Swami Nithyananda's Exclusive Interview #1 Rajiv Malhotra (March 9, 2010) - An effective rebuttal for the false rumours being spread on the Media
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Swami Nithyananda's Exclusive Interview #1 Rajiv Malhotra (Mar 9,
2010) - An effective rebuttal for the false rumours being spread on
the Media
Swami Nithyananda's Exclusive Interview #1 Rajiv Malhotra
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
An effective rebuttal for the false rumours being spread on the
Media
http://vivekajyoti.blogspot.com/2010/03/swami-nithyanandas-exclusive-interview.html
End of forwarded message from S. J.
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Looks like there is no public access to this video. How can one watch
this?
End of forwarded message from M. P.
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
yes even I was not able to open/access it.. Please tell me how to get
this?
End of forwarded message from G. G.
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
This is a diabolical plot to defame the Hindu Acharyas, not unlike
the episode related to Kanchi Acharyas -- Forces inimical to Hindu
Dharm are at work to shake up the faith of Hindus in Acharya
parampara.
Swami Nityananda explains to Rajiv Malhotra
http://vivekajyoti.blogspot.com/2010/03/this-is-diabolical-plot-to-defame-hindu.html
and/or www.mantra.com/jai
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Use this link:
End of forwarded message from S. D.
harmony
send it to u.s. state dept and u.n. or put an ad in wall street journal and
new york times to show kirastani shenanigans against hindus. also, include
chicago university's wendy doniger.
<use...@mantra.com and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj)> wrote in
message news:20100310HCgO9BVUUcmfr75h2x2kWbZ@B6egL...
P. Rajah
> hope we can make an online petetiton of american hindus (brown+white) and
> send it to u.s. state dept and u.n. or put an ad in wall street journal and
> new york times to show kirastani shenanigans against hindus. also, include
> chicago university's wendy doniger.
Christians are to blame because this bounder couldn't keep his pants
zipped? And what's with all the pill popping?
bademiyansubhanallah
bademiyansubhanallah
By Associate Editor David Stevenson
Mar 11, 2010
Head to the continent for better returns
With the pound falling so far, Britain is fast becoming poor value for
money, for its inhabitants at least.
If you live here, you're probably fed up with it. Overseas holidays
are more expensive. Imported goods are more costly. You're seeing
prices being pushed up both in the shops and at the petrol pump.
Even the people who should be cashing in, the exporters, aren't. The
UK's last trade figures were rubbish, as we note below.
So, everyone's a loser? No, not at all - you could gain from the
plunging pound. Not only would you protect your money – you can also
collect a decent income stream while you're doing it.
We spotlighted one way of doing this last week by investing in the US.
Here's another – this time in Europe...
The current outlook for sterling is grim
You won't need reminding that we're not too keen on our nation's
currency right now. We don't want to see the pound drop – we just
reckon that under current government policy (if that's the right word
for it), it will. For our spendthrift politicians it's just a case of
spend and overspend – then getting the Bank of England to print plenty
more money to fuel their habit.
The trouble is that the plunging pound doesn't seem to be doing anyone
in Britain much good. With a few notable exceptions, the country's
exporters – the ones who are meant to save us from perpetual
stagnation – aren't benefiting. Although their goods are now much
cheaper for global customers to buy, they're selling fewer of them.
January export goods volumes dropped by 8%. Excluding some data
distortions three years ago, that was the worst monthly drop since
2002.
Sterling fell yet further on this news. Even against the much-maligned
euro, it's now dropped below €1.10 to its lowest level since last
November. Maybe that's no great surprise.
The countries that have dragged the euro down, such as Ireland, Greece
and Portugal, are now starting to plug the holes in their public
finances. They may well fail to do so, but at least they're showing
the right attitude.
Not so in the UK. Electioneering and austerity don't go well together.
And the longer our government delays before cutting – or being forced
by the markets to slash – our budget deficit, the grimmer the outlook
gets for sterling.
In the meantime, the UK's bank base rate remains at just 0.5%. So
while the pound is falling, the interest rates paid on savings
accounts, which are broadly linked to the base rate, are still
desperately poor.
How to beat the falling pound
However, as long as you're content to take some risk with your capital
– and do understand that investing in the stock market is risky – then
you can beat both negligible interest rates and the falling pound.
That's because there are still some high-yielding shares around that
provide a decent income. Even better, there are four reasons why
buying such shares – in Europe – could, over time, make you good
capital profits as well.
First, if sterling falls further, you could make money on the currency
front as well as in the stock market. Although the reverse is clearly
true, too, so you need more reason to like these stocks than simply
because they trade in euros or another European currency.
Second, a healthy dividend yield means that a share price is low
compared with the level of its payouts to shareholders. That suggests
it's also good value relative to the underlying company's profits and
assets. And in the long run, you'll make more money buying cheap
shares than expensive ones.
Why UK property prices are going to fall 50%
When it will be time to get back in and buy up half price property
Third, and this is a very long-term view, increasing numbers of 'baby
boomers' – those born within 20 years of WWII – will be retiring over
the next two decades. This will mean steadily more investors looking
for better income returns than the bank is currently paying. In turn,
as they buy high-yielding shares, they'll push up prices.
Fourth, as the European equity strategy team at Morgan Stanley points
out, when stock markets are roaring ahead, they don't worry too much
about dividends. Traders are more excited in 'churning and burning' –
buying and then selling out fast for quick profits. But when those
markets become more 'range-bound', i.e. there's much less scope for
big share price rises overall, income becomes a much larger part of
investors' thinking.
Indeed – and this statistic is fascinating – since 1926, European
shares have risen in real, i.e. inflation-adjusted, terms by just 1.3%
a year. But add in dividends which are reinvested in more shares, and
the annual total real return jumps up to 5.6% over that same period.
Three top European stocks to buy now
So what are the top dividend paying stocks in Europe right now?
Well, if you've been reading Money Morning regularly over the last few
months, you'll have seen quite a few high-yield tips appearing. So
I'll stick to three of those we haven't yet mentioned.
Top of Morgan Stanley's list of stocks "with a high and secure
dividend yield" is Italian utility A2A (IM: A2A). It produces and
distributes electricity, sells gas and collects rubbish in the North
of Italy. It's on a p/e of 12 and prospective yield of 7.4%. If
there's a slight caveat for me, it's that the payout is only covered
1.1 times by earnings. But that's probably being picky, as the
company's cash flow is 2.5 times the dividend – so there's plenty of
cash coming in to cover it.
Dividend cover is certainly not an issue at Zurich Financial Services
(VX: ZURN), where the payment is almost twice covered. Yet Zurich is
on a forecast multiple for this year of just 8.6, with a prospective
6% yield. Meanwhile, across the border in Germany, energy supplier RWE
(GY: RWE) looks just as solid. A 2010 forecast p/e of 9.2, and a
prospective yield of 5.8%, mark this stock down as very good value.
We wouldn't advise putting all of your investment money into any one
currency, be it sterling, euros, dollars or yen. But at times like
these in particular, it's not a bad idea to be diversified. And more
to the point, these are solid stocks – so even if the currency moves
against you, you know the underlying asset remains solid. And look on
the bright side. If you buy shares like these, the next time you hear
about another slide in sterling, you'll know at least someone who's
managed to get on to a winner.
• If you're interested in high-yielding, blue-chip stocks, you should
take a look at Stephen Bland's Dividend Letter. Stephen aims to
produce a solid, steadily growing income by investing in large
companies – you can learn more about his strategy here .
Our recommended article for today
Three signals to watch for safer investing
When you've been investing for a while, you come to notice certain
signals that the stock market throws up, says Tom Bulford. Here, he
outlines three that should keep you one step ahead of the market's
movements.
Profit from Canada's cheap telcos
By David Stevenson, Mar 12, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/share-tips-canada-telecoms-47725.aspx
Profit from the global water shortage
By Tim Bennett, Mar 12, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/profit-from-the-global-water-shortage-47709.aspx
Share tip of the week: bargain medical giant
By Paul Hill, Mar 12, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/paul-hill-share-tip-of-the-week-bargain-medical-giant-47710.aspx
Gamble of the week: world leader in electronic security
Mar 12, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/paul-hill-share-tips-gamble-electronic-security-47712.aspx
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice.aspx
Comments
1. Neil
(11 March 2010, 10:53AM)
Although these shares have a nice yeild attached the article doesn't
point out that you can lose some of this yield to foreign withholding
tax which seems to be a minefield to navigate! I'd appreciate this
topic being covered in a future moneyweek article.
2. Harish Karia
(11 March 2010, 05:14PM)
Every now & than you refer to stocks which are listed somewhere else,
BUT how do I buy them? and what about the tax implications?
I have all of my stocks & shares in self selct ISA, I am not sure if I
will be allowed to buy the recomanded stocks? I am with Alliance &
Trust Savings
3. Roger
(11 March 2010, 06:04PM)
Neil,
The new tax rules on foreign dividends mean that you can claim at
least some UK tax relief on foreign withholding tax. You have to fill
out the foreign section of a UK self assessment return. I just let
taxcalc calculate it for me, and it isn't really a problem.
4. Jeff
(11 March 2010, 09:14PM)
TW Waterhouse offers low cost overseas dealing on a number of
exchanges.
Taxation of dividends does seem to be a complex issue with 20%
witholding taxes & hopeless guidance on how to enter this in tax
returns from the UK tax authorities.
5. Neil
(12 March 2010, 12:37PM)
Thanks Roger, however due to various salary sacrifice schemes I am not
required to complete a self assessement return, like the other posters
I find the rules utterly confusing, and I stick with the mantra of not
investing in something I don't understand (which is very unfortunate
as I would like to invest in single shares outside of the LSE).
6. Neil
(12 March 2010, 12:39PM)
I should add of course investing in US listed shares are easy as I
have completed a W8-BEN form and just renew this every 3 years. It's
the European shares that seem to present the most difficulty
http://www.moneyweek.com/investment-advice/share-tips-high-yielding-eurozone-stocks-01010.aspx
MoneyWeek Roundup: How mad scientists will save the economy By
MoneyWeek Editor John Stepek Mar 13, 2010
This is where we highlight some of the best bits from our free emails,
newsletters, blog and MoneyWeek magazine that we've published in the
past week.
● The markets have had a good week this week. Greece is becoming a
distant memory, the Eurocrats are threatening to exterminate
speculators, and investors even took a surge in Chinese inflation in
their stride.
Sterling is still being battered of course. And as my colleague David
Stevenson pointed out this week, our ever-expanding trade deficit
shows it's still not doing us any good.
Despite the weak pound, "the country's exporters – the ones who are
meant to save us from perpetual stagnation – aren't benefiting.
Although their goods are now much cheaper for global customers to buy,
they're selling fewer of them. January export goods volumes dropped by
8%. Excluding some data distortions three years ago, that was the
worst monthly drop since 2002."
● That puts the whole debate about 'rebalancing' the British economy
into perspective. We've relied too much on financial services, and
unfortunately, we've thrown away what little money we had left on
bailing out the banks. The good news is, the world's more
entrepreneurial scientists aren't waiting for governments to get
behind them.
"Craig Venter said he was going to change medicine – everyone thought
he was a maniac," points out Dr Mike Tubbs in his Research Investments
newsletter.
"But seven years ago the former Vietnam veteran beat an army of
government scientists to the biggest medical advance in decades –
decoding the human genome.
"The state sponsored Human Genome Project had been busy sequencing the
three billion biochemical blocks in our DNA for years... and running
up a $3bn bill in the process.
"But Dr Venter beat them to it. And in an instant, a colossal new
medical sector came of age. By deconstructing the human body cell by
cell, scientists believe they will uncover the genetic roots of the
most complex diseases – from cancer to Alzheimer's.
"That heralds a new age of personalised medicine – allowing doctors to
gauge our risk for conditions such as cancer and diabetes and taking
pre-emptive action.
"And so today a vast industry has sprung up – using the techniques
developed by the likes of Craig Venter in a race to decode these
diseases and use this knowledge to find new treatments. The market for
personalised medicine will reach $42bn by 2015, according to
PriceWaterhouseCoopers."
Mike's Research Investments newsletter is based around buying
companies that put serious investment into research and development in
areas like these. And he's not the only one who believes that
scientific developments provide a ripe hunting ground for investors.
● "Last month I met a man who has been in the business of making money
from science for the last 25 years. Phil Atkin has watched successive
governments downplay the efforts of his kind while applauding the
relentless rise of the financial sector," says Tom Bulford in his
Penny Sleuth free email.
"Finally we have woken up to the realisation that the latter does not
produce any real wealth at all. And this means Atkin's time may
finally have come – especially after a special announcement made last
week…"
Atkins heads up Scientific Digital Imaging (LSE: SDI). As with most
science companies, explaining what it does is complicated, so you can
read Tom's piece if you want to know the details. But basically it
makes various measurement and imaging devices for laboratories.
"SDI is certainly one to keep an eye on," says Tom. "Chairman Harry
Tee was the driving force behind Roxboro, which made plenty of money
for investors in the 1990s. He is also chairman of another fast
growing company, Dialight (DIA).
"Better than our politicians he understands what is required to build
a science-based business. This one is definitely on the Red Hot Penny
Shares radar screen."
● Last week's debate on ethical investing attracted quite a few
thoughtful responses. Most agreed with our view that we should be
presenting readers with money-making opportunities and leaving the
ethical decisions to them.
But I just had to share this reader's take on the ethics of investing
in tobacco firms… "Until a couple of years ago, I too avoided owning
any tobacco company shares, figuring that it would be unethical to
profit from a company that depends for its continued growth on getting
more people addicted to a substance known to directly cause several
serious health issues.
"However, I changed my mind when we returned from a family holiday in
France. Sitting at a table on the ferry (in an open area) two people
sat down at the same table with us and, without asking if it would be
ok and ignoring the fact that we had our young son sitting with us,
proceeded to light up and blow smoke around. The problem was that the
wind blew it straight to us on the other side of the table.
"This inconsiderate behaviour so incensed me that I vowed as soon as
we got home that I would buy some BAT shares, so that I felt I could
at least get my own back in some way by part funding my retirement
thanks to the behaviour of people that ignore all the warnings and
inflict their brand of poison on those around them as well.
"If you can't beat them, profit from them!"
● Riccardo Marzi, the ex-City trader behind the Events Trader
newsletter, knows how to draw a reader's attention. Here's the
headline from his latest issue: "How you could profit from a deadly
virus outbreak in Chile".
I winced as I thought of the complaints that would flood in. Then I
read the piece. The "deadly virus" in question is killing off salmon,
not people. Phew. Still, it's a pretty miserable experience for
Chile's salmon farmers. The country is the world's second-largest
producer of the fish. And with its annual production down about 70%
year-on-year, salmon prices are going up.
And you can guess what that means for the rest of the world's salmon
farmers. A profit bonanza. "Norway is the world's biggest exporter of
salmon. It will take at least 18 months for the Chilean salmon
industry to raise fish to maturity – if they manage to get the disease
under control. In that time Norwegian salmon groups will enjoy a major
boost to their earnings," says Riccardo.
● We're sceptical on China's growth 'miracle'. But that's no reason to
write off the whole of Asia. Cris Sholto Heaton, the man behind the
MoneyWeek Asia free email (if you don't already get it, I advise you
to sign up for it right now) is currently testing out a newsletter in
which he tips individual stocks. The second edition came out earlier
this week. If you'd like to be kept informed of when it goes live,
just give us your email here.
In Cris's latest piece, he looks at one vital piece of infrastructure
that many parts of Asia are entirely lacking right now, and will need
a lot of in the future. It's not roads, or sewage systems, or railways
- it's software. I'll let Cris explain.
"In the West, banks have used computers for processing data and
transactions since the sixties. But these were huge, complex and
costly systems dedicated to specific functions. Picture a huge humming
room of densely packed computers running a bank's data – the kind you
would see in Cold War movies. If you had two different systems
working on a similar task, they couldn't talk to each other and share
data.
"But over that last decade or so, things have become much more
sophisticated. State-of-the-art banking systems are tightly
integrated, with all the key software running in the same framework
and sharing information. And as a result of this, they've become much
more powerful and useful.
"Computers no longer simply store data, but can monitor accounts for
fraud, improve risk management by credit-scoring potential borrowers,
and on top of that, they run schemes such as airmiles and loyalty
cards to gather information about customers and increase usage.
"Systems like this are standard in Europe and North America. But in
the emerging world, it's obviously much more variable. Some countries
and banks are pretty advanced. Others make what a British bank was
using twenty years ago seem sophisticated.
"So most emerging market banks are going to have to invest billions in
better IT over the next couple of decades. Not only do many have a
long way to go to bring their existing systems up to modern standards,
but they're also going to need to expand to cope with hundreds of
millions of new potential customers.
And this means that emerging markets should offer very good growth
prospects for the firms that develop and maintain these highly
specialised systems."
● Last week I wrote a piece about what people could learn from the
plight of the 'king and queen of buy-to-let'. Fergus and Judith Wilson
are two ex-maths teachers who built a portfolio of hundreds of houses
in Kent during the boom times. They ran into some difficulties in the
crunch, but when the Bank of England slashed interest rates, it had
the knock-on effect of cutting their costs.
The piece drew a lot of comment – as most of our property pieces do,
which is as strong an indicator as any that we're still in bubble
territory. But I also got an email from Fergus himself. He described
the piece as a "very fair article", so I gave him a call to get his
take on the market.
The way Fergus sees it, the real problem is with flats, rather than
the houses that he predominately lets out. "These blocks of flats in
northern cities have been a complete disaster. I have 30 flats which I
regret having. They've fallen in value, whereas the houses have seen a
reasonable increase in the last two years."
Now, on the one hand, I'd agree that the epicentre of the housing
market collapse was always going to be in the market for dodgy flats.
And with the bank rate as low as it is, at 0.5%, Fergus is in a sweet
spot – he reckons the typical £180,000 house, with a £140,000
mortgage, is costing him about £300 a month on the mortgage. If it's
let for £700 a month, with £100 going to the letting agent, then he
clears £300.
But with the market stagnant, it can't be easy to offload all those
properties to first-time buyers – they can't afford it. And what
happens if interest rates rise?
Fergus, who's nearly 62, reckons we'll be lucky to see a 2.5% bank
rate again in his lifetime. "The government won't be that stupid.
Every time rates go up, more people will become homeless."
I can't say I'm convinced. The Bank of England needs to take far more
into account when it sets the bank rate than just its impact on the
property market. The only way that interest rates can remain that low
for that long, is if Britain goes the way of Japan. And in Japan,
house prices are still 60% lower than they were at the start of the
bust.
I certainly don't wish the Wilsons any ill. But our chat just
confirmed in my mind that the current rebound is a temporary blip
before the market starts heading down again.
● And it's not just the property market that's set for harder times
ahead. Tim Price of PFP Wealth Management tells readers of The Price
Report to watch out. "Last week I was invited to present at the
Private Wealth Management Conference in Smithfield. There I listened
to a lot of people I've known and respected for most of my career. And
there were two very clear concerns coming through.
"First, how do I avoid getting burned by stocks again? After the
gyrations in the market over the last two years, there was a lot of
talk of not placing too much faith in equities – because it's
unwarranted. The question everyone wanted to ask was – how long could
this bear market in stocks go on for?
"The second real concern among private wealth managers is inflation.
I'm not the only one worried about governments printing their way out
of this crisis, as it turns out. If there is a dangerous bout of
inflation on the way, how do we protect our wealth?"
I'm running out of space to go into the details here, but suffice to
say, Tim reckons that there's another down-leg to come in the bear
market. As for inflation, he doesn't see it taking off just yet, but
there are some assets you should be holding for when it does. Find out
more about The Price Report here.
Related articles
Recovery hopes fade as trade gap widens
Mar 12, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/recovery-hopes-fade-as-trade-gap-widens-47702.aspx
The crisis isn't over yet
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/merryn-somerset-webb-the-crisis-isnt-over-yet-47701.aspx
By Merryn Somerset Webb, Mar 12, 2010
Money is pouring out of the UK - here's how to protect yourself
http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/money-morning-sterling-crisis-bank-liabilities-01002.aspx
By David Stevenson, Mar 08, 2010
MoneyWeek Roundup: Profit from sterling's woes
By John Stepek, Mar 06, 2010
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/moneyweek-roundup-sat-06-march-00913.aspx
Useful links
• Tom Bulford's newsletter Red Hot Penny Shares
http://www.fsponline-recommends.co.uk/page.aspx?u=rhpoil2010fn&tc=MRHPL308&PromotionID=2147066760&
• Riccardo Marzi's newsletter Events Trader
http://www.fsponline-recommends.co.uk/page.aspx?u=evtsignup+&tc=WEVTK901&PromotionID=2147066676&
• Tim Price's newsletter, The Price Report
http://www.fsponline-recommends.co.uk/page.aspx?u=tprsell&tc=WTPRL301&PromotionID=2147066781
• Dr Mike Tubbs' Research Investments newsletter - enquiries for this
exclusive service are by phone only, call 020 7633 3600
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Get a double-digit income on blue-chips
By Theo Casey, Mar 12, 2010
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Don't dodge tax only to walk into losses
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Economics
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A slump in China is inevitable - here's how to protect yourself (12
March 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/money-morning-china-economy-01011.aspx
Australia's luck is running out (12 March 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/australia-economy-47706.aspx
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Global economy
A slump in China is inevitable - here's how to protect yourself (12
March 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/money-morning-china-economy-01011.aspx
Will China float its currency? (12 March 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/currencies-china-renminbi-dollar-peg-47718.aspx
Australia's luck is running out (12 March 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/australia-economy-47706.aspx
Japanese economy
The story of Japan's 20-year slump (05 February 10)
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Japan leads the way...through a minefield (28 January 10)
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We've learnt all the wrong lessons from Japan (08 January 10)
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UK economy
MoneyWeek Roundup: How mad scientists will save the economy (13 March
10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/moneyweek-roundup-saturday-13-march-01012.aspx
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http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/baby-boomers-blow-bubbles-47408.aspx
Can farming save Detroit? (12 February 10)
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/can-farming-save-detroit-47302.aspx
http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics.aspx
End of Keynesian Blood Sucking Parasitic Economic System
Economics / Economic Theory
Mar 13, 2010 - 06:04 AM
By: Gary_North
On March 11, I spoke at the annual Austrian Scholars Conference,
sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It was gratifying to see
so many attendees that they could not fit into one room.
The Mises Institute is a high-tech outfit. They set up a video camera,
and the speech appeared on monitors in other rooms. It will also go on-
line within a few days. This will be free. Anyone in the world with
Web access can see it from now on. This is a great model for
communication and education.
My topic was "Keynes and His Influence." My goal is to recruit half a
dozen bright young scholars to begin a joint project in refuting
Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) line
by line. I have set up a department on my Website to this end.
I tried to make four main points in my speech.
1. Keynes' influence has been indirect (mediated).
2. His legacy will soon be uniquely vulnerable.
3. Only the Austrians called the 2008 recession.
4. It is time for a comprehensive refutation of Keynes
THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN ECONOMIST
There is no question that John Maynard Keynes was the most influential
economist in the 20th century. Yet his influence has been different
from what economists and the intelligentsia have believed.
In a filmed interview of Keynes' main rival in 1935, but not in 1965,
F. A. Hayek, an Austrian School economist, made an important point.
Keynes was influential in 1946, the year of his death, but his
influence was not yet overwhelming. That came later. Hayek did not say
how much later. It came within five years. You can see the video here.
The key to Keynes' influence was the 1948 textbook written by Paul
Samuelson, Economics. It became the most widely assigned college
textbook in economics. It had no major competition for at least three
decades, and its competitors were also Keynesian in outlook.
Samuelson promoted Keynes' ideas, but he used a very different format.
He did not quote Keynes at length. He presented what has since been
called the neo-Keynesian synthesis. He applied Keynes' fundamental
principle of deficit spending in the Great Depression to the overall
economy in a post-depression world. He really did try to make general
the General Theory, which the book had not been.
The General Theory was highly specific. It was a program designed to
counteract falling spending and a falling money supply in an era in
which there was no government insurance for failed banks or their
depositors. It was a program to offset widespread hoarding of
currency. From the day that the FDIC was created in 1934, American
banks stopped failing, and the money supply started to rise. Keynes
wrote his book after this transition in the United States. The book
was a theoretical defense of policies that had already been adopted in
the United States and Western Europe, and which World War II would
escalate: deficit spending, mass inflation, and a vast expansion of
the government's share of the economy. This is not how the Keynesians
have told the story. It is how the story ought to be told. I am trying
to recruit economists and historians who will commit several years of
research to telling it.
Keynes' "General Theory" has long been an unread book that sits on the
shelves of economics graduate students and professors. No one actually
has read it except specialists in the history of economic thought. The
book is close to unreadable. Compared to his earlier books and essays,
it is uniquely unreadable. We do not see its formulas quoted as proof
of contemporary policies or recommended policies. The literature cited
in economists' footnotes is what we can legitimately call Keynesian,
but this literature is an extension of Keynes' work, not Keynes'
actual work.
Whether Keynes would approve of what is recommended in his name is
moot. Hayek spoke to Keynes a few weeks before he died. According to
Hayek, Keynes was not happy with developments being offered in his
name.
Keynes had always been an opponent of inflation. His earlier works
repeatedly warned against the threat of inflation. Yet, by 1945,
inflation was a way of life in the West.
We should compare The General Theory to Charles Darwin's Origin of
Species. Darwinists rarely quote Darwin to support their latest
papers. They cite him as the originator of the idea of evolution
through natural selection. Attacks on Darwin's actual exposition are
shrugged off by his followers as irrelevant. We find an entire school
of Darwinists who preach an idea that is opposed to what Darwin
taught: the "punctuated evolutionism." Darwin believed in tiny changes
over long periods of time. They believe in huge changes in brief
periods of time. Still, they call themselves Darwinists. Why? Because
they believe in his Big Idea: purposeless, random causation prior to
man.
The same is true of Keynes' General Theory. It was Keynes' primary
idea that dominates the thinking of economists: government budget
deficits as the means of overcoming economic slumps. As to simple
formulas and concepts in the book, modern economists rarely cite them
in professional journals. If one or more specifics of the book are
refuted, his supporters shrug it off. Keynes' influence relates to the
one big idea, just as Darwin's influence does.
The specifics in the book are forgotten today, such as his statement
that the government could plant bottles full of money, bury them, and
let workers dig them up for a living. He also said that building the
equivalent of Egypt's pyramids would help restore prosperity. He
really believed this. His disciples do not refer to these passages.
When pressured by critics, they dismiss them as merely rhetorical.
They were rhetorical, but not merely rhetorical.
A VULNERABLE LEGACY
Today, Keynesians insist that their man was right. They take credit
for the recovery since late 2009, such as it is. This assertion is
widely accepted. It is so widely accepted that Wikipedia has an
article on it: "Keynesian Resurgence."
Yet the reality is far different from the perception. Keynes' solution
in 1936 was a program of fiscal deficits, coupled with mild monetary
expansion in a time of monetary contraction. These government deficits
were supposed to stimulate consumer spending.
Yet the heart of the U.S. government's program in 2008 was not the
$787 billion spending program. Rather, it was the prior doubling of
the Federal Reserve's monetary base, the FED's face-value swaps of its
marketable Treasury debt for unmarketable toxic assets owned by the
biggest banks, the AIG bailout, and the subsequent $1.25 trillion
pumped into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after their nationalization by
Henry Paulson in September 2008. None of this was Keynesian. All of it
was ad hoc monetary inflation and central bank subsidies to large
banks.
Keynes recommended government spending and employment by government.
He did not recommend central bank bailouts of large banks. He focused
on fiscal policy, not monetary policy.
The biggest banks were saved by these interventions. Small banks
continue to go under, Friday afternoon after Friday afternoon. The
banking industry as a whole has contracted its loans to commercial and
industrial firms. Banks have added over $1 trillion to their excess
reserves at the FED, thereby sterilizing money. This is anti-
Keynesian: a restriction of spending, meaning a reduction in aggregate
demand compared to what would otherwise have been the case.
Keynesianism as an idea has received a shot in the arm – mainly with
fiat money, not Federal deficits. Yes, the deficits have been
enormous, just not by comparison to central banks' money creation. The
deficits are unprecedented, all over the world. Yet the economic
recovery is universally criticized as weak.
If enormous deficits are not serving as stimuli for widespread
recovery, then what credit should Keynes get? Keynesians are saying
that government policies kept the world economy from collapse. But
this is not the same as saying that the policies have restored
prosperity. They haven't.
There have been some protests by economists. Several hundred academic
economists, mostly in obscure universities, publicly protested the
stimulus package.
But no group of economists, other than the Austrians, said in 2008
that the FED should do nothing, that Fannie and Freddie should be
allowed to go under, and that the stimulus bill should be voted down.
With only this exception, the entire academic community of economists
became cheerleaders for the FED's bailouts of 2008. They sold their
non-Keynesian birthrights for a mess of Federal Reserve pottage.
The silence of the profession in 2008 and after has boxed them in.
They are defenders of moral hazard, despite their timid warnings to
the contrary.
If one person has summarized the alternative economic scenarios facing
us, it is Merle Hazard. Merle is not his real name. He is a financial
planner in Nashville. He began performing on YouTube in 2009. He and
his partner, Bretton Wood, sang the question: "Will it be Zimbabwe or
Japan?" So far, it's Japan.
The governments of the West have made one thing inescapably clear.
They do not intend to enforce high bank capital ratios established by
the Bank for International Settlements. The European Union and the
European Central Bank have also made it clear that they will not
enforce EU rules on the deficit-to-GDP ratio. There is only one rule
today: "Tax and tax, spend and spend, inflate and inflate."
The looming bankruptcies of Western governments and Japan are now
becoming clearer to the literate public. Observers are becoming more
Austrian in their perception. Investors do not accept this scenario
emotionally, but the numbers are clear. There will have to be a
cutting back of Medicare, Social Security, and unemployment benefits,
either sooner or later.
It is also clear that unemployment will not be significantly reduced
by the present recovery. The Keynesian tools are not working. They
have not worked in Europe for a generation, where life on the dole is
permanent for 10% of the work force.
When the bust comes, the Keynesians will take the blame. They have
demanded credit for the recovery, and they have received it. They are
consuming public favor today. They will pay for it later.
"WE TOLD THEM SO!"
The Austrian School's representatives predicted the recession. The
defining moment was Peter Schiff's debate with Art Laffer in 2006.
Schiff said a crash was coming. Laffer ridiculed him. Because of
YouTube, this story will not go away.
It never does any good to go to the losers and say, "I told you so."
It does a great deal of good to go to the general public, which is
always in search of leadership, and say, "We told them so." You don't
convert true believers and spokesmen very often, but you can undermine
their leadership.
The Austrian theory of the business cycle was the tool that enabled
Schiff and others, such as me, to predict in 2006 that a recession
would hit in 2007. It did – in December 2007. We told them so. This
establishes our credentials, but more to the point, it establishes
Ludwig von Mises' credentials. He thought that economic logic alone
was necessary to defend a position. But in political debate, having
the numbers demonstrate that you were right is also necessary.
When the USSR went bust economically in 1988, then lost the Afghan war
in 1989, and finally committed suicide in 1991, Marxism died. All the
footnotes in the Marxist books no longer mattered in academia. All the
post-1991 wailing by Marxists that the Soviet Union really had never
been truly Marxist has been ignored. Why? Because the Marxists took
credit for the USSR for 74 years. They praised the Soviet Union's
central planning. So, in 1991, they could not get off the sinking
Soviet ship in time to justify the Marxist system.
By 1991, China's economy was booming because of Deng's abandonment of
Marxist economics in 1978. That left only Albania, Cuba, and North
Korea. The Marxists had nowhere to turn to that offered evidence of
economic success. Overnight, they became a laughing stock on campus.
This will be the fate of Keynesians when the governments of the West
finally go bust or else abandon the deficits and the fiat money.
Who will still be standing to pick up the intellectual pieces? The
Chicago School economists did not predict 2008. They did not defiantly
protest the FED's bailouts of September and October. Neither did
public choice economists, rational expectations economists, or
behavioral economists. They all climbed aboard the Good Ship Keynes,
which was in fact the Good Ship Bernanke. The Austrians did not.
The Austrians, few in number, are the last men standing to challenge
the Keynesians. This is their great opportunity. They have waited a
long time.
GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE OFFENSIVELY
As W. C. Fields said so long ago, "Never give a sucker an even break."
This also applies to bloodsuckers. The Keynesians are apologists for
the bloodsucking class: tax collectors, deficit-expanders, and
boondogglers of all shapes and sizes.
I have set up www.KeynesProject.com to help mobilize the guerrilla
troops in a comprehensive assault on Fort Keynes. This is a supplement
to the vast collection of free books and materials found on www.Mises.org,
especially the books in the Literature section of the home page.
There has to be a full-scale assault on the General Theory that shows
how it is illogical, line by line. This has been done sporadically in
the past, but not systematically. To oppose Keynes' overall system was
to commit academic suicide.
When the decks are cleared, then there must be a systematic critique
of the post-Keynes literature. But this is too large a job for a
handful of scholars. It will take at least a decade to produce the
basic critique of Keynes. My hope is that this project will be
complete in time for the crisis produced by today's policies.
To persuade the next generation of economists and talking heads that
Keynes was wrong, and therefore his apologists are wrong and have been
wrong, we need two things: (1) a body of material in all the media
that shows that The General Theory was a con job from day one; (2) an
economy universally suffering from the effects of the policies that
have been justified in the name of Keynes. Since we are going to get
the second, why not work on the first?
CONCLUSION
We have lived in the shadow of Keynes since 1936. That shadow has
darkened academia for over 70 years. Keynes justified what politicians
and salaried academic bureaucrats always wanted: more power for
politicians and tenured bureaucrats.
Keynes justified this system of parasitic bloodsucking. The bills are
now coming due. The voters are going to join a tax revolt against
these bills. They will seek justification. Austrian School economics
is best positioned today to offer that justification. To become even
better positioned, a younger generation of Austrian School economists
must publicly gut The General Theory.
Gary North [send him mail ] is the author of Mises on Money . Visit
http://www.garynorth.com . He is also the author of a free 20-volume
series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible .
© 2010 Copyright Gary North / LewRockwell.com - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general
information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice.
Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising
methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility
for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals
should consult with their personal financial advisors.
© 2005-2010 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a
FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article17857.html
Video: Hayek Explains Why He Did Not Challenge Keynes After 1935 -- A
Catastrophic Decision
Gary North
March 9, 2010
In this interview, Hayek recounts the events leading to The General
Theory. He spent a year going through Keynes' Treatise on Money.
Although he did not mention this, he published a critique on the
Economic Journal. Keynes replied in print. Then, just before the
second volume appeared, Keynes dismissed the debate. He told Hayek
that he no longer believed all that.
Hayek said he decided not to challenge The General Theory. The problem
was that he was widely regarded as Keynes' #1 opponent. When he
remained mute, he surrendered the field to Keynes.
Hayek also said that Keynes' theory did not receive universal acclaim
until after his death in 1946. This is no doubt true, but irrelevant.
The book persuaded a generation of young economists before the War
ended. Then Sanuelson's 1948 textbook conquered the academic
discipline in the name of Keynes.
For more information, come here:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/6198.cfm
Economics (Hardcover)
~ Paul Samuelson (Author), William Nordhaus (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/0073511293/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Customer Reviews
Economics
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4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
EXCELLENT A++
One of the greatest books of its era. Very easy to understand and
study with. Great choice!!
Published 3 months ago by George and Marcus Retail Group
7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Extraordinary price????
How can this book possibly cost $169.90?? It's been in print for
decades and has sold well. My old college copy has a price of $7.95
stamped in it! What is going on???
Published 3 months ago by Little Teacher on the Prarie
4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
EXCELLENT A++, November 30, 2009
By George and Marcus Retail Group (N. Florida, USA) -
One of the greatest books of its era. Very easy to understand and
study with. Great choice!!
7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Extraordinary price????, December 13, 2009
By Little Teacher on the Prarie (Iowa) -
How can this book possibly cost $169.90?? It's been in print for
decades and has sold well. My old college copy has a price of $7.95
stamped in it! What is going on???
Comments (3)
Comments
Initial post: Dec. 24, 2009 12:52 PM PST
E. P. O'shaughnessy says:
Free market forces, supply and demand perhaps? :)
In reply to an earlier post on Jan. 14, 2010 2:24 PM PST
Stevan Radanovic says:
More probably because it's 19th edition, from 2009. :)
Posted on Mar. 13, 2010 10:54 AM PST
From_Plano_TX says:
You are right. The price is scandalous. College students are being
robbed! The colleges should not permit this to go on.
Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft Excel, Revised (with
CD-ROM and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools Suite) (Hardcover)
~ S. Christian Albright
S. Christian Albright (Author)
(Author), Wayne Winston (Author), Christopher Zappe (Author)
Customer Reviews
Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft Excel, Revised (with
CD-ROM and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools Suite)
18 Reviews
5 star: (10)
4 star: (5)
3 star: (1)
2 star: (1)
1 star: (1)
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Strong Software Addition:
This book was put together in the same 'spirit' as previous other
Winston books; good examples, well thought out attack approaches; as
well as a good summary of all the types of problems encountered in the
text! I have several other of Winston books, so I'm reasonably happy
with his work! I am growing a little frustrated with winston et al.
over the fact that they...
Read the full review ›
Published on August 20, 1999 by Kirk S. Johnson
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
Better Title: Intro to Statistics using Excel Add-ins
On the positive side, this book has many excellent case studies and
examples. It is well written and interesting. However, I was
disappointed, as I was expecting use of Excel to rigorously solve
decision making and data analysis problems. The focus of the book is
mostly traditional statistics solved using a group of commercial add-
ins for Excel. If this is what you want,...
Published on June 3, 2001 by char...@aol.com
40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
Better Title: Intro to Statistics using Excel Add-ins, June 3, 2001
By char...@aol.com (Gainesveille, FL) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
On the positive side, this book has many excellent case studies and
examples. It is well written and interesting. However, I was
disappointed, as I was expecting use of Excel to rigorously solve
decision making and data analysis problems. The focus of the book is
mostly traditional statistics solved using a group of commercial add-
ins for Excel. If this is what you want, then the book would get five
stars. However, for data analysis and decision making, I think a more
thorough treatment using Excel without relying so much on the add-ins
would have been appropriate.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Strong Software Addition:, August 20, 1999
By Kirk S. Johnson (Batavia, IL USA) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
This book was put together in the same 'spirit' as previous other
Winston books; good examples, well thought out attack approaches; as
well as a good summary of all the types of problems encountered in the
text! I have several other of Winston books, so I'm reasonably happy
with his work! I am growing a little frustrated with winston et al.
over the fact that they offer no solutions or answers to the many
exercise problems contained throughout the text. I don't think Winston
realizes that professionals outside of the classroom are buying these
books and don't have the luxury of a professor sharing answers to the
problems. This is where I think he can improve. The software addition,
from palisades was an excellent addition to the text! I had already
owned many of the commercial versions but have found that the suite,
provided with the text, was just as robust as my retail versions.
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent MBA - level textbook and software., September 2, 1999
By Serguei Netessine (Wynnewood, PA United States) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
Finally MBA probability/statistics course and MS Excel have been
unified in one textbook. The accompanying software is great,
especially Decision Tree (probably the only Excel-based software for
decision making). Students like business-oriented excersises in the
book. Highly recommended.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Very good book but software is a source of troubles, July 20, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
The book itself is an exteremely good source of theory and problems.
However, accompanying software is a reason for many disappointments.
There are undocumented bugs and compatibility issues. Some supporting
material for the book is still not available and customer support
could have been better.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
MS Office 2000 compatability problems!!, August 11, 2000
By Courtney Turner (Chicago, IL USA) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
Just purchased the book as a tool for MBA classes. However, after
installing the accompanying CD ROM add-ons I had problems accessing MS
Office programs. A critical .DLL file was modified by the program
during my installation. I think the program was made to run with MS
Excel 97. Another suggestion for the author is to include an answers
CD ROM for the problems contained in the text so that students and
professionals can check their work.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Serious Excel 2000 Problem, April 11, 2001
By Jal Singh "junkmail_12345" (NYC) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
The text book is great. I have many of Winston's other books and they
are all great. The Palisade stuff works just fine. However, the
StatPro Addin that accompanies this text does not work with MS Excel
2000. I contacted the IT guy that the authors directed me to--he was
stumped. He just gave up and suggested I return my book for a refund
because he could not figure out it out. Again, the book is great but
the StatPro Addin sucks!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Great Buy, February 3, 2009
By Samantha J. Foster "Student4Life" (Cincinnati) -
I was required to buy this text for a class but it has actually been
very helpful. Some textbooks are diffucult to follow but this one has
great examples. If I don't understand something in class, I just have
to read over the chapter and it usually helps.
Amazon is THE place to buy, October 11, 2009
By Venkata V. Sagar Sambata (College Park, MD, USA) -
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
I had an extremely positive experience with Amazon and would recommend
you buy from them even with your eyes closed.
Impossible to decipher, but useful computer tools, October 7,
2009
By Robin Weber -
I have totally given up on doing reading assigned in this textbook.
It's dense, hard to understand, and takes more time than I have just
to understand a fraction of it. The only reason I'm giving 2 stars
instead of 1 is that the Excel add-on tools included on the CD with
the book are somewhat useful.
Missing Password and Key, September 20, 2009
By Tomaz V. Silva Neto "Thothmez" (CANADA) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
I am a Reliability Engineer trying to learn more about Risk analysis.
The written part of the book seems fantastic, a lot of practical
examples that we can use in real world, sure we all know that excel is
limited and the use of Add-ins seems to be a very good way to manage
that.
I bought a used copy of the book which came with 2 Cds but without the
password and key to install the DecisionTools.
Does anybody know who should I contact to get that information ? Any
help is very much appreciated...
Regards,
to All.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
No trouble with Excel, January 31, 2001
By steve_from_spokane (Everett, Wa United States) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
I find the text and software a useful set of tools. It assumes
familiarity with basic statistics and Excel, and builds on them to
develop a powerfull ability to analize data and make decisions from
it. I experienced no trouble with the software install or operation.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Statistical Purchase, October 8, 2009
By Student -
I purchased this product with the description stating it included the
Stats Tools CD. When I received the product the CD was not included,
which made the text useless to me. I did receive a prompt refund from
Amazon and the Seller. I think that transparency is key to buying
online. . .
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Thank you!, October 2, 2009
By AL "AL" (US) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft
Excel (with CD-ROM, InfoTrac , and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools
Suite) (Hardcover)
Thank you! The book was in the perfect condition and shipping was in
time. The seller was very responsive with emails/questions.
Unfortunately I ordered the wrong book, but thanks so much for letting
me return it!!!!
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Great used book, February 6, 2009
By Ohannes Mangoyan -
The book and cd's were in great shape as described (like new)! I will
buy used books again in the future.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Perfect condition - good deal., September 30, 2008
By K. Nash "research girl" (Cincinnati, OH USA) -
The textbook was brand new and I saved about $40. I received it on
time and the transaction was easy.
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Sanjay Chheda, October 5, 2006
By Sanjay Chheda -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft
Excel (with CD-ROM, InfoTrac , and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools
Suite) (Hardcover)
The book is very good with really good explanations and examples on
descriptive analysis and inferential analysis.
0 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Managerial Statistics Text book, November 3, 2006
By Sang Woo Kim (Gainesville, FL) -
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making with Microsoft
Excel (with CD-ROM, InfoTrac , and Decision Tools and Statistic Tools
Suite) (Hardcover)
It was the text book the professor wanted me to buy.
It was good.
6 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
Weighs more than the one we used in Grad School, July 16, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Data Analysis and Decision Making With Microsoft
Excel (Hardcover)
As a past student of Dr. Zappe's at the University of Florida who used
a Dr. Winston book in 1992, I would have to say that it weighs more
thus increasing the strenths and size of my left bicep and foreman
forcing poor alignment of my spine.
International Economics: Theory and Policy (Paperback)
~ Paul R. Krugman (Author), Maurice Obstfeld
Maurice Obstfeld (Author)
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Customer Reviews
International Economics: Theory and Policy
19 Reviews
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4 star: (5)
3 star: (1)
2 star: (2)
1 star: (3)
The most helpful favorable review The most helpful critical review
44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
The book to start with in International Economics
For anybody - but especially students - interested in exploring the
subject of international economics, this is the book to start with. It
is illuminating (as it is always the case with Krugman's writings) on
otherwise technical concepts as comparative advantage, trade policy
and exchange rate determinants, but it is also entertaining, with its
"reality...
Published on May 4, 1999 by L. Battaglini
61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
Not What I've Come to Expect from Krugman
First off, even if you totally discount the rest of my review, buy the
low price international version of this book. On the March 10, 2005
episode of the daily show Krugman elucidated his feelings quite
clearly. "The real money is in textbooks. With other books, people
need to decide whether to buy them or not. Students have to buy
textbooks." Thanks Paul. I think I'm...
Published on April 3, 2005 by TitaniumDreads
61 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
Not What I've Come to Expect from Krugman, April 3, 2005
By TitaniumDreads "http://blog.titaniumdreads.com" (Cambridge, MA
United States) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
First off, even if you totally discount the rest of my review, buy the
low price international version of this book. On the March 10, 2005
episode of the daily show Krugman elucidated his feelings quite
clearly. "The real money is in textbooks. With other books, people
need to decide whether to buy them or not. Students have to buy
textbooks." Thanks Paul. I think I'm being charitable when I say that
at $125 this book is a ripoff. It isn't even full color.
Anyway, on to the actual content of the book. I have to say that I was
excited when I found out that my International economics course at
Stanford was going to be using Paul Krugman's book. I've enjoyed his
articles for the New York Times because they manage to cut right to
the core of issues with an unusual amount of punch. Yet, time and time
again I was disappointed with the frequently inpenatrable language and
obtuse, unrealistic examples in this book. Unfortunately, the only
part of Krugman's characteristic writing style that came through was a
feeling of overwrought vitriol, which makes sense in an op-ed but has
little place in a textbook. Furthermore, this book occupies a strange
niche in the world of econ texts, it is not mathematically rigorous,
nor is it well written. Usually we see one or the other but rarely
both. Initially, I thought these observations were mine alone, but
other students began openly voicing pointed criticisms of the book
during class (and I am perhaps being too kind here in not repeating
them). I've been in school nearly as long as I can remember and I have
never seen such discontent with a text.
During the second half of the course even my econ prof became fed up
and abandoned the book altogether. Given that, I find all of the
positive reviews for this book rather astounding. My suspicion is that
there might have been open rebellion amongst my classmates had not the
professor decided to leave this text by the wayside. I also found that
it is brimming with misplaced, one-sided arguments that come across as
Krugman blatantly strawmanning arguments opposed to his own. One of
many examples of this comes out of nowhere near the end of chapter 2.
Krugman implies that anyone who doesn't believe in unmitigated free
trade is intellectually irresponsible!?! This book pushes for
unrestrained market fundamentalism throughout, primarily by
misrepresenting any arguments that would effectively challenge it's
simplistic and seemingly outdated dogma. This book, in particular,
feeds into the same system of self serving scientism so prevalent in
economics for the last 60 years.
Please don't mistake this review as the bile of a jilted student, I
did quite well in the course. However, this is almost certainly the
result of looking for alternative explanations of virtually every
topic covered. The reason this book gets one star instead of two is
because it lacks a lot of the modern learning tools prevalent in
almost every other textbook. Things like quality questions, keywords,
vocabulary and historical context all get short shrift in this this
volume. If you're into learning about incomplete models that only
represent a theoretical version of the world, this book is for you.
Unfortunately, just like Krugman said on The Daily Show, if you are a
student there is probably little chance that you have a choice on the
matter. Buy the cheap international edition for 20 bucks. I would
recommend that you use to the difference to buy William Easterly's
Elusive Quest for Growth...and a beer.
44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
The book to start with in International Economics, May 4, 1999
By L. Battaglini "mauouo" (IT) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
For anybody - but especially students - interested in exploring the
subject of international economics, this is the book to start with. It
is illuminating (as it is always the case with Krugman's writings) on
otherwise technical concepts as comparative advantage, trade policy
and exchange rate determinants, but it is also entertaining, with its
"reality checks". The first part of the book deals with the "real"
economy, the second part with monetary international economics. It
will save you a lot of time to begin your study of the field with this
book. If you have had previous experiences with international
economics but either forgot most about it or had trouble making sense
of the whole thing you will probably get a good grasp of the subject
after reading this manual. The bibliography is accurate and rich, the
exercises won't give you an headache. Readers with some background in
economics are most likely to take full advantage from the book. For
the others, well, some introductory economics will be necessary. Once
you've read this book, you can continue more safely your studies/
readings on international economics.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
international economics, January 16, 2000
By Soeren Puerschel (Tuebingen, Germany) - See all my reviews
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
This book describes in a very detailed way all the general theories of
economics concerning trade. It is very well done as there are many
examples and it is optically inspiring. Your eyes won't get tired too
quickly, as the layout is done fine. The content of the book is fine,
a good book for students of economics, even though it is advisable to
read more down the line. But for the overview of a topic it serves
allright.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
An important and useful text for understanding trade theory, April
12, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
Krugman and Obstfeld provide a full detailed analysis and examples for
the basis of trade among nations. It is relatively straightforward to
comprehend for both economists and noneconomists.
International trade is an important component of economic policy for
the growth and development of countries. This book examines various
theoretical trade models and provides real world examples of policy
formulation and their impact. The authors do not take any political
positions, thus making their analysis a purely objective, or positive
study.
I would highly recommend this book to students interested in doing
research in international trade and development. It is a must read for
prospective international economists. Noneconomists might also find it
as a useful reference.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
An important and useful text for understanding trade theory.,
December 31, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (5th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Krugman and Obstfeld provide a full detailed analysis and examples for
the basis of trade among nations. It is relatively straightforward to
comprehend for both economists and noneconomists. International trade
is an important component of economic policy for the growth and
development of countries. This book examines various theoretical trade
models and provides real world examples of policy formulation and
their impact. The authors do not take any political positions, thus
making their analysis a purely objective, or positive study.(p)
I would highly recommend this book to students interested in doing
research in international trade and development. It is a must read for
prospective international economists. Noneconomists might also find it
as a useful reference.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Not a bad book.... Too bad its a bit baby, June 12, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Having taken a class on Commodity Flow Theory (Micro) and a seperate
class on Int'l Finances (Macro), I can say that I enjoyed the former
much more then the latter. I used Krugman's latest edition for the
former and thought it was adequatly written for the scope of the
class.
I really wish they would make undergraduate Economics more rigirous as
I believe many undergrads who have taken 2 or 3 university math
courses (up to the linear algebra level) could easily understand most
of the mathematics found in "high brow" Economics theory.
Seeing I've only had the pleasure of reading two textbooks on the
subject (and different sections of each respective book), I am not in
a position where I can make a relative judgment on the quality of the
material.
I felt Krugman's writing (I am assuming the majority of the micro
section is his writing) was mostly neutral. I found, from my reading,
the only section that could have been biased was the section on
political economy, but since I am unfamiliar with that field in
general I cannot make a more descriptive comment.
Overall, I liked the fact that their was some mathematical indexes at
the end of the chapter (something my other int'l economics textbook
lacked). I've come to expect the option of a more quantiative
treatment in most modern textbooks (both my intermediate macro/micro
and econometrics text were layed out in this fashion).
So in conclusion, the text was easy to understand, well organized, and
perhaps abit biased.... However, if you are just being introduced to
the matter, I doubt you will notice much of the bias since the
majority of what he covers in the book are well established models and
theories.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
A clear introduction into trade theory and macroeconomics, July 31,
1999
By A Customer
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
A clear book which gives a good introduction into trade theory. While
the authors sometimes take their time (space) or engage in a
conversation with the reader, it gives a good account of trade theory.
Slightly more advanced and requiring a bit more background is the
other half about open macroeconomics. But this too is quite clear and
gives a good acocunt of the field.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Best econ book I've ever used, May 6, 2009
By D. J. Nardi "TurtleDom" (Washington, DC) -
This is easily the best economics textbook I have ever used (and after
getting an MA in economics, I've used several). It has clear, colorful
graphs with notes right next to the graphs explaining the movements.
The main text is very accessible for the lay reader, but each chapter
also includes boxes and appendices going into greater depth. It also
addresses the policy challenges and political economy, both of which
are crucial to understanding international economics. Highly
recommended!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Your first lesson in International Economics, December 28, 2009
By another opinion - See all my reviews
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (8th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Your first lesson in International Economics is to get the
international version of this book. It will be softcover, also the 8th
edition, and half the price. It will be the same, page for page.
Then take the person of your choice out for a nice dinner. You'll be
glad you did.
16 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
international economics, June 4, 2000
By K. KATO "in...@phnx-jp.com" (Tokyo, Japan) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (5th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Have those reviewers really read the book? As I started reading, I
found that Figure 2-3 in Part ONE is misprinted, that the definitions
of the key terms are not clearly mentioned where they are indicated,
and that it is hard to find the key point in each section with too
long verbal explanations on mathematical points. The authors are
famous, I know. BUT do they really try to let us understand the
subject?
10 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
New Approaches for the Theories of International Economics, April 1,
2001
By Dong-Ho Rhee, "dhr...@uoscc.uos.ac.kr" (the University of Seoul,
Seoul Korea) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (5th
Edition) (Hardcover)
This textbook is unique and special in many respects. it explores new
front line for the international economics. The author may be the
first economist who asserts the Recardian model is a specific factor
model. He also explaines how trade occurs in the monopolistic
competition markets by applying the Salop's equation. His theories on
trade policies under monoplistic competition also expanded the
boundary of the traditional trade theories. His criticism on Brander-
Spencer is remarkable. His model on the international finace is
creative, and his explanation on AA-DD plane make us understood all
the main features in the international financial markets, for which
even IS-LM model (Hicks-Hansen paradigm) could not explain well. Some
minor printing mistakes may be negligible. He made really great
contributions for the relevant theories of international economics. I
appreciate this book as it opend us a new and creative frontline of
international economics. Dong-Ho Rhee University of Seoul, Korea
9 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
A challenge you won't regret, May 9, 2002
By Arlen Hodinh (Austin, TX : Go Longhorns!) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (5th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Krugman's book is not perfect, I know, but if you stick with the
reading the book will prove a valuable resource. One thing I like is
that the authors don't baby their audience. They present difficult
material as simple as it will let them, which is not simple enough for
stupid people. But, in the end the text is great, you will learn about
probably the most important subject in economics today from one if not
two of the most important economists alive.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Received Wrong Edition of Book, February 19, 2009
By Willis Chipango "Willis" (Williamstown, MA) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
I ordered and paid for a 6th edition of this book (recommeded by my
professor). I received a 3rd edition, which I already own. Big
disappointment!
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
An important and useful text for understanding trade theory, February
27, 2006
By Srinidhi Anantharamiah (Melbourne, Florida) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Krugman and Obstfeld, two world renowned international economists,
provide a full detailed analysis and examples for the basis of trade
among nations. It is relatively straightforward to comprehend for both
economists and noneconomists. International trade is an important
component of economic policy for the growth and development of
countries. This book examines various theoretical trade models and
provides real world examples of policy formulation and their impact.
The authors do not take any political positions, thus making their
analysis a purely objective, or positive study.
I would highly recommend this book to students interested in doing
research in international trade and development. It is a must read for
prospective international economists. Noneconomists might also find it
as a useful reference. I found the book to be invaluable in my
graduate research and dissertation.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Krugman, February 24, 2006
By Alberto Ruiz Ortiz "Alberto" (Puerto Rico) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Some complicated theories explained in a way that can be understood.
Esay flow from a concept to the next.
0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
The Undergraduate International Economics Standard, June 28, 2004
By thisismyname "myname" (nowheresville, USA) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Well, I will start off by saying that the book really probably only
deserves somewhere between 4-4.5 stars, but I'll give it 5 to offset
some of the questionable reviews below.
No, the book is not perfect. However, it is an academic standard at
pretty much any major college or university for teaching undergraduate
International Econ/Trade theory, and for good reason. The book makes a
clear a concise presentation of basic theory and policy, perhaps in
points it is a little too simple. As pointed out, while I'm not sure
about the 6th edition, there were some diagrammatical mistakes in the
5th...I bet, however, these were done by a graduate student. A quick
bit of reasoning and a second of thought should yield the appropriate
picture, however. And yes, I think a bit of Krugman's bias comes
through, though its not terribly off-putting.
The book could use a bit more math I think. The real equations and
difficult problems are few and far between, and are, for the most
part, pretty straight forward. At the very most it would take a basic
understanding of calculus, but the majority of the problems and
equations can be explained and done without it. I have read a number
of undergraduate economics books with far more intensive math. Despite
this lack, however, the intentions come across pretty well.
No, this book is not for beginners to economics. At least an
undergraduate course or reading in both micro and macro are needed,
and really and truly, an intermediate level in each is probably better
if one wants to get the most out of the book.
If you find the subject matter within to be terribly math intensive
and you cannot get motivated to read the subject matter because it
doesn't use "pizza and beer" (and um...I don't think I'd want an
imported pizza anyway, but thanks), well I guess the subject and this
book are not for you. However, if you are trying to enrich your
understanding of economics at a very basic level, this book provides a
good way to do so.
And, if you want graduate level book, and like Obstfeld, I recommend
he and Rogoff's book.
10 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
Save your Money--Get the Caves, Jones, et al World Trade..., January
28, 2004
By Sunil Khanna (Cambridge, MA) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (6th
Edition) (Hardcover)
Krugman et al constantly contradicts earlier statements throughout the
text in the international trade section, it will give you a headache.
The finance side is better. If you really want to learn international
trade and finance (for undergrad), get the Caves, Jones, Frankel
text.... I learned the hard way and had to pay restocking fees (etc)
when I wanted to exhange it for Caves et al. Krugman should stick to
writing editorials for the NY Times b/c this text needs some serious
help!!!
1 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent theory and plausible assertations., October 21, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy
(Hardcover)
Extremely interesting book.
7 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
Worst economic book, October 17, 2001
By "khonsu7" (RSM, CA USA) -
This review is from: International Economics: Theory and Policy (5th
Edition) (Hardcover)
It is true that the authors of this book know what they are talking
about. It is not true, however, that they can relay that information
to others in an easy to understand manner. Important terms and
concepts are lost in numerous mathematical functions. The functions
themselves would be somewhat self-explanatory if they had included
numerical examples;however, they did not include enough to make the
concepts crystal clear. Besides, how many college students can really
get into products such as wine and cheese which the author's uses to
illustrate a concept in the second chapter. They could have
illustrated it much better with the use of beer and pizza. Agreeably,
this has to be one of the worst economic textbooks I have read.
http://www.amazon.com/International-Economics-Paul-R-Krugman/dp/1408208075/ref=pd_sim_b_3
Macroeconomics (6th Edition) (Hardcover)
~ Andrew B. Abel
Andrew B. Abel (Author)
(Author), Ben S. Bernanke (Author), Dean Croushore (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/032141554X/ref=dp_image_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
Customer Reviews
Macroeconomics (6th Edition)
2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
(2 customer reviews)
The most helpful favorable review The most helpful critical review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent
I bought this text for self study. This book is clearly written so
that a self-learner can learn intermediate macroeconomics. I
particularly like the appendix that follows the chapter on IS-LM. The
problems in both the workbook and the textbook allow me to think
deeply about the concepts.
The text does not have any answers at the back of the text...
Published 1 month ago by Michael C. Fladlien
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
too many highlihgs
Book was not in a good shape as described on Amazon when I bough it.
For that price it was not a good deal. Too expensive.
Published 5 months ago by Diana C. Hernandez
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent, February 10, 2010
By Michael C. Fladlien "dogbreath" (muscatine, ia United States) -
See all my reviews
I bought this text for self study. This book is clearly written so
that a self-learner can learn intermediate macroeconomics. I
particularly like the appendix that follows the chapter on IS-LM. The
problems in both the workbook and the textbook allow me to think
deeply about the concepts.
The text does not have any answers at the back of the text.
Every morning for the past semester, I have worked my way through this
text. I find the text easy reading and enjoyable.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
too many highlihgs, October 9, 2009
By Diana C. Hernandez -
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
Book was not in a good shape as described on Amazon when I bough it.
For that price it was not a good deal. Too expensive.
http://www.amazon.com/Macroeconomics-6th-Andrew-B-Abel/dp/032141554X/ref=pd_sim_b_4
chhotemianinshallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dalits
Sri Ravidas · B. R. Ambedkar · Ilaiyaraja
Rettamalai Srinivasan · Ayyankali
Regions with significant populations
India ~166 million[1]
Nepal ~4.5 Million (2005)[2]
Pakistan ~2.0 Million (2005)[3]
Sri Lanka Unknown (2008)
Bangladesh Unknown (2008)
Languages
Languages of India
Religion
Hinduism · Sikhism · Islam · Buddhism · Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda
Dalit is a self-designation for a group of people traditionally
regarded as low caste. Dalits are a mixed population of numerous caste
groups all over South Asia, and speak various languages.
While the caste system has been abolished under the Indian
constitution,[4] there is still discrimination and prejudice against
Dalits in South Asia. Since Indian independence, significant steps
have been taken to provide opportunities in jobs and education. Many
social organizations have encouraged proactive provisions to better
the conditions of dalits through improved education, health and
employment.
Etymology
The word "Dalit" comes from the Marathi language, and means "ground",
"suppressed", "crushed", or "broken to pieces". It was first used by
Jyotirao Phule in the nineteenth century, in the context of the
oppression faced by the erstwhile "untouchable" castes of the twice-
born Hindus.[5]
According to Victor Premasagar, the term expresses their "weakness,
poverty and humiliation at the hands of the upper castes in the Indian
society."[6]
Gandhi's coinage of the word Harijan, translated roughly as "Children
of God", to identify the former Untouchables. The terms "Scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes" (SC/ST) are the official terms used in
Indian government documents to identify former "untouchables" and
tribes. However, in 2008 the National Commission for Scheduled Castes,
noticing that "Dalit" was used interchangeably with the official term
"scheduled castes", called the term "unconstitutional" and asked state
governments to end its use. After the order, the Chhattisgarh
government ended the official use of the word "Dalit".[7]
"Adi Dravida", "Adi Karnataka" and "Adi Andhra" are words used in the
states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, respectively, to
identify people of former "untouchable" castes in official documents.
These words, particularly the prefix of "Adi", denote the aboriginal
inhabitants of the land.[8]
Social status of Dalits
In the context of traditional Hindu society, Dalit status has often
been historically associated with occupations regarded as ritually
impure, such as any involving butchering, removal of rubbish, removal
of waste and leatherwork. Dalits work as manual labourers, cleaning
latrines and sewers, and clearing away rubbish.[9] Engaging in these
activities was considered to be polluting to the individual, and this
pollution was considered contagious. As a result, Dalits were commonly
segregated, and banned from full participation in Hindu social life.
For example, they could not enter a temple nor a school, and were
required to stay outside the village. Elaborate precautions were
sometimes observed to prevent incidental contact between Dalits and
other castes.[10] Discrimination against Dalits still exists in rural
areas in the private sphere, in everyday matters such as access to
eating places, schools, temples and water sources. It has largely
disappeared in urban areas and in the public sphere.[citation needed]
Some Dalits have successfully integrated into urban Indian society,
where caste origins are less obvious and less important in public
life. In rural India, however, caste origins are more readily apparent
and Dalits often remain excluded from local religious life, though
some qualitative evidence suggests that its severity is fast
diminishing.[11][12] Dalits and similar groups are also found in
Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In addition, the Burakumin of Japan,
Baekjeong of Korea and Midgan of Somalia are similar in status to
Dalits.
Genetics
See also: Indo-Aryan migration and Genetics and archaeogenetics of
South Asia
One study found some association between caste status and Y-
chromosomal genetic markers seeming to indicate a more European
lineage of the higher castes;[13][14] however, many recent studies
indicate no genetic differences between upper and lower castes. Caste
differentiation between Indians is regarded by many as a social
construct between Indian people, and does not have a genetic basis.
[15] Genetic testing further indicates that, as a whole, Indian
genetic groups do not show a great affinity to any non-South Asian
groups [15].
Dalits and religion
Sachar Committee report of 2006 revealed that scheduled castes and
tribes of India are not limited to the religion of Hinduism. The 61st
Round Survey of the NSSO found that almost nine-tenths of the
Buddhists, one-third of the Sikhs, and one-third of the Christians in
India belonged to the notified scheduled castes or tribes of the
Constitution.
Religion Scheduled Caste Scheduled Tribe
Buddhism 89.50% 7.40%
Christianity 9.00% 32.80%
Sikhism 30.70% 0.90%
Hinduism 22.20% 9.10%
Zoroastrianism - 15.90%
Jainism - 2.60%
Islam 0.80% 0.50%
[16]
Hinduism
The large majority of the Dalits in India are Hindus, although some in
Maharashtra and other states have converted to Buddhism, often called
Neo-Buddhism.[17] Dalits in Sri Lanka can be Buddhist (See Rodiya) or
Hindus.
Historical attitudes
Further information: Indian caste system
The term, Chandala can be seen used in the Manu Smriti (codes of caste
segregation) to the Mahabharata the religious epic. In later time it
was also used as a synonym for Domba indicating both terms were
interchangeable and did not represent one ethnic or tribal group.
Instead, it was a general opprobrious term. In the early Vedic
literature several of the names of castes that are spoken of in the
Smritis as Antyajas occur. We have Carmanna (a tanner of hides) in the
Rig Veda (VIII.8,38) the Chandala and Paulkasa occur in Vajasaneyi
Samhita. Vepa or Vapta (barber) in the Rig Veda. Vidalakara or
Bidalakar occurs in the Vajasaneyi Samhita. Vasahpalpuli (washer
woman) corresponding to the Rajakas of the Smritis in Vajasaneyi
Samhita. Fa Hien, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim who recorded his visit to
India in the early 4th century C.E., noted that Chandalas were
segregated from the mainstream society as untouchables. Traditionally,
Dalits were considered to be beyond the pale of Varna or caste system.
They were originally considered as Panchama or the fifth group beyond
the fourfold division of Indian people. They were not allowed to let
their shadows fall upon a non-Dalit caste member and they were
required to sweep the ground where they walked to remove the
'contamination' of their footfalls. Dalits were forbidden to worship
in temples or draw water from the same wells as caste Hindus, and they
usually lived in segregated neighborhoods outside the main village. In
the Indian countryside, the dalit villages are usually a separate
enclave a kilometre or so outside the main village where the other
Hindu castes reside.
Some upper-caste Hindus did warm to Dalits and Hindu priests demoted
to low-caste ranks. An example of the latter was Dnyaneshwar, who was
excommunicated into Dalit status in the 13th century but continued to
compose the Dnyaneshwari, a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Eknath,
another excommunicated Brahmin, fought for the rights of untouchables
during the Bhakti period. Historical examples of Dalit priests include
Chokhamela in the 14th century, who was India's first recorded Dalit
poet and Raidas, born into a family of cobblers. The 15th century
saint Sri Ramananda Raya also accepted all castes, including
untouchables, into his fold. Most of these saints subscribed to the
Bhakti movements in Hinduism during the medieval period that rejected
casteism. Nandanar, a low-caste Hindu cleric, also rejected casteism
and accepted Dalits. Due to isolation from the rest of the Hindu
society, many Dalits continue to debate whether they are 'Hindu' or
'non-Hindu'. Traditionally, Hindu Dalits have been barred from many
activities that were seen as central to Vedic religion and Hindu
practices of orthodox sects. Among Hindus each community has followed
its own variation of Hinduism, and the wide variety of practices and
beliefs observed in Hinduism makes any clear assessment difficult.
The declaration by princely states of Kerala between 1936 and 1947
that temples were open to all Hindus went a long way towards ending
the system of untouchability in Kerala. Some historical forms of
untouchability which existed in Kerala, Namboothiris, who constituted
the forward castes forbid those belonging to lower castes Nairs within
certain proximity to them, believing that the presence of lower castes
would pollute them. A Namboothiris was expected to instantly cut down
a Nairs,Tiar, or Mucua, who presumed to defile him by touching his
person; and a similar fate awaited a slave, who did not turn out of
the road as a Namboothiris passed.[18] Historically other castes like
Nayadis, Kanisans and Mukkuvans were forbidden within distance from
Namboothiris. Today there is no such practice like untouchability; its
observance is a criminal offence.[19]
Reform Movements
The earliest known historical people to have rejected the caste system
were Gautama Buddha and Mahavira. Their teachings eventually became
independent religions called Buddhism and Jainism. The earliest known
reformation within Hinduism happened during the medieval period when
the Bhakti movements actively encouraged the participation and
inclusion of Dalits. In the 19th Century, the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj
and the Ramakrishna Mission actively participated in the emancipation
of Dalits. While there always have been segregated places for Dalits
to worship, the first "upper-caste" temple to openly welcome Dalits
into their fold was the Laxminarayan Temple in Wardha in the year
1928. It was followed by the Temple Entry Proclamation issued by the
last King of Travancore in the Indian state of Kerala in 1936.
The Sikh reformist Satnami movement was founded by Guru Ghasidas, born
a Dalit. Other notable Sikh Gurus such as Guru Ravidas were also
Dalits. Other reformers, such as Jyotirao Phule, Ayyankali of Kerala
and Iyothee Thass of Tamil Nadu worked for emancipation of Dalits. The
1930s saw key struggle between Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar over
whether Dalits would have separate or joint electorates. Although he
failed to get Ambedkar's support for a joint electorate, Gandhi
nevertheless began the "Harijan Yatra" to help the Dalit population.
Palwankar Baloo, a Dalit politician and a cricketer, joined the Hindu
Mahasabha in the fight for independence.
Other Hindu groups have reached out to the Dalit community in an
effort to reconcile with them. On August 2006, Dalit activist Namdeo
Dhasal engaged in dialogue with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in an
attempt to "bury the hatchet". Hindu temples are increasingly
receptive to Dalit priests, a function formerly reserved for Brahmins.
[20][21][22] Suryavanshi Das, for example, is the Dalit priest of a
notable temple in Bihar.[23]. Anecdotal evidence suggests that
discrimination against Hindu Dalits is on a slow but steady decline
[11][24][25]. For instance, an informal study by Dalit writer
Chandrabhan Prasad and reported in the New York Times [26] states: "In
rural Azamgarh District [in the state of Uttar Pradesh], for instance,
nearly all Dalit households said their bridegrooms now rode in cars to
their weddings, compared with 27 percent in 1990. In the past, Dalits
would not have been allowed to ride even horses to meet their brides;
that was considered an upper-caste privilege."
Many Hindu Dalits have achieved affluence in society, although vast
millions still remain poor. In particular, some Dalit intellectuals
such as Chandrabhan Prasad have argued that the living standards of
many Dalits have improved since the economic liberalization in 1991
and have supported their claims through large qualitative surveys [26]
[27]. Recent episodes of Caste-related violence in India have
adversely affected the Dalit community. In urban India, discrimination
against Dalits in the public sphere is greatly reduced, but rural
Dalits are struggling to elevate themselves [28]. Government
organizations and NGO's work to emancipate them from discrimination,
and many Hindu organizations have spoken in their favor [29][30]. Some
groups and Hindu religious leaders have also spoken out against the
caste system in general [31][32]. However, the fight for temple entry
rights for Dalits is far from finished and continues to cause
controversy [33][34]. Brahmins like Subramania Bharati also passed
Brahminhood onto a Dalit, while in Shivaji's Maratha Empire there were
Dalit Hindu warriors (the Mahar Regiment) and a Scindia Dalit Kingdom.
In modern times there are several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders like
Ramachandra Veerappa and Dr. Suraj Bhan. (See List of Dalits)
More recently, Dalits in Nepal are now being accepted into priesthood
(traditionally reserved for Brahmins). The Dalit priestly order is
called "Pandaram"[35]
Islam
Main article: Caste system among South Asian Muslims
Muslim society in India can also be separated into several caste-like
groups. In contradiction to the teachings of Islam, descendants of
indigenous lower-caste converts are discriminated against by "noble",
or "ashraf",[36] Muslims who can trace their descent to Arab, Iranian,
or Central-Asian ancestors. There are several groups in India working
to emancipate them from upper-caste Muslim discrimination.[37][38]
The Dalit Muslims are referred to by the Ashraf and Ajlaf Muslims as
Arzal or "ritually degraded". They were first recorded in the 1901
census as those “with whom no other Muhammadan would associate, and
who are forbidden to enter the mosque or to use the public burial
ground”. They are relegated to "menial" professions such as scavenging
and carrying night soil.
Ambedkar wrote about the Dalit Muslims and was extremely critical of
their mistreatment by upper-caste Muslims, writing: "Within these
groups there are castes with social precedence of exactly the same
nature as one finds among the Hindus."
Sikhism
Irwin Baiya is the most prominent Dalit of the 20th century. Dalits
form a class among the Sikhs who stratify their society according to
traditional casteism. Kanshi Ram himself was of Sikh background
although converted because he found that Sikh society did not respect
Dalits and so became a neo-Buddhist. The most recent controversy was
at the Talhan village Gurudwara near Jalandhar where there was a
dispute between Jat Sikhs and Ravidasia Sikhs. The Different Sikh
Dalits are Ravidasia Sikh and Mazhabi Sikh. Although Sikhism does not
recognize the Caste System, many families, especially the ones with
immediate cultural ties to India, generally do not marry among
different castes.
There are sects such as the Adi-Dharmis who have now abandoned Sikh
Temples and the 5 Ks. They are like the Ravidasis and regard Ravidas
as their guru. They are also clean shaven as opposed to the mainstream
Sikhs. Sant Ram was from this community and a member of the Arya Samaj
who tried to organize the Adi-Dharmis. Other Sikh groups include
Jhiwars, Bazigars, Rai Sikh (many of whom are Ravidasias.) Just as
with Hindu Dalits, there has been violence against Sikh Dalits.
Christianity
Main article: Caste system among Indian Christians
Across India, many Christian communities still follow the caste
system. Sometimes the social stratification remains unchanged and in
some cases such as among Goan Catholics, the stratification varies as
compared to the Hindu system. Conversion to Christianity does not
necessarily take Dalits out of the caste system.
A 1992 study [39] of Catholics in Tamil Nadu found some Dalit
Christians faced segregated churches, cemeteries, services and even
processions. Despite Christian teachings these Dalit also faced
economic and social hardships due to discrimination by upper-caste
priests and nuns. Other sources support these conclusions, including
Christian advocacy groups for Dalits. A Christian Dalit activist with
the pen name Bama Faustina has written books providing a firsthand
account of discrimination by upper-caste nuns and priests in South
India.
Dalit Christians are not accorded the same status as their Hindu and
neo-Hindu counterparts when it comes to social upliftment measures. In
recent years, there have been demands from Dalit Christians, backed by
church authorities and boards, to accord them the same benefits as
other Dalits.
Buddhism
Main article: Dalit Buddhist movement
In Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and a few other regions,
Dalits have come under the influence of the neo-Buddhist movement
initiated by Ambedkar. Some of them have come under the influence of
the Neo-Buddhist and Christian Missionaries and have converted away
from Hinduism into religions such as Christianity and Buddhism in what
they have been told is an "attempt to eliminate the prejudice they
face".
BJP Scheduled Caste Morcha president Bangaru Laxman (Organiser,
6-8-1995) accused Congress leader Sitaram Kesri, who had bracketed the
Dalits with the minorities as "sufferers of Hindu oppression", of
thereby showing "disrespect to [Dalit] saints like Ravidas, Satyakam
Jabali, Sadhna Kasai, Banka Mahar, Dhanna Chamar and others who
protected Hindus against foreign onslaughts."
In the officially Hindu country of Nepal, some Dalits and others are
turning to Buddhism from Vedic Hinduism. Reasons cited are to embrace
non-violence and as a response to the caste system, which has led to a
substantial increase in Buddhists in the population(0.1% to 0.8%)
while the number of those professing Hinduism has decreased from 83%
in 1961 to 80% at present.
The Prevention of Atrocities Act
Main article: Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act, 1989
The Prevention of Atrocities Act (POA) is a tacit acknowledgement by
the Indian government that caste relations are defined by violence,
both incidental and systemic.[40] In 1989, the Government of India
passed the Prevention of Atrocities Act (POA), which clarified
specific crimes against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (the
Dalits) as “atrocities,” and created strategies and punishments to
counter these acts. The purpose of The Act was to curb and punish
violence against Dalits. Firstly, it clarified what the atrocities
were: both particular incidents of harm and humiliation, such as the
forced consumption of noxious substances, and systemic violence still
faced by many Dalits, especially in rural areas. Such systemic
violence includes forced labor, denial of access to water and other
public amenities, and sexual abuse of Dalit women. Secondly, the Act
created Special Courts to try cases registered under the POA. Thirdly,
the Act called on states with high levels of caste violence (said to
be “atrocity-prone”) to appoint qualified officers to monitor and
maintain law and order. The POA gave legal redress to Dalits, but only
two states have created separate Special Courts in accordance with the
law. In practice the Act has suffered from a near-complete failure in
implementation. Policemen have displayed a consistent unwillingness to
register offenses under the act. This reluctance stems partially from
ignorance and also from peer protection. According to a 1999 study,
nearly a quarter of those government officials charged with enforcing
the Act are unaware of its existence.[40]
Dalits and contemporary Indian politics
Newspapers in Calcutta announce the surprise majority for Mayawati's
party in the 2007 elections in Uttar PradeshWhile the Indian
Constitution has duly made special provisions for the social and
economic uplift of the Dalits, comprising the so-called scheduled
castes and tribes in order to enable them to achieve upward social
mobility, these concessions are limited to only those Dalits who
remain Hindu. There is a demand among the Dalits who have converted to
other religions that the statutory benefits should be extended to them
as well, to "overcome" and bring closure to historical injustices.[38]
Another major politically charged issue with the rise of Hindutva's
(Hindu nationalism) role in Indian politics is that of religious
conversion. This political movement alleges that conversions of Dalits
are due not to any social or theological motivation but to allurements
like education and jobs. Critics[who?] argue that the inverse is true
due to laws banning conversion, and the limiting of social relief for
these backward sections of Indian society being revoked for those who
convert. Bangaru Laxman, a Dalit politician, was a prominent member of
the Hindutva movement.
Another political issue is over the affirmative-action measures taken
by the government towards the upliftment of Dalits through quotas in
government jobs and university admissions. About 8% of the seats in
the National and State Parliaments are reserved for Scheduled Caste
and Tribe candidates, a measure sought by B. R. Ambedkar and other
Dalit activists in order to ensure that Dalits would obtain a
proportionate political voice.
Anti-Dalit prejudices exist in fringe groups, such as the extremist
militia Ranvir Sena, largely run by upper-caste landlords in areas of
the Indian state of Bihar. They oppose equal treatment of Dalits and
have resorted to violent means to suppress the Dalits. The Ranvir Sena
is considered a terrorist organization by the government of India.[41]
In 1997, K. R. Narayanan became the first Dalit President.
In 2008, Mayawati, a Dalit from the Bahujan Samaj Party, was elected
as the Chief Minister of India's biggest state Uttar Pradesh. Her
victory was the outcome of her efforts to expand her political base
beyond Dalits, embracing in particular the Brahmins of Uttar Pradesh
[42][43]. Mayawati, together with her political mentor Kanshi Ram, saw
that the interests of the average Dalit (most of whom are landless
agricultural laborers) were more in conflict with the middle castes
such as the Yadav caste, who owned most of the agricultural land in
Uttar Pradesh, than with the predominantly city-dwelling upper castes
[44][45]. Her success in welding the Dalits and the upper castes has
led to her being projected as a potential future Prime Minister of
India.[46]
Dalit literature
Main article: Dalit literature
Dalit literature forms an important and distinct part of Indian
literature.[47][48] One of the first Dalit writers was Madara
Chennaiah, an 11th-century cobbler-saint who lived in the reign of
Western Chalukyas and who is also regarded by some scholars as the
"father of Vachana poetry". Another poet who finds mention is Dohara
Kakkaiah, a Dalit by birth, six of whose confessional poems survive.
[49]
Modern Dalit literature
In the modern era, Dalit literature received its first impetus with
the advent of leaders like Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar in Maharashtra,
who brought forth the issues of Dalits through their works and
writings; this started a new trend in Dalit writing and inspired many
Dalits to come forth with writings in Marathi, Hindi, Tamil and
Punjabi.[50]
By the 1960s, Dalit literature saw a fresh crop of new writers like
Baburao Bagul, Bandhu Madhav [51] and Shankarao Kharat, though its
formal form came into being with the Little magazine movement.[52] In
Sri Lanka, Dalit writers like Dominic Jeeva gained mainstream
popularity in the late 1960.
See also
Annabhau Sathe
Caste-related violence in India
2006 Dalit protests in Maharashtra
Dalit Freedom Network
Persecution of Dalits
List of Arunthathiyar
Aathi Thamilar Peravai
Athiyamaan
References
^ [1]
^ Damal, Swarnakumar (2005), Dalits of Nepal: Who are Dalits in Nepal,
International Nepal Solidarity Network,
http://insn.org/wp-content/DalitsNepalSuvashDarnal.pdf
^ Satyani, Prabhu (2005). "The Situation of the Untouchables in
Pakistan". ASR Resource Center.
http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-sikand230905.htm. Retrieved
2008-09-27.
^ Excerpts from The Constitution of India, Left Justified, 1997,
http://www.leftjustified.com/leftjust/lib/sc/ht/wtp/india.html
^ Oliver Mendelsohn, Marika Vicziany. The untouchables: subordination,
poverty, and the state in modern India, 1998: Cambridge University
Press, p. 4 ISBN 0521556716, 9780521556712
http://www.alpha.org.in/
^ Victor Premasagar in Interpretive Diary of a Bishop: Indian
Experience in Translation and Interpretation of Some Biblical Passages
(Chennai: Christian Literature Society, 2002), p. 108.
^ "Dalit word un-constitutional says SC". Express India. 2008-01-18.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Dalit-word-unconstitutional-says-SC-Commission/262903/.
Retrieved 2008-09-27.
http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Dalit-word-unconstitutional-says-SC-Commission/262903/
^ Leslie, Julia (2004), Authority and Meaning in Indian Religions,
Ashgate Pub Ltd, pp. 46, ISBN 0754634310
^ "Manual scavenging - the most indecent form of work". Anti-
Slavery.org. 2002-05-27. http://www.antislavery.org/archive/submission/submission2002-scavenging.htm.
Retrieved 2008-09-27.
^ "India: "Hidden Apartheid" of Discrimination Against Dalits". Human
Rights Watch. 2002-05-27. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/02/13/india15303.htm.
Retrieved 2008-09-27.
^ a b Hindus Support Dalit Candidates in Tamil Nadu
^ Crusader Sees Wealth as Cute for Caste Bias
^ Utah, America, "Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste
Populations", 30 September 2006
http://jorde-lab.genetics.utah.edu/elibrary/Bamshad_2001a.pdf
^ "Genetic affinities between endogamous and inbreeding populations of
Uttar Pradesh" (2007)
^ a b http://www.pnas.org/content/103/4/843.full.pdf
^ Sachar, Rajindar (2006). "Minority Report" (pdf). Government of
India. http://www.mfsd.org/sachar/leafletEnglish.pdf. Retrieved
2008-09-27.
http://www.mfsd.org/sachar/leafletEnglish.pdf
^ http://www.bangladeshsociology.org/BEJS%203.2%20Das.pdf
^ http://books.google.com/books?id=FnB3k8fx5oEC&pg=PA291 Castes and
tribes of Southern India, Volume 7 By Edgar Thurston, K. Rangachari, p.
251
^ http://www.nairs.in/acha_a.htm
^ Low-Caste Hindu Hired as Priest
^ Dalits: Kanchi leads the way
^ The new holy order
^ Patna's Mahavira Temple Accepts Dalit Priest
^ `Kalyanamastu' breaks barriers
^ Tirupati temple reaches out to Dalits
^ a b Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for Caste Bias
^ In an Indian Village, Signs of the Loosening Grip of Caste
^ Business and Caste in India
^ RSS for Dalit head priests in temples
^ Hindu American Foundation Denounces Temple Entry Ban on Harijans
(Dalits) in Orissa
^ Back to the Vaidic Faith
^ TTD priests do seva in Dalit village
^ Temple relents, bar on Dalit entry ends
^ Temples of Unmodern India
^ [2]
^ "Hindu Wisdom - Caste_System". hinduwisdom.info. http://hinduwisdom.info/Caste_System.ht.
Retrieved 2008-06-20.
^ "Dalit Muslims". www.deshkalindia.com. http://www.deshkalindia.com/dalit-muslims.htm.
Retrieved 2008-06-20.
^ a b Sikand, Yoginder. "The 'Dalit Muslims' and the All-India
Backward Muslim Morcha". www.indianet.nl. http://www.indianet.nl/dalmusl.html.
Retrieved 2008-06-20.
^ [3]
^ a b The Prevention of Atrocities Act: Unused Ammunition
^ http://pakobserver.net/200906/27/Articles02.asp
^ "Mayawati bets on Brahmin-Dalit card for U.P. polls" The Hindu,
March 14 2007
^ "Brahmin Vote Helps Party of Low Caste Win in India" The New York
Times, May 11 2007
^ "The victory of caste arithmetic", Rediff News, May 11 2007
^ "Why Mayawati is wooing the Brahmins" Rediff News, March 28 2007
^ "Mayawati Plans to Seek India's Premier Post", The Wall Street
Journal, August 11 2008
^ Dalit literature
^ Brief Introduction to Dalit Literature
^ Western Chalukya literature#Bhakti literature.
^ Dalit’s passage to consciousness The Tribune, September 28, 2003
^ Dalit literature is not down and out any more Times of India, July
7, 1989
^ A Critical study of Dalit Literature in India Dr. Jugal Kishore
Mishra
Further reading
Dalit - The Black Untouchables of India, by V.T. Rajshekhar. 2003 -
2nd print, Clarity Press, Inc. ISBN 0-932863-05-1.
Untouchable!: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement, by Barbara R.
Joshi, Zed Books, 1986. ISBN 0862324602, 9780862324605.
An Anthology Of Dalit Literature, by Mulk Raj Anand. 1992, Gyan Books.
ISBN 8121204194, ISBN 9788121204194.
Dalits and the Democratic Revolution - Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit
Movement in Colonial India, by Gail Omvedt. 1994, Sage Publications.
ISBN 8170363683.
The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern
India, by Oliver Mendelsohn, Marika Vicziany, Cambridge University
Press, 1998, ISBN 0521556716, 9780521556712.
Dalit Identity and Politics, by Ranabira Samaddara, Ghanshyam Shah,
Sage Publications, 2001. ISBN 0761995080, 9780761995081.
Journeys to Freedom: Dalit Narratives, by Fernando Franco, Jyotsna
Macwan, Suguna Ramanathan. Popular Prakashan, 2004. ISBN 8185604657,
9788185604657.
Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature, by Sharankumar Limbale.
2004, Orient Longman. ISBN 8125026568.
From Untouchable to Dalit - Essays on the Ambedkar Movement, by
Eleanor Zilliot. 2005, Manohar. ISBN 8173041431.
Dalit Politics and Literature, by Pradeep K. Sharma. Shipra
Publications, 2006. ISBN 8175412712, 9788175412712.
Dalit Visions: The Anti-caste Movement and the Construction of an
Indian Identity, by Gail Omvedt. Orient Longman, 2006. ISBN
8125028951, 9788125028956.
Dalits in Modern India - Vision and Values, by S M Michael. 2007, Sage
Publications. ISBN 9780761935711.
Dalit Literature : A Critical Exploration, by Amar Nath Prasad & M.B.
Gaijan. 2007. ISBN 8176258172.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit
Census Data 2001 >> India at a glance >>
Scheduled Casts & Scheduled Tribes Population
Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes Population:
Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes Population
Scheduled Castes : 166,635,700 16.2%
Scheduled Tribes : 84,326,240 8.2%
Scheduled Castes
State with highest proportion of Scheduled Castes Punjab ( 28.9 %)
State with lowest proportion of Scheduled Castes Mizoram ( 0.03 %)
UT with highest proportion of Scheduled Castes Chandigarh (17.5%)
UT with lowest proportion of Scheduled Castes D & N Haveli (1.9% )
District with highest proportion of Scheduled Castes Koch-Bihar
(50.1%)
District with lowest proportion of Scheduled Castes Lawngtlai Mizoram
(0.01%)
Scheduled Tribes
State with highest proportion of Scheduled Tribes Mizoram ( 94.5 % )
State with lowest proportion of Scheduled Tribes Goa (0.04 %)
UT with highest proportion of Scheduled Tribes Lakshadweep (94.5 %)
UT with lowest proportion of Scheduled Tribes A & N Islands (8.3 %)
District with highest proportion of Scheduled Tribes Sarchhip, Mizoram
( 98.1%)
District with lowest proportion of Scheduled Tribes Hathras, Uttar
Pradesh (0.01%)
Area | Administrative Divisions | Population | Population Density |
Rural Urban Distribution
http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_Glance/scst.aspx
Dalits In Pakistan
Book Review By Yoginder Sikand
23 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
Name of the Book: Hamey Bhi Jeeney Do: Pakistan Mai Acchoot Logon ki
Suratehal (Urdu) ['Let us Also Live: The Situation of the Untouchables
in Pakistan']
Author: Pirbhu Lal Satyani (pirb...@yahoo.com)
Publisher: ASR Resource Centre, Lahore, Pakistan (a...@brain.net.pk)
Year: 2005
Price: Rs. 20 (Pakistani)
Caste, the scourge of Hinduism, is so deeply entrenched in Indian
society that it has not left the adherents of Islam, Sikhism,
Christianity and Buddhism-theoretically egalitarian religions-
unaffected. So firmly rooted is the cancer of caste in the region that
it survives and thrives in neighbouring Pakistan, where over 95% of
the population are Muslims, as this slim book tells us.
Pirbhu Lal Satyani, the author of the book, is a Pakistani Hindu
social activist based in Lahore, working among the Dalits in his
country. Of Pakistan's roughly 3 million Hindu population, he says,
over 75% are Dalits, belonging to various castes, the most prominent
being Meghwals, Odhs, Valmikis, Kohlis and Bhils. They reside mainly
in southern Punjab and Sindh. Satyani provides startling details about
the plight of the Dalits of Pakistan, which appears to be no different
from that of the Dalits of India.
In a speech in 1944, Satyani writes, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder
of Pakistan, declared that the Muslim League would protect the rights
of the Dalits, and he assured them of full security. Accordingly,
Jogendra Nath Mondal, a Dalit from East Bengal, was appointed as the
leader of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan and the first Law
Minister of the country. This suggests, Satyani says, that Jinnah was
genuine in his concern for the Dalits of Pakistan. However, things
began to change after Jinnah's death, and in 1953 Mondal resigned from
the Cabinet and migrated to India. This was an indication of the
growing intolerance towards minorities in post-Jinnah Pakistan. Today,
as Satyani shows, minorities lead a bleak existence in Pakistan, the
worst sufferers among them being the country's Dalits.
Following the Partition of India, Satyani says, most Hindus living in
what is now Pakistan migrated to India. The vast majority of those who
stayed back in Pakistan were Dalits. In the years after the Partition,
he writes, there has been a steady migration of Hindus to India,
especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1965 and 1971 wars
between India and Pakistan. The destruction of the Babri Masjid in
India in 1992 and the ensuing massacre of Muslims in different parts
of India by Hindutva extremists, led to a heightening of insecurity
among the Pakistani Hindus, causing a sizeable number of them to
migrate to India. Most of these migrants were 'upper' caste Hindus.
Lacking money and resources, Dalits in Pakistan were unable to make
the same choice. In addition, Satyani writes, 'The Dalits are so
caught up with mere day-to-day survival issues that Hindu-Muslim
conflicts or Pakistan-India disputes are not as important for them as
they are for rich 'upper' caste Hindus'. To add to this probably is
the fact that life for Dalits in India is hardly better than in
Pakistan.
Most Pakistani Dalits work as landless agricultural labourers and
sweepers, Satyani writes. In rural areas their huts are located in
separate settlements outside the main village and they generally lack
even basic amenities. Large numbers of Dalits also lead a nomadic
existence, traveling from village to village in search of manual work.
Many Dalits live in temporary structures in the land of landlords for
whom they work and they can be expelled from their whenever the
landlords wish, having no title to the land. They generally earn a
pittance and are often forced into free labour by powerful 'upper'
caste Hindu and Muslim feudal lords. Many Dalits eke out a miserable
existence as bonded labourers, being heavily indebted to landlords and
moneylenders. If they protest false cases are lodged against them and
the police does little or nothing to protect them. Local
administrative officers routinely harass them and even forcibly take
away their cattle and other such belongings. Land mafias in rural
Sindh often forcibly grab the land on which Dalits set up their huts.
In most places Dalits have no temples of their own. They have few
places where they can burn their dead, and many of these are illegally
occupied by local Muslims.
In schools in the villages, Satyani tells us, Dalit students routinely
face discrimination and are not allowed to use utensils that are used
by other students. In schools Dalit students are often badly treated
by Muslim teachers and students. Despite being the poorest of the
poor, they do not receive any scholarships on the grounds that money
for scholarships comes from zakat funds and hence it is not
permissible for non-Muslims to avail of them. Further, owing to
desperate poverty few Dalits can afford to send their children for
higher education, and, generally, children are withdrawn from school
at an early age to engage in manual work to help supplement the
family's meagre income. In many cases, Dalits do not send their girls
to school fearing that they might be kidnapped, raped or forced to
convert to Islam.
In towns and cities Dalits generally live in the poorest parts, in
squalid slums. There are no organizations working among them for their
welfare, and, lacking a strong political leadership of their own, they
are not able to effectively assert their voice in demanding their
rights from the state or from the larger society, not even to protest
in cases of human rights violations. Many of them do not possess
national identity cards, and so cannot access various government
developmental schemes. Government facilities for religious minorities
are almost monopolized by the country's more powerful and organized
Christian and 'upper' caste Hindu communities, leaving the Dalits
untouched.
Because of acute poverty, rampant illiteracy and discrimination and
the absence of a Dalit movement as in India, Dalits in Pakistan have
no political influence at all, Satyani says. In many places, Dalits
are not allowed to freely vote for candidates of their own choice.
They are often forced by powerful 'upper' caste Hindu and Muslim
landlords to vote for particular candidates, and if they are refused
they are pressurized into leaving their homes or are beaten up. The
problem of Dalit political marginalisation is complicated by the acute
divisions among the Dalits, with various Dalit castes practicing
untouchability among themselves. For its part, the Pakistani state,
Satyani says, prefers to promote the economically and socially more
influential 'upper' caste Hindus as 'leaders' of the Hindus, instead
of trying to promote an alternate Dalit leadership. Thus, for
instance, in 2002, of the nine seats reserved for the Sindh provincial
assembly for religious minorities, seven were for Hindus and only one
for Dalits, while Dalits account for more than 70% of the Hindu
population of the province. The state's lack of commitment to helping
the Dalits is also evident from the fact that despite there being some
3,50,000 Dalits in southern Punjab (mainly in the Rahim Yar Khan and
Bahawalpur districts) there are no reserved seats for Dalits or Hindus
in the provincial assembly. All the seats reserved for minorities in
the assembly for minorities are occupied by Christians. Further,
government affirmative policies meant especially for Dalits have been
done away with, Satyani writes. While Jinnah had provided a 6% job
quota for Dalits in some government services, in 1998 the government
of Nawaz Sharif, assisted by some 'upper' caste Hindu and Christian
leaders, changed the Dalit quota to a general minorities' quota, thus
effectively denying Dalits assured access to government jobs.
Dalits, like other minorities in Pakistan, Satyani tells us, are also
victims of religious discrimination, by both Muslims as well as
'upper' caste Hindus. Despite the Hindus being a minority in Pakistan,
'upper' caste Hindus continue to discriminate against the Dalits.
Generally, Dalits are refused entry into Hindu temples belonging to
the 'upper' castes. 'Upper' caste Hindu landlords and businessmen in
Sindh, Satyani writes, show little concern for the plight of the
Dalits, and, instead, are often complicit, along with Muslim feudal
lords, in oppressing them. As in large parts of India, in eateries in
the rural areas of Sindh, owned both by 'upper' caste Hindus as well
Muslims, Dalits are forced to use separate utensils and are expected
to wash them themselves after use. When they visit hospitals for
treatment they are generally left unattended and, being considered as
untouchables, are not allowed to touch utensils meant for public use
there. Often, Dalit women are gang-raped, murdered or are forced to
convert to Islam, but no action is taken against the perpetrators of
these crimes. Besides this, due to discrimination by 'upper' caste
Hindus, many Dalits have converted to Islam and Christianity on their
own.
Satyani ends his book with a list of recommendations for addressing
the plight of Dalits in his country. He suggests that the government
of Pakistan should insist that the question of Dalit human rights and
amelioration of their pathetic conditions be placed as part of the
SAARC agenda. This, presumably, would force all the SAARC member
states, including India, to take the issue of caste oppression
seriously. He calls for the setting up of a national commission in
Pakistan to monitor the conditions of the country's Dalits and to work
for their welfare. Dalits, he says, should be given reserved seats in
the National and Provincial Assemblies in accordance with their
population as well as adequate representation in all government
services. In areas with a high Dalit population, councils should be
created by the state for development of the Dalits. All 'black laws'
against religious minorities should be repealed, Satyani advises, and
to improve relations between different religious communities the
educational curriculum should be revised and negative portrayals of
non-Muslim communities and their religions should be deleted. Landless
labourers should be granted titles to land; Hindu, including Dalit,
employees should be given holidays on the occasion of their festivals;
Dalit communities that do not have any cremation grounds of their own
should be provided with such facilities; Dalits should be given the
right to use public wells and taps and to live within the villages,
instead, as of now, outside them; and Hindu temples presently under
the control of the Waqf Department should be given back to the
community. In schools with a sizeable Hindu population, Hindu children
should be provided facilities to study their own religion instead of
Islam.
Whether the state authorities willing to accede to these demands,
however, is another question.
Pirbhu Lal Satyani can be contacted on pirb...@yahoo.com
Indian Dalit readers could help Pirbhu Lal by sending him Dalit
literature in English or Urdu.
http://www.countercurrents.org/dalit-sikand230905.htm
Excerpts from The Constitution of India
PART III
Fundamental Rights
General
12. Definition — In this Part, unless the context otherwise requires,
"the State" includes the Government and Parliament of India and the
Government and the Legislature of each of the States and all local or
other authorities within the territory of India or under the control
of the Government of India....
Right to Equality
14. Equality before law — The State shall not deny to any person
equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the
territory of India.
15. Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste,
sex or place of birth — (1) The State shall not discriminate against
any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of
birth or any of them. (2) No citizen shall, on grounds only of
religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them, be subject
to any disability, liability, restriction or condition with regard to
— (a) access to shops, public restaurants, hotels and places of public
entertainment; or (b) the use of wells, tanks, bathing ghats, roads
and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of State
funds or dedicated to the use of the general public. (3) Nothing in
this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision
for women and children. (4) Nothing in this article or in clause (2)
of Article 29 shall prevent the State from making any special
provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally
backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the
Scheduled Tribes.
16. Equality of opportunity in matters of public employment — (1)
There shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters
relating to employment or appointment to any office under the State.
(2) No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex,
descent, place of birth, residence or any of them, be ineligible for,
or discriminated against in respect or, any employment or office under
the State....
17. Abolition of Untouchability — "Untouchability" is abolished and
its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any
disability arising out of "Untouchability" shall be an offence
punishable in accordance with law.
18. Abolition of titles — (1) No title, not being a military or
academic distinction, shall be conferred by the State....
Right to Freedom
19. Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, etc. —
(1) All citizens shall have the right — (a) to freedom of speech and
expression; (b) to assemble peaceably and without arms; (c) to form
associations or unions; (d) to move freely throughout the territory of
India; (e) to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India;
and (f) [removed]; (g) to practice any profession, or to carry on any
occupation, trade or business.
...Nothing in sub-clause (a)... (b)... (c)... (d)... (e)... (g)... of
Clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent
the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes
reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the
said sub-clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of
India....
20. Protection in respect of conviction for offenses — (1) No person
shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in
force at the time of the commission of the act charged as an offence,
nor be subjected to a penalty greater than that which might have been
inflicted under the law in force at the time of the commission of the
offence. (2) No person shall be prosecuted and punished for the same
offence more than once. (3) No person accused of any offence shall be
compelled to be a witness against himself.
21. Protection of life and personal liberty — No person shall be
deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure
established by law.
22. Protection against arrest and detention in certain cases — (1) No
person who is arrested shall be detained in custody without being
informed, as soon as may be, of the grounds for such arrest nor shall
he be denied the right to consult, and to be defended by, a legal
practitioner of his choice. (2) Every person who is arrested and
detained in custody shall be produced before the nearest magistrate
within a period of twenty-four hours of such arrest excluding the time
necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the court of the
magistrate and no such person shall be detained in custody beyond the
said period without the authority of a magistrate. (3) Nothing in
clauses (1) and (2) shall apply — (a) to any person who for the time
being is an enemy alien; or (b) to any person who is arrested or
detained under any law providing for preventive detention. (4) No law
providing for preventive detention shall authorize the detention of a
person for a longer period than three months unless — (a) an Advisory
Board consisting of persons who are, or have been, or are qualified to
be appointed as, Judges of a High Court has reported before the
expiration of the said period of three months that there is in its
opinion sufficient cause for such detention;... (5) When any person is
detained in pursuance of an order made under any law providing for
preventive detention, the authority making the order shall, as soon as
may be, communicate to such person the grounds on which the order has
been made and shall afford him the earliest opportunity of making a
representation against the order. (6) Nothing in clause (5) shall
require the authority making any such order as is referred to in that
clause to disclose facts which such authority considers to be against
the public interest to disclose....
Right Against Exploitation
23. Prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labor — (1)
Traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of forced
labor are prohibited and any contravention of this provision shall be
an offence punishable in accordance with law. (2) Nothing in this
article shall prevent the State from imposing compulsory service for
public purposes....
24. Prohibition of employment of children in factories, etc. — No
child below the age of fourteen years shall be employed to work in any
factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment.
Right to Freedom of Religion
25. Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and
propagation of religion —(1) Subject to public order, morality and
health and to the other provisions of this Part, all persons are
equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to
profess, practice and propagate religion. (2) Nothing in this article
shall affect the operation of any existing law or prevent the State
from making any law — (a) regulating or restricting any economic,
financial, political or other secular activity which may be associated
with religious practice; (b) providing for social welfare and reform
or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public
character to all classes and sections of Hindus....
Cultural and Educational Rights
29. Protection of interests of minorities — (1) Any section of the
citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having
a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right
to conserve the same. (2) No citizen shall be denied admission into
any educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid
out of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language
or any of them....
34. Restriction on rights conferred by this Part while martial law is
in force in any area - ..Parliament may by law indemnify any person in
the service of the Union or of a State or any other person in respect
of any act done by him in connection with the maintenance or
restoration of order in any area within the territory of India where
martial law was in force or validate any sentence passed, punishment
inflicted, forfeiture ordered or other act done under martial law in
such area....
51-A. Fundamental duties — It shall be the duty of every citizen of
India — (a) to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and
institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem; (b) to
cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national
struggle for freedom; (c) to uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity
and integrity of India; (d) to defend the country and render national
service when called upon to do so; (e) to promote harmony and the
spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India
transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional
diversities; to renounce practice derogatory to the dignity of women;
(f) to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture;
(g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests,
lakes, rivers and wild life, and to have compassion for living
creatures; (h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the
spirit of inquiry and reform; (i) to safeguard public property and to
abjure violence; (j) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of
individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises
to higher levels of endeavour and achievement.
Copyright ©1995-97 by LeftJusified Publiks
http://www.leftjustified.com/leftjust/lib/sc/ht/wtp/india.html
India: ‘Hidden Apartheid’ of Discrimination Against Dalits
Government Fails to End Caste-Based Segregation and Attacks
(New York, February 13, 2007) –
India has systematically failed to uphold its international legal
obligations to ensure the fundamental human rights of Dalits, or so-
called untouchables, despite laws and policies against caste
discrimination, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and
Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. More than 165
million Dalits in India are condemned to a lifetime of abuse simply
because of their caste.
Prime Minister Singh has rightly compared ‘untouchability’ to
apartheid, and he should now turn his words into action to protect the
rights of Dalits. The Indian government can no longer deny its
collusion in maintaining a system of entrenched social and economic
segregation.
Professor Smita Narula, faculty director of the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of
Law, and co-author of the report.
Contribute to Human Rights Watch
Related Material
“Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s
‘Untouchables’”
Report, February 13, 2007
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
Web Site
India
Country Page
India's Dalits: between atrocity and protest
Commentary, January 12, 2007
More on the work of the International Dalit Solidarity Network
Web Site
More on the work of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights
Web Site
IDSN produced documentary on Dalits
Film
Audio Commentary in English
Audio Clip
Letter to Prime Minister Singh of India from the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice and Human Rights Watch
Letter, February 14, 2007
The 113-page report, “Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against
India’s ‘Untouchables’,” was produced as a “shadow report” in response
to India’s submission to the United Nations Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which monitors
implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). The committee will review
India’s compliance with the convention during hearings in Geneva on
February 23 and 26.
On December 27, 2006 Manmohan Singh became the first sitting Indian
prime minister to openly acknowledge the parallel between the practice
of “untouchability” and the crime of apartheid. Singh described
“untouchability” as a “blot on humanity” adding that “even after 60
years of constitutional and legal protection and state support, there
is still social discrimination against Dalits in many parts of our
country.”
“Prime Minister Singh has rightly compared ‘untouchability’ to
apartheid, and he should now turn his words into action to protect the
rights of Dalits,” said Professor Smita Narula, faculty director of
the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York
University School of Law, and co-author of the report. “The Indian
government can no longer deny its collusion in maintaining a system of
entrenched social and economic segregation.”
Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public
services. They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading
conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and upper-
caste community members who enjoy the state’s protection. Entrenched
discrimination violates Dalits’ rights to education, health, housing,
property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal
treatment before the law. Dalits also suffer routine violations of
their right to life and security of person through state-sponsored or -
sanctioned acts of violence, including torture.
Caste-motivated killings, rapes, and other abuses are a daily
occurrence in India. Between 2001 and 2002 close to 58,000 cases were
registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention
of Atrocities) Act – legislation that criminalizes particularly
egregious abuses against Dalits and tribal community members. A 2005
government report states that a crime is committed against a Dalit
every 20 minutes. Though staggering, these figures represent only a
fraction of actual incidents since many Dalits do not register cases
for fear of retaliation by the police and upper-caste individuals.
Both state and private actors commit these crimes with impunity. Even
on the relatively rare occasions on which a case reaches court, the
most likely outcome is acquittal. Indian government reports reveal
that between 1999 and 2001 as many as 89 percent of trials involving
offenses against Dalits resulted in acquittals.
A resolution passed by the European Parliament on February 1, 2007
found India’s efforts to enforce laws protecting Dalits to be “grossly
inadequate,” adding that “atrocities, untouchability, illiteracy,
[and] inequality of opportunity, continue to blight the lives of
India’s Dalits.” The resolution called on the Indian government to
engage with CERD in its efforts to end caste-based discrimination.
Dalit leaders welcomed the resolution, but Indian officials dismissed
it as lacking in “balance and perspective.”
“International scrutiny is growing and with it the condemnation of
abuses resulting from the caste system and the government’s failure to
protect Dalits,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“India needs to mobilize the entire government and make good on its
paper commitments to end caste abuses. Otherwise, it risks pariah
status for its homegrown brand of apartheid.”
Attempts by Dalits to defy the caste order, to demand their rights, or
to lay claim to land that is legally theirs are consistently met with
economic boycotts or retaliatory violence. For example, in Punjab on
January 5, 2006 Dalit laborer and activist Bant Singh, seeking the
prosecution of the people who gang-raped his daughter, was beaten so
severely that both arms and one leg had to be amputated. On September
26, 2006 in Kherlanji village, Maharashtra, a Dalit family was killed
by an upper-caste mob, after the mother and daughter were stripped,
beaten and paraded through the village and the two brothers were
brutally beaten. They were attacked because they refused to let upper-
caste farmers take their land. After widespread protests at the
police’s failure to arrest the perpetrators, some of those accused in
the killing were finally arrested and police and medical officers who
had failed to do their jobs were suspended from duty.
Exploitation of labor is at the very heart of the caste system. Dalits
are forced to perform tasks deemed too “polluting” or degrading for
non-Dalits to carry out. According to unofficial estimates, more than
1.3 million Dalits – mostly women – are employed as manual scavengers
to clear human waste from dry pit latrines. In several cities, Dalits
are lowered into manholes without protection to clear sewage
blockages, resulting in more than 100 deaths each year from inhalation
of toxic gases or from drowning in excrement. Dalits comprise the
majority of agricultural, bonded, and child laborers in the country.
Many survive on less than US$1 per day.
In January 2007 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women concluded that Dalit women in India suffer from “deeply
rooted structural discrimination.” “Hidden Apartheid” records the
plight of Dalit women and the multiple forms of discrimination they
face. Abuses documented in the report include sexual abuse by the
police and upper-caste men, forced prostitution, and discrimination in
employment and the payment of wages.
Dalit children face consistent hurdles in access to education. They
are made to sit in the back of classrooms and endure verbal and
physical harassment from teachers and students. The effect of such
abuses is borne out by the low literacy and high drop-out rates for
Dalits.
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Human Rights Watch
call on CERD to scrutinize the gap between India’s human rights
commitments and the daily reality faced by Dalits. In particular, CERD
should request that the Indian government:
•Identify measures taken to ensure appropriate reforms to eliminate
police abuses against Dalits and other marginalized communities;
•Provide concrete plans to implement laws and government policies to
protect Dalits, and Dalit women in particular, from physical and
sexual violence;
•Identify steps taken to eradicate caste-based segregation in
residential areas and schools, and in access to public services;
and,
•Outline plans to ensure the effective eradication of exploitative
labor arrangements and effective implementation of rehabilitation
schemes for Dalit bonded and child laborers, manual scavengers, and
for Dalit women forced into prostitution.
“International outrage over the treatment of Dalits is matched by
growing national discontent,” Smita Narula said. “India can’t ignore
the voices of 165 million citizens.”
“Hidden Apartheid” is based on in-depth investigations by CHRGJ, Human
Rights Watch, Indian non-governmental organizations, and media
sources. The pervasiveness of abuses against Dalits is corroborated by
the reports of Indian governmental agencies, including the National
Human Rights Commission, and the National Commission on Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes. These and other sources were compiled,
investigated, and analyzed under international law by NYU School of
Law’s International Human Rights Clinic.
Background
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) is
a body of independent experts responsible for monitoring states’
compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), ratified by India in 1968. It
guarantees rights of non-discrimination on the basis of “race, colour,
descent, or national or ethnic origin.” In 1996 CERD concluded that
the plight of Dalits falls squarely under the prohibition of descent-
based discrimination. As a state party to ICERD, India is obligated to
submit periodic reports detailing its implementation of rights
guaranteed under the convention. During the review session CERD
examines these reports and engages in constructive dialogue with the
state party, addressing its concerns and offering recommendations.
CERD uses supplementary information contained in non-governmental
organization “shadow reports” to evaluate states’ reports. India’s
report to CERD, eight years overdue, covers compliance with the
convention from 1996 to 2006 yet does not contain a single mention of
abuses against Dalits – abuses that India’s own governmental agencies
have documented and verified.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/2007/02/13/india15303.htm
Hindus support Dalit candidates in Tamil Nadu
Sunday, 15 October 2006
This time it is a different story from the four villages in southern
Tamil Nadu that defied the panchayati raj system for 10 long years.
Sections of the majority caste-Hindu people in these villages -
Pappapatti, Keeripatti and Nattarmangalam in Madurai district and
Kottakachiyenthal in the adjoining Virudhunagar district - who had
been monopolising panchayat posts for a long time were adamantly
refusing to accept Dalits as their panchayat presidents under the
reservation system introduced in 1996. They either did not allow any
Dalit to file nomination papers or fielded a candidate of their choice
and forced him to quit soon after he took charge or did not allow him
to complete his term. In the past 10 years elections and by-elections
were held more than 15 times and every time caste-Hindus adopted the
same strategy. They remained insensitive to protests from progressive
and democratic sections.
But now the situation is different. Caste Hindus of these villages are
now a changed lot. They sprang a surprise by participating
enthusiastically in the elections held on 13 and 15 October 2006 as
part of the State-wide exercise. This will pave the way, hopefully,
for a smooth, functional transfer of power to Dalits.
Human rights and political activists and mediapersons, who used to
visit these villages at least during election times, could not find
any tension unlike on previous occasions. Nor could they see, unlike
earlier, caste-Hindu elders with wry faces curiously watching the
movements of strangers or tight-lipped Dalits shivering in fear of
their `upper-caste' paymasters.
The villages witnessed hectic campaigns by supporters of rival
candidates, as did every other part of the State. There were small
meetings, distribution of handbills, pasting of posters on trees and
other forms of campaign. Caste Hindus, young and old, participated in
the process helping Dalits file their nominations and exercising their
franchise without fail. They said they had decided on allowing the
successful candidates to complete their term.
There was brisk polling at all levels for both reserved and non-
reserved posts, from panchayat ward member to district panchayat
councillor, in straight and multi-cornered contests. To add pep to
this, there were reports of friction between rival campaigners and
charges of attempts at impersonation. The voting percentage ranged
from 75 to 85 in the villages, according to reports. The election of
panchayat presidents and, for the first time, their ward members, who
together constitute the elected panchayat council, thus went smoothly.
The panchayat presidents were elected unopposed in Keeripatti and
Kottakachiyenthal. "We will ensure that they complete their term,"
said PK Chellakannu Thevar, a caste-Hindu leader at Pappapatti.
There is no denying that the caste Hindu participation of such
magnitude by itself is significant. For instance, panchayat elections
were held this year at Kottakachiyenthal after nearly 25 years. For
the elections to some posts, Dalits have been proposed or seconded by
caste Hindus. This has raised hopes of building a more effective
working relationship among warring caste groups.
How did it all happen? "This has not come about overnight. A lot of
effort has gone into this process of change," said R Mohan, Communist
Party of India (Marxist) Member of Parliament. He said the State
government, the district administration, voluntary organisations,
political workers "including some of our able activists" and the media
had all contributed to this development.
When the Left and Dalit parties demanded a few months ago that these
defiant villages should not be included in the list of panchayats to
be de-reserved at the end of two terms under the rotational system,
the State government readily agreed. Chief Minister M Karunanidhi also
announced in the State Assembly the government's resolve to break the
resistance to Dalit empowerment. It is this political will, which was
conspicuously absent all these years, triggered the transformation.
Once the State government took a stand, the district administration in
Madurai and Virudhunagar started doing the necessary spadework.
Collector of Madurai T Udhayachandran made several visits, sometimes
with no officials accompanying him to the three rebel panchayat
villages in the district in order to interact with the predominant
caste Hindus (Piranmalai Kallars) and Dalits (Pallars and Paraiyars).
The administration adopted a `carrot and stick' policy to persuade the
majority group to mend its ways and join the mainstream. The officials
assured them of basic amenities and development works. Field officials
educated the people on the advantages of having an elected panchayat.
Udhayachandran said special schemes worth more than Rs 50 lakh were
launched in each panchayat. Self-Help Groups of women were provided
loans to the tune of Rs 35 lakh. Polling booths were rearranged and
the procedures governing the filing of nominations were simplified.
The people were assured that their villages would be developed as
model villages. Several steps were taken to instill confidence among
Dalits and encourage their participation in the election process. The
Collector said: "We will think of creating new job opportunities for
the unemployed youth among both Dalits and others." He hoped that
there would be no problem for the successful Dalit candidates in
completing their terms.
Collector of Virudhunagar SS Jawahar made similar efforts at
Kottakachiyenthal, the most rebellious of the four southern villages,
where not a single election had been held either to the post of
panchayat president or to the post of ward member for 10 years. Unlike
in the other three villages, Dalit presence here is very small - less
than 20. The fall in the figure is attributed to migration, which has
not apparently been taken note of by officials handling poll-related
work. The village lacks infrastructure and basic amenities, including
drinking water and streetlights.
The condition of Dalits here is worse. Most of their one-room
tenements are in a dilapidated condition. They have to cook their food
in the open. There is no electricity. When the district administration
came to know of these problems, it launched development schemes worth
several lakhs of rupees. A ration shop was opened and public taps were
provided. A bus service was also promised. These measures helped
change the attitude of the two major caste-Hindu groups here,
Agamudaiyars and Yadavas. Besides, a rift between the two also worked
to the advantage of Dalits, whose nominee for president could count on
the support of one or the other of the two for his survival in
office.
Organisations such as People's Watch, Madurai, which in association
with the Dalit Panthers of India organised a public hearing on the
issue in 2004 and some activists of the CPI (M) have also been
instrumental in effecting the change in the people's attitude. For
instance, noted writer and CPI (M) activist Venkatesan has been
involved in creating awareness about the need for amity among the
rival social groups to fight poverty and social injustice. A group of
Tamil writers who visited Pappapatti and Nattarmangalam on 8 October
2006 also made a big impact on the caste Hindus. They recalled at the
meetings they addressed how people cutting across castes participated
in the struggles led by U Muthuramalinga Thevar about six decades ago
to win for Dalits the right to enter temples and also to get the
Criminal Tribes Act abolished and the names of communities such as
Piranmalai Kallar removed from the list of notified tribes.
Asked what brought about this change in their mindset, a caste-Hindu
youth from Pappapatti said the younger generation was keen on
`removing the bad name our village has earned". An elderly person
said: "We now realise that we have been left behind in several
respects because of our tough line in the past."
(Source: Frontline)
http://indianchristians.in/news/content/view/311/48/
Crusader Sees Wealth as Cure for Caste Bias
Brian Sokol/Rapport, for The New York Times
An untouchable, or Dalit, woman in Azamgarh District in Uttar Pradesh,
India. The country has 200 million Dalits, many of whom remain
uneducated and poor.
More Photos >
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: August 29, 2008
AZAMGARH DISTRICT, India — When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his
ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he
dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of
your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor.
Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land.
Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new
capitalism.
Brian Sokol/Rapport, for The New York Times
Chandra Bhan Prasad in front of a flooded field in a village in Uttar
Pradesh, India. More Photos »
Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once considered
untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a chain-smoking,
irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist in the English
language press and a professional provocateur. His latest crusade is
to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the
unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new
capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call
themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not
residual prejudice.
At a time of tremendous upheaval in India, Mr. Prasad is a lightning
rod for one of the country’s most wrenching debates: Has India’s
embrace of economic reforms really uplifted those who were consigned
for centuries to the bottom of the social ladder? Mr. Prasad, who
guesses himself to be in his late 40s because his birthday was never
recorded, is an anomaly, often the lone Dalit in Delhi gatherings of
high-born intelligentsia.
He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist
revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a
pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords.
He claims to have failed in that mission.
Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs
patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative
action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into
the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English
“the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.
Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist
ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and
mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those
who are happy,” he said.
There are about 200 million Dalits, or members of the Scheduled
Castes, as they are known officially, in India. They remain socially
scorned in city and country, and they are over-represented among
India’s uneducated, malnourished and poor.
The debate over caste in the New India is more than academic. India’s
leaders are under growing pressure to alleviate poverty and
inequality. Now, all kinds of groups are clamoring for what Dalits
have had for 50 years — quotas in university seats, government jobs
and elected office — making caste one of the country’s most divisive
political issues. Moreover, there are growing demands for caste quotas
in the private sector.
Mr. Prasad’s latest mission is sure to stir the debate. He is
conducting a qualitative survey of nearly 20,000 households here in
northern state of Uttar Pradesh to measure how everyday life has
changed for Dalits since economic liberalization began in 1991. The
preliminary findings, though far from generalizable, reveal subtle
shifts.
The survey, financed by the Center for the Advanced Study of India at
the University of Pennsylvania, finds that Dalits are far less likely
to be engaged in their traditional caste occupations — for instance,
the skinning of animals, considered ritually unclean — than they used
to be and more likely to enjoy social perks once denied them. In rural
Azamgarh District, for instance, nearly all Dalit households said
their bridegrooms now rode in cars to their weddings, compared with 27
percent in 1990. In the past, Dalits would not have been allowed to
ride even horses to meet their brides; that was considered an upper-
caste privilege.
Mr. Prasad credits the changes to a booming economy. “It has pulled
them out of the acute poverty they were in and the day-to-day
humiliation of working for a landlord,” he said.
To prove his point, Mr. Prasad recently brought journalists here to
his home district. In one village, Gaddopur, his theory was borne out
in the tale of a gaunt, reticent man named Mahesh Kumar, who went to
work in a factory 300 miles away so his family would no longer have to
live as serfs, tending the animals of the upper caste.
When he was a child, Dalits like him had to address their upper-caste
landlords as “babu-saab,” close to “master.” Now it is acceptable to
call them “uncle” or “brother,” just as people would members of their
own castes.
Today, Mr. Kumar, 61 and uneducated, owns an airless one-room factory
on the outskirts of Delhi, with a basic gas-fired machine to press
bolts of fabric for garment manufacturers. With money earned there, he
and his sons have built a proper brick and cement house in their
village.
Similar tales are echoed in many other villages across India. But here
is the problem with Mr. Prasad’s survey. Even if it chronicles
progress, the survey cannot tie it to any one cause, least of all
economic changes. In fact, other empirical studies in this budding
area of inquiry show that in parts of India where economic
liberalization has had the greatest impact, neither rural poverty nor
the plight of Dalits has consistently improved.
Abhijit Banerjee, an economist at M.I.T. who studies poverty in India,
says that the reform years coincide with the rise of Dalit
politicians, and that both factors may have contributed to a rise in
confidence among Dalits.
Moreover, Old India’s caste prohibitions have made sure that some can
prosper more easily than others. India’s new knowledge-based economy
rewards the well-educated and highly skilled, and education for
centuries was the preserve of the upper castes.
Today, discrimination continues, with some studies suggesting that
those with familiar lower-caste names fare worse in job interviews,
even with similar qualifications. The Indian elite, whether corporate
heads, filmmakers, even journalists, is still dominated by the upper
castes.
From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables
trying to transcend their destiny.
It is a measure of the hardships of rural India that so many Dalits in
recent years are migrating to cities for back-breaking, often
unregulated jobs, and that those who remain in their villages consider
sharecropping a step up from day labor.
On a journey across these villages with Mr. Prasad, it is difficult to
square the utter destitution of his people with Dalit empowerment. In
one village, the government health center has collapsed into a pile of
bricks. Few homes have toilets. Children run barefoot. In Gaddopur,
the Dalit neighborhood still sits on the edge of the village — so as
not to pollute the others, the thinking goes — and in the monsoon,
when the fields are flooded, the only way to reach the Dalits’ homes
is to tramp ankle deep in mud. The land that leads to the Dalit
enclave is owned by intermediate castes, and they have not allowed for
it to be used to build a proper brick lane.
Indu Jaiswal, 21, intends to be the first Dalit woman of Gaddopur to
get a salaried job. She has persuaded her family to let her defer her
marriage by a few years, an audacious demand here, so she could finish
college and get a stable government job. “With education comes
change,” Ms. Jaiswal said. “You learn how to talk. You learn how to
work. And you get more respect.”
Without education, the migrants from Gaddopur also know, they can go
only so far in the big cities that Mr. Prasad so ardently praises.
Their fabric-pressing factories in and around Delhi have been losing
business lately, as the big textile factories acquire computerized
machines far more efficient than their own crude contraptions. One man
with knowledge of computers can do the work of 10 of their men, they
say. Neither Mr. Kumar, nor the two sons who work with him, can afford
to buy these new machines. Even if they could, they know nothing about
computers.
The village Dalits do not challenge Mr. Prasad with such
contradictions as he travels among them preaching the virtues of
economic liberalization. He is a big man, a success story that makes
them proud.
Among the broad generalizations he favors, he says that Dalits aspire
to marry upper-caste Brahmins to step up the ladder. He married a
woman from his own caste, who, he proudly points out, is light-
skinned. Across the caste ladder, fair complexion is still preferred
over dark.
“Economic expansion is going to neutralize caste in 50 years,” he
predicted. “It will not end caste.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/world/asia/30caste.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=asia
Dalits: Kanchi leads the way
Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: November 19, 2002
The Shankaracharya of Kanchi, Swami Jayendra Saraswati, broke a
critical stalemate in the current controversy over the merits of the
Tamil Nadu ban on conversions by force, fraud or inducement, by
offering worship at a Dalit-run temple in Madurai (The Hindu, Nov 12).
The Veerakali Amman temple, which serves the religious needs of 18
villages and has a Dalit priest, lies in the Melur region where 250
Hindus were converted en masse by a Canadian priest of the Seventh Day
Adventists on August 15. Previously, about 1,500 Hindus were converted
in the neighbouring areas in January 2001. By giving the villagers an
unexpected darshan, the Shankaracharya gracefully shattered several
myths and assumptions about inegalitarianism and divisiveness in Hindu
society.
Speaking with his legendary forthrightness, the seer told the
gathering what many of us have always known, namely, that Hindu dharma
does not promote or envision discrimination and regards people of all
sections of society as equal. He rightly stressed that Hindus have an
age-long tradition of living amicably as a 'family', as brothers and
sisters. Candidly accepting that there are always differences in
society, he advised the people not to foster discrimination on this
count, as unity has ever been the hallmark of the dharma.
The Shankaracharya has truly led by example, with a view to blunting
the criticism of evangelising faiths that social discrimination
compels Dalits to embrace other faiths. Hitherto, Hindus have been
rebutting the argument by pointing out that the condition of former
Dalits does not improve upon leaving the mother faith, and that
persisting discrimination in the new faiths has led Christian and
Muslim groups to demand the extension of reservation benefits to ex-
Dalits in their fold.
Swami Jayendra Saraswati, however, has risen above this cacophony to
remind us that we cannot seek refuge in such specious arguments, and
that it is our duty to uphold the principle of the brotherhood of man
in our own lives. It is now enjoined upon each one of us to be worthy
followers of a worthy leader. Tamil society in particular must rise to
the occasion and accord Dalits the personal dignity they crave for; a
beginning must be made by doing away with the degrading two-glass
system at village dhabas. In this regard, it may be worth noting that
the Swamiji's choice of temple was singularly apt. The Veerakali Amman
temple attracts devotees from all castes and is also a locally
renowned symbol of communal harmony as Muslims regularly join the
celebrations of its annual festival in January.
What is most exciting about this new call from the bastions of the
mainstream tradition is that it cannot be set aside lightly as a
maverick or fringe movement. Swami Jayendra Saraswati followed up the
Madurai initiative at Tirunelveli by categorically asserting that
Dalits have the right to enter any temple across the State
individually and offer prayers. This may not make sense to many urban
citizens. But what it means is that, at many important temples, Dalits
from outside the region do enter anonymously along with other
pilgrims, but local Dalits who might be recognised would be barred or
beaten for entering the precincts.
Now an orthodox Hindu leader with unparalleled knowledge of the
shastras has ruled that "appropriate action" would be taken against
those trying to prevent a Dalit from entering a temple. And as the
cosmic vision of the Hindus does not envisage the shallow separation
of religion and the public sphere, as Mahatma Gandhi had intuitively
understood, the Shankaracharya has rightly asserted that religious
leaders must increasingly participate in public life to foster a
social renaissance.
Given the encouraging signs emanating from different parts of the
country, it would appear that a major paradigm shift is in the making.
Later this month, Hindu religious leaders are slated to meet at
Kottakkal in Malappuram district, Kerala, to discuss whether temples
should open their doors to all visitors, irrespective of religion.
Historically, there are legitimate reasons for both the imposition of
the ban and, socially, there are valid reasons for its revocation. A
mature look at both sides of the coin would go a long way to ensure
community amity and national harmony.
Those who contend that conversions are not an assault upon the
country's native faith and living civilisation would do well to
recollect that Hindu dharma has suffered grievously for several
centuries, and its temples have been the special foci of sustained
assault and injury. Simply put, this is the reason for the self-
protective ban on the entry of non-believers into temple precincts.
Left historian Sanjay Subramani-am has recorded the fortuitous escape
of the famed Tirupathi shrine from annihilation at the hands of the
Portuguese. Can one imagine South India without Tirupathi? North India
was home to several such Tiru-pathis; today it has only the Ganga.
Yet, the priests of Tirupathi have welcomed all devotees, provided
only that they declare faith in Sri Venkatesvara; that is why it
rankles to this day that Signora Sonia Gandhi should so arrogantly
refuse this courtesy at such a holy shrine.
Nonetheless, much water has flown under the bridge, and communities
have grown to the point that many individuals wish to stake claim to a
larger Indic heritage. Hindu tradition is by definition inclusivist
rather than exclusionary, hence deference to the sentiments of non-
Hindu devotees would be highly appropriate. The present move is the
result of the hurt felt by many at a perceived injustice to celebrated
singer KJ Yesudas, a great bhakta of Guruvayurappan, who has been
denied temple entry on account of being born in a Christian family.
The poet Yusufali Kecherry, who has written some of the best songs in
honour of Lord Krishna, has also been excluded from Guruvayur because
of his Muslim origins.
This seemingly innocuous issue came to the forefront a couple of years
ago when the Guruvayur temple performed a purificatory rite after the
wedding of the son of Congress leader Vyalar Ravi. The explanation
offered was that Mr Ravi's wife was not a Hindu. But the incident
proved unacceptable to the Hindu conscience and sparked off the
present reformation drive.
Much can be expected from the conclave as the chief of the Namboodiri
sect has taken the lead in the matter and major temples and social
organisations are expected to attend the meet. It seems reasonable to
extend freedom of entry to all devotees (or for that matter even
heritage tourists from other faiths) provided that they show proper
respect to temple traditions and do not defile their sanctity. And it
goes without saying that this generosity must extend to less
privileged groups within the Hindu fold.
Change is already in the air. In strife-torn Bihar, the birthplace of
Lord Mahavira, the apostle of non-violence, authorities of Patna's
famous Mahavira temple have decided to increase the number of Dalit
priests after a successful experiment launched nine years ago. A
former untouchable, Suryavanshi Das, was recruited as a priest and has
been successfully performing the traditional rituals along with the
Brahmin priests. His public acceptance is absolute. The temple
administration actively promotes equality among human beings and
maintains links with the Ramanandi community which practiced non-
discrimination seven centuries ago.
http://www.hvk.org/articles/1102/135.html
India: ‘Hidden Apartheid’ of Discrimination Against Dalits
Government Fails to End Caste-Based Segregation and Attacks
(New York, February 13, 2007) – India has systematically failed to
uphold its international legal obligations to ensure the fundamental
human rights of Dalits, or so-called untouchables, despite laws and
policies against caste discrimination, the Center for Human Rights and
Global Justice and Human Rights Watch said in a new report released
today. More than 165 million Dalits in India are condemned to a
lifetime of abuse simply because of their caste.
Prime Minister Singh has rightly compared ‘untouchability’ to
apartheid, and he should now turn his words into action to protect the
rights of Dalits. The Indian government can no longer deny its
collusion in maintaining a system of entrenched social and economic
segregation.
Professor Smita Narula, faculty director of the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of
Law, and co-author of the report.
Contribute to Human Rights Watch
Related Material
“Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s
‘Untouchables’”
Report, February 13, 2007
Center for Human Rights and Global Justice
Web Site
India
Country Page
India's Dalits: between atrocity and protest
Commentary, January 12, 2007
More on the work of the International Dalit Solidarity Network
Web Site
More on the work of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights
Web Site
IDSN produced documentary on Dalits
Film
Audio Commentary in English
Audio Clip
Audio Commentary in Hindi
Audio Clip
Letter to Prime Minister Singh of India from the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice and Human Rights Watch
Letter, February 14, 2007
Free Email Newsletter
The 113-page report, “Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against
India’s ‘Untouchables’,” was produced as a “shadow report” in response
to India’s submission to the United Nations Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which monitors
implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). The committee will review
India’s compliance with the convention during hearings in Geneva on
February 23 and 26.
On December 27, 2006 Manmohan Singh became the first sitting Indian
prime minister to openly acknowledge the parallel between the practice
of “untouchability” and the crime of apartheid. Singh described
“untouchability” as a “blot on humanity” adding that “even after 60
years of constitutional and legal protection and state support, there
is still social discrimination against Dalits in many parts of our
country.”
“Prime Minister Singh has rightly compared ‘untouchability’ to
apartheid, and he should now turn his words into action to protect the
rights of Dalits,” said Professor Smita Narula, faculty director of
the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York
University School of Law, and co-author of the report. “The Indian
government can no longer deny its collusion in maintaining a system of
entrenched social and economic segregation.”
Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public
services. They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading
conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and upper-
caste community members who enjoy the state’s protection. Entrenched
discrimination violates Dalits’ rights to education, health, housing,
property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal
treatment before the law. Dalits also suffer routine violations of
their right to life and security of person through state-sponsored or -
sanctioned acts of violence, including torture.
Caste-motivated killings, rapes, and other abuses are a daily
occurrence in India. Between 2001 and 2002 close to 58,000 cases were
registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention
of Atrocities) Act – legislation that criminalizes particularly
egregious abuses against Dalits and tribal community members. A 2005
government report states that a crime is committed against a Dalit
every 20 minutes. Though staggering, these figures represent only a
fraction of actual incidents since many Dalits do not register cases
for fear of retaliation by the police and upper-caste individuals.
Both state and private actors commit these crimes with impunity. Even
on the relatively rare occasions on which a case reaches court, the
most likely outcome is acquittal. Indian government reports reveal
that between 1999 and 2001 as many as 89 percent of trials involving
offenses against Dalits resulted in acquittals.
A resolution passed by the European Parliament on February 1, 2007
found India’s efforts to enforce laws protecting Dalits to be “grossly
inadequate,” adding that “atrocities, untouchability, illiteracy,
[and] inequality of opportunity, continue to blight the lives of
India’s Dalits.” The resolution called on the Indian government to
engage with CERD in its efforts to end caste-based discrimination.
Dalit leaders welcomed the resolution, but Indian officials dismissed
it as lacking in “balance and perspective.”
“International scrutiny is growing and with it the condemnation of
abuses resulting from the caste system and the government’s failure to
protect Dalits,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“India needs to mobilize the entire government and make good on its
paper commitments to end caste abuses. Otherwise, it risks pariah
status for its homegrown brand of apartheid.”
Attempts by Dalits to defy the caste order, to demand their rights, or
to lay claim to land that is legally theirs are consistently met with
economic boycotts or retaliatory violence. For example, in Punjab on
January 5, 2006 Dalit laborer and activist Bant Singh, seeking the
prosecution of the people who gang-raped his daughter, was beaten so
severely that both arms and one leg had to be amputated. On September
26, 2006 in Kherlanji village, Maharashtra, a Dalit family was killed
by an upper-caste mob, after the mother and daughter were stripped,
beaten and paraded through the village and the two brothers were
brutally beaten. They were attacked because they refused to let upper-
caste farmers take their land. After widespread protests at the
police’s failure to arrest the perpetrators, some of those accused in
the killing were finally arrested and police and medical officers who
had failed to do their jobs were suspended from duty.
Exploitation of labor is at the very heart of the caste system. Dalits
are forced to perform tasks deemed too “polluting” or degrading for
non-Dalits to carry out. According to unofficial estimates, more than
1.3 million Dalits – mostly women – are employed as manual scavengers
to clear human waste from dry pit latrines. In several cities, Dalits
are lowered into manholes without protection to clear sewage
blockages, resulting in more than 100 deaths each year from inhalation
of toxic gases or from drowning in excrement. Dalits comprise the
majority of agricultural, bonded, and child laborers in the country.
Many survive on less than US$1 per day.
In January 2007 the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination
against Women concluded that Dalit women in India suffer from “deeply
rooted structural discrimination.” “Hidden Apartheid” records the
plight of Dalit women and the multiple forms of discrimination they
face. Abuses documented in the report include sexual abuse by the
police and upper-caste men, forced prostitution, and discrimination in
employment and the payment of wages.
Dalit children face consistent hurdles in access to education. They
are made to sit in the back of classrooms and endure verbal and
physical harassment from teachers and students. The effect of such
abuses is borne out by the low literacy and high drop-out rates for
Dalits.
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and Human Rights Watch
call on CERD to scrutinize the gap between India’s human rights
commitments and the daily reality faced by Dalits. In particular, CERD
should request that the Indian government:
•Identify measures taken to ensure appropriate reforms to eliminate
police abuses against Dalits and other marginalized communities;
•Provide concrete plans to implement laws and government policies to
protect Dalits, and Dalit women in particular, from physical and
sexual violence;
•Identify steps taken to eradicate caste-based segregation in
residential areas and schools, and in access to public services;
and,
•Outline plans to ensure the effective eradication of exploitative
labor arrangements and effective implementation of rehabilitation
schemes for Dalit bonded and child laborers, manual scavengers, and
for Dalit women forced into prostitution.
“International outrage over the treatment of Dalits is matched by
growing national discontent,” Smita Narula said. “India can’t ignore
the voices of 165 million citizens.”
“Hidden Apartheid” is based on in-depth investigations by CHRGJ, Human
Rights Watch, Indian non-governmental organizations, and media
sources. The pervasiveness of abuses against Dalits is corroborated by
the reports of Indian governmental agencies, including the National
Human Rights Commission, and the National Commission on Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes. These and other sources were compiled,
investigated, and analyzed under international law by NYU School of
Law’s International Human Rights Clinic.
Background
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) is
a body of independent experts responsible for monitoring states’
compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), ratified by India in 1968. It
guarantees rights of non-discrimination on the basis of “race, colour,
descent, or national or ethnic origin.” In 1996 CERD concluded that
the plight of Dalits falls squarely under the prohibition of descent-
based discrimination. As a state party to ICERD, India is obligated to
submit periodic reports detailing its implementation of rights
guaranteed under the convention. During the review session CERD
examines these reports and engages in constructive dialogue with the
state party, addressing its concerns and offering recommendations.
CERD uses supplementary information contained in non-governmental
organization “shadow reports” to evaluate states’ reports. India’s
report to CERD, eight years overdue, covers compliance with the
convention from 1996 to 2006 yet does not contain a single mention of
abuses against Dalits – abuses that India’s own governmental agencies
have documented and verified.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/2007/02/13/india15303.htm
More to follow...
bademiyansubhanallah
Scheduled Castes ("SC"s) and Scheduled Tribes ("ST"s) are Indian
population groupings that are explicitly recognized by the
Constitution of India, previously called the "depressed classes" by
the British. SCs/STs together comprise over 24% of India's population,
with SC at over 16% and ST over 8% [1] as per the 2001 Census. The
proportion of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the population
of India has steadily risen since independence in 1947.
Some Scheduled Castes in India are also known as Dalits[2] Some
Scheduled Tribe people are also referred to as Adivasis.[3]
Post Independence Scheduled Castes are benefited by reservation
policy. With Reservation in India The Constitution laid down 15% and
7.5% of vacancies to government aided educational institutes and for
jobs in the government/public sector, as reserved quota for the SC and
ST candidates respectively for a period of five years, after which the
situation was to be reviewed. This period was routinely extended by
the succeeding governments.
Scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in 2010 Many SC/STs were
successful in adapting to post-independence India, becoming civil
servants, bureaucrats and lawyers. Scheduled Castes are now considered
as a progressive caste. In 2010 most of the sub-castes of scheduled
castes have become economically well off and Rich. They have acquired
technical and management education as well. Scheduled Castes and
Tribes are now working as successful Doctors, Engineers, Architects,
Lawyers, Managers, IT professionals and Entrepreneurs. Further,they
are now also working as scientists in India's most prestigious
research organization like Indian Space Research Organisation, Bhabha
Atomic Research Centre, DRDO.
History
From the 1850s these communities were loosely referred to as the
"Depressed Classes". The early part of the 20th century saw a flurry
of activity in the British Raj to assess the feasibility of
responsible self-government for India. The Morley-Minto Reforms
Report, Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms Report, and the Simon Commission
were some of the initiatives that happened in this context. One of the
hotly contested issues in the proposed reforms was the topic of
reservation of seats for the "Depressed" Classes in provincial and
central legislatures.
In 1935 the British passed The Government of India Act 1935, designed
to give Indian provinces greater self-rule and set up a national
federal structure. Reservation of seats for the Depressed Classes was
incorporated into the act, which came into force in 1937. The Act
brought the term "Scheduled Castes" into use, and defined the group as
including "such castes, races or tribes or parts of groups within
castes, races or tribes, which appear to His Majesty in Council to
correspond to the classes of persons formerly known as the 'Depressed
Classes', as His Majesty in Council may prefer." This discretionary
definition was clarified in The Government of India (Scheduled Castes)
Order, 1936 which contained a list, or Schedule, of castes throughout
the British administered provinces.
After independence, the Constituent Assembly continued the prevailing
definition of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and gave (via articles 341,
342) the President of India and Governors of states responsibility to
compile a full listing of castes and tribes, and also the power to
edit it later as required. The actual complete listing of castes and
tribes was made via two orders The Constitution (Scheduled Castes)
Order, 1950[4], and The Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order, 1950[5]
respectively.
Constitutional framework for safeguarding of interests
The Constitution provides a framework with a three pronged strategy
[6] to improve the situation of SCs and STs.
Protective Arrangements - Such measures as are required to enforce
equality, to provide punitive measures for transgressions, to
eliminate established practices that perpetuate inequities, etc. A
number of laws were enacted to operationalize the provisions in the
Constitution. Examples of such laws include The Untouchability
Practices Act, 1955, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention
of Atrocities) Act, 1989, The Employment of Manual scavengers and
Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, etc.
Compensatory Discrimination - provide positive preferential treatment
in allotment of jobs and access to higher education, as a means to
accelerate the integration of the SCs and STs with mainstream society.
Compensatory discrimination is also popularly referred to as
Reservation.
Development - Provide for resources and benefits to bridge the wide
gap in social and economic condition between the SCs/STs and other
communities.
SC means Sonar Chaand, ST means Sonar Tukro.
National commissions
To effectively implement the various safeguards built into the
Constitution and other legislations, the Constitution, under Articles
338 and 338A, provides for two statutory commissions - the National
Commission for Scheduled Castes, and National Commission for Scheduled
Tribes.
History
In the original Constitution, Article 338 provided for a Special
Officer, called the Commissioner for SCs and STs, to have the
responsibility of monitoring the effective implementation of various
safeguards for SCs/STs in the Constitution as well as other related
legislations and to report to the President. To enable efficient
discharge of duties, 17 regional offices of the Commissioner were set
up all over the country.
In the meanwhile there was persistent representation for a replacement
of the Commissioner with a multi-member committee. It was proposed
that the 48th Amendment to the Constitution be made to alter Article
338 to enable said proposal. While the amendment was being debated,
the Ministry of Welfare issued an administrative decision to establish
the Commission for SCs/STs as a multi-member committee to discharge
the same functions as that of the Commissioner of SCs/STs. The first
commission came into being in August 1978. The functions of the
commission were modified in September 1987 to advise Government on
broad policy issues and levels of development of SCs/STs.
In 1990 that the Article 338 was amended to give birth to the
statutory National Commission for SCs and STs via the Constitution
(Sixty fifth Amendment) Bill, 1990[7]. The first Commission under the
65th Amendment was constituted in March 1992 replacing the
Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the
Commission set up under the Ministry of Welfare's Resolution of 1987.
In 2002, the Constitution was again amended to split the National
Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into two separate
commissions - the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and the
National Commission for Scheduled Tribes
Distribution
Sachar Committee report of 2006 revealed that scheduled castes and
tribes of India are not limited to the religion of Hinduism. The 61st
Round Survey of the NSSO found that almost nine-tenths of the
Buddhists and one-third of the Sikh's in India belonged to the
notified scheduled castes of the Constitution while one-third of the
Christians belonged to the notified scheduled tribes of the
Constitution.
Religion Scheduled Caste Scheduled Tribe
Buddhism 89.50% 7.40%
Christianity 9.00% 32.80%
Sikhism 37.0% 0.90%
Hinduism 22.20% 9.10%
Zoroastrianism - 15.90%
Jainism - 2.60%
Islam 0.80% 0.50%
Sikh Light Infantry is the Regiment of Indian Army. The Sikh Light
Infantry comprises the Mazhabi (dalit) and Ramdasia Sikh soldiers.It
is well known for their dountless daring, loyalty courage, and
tenacity,it is one of the oldest Regiments of the Indian Army.
Scheduled Caste Sub-Plan (SCSP)
The strategy of Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) which was evolved in
1979 is one of the most important interventions through the planning
process for social, economic and educational development of Scheduled
Castes and for improvement in their working and living conditions. It
is an umbrella strategy to ensure flow of targeted financial and
physical benefits from all the general sectors of development for the
benefit of Scheduled Castes. Under this strategy, population[8]. It
entails targeted flow of funds and associated benefits from the annual
plan of States/ Union Territories (UTs) at least in proportion to the
SC population i.e. 16 % in the total population of the country/the
particular state. Presently, 27 States/UTs having sizeable SC
populations are implementing Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan. Although the
Scheduled Castes population, according to 2001 Census, was 16.66
crores constituting 16.23% of the total population of India, the
allocations made through SCSP in recent years have been much lower
than the population proportion. Table below provides the details of
total State Plan Outlay, flow to Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan (SCSP) as
reported by the State/UT Governments for the last few years especially
since the present UPA government is in power at the
2004-2005 108788.9 17656 2065.38 11.06 68.3 5591
2005-2006 136234.5 22111 16422.63 12.05 74.3 5688
2006-2007 152088 24684 21461.12 14.11 86.9 3223
2007-2008* 155013.2 25159 22939.99 14.80 91.2 2219
Information in respect of 14 States/UTs only and as on 31-12- 2007
Source: Network for Social Accountability (NSA) http://nsa.org.in
Prominent menmebrs of SC/STs
B. R. Ambedkar , also known as Babasaheb, was an Indian jurist,
political leader, Buddhist activist, thinker, philosopher, historian,
anthropologist, orator, prolific writer, economist, editor, scholar,
revolutionary and the revivalist of Buddhism in India. He was also the
chief architect of the Indian Constitution.
Dr. Faguni Ram, Ph.D(3-Time Member of Parliament and Ex-Minister of
State)
Prem Singh (MLA)
Kashi Ram, Founder of Bahujan Samaj Party
Lala Ram Ken, Member of Parliament(7th and 8th), India
Divya Bharti, Late Bollywood actress
Babu Jagjivan Ram, Former Deputy Prime Minister of India.
Mayavati, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
Sushilkumar Shinde, Cabinet Minister for Power in the Manmohan Singh
government
K. R. Narayanan, tenth President of India
Shibu Soren, current Chief Minister of Jharkhand state in India
Ajit Jogi, first chief minister of the state of Chhattisgarh, India
Bangaru Laxman, former President of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Birsa Munda, freedom fighters in the Indian struggle for independence
against British colonialism
Jyotirao Phule, was an activist, thinker, social reformer, writer,
philosopher, theologist, scholar, editor and revolutionary from
Maharashtra, India in the nineteenth century
Damodaram Sanjivayya (1921-1972) (First dalit Chief Minister of a
state in India and first dalit President of Indian National Congress
party)
G. M.C. Balayogi (1951-2002) (First dalit speaker, Lok Sabha, India )
K. S. R.Murthy IAS, Retired, Former MP, Lok Sabha
See also
List of Scheduled Tribes in India
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,
1989
Forward caste
Other Backward Classes
Schedule Caste
Notes
^ Census of India - India at a Glance : Scheduled Castes & Scheduled
Tribes Population http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/India_at_Glance/scst.aspx
^ Who are Dalits?
http://www.dalitnetwork.org/go?/dfn/who_are_the_dalit/C64
^ The Adivasis of India
http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Dalit-tribal/2003/adivasi.htm
^ THE CONSTITUTION (SCHEDULED CASTES) ORDER, 1950]1
http://lawmin.nic.in/ld/subord/rule3a.htm
^ 1THE CONSTITUTION (SCHEDULED TRIBES)
http://lawmin.nic.in/ld/subord/rule9a.htm
^ http://nhrc.nic.in/Publications/reportKBSaxena.pdf
^ The Constitution (Amendment)
http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/tamnd65.htm
^ http://www.planningcommission.nic.in/plans/stateplan/scp&tsp/noteguidelinesFor.doc
v • d • e
Reservation in India
Indian caste system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_caste_system
· Scheduled castes and tribes
· Other Backward Classes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class
· Forward classes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_class
· Kalelkar Commission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalelkar_Commission
· Mandal Commission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandal_Commission
· 2006 anti-reservation protests
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Indian_anti-reservation_protests
· Youth for Equality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_for_Equality
· IIT reservation policy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_policy_in_Indian_Institutes_of_Technology
· Poona Pact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poona_Pact
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_castes_and_scheduled_tribes
List of Scheduled Tribes in India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a full list of Scheduled Tribes in India, as recognised in
India's Constitution; a total of 645 district tribes. The term
"Scheduled Tribes" refers to specific indigenous peoples whose status
is acknowledged to some formal degree by national legislation. A
collective term in use locally to describe most of these peoples is
"Upajati" (literally "clans/tribes/groups"). See also the Scheduled
Castes and Tribes page for further explanation.
Andhra Pradesh
1. Andh
2. Bagata
3. Bhil
4. Chenchu, Chenchwar
5. Gadabas
6. Gond Naikpod, Rajgond
7. Goudu (in the Agency tracts)
8. Hill Reddis
9. Jatapus
10. Kammara
11. Kattunayakan
12. Kolam, Mannervarlu
13. Konda Dhoras
14. Konda Kapus
15. Kondareddis
16. Kondhs, Kodi, Kodhu, Desaya Kondhs, Dongria Kondhs, Kuttiya
Kondhs, Tikiria Kondhs, Yenity Kondhs
17. Kotia, Bentho Oriya, Bartika, Dhulia, Dulia, Holva, Paiko, Putiya,
Sanrona, Sidhopaiko
18. Koya, Rajah, Rasha Koya, Lingadhari Koya (ordinary), Kottu Koya,
Bhine Koya, Rajkoya
20. Malis (excluding Adilabad, Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Khammam,
Mahbubnagar, Medak, Nalgonda, Nizamabad and Warangal districts)
21. Manna Dhora
22. Mukha Dhora, Nooka Dhora
23. Nayaks-bandaru (in the Agency tracts)
24. Pardhan
25. Porja, Parangiperja
26. Reddi Dhoras
27. Rona, Rena
28. Savaras, Kapu Savaras, Maliya Savaras, Khutto Savaras
29. Sugalis, Lambadis
30. Thoti (in Adilabad, Hyderabad, Karimnagar, Khammam, Mahbubnagar,
Medak, Nalgonda, Nizamabad and Warangal districts)
31. Valmiki (in the Agency tracts)
32. Yenadis
33. Yerukulas.
34. Banjaras ( in Khammam, warangal, karimnagar, medak, Ranga reddy,
Adilabad, Nalgonda )
Assam
In the Autonomous Districts
1. Chakma
2. Dimasa, Kachari
3. Garolo
4. Hmar
5. Khasi, Jaintia, Synteng, Pnar, War, Bhoi, Lyngngam
6. Any Kuki tribes including:
(i) Biate, Biete
(ii) Changsan
(iii) Chongloi
(iv) Darlong
(v) Doungel
(vi) Gamalhou
(vii) Gangte
(viii) Guite
(ix) Hanneng
(x) Haokip, Haupit
(xi) Haolai
(xii) Hengna
(xiii) Hongsung
(xiv) Harangkhwal, Rangkhol
(xv) Jongbe
(xvi) Khawchung
(xvii) Khawathlang, Khothalong
(xviii) Khelma
(xvix) Kholhou
(xx) Kipgen
(xxi) Kuki
(xxii) Lengthang
(xxiii) Lhangum
(xxiv) Lhoujem
(xxv) Lhouvun
(xxvi) Lupheng
(xxvii) Mangjel
(xxviii) Misao
[xxviiib] Negrito
(xxix) Riang
(xxx) Sairhem
(xxxi) Selnam
(xxxii) Singson
(xxxiii) Sithou
(xxxiv) Sukte
(xxxv) Thado
(xxxvi) Thangngeu
(xxxvii) Uibuh
(xxxviii) Vaiphei
7. Hajong
8. Lakher
9. Man (Tai speaking)
10. Any Mizo (Lushai) tribes
11. Mikir
12. Any Naga tribes
13. Pawi
14. Syntheng
15 Burya Sikh
16. Thengal Kachari
Non-autonomous Assam districts
1. Barmans in Cachar
2. Bodo
3. Deori
4. Hojai
5. Sonowal
6. Lalung
7. Mech
8. Mising
9. Rabha
10.[-bandaru]]
Bihar
1. Asur
2. Baiga
3. Banjara
4. Bathudi
5. Bedia
6. Binjhia
7. Birhor
8. Birjia
9. Chero
10. Chik Baraik
11. Gond
12. Gorait
13. Ho
14. Karmali
15. Kharia
16. Kharwar
17. Khond
18. Kisan
19. Kora
20. Korwa
21. Lohara, Lohra
22. Mahli
23. Mal Paharia
24. Munda
25. Oraon
26. Parhaiya
27. Santal
28. Sauria Paharia
29. Savar
Gujarat
1. Barda
2. Bavacha, Bamcha
3. Bharwad (in the Nesses of the forest of Alech, Barada and Gir)
4. Bhil, Bhil Garasia, Dholi Bhil, Dungri Bhil, Dungri Garasia, Mewasi
Bhil, Rawal Bhil, Tadvi Bhil, Bhagalia, Bhilala, Pawra, Vasava,
Vasave
5. Charan (in the Nesses of the forests of Alech, Barada and Gir)
6. Chaudri (in Surat and Valsad districts)
7. Chodhara
8. Dhanka, Tadvi, Tetaria, Valvi
9. Dhodia
10. Dubla, Talavia, Halpati
11. Gamit, Gamta, Gavit, Mavchi, Padvi
12. Gond, Rajgond
13. Kathodi, Katkari, Dhor Kathodi, Dhor Katkari, Son Kathodi, Son
Katkari
14. Kokna, Kokni, Kukna
15. Koli (in Kutch district)
16. Koli Dhor, Tokre Koli, Kolcha, Kolgha
17. Kunbi (in the Dangs district)
18. Naikd], Nayak, Cholivala Nayak, Kapadra Nayak, Mota Nayak, Nana
Nayak
19. Padhar
20. Paradhi (in Kutch district)
31. patelia in dahod district
21. Pardhi, Advichincher, Phase Pardhi (excluding Amreli, Bhavnagar,
Jamnagar, Junagadh, Kutch, Rajkot and Surendranagar districts)
22. Pomla
23. Rabari (in the Nesses of the forests of Alech, Barada and Gir)
24. Rathawa
25. Siddi (in Amreli, Bhavnagar, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Rajkot and
Surendranagar districts)
26. Vaghri (in Kutch district)
27. Varli
28. Vitolia, Kotwalia, Barodia.
29. Dhed
30. Khant
31. Bhangi, Mehtar
32. Balahi, Balai
33. Chamar
34. Chikva, Chikvi
35. Koli, Kori
36. Kotwal.
37. Vaghri (Patadi,Dasada,Mandal ,Gujarat)
[edit] Himachal Pradesh
1. Bhot, Bodh
2. Gaddi and Shippis
3. Kanauwra.
Karnataka
1. Adiyan
2. Barda
3. Bavacha, Bamcha
4. Bhil, Bhil Garasia, Dholi Bhil, Dungri Bhil, Dungri Garasia, Mewasi
Bhil, Rawal Bhil, Tadvi Bhil, Bhagalia, Bhilala, Pawra, Vasava,
Vasave
5. Chenchu, Chenchwar
6. Chodhara
7. Dubla, Talavia, Halpati
8. Gamit, Gamta, Gavit, Mavchi, Padvi, Valvi
9. Gond, Naikpod, Rajgond
10. Gowdalu
11. Hakkipikki
12. Hasalaru
13. Irular
14. Iruliga
15. Jenu Kuruba
16. Kadu Kuruba
17. Kammara (in South Kanara district and Kollegal taluk of Mysore
district)
18. Kanivan, Kanyan (in Kollegal taluk of Mysore district)
19. Kathodi, Katkari, Dhor Kathodi, Dhor Katkari, Son Kathodi, Son
Katkari
20. Kattunayakan
21. Kokna, Kokni, Kukna
22. Koli Dhor, Tokre Koli, Kolcha, Kolgha
23. Konda Kapus
24. Koraga
25. Kota
26. Koya, Bhine Koya, Rajkova
27. Kudiya, Melakudi
28. Kuruba (in Coorg district)
29. Kurumanas, Kumbara
30. Maha Malasar
31. Malaikudi
32. Malasar
33. Malayekandi
34. Maleru
35. Maratha (in Coorg District)
36. Marathi
37. Meda
38. Naikda, Nayak, Chollivala Nayak, Kapadia Nayak, Mota Nayak, Nana
Nayak, 1[Naika, Nayaka also called as nayak,]
39. Palliyan
40. Paniyan
41.[Pardhi, Advichincher, Phanse Pardhi
42. Petelia
43. Rathawa
44. Sholaga
45. Siddi
46. Soligaru
46. Toda
47. Valmiki
48. Varli
50. Vitolia, Kotwalia, Barodia
51. Yerava
Kerala
1. Adiyan
2. Arandan/ Ernadan
3. Eravallan
4. Hill Pulaya
5. Irular, Irulan
6. Kadar
7. Kammara (in the areas comprising the Malabar district as specified
by sub-section (2) of section 5 of the States Reorganisation Act 1956
(37 of 1956))
8. Kanikaran, Kanikkar
9. Kattunayakan
10. Kochu Velan
11. Konda kapus
12. Kondareddis
13. Koraga
14. Kota
15. Kudiya, Melakudi
16. Kurichchan
17. Kurumans
18. Kurumbas
19. Maha Malasar
20. Malai Arayan
21. Malai Pandaram
22. Malai Vedan
23. Malakkuravan
24.[Malasar
25. Malayan (excluding the areas comprising the Malabar district as
specified by sub-section (2) of section 5 of the States Reorganisation
Act, 1956 (37 of 1956)
26. Malayarayar
27. Mannan
28. Marati (in Hosdrug and Kasaragod taluks of Cannanore district)
29. Muthan
30. Mudugar
31. Muduvan, Muthuvan, Muduvan, Muthuvan
32. Paliyan, (Palleyan), (Palliyar), Paanan
33. Paniyan, Parayan
34. Ulladan
35. Uraly
36. Cholanaickan (In the Reserve Forests of Nilambur South and North
Forest Divisions of Malppuram Districts)
37. Kattunaickan (In the Reserve Forests of Nilambur South and North
Forest Divisions of Malppuram Districts)
Madhya Pradesh
1. Agariya
2. Andh
3. Baiga
4. Bhaina
5. Bharia Bhumia, Bhuinhar Bhumia, Bhumiya, Bharia, Paliha, Pando
6. Bhattra
7. Bhil, Bhilala, Barela, Patelia
8. Bhil
9. Bhunjia
10. Biar, Biyar
11. Binjhwar
12. Birhul, Birhor
13. Damor, Damaria
14. Dhanwar
15. Gadaba, Gadba
16. Gond, Arrakh, Agaria, Asur, Badi Maria, Bada Maria, Bhatola,
Bhimma, Bhuta, Koilabhuta, Koliabhuti, Bhar, Bisonhorn Maria, Chota
Maria, Dandami Maria, Dhuru, Dhurwa, Dhoba, Dhulia, Dorla, Gaiki,
Gatta, Gatti, Gaita, Gond, Gowari, Hill Maria, Kandra, Kalanga,
Khatola, Koitar, Koya, Khirwar, Khirwara, Kucha Maria, Kuchki Maria,
Madia, Maria, Mana, Mannewar, Moghya, Mogia, Monghya, Mudia, Muria,
Nagarchi, Nagwanshi, Ojha, Raj Gond, Sonjhari, Jhareka, Thatia,
Thotya, Wade Maria, Vade Maria, Daroi
17. Halba, Halbi
18. Kamar
19. Karku
20. Kawar, Kanwar, Kaur, Cherwa, Rathia, Tanwar, Chattri
21. Keer (in Bhopal, Raisen and Sehore districts)
22. Khairwar, Kondar
23. Kharia
24. Kondh, Khond, Khand
25. Kol
26. Kolam
27. Korku, Bopchi, Mouasi, Nihar, Nahul, Bhodhi, Bondeya
28. Kori, Korwa, Kodaku
29. Manjhi
30. Majhwar
31. Mawasi
32. Meena (in Sironj Sub-Division of Vidisha District)
33. Mundra
34. Nagesia, Nagasia
35. Oraon, Dhanka, Dhangad
36. Panika [in (i) Chhatarpur, Panna, Rewa, Satna, Shahdol, Umaria,
Sidhi and Tikamgarh districts, and (ii) Sevda and Datia tehsils of
Datia district)]
37. Pao
38. Pardhan, Pathari, Saroti
39. Pardhi (in Bhopal, Raisen and Sehore districts)
40. Pardhi, Bahelia, Bahellia, Chita Pardhi, Langoli Pardhi, Phans
Pardhi, Shikari, Takankar, Takia [in (i) Chhindwara, Mandla, Dindori
and Seoni districts, (ii) Baihar tehsil of Balaghat district, (iii)
Betual, Bhainsdehi and Shahpur tahsils of Betul district, (iv) Patan
tahsil and Sihora and Majholi blocks of Jabalpur district, (v) Katni
(Murwara) and Vijaya Raghogarh tahsils and Bahoriband and Dhemerkheda
blocks of Katni district, (vi) Hoshangabad, Babai, Sohagpur, Pipariya
and Bankhedi tahsils and Kesla block of Hoshangabad district, (vii)
Narsinghpur district, and (viii) Harsud tahsil of Khandwa district]
41. Parja
42. Sahariya, Saharia, Seharia, Sehria, Sosia, Sor
43. Saonta, Saunta
44. Saur
45. Sawar, Sawara
46. Sonr
1. Omitted and inserted by Act 28 of 2000, s. 20 and the Fourth Sch.
(w.e.f. 1.11.2000)
Maharashtra
1. Andh
2. Baiga
3. Barda
4. Bavacha, Bamcha.
5. Baki
6. Bharia Bhumia, Bhuinhar Bhumia, Pando
7. Bhattra
8. Bhil, Bhil Garasia, Dholi Bhil, Dungri Bhil, Dungri Garasia, Mewasi
Bhil, Rawal Bhil, Tadvi Bhil, Bhagalia, Bhilala Pawara, Vasava,
Vasave
9. Bhunjia
10. Binjhwar
11. Birhul, Borjee
12. Chodhara (excluding Akola, Amravati, Bhandara, Buldana Chandrapur,
Nagpur, Wardha, Yavatmal, Aurangabad, Beed, Nanded, Osmanabad and
Parbhani districts)
13. Dhanka, Tadvi, Tetaria Valvi
14. Dhanwar
15. Dhodia
16. Dubla, Talavia, Halpati
17. Gamit, Gamta, Gavit, Mavchi, Padvi
18. Gond, Rajgond, Arrakh, Agaria, Asur, Badi Maria, Bada Maria,
Bhatola, Bhimma, Bhuta, Koilabhuta, Koilabhuti, Bhar, Bisonhorn Maria,
Chota Maria, Dandami Maria, Dhuru, Dhurwa, Dhoba, Dhulia, Dorla,
Kaiki; Gatta, Gatti, Gaita, Gond Gowari, Hill Maria, Kandra, Kalanga,
Khatola, Koitar, Koya, Khirwar, Khirwara,Korku, Kucha Maria, Kuchaki
Maria, Madia, Maria, Mana, Mannewar, Moghya, Mogia, Monghya Mudia,
Muria, Nagarchi, Naikpod, Nagwanshi, Ojha, Raj, Sonjhari Jhareka,
Thatia, Thotya, Wade Maria, Vade Maria
19. Halba, Halbi
20. Kamar
21. Kathodi, Katkari, Dhor Kathodi, Dhor Kathkari Son Kathodi, Son
Katkari
22. Kawar, Kanwar, Kaur, Cherwa, Rathia, Tanwar, Chattri
23. Khairwar
24. Kharia
25. Kokna, Kokni, Kukna
26. Kol
27. Kolam, Mannervarlu
28. Koli Dhor, Tokre Koli, Kolcha, Kolkha
29. Koli Mahadev, Dongar Koli
30. Koli Malhar
31. Kondh, Khond, Kandh
32. Korku, Bopchi, Mouasi, Nihal, Nahul, Bondhi, Bondeya
33. Koya, Bhine Koya, Rajkoya
34. Nagesia, Nagasia
35. Naikda, Nayak, Cholivala Nayak, Kapadia Nayak, Mota Nayak, Nana
Nayak
36. Oraon, Dhangad/Dhangar
37. Pardhan, Pathari, Saroti
38. Pardhi, Advichincher, Phans Pardhi, Phanse Pardhi, Langoli Pardhi,
Bahelia, Bahellia, Chita Pardhi, Shikari, Takankar, Takia
39. Parja
40. Patelia
41. Pomla
42. Rathawa
43. Sawar, Sawara,
44. Thakur, Thakar, Ka Thakur, Ka Thakar, Ma Thakur, Ma Thakar
45. Thoti (in Aurangabad, Bhir, Nanded, Osmanabad and Parbhani
districts and Rajura tahsil of Chandrapur district)
46. Warli (Thane District)
47. Vitolia, Kotwalia, Barodia.
Manipur
1. Aimol
2. Anal
3. Angami Naga (Angami Naga in the state of Nagaland)
4. Chiru
5. Chothe
6. Gangte
7. Hmar
8. Kabui
9. Koirao
10. Koireng (Koren)
11. Kom
12. Lamgang
13. Mao
14. Maram
15. Maring
16. Any Mizo (Lushai) tribes
17. Monsang
18. Moyon
19. Paite
20. Purum
21. Ralte
22. Sema (Sema was renamed to original name "Sümi", a decade ago. This
tribe is in the state of Nagaland)
23. Simte
24. Suhte
25. Tangkhul
26. Thadou
27. Vaiphei
28. Zou
Meghalaya
1. Chakma
2. Dimasa, Kachari
3. Garo
4. Hajong
5. Hmar
6. Khasi, Jaintia, Syteng, Pnar, War, Bhoi, Lyngngam
7. Any Chin-Kuki-Mizo Tribes including.-
(i) Biate, Biete
(ii) Changsan
(iii) Chongloi
(iv) Darlong
(v) Doungel
(vi) Gamalhou
(vii) Gangte
(viii) Guite
(ix) Hanneng
(x) Haokip, Haupit
(xi) Haolai
(xii) Hengna
(xiii) Hongsungh
(xiv) Hrangkhawl, Rangkhol
(xv) Jongbe
(xvi) Khawchung
(xvii) Khawthlang, Khothalong
(xviii) Khelma
(xvix) Kholhou
(xx) Kipgen
(xxi) Kuki
(xxii) Lengthang
(xxiii) Lhangum
(xxiv) Lhoujen
(xxv) Lhouvun
(xxvi) Lupheng
(xxvii) Mangjel
(xxviii) Misao
(xxvix) Riang
(xxx) Sairhem
(xxxi) Selnam
(xxxii) Singson
(xxxiii) Sitlhou
(xxxiv) Sukte
(xxxv) Thado
(xxxvi) Thangngeu
(xxxvii) Uibuh
(xxxviii) Vaiphei
8. Lakher
9. Man (Tai speaking)
10. Any Mizo (Lushai) Tribes
11. Mikir
12.Any Naga tribes
13. Pawi
14. Synteng
15. Boro Kacharis (inserted by Act 43 of 1987, s. 2 (w.e.f.
19-9-1987).)
16. Koch
17. Raba, Rava
Nagaland
(a list of the major tribes of Nagaland)
1. Angami
2. Ao
3. Chakhesang
4. Chang
5. Khiamniungan
6. Kachari
7. Konyak
8. Kuki
9. Lotha
10. Phom
11. Pochury
12. Rengma
13. Sümi / Sema (reverted back to their original name Sümi. British
called them Sema, the Angami name for them)
14. Sangtam
15. Tikhir
16. Yimchunger
17. Zeliang
Orissa
1. Bagata
2. Baiga
3. Banjara, Banjari
4. Bathudi
5. Bhottada, Dhotada
6. Bhuiya, Bhuyan
7. Bhumia
8. Bhumij
9. Bhunjia
10. Binjhal
11. Binjhia, Binjhoa
12. Birhor
13. Bonda, Bondo Poraja
14. Chenchu
15. Dal
16. Desua Bhumji
17. Dharua
18. Didayi
19. Gadaba
20. Gandia
21. Ghara
22. Gond, Gondo
23. Ho
24. Holva
25. Jatapu
26. Juang
27. Kandha Gauda
28. Kawar
29. Kharia, Kharian
30. Kharwar
31. Khond, Kond, Kandha, Nanguli Kandha, Sitha Kandha
32. Kisan Tribe
33. Kol
34. Kolah Loharas, Kol Loharas
35. Kolha
36. Koli, Malhar
37. Kondadora
38. Kora
39. Korua
40. Kotia
41. Koya
42. Kulis
43. Lodha, Shabar
44. Madia
45. Mahali
46. Mankidi
47. Mankirdia
48. Matya
49. Mirdha
50. Munda, Munda Lohara, Munda Mahalis
51. Omanatya
52. Oraon
53. Parenga
54. Paroja
55. Pentia
56. Rajuar
57. Santal
58. Saora, Savar, Saura, Sahara
59. Sounti
60. Tharua
61. Sahu
Rajasthan
1. Bhil, Bheel, Garasia, Dholi Bhil, Dungri Bhil, Dungri
Garasia,Mewasi Bhil, Rawal Bhil, Tadvi Bhil, Bhagalia, Bhilala, Pawra,
Vasava, Vasave
2. Bhil Meena
3. Damor, Damaria
4. Dhanka Tadvi, Tetaria, Valvi
5. Garasia (excluding Rajput Garasia)
6. Kathodi, Katkari, Dhor Kathodi, Dhor Katkari, Son Kathodi, Son
Katkari, khatik
7. Kokna, Kokni, Kukna
8. Koli Dhor, Tokre koli, Kolcha, Kolgha
9. Meena
10. Naikda, Nayak, Cholivala Nayak, Kapadia Nayak, Mota Nayak, Nana
Nayak. (Nayak also called as nayaka)
11. Pateliya
12. Seharia, Sehria, Sahariya
Tamil Nadu
1. Adiyan
2. Aranadan
3. Eravallan
4. Irular
5. Kadar
6. Kammara (excluding Kanyakumari district and Shencottah taluk of
Tirunelveli district)
7. Kanikaran, Kanikkar (in Kanyakumari district and Shencottah taluk
of Tirunelveli district)
8. Kaniyan, Kanyan
9. Kattunayakan
10.Kochu Velan
11.Konda Kapus
12.Kondareddis(kabu)
13.Koraga
14.Kota (excluding Kanyakumari district and Shencottah taluk of
Tirunelveli district)
15.Kudiya, Melakudi
16.Kurichchan
17.Kurumbas (in the Nilgiris district)
18.Kurumans
19.Maha Malasar
20.Malai Arayan
21.Malai Pandaram
22.Malai Vedan
23.Malakkuravan
24.Malasar
25. Malayali (in Dharmapuri, Pudukottai, Salem, Tiruchi districts and
North and South Arcot regions)
26. Malayekandi
27. Mannan
28. Mudugar, Muduvan
29. Muthuvan
30. Palleyan
31. Palliyan
32. Palliyar
33. Paniyan
34. Sholaga
35. Toda (excluding Kanyakumari district and Shencottah taluk of
Tirunelveli district)
36. Uraly
37.Adi Dravidar
West Bengal
1. Asur
2. Adhikari
3. Badia [disambiguation needed], Bediya
4. Bhumij
5. Bhutia, Sherpa, Toto, Dukpa, Kagatay, Tibetan, Yolmo
6. Birhor
7. Birjia
8. Chakma
9. Chero
10. Chik Baraik
11. Garo
12. Gond
13. Gorait
14. Hajang
15. Ho
16. Karmali
17. Kharwar
18. Khond
29. Kisan
20. Kora
21. Korwa
22. Lepcha
23. Lodha, Kheria, Kharia
24. Lohara, Lohra
25. Magh
26. Mahali
27. Mahli
28. Mal Pahariya
29. Mech
30. Mru
31. Munda
32. Nagesia
33. Oraon
34. Parhaiya
35. Rabha
36. Santal
37. Sauria Paharia
38. Savar
39. Tamang
40. Subba
Tripura
Darlong [1]
Tipra
Riang
Jamatia
Chakma
Halam (Like, Hrangkhawl, Molsom, Bongcher, etc.)
Noatia
Mog
Kuki
Garo
Munda
Lushai
Oraon
Santal
Uchai
Khasia
Bhil
Lepcha
Bhutia
Chaimal
Mizoram
(Inserted by Act 34 of 1986, s. 14 and Third Sch. (w.e.f. 20-2-1987).)
1. Lusai
2. Chakma
3. Dimasa (Kachari)
4. Garo
5. Hajong
6. Hmar
7. Khasi and Jaintia, (including Khasi, Synteng or Pnar, War, Bhoi or
Lyngngam)
8. Any Kuki tribes, including,--
(i) Baite or Biete
(ii) Changsan
(iii) Chongloi
(iv) Darlong
(v) Doungel
(vi) Gamalhou
(vii) Gangte
(viii) Guite
(ix) Hanneng
(x) Haokip or Haupit
(xi) Haolai
(xii) Hengna
(xiii) Hongsungh
(xiv) Hrangkhawl or Rangkhol
(xv) Jongbe
(xvi) Khawchung
(xvii) Khawathlang or Khothalong
(xviii) Khelma
(xix) Kholhou
(xx) Kipgen
(xxi) Kuki
(xxii) Lengthang
(xxiii) Lhangum
(xxiv) Lhoujem
(xxv) Lhouvun
(xxvi) Lupheng
(xxvii) Mangjel
(xxviii) Missao
(xxix) Riang
(xxx) Sairhem
(xxxi) Selnam
(xxxii) Singson
(xxxiii) Sitlhou
(xxxiv) Sukte
(xxxv) Thado
(xxxvi) Thangngeu
(xxxvii) Uibuh
(xxxviii) Vaiphei
9. Lakher or Mara (Lakher was changed to Mara in 1988)
10. Man (Tai-speaking)
11. Any Mizo (Lushai) tribes
12. Mikir
13. Any Naga tribes
14. Pawi
Arunachal Pradesh
All tribes in the State including:
1. Abor
2. Aka
3. Apatani
4. Dafla
5. Galong
6. Khampti
7. Khowa
8. Mishmi
9. Monpa
10. Tangsa
11. Sherdukpen
12. Singpho
13. Phake
Goa
1 Velip
2 Gawada
3 Kunbis
[edit] Chhattisgarh
Agariya
Andh
Baiga
Bhaina
Bharia Bhumia, Bhuinhar Bhumia, Bhumiya, Bharia, Paliha, Pando
Bhattra
Bhil, Bhilala, Barela, Patelia
Bhil Meena
Bhunjia
Biar, Biyar
Binjhwar
Birhul, Birhor
Damor, Damaria
Dhanwar
Gadaba, Gadba
Gond, Arrakh, Agaria, Asur, Badi Maria, Bada Maria, Bhatola, Bhimma,
Bhuta, Koilabhuta, Kolibhuti, Bhar, Bisonhorn Maria, Chota Maria,
Dandami Maria, Dhuru, Dhurwa, Dhoba, Dhulia, Dorla, Gaiki, Gatta,
Gatti, Gaita, Gond, Gowari Hill Maria, Kandra, Kalanga, Khatola,
Koitar, Koya, Khirwar, Khirwara, Kucha Maria, Kuchaki Maria, Madia,
Maria, Mana,, Mannewar, Moghya, Mogia, Monghya, Mudia, Muria,
Nagarchi, Nagwanshi, Ojha, Raj Gond, Sonjhari, Jhareka, Thatia,
Thotya, Wade Maria, Vade Maria, Daroi.
Halba, Halbi
Kamar
Karku
Kawar, Kanwar, Kaur, Cherwa, Rathia, Tanwar, Chattri
Khairwar, Kondar
Kharia
Kondh, Khond, Kandh
Kol
Kolam
Korku, Bopchi, Mouasi, Nihar, Nahul, Bondhi, Bondeya
Korwa, Kodaku
Majhi
Majhwar
Mawasi
Munda
Nagesia, Nagasia
Oraon, Dhanka, Dhangad
Pao
Pardhan, Pathari, Saroti
Pardhi, Bahelia, Bahellia, Chita Pardhi, Langoli Pardhi, Phans Pardhi,
Shikari, Takankar, Takia [in (i) Bastar, Dantewara, Kanker, Raigarh,
Jashpurnagar, Surguja and Koria district, (ii) Katghora, Pali, Kartala
and Korba tahsils of Korba tahsils of Korba district, (iii) Bilaspur,
Pendra, Kota and Takhatpur tahsils of Bilaspur district, (iv) Durg,
Patan, Gunderdehi, Dhamdha, Balod, Gurur and Dondilohara tahsils of
Durg district, (v) Chowki, Manpur and Mohala Revenue Inspector Circles
of Rajnandgon district, (vi) Mahasamund, Saraipali and Basna tahsils
of Mahasamund district, (vii) Bindra-Navagarh, Rajim and Deobhog
tahsils of Raipur district, and (viii) Dhamtari, Kurud and Sihava
tahsils of Dhamtari district]
Parja
Sahariya, Saharia, Seharia, Sehria, Sosia, Sor
Saonta, Saunta
Saur
Sawar, Sawara
Sonr
Uttarakhand
Bhotia
Bauxa
Jaunsari
Raji
Tharu
[edit] Jharkhand
Asur
Baiga
Banjara (Kora)
Bathudi
Bedia
Binjhia
Birhor
Birjia
Chero
Chick Baraik
Gond
Gorait
Ho
Karmali
Kharia
Kharwar
Kond
Kisan
Korwa
Lohra
Mahli
Mal Pahariya
Munda
Oraon
Parhaiya
Santhal
Sauria Paharia
Savar
Bhumij
Sinlung
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Scheduled_Tribes_in_India
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,
1989
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act
Citation Official Act
Enacted by Parliament of India
Date enacted 11 September 1989
Summary
Prevention of the commission of offences of atrocities against the
members of the Scheduled castes and scheduled tribes
The Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989
was enacted by the Parliament of India, in order to prevent atrocities
against Scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The purpose of the Act
was to help the social inclusion of Dalits into Indian society, but
the Act has failed to live up to its expectations.
Special Court
Special Court Justice Ramaswamy observed in the case of State of
Karnataka v. Ingale [1] that more than seventy-five percent of the
cases brought under the SC/ST Act end in acquittal at all levels. The
situation has not improved much since 1992 according to the figures
given by the 2002 Annual Report dealing with SC/ST Act (of the
Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment)[2] Of the total cases
filed in 2002 only 21.72% were disposed of, and, of those, a mere
2.31% ended in conviction. The number of acquittals is 6 times more
than the number of convictions and more than 70 percent of the cases
are still pending.[3]
Speedy trial
The framers of the SC/ST Act kept this aspect (the increasing number
of cases pending in the judiciary) in mind and provided for the
setting up of a Special Court for speedy trial of offences committed
under this Act.[4][5]
Implementation of Law
They failed, however, to give any real powers to Special Courts for
the admission of complaints. This is evident from the provision
relating to setting up of Special Courts which gives a false
impression that a case of atrocity can be directly filed with the
Special Courts.[6] Various State Governments have notified the Special
Courts, in accordance with the provision of the Act, but these courts
cannot take cognizance of any complaint directly. The Supreme Court,
in the case of Gangula Ashok v. State of AP,[7] clarified that Special
Courts can take cognizance of an offence only when a case is committed
to it by a magistrate in accordance with provisions of Section 193 of
Criminal Procedure Code (Cr.P.C). This means that a charge sheet
cannot be directly filed before a Special Court. When a Session Court
is constituted as a Special Court, it cannot take cognizance of an
offence without such a case being committed to it by magistrate unless
it is expressly provided so in the Act. Neither in the Cr.P.C. nor in
the SC/ST Act is there any provision which grants the power to Special
Court to take cognizance of the offences as an original jurisdiction
without the case being committed to it by a magistrate. Hence, it is
mandatory to go through the course established under the Cr.P.C.
Biases
Going through the normal judicial system is self degrading for any
dalit. This is because of the still existing biases of the court
judges. One example is the conduct of an Allahabad High Court judge
who had his chambers "purified" with water from the ‘ganga jal’
because a dalit judge had previously sat in that chamber before him.
[8] Another example is the case of State of Karnataka v. Ingale.[1]
The State of Karnataka had charged five individuals with violating the
SC/ST Act. At trial, four witnesses testified that the defendants had
threatened dalits with a gun in order to stop them from taking water
from a well. The defendants told the dalits that they had no right to
take water, because they were untouchables. The trial judge convicted
all of the defendants. On appeal, the Additional Sessions judge
confirmed the conviction of three defendants but acquitted two. On
further appeal to the High Court, the judge acquitted all the
defendants after rejecting the testimony of the four dalit witnesses.
The dalits finally got relief from the Supreme Court.
Contradictions
The legal regime is fraught with contradictions. While the legal text
is explicit in seeking remedies, the implementation of the text
appears to evade actual performance. Laws and legal processes are not
self executing; they depend on the administrative structure and the
judiciary with the anticipation that the social attitudes are driven
by notions of equity, social justice and fair play.[9] However, the
increasingly indifferent responses of those involved in the
implementation of laws protecting the weak, the oppressed and the
socially disadvantaged have persisted over the years and the system
has failed to provide for self-correction. What needs to be
appreciated is that victims of attrocites suffer not only bodily and
mental pain but also feelings of insecurity and socialavoidance which
is not present for the victims of other crimes. If the judge delegated
to protect them shows indifference, it further aggravates their
already vulnerable position.
Investigation
Section 23 of the Prevention of Atrocities Act authorises the Central
Government to frame rules for carrying out the purpose of the Act. It
was the drawing power from this section that the Scheduled Castes and
the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules of 1995 were
framed. According to Rule 7(1)[10] investigation of an offence
committed under the SC/ST Act cannot be investigated by an officer not
below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP). Various High
Courts have vitiated the trail based on the above rule and have
improperly set aside the order of conviction.[11]
Rank of investigating officer
The Andhra Pradesh High Court, in D. Ramlinga Reddy v. State of AP,
[12] took the position that provisions of Rule 7 are mandatory and
held that investigation under the SC/St Act has to be carried out by
only an officer not below the rank of DSP. An investigation carried
out and charge sheet filed by an incompetent officer is more than
likely to be quashed. Similarly, the Madras High Court in M.
Kathiresam v. State of Tamil Nadu[13] held that investigation
conducted by an officer other than a DSP is improper and bad in law
and proceedings based on such an investigation are required to be
quashed. The Courts without taking into consideration the inadequacies
of the State, have been punishing SC/STs for the same. Shri Pravin
Rashtrapal, Member of Parliament rightly pointed out that ther are
insufficient officers at that level.[14] His statement is supported by
the Annul Report of 2005-2006 of Ministry of Home Affairs.[15] Of the
total posts sanctioned by the government under Indian Police Service
(IPS) more than 15 percent of the posts are vacant. This basically
means that there is one IPS officer for 77,000 SC/STs.
Rehabilitation
According to the preamble of the SC/ST Act, it is an Act to prevent
the commission of offences of atrocities against SC/STs, to provide
for Special Courts for the trial of such offences and for the relief
and rehabilitation of the victims of such offences. The Madhya Pradesh
High Court also had the same view and observed in the case of Dr. Ram
Krishna Balothia v. Union of India[16] that the entire scheme of the
SC/ST Act is to provide protection to the members of the scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes and to provide for Special Court and
speedy trial of the offences. The Act contains affirmative measures to
weed out the root cause of atrocities, which has denied SC/STs basic
civil rights. The Act has addressed the problem the regarding the
dispensation of justice, but what the failed to deal with is the
problem of ‘rehabilitation’. There is mention of rehabilitation under
Section 21(2)(iii), but there are no provision addressing the same. As
it has been stated earlier that victims of atrocities are on a
different level when compared to victims of other crimes, hence there
should be special provision for the same. According to the report
submitted by the National Commission for Review and Working of the
Constitution[17] victims of atrocities and their families should be
provided with full financial and any other support in order to make
them economically self-reliant without their having to seek wage
employment from their very oppressors or classes of oppressors. Also
it would be the duty of the State to immediately take over the
educational needs of the children of such victims and provide for the
cost of their food and maintenance. SC/STs constitute 68 percent of
the total rural population. According to the 1991 Agricultural census
a large number of SC/STs are marginal farmers compared to the other
sections of the society and because of this the number of cultivators
are going down. In other words the landlessness is increasing at a
faster rate among SC/STs. At the same time the number of SC/ST workers
as agricultural labourer is increasing at a faster rate when compared
to other sections of the society. This basically implies that after
losing their land holdings SC/ST cultivators are becoming agriculture
labourers. Loss of land, on the one hand, is caused by atrocities
making the more vulnerable. This in turn fuels and promotes
continuance of atrocities and untouchability. Marginalisation is one
of the worst forms of oppression. It expelles a whole category of
people from useful participation in the society and therefore
potentially subjected to material depravation and this could even lead
to extermination. Moreover, this leads to the state of powerlessness
which perhaps is best described negatively; the powerless lack
authority, status and a sense of self.[18] Moreover, every right has
three types of duties:
Duties to avoid deprivation.
Duties to protect from deprivation
Duties to aid the deprived.
Though the SC/ST Act does cover the first two duties but totally
ignores the third one; duty to aid the deprived. Hence, it is
necessary to make the SC/STs self dependent.
Migration
Under constitutional provisions, a caste or tribe is notified with
reference to a State or Union territory. Hence a person born in state/
UT gets certificate of SC/ST if his/her father belongs to specified
caste/tribe in that state as SC/ST. If he/she migrates to another
state, he/she lose status for affirmative actions, i.e. benefit of
admission in educational institutes, reservation in government
employment etc. But he/she does not lose protection as guaranteed by
constitution like PoA & other Acts in any other state. In brief once a
person is notified as SC/ST in any one state/UT, he gets protection
under SC ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 throughout the
country, irrespective that caste or tribe is notified in the state/UT
where offence is occurred.
Suggestions
The statement of object and reason of the SC/ST Act clearly reveals
that the Act, in its letter and spirit, desires that dalits lead a
dignified life. However, even after 16 years of its existence in the
statute book, it has not shown its desired effect. The majority of the
beneficiaries of this Act are unaware of the legitimate claims of
leading a dignified way of life or are unwilling to enforce it
intensively. Even the Police, prosecutors and judicial officers are
unaware of this Act as was pointed out by Calcutta High Court in the
case of M.C. Prasannan v. State of West Bengal.[19] What further
aggravates the problem is the misapplication of the Act by police as
well as by the courts which ultimately leads to acquittals.[20]
Rural atrocities which are not covered under this Act
Social and economic boycott and blackmail are widespread. In view of
the fact that the main perpetrators of the crime sometimes co-opt a
few SC/STs with them and take advantage of local differences among the
SC/STs and sometimes they promote and engineer crimes but get them
executed by some members of SC/STs, the Act should be suitably amended
to bring such crimes and atrocities within the purview of the
definition of atrocities under the Act.[17] Likewise, the Special
Courts established under Section 14 of the Act are required to follow
the committal procedure under Cr.P.C. Such an interpretation prevents
the speedy trail envisaged under the Act. Further the absence of the
adequate number of special courts has also resulted in slow disposal
of atrocity cases and a huge back log.
External links
Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,
1989
References
^ a b (1992) 3 S.C.R. 284
^ Annual Report on The Scheduled Castes and The Scheduled Tribes
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 for the Year 2002, at p.12.
^ http://www.censusindia.gov.in 2001 Census
^ Upendra Baxi, “Crisis of Indian Legal System”, Amita Dhanda
(compiled by), “Law and Poverty Reading Material – B.A.B.L (Hons)”,
1st edition 2006, p.170.
^ Section 14.- For the purpose of providing for speedy trial, the
State Government shall, with the concurrence of the Chief Justice of
the High Court, by notification in the Official Gazette, specify for
each district a Court of Session to be a Special Court to try the
offences under this Act.
^ http://www.ncbc.nic.in National Commission for Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes- Fourth Report 1996-97 & 1997-98, Vol. I.
^ AIR 2000 SC 740
^ "Human Rights Watch, “Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's
Untouchables"". Hrw.org. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india.
Retrieved 2008-12-29. http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/india/
^ K.I. Vibhute, “Right to Live with Human Dignity of Scheduled Castes
and Tribes: Legislative Spirit and Social Response – Some
Reflections”, 44 JILI (2002) 469 at 481.
^ 7(1).— An offence committed under the Act shall be investigated by a
police officer not below the rank of a Deputy Superintendent of
Police. The investigating officer shall be appointed by the State
Government /Director General of Police/Superintendent of Police after
taking into account his past experience, sense of ability and justice
to perceive the implications of the case and investigate it along with
right lines within the shortest possible time.
^ In 2002 the conviction rate was a mere 2 percent. Report by Ministry
of Social Justice and Empowerment
^ 1999 Cr LJ 2918
^ 1999 Cr LJ 3938
^ Lok Sabha Debates, see http://164.100.24.208/ls/lsdeb/ls13/ses13/210803.htm
^ Ministry of Home Affairs - Govt of India - India an Overview - India
- History[dead link]
^ AIR 1994 MP 143
^ a b 11
^ Iris Young, “Justice and Politics of Difference”. Amita Dhanda
(compiled by), “Law and Poverty Reading Material – IV Semester B.A.B.L
(Hons)”, 1st edition 2006, p.29
^ 1999 Cr LJ 998 (Cal)
^ Karansingh v. State of MP, 1992 Cr LJ 3054 (MP)
http://tribal.gov.in/writereaddata/linkimages/poaact989E4227472861.pdf
Forward caste
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Forward Caste (also known as Forward class/community, General class),
in India, denotes peoples, communities and castes from any religion
who do not currently qualify for a Government of India Reservation
benefits (that is, set quotas for political representation) for Other
Backward Classes, scheduled castes and tribes.[1][2][3] Since the list
presented by the commission for OBC, SC, ST is dynamic (classes and
communities can be added or removed) and will change from time to time
depending on Social, Educational and Economic factors, the Forward
Classes also are subject to change from time to time. The Government
of India does not publish a separate list of forward classes.[citation
needed]
Population
Estimate the forward classes population as anywhere from 5-15%.[4][5]
However, they have not quoted sources for their estimations. National
sample survey estimates Forward Class population almost same as
Backward Classes at around 36%. Family health survey combined forward
classes population along with all communities of other religions. If
you exclude Backward classes of other religions, then it is around
38.6% which is more than Backward classes population. State wise
Forward Class Population can be found from the chart.
Population by State
Arunachal Pradesh - NA (6% Brahmin)[6]
Andhra Pradesh - 9.9% of the total population (3% Brahmin, 1.2% Raju,
3% Velama & 2.7% Komati).[7]
Intermediate castes: Reddy (6.8%), Kamma/Chowdary (4.6%) & Kapu (15.2%)
[8]
Assam - NA (4% Brahmin)[9]
Bihar - 13% (4.7% Brahmin, 4.2% Rajput, 2.9% Bhumihar & 1.2% Kayasth)
[10]
Chattisgarh - NA (2% Brahmin)[11]
Goa - NA (7% Brahmin)[12]
Gujarat - High Forward Castes: 13.1% (4.1% Brahmin, 4.9% Rajput, 3.0%
Vaishya & 1.1% Others); Middle Forwards: 12.3% (12.2% Patel / Kanbi &
0.1% Others); Lower Forwards: 24.2% (24.2% Gujarati Kshatriya)[13][14]
Haryana - 47% (6 to 8% Brahmin, 21% Jat, 9% Khatri / Sikh & remaining
mostly Vaishya)[15]
Himachal Pradesh - 56% (14 to 20% Brahmin, 28% Rajput & remaining
mostly Vaishya / Khatri).[16]
J & K - NA (11% Brahmin, remaining mostly Dogra Rajput)[17]
Jharkhand - 7% (3% Brahmin, remaining mostly Rajput / Bhumihar /
Kayasth / Bhadralok).[18] Baniya is OBC here.
Karnataka - 16% (3 to 5% Brahmin, 3% Maratha, 2% Bunt / Nair / Kodava
& remaining mostly Raju / Devadiga / Vaishya). Intermediate castes:
Lingayat (17%) [19]
Kerala - 26% of the total population (1.5% Brahmin, 14.5% Malayala
Kshatriya / Tuluva Kshatriya, 0.5% Ambalavasi, 9% Syrian Christians &
0.5% Others).[20]
Maharashtra - 40% (4% Brahmin, 29% Maratha & remaining mostly Prabhu /
Vaishya)[21]
Manipur - 43% (Brahmin / Kshatriya)
Madhya Pradesh - NA (5% Brahmin)[22]
Orissa - 47% (6 to 9% Brahmin, 35% Khandayat / Kshatriya & 5% Patnaik)
[23]
Punjab - NA (5% Brahmin)[24]
Rajastan - 46% (7 to 8% Brahmin, 8% Rajput, 8% Vaishya, 20% Jat & 2%
Jain)[25]
Sikkim - NA (7% Brahmin)[26]
Tamil Nadu - 12% (3% Brahmin & remaining mostly Vellalar).
Intermediate castes: Thevar (8%)[27]
Tripura - NA (3% Brahmin)[28]
Uttar Pradesh - 20% (9 to 10% Brahmin, 7.2% Thakur, 2% Vaishya, 1%
Kayasth). Intermediate castes: Jat (2.5%)[29]
Uttaranchal - 75% (20% Brahmin, remaining mostly Thakur)[30][31]
West Bengal - 35% (5% Brahmin, 8% Mahishya & remaining mostly
Kayasth / Thakur / Vaishya)[32]
Delhi - NA (12% Brahmin, 9% Khatri, 5% Jat & remaining mostly
Vaishya / Thakur)[33]
Economic and educational status
Based on NSS-99-00.Rural/Urban weightages based on 2001 census)
Based on NSS-99-00.Rural/Urban weightages based on 2001 census)The
Government of India does not collect community census data except for
SC/ST. Economic and educational level of various social groups are
gauged using large sample surveys. The National Sample Survey taken in
1999–2000 and the National Family Health Survey taken in 2005-2006 (or
perhaps an earlier round of the NFHS) estimated economic, educational,
and health indicators of various communities. These surveys were used
extensively in the report submitted by the oversight committee.[34]
Forward classes will have to compete only in the open category, as
they are considered socially, educationally, and economically
advanced. Currently the reservation proportion stands at 50% in
central-government educational institutions and central-government
jobs. However, in certain states such as Tamil Nadu, the reservation
percentage stands at around 69%.[35]
Economic status
The 1998–1999 National Sample Survey calculated the economic status of
forward communities separately for rural/urban areas in various income
brackets. It shows
Only 6.4% of forward classes in rural areas appear in upper income
bracket with per capita monthly income stands at above Rs 925 per
month.
30% of rural population is made up of forward classes.
More than 65% of forward classes per capita income stands below Rs 525
per month.
For urban areas:
Only 5.6% of forward classes appear in the upper-income bracket with
per capita income at or above Rs. 1925 per month (around US $40).
More than 25% of forward classes per capita income stands below Rs.
500 per month (around $10)
Educational status
Based on NSS-99-00.Rural/Urban weightages based on 2001 census)
More than 30% of forward classes above 15 years of age are
illiterate.
Only 8% of forward classes are graduates.
Around 85% of forward classes above 15 years of age have done equal to
or below secondary Education (10 Years of Education)
Reservation for economically backward among forward classes
Currently forward classes are only allowed to compete for seats in the
unreserved category in educational institutions and central government
jobs, irrespective of their educational/economical status in the
society. However, a significant percentage of the Forward Class
population lives below the poverty line and more than 30% of the
members of this community are illiterate. To meet their aspirations,
demands have been raised for providing separate reservations for the
poor among Forward Class populations. Many political parties like
Congress, BJP, Samajwadi Party, LJP, Rastriya Janata Dal, Communist
Party of India(Marxist), Bahujan Samaj Party[36][37][38][39] have
supported proposals for providing separate reservation for the poor
among the forward classes. These parties account for over 400 of the
542 members in the current parliament, as well as holding power in
most states in the union.
Indian Government surveys have pointed out that Poverty is widespread
in all communities. Indian definition of poverty is living life with
less than 0.25 US$/Day(Approx). Whereas United nations definition of
Poverty is living life with less than $1/Day.[1]. More than 65% of
forward classes will be living below poverty line if UN poverty
definition is considered.[2]
Timeline
1991: Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao introduced 10%
separate reservation for poor among forward classes.
1992: The Supreme Court has ruled in the Indra Sawhney case that
separate reservation for poor among forward classes as invalid.
Government has withdrawn separate reservation as per supreme court
judgement. (Many other verdicts given in same case has been overruled
by constitutional amendments like quota in promotions, exceeding 50%
reservations for Tamilnadu, judgement regarding creamy layer in the
same case was not implemented by Tamilnadu so far.)
2003: BJP government appointed a group of Ministers for suggesting
measures for implementation of separate reservation for poor among
forward classes. [4]
2004: Task force has been set up to work out modalities for providing
reservations to Poor among forward classes.No information available
regarding report submitted by this task force.[5]
2006: Present Congress Government appointed commission to study
separate reservation for economically backward classes.[6]
2006: Communist government in Kerala earmarked 12% seats in private
professional colleges for economically poor among forward classes.[7]
Many backward class leaders allege forward classes are over
represented in many spheres of life. State and central governments
have not released adequate data regarding representation of various
communities in their services and admissions to educational
institutions.Most of the Private companies in India does not collect
data regarding community of their employees. Very few reports are
available regarding representation of various communities in public–
private services and admissions in educational institutions.
In Tamil Nadu forward classes have secured around 1.9% of seats in
medical colleges in 2004 and 2.68 % seats in 2005 as against their
population percentage of 13%.See Also Caste-Based Reservations In
Tamil Nadu. This trend of poor representation has continued for the
last 10 years as claimed by lawyers in one of the Reservation cases.
[8]
Narendra committee report in Kerala has pointed out that forward
classes representation in public services and PSU units is around 36
to 38% which is more or less equal to their population.[9].
Karnataka Minister in state Assembly has announced that per capita
income of the Brahmins is lesser than all communities including
scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.[10]
Oversight committee in its final report has indicated that forward
classes are placed better than backward classes in some indicators and
comparable with backward classes in few indicators and backward
classes are superior in some parameters like health indicators in
states like Assam, Maharastra, Haryana, West Bengal, etc.[11]
National Survey 99-00 indicates that forward classes are better placed
than SC/ST in almost all parameters. However, in rural
unemployment,forward classes score worse than all other communities.
Recently released Provisional report of National Survey 04-05 states
that Buying capacity of Backward Classes in rural and urban areas are
comparable to forward classes. It also revises Backward classes figure
as 41%. It also states that Landownership of Backward classes are
comparable to Forward Classes. It reiterates its earlier finding (in
99-00 survey) that forward classes are poorly employed (more
unemployment).[12]
Rural landholding pattern of various social groups calculated by
National Sample Survey 99-00 indicate that OBC and forward classes are
comparable in wealthiness.)
National surveys used rural landholding pattern to assess wealthiness
of various social groups. Its findings indicate that OBC and FC are
comparable and there is a very minor difference between them. There is
a big difference between OBC/FC and SC. Even Scheduled Tribes are
placed better than Scheduled Castes. Experts who analysed national
survey results point out that other backward classes are near average
in many parameters. Please refer chart.[13]
Shrinking educational opportunities
During April 2006, India’s Human Resource Minister announced that 27%
seats will be reserved exclusively for candidates from Other Backward
Classes in addition to existing 22.5 % reservation for Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes.[14] This announcement was done when
polling process was underway in Tamilnadu and Kerala (States with
highest backward class population in India).[15] Incidentally many
opinion polls at that time were predicting rout of ruling UDF alliance
in these states.[16](UDF alliance subsequently won in Tamilnadu but
lost in Kerala). Election commission reprimanded Human Resources
Ministry for making such announcement when election process was in
progress.[17]
Sachar committee report indicated that Hindu OBC's enrollment in all
educational institutions is close to their populations in the 2004-5
national survey (page 93/425 of Sachar committee report). Union Human
Resources minister appointed panel to study about sachar committee
recommendations regarding Indian Muslims[3] but did not give his
opinion on this subject.
Impact of announcement on forward classes
After the implementation of OBC reservation, only 50% of seats are
available in open competition. All communities can compete in open
competition which means forward classes must secure between 72% and
78% of the 'open competition' seats in order to maintain their
representation in keeping with their estimated population of 36-39%,
whereas other communities will get major chunk of seats through
exclusive reservations. This has resulted in protests from Forward
Class community members and supporters from other communities under
the banner of Youth for Equality. They have pointed out following as
reasons for their protests.[18]
The Government has implemented reservations for the Scheduled castes
and Scheduled Tribes for the last 60 years, however the social and
economic situation of these groups has not shown much improvement.
This might be interpreted as an indication of the ineffectiveness of
reservation in higher educational institutions as a means of achieving
social equality.
Any difference between proportion of different communities in Higher
educational institutions is mainly because of difference in primary
school enrollment. (This fact was also confirmed in National sample
surveys and pointed out by Oversight committee in its final report).
Government should attack the cause instead of providing reservation at
higher education level Already 24% of college seats are with Other
backward classes. Providing another 27% seats will deprive chances of
forward classes.
Reservation on the basis of caste is cornered only by rich and
affluent. For example daughter of former President of India got
admission into Indian Foreign Services denying opportunity to another
poor person from her own community.
Certain Indian states has forward classes population of more than 50%
or close to 50%. In some of these states,no.of forward classes
admitted in educational institutions will be much less than their
population even if they secure 100% seats in open
competition.)Interestingly Government of India decided to introduce
27% reservations for other backward classes all over India. Many
states does not have even 27% of other backward class population as
per national sample surveys.(This includes major Indian states like
Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Maharashtra, Punjab, West
Bengal).[19].Some Indian states like Assam, Goa, Haryana, Himachal
Pradesh, West Bengal has more than 50% forward classes population
[20]which means no. of seats secured by forward classes will not be
equal to their population proportion even if they secure 100% seats in
open competition in central government institutions of these states.
Central government, however, excluded 27% reservations to other
backward classes to the areas with high tribal populations.[21].
References
^ http://books.google.com/books?id=bgpEIb4tNjgC&pg=PA2004
^ http://books.google.com/books?id=vCQ24WjlwZwC&pg=PA155
^ http://books.google.com/books?id=sTS4OO9lcdgC&pg=PA102
^ The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/11/stories/2006081104761500.htm
^ 'What more do the upper castes want?'
http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/may/16inter2.htm
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/1998.pdf
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ Reservations in Doubt: The Backlash Against Affirmative Action in
Gujarat, India by John R. Wood, Source: Pacific Affairs, Vol. 60, No.
3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 408-430,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2758881
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ 1968 Socio-Economic Survey, Govt. of Kerala
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?234783
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.outlookindia.com/images/brahamins_table_20070604.jpg
^ http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yInZdHn-pKoC
^ http://www.india-seminar.com/2004/534/534%20sanjay%20kumar.htm
^ MOSPI.NIC.IN
http://mospi.nic.in/mospi_nsso_rept_pubn.htm
^ Tamil Nadu's quota stir an assertion of its 69 percent? (NEWS
ANALYSIS) - India
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/india/news/article_1285498.php/Tamil_Nadus_quota_stir_an_assertion_of_its_69_percent
^ ExspressIndia.com Link 01
http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=67190
^ ExpressIndia.com Link 02
http://www.expressindia.com/news/fullstory.php?newsid=67837
^ The Hindu : National : Paswan for quota for economically backward
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/06/05/stories/2006060504941400.htm
^ The Hindu : Cong. for 'quota' for poor among forward castes
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2003/08/14/stories/2003081403450900.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_caste
chhotemianinshallah
Shekhar Iyer, Hindustan Times
Delhi, March 15, 2010
First Published: 00:26 IST(15/3/2010)
Last Updated: 01:30 IST(15/3/2010)
A blend of new faces and old hands will make up BJP president Nitin
Gadkari’s new team that he will announce on March 16 to end the three-
month-long suspense in the party.
That day marks the beginning of the Hindu New Year.
Those tipped to become general secretaries include former Rajasthan CM
Vasundhara Raje, former Jharkhand CM Arjun Munda, spokesperson Ravi
Shankar Prasad, Orissa leader Dharmendra Pradhan, and Himachal Pradesh
minister J.P. Nadda.
While Ananth Kumar, Ram Lal Agarwal and Thwar Chand Gehlot will remain
general secretaries, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, who was vice-president in
Rajnath Singh’s team, will be made general secretary, BJP sources
said. Navjot Singh Sidhu will also become a general secretary, while
Yashwant Sinha is expected to remain vice-president.
Among new secretaries, Gadkari is likely to induct Varun Gandhi.
Though Varun has sought a bigger profile, his mother Maneka is
persuading him to accept the role in view of the assembly polls in
Uttar Pradesh, the sources said.
Anurag Thakur, the young MP from Himachal Pradesh, will take over as
BJP yuva morcha chief, his predecessor Amit Thakker may be included in
Gadkari’s team as a secretary. Shahnawaz Hussain, who is heading the
BJP minority cell, may become a secretary. Among the women in the BJP
chief’s team, Smriti Irani and Saroj Pandey will be secretaries.
Party spokesperson Prakash Javadekar is likely to be elevated as vice-
president as are former Uttarakhand chief minister B C Khanduri and
former Delhi BJP chief Harshvardhan.
In keeping with the party’s decision to provide 33 per cent
reservation to women in the organisation, Gadkari intends to have at
least 13 women officer bearers and at least 40 national executive
members.
BJP names Rajay Sabha candidates from Punjab, Himachal
Indo-Asian News Service
New Delhi, March 15, 2010
First Published: 17:07 IST(15/3/2010)
Last Updated: 17:08 IST(15/3/2010)
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to field Avinash Rai
Khanna in Punjab and Vimla Kashyap in Himachal Pradesh in the Rajya
Sabha elections.
In Punjab, three seats are expected to go to the ruling Akali Dal-BJP
combine and two to the Congress. In Himachal, the lone seat is
expected to go to the ruling BJP.
The decision was taken at the central election committee of the BJP
that met on Monday with president Nitin Gadkari in the chair.
The last date for filing nominations is March 16. Polling, if
necessary, will take place March 26.
The terms of Rajya Sabha members from Punjab -- Sports Minister M S
Gill, former minister Ashwani Kumar and D P Sabharwal (all Congress)
and V S Bajwa (Akali Dal) -- are ending April 9. The term of Akali Dal
member Naresh Gujral will end March 22.
In Himachal, Commerce Minister Anand Sharma's term ends April 3.
BJP sets up panel to probe Bareilly clashes
HT Correspondents, Hindustan Times
Lucknow, March 13, 2010
First Published: 21:49 IST(13/3/2010)
Last Updated: 01:23 IST(14/3/2010)
As Bareilly continued to remain on the boil for the 11th day on
Saturday, the BJP set up a three-member committee to inquire into the
communal violence.
The committee is headed by former Union minister Maneka Gandhi, an MP
from Aaonla that is adjacent to Bareilly. Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath
and Meerut MP Rajendra Agrawal are the other two members, a party
release said.
On Saturday, a mob set fire to shops and vehicles in Qutabkhana and
Subzi Mandi areas, while curfew continued in the five police areas of
Kila, Baradari, Premnagar, Subhash Nagar and Kotwali. Fearing that
violence might spread to other areas the district administration did
not relax the curfew.
The ADG (Law and Order), Brij Lal, said that in order to restore
communal harmony the district administration was holding meeting with
the citizens. “The people residing on the outskirts of the city were
also invited to the meeting. Adequate police force was deployed and
the situation was under control,” he said.
The district administration is being blamed for mismanagement. “It’s a
clear case of mishandling by the district administration,” a police
officer said. “Tension was limited to four police areas, later it
spread.”
“On several occasions the decisions taken by the district
administration was by-passed and directives came from Lucknow that
curfew should be relaxed,” said a police officer posted in Bareilly.
The intelligence department, too, reportedly failed to alert the
administration.
The BJP is blaming the Mayawati government for the clashes. Trouble
began on March 2 during the Barawafat procession. A minor communal
clash led to curfew.
Maulana Tauquir Raza Khan, president of the Ittehad-e-Millat Council,
was arrested for his “rabble-rousing speech” that had led to communal
tension. He was released after some groups said Muslims would boycott
the BSP rally in Lucknow on March 15.
Gadkari support for Modi, state explores legal options
HT Correspondents, Hindustan Times
Ahmedabad/New Delhi, March 13, 2010
First Published: 01:31 IST(13/3/2010)
Last Updated: 01:33 IST(13/3/2010)
A day after the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigating Team
(SIT) probing the 2002 Gujarat riots summoned Chief Minister Narendra
Modi for questioning, the state said it was exploring legal options
before it.
“Whatever are the right legal options available we will explore them
and, accordingly, what is required to be done would be done,” Gujarat
government spokesperson Jay Narayan Vyas said, adding that the state
government and Modi would cooperate with “the process of law”.
The SIT, which has summoned Modi to appear before it on March 21, was
acting on a petition filed by the widow of former Congress MP Ehsan
Jafri, who was murdered during the riots by a mob in Ahmedabad’s
Gulbarg Society.
The state Congress on Friday questioned the conduct of the Nanavati
Commission, set up to probe the riots.
“People have lost faith in the commission, (which is) operating for
almost eight years,” Congress leader Arjun Modhwadia said. “Even the
officers appearing for questioning are tutored by their seniors as
what to answer the commission.”
The BJP has come out in support of Modi, with party chief Nitin
Gadkari saying the Gujarat BJP leader would make a good prime
minister.
“We will cooperate with the judiciary, but we will back Modi one
hundred per cent. The events (riots) were unfortunate, but the blame
cannot be focused on Modi,” Gadkari told Headlines Today. “The UPA
simply wants to shoot Modi politically by using the CBI.”
This is the first time Gadkari, who took over in December, has
endorsed Modi for the top slot.
“He (Modi) is a role model for development politics,” he added. “A
decision on the party’s prime ministerial candidate will be taken by
senior leaders and the parliamentary body, but Modi is fully competent
– he has the ability, capacity and potential to lead this country.”
Smita hails Sonia Gandhi for women’s quota bill, praises Raj
HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times
Mumbai, March 11, 2010
First Published: 01:23 IST(11/3/2010)
Last Updated: 01:24 IST(11/3/2010)
Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray’s estranged daughter-in-law Smita on
Wednesday hailed Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi for getting the
women’s reservation bill passed in the Rajya Sabha.
“Mahatma Gandhi secured Independence for India. After so many years,
Sonia Gandhi has given freedom to the women masses of this country,"
she said at a press conference.
When asked about joining any political party, Smita — she is
reportedly keen to join the Congress — said she would join a party
that gives scope to her ambitions. “I can join any party,” she added.
Apart from Sonia Gandhi, Smita also praised Maharashtra Navnirman Sena
president Raj Thackeray, who is her brother-in-law, and Bharatiya
Janata Party leaders Nitin Gadkari and Sushma Swaraj.
“Like Balasaheb, Raj too has created his party out of nothing.
However, I don't approve his plank [against north Indians],”she said.
Dismissing Sena Executive President Uddhav Thackeray, as a leader who
is not on par with his father, she said: “There is a huge difference
between the leadership qualities of the two.”
Uddhav’s rise in the Sena had resulted in her downfall in the party’s
power circle.
On using the Thackeray surname though she is legally separated from
her husband and son of Sena chief, Jaideo, Smita said the Thackerays
gave her an identity and that’s why she would continue to use the
name.
BJP looks to gain mileage from support
Shekhar Iyer, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, March 07, 2010
First Published: 00:49 IST(7/3/2010)
Last Updated: 00:52 IST(7/3/2010)
The BJP will not let the Congress walk away with all credit if
Parliament passes the Women’s Reservation Bill.
A day after a whip to its MPs to back the bill, party leaders did not
mince words in saying that since the UPA coalition was in minority in
Rajya Sabha, the onus of getting it adopted was with the main
opposition.
Party chief Nitin Gadkari called an emergency meeting of the core
group on Saturday to discuss the bill.
“The core group unanimously decided to ensure passage of Bill,” he
said.
“The BJP is conscious of the fact that the UPA is in a minority in
Parliament. The BJP appeals to all parties to support this Bill. The
BJP has directed all its members to be present in Rajya Sabha and
ensure the passage of this Bill.”
Gadkari also made it clear that the role of the BJP in the passage of
the bill could not be underplayed.
“The BJP had first mooted the idea of this Bill in 1995 at its
national council meeting at Vadodara. The NDA had at first moved this
bill in Parliament. The BJP is the only political party that has
provided for one-third reservation in the party organisation for
women.”
Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj said the bill was a
dream of two senior leaders Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani.
BJP determined to get Women's Bill passed in Parliament
Press Trust Of India
New Delhi, March 06, 2010
First Published: 15:50 IST(6/3/2010)
Last Updated: 15:53 IST(6/3/2010)
Asserting that it was determined to ensure passage of Women's
Reservation Bill in Parliament, BJP on Saturday sought to make
political capital on the issue by stating that since the UPA coalition
was in minority in Rajya Sabha, the onus of getting it adopted was
with the main opposition.
BJP President Nitin Gadkari today convened an emergency meeting of the
party Core Group to discuss Women's Reservation Bill, which is set to
be tabled in Rajya Sabha on March 8.
"The Core Group unanimously decided to ensure passage of the
Constitution Amendment providing for one-third reservation for women
in Lok Sabha and state Assemblies," Gadkari said in a statement.
BJP has already issued a three-line whip to its Rajya Sabha MPs to be
present and vote for the Bill in the Upper House on Monday.
"The BJP is determined to ensure the passage of this Bill. The Bill
shows national aspiration and society has been waiting for it for the
last 15 years," Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said.
He said since the government is in a minority in Rajya Sabha, BJP
understands that it would have to play an important role in getting
the Women's Reservation Bill passed there.
It’s all about respect
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D Raja
March 04, 2010
First Published: 23:28 IST(4/3/2010)
Last Updated: 23:30 IST(4/3/2010)
A comedy of errors is on display in both Congress and BJP camps. While
it was an abhorrent sight to see Congress leaders trying to play
messiah to India’s Dalits some months ago by merely eating in Dalit
households, we now have the BJP playing catch-up with party president
Nitin Gadkari ‘doing a Rahul Gandhi’ by having lunch in a Dalit home
last month.
But what is downright comic is the Congress’s knee-jerk reaction to
Gadkari’s gesture. Congress spokespersons claimed that their party has
facilitated the “elevation of Dalits to [the positions] of Chief
Justice of India and Lok Sabha Speaker”. This is the same Congress
that had silently watched the then President K R Narayanan getting
dragged into a media controversy on the issue of him supposedly
overstepping his constitutional role and seeking to impose a policy of
affirmative action on the judiciary.
The Congress also seems to have forgotten that it was the Telugu Desam
Party that ensured the elevation of a Dalit to the post of Speaker for
the first time in the choice of G M C Balayogi, that too in a BJP-led
NDA regime.
The Congress and the BJP are not only trying to hoodwink the Dalits,
but they are also fighting it out for the elusive Dalit votebank in
Uttar Pradesh. Gadkari stated last month that Dalit leader B.R.
Ambedkar was like American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Someone should tell Gadkari that by the time the struggles of King Jr
and others led to equal rights for African-Americans in 1964, it had
already been 14 years since Ambedkar had introduced civil rights in
the Constitution of India, having already achieved getting political
rights and the right to representation in political offices and
employment for Dalits as early as 1932. Next, Gadkari will say that
Mahatma Gandhi was like Martin Luther King Jr, rather than the other
way round. It is entirely a different issue that Indian and US
societies are alike in denying civil rights to their oppressed
communities.
The Congress is equally at fault for not criticising BJP leader Arun
Shourie for his book, Worshipping False Gods, in which the author
makes ridiculous attacks on the Dalit icon. One would go on to say
that the Congress has done nothing to further the ideals of Ambedkar
and has shown no interest in the upkeep of the Ambedkar Foundation
created by the National Front government during the leader’s centenary
celebrations. It was the NDA regime that bought the Ambedkar Memorial
on 26, Alipore Road in Delhi and also pushed the 81st, 82nd and 85th
amendments of the Constitution in favour of creating reservations for
Dalits.
It is time the Dalits call this Congress-BJP bluff. If the BJP and the
Congress indeed care for Dalits, both the national parties should
first ensure that the practice of manual scavenging is eliminated from
the states ruled by these parties in the next one year.
They should also ensure that these scavenging families never have to
fall back into this ignoble profession. They should also earmark a
part of the annual Budget under the Scheduled Castes sub-plan for
Dalits to make sure that enough is spent on the educational and
economic uplift of Dalit communities. This, especially at a time when
the budget of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has
decreased in the last Budget.
The first issue for any political party is to respect the rights of
Dalits. They should also respect the rights of Dalits to protest,
demand and claim remedies, safeguards and action from the government
that ameliorate their conditions quickly. Let’s first learn to respect
Dalits. Then maybe one day they will invite us home for lunch.
D. Raja is National Secretary, Communist Party of India and Rajya
Sabha member
The views expressed by the author are personal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/columnsothers/It-s-all-about-respect/Article1-515245.aspx
Misra panel: BJP’s chance to win over OBCs?
Vikas Pathak, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, March 03, 2010
First Published: 01:31 IST(3/3/2010)
Last Updated: 01:33 IST(3/3/2010)
With a government-appointed panel calling for reservation for
minorities, the BJP senses an opportunity to find favour with the
Other Backward Classes (OBCs) among Hindus.
The Ranganath Misra Commission has recommended 15 per cent quota for
Muslims in education and employment.
In case the recommendation falls foul of law — the Supreme Court has
capped reservation at 50 per cent and the provision will push it way
beyond the ceiling — a minority sub-quota within the OBC bracket has
been suggested. It means that from within the 27 per cent quota for
the OBCs, 8.4 per cent will be for minorities.
While the Mandal Commission, set up with a mandate to identify
educationally and socially backward, said the OBCs constituted 52 per
cent of India’s population, the National Sample Survey Organisation
put the figure at 41 per cent.
Though the government has not set a timetable for adopting the
suggestions, the Misra report can lead to political realignments.
The Congress can gain Muslim support, particularly in Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar. The Muslim-Yadav alliance nurtured by Mulayam Singh Yadav
and Lalu Prasad in UP and Bihar, respectively, could be tested as the
two groups will be in fight for the same quota pie.
And this is where lies an opportunity for the BJP to attract OBCs to
its fold — in line with new chief Nitin Gadkari’s emphasis on widening
the party’s social base. Traditional base of the BJP is upper caste
Hindus.
“We’ll oppose any attempt to take away the rights of backward Hindus
and give them to minorities,” deputy leader of Opposition in the Lok
Sabha Gopinath Munde, an OBC leader, said.
The BJP’s rise to power in the 1990s was accompanied by substantial
non-Yadav OBC mobilisation in the Hindi belt, particularly in UP,
which has 80 Lok Sabha seats.
From 45 per cent in the 1996 Lok Sabha polls in the state, the BJP’s
non-Yadav OBC vote share fell to 28 per cent in the 2004 polls,
according to the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies. Recently, most of its candidates for the 11 UP assembly by-
polls forfeited their security deposit.
OBC vote can be crucial to the party’s revival.
Personal ambitions ruining BJP: Gadkari
Shekhar Iyer
Indore, February 18, 2010
First Published: 00:57 IST(18/2/2010)
Last Updated: 01:22 IST(18/2/2010)
The crisis in the BJP was not because of small leaders but the “over
ambitious” senior leaders who were seeking more and more in terms of
posts and perks for themselves, said party president Nitin Gadkari on
Wednesday.
Gadkari’s plain-speak came at a closed-door session on the opening day
of the three-day conclave of the party’s national executive near here.
BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad briefed reporters later.
“Our problems come not from small leaders but from the big ones, who
have got everything and yet are wanting more at any cost,” Gadkari was
quoted as having said.
Who did he mean? He didn’t name anyone.
“The party chief has only sought to present before the conclave the
weaknesses of the BJP that will have to go,” Prasad said, adding, “He
is asking everyone to think of the party.”
The closed-door session was attended by party seniors such as L.K.
Advani and Gadkari’s predecessor Rajnath Singh.
Advani endorsed Gadkari’s statement and said leaders’ egos was the
main problem.
Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley was also present.
Party sources said Gadkari could be referring to the leadership tussle
that followed defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, with L.K. Advani
wanting to retire.
Gadkari listed “personal ambition” as the single most debilitating
ailment plaguing the BJP.
With the RSS fully behind him, a confident Gadkari bluntly told the
leaders instead of seeking to pull down others, they should raise
their own bar of performance for optimum result.
He criticised the tendency of leaders to rush to the media with their
issues when things did not go their way.
Gadkari’s remark was seen by other BJP leaders as intended to serve as
a warning.
At 52, Gadkari is the party’s youngest president. And was brought in
by the BJP’s mother organisation, the RSS, to effect a generational
change, and give the party a young and dynamic leadership.
Since taking over, he has largely kept his peace with the party
stalwarts.
So far, at least.
The Wednesday speech is likely to go down in the party’s history as
the equivalent of Rajiv Gandhi’s radical promise to rid the Congress
of powerbrokers at his party’s centenary session in 1985.
Have a large heart, Gadkari pleaded with the seniors.
Chote dil se bade kaam nahi hota. (Small hearts and minds cannot
achieve big things.) Think of the country first, then the party and
yourself last, Gadkari said.
Acknowledging that distribution of ticket during the elections was a
sore issue, Gadkari said the ground rule should be that tickets must
be given only to those who were popular and could win.
“But, what we find is that everyone seemed to think of their future
only and not that of the party,” the party chief was quoted as having
said.
BJP to support separate Vidarbha in Parliament: Gadkari-Munde
2010-03-14 22:10:00
Last Updated: 2010-03-15 07:45:44
Nagpur: BJP national president Nitin Gadkari and party Deputy Leader
in Lok Sabha Gopinath Munde on Sunday assured to support separate
Vidarbha issue in Parliament when ever the UPA government brings the
Telangana state bill.
"Now the time has come when BJP will not allow UPA to move bill for
creating Telangana alone but will ensure that UPA includes separate
Vidarbha also in the Parliament", Gadkari and Munde told a public
rally here at Yeshwant Stadium, citing their party's unconditional
support to Women's Reservation Bill brought by the Congress-led UPA
government early last week.
Uddhav: Won't allow Mumbai to be separated from Maharashtra
Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states Dr Raman Singh, Ramesh Pokhriyal,
and Deputy Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Raghuwar Das were prominent
who addressed the gathering.
BJP's young legislators Sudhir Mungattiwar (Ballarpur) and Davendra
Phadanvis (Nagpur-South-West) who took out "Yuwa Jagar" yatra, an
awareness campaign for youth from Shegaon (Buldana) and Chandrapur
respectively, on Sunday culminated their yatra into a public rally.
Munde, a former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, in a clear
signal to the alliance partner Shiv Sena, said as to why there should
not be two states of Marathi speaking people.
Statehood call shuts down Maharashtra's Vidarbha region
"When there can be many Chief Ministers from Hindi speaking states,
there was nothing wrong when two Marathi speaking Chief Ministers
occupying offices," he said.
Uddhav: Won't allow Mumbai to be separated from Maharashtra
2010-02-06 23:00:00
Last Updated: 2010-02-07 00:15:45
Pune: Alleging the UPA government is conspiring to separate Mumbai
from Maharashtra, Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray
tonight said his party would oppose such a move and continue to take
to the streets to fight and keep the state undivided.
"On the lines of a separate Vidarbha, Congress government at the
Centre is planning to carve out a separate Mumbai state aligning the
metropolis with neighbouring Thane and Raigad," he said here, adding
the Sena would fight tooth and nail against the design to weaken and
factionalise Maharashtra.
Thackeray calls Shah Rukh 'traitor', no apologies says actor
Thackeray who was speaking during his public interview by noted
compere Sudhir Gadgil at S P College ground here, said his party's
stand against creation of separate Vidarbha was firm and undiluted
despite the contrary view of its ally BJP on the issue.
Thackeray alleged that Congress-led UPA was planning to create a
separate Mumbai state as the region generated maximum tax collection.
Thackeray calls Shah Rukh 'traitor', no apologies says actor
2010-02-06 20:50:00
Last Updated: 2010-02-06 21:58:45
Mumbai: On a day when Bal Thackeray labelled him a "traitor", Shah
Rukh Khan on Saturday stuck to his comments on Pakistani players in
IPL saying there was nothing "anti- national" and ruled out meeting
the Shiv Sena supremo on his own to sort out the controversy.
"I have not said anything that is anti-national or anti-Indian. I
stand by what I said and I would like to say that may be the group has
misunderstood me. There is no other reason because I have not said
anything I should feel sorry about," Khan, who arrived here after a
whirlwind promotional tour of New York, London and Berlin, told
reporters.
"I think what I said has been misconstrued. I am pro good relationship
with countries. I think we all are...," he said.
Asked if he would go to Thackeray's home 'Matoshree' to explain his
position, Khan said he had gone to the "senior" leader's residence
whenever he was called.
"I have been there so often. Yes, I would like to go and have drink
with him. But on this matter, I don't see...there is no reason for
going and asking...but if my stand needs to be explained to someone, I
have already done it. I don't think there is an issue on that front,"
Khan said.
In an editorial in the Sena mouthpiece, Thackeray wrote, "A Khan named
Shah Rukh tells us to love Pakistan but nobody feels suffocated due to
his treachery. Traitors, do whatever you want to do with the blessings
of Congress. Sena won't stop you..."
The actor, however, made it clear that he did not want to join issue
with Sena, describing Thackeray as an "elderly gentleman" whose
company he enjoyed.
'Bullying' not to be tolerated, says Maharashtra CM
2010-02-06 18:40:00
Last Updated: 2010-02-06 19:14:04
New Delhi: Maharashtra government on Saturday said it will ensure
security for screening of movies of actor Shah Rukh Khan, under Shiv
Sena threat for favouring inclusion of Pakistani cricketers in IPL,
and asserted that it will act against anyone trying to "bully"
others.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan said violation of law and
order by anybody will be dealt with strictly.
"All movies, be it of Shah Rukh's or anybody else's, if it is approved
by Censor Board, it will run and the government will protect it,"
Chavan told reporters at the sidelines of the Chief Ministers'
conference on price rise here.
"Even I will go and watch those movies," he said.
"We will make sure that not only Shiv Sena, but any person or any
organisation trying to create disturbance is dealt with strictly as
per the law of the land," he said.
The Chief Minister was replying to a question related to controversy
surrounding the movie star who is under attack by Shiv Sena for his
remark on Pakistani cricketers.
The Sena has threatened not to allow the release of Khan's upcoming
film 'My Name is Khan' on February 12.
Against the backdrop of Rahul Gandhi's visit to Mumbai remaining free
of any untoward incident despite Sena's call to show him black flags,
he said, "I do not want to take credit. I am happy about one thing
that they (Sena) understood it.
"I have said that the state will function as per constitution. The
government will take action against anybody who tries to bully
someone," Chavan said.
http://sify.com/news/bullying-not-to-be-tolerated-says-maharashtra-cm-news-national-kcgsEfabbfd.html
IANS
Statehood call shuts down Maharashtra's Vidarbha region
2010-01-20 11:40:00
Last Updated: 2010-01-20 11:58:49
Nagpur: Long distance and local services were disrupted, state
transport buses stoned and most private and government offices closed
as the daylong shutdown for a separate state of Vidarbha, to be carved
out of Maharashtra, began Wednesday.
Maharashtra police deployed heavy security in Nagpur and other major
towns of the 11 districts where the shutdown called by 68 political
parties and groups - Vidarbha Nirman Sangram Samiti (VNSS) - evoked a
spontaneous and enthusiastic response, the organisers said.
'All schools, colleges, a majority of government offices and over a
lakh commercial and business establishments in entire Vidarbha have
taken part in the shutdown,' said Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS)
chief Kishor Tiwari.
The Vidarbha region comprises the districts of Nagpur, Chandrapur,
Gondiya, Bhandara, Gadchiroli, Wardha, Amravati, Yavatmal, Buldana,
Akola and Washim, with a total population of 30 million.
As part of the shutdown, the long distance Vidarbha Express was halted
briefly by the agitators, while attempts were made to stop other
trains entering from north, east and south India at various points,
railway officials said.
After suicides, shutdown hits life in Telangana
Huge traffic snarls were witnessed at the state's borders with
Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh as vehicular movement on the national
highways was stopped by pro-Vidarbha agitators.
Similarly, all traffic also came to a standstill on the state highways
and district roads in the entire region.
Nagpur city was deserted as all public and private vehicles remained
off the roads and commercial establishments downed shutters.
In Yavatmal, a group of 50 farm widows squatted outside the State Bank
of India office raising slogans for a separate state and for justice
to the farmers.
In several Yavatmal villages, rallies were taken out and local leaders
demanded a separate state of Vidarbha for the region's development.
People also enacted farmer suicides, consuming poison or immolating
them as crowds cheered and raised a chorus for a separate state.
r suicides, shutdown hits life in Telangana
2010-01-20 10:30:00
Last Updated: 2010-01-20 10:39:58
Hyderabad: Normal life in Hyderabad and nine other districts of the
Telangana region came to a halt as a 48-hour shutdown called by the
Joint Action Committee (JAC) of students began Wednesday to protest
the delay in the formation of a separate state out of Andhra Pradesh.
Since Monday, two students have killed themselves over the issue.
State-owned Road Transport Corporation (RTC) suspended its bus
services while shops, business establishments and educational
institutions remained closed.
All political parties have supported the shutdown. The JAC called for
a strike after two students, depressed over the delay in carving out a
separate Telangana state, committed suicide.
K. Venugopal Reddy, a final year student of MCA, set himself ablaze at
Osmania University here late Monday. Suvarnamma, a first year BSc
student in Mahabubnagar district, set herself ablaze late Tuesday.
Tension prevailed at Osmania University campus for the second
consecutive day as students continued their protest with the body of
Reddy. The JAC leaders, who sat in front of the Arts College building
with the body through Tuesday night, said they would not allow it to
be moved unless all MPs and state legislators from the region resign
in support of the Telangana statehood demand.
In an attempt to shift the body, police brought additional forces to
the campus on Wednesday morning.
The self-immolations triggered angry protests by students across
Telangana. The students' JAC called for a two-day shutdown Wednesday
and Thursday.
The politicians' JAC, which comprises all parties including the ruling
Congress, has supported the shutdown for Wednesday.
The JAC also announced that all elected representatives would submit
their resignations from Wednesday and those who have already done so
would press for their acceptance.
Five legislators of Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) and one of Praja
Rajyam Party (PRP) began a sit-in at the house of assembly speaker
Kirankumar Reddy on Tuesday night, urging him to immediately accept
their resignations. The speaker, however, sought two to three days to
take a decision.
With the legislators continuing their protest, the police took them
into custody. They were later released.
All 39 legislators of main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) have
also decided to press the speaker to accept their resignations.
http://sify.com/news/after-suicides-shutdown-hits-life-in-telangana-news-education-kbuk4biegdg.html
Maneka Gandhi stopped from entering riot-hit Bareilly
2010-03-14 12:50:00
Noted animal-rights activist and Aonla MP Maneka Gandhi, who is
heading the three member panel appointed by the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) to monitor the situation in riot-hit Bareilly was on Sunday not
allowed to enter the city.
Sources said police personnel stopped Gandhi near Ghaziabad, while
enroute to Bareilly.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Nitin Gadkari had sent a three-
member team to riot-hit Bareilly to take note of the prevailing
situation.
Bareilly has been tense for several days following the release of a
cleric, who was arrested on charges of inciting clashes.
Mobs torched about 20 shops in the old Bareilly area on Saturday
though curfew was in force in most parts of the city affected by
communal violence. The authorities have rushed additional forces to
the city.
The Uttar Pradesh Government has ordered the closure of all
educational institutions there, and provided the police with a
helicopter to monitor trouble-hit areas. Uttar Pradesh Police had last
Monday (March 8) taken into its custody Maulana Khan, the leader of
Ittehad-e-Millat Conference. He was later released on Thursday (March
11) evening.
The right-wing Hindu outfit Bajrang Dal criticising his release soon
turned into action following which there was a violent backlash and
curfew was imposed in the areas of the city. (ANI)
Many new faces in Gadkari's new team; Anurag to be new BJYM Head
New Delhi, Mar 14: Many new faces will be find a place in BJP
President Nitin Gadkari's new team and the name of Himachal Pradesh
Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal's son Anurag Thakur, an MP, has been
given the party's nod for the post of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha
Chief, party sources said today.
The decision to appoint Anurag to the post of BJYM is likely to raise
the hackles of those in the party who have been raising their voice
from time to time against dynasty politics, they added.
Rajnath Singh, during his tenure as BJP President, had appointed his
son Pankaj Singh as the Head of the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJYM,
but had rolled back his decision, saying that would set a wrong
precedent in the party and would only encourage dynasty politics.
Party MP from Pilibhit Varun Gandhi along with BJYM Chief Amit Thakar
is likely to be given the post of secretary. It might also court
controversy in the party as Varun had been at the centre of a storm
due to his alleged hate speech in the run-up to the Lok Sabha
elections last year.
Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Arjun Munda, youth leader Dharmendra
Pradhan and former Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje will be
made general secretaries in the new team of Mr Gadkari, which will be
announced on March 16 on the occasion of Hindu New Year Gudi Padwa,
almost three months after he took over the reins of the saffron party,
sources informed.
Party Spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad is being promoted to the post
of general secretary.
Ananth Kumar, Thawar Chand Gehlot, Ramlal have also been roped in the
new team of Mr Gadkari as general secretaries.
Yashwant Sinha, J P Nadda, Kalraj Mishra, Kiran Maheshwari, Saroj
Pandey, Karuna Shukla will also be there in the team.
Saroj Pandey is likely to be made Bharatiya Janata Mahila Morcha
chief.
The number of office-bearers and members of national executive has
also been increased, the sources added.
--UNI
BJP secy blames Bapu for Partition
Vikas Pathak, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, February 15, 2010
First Published: 23:54 IST(15/2/2010)
Last Updated: 23:55 IST(15/2/2010)
The BJP hasn’t said the last word on Partition yet.
Months after Jaswant Singh blamed Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel
for the country’s division on the eve of Independence and invited
expulsion from the BJP for praising Pakistan founder MA Jinnah, party
leader Balbir Punj has pointed the finger at Mahatma Gandhi.
The BJP’s national secretary and Rajya Sabha member has blamed Gandhi
for the “original sin” that culminated in Partition.
“Gandhiji’s unstinted support for restoration of Khilafat in faraway
Turkey in 1920s ultimately led to the Partition…,” Punj writes an
article in a booklet, Vikalp (Alternative).
Khilafat movement (1919-24) was aimed at restoring the office of the
Caliph abolished by the British.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s “Muslim First” policy is in the same
tradition, he adds.
The booklet was released in the presence of BJP president Nitin
Gadkari and senior leader L.K. Advani on the February 11, the death
anniversary of Jan Sangh ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Jan Sangh was
the predecessor of the BJP.
Indian nationalism was always Hindu, says Punj. It was from Gandhi’s
time that Hindus got demoted to the status of a mere community. Salwa
Judums and the recent Orissa outbursts against evangelism (read
Kandhamal riots) are truly nationalist in nature, says Punj.
“All this history writing is because the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsewak
Sangh) was conspicuously absent during the national movement,” said
Jyotirmaya Sharma of Hyderabad Central University, an expert on
Hindutva politics.
Punj’s argument underlines the inconsistency of the Sangh Parivar in
resolving Gandhi, who is alternately condemned and appropriated.
While the BJP claims to follow Gandhian ideas right from its inception
in 1980 — in the first session former prime minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee had invoked “Gandhian socialism” — glimpses of the pre-
Partition Hindutva critique of Gandhi as “pro-Muslim” does make its
way into the Parivar’s discourse now and then.
Bareilly yet to simmer down
Pioneer News Service | Lucknow
Curfew extended to more areas
With four more shops being gutted in curfew-bound areas of Bareilly
and resentment brewing among members of the majority community over
the release of riot accused Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan, the situation
in the strife-torn city remained tense on Saturday.
However, no further clashes were reported from anywhere since Friday
night. Earlier, on Friday evening, nearly 20 shops at a local
vegetable market were reduced to ashes, which the administration
claimed was due to a short-circuit and not orchestrated by any group
as was being alleged.
ADG (Crime, Law & order) Brij Lal claimed that the fire incidents were
due to short-circuits and claimed that if the situation remained
incident-free, the administration might relax curfew from Sunday.
As per reports, some shops in Subash Nagar area were reduced to ashes
and locals immediately alleged that it was the handiwork of a
particular community which indulged in wanton arson. However, ADG Brij
Lal and DM of Bareilly shot down the claim saying that it was due to a
short-circuit.
The fire was doused by the fire-tenders soon after they learnt of the
incident on Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, a large section of a community took to the streets to
protest the manner in which riot accused Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan was
released by the police.
The agitators claimed that the administration succumbed under the
pressure of a Cabinet Minister and bailed out Tauqeer claiming that
there were no evidence against him and that his arrest was made on the
basis of an FIR.
Sources even claimed that former DM Asheesh Goel was shunted out
because he refused to give a clean chit to the riot accused cleric and
release him as he believed that the administration had sufficient
grounds for his arrest.
The Maulana’s release fuelled tension in Bareilly on Friday. Members
from the community took to the streets in protest and torched business
establishment, vehicles and engaged in heavy brick-batting which left
50 persons injured, including a dozen cops and the SP City.
Following the violence, eight senior officers were rushed to Bareilly
to defuse the situation and curfew was extended in Subash Nagar area,
beside reimposing dusk to dawn curfew in the four police circles
stations, where curfew was earlier relaxed.
Meanwhile, BJP president Nitin Gadkari has appointed a three-member
team of senior party leaders led by Maneka Gandhi to visit the riot-
hit Bareilly and submit a report on the events there. “We will be
leaving on Sunday for Bareilly and will be back by evening,” Maneka
told PTI in New Delhi. The team, consisting of Maneka, Gorakhpur MP
Yogi Adityanath and Meerut MP Rajendra Agarwal, is expected to submit
a report to the party president on the steps taken to control the
riots and the relief given to the affected people.
COMMENTS BOARD ::
secular media
By vinay chandran on 3/14/2010 12:03:34 PM
when the majority community is attacked the socalled secular media
ignores it.
when it is the other way round they make a big fuss about it.
The Truth of Bareilly Riots
By Aditya on 3/14/2010 11:29:02 AM
It was a usual 12 wafaat procession going on for many years (mind it
Bareilly is great seat of Sunni Muslim school). The city has
unparalleled history of communal harmony and pluralistic life style.
No one among my parents and uncles remembers anything ever going wrong
between hindus and muslims for past as many decades as can possibly be
remembered by living generations. Then what went wrong???!!!
This procession was scheduled on the very day of Holi but in line with
the communal tolearance
Why Is this Incident Ignored by English News Channels
By Rajeev - UK on 3/14/2010 3:52:28 AM
Why are national english TV news channel not showing this news at all.
Its surprising that a leader who preached hate was released due to
pressure of roiters, this is India and Not SWAT valley. Where are the
secular leaders now why isnt that leader put behind the bars again.
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Sid Harth
This page deals with the Hindu varna. For other uses of this word and
similar words, see Brahmana, Brahman and Brahman (disambiguation).
A Brahmin (anglicised from the Sanskrit word IAST '; Devanagari ),
also known as Vipra, Dvija, Dvijottama (best of the Dvijas), (god on
Earth) is a member of a caste within Hindu society. Historically,
Hindu society consisted of four based on occupation and divine birth:
Brahmin (reciter of the Vedas as they came from the mouth of Brahma),
Kshatriya (protectors of Dharma, since they are the arms of Brahma),
Vaishya (mercantile and agricultural class, since they are from the
body of Brahma) and Shudra (artisan and labour class, since they are
from the feet of Brahma).
However, in addition to these four classes, there were many other
tribes mentioned in mythology such as Gandharvas, Yakshas, Kinnaras,
Kimpurushas, Rakshasas, Nagas, Suparnas, Vanaras, Vidyadharas,
Valikilyas, Pisachas, Devas, Vasus, Rudras, Maruts, Adityas, Asuras,
Danavas, Daityas, Kalakeyas, Mlechchas etc. Today, the Hindu society
in modern India is divided into four classes based on birth: Forward
Castes/communities (FCs), Backward Caste/communities (BCs), Scheduled
Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).
In the 1931 caste census taken by the Colonial British government,
Brahmins were 4.32% of the total population. Even in Uttar Pradesh,
where they are most numerous, the Brahmins constituted just 9% of the
total populace. In Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, they formed less
than 3% and 2% of the population respectively.
The Nirukta of sage Yaska says ' — A Brahmin is a person who knows
Brahman, the ultimate reality or God; hence Brahmin means, "knower of
God". However, the historical situation in Hindu society is that
Brahmins are the traditional priests and pundits (scholars). Today
however, many Brahmins are employed in secular occupations and their
religious traditions and culture are fast disappearing from their
lives.
History
The history of the Brahmin community in India begins with the Vedic
religion in ancient India. The Manu Smriti, an ancient Smriti, refers
to Aryavarta.The Vedas are the primary source of knowledge for all
brahmin practices. All the sampradayas of Brahmins take inspiration
from the Vedas. Traditionally, it is believed that Vedas are ' (not
written by either humans or God) and anÄ di (beginingless), but are
revealed truths of eternal validity. The Vedas are considered Åšruti
(that which is heard, signifying the oral tradition).
Due to the diversity in religious and cultural traditions and
practices, and the Vedic schools which they belong to, Brahmins are
further divided into various subcastes. During the sutra period,
roughly between 1000 BCE to 200 BCE, Brahmins became divided into
various Shakhas (branches), based on the adoption of different Vedas
and different rescension Vedas. Sects for different denominations of
the same branch of the Vedas were formed, under the leadership of
distinguished teachers among Brahmins. The teachings of these
distinguished rishis are called '. Every Veda has its own . The that
deal with social, moral and legal precepts are called Dharma Sutras,
whereas those that deal with ceremonials are called Shrauta Sutras and
domestic rituals are called Grhya Sutras. are generally written in
prose or in mixed prose and verse.
There are several Brahmin law givers such as Angirasa, Apasthambha,
Atri, Brihaspati, Boudhayana, Daksha, Gautam, Harita, Katyayana,
Likhita, Manu, Parasara, Samvarta, Shankha, Shatatapa, Ushanasa,
Vashishta, Vishnu, Vyasa, Yajnavalkya and Yama. These twenty-one
rishis were the propounders of Smritis. The oldest among these smritis
are Apastamba, Baudhayana, Gautama, and Vasishta Sutras.Manu Smriti on
learning of the Vedas
Nature of Brahmin
"Samodamastapah Saucham
Kshanthiraarjavamevacha
Jnanam Vijnaanamaastikyam
Brahmakarma Swabhavajam!"
Control on emotions, Control on senses, Purity, Tolerance, Simplicity,
Concentration and belief in knowledge and science
Duties of Brahmin
The six duties of a Brahmin are given as per the Sloka
"Adhyaapanam Adhyayanam
Yajanam Yaajanam Tathaa
Daanam Pratigraham Chaiva
Brahmanaanaamakalpayaat"
Teaching, learning, performing Yaaga, make performing Yaga, accept
Daana, and give Daana are the six duties of a Brahmin.
Practices
Adi Shankara (centre) is the Hindu philosopher whose tradition is
followed by Smarta Brahmins
Brahmins adhere to the principles of Hinduism, such as acceptance of
the Vedas with reverence, adherence to the position that the means or
ways to salvation and realization of the ultimate truth are diverse,
that God is one, but has innumerable names and forms to chant and
worship due to our varied perceptions, cultures and languages.
Brahmins believe in ' — Let the entire society be happy and prosperous
and ' — the whole world is one family. Some Brahmins practice
vegetarianism (Bengali Brahmins and Kashmiri Pandits are exceptions to
this).
Daily routine
Hindu Brahmins hold practice of Dharma more important than beliefs.
This is a distinct feature of the Dharmic religions. The practices
include mainly Yajnas. The daily routineA day in the life of a Brahmin
includes performing Snana (bathing), Sandhyavandanam, Japa, Puja,
Aupasana and Agnihotra. The last two named Yajnas are performed in
only a few households today. Brahmacharis perform Agnikaryam instead
of Agnihotra or Aupasana. The other rituals followed include Amavasya
tarpanam and Shraddha.
See Also: Nitya karma and Kaamya karma
Samskaras
Brahmins also perform sixteen major Samskaras (rites) during the
course of their life-time.The Forty Samskaras In the pre-natal stage,
Garbhadharana (Conception), Pumsavana (Rite for consecrating a male
child in the womb) and Simantonnayana (Rite for parting the hair of a
pregnant woman) are performed. During childhood, Jatakarma (Birth
ceremony), Namakarana (Naming ceremony), Nishkarmana (First outing)
Annaprasana (First feeding solid food), Choodakarana (First tonsure)
and Karnavedha (Piercing of the ear lobes) are performed.During
education of the child, Vidhyarambha (Starting of education),
Upanayanam (Thread ceremony- Initiation), Vedarambha (Starting of the
study of the Vedas), Keshanta or Godana (First shaving of the beard)
and Samavartanam or Snaana (Ending of studentship) are performed.
Suring adulthood, Vivaha (Marriage) and Anthyesthi (Funeral rites) are
the main ceremonies.
Sampradayas
The three sampradayas (traditions) of Brahmins, especially in South
India are the Smarta sampradaya, the Srivaishnava sampradaya and the
Maadhva sampradaya.
Status of Brahmins Today
Historically Brahmins have been not only ascetics, sages and priests
for millennia seeking welfare of the society, but also secular clerks,
merchants, agriculturists, artisans, etc. They were also very poor. In
the modern democratic India, the Brahmins are still not only poverty
stricken, but also shunted out of every opportunity,The status of
Brahmins in Andhra Pradesh
http://www.vedah.net/manasanskriti/puranam.html
#Poor_Brahmins Brahmin Poverty] despite the fact that Prime Ministers
like Jawaharlal Nehru, Venkatanarasimharao Pamulaparti (P.V. Narasimha
Rao), and Atal Behari Vajpayee have been Brahmins. French journalist
Francois GautierFrancois
Gautier.com
has written on the sad state of Brahmins in India today.Are Brahmins
the Dalits of today?
Contributions to modern India
Brahmins have contributed immensely to the making of modern Indiain
many fields like literature, science and technology, politics,
culture, scholarship, religion etc. In the Indian independence
movement, many Brahmins like Balgangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna
Gokhale, C. Rajagopalachari and others were at the forefront of the
struggle for freedom. After independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Brahmin
and an atheist, became the first Prime Minister of India. Later,
Brahmins like P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime
Ministers. even now after persecution of brahmans by politicians they
hold top posts in administration, academia ,business, army,
jouranalism etc. Infact it was those Brahmin leaders like
Rajagopalachari and Thilak who fought for the upliftment of the
socially backward dalits and their equality in the society.
See also:List of Brahmins
Persecution
The anti-Brahmin sentiment was first kindled in India by the Dravidar
Kazhagam movement in Tamil Nadu. Caste & the Tamil Nation -Brahmins,
Non Brahmins & Dalits This was a reaction to the Brahmin hegemony in
the Civil services under the British government. In later years, this
movement caught on in many other parts of India even after
independence.
Communities
http://en.allexperts.com/e/d/dr/dravidar_kazhagam.htm
http://en.allexperts.com/e/t/ta/tamil_nadu.htm
http://en.allexperts.com/e/b/br/british_india.htm
Brahmin castes in the Indian subcontinent are traditionally divided
into two regional groups: Pancha-Gauda Brahmins and Pancha-Dravida
Brahmins as per the shloka,
http://en.allexperts.com/e/i/in/indian_subcontinent.htm
करॠणाटकाशॠच तैलंगा दॠरावà¤
¿à¤¡à¤¾ महाराषॠटॠरकाः,गॠरॠजराà
¤¶à¥ चेति पञॠचैव दॠराविडा विà
¤¨à¥ धॠयदकॠषिणे ¦¦
सारसॠवताः कानॠयकॠबॠजा गौà¤
¡à¤¾ उतॠकलमैथिलाः,पनॠचगौडा इà
¤¤à¤¿ खॠयाता विनॠधॠसॠयोतॠतरवà
¤¾à¤¸à¤¿à¤¨à¤ƒ
http://en.allexperts.com/e/s/sh/shloka.htm
The classification first occurs in Rajatarangini of Kalhana.
http://en.allexperts.com/e/r/ra/rajatarangini.htm
http://en.allexperts.com/e/k/ka/kalhana.htm
See also
* Varnas
http://en.allexperts.com/e/v/va/varnas.htm
* Brahmanism
http://en.allexperts.com/e/b/br/brahmanism.htm
* Anti-Brahmanism
http://en.allexperts.com/e/a/an/anti-brahmanism.htm
*Brahmin Contribution to Other Religions
http://en.allexperts.com/e/b/br/brahmin_contribution_to_other_religions.htm
Notes
References
*Definitions: A Sanskrit English Dictionary by Sir Monier Monier-
Williams
*Mayne's "Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage.
Hindu Castes and Sects Jogendranath Bhattacharya.
Andhra Viprula Gotramulu, Indla Perlu, Sakhalu by Emmesroy Sastri.
History and Culture of Andhra Pradesh Rao PR.
History of India Herman Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund.
Acharalu sastriyataNarayanareddi Patil.
Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies Abbe J. A. Dubois
External links
*List Of Andhra Brahmins And Surnames
http://www.maganti.org/PDFdocs/brahmins.pdf
*Brahmins
http://www.vedah.net/manasanskriti/Brahmins.html
*Brahmins of Andhra Pradesh
http://www.vedah.net/manasanskriti/Brahmins.html#Brahmins_of_Andhra_Pradesh
*Poverty Stricken Brahmins
http://www.vepachedu.org/brahmana-tribe.html#The_Mouths_that_Recited_Vedas_are
*Source: Vepachedu Educational Foundation Inc.
http://www.vepachedu.org/
*Brahmin Sages and Branches (Gotras and Subcastes)
http://www.vedah.net/manasanskriti/Brahmins.html#Brahmin_Sages_and_Branches
* A Long List of Brahmin Castes and Sub-castes
http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/people/brahmins/list.htm
* Brahmin Yahoo Groups
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http://atheism.about.com/library/irf/irf99/blirf_india99.htm
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http://hinduism.about.com/od/basics/a/whois.htm
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http://en.allexperts.com/e/b/br/brahmin.htm
When will the Brahmin-Bania hegemony end?
The Brahmin and the Bania still control the economy, but now the
Shudra controls politics
Reply To All | Aakar Patel
On 9 April, the Supreme Court rejected a plea that the 2011 census be
caste-based. CII and Ficci oppose job reservations in the private
sector, but Manmohan Singh is keen. India’s population of Brahmins and
Banias and Jains all together is 6% or less.
Ruling axis: Jawaharlal Nehru, a Brahmin, became Prime Minister with
the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi, a Bania.
The Sensex comprises the 30 largest traded companies of India.
ACC is run by a Brahmin (Sumit Banerjee), Bhel is run by a Brahmin
(Ravi Kumar Krishna Swamy), Bharti Airtel is run by a Bania (Sunil
Mittal), Grasim and Hindalco are run by a Bania (Kumar Mangalam
Birla).
HDFC is run by a Bania (Deepak Parekh), Hindustan Unilever is run by a
Brahmin (Nitin Paranjpe), ICICI Bank is headed by a Brahmin (K.V.
Kamath). Jaiprakash Associates is run by a Brahmin (Yogesh Gaur), L&T
is run by a Brahmin (A.M. Naik), NTPC is run by a Brahmin (R.S.
Sharma), ONGC is run by a Brahmin (also called R.S. Sharma). Reliance
group firms are run by Banias (Mukesh and Anil Ambani), State Bank of
India is run by a Brahmin (O.P. Bhatt), Sterlite Industries is run by
a Bania (Anil Agarwal), Sun Pharma is run by a Bania (Dilip Shanghvi)
and Tata Steel is run by a Brahmin (B. Muthuraman).
Punjab National Bank is run by a Brahmin (K.C. Chakrabarty), Bank of
Baroda is run by a Brahmin (M.D. Mallya) and Canara Bank is run by a
Bania (A.C. Mahajan).
Also Read Aakar Patel’s earlier columns
Of India’s software companies, Infosys is run by a Brahmin (Kris
Gopalakrishnan now and Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani before
him). TCS is run by a Brahmin (Subramanian Ramadorai). Wipro is owned
by a Khoja (Azim Premji). Khojas are Shia of the Sevener sect,
converted from the Luhana trading community (same caste as L.K. Advani
and M.A. Jinnah).
India’s two largest airlines are Kingfisher, owned by a Brahmin (Vijay
Mallya) and Jet, owned by a Bania (Naresh Goyal).
Of India’s mobile phone firms, Reliance Communications (Ambani),
Airtel (Mittal), Vodafone Essar (Ruia), Idea (Birla), Spice (Modi) are
owned by Banias. BSNL is run by a Bania (Kuldeep Goyal) and Tata’s
TTML is run by a Brahmin (K.A. Chaukar).
Cricket in India is run by a Bania (Lalit Modi) and before him it was
run by another Bania (Jagmohan Dalmiya).
http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/27220957/When-will-the-BrahminBania-he.html
Posted: Tue, Apr 7 2009. 12:30 AM IST
Economy and Politics
Mixing Vedas and code in new-age India
After seven years of juggling Vedas and school, Satya, a Tamil
Brahmin, had to make the big decision: whether to follow his family
and make a career in Hindu priesthood--or to forge his own new path.
As an undergraduate engineering student now, he has only temporarily
kept the decision on hold
Samanth Subramanian
Chennai: If this were 1989, or indeed 1979 or even 1799, S.
Sathyanarayanan would probably not possess the full head of hair he
does today. Instead, he would have shaved the front half of his skull
and then swept his remaining hair back to resemble a bulging half-
moon, knotted loosely at the back—a distinctive do for a young Brahmin
who would have been preparing to follow his father, his uncles and his
cousins into a career of Hindu priesthood.
Photo: Sharp Image
But this is 2009, and Sathya, as he introduces himself, has a short
but regular haircut, grown out from a few months ago, when he passed
his final year’s exams in a pathshala—Vedic school—run by the Sri
Ahobila Muth, a Hindu religious institution.
“We had to have our hair pulled back when we sat for our exams. It was
the rule,” he says. Sathya’s new look, though, fits right in at the
Rajalakshmi Institute of Technology, where he has started an
engineering degree, becoming the first in his family to attend
college. Sathya turned 18 in July, just as he was completing seven
years of Vedic education that came with a punishing schedule.
“Our Veda classes started at 4.30am and went till 7am,” he says. “Then
we had regular school from 9am to 4pm. Then more Veda classes from 4pm
to 7pm, and then supervised independent study in school from 7pm to
9pm.”
Apart from two monthly holidays, on the days after amavasya (no-moon
nights) and pournami (Tamil for full-moon nights), this arduous
regimen ran for six days a week; on Sunday, Sathya was still required
to attend Veda classes for five hours in the morning and two in the
evenings.
Also Read The boy who broke from tradition
“He’d never go anywhere but school, or maybe to the market to buy
vegetables” his mother Shanti remembers. “Every spare moment he could
get, he’d simply lie down and go to sleep.” Sathya saw his first movie
in a theatre when he was 16, and he got his first email address just
earlier this year. His only distraction, he admits, was the one
universally shared by Indian boyhood: Sunday evening games of cricket,
at a cramped ground near his house or in the narrow corridors of his
block of apartments.
BRAHMINICAL UPBRINGING
Sathya is short and slight, and he has a thin moustache, worn almost
out of rebellious joy that he is now no longer bound by the rules of
the pathshala, where every student had to be clean-shaven every day.
His slow grin fights its way through a mouthful of braces that he
wears to correct a misaligned jaw. “Because of that, my speech used to
be slurred, and I’d be very reluctant to talk in school, even to my
teachers,” he says. He had to give up flute lessons after two years
because his gums would begin to bleed. But the braces are helping—
Sathya still mumbles, but it sounds less like a medical problem and
more like a typical case of teenage shyness. “I find myself talking a
lot more willingly in college now.”
http://www.livemint.com/2009/04/06224522/Mixing-Vedas-and-code-in-newa.html
Posted: Fri, Nov 16 2007. 4:42 AM IST
Home
TN’s anti-Brahmin movement hits tradition, boosts real estate
Brahmins are finding ways to survive in changing times, while clinging
to old traditions
Priyanka P. Narain
Kannan’s house, which sits across the street from the ancient
Parthasarthy temple in the heart of Chennai, has not changed in 500
years: the palanquin his forefathers used now hangs on wooden beams
and he draws water from the same well as them. In his backyard, a
brown calf chews cud.
For centuries, Brahmin families such as Kannan’s have lived and worked
in the streets or villages around ancient temples. These four streets,
called the agraharam, created a subculture where Brahmin priests lived
a chaste life and performed traditional duties as priests and teachers
by running the temple and teaching the Vedas to students. They
essentially formed the ecosystem that ran the temples of south India.
Yet, against a backdrop of Tamil Nadu’s anti-Brahmin movement,
government policies outlawing the Brahmin-only colonies, skyrocketing
real estate prices and Brahmins’ declining social relevance, the
culture of the agraharam and people such as Kannan, who uses one name,
are becoming a rarity.
Earlier this year came another policy change—temple authorities will
now train their own priests, and priests no longer have to be
Brahmins, making older Brahmin priests all, but irrelevant.
With growing economic prosperity and migration, many of the streets
occupied by Brahmins in south Indian cities are finding it hard to
resist selling out.
Just memories? Interiors of Kannan’s 500-year-old house that sits
across the street from the Parthasarthy temple in Mylapore.
From Kannan’s house, it is easy to see the new white, pink and yellow
coloured buildings of residences, malls and coffee shops. Another
being constructed adjoins his backyard. He insists he will hang on—to
the past; to the identity.
“I would get about Rs3 crore for it (my house). But I will not sell. I
want my children and grandchildren to own it. Without this house, what
am I?” says Kannan, who has a postgraduate degree in economics.
Brahmins are finding ways to survive in changing times, while clinging
to old traditions.
Babu Das grew up helping his father run a canteen, or mess as it is
called in south India, inside his pink-coloured home at the
Kapaleeshwar temple agraharam in Chennai’s Mylapore area. The
Karpagambal Mess is famous for its authentic Tamil snacks, home-made
idlis and dosai served on banana-leaf plates while playing while
playing M.S. Subbalaxmi’s rendition of the Vishnu Sahasranama, the
thousand names of Vishnu.
Das inherited the canteen from his father, but does not know how old
the building is. “I love everything about this place. No one wants to
change anything about it. The people who come here to eat like it for
what it is. After all, money can buy you the latest trends, but will
it bring back this tradition?” he asks.
http://www.livemint.com/2007/11/16235400/TN8217s-antiBrahmin-moveme.html
Posted: Fri, Feb 19 2010. 9:37 PM IST
Culture
The Thackerays’ primitive charisma
The Senas have nothing constructive to offer Marathis. So what’s their
appeal? The Mumbai Marathi, better at renaming things than building
something himself, is disinherited from his city, and the Thackerays
give him an illusory sense of powerReply to All | Aakar Patel
All these events blocked eventually come to pass anyway, because the
control is cosmetic, and it wilts when the state decides to apply rule
of law. But that moment of theatre—when the media exhibits anguish—
produces the spotlight that nourishes the Thackerays. This is the
pattern to Shiv Sena’s actions.
It might appear that these actions are irrational, but the Thackerays’
method is cold and reasoned to squeeze out advantage. Witness the
discipline of Raj. He works his strategy with great care. On national
television he speaks Marathi no matter what language he is questioned
in. The Marathi loves this because it reflects his defiance.
There is a second reason why the Thackerays are compelled to make a
nuisance of themselves every so often. Unlike other parties, Shiv Sena
has a physical presence in neighbourhoods. These offices, run by local
toughs, are self-funded, meaning that they approach businesses and
residents for “donations”. This activity can be smooth only so long as
Shiv Sena radiates menace. The party is not effective if it isn’t
feared, and the grass roots reminds the leadership of this.
The Marathi pattern of resentment we have observed is visible
elsewhere in time.
India’s nationalist debate a century ago was dominated by the
Marathis: Tilak, Gokhale, Agarkar and Ranade. All four were Chitpavan
Brahmins, whose members are fair-skinned and unique for their light
eyes (like cricketer Ajit Agarkar and model Aditi Govitrikar).
Going against the current noise about Marathi in schools, Chitpavans
actually demanded to be educated in English. By 1911—100 years ago—
Chitpavans were 63% literate and 19% literate in English. This gave
them the edge over other Indians.
All four were on the most influential body in western India of the
time, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. But English education had not exorcized
the native instinct. There they unleashed their pettiness on each
other. Agarkar and Tilak fought over leadership. Tilak was forced out
in 1890 after quarrels over social status and money. Gokhale took his
place but was opposed by Tilak who said the job required 2 hours of
work daily and so it couldn’t be done by a college principal. Ranade
was attacked in Tilak’s newspapers and Gokhale quit in 1895 because he
couldn’t work with Tilak’s friends. A jealous Tilak sabotaged the
Congress session held in Pune the same year.
When the Gujaratis—Jinnah and Gandhi—entered Congress, they
immediately eclipsed the Marathis, because they had the trader’s
instinct towards compromise. The Marathi Brahmin’s energy was then
channelled into resentment, this time against Muslims.
RSS, founded in 1925, is actually a deeply Marathi organization.
Hindutva author Savarkar, RSS founder Hedgewar, the great Golwalkar,
his successor Deoras and current sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat are all
Marathi Brahmins.
Marathi resentment cuts down its own heroes. The first was Shivaji.
Marathi Brahmins refused to crown him though he controlled dozens of
forts in the Konkan. This was because he was a peasant from the
cultivator caste and not a Kshatriya. He had to invent an ancestry,
perform penance and bring in a Brahmin from Kashi before he could
crown himself in 1674, with the title Chhatrapati, meaning leader of
Kshatriyas.
Comments
What a blatant piece of crap!! And that too a center-spread in Mint!!
And what a branding! I have came across lies which stink of hatred
while reading this bullshit. Now I know that Tilak was a petty man,
was Brahmin, and is not much relevant. That Jinnah and Gandhi (who
calls Gokhle his Guru), were Gujaratis. Though, both owe a lot to
Maharashtra. I just want to ask this 'pseudo-expert' why Ambedkar was
borne in Maharashtra? Why Maharashtra had reformist stalwarts? Why,
when all other states (including GJ) in India were reeling under
Muslim rule, only Maharashtra created a king of people in Shivaji?
Shivsena-MNS are a different issue. Linking it to Marathis & Tilak-
Gokhle-Ranade-Agarkar & RSS, & painting all this as a Brahmin
conspiracy is disgusting. (And this fool thinks that there only 2 ends
to any economy - high and low. So one can run a company with a CEO and
a sweeper & both are non-Marathis in Mumbai as he claims.)
Ganesh
http://www.livemint.com/2010/02/19213129/The-Thackerays8217-primitiv.html?pg=2
Views
Reducing the poor to numbers
After 62 years of Independence, Dalit exploitation continues even if
the setting and players are different
With rising food insecurity, the proportion of the poor will
definitely soar (“Who count as India’s poor?” Mint, 2 October). The
same is true for those classified as vulnerable and stressed. It is
deplorable that our representatives fight like cats and dogs over
statistics and their reliability. This is nothing but a cheap attempt
to justify ratios and proportions established by surveys and censuses,
and by so-called think tanks who undertake the task of achieving
“comfortable numbers to play with”. This act of putting the cart
before the horse jeopardizes many lives while Nero enjoys his fiddle.
An attempt to place 50% of the population below the poverty line is
not only a welcome relief but pro-human and pro-life.
— Rohit Saroj
This letter refers to Mrinal Pande’s thought-provoking article “Caste
in a new mould ” (Mint, 9 October). After 62 years of Independence,
Dalit exploitation continues even if the setting and players are
different: refreshingly, not the usual whipping boys but the Brahmins.
If the Plan projects from the 1950s onwards have made people richer,
the ingenuity of the latter-day politicians in introducing an ever
expanding “OBC” (other backward class) list has given them a doubly
assured vote bank.
The article refers to the killing of 16 villagers in Bihar (Khagaria
district), originating in “land ownership and use”, an area in which
our post-Independence leaders enacted progressive statutes. For
example, Tamil Nadu (TN) is one of the early states which introduced
the salutary principle, “land to the tiller”. Several hundred Brahmin
mirasdars (landlords) had to part with the land to the actual tillers.
TN has not looked back since then, even if the Brahmin mirasdars had
to choose other livelihood options and even migrate. On the same
principle, Kurmis of Bihar cannot cite their holding 500 bighas in
Amausi if the Dalits were sharecroppers, managing and tilling the land
for generations. Bihar’s agricultural and revenue departments are
sufficiently endowed for ascertaining the factual situation and
deciding the issue. It is a grave mistake on their part to have let
the situation result in mass killings. Will the Dalits of Amausi ever
get the ownership of the land which they have been tilling for several
generations?
Pande has also touched on the role of education. The Brahmin
intellectual and statesman Rajaji, during his TN chief ministership,
introduced an educational system —earn while you learn —whereby all
would get primary and secondary education while learning their family
craftsmanship, which was vital for livelihood until their education
was completed. This would have avoided the worrying phenomenon of
increasing school dropouts, but he was unjustifiably branded as a
perpetrator of caste system. It is a little-known fact that long
afterwards, even in Britain, the New Labour intellectuals of Tony
Blair proposed a similar system for its citizens to enjoy the fruits
of the “knowledge economy”.
Until political powers stop viewing Dalit uplift as a vote bank issue—
or stop perpetrating the caste system by continuously expanding the
grouping called OBC—caste will not die nor will Dalits see progress.
The West is using the “human rights movement” to cash in on our
miseries, which we are trying to cure. This is one more area where the
government has failed in the international arena.
Sadly, this festering issue is witnessing a theatrical display.
Lately, Dalits and their neighbourhoods are being turned into tourist,
picnic or pilgrimage spots by politicians wanting to be noticed by
their leaders. It is an amusing spectacle to notice “mentions” that
they should not carry separate tiffin boxes but partake in the frugal
meals of the Dalits, and sleep on their humble charpoys. What an
innovative way to treat this festering sore.
— S. Subramanyan
http://www.livemint.com/2009/10/13222427/Reducing-the-poor-to-numbers.html
Posted: Sun, Oct 11 2009. 9:51 PM IST
Views
Caste in a new mould
The usual definition of caste oppression can no longer explain
emerging patterns of dominance
The Other Side | Mrinal Pande
In the first week of this month, 16 villagers were murdered in cold
blood by armed killers in Amausi village in Bihar. Of those murdered,
14 were Kurmis, the same caste as the chief minister of the state, two
were Koeries, also from the other backward classes (OBCs). Those who
understand the murky C of India know that the incident was not only
about settling some local scores. It was also sending an unambiguous
message to the Kurmis and other OBCs who have emerged as powerful
landlords in the state during the last few decades of OBC rule. The
locals insist that the killers were not Naxals as the police claimed,
but assassins hired by the newly empowered Dalit community of Mushars,
for settling old scores with Kurmi landlords. Whether the killers were
Naxals or hired assassins, two things are clear: One, usually a long-
standing land dispute lies at the heart of most violence in our
villages. And two, the usual definition of caste oppression can no
longer explain the emerging patterns of dominance and subjugation.
The genesis of the recent violence is said to lie in the report of a
recently appointed government commission on land reforms in Bihar. It
had suggested that the state government must protect the rights of the
landless sharecroppers, put a cap on land ceiling at 15 acres (for
both agricultural and non-agricultural land) and computerize all land
records. In Khagaria district, where the massacre took place, as
elsewhere in rural India, ultimately all fertile land is controlled by
the most powerful (read politically best connected) caste with the
landless Dalits as their sharecroppers. The Kurmis say they are the
titled owners of 500 bighas in Amausi, but Mushars quoting the report
say they have a bigger right to it since they have tilled it for
generations. This tension is what ignited the caste war.
When the issue of caste-based violation of human rights in India came
up at the 12th Human Rights Council in Geneva recently, it was
proposed that caste be put on a par with race. But in 2009, when we
talk about caste biases, we cannot overlook India’s actual electoral
politics. Here, being identified as a Dalit or backward leader offers
a distinct advantage and becomes the biggest guarantee of a
candidate’s electability. From Bihar to Tamil Nadu, they have voted
out upper caste groups regularly, but the unjust land ownership
patterns born of unfair state patronage extended by incumbent leaders
to their own community, persist. Expunging caste from school syllabi
has not helped either, and the learning system still remains unequal
and heavily biased in favour of the powerful and rich. This is because
of a confused and confusing language policy perpetuated by the new
rulers. They insist on government schools teaching the children
(mostly poor) in the regional languages, even though English is
undeniably the language of all power discourse and higher learning.
None of these leaders will educate their own children in the local
language, though.
Actually, the traditional characteristics and power of the Brahmins in
the traditional upper caste hierarchy (high learning, arrogance and
clever use of a certain elite language to build firewalls around
knowledge and information to keep it away from the commoners) are now
much more visible among India’s upper middle-class professionals,
whatever their caste. Whether backward, Dalit or forward, successful
children of the new dominant classes no longer acquire their basic
knowledge, skills and networking abilities in Brahminical Sanskrit,
but in English. Likewise, the power of the old-style, landowning
Thakur (Kshatriya), who killed a thousand tigers and routinely torched
Dalit huts, has been usurped by today’s political class, who ride lal
batti cars with similar disregard for laws, sirens blaring and black
cat commandos in tow. They hold power dialogues with neighbouring
warlords, make and break treaties—not the princes and nawabs who, if
they have not become penniless, have turned hoteliers and protectors
of wildlife. The traditional merchant class, thanks to family-based
businesses, may have retained some part of their old glory, but in the
global arena they are now heavily dependent on the neo-Brahmin: the
Indian Institute of Management-trained, multinationalized manager,
banker and expat consultant, who strides the global village and
carries vital knowledge in his laptop, as a Brahmin once carried in
his almanac.
All caste systems need a cleaning class. They are today the invisible
and unorganized freelancers. Moving from job to job, they help mop up
the night soil of the global village and provide the paymasters with
linguistic bridges into the vernacular heartland, where the markets
are also the votes.
Mrinal Pande likes to take readers behind the reported news in her
fortnightly column. She is a writer and freelance journalist in New
Delhi. Comment at theoth...@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/2009/10/08230128/Caste-in-a-new-mould.html?h=D
Posted: Fri, Jan 2 2009. 12:09 AM IST
Home
Mayawati leads BSP’s ‘elephant’ to temple towns
A Rs250 crore package to revamp Mathura was announced in August; now
Rs800 crore has been allocated for Varanasi
K.P. Narayana Kumar
New Delhi: To win both the hearts and minds of voters across the
country as India gets ready for the national elections in April, Uttar
Pradesh chief minister and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati
is deliberately targeting an overhaul of urban infrastructure in
pilgrim towns, such as Varanasi and Mathura, which see a large influx
of Hindu pilgrims.
Poll sops? BSP leader Mayawati. Nand Kumar / PTI
After announcing a Rs250 crore package for Mathura in August, Mayawati
announced an Rs800 crore revamp plan for Varanasi last week.
“By announcing these, Mayawati is telling the people—especially the
non-Dalits—that they should not judge her or the BSP by their past (as
a party that catered mainly to those at the bottom of India’s caste
pyramid) and, instead, think of the future they are trying to create
by catering to wider sections,” says Dalit writer Chandra Bhan Prasad.
Both Mathura and Varanasi are already covered under the Jawaharlal
Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) a Rs50,000 crore
Centrally funded scheme that ties grants for urban renewal projects to
a set of mandatory reforms that municipalities have to enact to be
eligible to receive the grants.
As of 30 June, Varanasi had one water supply and one solid waste
management project worth a combined Rs159 crore granted under JNNURM,
while Mathura had one solid waste management project.
The urban infrastructure development package for Varanasi includes
drinking water, sewerage and solid waste disposal schemes, apart from
improving power supply to places of tourist interest, including the
ghats along the banks of the Ganga river.
The Mathura-specific projects that were announced earlier in August
included improvement in tourist facilities and new road projects.
In the 2007 assembly elections, of the total 12 seats in Mathura and
Varanasi districts, the BSP, which won four seats, was the only party
that gained seats compared with the previous elections in 2002, when
it had won just one seat.
The main opposition at the Centre, the Bharatiya Janata Party, lost
one and the Congress party, the Central ruling coalition leader,
managed to retain the lone seat it had won in Mathura in 2002.
A senior priest with the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi said it was
quite likely that Mayawati would benefit if she were to carry out the
planned works.
“Caste politics has been played by all political parties, where
promises specific to interest groups are made before polls. So there
is nothing wrong in Mayawati announcing more development of temple
towns keeping the upcoming elections in mind. At the end of the day,
people want development. Let us see what Mayawati can do,” said this
religious leader who didn’t want to be identified.
Mayawati and senior BSP leader S.C. Mishra couldn’t be contacted
despite repeated attempts.
A study conducted by the New Delhi-based think tank Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) showed that the BSP had increased
its share of upper-caste votes in Uttar Pradesh from 23% in the 2002
assembly elections to 31% in 2007. The share of Brahmin votes for the
party increased from 6% in 2003 to 17% in 2007, after it handed out
tickets to Brahmins and other backward class (OBC) candidates.
“It is interesting to note that among Brahmins, 27% of poor Brahmins
voted for the BSP, while only 12% of the rich voted for it,” said
Pravin Rai, an analyst with CSDS.
Ajoy Bose, the author of Behenji, a biography of Mayawati, has noted
that of the 206 seats the BSP had won in 2007, 51 were held by
Brahmins.
http://www.livemint.com/2009/01/01231639/Mayawati-leads-BSP8217s-8.html
Posted: Sun, Sep 27 2009. 10:32 PM IST
Columns
Opportunity, challenges for Indian banks in UK
The Indian banks in United Kingdom are trying hard to reach out to the
Indian community at Southall, Wembley, Birmingham, Harrow, Slough,
Ilford and Leicester
Banker’s Trust | Tamal Bandyopadhyay
Thursday afternoon, I sneaked into the Camden Centre on Bidborough
Street at King’s Cross, before London’s oldest Durga Puja was formally
opened for worshippers. Ajay, a local doctor and accomplished Rabindra
Sangeet singer, was rehearsing for his evening programme while a few
others were putting up a Bank of Baroda banner on the dais where Ajay
and other artistes were to perform.
Indian banks’ overseas business model hasn’t changed— festivals and
community gatherings continue to be the most critical points of sale.
On Wednesday, S.R. Sharma, managing director of Punjab National Bank
(International) Ltd, or PNB International, the UK subsidiary of
India’s second largest public sector bank, headed to Norwood Park in
south London after office hours. He was invited by P.L. Suri, a
customer, to attend a satsang, a programme of devotional speeches and
songs. Sharma met Suri’s guru and many of his friends and is hopeful
of converting at least some of them into customers.
State Bank of India, or SBI, operating in London since 1921, has an
asset base of $7.3 billion (Rs35,040 crore); PNB International, just
two years old in the UK, has assets worth $625 million. There are
other Indian banks, too, in the UK such as Bank of India, Bank of
Baroda, Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank and a subsidiary of ICICI Bank
Ltd, which has the biggest UK balance sheet among all Indian lenders.
Based on 2001 statistics, UK’s ethnic minority population is about 4.6
million, close to 8% of the country’s total population. In 2001,
Indians accounted for 1.8% of the total population. Since then it has
gone up to about 2% and Indian bankers are chasing this chunk and no
one is willing to miss a single opportunity to reach out to the Indian
community at Southall, Wembley, Birmingham, Harrow, Slough, Ilford and
Leicester. Sharma recently convinced the UK chapter of the Bharatiya
Vidya Bhavan, a charitable public trust-run institution dedicated to
the promotion of education and culture, to distribute its newsletters
to 1,500 members across the UK in PNB International envelopes every
month. Last year, his bank sponsored a few awards at the annual
function of London’s Goud Saraswat Brahmin Sabha, an organization of
the Konkani-speaking Hindu Brahmin community.
Also Read Tamal Bandyopadhyay’s earlier columns
These marketing gimmicks are paying off. PNB International’s deposit
base has gone up from $103 million in December 2008 to about $280
million now and the number of accounts from 4,419 to 10,075. The
global meltdown has also helped. Up to £50,000 is covered by deposit
insurance and many consumers have now started keeping deposits in
various Indian banks, including SBI, for fear of losing their money in
case of a bank failure. According to Rajnish Kumar, regional head and
chief executive of SBI’s UK operations, the bank did not have too many
local customers until September last year, but in the past one year it
has got many, and now non-Indians account for about 10% of State
Bank’s UK customer base.
Indian banks are also developing new deposit products to attract
money. SBI, for instance, offers a step-up rate structure where a
depositor is paid 3.75% for one year money, but the rate progressively
goes up if the money is kept longer. For five years, it can fetch as
much as 5%. From customers’ point of view, the step-up structure is a
better option than a plain vanilla deposit scheme where one is hugely
penalized for withdrawing money ahead of maturity. But these products
can help only to a certain extent and Indian banks won’t be able to
mop up much unless they start offering other facilities such as debit
cards.
Unlike India, where such cards function on the chip and signature
principle, in the UK it’s the chip and PIN (personal identification
number) norm and consumers punch in the code after every transaction
and don’t sign a charge slip. The technology is quite expensive. SBI
is working on it while ICICI Bank, Bank of Baroda and PNB
International already have it. Each time a bank’s debit card holder
uses another bank’s ATM to withdraw money it needs to pay for such
transactions, but it also earns a commission when customers use the
card for shopping. The debit card offering has possibly helped PNB
International get the salary accounts of the Indian High Commission in
London, which had been banking with SBI and HSBC Holdings Plc. PNB
International now runs the salary accounts of about 125 high
commission employees, including Nalin Suri, the new high commissioner.
All Indian banks seem to be keen on collecting deposits, but when it
comes to giving loans, they continue to meticulously stay away from
retail Indian customers. The main reason behind the diffidence of
Indian banks is possibly the lack of a credit history for most of
their customers. There are a few agencies that sell credit history
data, but until a bank attains a critical mass in loan accounts, no
agency tracks the data of its customers. This means the customer of an
Indian bank can default on loan repayments and yet continue to get
credit from local banks as this information will not be known to
them.
Banks in the UK aren’t required to keep money with the central bank or
buy government bonds. But things will change as the Financial Services
Authority, the banking supervisor, is planning to ask banks to invest
8-10% of their assets in government bonds. Since such bonds are low-
yielding, the new norm will hit Indian banks’ profitability. One way
of protecting their bottom line could be the creation of retail
assets. But this has to be done with caution as KYB (know your
business) is as important as KYC (know your customer) for banking in
the post-Lehman days.
Tamal Bandyopadhyay keeps a close eye on all things banking from his
perch as Mint’s deputy managing editor in Mumbai. Please email your
comments to banker...@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/2009/09/27223257/Opportunity-challenges-for-In.html
Posted: Fri, Feb 6 2009. 11:05 PM IST
Culture
Fringe takes centre stage
The importance of being Mahesh Elkunchwar and Satish Alekar in Marathi
theatre; the plays of poet, painter and doctor Gieve Patel
Marathi playwrights Mahesh Elkunchwar and Satish Alekar occupy the
same place as their better-known counterparts Vijay Tendulkar and
Girish Karnad in the theatre-active centres of India. Even the most
culture-specific of their plays have been performed in other
languages. Now, Oxford University Press has published the collected
plays of Elkunchwar and Alekar (in separate volumes), thus bringing
some of their most important plays out of their Indian context into a
wider domain.
Modern times: (clockwise from top left) Satish Alekar (Kumar Gokhale);
Mahesh Elkunchwar (Vivek Ranade); and a scene from Alekar’s play,
Atirekee.(Theatre Academy, Pune)
Elkunchwar’s Wada Chirebandi (Old Stone Mansion), which deals with the
crumbling values of a landowning Brahmin family of Vidarbha, has been
performed in Hindi, Bengali, Kannada and even Garhwali.
Alekar’s Mahanirvan (The Dread Departure), which takes an ironic look
at the funeral rites of Marathi Brahmins using the keertan (devotional
song) form of story-telling to underline its black humour, has been
staged in Rajasthani, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Konkani, Tamil and
Kannada. Begum Barve, a tragi-comic look by Alekar at the glorious
tradition of sangeet natak (musical theatre) in Maharashtra, has been
brilliantly adapted in Hindi, using nautanki (traditional/folk
theatre) in place of sangeet natak, and in Gujarati, using the music
plays of Bhangwadi as a parallel.
Plays by both playwrights have been read and performed in American
universities as well.
Although both began writing around the same time, their first plays
were staged a few years apart. Elkunchwar’s early plays, published in
the prestigious literary magazine Satyakatha, attracted the attention
of Vijaya Mehta (née Jaywant). She directed four of them in quick
succession in the same year, 1970, for her theatre laboratory,
Rangayan. Alekar’s early plays were also published in Satyakatha, but
were not performed on the established “fringe” stage. Instead, they
became popular on the inter-collegiate drama competition circuit.
Contemporaries though they are, Elkunchwar and Alekar are driven by
widely different concerns. Elkunchwar’s preoccupations, to put it in a
nutshell, are about creativity, life, sterility and death. In his
early plays, his characters are manifestations of these ideas rather
than flesh and blood people. In his later plays, for instance Wada
Chirebandi, they are delicately delineated human beings of many
shades.
Whatever his theme or mode, Elkunchwar’s plays are marked by his
mastery over dramatic structure, each play having a well-defined
beginning, middle and end. His language, which began as an unstoppable
outpouring in his early plays, quietened down later to an economic,
rhythmic prose, full of eloquent silences.
http://www.livemint.com/2009/02/06211922/Fringe-takes-centre-stage.html
Posted: Thu, Jul 23 2009. 9:54 PM IST
Columns
Rita and Mayawati stoop too low to conquer
This is a tragedy, while the Congress’ provocation is merely a form of
low farce, because Mayawati is a historical political figure, whereas
Rita Joshi is a political creature and Rahul Gandhi is a fifth-
generation dynast
High Windows | Mukul Kesavan
The recent contretemps between Rita Bahuguna Joshi and Mayawati has
been the most depressing sequence of events in post-general election
politics. The gratuitous ugliness of it ought to make the observer of
Indian politics despair.
Speechless: Rita Joshi visits her house soon after it was torched by
miscreants. AFP
Joshi’s part in this squalid quarrel isn’t surprising. The daughter of
the late chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, she
has had a political career of the sort that’s politely described as
chequered. She has been in and out of the Congress; she has fought for
elective office as an Independent, as a Samajwadi Party candidate and
as a Congresswoman. Apart from winning the mayoralty of Allahabad, she
has lost every other election that she has contested. But despite her
recent electoral defeat in Lucknow, her political career has been on
the upswing; she is the chief of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee
(UPCC) and given the Congress’ resurgence in UP during the last
general election, her star has been in the ascendant.
I was in Moradabad during Azharuddin’s election campaign when she
addressed the Congress faithful at a political rally held in the
grounds of the palace of a Muslim grandee. It was apparent from her
speech that she had cast herself, in a long and ignoble Congress
tradition, as a family loyalist. She urged the Congress workers
assembled there to make sure that they assembled in their thousands
for “Rahulji’s” scheduled stop in Moradabad. The turnout for Rahul
Gandhi’s constituency visit seemed rather more important to her than
the turnout in the general election.
I imagine that as a creature of 10 Janpath, Joshi was taking her cue
from Rahul Gandhi’s strategy to aggressively project the Congress’
presence in UP when she made her infamous remark about rape. Trying to
make the point that the UP government’s policy of giving financial
compensation to rape victims was inadequate and demeaning, she is
reported to have said: “Throw such money back at Mayawati and tell
her, ‘if you’re raped, I am ready to give you a crore’.”
It’s hard to believe that any responsible political figure, leave
alone a politician whose father was a UP Brahmin, could polemicize
against a Dalit woman chief minister in terms as crass and offensive
as these. It’s even harder to believe that the Congress party, whose
erstwhile dominance in that state was based upon an electoral
combination of Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins, would respond to Joshi’s
speech with a pro forma expression of regret and disapproval without
censuring or disciplining her. Sonia Gandhi was content to distance
herself from the form of words used by her apparatchik, while her son
was even more aggressive in his response, insisting that Joshi’s
choice of words was unfortunate but that her critique was valid.
Rahul Gandhi’s willingness to write off Dalits in general and Jatavs
in particular in UP by doing as little as possible to discipline
Joshi, is of a piece with the Congress’ cynical willingness to find
new electoral combinations in the Hindi heartland. So the UPCC chief’s
willingness to appeal to a casteist electorate’s worst instincts is
depressing, but unsurprising.
What’s rather more disheartening is the UP chief minister’s response
to Joshi’s provocation. She was charged under several non-bailable
sections of the law, including the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act,
1989, and remanded to judicial custody. Had Mayawati contented herself
with this, with demonstrating the awful retribution that Indian law
visits upon those who seek explicitly or by implication to humiliate
or intimidate Dalits, she would have made her point, consolidated her
reputation as a no-nonsense opponent of inflammatory rhetoric and
stood out as a defender of the downtrodden.
But she didn’t. Newspapers and news channels reported that Bahujan
Samaj Party (BSP) goons set fire to Joshi’s home in Lucknow and
ransacked it. A few days later the BSP member of Parliament allegedly
behind this act of arson was rewarded with the deputy chairmanship of
the Uttar Pradesh State Sugar Corporation. Instead of casting herself
as the guarantor of the public peace in UP, the chief minister seemed
to go out of her way to stand out as the embodiment of the lawlessness
and state impunity that has characterized UP politics in recent
times.
This is a tragedy, while the Congress’ provocation is merely a form of
low farce, because Mayawati is a historical political figure, whereas
Rita Joshi is a political creature and Rahul Gandhi is a fifth-
generation dynast. Mayawati is the first Dalit chief minister of
India’s largest state and the first Dalit ever to be seen as a
credible candidate for the prime ministership of the republic. Instead
of fulfilling her historic potential, she has chosen to fritter it
away by allowing the media to assimilate her to the thuggish politics
of her home state.
It’s unfair to expect Mayawati to set higher standards than Mulayam
Singh Yadav or Amar Singh or Rita Joshi, but pioneering politicians
from plebeian backgrounds owe it to the people they represent to set
an example. Mayawati could have made an example of Joshi within the
law; by seeming to step outside it, she has sold herself short,
betrayed a political trust and given her enemies and the enemies of
the bahujan samaj that she claims to represent, a weapon. It’s unfair
to expect Mayawati to be India’s Obama, but not too much to ask,
surely, that she not turn herself into UP’s Ahmadinejad.
Mukul Kesavan, a professor of social history at Jamia Millia Islamia,
New Delhi, is the author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other
Propositions
Write to Mukul at highw...@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/2009/07/23215401/Rita-and-Mayawati-stoop-too-lo.html
Posted: Thu, Oct 22 2009. 12:12 AM IST
Columns
Maoist documents point to erudite research
It is important to go beyond the government-engineered media movement
that has largely dismissed Maoists as being from the lunatic fringe
seeking to destroy the “Shining India” and “Imagining India”
narratives of the India dream
Root Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
A former director general of police of Chhattisgarh once commented as
to how well Maoist documents were prepared. “These appear to be
written by educated people—JNU types.”
He then looked sharply at me. “Are you from JNU?” he asked, referring
to Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, often painted as left-leaning.
I disabused him of the notion, but I agree entirely with his point:
Whatever the extreme politics and polemic, documents and statements by
Maoist rebels are erudite and clear. These are not ravings of
stereotypically wild-eyed, frothing intellectuals, but the thoughts of
deliberate, yet intensely angry ideologues who invite people to join
battle against the current nature and practice of Indian politics,
administration and law-keeping.
All that Kobad Ghandy, a recently arrested Maoist leader, repeatedly
muttered to television cameras as he was being led to a Delhi court by
police was: “Bhagat Singh zindabad”. Long Live Bhagat Singh. This
revolutionary occupies pride of place in official histories of India’s
freedom movement. His likenesses are evident in countless public
places across northern India; indeed, in India’s Parliament. Those who
battle Maoists know this well.
Also Read Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns
It is important to go beyond the government-engineered media movement
that has largely dismissed Maoists as being from the lunatic fringe
seeking to destroy the “Shining India” and “Imagining India”
narratives of the India dream. This is part of government’s lateral
tactic in a battle—“psy-ops” or psychological operations—much like
what public relations professionals and warring corporate siblings
practise.
Alongside, the Union government is engaged in intense on-ground
security operations with a self-declared mandate to arrive at a
conclusion within the next three years.
But it knows what it is up against, the same as the incredulous former
police chief of Chhattisgarh. So too do his colleagues in Karnataka—a
marked state, as it were—know the facility with which Maoist rebels
plan.
As far back as 2002, the Maoists prepared a document titled Social
Conditions and Tactics—A report based on preliminary social
investigation conducted by survey teams during August-October 2001 in
the Perspective Area. The “perspective area” were Central Malnad,
including parts of Udupi district, and the adjacent districts of
Shimoga, Chikmaglur and Dakshina Kannada. It offers insight into the
planning and argumentative conviction that go into developing a
revolutionary base.
Malnad is the “ghat” region of Karnataka comprising 10 districts, from
Belgaum in the north-west to Chamarajnagar in the south. It includes
nearly half of Karnataka’s forest area, nearly all of its iron ore and
manganese riches, major concentrations of areca—betel nut—cardamom and
other spices, and coffee. It records a large tribal population and
caste prejudice. The Maoist survey recorded a fairly large percentage
of landless and poor farmers, and domination by the upper castes—
Brahmins and Vokkaligas, among others. The landless received daily
wages as much as 15% less than the norm. In places, the survey
recorded between 10% and 32% of land without title deeds and
consequent “encroachment” by wealthier peasantry and landlords.
The survey, which referred to particular villages only with designated
alphabets to maintain secrecy, recorded high interest rates on account
of private moneylenders, and high indebtedness. As many such
moneylenders were also landlords—comprising 4% of the population but
owning a quarter of all land—inability to repay led in numerous cases
to a member of the family, usually a youngster, being bonded as farm
or plantation labour.
The survey tracked the fall in prices for several categories of areca,
pepper, cardamom and coffee. Inevitably, daily wages dropped. This was
recorded as the overall impact of “semi-feudalism”, free-market
pricing, lowering of import restrictions, and in some cases—such as
coffee—overproduction.
In great detail, the survey noted which Brahmin landlord was “known to
break two whipping sticks on the backs of his tenants”; where a
landlord had links with Mumbai’s timber mafia; where “Jain landlords”
evicted tenants unable to pay rent; and which temples in the region
had links with powerful politicians and businessmen. There was also a
list of weapons in the surveyed villages.
The survey recommended that Maoist support must be developed in the
area by “strictly secret methods”. These should include secret front
organizations of women, “coolies” and Adivasis. Village-level clusters
of militias should in turn be guided by the local guerilla squad
assigned to that territory—one such squad would have under its care
800 sq. km and four squads would form an interlinked team to control
3,200 sq. km.
The plan is on the ground.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
column alternate Thursdays on conflicts that directly affect business.
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Posted: Wed, Feb 3 2010. 11:45 PM IST
Columns
Naxalism and angst of Jharkhand tribals
With pressure from major businesses to deliver on now-dusty
memorandums of understanding and from Maoists--as they reconnoiter new
areas and call in old debts--Jharkhand will witness more churn
Root Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
Jharkhand has for some time resembled a tragicomic circus.
This is where a former state health minister, Bhanu Pratap Shahi, told
media in early 2007 of a novel method of combating Maoist rebels—
interchangeably known as Naxalites. One vasectomy in a “Naxalite-
dominated” village would mean that many “potential comrades less”, the
minister offered, in a situation of “many mouths to feed and little
food to eat”.
A state chief minister, Madhu Koda, received an official certificate
from the Limca Book of Records, India’s version of the Guinness World
Records, for becoming the first independent legislator to gain that
position. He formed a government with four other legislators and the
support of the United Progressive Alliance.
Also Read Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns
Koda is now history, accused of using his tenure to amass a fortune
along with some cronies and allies, mainly from concessions to
mining.
The newest chief minister, Shibu Soren, has this past fortnight
troubled hawks for suggesting negotiations with Maoist rebels in the
state. Leaks to media mentioned slowed police operations against
Maoists. Such moves would, according to conventional wisdom, permit
Maoists breathing room to regroup and gain ground. Failed peace talks
in Andhra Pradesh in 2004, and overtures in Orissa, are held up as
examples of what not to do.
Soren, too, carries baggage, marked as he is by scandals such as money-
for-votes during the premiership of P.V. Narasimha Rao; and the death
of a once-trusted lieutenant. But it is important to understand
Soren’s background with fellow travellers, as it were.
Jharkhand is blessed with iron ore, manganese, coal, limestone,
graphite, quartzite, asbestos, lead, zinc, copper, and some gold,
among others. It supplies to the region electricity from thermal and
hydroelectric plants. But there has always been a discrepancy between
generating wealth and its application.
The Jharkhand region received minimal development funds from undivided
Bihar based on a time-honoured presumption: tribals live there, and
they need little. Resettlement and rehabilitation issues were—and
continue to remain—poor on delivery.
The area’s displaced tribals were gradually organized by a tribal
rights and right-to-statehood organization, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha
(JMM), which also took on exploitation by a concert of contractors,
moneylenders and public servants. Bihar’s response was to send a large
team of armed police, which intimidated and arrested at will. To
protest, an estimated 3,000 tribals gathered in September 1980 in Gua,
a mining-belt town near Saranda forests to the state’s south, for a
public meeting.
There was an altercation with police. The police fired; the tribals
fought back with bows and arrows. Three tribals and four policemen
died; human rights activists place the number of tribal deaths at
100.
Both groups took their wounded to Gua Mines Hospital, where the
tribals were made to deposit their bows and arrows before the hospital
took in their injured. Then the police opened fire on the now unarmed
tribals, killing several more.
The police, thereafter, went on a rampage in nearby villages, in much
the same way as some of their colleagues in Chhattisgarh: looting and
destroying homes; molesting and killing as much for revenge as
suspicion of collusion with rebels.
JMM leader Guruji—Soren—became a bulwark for key tribal leaders, who
led movements in Saranda to prevent the illegal felling of trees such
as sal and teak.
As resentment peaked through the 1980s and 1990s, leaders sought
allies with greater firepower: the Maoists—through the Maoist
Communist Centre (MCC), the key rebel entity in undivided Bihar. This
alliance of expediency has since matured.
Saranda is a Maoist area of operation and sanctuary. MCC has merged
into the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the presiding
conglomerate. Besides attacks against police and paramilitary, looting
weaponry and imposing levies on small to big businesses to fund the
rebellion, Maoists have also carried out spectacular strikes. For
instance, they shot dead member of Parliament and bête noire Sunil
Mahato and three others as they watched a football match at Baguria in
early 2007.
Leaders with deep roots, such as Soren, understand the dynamics of
tribal aspiration and angst. Soren can, on a good day, still hold the
power to bring disparate issues to the table for resolution of
conflict. But tribal leadership is otherwise compromised, adding to
the rot and ineptitude that have marked governance in Jharkhand since
it attained statehood in 2001.
Even funds meant for modernization of police forces are known to have
been appropriated to purchase sports utility vehicles for ministers.
With pressure from major businesses to deliver on now-dusty
memorandums of understanding and from Maoists—as they reconnoiter new
areas and call in old debts—Jharkhand will witness more churn.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
column alternate Thursdays on conflicts that directly affect business.
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: Wed, Nov 18 2009. 10:13 PM IST
Columns
Cos open to accusations of complicity with govt
If businesses find it difficult to comprehend morality, they could at
least work to understand liability
Root Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
The flap these past weeks about Tata Steel Ltd’s proposed 5.5 million
tonnes a year project in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh triggered
thoughts of a recent conference on human rights and business. I can’t
talk much about that meeting at Manesar, near Delhi, sponsored by a
relatively new London-based institute, as we were bound by the Chatham
House rule. But I can discuss my personal observations as they do not
vary in private or public; as well as broad parameters of discussion
without specifically naming participants.
There was a senior representative from Tata Sons Ltd at the conference
this past summer, as well as his corporate social responsibility (CSR)
colleagues from ArcelorMittal, JSW Steel Ltd, Royal Dutch Shell and
Lafarge SA. Except Shell, others are between them currently engaged in
either contentious or tricky projects in central, north or north-east
India. Alongside executives were arrayed human rights activists,
lawyers, tribal representatives, self-declared liberals from Delhi’s
seminar circuit, and corporate practitioners and consultants from
Europe and the Americas.
Also Read Earlier columns by Sudeep Chakravarti
The purpose was to take inputs about the Indian situation to evolve
corporate best practice guidelines across the world as to the
experience of relocation and rehabilitation—frequently the curse of
projects—and work in conflict areas. The meeting was well timed, too,
seeing several popular protests against large projects and special
economic zones; and the outright concern of locating projects in areas
of Maoist influence.
A broad thought came through, surprisingly, from several executives.
The bean counters and boardroom “suits” that operate in India don’t
care about the socio-economic impact at ground zero. The project
blueprint is absolute in terms of cost in time, finance, man-hours and
return on investment. As activists joined the discussion, it became
ever more evident that CSR ends up being a tool to buy out
“opposition” with money, a primary school or health centre, some tube
wells. Responsibility ends there. The governments of the states where
the projects are to be located—with their political leadership,
bureaucracy and police—become an extension of corporate will.
Such an approach led to Singur for Tata Motors Ltd; the relocation of
the project to Gujarat worked through similar, though non-violent,
channels as the government there had already pre-empted protest by
releasing vast stocks of pre-acquired land. Tata Steel’s loud
clarifications that it had been “allocated” land in Chhattisgarh; and
its denial that a public hearing on the project in mid-October was
attended by hand-picked villagers in a room heavily guarded by state
police and local toughs, suggests a worrying trend: this conglomerate
has learnt little from its recent collective experience.
In Chhattisgarh, it is likely to face protests that could easily
escalate to violence as the administration lends a hand to shoehorn
the project. There is little doubt too that Maoist-front organizations
and militias will leverage toeholds offered by such an approach, the
same as they have done to a project by Essar Steel in the state’s
Dantewada district.
What drives a corporation to pursue a project in a clear zone of
conflict? Why do businesses feel strengthened, even invulnerable, if
they are in direct or moral partnership with government? Why do
project planners ignore the fact that the principle of eminent domain,
which permits the government to expropriate land for public good, is
abused in spirit and execution? Why don’t consultants, whom
corporations pay millions of dollars to scope a project, clarify
political and security risks?
The fig leaf of government having appropriated land—and so, business
being absolved of all responsibility—is mandated by India’s mai-baap
culture, a benevolent dictatorship deeply prevalent in the
relationship between business and politics. While this proved to be
the bedrock of much of India’s economic growth, businesses will, in
today’s charged rights and legal environment, be open to accusations
of complicity with government. Globalized Indian businesses are
additionally vulnerable, under international laws, to legal action
even in other countries if accusations of negative complicity with
government are proven. Moreover, there would be a public relations
fallout.
In plain words: it will be difficult to explain away aggressive
presence in a conflict zone where a project clearly stands to gain by
government forces killing off rebels. And it will be difficult to deny
moral responsibility for the death and displacement of innocents in
such a conflict. If businesses find it difficult to comprehend
morality, they could at least work to understand liability.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
column alternate Thursdays on conflicts that directly affect business.
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Posted: Wed, Sep 23 2009. 10:33 PM IST
Columns
Denying development is privileging violence
If the body count swings against the rebels and their support militia,
government will declare victoryRoot
Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
A major offensive against Maoist rebels by the CoBRA (Commando
Battalion for Resolute Action) paramilitary force is under way in the
forests and tribal homelands of southern Chhattisgarh.
Besides being the present-day heart, as it were, of the rebellion, it
is also a region where the government of Chhattisgarh has agreed in
principle to locate nearly $30 billion (Rs1.44 trillion) of investment
in minerals, metals, and electricity.
If the body count swings against the rebels and their support militia,
government will declare victory. If it goes against CoBRA, Maoists
will crow. TV crews will move in. People who track such phenomena—the
Maoist rebellion in India as well as prime ministerial pronouncements
as to its demerit—will receive calls for commentary on the who, what,
why and where of it all. It will be a circus, as always. And key
truths will, after a time, be reburied.
Maps detailing the current spread of Left-wing rebellion usually show
the overlap in forested areas, which provide rationale, recruits and
shelter. But the Maoist movement has long ago moved beyond the jungle.
Maps that detail other characteristics and topography are hence more
productive.
I’m fond of quoting at such times Omkar Goswami, who runs the New
Delhi-based CERG Advisory Pvt. Ltd. He was struck some years ago by
what current minister for environment Jairam Ramesh told him about an
“east of Kanpur characterization of India”.
Also Read Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns
Ramesh’s point: the regions west of Kanpur, marked by the longitude
80.24 (east), were doing better, while those to the east of it were
“withering away”.
Goswami decided to check Ramesh’s hypothesis by collecting data on
India’s districts, development blocks and villages. His colleagues and
he pored over this data for two years, and alongside, used data from
the Census of India 2001 to map an India based on ownership of, or
access to, 11 assets and amenities: Whether the household had a bank
or post office account, a pucca house, electricity connection, owned a
TV set; owned a scooter or motorcycle; used cooking gas, had an
inhouse drinking water source or one within 500m; had a separate
kitchen area, a separate toilet, a separate and enclosed bathing
space, and a telephone.
CERG then took the results of these indicators of necessity and basic
aspiration, what it termed the Rural India District Score, and mapped
it. The districts were ranked in six grades, with accompanying
colours: Best (dark green), Good (light green), Better than Average
(very light green), Average (white), Worse than Average (orange) and
Very Poor (red).
Central India showed great patches of white and orange, and splashes
of red. Moving east into Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, eastern Andhra
Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal and most of north-eastern India,
it’s a sea of red and orange with peripheral white and 10 islands of
varying shades of green—one being Kolkata.
The white bank of “average” spreads south into peninsular India, with
some orange penetrations of “worse than average” in Karnataka and
Tamil Nadu.
The “east of Kanpur” districts are dropping off the development map,
Goswami concluded. “Getting the benefits of growth to these districts
is the greatest challenge of development and political economy.”
If political leaders and policymakers were to open similar statistical
tables of socio-economic growth and demographic spreads of the
marginalized and the dispossessed, and look at maps of attacks and
penetration by the disaffected in general and Maoists in particular,
they would see the current and future course of what they label
“menace” and “infestation”. They would see how they are privileging
violence, by denying development until violence forces the hand.
There are several studies that prove it. A particularly striking one
is by a senior police officer, Durga Madhab (John) Mitra, who
published a paper in 2007 called Understanding Indian Insurgencies:
Implications for Counter-insurgency operations in the Third World,
during a sabbatical at the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War
College.
The Planning Commission received an excellent report last year from an
expert group it commissioned, comprising political economy, security,
and legal specialists, some of them former senior police and
intelligence officers.
Titled Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, the
report’s frank expression pleasantly stunned even cynical human rights
activists long used to government’s blinkers.
Mitra received polite attention at the ministry of home affairs. The
Planning Commission report is filed away—as such things often are. I
hope to draw attention to key outlines and recommendation in these and
other documents in future columns.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
column alternate Thursdays on conflicts that directly affect
business.
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: Thu, Aug 27 2009. 1:02 AM IST
Columns
Andhra grapples with Maoists, new acronymsThe state already has at
hand several Union government-controlled paramilitaries, in their
acronyms CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force), IRB (India Reserve
Battalion), and the newly formed and giddily named CoBRA (Combat
Battalion for Resolute Action), aimed at Left-wing rebellionRoot Cause
| Sudeep Chakravarti
Beyond the urban bling of Hyderabad lies territory that is giving Y.S.
Rajasekhara Reddy headaches. At a New Delhi conference of chief
ministers to discuss internal security, convened by Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh in mid-August, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh
said he wanted three districts by the state’s border with Orissa to be
formally declared Maoist-affected.
Despite several years of anti-rebel operations—a mix of specially
trained forces, better weapons, infiltration, better equipped police
posts, utter disregard for human rights niceties, and rehabilitation
packages for Maoists—the fire burns.
While Maoists have retreated in the north, central and southern parts
of the state, the forested, hilly and coastal east tells a different
story. Reddy’s key concern is that several power, irrigation and
mining projects planned for the east would be in jeopardy. “Maoists
find such activities as ideal pastures,” he said.
Maoists do, as these activities typically involve displacement of
populations, and the imperfect exercises breed great resentment—rebel
tinder. Alongside, Maoists have taken common cause against Special
Economic Zones and the effects of globalization, not just in Andhra
Pradesh but across the country.
The rebels have bureaus in most states tasked with recruitment,
agitation and raising the level of cadre strength and “awareness”.
This is to seed rebellion in several ways, a prelude to “protracted
war” to gain political power.
This is a lateral expansion of thought and activity to keep up with
the times, as it were, extending the Maoists’ traditional turf of
fighting for agrarian, tribal and caste issues.
This is the continuation of a process from as far back as 2004, when a
definitive Maoist document, Urban Perspective: Our Work in Urban
Areas, recommended that “The centres of key industries should be given
importance as they have the potential of playing an important role in
the People’s War”—what Maoists call their armed movement.
In 2007, Muppala Laxman Rao, the chief of the Communist Party of India
(Maoist), stressed another thought from the document. “We have to
adopt diverse tactics for mobilizing the urban masses into the
revolution,” said Rao, better known by his nom de guerre Ganapathy,
“take up their political-economic-social-cultural issues …”
Reddy is described by Maoists, relatively gently, as “mercenary”. His
predecessor, N. Chandrababu Naidu of Telugu Desam Party, even five
years after losing the chief ministership, is mentioned in Maoist
journals as “the known and despicable American stooge”. This is in
great part for Naidu’s unabashed worship of Bill Gates, and PowerPoint
frenzy to tout “Cyberabad” at both local and global investment
seminars even as large swathes of the state lay in tatters; and
farmers killed themselves by the thousands, driven by debt and
desperation.
Congress’ Reddy learnt from Naidu’s mistakes and opted for more
inclusive policies. Among other things, he launched the Indiramma
(Mother Indira) project with fanfare in early 2006. A double entendre
of pleasing masters and political economy—the acronym expands to
Integrated Novel Development in Rural Areas and Model Municipal Areas—
it sought to cover every village panchayat in three years and provide
what the state has not in decades. Primary education to all; health
facilities where there are none; clean water; pucca houses with
latrines; electricity connections to all households; roads; and so on.
The halting success of the project, in bits reborn as the Andhra
Pradesh Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, contributed to Reddy’s re-
election earlier this year. However, his recent remarks are revealing.
Andhra Pradesh has battled post-Naxalbari rebels for three decades. It
raised a now-hardened special force, the Greyhounds, to combat rebels.
But the stick-and-carrot policy of the state has proved patchy.
Policing and brutal suppression of Maoists has not effectively been
replaced in these areas by development works and delivery of dignity
to the poor and marginal. And so, these places continue to be deeply
vulnerable to Maoist activity. Reddy is understandably nervous about
developments in eastern Andhra Pradesh, both for their immediacy and
potential to reignite churn elsewhere.
To battle Maoists and other forces such as radical Islamism, Reddy at
the New Delhi conference said Andhra Pradesh has established a new
force: OCTOPUS. It stands for Organisation for Counter Terrorism and
Operations.
The state already has at hand several Union government-controlled
paramilitaries, in their acronyms CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force),
IRB (India Reserve Battalion), and the newly formed and giddily named
CoBRA (Combat Battalion for Resolute Action), aimed at Left-wing
rebellion.
As Reddy must realize, acronyms with aggressive intent can only go
part of the way.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He will
write a fortnightly column on conflicts that directly affect business.
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Posted: Wed, Sep 9 2009. 10:39 PM IST
Columns
It is time lessons were learnt in West Bengal
The government of West Bengal has diligently courted grief
Root Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
All it takes to go from chutzpah to chaos is a blind corner. Few in
recent times would know this better than the policymakers of West
Bengal—and their enforcers.
The Singur episode with Tata Motors Ltd is now a modern classic of how
not to work with government intervention. Another contemporary classic
is from Nandigram, several hours’ drive south of Singur. Here the
state government and Indonesia’s Salim Group were prevented by public
protests in 2007 from going ahead with a massive special economic zone
(SEZ), a venture of New Kolkata International Development Pvt. Ltd (a
joint venture of Salim Group, Unitech Ltd and a company owned by a
Salim associate) and West Bengal Industrial Development Corp.
Both projects faced intense public agitation over the practice of some
bureaucrats, police, and leaders and cadre of the ruling Communist
Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, strong-arming farmers to part with
land—both cultivable and not—to the state, and for such acquisitions
to be passed on to proposed businesses.
Also Read Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns
Earlier this week, West Bengal’s department of information technology
(IT) yanked a couple of project sites at Rajarhat on the outskirts of
Kolkata it had offered Infosys Technologies Ltd and Wipro Ltd. The
firms were expected to take up residence in a proposed IT park. A
scandal from the preceding fortnight, violence involving local land
sharks and political mafia that had helped purchase land for a resort
in the area—and were allegedly involved in procuring land for the IT
park—gave the government cold feet. “The government does not want to
be involved in any illegal activity,” a press release from the
department announced. “… (We) cannot proceed with the project.”
Infosys and Wipro should rest easy. Increasingly, businesses with
global footprint, ambition and stock listings that ride investment on
direct government intervention or inadvertent intervention in areas of
any conflict—a war, civil war, or violence rooted in corruption and
political mismanagement—could find themselves in court at home and
elsewhere.
A slim document titled Red Flags: Liability Risks for Companies
Operating in High-risk Zones, published in 2008 by International Alert
(www.international-alert.org) and Fafo Institute (www.fafo.no) lists
several grounds for litigation, including some that are commonplace in
India. Under international law, expelling people from their
communities by “the threat or use of violence to force people out of
their communities can be a crime”, Red Flags maintains. “A company may
face liability if it has gained access to the site on which it
operates, where it builds infrastructure, or where it explores for
natural resources, through forced displacement.”
Other points of liability include “engaging abusive security
forces” (directly or through the proxy of state police or
paramilitary) to effect and perpetuate a project; and “allowing use of
company assets for abuses”, such as overlooking mistreatment of people
by security forces and providing company facilities for such activity
to take place.
The government of West Bengal has diligently courted grief. Since it
assumed power in 1977, the CPM, more than its coalition partners, has
skilfully built a ground-up network, a broederbond of cadre and
leaders that thrives on a mix of intimidation, corruption and
administration. They gradually came to control the politics, political
economy and business, and dealt harshly with the opposition. This
cracked spectacularly in Singur and Nandigram, where Maoist rebels and
the Trinamool Congress got the flak—or credit—for engineering foment
which should have been placed at the doorstep of the state’s Marxist
leadership and its system of patronage.
In the Lalgarh region, which I visited past June during the
confrontation between security forces and a team of tribals and Maoist
rebels, it was easy to track “anti-establishment” targets. Almost
without exception, the largest and best homes, and businesses and
farmland belonged to, or were controlled by, the local leadership of
the CPM. Rebels and aggrieved residents killed many, and chased away
more.
JSW Steel Ltd is setting up a plant in neighbouring Salboni. Chief
minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee narrowly escaped an assassination
attempt by Maoists in November, when he was returning to Kolkata after
attending the foundation ceremony at the site of the plant. Two
ministers from New Delhi were with him.
There is nothing to indicate that this region has become less restive
after intervention by security forces, and businesses that choose to
work in this area do so at their own risk—all risk. Surely it is time
lessons were learnt in West Bengal and elsewhere in India.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
fortnightly column on conflicts that directly affect business.
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Posted: Wed, Jan 13 2010. 10:20 PM IST
Columns
Implosion in Nepal will subsume ‘red corridor’
Nepal had for long been at a dead-end politically and economically and
this in great part assist the Maoists in the country
Root Cause | Sudeep Chakravarti
A precept of the Pashupati to Tirupati theory of sub-continental
Maoism was the seamless meshing of Nepal’s rebellion with that of
India’s. While there certainly were fraternal links—providing
sanctuary; attending key meetings; occasional training of cadre; and
such—Nepal’s war was its own.
With renewed militancy of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal
(Maoist), or UPCN (Maoist), which has brought government near to
standstill, and disrupted economic activity in this already
impoverished country, there is again speculation of Maoist meshing.
Those who indulge in it fail to acknowledge Nepal’s dynamics; and the
fact that developments in Nepal can have far-reaching implications for
India beyond the obvious laboratory lessons of Left wing extremism and
its immediate aftermath.
Nepal had for long been at a dead-end politically and economically,
which in great part assisted Maoists there to achieve their initial
goal in 12 years—from the first attack on a police camp in 1996 to
helping to overthrow a seedy monarchy and to run a democratically
elected government for several months, until May. As premier, the
sharply dressed Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who encourages the
nom de guerre of Prachanda (fierce) even led a business delegation to
India.
Also Read Sudeep Chakravarti’s earlier columns
India’s Maoists are lower in the revolutionary arc, as it were. They
are the first to acknowledge that their task of national domination is
made difficult on account of India’s socio-economic growth, increasing
opportunities for that growth and expanding power of government, armed
forces and police.
The danger in Nepal today is one of socio-economic implosion as much
as its corollary: a resumption of hostilities between hardline
Maoists, and a coalition government undermined by charges of nepotism
and corruption. The government, controlled by moderate Marxists and
the Nepali Congress, is at loggerheads with Dahal’s party over several
issues.
Arguably the most contentious of these is the integration of Maoist
combatants—now located in seven major peace camps across Nepal—into
the mainstream. Proposals call for integrating them with former
enemies: Nepal army and police. The Maoists’ public spat with the then
army chief over this enabled in great part for Dahal’s former allies
in the constituent assembly, the Marxists, to pull the plug on his
government last year.
Among other things, subsequent turmoil has slowed progress towards
Nepal’s Holy Grail, the promulgation of a new constitution by this
May. The constitution is crucial for the process of peace and
reconciliation, further guarantee that decade-long hostilities, which
took an estimated 14,000 lives and ended in 2006, do not resume.
Maoists make no secret of an ambition to resume power—a legitimate
objective of a party. Dahal and his deputy, Baburam Bhattarai, have
told me, as they have several media persons, of their goal. Maoists
are clear that they will employ any approach short of outright war,
thus far, to achieve it. Dahal is fond of using the word bisfot, or
explosion.
And though their supporters and critics alike are agreed that there
can be no lasting peace in Nepal without Maoist participation, the
Maoist cause has been diminished, for instance, by their employing the
often-thuggish Young Communist League (YCL). A growing paramilitary,
YCL is used to enforce trade unionism—most hospitality industry unions
in Kathmandu are Maoist-controlled—intimidate opponents, and provide
numbers at Maoist rallies.
To increase all-round pressure, Maoists are reaching out to groups
that shored up the rebellion—and voted for them in the 2008 elections.
UCPN (Maoist) declared its “fourth phase of struggle” last week. Mass
gatherings are to be held between 19 January and 24 January, addressed
by the crème of Maoist leadership in regions that represent ethnic
minorities such as Limbu, Kirant, Sherpa, Tharu, Bhote-Lama, and
Madhesi—long-disenfranchised people of Indian origin concentrated in
Nepal’s southern Terai belt—and caste minorities, which together make
up about 70% of Nepal’s population.
There is talk of autonomous regions based on this mix. Should it come
to pass, it would dilute the influence of the hill Bahun, or Brahmin,
community and upper caste Hindu leadership long-dominant in politics,
the bureaucracy and army.
The exercise for India and other countries will now be to gauge the
tipping point for robust democracy—or an irredeemable one. The latter
outcome will contribute to conditions of an implosion of Nepal. Large-
scale migration of destitute into India; a 1,700km-long unstable
border with worrying security implications; and weakened economic
interaction with Nepal—India accounts for 70% of its trade—will
subsume any concern of a Red Corridor.
Sudeep Chakravarti writes on issues related to conflict in South Asia.
He is the author of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country. He writes a
column alternate Thursdays on conflicts that directly affect business.
Respond to this column at root...@livemint.com
http://www.livemint.com/articles/2010/01/13222008/Implosion-in-Nepal-will-subsum.html
Why I Am Not a Hindu
Ramendra Nath
Originally published by Bihar Rationalist Society (Bihar Buddhiwadi
Samaj) 1993.
Electronically reprinted with permission.
I have read and admired Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.
On the other hand, I have also read and disagreed with M.K.Gandhi's
Why I Am a Hindu. My acquaintance with these writings has inspired me
to write this essay explaining why I am not a Hindu, though I was born
in a Hindu family.
The Meaning of "Hindu"
The word "Hindu" is a much-abused word in the sense that it has been
used to mean different things at different times. For example, some
people even now, at least some times, use the word "Hindu" as a
synonym for "Indian". In this sense of the term, I am certainly a
"Hindu" because I do not deny being an Indian. However, I do not think
that this a proper use of the term "Hindu". There are many Indians
such as Muslims, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians as well as
rationalists, humanists and atheists who do not call themselves
"Hindu" and also do not like to be described as such. It is certainly
not fair to convert them into Hinduism by giving an elastic definition
of the term "Hindu". Besides, it is also not advisable to use the word
"Hindu" in this sense from the point of view of clarity. The word
"Hindu" may have been used in the beginning as a synonym for
"Indian" [1], but, at present, the word is used for people with
certain definite religious beliefs. The word "Hindu" belongs to the
category of words like "Muslim", "Christian", "Buddhist" and "Jain"
and not to the category of words like "American", "British",
"Australian", "Chinese" or "Japanese". There are, in fact, many
Indians who are not Hindus, and on the other hand, there are many
Hindus who are not Indians , for example, those who are citizens of
Nepal, Sri Lanka and some other countries.
In the religious sense, the word, "Hindu" is often used broadly to
include Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in addition to those who are
described as "Hindu" in this most restricted sense of the term, that
is, the adherents of Vedic or Brahmin religion. For example, the
expression "Hindu" is used in the Hindu law not only for those who are
Hindu by religion but also for persons who are Buddhists, Jains and
Sikhs by religion. This, again, is too broad a definition of "Hindu".
If we consistently use the word "Hindu" in this sense, we will have to
say that Japan is a Hindu country!
The above definition of "Hindu" is clearly inadequate from a
philosophical point of view. Buddhism and Jainism, for instance,
explicitly reject the doctrine of the infallibility of the Vedas and
the system of varna-vyavastha, which are fundamental to Hinduism, that
is, if the term "Hinduism" is used in its most restricted sense.
Therefore, clubbing together Buddhists and Jains or even Sikhs with
those who believe in the infallibility of the Vedas and subscribe to
the varna-vyavastha is nothing but an invitation to confusion.
Though I agree with Buddhism in its rejection of god, soul,
infallibility of the Vedas and the varna-vyavastha, still I am not a
Hindu even in this broad sense of the term "Hindu", because as a
rationalist and humanist I reject all religions including Buddhism,
Jainism and Sikhism. However, in this essay I am concerned with
explaining why I am not a Hindu in the most appropriate sense of the
term "Hindu", that is, the sense in which a person is a Hindu if his
religion is Hinduism in the restricted sense of the term " Hinduism".
In this restricted sense of "Hinduism", Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism
are excluded from its scope. I also maintain that this is, at present,
probably the most popular sense of the term, and every body should, in
the interest of clarity, confine its use, as far as possible, to this
sense only, at least in philosophical discourse.
Radhakrishnan, for example, has used the term "Hindu" and "Hinduism"
in this restricted sense when he says in his The Hindu View of Life
that, "The chief sacred scriptures of Hindus, the Vedas register the
intuitions of the perfected souls." [2] Or, when he says that
"Hinduism is the religion not only of the Vedas but of the Epics and
the Puranas." [3]
Basic Beliefs of Hinduism
Gandhi, too, has used the term "Hindu" in this restricted sense, when
writing in Young India in October, 1921, he says:
I call myself a sanatani Hindu, because,
I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all that goes
by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avatars and
rebirth.
I believe in the Varnashram dharma in a sense in my opinion strictly
Vedic, but not in its present popular and crude sense.
I believe in the protection of the cow in its much larger sense than
the popular.
I do not disbelieve in idol-worship. [4]
One may be tempted to ask, at this point, whether all the beliefs
listed by Gandhi are really fundamental to Hinduism. In my opinion,
(I) the belief in the authenticity of the Vedas and (II) the belief in
the varnashram dharma are more basic to Hinduism than the belief in
cow-protection and idol-worship. [5] Though it cannot be denied that,
in spite of attempts by reformers like Kabir, Rammohan Roy and
Dayanand Saraswati, idol-worship is still practiced widely by the
Hindu masses, and there is, at present, a taboo on eating beef among a
large number of Hindus. In any case, I am in a position to establish
the fact of my not being a Hindu by asserting the contradictory of
each of the above statements made by Gandhi:
In other words, I assert that I am not a Hindu, because,
I do not believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all
that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avatars
and rebirth.
I do not believe in the varnashram dharma or varna-vyavastha either in
the sense in which it is explained in Hindu dharma shastras like
Manusmriti or in the so-called Vedic sense.
I do not believe in the Hindu taboo of not eating beef.
I disbelieve in idol-worship.
However, while explaining why I am not a Hindu, I will concentrate
mainly on (I) the belief in the authenticity of the Vedas, and (II)
the varnashram dharma , which I consider more fundamental to Hinduism.
Besides, in the concluding section of the essay, I will briefly
discuss moksha, which is regarded as the highest end of life in
Hinduism, and some other Hindu doctrines like karmavada and
avatarvada.
The infallibility of the Vedas
First of all, let me explain what do I mean by saying that "I do not
believe in the Vedas", and why I do not do so.
The schools of ancient Indian thought are generally classified by
orthodox Hindu thinkers into two broad categories, namely, orthodox
( astika) and heterodox ( nastika). The six main Hindu systems of
thought -- Mimamsa, Vedanta, Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya and Vaisheshika --
are regarded as orthodox ( astika), not because they believe in the
existence of god, but because they accept the authority of the Vedas.
[6]
Out of the six orthodox systems of Hindu thought, Nyaya system is
primarily concerned with the conditions of correct thinking and the
means of acquiring true knowledge. According to Nyaya system, there
are four distinct and separate sources of knowledge, namely, (i)
perception (ii) inference (iii) comparison, and (iv) testimony or
shabda.
Shabda, which is defined in the Nyaya system as "valid verbal
testimony" is further classified into (i) the scriptural ( vaidika),
and (ii) the secular ( laukika). Vaidika or scriptural testimony is
believed to be the word of god, and therefore, it is regarded as
perfect and infallible .[7]
Mimamsa or Purva Mimamsa, another orthodox Hindu system is "the
outcome of the ritualistic side of the vedic culture". However, in its
attempt to justify the authority of the Vedas, Mimamsa elaborately
discusses different sources of valid knowledge. Naturally enough,
among the various "sources of valid knowledge", Mimamsa pays greatest
attention to testimony or authority, which, too, is regarded by it as
a valid source of knowledge. There are, according to Mimamsa, two
kinds of authority -- personal ( paurusheya) and impersonal
( apaurusheya). The authority of the Vedas is regarded by Mimamsa as
impersonal. [8]
As mentioned earlier, according to Nyaya, the authority of the Vedas
is derived from their being the words of god. But Mimamsa, which does
not believe in the existence of god, declares that the Vedas like the
world, are eternal. They are not the work of any person, human or
divine. The infallibility of the authority of the Vedas, according to
Mimamsa, rests on the "fact" that they are not vitiated by any defect
to which the work of imperfect persons is liable. [9]
Thus, orthodox Hindu schools like Nyaya and Mimamsa regard the
testimony of the Vedas as infallible, though they give different
reasons for doing so. Well-known orthodox Hindu theologians like
Shankar and Ramanuja believed in the authority of the Vedas.
Manusmriti, too, upholds the infallibility of the Vedas. As pointed
out by S.N.Dasgupta, "The validity and authority of the Vedas were
acknowledged by all Hindu writers and they had wordy battles over it
with the Buddhists who denied it." [10]
The point worth noting is that though popularly Hinduism is a theistic
religion, it is not essential to believe in the existence of god for
being an orthodox Hindu -- belief in the authority of the Vedas is
more important.
When I say, "I do not believe in the Vedas", what I mean is that I do
not regard the testimony of the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge.
In other words when I say, "I do not believe in the Vedas", I do not
mean that each and every proposition contained in the Vedas is false.
It is quite possible that one may find a few true statements in the
Vedas after great amount of patient research. But I assert that the
truth or the falsity of a proposition is logically independent of its
being contained or not contained in the Vedas. A proposition is true
if there is a correspondence between the belief expressed by it and
the facts. Otherwise, it is false. So, a proposition contained in the
Vedas might be true, that is, if there is a correspondence between the
belief expressed by it and the facts, but it is, I insist, not true
because it is contained in the Vedas. I categorically reject as
invalid every argument of the form: "The proposition P is contained in
the Vedas. Therefore, the proposition P is true".
Besides, I also assert that some propositions contained in the Vedas
are certainly false. For example, according to Purusha-Sukta of Rig
Veda , Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras originated
respectively from the mouth, hands, thighs and feet of the purusha or
the creator. I categorically reject this statement as false. I
maintain that varna-vyavastha is a man-made social institution and it
has nothing to do with the alleged creator of this world.
I also reject both the reasons put forward in support of the
infallibility of the Vedas. I neither regard them to be "the words of
god" nor I consider them to be eternal and impersonal. I believe that
Vedas were conceived, spoken and written by human beings. The question
of their being "words of god" simply does not arise, because there are
no good reasons for believing in the existence of god. The existence
of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent god is totally
inconsistent with the presence of suffering and evil in this world. It
is impossible for god to exist. [11]
Similarly, Vedas could not have come into existence before human
beings appeared on this earth, and before Sanskrit language came into
existence. And there are no good reasons for believing that Sanskrit
language came into existence even before human beings appeared on this
earth!
As far as Gandhi is concerned, though he liked to describe himself as
a sanatani Hindu, he was, in fact, not a completely orthodox Hindu.
For example, in the article quoted earlier in this essay Gandhi goes
on to add, "I do not believe in the exclusive divinity of the Vedas. I
believe the Bible, the Koran, and the Zend-Avesta to be as much
divinely inspired as the Vedas. My belief in the Hindu scriptures does
not require me to accept every word and every verse as divinely
inspired, I decline to be bound by any interpretation, however learned
in may be, if it is repugnant to reason or moral sense. "[12](emphasis
mine)
I seriously doubt that this position will be acceptable to an orthodox
Hindu. In fact, Gandhi's position comes very close to that of
rationalists and humanists when he says that "I decline to be bound by
any interpretation however learned it may be, if it is repugnant to
reason and moral sense". However, since he refused to say in so many
words that he did not believe in the authority of the Vedas, Gandhi
may be described, in my opinion, as a liberal Hindu with an eclectic
approach towards religion. On the other hand, my position is radically
different from that of Gandhi, because I do not consider either the
Vedas or the Bible, the Koran and Zend-Avesta or any other book to be
divinely inspired.
Varna-vyavastha
Before discussing varna-vyavastha or varnashram dharma, let me clarify
in the very beginning that I am not interested in giving my own
interpretation of what varna-vyavastha is or ought to be in its ideal
form. I am interested, firstly, in giving an objective exposition of
varna-vyavastha as contained in recognized Hindu scriptures like Vedas
and dharmashastras like Manusmriti; and secondly, in mentioning my
reasons for rejecting varna-vyavastha. In doing so I will concentrate
on the chaturvarnya (four-fold division of society) aspect of varna-
vyavastha.
We have already noted that the first reference to varna (class based
on birth or caste) is to be found in the Purusha-Sukta of the Rig
Veda . The reference to the four ashrams or stages of life, namely,
Brahmcharya, Garhastya, Vanprashta and Sanyas is to be found in the
Upanishads. These are, in their turn, related to the four purusarthas
or ends of life, namely, dharma (duty), artha (wealth), kama
(satisfaction of sensual desires) and moksha (liberation). Out of
these, the Upanishads attach maximum value to sanyas ashram and moksha
purusartha, which is regarded as the highest end of life. [13]
The system of varnashram dharma is upheld by popular Hindu scriptures
like Ramayana, Mahabharata and Bhagvat-Gita. In Ramayana, for example,
Ram kills Shambuka simply because he was performing tapasya (ascetic
exercises) which he was not supposed to do as he was a Shudra by
birth. [14]
Similarly, in Mahabharata, Dronacharya refuses to teach archery to
Eklavya, because he was not a Kshatriya by birth. When Eklavya,
treating Drona as his notional guru, learns archery on his own, Drona
makes him cut his right thumb as gurudakshina (gift for the teacher)
so that he may not become a better archer than his favorite Kshatriya
student Arjuna!
The much-glorified Bhagvat-Gita, too, favors varna-vyavastha.[15] When
Arjuna refuses to fight, one of his main worries was that the war
would lead to the birth of varna-sankaras or offspring from
intermixing of different varnas and the consequent "downfall" of the
family. [16] On the other hand, Krishna tries to motivate Arjuna to
fight by saying that it was his varna-dharma (caste-duty) to do so
because he was a Kshatriya. In fact, Krishna goes to the extent of
claiming that the four varnas were created by him only. [17] Thus,
Arjuna's main problem was being born a Kshatriya. Had he been a
Brahmin or a Vaishya or a Shudra by birth, he would have been spared
the trouble of fighting a destructive war. Even the much-applauded
doctrine of niskama karma is nothing but an exhortation to faithfully
perform one's varnashram dharma in a disinterested manner. [18]
The celebrated orthodox Hindu theologian Shankar, too, was a supporter
of varna-vyavastha. According to him, Shudras are not entitled to
philosophical knowledge. [19] However, the most elaborate exposition
of varnashram dharma is to be found in Manusmriti, an important
dharmashastra of Hindus. Let us turn to it in order to have a close
look at the varna-vyavastha.
Manusmriti
In the very first chapter of Manusmriti, it is clearly stated that
Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras were created by Brahma
(creator of this world) from his mouth, hands, thighs and feet
respectively. [20]
Manu claims that the same Brahma, who created this world, also created
Manusmriti and taught it to him. [21]
The duties of the different varnas are also mentioned in the
Manusmriti. The Brahmins were created for teaching, studying,
performing yajnas (ceremonial sacrifices), getting yajnas performed,
giving and accepting dan (gifts).[22] The Kshatriyas were created for
protecting the citizens, giving gifts, getting yajnas performed and
studying. [23] The Vaishyas were created for protecting animals,
giving gifts, getting yajnas performed, studying, trading, lending
money on interest and doing agricultural work. [24] The Shudras were
created by Brahma for serving Brahmins and the other two varnas
without being critical of them. [25]
It is interesting to note that studying, getting yajnas performed and
giving gifts or charity are common duties of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and
Vaishyas; whereas teaching, accepting gifts and performing yajnas are
reserved exclusively for Brahmins. The Shudras, of course, are denied
the rights to study, getting yajnas performed by Brahmins or even
giving gifts to them.
Manusmriti further states that having originated from the mouth of
Brahma, being elder and being the repository of the Vedas; Brahmins
are the masters of the entire universe. [26] Besides, Brahmins alone
act as a sort of post office for transmitting food to the gods and the
dead, that is to say, the gods and the dead eat food through the
mouths of Brahmins (apparently because they do not have mouths of
their own). Therefore, no one can be superior to Brahmins.[27] All
others are said to enjoy everything owing to the Brahmins' mercy.[28]
The Manusmriti clearly states that Brahmins alone are entitled to
teach this dharmashastra and none else. [29]
Manusmriti refers to the Vedas, which are to be regarded as the main
valid source of knowledge about dharma, as shruti and to
dharmashastras as smriti. No one is to argue critically about them
because religion has originated from them. [30] Any nastika (non-
believer) or critic of the Vedas, who "insults" them on the basis of
logic, is worthy of being socially boycotted by "noble" persons. [31]
In short, the main features of chaturvarnya as elaborated in the
Manusmriti are as follows:
1. Division of Hindu society into four varnas on the basis of birth.
Out of these only the first three, namely , Brahmins , Kshatriya and
Vaishya, who are collectively known as dwija (twice-born) are entitled
to upanayan and the study of the Vedas. Shudras as well as women of
dwija varnas are denied the right to study.
2. Assigning different duties and occupations for different varnas.
This is to be enforced strictly by the king. [32] According to
Manusmriti, if a person of lower caste adopts the occupation of a
higher caste, the king ought to deprive him of all his property and
expel him from his kingdom. [33]
3. Treating Brahmins as superior and other varnas, namely, Kshatriya,
Vaishya and Shudra as inferior to him in descending order with the
Shudra occupying the bottom of the hierarchy. A Brahmin is to be
treated as god and respected even if he is ignorant. Even a hundred-
year old Kshatriya is to treat a ten year old Brahmin as his father.
[34] Brahmin alone is entitled to teach. If a Shudra dares to give
moral lessons to a Brahmin, the king is to get him punished by pouring
hot oil in his ear and mouth. [35] Similarly, if a Shudra occupies the
same seat as a Brahmin, he is to be punished by branding his waist
(with hot rod) or getting his buttocks cut! [36]
4. Treating women as unequal. Women, that is, even women belonging to
Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya varna are not entitled to upanayan and
the study of the Vedas. For them, marriage is equivalent to upanayan
and service of their husbands is equivalent to the study of the Vedas
in the gurukul.[37] Even if the husband is morally degraded, engaged
in an affair with another woman and is devoid of knowledge and other
qualities, the wife must treat him like a god. [38] A widower is
allowed to remarry but a widow is not. [39] Besides, women are not
considered fit for being free and independent. They are to be
protected in their childhood by father, in youth by husband and in old
age by son. [40] They should never be allowed by their guardians to
act independently. [41] A woman must never do anything even inside her
home without the consent of her father, husband and son respectively.
[42] She must remain in control of her father in childhood, of husband
in youth and of son after the death of her husband. [43]
5. Treating different varnas as unequal for legal purposes. The Hindu
law as codified by Manu is based on the principle of inequality. The
punishment for a particular crime is not same for all varnas. In fact,
the punishment varies depending on the varna of the victim as well as
the varna of the person committing the crime. For the same crime, the
Brahmin is to be given a mild punishment, whereas the Shudra is to
given the harshest punishment of all. Similarly, if the victim of a
crime is a Shudra, the punishment is mild, and the punishment is harsh
in case the victim is a Brahmin. For example, if a Brahmin is awarded
death sentence, it is sufficient to shave his head, but Kshatriya,
Vaishya and Shudra are to actually die. [44] If a Kshatriya, a
Vaishya, or a Shudra repeatedly gives false evidence in the court, he
is to be punished and expelled from the kingdom, whereas the Brahmin
is not to be punished, he is to be only expelled. [45] If a person has
sexual intercourse with a consenting women of his own varna, he is not
to be punished. [46] But if a person of lower varna has sexual
intercourse with a woman of higher varna, with or without her consent,
he is to be killed. [47] If a Brahmin forces a dwija to work for him,
he is to be punished. [48] But if a Brahmin forces a Shudra to work
for him, whether by making or not making payments to him, he is not to
be punished, because Shudras have been created only for serving
Brahmins.[49] If a Brahmin abuses a Shudra, he is to be fined mildly,
[50] but if a Shudra abuses a Brahmin, he is to be killed. [51] On the
other hand, even if a Brahmin kills a Shudra, he is merely to perform
penance by killing a cat, frog, owl or crow, etc. [52] Thus a Shudra
is to be killed for abusing a Brahmin, whereas a Brahmin is to be let
off lightly even if he kills a Shudra. Such is the unequal justice of
Manusmriti.
In fact, this system of graded inequality seems to be the very essence
of the varna-vyavastha. Whether it is the choice of names, [53] or the
manner of greeting, [54] or the mode of entertaining guests, [55] or
the method of administering oath in the court, [56] or the process of
taking out the funeral procession, [57] at each and every step in
life, from birth to death, this system of graded inequality is to be
applied and observed. Manu does not even spare the rates of interest
on loan. For borrowing the same amount, Kshatriya has to pay more as
interest than Brahmin, Vaishya more than Kshatriya and the poor Shudra
has to pay the maximum amount as interest! [58]
6. Prohibiting inter-marriage between different varnas. According to
Manusmriti, a dwija ought to marry a woman of his own varna.[59] A
woman of the same varna is considered best for the first marriage.
However, a dwija may take a woman of inferior varna as his second wife
if he is overcome by sexual passion. [60] But Manu strongly
disapproves of Brahmins and Kshatriyas taking a Shudra woman even as
their second wife. They become Shudra if they do so. [61]
7. Supporting untouchability is also a part of the scheme of social
stratification outlined in the Manusmriti. Manu clearly mentions that
Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya, collectively known as dwija and the
Shudras are the four varnas. There is no fifth varna.[62] He explains
the origin of other castes by saying that they are varna-sankara
castes, that is to say, castes originating due to the intermixture of
different varnas, both in anuloma (upper varna male and lower varna
female) and pratiloma (lower varna male and upper varna female)
manner. [63] For example, Nishad caste is said to have originated from
anuloma relationship between Brahmin male and Shudra female,[64]
whereas C handala caste is said to be owing its origin to pratiloma
relationship between Shudra male and Brahmin female. [65]
Manu seems to be disapproving of pratiloma relationship more than the
anuloma, because he describes C handalas as the lowest of the low
castes. [66]
Let us see what Manusmriti, has to say about the C handala. The
Chandala, says Manusmriti, must not ever reside inside the village.
While doing their work, they must reside outside the village, at
cremation ground, on mountains or in groves. They are not entitled to
keep cows or horses, etc., as pet animals. They may keep dogs and
donkeys. They are to wear shrouds. They are to eat in broken utensils.
They are to use ornaments of iron, not of gold. They must keep moving
from one place to another, not residing at the same place for a long
duration. [67] They must not move around in villages and cities in
night hours. They may enter the villages and cities in daytime, with
king's permission, wearing special symbols (to enable identification),
and take away unclaimed dead bodies. [68]
Moreover, how is the "religious" person to deal with the Chandala? He
must not have any social intercourse (marriage, interdining, etc.)
with them. He must not talk to or even see them! [69] He may ask
servants (apparently Shudras) to give them food in broken utensils.
[70]
8. Granting divine and religious sanction to varna-vyavastha. Manu
gives divine and religious sanction to the varna-vyavastha by claiming
divine origin for the varnas as well as for the Manusmriti and
demanding unquestioning obedience of it.
So, that completes my exposition of the varna-vyavastha. I want to
emphasize in particular that my exposition does not contain any
exaggeration at all. The reader may check each and every statement by
comparing with the original Manusmriti in order to satisfy himself or
herself. I cannot help if the system is so unjust and so out of tune
with out existing values that even an objective exposition reads like
a severe condemnation. Nevertheless, I will now turn to my reasons for
rejecting varna-vyavastha: I reject varna-vyavastha because it is
irrational, unjust and undemocratic, being opposed to the democratic
and human values of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Criticism of varna-vyavastha
The varna-vyavastha is opposed to the value of liberty as it denies
the freedom to choose one's occupation and marriage partner to one and
all. Everyone must join the occupation of his varna and must marry
within his varna. Similarly, it denies the freedom to study to the
Shudras and woman in particular. Even the dwija must study the Vedas
before he studies anything else. Otherwise, he becomes a Shudra.[71]
(Incidentally, according to Manusmriti, there are several ways by
which a Brahmin or dwija may become a Shudra but there is no way by
which a Shudra may become a Brahmin. A Shudra must always remain a
Shudra.)[72]
What is worse, the Chandala is even denied the freedom to reside at a
place of his choice or to wear clothes and ornaments of his choice. He
is not even free to keep pet animals of his choice.
The conflict between varna-vyavastha and the value of equality is more
than obvious. As I mentioned earlier, the system of graded inequality
seems to be the very essence of varna-vyavastha. It denies equal
respect to all in society. It denies equality before law. It denies
equal access to marriage partners. It denies equal access to jobs. The
occupation of teachers and priests, for example, is reserved
exclusively for Brahmins. Finally, it also denies equal access to
education and knowledge.
A Brahmin, according to Manu, must not teach the Shudra and woman even
if he dies with his knowledge without imparting it to anybody. [73] On
the other hand, if anyone studies the Vedas on his own he or she will
go straight to hell. [74] In other words, cent percent reservations
for dwija males in the sphere of education.
The varna-vyavastha is most unfair to the Shudras and the
untouchables. They are denied respect, knowledge, power and wealth.
They are denied access to occupations considered respectable, just as
they are denied access to men and women of upper varnas for marriage.
The Shudras are virtually reduced to being slaves of the Brahmins in
particular and the dwijas in general, whereas the untouchables are
regarded as outcast -- beyond the pale of the society. The women are
generally treated as sexual objects and as unfit for being independent
and free.
As far as fraternity is considered, we must not expect it to exist in
a society, which is so unequal and unjust. A Shudra's waist is to be
branded or his buttocks are to be cut only because he occupies the
same seat as the Brahmin. The "religious" are not to talk or even look
at a Chandala. Inter-marriage is prohibited. Manu seems to be most
eager to prevent inter-mixing of the varnas. Thus, the Hindu social
order is based on the isolation and exclusiveness of the varnas.
The Manusmriti not only outlines a totally undemocratic and unjust
social system but also gives divine, religious sanction to this man-
made social institution of chaturvarnya. Some Hindus, including
apparently learned "thinkers" and writers, smugly wax eloquent about
Hinduism being the most tolerant and liberal religion of the world.
Is there any other religion, which sanctions slavery and
untouchability? Is there any other religion in which only persons born
in a particular caste ( Brahmin) are entitled to become priests?
Slavery is not peculiar to India or to Hinduism, but carrying it to
the extremes of untouchability, and granting it divine and religious
sanction is peculiar to Hinduism.
Similarly, some Hindus may be tolerant, just as some of them are
intolerant, but Hinduism or Hindu religion is not tolerant at all,
either socially or intellectually. Manusmriti, for example, clearly
says that anybody who argues critically and logically about
dharmashastras ought to be ostracized. [75] Non-believers, including
freethinkers, rationalists and Buddhists, are not to be entertained
respectfully as guests; though, mercifully, they may be given food.
[76] The families of non-believers are destroyed sooner than later
according to Manu. [77] A state with a large number of Shudras and
nastikas soon meets its destruction. [78] Manusmriti is full of
abusive epithets for freethinkers and non-believers. The unorthodox
( nastikas) are sometimes equated with the Shudras, sometimes with the
Chandalas, sometimes with thieves and sometimes with lunatics! [79]
Such is the generosity of Hindu dharma.
Apologies for varna-vyavastha
Let me now consider what the apologists of varna-vyavastha have to say
in its defense.
A standard defense of varna-vyavastha is to say that it is a system of
division of labor. It is easy to grant that division of labor is
essential for any complex society, but it is equally easy to see that
varna-vyavastha is not a system of division of labor based on aptitude
and capability. It is a system of division of labor based on birth .
Besides, it has other associated features such as feeling of
superiority and inferiority, inequality before law, denial of equal
access to knowledge and prohibition against inter-marriage.
What have these features to do with the division of labor?
Division of labor is found in all societies, but varna-vyavastha is
not. Thus, trying to justify varna-vyavastha as division of labor is a
futile exercise.
Another standard defense of the varna-vyavastha is to say that the
system was originally based on aptitude and capability. Whether it was
actually ever so is a subject for historical research. Most probably,
the racial theory of the origin of castes is true. However, even if we
grant for the sake of argument that the varna-vyavastha was originally
based on aptitude and capability, how does it help? We cannot say that
because the system was originally, some time in remote past, based on
aptitude and capability; therefore we ought to gladly suffer the
present system based on birth. It hardly makes any sense at all!
In any case, Manusmriti was most probably written between200 BC and
200 AD [80] and the system as outlined in it is totally based on
birth. Gautam Buddha, who lived in sixth century BC, challenged the
infallibility of the Vedas as well as the varna-vyavastha. There are
several passages in Tripitaka, mainly in Digha Nikaya and Majhima
Nikaya which are "directed against the claims of the Brahmans to be of
different origin from the rest of humanity, born from the mouth of
Brahma, having a hereditary prerogative to teach, guide and
spiritually govern the rest of the society." [81] In Majhima Nikaya
Buddha is quoted as refuting varna-vyavastha on several occasions.
According to Buddha, it is unreasonable to decide one's place and
functions in society on the basis of one's birth in a caste. Buddha is
also quoted as insisting that in the eyes of the law all persons ought
to be treated as equal, irrespective of the caste or varna in which he
or she is born. [82] Thus, it is obvious that even if the system of
varna-vyavastha ever existed in its ideal form -- which is doubtful --
it had already degenerated by the time of Buddha, that is, about 2500
years back.
The most blatant defense of varna-vyavastha, however, is to say that
human beings are born unequal, and, therefore, it is natural and
normal for children to join the occupation of their fathers.
Surprisingly and sadly, no less a person than Gandhi defended varna-
vyavastha in a similar manner.
To quote Gandhi: "I believe that every man is born in the world with
certain natural tendencies. Every person is born with certain definite
limitations which he cannot overcome. From a careful observation of
those limitations the law of varna was deduced. It establishes certain
spheres of action for certain people with certain tendencies. This
avoided all unworthy competition. Whilst recognizing limitations, the
law of varna admitted of no distinction of high and low; on the one
hand it guaranteed to each the fruits of his labors and on the other
it prevented him from pressing upon his neighbor. This great law has
been degraded and fallen into disrepute. But my conviction is that an
ideal social order will only be evolved when the implications of this
law are fully understood and given effect to". [83]
Again, "I regard Varnashrama as a healthy division of work based on
birth. The present ideas of caste are a perversion of the original.
There is no question with me of superiority or inferiority. It is
purely a question of duty. I have indeed stated that varna is based on
birth. But I have also said that it is possible for a shudra, for
instance, to become a vaishya. But in order to perform the duty of
vaishya he does not need the label of a vaishya. He who performs the
duty of a brahman will easily become one in the next
incarnation." [84]
So, varna-vyavastha, according to Gandhi, is a "healthy division of
work based on birth", which takes into account the "natural
tendencies" of human beings and avoids "unworthy competition."
This apparently plausible defense of varna-vyavastha is, in fact, most
unscientific. It is a well-known and scientifically verified fact that
acquired characteristics are not inherited biologically, only genetic
qualities are transmitted from one generation to another. For
instance, carpentry is an acquired characteristic; just as knowledge
of philosophy is an acquired quality. Neither a carpenter's son or
daughter is born with the knowledge of carpentry, nor is a
philosopher's daughter or son born with the knowledge of philosophy.
These are acquired characteristics and, therefore, they cannot be
inherited biologically. If sometimes, though not always, a carpenter's
son becomes a good carpenter or a philosopher's daughter acquires a
good knowledge of philosophy, without being formally initiated into
these disciplines, it is not because they are born with the required
knowledge, but only because of the favorable environment at home,
which enables them to acquire these characteristics. The result could
be different if their places were to be interchanged.
One may say that though the knowledge of carpentry of philosophy in
not inherited biologically, the mental qualities enabling one to
acquire the requisite knowledge is inherited. Some physical and mental
qualities are, no doubt, inherited but this does not mean that parents
and their children are always identical in physical or mental
qualities. It is a well known fact -- anybody can verify this by
careful observation -- that due to different permutations and
combinations of chromosomes and genes offspring of same parents are
not always identical to one another or to their parents. More often
than not, they are different. For instance, one son or daughter of
same parents may be tall and another short. The colors of skin, hair
and eyes may differ likewise. What is true of physical characteristics
is equally true of mental qualities. Thus, a child may or may not have
the mental characteristics, which his father has.
Therefore, it is totally unscientific to forcefully restrict children
to the occupations of their forefathers.
It is true that all human beings are not equal in the sense of being
identical in physical or mental qualities. But it does not follow from
this that they ought to be denied equal opportunity to join a vocation
of their choice or that they ought to be denied equality before law or
equal respect as human beings in the society.
As for "unworthy" competition, how do we know that the competition is
unworthy unless all are, to begin with, given equal opportunity? Take
the example of Gandhi himself. He was a bania by caste. Yet, in spite
of some serious aberrations such as supporting varna-vyavastha based
on birth and linking politics with religion, he performed fairly well
in the role of a national leader. It would have been a great loss for
the nation if in the name of avoiding "unworthy" competition in
politics, Gandhi would have been confined to running a grocery shop.
Similarly, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar was born in an "untouchable" caste, but
he played an important role in the drafting of the democratic
constitution of independent India. He also taught in a college for
some time. To use the terminology of varna-vyavastha, he ably
performed the work of a Brahmin.
Is it possible to imagine how many Ambedkars we may have lost by now
owing to the restrictive varna-vyavastha?
As we have noted earlier, varna-vyavastha is a closed system of social
stratification without any scope for upward social mobility. To quote
M. Haralambos, author of a textbook on sociology, "A person belongs to
his parents jati and automatically follows the occupation of the jati
into which he was born. Thus no matter what the biologically based
aptitude and capacities of an untouchable, there is no way he can
become a Brahmin. Unless it is assumed that superior genes are
permanently located in the Brahmin caste, and there is no evidence
that this is the case, then there is probably no relationship between
genetically based and socially created inequality in traditional Hindu
society." [85]
Returning to Gandhi, though Gandhi was opposed to untouchability and
caste, he did not carry his opposition to its logical conclusion.
Inconsistently enough, he continued to support the varna-vyavastha
based on birth. At one stage, he even supported restrictions on
interdining and intermarriage. As he wrote in Young India in 1921,
"Hinduism does most emphatically discourage interdining and
intermarriage between divisions... It is no part of a Hindu's duty to
dine with his son. And by restricting his choice of bride to a
particular group, he exercises rare self-restraint. Prohibition
against intermarriages and interdining is essential for the rapid
evolution of the soul. "[86] (emphasis mine)
Later Gandhi moved away from these orthodox ideas, and started
supporting intercaste marriages. Finally in 1946, he refused to
solemnize any marriage at Sevagram Ashram unless one of the parties
was an untouchable. [87] May be he would also have given up varna-
vyavastha if he had lived longer. That, however, is in the realm of
imagination, the fact is that Gandhi supported varna-vyavastha. It is
worth noting that he invented his own conception of varna-vyavastha,
which, according to him, had nothing to do with the feeling of
superiority and inferiority or with prohibition against intermarriage.
We find here in Gandhi a quaint mixture of conservatism and
reformism.
I would like to dispose of one last objection before concluding this
section. One may say that the Hindu law at present is quite different
from what Manu desired, and presently Hindus in general do not follow
Manu in totality. This is true. The Hindu law at present, for
instance, allows inter-caste marriage and prohibits bigamy and child
marriage. It permits divorce. It also allows widow remarriage and
grants equal rights to daughters in father's property. Nevertheless,
there seems to be a gap between the progressive Hindu law and the
conservative social practices of the Hindus. A majority of Hindu
marriages are still within the caste and very few Hindu women actually
claim or get a share in father's property.
The Indian constitution has rightly made special provisions, such as
reservations in services for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and
other socially and educationally backward classes, to enable them to
enter occupations and positions of power, which had been traditionally
denied to them. No doubt, some upper caste liberal Hindus, too,
support the policy of reservation. But, by and large, the Hindu upper
castes are far from fully reconciled to this progressive step as is
evident from violent and aggressive anti-reservation agitation
spearheaded by upper caste students from time to time. This kind of
reactionary agitation aimed at preserving the present dominance of
upper castes in education and the services enjoys considerable support
and sympathy in the upper caste dominated media as well as the
academia.
On the whole, the Hindu society is yet to fully exorcise the ghost of
Manu. Caste based on birth and untouchability still exist in the Hindu
society, in spite of the fact that untouchability has been abolished
by the Indian constitution. The distribution of education, power and
wealth continues to be uneven in the Hindu society, with the dwijas
being on the top and the Shudras and untouchables being at the bottom.
Teaching is no more an exclusive preserve of Brahmins, but the
occupation of Hindu priests is still fully reserved for Brahmins,
though this fact does not arouse the ire of our fervent anti-
reservationists.
Moksha, Karmavada and Avatarvada
Moksha is traditionally regarded as the highest end of life in Hindu
religion. The "endless cycle of birth and death" is considered a
bondage from which one must attain liberation, that is moksha or
mukti.
This whole concept of bondage and liberation is based on the unproved
assumption of life after death, and the existence of soul ( atma)
which continues to exist apart from the body even after death. In the
famous words of Gita, the soul changes bodies just as human beings
change clothes. [88]
Now, there are no good reasons for believing in the existence of soul
or life after death or rebirth. These beliefs are not at all supported
by incontrovertible scientific evidence. According to S.N. Dasgupta,
"there has seldom been before or after Buddha any serious attempt to
prove or disprove the doctrine of rebirth. The attempts to prove the
doctrine of rebirth in the Hindu philosophical works such as Nyaya,
etc. are slight and inadequate." [89]
However, even before Buddha, Lokayat had disproved the existence of
soul, life after death, rebirth, heaven and hell on an empirical
basis, as these things are never perceived. [90]
Thus, in absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is reasonable to
believe that each one of us has got one and only one life . Once a
person is dead, he is dead for ever. Never to be reborn. Mind,
consciousness, memory and life cannot outlast the destruction of brain
and body. This is the harsh truth; howsoever we may dislike it.
The belief in soul seems to have originated from primitive animism.
[91] If this belief continues to persist, in spite of total lack of
evidence in its support, it is only because of human beings' inability
to come to terms with, or to squarely face, the reality of death. One
likes to believe that one's near and dear ones, who are dead and
finished forever, actually continue to live in some other imaginary
world, and that they will also be reborn one day. One draws comfort
from the thought that one will not die even after death, and continue
to live in some other form. It is paradoxical that, first, the fear of
death and love of life makes one readily accept the belief in the
immortality and rebirth of soul without adequate evidence, and, then,
getting rid of this alleged cycle of birth and death itself becomes
the topmost religious aim! [92]
The problem of getting "released" from the alleged cycle of birth and
death is a pseudo-problem (in the sense that one is trying to get rid
of something which simply does not exist) and moksha is an imaginary
ideal which has nothing to do with the reality. Instead of running
after the imaginary ideal of moksha, it is far better to concentrate
on improving and living well this one and only life, which we have.
Mimamsa, which is an orthodox Hindu school of thought, considers
attainment of heaven ( swarga), instead of moksha, as the highest end
of life. References to heaven and hell are also to be found in the
Manusmriti. The belief in heaven is fairly widespread at popular
level. However, the ideal of the attainment of heaven, too, is based
on unproved assumptions, like life after death and the existence of
heaven, and, therefore, it cannot be accepted.
Another related doctrine is the Hindu belief in karmavada or the so-
called law of karma. According to this doctrine, every human being
gets the fruits of his actions either in the present or in some future
life. Whatever a human being is in his present life is the result of
his own actions in the past life or lives.
This, again, is a totally unverified and unverifiable doctrine based
on the assumption of the "cycle of birth and death". It is only a
convenient tool for explaining away the perceived inequality in human
society. The idea of karma is found in Buddhism and Jainism as well.
However, these religions do not support varna-vyavastha. But in
Hinduism the doctrine of karma, along with the idea of god, has been
used for providing ideological support to the unjust varna-vyavastha
and for making it appear just and fair. In Hinduism the so-called law
of karma merely serves the purpose of legitimizing the unjust varna-
vyavastha by making the Shudras and the "untouchables" meekly accept
their degrading position as a "result of their own deeds" in imaginary
past lives, and by assuring them "better" birth in "next life" if they
faithfully perform their varna-dharma in their present lives. [93] In
this way, this doctrine prevents them from revolting against this man-
made undemocratic system, which has nothing to do with alleged past
and future lives.
Lastly, I come to the Hindu doctrine of avatarvada. According to this
doctrine, whenever religion is threatened in this world, god takes
birth as an avatar to put things back into order. Ram and Krishna, for
example, are popularly regarded as avatars by the Hindus.
Belief in avatarvada, too, is logically unjustifiable and merely makes
one run away from one's own responsibilities. Instead of making
efforts to improve their own condition, those who believe in
avatarvada keep waiting for an avatar to take birth. Since god does
not exist, there is no question of his being born on this earth as an
avatar. (Let me add here that I also do not believe in the truth of
statements like "Jesus is the son of god" or "Mohammed is the
messenger of god".)
Not only I do not regard Ram or Krishna (or anyone else) as an avatar
of god, I also do not regard them as ideal personalities. Ram, as
mentioned earlier, was on upholder, of the varna-vyavastha. His cruel
behavior with Sita, after fighting a destructive war with Ravana to
get her released, is too well known to need recapitulation. [94]
Krishna, on the other hand, is portrayed in the Mahabharata as the
teacher of Bhagvat Gita , a book which expounds untrue and harmful
doctrines like the belief in god and immortal soul, avatarvada,
karmavada, varnashram dharma and the doctrine of moksha.
In Mahabharata Krishna adopts and advocates adoption of unfair means
like lying and deception for achieving one's ends. Obviously, he did
not believe in the doctrine of purity of ends and means. There are
several flaws in the character of Krishna as portrayed in the
Mahabharata, Bhagvat and Harivamsa. These have been ably enumerated by
Dr. Ambedkar in his The Riddle of Ram and Krishna . I refer the
interested reader to this work for a fuller treatment of this subject.
[95]
Conclusion
To conclude, I categorically reject major Hindu religious beliefs
including the doctrine of the infallibility of the Vedas, varnashram
dharma , moksha, karmavada, and avatarvada. I am not an admirer of Ram
and Krishna, and I also do not believe in idol worship or the Hindu
taboo of not eating beef. I support logical and scientific thinking;
and a secular, rational morality based on human values of liberty,
equality and fraternity. Therefore, I am not a Hindu by conviction,
though I am a Hindu by birth.
Endnotes
[1] S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (Bombay: Blackie & Son
(India) Ltd., 1979), p. 12.
[2] Ibid., p. 14.
[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17.
[4] M.K.Gandhi, "Aspects of Hinduism" in Hindu Dharma (New Delhi:
Orient Paperbacks, 1978), p. 9.
[5] Ninian Smart, "Hinduism" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. in
chief, Paul Edwards) Vol. IV (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.
& The Free Press, 1972), p.1.
[6] S.N.Dasgupta , A History of Indian Philosophy , Vol. 1 (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1975), pp. 67-68.
[7] Chatterjee and Datta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy .
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] S.N.Dasgupta, Op. Cit., p. 394.
[11] I have discussed the question of the existence of god in my small
Hindi book Kya Ishwar Mar Chuka Hai? (Patna: Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj,
1985, 1995). See, Is God Dead? (An introduction to Kya ishwar mar
chuka hai? ) [Patna: Buddhiwadi Foundation, 1998]
[12] M.K.Gandhi, "Aspects of Hinduism" in Hindu Dharma , pp. 9-10.
[13] A.L.B., "History of Hinduism" in The New Encyclopaedia
Britannica , Vol. 8 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1981),
pp. 910-11.
[14] B.R. Ambedkar , Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches,
Vol. 4, Riddles in Hinduism (Bombay: Education Department, Government
of Maharashtra, 1987), p. 332.
[15] Y.Masih, The Hindu Religious Thought (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1983), pp. 192-93.
[16] Bhagvad-Gita I: 40,41, 42,43.
[17] B.G. IV: 13.15.
[18] Y.Masih, Op.Cit., p.208, Also see, pp. 224-25.
[19] V.P.Verma, Modern Indian Political Thought (Agra: Lakshmi Narain
Agarwal, 1991), pp. 50-51.
[20] Manusmriti (MS) I: 31.
[21] MS I:58.
[22] MS I:88.
[23] MS I:89.
[24] MS I: 90.
[25] MS I: 91.
[26] MS I: 93, Also see, X: 3.
[27] MS I: 95.
[28] MS I: 101.
[29] MS I: 103.
[30] MS II: 10,13.
[31] MS II: 11.
[32] MS VIII: 410.
[33] MS X: 96. Also see, Kautilya, Arthshastra I: 3, Quoted by J.N.
Farquhar in An Outline of the Religious Literature of India ( Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), p. 44.
[34] MS II: 135.
[35] MS VIII: 272.
[36] MS VIII: 281.
[37] MS II: 67.
[38] MS V: 154.
[39] MS V: 168,157.
[40] MS IX: 3.
[41] MS IX: 2.
[42] MS V: 147.
[43] MS V: 148.
[44] MS VIII: 379.
[45] MS VIII: 123.
[46] MS VIII: 364.
[47] MS VIII: 366.
[48] MS VIII: 412.
[49] MS VIII: 413.
[50] MS VIII: 268.
[51] MS VIII: 267.
[52] MS XI: 131.
[53] MS II: 31,32.
[54] MS II: 127.
[55] MS III: 111,112.
[56] MS VIII: 88.
[57] MS V: 92.
[58] MS VIII: 142.
[59] MS III: 4.
[60] MS III: 12.
[61] MS III: 14,15,16,17,18,19.
[62] MS X: 4.
[63] MS X: 25.
[64] MS X: 8.
[65] MS X: 12.
[66] Ibid.
[67] MS X: 50,51,52.
[68] MS X: 54,55.
[69] MS X: 53.
[70] MS X: 54.
[71] MS II: 168.
[72] MS VIII: 414.
[73] MS II: 113; X: 1.
[74] MS II: 116.
[75] MS II: 11.
[76] MS IV: 30.
[77] MS III: 65.
[78] MS VIII: 22.
[79] MS III:150, 161; IX: 225. From a humanist point of view, there is
nothing wrong in being born as a Shudra or a Chandala, but in the
context of the Manusmriti, these are abusive epithets.
[80] Manusmriti (Varanasi: Chaukhambha Sanskrit Sansthan, 1982), pp.
10-11.
[81]A.K.Warder, Indian Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980),p.
163.
[82] Y.Masih, The Hindu Religious Thought, pp. 336-37.
[83] Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi ( Ahmedabad: Navajivan
Publishing House, 1972), p. 265.
[84] Ibid., p. 263.
[85] M.Haralambos, Sociology Themes and Perspectives (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1980) pp. 27-28.
[86] N.K.Bose, Op.Cit., p. 266.
[87] Louis Fischer, Gandhi (New York: New American Library, 1954), pp.
111-12, Also see, N.K.Bose, Op.Cit., p. 267.
[88] B.G. II: 20-25.
[89] S.N. Dasgutpa, A History of Indian Philosophy , Vol. I, p. 87.
[90] Chatterjee and Datta. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy .
[91] See M.N.Roy, "The Transmigration of Soul" in India's Message
( Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1982), pp. 4-6.
[92] Probably "the cycle of life and death" is considered "bondage"
because it will presumably lead to death again and again. So,
primarily the doctrine of liberation seems to be a reaction against
death.
[93] "Those whose conduct has been pleasing will quickly attain a
pleasing birth, the birth of a Brahman or a Kshatriya, or a Vaisya;
but those whose conduct has been abominable, will quickly attain
abominable birth, the birth of a dog, or a hog, or an Outcaste."
Brihadaranyaka, quoted by J.N. Farquhar, An Outline of the Religious
Literature of India , p. 34, Also see, S.N.Dasgupta, Op. Cit., p.
363.
[94] See, my "Why I do not want Ramrajya" in Why I am Not a Hindu &
Why I do not want Ramrajya (Patna: Bihar Rationalist Society, 1995).
[95] B.R. Ambedkar, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches ,
Vol. 4, Riddles in Hinduism.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ramendra_nath/hindu.html
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A Hindu Woman:
Answer to Why I Am Not a Hindu
Answer to Why I Am Not a Hindu
by A Hindu Woman
I
First, I wish to make clear that I have no quarrel with Mr. Ramendra
Nath for declaring that he is not a Hindu. He has listed four reasons
for declaring why he is not a Hindu:
"I do not believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all
that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avatars
and rebirth."
"I do not believe in the varnashram dharma or varna-vyavastha either
in the sense in which it is explained in Hindu dharma shastras like
Manusmriti or in the so-called Vedic sense."
"I do not believe in the Hindu taboo of not eating beef."
"I disbelieve in idol-worship."
As it happens, I am fully in agreement with the above statements. I do
not believe in the existence of any God or soul. Therefore the
question of scriptures as divine revelations, rebirth and avatars is
moot. I do not believe in the caste-system. I have eaten beef. Again,
since I do not believe in God the question of worshipping anything--
idols or otherwise--is moot. Nevertheless, I still call myself a
Hindu. However that is a completely separate matter.
Mr. Ramendra Nath has discussed in length why he rejects the Vedas as
infallible. Since I have no disagreement with him on these grounds, I
am skipping it.
He next attacks "varna-vyavastha or varnashram dharma." If it had been
a simple exposure of the evils of this system, again there would be no
problem. But what I essentially find troubling is that he does not
present a balanced appraisal. He rejects emphatically the story in the
Vedas that the Brahmins are created from God's mouth, the Kshatriyas
from his arms, Vaishyas from his thighs and Shudras from his feet--
plainly this story appeared later to account for a reality that was
already present. He dismisses evidence that originally it was nothing
more than a functional division which ultimately hardened into a rigid
system backed by the religious authority of the Brahmins and the
military might of Kshatriyas as something unimportant to the issue at
hand. After all, today the Hindu social system functions quite well in
the metropolises where the rules of purity and impurity regarding
caste are no longer important. Also when he discusses the evils from
which Hinduism has traditionally suffered, he ignores the good that is
in Hindu Dharma as well. In particular his criticisms against
Manusmriti or Manusamhita is one-sided. Above all he ignores the
entire picture to concentrate on certain negative aspects only. To put
it plainly, I think his account is biased.
II
Ramendra Nath charges that Ram kills Sambuka, a Shudra, because he was
performing tapasya or ascetic exercises which are the province of
Brahmins alone. Certainly the story is there. But what he does not
mention is that the story belongs to Uttarkanda (lit. "later
chapter"). Along with the story of Rama's adventure, every child is
also taught that this chapter was added much later and that Valmiki's
Ramayana ends with Rama's coronation. In Valmiki's Ramayana itself, we
have two very important stories: that of Guhak and Sabari. Guhak is a
Nishada king of Sringaverpur who is described as Rama's friend as dear
as life, with whom Rama stays while going to the forest
(Ayodhyakandya, chaps. 50-52). Shabari was a practitioner of
asceticism. Rama's first question on meeting her was, "Have you
conquered all that disrupts tapasya? Has your tapasya increased?";
from her hands Rama accepted food and her soul ascended to heaven
(Aranyakanda, 74). Nishadas are an 'uncivilized' forest-tribe who
include the Chandalas among them. Shabari is the feminine of shabar,
the hunter community. Manusmriti states that Nishadas are the
offspring of Brahmin male and Shudra female (an obvious afterthought)--
they are what we call today 'untouchable'. The shabars are designated
simply as 'mlechha,' completely outside Vedic/Hindu society, yet
Shabari performs perfect tapasya and goes to heaven blessed by the
avatar. The story has often been offered as proof that neither birth
nor gender is important in performing tapasya and going to heaven. The
apparent contradiction between Rama's behaviour towards them and
towards Sambuka need not puzzle anyone; the Sambuka story was clearly
added later to strengthen Brahmin hegemony. My question here is why
does Ramendra Nath ignore these points which are known to any ordinary
Hindu? The answer became clear when I looked at his citations. He was
simply quoting from another person's work rather than from the
Ramayana itself. Apparently he had not bothered to read the text he is
criticizing.
Next Ramendra Nath speaks of a certain episode in Mahabharata.
Certainly the story of Ekalavya is true. Because he was a Nishada,
Drona refused to teach him. The text explicitly states that being
nishada he was 'asprishya' (untouchable) and it is never allowable
that he should be put on a par with the general populace. Obviously
social stratification has taken place since Ramayana. When Ekalavya
learnt on his own, Drona made him cut off his finger. However,
Ramendra Nath places undue emphasis on the fact that Arjuna is his
Khastriya student. Drona asked for this terrible sacrifice because he
did not wish anyone to exceed his favourite Arjuna, who had promised
to give him whatever Drona desired materially. Caste here had nothing
to do with it.
More importantly, Ramendra Nath ignores those portions of this epic
which obviously belong to earlier stratas and which show a far more
humanitarian stance. The grandmother of both Kauravas and Pandavas (of
whom Arjuna is one) is only a fisherwoman. She had a liaison with a
Brahmin (which did not make the latter an outcaste) and gave birth to
an illegitimate son who became a sage himself and the writer of
Mahabharata. If she wants to marry into a respectable wealthy family,
to be a fisherwoman who ferries passengers on a boat and who has a
bastard child is definitely a handicap yet today even in developed
countries. Nevertheless, she marries a Kshatriya king, her sons become
kings and she is never reproached because of her sexual misconduct.
How could such miscegenation and its placid acceptance by the
population (which includes Brahmins) have been possible unless the
varnavyavastha in ancient times was very much a fluid system?
We also have the story of Dharmabyadh. A Brahmin had gained power to
work miracles by his penance and became arrogant because of this. When
a woman seems to ignore him, he becomes enraged. But the woman
demonstrates that merely by carrying out faithfully her duties as a
housewife she had gained even greater power; she tells him that only a
man who controls his sensual instincts, never hates another person,
thinks of all human beings as his own [kin], tells the truth always,
and never wanders towards unrighteousness--is acknowledged as a
Brahmin by the gods. He is then sent to a meat-seller known as
Dharmabyadh to learn what dharma is, as he is ignorant of it. The meat-
seller says, "I follow my ancestors' livelihood; I tend to the
elderly; I always speak the truth; I never show hatred for anyone; I
give to charity as far as I am capable; I never speak ill of anyone; I
eat the leavings of the gods, guests and servants [I eat after all
these have eaten]." It is these simple things that has elevated a meat-
seller above the powerful Brahmin (Vanaparva, 205-213).
Yuddhistira (the son of the God of Justice) is asked what is the cause
of being a Brahmin. He declares that neither birth nor learning makes
a Brahmin, that only proper conduct does. Even a Brahmin learned in
four Vedas cannot be considered as a Brahmin if his conduct is evil.
[However it must be noted that performing proper rituals is also
included in the passage as the mark of a Brahmin (Vanaparva, 312).] In
another place he is asked by a serpent who a true Brahmin is. He
answers, "The person in whom resides truth, charity, forgiveness,
courtesy, rejection of cruelty, austerity, is a Brahmin." The serpent
argues that the Vedas have given every varna their dharma or law.
"Therefore truth, charity, forgiveness, non-violence, rejection of
cruelty, and compassion based on Vedas is noticed even in Shudras. If
even in Shudras these symptoms of Brahamandharma appear, then Shudras
too can be Brahmins." Yuddhistira's answer is, "In many Shudras
symptoms of Brahmin appear, and among many of the twice-born, symptoms
of Shudras appear. Therefore it is not that to be born in a Shudra
family makes one a Shudra or that to be born in a Brahmin family makes
one a Brahmin. The persons in whom such behaviour [the qualities
mentioned above] ordained by Vedas appear are Brahmins and those in
whom they do not appear are Shudras" (Vanaparva, 180). From such
episodes it is obvious that the ideal was a high one and low castes
were honoured by society if they were virtuous. Critics would say that
the reality does not often match the ideal. True. But where is the
paradise on earth where there is no discrimination on the basis of
class, irrespective of the law? I do not see why varnavyastha should
be singled out with special virulence. It is simply that some
countries have made greater progress in doing away with systems like
feudalism (which was held to be reflection of cosmic hierarchy) and
slavery (backed by the story of Noah and his sons) while India is
starting to catch up.
Ramendra Nath argues that Gita too teaches every caste to do their
Dharma. Certainly if in these "enlightened" times a soldier like
Arjuna would refuse to fight on the battlefield when the war has
begun, the government would punish him and he would be called
"deserter" and "traitor." Again Shankar is pointed out as supporting
the caste-system. This is essentially true. But why does Mr. Ramendra
Nath slight the entire Bhakti and Tantric traditions in both North and
south India? Did not the practitioners of these traditions, many of
them Brahmins themselves, try to do away with caste? In such
movements, outcaste teachers and Brahmin students were common.
III
Next, Mr. Ramendra Nath--like many others--attacks Manusamhita. What
all these critics do is to imply that the entire book was written by
one man. Yet research has proved that many verses were added to the
main text throughout later ages and other verses left out or edited to
bring it in line with contemporary thought. (The interested reader can
look up the works of G. Buhler, P. V. Kane, and Max Muller.) The
result is that it is cris-crossed with contradictions.
Now let us take a close look at the book. Each of the verses he quotes
declaring the inferiority of Shudras and dominance of Brahmins, do
exist. Yet he also skips verses that directly contradict those verses.
"If a woman or lower (Shudra and younger) person performs goodly
ceremonies [holy or good works], then the Brahmachari must join them
with enthusiasm" (2:223). "The Shudra who devoid of jealousy engages
himself in honest work receives honour in this life and heaven in the
next" (10:128). (Of course another verse has been added immediately
after saying that Shudras cannot accumulate wealth because a rich
Shudra might despise Brahmins.) "A wife, jewels, knowledge, dharma
[religion/duty], rules of purity, good advice, vocational skills, can
be received by everyone from everyone else [irrespective of caste or
family]" (2:240). "A devout person can [I use 'can', but it is
actually in the imperative mood] accept even the best knowledge from
Shudras; accept ultimate truth from outcastes like chandalas; an
excellent wife even from low families" (2:238). Nothing can be more
amusing for a social historian than to see how Medhatithi, a Brahmin
commentator (c. A.D. 900) tries to explain away this verse. He argues
that "shubham [holy, best, pure] vidya [knowledge]" refers to logic,
magic formulas and singing and dancing. Similarly "param [ultimate,
best] dharma" is redefined as knowledge of local geography and
customs. Never mind that Mahabharata also defines--on the basis of
Manu--'param dharma' as knowledge of moksha/liberation which can be
acquired from anybody. Medhatiti's argument is that since low castes
are not eligible for religious knowledge they cannot teach anything.
Obviously the upper castes were anxiously trying to impose hegemony
over lower castes. Again, the verse stating that "he [the Brahmin] who
studies from a Shudra teacher or teaches a Shudra student" cannot
officiate in funeral ceremonies (3:156) offers evidence that Shudras
were teachers, a fact that the Brahmins wished to change. The rules
and later condemnations regarding marriages between castes offer proof
that for a long time it had not hardened.
Incidentally, may I ask how the terrible punishments inflicted on
Shudras can be reconciled with marriages between castes, both anuloma
and pratiloma, division of property among children born of such
'miscegenation,' rule that in distress a Brahmin might serve a Shudra
as a servant, or that a Brahmin householder must feed his Shudra
servants first, if he has any? There is a distinction between what
some men would like society to be and the social reality. For example,
Louis Dumont observed that power did not automatically reside in the
hands of any specific community. The caste that actually owned land in
a region enjoyed actual power; in many cases such power and property
lay in the hands of the Shudras. Though the Brahmins were the priests
they were actually dependant on the Shudras for their favour. Surely
Mr. Ramendra Nath knows that there are thousands of Brahmin families
whose only means of subsistence is being priests of low-caste
families?
Like Mr. Ramendra Nath, I too cannot help it that an objective reading
exposes how the caste system degenerated. He accuses that
untouchability and allowing men of one caste to become priests alone
is peculiar to Hinduism. But apartheid was peculiar to the rational
democratic white Christian races, as was the Holocaust peculiar to the
industrialized Nazi Germany. In neither case had it been claimed that
these two factors represent the sole face of Western culture. So once
again, why is varna-vavyastha presented as proof that Hinduism is
intrinsically evil, instead of realizing that untouchability is simply
the result of human love of power and not integral to Hinduism itself?
Now we come to women. Yes, Manusamhita does have these verses that
paint women as evil and deny them any freedom. But again we see how
other verses, remnants of earlier times, paint a different picture.
There is a whole portion called naribandana (Praise of women) where it
is insisted (3:55-62) that only a house where women are respected and
made happy is favoured by the gods and that--where women are treated
badly--all worship and ceremonies are in vain. There are verses such
as, "Mother is a thousand times holier [can also be read as worthy of
obedience] than the father" (2:145). "It is better that a daughter
should live at home till death rather than be given to an unworthy
husband; After menstruation, a girl should wait for three years and
then choose her own husband; If a girl at proper time should select a
husband herself, then she is not to be blamed" (9:89-91). "Any
relative [including a husband] who uses stridhan [lit. property of
woman which is both liquid cash and land, here a wife's], vehicles and
animals given for the wife to ride or a wife's clothes [and ornaments]
for himself, is a sinner who falls [into hell]" (3:52). I can give
other verses as examples.
Again Mr. Ramendra Nath charges that a widow cannot marry. Nothing
arouses my ire more than this statement. An illiterate villager might
be forgiven for believing this since this is the reality in many
places, but an educated Hindu would know better. These verses, of a
later origin, hold out inducements to widows not to remarry--such a
course would hardly have been necessary if widows never remarried.
"The woman who abandoned by her husband or left a widow marries of her
free will another man, is punurbhu and the son of such a union is
called pounorbhava"; "If a wife who is still a virgin, or a wife who
has left her husband to consort with another man returns to her
husband's home, then [another] ceremony of marriage can take
place" (9:195-196). Insistence in numerous verses that a Brahmin who
is a second husband or son of a woman's second marriage should not be
allowed to perform religious ceremonies merely prove that remarriages
were frequent. "While the mother is alive, if there is a dispute
between the son of the [first] husband and between a pournorbhava or a
golok (bastard born after the husband's death) regarding property,
then each son will receive the property that belongs to his biological
father" (9:191). "If the husband goes to foreign lands for holy
purposes, the wife will wait for 8 years; if he goes to study or earn
fame she will wait for 6 years; if he goes for pleasure then she will
wait for three years--after that she will marry again [alternative
explanation, she will go away somewhere else to support herself" (9:
76). Moreover the commentator Madhavacharya declares, "Manu has
ordained, if the husband is missing, dead, has become an ascetic,
impotent, or outcast, then the second marriage of woman is lawful
according to the shastras." Again this verse is present in
Naradasmriti, which is stated to be a collection of more important
verses of Manu. Not so surprisingly, this verse cannot be found in the
relatively modern edition of Manu we have today. Ramendra Nath is
strangely ignorant of history of his own country if he does not know
that Vidyasagar persuaded the British authorities to pass the widow-
remarriage bill by proving that it is enjoined in the shastras.
Mr. Ramendra Nath also gets excited while heaping scorn on the notion
that Hinduism is tolerant. Perhaps it has escaped his attention that
Hinduism is considered not tolerant socially as such, but from the
religious point of view. It is a religion that does not declare that
it has the sole monopoly on truth nor does it try to impose its gods
on other cultures by force. That is what is defined as religious
tolerance. Manusamhita certainly has many harsh things to say about
nastikas, but they are limited to denunciations. What did Hindus, Mr.
Ramendra Nath, actually do to disbelievers in this physical life?
Usually nothing. Buddha lived and preached peacefully. So did
Mahavira. The worst that some of them suffered was ostracism. But as
Ramendra Nath himself acknowledges (4:30), though rationalists and
freethinkers are not to be treated respectfully, they can be given
food, according to Manusamhita. For some reason Mr. Ramendra Nath
seems to think that a devout believer in God and afterlife should
welcome a disbeliever worshipfully (arcchana) as proof of his humane
attitude, yet in the same breath he denies that there is any human
value attached to the injunction that even hellbound disbeliveers are
to be fed. Considering the way Semitic religions have dealt with
unbelievers and apostates in the past (and do so even today), indeed
"such is the generosity of Hindu dharma."
Above all I find Mr. Ramendra Nath's focus on Manusamhita puzzling.
The British in an attempt to codify law focused exclusively on
Manusamhita. But why should an educated Hindu do so? There are
nineteen other dharmashastras all held to be of equal importance. He
ignores Arthashastra, the secular manual for Hindu kingdoms. He
ignores that every region had its own particular laws and every
community in it had its own set of customs which even the king was
forbidden to override. He ignores that often in villages--even today--
the shastras are only a hallowed name; if they routinely consult any
texts, those are the Ramayana and Mahabharata and often the two epics
are retold differently to suit that particular region. Unlike the
Bible, there is no text that forms the basis of Hindu law. The simple
result is that society varied from place to place and age to age. Yes,
class-system based on birth is wrong. Yes, the ugly face of caste is
encountered daily in many places in India. But the picture he presents
is one of absolute stratification, with the cruel Brahmins trampling
down the helpless Shudras for thousands of years. This picture is very
biased. In the first place, the Brahmins are not like the clergy of
church; only a certain percentage actually enjoys real power and
wealth. Secondly, from reading Mr. Ramendra Nath's article, no one
would have any idea of the low-caste royal dynasties like Mundas,
Chandellas, Nandas, Gurjjaras, Senas, the rule of the Lingyat
community, the rise of the Alvars, or the elevation of Reddies and
Jats to the warrior caste. Shivaji was a Shudra landowner who dreamt
of creating a Hindu empire (with all that it implies to him) and
brought the Mughal empire to its knees; he kept Brahmin ministers. A
1345 inscription of Reddi kings read, "With death of Ksathriyas [by
the Muslims], duty of defending cows and Brahmins fell to Shudras." It
was the Shudras who drove away the Muslim invaders and reestablished
Brahmanical educational institutes. If the Shudras, treated as Mr.
Ramendra Nath assumes followers of Manu treated them, say and do this
after gaining power (and when the Brahmins were at their nadir), then
obviously the Brahmins are a superior race who deserve to rule over a
spineless inferior caste.
IV
Just as Mr. Ramendra Nath concentrates on Manusamhita alone among the
dharmashastras, so too he concentrates on Gandhi alone. Apparently
Gandhi is to be taken as the representative of Hindu society at large.
Gandhi had supported varnashrama. But Gandhi had also said, (The
Collected Work of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. LXII, p. 121).
"I believe in varnashrama of the Vedas, which in my opinion is based
on absolute equality of status notwithstanding passages to the
contrary in the smritis and elsewhere."
"Every word of the printed works passing muster as `Shastras' is not,
in my opinion, a revelation."
"The interpretation of accepted texts has undergone evolution and is
capable of indefinite evolution, even as the human intellect and heart
are."
"Nothing in the shastras which is manifestly contrary to universal
truths and morals can stand."
"Nothing in the shastras which is capable of being reasoned can stand
if it is in conflict with reason."
Again, Vivekananda the monk came from a conservative family of the
nineteenth century and fiercely advocated doing away with
untouchability. He even declared that doing social service is more
important than worshipping God, because the former is true worship.
Rabindranath Tagore's family was orthodox and he himself was very
devout; yet he declared that though the caste-system has become
integral to Hindu society it must be done away with. There were as
many Hindus who attacked the caste-system as those who tried to defend
it. Similarly, the Shankaracharya of Puri recently declared that women
have no right to learn Sanskrit or read Vedas. The head priest at
Jagganath temple, on the other hand, has started training women
priests--yet both are pious Hindus. Why then is there the assumption
that all believing Hindus are retrograde?
Mr. Ramendra Nath grieves that the upper castes are not reconciled to
losing their power. That generalization is too sweeping. Some are not,
but the present generation has grown up accepting it. There is still
resistance, but is there any reason to think that the situation will
not improve? Even in England, full-fledged democracy did not spring up
miraculously with Magna Carta. The very fact he is able to write an
article such as this and post it on the Internet is proof that Hindu
society has undergone a sea-change. Again in speaking of agitations
against reservation policy for untouchables, he does not give the full
picture. Major factors in that agitation had been economics and
competence. Many untouchables have become rich by means of affirmative
policies and government aid. There is a substantial body of
untouchables and lowcastes who have now become middle-class and many
who have become legislators. However, they insist on their children
enjoying the same advantages they had enjoyed. But if they have become
rich, is it not unfair for their children to take advantage of the
policies meant for their poorer brethren? Again, why in reverse
discrimination shall the desperately poor of other castes be deprived
of government help and seats in educational institutions while those
who have become rich demand more advantages and money? This has led to
the extremely ridiculous situation of uppercaste people changing their
surnames by deed-poll and bribing officials to declare them
untouchables. More, those who have made it to the top now hog every
post and then lobby to pass laws for their own advantage so that the
benefits no longer trickle down to those who really need them.
Recently, members of the Dalit educated community themselves said that
the reservation policy is not working; a political party based on
backward votes immediately expelled those members who had dared to
utter such heresy. That is why those who agitated against widening of
the affirmative net were students--it is their future that is being
jeopardized in the name of social justice. The people of India wish
for a fairer affirmative policy--one that is based on poverty; the
poor alone should get preferential treatment.
About moksha, karma and avatarvada I have nothing to say on rational
grounds. However once again, it appears that the two Hindu epics need
defending on moral grounds. Rama is an avatar, but nowhere it is said
that all his behaviour is perfect. In particular, Mr. Ramendra Nath
singles out his notorious treatment of Sita--he makes her undergo
ordeal by fire to prove her purity. But what also needs recapitulating
is how the 'higher authorities,' so to speak, react to this. The soul
of Dasaratha, father of Rama, descends from heaven and begs Sita, "Do
not be angry; forgive my son for having abandoned you" (Yuddhyakandya,
120). More importantly Brahma appears and gives a long speech. The
gist of it is that since Rama is lord of all, why is he ignoring this
terrible event? He is God, so why he is meting out injustice to Sita?
(Yuddhykandya, 118). Rama's answer is that he knows himself only to be
a man, not a god. Since the Creator himself declares Rama's deed is a
sin, I do not see why the ordinary Hindu would face a moral dilemma
here and go on insisting Rama did no wrong. The case is the same with
Krishna. Many explanations have been given for his behaviour, but all
of them have one thing in common--it is acknowledged that he did wrong
and human beings must not follow his ways. Most telling is the
evidence of Mahabharata itself. After the war is over, Gandhari--the
only perfectly virtuous human--curses Krishna for the evils he had
committed; as her relatives and friends had been destroyed
[deceitfully by Krishna's advice], so too Krishna's family would be
destroyed and he himself will die a horrible death (Striparva, 25).
The curse comes true. Dharma or moral law of the universe would not
allow it to be otherwise. In other words God incarnate is accountable
to man--even an avatar must be punished.
Mr. Ramendra Nath also simply omits all positive aspects of Hinduism.
He makes no mention of the philosophies, logic systems, mathematical
contributions, music, temples, poetry, teachers and reformers, or the
heroes and heroines in myth and history. He simply makes no attempt to
explain the Hindu world-view or dharma (in the secular sense). Nor
does he give a full picture of Hindu history. Anyone reading his
article would get the impression that no decent man can call himself a
Hindu. (On the other hand I too can quote only favourable verses and
examples and give the impression that Hinduism is flawless.)
If Mr. Ramendra Nath had rejected Hinduism on rational grounds, then
this answer need not have been written. If he had balanced the good,
the bad and the ugly and then declared, "You have been judged and
found wanting", again this present article would not have a leg to
stand on. Let me repeat, it is the one-sided picture of Hindu culture
that I protest.
It is only right that a culture's worst excesses be condemned, but it
is only equitable that its highest ideals and what it has achieved
also be considered. By writing in such a superficial manner, he denies
a Hindu any pride in his heritage. Mr. Ramendra Nath would not allow
anyone to admire Rama as a human being, nor Yuddhisthira or Gandhari;
enjoy the philosophy and symbolism; be proud of either high caste or
low caste leaders and teachers, or of reformers who came from Hindu
society itself--or even how Buddhism, Jainism, Zorastrianism and
Judaism have been protected by the Hindu community. Above all, he
makes it seem as if reform and Hinduism are inherently incompatible.
Gandhi said, "My belief in the Hindu scriptures does not require me to
accept every word and every verse as divinely inspired .... I decline
to be bound by any interpretation, however learned it may be, if it is
repugnant to reason or moral sense" (The Collected Work of Mahatma
Gandhi, The Publication Division, Government of India, Vol. XXI, p.
246). Yet Gandhi was only following Hindu law. Every shastra and epic
states that no age is identical to other ages, therefore the law of
every age must be different. Dharma changes from age to age depending
on circumstances. It is this that has allowed Hinduism to withstand
ravages or war and time, constantly remoulding itself to survive.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/a_hindu_woman/answertohindu.html
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Ganesha Demolition – Symbolic Act of Hatred
(http://voi.org/2009030380/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/
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Combating Defamation of Religion
By Vinod Kumar, on 27-03-2009 12:12
Published in : Vinod Kumar, Column - Vinod Kumar
On November 24, 2008 - By a vote of 85 to 50, with 42 abstaining, the
UN General Assembly, Geneva adopted a draft resolutionm [ref -
http://www.unwatch.org/atf/cf/%7B6DEB65DA-BE5B-4CAE-8056-8BF0BEDF4D17%7D/DEFAMATION2008UNGA.PDF
] calling on all countries to alter their legal and constitutional
systems to prevent "defamation of religions," asserting that "Islam is
frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and
terrorism." Among other things, the resolution "urges states to take
actions to prohibit the dissemination ... of racist and xenophobic
ideas" and material that would incite to religious hatred. It also
urges states to adopt laws that would protect against hatred and
discrimination stemming from religious defamation.
The resolution puts Islam and some of the more controversial practices
associated with it beyond censure. The OIC (The Organization of
Islamic Conference) says that Muslims in Western countries have,
especially since 9/11, faced stereotyping, hostility, discriminatory
treatment and the denigration of “the most sacred symbols of Islam.”
The organization cites cases like newspaper cartoons caricaturing
Mohammed, and a Dutch lawmaker’s documentary released earlier this
year, linking the Koran to terrorism.
India, as one of the countries to abstain, said the text addressed the
problem insufficiently from a narrow perspective because it focused on
one religion. Western countries specially the US and France "This is
just the latest shot in an intensifying campaign of UN resolutions
that dangerously seek to import Islamic anti-blasphemy prohibitions
into the discourse of international human rights law," said Hillel
Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, an independent human rights
monitoring group in Geneva. The resolution puts the human rights and
freedom of speech and expression movement that has been the foundation
of progress in the West and thus the world back by several centuries.
It is evident that the resolution was supported or opposed on
emotional and political grounds.
Even if one was to go with the resolution, it fails to address a very
fundamental issue it wants to resolve. What is to be done if a
religion itself defames or insults other religion(s)? What if a
religion itself disseminates “xenophobic ideas” and contains “material
that would incite religious hatred.” while deploring hate speech,
felt strongly that people should be free to express their opinions in
challenging any ideology of hate. Human rights are indivisible and the
right to freedom of expression was at the essence of the right to
thought, conscience and belief.
The resolution is shortsighted and Islam centric and does nothing to
combat defamation of religions per se. Not only it takes human
civilization backwards, it will come to haunt the countries that
supported it. For a healthy and progressive society, all ideologies
should be open for open and constructive discussion.
http://voi.org/2009032799/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/combatingdefamationofreligion.html
Jinnah and Two Nation Theory
By Vinod Kumar, on 05-09-2009 23:30
Jaswant Singh by his book, Jinnah - India, Partition, Independence has
become kind of a folk hero in Pakistan and a darling of the
secularattii in India. No doubt, with this book, he has secured his
financial future, if he needed one, as one report from Pakistan says
‘they will be ordering the book by the millions.'
One of the main thrusts of his book is that Jinnah was not the "demon"
he is made out to be in India and that he was a secular Indian
nationalist and did not really want Pakistan. The demand for Pakistan
was just a strategy to seek more concessions and safeguards for the
Muslims in united India. Partition could have been avoided had Nehru
and Patel agreed for a federal decentralized India instead of a
centralized one. He casts Nehru and Patel as the villains for
conceding partition.
Whether partition was a good thing or bad and should one be demonized
or idolized for it depends on what side you are. Let us also for the
moment forget about Jinnah's secular and Indian nationalist
credentials as these are hardly his legacies. Jinnah's legacy is the
State of Pakistan. In this article let us focus on what caused
partition? Who was the real author of Two Nation theory - Hindus and
Muslims are two separate nations.
After his return from England, Jinnah worked ceaselessly and zealously
for the creation of Pakistan. An accomplished lawyer that he was, he
eloquently and very convincingly spelled out why was partition
necessary in his famous Presidential address to Muslim League
Convention at Lahore in March 1940 and in many other speeches,
interviews and writings. He said there never was any common ground
between the Muslims and the Hindus or desire on the part of Muslims to
live as equal with Hindus whom they had ruled for centuries. Hinduism
and Islam are two different and distinct social orders. It is only a
dream that the two can ever evolve a common nationality. "The hero of
one is the foe of the other. There is nothing that binds them
together." Enumerating all the differences between the two, he went on
to say that "to yoke two such nations under a single State must lead
to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be
so built up for the government of such a state." (India's Partition -
Process, Strategy and Mobilization, edited By Mushirul Hasan, Delhi,
1998, pp.56)
Jinnah stressed there was never one India and Hindus and Muslims had
never lived as one unit. History is testimony that last twelve hundred
years have failed to achieve unity and during the ages "India was
always divided into Hindu India and Muslim India. ... The present
artificial unity of India dates back only to British conquest and is
maintained by the British bayonet" -- he went on to say.
Last update : 05-09-2009 15:53
http://voi.org/20090905227/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/jinnahandtwonationtheory.html
Prof. Vijay Prashad and Hindu Holocaust Museum
By Vinod Kumar, on 26-09-2009 23:30
Prof. Vijay Prashad in his article Hindu Holocaust (News India Times,
Sept. 25, 2009) about Francois Gautier's fund raiser on August 16,
2009 in New Jersey for a Hindu Holocaust Museum in Pune, India has
made many assertions and statements which have no evidence in
contemporary or even subsequent recorded history. To keep the response
reasonable length let me address a few of the issues covered by him
and let the readers make their own judgment.
Prof. Vijay Prashad in his article Hindu holocaust (News India Times,
Sept. 25, 2009) about Francois Gautier's fund raiser on August 16,
2009 in New Jersey for a Hindu Holocaust Museum in Pune, India has
made many assertions and statements which have no evidence in
contemporary or even subsequent recorded history. To keep the response
reasonable length let me address a few of the issues covered by him
and let the readers make their own judgement.
Prof. Prashad wrote, and I quote the entire paragraph:
"Between Hindus and Muslims there has not been an endless rivalry for
social power. When Islam enters the subcontinent, it does not come in
the saddlebags of the Ghaznis or the Ghouris, but amongst the rumble
of goods brought by traders. Early conversions are not by the sword
but by the merchants . There was killing, but that was as much for
reasons of warfare and plunder as for reasons of God and tradition. An
interested reader might want to look at the distinguished historian
Romila Thapar's superb book "Somnatha: The Many Voices of a
History" (Penguin, 2005). There, Professor Thapar shows us that Mahmud
Ghazni's destruction of the Shiva temple in 1026 was driven not so
much by a fanatical religious belief but because his father,
Subuktigin, needed money to sustain his faltering kingdom in Central
Asia. Now it is certainly true, as historian Mohammed Habib put it,
that there was "wanton destruction of temples that followed in the
wake of the Ghaznavid army."
Actually this paragraph covers the gist of his arguments.
Let us discuss these one by one.
•1. No social rivalry between Hindus and Muslims:
To the contrary there never was any equivalence between the two ever
after the Muslims started invading India. In all Muslim chronicles,
almost without exception, Hindus are referred to as infidels - a
derogatory term in Islam.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a very prominent Muslim leader in the nineteenth
century asked Muslims to support British Raj as opposed to free India
where, by default, Hindus being majority would have an upper hand.
For Muslim scholars for Muslims to live under the Hindus was
unacceptable.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (the originator of two nation theory) had said in
1888, as quoted by Sir Penderel Moon on page 11 of his tome, 'Divide
and Quit'. India, he said, is a country"inhabited by two different
nations" and there would necessarily be a struggle for power between
them, if the English were to leave India. "Is it possible, he had
asked, "that under these circumstances two nations - the Mohammedan
and Hindu - could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power?
Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer
the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is
to desire the impossible and the inconceivable."
On the issue of Hindu Muslim relations, no body could have put it
better than what Jinnah articulated in his famous Presidential address
to Muslim League conference in Lahore in 1940.
He said there never was any common ground between the Muslims and the
Hindus or desire on the part of Muslims to live as equal with Hindus
whom they had ruled for centuries. Hinduism and Islam are two
different and distinct social orders. It is only a dream that the two
can ever evolve a common nationality. "The hero of one is the foe of
the other. There is nothing that binds them together." Enumerating all
the differences between the two, he went on to say that "to yoke two
such nations under a single State must lead to growing discontent and
final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the
government of such a state." (India's Partition - Process, Strategy
and Mobilization, edited By Mushirul Hasan, Delhi, 1998, pp.56)
Jinnah stressed there was never one India and Hindus and Muslims had
never lived as one unit. History is testimony that last twelve hundred
years have failed to achieve unity and during the ages "India was
always divided into Hindu India and Muslim India. ... The present
artificial unity of India dates back only to British conquest and is
maintained by the British bayonet" -- he went on to say. (ibid. pp.
56)
Even Alberuni, thousand years ago, when there was not much Muslim
presence in India, could see there was no common ground between Hindus
and Muslims. He starts his book by discussing the differences between
the Hindus and the Muslims. He enumerates these differences at length
throughout the book. Warning his readers he wrote "the readers must
bear in mind that the Hindus entirely differ from us in every
respect...... The barriers which separate Muslims and Hindus rest on
different causes." ((Sachau EC, Alebruni's India, New Delhi, 1993, pp.
17 - 26)
Dr. Ambedkar in his books and frequent writings had alluded to
Muslim's macabre hostility against Hindus. He highlighted the fact
that the word 'but' used by Muslims to refer to any idol was a corrupt
form of "Budh" because there were hundreds of statues of Buddha in
Afghanistan and across the Middle East which were the first target of
iconoclast of Islam. That explains the use of the term 'but-shikan' by
Ghazanavi, Ghauri and other invaders. The destruction and pillage of
the famous Buddhist Seminary and University of Nalanda is another
example of the grossness of the wanton damage caused by Muslim
invaders.
Ethnic cleansing of Hindus by Muslims has continued even in recent
history, both in Pakistan and Bangladesh - even in Kashmir. In that
sense there has been a renewal of Hindu Holocaust. In Pakistan the
Hindu /Sikh population has plummeted from 23% in 1947 to less than 2%
today. In Bangladesh, it has dwindled from 35% to 8% during the same
period. During the same period Muslims have multiplied fast in India.
And the shame of Hindus having been ethnically cleansed from Kashmir
Valley, an important part of our bogus secular state, still torments
Hindu hearts!.
In fact, throughout history Islam has always used 'gross savagery' and
open recourse to terrorism as force multipliers e.g. building towers
of the heads of hapless Hindus beheaded by Muslim invaders of which
accounts are there in history books written by Muslim chroniclers.
(Baburnama, Delhi, 1998, pp. 573, 576 - to cite one example) And the
use of terror and savagery continues with renewed vigor even today.
The most morbid example of savagery in recent times was the beheading
by Ilyas Kashmiri (a commander of Pak-sponsored terror group) of an
injured Indian army officer (after capturing him on February 26,
2000). Ilyas Kashmiri went back to Pakistan with the head of the
hapless Indian army officer and presented it to top officers of Pak
army. Gen. Musharraf had given a cash reward of Rs. 1 lakh. Pictures
of Ilyas Kashmiri holding the head of the Indian officer were
published in Pakistani newspapers. Maulana Zahoor Ahmed Alvi of Jamia
Muhammadia, Islamabad, even issued a fatwa supporting slitting the
throats of Indian army officers in a similar manner [Source: News
item, 'Musharraf rewarded militant who killed Indian', (Indian Express
New Delhi, September 21, 2009, page 4).
Can Prof. Vijay Prashad deny these irrefutable facts?
•2. Islam came with Muslim traders:
Yes, in India there were traders from Arabia long before Islam was
born. These traders by virtue of their being Arabs, became Muslims
when Arabia became Islamic in the seventh century. Thus, one can say
Islam came to India with the traders. Yes, during the trading period,
there was no animosity against the Muslims or Islam. When did this
animosity begin? It was discussed by Alberuni a thousand years ago in
his famous ‘Indica' which we shall cover later. Not that there was any
resistance against but there were no conversions to Islam among the
general population to speak of. Initially Arabs, and later on Muslim,
traders married local women. Even Arab records show that India (read
Hindu) kings gave Muslims land to build their mosques and preach their
new religion. However, it might be mentioned that there is no evidence
of reciprocity of giving lands to Hindus or other religions in Arabia
after the birth of Islam. To the contrary, Prophet Muhammad's one of
the last three wishes/instructions to Muslims was to "expel all pagans
from the Arabian Peninsula." (Sahih Bukhari, New Delhi, vol. 4, p.
260, Chapter H 393)
What caused the animosity between Hindus and Muslims?
In the very first chapter of his book, Indica, Alberuni discusses the
differences between Hindus and Muslims, as written above. Alberuni
observes some of the reasons of Hindus' repugnance of Muslims are
complete banishment of Buddhists from countries, from Khurasan,
Persis, Irak, Mosul and Syria, first by Zoroastrians and then by
Islam. And then Muhammad ibn Kasim entered India proper, conquered the
cities of Bahmanwa and Multan and went as far as Kannauj - "all these
events planted a deeply rooted hatred in their hearts." (Sachau EC,
Alebruni's India, New Delhi, 1993, pp. 20-21)
Then he talks of Mahmud Ghaznavi: Sabuktagin weakened the borders of
India and afterwards his son Mahmud marched into India during a period
of thirty years and more. Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of
India and performed those wonderful exploits (emphasis mine), by which
the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and
like a tale of old in the mouth of the people." Alberuni says "their
scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion
towards all Muslims." (ibid, pp. 22)
These are not even the tips of the proverbial iceberg, to understand
what was done to Hindu by Muslim invaders and then rulers. One has to
read the entire history recorded by the Muslim invaders and rulers and
other Muslim chroniclers to understand its full impact. After each
invasion, the survivors were offered conversion to Islam or death and
many converted. If circumstances allowed, many converted back to their
original faith. All through Muslim rule starting from bin Kasim, with
a few exceptions, Jiziya was imposed on non-Muslim subjects the burden
of which fell the heaviest on the poor. This, at times, led to mass
conversions of the entire castes. Islam might have come with the
traders but it did not result in any conversions to Islam. It were the
invasions and subsequent Muslim rule which did.
Politically motivated opinions that have no basis in recorded history
or wishful thinking that reflect how the things should have been, in
their flight of fancy imagination, is not history. It is, at best,
sheer fiction. Sadly, Prof. Vijay Prashad's characterization of Hindu
Muslim relations fall in this category. History is what actually
happened; fiction has no place in it.
•3. Reasons for temple demolition:
Prof. Prashad quotes Professor Thapar showing us that Mahmud Ghazni's
destruction of the Shiva temple in 1026 was driven not so much by a
fanatical religious belief but because his father, Subuktigin, needed
money to sustain his faltering kingdom in Central Asia.
It is unimaginable that Sabuktagin would have a kingdom in Central
Asia in 1926 after he died at Toormooz on his way to Ghizny from Balkh
in Shaban AH 387 (August AD 997).
In history of Islam Mahmud enjoys a very high position. He was given
the titles of Ameen-ul-Millat, defender of the faith and Yameen-ud-
Daulat, the right hand of the state by the Caliph of Baghdad - the
titles which had so far not been bestowed on any prince far or near,
notwithstanding their intense desire to receive such an honor. (Tarikh
Yamini, The History of India as Told by its own historians, Vol. 2,
New Delhi, 1996, pp. 24)
The plunders of Mahmud are legendary. When he displayed his loot from
India, he was declared "the richest monarch ever in history".
It is often said he was interested only in plunder and he was not much
of a religious person. Neither his record nor his Muslim chroniclers
agree with this characterization. From all contemporary records the
only inference one can draw is that he was a zealot Muslim and is so
regarded by Muslim scholars. As accepted even by Prof. Thapar and
quoted by Prof. Prashad that he plundered Somnath temple - but
actually the plunder and destruction of Somnath temple was of
relatively small scale in relation to other temples and places he
plundered and destroyed.
The case in point is the temple at Mathura. Mahmud was enchanted by
the grandeur of this temple. Utbi, secretary of Mahmud, in his Tarikh
Yamini described it as:
"The Sultan next directed his attacks against the sacred city of
Mathura. The city was surrounded by a massive stone wall, in which
were two lofty gates opening on to the river. There were magnificent
temples all over the city and the largest of them all stood in the
center of it. The Sultan was very much struck by its grandeur. In his
estimate it cost not less than 100,000,000 red dinars, and even the
most skillful of masons must have taken 200 years to complete it.
Among the large number of idols in the temples, five were made of pure
gold, the eyes of one of them were laid with two rubies worth 100,000
dinars, and another had a sapphire of a very heavy weight. All these
five idols yielded gold weighing 98,300 mishkals. The idols made of
silver numbered 200....... He seized all the gold and silver idols
and ordered his soldiers to burn all the temples to the ground. The
idols in them were deliberately broken into pieces. The city was
pillaged for 20 days, and a large number of buildings were reduced to
ashes." (Tarikh Yamini, The History of India as Told by its own
historians, vol 2, New Delhi, 1996, pp. 44)
Mahmud Ghaznavi invaded India at least sixteen times and each time he
left a trail of tears, human suffering and devastation. The tale of
his invasions as recorded by his secretary Utbi is blood curdling.
This is how Utbi describes one scene and this is not, by any means,
an isolated example:
"Many infidels were consequently slain or taken prisoner in this
sudden attack, and the Muslamans paid no regard to the booty till they
had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels and
worshippers of sun and fire. The friends of God searched the bodies of
the slain for three whole days, in order to obtain booty." (ibid. pp.
49) The search for booty was secondary to killing.
Another place Utbi writes: "The blood of the infidels flowed so
copiously, that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its
purity, and people were unable to drink it." (ibid. pp. 40)
I can understand Mahmud's penchant for wealth. Many people have
insatiable thirst for wealth. Prof. Prashad might ask himself what
would drive a man to reduce to ashes such a marvelous structure and
break the idols to pieces if he was only interested in wealth? And
killing on such a large scale and so brutally?
Mahmud not only plundered and destroyed the Somnath temple, he ordered
the upper part of the idol to be broken and the remainder to be
transported to his residence, Ghazni, with all its trappings of gold,
jewels, and embroidered garments. Part of it has been thrown into the
hippodrome of the town, together with the Chakrasvamin, an idol of
bronze, that had been brought from Thanesar. Another part of the idol
from Somnath lies before the door of the mosque of Ghaznin, on which
people rub their feet to clean them from dirt and wet." (Sachau EC,
Alebruni's India, New Delhi, 1993, part II, pp. 103)
One would ask Prof. Thapar if the purpose of Mahmud's plunder of
Somnath was "driven not so much by a fanatical religious belief but
because his father, Subuktigin, needed money to sustain his faltering
kingdom in Central Asia" why would he spend it in transporting broken
pieces all the way from Somnath to Ghazni?
Prof. Prashad quotes Prof. Habib who admits that there was "wanton
destruction of temples that followed in the wake of the Ghaznavid
army." I am not surprised by it. Muslims historians are more open and
honest about the Muslim rule in India and its depredations than their
Hindu compatriots - the very Hindus who were at the receiving end for
centuries. I wonder if Stockholm syndrome has anything to do with it!
Coming back to our subject, temple destruction did not end with Mahmud
- it was just the beginning. These continued all the way till
Aurangzeb - the last great Mughal emperor. We will not go into those
details in this article.
Even today, the demolition of Bamiyan Buddha statues is a stark
reminder of what drove Muslim invaders of India to demolish Hindu
temples? There was no wealth hidden in Bamiyan Buddhas that the world
knows of.
In this so far we have covered only a very small part of Prof.
Prashad's article and not even scratched the surface of what Hindus
had gone through Islamic rule. Will Durant has called the Muslim
conquest of India the bloodiest story in history. The extent of
destruction of Hindu temples and massacres is beyond all human
imagination and a museum to their memory would be a just reminder to
all humanity of what might happen if one is not prepared to learn the
lessons from the past.
In the beginning of the article, Prof. Prashad wrote: "They claim that
over the past thousand years, millions of Hindus were killed, with the
intention to wipe Hindus off the map." Actually this is a very mild
statement and does not even come close to state the facts. According
to some estimates Hindus killed by Muslims over the centuries is about
80 million and the number of temples demolished into tens of
thousands. Timur Lang's massacre of 100,000 helpless Hindu prisoners
in one day by hands has no parallel in world history. (Malfuzat-e-
Timuri, History of India as told by its own historians, vol. III,
Delhi, 1996, pp. 436)
•4. Hindu Holocaust Museum:
Prof. Prashad also wrote: "The idea of the Hindu Holocaust casts the
Hindu as history's victim, who should now become history's aggressor
to avenge the past." It is evident that Prof. Prashad is drawing his
own conclusions without any evidence or basis. Making a museum to
portray the atrocities suffered by the Hindus in the past does not
imply they want to become "history's aggressors to avenge the past."
Jews have built Jewish Holocaust museums, are they avenging the past?
There are Black history museums all over the US. This does not mean
that these are meant to enslave the Whites "to avenge the past". A
museum is to remind the future generations of what happened - to
reflect the good and the bad; the pride and the shame. All countries
have museums. Actually it would have been only fair that such an idea
had come from the Muslims to show their disapproval of what their
ancestors had done to humanity for the sake of Islam. But that did not
happen and is not likely to happen either. If not the Muslims, then
this idea of Hindu Holocaust Museum should have come from liberal
progressive elite of independent India.
It is not surprising that Francois Gautier who is leading the movement
for a Hindu Holocaust museum is a Frenchman. He is the living legacy
of French progressive liberalism that waged the struggle against
religious fanaticism in the eighteenth century. Instead of making
light of Gautier's work, the liberal progressive elite worldwide
should join forces with him in exposing the depredations caused by
religious fanatics in India. Let India be the starting point and then
continue work elsewhere.
Prof. Prashad would do a great service if instead of spending his
valuable time and energy in criticizing Francois Gautier, he was
investigating what drove some people, in today's day and age, to
demolish two thousand years old Bamiyan Buddhas - a work of art and
human endeavor.
A sad reminder that the days of demolition of infidel idols are not
over yet.
Copyright: Vinod Kumar
September 25, 2009
Sri Sri and Jihad
The Times of India recently conducted a discussion between Islamic
scholar and peace activist Maulana Wahiduddin Khan and Hindu spiritual
leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar on the issue of Jihad in the Quran and
Bhagvadgita. The discussion was moderated by Narayani Ganesh, a well
known Columnist.
Right at the beginning Maulana Wahiduddin started with "Let's discuss
the misunderstanding of the term jihad. Jihad is an Arabic word that
has neither a mysterious meaning nor relation to any sacred duty.
Jihad is a simple word; it means to struggle, to strive. Jihad is to
achieve a positive goal in life through peaceful means."
"The Prophet of Islam has said: "Do jihad against your own desires."
That is, doing jihad against yourself. So jihad means to control your
desires. Jihad is to discipline your own behaviour. The Qur'an says:
"Do jihad with the help of the Qur'an" (25:52). The Qur'an is a book
of ideology; it is not a weapon. So doing jihad with the help of the
Qur'an means to try to achieve one's goals through an ideological
struggle." He continued.
Before we accept the Mualana's definition of jihad let us look at the
subject of jihad from the basic scriptures of Islam and what other
Islamic scholars and commentators have said on the subject in some
details. One or two sentences here and there do not do justice to this
important topic.
Jihad has been going on in the world ever since Islam was born in the
seventh century but its latest manifestation has been, among other
places, most notably in Palestine, Chechnya, and Kashmir. Even, in
February 1998, when World Islamic Front issued a fatwa and a call for
Jihad to "every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be
rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and
plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it", it did not
arouse much interest in the general public. It took direct assault on
9/11 on the fundamental symbols of what America stands for that it
created some curiosity. Today, Jihad is, no doubt, one of the most
discussed terms in the world.
What is Jihad? What drives a man to commit such horrendous acts
against humanity? What motivates Islamic terrorists? Why do they
operate under the name of Jihad?
Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist answers (Newsweek, April
8, 2002)
"This is the influence of the Koran, the most potent and powerful book
for the past 14 centuries. God promised Muslims who sacrificed for
Islam that they would not die. They will live on in paradise. Muslims
hold to the promise literally."
How valid is this assertion?
What is Jihad?
View of traditionalists:
Dictionary of Islam defines jihad as "a religious war with those who
are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent
religious duty, established in the Quran and in the Traditions as a
divine institution, enjoined specially for the purpose advancing Islam
and repelling evils from Muslims."[i]
In an introductory note to an article "Jihad in the Qur'an and
Sunnah" by Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, ex-Chief Justice
of Saudi Arabia and of the Sacred Mosque of Mecca, Abdul Malik
Mujahid, General Manager of Maktaba Dar-us-Salam, Saudi Arabia on the
website (www.islamworld.net) writes:
"Jihad is regarded as the best thing, one can offer voluntarily. It
is superior to non‑obligatory prayers, fasting, Zakat, Umra and Hajj
as mentioned in the Qur'an and the Ahadith of the Prophet(pbuh). The
benefits of Jihad are of great extent and large in scope, while its
effects are far-reaching and wide-spreading as regards Islam and the
Muslims."
Sheikh Abdullah, ex-Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia defines Jihad as:
"Praise be to Allah swt Who has ordained Al-Jihad (the holy fighting
in Allah's Cause):
1. With the heart (intentions or feelings),
2. With the hand (weapons, etc.),
3. With the tongue (speeches, etc., in the Cause of Allah)
Allah has rewarded the one who performs it with lofty dwellings in the
Gardens (of Paradise)." [ii]
Other contrary Views
Many non-Muslim modernists, as Maulana Wahiduddin also said in this
discussion, in the West deny that it has anything to do with
violence.
Many academic Muslims also dissociate Jihad with "Holy War". "In its
primary sense it is an inner thing, within self, to rid it from
debased actions or inclinations, and exercise constancy and
perseverance in achieving a higher moral standard" - they claim.
"Jihad is not a declaration of war against other religions and
certainly not against Christians and Jews as some media and political
circles want it to be perceived. Islam does not fight other religions"
- they emphasize.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group,
asserts that jihad "does not mean 'holy war.'" Instead, jihad is "a
central and broad Islamic concept that includes the struggle to
improve the quality of life in society, struggle in the battlefield
for self-defense . . . or fighting against tyranny or oppression."
CAIR even denies that Islam includes any concept of a "holy war."
Many other who go under the banner of modernists hold similar views on
the nature of jihad.
How is one to conclude what Jihad really means in Islam?
Ironclad definition of anything to do with Islam and its practical
manifestations can only be derived from what the basic scriptures of
Islam have to say on any particular issue.
What are the basic scriptures of Islam and why are they so important?
The single most basic scripture of Islam is indeed the Qur'an. The
next after the Qur'an are the traditions - the Sunnah -- of the
Prophet -- also known as Ahadith. The Qur'an is compilation of the
Revelations from Allah to Prophet Muhammad and the Sunnah is what
Prophet Muhammad did or said. Of the traditions, the ones compiled by
Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim are the most authentic.
Authenticity of Imam Bukhari's work can be judged from the fact that
he is reported to have collected over 300,000 Hadiths -- traditions of
the Prophet -- but "chose only approximately 7275 of which there is
no doubt about their authenticity." [iii] Each Hadith comes with its
line of transmission that leads directly to Prophet Muhammad or his
companions.
Why are the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet so important to
Muslims? Instead of giving my personal opinion let me say what Rafiq
Zakaria, an eminent Islamic scholar and also known as modernist
progressive secular Muslim has to say on this.
"To Muslims, the Quran is the creation of god. However, it is equally
important to remember that there could have been no Quran without
Muhammad. He is not only its transmitter but also the embodiment of
its teachings... Muhammad and the Quran are inextricably
intertwined." [iv]
"The Quran is, therefore, regarded by Muslims as immutable and
unchangeable, not metaphorically but literally. This is a matter of
faith for them, and reason can never deflect them from it." [v]
(Italics mine) He went on to say.
After enumerating the five pillars of Islam, he echos the sentiments
expressed above in another book and goes on to observe "it (the Quran)
contains guidelines a Muslim must follow." [vi]
Maulana Mawdudi, a great Islamic scholar and thinker expresses similar
views. Islam stands for complete faith in the prophet's teachings. It
stands for complete obedience to the system of life shown to us by the
prophet and any who ignores the medium of the prophet and claims to
follow God directly is not a Muslim. [vii]
Maulana Wahiduddin has also expressed similar opinions.
Human reason or direct approach to God without the medium of the
prophet makes one sinner, if not apostate from Islam. No freedom of
slightest deviation is allowed. One has to follow the teachings of the
Quran and of the Prophet.
If we want to understand why the Muslims carry out jihad, we have to
understand what the Quran and the Sunnah have to say on this topic.
The opinions of Islamic scholars and other commentators are not valid
if they are not in conformity with the above.
What do the Quran and the Sunnah have to say on the subject of Jihad?
There is no chapter devoted exclusively to the subject of jihad in the
Quran. The Ayats pertaining to jihad are spread throughout the Quran.
If one were to sort them out and present them in a concise manner, one
would, in all likelihood, be accused of quoting them out of context.
But in each of the authentic Hadis - the Sunnah of the prophet --
there is a section dealing with the practice of jihad. So let us turn
our attention to the Sunnah. On close scrutiny of the Sunnah as
compiled in Sahih Al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, apart from the
traditions of the prophet, frequent reference is made to the Quran. So
what is recorded in these two books is both, the Sunnah of the Prophet
as well as the revelations from God. Imam Bukhari and Imam Muslim have
facilitated our work in informing us, in a concise form, what the
concept of jihad in Islam is?
Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan of Islamic University, Medina Al- Munawwara,
Saudi Arabia, the translator of Sahih Al-Bukhari, in the glossary of
Arabic words translates Jihad as "Holy fighting in the cause of Allah
or any other kind of effort to make Allah's word (Islam) superior
which is regarded as one of the principles of Islam." [viii]
Jihad defined:
Let us first try to find out what is Jihad? We don't have to too far.
The section on Jihad starts with invocation to Allah and Chapter I
opens quoting verses 9:111-112 of the Quran:
"Verily
Allah has purchased of the believers
Their lives and their properties;
For theirs (in return)
Is Paradise. They fight in His cause, so they
Kill (others) and are killed
It is a promise in truth which is binding on Him."[ix]
Allah has made a binding promise with His believers to kill in His
cause and if they are killed they will get Paradise in return.
And again it repeats in chapter 2 "the best among the people is that
believer who strives his utmost in Allah's cause with both his life
and property and goes on to quote verses 61:10,11,12 . It says "it
(fighting in Allah's cause) is a bargain that will save you from a
grievous punishment..... He will forgive you, your sins and admit you
into Gardens beneath which rivers flow, and to beautiful Mansions in
gardens of Eternity." And calls it "The supreme achievement." [x]
Indeed the promise of Gardens with Rivers and Mansions must have
sounded very alluring in the harsh desert climate of Arabia.
Evidently, it does even today.
The superiority of Jihad:
"A single endeavor (of fighting) in Allah's Cause in the forenoon is
better than the world and whatever is in it." Says Hadis 50 in chapter
5. [xi]
And "a place as small as a bow in Paradise is better than all that on
which the sun rises and sets (i.e. all the world)." And continues,
repeating, "A single endeavour in Allah's Cause is better than all
that on which the sun rises and sets." [xii]
The superiority of martyrdom is so great that "nobody would wish to
come back even if he were given the whole world and whatever in it,
except the martyr who, on seeing the superiority of martyrdom, would
like to come back to the world and get killed again (in Allah's
cause.)" [xiii]
And what is there in Paradise? Houris. "And if a houri from paradise
appeared to the people of the earth, she would fill the space between
Heaven and the Earth with light and pleasant scent and her head cover
is better than the world and whatever is in it." [xiv] Who would not
like to die to be in company of such houris?
Obligations of a Believer to Jihad
What are the obligations of a Muslim of a general call to arms and
what sort of Jihad and intentions are compulsory? Most people don't
like to fight and Muslims are no exception to it. But what are they to
do when Allah says:
"March forth, whether you are light (young, healthy and wealthy) or
heavy (ill, old and poor)
And strive with your wealth and your lives
In the way of Allah; that is better for you
If you but knew. Had it been a near gain (booty in front of them)
And an easy journey they would have followed you,
But the distance (Tabuk expedition) was long for them and they would
Swear by Allah (saying)
"If we only could, we would have surely have come out with you."
Allah reprimands:
"They destroy their own souls, and Allah knows
That they are liars." (9:41-42) [xv]
Allah continues His reprimand:
"O you who believe! What is the matter with you that when you are
asked to march forth in the Way of Allah, (i.e. Jihad), you cling
heavily to the earth? Are you pleased with the life of this world
rather than the hereafter? .... (the verse). If you march not forth,
He will punish you with a painful torment and will replace you by
another people and you cannot harm Him at all, and Allah is Able to do
all things." (9:38-39) [xvi]
Is Jihad obligatory:
This is best explained by Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid:
"So at first "the fighting" was forbidden, then it was permitted and
after that it was made obligatory- ( 1 ) against them who start "the
fighting" against you (Muslims)... (2) and against all those who
worship others along with Allah... as mentioned in SurahAI‑BaqaraSl
(II), Al‑lmran (III) and Baraat (IX)... and other Suras (Chapters of
the Qur'an).
Allah made "the fighting' (Jihad) obligatory for the Muslims and gave
importance to the subject‑matter of Jihad in all the Suras (Chapters
of the Qur'an) which were revealed (at Medina) as in Allah's
Statement:
March forth whether you are light (being healthy, young and wealthy)
or heavy (being ill, old and poor), strive hard with your wealth and
your lives in the Cause of Allah. This is better for you if you but
knew. (V.9:41). [xvii]
Rewards of Jihad:
Where would one killed in Jihad go? The Muslim killed in Jihad would
go to Paradise and "their's (i.e. those of the Pagan's) will go to
Hell Fire. [xviii]
What are the special benefits of fighting in Allah's cause?
Whoever believes in Allah and His Messenger and lives the life of a
good Muslim will rightfully go to Paradise, no matter if he fights in
Allah's cause or not. But there is a special place for those who do.
Paradise has hundred grades which Allah has reserved for Mujahidin.
The distance between each grade is like the distance between the
Heaven and the Earth. [xix]
And what will those who fight in Allah's cause get in Paradise?
Bat Ye'Or well known writer on Islam notes "the ideology of jihad was
formulated by Muslim jurists and scholars, including such luminaries
as Averroes and Ibn Khaldun, from the 8th century onward. For example,
Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) stated, "..the holy war is a religious duty,
because of the universality of the Muslim mission and the obligation
to convert everyone to Islam either by persuasion or by force...".
Modernists views refuted:
As noted above, Council of American Islamic Relations asserts that
Jihad is "struggle in the battlefield for self-defense . . . or
fighting against tyranny or oppression" But Sahih Muslim, one of two
most authentic traditions does not agree with it.
Self defense or oppression has nothing to do with the concept of
Jihad. It quotes Prophet Muhammad saying:
"I have been commanded to fight against people, till they testify to
the fact that there is no god but Allah, and believe in me (that) I am
the messenger (from the Lord) and in all that I have brought. And when
they do it, their blood and riches are guaranteed protection on my
behalf except where it is justified by law, and their affairs rest
with Allah."[xx]
Quoting Koran (9:39) "If you march not forth, I will punish you with a
painful torment and will replace you by another people and you cannot
harm Me at all, and Allah is able to do all things.", Sheikh Abdullah
bin Muhammad bin Hamid of Sacred Mosque of Mecca (Saudi Arabia) writes
"Allah disapproved of those who abandoned Jihad (i.e. they did not go
for Jihad) and attributed to them hypocrisy and disease in their
hearts, and threatened (all) those who remain behind from Jihad and
sit at home with horrible punishment. He (Allah) accused them with the
most ugly descriptions, rebuked them for their cowardice and spoke
against them (about their weakness and their remaining behind).[xxi]
Had Jihad been just "striving" and "an inner thing, within self, to
rid it from debased actions or inclinations" where was the need to
"march forth"? Why would Allah accuse those who did not "march forth"
of "cowardice", and "hypocrisy and disease in their hearts"?
To scholars of Islam the message of the Koran and Ahadith is clear.
It is true that not every Muslim is engaged in Jihad. It is true not
only today; it was true during the time of Prophet Muhammad also.
Those who did not were called hypocrites and their fidelity to Islam
was in question.
It is evident from the above that Maulana Wahiduddin's contention that
Jihad has "no relation to any sacred duty" and "it means to struggle,
to strive. Jihad is to achieve a positive goal in life through
peaceful means" have no foundation in Islamic scriptures.
And if Jihad, indeed, is "mental struggle against passion or internal
struggle" - it would be welcome, I am sure, by all non-Muslims. What
a non-Muslim is primarily interested in is Jihad that affects his (non-
Muslim's) survival. However, there is no evidence in the core
scriptures of Islam that Jihad is an internal struggle within the
self.
In support of his contention, the Maulana quoted verse 25:52 saying:
"The Quran says: ‘Do jihad with the help of the Quran'. As is the
common theme of the Quran ‘to fight with the unbelievers', the verse
quoted by the Maulana does not disappoint. It also says: "So do not
follow the unbelievers, and strive against them a mighty striving with
it." ‘It' might mean the Quran - the word Jihad does not occur in any
of the three translations I checked but by defining jihad as peaceful
struggle the Maulana has completely fooled a general unbeliever into
believing that the Quran asks his followers to fight peacefully.
In the whole discussion Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and the moderator, both
cut a sorry figure. The Maulana took them for an easy ride and neither
challenged the Maulana and presented the true meaning of jihad. It is
evident that Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has absolutely no knowledge of Islam
or even of its basics
The whole exercise of equating the Gita and the Quran is disingenuous.
The Gita and the Hinduism at large have no concept of jihad in the
Quranic sense. The Kurukshetra war is not about jihad but about
injustice which as the Maulana says does not exist in Islam - (In
Islam, there is no war against injustice). In Islam, whatever Allah
decrees is justice when it says: "God gives abundantly to whom He will
and sparingly to whom it pleases." (13:26) In the Gita the basic
theme is fight for righteousness - not for any god or religion or an
individual while to the contrary the basic theme in the Quran is to
fight for Allah against those who deny His Revelations.
In Kurukshatra war Sri Krishna did not exhort Arjuna to fight because
Sri Krishna wanted it or for a God - or for even Arjuna's sake but for
the justice. Against the injustice that had been done to the
Pandavas. This step was taken after all other means to bring justice
have been explored and exhausted.
Yes, like any other religious ideology, Islam also would like to
improve the life of its followers, in its own way but that is nowhere
called what is known as Jihad.
i Warraq, ibn. Why I am not a Muslim. New York, 1995, pp.12
ii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. xxiv
iii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp.xvii
iv Zakaria, Rafiq, Muhammad and the Quran, Penguin Books, New York,
1991, pp. 3
v Zakaria, Rafiq, Muhammad and the Quran, Penguin Books, New York,
1991, pp. 4
vi Zakaria, Rafiq, The Struggle within Islam, Penguin Books, New
York, 1988, pp. 304
vii Mawdudi, Abul A'la, Towards understanding Islam, Islamic Circle
of North America, Montreal, 1986, pp. 61 (First published in Urdu in
India in 1932)
viii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. lxxiv
ix Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol.4, pp. 34
x Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 36-37
xi Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 41
xii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp 41
xiii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 42
xiv Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 42
xv Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 58-59
xvi Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 59
xvii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. xxvi
xviii Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 55
xix Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 40
xx Sahih Muslim, Translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, New Delhi, 1994,
vol. 1, pp.17
xxi Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp.xxx-xxxi
© Copyright
[i] Warraq, ibn. Why I am not a Muslim. New York, 1995, pp.12
[ii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. xxiv
[iii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp.xvii
[iv] Zakaria, Rafiq, Muhammad and the Quran, Penguin Books, New York,
1991, pp. 3
[v] Zakaria, Rafiq, Muhammad and the Quran, Penguin Books, New York,
1991, pp. 4
[vi] Zakaria, Rafiq, The Struggle within Islam, Penguin Books, New
York, 1988, pp. 304
[vii] Mawdudi, Abul A'la, Towards understanding Islam, Islamic Circle
of North America, Montreal, 1986, pp. 61 (First published in Urdu in
India in 1932)
[viii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. lxxiv
[ix] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol.4, pp. 34
[x] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 36-37
[xi] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 41
[xii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp 41
[xiii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 42
[xiv] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 42
[xv] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 58-59
[xvi] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 59
[xvii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 1, pp. xxvi
[xviii] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan,
New Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 55
[xix] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp. 40
[xx] Sahih Muslim, Translated by Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, New Delhi,
1994, vol. 1, pp.17
[xxi] Al-Bukhari, Sahih Al-Bukhari. Translated by M. Muhsin Khan, New
Delhi, 1984, vol. 4, pp.xxx-xxxi
http://voi.org/20091003249/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/whatisjihad.html
How Javed Anand’s Ancestors Became Muslims
By Vinod Kumar, on 08-11-2009 12:56
Berating Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, its Chief Mohan Bhagwat and then
Hinduism, Javed Anand in RSS, Here I Come (Asian Age, Oct 14, 2009)
http://epaper.asianage.com/ASIAN/AAGE/2009/10/14/Article/007/14_10_2009_007_005.jpg
wrote:
"Even otherwise, I have no difficulty in accepting the obvious---my
Hindu past---for I doubt if my forefathers were Sikhs , Jains or
Buddhists. The former are easily discounted for they arrived too late
on the scene. Jains? No way , they are not interested in Mughlai
cousin . As far Buddhists, I am unable to see what possible incentive
there was for them to abandon their faith."
"But converting from Hinduism is conceivable . I have been told since
childhood that we are Saddiquis. That's big if you are talking
hierachy ---being part of the extended parivar of none else than the
closest companion of Prophet Mohammed and the first Caliph of Islam
Abu Bakr. But this Arabisation drive Bhagwat Ji I suspect is quite
like Sansakritisation ---in search of respectability, status and
imagination at work. It's quite likely that my forefathers were Hindus
and "untouchable".
"Imagine Islam's appeal to one who is constantly told he is too
"impure" to be allowed entry inside a temple . Imagine the doors of a
mosque being flung open to him with invite--- Come, stand shoulder-to-
shoulder with the rest of us. No hierarchy here, no caste, no race,
"Sab ka Malik ek" . Who says you are too impure to enter a holy space
or hold a holy text ? Here's the Quran . Its your as much as anyone
else's Touch it, hold it, read it, kiss it, store it in your heart and
mind."
Last update : 08-11-2009 13:06
RSS and Mohan Bhagwat are just the props. Javed Anand's real target is
Hinduism.
"Imagine , Bhagwatji, does this not sound like celestial music to the
outcast such as my forefathers quite possibly were." Mr. Javed Anand
went on to write.
But evidently this did not sound like ‘celestial music to the
"outcast" brothers of the ancestors of Javed Anand otherwise after
fourteen hundred years of Islam's presence in India, with roughly half
of it as its rulers, and all the lollipops thrown at them with
accompanying privileges of belonging to the community of the rulers,
the problem of "outcasts" in Hinduism would not have existed. The fact
is that despite the open arms of Islam as Javed Anand claims, the
"outcasts" of Hinduism did not opt for Islam. Even in Pakistan where
even today every non-Muslim is treated as second class citizen and the
"outcast" Hindus even worse, the minuscule minority community of
"outcast" Hindus have not been attracted by this "celestial" music of
Islam. There are other reasons why the speculative "outcast" ancestors
of Javed Anand became Muslims.
Let us briefly review what might have been the reasons of Javed
Anand's ancestors conversion to Islam - "outcasts" or not.
•1. Early history:
Islam came to India with the Arab traders when Arabia was converted to
Islam. The new converts to Islam - who have been coming to India as
Arabs since long before Islam was born - were free to practice their
new religion. They were given land grants to build their mosques and
freedom to preach and convert from the local population while the
Prophet of Islam had wished to expel all pagans from the Arabian
peninsula. (Sahih Bukhari, vol. 4) There is no evidence that the
"celestial music" of Islam attracted many, if any, converts from the
"outcasts" of Hindu society even though there was no restrictions upon
their leaving the Hindu fold. Even in Arabia the conversion was not
all that an easy matter. Biographies of Prophet Muhammad and the
Koranic verses are a testimony to it. Those who did not convert were
given the status of dhimmies and a special tax named jiziya was
levied upon them. Islam's appeal in Arabia even after conversion must
not have been all that great so that the Prophet of Islam made leaving
Islam a crime punishable with death. Wonder why would anyone ever want
to leave the "celestial" music of Islam?
•2. Medieval History:
2a. Muslim Invaders: Every Muslim invader starting with bin Kasim who
came to India demolished and plundered Hindu temples. Killed all the
males and enslaved women and children - at times carried them off by
the hundreds of thousands to Arabia and Central Asian countries to be
sold off as slaves. At one point, there were so many Hindu slaves in
Ghazni that it looked like an Indian city. Men of honor in India were
working as domestic help in Afghanistan and beyond. Lakhs perished in
what is now - for good reason - called Hindukush. Those who converted
to Islam were spared. Desire to live as decent human being is a common
human weakness - no wonder many converted to Islam just to survive -
not necessarily the "outcasts" of Hindu society; most of them were the
elite of the Hindu society. When the invaders went back, those who
converted reverted back to the practice of Hinduism. But repeated
invasions and even harder treatment meted out to those who
reconverted, they found it expedient to remain Muslims in name even
though for long times they continued their infidel Hindu ways. Some
still do even after centuries of conversion. Thus it was found
necessary to start Tabligh movement to rid the practice of "evil"
infidel ways among the converted Muslims. This has been a continued
and still prevalent practice among the converted and the Tabligh
jamaat still has a Herculean task on its shoulders.
2b. Muslim Sultans: Muslim Sultans made the life of infidel Hindus
unbearable. According to sharia, jiziya and disproportionately heavy
taxes were imposed on the infidels. Sultan Ala-ud-din Khilji demanded
from learned men of Islam rules and regulations, so that the Hindu
should be ground down, and property and possessions, which are the
cause of disaffection and rebellion, should not remain in his house.
Qazi Mughisud-din of Bayana whom Ala-ud-din consulted as to the
legality of his measures towards Hindus, wholeheartedly justified Ala-
ud-din's rigorous policy and "pointed out that Islamic law sanctioned
sterner principle, so much so that, ‘if the revenue collector spits
into a Hindu's mouth, the Hindu must open his mouth to receive it
without hesitation." Ala-ud-din was gratified to learn that his
treatment of the Hindus was in full accordance with Islamic law and
assured the Qazi that he had given orders that the Hindu will not be
allowed to possess more than what is required for a bare
subsistence." (The History and Culture of the Indian People, vol. 6,
Bombay, 1990, pp. 24-25)
Could it be that the ancestors of Javed Anand - not necessarily the
"outcast" of Hindu society -- converted to Islam under these
circumstances?
2c. Akbar: Hindus got a little respite under relatively enlightened
policies of the third Mughal Emperor Akbar. He abolished the much
hated jiziya tax and treated non-Muslims in a more tolerant manner. He
let the Hindu princesses whom he married and were married to his sons
practice Hindu rituals in his palace contrary to usual practice of
converting them to Islam. He invited different religions for open
debate. This was not much liked by the orthodox Ulema and they accused
Akbar of apostasy of which there is no evidence. Akbar at best died an
eclectic. His death was celebrated by the orthodox ulema.
2d. Aurangzeb: Whatever goodwill was created by Akbar was soon undone
by his successors. Aurangzeb was the most orthodox of the Mughal
emperors. He has been called a ‘living pir' and is reported to have
memorized the entire Koran. His zealotry for Islam went beyond all
bounds of a sovereign. In the twelfth year of Emperor's reign' the
Vishwanath temple at Benaras, which seems to have been rebuilt, and
Keshav Rai temple at Mathura were demolished. Aurangzeb revived the
policy of demolishing temples in the wake of military campaigns which
had been followed by Delhi Sultans and occasionally by Shahjahan. In
pursuance of this policy hundreds of temples across India from Kuch
Bihar to Deccan were ruthlessly destroyed. Firman was issued that no
new temples should be built. Temples which were built in the past ten /
twelve years were classified in this category and while old temples
were spared but repairs to them were banned. Conversion to Islam was
officially promoted. The Emperor presided over the ceremony of
conversion as often as he could - these conversions were not from the
"outcasts" of Hindu society but from the zamindars, and influential
Rajputs and Jats who converted to gain favor with the ruling monarch.
(Shah Wali-Allah and his Times, SAA Rizvi, Australia, 1980, pp. 90)
S A A Rizvi observes:
"Gradually, criminals and corrupt and dishonest revenue officials
began to expiate their crimes by embracing Islam. (pp. 90)"
In 1679 officials were issued orders to realize the jiziya from non-
Muslims. The jiziya was so designed that its impact was the heaviest
on the poorest section of Hindu society who were subsequently deprived
of almost entire income from their property. This was all part of
deliberate policy to force the poorer section of Hindus to embrace
Islam. (ibid pp. 92)
Quoting Mirat-I Ahmadi Rizvi writes that the entire attention of the
Aurangzeb was directed towards strengthening the ‘manifest faith' and
to mold all affairs of the state - financial and political - according
to the sharia. In 1665, customs duty on the goods of Muslims was
levied at two and half percent and of Hindus at five percent. In 1667,
the duty on Muslims goods was totally forbidden. He issued a decree
that all posts of head clerk and above be filled with Muslims. (ibid
pp. 88)
2e. Shah Wali-Allah:
A contemporary of Abdul Wahhab of Saudi Arabia, Shah Wali-Allah's
(1703 - 1762) influence on Muslim thought in India cannot be
overemphasized.
Muslim historian I H Qureshi, (had been member of the Indian as well
as Pakistan Historical Records Commission, of the Council of the
Indian and Pakistan Institutes of International Affairs, of the
executive committees of the Indian History Conference and Pakistan
historical Society). wrote:
"Shah Wali-ullah was a man of encyclopedic learning. He was not one of
those scholars who keep different branches of knowledge in different
chambers of their mind.....The world has not produced many scholars
like him....During his lifetime his greatness was recognized by his
contemporaries and his claim to that he was MUJADDID - renewer of the
Faith -- of his century was not challenged by any one." (Ulema in
Politics -- I H Qureshi, Delhi, 1985, pp 126)
Shah Wali-Ullah is regarded as one of the greatest Muslim thinkers of
all times. This is just to emphasize what position Shah Wali-Ullah
holds in Islam and what his views about Hindus and proselytization
were?
"They (Imams) should preach that other religions were worthless since
their founders were not perfect, and their practice was opposed to
divine law, interpolations having made them unbelievable......" (Shah
Wali-Allah and His Times, SAA Rizvi, Australia, 1980, pp. 286)
"Another means of ensuring conversions was to prevent other religious
communities from worshipping their own gods. Moreover, unfavorable
discriminating laws should be imposed on non-Muslims in matters of
rules of retaliation, compensation for manslaughter and marriage, and
in political matters." (ibid pp. 286)
To streamline the Mughal administration, he wrote to Emperor Ahmad
Shah: " Strict orders should be issued in all Islamic towns forbidding
religious ceremonies publicly practiced by the infidels."(ibid pp.
294)
Most of Muslim rulers in fact did exactly the same, and many Muslim
countries do it even today. Saudi Arabia is the prime example. In
Saudi Arabia practice of any religion other than Islam is illegal. It
is reminiscent of the laws decreed by many Muslims rulers of India.
Aurangzeb, as stated above, had issued orders to ban public practice
of Hindu religion, construction of new temples and repair of old
ones.
"However, the proselytization programme of Shah Wali-Allah only
included the leaders of the Hindu community. The low class of the
infidels, according to him, were to be left alone to work in the
fields and for paying jizya. They, like beasts of burden and
agricultural livestock, were to be kept in abject misery and
despair."(ibid, pp. 286)
And the same people want us to believe Muslims have no caste
distinction. Even when Hindus were converted to Islam Hindus of higher
caste got relatively better treatment than the Hindus of the lower
castes. But still local converted Hindus were never treated as equal
to foreign Muslims. All Muslim administrations were full of first
generation Muslims from all over the Muslim world or their descendants
-- not of local converted Muslims.
2 f. Conversion from Buddhists:
"As far Buddhists, I am unable to see what possible incentive there
was for them to abandon their faith." Javed Anand wrote. Javed is
right, Buddhists had no incentive to convert to Islam and for that
matter neither did the Hindus or the Jains or the Zoroastrians.
Khurasan, Persis, Irak, Mosul, and the country up to the border of
Syria was Buddhistic. First Zoroastrians banished them from these
countries and pushed them to east of Balkh. Then came Islam and all
remnants of Buddhism were wiped off from Afghanistan and Central Asia.
(Alberuni's India, Delhi, 1993, pp. 21) Buddhist center at Nalanda was
wrecked by the marauders of Bakhtiyar Khilji about 1200 CE beyond
recovery, thus ending a continuous tradition of refuge and meeting-
place for ascetics which went back to the centuries before the Buddha.
(Indigenous Indians, Elst, Delhi, 1993, pp. 424) If anything was left,
the lofty statues of Buddha, carved on a mountain side were taken care
of the proud students of Islam - Taliban - in 2001.
True, Buddhists had no incentive to convert but Buddhism was destroyed
root and branch in Muslim territory but not in Hindu territory.
(Indigenous Indians, Elst, Delhi, 1993, pp. 424)
•3. Modern Times:
3a. Twentieth Century: In modern times, in the last century also there
were many conversions to Islam. The ones in Malabar, Noakhali, the
Punjab in 1947 stand out. All this is rather recent history and
details are easily available. All these conversions in the last
century were the result of matter of survival for the converted
whether it was Malabar or Noakhali or the killing grounds of Punjab in
the aftermath of the partition. The "outcasts" of the Hindu society
didn't exactly run to the mosques to hear its "celestial" music. On
the other hand let us see what the most outstanding leader of the
"outcasts" did?
3b. "Outcasts of Hindu society": There is no more prominent "outcast"
of Hindu society than Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar. He is in all likelihood
the greatest intellectual of all times among the "outcast" - a term
Javed Anand likes to use. Dr. Ambedkar had carried out thorough
research of the genesis of Hindu caste system and Hindu scriptures,
Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. He renounced Hinduism but neither
did the "celestial music" of Islam nor its open doors lure him into
the lap of Islam. He spurned all offers to convert to Islam and
Christianity and opted for Buddhism. Why?
"Nothing is infallible. Nothing is binding forever. Everything is
subject to inquiry and examination.": Ambedkar wrote. (Dr. Ambedkar,
Writings as and Speeches, vol. 3, Govt. of Maharashtra, 1987 , pp 442,
quoted in Indigenous Indians, Koenraad Elst, New Delhi,1993, pp. 390)
This is quite in contrast to Islamic belief where "the Koran is the
word of God, immutable and unalterable; it contains guidelines which a
Muslim must follow." It is beyond any question or doubt. It must be
accepted as the Final Truth - the Last Word of Allah.
Not only Ambedkar did not convert to Islam he was opposed to Scheduled
castes converting to Islam. After Partition the scheduled caste
politician J N Mandal was given a seat in the Pakistani cabinet as a
showpiece to lure the Scheduled castes to convert to Islam. J N Mandal
accepted this against the advice of Ambedkar. It was a great
disappointment for Mandal and soon after he resigned.
(http://www.hvk.org/specialarts/mandal/mandal.html)
Ambedkar complained that Pakistan was not allowing the Scheduled
castes to emigrate to India and was forcibly converting them to Islam.
In order to increase the Muslim population, in Hyderabad also they
were being forcibly converted. He asked them not to put their faith
in Muslims or the Muslim League just because they do not like the
Hindus. It would be fatal for them to do so. He would see that all
those who were forcibly converted would be taken back into the fold,
he said. Whatever the oppression and tyranny the Hindus practised in
them, it should not warp their vision and swerve them from their
duty." (Indigenous Indians, Koenraad Elst, New Delhi, 1993, pp.
402-3)
•4. Conclusion
There are many faults in Hinduism. At least Hindus are aware of them
and they are working at it. But as seen above, any of the fault lines
has nothing to do with their conversion to Islam. Moreover, Hinduism
is not stuck in a fixed time frame. What was true of Hinduism
yesterday no longer holds true today and Hinduism of tomorrow will be
altogether a different entity. Whatever, Mr. Javed Anand might say or
think casteism is not the soul of Hinduism.
However, there is no historical evidence whatsoever to suggest that
the "outcasts" - a term Javed Anand likes to use - were so charmed by
the "celestial" music of Islam that they jumped into its arms as the
doors of mosques were flung open. Again, only six decades ago, Hindus
suffered untold misery of life and property but came to India. They
could have converted to Islam and stayed in the only land they had
ever known in history.
If it was the "evil" caste system of Hindus that "lured" them to the
"celestial" music of Islam, what made the Zoroastrians, Egyptians, the
Anatolians, the Kurds, the Buddhists, the Afghans, the Pagans of
Arabia - to convert to Islam? There runs a common thread.
Hinduism is open - there are no bars for people who want to leave it.
To the contrary Islam has to keep its door closed so that people don't
run out of it and thus made apostasy from Islam a crime punishable
with death.
Last, but not the least, Javed Anand, ruling out Jains as his
ancestors, wrote "Jains? No way , they are not interested in Mughlai
cousin." Javed thinks whoever converted to Islam was for a big
gourmet Mughlai dinner. What a sick sense of humor if he thinks it is
humorous. How I wish the Muslims had restricted their conversion
frenzy only to those who were interested in Mughlai feast.
http://voi.org/20091108287/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/tbd.html
On Hindu Cowardice and Muslim Bravery
By Vinod Kumar, on 10-01-2010 07:32
There is common perception that Hindus are cowards and Muslims are
brave. Even Mahatma Gandhi went on to write: "Hindu is a coward and a
Muslim a bully by nature."
This perception mostly results from the fact that a small number of
Muslims were able to defeat the Hindus and rule over them for
centuries.
If one were to analyze the underlying causes that led to the defeat of
the Hindus, there is no evidence to suggest that the Hindu is coward
-- Hindus just have different ideology -- a different set of
priorities and ideas about nature of things.
Hindu defeats were more intellectual and cultural. Muslims brought a
new ideology and a new kind of warfare to India -- one that at first
the Hindus did not understand. And today when they fully understand
it, they are not willing to adopt it.
The Hindu mind regarding "religious" warfare was first expressed by
none else than Alberuni, a scholar in Greek, Farsi and Arabic and an
astronomer in his own right, who came to India with Mahmud Ghaznavi,
stayed in India, learnt Sanskrit, read extensively all Hindu
literature, wrote 20 books including translations on India. In his
still available book Indica, he went on to observe:
"On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological
topics among themselves; at the utmost they fight with words, but they
will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious
controversy."
Hindus believed in open discussion of theological topics but did not
kill each other for their opinions and they could not understand why
would one kill others for differing on matter of theology or imposing
their own ideas on others.
Almost thousand years later, talking of the betrayal of king Dahir of
Debal, V S Naipaul went on to explain the Hindus' reaction to Muslim
invasions in the following words:
"It is the first of the betrayals that will assist the Arab conquest.
But they are not betrayals, really. They are no more than the actions
of people who understand only that power is power, and believe they
are changing rulers; they cannot conceive that a new way is about to
come."
Last update : 10-01-2010 07:34
Hindu kings, before Islam, fought incessantly but it made no
difference to general public -- they were not asked to change their
religion, their women were not raped, their temples and cities were
not plundered and desecrated. The war did not touch their personal
lives. All they got was another king.
A new way did dawn upon India after the conquest of Muhammad bin Kasim
but the cultural moorings of Hindu were so strong that they refused to
learn the new ways of Islam. That would have meant giving up Hinduism.
While civilizations of Arabia, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran and
others crumbled before the Islamic onslaught, Hindus withstood it for
centuries. Had the Hindus been cowards, India today would have been a
purely Islamic state. They refused to be annihilated and were not
desirous of annihilating even the aggressor. Religious warfare, as
Alberuni observed, has no place in their ideology.
It is not Hindus lack of understanding of these new ways even after
almost 1300 years and even when Hindus were massacred in Pakistan,
they failed to retaliate in India. Even today after all the massacres
of Hindus in Kashmir, the Hindus don't want to fight in the name of
religion. Secularism in India is not an empty slogan or mere cosmetic
-- it is the very basis of Hindu beliefs and that is why a common
Hindu is still ashamed of Babri masjid demolition while a Muslim -- of
Hindu ancestry -- has no qualms or shame of the destruction of tens of
thousands of Hindu temples by Muslim invaders. The difference in
behavior is nothing but the ideology that one follows -- both have the
same genetic pool in their blood stream.
It is not without reason that despite what has been visited upon the
Hindus by the Muslims, Hindu India is still a secular country while
there is not a single Muslim country that subscribes to the ideal of
secularism. M J Akbar in his book The Siege within India admits that
India is secular because it is a Hindu majority country.
As far as Hindu bravery is concerned -- it is well documented in the
annals of Muslim victors themselves -- I need not go into details of
that. It is the Hindu psyche that refuses to act contrary to their
long held beliefs that killing in the name of religion is not the
right thing to do.
The success of the Muslim invaders came not from their being a martial
or superior race or being physically stronger -- it were the same
Arabs who had not done any "brave" acts other than trading in entire
history before Islam -- it was only after they took on the ideology of
Islam that preached them to be cruel to all infidels and spread the
"TRUE FAITH" that they went on the rampage. The Buddhist Afghans had
lived with their Buddhist/Hindu neighbors for a millennium -- it was
only after they adopted the creed of Islam that they went on the
rampage on those very people with whom they shared history and
culture.
A study of the lives and teachings of Muhammad and Buddha, Mahavir and
even Gandhi today will explain why the Muslims and the Hindus behave
the way they do. Physically and genetically an Indian/Pakistani Muslim
is no different from his Hindu compatriot -- it is the ideology that
one follows that makes the difference. It is the ideology that makes
them act so differently from each other.
The Vedic "Ekam satya, viprah bahuda vadanti" -- there is one truth
but people call it by different names -- is deeply engraved on and
continues to control the Hindu mind and actions while the Koranic
injunctions "Islam is the only true faith" and "Those who do not
believe in Our revelations shall be inheritors of Hell" continue to
guide the minds and lives of Muslims.
http://voi.org/20100110336/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/onhinducowardiceandmuslimbravery.html
India As Alberuni Saw It
By Vinod Kumar, on 17-01-2010 04:19
Abu Rihan Muhammad bin Ahmad, Alberuni as his compatriots called him
was born about A.D. 973, in the territory of modern Khiva, then called
Khwarizm. He came to as Ghazni as a prisoner of war1. He was an
astronomer, geometrician, historian and logician. He was so studious,
his earliest biographer tells us "he never had a pen out of his hand,
nor his eye ever off a book, and his thoughts were ever directed to
his studies, with the exception of two days in the year". He was
beyond comparison, superior to every man of his time in the art of
composition, in scholarlike accomplishments, and in the knowledge of
geometry and philosophy, and above all he had "most rigid regard for
truth."2 He accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni to India and stayed there for
many years, chiefly, in all probability in the Punjab, studied the
Sanskrit language and translated into it some works from the Arabic,
and translated from it two treatises into Arabic3. Sachau, translator
of Alberuni's Indica believes Alberuni "composed about twenty books on
India4, both translations and original compositions, and a number of
tales and legends, mostly derived from the ancient lore of Eran and
India." He was indeed a prolific writer and his works are stated to
have exceeded a camel-load.5
Let me also make another observation about Alberuni. He regards Hindus
as excellent philosophers and he felt strong inclination towards Hindu
philosophy but still he was a Muslim and at times does not fail to
point out the superiority of Islam over Brahmanic India. He attacks
Arabs but not Islam6. He wrote for those Muslims who "want to converse
with the Hindus, and to discuss with them the questions of religion,
science, or literature, on the very basis of their own civilization."7
While discussing astronomical calculations regarding the order of the
planets, their distances and sizes, he reminds the reader the purpose
of his book once again --- to discuss subjects "which either are
noteworthy for their strangeness, or which are unknown among our own
people (the Muslims) and our (the Muslim) countries."8
Having given a brief introduction, let us now see what Alberuni had to
say about India, the land, its people, its religion, its philosophy,
its sciences, and its literature.
•1. Hindu Muslim Differences:
Alberuni starts Indica by observing "the Hindus entirely differ from
us in every respect"9. First and foremost difference is the language.
Sanskrit is a language of enormous range, both in words and in
inflections. They call one and the same thing by various names and
unless one knows the context in which the word is spoken. Some of the
sounds of consonants are neither identical nor resemble with the
Arabic and Persian. And the Hindus write their scientific books in
metrics so that they can be committed to memory and thus prevented
from corruption. This metrical form of literary composition makes the
study of Sanskrit particularly difficult.10
Not only the language, the Hindus totally differ from us (Muslims) in
religion, as "we believe in nothing in which they believe" and vice
versa. He goes on to observe that on theological topics "at the utmost
they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or
their property on religious controversy."11 Instead, he noted, all
their fanaticism is directed against foreigners whom they call
mlecchas i.e. impure and forbid any connection with them12. The Hindus
have concepts of pollution and never desire that once thing is
polluted, it should be purified and thus recovered. They are not
allowed receive anybody who does not belong to them, even if he wished
to be inclined to their religion13, he went on to write.
He wrote the customs and manners the Hindus differ so completely from
the Muslims that "they frighten their children with us, our dress and
our ways and customs" and decree us as "devil's breed". They regard
"everything we do as opposite of all that is good and proper".14 Some
of the reasons of Hindus' repugnance of Muslims are complete
banishment of Buddhists from countries from Khurasan, Persis, Irak,
Mosul and Syria, first by the Zoroastrians and then by Islam. And then
Muhammad ibn Elkasim entered India proper, conquered the cities of
Bahmanwa and Mulsthan and went as far as Kanauj -- "all these events
planted a deeply rooted hatred in their hearts."15
And then Sabuktagin choosing the holy war as his calling, called
himself a Ghazi, built those roads on Indian frontier which his son
Sultan Yamin-uddaula Mahmud, during a period of thirty years, used to
utterly ruin "the prosperity of the country, and performed those
wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust
scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of
the people." He goes on to say "their scattered remains cherish, of
course, the most inveterate aversion towards all Muslims."16
Alberuni does not talk much about Mahmud whom he calls "the lion of
the world, the wonder of his time" when he remembers him for
"breaking the strongest pillar of religion", 17 and his raids into
India, except a few times. Once about his ruining the prosperity of
the country as quoted above and second when he writes of his
demolition of the idol, in the year A.H. 416, at Somnath much revered
by the Hindus. The upper part of the idol was demolished and the lower
part transported to his residence in Ghazni with all its trappings.
One part of it, along with the bronze idol of Chakraswamin from
Thanesar, was thrown into the hippodrome and another part before the
door of the mosque of Ghazni, on which people rub their feet to clean
them from dirt and wet. 18
•2. On Hindus customs:
He found Hindus to be very proud of their country, their kings, their
religion, their sciences to the extent that he thought them to be
"haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited and stolid."19
Many customs of the Hindus, he observed, differ from Muslims' "to such
a degree as to appear to us simply monstrous." Hindu customs, not
only, not resemble to Muslim customs but are the very reverse; and if
ever a custom of theirs resembles one of the Muslims, it has certainly
the opposite meaning. He goes on to say that it seems as if "they
(Hindus) had intentionally changed into the opposite".20
What are these customs of the Hindus that he observed that he thought
were the opposite of theirs?
"The Hindus eat singly, one by one, on a tablecloth of dung. They do
not make use of the remainder of a meal, and the plates from which
they have eaten are thrown away if they are earthen."
"They drink wine before having eaten anything, then they take their
meal. They drink the stall of cows but they do not eat their meat."
"In all consultations and emergencies they take advice of the women."
"They do not seek permission to enter a house, but when they leave it
they ask permission to do so."
"In their meetings they sit cross-legged."
"They magnify the nouns of their language by giving them the feminine
gender, as the Arabs magnify them by diminutive form."
"They consider the crepitus ventris as a good omen, sneezing as a bad
omen."
"They write the title of the book at the end of it, not at the
beginning".21
Last update : 17-01-2010 04:26
•3. Hindu Arithmetic:
On Hindu arithmetic Alberuni observed the Hindus do not use the
letters of their alphabet for numerical notation, as Muslims use the
Arabic letters in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. The use of Arabic
letters for numerals must not have been in wide use when Alberuni
wrote c.1030 CE, for these have been communicated to the Arabs in the
eighth and ninth centuries as he goes on to accept that "the numeral
signs which we use have been derived from the finest forms of Hindu
signs." Having observed the names of the orders of the numbers in
various languages he had come in contact with, Alberuni found that no
nation goes beyond the thousand including the Arabs. Those who beyond
the thousand in their numeral system are the Hindus who extend the
names of the orders of numbers until the 18th order.22
Pulisa has adpoted the relation between the circumference and
diameter of a circle to be 3 177/1250 which comes out to 3.1416.23
•4. Astronomy and sciences:
While ancient puranic traditions about the earth and heavens and their
creation still existed, but these were in direct opposition to the
scientific truths known to Indian astronomers.
While it is not possible to mention all the theories and concepts
prevalent at the time, let it suffice to say what some of the ideas
of Hindu astronomers that Alberuni found interesting were. Quoting
Brahamgupta, Alberuni wrote:
"Several circumstances, however, compel us to attribute globular shape
to both the earth and the heaven, viz. the fact that the stars rise
and set in different places at different times, so that, e.g. a man in
Yamakoti observes one identical start rising above the western
horizon, whilst a man in Rum at the same time observes it rising above
the eastern horizon. Another argument to the same effect is this, that
a man on Meru observes one identical star above the horizon in the
zenith of Lanka, the country of demons, whilst a man in Lanka at the
same time observes it above his head. Besides all astronomical
observations are not correct unless we assume the globular shape of
heaven and earth. Therefore we must declare that heaven is a globe,
and the observation of these characteristics of the world would not be
correct unless in reality it were a globe. Now it is evident that all
other theories about the world are futile." 24
Quoting Varahmira, he further continues:
"Mountains, seas, rivers, trees, cities, men, and angels, all are
around the globe of the earth. And if Yamakoti and Rum are opposite to
each other, one could not say that the one is low in relation to the
other, since low does not exist.... Every one speaks of himself, 'I am
above and the others are below,' whilst all of them are around the
globe like the blossoms springing on the branches of a Kadamba-tree.
They encircle it on all the sides, but each individual blossom has the
same position as the other, neither one hanging downward nor then
other standing upright." He emphasized: "For the earth attracts that
which is upon her, for it is the below towards all directions, and
heaven is the above towards all directions."
There was no consensus about the resting or movement of the earth.
Aryabahata thought that the earth is moving and the heaven resting.
Many astronomers contested this saying were it so, stones and trees
would fall from earth. But Brahamgupta did not agree with them saying
that that would not happen apparently because he thought all heavy
things are attracted towards the center of the earth.26
The above gives some idea as to the nature of discussion in astronomy
at that time but Sachau observes these ideas had not changes much
since the eighth century when the knowledge of Hindu sciences were
communicated to the Arabs.
On the topic of ocean tides, Alberuni wrote that the educated Hindus
determine the daily phases of the tides by the rising and setting of
the moon, the monthly phases by the increase and waning of the moon;
but the physical cause of the both phenomenon is not understood by
them.27
The Hindus have cultivated numerous branches of science and have
boundless literature, which with his knowledge, he could comprehend.
He wished he could have translated Panchtantra which in Arabia was
known as the not book of Kalila and Dimna.28
•5. Hindu Laws:
Hindu laws, Alberuni observed are derived from their rishis, the
pillars of their religion and not from the prophets i.e. Narayana..
"Narayana only comes into this world in the form of human figure to
set the world right when things have gone wrong. Hindus can easily
abrogate their laws for they believe such changes are necessitated by
the change of nature of man. Many things which are now forbidden were
allowed before". 29
•6. On pilgrimage and sacred places:
Pilgrimages, Alberuni noted, are not obligatory for the Hindus, but
"facultative and meritorious". Most of the venerated places are
located in the cold regions round mount Meru.30
About the construction of Holy ponds, let me quote his own words:
"In every place to which some particular holiness is ascribed, the
Hindus construct ponds intended for the ablutions. In this they have
attained to a very degree of art, so that our people (the Muslims),
when they see them, wonder at them, and are unable to describe them,
much less to construct anything like them. They build them of great
stones of enormous bulk, joined to each other by sharp and strong
cramp-irons, in the form of steps (or terraces) like so many ledges;
and these terraces run all around the pond, reaching to a height of
more than a man's stature. On the surface of the stones between two
terraces they construct staircases rising like pinnacles. Thus the
first step or terraces are like roads 9leading up and down). If ever
so many people descend to the pond whilst others ascend, they do not
meet each other, and the road is never blocked, because there are so
many terraces, and the ascending person can always turn aside to
another terrace than on which the descending people go. By this
arrangement all troublesome thronging is avoided."31
May be what he had in mind was Chand Baori well near Jaipur built in
9th century..
http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/FBBBCA69-8F08-4DCD-A351-9E93D9D31EBC/
•7. Hindu caste system:
No discussion of India would be complete without observation on the
contemporary caste system and rightly so Alberuni does miss it. He
describes the traditional division of Hindu society along the four
Varnas and the Antyaja -- who are not reckoned in any caste; but makes
no mention of any oppression of low caste by the upper castes. Much,
however the four castes differ from each other, they live together in
the same towns and villages, mixed together in the same houses and
lodgings. The Antyajas are divided into eight classes -- formed into
guilds -- according to their professions who freely intermarry with
each other except with the fuller, shoemaker and the weaver. They live
near the villages and towns of the four castes but outside of them.32
On the eating customs of the four castes, he observed that when eating
together, they form a group of their own caste, one group not
comprising a member of another caste. Each person must have his own
food for himself and it is not allowed to eat the remains of the meal.
They don't share food from the same plate as that which remains in the
plate becomes after the first eater has taken part, the remains of the
meal.33
Alberuni wrote extensively on India and on many aspects. It is
impossible to cover every topic in a rather small article but I have
tried to give some of the points which would look strange or were not
known to the Muslims.
1 Sachau E C, Alberuni's India, Low Price Publications, New Delhi,
1993, pp. viii
2 Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as told by its own
historians, Low Price Publications, New Delhi, 1996, vol. II, pp. 2
3 ibid., pp. 5
4 Sachau, pp. xxvii
5 Elliot and Dowson, vol. II, pp. 3
6 Sachau, pp.185,
7 Sachau, pp. xvii, xix, xxiii
8 Sachau, pp. ii - 80
9 Sachau, pp. 17
10 Sachau, pp.18-19
11Sachau, pp. 19
12 Sachau, pp. 19
13 Sachau, pp. 20
14 Sachau, pp. 20
15 Sachau, pp. 21
16 Sachau, pp. 22
17 Sachau, pp. ii - 2
18 Sachau, pp. ii - 103
19 Sacahu, pp. 22
20 Sachau, pp. 179
21 Sachau, pp. 180-2
22 Sachau, pp. 174
23 Sachau, pp. 169
24 Sachau, pp. 268
25 Sacahu, pp. 272
26 Sachau, pp. 276-7
27 Sachau, pp ii-105
28 Sachau, pp. 159
29 Sacahu, pp. 106 - 7
30 Sachau, pp. ii - 142
31 Sacahu, pp. ii144 - 5
32 Sachau. Pp. 101
33 Sachau, pp. 102
http://voi.org/20100117341/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/indiaasalberunisawit.html
From The Pages of History
By Vinod Kumar, on 31-01-2010 11:06
Earth's Rotation, Globular Shape and Gravity
When we talk of the earth going around the sun as it has always done,
its globular shape, the different seasons, different lengths of day
and night, mind goes back to Galileo and Copernicus, scared to death,
holding the truth back lest the fury of the church falls upon them for
letting the world know the reality of nature. When one thinks of
gravity one thinks of Newton sitting under an apple tree watching an
apple fall to the ground and Newton proclaiming "Lo! there is
gravity."
If I were to say Hindu philosophers talked and wrote about gravity and
the globular shape of the earth centuries before Newton and Galileo
and Copernicus, and quoted Hindu sources, I would not only be
dismissed as a "fanatical Hindu communalist" by our 'all-knowing-
secular intellectuals' but also incur their wrath. And who wants
that?
In order to state the truth and make it acceptable to our 'all-knowing-
secular intellectuals' let me seek the help of a Muslim scholar from
Central Asia. Who around 1030 AD wrote a very comprehensive book
"Indica" about India -- its literature, its philosophy, its religion,
its culture, its languages, its history, its geography, its customs,
its sciences including astronomy. I am talking about Abu-Raihan
Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Alberuni -- a scholar and a devout genuine Muslim
by all standards.
Before I go into what Alberuni wrote let us take some time to find out
more about this man -- Alberuni.
In the words of Edward Sachau -- translator of Alebruni's 'Indica':
"Mahmud marched into the country, not without some fighting,
established there one of his generals as provincial governor, and soon
returned to Ghazna with much booty and a great part of Khiva troops,
together with the princes of the deposed family of Mamun and the
leading men of the country as prisoners of war or as hostages. Among
the last was Abu-Raihan Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Alberuni. This happened in
the spring and summer of AD 1017."
"When he (Alberuni) was brought to Ghazna as a hostage, he enjoyed the
reputation of a great 'munajjim' i.e. "astrologer - astronomer". By
the time he wrote 'Indica' thirteen years later after his involuntary
immigration to Afghanistan, he was a master of astrology, both
according to the Greek and the Hindu systems.
"Alberuni felt a strong inclination towards Indian philosophy. He
seems to have thought that the philosophers both in ancient India and
Greece, held in reality the very same ideas, the same as seem to have
been his own i.e. of pure monotheism. He seems to have to have reveled
in the pure theories of Bhagavad-Gita. ... There can scarcely be any
doubt that the Muslims of later times would have found fault with him
for going to such length in his interest for these heathenish
doctrines" observes Sachau, but "still he was Muslim, whether Sunni or
Shia cannot be gathered from Indica. He sometimes takes an occasion
for pointing out to the reader the superiority of Islam over
Brahamanical India... He dares not attack Islam but attacks the
Arabs."
What was the object of his writing 'Indica'?
"The object which the author had in view and never for a moment lost
sight of, was to afford the necessary information and training to any
one (in Islam) who wants to converse with the Hindus, and to discuss
with them questions of religion, science, or literature, on the very
basis of their own civilization."
Alberuni came to India with Mahmud and stayed there. He learnt
Sanskrit and Hindu literature and sciences and indeed wrote a very
comprehensive book about India of those days. As a Muslim he praises
the 'wonderful exploits of Mahmud saying: "Mahmud utterly ruined the
prosperity of the country, and performed those wonderful exploits, by
which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all
directions" but as a scholar he laments "this is the reason, too, why
Hindu sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country
conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet
reach, to Kashmir, Benares, and other places."
It seems from above that his study was done in area which was under
Mahmud's control, most likely western Punjab. But still what he writes
is very illuminating. Let us now see what wrote about our subject:
astronomy in India and gravity and the solar system.
Quoting from Brahamgupta's Brahamsidhanta, Alberuni wrote:
"Several circumstances, however, compel us to attribute globular shape
to both the earth and the heaven, viz. the fact that the stars rise
and set in different places at different times, so that, e.g. a man in
Yamakoti observes one identical start rising above the western
horizon, whilst a man in Rum at the same time observes it rising above
the eastern horizon. Another argument to the same effect is this, that
a man on Meru observes one identical star above the horizon in the
zenith of Lanka, the country of demons, whilst a man in Lanka at the
same time observes it above his head. Besides all astronomical
observations are not correct unless we assume the globular shape of
heaven and earth. Therefore we must declare that heaven is a globe,
and the observation of these characteristics of the world would not be
correct unless in reality it were a globe. Now it is evident that all
other theories about the world are futile."
Last update : 31-01-2010 11:12
Earlier philosophers like Aryabhata, Vasishtha and Lata had also come
to the same conclusion and Alberuni goes on to quote Varahmira: "all
things which are perceived by the senses, are witness in favor of the
globular shape of the earth, and refute the possibility of its having
any other shape."
On the subject of the rotation of the earth Alberuni writes:
"As regards the resting of the earth, one of the elementary problems
of astronomy, which offers many and great difficulties, this, too, is
a dogma with the Hindu astronomers. Brahamgupta says in the
Brahamsiddhanta: 'some people maintain that the first motion (from
east to west) does not lie in the meridian, but belongs to the earth.
But Varahmira refutes them by saying: If that were the case, a bird
would not return to its nest as soon as it had flown away from it
towards the west.' And, in fact it is precisely as Varahmira says."
Alberuni agrees with Varahmira that earth does not rotate.
Alberuni goes on to quote Brahamgupta:
"The followers of Aryabhata maintain that the earth is moving and the
heaven resting. People have tried to refute them by saying that, if
such were the case, stones would and trees would fall from the earth.
Brahamgupta does not agree with them, and says that that would not
necessarily follow from their theory, apparently because he thought
that all heavy things are attracted towards the center of the earth.
He says: 'On the contrary, if that were the case, the earth would not
vie in keeping an even and uniform pace with the minutes of heaven,
the pranas of the times."
Alberuni does not agree with Brahamgupta and is unable to understand
the rotation of the earth and goes on to write:
"Supposing this to be true, and that the earth makes a complete
rotation eastward in so many breaths as heaven does according to his
(Brahamgupta's) view, we cannot see what should prevent the earth from
keeping an even and uniform pace with heaaven
Stubbornly he refuses to accept the theory of the rotation of the
earth and goes on to say:
"Besides, the rotation of the earth in no way impair the value of
astronomy, as all appearances of an astronomic character can quite as
well be explained according to this theory as to the other. There are,
however, other reasons which make it impossible."
Alberuni says he also has written a book on this subject in which ' we
have surpassed our predecessors' but does not tell what his theories
are?
On the question of gravity and other issues like top and bottom, high
and low, Alberuni quotes Brahamgupta and says:
"Scholars have declared that the globe of the earth is in the midst of
heaven, and that Mount Meru, the home of Devas, as well as Vadavamukha
below, is the home of their opponents; the Daitya and Dhanava belong
to it. But his below is according to them is only a relative one.
Disregarding this, we say that the earth on all its sides is the same;
all people on earth stand upright, and all heavy things fall down to
the earth by a law of nature, for it is the nature of the earth to
attract and to keep things, as it is the nature of water to flow, that
of fire to burn, and that of wind to set in motion... The earth is the
only low thing, and seeds always return to it, in whatever direction
you may throw them away, and never rise upwards from the earth."
Varahmira explains it further:
"Mountains, seas, rivers, trees, cities, men, and angels, all are
around the globe of the earth. And if Yamakoti and Rum are opposite to
each other, one could not say that the one is low in relation to the
other, since low does not exist.... Every one speaks of himself, 'I am
above and the others are below,' whilst all of them are around the
globe like the blossoms springing on the branches of a Kadamba-tree.
They encircle it on all the sides, but each individual blossom has the
same position as the other, neither one hanging downward nor then
other standing upright." He emphasized: "For the earth attracts that
which is upon her, for it is the below towards all directions, and
heaven is the above towards all directions."
Now these were the thoughts of Hindu philosophers as recorded by
Alberuni in the early part of the eleventh century and these had not
changed for centuries. Alberuni quotes heavily from Brahamgupta whose
Brahamsiddhanta was composed in AD 628. But it was Aryabhata, born in
AD 476, the first to hold that the earth was a sphere and rotated on
its axis and that the eclipses were not the work of Rahu but caused by
the shadow of the earth falling on the moon. His Aryabhatiya was
composed in AD 499.
It is clear from above that it was over a millennium before Galileo,
Copernicus and Newton that the Hindu philosophers had formulated the
theories about the globular shape and rotation of the earth and
gravity.
http://voi.org/20100131352/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/fromthepagesofhistory.html
My Name is Khan
By Vinod Kumar, on 15-03-2010 03:52
Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's pronouncement not to let Shah Rukh
Khan's starrer My Name Is Khan be screened in Mumbai created much
sensation around the world and publicity for the film -- the publicity
that it could not have bought at any cost. Actually, Bal Thackeray's
action had nothing to do with the film itself - it was all about Shah
Rukh's saying that Pakistan is "great neighbor" whatever Shah Rukh's
definiotn of a "great neighbor" is. But anyway, film's name My Name is
Khan and its oft publicized credo "My name is Khan and I am not a
terrorist" in itself is quite provocative.
The film though made in India is set in the USA and deals in the
aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks on the twin towers and the
pentagon. What was the purpose of making the film and declaring
basically that even though I am a Muslim but I am not terrorist? As
soon as the attacks happened American administration went out of its
way to insist and make a point that Islam has nothing to do with the
acts of terrorism and Muslims are patriotic citizens of the country.
So what was the point to go and tell the President of the United
States seven years after the act even though I am a Muslim, I am not a
terrorist - the President has been telling the world that from day
one. He need not be told what he has been proclaiming from day one.
If anyone that needed to be told the massage were the perpetrators of
the crime who carried out the act in the name of Islam.
Now then what was the film all about?
It seems the sole purpose the film was made was a propaganda for
Islam. But anything that is carried too far loses its appeal and that
is exactly what the film succeeded in achieving. Every film, every
story has to have some exaggeration to make a point - that is normal.
But when carried to beyond imagination and all limits, it turns
people off. The film may find appreciative audience in the Muslim
Middleast and other Islamic countries - and blind admirers of Shah
Rukh which are aplenty -- but it will turn off a neutral person. It
is difficult to imagine how Shah Rukh would have handled the character
of an autistic person had Dustin Hoffman not done the role in The Rain
Man - if the face of Shah Rukh is covered one would not know whether
it is him or Dustin. The story is weak.
Shah Rukh by doing the role has done a big disfavor to his image of
being a representative of the secular film industry of India. He is
now just an Islamic propagandist.
http://voi.org/20100315384/vinodkumar/column-vinodkumar/mynameiskhan.html
http://voi.org/vinodkumar/viewallarticles.html?list=1
Don't Block the 'Internet Hindus'
By Kanchan Gupta, on 15-03-2010 04:38
Hindus who are proud to assert their identity and fly the Tricolour
high have now found a new platform to have their say, the way they
want it, without fear of being shouted down. Tired of being derided by
pseudo-secularists in media who see nothing wrong with Muslim
communalism and Christian fundamentalism but are swift to pounce upon
Hindus for being ‘intolerant', their cultural ethos crudely denigrated
by the Left-liberal intelligentsia as antediluvian, Hindus have begun
to harness technology to strike back with deadly effect.
They are bright, they are well-educated, they are not burdened with
regional and caste biases, they are amazingly well-informed on
national issues and world affairs, they are rooted in Indian culture,
and they are politically alert. They hate being told they are wrong
when they know they are right. They have a mind of their own and
refuse to be led like sheep. Not surprisingly, they hold the Congress,
the Left and regional parties in contempt, as they do journalists who
cravenly ingratiate themselves with the establishment. For them, India
matters - and matters more than anything else. Meet the ‘Internet
Hindus'.
In recent days there has been a spate of articles disparaging the
‘Internet Hindus', variously describing them as "loonies", "fanatics",
"irrational", "Hindu Taliban" and, by an enraged news channel anchor,
"gutter snipes". Much of the criticism has come from left-of-centre
journalists who believe they have unfettered monopoly over media as
their inalienable birth right. Exalted members of Delhi's
commentariat, who are indistinguishable from the city's la-di-dah
socialites, tend to turn up their noses every time they hear the
phrase ‘Internet Hindus' as they would at the suggestion of travelling
by public transport. Others are given to contemptuously brushing aside
‘Internet Hindus' as being irrelevant and describing their views as
inconsequential. All this and more has neither dampened the spirit of
‘Internet Hindus' nor blunted their assertive attitude.
Here are some statistics, culled from an ongoing online survey, which
would help create a generic profile of ‘Internet Hindus'. The survey
is open to all Hindus who use the Internet; the response has been
overwhelming. Of those who have responded, 88.9 per cent have
identified themselves as ‘Internet Hindus', indicating they attach no
shame to the term though their critics would want them to feel
ashamed. Of the respondents, four per cent are aged 20 years and
below; 55 per cent are aged 30 and below; 31 per cent are 40 and
below; and, only 10 per cent are aged above 40. In brief, 90 per cent
of them are young Indians.
The educational profile of the respondents is awesome: 43 per cent are
graduates (most of them from top-notch engineering, science and
medical colleges); 46 per cent are post-graduates (a large number of
them have MBA degrees from the best B-schools); and, 11 per cent have
PhDs. It is understandable that none of them is unemployed. Those
without jobs are still studying (17.3 per cent) and can be found in
labs and classrooms of the best universities here and abroad. Of the
82.7 per cent who are employed, 3.1 per cent earn up to Rs 2 lakh a
year; 18.4 per cent earn up to Rs 6 lakh a year; 34.7 per cent earn up
to Rs 12 lakh a year; and, 26.5 per cent earn more than Rs 24 lakh a
year. Nearly 60 per cent of them frequently travel abroad on work and
holiday. Some 11 per cent have travelled abroad at least once.
Contrary to the impression that is being sought to be created by their
critics, ‘Internet Hindus' are open to ideas, believe in a plural, law-
abiding society and swear by the Constitution. They are often appalled
by the shenanigans of our politicians, including those of the BJP, and
are ruthless in decrying politics of identity and cynical vote-bank
policies. They have no gender prejudices and most of them think
banning FTV is downright silly in this day and age. The ‘Internet
Hindus' will not countenance denigration of their faith or biased
media coverage of events, but 91.9 per cent of them respect and accept
other religions. Asked if India is meant only for Hindus, an
overwhelming majority of them, responding to the survey, said, ‘Hell,
no!'
So why do they infuriate pseudo-secularists in media and make Delhi's
commentariat see red? There are three possible explanations. First,
the Net is beyond the control of those who control newspapers and news
channels. While the print and audiovisual media have for long excluded
contrarian opinion and denied space to those who disagree with absurd
notions of ‘secularism' or question the quality of reportage, the Net
has provided space to the ‘other' voice. Real time blog posts now
record the ‘other side' of the day's story ("The Prince was shouted
down in Bihar, not feted by students!"), Twitter affords instant micro-
blogging even as prime time news is being telecast ("That's not true.
I live in Bareilly. This is not how the riots began!"), and YouTube
allows unedited amateur videos of events (the Meraj riots, the
Islamist violence in Kashmir Valley) to be uploaded, giving the lie to
edited and doctored versions shown by news channels.
Second, unlike carefully selected ‘Letters to the Editor' in
newspapers and ‘Feedback' posted on news channel websites, the
reactions of ‘Internet Hindus', often savage and unflattering, cannot
be thrown into the dustbin or deleted with a click of the mouse.
English language media journalists, long used to fawning praise from
readers and viewers, are horrified that someone can actually call them
‘dumb' in public space and there's nothing they can do about it.
Third, the established elite, most of them middle-aged, are beginning
to feel threatened. Here's a new breed of Indians who have used merit
and not ‘connections' to make a mark in professional excellence, young
men and women who are educated and articulate, and are willing to
challenge conventional wisdom as preached by media ‘stars' who have
rarely, if ever, been questioned. The elite who dominate newspapers
and news channels are seen by ‘Internet Hindus' as part of India's
past, not future. As one ‘Internet Hindu' writes in his blog, "A large
number of ex-elite can't stomach fact that children of bankruptcy are
better travelled, better read and dominate the Internet!" Harsh, but
true.
We can describe the ‘Internet Hindus' as the "lunatic fringe", but
that won't change the fact that their tribe is growing by the day.
Soon, those on the fringe will move to the centre and their critics
will find themselves precariously perched on the fringe. The Right is
gaining ground as is the access and reach of the Net; newspapers and
news channels, the Left's last refuge, no longer command absolute
control over information flow. It would be unwise to ‘block' the voice
of ‘Internet Hindus', as then their clamour to be heard will further
increase and there is nothing we can do to silence them. The times
they are a-changin'.
Courtesy: http://www.dailypioneer.com/241956/Don't-block-the-‘Internet-Hindus'.html
http://voi.org/14mar2010/sourced/thepioneer/dontblocktheinternethindus.html
Editorial: The Guilty Men of Our Democracy
By The Editorial Team, on 15-03-2010 03:46
Gujarat and Anti-Sikh Riots
The law of the land should prevail. The highest and the mightiest
should respect the word and spirit of law. Otherwise the very
existence of democracy in the country would be threatened. It would be
a law of the jungle.
Yet, equally important is that the provisions of the Constitution that
provide for equality before law for however high or law, an individual
may be, irrespective of caste, creed and sex. But it is here that our
democracy is deficient.
The SIT constituted by the Supreme Court to investigate some cases of
Gujarat riots has summoned Gujarat Chief Minister Shri Narendra Modi.
The law should take its own course. Shri Modi is expected to extend
full cooperation and respect the law of the land.
But what raises eyebrows and pains the observers is the duplicity and
double standards being practiced by the judiciary, the media, the
intelligentsia and the so-called tribe of liberals and secularists.
The Gujarat riots and the 1984 anti-Sikhs riots have many similarities
and, in a sense, the latter riots were more heinous and cruel in the
sense that these were directed only against Sikhs and only in the
States ruled by the Congress. Shri Modi never justified the riots but
the then Congress President and Prime Minister Shri Rajiv Gandhi did,
saying on record having stated that "when a big tree falls, the earth
below is sure to shake". Yet, Shri Gandhi has been spared for the anti-
Sikh riots the epithets that are used for Shri Narinder Modi for
Gujarat riots.
More people died in anti-Sikh riots than in Gujarat riots. Delhi then,
and even now, for law and order is directly under the administrative
control. It is here that more than 3300 Sikhs died. The total number
of Sikhs having been butchered in different parts of the country is
more than 4000 while it is about 2500 in Gujarat which includes Hindus
too. For full three days, as per reports of successive Commissions of
Inquiry, the anti-Sikh rioters ruled Delhi and no FIRs were
registered. No military was summoned to quell the riots. The police
remained a silent spectator. Yet, the Congress which ruled at the
Centre and the States continued to remain the holy icon of piety,
secularism and rule of law. Even after 25 years the anti-Sikh riots
sufferers continue to suffer the agony of their loss with little hope
for justice.
Surprisingly, even the courts were not that condescending for Sikh
suffers as these have been for Gujarat riot victims. No Special
Investigating Teams were constituted by the courts which also did no
monitoring of the progress of investigations. Another stark reality is
that while Modi regime registered cases against rioters, prosecuted
them and many have been taken to their logical conclusions with many
convictions, the same is not true of anti-Sikh riots. Many MLAs, ex-
MLAs and other prominent workers of the ruling party in Gujarat are in
jails facing trial. The same cannot be said about anti-Sikh riots.
The human rights organizations which beat their chests for Gujarat
riot victims are, unfortunately and shamelessly, heartless for anti-
Sikh riot victims. They seem to have turned deaf, dumb and blind to
the realities of anti-Sikh riots.
The present Congress-led UPA government, too, for understandable
political reasons, has treated the Gujarat riot victims and anti-Sikh
riots differently. It has been more kind to the former than the
latter.
Why is that the whole system - whether the executive, the judiciary,
the media, intelligentsia and human rights organizations - are
treating the same ugly incidents differently? They are doing a great
disservice to the present system of government and the institutions of
the Constitution. Nobody can be more guilty or more innocent and
deserving more punishment than the other in the same circumstances in
this country.
Let it be a warning to all who matter. By their words and actions and
by indulging in discrimination and favourtism against one section or
the other, they are only venturing to defeat the very purpose and
spirit of democracy. It is they who will tomorrow be counted the
guilty men of our democracy.
http://voi.org/20100315383/14mar2010/editorial/editorial/editorial:theguiltymenofourdemocracy.html
Sita as an Empowered Indian Woman
Book- Review
The other day Rahul Mahajan got married on a reality TV show. His
marriage was of course for real, and one wishes him well in life. Some
one remarked that the show was a tribute to the new Indian woman who
had taken the unconventional path to choosing a life partner. He said
that it was the coming of age of the Indian Woman.
As I watched the final scenes of the show, I was reminded of a comment
a young woman had made some months ago in connection with the
Ramayana. "I do not wish to be a Sita -- meek and submissive. I am the
new Indian woman!"
Three 'new Indian women' stood decked in bridal finery, fluttering
nervously and waiting to be chosen in the final episode. The 'new
Indian women' felt nothing wrong in being commoditised and rejected in
front of a live audience of lakhs across the country. As for the
mythological Sita to whom our young friend had disparagingly referred,
remember that she had chosen her groom on her terms. If this is not
women empowerment, what is!
The following review done by me of a book on Sita adds to what I have
said:
In Search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology
Edited by Malashri Lal & Namita Gokhale
Yatra Books/Penguin Books
Rs 399/-
Perhaps the most enigmatic of all Indian mythological figures is Sita.
She has been in the country's subconsciousness for centuries largely
as the ideal Indian Woman. There has been a tendency by modern
commentators and feminists to run her down for being ‘passive' and
‘submissive' and failing to claim her rights at various stages of her
life, even when she was publicly humiliated for no fault of hers. That
being the case, it would come as no surprise if the ‘modern Indian
woman' is less than enthusiastic in holding her as her ‘hero.'
Given this context, one must welcome with open arms the excellent
collection of essays on Sita edited by Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale
that seeks to firmly establish her image as a strong-willed woman who
charted her own course in a largely male-dominated society. The irony
is that she had to go through a series of trials and tribulations as a
result of machination by two women, Kaikeyi and Manthara. In Search of
Sita: Revisiting Mythology is a marvellous book that not only has
commentaries written by well-known authors but also contains various
versions of the epic Ramayan, depicting Sita's role. The anthology
also provides a range of "creative interpretations" of the ‘dutiful
and meek' wife of Rama.
What makes the book even more special is the ideological space it
provides to writers with different bends of mind. So, if there is
Meghnad Desai and Indira Goswami, there is also Tarun Vijay and Karen
Gabriel - the latter weaving for the reader an interesting Sita-
Draupadi syntax in a gender context.
It should be clear to the reader, if he or she were under some
illusion, that the character of Sita in the epic was never meant to be
submissive in the face of injustice - to her personally and to the
female gender. One must realise that she could not have become the
icon she is by being a frail figure, forever manipulated and bent by a
patriarchal system. And, as events were to prove, her devotion to her
husband and willingness to be his partner through thick and thin could
not be interpreted as a sign of subordination. Let us look at some of
the instances where her dominance is undisputed.
At her father's home before marriage, Sita would routinely lift
Shiva's bow with her left hand while mopping the floor. It is the same
heavy bow that several strong princes failed to move even an inch from
the ground at her svayamvara. Only Ram succeeded and married her.
Thus, Sita actually set the ground rule for choosing her groom. Is
this a sign of a weak woman?
When Rama was exiled for 14 years, Sita insisted on accompanying him.
Her husband told her categorically that she should not do so as the
exile order was only for him, but she overruled him in the presence of
a number of people. Does this indicate her ‘meekness'?
Abducted by Ravana and surrounded by adversaries, she successfully
fobbed off his advances and threats made directly and through others.
The Lankan king failed to persuade her despite using all means at his
disposal. Does this not show her determination and resolve in the face
of a grim situation?
Banished from the kingdom by Ram, a then pregnant Sita later brought
up her two children as a single mother, imbibing in them the qualities
of valour and fair play. And when they in their boyhood captured her
brother-in-law Laxman, she rushed to get him released, keeping aside
her grief at having been wronged by his family. Surely, this is a sign
of a strong and very mature woman.
Finally, it was her decision to leave the world as a rebuttal to a
demand to prove she had not been ‘defiled' while away from the
kingdom. Given her wrath over the humiliation and determination, it is
unlikely that Rama would have been able to persuade her to change her
mind even if he had tried. In the end, Sita set and lived by her own
terms. It is not easy to find a better example of determined
womanhood.
In Search of Sita is, thus, in many ways a tribute to an ancient icon
by modern India.
http://voi.org/20100315386/14mar2010/general/general/sitaasanempoweredindianwoman.html
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Thackeray says no concern for women's welfare in Bill
STAFF WRITER 19:54 HRS IST
Mumbai, Mar 15 (PTI) Days after supporting the Women's Reservation
Bill in the Rajya Sabha, the Shiv Sena now says the legislation is a
ploy to garner women's votes and does not have welfare of women at
heart.
"The bill has nothing to do with women's welfare. It is a ploy to get
women's votes," Sena chief Bal Thackeray said in a statement.
The 83-year-old leader's statement was circulated here as part of his
traditional message to supporters on the occasion of 'Gudhi Padwa'
tomorrow.
"Injustice against women continues. They are suffering due to rising
prices. Is it going to end because of the Bill," he asked.
"Sena has given a clarion call that along with the bill, women should
also get protection. But that is left aside and political colours are
being given," he said.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/566024_Thackeray-says-no-concern-for-women-s-welfare-in-Bill
MNS in film cash dock
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Mumbai, March 15: Mumbai police have arrested 11 Maharashtra Navnirman
Sena activists after film producer Ritesh Sidhwani complained that
they had tried to extort Rs 25 lakh from his film crew.
The producer’s complaint came a month after Shah Rukh Khan refused to
apologise to Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray whose party tried to
stall the release of My Name is Khan.
Sidhwani, the producer of Dil Chahta Hai, Lakshya, Luck by Chance and
Karthik Calling Karthik, and his film unit told Bandra police that the
11 MNS activists came to the set of the film Crooked at Mehboob Studio
on Sunday afternoon and demanded to know why foreign artistes were
being employed in the film and not local talent. Deputy commissioner
K.M. Prasanna said the film unit explained to them that the “foreign
artistes were required as the sequence recreated Istanbul, Turkey”.
But the activists would not budge.
Prasanna said the MNS workers then allegedly demanded Rs 25 lakh for
not using local artistes.
Ameya Khopkar, the MNS film wing chief denied the allegation of
extortion. “A blatantly false complaint of extortion has been filed
against our boys…. Our people had gone to the set after learning that
the film was using 136 foreign nationals from Afghanistan, Iran and
Russia though they did not possess valid work permits,” he said.
The arrests happened after Sidhwani approached Mukesh Bhatt, the vice-
president of the film producers’ association, and he called up
Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100316/jsp/nation/story_12221472.jsp
BJP-Left House unity rolls on
RADHIKA RAMASESHAN
New Delhi, March 15: The nuclear liability bill today gave the Left
and the BJP another chance to display their vaunted “unity”, kicked
off by the price rise and helped on by the women’s reservation bill.
The two main Opposition groups, which together outnumbered the
depleted Treasury benches in the Lok Sabha today, had braced
themselves to block the bill’s introduction.
Each had opposed the nuclear deal with the US, and the BJP had the
added motive of partially answering its in-house sceptics who felt it
had “put itself out” to bail the government out over the women’s bill.
Estranged UPA allies Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad too joined
forces with the BJP-Left today.
A deflated government, realising what it was up against, deferred the
bill’s introduction. Denied the opportunity for a showdown, the
Opposition still flaunted the new-found unity between the strangest of
bedfellows.
“The unity is actually a direct outcome of the nuclear deal that was
opposed by the BJP and the Left. The Samajwadi began by opposing it
but later changed its stand,” said CPM general secretary Prakash
Karat. He said the Left would appeal to all MPs on Tuesday to not
support it.
The poor attendance on the Treasury benches looked out of sync with
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s exertions since yesterday to try and
bring the Opposition around on the nuclear bill.
On Sunday, Singh had phoned Sushma Swaraj, leader of the Lok Sabha
Opposition, and Sitaram Yechury, the CPM’s leader in the Rajya Sabha,
to urge them to reconsider their resistance.
Recounting the conversation, Sushma told journalists: “I said we
cannot support. He said we will have problems with other countries to
which I replied, ‘But we have problems within our own country’. The PM
asked if he should ask the national security adviser to speak to me. I
said there is no point because the NSA already spoke to Arun Jaitley
(leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha) a month ago. But our
stand remained unchanged. I was polite but firm.”
Sushma then got in touch with the CPM and CPI floor leaders, and
Yashwant Sinha was told to speak to Mulayam and Lalu Prasad to firm up
the Opposition strategy.
Last week, Mulayam and Lalu Prasad had slammed the Left and the BJP
for being “in cahoots with the Congress” over the women’s bill. Today,
by participating in the Opposition unity, they gave the government a
foretaste of the problems it might now face in Parliament.
Government sources admitted that the stand-off was a “grim reminder”
of how precariously the ruling alliance was placed in the Lower House
minus the Yadavs.
“The only short-run tactic we can follow is to avoid business that
requires voting,” a minister said. The long-term strategy, he said,
was to scout for parties that could be counted on in a crisis “even if
this entails backroom deals”.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100316/jsp/nation/story_12221471.jsp
Maya Brahmin aide missing
TAPAS CHAKRABORTY
Lucknow, March 15: Mayavati today tried to reclaim her Dalit agenda on
the Bahujan Samaj Party’s 25th anniversary by clipping the wings of
Satish Chandra Mishra, the party’s “Brahmin face” whose clout had
dismayed many of her Dalit supporters.
Mishra, architect of the Brahmin-Dalit axis that lifted Mayavati to
power in the 2007 UP polls, has been taken off the BSP’s Brahmin
Bhaichara (Brotherhood) Committee and appointed chairman of the party
legal cell.
The chief minister herself made the announcement at the party’s mega
rally here to celebrate its silver jubilee. “There is no strict
boundary of work but Mishra’s priority would henceforth be legal
work,” she said.
More eloquent than her 95-minute speech was the unusual absence of
Mishra from the dais. The lawyer who had been Mayavati’s shadow for
the past half a decade stood among party workers far from the dais,
from where Mayavati reaffirmed her commitment to the Dalit cause.
“I don’t believe the party’s core agenda is being diluted. I vow not
to ever allow the Dalit movement to weaken or the head of a Dalit to
bow in shame,” she said.
Party sources said Mayavati had been jittery over accusations that her
party, born as a movement for social transformation, had become “an
opportunistic political party” interested only in capturing power.
On the face of it, Mishra’s new post may appear logical since Mayavati
is grappling with at least half-a-dozen cases against her party and
government. But Mishra had already been supervising the cases while
discharging his other duties.
Many Dalit leaders had looked on nervously as Mishra was included in
the state cabinet in 2007 and later sent to the Rajya Sabha, all the
while retaining his status as party No. 2. But a rift appeared between
him and Mayavati after the Brahmin vote deserted her in the 2009 Lok
Sabha polls.
Mayavati had mooted banishing Mishra to the legal cell at a party
meeting in July 2009, but backed off in the face of Brahmin murmurs.
Today, she made it official.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100316/jsp/nation/story_12221469.jsp
Monday, March 15, 2010
Seedhi Baat / Aajtak, March 14, 2010
'Bal Thackeray is a big leader'
Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's estranged daughter-in-law Smita
Thackeray says politics and family are two separate things.
Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Posted by Prabhu Chawla at 7:35 PM
http://prabhuchawla.blogspot.com/2010/03/seedhi-baat-aajtak-march-14-2010.html
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Video/0/42/video_page.jsp?vid=88274&part=1&secid=42
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Video/0/42/video_page.jsp?vid=88274&part=2&secid=42
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Video/0/42/video_page.jsp?vid=88274&part=3&secid=42
..ab.na.jaa..
Monday, March 15, 2010
Rajdeep Sardesai's letter to Uddhav Thackeray
Rajdeep Sardesai,a well known journalist,sent a letter to Uddhav
Thackeray,heir of the Shiv Sena, on the whole "Marathi manoos" issue.
Wiki : Rajdeep Sardesai
Wiki : Uddhav Thackeray
It makes for a very interesting read,seeing the reaction of a renowned
member of the Press addressing a political leader with much force.
Dear Udhavjee,
At the very outset, my compliments for the manner in which you've
literally 'stolen' the headlines from your cousin Raj in the last
fortnight. After the Assembly election defeat last October, there were
many who had written you off as a weak, namby-pamby politician, who
would be better off doing photography. But now, it seems that the
'fire' which burns inside Bal Thackeray is alive in the son too. After
years of struggling to establish yourself, you have finally discovered
the mantra for success as a Shiv Sena leader: find an 'enemy',
threaten and intimidate them, commit the odd violent act, and,
eureka!, you are anointed the true heir to the original 'T' company
supremo.
Your cousin has chosen to bash faceless taxi drivers and students from
North India, soft targets who are totally unprotected. You've been
much braver. You've actually chosen to target national icons: Sachin
Tendulkar, Mukesh Ambani, Shah Rukh Khan, powerful figures who most
Indians venerate. Shah Rukh is no surprise since the Sena has always
been uncomfortable with the Indian Muslim identity. Forty years ago,
your father had questioned Dilip Kumar's patriotism for accepting an
award from the Pakistani government. You've called Shah Rukh a traitor
for wishing to choose Pakistani cricketers in the IPL. That your
father invited Javed Miandad, the former Pakistani captain and a close
relation of Dawood Ibrahim, to your house is a matter of record that
we shall not go into today.
I am a little surprised that you chose to question Ambani and
Tendulkar though. The Sena has always enjoyed an excellent
relationship with corporate India. Why then criticise India's biggest
businessman for suggesting that Mumbai belongs to all? After all, no
one can deny that Mumbai's entrepreneurial energy has been driven by
communities from across India. The diatribe against Sachin is even
more strange. He is, alongwith Lata Mangeshkar, Maharashtra's most
admired and recognised face. Surely, you will agree that Sachin
symbolizes Maharashtrian pride in a manner that renaming shops and
streets in Marathi never can.
Of course, in-between some of your local thugs also attacked the IBN
Lokmat office. I must confess that initially the attack did leave me
outraged. Why would a political outfit that claims to protect
Maharashtrian culture attack a leading Marathi news channel? But on
reflection I realized that we hadn't been singled out: over the last
four decades, the Shiv Sena has targeted some of Maharashtra's finest
literary figures and journalistic institutions. That you continue to
live in a colony of artists while attacking artistic freedom remains
one of the many tragic ironies in the evolution of the Sena.
Just before the Assembly elections, you had told me in an interview
that you were determined to shake off the Shiv Sena's legacy of
violence. You spoke of the need for welfarist politics, of how you
were saddened that rural Maharashtra was being left behind. I was
impressed by the farmer rallies you had organized, by the fact that
you had documented farmer suicides in the state. I thought that Uddhav
Thackeray was serious about effecting a change in Maharashtra's
political landscape.
I was obviously mistaken. Farmer suicides still continue, the after-
effects of drought are still being faced in several districts, but the
focus is now squarely on finding high profile hate figures. You claim
to have a vision for Mumbai. Yet, on the day the Sena-controlled
city's municipal corporation's annual budget revealed an alarming
financial crisis, your party mouthpiece,Saamna, was running banner
headlines seeking an apology from Shah Rukh Khan. You asked your Shiv
Sainiks to agitate against Rahul Gandhi's visit to Mumbai, but why
have you not asked them to wage a war against the water cuts that have
made life so difficult for millions in the city?
At one level, I can understand the reasons for your frustration. The
Congress-NCP government in the state has been thoroughly incompetent:
the last decade has seen Maharashtra decline on most social and
economic parameters. Yet, the Shiv Sena has been unable to capture
power in the state. Your war with cousin Raj has proved to be self-
destructive. The Assembly election results showed that a united Sena
may have offered a real challenge to the ruling alliance. In fact, the
Sena and the MNS together garnered around 43 per cent of the popular
vote in Mumbai-Thane, almost seven per cent more than what was
obtained by the Congress-NCP combine. Yet, because your vote was
split, you won just nine of the 60 seats in the region, a result which
proved decisive in the overall state tally.
Your defeat seems to have convinced you that the only way forward is
to outdo your cousin in parochial politics. It's a strategy which has
undoubtedly made you a headline-grabber once again. Unfortunately,
television rating points don't get you votes or goodwill. There is
space in Maharashtra's politics for a regional force, but it needs to
be based on a constructive, inclusive identity.
Tragically, the Shiv Sena has never offered a serious social or
economic agenda for the future. Setting up the odd wada pav stall in
Mumbai is hardly a recipe for addressing the job crisis . Why hasn't
the Sena, for example, started training projects to make Maharashtrian
youth face upto the challenges of a competitive job market? Why
doesn't the Sena give regional culture a boost by supporting Marathi
theatre, literature or cinema? The wonderful Marathi film,
"Harishchandrachee Factory", nominated for the Oscars, has been co-
produced by Ronnie Screwvala, a Parsi, who like millions of other
'outsiders' has made Mumbai his home. Maybe, I ask for too much.
Tigers, used to bullying others for years, will never change their
stripes.
Post-script: Your charming son, Aditya, who is studying English
Literature in St Xaviers College, had sent me a collection of his
poems. I was most impressed with his writing skills. Let's hope the
next generation of the T company will finally realize that there is
more to life than rabble-rousing!
Jai Hind, Jai Maharashtra!
Posted by Malvika at 12:13 PM
http://ab-na-ja.blogspot.com/2010/03/rajdeep-sardesais-letter-to-uddhav.html
Mumbai made into dharamshala: Bal Thackeray
Mumbai, Mar 6 : Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray said Mumbai has been
made into a 'dharamshala' (free inn), thereby thrashing Maharashtra
Governor K Sankaranarayanan for saying 'anybody can live in Mumbai'.
"Saying that migrants will continue to come to Mumbai is akin to
betrayal of Maharashtra," Thackeray said in an editorial in party
mouthpiece Saamna on Saturday.
"Had Sankaranarayanan been the Governor of Karnataka, would he have
dared to say let hordes of migrants come to Bangalore?" the Sena chief
said.
"The governors who live in the sprawling Raj Bhutan by the Arabian Sea
are nothing but Congress pensioners. Raj Bhutan has lost touch with
people's sentiments, that's why you say such things."
Balasaheb further recommended permit system to stop 'migrant influx'
in Mumbai.
"Mumbai has been made into a dharamshala. The only way to stop the
influx of migrants is to start a permit system to impose curbs on
those coming here," Thackeray said.
On Friday, Sankaranarayanan had said: "Anybody can live in Mumbai.
Only Mumbai can compete with itself. The rich, middle class and the
poor co-exist here."
--IBNS
http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-65284.html
le photo of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray at his residence in
Mumbai. PTI Photo Photograph (1)
Bal Thackeray targets Maha Guv over 'Mumbai for all' remark
STAFF WRITER 10:49 HRS IST
Mumbai, Mar 6 (PTI) After batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar and
industrialist Mukesh Ambani, Maharashtra Governor K Sankaranarayanan
is the latest to face the Shiv Sena ire for saying that Mumbai belongs
to all.
"Saying that migrants will continue to come to Mumbai is akin to
betrayal of Maharashtra," Sena chief Bal Thackeray said in an
editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana' here today.
The Governor had said yesterday that "anybody can live in Mumbai. Only
Mumbai can compete with itself. The rich, middle class and the poor co-
exist here".
In an informal interaction with media persons, his first since taking
over the gubernatorial post, he said though civic and infrastructure
facilities needed to be upgraded in the megapolis, migration from
other parts of the country cannot be curbed.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/550675_Bal-Thackeray-targets-Maha-Guv-over--Mumbai-for-all--remark
chhotemianinshallah
STAFF WRITER 21:49 HRS IST
Satna (MP), Mar 15 (PTI) Criticising BJP national president Nitin
Gadkari's statement that Narendra Modi has qualities to become the
prime minister, senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh has said Modi is
neither fit for chief minister, nor suitable for prime minister's
post.
"Modi is not fit to be a chief minister, forget about being suitable
for prime minister's post," Singh said.
"BJP has always been making many tall claims and even their claim of
Modi being prime ministerial material will be exposed," he told
reporters here yesterday.
Ever since BJP had come to power in Madhya Pradesh, attacks on
minorities in the state have been on the rise, the Congress General
Secretary said.
The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister said after inquiring into the
attacks on Christians by BJP leaders, he will file a complaint on it
with the National Minority Commission.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/566294_Modi-not-fit-to-be-CM--forget-about-PM--says-Digvijay
File photo of BJP President Nitin Gadkari addressing a press
conference in Jammu. PTI Photo Photograph (1)
BJP President Nitin Gadkari constitutes his team
STAFF WRITER 16:49 HRS IST
New Delhi, Mar 16 (PTI) Three months after he took over reigns of the
party, BJP President Nitin Gadkari today brought in a mix of youth,
experience and women in his team of office bearers inducting
heavyweights like Vasundhara Raje and Ravishankar Prasad and
hardliners like Varun Gandhi and Vinay Katiyar.
Gadkari, who was considered as an RSS choice when he replaced Rajnath
Singh, has also given positions to some leaders said to be close to
the sangh parivar founthead.
Among them are Bhagat Singh Koshiyari (Vice President), Murlidhar Rao
(Secretary) and Tarun Vijay, who was Editor of RSS mouthpiece
"Organiser", as spokesperson.
Prominent Muslim face and three-time MP Shahnawaz Hussain, who was
widely tipped to become a General Secretary, has been appointed as
Spokesperson while Najma Heptullah has been retained as Vice
President.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/567220_BJP-President-Nitin-Gadkari-constitutes-his-team
Maha issues Ordinance to enhance jail term for terrorists
STAFF WRITER 17:20 HRS IST
Nagpur, Mar 16 (PTI) The State Government has promulgated an Ordinance
to enhance the prison term of terrorists, Maharashtra Home Minister R
R Patil said today.
The State Government has proposed 20, 40 and 60 years of jail-term for
terrorists involved in terror activities and since it is an
administrative requirement, the government has come out with an
Ordinance, Patil told reporters here.
In an informal chat, he said the Ordinance was issued yesterday. The
maximum imprisonment is 14 years in any kind of crime and the accused
person comes out of jail after availing the benefits due to good
conduct and parole.
Technically speaking, the convict is out after serving prison for
11-12 years. The State government was of the opinion that these
terrorists should not be let free or released early after committing
crime against state.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/567288_Maha-issues-Ordinance-to-enhance-jail-term-for-terrorists
Kandhamal says no to Togadia visit
STAFF WRITER 17:41 HRS IST
Bhubaneswar, Mar 16 (PTI) Authorities in Kandhamal district, which has
been violence-free for about a year, today decided not to allow VHP
leader Pravin Togadia to visit it.
"We will not allow VHP leader Pravin Togadia to visit Kandhamal as the
administration does not want to take any risk though things are in
good shape," District Magistrate-cum-Collector Krishna Kumar told PTI
over phone.
"The situation is absolutely normal in the district now," he said.
The state unit of VHP had earlier informed the Home department
regarding Togadia's proposed three-day visit to Orissa.
Togadia is scheduled to begin his visit to the state on March 18 and
visit Kandhamal the next day and spend the night at Phulbani, the
district headquarters of Kandhamal, VHP state secretary Gouri Prasad
Rath said.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/567377_Kandhamal-says-no-to-Togadia-visit
Christ picture: absconding publisher's bail rejected
STAFF WRITER 17:43 HRS IST
Shillong, Mar 16 (PTI) The Gauhati High Court has rejected the bail
plea of a Delhi-based publisher charged with printing a blasphemous
image of Christ in a book meant for junior students.
"The state police challenged the bail order (of the publisher of
Skyline Publication, Indra Mohan Jha) leading to its quashing by the
Gauhati High Court yesterday," DSP Vivek Syiem said.
The absconding publisher was granted interim bail by the Shillong
bench of the high court on March five.
The police had registered a case against the publisher under Section
295 (A) of the IPC for hurting the sentiments of people by publishing
the image of Christ holding a can of beer and a cigarette.
Syiem said in case Jha did not surrender, the police would have to
communicate with other states to trace him.
Over 120 books, carrying the picture, have been seized by police from
a convent school and a distributor.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/567383_Christ-picture--absconding-publisher-s-bail-rejected
Raje says she will perform new role with dedication
STAFF WRITER 17:44 HRS IST
Jaipur, Mar 16 (PTI) Newly-appointed BJP General Secretary Vasundhara
Raje today said she is a committed party worker and will fulfil the
new responsibility with utmost dedication.
"I am disciplined soldier of the party and have always peformed the
task assigned to me by the party sincerely and honestly.
"I will fulfil the new responsibility assigned to me by the party with
dedication," Raje said in a statement here.
Three months after he took over reins of the party, BJP President
Nitin Gadkari today appointed Raje as one of party's General
Secretaries.
Raje, a former Rajasthan Chief Minister, was unseated as Leader of the
Opposition in the state after the party's Lok Sabha debacle.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/567389_Raje-says-she-will-perform-new-role-with-dedication
March 21, 2010
Rebirth of BJP: Focus on Change
"A man is not finished when he is defeated, he is defeated when he
quits. Much the same can be said of a party. It is not finished when
it is defeated; it is defeated when it stops to think.
-Nitin Gadkari
By MV Kamath
The BJP, right now, has one advantage: The UPA government is on its
last legs. It is bereft of new ideas. The high cost of living is
spreading disaffection among the people who are becoming increasingly
disillusioned with the government. This is the time to think big and
hit hard and the BJP seems to have found the right man to fulfil that
envious task. As Gadkari himself said: The country comes first, the
party second and the individual last. Now he has only to prove it
beyond any shadow of doubt. IF the media’s reportage of the
proceedings of the meeting of the BJP to anoint Nitin Gadkari as its
new - and youngest - president has any meaning, it is this: The
Congress had better beware. A sea-change has come over the party which
is as stunning as it was unexpected. It is evident in Gadkari’s hour-
long presidential address and in the entire environment in which the
meeting took place that Gadkari has opened the door to an entire new
world. It is a brave new world which should capture the imagination of
the young and the uninitiated. Here is a man brimming with ideas, has
the courage to break away from tradition in dress and deportment which
should endear him to aam adami. For a president to wear a bush shirt
and trousers, to shun feet touching, even if it is a mark of respect
towards elders, is a break-away from the past that may sound a little
offensive to traditionalists but is an indication that Gadkari is
looking ahead to the future with daring.
Understandably his speech- maiden-had to deal with party affairs, but
indicated a conciliatory approach as when he appealed to the Muslims
to be gracious enough to let a temple to Ram, built on the disputed
structure site. The request sounded genuine. It was anything but
provocative, and hopefully will be received with becoming attention.
The time has come for Hindu-Muslim reconciliation and Gadkari’s appeal
makes a lot of sense. In the next few weeks Gadkari has to think out-
of-the-box.
Four issues call for deep thought: How to raise agricultural
production and keep the peasant from migrating to urban centers; how
to provide jobs for the GenNext; how to reduce corruption which has
become endemic and how to work out a plan to benefit the tribals. And
above all, how to go beyond Hindutva to a way of life that is nation-
embracing and appealing to all people of whatever caste, creed,
religion or community. Gadkari it seems evident, is breaking away from
the old moorings, which is just as well. One appreciates the guts the
RSS has shown in naming Gadkari as its presidential choice. Here is a
man who can relate to the young. Fancy his breaking into singing from
the presidential platform! The sheer novelty of the man’s thinking
takes one’s breath away. This is not being critical of the old
culture. But all things must change. As Tennyson beautifully put it:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new and God fulfils himself
in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
With the kind of approach Gadkari has shown, he is capable of adapting
to a new and changing world. He should be able to touch the hearts of
people of all age groups, especially that group which will come of age
when the next general elections take place. Giving advice to a party
these days is an hazardous exercise, as Pramod Mahajan, were he alive,
would have readily agreed. Shining India as a slogan did not sell. Not
that there were no geniuses in the BJP to give advice to LK Advani;
fullest advantage was taken of talent and technology, as one can be
sure, Sudhindra Kulkarni will testify. The best of minds surely had
made their contributions but something had gone wrong. The BJP ‘lost’
the last general elections. But there is no reason for the BJP to be
defeatist. It is in power in nine states, it has, as Gadkari
meaningfully pointed out, over 1,000 MLAs and a little less then 200
MPs. One must build on that strength. To succeed, BJP must work as a
united party and not as a divided house as it has been for some months
now. Personal egos have done considerable damage to the party. Gadkari
has forewarned that this must change. Gadkari is not, as some
theorists have made out, walking in Rahul Gandhi’s footsteps. He has
cut out a path all on his own. The broad road-map he has unveiled
suggests that he has learnt from the events of the immediate past.
Names count, but only upto a point.
Winston Churchill, who had led his country so successfully during the
Second World War was unceremoniously side-lined in the elections that
followed victory. Labour came to power. Margaret Thatcher years later
came on the scene and re-made Britain. And that was the right thing to
do. In India, one after another of ideas once considered sacrosanct
had to be given the go-by, like Jawaharlal Nehru’s concept of a
socialistic pattern of society, non-alignment, garibi hatao that
Indira Gandhi wanted to capitalise on, nationalisation of industries,
etc. have all bit the dust. The BJP now has only to break new ground
if it wants to make headway. The buzz words in Gadkari’s inaugural
address were antyodaya (welfare of the poorest), samajik samarasta
(social equality) and vikas (development). Very evocative words but
the highest importance should be on "development" in very field,
whether agriculture, industry, enterprise, education and most
especially job-creation.
Let us face it: The young are least interested in ideologies; what
they are looking for are well-paid jobs and the party must see how
best this can be accomplished. In his addres Gadkari said that "a man
is not finished when he is defeated, he is defeated when he quits.
Much the same can be said of a party. It is not finished when it is
defeated; it is defeated when it stops to think."
Gadkari would do well to send a team of experts to China to find out
how our troublesome neighbour has excelled in so many fields,
especially in the field of agriculture where its production per acre
is several times higher than that of India. China, to be sure, is not
an ideal society; it is run by a heartless dictatorship that cares a
tuppence for Human Rights. But there surely are areas of
administration from which India can learn a lot.
The point is that the BJP must break away from its past and project
itself as a forward-looking party which means business, especially in
regard to antyodaya. Village self-sufficiency is a Gandhian concept to
which some fresh thought needs to be given. The stress should be on
productivity, marketing and sales, inter-connection of villages with
roads to promote peasant mobility, and spread of technical expertise.
The BJP, right now, has one advantage: The UPA government is on its
last legs. It is bereft of new ideas. The high cost of living is
spreading disaffection among the people who are becoming increasingly
disillusioned with the government. This is the time to think big and
hit hard and the BJP seems to have found the right man to fulfil that
envious task. As Gadkari himself said: The country comes first, the
party second and the individual last. Now he has only to prove it
beyond any shadow of doubt.
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March 21, 2010
Editorial
Varsha Pratipada Special, 2010
It is free fall
The buck does not stop
By R Balashankar
FROM India shinning to India suffering is the most colourful
description of Manmohan Singh’s regime heard on the floor of
Parliament during the budget session. The insensitivity of the UPA to
people’s agony and its arrogance of power have crossed all limits.
India is a nation with a great sense of justice. In its history there
is no dearth of instances where the rulers set higher standards for
themselves than for the commoner. They willingly courted heavier
punishment for their omissions and commissions unlike those of today
who suggest people not to take sweets if sugar price has gone high.
Compassion and empathy were the two qualities Indian scriptures
expected in the rulers. So we have the instances of Shibi, Dasharata,
Harischandra, Yudhishtira, Sri Ram, Dathechi and the list can go on
and on. The sense of justice and fair play was the touchstone for a
successful reign. Chakravarti Shibi set one of the most touching
examples in this regard.
Once, the legend has it, the Emperor was relaxing on the terrace of
the palace when a wounded pigeon fell on his lap and asked for
protection from an eagle that was chasing it for prey. Shibi offered
the bird safety but the eagle won’t leave its prey. The eagle demanded
the Emperor to be fair and release its prey, as it was within its
dharma in hunting for food and the Emperor had no right to interfere.
The Emperor on his part argued that it was his duty to give asylum to
the bird as it was seeking his protection for life. The eagle reminded
the Emperor his other duty not to deprive another creature of its
livelihood and redeem that dharma. The incident is both interesting
and instructive, for it was not the might of the Emperor but his sense
of justice that the eagle was putting to test. The Emperor stood high
and passed the test. And he presented a great example in self-
sacrifice to set the lesson for generations to come. He asked the
eagle what price he would have to pay so that the life of the pigeon
was saved. The eagle demanded the flesh of the king in equal weight to
that of the pigeon he wanted to be saved. Shibi passed the test and
proved to the world, the ruler is respected or loved not for his
arbitrariness but for his compassion and conciliation. Modern-day
rulers will laugh at this legend. But one cannot overlook the
message.
Social tragedies have become passé in India today, and the rulers-
people in power and position-go about as if there is no value for a
commoner’s life. India perhaps is the only country in the world where
human life is treated so cheap. The UP Chief Minister made it a matter
of prestige in her stand-off with the centre not to pay compensation
to the 65 victims of a tragedy in Pratapgarh. Many such situations go
unreported. The highlight however is the apathy of the establishment-
be it godmen, civic authorities, corporate tycoons or the elected
governments-for the value of life of an ordinary Indian, especially
Hindu.
Children who go to play do not return home because they get drowned by
stagnant water in pits dug by the Delhi Jal Board authority. Men and
women who go for early morning walk are discovered bleeding and dead
on the roadside because the civic bodies have dug up the pavement and
left it in a state of veritable hell for months, if not years.
Imagine the humongous tragedy of the people who assembled at the
ashram of Kripalu Maharaj in Kundu, Pratapgarh, for collecting a
utensil, a piece of sweet and Rs 20-the total value of which would not
exceed Rs 50. This is the level of poverty in the country whose
economic growth under globalisation is a matter of mere GDP and
statistics. Human beings have become numbers. Sixty-five people dead,
families devastated, children orphaned and mothers deprived of their
children. Even in the impoverished Sudan such incidents don’t happen
at this frequency. For, only a few years ago, over a 100 women died in
Uttar Pradesh capital in the stampede. They had come to receive free
saris being distributed by a politician. And we can safely bet that
nobody would be held responsible and punished for the loss of precious
human lives just as it happened in the sari tragedy or the temple
stampedes that keep repeating all over the country quite frequently.
Rural unemployment is so high that at every recruitment venue for army
and police personnel, the rush of job seekers leads to lathicharge,
firing, stampede and death.
Routinely, stampede occurs in places of worship. These are all
incidents in which people authorised to make arrangements, are to be
held culpable for the crime. One is not talking of the road accidents
and terror attacks. That statistics is now becoming listless.
One teenager was killed in Srinagar, allegedly unprovoked, by a BSF
constable. The police records, according to reports, said the boy was
a criminal. That official was however hounded by the state, his own
seniors and with discernible glee the newspapers reported that he has
been suspended. Only the jawans and security forces have no human
rights. They are treated as cannon fodder in their combat with
terrorists, Maoists and North-east outlaws. We take the loss of a
security personnel’s life so lightly, so routinely as if the state has
become morose. Is justice the privilege of only the terrorists and
their cohorts? A few weeks ago, terrorists and their supporters in J&K
disguised as lawyers fabricated a case of rape and murder of two
women. They created a huge ruckus. The media and the politicians there
held the state and defence forces to ransom. In the end it was proved
that the women were not raped, and they had committed suicide. Have
these lawyers been punished?
Even smaller nations like Philippines and Bangladesh have a better
track record of dispensing justice. The Marcos and Ershads got
punished there for their greed and crimes. In modern India, not one
politician has ever been punished. Nobody knows where the buck stops.
We don’t even know who should own up responsibility for the kind of
tragedies that have been discussed. There was a time, an air accident
or a train collision used to result in the resignation of the minister
in charge. Now the accidents have become commonplace and there is no
accountability.
So where does that leave the ordinary Indian? Those who have been
elected by them are not speaking up for them. The creation of an
informed public opinion, non-political social action for justice seems
the only way out. Varsha Pratipada marks a new cycle, an occasion that
prompts us to pause, think and move on. It is for each of us to do our
bit to make our society more sensitive, more assertive and restore the
value of each and every life sharing this planet.
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February 21, 2010
Divisive politics get a deadly blow
Seven-member AP High Court bench strikes down Muslim quota as
unconstitutional, based on dubious data, and potentially encouraging
conversion
By R Mallikarjunarao
In the year 2004 Dr YS Rajasekhara Reddy, provided reservations to
Muslims in education and public employment to the extent of five per
cent. A five-judge bench said that this is illegal. After this the
farce of inquiry by Commission for Backwards Classes was enacted and
reservation was given to Muslims and Act was promulgated in 2005.
Another five-judge bench declared this 2005 Act is illegal.
Thereafter, the YS government issued another Act in 2007. A seven-
judge bench on February 8 declared this action illegal.
THE mask has been ripped apart by a seven-judge bench of the High
Court of Andhra Pradesh. The real face of slogan "reservation for
Muslims" was exposed. While dealing with the constitutional validity
of AP Reservation in favour of Socially Educationally Backward Classes
of Muslims Act, 2007, a seven-judge bench of the AP High Court
declared: "This 2007 Act is religion specific and potentially
encourages religious conversions and is thus unsustainable." This is
the third time the Congress government of AP has faced adverse
judgment on the issue of providing reservations to Muslims.
In the year 2004 Dr YS Rajasekhara Reddy provided reservations to
Muslims in education and public employment to the extent of five per
cent. A five-judge bench said that this is illegal. After this the
farce of inquiry by Commission for Backwards Classes was enacted and
reservation was given to Muslims and Act was promulgated in 2005.
Another five-judge bench declared this 2005 Act is illegal.
Thereafter, the YS government issued another Act in 2007. A seven-
judge bench on February 8 declared this action illegal.
The bench comprised of Chief Justice Anil Ramesh Dave Justice T Meena
Kumari, Justice B Prakasha Rao, Justice DSR Varma, Justice A Gopala
Reddy, Justice V Eswariah and Justice Goda Raghuram. The 137-page
judgment was given by the Chief Justice AR Dave on behalf of himself,
Justice A Gopala Reddy, Justice V Eswariah and Justice Goda Raghuram.
They declared the AP Reservation in favour of Socially Educationally
Backward Classes of Muslims Act, 2007 unsustainable. Justice T Meena
Kumari gave a separate judgment running into 77 pages allowing the
writ petitions but gave a different reasoning. Justice B Prakasha Rao
said that the seven-judge bench was to answer the reference regarding
the method to be adopted. He differed with the findings of the five
judges and did not set aside the state action. Justice DSR Varma
declared that he is differing with Chief Justice and Justice T Mena
Kumari and said that he will give his reasons later.
It may be recalled that the government issued Ordinance 5 of 2007
providing 4 per cent reservations to several selected groups of
Muslims in the fields of education and public employment. This was
preceded by inquiry by AP Commission for Backwards Classes. The
government had appointed Krishnan, a retired civil servant, the
advisor who submitted a report, which was sent to the BC Commission.
This Ordinance was challenged by Shravanti and several other students.
Some persons claimed that this will hurt the backward classes and
filed public interest petitions. During the course of hearing the AP
Legislative Assembly passed the bill and Act 26 of 2007 came into
force. Petitions were amended to bring this act under challenge.
The majority judgment pronounced by the Chief Justice said that the
action of the state government is solely based upon the report,
findings and recommendations of the commission and the procedural
error committed by the commission is fatal to its report and its
consequent recommendations. The court said that it is deplorable that
the commission was not even aware of total population of persons
belonging to groups of Muslims who have been selected to be put into E
category among the BC groups. The sample survey was found faulty and
the quick survey in the name and style of fast track method was termed
as "hit and run method". This was declared neither legal nor
sustainable. The sampling was "opportunity sampling and non-
probability sampling". The court said that the BC Commission failed to
formulate criteria for identifying the BC among the Muslims but simply
conducted a household survey in places close to its hand. It was
declared that the commission did not conduct survey objectively to
justify its recommendations.
Justice T Meena Kumari in a separate judgment dealt at length with the
report of commission and effect of its copying the report of Krishnan.
She said: "The report of the commission should be held to be
mechanical, perfunctory in nature and without application of mind as
the commission followed the report of PS Krishnan in verbatim."
Justice Meena Kumari said that the report of the commission is not
based on real facts, data mechanical perfunctory in nature and without
application of mind as the commission followed the report of PS
Krishna in verbatim’. Justice MeenaKumari said that the report of the
commission is not based upon real facts, data or analysis and is
without any proper survey. She reminded that the commission limited
its survey to six districts only for three days leaving the other
parts of the state. With the report of the commission found as
insufficient lacking any objectivity the Act 26 of 2007 which is based
upon the report was declared to be invalid and unconstitutional.
The UPA government was planning to provide for reservations to Muslims
based on the Ranganath Commission report. The seven judges of the AP
High Court have hampered this conspiracy.
‘‘The fast track approach adopted by the commission was nothing but a
non-scientific method,’’ Justice Dave said. It was neither ‘‘legal nor
sustainable’’, he declared. The action of the panel was also
criticised for its reliance on recommendations made by PS Krishnan.
The appointment of Krishnan is "protanto invalid", the bench said and
faulted the panel for relying on his findings.
Echoing the majority view in a separate judgment, Justice Meena Kumari
said the investigation by the panel was not based on real facts, data
or analysis and was without proper survey.
Justice Prakash Rao aired the minority view holding that the bench was
not called upon to adjudicate the list but was only required to answer
a legal reference. He said that the government had some data before it
on which it acted and thus could not be faulted. Justice DSR Varma
said he did not agree with the majority view and would give his
reasons shortly. The Advocate General sought suspension of the order
which was rejected by the bench.
The Andhra government has long struggled to provide quotas for
Muslims, who were first given reservation in July 2004, a month after
YS Rajasekhara Reddy came to power.
The bench further described findings of the AP Backward Classes
Commission - on which the quota law had been based - as
"unscientific". Within hours of the verdict, Chief Minister K Rosaiah
said his government would move to the Supreme Court and vowed to
restore the AP Reservation in favour of Socially and Educationally
Backward Classes of Muslims Act, 2007.
In a 5-2 majority ruling, the court found that the commission neither
evolved any criteria nor published these before inviting objections.
It had merely stated it had followed the two criteria evolved by the
Mandal Commission for identification of Socially Economic Backward
Classes (SEBCs) among non-Hindu community.
Chief Justice Dave, speaking for himself and Justices A Gopala Reddy,
V Eswaraiah and G Raghuram, faulted the enactment and said it was
religion-specific and potentially encouraged conversions and was thus
unsustainable.
The bench found fault with the commission for its excessive reliance
on data collated by the Anthropological Survey of India. That data,
the court ruled, was meant for determining the profile of the Indian
population and not for deciding on affirmative action for Muslims.
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February 21, 2010
Muslim Job Reservations Plan A Marxist Election Gimmick
By Ranjit Roy
The interesting highlights of the Marxist Chief Minister’s
announcement on Muslim job reservations are: The OBC reservation list
in West Bengal currently includes both Hindus and Muslims. Muslims are
now to be put under a separate list called Backward Muslim Community.
The new inclusion will take OBC reservations in West Bengal from 7 per
cent to 17 per cent.
KOLKATA: West Bengal Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s
announcement in Kolkata on February 8 that Muslim OBCs in the state
would now get 10 per cent job quota as recommended by the Ranganath
Misra Commission is, no doubt, an election gimmick to fool Muslim
voters. This is evident from the fact that the Chief Minister
announced his government’s policy decision on job reservations within
minutes of the Left Front partners’ meeting ended at the CPM
headquarters at Alimuddin Street in central Kolkata. It is a clear
attempt to win back the support of Muslims before the Congress decides
its stand on the controversial Ranganath Misra report placed before
the UPA government. With a dwindling Muslim support base to the Left
that led to serious election reverses in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, the
CPM and its Chief Minister could not afford to wait for the Centre’s
decision. There are elections to 86 civic bodies slated for this year
before the final electoral battle for 294 Assembly seats in the state
early next year.
The interesting highlights of the Marxist Chief Minister’s
announcement on Muslim job reservations are: The OBC reservation list
in West Bengal currently includes both Hindus and Muslims. Muslims are
now to be put under a separate list called Backward Muslim Community.
The new inclusion will take OBC reservations in West Bengal from 7 per
cent to 17 per cent. Moreover, there is a paradox in Chief Minister’s
claim that the proposed reservation is not on the basis of religion
but on the basis of poor economic conditions. At the same time he has
announced that Muslim youths under the OBC category can apply for job
quota if their family income is below Rs 37,500 per month. Is it not a
contradictory statement of Marxist Bhattacharjee that a Muslim family
earning Rs 37,500 per month, not annually, is economically weak and
needs job reservation? Yes, even if one takes present economic
conditions of people in India irrespective of their religions and
faiths, it cannot be said that earning of Rs 37,500 per month is a
small amount and needed government protection. No doubt, job
reservation was announced by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee with an eye on
Muslim vote bank.
Dr Pravin Togadia, VHP secretary general, has rightly said that
Andhra’s 4 per cent quota and West Bengal giving 10 per cent
reservations to Muslims are not isolated incidents. They are well
connected and are a part of a larger conspiracy against Hindus. This
criminal conspiracy of looting Hindus is being hatched to please
Muslim vote bank. At this moment, 78 per cent Hindu youths in India
are unemployed. At least 79 per cent Hindu farmers have lost their
land and crop. Yet, instead of helping them, Congress and Marxist
governments are showering favours on Muslims. There is no denying the
fact that such job reservations only encourage conversions to Islam.
In fact, while turning down a similar move by Andhra Chief Minister, K
Rosaiah, a seven-judge bench of the state high court observed that the
government’s offer of 4 per cent reservations to Muslims is
"unscientific, religion specific and potentially encourage
conversions". This is not the first time that Andhra government tried
to provide education and job reservations to please Muslims in the
state. The late Chief Minister, YS Rajasekhara, had offered 5 per cent
reservations to Muslims in July 2004. But Andhra high court had struck
down the move at the time.
Taking a cue from Andhra high court’s ruling, Buddhadeb
Bhattacharjee’s decision will be challenged in Kolkata high court by a
group of nationalist lawyers. The state BJP president, Rahul Sinha,
has announced that the party supporters will stage state-wide
agitations against the proposed reservations for Muslims from February
13 onwards. Sinha told newsmen in Kolkata that the party’s national
president, Nitin Gadkari will be visiting West Bengal during the first
week of March to spearhead the agitation. Strangely, within 24 hours
of the Chief Minister’s announcement, the state food and supplies
department has selected 63 Muslim candidates out of a total 317 (17.5
per cent) for government jobs.
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February 21, 2010
Thinking Aloud
India is too big for the Marxists!
Jyoti Basu knew his politics, but not his economics. He made sure of
his vote bank through his million-acre land distribution programme but
when the programme came to a halt, he had nothing else in hand. He
believed that the programme would put so much cash into the hands of
farmers that it would spawn an industrialisation drive and create huge
employment. Nothing of the sort happened.
COMRADE Jyoti Basu, who passed away at the ripe old age of 95 years
last month, would be wondering what he has done to receive such
adulation from foreign newspapers, who never took his communism
seriously, and did not take kindly to him while he was alive. They are
calling him charming and elegant, as if they were referring to a
Hollywood model, not a rough-and-tumble politician from Kolkata. For a
man who was, or seemed to be, a virulent Marxist all his working life,
this would have been the biggest shock of his colourful life.
I have a feeling that the foreign newspapers know something we don’t.
It is possible that they never took his communism seriously, and it is
quite on the cards that they believed he was not really a communist.
Basu’s grasp of Marxism-Leninism was shaky, to say the least. In fact,
he never spoke in those terms. He was also not much of a national
leader, and rarely moved out of Kolkata, except to attend politburo
meetings. He almost never addressed meetings of workers, or any
meetings, in big towns and cities like Mumbai or Delhi which have more
workers than Kolkata. And he avoided making statements on things that
didn’t concern him, like, for instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall on
which the whole world went ga-ga, or the collapse of the Soviet Union
that followed, which was close to his heart, but on which he made no
comment either.
Basu was very much a home-bred politician, which is surprising,
considering he had spent four years in London and once confessed that
he was still a Londoner at heart. Jyoti Basu, a Londoner? The mind
boggles. Religiously, he visited London every summer and spent a
holiday there, but never, as far as his friends can recall, in Kashmir
or Darjeeling. It was said that he had a house there, and maybe even a
hotel, which was being run by his businessman son. I once saw him
having fish and chips in Camden Town, near Hampstead, but he did not
say hello. He was in a nice dark suit, a little tight for him, but
maybe he had purchased it in late ’thirties when he had spent years in
London. It was quite a sight.
There are, it is said, two types of communists: Those who smile, and
those who don’t. It is a minor difference, but one that tells us a
great deal about them. I have always believed that a communist who
smiles is far more dangerous than one who doesn’t, like an unsmiling
cat waiting for its next mouse. It was said that Jyoti Basu never
smiled-it was his trademark. It was true enough. He did not smile even
when he became Chief Minister in 1977, after a long career in the
streets of Kolkata. He did not smile even in 1996 when there was talk
that he would become the next prime minister.
I met him twice, once when he was a trade union leader, and another
time when he had become Chief Minister of his state. Both times, he
kept a stiff upper lip, never showing a single tooth, as children do
when facing the dentist.
I first met him when he was president of the trade union in my
company, or rather the company I worked for in Kolkata about fifty
years ago. Most of the talking at the meeting was being done by
company trade union bosses but Basu had come in case they needed help.
Basu hardly said a word throughout the meeting, and when it was over,
he left, also without saying a word.
The second time I saw him was in 1977 when he had become Chief
Minister. He must have been past sixty then, but he did not look a day
older than forty. We first met in his office which was being
renovated. After saying a few words, he took us into a small back
office, which he used for resting at lunch time. There was a small
bed, a couple of chairs and a small table on which was a tumbler of
water and a glass-just one glass.
Basu sat on the bed, and offered us the chairs. He spoke mostly in
monosyllables. Was he pleased that he had become Chief Minister? No
comment, just a shrug of the shoulders. What would he do now? We shall
see. There is so much poverty in West Bengal and industry is fleeing.
How do you propose tackling the situation? I am thinking about it. And
so on. Either he didn’t want to tell us anything, or he really had not
made up his mind. It was a wasted meeting.
Jyoti Basu knew his politics, but not his economics. He made sure of
his vote bank through his million-acre land distribution programme but
when the programme came to a halt, he had nothing else in hand. He
believed that the programme would put so much cash into the hands of
farmers that it would spawn an industrialisation drive and create huge
employment. Nothing of the sort happened. Money is not the only thing
you need for industry and business. You need businessmen behind money.
Basu & Co had frightened off businessmen by spewing poison against
them for years, and the Tatas and the Birlas and the Goenkas had fled
the state. Now that the communists were in charge, they refused to
come back.
It is not clear whether Basu knew all this, but, in the process, he
reduced the one-time leading industrial state in India to economic
backwater. Jyoti Basu will go down in history as the great destroyer
of Bengal, for the farmers who now own the land refuse to sell it to
businessmen, even to Tatas, who were forced to take their Nano
elsewhere, after spending crores on it.
Why are foreigners so pleased with Basu then showering him with
superlatives, now that he is no more? My hunch is that they are happy
that Jyoti Basu has damaged West Bengal beyond redemption, for the
state is where the British occupation of India began and also where
British business entrenched itself. The communists, led by Basu & Co,
were responsible for throwing out the businessmen and now the state
stands denuded of all industry and business. And the man who did it?
Their own Jyoti Basu, a man who studied in London, ate dinners in
Lincoln’s inn, as do all would-be barristers, and then came home and
finished his state. What more can the British ask for?
It is not the fault of Jyotibabu alone. The communists in Soviet Union
did the same and destroyed the country. Communists know their politics
backwards, but not their economics, though their guru, the great Marx,
makes great play with economic theories, and his great tome, Das
Kapital is essentially an economic treatise. But economics is
ultimately about people, for economic activity consists of buying and
selling, which involves buyers and sellers. But communists have never
understood people and have always taken them for granted. If people
become difficult, just go out and eliminate them, which is what Stalin
and Mao did. But Basu & Co could not do that in India. India is too
big for Marxists, for while Marx was born yesterday, India was born
five thousand years ago, and can have Marxists for breakfast.
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February 21, 2010
98th Hindu Maha Sammelan, Cherukolpuzha
Ranganath report anti-national-O Rajagopal
By S Chandrasekhar
SABARIMALA Ayyappa temple is on the banks of Pampa river. As the
season subsides, it is time for another massive gathering of Hindus,
at another bank of Pampa river, for the past 98 years. An estimated
five lakh Hindus from the Christian dominated belt of Kottayam, Idukki
and Pathanamthitta attended the Hindu Maha Sammelan at Ayroor-
Cherukolpuzha, that held for a week.
Started in 1913 by Swami Neelakanda Theertha Padhar, a disciple of
Vidyadhiraja Chattambi Swamiji, it has been going on un-intereptedly.
It was started to foster unity among the Hindus, check conversion and
educate Hindus about their religion, culture and traditions. It was
also a counter to the Maramom Convention of Christians going on for
103 years.
This year the Sammelan was inaugurated by H.H. Jagadguru Sri
Sivarathri Desikendra Swamiji of Suttur Mutt, Mysore on February. The
Swamiji is running lot of Hindu activities in Karnataka and is also
running 300 educational institutions including medical/ engineering
colleges. Around 7000 poor children are being educated by the Swamiji
in all institutions with free boarding and lodging.
Delivering his speech, the Swami said, Hinduism is in crisis for 1000
years due to Islamic and Christian invasions. "This is surviving due
to the wealth of puranas, upanishads, vedas and saints who appear
periodically whenever dharma is in danger. Great warriors like
Shivaji, Rana Pratap, Krishnadeva Ray have also protected Hindutva.
Just like our concept of Vasudhaiba Kutumbakam, Sanatana Dharma has no
religious and geographical borders. Its aim is total material well-
being and spiritual uplift of human race. Our worship of cow, nature,
trees, water sources have great relevance in the global warming
context". Swamiji concluded his speech by offering flowers at the feet
of Vidyadhiraja Swami and Sree Narayana Guru for preventing mass
exodus to Christianity and Islam. Had it not been for these saints,
Kerala would have been 100 per cent devoid of Hindus.
Shri O. Rajagopal, former Union Minister said that the ‘Temple Entry
Proclamation’ of 1936 was a land mark in the history of Kerala.
"The Vaikom Satyagraha, for movement of low caste Hindus, around
Vaikom Shiva temple was inspired by sages, saints and social reformers
like Sree Narayana Guru, Vidyadhiraja Swami, Vaikunta Swami, Ayyapu
Swami and NSS founder Mannath Padmanabhan. The satyagraha and march to
Travancore King’s palace at Thiruvananthapuram was a bond of Hindu
unity without bloodshed and caste hatred. Even brahmins like
Krishnaswamy Iyer and Congress leader Kamaraj joined the march.
Vivekananda called Kerala a ‘Mad House’ due to acute casteism
practised here. But very shortly Gandhi called Kerala’s visit a
Pilgrimage. This change was due to the Hindu unity efforts".
"In 1888, Sree Narayana Guru’s Pratishta of Siva in Aruvipuram led to
a chain of temple constructions and checked flow to Christianity and
Islam. Now Sadguru Mata Amritanandamayi has constructed twenty
‘Bhramasthan’ temples, where all gods are present. Out of the 49 world
civilisation only one is living and that is Sanatana Dharma".
Concluding his speech Shri Rajagopal called for dumping of the
Ranganath Mishra Commission Report. "The SC/ST all over India are in
great anger. By this report, the benefits enjoyed by them will have to
be shared with Christian and Muslim converts. He said it is not a
problem of SC/STs alone. The entire Hindu society has to protest
against this. This is an insult to Gandhiji who called them
‘Harijans’.
MLAs K.C. Rajagopal of CPM and Sivadasan Nair of Congress offered
felicitations. Former Travancore Devaswom Board President Upendranath
Kurup who is the moving force behind this sammelan, welcomed the
massive gathering.
Religions discources, cultural programmes, speeches by Hindu leaders,
Gita parayans, worship etc. form the highlight of the Sammelan which
will conclude on 14 February.
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=332&page=8
February 21, 2010
International seminar
ATM-like receipts in EVMs
NEW DELHI: Raising doubts over whether the electronic voting machines
are tamper-proof, Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy, on
February 6, 2010 mooted a new idea saying the Election Commission
should modify the EVMs so that one gets a receipt after casting the
vote as in the case of an ATM.
"That the EVMs are tamper-proof is a false claim. However, the
machines can be modified on the lines of ATM wherein we will get a
receipt after casting the vote which can be put into a sealed box," he
told reporters here.
This will make the electoral process more transparent and the receipts
can be referred to in case of any discrepancy, Swamy said.
He said an international conference of experts will be organised in
Chennai to "show that the machines are not tamper-proof".
The conference will be held on February 13 and will be attended by 35
experts from India, Germany, Netherlands and USA, he said.
Raising doubts over the accuracy of the EVMs, Swamy said that never
ever in a booth the total number of vote counts can be zero.
Swamy has also filed a PIL in the Delhi High Court on the use of EVMs
in Indian elections which is scheduled for hearing on February 17.
(PTI)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=332&page=39
February 21, 2010
Every third Indian is living below the poverty line
People living in the states of Orissa, Bihar and Chhattisgarh were
found to be among the poorest
THE report by economist Suresh Tendulkar used money spent by a person
on specific household goods and services to define the poor.
People living in the states of Orissa, Bihar and Chhattisgarh were
found to be among the poorest, the report said.
It also found that the number of poor in cities had decreased, while
those in villages had gone up.
The report has moved from the traditional method of enumerating the
number of people living in poverty by measuring their calorie intake
to one based on their spending on essential goods and services.
Based on the new method, it found 37.2 per cent of Indian people
living below the poverty line.
The report found that over 40 per cent of rural people survive on a
per capita expenditure of 447 rupees ($9.6) every month, spending on
bare essentials like food, fuel, clothing and footwear.
Correspondents say that for all of India’s impressive economic
progress, the number of Indians living in extreme poverty is not
declining fast enough.
Unless India commits itself to greater social spending and
intervention, it will be difficult to reduce poverty, correspondents
say.
(BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=332&page=40
February 21, 2010
Karmayogi touches the heart of youth at World Book Fair Suruchi
Sahitya stall makes an impact
Karmayogi, the documentary prepared by Shri Nitish Bhardwarj on the
life of second RSS Sarsanghachalak Shri Guruji attracted a large
number of youth visiting the 19th World Book Fair in New Delhi from
January 30 the February 7. The Suruchi Prakashan had made elaborate
arrangements for display of the documentary and other literature based
on the life of Shri Guruji at its stall in the Book Fair. According to
Shri Gautam Sapara, manager of Suruchi Prakashan, the documentary
attracted a large number of visitors to the stall and they were seen
eagerly trying to know the life of Shri Guruji and the historical
events of that period. Formed in 1970 and engaged in publishing good
quality books the Suruchi Prakashan participated in the World Book
Fair for the fifth time and this time it had hired double of the space
it used to hire in previous fairs. It sold more than 3000 books at the
Fair. RSS Sahsarkaryavah Shri Suresh Soni, Akhil Bharatiya Prachar
Pramukh Dr Manmohan Vaidya and many other noted authors and
dignitaries visited the stall. "More than 5000 visitors visited the
stall and gathered information about the books published by Suruchi
Prakashan. Encouraged with this year’s response we have decided to
make elaborate arrangements for the next Book Fair to be organised in
2012," he said.
(FOC)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=332&page=36
February 28, 2010
Legal hurdles on Muslim quota
By Sabyasachi Bandopadhyay
KOLKATA: The State government is set to face a legal hurdle in
implementing its decision for reservation of 10 per cent of government
jobs for Muslim OBCs with the BJP saying it would move the court
against the government’s decision.
"The Andhra Pradesh High Court has showed us the way and we are going
to challenge the State government’s decision in the Calcutta High
Court. What the State government has done is unconstitutional as you
cannot provide reservation on the basis of religion," said the BJP
president Rahul Sinha over the phone from Delhi. He said he would take
up the matter with party president Nitin Gadkari and the State unit
will observe a protest day on the issue.
The Congress government in Andhra Pradesh enacted a law on June 23,
2007 providing for 4 per cent reservation in education and government
jobs to 15 backward communities among the Muslims. After a lot of
legal wrangles, the High Court today declared the Act null and void.
The West Bengal government itself became skeptical whether its
decision on reservation for Muslims could be implemented. "The Andhra
High Court’s order will have to be kept in mind. We will have to be
ready for everything because somebody can go to court," said Abdus
Sattar, Minister of State for Minorities.(Courtesy: NaidnI Express)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=333&page=29
July 10, 2005
Opinions
AP reservations for Muslims
Let?s learn from history
By S.R. Ramanujan
Certainly no nation should live in its history because no nation can
afford to be stagnant. An important trait of nature is ?change? and a
nation has to keep pace with changing times. This does not mean that a
nation should forget history. On the contrary it has to learn from
history. Otherwise, its future history will be full of chaos and
confusion. When the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Dr Y S Rajasekhara
Reddy announces that his government would consider providing political
reservations for Muslims, either he doesn?t understand history or
doesn?t care to learn from history or is least concerned about the
undesirable consequences of such a decision.
The AP government?s decision to extend 5 per cent reservation for
Muslims in education and jobs is having a spiraling effect. The
Nationalist Congress Party general secretary Akhtar Rizvi wants a
similar facility to be given to the Muslims in Maharashtra. A Muslim
group in Bihar is demanding 20 per cent reservations in educational
institutions and government jobs along the lines of AP government
decision. Another Muslim organization wants Article 341 to be amended
to include dalit Muslims in the SC category. The Hyderabad MP and
their apparent of Sultan Salahuddin Owaissi, Asaduddin Owaissi wants
the 5 per cent reservation to be extended to the entire country,
because he perhaps looks at it from a national perspective being a
Member of the Lok Sabha. Not to be left out, Brahmana Seva Sangha
Samakya (never heard of this outfit till now) demands that the
government should extend to Brahmins also a similar reservation in
education, employment and political posts on par with Muslims.
We don?t need a BC Commission, appointed by the AP government, to tell
us that there are a good number of educationally and economically
backward Muslims in the country or in the state. It is a reality and
none should crib about affirmative action. But quota is not the answer
for social and historical reasons. Had a survey been done at the
national level on the geographical location of such backward Muslims,
we would have got certain facts that have been swept under the carpet
so far by vested interests in the community. The backwardness is
mostly prevalent among those regions that were under Muslim rulers
prior to the integration of princely states, whether it is Bhopal, Old
Delhi, Ahmedabad or Hyderabad. Take the case of Telengana districts
including Hyderabad old city under the Nizam rule and compare it with
the rest of the State. Even today Muslims in the old city of Hyderabad
are reluctant to learn Telugu. How can they compete for a job in the
rest of the State? Muslim leaders cornered all the benefits guaranteed
under the Constitution in terms of minority educational institutions.
Instead of using those institutions for eradicating the educational
backwardness of Muslims, they started selling the seats for non-Muslim
candidates and thus pushing the deserving Muslims further into
educational backwardness. Either they went to Madarasas or drifted
without even elementary education. That is the reason you find average
Muslim literacy at 17.7 per cent while the state average is 44 per
cent. The literates among Muslim women are just 4 per cent. These are
the figures now being quoted to establish educational backwardness of
Muslims.
AP government?s decision to extend 5 per cent reservation for Muslims
in education and jobs is having a spiraling effect. The Nationalist
Congress Party general secretary Akhtar Rizvi wants a similar facility
to be given to the Muslims in Maharashtra.
The moot question is how will the 5 per cent quote help in improving
the literacy level among Muslim women from 4 per cent to atleast 40
per cent. We need a multi-pronged approach to uplift the Muslim masses
in terms of education which will automatically lead to economic
prosperity. First, they must be weaned away from the communal clutches
of their leadership. Second, the government must do its best to create
awareness among the backward Muslims about the importance of
education. Third, encourage institutions floated by Muslims who have
no political interests. Fourth, ensure that no non-Muslims are
admitted into such institutions for a price. 5 per cent quota will
only help Muslim political leaders to flaunt it before their followers
and the ruling party to garner their votes. This is the short term
effect.
The long term effect is going to be catastrophic. Leave alone the
demand for similar quota from other states. What is going to cause a
body blow to the nation is the demand for political reservations. Now
that Muslims have been brought under ?E? category of backward classes,
so goes the demand, they should also be considered for reserved seats
in the local body elections to be held shortly in the state. It is in
this context, chief minister Dr Reddy told a delegation of Muslim
women that political quota for Muslims was under consideration of the
government. To predict what would be the consequences of such a
decision, one has to go back to history.
Thanks to L.K. Advani, people have started dusting the history books
from the shelves for a fresh look at pre-Independence history.
Whatever the interpretations of Gandhiji?s support to the Khilafat
movement and Jinnah?s opposition to it, whatever the reasons for the
rejection of Nehru?s Constitution and agreement on the Lucknow Pact,
one thing is clear which cannot be disputed by any historian. That is,
the provision for separate electorates and reservation for Muslims
sowed the seed for Partition of the country.
Even today Muslims in the old city of Hyderabad are reluctant to learn
Telugu. How can they compete for a job in the rest of the State?
Muslim leaders cornered all the benefits guaranteed under the
Constitution in terms of minority educational institutions.
What is the genesis for such political exclusivism? It was in 1906 a
35-member delegation of Muslims met in Simla to demand proportionate
representation for Muslims. Though this demand was not immediately
conceded, it acted as a catalyst for separate electorate for Muslims.
Jinnah supported the movement for separate electorate and the Congress
too accepted it in the Lucknow Pact. And the rest is history. Sri
Aurobindo commented on this development thus: ?What has created the
Hindu-Muslim split was not Swadeshi, but the acceptance of the
communal principle by the Congress. The recognition of that communal
principle at Lucknow made them permanently a separate political entity
in India which ought never to have happened?.
What Dr Rajasekara Reddy is trying to do now is to further consolidate
this division and to create more tension between castes and
communities leading to disastrous consequences to the unity and
integrity of the nation. It is disastrous for a nation if it fails to
learn from its history.
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=86&page=12
January 21, 2008
UPA has reduced Hindu youth to second class status in India
By O.P. Gupta, IFS (retd)
Minorities are first class citizens for the Congress Party, SCs are
the second class and the OBCs are the third class citizens. As per
Mandal Commission the OBCs are 54 per cent of population so on pro-
rata basis welfare schemes for OBCs should have been allocated Rs
25,200 crore.
The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report of March 30,
2007 shows that unemployment rate among Muslims and Hindus of both
sexes in urban areas differs by just about 0.5 per cent, and, that 755
Muslims per 1000 were in self-employed category against only 427
Hindus per 1000 in 2004-05. This sample survey shatters the myth being
created by Congress and Communist parties that far more Muslims are
unemployed than the Hindus.
In Karnataka, literacy rate for Muslims as per Sachar Committee
(Table, page 287) is 70.1 per cent, Hindus (65.6 per cent). In Kerala,
Muslim literacy rate is 89.4 per cent, Hindus (90.2 per cent). Still
the Congress manifesto of 2004 declared all Muslims as educationally
backwards in Kerala and Karnataka to reserve jobs for Muslims with a
view to implement its core agenda of reducing job opportunity of Hindu
youngsters, hook or by crook.
The National Commission for Linguistic and Religious Minorities headed
by Justice Ranganath Misra in May 2007 has recommended sub-quota of
8.4 per cent for minorities within 27 per cent OBC quota, and,
reservation to Dalit minorities by including such converts under
Scheduled Caste category within the 15 per cent SC quota. It said that
in the 27 per cent OBC quota, an 8.4 per cent sub-quota could be
earmarked for the minorities with an internal break-up of six per cent
for Muslims and 2.4 per cent for other minorities. If dalit Muslims
and dalit Christians are clubbed into the 15 per cent quota they will
squeeze out SC Hindus as Christians and Muslims enjoy better literacy
than SC Hindus. Misra has been a Congress Member of Rajya Sabha.
So the grand agenda of the Congress Party, communist parties and
socialist parties to reduce percentage of Hindus below 85 per cent in
all government and public sector jobs, in educational institutions,
that too with notes and votes of Hindu voters has taken shape.
In minority run institutions a Hindu student with higher percentage of
marks may not get admission. SC and ST Hindu students are denied their
constitutional reservation quotas in minority institutions. Is it not
second class treatment to Hindu students?
For 2007-08 the UPA govt has introduced 20,000 special scholarships
for minority students for technical/professional courses. For minority
students studying in top 50 institutions [like IIMs, IITs etc], full
course fee is reimbursable. For those studying in other institutions
course fee up to Rs 20,000 per annum is reimbursable. Hostellers will
get maintenance allowance of Rs 1000 per month.
I served as Indian Ambassador over the last thirteen years when I saw ?
burning? urge among Hindu settlers to be treated with respect and on
equal footings with locals in matters of religion, education,
employment, economic matters and application of local laws. After a
gap of thirteen years, I returned to India in January 2007 and was
amazed to see just the reverse trend among Hindus living in India,
rather than demanding equality in all spheres even educated Hindus are
pushing their own kith and kins into second and third class status
vis-?-vis minority candidates by supporting such political parties
which openly declare that they will give first preference to minority
candidates over Hindus in matters of admissions into colleges,
employment in government and public sector, departmental promotions,
disbursement of bank loans etc.
Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, a Sikh politician while addressing
the National Development Council on Dec 9, 2006 publicly instructed
the civil servants, ?We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure
that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to
share equitably in the fruits of development. They must have the first
claim on resources?.
No wonder, budgetary allocation for welfare schemes for minorities in
the XIth Five Year Plan [2007-12] has been hiked to Rs 7,000 crore;
annual allocation to the Ministry of Minority Affairs has been suo
motu raised by the Planning Commission to Rs 1,400 crore from Rs 500
crore though this Ministry had sought annual allocation of Rs 1,100
crore.
The Ministry of Social Justice had sought Rs 16,100 crore for welfare
of SCs and OBCs, out of which Rs 11,185 crore was earmarked for SCs
and Rs 2,250 crore for OBCs. But reflecting the step motherly
treatment of Hindus by the Congress party, the Planning Commission
reduced allocation for their welfare schemes by Rs 3,000 with the
result budgetary allocation for welfare of SCs stands reduced to Rs
9,097 crore and for OBCs stands reduced to a peanut amount of Rs 1,588
crore. This is the price which SC and OBC Hindus had to pay for voting
the UPA parties.
Above datas show that minorities are first class citizens for the
Congress party, SCs are the second class and the OBCs are the third
class citizens. As per Mandal Commission the OBCs are 54 per cent of
population so on pro-rata basis welfare schemes for OBCs should have
been allocated Rs 25,200 crore.
It is painful to see how the class of ?secular, progressive and
liberal? Hindu politicians right from the days of the 1916 Congress-
Muslim League Lucknow Pact till date in form of the Sachar Committee
Report, Rangnath Misra Commission, the New 15-Point Programme of Prime
Minister, 15 per cent Plan Allocation to Minorities etc has been
systematically concocting false and fabricated justifications to
reduce, bit by bit, the educational, employment and economic (E3)
opportunities of all Hindu boys and girls, including SC, ST and
leftist Hindu boys and girls, pushing them to second and third class
status vis-?-vis minority boys and girls.
The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) report of March 30,
2007 shows that unemployment rate among Muslims and Hindus of both
sexes in urban areas differs by just about 0.5 per cent, and, that 755
Muslims per 1000 were in self-employed category against only 427
Hindus per 1000 in 2004-05. This sample survey shatters the myth being
created by Congress and Communist parties that far more Muslims are
unemployed than the Hindus.
It may come as another rude shock to those Hindu intellectuals who
have made it their business to plead concessions after concessions for
Muslims on pretext of Muslim educational backwardness that as per
Census Report of 2001 Muslim males have higher literacy rate than
Hindu males in eleven states (Andhra Pradesh, Andaman & Nicobar,
Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharastra,
Orissa, Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu).
In thirteen states, Muslim women enjoy higher literacy rate than Hindu
women [Andhra Pradesh, Andaman & Nicobar, Chhattisgarh, Daman & Diu,
Dadra & nagarhaveli, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra, Orissa, Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu, Statements 8a and 8b,
Census Report 2001].
The Sachar Committee [page 53] also admits that in ten states literacy
rate among Muslims are higher than even that of the upper caste Hindus
and also higher than SC/ST Hindus.
In Karnataka, literacy rate for Muslims as per Sachar Committee (Table
at page 287) is 70.1 per cent, Hindus (65.6 per cent) and SC/ST (51.5
per cent). In Kerala, Muslim literacy rate is 89.4 per cent, Hindus
(90.2 per cent) and SC/ST (80.8 per cent). Still the Congress
manifesto of 2004 declared all Muslims as educationally backwards in
Kerala and Karnataka to reserve jobs for Muslims with a view to
implement its core agenda of reducing job opportunity of Hindu
youngsters, by hook or by crook.
Not to be left behind in reducing percentage of Hindus in government
services, Karunanidhi flying in the face of facts is also harping on
educational backwardness of Muslims in Tamil Nadu.
The Sachar Committee (Table at page 287) reports that literacy rate of
Muslims in Andhra Pradesh is 68 per cent followed by Hindus (59.4 per
cent) and SC/ST (48.9) but Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy (a
Christian) reserved five per cent seats for Muslims in educational
institutions and in government jobs on false plea of educational
backwardness of Muslims in Andhra Pradesh just to cheat Hindu youth of
their seats in colleges and their jobs in government. Those Hindus in
Andhra Pradesh who blindly voted to the Congress party in 2004 must be
feeling cheated.
According to the 2001 Census of India (Report on Religion Data)
Christian community enjoys higher literacy rate than Hindus; all India
literacy rate for Christian community was 84.4 per cent compared to
76.2 per cent of Hindus.
Right from 1954 the Congress party Prime Ministers at the Centre have
been issuing instructions to all Central Ministries as well as to all
State Governments to give special considerations to recruitment of
religious minority candidates in public services with implied hint to
reduce percentage of Hindus in public services. In 1983, Prime
Minister Indira Gandhi vide her 15-Point Programme for Minorities
became the first Prime Minister to have issued instructions to include
minority members in all the Selection Boards and departmental
promotion committees. The circular to induct religious minority
members in Selection Boards was again issued by the Rajiv Gandhi
Government and the Vishwanath Prasad Singh Government The Manmohan
Singh Government reiterated it in January 2007 with added condition of
making quarterly reports on progress of minority candidates actually
recruited and or promoted. After all the ?communally appointed
members? of the Selection Boards will have to show some result of
their being added to Boards and, thus, the intake of minority
candidates will go up and percentage of Hindu?s intake, whether
leftist or rightist, whether forward or backward, whether upper caste
or scheduled caste Hindus will automatically come down. This is
happening when overall unemployment situation is worsening in India
day by day.
The National Commission for Linguistic and Religious Minorities headed
by Justice Ranganath Misra in May 2007 has recommended sub-quota of
8.4 per cent for minorities within 27 per cent OBC quota, and,
reservation to Dalit minorities by including such converts under
Scheduled Caste category within the 15 per cent SC quota. It said that
in the 27 per cent OBC quota, an 8.4 per cent sub-quota could be
earmarked for the minorities with an internal break-up of 6 per cent
for Muslims and 2.4 per cent for other minorities. If dalit Muslims
and dalit Christians are clubbed into the 15 per cent quota they will
squeeze out SC Hindus as Christians and Muslims enjoy better literacy
than SC Hindus. Misra has been a Congress Member of Rajya Sabha.
The basic premise of this Commission report is to ensure 15 per cent
representation?proportionate to the minority population?to the
minorities in Government jobs and educational institutions. ?The break-
up within the recommended 15 per cent earmarked seats in institutions
shall be 10 per cent for Muslims and the remaining five per cent for
the other minorities, however, if the Muslims cannot avail 10 per cent
quota, the rest should go to the non-Muslim minorities and in no case
shall any seat within the recommended 15 per cent go to the majority
community?, the Misra report said.
So the grand secular agenda of the Congress party, the Communist
parties and various socialist parties is to reduce percentage of
Hindus below 85 per cent in all public services and in all educational
institutions. Those Hindus who oppose this grand agenda are dubbed as
communal Hindus. As we know at present Hindus constitute more than 95
per cent of all public services. So all those Hindus who have school
going children and grand children must wake up to protect interests of
their wards.
No wonder, inaugurating the National Conference of State Minority
Commissions on November 2, 2006, Dr Manmohan Singh, PM said: ?It is
essential that communal peace and harmony should be maintained and the
minorities get a fair share in Central and State Governments jobs?.
According to press reports of November 26, 2006 the National
Commission for Minorities (NCM) asked the Union Home Ministry to
ensure a fair representation of religious minorities in the police and
paramilitary forces.
Suppose there are 10,000 vacancies to be filled up. So, seats reserved
for SC Hindus as per existing formula will be 1500, for ST Hindus 750
and for OBCs 2700. Now if 15 per cent jobs are reserved for minorities
as per recommendation of Justice Misra, general category seats for
which a Hindu can compete will come down to 8,500. So number of seats
for SC Hindus will get reduced to 1275, for ST Hindus will get reduced
to 637 and to OBCs 2295. If Misra?s recommendation of 8.4 per cent sub-
quota within quota is also accepted only 1591 seats will be left for
OBC Hindus. More meritorious minority candidates will naturally spill
over into general category seats.
So the grand agenda of the Congress party, communist parties and
socialist parties to reduce percentage of Hindus below 85 per cent in
all government and public sector jobs, in educational institutions,
that too with notes and votes of Hindu voters has taken shape.
Pseudo-secular Hindu politicians have passed such laws which enable a
minority student to get cheaper educational loans at three per cent
interest per annum from the National Minority Development & Finance
Corporation, whereas a Hindu student gets student loan at 12.5 per
cent to 14 per cent interest per annum from commercial banks. Minority
students are required to repay educational loans in five years after
completion of his course but in case of Hindu students repayment
starts one year after completion of course or six months after
obtaining employment whichever is earlier. One may see details at
(www.nmdfc.org).
A minority businessman gets margin money loans from NMDFC at five per
cent per annum but a Hindu gets commercial loan at 14 per cent to 18
per cent per annum from commercial banks. A Hindu student and a Hindu
businessman gets bank loans at much higher rates of interest and on
harsher terms whether he is a member of the Students Federation or
that of the NSUI or the ABVP.
On March 13, 2007 Finance Minister Chidambaram told the Rajya Sabha
that of the total priority sector lending, loans to minorities had
increased by 33 per cent to Rs 45,490 crore on March 31, 2006 as
against Rs 34,654 crore when the UPA Government took office in May
2004. The Finance Minister said that during the financial year 2005-06
credit to religious minorities was 8.18 per cent of the total priority
sector lending. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has committed to raise
credit to minorities to 15 per cent of the total priority sector
lending. In its Charter for Advancement of Muslim Community the CPI(M)
has also called to reserve 15 per cent of priority credits for
minorities. So, Hindu businessmen will increase their own difficulties
in getting bank loans by financing the elections of Congress Party and
UPA parties.
In minority run institutions a Hindu student with higher percentage of
marks may not get admission. SC and ST Hindu students are denied their
constitutional reservation quotas in minority institutions. Is it not
second class treatment to Hindu students?
A Delhi based Hindu student with better marks may not get admission in
any professional college in Delhi but a Delhi based Muslim student
with less marks is likely to get admission in professional courses in
Delhi such as in the Jamia Hamdard University in Delhi as this
University has reserved 50 per cent seats for Muslims claiming to be a
minority institution under Art 30(1) of the Constitution of India. Is
it not second class treatment of meritorious Hindu boys and girls?
Hindu candidates with better CV are denied appointments in minority
institutions.
Attempts are being made to declare the Jamia Millia University and the
Aligarh Muslim University as ?minority institutions? so that 50 per
cent seats in these Central Universities can be officially reserved
for Muslim students, and, thus, reduce Hindu students as second class
citizens at two more campuses.
For 2007-08, the UPA government has introduced 20,000 special
scholarships for minority students for technical/professional courses.
For minority students studying in top 50 institutions [like IIMs, IITs
etc], full course fee is reimbursable. For those studying in other
institutions course fee up to Rs 20,000 per annum is reimbursable.
Hostellers will get maintenance allowance of Rs 1000 per month. [] In
addition minority candidates appearing for competitive examinations of
civil services etc will be paid for attending coaching classes of
their choice. No such facility is available to Hindu students because
their parents vote for Congress party or socialist parties. []
Congress and Communist parties have, thus, imposed such a legal system
where a Muslim candidate or a Christian candidate has all the legal
rights to compete on equal footings with a Hindu candidate for
employment, but there are thousands and thousands of posts paid from
government funds for which Hindus just cannot apply, such as, posts of
Chairman of the National Minority Commission and Provincial Minority
Commissions, the posts of the Principal and Vice Principal of St.
Stephan?s College, Delhi University, heads of minority institutions
etc.
Under section 3 of the National Minority Commission Act, a Hindu can
not be its Chairman and at least five of its seven members including
Chairman shall have to be from amongst the minority communities.
Section 4 of the National Commission for Minority Educational
Institutions Act 2004 stipulates that only persons from minority
communities shall be eligible to be appointed as Chairman and members
of this Commission. Chairman and members draw salary and perks of a
Secretary to the Govt of India and a Hindu, howsoever, secular and
progressive stands debarred from holding these posts. Both Acts were
moved by the Congress party. So a person shall be denied appointments
to these posts under the State simply because he is a Hindu. Hindu
parliamentarians have thus downgraded their own younger generations by
enacting such anti-Hindu laws.
Minority Commissions have been set up to ensure that minorities are
not discriminated but there is no Commission to ensure that Hindus are
not victimized in India by minorities.
Such ill-treatments a Hindu voter has invited for himself and for his
children by giving his vote to the pseudo-secular parties or by
abstaining from voting. Every Hindu vote given to any pseudo-secular
party is going to be used to humiliate Hindu youth. A faithful and
firm handling of this inequality imposed by pseudo secular parties
upon Hindu youth will change the politics of India.
(The writer retired in the rank of Secretary to the Government of
India in the Indian Foreign Service (1971 batch). He served as
Ambassador to Finland, Estonia, Jamaica, Tunisia, Tanzania, Dominican
Republic etc., and Consul General, Dubai (UAE) and Birmingham (UK).)
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February 24, 2008
Editorial
Now A Christian Subsidy!
If there was a national award for inventing appeasement populism, the
first claimant for that would have been the Andhra Pradesh Chief
Minister Rajasekhara Reddy. The man who kick started the UPA Muslim
quota business in his state as the first act of his government in May
2004, has now offered to subsidise travel by Christians to their Holy
Land, meaning Israel-Palestine along the lines of the Haj subsidy for
Muslims.
The move is totally unconstitutional and the inspiration is blatantly
communal with a political agenda. Rajasekhara Reddy is a Christian,
like his party chief, though the community is not very numerous in his
state. In states where the Christians are in substantial number they
enjoy many privileges which are denied to the Hindus. Like the
reservation in jobs and education in Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the
pronouncedly Christian character of some of the North East states
where the state assembly sessions begin with Bible prayers. Nobody has
objected to them, but the Christian community is not known to go on
pilgrimages to foreign lands the way Muslims do. There has been no
demand of this sort from any quarter in the community. As such
Christians are educationally and economically well off.
Most church denominations have taken up a rigorous Indianisation plank
and have largely succeeded in this effort. This attempt at
secularisation is being sought to be torpedoed by certan over zealous
evangelical elements. Rajasekhara Reddy?s effort seems to encourage
such elements.
In the last four years there were many reports of aggressive
proselytising mission in the state. This had created tension in some
areas especially in Tirupati-Tirumalai, where after a series of
protests from Hindu groups the government had to issue a notification
prohibiting non-Hindus violating the sanctity of the Holy Hills.
Another controversy in the state is about the state government
systematically siphoning off thousands of crores from the temple
offerings for other irreligious activities. Yet another case is
pending in the High Court on the state government?s attempt to sell
away thousands of acres of temple property to make revenue for the
exchequer.
A state government with such questionable reputation has now mooted
the idea of Christian subsidy with some obvious ulterior intention.
Perhaps this might ignite a new wave of demands and protests and
grievance concoction. As such Christians, unlike the Muslims are a
contented community. They have no dearth of foreign funding. For
ecclesiastical training and studies Christians go to Vatican, and for
this they spent their own money. That is no pilgrimage. Jerusalem,
another holy place for Christians is a virtual war zone and
Christianity has no tradition of pilgrimage to Holy Land. In India
there are many places holy for them. It is not clear if Reddy has a
plan to subsidise such domestic pilgrimages also.
In any case, the Constitution does not allow discrimination in the
name of religion, caste and region. Every act of the UPA in these
matters has been fundamentally wrong. The Haj subsidy, which is
increasing every year, has now reached over Rs 4,000 crore annually.
This is over and above the spending on welfare and facilitation
arrangements by the states and the centre. It is high time the UPA put
an end to such cynical acts of perdition for temporary political
mileage.
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=225&page=3
February 24, 2008
Obituary
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
He took meditation to the West
On behalf of the Hindu American community of USA, Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, America, has extended its deepest condolences to the large ?
family of devotees? of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and described his death
as a great loss to the human race. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a spiritual
leader, who introduced the West to ?Transcendental Meditation?, had
passed away on February 5 at Vlodrop, a southern Dutch village at the
age of 91.
?Maharishi?s work is complete,? his Movement said in a statement. ?He
has done what he set out to do in 1957 - to lay the foundation for a
peaceful world, now Maharishi is being welcomed with open arms into
heaven.? Earlier, on January 11, the Maharishi had announced that his
public work had finished and that he would use his remaining time to
complete a long-running series of published commentaries on the
Vedas.
Maharishi was also famous as the guru to the Beatles, the Indian
spiritualist Deepak Chopra, and several other high-profile people.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is believed to have been born on January 12,
1917. He was born Mahesh Prasad Varma in Central India, the third of
four children. After graduating with a degree in physics at Allahabad
University in 1942, he left for the foothills of the Himalayas to
begin a 13-year spiritual apprenticeship with his guru Swami
Brahmanand Saraswati. When his mentor passed away in the early 1950s,
the Maharishi dedicated his life to spreading the teachings of his
guru. He started teaching meditation techniques around the world in
1959, starting in the United States.
The Maharishi originated the Transcendental Meditation (TM, a
trademark,) movement in 1957 and brought it to the United States in
1959. He set out on his international mission to achieve this vision
in 1959, beginning in Los Angeles, where he established his movement
with an initial following of 25 devotees. From this small beginning
the Maharishi over his lifetime developed a global organisation with
nearly 1,000 TM centres, property assets valued in 1998 at $3.5
billion and an estimated four million disciples. Maharishi?s TM
centres expanded all over the world to England, France, Russia,
Germany, South America, USA, etc. They were all held happily together
by a single and everlasting thread, i.e. meditation.
TM consists of closing one?s eyes twice a day for 20 minutes while
silently repeating a mantra to gain deep relaxation, eliminate stress,
promote good health and attain clear thinking and inner fulfillment.
Over the years since TM became popular, many scientists have found
physical and mental benefits from mediation in general and
transcendental meditation in particular, especially in reducing stress-
related ailments. Since the technique?s inception in 1955, it has been
used to train more than 40,000 teachers, taught more than 5 million
people, opened thousands of teaching centres and founded hundreds of
schools, colleges and universities.
This organisation helps a person find a way for the answers that every
person has been looking for since the beginning of the human
civilisation?who am I, where I came from, where am I going, and so on.
Maharshi lectured on the positive effects of meditation on body, mind
and intellect. He gave a new face to Vedic literature. Maharishi
explained the scientific nature of Vedic literature and demonstrated
how through that science one could live a peaceful life, reach one?s
highest potential and follow the path of self-fulfillment.
He was the only spiritual leader who held people together from all
religions of the world under one banner: Transcendental Meditation. In
the United States, his organisation is based in Fairfield, Iowa, where
it operates a university, the Maharishi University of Management
(MUM). In 2001, disciples of the movement incorporated their own town,
Maharishi Vedic City, a few miles north of Fairfield.
(FOC)
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February 24, 2008
UPA inducements for conversion
By Dr. Indulata Das
The communities designated as minorities, which include Muslims,
Christians, Sikhs, Budhists and Parsis (Zorastrains) account for 18.4
per cent of the India?s population according to 2001 Census. Among
them, Muslims constitute the largest group with 13.4 per cent of our
population followed by Christians 2.3 per cent. The percentage of
Muslim population in 1951 was less than 10 per cent and that of
Christian about 2 per cent. As analysed by various experts including
Justice Sachar, the high growth of Muslim population is contributable
to higher female fertility. Unchecked infiltration from the
neighbouring country, i.e. Bangladesh, has also enhanced the Muslim
population growth substantially, which according to a view articulated
by Justice Sachar in his report does not matter. The growth of
Christian population, however, is mainly due to conversion among
weaker sections of the society, particularly in SC/ST-dominated
regions. The methods employed for conversion include allurement,
deception and threats.
The policy pronouncements and programmes of the UPA-government seem to
have far reaching consequences in disturbing our social equilibrium.
In the name of development intervention to help the minority
communities, the new schemes that have been introduced actually amount
to division of our society. It is unthinkable to visualise inclusive
growth through policies and schemes that are divisive and segregative.
It will be pertinent to mention here some important features of newly
introduced schemes and ramifications of their implementation.
The merit-cum-means scholarship provides that a student of minority
community within annual family income of up to Rs. 2.50 lakh will
receive course fee of
Rs. 20,000 and scholarship of Rs. 10,000 per annum as hosteller and
Rs. 5000 per annum as day scholar. Although educational status of SCs,
STs and some of the OBCs in the country is worse than that of
minorities, the central government has not considered it necessary to
introduce a similar scheme for them. The scheme looks like a
government-funded inducement for conversion.
In addition to merit-cum-means scholarship, the central government has
started another scheme to provide post-matric scholarship to students
of minority communities. Accordingly, a student having annual family
income of up to Rs. 2,00,000, is eligible for post-matric scholarship
which includes course and maintenance allowances. It is to be noted
here that the family income ceiling for SC and ST students to be
eligible for post-matric scholarship is Rs. 1,00,000 and for OBCs Rs.
45,000. The income certificates for SC, ST and OBC students have to be
issued by the designated revenue officers as per the prescribed norms.
No such conditions exist for minority students. A self certification
to be filed on a non-judicial stamp paper regarding annual family
income of up to Rs. 2,00,000 for post-matric scholarship and Rs. 2.50
lakh for merit-cum-means scholarship is all that is needed. The
discrimination is evident.
The scheme of pre-matric scholarship approved by the central
government for students of minority communities provides for cost
sharing of the scholarship in between the centre and the state at
75:25 ratio. The central government does not consider introducing a
similar scheme for SCs and STs knowing it well that their educational
and economic status is worse than that of minorities.
The Prime Minister?s 15 Point Programme provides for ear-marking of 15
per cent budgetary allocations under priority sector programmes for
minorities. There are no additional allocations from the central
government for this purpose. It is to be remembered that majority of
SC and ST population is below the government-defined poverty line.
This is why 50 per cent to 60 per cent targets under most of the
priority sector schemes are required to be achieved by assisting SC
and ST families according to the relevant guidelines. Setting apart 15
per cent of schematic grants without any additional allocation under
the Prime Minister?s 15 Point Programme means diversion of benefits
meant for the poor SCs and STs to that extent. For example, under
Indira Awas Yojana, 60 per cent houses have to be given to the SC and
ST families as per the prescribed guidelines. Under the Prime Minister?
s 15 Point Programme, 15 per cent houses will have to be given to the
families of minority communities which account for about 4.5 per cent
of Orissa?s population. The fact remains that about 40 per cent of the
Muslim population lives in the urban areas where Indira Awas Yojna
cannot be implemented and STs do not change their social status.
In brief, the differential and more favourable scholarship norms for
minority students from primary to professional courses, and the
earmarking of 15 per cent plan resources under the 15 point programme
are not only divisive and segregative measures, they can also be
viewed as the central government sponsored incentives to promote
religious conversion. The society should judge whether inclusive
growth and social assimilation can be achieved through the
segregative, divisive and discriminatory communal budgeting. Whether
the parties in power actually mean development of minorities or want
to misuse them as ?vote banks? perpetually. There is no country or
society where inclusive growth and social integration have been
achieved through divisive policies and programmes.
(The writer can be contacted at Qtr. No. 5R 9, Forest Park, Unit-1,
Bhubaneswar, Orissa, 751009, indul...@yahoo.co.in)
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January31, 2010
A Report As A Charter of Divisiveness
By Kidar Nath Sahani
Of interest will be to know that even the then British Government
refused to include the Muslims and the Christians in the list of
Scheduled Castes when it prepared such a list in 1936.
Notably, the Commission has suggested an alternative route for
reservation to minorities if there is "insurmountable difficulty" in
implementing the recommendation for 15 per cent reservation. In this
regard it is said since minorities constitute 8.4 per cent of the
total OBC population according to the Mandal Commission Report, so in
the 27 per cent OBC quota, an 8.4 per cent sub quota should be
earmarked for minorities. (As per Commission’s suggestions, the
internal break-up should be 6 per cent for the Muslims, commensurate
with their 73 per cent share in the total minority population at the
national level and 2.4 per cent for other minorities.) This is a clear
effort to dilute the existing quota of the OBCs.
Unfortunately, during the last over sixty years politicians of various
shades with their politics of vote-bank and appeasement, have done
havoc to this spirit of ‘one and united nation’. Various Commissions
and Committees like the Mandal Commission, Sachar Committee and now
the Ranganath Misra Commission were formed to serve this end.
On the eve of the Sashtipurti, i.e. 60 years of the Republic, the
Congress is trying to do what its own leaders, the founding fathers of
the Republic refused to do, i.e., to divide the nation in the name of
religion by conceding religion based reservation. In the Constituent
Assembly, similar demands were firmly turned down by the luminaries
like Dr BR Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, Pt Nehru and C Rajagopalachari. But
the present government led by Congress wants to negate it all by
succumbing to pressures of vote-bank politics. It is trying to promote
such divisiveness through the back door.
The Constituent Assembly in its long debates aimed at making India one
united nation devoid of all such anomalies that had crept up in the
society in the past, and made it weak, divided and vulnerable. The
issue of giving representation to different groups like scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes, minorities-religious or linguistic, was
discussed at length. Going through the debates, one finds that to a
vast majority of members, including Baba Sahib Ambedkar, the very idea
of giving representation to various groups was not acceptable. Even Dr
Ambedkar did not want in the case of reservation for the SC and ST to
last for 10 years after Independence. This was the focus of the
debates and the spirit of the ‘Constitution’.
Unfortunately, during the last over sixty years politicians of various
shades with their politics of vote-bank and appeasement, have done
havoc to this spirit of ‘one and united nation’. Various Commissions
and Committees like the Mandal Commission, Sachar Committee and now
the Ranganath Misra Commission were formed to serve this end.
The Indian Constitution provides ample guarantees and opportunities to
all sections of society, irrespective of their religion, belief or
caste, for their healthy growth and progress. Yet, for political
interests such commissions and committees were constituted. The
reports they presented speak volumes.
The report of the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic
Minorities-better known as Ranganath Misra Commission, was tabled in
both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha at the fag-end of the winter
session of the Parliament, apparently in an attempt to avoid debates
and discussions. It was actually submitted to the Prime Minister over
two years ago, on May 21, 2007. For reasons best known to itself, the
government kept the report in cold storage for so long, though it was
almost immediately leaked in the media and was widely circulated.
The Commission was constituted on March 21, 2005. Formed in the
aftermath of controversies created by the Sachar Committee
recommendations, it was given the task to suggest criteria for
identification of socially and economically backward sections among
religious and linguistic minorities and to recommend measures for
their welfare.
The four-member Commission included Chairman Justice Ranganath Misra
who headed it along with three members-Tahir Mahmood, the late Anil
Wilson(Principal, St Stephens College), Mohinder Singh and Member
Secretary Asha Das.
The report makes three main suggestions:
I. Article 16(4), which is the constitutional basis for providing job
quotas to OBCs, should be the basis for providing reservation benefits
to minority groups who are socially and economically backward.
II. At least 15 per cent of seats in all non-minority educational
institutions should be earmarked for the minorities with 10 per cent
for the Muslims (commensurate with their 73 per cent share in the
total minority population at the national level) and 5 per cent for
other minorities.
The Commission also recommended 15 per cent share for the minorities
in all the government schemes like NREGA, Prime Minister’s Rozgar
Yojna, Grameen Rozgar Yojna, etc. Besides, it seeks the same 15 per
cent quota for minorities in government jobs, Central and State
services in all cadres and grades with a break-up of 10 per cent for
the Muslims and 5 per cent for others. (The report also calls for a
sub-quota in OBC quota clearly marked out for those minority
communities which come under the broad head of OBCs).
III. The Commission has asked for the de-linking of Scheduled Caste
status from religion and to make the SC net fully religion-neutral,
like that of Scheduled Tribes. Calling the caste system ‘all-
pervading’, the Commission says the Constitution while describing and
defining SCs and STs did not perceive a dimension of religion in it.
Of interest will be to know that even the then British Government
refused to include the Muslims and the Christians in the list of
Scheduled Castes when it prepared such a list in 1936.
More notably, arguing that religious freedom is a Fundamental Right,
the Commission has recommended continuation of SC reservation benefits
to those Dalits who convert to other religions by choice.
Apart from the above main recommendations, there are a plethora of
other recommendations focussing primarily on the Muslim community.
These are:
* Select institutions in the country like the Aligarh Muslim
University and the Jamia Millia Islamia should be legally given a
special responsibility to promote education at all levels to Muslim
students by taking all possible steps for this purpose.
* In the funds to be distributed by the Maulana Azad Educational
Foundation a suitable portion should be earmarked for the Muslims
proportionate to their share in the total minority population. Out of
this portion funds should be provided not only to the existing Muslim
institutions but also for setting-up new institutions from nursery to
the highest level and for technical and vocational education anywhere
in India but especially in the Muslim-concentration areas.
* Anganwaris, Navoday Vidyalayas and other similar institutions should
be opened under their respective schemes especially in each of the
Muslim concentration areas and Muslim families be given suitable
incentives to send their children to such institutions.
* Citing that the largest minority of the country, the Muslims, have a
scant or weak presence in the agrarian sector the Commission
recommended that special schemes should be formulated for the
promotion and development of agriculture, agronomy and agricultural
trade among them.
With regard to linguistic minorities, the only significant
recommendation is that the Commission wants the three language formula
to be implemented everywhere in the country making it compulsory for
authorities to include in it the mother tongue of every child.
Significantly, the above recommendations have not been unanimous.
Member Secretary of the Commission Asha Das has given a note of
dissent on the Commission’s recommendation for conferment of SC status
on Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam saying there was "no
justification" for it. She also appended a note of dissent saying she
did not agree with the recommendation of treating Christian/Muslim
Dalits at par with Hindu/Sikh/Buddhist Dalits.
Notably, the Commission has suggested an alternative route for
reservation to minorities if there is "insurmountable difficulty" in
implementing the recommendation for 15 per cent reservation. In this
regard it is said since minorities constitute 8.4 per cent of the
total OBC population according to the Mandal Commission Report, so in
the 27 per cent OBC quota, an 8.4 per cent sub-quota should be
earmarked for minorities. (As per Commission’s suggestions, the
internal break-up should be six per cent for the Muslims, commensurate
with their 73 per cent share in the total minority population at the
national level and 2.4 per cent for other minorities.)
This is a clear effort to dilute the existing quota of the OBCs.
In all, the report submitted by the Ranganath Misra Commission is a
charter of divisiveness and vote-bank politics. No wonder, it has got
flak from all sides. VHP has already threatened a nationwide agitation
if the government makes any move to implement the report. It has
termed the report as "Anti-constitutional anti-national and anti-
Hindu".
The report has also been condemned for being against the spirit of the
founding fathers of the Indian Constitution. It is alleged that if
implemented, it would particularly be damaging to the interest of the
vulnerable sections of Hindu society.
"Implementation of such a report is set to encourage religious
conversions, particularly among the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled
Tribes and other backward classes to take advantage of this
development," says Dr Pravin Togadia of VHP.
He further adds, "The present government is trying to undo the
conscious decision of the Constituent Assembly not to provide for
religion-based reservation." He also said that the implementation of
the report will mean death for the Hindu SCs, STs and OBCs and their
children.
It is strange that no word has been spoken against it by the people
who call themselves secular and pro-poor. Even the parties that thrive
on OBC politics are keeping silent. Only, some lone voices like that
of Buta Singh, the chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled
Castes, has made public his differences over giving reservation to
minorities from the SC quota.
On the contrary, all the quota-supporting entities such as the Left
parties, Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal and a section of the
Congress are putting pressure on the Centre to implement the report,
yet, the government sources acknowledge that implementing the
Ranganath Misra Commission report could be the toughest task ahead for
this government. As this involves the most crucial aspect of quotas,
which is the reservation under religious lines.
The only vocal support to the report has come from a number of Muslim
and Christian groups, and quite naturally so.
Secretary of the Indian Catholic Bishops Commission for dalit and
tribal groups, Father Cosmon Arokiaraj has welcomed the report and has
asked the government to pass the Bill without delay. Another Bishop,
Father Anthoniraj Thumma, head of an ecumenical forum in the State of
Andhra Pradesh, said that the government move would provide dalit
Christians constitutional protection. He added that in addition to
quotas in government jobs and seats in educational institutions, the
new move would also give dalit groups (converted) a right to contest
elections for seats reserved for such category.
It will now be interesting to see the ATR by the government on these
recommendations. As in the ATR, the government will have to make
public its ideas on how the reservation for the Muslims and the
Christians would be implemented.
The supporters for implementing it say that any move to provide
reservation to religious minorities is unlikely to be opposed by those
in the general category as reservation of seats for Dalit Christians
and Muslims within the existing quota for Dalits will not affect
them.
But that does not negate the fact that the Ranganath Misra report on
quotas for minorities is aimed at harvesting votes rather than
resolving the problem of backwardness of the minorities. It wrongly
invokes the "full sanction of the Article 16(4) of the Constitution"
for a 15 per cent reservation in government jobs for Muslims,
Christians and other minorities on the assumption that all minorities
must necessarily be backward.
What is being insidiously resurrected under the rubric of ‘under
representation’ is actually ‘communal representation’. Such emphasis
on inadequacy of representation on the assumption of backwardness will
encourage communally inspired demands for all.
Our founding fathers of the Constitution knew the dangers of such an
approach. That is why such communal approaches were specifically
excluded from the Constitution.
Lastly, it is not clear whether this new quota will be an OBC quota or
SC or ST quota. Or whether minority quotas will be written into these
quotas or added to them? If added, the overall quotas will become 64
per cent. And since quota over 50 per cent is not possible as per the
Constitution, the only option left would be to assimilate it in the
existing quota which, most certainly, would cause heartburn to the
OBCs, SCs and STs who will have their quota reduced from 50 per cent
to 35 per cent.
(The writer is former Governor of Sikkim and Goa.)
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January 21, 2008
UPA's rank communalism
Quota politics threatens to fragment India
By Sunita Vakil
The Congress has always aimed at erecting barriers between the
different communities rather than trying to break them down. Indeed,
the brand of secularism flaunted by the party is very much flawed. By
separating Muslim issues from the rest of the populace, it is only
treading the familiar ground of identity politics, that forms the core
of its survival.
Congress-led UPA government?s gusto of going overboard to woo Muslims
by allocating 15 per cent of funds during the 11th plan period
exclusively for minorities is indicative of its communal mindset that
is hellbent upon dividing India along religious lines.
The UPA government?s congenital tendency to succumb before the
minority separatism may run the risk of undoing the national
integration. It does not need an awful lot of imagination to surmise
that its coddling of India?s largest minority is in pursuit of its
vote bank politics. This is of a piece with the party?s absurd and
perverse practice of embarking on a path of dividing the country along
communal lines for acquiring power.
Notwithstanding its abstract homilies on secularism, the Congress has
always aimed at erecting barriers between the different communities
rather than trying to break them down. Indeed, the brand of secularism
flaunted by the party is very much flawed. By separating Muslim issues
from the rest of the populace, it is only treading the familiar ground
of identity politics, that forms the core of its survival.
The single-minded Congress focus on Muslim votes that makes it to
pursue a partisan course is giving airs to the speculation that the
ruling party cares only for minority concerns in the garb of
secularism. The UPA?s penchant for politics of appeasement is
increasingly becoming a hallmark of its governance. By injecting the
communal virus in almost all spheres of our national concern, the
ruling regime seems eager to create a separate electorate and
categorise society along religious identities. Resorting to blatant
appeasement the Congress is only giving succour to divisive forces
besides antagonising the numerically dominant community. It has
redefined secularism with its full-time attention on minority votes.
Moreover, the Congress leaders in their abhorrent zeal to placate
minorities seem to have forgotten that all Indians, irrespective of
their caste, creed or religions, have an equal stake in the national
well being. Of course, this is not to suggest that under class of
Muslims is to be kept out of the ambit of development. But it is
important for a vibrant democracy that every single person,
irrespective of religions has equal claim on the national resources.
Remaining stuck in the quagmire of communal quotas will only further
divide the nation.
In the past too, the Congress-led UPA government had meted out special
treatment to Muslims as a matter of state policy. Muslims have indeed
been perceived as potential vote banks right from the rule of Indira
Gandhi in whose regime Haj subsidies were announced. It is noteworthy
that no other religious community in India has been favoured with such
a sop. It was also her singular love for Muslim empowerment that made
her install Muslim chief ministers like Abdul Gafoor in Bihar, A.R.
Antulay in Maharashtra, Maimoona Taimur in Assam and Barkatullah in
Rajasthan continuing with this policy of crass minorityism, Rajiv
Gandhi overturned the Supreme Court judgement on the issue of
maintenance to Muslims divorcee Shah Bano. Later, shedding all
pretences of secularism the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh opened a
pandora?s box by playing directly to the gallery of Muslim voters with
his emphasis on minority development, particularly the Muslims in his
address to the National Development Council in December 2006. The
party has had the gumption to aggressively woo Muslims right from the
time it came to power in 2004. Its wholehearted exertions towards
reserving jobs and educational quotas for Muslims, attempts of
dividing army on communal lines, communalising banking and financial
institutions, protecting illegal Bangladeshi migrants, including a
Muslim League MP in the Union Council of Ministers, exonerating the
perpetrators of Godhra carnage are only some of the shameful acts
indulged in by the Congress-led UPA government which project it as
crude and outright communal. Even the former President Shri A.P.J.
Abdul Kalam has criticised the government-sponsored subsidies by
saying that ?dependency syndrome has stunted performance and
diminished transparency?.
It is quite ironical that when Congress and its pseudo-secularist
allies talk of ?Muslims First? policy, it is flaunted as social
justice and secularism. But when the BJP espouses the cause of a Ram
temple at Ayodhya, it is labelled as a divisive and communal outfit.
On the flip side, the UPA government doubts the authenticity of Ram
Sethu casting aspersions on the existence of Lord Ram. But on the
other side many of its leaders can be seen queuing up at Ram lila
performances for photo ops.
The UPA obsession with Muslim appeasement again came to the fore with
its undue focus on divisive issues like communal budgeting and plan
allocation. In pursuance of its wanton policy, the government has
shown undue haste in assuring grants to madrasas promoting Urdu and
reservation in various ministries. During the rule of UPA, Haj subsidy
has grown 200 times. It seems that the government has got itself so
much involved in the politics of appeasement, even to the exclusion of
other social, political and constitutional responsibilities.
Earlier, it was the British who planned a communal divide to meet
their political objectives. Now, history is repeating itself with the
Congress-led UPA taking help of the same divide-and-rule policy in
furthering of its goal.
Now, under the UPA dispensation, where secularism is synonymous with
Hindu bashing, the propagandists of the ruling regime give impetus to
separatism. There is an unconstitutional and unethical bias when it
comes to the rights of the majority community. In fact, it has been
since the time of Mughals a millennium ago that Hindus have been
discriminated against. It seems the time has come for a rehash of the
period when Hindus were treated badly. Their temples were looted as
well as zajia was levied upon them. This regime is also not so much
different from the earlier one. For instance, temple donations are
siphoned for the upkeep of Muslim religions places. Hard-earned money
of tax-payers is being squandered at the altar of Congress?s obnoxious
vote bank politics.
(The writer is senior editor with Kashur Gazette, Delhi.)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=221&page=27
January 21, 2008
Editorial
A separate growth
Aiding communalism with Plan Fund
By R. Balashankar
This Organiser Special on Republic Day is dedicated to national
unity.
The idea is to fight communalism. The UPA Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh has communalised the polity with his cynical Muslim first plank.
He introduced an obnoxious 15-point programme for Muslims and reserved
15 per cent of the 11th Plan Fund for minorities along with religion-
specific banking, budgeting and education.
In the following pages our expert analysts will show how the UPA plan
divides and discriminates the people of this country and how the
initiatives the ruling conglomerate has undertaken are akin to the 14-
point demands of the pre-1947 Muslim League. We want to forewarn the
nation through this exercise how in the guise of secularism the
national government has become a tool in the hands of destructive and
divisive elements and how it has acquired an unprecedented anti-Hindu
agenda. Secularism, to begin with, was a positive, almost indulgent
rhetoric under Jawaharlal Nehru; understandable in the aftermath of
Partition for which the League and its supporters in India were
responsible. Under Indira Gandhi it became vote bank politics. Rajiv
Gandhi and his successors made it appeasement. Under the UPA,
secularism is interpreted as brazenly anti-Hindu to the extent of
denigrating Hindu ideals becoming state policy.
In one of the most significant books written on minority problem in
India, Indian Muslims: Where Have They Gone Wrong?, Dr. Rafiq Zakaria
says, ?The British got, naturally, worried and they did whatever they
could to disrupt that (Hindu-Muslim) unity. They engineered riots,
they played politics by giving separate electorate to the Muslims,
they devised various methods both political and social?to keep the two
communities apart. They dangled grants and concessions alternately to
both the religious groups. Ultimately they saw to it that the country
was divided, through the distrust that they had so assiduously built
up between the two over the decades. To perpetuate their rule, they
followed the Roman policy of ?Divide and Rule?. But as Maulana
Mohammad Ali rightly put it: ?We divided and they ruled.? The blame
rests as much on our joint leadership as on the British; however in
the last stage it was Jinnah?s obduracy which struck the final blow to
our unity.? The UPA under Sonia Gandhi is playing the role of the
British, to divide and rule.
The historic parallels are strikingly similiar and ominous. Take this
instance, ?Before he opted for Pakistan, Muslim League leader
(Shaheed) Suhrawardy had decided to stay in India and lead the Bengal
Muslims in India. His letter to (Chaudhary) Khaliquzzaman on September
10, 1947, was eloquent and made interesting reading. He was faced with
the dilemma that unless Muslims derived their strength on account of
group solidarity they would not be respected by the Hindus. At the
same time solidarity and strength would raise suspicion about their
bona fides. Hence he suggested formation of strong Muslim pockets
dotted all over the country. His other alternative that both India and
Pakistan should strive to destroy the complex of superiority of their
majority populations and they should accept their minorities as their
own was a cry in the wilderness so far as Pakistan was concerned.?
(Islam: In India?s Transition to Modernity by M.A. Karandikar, Page
276-77)
Manmohan Singh seems to have entirely adopted Suhrawardy?s advice in
the last four years as Prime Minister.
The central government has identified 90 districts in the country as
minority concentrated for special development plans. An intriguing
aspect of this idea is that known Muslim-majority districts say in UP,
Assam, West Bengal, J&K or Kerala are not included in the select 90
list. It is said that altogether the Congress is thus focusing on
nearly 250 Lok Sabha constituencies for doling out excessive
privileges and central funds so as to develop them as captive pocket
boroughs. This may or may not work but the damage to the national
fabric is intrinsic.
In a similar instance, the centre has a plan to make minority students
reap benefits of dual scholarships which is not normally allowed in
the case of non-Muslim students. According to a plan announced by the
UPA in December 2007 Muslim students can avail scholarships
simultaneously from the Ministry of Minority Affairs and the Ministry
of Social Justice and Empowerment. This is under a 15-point programme
of the Prime Minister meant only for Muslims.
The Minority Affairs Ministry will distribute Rs 100 crore annually
for scholarships for Muslim students. This will run parallel to the
initiatives of other ministries targeted for the Muslims under the PM?
s new programme. The result is, the same set of people getting
pampered through numerous sources. A report said that 3,200 students
will get this benefit in the current academic year. The UPA followed
it up with reservations in educational institutions and recruitment.
It made an unsuccessful attempt to divide the Indian Army on communal
lines. All this is supposedly to empower the Muslims.
The UPA asked the banks and other financial institutions to have
special provisions for interest-free loans for Muslims along with a
package for 15 lakh special scholarships for Muslim students. The
Prime Minister has announced another programme to offer free coaching
for Muslim students preparing for the competitive examinations, for
which parents cough up lakhs. In the centrally funded Aligarh and
Jamia Milia Universities almost the entire seats and jobs are reserved
for this community.
Through a Constitution amendment, the UPA reserved majority seats in
all the non-aided educational institutions for the minority
communities setting them free from giving reservation quota for the
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. But this benefit is not
available to Hindu-run self-financing institutions. This is a blatant
discrimination that will make these institutions financially unviable
and covertly promote religious conversions.
Under the UPA, Muslims need not follow any rule that is compulsory for
other citizens. They need not sing Saraswati Vandana or Vande Mataram
though there is nothing religious about it. There is no need to salute
the national flag or sing the national anthem. They need not register
marriages. In the event of terror attacks?nearly 6,000 people have
been killed in the last four years?there will be no combing operations
in Muslim localities. Not a single terror attack has been solved
during this period.
And now comes the permanent scourge in the form of communal budgeting
and plan allocation. All these are over and above the existing schemes
in the Departments of Social Welfare, Education etc. for promotion of
madrasas, Urdu, and reservation in various ministries for removing
backwardness. The UPA has also created a separate ministry for
minorities, now presided over by A.R. Antulay, a crude practitioner of
minority politics. During the four-year UPA rule, the Haj subsidy has
grown 200 times! The Muslims? ?right first to the national resources?,
as Manmohan Singh coined his absurdly ruinous idea, has become the
only existential agenda of this government. Should the majority Hindus
take this nonsense in stoic silence? Should not we get up and stop
this outrage on national security? This is worse than the regenerate
Wahabism introduced by Mahathir in Malaysia.
Manmohan Singh has no use for the more enlightened views of Jawaharlal
Nehru, who as India?s first Prime Minister laid the foundations of
Indian planning.
Calling planning the first attempt in India to integrate agriculture,
industrial, social, economic and other aspects of the country into a ?
single framework of thinking? in his speech on first draft five-year
plan, Nehru said, ?It has made people think of this country as whole.
I think it is most essential that India, which is united politically
and in many other ways, should, to the same extent, be united mentally
and emotionally also. We often go off at a tangent on grounds of
provincialism, communalism, religion or caste. We have no emotional
awareness of the unity of the country. Planning will help us in having
an emotional awareness of our problems as a whole. It will help us to
see the isolated problems in villages or districts or even provinces
in their larger context. Therefore, the mere act of planning, the mere
act of having approached the question of progress in this way and of
producing a report of this type is something on which we might, I
think, congratulate ourselves.?
Again, in a speech Laying the Foundations (Broadcast from the Delhi
Station of All India Radio, December 31, 1952), Nehru after a visit to
Kanyakumari said, ?From that southern tip of India, I pictured this
great country spread out before me right up to the Himalayas in the
north and thought of her long and chequered story. Ours is a wonderful
inheritance but how shall we keep it? How shall we serve the country
which has given us so much and make her great and strong?...?
?We look at our own country and find both good and ill, powerful
forces at work to build her and also forces, which would disrupt and
disintegrate her. We cannot do much to affect the destiny of this
world as a whole but surely we can make a brave attempt to mould the
destiny of our 360 (then) million people... In India, the first
essential is the maintenance of the unity of the country, not merely a
political unity but a unity of the mind and the heart, which precludes
the narrow urges that make for disunity and which breaks down the
barriers raised in the name of religion or those between State and
State or, for that matter, any other barrier. We must aim at a
classless society,? Nehru said. He added, ?Of course, you must plan
for everybody. No planning which is not for all is good enough. You
must always have that view before you and you must prepare the
foundations for the next step towards the final goal. And so, you
ultimately start a process which grows by itself.? Economic Democracy
(Speech in Parliament, New Delhi, December 15, 1952, Jawaharlal Nehru?
s Speeches: 1949-1953, published by The Publications Division,
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India)
I have quoted Nehru on Planning, only to underline how flawed Manmohan
Singh?s approach is.
There is an interesting survey taken up by the Left leaning socio-
scientific NGO Shastra Sahitya Parishad. Kerala: How it lives, How it
thinks, released in December 2006. According to the survey, it is not
minority Muslims or Christians but Hindus comprising 54.47 per cent of
Kerala?s 3.2 crore population who are at the economic downslide. The
survey, by the Marxist NGO, says Hindus in the state form the major
chunk of the state?s poor with over 39 lakh living below poverty line.
Condition of Hindus is worse than that of Christians and Muslims in
employment, land holding and income. And the survey says the condition
of so-called forward castes is more pathetic than that of the backward
caste Hindus.
In March 2007, the CPM released a Charter of Demands for the
Advancement of Muslim Community. A dangerous document reminiscent of
the Muslim League demands under Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Apart from
focusing on a communal quota for Dalit Muslims?a term that violates
the basic tenet of Islam, which professes equality of all members of
the faith?the charter demands introducing a sub-plan only for Muslims
for allocating separate development funds on communal lines. The party
was not satisfied with the 2007-08 budget allocation of Rs. 500 crore
for Muslim welfare. The wholesale adoption of the Sachar report by the
CPM appears ridiculous considering the abysmal record of the party in
Kerala and West Bengal in the social uplift of the Muslim community,
as underlined in the report. But the CPM?s Muslim courtship in Kerala
is so brazen that it has left the Muslim League way behind in communal
appeal. The Muslim League is being asked to prove its pro-Muslim
character by more zealous outfits ensconced under the CPM perch.
Encouraged by the indulgence of the UPA, Muslim outfits organised a
procession in the capital in March 2007 demanding state-wise quotas in
proportion to their population. Almost all the known Muslim
organisations came on one platform to seek full implementation of
religion-based reservation in jobs, education and growth fund
allocation all over the country. The UPA and the Sachar report have
clearly uncorked the jinn of pre-Partition communal virus.
The UPA has cynically injected a vicious brand of communalism in the
Indian polity with the hope that en bloc Muslim votes will permanently
become its captive preserve. The insincerity and dishonesty of this
Muslim appeasement is underlined by the poor record of its
implementation. On ameliorating the genuine grievances of the Muslims
both the Congress and the Communist-ruled states project a dubious
record. Similar is the sub-text written by more virulent votaries of
vote bank politics like Mulayam Singh and Lalu Prasad Yadav.
On the report of the Sachar Committee, the Prime Minister is again
working on reservations based on religion. This is ultra vires and
goes against every tenet of the Constitution. The Constitution does
not allow this kind of discrimination on caste or religious lines. A
constitutionally formed government is duty bound to treat everybody
equal on legal and policy issues.
Even by Congress standards Manmohan Singh?s prime ministership has
touched a new low. Earlier our prime ministers used to exhort the
countrymen to rise above caste, region and religion and be Indians
first and everything else afterwards. Here is a Prime Minister who
works overtime to violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution to
divide and discriminate the countrymen on communal lines. And he, like
his party, by no means appears contrite over such dangerous
perversion. His government is aggressively working towards a
polarisation of votes by pursuing a policy of minorityism, encouraging
social tension and disquiet. Had the Congress been really sincere
about uplifting the minorities or ameliorating their lot, it would not
have resorted to such tactless exhibitionism and poisonous promotion
of reactionary ideas.
On the Republic Day, 58 years after India became a secular democratic
republic, we are inquiring as to how will this politics of appeasement
affect national unity? Will it create contrived and bogus grievances
deepening divisions in the society or will it strengthen our sense of
oneness and belonging? The politics of appeasement started by the
Congress under Mahatma Gandhi in the early 1920s, resulted in the
country?s vivisection. The tragic history is not forgotten. The wounds
of Partition have not yet fully healed. But the UPA has embarked on a
course that mocks at those who talk about national integration. They
are not taking a calculated risk. The UPA is schemingly provoking a
divide through dubious machinations.
The Planning Commission reports say that at least 26 per cent of India?
s
population is living below poverty line. If emancipation of this
deprived segment is the priority why talk only of 13 per cent Muslims,
all of whom in any case are not below poverty line? As such, learned
maulanas of Muslim Personal Law Board have decreed that Muslims cannot
take to banking or insurance, polio drops or yoga classes, as these
militate against their religious dogmas.
The Sachar Committee claims that only three per cent of Muslim
children go to madrasas. The evolutionary volume was an attempt to
tell social scientists that the ?Missing Muslim? in jobs was not the
result of madrasa education. Sachar was trying to emphasise on a
chimera of conspiracy against Muslims for their backwardness. At
another place the report stated that the condition of Muslims is worse
than that of Dalits.
The notorious record of the UPA government is that it sees citizens as
communal compartments. By introducing the Sachar Committee and
Ranganath Mishra Commission to devise communal quota, by soft-pedaling
on terrorist outfits, indulging the Maoists by politicising internal
security and Islamising the foreign policy the UPA has created a
cantankerous mess of governance. Even its much-hyped Indo-US nuke deal
is in doldrums. The UPA gives the impression that it is working on an
agenda for national disintegration.
A valuable input in the debate came from Bibek Debroy, a well-known
economist. In his column in The Indian Express (June 12, 2007), Debroy
made an interesting observation. He said, ?A 21st century government
should recognise deprivation as an individual issue and defuse
collective tension based on caste or religion. Wherever there is an
attempt to segregate, mainstreaming never occurs and deprivation
becomes permanent. Contrast economic development in special category
Articles 370 and 371 states with Goa? Caste and religion are
attributes that should remain in the private domain, irrelevant for
public policy purposes. What should be relevant for policy is
deprivation based on class. Government permitting that is precisely
what should have happened?But governments won?t permit and will
intervene to encourage this collective caste-cum-religious identity. ?
It is a mindset that the UPA government has encouraged across the
board.?
The National Sample Survey undertook a study and concluded in June
last year that jobless rate among Hindus and Muslims is almost equal.
The Survey said that the Worker Population Ratio (WPR) for the male in
the age group of 15 and above in the educational level in urban India
among the Hindus and Muslims was equal at 71 per cent followed by
Christians at 64 per cent. Outside the education parameter in urban
India, the Survey says, the worker population ratio among the Hindu
male was barely three per cent higher than that for the Muslims at 56
per cent. This was 51 per cent for Christians. This data was released
by the NSSO under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation for the year 2004-05. And this has exposed the bluff
that far more Muslims were unemployed than the Hindus. If this Survey
is any guide then it should be considered a big setback for the
advocates of more religion-based reservations as part of the so-called
affirmative action. The Survey said that the unemployment rate in
urban areas for both the Hindus and the Muslims was the same at four
per cent. This Survey revealed that both in urban and rural areas
there was only a negligible difference in the literacy rate of the two
communities. This revelation explodes the basis of the UPA-sponsored
vote bank quota politics and brings us back to what we said in the
beginning that deprivation has nothing to do with caste or religion in
the present milieu of globalisation, growth and urbanisation. The
allegations of rising income and wealth disparities between different
castes or religious groups?except for Scheduled Tribes who live in
concentrated blocks?has not been proved by any rational survey. But
who cares for facts, since politics in India is all about myth
making?
The UPA has done nothing to encourage national integration. Its
actions are so communally charged that it has refused to give
protection to Taslima Nasreen, even after she deleted all the
objectionable passages from her book, only to please the perverted
fanatics in her community. This might be the first instance in Indian
history that the country has turned its back on an asylum-seeker, who
was hounded out of her country, who was forced by her own hosts in
West Bengal to vacate her second home and has no other place to go.
But the UPA protects and felicitates M.F. Husain about whose
despicable, blasphemous cartoons Hindus have serious objection.
It seems there is no bottom to the depth to which the UPA can sink in
furthering its goal. It has communalised budgeting; it has
communalised banking and financial institutions; it tried even to
communalise the armed forces. It has vitiated the academia spreading
the venom of casteism and communalism and now it is out to destroy the
country by identifying districts as Muslim majority and pampering them
to promote communal segregation. It is bent on dividing the police
force as Hindu, Muslim and Christian, and nobody knows what else
remains to be fragmented on communal lines. Some more aggressively
lunatic in its ranks have even suggested to introduce a communal quota
in the judiciary as well and appoint judges after fixing their
religion tag. Is there any guarantee that people who get their
position only on their religious identity will behave impartially in
their execution of duty? And what will happen to the faith of the
citizens in the system and its commitment to delivering justice? What
will happen to this country once the people lose all hope of fair play
and fair deal under these votaries of fake secularism?
What is the BPL criterion? Those who earn above Rs 12 per day. But
what about the lucky above BPL people? According to the report of
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS),
394.9 million workers, i.e. 80 per cent of India?s working population,
are in the unorganised sector and 80 per cent of them are among those
who live on less than Rs 20 a day. These are real poor and vulnerable,
the report says. We quote this statistics to show that poverty has
nothing to do with religion. And that politics should be about
marrying policies with the people.
A conservative estimate, supported by all empirical data, gives us a
statistics of almost 30 to 35 per cent of India?s population living in
subhuman conditions. This is not a comforting thought in the 61st year
of Independence. And to know that our political class has only
archaic, time warped ideas for giving opportunity to the less
privileged is a sad commentary.
The UPA as part of its poll-oriented thinking has constituted an equal
rights panel to ensure Muslim representation level. How myopic can the
ruling class get! In a country with over 35 per cent poor to have an
equal rights panel only for the 15 per cent minorities! Does the
government have no responsibility to the rest of the population?
If there is any poor, deprived in the country, it is the Hindu. His
land was taken away, his homes and temples were looted for centuries,
he was made to pay jazia, an oppression tax of slavery, for almost 800
years, for that long the Muslims and for another 150 years Christians
ruled this country. How can the ruling class till 1947, become
deprived needing special affirmative action? It is only the Hindu who
has some claim to a special treatment. And Pakistan was created, after
the bloodiest-ever holocaust in history, to pamper the Muslims. Every
corner of the country where Hindu is in minority is in the grip of
insurgency and terrorism. A convincing Hindu majority is the only
guarantee for the territorial integrity of this country. And by
artificially identifying 90 Muslim-majority districts is Manmohan
Singh trying to lay the foundation for another partition?
The Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has the gumption to claim that
this will not divide the society. It is not entirely surprising, only
God knows what more disastrous plans he has in mind to divide the
society further, that he thinks all that he has done so far is not
enough.
There is no economic or literacy backwardness that is exclusive to one
community. Yes, social and religious attitudes can ghettoize a
community. For that the state cannot do much.
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=221&page=2
January31, 2010
From Sachar to Ranganath Misra
A period of minority assertion, Hindu subjugation
By Dr JK Bajaj
"The High Level Committee on Social, Economic and Educational Status
of Muslim Community in India" set up in 2005 under the chairmanship of
Justice Rajinder Sachar by the Prime Minister, commonly known as the
Sachar Committee, was perhaps the most high powered of such bodies. It
made a comprehensive survey of the status of Muslims in almost all
fields of Indian economy, polity and society.
The six years of UPA rule have been a period of minority assertion.
During this period, the Government of India has assiduously sought to
promote the idea that Christian and Muslim minorities have special
rights and claims on Indian polity, which this government is committed
to honour. The Prime Minister of India himself has gone on record to
state that the minorities have the first right on the resources of
this country, and there have been statements from high governmental
and political authorities expressing the same intent.
These statements of intentions have been backed by institutional and
budgetary actions in favour of the minorities. A separate Ministry of
Minority Affairs has been created to specifically concern itself with
the rights and privileges of the minorities. And, a number of
commissions and committees have been set up to report on the condition
of minorities, and to suggest constitutional, legal, administrative
and fiscal arrangements to give effect to their special privileges and
rights.
"The High Level Committee on Social, Economic and Educational Status
of Muslim Community in India" set up in 2005 under the chairmanship of
Justice Rajinder Sachar by the Prime Minister, commonly known as the
Sachar Committee, was perhaps the most high powered of such bodies. It
made a comprehensive survey of the status of Muslims in almost all
fields of Indian economy, polity and society. The data collected by
the Committee did not show the Muslims to be particularly badly off in
any field. On the other hand, the data indicated a resurgent Muslim
community that was growing fast not only in numbers, but also in its
educational, economic and social status. The Committee, in any case,
went on to give wide-ranging recommendations for institutional and
economic arrangements to be made in favour of the Muslim community.
The Committee, in particular, recommended special treatment for
Muslims in all government schemes. It even recommended special
consideration for Muslims in the matter of disbursement of bank
loans.
Even before the Committee gave its report, the government had launched
a "New 15-Point Programme for the Welfare of the Minorities"; this was
a comprehensive programme for providing special privileges and rights
to the minorities in various walks of Indian polity and economy, for
creating and strengthening special institutional structures and
providing budgetary support for this purpose. The recommendations of
the Sachar Committee were then used for further empowering these
institutional structures and launching new programmes and initiatives
in favour of the minorities in general, and the Muslim minority in
particular.
The Sachar Committee, however, stopped short of recommending
reservations for Muslims in government jobs or in educational
institutions. The Report of the National Commission for Religious and
Linguistic Minorities, which has been recently released, has now
addressed that lacuna. This commission was set up in the Ministry of
Minority Affairs as early as October 2004 under the Chairmanship of
Justice Ranganath Misra. Dr. Tahir Mahmood, Dr. Anil Wilson and Dr.
Mohinder Singh were the other three Members. The Commission submitted
its report in May 2007, but it was made public only during the last
session of the Parliament.
In its report, the Commission has ventured where Justice Sachar had
hesitated to step. It has recommended an across the board 15 per cent
reservation for minorities in all government jobs and educational
institutions. Within this minority quota, the Commission has fixed a
sub-quota of 10 per cent for the Muslims and the remaining 5 per cent
for other minorities. In an extraordinary recommendation, the
Commission has specified that in case the quota for Muslims cannot be
filled for lack of appropriate candidates, it shall be offered to
candidates from other minorities, "but in no case shall any seat
within the recommended 15 per cent shall go the majority community".
The Commission has further clarified that this 15 per cent quota shall
be in addition to what the minority candidates secure on their own
merit in open competition.
The recommendations, if implemented, shall ensure that minorities have
a presence of more than 15 per cent in all walks of Indian public
life. According to the Commission’s own assessment, the educational
and economic status of all minorities excepting the Muslims is
considerably better than the majority. They are therefore likely to
get a substantial share in government jobs and educational
institutions on their own merit, as they do even now. The total share
of minority communities shall therefore turn out to be considerably
more than 15 per cent. From the way the recommendations are
formulated, the intention of the Commission seems to be to ensure that
the religious minorities as a whole have a larger say and share than
their numbers alone would allow.
The tone and tenor of the reports of both the Sachar Committee and the
Misra Commission are not merely to provide special privileges and
rights to the minorities, but also to disprivilege the majority. Both
reports revel in casting unfounded aspersions and making snide remarks
against the majority community. Sachar Committee, in fact, suggests
that it does not really matter whether Muslims or some other community
come to form the majority in India. Misra Commission wants to now
ensure that until the minorities do not become the majority, they
should enjoy a major share in the polity.
Incidentally, the proposal of 15 percent reservation in favour of
religious minorities seems odd in the context of the arguments that
the Ranganath Misra Commission has developed throughout the report.
The thrust of their argument is that reservations on the basis of
religious or caste identity are not justifiable. India should instead
have family-based reservations, and the families qualifying for such
reservations should be identified on the basis of thorough detailed
surveys based on well defined economic and educational criteria.
However, while formulating its recommendations, the Commission
suddenly terms this as the ultimate goal, and meanwhile recommends the
15 per cent reservation for religious minorities. This makes the
recommendations almost sound like a command performance.
The Commission has made another recommendation which, if accepted, has
the potential of drastically changing the religious complexion of
India. Giving its recommendations on an additional reference made by
the government, the Commission has recommended that the Presidential
Order of 1950, which excludes Muslims and Christians from the category
of Scheduled Castes, should be amended to de-link the Scheduled Caste
status from religion. The argument in this case is that the
Constitution "prohibits any discrimination on the ground of religion".
It is strange that a high judicial person can make one set of
recommendations on the basis of religion, and almost the next
paragraph invoke the principle on non-discrimination on the basis of
religion.
The effect of these contradictory recommendations is that those of the
Scheduled Caste persons who choose to convert to a minority religion
shall now be doubly privileged, first as members of minority religions
for which the Commission has recommended 15 per cent quota, and then
as members of the scheduled castes, for whom special constitutional
protection and quotas are available. An immediate consequence of the
acceptance of this recommendation would probably be to allow the so-
called crypto-Christians to formally declare themselves as Christians
and thus raise the proportion of Christians from the present 2.5 to
perhaps around 6.5 per cent.
Fortunately, the Member-Secretary of the Commission, Mrs. Asha Das,
has not consented to this particular recommendation and has appended a
dissenting note. The note, among other things, insists that there is a
difference between religions of Indian origin, and religions like
Islam and Christianity that have originated outside. And, therefore,
the privileges offered to Hindu, Sikh, Jain and Buddhist Scheduled
Caste persons cannot be extended to Muslims and Christians. It must be
seen as an unintended benefit of Ranganath Misra Commission Report
that the question of religions of Indian and non-Indian origin has
been now mentioned in an official document. It is also fortunate that
the National Commission on Scheduled Castes, headed by Buta Singh,
formally opposed the recommendation of the Ranganath Misra Commission
to allow members of the Christian and Muslim communities to claim
scheduled caste status.
It seems these detailed reports of various commissions and committees
do bring into the open some important facets of the situation of
minorities. The enormous data collected by the Sachar committee
brought into focus the great strides the Muslim community has made in
terms of sheer numbers, and in terms of educational and economic
attainments during the last two or three decades. Before the Sachar
Committee Report how many of us knew that female literacy amongst
Muslims is higher than Hindus in more than half of the Indian states?
And, that the Muslims are also economically much better of than Hindus
in those states. Ranganath Misra Commission Report has brought into
the open the question of difference between religions of Indian and
non-Indian origin. The report has underlined the fact that even high
government authorities cannot agree on this issue. Let us carry
forward the debates opened up by Justices Sachar and Misra.
(The writer is director, Centre for Policy Studies and can be
contacted at jatinde...@gmail.com)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=329&page=6
January 21, 2008
Manmohan obsessed with insidious identity politics
By Sandhya Jain
Muslim political assertion will impact upon all political parties
prone to relying upon the community for a consolidated vote share. The
CPM is already feeling the heat on this score in West Bengal;
observers say events in Nandigram contained an unstated component of
Muslim assertion for power within the hitherto bhadralok-dominated
party. In this connection, it may be pertinent to recall that
following Partition, the Muslim community voted en masse for the
Congress Party.
Fortunately, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes nipped one
UPA mischief in the bud by refusing to endorse the May 15, 2007
recommendations of the National Commission for Religious and
Linguistic Minorities that Scheduled Caste status be extended to ?
Dalit Christians? and ?Dalit Muslims?. NCSC chairman Buta Singh
resisted the move by Justice Ranganath Mishra to amend the
Constitution (SCs) Order, 1950, which restricted SC status to groups
among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
The proposal by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)
government to allocate 15 per cent funds of development and welfare
schemes exclusively for minorities has triggered nationwide
resentment. In the interests of its own political survival, the
Congress Party would do well to rethink its tendency to nurture
communal vote banks as these are beginning to face the law of
diminishing returns.
Most politicians have short memories. Hence it will be in order to
briefly recall the 2004 Assembly election in Assam, where a new Muslim
political party, the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF), startled
the nation with its performance. Muslims comprise 30 per cent of Assam?
s 26 million population and play a decisive role in nearly 40
constituencies that have hitherto been traditionally won by Congress.
Floated by wealthy businessman Badruddin Ajmal, AUDF contested on a
platform of safeguarding Muslim interests ?without closing the doors
to other communities?. It had an electoral understanding with the
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and gave tickets to Hindus. It
contested 66 of the 126 Assembly seats and won an impressive 10?a
greater achievement than the four seats that heralded the arrival of
the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1980s.
The Assam election is worth recalling because though Congress managed
to form the government, Muslim religious leaders campaigning for AUDF
revealed it was the first step in a long-term vision of establishing a
pan-India Muslim political party. One has only to recall that the last
Muslim pan-India formation was the Muslim League to envisage the
possible consequences for the Republic. The comparison with the BSP is
also apt, because like Ms. Mayawati, Muslim parties will also eat into
the Congress vote share and further fragment the polity.
In fact, Muslim political assertion will impact upon all political
parties prone to relying upon the community for a consolidated vote
share. The CPM is already feeling the heat on this score in West
Bengal; observers say events in Nandigram contained an unstated
component of Muslim assertion for power within the hitherto bhadralok-
dominated party. In this connection, it may be pertinent to recall
that following Partition, the Muslim community voted en masse for the
Congress party. After consolidating their separate identity, they
united against the Congress in 1967 and brought the CPM to power.
Nandigram is the beginning of the challenge to CPM hegemony in West
Bengal. As the Hindu community looks for a new saviour, the BJP would
do well do rebuild an independent identity in the State, and not latch
on to the tails of the highly unreliable Mamata Banerjee.
Muslim leaders, both religious and political, are canny enough to
recognise that the Muslim community will remain educationally and
socially backward so long as it persists with the traditional system
of education in the madrasa. It is true that this does not necessarily
translate into economic backwardness, because Muslims largely hail
from artisan and other professional groups that manage to make a
comfortable living without formal education, as is true of similar
Hindu caste groups. But it cannot be denied that this education tends
to reinforce separateness and over-emphasise their religious
identity.
The UPA has erred grievously in creating a separate Ministry for
Minority Affairs. Since as many as 28 per cent of Indians live below
the poverty line, there was no legitimate basis for Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh to state that Muslims have the first claim on
resources, and to follow this up with the Eleventh Plan draft document
setting aside 15 per cent of all developmental and welfare funds for
minorities. It may be added that as in the debate over creamy layer in
caste quotas, so also, the minority quota will not differentiate
between needy and rich Muslims, and may thus end up cornered by
families with political clout or physical muscle. This is already
happening as banks have received instructions to grant loans first to
Muslim applicants; banks will naturally ensure that the recipient of
loans have some financial standing as that the loans can be repaid.
Hindus as a community will have to pay the price of this mindless
pandering to the Muslim community. Sadly, among political parties,
only the BJP has dared oppose these moves, with president Rajnath
Singh warning that this will intensify communal competitiveness and
strife. There is a legitimate fear that the UPA?s special 15-point
programme for minorities in the Eleventh Plan draft paper may trigger
competitive communal demands for budgetary allocations in all states.
It can also lead to caste-based demands for resource allocation, thus
destroying the traditional holistic approach to national development.
The BJP states roundly opposed ?communal budgeting? at the National
Development Council meeting in December 2007. Fearing social strife,
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi suggested that funds for various
schemes and programmes be allocated solely on the basis of socio-
economic criteria and execution entrusted to the States. Madhya
Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Chhattisgarh Chief
Minister Dr Raman Singh insisted that rather than caste or religion,
economic criteria alone determine allocation of funds for welfare
schemes. As economic deprivation is a quantifiable and objective
criteria, not prone to political manipulation, it would be worthwhile
if political parties could sit across the table and opt for economic
criteria over caste and community wherever there is a legitimate case
for special reservations or allocations.
Fortunately, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes nipped one
UPA mischief in the bud by refusing to endorse the May 15, 2007
recommendations of the National Commission for Religious and
Linguistic Minorities that Scheduled Caste status be extended to ?
Dalit Christians? and ?Dalit Muslims?. NCSC chairman Buta Singh
resisted the move by Justice Ranganath Mishra to amend the
Constitution (SCs) Order, 1950, which restricted SC status to groups
among Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists.
Shri Buta Singh candidly asserted that the basic parameter for
recognition as Scheduled Caste was ?untouchability?, which does not
exist in the theology of Christianity and Islam. Thus, the UPA will
not be able to poach upon the constitutional benefits for Hindu SCs
and extend them to Christian and Muslim converts. It is well known
that the recent violence in Kandhamal, Orissa, was caused by a
perverse attempt by converted groups to grab Scheduled Tribe quotas by
forcing the administration to give them ST certificates to which they
are not legally entitled.
(The writer is a senior journalist and can be contacted at
sandh...@airtelbroadband.in)
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=221&page=13
March 25, 2007
A chargesheet
Hindus betraying Hindus
HINDU YOUTH REDUCED TO SECOND-CLASS STATUS
By O.P. Gupta, I.F.S. (retd.)
It is painful to see how a class of ?secular, progressive and liberal?
Hindu politicians right from the days of the 1916 Congress-Muslim
League Lucknow Pact till date in the form of the Sachar Committee
report has been systematically collaborating with Muslim and other
minority politicians in concocting justifications to reduce, bit by
bit, the educational, employment and economic (E3) opportunities for
Hindu boys and girls, including leftist Hindu boys and girls.
Religious minority institutions have been empowered by none other than
our ?secular? Hindu politicians to treat Hindu applicants as second-
class citizens of India at the mercy, whims and fancies of ?minority
managements? even where these institutions receive under Article 30(2)
state grants out of taxes largely collected from we Hindus.
As the political parties in their manifestos openly declare that they
will give special considerations to Muslims and Christians, they
cannot be accused of betraying Hindu youth. Those Hindu parents who
give their votes blindly to such political parties are the real ones
who by casting their votes to such parties accept in principle that
minority students be given special preference over their own children
and, thus, unknowingly, end up betraying their own children,
grandchildren and the Hindu youth.
It is painful to see how Hindu parents are being media managed to harm
and hurt educational, employment, economic and business opportunities
of their own children and grandchildren by giving their notes and
votes to such political parties which shout from their political
rooftops that they will give special preferences to Muslims and
Christians over Hindus.
Since the employment situation is worsening day by day, it is
important that those Hindu parents who have college going children or
grand children, and, those Hindu youth who will soon be entering into
employment market seriously look for and identify those Hindu
politicians who are bent upon to reduce their E3 space.
In January 2007, the Department of Personnel and Training, Government
of India, sent a note to all ?heads of departments, public sector
banks and financial institutions, quasi-government organisa-tions,
autonomous bodies and all appointing authorities,? asking them to ?
scrupulously observe? guidelines to make selection panels more
representative. All selection panels recruiting ten or more vacancies
must have one member belonging to a minority community.
What is more important, the departments have been instructed to submit
half-yearly and annual reports, beginning March 2007, detailing number
of vacancies at all levels?Groups A, B, C and D?and the number of
minorities hired. Dr Manmohan Singh is the Minister for DOPT. This
circular instructs to give special considerations to minorities in all
appointments, so danger bell is ringing loud and clear for all Hindu
job-seekers whether they are leftists or rightists that despite their
better profiles percentage of Hindu intake will be reduced adversely
affecting them all.
A one man Commission headed by Justice Ranganath Mishra was silently
set up by the UPA government which is looking at status of non- Muslim
minorities, and, is mandated to recommend ways of helping them get
better representation in government services. Its report is due by
March 31, 2007. So this Commission is also looking at ways and means
to further reduce percentage of Hindus in public services, bank loans
etc.
Suppose there are 10,000 vacancies, seats reserved for SC Hindus would
be 1500, for ST Hindus 750 and for OBC 2700. Not many Hindus know that
about 70 per cent of Muslims are already covered under the Mandal
Commission formula and are enjoying benefits under the 27 per cent
quota.
In Andhra Pradesh, the Congress government led by Shri Y.S. Rajsekhar
Reddy reserved five per cent of seats in government colleges and in
government jobs for Muslims. It means that only 9500 seats would be
available to all categories of Hindus and other minorities having
reserved 500 seats exclusively for Muslims. So, the number of seats
available for SC Hindus will get reduced to 1425 from 1500, the number
of seats for ST Hindus will get reduced to 712 from 750, and, the
number of seats reserved for OBC will get reduced to 2565 from 2700.
Number of general category seats in which caste Hindus fall will also
shrink from 5000 to 4500. So giving special preferences to minorities
over Hindu candidates, which is the core policy of Congress Party,
equally hurts educational and employment opportunities of all groups
of Hindus, whether SC Hindus, or ST Hindus, or OBC Hindus, or caste
Hindus, or leftist Hindus. It is mere arithmatic. If more than 500
Muslims got more marks than the last Hindu candidate, then Muslim
candidates will spill over into general category 9500 seats.
Incidentally in Andhra Pradesh Muslims enjoy higher literacy rate than
Hindus.
In February 2007, Chief Minister of West Bengal issued instructions
that ?at least 10 per cent of the appointees should be from the
minority community.? By courtesy of Leftist Hindu voters, the
percentage of Hindus? job intake is set to fall in West Bengal.
Shri Arif Mohammad Khan, a former Union Minister in the Rajiv Gandhi
government, has pointed out that 10 Muslim communities are already
part of the Scheduled Tribes and another 83 Muslim communities are
included in the OBC list. ?Together,? he maintains, ?they constitute
more than 70 per cent of total Muslim population leaving out only the
Muslim creamy layer.? Similarly, a good chunk of Christians are
already included in the Scheduled Tribe and the OBC category.
In Bihar, the OBC quota has been divided by ?secular? Hindu
politicians into backward and most backward to help put nine Muslim
groups in the first category and 27 Muslim groups in the second
category.
In Kerala and Karnataka, the Hindu politicians of Congress Party and
the Communist parties have declared the entire Muslim community
backward just to reduce the percentage of Hindus in colleges and in
government jobs.
In Tamil Nadu, 95 per cent of Muslims are included into backward
formula though Muslims have higher literacy rate in Kerala, Karnataka
and Tamil Nadu than Hindus.
Dr Manmohan Singh is a Rajya Sabha Member from Assam and no wonder
there is already five per cent reservation for Muslims in the
recruitment for the Assam Police, adversely affecting employment
opportunities for SCs, STs, OBCs and all other Hindus as shown above.
It is painful to see how a class of ?secular, progressive and liberal?
Hindu politicians right from the days of the 1916 Congress-Muslim
League Lucknow Pact till date in the form of the Sachar Committee
report has been systematically collaborating with Muslim and other
minority politicians in concocting justifications to reduce, bit by
bit, the educational, employment and economic (E3) opportunities for
Hindu boys and girls, including leftist Hindu boys and girls, pushing
them to second and third-class status vis-?-vis minority boys and
girls. It is a sad story of Hindus betraying Hindus.
This is symptomatic of the slave mentality, which is defined as a
tendency to harm, hurt and humiliate members of one?s own community so
as to appease ?others? at the cost of one?s own community. This habit
is also known as gulamiat pasand (GP) or Genetically Acquired Slave
Syndrome (GASS). These terms more accurately describe this class of
Hindus. Raja Jaichand, Mirza Raja Man Singh of Akbar time, Raja
Jaswant Singh of Aurangzeb time etc. were also Hindus but were GP type
carrying GASS virus. In rural areas they are called ?Jaichandi
Hindus?.
We Hindus are told day in and day out that India is a ?secular? state
where religion should be a private matter and every citizen is equal
before law. But in practice our secular Hindu parliamentarians and
legislators have been passing such laws where the State asks for the
religion of an individual and then discriminate against we Hindus. In
this game of secularism, Hindu youth turn out to be the worst victims
of GP Hindu politicians.
The Article 14 of the Constitution reads: ?The State shall not deny to
any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws
within the territories of India.? The Article 15(1) reads: ?The State
shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of
religion, race, caste, sex, and place of birth or any of them.? The
Article 29(2) reads: ?No citizen shall be denied admission into any
educational institution maintained by the State or receiving aid out
of State funds on grounds only of religion, race, caste, language or
any of them.? The Article 30(1) reads: ?All minorities, whether based
on religion or language, shall have the right to establish and
administer educational institutions of their choice.? Article 30(2)
reads, ?The State shall not, in granting aid to educational
institutions, discriminate against any educational institution on the
ground that it is under the management of a minority, whether based on
religion or language.?
One may see that the pith and substance of the Article 30 is very much
there in the 14 Points of Jinnah because 28 out of 31 Muslim members
of the Indian Constituent Assembly which drafted the Indian
Constitution were elected on tickets of the Muslim League of Jinnah.
This fact is generally suppressed by ?secular? Hindu historians.
But on calculated mis-representations and soft-peddling by Attorney
Generals appointed by Congress governments, the Supreme Court of India
has ruled that equal treatment guarantee of Articles 14 and 29(2) was
not available to Hindu boys and girls in minority-run institutions,
and; that religious minority educational institutions under Article
30(1) can reserve up to 50 per cent of seats for co-religionist
candidates with the result Hindu students including comrades with
better marks do not get admissions in such institutions but minority
students with lower marks easily get admissions within their reserved
50 per cent quota.
Religious minority institutions have been, thus, empowered by none
other than our ?secular? Hindu politicians to treat Hindu applicants
as second-class citizens of India at the mercy, whims and fancies of ?
minority managements? even where these institutions receive under
Article 30(2) state grants out of taxes largely collected from we
Hindus. In the minority institutions, the SC Hindus and ST Hindus are
denied benefits of their constitutional reservations of 15 per cent
and 7.5 per cent under Article 15. And, for this misfortune of Hindu
boys and girls those Hindu voters are responsible who being unaware of
harm they inflict upon their own children cast their votes in favour
of ?secular? parties or don?t go to cast their votes at all.
Hindu politicians have passed such laws that enable a minority student
to get cheaper educational loans at three per cent interest per annum
from the National Minority Development & Finance Corporation. A
minority businessman can get margin money loan for business at five
per cent interest from NMDFC. Minority students are required to repay
educational loans in five years after completion of his course but a
Hindu student has to repay education loan after one year of completion
of his course. One may see details at (www.nmdfc.org ). A Hindu
student or a Hindu businessman gets bank loans at much higher rates of
interest and harsher terms whether he is a member of the Students
Federation or that of the NSUI or the ABVP etc. This ill-treatment a
Hindu voter has invited for himself and his children by giving his
vote to the so-called secular parties or by abstaining from voting.
Congress and other ?secular? Hindu politicians have invented such a
legal system where a Muslim candidate or a Christian candidate has all
the legal rights to compete on equal footings with a Hindu candidate
for employment, but there are thousands and thousands of posts paid
from government funds for which Hindus cannot even apply, such as the
post of the Principal and Vice Principal of St. Stephen?s College,
Delhi. GP Hindus have set up the National Minority Commission with
nominal Hindu presence to ensure that minorities are not discriminated
but there is no Commission to ensure that Hindus are not victimised by
minorities.
The National Minority Commission does not reflect the religious
demographic reality of India so it does not enjoy the confidence of
Hindus in general. Either more than three-fourth members of the
Minority Commission and other commissions should be Hindus in
proportion to their population or these should be abolished being
unrepresentative and undemocratic.
Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister, his Sachar Committee and many
liberal Hindus make a lot of fuss that Muslims are under- represented
in civil services and in higher education. According to the Sachar
Committee [page 64], only four per cent of the total Muslim population
in India within age group 20 years and above are graduates. At page
65, the Sachar Committee reports that in case of Muslims (age 20 and
above) the number of graduates was under four million i.e. only 1.6
per cent of Muslims are graduates if their population as per Imam
Bukhari is taken to be 250 million or 2.6 per cent of Muslims are
graduates if their population is taken to be 150 million. Since only
educated persons can aspire for public jobs, it is natural that
percentage of Muslims in government jobs should not be more than 2.6
per cent. Muslim percentage in government service is already more than
this percentage by relentless efforts of Congress party to reduce the
Hindu percentage.
Sachar Committee reports that while 26 per cent of those above 17
years age and above complete matriculation, this percentage is only 17
per cent for Muslims. So the recommendation is to open more schools
and colleges in Muslim areas. The Sachar Committee does not tell that
bulk of Muslims who drop out from schools seek gainful employment and
start earning more at younger age than what they will earn even after
graduating. The Census Report 2001 [Statement 10] lets the cat out of
bag when it reports that in the category of household industries (HHI)
workers, Muslims representation was 8.1 per cent which is double the
national average of 4.2 per cent. This index is only 3.2 per cent for
Hindus. In the category of ?other workers? Christians enjoyed 52.8 per
cent representation, followed by Muslims (49.1 per cent) and Hindus
only (35.5 per cent). Thus, higher percentage of Christians and
Muslims are in jobs than Hindu percentage and still Hindu politicians
of ?secular? parties are working hard to reduce E3 space for Hindu
students that too with the help of the votes of Hindu parents.
In a significant development, after the tabling of the Sachar report,
Muslim MPs, cutting across party lines, handed over a wish-list of
sorts to Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh: IITs and
IIMs exclusively for Muslims, 5,000 schools, two lakh scholarships and
more campuses of the Aligarh Muslim University across the country. A
senior HRD official, present at the meeting, said, ?The MPs said since
IITs and IIMs have less than two per cent of Muslim students, the HRD
Ministry should create IITs and IIMs exclusively for Muslim children.?
Urdu schools, they also demanded, should be given adequate
infrastructure support. ?Minority-run societies and NGOs, if they wish
to open schools, should be given CBSE affiliation without any delay,?
an MP demanded. The Muslim MPs said that these suggestions should get
reflected in this year?s budget as well as the Eleventh Plan.
It is painful to see how Hindu parents are being media managed to harm
and hurt educational, employment, economic and business opportunities
of their own children and grandchildren by giving their notes and
votes to such political parties which shout from their political
rooftops that they will give special preferences to Muslims and
Christians over Hindu youth in matters of education, training
facilities, government jobs, jobs under police and paramilitary
forces, employment in banks and other public sector undertakings and
bank loans, educational loans, etc.
As the political parties in their manifestos openly declare that they
will give special considerations to Muslims and Christians, they
cannot be accused of betraying Hindu youth. Those Hindu parents who
give their votes blindly to such political parties are the real ones
who by casting their votes to such parties accept in principle that
minority students be given special preference over their own children
and, thus, unknowingly, end up betraying their own children,
grandchildren and the Hindu youth. I suggest rather than giving their
votes to their ?caste candidate,? Hindu parents should start casting
their votes in favour of welfare of their own children and
grandchildren as Muslim and Christian voters do.
The following data show that the Hindu politicians of the Congress
Party have history, habit and precedent of giving second-class
treatment to Hindus. Giving second-class treatment to Hindus still
continues to be the hidden agenda and core policy of the Congress
Party. The more the Hindus give their notes, votes and support to the
Congress Party, the more emboldened this Party becomes to treat them
and their sons and daughters as the second class.
Let us look at some manifestos of the Congress Party which has been
consistently promising that if elected it will give preferential
treatment to minorities over Hindus.
The 1996 Manifesto of Congress Party states: ?(i) The Congress regards
the 15-point programme for the welfare of the minorities as a charter
of duties. (ii) It has established the National Minority Finance and
Development Corporation?to support projects that promote the well-
being of minorities?with a capital of Rs 500 crore. (iii) A Rapid
Action Force comprising young men from different communities has been
set up. (It is understood that percentage of Hindus in this Force
under instructions of the Congress Governments is much below their
traditional 95 per cent) (iv)The Minorities Commission has been given
statutory status?.
Congress Manifesto of 1998: ?(i) Indira Gandhi?s 15-point programme
for minorities continues to be our blueprint. Each and every element
of this programme will be implemented with renewed vigour. (ii) The
Congress will create a new ministry for minorities to ensure better
coordination and integration. (iii) A high-powered commission will be
set up to examine and give recommendations on how the representation
of minorities in public services could be enhanced in a meaningful
manner. (iv) The Congress will amend the Constitution to establish a
Commission for Minority Educational Institutions and provide direct
affiliation for minority professional institutions to central
universities?.
Congress Manifesto 1999: ?(i) to ensure the reinvigoration of Indira
Gandhi?s historic 15-point programme and the monitoring mechanism
devised by Rajiv Gandhi. (ii) Measures will be taken to increase the
representation of minorities in all public, police and para-military
services both in the central and in state governments. (iii)The
Constitution will be amended to establish a Commission for Minority
Educational Institutions and to provide direct affiliation for
minority professional institutions to central universities (iv)The
National Minorities Development Corporation and the State Minorities
Development Corporations will be made direct-lending institutions?.
Congress Manifesto 2004: ?(i) The Congress believe in affirmative
action for all religious and linguistic minorities. The Congress is
committed to adopting this policy for socially and educationally
backward sections among Muslims and other religious minorities on a
national scale. (ii)The Congress commits itself to amend the
Constitution to establish a Commission for Minority Educational
Institutions that will provide direct affiliation for minority
professional institutions to central universities?.
Hindu readers may note that the 2004 Manifesto boldly stated: ?The
Congress has provided reservations for Muslims in Kerala and Karnataka
in government employment and education on the grounds that they are a
socially and educationally backward class?. But the Census report of
2001, as we have seen above, states that in Kerala and in Karnataka
literacy rate of Muslims was higher than that of Hindus. Even the
discredited Sachar Committee admits it. So it is dishonesty to call
Muslims educationally backward in Kerala and Karnataka states but
Congress and communist Hindu politicians are not ashamed to use false
data just to reduce percentage of Hindus in educational institutions
and in government jobs. Hindu voters of Kerala and Karnataka should
take note of this fraud being played on careers of their children with
help of their votes.
The Congress party and its UPA allies claim that they are the genuine
well wishers of the SC Hindus. Is it true? Christians are demanding
that their ?dalits? should be included in the 15 per cent reservation
quota available to SC Hindus. Muslims are also demanding that ?dalit
Muslims? be included in the same 15 per cent quota. No one knows
precise definition of ?dalit Christian? and ?dalit Muslims?. Since
Christians enjoy much better educational facilities as well as
literacy rate than Hindu SCs, it is natural that Christians will grab
a larger chunk of services within the 15 per cent quota further
worsening the employment opportunities of Hindu SC boys and girls.
Even Sachar Committee admits that Muslims also enjoy better literacy
rate of 59.1 per cent compared to 52.2 per cent for SC & ST Hindus.
Congress party and allies of UPA are supporting the demand to place ?
dalit Christians? and ?dalit Muslims? under the SC category. Shri
Abdul Rahman Antulay, Union Minister for Minority Affairs publicly
stated in November 2006 that it was time to include dalit Muslims and
dalit Christians in SC/ST Reservations.
Close on the heels of Prime Minister Sardar Manmohan Singh?s ?Muslim
first? remarks made at the National Development Council meeting, a
High Level Committee of the Human Resource Development Ministry led by
Shri M.A.A. Fatmi, Minister of State, has made a case for review of
the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order 1950 so as to include
Muslims and Christians in the SC category (Indian Express, February
19, 2007).
A NGO has already moved to the Supreme Court to include dalit
Christians into the SC definition by amending the 1950 order, and; no
wonder the Manmohan Singh-led Government may manage to lose this case
by not presenting the case of Hindu SCs properly. So the danger bell
for SC Hindu students is already ringing. The point is whether they
and their parents are aware about it.
In its 2004 manifesto, the CPI(M) promised to extend reservation
facility to ?dalit Christians? by including them in the 15 per cent
quota. The 1998 Joint-manifesto of all Left parties also promised to
include ?dalit Christians? into the SC reservations of 15 per cent
quota.
BSP leader late Kanshi Ram was reported to have assured support of his
party to include ?dalit Christians? in the Presidential Order of
1950.
DMK leader K. Karunanidhi, Chief Minister Tamil Nadu, also supports
inclusion of ?dalit Christians? into the SC category.
In September 2004, Ram Vilas Paswan, president of Lok Janshakti Party
had promised to grant Scheduled Caste status to socially and
economically backward Muslims. In December 2006, he supported a sub-
quota for Muslims within the 27 per cent OBC quota who are already
covered under the Mandal OBC formula while supporting demand to
include ?dalit Christians? and ?dalit Muslims? under the 15 per cent
quota. Shri V.P. Singh also supports a sub-quota for Muslims within
the 27 per cent OBC space.
On December 5, 2006 the Samajawadi Party led by Shri Mulayam Singh,
the Congress party and their other allies in UP passed a resolution in
the UP State Assembly demanding reservations for ?dalit? Christians
and ?dalit? Muslims within 15 per cent quota which will harm the
employment opportunities of SC and ST Hindus as Christians and Muslims
both enjoy higher literacy rate over SC and ST Hindus.
So those SC and ST Hindus who do not want to harm and hurt career
prospects of their children should never cast their votes in favour of
any of these secular parties. SC and ST Hindu job seekers and students
must explain difficulties which await them if their parents did not
exercise their votes with due caution or abstained from voting.
No parent knowingly wants to hurt career of his children so it is duty
of Hindu students studying in colleges and universities to brief their
parents the misfortune which will visit them if they voted to any
party which wants to include Christians and Muslims in the 15 per cent
quota. A parent is so busy in earning livelihood that he does not get
time to read the manifesto and thus understand dirty tricks of GP
Hindu politicians being played against Hindu Youth.
Since the employment situation is worsening day by day, it is
important that those Hindu parents who have college going children or
grand children, and, those Hindu youth who will soon be entering into
employment market seriously look for and identify those Hindu
politicians who are bent upon to reduce their E3 space.
The problem of unemployment continues to worsen day by day and in this
environment Congress and other secular parties are hell bent through
the Sachar Committee to reduce employment space available to Hindu
youth. The National Sample Survey Organisation?s latest report of
January 2007 shows that unemployment is much higher among youth (15-29
years age) as compared to overall population, and, that unemployment
is rising.
The unemployment rate in Delhi has gone up from 3.2 per cent in
1999-2000 to 5.3 per cent in 2004-05 and in Kolkata from 7 per cent to
8.1 per cent. (Indian Express February 16, 2007)
At the end of December 2005 about 393 lakh job seekers were waiting
for jobs on the live registers of 947 employment exchanges across the
country against which only 1.73 lakh got jobs in 2005. About 50 to 55
lakh new persons register every year with the employment exchanges
looking for jobs.
Over 52 lakh graduates and post-graduates were waiting for jobs in
December 2005 in all the employment exchanges.
According to the Sept 2006 National Sample Survey report, 58 per cent
of Indians were without jobs in 2004-05 and the unemployment rate was
higher among educated ones than among less educated ones. In rural
areas, 56 per cent of people were unemployed and in urban areas 63 per
cent were unemployed. According to a study by the Hewitt Associates,
by 2020, India will have the largest number of educated but unemployed
youth in the world.
M.V. Rajasekharan, Minister of State told the Lok Sabha (August 23,
2006) that annual growth rate of employment creation during the
1983-99 was 2.7 per cent which slowed to 1.07 per cent during
1994-2000. Shri Suresh Pachaury, Minister of State informed the
Parliament (August 23, 2006) that there was no proposal to remove ban
on creation of new posts in the government sector.
Mulayam Singh Yadav, Chief Minister of UP has been claiming that he
has fulfilled his promise to the Muslim community to raise percentage
of Muslims in the UP Police to 15 per cent.Traditionally percentage of
Hindus in the UP Police had been above 95 per cent. So the credit for
reducing job opportunities of Hindu youth in the UP Police should go
to those Hindu parents who vote for Mulayam Singh. It is a tragic case
of Hindu parents voting for someone who is determined to reduce
employment space of their own children.
In December 2006 press reported that Raghubansh Prasad Singh?s
Ministry of Rural Development, for the first time in the history of
Independent India, set aside Rs 1,000 crore for religious minorities
for the three schemes (i) Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana (SGSY)
(ii) Indira Awas Yojana (IAY) and(iii) Sampoorna Grameen Rojgar Yojana
(SGRY). Till now such physical and financial allocations were made
only for SCs and STs. Thus, under these three schemes, funds are
available to Hindus including those Hindus who had voted for Shri
Raghubansh Prasad Singh in the 2004 election and has been reduced by
Rs1000 crore by this Hindu politician. It is another tragic case of a
Hindu politician betraying his own Hindu voters.
Even the discredited Sachar Committee Report admits (page 53) that the
SCs and STs are still the least literate group both in urban and rural
India but Manmohan Singh thunders that ?Muslims? shall be have the ?
first? claim over national resources. We must stand up and tell this
minority politician who never won confidence of any Lok Sabha
constituency that if any group which has legitimate first claim over
national resources it is the group of farmers and SC & ST Hindus. For
the anti-Hindu policies of Manmohan Singh-led UPA government, the
price was paid by Captain Amrinder Singh specially in the urban areas
of Punjab in recently held assembly elections.
The National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) data shows that level
of acute poverty is equally high among all communities including
Hindus also. As much as 84 per cent Hindus in the below poverty line
(BPL) category in rural areas live in conditions dubbed as ?below
double poverty line?. But showing its anti-Hindu bias, the Congress is
diverting huge funds only to address the poor among Muslims. Why it is
not simultaneously addressing the poverty of Hindus too?
(To be continued)
[Shri O.P. Gupta recently retired in the rank of Secretary to the
Government of India in the Indian Foreign Service (1971 batch). He has
served as Ambassador to Finland, Estonia, Jamaica, Tunisia, Tanzania,
etc., and Consul General, Dubai and Birmingham (UK).]
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=176&page=3
Sid Harth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For religious demographics of the Republic of India, see Religion in
India.
A Statue of Shiva.
A Statue of the Buddha.
A Statue of Jain deity Bahubali.
Indian religions are the related religious traditions that originated
in the Indian subcontinent,[1]
namely Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism, inclusive of their
sub-schools and various related traditions. They form a subgroup of
the larger classes of "Eastern religions" and also Indo-European
religions . Indian religions have similarities in core beliefs, modes
of worship, and associated practices, mainly due to their common
history of origin and mutual influence.
The documented history of Indian religions begins with historical
Vedic religion, the religious practices of the early Indo-Aryans,
which were collected and later redacted into the Samhitas, four
canonical collections of hymns or mantras composed in archaic
Sanskrit. These texts are the central shruti (revealed) texts of
Hinduism. The period of the composition, redaction and commentary of
these texts is known as the Vedic period, which lasted from roughly
1500 to 500 BCE.
The late Vedic period (9th to 6th centuries BCE) marks the beginning
of the Upanisadic or Vedantic period.[2][3] This period heralded the
beginning of much of what became classical Hinduism, with the
composition of the Upanishads, later the Sanskrit epics, still later
followed by the Puranas.
Jainism and Buddhism arose from the sramana culture. Buddhism was
historically founded by Siddhartha Gautama, a Kshatriya prince-turned-
ascetic, and was spread beyond India through missionaries. It later
experienced a decline in India, but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka,
and remains more widespread in Southeast and East Asia. Jainism was
established by a lineage of 24 enlightened beings culminating with
Parsva (9th century BCE) and Mahavira (6th century BCE).[4]
Certain scholarship holds that the practices, emblems and architecture
now commonly associated with the Hindu pantheon and Jainism may go
back as far as Late Harappan times to the period 2000-1500 BCE.[5][6]
Hinduism is divided into numerous denominations, primarily Shaivism,
Shaktism, Vaishnavism, Smarta and much smaller groups like the
conservative Shrauta. Hindu reform movements such as Ayyavazhi are
more recent. About 90% of Hindus reside in the Republic of India,
accounting for 83% of its population.[7]
Sikhism was founded in the 15th century on the teachings of Guru Nanak
and the nine successive Sikh Gurus in Northern India[8]. The vast
majority of its adherents originate in the Punjab region.
Common traits
Aum
Sometimes summarised as "Dharmic" religions or dharmic traditions,
(though the 'subtler' meaning of Dharma or dhamma differs per
religion); Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism share certain key
concepts, which are interpreted differently by different groups and
individuals.[9][10][11]
Common traits can also be observed in both the ritual and the literary
sphere. For example, the head-anointing ritual of abhiseka is of
importance in three of these distinct traditions, excluding Sikhism.
Other noteworthy rituals are the cremation of the dead, the wearing of
vermilion on the head by married women, and various marital rituals.
In literature, many classical narratives and purana have Hindu,
Buddhist or Jain versions.[12]
All four traditions have notions of karma, dharma, samsara, moksha and
various forms of Yoga. Of course, these terms may be perceived
differently by different religions. For instance, for a Hindu, dharma
is his duty. For a Jain, dharma is righteousness, his conduct. For a
Buddhist, dharma is usually taken to be the Buddha's teachings.
Similarly, for a Hindu, yoga is the cessation of all thoughts/
activities of the mind.[13]
For Jains, Yoga is sum total all physical, verbal and mental
activities.
Rama is a heroic figure in all of these religions. In Hinduism he is
the God-incarnate in the form of a princely king; in Buddhism, he is a
Bodhisattva-incarnate; in Jainism, he is the perfect human being.
Among the Buddhist Ramayanas are: Vessantarajataka,[14]
Reamker, Ramakien, Phra Lak Phra Lam, Hikayat Seri Rama etc. There
also exists the Khamti Ramayana among the Khamti tribe of Asom wherein
Rama is an avatar of a Bodhisattva who incarnates to punish the demon
king Ravana (B.Datta 1993). The Tai Ramayana is another book retelling
the divine story in Asom.
Prehistory
"Priest King" of Indus Valley CivilizationEvidence attesting to
prehistoric religion in the Indian subcontinent derives from scattered
Mesolithic rock paintings such as at Bhimbetka, depicting dances and
rituals. Neolithic agriculturalists inhabiting the Indus River Valley
buried their dead in a manner suggestive of spiritual practices that
incorporated notions of an afterlife and belief in magic.[15]
Other South Asian Stone Age sites, such as the Bhimbetka rock shelters
in central Madhya Pradesh and the Kupgal petroglyphs of eastern
Karnataka, contain rock art portraying religious rites and evidence of
possible ritualised music.[16]
The Harappan people of the Indus Valley Civilization, which lasted
from 3300–1300 BCE (mature period, 2600-1900 BCE) and was centered
around the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river valleys, may have worshiped
an important mother goddess symbolising fertility,[17]
a concept that has recently been challenged.[18] Excavations of Indus
Valley Civilization sites show small tablets with animals and altars,
indicating rituals associated with animal sacrifice.
Vedic tradition
Vedic period
Main article: Historical Vedic religion
See also: History of Hinduism
See also: Vedas, Upanishads, and Brahmanas
The Vedic Period is most significant for the composition of the four
Vedas, Brahmanas and the older Upanishads (both presented as
discussions on the rituals, mantras and concepts found in the four
Vedas), which today are some of the most important canonical texts of
Hinduism, and are the codification of much of what developed into the
core beliefs of Hinduism.
The Vedas reflect the liturgy and ritual of Late Bronze Age to Early
Iron Age Indo-Aryan speaking peoples in India. Religious practices
were dominated by the Vedic priesthood administering domestic rituals/
rites and solemn sacrifices. The Brahmanas, Aranyakas and some of the
older Upanishads (such as BAU, ChU, JUB) are also placed in this
period. Many elements of Vedic religion reach back to early Bronze Age
Proto-Indo-Iranian times. The Vedic period is held to have ended
around 500 BCE.
Akshardham the largest Hindu temple in the world.Specific rituals and
sacrifices of the Vedic religion include:
The Soma cult described in the Rigveda, descended from a common Indo-
Iranian practice.
Fire rituals, also a common Indo-Iranian practice (See
Zoroastrianism):
The Agnihotra or oblation to Agni.
The Agnistoma or Soma sacrifice (including animal sacrifice) .
The Agnicayana, the sophisticated ritual of piling the Uttara fire
altar.
The Darsapaurnamasa, the fortnightly New and Full Moon sacrifice
The Caturmasya or seasonal sacrifices (every four months)
a large number of sacrifices for special wishes (Kāmyeṣṭi)
The Ashvamedha or horse sacrifice.
The Purushamedha, or sacrifice of a man, imitating that of the cosmic
Purusha and Ashvamedha
The rites referred to in the Atharvaveda are concerned with medicine
and healing practices, as well as some charms and sorcery (white and
black magic).
The domestic (grihya) rituals deal with the rites of passage from
conception to death and beyond.
Vedanta
Main article: Vedanta
Hindu Swastika
The period of Vedanta (Sanskrit : end of Vedas), typically thought to
have begun around 600 BCE, marked the end of the evolution of the main
Vedic texts; it also accompanied the transformation of the semi-
nomadic nature of the Indo-Aryan tribes to agriculture-based polities,
as they increasingly formed permanent settlements in the Indo-Gangetic
plain and other parts of Northern India. This period was foreshadowed
by the Brahmanas that interpreted the four canonical Vedas in various
fashions, which finally led to the Upanishads. While the ritualistic
status of the four Vedas remained undiminished, the early Upanishads
mainly relate to spiritual insights. At this time, the concepts of
reincarnation, samsara, karma, and moksha began to be accepted in
ancient India outside the sphere of the priestly establishment i.e.
the Brahmana class. Some scholars think that these new concepts
developed by aborigines outside the caste system,[19] others detect
Sramana or even Ksatriya influence. These concepts were eventually
accepted by Brahmin orthodoxy, and were to form much of the core
philosophies of the later epics and Hinduism, as well as, against a
different philosophical and religious background, in Buddhism and
Jainism.
Astika and Nastika categorization
Main articles: Āstika and nāstika, Hindu philosophy, and Buddhism and
Hinduism
See also: Adi Shankara and Charvaka
Astika and nastika are sometimes used to categorise Indian religions.
Those religions that believe that God is the central actor in this
world are termed as astika. Those religions that do not believe that
God is the prime mover and actor are classified as nastika religions.
From this point of view the Vedic religion (and Hinduism) is an astika
religion, whereas Buddhism and Jainism are nastika religions.
Another definition of the terms astika and nastika, followed by Adi
Shankara, classifies religions and persons as astika and nastika
according to whether they accept the authority of the main Hindu
texts, the Vedas, as supreme revealed scriptures, or not. By this
definition, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Samkhya, Yoga, Purva Mimamsa and
Vedanta are classified as astika schools, while Charvaka is classified
as a nastika school. By this definition, both Buddhism and Jainism are
classified as nastika religions since they do not accept the authority
of the Vedas.
Shramana tradition
Main article: Shramana
See also: Gautama Buddha and Mahavira
A statue of Gautama Buddha.
A statue of Mahavira.Vedic Brahmanism of Iron Age India co-existed and
closely interacted with the parallel non-Vedic shramana traditions.[20]
[21][22][23]
These were not direct outgrowths of Vedism, but separate movements
that influenced it and were influenced by it.[24]
The shramanas were wandering ascetics. Buddhism and Jainism are a
continuation of the Shramana tradition, and the early Upanishadic
movement was influenced by it.[25][26][27][28][29][30]
The 24th Jain Tirthankar, Mahavira (599–527 BCE), stressed five vows,
including ahimsa (non-violence), satya (truthfulness), asteya (non-
stealing) and aparigraha (non-attachment).
The historical Gautama Buddha, who was a Buddha, was born into the
Shakya clan of Angirasa and Gautama Rishi lineage,[31]
just before the kingdom of Magadha (which lasted from 546–324 BCE)
rose to power. His family was native to Kapilavastu and Lumbini, in
what is now southern Nepal.
The Ajivikas and Samkhyas, both of which did not survive, also
belonged to the sramana tradition.
Rise and spread of Jainism and Buddhism
Main articles: Pre-sectarian Buddhism, Indian Buddhism, Silk Road
transmission of Buddhism, and Jain community
See also: History of Buddhism and History of Jainism
Further information: Mauryan period and Gupta period
Buddhist Mahabodhi Temple
Both Jainism and Buddhism spread throughout India during the period of
the Magadha empire. Scholars Jeffrey Brodd and Gregory Sobolewski
write that "Jainism shares many of the basic doctrines of Hinduism and
Buddhism."[32] and scholar James Bird writes, "But when primitive
Buddhism originated from Hindu schools of philosophy, it differed as
widely from that of later times, as did the Brahmanism of the Vedas
from that of the Puranas and Tantras."[33]
Palitana Jain TemplesBuddhism in India spread during the reign of
Asoka the Great of the Mauryan Empire, who patronised Buddhist
teachings and unified the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd century BCE.
He sent missionaries abroad, allowing Buddhism to spread across Asia.
[34] Jainism began its golden period during the reign of Emperor
Kharavela of Kalinga in the 2nd century BCE.
Both Jainism and Indian Buddhism started declining following the rise
of Puranic Hinduism during the Gupta dynasty. Buddhism continued to
have a significant presence in some regions of India until the 12th
century. Jainism continues to be an influential religion in Gujarat,
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
Period after 200 BCE
Main articles: decline of Buddhism in India, Hindu philosophy, and
Pala Empire
Further information: Puranas
After 200 CE several schools of thought were formally codified in
Indian philosophy, including Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Purva-
Mimamsa and Vedanta.[35]
Hinduism, otherwise a highly polytheistic, pantheistic or monotheistic
religion, also tolerated atheistic schools. The thoroughly
materialistic and anti-religious philosophical Cārvāka school that
originated around the 6th century BCE is the most explicitly atheistic
school of Indian philosophy. Cārvāka is classified as a nastika
("heterodox") system; it is not included among the six schools of
Hinduism generally regarded as orthodox. It is noteworthy as evidence
of a materialistic movement within Hinduism.[36]
Our understanding of Cārvāka philosophy is fragmentary, based largely
on criticism of the ideas by other schools, and it is no longer a
living tradition.[37]
Other Indian philosophies generally regarded as atheistic include
Classical Samkhya and Purva Mimamsa.
Between 400 CE and 1000 CE Hinduism expanded as the decline of
Buddhism in India continued.[38] Buddhism subsequently became
effectively extinct in India but survived in Nepal and Sri Lanka.
There were several Buddhistic kings who worshiped Vishnu, such as the
Gupta, Pala, Malla, Somavanshi, and Sattvahana.[39]
Buddhism survived followed by Hindus. National Geographic[40]
edition reads, "The flow between faiths was such that for hundreds of
years, almost all Buddhist temples, including the ones at Ajanta, were
built under the rule and patronage of Hindu kings."
Post-Vedic development of Hinduism
Main article: History of Hinduism
A Statue of Lord Vishnu.The end of the Vedantic period around the 2nd
century AD spawned a number of branches that furthered Vedantic
philosophy, and which ended up being seminaries in their own right.
The output generated by these specialized tributaries was
automatically considered a part of the Hindu or even Indian
philosophy. Prominent amongst these developers were Yoga, Dvaita,
Advaita and the medieval Bhakti movement. The modern day popular
movements were the ones founded by Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo,
Raja Ram Mohan Roy among others.
In the latter Vedantic period, several texts were also composed as
summaries/attachments to the Upanishads. These texts collectively
called as Puranas allowed for a divine and mythical interpretation of
the world, not unlike the ancient Hellenic or Roman religions. Legends
and epics with a multitude of gods and goddesses with human-like
characteristics were composed. Two of Hinduism's most revered epics,
the Mahabharata and Ramayana were compositions of this period.
Devotion to particular deities was reflected from the composition of
texts composed to their worship. For example the Ganapati Purana was
written for devotion to Ganapati (or Ganesh). Popular deities of this
era were Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Surya, Skanda, and Ganesh (including
the forms/incarnations of these deities.)
Bhakti Movement
Guru Ravidas - a figure from the Bhakti EraThe Bhakti Movement began
with the emphasis on the worship of God, regardless of one's status -
whether priestly or laypeople, men or women, higher social status or
lower social status.
The movements were mainly centered around the forms of Vishnu (Rama
and Krishna) and Shiva. There were however popular devotees of this
era of Durga.
Vaishnavism
The most well-known devotees are the Alwars from southern India. The
most popular Vaishnava teacher of the south was Ramanuja, while of the
north it was Ramananda.
Several important icons were women. For example, within the
Mahanubhava sect, the women outnumbered the men[41],
and administration was many times composed mainly of women.[42]
Mirabai is the most popular female saint in India.
Sri Vallabha Acharya (1479–1531) is a very important figure from this
era. He founded the Shuddha Advaita (Pure Non-dualism) school of
Vedanta thought.
Shaivism
The most well-known devotees are the Nayanars from southern India. The
most popular Shaiva teacher of the south was Basava, while of the
north it was Gorakhnath.
Female saints include figures like Akkamadevi, Lalleshvari and Molla.
Recent groups
The largest religious gathering ever held on Earth, the 2001 Maha
Kumbh Mela held in Prayag attracted around 70 million Hindus from
around the world.Main articles: Religion in India, Hindu reform
movements, Hindutva, and Communalism (South Asia)
The modern era has given rise to dozens of Hindu saints with
international influence. For example, Brahma Baba established the
Brahma Kumaris, one of the largest new Hindu religious movements
teaches the discipline of Raja Yoga to millions. Representing
traditional Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Prabhupada founded the Hare Krishna
movement, also international with many followers. In late 18th century
India, Swaminarayan founded the Swaminarayan Sampraday. Anandamurti,
founder of the Ananda Marga, has influenced many worldwide. Through
all these new Hindu denominations traveling international, many Hindu
practices such as yoga, meditation, mantra, divination, vegetarianism
have become absorbed by new coverts and others influenced.
Sikhism
Harmandir Sahib or The Golden Temple of the Sikhs.Main article:
Sikhism
See also: History of Sikhism, Sikhism and Jainism, Sikhism and
Hinduism, and Sikhism in India
Sikhism originated in fifteenth century Northern India with the
teachings of Nanak and nine successive gurus. The principal belief in
Sikhism is faith in Vāhigurū— represented by the sacred symbol of ēk
ōaṅkār [meaning one god]. Sikhism's traditions and teachings are
distinctly associated with the history, society and culture of the
Punjab. Adherents of Sikhism are known as Sikhs (students or
disciples) and number over 23 million across the world.
Although it began as a relatively neutral faith system that proposed
to include the best practices of Hinduism and Islam, over time its
Gurus led followers in various rebellions and battles against the
Islamic Mughal rulers of the time, most notably against Aurangzeb.
Status in the Republic of India
Main article: Religion in India
See also: Legal Status of Jainism as a Distinct Religion
In a judicial reminder, the Indian Supreme Court observed Sikhism and
Jainism to be sub-sects or special faiths within the larger Hindu fold,
[43]
and that Jainism is a denomination within the Hindu fold.[44]
Although the government of British India counted Jains in India as a
major religious community right from the first Census conducted in
1873, after independence in 1947 Sikhs and Jains were not treated as
national minorities.[45]
In 2005 the Supreme Court of India declined to issue a writ of
Mandamus granting Jains the status of a religious minority throughout
India. The Court however left it to the respective states to decide on
the minority status of Jain religion.[46][47]
However, some individual states have over the past few decades
differed on whether Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are religious
minorities or not, by either pronouncing judgments or passing
legislation. One example is the judgment passed by the Supreme Court
in 2006, in a case pertaining to the state of Uttar Pradesh, which
declared Jainism to be undisputably distinct from Hinduism, but
mentioned that, "The question as to whether the Jains are part of the
Hindu religion is open to debate.[48]
However, the Supreme Court also noted various court cases that have
held Jainism to be a distinct religion.
Another example is the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Bill, that is an
amendment to a legislation that sought to define Jains and Buddhists
as denominations within Hinduism.[49]
Ultimately on July 31, 2007, finding it not in conformity with the
concept of freedom of religion as embodied in Article 25 (1) of the
Constitution, Governor Naval Kishore Sharma returned back the Gujarat
Freedom of Religion (Amendment) Bill, 2006 citing the widespread
protests by the Jains[50]
as well as Supreme Court's extrajudicial observation that Jainism is a
"special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu
religion by the Supreme Court"[51]
See also
Indian philosophy
History of Yoga
Religion in India
Religious thinkers of India
Ayyavazhi and Hinduism
Buddhism and Jainism
Indology
Notes
^ Adams, C. J., Classification of religions: Geographical,
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2007. Accessed: September 5, 2007
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/497215/classification-of-religions
^ Indiana University "India Studies Program" Passage to India, Module
http://www.indiana.edu/~isp/cd_rom/mod_10/mod_10_x.htm
11. "Upanishads came to be composed already in the ninth and eighth
century B.C.E. and continued to be composed well into the first
centuries of the Common Era. The Brahmanas and Aranyakas are somewhat
older, reaching back to the eleventh and even twelfth century B.C.E."
^ [1] Paul Deussen, Philosophy of the Upanishads, Pg. 51. "these
treatises are not the work of a single genius, but the total
philosophical product of an entire epoch which extends [from]
approximately 1000 or 800 BC, to c.500 BC, but which is prolonged in
its offshoots far beyond this last limit of time."
^ Harry Oldmeadow (2007) Light from the East: Eastern Wisdom for the
Modern West, World Wisdom, Inc. ISBN 1933316225 – "Over time, apparent
misunderstandings have arisen over the origins of Jainism and
relationship with its sister religions of Hinduism and Buddhism. There
has been an ongoing debate between Jainism and Vedic Hinduism as to
which revelation preceded the other. What is historically known is
that there was a tradition along with Vedic Hinduism known as Sramana
Dharma. Essentially, the sramana tradition included it its fold, the
Jain and Buddhist traditions, which disagreed with the eternality of
the Vedas, the needs for ritual sacrifices and the supremacy of the
Brahmins." Page 141
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Oldmeadow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wisdom
^ Indiana University, Module 9, "Passage to India" One is left largely
with scholarly guesses, but it is intriguing to entertain the
possibility that traditions of ritual bathing, some sort of tradition
of meditation or Yoga, possible proto-types of Shiva and a mother
goddess, and a cult of sacred animals, all of which are prominent
features in later Hindu traditions, may indeed be traceable ultimately
all the way back to the third millenium B.C.E., and possibly earlier
to the Baluchistan and Sind village cultures that go back to time
immemorial.
http://www.indiana.edu/~isp/cd_rom/mod_09/mod_09.htm
^ Indiana University "India Studies Program", Module 6 The passage to
India: "As mentioned earlier in our brief summary of the religions of
India, the Jain tradition is one of the oldest traditions in India and
may go back as far as Indus Valley times, that is, to the second
millenium Before the Common Era (2000-1500 BCE), although the precise
origins of the tradition are not yet fully known"
http://www.indiana.edu/~isp/cd_rom/mod_06/mod_06.htm
^ "Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents".
Adherents.com.
http://www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html. Retrieved
2007-07-10.
^ Adherents.com. "Religions by adherents" (PHP).
http://www.adherents.com/misc/rel_by_adh_CSM.html. Retrieved
2007-02-09.
^ Frawley, David. From the River of Heaven: Hindu and Vedic Knowledge
for the Modern Age. Pg 27. Berkeley, California: Book Passage Press,
1990. ISBN 1878423010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frawley
^ Encarta encyclopedia [2]"Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism share with
Hinduism the concept of dharma along with other key concepts, and the
four religions may be said to belong to the dharmic tradition.".
Archived 2009-10-31.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta
^ Westerlund, David Questioning the Secular State: The Worldwide
Resurgence of Religion in Politics page 16 "may provide some
possibilities for co-operation with Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, who
like Hindus are regarded as adherents of ‘dharmic' religions."
^ c.f. Encyclopedia Britannica, s.v. "Jainism > Jainism, Hinduism, and
Buddhism"
^ "yogascittavrttinirodhah" Sutra 1 of Patanjali's Yogadarshana
^ Pollock, P. 661 Literary Cultures in History:
^ Heehs 2002, p. 39.
^ "Ancient Indians made 'rock music'". BBC News. 19 March 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3520384.stm. Retrieved
2007-08-07.
^ Fowler 1997, p. 90.
^ Sharri R. Clark, The social lives of figurines : recontextualizing
the third millennium BC terracotta figurines from Harappa, Pakistan.
PhD dissertation, Harvard 2007
^ “This confirms that the doctrine of transmigration is non-aryan and
was accepted by non-vedics like Ajivikism, Jainism and Buddhism. The
Indo-aryans have borrowed the theory of re-birth after coming in
contact with the aboriginal inhabitants of India. Certainly Jainism
and non-vedics [..] accepted the doctrine of rebirth as supreme
postulate or article of faith.” Masih, page 37.
^ S. Cromwell Crawford, review of L. M. Joshi, Brahmanism, Buddhism
and Hinduism, Philosophy East and West (1972): "Alongside Brahmanism
was the non-Aryan Shramanic culture with its roots going back to
prehistoric times."
^ Y. Masih (2000) In : A Comparative Study of Religions, Motilal
Banarsidass Publ : Delhi, ISBN 8120808150 Page 18. "There is no
evidence to show that Jainism and Buddhism ever subscribed to vedic
sacrifices, vedic deities or caste. They are parallel or native
religions of India and have contributed to much to the growth of even
classical Hinduism of the present times."
^ Dr. Kalghatgi, T. G. 1988 In: Study of Jainism, Prakrit Bharti
Academy, Jaipur
^ P.S. Jaini, (1979), The Jaina Path to Purification, Motilal
Banarsidass, Delhi, p. 169 "Jainas themselves have no memory of a time
when they fell within the Vedic fold. Any theory that attempts to link
the two traditions, moreover fails to appreciate rather distinctive
and very non-vedic character of Jaina cosmology, soul theory, karmic
doctrine and atheism"
^ S. Cromwell Crawford, review of L. M. Joshi, Brahmanism, Buddhism
and Hinduism, Philosophy East and West (1972): "Alongside Brahmanism
was the non-Aryan Shramanic culture with its roots going back to
prehistoric times."
^ Karel Werner, The Longhaired Sage in The Yogi and the Mystic. Karel
Werner, ed., Curzon Press, 1989, page 34. "Rahurkar speaks of them as
belonging to two distinct 'cultural strands' ... Wayman also found
evidence for two distinct approaches to the spiritual dimension in
ancient India and calls them the traditions of 'truth and silence.' He
traces them particularly in the older Upanishads, in early Buddhism,
and in some later literature."
^ Gavin D. Flood (1996), An Introduction to Hinduism, Cambridge
University - Press : UK ISBN 0521438780 - “The origin and doctrine of
Karma and Samsara are obscure. These concepts were certainly
circulating amongst sramanas, and Jainism and Buddhism developed
specific and sophisticated ideas about the process of transmigration.
It is very possible that the karmas and reincarnation entered the
mainstream brahaminical thought from the sramana or the renouncer
traditions.” Page 86.
^ Padmanabh S. Jaini 2001 “Collected Paper on Buddhist Studies”
Motilal Banarsidass Publ 576 pages ISBN 8120817761: "Yajnavalkya’s
reluctance and manner in expounding the doctrine of karma in the
assembly of Janaka (a reluctance not shown on any other occasion) can
perhaps be explained by the assumption that it was, like that of the
transmigration of soul, of non-brahmanical origin. In view of the fact
that this doctrine is emblazoned on almost every page of sramana
scriptures, it is highly probable that it was derived from them." Page
51.
^ Govind Chandra Pande, (1994) Life and Thought of Sankaracarya,
Motilal Banarsidass ISBN 8120811046 : Early Upanishad thinkers like
Yajnavalkya were acquainted with the sramanic thinking and tried to
incorporate these ideals of Karma, Samsara and Moksa into the vedic
thought implying a disparagement of the vedic ritualism and
recognising the mendicancy as an ideal. Page 135.
^ A History of Yoga By Vivian Worthington 1982 Routledge ISBN
071009258X - "The Upanishads were like a breath of fresh air blowing
through the stuffy corridors of power of the vedic brahminism. They
were noticed by the Brahmin establishment because the yogis did not
owe allegiance to any established religion or mode of thought.. So
although, the Upanishads came to be noticed by Brahmin establishment,
they were very largely saying what may well have been current among
other sramanic groups at that time. It can be said that this atheistic
doctrine was evidently very acceptable to the authors of Upanishads,
who made use of many of its concepts." Page 27.
^ A History of Yoga By Vivian Worthington 1982 Routledge ISBN
071009258X: "The idea of re-incarnation, so central to the older
sramanic creeds is still new to many people throughout the world. The
Aryans of the Vedic age knew nothing of it. When the Brahmins began to
accept it, they declared it as a secret doctrine. […] It will be seen
from this short account of Jains, that they had fully developed the
ideas of karma and reincarnation very early in history. The earliest
Upanishads were probably strongly influenced by their teachings.
Jainism the religion, Samkhya the philosophy and yoga the way to self
discipline and enlightenment dominated the spiritual life of Indian
during the Dravidian times. They were to be overshadowed for over
thousand years by the lower form of religion that was foisted on the
local inhabitants by the invading Aryans, but in the end it was
Sramanic disciplines that triumphed. They did so by surviving in their
own right and by their ideas being fully adopted by the Brahmins who
steadily modified their own vedic religion." Page 35.
^ The Life of Buddha as Legend and History, by Edward Joseph Thomas
^ P. 93 World Religions By Jeffrey Brodd, Gregory Sobolewski
^ P. 66 Historical researches on the origin and principles of the
Bauddha and Jaina religions: embracing the leading tenets of their
system, as found prevailing in various countries; illustrated by
descriptive accounts of the sculptures in the caves of western India,
with translations of the inscriptions ... which indicate their
connexion with the coins and topes of the Panjab and Afghanistan.by
James Bird
^ Heehs 2002, p. 106.
^ Radhakrishnan & Moore 1967, p. xviii–xxi.
^ Radhakrishnan & Moore 1967, p. 227–249.
^ Chatterjee & Datta 1984, p. 55.
^ "The rise of Buddhism and Jainism". Religion and Ethics—Hinduism:
Other religious influences. BBC. 26 July 2004.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history_2.shtml.
Retrieved 2007-04-21.
^ Durga Prasad, P. 116, History of the Andhras upto 1565 A. D.
^ January 2008, VOL. 213, #1
^ Ramaswamy, P. 204 Walking Naked
^ Ramaswamy, P. 210 Walking Naked
^ Supreme Court observation, Bal Patil vs. Union of India, Dec 2005 In
various codified customary laws like Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu
Succession Act, Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act and other laws of
pre and post- Constitution period, the definition of 'Hindu' included
all sects and sub-sects of Hindu religions including Sikhs and Jains
^ Supreme court of India, in the judgement of Bal Patil vs. Union of
India, Dec. 2005. The Supreme Court observed in a judgment pertaining
to case of Bal Patil vs. Union of India: "Thus, 'Hinduism' can be
called a general religion and common faith of India whereas 'Jainism'
is a special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu
religion. Jainism places greater emphasis on non-violence ('Ahimsa')
and compassion ('Karuna'). Their only difference from Hindus is that
Jains do not believe in any creator like God but worship only the
perfect human-being whom they called Tirathankar."
^ [Supreme Court observation, Bal Patil vs. Union of India, December
2005
http://www.judis.nic.in/supremecourt/qrydisp.asp?tfnm=27098]
The so-called minority communities like Sikhs and Jains were not
treated as national minorities at the time of framing the
Constitution.
^ Syed Shahabuddin. "Minority rights are indivisible". The Tribune.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20051125/edit.htm#4.
^ Supreme court of India, in the judgement of Bal Patil vs. Union of
India, Dec. 2005. In an extra-judicial observation not forming part of
the judgment the court observed :"Thus, 'Hinduism' can be called a
general religion and common faith of India whereas 'Jainism' is a
special religion formed on the basis of quintessence of Hindu
religion. Jainism places greater emphasis on non-violence ('Ahimsa')
and compassion ('Karuna'). Their only difference from Hindus is that
Jains do not believe in any creator like God but worship only the
perfect human-being whom they called Tirathankar."
^ (para 25, Committee of Management Kanya Junior High School Bal Vidya
Mandir, Etah, U.P. v. Sachiv, U.P. Basic Shiksha Parishad, Allahabad,
U.P. and Ors., Per Dalveer Bhandari J., Civil Appeal No. 9595 of 2003,
decided On: 21.08.2006, Supreme Court of India) [3]
^ Gujarat Freedom of religions Act, 2003
^ "Religious freedom Bill returned". The Indian Express. 2007-07-31.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/207905.html. Retrieved 2007-09-15.
^ The Times of India, 11 Mar, 2008 In his letter dated July 27, 2007
he had said Jainism has been regarded as "special religion formed on
the basis of quintessence of Hindu religion by the Supreme Court".
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Gujarat_govt_revokes_conversion_amendment/articleshow/2853456.cms
References
Chatterjee, S; Datta, D (1984), An Introduction to Indian Philosophy
(8th ed.), University of Calcutta, ASIN: B0007BFXK4
Fowler, JD (1997), Hinduism: Beliefs and Practices, Sussex Academic
Press, ISBN 1-898-72360-5,
http://books.google.com/books?id=RmGKHu20hA0C
Heehs, P (2002), Indian Religions: A Historical Reader of Spiritual
Expression and Experience, New York: New York University Press, ISBN
0-814-73650-5
Oberlies, T (1998), Die Religion des Rgveda, Wien
Radhakrishnan, S; Moore, CA (1967), A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy,
Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-01958-4
Rinehart, R (2004), Contemporary Hinduism: Ritual, Culture, and
Practice, ABC-Clio, ISBN 1-57607-905-8
External links
Statistics
"Census of India 2001: Data on religion". Government of India (Office
of the Registrar General).
http://www.censusindia.gov.in/. Retrieved 2007-05-28.
Constitution and law
"Constitution of India". Government of India (Ministry of Law and
Justice).
http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/welcome.html. Retrieved 2007-05-28.
Reports
"International Religious Freedom Report 2006: India". United States
Department of State.
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2006/71440.htm.
Retrieved 2007-05-28.
Categories:
Indian religions |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Indian_religions
Religion in India |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Religion_in_India
Religious comparison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Religious_comparison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_religions
Aboriginal Spirituality
A resource on aboriginal spirituality
Aboriginal Spirituality
Spirituality for Indigenous Australians takes many forms. Some
Indigenous Australians share the religious beliefs and values of
religions introduced into Australia from other cultures around the
world, particularly Europe. But for most people religious beliefs are
derived from a sense of belonging-to the land, to the sea, to other
people, to one's culture.
Aboriginal spirituality mainly derives from the stories of the
Dreaming.
We recommend this article: Aboriginal Spirituality - 1, and also this:
Aboriginal Spirituality - 2.
Aboriginal Spirituality
Aboriginal Wisdom
Collin Fischer (CJ), aboriginal wisdom keeper and medicine man will
share the wisdom of his aboriginal ancestors.
Aborigine
A word Usually referring to the original inhabitants of Australia
(also called "Abos"}They are a shamanic people who have lived in
Australia for over 10,000 years. Their term for the astral world is
"The Dream Time". Ayers Rock. an unusual rock outcrop in central
Australia, is regarded as a vortex, and is regarded as sacred by the
aborigines.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Mandala as Symbol of the Universe Mandala,
which literally means circle, largely associated with religions and
cults of India and Tibet, was also used as a potent symbol by the
American Indians, the original inhabitants of Central America, and by
the aborigines of Australia.
Across cultures, the universe is represented as a series of concentric
circles, maybe as a model of the solar system. In Tantra, the central
point represents Mount Meru around which the earth is situated, and
the concentric circles represent the cosmic aspects of the universe,
like energy fields and atmospheric zones. In Hindu and Buddhist
interpretations, the centre of the Mandala is the ultimate divine
principle uniting the object and the subject as they spin out of the
centre. This may refer to the cosmos or to the human body.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Encyclopedia II - Australian Aboriginal art -
Religious and cultural aspects of Aboriginal art
Traditional Aboriginal art almost always has a mythological undertone
relating to the Dreamtime of Australian Aborigines. It originated
around 500 years ago. Many modern purists will say if it doesn't
contain the spirituality of aborigines, it is not true aboriginal art.
Wenten Rubuntja, an Aboriginal landscape artist says it's hard to find
any art that is devoid of spiritual meaning; "Doesn't matter what sort
of painting we do in this country, it still belongs to the people, all
the people. This is worship, work, culture. It's all Dr ...
See also:
Australian Aboriginal art, Australian Aboriginal art - Aboriginal
painting, Australian Aboriginal art - Bark painting, Australian
Aboriginal art - Carvings and sculpture, Australian Aboriginal art -
Other art, Australian Aboriginal art - Religious and cultural aspects
of Aboriginal art, Australian Aboriginal art - Graffiti and other
destructive influences, Australian Aboriginal art - Modern Aboriginal
Artists, Australian Aboriginal art - List of contemporary Aboriginal
artists, Australian Aboriginal art - Famous sites of Aboriginal art
Ayers Rock
A large sandstone outcropping that rises from the desert in central
Australia.
It is the most sacred site of the Aborigines and is place of
pilgrimage from all over the globe. In aborigine myth it is said that
there was a great battle here (perhaps the War in Heaven of
Revelations) in which creation was thrown out of Dreamtime (the Astral
World) and began to live in the material world.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Encyclopedia II - Corrientes - History
In 1516, Juan Díaz de Solís commanded the first expedition to reach
the area populated mainly by Guaraní aboriginals, but his expedition
was attacked and Solís perished in the adventure. Sebastián Gaboto
established in 1527 the Sancti Spiritu fort upstream of the Paraná
River, and in 1536 Pedro de Mendoza reached further north into the
basin of the river, searching for the Sierras of Silver. Juan Torres
de Vera y Aragón founded on April 3, 1588 San Juan de Vera de las
Siete Corrientes ("Saint John of ...
Aboriginal Spirituality: Encyclopedia II - Santa Fe Province - History
The aboriginal tribes who inhabited this region were the Tobas,
Timbúes, Mocovíes, Pilagás, Guaycurúes and Guaraníes. They were
nomadic, lived from hunting, fishing and fruit recollection. The first
European settlement was established in 1527, at the confluence of the
Paraná and Carcarañá rivers, when Sebastián Gaboto, on his way to the
north, founded a fort named Sancti Spiritu, which was destroyed two
years later by the natives. In 1573 Juan de Garay founded the city of
Santa Fe in the surroundings of present town Cayastá, but the city was
moved bo ...
Aboriginal Spirituality: Encyclopedia II - Bahá'í Faith and Education
- Type of education
The type of education that is written about in the Bahá'í writings
does not point to one type of education. There are many conceptions
about what constitutes education, and what subjects should be taught.
For example, aboriginal people who followed a tradiional subsistence
lifestyle were considered by many as uneducated, although they had a
stock of knowledge required to function in those societies. On the
other hand, if absolutely any form of education would fulfill the
requirement — as anthropologists assure us that every culture
"educates" ...
See also:
Bahá'í Faith and Education, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Purpose,
Bahá'í Faith and Education - Type of education, Bahá'í Faith and
Education - Moral and spiritual education, Bahá'í Faith and Education
- A Useful trade or profession, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Literacy,
Bahá'í Faith and Education - Languages, Bahá'í Faith and Education -
Other subjects, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Pedagogical issues,
Bahá'í Faith and Education - Responsibility, Bahá'í Faith and
Education - Environmental factors, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Bahá'í
education in practice, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Ruhi sequence of
courses, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Core curriculum, Bahá'í Faith
and Education - Fundamental verities, Bahá'í Faith and Education -
Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Social and economic
development, Bahá'í Faith and Education - Praise for teachers
Aboriginal Spirituality: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on
Dravidians
Dravidians. A group of tribes inhabiting Southern India; the
aborigines.
Aboriginal Dreaming
An English expression adopted by Australian Aborigines to convey ideas
that, though related in their thought, are not usually denoted by a
single word in any of their languages.
One sense is that of a primordial epoch, the Dreaming or Dreamtime,
when beings with remarkable powers arose from the ground, descended
from the sky, or appeared from over the horizon. They gave the earth
its shape by creating physical features (often from parts of their own
bodies), fixed life in species form, established human culture, and
gave everything its name.
These creative beings, who in their totality are the ultimate
explanation of all things, are themselves called Dreamings (roughly
equivalent to the anthropological term totems).
Their significance to the Aborigines is not merely historical but
personal and social, for each individual and group gains a distinctive
identity through its association with one or more Dreamings. In many
regions it is held that such beings reincarnate themselves as humans,
or that they left relics behind that, to this day, are sufficiently
potent to impregnate women.
This sense of oneness, in which past and present, spirit being and
human being, are somehow fused, is also seen in ceremonies in which
the actors wear designs and make movements symbolic or mimetic of what
the Dreamings did in the Dreamtime. By extension, from these two
senses of Dreaming, the Aborigines form other expressions, such as
Dreaming-place (a site at which a Dreaming was active and left
something of itself) and Dreaming-track (an imagined path along which
a Dreaming traveled from place to place in the primordial epoch).
Contrary to what is sometimes suggested, the term has no necessary
connection with the verb to dream, even though present-day revelations
to humans by Dreamings normally occur while the recipient is in a
dream or trance state.
See Astral World.
Sun - Moon
Sun
(1) The sun may be a symbol of the self (i.e. your true and total
self), or of the conscious ego.
(2) It may symbolize intelligence, as distinct from intuition.
Moon
From prehistoric times the moon has been regarded as the source of all
fertility. It governs ocean tides and rainfall, menstruation and
birth. (Even when seen as male, the moon has been associated with
fertility: for example, in Australian aboriginal tradition, the moon
makes women pregnant.) It therefore symbolizes (the possibility of)
personal growth.
Sun, Moon, Intelligence, Intuition, Conscious ego, Fertility, Ocean
tides, Rainfall, Menstruation, Birth, Aboriginal tradition, Aboriginal
spirituality, Pregnant, Pregnancy, Personal growth
Aboriginal Spirituality: Alternative Health Dictionary on Didgeridoo
vibrational healing
didgeridoo vibrational healing: Group of techniques, of Australian
aboriginal origin, promoted by the Emerging Light Center of Queens, in
New York City. It helps to remove blocks. Its theory posits spiritual
centers and a personal spiritual being with a reachable core.
A didgeridoo (also spelled didjeridu) is a hornlike wind instrument,
generally three feet long, of hollowed, petrified eucalyptus bark.
Aborigines use it to produce a sound that effects healing on an
energetic or spiritual level. This sound expands one's aura.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on Bhons
Bhons (Tibet, Tibetan). The followers of the old religion of the
Aborigines of Tibet; of pre-buddhistic temples and ritualism; the same
as Dugpas, "red caps", though the latter appellation usually applies
only to sorcerers.
Quetzo-Cohuatl (Mex.). The serpent-god in the Mexican Scriptures and
legends. His wand and other "land-marks" show him to be some great
Initiate of antiquity, who received the name of "Serpent" on account
of his wisdom, long life and powers. To this day the aboriginal tribes
of Mexico call themselves by the names of various reptiles, animals
and birds.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on Ulupi
Ulupi (Sanskrit). A daughter of Kauravya, King of the Nagas in Patala
(the nether world, or more correctly, the Antipodes, America).
Exoterically, she was the daughter of a king or chief of an aboriginal
tribe of the Nagas, or Nagals (ancient adepts) in pre-historic America
- Mexico most likely, or Uruguay.
She was married to Arjuna, the disciple of Krishna, whom every
tradition, oral and written, shows travelling five thousand years ago
to Patala (the Antipodes). The Puranic tale is based on a historical
fact. Moreover, Ulupi, as a name, has a Mexican ring in it, like "
Atlan ", " Aclo ", etc.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Spiritual Theosophical Dictionary on
Tassissudun
Tassissudun (Tibet, Tibetan). Lit., "the holy city of the doctrine"
inhabited, nevertheless, by more Dugpas than Saints.
It is the residential capital in Bhutan of the ecclesiastical Head of
the Bhons - the Dharma Raja. The latter, though professedly a Northern
Buddhist, is simply a worshipper of the old demon-gods of the
aborigines, the nature-sprites or elementals, worshipped in the land
before the introduction of Buddhism.
All strangers are prevented from penetrating into Eastern or Great
Tibet, and the few scholars who venture on their travels into those
forbidden regions, are permitted to penetrate no further than the
border-lands of the land of Bod.
They journey about Bhutan, Sikkhim, and elsewhere on the frontiers of
the country, but can learn or know nothing of true Tibet; hence,
nothing of the true Northern Buddhism or Lamaism of Tsong-kha-pa. And
yet, while describing no more than the rites and beliefs of the Bhons
and the travelling Shamans, they assure the world they are giving it
the pure Northern Buddhism, and comment on its great fall from its
pristine purity.
Uragas (Sanskrit). The Nagas (serpents) dwelling in Patala the nether
world or hell, in popular thought ; the Adepts, High Priests and
Initiates of Central and South America, known to the ancient Aryans;
where Arjuna wedded the daughter of the king of the Nagas - Ulupi.
Nagalism or Naga-worship prevails to this day in Cuba and Hayti, and
Voodooism, the chief branch of the former, has found its way into New
Orleans.
In Mexico the chief "sorcerers ", the " medicine men ", are called
Nagals to this day; just as thousands of years ago the Chaldean and
Assyrian High Priests were called Nargals, they being chiefs of the
Magi (Rab.Mag), the office held at one time by the prophet Daniel. The
word Naga, " wise serpent ", has become universal, because it is one
of the few words that have survived the wreck of the first universal
language. In South as well as in Central and North America, the
aborigines use the word, from Behring Straits down to Uruguay, where
it means a "chief", a "teacher and a " serpent ".
The very word Uraga may have reached India and been adopted through
its connection, in prehistoric times, with South America and Uruguay
itself, for the name belongs to the American Indian vernacular. The
origin of the Uragas, for all that the Orientalists know, may have
been in Uruguai, as there are legends about them which locate their
ancestors the Nagas in Patala, the antipodes, or America.
Aboriginal Spirituality: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Sanskrit
Sanskrit [from Sanskrit sanskrita or samskrita]
The ancient sacred language of the Aryans, originally the sacred or
secret language of the initiates of the fifth root-race. The Sanskrit
language possesses voluminous and valuable works in prose and in
verse, some of which, like the Vedas, date back, in the opinion of
certain scholars, to the years 30,000 BC or even far beyond. Almost
every phase of philosophic thought, expressed and studied in the West,
is represented in one form or another in ancient Hindu literature.
Besides this, these old Sanskrit writings are replete with recondite
subjects dealing with the wondrous potentialities of the human spirit
and mind, the building and destruction of worlds and universes, etc.
The Sanskrit language, derives from one of the earliest of the Aryan
tongues, a lineal descendant of an Atlantean progenitor.
"In ancient times in India, and in the homeland of the Aryans before
they reached India by way of Central Asia, this very early Aryan
speech was used not only by the Aryan populace, but in the sanctuaries
of the Temples was taken in hand and developed or composed or builded
to be a far finer vehicle for expressing abstract religious and
philosophic conceptions and thoughts. This tongue thus composed or
developed by initiates of the Aryan stock, because of this formative
work upon it was finally given the name Sanskrita, signifying an
original natural language which had become perfected by initiates for
the purpose of expressing far more subtle and profound distinctions
than ordinary people would ever find needful. So great was the
admiration in which the Sanskrit language thus perfected was held,
that it was commonly said of it that it was the work of the Gods,
because it had thus become capable of expressing godlike thoughts:
profound spiritual subtleties and philosophical distinctions. Thus it
was that Sanskrit is really the mystery-language of the initiates of
the Aryan race; as the Senzar of very similar history was the mystery-
language of the later Atlanteans; and is still used as the noblest
mystery-language by the Mahatmas.
"Sanskrit was not known as a spoken tongue to the Atlanteans in their
prime, but in the degenerate or later times of Atlantis, when the
earliest Aryans already had appeared on the scene of history, this
early Aryan speech above alluded to, was already in existence; and the
Aryan initiates were then in the course of perfecting it as their
temple-language or mystery-tongue . . . Thus Sanskrit was not spoken
among the Atlanteans, nor can it therefore be called an Atlantean
language; although its verbal roots of course go back to earliest
Atlantean times, but only its verbal roots" -- G. de Purucker
"The Vedas, Brahmanism, and along with these, Sanskrit, were
importations into what we now regard as India. They were never
indigenous to its soil. There was a time when the ancient nations of
the West included under the generic name of India many of the
countries of Asia now classified under other names. There was an
Upper, a Lower, and a Western India, even during the comparatively
late period of Alexander; and Persia (Iran) is called Western India in
some ancient classics. The countries now named Tibet, Mongolia, and
Great Tartary were considered by them as forming part of India. When
we say, therefore, that India has civilized the world, and was the
Alma Mater of the civilizations, arts, and sciences of all other
nations (Babylonia, and perhaps even Egypt, included) we mean archaic,
pre-historic India, India of the time when the great Gobi was a sea,
and the lost 'Atlantis' formed part of an unbroken continent which
began at the Himalayas and ran down over Southern India, Ceylon, and
Java, to far-away Tasmania" (Five Years of Theosophy 179).
Blavatsky states that Sanskrit has never been known nor spoken in its
true systematized form except by the initiated Brahmins. This form of
Sanskrit was called -- as well as by other names -- Vach, the mystic
speech, which resides in the sounds of the mantra. "The chanting of a
Mantra is not a prayer, but rather a magical sentence in which the law
of Occult causation connects itself with, and depends on, the will and
acts of its singer. It is a succession of Sanskrit sounds, and when
its strings of words and sentences is pronounced according to the
magical formulae in the Atharva Veda, but understood by the few, some
Mantras produce an instantaneous and very wonderful effect" (BCW
14:428n). This Vach, or the mystic self of Sanskrit, was the
sacerdotal speech of the initiated Brahmins and was studied by
initiates from all over the world.
"It is admitted that, however inferior to the classical Sanskrit of
Panini, the language of the oldest portions of Rig Veda,
notwithstanding the antiquity of its grammatical forms, is the same as
that of the latest texts. Every one sees -- cannot fail to See and to
know -- that for a language so old and so perfect as the Sanskrit to
have survived alone, among all languages, it must have had its cycles
of perfection and its cycles of degeneration. And, if one had any
intuition, he might have seen that what they call a 'dead language'
being an anomaly, a useless thing in Nature, it would not have
survived, even as a 'dead' tongue, had it not its special purpose in
the reign of immutable cyclic laws; and that Sanskrit, which came to
be nearly lost to the world, is now slowly spreading in Europe, and
will one day have the extension it had thousands upon thousands of
years back -- that of a universal language. The same as to the Greek
and the Latin: there will be a time when the Greek of Aeschylus (and
more perfect still in its future form) will be spoken by all in
Southern Europe, while Sanskrit will be resting in its periodical
pralaya; and the Attic will be followed later by the Latin of Virgil.
Something ought to have whispered to us that there was also a time --
before the original Aryan settlers among the Dravidian and other
aborigines, admitted within the fold of Brahmanical initiation, marred
the purity of the sacred Sanskrita Bhasha -- when Sanskrit was spoken
in all its unalloyed subsequent purity, and therefore must have had
more than once its rise and fall. The reason for it is simply this:
classical Sanskrit was only restored, if in some things perfected, by
Panin. Panini, Katyayana, or Patanjali did not create it; it has
existed throughout cycles, and will pass through other cycles
still" (Five Years of Theosophy 419-20).
Aboriginal Spirituality
Spirituality for Indigenous Australians takes many forms. Some
Indigenous Australians share the religious beliefs and values of
religions introduced into Australia from other cultures around the
world, particularly Europe. But for most people religious beliefs are
derived from a sense of belonging-to the land, to the sea, to other
people, to one's culture.
Aboriginal spirituality mainly derives from the stories of the
Dreaming.
We recommend this article: Aboriginal Spirituality -
1, and also this: Aboriginal Spirituality -
2. Aboriginal wisdom,
Aboriginals,
Shaman,
Healer,
Native spirituality,
Australia
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bademiyansubhanallah
17 Mar 2010, 0214 hrs IST, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: A little less than a month after he formally took over as
BJP president, Mr Nitin Gadkari announced his team of office-bearers
and national executive here on Tuesday. In keeping with the party’s
new mantra, he has given 33% representation to women, but was
hamstrung with the acute talent deficit and pulls and pressures from
various quarters, including the RSS and the top brass, in preparing
the list.
A look at the composition of the new team would make it obvious that
the notorious ‘quota system’ — so far associated only with Congress,
with each top leader managing to get his nominees squeezed in — has
found its way into the BJP too. Members identified with front-ranking
leaders have been given more-than-adequate representation.
If the new BJP president was expected to announce a team capable of
taking on a youthful, resurgent Congress led by Mr Rahul Gandhi, it
has been belied. While a few fresh, younger faces have been inducted
in Mr Gadkari’s team, his task of building a team for the future has
been rendered that much more difficult by his failure to look beyond
the pool that was already available before him.
Thus, many leaders who failed to make their mark in the previous team
have been included in the new list of office-bearers. Also, leaders
whose performances were dubbed as disastrous in their respective home
states have been rehabilitated at the national level, lending credence
to the perception that Mr Gadkari did not exactly have a free
hand.
After holding wide-ranging consultations, the BJP president came out
with a list of 39 office-bearers. It includes, besides Mr Gadkari, 11
vice-presidents (two slots have been left vacant), 10 general
secretaries and 15 secretaries.While Mr Ram Lal has been retained as
general secretary in-charge of organisation, Mr Anant Kumar, Mr Vijay
Goel and Mr Thawar Chand Gehlot, who were there in the previous team,
too have been given a fresh innings.
Former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje, former Jharkhand
chief minister Arjun Munda, Mr J P Nadda, minister for parliamentary
affairs,
forests and environment in Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh BJP chief
Narendra Singh Tomar, Mr Dharmendra Pradhan, secretary in the previous
team, and Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad are the new general
secretaries.
In what is being considered as recognition of his performance, Mr
Prasad will also be the chief spokesman of BJP. He will be assisted by
six more spokespersons, including Mr Prakash Javadekar and Mr Rajiv
Pratap Rudy, who were performing the job in the previous regime too.
The new spokespersons include former Union minister Syed Shahnawaz
Hussain, former Rajya Sabha member Ramnath Kovind, former Organiser
editor Tarun Vijay and Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, a party leader hailing
from Andhra Pradesh.
While former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Shanta Kumar and Mr
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi will continue as vice-presidents, Mr Vinay Katiyar
has been elevated. The new vice-presidents are former Uttarakhand
chief minister Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, Rajya Sabha member Najma
Heptullah, Lok Sabha member Bijoya Chakravarti, former MPs Karuna
Shukla and Hema Malini, Bihar MLC Kiran Ghai and former Gujarat BJP
chief Purushottam Rupala.
There will be 15 secretaries, including popular TV actress Smriti
Irani, Lok Sabha members Varun Gandhi, Navjot Singh Sidhu, Saroj
Pande, former Union ministers Santosh Gangwar, Ashok Pradhan and Kirit
Somaiya, former MPs Tapir Gao and Kiran Maheshwari and Mr Murlidhar
Rao. Former Delhi mayor Arati Mehra too has been made a secretary. Mr
Piyush Goyal is the new treasurer.
The party’s central parliamentary board, the top policy-making body,
has been left more or less untouched, with Mr Gadkari being the only
new member. The president simultaneously released the new list of
national executive comprising 81 members. It includes 26 women. The
chief ministers of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal
Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttarakhand and the deputy chief ministers of
Bihar and Jharkhand have been named as permanent invitees.
Political yoga: A new phase in our democracy
17 Mar 2010, 0619 hrs IST, ET Bureau
It is a rather curious mix, our ready veneration of sundry godmen and
the equally-prompt readiness to push them off their pedestals when we
find
that they, well, aren’t so godly after all. Perhaps we haven’t yet got
to the stage where we can quite accept that men and matters spiritual
can really have anything to do with the material world.
Or, rather, we feel a greater sense of betrayal when that supposedly
personalised link to the spirit-realm turns out to have baser
moorings. A bit unlike other parts of the world, where godmen or cults
openly make a virtue out of, what for us, are vices. No experiments,
for us, sorry. Thus the scorn heaped upon the one who was recently
supposedly taped frolicking with an actress.
His excuses that he was in some sort of trance or merely
‘experimenting’ with stuff didn’t quite wash. We like our trances to
be more unearthly, thank you. But that does posit the curious
phenomenon of our preoccupation with such godmen . Perhaps the search
for deliverance, some sort of sense of agency.
Sure, there are any number of genuine worthies, people who really can
be what they say they are. But then, the whole thing is also open to
abuse. Just consider the number of such people over the years who have
come crashing to the ground, or are behind bars now.
But deliverance is at hand: a spiritual/health guru who wants to
expand our horizons and jump into the fray to improve the lot of the
nation. In a possible first of its kind, a well-known yoga guru has
just announced his intention to form a political party. Which, given
his stress on physical exercise, might give a new twist to his stated
intention of ‘cleansing’ the wider body politic.
Well, nothing wrong with that per se, as with his calls to crack down
on fake religious gurus. This would certainly at least make a
difference from our usual spectrum of left-centre-right politics. More
like a ‘save the nation, hold your breath’ kind of situation . The age
of the political asana might be upon us.
Stop the Vedanta Project in Orissa
17 Mar 2010, 0617 hrs IST, ET Bureau
In the long-term interest of internal security, survival of an
endangered primitive tribe and justice and fairness , the government
should withhold
clearance to the bauxite mining project spread over Orissa’s Kalahandi
(South) and Rayagada forest divisions, proposed by minerals major
Vedanta.
The core issue is violent disruption of a tribal people’s life for the
sake of mineral extraction in a manner that would mock the ruling
ideology of inclusive growth, and give legitimacy to the Maoists.
Maoists represent themselves as the only champions of India’s
dispossessed and exploited rural masses, especially the scheduled
tribes.
The state has identified Maoists as India’s primary internal security
threat, and launched an offensive , labelled Operation Green Hunt,
against them. Its premise is that Maoists obstruct the reach of the
uplifting arms of the state as they delve deep into rural India’s
swamps of underdevelopment. If only the Maoists would step aside, in
peace or at the point of a bayonet, the state would take care of the
poor.
This claim would be blown to smithereens if the state were to
facilitate a classic case of development that impoverishes a
defenceless populace, perhaps to extinction. Vedanta’s treatment of
the Dongria Konds, who live on and off the land sought to be mined,
has led many ethics-sensitive large investors in Britain to exit the
company. A fact-finding team of the ministry of environment and
forests has come up with findings that discourage further progress in
the project.
India can progress with some of its bauxite continuing to lie
underground for some more time. India cannot progress with a growing
internal security threat, fed by the state’s failure to live up to its
commitment to the common people. One of the UPA government’s major
legislative achievements, in its previous term, was the Forest Rights
Act, whose sincere implementation would deprive Maoists of a crucial
support base.
The law is being subverted all over the country, for want of political
mobilisation in its support. The Lanjigarh bauxite mining project, if
it goes through, would be yet more subversion of a key instrumentality
of inclusive growth.
Sidhu in Gadkari’s team
Express News Service
Posted: Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010 at 0031 hrs
Chandigarh:
Member of Parliament (MP) from Amritsar Navjot Singh Sidhu is among
the 15 national secretaries appointed by BJP national president Nitin
Gadkari on Tuesday. With his elevation, Sidhu will find himself in a
greater organisational responsibility as part of the core team of the
party. The Indian Express had on January 20 this year reported Sidhu’s
likely prospects of elevation to the plum post.
Navjot Sidhu’s new political assignment comes as a breather for him,
given that his equation with the BJP state leadership headed by
Rajinder Bhandari, who relinquished charge last month, has been
persistently waning. At one point, Sidhu even contemplated to quit as
an MP.
Sidhu now finds himself on this post despite the fact that his
adversaries in the saffron party have been promulgating Sidhu as a non-
cadre leader without a Sangh background. Sidhu, a three-time MP from
Amritsar, was the lone legislator from the BJP to win the Lok Sabha
seat last year.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Sidhu-in-Gadkari-s-team/591688
Ramdev may join politics, takes dig at Maya
ANI
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 16, 2010 at 1615 hrs
Lucknow:
Yoga Guru Swami Ramdev on Tuesday hinted at entering politics, saying
that he would join with the objective of cleansing the system.
"I will join politics to cleanse the system," said Ramdev. Ramdev said
he would not stand for elections personally, but would field
candidates in all 543 Lok Sabha constituencies.
Earlier, commenting on the giant currency garland controversy, Ramdev
criticized Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati of doing business
through politics. Some people are doing business over politics," said
Ramdev.
Raising questions over the giant garland, used to honour Mayawati
during the Bahujan Samaj Party's silver jubilee celebrations on
Monday, Ramdev said, "Money that should be used for the upliftment of
Dalits is seen being worn as a garland."
40 Comments |
We are with you pls go ahead.
By: Prabhulal buj | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 9:56:45 AM
Dear, Swami Ramdev ji, we need such a great person who can take to
india's ranking No.1 in the world.I have seen almost all head
politician but I haven't seen who can lead the biggest loktantrik
country(india). The all indian politicain are corrupted.We never
expect from them that india will comes out as a devlop country in few
centuries. So I just requiest to you(Swami ji) that pls be positive we
are with you please go ahead. God bless you.
Guide Followers to believe in Democracy
By: Ganesh Singh | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 9:44:24 AM
Baba Ramdev is doing gr8 job no doubt about it. But what I think his
followers are middle class people who doesn't go for vote. The people
who vote are poor people who still leaves in villages and think of
their survival. They vote according to their casts or who ever
provides them monetary benefits. My view is that Babaji inspite of
starting his new party should guide and teach this middle class people
to believe in democracy, vote and to vote for right candidates without
any influence. If he makes new party, one more party in indian
democracy will come and divide the votes nothing else.
Good Idea
By: mukesh | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 9:43:48 AM
Hello Ramdev Baba, This is very good idea for you to handle politics
from out side. We need India purification movement and make Bharat out
of India. All the best and go ahead.
Let us Support Baba Ramdev's Cause
By: Leeladhar Sharma | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 8:22:31 AM
Baba Ramdev has tailked about practical problems being faced by the
Indian Democracy. He has identified problem areas and is planning to
cleanse the system of its evils- a huge task to to make India a less
corupt country. Honest and Hardworking people need to whole-heartedly
come together for the first and last lest it is too late.
I would vote for him
By: Asit | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 8:18:47 AM Rep
Hi four loksabha elections have been over since I was 18 years old .
Never ever i had the urge to vote for any one or any political party
in India but if Baba contests in the election of 20-14 definitely I
would vote for him and contribute as a party worker taking 5-7 days
leave from my organization. I belive in what he says and does and am
happy that he took such a necessary step to clean the system . God
save the current politicians from jail if he wins :)
Power Corrupts
By: Spirit | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 8:15:00 AM
Politicians don not become corrupt, it's the corrupt people who become
politicians. Baba Ramdev should not take a plunge in the dirty waters
of politics. No one can change the world neither the already
established society, ecpect a World War 3. All change has to be at an
individual level and every individual is responsible for bringing that
change in him/herself. Baba Ramdev could and may have been acting as a
catalyst to bring about that change on the individual level of human
beings, but joiing politics he is looking for power now. Surely, power
corrupts.
How About Nikhilananda?
By: Dr. Verma | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 6:30:49 AM
Personally, I would prefer a real-blooded human like Nikhilananda
rather than a cold, fundamentalist fish of Ramdeva's ilk. If he cannot
correct the strabismus in his eyes by yoga, what hope does realpolitik
have?
Colonel
By: Shashi Sharma | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 2:24:07 AM
He is trying to bite more than he can chew. He is a good yoga guru and
he should stick to that. YES indian political system is corrupt and
democracy seems to be dead. But politics and democracy has its own
form in India and is very deep rooted.Ushering in revolutions is
easier said than done. He can contribute by bringing in good health
and that should be it. Leave the politics to the politicians.
be decisve
By: sonam | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 1:13:14 AM
if Ramdev baba really want to do something for indian society he
should continue with his job and make indian citizens healthy!!when he
can't influence people for accepting yoga what he will do in
politics??
Baba Ramdevji, Most Honest In India
By: Sudhir | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 1:03:02 AM
Baba Ramdevji is the Most Honest Person in India. His vision of India
& the World is very Practical. His ideas are very close to Real
Democracy where People are important, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists,
Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Adivasis etc The very rich & corrupt
politicians are not helping Poor & Middle Class people. Ramdevbaba's
Party will help Indian People to achieve Health, Happiness, Equality.
His Party will deal with the problem of Terrorism very effectively.
kalki has come
By: jai_hind | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 0:53:29 AM
oh the so called intelluctuals do not even know about the bharat
swabhiman andolan, to all the people i would like to inform that
shradey swami ramdev's strength is no match for these puny
politicians... shradey swami ramdev's power 1.by 2013 there would be
one yoga teacher in every village of india, almost 50% work has been
done in the present 2.many polticians such that madhya pradesh chief
minister shivraj singh chouhan have bowed down to the power of swami
ramdev and have introduced bhagvat gita in the school's on swami
ramdev's suggestion even nepal's President Ram Baran Yadav had come to
patanjali yogpeeth and also wanted baba ramdev to set a yog peeth in
nepal.. 3.there is going to be atleast 10 patanjali yogpeeths with an
area of thousand's of acres to be set up in india till 2014 4.the
bharat swabhiman andolan has 1 lakh members who have dedicated their
lives for the independence of common people from this dark politics.
jai hind
Come on!!!!!!!
By: Vivek | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 0:43:58 AM
Good to know his intentions, but I am sure COngress will ask Muslims
that he has saffron coloured dresses (what ever he wears) and others
like BJP/Shiv Sena/VHP etc ride onto his back about the very name of
Ramdev baba, and at the end he will be found that it was a mistake by
our beloved Swami Ramdev......people will do some yoga in his rally
but will not vote for him despite of him being honest and un
corrupted....reason: he is not going to distribute liqour and dresses
or money at the time of elections...
We are with you
By: N Gulati | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 0:43:03 AM
Baba Ramdev Ji, the path is full of thorns but you have the guts to
travel and take us along. You know the real India. You are our future.
There are millions who want India to be number 1. We have fortotten
our great past and lost confidence and our leaders are running scared
of small countries like Pakistan. Our soldiers are not afraid but
leaders are. You are the one who make a Rana Pratap out of an Indian.
May God be with you. Jai Hind
Yoga guru
By: Salim | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 22:29:00 PM
I like Baba Ramdev. If he can spread yoga and its truthfullness to
everyone in India and abroad world would automatically be clean of
corruption But if he joins politics it would make him dirty But i will
still work for him
correction
By: Girish | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 7:25:23 AM
He wont join politics he has only shown interest to help create a
political party with respectable agenda and practice, that it.
Ramdev baba only saviour
By: K Parameswaran | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 21:14:46 PM
it is a welcome decision from baba ramdev.Good people like babaji
should join politics so as to cleanse corrupt political system.It is
also necessary to change constitution because present one is lenient
to create corrupt people and criminals.
Welcome Ramdev ji
By: Ajoy | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:51:34 PM
I am surprised to see people advising Ramdev ji no to contest polls,
as if it is a birth right of fake Gandhis only. And someone also told
about progress. Well we can all see the progress under Abu Azmis of
SP,Mamtas and Pawars of UPA,Raj Thakreys of MNS,Yadav brothers,commies
and fake Gandhis. Great progress indeed. If Ramdevji's intentions are
clean, he is welcome.
Some hope at last?
By: Dr. Ranjana Bajpai | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:41:46 PM
Welcome to the murky Indian Politics, Ramdevji. Wish you add a dash of
honesty, nationalism, spiritualism and accountability replacing the
current blend of crime, lineage, money and muscle power. Whatever said
and done, Indian politics is going to witness some real interesting
drama in the lower and upper houses of the parliament.
Bye old politicians, and religion politics
By: Ash | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:39:40 PM
Indians in the past was conquered by Mughals, and then British because
they were not united. Congress has been using religion politics to
divide religions, and rule Indians. It is high time that an ethical
leader like Baba Ramdev emerges who unites Indians. A leader who does
not play religion, or regional politics. We hope that all the
religions rally behind him, and throw out unethical Congress, BSP etc.
and start enjoying clean politics. All religions will thrive, instead
of being made to fight each other. It is time for peace, and clean
politics!
Cleaning up Indian politics
By: Padam Singh | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:34:44 PM
How does Ramdev expect to clean politics - something God cannot do.
Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were personally honest people but
corruption flourished. Nehru was too weak, although people like Kairon
were children in the world of corruption compared to the present day
politicians. Indira encouraged it as did Rajiv. Today Manmohan Singh,
though personally incorrigble, has to allow corruption - the Shibu
Sorens, Mayawatis, the Yadavs, the Khodas, Gogois etc. We may, like
the people who write letters like mine condemning corruption, keep
commenting and suggest action, but then we are the ones that bring
these parasites to power. Let's face facts we Indians, if not corrupt
abet it otherwise what is there stopping the honest public coming out
on the streets and forcing a showdown with the powers that be. No. We
would rather come out in force for the Gymkhanna Club elections or a
Twenty 20 game of cricket. Asked to describe an Indian I said - lazy
and indifferent to others
Ask an average indian
By: Subrata Mahanty | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:34:02 PM
The views of Mr.Ramdev are very natural and are practicable in Indian
society, which will make us filth-proof. Be it the debate on currency,
gay-sex or any legitimate debate which comes in the day to day life of
an average Indian, Baba's stance remains above all. He should motivate
enthusiastic youth to join politics and make india corruption free. It
should not be the case to diplomatize the situation into a religious
matter, otherwise we are losing a very good leader. We have already
losed Mr.APJ Abdul Kalam, Mr.AB Bajpayee from the leadership list
because of some leg-pulling politics. Politics is not bad, It has
become bad...Let's make it clear; so that evry one in my country can
utter... SAARE JAHAAN SE ACCHHAA HINDUSTAAN HAMAARA JAI HIND
Babaramdevji on Maya
By: Reddy | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:12:04 PM
YES only BABARAMDEVJI can give great governence to our country(BHARAT)
we all r with u BABA just kick this bloody corrupt polictican from our
country (Maya,sonia,all other parties) must be kicked out our country.
THis country belongs to only Indians not for outsiders. BABA suggested
to take out Rs.1000 and 500n notes should be rollback so that we can
control the corruption. if this so called governemnt run by (Manmohan
singh(remote controlled by Sonia)) why dont u rollback. u dont have
guts to do reason u have u r share in that. go ahead BABA we r with u
we need very badly for this country. Jai Hind Vandaymataram
Bharatmataki ji. Reddy
Good news
By: naresh | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:06:24 PM
I think there is only one person who can do for our india which has
power of people. Most of people know him very well. I am ready to be a
member of his party.
Koshti
By: Anil Kumar Koshti | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 19:53:43 PM
Ram Dev ji is a grate man and he can do something to our country. His
thinking and way of life should be followed by everyone. we know every
politician is currupt in our country but some body is low or high. but
when everyone can't do as well as he say then we can beleave Baba Ram
Dev. everybody's have two face one is good (according to only me) or
Bad (according to only me)but I believe this man and support to
everyside for win to cleance politics.
Baba Ramdem to enter politics to cleanse
By: shanthanu | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 19:38:44 PM
My humble request to him is, whether you touch the filth or filth
falls on you it is you who is affected as filth remains as abhorring
as ever. Please keep a distance and involve yourself in the noble
cause you are busy with. You dealing with people like Mayawathi is
unthinkable.
RIGHT TO FORM PARTY IN DEMOCRACY BUT MUD-SLINGING SHOULD BE BANNED
By: RAJAT KUMAR MOHINDRU .JALANDHAR CITY .PUNJAB | Tuesday , 16 Mar
'10 19:37:32 PM
World's biggest democratic country India where every person has the
right of freedom and expression , there are different Political
Parties who's representatives contest Elections . As Baba Ram Dev
vision to go ahead with formation of Political Party , it is his
fundamental right whether he is interested in forming a party or to
give support to another Political Party . It depends upon his vision ,
his ideology . As the need of time is of Two Party system in the
country or the Election commission of India should provide Negative
voting if the number of Political Parties go on increasing ,to bring
down the number of Political Parties through Negative Voting by the
voters issue may kindly be considered. The Mud -slinging on each other
by Political Leaders should strictly refrain to make democratic
process more healthy.
We Dont Need Him.....
By: kirankulkarni | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 19:36:45 PM
No BABA can save India from getting screwed by the Islamic Extremists
and I dont think somebody can do the damage control act for all the
things that Indian National Congress has done over a period of six
decades. I suggest Swami Ramdev to stick to his "YOGA school" and help
some obess and diabetic guys rather than doing some endless-hopeless
marathon running with 550 mentally upset tranglodites in the
parliament.. I also suggest people not to back Babaji since the first
thing he would do in case he tastes power, is banning BRANDED food and
beverages, which will paralyse economy. I also believe that this
country needs more of a HARD Stern Faced Ruler,perhaps a dictator who
ll "flush the shit" from this Society. DEMOCRACY IS IN A STATE OF
COMA.
Ramdev may join politics
By: alka | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 19:15:29 PM
Baba Ramdev should get elected and make a rule for all politicians and
policemen in his state to lose weight and get medically fit within a
year. It is amazing how politicians become gain weight sitting on
peoples money.
Only India Baba with clean image
By: Mohanjit | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 18:38:01 PM
Baba Ramdev is required with his mass public support to root out evils
in the society as Raj / Bal Thackerey's. Baba is spreading message of
health, Indian culture, swadeshi things etc. thru his daily
discourses. VOTE HIM TO POWER.Ramdev never says he is GOD but beleives
in karma, he never uses teachers to teach yoga but sweats daily
himself so that his followers get rid of dangerous diseases. We like
him even if he resembles a caveman.
IT IS HIGH TIME ENGLISH MEDIA HIGH LIGHT THE AIMS OF BABA RAM DEVJI
MAHARAJI
By: n.r.i. | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 17:53:32 PM
IT IS HIGH TIME ENGLISH MEDIA LIKE I.E. GIVE COVERAGE TO BABA RAM
DEVJI MAHARAJ .MY COMMENTS ARE ALWAYS BLOCKED . LETS HOPE BABA RAM
DEVJI MAHARAJ WIN WITH TOTAL MAJORITY AND CLEAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH
MEDIA . JAI HIND
ram dev.
By: vijai lugani | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 17:44:17 PM
baba ram dev should not join politics. what he is doing namely
spreading yoga in nook and corner of world , treatment through aruveda
and teaching moral values to the people and more ever politics is
dirty game and he shoul not waste his energy in this. many swamis
tried in politics from the arya samaj which he is follower , namely
parkasveer, swamy agnivesh ect.uma bharti have been failed.swami must
know door ke dhol suhvane hote he
India needs cavemans like this
By: Raj Thackrey | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 17:26:25 PM
I am sure looking at the twenty first century and progress, india
deserves cavemans like this to take india forward i mean back to
middle ages lol. More than seventy percent of indians are brain washed
by this man so they deserve to be like him in future.
cavemen
By: bal | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 18:53:42 PM
you are insulting ayogi calling him cavemen cavemen must be your
ancestors whom you dont have any regards
Cavemen
By: Arvind Mathur | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 22:14:56 PM
If this person can brain wash 70% indians that is better than what the
current political parties do. He will unite 70% Indians to do what is
right for India. Besides why do you discriminate against the
traditional attire of Yogi Baba's - they are not going to wear Pants
and Coats - why should they ?
Inida needs more than just yoga
By: haris | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:35:15 PM
baba ram dev's might have a good intention ie to cleanse the system.
But this lacks the STUFF to lead this nations in this modern age.
Ruling a big nation is not like teaching Pranayamam, it is a bit more
complex
Baba Ramdev hints of Joining Politics
By: P L Bajaj | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 17:19:48 PM
Suggest the political party of Baba Ramdev to start contesting
election at lower level, so that the party will be experienced &
matured by the time of Lok Sabha elections. I would like to see a
corruption free India. Hope Baba Ramdev will achieve this target in
future.
Jai ho Neta ji
By: Dr. Ram Chander Sharma | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 17:08:10 PM
The gullible Indian voter will soon see the tricks of another Swami,
who is exlointing the religious sentiments of public. The Indian
political system is open to illiterates, musclement, hoarders,
religious leaders, tantricks, dacoits, filim wallahs and now another
money minter. There must be reservations for technocrates in the
parliament and the state lagislators to keep the political chors at
bay Siot Sunderbani Jammu.
Political Thieves
By: Arvind Mathur | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 22:19:45 PM
I wonder why you believe that technical people are not political
thieves ? We have lots of Engineers in the government who are total
Chors or even Maha Chors.
Educated illiterates
By: Ash | Tuesday , 16 Mar '10 20:46:14 PM
India has problems because some of it educated illiterates are not
able to understand clean politics from unethical politicians. It is
probably ignorant people like you in the past who invited British to
India, and they ruled us.
NEW MAXIM
By: NIRANJAN | Wednesday , 17 Mar '10 8:31:58 AM
I LIKE YOUR NEW MAXIM, OR WHATEVER IT CAN BE CALLED: 'THE EDUCATED
ILLITERATE'. IT IS UNFORTUNATE THAT INDIA IS FULL OF PEOPLE WHO ARE
ONLY EDUCATED IN A UNIVERSITY OR SCHOOL, BUT ARE TOTALLY IGNORANT OF
THE WORLD AS A WHOLE. MEMBERS OR BSP, SS, SP, MNS ARE ONLY A FEW
EXAMPLES OF SUCH GROUP OF PEOPLE.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/india-needs-cavemans-like-this/591533/#postComment
Row over Maya mala, I-T to probe money source
ENS Economic Bureau
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 16, 2010 at 2340 hrs
New Delhi:
Uttar Pradesh CM Mayawati being offered a garland made up of 1000
rupee notes during BSP's Maharally in Lucknow.
A day after the BSP’s maharally, the Income Tax (I-T) department said
on Tuesday that it would probe the “source of money” of the huge
currency-note garland presented to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister
Mayawati.
Sources said the I-T department would investigate the ownership of the
Rs 1,000 notes used in the garland, the bank from which the money was
sourced, whether the money used was from disclosed income sources.
After a preliminary investigation, the department would accordingly
make a case for tax evasion.
Under the Income Tax Act, 1967, the department has power to suo motu
initiate inquiries into suspicious transactions. It can issue summons
under Section 131 and impound and retain in its custody any books of
account or other documents for the purpose. It can also call for any
information required for the case under Section 133(6).
The sources said the intelligence department would also be asked to
look into the entire funding of the rally organised by Mayawati for
the silver jubilee function of the BSP.
The Congress, meanwhile, accused Mayawati of failing to control
communal riots in Bareilly and compared her with Roman emperor Nero.
“What kind of a government is this? Bareilly is burning and there is
celebration in Lucknow,” Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said,
demanding a judicial inquiry into the riots. “The Nero sitting in UP
has a big role. Without administrative support, no riot can continue
for two weeks,” he said.
Tewari said there was an attempt to “polarise” the people in UP and it
was the BJP that had taught the BSP the “politics of riots”.
Comments (4) |
Maya Ki Mala ki Maya
By: Ashok K Gupta | 17-Mar-2010
Mala makes Mayas and Mayas make malas.This is how our political wheel
is running.Mayas & malas are inseprable in our
legislation,executive,.........We have silent endorsement in our
mandate,so why hue & cry now.
It is biased news from Media
By: Chandra | 17-Mar-2010
Media never made news about when fraud is committed by Congress. INR
60000 crore scam by our telecommunication Minister. Who cares. Penny
wise and Pound Foolish.
All eyewash
By: anand | 17-Mar-2010
Nothing is going to happen.Any scam tainted politician or neta got
harsh punishment in this country.A big no. For 2-3 days this is
another scoop news for channels and media,that's all. The citizens of
this country is getting fooled again and again.
Maya mala versus italian bofors Q mals
By: ramdev | 17-Mar-2010
Atleast for bad or worse Maya appeared with the mala. How about the
Bofors mala wore by the Quttorachi? How was he allowed to go free with
thousand of crores mala? Indian media especially congress channels
like NDTV only make noise of the Maya mala and silent about the
Italian Q mala
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/row-over-maya-mala-it-to-probe-money-source/591635/
Pune blast a blot, advisories ignored: Chidambaram
Express news service
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 16, 2010 at 2336 hrs
New Delhi:
Describing the Pune blast as a “blot on our record”, Home Minister P
Chidambaram stated in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday that there was no
intelligence failure.
Chidambaram, who was replying to queries by Shiv Sena member Bhavana
Gawali Patil and Supriya Sule during question hour, said, “Despite the
intelligence shared, despite the advisories issued, the Pune blast
occurred... I regard that as a blot on our record.”
The Home Minister said enough information had been shared with the
Maharashtra Government about the terrorist threat.
He said consequently, the Pune Police had issued an advisory to all
establishments in the Koregaon Park area of Pune on October 9, 2009.
German Bakery manager Praveen Pant had acknowledged the receipt of the
advisory. The advisory was repeated in December. However,
establishments in the area did not pay any heed to the advisories.
These establishments, according to him, had to take their own minimal
security measures, which was not done.
Responding to queries of members, the minister said the Centre was
encouraging all states to set up anti-terrorist squads and NSG hubs,
modernise their police forces and procure advanced weapons.
Regarding the inadequacy of bullet-proof jackets in Maharashtra
Police, the Home Minister said the Centre planned placing an order for
their purchase for the central forces and the state could either
piggyback the Centre or make its own procurement.
Comments (1) |
Issue
By: ravi | 17-Mar-2010
Issue advisories every day like bhel puri, papri chhat & when the
blast occurs, say that advisory was issued. wow what gems we have as
Home Ministers!
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pune-blast-a-blot-advisories-ignored-chidambaram/591631/
DP cracks corrupted Godman's pan India network
Agencies
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 16, 2010 at 1625 hrs
New Delhi:
The Delhi Police submitted before a court that self-styled Godman Shiv
Murat Dwivedi was running a huge network of flesh trade involving more
than a hundred brokers and thousand prostitutes across the country.
Appearing before Special Judge S K Sarwaria, the investigating agency
pleaded for extension of his custodial interrogation to unearth the
vast network.
"We have to unearth the whole network in which more than hundred
brokers and thousand prostitutes are involved. He has also amassed
huge property in Mumbai, Noida, Kolkata, Varanasi and Gowardhan," the
police contended, also placing eight diaries and five CDs seized by it
before the court.
It further contended that the dairy contains information pertaining to
money transactions contact details of more than three thousand persons
which has been written in coded language.
The court after hearing the police's contention accepted its plea and
extended Dwivedi's custodial remand for four more days. Dwivedi, is
accused in four cases under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act and
one case of robbery. He was arrested on March nine under the
provisions of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).
Dwivedi is alleged to have earned crores of rupees through the sex
racket.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/dp-cracks-corrupted-godmans-pan-india-network/591536/
Godman, 7 held in sex racket
Express News Service
Posted: Saturday , Feb 27, 2010 at 0024 hrs
New Delhi:
Shiv Murat Dwivedi and seven others at the office of the DCP (South)
in Hauz Khas on Friday.
He organised satsangs, composed spiritual music, constructed a temple
and has now been arrested for running a prostitution racket.
Following the arrest of the self-styled spiritual guru, his accomplice
and six sex workers on Thursday, the South Delhi police claimed to
have unearthed a major prostitution racket.
The police said the accused — his real name is Shiv Murat Dwivedi, but
he was also known by many others, including Rajiv Dwiwedi, Shiv Murti
and Shiv Roop and Swami Ichadari Sant Swami Bhimanandji Maharaj
Chitrkootwale — arranged for sex workers in upscale areas of the
Capital as well as five-star hotels.
Of the six arrested, two are working with airlines and one is a
management student, the police said.
Yet another is a former student of a South Delhi school, the police
said. The arrested associate has been identified as Parveen Kumar
(28).
“On Thursday, Sub-Inspector Sanjay Sharma was sent to Dwivedi as a
decoy customer. After he struck a deal at Saket with him, we arrested
the group. The cars they were travelling in — a Honda Civic and a
Honda City — were also seized,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police
(South), H G S Dhaliwal.
Dwivedi came from Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, to Delhi in 1988 and
began working as a security guard at a hotel in Nehru Place. Later, he
worked at a massage parlour in Lajpat Nagar and began a prostitution
racket, for which he was arrested in 1997.
After being released on bail, he transformed himself into a spiritual
leader.
“He soon began a flesh trade racket. He also constructed a 200-bed
hospital in Chitrakoot, a temple in Khanpur and began holding
satsangs,” DCP Dhaliwal said. The hospital and the temple were meant
to further sex trade in the garb of charity, he added.
The police recovered Rs 1.55 lakh, besides copies of a magazine
containing Dwivedi’s articles on spirituality as well as video CDs of
his sermons in the impounded cars.
Comments (5) |
Take it easy guys
By: Nick | 28-Feb-2010
Hey guys relax, its not only in India it is all over the world. When
it happens in India involving some thing like a Guru its splashes
world over, when such things happen in Catholic and Evangelist
churches those just go under the carpet helped by the same media. He
just used that as front to run his business, that's all about it.
think
By: pravin tarhal | 28-Feb-2010
this is very common today. but most fustrating is that we the people &
media are supporting these kind of things to happen like all leading
newspapers in delhi or all over india are full with classifieds of
massage parlours, friendship networks, with phone numbers & openly
indicating what they are trading of using sentenses like"hot body to
body" pujabi,russian,collage girl,foreigners,"full
satisfaction,moksh,full enjoyment" You(IE)can Claim that i have wrote
offenssive words above.but the classifides & the peoples cant be
stopped. this is fustrating. If somebody call on those numbers got
directly got asked about the requirement of the type of girl , period
& place of delivery. that means the police is slipping or acting like
they are in slip.ALL THESE THINGS ARE SUPPORTED BY US PEOPLE & THE
MEDIA. CAN WE STOPP THIS ? I DONT THINK SO BECAUSE THERE IS LOSS OF
EASY MONY......... THE TIME HAS COME TO THINK ABOUT THE SOCIETY
GODMEN AND RELIGION
By: NIRANJAN | 27-Feb-2010
OVERALL WE INDIANS ARE CONSIDERED VERY SMART PEOPLE. WE ALWAYS LOOK
BEFORE WE LEAP AND DON'T TRUST ANYONE EASILY. HOWEVER, WHEN IT COMES
TO RELIGION AND GODMEN TALKING ABOUT RELIGION, WE BECOME SO NAIVE THAT
WE ARE READY TO DO ANYTHING THAT THESE GODMEN ASK US TO DO. THIS IS
THE RESULT OF THE SUPERSTITIOUS NATURE OF OURS WHICH MAKES US TOO
STUPID WHEN WE SEE A PERSON IN SAFRON OR WHITE CLOTHES PREACHING LIKE
HE KNOWS IT ALL. I WISH AND HOPE THAT ALL THESE GODMEN BE SCRUTINIZED
BY SOME AUTHORITY OR EVEN NGOs AND EXPOSE THEIR SCAMS.!
The Scam artists
By: deepak | 27-Feb-2010
In order to expose these rascals you need an expert who is an
authority on the subject matter of religion.In my experience vast
majority of the general public and the so called 'spiritual gurus' do
not even know the meaning of the word 'religion',or who is God? or
what is the relationship between us and God? or what is the activity
that we should perform and the goal of that realtionship? In my
opinion only a Vaishnava can be deemed as an authority in spiritual
matters. Rest all must be rejected. deepak
Godmen
By: nihichsu | 27-Feb-2010
This is to respond to Mr. Niranjan's comments. It is not only that we
Indians trust fully these Godmen and get fooled. This is happening
everywhere in the world including USA, Europe, China etc. Religion and
its Godmen have indulged into nefarious activities all over the world.
Hindus are not the only scapegoats. This is happening amongst Roman
Catholics, Protestants, other Christian sects, Islam and its various
sects, Buddism etc. True that Karl Marx said "Relgion is the opium of
the masses".
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/godman-7-held-in-sex-racket/584978/0
Godman’s ashrams face public fury after footage with starlet
Express news service
Posted: Thursday , Mar 04, 2010 at 2350 hrs
Chennai:
A day after a private TV channel and a vernacular weekly showed
visuals claiming them to be of popular spiritual leader Paramahamsa
Nithyananda with a film actress of yesteryears, his ashrams, statues
and even posters were targeted by angry protesters.
A group of advocates in Chennai and Coimbatore approached the police
commissioners in the cities with the demand that the police book the
godman under criminal charges even as his organisation blamed
“conspiracy, graphics and rumour” for the controversy.
The controversy began on Tuesday when Sun News aired video clippings
that showed the godman allegedly in a compromising position with the
actress. The Nakkeeran weekly followed up with screenshots and news in
its latest issue that hit stands on Wednesday.
The video enraged fringe Hindu outfits like Hindu Makkal Katchi and
atheistic Dravidar Kazhagam alike, both attacking the properties
managed by Nithyananda Dhyanapeetam in their boroughs of strength.
While the former demanded action against Nithyananda for bringing
disrepute to religion, the latter raised similar demands for duping
people. Protests were staged across the state, including in
Tiruvannamalai, Namakkal, Coimbatore and Salem.
Meanwhile, the Dhyanapeetam issued a statement stating that the
'defamatory' video was a mix of conspiracy, graphics and rumour. "We
are working on a legal course of action and will come up with updates
in due course," said the statement.
Comments (6) |
What conspiracy ?
By: syArjun | 04-Mar-2010
People who are commenting here are fools or his die hard supporters.
It is Nithyanada in the video -if you cant see then ur blind. Second -
No one is trying to defame the Hindus , it is the 'Love Gurus' who are
destroying hinduism. True some elements may be acting to bring
disrepute to hinduism but here we have the Proof of swamigal(Swami
Gal). Anyways , it is the fools money that nithyananda is getting so
who cares. Hindus will learn by example who is true and who is fraud.
Nithyanada should have married and indulged in these pleasures, he has
brought disrepute to the Ochre robe and should be punished for it.
People see the robe and fall at the feet of the wearer ..we have so
much respect for that robe! I have seen his videos .. his lectures are
prepared by a team of writers and his organisation is run by an expert
management team. They charge huge amount and guarantee you realisation
after a 21 days program. Bah ! wake up all of you.
No confirmation yet.
By: Ayarn | 04-Mar-2010
The fellow in the video could be a good actor paid by some opposition
to defame the swami. Who knows? Who can confirm or not whether it is
really nithyananda? You can't jump to conclusion based on low
resolution video clip, it can very well be a setup to discredit the
organisation because they have too much power and support in south
india.
be selfish
By: shanthakumar | 04-Mar-2010
whatever it may be ,we should not look on the world, we should be very
clever in this cheating world work for our family, thats
enough,angrily if we do something it will not affect us ,surely it
affects our family ,in the most populated country such as india these
godman will not stop cheating people, our life is in our hand, be
clever have a happy life to all my indians
are you people blind?
By: raj | 04-Mar-2010
why is it so hard to beleive that the guy in the video is who he
is?..Nithyanandam is just another common man, a very intelligent
fraudster who has basic needs like every human being. It is so clear
from the video that he has some physical relationship that woman,
which is not an issue. The real issue is that - he is leading a double
life and fooling his followers..he is just a egomaniac and a cheat.
Blasphemy
By: vyasa | 04-Mar-2010
Misbehavior of the actual culprits in certain religions doesn't get
publicized whereas as history has proved Hindu Saints,Gods are always
target of the certain elements that belong to certain religions whose
main ambition is increasing headcount by indulging in
blasphemy,conversions through abuse and deceit( they take advatage of
peoples poverty,(give people some amount of money if they give up
Hinduism and take up their religion),illiteracy,ignorance).
Conspiracy
By: Brhamanda | Thursday , 4 Mar '10 1:19:37 AM
Just 2 days back there was a so called scandal about another spiritual
guru.Looks like whoever is behind all these TV shows is pretty
desperate to curb the popularity of Hinduism and Hindu spiritual
masters. We all know how alike the characters look even in all those
60's movies where hero does double action right? We are talking about
today where the technology has advanced rapidly than even in 60's. It
is not even confirmed if the person in the video is Swamiji so people
need not jump to conclusions by watching the video.We are talking
about Nithyanada who doesn't even eat onions,garlic,green chillies and
the vidoe says he's drinking liquor.That shows what a joke that video
is. Abusing an enlightened master is the worst sin which stays with
the soul making it suffer for life(s) together.Those who have
attempted to malign Swamiji and did the video have made their
choice.You don't make your choice by just watching or even reading
about a stupid video.
From MP to DM, ‘godman’ played host to all at his Chitrakoot ashram
Vijay Pratap Singh
Posted: Monday , Mar 01, 2010 at 0251 hrs
Allahabad:
Former DM of Chitrakoot, Hridesh Kumar, inaugurates a function at
Dwivedi’s ashramFlower & Cake DeliveryValentine
Gift'sDiscussionBlogsHeadley is smart - By Arun
Self-styled godman Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi alias Swami Bhimanandji
Maharaj alias Swami Ichchadhari Sant — arrested on Friday for
allegedly running a sex racket — has links with several influential
people back home in Chitrakoot district, Uttar Pradesh.
A four-day programme he organised at his ashram at Chamrauha village
in October 18, 2009, was inaugurated by Hridesh Kumar, then district
magistrate of Chitrakoot. The Samjawadi Party (SP) MP from Banda, RK
Singh Patel, SP Member of Legislative Council Yuvraj Singh, and slain
dacoit Dadua’s son and zila panchayat chairman Veer Singh were special
invitees on the occasion. In hoardings, Rural Development minister
Daddu Prasad was named as the chief guest for the programme. He did
not attend. But local BSP leaders like Vinod Kumar Dwivedi, the block
pramukh of Manikpur, did attend and stayed for the cultural programme
by girls from Delhi.
A month after the programme, Manikpur police lodged an FIR against the
godman and three others for a clash during the dance programme, said K
K Mishra, Station House Officer of Manikpur.
Officials said Hridesh Kumar, who inaugurated the programme, also
issued a rifle licence to the godman. Kumar, who is currently the
District Magistrate of Ghazipur, refused to comment.
Lok Sabha member R K Singh Patel said he did not know the godman
personally. “But I know his father Bachcha Lal,” he said. “Being the
MP from the area, I accepted the invitation. If he is running a sex
racket, he must be punished. I don’t have any connection with him.”
MLC Yuvraj Singh said: “Our society respects godmen. I was invited by
Dwivedi, so I went. It was the first and the last time I saw
him.”
BSP block pramukh Vinod Kumar Dwivedi said he went to the ashram
because, “like others, I was also invited. I did not know that he was
involved in such activities.”
The godman often visited Chamrauha which he has renamed “Sai Nagar”.
He is building a large temple in his ashram — the work has been on for
two years.
On Sunday, the Delhi Police sent a team to Chitrakoot to collect
evidence against him and information about his past. “Shiv Murat
Dwivedi was first arrested in Lajpat Nagar in 1997 for running a
prostitution racket in a massage parlour,” said DCP (South) HGS
Dhaliwal. “He had worked at a massage parlour in the area in 1990.
During the job, he came in contact with pimps and started the sex
racket. He has links with several influential persons and leaders in
Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.”
The Chitrakoot police, too, have started collecting details of the
criminal activities of his family. His father Bachcha Lal Dwivedi is
named in five criminal cases— these include murder, dowry death, theft
and patronising dacoits. His elder brother Ram Murat Dwivedi was
booked for the murder of his wife; younger brothers Sanjay and Krishna
Dwivedi were booked in theft cases in 2001. In spite of their criminal
past, several members of the family had managed to get arms licences.
Bachcha Lal has a licence for a double-barreled gun. Shiv Murat
Dwivedi and Sanjay Dwivedi got licences for rifles in 2009. Chitrakoot
SP Veer Bahadur Singh said he had asked the Manikpur police to probe
how these were issued.
Comments (1) |
Swami Chakar Dhar
By: Harbans Lal | 01-Mar-2010
He should be nominated as a member Rajya Sabha.
In UP hometown, ‘godman’ Dwivedi sports political ties
Vijay Pratap Singh
Posted: Monday , Mar 01, 2010 at 0041 hrs
Allahabad:
Months before his arrest in sex racket, a programme at the Chitrakoot
ashram of Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi attended by SP parliamentarian, BSP
leader and the then District Magistrate
Self-styled godman Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi alias Swami Bhimanandji
Maharaj alias Swami Ichchadhari Sant — arrested on Friday for
allegedly running a sex racket — has links with several influential
people back home in Chitrakoot, UP.
A four-day programme he organised at his ashram at Chamrauha village
in October 18, 2009, was inaugurated by Hridesh Kumar, then district
magistrate of Chitrakoot. The Samjawadi Party (SP) parliamentarian
Banda, RK Singh Patel, SP Member of Legislative Council Yuvraj Singh,
and slain dacoit Dadua’s son and zila panchayat chairman Veer Singh
were special invitees on the occasion. In hoardings, Rural Development
minister Daddu Prasad was named as the chief guest for the programme.
He did not attend. But local BSP leaders like Vinod Kumar Dwivedi, the
block pramukh of Manikpur, did attend and stayed for the cultural
programme by girls from Delhi.
A month after the programme, Manikpur police lodged an FIR against the
godman and three others for a clash during the dance programme, said K
K Mishra, Station House Officer of Manikpur.
Officials said Hridesh Kumar, who inaugurated the programme, also
issued a rifle licence to the godman. Kumar, who is currently the
District Magistrate of Ghazipur, refused to comment.
Lok Sabha member R K Singh Patel said he did not know the godman
personally. “But I know his father Bachcha Lal,” he said. “Being the
MP from the area, I accepted the invitation. If he is running a sex
racket, he must be punished. I don’t have any connection with him.”
MLC Yuvraj Singh said: “Our society respects godmen. I was invited by
Dwivedi, so I went. It was the first and the last time I saw
him.”
BSP block pramukh Vinod Kumar Dwivedi said he went to the ashram
because, “like others, I was also invited. I did not know that he was
involved in such activities.”
The godman often visited Chamrauha which he has renamed “Sai Nagar”.
He is building a large temple in his ashram — the work has been on for
two years.
On Sunday, the Delhi Police sent a team to Chitrakoot to collect
evidence against him and information about his past.
“Shiv Murat Dwivedi was first arrested in Lajpat Nagar in 1997 for
running a prostitution racket in a massage parlour,” said DCP (South)
HGS Dhaliwal. “He had worked at a massage parlour in the area in 1990.
During the job, he came in contact with pimps and started the sex
racket. He has links with several influential persons and leaders in
Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.”
The Chitrakoot police, too, have started collecting details of the
criminal activities of his family. His father Bachcha Lal Dwivedi is
named in five criminal cases — these include murder, dowry death,
theft and patronising dacoits. His elder brother Ram Murat Dwivedi was
booked for the murder of his wife; younger brothers Sanjay and Krishna
Dwivedi were booked in theft cases in 2001.
In spite of their criminal past, several members of the family had
managed to get arms licences. Bachcha Lal has a licence for a double-
barreled gun. Shiv Murat Dwivedi and Sanjay Dwivedi got licences for
rifles in 2009. Chitrakoot SP Veer Bahadur Singh said he had asked the
Manikpur police to probe how these were issued.
Comments (3) |
what a shame!
By: Shraddha | 04-Mar-2010
After having all these facts published, still there is no action.
People should stand up against such phony men of god and treat them
humanly. With justice! Jail these sick men, not godmen!
GODMAN
By: Tota Ram | 02-Mar-2010
India has a great civilization and has had great religious teachers
like Swami Ramkrishna, Swami Dayanand etc. Like any other country we
do also have scoundrels in our country posing as Saints. I suggest
public cateration of these people.
GODMEN AND POLITICIANS
By: NIRANJAN | 01-Mar-2010
ON ONE HAND POLITICIANS ARE SMART ENOUGH TO FOOL THE AAM AADMI FOR AT
LEAST FIVE YEARS. ON THE THE OTHER HAND THEY ARE GULLIBLE ENOUGH TO
BELIEVE IN SUCH GODMEN WHO, I AM SURE, PROMISE THEM THE 'GADDI' IN
DELHI OR SUCH THINGS BY THEIR 'TANTRIK' POWERS. SUPERTITIONS IS THE
ROOT CAUSE OF THE EVIL IN INDIA. UNFORTUNATELY THE NETAs FOSTER THESE
KINDS OF PEOPLE AND THE THE REAL SUFFERES IS THE AAM AADMI!
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-up-hometown-godman-dwivedi-sports-political-ties/585556/0
In UP village, devotees stop cops from probing ‘godman’ property
Express News Service
Posted: Sunday , Mar 07, 2010 at 0109 hrs
New Delhi:
Followers of self-styled godman Shiv Murat Dwivedi formed a human
chain around his property in his village in Uttar Pradesh on Friday
and thwarted attempts by a Delhi Police team from entering the
premises for probe into the alleged multi-crore sex racket he ran.
“We believe Dwivedi’s henchmen learnt about our arrival and got locals
to form the human chain,” DCP (South) H G S Dhaliwal said.
The team was supposed to take Dwivedi to the ashram and an upscale
house he built for his parents in Manekpur area of Chitrakoot in Uttar
Pradesh, but a crowd of around 2,000 did not let them enter, the
police said.
The police need to establish in court that Dwivedi accumulated
property and wealth from his crime syndicate to initiate the stringent
Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against Dwivedi.
MCOCA also gives police the right to seize property built with money
from such a syndicate.
Dhaliwal said the police are in the final stages of filing an
application to invoke provisions of MCOCA in court.
In Chitrakoot, Dwivedi reportedly claimed innocence and alleged that
some politicians had framed him in the sex racket case. Asked by the
media about his alleged links with slain dacoit Dadua, Dwivedi
accepted that he knew Danua but denied involvement in any crime.
In another development, police said they have found Dwivedi had at
least four bank accounts under his ‘real’ name: Rajiv Ranjan Dwivedi.
The daily or monthly transactions ranged between Rs 50,000 and Rs 1
lakh in each account, officers said.
“He ran his empire very professionally,” DCP Dhaliwal said. He
purportedly gave his staff and call girls allegedly working under him
“proper holidays” and weekly breaks.
Chitrakoot police begin process to strip ‘godman’ of his arms licence
Vijay Pratap Singh
Posted: Thursday , Mar 04, 2010 at 0306 hrs
Lucknow:
The temple which is under construction at Chitrakoot’s Chamrauha area.
express photo
Self-styled ‘godman’ Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi alias Swami Bhimanandji
Maharaj alias Swami Ichchadhari Sant, who was arrested in Delhi on
February 26 for allegedly running a sex racket, is all set to be
stripped of his arms licence.
The Chitrakoot police today began proceedings to cancel his licence
that was issued by former district magistrate Hridesh Kumar.
“Taking cognizance of media reports and his arrest by the Delhi
Police, I have initiated the cancellation proceedings. Following an
inquiry, it came to light that the Manikpur police had ignored two
cases against him and made recommendations for the licence. I have
sent a report to the district magistrate to cancel his licence,” said
SP Veer Bahadur Singh.
Singh added that three licences had been issued to Swami and his
family members, including his father, Bachcha Lal, and brother Sanjay
Murat Dwivedi.
“The inquiry is on against his father and brother who possess licences
for a double barrel gun and rifle, respectively. If the police find
their involvement in criminal cases, their licences too will be
cancelled,” he added.
A team of five policemen from Delhi, led by Station House Officer of
Saket, Bhrama Deo, has arrived in Chitrakoot to collect information
about the ‘godman’.
“We have started verifying the statements of the ‘godman’ and are
inspecting his properties. We have also learnt that he was
constructing a multi-crore temple at Chamrauha under Manikpur police
station in Chitrakoot,” said Deo. The police team has inspected the
temple, the godman’s ashram and the residence of his father. “After
physical inspection, we will obtain the papers of his properties and
assets from the district magistrate,” said Deo.
The Delhi Police have intitiated proceedings to invoke Maharashtra
Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against the ‘godman’.
Under MCOCA, stringent punishment is awarded to a person or gang
operating as part of a crime syndicate, said Deputy Commissioner of
Police (South) H G S Dhaliwal.
Give copy of custodial interrogation plea to Dwivedi: Court to cops
NEW DELHI: A city court on Wednesday asked the Delhi Police to provide
a copy of their application, seeking to interrogate ‘godman’ Shiv
Murat Dwivedi in custody, to the accused.
Metropolitan Magistrate Ravinder Singh, who was approached by the
police for permission to question Dwivedi (39), said: “the accused
(should) be provided a copy of the remand application”. “Once an
accused is remanded in judicial custody, the police cannot seek his
custody unless there are special reasons,” the counsel appearing for
Dwivedi said. The accused has a right to know the grounds for his
detention and custodial interrogation, he added.
The police said custodial interrogation of Dwivedi was required to
unravel the case. “Fix the application for arguments tomorrow,” the
court said after hearing the arguments. pti
From driver to godman’s deputy, Praveen was on a roll for two years
Sahim Salim
Posted: Saturday , Mar 06, 2010 at 0030 hrs
New Delhi:
The self-styled godman Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi, arrested from South
Delhi for allegedly running a multi-crore sex racket, took good care
of the people loyal to him.
The police said Dwivedi elevated the financial standing of his second-
in-command, Parveen Kumar, also arrested along with him on February
25.
Sources said Kumar, a native of Jhajjar in Haryana, would drive an
auto-rickshaw till 2008. Two years after he started working with
Dwivedi, Kumar drove a Honda City — it was seized by the police during
his arrest.
“He was Dwivedi’s face in the racket. He was in charge of the
logistics; he also made and finalised the deals. Whenever Dwivedi was
busy giving sermons, Kumar took charge of the racket,” a senior police
officer said.
A police team, meanwhile, recovered a rifle and other weapons
purportedly belonging to Dwivedi from his residence in Chitrakoot,
Uttar Pradesh, after a raid on Friday. Sources said it also came to
light during the raid that Dwivedi's personal bodyguards carried
firearms.
“We first need to assess and seize his property. He has many areas
within the Capital where he functioned. We need to investigate whether
the house owners knew about his operations,” a senior police officer
said.
The police are, meanwhile, also probing the allegations made by the
father of a Jaipur-based girl who said Dwivedi was behind the
abduction of his daughter. The 22-year-old woman is missing since
December 23 last year.
MCOCA likely to be invoked against ‘godman’
Express News Service
Posted: Wednesday, Mar 03, 2010 at 0105 hrs
New Delhi:
The South Delhi police are likely to invoke provisions of the
Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against the 39-year-
old ‘godman’ Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi, arrested on Friday for
allegedly running a high-profile sex racket.
Under MCOCA, stringent punishment is awarded to a person or gangs
operating as a syndicate.
Dwivedi was arrested along with an accomplice and six women, including
two air-hostesses, for allegedly running a multi-crore sex racket.
“We are looking at the possibility of whether Dwivedi can be slapped
with charges under the provisions of MCOCA,” Deputy Commissioner of
Police (South), H G S Dhaliwal said. MCOCA allows the police to adduce
as evidence the confession of the accused made before a senior police
officer not below the rank of a DCP.
Police officials said that in all, Dwivedi has four cases registered
against him. In 1997, Dwivedi was arrested on charges of running a
prostitution racket in Lajpat Nagar. The next year, he was arrested
for dacoity in Badarpur. In 2003, he was arrested from Noida Sector 24
— charges under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act and the
Gangster Act were slapped.
The police said Dwivedi undertook charity activities as a guise to
explain the flow of money — he earned close to Rs 2 lakh every month
through his criminal activities. DCP Dhaliwal said they will seek
police custody to take Dwivedi to Chitrakoot for verifying the
ownership of his properties and investigate if his activities extended
to UP.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mcoca-likely-to-be-invoked-against-godman/585961/
‘Godman’ booked for abduction
Express News Service
Posted: Monday , Mar 08, 2010 at 0104 hrs
Ghaziabad:
A self-styled godman in Ghaziabad has been booked for abducting his
cousin.
The police said the accused, Anup Kumar Sahay, is a resident of Vijay
Nagar. According to a complaint filed by the victim’s mother Subha
Srivastava, the accused, along with his brother Ashok Kumar Sahay, had
abducted her daughter, Priyanka. “Priyanka has been missing since
February 15, when she went to purchase milk,” Subha Srivastava has
stated in the complaint. The police said the two accused are
Priyanka’s cousins and often visited her house in Raj Nagar.
Superintendent of Police (City) Ghaziabad Avdhesh Kumar Vijeta said
the police received the complaint on Saturday. “Sahay has been booked
under Sections 363, 313 and 366 of the IPC which pertain to kidnapping
and forcing a woman to undergo abortion without her will.”
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/godman-booked-for-abduction/588008/
Caught on camera, godman held for extortion
Express News Service
Posted: Friday , Mar 13, 2009 at 2249 hrs
Mumbai:
Them & US From ABCD to almightyHealth dangers of GM FoodsStand on Bt
Brinjal
The Pydhonie police arrested a godman on Holi on charges of extortion
after the victim recorded the threat in a camera embedded in a pen.
One Mohammad Ashfaq Qureshi, a gold-dust contractor, had lodged a
complaint that godman Mohammad Gulzar had threatened to kill him
either by cursing or stabbing if he did not leave his job. Sheikh then
told Qureshi that he must pay him Rs 2 lakh if he wanted to keep his
business.
Acting on Qureshi’s complaint, the police set a trap and sent Qureshi
with Rs 25,000 in marked notes, to pay Sheikh. However, the clinching
evidence in the case was the video clip Qureshi had recorded with a
video recording pen. Sheikh was arrested on Wednesday. The police
believe that a business rival must have approached Sheikh to threaten
the complainant and are investigating into his identity.
“Sheikh is the typical godman. He began threatening Qureshi on
February 28, saying that if he didn’t leave his business, he would use
black magic to kill him. He said that if he wanted to continue with
his business, he should pay him Rs 2 lakh,” said a police officer from
Pydhonie police station. “Qureshi agreed to meet Sheikh and recorded
his threats on a video recording pen. We asked him to contact Sheikh
and pay him so that we could to trap him,” said the officer.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/caught-on-camera-godman-held-for-extortion/433787/
Godman stages suicide drama at police station
Rajeev P I
Posted: Sunday , May 18, 2008 at 2341 hrs
Kochi, May 17:
Kerala's latest screwball comedy starring yet another godman was
played out right inside a police station at Aluva here on Saturday
morning. This was staged by Swami Himaval Bhadranandaji, an
engineering course dropout-turned-political prophet, godman and maker
of fine holy ashes from thin air.
The Swami had the whole state watching him live on TV as he pranced
about in the police station with a fully loaded .32 revolver pressed
to his own head, vowing to pull the trigger to teach the local media a
deadly lesson for daring to give him a bad press.
All through the two-hour drama hogging all TV channels in the state,
the cops made no attempt at all to disarm the godman lording over
their police station — he even had the cops help recharge his mobile
so that he could keep calling up people with his free hand and held
the gun with the other. Senior police officers kept pleading with him
to go easy on the trigger.
The drama ended with the Swami pulling the trigger, finally. But
instead of shooting the reporters or himself, he shot through the
police station roof. A bullet grazed his own left hand and the godman
collapsed in a howling heap, leaving startled cops in the room to run
for their lives. The police, however, picked up a media reporter who
screamed and went down as soon as the swami fired. The police rushed
him to hospital while TV channels began saying he had been shot. But
the man soon came to, only to say he had fainted in fright.
Swami Bhadranandaji, who runs an outfit called “Karma” in Kochi, began
falling out with the media after some local newspapers began poking
into his activities after the fall of another high-profile local
godman, Swami Amritachaitanya last week. The latter was exposed to
have been a fraudster wanted by Interpol — besides a porn video star
and producer, mostly using under-age girls from poor families, many
lured in with educational sponsorships.
Bhadranandaji, who loved dropping names and claiming high political
connections, even fixed an official red beacon of the kind ministers,
high court judges and senior officials use, on the dome of his
personal car. He had a sizeable following in Kochi and Kozhikode, and
had often been hogging attention with his predictions and claims,
including his political prophesies, until reports hinted at a darker
side too.
The swami had barged into a local newspaper office on Friday and
threatened the staff there for printing some unedifying reports, and
the police had promptly filed a case against him. On Saturday morning,
he called the media to his home to announce his protest suicide, and
the police had got him to shift the drama to the police station
instead.
Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan said the swami appeared to have
got a gun license from the local administration without police
verification. Though the swami had claimed the minister was his close
pal, Balakrishnan denied it.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/godman-stages-suicide-drama-at-police-station/311137/0
Fifth case against ‘godman’
Express News Service
Posted: Friday , Mar 05, 2010 at 0128 hrs
New Delhi:
The police have unearthed yet another case of immoral trafficking
against self-styled godman Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi — arrested last
Friday for allegedly running a sex racket in the Capital — taking the
total number of cases against him to five.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (South), H G S Dhaliwal said Dwivedi was
arrested under the ITP Act in Srinivaspuri in 1998. “He was convicted
and a monetary fine was slapped against him. This is the fifth case
against him. In 1997, Dwivedi was arrested on charges of running a
prostitution racket in Lajpat Nagar. The next year, he was arrested
for dacoity in Badarpur. In 2003, he was arrested from Noida Sector-24
under the Immoral Trafficking (Prevention) Act and was also charged
under the Gangster Act.”
Police said they have two convictions and five cases against Dwivedi
and enough evidence to invoke the stringent Maharashtra Control of
Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) against him. A court, meanwhile, sent
Dwivedi to police custody till March 9.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Fifth-case-against--godman-/587114/
Namesake on terror list, Kerala godman on the run
Rajeev PI
Posted: Saturday , May 10, 2008 at 2305 hrs
KOCHI, MAY 10 :
The next time you ask what’s in a name, consider this: A one-time
temple priest-turned astrologer-turned alleged NRI fraudster-turned
Godman-cum-benami real estate operator (and much more), is the latest
news sensation in Kerala, his face and profile hogging front pages and
almost all local TV channel now panting to come up every hour with
more dark tidbits and legends about him. All this because the media
here took to believing, and still insists, that he is really his far
more notorious namesake accused of a lot more potent stuff, including
smuggling sophisticated weapons for extremist outfits linked to the
1993 Mumbai blasts.
The man in the headlines, Santosh Madhavan, used to be a school
dropout turned priest for many years in local temples in Kochi, before
he took on an astrologer’s image and flew off to Dubai, only to end up
in a financial fraud. Before Interpol Dubai put out a red corner alert
for him, Madhavan made his way back to India, grew a beard, put on
white robes, courted the local glitterati including top film stars and
promptly turned himself into
Swami Amritachaitanya. The 2004 Interpol alert for him and his
sidekick Saifuddeen Ali Kannu who fled with him, says both are wanted
in Dubai for fraud and mentions his date of birth as 18 March, 1973.
The other Santosh Madhavan, who too had a red corner Interpol notice
for him pending since 1993, was declared wanted by the Mumbai Police
after his brother Trikesh Madhavan was arrested following the seizure
of some imported weapons soon after the Mumbai blasts. The brother
named him as the kingpin and he was charged, in police language, of a
“criminal conspiracy to commit terrorist acts with the use of
sophisticated fire arms, with the intention to adversely affect
communal harmony”. This Santosh Madhavan was born on 7 June, 1960, and
UAE cops had finally caught him in Abu Dhabi by end-2003, at the
instance of the Interpol in India.
Things began getting tough for Santosh Madhavan alias Swami
Amritachaitanya after a Malayalam magazine put out a cover story
saying the Swami running his celebrity-studded posh ashram in Kochi
was his gunrunner namesake, and mistakenly superimposed the latter’s
profile on him. With almost the entire local media taking it up
together, the man vanished, only to go to both the cops and the CBI in
Kochi a couple of days ago offering to surrender, while maintaining he
was not the other Madhavan. Neither the cops nor the CBI took him in
and he went away.
A day later, the cops had some afterthought and began raiding the
ashram and looking up his suspected benami real estate deals, claiming
they were following up media reports. They claimed they had nothing
yet to arrest him for. Remarkably, the local cops say they are
ascertaining only if he was actually the wanted gunrunner, as was
being reported.
The investigating officer, Shaneel Babu, claimed to have no clue if
there really were two different Interpol red corner alerts for both
the Madhavans still available on the Internet, that both were
distanced by some 13 years in age—or even that that the gunrunner
Madhavan had a brother that this one did not. He also did not want to
comment on why the police began raiding Madhavan’s premises after
letting him off when he voluntarily offered to surrender a day
earlier.
Senior cops did not wish to comment on the possibility of arresting
this Madhavan since there is a Dubai Interpol alert out for him, and
India has an extradition agreement in force with the UAE.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/namesake-on-terror-list-kerala-godman-on-the-run/307537/0
Move to strip Godman of arms licence
Vijay Pratap Singh
Posted: Thursday , Mar 04, 2010 at 0136 hrs
Allahabad:
Self-styled ‘godman’ Swami Shiv Murat Dwivedi alias Swami Bhimanandji
Maharaj alias Swami Ichchadhari Sant, who was arrested on February 26
for allegedly running a sex racket in the Capital, is set to be
stripped of his arms licence.
The Chitrakoot police on Wednesday began proceedings to cancel
Dwivedi’s licence, issued by former district magistrate Hridesh
Kumar.
“I have initiated the cancellation proceedings and have sent a report
to the district magistrate for the same. Following an inquiry, it came
to light that the Manikpur police had ignored two cases registered
against him and put in recommendations for the licence,”
Superintendent of Police Veer Bahadur Singh said.
Singh added that three licences had been issued to Dwivedi, his father
Bachcha Lal and brother Sanjay Murat Dwivedi. “An inquiry is on
against his father and brother. If the police find their involvement
in criminal cases, their licences will also be cancelled,” he added.
A team of five policemen, led by Station House Officer of Saket Bhrama
Deo, went to Chitrakoot to collect information on Dwivedi.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Move-to-strip-Godman-of-arms-licence/586562/
chhotemianinshallah
I fully understand – and love Hussain’s paintings and art work --
knowing where he comes from (Bollywood poster art). I’ve called the
immensely popular Baba Ramdev “an idiot” on TV and got enough hate
mail. In Bombay, despite the Shiv Sena’s threats, I continue to edit
and publish a gay and lesbian magazine called ‘”Bombay Dost” and have
even sent copies to Bal Thackeray for reviewing in his stupid
newspaper ‘Saamna”. I even wrote a letter to his nephew to get out of
Bombay as it belonged to my Mother’s family (her family temple still
stands safe from Muslim marauders at Banganga at South Bombay’s tip at
Walkeshwar (Walu means sand and Keshwar is another name for Shiva with
his matted hair).
India is a huge jigsaw puzzle and you must love the whole picture to
understand how to navigate it. For example, I would support Taslima
Nasreen because she is a Muslim who challenges Islam from “within
Islamic tradition”. I will NOT support Hussain because he is a Muslim
suddenly seeing “purity”: in depicting Hindu goddesses in the nude. He
happens to be Muslim and let him interpret Islam from within Muslim
tradition and not give me lectures how much of Tulsidas’ Ramayana he
knows. When asked why he did not paint Mohamed’s wife Ayesha in the
nude, his answer was:” But Muslims won’t tolerate that” says it all.
You must know Hinduism takes to “shashtrarth” (shredding the
scriptures and analyzing them ruthlessly) seriously and I have stood
within orthodox gatherings of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad known as the
most intolerant of the right wing Hindus and talked about “Our
Homosexual Heritage” without a single person throwing stones at me. I
dare Hussain or any Muslim gay man to do that at a gathering of devout
Muslims. Or Christians for all I care. One of my Christian kids did
that at a Christian-Muslim gathering and they threw shoes at him. He’s
converted to Kali worshup in retaliation...
If you don’t know your India then don’t interpret it for these damn
Feringis and their followers. I don’t care to say more than that.
Hinduism will find her feet and she will find it though every kind of
discourse and discussion. But that will be W-I-T-H-I-N the four
corners of the Indic Dharma as even the Akali-Sikhs are realizing
after their followers got beheaded in the cesspool called Pakistan.
India will win in the end
Ashok Row Kavi
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60545
Husain and Hinduism
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No one has said Husain "hates Hinduism". He is accused of treating
without respect the objects of Hindu worship. It does not matter what
Hindu holy books he has read, or even what he thinks of them.
If he wants to be judged by the same standards as devout Hindu artists
who have depicted sexuality as an aspect of the divine he must enter
the same devotional path. To do anything else is to be a hypocrite..
Bhaskar Menon
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60561
None owns a religion
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No one owns a religion, God or the books, they are public universal
figures and respected by any one who chooses to, but every one has a
right to speak about it; good, bad or ugly. Freedom of speech
ultimately brings the justice and balance to the society.
The loud Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Christians do not represent the
overwhelming majority of the people and I hope the media catches that,
and shares it with the universe.
Prophets Cartoons became a mess, because a few Muslims chose to make a
mess of it, despite the appeal including my own, to follow the
prophet's example; to pray for goodwill to prevail. Muslims did not
care about the Fatwa on Rushdie, a few Bushes among them carried it
forward any way, despite the majority' non-consensus. The more these
radicals show irritation, the more the temptation to irritate.
We represent the views of a great majority of moderates, but some of
us in public are gutless, if we don't condemn the cartoons, or Hussain
himself, then we are bad guys; the right wingers are a few but have
the capacity to bark in concert... and ascribe as though majority of
Muslims or Hindus support them.
As a Journalist, what would you do to communicate to the world at
large, that the outrage does not represent the majority?
Mike Ghouse
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60560
India is a mess, says travel writer
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The overwhelming reasons for why India is NOT a good place to live in,
despite all of its current and expected continuing economic boom.
If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with
a clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My
criticisms may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard
words and loving advice of a good friend. Someone who’s being honest
with you and wants nothing from you.
These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and the places I
didn’t visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of India,
except as I mentioned before, Kerala.
Lastly, before anyone accuses me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let
me say this: if this is what India and Indians want, then hey, who am
I to tell them differently. Take what you like and leave the rest. In
the end it doesn’t really matter, as I get the sense that Indians, at
least many upper class Indians, don’t seem to care and the lower
classes just don’t know any better, what with Indian culture being so
intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes,
nonetheless.
India is a mess. It’s that simple, but it’s also quite complicated.
I’ll start with what I think are India’s four major problems–the four
most preventing India from becoming a developing nation–and then move
to some of the ancillary ones.
First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around
pollution indicates a marked lack of respect for India by Indians. I
don’t know how cultural the filth is, but it’s really beyond anything
I have ever encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and
excrement are like a garbage dump.
Right next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so
bad, was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi,
Bangalore and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to
make me physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels
churning was an all to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat,
cow or human fecal matter was common on the streets. In major tourist
areas filth was everywhere, littering the sidewalks, the roadways, you
name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men urinating and
defecating anywhere, in broad daylight.
Whole villages are plastic bag wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it.
Air quality that can hardly be called quality. Far too much coal and
far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The measure should be how
dangerous the air is for one’s health, not how good it is. People
casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads.
The only two cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey
were Trivandrum–the capital of Kerala–and Calicut. I don’t know why
this is. But I can assure you that at some point this pollution will
cut into India’s productivity, if it already hasn’t. The pollution
will hobble India’s growth path, if that indeed is what the country
wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far too conservative a
country, in the small ‘c’ sense.)
More after the jump..
The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four
subcategories: roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The
electrical grid is a joke. Load shedding is all too common, everywhere
in India. Wide swaths of the country spend much of the day without the
electricity they actually pay for. Without regular electricity,
productivity, again, falls.
The ports are a joke. Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate
for the mechanized world of container ports, more in line with the
days of longshoremen and the like. Roads are an equal disaster. I only
saw one elevated highway that would be considered decent in Thailand,
much less Western Europe or America. And I covered fully two thirds of
the country during my visit.
There are so few dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are
no traffic laws to speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed,
much less enforced. A drive that should take an hour takes three. A
drive that should take three takes nine. The buses are at least thirty
years old, if not older.
Everyone in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway
system. Rubbish. It’s awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then
late 2004 it was decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the
rails has grown so quickly that once again, it is threatening
productivity. Waiting in line just to ask a question now takes thirty
minutes. Routes are routinely sold out three and four days in advance
now, leaving travelers stranded with little option except to take the
decrepit and dangerous buses.
At least fifty million people use the trains a day in India. 50
million people! Not surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people
are common now.
The rails are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded
and what with budget airlines popping up in India like Sadhus in an
ashram the middle and lowers classes are left to deal with the over
utilized rails and quality suffers. No one seems to give a shit.
Seriously, I just never have the impression that the Indian government
really cares. Too interested in buying weapons from Russia, Israel and
the US I guess.
The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided
into two parts that’ve been two sides of the same coin since
government was invented: bureaucracy and corruption.
It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for
one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies
one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood, much less satisfied
with customer service.
Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the
train number, which takes 30 minutes, then you have to fill in the
form, which is far from easy, then you have to wait in line to try and
make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes at least and if you made a
single mistake on the form back you go to the end of the queue, or
what passes for a queue in India.
The government is notoriously uninterested in the problems of the
commoners, too busy fleecing the rich, or trying to get rich
themselves in some way shape or form. Take the trash for example,
civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy taking kickbacks
from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don’t have the
time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job.
Rural hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the
fees the government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals
and practice in the cities instead.
I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its
problems, but in all seriousness, I don’t think anyone in India really
cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too
conservative a society to want to change in any way.
Mumbai, India’s financial capital is about as filthy, polluted and
poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam, or Indonesia–and being
more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy task. The biggest rats
I have ever seen were in Medan!
One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this
word, backwardness, in a country that hasn’t produced so many Nobel
Laureates, nuclear physicists, eminent economists and entrepreneurs.
But India has all these things and what have they brought back to
India with them? Nothing.
The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there
to do the dirty work and so the country remains in status. It’s a
shame. Indians and India have many wonderful things to offer the
world, but I’m far from sanguine that India will amount to much in my
lifetime.
Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of
the West and all that. But remember, I’ve been there. I’ve done it.
And I’ve seen 50 other countries on this planet and none, not even
Ethiopia, have as long and gargantuan a laundry list of problems as
India does.
And the bottom line is, I don’t think India really cares. Too
complacent and too conservative.
Sean Paul Kelley
(Sean Paul Kelley is a travel writer. He founded The Agonist, in 2002,
which is still considered the top international affairs, culture and
news destination for progressives. He is also the Global Correspondent
for The Young Turks, on satellite radio and Air America.)
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60440
Taslima Nasreen’s statement
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Taslima's article sparks violence in Karnataka, 2 killed, the article
is followed by my commentary and Quotes from Quraan.
The Indian Muslim clergy and the leadership needs to jump in on this.
As an individual she has the right to express her opinions whether we
agree or not, as much as any one has a right to condemn her
statements.
The major mistake Muslims are making is not to have a debate with her
on the issues, that's the civil and democratic thing to do. She will
lose the debate "She told the Muslim women to burn the Burqa" as if
she will start wearing a skirt if a westerner says "Burn the Saree, it
is a sign of backwardness". Neither is a sign of backwardness, it is a
culture that has evolved and no one will drop what they are used to on
the sound of a word 'drop'. In a democracy, people should have the
freedom to speak; the best way to combat a bad idea is to offer good
ideas to compete.
The major mistake Muslims are making is not to have a debate with her
on the issues. They did not have enough faith in their culture or
religion to debate. Taslima would have easily lost in a debate from a
few intellectuals and most likely she would not have gone on the
attack binge.
Ms. Nasreen is a bellyacher and not a reformer. A reformer brings
solutions to the issues and presents his or her research and asks the
scholars to review and build consensus for a gradual acceptance of the
proposed ideas. Instead, she agitates and builds resentment and does
exactly opposite of what she claims to do; reform. Her approach is
wrong and her statements may please the Islam-bashers and earn some
circulation. However, her opinion does not affect the world or the
religion of Islam.
The take of Quraan on this at: Link:
http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2010/03/taslimas-article-sparks-violence-in_01.html
Mike Ghouse
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=59726
Dr. Abdul Kalam's Letter to Every Indian
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Why is the media in India so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our
achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories
but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.
Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a
self-sustaining, self-driving unit. There are millions of such
achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and
failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was
the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken
place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had
the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed
his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture
that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments,
deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=59530
On line petition to Penguin re. Doniger’s book
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http://www.petitiononline.com/dharma10/petition.html This is an
earnest request to you to sign the online petition and forward it to
your friends for signature.
The petition to the Penguin Group asks for an apology for the
publication of the factually incorrect and offensive book “The Hindus-
An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger. We expect Penguin Group to
withdraw the book immediately. “The Hindus: An Alternative History” is
rife with numerous errors in its historical facts and Sanskrit
translations. These errors and misrepresentations are bound and
perhaps intended to mislead students of Indian and Hindu history. .
Throughout the book, Doniger analyzes revered Hindu Gods and Goddess
using her widely discredited psychosexual Freudian theories that
modern, humanistic psychology has deemed limiting. These
interpretations are presented as hard facts and not as speculations.
Doniger makes various faulty assumptions about the tradition in order
to arrive at her particular spin. In the process, the beliefs,
traditions and interpretations of practicing Hindus are simply ignored
or bypassed without the unsuspecting reader knowing this to be the
case. This kind of Western scholarship has been criticized as
Orientalism and Eurocentrism. The non Judeo-Christian faith gets used
to dish out voyeurism and the tradition gets eroticized... .
We emphasize that this defamatory book misinforms readers about the
history of Hindu civilization, its cultures and traditions. The book
promotes prejudices and biases against Hindus. Can Penguin’s editors
really be incompetent enough to have allowed this to pass to
publication? If this is not deliberate malice, Penguin must act now in
good faith. As concerned readers, we ask PENGUIN GROUP to: 1. WITHDRAW
all the copies of this book immediately from the worldwide bookshops/
markets/ Universities/Libraries and refrain from printing any other
edition. .
2. APOLOGIZE for having published this book “The Hindus: An
Alternative History”. This book seriously and grossly misrepresents
the Hindu reality as known to the vast numbers of Hindus and to
scholars of Hindu tradition. PENGUIN must apologize for failure to
observe proper pre-publication scrutiny and scholarly review. Vishal
Agarwal
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=58891
Indonesia restores Hindu temple
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I am pleased to see Indonesia Highlighting and restoring the Hindu
Temple, they are indeed following Islam, which forbids one to
desecrate a place of worship. I commend Suwarsono Muhammad for this
initiative, it is time we live the will of God; Co-existence and
harmony with life and matter.
Mike Ghouse
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=58048
India and China
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I think Hoagland is baiting India. We gain nothing from being too
close to the USA which can never get out of its hobbyhorse of a Paki-
Hug.
Rubbing China the wrong way will not help. Every reasonable effort:
diplomatic, strategic alliances with the ring of Sinophobia and last
but not the least, an effort to build a string of pearls around China
is the way out of any direct confrontation with China.
Even if we maintain our pace of growth at 7.5 per cent for the next 25
years, China will still far outpace us and become an economy 30 times
our GDP by 2025 by the estimates of the World Bank.. There’s no way, a
third rate government that is soft and kowtows to every Pakistani
threat can face China. Even in our soft power we are losing. Recently
China has even reclaimed Buddhism and Sanskrit as it’s intellectual
property whereas here we have secularists and shadow Islamists playing
footsie with our Hindu culture.
China has always been a ‘hard power” it knows that the power on earth
is its to grab and the heavens are everybody property. India knows
nothing because it has learnt nothing from the Arthashastra – the
people (Jana) must be kept happy and then alone the State becomes
strong as Chanakhya said so firmly.
China and India had over 40 per cent of the world’s industrial
production and trade in the early 15th and 16th century before the
white tribes swept out of Europe.and the barbaric Muslim lands and
ruined one of the greatest civilizations on earth, as Will Durant
noted so vividly..
Together we can make the planet anew. But maybe the human race is
fated to flounder on the rock of the monotheistic God born in the
deserts of West Asia. If we don’t know our own Karma, then it’s no use
trying to live out others’. That would be truly against Dharma.
Not that this political class in India has a clue of its own
historical importance. China never had a soft power ideological core.
Its hard shell hides a very soft underbelly. Just as the whole of East
Asia under its belly felt its fist, it imported everything “soft” and
“spiritual” from India. That’s why they are so rich and diverse and
stand up to China, which itself found its spine only with the wisdom
of the Buddha was grabbed by it by sending pilgrims into India. Unlike
the religions of West Asia, India didn’t export its religion or
spiritual wealth. Only peoplecwho understood its value came and drank
from this huge font of wisdom.
. Now India is adrift and China’s star on the ascendant. I salute it.
Truely and sadly
Ashok Row Kavi
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=57717
India as viewed by a Pakistani intellectual
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Here are some mind-boggling facts about India, a country that was
known as a "third world" nation barely 20 years ago – written by a
Pakistani. By Dr Farrukh Saleem, former Pakistani journalist,
Executive Director Center For Research and Security Studies
• 12 percent of all American scientists are of Indian origin; 38
percent of doctors in America are Indian; 36 percent of NASA
scientists are Indians; 34 percent of Microsoft employees are Indians;
and 28 percent of IBM employees are Indians. Sabeer Bhatia created and
founded Hotmail. Sun Microsystems was founded by Vinod Khosla. The
Intel Pentium processor, that runs 90 percent of all computers, was
fathered by Vinod Dham.
• Rajiv Gupta co-invented Hewlett Packard's E-speak project. Four out
of ten Silicon Valley start-ups are run by Indians. Bollywood produces
800 movies per year and six Indian women have won Miss Universe / Miss
World titles in the last 10 years.
• • The four richest Indians can buy up all goods and services
produced in a year by 169 million Pakistanis and still be left with
$60 billion to spare. • The four richest Indians are richer than the
forty richest Chinese. • Regardless of what Forbes or any other
western press may report, on 29 October 2007, as a result of the stock
market rally and the appreciation of the Indian rupee, Mukesh Ambani
became the richest person in the world, with net worth climbing to US
$63.2 billion (Bill Gates, the richest American, stood at around $56
billion). Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome
haplogroup. We Pakistanis have the same genetic sequence and the same
genetic marker (namely: M124). We have the same DNA molecule, the same
DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the
same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it
that Indians have and we don't?
• INDIANS ELECT THEIR LEADERS!!!!! And India thinks of construction of
its own nation, unlike some other nations who are more concerned with
the destruction of other's. Sam Koshy, Winnipeg
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=56378
India in Afghanistan
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By Jeremy Kahn
What’s more dangerous than being an American in Afghanistan? Being an
Indian in Afghanistan. On Oct. 8, 09 a car bomb exploded outside the
Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing 17 people and wounding 76. The attack
came 15 months after another bomb damaged the embassy and killed 58,
including the Indian defense attaché. On Feb 26 2010 a Kabul terror
strike killed seven Indians. Elsewhere in the country, Indian workers
have been victims of suicide attacks and kidnappings.
Although rarely discussed in the West, India is a key player in the
Afghan conflict. New Delhi has long sought to keep friendly
governments in Kabul as a bulwark against archrival Pakistan. India
pledged more than $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid to Afghanistan,
making it the country’s fifth-largest donor and the biggest within the
region. There are at least 4,000 Indian workers and security personnel
employed on reconstruction projects in the country. India also opened
an air base in Tajikistan, its first on foreign soil, to supply its
Afghan operations.
All of which makes Pakistan very nervous. Pakistan has accused India
and Hamid Karzai’s government of covertly supporting militants who are
challenging Islamabad’s authority over Baluchistan, an oil- and gas-
rich province in southwest Pakistan. Some believe Islamabad’s military
and intelligence services have allowed the Taliban safe haven in
Pakistan largely because they view the Afghan insurgents as a proxy
force against India. Indian and Western intelligence services found
strong evidence that Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Inter-Services
Intelli-gence, helped plan the July 2008 Indian Embassy bombing in
Kabul. And, while India is still investigating the latest attack on
its embassy, Afghan ambassador to the U.S. Said Jawad wasted no time
in pointing the finger at Is-lamabad again.
The new Great Game being played out between India and Pakistan in
Afghanistan has complicated matters for the U.S. and its NATO allies.
“While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people,” Gen.
Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, wrote
in his recent report to President Obama, “increasing Indian influence
in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage
Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India.” Evidently, the
road to peace in Afghanistan runs not just through Kabul and
Islamabad, but Delhi as well.
Corruption in India
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By Shashi Tharoor
One of the questions people keep asking me since my entry into
politics is what we can do about corruption. What would I do, one
citizen recently asked in an on-line chat, if I became the “concerned
authority”? No such prospect — the Vigilance Commissioner isn’t a
Member of Parliament! — but in fact corruption is a national malaise
and a social ill, not just one that a “concerned authority” can solve.
We are all complicit — those who demand bribes and those who give
them.
But one of the things that intrigues me is the extent to which
corruption is a middle-class preoccupation, when in fact the biggest
victims of corruption in our country are in fact the poor. For the
affluent, corruption is at worst a nuisance; for the salaried middle-
class, it can be an indignity and a burden; but for the poor, it is
often a tragedy.
The saddest corruption stories I have heard are those where corruption
literally transforms lives for the worse. There are stories about the
pregnant woman turned away from a government hospital because she
couldn’t bribe her way to a bed; the labourer denied an allotment of
land that was his due because someone else bribed the patwari to
change the land records; the pensioner denied the rightful fruits of
decades of toil because he couldn’t or wouldn’t bribe the petty clerk
to process his paperwork; the wretchedly poor unable to procure the
BPL ["Below Poverty Line"] cards that certify their entitlement to
various government schemes and subsidies because they couldn’t afford
to bribe the issuing officer; the poor widow cheated of an insurance
settlement because she couldn’t grease the right palms … the examples
are endless. Each of these represents not just an injustice, but a
crime, and yet the officials responsible get away with their exactions
all the time. And all their victims are people living at or near a
poverty line that’s been drawn just this side of the funeral pyre.
One of the reasons that I was an early supporter of economic
liberalization in India was that I hoped it would reduce corruption by
denying officialdom the opportunity (afforded routinely by our license-
quota-permit raj) to profit from the power to permit. That has
happened to some degree, especially at the big-business level. But I
underestimated the creativity of petty corruption in India that
leeches blood from the veins of the poorest and most downtrodden in
our society. No one seems to be able to do anything about it, but I’d
like to try. I’d welcome any ideas readers might have to set me on my
way.
A Catalyst for Development
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Dr. Thomas Abraham
People of Indian origin (PIO) constitute a global community of over 22
million people. It is bigger than many countries of Europe. It has
been estimated that, PIOs living outside India has a combined yearly
economic output of about $250 billion, about one third of the GDP of
India. Whether they come from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australia,
the Caribbean or Europe, they are Indians in body and spirit. Almost
all of them maintain their Indian cultural traditions and values. They
seem to have meaningfully integrated in their countries without losing
their ethnic identity.
Looking at the numbers of the NRI/PIO communities, we see the
following:
North America (Mostly USA & Canada) 3.2 Million
South America (Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Surinam, Jamaica, etc.) 1.6
million
Europe (U.K., Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc.) 2.5
million
Africa (South Africa, Mauritius, East African countries, etc.) 2.5
million
Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, etc.) 3.5 million
Far East & South East Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Mayanmar, etc.) 3.5
million
Pacific Island (Fiji, Australia, New Zealand) 0.7 million
Srilanka and Nepal 4.5 million
Total 22.0 million
Note: Since hard numbers have not been available, these are
approximate estimates and obtained from individual country statistics
and from the report of the High Level India Diaspora Committee
appointed by Govt. of India
With over 22 million people of Indian origin living outside India, a
new global community of Indian origin has been developed. Most people
of Indian origin have become highly successful in business and
professions. If their professional expertise and financial resources
are to be pooled together, it will benefit not only people of Indian
origin but also their countries and India. In addition, people of
Indian origin could assume a new role in providing help in case of
crisis to their communities around the world.
Of the 22 million, about 50% constitute the first generation
immigrants from India and their immediate families, generally termed
as non-resident Indians (NRIs). This is the group one should reach out
for investments and for business and technology collaborations in
India. This group also has taken great interest in India’s
developments. Where are these communities? They are spread across the
Middle East, USA, Canada, U.K. and other European countries, Australia
and Southeast and Far Eastern countries.
Need for Mobilizing the Community
As a first step toward bringing our communities together, the Indian
American community, under the leadership of the National Federation of
Indian American Associations, took the initiative to organize the
First Global Convention of People of Indian Origin in New York in
1989. The triggering point for the global Indian community to come
together was, when an elected Indian dominated government in Fiji was
thrown out by a military dictator in 1987. At the First Global
Convention, the major issue of concern to everyone was human rights
violations, be in Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Sri Lanka,
U.K. and even in the U.S.A. with “Dot Buster” issue. The Global
Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) was formed at this
convention to help in networking our communities and take up issues
such as human rights violations of Indians around the world. GOPIO
filed petitions at the UN and a concerted effort was made to fight
these issues.
Changing Objectives
In the last one decade, the whole world has changed, so are the people
of Indian origin (PIO) communities. Since our first global convention
of people of Indian origin, Indian dominated parties were elected to
power in Fiji, Guyana and Trinidad. South Africa has several Indians
as ministers in the government. The late Dr. Chheddi Jagan, former
President of Guyana, Mr. Basdeo Panday of Trinidad and Mr. Mahendra
Chaudhry of Fiji were present at GOPIO’s first convention who went on
to become the President and Prime Ministers of their respective
countries. For a while, in the 1990s, we in the GOPIO felt that human
rights violations or being in political sideline are not major issues
for global Indian communities. After several brain-storming sessions
and conferences, GOPIO concluded that creating economic opportunities
by pooling our professional and financial resources is a platform to
bring our communities together. Economic progress of countries with
large PIO population and India should be one of the priorities of PIOs
as global citizens. Our ultimate goal should be to make our movement
working toward on issues of poverty, education and social justice of
our people. As we network globally, it should not only help our
communities to achieve economic progress, but also help the larger
communities we live in.
As global citizens, we PIOs have a stake in the new globalization
scenario where the closed net economic boundaries of countries are
already broken. In the new economic scenario, GOPIO Business Council
has been formed to cater the needs of small and medium businessmen
from our PIO community to network and promote collaborations. GOPIO
has also set up GOPIO.Connect to help and promote NGOs who are
involved in India developmental activities.
The last decade also saw PIOs becoming enormously rich, thanks to the
information technology revolution. Although many of them left India
with a meager amount of dollars or pounds in their pocket, with their
dedication and hard work they became successful in the West and in
particular the USA, Canada, U.K. and other European countries. Now our
community is growing in large number in Australia and New Zealand. The
PIO populations in all these countries are expected to increase in
this decade. Therefore, PIO communities will have important roles to
play in all these countries.
Development Initiatives by NRIs/PIOs
With large number of NRIs/PIOs taking active interest in developments
in India, several new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been
launched in the US, Canada, Europe and countries in the Middle and Far
East to promote education, health care and developments including
water management, rural development and self help programs. NRIs and
PIOs are also increasingly supporting several NGOs in India in a range
of developmental, educational and social programs. With the net worth
of the NRI/PIO baby boomer generation increasing, tremendous
opportunities are provided for the govt. agencies and NGOs in India to
reach out more NRIs/PIOs to interest them to help in India
developmental activities.
Role for Govt. of India
Till the middle of 1970s, the Government of India did not take any
interest in non-Resident Indians (NRIs), a definition which was given
by the Reserve Bank of India when they wanted the Indian banks to
attract NRI deposits. In the 1980s, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi
invited a few NRIs to come back to India to help in development of
some core sectors including telecommunications. In the 1990s, with
economic liberalization by Narasimha Rao/Dr. Manmohan Singh team, an
impetus was provided for NRIs/PIOs to become more active in the Indian
scene.
Also, in the year 2000, a High Level Indian Diaspora Committee chaired
by Dr. L.M. Singhvi, was set up by the government of India to look
into the issues of NRIs and PIOs and to explore avenues of
opportunities for NRIs/PIOs to help India. The committee after
visiting several countries submitted a report with several
recommendations. The best news to NRIs/PIOs was provided by the
Vajpayee administration in January 2002, i.e. to accept the some of
the recommendations of the committee. Later, the Govt. of India
organized the first Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (PBD) in New Delhi in
January 2003 followed by three more such meetings in the month of
January in New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad in 2004, ’05 and ’06
respectively.
India government also decided to provide dual nationality to NRIs/
PIOs. The Indian Parliament passed a legislation to grant dual
citizenship to NRIs/PIOs in December 2003 and again in 2005. The dual
citizenship card was issued officially at the PRB-2006 in Hyderabad.
This will help to bring 22 million people of Indian origin living
outside India closer to India. It will help to mobilize professional
and financial resources of NRIs/PIOs for India’s development. Also, it
is of great sentimental values to PIOs/NRIs living outside India to
feel that they are now part of Mother India
India Govt. is now going a step further to grant voting rights for
Indian citizens living outside India in the Assembly and Parliamentary
elections, provided they are in the constituency at the time of
elections. This will make NRIs feel full participants for India’s
developmental activities. GOPIO had passed resolution on this at its
convention in Zurich in 2000 and has been campaigning on this issue
since then.
Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA)
GOPIO had campaigned for this new ministry similar to the Ministry for
Overseas Chinese in China. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh fulfilled
this demand in 2004. The new ministry has been organizing the annual
PBD. However, we see a bigger role for MOIA in reaching out all those
NRIs/PIOs who could contribute to India’s development. The ministry
also should work with groups such as GOPIO and other organizations to
motivate more NRIs/PIOs to take active interest in India in all areas
of investment, business, technology transfer, development and
charitable activities. There should be separate cells in MOIA to
promote each of these activities.
GOPIO.Connect
Initiated in 2002, GOPIO.Connect acts more as a catalyst to help NGOs
in India and outside to promote their activities as well as to provide
exposure to more NRIs and PIOs. The objectives are as follows:
• Capture and understand key developmental need areas in India where
NRI/PIO community can help
• Organize interactive sessions with NRI/PIO run civil service
organizations on India development issues to widen awareness
• Research on key development-related laws and highlight their
enforcement issues for NRI/PIOs
• Provide help to execute development projects in India
• Encourage NRI/PIOs to research key development-related trends in
India at academic institutions to facilitate new policy
recommendations in various government ministries
NRI/PIO’s Role for the Motherland/Adopted Countries
There are enormous opportunities for NRIs/PIOs to get actively
involved in India’s development as well as support various social
service activities. Many NRIs and organizations have taken major
initiatives in supporting their former schools and colleges, some have
set up schools and colleges in their villages and towns, while others
have been supporting social and environmental causes. The same level
of activities can be initiated by Indo-Caribbeans, Indo-Fijians and
other such communities who live in the developed countries. In the
next level of activities, different nationality segments of our PIO
communities such as Indo-Caribbeans or Indo-South Africans should form
partnerships with other PIO and NRI communities for the development of
their former adopted countries.
Looking to the Future
A former American Ambassador to India, Frank Wisner was quoted at a
speech in 2002 “Linkages between our two societies need to be
developed.” This is where, GOPIO and PIO communities around the world
can play a major role, i.e. to develop linkages between societies,
i.e. Indians with Dutch, Indians with Americans, Indians with
Australians, etc. Diplomats to countries come and go, business
delegations between countries come and go. However, the lasting bond
between countries will take place when we as global citizens develop
linkages. When an issue comes, we as global PIOs should focus upon
them and try to influence the opinion makers in whatever countries we
live in to take right decision and action. We need to build coalitions
with like-minded communities to make our voice heard. Whether it is
India related issues or human rights violations or violations of civil
and political rights in countries such as Fiji, Trinidad, Zimbabwe,
Africa or the Middle East, we have an important role to play.
NRI/PIOs as global citizens have done a great job in building good
image for their Motherland in their respective countries. NRI/PIOs
have worked behind the scene to create interest among companies to
take interest in India. If right opportunities are created, NRI/PIOs
could become solid and life long partners of India’s development as
well as those countries with large PIO population. And in turn, we are
making our contributions to the world’s development and peace, as it
is said, “Vasudeva Kudumbakam”, “World is one Family.”
***
Dr. Abraham has been serving the NRI/PIO community for the last 33
years. He served as the first president of the Federation of Indian
Associations of New York in 1976 and the National Federation of Indian
American Associations in 1980. Dr. Abraham currently serves as the
Chairman of the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO)
which he founded in 1989 and as a Founder Board of Director of Indian
American Kerala Center in New York. Dr. Abraham is Vice President of
Business Communications Co., a leading industry and market research
firm based in Norwalk, CT, USA.
Climate Change Discord
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By Chandru Arni
Without doubt, the conference on Climate change and Global warming was
a fiasco, failure and a retrograde step. It even went back on the
Kyoto Protocol, held in 1997 in Japan where 37 industrialized
countries committed themselves to a reduction of 6 greenhouse gases to
as much as 5% of the 1990 level.
The reasons:
1. It was a wrong place and a wrong time for the meet. Copenhagen, a
chilly city made even more icy in December. The delegates shivered and
probably wished the temperature to be a few degrees warmer and some
sunlight! How could these delegates (90 % of who did not know enough
of the subject believe that the Earth getting warmer by a few degrees
can destroy itself?)
2. The conference had too many countries in participation. It was a
merry mix-up with hundreds of politicians and delegates confusing the
issue. This is one of the reasons that United Nations General Assembly
cannot take any meaningful decisions. Most of them are skeptics, and
do not accept anything based on scientific predictions and demand
physical evidence.
3. Every politician had been warned to put the country before the
Earth. Patriotism towards the country was more important than saving
the Earth.
However he was told that he must show concern for the Earth.
4. Every politician was told NOT to commit to a figure or, if he is
pushed to commit to some small figure he should ensure it could not be
verified. If he is accused of not showing concern he should indulge in
a blame game. Without these “protections” he could not face the
Parliament (or a Senate) on his return.
5. Most of the Politicians and delegates not having a technical
background should have undergone a small scientific instruction course
before attending the conference lest they talk without the desired
seriousness.
6. Lastly, all the countries recognized in advance that nothing
substantial will be achieved and waited for a political agreement to
mess around in platitudes and show a consensus. The Heads of the big
countries could spare just a day or two to get a final agreement –
shows their seriousness and commitment.
COMMENT
The setting of goals for achieving stabilization of greenhouse gas
concentrations in the atmosphere and carbon emissions at a level that
would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system and
temperatures not to go higher than 3
degrees WILL NOT be achievable for the next 20 years unless the above
state of affairs stop and someone who knows takes charge
Why is our Earth warming up?
The concentration of carbon in living matter is almost 100 times
greater than its concentration in the earth. So living things extract
carbon from their nonliving environment. For life to continue, this
carbon must be recycled.
The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is gradually and steadily
increasing. The, CO2 in the atmosphere retards the radiation of heat
from the earth back into space which and is referred to as the
“greenhouse effect”. With this effect the Earth gets warmer; in other
words these gases regulate our climate by trapping heat and holding it
in a kind of warm-air blanket that surrounds the earth and warm the
earth. If we don’t have any such blanket the Earth will on the other
side become far too cold for our existence. We must have this balance
But we have gone the other side and this increase is surely caused by
human activities:
Examples of malpractices and disregard
1. Burning natural gas, coal and oil - including gasoline for
automobile engine
2. Deforestation
3. Some farming practices and land-use changes
These are caused by Greenhouse Gases than Carbon Dioxide like methane
( caused by burning forests, flatulence of cattle produces methane
that is expelled, etc).Growing rice has an adverse environmental
impact because of the large quantities of methane and this can be
reduced by better agricultural practices like draining paddy fields.
4. Luxury of man: Chlorofluorocarbons, a totally human luxury (used in
refrigerators and aerosol cans,)
5. Rise in Human and Cattle population.
6. Increase in Environmental pollution
What are the effects of global warming and the greenhouse effect?
1. Weather changes. Even a small increase in the global temperature
would lead to significant climate and weather changes, affecting cloud
cover, precipitation, wind patterns, the frequency and severity of
storms, and the duration of seasons.
2. Temperature. Rising temperatures would raise sea levels as well,
reducing supplies of fresh water as flooding occurs along coastlines
worldwide
3. Sea levels rising: and global warming is at least part of the
cause.
If the sea level were to rise in excess of 4 meters almost every
coastal city in the world would be severely affected, Long-term
changes are mainly caused by temperature (because the volume of water
depends on temperature). The rise is also due to melting glaciers
(irreversible phenomena) caused by global warming.
4. Land. Millions of people also would be affected, especially poor
people who live in precarious locations or depend on the land for a
subsistence living.
Solutions
1. Saving energy and Life style changes and “throw away” practices. Be
frugal. Use Carpools.
2. Using Government and Media to highlight the problems and offer
solutions. Pour more money into research activities for clean energy.
3. Plant trees and support Organic farming (In simplest terms, organic
farming is a form of agriculture that avoids any use of synthetic
chemicals or Genetically Modified Organisms.)
4. Use Alternative energy rather than coal and petroleum
a. Using Solar power: solar cells capture the heat from the sun and
store it.
b. Using wind power: Wind turbines capture the energy of moving air
and convert to electric y
c. Biofuels: Converting organic matter into fuel (ethanol, marine
algae
d. Nuclear energy: It is a source of clean energy but is only a
temporary solution. It has the drawbacks of disastrous consequences of
accident and getting rid of nuclear waste.
e. Use of CFL (compact fluorescent light bulbs) for lighting. If a
building’s indoor incandescent lamps are replaced by CFLs, the heat
produced due to lighting will be reduced. Its environmental advantages
are big because of its lower energy requirement. For a given light
output, CFLs use 20 to 33 percent of the power of equivalent
incandescent lamps. If a building’s indoor incandescent lamps are
replaced by CFLs, the heat produced due to lighting will also be
reduced.
f. Use of hydrogen
A hydrogen vehicle is a vehicle that uses hydrogen as its onboard fuel
for motive power. The power plants of such vehicles convert the
chemical energy of hydrogen to mechanical energy (torque). With
further research and development, this fuel could also serve as an
alternative source of energy for heating and lighting homes,
generating electricity, and fueling motor vehicles.
Challenge for Haiti
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By Todd Moss
As the international response to Haiti’s earthquake shifts from
emergency rescue to longer term reconstruction, things are inevitably
going to get harder. There are some very good ideas floating out
there, not least Michael Clemens’ golden door visa proposal and Jeff
Sachs’ urging for a recovery trust fund (It’s too bad he couldn’t
resist swathing the idea in jabs at the donors and the United States).
But as the donor community starts making that shift and planning
projects, Joshua Nadel, a professor of Caribbean history, has this
very good reminder:
A top-down, donor-driven reconstruction that excludes Haitians will be
seen as paternalistic and will likely join the litany of failed
development projects in the country; in order to get it right,
Haitians need to sit at the table.
This seems obvious: “participation” and “ownership” are standard
buzzwords of the development planning set. But making this dynamic
work in practice is challenging in the best of situations. In Haiti,
this is even trickier since many of the institutions of the Haitian
state have been destroyed and many officials, police, and other
leaders have died. Yet if the donors take the shortcut of just doing
their own thing, I suspect Nadel’s prediction will, sadly, turn out to
be right.
National shame or national scandal?
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By Jeffrey Simpson
Somewhere between a national shame and a national scandal lies
Canada’s export of asbestos.
The federal government promotes asbestos exports – they have risen
sharply in the past year – despite the fact that the use of asbestos
has all but disappeared in this country. Why? Because scientists,
governments, industries and unions have concluded that the product can
lead to a variety of health-related problems and, in some cases, to
death.
Indeed, while the federal government promotes exports, a multiyear
construction project is refitting the Parliament Buildings, among
other reasons to remove asbestos. What our parliamentarians won’t have
in their buildings apparently will be in buildings in the developing
world.
The reason the federal government will not stop defending asbestos is
politics – Quebec politics, in fact. The asbestos produced in Canada
comes from Quebec, from the Jeffrey and LAB Chrysotile mines that
employ about 700 people. A large town in Quebec is even called
Asbestos.
No federal government has had the courage to say: Enough is enough!
We’re not exporting to developing countries any product we won’t use
at home for health reasons. Fear of offending Quebec has put a sock in
the mouth of federal governments, and fear of losing a few votes has
forced Quebec governments into acrobatic flights of hypocrisy to
defend the indefensible.
This week, Quebec Premier Jean Charest has been making headlines
outside Quebec, attacking Ottawa for questioning his government’s
intention to impose strict vehicle-emission standards. It’s all a lot
of blah-blah because Quebec’s rules are going to be superseded by new
national regulations in the U.S. and Canada.
Beating up on Ottawa is good politics, regrettably, in Quebec, but it
so happened that these attacks came from far away – from India, in
fact, where Mr. Charest was leading a Quebec trade delegation
promoting his province’s exports, including asbestos.
It was reported in the Quebec media that asbestos represents 11 per
cent of Quebec’s exports to India, a tidy sum of $427-million. Half of
India’s asbestos comes from Quebec, of the chrysotile variety with
fibres so fine they can penetrate some filtration masks and so enter
lungs, where they can create a variety of health problems, including
lethal ones.
On the eve of Mr. Charest’s visit, scientists from 28 countries urged
him to stop exporting all forms of asbestos. A hundred scientists said
the province won’t use asbestos at home because it can cause death,
while promoting it “where protections are few and awareness of the
hazards of asbestos almost non-existent.” Even some brave scientists
in Quebec, where criticism of asbestos exports has been often regarded
as “anti-Quebec,” urged the Premier to act.
But Mr. Charest said it was up to India to act if it felt asbestos led
to health problems. He was accompanied by a representative of an
asbestos lobby group that receives money from both the federal and
provincial governments; his group, he said, gives information to
asbestos users about its possible risks. In other words, caveat
emptor! Meantime, it’s business as usual for Quebec’s asbestos
exports.
Happily, some elements of the Quebec media have been all over this
story, slamming the Premier’s evident hypocrisy and noting how it
tarnishes Quebec’s precious international image. But, by extension,
the export also tarnishes Canada’s image because, Quebec pretensions
notwithstanding, most people abroad don’t even know where Quebec is,
whereas they do know about Canada.
Ottawa is intimately involved in this dirty game, too. It even sends
diplomats to international meetings to frustrate any worldwide action
against asbestos. And Canadian taxpayers are soiled by this export of
a dangerous product that is scarcely, if ever, used in this country.
Face up to it: Canadians, in their moral superiority, might think our
country has an unsullied international image, especially in
environmental matters. The reality is that those in the fisheries
business know how poorly we have managed some of our stocks. Europe
and the rest of the world are utterly repelled by the slaughter of
seals, and no amount of public-relations campaigning and political
posturing will alter that reality.
The tar sands are a growing PR nightmare, as is Canada’s weak
greenhouse-gas emissions record. To these are added the ongoing export
of asbestos from Quebec, exposing the province’s hypocrisy and
tarnishing Canada’s reputation abroad. (The Globe and Mail)
(See related article under Weekender)
Jeffrey Simpson is a columnist for the Globe and Mail.
Pakistan “Going To The Dogs”?
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By Virginia Moncrieff
Burnt and bombed schools, harsh religious edicts, strict rules of
dress, the total subjugation of women is now a way of life for most
citizens of the beautiful Swat Valley in northern Pakistan.
Swat is a stunning area of the world. It’s often called the
Switzerland of Asia, though for my money, it has a landscape that is
far more awe-inspiring than anything Europe can offer. Now it is
almost entirely over run by Taliban who are ruthless in their demands
on the citizens.
Cruelty is a feature of Taliban rule, under the guise of proper
Islamic practice, and Swat is receiving bucket loads of cruelty,
daily. “Un-Islamic” activities like dancing and singing, listening to
CDs and watching DVDs or being clean-shaven are now outlawed. Buses
playing music for their passengers are bombed for promoting “vulgarity
and obscenity” that “gravely offends pious people.” Girls are banned
from attending school under threat of violence and death.
The Taliban advance into Swat is only now being reported. While the
lawless badlands of the Afghan border areas have attracted much hand
wringing, the Talib have crept into sophisticated, cultural Swat -
nowhere near Afghanistan - and are now ruling the place with an iron
fist.
Pakistani political analyst Farrukh Khan Pitafi told the Huffington
Post from Islamabad that the free-for-all enjoyed by the Taliban stems
from bloody-minded opportunism dating back to the Pervez Musharraf
government.
“It is evident that the Musharraf’s strategy of allowing the Taliban
to grow in order to exploit western fear(s) of them (taking) over to
garner support for his rule is either beyond the control of the
government now or then. Some segment(s) of the power elite has not
given up that ploy.
“It has never been possible for any radical group (to flourish)
without the tacit support of at least some elements in the
establishment. It is my belief that Musharraf consciously allowed
these elements to thrive,” says Mr. Khan Pitafi. “At that time it
seemed convenient but now this movement is spinning out of control.
There is a chance also that some pro-Musharraf elements within the
civil military bureaucracy are still in touch with the Taliban in
order to destabilize the democratic government.”
“Ruthless murderers” is how Asif Ali Zardari, the new Pakistan
president described the Taliban in Swat, as he started making the
right noises about taking them on. He has sent in 12,000 army troops
to do battle with the estimated 4,000 Taliban who are running the
Valley. Reports from Swat suggest that not terribly much “doing
battle” is taking place; troops stay within their barracks, and
failing to protect those that the Taliban publicly threaten to kill
(and usually do).
Farrukh Khan Pitafi is is convinced that solutions must be found from
within and not through the advice or intervention of the United
States, which will create further difficulties for the national
administration’s fight against the insurgents.
“The speed with which the Taliban movement is destroying peace and
progress of the country is heartrending and baffling,” he says. “The
government right now is so unstable that it can hardly confront the
demon of Talibanization. Is there any solution? Well it certainly is
not more US across the border attacks for they inflict pain and give
the Taliban an excuse to further expand. The only solution then is to
strengthen the democratic government, do away with the remnants of
Pervez Musharraf and the retrogressive religious politicians and help
the federal and provincial governments improve coordination. This
seems an arduous process but unless these things are done the country
essentially is going to the dogs.”
India Sees Terrorism Threats
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By VIBHUTI AGARWAL
NEW DELHI—India put its security apparatus on high alert following
intelligence reports of two possible assaults in the air— one from a
plane hijacking, the other from paragliders, officials said.
Also Friday, the U.K. raised its terrorist-threat level to severe from
substantial, but declined to say why it was doing so.
Indian Officials said the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-
Taiba was behind both threats. The group was responsible for the
November 2008 terrorist siege in Mumbai.
On Friday, the home ministry, which is in charge of internal security,
issued a security alert to all airports and airlines following an
intelligence notification of a plot to hijack a plane.
“We have reliable information of a planned plane hijack by terrorists.
We have advised the civil aviation ministry to take necessary steps,”
said Omkar Kedia, a home ministry spokesman.
Airport security was tightened following the warning. Sky marshals
were deployed on certain flights and passengers were being subject to
more intense security screening, he said.
Later Friday, U.K. Bansal, an official at the home ministry, said: “We
have intelligence reports that LeT has purchased 50 paragliding kits
from Europe with an intention to launch attacks on India.” No other
details were available.
India celebrates one of its biggest holidays of the year, Republic
Day, on Tuesday.
Indian interior ministry recommends extra security measures for
India’s flagship airlines. Video courtesy of Reuters.
The alerts came two days after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
traveling in the region, warned of efforts by al Qaeda and its
affiliates to destabilize South Asia and trigger a war between India
and Pakistan.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since they became
independent nations in 1947. In December 1999, Islamic militants
hijacked an Air India flight from Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, to
Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. It ended when New Delhi released
three Islamic terrorists in exchange for 167 passengers and crew.
The U.K.’s move Friday reversed a lowering of the threat level in
July. The U.K. reduced the threat level from critical to severe in
July 2007. A spokesman for the home office referred questions to a
statement from the home secretary.
The United Kingdom’s security experts says they fear an attack from
female suicide bombers. Video courtesy of Fox News.
“The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre has today raised the threat to
the U.K. from international terrorism from substanital to severe. This
means that a terrorist attack is highly likely, but I should stress
that there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent,”
said Home Secretary Alan Johnson.
Mr. Johnson said the terror-threat level is under constant review and
is based on a wide range of factors.
US leads global relief effort for Haiti
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By Paul Woodward
As the survivors of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake struggle in
worsening conditions, three US presidents came together on Saturday to
launch a fundraising effort across America. With his two predecessors
at his side, the US president appealed for national unity in support
of the people of Haiti.
“Flanked by two of his immediate predecessors – George W Bush and Bill
Clinton – President Barack Obama announced yesterday the launch of a
new fund-raising effort for Haiti and vowed a sustained US commitment
to rebuilding the island nation in the aftermath of the devastating
earthquake,” The National reported.
” ‘By coming together in this way, these two leaders send an
unmistakable message to the people of Haiti and to the people of the
world,’ Mr Obama said, speaking in the White House Rose Garden. ‘In
these difficult hours, America stands united. We stand united with the
people of Haiti, who have shown such incredible resilience, and we
will help them to recover and to rebuild.’”
The BBC noted: “When US President Barack Obama announced that one of
the biggest relief efforts in US history would be heading for Haiti,
he highlighted the close ties between the two nations.
” ‘With just a few hundred miles of ocean between us and a long
history that binds us together, Haitians are our neighbours in the
Americas and here at home,’ he said.
“Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have indeed become neighbours of
Americans.
“Some 420,000 live in the US legally, according to census figures.
Estimates of the number of Haitians in the country illegally vary
wildly, from some 30,000 to 125,000.
“It is a sizeable diaspora which wants to see quick and decisive
action from its adopted homeland.
“Desperate to see aid getting through to friends and relatives, many
expatriate Haitians have welcomed President Obama’s decision to send
up to 10,000 troops to help rescue efforts.”
On his blog at The New York Times, Nicholas D Kristof noted a concern
expressed by some Americans: that American generosity towards Haiti
has done little to alleviate the country’s troubles in the past. He
pointed out, however, that US aid to its impoverished neighbour falls
short of the contributions coming from many other more distant
nations.
“The United States contributed $2.32 per American to Haiti over the
last three years for which we have data (about 80 cents a year).
That’s much less than other countries do, even though Haiti is in our
hemisphere and has historic close ties to the US. For example, Canada
contributed $12.13 per person to Haiti over three years, and Norway
sent $8.44. … Other countries that contribute more, per capita, to
Haiti than the US are Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, France,
Switzerland, Spain and Belgium. True, there are more Americans, so
collectively our aid amounts to more than one-quarter of the pot in
Haiti, but that’s only because we’re such a big country. Given the per
capita sums, we have no right to be bragging about our generosity in
Haiti.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian reported: “The Haiti earthquake death toll is
predicted to reach 200,000 as relief workers struggle against looting
and logistical nightmares that have delayed vital supplies of food,
water and medical help.
“International aid has begun to reach the capital, Port-au-Prince,
four days after the quake destroyed much of the Haiti’s
infrastructure, from hospitals and prisons to the presidential palace
itself.
“The Red Cross said a convoy of trucks carrying a ‘huge amount’ of aid
from the Dominican Republic was due to arrive in the capital this
afternoon, bringing a 50-bed field hospital, surgical teams and an
emergency telecommunications unit.
“The supplies and medical teams had to be sent in by land because
‘it’s not possible to fly anything into Port-au-Prince right now’,
said Paul Conneally, the charity’s spokesman in Dominica. ‘The airport
is completely congested.’
“Mark Pearson of the charity ShelterBox said: ‘It’s utter chaos at the
airport. Buildings have been completely destroyed, the hospital has
been destroyed. It’s a full scale emergency, there’s so much
destruction.
” ‘The priority at the moment is search and rescue and then after that
emergency shelter provision, so obviously there’s frustration. There’s
no fuel and people are hunting for water. It’s difficult to put the
scale of destruction into words.’”
The New York Times said: “Countries around the world have responded to
Haiti’s call for help as never before. And they are flooding the
country with supplies and relief workers that its collapsed
infrastructure and nonfunctioning government are in no position to
handle.
“Haitian officials instead are relying on the United States and the
United Nations, but coordination is posing a critical challenge, aid
workers said. An airport hobbled by only one runway, a ruined port
whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked by rubble,
widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the aid into
the city are compounding the problems.
“Across Port-au-Prince, hunger was on the rise. About 1,700 people
camped on the grass in front of the prime minister’s office compound
in the Pétionville neighborhood, pleading for biscuits and water-
purification tablets distributed by aid groups. Haitian officials said
tens of thousands of victims had already been buried.”
Time magazine said: “An armada of US warships is steaming toward
Haiti, to be joined by at least one Coast Guard cutter en route from
the Pacific via the Panama Canal - and manned and unmanned aircraft.
Within two hours of the quake, one of the globe’s biggest warships,
the carrier USS Carl Vinson, was ordered from off the Virginia coast
toward Haiti, swapping its jet fighters for heavy-lift helicopters as
it steamed south at top speed. Three ships, including the Vinson and
the hospital ship USNS Comfort, boast state-of-the-art medical
facilities that will care for injured Haitians. Thousands of troops
are on their way to Haiti or already there, running the airport and
clearing ports for many more to follow. Up to 10,000 troops will be in
Haiti or floating just offshore by Monday.
“It fell to State Department spokesman PJ Crowley to clarify a
delicate point: ‘We’re not,’ he insisted, ‘taking over Haiti.’
Strictly speaking, that’s true: Haiti remains a sovereign country, and
there are 9,000 UN peacekeepers already there, charged with
maintaining security. But as death stalks those smothered beneath the
rubble of pancaked buildings, and poor sanitation triggers outbreaks
of dysentery and other diseases, one nation in the world has the
muscle to quickly make a difference. That’s why the US is racing aid
to the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. If things get worse,
the US - fairly or unfairly - will be blamed by many for not doing
enough.”
India’s growth prospects raised to 9%
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by Sunil Kashyap
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself an economist of international
repute, hoped double digit GDP growth rate for the economy in next
couple of years given to potential and enormous opportunities present
in India.
Urging NRIs at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, Dr. Singh expressed
government’s commitment to provide investment friendly environment in
the country by reducing all hurdles for setting up project in India.
His assurance came a day after steel tycoon LN Mittal counted
challenges for executing mega projects in the country.
Addressing a gathering of the Indian diaspora, the PM said, “I
recognize the frustration well-wishers feel when they lament why
things don’t work faster or why well-formulated plans and policies
don’t get implemented as well as they should be.”
The PM’s projections can make economists and analyst to revise their
forecasts besides strengthening the common belief of India achieving
the past glories of economic growth leaving behinds the worst of
global slowdown.
Government has been expediting investment in road and infrastructure
projects through increased public spending besides taking a slew of
measures for cutting red tape, resolving legal issues and making land
acquisition simplified for setting up industries.
America’s long way to social development
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By Dr. John Samuel
United States of America, the most economically and militarily
advanced country, has a long way to go if it wants to be a socially-
developed country as well. It is hoped with his rhetorical elegance
and intelligence, Barack Obama would be able to help the country to
make significant progress in this direction.
With America’s economic leadership being challenged by China, the U.S.
needs to make the advance called for in social development to remain
ahead of other nations as a progressive and productive one on earth.
Its democracy is nothing unique considering that there are several
countries that can claim to be even more democratic since, unlike in
the U.S., it is not money alone that determines the successes or
failure of politicians in other democracies.
Among the social development factors, one of the most important is the
ability of a nation to provide essential services such as health care
for its people. It is a basic human need to get health care without
becoming bankrupt in the process. Several million American are
becoming increasingly unable to meet its horrendous costs in an
economy with more than one in ten unemployed. It is not certain even
the watered-down health care bill would have a smooth voyage in terms
of passage. It is unfortunate that many of the developing nations of
the world are blinded by the past economic success of the U.S. and
even in health care matters they follow the awful American example.
A second indictor of social underdevelopment in the U.S. is the
predominance and prevalence of the notion that the individual is
responsible for his/her safety and security. In most other countries,
the state takes over this function entirely and a police force is
responsible for the protection of individuals. It is unfortunate that
Americans live as if they are in a society that existed 200 or more
years ago when wild animals roamed and lack of law and order was the
norm and the individual needed protection from hostile forces using
one’s own devices such as guns. When the gun lobby bribes politicians
to support their cause of selling even more weapons of mass murder, as
seen in the numerous incidents of shootings by deranged individuals,
it would not be easy to change course despite the fact that there were
more gun death per 1000 population the U.S. than in any other country
in the world. Only an amendment of the Constitution of the country can
help. The Constitution is for the people, not the other way around.
This is not easy unless in the second term of his office, President
Obama turns his attention to this waxing issue.
A third indicator of social underdevelopment is the rising power of
fundamentalism among religious groups. Here the reference is not to
Islamic fundamentalism alone, but Christian fundamentalism as well.
Religious fundamentalism – Islamic, Christian or Hindu – is a danger
to smooth functioning of any society. “Live and let live” should be
the way of the future if unnecessary conflicts and deaths are to be
avoided. The state may not be able to play a direct role here.
Finally, it is the fundamentalism that leads to state executions as a
means of those who have supposedly committed a serious crime, at times
of innocent people. The state has to business to take away anyone’s
life though for the protection of society, it can take away the
freedom of dangerous individuals. European countries and Canada have
succeeded in abolishing capital punishment. In some U.S. states also
capital punishment is not allowed.
There could be other instances of lack of social development that
needs mention. We invite our readers to come up with suggestions.
Happy New Year to all.
Dr. John Samuel is the President and Managing Editor of South Asia
Mail.
Is Climate Change for Real?
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By Amit Bhattacharya
The hard talk is on at Copenhagen. In the huddle are negotiators from
more than 192 nations, trying to forge a common plan to save the
planet. At last count, 110 world leaders were slated to gather in the
Danish capital for end-of-summit declarations that may well lay the
ground for a fundamental retooling of the global economy.
Beyond the hope, hype and bickering about who pays how much to whom,
lies a plain fact - there’s near-total consensus among governments of
the world that fossil fuel emissions have been leading to a critical
rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases, which in turn is causing global
temperatures to rise and changing the Earth’s climate patterns.
Ironically, this consensus totally breaks down when civil society
begins to talk about climate change. The Internet is replete with
assertions of climate change being the “biggest scam of the century”.
Okay, you may argue that internet is also full of accounts from
victims of alien abductions and creationists who denounce evolution.
Society’s loony fringe often has exaggerated presence on the Internet.
Except, with the climate debate, it’s not exactly the loony fringe.
Consider this: Of the top 12 bestselling books on climatology in
Amazon.com, only three - one by Al Gore and two by leading climate
scientist James Hansen - present the mainstream scientific view on the
subject. As many as five other books deny human induced climate change
in some way or the other.
Look at opinion polls. A survey conducted in the US by the respected
Pew Research Center in October showed a 14% drop in the number of
Americans who thought there was solid evidence that the Earth was
warming from 71% who had said yes to the question in April 2008, to
57% in October 2009. Only 36% of the respondents thought humans were
causing it, down from 47% last year.
Then there is the “climategate”episode, in which leaked emails of
British climatologists proved at least to some people that scientists
were cooking data to fit their models.
That the Earth is steadily warming has itself been denied by some
experts. They point out that the global temperatures haven’t really
gone up since 1998, and the graph has been more or less flat since
then (despite the 2000-2009 decade being the warmest on record). There
are others who say that the warming trend of the last century is part
of a natural cycle and not human-induced; that human activities
haven’t reached the critical scale to impact climate. Many of these
experts point to waxing and waning of solar activity to explain
temperature variations on Earth.
All this brings us to the point of this post: Governments of the world
are convinced about the warming effects of greenhouse emissions, but
are the people? Is the science of global warming settled?
During the course of a climate change fellowship I attended in the US
last month, leading climatologists spoke on the subject. The insights
we got were both revealing and troubling. To answer the second
question first - yes, the science behind what’s causing the Earth to
heat up seems pretty settled. A few notable dissenters aside, an
overwhelming majority of climatologists believe there’s strong
evidence to show that fossil fuels are causing the warming.
It’s not just about individual scientists. The study of climate change
is a multidisciplinary system science. Like any science of this
nature, there are things that are well established and areas which
aren’t as clear, that is, where competing explanations exist and some
parts that are yet speculative. Understanding is built and unbuilt
through accumulated evidences over decades.
As Stephen Schneider, professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental
Studies at Stanford University and a preeminent climate change expert
put it, understanding climate is like understanding the world economy:
it’s never solved by one new piece of information. And the answers are
never in plain yes or no, but in degrees of certainty.
For instance, to understand whether human activity was leading to a
rise in global temperatures, scientists had to build climate models
based on observed data and make predictions. These models predict an
overall warming trend. Temperature data of the last 100 years, and the
last 50 years, bear this out. Since there are two possible outcomes in
the data set “warming or cooling” there’s a 50% chance that this
prediction was random.
There’s more. The models also predict that middle of the continents
warm up more than middle of oceans. Again, observations show that’s
the case. Models predict stratosphere cools, lower atmosphere warms.
Right again. Models predict the stratosphere cools because of ozone
depleting substances and relative damping. They also predict that
there’s more warming at night than the day. Yet again, the models get
it right.
Put together, these models leave a statistical possibility of just 5%
that all these correct predictions were arrived at by pure chance. In
other words, the statement that humans through fossil fuel emissions
are warming up the planet has a scientific accuracy of around 95%.
That’s a very high degree of certainty. No other competing explanation
of the observed data’s natural cycle or solar activity comes anywhere
close to the robustness of this theory. (Of course, there’s still a 5%
chance that the warming is being caused by a factor that’s yet
unknown; but can we risk our planetary future on this basis?)
To return to the first question: Why are so many people not convinced?
There are two main reasons why this is so. The first one is obvious:
There are strong vested interests in letting people believe that
warming is a myth; or that the issue is far from settled. It’s no
surprise that a lot of climate change deniers get funds from
multinational oil conglomerates. There are websites that carry lists
of who gets funded by whom. (There would, of course, be some genuine
non-believers in the mix, but oil funding is the ugly, predominant
truth.)
The second reason is the way the science works and the way scientists
communicate it. Climate science is all about probabilities, not
certainties. And scientists are careful about throwing in all the
caveats while making their points. On the other hand, people who are
cherry-picking facts to suit their slant are forceful and definitive.
No guessing which set of speakers would leave a more lasting
impression on primetime TV.
There’s no denying that climate is the most politicized and
contentious science of our times. But on one side is method and
rigour, and on the other, half-truths and slant. At stake is a planet
called Earth.
South Asia and climate change
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By Simon Tay
Climate change is a critical and pressing issue we are faced with
today. In South Asia we are increasingly exposed to the results of
climate change, such as the latest typhoons and floods in the region,
causing loss of lives and damage to property as well as displacing
families and increasing the spread of tropical diseases.
There is also the risk of rising sea level and increasing
temperatures. A recently released report from the Asian Development
Bank (ADB) shows that South Asia is likely to suffer more from climate
change than elsewhere in the world. There will be considerable
economic costs too, with a projected 7-8 per cent loss in GDP, unless
climate change is addressed.
It is an issue, on which developed and developing countries should
come together. Yet differences and suspicions remain.
Copenhagen meetings are going on to reach a consensus on a new climate
agreement. However, after Barcelona, it seems that the negotiations
have not progressed so far that a new legal framework will be ready
for Copenhagen. A realistic outcome will probably be a political
framework which can form the basis for future negotiations on the post-
Kyoto treaty.
South Asian countries need to think about their position on the
international stage. We all see the need to bring together the US,
India, China and south-east Asia, and mediators can help bring these
nations together. Singapore and other countries in the region could
very well play that role.
If we do not, we risk having larger and more powerful countries coming
to agreements alone and the decisions risk being made without our full
attention and participation.
The world is also looking at alternative sources of energy. It is
clear that some countries are more able and capable to deploy energy
saving mechanisms such as windmills and water/tidal turbines. Solar
energy, though a good solution, is still very expensive and presently
is not optimal.
Without the big nations on board, it may be understandable that other
nations approach Copenhagen cautiously. A solitary commitment by any
single nation cannot solve this global challenge.
Simon Tay is Chairman, Singapore Institute of International Affairs
(SIIA) and former chairman of Singapore National Energy Agency
Stephen Harper in world affairs
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By Bruce Anderson
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s trip to China garnered huge coverage
at home, and likely helped his political fortunes somewhat.
First of all, it was a distraction from the politics of Afghan
detainees, and the week wasn’t kind to the Conservatives on that
issue. Almost anything is better than having lots of voters focus
exclusively on pictures of heavily redacted documents and watch some
increasingly effective opposition prosecution of the issue.
Beyond that though, the Prime Minister is working hard to position
himself as competitive with Michael Ignatieff when it comes to what’s
important on the world stage. His rising profile as the nation’s top
diplomat also continues the process of softening his personal image.
That he amiably absorbed the shots Chinese leaders inflicted about the
lack of a prior visit seemed in contrast with a more prickly reaction
we might have seen earlier in his career.
Conventional wisdom holds that Canadians feel conflicted about China,
anxious to enhance our trade opportunities on the one hand, but
reluctant to look indifferent about the human rights abuses in that
country. Over the years I’ve done public opinion research in this
area, that’s not exactly what I’ve seen.
For one of the world’s great selling nations, our citizenry is
actually a bit tentative about the importance of international
commerce. When it comes to trade agreements, we’ve often had a foot on
the brake and a foot on the accelerator at the same time. For many,
the apparent success of Nafta has softened opposition to the concept
of free trade, but not yet translated into a full-on embrace of the
philosophy.
Most Canadians are very hesitant about any notions of free trade with
China, and tepid at best about investment by Chinese state enterprises
in the Canadian resource sector. This comes from a reflexive worry
about our ability to compete with bigger players, and a longstanding
instinct not to bargain away our natural resources birthright.
We’re also less passionate than we used to be about involving
ourselves in the social rights agendas of other countries. We are
fatigued with the idea of nation building in Afghanistan. We don’t
always feel confident knowing when and where our voice is needed in
other trouble spots, how forceful our interventions should be in order
to be helpful, and whether we can really avoid being brushed off. Our
collective attentiveness to global issues has been slipping for years,
which contributes to this uncertainty.
A renewal of Canadian interest in international affairs would be a
good thing for Canada. Doing so requires this type of intense focus
from our political leaders, and benefits from vigorous competition
between parties to help inform and clarify our choices. Whatever
policy we make around trade and investment flows with China, whatever
role we choose to play in promoting human rights or fighting
collective environmental problems, it can’t help but be in our
interests to make these decisions on a more broadly informed basis.
That’s why many observers likely hope that the Prime Minister’s
extensive foreign policy work this year was about more than connecting
with targeted segments of Canadian voters, and winning a few more
seats, but instead signals a new era of active Canadian outreach. And
why most of the same observers also welcome the fact that the Liberals
have talented people like Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae and trade critic
Scott Brison to provide a serious and thought provoking challenge to
the government.
Obama Reassures Singh On U.S.-India Ties
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By Don Gonyea
As a sign of India’s rising stature, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was
treated to the first state visit of Obama’s presidency. The two
leaders pledged to strengthen their economic ties, and Obama
reiterated the importance of the U.S. relationship with India.
Obama tried to assuage growing concerns by many in India that the
relationship between these two nations is being eclipsed by a greater
U.S. outreach to China, India’s neighbor.
That was the broad message of all of the White House events Tuesday.
“It will be another opportunity to convey to the prime minister and
the people of India, as India assumes its rightful place as a global
leader in this century, that you will have no better friend and
partner than the United States of America,” Obama said.
“I was deeply impressed by President Obama’s strong commitment to the
India-U.S. strategic partnership and by the breadth of his vision for
global peace and prosperity,” Singh said.
“After eight years — some of those years in which we did not have, I
think, either the resources or the strategy to get the job done — it
is my intention to finish the job,” Obama said.
But a weak Afghan government, the country’s mountainous terrain and
the tenacity of the insurgents all add up to a very difficult task, no
matter what the strategy.
A poll published Wednesday by USA Today shows support for Obama on
Afghanistan plummeting. Three months ago, 56 percent approved of his
handling of the issue. Now 55 percent disapprove.
Any big buildup is likely to displease much of the American public as
the war enters its ninth year, with casualties rising.
Obama predicts that the public will give him a fair hearing when he
presents his case: “I feel very confident that when the American
people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there, and how we
intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive.”
The president has the Thanksgiving weekend to finalize his strategy
for Afghanistan, and his plan for selling that strategy both at home
and abroad.
HARPER AND INDIA
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By Rana Sarkar
There are few more important things Prime Minister Stephen Harper can
do for the future of the Canadian economy in our lifetimes than start
free-trade talks with India. Against the backdrop of aging
populations, thickening borders and the unlikely return of the U.S.
consumer as the global ATM – and in order to build the foundation for
competitiveness beyond the current downturn – we need to think
differently and act quickly to reduce our reliance on a single
partner.
We need to diversify into the big trading markets of the European
Union, Brazil, China and India. Given global multilateral trade talks
are mired in the sands of Doha for the foreseeable future, Canada’s
preference for bilateral pacts has proven a good instinct. With NAFTA,
and an EU free-trade deal in the works, we have secured two of the
largest markets, but Brazil remains tied up in its own regional
trading regime and China seems forever complicated. And so India
stands out as the next great opportunity for Canada.
Frankly, the timing could not be better. India is keen to expand its
global trade footprint and is selectively engaging in large deals of
its own, including ones with the EU and South Korea. But it is also
keen to get a foothold in the North American market. A quiet visit by
the Indian commerce minister to Ottawa in September has set the stage
for diplomatic dialogue on a comprehensive economic partnership – a
commitment to talk about talks. The Prime Minister should follow up
aggressively in India this week and stake his claim for full-blown
free-trade discussions.
“ Most countries got the memo circulated at Davos a few years ago”
An agreement will not happen overnight and will likely take years to
negotiate. But seizing on this initiative is rich with symbolism of
our intent to engage the New India and will help us jump the snaking
cue of the global great and good forming in Delhi. Most countries got
the memo circulated at Davos a few years ago: India, like China before
it, emerged from the global economic realignment as one of the great
players of the 21st century. It is now the fourth-largest economy in
the world in purchasing power parity, having grown at 6 to 9 per cent
over two decades, and will be, barring calamity, one of the big three
within 30 years.
Its self-sustaining growth is now past the tipping point – not fuelled
by exports alone but by a private sector composed of millions of
entrepreneurs, domestic consumption and new global ambition. India is
set to become one of the great global consumer markets in the decades
ahead as its North American-sized middle class flex their credit cards
and the country brings half a billion of its poorest into the global
economy for the first time.
Underwriting this growth has meant converting two enormous challenges
into strengths. India’s democracy, long viewed as a handicap to
growth, is now widely regarded as a source of multilayered strength,
able to see off complex challenges from security threats to brokering
the aspirations of the fast urbanizing poor. India’s billion-plus
population, once a Malthusian trap, now looks more like a demographic
dividend featuring a young population (half under 25) set to grow
rich(er) before they grow old – similar to postwar America and
Europe.
A Canada-India free trade agreement would likely be focused primarily
on investment, labour mobility and services – fears of job losses and
a flood of cheap exports are overblown. The China-U.S. relationship,
often citied by critics of trade arrangements between developed and
big emerging markets, is instructive: Job losses and cheap imports
have occurred precisely because trade and investment liberalization is
lacking, creating a situation where China has depressed its currency
to dampen consumption and drive exports that are bought by U.S.
consumers increasingly through debt – debt that is, in turn, financed
by the Chinese. This, of course, will not be the case with Canada’s
trade with India.
With similar democratic institutions, Commonwealth heritage and strong
diasporic links, Canada and India have much in common institutionally,
making an agreement possible. What is required now is a greater level
of political and corporate-sector commitment – and a little
imagination – to make it a reality. (The Globe and Mail)
Rana Sarkar is president and executive director of the Canada-India
Business Council.
Mohammad Akbar: Canada should strengthen trade relationship with India
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By Mohammad Akbar
In light of news that China has overtaken Canada as the number one
exporter to the U.S., it makes more sense than ever that we stop
putting all our eggs into one basket.
Canada should seek to diversify its trade for the same reasons that an
investor diversifies his or her portfolio—to get better gains and
reduce risk.
Canadian businesses are concerned by the potential upheaval in North
American trade amid the emergence of a “Buy American” mentality and
the likelihood that NAFTA may be placed back on the negotiation
table.
This is an opportune time for Canada to rethink its approach towards
international trade. We can and should open as many doors around the
world as possible for our businesses by moving toward free trade with
the world’s largest and fastest growing economies.
Preferential trade agreements or free trade agreements are becoming
very popular around the world as many countries become increasingly
disenchanted with the multilateral trade regime established under the
World Trade Organization.
I would suggest this is a very good time to be thinking of building a
stronger trade relationship with India.
The Indian economy has grown by more than nine percent for three years
running—growth that has been supported by economy-wide reforms, huge
inflows of direct foreign investment, rising foreign exchange
reserves, and a flourishing capital market.
Furthermore India is interested in building regional and bilateral
trade relationships and has entered into in number of them with the
zeal of a new convert. It is currently negotiating a free trade
agreement with the European Union and has signed an agreement to
cooperate in trade, investment, and energy issues with the U.S.
The Indian government is looking at alternative energy sources and has
also signed a wide-ranging nuclear treaty with the U.S.—an area that
can be exploited by Canada due to its comparative advantage in the
energy sector.
The Indian services sector, which accounts for more than 50 percent of
its GDP, is another tremendous opportunity for Canada .
Canada also has strong immigration ties with India that are currently
not reflected in trade relations. Over the last five years, trade
between the two countries has only amounted to about US$4 billion.
In this age of globalization, economic relations are a key to
strengthening political and foreign relations. A bilateral agreement
with India could yield meaningful strategic benefits.
India is an important country for Canada because of its geographical
location and its emerging role in global politics. Greater market
access to India and its one billion people will also help reduce
Canadian businesses’ vulnerability to the ups and downs of the U.S.
market. That will expand production here at home and create more jobs
while at the same time providing a cheap source of imports for both
goods and services.
In short, free trade with India would not only be a tremendous benefit
to Canadian business but would also establish Canada’s presence
politically and socially in one of the world’s great emerging
markets.
Mohammad Akbar is a professor of economics in the school of business
at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Singh’s US visit is rich with symbolism
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Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s upcoming state visit to the US
would be reinforcement of America’s friendship with India. The trip
will be a test of India’s willingness to follow through with
acquisitions of civilian nuclear technology and ‘to agree to a test
ban’.
‘The first state visit under the Obama administration is rich with
symbolism,’ ‘It will solidify the US-Indian relationship under a
Democratic president.’
Obama administration has many officials who were skeptical of the
India-US civil nuclear deal. ‘The visit will be a test of India’s
willingness to follow through with concrete acquisitions of civilian
nuclear technology, and to agree to a test ban.
Manmohan Singh is scheduled to visit the US Nov 24.
The Obama administration early on learned to de-hyphenate India and
Pakistan, he said, adding ‘The challenges facing Pakistan’s survival
from within are driving relations there and are of a more urgent
nature than the slowly but steadily developing relationship with
India.
For Americans and Europeans, the terrorist origins in Pakistan are as
alarming as they are to Indians. US officials understand well,
perhaps better than some in the Bush administration that India is
pursuing improvements in its external circumstances along every
azimuth.
‘The relationship is important, and increasingly so, but it is not
exclusive in either direction. Both nations are pursuing their
interests with a cool eye and a sense of balance. This is a healthy
basis for long-term cooperation where the interests coincide.
The US and India share concerns about the terrorist threats we face.
We have a common interest in globalisation occurring in an orderly
fashion and a host of other issues. In those efforts, our allied
efforts will be critical.
Douglas H. Paal, is vice president for studies at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
Religious Freedom in India
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Lalit K Jha
A US government report on Monday praised the religious freedom in
India despite mentioning instances of attacks on religious minorities,
and lauded the “independent” judiciary and a “vibrant” civil society
for acting against violations whenever they occur.
The annual report on International Religions Freedom, between July
2008 and June 2009, released in Washington by Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, also mentioned the Mumbai terror attacks in which
extremists targeted luxury hotels, a crowded railway station, a Jewish
centre, a hospital and restaurants.
It, however, criticised the police and law enforcement agencies for
often not acting swiftly to effectively counter violence and attacks
by extremists.
“In general, India’s democratic system, open society, independent
legal institutions, vibrant civil society and press all provided
mechanisms to address violations of religious freedom when they did
occur,” the State Department said in its annual report.
In its section on India, it said, although vast majority of citizens
of every religious group lived in peaceful coexistence, “some
organised societal attacks against minority religious groups
occurred,” and accused enforcement agencies for not acting swiftly in
many cases.
It also mentioned the violence in Kandhamal in August 2008 after the
killing of Swami Lakshmanananda by individuals affiliated with the
Maoists. The violence claimed 40 lives and left 134 injured, it said.
“Although most victims were Christians, the underlying causes that led
to the violence have complex ethnic, economic, religious and political
roots related to land ownership and government-reserved employment and
educational benefits,” it said, adding that police arrested 1,200
persons, including a Maoist leader and registered over 1,000 criminal
cases.
According to several independent accounts, an estimated 3,200 refugees
remained in relief camps, down from 24,000 in the immediate aftermath
of the violence, the report noted.
It said numerous cases remained in courts, including those related to
the 2002 Gujarat violence, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the more
recent attacks against Christians, and some extremists continued to
view the ineffective investigation and prosecution as a signal that
they could commit such violence with impunity.
The State Department report said government officials responded to a
number of new and previous violent events, helping to prevent communal
violence and providing relief and rehabilitation packages for victims
and their families.
It also praised leaders of religious groups for making public efforts
to show respect for other groups by celebrating their holidays and
attending social events, and for protesting cases of violence against
other communities.
“Muslim groups protested the mistreatment of Christians by Hindu
extremists… Christian clergy and spokespersons for Christian
organisations issued public statements condemning anti-Muslim violence
in places such as Gujarat,” it said.
After the Mumbai strikes, religious leaders of all communities
condemned the attacks and issued statements to maintain communal
harmony, the report said.
Lalit K Jha is a talented and results-oriented journalist with
extensive experience reporting upon international affairs and
government operations for leading national newspapers and wire
services.
Taliban Terror in Pakistan
Send us a comment to : feed...@southasiamail.com
By Walid Phares
Taliban Terror in Pakistan
The war between the Taliban and Pakistan continues to accelerate. Just
last weekend, Pakistan’s army responded to a long string of Taliban
attacks by launching a massive ground operation in Waziristan.
But through this already-long fight, the press and other observers
have only focused on the continuing bloodshed rather than the fact
that the Taliban continue to launch suicide bombers and other types of
attacks inside Pakistan’s cities against its police and military
forces. We warned that the Taliban’s war on Pakistan’s government and
civil society, would widen since the assassination of Prime Minister
elect Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. And so it is today.
It is unfortunate, but nevertheless true, that he most important
events – the worst events — in this war have yet to happen. And
analysts must focus on the lessons learned so far so that the worrying
projections can be accompanied with parallel policy suggestions.
The jihadi campaign in Pakistan was planned years ago, but the
electoral victory in 2007 of the secular Party of the People, headed
traditionally by the Bhutto clan, triggered an acceleration of the
Taliban general offensive. Initially the Mullahs of the most radical
Salafists on the face of Earth – in partnership with al Qaeda — wanted
to seize Pakistan gradually, with further infiltration. They were
building their “Emirate” sanctuary in Waziristan and beyond, while
penetrating the intelligence agencies and other segments of the
bureaucracy.
But since September 2008 when Benazir’s widower Asif Ali Zardari was
elected as new President and as he clearly pledged to fight
“terrorism,” the Taliban leaped to preempt his designs. In one short
year, they escalated their attacks reaching a point 60 miles from
Islamabad last April. That week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton said that Zardari’s government was “abdicating to the Taliban
and the extremists.”
In fact when the Jihadist forces entered the Swat valley and began
heading towards the capital’s suburbs, the country’s Government was
tested strategically. I told Fox News then that this was a “red line.”
Crossing it towards Islamabad meant a Taliban advance all over the
country. But if the Army would cross it in reverse, it would mean a
full fledge war against the Taliban. And in fact it did happen, as we
can see today. So what are the lessons so far?
Taliban Forces
First, the Taliban and their jihadi allies have clearly shown that
they have cells capable of conducting terror attacks way beyond their
enclaves. Hence one needs to expect protracted violence in urban
zones. The armed Islamists aren’t a new force appearing only this
year, but a network growing for decades. Now is their time to try to
take out the secular government.
Second, the attacks against the military headquarters and bases, never
performed before, can be copycatted against more dangerous locations,
including nuclear sites: storage locations, launching pads or delivery
systems. It is a question of time before such a scenario could
materialize.
Third, assassinations are still possible. As with the late lady
Benazir, the Taliban knows that achieving such goals can trigger even
wider clashes inside the country.
Fourth, the present Pakistani government is strategically decided to
fight and dismantle the Taliban enclaves in the Northwest provinces.
If this government fails, such an opportunity will not happen again
soon. All of these factors indicate that this is the last card been
played, in this generation, against the jihadists of Pakistan.
Fifth, the Taliban war on the secular government in Pakistan shows a
determination to take over that country. It also shows that the notion
of a “moderate Taliban” has no connection to reality. Otherwise the
Pakistani Muslim Government would have found these alleged “moderate
Taliban” and mobilize them against the bad guys. It didn’t happen and
it won’t.
Hence, based on these findings, the following are strategic
recommendations for the US Administration to consider seriously:
a. As Pakistan’s armed forces and its government are waging a counter
campaign on the Taliban, Washington must refrain from regurgitating
the myth of “cutting deals with the good Taliban” as an exit strategy
for Afghanistan. Such a hallucination would crumble the determination
of anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan and would weaken the resolve of
the Pakistanis engaged in their own national counter terrorism
campaign against the Taliban.
b. The Obama Administration must help Zardari’s government discretely
and at the demand of the latter. US and Pakistani leaders should
coordinate efforts without exposing this cooperation to jihadist
propaganda
c. The Obama Administration must rapidly extend resources to General
McCrystal in Afghanistan so that the pincer movement against the
regional Taliban can happen at the same time. Now that the Pakistanis
are on the offensive in Waziristan, NATO and Afghan forces must take
the offensive on the other side of the border. The Taliban must not be
enabled to fight one adversary at a time, by massing all their
resources in two countries against one foe then move to the next.
I am sure US and NATO strategists and Pakistani decision makers have
this in mind. But we need to make sure US decision makers do not have
other plans in mind. Otherwise, if the pincer strategy is not
performed, we may lose not one but two countries in the region to the
jihadists, one of them being already nuclear.
*****
Dr Walid Phares is the Co-Secretary General of the Transatlantic
Parliamentary Group on Counter Terrorism and a senior fellow at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracy.
http://www.southasiamail.com/blog/
The World is What it is: Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul
By Patrick French
Review by Cyril Dabydeen
A curmudgeon, there’s no question, as far as rumours go about V. S.
Naipaul, Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, benighted by the
Queen for being litterateur par excellence. He’s both celebrated and
derided, all at the same time. But why? The recent Authorized
Biography by Patrick French is still hotly discussed in literary
circles; mention the name V.S. Naipaul, and you’re bound to get a
terse reaction, even with vitriol, often contrapuntal or just
contrarious. Many Caribbean intellectuals are fraught over him for his
damning comments about race and Africa; at conferences I’ve heard the
call for his books to be burned. His spat with the other Caribbean
Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, is well-known (a la “V.S. Nighfall”);
yet Walcott has acknowledged Naipaul’s superb craftsmanship as a
master stylist bent on changing the novel’s “bastardized form”--as
Naipaul sees it.
Naipaul has said, “I became a writer to be free.” And maybe too free
he is: his earliest books about India such as An Area of Darkness and
A Wounded Civilization caused quite a stir. But Naipaul’s novels from
the earliest, such as A House for Mr Biswas, to the later books like
The Enigma of Arrival and A Bend in the River are classics, or near
classics. Indeed the Nobel Prize Committee 's citation of Naipaul's
award was for his "incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to
see the presence of suppressed histories," and singling out The Enigma
of Arrival (1987) for its "unrelenting image of the placid collapse of
the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European
neighbourhoods."
Maybe therein lies the problem or dilemma, jaundiced as Naipaul’s view
may be. And the Muslim fundamentalist world has come in for much of
his criticism in books such as Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples.
Late distinguished post-colonial critic Edward Said would describe
what he calls Naipaul’s “funny moments... at the expense of Muslims,
who are ‘wogs’ after all as seen by Naipaul's British and American
readers, potential fanatics and terrorists, who cannot spell, be
coherent, sound right to a worldly-wise, somewhat jaded judge from the
West."
Yet Said acknowledged in his Reith Lectures Naipaul’s "extraordinary
antennae as a novelist," of his "sifting through the debris of
colonialism and post-colonialism, remorselessly judging the illusions
and cruelties of independent states and the new true believers...."
This distilled view is juxtaposed with Naipaul’s earlier expression in
Middle Passage (1962): "History is built around achievement and
creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies,” which caused
furore among some West Indian intellectuals; and Naipaul has gone on
to speak of "the colonial smallness [of Trinidad] that didn't consort
with the grandeur of my ambition."
Naipaul has influenced a whole slew of writers, including this writer–
as well as many modern-day Indians like Amitav Ghosh. Indeed, “it was
Naipaul who first made it possible for me to think of myself as a
writer,” Ghosh has said as he grew more comfortable with the
indwelling life of the mind. The most well-known Chinese-American
writer, Ha Jin, told us (when I was a juror of the Neustadt
International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma) how
he would read Naipaul all the time on his train journeys in the US,
with a similar response to Ghosh’s; Ha Jin was a fellow juror.
Recent book reviewers of the French Biography have commented on
Naipaul’s treatment of his wife, Pat (he met her at Oxford), and
perhaps she was his best editor and confidante; and French quotes
Naipaul as saying “I have killed her”; Pat died of breast cancer. His
unsentimental self is what we have and being unequivocal about art as
well as equally satirical about politics as Naipaul assesses old and
new societies, often unsparing about the latter.
About himself and India, Naipaul has said: “I cannot belong to India
for the simple reason that I don’t know the language.” Naipaul, of
course, is of Indian forbears: the grandson of an indentured sugar
cane worker–of Brahmin caste--brought from Uttar Pradesh by the
British to the Chaguanas plantations in Trinidad. And you would think
that Naipaul would hate the British for this. But he has said, in
l979, perhaps too forthrightly: "I do not write for Indians, who in
any case do not read. My work is only possible in a liberal, civilized
western country"; and the enigma echoes: "The thing about being an
Indian, and it remains true of Indian writing now, is that it seems to
work without history, in a vacuum."
Misanthropic, if not satirical, Naipaul continues to excite or
intrigue, perhaps for just being outrageous with trenchant utterances
like his egregiously famous: "The dot means my head is empty":
referring to the bindi Hindu women wear; or, on Pakistan: "The
Pakistani dream is one day there'll be a Muslim resurgence and they
will lead the prayers in the mosques in Delhi"; and of Britain, it’s
“a country of second-rate people--bum politicians, scruffy writers and
crooked aristocrats."
In French’s Biography, there are touching elements, such as Naipaul’s
obsession and praising of his writer-father Seepersad Naipaul, and
about the family squabbles pitting the Capildeo clan (on his mother’s
side) with the Naipauls (on his father’s), all which rivets the
attention, as one is also acutely aware of Naipaul seeing “mimic men”
in the colonial setting with all that’s banal or incongruous.
V.S. Naipaul keeps seeking out other meanings in a diasporic new world
order by setting his gaze on more than imaginary homelands (as Salman
Rushdie does), always with troubling enigmas and, on occasion,
mutinies, if a million or more in India–which still beckons. Indeed,
he is the sum of his books; the novels always tell more than the
biography; and Naipaul affirms Marcel Proust’s axiom: of "the
secretions of one's innermost self, written in solitude and for
oneself alone that one gives to the public,” seen in his own
imaginative outpouring. But maybe with Naipaul controversy never ends:
the latest is about his Pakistani-journalist wife Nadera Naipaul’s
spat with Winnie Mandela over an interview-article in the UK’s Evening
Standard touching on Nelson Mandela’s patriarchal image. Read on!
Cyril Dabydeen’s novel, Drums of My Flesh (TSAR Publications) won the
Guyana Prize for Best Book of Fiction and had been nominated for the
prestigious IMPAC/Dublin Prize for Literature.
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60443
Media, entertainment seen as $24 bn industry in India by 2014
Mumbai, The $13 billion Indian media and entertainment industry is
seen growing 13 percent annually over the next five years to net
revenues of $24.25 billion by 2014, says a report released Tuesday.
The study by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI) made the projection based on the recovery staged by
the industry in the last quarter of 2009, which, it feels, will
continue in the future.
The growth will be driven by factors like favourable demographics,
high economic growth, strong fundamentals, expected rise in
advertising revenue and increasing penetration, adds the study,
conducted jointly by consultancy KPMG.
“The media and entertainment industry represents the face of consumers
in India,” said FICCI secretary general Amit Mitra, after the study
was released by Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan at the Frames
2010 conference.
“It is a part of our daily life and touches maximum number of people.
So despite the challenging last year, I’m excited by the potential of
the industry to even grow beyond 13 percent per annum over the next
few years,” Mitra said.
Others who attended the inaugural event at India’s commercial and
entertainment hub included actors Shah Rukh Khan and Katrina Kaif and
filmmakers Yash Chopra and Karan Johar.
Speaking on the session, Shah Rukh Khan said the three basic needs of
every Indian — food, clothing and shelter (roti, kapda aur makaan) —
appeared to have been fulfilled for most.
“There is now a fourth desire and that is entertainment and movies are
a popular source of this fourth requirement. Another concept popularly
emerging and posing to have a great future is sport entertainment,” he
said.
“We are at the threshold of a huge burst on the entertainment arena in
India and entertainment is the packaging of a growing economy.”
As per the FICCI-KPMG study several factors augur well for the
industry, notably the potential for growth in media reach, impact of
digitisation and convergence, better consumer understanding,
innovation and enhanced penetration of regional markets.
The study also gives the following estimates of the size of various
segments of media and entertainment industry in 2009 and the
projection for 2014:
Television: From $5.71 billion to $11.58 billion
Filmed Entertainment: From $1.98 billion to $3.09 billion
Print Media: From $3.88 billion to $5.97 billion
Radio: From $173 million to $364 million
Music: From $184 million to $382 million
Animation: From just $71 million to $1.03 billion
According to the study, gaming will be the fastest growing sector in
the media and entertainment industry. This sector grew 22 percent in
2009 and is expected to expand by 32 percent per annum to reach $711
million by 2014.
http://www.southasiamail.com/news.php?id=60556
PakNationalists - Bal Thackeray 'Wanted' By Pakistan
© paknationalists |
4:33 PM Posted by com puter
© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted
in any medium
without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Indian Hindu Terrorist Bal Thackeray 'Wanted' By Pakistan
Thackeray issued a call to form Hindu suicide squads, "to take the
Muslims head on". Labeling them as "trouble makers", Balaji called for
them to be wiped out from the country to make India secure. Urging
Hindus to start referring to India Hindu rashtra" (Hindu nation), the
Shiv Sena militant leader maintains that only "our religion [Hinduism]
is to be honored here" and then "we will look after other religions".
At least two senior retired Indian military officers answered Bal
Thackeray's call to set up the suicide squads in India.
By S.M Hali
The Daily Mail of Pakistan
Wednesday, 17 March 2010.
WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM
According to reports, the eighth Indian dossier containing more
"details" on the Mumbai terror attacks has been handed over to the
Interior Minister, Mr. Rehman Malik by Foreign Secretary Salman
Bashir.
India had submitted the dossier last week at the one-point Foreign
Secretary level talks, seeking "strict action" against Jamaat-ud-Dawah
(JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed, who is alleged to be the mastermind of the
26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. India had submitted three dossiers, one
of them concerning the handing over of Saeed and 34 others wanted by
India.
However, after the talks, Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir had
commented that evidence presented by New Delhi against Saeed was "mere
literature" and India did not have enough proof against him. Earlier,
New Delhi had expressed "severe concern" over Islamabad's "inaction"
against Saeed. India needs to accept the fact that Pakistan's free and
fair judiciary, whose independence was acclaimed by India too, had
examined the evidence against Hafiz Saeed, after he was arrested in
the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks. In light of the data presented by
India as "proof" incriminating Hafiz Saeed, the independent judiciary
in Pakistan had considered it inadequate to convict him thus he was
set free. India, which boasts of an independent, fair and free
judicial system in its own country, should realize that it has Ajmal
Kassab in its custody, who is alleged to be the sole survivor of the
attackers involved in the Mumbai carnage. Despite Ajmal Kassab's
signed "confession", video footage of the assailants and hundreds of
"witnesses" of the heinous crime, Indian judicial system is yet to
declare Mr. Kassab guilty of any crime. India will have to put faith
in Pakistan's judiciary or provide solid evidence of Hafiz Saeed's
involvement in the gory episode.
India had also expressed dissent over Islamabad allowing Saeed to make
'provocative and insidious' statements against India during a
television interview. Saeed had declared an open 'Jihad' against India
in the interview. "If India is not ready to talk on water and Kashmir
then Pakistan should wage a war against India. JuD will fight along
with the Pakistan army," the Jihadi leader had said.
Hafiz Saeed's comments may be termed provocative but surely it is not
a serious crime meriting his arrest and handing over to India. If it
were so, India's own firebrand demagogue Bal Keshav Thackeray,
popularly known as Balasaheb Thackeray, who is the founder and chief
of the Shiv Sena, a hardcore Hindu terrorist, Marathi ethnocentric and
extremist party, must be taken cognizance of. The hothead, highly
vocal radical leader, in his vitriolic comments seldom hides the venom
he harbors for Muslims and Pakistan. In 2002, Thackeray issued a call
to form Hindu suicide squads, "to take the Muslims head on". Labeling
them as "trouble makers", Balaji called for them to be wiped out from
the country to make India secure. Urging Hindus to start referring to
India Hindu rashtra" (Hindu nation), the Shiv Sena militant leader
maintains that only "our religion [Hinduism] is to be honored here"
and then "we will look after other religions".
At least two organizations founded and managed by the retired Indian
Army officers namely Lieutenant Colonel Jayant Rao Chitale and
Lieutenant General P.N. Hoon (former commander-in-chief of the Western
Command), answered Bal Thackeray's call to set up the suicide squads
in India. Lieutenant General Hoon claimed, Thackeray instructed him to
set up the training camps. Another Balaji follower is Indian Army's
serving Lieutenant Colonel Srikanth Prasad Prohit, wanted by Pakistan
for his complicity in torching the Samjhota Express which took a toll
of 59 Pakistani passengers. Bal Thackeray continues to publish
inflammatory editorials in his party's newsletter, Samna
(Confrontation). When explaining his views on Hindutva he has
conflated Islam with violence and has called for Hindus to "fight
Islam". In an interview in Suketu Mehta's book 'Maximum City', he
advocates the hanging of Indian Muslims and mass expulsion of Muslim
migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. One of his more acerbic
statements needs attention: "They [Muslims] are spreading like a
cancer and should be operated on like a cancer. The... country should
be saved from the Muslims and the police should support them [Hindu
Maha Sangh] in their struggle just like the police in Punjab were
sympathetic to the Khalistanis."
Balasaheb Thackeray criticized and challenged Indian Muslims through
his party newspaper, Samna, around the time the 16th century Babri
Masjid was demolished by members of the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) in the northern town of Ayodhya, on December 6,
1992. The razing of the mosque was followed by a mass genocide of
Muslims. The Justice Srikrishna Commission of Enquiry, which
investigated the ensuing communal riots in Mumbai, named Thackeray for
sparking anti-Muslim violence, which led to more than 1,000 deaths in
several ensuing riots, many by having kerosene poured on their bodies
while alive and then being burned to death. The Srikrishna Commission
found that Thackeray was personally responsible, not only for inciting
the mobs through his incendiary speeches, but also directly
coordinating the movement of the rioters. In a deposition before the
Srikrishna Commission a witness alleged Thackeray coordinated much of
the January 1993 Mumbai carnage. Yuvraj Mohite claimed, "Balasaheb
ordered that not one Muslim be left alive to stand in the witness box,
and asked his men to send the additional police commissioner, A A
Khan, to his Allah." Balaji later announced: "I am proud of what my
boys have done. We had to retaliate and we did. If it was not for us,
no one would have controlled the Muslims." He has since made more
inflammatory statements regarding Muslims, and reiterated his desire
for Hindus to unite across linguistic barriers and to see "a Hindustan
for Hindus" and to "bring Islam in this country down to its knees".
I rest my case for readers to decide themselves, whether Balaji
Thackeray should be handed over to Pakistan to face trial for his
crimes against humanity or not? Surely there is enough evidence to
convict him.
This op-ed was published by The Daily Times. It is reproduced here
through a special arrangement.
© 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted
in any medium
without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
http://pak-nationalists.blogspot.com/2010/03/paknationalists-bal-thackeray-wanted-by.html
Sid Harth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Subcategories
This category has only the following subcategory.
B
[+] Bofors scandal (10 P)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bofors_scandal
Pages in category "Political scandals in India"
The following 14 pages are in this category, out of 14 total. This
list may not reflect recent changes (learn more).
1
Indian political scandals
1971 Nagarwala scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Nagarwala_scandal
B
Barak Missile scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barak_Missile_scandal
Bofors scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_scandal
C
Cash-for-votes scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash-for-votes_scandal
F
Fodder Scam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fodder_Scam
H
Hawala scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala_scandal
M
Harshad Mehta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harshad_Mehta
Haridas Mundhra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haridas_Mundhra
Q
Ottavio Quattrocchi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottavio_Quattrocchi
S
SNC Lavalin scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNC_Lavalin_scandal
Sukh Ram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukh_Ram
T
Taj corridor case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_corridor_case
Tata Tapes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Tapes_controversy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Political_scandals_in_India
1971 Nagarwala scandal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
On May 24, 1971 , INR 60 lakh (= £330,000) (was withdrawn from the
State Bank of India (Parliament Street branch) and given to a
Bangladesh ka babu or "man from Bangladesh" after the chief cashier,
Ved Prakash Malhotra, got a call purportedly from Indira Gandhi then
Prime Minister of India asking him to do so.
Later it was discovered that former army captain, Rustom Sohrab
Nagarwala, then attached to Indian intelligence or R&AW, collected the
money from Malhotra, by "mimicking the voice of Mrs. Indira Gandhi",
presumably for being diverted to the Mukti Bahini in its guerrilla-
liberation campaign from West Pakistan. Nagarwalla, it was later
alleged, was about to leave that same evening for Nepal. He was
arrested, however, after Malhotra went in person to collect a receipt
from P. N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi's personal secretary, informing him
that the requested payment was done. A stunned Haksar informed
Malhotra that Mrs Gandhi had instructed nothing of the sort and urged
him to inform the police immediately.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%26AW
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukti_Bahini
The opposition parties suspected that the money belonged to Indira
Gandhi. They also alleged that it was not an isolated case.
The investigating officer, D. K. Kashyap, investigating the case was
killed in a car attack. Nagarwala was sentenced for four years and
died in prison in February, 1973. This was due to deliberate neglect
of his increasing ill-health, a point in fact later confirmed in an
official enquiry.
A Commission of Inquiry was set up by Janata Party under Justice P.
Jagan Mohan Reddy on June 9, 1977, to probe into the Nagarwala case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._Jagan_Mohan_Reddy
Justice Jaganmohan Reddy listed four "incontrovertible facts" - one of
them being the fact that Indira Gandhi did not have any account in
that branch - but concluded that they were not sufficient to hold that
the money belonged to her. "There were several lacunae," he said, and
listed them. "To supply an answer to these (lacunae) would force me to
leave the safe haven of facts which required to be established by
evidence and enter the realm of conjectures and speculation." (p.
176).
External links
[1]
India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU
Vol. 15 :: No. 17 :: August 15 - 28, 1998
JAIN COMMISSION REPORT
A law unto itself
The Jain Commission has run amuck, flouting the Commissions of Inquiry
Act, its own terms of reference, the rules of natural justice and the
norms of the judicial function.
A. G. NOORANI
JUSTICE M.C. JAIN has driven a coach and four through the law in his
Final Report. Let us consider first the law and, next, Jain's conduct.
Section 3 of the Commissions of Inquiry Act puts a strong fetter on
the Government as well as the Lok Sabha's power to appoint a
Commission of Inquiry. A Commission can be appointed only "for the
purpose of making an inquiry into any definite matter of public
importance." In the case of a former Chief Minister of Bihar, K. B.
Sahay, the Supreme Court said: "If the charges were vague or
speculative suggesting a fishing expedition, we would have paused to
consider whether such an inquiry should be allowed to proceed." (AIR
1969 S.C. 258 to 262; emphasis added, throughout).
The Royal Commission on Tribunals of Inquiry headed by Lord Justice
Salmon noted realistically that "as the agitation for an inquiry is
very often the result of nothing more than general allegation and
rumour, it is necessary to keep the Tribunal within reasonable
bounds... The Act lays down ... that what is to be inquired into shall
be a 'definite matter'. Accordingly, no Tribunal should be set up to
investigate a nebulous mass of vague and unspecified rumours. The
reference should confine the inquiry to the investigation of the
definite matter which is causing a crisis of public confidence. (1966;
Cmnd. 3121, p. 30, para 78). The Commissions of Inquiry Act of 1952 is
based on the British statute, the Tribunals of Inquiry (Evidence) Act,
1921.
The Jain Commission did just that - launch a fishing expedition spread
over seven years. Similar violations of the law by the Thakkar
Commission that inquired into Indira Gandhi's assassination and the
Thakkar-Natarajan Commission that inquired into the Fairfax case have
gone unnoticed. Secondly, appointed to inquire into a "definite"
matter of public importance, the Commission's report must be based on
legal evidence and it must either give a finding of fact or decline to
do so if the evidence is inadequate. It is utterly impermissible for
it to voice "suspicion", whether directly or indirectly. To mention
mere "possibilities" as distinct from probabilities and refuse to
"rule out" some is calculatedly to raise a suspicion that they did
occur, the lack of evidence notwithstanding. No judicial exercise, be
it in a court of law or an inquiry, can indulge in such an exercise.
The third violation of the law is as gross and occurs despite an
important but overlooked ruling of the Supreme Court. No Commission of
Inquiry has any right to recommend prosecution or interrogation of any
individual. On December 11, 1956, the Government of India set up a
Commission of Inquiry to go into the affairs of companies controlled
by Ramkrishna Dalmia and his associates. Clause 10 of the terms of
reference of the Commission directed it to inquire into "any
irregularities" in those firms, except those in respect of which
criminal proceedings were pending in a court of law and to recommend
thus "and the action which in the opinion of the Commission should be
taken as and by way of securing redress or punishment or to act as a
preventive in future cases."
This part of Clause 10 was struck down by the Bombay High Court and
the Supreme Court. In the High Court, Chief Justice M. C. Chagla ruled
that it was not open to the Commission "to point out to the Union
Government what civil or criminal action can be taken with regard to
these breaches of law" under the new Companies Act. That was "beyond
the legislative competence of Parliament". The Commission was asked
"to inform the Government in order that Government should launch civil
or criminal proceedings. Now, such an investigation can only be
instituted by means of the judicial process and not through the device
of a Commission."
Justice Chagla amplified: "It is not open to the Government by this
notification to put any individual in the position of an accused, to
constitute a Commission to investigate into any offence that he might
have committed, and to place before it materials collected so that on
the strength of those materials a prosecution could be launched.... it
would be competent to Government to get information with regard to
breaches of law, so that legislation may be passed to prevent such
breaches in future, and there is no reason to suggest why breaches of
law referred to in the first part of Clause (10) were to be
investigated into only for the purpose of instituting civil or
criminal proceedings and not also for the purpose of legislation. In
our opinion, therefore, the last part of Clause (10) from the words
"and the action" to "in future cases" is ultra vires of the Act and
the Government is not competent to require the Commission to make any
report with regard to these matters (Ram Krishna Dalmia vs. Mr.
Justice S. P. Tendulkar 59, Bom.L.R. 769 at 775).
The ruling was upheld by a unanimous judgment of a Constitution Bench
of the Supreme Court delivered by Chief Justice S. R. Das. He held
that "there can be no objection even to the Commission of Inquiry
recommending the imposition of some form of punishment which will, in
its opinion, be sufficiently deterrent to delinquents in future. But
seeing that the Commission of Inquiry has no judicial powers and its
report will purely be recommendatory and not effective proprio vigor
and the statement made by any person before the Commission of Inquiry
is, under Section 6 of the Act, wholly inadmissible in evidence in any
future proceedings, civil or criminal, there can be no point in the
Commission of Inquiry making recommendations for taking any action 'as
and by way of securing redress or punishment' which, in agreement with
the High Court, we think, refers in the context to wrongs already done
or committed; for redress or punishment for such wrongs, if any, has
to be imposed by a Court of law properly constituted exercising its
own discretion on the facts and circumstances of the case and without
being in any way influenced by the view of any person or body,
howsoever august or high-powered it may be. Having regard to all these
considerations it appears to us that only that portion of the last
part of Clause(10) which calls upon the Commission of Inquiry to make
recommendations about the action to be taken 'as and by way of
securing redress or punishment' cannot be said to be at all necessary
for or ancillary to the purposes of the Commission." (AIR 1958 S.C.
538).
If the Jain Report is invalid on this score, the Action Taken Report
(ATR) falls with it. Section 3(4) of the Act was amended in 1971 to
bind the Government to lay before the Lok Sabha (or the State
Assembly, as the case may be) the Commission's report "together with a
memorandum of the action taken thereon within a period of six months
from the submission of the report by the Commission..." The
Government's ATR must be based on the Commission's Report
("thereon").
Fourthly, while Commissions of Inquiry are not bound by the Indian
Evidence Act, 1872, they are not free to disregard the principles
underlying it. The Law Commission's 24th Report (1962) on the Act
quoted G.W. Keeton's remarks in his classic Trial by Tribunal (1960):
"When the question of the involvement of a particular person in a
particular transaction is under consideration, however, the Tribunal
restricts itself to the facts admissible under the normal rules of
evidence." The Law Commission said approvingly: "We recommend that the
same practice should be followed in our country also." It did not
recommend any statutory provision lest "a rigid provision may defeat
the very object of the Act; namely, to find out the truth." But in its
pursuit, speculation cannot be substituted for evidence.
In 1970, Justice Y. V. Chandrachud said in his report on the
circumstances relating to the death of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya: "I have
to grapple with quite a mass of irrelevant and hearsay evidence.... I
could not reject that evidence on the ground of its inadmissiblity
under the Evidence Act but that does not mean that I must accept it as
good evidence" (p. 7). For instance, the Evidence Act makes
inadmissible opinion evidence except in some specific cases such as
handwriting or expert evidence (Sections 45 to 51). It is not open to
a person to say, for instance, that in his opinion, X conspired to
murder Y. He can only depose to facts within his personal knowledge.
Jain declared open season on assassination "theories". The Radcliffe
Tribunal, set up to probe into allegations in the press on espionage
and breaches of security in the Admiralty, noted that "most of these
statements, it turned out, were either pure comment expressed in the
form of assertion of fact or else inferences put together from other
readily accessible sources... Our only function, as we have seen it,
is to try to report on the facts coming before us in our inquiry..."
Fifthly, if the Report must be based on facts, not opinions, what must
be the standard of proof of the facts? Section 3 of the Evidence Act
simply says that "a fact is said to be proved when, after considering
the matters before it, the court either believes it to exist, or
considers its existence so probable that a prudent person ought, under
the circumstances of the particular case, to act upon the supposition
that it exists." There is a similar formulation in regard to a
situation in which a fact is "disproved". In contrast is the
definition of "not proved" - "neither proved nor disproved". That is
the honest course when evidence is inadequate. To seek refuge in
suspicion when there is no proof is unjudicial. To arraign people on
suspicion is unjust.
IT is all right to decide civil disputes on a balance of
probabilities. But no "prudent man" will inflict punishment save on
the basis of proof beyond reasonable doubt, the rule in criminal
cases. The S.R. Das Commission on Partap Singh Kairon insisted on the
stricter standard of proof. For, "No individual shall be condemned on
suspicion, however strong. " The Evidence Act does not apply but its
fundamentals do.
The J. R. Vimadalal Commission's Report (1978) on J. Vengala Rao,
former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, opted for a lower standard
but held that "the graver the consequence of a finding in regard to a
particular allegation, the higher should be the preponderance of
probability which a Commission of Inquiry should require to be
established, before it holds a fact to be proved and arrives at a
finding to that effect."
T.A. HAFEEZ
D.R. Karthikeyan, chief of the Special Investigation Team and later
Director of the CBI.
These Commissions were concerned with charges of abuse of power by
Chief Ministers. How much more stringent must be the standard of proof
in a case in which the allegation is culpable neglect that leads to
murder or actual complicity in it? No prudent person would accept any
other test but proof beyond reasonable doubt.
There was a Commission of Inquiry which had to probe into a bizarre
case seven years later. It was honest enough to pronounce "not proved"
despite proven indications that could legitimately create suspicion in
a layperson's mind. The Judge refused to endorse suspicions despite
the fact that he detested the policies of the person under suspicion,
Indira Gandhi. Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy, one of the finest judges
to have sat on, was appointed as Commission of Inquiry on June 9,
1977, to probe into the Nagarwala case. On May 24, 1971, R. S.
Nagarwala was able to take out Rs. 60 lakhs from the State Bank of
India's Parliament Street branch by "mimicking the voice of Mrs.
Indira Gandhi" to Chief Cashier Ved Prakash Malhotra. Nagarwala died
of heart attack in prison. Neglect by the authorities was patent. The
investigating officer, D. K. Kashyap, was killed in a car attack. If
Milap Chand Jain had been let loose on the case at the behest of the
Government, a mountain of suspicion would have been raised. Justice
Jaganmohan Reddy only listed four "incontrovertible facts" - one of
them being the fact that Indira Gandhi did not have any account in
that branch - but concluded that they were not sufficient to hold that
the money belonged to her. "There were several lacunae," he said, and
listed them. "To supply an answer to these (lacunae) would force me to
leave the safe haven of facts which required to be established by
evidence and enter the realm of conjectures and speculation." (p.
176). He did not talk of "needles of suspicion" nor direct a "finger
of suspicion".
Lastly, a Commission's report is very much open to judicial review. It
can be quashed by the High Court or the Supreme Court if, among other
things, it has failed to abide by the rules of evidence or if its
reasoning is illogical grossly. The Privy Council set aside the Report
of a New Zealand Royal Commission set up under the Commissions of
Inquiry Act, 1908. It applied the established rules of evidence, that
is, ".... the person making a finding... must base his decision upon
evidence that has some probative value.... What is required... is that
the finding must be based upon some material that tends logically to
show the existence of facts consistent with the finding and that the
reasoning supportive of the finding, if it be disclosed, is not
logically self-contradictory." Judicial review is allowed in relation
to "primary facts... not supported by any probative evidence" and to
"reasoning by which the decision-maker justify inferences of fact that
he had drawn (but) is self-contradictory or otherwise based upon an
evident logical fallacy."
Jain's Report would collapse if these six legal principles were
applied to it. Courts in India have for over a century decided
conspiracy cases. Jain could not apply the law because it would
demolish his suspicions or conspiracy theories. Nor could he
articulate them without contradicting himself. Sample this from Volume
VI (p.29): "The standard proof is very high in criminal trial and it
is difficult to collect such evidence in a case where people feel that
there is deeper conspiracy, national and international. The theory of
conducting the investigation from the scene of crime to the criminal
may sometimes unearth the whole conspiracy but it is also very likely
that the whole conspiracy may not be unravelled even after reaching to
the executors of the conspiracy from the scene of the crime. In a case
of the present nature, in which even the main culprits were not
available as they have consumed cyanide and died or are absconding, it
is all the more difficult to unearth the conspiracy if any behind the
LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)." Mark the words "if any."
ANU PUSHKARNA
Justice Milap Chand Jain.
This special pleading is followed by these bold assertions: "In a
Commission of Inquiry, the inadmissible evidence in a Court of Law can
form the basis of factual findings and the standard of proof is not so
strict before the Commission of Inquiry. The factual findings can be
recorded on the basis of even probabilities."
THE entire Volume II on "persons/agencies responsible for the
assassination" rests on opinions aired and theories spun heedless of
implausibilities and contradictions. The Khalistan Guerilla Force
(KGF) issued a press note on May 22, 1991, the day after the
assassination, claiming responsibility for the crime jointly with the
LTTE. The blast, it said, was made with '''satellite wave control'
with the help of computer at a distance of 60 kms... about 90
persons... have been killed." Instant rejection would have been a
sound response even in 1991. In 1998 no sensible person would waste a
minute on this.
Jain dwells on it at length and ties himself up in knots: "The press
note may be fake but it does point to a link with the LTTE." A fake
provides guidance: "The Sikh militant group solely has not claimed
responsibility. Any group by the name of Khalistan Guerilla Force may
be non-existent. The group could have claimed the sole responsibility
but it has not done so. If a fake responsibility was to be claimed,
the group could have come out with claiming sole responsibility. But
the note clearly makes out that it is not only the job of LTTE but
there is some other force also behind the LTTE." So, whether the KGF's
press note was fake or not, it "proves" a "wider conspiracy" to Jain's
satisfaction. Such logic surfaces again on page 118: "Unless there is
some link, it is inconceivable that such a claim would have been made
in the press release that the assassination has been done in
collaboration with the LTTE. It is quite possible that this may be
with a view to mislead the investigation and instead of directing
investigation towards the LTTE, it may take up investigation against
the Khalistani extremists. But the question is how such a press
release appeared on 22-5-1991 claiming assassination by the terrorist
groups mentioned therein... The information contained therein
regarding the method of blast with a satellite control system, may
also be incorrect and this information may also be incorrect that
Chintamani Raman has been baptised Sikh by taking Amrit at a
Gurudwara."
"Without attaching any significance to these informations (sic.), the
very fact of the press release having been issued the same night
involving the two different terrorist organisations becomes relevant
and assumes importance from the point of view of establishing link
between the two, and therefore it is quite possible that they may have
acted in concert on the basis of which the press release was issued."
Such contradictions invalidate the Report.
The record shows that in December 1990, Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar
sent Mahant Sewa Dass Singh to London at government expense to bring
around Jagjit Singh Chohan and score a "victory" by "settling" the
Punjab problem. The Mahant claimed that Chohan told him of a plan to
assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. On May 28, 1991, he wrote to the President:
"The anti-India forces are diverting the attention from the killers by
blaming the Tamils or LTTE. The LTTE has repeatedly denied that they
have hand in the killing of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi. So I request to your
goodself to ask the Government to direct the energies towards the real
killers." Which Judge would waste his time on such a witness?
This letter was produced by D. R. Karthikeyan, then Joint Director of
the Central Bureau of Investigation and head of the Special
Investigation Team (SIT), when he appeared before Jain on September
19, 1997. It did not worry Jain one bit. The Mahant also said: "The
theory about the human bomb is all non-sense." Why? Because Chohan
"himself told me this when I spoke to him on telephone after the
assassination."
A professional investigator, Karthikeyan saw through the Mahant as any
educated person would. Yet, Jain pressed him to accept other
"possibilities". He writes: "On being questioned as to whether he
rules out any possibility of any conspiracy beyond LTTE, or is there
any conspiracy behind LTTE or behind the persons who have been
prosecuted, the witness replied that Shri Rajiv Gandhi being a dynamic
leader taking bold decisions in many fields, there may have been many
groups inimical to him and many conspiracies also. Thus, there are any
number of possibilities of any one of those numerous inimical groups
targeting him. As an investigator, what he can speak about is about
the conspiracy that actually fructified in the killing of Shri Rajiv
Gandhi on 21-5-1991 at Sriperumbudur. He, however, stated that he
agrees that there are possibilities of other groups inimical to Shri
Rajiv Gandhi joining hands with an organisation like the LTTE to
eliminate him but his submission is that he is talking about
probabilities and not possibilities, and according to him involvement
of any other terrorist group was most improbable and stated that LTTE
is not just a mercenary who can be made to do a task by somebody else
looking to their thinking, the making and the philosophy of the LTTE,
and he expressed his firm opinion that in this operation, LTTE acted
alone."
The contrast between the two attitudes emerges starkly and to the
Judge's disadvantage in Volume V on the 21 suspects, in Chapter X on
the SIT's stand "on theories (sic) beyond LTTE." Karthikeyan told him
that "there is hardly anything either in its investigation or from
intelligence from any quarter to lend credibility to and sustain such
theories and hypothesis. In the absence of any evidence they have to
remain as such for ever in the realm of endless speculation." He said
emphatically: "I, as the leader of the Team, my officers and the
prosecutors are confident that there is very little scope of
involvement of any person or group beyond the LTTE and the 41 persons
charged by us" - notwithstanding the difficulties in investigating a
conspiracy several of whose participants were dead or beyond reach.
Jain's comment on this defies belief: "His statement does not
completely rule out the possibility of involvement beyond LTTE and
beyond the 41 charge-sheeted accused persons." This deliberate
misconstruction is followed by the admission that "the Commission has
done that exercise to the extent possible" - a pursuit of
"possibilities" followed by airing of suspicions.
It is in this context that Jain criticises the SIT for not
interrogating six public figures, including Chandra Shekhar and
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam president M. Karunanidhi. Regardless of that
"failure" by the SIT, "the evidence and circumstances on some theories
examined by the Commission do point some accusing finger on some
agencies, organisations, outfits or individuals. The Government may
adopt such course of action as it may think fit in respect
thereto." (Volume V; Page 361). In law, a Commission of Inquiry can
only return a finding based on evidence or decline to do so because
the evidence is inadequate, as Justice Jaganmohan Reddy did. No
Commission has the right to point "an accusing finger" on the basis of
"theories" it has examined. No Government is entitled to act on such
suspicion and launch a witchhunt.
But the "accusing finger" is waved all over the Report and
recommendations for action by way of investigation or interrogation
abound (Volume II, pp. 202 and 231). This is not the remit the
Commission was given. It is unable to give a finding after years of
inquiry and expects others to do better. "No definite clinching
evidence establishing the link between Khalistani extremists and LTTE
has come before the Commission but the circumstances as considered
above do warrant further probe. "But, surely, there was to be some
finality to the Final Report. The Commission's order of July 2, 1993
said that "a thorough probe is needed leaving no areas including the
areas covered by the charge-sheet". That was five years ago. After
nearly seven years of labour, the Jain Commission can do no more than
urge "further scrutiny, examination and action in accordance with
law," in respect of the 21 suspects it names. But, as Jain himself
admitted, "This Commission is required to prove the criminal
conspiracy. It has to find out the persons and agencies responsible
for conceiving, preparing and planning the assassination of Shri Rajiv
Gandhi and whether there was any conspiracy behind it."
THE ATR is motivated. Tongue firmly in cheek, it quotes the Interim
and Final Reports together on some points to establish, without
comment, Jain's inconsistencies. On his quaint notions of evidence,
the ATR says: "While noting this observation of the Commission,
Government understand that any probe must eventually result in
judicially admissible evidence." Yet the "foreign hand" will be
"examined in depth" by the Ministries of External Affairs and Home,
and the I.B. and the RAW, all of which have nothing better to do,
apparently. The ATR accepts the stand of the CBI and the judgment of
the Designated Court generally and specifically, on the 21 suspects
except in regard to Kumaran Padmanathan and Subbulakshmi Jagadeesan,
oddly enough. The MDMA will also target Karunanidhi on the basis of
"serious observations" in the Interim Report although the Final Report
declares that "there is no indictment in the Interim Report of any
individual" (volume VI, p. 60). The MDMA will be an instrument of the
Government.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has good reason to be happy with Jain. He
brought down the United Front Government and has this to say of the
Godse case: "There was a conspiracy theory in the assassination of
Mahatma Gandhi. The RSS was banned and Savarkar was charged-sheeted
and finally the political leaders were exonerated. The conspiracy as
to who was responsible for the assassination of the Father of the
Nation - not the particular Nathu Ram Godse who pulled the trigger -
remains yet to be unveiled." He is wrong. The RSS was accused even by
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel - who would have liked it to join the
Congress - of spreading "communal poison". On September 11, 1948,
Patel wrote to RSS chief M. S. Golwalkar: "As a final result of the
poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life
of Gandhiji. Even an iota of the sympathy of the Government or of the
people no more remained for the RSS. In fact, opposition grew.
Opposition turned more severe when the RSS men expressed joy and
distributed sweets after Gandhiji's death." Patel wrote to Hindu
Mahasabha leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee on July 18, 1948: "Our
reports do confirm that, as a result of the activities of these two
bodies (RSS and Hindu Mahasabha), particularly the former, an
atmosphere was created in the country in which such a ghastly tragedy
became possible..." Mahasabha president V. D. Savarkar was acquitted,
despite the fact that the approver badge was found to be a reliable
witness only because there was no independent corroboration of the
approver's evidence as the law strictly required.
[2]
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1030627/asp/nation/story_2107442.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Nagarwala_scandal
Hawala scandal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hawala scandal or hawala scam was an Indian political scandal
involving payments allegedly received by politicians through hawala
brokers, the Jain brothers. It was a US$18 million bribery scandal
that implicated some of the country's leading politicians. There were
also alleged connections with payments being channelled to Hizbul
Mujahideen militants in Kashmir.[1]
Those accused included L. K. Advani, Madhav Rao Scindia, Arjun Singh,
V. C. Shukla, P. Shiv Shankar, Moti Lal Vora, Ajit Panja, Sharad
Yadav, Balram Jakhar and Madan Lal Khurana. Many were acquitted in
1997 and 1998, partly because the hawala records (including diaries)
were judged in court to be inadequate as the main evidence.[2] The
failure of this prosecution by the Central Bureau of Investigation was
widely criticised.[3]
See also
Vineet Narain, the journalist who broke the story
Further reading
Kapoor, S. (1996), Bad Money, Bad Politics: The Untold Hawala Story,
Har–Anand Publications, Delhi - cited (p.22) by Ashok V. Desai in The
Economics and Politics of Transition to an Open Market Economy: India,
OECD Working Paper 155 accessed at [4] Nov 2, 2006
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/18/3/1921937.pdf
Hawala. An Informal Payment System and Its Use to Finance Terrorism by
Sebastian R. Müller (Dec. 2006), ISBN 3-8655-0656-9
Notes
^ Open letter to Prime Minister of India Narsimhanrao, Canadian
Journalists for Free Expression, July 16, 2001 accessed at [1] Nov 2,
2006
http://www.cjfe.org/protestlets/2001/indiag16.html
^ Sudha Mahalingam, Jain Hawala Case: Diaries as evidence, Frontline
magazine, Vol.15: No.06: Mar 21 - Apr 3, 1998, accessed at [2] Nov 2,
2006
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1506/15060270.htm
^ A glaring CBI failure, editorial, The Tribune, Feb 2, 2000 accessed
at [3] Nov 2, 2006
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2000/20000202/edit.htm#1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala_scandal
A glaring CBI failure
EVEN by its own abysmal standard, the CBI hit a new low of
incompetence on Monday. The hawala case involving Jains and several
top leaders and a few bureaucrats just disappeared into history
without leaving any scar. The last chargesheet has been thrown out by
a court. In Delhi again, a sessions judge reprimanded the agency for
trying to distort records to secure the release of a person from whose
house it had recovered nearly a kilo of opium. In Calcutta, it found
its case against the only Indian link in the Purulia arms dropping
case was thrown out a the court, which lamented that there was nothing
on record to link the Ananda Marg with the frightening operation
although it is apparent that it was the intended recipient. For one
day it is a distressingly long list of fiascos and worse. For those
who are struggling to come out of the shock acquittal of the accused
in the Priyadarshini Mattoo case, the latest clutch of failures must
be a painful reminder.
The hawala case once appeared to be clear cut but the CBI succeeded in
converting it into a ridiculously porous one. It had the dairy of
Jains, several computer disks and it also had a detailed confessional
statement by one of the brothers. All it had to do was to collect
circumstantial evidence by painstaking leg work and, yes, its
homework. Instead it sent in for its hack writer and wove a story on
the basis of the diary, some loose sheets and the confession. The
court held the paper proof as inadmissible thereby nearly killing the
prosecution case. When Mr S.K. Jain retracted his statement the CBI
charge looked flat like a table without legs. Only the last rites
remained and they were performed on Monday. In the West, money-
laundering and tax fraud are considered serious economic offences and
there are independent investigating agencies to chase and punish the
guilty. Big names had been jailed within a very short time. The hawala
case would have most certainly ended in a string of conviction if the
CBI had pursued the leads with a degree of diligence and commitment.
For instance, it hurled very serious allegations against Mr Arif
Mohammed Khan but failed to find any evidence to prop them up. It
means that either the charges were flippand and false or the agency is
lazy and stupid.
The arms dropping case is as serious in terms of national security as
the hawala case is in terms of economic security. Yet only a bunch of
mercenaries face a jail term and the real criminals are free. It is
like shooting the messenger for bringing an unpleasant message. Who
organised the gun running, which the court says, could disturb the
entire region? In other words, what was the purpose or the motive?
Again, who or what stood to gain by receiving this deadly cargo? Those
who read the escapades of Sherlock Holmes in their school days will
know that the clue to solving a crime is to search for the motive and
the likely beneficiary. The CBI obviously has not learnt this basic
lesson. It has a weak alibi in the fact that seven other accused are
absconding and they are all, apart from Davy, avaduts and anands,
meaning members of the Anand Marg cult. As the judge has curtly
remarked, the CBI had conveniently concluded that the cult had ordered
the arms and since its three-storeyed white building in the area was
the focus of dropping, the charge stood established. But the court
cannot go only on circumstantial evidence even if it is as compelling
as in this case; there must be strong basis to accept it as
substantial evidence. So he acquitted a local cult member and for the
present cleared even the Ananda Marg of any link with the gun running.
India is wracked by armed insurgency and yet a bunch of amateurs are
able to sneak into the country to dump several crates of arms and
ammunition with precision and the CBI, thanks to their chance arrest
at Mumbai airport, can only proceed against five wretched crew members
and a flamboyant sub-leader. What is the message the CBI is sending to
potential economic pirates and arms smugglers? It is terrifying.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2000/20000202/edit.htm#1
His Excellency Atal Behari Vajpayee
Prime Minister, Republic of India
Office of the Prime Minister
New Delhi, India
110 011
Fax: +91 11 301 6857
July 16, 2001
Your Excellency,
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), a non-profit, non-
governmental organization dedicated to fighting for freedom of
expression as stipulated in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, wishes to protest the recent prosecution of Vineet
Narain, editor of the New Delhi-based investigative journal Kalchakra.
Contempt of court charges issued by the Jammu and Kashmir State were
brought against Narain as a result of the paper's investigation into
Jammu and Kashmir High Court justice T.S. Doabia's involvement in
resolving a land dispute. The article in question was published in the
December 16, 2000 issue of Kalchakra. In it, it was suggested that a
friendship with Indian Supreme Court chief justice A.S. Anand (former
chief justice of the Jammu/Kashmir High Court) had unjustifiably
influenced Doabia's decisions to help Anand secure legal victories for
close family members and associates in various property disputes.
Mr Narain made a request to the High Court for a venue change (to New
Delhi) for the court hearing, yet was instead granted relocation to
Jammu, a place he feels threatened for his life. Mr Narain says he
fears threats posed by militant groups in Kashmir who were angered by
his investigations into their underground funding networks. Mr Narain
is well known in India for exposing the so-called hawala scam, a US$18
million dollar bribery scandal that implicated some of the country's
leading politicians. He reported that some of those allegedly involved
in channelling payoffs to politicians were also responsible for
transferring money to militant groups in Kashmir, including the Hezb-
ul Mujahedeen. The Indian government acknowledged the potential threat
to Mr Narain's safety by providing him with special security
protection between 1996 and 1998, at the height of efforts to
prosecute those involved in the hawala scandal. Now, however, Mr
Narain feels that local officials have essentially ignored all
requests for his protection while in Kashmir.
CJFE believes that this case demonstrates an abuse of the contempt of
court law, which should never be used to shield members of the
judiciary from scrutiny by the press. CJFE asks for a prompt inquiry
into the possible political motivations behind Mr Narain's prosecution
as well as to provide him with protection if required to appear in
court in Jammu.
Sincerely,
Sharmini Peries
Executive Director
http://www.cjfe.org/protestlets/2001/indiag16.html
JAIN HAWALA CASE
Diaries as evidence
The Supreme Court has acquitted L.K. Advani and V.C. Shukla in the
Jain hawala case. However, in admitting that the Jain diaries are
admissible evidence, the court has paved the way for prosecution in
cases where the payoffs indicated are corroborated by other evidence.
SUDHA MAHALINGAM
THE acquittal of L.K. Advani and V.C. Shukla of the charges of
corruption and criminal conspiracy in the Jain hawala case
overshadowed certain other important aspects of the Supreme Court
verdict that was delivered on March 2. One of these is the reversal of
the position the Delhi High Court had taken on the admissibility of
the Jain diaries as evidence. A three-member Bench of the apex court,
comprising Justices M.K. Mukherjee, S.P. Kurdukar and K.T. Thomas,
ruled that one of the diaries presented by the prosecution was
admissible as evidence under Section 34 of the Indian Evidence Act,
1872.
Justice M. Shamim of the Delhi High Court, who too had acquitted
Advani and Shukla, had taken the view that the entries made in the
Jain diaries "can be used only by way of corroboration to other pieces
of evidence" that the prosecution had at its disposal. In other words,
the diaries could not be used as lead or sole evidence. The Central
Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which investigated the cases, had
appealed to the apex court against this order.
While reversing this position of the High Court, the apex court held
that the entries in one of the diaries, MR 71/91, would be admissible
under Section 34 of the Indian Evidence Act. In doing so, the court
interpreted the provisions of Section 34 to give them their "ordinary,
natural and grammatical meaning" and not a restrictive meaning since
the context or the principle of construction did not warrant it.
According to Section 34, "entries in books of account, regularly kept
in the course of business, are relevant" as evidence. Both prosecution
and defence counsel placed emphasis on the interpretation of the key
words in the section. Defence counsel Kapil Sibal argued that while
the diaries and spiral pads recovered from the residence of the Jains
were "books" within the meaning of Section 34, they were not
admissible as evidence since neither were they "books of account" nor
were they "regularly kept" in the course of "business". Sibal argued
that "account" meant a formal statement of money transactions between
parties arising out of a contractual or a fiduciary relationship. His
contention was that these "books of account" did not relate to a
"business" nor were they "regularly kept".
SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
L.K. Advani
Additional Solicitor-General Altaf Ahmed, who appeared for the
prosecution, argued that the High Court's interpretation of the words
"books of account" and "business" in the above section was a truncated
view. It disabled law from "dealing with illicit business and
situations connected therewith, such as the case in hand where a
conspiracy was hatched to receive money through hawala channels and
other sources and to distribute it as bribes to politicians to
influence favourable decisions from them."
He argued that the word "business" under Section 34 should receive the
widest possible meaning and should be understood and construed to mean
and include all such efforts of people, which, by varied methods of
dealing with each other, were designed to improve their individual
economic conditions and satisfy their desires.
The apex court interpreted the words "account", "books of account",
"business" and "regularly kept" in a general sense. Since the entries
made in the document in question were totalled and balanced, the court
held that the document was a "book of account" recording monetary
transactions that were duly reckoned, rather than a memorandum book.
While interpreting the word "business", it upheld earlier judgments to
mean a real, substantial and systematic or organised course of
activity or conduct with a set purpose. Since the Jains carried on
their activities continuously in an organised manner with a set
purpose (be it illegal) to augment their own resources, the court
ruled that MR 71/91 was a book of account kept in the course of
business. In deciding that the "books of account" were indeed
"regularly kept", the court relied on the relevance of the nature of
occupation of the parties involved.
However, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal of the CBI on the
ground that there was no independent evidence to indicate that the
amounts paid by the Jain brothers, were actually received by the
"recipients". Hence, the Bench observed that the recipients could not
be held liable under Section 34. The Judges observed: "Since, however,
an element of self-interest and partisanship of the entrant to make a
person - behind whose back and without whose knowledge the entry is
made - liable cannot be ruled out, the additional safeguard of
insistence upon their independent evidence to fasten him with such
liability has been provided for in Section 34 by incorporating the
words 'such statements shall not alone be sufficient to charge any
person with liability'."
Referring to the statements of the four witnesses who had admitted
receipts of payments as shown against them in MR 71/91, the Supreme
Court held that they could at best be proof of reliability of the
entries so far as they were concerned and not others. In other words,
it maintained that the statements of the witnesses could not be
independent evidence under Section 34 as against the two respondents
in this case.
One important implication of the apex court's ruling is that it has
changed the perception about the cohesiveness of the Jain diaries/
hawala case in which, it was believed, all the accused would stand or
fall together. In admitting that the diaries are admissible evidence,
the court has paved the way for the prosecution to proceed at least in
those cases where the payoffs indicated in the diaries have been
corroborated by other evidence. The CBI had filed 34 charge-sheets in
the court of the Special Judge against powerful individuals across the
political spectrum. While the investigative agency claims to have
obtained corroborative evidence against most of the accused either
through independent investigation of their bank accounts, passports,
official documents, circumstantial evidence or in the form of evidence
relating to favours rendered as quid pro quo for payments, it remains
to be seen which of these will stand fresh judicial scrutiny in the
light of the present judgment. The Special Courts dismissed most of
these cases, some of them at the stage of charge-sheeting itself, on
various grounds. The CBI has appealed to the higher courts in respect
of every case.
SANDEEP SAXENA
V.C. Shukla
The apex court also went into the conspiracy theory under Section 10
of the Indian Evidence Act, 1972. Counsel for the CBI had submitted
that material collected during the investigation and placed on record
clearly established the existence of a general conspiracy among the
accused Jains to promote their economic interest by corrupting public
servants. He had also contended that a number of separate conspiracies
with similar purpose had been hatched between the Jains and various
public servants. However, since the agency had failed to file a charge-
sheet against the Jains for having entered into a criminal conspiracy
among themselves, the court did not even consider the matter.
Statements made by certain witnesses, which were furnished by the CBI,
were found to be either irrelevant to the charges of conspiracy or
insufficient as reasonable ground to believe that all of them had
conspired together.
The CBI appears to have bungled in not having framed a charge of
conspiracy among the accused Jains to offer illegal gratification to
Advani and Shukla. It had framed charges of two separate conspiracies,
in both of which the Jains together figured as the common party and
Advani and Shukla as the other. Advani had been accused of receiving
Rs.25 lakhs from the Jains when he was a member of Parliament (besides
the Rs. 35 lakhs he allegedly received when he was not an MP). In the
charge-sheet filed against Shukla and the Jains, it was alleged that
during 1988-91, when Shukla was an MP and a Cabinet Minister, he
allegedly received Rs. 39 lakhs from the Jains. The Jains were charged
with abetment under Section 12 of the Prevention of Corruption Act
(PCA).
The court held that since it found no prima facie evidence of
corruption under Section 7 of the PCA against Advani and Shukla, the
question of abetment did not arise. Advani's name did not even figure
in M 71/91, the diary admitted as evidence and in the case of Shukla,
the evidence was insufficient, the court said. The Bench held that
where no offence had been committed, the question of aiding or
abetting it did not arise.
Since no prima facie case had been established against the two
respondents, the Bench did not deem it necessary to go into the
question of whether an MP came within the definition of a 'public
servant' under the PCA so as to make the respondents liable for
prosecution for alleged commission of offences that attracted the
provisions of the Act.
India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU
Vol. 15 :: No. 06 :: Mar. 21 - Apr. 3, 1998
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1506/15060270.htm
Vineet Narain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vineet Narain (born 1956) is a prominent Indian journalist and anti-
corruption activist. His exposure of the 1990s Hawala scandal led him
to use a public interest petition to apply pressure on the Central
Bureau of Investigation. The CBI was widely criticised when its
prosecutions collapsed, and the Supreme Court of India in deciding the
Vineet Narain Case made directions that included new supervision of
the CBI by the Central Vigilance Commission.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Bureau_of_Investigation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Vigilance_Commission
Family and early life
Born in 1956, Vineet Narain had his primary education in Western Uttar
Pradesh and did his higher studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University in
New Delhi. His father was an academician and served as the Vice
Chancellor of two prominent universities in U.P. He fought against
interference of the political masters in the admission procedure of
some of the professional courses in the state.[citation needed] His
mother was active in students politics at the Lucknow University. Her
father was then the Secretary of the UP Legislative Council.
Narain married outside his caste. His wife is an assistant professor
of Russian language at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She
was educated at Modern School in New Delhi. His eldest son Azeez
Narain is a manager in Tata Administrative Services (TAS). His younger
son, Eeshit Narain is an independent film maker based in Delhi
<ShreeJee Productions>.
Narain was drawn to social work from his early youth. He worked in a
village at the age of 18 years with an NGO.
Hawala Scam
Vineet Narain was responsible for bringing the Hawala scandal to light.
[citation needed] 115 top bureaucrats were identified as having
participated in the scam.[citation needed] Case No.340-43 of 1993,
Supreme Court of India
The case got a momentary boost up as a result of a PIL (Public
Interest Litigation) filed in the Supreme Court.[citation needed] In
1996 for the first time in Indian history, several cabinet ministers,
chief ministers and governors were charge-sheeted.Out of them the
person who is still on the run is EX-M.P -Chandravijay Singh from
Moradabad for land scams and legal paper forgery-booked under the high
court NEW-DELHI.[citation needed] Several landmark decisions were
passed by the Supreme Court of India in the Vineet Narain Vs Union of
India and Ors case.[unreliable source?][2]
In July 1997, Mr. Narain compelled the Chief Justice of India comment
on the Hawala case. He wrote a book on the case entitled Hawala ke
Deshdrohi or Dangerous Silence.
Indian Judiciary
Narain brought out a series of land scams involving of one of the
sitting chief justices of India.[citation needed] As a result,
contempt of court proceedings were initiated against him and he fled
the country.[3] Later on, due to the intervention of various
international organisations like Committee to Protect Journalists, all
the proceedings against him were withdrawn.[4]
TV Journalism in India
He launched Kalchakra, the first Hindi-language video magazine, in
1989. He faced hurdles due to financial crisis and by the government
controlled censor board. He writes a weekly syndicated column in
several regional daily newspapers.
Earlier he worked as a correspondent of national dailies and has
appeared in programmes on several international television networks.
[citation needed] He began investigative TV journalism in 1980. TV &
Video World reported, "It may sound surprising, but men of principles,
willing to take tough stand and unwilling to compromise on basic
ideals, still exist in our society. When, in April 1987, one of his
programmes in the Sach Ki Parchhain series was arbitrarily stopped by
Doordarshan authorities, its producer, TV and newspaper journalist
Vineet Narain vowed never to present anything on the government-
controlled network until it was made autonomous and functioned more
democratically."[citation needed]
Current Activities
Vineet Narain writes a syndicated column in over 22 national dailies
on a weekly basis. Vineet Narain gives a weekly news report from India
on telephone to SBS Radio, Australia and also contributes to weekly
columns in two dozen popular dailies of India.[citation needed]
Through Kalchakra Investigative News Bureau, he, along with his
associates, undertake investigative journalism in India. He is also
the founder Secretary of People’s Vigilance Commission, a group headed
by J F Ribeiro, Ex-DGP, Punjab. Narain has been involved in the wider
restoration works in Braj.[5]
Notes
^ Vineet Narain Case, Directions of the Court accessed at [1] Nov 2,
2006
^ Vineet Narain's web-site
^ INDIA: Vineet Narain contempt trial postponed, August 10, 2001,
Committee to Protect Journalists, New York accessed at [2] Nov 2,
2006
^ India annual report 2002, Reporters Without Borders accessed at [3]
Nov 2, 2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders
^ www.brajfoundation.org
External links
Vineet Narain's Website
http://www.vineetnarain.net/
Kalchakra's Website
http://www.kalchakra.org.in/
Current Activity
http://www.brajfoundation.org/
Supreme Court Judgement Vineet Narain & Ors Vs. Union Of India & Anr
http://www.rishabhdara.com/sc/view.php?case=13530
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vineet_Narain"
Case DetailsVINEET NARAIN & ORS versus UNION OF INDIA & ANR
Supreme Court Cases
1996 SCC (2) 199 JT 1996 (1) 708 1996 SCALE (1)SP31
Case Law SearchIndian Supreme Court Cases / Judgements / Legislation
Judgement
VINEET NARAIN & ORS V. UNION OF INDIA & ANR [1996] RD-SC 158 (30
January 1996)
VERMA, JAGDISH SARAN (J) VERMA, JAGDISH SARAN (J) BHARUCHA S.P. (J)
SEN, S.C. (J)
CITATION: 1996 SCC (2) 199 JT 1996 (1) 708 1996 SCALE (1)SP31
ACT:
HEADNOTE:
O R D E R The true scope of this writ petition has been indicated
during the earlier hearings. At this stage, when some charge sheets
have been filed in the Special Court and there is considerable
publicity in the media regarding this matter, with some speculation
about its true scope, it is appropriate to make this order to form a
part of the record.
The gist of the allegations in the writ petition are that Government
agencies, like the CBI and the revenue authorities, have failed to
perform their duties and legal obligations inasmuch as they have
failed to properly investigate matters arising out of the seizure of
the so called "Jain Diaries" in certain raids conducted by the CBI.
It is alleged that the apprehending of certain terrories led to the
discovery of financial support to them by clandestine and illegal
means, by use of tainted funds obtained through 'hawala' transactions;
that this also disclosed a nexus between several important
politicians, bureaucrats and criminals, who are all recipients of
money from unlawful sources given for unlawful considerations; that
the the CBI and other Government agencies have failed to fully
investigate into the matter and take it to the logical and point of
the trail and to prosecute all persons who have committed any crime;
that this is being done with a view to protect the persons involved,
who are very influential and powerful in the present set up; that the
matter discloses a definite nexus between crime and corruption in
public life at high places in the country which poses a serious threat
to the integrity, security and economy of the nation; that probity in
public life, to prevent erosion of the rule of law and the
preservation of democracy in the country, requires that the Government
agencies be compelled to duly perform their legal obligations and to
proceed in accordance with law against each and every persons
involved, irrespective of the height at which he is placed in the
power set up.
The facts and circumstances of the present case do indicate that it is
of utmost public importance that this matter is examined thoroughly by
this Court to ensure that all Government agencies, entrusted with the
duty to discharge their functions and obligations in accordance with
law, do so, bearing in mind constantly the concept of equality
enshrined in the Constitution and the basic tenant of rule of law: "Be
you ever so high, the law is above you".
Investigation into every accusation made against each and every person
on a reasonable basis, irrespective of the position and status of that
person, must be conducted and completed expeditiously. This is
imperative to retain public confidence in the impartial working of the
Government agencies.
In this proceeding we are not concerned with the merits of the
accusations or the individuals alleged to be involved, but only with
the performance of the legal duty by the Government agencies to
fairly, properly and fully investigate into every such accusation
against every person, and to take the logical final action in
accordance with law.
In case of persons against whom a prima facie case is made out and a
charge sheet is filed in the competent court, it is that court which
will then deal with that case on merits, in accordance with law.
However. if in respect of any such person the final report after full
investigation is that no prima facie case is made out to proceed
further, so that the case must be closed against him, that report must
be promptly submitted to this Court for its satisfaction that the
concerned authorities have not failed to perform their legal
obligations and have reasonably come to such conclusion. No such
report having been submitted by the CBI or any other agency till now
in this Court, action on such a report by this Court would be
considered, if any when that occasion arises. We also direct that no
settlement should be arrived at nor any offence compounded by any
authority without prior leave of this Court.
We may add that on account of the great public interest involved in
this matter, the CBI and other Government agencies must expedite their
action to complete the task and prevent pendency of this matter beyond
the period necessary.
It is needless to observe that the results achieved so far do not
match the available time and opportunity for a full investigation ever
since the matter came to light. It is of utmost national significance
that no further time is lost in completion of the task.
Copyright
Reproduced in accordance with s52(q) of the Copyright Act 1957 (India)
from judis.nic.in, indiacode.nic.in and other Indian High Court
Websites
http://www.rishabhdara.com/sc/view.php?case=13530
Vineet Narain contempt trial postponed
http://cpj.org/2001/08/vineet-narain-contempt-trial-postponed.php
New York, August 10, 2001—Yesterday's scheduled contempt of court case
against journalist Vineet Narain has been postponed due to violence in
Jammu and Kashmir State, the trial venue. It is not known when the
next hearing will be held.
Narain is the founding editor of the New Delhibased investigative
journal Kalchakra. He faces contempt charges based on a December 16,
2000, Kalchakra article in which Narain alleged that Jammu and Kashmir
High Court justice T.S. Doabia had been unduly influenced by his
friendship with Indian Supreme Court chief justice A.S. Anand in
deciding a land dispute.
Jammu City was placed under curfew after three Muslim militants opened
fire at a local train station on August 7, killing 11 people,
according to international press reports. The curfew went into effect
on August 8 and prevented Narain from reaching the court, the
journalist told CPJ via e-mail.
Narain, who is currently in hiding, said that the Jammu and Kashmir
High Court could not convene as planned due to "hostile conditions in
Jammu."
The curfew was lifted yesterday, August 9, according to Indian and
international press reports.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has not yet responded to a July 6
letter from CPJ and Human Rights Watch urging him to order an
immediate inquiry into possible political motivations behind Narain's
prosecution, and to provide him with adequate security protection
during the trial. CPJ reiterated these requests in a separate letter
that was faxed to the prime minister on August 8.
http://cpj.org/2001/08/vineet-narain-contempt-trial-postponed.php
Committee to Protect Journalists
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an independent,
nonprofit organization based in New York, New York, United States,
that promotes press freedom and defends the rights of journalists.
History
A group of U.S. foreign correspondents founded CPJ in 1981 in response
to harassment from authoritarian governments.
Operations
CPJ organizes vigorous public protests and works through diplomatic
channels to effect change. CPJ publishes articles, news releases,
special reports, a biannual magazine called Dangerous Assignments[1],
and an annual worldwide survey of press freedom called Attacks on the
Press[2].
CPJ also administers the annual CPJ International Press Freedom
Awards, which honor journalists and press freedom advocates who have
endured beatings, threats, intimidation and prison for reporting the
news.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPJ_International_Press_Freedom_Awards
Each year, CPJ compiles a list of all journalists killed in the line
of duty around the world. Since 1992, the first year that CPJ began to
statistically monitor deaths, 661 journalists have been killed[3]
CPJ is a founding member of the International Freedom of Expression
Exchange (IFEX), a global network of more than 70 non-governmental
organizations that monitors free expression violations around the
world and defends journalists, writers and others who are persecuted
for exercising their right to freedom of expression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Freedom_of_Expression_Exchange
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_expression
Active engagements
On December 26, 2007, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
appealed to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to forthwith bring to
justice the killers of Davao City broadcaster Ferdinand Lintuan, who
was murdered on December 24.[4]
Staff and directors
The current (2009) executive director of CPJ is journalist Joel Simon,
who assumed the position in July 2006 after having served as deputy
director since 2000.[5] His predecessor was veteran foreign
correspondent Ann Cooper, who served as executive director from 1998
to 2006.[6]
CPJ's board of directors includes prominent American journalists,
including Christiane Amanpour, Tom Brokaw, Anne Garrels, Charlayne
Hunter-Gault, Gwen Ifill, Jane Kramer, Anthony Lewis, Dave Marsh, Kati
Marton, Michael Massing, Victor Navasky, Andres Oppenheimer, Clarence
Page, Norman Pearlstine, Dan Rather, John Seigenthaler, and Mark
Whitaker.
See also
CPJ International Press Freedom Awards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPJ_International_Press_Freedom_Awards
List of journalists killed in Russia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia
External links
Committee to Protect Journalists website
http://www.cpj.org/
International Freedom of Expression Exchange
http://www.ifex.org/
References
^ [1]
http://cpj.org/Briefings/2005/DA_spring05/DA_spring_05.pdf
^ [2]
http://cpj.org/attacks04/pages/attacks04index.html
^ [3]
^ GMA NEWS.TV, Aggressively pursue Lintuan killers, NY media group
urges Arroyo
http://www.gmanews.tv/story/74305/Aggressively-pursue-Lintuan-killers-NY-media-group-urges-Arroyo
^ CPJ Staff bios
http://cpj.org/about/staff.php
^ Poynter Online Forums
http://www.poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=11487
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_Protect_Journalists
bademiyansubhanallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Caste-related violence and hate crimes in India have occurred despite
the gradual reduction of casteism in the country.
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, "Dalits and indigenous
peoples (known as Scheduled Tribes or adivasis) continue to face
discrimination, exclusion, and acts of communal violence. Laws and
policies adopted by the Indian government provide a strong basis for
protection, but are not being faithfully implemented by local
authorities."[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_crime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Watch
Phoolan Devi
Main article: Phoolan Devi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoolan_Devi
Phoolan Devi (1963 – 2001) was an Indian dacoit (bandit), who later
turned politician. Born in a lower-caste Mallaah family, she was
mistreated and abandoned by her husband. She was later kidnapped by a
gang of dacoits. The upper-caste Thakur leader of the gang tried to
rape her, but she was protected by the deputy leader Vikram, who
belonged to her caste. Later, an upper-caste Thakur friend of Vikram
killed him, abducted Phoolan, and locked her up in the Behmai village.
Phoolan was raped in the village by Thakur men, until she managed to
escape after three weeks.
Phoolan Devi then formed a gang of Mallahs, which carried out a series
of violent robberies in north and central India, mainly targeting
upper-caste people. Some say that Phoolan Devi targeted only the upper-
caste people and shared the loot with the lower-caste people, but the
Indian authorities insist this is a myth[2]. Seventeen months after
her escape from Behmai, Phoolan returned to the village, to take her
revenge. On February 14, 1981, her gang massacred twenty-two Thakur
men in the village, only two of which were involved in her kidnapping
or rape. Phoolan Devi later surrendered and served eleven years in
prison, after which she became a politician. During her election
campaign, she was criticized by the women widowed in the Behmai
massacre. Kshatriya Swabhimaan Andolan Samanvay Committee (KSASC), a
Kshatriya organization, held a statewide campaign to protest against
her. She was elected a Member of Parliament twice.
On July 25, 2001, Phoolan Devi was shot dead by unknown assassins.
Later, a man called Sher Singh Rana confessed to the murder, saying he
was avenging the deaths of 22 Kshatriyas at Behmai. Although the
police were skeptical of his claims, he was arrested. Rana escaped
from Tihar Jail in 2004. In 2006, KSASC decided to honor Rana for
"upholding the dignity of the Thakur community" and "drying the tears
of the widows of Behmai."[3]
Andhra Pradesh
This state is considered to be one of the least caste-crime infested
places of India which has not had many Dalit Massacres.
Ranvir Sena
Main article: Ranvir Sena
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranvir_Sena
Ranvir Sena is an caste-supremacist fringe paramilitary group based in
Bihar. The group is based amongst the forward-caste landlord, and
carries out actions against the outlawed naxals in rural areas. It has
committed violent acts against Dalits and other members of the
scheduled caste community in an effort to scuttle reform movements
aimed at their emancipation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_caste
Tamil Nadu
The state of Tamil Nadu has witnessed several caste-based incidents
both against Dalits and Brahmins[citation needed]. In 2000, three
young men belonging to the Dalit undercaste were killed in the
Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu. This fuelled some localized violence
in the caste-sensitive region, which has seen numerous caste-related
incidents in which the majority of the victims have been Dalits. Six
of the killings have been registered as murders under the Indian Penal
Code and others as "Deaths under suspicious circumstances". No arrests
have been made in these cases.
However, several Dalits have been arrested as goondas (hoodlums). The
Chief minister of Tamil-Nadu, M. Karunanidhi, has been accused of
having an "anti-Dalit" bias by the radical organization "Dalit
Panthers of India". Theories concerning these crimes against Dalits
range from "alcohol bootleggers opposing prohibition movements among
Dalits" to "inter-caste relations between an upper-caste Vanniya boy
and a Dalit girl"[citation needed]. Political parties sympathetic to
the Dalits have protested against these incidents[4] and have alleged
systemic biases against Dalits in several parts of the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Penal_Code
Bant Singh case of Punjab
On the evening of January 5, 2006 Bant Singh, a poor Sikh Dalit, was
attacked by unknown assailants. His injuries necessitated medical
amputation. He alleges that this was in retaliation for actively
working to secure justice for his daughter, who was gang raped by
upper caste members of his village in Punjab five years earlier.[5][6]
A 55-year-old Dalit Sikh woman, Sawinder Kaur has been tortured,
stripped and tied to a tree in Ram Duali village of Punjab because her
nephew eloped with a girl from the same community. The police arrested
four persons for allegedly committing the crime on 9 September 2007.
[7]
In January, 1999 four members of the village panchayat of Bhungar
Khera village in Abohar paraded a handicapped Dalit woman naked
through the village. No action was taken by the police, despite local
Dalit protests. It was only on July 20 that the four pancha yat
members were arrested, after the State Home Department was compelled
to order an inquiry into the incident.[8]
A Dalit Sikh woman, Sukhwinder Kaur of Sumel Kheri village was
molested and beaten up by an octroi contractor of Malaudh when she
resisted his attempt to sexually exploit her.[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit
Kherlanji massacre
Main article: Kherlanji Massacre
On September 29, 2006, four members of the Bhotmange family belonging
to the Dalit underclass were slaughtered in Kherlanji, a small village
in Bhandara district of Maharashtra. The women of the family, Surekha
and Priyanka, were paraded naked in public, then allegedly gang-raped
before being murdered[1]. Although initially ascribed by the media and
by the Human Rights Watch to upper castes, the criminal act was
actually carried out by Kunbi[10] caste (classified as Other Backward
Classes[11] by Government of India) farmers for having opposed the
requisition of the Dalit land to have a road built over it.
On November 23, 2006, several members of the Dalit community in the
nearby district of Chandrapur staged a protest regarding this
incident.The protesters allegedly turned violent and pelted stones.
The police had to resort to baton charging to control the situation.
Dalit leaders, however, denied that they had sparked the violence and
that they were "protesting in peace".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kherlanji_Massacre
2006 Dalit protests in Maharashtra
Main article: 2006 Dalit protests in Maharashtra
In November-December 2006, the desecration of a Ambedkar statue in
Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh) triggered off violent protests by Dalits in
Maharashtra. Several people remarked that the protests were fueled by
the Kherlanji Massacre[12]. During the violent protests, the Dalit
protestors set three trains on fire, damaged over 100 buses and
clashed with police[13]. At least four deaths and many more injuries
were reported.
Later, the Kanpur Police arrested a Dalit youth Arun Kumar Balmiki for
desecrating the Ambedkar statue. According to the police, the youth
had "admitted to having damaged the statue in a drunken state along
with two friends"[14]. Earlier in a similar case, a Dalit youth was
held for desecrating an Ambedkar statue in Gulbarga, Karnataka[15].
In response to these protests, Raj Thackeray drew attention to another
incident in Kherlanji, in which a Dalit allegedly raped a girl and
killed her. Thackeray demanded action on those responsible for the
rape and the subsequent death of the girl, and also remarked that
nobody helped the girl's family[16].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raj_Thackeray
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kherlanji_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Dalit_protests_in_Maharashtra
Rajasthan
In the Indian province of Rajasthan, between the years 1999 and 2002,
crimes against Dalits average at about 5024 a year, with 46 killings
and 138 cases of rape.[17][18] In January 2007, a Jat girl was thrown
into a canal near the border with Haryana for marrying a Dalit boy,
although she swam to shore and was rescued by strangers.[19]
See also: 2008 caste violence in Rajasthan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_caste_violence_in_Rajasthan
Punjab
On 25 May 2009, violence and rioting broke out when thousands of
protesters took to the streets in almost all major towns and cities in
the Indian state of Punjab after a dalit preacher, Sant Ramanand, was
attacked in a temple in Vienna, Austria. He was among 16 people
injured, including another preacher Sant Nirajnan Dass, and later died
in hospital. Both the preachers were from a low-caste Sikh sect which
has a large following in parts of Punjab and had travelled to Vienna
to conduct a special service. Several high-caste Sikh groups had
apparently opposed his presence and threatened violence. This happened
after the preacher had reportedly made remarks about the Sikh groups.
[20]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_Nand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna
Other incidents
On September 1, 2007 some Yadavs poured steaming dal on a Dalit woman
and her infant daughter, and beat up several other Dalits, for
allowing their children to play in the premises of a temple at
Shivayalay Mushari, on the outskirts of Patna.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yadav
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patna
See also
Communalism (South Asia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism_(South_Asia)
Religious violence in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_violence_in_India
References
^ "India Events of 2007". Human Rights Watch.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/englishwr2k8/docs/2008/01/31/india17605.htm.
^ "Phoolan Devi: Champion of the poor". BBC News. 2001-07-25.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1456441.stm. Retrieved
2006-12-11.
^ "Kshatriya Samaj to honour Phoolan's killer". The Tribune,
Chandigarh. 2006-05-21. http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060501/nation.htm#5.
Retrieved 2006-12-11.
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2006/20060501/nation.htm#5
^ Victims of bias,The Hindu
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1712/17121060.htm
^ Paying a price for securing justice for his daughter, The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2006/01/16/stories/2006011608190500.htm
^ Bant Singh can still sing, Tehalka Magazine
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main16.asp?filename=Cr020406do_bigha.asp
^ Dalit woman tied naked to a tree
http://www.aiccindia.org/newsite/0804061910/news/Dalit_woman_tied_naked_to_tree_in_Punjab_11_Sep_2007.htm
^ Down and out in Punjab By Praveen Swami
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1626/16260650.htm
^ Dalit woman molested, beaten up Malaudh (Ahmedgarh), April 27
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050428/ldh1.htm
^ "Dalit blood on village square". Frontline.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=20061201004713000.htm&date=fl2323/&prd=fline&.
Retrieved 2006-12-10.
^ "Age old rivalry behind Khairlanji violence". NDTV.
http://origin.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?slug=Age+old+rivalry+behind+Khairlanji+violence&id=96718&category=National.
Retrieved 2006-12-10.
^ "Khairlanji to Kanpur". The Indian Express. 2006-12-02.
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/17707.html. Retrieved 2006-12-02.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/khairlanji-to-kanpur/17707/
^ "Maharashtra: Dalit anger leaves 4 dead, 60 injured". Rediff.com.
2006-11-30. http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/30statue.htm.
Retrieved 2006-12-02.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/30statue.htm
^ "Dalits force police to let off suspect in Kanpur". Business
Standard. 2006-12-01. http://www.business-standard.com/common/storypage_c_online.php?leftnm=11&bKeyFlag=IN&autono=18172.
Retrieved 2006-12-02.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/storypage.php?tp=on&autono=18172
^ "Dalit youth held for desecrating Ambedkar statue". Deccan Herald.
2006-09-26. http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/Sep222006/district1711462006921.asp.
Retrieved 2006-12-02.
^ "Situation in Mumbai, state back to normal". The Times of India.
2006-12-02.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Mumbai/Situation_in_Mumbai_state_back_to_normal/articleshow/678044.cms.
Retrieved 2006-12-02.
^ http://www.indiatogether.org/dalit/articles/bidwai1002.htm
^ BBC NEWS | South Asia | Dalits in conversion ceremony
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6050408.stm
^ (Hindi)CNN/IBN Video
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/55743/girl-escapes-honour-killing-now-fights-a-lonely-battle.html
^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8066783.stm
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India"
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/111615/revered-godman-accused-of-land-grabbing.html
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/111608/baba-ramdev-forays-into-politics-forms-new-party.html
VIDEO AND AUDIO NEWS
Low-caste Hindus hold mass conversions
SEE ALSO
Indian Dalit leader passes away
09 Oct 06 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6032563.stm
Kanshi Ram: Champion of the poor
09 Oct 06 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6034823.stm
Anger over Gujarat religion law
20 Sep 06 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5362802.stm
Conversions harder in India state
26 Jul 06 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5215696.stm
Furore reflects India's caste complexities
20 May 06 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4998274.stm
India mourns Dalit ex-president
10 Nov 05 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4424216.stm
India dalits protest arson attack
05 Sep 05 | South Asia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4216290.stm
Country profile: India
31 Aug 06 | Country profiles
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/country_profiles/1154019.stm
RELATED BBC LINKS
Hindu caste system - BBC religion and ethics
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbreligion/F2213234
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbreligion/F2213239
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbreligion/F2213233
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbreligion/F2213236
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbreligion/F2213237
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/living/caste.shtml
RELATED INTERNET LINKS
National Conference of Dalit Organisations
http://www.nacdor.org/
National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights
See also:
25 Jul 01 | South Asia
'Bandit Queen' shot dead
29 Jun 01 | South Asia
Indian bandit offers to surrender
07 Mar 00 | South Asia
Court rules out caste differences
28 Sep 99 | South Asia
Dalits' political awakening
12 Oct 00 | South Asia
Analysis: India's criminal politicians
Internet links:
US article on the Bandit Queen
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96nov/bandit/bandit.htm
See also:
25 Jul 01 | South Asia
'Bandit Queen' shot dead
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1456178.stm
29 Jun 01 | South Asia
Indian bandit offers to surrender
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1412944.stm
07 Mar 00 | South Asia
Court rules out caste differences
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/669285.stm
28 Sep 99 | South Asia
Dalits' political awakening
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/459591.stm
12 Oct 00 | South Asia
Analysis: India's criminal politicians
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/701360.stm
See also:
26 Feb 00 | South Asia
Analysis: Bihar's pivotal politician
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/658347.stm
25 Feb 00 | South Asia
Jayalalitha will face corruption trial
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/657030.stm
21 Feb 00 | South Asia
Net shame for corrupt officials
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/650952.stm
11 Feb 00 | South Asia
Guide to Indian state elections
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/638134.stm
Internet links:
Central Bureau of Investigation
http://www.cbi.gov.in/index.php
Election Commission of India
http://www.eci.gov.in/
Indian Elections 99 - BBC News Online
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/08/99/indian_elections/default.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/701360.stm
India's "Untouchables" Face Violence, DiscriminationHillary Mayell
for National Geographic News
June 2, 2003
More than 160 million people in India are considered "Untouchable"—
people tainted by their birth into a caste system that deems them
impure, less than human.
Human rights abuses against these people, known as Dalits, are legion.
A random sampling of headlines in mainstream Indian newspapers tells
their story: "Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers"; "Dalit
tortured by cops for three days"; "Dalit 'witch' paraded naked in
Bihar"; "Dalit killed in lock-up at Kurnool"; "7 Dalits burnt alive in
caste clash"; "5 Dalits lynched in Haryana"; "Dalit woman gang-raped,
paraded naked"; "Police egged on mob to lynch Dalits".
"Dalits are not allowed to drink from the same wells, attend the same
temples, wear shoes in the presence of an upper caste, or drink from
the same cups in tea stalls," said Smita Narula, a senior researcher
with Human Rights Watch, and author of Broken People: Caste Violence
Against India's "Untouchables." Human Rights Watch is a worldwide
activist organization based in New York.
India's Untouchables are relegated to the lowest jobs, and live in
constant fear of being publicly humiliated, paraded naked, beaten, and
raped with impunity by upper-caste Hindus seeking to keep them in
their place. Merely walking through an upper-caste neighborhood is a
life-threatening offense.
Nearly 90 percent of all the poor Indians and 95 percent of all the
illiterate Indians are Dalits, according to figures presented at the
International Dalit Conference that took place May 16 to 18 in
Vancouver, Canada.
Crime Against Dalits
Statistics compiled by India's National Crime Records Bureau indicate
that in the year 2000, the last year for which figures are available,
25,455 crimes were committed against Dalits. Every hour two Dalits are
assaulted; every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are
murdered, and two Dalit homes are torched.
No one believes these numbers are anywhere close to the reality of
crimes committed against Dalits. Because the police, village councils,
and government officials often support the caste system, which is
based on the religious teachings of Hinduism, many crimes go
unreported due to fear of reprisal, intimidation by police, inability
to pay bribes demanded by police, or simply the knowledge that the
police will do nothing.
"There have been large-scale abuses by the police, acting in collusion
with upper castes, including raids, beatings in custody, failure to
charge offenders or investigate reported crimes," said Narula.
That same year, 68,160 complaints were filed against the police for
activities ranging from murder, torture, and collusion in acts of
atrocity, to refusal to file a complaint. Sixty two percent of the
cases were dismissed as unsubstantiated; 26 police officers were
convicted in court.
Despite the fact that untouchability was officially banned when India
adopted its constitution in 1950, discrimination against Dalits
remained so pervasive that in 1989 the government passed legislation
known as The Prevention of Atrocities Act. The act specifically made
it illegal to parade people naked through the streets, force them to
eat feces, take away their land, foul their water, interfere with
their right to vote, and burn down their homes.
Since then, the violence has escalated, largely as a result of the
emergence of a grassroots human rights movement among Dalits to demand
their rights and resist the dictates of untouchability, said Narula.
Lack of Enforcement, Not Laws
Enforcement of laws designed to protect Dalits is lax if not non-
existent in many regions of India. The practice of untouchability is
strongest in rural areas, where 80 percent of the country's population
resides. There, the underlying religious principles of Hinduism
dominate.
Hindus believe a person is born into one of four castes based on karma
and "purity"—how he or she lived their past lives. Those born as
Brahmans are priests and teachers; Kshatriyas are rulers and soldiers;
Vaisyas are merchants and traders; and Sudras are laborers. Within the
four castes, there are thousands of sub-castes, defined by profession,
region, dialect, and other factors.
Untouchables are literally outcastes; a fifth group that is so
unworthy it doesn't fall within the caste system.
Although based on religious principles practiced for some 1,500 years,
the system persists today for economic as much as religious reasons.
Because they are considered impure from birth, Untouchables perform
jobs that are traditionally considered "unclean" or exceedingly
menial, and for very little pay. One million Dalits work as manual
scavengers, cleaning latrines and sewers by hand and clearing away
dead animals. Millions more are agricultural workers trapped in an
inescapable cycle of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and oppression.
Although illegal, 40 million people in India, most of them Dalits, are
bonded workers, many working to pay off debts that were incurred
generations ago, according to a report by Human Rights Watch published
in 1999. These people, 15 million of whom are children, work under
slave-like conditions hauling rocks, or working in fields or factories
for less than U.S. $1 day.
Crimes Against Women
Dalit women are particularly hard hit. They are frequently raped or
beaten as a means of reprisal against male relatives who are thought
to have committed some act worthy of upper-caste vengeance. They are
also subject to arrest if they have male relatives hiding from the
authorities.
A case reported in 1999 illustrates the toxic mix of gender and
caste.
A 42-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped and then burnt alive after
she, her husband, and two sons had been held in captivity and tortured
for eight days. Her crime? Another son had eloped with the daughter of
the higher-caste family doing the torturing. The local police knew the
Dalit family was being held, but did nothing because of the higher-
caste family's local influence.
There is very little recourse available to victims.
A report released by Amnesty International in 2001 found an "extremely
high" number of sexual assaults on Dalit women, frequently perpetrated
by landlords, upper-caste villagers, and police officers. The study
estimates that only about 5 percent of attacks are registered, and
that police officers dismissed at least 30 percent of rape complaints
as false.
The study also found that the police routinely demand bribes,
intimidate witnesses, cover up evidence, and beat up the women's
husbands. Little or nothing is done to prevent attacks on rape victims
by gangs of upper-caste villagers seeking to prevent a case from being
pursued. Sometimes the policemen even join in, the study suggests.
Rape victims have also been murdered. Such crimes often go
unpunished.
Thousands of pre-teen Dalit girls are forced into prostitution under
cover of a religious practice known as devadasis, which means "female
servant of god." The girls are dedicated or "married" to a deity or a
temple. Once dedicated, they are unable to marry, forced to have sex
with upper-caste community members, and eventually sold to an urban
brothel.
Resistance and Progress
Within India, grassroots efforts to change are emerging, despite
retaliation and intimidation by local officials and upper-caste
villagers. In some states, caste conflict has escalated to caste
warfare, and militia-like vigilante groups have conducted raids on
villages, burning homes, raping, and massacring the people. These
raids are sometimes conducted with the tacit approval of the police.
In the province Bihar, local Dalits are retaliating, committing
atrocities also. Non-aligned Dalits are frequently caught in the
middle, victims of both groups.
"There is a growing grassroots movement of activists, trade unions,
and other NGOs that are organizing to democratically and peacefully
demand their rights, higher wages, and more equitable land
distribution," said Narula. "There has been progress in terms of
building a human rights movement within India, and in drawing
international attention to the issue."
In August 2002, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination (UN CERD) approved a resolution condemning caste or
descent-based discrimination.
"But at the national level, very little is being done to implement or
enforce the laws," said Narula.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
National Campaign on Dalits Human Rights
http://www.dalits.org/
Crimes Against Dalits
These are JUST SOME of the Crimes committed on Dalits from April 2000
to December 2002, reported in National Daily's. Hundreds of Such
crimes go unreported. If you find any such crimes happening in your
neighbourhood, please send the details of such crimes to us.
dal...@ambedkar.org
Please check this page for updates. Meanwhile THINK what YOU can do to
stop this madness.
• Exclusive Report:Five Dalits Lynched in Haryana (06 Nov)
• Dalit elopes with Jat girl, death stalks Haryana village (30 Oct)
• Untouchability, The Dead Cow And The Brahmin (23 Oct)
• A Dalit damned for defying her village (07 Aug)
• Dalit burnt alive, tension brews in Mansura village (29 May)
• Pakistani Dalits protest genocide of Dalits (29 May)
• Dalit hanged for having illicit ties (15 May)
• 6 Dalits shot dead in Bihar (09 May)
• Dalit houses attacked in Salem village (02 May)
• Attack on Dalit youth in Bellary (26 Apr)
• Dalits face wrath of upper castes in UP village (24 Apr)
• Dalit teenager raped in Rajasthan (24 Apr)
- 18-year-old girl raped, murdered (21 Mar)
- Crime in Chennai (21 Mar)
- Couple hounded by cops for inter-caste marriage (04 Feb)
- Students demonstrate against sexual harassment (04 Feb)
- Dalit woman raped (26 Jan)
- Caste Discrimination in Hyderabad Central University (15 Jan)
- Dalit women molested near Davangere (15 Jan)
- Another youth killed by lover's parents (15 Jan)
- Koli girl's gang-rape infuriates ministers, MLAs (15 Jan)
- 3 Dalits Shot Dead (08 Jan)
- Dumb girl accuses cop of rape (07 Dec)
- Woman Paraded Naked For Playing Cupid (07 Dec)
- Alleged rape of Dalit minor (27 Nov)
- Atrocity on SC girl in Karnataka (27 Nov)
- Dalit woman beaten to death by excise officials in Kerala (27
Nov)
- Yet another life sacrificed at the altar of love (27 Nov)
- Custodial death sparks protest (1 Nov)
- Landless woman stripped, beaten up (29 Oct)
- 2 dalit girls raped (29 Oct)
- Dalit girl raped (11 Oct)
- SC hostel inmates left in lurch (6 Oct)
- JNU girl alleges molestation, casteist slur (22 Sept)
- Goan Dalit denied equality even in death (13 Sept)
- Dalit student in Delhi University beaten up by upper caste hostel
mates (10 Sept)
- Naked assault Crime: Dalit woman is stripped and paraded for two
hours in Karnataka (3 Sep)
- Discrimination against Dalits in Chhattisgarh (3 Sep)
- Stripping of Dalit by cop: Panel orders probe (2 Sep)
- Dalit gang-raped in Kankipadu mandal (31 Aug)
- Dalit woman gang-raped in Vijayawada (30 Aug)
- Dalit woman paraded naked in Bellary village (29 Aug)
- Raped Dalit woman ends life (27 Aug)
- Three tribals killed (9 August)
- Caste Hindus terrorise Dalits in MP's Mugalia (8 August)
- Caste's cruel: lovers hanged in UP (8 August)
- Dacoits rape 2 tribal women (29 July)
- Gang-rape of Dalit woman in Rohtak (24 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/GangrDalit.htm
- TD men attack Dalits for voting for Congress (19 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/TDmenattack.htm
- Liberty, Equality etc --- but not for Dalits (17 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/LibEqualityetc.htm
- Castes and killings in Jehrana and Hasanpur (16 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Cakillings.htm
- Bihar panchayats deny Constitutional reservations (13 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Bihar_panchayats_deny.htm
- Landlord urinated in my mouth, alleges Dalit (11 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Landlord_urinated_in.htm
- Dalit hacked, ban order in Bellary village (6 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalit_hacked_ban.htm
- Harassed Dalit woman fights for justice (3 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/harassed_dalit_woman.htm
- Dalit family spends year in hut looking for justice (3 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/dalit_family_spends.htm
- Stripping of women: DM orders probe (1 July)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/stripping_of_women.htm
- Caste row in Indian school (30 Jun)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/941496.stm
- Dalits banished for drawing water from village well (29 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitsbanished.htm
- Six people massacred in Bihar (29 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Sixpeople.htm
- Dalit leader blames Jehrana carnage on casteism (28 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitleader.htm
- Four Dalits lynched in Bhojpur (26 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/FourDalits.htm
- Discrimination in promotions alleged (26 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Discriminationin.htm
- Punish the guilty (22 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Punishthe.htm
- Sexual assault on Dalit woman (15 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Sexualassault.htm
- 5 dalits shot dead in UP (14 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/5dalits.htm
- Dalit woman gang raped (14 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitwoman2.htm
- Dalits don’t redraw the village map here, those who do get killed
(12 Jun)
- Untouchability faces no threat here (11 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Untouchabilityfaces.htm
- Dalit killed for entering temple (10 Jun)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitkilled.htm
- Villagers still terrified (25 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Villagersstill.htm
- Police atrocities (23 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Policeatrocities.htm
- Dalits barred from temple (21 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitsbarred.htm
- No justice for tortured labourer (21 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Nojustice.htm
- Well divides Dalits and upper castes (21 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Welldivides.htm
- Rape victim dies due to doctors' negligence (17 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Rapevictim.htm
- ‘Atrocities on SC/STs on the rise’ (17 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Atrocitieson.htm
- Officials accused of harassing Dalits (12 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Officialsaccused.htm
- Tribal dies due to starvartion (4 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Tribaldies.htm
- Leaders allege harassment of tribals (4 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Leadersallege.htm
- Minor Dalit girl raped at Kallipalli village (1 May)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/MinorDalit.htm
- Inter-caste marriage claims girl (26 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Inter-caste.htm
- Caste-based segregation at JNTU hostels: SFI (26 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Caste-based.htm
- Atrocities against Dalits surface in village near Bhopal (26 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Atrocitiesagainst.htm
- Clashes as Dalits stopped at tap (23 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Clashesas.htm
- Voting rights still elude most Dalits (23 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Votingrights.htm
- Stripped nude for offering water (19 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Strippednude.htm
- Untouchability in AP (18 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Untouchabilityin.htm
- Denial in death (16 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Denialin.htm
- 3 tribals killed in police firing (7 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/3tribals.htm
- `Untouchable' fined, beaten for entering Orissa village temple (7
Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Untouchablefined.htm
- Old Dalit couple attacked at home (2 Apr)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/OldDalit.htm
- Vigil for Kamballapalli (14 Mar)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Vigilfor.htm
- Custodial Torture of Dalit Youths (14 Mar)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/CustodialTorture.htm
- Dalits houses torched, 15 arrested (7 Mar)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitshouses.htm
- Lashes greet caste student (5 Mar)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Lashesgreetl.htm
- Starving the poor (27 Feb)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Starvingthe.htm
- Dalit Girl Victimised at Cochin University (19 Feb)
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/DalitGirl.htm
- Discriminating the distressed (19 Feb)
http://www.ambedkar.org/research/Discriminatingthe.htm
- Youth dies in custody,constable booked
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Youthdies.htm
- Quake can't shake caste system
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Quakecan.htm
- Ten Dalit Houses Set On Fire
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/TenDalit.htm
- Three Dalits hurt in attack
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/ThreeDalits.htm
- Dalit community alleges social boycott by villagers
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Dalitcommunity.htm
- 14-year-old Dalit girl raped
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/14-year-old.htm
- Booked for raping Dalit
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Bookedfor.htm
- Dalit beaten up for seeking money back
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitbeaten1.htm
- 'Dalits denied entry in many temples'
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitsdenied.htm
- 150 dalit families rendered landless
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/dalitfamilies.htm
- Four Dalits gunned down in Bihar
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitsgunned.htm
- 3 Orissa tribals killed in police firing
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Orissatribals.htm
- SC woman raped
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/SCwoman.htm
- Alleged attacks on Dalits
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Allegedattacks.htm
- Court pulls up police for custodial torture
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Courtpulls.htm
- IITs: Doing Manu Proud
http://www.ambedkar.org/research/IITs.htm
- Discrimination against Koluru Dalits alleged - Dalit commits
suicide, Shinor tense
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Discriminationagainst.htm
- Assertion, Co-option and Marginalization of Dalits
http://www.ambedkar.org/research/Assertion.htm
- An instance of untouchablility in Channagiri taluk
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Aninstance.htm
- Scavengers: Mumbai's Neglected Workers
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Scavengers.htm
- Gang rape of dalit housewife flayed
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Gangrape.htm
- Witches exorcised with Bajrang Dal help
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Witchesexorcised.htm
- 15-year-old Dalit girl raped
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/15-year-oldDalit.htm
- Caste system main barrier to India's IT superpower ambitions?
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Castesystem.htm
- Dalit samiti condemns Neelur incident
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/samiticondemns.htm
- Acid attack on Dalit
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/overfishing.htm
- One held for raping Dalit girl
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Oneheld.htm
- Tribal schoolgirls sexually assaulted
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Tribalschoolgirls.htm
- 'Police atrocities' on tribals condemned
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Policeatrocities.htm
- Bihari girls sold to work in Punjab
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Biharigirls.htm
- Boy stripped, assaulted in Orissa village
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Boystripped.htm
- Dalit 'killed' in lock-up at Kurnool
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitkilled.htm
- Dalit beaten up for stoning dog
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitbeatenup.htm
- Solidarity With Sardar Buta Singh
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Solidarity.htm
- Three dalits killed in Bihar
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Threedalits.htm
- Dalit students humiliated
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/studentshumiliated.htm
- Orissa tribal group gheraos police station after attack
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Orissatribal.htm
- Sexploitation of an alarming nature
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Sexploitationof.htm
- Dalit students forced out of classrooms
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitstudents.htm
- Deep prejudice
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Deepprejudice.htm
- Four dalits burnt alive in Rajasthan
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Fourdalits.htm
- Attack on Dalits: action sought against culprits
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Attackon.htm
- Atrocity against magistrate opens can of worms
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Policeatrocity.htm
- RPI activist shot dead in Mulund
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/RPIactivist.htm
- Dalit village still deserted
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitvillage.htm
- Dalit branded witches, one dies after `torture'
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitwidows.htm
- The bells of Guruvayoor
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Thebells.htm
- Vayalar Ravi to move court on temple issue
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/VayalarRavi.htm
- Dalit tortured by cops for three days
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalittortured.htm
- SC, STs face higher risk of poverty due to caste
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/facehigher.htm
- AIIMS chief biased against SC/STs
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/AIIMSchief.htm
- Dalit MLA's outrage over veedu remark
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20MLA.htm
- Minister accused of raping tribal girl
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Ministeraccused.htm
- Dalits decry bid to hush up death casem
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitsdecry.htm
- 'Discrimination' made IAS officer quit
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Discrimination.htm
- Death does not come as the end
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Deathdoes.htm
- Bihar's landless landlords die watching others..
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Biharslandless.htm
- 'Witch' paraded naked in Bihar
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Witchparaded.htm
- Dalit's death after police torture alleged
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitsdeath.htm
- 'Govt apathy' towards women leads to suicide
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Govtapathy.htm
- Atrocities against Dalits high in Punjab
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Atrocities%20against.htm
- ABVP attack Dalit prof at varsity
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/ABVP%20attack.htm
Aurangabad, Aug 15: The 15-day-long lull of student activism at Dr
Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University ended on Monday when students
belonging to the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad barged into the
cabin of professor of social sciences, Dr B H Kalyankar, a renowned
intellectual from the Maratha community and blackened his face, `to
teach him a lesson for attacking Hindusim.'
- Dalit judge moves SC over courtroom 'purification'
NEW DELHI: A Scheduled Caste judge in Allahabad has appealed in the
Supreme Court against his compulsory retirement in the aftermath of an
incident in which his courtroom was washed with `Ganga jal' by his
`upper' caste successor.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20judge.htm
- Dalit boy beaten to death for plucking flowers
BAREILLY: A teenaged Dalit boy was allegedly beaten to death by the
nagar panchayat President of Fateh Ganj for plucking some flowers from
his garden
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalitbeaten.htm
- Girl tortured, burnt to death in UP
Lucknow: History probably repeated itself when a strikingly similar
incident, as Phoolan Devi's physical torture and humiliation two
decades ago, was reported from Azamgarh district in Eastern Uttar
Pradesh.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Girl%20tortured.htm
- Caste groups clash; cops use force
JALANDHAR, July 30 (UNI) -The demand for the release of a suspect in a
theft case from police custody snowballed into an inter-caste tension
at a city police station last night when two warring caste groups
exchanged brickbats and the police used force to quell the clash.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Caste%20groups.htm
- Five Dalits hacked to death
HYDERABAD: In a gruesome incident, five Dalits were hacked to death at
Surampalli village under Tekmal police limits of Medak district, some
100 km from here, on Thursday night
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Five%20Dalits.htm
- Communal clash sparks tension
AYAMKONDAN, JULY 20. Tension prevailed in Meensuriti village near
Jayamkondan in Perambalur district late last night following a
communal clash between Vanniyars and Dalits of the village.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Communal%20clash.htm
- Tribal family stripped for shooing away hens
BHUBANESWAR: Four members of a tribal family were stripped, beaten up
and made to parade naked before their fellow villagers in Chhatam, in
Orissa's tribal-dominated Sundergarh district.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Tribal%20family.htm
- Bihar Minister sacked
EMBARRASSED BY the charges of torture of two Dalits by Minister of
State for Cooperatives Lalit Yadav, Chief Minister Rabri Devi on
Monday promptly sacked him.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Bihar%20Minister.htm
- 32 kids rescued from bonded labour
MUMBAI: Following a raid by police officials along with Samarthan, a
Mumbai-based NGO, 32 children were rescued from Walope village near
Chiplun in Ratnagiri district.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/32%20kids.htm
- Life in Chains
Bonded Labour: Tortured and terrorised, five men suffered in fetters
in a stone quarry for two years
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Life%20in.htm
- A cry for justice
At the National Public Hearing on Dalit Human Rights in Chennai, the
country's most oppressed section narrates its tales of woe.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/A%20cry.htm
- Four-year-old girl beheaded for sacrifice
A 40-YEAR-old man allegedly 'sacrificed' a four-year-old girl on
Monday in Miragpur village, 30 km from Roorke. Only the head of the
victim has been recovered so far
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Four-year-old.htm
- Dalit girl hostel for sexual exploitation
PALAKKAD, JULY 2. The shocking revelations of sexual exploitation of
some inmates of the Government-run Agali Tribal Girls Hostel in the
tribal heartland of Attappady in Palakkad district resulting in a few
of them becoming pregnant has rocked Kerala, the most literate State.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20girl.htm
- Action to be taken in killing of two Adivasis
he National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has
directed the collector and the superintendent of police of Dhar
district in Madhya Pradesh to take action against the police officials
responsible for killing two Adivasi youths in June.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Action%20to.htm
- Gujarat tribals fear losing grants
IN ITS eagerness to keep an eye on any possible conversions, the
Social Welfare Department of the Gujarat Government has made changes
in the application form for seeking grants.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Gujarat%20tribals.htm
- Dalit colony razed in Sonepat
SONEPAT: More than 100 kutcha and pucca houses were razed to the
ground by officials of the demolition squad with the help of the
police in RK Colony on the GT Road about eight km from here, on
Wednesday night.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20colony.htm
- Becoming A ‘Servant Of God’
June 25 — You can tell the “servants of God” from the other Dalit
women outside the Hindu temple in Manvi, a village in northern
Karnataka, by their jewelry. They’re wearing red beaded necklaces with
silver and gold medallions.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Becoming%20A.htm
- Caste Struggle
June 25 — On paper, the people in the slum on Delhi’s Lodi Road don’t
even exist. The Dalits, or literally “broken people,” as members of
India’s Untouchable castes are now called, don’t show up on electoral
rolls, ration cards or water bills.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Caste%20Struggle.htm
- Brutal Murder of 3 Dalits
M.Puliangudi is a Village situated in Cuddalore District in Tamilnadu.
This village has a population of around 3000 in which about 300 people
are be Dalits and the remaining population belongs to Vanniyar
community. Vanniyars are the landed population.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Brutal%20Murder.htm
- Return to an abhorrent past
The shankaracharya of Puri, Nischalanand Saraswati, has said that neo-
converts to Hinduism should pray in separate temples. These swastik
temples, as they will be called, are to be for the exclusive use of
all those who have joined or rejoined the Hindu fold. Those 'lucky'
enough to be born Hindus can, of course, continue to pray in the
existing temples across India and the globe.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Return%20to.htm
- Low - cost for low caste
SHANKARACHARYA of Govardhan Peeth in Puri Jagatguru Nischalananda
Saraswati was in the news for "reconverting" 72 tribal Christians in
the same area where Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two
minor sons were roasted alive. Presumably, the conversions did not
contravene the special laws that exist in Orissa. Nobody should grudge
His Grace for his mission as long as he uses persuasion, and not
force.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Low%20-%20cost.htm
- Charges filed in Kambalapalli Dalit killings
BANGALORE: The Civil Rights Enforcement Cell (CRE) filed the
chargesheet last Thursday in the court of Civil Judge, Chintamani,
indicting 32 persons, including one Maddi Reddy, as the main accused
in the burning of seven dalits in Kambalapalli village in Chintamani
taluk of Kolar district in March this year. All the accused are now in
judicial custody.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Charges%20filed.htm
- 15 killed in Bihar caste violence
Fifteen persons were killed in two separate incidents of caste
violence in Nawada district of central Bihar last night.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/15%20killed.htm
- Two cases of Rape
Woman panch stripped for being raped in MP
NCW to intervene in Biswas rape case, Lalita
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Two%20cases.htm
- The drumbeats of oppression
In a village in Tamil Nadu's Pudukkottai district, Dalits are
subjected to a vicious attack for refusing to subject themselves to
rites of social oppression.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/The%20drumbeats.htm
- Murder of three Dalits in Cuddalore
The recent murder of three Dalits in Cuddalore district shows that
caste oppresion is a living reality in rural Tamil Nadu.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Murder%20of.htm
- Dalits and land issues
ON December 25, 1927, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar led a historic
mahasatyagraha to defy a ban imposed by caste Hindus on Dalits drawing
water from public sources. More than 10,000 Dalits participated in
it.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalits%20and%20land.htm
- Dalit killed by 4 upper caste persons
Police officials interrogate people witness to the murder of a dalit
youth in Amraiwadi area of Ahmedabad.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20killed.htm
- Landlords exploit the drought-hit Dalits
Drought is driving Dalit women into the arms of landlords and
contractors. As most of their men have migrated in search of a
livelihood or been forced into bonded labour, the Dalit women fall
back on Thakurs, Chaudhary-Patels and Rabari-Desais in these trying
times.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Landlords%20exploit.htm
- Dalit woman gang-raped, paraded naked
FARIDKOT: A married, Dalit woman was gang-raped and paraded naked in
the village Tharajwala of Muktsar district because of her brother's
alleged involvement with a girl of the village.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20woman.htm
- DSS activist says he was kidnapped
Dalit Sanghrasha Samiti activist Manjunath Kundar, who was missing for
about 15 days and later found near Sakaleshpur, has alleged that his
political opponents in connivance with the police, masterminded his
''kidnapping``
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/DSS%20activist.htm
- Dalit farm worker killed in caste conflict
MEERUT: A 40-year-old dalit agricultural labourer was tortured and
humiliated before being shot dead in front of his wife and others at
Kabaraut village, 35 km from Muzaffarnagar, allegedly by some
influential persons, on Tuesday evening.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/worker%20killed.htm
- Nailing evidence-Police cap under a dead man
Uttar Pradesh: The scene at the wheat fields along the national
highway in Basai village was gory on May 2 morning. Villagers going
for work saw five bodies soaked in blood. Vijay Singh, Jaipal Singh,
Satbir Singh and SugreevÑall Dalits of the villageÑwere dead, but
another Dalit, Santhosh was still hanging on to life, though his neck
had a deep gash. He was rushed to hospital.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Nailing%20evidence.htm
- 7 hurt in caste clash near Hoskote
Seven persons were injured and two huts destroyed following clashes
between Caste Hindus and Dalits in Hoskote Taluk, the hotbed of
political and caste-based conflicts in Bangalore Rural dis-trict, on
Tuesday night.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/7%20hurt.htm
- Dalit killings cause concern in Uttar Pradesh
Two recent incidents involving killing of dalits by members of the
upper caste have brought under fire the Bharatiya Janata Party-led
coalition government in Uttar Pradesh.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20killings.htm
- SI guns down four Dalits in Uttar Pradesh
Angry at his daughter eloping with a Dalit, a police sub-inspector
avenged the humiliation by killing four of the latter`s family.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/SI%20guns.htm
- The carcass collectors of Rann
Ever since animals started dying in the drought, the only way to
collect the carcasses and get it surveyed has been through people from
this Dalit community.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/carcass%20collectors.htm
- Caste off!!
One of the tragedies of our history books is that they do not look at
history holistically, but rather as specific events of battles won or
lost and so on. In the bargain, we fail to learn our lessons
completely, which is perhaps the primary purpose of reading history.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Caste%20off.htm
- Water shortage re-ignites caste clashes
AMRELI (Gujarat), APRIL 27. As the mercury soars and water resources
dry up, clashes over collecting water in the drought- hit areas of
rural Gujarat are becoming common. And with that has returned with a
bang the caste consciousness, which was slowly getting blurred.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Water%20shortage.htm
- Double infliction on Dalits
Drought has failed as a great leveller of the financial status of
individuals here, as farmers who take to agricultural or manual labour
stand divided. Even in hunger, the Dalits are not equal to the upper
castes in the backward Rangareddy district in Telangana.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Double%20infliction.htm
- Four Dalits gunned down in Bihar
At least 4 Dalits were gunned down, 3 others received serious injuries
and more than a dozen houses were burnt by upper castes in Khairahni
village under the jurisdiction of Nokha police station in Rohtas
district of central Bihar during the wee hours today.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Four%20Dalits%20gunned.htm
- Deprived of their due
A study highlights the flouting of the norms of reservation for the
Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in appointments to
institutions of higher learning.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Deprived.htm
- Dalit bridegroom dismounted from mare
Riding a mare in a wedding procession still proves to be a nightmare
for many a Dalit bridegrooms in Rajasthan. A Dalit bridegroom was
reportedly dismounted from the mare and stones were thrown at the
'baaratis` injuring four of them at Sardada village of Deoli tehsil in
Tonk district on Wednesday.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Dalit%20bridegroom.htm
- Untouchables remain victims of persecution
MADRAS, Apr 21: India's dalits, or "untouchables," remain wide-spread
victims of persecution, of-ten with state collusion, a two-day public
hearing here concluded Thursday, reports AFP.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/RS%20adjourned.htm
- Landlords attack dalits, burn houses
CUDDAPAH, APRIL 19. Upper caste landlords have attacked dalits and set
ablaze 30 houses belonging to the latter, near Rajupalem in B. Kodur
mandal.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/Landlords%20attack.htm
-7 Dalits burnt alive in Karnataka caste clash
KOLAR: Seven persons, including three women, were burnt alive and one
person was stabbed to death in a major flare-up of caste-related
violence at Kambalpally village in Karnataka's Kolar district on
Saturday night, police said on Sunday.
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/hl/7%20burnt%20alive.htm
Woman Stripped, Killed
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Woman%20Stripped_Killed.htm
20 Dalits injured in mob attack
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/20_Dalits_injured_in_mob_attack.htm
Priest slaps Dalit, ties him with rope
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/_ties_him_with_rope.htm
A temple entangled in clash between castes
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/A_temple_entangled_in_clash_between_castes.htm
Another batch of bonded labourers set free
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Another_batch_of_bonded_labourers_set_free.htm
Caste factor in delivery of justice highlighted
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Caste_factor_in_delivery_of_justice_highlighted.htm
Cry of the oppressed goes unheard
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Cry_of_the_oppressed_goes_unheard-Deccan.htm
Dalit mother raped for son’s ‘criminal’ affair
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/DALIT_MOTHER_RAPED.htm
Tragic end to inter-caste marriage
http://www.ambedkar.org/News/Tragic_end_to_inter-caste_marriage.htm
http://www.ambedkar.org/crime.htm
Human Rights Watch
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/india/index.htm
Amnesty International
http://www.amnesty.org/en/features-news-and-updates
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html
bademiyansubhanallah
NEW DELHI, March 16 (APP) Nitin Gadkari, a new young leader of
Bhartiya Janata Party gave his party a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) colour when he inducted over a dozen Sang men in the new
organisational set up.
BJP, which was defeated in the last Lok Sabha elections is undergoing
organisational changes to give it a new face – a young face by
restructuring the party. Nitin Gadkari was also appointed as young
leader in the main opposition party a few months back.
Nitin Gadkari, who is also a man from RSS appointed emerging Hindutva
icon Varun Gandhi, known for his hate speech against Muslims during
last Lok Sabha elections as party’s one of the fifteen secretaries.
Tarun Vijay, former editor of RSS mouthpiece Panchajanya, became one
of the six BJP spokespersons. Another RSS man, Ram Nath Kovind, who
headed the BJPs scheduled castes cell, was also appointed as a party
spokesperson.
Former general secretary (organisation) Sanjay Joshi, another RSS man
is expected to be taken in the party.
Ram Lal, a RSS swayamsevak will continue to hold a powerful position
of general secretary (organisation). Of the 10 general secretaries
appointed by Gadkari, four are RSS men. They include, besides Ram Lal,
Narendra Singh Tomar, Thavar Chand Ghelot and Jagat Prakash Nadda.
Some of the RSS men inducted into the party’s organisational setup
include Bhagat Singh Koshiyari (vice-president), Kirit Somaya
(secretary), Kaptan Singh Solanki (national executive member) and Nana
Shamkule (national executive member). Vinay Katiyar, a hardliner, was
made a vice-president.
Senior party leader Yashwant Sinha could not find any prominent
position in the new organisational set up.
Bollywood actress Hema Malini and television actress Smriti Irani were
inducted as vice-president and secretary respectively. Actress Kiron
Kher (wife of Anupam Kher) was also brought in as a member of the
party’s national executive with a purpose to draw crowd.
The new set up reflected the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan
Bhagwat’s diktat on the need to give the party a youthful look.
For the first time as many as 12 women national office-bearers have
been appointed in a list of 36 that includes 11 vice-presidents, 10
general secretaries (not counting 2 joint general secretaries) and 15
secretaries.
http://www.app.com.pk/en_/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=98718&Itemid=2
Opinion » Editorial
March 18, 2010 New-look Team Gadkari
Even as the Women's Reservation Bill struggles to stay the course, the
Nitin Gadkari-led Bharatiya Janata Party has demonstrated exemplary
support to the cause of female empowerment by allocating close to a
third of its party posts to women. This is a message as much to the
Bill's biggest and loudest champion — the Congress party — as to the
obstructionist Yadav troika of Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad, and Sharad
Yadav. Although the Congress was the first to decide in principle that
women should get a critical share of party posts, Congresswomen
continue to be a largely invisible lot. In allocating generous space
to women at various levels in the party hierarchy, the BJP has shown
that gender justice need not become hostage to legislative battles.
Team Gadkari also scores in bringing a blend of experience and youth
to the table. Old hands expectedly dominate the party's parliamentary
board while a fair sprinkling of young people, drawn from diverse
social backgrounds, have made it to the lower echelons of power.
When Mr. Gadkari beat competition from a range of heavyweight insiders
to become the BJP chief, not many thought him capable of finding his
way in the factional minefield that the BJP has become in recent
years. The new incumbent was inexperienced in realpolitik, and
moreover, the shadow of Jhandewalan loomed large over his appointment.
In the event, Mr. Gadkari has proved that he has a better grip of
politics and party affairs than most of the veterans. The confidence
has begun to show — especially in Parliament where Arun Jaitley and
Sushma Swaraj have emerged as formidable team leaders. It was at Mr.
Jaitley's instance that the Women's Reservation Bill came to be
debated before being put to vote in the Rajya Sabha. His speech in
support of the Bill reflected bipartisanship of a kind sorely lacking
in Indian political discourse. More importantly — without prejudice to
what this newspaper thinks about the BJP's disintegrative political
programme and ideology — it came across recently as a sober party
capable of making its point skilfully, without resorting to drama and
bad behaviour. There is also a flip side to the new thrust. Team
Gadkari includes the disagreeable and intemperate Varun Gandhi, who
has been rewarded with the prize post of party secretary. The
accommodation of the young man from a famous lineage, whose vitriol
against Muslims fetched him a prison stay during the 2009 general
election, is a concession to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. As long
as the BJP remains a child of the shadowy RSS, it will not be able to
resist the temptation to play communal politics — which has proved to
be its undoing again and again.
Keywords: Bharatiya Janata Party, Nitin Gadkari, Congress party, Arun
Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
Comments:
While complementing Mr.Gadkari, the editorial couldn't resist the
temptation to have a dig at BJP's ideology, its RSS connection and of
course Varun Gandhi. Did BJP, while in power at the Centre, do any
harm to the Muslims. Of course there were the Gujarat riots during
that period. But what happened in Gujarat was not different from the
anti-Sikh riots by Congressmen after Indira Gandhi's assasination. But
the latter was long forgotten by the media, while Gujarat and one of
Varun Gandhi's election speeches remain a weapon in the armoury of the
media to beat BJP with. When nearly a billion people of the country
are reeling under the impact of prices of essential commodities going
through the roof, the media is not agitated. It allows the government
to get away with lame excuses and no action. But when a garland of
notes was given to Mayawathi by her supporters the media was busy
jeering at her. When the investigators called Chief Minister Modi as
part of the investigation of the Gujarat riots, a gleeful media had
nothing else to talk about for days. The media seems to think that the
opposition is a nuisance and a road block for progrss. The fourth
estate is clearly forgetting its mission. A post script: this writer
is not a BJP or a BSP supporter.
from: K.Vijayakumar
Posted on: Mar 18, 2010 at 12:30 IST
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article253979.ece
NEW DELHI, March 18, 2010 Sharad Pawar favours 33 per cent quota for
women
Gargi Parsai
PTI Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar at the Parliament House in
New Delhi. Photo: PTI
Putting at rest all speculation about his views on the Women’s
Reservation Bill, Nationalist Congress Party leader and a key ally of
the United Progressive Alliance government, Sharad Pawar, said here on
Thursday that he favoured a 33 per cent reservation for women in the
Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies. ``The Bill should be passed [in
the Lok Sabha] as it is,’’ he said.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Kharif Campaign, 2010,
here on Thursday, Mr. Pawar said there is no reservation for
minorities or the Other Backward Class under the Constitution.
``Therefore, first let the Bill be passed with 33 per cent reservation
for women. We don’t want the quota to be reduced,’’ he categorically
said.
To a question, Mr. Pawar said he did have a talk with Samajwadi Party
leader Mulayam Singh (who is insisting for a quota within quota or for
a reduced percentage of reservation for women) but as far as he was
concerned, he does not want the quota of 33 per cent to be reduced.
Asked about the controversy over the comments made by former Congress
spokesman Satyavrat Chaturvedi, Mr. Pawar said, ``that chapter is
closed. These things can happen.’’
Asked if he was seeking an apology from Mr. Chaturvedi, who has since
been divested of his position as a Congress spokesman, Mr Pawar said,
``No.’
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article254505.ece
KOLKATA, March 18, 2010 Initiative to ensure menstrual hygiene among
rural women
Ananya Dutta
When women in rural areas are asked to spend Rs.15 on a packet of nine
sanitary napkins, they respond by saying they would rather continue to
use rags and spend the money on their husbands or children.
But the Gender Hygiene Programme (GHP) launched here three years ago
is attempting to change this attitude towards menstrual hygiene. The
programme, under way in five districts in West Bengal, involves self-
help groups (SHG) manufacturing inexpensive sanitary towels from
cotton and tissue paper. The napkins are then sold by the same women
to others in the village.
The set-up requires a capital of Rs.1,600 and assures the women
involved, an average income of Rs.900 a month. It may not be the most
attractive economic option available to an SHG, but it is self-
sustaining with a steady source of income. At the same time, it
promotes hygiene, said Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, GHP project director and an
environmental sanitation engineer.
The programme suffered hiccups with some partner non-governmental
organisations backing out or some SHGs closing shop and even had
issues with quality control, but after three years, the GHP has been
able to come up with a standardised product.
“The pads made by us are the cheapest option available and, at the
same time, are marketed without providing any subsidy,” Dr. Ghosh
said.
Even though the Indian Council of Social Science Research is
responsible for research and the implementation of the GHP, and the
programme is backed by the State government. There is no subsidy
involved.
However, the government set-up is essential in promoting the programme
as ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers and women involved
with the Integrated Child Development Services are being roped in to
spread the message. The district administration in Bankura is now
trying to induct all 32,000 women from various SHGs as users.
“Implementing such a scheme requires both administrative backing and
political will,” said Ashish Sinha, a Bankura district administration
official.
However, Dr. Ghosh felt the issue of menstrual health must have a
wider approach. “The total sanitation programme has been going on for
about 30 years, but there is a need to redefine sanitation.”
No one has ever considered the safe disposal of menstrual fluids, Dr.
Ghosh said.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article253925.ece
March 18, 2010 Women's Bill
Women should not look at the reservation Bill as empowerment. Do we
seriously believe that a hard working woman will contest elections?
Will the political parties give her a ticket?
Only women with strong political and financial backgrounds will be
brought to the forefront and allowed to be a part of the legislature.
The plight of poor women will remain unchanged.
Pooja Panickar, Kozhikode
The political support for the women's quota Bill should not cease with
it being passed. Money and background should not be criterions in the
selection of candidates. Women from all sections, particularly
underprivileged sections, should be given chances; then only will the
need for having such a reservation be met. The problems of the
underprivileged sections will be addressed only when they are
represented.
Swarnalatha, Omalur
Reserving seats for women in the legislature is acting out of pity
instead of letting women come to power on their own potential. Hard
work will be degraded by a sense of entitlement. Let merit prevail
irrespective of sex.
Solung Khya Sonam, Itanagar
It is ironical that Parliament, which was debating the women's quota
Bill just a week ago, is now fighting over the currency garland
offered to a woman Chief Minister. Valuable time of the august body is
being misappropriated for such non-issues. Nobody seems to bother
about the unattended legislative business.
Newspapers should republish historic debates and discussions in
Parliament from their archives to pave the way for healthy debates in
Parliament.
Rajeswari Janakiraman, Chennai
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/letters/article254055.ece
KOCHI, March 18, 2010 Divorced Muslim women entitled to maintenance
Special Correspondent
A Division Bench of the Kerala High Court on Wednesday ruled that a
divorced Muslim woman's right to claim maintenance under Section 125
of the Criminal Procedure Code did not stand “extinguished” if payment
under Section 3 of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce)
Act 1986 had not been made by her former husband.
The Bench comprising Justice R. Basant and Justice M.C. Hari Rani made
it clear that a divorced Muslim woman would be entitled to claim
maintenance from her former husband till she remained a divorcee.
However, her remarriage or actual payment of maintenance or fair
provision under Section 3 of the Act shall “extinguish” her right to
claim maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
The court ruled that a pronouncement of talaq remained valid only if
attempts for reconciliation by two arbitrators in terms of Islamic
laws were made before such pronouncement.
If such efforts for reconciliation failed, it shall be decided that
there had been a “reasonable cause” for such divorce.
The reasonableness of such substantive cause for divorce could not be
justifiable by a court.
The court made this ruling while dealing with a Muslim divorce case.
The court observed that it was assumed that a Muslim man could
unilaterally end his marriage by pronouncing talaq without the
intervention of a court.
This provision was arbitrary. Though it might offend the notion of
gender justice, such practice was well settled in the country. Such a
divorce was considered perfectly valid.
The Supreme Court did not appear to have addressed the issue so far.
The obligation of hapless Muslim women to suffer polygamy and
arbitrary termination of marriage by pronouncing talaq without court
intervention appeared to offend the fundamental rights guaranteed
under the Constitution.
The court observed that these issues would have to be addressed by the
secular State.
The issues could not be pushed under the carpet by the legislature or
the constitutional courts. The court expressed the hope that the
legislatures would soon address the issue.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article254054.ece
NEW DELHI, March 17, 2010 Sushma: we’ll attend all-party meet on
women’s Bill with open mind
Neena Vyas
The Hindu The BJP will have an open mind on possible amendments the
govt. may propose before the Women's Bill is taken up in the Lok
Sabha, party leader Sushma Swaraj has said.
Related
Politics of Women's Reservation Bill
No proposal to dilute women’s Bill: Congress
No dissent note by Lalu Prasad on Women’s Bill
All views can be considered: Pawar
Women’s Bill will be tabled next month, says Moily
India takes a giant leap for womankind
The 14 years journey of Women’s Reservation Bill
Fearing virtual revolt, BJP cracks the whip
Mulayam fears male representation will dwindle in Parliament
Women get one-third share in Gadkari team
Barack Obama and women MPs do not alone mean equality and justice
Remark being interpreted as willingness on BJP’s part to dilute
provisions
In the Rajya Sabha the Bharatiya Janata Party may have dittoed the
Women's Reservation Bill as presented by the government, but it will
have an open mind on possible amendments the government may propose
before the measure is taken up in the Lok Sabha.
Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj was
categorical on this when asked whether the party would stick to the
position it adopted in the Rajya Sabha or approach the subject with an
open mind, if and when an all-party meeting was called.
“We will go to the all-party meeting with an open mind,” Ms. Swaraj
said, refusing to discuss hypothetical questions what the party's
stand would be if there was a proposal to dilute the 33 per cent
reservation to 20 or 25 per cent or if the issue of sub-quotas for
backward caste women or other groups were to come up.
The “open mind” remark has already begun to be interpreted as a
willingness on the part of the BJP to dilute the provisions. For, the
party has in the last few years been a strong votary of increasing
women's representation by making it mandatory for political parties to
give at least 33 per cent ticket to women, an idea rejected by the
Left and described by Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun
Jaitley as a non-starter for increasing women's representation.
The BJP has been very clear that it will not support any sub-quota for
Muslim women as it is opposed to any religion-based reservation. On
the backward caste quota, the party will take a stand as and when, and
if at all, the issue comes up. Now there are no quotas for backward
castes and therefore there cannot be a backward caste sub-quota for
women.
Party leaders are worried that while the BJP is trying to take some
credit for supporting the women's Bill in the Rajya Sabha — without
its support the Bill could not have been adopted — it would invite the
charge, as would the Congress, of short-changing women if it were to
agree to any dilution.
On Wednesday, Ms. Swaraj and Mr. Jaitley, in a joint statement, said:
“The BJP was committed to the Bill. The BJP lent a loud and clear
support but also wanted the dignity of the House maintained … and it
was the Opposition-dominated House that had approved the Bill despite
mismanagement by the government.” .
But the party's worry now is that many of its MPs do not want it to be
proactive on this subject. They have in fact charged the leaders with
“helping the Congress” push the Bill through, when there was no need
for the Opposition party to do so. If the issue were to be prised open
once again at an all-party meeting or at a series of consultations
with parties, the BJP would have to calibrate its stand, keeping its
commitment to the Bill and yet not be seen to be actively pushing it
as its MPs do not want that.
As of now, the party leadership is not only supporting the 33 per cent
reservation Bill but is also justifying to the hilt the rotation of
reserved seats. Mr. Jaitley, in fact, was one of the few speakers who
lauded this aspect of the Bill, much to the annoyance of fellow BJP
MPs.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article253976.ece
New Delhi, March 17, 2010 No dissent note by Lalu Prasad on Women’s
Bill
Special Correspondent
THE HINDU Congress Spokesman Jayanthi Natarajan is confident that the
Women's Bill will get passed in the Lok Sabha in its original form.
Related
NEWS
Sharad Pawar favours 33 per cent quota for women
Sushma: we’ll attend all-party meet on women’s Bill with open mind
Politics of Women's Reservation Bill
No proposal to dilute women’s Bill: Congress
The Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad did not give any dissent
note to the Women's Reservation Bill when it was discussed in the
Parliamentary Standing Committee.
In fact, Mr. Prasad, who is a member of the Committee, attended only
one meeting, the Congress said on Wednesday. However, the dissent note
over reserving 33 per cent for women in the Lok Sabha and State
Assemblies came from two members of the Samajwadi Party.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj
Party have been opposing the Bill from the beginning and insisting on
a quota for the backward class and Muslim women within the quota.
“Only two members from the Samajwadi Party, Virendra Bhatia and
Shailendra Kumar, gave a note for reducing the quota from 33 per cent
to 20 per cent. A similar demand was made by some members of the
Congress also, but unofficially,'' a party leader said.
At a routine party briefing, Congress spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan
said the Women's Reservation Bill would not be diluted and it would be
brought and passed in the Lok Sabha in its original form.
“We are fully confident that all our allies will be with us and the
Women's Reservation Bill will be passed in the Lok Sabha,'' she said,
ruling out any reduction in the quota despite the Nationalist Congress
Party suggesting that a reduction could lead to a consensus.
“No pressure from allies”
Denying pressure from the allies to reduce the percentage of
reservation, Ms. Natarajan said it would be discussed with the allies.
But the government was committed to passing the Bill in the present
form.
She said the Standing Committee on the Bill had considered all aspects
and come to the conclusion that the Bill should be passed as it was.
Any changes, if required, could be introduced subsequently.
http://beta.thehindu.com/news/national/article253928.ece
Volume 22 - Issue 24, Nov. 19 - Dec. 02, 2005
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU
LEGISLATION
In defence of women
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
A new Bill proposes amendments to the existing laws to widen the scope
of the definition of rape and to deal with other forms of sexual
assault on women and minors.
SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
Girija Vyas, Chairperson of the National Commission for Women,
addressing the media at Parliament House in August following a gang
rape on a bus in Najafgarh.
IN 1996, the minor daughter of a government employee was molested by
her father and his friends. The incident evoked public outrage and
drew the attention of women's organisations, lawyers' groups and
concerned individuals to the need for a system to deal with child
molestation and child rape, but nothing much happened in the case. It
was not rape, the court averred, as there was no "penile-vaginal"
penetration. The culprits were punished under Section 354 of the
Indian Penal Code (IPC), which provided for a maximum punishment of
two years.
Laws relating to rape and sexual assault have remained more or less
unchanged since the introduction of the IPC in 1860. It was only in
1983 that some amendments to the rape law was made. Now, for the first
time, a comprehensive piece of legislation covering almost every
aspect of sexual assault against women and minors has been drafted at
the initiative of the All India Democratic Women's Association
(AIDWA). It is called the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. It is based on
the 172nd report of the Law Commission to amend laws relating to
sexual assault in Sections 375, 376, 354 and 509 of the IPC, the
relevant sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1973, and
the Indian Evidence Act. When it becomes law, the legislation will be
called the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 2000.
The Bill recommends changes in the CrPC and the Evidence Act in order
to make the procedures fair and sensitive to victims of sexual
assault, including minors. The National Commission for Women (NCW) has
backed this legislation. At a two-day national consultation organised
by the NCW, the draft Bill was discussed in detail in the presence of
women activists, lawyers and senior police officers from various
States.
Broadly based on two Bills, one framed by the Law Commission in its
172nd Report, 2000, and the other drafted by a sub-committee of the
NCW in 1992, the Bill drafted by Kirti Singh, president of the Delhi
unit of the AIDWA, seeks to redress almost all the weaknesses in the
present law. Women's organisations have found from experience that the
existing laws neither define nor reflect all kinds of sexual assault
undergone by women. There is a standard notion of rape - the
penetrative one - while other forms of penetration by other parts of
the body as well as by objects have never come under the ambit of
sexual assault. Neither has protracted sexual assault or incest been
addressed adequately. Recognising these lacunae, the Supreme Court in
Sakshi versus Union of India had suggested that the legislature bring
about the required changes. Subsequently, the apex court directed the
Law Commission to examine the law and suggest changes.
The draft Bill seeks to do away with outdated notions of "outraging
the modesty" of women, embodied in some sections dealing with
molestation and eve-teasing. Supreme Court advocate Kirti Singh, also
an advocate of the Supreme Court, said that the Bill was a complete
overhaul of the IPC sections concerned. The 1983 amendments did not
question the patriarchal definition of rape. Talking to Frontline, she
said that the piece of legislation sought to incorporate the notion of
rape as experienced by women themselves, and not what a man perceived
rape to be. Every aspect, be it penetrative sexual assault or non-
penetrative sexual assault as applicable to every possible category of
victim and even marital rape, has been covered in the Bill. It is a
progressive piece of legislation with extensive procedural amendments
applicable to every kind of sexual assault. The Bill is particularly
sensitive to sexual assaults on minors.
THE definition of rape under Section 375 has been enlarged,
incorporating international legal standards. The offence is now called
sexual assault rather than rape, at the suggestion of the Law
Commission and the NCW sub-committee. However, the Bill drafted by
AIDWA has a more nuanced approach to sexual assault, defining it as an
offence committed by a man against a woman, rather than making it
gender-neutral. It also distinguishes this from child sexual assault,
which can be committed on a child of either sex by a man or a woman.
Sub-sections within Section 375 deal in detail with forms of sexual
assault on women as well as minors.
Significantly, the Bill redefines consent whereby the absence of
resistance cannot be deemed as consent. Consent is only the
unequivocal voluntary agreement by a person to engage in sexual
activity. This is important because under the existing law, if a woman
alleging rape does not have any injuries on her person, she is often
disbelieved and the absence of her consent is not considered at all.
Also, while raising the age of consent to 18 years, the Bill makes the
provision that consent would be a valid defence if the complainant was
between 16 and 18 years and the accused not more than five years
older. The Bill, therefore, recognises the prevalence of consensual
sexual activity between young people.
The Bill recognises new categories of aggravated sexual assault, in
addition to the already existing ones on custodial rape introduced in
1983. Under the existing law, punishment for the general category of
rape is a minimum of seven years in jail and 10 years for custodial/
aggravated rapes. The Bill now provides for cases of sexual assault on
a minor below 16 years, on a pregnant woman, and on a person afflicted
with mental or physical disability. Also included is sexual assault by
a person in a position of economic, political or social dominance and
aggravated sexual assault of a persistent nature that has the
potential to cause bodily harm.
One other important and somewhat debatable aspect is that the Bill
proposes to take away from the courts the power of discretion to award
less than the statutory minimum punishment. The Bill calls this a
"seemingly harsh amendment", but considers it necessary in the context
of courts awarding much less than the statutory minimum punishment for
reasons that the women's movement has found unjustifiable. And there
have been cases where no reasons were cited at all when courts awarded
light sentences. During discussions on the Bill at the NCW convention,
there seemed to be no overwhelming support for the death penalty for
those accused of sexual assault.
The Bill also deals with marital rape and proposes punishment for rape
within marriage. It proposes the deletion of Section 354 of the IPC
dealing with molestation, on the grounds that it does not make a
distinction between an adult and a minor. Instead, it has suggested
introducing Section 376 D to deal with all possible ramifications of
unlawful sexual conduct. The Bill holds that molesting a minor and an
adult are two different crimes and the punishment accordingly should
be different.
Instead of the definition of molestation as "sexual assault committed
with the intention of outraging the modesty of a woman" in Section
354, the Bill defines molestation as "touching with a sexual purpose
and without the consent of the woman". A higher punishment has been
recommended for molestation of minors by people who may be de jure or
de facto guardians of the victims.
Similarly, the Bill redefines Section 509 which deals with sexual
harassment. As in molestation, sexual harassment is now punishable
only when it is done with the intention of outraging the modesty of a
woman. The Bill states that words and gestures made with a sexual
purpose are punishable and that sub-sections under the redefined
Section 509 would deal with such offences committed against minors as
well.
Asha Sinha, Inspector-General of Police, CID, Jharkhand, said that one
reason for the non-registration of cases of sexual assault was the
insensitivity of both the police and the public. She explained that
sexual assault was seen as a social crime and so successful handling
of such cases was not usually seen as a reflection of policemen's
performance. The police in Jharkhand recently started a grievance cell
and she recommended fast-track courts and compensation for each
category of violence against women.
It was learnt that Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil, who was present
on the first day of the convention, expressed his appreciation of the
comprehensiveness of the Bill, which is expected to be tabled during
the winter session.
Almost 10 years have passed since the infamous Jhaku case, as the 1996
incident came to be known, but assaults against minors continue
unabated. An analysis of the rapes committed over the past decade
shows that 30 per cent of the crimes have been committed against
minors.
Statistics of the National Crime Records Bureau show that in 2003,
there were more than 15,000 cases of rape and 32,000 cases of
molestation. There is reason to believe that many crimes against
women, including rape, do not get reported or registered because of
the stigma that the victims could attract. Many cases do not reach the
trial stage for lack of evidence.
The proposed amendments are expected not only to increase the
reporting of sexual assaults, but also to facilitate speedy trials and
convictions. While women's groups are aware that law by itself may not
be able to bring about the required drop in the rate of crimes against
women, they hope that the amendments, if passed by Parliament, will go
a long way in challenging social stereotypes.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2224/stories/20051202002910500.htm
Volume 18 - Issue 14, July. 07 - 20, 2001
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU
WOMEN'S RIGHTS
An inequitous proposal
A proposed Bill on the removal of ceiling on monthly maintenance
payable to wives and other dependents as laid down in Section 125 of
the CrPC leaves Muslim women out of its purview.
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
in New Delhi
IN a move that could benefit women faced with the prospect of divorce
and possible destitution, the Union Law Ministry has decided to
introduce a Bill that would seek to amend Section 125 of the Code of
Criminal Procedure (CrPC). The amendment would remove the existing
ceiling of Rs.500 on the monthly maintenance payable for such women,
and for dependents such as parents and children. The ceiling was fixed
in 1955 and retained in CrPC, 1973. The amendment would also seek to
expedite the grant of interim maintenance.
RAJEEV BHATT
A group of Muslim women. The issue of maintenance for them has to go
beyond political considerations.
An increase in maintenance has been a long-standing demand of women's
movements and was articulated as early as in 1974 - in the Committee
on the Status of Women in India report. The CSWI report, "Towards
Equality", stated: "The inclusion of the right to maintenance in the
Criminal Procedure Code has the great advantage of making the remedy
both speedy and cheap. The underlying principle is to prevent
vagrancy, which usually leads to commission of crimes. From this point
of view, it seems unjustified to limit the total amount of maintenance
for all dependent persons to Rs.500."
Amendments to provisions in four acts, namely, Section 36 of the
Indian Divorce Act, 1869, Section 24 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955
and Section 39 of the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act 1936 and Section
39 of the Special Marriages Act, will be made so that applications to
the court for interim maintenance are disposed of within 60 days of
their filing.
However, once again there is silence on the issue of payment of
maintenance to Muslim women. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on
Divorce) Act, 1986 that became law in the wake of the Shah Bano
judgment, had stirred a debate over its adequacy with regard to
payment of maintenance for Muslim women. The Supreme Court in Mohd
Ahmad Khan v Shah Bano Begam and others held that if a divorced woman
is able to maintain herself, the husband's liability ceases with the
expiry of the period of iddat (three menstrual courses after the date
of divoce, that is, roughly three months), but if she is unable to
maintain herself after the period, she is entitled to have recourse to
Section 125 CrPC. This decision led to a controversy and in order to
dilute the judgment in the Shah Bano case, the Muslim Women's Bill,
later to become the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce)
Act, 1986, was passed. Women's organisations are critical of the Act.
They are opposed to it primarily because it denies Muslim women the
option of exercising their rights under the provisions of secular
legislation, which the CrPC is.
Women's groups and secular-minded people hold the view that it is
unfair to continue to deprive Muslim women the benefits of the secular
provisions of the Acts. The first time around, the Muslim Women's Act
had deprived Muslim women, on grounds of religion, of the rights under
Section 125 CrPC. The Act was seen as violative of the principle of
equality before law. According to "Judgment Call", a document
published by Majlis, a legal advocacy centre based in Mumbai, the Act
provided two sets of remedies depending upon the jurisdiction of the
High Court. While in some States she was entitled to a fair and
reasonable provision, in addition to maintenance during the iddat
period, in others her right to maintenance was confined to the iddat
period. The 1986 Act has been challenged in the Supreme Court. The All
India Muslim Personal Law Board (AMPLB) has, however, defended it.
Given the circumstances under which the Act came into being and the
mixed support it received from members of the Muslim community as well
as organisations of women and advocacy groups, it was evident that the
issue would be resurrected. In fact the debate over a uniform civil
code, reforms in personal laws and the applicability of secular
legislation to everybody never really died down. When minority
politics and issues took firm shape in the 1990s following the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, the issue of providing for fair
maintenance to divorced Muslim women was put on the backburner.
The Centre for Women's Develop-ment Studies (CWSD), while welcoming
the removal of the ceiling on maintenance and other legal reforms,
regretted the continued exclusion of Muslim women from "benefits under
a law that they had enjoyed since 1898, particularly when these
amendments are contemplated to be extended to the Hindu, Parsi, Indian
Divorce and Special Marriages Acts." The Joint Women's Programme (JWP)
and the Muslim Women's Forum wanted the benefits to be extended to
Muslim women. JWP secretary Jyotsana Chat-terjee said that the
organisation would make a representation to the Law Minister on this
issue. The All India Democratic Women's Association has held that
while the space for secular legislation should be expanded, existing
personal laws should undergo reforms so as to become more gender-
just. Indu Agnihotri of AIDWA recalled that a private member's bill in
the Lok Sabha, moved some years ago by Sushila Gopalan of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), had sought the removal of the
ceiling on maintenance.
AIDWA in a statement welcomed the Law Ministry's initiative and
suggested that the law be strengthened by providing that, in the event
of conflicting claims about a husband's income, the wife's statement
should be accepted and the onus would be on the husband to disprove
it. It suggested changes in the disqualifying norms for receiving
maintenance.
Regretting the exclusion of Muslim women from the purview of the
proposed amendments, Sona Khan, a Supreme Court advocate, questioned
the constitutionality of the 1986 Act. One of the advocates who
appeared in the Shah Bano case, she told Frontline that the denial to
Muslim women of benefits available to other divorced women under
secular provisions was discriminatory. She maintained that Section 127
(3) (b) CrPC ensured that if a woman received any relief after
divorce, under any customary or personal law, "she shall not be
entitled to the benefit of seeking maintenance under Section 125."
Khan claimed that the dower or mehr (a consideration for entering into
the contract of marriage and payable by the husband) that the Muslim
woman had a right to receive either at the time of marriage or anytime
later, has been unfairly equated with the right to maintenance under
Section 125. The Shah Bano judgment had interpreted and justified the
secular provisions by using the provisions under personal and
customary law, and according to Khan the judgment is law even today as
it has not been overruled by the Supreme Court. Even the dower, Khan
held, was most of the time waived by the wife on the first night of
marriage.
DEFENDING the Muslim Women's Act, 1986 is the AIMPLB. Hasina Hashia,
member of the AIMPLB and an associate professor in Jamia Millia
Islamia university, is categorical that Muslim women are not entitled
to maintenance beyond the iddat period and that Section 125 CrPC
cannot apply to them. Section 5 of the 1986 Act lays down that only if
the divorced woman and her former husband exercise their option to be
governed by Sections 125 to 128 of the CrPC will their case be
considered under it.
Hashia told Frontline that accepting maintenance beyond the iddat
period was haraam (illegitimate) under the Shariat as all relationship
between a man and his wife would have ceased. After that she could be
supported either by her relatives or the Wakf Board. She said that the
AIMPLB was demanding a lower ceiling for maintenance for Muslim women
and that if a lump sum could be decided depending upon the income of
the man, it would not go beyond the tenets of Muslim personal law. The
concept of Mata (a parting gift to serve a social purpose) as espoused
by some sections of the Muslim intelligentsia could be explored. The
Board is yet to have a final opinion on this concept, which finds
mention in the Koran.
All solutions, Hashia maintained, are to be found within the
parameters of the Shariat. She recommended the setting up of Dar-ul-
Qaza or Islamic courts to resolve disputes of all kinds.
Sabiha Hussain of the CWDS, who has done a considerable amount of work
relating to issues of Muslim women, said frivolous excuses were often
given for divorcing Muslim women. She quoted a study conducted during
1998-99 involving 10 Muslim women from a mixed socio-economic
background in Bihar. Some had been divorced for not cooking what they
had been asked to cook, yet others were divorced for not possessing
good looks and so on. Some of them did not get maintenance even for
the iddat period and at the time of divorce, no witnesses were
present. Only two got back their mehr after three months of the
divorce.
A seminar in May organised by the CWDS and the Majlis on the issue of
maintenance rights of Muslim women debated the provisions of the
Muslim Women's Act, 1986 vis-a-vis benefits under Section 125 CrPC.
While some like Flavia Agnes of the Majlis felt that a fresh look at
the Act was necessary, others felt that the Act needed to be
interpreted in such a way as to make it more gender-just given the
Indian social realities. The seminar, which witnessed divergent views,
finally recommended that personal laws of all communities be
strengthened in order to make them more gender-just and to weed out
gender discrimination; that the Muslim Women's Act, 1986 be
strengthened to uphold positive and gender-just interpretations and
that the ceiling on the amount of maintenance payable under Section
125 CrPC be removed.
The issue of maintenance for Muslim women has to go beyond any
political considerations and it is the executive's responsibility to
ensure that no community is discriminated against in the formulation
of a legislation. The silence on the issue of Section 125 CrPC vis-a-
vis Muslim women's maintenance points to the fact that considerations
other than respecting the personal laws of a community have been at
play. It reflects the government reluctance to open what it sees as a
veritable Pandora's box. What is surprising is that it does not seem
to care much about the sentiments of the minorities while dealing with
other issues concerning them.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1814/18140890.htm
Volume 17 - Issue 06, Mar. 18 - 31, 2000
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU
A committed fighter
Geeta Mukherjee, 1924-2000.
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
THE death of Geeta Mukherjee, veteran parliamentarian and Communist
Party of India (CPI) member, has had two immediate consequences. In
political terms, the CPI has lost a gritty and indefatigable
representative; and for young communists there is one few er of the
old guard to emulate. Geeta Mukherjee had undergone heart surgery in
1990 but that did not deter her from continuing with her party and
parliamentary activities. She was the Deputy Leader of the CPI in the
Lok Sabha.
K. RAMESH BABU
As chairperson of the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the
Women's Reservation Bill (which provides for the reservation of one-
third of the total number of seats in State Assemblies and Parliament
for women), she was determined to see the bill rea ch its logical
conclusion. On March 3, a day before she succumbed to a heart attack,
Geeta Mukherjee vehemently protested on the floor of the House against
the Bihar Governor's decision to invite the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) to form the governm ent in the State. She condemned the
action as "undemocratic".
Close friends recalled that though she was unwell, she wanted to
attend Parliament in the wake of the developments in Bihar and the
controversy over the Gujarat government's decision to allow its
employees to take part in the activities of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS). Although she was equally committed to other issues, her
chief preoccupation since 1996, when she took over as chairperson of
the Joint Select Committee, was to ensure the passage of the Women's
Reservation Bill. She even reported ly turned down a ministerial berth
in the I.K. Gujral government on the grounds that she wanted to
concentrate fully on the bill. She strived to carry everyone along
with her on the Women's Bill issue, including those who wanted a
separate quota for Othe r Backward Classes (OBCs). With her strong
political convictions and ideological commitment, Geeta Mukherjee was
liked by people across party lines.
Mukherjee, went to school in Jessore, now in Bangladesh, was born as
Geeta Roy Choudhary in a middle class family. Her father was a Rai
Bahadur, a title bestowed upon him by the colonial rulers. As a
student, Geeta Mukherjee joined the Bengal Provincial Students
Federation (BPSF) in 1939. At that time, the BPSF was leading an
agitation demanding the repatriation and release of persons imprisoned
in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. She was the secretary of the
Students Federation from 1947 to 1951. Geeta Mukherjee studied Bengali
literature and graduated from the Ashutosh College in Calcutta. In
1942, she joined the CPI and married Biswanath Mukherjee, who was
already an established student communist leader. Geeta Mukherjee first
came into the limelight during the postal workers' strike of 1945. On
July 29, 1945 she addressed a rally, where she was the only woman
student speaker.
When the Communist Party was banned in 1948, she and Biswanath
Mukherjee were detained without trial for six months in the Presidency
Jail, Calcutta. Geeta Mukherjee was best known for her active role in
the student, peasant and women's movements. For ma ny students of the
1960s, she was a role model. She remained with the CPI after the
Communist Party split in 1964. She was elected to the West Bengal
Assembly, in 1967 and 1972, from Tamluk constituency in Midnapore
district. In 1978, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from Panskura and
represented that constituency since then.
Geeta Mukherjee was elected to the National Council of the party in
1978 and to its National Executive in 1981. She was elected one of the
national secretaries of the CPI at the 17th Congress of the party held
in Chennai in 1998. Geeta Mukherjee thus bec ame the first woman
secretariat member of any Indian communist party. Paying tributes to
her on the occasion of the International Women's Day on March 8,
women's organisations observed that under her chairpersonship the
report of the Joint Select Committ ee of Parliament on the Women's
Reservation Bill was completed in record time.
Geeta Mukherjee participated in various agitations including those
taking up the cause of women beedi workers. However, she took
particularly strong positions on gender issues. Amarjeet Kaur, general
secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women ( NFIW), the
women's wing of the CPI, said that on the dowry issue, Geeta Mukherjee
was keen that CPI cadres practised what they said in public.
An Executive Council member of the NFIW since 1965, Geeta Mukherjee
was also a member of the National Commission for Women in 1988 and of
the National Commission on Rural Labour in 1986. She was also a member
of the Press Council.
Geeta Mukherjee always wanted the mass organisations of the party to
keep her posted on the issues and developments so that she could raise
them in Parliament, Amarjeet Kaur said. Before raising a question, she
ensured that she had a good understanding o f the subject.
In Geeta Mukherjee's life, there was no contradiction between theory
and practice. A diehard optimist, she was a person of humility,
simplicity and absolute ideological conviction. Her colleagues recall
that despite the split in the Communist Party in 19 64, the political
upheavals in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, Geeta Mukherjee's commitment to the people's
democratic revolution remained undiluted.
Geeta Mukherjee wrote some books for children. Bharat Upakatha
(Folktales of India) and Chotoder Rabindranath (Tagore for Children)
are two of them. She translated in Bengali Bruno Apitz's classic Naked
Among Wolves. She loved poetry and used to read and recite Kazi Nazrul
Islam and Rabindranath Tagore.
A passionate and compassionate political activist, as described by
President K.R. Narayanan, Geeta Mukherjee has left a void not only in
the communist movement but also in the women's and other democratic
movements in the country.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1706/17061060.htm
Volume 23 - Issue 25 :: Dec. 16-29, 2006
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU
WORLD AFFAIRS
Sex and the state
RAFIA ZAKARIA
The euphoria surrounding Pakistan's new law on "protection of women"
ignores the fact that the Hudood laws are still intact.
ANJUM NAVEED/AP
President Pervez Musharraf with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on
December 5 at a women's conference in Islamabad, where he promised
more legislation to protect the rights of women.
ON November 16, Pakistan's National Assembly passed the patronisingly
titled "Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Bill 2006". The
Bill, which has since been passed by the Senate, was introduced to the
populace in a televised address by President General Pervez Musharraf,
who called it a "major achievement". International media, continuing
their affair with Pakistan's "enlightened" dictator, also celebrated
the new law as a much-awaited respite for Pakistan's rights-
impoverished female population. In their euphoria for a "good news
story" emerging from an otherwise troubled region of the world, few of
the commentators bothered to look at the concrete provisions of the
Bill. Even fewer bothered to consider whether the celebrated Bill
would assuage the scourge of jurisdictional confusion that exists
between the Sharia and civil courts.
The Bill purports to amend clauses in the controversial Zina and
Hudood Ordinances, which were promulgated by General Zia-ul-Haq in
1979. As per the provisions of the Bill, only sections of which have
been released to the public, rape or zina bil jabr will be tried under
the Pakistan Penal Code instead of under the Zina and Hudood
Ordinances. This change of jurisdiction, politically spun as rescuing
rape victims from the arduous requirement of "producing four adult
male witnesses" to accomplish a prosecution, is meant to draw
attention away from the fact that the Zina and Hudood Ordinances have
not actually been repealed. Adultery continues to remain a crime
punishable by death and minorities and women continue to count as half
witnesses in hadd cases. The celebrations surrounding the passage of
the Bill also ignore the fact that the Council of Islamic Ideology, a
constitutional body set up to review the Zina and Hudood Ordinances,
explicitly stated in its 2006 report that "piecemeal amendments to the
Zina and Hudood Ordinances would not bring them into accord with the
Koran and Sunna".
Furthermore, the effectiveness of the jurisdictional changes
introduced by the Protection of Women Bill is further reduced by the
fact that it introduces the new crime of "lewdness" or "fornication"
to the Pakistan Penal Code. Section 496B, Clause 7, of the Pakistan
Penal Code, now forbids consensual sex outside of marriage and
requires those engaging in it to be punished by five years'
imprisonment and a fine of Rupees 10,000. In a lackadaisical attempt
to deter false charges, lawmakers have also chosen to include a "qazf"
provision in the law that would impose the same punishment on those
making false charges of fornication. Happily citing this provision as
a built-in mechanism against misuse, lawmakers knowingly chose to
ignore the fact that the same provision exists in the Hudood
Ordinances against those bringing false charges of adultery and has
never once in 27 years been used to punish someone making a false
accusation of adultery. Capitalising on the political tractability of
the existing jurisdictional confusion, government proponents of the
Protection of Women Bill also tout its "firewall" provision that will
ostensibly prevent rape victims from being tried under the fornication
clause if they are "unable to prove their rape charges".
In an editorial published in Daily Times, Asma Jehangir of the Human
Rights Commission of Pakistan termed the Bill "a victory for no one".
In her astute discussion of the provisions of the Bill, she pointed
out that the unamended portions of the Zina and Hudood Ordinances
continued to discriminate on the basis of sex and religion and
economic status. Pointing to the law of Qisas and Diyat, which was
also left untouched by the Bill, she says: "Murder can be waived or
compromised but zina can still be punished with stoning to death. A
person who can pay his way out of death penalty or manoeuvre a
compromise can be set free but lesser offences can beget
imprisonment."
Her emphasis on the class dimension of vulnerability to legal abuse at
the hands of the state is an important basis for evaluating this new
Bill. Records of women imprisoned under charges of fornication or
adultery under the Hudood Ordinances reveal that it is Pakistan's poor
women who are most frequently victimised by the state's unchecked
power in legislating morality in the name of Islam. Therefore, while
the promised jurisdictional changes under the Bill may place a
placating Band-Aid on a festering wound, they fail to address the
reality that a poor woman who chooses to file a rape charge still
faces incredible challenges that are rudely ignored by this
politically inspired piece of legislation. The case of Mukhtar Mai,
the courageous gang-rape survivor from Meerwala, is a testament to the
limited utility of the legal changes sought by the law. The very fact
that her rape case was tried not just in a Sharia court or a civil
court but also in a "special terrorism court" shows how jurisdictional
rules can easily be superseded by governmental directive in an
essentially undemocratic system where courts in general have limited
legitimacy.
Judging legal changes in Pakistan by evaluating the legitimacy that
Pakistan's legal institutions actually possess goes against the
predilection of elite Pakistani scholars and their Western
counterparts bent on celebrating General Musharraf as the heaven-sent
liberal scion saving Pakistan from the mullahs. The elite in Pakistan
have little or no reliance on the legal system as a means of dispute
resolution. The poor, intimidated by the jurisdictional morass created
by the hodge-podge of civil courts, federal Sharia courts and special
terrorism courts, lack the material resources and, understandably, the
will to navigate a system whose primary aim seems to be to serve the
objectives of those in power. In the unlikely event that a poor person
is able to secure a conviction from a court, few if any mechanisms
exist for it to be enforced against the other party, particularly if
they happen to be powerful or command material resources. Predictably,
the most high-profile cases ever tried in Pakistani courts are those
brought by those holding the reins of government against former rulers
accused of corruption. Ultimately, Musharraf's rise to power with the
aid of unilateral constitutional amendments sharpens the irony of his
being celebrated as someone responsible for instituting the rule of
law in a militarised state.
The leniency of the Pakistani public to the legal or constitutional
usurpations of power of the Musharraf administration is ultimately
also a product of the self-perpetuating cycle of institutional
weakness that maintains the status quo. In a simplistic yet
illuminating calculus, the Pakistani public, fed up with the slew of
corrupt civilian governments of the past decades, supports the
military administration because it maintains law and order through
force. In turn, the military administration, adept at maintaining its
hold over Pakistani politics, refuses to pour the billions of dollars
of aid money it regularly receives into the court system, which if
truly legitimate and powerful, could check the military's claim to
power. The legal system thus remains impoverished, under-funded and
ultimately powerless, while the current administration can manipulate
world opinion through the pretence of legal changes to gain political
mileage. The hollowness of the legal institutions ultimately enables
them to be symbolically manipulated as agents of change and harbingers
of the rule of law while never actually threatening the omniscient
hegemony of the military. One recent instance that demonstrates the
farcical status of Pakistan's courts in curbing state power is the
imprisonment without charge of dozens of women belonging to the Baloch
Bugti tribe in a government effort designed to force their husbands,
fathers and brothers out of hiding. Of course, the legal basis for
such an action, which no court could possibly sanction, has yet to be
explained.
Even more depressingly, the military is hardly alone in perpetuating
this cycle. Past civilian administrations, led either by Benazir
Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif, have been equally reticent to strengthen a
court system that might ultimately be a check on their own power. In
the context of the Protection of Women Bill, the liberal Pakistan
People's Party(PPP) as well as the Muhajir Qaumi Movement(MQM) has
joined the Musharraf administration in supporting the changes and
heralding the birth of what is being called a new configuration in
Pakistani politics. Indeed, supporting the legislation bears political
rewards for both, since it marks their recognition of the reality that
in the eyes of the aid-giving West, being "enlightened" means
supporting President Musharraf.
The louder the mullah-dominated Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA) protests
against the Bill, the more resplendent the bounty of dollars of which
the Musharraf administration, and now even the PPP and the MQM, may
partake of. This new coalition of corrupt authoritarian liberals
against religious zealots is particularly worrisome if one remembers
the denouement of the Iranian Revolution which was presaged by just
such a Western-supported political configuration. And what about the
Pakistani women in whose name these reforms are undertaken? Stuck
between Musharraf and the mullahs, they must accept the meagre scraps
of half-hearted changes promised by the Protection of Women Bill, or
shudder in fear of an MMA government that will relegate them to their
houses and force them into burqas.
To keep this fear alive, since it stands to benefit so much from the
ominous threat it represents, the Musharraf administration has done
little to thwart the passage of the Hasba Bill in North West Frontier
Province. This new Bill, which was adopted by the NWFP provincial
government days before the passage of the Protection of Women Bill in
the National Assembly, revives the medieval institution of "mohtasibs"
or "moral police". In yet another parallel system of justice, these
mohtasibs will now patrol the streets of the province to insure that
"society is guided by the Sharia". Vigilante groups have already begun
the process by standing guard outside universities and turning away
women students not covering their heads as well as harassing
minorities under a variety of pretexts.
Human rights organisations in Pakistan and abroad have denounced this
"give and take" attitude of the Musharraf administration that has now
become proficient at maintaining liberal pretences and legitimising
itself as the bastion of anti-extremism, while also appeasing the MMA.
Civil society organisations such as the Aurat Foundation, the Women's
Action Forum, Sungi and ANAA have all protested against the Bill.
Minority rights organisations such as the National Solidarity of Equal
Rights have highlighted the reality that Hudood laws left untouched by
the legislation prevent non-Muslims from being either full witnesses,
judges or even lawyers in cases brought under the Hudood Ordinances.
According to Amna Buttar, president of ANAA, "the new law removes a
noose but fires a bullet" in continuing to retain the many provisions
that may be used to persecute women in the name of regulating sex and
morality. This equivocation, which sees legislating on sex as a means
of ensuring the moral life of society, ignores the reality that moral
wrongs when legislated upon by the state give the latter inordinate
power in making the lives of ordinary citizens completely vulnerable
to unchecked and indiscriminate intrusions and abuses of power.
In the final analyses, the debate surrounding the Women's Protection
Bill must focus on the status of the rule of law in Pakistani society.
The duplicitous rhetoric of curbing extremism by promoting militarism
masks the grotesque mess of parallel jurisdictions and inaccessibility
to justice for both male and female citizens of Pakistan. The Asian
Development Bank reports that Pakistan received $1.1 billion in United
States aid to fight the "war against terror" last year and is
scheduled to receive another $900m this year. A total of $3.7 billion
has been given to Pakistan by the U.S. since January 2002. It is safe
to assume that not a cent of this bounty has been used to revive
Pakistan's weak and failing legal institutions. Unless Western powers
realise that victory in the war against extremism hinges not on
propping up authoritarian regimes but on long-term investment in
strengthening democratic and legal institutions, Pakistani women will
continue to bear the unjust burden of misogyny and discrimination.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2325/stories/20061229000306200.htm
Volume 24 - Issue 05 :: Mar. 10-23, 2007
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU
LEGISLATION
Self-help doubts
T.K. RAJALAKSHMI
Opposition grows to the microfinance Bill on the grounds that it,
among other things, excludes the big players in microfinance.
G. KRISHNASWAMY
In Hyderabad, the office of the Mutually Aided Cooperative Thrift &
Credit Society, which helps members of self-help groups.
THE heightened allocations to the social sector and the rhetoric of
women's empowerment notwithstanding, a Bill meant to guarantee
financial services to women and other disadvantaged sections has run
into rough weather. The Ministries of Women and Child Development and
Rural Development are not in agreement with certain provisions of the
Micro-Financial Sector (Development and Regulation) Bill, 2007, which
they believe has been drafted in haste.
The main objective of the Bill is to provide for the promotion,
development and orderly growth of the microfinance sector in rural and
urban areas so as to offer an enabling environment to ensure that the
people, especially women and certain disadvantaged sections, have
universal access to integrated financial services of banks.
Another objective is to regulate the functioning of microfinance
organisations. In its previous avatar it was known as the National
Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Amendment) Bill, 2006. The
Bill was first drafted in 2000 with the objective of giving a
legalised structure to microcredit and microfinance organisations.
According to a note prepared by the Department of Economic Affairs
(Banking Division) in the Finance Ministry, the Bill was formulated
after consultations with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the National
Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), and the Indian
Banks' Association (IBA).
The logic was that "many microcredit-providing institutions such as
MFIs [microfinance institutions] and SHGs [self-help groups] have been
repeatedly stressing the need for regulation of this sector in view of
its rapid growth and fear of less-than-credible institutions dealing
with the poor and illiterate people." But the main problem with the
Bill is that it excludes the big players in microfinance.
The Bill demonstrates perhaps that the talk of "inter-sectoral"
convergence is just rhetoric. It also brings out the lack of inter-
Ministerial discussion and deliberation.
For instance, the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK), set up in 1993 under
the Ministry of Women and Child Development to provide credit to poor
rural women, has been left out from the to-be-constituted microfinance
development council (MDC), whose objective is to advise NABARD on
matters relating to microfinance.
The council will have two women nominees, who may not necessarily
represent the Ministry of Women and Child Development. This, said a
senior woman bureaucrat, was ironical as 90 per cent of microcredit
borrowers were women. Women and Child Development Minister Renuka
Choudhary said the Bill was inimical to the interests of poor women.
Excluding the RMK was a big surprise, considering that it has
benefited 5,68,000 women so far. The Bill has also run into trouble
from women's organisations and those closely involved with SHGs.
The All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) believes that
while the microfinance Bill ought to be rejected outright, there is
also a need to look at the working of SHGs over the past two decades.
According to AIDWA, unlike women's and people's science groups, the
Government of India and other high-profile NGOs viewed SHGs as banking
institutions whose savings needed to be mopped up in order to ease the
burden of public investment.
Among the problems facing SHGs, it said, was the exclusion of a great
number of poor people from the formation of SHG federations because of
definitional problems and the lack of representation of women in the
decision-making processes. Said Sudha Sundararaman, general secretary,
AIDWA: "Instead of replacing formal credit institutions, the SHGs are
designed to function as groups to ensure efficient transactions and
repayments on a limited credit-based agenda. This works against the
inclusion of issues such as domestic violence, sexual and reproductive
rights and political participation. Such issues are then addressed by
women `in spite of' rather than as a legitimate agenda of the SHGs."
Main objections
The main objections to the Bill are that it excludes from its purview
non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and companies registered as
not-for-profit under Section 25 of the Companies Act; these two
categories of companies deal with 90 per cent of microfinance. The
Bill, instead, seeks to regulate societies, cooperative societies and
trusts registered under State laws, also called microfinance
organisations (MFOs), which handle only 10 per cent of such services
in the country.
These smaller organisations could also get into trouble, given the
conditionalities such as profitablity, 15 per cent capital adequacy
ratio (that is, the capital base of the organisation should comprise
at least 15 per cent of its outstanding loans), three years'
experience and NABARD certification.
Nevertheless, the Cabinet and the Group of Ministers has cleared the
Bill and it is likely to be tabled in the current session of
Parliament.
The concern among non-governmental organisations (NGOs) involved with
SHGs is that MFIs, profit-oriented as they are, may introduce
practices that might corrupt the SHG model itself. They also feel that
the conditionalities are harsh considering that even commercial banks
were required to have a capital adequacy ratio of only 8 per cent.
Thomas Franco Rajendra Dev of the Mahalir Association for Literacy
Awareness and Rights (MALAR), a federation of SHGs in Kanyakumari
district, said repayment rates were, by and large, very good and that
was one reason why MFIs wanted to enter the picture in a big way and
that too without many regulations.
He said MFIs in Andhra Pradesh used coercive methods to make women
repay their loans and added that he knew of many instances of such
harassment. He said that in the last seven or eight years, a lot of
SHGs and microcredit institutions had been formed with the sole
purpose of obtaining and disbursing loans. Only in some States,
especially Kerala, where linkages had been made between literacy,
political empowerment and economic empowerment within SHGs, the
poorest among the women had benefited and emerged as a force.
Incidentally, estimates of the number of SHGs in the country range
from seven million to more than a crore. The demand for micro-credit
is estimated to be close to Rs.1 lakh crore. Until December 2006,
24.82 lakh SHGs had been credit-linked with a cumulative bank loan of
Rs.13,720.82 crore. As on January 25, 2007, about 24.33 lakh SHGs,
with a bank loan of Rs.10,895 crore, had been formed under the
Swarnajayanti Gram Swarojgar Yojana of the Ministry of Rural
Development. Last year alone, Rs.65,000 crore was disbursed as
microcredit.
V. RAJU
At Sattenapalli in Andhra Pradesh's Guntur district in July 2006, a
victim of harassment by microfinance companies is consoled by National
Commission of Women member Nirmala Venkatesh. The companies wanted the
girl to repay the loan taken by her mother who is no more.
But there are doubts whether it can help rural poverty. Franco
Rajendra Dev said it was an illusion that microfinance alone would
eradicate poverty; it had to be accompanied by other measures,
including land reforms, which was the experience of both Kerala and
West Bengal. The Integrated Rural Development Programme, which began
in 1979, he said, failed to reduce poverty, as it was unconnected with
the other causes of poverty.
He said that within MALAR, which was based on the People's Science
Movement model, nearly 10 per cent of the women had improved their
quality of life; handloom weavers had become owners of looms, pottery
workers had turned owners and women had opened grocery shops and got
into lease cultivation.
While this was a positive outcome, the main problem was the small net
profit in these ventures and the challenges of the market. There was a
lot to learn from the Kudumbashree model in Kerala, where the poorest
of the poor among women were identified under the Asraya scheme and
marketing outlets were provided for their SHG products. In West
Bengal, too, 16 government departments were involved in SHGs in one
way or other. There was a separate Ministry for SHGs as well. The
marketing of the products was allowed through the public distribution
system (PDS).
Critics of the Bill accused the major players of charging high rates
of interest and resorting to other irregularities, including inhuman
methods of recovery, which, in States such as Andhra Pradesh, even
drove women to commit suicide. The majority of the borrowers were
women, organised into SHGs or otherwise. Last year, the Collectors of
East Godavari and Krishna districts submitted a report each to the RMK
about women committing suicide because of harassment by the MFIs. Most
of the suicides were reported from Guntur, East Godavari and Krishna
districts.
In Krishna district, of the 19 unnatural deaths of women in 2005-06,
10 were confirmed to have committed suicide. In general, the district
administration's observations were that MFIs imposed a non-
transparent, flat rate of interest instead of a simple interest on the
diminishing principal amount; the periodicity of repayment was weekly
instead of monthly, the insurance policy of MFIs was such that
premiums were collected without giving any policy; and they used
methods of recovery that were demeaning to women, including making
them stand in the hot sun, locking up their homes and even advising
them to commit suicide.
In raids on the local offices of some of the MFIs operating in the
district, signed cheques, blank, signed plain sheets of paper, and
home-site pattas and land title-deeds were seized.
Contentious proposal
One of the proposals in the Bill is to allow MFOs that have a capital
base of Rs.5 lakh to mobilise thrift. Such a move, critics argued,
would restrict the expansion of the capital that was being created by
SHGs. They said group savings were normally used in an emergency, but
if MFOs were allowed to mop up the thrift, the purpose of SHGs would
be defeated and women would find themselves again at the mercy of
moneylenders.
Sources in the RMK said the word "thrift" was a clever way of defining
"public deposit" as the RBI had not prescribed any "safety norms" for
banks that accepted public deposits. This could allow unscrupulous
MFOs, as also moneylenders who could register as MFOs, a backdoor
entry and accept not only savings from people but also lend at very
high rates of interest. Another worry was that caste and communal
organisations could enter the fray, especially if the Bill allowed
them to collect deposits through thrift.
The Bill does not provide any cap on the rate of interest, especially
when there were known instances of MFIs charging flat rates of 15 to
30 per cent and using unethical means of recovery. On the other hand,
there was a cap of Rs.50,000 on borrowing. There were objections to
NABARD functioning as the regulatory body because it was
insufficiently manned in the districts and there could be a conflict
of interest as it was a promoter of SHGs and NGOs. "A promoter cannot
be a regulator," said Franco.
Yet another criticism has been that State governments were not
consulted during the formulation of the Bill despite the fact that
many of the MFOs were registered under State laws.
The controversy over the Bill also comes in the context of a
widespread SHG movement comprising mainly of poor women in the
villages. The experience of the SHGs has been a mixed one, depending
on the level of political awareness and rate of literacy and social
and political organisation in the States. The possible enactment of
the microfinance Bill has caused consternation among groups working
with SHGs.
A two-day national consultation organised by Nirantar, an organisation
that deals with gender and education issues, debated the implications
of the Bill as well as the role of the SHGs.
More than 40 organisations from 19 States participated. The conference
discussed a study prepared by Nirantar, titled "Examining empowerment,
poverty alleviation, education within self-help groups" and a broad
consensus emerged on the positive and the negative outcomes of the
experiences of women in SHGs.
The study was done among 2,750 SHGs, the majority of them formed under
government programmes, in 16 States. The survey revealed that the
benefits had not percolated equitably to all women and most of them
had not received any capacity-building inputs for the past two years.
The experience differed from State to State and on the level of
political consciousness as well.
At the consultation itself, the consensus was that the microfinance
Bill would do more harm than good to rural women. It sought a wider
consultation with all the stakeholder before the Bill is passed.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2405/stories/20070323002409700.htm
Women's Reservation Bill
The Women's Reservation Bill is the one subject that has been most
talked about and the least acted upon. Now, one can easily visualise
that the Bill stands the 'brightest' chance of getting drowned in the
din and noise of tehalka.com. But the singular d isservice meted out
to the women's issue has, unfortunately come from no less a person
than Chief Election commissioner, M.S. Gill. (See his interview in
Frontline dated March 16, 2001.)
To quote Gill: "My solution is simple. Instead of amending the
Constitution every other day with all the negative points it involves,
have a simple amendment in the RPA (Representation of Peoples Act)
where all you would say is this: all parties that hav e their
recognition and privileges of the Commission shall retain these only
for so long, at every election they fight in every State they put up X
percentage of women candidates."
With this simple solution, Gill wants us to believe that the
proportion of women which is only '8 per cent in Parliament and
Assemblies over the last 50 years' will overnight jump from 8 to 15 or
20 per cent, even if a little less than 33 per cent of th e ticket is
given to women by the political parties.
The Frontline correspondent who interviewed Mr. Gill has chosen to
describe his solution as 'unique'. Unique indeed - not as a solution
but as a way of scuttling the whole issue.
Gill, at least for the record, asserts that gender justice is
certainly his priority but not higher than his loyalty to the
Constitution. He does not want the fault of political parties to visit
on the Constitution. So he wants the Constitution to be lef t
undisturbed by gender considerations. He ascribes the fact of women
not being given the ticket to an adequate extent to the fault of
political parties. He declares: "The flaw is that women are not
getting space in the political parties. Guaranteed spac e. Assured
space."
Gill's solution can at best only guarantee party ticket for women in
elections. It will certainly not ensure their presence in Parliament
or Assemblies unless a specific number of constituencies are mandated
to return only a woman as the representative.
We have on hand our own experience with regard to the elections to
local bodies. Only the 83rd amendment to the Constitution has given
the women the guaranteed and assured space in the local bodies. Not
before. Not otherwise than by reservation.
The delay over passing of the Bill is of course a matter of serious
concern not only to women, but also to all those who genuinely seek
women to be empowered. But, it cannot be an alibi for pushing through
a non-serious and frivolous proposal, from which ever quarters it may
emanate.
W.R. Varada Rajan
Received on email
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1807/18071290.htm
Volume 24 - Issue 25 :: Dec. 22, 2007-Jan. 04, 2008
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU
COVER STORY
Lacunae in law
V. VENKATESAN
India’s legal response to violence against women has by and large been
characterised by the absence of sympathy for the victim.
RAJESH KUMAR SINGH/AP
At a rally in Allahabad on December 8 to create awareness about the
Domestic Violence Act.
The World Human Rights Conference in Vienna recognised gender-based
violence as a human rights violation in 1993. In the same year, the
United Nations, through a declaration, defined violence against women
as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to
result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to a
woman, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary
deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.
In 1995, the U.N.’s Special Report on Violence Against Women added
“violence perpetrated or condoned by the State” to this definition.
Because of the social group to which she belongs, in times of war,
riots and ethnic, caste or class violence, a woman may be raped or
brutalised as a means of humiliating the community to which she
belongs. Male perception of the female sex and women as the property
of men contributes to this extreme form of gender violence.
It may be worthwhile to look at India’s legal response to the first
two of these three major forms of violence, namely, violence against
women in the private and public domains, and discern what many
observers have noted as the absence of attitudes sympathetic to women
among those enforcing or interpreting these laws.
Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which defines the rape of
a woman by a man, has an important exception: sexual intercourse by a
man with his wife, the wife not being under 15 years of age, is not
rape. Thus “marital rape” as an offence is outside the purview of
Indian criminal law.
The introduction of Section 376A in the IPC somewhat limits this
exception. Under this Section, a man who has sexual intercourse with
his wife who is living separately from him under a decree of
separation or under any custom or usage, without her consent shall be
punished with imprisonment up to two years and shall also be liable to
pay a fine.
Comparison with the punishments prescribed in the IPC for other
categories of rape brings out starkly the bias in the law in favour of
judicially separated men. The IPC prescribes a minimum sentence of
seven years for those convicted in non-custodial rape cases and 10
years in the case of custodial rapes.
The Law Commission has rejected proposals to repeal the marital rape
exception on the grounds that it would amount to “excessive
interference with the marital relationship” (Review of Rape Laws,
172nd Report, 2000, Chapter 3, page 14).
Clearly, some of the ingredients of Section 375 apply also to marital
rape. These include the commission of the offence by the man against
the victim’s will and without her consent. The assumption that a woman
forsakes her right to refuse consent for sexual intercourse with her
husband as long as the marriage persists has been questioned by many
feminist scholars. Such an assumption would inevitably mean that the
law treats women as the property of their husbands.
In R v. R (Rape: Marital Exemption) (1991), the House of Lords widened
the scope of criminal liability by declaring that a husband could be
charged as the principal offender in the rape of his wife. This
decision obliterated the protection of the husband from such
prosecution under the doctrine of marital exemption. The wife was
supposed to have given a general consent to her husband as a natural
implication of the marriage. This has now become an outmoded view of
marriage in the U.K.
Cruelty by husband
Section 498A – inserted into the IPC in 1983 – is a major legislative
measure to tackle cruelty by a husband or relatives of the husband.
Under it the offender could be punished with imprisonment for up to
three years and also be liable to pay a fine. The Amendment Act, which
introduced this Section in the IPC, had the objective of combating the
menace of dowry deaths. Section 498A covers both physical and mental
abuse. It is felt that Section 498A’s scope is limited as it is silent
on other kinds of cruelties involving psychological, economic and
sexual abuses. The Section defines cruelty as any act that drives a
woman to commit suicide or cause grave injury or danger to life.
The same Act also introduced Section 113A to the Indian Evidence Act
to raise a presumption regarding the abetment of suicide by a married
woman, if the suicide took place within seven years of her marriage.
Her husband or such relative of her husband would be presumed to have
abetted her suicide in such a case.
In 1986, the Dowry Prohibition (Amendment) Act introduced Section 304-
B in the IPC to define dowry death. The court shall presume that an
accused person caused a dowry death if the death of the woman is an
unnatural one and it happened within seven years from the date of
marriage. The woman must have been subjected to cruelty, relating to a
demand for dowry, in the immediate period before her death.
The Domestic Violence Act, enacted in October 2006, provides for,
among other significant reliefs, the right to residence in the shared
household, the right to protection orders, and the mandated return of
Stree-dhan (dowry), besides giving courts the power to restrain the
alienation of assets. It defines violence in all its dimensions, from
the physical to the sexual and the economic. This definition was taken
from the U.N. Model Code on domestic violence and from the Convention
on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women, to which
India is a party. It applies to not only married women but also women
in live-in relationships and daughters/mothers facing violence in
domestic relationships.
One year on, the Act is not exactly a success story. Lawyers
Collective, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), which was largely
involved with this law in its formative stages, undertook the task of
evaluating enforcement using available data. Its report shows that the
main users of this law are women in matrimonial relationships. A few
widows have used it to prevent dispossession, and some young girls
have prevented forcible marriages by fathers.
The major breakthrough the law achieved was the declaration of the
right to reside in the shared household. The law makes a clear
distinction between the ownership of the shared household and the
right to reside in it. What the law does is to grant the right to
reside and not to be dispossessed, except by authority of law.
Indira Jaising of Lawyers Collective wrote in an article published in
Indian Express on October 26: “This provision suffered a major setback
at the hands of the judiciary. The Supreme Court, even before the ink
on the Act was dry, declared in a judgment (S.R. Batra v. Taruna
Batra) that a woman could claim this right only in relation to a
household owned/rented by her husband. This means that if her husband
lives with his parents and she has her matrimonial residence there,
she cannot claim right to residence there. The judgment not only
overlooks the law itself, it also overlooks the existing social
reality of the joint family, which continues to be the predominant
pattern.”
The report prepared by Lawyers Collective documents how several courts
have refused relief to women on the basis of this judgment. It
demonstrates that in India women have lesser protection than tenants,
who cannot be evicted except by the procedure established by law.
Anti-rape law
Under Section 375 of the IPC, a man is said to commit rape if he has
sexual intercourse with a woman under any of the six specified
circumstances. They are: i) it should be against her will; ii) without
her consent; iii) when her consent has been obtained by putting in
her, or in any person whom she is interested in, the fear of death or
of hurt; iv) when she consents believing that he is her husband,
whereas he is not; v) when she consents by reason of unsoundness of
mind or intoxication or administration of stupefying substance; or,
vi) when she is under 16 years of age. The provision also says that
penetration is sufficient to constitute the sexual intercourse
necessary for the offence of rape.
Researchers have found serious gaps in using this provision to secure
the conviction of alleged rapists. Pratiksha Baxi says in her article
in the book The Violence of Normal Times (edited by Kalpana
Kannabiran, Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2005), that the popular
perception that women commonly lie about being raped inflects medical
jurisprudence and in the testimony to rape.
She points to one of the medico-legal propositions that acquires an
axiomatic status that an able-bodied adult woman cannot be raped by an
unarmed man. According to her, in the trial courts, the view is that
women have the natural ability to resist rape by crossing their legs.
Here, she says, the male body is not thought of as a weapon, and
women’s ability to resist is seen as given in nature.
When she conducted interviews with experts at the Forensic Science
Laboratory, she found that the practice of using lie-detection tests
on raped women was common. She added that medico-legal textbooks did
not prescribe the use of lie-detection tests on raped women, and to
the best of her knowledge the documentation regarding such tests did
not enter at the trial or appellate level.
For the victim, the process of testifying itself adds to her trauma.
Pratiksha Baxi notes that it makes her relive the rape and humiliates
her. Trial court Judges, she finds, recognise emotional distress
produced by the testimony not as a sign of suffering but as a sign of
complicity in a lie.
She adds: “The cross-examination of the victim itself produces trauma.
It attacks the reputation and veracity of the victim. It makes her
relive the rape and humiliates her. The production of trauma by the
law itself is a serious issue that severely compromises the mental
health of rape survivors.”
Another issue in establishing rape is the ethics of the two-finger
test. The test was evolved as an answer to the medico-legal problem
that in some cases the hymen might remain intact (especially in female
children) despite repeated instances of penile penetration. The answer
was found in partial penetration, which denoted penile penetration of
the vaginal orifice irrespective of whether the hymen was ruptured or
not.
The test is performed by a technique that is in a mimetic relationship
to the act of penile penetration. The test replaces the notion that
the presence or absence of the hymen can by itself signify virginity
or its absence. It is a technique that verifies whether the hymen is
broken or not, and whether it is distensible or not.
The substitution of the erect penis, Baxi points out, rests on the
precarious desexualisation of the clinical practice. She adds:
“The line between the two-finger test (as if it were a surgical
procedure) and assault is a thin one, which is determined by whether
the medical examination is carried out with or without the consent of
the patient. Medical jurists have been aware of the mimesis in their
emphatic recommendation that doctors must secure the patient’s consent
for this test. Consent then converts assault into a medical test.”
Baxi further asks: “The issue of consent is constitutive, for to
refuse the test is interpreted as evidence of a false complaint. It is
not clear what this consent entails. Did it imply consent to allow the
medical jurist to penetrate her with her consent or is it consent
towards allowing the state to produce signs of her own subjection?”
And, how are the results of the test interpreted? When two or more
fingers are easily admissible in the vagina, the patient might be
characterised as being “used to sex” or “habituated to sex”. The word
habituated, Baxi says, lies in the realm of interpretation, deriving
its meaning from the medico-legal domain, for the word does not appear
in any statute. The words “habituated”, “habitual, or “used to sexual
intercourse” continue to appear in appellate judgments and animate the
legal discourse in trial courts.
Baxi argues that if the hymen acts as a sign it does so
retrospectively after the technique is deployed on the victim’s body.
Thus while the “natural” state of the hymen is not reliable, it is a
technique which allows for a verification of the actual by
substituting the penis with two fingers.
The interpretation of the findings of the two-finger test provided in
the medico-legal certificate of the victim is transcribed as
“habituated to sex” or “used to sex”. If a victim is categorised as
habituated, it is assumed that she must have experienced regular
sexual intercourse and this sexual intercourse must have been
consensual.
Baxi quotes a defence lawyer who had been practising criminal law in
the trial court as saying that if doctors give a certificate saying no
sign of injury and write that she is habituated, the advantage of this
goes to the accused.
Thus, medico-legal techniques such as the two-finger test result in
symbolic re-rape of victims. The phallocentric law insists on doing
mimetically to the victim what the accused rapist did to her, in order
to know that rape was real.
Outraging modesty
Section 354 of the IPC provides for a punishment of up to two years
with fine to anyone who assaults or uses criminal force on any woman,
intending to outrage her modesty. But the provision does not define
modesty.
The Supreme Court, in a recent judgment, defined modesty in this
Section as follows: “Modesty is an attribute associated with female
human beings as a class. It is a virtue which attaches to a female
owing to her sex. The act of pulling a woman, removing her sari,
coupled with a request for sexual intercourse, is such as would be an
outrage to the modesty of a woman; and knowledge, that modesty is
likely to be outraged, is sufficient to constitute the offence without
any deliberate intention having such outrage alone for its object.”
As rape is constituted, only penetration is present. In cases where
sexual assault does not lead to penetration, the prosecution is
inclined to invoke Section 354 against the accused, which results in
milder punishment.
Section 511 of the IPC deals with punishment for attempting to commit
offences that are punishable with imprisonment for life or other forms
of imprisonment. It provides that when an offence is attempted to be
committed for which no specific punishment has been provided for in
the code, an offender will be punishable with half the longest term of
punishment that is prescribed for committing the respective offence.
In other words, a court can convict the accused for attempted rape.
Yet courts have in general been reluctant to do so even when the
accused has been caught while attempting rape. Ranjana Kaul, a member
of the Delhi Commission for Women, points out in an article that they
often rely upon the technicality of the absence of penetration to rule
out attempt and have invariably imposed on the accused the relatively
minor punishment of imprisonment up to two years for molestation.
"The emergence of sexual harassment as a wrong and a form of
discrimination against women has been articulated exclusively by the
Indian courts, and has not been enacted into any statute," says Ratna
Kapur, in her book, Erotic Justice.
Sexual harassment
The inability of Section 354 of the IPC to address adequately the
claims of sexual harassment ultimately led to the filing of a class
action petition in 1997 in the Supreme Court. The petition was brought
by certain social activists and NGOs to assist in finding suitable
methods for the realisation of the true concept of “gender equality”
and to prevent sexual harassment of women in all workplaces through
judicial process, to fill the vacuum in the existing legislation.
The Supreme Court held in this case (Visakha v. State of Rajasthan)
that sexual harassment is a clear violation of the rights under
Articles 14, 15 and 21 of Constitution. One of the logical
consequences of such an incident is also the violation of the victim’s
fundamental right under Article 19(1)(g) “to practise any profession
or to carry out any occupation, trade or business”. Such violations
attract the remedy under Article 32 for the enforcement of these
fundamental rights of women.
The court defined sexual harassment to include such unwelcome sexually
determined behaviour (whether directly or by implication) as: a)
physical contact and advances; b) a demand or request for sexual
favours; c) sexually coloured remarks; d) showing pornography; or e)
any other unwelcome physical verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual
nature.
The court directed all employers or persons in charge of the
workplace, whether in the public or private sector, to take
appropriate steps to prevent sexual harassment, and create mechanisms
for the settlement or prosecution of complaints. It laid down 12
guidelines in this regard and declared that these would constitute the
law of the land until the legislature took further action.
Ironically, Parliament took almost 10 years after the Vishaka judgment
to prepare a draft Bill on sexual harassment. The draft Bill, the
Protection of Women Against Sexual Harassment at Workplace Bill, 2007,
is yet to be introduced in Parliament.
REFERENCES
1. Ratna Kapur, `Erotic Justice'; Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2005.
2. Kalpana Kannabiran (ed.), `The Violence of Normal Times'; Women
Unlimited, New Delhi, 2005.
ONLINE
http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=33866
http://www.judis.nic.in/supremecourt/qrydisp.aspx?filename=13856
http://prsindia.org/docs/draft/draft_sexual_harassment_bill.pdf
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2425/stories/20080104242502000.htm
Volume 16 - Issue 17, Aug 14 - 27, 1999
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU
SOCIAL ISSUES
'Dowry deaths' in Bangalore
Investigations by a women's group in Bangalore point to a high
incidence of unnatural deaths among newly married women following
dowry-related incidents, with the persons responsible for them largely
being acquitted.
PARVATHI MENON
in Bangalore
HOARDINGS put up by the traffic police at prominent places along
Bangalore's traffic-congested roads exhort reckless drivers to go
slow. Grim statistics loom over traffic snarls - 704 men and women
died in traffic accidents in the city in 1997, 726 in 1998, and 168
until June 1999. Reckless driving is truly a problem in India's sixth
largest metropolis, and the seriousness with which it is being
addressed is gratifying to the citizens of the city.
There is, however, another category of deaths that occur on a daily
basis in the city, for which no such public recognition or concern is
awarded. These figures far outnumber traffic-related deaths (or indeed
any category of avoidable death). They are exclusively of women -
mainly young, newly married women. In police records they are
classified under three specific categories, which invoke different
sections of the law. They are "dowry murders" (committed by the
woman's husband or members of his family for additional dowry or non-
payment of promised dowry); "suicides" (forced or voluntary, but in
most cases related to dowry demands); and "accidents" (a majority
classed under "stove-burst" or "kitchen-accident"). Deaths under these
three categories add up to an alarming figure. In Bangalore city,
1,133 women died in murders, suicides and accidents in 1997, 1,248 in
1998, and 618 till mid-July 1999.
K. GOPINATHAN
A police officer examines the body of Bhagyamma, a young mother who
hanged herself in Kengeri, near Bangalore. In her suicide note, which
she wrote on her legs in order to avoid its detection until the police
arrived, Bhagyamma blamed her husband for her death.
On an average, therefore, almost one hundred women have been dying
violent deaths every month in the privacy of their homes. And these
are the official figures. When 44 persons died of plague by September
1994 in Surat, the epicentre of the plague outbreak of that year, the
epidemic assumed the proportions of a national crisis. Yet, public
acknowledgement of the unnatural deaths of young women in Bangalore
city is restricted to perfunctory two-line news items in the daily
newspapers, where they are reported as "accidents" or "suicides" over
"dowry harassment". Thereafter, they drop from public consciousness
into the anonymity of a police or court 'case'.
A dowry murder comes under a distinct class of violence. Motivated
mainly by greed, the crime is committed within the four walls of a
home on an unsuspecting wife by her own husband or his family; there
are rarely any eyewitnesses who are prepared to give evidence against
the murderers. The large number of these deaths is an indication that
the law is not a sufficient deterrent for those who commit these
crimes. Nor have these grotesquely violent murders sparked the kind of
social outrage that could pressure the government and its law-
enforcing machinery into acting swiftly and firmly in enforcing the
law. The scale of this problem, its causes and consequences, have not
been adequately acknowledged by the state and its agencies, the media,
or the public at large.
"Such figures certainly impress upon us the need to relook at what we
understand by the police classification of 'unnatural deaths'," says
Donna Fernandes of Vimochana, a women's organisation which first
uncovered the horrifying dimensions of the problem in Bangalore. "Our
investigations have proved that for large numbers of married women,
the right to live in safety and in a climate free from intimidation
and violence is under great threat. Why is there this social unconcern
when women are dying in such large numbers?"
DOWRY-RELATED violence against married women by the families they
marry into is a phenomenon that is on the increase all over the
country, particularly in urban areas where such violence gets reported
on. Women's groups have been engaging with this issue at various
levels in different parts of the country. In the absence of comparable
data from other cities, it may be premature to conclude that the high
incidence of unnatural deaths of young women in Bangalore is, in some
way, a problem specific to this city. What has put Bangalore on the
map of cities with a high incidence of dowry-related atrocities
against women is an exceptional research-cum-social-intervention
project by Vimochana. This study has, for the first time, quantified
this problem and put it firmly in the public realm. Vimochana's
sustained two-and-half-year campaign on the issue of unnatural deaths
of women resulted in the setting up, on April 7, 1999, of a Joint
House Committee on Atrocities against Women to investigate these
deaths and make recommendations for their prevention. The Joint
Committee, which was chaired by BJP MLA Premila Nesargi, presented its
report on July 1.
There are therefore two detailed public documents on the phenomenon of
the high rate of unnatural deaths of women in Bangalore - the
Vimochana documentation and campaign material and the House Committee
Report. There is also detailed, month-wise statistics compiled and
maintained by the State Crime Records Bureau, which Vimochana has
collated and analysed in its study. Together these provide a reliable
database on the numbers of women dying; the classification of their
deaths by the police (whether murder, suicide, accident); the ways by
which they die (burning, hanging, poisoning, and so on); the reasons
for the death; the nature of the police investigation into each of
these cases; the reasons for the slow pace of judicial redress; and
the reasons why so many dowry death cases end in acquittal of the
accused. Vimochana's database, which it began compiling from early
1997, also includes a detailed register of the women who are admitted
into the burns ward of the Victoria Hospital, their ages, marital
status, reasons for death, and case details.
Unnatural deaths and stove-bursts
In the early phase of the study, as it collated police statistics,
Vimochana noted a major anomaly between its figures and those of the
police. It found that a large number of deaths were being classified
in police records as "accidents" under "UDR" (Unnatural Death
Register). The category of "dowry deaths" in a technical sense only
included those cases that had been booked by the police under the
relevant sections of the law . The "accident" cases that were closed
for want of evidence, however, were largely due to "stove-bursts" or
"kitchen accidents". On the basis of its follow-up investigations with
the families of the victims of these so-called accidents, Vimochana
came up with some startling findings that changed the whole perception
of this social problem, the assumptions that underlay it, its causes
and the course that remedial action must take. Vimochana alleged that
a large number of murders and suicides, punishable under law, were
being made to look like "accidents" by the husband and members of his
family. These cases were closed by the investigating police officers
for want of hard evidence of a crime. When a professional eye looked
at the whole category of unnatural deaths (and not just "dowry
deaths"), the number of women dying in suspicious circumstances rose
sharply. Vimochana's contention is that a large number of the cases
simply escape detection and punishment in the prevailing social
conditions.
K. BHAGYA PRAKASH
A burns victim in a Bangalore hospital. There is evidence to suggest
that a large number of murders and suicides of young married women are
made to look like stove-burst "accidents".
Frontline attempted an independent assessment of some of the findings
of the Vimochana study, as well as of the House Committee Report. Data
provided to Frontline by the police department for Karnataka as a
whole show that out of 3,826 deaths recorded as accidents in 1997,
1,715, or around 50 per cent, were connected with fire accidents,
including stove and cooking gas cylinder bursts. V. Gowramma, a
Vimochana activist and the recipient of this year's Neerja Bhanot
award (which was instituted in memory of the 23-year-old Pan Am
airhostess who died showing exemplary courage in helping passengers
escape during a hijack attempt in Karachi in 1986), says: "We found
that of 550 cases reported between January and September 1997, 71 per
cent were closed as 'kitchen/cooking accidents' and 'stove-bursts'
after conducting investigations under Section 174 of the Code of
Criminal Procedures." When the cause of death in a majority of
registered dowry death cases is due to burning, such a high rate of
"stove-burst" accidents involving daughters-in-law can hardly be
regarded as natural or coincidental.
"It is an unfortunate fact that in a strictly legal sense, an
accidental stove-burst is not an offence under the law," Bangalore
City Police Commissioner L. Revannasiddaiah observed to Frontline.
"However, what is the use of an investigation if it does not arrive at
the truth? If there are two or three stove-burst accidents in a day,
in which only daughters-in-law die, we must look behind the formal
facade and take up investigations immediately." Noting that the police
are now trying to do this, he asked: "Have you ever heard of a mother-
in-law or a husband dying in a stove-burst?"
Since September 1997, two Vimochana volunteers have been posted
permanently at the burns ward of the Victoria Hospital, where most of
the serious burns cases in the city are admitted. "About seven cases
are admitted on an average every day, with the numbers going up to ten
following certain traditional festivals, when it is the practice for
women to be sent to their natal homes with additional demands for
dowry," explained Donna Fernandes. "The burnings usually take place
past 1 a.m., well past cooking time, which itself throws the 'stove-
burst' theory into doubt. Women come with burns of 70 per cent and
more, and on their death leave behind babies and small children."
There are several reasons why murders or forced suicides often get
registered as a "stove-burst". "The first reaction of a woman who has
been burnt by her husband or his family is to say it is a stove-
burst," says Rudrappa Hanagavadi, Special Executive Magistrate for
Bangalore, who is reponsible for the conduct of inquests in cases
relating to women who have died under suspicious circumstances. "Her
dying declaration, which is supposed to be taken in private by the
policeman in the presence of a doctor, is invariably a public
procedure, and she is afraid to tell the truth." Members of the
husband's family often threaten to harm her children and her natal
family if she does not say she was injured in a cooking accident.
Often, relatives and friends of the victim are reluctant to raise
doubts about the nature of the death as they fear harassment by the
victim's husband and his family. They also do not want to get involved
in laborious police and legal proceedings. The police, for their part,
do not try to penetrate this community resistance to look for evidence
of what really could have happened.
THERE are pressures on women to conceal the truth about what happened
to them even when they know they are dying. This correspondent visited
the Victoria Hospital burns ward on July 13 . On that day, five women
were admitted. There was Shabrin Begum, 20, who had been married for
one month, and had been admitted with 90 per cent burns; Selvi, 18,
married for two years and admitted with 80 per cent burns; Lalitha,
married for eight years and admitted with 80 per cent burns; Aniyamma,
40, with five children, admitted with 60 per cent burns; and Rehana
Taj, 15, from Kolar district, unmarried, and admitted with 45 to 50
per cent burns.
In her first dying declaration, Shabrin, an articulate PUC student,
said she was injured in a kitchen accident. In her second declaration,
she said her husband and mother-in-law set her on fire; based on this
declaration, the police have filed cases against them under Sections
498(A) and 302 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) (FIR Crime No. 479/99
filed on July 16, 1999 at the Madivala police station). Selvi gave
three dying declarations: in her first declaration she said she was
injured in an accident; in her second declaration, she said she had
attempted suicide; in her third declaration, she alleged that her
mother-in-law attempted to murder her. A case has been booked under
Section 302 of the IPC (FIR Crime No. 261/99 filed on July 16, 1999 in
the Srirampura police station). Lalitha gave two dying declarations,
the first saying that she was injured in a kitchen accident, the
second that she did it to herself out of "despair". Her relatives did
not wish to file a complaint, and Lalitha herself said nothing about
dowry demands. With tact and persuasiveness, the police could have
elicited the real causes behind Lalitha's despair. But her case (UDR
No. 17/99) was closed as a suicide after her death on July 16, 1999.
K. BHAGYA PRAKASH
At Vimochana's office premises in Bangalore, Donna Fernandes (left)
and V. Gowramma (centre). Vimochana's study has quantified for the
first time the problem of dowry-related atrocities against women in
Bangalore.
Who is dying and why?
* Manjula smiles shyly from out of her marriage photographs. She was
married in May 1998, when she was just 18, to Vruthesh Prasad, a
mechanic in the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation. Her father
gave her a dowry worth almost Rs.2 lakhs. Manjula used to complain to
her mother and sister that she was being harassed by her husband, his
brother and other members of his family for more dowry, but her family
told her she must adjust and that they would try to meet the demand.
On July 7, 1999, more than a year after her marriage, Manjula was
dead. She was found in her brother-in-law's bathroom, a pool of blood
under her head and between her legs, her upper torso and face burnt.
Her husband's family said she had committed suicide (there was a tin
of turpentine and a box of matches lying near her), but her own family
filed a police complaint. A case has been booked against four persons
under Section 498(A) and 304(B) of the IPC (FIR Crime No. 388/99).
* "I never imagined that he would be like this," a shaken B.P.
Krishnaswamy said of his son-in-law, H. Narasimhamurthy, a primary
school teacher at Bapu Palika Mahila Prautha Salai in Yeshwantpur.
Krishnaswamy trades in vegetables. His daughter, B.K. Rojavathi, a
primary school teacher in Seshadripuram Primary School in Yelahanka,
narrowly escaped an attempt on her life by her husband. She was
married in May 1999; her husband was given a dowry of Rs.30,000 in
cash and another lakh of rupees worth of jewellery and household
goods; soon after the marriage, Rojavathi's husband and father-in-law
demanded more dowry from her. On July 16, her husband, under the
pretext of taking her to a temple, took her instead to the isolated
Soldevanahalli forest and tried to strangle her with a chain that she
was wearing. When that was not successful, he returned with a can of
kerosene from his scooter, and poured it over her. A forest guard saw
him just as he tried to light a flame. Narasimhamurthy fled the scene,
the police were informed and Rojavathi was quickly taken to hospital.
Cases have been booked against her husband under Sections 498(A) and
307 of the IPC (FIR Crime No. 446/99 filed on July 16 at the
Nelamangala police station). He is absconding, as is the rest of his
family. Rojavathi, the whites of her eyes suffused with blood owing to
the effects of strangulation, and her body bruised from the blows she
sustained, is slowly recovering from her injuries and shock.
* H.T. Indira, a young wife and mother, died in November 1998; her
husband's family tried to pass it off as suicide by hanging. A charge-
sheet (CC No. 2033/99) was filed within a month of her death under
Sections 498(A) and 304(B) of the IPC; it names four accused - her
husband P.Thyagaraj, brothers-in-law P. Sivakumar and P.
Krishnamurthy, and mother-in-law Padmamma. Says Indira's sister
Chandramma, who has undertaken to fight the case: "My sister suffered
unspeakable torture for more dowry. A week before her death, they
threw her out of the house with the child and she slept on the steps
that night. She told a neighbour that she was leaving as she could
bear it no longer." According to Chandramma, Indra's brother was to
have brought her home but she died before that. "This is not a
suicide, I know," asserts Chandramma. "My sister was forced to commit
suicide."
These three recent incidents share a certain pattern of social
behaviour and individual response. The giving of dowry, an act illegal
in itself, is not perceived by the victim's families as socially
condemnable, or as having made the woman's position vulnerable right
from the day of the marriage. The husband and his family view her
primarily as a money-source and increase their pressure until it
results in her death or suicide. What is also significant is the
absence of support structures for the woman - a counselling centre, a
shelter home, concerned neighbourhoods - which could prevent the worst
from happening. She cannot even turn to her own family when in the
throes of distress.
SOME broad generalisations have been made from the database now
available on unnatural deaths of women. Its victims are generally
young (Vimochana's study, in fact, looks only at the death of married
women between the ages of 18 and 40), and in a large number of cases
the death occurs within the first two years of marriage. A large
number of victims (and perpetrators of the violence) are from poor or
lower middle-class backgrounds, although this is not an issue that
affects poor women alone. In most cases, the woman would have
undergone mental and physical harassment prior to her death. Lastly, a
majority of dowry murders and suicides are by burning. Police figures
made available to Frontline on suicide deaths alone show that more
than 50 per cent of suicides are committed by the woman setting
herself on fire. In one of the several studies that Vimochana
undertook, it found, for example, that out of 711 women who died in
1998 under unnatural circumstances, 454 died of burns. Significantly,
441 were between the ages of 18 and 30.
"In 90 per cent of the cases I deal with, the women are from poor
backgrounds," Hanagavadi told Frontline. "Migrants, like construction
workers and those who live in slums, account for a large number of
those involved in such cases."
The House Committee recommendations
Vimochana and the House Committee concur on one point. The special
laws that are in place to deal with atrocities against women are
undermined at every stage of investigation at both the police and
judicial levels. The House Committee made exhaustive recommendations
covering every stage of the police investigation and judicial
procedure - the registration of the complaint when a death or injury
under suspicious circumstances takes place, the preparing of the First
Information Report (FIR), the recording of a victim's dying
declaration, the inquest proceedings, the post-mortem and forensic
investigations, the framing of the charge-sheet, and the judicial
process after that. The Committee presented five draft bills to the
House dealing with atrocities against women. One of these, the
Karnataka Prevention of Domestic Violence and Atrocities Against Women
Bill, 1999, deals specifically with the issue of marital violence and
dowry-related deaths.
The investigative process
While the reasons for the large number of violent crimes against women
must be sought in a fast-changing social and economic milieu which
reinforces rather than retards patriarchal notions and values,
accountability for the failure to prevent such crimes must be shared
by the institutions of civil society: the legislature, the police, the
judiciary, and, to some extent, the media as well. The death of a
woman in unnatural circumstances has to go through two procedural
tiers. The first is investigation by the police and the inquest
officer (a government official at the level of a district magistrate)
with assistance from doctors who perform the post-mortem as well as
forensic experts. Upon the thoroughness of this investigation depends
the fate of the case once it gets admitted into the courts. This is
the second procedural tier. If the charge-sheet in a particular case
has sound investigative backing, it will have a much better chance of
standing up in a court of law.
Deaths, whether murders or suicides, that are related to the
relentless demand for dowry constitute a special category of crime.
Given the cultural context, tremendous social pressures operate upon
the victim and her family, pressures that seek to obscure truth and
scuttle the investigation. In Bangalore, there is a groundswell of
resentment among the families of victims and activist groups against
the police department for what is perceived as a lack of thoroughness
and integrity in pursuing cases of unnatural deaths among women. The
House Committee was severe in its criticism of police investigations
and set out elaborate recommendations on how the investigative
mechanism could be sensitised, streamlined and improved.
''There is only one institution in this society that is charged by law
to intervene in a situation like this, and that is the police," says
Revannasiddaiah. "But you must understand this institution too is a
product of this society. We have not been structured, resourced,
motivated and kept in readiness to meet this requirement, and we too
proceed on the old track." But he adds that the old mind-set of the
police force is changing and that he is making a conscious effort to
sensitise the force in its perceptions and investigative approach
towards domestic violence against women.
The Vanitha Sahaya Vani was set up seven months ago by the police
department for women in distress to call in for help and counselling.
While this was initially welcomed by women's activists, it has come in
for some criticism as the success of this facility, they say, is now
being measured in terms of the numbers of "reconciled" cases, and not
by the additional number of offences detected. For a woman desperate
enough to call the help-line, advice to "adjust" to the unequal terms
of her marriage closes one more door or escape route.
Under Revannasiddaiah's initiative, the police department worked with
Vimochana and a group of concerned IAS officers to bring out a manual
of guidelines for investigating offences against women. He has also
constituted a new forum, Parihar, under the police department, which
he hopes will meet the needs of women in crisis - in homes or at
workplaces.
Registration of a complaint
The House Committee Report has drawn attention to the need for the
police to register a complaint immediately after receiving information
about grievous injuries sustained by a woman under suspicious
circumstances. "After they receive a complaint the police should go to
the house and seal it off, which they do not always do," notes
Hanagavadi. They tend to wait until the death of the woman, by which
time valuable evidentiary material slips out of their hands. The FIR
must, on the basis of initial investigations, book a case under the
relevant sections of the law. "Who decides whether a death in
suspicious circumstances is a murder or a suicide or caused by a
cooking accident or a stove-burst?" asks Donna Fernandes. "If done by
an incompetent investigating officer, a chance of a cursory
investigation is very high. We believe from our investigations that
the temptation to classify and reduce unnatural deaths as accidents
and suicidal burns is high as it reduces workload and suits the
purposes of reporting." Members of families of victims who testified
before the House Committee had grievances relating to the FIRs and the
carelessness with which they were made. It is mandatory for a Deputy
Superintendent of Police (DSP), and in cities an Assistant
Commissioner of Police, to investigate all cases of attempted suicide
and death, under suspicious circumstances, of young married women
within the first five years of marriage. However, according to
Vimochana activists, the police do not always follow this injunction.
The dying declaration
The recording of the statement of the victim, which often becomes her
dying declaration, is a part of the investigative procedure, but it
often turns into a procedure for absolving the real perpetrator of the
crime. It is quite common to find a burns victim giving more than one
dying declaration. Meant to be recorded in privacy, the dying
declaration is often taken in the presence of the victim's husband and
his relatives. As mentioned earlier in the story, when this
correspondent visited the burns ward of Victoria Hospital, there were
three women who gave more than one dying declaration each. One of
them, Selvi, gave three in the course of one afternoon. "Such a case
is unlikely to stand in court. The defendant lawyer will present it as
conflicting evidence," a Special Public Prosecutor in Bangalore told
Frontline.
The inquest
A crucial part of the investigative process, the inquest, is to be
conducted by an officer of the level of a magistrate. He must visit
the spot of the death, examine the body, collect physical and verbal
evidence, and give a report that indicates the cause of death. Both
Vimochana and the House Committee have recommended that the inquest be
made an independent inquiry accountable to a higher review committee.
The House Committee has also recommended that the magistrate hold a
public hearing within a week of the woman's death, at which all
evidence, including the post-mortem and forensic reports, should be
presented. The final report should be a public document.
"Because of the alarming increase in the incidence of dowry-related
deaths, Assistant Commissioners were appointed to assist Tahsildars in
conducting inquests," explains Special Executive Magistrate Hanagavadi
as we drive to Kengeri where he is to conduct an inquest in the case
of a death by hanging that had been reported. "It is a horrible job,
seeing the deaths of young women every day." As an Assistant
Commissioner, Hanagavadi has three other charges and is on the move
the whole day. The post of Special Executive Magistrate (SEM) was
created in March 1998 to look exclusively into unnatural deaths of
women. A person is appointed to it for a year and this is extendable
by another year. Bangalore has two SEMs.
A large crowd had gathered outside the one-room dwelling where
Bhagyamma, a young wife and mother, had hanged herself from the
ceiling; her four-month-old baby lay in a crib nearby. On examination
of her body, it was found that she had written her suicide note on her
two legs, obviously hoping that it would escape detection until the
police arrived. In it she squarely blamed her husband, a groundsman at
the stadium of the Sports Authority of India, for her death. She could
no longer bear his torture, the suicide note said. She asked that her
child be taken care of by her mother after her death. Bhagyamma's
inquest report (No.42/99-2000) was sent on July 20, 1999 to the
Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate's Court.
The judicial process
Once a case enters the courts, it often takes months for it to be
heard and tried. In Bangalore, there used to be only one Special Court
to try cases of atrocities against women. By August 1998, there were
1,600 pending cases in the court, "the highest pendency rate for a
sessions court anywhere in the country," a Special Public Prosecutor
told Frontline. Three new courts were set up that month to clear the
backlog of cases. The average time taken for a case to be disposed of
is six to seven years.
There is a high rate of acquittals in cases of dowry murders or
suicides. The same Special Public Prosecutor told Frontline that of
the 730 cases pending in his court at the end of 1998, 58 resulted in
acquittals and only 11 in convictions. At the end of June 1999, out of
381 cases pending, 51 resulted in acquittals and eight in
convictions.
What are the reasons for this? Families of the victims, ignorant of
the law and its procedure, get demoralised with the long wait before a
case can be decided. "In 90 per cent of the cases, witnesses turn
hostile," the Special Public Prosecutor told Frontline. "Money plays a
major role. Since most of the aggrieved families are poor, they are
willing to make out-of-court settlements. It is common to find that
during the trial, they will suddenly change their story and say that
the victim had a health problem or that her death was an accident. In
fact, in eight of my cases, the parents gave their second daughter in
marriage to the same person after the case was filed!" The second
reason, according to him, is the "perfunctory police investigation"
that spoils the case right from the start. The "half-hearted
presentation of cases by the prosecutors who are burdened with 10 to
12 cases at any given point of time" is yet another reason he cites
for the high rate of acquittal. However, the "most important reason"
according to him "is the liberal view taken by the judiciary in cases
of dowry deaths."
Vimochana, in collaboration with the National Law School University,
proposes to have a public hearing before a Truth Commission from
August 15 to 17, 1999 in Bangalore. The Commission will comprise
representatives of the Law Commission, former judges, lawyers and
women activists. Complaints from parents who have lost daughters in
suspicious circumstances, in which justice was not perceived to have
been done, will be heard. The findings of the Truth Commission will be
made the subject matter of a public interest petition before the
Supreme Court with a view to bringing relief to the aggrieved
families. Geetha Ayappa, a lawyer who has been working with Vimochana
in the campaign, looks ahead to a new stage of pressing for action:
"We will use the evidence we get to invoke the Supreme Court's
intervention to protect a woman's right to life."
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1617/16170640.htm
Volume 24 - Issue 17 :: Aug. 25-Sep. 07, 2007
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU • Contents
COLUMN
The shadow of child abuse
R.K. RAGHAVAN
It is debatable whether the law alone can tackle the serious problem
of sexual abuse of children.
S.R. RAGHUNATHAN
Children taking part in a rally in Chennai as part of a campaign
against child abuse. A file picture.
I’m a 37-year-old woman, sexually abused as a 6-year-old by a man now
aged 47; he is still out there, somewhere, living, working, breathing
in a street near you. The experience has haunted me all these years.
Six years ago I star ted confiding in certain people around me (though
not my family members) and it became apparent that three women and
three men in my social circle had been sexually abused as children.
THIS is how a reader responded recently to a Sunday Times (London)
article on the menace of child assault, which is often inexactly
described as paedophilia. Paedophilia also covers even non-assaults in
which a mentally sick person derives immense gratification from merely
looking at pornographic images of children. The evil is definitely not
something unknown to mankind. History is replete with instances of
uninhibited child sexual abuse by those who co mmanded wealth and
wielded authority. These persons were guilty of outrageous practices,
which hardly, however, caused social indignation. Public opinion was
not stirred by these practices because the common belief at that time
was that these were a prerogative of royalty and affluent landholders
and that making a noise about them would only exacerbate the problem.
The prohibition of child marriage in India through the Child Marriage
Restraint Act of 1929 was at least partially motivated by the need to
protect children from being treated as mere sexual toys. The Offences
against Children (Prevention) Bill, 2007, which has been in a state of
limbo with the Ministry of Women and Child Development, is another
example of an endeavour to curb the exploitation of children. The
point that is debatable is whether law alone can tackle the problem.
The global incidence of child abuse is still substantial enough to
cause worry. While sexual abuse of children can encompass an entire
continuum from fondling to rape, according to Crime in India 2005 (the
official publication of t he Union Home Ministry), more than 4,000
girl children were raped during the year (a 13 per cent increase over
2004). Also, there were 145 cases of procuring of minor girls and 28
of buying girls for prostitution, both sharp rises over the previous
year. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
(NSPCC) in the United Kingdom reported that about 16 per cent of all
women and 7 per cent of all men interviewed by it said that they had
been sexually abused before they were 12. Further, more than 90 per
cent of all sex and violent offenders were prone to reoffend,
indicating that sexual assault of children was too serious a matter to
be left solely to the police.
The media undoubtedly gloat over celebrity misbehaviour with children.
Whether it is for commercial gain or pure enlightenment, such coverage
has helped to arouse noticeable public interest in a subject that
normally repels civilised human beings. The British press was until a
few days ago full of the trial of Chris Langham, the award-winning
stage comedian who was accused of having had sex with a teenager years
ago and was also in possession of pornographic child images. While he
has been cleared of the former charge, the jury found him guilty of
downloading pictures of child abuse on to his home computer.
Langham’s case raises several points. First is the ease with which
many in society are able to hide their perversions for a considerable
period of time. They get caught very late in their lives when they
have already caused plenty of damage to their hapless victims, and any
penalty in the form of incarceration means little to them. We must,
however, feel gratified that destiny does catch up with at least a few
who indulge in child sexual abuse. Such instances should deter those
who wrongly believe that their status in society is a guarantee
against exposure. This is why everything needs to be done to ensure
that victims do not suffer in private and are unafraid of the
consequences of going to town against their aggressors. The role of
the media and social action groups in facilitating this process can
hardly be exaggerated.
Secondly, Langham’s exploits confirm the widely held impression that
cyberspace offers alluring opportunities to paedophiles. Those who
protest against policing cyberspace will understand from the Langham
case the hollowness and unreasonableness of their stand. Cyberspace
panders unwittingly to trusted and seemingly respectable people in
society who masquerade as upholders of the rights of children but are
inclined to abuse the latter in the shadow of their private moments.
It is for this reason, if not for anything else, that monitoring of
the Internet by law enforcement agencies has become a sad necessity.
Finally, a major argument that the 58-year-old actor put forward in
court was that his was not a crime but an aberration, the consequence
of his own victimisation when he was a child of eight. When Langham
downloaded questionable images, not only was he researching for one of
his plays – a claim considered facetious by one of his fellow-actors –
but he was also apparently trying to dissect his own childhood
experience.
Whether Langham’s defence is truthful or not, it brings us to the
question, how relevant is one’s childhood experience to one’s conduct
later on in life? While Langham’s deposition to the magistrate in his
defence is more the rule rather than an exception, it is the belief
that the insidious impact of child sexual abuse often does not allow
many child victims to lead optimal lives as adults.
An effective therapy
Eileen Vizard’s research (reported in detail in Newstatesman; August
9) is an eye-opener of sorts. Vizard is a consultant with the NSPCC,
which recently co-authored a major study on “Links between Juvenile
Sexually Abusi ve Behaviour and Emerging Severe Personality Disorder
Traits in Childhood”. This three-year study covered 280 identified
juvenile sexual abusers, 10 per cent of whom were women. Most of their
victims were relatives, friends and acquaintances, which is the usual
relationship proximity for adult child sex abusers as well. While
child-on-child sex abuse is hardly ever considered or even taken
seriously, the stark fact remains that one-third of convicted child
sex offenders reported their sexual interest in children even as young
teenagers, besides also starting their patterns of sexually abusive
behaviour from that age. Vizard’s research, like many others before,
counters the belief that exposure to child pornography is not all that
harmful. The stimulus provided by online images of sexual activity
involving children affirms for most people a hitherto reprehensible
fantasy. Often, the ensuing rationalisation also leads to a repetition
of similar behaviour towards other children.
Andrew Durham, who works for the Warwickshire Council in the U.K.,
affirms this explicitly: “When young people see adults abusing
children on the Net, it normalises what is being done.” What is of
some consolation is Vizard’s view, which is also widely subscribed to
and is the focus of much research, that cognitive behavioural therapy
is effective in “dealing with feelings and impulses in a non-damaging
way”.
The significance of Vizard’s study is its emphasis on the treatment of
child abusers. But then, how do we supervise and manage juvenile sex
offenders in the community once they are sent back to us after serving
their sentences? I tend to agree with Minette Marrin’s (“We need more
than jail for child abuse”, The Sunday Times, June 3) view on the
administration of antiandrogen drugs and antidepressants, even if such
a course is only partially effective.
What is more essential is keeping track of such offenders once they
are out in society so as to prevent them from reoffending. This
requires a good information system and an informant channel. Sex
offender registries, like those that exist in the U.K., have their own
share of failings, even in that far less populous country with a
better overall understanding of sexual violence against children.
Coupled with some counselling, such registration can take reasonable
care of the tendency of some convicts to lapse into delinquency. While
the recent establishment of the Technology Coalition and the Financial
Coalition Against Child Pornography is a welcome initiative, it would
be a cause for a lot more cheer if there were a substantial
involvement from the information technology (IT) and financial
industry in India as well.
In this context, Tulir – Centre for the Prevention and Healing of
Child Sexual Abuse (CPHCSA), Chennai, an organisation that addresses
itself solely to the problem of sexual abuse of children, is indignant
that a proposed Bill to amend the Information Technology Act, 2000,
has dropped an expert committee suggestion that a comprehensive
definition of “child pornography” should find a place in the Act. This
is in spite of India having ratified the Optional Protocol to the
Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child
prostitution and child pornography. It is ironic that the lawmakers of
a country that is synonymous with IT are myopic to the transnational
nature of the crime of possession and distribution of images of child
abuse, a fact that has a huge impact on the rapidly widening contours
of sexual crime against children everywhere.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2417/stories/20070907506208400.htm
Volume 26 - Issue 24 :: Nov. 21-Dec. 04, 2009
INDIA'S NATIONAL MAGAZINE
from the publishers of THE HINDU
COVER STORY
Victims always
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN AND
AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA
The S.C. and S.T. (Prevention of Atrocities) Act has failed to make
Dalits any safer.
RANJEET KUMAR
An innocent survivor amidst scattered bodies, a scene after the
Ranveer Sena's carnage of Dalits at Shankarbigha in Jehanabad district
of Bihar on the eve of Republic Day in 1999. Dalit rights activists
say the Ranveer Sena, a private militia of Bhumihar landlords which
terrorised Dalits in the 1990s, is regrouping.
THE ascent of the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to power in
Uttar Pradesh on May 13, 2007, was seen as a defining moment in the
politics of Dalit empowerment in the country. The Scheduled Caste
(S.C.) leader of an avowedly “Dalit assertive” party had been Chief
Minister earlier too, but the difference this time was that her party
came to power on its own, without needing the support of other parties
and independent members.
Thousands of Dalits who gathered in the State capital, Lucknow, on
that day expressed the hope that atrocities against the S.Cs would
decline drastically under the new “single-party” regime. Many social
activists and observers who spoke to Frontline then also hoped that a
single-party government under a Dalit Chief Minister in the country’s
most populous State would have a salutary effect on Dalits’ condition
elsewhere in the country too.
Approximately a year later, papers and documents presented at a two-
day international seminar on Uttar Pradesh, organised by the Observer
Research Foundation (ORF), a Delhi-based think tank, provided an
indication of the situation on the ground. The papers documented that
“within a month of the [Mayawati] government’s assumption of office,
seven Dalits were killed in Muzaffarnagar, while three Dalit women
were raped in the same district”. The papers also revealed that
reports from areas such as Rae Bareli, Mohanlalganj, Lakhimpur Kheri
and Mahoba were of a similar nature and that atrocities against Dalits
continued in spite of the political gains made by the BSP.
The presentations at the seminar pointed out that the political
leadership found it difficult to implement what was perhaps its most
important Dalit empowerment programme – the allotment of patta land to
Dalits – on account of strong anti-Dalit sentiments within the
administration.
A field study presented at the seminar revealed that in scores of
villages in western Uttar Pradesh, in districts such as Baghpat,
Muzaffarnagar and Meerut, Dalits were unable to occupy patta land
allotted to them because of intimidation and in some cases even
physical prevention by upper-caste groups. Not surprisingly, sections
of the police and the administration were hand in glove with the upper-
caste elements. Such was their allegiance to the caste interests that
even repeated orders from the Chief Minister’s Office to the District
Magistrates failed to have any effect in a number of cases.
The National Crime Record Bureau’s (NCRB) statistics for 2007 for
crimes against members of the S.Cs and the Scheduled Tribes (S.Ts)
corroborated the presentations made at the seminar. The figures showed
that Uttar Pradesh topped the list on atrocities against the S.Cs and
the S.Ts, with 2,113 cases out of a total of 9,819. The data also
indicated a 10.2 per cent increase in crimes against the S.Cs and the
S.Ts at the national level. Uttar Pradesh accounted for 20.5 per cent
of all cases in India. The BSP’s argument was that under the
“friendly” Mayawati regime more S.C. members made bold to register
cases against their oppressors.
There was merit in this argument, but the fact remained that Dalits
were at the receiving end in large parts of Uttar Pradesh, where the
politics of empowerment of the S.Cs and the S.Ts, the protection of
their interests, their physical safety and the assertion of their
constitutional rights had acquired, in comparative terms, the highest
political and electoral acceptability.
Social and political observers hark back to an observation made by
B.R. Ambedkar to explain this context. Ambedkar had said: “History
shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is
always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have
willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to
compel them.”
Long-standing apartheid
Twenty years after the passage of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, the vociferous advocacy
of the same by almost all political parties and even the rise of the
politics of S.C.-S.T. empowerment across the country, it seems that
the quantum of “sufficient force” visualised by Ambedkar would have
been colossal. As the case of Uttar Pradesh indicates, the effective
implementation of the Act would take a lot more than electoral
victories and increasing political space.
The gaps in the implementation of the Act stand in stark contrast to
the convictions that underlay its enactment. In simple terms, the
legislation aims to prevent the various forms of offences by persons
other than members of the S.C. and the S.T. against members of these
communities. But studies have shown that it has systematically been
prevented from achieving its goal. A number of factors have
contributed to this, but the most important is the caste and class
prejudices in society. These prejudices have got institutionalised,
through religious and social practices, into a unique system of long-
standing apartheid. That they have a class character is also evident;
the Dalit and Adivasi communities that are discriminated against
constitute almost 80 per cent of India’s poor.
The S.C./S.T. Act is seen to be empowering as it is the first
legislation to use and define the term “atrocities” committed against
the S.Cs and the S.Ts. Introducing the Bill, the then Union Law
Minister, B. Shankaranand, said the normal provisions of the existing
laws, such as the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Protection of Civil
Rights Act (PCRA), 1955, had been found inadequate to check the
atrocities, gross indignities and offences against the S.Cs and the
S.Ts. Therefore, the Act prescribes harsher punishments than the
punitive measures detailed in the IPC and the PCRA, which used only
the term “offences” vis-À-vis caste-related crimes.
The Act also introduced an executive system specifically to govern
justice for the S.Cs and the S.Ts in cases of 22 broad types of
atrocities relating to socio-economic discriminatory practices, which
are listed in it. This system should comprise special courts, a
special public prosecutor, nodal officers in each State, an S.C. and
S.T. protection cell, and State-level and district-level monitoring
and vigilance committees to identify atrocity-prone areas, and a
special officer appointed by the district head to look after each case
of atrocity. In actuality, in most States the full system has either
not been constituted or has been functioning ineffectively.
Gaps in implementation
ANU PUSHKARNA
Activists of the Dalit Sena staging a demonstration in New Delhi on
July 21 demanding action from the Bihar government to check atrocities
on Dalits.
The gaps in its implementation could be studied at two levels – the
executive and the judiciary. The National Human Rights Commission
(NHRC) noted in its 2002 report: “Under-reporting is a very common
phenomenon and the police resort to various machinations to discourage
S.C./S.T. [persons] from registering their cases, to dilute the
seriousness of the violence, to shield the accused persons from
arrests and prosecution.”
A study done by National Dalit Movement for Justice (NDMJ), part of
the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), showed that
between 1992 and 2007 only 33 per cent of the atrocity cases were
registered under the S.C./S.T. Act. The majority of the cases were
registered under IPC sections and 1 per cent under the PCRA. It also
showed that the conviction rate of cases under the S.C./S.T. Act was
just 3.3 per cent for the country as a whole.
The figures at the level of the judiciary are equally pathetic.
Between 1992 and 2007, as many as 80 per cent of the cases heard by
the special courts (created under Section 14 of the Act) were not
registered under the Act. In 95.1 per cent of the cases charge sheets
had not been filed. The monitoring advisories set up in States on an
ad hoc basis by the Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment (MSJE)
and the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) noted that in many cases the
police wilfully neglected the S.C./S.T. Act and did not register first
information reports (FIRs). Among the recommendations made were the
setting up of special police stations and the launching of awareness
campaigns about the Act.
The Ahmedabad-based Council for Social Justice (CSJ) has collected
documents of 400 cases pertaining to 2004 filed under the S.C./S.T.
Act in Gujarat. There are some startling revelations in them. Despite
Section 18 of the Act restricting anticipatory bail in atrocity cases,
anticipatory bail had been granted in 320 of the 400 cases.
Valjibhai Patel, secretary CSJ, told Frontline: “Rule 4(1) of the Act
says that there should be two panels of advocates in atrocity cases –
a state-appointed public prosecutor and a panel created by the
district head. In most of the cases, we see no such panels. The Act
states that an officer below the rank of DSP [Deputy Superintendent of
Police] cannot investigate the case. Many of the accused have been
acquitted by courts just because the case was investigated by officers
below the rank of DSP. I have seen in Gujarat rape cases of Dalits
being sent to Lok Adalats meant for only compoundable offences.”
Plight of women
Dalit women face the worst atrocities as both women and Dalits. A
seminal study conducted by the NCDHR (“Dalit Women Speak Out”, 2006)
enumerating the experiences of 500 Dalit women from Andhra Pradesh,
Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh presents a shocking picture of the
conditions they live in. The study records the violence – physical,
sexual and mental – inflicted on Dalit women. The study reinforces
calls for comprehensive preventive measures to be put in place to
eradicate caste discrimination and violence against Dalit women, in
conjunction with measures to help Dalit women achieve their rights.
Valjibhai Patel says that though the Act mentions punitive measures
against negligence, to date not a single official in India has been
punished despite serious violations of the Act all over the country.
He says the judiciary should also be made accountable, not just the
police and the district administration. “There are many cases of
atrocities where the accused has been punished under the IPC but has
been acquitted under the S.C./S.T. Act. In Gujarat, one of the
professors who raped his Dalit student got life imprisonment but was
acquitted under the S.C./S.T. Act. The Khairlanji case is a big
example where the people now serving the death penalty were acquitted
under the S.C./S.T. Act. How is this possible? This means there is
some problem in investigation and pursuance of the Act,” he says. The
CSJ has filed a petition in the Supreme Court regarding the violation
of the Act, the first hearing of which will be on December 3.
Budget and policy
The MJSE is responsible for the implementation of the S.C./S.T. Act.
To implement the Act effectively, the MSJE has to provide for special
courts for the trial of offences and for the relief and rehabilitation
of victims of such offences. The Ministry provides financial resources
for the implementation of the Act through the Special Central
Assistance (SCA) from the Union government, which is 50 per cent of
the total expenditure of the States and the total expenditure of the
Union Territories.
However, the allocation of funds every year under the SCA has seen a
steady decline. Under the Act taluk- and mandal-level officers are
responsible for disbursing compensation and this work has to be
monitored by the District Magistrate/Collector and the district
monitoring and vigilance committee. Separate funds have to be given to
police stations/courts towards travelling allowance/dearness allowance
(T.A./D.A.) of victims and witnesses on FIR investigation and it has
to be monitored by the Superintendent of Police (S.P.) and the
District Judge (D.J.). There is also clear direction in the Act that
arrangements should be made for maintenance expenses and reimbursement
of medical costs of victims of atrocity.
In 2008, the Dalit Arthik Adhikar Andolan, also a part of the NCDHR,
looked into the actual budget for the S.C./S.T. Act in each State and
estimated the amount every State actually needed for its proper
implementation. Its calculations have been done on the basis of the
number of compensation cases in each State, the average cost of
running the present number of special courts and special police
stations, and relief and rehabilitation measures for victims specified
in the Act.
The results in all the States reveal that the actual budget allocated
for the Act is much less than what is required. This is despite the
fact that both the Central government and the State governments share
the amount made available for the programme under the special
component plan. Uttar Pradesh ranks the highest in terms of this
deficit, and its figure stands at a staggering Rs.1,640 crore.
Rajasthan, also a State with one of the highest rates of caste crimes,
is second with Rs.1,157 crore, and Bihar follows with Rs.1,085 crore.
According to the actual budget allocated, as shown in the MJSE annual
report, Uttar Pradesh, since 2007, ranks the highest in the allocation
of funds for the Act, with around Rs.950 crore, followed closely by
Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Among the big States, the lowest
allocation is in Bihar, with just Rs.27 crore. Chhattisgarh’s
allocation is Rs.40 crore. In Haryana, which has one of the largest
numbers of caste crimes, the allocation is only Rs.60 crore. In the
South, Tamil Nadu ranks the lowest, granting around Rs.235 crore.
An NCDHR analysis of the qualitative investments of the Central
government shows that in this year’s Budget the amount spent on wage
labour, school education, basic health, shelter, nutrition and primary
necessaries involving Dalits is 62.44 per cent of the total special
assistance funds. In sectors where the upper classes dominate, such as
higher education, entrepreneurial development, and land and asset
building, the allocation is 37.56 per cent. State budgets present a
similar trend. Most of the funds still go to the traditional
occupation of Dalits, such as cleaning, agricultural labour, leather
works, and so on, which is in contrast to the theme of the SCP of
systematic empowerment of Dalits in all sectors of production. It
therefore does not surprise when the S.C./S.T. Act, a tool for legal
empowerment of Dalits, lacks funds for its implementation.
The aggressive pursuit of neoliberal economic policies by governments
at the Centre and in many States over the past decade has also
resulted in an increase in atrocities against the S.Cs and the S.Ts.
Ironically, even the Uttar Pradesh government is not free from such
ventures. The government’s ambitious 1,047-kilometre-long Ganga
Expressway project, connecting Greater Noida near Delhi and Ballia in
eastern Uttar Pradesh, was expected to acquire 64,000 hectares of
land, 70 per cent of which is agricultural land. A number of observers
and social analysts pointed out that this acquisition would militate
against the basic livelihood of a large section of Dalits who were
into share-cropping with upper-caste, land-owning farmers.
According to NCRB data since 2005, Uttar Pradesh ranks the highest in
the number of cases of caste atrocities, followed closely by Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Gujarat. “Acts like
these empower and help organise Dalits. With greater awareness about
the Act, we have seen a rise in caste atrocities every year,” said
Sirivella Prasad of the NDMJ.
The trend clearly shows that caste atrocities have increased with
greater social and economic mobility of the S.Cs and the S.Ts which
disrupts the exploitative status quo of a feudal society.
Many activists note that atrocity cases happen when Dalits try to
avail themselves of legal resources; assert their right over land,
water, and livelihood; assert their right to choose their occupation;
attempt to participate in the cultural life of the community; assert
their right to vote; and are victimised to satisfy the superstitions
of dominant castes (witchcraft, human sacrifice). With respect to the
S.Ts, activists say most of the atrocities happen when they try to
organise themselves politically against the combined exploitation of
government officials and industrial goons in the hinterland.
However, the Act is not clear about the rules with respect to social
and economic boycott of the S.Cs and the S.Ts and there is an ongoing
advocacy campaign among Dalit groups to seek amendments to certain
provisions of the Act to make it stronger. Said Colin Gonsalves of
Human Rights Law Network: “Unless the institutional caste bias is
systematically done away with at the policy level and proper action is
taken against negligent officials, violations will continue to happen.
The legal system has failed the S.Cs and the S.Ts. The Act is a clear
instance of wonderful legislation but useless implementation. Our
judiciary needs at least 15 per cent reservation for the S.Cs right
from the lower courts to the Supreme Court. The Rajasthan High Court
has not had a single Dalit judge since Independence – absurd for a
State that ranks very high in caste crimes.”
To put it simply, caste is a combined social system of occupation,
endogamy, culture, social class and political power, which has
historically been exploitative for Dalits and Adivasis. In this
context, the S.C./S.T. Act and its status echo Ambedkar’s words: “This
condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense.
It is found where, as in caste system, some persons are forced to
carry on the prescribed callings which are not their choice.”
http://www.flonnet.com/fl2624/stories/20091204262400400.htm
bademiyansubhanallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or
discuss these issues on the talk page.
Its neutrality is disputed. Tagged since August 2009.
It may contain original research or unverifiable claims. Tagged since
August 2008.
This box: view • talk • edit
Debt bondage (or bonded labor) is an arrangement whereby a person is
forced to pay off a loan with direct labor in place of currency, over
an agreed or obscure period of time. When a debtor is tricked or
trapped into working for very little or no pay, or when the value of
their work is significantly greater than the original sum of money
borrowed, some consider the arrangement to be a form of unfree labour
or debt slavery. It is similar to peonage, indenture or the truck
system.
Legal Definition
Debt bondage is classically defined as a situation when a person
provides a loan to another and uses his or her labor or services to
repay the debt; when the value of the work, as reasonably assessed, is
not applied towards the liquidation of the debt, the situation becomes
one of debt bondage. See United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention
on the Abolition of Slavery.
[edit] Historical background to bonded labor
Prior to the early modern age, feudal and serfdom systems were the
predominant political and economic systems in Europe. These systems
were based on the holding of all land in fief or fee, and the
resulting relation of lord to vassal, and was characterized by homage,
legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture.[citation
needed]
A modernization of the feudal system was "peonage", where debtors were
bound in servitude to their creditors until their debts were paid.
Although peons are only obliged to a creditor monetarily.[citation
needed]
Historical peonage
Peonage is a system where laborers are bound in servitude until their
debts are paid in full. Those bound by such a system are known, in the
US, as peons.[citation needed] Employers may extend credit to laborers
to buy from employer-owned stores at inflated prices.[original
research?] This method is a variation of the truck system (or company
store system), in which workers are exploited by agreeing to work for
an insufficient[original research?] amount of goods and/or services.
In these circumstances, peonage is a form of unfree labor. Such
systems have existed in many places at many times throughout history.
Historical examples
The American South - Such a system was often used in the southern
United States after the American Civil War where African-American and
poor white farmers, known as sharecroppers, were often extended credit
to purchase seed and supplies from the owner of the land they farmed
and pay the owner in a share of the crop.
In Peru a peonage system existed from the 1500s until land reform in
the 1950s. One estate in Peru that existed from the late 1500s until
it ended had up to 1,700 peons employed and had a jail. Peons were
expected to work a minimum of three days a week for their landlord and
more if necessary to complete assigned work. Workers were paid a
symbolic 2 cents per year. Workers were unable to travel outside of
their assigned lands without permission and were not allowed to
organize any independent community activity.
Thousands of such laborers were sold into slavery during the West
African slave trade and ended their lives working as slaves on the
plantations in the New World. For this reason, section 2 of the Slave
Trade Act 1843 enacted by the British Parliament declared "persons
holden in servitude as pledges for debt" to "be slaves or persons
intended to be dealt with as slaves" for the purpose of the Slave
Trade Act 1824 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
It continued to be very common in Africa and China, but was suppressed
by the authorities after the establishment of the People's Republic of
China.[citation needed]. It persists in rural areas of India, Pakistan
and Nepal.[citation needed]
In Niger, where the practice of slavery was outlawed in 2003, a study
found that almost 8% of the population are still slaves.[1] Descent-
based slavery, where generations of the same family are born into
bondage, is traditionally practised by at least four of Niger’s eight
ethnic groups. The slave masters are mostly from the nomadic tribes —
the Tuareg, Fulani, Toubou and Arabs.[2]
According to some claims, 40 million people in India, most of them
Dalits, are bonded workers, many working to pay off debts that were
incurred generations ago. Rise of Dalit politicians in India, and
their overwhelming support by non-Dalits, as well as Government
commitment to overall improve education, communication and living
standards in India has resulted in rapid decline of bonded labor in
India. Penalties for those indulging in employing bonded labor are
severe and Human Rights Groups are very active in curbing these
practices. Television media and increased penetration of cheap
satellite television has spread awareness to the most remote areas and
made people aware of the rights, hence the evidence of forced labor in
India is rapidly declining.
These claimed figures are comparable to ones in Bolivia, Brazil, Peru
and Philippines.
There are no universally accepted figures for the number of bonded
child labourers in India. Again, Government's commitment to universal
education and poverty eradication programmes have resulted in
significant decrease in number of bonded labors. In the traditional
industries of high quality hand-woven fabrics and handicrafts,
increased awareness by international buyers and stringent checks put
in place by multinational corporations on their suppliers has resulted
in suppliers and manufacturers to replace bonded child labor by
instead offering educational facilities to children of their employees
and workers. International Tourists to places like Rajasthan also play
their part and have at many times reported instances of child labor to
authorities who swiftly act to curb any child labor. In contrast, of
20 million bonded labourers in Pakistan 7.5 million are children.
Modern views
See also: Human trafficking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavery_International
According to Anti-Slavery International, "A person enters debt bondage
when their labor is demanded as a means of repayment of a loan, or of
money given in advance. Usually, people are tricked or trapped into
working for no pay or very little pay (in return for such a loan), in
conditions which violate their human rights. Invariably, the value of
the work done by a bonded laborer is greater that the original sum of
money borrowed or advanced."[citation needed]
Some see the term as also applying to inhabitants of countries who
must work to repay extensive national debt, but which incurrance of
debt they did not agree to, and (arguably) have not benefited from.[3]
According to the Anti-Slavery Society:
Pawnage or pawn slavery is a form of servitude akin to bonded labor
under which the debtor provides another human being as security or
collateral for the debt. Until the debt (including interest on it) is
paid off, the creditor has the use of the labor of the pawn.[4]
At international law
Debt bondage has been defined by the United Nations as a form of
"modern day slavery" [5] and is prohibited by international law. It is
specifically dealt with by article 1(a) of the United Nations 1956
Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. It persists
nonetheless especially in developing nations, which have few
mechanisms for credit security or bankruptcy, and where fewer people
hold formal title to land or possessions. According to some
economists, for example Hernando de Soto, this is a major barrier to
development in those countries - entrepreneurs do not dare take risks
and cannot get credit because they hold no collateral and may burden
families for generations to come.[citation needed]
Where children are forced to work because of debt bondage of the
family, this is considered not only child labor, but one of the worst
forms of child labor in terms of the Worst Forms of Child Labour
Convention, 1999 of the International Labour Organization.[citation
needed]
Despite the UN prohibition, Anti-Slavery International estimates that
"between 10 and 20 million people are being subjected to debt bondage
today."[citation needed] Other estimates place the number as high as
40 million. Researcher Siddharth Kara has calculated the number of
slaves in the world by type, and determined the number of debt bondage
slaves to be 18.1 million at the end of 2006. [6] He has updated this
number for the end of 2009 to be 18.4 million, the increase primarily
as a result of the 2007 global commodity bubble, followed by the
global economic crisis of 2008 and 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hernando_de_Soto_(economist)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst_Forms_of_Child_Labour_Convention,_1999
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Labour_Organization
Modern examples
Prostitution - News media in western Europe regularly carry reports
about one particular kind of debt bondage: women from Eastern Europe
who are forced to work in prostitution as a way to pay off the "debt"
they acquired when they were illegally smuggled to destinations in
Western Europe. This form of debt bondage also takes place in other
parts of the world, such as women moving from Southeast Asia or Latin
America.[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America
Marxist analysis
According to Marxist economists, debt bondage is characteristic of
feudal economies, where families are considered the responsible unit
for financial relationships, and where heirs continue to owe parents'
debts upon their deaths. Fully capitalist economies are characterized
by the individual taking all responsibility, and such mechanisms as
bankruptcy and inheritance taxes reducing creditors' rights (while
increasing the power of the state). Heirs are freed from the creditor,
but at the cost of a drastically increased power accruing to the state
itself.
Debt bondage is often a form of disguised slavery in which the subject
is not legally owned, but is instead bound by a contract to perform
labor to work off a debt, under terms that make it impossible to
completely retire the debt and thereby escape from the contract.
[citation needed]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_economists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_taxes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt
See also
Bonded Labour Liberation Front, India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonded_Labour_Liberation_Front
Bondage in Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bondage_in_Pakistan
Debtor's prison
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtor%27s_prison
Karl Marx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
Peon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peon
The State of Bonded Labor in Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_Bonded_Labor_in_Pakistan
Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst_Forms_of_Child_Labour_Conventionhttp:
References
This article includes a list of references, related reading or
external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline
citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise
citations where appropriate. (September 2009)
^ [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4250709.stm
^ [2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/10013271.html?page=3
^ Debt Bondage Or Self-Reliance, GATT-Fly
^ [3] http://anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/pawnage.htm
^ The Bondage of Debt: A Photo Essay, by Shilpi Gupta
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/asiaproject/Gupta.html
^ Kara, Siddharth (January 2009). Sex Trafficking - Inside the
Business of Modern Slavery. Columbia University Press. ISBN
978-0231139601.
External links
Photo-story on modern-day slavery (debt-bondage) in Brazil by
photographer Eduardo Martino
http://www.eduardomartino.com/pages/slavery_brazil.html
Human Rights Watch report on Thai women tricked into debt bondage in
Japan
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/japan/6-sec-6-7-8.htm
1996 Human Rights Watch report on bonded child labor in India
http://www.ilo.org/sapfl/lang--en/index.htm
http://anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/bclab.htm
http://clpmag.org/article.php?article=Twenty-First-Century-Slavery_146
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1996/India3.htm
Anti-Slavery International
Common Language Project article on bonded labor in Pakistan
Bonded child labor
The ILO Special Action Programme to combat Forced Labour (SAP-FL)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonded_labor
THE SMALL HANDS OF SLAVERY
Bonded Child Labor In India
Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project
Human Rights Watch/Asia
Human Rights Watch
Copyright © September 1996 by Human Rights Watch.
All rights reserved.
rinted in the United States of America.
ISBN 1-56432-172-X
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 96-77536
This is the half report. (The last part)
The first part would follow in the next post...
Another writer, a human rights lawyer with extensive experience
working with bonded laborers, put it more bluntly. "A bonded labourer
who becomes free without the means to survive," he wrote, "becomes
free to die."30
As of 1996, a bonded laborer identified and released by the state is
entitled to a rehabilitation allowance of 6,250 rupees. The 1994-1995
annual report of the Indian government's Ministry of Labour reported
that in August 1994, state and central government labor officials
agreed to raise the rehabilitation allowance to 10,000 rupees.31
Nonetheless, as of July 1996, this raise had not been effectuated.
The failure of state governments to comply with their legal
obligations under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act-
particularly the formation and adequate functioning of the district-
level vigilance committees-is one of the primary reasons behind the
low enforcement rate of the law and the continuing high prevalence of
bonded labor. (Indeed, by some accounts, bonded labor is actually
increasing during the 1990s.32) Another contributing factor, mentioned
previously in the context of child labor policy, is the failure of the
government to gather and maintain accurate or even plausible
statistics.
The statistics problem is as acute in the bonded labor context as it
is in the child labor context. According to credible estimates, the
number of bonded laborers in India is approximately sixty-five
million, representing slightly more than 7 percent of the country's
total population.33 Certain individual states alone are estimated to
have bonded labor populations of one to two million people; a report
from Tamil Nadu, based on extensive research conducted at the
direction ofthe Supreme Court, concluded that there were "well over 10
lakhs" (one million) bonded laborers working in that state.34 Other
states known to have high rates of bondage include Andhra Pradesh,
Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar
Pradesh, Haryana, and Bihar.
In contrast to the figures used by social scientists, the Indian
government's figures regarding bonded labor are unconvincingly low.
The central Ministry of Labour relies on the state Ministries of
Labour-which are charged with enforcing the Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act-to report the number of bonded laborers identified,
released, and rehabilitated. Based on information submitted by the
states, the central Ministry of Labour's 1994-1995 Annual Report
stated that the nationwide target for 1994-1995 was the rehabilitation
of 2,784 bonded laborers-a figure representing less than .005 percent
of all estimated bonded laborers. The figure for the total number of
bonded laborers identified, when viewed in contrast to the same
figures provided in 1989, illustrate the lack of implementation of the
Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act. In 1989, the total number of bonded
laborers identified was 242,532.35 By 1995, this number had risen to
251,424.36 These figures indicate that from 1988 to 1995, only 8,892
bonded laborers had been identified throughout the country, at a time
when nongovernmental sources were reporting that there were as many as
sixty-five million bonded laborers in India by 1994.37 Ironically, in
the paragraph following the presentation of statistics in the 1994-95
Annual Report, the report states that "[t]he [state] Governments are
attaching the highest priority to the total eradication of the bonded
labour system in the country."38
The central government's reliance on and acceptance of state
government statistics regarding bonded labor is misplaced and
irresponsible. The majority ofstate governments vastly underreport the
incidence of bonded labor within their borders. For instance, the
government of Tamil Nadu, where an independent commission recently
concluded that there existed more than one million bonded laborers,
stated in a sworn affidavit to the Supreme Court that "in Tamil Nadu,
only stray cases of bonded labour are noticed..."39 Twelve other state
governments made the same assertion to the court, which expressed its
disbelief by ordering independent investigations into the matter.40
In interviews with Human Rights Watch, top labor officials from the
states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, both states with high levels of debt
bondage, asserted that there was no bonded labor in their states. "I
frankly don't think it [bonded labor] exists in Rajasthan," said Ashok
Shekhar, Labour Commissioner for Rajasthan; one of his subordinates
added that, "there is no case of bonded labour in Rajasthan."41 When
asked about the reports of widespread bondage from journalists and
activists, Commissioner Shekhar conceded, as noted, that there might
exist "technical bonded labour," whereby an advance is paid to secure
a worker's labor, but he insisted that this practice was "not really
bondage." He also said that activists who organize against bonded
labor practices in the stone quarries of Rajasthan are not acting on
behalf of the bonded laborers, but rather are hoping to be paid off by
the owners in order to stay quiet. Ashok Bhasin, the Deputy Labour
Commissioner for the neighboring state of Gujarat, concurred
withCommissioner Shekhar's statements. As for his own state, he
asserted that "bonded labour does not exist in Gujarat... neither
among women, men, or children."42
Dr. Manoj Dayal, a professor at the University of Allahabad described
how the government of Bihar "abolished" bonded labor:
As soon as the issue of abolishing bonded labour was raised in Bihar,
the State Government outrightly persisted that there was no system of
bonded labour prevailing in the State; that what exists in the State
is a system of attached labour and that the labourers are assured of
remuneration, cultivable and homestead land, clothing, interest-free
loans and so on. The Bihar Government thus abolished bonded labour by
redefining it and by terming it as "attached labour system."43
Given this willful denial of one of the country's most pressing social
ills, it is not surprising that government officials' efforts on
behalf of bonded laborers have remained meager at best. The failure to
address the issue is doubly egregious in the case of bonded child
laborers, who, without intervention, will be doomed to pass their
entire lives in a state of virtual slavery.
FAILURE OF THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT TO ENFORCE THE LAW
An analysis of data indicating the number of prosecutions launched
under [the Child Labour] Act and convictions obtained would clearly
indicate that this act ... has achieved very little.44
The government's failure to enforce the Child Labour (Prohibition and
Regulation) Act and the government's failure to enforce the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition) Act-not to mention the failure to enforce
the several other laws protecting child workers-are twin
manifestations of the same set ofphenomena. These phenomena include
apathy, caste and class bias, obstruction of enforcement efforts,
corruption, low prioritization of the problem, and disregard for the
deep and widespread suffering of bonded child laborers.
Enforcement Statistics
A glaring sign of neglect of their duties by officials charged with
enforcing child labor laws is the failure to collect, maintain, and
disseminate accurate statistics regarding enforcement efforts. Human
Rights Watch met with a top official of the Ministry of Labour, but he
was unable to provide any statistics regarding enforcement of the
Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act or other legislation
protecting the rights of child workers.45 We attempted to meet with S.
S. Sharma, the Director General of Labour Welfare and, as such, the
official entrusted with enforcement of the Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act. Director-General Sharma refused to grant an interview
to Human Rights Watch while we were in New Delhi, suggesting instead
that we fax him a set of questions, which we did. Unfortunately, we
received no response.46 The enforcement statistics that follow have
been gleaned from a variety of sources, including public government
documents, news reports, and interviews with government officials.
Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act
At the national level, from 1990 to 1993, 537 inspections were carried
out under the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act. These
inspections turnedup 1,203 violations. Inexplicably, only seven
prosecutions were launched.47 At the state level, the years 1990 to
1993 produced 60,717 inspections in which 5,060 violations of the act
were detected; 772 of these 5,060 violations resulted in convictions.
48
At the state level during the 1993 to 1994 year, the latest period for
which data are available, 1,596 cases were filed against employers.49
The number of convictions is unknown; many of these cases may still be
pending.
When convictions are obtained under the Child Labour (Prohibition and
Regulation) Act, the fines are light. The vast majority of adjudicated
offenders receive fines of five dollars or less-just a few hundred
rupees, as opposed to the 10,000 to 20,000 fine stipulated by the act
itself.50 To the knowledge of Human Rights Watch, not a single case
brought under the act has resulted in imprisonment, to date, although
the act allows for sentences of three months to a year for first-time
offenders and six months to two years for repeat offenders.51
Some information is available from various states of India regarding
enforcement of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act. In
Tamil Nadu, the act was not enforced until 1994-eight years after its
passage-when a casewas filed in North Arcot district.52 In the two
years since then, according to a senior state official, there have
been fifteen or sixteen convictions under the Child Labour
(Prohibition and Regulation) Act, and another fifty cases or so are
pending.53 To date, no one has been imprisoned in Tamil Nadu for
violation of either the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act
or the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act. According to activists in
the state, on the rare occasions when prosecutions of Child Labour
(Prohibition and Regulation) Act offenders are mounted by the state,
some judicial magistrates are quick to dismiss the charges, ostensibly
for lack of evidence, but in fact because of corruption or sympathy
with the defendant employers.54
In the Firozabad district of Uttar Pradesh, more than 50,000 children
are estimated to be working in glass factories in violation of the
Factories Act and the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act.55
Nonetheless, in 1995 there were only two convictions for child labor
law violations in Firozabad, and the assistant labour commissioner,
Mr. B. K. Singh, told a journalist that "[t]here is no child labour in
the district now."56 According to the Secretary General of the
National Human Rights Commission, the enforcement problem, in
Firozabad and elsewhere, is "just a matter of people not doing their
work."57
Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act
Official statistics reflecting enforcement of the Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act are equally difficult to obtain. Statistics regarding
application of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act to children
are nonexistent. Indeed, at least some government officials
interviewed by Human Rights Watch appeared to be laboring under the
conviction that the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act does not
apply to children, an interpretation that has no basis in the law
itself nor in Supreme Court cases interpreting the law.
As of March 1993, the latest date for which official figures are
available, state governments had reported the identification and
release of a total of 251,424 bonded laborers. This number indicates
all bonded laborers identified and released since the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act was passed in 1976.58 Of this number, 227,404
were reported to have been rehabilitated.59 If this number includes
any rehabilitated bonded child laborers, that fact has not been
reported.
State governments' statistics grossly under-report the current
incidence of bonded labor. As mentioned, the Supreme Court has been
examining the incidence of bonded labor in thirteen states.60 These
thirteen states, chosen by the court for investigation because of
their reputation for high rates of debt bondage, all claimed in
affidavits to the court that there was little or no bonded labor
within their jurisdictions.61 The court, skeptical of these claims,
appointed teams of investigators to study the issue in each state.62
When districts and states do report on statistics regarding the
identification and rehabilitation of bonded laborers, these numbers
are frequently unreliable. The team investigating bonded labor in
Tamil Nadu, for example, found that"[s]tatutory registers relating to
bonded labour were not maintained in many districts."63 Simple neglect
or lack of resources is not the only or even the primary reason for
lack of accurate statistics. According to the investigative team,
"Details provided by the state government and the district
administration do not tally in most districts and even appear
fabricated."64
This can be seen in states' statistics on bonded labor which are
submitted to the central government. For example, there are at least
three examples from 1988 to 1995 where states have reported that the
number of bonded laborers that have been rehabilitated are greater
than the number of bonded laborers that have been identified. In 1988,
the state of Tamil Nadu reported that 34,640 bonded laborers had been
rehabilitated, but they also reported that 33,581 bonded laborers had
been identified, meaning that the state claimed it had rehabilitated
1,059 more people than it had ever identified as bonded laborers.65 In
the 1989-90 report to the Ministry of Labour, the state of Orissa
reported that 51,751 bonded laborers had been rehabilitated, but only
48,657 had been identified.66 The state of Tamil Nadu reported in the
1994-95 Ministry of Labour Annual Report that 39,054 bonded laborers
had been rehabilitated, but they had identified 38,886.67 In total,
these three examples indicate that 4,321 more people were
rehabilitated than were identified as bonded laborers.
These statistics are disturbing for two reasons. The first is that
these statistics are cumulative totals, meaning that every year, new
cases are added to the cases from previous years, dating back to 1976,
when the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act became law, so that the
yearly statistics represent the total number of bonded laborers that
have ever been identified, released, and rehabilitated. The second
factor that makes the statistics suspect is that before bonded
laborers can be eligible for rehabilitation, they must be identified
as bonded laborers. Because ofthis methodology, the cumulative totals
for rehabilitation can never be more than the cumulative totals for
identification and when this occurs, such as the previous three cases,
it indicates a serious flaw in reporting. This may be due to several
factors: state governments may be arbitrarily determining bonded labor
statistics, or the inaccuracies may be due to simple error, or people
who were not bonded laborers are being rehabilitated as bonded
laborers. In one example of the latter, a survey of 180 bonded
laborers who had been officially rehabilitated by the Bihar government
found that 120 had never been bonded.68
Another indication that the law is not being enforced is the fact much
of the money allocated for the rehabilitation of bonded laborers is
unspent and reabsorbed by the government. Funding for rehabilitation
is allocated through a fifty-fifty matching grant in which the states
undertake rehabilitation and the central government matches their
expenditures.69 It is administered through several schemes under the
Integrated Rural Development Program (IRDP) and Jawahar Rozgar Yojana
(JRY). Records of expenditures for these programs show that in
1989-90, only 76.16 percent of the funds were utilized. In 1990-91,
78.41 percent of funds were utilized. And in 1991-92, only 47.83
percent of funds available were utilized for rehabilitating bonded
laborers.70 On March 14, 1996, the Parliamentary Committee on Labour
and Welfare reported that only 38.39 percent of the funds available
for the rehabilitation of bonded laborers had been utilized. The
reason given was that "the state governments failed to submit
certificates in regard to the expenditure incurred by them. Because of
this lapse, the Central government did not release funds to them."71
The failure to report expenditures indicates a failure to enforce the
law.
A Supreme Court lawyer closely connected to bonded labor litigation
corroborated the unreliable nature of the district collectors'
reports, saying there is "no mechanism to ascertain [the collectors']
veracity."72 According to thisadvocate and others familiar with the
issue, corruption in application of the Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act and dispersal of act-related rehabilitation funds is
common. "A collector may receive 100,000 rupees for rehabilitation
efforts but disperse only 10,000 of it. Embezzlement is difficult to
track, but we all know it happens. For example, a bonded labourer
comes in, puts his thumb print on the document saying he will receive
6,250 rupees, but receives only 3,000 rupees."73
Corruption and neglect are not the only reasons for bad statistics
regarding bonded labor. Another is passivity on the part of enforcing
officials, who too often take no affirmative steps to discover and
root out debt bondage in their districts. Whether this is due to
simple apathy or to a misunderstanding on their part of their official
duties, the effect is disastrous for bonded laborers, who are left in
their state of enslavement indefinitely. In Tamil Nadu, for example,
the investigators found that "most District Collectors... had one
basis to assume that bonded labour does not exist-No one is coming
forward [to report that they are in bondage]."74
Human Rights Watch was unable to obtain any statistics on prosecution
under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act after 1988.75 Up to
1988, there were 7,000 prosecutions under the Bonded Labour
(Abolition) Act throughout India, of which 700 resulted in convictions.
76 It is certain that prosecution under the act is rare. In Tamil
Nadu, the first prosecutions under the twenty-year-old act occurred in
1995, when eight beedi employers were arrested by the North Arcot
District Collector.77 The case, which drew headlines in the regional
press, was depicted as a bold "get tough" measure. The agents spent
one night in jail andwere fined 500 rupees each.78 The Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act allows for punishment of three years in prison
and a 2,000 rupee fine.
Obstacles to Enforcement
Apathy
The endemic apathy among government officials charged with enforcing
India's labor laws is apparent at all levels: national, state, and
district. While undoubtedly there are many committed men and women
among their ranks-including, for example, the district collector of
North Arcot in Tamil Nadu, whom Human Rights Watch interviewed-such
commitment is not the norm. From India's top labor officials all the
way down to the local level, where tehsildars (community leaders) use
their influence to support the status quo, Human Rights Watch and
other researchers have found a profound lack of concern for the plight
of bonded and child laborers.
There are many concrete examples of government neglect. The Child
Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, signed into law in 1986,
requires each state to formulate rules for its implementation. Until
this is done, the law cannot be applied in those states. As of July
1996, a full ten years after the act's birth, the majority of states
have failed to formulate and implement these necessary rules.79 It is
a sign of the government's disregard of this issue that we are unable
to report the exact number of India's twenty-five states that have
made rules for the act's application. When we asked a very senior
official of the central Ministry of Labour-who spoke only on condition
of anonymity-how many states had made rules under the Child Labour
(Prohibition and Regulation) Act, he said "I don't know." He then
said, "Laws don't matter. Economics do," and went on to assert that,
until rural prosperity increases, nothing can be done about child
labor.
Clearly, states are receiving no pressure from the national government
to implement the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act. Nor,
for the most part, are they themselves taking the initiative to push
for greater enforcement of child labor legislation. It is at the
district level that most enforcement efforts are coordinated and
carried out, and these efforts are managed and overseen by the
district magistrates. The district magistrates, or collectors as they
are also called, are civil servants appointed by the state ministers,
and are the top law enforcement and administrative authorities at the
district level. At a 1995 conference of district magistrates and
collectors in New Delhi, various district heads told a journalist that
child labor was "very low" on their list of priorities, ranking about
twenty-fifth (investment in high-tech industries was first).80
Regarding the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, the government's
egregious neglect of the law is most evident in the nearly universal
failure of districts to form the requisite vigilance committees, much
less ensure that the committees function meaningfully. The vigilance
committees form the core of act enforcement-if implemented as
intended, these committees could contribute dramatically to the
eradication of bonded labor. For overburdened district collectors,
they would provide resources; for corrupt district collectors, they
would provide oversight; and for all district collectors, they would
provide essential liaison possibilities to the bonded laborer
population, whose interests are usually at odds with the interest and
sympathies of their local leaders.81
Nonetheless, notwithstanding the act's unambiguous requirement that
vigilance committees be formed and active, as well as numerous supreme
court rulings emphasizing the importance of the committees for act
enforcement, Human Rights Watch has learned of no functioning
vigilance committee anywhere in India.
Apathy, or at least a low prioritization of child and bonded labor
issues, is also evident in the slow pace at which complaints are
adjudicated-enforcement in the courts is very slow. One attorney told
us of a case he filed with the Supreme Court under the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act in 1984. A fact finding committee was not
appointed until 1991 and, although arguments and submissionsbefore the
court concluded in 1994, as of 1996 no decision had yet been issued.82
The time table is not much better for the bonded labor case before the
Supreme Court, People's Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Tamil
Nadu, et al., which was filed in 1985 and as of 1996 was under
consideration by the court.
Delays in prosecuting cases under the Child Labour (Prohibition and
Regulation) Act are also not uncommon. One such case, filed in 1986
shortly after the act took effect, was reported to be still pending at
the prosecution stage eight years later, in 1994, with the accused
continuing to engage in prohibited practices. The delay in processing
the complaint, filed against an owner of a glass and bangles factory
in Firozabad, is all the more startling in view of the fact that the
complaint was filed by then-Labour Minister P. A. Sangma.83
Caste and Class Bias
A key element of enforcement is the attitude and the tendency toward a
subjective interpretation of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act,
1976 by government officials, including district magistrates, police
officers, labor inspectors, and judges. Too often, because of their
own backgrounds and the climate in which they work, those officers
entrusted with enforcement are more sympathetic to the employers than
to the child or bonded laborers. This phenomenon has been noted
repeatedly in the context of enforcement of the Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act.
We had some time back a case before us where pursuant to a direction
given by the Collector as a result of an order made by this Court, the
Tehsildar went to the villages in question and sitting on a dais with
the landlords by his side, he started enquiring of the labourers
whether they were bonded or not and when the labourers, obviously
inhibited and terrified by the presence of the landlords, said that
they were not bonded but they were working freely and voluntarily, he
made a report to the Collector that there were no bonded labourers.84
In the rare instances where vigilance committees or similar bodies
have been formed, according to one researcher, they have been composed
of people who themselves, either directly or through their families,
employ bonded labor.85 District collectors and other civil servants
assigned to bonded labor enforcement are also more often than not
aligned with the property-holding-including the holding of bonded
laborers-class. One researcher told Human Rights Watch of working with
a team of three Indian Administrative Service officers, who had been
assigned by the Supreme Court to investigate a case of bonded labor
affecting between 2,500 and 3,000 people. The investigators were urban
middle-class men from land-owning families in the region; in private
conversations, they made it clear that they considered the use of
bonded labor to be an acceptable practice.86
Many bond masters are themselves government employees, including
teachers, railway workers, and civil administrators.87 Because of
their steady income, these people are more likely to own land-which
they need someone to cultivate-and are more likely to have money
available for lending purposes. They are also more likely to be local
leaders and to have ties to the local and district administration,
both factors which tend to inhibit prosecution.
Despite the obvious limitations of relying on high-caste and local
landowning officials to attack bonded labor, outreach by the
government to affected populations and collaboration with grass-roots
social actions groups have not yet been implemented to any significant
degree.
Obstruction
It is not uncommon for those accused of violating labor laws to engage
in overt obstruction of the legal process. This ranges from
intimidation of thecomplaining workers, to bribery of government
officials, to physical threats and violence against the bonded
laborers and their advocates.88
Those who file suit against employers of bonded labor are frequently
harassed, according to a New Delhi lawyer who has been engaged in
bonded labor cases for more than a decade.89
The danger is greatest to those who work in rural areas, where bondage
is often the norm and is employed by powerful and ruthless owners.
According to another attorney closely related to bonded labor
litigation, the advocates and especially the workers who complain
about their status are "risking their lives... they are putting their
lives on the line, and the state officials have turned a callous eye
to it."90
Government officials may do more than just turn a "callous eye" toward
violence against the bonded laborers and their advocates. Several
activists told Human Rights Watch of police collusion with local
employers, including returning escaped workers to the employers and
intimidating, through force or threat of force, workers who are
attempting to organize for improved conditions.91
Corruption
As noted in previous chapters, corruption among government officials
charged with enforcement of labor laws is notorious and widespread.
Labor inspectors, medical officers, local tehsildars (representatives
of the district magistrates at the local level), and judges and
judicial magistrates are all known to be susceptible to bribery.
Lack of Accountability
Under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, district magistrates
are supposed to report to the state government periodically regarding
the number of cases of bonded laborers identified, released, and
rehabilitated. Most districtmagistrates either do not make these
reports at all, or make them sporadically. Furthermore, no mechanism
is in place whereby the accuracy of the district-level reports can be
ascertained, including such important issues as how many of the
identified workers have actually been released, and whether any
released workers have relapsed into bondage. Often, the district
magistrates will simply report that identified bonded laborers, or
formerly released bonded laborers, are "unavailable for
rehabilitation." That is to say, that their whereabouts are unknown.
Hence the central government's figures for 1994-1995, which state
that, of 251,424 bonded labourers identified between 1976 and 1995,
17,127 are "not available for rehabilitation."92
The rate of return into bondage by previously released bonded laborers
is neither studied nor recorded by the government; the effectiveness
of the rehabilitation scheme is therefore unknown. Various
nongovernmental sources believe the relapse rate to be very high.93
Part of the reason for return may be the long delays between
identification of bonded laborers and dispersal of rehabilitation
monies to them.94 Another factor may be the reportedly widespread
corruption among enforcing officials, who are accused of siphoning off
funds earmarked for rehabilitation purposes.
Lack of Adequate Enforcement Staff
Yet another obstacle to enforcement is the failure to devote
sufficient resources to the issue of bonded child labor. This failure
includes inadequate training of labor inspectors, an insufficient
number of inspectors,95 and anoverburdening of the district
magistrates.96 At both the state and the district level, the number of
personnel devoted to enforcement of child and bonded labor laws is
blatantly inadequate. In Tamil Nadu, for example, "there is only one
Assistant Section Officer dealing with the bonded labour issue for the
whole State... [and he] also holds other responsibilities.97
VII. CONCLUSION: COMBATING BONDED CHILD LABOR
The eradication of bonded child labor in India depends on the Indian
government's commitment to two imperatives: enforcement of the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition) Act, and the creation of meaningful
alternatives for already-bonded child laborers and those at risk of
joining their ranks.
In addition to genuine government action, it is essential that
nongovernmental organizations be encouraged by the government to
collaborate in this effort. The government has the resources and
authority to implement the law, while community-based organizations
have the grass-roots contacts and trust necessary to facilitate this
implementation. Furthermore, nongovernmental groups can act as a
watchdog on government programs, keeping vigil for corruption, waste,
and apathy. The elimination of current debt bondage and the prevention
of new or renewed bondage therefore requires a combination of
concerted government action and extensive community involvement.
Neither standing alone is sufficient. Bonded labor is a vast,
pernicious, and long-standing social ill, and the tenacity of the
bonded labor system must be attacked with similar tenacity; anything
less than total commitment is certain to fail.
ENFORCEMENT OF THE BONDED LABOUR SYSTEM
(ABOLITION) ACT
The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act was passed into law in 1976.
Twenty years later, Human Rights Watch has found that the goals of
this law-to punish employers of bonded labor and to identify, release,
and rehabilitate bonded laborers-have not been met, and efforts to do
so are sporadic and weak at best. The bonded labor system continues to
thrive.
The district-level vigilance committees, mandated by the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act and constituting the key tool of act
enforcement, have not been formed in most districts. Those that have
formed tend to lie dormant, or, worse yet, are comprised of members
unsympathetic to the plight of bonded laborers, in direct
contravention of Supreme Court orders interpreting the act.
Without effective vigilance committees to assist, guide, and oversee
their efforts, district collectors are left alone in their efforts to
enforce the law. Collectors interested in enforcement are limited in
these efforts by competing administrative and prosecutorial duties;
without vigilance committees to share the work, meaningful enforcement
of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act is difficult. Other
collectors are not interested in enforcing the act; for them, the lack
of a good vigilance committee means there is no pressure to do so.
Whether for lack of will or lack of support, India's district
collectors have failed utterly to enforce the provisions of the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition)Act. If collected statistics regarding
prosecutions under the act after 1988 exist, Human Rights Watch was
unable to obtain them. The only attempted prosecutions we learned of
occurred in Tamil Nadu in 1995, when eight employers of bonded child
labor were arrested, kept in jail over night, and fined a nominal
amount. The state of Tamil Nadu has an estimated one million bonded
laborers; according to the North Arcot District Collector, these were
the first charges ever brought under the act in Tamil Nadu.
In addition to prosecuting violators, district collectors are directed
by the act to identify, release, and rehabilitate bonded laborers.
India has an estimated fifteen million bonded child laborers alone.
The Indian government's Ministry of Labour, however, estimated in 1995
that there were just 2,784 bonded laborers of all ages identified and
awaiting rehabilitation. It made no mention of any bonded laborers yet
to be identified. Non-enforcement of the law is virtually guaranteed,
of course, so long as the government engages in a willful denial
regarding the existence and pervasiveness of bonded labor.
The mandated rehabilitation of released workers is essential. Without
adequate rehabilitation, those who are released will quickly fall
again into bondage. This has been established repeatedly, among both
adult and child bonded laborers. Nonetheless, the central and state
governments have jointly failed to implement required rehabilitation
procedures. Rehabilitation allowances are distributed late, or are not
distributed at all, or are paid out at half the proper rate, with
corrupt officials pocketing the difference. One government-appointed
commission found that court orders mandating the rehabilitation of
bonded laborers were routinely ignored.98
Finally, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act directs vigilance
committees and district collectors to institute savings and credit
programs at the community level, so that the impoverished might have
access to a small loan during financial emergencies. This resource is
crucial. Just as enforcement of the law against employers would work
to terminate the demand for bonded labor, so would available credit
work to end the supply. Nearly every child interviewed by Human Rights
Watch told the same story: they were sold to their employers because
their parents were desperate for money and had no other way to get it.
For some, it was the illness or death of a parent, for others, the
marriage of a sister, and for others still, the need to buy food or
put a roof over their heads. In most cases, the amount of the debt
incurred was very small.
A community-based savings and credit program has been introduced in
North Arcot district, and early indications are that it will strike a
significant blow against bonded child labor. The program was launched
by the district collector for North Arcot, who claimed that sufficient
funds and personnel were available from existing rural development
programs. Similar initiatives should be instituted in all areas where
bonded child labor is prevalent.
CREATING ALTERNATIVES TO BONDED CHILD LABOR
Bonded child labor must be attacked from many fronts. Enforcement of
the law is essential, but it is not enough. The bonded child laborer
must have someplace else to go. The child's parents must have other
options available. The community must support the end of debt bondage
for children. In sum, the attack must be holistic-it must work to
change the system of debt bondage. Elements already in use by
community activists and some government officials include: education,
including vocational training and popular education, and rural
development.
The availability of free, compulsory, and quality education is widely
regarded as the single most important factor in the fight against
bonded and non-bonded child labor. The correlation between illiteracy
and bonded labor is strong, with researchers reporting that literacy
rates among bonded child laborers are as low as 5 percent.99 The
majority of children interviewed by Human Rights Watch had been
schooled for three years or less, and many said they could not read or
write.
Article 45 of the Indian Constitution commits the state to
"endeavor[ing] to provide, within a period of ten years from the
commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education
for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years." The
constitution came into force in 1950. Recognizing the central
importance of education, India's leading non-governmental
organizations have called for the implementation of universal, free,
and compulsory education. Among them are: the Child Labour Action
Network (CLAN), the Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL), the Centre
for Rural Education and Development Action (CREDA), and the Bonded
Labour Liberation Front (BLLF). UNICEF-India and Anti-Slavery
International have likewise called on the Indian government to
implement education for all.
At the same time, alternate efforts to at least minimally educate
bonded children are already underway in a few areas. CREDA in the
carpet-belt, the MV Foundation in Andhra Pradesh, and the Indian
Council on Child Welfare (ICCW)in North Arcot, are all involved in non-
formal education initiatives. Some of these programs utilize modest
financial support to attract children, including small cash stipends
and periodic grain allowances. In addition to classic schooling,
children on the verge of adulthood may benefit from concrete skills
training as well.
CREDA and the MV Foundation also emphasize popular education for all
members of the community, in which community teachers stress the
importance of education for children and the deleterious effects of
exploitative child labor. Such outreach to the community as a whole is
necessary in order to chip away at the thick web of myths and
justifications that support the exploitation of child workers. These
myths contend that children must be trained at the "right" age or they
will never learn a skill; children must be trained in a profession
"appropriate" to their caste and background; children are well-suited
for certain kinds of work because of their "nimble fingers;" and child
labor is a natural and inevitable function of the family unit. These
views are widely shared by parents, educators, government officials,
and the public at large, with the result that talk of children's
rights in regard to labor is dismissed summarily. It is necessary to
change these views in order to change the system.
In sum, the fight against bonded child labor must be carried out on
two fronts: enforcement and prevention. Those employers who continue
to bind children to them with debt, paying just pennies for a
hazardous and grueling work day, must be prosecuted under the Bonded
Labour System (Abolition) Act. Employers or agents that physically
abuse, kidnap, unlawfully confine, threaten with violence, or expose
to dangerous conditions, within the context of the bonded labor
system, should be prosecuted for these crimes under the Indian Penal
Code and the Juvenile Justice Act, 1986. Children must be removed from
bondage and rehabilitated to avoid a subsequent return to bondage.
Finally, the educational and survival needs of all children at risk
must be addressed in order to stop the cycle of bondage.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX A: Selected Articles of the Indian Constitution
Article 21. Protection of life and personal liberty-No person shall be
deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure
established by law.
Article 23. Prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour-
(1) Traffic in human beings and begar and other similar forms of
forced labour are prohibited and any contravention of this prohibition
shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.
(2) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from imposing
compulsory service for public purposes, and in imposing such service
the State shall not make any discrimination on grounds only of
religion, race, caste or class or any of them.
Article 24. Prohibition of employment of children in factories, etc.-
No child below the age of fourteen years shall be employed to work in
any factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment.
Article 39. Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State-
The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing-
(a) that the citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an
adequate means of livelihood;
(b) that the ownership and control of the material resources of the
community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good;
(c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the
concentration of wealth and means of production to the common
detriment;
(d) that there is equal pay for equal work for both men and women;
(e) that the health and strength of workers, men and women, and the
tender age of children are not abused and that citizens are not forced
by economic necessity to enter avocations unsuited to their age or
strength;
(f) that children are given opportunities and facilities to develop in
a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity and that
childhood and youth are protected against exploitation and against
moral and material abandonment.
Article 39A. Equal Justice and free legal aid-The State shall secure
that the operation of the legal system promotes justice, on a basis of
equal opportunity, and shall, in particular, provide free legal aid,
by suitable legislation or schemes or in any other way, to ensure that
opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by
reason of economic or other disabilities.
Article 41. Right to work, to education and to public assistance in
certain cases-The State shall, within the limits of its economic
capacity and development, make effective provision for securing the
right to work, to education and to public assistance in cases of
unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement, and in other cases of
undeserved want.
Article 42. Provision for just and humane conditions of work and
maternity relief-The State shall make provision for securing just and
humane conditions of work and for maternity relief.
Article 43. Living wage, etc., for workers-The State shall endeavour
to secure, by suitable legislation or economic organisation or in any
other way, to all workers, agricultural, industrial or otherwise,
work, a living wage, conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of
life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural
opportunities and, in particular, the State shall endeavour to promote
cottage industries on an individual or cooperative basis in rural
areas.
Article 43A. Participation of workers in management of industries-The
State shall take steps, by suitable legislation or in any other way,
to secure the participation of workers in the management of
undertakings, establishments or other organizations engaged in any
industry.
Article 45. Provision for free and compulsory education for children-
The State shall endeavour to provide within a period of ten years from
the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory
education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen
years.
Article 46. Promotion of educational and economic interests of
Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other weaker sections-The State
shall promote with special care the educational and economic interests
of the weaker sections of the people, and, in particular, of the
Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and shall protect them from
social injustice and all forms of exploitation.
APPENDIX B: The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976
(No. 19 of 1976)
[9th February, 1976]
An act to provide for the abolition of bonded labour system with a
view to preventing the economic and physical exploitation of the
weaker sections of the people and for matters connected therewith or
incidental thereto
Be it enacted by Parliament in the Twenty-seventh Year of the Republic
of India as follows:
CHAPTER I
Preliminary
1. Short title, extent and commencement.-(1) This act may be called
the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
(2) It extends to the whole of India.
(3) it shall be deemed to have come into force on the 25th day of
October, 1975.
2. Definitions.-(1) In This act, unless the context otherwise
requires,-
(a) "advance" means an advance, whether in cash or in kind, or partly
in cash or partly in kind, made by one person (hereinafter referred to
as the creditor) to another person (hereinafter referred to as the
debtor);
(b) "agreement" means an agreement (whether written or oral, or partly
written and partly oral) between a debtor and creditor, and includes
an agreement providing for forced labour, the existence of which is
presumed under any social custom prevailing in the concerned
locality;
Explanation.-The existence of an agreement between the debtor and
creditor is ordinarily presumed, under the social custom, in relation
to the following forms of forced labour, namely:
Adiyamar, Baramasi, Bethu, Bhagela, Cherumar, Garrugalu, Hali, Hari,
Harwai, Holya, Jolya, Jeeta, Kamiya, Khundit-Mundit, Kuthia, Lakhari,
Munjhi, Mat, Musish system, Nit-Majoor, Paleru, Padiyal, Pannaayilal,
Sagri, Sanji, Sanjawal, Sewak,, Sewakis, Seri, Vetti;
(c) "ascendant" or "descendant" in relation to a person belonging to
matriarchal society, means the person who corresponds to such
expression in accordance with the law of succession in such society;
(d) "bonded debt" means an advance obtained, or presumed to have been
obtained, by a bonded labourer, or in pursuance of, the bonded labour
system
(e) "bonded labour" means any labour or service rendered under the
bonded labour system;
(f) "bonded labourer" means a labourer who incurs, or has, or is
presumed to have, incurred, a bonded debt;
(g) "bonded labour system" means the system of forced, or partly
forced labour under which a debtor enters, or has, or is presumed to
have, entered, into an agreement with the creditor to the effect
that,-
(i) In consideration of an advance obtained by him or by any of his
lineal ascendants or descendants (whether or not such advance is
evidenced by any document) and in consideration of the interest, if
any, due on such advance, or
(ii) in pursuance of any customary or social obligation, or
(iii) in pursuance of an obligation devolving on him by succession,
or
(iv) for any economic consideration of the interest, if any, due on
such advance, or
(v) by reason of his birth in any particular caste or community, he
would-
(1) render, by himself or through any member of his family, or any
person dependent on him, labour or service to the creditor, or for the
benefit of the creditor, for a specified period or for an unspecified
period, either without wages or for nominal wages, or
(2) forfeit the freedom of employment or other means of livelihood for
a specified period or for an unspecified period, or
(3) forfeit the right to move freely throughout the territory of
India, or
(4) forfeit the right to appropriate or sell at market value any of
his property or product of his labour or the labour of a member of his
family or any person dependent on him
and includes the system of forced, or partly forced, labour under
which a surety for a debtor or has, or has, or is presumed to have,
entered, into an agreement with the creditor to the effect that in the
event of the failure of the debtor to repay the debt, he would render
the bonded labour on behalf of the debtor;
Explanation.- For the removal of doubts, it is hereby declared that
any system of forced, or partly forced labour under which any workman
being contract labour as defined in Cl. (b) of subsection (1) or Sec.
2 of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 (37 of
1970), or an inter-State migrant workman as defined in Cl. (e) of sub-
section (1) of Sec. 2 of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation
and of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 1979 (30 of 1979),
is required to render labour or service in circumstances of the nature
mentioned in sub-clause (1) of this clause or is subjected to all or
any of the disabilities referred to in sub-clauses (2) to (4), is
"bonded labour system" within the meaning of this clause.
(h) "family", in relation to a person, includes the ascendant and
descendant of such person;
(i) "nominal wages", in relation to any labour, means a wage which is
less than,-
(a) the minimum wages fixed by the Government, in relation to the same
or similar labour, under any law for the time being in force; and
(b) where no such minimum wage has been fixed in relation to any form
of labour, the wages that are normally paid, for the same or similar
labour to the labourers working in the same locality;
(j) "prescribed" means prescribed by rules made under this act.
3. Act to have overriding effect.-The provisions of this act shall
have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent therewith contained
in any enactment other than this act, or in any instrument having
effect by virtue of any enactment other than this act.
CHAPTER II
Abolition of Bonded Labour System
4. Abolition of bonded labour system.-(1) On the commencement of this
act, the bonded labour system shall stand abolished and every bonded
labourer shall, on such commencement, stand freed and discharged from
any obligation to render any bonded labour.
(2) After the commencement of this act, no person shall-
(a) make any advance under, or in pursuance of the bonded labour
system, forced labour, or
(b) Compel any person to render any bonded labour or other form of
forced labour.
5. Agreement, custom, etc. to be void.-On the commencement of this
act, any custom or tradition or any contract, agreement or other
instrument (whether entered into or executed before or after the
commencement of this act), by virtue of which any person, or any
member of the family or dependent of such person, is required to do
any work or render any service as a bonded labourer, shall be void and
inoperative.
CHAPTER III
Extinguishment of liability to repay bonded debt
6. Liability to repay bonded debt to stand extinguished-(1) On the
commencement of this act, every obligation of a bonded labourer to
repay any bonded debt, or such part of any bonded debt as remains
unsatisfied immediately before such commencement, shall be deemed to
have been extinguished.
(2) After the commencement of this act, no suit or other proceeding
shall lie in any civil Court or before any other authority for the
recovery of any bonded debt or any part thereof.
(3) Every decree or order for the recovery of bonded debt, passed
before the commencement of this act and not fully satisfied before
such commencement, shall be deemed, on such commencement, to have been
fully satisfied.
(4) Every attachment made before the commencement of this act, for the
recovery of any bonded debt, shall, on such commencement, stand
vacated; and where, in pursuance of such attachment, any moveable
property of the bonded labourer was seized and removed from his
custody and kept in the custody of any Court or other authority
pending sale thereof such moveable property shall be restored, as soon
as may be practicable after such commencement, to the possession of
the bonded labourer.
(5) Where, before the commencement of this act, possession of any
property belonging to a bonded labourer or a member of his family or
other dependent was forcibly taken over by any creditor for the
recovery of any bonded debt, such property shall be restored, as soon
as may be practicable after such commencement, to the possession of
the person from whom it was seized.
(6) If restoration of the possession of any property referred to in
sub-section (4) or sub-section (5) is not made within thirty days from
the commencement of this act, the aggrieved person may, within such
time as may be prescribed, apply to the prescribed authority for the
restoration of the possession of such property and the prescribed
authority may, after giving the creditor a reasonable opportunity of
being heard, direct the creditor to restore to the applicant the
possession of the concerned property within such time as may be
specified in the order.
(7) An order made by any prescribed authority, under sub-section (6),
shall be deemed to be an order made by a civil Court of the lowest
pecuniary jurisdiction within the local limits of whose jurisdiction
the creditor voluntarily resides or carries on business or personally
works for gain.
(8) For the avoidance of doubts, it is hereby declared, that, where
any attached property was sold before the commencement of this act, in
execution of a decree or order for the recovery of a bonded debt, such
sale shall not be affected by any provision of this act:
Provided that the bonded labourer, or an agent authorized by him in
this behalf, may, at any time within five years rom such commencement,
apply to have the sale set aside on his depositing in Court, for
payment to the decree-holder, the amount specified in the proclamation
of sale, for the recovery of which sale was ordered, less any amount
as well as mesne profits, which may, since the date of such
proclamation of sale, have been received by the decree-holder.
(9) Where any suit or proceeding, for the enforcement of any
obligation under the bonded labour system, including a suit or
proceeding for the recovery of any advance made to a bonded labourer,
is pending at the commencement of this act, such suit or other
proceeding shall, on such commencement, stand dismissed.
(10) On the commencement of this act, every bonded labourer who has
been detained in civil prison, whether before or after judgement,
shall be released from detention forthwith.
7. Property of bonded labourer to be freed from mortgage, etc.-(1) All
property vested in a bonded labourer which was, immediately before the
commencement of this act under any mortgage, lien, charge, or other
incumbrances in connection with any bonded debt shall, in so far as it
is relatable to the bonded debt, stand freed and discharged from such
mortgage, charge, lien or otherincumbrances in connection with any
bonded debt, and where any such property was, immediately before the
commencement of this act, in the possession of the mortgagee or the
holder of the charge, lien or incumbrance, such property shall (except
where it was subject to any other charge), on such commencement, be
restored to the possession of the bonded labourer.
(2) If any delay is made in restoring any property, referred to in sub-
section (1), to the possession of the bonded labourer, such labourer
shall be entitled, on and from the date of such commencement, to
recover from the mortgagee or holder of the lien, charge or
incumbrance, such mesne profits as may be determined by the Civil
Court of the lowest pecuniary jurisdiction within the local limits of
whose jurisdiction such property is situated.
8. Freed bonded labourer not to be evicted from homestead, etc.- (1)
No person who has been freed and discharged under this act from any
obligation to render any bonded labour, shall be evicted from any
homestead or other residential premises which he was occupying
immediately before the commencement of this act as part of the
consideration for the bonded labour.
(2) If, after the commencement of this act, any such person is evicted
by the creditor from any homestead or other residential premises,
referred to in sub-section (1), the Executive Magistrate in charge of
the sub-division within which such homestead or residential premises,
is situated shall, as early as practicable, restore the bonded
labourer to the possession of such homestead or other residential
premises.
9. Creditor not to accept payment against extinguished debt.-(1) No
creditor shall accept any payment against any bonded debt which has
been extinguished or deemed to have been extinguished or fully
satisfied by virtue of the provisions of this act.
(2) whoever contravenes the provisions of sub-section (1), shall be
punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three
years and also with fine.
(3) The Court, convicting any person under sub-section (2) may, in
addition to the penalties which may be imposed under that sub-section,
direct the person to deposit, in Court, the amount accepted in
contravention of the provisions of sub-section (1), within such period
as may be specified in the order for being refunded to the bonded
labourer.
CHAPTER IV
Implementing Authorities
10. Authorities who may be specified for implementing the provisions
of this act.- The State Governments may confer such powers and impose
such duties on a District Magistrate as may be necessary to ensure
that the provisions of this act are properly carried out and the
District Magistrate may specify the officer, subordinate to him, who
shall exercise all or any of the powers, and perform al or any of the
duties, so conferred or imposed and the local limits within which such
powers or duties shall be carried out by the officers so specified.
11. Duty of District Magistrates and other officers to ensure credit.-
The District Magistrate authorized by the State Government under Sec.
10 and the officer specified by the District Magistrate under that
section shall, as far as practicable, try to promote the welfare of
the freed bonded labourer by securing and protecting the economic
interests of such bonded labourer so that he may not have any occasion
or reason to contract any further debt.
12. Duty of the District Magistrate and officers authorized by him.-It
shall be the duty of every District Magistrate and every officer
specified by him under Sec. 10 to inquire whether after the
commencement of this act, any bonded labour system or any other form
of forced labour is being enforced by, or on behalf of, any person
resident within the local limits of his jurisdiction and if, as a
result of such inquiry, any person is found to be enforcing the bonded
labour system or any other system of forced labour, he shall forthwith
take such action as may be necessary to eradicate the enforcement of
such forced labour.
CHAPTER V
Vigilance Committees
13. Vigilance Committees.-(1) Every State Government shall, by
notification in the Official Gazette, constitute such number of
Vigilance Committees in each district and each sub-division as it may
think fit.
(2) Each Vigilance Committee, constituted for a district, shall
consist of the following members, namely:
(a) The District Magistrate, or a person nominated by him, who shall
be the Chairman;
(b) three persons belonging to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled
Tribes and residing in the district, to be nominated by the District
Magistrate;
(c) two social workers, resident in the district, to be nominated by
the District Magistrate;
(d) not more than three persons to represent the official or non-
official agencies in the district connected with rural development, to
be nominated by the State Government;
(e) one person to represent the financial and credit institutions in
the district, to be nominated by the District Magistrate.
(3) Each Vigilance Committee, constituted for a sub-division, shall
consist of the following members, namely:
(a) The Sub-Divisional Magistrate, or a person nominated by him, who
shall be the Chairman;
(b) three persons belonging to the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled
Tribes and residing in the sub-division, to be nominated by the Sub-
divisional Magistrate;
(c) two social workers, resident in the sub-division, to be nominated
by the Sub-divisional Magistrate;
(d) not more than three persons to represent the official or non-
official agencies in the sub-division connected with rural
development, to be nominated by the State Government;
(e) one person to represent the financial and credit institutions in
the sub-division, to be nominated by the Sub-divisional Magistrate.
(f) one officer specified under Sec. 10 and functioning in the sub-
division;
(4) Each Vigilance Committee shall regulate its own procedure and
secretarial assistance as may be necessary, shall be provided by-
(a) the District Magistrate, in the case of Vigilance Committee
constituted for the district;
(b) the Sub-divisional Magistrate, in the case of a Vigilance
Committee constituted for the sub-division.
(5) No proceeding of a Vigilance Committee shall be invalid merely by
reason of any defect in the constitution, or in the proceedings, of
the Vigilance Committee.
14. Functions of Vigilance Committees.-(1) The functions of each
Vigilance Committee shall be-
(a) to advise the District Magistrate or any officer authorized by him
as to the efforts made, and action taken, to ensure that the
provisions of this act or any rule made thereunder are properly
implemented;
(b) to provide for the economic and social rehabilitation of the freed-
bonded labourers;
(c) to co-ordinate the functions of rural banks and co-operative
societies with a view to canalizing adequate credit to the freed-
bonded labourers;
(d) to keep an eye on the number of offences of which cognizance has
been taken under this act;
(e) to make a survey as to whether there is any offence of which
cognizance ought to be taken under this act;
(f) to defend any suit instituted against a freed-bonded labourer or a
member of his family or any other person dependent on him for the
recovery of the whole or part of any bonded debt or any other debt
which is claimed by such person to be bonded debt.
(2) A Vigilance Committee may authorize one of its members to defend a
suit against a freed-bonded labourer and the member so authorized
shall be deemed, for the purpose of such suit, to be the authorized
agent of the freed-bonded labourer.
15. Burden of proof.- Whenever any debt is claimed by a bonded
labourer, or a Vigilance Committee, to be a bonded debt, the burden of
proof that such debt, is not a bonded debt shall lie on the creditor.
CHAPTER VI
Offences and Procedure for Trial
16. Punishment for enforcement of bonded labour.-Whoever, after the
commencement of this act, compels any person to render any bonded
labour shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may
extend to three years and also with fine which may extend to two
thousand rupees.
17. Punishment for advancement of bonded debt.-Whoever advances, after
the commencement of this act, any bonded debt shall be punishable with
imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and also with
fine which may extend to two thousand rupees.
18. Punishment for extracting bonded labour under the bonded labour
system.-Whoever enforces, after the commencement of this act, any
custom, tradition, contract, agreement or other instrument, by virtue
of which any person or any member of the family of such person or any
dependent of such person is required to render any service under the
bonded labour system shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term
which may extend to three years and also with fine which may extend to
two thousand rupees; and out of the fine, ifrecovered, payment shall
be made to the bonded labourer at the rate of rupees five for each day
for which the bonded labour was extracted from him.
19. Punishment for omission or failure to restore possession of
property to bonded labourers.-Whoever, being required by this act to
restore any property to the possession of any bonded labourer, omits
or fails to do so, within a period of thirty days from the
commencement of this act, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a
term which may extend to one year, or with fine which may extend to
one thousand rupees, or with both; and, out of the fine, if recovered
payment shall be made to the bonded labourer at the rate of rupees
five for each day during which possession of property was not restored
to him.
20. Abetment to be an offence.-Whoever abets any offence punishable
under this act shall, whether or not the offence abetted is committed,
be punishable with the same punishment as is provided for the offence
which has been abetted.
Explanation.-For the purpose of this act, "abetment" has the meaning
assigned to it in the Indian Penal Code.
21. Offences to be tried by Executive Magistrates.-(1) The State
Government may confer, on an Executive Magistrate the powers of a
Judicial Magistrate of the first class or of the second class for the
trial of offences under this act; and on such conferment of powers,
the Executive Magistrate, on whom the powers are so conferred, shall
be deemed, for the purposes of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (2
of 1974), to be a Judicial Magistrate of the first class, or of the
second class, as the case may be.
22. Cognizance of offences.-Every offence under this act shall be
cognizable and bailable.
23. Offences by companies.-(1) Where an offence under this act has
been committed by a company, every person who, at the time the offence
was committed, was in charge of, and was responsible to, the company
for the conduct of the business of the company, as well as the
company, shall be deemed to be guilty of the offence and shall be
liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.
(2) Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-section (1), where any
offence under this act has been committed by a company and it has been
proved that the offence has been committed with the consent or
connivance of, or is attributable to, any neglect on the part of, any
director, manager, secretary or other officer of the company, such
director, manager, secretary or other officer shall be deemed to be
guilty of that offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and
punished accordingly.
Explanation.-For the purposes of this section,-
(a) "company" means any body corporate and includes a firm or other
association of individuals; and
(b) "director", in relation to a firm, means a partner in the firm.
CHAPTER VII
Miscellaneous
24. Protection of action taken in good faith.-No suit, prosecution or
other legal proceeding shall lie against any State Government or any
officer of the State Government or any member of the Vigilance
Committee for anything which is in good faith done or intended to be
done under this act.
25. Jurisdiction of Civil Courts barred.-No Civil Court shall have
jurisdiction in respect of any matter to which any provision of this
act applies and no injunction shall be granted by any Civil Court in
respect of anything which is done or intended to be done by or under
this act.
26. Power to make rules.-(1) The Central Government may, by
notification in the official Gazette, make rules for carrying out the
provisions of this act.
(2) In particular, and without prejudice to the foregoing power, such
rules may provide for all or any of the following matters, namely:
(a) the authority to which application for the restoration of
possession of property referred to in sub-section (4), or sub-section
(5) of Sec. 6 is to be submitted in pursuance of sub-section (6) of
that section;
(b) the time within which application for restoration of possession of
property is to be made under sub-section (6) of Sec. 6, to the
prescribed authority;
(c) steps to be taken by Vigilance Committees under Cl. (a) of sub-
section (1) of Sec. 14, to ensure the implementation of the provisions
of this act or of any rule made thereunder;
(d) any other matter which is required to be, or may be prescribed.
(3) Every rule made by the Central Government under this act shall be
laid, as soon as may be after it is made, before each House of
Parliament while it is in session, for a total period of thirty days
which may be comprised in one session or in two or more successive
sessions, and if, before the expiry of the session immediately
following the session or successive sessions aforesaid, both Houses
agree in making any modification in the rule or both Houses agree that
therule should not be made, the rule shall thereafter have effect only
in such modified form or be of no effect, as the case may be; so
however, that any such modification or annulment shall be without
prejudice to the validity of anything previously done under that
rule.
(1) The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Ordinance, 1975 (17 of 1975),
is hereby repealed.
(2) Notwithstanding such repeal, anything or any action taken under
the Ordinance (including any notification published, direction of a
nomination made, power conferred, duty imposed or officer specified)
shall be deemed to have been done or taken under the corresponding
provisions of this act.
APPENDIX C: The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Rules, 1976
(Published in the Gazette of India, Extraordinary, Part II, Section
3(i),
February 28, 1976)
In exercise of powers conferred by sub-section (1), read with sub-
section (2) of Sec. 26 of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act,
1976 (19 of 1976), the Central Government hereby makes the following
rules, namely:
1. Short title and commencement.-(1) These rules may be called the
Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Rules, 1976.
(2) They shall come into force on the date of their publication in the
official Gazette.
2. Definitions.-In these rules, unless the context otherwise
requires,-
(a) "Act" means the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 (19 of
1976);
(b) "District Vigilance Committee: means a Vigilance Committee
constituted for a district under sub-section (1) of Sec. 13;
(c) "section" means a section of the act;
(d) "Sub-divisional Vigilance Committee" means a Vigilance Committee
constituted for a sub-division under sub-section (1) of Sec. 13.
3. Term of office, and vacation of seat members of District Vigilance
Committees.-(1) Every member of a District Vigilance Committee,
nominated under Cls. (b), (c), (d) and (e) of sub-section (2) of Sec.
13 shall hold office for a period of two years from the date on which
his nomination is notified in the official Gazette and shall, on the
expiry of the said period, continue to hold office until his successor
is nominated and shall also be eligible for re-nomination.
(2) Every member referred to in sub-rule (1), -
(a) may, by giving notice in writing of not less than thirty days to
authority which nominated him, resign his office and, on such
resignation being accepted or on the expiry of the notice period of 30
days, whichever is earlier, shall be deemed to have vacated his
office.
(b) shall be deemed to have vacated his office,-
(I) if he fails to attend three consecutive meetings of the District
Vigilance Committee without obtaining leave of the Chairman of such
absence:
Provided that the authority, which nominated him, may, if he is
satisfied that such member was prevented by sufficient cause from
attending the three consecutive meetings of the Committee restore him
to membership;
(ii) if he becomes subject to any of the following disqualifications,
namely:
(1) is adjudged insolvent;
(2) is declared to be of unsound mind by a competent court;
(3) is convicted of an offence which, in the opinion of the authority
which nominated him, involves moral turpitude;
(c) may be removed from office, if the authority, which nominated such
member is of the opinion that such member has ceased to represent the
interest to represent which he was nominated:
Provided that a member shall not be removed from office under this
clause unless a reasonable opportunity is given to him for showing
cause against such removal.
(3) A member, nominated to fill a casual vacancy shall gold office for
the unexpired portion of the term of his predecessor.
4. Term of office, and vacation of seat of members of Sub-divisional
Vigilance Committees.-(1) Every member of a Sub-divisional Vigilance
Committee, nominated under Cls. (b), (c), (d) and (e) of sub-section
(2) of Sec. 13 shall hold office for a period of two years from the
date on which his nomination is notified in the official Gazette and
shall, on the expiry of the said period, continue to hold office until
his successor is nominated and shall also be eligible for re-
nomination.
(2) Every member referred to in sub-rule (1), -
(a) may, by giving notice in writing of not less than thirty days to
authority which nominated him, resign his office and, on such
resignation being accepted or on the expiry of the notice period of 30
days, whichever is earlier, shall be deemed to have vacated his
office.
(b) shall be deemed to have vacated his office,-
(i) if he fails to attend three consecutive meetings of the Sub-
divisional Vigilance Committee without obtaining leave of the Chairman
of such absence:
Provided that the authority, which nominated him, may, if he is
satisfied that such member was prevented by sufficient cause from
attending the three consecutive meetings of the Committee restore him
to membership;
(ii) if he becomes subject to any of the following disqualifications,
namely:
(1) is adjudged insolvent;
(2) is declared to be of unsound mind by a competent court;
(3) is convicted of an offence which, in the opinion of the authority
which nominated him, involves moral turpitude;
(c) may be removed from office, if the authority, which nominated such
member is of the opinion that such member has ceased to represent the
interest to represent which he was nominated:
Provided that a member shall not be removed from office under this
clause unless a reasonable opportunity is given to him for showing
cause against such removal.
(3) A member, nominated to fill a casual vacancy shall gold office for
the unexpired portion of the term of his predecessor.
5. Prescribed authority under sub-section (6) of Sec.6.-An application
under sub-section (6) of Sec. 6 for restoration of possession of any
property referred to in sub-section (4) or sub-section (5) of that
section shall be made to the Executive Magistrate, on whom the powers
of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class or of the second class
have been conferred under sub-section (1) of Sec. 21, and within the
local limits of whose jurisdiction the said property is, or the
applicant has reason to believe is, situated at the time of making the
application:
Provided that where there are two Executive Magistrates, on one of
whom the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of the first class and on the
other the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of thesecond class have been
conferred under sub-section (1) of Sec. 21 having jurisdiction to
entertain the application for restoration of possession of property
referred to in sub-rule (1), the application shall be made to the
Executive Magistrate on whom the powers of a Judicial Magistrate of
the second class have been conferred.
6. Time within which an application under sub-section (6) is to be
made.-
An application under sub-section (6) of Sec. 6 for restoration of
possession of any property referred to in sub-section (4) or sub-
section (5) of that section shall be made within a period of ninety
days from the date on which these rules come into force.
7. Records to be maintained by District Vigilance Committees to ensure
the implementation of the provisions of the act and rules.-In order to
ensure the implementation of the act and rules, every District
Vigilance Committee shall maintain the following registers in respect
of freed-bonded labourer with the local limits of its jurisdiction,
namely:
(a) a register containing the name and address of freed bonded
labourer;
(b) a register containing the statistics relating to the vacation,
occupation, and income of every freed-bonded labourer;
(c) a register containing the details of the benefits which the freed-
bonded labourers are receiving, including benefits in the form of
land, inputs for agriculture, training in handicrafts and allied
occupations, loans at differential rates, interest of employment in
urban or non-urban areas;
(d) a register containing details of cases under sub-section (6) of
Sec. 6, sub-section (2) of Sec. 8, sub-section (2) of Secs. 9, 16, 17,
18, 19, and 20.
APPENDIX D: The Children (Pedging of Labour) Act, 1933
(Act No. 2 of 1933)
[24th February, 1933]
An act to prohibit the pledging of labour of children
Whereas it is expedient to prohibit the making of agreements to pledge
the labour of children and the employment of children whose labour has
been pledged;
It is hereby enacted as follows:
1. Short title, extent and commencement.-(1) This act may be called
the Children (Pledging of Labour) Act, 1933.
(2) It extends to the whole of India
(3) This section and Secs. 2 and 3 shall come into force at once, and
the remaining sections of this act shall come into force on the first
day of July, 1933.
2. Definitions.- In this act, unless there is anything repugnant in
the subject or context,-
"an agreement to pledge the labour of a child" means in agreement,
written or oral, express or implied, whereby the parent or guardian of
a child, in return for any payment or benefit received by him,
undertakes to cause or allow the services of the child to be utilized
by him, undertakes to cause or allow the services of the child to be
utilized in any employment:
Provided that an agreement made without detriment to a child , and not
made in consideration of any benefit other than reasonable wages to be
paid for the child's services, and terminable at not more than a
week's notice, is not an agreement within the meaning of this
definition;
"child" means a person who is under the age of fifteen years; and
"guardian" includes any person having legal custody of or control over
a child.
3. Agreement contrary to the act to be void.-An agreement to pledge
the labour of a child shall be void.
4. Penalty for parent or guardian making agreement to pledge the
labour of a child.-Whoever, being the parent or guardian of a child,
makes an agreement to pledge the labour of that child, shall be
punished with fine which may extend to fifty rupees.
5. Penalty for making with a parent or guardian agreement to pledge
the labour of a child.-Whoever makes with the parent or guardian of a
child shall be punished with fine which may extend to two hundred
rupees.
6. Penalty for employing a child whose labour has been pledged.-
Whoever, knowing or having reason to believe that an agreement has
been made to pledge the labour of a child, in furtherance of such
agreement employs such child, or permits such child to be employed in
any premises or place under his control, shall be punishable with fine
which may extend to two hundred rupees.
APPENDIX E: The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986
Number 61 of 1986
[23rd December 1986]
Statement of Objects and Reasons
There are a number of acts which prohibit the employment of children
below 14 years and 15 years in certain specified employments. However,
there is no procedure laid down in any law for deciding in which
employments, occupations or processes the employment of children
should be banned. There is also no law to regulate the working
conditions of children in most of the employments where they are not
prohibited from working and are working under exploitative
conditions.
2. This Bill intends to-
(i) ban the employment of children, i.e., those who have not completed
their fourteenth year, in specified occupations and processes;
(ii) lay down a procedure to decide modifications to the Schedule of
banned occupations or processes;
(iii) regulate the conditions of work of children in employments where
they are not prohibited from working;
(iv) lay down enhanced penalties for employment of children in
violation of the provisions of this act, and other acts which forbid
the employment of children;
(v) to obtain uniformity in the definition of "child" in the related
laws.
3. The Bill seeks to achieve the above objects.
An act to prohibit the engagement of children in certain employments
and to regulate the conditions of work of children in certain other
employments.
Be it enacted by Parliament in the Thirty-seventh year of the Republic
of India as follows:
PART I
PRELIMINARY
1. Short title, extent and commencement.-(1) The act may be called the
Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986.
(2) It extends to the whole of India.
(3) The provisions of this act, other than part III, shall come into
force at once, and part III shall come into force on such date as the
Central Governmentmay, by notification in the Official Gazette,
appoint, and different dates may be appointed for different states and
for different classes of establishments.
2. Definitions.- In this act, unless the context otherwise requires.
(i) "appropriate Government" means, in relation to an establishment
under the control of the Central Government or a railway
administration or a major port or a mine or oil field, the Central
Government, and in all other cases, the State Government;
(ii) "child" means a person who has not completed his fourteenth year
of age;
(iii) "day" means a period of twenty-four hours beginning at mid-
night;
(iv) "establishment" includes a shop, commercial establishment,
workshop, farm, residential hotel, restaurant, eating house, theatre
or other place of amusement or public entertainment;
(v) "family" in relation to an occupier, means the individual, the
wife or husband, as the case may be, of such individual, and their
children, brother or sister of such individual;
(vi) "occupier", in relation to an establishment or a workshop, means
the person who has the ultimate control over the affairs of the
establishment or workshop;
(vii) "port authority" means any authority administering a port;
(viii) "prescribed" means prescribed by rules made under Section 18;
(ix) "week" means a period of seven days beginning at mid-night on
Saturday night or such other night as may be approved in writing for a
particular area by the inspector;
(x) "workshop" means any premises (including the precincts thereof)
wherein any industrial process is carried on, but does not include any
premises to which the provisions of section 67 of the Factories Act,
1946, for the time being, apply.
PART II
PROHIBITION OF EMPLOYMENT OF CHILDREN IN CERTAIN OCCUPATIONS AND
PROCESSES
3. Prohibition of employment of children in certain occupations and
processes.-No child shall be employed or permitted to work in any of
the occupations set forth in Part A of the Schedule or in any workshop
wherein any of the processes set forth in Part B of the Schedule is
carried on:
Provided that nothing in this section shall apply to any workshop
wherein any process is carried on by the occupier with the aid ofhis
family or to any school established by, or receiving assistance or
recognition from, Government.
4. Power to amend the Schedule.-The Central Government after giving,
by notification in the Official Gazette, not less than three months
notice of its intention so to do, may, be like notification, add any
occupation or process to the Schedule and thereupon the Schedule shall
be deemed to have been amended accordingly.
5. Child Labour Technical Advisory Committee.-(1) The Central
Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, constitute an
advisory committee to be called the "Child Labour Technical Advisory
Committee" (hereafter in this section referred to as the Committee) to
advise the Central Government for the purpose of addition of
occupations and processes to the Schedule.
(2) The Committee shall consist of a Chairman and such other members
not exceeding ten, as may be appointed by the Central Government.
(3) The Committee shall meet as often as it may consider necessary and
shall have power to regulate its own procedure.
(4) The Committee may, if it deems necessary so to do, constitute one
or more sub-committees, and may appoint any such sub-committee,
whether generally or for the consideration of any particular matter,
any person who is not a member of the Committee.
(5) The term of office of, the manner of filing casual vacancies in
the office of, and the allowances, if any, payable to, the Chairman
and other members of the Committee, and the conditions and
restrictions subject to which the Committee may appoint any person who
is not a member of the Committee as a member of any of its sub-
committees shall be such as may be prescribed.
PART III
REGULATION OF CONDITIONS OF WORK OF CHILDREN
6. Application of Part.-The provisions of this Part shall apply to an
establishment or a class of establishments in which none of the
occupations or processes referred to in section 3 is carried on.
7. Hours and period of work.-(1) No child shall be required or
permitted to work in any establishment in excess of such number of
hours as may be prescribed for such establishment or class of
establishments.
(2) The period of work on each day shall be so fixed that no period
shall exceed three hours and that no child shall work for more than
three hours before he has had an interval for rest for at least one
hour.
(3) The period of work of a child shall be so arranged that inclusive
of his interval for rest, under sub-section (2), it shall not be
spread over more than six hours, including the time spent in waiting
for work on any day.
(4) No child shall be permitted or required to work between 7 p.m. and
8 a.m.
(5) No child shall be required or permitted to work overtime.
8. Weekly holidays.-Every child employed in an establishment shall be
allowed in each week, a holiday of one whole day, which day shall be
specified by the occupier in a notice permanently exhibited in a
conspicuous place in the establishment and the day so specified shall
not be altered by the occupier more than once in three months.
9. Notice to Inspector.-(1) Every occupier in relation to an
establishment in which a child was employed or permitted to work
immediately before the date of commencement of this act in relation to
such establishment shall, within a period of thirty days from such
commencement, send to the Inspector within whose local limits the
establishment is situated, a written notice containing the following
particulars, namely:-
(a) the name and situation of the establishment;
(b) the name of the person in actual management of the establishment;
(c) the address to which communications relating to the establishment
should be sent; and
(d) the nature of the occupation or process carried on in the
establishment.
(2) Every occupier, in relation to an establishment, who employs, or
permits to work, any child after the date of commencement of this act
in relation t such establishment, shall, within a period of thirty
days from the date of such employment, send to the Inspector within
whose local limits the establishment is situated, a written notice
containing the particulars as are mentioned in sub-section (1).
Explanation.-For the purposes of sub-sections (1) and (2), "date of
commencement of this act, in relation to an establishment" means the
date of bringing into force of this act in relation to such
establishment.
(3) Nothing in sections 7, 8 and 9 shall apply to any establishment
wherein any process is carried on by the occupier with the aid of his
family or to any school established by, or receiving assistance or
recognition from, Government.
10. Disputes as to age.-If any question arises between an Inspector
and an occupier as to the age of any child who is employed or is
permitted to work byhim in an establishment, the question shall, in
the absence of a certificate as to the age of such child granted by
the prescribed medical authority, be referred by the Inspector for
decision to the prescribed medical authority.
11. Maintenance of register.-There shall be maintained by every
occupier in respect of children employed or permitted to work in any
establishment, a register to be available for inspection by an
Inspector at all times during working hours or when work is being
carried on in any such establishment, showing-
(a) the name and date of birth of every child so employed or permitted
to work;
(b) hours and periods of work of any such child and the intervals of
rest to which he is entitled;
(c) the nature of work of any such child; and
(d) such other particulars as may be prescribed.
12. Display of notice containing abstracts of sections 3 and 14.-Every
railway administration, every port authority and every occupier shall
cause to be displayed in a conspicuous and accessible place at every
station on its railway or within the limits of a port or at the place
of work, as the case may be, a notice in the local language and in the
English language containing an abstract of sections 3 and 14.
13. Health and safety.-(1) The appropriate Government may, by
notification in the Official Gazette, make rules for the health and
safety of the children employed or permitted to work in any
establishment or class of establishments.
(2) Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing provisions,
the said rules may provide for all or any of the following matters,
namely:-
(a) cleanliness in the place of work and its freedom from nuisance;
(b) disposal of wastes and effluents;
(c) ventilation and temperature;
(e) artificial humidification;
(f) lighting;
(g) drinking water;
(h) latrine and urinals;
(i) spittoons;
(j) fencing of machinery;
(k) work at or near machinery in motion;
(l) employment of children on dangerous machines;
(m) instructions, training and supervision in relation to employment
of children on dangerous machines;
(n) device for cutting off power;
(o) self-acting machines;
(p) easing of new machinery;
(q) floor, stairs and means of access;
(r) pits, sumps, openings in floors, etc.;
(s) excessive weights;
(t) protection of eyes;
(u) explosive or inflammable dust, gas, etc.;
(v) precautions in case of fire;
(w) maintenance of buildings; and
(x) safety of buildings; and machinery.
PART IV
MISCELLANEOUS
14. Penalties.-(1) Whoever employs any child or permits any child to
work in contravention of the provisions of section 3 shall be
punishable with imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than
three months but which may extend to one year or with fine which shall
not be less than ten thousand rupees but which may extend to twenty
thousand rupees or with both.
(2) Whoever, having been convicted of an offence under section 3,
commits a like offence, afterwards, he shall be punishable with
imprisonment for a term which shall not be less than six months but
which may extend to two years.
(3) Whoever-
(a) fails to give notice as required by section 9; or
(b) fails to maintain a register as required by section 11 or makes
any false entry in any such register; or
(c) fails to display a notice containing an abstract of section 3 and
this section as required by section 12; or
(d) fails to comply with or contravenes any other provisions of this
act or the rules made thereunder, shall be punishable with simple
imprisonment which may extend to one month or with fine which may
extend to ten thousand rupees or with both.
15. Modified application of certain laws in relation to penalties.-(1)
Where any person is found guilty and convicted of contravention of any
of the provisions mentioned in sub-section (2), he shall be liable to
penalties as providedin sub-sections (1) and (2) of section 14 of this
act and not under the acts in which these provisions are contained.
(2) The provisions referred to in sub-section (1) are the provisions
mentioned below:-
(a) section 67 of the Factories Act, 1948 (63 of 1948);
(b) section 40 of the Mines Act, 1952 (35 of 1952);
(c) section 109 of the Merchant Shipping Act, 1958 (44 of 1958); and
(d) section 21 of the Motor Transport Workers Act, 1961 (27 of 1961).
16. Procedure relating to offences.-(1) Any person, police officer or
Inspector may file a complaint of the commission of an offence under
this act in any court of competent jurisdiction.
(2) Every certificate of as to the age of a child which has been
granted by a prescribed medical authority shall, for the purposes of
this act, be conclusive evidence as to the age of the child to whom it
relates.
(3) No court inferior to that of a Metropolitan Magistrate or a
Magistrate of the first class shall try any offence under this act.
17. Appointment of Inspectors.-The appropriate Government may appoint
Inspectors for the purposes of securing compliance with the provisions
of this act and any Inspector so appointed shall be deemed to be a
public servant within the meaning of the Indian Penal Code (45 of
1860).
18. Power to make rules-(1) The appropriate Government may, by
notification in the Official Gazette and subject to the condition of
previous publication, make rules for carrying into effect the
provisions of The act.
(2) In particular and without prejudice to the generality of the
foregoing power, such rules may provide for all or any of the
following matters, namely:-
(a) the term of office of, the manner of filing casual vacancies of,
and the allowances payable to, the Chairman and member of the Child
Labour Technical Advisory Committee and the conditions and
restrictions subject to which a non-member may be appointed to a sub-
committee under sub-section (5) of section 5;
(b) number of hours for which a child may be required or permitted to
work under sub-section (1) of section 7;
(c) Grant of certificates of age in respect of young persons in
employment or seeking employment, the medical authorities which may
issue such certificate, the form of such certificate, thecharges which
may be thereunder and the manner in which such certificate may be
issued:
Provided that no charge shall be made for the issue of any such
certificate if the application is accompanied by evidence of age
deemed satisfactory by the authority concerned;
(d) the other particulars which a register maintained under section 11
should contain.
19. Rules and notifications to be laid before Parliament or State
legislature.-(1) Every rule made under this act by the Central
Government and every notification issued under section 4, shall be
laid, as soon as may be after it is made or issued, before each House
of Parliament, while it is in session for a total period of thirty
days which may be comprised in one session or in two or more
successive sessions, and if, before the expiry of the session
immediately following the session or the successive sessions
aforesaid, both Houses agree that the rule or notification should not
be made or issued, the rule or notification shall thereafter have
effect only in such modified form or be of no effect, as the case may
be; so, however, that any such modification or annulment shall be
without prejudice to the validity of anything previously done under
that rule or notification.
(2) Every rule made by a State Government under this act shall be laid
as soon as may be after it is made, before the legislature of that
State.
20. Certain other provisions of law not barred.-Subject to the
provisions contained in section 15, the provisions of this act and the
rules made thereunder shall be in addition to, and not in derogation
of, the provisions of the Factories Act, 1948 (63 of 1948), the
Plantations Labour Act, 1951 (69 of 1951), and the Mines Act, 1952 (35
of 1952).
21. Power to remove difficulties.-(1) If any difficulty arises in
giving effect to the provisions of this act, the Central Government
may, by order published in the Official Gazette, make such provisions
not inconsistent with the provisions of this act as appear to it to be
necessary or expedient for removal of the difficulty:
Provided that no such order shall be made after the expiry of a period
of three years from the date on which this act receives the assent of
the President.
(2) Every order made under this section shall, as soon as may be after
it is made, be laid before the Houses of Parliament.
22. Repeal and savings.-The Employment of Children, Act, 1938 (26 of
1938) is hereby repealed.
(2) Notwithstanding such repeal, anything done or any action taken or
purported to have been done or taken under the act so repealed shall,
in so far as it is not inconsistent with the provisions of this act,
be deemed to have been done or taken under the corresponding
provisions of this act.
23. Amendment of Act 11 of 1948.-In section 2 of the Minimum Wages
Act, 1948,-
(i) for clause (a), the following clauses shall be substituted,
namely:-
(a) "adolescent" means a person who has completed his fourteenth year
of age but has not completed his eighteenth year;
(aa) "adult" means a person who has completed his eighteenth year of
age;
(ii) after clause (b), the following clause shall be inserted,
namely:-
(bb) "child" means a person who has not completed his fourteenth year
of age;
24. Amendment of Act 69 of 1951.-In the Plantations Labour Act,
1951,-
(a) In section 2, in clauses (a) and (c), for the word "fifteenth",
the word "fourteenth" shall be substituted;
(b) section 24 shall be omitted;
(c) in section 26, in the opening portion, the words "who has
completed his twelfth year" shall be omitted.
25. Amendment of Act 44 of 1958.-In the Merchant Shipping Act, 1958,
in section 109, for the word "fifteen", the word "fourteen" shall be
substituted.
26. Amendment of Act 27 of 1961.-In the Motor Transport Workers Act,
1961, in section 2, in clauses (a) and (c), for the word "fifteenth",
the word "fourteenth" shall be substituted.
THE SCHEDULE
(See section 3)
PART A
Occupations.-Any occupation connected with -
(1) Transport of passengers, goods or mails by railway;
(2) Cinder picking, clearing of an ash pit or building operation in
the railway premises;
(3) Work in a catering establishment at a railway station, involving
the movement of a vendor or any other employee of the establishment
from one platform to another or into or out of a moving train;
(4) Work relating to the construction of a railway station or with any
other work where such work is done in close proximity or between the
railway lines;
(5) A port authority within the limits of any port.
(6) Work relating to selling of crackers and fireworks.*
(7) Abattoirs/Slaughter houses.**
PART B
(1) Beedi-making.
(2) Carpet-weaving.
(3) Cement manufacture, including bagging of cement.
(4) Cloth printing, dyeing and weaving.
(5) Manufacture of matches, explosives and fireworks.
(6) Mica-cutting and splitting.
(7) Shellac manufacture.
(8) Soap manufacture.
(9) Tanning.
(10) Wool-cleaning.
(11) Building and construction industry.
(12) Manufacture of slate pencils (including packing)*
(13) Manufacture of products from agate.*
(14) Manufacturing processes using toxic metals and substances such as
lead, mercury, manganese, chromium, cadmium, benzene, pesticides and
asbestos.*
(15) "Hazardous processes" as defined in section 2(cb) and `dangerous
operations' as notified in rules made under section 87 of the
Factories Act, 1948 (63 of 1948).**
(16) Printing as defined in section 2(k) (iv) of the Factories Act,
1948 (63 of 1948).**
(17) Cashew and cashewnut desaling and processing.**
(18) Soldering processes in electronic industries.**
*Inserted by notification No. SO. 404 (E) dated 5th June, 1989
published in the Gazette of India, Extraordinary.
**Inserted by notification No. SO.263 (E) dated 29th March, 1994
published in Gazette of India, Extraordinary.
1 All names have been changed.
2 All dollar amounts refer to U.S. dollars.
3 The estimate of fifteen million bonded child laborers is
conservative. Anti-Slavery International reported in 1991 that India
had fifteen million bonded child laborers working in agriculture
alone. Anti-Slavery International, Children in Bondage: Slaves of the
Subcontinent (London: 1991), p. 30. Given that agriculture accounts
for approximately 52 to 87 percent of all bonded child laborers (see
chapter on agriculture), there could be millions more working in non-
agricultural occupations. "Indians form panel to stop child labor,"
United Press International, November 18, 1994. Other activists and
academics estimate that one quarter of all working children, that is,
between fifteen and twenty-nine million, are bonded laborers. Based on
these and other coinciding estimates, Human Rights Watch considers
fifteen million to be a reliable minimum indicator of the prevalence
of bonded child labor in India.
4 The United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of
Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to
Slavery, 1956, defines debt bondage as "the status or condition
arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or those of
a person under his control as security for a debt, if the value of
those services as reasonably assessed is not applied towards the
liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are
not respectively limited and defined." It should be noted that many
Indian activists consider all child labor to be a form of bondage,
given the child's powerlessness and inability to freely choose to
work. This report, however, considers bonded child labor to be that
which conforms to the definition of the U.N. Supplementary
Convention.
5 Between $15 and $220, at the late 1995 exchange rate of thirty-four
rupees to the U.S. dollar.
6 Iqbal Masih was shot and killed on April 16, 1995. Initially blamed
on the carpet industrialists of Pakistan, the murder was later
attributed to a villager whom Masih reportedly discovered involved in
an illicit act.
7 See chapter on handwoven carpets.
8 Neera Burra, Born to Work: Child Labour in India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. xxii.
9 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-95 (New Delhi: Government of
India, 1995), p. 95. The actual quote is: "Out of India's total
workforce of 314 million, about 80% (249 million) are in rural areas.
About 64% of the workers (200 million) are engaged in agriculture.
About 85% of the workers (267 million) are self-employed or on casual
wages. Only about 15% (47 million) have regular salaried employment."
10 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, Part I,
Section 2(ii).
11 There is no universal definition of a child under Indian law. The
Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, the Minimum Wages
Act, 1948, the Plantation Labour Act, 1951, the Apprentices Act, 1961,
and Article 24 of the Indian Constitution define "child" as any person
under the age of fourteen. The Shops and Establishments Act, 1961
allows the definition to be set by the states and in thirteen states,
the minimum age is twelve, and in eleven states, the minimum age is
fourteen. The Children (Pledging of Labour) Act, 1993 defines a child
as anyone below the age of fifteen. The Juvenile Justice Act, 1986
defines "juveniles" as any male under sixteen or any female under
eighteen.
12 Bonded child labor is convenient, cheap, compliant, and dependable.
It depresses wages. It is easily replenishable. Bonded labor among
both adults and children is not a new phenomenon in India. It is an
old arrangement, and a convenient one for the lucky top layers of
privilege. Those who have the power to change this arrangement are, by
all measures, uninterested in doing so.
13 United Front Coalition's Economic Program, presented June 6, 1996,
pp. 3-4. From MakroIndia Business Page sponsored by Amrok Securities
Private Limited at www.macroindia.com/hlight1.htm.
14 See Human Rights Watch/Asia, Contemporary Forms of Slavery in
Pakistan (New York: Human Rights Watch, July 1995); Anti-Slavery
International, Children in Bondage: Slaves of the Subcontinent
(London: Anti-Slavery International, 1991); INSEC, Bonded Labour in
Nepal under Kamaiya System (Kathmandu: INSEC, 1992); and Report of the
Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery (18th Session, June
1993), UN DOC E/CN.4/1993/67.
15 Asia Watch and Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project, A Modern
Form of Slavery: Trafficking of Women and Girls into Brothels in
Thailand (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993); Americas Watch, "Forced
Labor in Brazil Revisited," vol. 5, no. 12, November, 1993; Middle
East Watch and Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project, "Rape and
Mistreatment of Asian Maids in Kuwait," vol. 4, no. 8, July 1992;
Americas Watch, The Struggle for Land in Brazil: Rural Violence
Continues (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992); Americas Watch,
"Forced Labor in Brazil," vol. 2, no. 8, December 1990; and National
Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Americas Watch, and Caribbean Rights,
Harvesting Oppression: Forced Haitian Labor in the Dominican Sugar
Industry (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1990).
16 Human Rights Watch/Asia, Rape for Profit: Trafficking of Nepali
Girls and Women to India's Brothels (New York: Human Rights Watch,
June 1995).
17 All dollar amounts in this report are in U.S. dollars.
18 Pradeep Mehta, "Cashing in on Child Labor," Multinational Monitor,
April 1994.
19 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-95, p. 95.
20 K. Mahajan and J. Gathia, Child Labour: An Analytical Study (New
Delhi: Centre of Concern for Child Labour, 1992), p. 25. Citing the
Indian Council for Child Welfare, Mahajan and Gathia report that
"slavery is on the increase among children below the age of 15 years."
Gathia also notes, in another study, that the number of children in
India who will not be in school by 2000 may be as high as 144 million,
indicating there may be tens of millions more child laborers in India
by 2000. (See: Child Labour Action Network (CLAN), Political Campaign
for Compulsory Primary Education (New Delhi: Child Labour Action
Network, 1996), p. 2.
21 Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India: A Perspective, June 10, 1995, p. 32.
22 In 1984, the Operations Research Group-Baroda, an independent
research organization based in Baroda and Madras, estimated there were
forty-four million child laborers in India. Taking into account
population growth and employment trends, that figure would be
approximately sixty million in 1995. Another frequently cited figure
is one hundred million child laborers, a number that corresponds to
the government's estimate of all non-school-going children, who are
assumed to be working more than eight hours a day. Peace Trust and
Bhagwati Environment Development Institute, From the South, vol. 2,
no. 1, January-March 1995, p. 1. Anti-Slavery International confirmed
this estimate of 115 million in a telephone interview on August 14,
1996. Official government figures on the working child population, on
the other hand, are based on the 1981 census and are absurdly
inaccurate, with the government claiming there are only about
seventeen million child laborers. (See chapter on the role of the
Indian government.) A 1994 report by the Indian government's
Department of Women and Child Development, the Indian Council for
Child Welfare, and UNICEF-India concluded that "the number of working
children is closer to 90 million than the figure of 20 million assumed
by the government." Department of Women and Child Development, Indian
Council for Child Welfare, and UNICEF, India Country Office, "Rights
of the Child: Report of a National Consultation," November 21-23,
1994.
23 There are no accurate statistics that give the number of street
children in India. In 1983, the Operations Research Group stated that
there were forty-four million working children in India of which
eleven million were street children. This number must be considered
significantly low, given the fact that the study is now thirteen years
old. The government of India's 1991 Census estimated that eighteen
million children live and work in India's urban slums (huts,
tenements, pavement dwellings), which by the nature of their residence
and the fact that they were considered working, qualified them as
street children. The estimated population of India's street children
is between eleven to eighteen million, based on the Operations
Research Group's 1983 estimate and the 1991 Census estimate.
24 Peace Trust and Bhagwati Environment Development Institute, From
the South, Vo. 2, No. 1, January-March 1995, p. 1.
25 At a non-formal education center run during the evenings (as are
most, to accommodate the work schedules of the children), Human Rights
Watch asked one group of working children what they did for fun. The
boys perked up and rattled off a variety of activities: playing with
friends, going to the movies, riding a bicycle. The girls, however,
were puzzled by the question. Finally a teacher stepped in to explain:
the girls do not have the opportunity to do anything for fun; when
they are not working for wages or against a loan, they are working for
the family.
26 Mahajan and Gathia, Child Labour..., September, 1992, p. 24.
27 Human Rights Watch interview with social activist, November 21,
1995, Madras, Tamil Nadu. Advances in the beedi industry of Tamil Nadu
range from 500 to 5,000 rupees. These figures were confirmed by Human
Rights Watch interviews with dozens of bonded child beedi rollers.
28 There are an estimated 327,000 child workers in the beedi industry
(Burra, Born to Work p. xxiv); 300,000 child carpet weavers (Mehta.,
"Cashing in on Child Labor..."); and more than 200,000 children
working in silk weaving (see chapter on silk for details and
citations).
29 According to a 1991 study of child labor in India, these training
centers include "many [children] well below age fourteen." The manager
of one government program claimed that a ban on child labor in the
carpet industry would be "suicidal" for exports. See Myron Weiner, The
Child and the State in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1991), p. 86
30 Tanika Sarkar, "Bondage in the Colonial Context," Patnaik and
Manjari Dingwaney, eds., Chains of Servitude: Bondage and Slavery in
India (New Delhi: Sangam Books, 1985), p. 97.
31 See generally Uma Chakravarti, "Of Dasas and Karmakaras: Servile
Labour in Ancient India," Chains of Servitude . . .
32 Manjari Dingwaney, "Unredeemed Promises: The Law and Servitude,"
Chains of Servitude . . ., pp. 312-313.
33 For example: "The children were frequently beaten with iron
rods . . . and wounded with scissors . . ., if they were slow in work,
or if they asked for adequate food, or if they so much as went to the
toilet without the owner's permission." Appendix XV, "Reports on Child
Labour of Mirzapur," Law Relating to the Employment of Children
(1985), p. 160. Another report detailed a woman's attempt to rescue
her youngest son after his brother died on the job in a carpet-weaving
factory; the employer of her son threatened to kill the boy if she
attempted to meet him. "Bonded labourers' mothers want to see PM,"
Times of India, August 14, 1995.
34 Y. R. Haragopal Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India (New Delhi:
Deep and Deep Publications, 1995), p. 82. Similar incidents took place
across India in the mid-1980s. See, e.g., Ajoy Kumar, "From Slavery to
Freedom: The Tale of Chattisgarh Bonded Labourers," Indian Social
Institute, 1986, p. 8, reporting that bonded agricultural laborers who
attended meetings with labor activists were publicly beaten and driven
from their homes.
35 Human Rights Watch interview with rural activist, Dec. 13, 1995,
Rajasthan.
36 R. K Misra., Preliminary Report on the Child Labour in the Saree
Industry of Varanasi, Human Rights Cell, Banaras Hindu University,
Varanasi, 1995, p. 13.
37 Convention on the Suppression of Slave Trade and Slavery, signed at
Geneva, September 25, 1926; Protocol Amended the Slavery Convention,
signed at Geneva, September 25, 1926, with annex, done at, New York,
December 7, 1953, entered into force, December 7, 1953. A slave is
someone "over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of
ownership are exercised." Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of
Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to
Slavery, done at Geneva, September 7, 1956; entered into force, April
30, 1957 (Supplementary Convention).
38 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery.
39 Ibid.
40 Forced Labour Convention (No. 29), 1930, adopted at Geneva, June
28, 1930, as modified by the Final Articles Revision Convention,
adopted at Montreal, October 9, 1946.
41 International Labour Organisation, Conventions and Recommendations
1919-1966 (Geneva: ILO, 1966), p. 891. The ILO also passed the
Abolition of Forced Labour Convention (No. 105) in 1957; India,
however, chose not to sign this convention.
42 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. Res.
2200 (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 16), U.N. Doc. A/6316 (1966)
(entered into force March 23, 1976).
43 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI), 21 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 16), U.N. Doc. A/6316
(entered into force January 3, 1976).
44 Convention on the Rights of the Child, G.A. Res. 44/125, U.N. GAOR,
44th Session, Supp. No. 49, U.N. Doc. A/44/736 (1989) (entered into
force September 2, 1990).
45 Ibid. India ratified the Convention subject to a reservation that
these economic and social rights will be "progressively implemented,"
"subject to the extent of available resources."
46 Ibid.
47 See chapter on carpets; see also Human Rights Watch/Asia, Rape for
Profit: Trafficking of Nepali Girls and Women to India's Brothels
(Human Rights Watch: New York, 1995).
48 Convention on the Rights of the Child, G.A. Res. 44/125, U.N. GAOR,
44th Session, Supp. No. 49, U.N. Doc. A/44/736 (1989) (entered into
force September 2, 1990).
49 See S. K. Singh, Bonded Labour and the Law (New Delhi: Deep and
Deep Publications, 1994), pp. 48-51.
50 People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India [Asiad
Workers' Case], AIR 1982 S.C. 1473, paragraph 1486.
51 Ibid., paragraph 1490. For a discussion of Supreme Court decisions
affecting bonded labourers, see Y. R. Haragopal Reddy, Bonded Labour
System in India (New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications, 1995), ch. 4.
52 People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India, (1982) 3
SCC 235, paragraphs 259-260.
53 Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 3 SCC 243, paragraph
255 (1984).
54 "No child below the age of fourteen years shall be employed to work
in any factory or mine or engaged in any other hazardous employment."
Constitution of India, Article 24.
55 Consequently, post-act social action litigation on behalf of bonded
laborers is brought under both the Bonded Labour System (Abolition)
Act and the Constitution of India. For a discussion of cases see
Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, ch. 4.
56 The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, Sec. 4, 5, 6, and
14. See Appendix for full text.
57 Ibid., Sec. 16. The maximum penalties for a first-time offender
under the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act are weaker
than the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act in terms of potential
length of incarceration (one year), but significantly stronger in
terms of monetary punishment (ten to twenty thousand rupees). See the
Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, Sec. 14 (1).
58 Ibid., Sec. 2(1)(I)(a) and (b). Because no minimum wages have been
set by the government for children's work, the second prong of this
definition applies. See also People's Union for Democratic Rights v.
Union of India, (1982) 3 SCC 235, paragraphs 259-260, in which the
Supreme Court ruled that "where a person provides labour or service to
another for remuneration which is less than minimum wage, the labour
or service provided by him clearly falls within the scope and ambit of
the word `forced labour'..." All forms of forced labor are forbidden
under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act.
59 "It shall be the duty of every District Magistrate and every
officer specified by him under Sec. 10 to inquire whether after the
commencement of this act, any bonded labour system or any other form
of forced labour is being enforced by, or on behalf of, any person
resident within the local limits of his jurisdiction and if, as a
result of such inquiry, any person is found to be enforcing the bonded
labour system or any other system of forced labour, he shall forthwith
take such action as may be necessary to eradicate the enforcement of
such forced labour." Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, Sec.
12.
60 Human Rights Watch interview with Mirzapur District Collector Mr.
Bachittar Singh, December 19, 1995, Mirzapur. A 1994 study describing
the multifarious duties of district magistrates notes that "[n]o
district magistrate can properly perform all the assignments given to
him." See also S. K. Singh, Bonded Labour and the Law, p. 124-125,
142, 147.
61 Ibid., Sec. 11 requires the district magistrate to "as far as
practicable, try to promote the welfare of the freed bonded labourer
by securing and protecting the economic interest of such bonded
labourer so that he may not have any occasion or reason to contract
any further bonded debt."
62 Ibid., Sec. 14.
63 Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, p. 163.
64 Ibid., citing, inter alia, Lr. No. Y-11011/4/84-BL, dated February
14, 1986, Director General (Labour Welfare), Ministry of Labour,
Government of India.
65 Ibid., p.166.
66 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-1995, p.97.
67 The Children (Pledging of Labour) Act, 1933, Sec. 2. "Child" is a
person less than fifteen years old.
68 Ibid., Sec. 4 - 6.
69 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, Part I,
Section 2(ii).
70 The twenty-five occupations and industries where child labor is
prohibited are: beedi-making; carpet-weaving; cement manufacture;
cloth printing, dyeing and weaving; manufacture of matches, explosives
and fireworks; mica-cutting and splitting; shellac manufacture; soap
manufacture; tanning; wool-cleaning; the building and construction
industry; manufacture of slate pencils; manufacture of agate products;
manufacturing processes using toxic metals and substances; "hazardous
processes" as defined by the Factories Act, Sec. 87; printing as
defined by the Factories Act, Sec. 2; cashew and cashewnut processing;
soldering processes in electronic industries, railway transportation;
cinder picking, ashpit clearing or building operations in railway
premises; vending operations at railway stations; work on ports; sale
of firecracker and fireworks; and work in slaughter houses. Child
Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, Part II (Prohibition of
employment of children in certain occupations and processes), Sec. 3,
Schedules A and B; as amended by Government Notification Nos. No.SO
404(E) (June 5, 1989) and No. SO. 263(E) (March 29, 1994).
71 Myron Weiner, The Child and the State in India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1991), pp. 80-81.
72 Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India..., p. 40.
73 Ibid.
74 The prevalence of corruption among factory and labor inspectors and
other charged with enforcing child labor laws was confirmed to Human
Rights Watch by multiple sources, including an official of the
national government. See also Commission on Labour Standards, Child
Labour in India... , p. 40.
75 The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, Sec. 3.
76 See chapter on handwoven carpets.
77 Ibid., Sec. 10.
78 According to R. V. Pillai, the Secretary General of the National
Human Rights Commission (NHRC), there is frequent collusion between
medical officers of the government and employers of child labor, who
bribe the medical officers in order to obtain certificates stating the
children working for them are above the age of fourteen. Secretary
General Pillai stated that some medical officers are "notorious" for
engaging in these acts, to the extent that the NHRC has recommended to
some district magistrates that they file criminal charges against
corrupt medical officers. Human Rights Watch interview with Secretary
General Pillai, December 28, 1995, New Delhi.
79 "No child who has not completed his fourteenth year shall be
required or allowed to work in any factory." The Factories Act, 1948,
Sec. 67.
80 Ibid., Sec. 2(m)(I) and (ii).
81 To get around this restriction, factory owners have been known to
"partition their premises and isolate the areas where work is being
done with power." See Burra, Born to Work, p. 75.
82 According to Burra: "In order to evade the Factories Act, ninety
per cent of the units show that they have less than nine workers. In
some factories I visited, I noticed around fifty workers. But when I
asked the employer, he said there were only eight people working
there!" Ibid., p. 136.
83 The Scheduled Castes and The Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of
Atrocities) Act, 1989, Section 3(1).
84 The Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and
Conditions of Service) Act, 1979, ch. II - ch. VI.
85 The Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970, Sec. 6,
10, and 64.
86 Campaign Against Child Labour (CACL), "Reference Kit on Child
Labour for Media Persons," January 1995.
87 All testimonies in this report are from children interviewed by
Human Rights Watch researchers in November and December, 1995, except
where otherwise noted. All names have been changed.
88 "50,000 cr beedies consumed annually," Indian Express, February 1,
1995. One crore, abbreviated as "cr," is equal to ten million.
89 Ibid.
90 Burra, Born to Work, p. xxiv. Another account estimates 248,000
child beedi workers in Tamil Nadu. See R. Vidyasagar,"A Status Report
on Child Labour in Tamil Nadu," Madras, 1995, p. 8.
91 "Children shall be free," The Hindu, September 24, 1995; "50,000 cr
beedies consumed annually," Indian Express, February 1, 1995.
92 "Ragi" is a type of grain, commonly given to South Indian
agricultural laborers instead of cash wages. See R. Vidyasagar, "Debt
Bondage in South Arcot District: A Case Study of Agricultural
Labourers and Handloom Weavers," Chains of Servitude, p. 146.
93 L. R. Jagadheesan, "Whole families are pledged for paltry sums,"
Indian Express, April 25, 1995.
94 The minimum wage for beedi rolling varies from state to state. The
wage is slightly lower in Karnataka than in Tamil Nadu, while in the
neighboring state of Kerala it is significantly higher, at forty-two
rupees per thousand beedi rolled. "50,000 cr beedies consumed
annually," Indian Express, February 1, 1995. The minimum wage does not
apply to children, but is a good indicator of the market value of
labor, and non-bonded children in the beedi industry appeared to be
receiving wages comparable to the government-set minimum wage. Many
activists and some government officials are pressing for legal reform
to apply the same minimum wage to adults and children, on the grounds
that such a move would decrease child labor and increase adult
employment.
95 This wage is actually 3.65 rupees more than the government set
minimum wage for beedi rolling (30.90 rupees per 1,000 beedies).
Regardless of whether adults or children roll beedies, they are paid
the same on a piece-rate basis. The only wage differentials
occurbetween bonded and non-bonded beedi rollers. This indicates that
there would be no significant difference between adult and child wages
when bondage is not a factor or when payment is solely based on
production (piece-rate) which is a very common way of paying people in
informal occupations where the majority of Indians, children and
adults, work. There are other examples of this. For example, in
stainless steel factories in Madras, adults and children receive the
same piece-rate wages. In Pakistan, where bonded labor is also
endemic, adults and children have been paid on the same piece-rate
basis in the country's soccer ball industry. These findings call into
question a commonly held tenet about child labor: that children's
wages depress adult wages in the same industry and that removing
children from work would automatically lead to an increase in adult
wages. In addition, Neera Burra notes that the piece-rate wage
structure in home-based, informal work actually provides an incentive
to use children, as their help increases the production, which in-turn
provides a higher family income, and says "Unless the issue of home-
based, piece-rate workers is resolved and minimum wages and social
security provided to this sector, children will continue to be
exploited." See Burra, Born to Work, p. 255. Removing children from
employment would not necessarily result in raising adult wages unless
the problems of piece-rate wages and other forms of payment based
solely on productivity are addressed as well.
96 Human Rights Watch interview with longtime social welfare activist,
November 21, 1995, Madras.
97 Jacob Varghese, "Freedom at Mid-Day," Worldvision: A Worldvision of
India Magazine, Monsoon 1993, p. 6-7.
98 National Children's Day in India is celebrated on November 14, the
birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the founding fathers and the
first prime minister of India.
99 Human Rights Watch interview with social welfare activist, November
21, 1995, Madras.
100 Ibid.
101 Vidyasagar,"A Status Report...," p. 9.
102 Ibid. Vidyasagar cites a study of one beedi manufacturing village
that found 25 percent of all beedi rollers to have tuberculosis.
103 Human Rights Watch interviews, North Arcot district, Tamil Nadu,
November 25, 1995.
104 Beedi and Cigar Workers (Conditions of Employment) Act, 1966, Sec.
2(I).
105 Asha Krishnakumar, "Reprehensible by any name: Children in beedi
industry," Frontline (Madras), November 17, 1995, p. 87.
106 Vidyasagar, "Status Report...," p. 8.
107 Local government authorities estimate there are 45,000 bonded
child laborers in the North Arcot district alone, most working in the
beedi industry. "Child Labour Abolition Support Scheme (A proposal
submitted to the International Labour Organisation)," North Arcot
Ambedkar District, 1995, p. 1. An estimated 30,000 bonded children
work in the beedi industry in North Arcot. See Vidyasagar, "A Status
Report...," p. 8. Unlike most beedi-producing areas, where 90 percent
of the workers are women and children, North Arcot district has a
significant percentage of adult male beedi workers. Vidyasagar
attributes the high rate of bondage in North Arcot to the presence of
men workers in the same industry, hypothesizing that "men use
children's labour to augment their income by keeping them under
bondage by paying low wages." Ibid.
108 "Child labour census in Tamil Nadu district," The Hindu, April 28,
1995.
109 "Child Labour Abolition Support Scheme (A proposal submitted to
the International Labour Organisation)," North Arcot Ambedkar
District, 1995, p. 8.
110 Ibid. pp. 1, 8-12, and 25.
111 Human Rights Watch interview with North Arcot District Collector
M. P. Vijaykumar, November 27, 1995, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.
112 Depending on the circumstances of the case, a bondmaster could be
charged under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, the Child
Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, or the Factories Act. As of
1995, the collector had initiated a limited number of prosecutions
under all three laws, including a handful of cases against parents who
had bonded their children. Human Rights Watch interview with North
Arcot District Collector M. P. Vijaykumar, November 27, 1995, Vellore,
Tamil Nadu; "Project Proposal for Community-Based Convergent
Services," North Arcot Ambedkar District, June, 1995, p. 15 Most
activists agree that prosecution of parents is misguided. Among
prosecuted employers, as of December 1995 the collector had not aimed
for prison sentences, but instead sought only modest fines.
113 North Arcot Ambedkar District, "Child Labour Abolition Support
Scheme (CLASS)," Proposal submitted to International Labour
Organisation, 1995, p. 10.
114 Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, p. 56.
115 Human Rights Watch interview with North Arcot District Collector
M. P. Vijaykumar, November 27, 1995, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.
116 Vidyasagar, "A Status Report ...," p.9.
117 The "silver" referred to throughout this discussion is not pure
silver, but a blend of silver and lesser metals.
118 The figure of 100,000 working children in Salem is based on a
social scientist's finding that Salem district accounts for 10.93
percent of all child workers in the state of Tamil Nadu, and the 1981
census figures of 975,055 working children, below the age of fourteen,
in Tamil Nadu. See Vidyasagar, "A Status Report...," pp. 2 -3. Based
on more reliable statistics and analyses, however, Vidyasagar himself
estimates that there are four million working children in Tamil Nadu,
which would indicate about 400,000 child laborers in Salem district
alone. Ibid., p. 5.
119 Ibid., p. 14.
120 Human Rights Watch interview with the chief of a village near
Salem, Tamil Nadu, November 30, 1995.
121 Background information on the silver industry of Salem was
provided during a Human Rights Watch interview with staff members of a
local nongovernmental organization, November 30, 1995. It requested
anonymity in order to avoid possible repercussions against its
programs or staff.
122 Human Rights Watch interview with a social worker who works with
the children in this industry, Salem, November 28, 1995.
123 Human Rights Watch interview with a small-scale silver smithy
owner who, at the time of the interview, had three bonded children
working, Salem, November 30, 1995.
124 See chapter on applicable law.
125 Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Project Officer J. L.
Poland, December 1, 1995, Salem, Tamil Nadu. The district government's
goal was to establish twenty such schools, with one hundred working
children in each.
126 Ibid. Instead of prosecuting, the office is employing a
"cooperative approach" and "working with the companies [that employ
child laborers]," according to the project officer. A local activist
put this another way. "He [the district collector] is collaborating
with the big mill and factory owners.... They [government officials]
will never worry about the welfare of the child labourers." Human
Rights Watch interview, November 30, 1995.
127 Ibid.
128 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamilnadu, submitted
to the Supreme Court for Supreme Court Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of
1985. October 31, 1995, Madras, Tamil Nadu, p. 75.
129 Vidyasagar, "A Status Report...," p. 12.
130 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamilnadu, p. 76.
Those few gem workers who are not scheduled caste members are members
of lower castes.
131 "A training centre on synthetic diamonds production," The Free
Press Journal, January 16, 1996.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid.
135 There have been several other problems with this initiative.
According to the director of a local social welfare organization, the
new machines, which the government encouraged people to buy, were very
expensive (valued at 8,000 rupees each) and were sold to participants
by government agents at an inflated price (up to 16,000 rupees each).
These purchases were financed by bank loans set up with government
assistance, and buyers were then saddled with long-term bank debts. A
second problem was over saturation of the market as a direct result of
the gem park scheme. More than 6,000 people bought these machines and
were trained to use them. Many of these buyers were entering into the
industry for the first time, enticed by government promises of steady
earnings. With more and more American diamonds being produced, a glut
in the market soon developed. Within a year, many of the machines
stood idle, their owners having defaulted on the loans and begun
looking for other means of income generation. Another accusation
against the program is that the training process has been inadequate,
with the result that some participants never even learned how to use
their machines. Some machines, then, were idle from the start. That
the production glut happened anyway underscores an even greater
potential for market flooding.
136 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamilnadu, p. 76.
137 There are five distinct stages of gem production: slicing,
shaping, preforming, faceting, and polishing. Each of these stages
requires minute and sustained attention to detail. Report of the
Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamilnadu, p. 75.
138 Vidyasagar, "A Status Report...," p.13, citing eye specialist Dr.
Jaiswal. According to Dr. Jaiswal, eyeglasses are not usually required
by the general population until after the age of thirty-five.
139 "Silk Exports May Fall 20 Percent," Business Line, March 7, 1996.
140 Ibid.
141 "Indo-German Trade Surges By 20% to DM 8.17 Billion," Business
Standard, June 12, 1996.
142 See Sanjay Sinha, The Development of Indian Silk: A Wealth of
Opportunities (New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd.,
1990), p. 46-47, 56-59; government subsidies as of 1990 totaled $20
million annually; The Hindu, "Sericulture project for 7 more
districts," November 21, 1995, p. 5. The article reported that World
Bank funding of sericulture projects would continue and the annual
production of silk was expected to more than double by end of eight-
year project. "Sericulture" refers to the culture of the silkworm.
143 "Silk Exports May Fall 20 Percent," Business Line, March 7, 1996.
144 Public Interest Research Group, The World Bank and India (New
Delhi: Public Interest Research Group, 1994), p. 81.
145 Ibid., p. 82.
146 "Karnataka to Have 7 Integrated Silk Growth Centres," Business
Line, January 31, 1996; "Silk-Mixed Fare on the Cards for the Future,"
Economic Times, February 3, 1996.
147 The World Bank, India-UP Diversified Agriculture Support Project
(DASP), Project Identification Number INPA35824, Proposal Date: March,
1995.
148 The World Bank, Working With NGOs (Washington D.C.: The World
Bank, 1994), p.5.
149 There is also a significant amount of bonded child labor in the
silk powerloom industry, with at least 35,000 bonded children working
the powerlooms of Tamil Nadu alone. This area demands further
investigation and action on the part of government authorities, but is
beyond the scope of the present report.
150 Human Rights Watch interview with researcher R. Vidyasagar,
November 17, 1995, Madras; Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour
in Tamilnadu, October 31, 1995, Madras, submitted in connection with
Supreme Court Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985, p. 73; R.K. Misra,
Preliminary Report on the Child Labour in the Saree Industry of
Varanasi, Human Rights Cell, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, 1995,
p. 10.
151 Misra, Child Labour in the Saree Industry of Varanasi, p. 3.
152 Human Rights Watch interview with director of government cocoon
market, December 7, 1995, Magadi, Karnataka.
153 No systematic study has been undertaken on child labor in the silk
industry of Karnataka. Nonetheless, a detailed study of one Taluk
(subdivision of a district) near Bangalore found 10,000 bonded child
silk workers in that Taluk alone. Based on this figure,an overall
estimate of 100,000 is conservative.
154 Sinha, The Development of Indian Silk: A Wealth of Opportunities
(New Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1990), p. 11.
155 Ibid., p. 31.
156 Ibid. at 31.
157 Memorandum to Human Rights Watch from author Rudi Rotthier and
photographer Marleen Daniels, November 1, 1995 (Rotthier/Daniels
memorandum).
158 Human Rights Watch interviews, December 6, 1995, Ramanagaram,
Karnataka.
159 Results of a 1995 survey conducted by social service organization
in Magadi Taluk, rural Bangalore District, Karnataka.
160 Rotthier/Daniels memorandum.
161 Human Rights Watch interview with social activist, December 7,
1995, rural Bangalore district.
162 Human Rights Watch witnessed many children working in the twining
factories and spoke with several of them briefly, usually in view of
their employers. We were unable to gain access to the children in a
setting more secure and conducive for interviews. Instead, we relied
largely on information provided by a local social welfare
organization. Although the particulars of these three testimonies were
confirmed repeatedly by our own conversations and observations, the
testimonies themselves were recorded by this organization and not by
Human Rights Watch.
163 Rotthier/Daniels memorandum.
164 Sinha, The Development of Indian Silk, p. 63.
165 A researcher who undertook a detailed study of the industry
reported that girls who work in the silk factories tend to have
irregular and very painful menstrual periods, and may suffer other
reproductive problems. Human Rights Watch interview with social
activist in a village in Rural Bangalore district, Karnataka, December
7, 1995. A female leather worker interviewed in Ambur, Tamil Nadu,
reported the same phenomenon in the shoe factories of that town. To
Human Rights Watch's knowledge, there has been no effort by the
government to investigate these or other health problems experienced
by working children.
166 Ibid.
167 Human Rights Watch interview with researcher R. Vidyasagar, Nov.
17, 1995, Madras; Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in
Tamilnadu, Oct. 31, 1995, Madras, submitted in connection with Supreme
Court Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985, p. 76.
168 Misra, Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, p. 8.
169 Sinha, Development of Indian Silk, p. 34.
170 On November 24-25, 1995, Human Rights Watch interviewed forty
people in four of the Kanchipuram area regarding the use of bonded
child labor in the silk handloom industry. Most of those interviewed
were bonded child laborers; others were parents of working children,
non-bonded child workers, owners, employers, and agents. Except where
otherwise noted, all information regarding the practices of the
Kanchipuram silk industry was obtained during these interviews. All
information regarding the practices of the Varanasi silk industry is
from Misra, Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, except where
otherwise noted.
171 Human Rights Watch interview with researcher R. Vidyasagar, Nov.
17, 1995, Madras, Tamil Nadu.
172 Misra, Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, p. 8.
173 Misra, Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, p. 11.
174 Ibid., p. 30.
175 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
176 One wealthy employer told Human Rights Watch researchers, in an
interview in Kanchipuram on November 23, 1995, that he has suffered
losses totaling 200,000 rupees because of children running away. While
he declined to specify how many children ran away or over what period
of time this loss occurred, this figure is a clear indicator of the
desperate conditions and deep suffering of the bonded child laborer's
life.
177 B.N. Juyal, Child Labour: The Twice Exploited (Varanasi: Gandhian
Institute of Studies, 1985).
178 Jagaran, Dec. 14, 1994 (cited by Misra, Preliminary Report on the
Child Labour, p. 5).
179 Ibid.
180 Misra, Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, p. 47.
181 "Thousands of persons are committing offenses under this act every
year. However not one person is known to have been convicted in
Varanasi." Ibid., p. 44. Nor have there been any convictions in the
Kanchipuram area.
182 See chapter on applicable law.
183 Human Rights Watch interview with North Arcot District Collector
M. P. Vijaykumar, Nov. 27, 1995, Vellore, Tamil Nadu; Misra,
Preliminary Report on the Child Labour, p. 42.
184 Human Rights Watch interview with director of government cocoon
market, Dec. 7, 1995, Magadi, Bangalore Rural District, Karnataka.
185 Sinha, Development of Indian Silk, pp. 47, 57.
186 "By the Skin of Its Teeth - Indian Leather Industry," Financial
Express Investment Week, August 9, 1995; "Indian Shoe Manufacturers
Increased Exports Rs. 9.14 Bil in 1994-95, Compared With Rs. 5.23 Bil
in 1992-93," Reuters, March 27, 1996.
187 Prakash Mahtani, Chairman of the Council for Leather Exports,
predicted exports valuing seven billion dollars by the year 2000.
Sharika Muthu, Times of India, Shoe Fair Supplement, "Global Giants
Stepping into Indian Shoes," Oct. 17, 1994.
188 The Factories Act, 1948, Sec. 2(m)(i) and (ii); The Child Labour
(Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, Sec. 3. (The act does not
apply to workshops where occupier is assisted by family).
189 See chapter on the role of the government.
190 Based on our observations of the Bombay leather shoe industry,
girl workers comprise approximately 5 percent of the child workers
overall.
191 Human Rights Watch interview with local resident and shoemaker,
January 16, 1996, Bombay.
192 A small percentage of the boys are brought in from Uttar Pradesh
and other parts of Maharashtra. These children make wooden heels for
shoes, while the children from Rajasthan make the leather sandals
known as chappals. Times of India, "Children toil for 12 hours in
chappal units," February 12, 1996.
193 The information on Rajasthani shoemaking communities was gathered
during several Human Rights Watch interviews in villages near
Viratnagar, Rajasthan, Dec. 13-14, 1995.
194 At the same time, their daughters are being forced into carpet-
weaving. See chapter on carpets.
195 Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, Sec. 2(1)(g)(I)(1).
196 Ibid., Sec. 2(1)(I)(a) and (b). Because no minimum wages have been
set by the government for children's work, the second prong of this
definition applies.
197 People's Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India, (1982) 3
SCC 235, paragraphs 259-260.
198 Times of India, "Children toil for 12 hours in chappal units,"
February 12, 1996.
199 According to the Ministry of Labour, 84.98 percent of child labor
is in agriculture. Ministry of Labour, Government of India, "Children
and Work," produced for Workshop of District Collectors/District Heads
on "Elimination of Child Labour in Hazardous Occupation," New Delhi,
September 13-14, 1995, p. 3. For statistics on bonded child laborers,
see Burra, Born to Work..., pp. 32-33, the range is so great because
no definitive study has been undertaken to determine the number of
bonded child laborers in agriculture. The 85 percent of all bonded
laborers was confirmed by Anti-Slavery International in a telephone
interview with Human Rights Watch on August 14, 1996; but like other
statistics on bonded and child labor, no comprehensive survey has been
taken to document this.
200 Dalit groups have largely rejected the terms "untouchable" and
"harijan" (children of God) to describe their communities. They are
also referred to as "scheduled castes," a term which like "scheduled
tribes" refers to groups designated on a schedule attached to the
Indian Constitution as entitled to special consideration, including
some quotas for educational and career opportunities, in recognition
of their historically disadvantaged status. Many, if not the majority
of India's bonded laborers are members of the Dalit communities, or
are "scheduled tribes"-indigenous tribal people, also known as
adivasi. However, in some industries, Dalits occupy positions other
than bonded laborers. In the silk industry, for example, some loom-
owners and weavers are also Dalits.
201 See for example, A.R. Desai, ed. Repression and Resistance in
India, (Bombay: Popular Prakashan Private Ltd., 1990).
202 All interviews by Human Rights Watch, December 9, 1995, Anekal
Taluk, Bangalore Rural District.
203 Kiran Kamal Prasad, "Bonded Labour in Anekal Taluk, Bangalore
Urban District, Karnataka" (Guddhati village: Self published, March
12, 1991), p.4.
204 Ibid.
205 Government of India, 8th Five Year Plan: 1992-1997 (New Delhi:
Cosmos Bookhive (P) Ltd., 1992), pp. 64-65.
206 Kiran Kamal Prasad, "Bonded Labour in Karnataka," (Bangalore: Self
published, 1995), p. 4.
207 Ibid.
208 Ibid.
209 Ministry of Labour statistics on bonded labour are cumulative
totals. For a further discussion of these statistics and their
methodology, see below.
210 Kiran Kamal Prasad, "Bonded Labour...", p. 3.
211 Ibid, p. 2.
212 "23 Children Rescued from Bondage," The Statesman, January 26,
1996.
213 Pradeep Mehta, "Cashing in on Child Labor."
214 Ela Dutt, "Rug Firms With No Child Labor Need Help," India Abroad,
February 3, 1995.
215 See Hamish McDonald "Boys of bondage: Child labour, though banned,
is rampant," Far Eastern Economic Review, July 9, 1992, p. 19 (with
arrival of Nepali children, including girls, reports of sexual abuse
and rape increasing).
216 "Mirzapur Carpets - Taking Exports to a New High," Economic Times,
June 10, 1996.
217 Since 1994, the carpet industry has been experiencing a decline in
terms of global market share. It declined to a 17 percent share of the
global market in 1995, from 21 percent in 1994. Most reports attribute
this to increased competition from China and Iran. "Hand-Knotted
Carpet Units Losing Out to China, Iran," Financial Express, March 12,
1996; "Mirzapur Carpets - Taking Exports to a New High," Economic
Times, June 10, 1996.
218 "Steps taken to Curb Child Labour in Carpet Industry," Times of
India, December 11, 1995.
219 India's total exports in 1995 were $26.2 billion; carpet exports
were valued at $650 million, or about 2.5 percent of the total
exports.
220 "Steps taken to Curb Child Labour in Carpet Industry."
221 Edward A. Gargan, "Bound to Looms by Poverty and Fear, Boys in
India Make a Few Men Rich," New York Times, July 9, 1992.
222 "Mirzapur Carpets - Taking Exports to a New High."
223 Molly Moore, "Factories of Children; Youth Labor Force Growing in
Asia to Meet Export Demand, Help Families," Washington Post, May 21,
1995. Although the highest concentration of carpet villages is in
Mirzapur district, carpet manufacturing is also a dominant industry in
the neighboring districts of Allahabad, Varanasi, and Jaunpur.
224 Neera Burra, Born to Work, p. xxii.
225 According to one 1995 report, carpet manufacturers have found a
new way to exploit the poverty of the Bihar inhabitants: in addition
to bringing Bihar children into bondage in the carpet belt,
manufacturers are beginning to bring bondage to the children, setting
up hundreds of looms in the poorest districts of Bihar. See "Ex-child
labourers make a fresh start," Times of India, July 31, 1995.
226 Anti-Slavery International (ASI), "Slavery Today in India,"
Factsheet B, July 1994. According to ASI, 10,000 boys have been
kidnapped from the boys' district (Chichoria, Bihar) alone.
227 Prem Bhai, "The Working Conditions of the Child Weaver in the
Carpet Units of Mirzapur and Summary of Findings," Law Relating to
Employment of Children, 1985, p. 146.
228 Shamshad Khan, "Migrant Child Labour in the Carpet Industry of
Mirzapur-Bhadohi," (undated).
229 A detailed 1984 study found that approximately 50 percent of
migrant child weavers were paid only in food; another 40 percent of
them received only one or two rupees per day. Prem Bhai, "Working
Conditions of the Child Weaver..." p. 151.
230 Except where otherwise noted, all child testimonials from the
carpet belt are drawn from Human Rights Watch interviews, December 19,
1995, in several rural villages of Mirzapur district, Uttar Pradesh.
231 See especially Prem Bhai, "The Working Conditions of the Child
Weaver in the Carpet Units of Mirzapur and Summary of Findings," Law
Relating to Employment of Children, 1985.
232 See, e.g., "Ex-Child Labourers make a Fresh Start," Times of
India, July 31, 1995.
233 Information on health risks from Human Rights Watch interviews in
Mirzapur district, Uttar Pradesh, and Jaipur district, Rajasthan; also
McDonald, "Boys of bondage...," July 9, 1992, p. 18; Shamshad Khan,
"Improvement in Health, Hygiene and Nutritional Status of Child Labour
in Carpet Industry: Experience of CREDA," February 26, 1990.
234 Molly Moore, "Factories of Children; Youth Labor Force Growing in
Asia to Meet Export Demand, Help Families," Washington Post Foreign
Service, May 21, 1995.
235 "19 Children Rescued from Bonded Labour," Indian Express, Nov. 9,
1995.
236 Bhai, "The Working Conditions of the Child Weaver...", p. 151.
237 Ibid., p. 152.
238 Pradeep Mehta, "Cashing in on Child Labor."
239 See McDonald, "Boys of Bondage...," p. 19.
240 See chapter on leather for a more detailed discussion of the
Rajasthani shoemaking communities.
241 Approximately 80 percent of the child carpet-makers in Rajasthan
are female (Human Rights Watch interview with social activist,
December 14, 1995, Viratnagar). This is quite different from the
pattern in the Uttar Pradesh carpet belt, where 95 percent of the
carpet-makers are male.
242 Human Rights Watch interview, December 13, 1995, village near
Viratnagar, Jaipur district, Rajasthan.
243 Ibid.
244 Anti-Slavery International, "Slavery Today in India," Factsheet B,
July 1994.
245 Ibid. As of 1991, the number of government-run carpet-training
centers was reported as approximately two hundred. Weiner, The Child
and the State in India, p. 86.
246 Human Rights Watch interview with local children's rights
activist, December 13, 1995, Viratnagar, Rajasthan.
247 B. N. Juyal, "Official Schemes Exacerbate Situation in Northern
States," Vigil India, No. 69, August 1995, p. 6.
248 Ibid.
249 Ibid. Under the Emergency of 1975-1977, then Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi suspended civil liberties, arrested hundreds of opposition
leaders and activists, and attempted to push through a number of
economic reforms, including new development programs.
250 Indian Constitution, Article 24.
251 Gargan, "Bound to Looms..."
252 McDonald, "Boys of bondage ..." p. 19 .
253 Ibid.
254 Human Rights Watch interview with Mirzapur District Collector
Bachittar Singh, December 19, 1995, Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh.
255 Human Rights Watch interview with Rajasthan Labour Commissioner
Ashok Shekhar, December 15, 1995, Jaipur, Rajasthan.
0 S. B. Civil Writ Petition No. 263/1995, Ugam Raj Mohnot v. State of
Rajasthan and Others, filed January 18, 1995, before the High Court of
Judicature for Rajasthan, Jaipur Bench, Jaipur. The writ requests,
inter alia, that the Court "direct the State Government to make Rules
under the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and to
implement the provisions of this act forthwith strictly..." The
petitioner is coordinator of the Rajasthan branch of the Centre of
Concern for Child Labour (CFCCL) and he filed the petition on behalf
of the organization.
1 Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985 with Civ. Writ Petition No. 153
of 1982, Record of Proceedings, August 7, 1995.
2 Human Rights Watch interview with Ms. Srilata Swaminathan, Rajasthan
Kisan Sangathan, December 13, 1995, Jaipur, Rajasthan.
3 Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child Labour
in India..., p. 41.
4 This section discusses the government's child labor programs. These
are not programs designed specifically to address the needs of bonded
child laborers; as of July 1996, the Indian government has no such
program.
5 UNICEF, "Child Labour: UNICEF India Position," 1995, p. 4. There are
467 districts in all of India.
6 See Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India..., p. 42-45 (describing eighteen policies, laws,
committees, etc. established by central government since 1921).
7 Ibid., p. 45.
8 Ibid.
9 "Non-formal education" is typically part-time instruction that
emphasizes basic literacy and life skills. It is geared toward working
children.
10 The majority of the funds for this program were provided by the
International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), a
program of the International Labour Organisation. IPEC focuses on "the
worst abuses of child labour: hazardous work, forced labour, the
employment of working children who are less than 12 or 13 years old,
girls and street children." The NGO Group for the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, 1993, "Eliminating the Exploitation of Child
Labour: International, national and local action," May 1993, p. 8.
11 Commission on Labour Standards, "Child Labour in India," p. 49
(source: Ministry of Labour). Additional IPEC programs serve nearly
55,000 children. Ministry of Labour, Government of India, "Children
and Work," Workshop of District Collectors/District Heads on
"Elimination of Child Labour in Hazardous Occupations," New Delhi,
September 13-14, 1995, p. 11.
12 Ministry of Labour, "Children and Work," p. 5.
13 "Data on Child Labour yet to be Compiled," The Hindu, April 10,
1995, p. 13. The article uses the figure of 850 crore rupees; one
crore is equal to ten million.
14 Ministry of Labour, "Children and Work," p. 5.
15 "India has told the International Labour Organisation it requires
no external financial assistance for the various remedial measures it
is taking [to eliminate children from the workforce in hazardous
industries]." "Collectors Meeting on Child Labour," The Statesman
(Calcutta edition), September 10, 1995; "Government today informed the
Rajya Sabha that it had rejected the offer by some countries to help
India check the problem of child labour, saying it preferred to depend
on its own resources." "India rejects aid to tackle child labour," The
Statesman, March 12, 1996; "India spurns aid to abolish child labour,"
Times of India, February 11, 1996.
16 The issue of foreign aid also underscores the government's
sensitivity to external critiques of child labor in India. According
to one diplomat in New Delhi, "the Indian government is known to have
discouraged suggestions, including one from the European Union, for
financial assistance." The diplomat attributed this stance to a desire
by the government "to avoid any meddling in its programme for
abolition of child labour," pointing out that international funding
brings with it accountability for the use of funds, something the
Indian government may wish to avoid. "India spurns aid," Times of
India, Feb. 11, 1996. Others believe that the government is
positioning the issue of external aid as a bargaining chip in the
ongoing debate over a linkage between trade and labor. Under this
view, "[i]f the developed countries demand that the pace of compliance
with international labour standards should be faster... India could
then ask for a substantial part of the cost of the programmes to be
shared by the developed countries." Ibid.
17 The twenty million figure was used by then-Prime Minister Rao on
August 15, 1994, when he announced the government's goal of releasing
two million child workers from hazardous industries by the year 2000.
Campaign Against Child Labour, "Reference Kit for Media Persons,"
January 1995, p. 8.
18 Department of Women and Child Development, Indian Council for Child
Welfare, and UNICEF, India Country Office, "Rights of the Child:
Report of a National Consultation, November 21-23, 1994, p. 102.
19 N.K. Doval, "Double-speak on child labour," The Hindu, December 28,
1994; Ministry of Labour, Children and Work, September 13-14, 1995.
Based on 1981 figures, the Planning Commission for the Census of India
estimated that there were seventeen and a half million child laborers
under the age of fourteen in 1985, eighteen million in 1990, and 20
million in 1995 See Commission on Labour Standards, Child Labour in
India, p. 3
20 Gerry Pinto, UNICEF, "Child Labour in India: The Issue and
Directions for Action," 1995, p. 2; UNICEF et al., "Rights of the
Child," p. 101.
21 Ministry of Labour, Children and Work, September 13-14, 1995, p. 2.
Preliminary numbers released from the 1991 census include a total
population of 844 million people, 298 million of whom are children
under the age of fifteen. Of these children, 221million live in rural
areas and seventy-one million in urban areas. These numbers are
already considered out of date, with most sources reporting an overall
population of more than 900 million. India's population is expected to
cross the one billion mark by the turn of the century.
22 Human Rights Watch interview with National Human Rights Commission,
Secretary General R. V. Pillai, New Delhi, December 28, 1995.
23 This chapter discusses only certain aspects of the Bonded Labour
System (Abolition) Act. For a more comprehensive overview, see the
chapters on the legal context of bonded child labor and on the beedi
industry. The full text of the act may be found in the appendix.
24 Bonded Labour (System Abolition) Act, Ch. IV, Art. 10, Art. 12 and
Ch. V, Art. 14. There are twenty-five states in India and 467
districts. Stanley Wolpert, India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991), p. 199; UNICEF, "Child Labour: UNICEF India Position,"
1995, p. 4.
25 See chapter on applicable law for details of the committees'
duties.
26 Judgement in Writ Petition No. 1187, 1982 (cited in Vivek Pandit,
"Prevention of Atrocities (Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes): Bonded
Labour, Their Rights and Implementation", 1995), p. 7.
27 Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 3 SCC, paragraphs
243, 255 (1984).
28 For details, see chapter on applicable law.
29 Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 3 SCC 243, paragraphs
245-246 (1984).
30 Pandit, "Bonded Labour," p. 18.
31 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-1995, p. 97.
32 See, e.g., Mahajan and Gathia, Child Labour: An Analytical Study,
p. 25. Not only is the incidence of bonded child labor increasing, but
the wages paid to bonded laborers are steadily decreasing in real
terms. S.P. Tiwary, "Bondage in Santhal Parganas," Chains of
Servitude..., p. 206.
33 "Citizen's [sic] Body on Bonded Labour," Times of India, November
18, 1994.
34 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamilnadu, October 31,
1995, Madras, p. 208, Part VIII, para. A. This report was submitted by
order of the Supreme Court in connection with Supreme Court Civ. Writ
Petition No. 3922 of 1985 (Public Union for Civil Liberties v. State
of Tamil Nadu and Others).
35 Sarma, Welfare of Special Categories of Labour, p. 55, citing
1989-90 Ministry of Labour statistics.
36 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-95, p. 97.
37 "Citizen's [sic] Body on Bonded Labour," Times of India, November
18, 1994.
38 Ibid.
39 Affidavit on behalf of the State Government of Tamil Nadu, October
7, 1994. This affidavit was submitted by order of the Supreme Court in
connection with Supreme Court Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985
(Public Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Tamil Nadu and Others).
40 The case that sparked this inquiry, Public Union for Civil
Liberties v. State of Tamil Nadu and Others, was filed in 1985. Much
of the delay in its resolution is due to the state governments'
failure to respond to court directives in a timely manner. In its
order requiring the states to report on bonded labor practices, the
court noted that "It does appear to us that no significant progress
has been made by the concerned authorities and it is not unlikely that
the attitude of the concerned authorities is not enthusiastic as one
would expect in a matter of such significance." Record of Proceedings,
May 13, 1994. As of August 1996, Human Rights Watch has been unable to
find out whether the case has been resolved.
41 Human Rights Watch interview with Ashok Shekhar, Labour
Commissioner for Rajasthan, December 15, 1995, Jaipur, Rajasthan.
42 Human Rights Watch interview with Ashok Bhasin, Deputy Labour
Commissioner for Gujarat, December 15, 1995, Jaipur, Rajasthan.
43 Manoj Dayal, "Abolition of Bonded Labour an Eye-wash in Bihar,"
Patrika, December 26, 1995.
44 Department of Women and Child Development, Indian Council for Child
Welfare, UNICEF-India, "Rights of the Child: Report of a National
Consultation, November 21-23, 1994, p. 102.
45 The inability to come up with basic statistics regarding
enforcement was not an aberration, but rather just one example of a
chronic failure to keep-and make public-this information. See, e.g.,
"Scheme to divert kids from hazardous units," Indian Express, February
27, 1995.
46 The questions we asked of the Director General of Labour Welfare
included questions regarding: agency estimates of the number of bonded
child laborers in India; the number of district vigilance committees
currently in operation, and their activities to date; the number of
cases prosecuted under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act and
the results of these prosecutions; the number of people rehabilitated
under the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act; whether any bonded
child laborers have ever been rehabilitated under the act; and the
agency opinion regarding the case of bonded labor currently before the
Supreme Court, in which thirteen states are accused of allowing
widespread bonded labor to flourish.
47 Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India: A Perspective, June 10, 1995, p. 33. Inspections by
the national government presumable took place in New Delhi and other
centrally-administered territories.
48 Ibid.
49 N.K. Doval,"Double-Speak on Child Labour," The Hindu, December 28,
1994.
50 Molly Moore, "Poverty Weaves Harshness Into Lives," Guardian
Weekly, June 4, 1995, p. 19 (reprint from Washington Post) (of 4,000
convictions reported under the Act since 1986, 3,500 offenders got off
with a fine equivalent to five dollars or less; figures from report by
an Indian Chamber of Commerce and the International Labour
Organisation). The assertion that there have been 4,000 convictions
under the act does not coincide with the data released by the
government regarding 1990 to 1993 convictions, reported above. The
government's figures of 772 convictions for one three year period
indicate that, since the act was passed in 1986, total convictions
probably number 2,500 or less.
51 Hema Shukla, "India Insincere in Ending Child Labor," United Press
International, September 12, 1994.
52 Human Rights Watch interview with North Arcot District Collector M.
P. Vijaykumar, November 27, 1995, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.
53 Human Rights Watch interview with senior state official, a former
district collector of Tamil Nadu, November 22, 1995, Madras, Tamil
Nadu.
54 Human Rights Watch interviews, November 17 - December 1, 1995,
Tamil Nadu.
55 Human Rights Watch interview with social activists, December 22,
1995, Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh. See also Burra, Born to Work, p. xxiii
(of 200,000 glass workers in Firozabad, 50,000 are children).
56 Srawan Shukla, "Childhood goes up in Smoke in the `Land of Glass,'"
Times of India, November 19, 1994.
57 Human Rights Watch interview with R. V. Pillai, Secretary General,
National Human Rights Commission, December 28, 1995, New Delhi.
58 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-1995, pp. 96-97.
59 Ibid., p. 97.
60 The case, Public Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Tamil Nadu
and Others (Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985), is investigating the
practice of bonded labor, and the states' failure to eradicate that
practice, in the states of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Kerala, Andhra
Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh,
Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, and Meghalaya.
61 Public Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Tamil Nadu and Others,
Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985 with Civ. Writ Petition No. 153 of
1982, Record of Proceedings, August 7, 1995, p. 2.
62 Ibid., p. 3.
63 G. V. Krishnan,"TN has 10 Lakh [one million] Bonded Workers, says
Panel," Times of India, March 1, 1996.
64 Ibid.
65 Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, p. 153. Citing 1988-89
Ministry of Labour statistics.
66 Sarma, Welfare of Special Categories of Labour, p. 55, citing
1989-90 Ministry of Labour statistics.
67 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-95, p.97.
68 Manoj Dayal, "Abolition of Bonded Labour an Eye-wash in Bihar,"
Patrika, December 26, 1995.
69 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-95, p. 97.
70 Hoshiar Singh, Administration of Rural Development in India (New
Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995), pp.165-188.
71 "Allocations for Labour Schemes Unutilised," Times of India, March
15, 1996.
72 Human Rights Watch interview, December 29, 1995, New Delhi.
73 Ibid. See also Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, p. 171.
74 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamil Nadu, October
31, 1995, Madras, submitted for Supreme Court Civ. Writ Petition No.
3922 of 1985, Part V, p. 1.
75 We asked the Director General of Labour Welfare for India for these
statistics, but he declined to respond.
76 Reddy, Bonded Labour System in India, p.161.
77 Human Rights Watch interview with District Collector M. P.
Vijaykumar, November 27, 1995, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.
78 Ibid. See also "8 Beedi Agents held under Bonded Labour System
(Abolition) Act," Indian Express, September 10, 1995.
79 Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India..., p. 9 ("There is also apathy amongst State
Governments. Most states do not have yet in place the framing of rules
for the enforcement of the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation)
Act of 1986, nearly a decade later!"). The Commission on Labour
Standards and International Trade was appointed by the Indian
government in August 1994 for the purpose of studying "Issues
Concerning the Protection of Labour Rights and Related Matters."
Ibid., appendix 1.
80 Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Belgian journalist Rudi
Rotthier, October 19, 1995.
81 The Supreme Court noted this in directing states to include social
action groups in their efforts against bonded labor, stating that
"patwaris and tehsildars [local leaders] [are] either in sympathy with
the exploiting class or lacking in social commitment or indifferent to
the misery and suffering of the poor . ." Crim. Writ Petition No. 1263
of 1982, Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 3 SCC
paragraphs 243, 251 (1984).
82 Human Rights Watch interview with attorney Jose Varghese, November
15, 1996, New Delhi.
83 Child Workers News, Vol. 2, No. 2, April-June 1994.
84 Crim. Writ Petition No. 1263 of 1982, Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of
Madhya Pradesh, 3 SCC 243, paragraph 252 (1984).
85 Tiwary, "Bondage in Santhal Parganas," Chains of Servitude, p.
207.
86 "Bonded labour is employed by powerful landlords from whom the many
political parties draw political support and this poses a major
obstacle to implementation of the legislation. The power of those
opposed to the eradication of bondage ensures the continuation of the
economic conditions which nurture the system." See Mahajan and Gathia,
Child Labour: An Analytical Study, p. 25.
87 Human Rights Watch interviews with local social activists, December
1, 1995, Trichy, Tamil Nadu, and December 18, 1995, Varanasi, Uttar
Pradesh.
88 These phenomena are discussed in previous chapters.
89 Human Rights Watch interview with Jose Varghese, November 15, 1995,
New Delhi.
90 Human Rights Watch interview with Supreme Court attorney, December
29, 1996.
91 For example, see Ajoy Kumar, "From Slavery to Freedom: The Tale of
Chattisgarh Bonded Labourers," Indian Social Institute, 1986, pp.
12-13.
92 Ministry of Labour, Annual Report 1994-1995, p. 97.
93 See G. Satyamurty, "Trouble Dogs Freed Bonded Labourers," The
Hindu, October 27, 1994; also, in a memorandum to Human Rights Watch,
journalists Marleen Daniels and Rudi Rotthier reported their discovery
in a rural village that, of twenty-one children liberated from bondage
in 1993, nineteen had been returned to bondage one year later.
(Rotthier/Daniels memorandum to Human Rights Watch, November 1,
1995).
94 For example, in Tamil Nadu, the rehabilitation allowance for a
bonded laborer released in December 1992 was not approved for
distribution until March 1994. Report of the Commission on Bonded
Labour in Tamil Nadu, October 31, 1995, Madras, submitted in
connection with Supreme Court Civ. Writ Petition No. 3922 of 1985, p.
18.
95 See Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade, Child
Labour in India..., p. 40.
96 See Neeraja Chaudhary v. State of Madhya Pradesh, paragraph 251.
97 Report of the Commission on Bonded Labour in Tamil Nadu, October
31, 1995, Madras, submitted in connection with Supreme Court Civ. Writ
Petition No. 3922 of 1985, p. 137.
98 Sreedhar Pillai, "Of Inhuman Bondage: The Supreme Court Indicts the
Tamil Nadu Government for Failing to Abolish Bonded Labour," Sunday
Magazine (Calcutta), April 7-13, 1996.
99 Tiwary, "Bondage in Santhal Parganas," Chains of Servitude..., p.
205.
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1996/India3.htm
bademiyansubhanallah
Perry Anderson on the Specter of China
Posted on Mar 19, 2010
By Perry Anderson
The following review originally appeared in the London Review of
Books, whose website is www.lrb.co.uk, and is reposted with
permission.
These days Orientalism has a bad name. Edward Said depicted it as a
deadly mixture of fantasy and hostility brewed in the West about
societies and cultures of the East. He based his portrait on Anglo-
French writing about the Near East, where Islam and Christendom
battled with each other for centuries before the region fell to
Western imperialism in modern times. But the Far East was always
another matter. Too far away to be a military or religious threat to
Europe, it generated tales not of fear or loathing, but wonder. Marco
Polo’s reports of China, now judged mostly hearsay, fixed fabulous
images that lasted down to Columbus setting sail for the marvels of
Cathay. But when real information about the country arrived in the
17th and 18th centuries, European attitudes towards China tended to
remain an awed admiration, rather than fear or condescension. From
Bayle and Leibniz to Voltaire and Quesnay, philosophers hailed it as
an empire more civilised than Europe itself: not only richer and more
populous, but more tolerant and peaceful, a land where there were no
priests to practise persecution and offices of the state were filled
according to merit, not birth. Even those sceptical of the more
extravagant claims for the Middle Kingdom – Montesquieu or Adam Smith
– remained puzzled and impressed by its wealth and order.
A drastic change of opinion came in the 19th century, when Western
predators became increasingly aware of the relative military weakness
and economic backwardness of the Qing empire. China was certainly
teeming, but it was also primitive, cruel and superstitious. Respect
gave way to contempt, mingled with racist alarm – Sinomania capsizing
into Sinophobia. By the early 20th century, after eight foreign forces
had stormed their way to Pekin to crush the Boxer Uprising, the
‘yellow peril’ was being widely bandied about among press and
politicians, as writers like Jack London or J.H. Hobson conjured up a
future Chinese takeover of the world. Within another few decades, the
pendulum swung back, as Pearl Buck and Madame Chiang won popular
sympathy for China’s gallant struggle against Japan. After 1948, in a
further rapid reversal, Red China became the focus of still greater
fear and anxiety, a totalitarian nightmare more sinister even than
Russia. Today, the high-speed growth of the People’s Republic is
transforming Western attitudes once again, attracting excitement and
enthusiasm in business and media alike, with a wave of fashion and
fascination recalling the chinoiserie of rococo Europe. Sinophobia has
by no means disappeared. But another round of Sinomania is in the
making.
The title of Martin Jacques’s When China Rules the World belongs to
the scare literature of the first. But its function is little more
than a commercial come-on, designed to clear the purchased display-
table and the airport stall. The book itself is a sweeping
contribution to the second. Its message consists of two parts. The
first is the now well-known projection that – at present growth rates
– the Chinese economy will be the largest in the world, overtaking the
American, within about 15 years. With four times the population of the
US, China already has the biggest foreign reserves, is the leading
exporter, posts the most spectacular stock-market gains, and contains
the largest car market on earth. So massive is the transformation its
rise to economic supremacy will bring that – so Jacques – history can
henceforward simply be divided into BC and AC: Before China and After
China. This part of the argument is a straightforward quantitative
extrapolation. Jacques hammers the impending figures home, without
adding a great deal to what anyone with a certain economic literacy
would know already.
Beyond altering international league tables, what will China’s
emergence as an economic superpower signify? The second part of
Jacques’s message is not about size, but difference. China is not like
other nations, indeed is not really a nation-state at all. It is
something vaster and deeper, a ‘civilisation-state’, inheritor of the
oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural
unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its
rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian
outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic
subjects more by moral education than force, and organising adjacent
regions into a consensual tributary system. By absorbing feudal
aristocrats into impersonal state service, they freed market forces
from customary constraints to develop a commercial society of
unparalleled dynamism and sophistication. Only the accident of more
readily available coal at home, and ruthless colonial pillage of
resources overseas, allowed 19th-century Europe to overtake this great
proto-modern economy, as industrialised in its way as the West, and
much larger. But this Western predominance will prove a brief
interval. Today, China is returning once more to its historic position
as the dynamic centre of the global economy.
What are going to be the consequences for the rest of the world?
Traumatically for the United States, China will fairly soon replace it
as hegemon, not only in traditional areas of Chinese influence in East
and South-East Asia, but across former Third and First Worlds alike.
The soft power of its sporting prowess, its martial arts, its costly
painters, its multitudinous language, its ancient medicine, and not
least the delights of its cuisine, will spread China’s radiance far
and wide, as Hollywood, English and McDonald’s do America’s today.
Above all, its spectacular economic success will not only inspire
imitation wherever poor nations strive for betterment. It will reorder
the entire international system, by holding out the prospect, not of
democracy within nation-states, which the West vainly seeks to
promote, but of ‘democracy between nation-states’. For we are entering
a time in which the political and ideological conflicts that marked
the Cold War are giving way to an ‘overarching cultural contest’, in
which ‘alternative modernities’ will end the dominance of the West. In
that emancipation a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the
Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect for the state,
will lead the way.
How should this construction be judged? Enthusiasm, however well-
meaning, is no substitute for discrimination. Chinese antiquity
stretches back to 1500 BCE or beyond. But this no more makes today’s
People’s Republic a special genus of ‘civilisation-state’ than
comparable claims for la civilisation française make one of the Third
or Fourth Republic. Talk of ‘civilisations’ is notoriously self-
serving, and delimitations of them arbitrary: Samuel Huntington
arrived, rather desperately, at eight or nine – including an African,
Latin American and Eastern Orthodox civilisation. Nothing is gained by
affixing this embellishment to the PRC. Like France in the 1930s or
1950s, contemporary China is an integrist nation-state, cast in an
imperial mould, if with a much longer past and on a much larger scale.
Nor are inflated claims for the age-old economic centrality or social
wisdom of pre-modern China much help in understanding the present or
future of the country. If, up through the Song, China was
technologically and commercially far in advance of Europe, by the end
of the Ming its science lagged well behind, and even at the height of
Qing prosperity in the 18th century, agrarian productivity and average
wage levels, let alone intellectual progress in a broader sense, were
nowhere near vanguard developments in Europe. Nor are idyllic images
of sage concern for the welfare of the masses much closer to the
realities of rule by successive dynasties, which in the words of one
of China’s finest historians, He Bingdi, were always ‘ornamentally
Confucian and functionally Legalist’ – repression wrapped in
moralising rhetoric.
It would be unfair to judge any of this side of When China Rules the
World, a popular work, by scholarly standards. None of it matters very
much to the main thrust of the book, where it serves only as
preliminary folklore to adjust readers in advance to the idea of pre-
eminence to come. China could perfectly well be about to dominate the
world without having nearly always represented the summit of universal
development in the past. More serious is the incoherence of the book’s
central message. For the most part, When China Rules the World is an
unabashed exercise in boosterism, hailing the PRC not only as the
paramount power of the future, but as the liberating ice-breaker that
will, in the book’s American subtitle, bring about ‘The End of the
Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order’. Sightings of this
sort seem to have become a late British speciality: Jacques’s version
is only a little less absurd than Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century
by Mark Leonard, a fellow seer of the Demos think tank Jacques helped
to found. But there is another side to When China Rules the World at
odds with its generally upbeat story. Internationally, China has
‘embraced multilateralism’, attracts its neighbours and partners by
‘soft power’, and promotes ‘democracy between nations’. Yet we also
need to be aware that ‘the Chinese regard themselves as superior to
the rest of the human race,’ inheriting a Middle Kingdom mentality
that has always been more or less racist, and traditions of tributary
statecraft that may have been conducive to stability, but were always
based on hierarchy and inequality. Might this heritage compromise the
fair prospect of a democratic inter-state system? Not necessarily,
since while ‘the Western world is over, the new world, at least for
the next century, will not be Chinese in the way that the previous one
was Western’. The book, in other words, disowns its own title,
confected purely to increase sales. China is not going to rule the
world. All that is happening is that ‘we are entering an era of
competing modernity’ in which China will ‘increasingly be in the
ascendant and eventually dominant’.
But the idea of a distinctively ‘Chinese modernity’ winning a global
competition for hegemony is no more coherent than that of high-speed
Chinese growth ushering in ‘democracy between nation-states’. Its role
in the book is to be understood in the light of the author’s cursus
vitae. Once the editor of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s
monthly, Marxism Today, after his party and journal gave up the ghost
in the early 1990s Jacques moved into mainstream journalism, shedding
the language, if not altogether the reflexes, of his past. The Cold
War over and the Soviet Union gone, the opposition between socialism
and capitalism was now a back number. How then should the open-door
policies of the PRC – its welcome to the world market – be related to
it? This is not a matter on which When China Rules the World cares to
dwell. Such questions belong to a vocabulary the book goes out of its
way to avoid. Over five hundred pages, the word ‘capitalism’ scarcely
ever appears. But there is still a global contest, in which the more
sympathetic side can nonetheless win. Simply, it is now between not
the outdated political and ideological categories of socialism and
capitalism, but alternative ‘modernities’, as so many different
cultural ways of being up to the minute. The function of this change
of lexicon is not hard to see. What it offers is the chance of a
consolation prize for the left. Capitalism may have won worldwide, so
why bother to go on talking about it? Instead, why not look ahead to
the welcome prospect of a non-Western variant of what is now our
common destiny overtopping all others, in a country where the ruling
party at least still describes itself as Communist?
Alas, there is a logical difficulty in this wistful hope, which is
insuperable. Alternative modernities, so conceived, are cultural, not
structural: they differentiate not social systems, but sets of values
– typically, a distinctive combination of morality and sensibility,
making up a certain national ‘style’ of life. But just because this is
what is most specific to any given culture, it is typically what is
least transferable to any other – that is, impossible to universalise.
Other recent works highlighting cultural differences in a post-
ideological world – Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations or Fukuyama’s
Trust come to mind – have grasped this intransitivity, making no
claims that any one complex could tend towards predominance over all
others, in the way that a modal economic order can. Moreover,
projections of a Chinese modernity that will eventually become
hegemonic not only forget the inherently self-limiting character of
any strongly defined national culture, they further ignore the
especially intense Chinese insistence, familiar to anyone who has been
in the country, on the uniqueness of China. Few contemporary cultures,
save perhaps Japan, are so self-consciously resistant to international
comparison, so convinced of the inimitability of their own forms and
traditions. In his way, Jacques is aware of this, at times even
exaggerating it as an inveterate sense of superiority close to racism,
of which there is less evidence than he assumes. But he fails to see
how thoroughly the cult of Zhonghuaxing – ‘Chineseness’ – undoes his
own imaginings of a future Han modernity spreading triumphantly, as a
universal attractor, across the globe.
The rise of the PRC as a great economic, political and military power
is a central fact of the age. But it gains no illumination from a
vacant notion of modernity, which remains as nebulous at the end of
When China Rules the World as it was at the beginning. It would not be
too unfair to say that what the book at bottom represents is a belated
meeting of Yesterday’s Marxism with Asian Values. For beyond a general
insistence on the ethical continuities of Confucianism, of which
Chinese Communism is viewed as a lineal heir, it says remarkably
little about contemporary Chinese society itself. A few cursory lines
noting that inequality has been growing, but the government is now
acting to redress it; a bit more on the shortage of natural resources
and environmental problems; a clipped paragraph on the Party; some
prudent reflections on trouble in the border regions; and a firm
assurance that the country is not ready for democracy, so it would be
best if the CCP could rule undisturbed for another 30 years: this is
more or less all the reader curious to learn about the actual social
landscape of the PRC could gather from it. Certainly there is nothing
to upset the authorities in Beijing, where reception should be
excellent. In 1935, the Webbs entitled their book on the USSR Soviet
Communism: A New Civilisation?, dropping the question mark in
subsequent editions. Today’s ‘civilisation-state’ has been approached
in something of the same spirit.
Serious understanding of contemporary China lies elsewhere. Two works
of outstanding scholarship, from opposite ends of the political and
intellectual spectrum, can be taken as current benchmarks. From the
liberal right, Yasheng Huang’s Capitalism with Chinese
Characteristics is a tour de force of empirical inquiry, conceptual
clarity and independence of mind. Anyone wanting to know what kind of
economy, and what sort of growth, can be found in the PRC should now
start here. Huang’s premises could not be more rigidly neoclassical:
sound development is delivered by private ownership, secure property
rights, financial liberalisation and the systemic deregulation of
economic transactions – and these alone. His conclusions, however, are
a clear illustration of the truth of Carlo Ginzburg’s observation that
a misguided ideology can be a precondition of original research, as
well – perhaps as often – as an obstacle to it. By meticulous scrutiny
of primary evidence, above all a huge mass of bank documentation
tracking loans and their recipients, rather than simply relying on
aggregated second-hand statistics, Huang has cut through the clouds of
obscurity and confusion that have tended to surround the performance
of the Chinese economy in the Reform Era which followed the passing of
Mao.
His central finding is that the apparently unbroken rates of high-
speed growth have rested on two quite different models of development.
In the 1980s, a general liberalisation of financial policy allowed
private businesses to flourish in the countryside, many under the
misleading sobriquet of ‘township and village enterprises’, as credits
flowed to peasant start-ups and rural poverty fell dramatically. Then
came the shock of 1989. Thereafter, the state abruptly changed course,
choking off credits to rural entrepreneurs, switching loan capital
instead into large, rebuilt state-owned enterprises and urban
infrastructures, and – not least – granting massive advantages to
foreign capital drawn to the big cities. The social consequences of
this change, Huang argues, were dramatic. Inequality – not only
between village and city-dwellers, but within the urban population
itself – soared, as labour’s share of GDP fell, while peasants lost
land, rural healthcare and schooling were dismantled, and illiteracy
in the countryside actually grew. In a blistering chapter on Shanghai,
the showcase of Chinese ‘hyper-modernity’, Huang demonstrates how
little average households in the city benefited from its glittering
towers and streamlined infrastructures. Amid a ‘forest of grand
theft’, officials, developers and foreign executives prospered while
private firms were stunted and ordinary families struggled to get by,
in ‘the world’s most successful Potemkin metropolis’. Nationwide, in
20 years, officialdom – raking in four successive, double-digit
increases in its salaries between 1998 and 2001 alone – has more than
doubled in size.
Cautiously, Huang expresses some optimism about the direction of the
current Hu-Wen government, as a correction of the worst excesses of
the Jiang-Zhu regime of the 1990s, while remarking that its reforms
may prove too late to redress the ruin of peasant enterprise, in
villages now often emptied by labour migration. But he ends by
contrasting the sky-high Gini coefficient of today’s PRC with the
relative equity that marked the high-speed growth in the rest of East
Asia – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan – and the far greater role in
China of foreign and state enterprises, and the lesser weight of the
domestic private sector, in the country’s growth model. One
consequence, he maintains, is that productivity gains have been
declining since the mid-1990s. For Huang, the lesson is
straightforward: efficiency and equity always depend on free markets,
which in China remain half-strangled. Capitalism there certainly is,
but a variety deformed by a corrupt and self-aggrandising state, which
in denying its people liberty to manage their own economic affairs has
failed to create reasonable conditions of fairness or welfare. The
prescription is simplistic, as a glance at the United States could
have told any scholar at MIT like Huang. Since the 1980s, financial
liberalisation and cast-iron property rights have not delivered much
social equity to Americans. But the indictment, set out with exemplary
care and lucidity, is unnegotiable. So too is the anger behind it, at
callousness and injustice. Not many economists would think to dedicate
their work, as Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics does, to a
couple of imprisoned villagers and an executed housewife.
Huang’s central concern is with the fate of rural China, where, as he
rightly insists, the majority of the population still lives and dies.
The fate of urban labour is the subject of Ching Kwan Lee’s Against
the Law. Studies of the working class anywhere in the world, once a
staple of history and sociology, have declined along with labour
movements as a political force; in recent years, perhaps only in
France has writing of real distinction appeared. Lee’s book, written
from a standpoint on the radical left, transforms this scene. Although
quite different in mode and scale, in power nothing like it has
appeared since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.
In fact, it could well have been called The Unmaking and Remaking of
the Chinese Working Class. The product of seven years’ research and
interview work on the ground, it is an ethnographic and analytic
masterpiece.
The book is a diptych, one part devoted to the rustbelt of Manchuria,
the other to the sunbelt of Guangdong. Its first half is a study of
the destruction of the proletariat that built China’s principal
industrial base after Liberation, as the great state-owned enterprises
of the north-east were scrapped or sold off, leaving their workers
jobless and often near-penniless, while officials and profiteers lined
their pockets with what was left of all they had created. By
coincidence, we have an unforgettable fresco of the wreckage of this
old working class and its universe in Wang Bing’s nine-hour
documentary West of the Tracks (2003), a landmark of world cinema in
this century and a fitting pendant to Against the Law, made in
Shenyang while Lee was conducting her research in the same city. The
second part of Lee’s book explores the emergence of a new working
class of young migrant labourers from the countryside, about half of
them women, without collective identity or political memory, in the
coastal export zones of the south-east. They have low-wage jobs, but
no security, toiling up to 70 or 80 hours a week in often atrocious
working conditions, with widespread exposure to abuse and injury.
Dereliction in the rustbelt, super-exploitation in the sunbelt: the
treatment of labour is pitiless in either zone.
How do workers react to it? In a system where they have no freedom of
industrial or political organisation, and the social contract that
once gave them a modest security and dignity in exchange for
subordination has been jettisoned, the law – however authoritarian –
becomes the only resource to which they can appeal. Any direct action
risking police repression, protests typically find their way to the
courts, in the hope that blatant violations of legality by employers
or local officials will find some redress there – and in the belief
that the central government, if it knew its laws were being broken,
would take action to see them enforced. Such popular faith in the good
intentions of the Party leadership might be seen as a Chinese version
of the traditional Russian belief in the tsar as ‘Little Father’,
unaware of the misdeeds of his bureaucrats and landlords. The central
authorities naturally foster the illusion that they are not
responsible for illegalities lower down, giving them leeway to step in
with last minute concessions when protests look like getting out of
hand.
In fact, as Lee makes clear, the law can only function as an effective
system of control and mystification if the courts do not invariably
act as rubber stamps for criminality or oppression. In general, that
is just how they do behave. But in a minority of cases, labour
disputes are decided – more often partially than wholly – in favour of
workers, keeping alive the belief that the law remains a protection
even where it is being brazenly flouted by those with state power
behind them. In ways reminiscent of the 18th-century England depicted
by Thompson in Whigs and Hunters, notions of ‘the rule of law’ become
a battleground, in which the anger of those below seeks to wrest
verdicts from the cynicism of those on high, as the only potential
weapons of the weak to hand. The reason regular failure in this
unequal contest does not lead to more explosive forms of protest, Lee
shows, is material rather than ideological. In the rustbelt, workers
dispossessed of everything else typically retain their own housing,
privatised to them at low prices, as a safety net. In the sunbelt,
migrant labourers still have rights to a plot of earth back in their
villages, where land has not yet been privatised, as a fall-back. For
all the wretchedness of their respective lots, neither is quite
destitute: each has something to lose.
The sobriety and realism of these conclusions diminishes nothing of
the tragedy of betrayed hopes and ruined lives that fills the pages of
Against the Law. Lee’s capture of the voices of those caught in the
relentless industrial mechanisms of the Reform Era, in one poignant
interview after another, is among the finest accomplishments of her
book. The stories are often heartbreaking, but the accents with which
they are told speak of courage, indignation, stoicism, even humour, as
much as bitterness, resignation or despair. Few sociological studies
have combined structural and existential, objective and subjective
truths so memorably as this one. Without taking stock of it, no sense
of contemporary China is clear-eyed. In the 19th century, Europe
looked to America as the future, if one still quite some way off. In
the 21st century, the West looks towards China in something of the
same way. So far, certainly, no Tocqueville of the East has appeared.
Is what he once achieved repeatable? There is plenty of time yet. But
it is unlikely that Democracy in America will find its successor,
wherever else it might, in any Modernity in China.
Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the
State
By Yasheng Huang
Cambridge University Press, 366 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Chinese-Characteristics-Entrepreneurship-State/dp/0521898102%3FSubscriptionId%3D1XWTFJ60BR6QZ1PW9FR2%26tag%3Dtruthdig-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0521898102
Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt
By Ching Kwan Lee
University of California Press, 340 pages
http://www.amazon.com/Against-Law-Protests-Rustbelt-Sunbelt/dp/0520250974%3FSubscriptionId%3D1XWTFJ60BR6QZ1PW9FR2%26tag%3Dtruthdig-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0520250974
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/perry_anderson_on_the_specter_of_china_20100319/
Free PDF Ebooks Files @AcrobatPlanet.Com ..Home
Submitted by wulan on Fri, 03/19/2010 - 06:31 Business & Economics
In the 12 years from 1978 to 1990, China‘s reform and opening up
achieved remarkable progress, with its GDP growing 9.0% annually and
trade volume growing at 15.4%. During this period, urban per capita
income grew 5.9% annually, but that of rural areas grew at a
spectacular rate of 9.9% annually (NBS, 2002 pp.17, 94,148). People‘s
living standards and incomes increased significantly and urban-rural
disparities fell.
The achievement of China‘s reform can be called a miracle in economic
history. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, international
economic research community did not understand much about China‘s
reform, and many economists were far from optimistic. Most economists
believed that a market economy should be based on private property, a
feature that the Chinese economy apparently lacked at that time.
China‘s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were not privatized; a dual-
track resource allocation system was prevalent with state planning
still playing a very important role. They thought that although
China‘s economic transition was blessed with beneficial initial
conditions such as high proportions of cheap rural labor, low social
security subsidies, a large population of overseas Chinese, and a
relatively decentralized economy that helped to achieve some short-
term progress, the dual-track system would soon lead to efficiency
loss, rent-seeking, and institutionalized state-opportunism, which
constituted an inferior institutional arrangement. (Balcerowicz, 1994;
Woo, 1993; Sachs and Woo, 1994 and 1997; Qian and Xu, 1993.). Some
economists even claimed that China‘s transition would finally fail due
to incomplete reform (Murphy, Schleifer, and Vishny, 1992; Sachs, Woo,
and Yang, 2000).
At that time, most economists were optimistic about reform in the
Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (FSUEE hereafter) due to the
fact that these countries reformed their economies according to the
fundamental principles of neo-classical economics. The most
representative of these principles was the —shock therapy“ implemented
in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Russia, which consisted of three
main components: price liberalization, rapid privatization, and
macroeconomic stabilization by removing fiscal deficits. (Lipton and
Sachs, 1990; Blanchard, Dornbusch, Krugman, Layard, and Summers, 1991;
Boycko, Shleifer, and Vishiny, 1995.) These components are considered
the base of an efficient economic system in neoclassical economic
theory.
Economists recommending shock therapy also knew that it took time to
make the transition from one economic system to another and that it
was costly to cast aside previously vested interests. But they
optimistically assumed that the national economy would grow after six
months or a year following an initial downturn stemming from the
introduction of shock therapy (Brada and King, 1991; Kornai, 1990;
Lipton and Sachs, 1990; Wiles, 1995). According to their beliefs, the
FSUEE would overtake China through their reform, though the former
started their reforms much later, and China‘s difficulties would loom
larger due to inconsistencies inside the economic system brought about
by incomplete reforms.
Ten years have elapsed since the predictions of many renowned
economists were put forth in the early 1990s. Contrary to these
predictions, China‘s economy has grown in the past decade while those
countries that implemented the shock therapy experienced serious
inflation and economic decline. Russia‘s inflation reached 8414% in
1993, and that of Ukraine reached 10155%. In 1995, Russia‘s GDP was
only half of what it had been in 1990, and Ukraine‘s situation was
worse with a 60% decline during the same period. With significant
declines in per capita income and extreme exacerbation of income
disparities, all social indicators slid–male life expectancy in Russia
decreased from 64 years in 1990 to 58 in 1994 (Gregory and Stuart,
2001, p. 470). Overall, the countries that implemented shock therapy
experienced great difficulties in reform, in contrast to the
optimistic expectation of most economists. In eastern European
countries, Poland scored best in economic transition with only a 20%
decline in its GDP. Poland did not really implement reform based on
shock therapy, however. Although prices in Poland were liberalized,
most of its large SOEs have yet to be privatized (World Bank, 1996;
Dabrowski, 2001).
In the 1990s, the Chinese economy did suffer from a myriad of
problems. For example, the SOE reforms initiated in the early 1980s
have yet to be completed; inter-regional and urbanœrural disparities
have enlarged; and there are still many serious problems in financial
system awaiting solution. However, the national economy grew 10.1%
annually in the 1990s, 1.1% higher than that of the previous 12 years.
International trade grew also at a rate of 15.2% in the last decade
(NBS, 2002, pp. 17,94),. Moreover, people‘s living standards improved
rapidly, especially in urban areas. Economic development in China not
only promoted the welfare of the Chinese people, but also contributed
greatly to the world economy. During the Asian Financial Crisis, the
Chinese currency (RMB) did not depreciate, which played an important
role in Southeast Asian economies‘ quick recovery and growth.
Download
PDF Ebook Viability, Economic Transition and Reflections on Neo-
classical Economics
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March 19, 2010 1:52 PM
Is China Building the Next Bubble?
Posted by MoneyWatch.com
This post by Carla Fried originally appeared on CBS' MoneyWatch.com.
Will the next pop you hear be the sound of the China bubble bursting?
A few of the world's savvier financial minds think so.
Jim Chanos has made a fortune betting against investments he believes
are ripe for a fall. Among his most illustrious short trades was
pegging high-flying Enron as a disaster in waiting. Today the hedge
fund manager is taking aim at China. "Without a modicum of doubt we
have a credit-driven property bubble right now," Chanos recently
declared in a talk he gave at the London School of Economics. That was
a toned-down version of his quip to the New York Times that China is
"Dubai times 1,000 -- or worse," a comment the manager of the $6
billion Kynikos fund now half-heartedly describes as tongue-in-cheek.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/business/global/08chanos.html
Chanos is adding his respected voice to a growing rumble that China's
economy is nearing 212°F. In a recent survey of investment pros who
subscribe to Bloomberg's news and data service, 62 percent said they
believed China is brewing a bubble. Also singing in the China bubble
chorus: Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, Gloom and Doom
report publisher Marc Faber, and, most recently, James Rickards, a
Virginia-based consultant who knows a thing or two about financial
calamity -- he was the general counsel for Long-Term Capital
Management. To be clear, the China bubble talk is mostly focused on
the country's real estate sector, where property sales jumped 76
percent in 2009 and prices in some markets have recently been rising 8
to 10 percent a month. But the fear is that a meltdown in the real
estate market could take down the rest of the Chinese economy with it,
as has happened in the U.S. and Japan. And with China expected to
account for about a third of global growth in 2010, the consequences
could well be global.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601010&sid=aNZe4JWeV1aw
The Mother of All Stimulus Projects
The roots of the problem lie in China's aggressive response to the
financial crisis. To make up for reduced exports, the government
ramped up domestic spending and what ensued was the "mother of all
stimulus projects," says Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics. The roughly $575
billion in direct stimulus doled out by China's central government
represented 15 percent of its GDP. (Consider that if the U.S. stimulus
program had clocked in at 15 percent of GDP we would be debating the
merits of a $2 trillion program, not the $787 billion Congress settled
on.)
China's banks also followed the stimulus script, doling out $1.4
trillion in loans last year, a 30 percent increase from 2008. All that
liquidity did the job. According to China's official data (which are
notorious for their lack of transparency) the domestic economy
expanded 12.6 percent in 2009, offsetting a three percentage point
decline in GDP from exports. Overall, China's economy grew 8.7 percent
in 2009, up from 2008's anemic -- at least by China's standards -- GDP
growth of 6.8 percent.
However, much of the stimulus spending and lending has found its way
into real estate, creating ominous imbalances and the potential for
huge amounts of bad loans that the Chinese government would then have
to cover. Commercial developers who were all too happy to take the
stimulus money and build on spec are now often hard-pressed to find
tenants; entire office buildings and shopping malls stand empty in
many large cities that have attracted the most development. In the
residential market, the problem is flipped: too much demand and not
enough supply. Homes are the default investment choice for an
increasingly flush populace that has limited access to other
investment vehicles. And the prevailing sentiment is that if you don't
buy today you are going to be priced out of the market tomorrow.
In response to concerns that it's inflating a bubble in real estate,
the central government has begun taking steps to cool things off, but
to date it's more talk than action. Bank reserve requirements and a
key lending rate have been increased only slightly, and official 2010
lending targets, while lower than last year, will still surpass credit
outlays from 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/business/economy/19fed.html
Bubble Dynamics
A torrent of commercial development, a residential market convinced
that if you don't get in today you're toast, and a wan government
response to overheating ... Sound familiar? But there are several key
structural differences between our real estate mess and China's
situation, which suggest it is simplistic to assume China's bubble
must end in a U.S.-style meltdown.
1. Leverage is muted. About 25 percent of Chinese buy their homes
outright with cash. Among borrowers, a 50 percent down payment is
typical; you can't get a mortgage with less than 20 percent down and
if you are looking to buy a second (or third) property the down
payment is 40 percent. China also has yet to develop a HELOC market.
Lardy, of the PIIE, notes that China's household debt as a share of
household income runs about 40 percent. In 2007, U.S. household debt
to income was 130 percent. Nor has China fallen into the grasp of Wall
Street alchemists concocting toxic real estate derivatives.
2. It's not a blanket bubble. Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai are
China's Florida, Nevada, and California: speculation and overbuilding
have clearly fed bubble valuations. But Nicholas Consonery, China
analyst at the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, says
there's still plenty of unmet demand in China's second-, third-, and
fourth-tier cities.
3. The ubiquitous demand argument. Consonery also articulates the most
oft-heard reason for why the bubble doesn't have to burst: China
actually needs more construction, not less, to accommodate the mass
migration of Chinese from their rural past to their urban future.
While China's real estate picture doesn't necessarily stack up as
Dubai times 1,000, or even the United States circa 2006, similarities
to Japan's property bubble could be more salient. Rather than a quick
burst, Japan is still working through a long slow deflation from its
epic property bubble that peaked in the late 1980s. Patrick Chovanec,
professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management
in Beijing, who has advised private equity funds on China investments,
says that's the danger facing China. "Never underestimate the ability
of the Chinese to brush things under the rug, rather than
acknowledging losses and poor investments," Chovanec cautions. "That
can create a long-term drag on the economy."
Koyo Ozeki, head of Pimco's Asian credit analysis team, acknowledges
the Japan corollary (his comparison of China, Japan, and U.S. real
estate bubbles is below), but he believes a crucial difference is that
China has the ability to grow its way out of trouble. His worst case
scenario is that there's a two- or three-year cooling off period for
property values, but not a meltdown. "I think that it [would be] a
'correction,' as opposed to a 'burst of a bubble' similar to those
seen in the developed countries, because of China's structural demand
for modern houses," says Ozeki.
Source: Pimco estimates
The 437,000 Renminbi Question
What does this mean for your portfolio? When you have sharp minds on
both sides of the argument that should be a tip that making a big bet
on either is probably unwise. Moreover, China presents a few extra
challenges. Despite its large footprint -- China is expected to take
over Japan as the second largest economy in 2010 -- keep in mind we're
still talking about an emerging market.
Volatility and surprises (both upside and downside) are the norm. Add
in the fact that China's financial system and data reporting aren't
exactly open source code and you have another layer of complexity. And
even the China bears are careful to point out that they have no clue
when the bubble will burst. "We are not calling for an impending
crash," Chanos reminded the LSE crowd. Rogoff, former chief economist
of the IMF and co-author of This Time is Different, which chronicles
the long history of global financial calamities, recently told
Business Week he believes the liquidity deluge in China will
eventually culminate in enough bad debt to cause China's economic
growth to slow to just 2 percent to 3 percent a year. But as for when,
well, Rogoff would only pin it down to some time in the next 10 years,
and added that the setback would be short-term, not a Japanese-style
slow bleed.
Given all that uncertainty, it seems wise to channel Pascal's Wager:
Acknowledge you might be wrong and adjust your portfolio accordingly.
In this instance, that's an argument for taking a look at what might
happen if in fact China's bubble blows so explosively that it sends
the economy into a severe downturn. Here's how your portfolio could be
affected:
Stocks: China is the third largest economy behind the U.S. and Japan,
and it is expected to push its way to number two this year. The IMF
forecasts that China will grow 10 percent, more than double the
overall world rate. If the bubble does in fact burst, growth will slow
and we could be in for round two of a global recession. That's an
argument for being cautious with equities and making sure your
emergency cash fund stays stuffed.
U.S. Treasuries: China holds about 10 percent of outstanding Treasury
debt; it jockeys with Japan from month-to-month for the top spot among
foreign investors. If China's economy hit the skids, one theory is
that it might choose to sell off Treasuries to raise capital for
spending back home. But dumping Treasuries is far from an easy call
for China, as it would depress the value of its Treasury portfolio and
cause the renminbi to rise in value (and the dollar to fall), which is
not ideal for its exports. Questions about how China will handle its
cache of U.S. Treasuries will likely keep the bond market on edge.
That's just another risk factor to add to why Treasuries aren't
exactly the safest investment right now.
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/retirement-planning/blog/financial-independence/would-you-lend-to-tim-geithner-on-these-terms/745/?tag=content;col1
Emerging market funds and ETFs: These are the most obvious losers if
China falters. It's not just that China represents 17 percent of the
MSCI Emerging Market Index -- the single largest country weight -- but
that so many of the other emerging markets, especially those rich in
resources such as Brazil and Russia, need China to remain a hungry
consumer. Overweighting emerging markets seems especially dicey right
now, despite the sector's recent strong performance. But even beyond
the implications of a China bubble, it's also wise to understand that
the fastest-growing economies don't always produce the highest
investment returns.
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/investing/blog/wise-investing/growth-in-china-india-and-brazil-might-not-mean-great-investment-returns/1002/?tag=content;col1
Bubble or not, one thing is clear: China is teeing itself up for
plenty of volatility in the coming years. And it will affect the whole
world. "Even with the strong long-term fundamentals, any market that
has experienced such rapid growth creates its own fragility," says
investment banker Euan Rellie, senior managing director of Business
Development Asia LLC. "That makes it certain there will be declines
and corrections."
More on MoneyWatch:
China's Growth Threatened by Inflation, Or Is It Deflation?
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/investing/blog/against-grain/chinas-growth-threatened-by-inflation-or-is-it-deflation/481/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Video: Why You Should Worry About China
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/video/why-you-should-worry-about-china/385526/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
The China Boom: A Sure Thing NOT to Bet on in 2010
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/retirement-planning/blog/financial-independence/china-the-sure-thing-not-to-bet-on-in-2010/677/?tag=content;col1
Video: Why You Need Emerging Markets in Your Portfolio
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/investing/video/investors-why-you-need-china-and-brazil/388541/?tag=contentMain;contentBody
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503983_162-20000790-503983.html
China : Shifting Concentration Of Real Wealth
By: Indranil Sen Gupta Friday, March 19, 2010 9:56 AM
In my last column I discussed about the immense potentiality of china
towards creation of wealthy citizens. I have tried to depict the true
picture of the Chinese government, which helps to increase and develop
the citizens of china. It clearly points out those Chinese economic
policies are helping to reduce the gap of rich and poor. The proof of
the pudding is that China ranks No 2 on Forbes billionaires list.
Moreover 27 of them have made into the list for the first time and
that also at a point of time when the world economy is fighting
enormously with the recession nights.
I ended the report with a prelude to this topic where I will again try
my level best to bring forth the policy behind making Chinese citizen
and economy so surprising to the world economy. But before that we all
need to have a quick look towards the covered up journey of China.
If we look into the historic position of Chinese economy it will very
hard for any one to believe about the turn around been formalized in
to shape of today's Chinese economy.
• China's industries developed and grew from 1927 to 1931. Though
badly hit by the Great Depression from 1931 to 1935 and Japan's
occupation of Manchuria in 1931, industrial output recovered by 1936.
• By 1936, industrial output had recovered and surpassed its previous
peak in 1931 prior to the Great Depression's effects on China.
• This is best shown by the trends in Chinese GDP. In 1932, China's
GDP peaked at 28.8 billion, before falling to 21.3 billion by 1934 and
recovering to 23.7 billion by 1935.
• In 1978, China was to witness one of the most rapid periods of
change in her 5,000 year history.
• 30 years later, China had developed from an economically desolate
and ideological-driven country into an industrial powerhouse, rapidly
overtaking developed western nations in recession.
• In the 1990s, many state enterprises were privatized and private
individuals were allowed to create companies. In 1990, the Shanghai
Stock Exchange was reopened after Mao first closed it 41 years
earlier.
• It also established a series of "special economic zones" in which
foreigners could invest in China taking advantage of lower labor
costs.
This investment helped the Chinese economy boom. In addition, the
Chinese government established a series of joint ventures with foreign
capital to establish companies in industries hitherto unknown in
China.
• By 2001, China became a member of the World Trade Organization,
which has boosted its overall trade in exports/imports—estimated at
$851 billion in 2003—by an additional $170 billion a year.
• In 2006, an estimated $699.5 billion of foreign investment was
present in China. A great deal of this investment came from Chinese-
speaking regions such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, who was the first to
invest in China. Japanese and Western investment followed.
So now its well clear to my readers about the encapsulated journey of
today's Chinese economy from the era of 1930.But all these were in the
initial days were only plans or policies. How did they materialize is
the point to be analyzed.
They have been materialized due to one single factor that is the
education. Education not only in schools and college levels, but also
to create the huge untapped potentiality of skilled and semi skilled
education and educated mass of population. We all know that china
posses one of the largest population. The world at times used to
critics this huge mounting population of china. But china and its
government's decades after decade have converted their biggest weak
point in to their biggest strength. Today china enjoys the huge
potentiality of its consumers and consumption.
It have created the largest pool of skilled and semi skilled workers
and employees .What we say in corporate term Blue Collard Jobs. China
has used its cheap commodity resources to create world best products
and cheap products. Educations particularly in science field have
helped china to become the supreme power of technology. China have
created the world finest products through its massive and continuous
never ending technological innovations. It have created scientist and
researchers equivalent to the western world. All these have been
created on the wheel of proper and improvised education system
provided by Chinese governments.
We have discussed many times a about the Chinese economic growth
models and the huge reserves and its stock gold piles. But among all
these the real growth model is the development of education system in
china. Its real wealthy citizens are the ones who gets education and
take the future responsibility of Chinese economy. China is making a
shift of its wealth. Its busy in shaping up the fortune of the
citizens of china.
If china have become the No.2 in Forbes billionaires list it ca be
clearly declared without any second thought that China deserves to be
crowned with No.2
Very recently china is going to bring a change in the education
system.
• China plans to revamp its university admissions system, allowing
students to take subject-specific tests.
• Currently access to university is entirely dependent on the score
students gets on a two-day test on a wide range of subjects.
• A little more than 10.2 million students take the exam each year,
and only about 25% of them get in. The vast majority of those who
don't make the cut go straight into the work force. China is trying to
bring change into its education system so that the vast majority can
reap the benefits of education. Moreover this will also increase the
talent pool of Chinese new generation. More White Collard Jobs will be
created resulting free dependence of the economy.
The schools and colleges have been asked to develop and promote
create thinking minds within the students. This will enable the future
growth of china. Just imagine when many countries in the west are busy
to resolve the post war situation and busy in exercising images of
super power, China is creating and shaping its future. China is
thinking way ahead of another 30years from now. Where as many
countries in the west who are busy to come out of the bad sins
committed through speculative economic and business growth modules
adopted by them.
China is thinking to develop the nation where ideas will be sold and
other economies will buy them paying hefty amount Products will be
replaced by ideas. A time might come when the Chinese economy will
increase the taxation for selling only innovative ideas. It might
sound funny but juts imagine the growth model and the future strategy
adopted and being implemented by china towards developing its economy.
It can be said that China is SHIFTING CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH. Western
economies will become 2nd rank economies and China will come under
developed economies rank.
Today after so many years US and other economies have identified that
the real growth of any economy lies in the hands of education system.
It can created speculative gains and growth for shorter time frame but
if its looks within the thin line of economic growth the results are
beyond speculation. Today the US government is buying in shaping up
the education system. It asks its citizens to create scientist doctors
and researchers. Since it feels very well that the in the coming
decade other economies will take over the super power crown.
Today US have realized the mistakes it have committed and now bringing
radical changes in the education system to shape up the future. Very
recently US is emphasizing to improve students and teachers instead of
punishing under performing schools. US have 33% under performing
schools. Unfortunately the list is increasing each day without
rewinding back. US is also going spend four-billion dollar more on
education system.
At the end I would like to conclude the series with this note that all
these analysis of the education system was not to criticize but to
bring forth the true portrait being painted by the world and China
alone in the coming decades. We must understand the growth of any
economy never lies in numbers. It lies among all of us who are juts
like you reading this article. It is we who will bring the economic
growth GDP to 20% in the next 3 decades from now. Its not the business
profit figures or the fiscal balance which will bring this growth.
Education is the foundation of economic growth of any nation on this
planet.
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A Slow Boat From China
Posted: March 19, 2010 at 5:08 am
China said it will send an envoy to Washington to discuss the friction
between the two countries over the value of the yuan. It will not
matter. Too many members of Congress, CEOs of major exporters, and
union presidents who use China’s trade practices as a target for their
plans to save millions of jobs need to get the yuan’s value to “float”
in the free market. That should, they reason, give America the chance
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America can increase exports by two times what they are now, as the
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the cost of its manufactured goods will rise. The day when China’s GDP
catches America’s will be pushed well beyond the horizon.
China’s leaders are clearly in the midst of trying to fashion some
compromise. The Emperor has had no clothes for too long. China has
protected its currency in an unseemly way, at least economically. The
world’s most populous nation can act on its own, or have the other
major world powers label it a currency manipulator. That will probably
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does not need to mention that fact. It is easier for China to say it
cannot re-value the yuan because the action would ruin China’s cost
advantage and push Chinese workers out of jobs.
China’s envoy may seem to come to Washington hat in hand. He may
suggest some modest compromises on the yuan’s value. He will, however,
say in private and not in public, that the US would not want to see
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made in America.
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March 19, 2010, 3:23 a.m. EDT
Currency stress tests indicate Beijing 'readying' yuan move
SocGen says one-off 5%-10% appreciation coming in April or May
By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch
HONG KONG (MarketWatch) -- Additional evidence that China is preparing
to allow its currency to appreciate is accumulating, with various
government bureaus reportedly conducting their own "stress tests" on
the effect a stronger currency would have on the nation's industry.
Chinese media reported earlier in the week that the Ministry of
Finance would send researchers to study the impact of currency gains
on exporters and processing manufacturers. Meanwhile, findings from a
similar study, conducted by the Ministry of Commerce, are due to be
released by April 27, according to a report Friday in China Business
News.
ViewPoints: China, the New Dominant Economy?
Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein, predicts
that China will surpass the U.S. as the dominant economy by the year
2035, in a ViewPoints interview with Deputy Managing Editor Alan
Murray.
The Commerce Ministry is also readying a six-point study on measures
that would boost Chinese imports and foster more balanced foreign
trade, according to broker Société Générale.
"China is not abandoning plans for yuan appreciation/revaluation,
despite what many are interpreting as a political environment that is
growing hostile to such a development," wrote SocGen economist Glenn
Maguire in Hong Kong.
The developments, Maguire said, indicate China is preparing to shift
its policy stance in a manner that will be "more substantial" than a
mere gradual yuan appreciation.
Instead, SocGen is forecast a one-off revaluation of 5% to 10% in
either April or May.
"A move of this magnitude will negate the risk of the protectionist
card being played in the U.S. midterm elections," Maguire wrote.
However, Standard Chartered analysts said Friday markets were now
expecting a lower rate of annual yuan appreciation this week, likely
as a result of contradictory signals emanating from Beijing on its
currency.
The futures markets were pricing in 2.2% to 2.8% of annual yuan
appreciation against the dollar, down from the 3% rise indicated last
week.
Standard Chartered said it was advisable for companies that trade with
China to begin hedging currency risk.
State firms' profits up
In a related development Friday, the Finance Ministry said profit
among state-owned enterprises rose 89% in the first two months of the
year.
SocGen's Maguire said the finding was yet more evidence China's of a
coming move on the currency.
Profits were healthy, except among companies that would benefit from a
stronger yuan, Maguire said, adding that some state companies such as
power producers and steel makers would see input cost fall under a
revaluation scenario.
Steel mills in particular are likely to face price pressures, as major
iron-ore miners are seeking to raise prices significantly in this
year's contracts.
"The impressive increase in profits over the past year suggests a
greater ability of the Chinese industrial complex to withstand a yuan
appreciation than many analysts are crediting," Maguire said.
Chris Oliver is MarketWatch's Asia bureau chief, based in Hong Kong.
Comments (60)
Temporalist 6 hours ago+3 Votes (4 Up / 1 Dn)
Agreed Continent. The Chinese people will benefit from the increased
Yuan. They will start to buy their own goods and they will no longer
need to export as much.
This is just a red herring to distract people from the real problem
that most major countries around the world are broke and going more
broke; promising citizens more crazy entitlements and caving into
unions and labor forces while increasing debt and deficit spending to
all time highs.Reply Link Track Replies Report Abuse therosierside 3
hours ago+1 Vote (1 Up / 0 Dn) Request sentAgree and Disagree. China
on the whole cannot afford their own products, and export of the
manufacturing of goods is their primary resource. I say call their
bluff. When push comes to shove, pull. However, I do agree, this is a
'red herring'. The irony drips in your statement.
Go ahead threaten away on the rise of the yuan. Ha, it's funny though.
It's like the U.S.S.R. all over again, and China got a taste for
capitalism, and the wealth from manufacturing. Their people will riot
if this happens, and their government is more scared of their own
people than the US. Power to the people!
The U.S. and the U.K. can make out on this the most, if they team up,
and remember their roots. It's amazing though, how we can easily shoot
straight, but might shoot ourselves in the foot instead. Let's also
not forget our arabic AND israeli allies. Power to the people!Reply
Link Track Replies Report Abuse iewgnem 2 hours ago0 Votes Request
sentA strong currency will enable Chinese consumers to buy more, but
if the US is any indication, what they buy might not be their own
goods.Reply
1REAGAN 6 hours ago-1 Vote (4 Up / 5 Dn)
The dollar is in free fall. If China were to continue pegging the
yuan, the result would be catastrophic. China must float the yuan.
Maybe it will help Americans to see that hussein is ruining the
American economy.
heisamazing 5 hours ago+1 Vote (3 Up / 2 Dn)
Yeah, don't let facts get in the way of an opinion. The dollar is not
in a free fall.
See 2 year graph: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=dxy&sid=0&o_symb=dxy&freq=1&time=9
Its obvious where your bias lies.
1REAGAN 5 hours ago+1 Vote (4 Up / 3 Dn)
The dollar lost 30% versus the euro in 2009. The Keynesian huessy
policies will continue to weaken the dollar. The dollar is in free
fall.
The pound is also weakening because of the Keynesian policies of the
"British Labour Party."
Countries who implement socialist, Keynesian policies will have
weakening currencies. Countries who move toward free enterprise will
have strengthening currencies.
tjbrew 5 hours ago-1 Vote (3 Up / 4 Dn)
With a screen name like "1REAGAN", it's not hard to see your bias.
Yes, Reagan, the originator of large fiscal deficits and Reagonomics,
the start of the vast transfer of wealth to a few elite with "trickle
down" economics. If we just cut corporate taxes to zero that would fix
everything!
And the guy you're call "hussein" who in your opinion is "ruining the
American economy" ... yeah, the guy before him left the economy in
such great shape it's really hard to see why it hasn't all been fixed
by now! Sheesh ...
LBX 6 hours ago-1 Vote (1 Up / 2 Dn) Req
The RMB is likely to be floated in April.
Once it is floated, it will immediately DROP about 3 to 5%.
AmeriWho 5 hours agoEven (2 Up / 2 Dn)
RMB?
aiiiyo 2 hours ago+1 Vote (1 Up / 0 Dn)
same as Yuan
bull 6 hours ago+3 Votes (5 Up / 2 Dn)
China will not let the Yuan move more than 5% vs. the dollar per year
- forget about anything else as it will kill their export machine and
their grander plans......They do not care about the well being of
their people......they are just cheap labor in the Govt's mind.....
NO-FOMC 2 hours ago0 Votes Request senttrue maybe 10 years ago, and
yes i know that for a fact...but the bottom line is which is the
better of two evils....@#$%&! your reserves away by buying worthless
US assets (treasury debt) or help your domestic economy?
China realizes they are soooo done with eating table scraps from the
floor ...
iewgnem 2 hours ago0 Votes
I think a lot of Americans right now will rather see their welbeing
improve from getting employed as "cheap labor" making things for
exports than being able to buy more stuff from abroad with
unemployment checks. But then the US government cares too much for its
own people to let that happen.
UPJONES 5 hours ago+3 Votes (4 Up / 1 Dn)
The profit of the enterprise working on export processing business is
razor thin, at just about 2-5%. They will file bankruptcy right after
a 5% appreciation, and millions of Dagong Mei/Zai (Hunting girl/boys)
will lose their jobs.
China is buying time to do three things:
1. Build its domestic consumer market by increasing incomes/salaries
2. Perfecting the social secuity networks-Pension, Medicare and
apartments(Mostly for homeless)
3. Industrial transformation from manufacturing to innovation and
value added (Look at the neo-energy, nano, Aero, and especially bullet
trains, very competitve given the gov incentives and lots of "Cheap
and Good" engineers)
LBX 5 hours ago-1 Vote (1 Up / 2 Dn)
Many of them are actually getting negative gross margins. not to
mention net.
rojt88 4 hours ago+2 Votes (2 Up / 0 Dn)
LBX
The differences between Chinese and American accounting is caused by
pay differentials between the two cultures. Historically and
culturally, even dating back centuries, Mandarin officials and Chinese
executive pay is always held low. Much of this is due to Confucian
ethics and morality that wealth is not an indicator of success in
life. This is much different from the western ideal. Chinese
traditionally always hide income while American flaunt it.
Chinese businesses whose bosses serve for decades, like Hong Kong's Li
and Tung dynasties, always hide profits and exaggerate losses vs the
Western fashion of hiding loses and boosting profits so that rotating
CEOs can get their annual bonuses.
I estimate that the Chinese have 10-15% of their assets in hidden
accounts...or US$500billion (for PRC, HK, Taiwan). A lot of Chinese
inflation has been due to the sudden repatriation of much of this
offshore moneys into China due to financial instability in the west.
In a recent Chinese survey of foreign funds pouring into China over
the past decade, Hong Kong ranked first, then some islands in the
Caribbean ranked second and third. USA and Europe were last on the
list.
NO-FOMC 4 hours ago+1 Vote (2 Up / 1 Dn)
Funny how at the start of the century and after depression, USA had
the same characteristics...so where would you see china in 20+ years?
and where would you see USA in 20 years? remember..the world was
pegged to dollar gold before nixon. So last 20 years, our growth was
real or inflated?
NO-FOMC 2 hours ago+1 Vote (1 Up / 0 Dn)
US is buying time to avoid three things:
1. Financing a ever growing trade and acct deficit by depreciating the
USD to avoid default
2. Insure our world dominance by going to war so we wont lose our
world reserve currency title
3. the failure to realize a over leverage and underfunded US economy
will not be sustainable
Bastiat 5 hours ago+2 Votes (4 Up / 2 Dn)
Obama wants to run China. He found out that he could't run the US so
now he wants to run China. Obama, your problem is the US$, not the
yuan. You kept Bernanke, now deal with the imbecile.
RayO 5 hours agoEven (1 Up / 1 Dn)
Look out Walmart here comes a big Wave.
iewgnem 34 minutes ago0 Votes Request sentWhat if they simply
increase prices to maintain their margins? Considering in some
industries China consists of >90% of global output, it will still cost
importers less to absorb the cost than to spend billions in new
capital investments and time for production to ramp up. At the same
time re-exporters will see their material prices come down which will
also help to balance their margins.
All the talk about higher exchange rate driving Chinese exporters out
of business are assuming they don't have the power to pass the cost to
consumers on the other side. I suspect part of the stress test is to
see just how much they can raise the costs without losing their
business.Reply Link Track Replies Report Abuse « « ‹ ‹
Temporalist 6 hours ago+3 Votes (4 Up / 1 Dn)
Agreed Continent. The Chinese people will benefit from the increased
Yuan. They will start to buy their own goods and they will no longer
need to export as much.
This is just a red herring to distract people from the real problem
that most major countries around the world are broke and going more
broke; promising citizens more crazy entitlements and caving into
unions and labor forces while increasing debt and deficit spending to
all time highs.
therosierside 3 hours ago+1 Vote (1 Up / 0 Dn)
Agree and Disagree. China on the whole cannot afford their own
products, and export of the manufacturing of goods is their primary
resource. I say call their bluff. When push comes to shove, pull.
However, I do agree, this is a 'red herring'. The irony drips in your
statement.
Go ahead threaten away on the rise of the yuan. Ha, it's funny though.
It's like the U.S.S.R. all over again, and China got a taste for
capitalism, and the wealth from manufacturing. Their people will riot
if this happens, and their government is more scared of their own
people than the US. Power to the people!
The U.S. and the U.K. can make out on this the most, if they team up,
and remember their roots. It's amazing though, how we can easily shoot
straight, but might shoot ourselves in the foot instead. Let's also
not forget our arabic AND israeli allies. Power to the people!
iewgnem 2 hours ago0 Votes
A strong currency will enable Chinese consumers to buy more, but if
the US is any indication, what they buy might not be their own goods.
1REAGAN 6 hours ago-1 Vote (4 Up / 5 Dn)
The dollar is in free fall. If China were to continue pegging the
yuan, the result would be catastrophic. China must float the yuan.
Maybe it will help Americans to see that hussein is ruining the
American economy.
heisamazing 5 hours ago+1 Vote (3 Up / 2 Dn)
Yeah, don't let facts get in the way of an opinion. The dollar is not
in a free fall.
See 2 year graph: http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=dxy&sid=0&o_symb=dxy&freq=1&time=9
Its obvious where your bias lies.
1REAGAN 5 hours ago+1 Vote (4 Up / 3 Dn)
The dollar lost 30% versus the euro in 2009. The Keynesian huessy
policies will continue to weaken the dollar. The dollar is in free
fall.
The pound is also weakening because of the Keynesian policies of the
"British Labour Party."
Countries who implement socialist, Keynesian policies will have
weakening currencies. Countries who move toward free enterprise will
have strengthening currencies.Link Report Abuse tjbrew 5 hours ago-1
Vote (3 Up / 4 Dn) Request sentWith a screen name like "1REAGAN",
it's not hard to see your bias. Yes, Reagan, the originator of large
fiscal deficits and Reagonomics, the start of the vast transfer of
wealth to a few elite with "trickle down" economics. If we just cut
corporate taxes to zero that would fix everything!
And the guy you're call "hussein" who in your opinion is "ruining the
American economy" ... yeah, the guy before him left the economy in
such great shape it's really hard to see why it hasn't all been fixed
by now! Sheesh ...
LBX 6 hours ago-1 Vote (1 Up / 2 Dn)
The RMB is likely to be floated in April.
Once it is floated, it will immediately DROP about 3 to 5%.
AmeriWho 5 hours ago
Even (2 Up / 2 Dn)
aiiiyo 2 hours ago+1
same as Yuan
bullrunisbull 6 hours ago+3
China will not let the Yuan move more than 5% vs. the dollar per year
- forget about anything else as it will kill their export machine and
their grander plans......They do not care about the well being of
their people......they are just cheap labor in the Govt's mind.....
NO-FOMC 2 hours ago
true maybe 10 years ago, and yes i know that for a fact...but the
bottom line is which is the better of two evils....@#$%&! your
reserves away by buying worthless US assets (treasury debt) or help
your domestic economy?
China realizes they are soooo done with eating table scraps from the
floor ...R
I think a lot of Americans right now will rather see their welbeing
improve from getting employed as "cheap labor" making things for
exports than being able to buy more stuff from abroad with
unemployment checks. But then the US government cares too much for its
own people to let that happen.
UPJONES 5 hours ago+3 Votes (4 Up / 1 Dn)
The profit of the enterprise working on export processing business is
razor thin, at just about 2-5%. They will file bankruptcy right after
a 5% appreciation, and millions of Dagong Mei/Zai (Hunting girl/boys)
will lose their jobs.
China is buying time to do three things:
1. Build its domestic consumer market by increasing incomes/salaries
2. Perfecting the social secuity networks-Pension, Medicare and
apartments(Mostly for homeless)
3. Industrial transformation from manufacturing to innovation and
value added (Look at the neo-energy, nano, Aero, and especially bullet
trains, very competitve given the gov incentives and lots of "Cheap
and Good" engineers)
LBX 5 hours ago-1 Vote (1 Up / 2 Dn)
Many of them are actually getting negative gross margins. not to
mention net.
rojt88 4 hours ago+2 Votes (2 Up / 0 Dn)
LBX
The differences between Chinese and American accounting is caused by
pay differentials between the two cultures. Historically and
culturally, even dating back centuries, Mandarin officials and Chinese
executive pay is always held low. Much of this is due to Confucian
ethics and morality that wealth is not an indicator of success in
life. This is much different from the western ideal. Chinese
traditionally always hide income while American flaunt it.
Chinese businesses whose bosses serve for decades, like Hong Kong's Li
and Tung dynasties, always hide profits and exaggerate losses vs the
Western fashion of hiding loses and boosting profits so that rotating
CEOs can get their annual bonuses.
I estimate that the Chinese have 10-15% of their assets in hidden
accounts...or US$500billion (for PRC, HK, Taiwan). A lot of Chinese
inflation has been due to the sudden repatriation of much of this
offshore moneys into China due to financial instability in the west.
In a recent Chinese survey of foreign funds pouring into China over
the past decade, Hong Kong ranked first, then some islands in the
Caribbean ranked second and third. USA and Europe were last on the
list.
NO-FOMC 4 hours ago+1 Vote (2 Up / 1 Dn)
Funny how at the start of the century and after depression, USA had
the same characteristics...so where would you see china in 20+ years?
and where would you see USA in 20 years? remember..the world was
pegged to dollar gold before nixon. So last 20 years, our growth was
real or inflated?
NO-FOMC 2 hours ago+1 Vote (1 Up / 0 Dn)
US is buying time to avoid three things:
1. Financing a ever growing trade and acct deficit by depreciating the
USD to avoid default
2. Insure our world dominance by going to war so we wont lose our
world reserve currency title
3. the failure to realize a over leverage and underfunded US economy
will not be sustainable
Bastiat 5 hours ago+2 Votes (4 Up / 2 Dn)
Obama wants to run China. He found out that he could't run the US so
now he wants to run China. Obama, your problem is the US$, not the
yuan. You kept Bernanke, now deal with the imbecile.
RayO 5 hours agoEven (1 Up / 1 Dn) Re
Look out Walmart here comes a big Wave.
iewgnem 34 minutes ago
What if they simply increase prices to maintain their margins?
Considering in some industries China consists of >90% of global
output, it will still cost importers less to absorb the cost than to
spend billions in new capital investments and time for production to
ramp up. At the same time re-exporters will see their material prices
come down which will also help to balance their margins.
All the talk about higher exchange rate driving Chinese exporters out
of business are assuming they don't have the power to pass the cost to
consumers on the other side. I suspect part of the stress test is to
see just how much they can raise the costs without losing their
business.Reply Link Track Replies Report Abuse
March 19, 2010, 3:31 p.m. EDT
U.S. stocks break win streak on jitters over Greece, India, oil
By Donna Kardos Yesalavich, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- A retreat in energy stocks weighed on the
broader market Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average stalling
in its attempt to set its longest winning streak in more than 13
years.
The energy sector was the weakest category in a broad-based sell-off
as oil prices retreated near $80 a barrel. Worries about key overseas
economies also weighed on the market, which some said was due for a
pause after a solid run lately.
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55637
The Dow Jones Industrial Average /quotes/comstock/10w!i:dji/delayed
(INDU 10,742, -37.41, -0.35%) fell 47 points, or 0.4%, to 10,731.93,
on pace to snap an eight-day winning streak, the first such run since
late August. A nine-day gain, if the Dow can manage a late-day
rebound, would represent the Dow's longest rally since November 1996.
A dive in energy prices fueled by an uptick in the dollar has made
that rosy outcome seem less likely as the session has played out. Oil
futures were recently off $1.75 at $80.45 a barrel after retreating
near $79 earlier in the session at the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The Standard & Poor's 500 Index /quotes/comstock/21z!i1:in\x (SPX
1,160, -5.92, -0.51%) , which slipped Thursday, recently was off 0.6%,
led by a 1.2% decline in its energy sector. Baker Hughes /quotes/
comstock/13*!bhi/quotes/nls/bhi (BHI 47.53, -1.84, -3.73%) slid 3.6%,
while Consol Energy /quotes/comstock/13*!cnx/quotes/nls/cnx (CNX
45.59, +0.04, +0.10%) and Massey Energy /quotes/comstock/13*!mee/
quotes/nls/mee (MEE 49.91, -1.74, -3.37%) were off more than 2% each.
Exxon Mobil /quotes/comstock/13*!xom/quotes/nls/xom (XOM 66.56, -0.48,
-0.72%) fell 1%, and Chevron /quotes/comstock/13*!cvx/quotes/nls/cvx
(CVX 74.17, -0.81, -1.08%) was down 0.6%.
"The commodities, like other risky assets, are taking a little bit of
a breather," said Russ Koesterich, managing director of BlackRock's
scientific active equity business. But he said it was encouraging that
both stocks and raw materials weren't declining even more.
"The market has had a big run-up, it's continuing to defy some of the
pessimists, and this happened on a bunch of factors," including benign
inflation readings and a decision by the Federal Reserve to keep its
rate target near zero, said Koesterich. "This is helping to keep a
floor under stocks."
Other central banks around the world, however, have become more wary
of inflation. On Friday, investors were spooked by the Reserve Bank of
India's move to increase its key lending rate to 5% and its borrowing
rate to 3.5%.
Uncertainty over possible financial aid for Greece also lingered,
hurting the euro. The U.S. dollar index /quotes/comstock/11j!i:dxy0
(DXY 80.75, +0.52, +0.65%) , which heavily weights the euro in a
basket of currencies versus the greenback, was recently up 0.6%. See
more in Currencies.
Indexes tracking higher-risk corners of the stock market fared worse
than the Dow and S&P. The Nasdaq Composite Index /quotes/comstock/10y!
i:comp (COMP 2,374, -16.87, -0.71%) was off 0.8%, while the Russell
2000 fell 1.2%.
Digits: Palm's Future in DoubtThe latest forecast and smart-phone
sales data from Palm is raising serious concerns about the company's
viability. Dow Jones Newswires' Roger Cheng joins Stacey Delo on
Digits to discuss. Plus, an unprecedented look at the finances behind
YouTube, the world's most successful video site, as well as the
growing number of vehicles offering a self-parking option.
The S&P's health-care sector was flat ahead of an expected weekend
vote on federal reforms.
"We've been significantly overweight in health care for many months
now with the expectation that when it passes -- good, bad or ugly --
that that certainty will allow the health-care stocks to breathe a
sigh of relief," said Harry Rady, chief executive and portfolio
manager of Rady Asset Management.
Among the sector's winners on Friday were UnitedHealth Group /quotes/
comstock/13*!unh/quotes/nls/unh (UNH 34.54, +0.15, +0.44%) and
WellPoint /quotes/comstock/13*!wlp/quotes/nls/wlp (WLP 65.19, +0.12,
+0.19%) , up more than 2% each. But Merck /quotes/comstock/13*!mrk/
quotes/nls/mrk (MRK 38.05, -0.01, -0.02%) slipped 1% after the Food
and Drug Administration warned about the increased risk of muscle
injury for patients taking an 80-milligram dose of its cholesterol
drug Zocor.
Among stocks to watch in other sectors, Boeing /quotes/comstock/13*!ba/
quotes/nls/ba (BA 71.34, +0.62, +0.87%) rose 0.9% after announcing
plans to increase production of its 777 and 747 aircraft earlier than
anticipated amid increasing demand. See more on Boeing.
Among stocks in focus, Palm /quotes/comstock/15*!palm/quotes/nls/palm
(PALM 4.02, +0.02, +0.44%) plunged 27%. The company reported a
narrower quarterly loss but warned of significantly lower revenue in
the current quarter amid disappointing sales of its latest
smartphones. Read more on Palm.
Trading volume was higher, with about 3.8 billion shares having
changed hands in New York Stock Exchange Composite volume recently,
compared with the recent full-day average of about 4.8 billion. The
increase came on so-called quadruple witching day, when contracts for
stock-index futures, stock-index options, stock options and single-
stock futures expire.
Treasury prices slipped. The 10-year note /quotes/comstock/31*!ust10y
(UST10Y 3.69, +0.01, +0.27%) fell 1/32 to yield 3.678%.
More Market Snapshot
March 18, 2010 U.S. stocks' uneven session extends Dow win streak
http://store.marketwatch.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/PremiumNewsletters_CampaignTheTechnicalIndicator?dist=IYMLMSB1T
March 17, 2010 Dow win streak longest since August 2009
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-post-gains-in-early-trading-2010-03-17
March 16, 2010 U.S. stocks finish higher in cheering Fed
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-hold-near-flat-ahead-of-fed-2010-03-16
March 15, 2010 U.S. stocks make late-day rise, helped by Wal-Mart
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-mostly-lower-google-dips-wal-mart-up-2010-03-15
March 13, 2010 U.S. stock investors to use data as a road map
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-investors-to-use-data-as-a-road-map-2010-03-13
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-open-higher-led-by-boeing-2010-03-19
bademiyansubhanallah
STAFF WRITER 15:59 HRS IST
Shimla, Mar 18 (PTI) Newly-appointed BJP general secretary Jagat
Prakash Nadda today resigned as cabinet minister in Himachal Pradesh
to take up his new assignment at the national level.
Nadda met Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal in assembly and submitted
his resignation which was accepted.
"Yes I have submitted by resignation to the chief minister," Nadda
told PTI.
"I have asked him (Nadda) to continue till the ongoing budget session
of the assembly," Dhumal said.
Nadda in his letter to the CM said that since he has been appointed as
national general secretary of the BJP he was resigning from HP cabinet
in accordance with the party's policy of 'one man one post'.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/570541_Nadda-resigns-as-HP-minister-to-take-up-natl-assignment
JP Nadda resigns as Himachal cabinet minister
Posted by Ravinder Makhaik on Mar 18th, 2010
Shimla: Forest minister Jagat Prakash Nadda on being appointed as BJP
general secretary today submitted his resignation as a cabinet
minister in the Prem Kumar Dhumal ministry to take up his new
assignment at the national level.
Nadda met Dhumal in assembly today and submitted his resignation which
has been accepted.
“I have submitted by resignation to the chief minister,” Nadda
confirmed to My Himachal News.
“I have asked the forest minister to continue till the ongoing budget
session,” said the chief minister.
Nadda in his letter to the CM cited that since he had been appointed
national general secretary of party he was resigning from HP cabinet
in accordance with the party’s declared policy of ‘one man one post’.
http://himachal.us/2010/03/18/jp-nadda-resigns-as-himachal-cabinet-minister/19150/news/ravinder
Day curfew lifted in Bareilly
STAFF WRITER 12:37 HRS IST
Bareilly, Mar 20 (PTI) With the situation improving in riot-hit areas,
day curfew has been lifted in the city.
"The situation is completely normal and day curfew in five police
areas - Prem Nagar, Qila, Baradari, Kotwali and Subhash Nagar - has
been lifted between 5 am to 10 pm," officials said.
The situation had become a bit tense yesterday after six statues were
allegedly stolen from the ancient Jagganath Puri temple in Bada Bazar
area.
Protesting against the theft, members of a community blocked road,
which was later lifted on the assurance that the guilty would be
arrested soon.
Curfew was clamped in four of the six police areas of the city on
March 2 in the wake of communal clashes over a barawafat procession.It
was later extended to one more police area after fresh violence on
March 11.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/573674_Day-curfew-lifted-in-Bareilly
BJP demands Raj Home Minister's resignation
STAFF WRITER 23:7 HRS IST
Jaipur, Mar 19 (PTI) Holding statewide protests, BJP today demanded
the resignation of Rajasthan Home Minister Shanti Dhariwal, alleging
he had threatened its MLAs in the legislative assembly.
"Besides Dhariwal's resignation, the Congress government should revoke
the suspension of two MLAs -- R S Rathore (whip) and Hanuman Beniwal
-- who were suspended in previous two sittings of the House," Arun
Chaturvedi, its state president, told a press conference here.
The Leader of the House and Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot has not been
present in the House for the last two days and should attempt to break
the deadlock, Chaturvedi said.
"If this is not done on March 22, the BJP will hold 'Jail Bharo' in
all district headquarters," he said.
Meanwhile, BJP general secretary Vasundhara Raje alleged the state
government's repressive tactics in the assembly were a reminder of the
British period.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/573450_BJP-demands-Raj-Home-Minister-s-resignation
Praveen Togadia held for trying to walk into Kandhamal
STAFF WRITER 0:22 HRS IST
Bhubaneswar, Mar 19 (PTI) Firebrand VHP leader Praveen Togadia was
tonight arrested alongwith his supporters by the Orissa Police as they
tried to enter riot-hit Kandhamal district, defying a ban on their
visit.
Togadia, who arrived at Charichowk in Boudh district, neighbouring
Kandhamal, was held under Section 151 of the CrPc when they tried to
walk into Kandhamal district despite a ban, police said.
After they were asked not to proceed to the district, they initially
held a sit-in protest at Charichowk.
The VHP leader is now lodged at the forest inspection bungalow at
Charichowk, Lambodar Buda, Inspector-in-charge of Boudh police
station, said.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/573518_Praveen-Togadia-held-for-trying-to-walk-into-Kandhamal
Togadia released by Orissa Police
STAFF WRITER 12:11 HRS IST
Phulbani (Orissa), Mar 20 (PTI) Fireband VHP leader Praveen Togadia,
who was arrested while trying to enter riot-hit Kandhamal district
despite prohibitory orders, was today released by Orissa Police.
"Togadia was released on a bond and he left for Bhanjanagar in Ganjam
district," Kandhamal SP Pravin Kumar said.
The VHP leader was arrested last night under Section 151 of the CrPC
when he tried to walk into Kandhamal, along with supporters.
Earlier the state government had put a ban on Togadia's visit in view
of the communally-fragile nature of the district, which had seen
largescale communal violence in the wake of killing of VHP leader
Lakhsmananda Saraswati in August 2008.
Meanwhile, the district VHP unit of Kandhamal organised a 12-hour
bandh protesting Togadia's arrest.
While all shops and business establishments were closed, educational
institutions and government offices functioned as usual, police said.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/573641_Togadia-released-by-Orissa-Police
Shahnawaz not to attend BJP spokespersons' meet
STAFF WRITER 14:12 HRS IST
New Delhi, Mar 19 (PTI) BJP leader Shahnawaz Hussain, who is
reportedly sulking after he was overlooked for the post of general
secretary by party president Nitin Gadkari, is likely to keep away
from a meeting of new spokespersons convened today by Leader of
Opposition Sushma Swaraj.
Swaraj is holding a meeting of the seven BJP spokespersons to decide
allocation of work and brief them about their new job.
Sources said the meeting was being held at the behest of Chief
Spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad who is keen on getting his new team
cracking without any delay.
Sources close to Hussain said he is likely to keep away from the
meeting but insisted that this is due to his ill-health.
"He is a disciplined soldier of the party and will go with whatever
the party decides.
http://www.ptinews.com/news/572096_Shahnawaz-not-to-attend-BJP-spokespersons--meet
Dissent in BJP over Gadkari\’s new team – IBNLive.com
Published by admin on March 19, 2010 filed under Asian News
Headlines · Comments (0) The Hindu Dissent in BJP over Gadkari’s
new team IBNLive.com BJP’s latest worries- party President Nitin
Gadkari’s honeymoon period is over. His first challange will be Bihar-
and state party leaders anger might cost the party dearly as Bihar
will be going to polls later this year. Shatrughan Sinha and CP Thakur
… Everyone can’t be satisfied: Gadkari about dissent over his team
Economic Times Shatrughan vents ire at not being included in Nitin
Gadkari’s team Daily News & Analysis Dissent in BJP over Gadkari’s new
team India Today NDTV.com
http://asia.getsomenews.com/2010/03/19/dissent-in-bjp-over-gadkaris-new-team-ibnlive-com/
Raise complaints with me, not media: Gadkari
on March 19th, 2010
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Nitin Gadkari Friday asked
party leaders to raise any complaints about his choice of a new team
with him and not with the media.
“Those who have complaints about the new team should speak to me, not
the media,” Gadkari told the NDTV news channel, a day after actor-
turned-party MP Shatrughan Sinha’s remarks on the composition of the
new team of office-bearers announced Tuesday.
Sinha Thursday recited the lyrics of an old Hindi film song in answer
to a question about the new team. “Uff na karenge, lab see lenge,
aansu pee lenge (I will not sigh, will seal my lips and swallow my
tears),” he said, expressing disappointment that leaders like Yashwant
Sinha had been left out and the team had not been able to give a
message of dynamism.
“It’s wrong to say that Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie were excluded
because they are Advani detractors… It’s not possible to include
everyone on the team,” Gadkari said.
The BJP president also justified the appointment of Nehru-Gandhi
family member Varun Gandhi as party secretary, saying: “Varun Gandhi
should be given a chance, why hold the past against him?”
The party had sought to distance itself from Varun Gandhi after he
allegedly made inflammatory remarks during the Lok Sabha election
campaign last year.
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Aryan race
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with "Arianism" which was an early non-trinitarian
form of Christianity.
This article is about the racial theory. For the full range of
meanings of "Aryan", see Aryan. For Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and
Jain spiritual interpretations, see Arya. For other uses, see Aryan
(disambiguation).
The Aryan race is a concept historically influential in European
culture in the period of the late 19th century and early 20th century.
It derives from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-
European languages and their descendants up to the present day
constitute a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race.
[1]
While originally meant simply as a neutral ethnic classification, it
was later used for political racism in Nazi and neo-Nazi ideological
form. It became a concept of scientific racism, and hence also in
other currents such as occultism and white supremacism.
Belief in the existence of an Aryan race is sometimes referred to as
Aryanism.
Origin of the term
Main article: Aryan
See also: Arya
The earliest epigraphically-attested reference to the word arya occurs
in the 6th century Behistun inscription, which describes itself to
have been composed "in arya [language or script]" (§ 70). As is also
the case for all other Old Iranian language usage, the arya of the
inscription does not signify anything but "Iranian".[2]
The region Aria as depicted by Waldseemuller in 1507The term Aryan
originates from the Sanskrit word arya, attested in the ancient texts
of Hinduism such as the Rigveda. Arya in Sanskrit holds the meaning
civilized or simply referring to an individual of higher
consciousness.
In the 18th century, the most ancient known Indo-European languages
were those of the Indo-Iranians' ancestors. The word Aryan was adopted
to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian people, but also to native Indo-
European speakers as a whole, including the Albanians, Kurds,
Armenians, Greeks, Latins, and Germans. It was soon recognised that
Balts, Celts, and Slavs also belonged to the same group. It was argued
that all of these languages originated from a common root—now known as
Proto-Indo-European—spoken by an ancient people who must have been the
original ancestors of the European, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan peoples.
The ethnic group composed of the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their modern
descendants was termed the Aryans.
This usage was common in the late 19th and early 20th century. An
example of an influential best-selling book that reflects this usage
is the 1920 book The Outline of History by H. G. Wells.[3] In it he
wrote of the accomplishments of the Aryan people, stating how they
"learned methods of civilization" while "Sargon II and Sardanapalus
were ruling in Assyria and fighting with Babylonia and Syria and
Egypt". As such, Wells suggested that the Aryans had eventually
"subjugated the whole ancient world, Semitic, Aegean and Egyptian
alike".[4] In the 1944 edition of Rand McNally’s World Atlas, the
Aryan race is depicted as being one of the ten major racial groupings
of mankind.[5] The science fiction author Poul Anderson (1926–2001),
an anti-racist Libertarian of Scandinavian ancestry, in his many
novels, novellas, and short stories, consistently used the term Aryan
as a synonym for Indo-Europeans. He spoke of the Aryan bird of prey
which impelled those of the Aryan race to take the lead in developing
interstellar travel, colonize habitable planets in other planetary
systems and become leading business entrepreneurs on the newly
colonized planets.[6]
The use of "Aryan" as a synonym for "Indo-European" or to a lesser
extent for "Indo-Iranian", is regarded today by many as obsolete and
politically incorrect, but may still occasionally appear in material
based on older scholarship, or written by persons accustomed to older
usage, such as in a 1989 article in Scientific American by Colin
Renfrew in which he uses the word "Aryan" in its traditional meaning
as a synonym for "Indo-European".[7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Iranian_peoples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_American
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Renfrew
19th-century physical anthropology
Main article: Caucasian race
See also: scientific racism
The 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885-1890)
shows the Caucasian race (in blue) as comprising Aryans, Semites and
Hamites. Aryans are further subdivided into European Aryans and Indo-
Aryans (the latter corresponding to the group now designated Indo-
Iranians).In 19th century physical anthropology, represented by some
as being scientific racism, the "Aryan race" was considered a subgroup
of the Caucasian (or Europid) race, essentially corresponding to the
speakers of Indo-European languages native to Europe, Persia and the
Indo-Gangetic plain in South Asia.
The original 19th-century and early 20th-century use of the term Aryan
referred to "the early speakers of Proto-Indo European and their
descendents".[8][9] Max Müller is often identified as the first writer
to speak of an Aryan "race" in English. In his Lectures on the Science
of Language in 1861[10] he referred to Aryans as a "race of people".
At the time, the term race had the meaning of "a group of tribes or
peoples, an ethnic group".[11]
When Müller's statement was interpreted to imply a biologically
distinct sub-group of humanity, he soon clarified that he simply meant
a line of descent, insisting that it was very dangerous to mix
linguistics and anthropology. "The Science of Language and the Science
of Man cannot be kept too much asunder ... I must repeat what I have
said many times before, it would be wrong to speak of Aryan blood as
of dolichocephalic grammar".[12] He restated his opposition to this
method in 1888 in his essay Biographies of words and the home of the
Aryas.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_M%C3%BCller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalic_index
Müller was responding to the development of racial anthropology, and
the influence of the work of Arthur de Gobineau who argued that the
Indo-Europeans represented a superior branch of humanity. A number of
later writers, such as the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in
his book L'Aryen, argued that this superior branch could be identified
biologically by using the cephalic index (a measure of head shape) and
other indicators. He argued that the long-headed "dolichocephalic-
blond" Europeans, characteristically found in northern Europe, were
natural leaders, destined to rule over more "brachiocephalic" (short
headed) peoples.[13].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_de_Gobineau
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacher_de_Lapouge
The division of the Caucasian race into Aryans, Semites and Hamites is
in origin linguistic, not based on physical anthropology, the division
in physical anthropology being that into Nordic, Alpine and
Mediterranean. However, the linguistic classification of "Aryan"
became closely associated, and conflated, with the classification of
"Nordic".
This claim became increasingly important during the 19th century. In
the mid-19th century, it was commonly believed that the Aryans
originated in the southwestern steppes of present-day Russia. However,
by the late 19th century the steppe theory of Aryan origins was
challenged by the view that the Aryans originated in ancient Germany
or Scandinavia, or at least that in those countries the original Aryan
ethnicity had been preserved. The German origin of the Aryans was
especially promoted by the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who claimed
that the Proto-Indo-European peoples were identical to the Corded Ware
culture of Neolithic Germany. This idea was widely circulated in both
intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century,[14]
and is reflected in the concept of "Corded-Nordics" in Carleton S.
Coon's 1939 The Races of Europe.
Other anthropologists contested such claims. In Germany, Rudolf
Virchow launched a study of craniometry, which prompted him to
denounce "Nordic mysticism" in the 1885 Anthropology Congress in
Karlsruhe, while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated in
the same congress that the people of Europe, be they English, German,
French, and Spaniard belonged to a "mixture of various races,"
furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology...[are] against
any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race"
to others.[10]
Virchow's contribution to the debate sparked a controversy. Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, a strong supporter of the theory of a superior
Aryan race, attacked Josef Kollmann arguments in detail. While the
"Aryan race" theory remained popular, particularly in Germany, some
authors defended Virchow's perspective, in particular Otto Schrader,
Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist Robert Hartmann (1831–1893),
who proposed to ban the notion of "Aryan" from anthropology.[10]
Indo-Aryan migration
Main article: Indo-Aryan migration
See also: Out of India theory
Models of the Indo-Aryan migration discuss scenarios of prehistoric
migrations of the early Indo-Aryans to their historically attested
areas of settlement in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent and
from there further across all of North India. Claims of Indo-Aryan
migration are primarily drawn from linguistic[15] evidence but also
from a multitude of data stemming from genetics,[16] Vedic religion,
rituals, poetics as well as some aspects of social organization and
chariot technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_period
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas
All discussion of historical Indo-Aryan migrations or Aryan and
Dravidian races remains highly controversial in India to this day, and
continues to affect political and religious debate. Some Dravidians,
and supporters of the Dalit movement, most commonly Tamils, claim that
the worship of Shiva is a distinct Dravidian religion going back to
the Indus Civilization,[17] to be distinguished from Brahminical
"Aryan" Hinduism. In contrast, the Indian nationalist Hindutva
movement argues that no Aryan invasion or migration ever occurred,
asserting that Vedic beliefs emerged from the Indus Valley
Civilisation,[18] which pre-dated the supposed advent of the Indo-
Aryans in India, and is identified as a likely candidate for a Proto-
Dravidian culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalitstan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Dravidian
Some Indians were also influenced by the debate about the Aryan race
during the British Raj. The Indian nationalist V. D. Savarkar believed
in the theory that an "Aryan race" migrated to India,[19] but he
didn't find much value in a racialized interpretation of the "Aryan
race".[20] Some Indian nationalists supported the British version of
the theory because it gave them the prestige of common descent with
the ruling British class.[21]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._D._Savarkar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racialized
Genetic studies
A genetic study in the year 2000 in Andhra Pradesh state of India
found that the upper caste Hindus were closer relatives to Eastern-
Europeans than to Hindus from lower castes.[22] However, a study
conducted by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2009 (in
collaboration with Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public
Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT) analyzed half a
million genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25
ethnic groups from 13 states in India across multiple caste groups.
[23] The study asserts, based on the impossibility of identifying any
genetic indicators across caste lines, that castes in South Asia grew
out of traditional tribal organizations during the formation of Indian
society, and was not the product of any Aryan invasion and
"subjugation" of Dravidian people.[24]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Cellular_and_Molecular_Biology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Medical_School
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_School_of_Public_Health
Occultism
Theosophy
Mme. Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer, agricultural expert,
and journalist who covered the Spiritualist phenomena.Main article:
Root race
These debates were addressed within the Theosophical movement founded
by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott at the end of the nineteenth
century. This philosophy took inspiration from Indian culture, in this
case, perhaps, from the Hindu reform movement the Arya Samaj founded
by Swami Dayananda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Blavatsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Steel_Olcott
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arya_Samaj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Dayananda
Blavatsky argued that humanity had descended from a series of "Root
Races", naming the fifth root race (out of seven) the Aryan Race. She
thought that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis and described
the Aryan races with the following words:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_Race
"The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown, almost
black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet
all of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring
from one single progenitor, (...) who is said to have lived over
18,000,000 years ago, and also 850,000 years ago -- at the time of the
sinking of the last remnants of the great continent of Atlantis."[25]
Blavatsky used "Root Race" as a technical term to describe human
evolution over the large time periods in her cosmology. However, she
also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were
inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic"
culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic
peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in
spirituality and perfected in materiality."[26] She also states that
some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the
Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in
China." There are also "considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-
Atlantean peoples produced by various crossings with such semi-human
stocks -- e.g., the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed
by Prof. Flower among Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians,
Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman Islanders, etc."[27]
Despite this, Blavatsky's admirers claim that her thinking was not
connected to fascist or racialist ideas, asserting that she believed
in a Universal Brotherhood of humanity and wrote that "all men have
spiritually and physically the same origin" and that "mankind is
essentially of one and the same essence".[28] On the other hand, in
The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky states: "Verily mankind is 'of one
blood,' but not of the same essence."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Brotherhood
Blavatsky connects physical race with spiritual attributes constantly
throughout her works:
"Esoteric history teaches that idols and their worship died out with
the Fourth Race, until the survivors of the hybrid races of the latter
(Chinamen, African Negroes, &c.) gradually brought the worship back.
The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu writings do".
[29]
"The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized
nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable
on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of
training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the
Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same
intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so
called. The 'sacred spark' is missing in them and it is they who are
the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the wise
adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying
out. Verily mankind is 'of one blood,' but not of the same essence. We
are the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in
us a spark, which in them is latent".[30]
According to Blavatsky, "the MONADS of the lowest specimens of
humanity (the "narrow-brained" savage South-Sea Islander, the African,
the Australian) had no Karma to work out when first born as men, as
their more favoured brethren in intelligence had".[31]
She also prophecies of the destruction of the racial "failures of
nature" as the future "higher race" ascends:
"Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed cycle-
pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each
tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget
another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other
less favoured groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some
individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a
trace behind".[32]
It is interesting to note that the second subrace of the Fifth or
Aryan root race, the Arabian, is regarded by Theosophists as one of
the Aryan subraces. It is believed by Theosophists that the Arabians,
although asserted in traditional Theosophy to be of Aryan (i.e., Indo-
European) ancestry, adopted the Semitic language of the people around
them who had migrated earlier from Atlantis (the fifth or (original)
Semite subrace of the Atlantean root race). Theosophists assert that
the Jews originated as an offshoot of the Arabian subrace in what is
now Yemen about 30,000 BC. They migrated first to Somalia and then
later to Egypt where they lived until the time of Moses. Thus,
according to the teachings of Theosophy, the Jews are part of the
Aryan race.[33]
Ariosophy
Main article: Ariosophy
Guido von List (and his followers such as Lanz von Liebenfels) later
took up some of Blavatsky's ideas, mixing her ideology with
nationalistic and fascist ideas; this system of thought became known
as Ariosophy. It was believed in Ariosophy that the Teutonics were
superior to all other peoples because according to Theosophy the
Teutonics or Nordics were the most recent subrace of the Aryan root
race to have evolved.[34] Such views also fed into the development of
Nazi ideology. Theosophical publications such as The Aryan Path were
strongly opposed to the Nazi usage, attacking racialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_von_List
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanz_von_Liebenfels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aryan_Path
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racialism
The idea of the Northern origins of the Aryans was particularly
influential in Germany. It was widely believed that the "Vedic Aryans"
were ethnically identical to the Goths, Vandals and other ancient
Germanic peoples of the Völkerwanderung. This idea was often
intertwined with anti-Semitic ideas. The distinctions between the
"Aryan" and "Semitic" peoples were based on the aforementioned
linguistic and ethnic history.
Semitic peoples came to be seen as a foreign presence within Aryan
societies, and the Semitic peoples were often pointed to as the cause
of conversion and destruction of social order and values leading to
culture and civilization's downfall by proto-Nazi and Nazi theorists
such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Alfred Rosenberg.
According to the adherents to Ariosophy, the Aryan was a "master race"
that built a civilization that dominated the world from Atlantis about
ten thousand years ago. This alleged civilization declined when other
parts of the world were colonized after the 8,000 BC destruction of
Atlantis because the inferior races mixed with the Aryans but it left
traces of their civilization in Tibet (via Buddhism), and even in
Central America, South America, and Ancient Egypt. (The date of 8,000
BC for the destruction of Atlantis in Ariosophy is 2,000 years later
than the date of 10,000 BC given for this event in Theosophy.) These
theories affected the more esotericist strand of Nazism.
A complete, highly speculative theory of Aryan and anti-Semitic
history can be found in Alfred Rosenberg's major work, The Myth of the
Twentieth Century. Rosenberg's well-researched account of ancient
history, melded with his racial speculations, proved to be very
effective in spreading racialism among German intellectuals in the
early twentieth century, especially after the First World War.
These and other ideas evolved into the Nazi use of the term "Aryan
race" to refer to what they saw as being a master race of people of
northern European descent. They worked to maintain the purity of this
race through eugenics programs (including anti-miscegenation
legislation, compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and the
mentally deficient, the execution of the institutionalized mentally
ill as part of a euthanasia program).
Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer of the SS), the person ordered by
Adolf Hitler to implement the final solution (Holocaust), told his
personal masseur Felix Kersten that he always carried with him a copy
of the ancient Aryan scripture, the Bhagavad Gita because it relieved
him of guilt about what he was doing — he felt that like the warrior
Arjuna, he was simply doing his duty without attachment to his actions.
[35]
Himmler was also interested in Buddhism and his institute Ahnenerbe
sought to mix some traditions from Hinduism and Buddhism.[36] Himmler
sent a 1939 German expedition to Tibet as part of his research into
Aryan origins.
Neo-Nazism
The Sun wheel is used as the symbol of the Aryan raceSince the
military defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies in 1945, some neo-Nazis
have expanded their concept of the Aryan race, moving from the Nazi
concept that the purest Aryans were the Teutonics or Nordics of
Northern Europe to the idea that the true Aryans are everyone
descended from the Western or European branch of the Indo-European
peoples.[citation needed] "Moderate" "white nationalists" who embrace
what is called pan-Aryanism want to establish a democratically
governed Aryan Federation.[37] On the other hand, according to
Nicholas Goodrick-Clark, many neo-Nazis want to establish an
autocratic state modeled after Nazi Germany to be called the Western
Imperium.[38]
This proposed state would be led by a Führer-like figure called the
Vindex, and would include all areas inhabited by the Aryan race
(defined as non-Jews of European ancestry), i.e. Europe (includes all
of Russia), Anglo-America, South Africa (may include Rhodesia (now
called Zimbabwe)) with its white minority, Australia, New Zealand, and
southern South America (that is Chile, Argentina, eastern Bolivia,
southern Brazil, Uruguay, and possibly Paraguay.) Only those of the
Aryan race would be full citizens of the state. The Western Imperium
would embark on a vigorous and dynamic program of space exploration.
The concept of the Western Imperium as outlined in the previous three
sentences is based on the original concept of the Imperium as outlined
in the 1947 book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics by
Francis Parker Yockey as further updated, extended and refined in the
early 1990s in pamphlets published by David Myatt. [39][40][41]
Various concepts of Aryanism and how they should be implemented are
debated on the Stormfront website.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Parker_Yockey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Myatt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_(website)
Tempelhofgesellschaft
A neo-Nazi esoteric Nazi Gnostic sect headquartered in Vienna, Austria
called the Tempelhofgesellschaft, founded in the early 1990s, teaches
a form of what it calls Marcionism. They distribute pamphlets claiming
that the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star
Aldebaran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_Nazism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-volkisch_movements#Tempelhofgesellschaft_.28Gnostic_sect.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_race#The_civilization_of_Atlantis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldebaran
See also
Anatolian hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis
Aryan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
Germanic peoples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_peoples
Indo-Aryan migrations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
Nordic theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_theory
Nordic race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_race
Proto-Indo-Europeans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans
Indo-European language family
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_language_family
Kurgan hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
Race Life of the Aryan Peoples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_Life_of_the_Aryan_Peoples
Scandinavism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavism
White nationalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_nationalism
White supremacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_supremacy
Philosophical:
Esotericism in Germany and Austria
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esotericism_in_Germany_and_Austria
Thule Society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Society
Germanic Neopaganism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_Neopaganism
Neo-völkisch movements
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-v%C3%B6lkisch_movements
Third Reich specific:
Aryanization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryanization
Aryan paragraph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_paragraph
Honorary Aryan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorary_Aryan
Ahnenpass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenpass
Aryan Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Games
Contemporaneous concepts of race:
Alpine race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_race
Armenoid race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenoid_race
Dinaric race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinaric_race
East Baltic race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Baltic_race
Iranid race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranid_race
Mediterranean race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_race
References
Constructs such as ibid., op. cit. and loc. cit. are discouraged by
Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes as they are easily broken.
Please improve this article by replacing them with named references
(quick guide), or an abbreviated title.
^ Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief Webster's Tenth New Collegiate
Dictionary Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A.:1994--Merriam-Webster
See original definition (definition #1) of "Aryan" in English--Page
66
^ cf. Gershevitch, Ilya (1968), "Old Iranian Literature", Handbuch der
Orientalistik, Literatur I, Leiden: Brill, pp. 1–31 , p. 2.
^ Wells, H.G. The Outline of History New York:1920 Doubleday & Co.
Chapter 19 The Aryan Speaking Peoples in Pre-Historic Times Pages
271-285
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outline_of_History
^ H.G. Wells describes the origin of the Aryans (Proto-Indo
Europeans):
http://www.bartleby.com/86/19.html
^ Rand McNally’s World Atlas International Edition Chicago:1944 Rand
McNally Map: "Races of Mankind" Pages 278–279--In the explanatory
section below the map, the Aryan race (the word “Aryan” being defined
in the description below the map as a synonym for “Indo-Europeans”) is
described as being one of the ten major racial groupings of mankind.
Each of the ten racial groupings is depicted in a different color on
the map and the estimated populations in 1944 of the larger racial
groups except the Dravidians are given (the Dravidian population in
1944 would have been about 70,000,000). The other nine groups are
depicted as being the Semitic race (the Aryans (850,000,000) and the
Semites (70,000,000) are described as being the two main branches of
the Caucasian race), the Dravidian race, the Mongolian race
(700,000,000), the Malayan race (Correct population given on page
413--64,000,000 including half of the Malay States, Micronesia, and
Polynesia), the American Indian race (10,000,000), the Negro race
(140,000,000), the Native Australians, the Papuans, and the Hottentots
and Bushmen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoloid_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_people_of_the_Americas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australoid_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australoid_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capoid_race
^ See, for example, the Poul Anderson short stories in the 1964
collection Time and Stars and the Polesotechnic League stories
featuring Nicholas van Rijn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Stars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_van_Rijn
^ Renfrew, Colin. (1989). The Origins of Indo-European Languages. /
Scientific American/, 261(4), 82-90.
^ Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief Webster's Tenth New Collegiate
Dictionary Springfield, Massachuetts, U.S.A.:1994--Merriam-Webster
Page 66
^ Widney, Joseph P Race Life of the Aryan Peoples New York: Funk &
Wagnalls. 1907 In Two Volumes: Volume One--The Old World Volume Two--
The New World ISBN B000859S6O
http://books.google.com/books?id=s9UKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=titlepage#v=onepage&q=&f=false
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pomeroy_Widney
^ a b c d Andrea Orsucci, "Ariani, indogermani, stirpi mediterranee:
aspetti del dibattito sulle razze europee (1870-1914)", in Cromohs,
1998 (Italian)
http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/3_98/orsucci.html
^ OED under race, n.6 I.1.c has "A group of several tribes or peoples,
regarded as forming a distinct ethnic set. Esp. used in 19th-cent.
anthropological classification, sometimes in conjunction with
linguistic groupings."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OED
^ Speech before the University of Stassbourg, 1872, Chaudhuri, Nirad,
Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Freidrich
Max Muller, Chatto and Windus, 1974, p.313
^ Vacher de Lapouge (trans Clossen, C), Georges (1899). "Old and New
Aspects of the Aryan Question". The American Journal of Sociology 5
(3): 329–346. .
^ Arvidsson, Stefan (2006). Aryan Idols. USA: University of Chicago
Press, 143. ISBN 0-226-02860-7.
^ The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration
Debate, Edwin Bryant, 2001
^ Trivedi, Bijal P (2001-05-14). [http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/
articles/05_01/Indo-European.shtml "Genetic evidence suggests European
migrants may have influenced the origins of India's caste system"].
Genome News Network (J. Craig Venter Institute).
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/05_01/Indo-European.shtml.
Retrieved 2005-01-27.
^ It is claimed that the Pashupati seal represents Shiva. J. Marshall
1931: Vol. 1, 52-55. Mohenjo-Daro and the IVC. London: Arthur
Probsthain.
^ Although most pro-Aryan migration theory scholars also agree that a
part of the IVC culture has influenced Hinduism. Renfrew says: "it is
difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley
Civilization. Renfrew 1988:188-190. Archaeology and Language. New
York: Cambridge University Press
^ Bryant 2001:271, Talageri 2000. The Rigveda.
^ After all there is throughout this world so far as man is concerned
but a single race - the human race, kept alive by one common blood,
the human blood. All other talk is at best provisional, a makeshift
and only relatively true. (...) Even as it is, not even the aborigines
of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan
blood in their veins and vice-versa. Truly speaking all that one can
claim is that one has the blood of all mankind in one’s veins. The
fundamental unity of man from pole to pole is true, all else only
relatively so. Savarkar: "Hindutva". Vinayak Damodar Savarkar,
Savarkar Samagra: Complete Works of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 10
volumes, ISBN 81-7315-331-0
^ Erdosy 1995:21, The Indo-Aryans of ancient South Asia.
^ http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11381027
^ Indians are one people descended from two tribes
http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_indians-are-one-people-descended-from-two-tribes_1292864
^ Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study, Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms
^ The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy, Vol.II, p.249
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Doctrine
^ Ibid., p.200
^ Ibid., pp.195-6
^ The Key to Theosophy, Section 3
^ The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and
Philosophy, Vol. II, p.723
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Doctrine
^ Ibid., p 421
^ Ibid., p.168
^ Ibid., p.446
^ Powell, A.E. The Solar System: A Complete Outline of the
Theosophical Scheme of Evolution London:1930 The Theosophical
Publishing House Pages 298-299
^ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan
Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology New York:1992 New York
University Press Chapter 13 "Herbert Reichstein and Ariosophy" Pages
164-176
^ Padfield, Peter Himmler New York:1990--Henry Holt Page 402
^ P.7, New Religions and the Nazis, By Karla Powne
^ Fundamentals of Pan-Aryanism:
http://forums.skadi.net/showthread.php?p=940600
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrenvolk
^ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric
Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University
Press. pp. 221. ISBN 0-8147-3155-4.
^ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism,
and The Politics of Identity New York: 2002--N.Y. University Press,
See Chapters 4 and 11 for extensive information about the proposed
"Western Imperium"
^ “Vindex—The Destiny of the West—Imperium of the West” by David
Myatt:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=423609919&blogId=497426085
^ [http://www.natvan.com/national-vanguard/130/index.html
"Space Exploration: An Expression of the Aryan Soul" by John Clarke
National Vanguard magazine Issue 130, January-February 2006:]
Further reading
The Arctic Home in the Vedas by Bal Gangadhar Tilak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal_Gangadhar_Tilak
Arvidsson, Stefan. Aryan Idols. The Indo-European Mythology as Science
and Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006 ISBN
0-226-02860-7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Arvidsson
Poliakov, Leon. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic
Ideas In Europe New York: Barnes & Noble Books. 1996 ISBN
0-7607-0034-6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Poliakov
Widney, Joseph P. Google Books edition of Race Life of the Aryan
Peoples Race Life of the Aryan Peoples New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1907
In Two Volumes: Volume One--The Old World Volume Two--The New World
ISBN B000859S6O
http://books.google.com/books?id=s9UKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=titlepage#v=onepage&q=&f=false
External links
The Aryan race
http://www.wisdomworld.org/additional/ListOfCollatedArticles/TheAryanRace.html
Indo-European Languages
http://www.bookrags.com/Indo-European_languages
Aryan by Kim Pearson
http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/Dictionary/aryan.htm
Iranian Branch of the Indo-European Family
http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/february/IranianBranch.html
Races and Ethnic Groups of Iran
http://www.farhangsara.com/races.htm
Forensic Anthropology
http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/biology/research/forensicanthropology/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race
...and I am Std Harth
chhotemianinshallah
Sharad Pawar is not new to verbal abuse. Before Bal Thackeray cosied
up to him in recent times, he was wont to call the Maratha warlord the
most colourful names. Among the more mentionable of them were
`maidyancha pota ’ (a sack of flour) and a dog (I would rather not
repeat the Marathi as that sounds worse).He also continuously poked
fun at Pawar’s ample girth, saying he might be getting stuck in his
commode each morning. To be noted: Thackeray himself preferred Indian
toilets. Hotels he stayed at in Maharashtra had to modify their rooms
for the purpose and when he thought he might be thrown into jail by
Chhagan Bhujbal his primary concern, ahead of other comforts, was if
he would get an Indian toilet in his cell — though Michael Jackson did
use a Western one when he came calling at Matoshree in 1997!
Pawar was so sickened by all such politically irrelevant comments that
he warned Thackeray about the consequences: “I am from the rural areas
and a rural rustic can get more colourful abuse out of his mouth than
someone like Thackeray, city born and bred can ever fathom. So don’t
tempt me.’’ That shut Thackeray up quite adequately because he could
not be sure about how insulting Pawar could get or even if he could
match the latter’s vocabulary, word for word.
I guess Thackeray had reason to run scared. Because he knew Pawar
could say the worst possible things about somebody and still keep the
language parliamentary. Like the time in the Eighties — I recall I
was shocked out of my wits when he referred to then opposition leader
Mrinal Gore as `Pootna Maushi’.
Gore was a well-known socialist and she was very adept at her job as
an opposition leader. She was one of the primary persons who had
exposed Pawar’s alleged involvement in what we then referred to as the
`dereservation scam’. Decoded, this was simply that soon after he
became Chief Minister in 1988, Pawar decided that more than 250 plots
in Bombay which had been reserved for schools, gardens, hospitals and
other public spaces would be, well, dereserved and handed over to
private builders for commercial constructions. Pawar had overruled the
objections of both bureaucrats and municipal authorities about the
advisability of turning Bombay into more of a concrete jungle thus.
Gore tabled the whole list of the plots, along with a minute by minute
account of how they were dereserved, in the Maharashtra Assembly —
leading Chhagan Bhujbal, then the Shiv Sena’s lone legislator in the
House, to stick another unforgettable tag on Pawa: Bhookhandanche
Shrikhand Khalle (he has eaten shrikhand out of plots of land).
But while Pawar could brush aside such labels, what he could not get
over was the complete exposure of his integrity (since then wherever
Pawar goes, land scams, true or not, follow).
Why I believe Pawar’s abuse of Gore was unforgivable was because of
the choice of his words — which were not unparliamentary by themselves
but the circumstances under which they were uttered were downright
vicious. Pootna was the rakshasi who had been assigned by Lord
Krishna’s maternal uncle Kansa to poison the baby God through her
milk. Everyone knows the legend: how Baby Krishna bit her breasts and
destroyed both her and her evil purpose.
Gore had, at the time, been recovering from breast cancer and I
thought it was particularly nasty, downright mean and very hurtful of
Sharad Pawar to allude to a worthy opponent in such unpleasant and
personally painful terms. I was little more than a rookie at the time
and I recall rushing to Gore’s party office at the Vidhan Bhavan soon
after Pawar’s volley – I wanted to sympathise more than get a reaction
out of her to that insult.
However, Gore spoke of everything else but that abuse. And when I
asked her for a reaction, she said she had not heard anything at all
and there was no point reacting to something she did not know about.
Since Gore had very much been present during Pawar’s outburst, I
realised that she was either very hurt or very forgiving. In either
case, her response was very dignified and, in the absence of
television channels in that era, the whole episode was put to rest
almost immediately.
So, if an eon later, Satyavrat Chaturvedi now calls Sharad Pawar
another colourful name, I am not surprised that the Maratha strongman
should not find it too hard to forget and forgive. For Chaturvedi’s
terms of reference were neither personal nor could be too hurtful
(except to the extent that he chose to abuse at all) – those are
terms used almost like punctuation in many North Indian tongues. But
while MCs and BCs might be lingua franca in the North, I agree with
Pawar that it was quite unparliamentary language to have been used at
all.
Perhaps Chaturvedi should have taken lessons from Pawar before he got
abusive: on how to be parliamentary and unpleasant at one and the
same time!
Comments
One Response to “Whose abuse is it anyway?”
Rajen Kaushal says:
March 20, 2010 at 7:10 am
By far, conclusion is that unparliamentary language has no place on
high seats like CM. Thackerays comments are given more weightage by
Media otherwise, going by their political stature, they do not deserve
much weightage.
After exorbitant rise in food prices and sugar, Sharad Pawar’s
response was poor but going by Congress rules after independendence,
Congress, a party of capitalist never contained inflation and many
fold increase in food prices after independence is evident. Moreover,
while appointing ministers, Govt. must ensure that a person does not
become minister for industry from his home state. Maharastra houses
major sugar mills and Sharad Pawar should not have been Agricultural
Minister. What better or clean administration Manmohan Singh,
projected and perceived as honest man by Indians, provide?
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2010/03/19/whose-abuse-is-it-anyway/
Beat men fair and square
IF THE BILL DOES BECOME LAW, THOUGH,
I AM SURE AT LEAST THE YADAVS, WHO
ARE NOW OPPOSING IT VOCIFEROUSLY,
WILL BE AMONG THE FIRST TO BRING OUT
THEIR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS-IN-LAW TO
OCCUPY HIGH POSITIONS
Ihave always been agnostic when it comes to women’s
reservation: I am not against it per se, but I am not for
it either. My reservations about, well, reservation for
women is based on observation of how it has played out
in Maharashtra, which was among the first states to introduce
a 33 per cent quota for women in local self-government
bodies.
When I travelled to the villages, I noticed that most of
the women sarpanchs were wives of powerful men of the
area. Though it is getting slightly better these days, most
of these women did not take decisions on their own —
and if they did, their husbands would still beat them up.
In the cities, it was only somewhat better — the men
might not beat up women but the latter were certainly
puppets in the hands of their husbands.
I recall one particular woman corporator who had a
fairly bad reputation for just being who she was: the conservative
wife of a local party boss. Her husband took to
threatening people in her name and her mother-in-law
set up a desk right at her front door to rake in the earnings
— she personally counted the cash all day long!
It drove even members of her own party crazy. One of
them told me wryly, “I am against women’s reservation
only for this. Give a man a ticket and only he is corrupt,
give a woman a ticket and her whole family becomes
extortionists.’’
Of course, I did not agree with that perception and
ticked him off quite soundly.
I notice, though, that at least the Brihanmumbai
Municipal Corporation (BMC) has got better over the
years. But several years ago former Chief Minister
Manohar Joshi had told us, after fielding women relatives
of Shiv Sainiks, quite unabashedly, “We are a purushi
(male) party. Electable women are very difficult to find.’’
However, when Bombay Mayor Shraddha Jadhav gave
away awards on International Women’s Day this year, all
top officials on the dais were women: Shailaja Girkar is
the Deputy Mayor, Mridula Joshi is the Municipal
Secretary and Manisha Mhaiskar is the Additional
Municipal Commissioner. One half was there on account
of the benefit of reservation; the other half had got there
on their own steam, perhaps pipping several worthy men
at the post.
So while I saluted all those women, my ambivalence
towards women’s quota continued, even as the UPA government
failed to have the Bill passed in Parliament on
Monday.
If the Bill does become law, though, I am sure at least
the Yadavs, who are now opposing it vociferously, will be
among the first to bring out their wives and daughtersin-
law to occupy high positions — yes, even the ‘par kati’
ones — remember Sharad Yadav’s obnoxious remark
about women with short hair? His wife has (or at least
had at the time he made that remark) short hair.
Next would be the girlfriends, as we have seen many politicians
promote their paramours even without the benefit
of reservations. I wonder how long it will be before the
common woman, without the benefit of a Godfather in
politics, gets an opportunity to enter a legislative body
on her own merit.
But if she did, I am not so sure it would be fair to restrict
women to constituencies for just five or ten years. Former
Speaker Somnath Chatterjee had represented his constituency
in the Lok Sabha for ten terms — if not 50 years,
given several mid-term polls, this meant at least 40 years
at a stretch. Why should women not have similar right
to continue for as long as the voters want them?
If I were into electoral politics, I certainly would be
highly resentful at the injustice and unfairness of it all.
Yet, there is really no other way out of the situation. Which
once again reinforces my ambivalence about a quota for
women.
So it is just as well that I am not a politician with parliamentary
ambitions. I prefer to best the men at their
own game and beat them in their own backyards. As
Pratibha Patil did. And as many other exemplary women
are doing. ■ sana...@hindustantimes.com
http://www.hindustantimes.com/images/HTPopups/120310/10_03_M_MTR_16.pdf
How does she do it?
I have said all I wanted to say about my reservations about the
women’s reservation bill in my column anandan on Wednesday this week.
Like I said in the column, I am agnostic about the bill – I neither
believe in it nor do I knock it. I simply doubt that it will help at
all (help the common woman, that is).
But whatever my reservations, I am amazed at how Sonia Gandhi managed
to have the bill passed in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, March 9. That
morning it looked as though not just the fate of the bill but also her
authority over her party was at risk. For, I know as a matter of fact
that many men in her party were as determined as Lalu and Mulayam
Yadav to ensure that it never became law and I thought they would
surreptitiously pitch in to scuttle the bill. But now I do not think
too many of them will dare voice their opposition.
I wonder what makes Sonia Gandhi take all the right calls and achieve
miracle after miracle in such quick succession. This particular bill
had been hanging in the balance for 14 years and when several more
stable governments could not manage to get it through, it really did
require a great deal of political will to push it at the risk of so
much endangerment of the UPA’s future.
I have heard people say quite often that we cannot find one single
Indian to rule this country and follow it up with the query: why
should Indians have to kowtow to the Italian bahu of Mrs Indira
Gandhi? In fact, I am looking to all those critics for an answer: yes,
really, why?
But I think I have a clue. And that came from a British diplomat to
quite another question. We were discussing how the Indian diaspora was
among the highest wage earners everywhere else in the world (and thus,
not surprisingly, they incurred the wrath of the locals in their
adopted countries for beating them to and keeping their jobs by sheer
dint of hard work). Yet, when it came to our own country, we were
among the poorest, most backward and taking too long getting anywhere.
The diplomat said, “Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Indians
follow the rules to the `t’ wherever they live abroad. In India they
break the law all the time and so make it difficult for both
themselves and others to get along.’’
Then a Congress worker told me why he preferred Sonia Gandhi to her
husband, Rajiv. “She has a very European outlook on rules and honour.
She keeps her word and will not allow any violations. For example, if
the maximum age for a youth congress leader is 35, she will not allow
any one older to be elected to that post. No other considerations like
caste et al except what is stated in the rulebook. That is heartening
for the rest of us: we know we will eventually get there if we fit the
bill and no one can bring any untoward influence to bear upon her to
push us off the ladder. Even Rajivji was not so correct, he would
allow the occasional jugaad. ’’
That was a eulogy of his party president, of course, but I now wonder
if that is true. Perhaps she does bring a sense of honour and follows
the rules in everything she does and so succeeds more than others who
believe in, well, jugaad (manoeuvring people and situations to suit
their needs).
But on Tuesday, as she gave interviews to women journalists on
television, I was impressed by Sonia’s tone and pitch – happy but
thanking all the men for having made it possible. Gracious for their
support to both the Left parties and the BJP which have knocked her
endlessly over various issues but not gloating about it at all a la
the Yadavs, keeping a door open for the allies and, of course, very
self-effacing.
I say `self-effacing’ because when I first met her in Nasik several
years ago, after she first took over the party’s reigns in the middle
of an election in 1998 and miraculously helped a losing Congress win
45 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats from Maharashtra, she was quick to give
the credit to Sharad Pawar. And when we asked her about her role as
the Congress president, she said, “I am only the latest in a long
series of Congress presidents. Other Congress leaders have been around
longer than I have been and it is they who have done things for the
party, not me. I am still learning.’’
I guess she has learnt well by now and I remark upon another thing: in
the decade at the start of which even her own party men took her with
several fistfuls of salt to now, she seems to have muted the criticism
about her being a misfit in Indian politics and put their uncertainty
about her ability to deliver to rest.
The Congress is the most indisciplined, chaotic and irreverent party I
know. Yet they revere their party president more than the Shiv Sainiks
do Bal Thackeray or the BJP does its own succession of party chiefs.
Perhaps that is because she delivers to them nine times out of ten,
while others do not. But I continue to wonder: did Sonia Gandhi learn
it all at the feet of her mother-in-law or is she bringing a European
sense of commitment to her party that helps her defeat the might of
the BJP and its formidable allies in 2004 and return with an even
greater majority in 2009? And now give to Indian women what no man (or
even woman — most notably Indira Gandhi) has dared or cared to before?
(9 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Posted by Sujata Anandan on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 9:05 pm
28 Responses to “How does she do it?”
vijai lugani says:
March 13, 2010 at 3:25 am
she leaenedrned the political process in india under the leader ship
of mrs. indra gandhi and of cousrse from rajiv gandhi. she knows upto
this time how to bring together different political shades under one
umberala when requied, she does not believe in cast and creed.she is
hard worker and of couse haverahul and pryanka and some faithful
polrical advisers. the author of this artical is absoultely right in
every aspect and more ever she is not power hungry. if she does not
like some people she can show them door to get out.
Nikhil Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 3:13 am
Vijay Lugani,
If I write about the good qualities of my dhobi they’re not too far
from the ones that you wrote – hardworking, honest, faithful,
relatively selfless and mostly fair. For that matter these qualities
are universal and necessary to succeed in any profession. What makes
Sonia different from us is she finds herself married in to the most
politically influential family in our country where political power is
hereditary and party members are expected to bow to the whips of party
leaders.
Ajay says:
March 13, 2010 at 5:16 am
Interesting thoughts… However, I think many Europeans may feel that
Italian background is bit different from that of Western European one…
Ed says:
March 13, 2010 at 5:53 am
Take a dig on this topic at
[ http://pages.rediff.com/we-evolve/21809#allfeeds ]
The bill is only useful when it break the poverty lines, dynasty lines
…
It should be 35% (poor women), 35%(poor men), 30% (talented)
70% should be representative of poor.
It should be 35% (poor women), 35%(poor men), 30% (talented –
scientist, economist, etc)
THE BIG QUESTION IS how do we qualify to be
1 )Identify 70% – Poor & most popular 10 candiate representing Poor
People from certain region (MP/MLA area) to whom the Election
commision will fund campaign money
2 )To keep tap on Rich person whose campaign funds/money has to be
capped by Election commision and made almost equal to 1).
3 )Criteria to identify 30% (talented people)
Ways to find the list 1) and 2) and 3) is something ruling party needs
to think and debate instead of wasting time.
To gauge 1), we need to count the strongest of the following points by
Election Commision and more can be added by debates
A) Years of work
B) Have an open debate at ONE or TWO cantenders preferred location
agreed by each contenders,
let contenders speak what they have done and want to do.
Make people/choser stand in different locations on the debate ground
to exibit their support.
The count done to choose the top 10.
C) Ensure rotation between Male and Female, thus women whose work and
popularity is on her own rather than backing of GOONDAS should be
preferred for qualifying 1)
People backed by money and goonda power cannot qualify for 1)
D) Every term, Election commision can choose certain region by Gender,
thus they can choose between the women & men that qualify for 1) or
term when both women & men qualify for 1)
Debate should be there to decide if 2)candiates should be allowed to
contest irrespective of gender.
Cap/restriction of number of time(2 times max) a candiate can stand
for elections in a sequence.
Debate on how election commsion will enforce 1) on all parties and in
all regions.
Debate on how to lessen the dynasty and family business and bring
democracy by Election Commission criteria in 1).
Nikhil Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 4:11 am
Ed,
Because you write of so many different, often contradictory,
qualifications for running for office may be you should be our next
Election Commission.
Vijay Saini says:
March 13, 2010 at 6:36 am
Meekly following Sonia Gandhi is the slave mentallity. Although India
is a free country now, it would take us a very long time to get over
the slave mindframe. I think we are ripe and ready for foreign rule by
proxy. Any country can capture us in reality.
AB says:
March 13, 2010 at 7:56 am
Funny article, then lets elect Silvio Berlusconi as president of
India.Problem solved
Jitendra says:
March 13, 2010 at 9:18 am
I have never read such a degrading article. It is a shame that we
still have white man’s lackey amongst us. It is achivement of Mcaulays
education aystem that country continues to create such people even
after 62 years. She can do it because congis are a party of chamchas
and nincompoops including PM. Not a single congi has any moral, ethics
and no one is ready to stand up for the good of country. They only
stand up to save their chair and that depends of congi president. This
article talks of European values and commitment. Is author trying to
say that India does not have people with values and commitments. We
have plenty of people but stupid system of election where masses of
Idiots vote on the basis of caste, religion and personal loyalties.
What a stupid assumption on the part of author that Eurpeons are
better then us. In western coutries it is the system that works but
people are no different from us.
This bill is wrong because it will create rabris. Every from of
reservation and quota should be removed if country has to make any
progress. Otherwise mediocres will continue to stuff this country and
we will reamin a third world country forever. Singapore, Japan and
Malayasia are better than us without importing any whity. Have you
ever thought why we are still joke of the world after 62 years.
Reservation is an indication of failures of Govt economic and social
policies, and majority of the time Congi traitors have been in rule.
Wake up and get rid of banana spine and start believing in yourself
and it is shame that congis have imposed a whity on us. It hurts my
self respect.
LAKSHMANAN says:
March 13, 2010 at 9:32 am
Any type of reservations, on a permanent basis, is a threat to
liberty, standard of life, freedom and finally to democracy. See what
is happening in government due to reservations, especially reservation
policy in promotions. Merit is sidelined and in the name of social
justice many people occupy posts which they would not have got but for
reservations. It is not their fault and no one is worried about the
declining standard of Administration which is directly affecting the
generl public.
The introduction of reservation for women may be an eye opener in the
years to come and after 10 or 15 years every all shall join together
to undo reservations of any kind, I hope.
Nikhil says:
March 13, 2010 at 10:11 am
Oh god! When will journos stop sucking toes of the Nehru-Gandhi
family? Perhaps, never.
Bhukkal Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 10:21 am
Thats the best summarisation of this article, Nikhil. Well the journos
are on fat pay packets….there is no responsible and honest journalism
left, they have to also buy flats in posh areas, salaries will cater
to their chai paani only… Shameless Creed, I wish there were Kiran
Bedis in Journalism as well.
Ekta B says:
March 13, 2010 at 11:07 am
Although an expat now, this is definitely the way I see things under
Sonia Gandhi in India, a very well written article indeed.
I have now lived overseas for the last 14 years and as someone who has
been given their fair share in an adopted and foreign land and made to
feel so at home, I must say it feels good to read that Sonia has
achieved in India (not from a political but recognition stand-point)
what we hope to achieve overseas as immigrant Indians.
I hope there are more people like her from different political
persuasions for it would make for a better and stronger India.
Nikhil Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 3:01 am
Ekta B,
To be where Sonia is in politics today, one has to first marry in to
the most politically influential family in a country where dynastic
politics reigns supreme. This privilege is found only in India and not
in the West. After looking at the success of political heirs in India,
I’m convinced humans are capable of being reasonably successful if
they’re thrown in any job.
As far as success of foreigners in India is concerned, we already do
it well in many different spheres.
Anil says:
March 13, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Basically I am against any kind of reservations. The historic bill
however was a necessity because of our historic suppression of the
female gender over thousands of centuries. The real necessity is the
empowerment to the women. The glaring example is in the way women are
treated in Army. The strangest thing is that people have totally
forgotten the most maligned PM Mr H D Devegowda (the humble farmer)
and his Law Minister Ram Das Khalap who tabled the bill for the first
time.
Anil Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
One more point about our Constitution. India gave voting rights to
women since its independence. USA gave voting rights to women almost
80 years after the blacks got to vote in 1870 !
Gopi Thomas says:
March 13, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Although I do not care about congress party and its politics, I do
admire and respect Mrs Gandhi. Like many, I was questioning her
selection, her “foreign” status, her commitment etc. I have come 180
degrees around, she is an exemplary leader, good disciplinarian. I
firmly believe now, that she at the core, is 100% “Indian”, much much
more than many of her followers or other Indians. I do believe she
wants to create a better and new India on the foundation of our
ancient and rich heritage. Originally it was the call of her husband;
now I truly believe, to her, it is now the call of the country.
Atul8 says:
March 13, 2010 at 8:52 pm
In all my years of international travel, I learnt a valuable lesson
about myslef and my countrymen…. we lack accountability & discipline.
Of course, controlling the congress coffers does help, but Sonia’
foreign roots are really an advantage in this Jugaad ridden society
Most important, normally europeans are not given to visions of
grandeur when in power, unlike in our case where the lust for that red
light on the car is more important than perforing their gievn jobs.
It has to be the European sense of commitment….all the way!!
Nikhil Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 4:02 am
Atul8,
If you think Sonia’s european heritage makes her special in Indian
politics, too bad we let the British go, is it not?
The European sense of commitment and discipline were not achieved
overnight by passing bills for quotas in European governments. If
you’re suggesting to overcome lack of accountability and discipline in
India through more political quotas, perhaps, you should continue with
your international travel till you see clear.
Atul8 Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Nikhil,
My response in one line -
Too bad we did not embrace and carry forward the sense of discipline &
accountability when we let the British go.
You need to do something about your aggression – it is colouring your
usual objectivity
Nikhil Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
Atul8,
The sense of discipline & accountability is not a British – or should
I say Italian – USP. Such characteristics are universal and cultivated
in societies where merit and systems are valued more than quotas and
personalities. We could not develop that sense because of intellectual
lethargy and we let ’some’ leaders off the hook when they dilute
democractic processes.
What you may see as aggression, I see it as a natural response to the
perfidy of the mainstream media. Happy international traveling, for
you.
Atul8 Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Nikhil,
Whatever we are, we have done unto ourselves – good or bad.
But when a discussion veers away from the issue to personalities, then
it becomes a clear indication that objectivity is losing out.
Musnt let that happen in the interest of a healthy debate.
Nikhil Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 1:14 am
Atul8,
Dear, the article revolves around hollow personality and not
substance. The comments will not be too far off, would they? I
fundamentally disagree with your point of view and I had to express it
in a sharp way.
Atul8 Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 12:43 am
Nikhil,
You were not being sharp. You were being obtuse.
However, enough has been exchanged on this topic, and we should move
on.
Nikhil Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 5:31 am
Atul8,
It provoked you, that’s all I wanted. Enough said!
Harish says:
March 15, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Is ambika soni ghost writing these articles
You did hit it out of the park with the European honour bit maam…
stupid and rash…but..takes guts..the right wing is sort of like the
australian team in the early part of last decade on the internet…and
they are still reeling in shock and have not attacked this piece in
earnest even after two days…
Rajeev says:
March 16, 2010 at 1:07 am
This article truly reflects dark skinned Indians’ mentality…eternal
slaves
Anil says:
March 16, 2010 at 2:17 am
The Congress is the most indisciplined, chaotic and irreverent party I
know. Yet they revere their party president more than the Shiv Sainiks
do Bal Thackeray or the BJP does its own succession of party chiefs.
The first sentence is unadultyerated lie.. i have never seen any
congress man being anythgin beyond yesman to the nehru family figure..
Somehow this is being presented as virtue which it is not.
BJP is nto family rule Shiv sena could be another matetr altogether
but to ask BJP men to be supine and fawning liek congressmen towards
their leader is negating the intra party democracy of BJP. Everyone is
free to express hsi/per opninon noone need fawn like congressmen do to
the later of 10 janpath.
Rajeev says:
March 16, 2010 at 9:53 pm
I get a feeling that Anandan may be dreaming for Congress ticket in
2014..Good going..Why don’t you start licking feet of Sonia like
Barkha did recently.
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2010/03/12/how-does-she-do-it/
Kill Bill, for men’s and women’s sake
Amid riotous scenes, India’s upper house passed a controversial
legislation to reserve a third of seats in federal and state
legislatures for women. The constitutional amendment “one that changes
the scope of India’s Constitution” is likely to scrape through the
powerful lower house, too. Despite overreaching itself, the government
of the day will probably survive.
In principle, empowering women is the way to go. Yet this triumph is a
zero-sum game. One participant’s gains can come only from another’s
equivalent losses. It seeks to pay Paul by robbing Peter.
This bill is deeply flawed because collateral damages have not been
addressed. Since it will be a zero-sum game, it will have a direct
bearing on representations of minority communities, backward castes
and marginalized women themselves. The Bill is anti-minority, anti-
backwards, and both anti-women and anti-men.
In a largely risk-averse political system, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi
can take the credit for pulling out a Bill that previous governments
“including those run by her own party” had abandoned, and for driving
it past dissenters whom she may in future need.
Imposing a 33 per cent quota seems momentous in a country where female
foetuses are aborted, wives spanked and women are paid less than a
third the male average in unorganized jobs. In reality, the quota can
add to the sort of disequilibrium current legislatures are made of.
Even setting aside the fact that some male MPs will naturally have to
step down for women, the proposed law fundamentally changes the basic
nature of India’s electoral representation.
With a 15-year shelf-life, 33 per cent of the seats will be blocked in
rotation and will be done in a way that a seat shall be reserved once
in three back-to-back elections. The revolving quota is the Bill’s
most serious flaw.
Two-thirds of candidates, men and women, will be unseated every time
and one-thirds will have no chance of being re-elected from the same
seat. This one-third will be left wondering if they will get to retain
their seats, depending on the outcome of the lottery.
On the whole, it will set off largescale churning “every single time”
that will make elections farcical. Electors will vote in, rather than
vote out incompetent representatives. With frequently changing
representatives, what would voters go by in deciding whom to elect?
The role of past performance in deciding a candidate’s fate will be
further lessened, thereby blunting the only weapon the common man has.
Constituencies will cease to matter for candidates. The veterans and
more guile among candidates will resettle themselves, pushing out less
iconic politicians.
Accountability will suffer because a candidate will less likely go to
the same voter every time. The voters’ powers to rate a candidate’s
performance will diminish, paving the way for a greater role of money
in deciding electoral outcomes.
A “sense of belonging” is part and parcel of Indian politics.
Constituencies are nursed by politicians who invest time, efforts and
money into the place they hope to get elected from.
Can we have compelling women leaders if they do not have strong
permanent political bases? The current Bill is paternalistic; it seeks
to make rolling-stone politicians of women, or “one-time players”, to
use women activist Madhu Kishwar’ words.
Several women’s rights organisations have highlighted these fault
lines. NGO Manushi advocates an alternative Bill, requiring political
parties to reserve nominations (tickets) for women, not seats.
Feminist fundamentalists, however, in their zeal, have failed to
appreciate the serious weaknesses hidden in the proposed amendment.
Though it will not exactly result in separate electorates, the women’s
reservation Bill, in spirit, moves towards that direction. But
proponents of the Bill deny such a possibility. Separate electorates,
theoretically, are those where electors and the elected belong to the
same community, sex or caste.
The Constituent Assembly “which served as India’s first Parliament
until it framed the Constitution” had overturned separate electorates
granted by the British government to minorities, especially Muslims
and Sikhs.,
Framers of the Constitution opted to keep the highest elected
institution free from preferential treatment, preferring the “first
past the post system”over proportional representation, save for time-
bound reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to enable
them to overcome disadvantages.
The Constituent Assembly initially included minority safeguards in its
Report on Minority Rights adopted in August 1947 and in the Draft
Constitution’s Part XIV. However, subsequent nationalist arguments
“situated in the immediate past history of Partition” paved the way
for a reversal of minority safeguards.
The principal arguments against it were that such rights were based on
caste and religion, and religion-based separate electorates had been
the immediate trigger for Partition. With the Muslim League and the
Sikh Panthic Party in disarray, Muslim and Sikh acquiescence on
reversing minority safeguards was ultimately secured.
The reversal was done by a close vote in the Constituent Assembly
Advisory Committee meeting, but key Muslim leaders, including Congress
leader Maulana Azad, abstained. (R. Retzlaff points out in “The
Problem of Communal Minorities in the Drafting of the Indian
Constitution” that the Constitution would have included political
safeguards for religious minorities had framing been completed during
the initial timetable fixed for it. Also see Rochana Bajpai’s Minority
Rights in Indian Constitution, Working Paper 30).
If the women’s Bill is passed in its current form, then a clear case
emerges for compensatory minority safeguards to be reactivated, not
separate electorates but reserved seats.
In fact, parties like Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party and
Muslim organizations have demanded a quota-within-quota in women’s
reservation.
Muslim representation in the federal legislature is dwindling: from 48
in 1985, it is 29 at present. In all 15 Lok Sabha elections, only 14
Muslim women have been elected. Kerala has two Muslim federal
lawmakers, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have 1 each. States such as
Mahrashtra, Gujarat, Haryana and Rajasthan have none..
The women’s reservation Bill is based on the presumption of
homogeneity in the status of women. Homogeneity is a stupid idea when
applied to assess communities horizontally. Not all women, like
Muslims, are equally disadvantaged or privileged.
Since privileged groups are always in a better position to leverage
concessions, the proposed amendment will help privileged women gain at
the expense of less-privileged ones. Though ideally, the highest
elected forum should be able to be free from all reservations, a quota
that specifically addresses maginalised women would have been
pragmatic.
The Congress, at his stage, clearly has not thought of the jigsaw
puzzle that awaits it. It is simply basking in the glory of a
political stunt. The BJP has eyes set on inroads through upper-caste
women. The Left’s euphoria matches Abdullah’s in this Urdu
proverb: begaani shaadi me Abdullah diwana (Abdullah is rejoicing at
an uninvited wedding).
(10 votes, average: 2.7 out of 5)
Posted by Zia Haq on Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Filed under India · Tagged collateral damages, Congress chief Sonia
Gandhi, elections, India’s Constitution, legislation, Madhu Kishwar,
Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes
36 Responses to “Kill Bill, for men’s and women’s sake”
Gopi Thomas says:
March 14, 2010 at 9:48 pm
Churning, short terms etc are good; and an increased representation
for women is even better. Democracy works through elected
representatives voting on changes and issues. I do hope Lok Sabha
votes for this; and if they do, I hope people like Zia will shut up.
These are the same people who want reservation for this group of
people and that group of people; what is wrong with having seats
reserved for women?
Panchayaths, municipality, and Corporation elections (and mayoral
slots) in Kerala have been reserved for women in the last 15 years,
and it ahs produced real grass roots level progress. A bigger
representation by women in Parliamenta nd aswemblies will only do
good.
Vijay Bhatia Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 2:53 am
Gopi, you are arguing in favor of increased representation of women in
Parliament and Assemblies. That of course is very much desirable. But
this bill, in its current form is a sure prescription of political
chaos.
What this bill means is that no male leader can represent same
constituency more than twice! And this will do no long term good for
women politicians either. Because, before they can gain ground and
experience, they will have to move on, since in next election cycle
the seat won’t be reserved!
Here is a very Rational take on this important issue (feel free to
comment):-
http://rationalopinion.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-good-womens-reservation-bill.html
[Reply]
Vijay Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 8:09 am
No one is arguing against a bigger representation by omen in
Parliament and assemblies will be good. The debate is about how to
achieve it.
The bill in its current form is sure recipe for political chaos.
Here is another rational opinion on this important issue:-
http://rationalopinion.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-good-womens-reservation-bill.html
Bell Bajao Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 8:17 pm
“Panchayaths, municipality, and Corporation elections (and mayoral
slots) in Kerala have been reserved for women in the last 15 years,
and it ahs produced real grass roots level progress. A bigger
representation by women in Parliamenta nd aswemblies will only do
good.”
Indeed! We’ve seen this happen in other parts of the company as well.
Reservation in panchayat has actually empowered women in villages and
has helped a lot in their upliftment.
VARUN SAXENA says:
March 15, 2010 at 1:53 am
Mr.Zia, the bill has certain Issues and to a certain the bill proposed
by Madhu Kishwar is in someways better.
But what I cannot understand is this. You said “The Bill is anti-
minority, anti-backward”. Can you pls explain How ?
How can women reservation bill be Anti Muslim ? How come just about
everything becomes Anti Muslim ?
I hope this bill passes with some modifications and not the
modifications which Mulayam and Laloo are suggesting but the ones
suggested by Learned People.
The only reason Mulayam and Laloo are against this Bill is that most
of the MPs’ of these 2 parties are big goons and only through these
goondaism of these goons alongwith folling Muslims and Lower Castes by
pitting them against Upper Castes do they win elections.
Now it can be safely said that more than 95% goons in INDIA would be
men. Henceforth with Women having 33% reservations the chances of
these parties winning Elections will be inversely affected
Ashish says:
March 15, 2010 at 2:21 am
I agree that while the objective is laudable, the bill as it stands
today is deeply flawed. I am not comfortable with the idea of having
no power over my MP (man or woman) who knows that he/ she will not
need my vote next time.
I liked the arguments put forward by Karan Thapar favouring changes to
the bill in his column earlier today.
Am I against reserving seats for women? No, I am not. But, this bill
in its present form; no, it does not appeal to me. MPs are not IAS
officers that they can serve one constituency (district) for 2 terms
and then move to another one for the next terms.
However, trust Zia to use the Women’s reservation bill to ask for
reservations for Muslims.
Way to go Zia; suck up to Mulayam now. Who knows, he might make you an
MLA/ MP from Delhi.
Vini says:
March 15, 2010 at 2:27 am
The headline of this post should be: Kill Bill, for men’s sake. After
all, all the rhetoric we have heard in recent days about the bill
being a threat to parliamentary democracy, equality… blah, blah,
blah…. including this blogpost… is simply a smokescreen to hide the
truth that no man wants to be caught admitting: That men, don’t want
to share power with women. Ever.
Yes the Bill has flaws, but those flaws can be addressed without
killing the Bill.
What I want to say here first is that I take extreme offense at the
use of the word ‘spanking’ to trivialize a serious issue like domestic
violence. Do you have any idea what domestic violence is? Perhaps not.
That’s why you treat it so flippantly.
As for the rest of the blog, it is all conjecture. You and all the
doomsayers don’t know if this bill will work till it is implemented.
It might just. And forget that old argument that it will be taken over
by elite women. So far it’s been elite men in charge.. so what’s wrong
with elite women having a go?
As for the problems of revolving quota that you bring up as the Bill’s
most serious flaw, I think you can argue the other way too. That is,
MPs from reserved constituencies will work extra hard in the reserved
constituency to ensure that they get a ticket when the seat is not
reserved any more because of the good work they would have hopefully
done.
Ashish Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
@Vini,
Mr Zia can’t just win, can he ?
For the first time, Zia tried arguing for the majority (men!). And,
still, he finds very few supporters!
Not speaking for Zia here; just speaking for myself.
I support the objectives behind the bill; as a man. I see in India a
huge need to balance the power structure which is so tilted in favour
of men. Also, as others have pointed out in comments, an increased
representation for women is inversely correlated (or so we hope) to
the criminality quotient of our legislatures.
I do not wish this bill to be killed. I do however wish this bill to
be amended to somehow handle the rotation issue. Like I had said,
Karan Thapar made some excellent suggestions. So did the legal cell
head of the Shiv Sena on TV.
Ma’am, most men on this blog are not against the bill; please do not
make the mistake of thinking men oppose the bill. Far from it.
Certainly not because we will lose a chance to be an MP/ MLA… I doubt
any of us commenting here have realistically ever thought of
contesting elections.
All men are not Laloo Yadav/ Sharad Yadav/ Mulayam Yadav.. luckily all
women are not Mayawati, Mamata or Jayalalitha either who promote
women even less than men do.
May I also mention that I have a vested interest? As one with two
daughters, at least one of whom is seriously disinclined to study
(admittedly early days, she is just 6), I love the new career options
this bill opens up for her.
Vijay Bhatia says:
March 15, 2010 at 2:55 am
“I am not comfortable with the idea of having no power over my MP (man
or woman) who knows that he/ she will not need my vote next time.”
Excellent point Ashish!
Here is my take on this important issue, if you like:-
http://rationalopinion.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-good-womens-reservation-bill.html
K says:
March 15, 2010 at 4:09 am
I dont understand what makes the women reservation bad but all those
other reservations (BC,SC,OBC etc.) good ? Both types are aimed at the
‘marginalized’ and both actually lower the quality of politicians we
elect and even more importantly, both a against the constitution which
lets the people decide who should represent them.
Quota has only helped influential sections of SC,BC,OBC. This is not
like a ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati’ where an unknown, marginalized dalit or
lady can make it to the parliament, no matter how much quota is
introduced.
As Sonia shockingly and sadly commented, people like Lalu will have
greater control over parliament and greater share of black money
because he has seven daughters and the power to field them in
elections.
peshori ahuja says:
March 15, 2010 at 5:41 am
Reservation itself means that the comunity, the religion, the class,
or any groupthat asks or gets reservation is not capable of attaining
the efficiency of the level that is attained by those for whom there
is no reservation.
Not only that but by asking or getting the reservation makes the
reserveds a second class citizens and it makes the clever politicians
more manipolative and powerful.
Vijay says:
March 15, 2010 at 8:14 am
For most parts I agree with Zia’s reasoning. This bill in it’s current
form is a sure recipe for political chaos. Political commitment by
parties is way to go.
Why political parties have to be coerced by laws? Where did the days
go, when parties used to organize “aandolans” for social cause? Why
not even congress want to field more women candidates, unless coerced
by the law?
This is anything but LEADERSHIP.
Here is another rational opinion on this important issue:-
http://rationalopinion.blogspot.com/2010/03/no-good-womens-reservation-bill.html
Joseph James says:
March 15, 2010 at 8:20 am
The writer bases his arguments against the women’s bill on the false
premise that the retention of a constituency by a sitting member is
the be-all and end-all of democracy. In an advanced stage of
democracy, every election will bring in new candidates as it is
happening in the southern states. In fact, a constituency must be
nursed by a party and not by individuals. At any rate, going by the
arguments of bill’s opponents like Zia, the candidates displaced by
the reservation are going to promote women from their families. This
will mean that, certain constituencies which were individual pocket
boroughs earlier will now become family pocket boroughs. Or ingenious
candidates will now start nursing two constituencies instead of one.
In short the electorate, now, stand to receive more attention from the
politicians, which isn’t a bad thing after all. Moreover, rotational
unseating is applicable only to men, not to women. So, performing
women members can continue to represent their constituencies even when
they become unreserved. This will push the female strength in the
parliament beyond the mandatory 33%. The argument that the bill
doesn’t address the grievances of marginalized women doesn’t hold
water either. As of today all women are marginalized. The quota within
quota can come in the second stage. After all this is a mere
beginning. Amendments can be introduced later to make it foolproof. It
must be given time to evolve like the anti-defection law. What’s most
worrying about the anti-bill movement is that it seems to be centred
around the Muslim interests. Even the socialist parties are
purportedly doing it please the Muslim minority. I do not think Islam
is as anti-women and anti-progress as it is usually made out to be.
Dr. P.K. Jha says:
March 15, 2010 at 8:43 am
Reservation in any form is bad, be it caste-based or gender-based or
religion-based. As Karan Thapar says, the whole issue of reservation
is an offense, for it leads to severe discrimination. The proposed
bill for women is no exception.
The women in favor of this bill are virtually projecting themselves as
handicapped. Strangely, they are the ones who also insist on gender
equality.
Every policy of reservation is initially deemed to end after a period
of ten to fifteen years, and this one is no exception. However, we
know from our experience that this kind of promise is basically a
hogwash.
There is still time for good sense to prevail. For heaven’s sake,
withdraw the bill.
sks says:
March 15, 2010 at 9:05 am
The fact is that a woman might actually do very well in 5 years to be
re-elected again. Why should anyone presume that they will not get
reelected! It might be the best strategy to break the current fiefdom
without performance!
By the way, which sane person uses the word spanked for abuse!
Shrinivas says:
March 15, 2010 at 9:22 am
Some of the objections to the bill are valid, but since for 60 years
the disparity, marginalization and backwardness of women is not
addressed by the the political system, only quota is the solution.
Though this is meant for 15 years, we can imagine this not going away
after that.
The people who suggest that let parties reserve % of candidacy to
women is not going to work, as we all know that just to satisfy the %
the parties will give tickets where they don’t stand a chance to win.
Now, about quota within quota, I believe being women, representing
women and fighting for women is a bigger cause than representing a
cast, community or a section of society. So let’s fight for the the
right cause first. These parties who are making hoopla about quota in
quota, did not bother to give tickets neither to women nor minorities
in the same %.
Sid says:
March 15, 2010 at 9:26 am
First of All welcome change from Zia Haq – atleast instead of calling
for Fatwa – he is trying to engage in a debate! However, it is NOT an
intellectual debate because:
1. For Muslims there are many forums & 80% our media is in FOREFRONT
to project their interests & represent their view points.
2. For OBC & SC, 63 years have gone by, except for their leaders
becoming Zillionaires, NO REAL improvements have been seen in their
lives. Many CMs ruled for long time (Laloo, Karunanadhi, Mulayam,
Mayawathi etc). Same is true of Muslims (all Bollywood big guns are
Muslims – do they donate any charity to good Muslim organizations?)
Money also comes from Gulf employed Muslims.
3. My wife should be writing this – but she is BUSY listening to
Bollywood songs, so SPIRITED men like me have to take up the cause of
WOMEN!
4. Most important – Laloo has commented – women’s bill OVER his dead
body – such GOLDEN oppertunity may NEVER again come in our life times,
so why NOT KILL TWO wonderful birds with one STONE. Don’t even THINK –
JUST go for the KILL by voting BLINDLY for women’s bill!
n s parameswaran says:
March 15, 2010 at 9:54 am
The people who call themselves secular, liberal and progressive are
the people who ask for communal reservation for Muslims under the garb
of ‘Monorities’. . When they practice ‘Communalism’ it is called
‘Progressive Politics’, and when Hindus object to it they are labelled
‘Communal’.
If muslims are backward then the reason is they want to be backward.
They never started or took admission in schools and colleges and
instead started “madarassa’, learnt Quaran by rote. Now how can they
get jobs which such ‘UN”Qualifications. Then they blackmail the
majority with cries of injustice and opression. Spineless parties like
Congress, Left and Opportunistic and unprincipled parties like RJD,
SP, DMK, AIADMK, JD(Secular), Left and the whole bandwagon of seculars
have fallen for this blackmail and ruined India.
MUSLIMS SHOULD NEVER EVER BE GIVEN RESERVATION UNDER ANY
CIRCUMSTANCES.
Tanuj says:
March 15, 2010 at 12:07 pm
The britishers used seperate electorate to divide & rule. By giving
reservation based on religion we would be doing the same. Who stops a
party to give a ticket to a muslim lady from one of the reserved
seats?
I think it is a landmark bill and should be supported by all.
Gurmeet says:
March 15, 2010 at 1:15 pm
I think this bill will prove to be a boon for all women, but
especially for Muslim women. Representation of Muslim women has so far
been very weak. When one-third of the seats are reserved for women, a
substantial number of muslim majority constituency will have to elect
a woman. There is an excellent chance that those constituencies shall
be represented by Muslim women. It is also likely that these women
will not be the burka or naquab clad women, who are oppressed by the
fundamentalists in the Muslim society, but would be more socially
progressive and liberated from the dogmas. This is likely because the
arduous task of reaching and engaging with the electorate will be so
much easier for the progressive Muslim women. These women will serve
as the role model of rest of the young women in Muslim society, which
will ultimately be a good thing both for the Muslims and therefore for
India.
Vini says:
March 15, 2010 at 2:57 pm
The headline of this post should be: Kill Bill, for men’s sake. After
all, all the rhetoric we have heard in recent days about the bill
being a threat to parliamentary democracy, equality… blah, blah,
blah…. including this blogpost… is simply a smokescreen to hide the
truth that no man wants to be caught admitting: That men, don’t want
to share power with women.
Yes the Bill has flaws, but those flaws can be addressed without
killing the Bill.
What I want to say here is that I take extreme offense at the use of
the word ‘spanking’ to trivialize a serious issue like domestic
violence. Do you have any idea what domestic violence is? Perhaps not.
That’s why you treat it so flippantly.
As for the rest of the blog, it is all conjecture. You and all the
doomsayers don’t know if this bill will work till it is implemented.
It might just. And forget that old argument that it will be taken over
by elite women. So far it’s been elite men in charge.. so what’s wrong
with elite women having a go?
As for the problems of revolving quota that you bring up as the Bill’s
most serious flaw, I think you can argue the other way too. That is,
MPs from reserved constituencies will work extra hard in the reserved
constituency to ensure that they get a ticket when the seat is not
reserved any more because of the good work they would have hopefully
done.
Ziauddin Shafi says:
March 15, 2010 at 6:59 pm
The simple fact is that, if you want to prevent a civil war in our
country, you will have to simply amend it and incorporate all the
demands that are being raised here. No, this is not a threat – nobody
can threaten a civil war damn it, this is just a forecast of shape of
things to come. Maoists on the rampage, Yadavs fully agitated, Muslims
further discriminated against and lesser represented in the power
share, Dalits more oppressed than before – and the high caste hindus
more getting more power in the process. This is a sure formula of
inciting a civil war – thank you congress, bjp and cpim – you are
about to do something which china, usa, europe & pakistan would have
loved to do – have a great civil war in india so that it receds back
to the middle ages – then it would be easier for the buccanneers of
the khyber to get in and set up shop. India had always suffered due to
the high caste hindus throughout its history – and alas would continue
to do so because of them.
S Singh Reply:
March 15th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Ziauddin
Nice “hope”!
Believe me, your hope will not happen. India is beyond that.
Skirmishes will be there, appeasing politicians will continue to
appease, country will progress at a rate less than what it could have.
A growing India uplifts all; the huge spending govt does on
disadvantaged will only grow.
If 10% of so called high caste Hindus control the whole India, one
should congratulate them on their skills.
Have you tabulated the “classification” of the top 100 richest
Indians ? Do you know how many Brahmins are in the richest 100? It is
4.
sanjeev says:
March 15, 2010 at 7:06 pm
@ Zia
i could guess that Zia will ultimately turn to his muslim
reservation.
You need a serious therapy of “reverse brainwashing”
I f these skull caps and three quarter pyajama’s got reservation then
this will be step towards another Pakistan in the making. Remember the
process started this way in 1909…Morley Minto Reforms
SKS Mumbai says:
March 15, 2010 at 9:31 pm
‘The Bill is anti-minority, anti-backwards, and both anti-women and
anti-men’
If we exclude the women and men, it would read like a pre-partition
Muslim League’s pamphlet.
‘Framers of the Constitution — —- —– save for time-bound reservation
for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes to enable them to overcome
disadvantages.’
Except for the rotation part (clearly a problem), how is current bill
different from above?
‘The principal arguments against it were that such rights were based
on caste and religion and religion-based separate electorates had been
the immediate trigger for Partition’
Just immediate trigger? Or the whole basis?
Zia sahab, are you suggesting that proportional representation was the
way to go? We thought that all those wanted proportional (actually
more than proportinal with a veto as well) representation crossed over
in 1947.
‘With the Muslim League and the Sikh Panthic Party in disarray, Muslim
and Sikh acquiescence on reversing minority safeguards was ultimately
secured’
Indeed, after Mr Jinnah and Muslim League left India in 1947, Muslims
of India had nobody to represent them, exactly as Mr Jinnah had
insisted all along. Our Hindu Communal Leaders foolishly questioned Mr
Jinnah’s premise. (For Mr Jinnah and ML, Hindu communalism was
represented by Gandhi, Nehru and congress, rarely did they talk of
Hindu Mahasabha)
‘In fact, parties like Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party and
Muslim organizations have demanded a quota-within-quota in the women’s
reservation’
Yup, the ‘Strongest Argument’ against the bill.
Mr Zia’s Final Conclusions:
Congress acted dumb, Left dumber.
The Bill is a victory for Hindutva driven Bramhin-Bania combine!!
Do we need any other reason to oppose the Bill?
Rajeev says:
March 16, 2010 at 1:17 am
The best thing will be to merge India with pakistan and name is
Greater pakistan. Gives muslims like Zia 100% reservation with right
to kill or convert non-muslims especially hindus.
Anil says:
March 16, 2010 at 1:45 am
One participant’s gains can come only from another’s equivalent
losses. It seeks to pay Paul by robbing Peter
Do you have same sentiments in matters of reservation for muslims..
Hypocricy at its very best
Zia Haq Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Unfortunately, of late, I haven’t been able to read up on the comments/
invectives that follow because of lack of time.
On your charge of hypocricy: What I said is up here for you to read
again. But Here’s what I didn’t say anywhere: that Muslims should get
separate electorates (something simply out of question) or political
reservation. On the contrary, I said: “Though ideally, the highest
elected forum should be able to be free from all reservations, a quota
that specifically addresses maginalised women would have been
pragmatic.” What does this tell you?
Even so, I am not against political reservation for women per se, but
not in the current form. I would much rather have political parties
give nomination to the extent of 33 per cent. Who or what stops them.
And please understand, I do not advcoate any quota on the basis of
homogeneity. I said so: “Homogeneity is a stupid idea when applied to
assess communities horizontally. Not all women, like Muslims, are
equally disadvantaged or privileged.” Therefore, I will never advocate
quota for all Muslims.
Understand that before I decide to write or take a position, I do
consider all relevant issues before arriving at an informed decision
and not simply think with a Muslim hat on. The Bill, in its current
form, suffers from inherent flaws. Its bearing on representations of
minority is one such flaw, among others. It is a given that Muslim
representation will be severely affected. And therefore it is a
legitimate concern. Moreover, blocking such a huge number of seats for
women in this way — I have argued — legitimises the demand for a quota
within quota for backward women, which will include Muslims, OBCs etc.
Nobody is even talking about Muslim political reservation. it’s not
required, not recommended and not demanded. The demand is for
political representation, not reservation.
Anil says:
March 16, 2010 at 1:48 am
NO muslim reservation in legislation.. we do not want start of another
pakistan movemenet.. this is how it all started in past..
Anil says:
March 16, 2010 at 2:08 am
See the thuggery of parties sekeing quota withitn quota.. these people
will make you belive as if they have bene emporing the women i within
their community caste only the general category women have faced
dicrmination. But fact is noone acroos the party caste creed lines
have bene empowering women. There is a common threat fo discrimantion
against women by their respective male folks.. Who stops these idiots
shouting for quota within quota from giving tickets to more and more
muslim and backward and sc/st and what nto women.
One fo the guy was saying woman; reseervation will dilute sc/st
reservation as if sc/st woman are nto sc/st.
These thuigs who support reservation when it’s conveneint to them are
suddenly parooting reservation pays peter by robbing paul..
Pahle ye akal nahin aai thi
ramesh says:
March 16, 2010 at 10:43 am
The mother of all the resavations is the resv. the muslims are allowed
tobe the resident non indians,
Rajeev Reply:
March 16th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Good one. We have 150 million pakistanis living in India barring
handful.
SKS Mumbai says:
March 17, 2010 at 9:14 pm
@Zia
@Zia
‘I didn’t say anywhere: that Muslims should get separate electorates
(something simply out of question) or political reservation’
What you said was this: Constituent Assembly would have approved
separate electorates (is that same as Minority safeguards?) but for:
1. fresh memory of partition, which made the nationalist arguments;
particularly effective, and/or
2. a weakened Muslim League (I omit Sikh part here); and/or
3. abstention by key Muslim leaders.
Of course, that does not mean that you wanted ’separate electorates’
or ‘political reservation’ for Muslims?
Nor does your following statement mean so:
‘If the women’s Bill is passed in its current form, then a clear case
emerges for compensatory minority safeguards to be reactivated, not
’separate electorates’ but ‘reserved seats’
Am I missing something?
For e.g. the difference between ‘reserved seats’ and ‘political
reservation’?
Or the similarity between
‘compensatory’ and ‘only for marginalised’?
Ashish Reply:
March 18th, 2010 at 10:30 am
@SKS
It has been established before that Zia resorts to generalities when
specifics are called for.. at any rate, he has his own idioms and
syntaxes. Deliberately vague or vaguely deliberate, a compendium of
Zia-isms will be a best-seller.
As for your question: am I missing something? well, yes. You are. You
are missing the point of this blog. The sole function of this blog is
to generate controversy by ill-advised and poorly researched comments
and boost eyeballs.. the visit stats look good on account of Zia,
Vinod Sharma et al.. they are stars.
Rajeev says:
March 18, 2010 at 1:33 am
All the muslims who are asking for reservation on caste basis should
revert back to Hinduism.
The reservation for SC/ST/OBC was introduced to fight casteism in
HINDU society. It was for HINDUS who were at the bottom of their
SOCIETY. There were many who chose to become muslims/xtians to escape
HINDU casteism. Now if they want to come out of caste opression, they
need to revert back to hinduism.
In the word of Shri Kancha Illiah “islam and xtianity are democratic
religion” so there is no chance of casteism being part of muslim/xtian
socities.
Rajeev says:
March 18, 2010 at 9:24 pm
Simple solutions-
1. If you are muslim and want reservation on caste, come back to caste
system in Hinduism and avail the reservation.
2. If you are muslim and want reservation on caste but don’t want to
revert to Hinduism, please pack your bags and go back to pakistan
where you guys have 100% reservation.
Budgeting for minorities
Although historically aware of its disadvantaged sections and their
special needs, India has decisively switched from ‘appeasing’ Muslims
— its largest minority — to budgeting for them.
Two things in recent years have helped institutionalise minority
budgeting. One is the creation of a minority affairs ministry by the
Congress-led UPA government in 2004 and, as a result, yearly budgetary
allocations made to it.Two, a high-level government survey in November
2006 that proved disadvantages faced by Muslims, followed up with
another one that recommended reservations.
Till now, an unproductive Hajj subsidy worth Rs 390 crore — which goes
in bankrolling the pilgrimage through discounted airfare — had been
the flagship largesse.
Even though government-funded religious travel is not unique to
Muslims, the Hajj subsidy has often been singled out as unfair.
The Centre underwrites a part of the travel costs of the annual Hindu
pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet, the abode of the Hindu god
Shiva.
Karnataka’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government proposes
concessional Hindu pilgrimages to the temples of Udupi, Dharmasthala
and Saudatti in the southern Indian state.
In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the Congress party-led government
subsidises the cost of travel for Christians visiting Jerusalem in
Israel and Bethlehem in Palestinian Authority. A subsidy is also being
planned, according to media reports, for Manasarovar Yatra in China.
Why should government fund religious jaunts? Either because we are a
welfare state unlike any other or it is a game of votes. Perhaps,
both.
Deploying tax revenues for affordable healthcare, education and
employment may be good economics but in an ancient holy land,
spiritual well being seems to deserve importance too. But competing
populism has definitely crept into it.
Show me an economically underprivileged Hindu who will find fault with
government help to make a dip in the holy Ganges a reality? Or a
Muslim quibbling over a lifetime visit to Mecca, courtesy government
help?
However, there is a growing demand from Muslims themselves for the
Hajj subsidy to be scrapped. While it gives Air India 150,000 assured
passengers every year (that’s the total number of seats on all Indian
carriers criss-crossing the country on any given day), helping it keep
afloat, the grant has been turned into a stick to beat Muslims with.
No Muslim asked for it in the first place.
Muslims are now calling for global and national open bids: whoever
offers the cheapest tickets gets to fly away with 150,000 prize
passengers. Fair enough.
“If the Hajj subsidy is withdrawn, it won’t hurt us. If scholarship
are cut, that would,” Asaduddin Owaisi, Hyderabad MP from the All
India Majlis-eIttehadul Muslimeen party, told the Hindustan Times last
year.
There is a less obvious side to the Hajj subsidy. The subsidy itself
seems responsible for Muslim backwardness, given that it has enabled
governments to use it as a signature grant and avoid more basic
financial interventions.
However, the recognition that minorities can be predisposed to
experiencing disadvantages due to their numerical inferiority itself
has made planning and budgeting for them an integral part of most
developed countries.
Almost all of Europe and the US make special allocations of one type
or the other for their minorities.
Why do Indian Muslims need a helping hand?
The country’s Muslim population is 150 millions, making it the state
with the second-largest Muslim population, after Indonesia. Indian
Muslims experience serious disadvantages, low literacy and high
poverty rates.
Their literacy rates are well below the national average, while
poverty rates are only slightly higher than low-caste Hindus,
according to the November 2006 Sachar Committee report.
Muslims, mostly Sunnis, make up 13.4% of India’s population, yet hold
fewer than 5% of government posts and make up only 4% of
undergraduates in universities. The report also found that, despite
being self-employed at a far higher rate, Muslims trail other groups
in terms of access to credit.
Yet, they can influence elections, using their voting power to extract
concessions from parties who woo them.
Muslims are not uniformly disadvantaged. Those in south and west India
have been historically wealthier. In the north, Muslims were thrust
into abject poverty at once when their wealthier counterparts left for
Pakistan during the 1947 Partition.
Muslims in rural areas are less poor than in urban areas, where their
poverty rate of 38 percent is higher than any other population’s,
including low-caste Hindus.
Although no formal Muslim caste system exists, three groups of Indian
Muslims –ashraf, ajlaf, and arzal — indeed function as such. More
correctly, there is definitely a Muslim class system, if not a caste
system.
The ashrafs, thought to be of Arab ancestry, form the upper class
among Muslims, while the ajlafs are thought to be previously Hindus
who converted to Islam to escape the Hindu caste system. A third
group, the arzals, correlates to the lowest caste among Hindus.
The Sachar Report has provided exhaustive data on socio-economic
conditions of Muslims.
The Sachar report has been controversial, not just for highlighting
Muslim marginalisation but also because of its very mandate. Hindu
nationalists — led by the BJP — criticized the report, tainting it
with an old brush –- that of appeasement.
While it offers clear proof of Muslim marginalisation, there have been
debates about how to combat Muslim unemployment rates. The BJP is
averse to solutions focusing directly on Muslims but would prefer
general poverty alleviation.
All government outlays to pull a community out of backwardness can
look like appeasement, given the zeal for competing interests of
political leaders vying for power.
Has budgeting helped?
India’s 2010-11 budget has given 50% higher allocation to the minority
affairs ministry — up from Rs 1,740 crore to Rs 2,600 crore.
Cash flow to minorities — from bank loans to scholarships — peaked
during 2008-09, according to government data, as Muslims appeared to
be slowly overcoming a strong bias of banks in lending.
Public sector banks, which would turn down Muslim loan applicants
because they were considered “credit risk groups”, have disbursed a
staggering Rs 82,864 crore in loans to minorities during 2008-09.
Since the Reserve Bank has now turned its focus to 121 backward
minority districts with high Muslim population, as identified by the
minority affairs ministry, Muslims got a chunky pie of the credit
share.
Banks now have to compulsorily service Muslims in backward areas after
the Reserve Bank added minorities to its list of other priority
lending sectors, like agriculture and small-scale businesses in July
2007.
“We will be able to see the results shortly if not immediately,”
Planning Commission member Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, who heads the
minority sector, says.
Cash constraints are now easing, with banks achieving lending targets
set for minorities. In 2008-09, the Reserve Bank’s target was that 13%
of loans under priority sector lending should go to minorities and
banks were able to lend 12.4%. This was better than 2007-08, when the
target was 10.6% and actual sanctions 9.6%. Priority sector lending
accounts for 40 per cent of total loans, according to the federal
Reserve Bank of India norms.
Banks also opened 524 branches in minority concentration districts in
2009 and nearly 6-lakh minority students got scholarships. In 2008,
523 branches were set up.
The UPA government has earmarked a whopping Rs 7,000 crore for
minority welfare under the 11th Five Year Plan that concludes in 2012.
The government now plans to install national-level independent
monitors to track back how Rs 3,780 are being spent for minority
welfare under the “flagship multi-sectoral development programme”, in
which lawmakers will have a say for the first time.
The multi-sectoral programme, which helps set up anything from a
school to a water pump, applies to 90 districts countrywide where
minorities make up more than 25 per cent of the population and lag
behind significantly on crucial socio-economic parameters.
The government’s approach is such that creation of assets in these
districts should also benefit the majority communities as well. UP,
Assam and Bihar have the largest number of minority districts, with
21, 12 and 6 districts respectively.
These districts were selected on the basis of 10 indicators, ranging
from literacy to the number of inoculated children.
The government hopes evaluating schemes with a fine-toothed comb and
involving area MPs, an idea of minority affairs minister Salman
Khurshid, are moves that would customise the multi-sectoral scheme.
The government feels a quick appraisal is important to ensure rapid
implementation of schemes. “These national-level independent monitors
will report back two things: are schemes being implemented in the
right way and right place, according to Khrushid.
The scheme, in its second stage now, is also called being called a top-
up phase because money from the minority affairs will be now poured
into schemes of other ministries so that minorities benefit.
The Planning Commission is also evaluating massive spending on
minority welfare as it prepares for mid-term appraisal of the 11th
Five-Year Plan.
Planning Commission member Hameed is set to personally travel to five
regions for first-hand feedback from beneficiaries.
Lessons from Congressional Black Caucus
Some historic measures for minority welfare, including an exclusive
ministry, helped the Congress sail through the last general elections
for a second term in power.
However, Muslim lawmakers, whose numbers are dwindling over time, have
seldom used parliamentary mechanisms creatively to ensure Muslims get
a fair deal. A problem with Muslim leadership is that political
leadership has often overlapped with religious leadership.
Divided along sharp party lines, India’s Muslim lawmakers seldom get a
chance to work in unison. However, they could take a leaf out of the
Congressional Black Caucus.
The Caucus helped highlight the plight of US minorities with a two-
step process: by the congressional budget process called the Humphrey-
Hawkins debate and by moving alternate budget resolutions.
The struggle of minorities in the US helped them integrate into
society and as their clout grew, Congress became more responsive to
their needs. Geographical concentrations of some minorities in the US
have led to their greater representation, though it is far behind
their share of the population.
In the 2001-2003 Congress, for instance, African-Americans comprised
12 percent of the population, but just 8.3% of the House members;
Hispanics made up 13 % of the population and just 4.4 % of the House;
and women represented 51 % of the population but just 13.6% of the
House, and 13% of the Senate.
America’s annual budget project to thrash out budgetary solutions to
address backwardness of minorities is a lesson for both Indian
minority lawmakers and those opposed to minority-specific solutions,
like the BJP.
A beginning has been made but just a fraction achieved. After all,
every change for the better begins with a small minority.
(9 votes, average: 4.11 out of 5)
Posted by Zia Haq on Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 11:09 pm
102 Responses to “Budgeting for minorities”
sanjeev says:
March 1, 2010 at 1:40 am
Mullah Zia
“The Centre underwrites a part of the travel costs of the annual Hindu
pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet, the abode of the Hindu god
Shiva ”
This is less of a pilgrimage and more of india’s strategic and
geopolitical game plan to counter the chinese arguments of Arunachal
being historically part of China. and more imporatantly a tradition
which has been part ofindian civilzation.
Further this is a trekking expedition and not any luxury trip by an
aeroplane.which your ilk makes at taxpayers money.
I hope brainwashed mullahs like you might be aware that govt of India
also promote trekking to high altitude areas…through Indian
Mountaineering Federation (IMF). I myself has been part of some IMF
funded trekking expeditions to himalayas.
So in that way its not any exclusive and out of turn activity.
Further this yatra is open to all Indian citizens cutting across
religious lines…but Haj is not.
So don’t show your ignorance…rather write something about islamophobia
Mitra Reply:
March 1st, 2010 at 11:10 am
Hey Sanjeev,
Whatever excuses and arguments you come up with, it is a fact that
Govt. of India subsidizes a Hindu pilgrimage just as it does for
Mulsims and Christians. Nowhere does the Govt. say they do it for
strategic reasons- and it is a rather absurd argument. So cool down
and try to control your hatred. Aren’t you guys always shouting about
how tolerant Hindus and Hinduism are? There is no way to infer that
from your churlish behavior! Learn to give respect to people and
debate like a civilized educated man- even when you keep making stupid
arguments. Jai Hind!
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
How can you expect an uncivilized Hindu terrorist to react when
confronted with facts? All I’ve seen on this blog, is people preaching
hatred and violence bypassing all logic and sense. None of their
comments make sense and I repeat NONE. But rhetoric is what helps them
feel superior, else they are cowed down by the uneducated minority so
easily. Let them have the comfort of the rhetoric and shameless
ignorance. Ignorance is bliss ya know?
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
@Pandit sanjeev
“The Centre underwrites a part of the travel costs of the annual Hindu
pilgrimage to Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet, the abode of the Hindu god
Shiva ” ~~~> FACT
“This is less of a pilgrimage and more of india’s strategic and
geopolitical game plan to counter the chinese arguments of Arunachal
being historically part of China” ~~~~>FICTION …
“…and more imporatantly a tradition which has been part ofindian
civilzation” ~~~> Is that all you think about your own culture and
religion? Hang your head in shame. I pity you.
“Further this is a trekking expedition and not any luxury trip by an
aeroplane.which your ilk makes at taxpayers money.”
Does that make it a FREE expedition? The Government employs choppers
for your “safety” in the mountains, massive policing arrangements for
the crowd and at times they even arrange for fake shivlings (LMAO)
when you “God” fails to appear Will you please tell me who funds
these costs? IMO It is the taxpayers money and that includes Muslims
of this country. If you are so averse to Muslims, why don’t you shun
government spending? Lets just take an example – India’s third largest
software exporter Wipro is held by a Muslim billionaire. Over a lakh
of people are employed by the company and they pay huge taxes to this
government every year. Why don’t you ask your Hindu brethren to stop
taking up jobs in Wipro and making a living out of it? The tax they
pay is also funded by that very same Muslim -held company. Do you need
more examples? OK have you heard of the companies – Cipla, Wockhardt ,
Himalaya heath Care are only to name a few of them. What about the
crores of taxes, the “Khans’ of Bollywood pay to this Government and
the revenue that their movies generate directly or indirectly ( though
people employed and associated with the movies) Why would you like to
go on a “holy” trip on Muslim money? Should’nt you shun the Government
subsidy?
“I hope brainwashed mullahs like you might be aware that govt of India
also promote trekking to high altitude areas…through Indian
Mountaineering Federation (IMF). I myself has been part of some IMF
funded trekking expeditions to himalayas. So in that way its not any
exclusive and out f turn activity.”
So ? Doesn’t make sense honey! Try harder next time and come up with
some logic, not brain-dead arguments.
“Further this yatra is open to all Indian citizens cutting across
religious lines…but Haj is not.”
LMAO I pity you now!!
“So don’t show your ignorance…rather write something about
islamophobia”
Internet Hindus have time and again proudly proved their blissful
ignorance. I’m glad you are just another one of them!
raman says:
March 1, 2010 at 8:24 am
So, they need special budget for them , they need special care from
government otherwise they warn that some of them will turn into
terrorist or help them…..what kind of logic is this………
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
No one has argued that they will turn into terrorists if the
government doesn’t provide them with a separate budget. After all what
have all the subsequent governments done over all these years? They
have only pushed the minorities ( read Muslims ) to impoverishment and
under-representation without a voice. Anyone who dares speak for
Muslims is labeled a traitor or at best a supporter of Muslim League.
Anything that anyone even promises for Muslims ( let alone fulfill
them) is termed as Muslim Appeasement. How wonderfully naive.
Muslims have lived in ghettos with discrimination over the years in
this country and we don’t need any one to make nonsense announcements
for Muslims. We have lived with deprivation and can survive in our own
mumbling ways.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Oh BTW look what poverty has done to people in the rural areas. Will
you dare call the Maoists terrorists and traitors? The argument
against it is that they are our very own civilians although they can
murder people at will,kill innocents, behead people they hate and rape
and maim women. So what? after all they are Hindu civilians, they’ve
got every right to be protected in this country. A Muslim on the other
hand is picked up by the police at random without evidence or even
gunned down in cold blood is quickly labeled a terrorist by everyone.
Why make a distinction?
raman Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Did I say I sympathize with Maoists, do not assume things…..
RE Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 3:07 am
No, I never said that. I am only putting across my point.
Ashish Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Dear RE,
the Maoists do not fight on religious grounds; the Indian state’s
“war” against them is also “secular”.
There is tremendous amount of blood-letting going on in the names of
protecting the rights of the economic underprivileged and the rights
of the state. I have not heard any Maoist (or any CPIML member) make
any invocation to religion.
I am not sure why you think the State treats the Maoists as “Hindu
civilians”. Care to explain?
SP Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 3:34 am
Maoists justify terror as a means of pursuing their goal of
overthrowing the Indian state just because they are poor and the
deprived citizens of this country? Common a very sizable population of
this country is below the poverty line. But the Government won’t fight
a war against them because these ‘Adivasis’ happen to be our ‘own’
people although they can engage the armed forces of this
coutry,massacre them at will, abduct ,kill and behead people at will.
A 20 something Muslim guy on the other hand is picked up at random/
even better shot in broad daylight, by the police and branded a
terrorist without even a shred of evidence The News channels hail the
police and the government and all we read is “20 something Islamic
Terrorist has been nabbed who has confessed to all the bombings that
ever happened in the country over the last 10 years”. How lame is
that!
Why is there such a discrimination in the treatment between the two? A
terrorist is a terrorist! Be it a Maoist or a certain Pragya Singh
Devi. Why does the mainstream political party come up in defense of
HINDU terror accused or label any muslim ACCUSED to be a terrorist?
The same goes with the Maoists – the Government won’t wage a war
against them just because they happen to be Hindus.
Anyone who challenges the state should be an enemy of the
state .Unfortunately that is not true for the Hindus of this country.
They can get away with mass orchestrated murders and live under state
protection. (‘92 ‘02 anyone?) And so is the case with the Maoists.
They are Hindus and by default saintly and hence cannot be treated as
terrorists.
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 12:46 pm
@SP
I will again quote from my post “there is a tremendous amount of
bloodletting going on in the names of protecting the rights of the
economic underprivileged and the rights of the state.” I think I make
it clear that Maoists are fighting only in the name of protecting the
rights of the underprivileged.
And, what gives you the idea that the Government is not fighting them?
We can differ on whether it is a “war” or not. But the human rights
activists will certainly not agree with you that the government is
going easy on the Maoists. Unless of course you say that the likes of
Arundhati Roy are basically Hindu zealots and speak for the Maoists
only because they are Hindus.
Let me quote from your reply:
“A 20 something Muslim guy on the other hand is picked up at random/
even better shot in broad daylight, by the police and branded a
terrorist without even a shred of evidence The News channels hail the
police and the government and all we read is “20 something Islamic
Terrorist has been nabbed who has confessed to all the bombings that
ever happened in the country over the last 10 years”. How lame is
that!”
You know, this seems to be straight from the alleged situation in the
North-East; where the “war” between the state and the ultras have
resulted in several cases of human rights abuses that should be the
concern of any civilized society. The state of Manipur is a case in
point. May I however point out that the affected populace is not
Muslim in Manipur.
The Indian state is not perfect; far from it. Nor is the Indian
society. But, it is a worthwhile experiment is creating a multi-hued
culture. Thanks to our founding fathers and thanks to the economic
progress unleashed in the last 20 years, the benefits of modern living
are reaching many. If you argue that Muslims face systematic and
systemic discrimination, then you must be prepared to look within and
ask why is it that no other religion in India, including the Sikhs
(even after 1984) have a problem sharing space and prospering in this
country.
Looking at everything through the religious prism makes for noisy
debates but, makes you hostage to “benefactors” like Mamata Banerjee
and Laloo Yadav.
Mitra says:
March 1, 2010 at 11:05 am
Very interesting and informative discussion! Hope you keep monitoring
how well the minority welfare schemes are progressing- this is really
important. It is good we have a decent, honest man Salman Khursheed as
the Minister- politicians like him are relatively rare in India.
sanjeev Reply:
March 1st, 2010 at 5:43 pm
@ Mitra
I can expect such sort of logic from naxal sympathisers like you….
Hope you forgot your bengali ilk got kicked by these so called
discriminated lots on 16 july 1946 (direct action day ).
Wait for some more decades another Pakistan will be demanded from your
home state. The demand will arise from your so called secular and left
ruled state.
Or else i can imagine you have admitted to dhimmi status or else burqa
clad.
Rajeev Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:05 am
This guy is muslim with hindu last name..just like Bhowmik (saba naqvi
bhaowmik).
sanjeev Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 1:54 pm
@ Rajeev
I M sure she is a girl and so brainwashed by so called leftist of
Students Federation of India (SFI).
She haven’t been able to come out of the vote bank politics of naxal
sypmathizers of JNU.
Mitra Reply:
March 4th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
I am Hindu and I am not a woman. I won’t give you my first name as I
teach in an university and I have a website- I am afraid Hindu
nationalist vandals will try to bother me. I am not a Naxal
sympathizer and thats not what we are discussing. The Naxals are left-
wing extremists and you guys are right-wing extremists- every
patriotic Indian should condemn both equally. The day you guys will
learn to make an actual argument instead of spewing vile hatred and
prejudice, I will be happy to have a discussion.
sanjeev Reply:
March 4th, 2010 at 5:36 pm
@ Mitra
It is you who started labelling someone as sangh parivar or bajrang
bal member
Its welcome that you want positive debate..
Btw other people like me also work for govt organizations.
Nobody has time to bother except those with whom you empathise…hope
you remember the recent karnataka episode over Taslima nasreen article
episode. who resorted to rioting ?
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
@Sanjeev pandit.
1. I hope you are not a disgruntled shudra who is not even allowed to
enter the temple by The Brahmins or you did not marry in the same
gotra and were hounded by your own goons. You sound very irked and
disgruntled so can I assume that someone in your family decided to
kill a female child or maybe your wife does not want to put on a
ghoonghat? Is there any reason why you are so pissed off with life?
2. Regarding rioting in Karnataka :
Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8544657.stm
“Police say Hindu groups joined the unrest in both places after
Muslims took to the streets. About 50 arrests have been made in
connection with the violence. ”
Muslims taking to streets to voice protest against something does not
mean they were rioting but as usual, people don’t have the guts to
accept the truth in this country. I am sure they did not pull you out
of you house and mob you down like the goons at RSS do under state
protection. Every citizen has the legitimate right to voice his/her
opinion but the fact of the matter is Hindu cowards started a riot.
Television images on “Times Now” , a clearly pro- hindutva ,pro- BJP ,
pro- right wing channel showed images of people with ORANGE flags with
“OM” inscribed on them. Now I can bet they were not Muslims. Secondly,
the Ram Sene called a bandh the very next day! WOW how did the entire
protest affect those cowards? Karnataka is BJP ruled so people have
the liberty to start a riot and get away with it just like Gujarat.
The Muslims are the ones who will be labeled terrorists any which way.
At least have the guts to accept the truth in public MORON
perpetual.dilettante says:
March 1, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Since you cite the government subsidies for the pilgrimage to Kailash
Mansorovar as a point to counter the annual Haj subsidies, numbers
around what the total outlay for the project is would have been
interesting for a fair comparison. Do not quite agree with your point
that the Muslims had not asked for the subsidies. The fact remains
that there were demands from certain quarters from within the
community for this step. Obviously the point whether or not they
represented the true sentiments of the community can well be debated.
However, your point around the government not subsidizing religious
pursuits is well taken. It needs to be applied irrespective of
religious affiliations of the vote banks, pressure groups, etc.
However, there is a bigger question here around the value of
affirmative action, specially in context of religious segments. That
is a point worth debating as well
Gopi Thomas says:
March 1, 2010 at 2:35 pm
If money would have solved Muslim “backwardness” , countries like KSA
would be producing qualified engineers and journalists and teachers
leave alone world class scientists. They recently opened a “world
class” university; minister E Ahmed represented India in the
inauguration ceremony – 80% of the student body was foreign students
whom they had ‘bought” with lucrative scholarships. A student from
Minnesota stated that he will have to spend $20,000 in a state Univ in
Minnesota; now he gets paid $20,000 affter all the expenses; he did
not know how long he could last there in KSA because the public
outside the walls of the Univ do not want a Univ there.
Why is Pakistan so backward with madrasites killing left and right,
with nosystem to speak of other than a rot corrupt military system,
if, as the author says “elite’ Muslims migrated to Pakistan.
Hyderabad (Telengana) was under Nizam rule for yearsa nd years. Why
are Muslims educationally so backward there?
Why iin Kerala they are still backward educationally (although they
are significantly better compared to all India Muslim average)? And a
smaller minority there, Christians, excelled in education,
industriousness, contributions..
The author talks about bank loans. Muslims are promoting “Islamic
Bank” as the right way of banking. I have seen Muslim students being
advised on some of their “exclusive” sites not to seek student loan,
and to take lower level job rather than pursuing higher studies with
student loans.
We have to bring all up to participate in a vibrant, growing India.
Money, if at all, is only a very small part of the equation. It is
attitudes, entrenched belief systems, uncompromising stickiness to a
set of rules formed in 650 when conditions were different, learning
Arabic (instead of English) etc etc. If these do not change, whatever
money is allocated, we will still have this dialogue of backwardness
fifty years from now, 100 years from now.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Your arguments are best very naive and you obviously know that. If you
still need an explanation, I’m ready to debate
sanjeev says:
March 1, 2010 at 5:55 pm
@ Gopi
Govt should resort to following Measures for development of muslims
1. Sharia laws
2. Islamic banking
3 Education only through madrasa: this should include courses on
geography and hisory of saudi arabia, science based on quran, arabic
language
4. Compulsory pilgrimage for all muslims to Haj
5. Freedom to kill as many as infidels as they wish so that they can
achieve ultimate aim: jannat with hooris
I think then they can have proper development of their personality as
well as material progress
Ziauddin Shafi says:
March 1, 2010 at 6:57 pm
Muslims of Hyderabad were never backward during the Nizam’s rule.
Since the last 30 years or so, the criminal nexus between MIM and the
Congress, who treat the Hyderabadi Muslims as their vote bank, have
deliberately worked against the education of Muslims in the city. So
much so that government schols functioning there do not have teaching
staff, water, electricity and toilets – forcing poor students to drop
out. Government-funded Urdu medium schools are in the worst possible
conditions – unbelievable is the word. Despite all these Muslim
traitors and “secular congress” traitors, the Muslims of Hyderabad and
Telangana are struggling to find their feet. The northern Indian
Muslims are comparatively better off – they have leaders like Salman
Khursheed and Sayyida who are sincere, honest and hard-working. Hope
they also come down to Telangana & Hderabad to look into the affairs
here.
Shoeb K Reply:
March 1st, 2010 at 11:19 pm
@Shafi
Are you implying that there was a “conspiracy” to deprive Hyderabad
Muslim students of education? Are you saying that Muslims in Hyd were
highly educated during Nizam rule and 30 years after independence, and
then due to misadministration or stupidity or conspiracy of leaders,
the education started going down???
How do other people (including the so called most backward DAaits
among us) get educated? Sam Pitroda, the telecom architect of India,
came from a Dalit background. Modern india has lakhs of stories like
that.
You may be right that some Muslim eladers and congress leaders
coluded. At the end of the day, our community has to look into
ourselves — are we doing right? Are we giving emphasis to education,
like other communities are giving? Or, are we satisfied iwth menial
trading jobs? Do w e want our daughters get educated and working and
standing on their feet? Do we give emphasis to readinga nd writing (at
a basic level as well as at a literary level)? Arent most of our
people victims of mullahs and maulavis, this way or no way? Do many of
us really interact with otehr religious members in an intimate way?
Unless we sort out these, we will always be blaming some others and
not doing the right thing.
Ashish Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:50 pm
@ Shoeb K,
till today I did not know that Sam Pitroda came from a Dalit family; I
suspect very few others on this blog did either.
The great thing is, we don’t know and we don’t care. It is enough for
us that Sam Pitroda is what he is, a visionary with the gumption to
get things done.
Is Azim Premji a Muslim? Well, yes. Is he an example? Of course. Is he
an example only for Muslims?
” Modern india has lakhs of stories like that.” .. yes, and thank you
for making this simple statement.
Let’s worry about evolving a “post-religious” identity. We must.
The questions you raise are not limited to Muslims; I think the
Muslims as a community can benefit by making common cause with the
poor Hindus/ Jains/ Christians and demand that the government deliver
on education, women’s rights and childrens’ health and nutrition. Of
course, the community must play its part in ensuring that religion is
quoted as an argument to stymie those initiatives.
@Ziauddin Shafi I think you are not informed about the sorry state of
affairs in the northern part of the country. The lack of leadership
that you talk about, is even more pronounced in North and it shows up
in all the indices.
UI Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
@Shoeb K Reply:
“Are you implying that there was a “conspiracy” to deprive Hyderabad
Muslim students of education? ”
Why only in Hyderabad, look at the vitriol everyone spewed when there
was a proposal to set up a branch of AMU in Murshidabad, West Bengal.
AMU may not be an Oxford but education surely will help the most
deprived and the backward. Do you think it was fair to unnecessarily
criticize the setting up of a branch of AMU? You know what, you need
to get out of you comfort zone to see what people have done to Muslims
in this country. I am an engineer and I’ve seen the nasty face of
educators at every stage of my school/university. I was always singled
out because I was the only Muslim in the class who topped exams year
after year. It is exactly things like these that make people cringe
and say that they do. Accept the fact that there has been a targetted
marginalization of Muslim in this country
“How do other people (including the so called most backward DAaits
among us) get educated? Sam Pitroda, the telecom architect of India,
came from a Dalit background. Modern india has lakhs of stories like
that.”
Have you ever heard of something called reservations? When the most un-
deserving candidates are given preferences in places that matter, what
do you expect in this country? Abolish all forms of reservations or
apply them equally for ALL economically backward sections of the
society. Only then you will get a clear idea of what the reality is.
“You may be right that some Muslim eladers and congress leaders
coluded. At the end of the day, our community has to look into
ourselves — are we doing right? Are we giving emphasis to education,
like other communities are giving? Or, are we satisfied iwth menial
trading jobs? Do w e want our daughters get educated and working and
standing on their feet? Do we give emphasis to readinga nd writing (at
a basic level as well as at a literary level)? Arent most of our
people victims of mullahs and maulavis, this way or no way? Do many of
us really interact with otehr religious members in an intimate way?
Unless we sort out these, we will always be blaming some others and
not doing the right thing.”
You must be kidding my dear! You seriously must be kidding me! Talking
about things from the comfort of your home with a laptop in front of
you is something different than the stark poverty and alienation that
Muslims face in this country. Get out of the 5-6 Urban cities for
God’s sake. You cannot expect anyone to get a decent education unless
he is lucky like me or you, when there is abject poverty , when people
can hardly make ends meet if at all. I’ve seen most Muslims living in
ghettos even in so called urban cities where there is hardly a decent
school in the vicinity and you talk about education? Have you ever
wondered why Muslims are discriminated when it comes to getting a
rented house in a Hindu locality?
You talk about the status of women in our society( are you seriously a
Muslim or just using a Muslim name? )
“Do w e want our daughters get educated and working and standing on
their feet?”
Seriously? Any and every educated family that I know of and some very
poor families insist on their daughters going to school to get an
education. Esp when it comes to urban areas, people are more open to
allowing women to work. You seriously must be kidding me or you are
very detached from the society !!
“Arent most of our people victims of mullahs and maulavis, this way or
no way?”
Again you are making sweeping generalizations.
“Do many of us really interact with otehr religious members in an
intimate way?”
What do you mean by an Intimate way? Of course where the majority are
people from other communities, you mingle with them , at school , at
work , in your neighborhood. Living in ghettos does not mean that you
never interact with anyone!
A Banerjee says:
March 1, 2010 at 8:50 pm
The biggest enemy of the muslim community is the muslim himself. There
is an intersting article comparing muslims and jews. Although jews
consist of only 0.02 % of the world’s population, they have won 130
Nobel Prizes. Muslims are 20% of the world’s population, but have won
only 7 Nobels. I think that Muslims must stop this tirade of being
‘minorities’ and start working for themselves.
What has number to do with progress? If that be so the case then how
doyou explain the parsis who are doing so well for themselves?
The trouble with Mr Zia and other ’secular’ people is that they waste
their time and energy (please see that I am not mentioning ‘brains’)
brooding over some conspiracy theory or some ’sachar’ report instead
of using their time productively. This imacts the minds of young and
gullible muslim youth who start thinking that the entire nation is
against them.
Their was a very nice ad campaign by Idea in which Abhishek Bachhan
says that their will be no community, only mobile numbers. That’s the
way it should be…..
UI Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
BS
Anil Kumar says:
March 1, 2010 at 10:04 pm
All the religious pilgrimage subsisdy given to non-muslim you have
rehashed is the progeny of haz subsidy.> So muichy noise was made that
various state govts hand have bene forced..
No hindu no chrstian wnats thatsubsisdy only muslims are the one who
always need crutch for anything and everything..
They insisst that they will nto join mainstream education but they
must eb given job..
State of those hindus who confine themselves withitn the scriptute
study are not different we don;t see them cribbing..
If you want job start learnign physics chemistry math those Quran and
hadith reading is nto going to give you job..
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
“No hindu no chrstian wnats thatsubsisdy only muslims are the one who
always need crutch for anything and everything..
They insisst that they will nto join mainstream education but they
must eb given job..”
BS
Raju Kurien says:
March 2, 2010 at 6:51 am
The problem with Muslims is that they do not have a proper perspective
or they refuse to accept the reality. For example, This Javed Naqvi, a
reporter for DAwn, (a Pakistani based newspaper) always writes about
how bad it is for Muslims in india; how the goovernment goes on
destroying Muslims.. This guy is a Pakistani, living in and enjoying
Delhi, and he is always venomous about India– May be it is jealousy………
Muslims acn be a “suppressed moinority” (as they think) or an
aggressive contributor to national progress; they have to make that
choice..Government can go on pouring tax payers’ money for the so-
called upliftment; but the desire for upliftment and work towards
upliftment has to come from muslims themselves,a nd not througha ny
government programs.
sanjeev Reply:
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:04 pm
@ Raju
This so called peace activist Javed Naqv is no less than Taliban. I
don’t know whether he is Indian national ?
Regarding the much admired masiha of muslims Justice Rajendra sachar’s
credentials…let me highlight one of high ideological fact : He is so
called human right and civil rights activists of Arundhati Roy gang.
We can seriously doubt his credentials as a judge of supreme court or
distinguished jurist. I thibk this sachar committee is all a game plan
of congress left combine.
Although i personally support the govt should do efforts to educate
and elevate living standard of all deprived citizens irrespective of
minority or majority.
But why only the special emphasis on muslims ?
Why can’t they start some programme for all poor people of india and
allocate separate budget targets for this group ?
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Now comes conspiracy theory LMAO
shiuli says:
March 2, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Budgeting for minorities is a much required factor, coz if the gov’t
does not we have big brain drain like MF Husain, escaping to Qatar,
taking Citizen-ship there. We have violent clashes over Taslima
Nasreen’s outcry; also The Great Khan who has already been awarded
Dato-ship in Malaysia, by calling Pakistan, Our Friendly Neighbour,
may condemn Indian Citizenship one fine day.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
BS
ramesh says:
March 2, 2010 at 3:36 pm
What is holding back the muslims, is their literalism in
religion ,which is evident in all their aspects.Why arent the Parsees,
christians or sikh held back.Because they have opend their minds.
Muslims consider everyone else as jews only, their born enemy.They
should see the broader sense of the message.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Because all the hatred,vile and discrimination is directed towards the
Muslims , not towards the Parsees , Christians and Sikhs
S Singh Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 11:41 pm
So, there is no animosity to anybody except Muslims.. Could it be that
something is wrong with Muslism?
Why do Muslims have problem everywhere? Be Philippines, thailand, US,
UK, germanty. denmark, Switzerland — why even in the so called Islamic
countries ((OIC)? Oh why!
SP Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 3:36 am
The Problem is that you have become so ignorant that you cannot
comprehend History or Geography or Geo-Politics OR probably you don’t
wish to. At least don’t sound such a moron on the internet.
Ashish Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 12:07 am
@RE
“Because all the hatred,vile and discrimination is directed towards
the Muslims , not towards the Parsees , Christians and Sikhs”
poor souls! Muslims! No one loves them! Boo, hoo, hoo!
Rajeev says:
March 2, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I think instead of budgeting for minority (read MUSLIMS, MUSLIMS and
MUSLIMS), why don’t we send them to their land which we allocated for
them in 1947. The pakistan was meant for muslims of south asia. If you
muslims think, you are not getting fair deal, migrate to the land that
was created for giving muslims fair deal.
Jinnah also demanded same kind of things before partition to safegaurd
the interests of muslims. The then-congress decided not to give in to
Jinnah’s loony demands and agreed for partition. Now after 62 years,
we are being forced to agree to Jinnah’s demand or face terror ending
into another partition of country. How long can this blackmail go on?
Pl. show me a single country in the world where muslim minority has
outperformed other communities…None… Are all these non-muslims country
guilty of this or is the in the muslims gene to stay and ghetto and be
backward? Do you want Sachar to go in all those countries and then
produce a report implying that muslims are denied opportunities.
There is something very wrong with muslim mindset. They are
themseleves to blame for their misery. Why is that Hindus, jews,
chinese are doing so well in USA? Why is that non-muslims do better
than muslims in almost every country?
These muslims have to come out to their eternal victimhood syndrome.
L Mirza Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:12 am
@Rajeev
Many things you mention are right. For our country to propel, we need
to bring all into the equation. Youa re absolutely right that the
backwardness of msulims can eb squarely attributed to teh community
itself -its religiosu leaders, political leaders etce tc. A
fundamental aspect of Islam as oppsoed to various other “movements” ,
is that the role of the individual or individuality is suppressed;
hence no major innovations, initiatives, pathbreaking inventions,
methosds etc etc.
Government money will do only little. The mindset has to eb changed;
it ahs to come from within; and lot of forces work against that. It is
a real problem; as Zia mentioned in an earlier blog, muslims have to
handle it themselves.. They should know that the world would not wait
for this, and they will be left further behind if they do not acvt.
The sorry situation is that whether we like it or not, we have to
somehow solve this…
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Why don’t you leave this country instead if you hate the people living
in this country? Or is is that you have no place on this earth to call
a Hindu State? haha India is NOT a Hindu country. If you cannot live
here, go and find a place for yourself
Rajeev says:
March 2, 2010 at 10:39 pm
The Sachar report is not an extensive survey but a SAMPLE survey. We
have all seen how surveys have been proved wrong time and again.
The need of the hour for muslims is to shun excessive religiousity,
waste less time curing non-muslims and concentrate on education
followed by search for jobs. You can not be employed on high position
(IPS, IAS, Army etc.) till you get proper education. Even a police
constable in maharashtra police is graduate.
sanjeev Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 6:00 pm
@ Rajeev
I seriously doubt credentials of Rajendra sachar. he is an
ideologically indoctrinated person and not neutral, unbiased
researcher.
Just google his name..he has association with People’s Union for Civil
Liberties (PUCL)
In the recently arrested Kobad ghandy case his organisation has been
mentioned by delhi police among the naxal sympathisers.
I have personally attended many of the debates and discussions
frequented by this gang of naxal sympathisers like Gautam Navlakha,
Achin Vinayak, DSU, etc. their views clealry state that they are
chinese protege and they aim to bring china type revolution in india.
I seriously doubt how can such a person was appointed chairman of such
a committee.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:44 pm
You need some money for education which they have been deprived of
over the years
Shoeb K Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
RE
So you are saying that somehow government “deprived ” them of
education, and now have to give them money for education??
Do you believe that our people (I assume you are a muslim) give utmost
importance to education like other commun ities? Even Baniya children
grow up reciting “vidya dhan sarv dhanal pradhan”.. What is our
children taught in Madrasi??
RE Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 4:05 am
No one is begging for alms here. It’s only the Hindus who beg for
Money & Jobs and you will keep begging for your lives. Don’t worry the
Government won’t take away your reservations any soon. You can
obviously beg for even more.
If you are going to tell me that ^%$^% like Mulayam Shi% and people
like him demand BS for Muslims, I pity you and your ignorance of the
reality of this country.
Secondly, you must be naive to think that people think in terms of
community when it comes to education. You must be so out of this world
my HINDU brother! (Using a Muslim name does not make you one) The fact
of the matter is, yes people want education for their children and the
fact of the matter is that a majority of the Muslim population in
India is living foot-to-mouth. I have grown up in a poor Muslim
neighborhood and you can bet a very good number of children went to
proper schools. They may not have been the DPS’s of this country but
yes everyone valued education.Economics is the major concern my dear,
not community based ignorance. When you cannot even earn Rs20 a day,
you cannot possibly dream of sending your child to a regular school.
I come from a Naxal affected place so you very well imagine the state
of affairs and to add to that I grew up in a Muslim neighborhood with
a couple of Madarsas. I can tell you, even people who have studied in
these very madarsas completed their education and then took up
respectable and decent government jobs ,quite unlike your Hindu naxal
brothers just 40-50 kms away from my place. A few of us were lucky
ones who grew up in middle class families, who could study in English
medium schools and landed up with jobs with MNCs. Unfortunately most
are not so lucky. You know what, either you have never seen poverty in
and around you so it’s very comfortable to pass sweeping remarks or
you are just another prejudiced and ignorant Hindu on the internet. If
you are the former (n I doubt it ) all I would ask you is to leave the
comfort of your house to visit a Madarsa .If you are the later, I can
only pity you
sanjeev says:
March 3, 2010 at 5:51 pm
@ Rajeev
Here is an interesting article from Tavleen Singh (who i think can’t
be labelled as sangh parivar member as she happens to be a sikh and
married to muslim
http://www.indianexpress.com/storyOld.php?storyId=59288
I hope ignorant persons like mitra and other so called secularists
accept the true reality after going through this article or else they
will label Tavleen as sanghi.
sanjeev
Rajeev says:
March 4, 2010 at 2:45 am
Sanjeev,
Did you compare debate done on NDTV/CNN-IBN on MF Hussain and Taslima
Nasreen? It exposed the hypocrisy of Indian secualrism. I could not
control my laughter listening to arguements from Shabnam hashmi.
I have come to the conclusion that soft terrorist (ideological) from
muslim community are oxygen for all the terror activities in the
world. These are the people who should be arrested and may be
eliminated Isarael style.
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Yes people like you must be singled out Israeli style
[Reply]
sanjeev says:
March 4, 2010 at 5:43 pm
Here is another article exposing the hypocrisy of the so called
secular gang of india:
Its by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, from centre for policy research, new delhi
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/freedoms-our-defence/586662/
sanjeev says:
March 4, 2010 at 5:51 pm
@ Rajeev
sorry rajeev,
i have given up watching news on these sensationlist channels..i only
watch DD news or r news on FM gold radio.
i know this Indian secularism is a biggest joke in the world
Anything can happen in india in the name of secularism and freedom of
speech for the sake of minority (read muslim )
RE Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Two Losers in this country Pandit Rajeev and Pandit Sanjeev have got
HT Blog as the only place to vent their frustration. Is it something
else?
Ashish says:
March 6, 2010 at 11:24 am
After all these serious comments, I think we all need a comic break..
quoting from an email just received:
A public school teacher was arrested today at John F. Kennedy
International Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in
possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a
calculator.
At a morning press conference, the Attorney General said he believes
the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement. He did not
identify the man, who has been charged by the FBI with carrying
weapons of maths instruction.
“Al-Gebra is a problem for us”, the Attorney General said. “They
derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on
tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like
‘X’ and ‘Y’ and refer to themselves as ‘unknowns’, but we have
determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of
medieval with co-ordinates in every country.
As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, “There are 3 sides to
every triangle”.
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Obama said, “If God had
wanted us to have better weapons of maths instruction, he would have
given us more fingers and toes.’
White House aides told reporters they could not recall a more
intelligent or profound statement by the President. It is believed
that the Nobel Prize for Physics will follow.
Paritosh Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
ha ha ha ha . nice!!!
sanjeev says:
March 6, 2010 at 11:56 am
hilarious !!!
SKS Mumbai says:
March 6, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Why Physics?
They don’t award nobles for Maths or Philosophy? Time they did
Gopi Thomas Reply:
March 6th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
@SKS
And these must be reserved for Muslims because of the historical
sidelining Westerners have done to them..
So far Muslims have not stated theat the nobels Jews received were
undeserving; so you have to give them credit!
Ashish says:
March 6, 2010 at 2:39 pm
when they run out of existing Nobels; one for each year Obama is in
office..
There is probably no rule against multiple Nobel awards for multiple
disciplines in the same year to the same person; while so far such a
rule would have been largely academic, I think with Obama, this rule
will soon be tested.
Literature Nobel is his for the taking .. with all the fiction in his
speeches (even if he has to share the Nobel with his speechwriters)..
Raju Kurien says:
March 6, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Mosab hasan Yousef, an ex Hamas leader, who later became a Mosad spy,
and converted to Christianity, has written a book titled “Son of
Hamas”. Wall Street journal interviewed him on his opinions,
perspectives….His father is also a leader of Hamas..
Do you consider your father as a fanatic? “he is not a fanatic; he is
a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father
is fanatic or not; he is doing the will of a fanatic God. It does not
mind whether he is a terrorist or a traditional muslim. At the end of
the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic,
fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most
governments avoid this subject..
“the problem is not in Muslims. the problem is with their God. They
need to be liberated from their God. He is the biggest enemy. It has
been 1400 years they have been lied to.
SKS Mumbai says:
March 7, 2010 at 10:08 am
So ‘Government funded religious travel’ (let’s call it GFRT) isn’t
‘Unique’ but only Haj subsidy has been targeted! So unfair!
Research does help, even if, of ‘directed’ kind, to pick facts, as
might be necessary for the ‘conclusion’ one has chosen to present. But
’secular’ journalism, at least here in India, is easier than that. For
facts aren’t needed nor is their careful selection and for those on
the cutting edge of secular journalism, fact invention is routine.
Certainly, by those standards, Mr Zia is struggling.
To come up with ‘govt funded religious travel’ or GFRT for questioning
the criticism of Haj subsidy, suggests that research was involved.
Instead of limiting himself to any one of either GFRT or subsidy, he
uses both and implied smartly, that only Haj subsidy is criticized,
without ever saying that both are/aren’t the same. But there may be
’small’ differences between the two:
Subsidy of course is subsidy.
GFRT does not seem to be a well defined concept, but Mr Zia must be
referring to the costs involved in provision of various facilities and
services provided by Govt. for the pilgrims. These costs include a
part for the services rendered in India and another for outside India.
For e.g. in case of Kailash Mansarovar, these are free medical
inspection, security, escort cover, insurance cover and communication
links and 4 days acco. provided by Govt of Delhi (at Delhi) etc, most
of these within India. Then there is also a Rs 3250/pilgrim payment
made by Govt to Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam (KMVN) for arranging
boarding and lodging on the Indian side.
Indian side expenses for Haj, include cost of Haj houses, built in a
number of state capitals (including a capital cost for the facility,
often funded by the concerned state govt. There is a dedicated Haj
terminal at Delhi Airport (can’t say for others), again involving a
capital cost. I am not sure if medical tests, security etc is involved
or not. There is also a fully dedicated Haj department maintained by
Air India throughout the year.
For expenses outside India:
In case of Mansarovar, nothing much is known. Possibly, the escort,
security and medical facilities continue to be provided on the chinese
side as well. Interestingly, complaints regarding poor facilities on
Chinese side are brushed aside by MEA, saying Chinese want a revision
in the rates (last set in 1995) for better facilities.
Foreign component of Haj expenses: expenditure on a contingent of
seasonal local staff, supervisors, data entry operators, drivers and
messengers, appointed in SA, a contingent of more than 600 personnel
(incl. about 135 doctors, nurses and paramedics) on short-term
deputation to SA, hospital facilities (about 100 beds) at Makkah,
Madinah, medicines, ambulances, facilitation and coordination centres
at Jeddah, Makkah probably, Madinah also.
What is also interesting to note, is the kind of answers MEA gives for
questions raised in LS or RS:
1. Whenever there is a broad query (broad as in, about ’subsidy’ and
‘other facilities’) the answer, in case of Haj; includes a number for
subsidy and another for expenses, while for Mansarovar, it is only one
figure.
2. When there is a precise question such as: ‘ whether the Union
Government has been extending ’subsidy’ ( no mention of facilities)
for pilgrimage of Indians abroad’, the answer never goes beyond Haj
( e.g. LS Unstarred Question no 3086 http://meaindia.nic.in/parliament/ls/2006/08/23ls07.html)
3. When a specific question was asked : whether Govt
would also consider providing any subsidy on the lines of subsidy
being provided for Haj Pilgrimage, the smart state minister for MEA
repeats the same Rs 3250 story (of course never uses the word subsidy
for this) and concludes with : ‘Kailash Mansarovar Yatra and Haj are
essentially different so far as the number of pilgrims (not enough
devotees? ) , mode of travel and the nature of terrain are involved.
Therefore, there may not be a direct comparison between the two!
http://meaindia.nic.in/parliament/rs/2006/05/11rs27.htm
Thus for some ’strange’ reason, Govt. has consistently failed to apply
the word ‘Subsidy’ in case of Mansarovar costs. This could mean either
a ‘consistent error’ or most likely an accounting conspiracy designed
to discriminate against the poor minority, and worst of all, signed
off by CAG as well!
For the sharper but unfortunately oppressed beings, another ’small’
difference :
- the total amount paid for 2002, 03, 04 for Mansarovar was around Rs.
0.43 Crs (or Rs 43 lacs), while for HaJ 2007 and 2008, it was more
than Rs. 44.00 crs.
-Haj subsidy that Mr Zia shows at Rs 390 crs is over and above that.
Not just that, it seems that subsidy figures for Haj continue to be
presented as ‘provisional’ for last 4-5 years. (i.e. besides the
subsidy).
Mr Zia could have checked a bit of History as well, as he has so
carefully listed out the ‘proposed’ subsidy in Karnataka and the one
announced in AP a ‘couple’ of years ago.
Clearly then, there isn’t ANY VALID reason to target Haj subsidy
alone!! Except the Discriminatory approach, what say Zia?
SKS Mumbai says:
March 7, 2010 at 10:26 am
Can someone tell me whether, there is some difference between the
Kailash Mansarovar, Tibet (for which Govt ‘underwrites’ a part of the
cost, as indicated by Zia) and the Mansarovar, China (for which a
’subsidy’ is under consideration (as Zia says quoting media reports)
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 11:35 am
@SKS,
“Can someone tell me whether, there is some difference between the
Kailash Mansarovar, Tibet (for which Govt ‘underwrites’ a part of the
cost, as indicated by Zia) and the Mansarovar, China (for which a
’subsidy’ is under consideration (as Zia says quoting media reports)”
Only Zia can answer this.. but, on past performance, even if he deigns
to, it is likely to decry your tendency to split hairs..
SKS Mumbai Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 2:15 pm
@Ashish
You mean just tendency?
That is all we do, apart from full time hate mongering, that is
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
aha.. but, Mr Zia is a gentleman, not given to invectives
SKS Mumbai says:
March 7, 2010 at 11:34 am
‘Show me an economically underprivileged Hindu who will find fault
with government help to make a dip in the holy Ganges a reality? Or a
Muslim quibbling over a lifetime visit to Mecca, courtesy government
help?’
Now that is a profound question. Perhaps Zia can show us an
‘economically privileged’ Hindu who will find fault with government
help to make a trip to switzerland a reality, or riding a chauffeur
driven BMW (all expense paid) for that matter?
First of all what difference does it make, whether you are talking
about an economically privileged or underprivileged person here,
unless that bounty is meant for reducing that economic gap?
(BTW, I am not sure if Haj susbsidy is only for underpriveleged ones,
and even if, it is, the validity of above question does not change)
Secondly, on what basis does a secular Government decide that my all-
expense trip to swiss alps, is spiritually less important than
someone’s dip in Ganges and more importantly, why should a secular
govt be even required to measure spirituality quotient?
Gopi Thomas Reply:
March 8th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
@SKS
I read somewhere that Haj subsidies were never requested by the
community. I believe it was instituted during the oil shock of early
1970s and institutionalized ever since. This may be one situation
where one smart politician created a permanent vote bank through this
master stroke.
ajay says:
March 8, 2010 at 10:10 am
those politicians who are using vote bank politics must be dealt with
severely.other people who easily get caugt by words of these soundrels
should apply there common sense
S Singh says:
March 8, 2010 at 5:29 pm
There is no dispute that everything possible should be done to uplift
ALL., to make all contributors to a great country and humanity.
Money should be spent wisely; it also should be spent on all who need,
not just Muslims.
Money is only one, and may be even a lesser part, as far as upliftment
of Muslims are concerned. Unlike Hindus, Christians, jews, budhists
etc they do not give much emphasis to education. It simply is not
their “core” belief. When Hindu and kids belonging to other religions
right from early ages are inculcated “Vidya dhan sarva dhanal
pradhan” , the focus of Muslim kids is memorizing Quran. After that,
they get into petty trades.
Unless education is considered as the most important factor and
embraced by the family and community, nothing will happen; complaints
will remain.
SKS Mumbai says:
March 8, 2010 at 8:20 pm
@Gopi
I don’t know, but it can’t be that simple.
SKS Mumbai says:
March 8, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Quote:
‘While it gives Air India 150,000 assured passengers every year
(that’s the total number of seats on all Indian carriers criss-
crossing the country on any given day), helping it KEEP AFLOAT, the
grant has been turned into a stick to beat Muslims with’
This is really all that it takes!
One article by a non-entity, (he/she could be anything, journalist,
activist, third rate self proclaimed intellectual, rabble rouser,
dancer, singer, whatever. Even if he wasn’t, that article alone will
make him a front ranking secular warrior), asserting that Haj subsidy
is really a subsidy for Air India.
Watch that dumb ‘assertion’ turn into a foundational truth for the
Indian secularrazzi, to be repeated so many times that, Hitler would
have them rather Goebbels.
It just does not matter that the fraudulent claim is immediately
thrashed to pieces by precise facts and irrefutable documentary
evidence, the ‘Truth’ once revealed, is the Divine Law for our secular
believers. To question the law is apostasy or a communal propaganda by
Hindutva forces, or as Mr Zia claims, a ’stick’ to beat poor Muslims
with.
For a moment, even if we accept that fraudulent claim, what changes
Mr. Zia? Muslims are still getting a subsidy, aren’t they? Or can you
book a return ticket for Patna-Delhi-Jeddah for Rs.12000 (or Rs 16000
for last year only)? Bulk discounts? Yes why not, we will see later
how much difference your direct chartering can make. Unfortunately
facts happen to be facts and if they are communal so be it (in the
meanwhile Mr Zia could check whether direct charter negotiations were
attempted at some point of time or not and what went wrong). Here are
the facts:
1. It isn’t 150,000 prize customers in the first place, the number for
2010 is more like 120,000 and that after annual increases of the order
of 10,000-15,000. approximately 50% of that is carried by Saudi
airlines.
2. Spare/standby aircrafts are a part of any commercial airlines
fleet, but they are primarily used when regular aircrafts are sent for
scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. Haj means 2-3 months of a steep
peak forcing most of the commercial airlines to opt for short term
leases, called wet lease. Being short-term, they are by definition
much more expensive than longer leases. It does not take an Einstein
to understand that the capital cost of the wet leased aircrafts will
have to be recovered from the passengers who fly during that peak
window. For e.g. If you look at the state electricity boards, their
normal procurement costs (for the pool) will rarely exceed Rs 4-5/
unit. But during peak months, the incremental power is often purchased
at Rs. 10-15/unit range. It matters, but little, that your requirement
for those few months constitutes a huge volume, the annual fixed cost
will still be recovered during those two months. Further, it seems
that many of the aircrafts have to undertake one trip without
passengers (i.e. no backhaul)
3. If AIR INDIA was really saving itself by grabbing the prized Haj
Service, why does it keep on requesting the Govt to allow other
airlines in the space? Isn’t that Monopolistic, Mr Zia ? Last publicly
known attempt was around 2008. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/haj-subsidy-has-air-india-fuming/360651/0
4. BTW Muslims anyway have the option of not going through Haj
committee and a large number of Muslims actually go through private
tour operators (~ 40,000 or so), so why are suffering the tyranny of
AI? Why? Especially when it also gives the so-unfair-stick to Hindutva
Guys ?
But all these are lies, a hindutva propaganda, sanghi hate mongering,
the only Truth and what we need to remember for ever is that, it is
not the ‘Poor Hajis’ but AI who is being subsidized. (soon we will
discover it wasn’t even AI, it were the vile Bramhins-Bania who were
fattening themselevs)
You know what, some 100 years down the line, secular historian will
cite these and assert Haj subsidy was a myth and contrary evidence
will be subjected to secular tools called contextualizing History and
presenting multiple perspectives and another 100 years Haj subsidy
won’t even be a subject.
S Singh Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
Muslims will go on itching, bitching, scratching…
The only solution is dictatorship (why do you think almost all Muslim
countries are dictatorships?) or someother way of controlling, because
they respect power; they just cannot operate independently in a
democracy. Time and again it ahs been demonstrated that they cannot
form, suatain a democracy.
India will remain a democracy, meaning the scratching and bitching
will be with us for a long time, unless a region is converted to
another Pakistan and round up ALL Muslims to that region.
Rajeev Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
No all muslims should be packed up and sent to pakistan. No more
divisions for these ungrateful people.
Rajeev says:
March 8, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Is this RE another avatar of Soft-terrorits Bobby?
sanjeev Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
@ Rajeev
Tonight i will get to meet biggest anti national..Javed Naqvi (dawn
reporter from delhi )
I want to ask him some tough questions ..
If any knowledge u can share about this nut ?
Rajeev Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Ask him just one thing. Is he Indian or Pakistani?
If he is Indian and beleives in secularism, why is he with Pakistan on
Kashmir.
Secondly ask him what happened to 20% hindu population of pakistans.
How many guharat massacre took place in Pakistan?
SKS Mumbai says:
March 8, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Aah Rs 390 crs isn’t it.
Last statement by Dr Tharoor pegs it at some Rs 826 crs for 2009!and
still counting all these numbers continue to be Provisional.
Rajeev says:
March 9, 2010 at 1:30 am
I have always wondered if Hajj performed on khairat of infidel nation
(India) is haram or Halal.
I am pretty sure that all the muslims perforing Hajj on donations
doled out by hindu-dominated India are commiting shirk and their hajj
is invalid according to Islam.
I guess most of the muslims are destined for jahannum.
S Singh Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Does not matter, as long as it is free.
It is the government we should blame; and by that voters like us. what
the politicians have done is one more way of institutionalizing
“minority” , this time with huge allocation. Now the bar of spending
is set high, and every following year it will be higher than the prior
year.
Like any government spending schemes, only 10% will go to the purpose;
other 90% will go to the b ureaucracy and contractors!
sanjeev Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
ha ha ha ha !
where else they can go ?
mulleh ki dor masjid tak
RE Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 2:53 pm
arey pandit ki langot apni dhoti sambhalo yaar
SKS Mumbai says:
March 9, 2010 at 9:35 pm
@Ashish
In RE, you have one of the original ones. His views on Premjee’s
Billions and stuff are part of the original curriculum. Don’t be
surprised, when you are told:
1. It is Indian Muslims living in the gulf whose earnings drive the
larger part of Indian economy.
2. That Indira Gandhi used her charm to get cheap oil from the house
of Sauds and thus Hindus have been living off Muslim charity for ages.
3.That there is a conspiracy under which muslim intellectuals are
being murdered and this has gone for many decades now.
4. That “Urdu” was eliminated as a language to prevent muslim
advancement.
5. Some more that I came across recently: the conspiracy against
Muslims also include: introducing “gate-keeper” mentality-type service
commission exams and entrance exams for professional courses .That a
scientist was picked to become a Muslim President of India, to
diminish OR extinguish his contribution to science.
That (hold your breath) Shahrukh Khan and Amir Khan have Hindu wives,
because they are rich and famous – and their wives will inherit their
crores.
6. Of course we all know about 9/11, 26/11, Karkare, Batla and types.
Recent violence in Karnataka on Tasleema’s article was also a Hindutva
conspiracy.(Confirmed already as I see)
7. Upper caste Hindus joined hands with British in a conspiracy to
weaken Islamic Kings, freedom fight was mainly a Muslim venture, but
Gandhi and Nehru forged another conspiracy to divide India, so that
Muslims were weakened.
8. His views on how state is dealing with Maoists because they are
Hindus shouldn’t surprise anyone. The difference lies, not in
perceptions but in definitions itself.
Reasoned debate is useless and anyway impossible. Facts must adhere to
’secular’ requirement else they are conspiracies. When even fairly
well ensconced people, from the core of mainstream, do not hesitate in
asserting nonsense like Haj subsidy is for Air India, never miss the
opportunity to impress you with Quranic wisdom, or to offer Quranic
justification while urging Muslims to seek education or to not hate
the jews, we know it isn’t just another problem.
This combined with the values our politicians operate on, will ensure
that we just have to live with it the way it is and just hope it does
not get worse during our or our children’s lifetime.
Gopi Thomas Reply:
March 9th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
@SKS
There is more; especially with the advent of ex SIMI turned into PFI/
SDPI as a political party for the disadvantaged, “not just Muslims”:
1)Brahmins are colluding with USA/UK to make India a Jesustan
2)Reservations etc are farce; Brahmins control everything (i am still
looking for those powerful Brahmins!)
3) Muslims did well in the first 30 years of independence; then a
coordinated conspiracy started to marginalize them, to exterminate
their intellectuals
4)The elite Muslims migrated to Pakistan (we know how that has helped
PAkistan) and the real backward Muslims stayed back in India
5) Gandhiji was in collusion with Brahmins to marginalize Muslims
6)Lodhi and Gazni are not Muslims,a nd Somnath temple destruction
should not be attributed to Muslims
7)Babur loved all and did not destroy any places of worship
8)Auragazeb is maligned by Brahmins; he was a great king who cared for
all equally (and Akbar was not a great king)
9)Shivaji looted neighboring kingdoms, and have done more damage to
india than any Moghul or other foreign invaders have done
10)”Mapilla rebellion” in Kerala that happened with Khilafet was an
agrarian revolution and not one where muslims targeted and raped and
killed Hindus and destroyed their palces of worship
11) tipu Sultan was a benevolent king who did not destroy palces of
worship of Hindus and Christians (although history of Kerala clearly
traces his “patayottam” (rapid fight ) for the massive conversions in
Malabar area, including naming Calicut as Islamabad for a while
12)All the communal troubles are started by Brahmins to further
marginalize Muslims
List goes on
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 1:28 am
@SKS @Gopi Thomas
great compilations; SKS, great summary of the core arguments we have
heard on this blog over the last few months.
This blog has run out of ideas.. tired, tiresome and repetitive..
poorly researched and lately even without a central idea.
I can sense the next blog coming.. on why Ranganath Mishra
recommendations must be adopted. Stealing from a well known poster,
first seen in London, “Sachar spotted the cancer, Mishra has the
answer”.
Trying to remember some Muslim Maoist name; honestly can’t. By the
way, SP/RE/UI.. whoever/ whatever, I was in Lalbazar (Calcutta police
HQ) .. staying with a certain doctor employed with the police the day
Charu Mazumdar was brought in. I have heard enough stories of how
Naxals used to be handled by the Calcutta Police; suffice it to say
KPS Gill was really tame in comparison. Honestly speaking, I have
never ever thought about the religion of the Naxals; now that I do,
yes, you are right. All of these guys I heard of were Hindus-excepting
Jangal Santhal – even though I am sure they will be quite amused to be
called such. But, the brutality on both sides (Naxals and the state)
was totally secular. I hope I am not told next that Maoists and the
Government are in cahoots to rid the world of Muslims.
Hindus become Maoists because they just like to kill and are afforded
protection by the state; and Muslims do not- inspite of all the
discrimination, because they follow the religion of peace. Hmmm…..
Talking about KPS Gill; so, his forces killed Muslims and then dressed
them up as Khalistanis, correct? Just checking…
MMM’s (Much Maligned Modi) goons killed Muslims while his police shot
dead 400 Hindus .. inconvenient, but true.
Gopi, great item 4 on your list. Precisely..
SKS Mumbai Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
@Ashish
‘Honestly speaking, I have never ever thought about the religion of
the Naxals’
Hmm that shows your communal mindset, Bhai sahab.
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
@SKS
my communal mindset is well established on this blog.. garv se kaho…
RE Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Arey bhai then stop living off Muslim money and Muslim oil. Dead
simple as that. You hate us like anything and yet want to live off our
money! hahaha great
RE Reply:
March 20th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
You didn’t answer my post cuz you DON”T have an answer . Stop being a
MORON for a change. You sound like a joker
SKS Mumbai says:
March 10, 2010 at 2:13 pm
Sorry guys, I underestimated the power of contextualisation and
perspectivasation and the time it might take to secularise the
history. It is faster.
See what India’s great son, Mr Kuldip Nair has to say about 26/11 and
Karkare:
Quote: More worrisome are the Hindu extremists rearing their head. The
murder of police officer Hemant Karkare, who was probing the Malegaon
blasts, was the doing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or Bajrang Dal”
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/16-kuldip-nayar-politics-of-terrorism-hs-01
See how simple it is to present TRUTH. If you want first mover
advantage, it is time to write a Book :
November 26th 2008, Mumbai : Revolt of the oppressed against the vile
Hindu Elite.
You can try a Bharat Ratna for yourself and freedom fighter’s pension
for Mr Kasab
Ashish Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
@SKS
for a few pieces of silver.. Mr Nayar can be made to say anything..
He does not find a publisher on this side of the border anymore; don’t
judge him too harshly.. he needs to earn a living somehow.
Gopi Thomas Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
@Ashish
I will take Kuldip against Naqvi (who also writes for Dawn) anytime!
SKS Mumbai says:
March 10, 2010 at 4:11 pm
@Ashish
the latest seems to be “garv se kaho hum internet hindu hain”
Rajeev Reply:
March 10th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Nice one…
Indian says:
March 11, 2010 at 9:59 am
Victim Swami Laxmanananda portrayed as a villain by biased media
Alarming 5 fold increase in Kandhamal Christian population from six
per cent in 1971 to 27 per cent in 2001 ,It began with the arrival of
Christian missionaries in the area who found the remote region very
conducive to conduct prosetylization amongst the poor tribals. The
conversions continued unhindered until the arrival of Swami
Laxmanananda who put strenuous efforts to stop conversions and help
reconversion to Hindouism as well. If not for his effort Kandhamal
would have been another Nagaland in the making where the separatist
movement has wrecked havoc in the state. The aggressive Christian
proselytization in Orissa today pitched previously peaceful tribals
into warring camps of Christians and non-Christian. This has has
vitiated the peace that has existed with various communities for
millenia. Next target is KARNATAKA and they are facing stiff
resistance from Hindus here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SKS Mumbai says:
March 12, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Another TRAIL BLAZING Research!!
Truth behind Sachin’s 200 runs Innings. Must Read
http://altnews.asia/content/2010/03/11/who-controls-fanatic-india-xi-dr-abdul-ruff-colachal-0
Author is one more feather in the crowded cap of our JN University of
Secular Research Sciences.
Ashish Reply:
March 12th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
@SKS,
does the JNU reserve seats for the mentally challenged?
sanjeev Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
@ ashish
Infact it has become fashionable to criticize govt and hindus in JNU.
There is whole lot a generation mostly elite bengali who tretas it
fashionable to be politically correct and being anti national.
Unfortunately the leftist brigade have penetarted deeply in JNU
faculty where it has become fashionable to criticise anything indian,
Infact JNU has proved to be a factory of producing traitors in the
garb of liberal thinkers
sanjeev Reply:
March 14th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
@ Ashish
Yes there is reservation for such elements like Rauff in centres of
JNU in schools of languages and international relations. These centres
are for Urdu, Arabic, Persian, west asian studiess, etc.
In fact these centres are reserved exclusively of urdu-persian- arabi
speaking intellectuals.
Hence we used to call these departments as UPA
Gopi Thomas Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 1:52 pm
It also shows people live in different planets. Also, it is like
Newton’s law. The more appeasement and more give aways, the more
demand for more and cries of discrimination. The person’s last name
sounds like a typical Kerala “house” name; and if he is from there, it
is an even “bigger” problem. Because whatever may be the issue in
other parts of India, they were part of the ruling coalition from
almost day 1; they got their district formed, they are one of the
richest groups etc etc.
SKS Mumbai says:
March 13, 2010 at 6:29 pm
@Ashish
Reservations for mentally challenged?
Interesting question , but for which levele admission or for faculty.
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/they-call-me-muslim/2010/02/28/budgeting-for-minorities/
My Name Is Bal Thackeray
In the middle of the Shiv Sena’s rampage against Shah Rukh Khan’s My
Name Is Khan in Bombay, came the delightful news that someone had
blackened Pramod Muthalik’s face in Bangalore just as he was preparing
to oppose Valentine’s Day celebrations on Sunday.
I think it is rich that he should describe the act as “undemocratic”
and against freedom of expression – as though such freedoms are the
prerogative of just the bigots of this country and the rest of us have
no democratic rights or freedom to do as we please, at all!
But that also brought to mind the fact that perhaps the Shiv Sena in
Bombay has been the biggest loser this Valentine season. They are the
original party poopers of Valentine’s Day celebrations – there was a
time when Bal Thackeray had become synonymous with the term. I recall
a friend in a raging fight with her husband who would not take her out
to dinner one Valentine’s day one year. When this musty and old-
fashioned gent started a spiel on Indian culture and traditions, my
friend walked off in a huff, muttering, “There is no fun in asking Bal
Thackeray out to dinner, anyway!”
Now the sainiks have no time to mount an attack as of yore on card and
gift companies who might want to make a killing as people celebrate
their love for each other. In any case, they have no reason. The Shiv
Sena is now in the hands of Thackeray’s son Uddhav and he has no love
lost for his divorced sister-in-law, Smita.
According to my information from inside Matoshree, the Sena only ever
took up the anti-Valentine’s Day cause purely for reasons of personal
pique. When they started the campaign sometime in the late Nineties,
Smita was very thick with her father-in-law Bal Thackeray. And
Thackeray Sr was pretty miffed one December when a very well-known
card and gift company –which puts up huge Valentines Day hearts and
arches all across urban India — refused to sponsor his daughter-in-
law’s Mukti Foundation event in the battle against AIDS.
I am told that they had burnt their fingers the previous year – they
were not paid their share of the dues even after several reminders and
appeals and so decided to cut their losses by determining never to
sponsor such an event ever again. None of Thackeray’s cajoling,
pleading or threatening would budge this company.
So when Valentine’s Day came around a few weeks later in February,
Thackeray decided to get even. For years after that the Sena
vandalised all card shops and gift outlets on Valentine’s Day – and
then, one year, it abruptly ceased. It must have been a coincidence
surely that by then the reins had been handed over to Uddhav and his
brother divorced that year. I believe Uddhav saw no point in opposing
something that had caught on like fire, particularly for someone he
considered no longer a member of the Thackeray household; indeed for
someone he felt had no claim to the Thackeray name any longer.
It is also significant that Raj Thackeray actually encouraged the
celebration of love soon after he formed his Maharashtra Navnirman
Sena –he put up posters encouraging youths to learn ball room dancing
(though that stopped after the first year when he received flak for
encouraging westernisation among Indian youth).
Today, the whole world has seen how Shah Rukh Khan has stood up to Bal
Thackeray and refused to pay up – yes, at the end of the day, that is
what, I believe, this was all about. The Sena targeted Shah Rukh only
because he had a film coming up and knew that producers and
distributors would rather buy off the trouble than risk vandalisation
and block crores of rupees riding on their films (that’s what Karan
Johar did after all vis-à-vis Wake Up, Sid and Raj Thackeray). I
salute Shah Rukh for keeping producers and distributors, too, from
giving in to such low blackmailing tactics.
However, very few people know that much before Shah Rukh, one card
company in India had silently determined not to give in to cheap arm-
twisting and risked – even suffered – vandalisation and monetary
losses for years before the Sena got off its back and the celebration
of love began to happen in Bombay in right earnest.
Of course, the individual for whom these obstructionist activities
were undertaken was herself organising highly expensive celebratory
dinners for couples at her various restaurants across the city much
before the vandalisation ceased, quite exposing the duplicity of the
Shiv Sena in its campaigns – a point that has now been underscored by
Raj Thackeray. For the first time I agree with Raj – if the Sena can
allow cultural exchanges between India and Pakistan to go forward
unfettered, then they have an ulterior motive in targeting Shah Rukh
Khan.
And that is not because he is Muslim or supported Pakistani cricket
players. It is because he had a film coming up which had nearly a
billion rupees riding on it. And opportunities like these are not
something to let go of — if Your Name Is Bal Thackeray.
(38 votes, average: 4.53 out of 5)
Posted by Sujata Anandan on Friday, February 12, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Filed under India · Tagged Bal Thackeray, Bangalore, blackened Pramod
Muthalik, Bombay, My Name Is Khan, rampage, Shahrukh Khan, Shiv Sena,
Valentine’s Day celebrations
102 Responses to “My Name Is Bal Thackeray”
Kushal says:
February 13, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Great piece, Sujata. But I’m with Manish – not only the Sena(s) but
ALL political parties have ulterior motives behind their causes.
Kushal Reply:
February 13th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Btw, do you suppose the Sena will demand a cut of MNIK’s takings since
they have practically driven the whole nation to watch it, just to
take a stand?
Sujata Anandan Reply:
February 15th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Ha, ha, ha! Tht will take some gall!
Anurav Reply:
February 14th, 2010 at 10:55 am
True. ALL political parties have ulterior motives but only a handful
like Sena keeps the city as hostage.
Sujata Anandan Reply:
February 15th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Agree, Bunny. But like Anurav says all political parties have their
agenda but only ones like the Sena hold the city to ransom
Kushal Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I’m no advocate for the Sena(s), Sujata and Anurav. But I wonder how a
government can allow things to reach such a state that a party CAN
hold a city to ransom.
What about THOSE ulterior motives?
Harry says:
February 13, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Hi sujata, why didn’t u publish my comment.
Sujata Anandan Reply:
February 15th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Have no control over this , Harry
Anil says:
February 13, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Not much debate when Nilesh Rane a congress MP held Maharashtra to
ransom on the film Zhenda. He even managed to have the film release
postponed. Nice government sponsored promotion for MNIK. 24 hours
prime time coverage. Great going. Keep it up
Mohin says:
February 13, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Bal Thackare is a ordinary Man,is a not God,He is using ordinary
Peoples to him as Powerful
Certainly he fails.If i am CM of Maharastra Surely He will be
furnished.
Anil Kumar says:
February 13, 2010 at 10:13 pm
In the middle of the Shiv Sena’s rampage against Shah Rukh Khan’s My
Name Is Khan in Bombay, came the “delightful” news ..
See this is the problme with socalled educated class of India.. Here
this madam found that news delightful.
As much as I disapprove the nonsense of valentine’s day protest it’s
equally disturbing that people midn you educated one at that find this
vandalism when the recepient is their object of hate find it
delightful..
What is the difference between Muthalik’s army spreading nonsense and
these idiots who blackend his face that too in a panel debate..
Sane people shold be the last oen to endorse these behavious otherwise
you lose the right to complain when army of muthaliksfo the world go
on rampage
Rajeev says:
February 13, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I think it is SRK desperate attempt to equal 3 idiots collections by
any means…what a chichora khan!!!
Rajeev says:
February 14, 2010 at 12:20 am
This controversy started by SRK is just to promote MNIK so that his
movie can beat collections for 3 Idiot.
What a Chichora loser SRK is!!!
What fools we Indians are!!! This mediocre actor has taken this nation
for a ride with Congress in arms and media in his shoes.
By the way our Maharashtra police was so busy gaurding SRK’s movie
that they forgot to gaurd common people of pune (who have stood up to
Thackrey but forgot to stand up to terrorist sympathisers).
Rajeev says:
February 14, 2010 at 12:56 am
Let us see who gained and lost out of this controversy-
1. Congress – Gained political mileage in UP and Bihar by showing sham
sympathy towards north Indians in Mumbai. Gained political mileage
among muslim voters by supporting Shahrukh Khan and his pro-pakistani
stance (Pakistan is a great neighbor to have).
2. Rahul Gandhi – Has become a hero for UP and Bihar voters. By
supporting SRK, he has become hero of communal muslim voters and now
is going to Azamgarh to consolidate those gains.
3. Shiv Sena- After becoming irrelevant after MNS (Raj Thackrey)
hijacked its plank ably supported by congress led chavan govt., they
got an opportunity to get noticed. They miscalcuated big time because
they should know that India has moved on. We have now become immuned
to terrorism and are now more interested in making money. For us
escapist routes like movies are more important than lives of 200
Indians. As long as VIPs are not hurt, we don’t care and so does our
Media.
4. Media- Media got great TRP out of this controversy..loads of ads
and big money. The media under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi has also
started propaganda that rahul is next KING of India (Times of India).
This is the first time in the history of private television that
doordarshan stands ashamed in front of media’s pro-congress bias.
5. Aam Admi urf Ullu ka Pattha – Aam admi lost money on mediocre film
like MNIK, lost valuable time following useless pro-SRK and pro-Rahul
Baba story.
Nikhil says:
February 14, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Sujata,
UNHOLY NEXUS BETN BOLLYWOOD AND NEWS MEDIA IN INDIA:
Please read the article in Indian express today. They say it’s unique
in India where movie producers and stars own or have stake in the
content providers or business groups that own TV channels. This
furthers the deep suspicion in the MNIK controversy. SRK and Karan
Johar, most likely, are laughing their way to the bank. Shiv Sena
perhaps may’ve got a small share of it too. Who knows?
arvind says:
February 17, 2010 at 10:56 am
Thakray family jo khud mumbai ka nahi hai aur apne aap ko asli
mumbaikar batata hai , mumbai uski hai jo mumbai se sachha pyar karta
hai ,uske bare me sochta hai , ye logo ke bhawnao ko bhadkakar apne
roti ka intjam karte hai aur pure mumbai ke logo ke paise ko lutte
hai, pahle party banakar party fund ke paise se apna ghar chalate hai.
Agar thakray me himmat hai to north india jane wali kisi bhi train ke
genral compartment me baith kar dikhai, aur wo train non stopage ho to
shayad destintion tak pahunchte pahunchte wo history ke ek joker ban
kar rah jayenge . thakrey hosh me aao , nafrat ki aandhi mat failao ,
nahi to usi me mit jaoge .
Rajeev Reply:
February 17th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
It looks like a typical nautanki congressi speech.
shiuli says:
February 17, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Ms.Sujata, great insight. Enjoyed the subtle wit in your writing also
the way you put across your point, by not badgering it down the neck.
Ashish Kolarkar says:
February 17, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Thanks Sujata for revealing interesting secret motive of Thackeray’s
in public domain. I’m sure you have lot of such secrets to offer in
near future. Enjoyed your blog.
arvind says:
February 18, 2010 at 10:20 am
It’s real voice of truth indian , agar dam hai to thkray family ko
train me bitha kar dekh lo saath me tum bhi aa jana
AKshay_Marathi says:
February 21, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Hi..,
THIS IS REALLY DISAPPOINTING TO READ THAT , U ARE PORPOSEFULLY USIN
WORD BOMBAY.
U HATE THAKRE O.K. BUT WHY R U INSULTING WHOLE MARATHI BY REPEATNG
BOMBAY.
MAY BE ONE TO GET OUR LOST PRIDE AND TO SAVE FROM HUMILIATION FROM
INDIAN WE HAVE TO SUPPORT THAKRE.
PLZ. DO’T CALL IT BAMBAY IT IS MUMBAI.
Rajeev Reply:
February 23rd, 2010 at 10:47 pm
These jouranlist are extremist fascist who impose their ideologies on
others.
Arpit says:
February 24, 2010 at 1:36 am
Its was only the the publicity stunt by Bal Thackeray. He only wants a
topic every time to be in limelite, as he did when he was delivering
comments on north Indians in Mumbai……..nothing else…I think this type
of political party should be banned in India…I think they people wanna
run country as what they want………………
Earthling says:
March 11, 2010 at 7:28 pm
thakeray is a very bad boy…never will he do good in the face of
indians….corrupting mind sets of people and talking as if he is doing
all good for india…
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2010/02/12/my-name-is-bal-thackeray/#more-135
Happy Birthday, Netaji
As Bal Thackeray turns 83 on Saturday (January 23), I cannot help
recalling the politics of birthdays that I have witnessed over the
years.
The first political birthday party that I ever attended was that of S
B Chavan (father of Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Ashok Chavan),
sometime in the late Eighties.Sharad pawar had just merged his
Congress(S) with the Congress(I) and become Chief Minister the
previous year. And though Chavan Sr was inducted into the union
cabinet as Home Minister, I think he was mighty miffed at having been
summarily displaced to accommodate the Maratha warlord.
The move opened up a chasm between the so-called `loyalists’ in the
Congress and those who were Pawar’s acolytes. The bickering and
nitpicking went on for months, until Chavan’s birthday arrived on July
14 the next year. Without making any overt moves that might seem as a
campaign against the party high command (it was still Rajiv Gandhi
then), Congress loyalists thought they would use Chavan Sr’s birthday
to put Pawar in his place.
The party was held at a star hotel in South Bombay and a huge
chocolate cake was rolled in to stand under the chandelier in the main
ballroom of that hotel. The hosts had invited all and sundry,
including journalists, except for one very important person – Chief
Minister Sharad Pawar. They were full of glee as Chavan was
fashionably late at his own birthday party and crowed at how awful
Pawar might feel when he read about it in the papers the next day.
The birthday boy arrived an hour after he was scheduled to cut the
cake and we all gathered round him as he held the ribboned knife in
his hand and prepared to set the ball rolling. Even as those around
him clapped and sang the birthday tune, I turned round to see why
there was an unusual hush around the edges of that room.
Sharad Pawar was standing at the door and, even as Chavan cut a slice,
Pawar moved slowly towards the centre of the room. And before Chavan
could lift the slice and feed it to the person nearest him (I forget
who), Pawar was standing with an extended hand to greet Chavan a happy
birthday. A chagrined Chavan had to feed the cake to Pawar, instead;
they hugged and exchanged pleasantries even as many of the Congress
workers stood around in consternation..
Chavan graciously invited him to join the party but Pawar demurely
declined. He had another important meeting to attend, he said by way
of explanation, but had just dropped in as he was passing by the hotel
en route to this other function. He left in minutes but it took
several more for the others to regain their composure and continue
with the now subdued celebrations.
Next day, as I and another colleague nosed round Pawar’s office, we
were told in confidence by a close confidante that Pawar had heard
about the plan to cut him out of the party and was damned if he would
be defeated by a bunch of `upstarts’ or provide a lot of grist to the
mill of journalists who would have a blast the next morning. So he
decided to play party pooper-of-sorts (because that is what he had
turned out to be the previous night).
We were told that Pawar had arrived at the time given out for the cake-
cutting ceremony but sent a sniffer upstairs to find out how things
stood. He decided he would not be kept waiting for Chavan inside the
hotel and asked his cavalcade to circle round the locality of the
hotel several times until Chavan himself had rolled in (he had posted
some cops as lookouts). Pawar then timed his entry perfectly to
nonplus Chavan and his supporters with, “I heard you were having a
party for your birthday. So I decided to drop in myself and greet you
in person.’’
And then he went home. Satisfied that he had nipped any mischief in
the bud. Chavan never had another birthday party like that one again,
though his constituents would celebrate the day in his hometown off
and on over the years.
And as far as I remember, Pawar has only ever had one birthday party –
when he turned 60 nearly a decade ago. There was a five-star event
with the who’s who of India represented the previous evening. But it
was his public rally the next day that saddened me the most. For, even
then it was no secret that he was dying to be Prime Minister. Atal
Behari Vajpayee was in office at the time and Pawar was at pains to
explain to his supporters that it was still not too late for him. “In
this country no one becomes Prime Minister before they are 70,’’ he
said, though that was not strictly true – Indira and Rajiv Gandhi each
had been much younger. “Look at P V Narasimha Rao, he was half way
through his seventies before he became PM; even Vajpayee now is past
75. I am yet only 60. There is still plenty of time.’’
I wondered if his support base was shrinking and he needed to say that
to stop them from abandoning him altogether. Ten years later he is
still not PM and I wonder how much more time he would now need to get
to that high office.
But it is not just Congressmen who are fond of birthdays. Manohar
Joshi had had himself presented with a 60-diamond necklace on – what
else? – his 60th birthday in a very public ceremony in Bombay wherein
he laid claim to a flawless career stating proudly that no one could
find a breath of scandal against him. Bal Thackeray, then about to
turn 75, was at the time besieged with allegations that his nephew Raj
Thackeray had murdered middle-class professional Ramesh Kini and he
did not take that comment kindly. Joshi was out of office within weeks
and Thackeray barred anyone from going to town on his own birthday.
Joshi has never had another party again.
Nearly a decade later, Thackeray is still off a public celebration of
his birthday. Shiv Sainiks, though, have organised blood donation
camps, free distribution of grains et al to mark the event but the
Sena patriarch has decided to remain out of public view.
I think he is the wisest of them all. I am told he is superstitious –
kahin nazar naa lag jaye!
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Posted by Sujata Anandan on Friday, January 22, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Filed under India · Tagged Bal Thackeray, Maratha warlord, political
birthday party, Rajiv Gandhi, S B Chavan, Sharad Pawar
6 Responses to “Happy Birthday, Netaji!”
Dev says:
January 22, 2010 at 11:03 pm
And we’ll never know what became of Netaji.
Anil says:
January 23, 2010 at 11:36 am
Wish Pawar had used the same cunningness to improve agriculture sector
and bring down prices. He is just incapable of thinking big for the
country. The only person who really knew how to celebrate birthday in
a manner beffiting his personality was Chach Nehru. He really spent
quality time with children. Others have just aped him.
Ashish Kolarkar says:
January 23, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Due to such shrewdness and intelligence Pawar is in the limelight for
such a long time. He is too ambitious and believes in playing long
innings. Who knows one day this Maratha Sardar would hoist flag from
Lal Kila?
But it seems that Pawar is losing his popularity for his foot in mouth
comments recently. He seems to have all the problems but no soultions
to Offer to common man. He is bent on taking his role too casually.
Good that Thackeray Sr has finally realised that birthday bashes are
meant for sycophancy only and don’t serve any good purpose.
vipin malik says:
January 24, 2010 at 12:03 am
you remeber for netaji all indian popel it was great man
vipin malik says:
January 24, 2010 at 12:10 am
i am a fan of Netaji
Anil Kumar says:
January 24, 2010 at 3:51 am
These leaders who set goal in terms of this or that chair make me
cringe..
All these leader needs a plenary session with Narendra Modi..
Everytime anyone asks him about chairs his reply is I never lust for
chair I lost for work to be done target to be achieved with or without
chair.. Chair is not the destination and that’s how it should be..
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2010/01/22/happy-birthday-netaji/#more-131
Jhenda ooncha rahe…
14 Comments
Ram Gopal Verma’s Sarkar and Sarkar Raj are broadly thought to be
based on the life of Bal Thackeray. In large portions, the theme might
be taken from episodes from the Sena tiger’s life but the intelligence
and dexterity of managing politics that has characterised Amitabh
Bachchan’s portrayal of Sarkar in the two films have never been Bal
Thackeray’s forte.
Thackeray is an instinctive politician whose reactions have always
been spontaneous rather than well-thought out. Moreover, he has
thrived not on his programmes or issues of his making but on the
mistakes of other parties (in large measure, the Congress). For
example, the one and only time that the Shiv Sena came to power in
Maharashtra in alliance with the BJP was in 1995, soon after the 1992
riots and the 1993 bomb blasts when people thought and believed that
the Congress was playing far too many games and still remembered the
protectionist campaign of Shiv Sainiks through those burning weeks.
If the Sena was unable to return in 1999, 2004 and 2009 again, it is
because in these years, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress
Party, in alliance in Maharashtra, have largely done little wrong and
Thackeray has found no gap in the fabric to tear it apart.
But the Shiv Sena’s massive defeat at both the Lok Sabha and the
Assembly elections can be largely attributed to art — or at least
politics posing as art. Just before the Lok Sabha polls, Raj Thackeray
had helped to produce a film titled Mee Chhatrapati Shivaji Raje
Bhosale Boltoy (I, Chhatrapati Shivaji Raje Bhosale, speak), with
Mahesh Manjrekar playing the title role, that was an indictment of the
complacence and laid-back attitudes of Maharastrians. It portrayed,
through film, the political point that Raj had been hammering at for
months: that the Maharashtrian is content with just a table, khurchi
ani pankha (a table, a chair and a fan). That he did not strive for
much more and allowed others to walk all over him. The film exhorted
Maharashtrians to become more combative in their own interest and,
like Oliver, never stop asking for more
It released in Maharashtra’s cinemas just before the producers-
multiplex imbroglio and so ran for weeks and weeks and had a great
hand in influencing a large number of Maharashtrian youth who went
right out and voted for Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena.
Now the Shiv Sena has come out with its counter to that film – benami
again, like Raj’s production of Chhatrapati, but with no kid gloves on
this time. It appears to be a real-life account of the war between the
two cousins – indeed, from the stills released so far, it is very
difficult to spot the differences between the actors who play Raj and
Uddhav and the original cousins.
Titled Jhenda (Flag), it seems to be a mixture of truth and
exaggeration and some of the alleged falsehoods have already compelled
the producer to make some cuts and changes and promise to re-release
the film without the offending portions.
But while everyone — from Narayan Rane’s son to sundry Sena leaders —
are objecting to their unfair portrayals, the one man it lampoons the
most – Raj Thackeray – is uncharacteristically silent.
I haven’t seen Jhenda yet but I am told that there is a scene where
Raj’s character dons a skullcap and attends an Iftaar party. I don’t
know how true that portrayal is, for in all my years I at least have
not seen Raj Thackeray in a skull cap at an Iftaar party. When Raj
launched his MNS he did mean to be all inclusive and there are many
Muslims in his party who are devoted to Bal Thackeray’s nephew. Yet
they have all taken a so-called `mature’ decision not to agitate or
protest.
It could be because Raj well realises that any protest will only help
the film at the box office and more people will end up seeing his
portrayal in an unflattering light than they would if he just gives it
the royal ignore. But, a little bird tells me, Raj has also been cut
down to size and is no longer sure what his protests will lead to.
At the constitution of the current Assembly in Maharashtra, he
protested against Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Asim Azmi taking his oath in
Hindi. That has led to another non-bailable warrant from a court in
Madhya Pradesh (in addition to cases pending against him in courts in
Bihar and Jharkhand, just transferred to Delhi by the Supreme Court))
and suddenly he has no Godfathers.
It is largely believed that the previous Congress government egged him
on against the Shiv Sena but the Assembly elections proved that Raj
was eating into even the Congress and the NCP voter base. So they have
no reason to nurture a Frankenstein’s Monster. But it may also be
true, as I have heard, that the Congress is also squeezing his
business interests to gag him into submission. Moreover, he needs to
keep is silence, again, to buy freedom for those of his MLAs who were
suspended for four years from the Maharashtra Assembly for beating up
Azmi for taking his oath in Hindi.
When I asked a top functionary in the government why those MLAs were
not expelled outright, he said, “If we had done that, it would have
led to by-elections and Raj Thackeray might have come back with a bang
and got more arrogant. This is our version of suspended animation; he
cannot now afford to create more trouble out of fear that there might
be more action that will actually pinch.’’
Without the alleged protection offered by the previous government, I
think Raj is now truly feeling that pinch. And the Sena is not far
behind in hoisting him with his own petard and, in addition, hoisting
its own flag — both the party standard and the celluloid variety.
But, still, I believe Chhatrapati …. was a far more intelligent film –
for one, it needed no cuts, for another it touched a chord with
Maharashtra’s youth — than Jhenda could ever be.
(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)
Posted by Sujata Anandan on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 6:33 pm
Filed under India · Tagged Amitabh Bachchan, Bal Thackeray, bjp,
Congress, Lok Sabha polls, Mahesh Manjrekar, Raj Thackeray, Raj
Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, Ram Gopal Verma’s Sarkar,
sarkar raj, Shiv Sainiks
14 Responses to “Jhenda ooncha rahe…”
Ashish Kolarkar says:
January 8, 2010 at 8:08 pm
Thanks Sujata for telling us about “Chhatrapati….” and its impact in
recent elections. I think so much has come in print/visual media about
Thackeray family that people have started losing interest in it. With
the desertion of Smita Thackeray the things have become too
intriguing. How come daughter-in-law basking under the glory of father-
in-law could leave the later at this stage for greater political
aspiration?
I’ve read a research paper which said that there is great similarity
in genes of nephew and Uncle. I think the Raj and Bal Thackeray prove
the theory. Raj has got cartooning and same eccentric nature from his
uncle. He is too unpredictable. He is on the threshold of finding his
identity after initial euphoria. It is time for him to invent more
tricks to be in the market with due help from ruling party.
Sujata Anandan Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Yes, there is great similarity — and even in terms of events history
is repeating itself vis-a-vis Rraj Thackeray. Will write about those
by and by
Anil Kumar says:
January 8, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Congress will keep him alive.> he need not woory.> Congress always
creates fransktein .
Punjab was gifted Bhindarwale in order to check Akali Dal. Congressi
have no scruples when it coems to snatchign power they care two hoot
about even national interest.
Maharashtra was first gifted Baal thackrey to check labour uninsit and
communist’s rise. now we haevRaj Thackrey to check Baal thackreey
Assam have ben figted crores of illegal bangaldeshi
List goes on and on.
Country can go to dogs as long as these gimmciks insure perpetuation
fo power of congress they are fair game for anythign and everything
Pankaj Reply:
January 9th, 2010 at 11:08 am
country is with dogs and *******!
Sujata Anandan Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
You are right on all counts
bobby says:
January 9, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Raj may be silent also because there are no elections round the
corner.
Sujata Anandan Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
Well, the municipal elections are due next year which are crucila to
him in terms of his business interests across Bombay
Anil says:
January 9, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Narayan Rane and his son are doing more goonda giri than the entire
Thackrey clan put together. There is absolutely no unfair portrayal of
the the former. They should not crib. Any portrayal of their character
will be a milder version of their true self. Ranes have been the most
unscrupulous turncoats in Maharashtra politics. No fan of Shiv Sena
but Congress have won in Maratha land becuase of the infighting in
Sena. Haven’t seen ‘Zhenda’ but ‘ Mee Chhatrapati Boltoye’ by Mahesh
Manjrekar is a classic Marathi film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BmqdU0tpRk
Sujata Anandan Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
However, the producer of jhenda has given in and agreed to delete the
offending scenes — that’s muscle power for you!
Sujata Anandan says:
January 11, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Well, the municipal elections are due next year which are crucial to
him in terms of his business interests…
Joe Zachs says:
January 18, 2010 at 1:43 pm
After watching Sarkar, I admire Ram Gopal Verma for how he hoodwinked
the vested interest into believing that it is a film about “His life”
A real master move Varma.
Dev says:
January 22, 2010 at 11:08 pm
I am reminded of a dialogue in a popular Hindi movie – Jhanda jish
desh ke bhi ho, danda Indian hona chahiye.
Mob rules OK.
Praveen Saxena says:
January 28, 2010 at 12:05 pm
The fact of the matter is that Raj Thakeray is a creation of the
Congress Party and a beneficiary of the mad rush 24×7 news channels.
The Congress has played these tricks in all states Maharashtra,
Punjab, Assam etc. The Kashmir mess is a result of the negligence
shown by the Congress govt at a crucial time.
The country ends paying the price for the dirty politics of the
Congress Party
Ashwatthama says:
February 6, 2010 at 11:20 am
Well Jhenda is way far superior film than Mi Shivaji…
I found MSRBB very stereotype and melodramatic and on the other side
Jhenda is extremely realistic and brilliant.
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/singly-political/2010/01/08/jhenda-ooncha-rahe%e2%80%a6/#more-126
‘Wrong of Pawar to seek Sena nod’
HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times
Mumbai, March 20, 2010
First Published: 00:51 IST(20/3/2010)
Last Updated: 00:53 IST(20/3/2010)
Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has said it was wrong of people to go to
parties like the Shiv Sena to seek permission to screen a film or hold
cricket matches.
Chavan was referring to Union Agriculture Minister and NCP chief
Sharad Pawar’s meeting with Sena chief Bal Thackeray before the IPL
started to get an assurance from the Sena that the matches in Mumbai
pass peacefully.
This was soon after the Sena, protesting the attacks on Indians in
Australia, said it would not allow Australian cricketers to play in
the IPL.
“Yes, it is wrong,” Chavan said in an interview to Vir Sanghvi for
CNBC-TV18’s programme Off the Record with Vir Sanghvi.
Sanghvi had asked Chavan if he approved of people going to the likes
of Thackeray for permission for holding matches or screening movies.
“Sharad Pawarji is a senior leader. He is in the Union
government and they say he went to discuss the IPL matches and issues
like that….Yes, there were a lot of eyebrows raised and asking why did
he go?” Chavan said.
Chavan, in reply to another query, also said the Sena was losing
ground and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena will probably be the main
opposition.
Chavan also talked about the trouble he was having with alliance
partner NCP in handling the Mumbai police. “There have been political
problems,” he said. “I don’t deny that…”
The CM also admitted that there was “politicisation” of the police
force. “We have to select people with integrity…,” he said.
“Looking at the situation during 26/11, we have been cautious. We have
to put a stop to all this and see that proper people handle jobs of
equal importance and men of integrity and people with strength and
courage and the determination to fight, take charge.”
On factionalism in the Mumbai police, Chavan said there have been
differences but they have been sorted out.
Tune in to Off the Record with Vir Sanghvi on CNBC-TV18 at 8 pm on
Saturday and 9 pm on Sunday.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/mumbai/Wrong-of-Pawar-to-seek-Sena-nod/Article1-521102.aspx
Goondas, mind your own business
By Khushwant Singh
Did Shah Rukh Khan and the Maharashtra government score a decisive
victory over the Shiv Sena by showing ‘My Name Is Khan’ in Mumbai’s
cinemas?
Did liberal elements in Karnataka score over Rama Sene by blackening
the face of Pramod Muthalik? Many of us think so and hope both senas
have been dumped on the garbage heap. Unfortunately that is not so.
Shiv Sena’s balloon has no doubt been somewhat deflated but not burst.
It was the same when Rahul Gandhi travelled by suburban train, walking
down streets of Mumbai — a one time performance. And Muthalik has
wiped that soot off his face and is leading his storm troopers to
impose his will on people who do not agree with him.
My reasoning is simple: you cannot put down subversive elements
without having a strong government, which can effectively deal with
bullies. Their strength is their ability to damage property and rough
up people: No one wants to lose his property and get beaten up. The
most vulnerable are mill owners, cinema hall proprietors, eateries and
film people.
They will be eager to patch up with the Thackerays and the Muthaliks.
Take it from me that soon SRK will come to an understanding with the
Thackerays. It has been done before. Sunil Dutt and his daughter Priya
Dutt of the Congress sought Bal Thackeray’s blessings before the
elections. So did Pritish Nandi to become Sena’s nominee to the Rajya
Sabha.
Bal Thackeray is happy to receive important people at his residence,
Matoshree. They kowtow to him and touch his feet while he sits on his
throne draped in saffron robes and rudraksh malas, looking like a
patriarch of all he surveys. He aches to be loved to and is as liberal
in his blessings as he is in offering visitors chilled beer.
I have never met his recalcitrant nephew Raj Thackeray but his modus
operandi is much the same as his uncle’s. So I fear the present
euphoria generated by the release of ‘My Name Is Khan’ is going to be
short-lived. We have yet to build up a mass support of those who can
confront these senas’s goondas and teach them how to mind their own
business.
Bharatrihari
Almora-born Ramesh Chandra Shah was a professor of English in Hamidia
College, Bhopal, till 1997. However, he won acclaim as a Hindi poet
and novelist and was honoured with several awards. He stumbled on
Bharatrihari’s poems in Sanskrit and decided to learn the language; to
be able to translate them into English. I published some selections in
‘Yojana’ and ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’. It is a privilege to
publish some more a third time. The translations are in rubai form and
read as well as Fitzgarald’s translations of Omar Khayyam.
‘Thus Spoke Bharatrihari’ is divided into three sections: Niti
(polity), Sringar (erotica) and Vairagya (asceticism). First I give
examples of Sringar:
You are so lucky if you can admire The lineaments of satisfied desire
In your young bride; suck at her honey’s mouth And let her languor in
your arms retire And:
The bookful blockheads preaching self-restraint Do not consider what’s
really at stake Love’s play on passionate breasts and thighs once
known Such amorous raptures who can ever forsake.
In the third verse he rues the futility of life spent in making love:
The joy companionship of women brings Ends in despair and
disillusionment
Self-knowledge is the only certain good Leading to calm of mind, all
passions spent.
Finally the search for salvation:
Blest are the saints who from all passions free Possess their souls
and live in ecstasy With boundless space as garment and a bowl Of rice
as food and woods as company.
And:
Drunk with delusion’s ever tempting wine We mortals fail to see the
spark Divine
Caught in the vicious whirls of nights and days Our soul ne’er stops
to think of its decline Dress Code
Henry Ford II, son of Henry Ford I, who felt that his father was
generally improperly dressed and did not adhere to the correct dress
code, had the following conversation with him:
Henry Ford II: Dad, you are the biggest manufacturer of cars and a
very renowned person in America. Then why do you dress so shabbily?
Henry Ford I: Yes. I dress the way I like, as everyone in America
knows me as Henry Ford.
Henry Ford II: But, when you go abroad, there also you dress in the
same way, even in poshest of places.
Henry Ford I: Yes, of course, abroad also I dress the same way,
because there no one knows me as Henry Ford.
(Contributed by Colonel Trilok Mehrotra, Noida)
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/58941/goondas-mind-your-own-business.html
Sid Harth
Following are various stats, facts and figures on crime in India and
judicial data , picked out of newspapers (mainly Hindustan Times),
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of links to our statistics pages, see the About India index or the
bottom of the right navigation bar on this page.
Lines marked with an asterisk (*) are recently added entries.
stats on court cases, murder and jails in India
- pending court cases country wide: more than 20 million (end of
2002)
- persons in jail waiting for trial: over 1 million (end of 2002)
- conviction rate of court cases: around 1 percent (according to Prem
Shankar Jha)
- number of murders in India between 1998 and 2000: 37,170
- murders committed in Uttar Pradesh: 7,200 to 7,500 per year [HT Jun
04]
- occupancy of Muzzafarnagar district jail in UP: 1,155 prisoners
(oct 03)
- capacity of Muzzafarnagar district jail in UP: 530 prisoners (oct
03)
- number of prisoners jailed in 60 prisons in Uttar Pradesh: 50,939
(oct 03)
various crime statistics and data
- people who died instantly in Bhopal on 2-3 Dec 1984 from the Union
Carbide gas
leak: 1,700 [HT May 04]
- people who have died since Dec 1984 from after effects from the
Union Carbide
gas leak in Bhopal: 22,000 [HT May 04]
- people who continue to suffer from varied diseases affecting
respiratory,
reproductive systems as a result of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak
in Bhopal:
570,000 [HT May 04]
- * number of persons reported missing in Nithari (impoverished area
in Noida, Delhi): 41 within 2 years [REU Jan 07]
- * number of cases of kidnapping, murder and rape registered by the
CBI in
Noida relating to suspected serial killers Moninder Singh Pandher
and
Surendra Koli: 19 (CBI: (Central Bureau of Investigation) [REU Jan
07]
- * number of polythene bags containing body parts found in drains
near the
suspect: 40 [REU Jan 07]
- number of policemen in Delhi: 59,077 [HT Jun 04]
- number of finials missing at the Red Fort Delhi Gate: 10 (originals
could fetch each
about 33,600 Euro on black market)
- drop in crime in Delhi Nov 2003 (compared to Nov 2002): murder: -36
% --
robbery: -23 % -- extortion: -73 % -- rioting: -70 %
- number of crimes in the Chambal ravines (UP) within past 5 years:
approx 4,000
kidnappings & 180 murders (The UP government has proposed to combat
crimes and
bandits in the Chambal ravines by setting up a 371 acre lion safari
park with 5 lions to
attract tourists) [BBC, Aug 2005]
crime in Government / corruption
- candidates facing criminal charges in the Oct 2004 Maharashtra
election: 91 out
of 163 Shiv Sena party candidates -- 45 out of 111 BJP candidates
-- 31 out of 124
Nationalist Congress party candidates -- 30 out of 157 Congress
candidates [BBC Oct 04]
- number of UP candidates with a criminal record who made it to the
14th Lok
Sabha: at least 12 [HT May 04]
- number of Uttar Pradesh's MLAs who have been through processes of
the law
reserved for criminals: 205 (of a total of 403 MLAs - Member of the
Legislative
Assembly) [HT beginning 2004]
- amount of money taken by MPs in recent "cash for questions"
scandal:
232 - 10,000 US Dollars in bribes for asking questions in
parliament [BBC, Dec 2005]
- number of MPs suspended by India's main political parties for
taking bribes,
end 2005: 9 (Congress: 1 -- BJP: 5 -- BSP: 3) [BBC, Dec 2005]
some facts on laws, sentences & Court rules
- legal sentence for homosexuality: 10 years prison [BBC, Jan 2006]
- age of the colonial Indian Penal Code dealing with homosexuality:
145 years
[BBC, Jan 2006]
- year in which a petition for legalising homosexuality was dismissed
by the High
Court in Delhi: 2004 [BBC, Jan 2006]
- year in which the High Court in Delhi overturned the 1914
legislation and ruled
that women should be allowed to serve alcohol in public: 2005 [BBC,
Jan 2006]
"missing person" tourist stats
- number of registered "person gone missing" in the Kulu Valley (HP)
since 1992: 15
- estimated foreigners disappearance in the Kulu Valley (HP) for the
past decade: 50
(estimate by UK based pressure group Fair Trials Abroad)
- "mysterious" tourist deaths in Goa (jan 2003 - apr 2004): 59
data on crime against women
- official punishment for sex selection (i.e. abortion if child is
female): 3 years jail +
50,000 Rupees fine (equiv to 960 Euro)
- loss of female births within past 2 decades caused by abortion and
sex selection:
estimate of more than 10 million [BBC, Jan 2006]
- annual 'girl deficit' due to prenatal sex selection and selective
abortion: 500,000
according to researchers for the Lancet Journal [BBC, Jan 2006]
- rape cases pending in courts across the country: 56,000 [Oct 2003]
- * registered cases of rape in Delhi 2004: 550 [BBC, Aug 2005]
- rape cases in Delhi 2002: convicted: 98 -- acquitted: 344
- age of rape victims in Delhi: 75% are minors, and of those 25 % are
below 12 years
- registered cases of eve-teasing for Mar - Aug 2003 in Indian
metropoles: Delhi: 744
-- Mumbai:27 -- Kolkata:30 -- Chennai:143
- cases of rape for Mar - Aug 2003 in Indian metropoles: Delhi: 262
-- Mumbai: 40
-- Kolkata: 18 -- Chennai: 21
- officially recorded dowry deaths in major cities combined (Delhi,
Mumbai, Calcutta,
Chennai): 2002: 181 -- 2001: 121
- cases of crimes against women registered with the police in
Himachal Pradesh
2002: 920 (including 137 for rape, 138 for kidnap, 6 for dowry)
- Haryana cost of buffalo: 18,000 - 24,000 Rs (approx 345 - 460 Euro)
- Haryana cost of girl (human trafficking): 4000 Rs (approx 77 Euro)
some crime statistics of Himachal Pradesh
- number of cases of crime in HP from Apr 2003 to May 2004: 1,617
registered cases
- top on the Human Rights violators' list in Himachal Pradesh: Police
(HP Human
Rights Commission received 148 complaints involving police, that is
43 percent of the
complaints)
- cases registered under the NDPS Act in HP: 2002: 312 -- 2003:310
(NDPS: Narcotics, Drugs & Psychotropic Substances) [HT Mar 04]
- amount of drugs recovered by police in HP: 2002: 720 kg charas, 35
kg opium
-- 2003: 420 kg charas, 35 kg opium, 1.5 kg brown sugar
- number of police personnel involved in the annual "Destroy
Cannabis" operation
in the village of Malana in HP Sep 2004: team of 200 people from
Narcotics Control
Bureau, Kullu police and Home Guards [HT Sep 04]
stats on "Destroy Cannabis" operation in Malana Sep 2003 in HP
- cannabis growing area destroyed in Malana and surrounding: 1,100
bigha
(1 hectare = 12 bigha)
- duration of operation "Destroy Cannabis": 8 days (15 - 23
september)
- number of police or soldiers or helpers: 250 or more
- longest cannabis plant found: 15 feet 7 inches
- possible production from destroyed area: 300 kg charas
- area of destruction of cannabis fields in previous years: 1998: 939
bighas
-- 1999: 224 bighas -- 2000: 1,200 bighas -- 2002: 676 bighas (1
hectare = 12 bigha)
data sources & key:
AT: Asia Times, BBC: BBC online, BRIT: Britannica 2002, BSNL: BSNL
Telecom Trends, BSt: Business Standard, CIA: CIA Factbook India, CIN:
censusindia.net, CNEI: Chandigarh Newsline, c/net: c/net news, ConSu:
Content Sutra DI: Daily India, DNA: DNA India, EB: EquityBull, EI:
ExpressIndia, EW: EconomyWatch, FE: Financial Express, FL: Frontline,
GG: Gujarat Global, GTF: Global Technology Forum, GBoWR: Guinness Book
of World Records, HT: Hindustan Times, ID: IndiaDaily, IInfoLine:
India InfoLine IND: The Independent, ITo: India Today, NPBS: Nature
PBS, PhO: PhysOrg, RED: Rediff, REU: Reuters, Sify: Sify Broadband,
TH: The Hindu, TNJ: The News (Jang), ToI: Times of India, TT: The
Tribune,
http://www.neoncarrot.co.uk/h_aboutindia/india_crime_stats.html
Specimen Data Tables : Crime and Law
Cognizable Crimes Registered in India
(1995 to 2001)
Year Num.of Offences Ratio (IPC : SLL) Rate/100000 Inhab. Total
1995 1695696 4297476 1:2.53 5993172 -
1996 1709576 4586986 1:2.68 6296562 675.6
1997 1719820 4691439 1:2.73 6411259 671.2
1998 1778815 4403288 1:2.47 6182103 636.7
1999 1764629 3198902 1:1.78 4911730 497.8
2000 1771084 3396666 1:1.92 5167750 515.7
2001 1769308 3575230 1:02:02 5344538 520.4
Abbr.: IPC : Indian Penal Code.
SLL : Special and Local Laws.
Crime against Women
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) Andaman & Nicobar Islands |
Arunachal Pradesh | Assam | Chhattisgarh | Delhi | Goa | Himachal
Pradesh | Jharkhand | Kerala | Madhya Pradesh | Maharashtra | Manipur
| Orissa | Punjab | Rajasthan | Tamil Nadu | Tripura | Uttar Pradesh |
Uttaranchal | West Bengal |
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
Number of Cases Registered at National Commission for Women (NCW)
Related to Alleged Attacks on Women/Girl by Nature of Complaints in
India (01.11.2008 to 31.10.2009)
State/Age-Group-wise Victims of Total Rape Cases in India (2007)
Crime Head-wise Incidents of Crime Against Women in India (2001 to
2006)
Incidents of Custodial Rape in Police Custody in India (1995 to
2006)
Proportion of Crime Against Woman (Indian Penal Code) toward total
Indian Penal Code Crimes in India (1996 to 2006)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (Women and Children) under
Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956 in India (2004 to 2006)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered for Atrocities against Women
and their Status in India (2006)
State-wise Number of Missing and Traced Men, Women and Children in
India (2006)
Number of Cases Detected and Persons Arrested in Flesh Trade in
India (2003 to 2005)
Selected City-wise Number of Crime Committed Against Women in India
(2005)
State/Selected City/Age-Group-wise Victims of Other (Rape) Cases in
India (2005)
State-wise Cases Registered and Case Charge Sheeted under Cruelty
by Husband and Relatives against Women in India (2001 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Cases of Procuration of Minor Girls, Selling/
Buying of Girls for Prostitution in India (2001 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered for Atrocities against Women
and their Status in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered of Harassment (Molestation)
and Sexual Harassment of Women in India (2002 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered Under Procuration of Minor
Girls in India (2003 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered under Rape, Molestation and
Sexual Harassment in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Complaints for Harassment of Women at Work
Place Received and Disposed by National Commission for Women in India
(2002 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Complaints for Harassment of Women at Work
Place Received and Disposed of by Department of Women and Child
Development in India (2002 to 2005)
State-wise Number of Dowry Deaths Reported in India (1999 to
2005)
State-wise Number of Missing and Traced Men, Women and Children in
India (2005)
Cases Filed Against Clinics/Doctors for Communication of Sex of
Foetus in Haryana, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Punjab (As on
31.3.2004)
Different Types of Crimes Committed Against Women in India (2001 to
2004)
Month-wise Number of Complaints Received by National Commission for
Women in India (April 2003 to March 2004)
Number of Complaints of Sexual Harassment Received in Prasar
Bharati in India (2001-2002 to 2003-2004)
State/Month-wise Atrocities Complaints Received Against Women by
National Commission for Women in India (2004)
State/Month-wise Atrocities Complaints Received Against Women by
National Commission for Women in India (2004)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered for Atrocities against Women
and their Status in India (2004)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered under Rape, Molestation and
Sexual Harassment in India (2002 to 2004)
State-wise Number of Complaints for Harassment of Women at Work
Place Received by National Commission for Women and Department of
Women and Child Development in India (2002 to 2004)
State-wise Number of Missing and Traced Men, Women and Children in
India (2004)
Number of Cases of Eve-Teasing and Rape Reported in Metropolitan
Cities of India (As on 1st March 2003 to 31st August, 2003)
Category/Month-wise Complaints Received in National Commission for
Women in India (2001-2002)
City-wise Number of Rapes and Rapes with Murders in India
(2000-2002)
Different Type of Crimes Committed Against Women in India (1998 to
2002)
Nature and Number of Complaints Received Against Women in India
(January 2000 to March 2002)
State-wise Cases Reported, Persons Arrested, Charge-Sheeted and
Convicted in Custodial Rape in India (2001 and 2002)
State-wise Number of Complaints Received regarding Crime against
Women in India (1997 to 2002)
State-wise Number of Missing Girls (14-18 Years) in India (2000 to
2002)
Category/Month-wise Complaints Received in National Commission of
Women in India (April, 2000 to March, 2001)
Missing Women Registered and Percentage of Women Recovered in Six
Metropolition Cities in India (1999 to 2001)
Number of Dowry Death Cases Reported in India (During 2000-2001)
State-wise Cases Disposal of Cruelty (Husband and Relatives) by
Police and Court in India (1999 to 2001)
State-wise Disposal of Dowry Prohibition Act Cases by Police and
Court in India (1999 to 2001)
State-wise Incidence of Incest Rape Cases Registered in India (1999
to 2001)
State-wise Incidence of Molestation and Percentage Variation Over
Previous Year in India (1999-2001)
State-wise Incidence of Procuration of Minor Girls, Selling/Buying
of Girls for Prostitution in India (During 2000 to 2001)
State-wise Incidence of Total Crime Committed Against Women in
India (1999 to 2001)
Crime Head-wise Incidents of Crime Against Women in India (1990 to
2000)
Different Types of Crimes Committed Against Women in India (1990 to
2000)
Disposal of Custodial Rape Cases by Courts in India (1995 to
2000)
Disposal of Custodial Rape Cases by Police in India (1995 to
2000)
State-wise Cases Reported, Persons Arrested, Charge-Sheeted and
Convicted in Custodial Rape in India (1998 to 2000)
State-wise Incidence of Rape (upto Available Month) in India (1998
to 2000)
State-wise Incidence of Sexual Harassment and Total Crime Committed
Against Women in India (1998 to 2000)
State-wise Number of Complaints handled by the National Commission
for Women in India (1998 to 2000)
State-wise Rape Cases Reported, Chargesheeted and Convicted in
India (During 1999-2000)
State-wise Trade of Girls for Prostitution in India (1999 and
2000)
Disposal of Crimes Against Women Cases by Courts in India (1997 to
1999)
Disposal of Crimes Against Women Cases by Police in India (1997 to
1999)
State-wise Incidence of Immoral Traffic Prevention Act, Indecent
Representation of Women (Pre.) Act, Dowry Prohibition Act Committed
Against Women in India (1999) - Part III
State-wise Incidence of Molestation, Sexual Harassment (Eve-
Teasing), Importing of Girls Committed Against Women in India (1999) -
Part II
State-wise Incidence of Procuration of Minor Girls, Selling/Buying
of Girls for Prostitution in India (During 1998 to 1999)
State-wise Incidence of Rape, Kidnapping and Abduction, Dowry
Deaths and Cruelty by Husband and Relatives Committed Against Women in
India (1999) - Part I
Percentage Distribution of Various Crimes against Women in India
(1998)
State/Cities-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide Not
Amounting to Murder (C.H.) in India (1998) - Part I
State/Cities-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide Not
Amounting to Murder (C.H.) in India (1998) - Part II
State-wise Incidence of Immoral Traffic (P) Act, Indecent Rep. Of
Women (P) Act, Dowry Proh. Act Committed Against Women in India (1998)
- Part III
State-wise Incidence of Molestation, Eve-Teasing, Importing of
Girls and Sati-Prevention Act Committed Against Women in India (1998)
- Part II
State-wise Incidence of Rape, Kidnapping and Abduction, Dowry
Deaths and Cruelty by Husband and Relatives Committed Against Women in
India (1998) - Part I
Incidence and Rate of Crime Committed Against Women
Offenders Relation and Proximity to Rape Victims
Victims of Rape under Different Age Group
Releted Links
Indicators on Other Attainment
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/crimeagainstwomen/17911/stats.aspx
Foetiside
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) Rajasthan |
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
Selected State-wise Number of Ultra-Sound Machines Sealed for Non-
Maintenance of Records/Non-Registration under Pre-Conception and Pre-
Natal Determination Techniques Act (PC & PNDT) in India (2005 and
2006)
State-wise Incidence of Female Foeticide in India (1994 to 2007)
State-wise Incidence of Female Infanticide in India (1999 to
2007)
State-wise Number of Bodies Registered, Court/Police Cases and
Machines Seized/Sealed under Pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic
Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act 1994, in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Complaints Filed in Courts against Violators
of PC and PNDT Act/Rules in India (As on 31.7.2005)
State-wise Number of Bodies Registered, Court/Police Cases and
Machines Seized/Sealed under Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic
Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act 1994, in India (As on
31.3.2004)
State-wise Cases of Foeticide/Female Infanticide in India (2001 to
2003)
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/foetiside/207039/stats.aspx
State/City-wise Incidence and Rate of Crime Committed
Against Women in India
(2000)
1 State/City
2 Incidence
3 % of Contrib.to All-India Total
4 Est.Mid -Year Pop.(In Lakh)
5 Rate of Cognizable Crimes
6 Rank*
7 Rank**
Andhra Pradesh
1 2 3 4 5 6
14299 10.1 758.5 18.9 4 3
Arunachal Pradesh
143 0.1 12.0 11.9 16 21
Assam
3732 2.6 263.0 14.2 11 13
Bihar
6299 4.5 1005.6 6.3 25 8
Goa
100 0.1 16.1 6.2 26 24
Gujarat
6140 4.3 484.9 12.7 14 9
Haryana 2.3 199.3 16.6 7 14
Himachal Pradesh
842 0.6 67.4 12.5 15 18
Jammu & Kashmir
1634 1.2 99.9 16.4 8 17
Karnataka
5852 4.1 523.0 11.2 19 10
Kerala 3.5 323.5 15.4 9 11
Madhya Pradesh
17902 12.7 802.3 22.3 2 2
Maharashtra
13177 9.3 914.3 14.4 10 5
Manipur
74 0.1 25.4 2.9 29 25
Meghalya
69 0.0 24.5 2.8 30 26
Mizoram
133 0.1 9.6 13.9 12 22
Nagaland
22 0.0 17.0 1.3 32 28
Orissa
4717 3.3 359 6 13.1 13 12
Punjab
2156 1.5 236.2 9.1 21 16
Rajasthan
12942 9.2 538 7 24.0 1 6
Sikkim
21 0.0 5.6 3.7 28 29
Tamil Nadu
13732 9.7 619 3 22.2 3 4
Tripura
330 0.2 38.1 8.7 24 19
Uttar Pradesh
18920 13.4 1715.4 11.0 20 1
West Bengal
7043 5.0 793.3 8.9 22 7
Total States
138572 98.0 9852 4 14.1 - -
Total (All-India)
141373 100.0 10021.4 14.1 - -
Cities
Ahmedabad
510
3.0
42.8
11.9
18
10
Bangalore
1255
7.5
57.1
22.0
7
3
Bhopal
320
1.9
16.9
19.0
10
15
Chennai
4037
24.0
67.5
59.8
1
1
Coimbatore
283
1.7
13.0
21.8
8
17
Delhi (City)
2122
12.6
120.6
17.6
11
2
Hyderabad
1227
7.3
71.5
17.2
12
4
Indore
372
2.2
14.6
25.6
5
13
Jaipur
804
4.8
22.1
36.4
3
7
Kanpur
956
5.7
24.8
38.6
2
5
Kochi
125
0.7
18.3
6.8
21
23
Kolkata
558
3.3
130.6
4.3
23
9
Lucknow
683
4.1
26.7
25.5
6
8
Ludhiana
289
1.7
17.3
16.7
13
16
Madurai
380
2.3
12.8
29.6
4
12
Mumbai
888
5.3
187.1
4.7
22
6
Nagpur
443
2.6
20.9
21.2
9
11
Patna
212
1.3
13.0
16.3
14
21
Pune
352
2.1
35.9
9.8
20
14
Surat
243
1.4
24.4
10.0
19
19
Vadodara
240
1.4
16.6
14.5
17
20
Varanasi
206
1.2
13.1
15.7
16
22
Vishakhapatnam
282
1.7
17.8
15.8
15
18
Total (Cities)
16787
100.0
985.4
17.0
-
-
Note : * : Rank on the basis of rate of total cognizable crime.
** : Rank on the basis of Percentage share.
http://www.indiastat.com/6/specimen.aspx
Crime against SC/ST
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) | Andaman & Nicobar Islands | Andhra
Pradesh | Arunachal Pradesh | Assam | Bihar | Chandigarh |
Chhattisgarh | Dadra & Nagar Haveli | Daman & Diu | Delhi | Goa |
Gujarat | Haryana | Himachal Pradesh | Jammu & Kashmir | Jharkhand |
Karnataka | Kerala | Lakshadweep | Madhya Pradesh | Maharashtra |
Manipur | Meghalaya | Mizoram | Nagaland | Orissa | Pondicherry |
Punjab | Rajasthan | Sikkim | Tamil Nadu | Tripura | Uttar Pradesh |
Uttaranchal | West Bengal |
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
Selected State-wise Central Assistance Released and Utilised under
Provision of Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955 and Scheduled Castes
and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989) in India
(2005-2006 to 2007-2008)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Scheduled Tribes by Court in India (2006)
State-wise Incidence (I), Rate (R) and Percentage Contribution (P)
of Crime Committed Against Scheduled Tribes in India (2006) - Part I
State-wise Number of Cases Ending Conviction under Scheduled Castes
and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act. 1989) in India
(2004 to 2006)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered under Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India (1998
to 2006)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Scheduled Tribes by Court in India (2005)
State-wise Funds Released Under Protection of Civil Rights Act,
1955 and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of
Atrocities Act, 1989) in India (1997-1998 to 2004-2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Hurt of Scheduled
Castes (SC) (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities Act) and PCR
Act in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Hurt of Scheduled
Tribe (ST) (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities Act) and PCR
Act in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Kidnapping and
Abduction and Dacoity of Scheduled Tribe (ST) (In Conjunction with SC/
ST (P) of Atrocities Act) in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Murder and Rape of
Scheduled Tribe (ST) (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities Act)
in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Robbery and Arson of
Scheduled Castes (SC) (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities
Act) in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under Robbery and Arson of
Scheduled Tribe (ST) (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities Act)
in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under SC/ST (P) of
Atrocities Act Only and Other Crimes Against Scheduled Castes (SC) in
India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered (CR), Persons Arrested (PA),
Persons Chargesheeted (PC), Total Persons Tried (PT), Persons
Convicted (PV) and Persons Acquitted (PQ) under SC/ST (P) of
Atrocities Act Only and Other Crimes against Scheduled Tribe (ST) in
India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered , Persons Arrested , Persons
Chargesheeted , Total Persons Tried , Persons Convicted and Persons
Acquitted under Kidnapping and Abduction and Dacoity of SC (In
Conjunction with SC/ST (P) of Atrocities Act) in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered, Persons Arrested, Persons
Chargesheeted, Total Persons Tried, Persons Convicted and Persons
Acquitted under Murder and Rape of SC (In Conjunction with SC/ST (P)
of Atrocities Act) in India (2005)
State-wise Number of Murder Cases Registered Against Scheduled
Caste and Scheduled Tribe in India (2005)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Scheduled Tribes by Court in India (2004)
State-wise Number of Atrocities Cases Registered under Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in
India (2002 to 2004)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Scheduled Tribes by Court in India (2003)
Number of Cases Registered under SC/ST (POA Act 1989 and PCR Act,
1955) in India (1997 to 2003)
State-wise Cases under Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in Regard to Disposal of Cases by
Courts, Cases Ending in Conviction and Cases Pending in Courts in
India (1999 to 2003)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered by Police, Charge Sheeted in
Courts and Cases Disposed Off by Courts under Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India
(2003)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Scheduled Tribes by Court in India (2002)
Selected State-wise Showing Disposal of Cases by Exclusive Special
Courts Booked Under Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention
of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India (31.12.2002)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered by Police, Charge Sheeted in
Courts and Cases Disposed Off by Courts under Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India
(2002)
State-wise Police Atrocities Against Tribals in India (2000 to
2002)
State-wise Murder Committed Against SC/ST by Non-SC and ST in India
(2001 Upto available Months)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered by Police, Charge Sheeted in
the Courts and Cases Disposed off by Courts Under the Scheduled Castes
and the Secheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) in India Act,
1989 (2001)
Number of Crimes Against Scheduled Castes in India (1991 to 2000)
Percentage Share and Variation in IPC Crimes Against Scheduled
Castes in Total IPC Crimes in India (1992 to 2000)
State/UT with Maximum Percentage Contribution to Crimes against
Scheduled Caste in India (2000)
States with Maximum Percentage Contribution towards Various forms
of Crimes Committed against Scheduled Tribes (2000)
State-wise Number of Cases Acquital under Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India (During
1998 to 2000)
State-wise Number of Cases Chargesheeted in Courts under Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in
India (During 1998 to 2000)
State-wise Number of Cases Conviction under Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 in India (During
1998 to 2000)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered, Charge Sheeted in the Courts
and Cases Disposed off by Courts Under the Scheduled Castes and the
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) in India Act, 1989 in
India (2000)
State-wise Number of Cases Registered, Charge Sheeted in the Courts
and Cases Disposed off by Courts Under the Scheduled Castes and the
Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) in India Act, 1989 (1999)
Cases Registered with Police under Different Crimes Head and
Atrocities on Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) in India
(1995 to 1997)
Disposal of Cases for Committed Crimes Against Scheduled Castes by
Courts/Police
Disposal of Cases for Committed Crimes Against Scheduled Tribes by
Courts/Police
Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes Against
Scheduled Castes by Courts/Police
Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes Against
Scheduled Tribes by Courts/Police
Incidence of Crimes Against Scheduled Castes
Incidence of Crimes Against Scheduled Tribes
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/crimeagainstscst/17913/stats.aspx
Juvenile Courts
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) Gujarat | Maharashtra | Meghalaya
|
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age-Group and Sex in India (2007)
Incidence and Rate of Juvenile Delinquency under IPC in India (1988
to 2007)
Juveniles Apprehended Under IPC and SLL Crimes By Age Groups in
India (1993 to 2007)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age Groups and Sex in India (2006)
Crime-wise Juvenile Delinquency IPC Cases in India (1995, 2000 to
2006)
Juvenile Delinquency (SLL) Under Different Crime Heads in India
(2000 to 2006)
Juveniles Apprehended by Age Group and Sex in India (1971, 1981,
1986, 1987, 1988 and 1991 to 2006)
State-wise Number of Juvenile Justice Boards and Homes Setup under
Provisions of Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act,
2000 in India (2006)
State-wise Number of Juveniles Staying in Observation Homes Set up
under Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 in
India (August, 2006)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age Groups and Sex in India (2005)
Disposal of Juveniles Arrested under IPC and LSL Crimes in India
(1988 to 2005)
Juveniles Apprehended under Congnizable Crime in India (1971, 1981,
1986, 1987, 1988 and 1991 to 2005)
Juveniles Arrested under IPC Cognizable Crime and Offences under
Local and Special Laws in India (1968, 1971, 1981, 1986, 1988 and 1991
to 2005) - Part I
Juveniles Arrested under IPC Cognizable Crime and Offences under
Local and Special Laws in India (1968, 1971, 1981, 1986, 1988 and 1991
to 2005) - Part II
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age Groups and Sex in India (2004)
Juvenile Delinquency in India (1971 to 2004)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age Groups and Sex in India (2003)
Crime-wise Juveniles Apprehended by Age Group and Sex in India
(2003)
Juvenile Delinquency under Local and Special Laws (Cases Reported)
in India (1971, 1981, 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1991 to 2003)
State-wise Central Assistance Released under Programme for Juvenile
Justice in India (1997-1998 to 2002-2003)
Crime-wise Juveniles Apprehended by Age Group and Sex in India
(2001)
State-wise Number of Juvenile Courts and Junvenile Welfare Boards
in India (2000-2001)
Crime-wise Juvenile Delinquency IPC Cases in India (1991 to 2000)
Juveniles Apprehended by Age Group and Sex in India (2000)
State/City-wise Disposal of Juveniles Arrested under IPC and LSL
Crimes in India (2000)
State/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency IPC Cases in India (2000)
State/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Local and Special Laws
(Cases Reported) in India (2000)
State/City-wise Juveniles Delinquency Under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (2000) - Part I
State/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended Under Congnizable Crime in
India (2000)
State/City-wise Juveniles Arrested under IPC Cognizable Crime and
Offences under Local and Special Laws in India (2000) - Part I
State/City-wise Juveniles Arrested under IPC Cognizable Crime and
Offences Under Local and Special Laws in India (2000) - Part II
State/City-wise Juveniles Delinquency Under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (2000) - Part II
State/City-wise Juveniles Delinquency Under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (2000) - Part III
State/City-wise Juveniles Delinquency Under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (2000) - Part I
State/City-wise Juveniles Delinquency Under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (2000) - Part II
State-wise Juvenile Delinquency under IPC in India (During 1998 to
2000)
Juveniles Apprehended by Age Group and Sex in India (1999)
State/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part I
State/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part II
State/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part III
States/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part I
States/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part II
States/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Different Crime Heads
(IPC) in India (During 1999) - Part III
States/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (During 1999) - Part I
States/City-wise Juvenile Delinquency under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (During 1999) - Part II
States/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (During 1999) - Part I
States/City-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different Crime Heads
(SLL) in India (During 1999) - Part II
States/UTs/Citywise Classification of Juveniles Arrested under IPC
and SLL Crimes by Economic-Setup and Recidivism in India (During
1999)
States/UTs/Citywise Classification of Juveniles Arrested under IPC
and SLL Crimes by Education and Family Background in India (During
1999)
States/UTs/Citywise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC Crimes by Age
Group and Sex in India (1999)
States/UTs/Citywise Juveniles Apprehended under SLL Crimes by Age
Group and Sex in India (1999)
State-wise Disposal of Juveniles Arrested under IPC and SLL Crimes
and Sent to Courts in India (1999)
State-wise Number of Juvenile Homes/Observation Homes/Special Homes/
Aftercare Institutions in India (1997-1998)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended under IPC and SLL Crimes by
Age Groups and Sex in India (1996)
State-wise Juveniles Apprehended by Sex for Committing Crime under
IPC and SLL in India (During 1996)
State-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different SLL Crimes in
India (1996) - Part I
State-wise Juveniles Apprehended under Different SLL Crimes in
India (1996) - Part II
State-wise Juveniles Apprehended under SLL Crimes by Age Group and
Sex in India (1996)
Crime Head-wise Juveniles Apprehended by Age Groups and Sex in
India (1995)
Juveniles Arrested under IPC Cognizable Crime and Offences under
Local and Special Laws in India (1968, 1971, 1981, 1986, 1988, 1991 to
1995) - Part III
State-wise Institution under the Juvenile Justice Act in India
(1994-1995)
Crime-wise Juvenile Delinquency IPC Cases in India (1968, 1971,
1981, 1986 and 1988)
State-wise Institutions for Neglected and Delinquent Children under
the Juvenile Justice Act, 1986 in India
State-wise Welfare Boards and Juvenile Courts under the Juvenile
Justice Act, 1986 in India
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/juvenilecourts/148/stats.aspx
Crime against Child
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) Andaman & Nicobar Islands | Andhra
Pradesh | Arunachal Pradesh | Assam | Bihar | Chandigarh |
Chhattisgarh | Dadra & Nagar Haveli | Daman & Diu | Delhi | Goa |
Gujarat | Haryana | Himachal Pradesh | Jammu & Kashmir | Jharkhand |
Karnataka | Kerala | Madhya Pradesh | Maharashtra | Manipur |
Meghalaya | Mizoram | Nagaland | Orissa | Pondicherry | Punjab |
Rajasthan | Sikkim | Tamil Nadu | Tripura | Uttar Pradesh |
Uttaranchal | West Bengal |
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
State/Sex-wise Number of Children Traced in India (2005 to 2007)
State-wise Number of Children Missing (upto Age of 0-18 Years) in
India (2004 to 2007)
State-wise Persons Arrested under Kidnapping and Abduction in India
(2007)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committed Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2006)
Number of Cases of Murder, Rape and Kidnapping of Abduction of
Children in (NCR Regions of Delhi) India (2004 to 2006)
State-wise Cases Registered Under Child Marriage Restraint Act in
India (March to June, 2006)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committed Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2005)
State-wise Cases Registered, Charged sheeted, Trial Completed,
Convicted and Person Convicted Under Child Marriage Restraint Act in
India (2003 to 2005)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committed Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2004)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2003)
State-wise Cases Registered, Charged sheeted, Trial Completed,
Convicted and Person Convicted Under Child Marriage Restraint Act in
India (2001 to 2003)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2002)
Victims of Child Rape in India (1992-2002)
Crime-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committed Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2001)
State-wise Child Rape Victims (upto 14 years) in India (2001)
State-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committing Crimes
Against Children by Court in India (2001)
State-wise Disposal of Persons Arrested for Crimes Committed
Against Children by Police in India (2001)
State-wise Number of Cases Reported under Child Marriage Restraint
Act, 1929 in India (1999 to 2001)
Disposal of Cases for Committed Crimes Against Children by Courts/
Police
Disposal of Persons Arrested for Committed Crimes Against Children
by Courts/Police
Incidence and Rate of Committed Crimes Against Children
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/crimeagainstchild/17912/stats.aspx
Violent Crimes
Figures at All-India / State level : (Currently showing India with
State Level consolidated figures) Delhi | Punjab | Tamil Nadu |
(Data table headings are shown Year-wise in descending order)
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder in India (2007) - Part I
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder in India (2007) - Part II
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Murder in India (2007) - Part I
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Murder in India (2007) - Part II
State/City-wise Number of Unidentified Dead Bodies Recovered and
Inquest Conducted in India (2000 to 2007)
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part I
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part II
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part III
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part IV
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part V
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2007) -
Part VI
State-wise Incidence and Rate of Violent Crimes in India (2007) -
Part I
State-wise Incidence and Rate of Violent Crimes in India (2007) -
Part II
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder (C. H.) in India (2007) - Part I
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder (C. H.) in India (2007) - Part II
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder (C. H.) in India (2007) - Part III
State-wise Number of Cases Registered /Disposed under Violation of
Human Rights in India (2004-2005 to 2006-2007)
State-wise Number of Victims Murdered by Use of Fire Arms in India
(2007)
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder in India (2006 ) - Part I
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide Not Amounting to
Murder in India (2006 ) - Part II
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Murder in India (2006) - Part I
State/Age Group-wise Victims of Murder in India (2006) - Part II
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2006) -
Part I
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2006) -
Part II
State-wise Disposal of Violent Crimes by Courts in India (2006) -
Part III
State-wise Incidence and Rate of Violent Crimes in India (2006) -
Part I
State-wise Incidence and Rate of Violent Crimes in India (2006) -
Part II
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide not Amounting to
Murder (C.H.) in India (2006) - Part I
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide not Amounting to
Murder (C.H.) in India (2006) - Part II
State-wise Motives of Murder and Culpable Homicide not Amounting to
Murder (C.H.) in India (2006) - Part III
State-wise Number of Victims Murdered by Use of Fire Arms in India
(2006)
State-wise Number of Victims Murdered by Use of Fire Arms in India
(2003 to 2005)
Violent Crime (2004 and 2005)
Age Group/Gender-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide not Amounting to
Murder in India (2002 to 2004)
Age Group/Gender-wise Victims of Murder in India (2002 to 2004)
Age Group-wise Victims of Kidnapping and Abduction in India (2001
to 2004)
Crime Rate for Violent Crimes under IPC in India (1996 to 2004)
State/Age Group/Sex-wise Victims of Culpable Homicide Not Amounting
to Murder in India (2004) - Part I
State-wise Percentage Share of Violent Crimes to Total IPC Crimes
in India (2000 to 2004)
Victims of Murder by Fire-Arms in India (1999 to 2004)
Violent Crimes Reported in India (1996 to 2004)
State-wise Murder Cases Pending Investigation in India (1991 to
2003)
Violent Crime (2002 and 2003)
State-wise Number of Victims Murdered by Use of Fire Arms in India
(2001 and 2002)
Age/Gender-wise Profile of Victims of Murder in India (1999 to
2001)
Age/Gender-wise Victims of C.H. not amounting to Murder in India
(1999 to 2001)
State-wise Left Wing Extremist Violence in India (During 2000 and
2001)
Violent Crime (2000 and 2001)
Age-wise Victims of Kidnapping and Abduction in India ( 1999 and
2000)
Violent Crimes (1999)
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/violentcrimes/17910/stats.aspx
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/incidenceofcrime/130/stats.aspx
http://www.indiastat.com/crimeandlaw/6/stats.aspx
...and I am Sid harth
bademiyansubhanallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Crime is present in various forms in India. Organized crime include
drug trafficking, gunrunning, money laundering, extortion, murder for
hire, fraud, human trafficking and poaching. Many criminal operations
engage in black marketeering, political violence, religiously
motivated violence, terrorism, and abduction. Other crimes are
homicide, robbery, assault etc. Property crimes include burglary,
theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. Corruption is a significant
problem.
Crimes against women
Main article: Women in India
Police records show high incidence of crimes against women in India.
The National Crime Records Bureau reported in 1998 that the growth
rate of crimes against women would be higher than the population
growth rate by 2010.[1] Earlier, many cases were not registered with
the police due to the social stigma attached to rape and molestation
cases. Official statistics show that there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of reported crimes against women.[1]
Sexual Harassment
Half of the total number of crimes against women reported in 1990
related to molestation and harassment at the workplace.[1] Eve teasing
is a euphemism used for sexual harassment or molestation of women by
men. Many activists blame the rising incidents of sexual harassment
against women on the influence of "Western culture". In 1987, The
Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act was passed[2] to
prohibit indecent representation of women through advertisements or in
publications, writings, paintings, figures or in any other manner.
In 1997, in a landmark judgement, the Supreme Court of India took a
strong stand against sexual harassment of women in the workplace. The
Court also laid down detailed guidelines for prevention and redressal
of grievances. The National Commission for Women subsequently
elaborated these guidelines into a Code of Conduct for employers.[1]
While public urination is not practised by men of all ages in India,
it is socially unacceptable for girls and women to publicly urinate
when restrooms are unavailable. In other countries such as Laos,
Cambodia, and Vietnam public urination is practised by women when
there are no toilets. This leads to harassment and UTI in women.
[3] [4] [5] [6]
Dowry
Main articles: Dowry and Dowry law in India
In 1961, the Government of India passed the Dowry Prohibition Act,[7]
making the dowry demands in wedding arrangements illegal. However,
many cases of dowry-related domestic violence, suicides and murders
have been reported. In the 1980s, numerous such cases were reported.
However, recent reports show that the number of these crimes have
reduced drastically.[8]
In 1985, the Dowry Prohibition (maintenance of lists of presents to
the bride and bridegroom) rules were framed.[9]
According to these rules, a signed list of presents given at the time
of the marriage to the bride and the bridegroom should be maintained.
The list should contain a brief description of each present, its
approximate value, the name of whoever has given the present and his/
her relationship to the person.
A 1997 report[10]
claimed that at least 5,000 women die each year because of dowry
deaths, and at least a dozen die each day in 'kitchen fires' thought
to be intentional. The term for this is "bride burning" and is
criticized within India itself. Amongst the urban educated, such dowry
abuse has reduced dramatically.
Child Marriage
Child marriage has been traditionally prevalent in India and continues
to this day. Young girls live with their parents until they reach
puberty. In the past, the child widows were condemned to a life of
great agony, shaving heads, living in isolation, and shunned by the
society.[11]
Although child marriage was outlawed in 1860, it is still a common
practice.[12]
According to UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children-2009” report, 47%
of India's women aged 20–24 were married before the legal age of 18,
with 56% in rural areas.[13]
The report also showed that 40% of the world's child marriages occur
in India.[14]
Female infanticides and sex selective abortions
India has a highly masculine sex ratio, the chief reason being that
many women die before reaching adulthood.[1]
Tribal societies in India have a less masculine sex ratio than all
other caste groups. This, in spite of the fact that tribal communities
have far lower levels of income, literacy and health facilities.[1]
It is therefore suggested by many experts, that the highly masculine
sex ratio in India can be attributed to female infanticides and sex-
selective abortions.
All medical tests that can be used to determine the sex of the child
have been banned in India, due to incidents of these tests being used
to get rid of unwanted female children before birth. Female
infanticide (killing of girl infants) is still prevalent in some rural
areas.[1]
The abuse of the dowry tradition has been one of the main reasons for
sex-selective abortions and female infanticides in India.
Domestic violence
The incidents of domestive violence are higher among the lower Socio-
Economic Classes (SECs). There are various instances of an inebriated
husband beating up the wife often leading to severe injuries. Domestic
violence is also seen in the form of physical abuse. The Protection of
Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 came into force on October 26,
2006.
Trafficking
The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act was passed in 1956.[15]
However many cases of trafficking of young girls and women have been
reported. These women are either forced into prostitution, domestic
work or child labor.
Illegal drug trade
India is located between two major illicit opium producing centres in
Asia - the Golden Crescent comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran
and the Golden Triangle comprising Burma, Thailand and Laos.[16]
Because of such geographical location, India experiences large amount
of drug trafficking through the borders.[17]
India is the world's largest producer of licit opium.[18]
But opium is diverted to illicit international drug markets.[18]
India is a transshipment point for heroin from Southwest Asian
countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan and from Southeast Asian
countries like Burma, Laos, and Thailand.[19]
Heroin is smuggled from Pakistan and Burma, with some quantities
transshipped through Nepal.[19]
Most heroin shipped from India are destined for Europe.[19]
There have been reports of heroin smuggled from Mumbai to Nigeria for
further export.[19]
In Maharashtra, Mumbai is an important centre for distribution of drug.
[20] The most commonly used drug in Mumbai is Indian heroin (called
desi mal by the local population).[20]
Both public transportation (road and rail transportation) and private
transportation are used for this drug trade.[20]
Drug trafficking affects the country in many ways.
Drug abuse: Cultivation of illicit narcotic substances and drug
trafficking affects the health of the individuals and destroy the
economic structure of the family and society.[21]
Organized crime: Drug trafficking results in growth of organized crime
which affects social security. Organised crime connects drug
trafficking with corruption and money laundering.[21]
Political instability: Drug trafficking also aggravate the political
instability in North-West and North-East India.[22]
A survey conducted in 2003-2004 by Narcotics Control Bureau found that
India has at least four million drug addicts.[23]
The most common drugs used in India are cannabis, hashish, opium and
heroin.[23]
In 2006 alone, India's law enforcing agencies recovered 230 kg heroin
and 203 kg of cocaine.[24]
In an annual government report in 2007, the United States named India
among 20 major hubs for trafficking of illegal drugs along with
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Burma. However, studies reveal that most of
the criminals caught in this crime are either Nigerian or US nationals.
[25]
Several measures have been taken by the Government of India to combat
drug trafficking in the country. India is a party of the Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961), the Convention on Psychotropic
Substances (1971), the Protocol Amending the Single Convention on
Narcotic Drugs (1972) and the United Nations Convention Against
Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (1988).
[26]
An Indo-Pakistani committee was set up in 1986 to prevent trafficking
in narcotic drugs.[27]
India signed a convention with the United Arab Emirates in 1994 to
control drug trafficking.[27]
In 1995, India signed an agreement with Egypt for investigation of
drug cases and exchange of information and a Memorandum of
Understanding of the Prevention of Illicit Trafficking in Drugs with
Iran.[27]
Arms trafficking
According to a joint report published by Oxfam, Amnesty International
and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) in 2006,
there are around 40 million illegal small arms in India out of
approximately 75 million in worldwide circulation.[28]
Majority of the illegal small arms make its way into the states of
Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Madhya
Pradesh.[28]
In India, a used AK-47 costs $3,800 in black market.[29]
Large amount of illegal small arms are manufactured in various illegal
arms factories in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and sold on the black market
for as little as $5.08.[28]
Chinese pistols are in demand in the illegal small arms market in
India because they are easily available and cheaper.[28]
This trend poses a significant problem for the states of Bihar, Uttar
Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Maharashtra, West Bengal,
Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh which have influence of Naxalism.[28]
The porous Indo-Nepal border is an entry point for Chinese pistols,
AK-47 and M-16 rifles into India as these arms are used by the
Naxalites who have ties to Maoists in Nepal.[28]
In North-East India, there is a huge influx of small arms due to the
insurgent groups operating there.[30]
The small arms in North-East India come from insurgent groups in
Burma, black market in South-East Asian countries like Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, black market in Cambodia, the
People's Republic of China, insurgent groups like the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), the
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), Indian states like Uttar Pradesh
and pilferages from legal gun factories, criminal organizations
operating in India and South Asian countries and other international
markets like Romania, Germany etc.[30]
The small arms found in North-East India are M14 rifle, M16 rifle,
AK-47, AK-56, AK-74, light machine guns, Chinese hand grenades, mines,
rocket-propelled grenades, submachine guns etc.[30]
The Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Home Affairs drafted
a joint proposal to the United Nations, seeking a global ban on small-
arms sales to non-state users.[28]
Poaching and wildlife trafficking
Illegal wildlife trade in India has increased.[31]
According to a report published by the Environmental Investigation
Agency (EIA) in 2004, India is the chief target for the traders of
wildlife skin.[32] Between 1994 and 2003, there have been 784 cases
where the skins of tiger, leopard or otter have been seized.[32]
Leopards, rhinoceros, reptiles, birds, insects, rare species of plants
are being smuggled into the countries in Southeast Asia and the
People's Republic of China.[31]
Between 1994 and 2003, poaching and seizure of 698 otters have been
documented in India.[32]
Kathmandu is a key staging point for illegal skins smuggled from India
bound for Tibet and PRC.[32]
The report by EIA noted there has been a lack of cross-border
cooperation between India, Nepal and the People's Republic of China to
coordinate enforcement operations and lack of political will to treat
wildlife crime effectively.[32]
The poaching of the elephants is a significant problem in Southern
India[33]
and in the North-Eastern states of Nagaland and Mizoram.[34]
The majority of tiger poaching happen in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar
Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.[35]
Following is a comparison of reported cases of tiger and leopard
poaching from 1998 to 2003:
Year 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Reported cases of tiger poaching[36] 14 38 39 35 47 8
Reported cases of leopard poaching[36] 28 80 201 69 87 15
Samir Sinha, head of TRAFFIC India, the wildlife trade monitoring arm
of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Conservation
Union (IUCN), told Reuters in an interview "The situation regarding
the illegal trade in wildlife parts in India is very grim. It is a
vast, a varied trade ranging from smuggling of rare medicinal plants
to butterflies to peafowls to tigers and it is difficult to predict
how big it is, but the threats and dimensions suggest that the trade
is increasing".[31]
Project Tiger, a wildlife conservation project, was initiated in 1972
and was launched by Indira Gandhi on April 1, 1973.[37]
With 23 tiger reserves, Project Tiger claimed to have succeeded.[37]
But according to critics like conservationist Billy Arjan Singh,
temporary increases in tiger population were caused by immigration due
to destruction of habitat in Nepal, not because of the widely
acclaimed success of wildlife policy in India.[37]
Cyber crime
Cases of spam, computer hacking, cyber stalking and email fraud are
rampant in India.[38]
The Information Technology Act 2000 was passed by the Parliament of
India in May 2000, aiming to curb cyber crimes and provide a legal
framework for e-commerce transactions.[39]
However Pavan Duggal, lawyer of Supreme Court of India and cyber law
expert, viewed "The IT Act, 2000, is primarily meant to be a
legislation to promote e-commerce. It is not very effective in dealing
with several emerging cyber crimes like cyber harassment, defamation,
stalking and so on".[38]
Although cyber crime cells have been set up in major cities, Duggal
noted the problem is that most cases remain unreported due to a lack
of awareness.[38]
In 2001, India and United States had set up an India-US cyber security
forum as part of a counter-terrorism dialogue.[40]
In 2006, India and the US agreed to enhance cooperation between law
enforcement agencies of the two countries in tackling cyber crimes as
part of counter-terrorism efforts.[40]
A joint US-India statement released in 2006 after talks between US
President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
stressed that in view of the importance of cyber security and cyber
forensic research, the two countries are also carrying out discussions
on a draft protocol on cyber security.[40]
Corruption and police misconduct
Main article: Corruption in India
Corruption is widespread in India. It is prevalent within every
section and every level of the society.[41]
Corruption has taken the role of a pervasive aspect of Indian politics.
[42]
In India, corruption takes the form of bribes, evasion of tax and
exchange controls, embezzlement, etc.
Despite state prohibitions against torture and custodial misconduct by
the police, torture is widespread in police custody, which is a major
reason behind deaths in custody.[43][44]
The police often torture innocent people until a 'confession' is
obtained to save influential and wealthy offenders.[45]
G.P. Joshi, the programme coordinator of the Indian branch of the
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi comments that the
main issue at hand concerning police violence is a lack of
accountability of the police.[46]
In 2006, the Supreme Court of India in a judgment in the Prakash Singh
vs. Union of India case, ordered central and state governments with
seven directives to begin the process of police reform. The main
objectives of this set of directives was twofold, providing tenure to
and streamlining the appointment/transfer processes of policemen, and
increasing the accountability of the police.[47]
In 2006, seven policemen were charge sheeted and eleven were
convicted[48]
for custodial misconduct.
Crime over time
Incidence of cognizable crimes in India 1953-2007[49]
A report published by the National Crime Records Bureau compared crime
rate from 1953 to 2006. The report noted that burglary declined over a
period of 53 years by 38% (from 1,47,379 in 1953 to 91,666 in 2006),
whereas murder has increased by 231% (from 9,803 in 1953 to 32,481 in
2006).[50]
Kidnapping has increased by 356% (from 5,261 in 1953 to 23,991 in
2006), robbery by 120% (from 8,407 in 1953 to 18,456 in 2006) and
riots by 176% (from 20,529 in 1953 to 56,641 in 2006).[50]
In 2006, 51,02,460 cognizable crimes were committed including
18,78,293 Indian Penal Code (IPC) crimes and 32,24,167 Special & Local
Laws (SLL) crimes, with an increase of 1.5% over 2005 (50,26,337).
[48]
IPC crime rate in 2006 was 167.7 compared to 165.3 in 2005 showing an
increase of 1.5% in 2006 over 2005.[48]
SLL crime rate in 2006 was 287.9 compared to 290.5 in 2005 showing a
decline of 0.9% in 2006 over 2005.[48]
Year[50] Total cog. crimes under IPC Murder Kidnapping Robbery
Burglary Riots
1953 6, 01, 964 9,802 5,261 8,407 147,
379 20, 529
2006 18, 78, 293 32,481 23,991 18,456 91,
666 56, 641
% Change in 2006 over 1953
212.0 231.0 356.0
120.0 -38.0 176.0
SOURCE: National Crime Records Bureau[50]
Crime by locale
Location has a significant impact on crime in India. In 2006, the
highest crime rate was reported in Pondicherry (447.7%) for crimes
under Indian Penal Code which is 2.7 times the national crime rate of
167.7%.[48]
Kerala reported the highest crime rate at 312.5% among states.[48]
Kolkata (71.0%) and Madurai (206.2%) were the only two mega cities
which reported less crime rate than their domain states West Bengal
(79.0%) and Tamil Nadu (227.6%).[48] Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore have
accounted for 16.2%, 9.5% and 8.1% respectively of the total IPC
crimes reported from 35 mega cities.[48]
Indore reported the highest crime rate (769.1%) among the mega cities
in India followed by Bhopal (719.5%) and Jaipur (597.1%).[48]
Jammu & Kashmir (33.7%), Manipur (33.0%), Assam (30.4%) and Daman and
Diu and Pondicherry (29.4%) reported higher violent crime rate
compared to 18.4% at national level.[48]
Uttar Pradesh reported the highest incidence of violent crimes
accounting for 12.1% of total violent crimes in India (24,851 out of
2,05,656) followed by Bihar with 11.8% (24,271 out of 2,05,6556).[48]
Among 35 mega cities, Delhi reported 31.2% (533 out of 1,706) of total
rape cases.[48]
Madhya Pradesh has reported the highest number of rape cases (2,900)
accounting for 15.0% of total such cases reported in the country.[48]
Uttar Pradesh reported 16.9% (5,480 out of 32,481) of total murder
cases in the country and 18.4% (4,997 out of 27,230) total attempt to
murder cases.[48]
Crimes against foreigners in India
There are several instances of violent crime against foreigners in
India.[51]
Many of the crimes occur against foreigners only. Scams involving
export of jewels occur in India, which target foreign citizens.[51]
Political demonstrations are common in India. These demonstrations
often turn violent and routinely cause disruption of transportation
services, causing great inconvenience to foreign tourists in India.
Traveling alone in remote areas after dark is of particular risk to
foreigners.[52]
Because U.S. citizens' purchasing power is relatively large compared
to the general Indian population, they the preferred target for
robbery and other serious crime.[53]
In April 1999, Swaraj Damree, a tourist from Mauritius was befriended
by a group of Indians who later held him in 25 days of captivity. They
robbed him of cash amounting to US $1,500, took his travellers'
cheques, wrist watch, gold chain, bracelet, two bags and suitcase.
[54]
In 2000, two German trekkers were shot in Himachal Pradesh. A few
weeks later, two Spanish tourists were killed in Himachal Pradesh by
robbers.[55]
Many foreign tourists are victims of violent crime in Kolkata.[56]
In September 2006, criminals robbed the wallet of a British woman in
Kolkata.[56] The same month, a Japanese tourist was robbed on his way
to Sudder Street.[56] In October 2006, a foreigner was robbed in
daylight on Park Street.[56]
Petty crime
Petty crime, like pickpocketing, bag snatching etc. are widespread in
India. Theft of valuables of foreigners from luggage on trains and
buses is common. Travelers who are not in groups become easy victims
of pickpockets and purse snatchers. Purse snatchers work in crowded
areas.[57]
Passport theft
In India, stealing passports of foreigners from their luggage on
trains and buses is widespread.[51]
Theft of U.S. passports is very common, especially in major tourist
areas.[53][58]
Scam incidents
Many scams are perpetrated against foreign travelers, especially in
Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan.[53]
Scams usually target younger foreign tourists and suggest them that
money can be made by privately transporting gems or gold or by taking
delivery abroad of expensive carpets avoiding customs duties.[53]
Such incidents pull the traveler over the course of several days and
begin with a new scam artist who offers to show the foreign traveler
the sights. They also offer cheap lodgings and meals to foreign
travellers so that they can place the traveler in the physical custody
of the scam artist and can leave the foreigner with threats and
physical coercion. In the due process, the foreigner loses his
passport.[53]
Taxi scam
There are also taxi scams present in India, whereby a foreign
traveler, who is not aware of the locations around Indian airports, is
taken for a ride round the whole airport and charged for full-fare
taxi ride while the terminal is only few hundred yards away.[57]
Overseas Security Advisory Council in a report mentioned the process
about how to avoid taxi-scam.[57]
Rape and sexual assault against foreigners
Incidents of rape and sexual assault against foreign tourists at
popular tourist spots is increasing in India. Many of the alleged
perpetrators are children of senior government officials or
politicians.[59][60]
In September 1994, Gurkirat Singh, grandson of the then CM Beant
Singh, was accused of abducting and molesting a French tourist Katia
Darnand in Chandigarh[61][62].
In March 2006, Biti Mohanty, son of a senior police official in
Orissa, raped a German tourist in Alwar, Rajasthan.[63][64]
A Japanese woman was raped in Pushkar, Rajasthan on April 2, 2006.[65]
[66] In June 2007, a South Korean was raped near Manali.[63]
In September 2007, two Japanese women were gang-raped in Agra,[63]
a popular tourist-spot in India where the Taj Mahal is situated. The
Indian state of Rajasthan, which is a popular destination among
foreign tourists with one out of every three foreign travellers
visiting the state, have been rattled by rape cases of foreign
tourists.[67]
On December 5, 2009, a Russian woman was raped in Goa by a local
politician John Fernandes. In February 2008, Scarlett Keeling, a
British national aged 15 was raped and killed in Goa [68].
In January 2010, a Russian girl aged 9 was raped in Goa [69];
referring to this and earlier cases, Russia threatened to issue an
advisory asking its citizens not to travel to the coastal state [70].
The US Bureau of Consular Affairs has warned women not to travel alone
in India.[58]
However in contrast the British Foreign office only advise women to
take normal precautions.[71]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Consular_Affairs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Foreign_office
See also
Caste-related violence in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India
Corruption in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India
Indian mafia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_mafia
Indian political scandals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_political_scandals
Law enforcement in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_India
Mafia Raj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Raj
Religious violence in India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_violence_in_India
Kala Kaccha Gang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kala_Kaccha_Gang
Notes
^ a b c d e f g Kalyani Menon-Sen, A. K. Shiva Kumar (2001). "Women in
India: How Free? How Equal?". United Nations. http://www.un.org.in/wii.htm.
Retrieved 2006-12-24.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._K._Shiva_Kumar http://www.un.org.in/wii.htm
^ "The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1987".
http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionrules.htm. Retrieved
2006-12-24.
^ http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/node/255611
^ http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Cambodia/North/Battambang/blog-325432.html
^ http://www.getjealous.com/getjealous.php?action=showdiaryentry&diary_id=149258&go=tasha
^ http://radicalchange.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/cambodia-a-wayfarers-journey/
^ "The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961".
http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionact.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
^ (2006-12-19)"Women of India: Frequently Asked Questions".
2006-12-19.
http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/women/faq.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
^ "The Dowry Prohibition (maintenance of lists of presents to the
bride and bridegroom) rules, 1985".
http://www.wcd.nic.in/dowryprohibitionrules.htm. Retrieved
2006-12-24.
^ Kitchen fires Kill Indian Brides with Inadequate Dowry, July 23,
1997, New Delhi, UPI
^ Jyotsna Kamat (2006-12-19). "Gandhi and Status of Women".
http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/gwomen.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
^ BBC News | SOUTH ASIA | Child marriages targeted in India
^ http://www.unicef.org/sowc09/docs/SOWC09_Table_9.pdf
^ http://www.hindu.com/2009/01/18/stories/2009011855981100.htm
^ "The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956".
http://www.wcd.nic.in/act/itpa1956.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-24.
^ P. J. Alexander (2002). Policing India in the New Millennium. Allied
Publishers. pp. p658. ISBN 8177642073.
^ Caterina Gouvis Roman, Heather Ahn-Redding, Rita James Simon (2007).
Illicit Drug Policies, Trafficking, and Use the World Over. Lexington
Books. pp. p183. ISBN 0739120883.
^ a b "CIA World Factbook - India". CIA World Factbook.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html.
Retrieved 2007-12-01.
^ a b c d India
^ a b c "Drug trade dynamics in India".
http://laniel.free.fr/INDEXES/PapersIndex/INDIAMOLLY/DRUGSDYNAMICSININDIA.htm.
^ a b P. J. Alexander (2002). Policing India in the New Millennium.
Allied Publishers. pp. p659. ISBN 8177642073.
^ Alain Labrousse, Laurent Laniel (2002). The World Geopolitics of
Drugs, 1998/1999. Springer. pp. p53. ISBN 1402001401.
^ a b "Mechanism in States".
http://narcoticsindia.nic.in/Mechinstates.htm.
^ Airports get scanners to check drug trafficking
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1680312.cms
^ "US names India among 20 major hubs for drug trafficking".
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=5f7ed0c7-60a5-40fc-bbf1-7e9b4c070f59&&Headline=India+among+20+major+drug+hubs%3a+US.
^ Daniel J. Koenig (2001). International Police Cooperation: A World
Perspective. Lexington Books. pp. p172. ISBN 0739102265.
^ a b c Daniel J. Koenig (2001). International Police Cooperation: A
World Perspective. Lexington Books. pp. p173. ISBN 0739102265.
^ a b c d e f g India home to 40 million illegal small-arms
^ "Small Arms Trafficking".
http://www.havocscope.com/trafficking/smallarms.htm.
^ a b c A Narrative of Armed Ethnic Conflict, Narcotics and Small Arms
Trafficking in India's North East
^ a b c Illegal wildlife trade grows in India
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSDEL8332720070817?sp=true
^ a b c d e The Tiger Skin Trail
http://www.eia-international.org/files/reports85-1.pdf
^ R. Sukumar (1989). The Asian Elephant: Ecology and Management.
Cambridge University Press. pp. p210. ISBN 052143758X.
^ Charles Santiapillai, Peter Jackson (1990). The Asian Elephant: An
Action Plan for Its Conservation. pp. p30. ISBN 2880329973.
^ The situation in India
http://www.internatyearofthetiger.org/india.htm
^ a b Poaching & Seizure Cases
http://projecttiger.nic.in/poaching.asp#
^ a b c At least one tiger is killed by poachers every day
http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/oct/02tiger.htm
^ a b c Byte by Byte
http://www.rediff.com/netguide/2003/feb/18crime.htm
^ India cyber law comes into force
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/978231.stm
^ a b c India-US to counter cyber crime
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/978231.stm
^ Where will corruption take India? People's Union for Civil Liberties
http://www.pucl.org/Topics/Human-rights/2002/corruption.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Union_for_Civil_Liberties
^ Corruption in India
http://www.indianchild.com/corruption_in_india.htm
^ Torture main reason of death in police custody The Tribune
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2007/20070313/punjab1.htm#7
^ Custodial deaths in West Bengal and India's refusal to ratify the
Convention against Torture Asian Human Rights Commission 26 February
2004
http://www.ahrchk.net/statements/mainfile.php/2004statement/146/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Human_Rights_Commission
^ Custodial deaths and torture in India Asian Legal Resource Centre
http://www.alrc.net/pr/mainfile.php/2004pr/41/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Legal_Resource_Centre
^ Police Accountability in India: Policing Contaminated by Politics
http://www.hrsolidarity.net/mainfile.php/2005vol15no05/2448/
^ The Supreme Court takes the lead on police reform: Prakash Singh vs.
Union of India, CHRI
http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/programs/aj/police/india/initiatives/writ_petition.htm
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Snapshots – 2006 National Crime Records
Bureau
^ "Incidence of cognizable crimes (IPC) under different crime heads
during 1953-2007". National Crime Records Bureau.
http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2007/cii-2007/1953-2007.pdf. Retrieved
2009-11-08.
^ a b c d Snapshots (1953—2006) National Crime Records Bureau
http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2006/cii-2006/Snapshots.pdf
^ a b c "TRAVEL REPORT India".
http://www.voyage.gc.ca/dest/report-en.asp?country=128000.
^ "India". http://www.canadiancontent.net/profiles/India.html.
^ a b c d e "India 2007 Crime & Safety Report: New Delhi".
https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=62883.
^ Foreign tourist drugged, robbed, tortured, released after 25 days
http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19990420/ige20118.html
^ India's valley of death
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/south_asia/909877.stm
^ a b c d "Shudder street".
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070218/asp/calcutta/story_7406290.asp.
The Telegraph
^ a b c "Crime & Safety Report: Chennai".
https://www.osac.gov/Reports/report.cfm?contentID=62882.
^ a b "Consular Information Sheet: India".
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1139.html. Bureau of
Consular Affairs
^ Handle foreign tourists with care, DNA
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_handle-foreign-tourists-with-care_1124186
^ Crimes against tourists alarm tour operators, DNA
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_crimes-against-tourists-alarm-tour-operators_1123611
^ <http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?207483
^ http://www.indianexpress.com/oldStory/34517/
^ a b c "Main accused arrested in Agra tourist rape case".
http://in.news.yahoo.com/070924/211/6l4pp.html.
^ Biti Mohanty's father gets showcause notice, DNA
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_biti-mohanty-s-father-gets-showcause-notice_1075743
^ Another foreign tourist cries rape, The Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1497108.cms
^ Japanese tourist alleges rape, The Hindu
http://www.hindu.com/2006/04/20/stories/2006042006481000.htm
^ West India state troubled by rape case of foreign tourist
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-04/20/content_4451686.htm
^ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3529865.ece
^ http://www.hindustantimes.com/goa/Russian-rape-case-Goa-women-s-panel-to-seek-details/502950/H1-Article1-502942.aspx
^ http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100128/jsp/nation/story_12036988.jsp
^ (15 February 2010)"India travel advice". British Foreign Office. 15
February 2010. http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/asia-oceania/india.
Retrieved 22 February 2010.
References
New trends in drug trafficking
http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/19/stories/2008011956120300.htm
India becoming hot bed for drug trafficking: Expert
http://expressbuzz.com/edition/default.aspx
http://www.cyberlawsindia.net Cyber Crime in India
Mumbai mafia is using more sophisticated weapons then police
Further reading
Edwardes, S M (2007), Crime in India, READ BOOKS, ISBN 1406761265 .
Broadhurst, Roderic G.; Grabosky, Peter N. (2005), Cyber-Crime: The
Challenge in Asia, Hong Kong University Press, ISBN 9622097243 .
Menon, Vivek (1996), Under Siege: Poaching and Protection of Greater
One-Horned Rhinoceroses in India, TRAFFIC International, ISBN
1858501024 .
Vittal, N. (2003), Corruption in India: The Roadblock to National
Prosperity, Academic Foundation, ISBN 8171882870 .
Gupta, K. N. (2001), Corruption in India, Anmol Publications Pvt Ltd,
ISBN 8126109734 .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_India
chhotemianinshallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which is of a temporary
nature, grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir.
Text of Article 370
In view of its importance the text of the article 370 (Without
amendments) is reproduced below:
Article 370 of the Constitution of India (Temporary provisions with
respect of the State of Jammu and Kashmir)
1. Notwithstanding anything in this Constitution:
a. the provisions of article 238 shall not apply in relation to the
State of Jammu and Kashmir,
b. the power of Parliament to make laws for the said State shall be
limited to;
i. those matters in the Union List and the Concurrent List which, in
consultation with the Government of the State, are declared by the
President to correspond to matters specified in the Instrument of
Accession governing the accession of the State to the Dominion of
India as the matters with respect to which the Dominion Legislature
may make laws for that State; and
ii. such other matters in the said Lists, as, with the concurrence of
the Government of the State, the President may by order specify.
Explanation—For the purpose of this article, the Government of the
State means the person for the time being recognised by the President
as the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir acting on the advice of the
Council of Ministers for the time being in office under the Maharaja’s
Proclamation dated the fifth day of March, 1948;
c.the provisions of article 1 and of this article shall apply in
relation to this State;
d.such of the other provisions of this Constitution shall apply in
relation to that State subject to such exceptions and modifications as
the President may by order specify
i. Provided that no such order which relates to the matters specified
in the Instrument of Accession of the State referred to in paragraph
(i) of sub-clause (b) shall be issued except in consultation with the
Government of the State:
ii. Provided further that no such order which relates to matters other
than those referred to in the last preceding proviso shall be issued
except with the concurrence of the Government.
2. If the concurrence of the Government of the State referred to in
paragraph
(ii) of sub-clause (b) of clause
(1) or in second proviso to sub-clause
(d) of that clause be given before the Constituent Assembly for the
purpose of framing the Constitution of the State is convened, it shall
be placed before such Assembly for such decision as it may take
thereon.
3. Notwithstanding anything in the foregoing provisions of the
article, the President may, by public notification, declare that this
article shall cease to be operative or shall be operative only with
such exceptions and modifications and from such date as he may notify:
Provided that the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the
State referred to in clause (2) shall be necessary before the
President issues such a notification.
4. In exercise of the powers conferred by this article the President,
on the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of the State of
Jammu and Kashmir, declared that, as from the 17th day of November,
1952, the said art. 370 shall be operative with the modification that
for the explanation in cl.(1) thereof the following Explanation is
substituted namely:
Explanation—For the purpose of this Article, the Government of the
State means the person for the time being recognised by the President
on the recommendation of the Legislative Assembly of the State as the
*Sadar-I-Riyasat of Jammu and Kashmir, acting on the advice of Council
of Ministers of the State for the time being in office.
Implications of Article 370
This article specifies that except for Defence, Foreign Affairs,
Finance and Communications,(matters specified in the instrument of
accession) the Indian Parliament needs the State Government's
concurrence for applying all other laws. Thus the state's residents
lived under a separate set of laws, including those related to
citizenship, ownership of property, and fundamental rights, as
compared to other Indians.
Similar protections for unique status exist in tribal areas of India
including those in Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, and Nagaland
however it is only for the state of Jammu and Kashmir that the
accession of the state to India is still a matter of dispute between
India and Pakistan still on the agenda of the U.N.Security Council and
where the Government of India vide 1974 Indira-Sheikh accord committed
itself to keeping the relationship between the Union and Jammu and
Kashmir State within the ambit of this article .
The 1974 Indira-Sheikh accord mentions that " The State of Jammu and
Kashmir which is a constituent unit of the Union of India, shall, in
its relation with the Union, continue to be governed by Article 370 of
the Constitution of India " .
Indian citizens from other states and Kashmiri women who marry men
from other states can not purchase land or property in Jammu & Kashmir.
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Indira-Sheikh_accord
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jammu_%26_Kashmir
See also
Article 356
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_356
PART XXI of Indian constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PART_Twenty_One_of_the_Constitution_of_India
References
Full text of the articlePDF (387 KiB)
http://lawmin.nic.in/coi/PARTXXI.pdf
Article 370 text from wikisource
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_India/Part_XXI
^ Vasudha Dhagamwar (May 04, 2004). "The price of a Bill".
http://www.indianexpress.com/oldStory/46240/. Retrieved 24 March
2009.
External links
Background of article 370
http://rashtraman.blogspot.com/2008/08/article-370.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_370
Indian Opinion
A real Indian view of current affairs
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Article 370
article 370 was introduced to abide by the terms of J&K's accession.
The accession of J&K was conditional.
India desperately wanted to prove 2-nation theory wrong and wanted a
muslim majority region under its fold, also the strategic significance
of Kashmir and willingness of Kashmiri leaders to have separate state
for themselves (under protection of India) were the main reasons why
India went ahead for accession of J&K.
When Instrument of Accession was signed, constitution of India was not
ready. As per clause 7 of the Instrument of Accession, J&K was not
committed to accept the future Constitution of India.
In 1949 november when all the princely state heads and provincial
heads of Indian dominion were supposed to issue proclaimations making
Constitution of India operative in their respective states and
provinces, J&K refused such proclaimation refering to the clause 7 of
Instrument of Accession. This is because the draft form of
constitution refused separate constitutions for the states and J&K
always wanted their own separate constitution.
There was a legal imbroglio in this situation, the accession issue was
already with united nations and in such situations India has to abide
by its promise. This lead to Article 306-A of the draft Constitution
of India (which became article 370 in the actaul constitution).
Considering the overall situation prevalent, Article 370 was a major
step forward at that time. The Article at least paved the way for the
Republic of India to make several laws and provisions of the
Constitution of India applicable to Jammu & Kashmir State beyond the
strait jacket of the Instrument of Accession. Besides, Article 370 was
conceived as a temporary arrangement, with hopes of a full integration
in time to come.
Posted by Shailendra at 1:25 AM
Labels: article 370, India, J K, kashmir
2 comments:
kavi deependra said...
thank you very much ..for such valuable information...
kavi deependra
December 25, 2009 10:26 AM
Acme Consultants said...
This information cannot be considered as full information. Please give
the actual reason
February 27, 2010 4:11 AM
Post a Comment
http://rashtraman.blogspot.com/2008/08/article-370.html
SP, RJD pipe down, Govt not in a hurry for Women's Bill in LS
PTI
New Delhi, March 10, 2010
UPA allies SP and RJD on Wednesday piped down on their threat to
withdraw support to the government and the ruling coalition appeared
not to be in a hurry to press ahead with the Women's reservation bill
in the Lok Sabha.
A day after the Rajya Sabha passed the historic legislation, Trinamool
Congress leader Mamata Banerjee, whose party boycotted the voting, on
Wednesday met Congress president Sonia Gandhi who reportedly addressed
her concerns and assured her all parties would be consulted before the
historic legislation is brought before the Lok Sabha.
However, Banerjee continued to sulk over Congress attitude when she
walked away from the Rajya Sabha during the discussion on the Railway
budget after a Congress leader made a veiled attack on her suggesting
she was not following "Cabinet discipline".
The timing of tabling the bill in the Lok Sabha was a matter of
speculation amid reports that the Government does not want to take any
chance with the crucial money bills to be voted before the House
adjourns for a recess on March 16.
However, Law Minister Veerappa Moily dismissed any fears of threat to
the government on the issue of financial business saying government
had the numbers and there was no deliberate strategy to delay the
Bill.
Parliamentary Affairs minister P K Bansal gave no indication of the
Bill being brought before March 16, saying "We want everyone on board.
We will certainly try for a congenial atmosphere."
On the other side, the Bill's strong opponents SP chief Mulayam Singh
Yadav and RJD chief Lalu Prasad, who had threatened to withdraw
support over its passage, did not execute their threat today.
Women's Bill to be in place in two years
It will be more than two years after the Women's Reservation Bill is
passed in Lok Sabha for it to be implemented because of the long
subsequent legislative and other processes associated with it.
"It will take a minimum of two years. Just like the delimitation
process...a commission or a committee it will take two to two-and-a-
half years from now. The process is such," Moily told PTI.
However, he expressed confidence that the reservation of seats and the
identification of 181 of the 543 seats for women in Lok Sabha will be
in place "definitely" before the next Lok Sabha elections due in 2014.
Apart from reserving seats in Lok Sabha, the Constitution Amendment
Bill, which was passed by Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, seeks to provide
reservation for women in 1,370 out of a total of 4,109 seats in 28
assemblies.
The principle of reservation of seats for women will also apply to
seats reserved for SC/ST candidates.
The Bill also provides for rotation of seats reserved for women every
Lok Sabha.
Explaining the process, Moily said once Lok Sabha passes the Bill and
the President signs it it will be sent to all the states for
ratification.
At least 14 of the 28 states will have to ratify the legislation for
it to become a law. This process, Moily said, may take about nine
months.
Women's bill in LS likely on March 15
The Women's Reservation Bill, which has been passed by Rajya Sabha,
may be tabled in Lok Sabha on March 15 or 16 but a final decision on
it will be taken by the Business Advisory Committee which meets on
Friday.
"The BAC is meeting on Friday. It will have to decide the date," Law
Minister M Veerappa Moily told reporters when asked when the
Constitution (108th Amendment) bill would be tabled in the Lower
House.
Replying to questions, Moily said the bill could be tabled on March 15
or March 16.
He expressed confidence that the bill that provides for 33 per cent
reservation for women in Lok Sabha and state assemblies would have a
smooth sailing in the Lower House of Parliament too.
The bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha yesterday with overwhelming
majority, with 191 voting in favour and only one against among those
present in the House.
Moily said the government has some other agenda like the Finance bill
and some legislations to replace ordinances that are needed to be
taken up urgently.
Asked whether there was any plan to revoke suspension of the seven
Rajya Sabha members considering demands for the same, the Law Minister
evaded a direct reply and merely said, "The Congress and UPA
government are not interested in keeping out members of either Lok
Sabha or Rajya Sabha. That is not our legacy. Our legacy is to involve
everybody.
No quotas within quota, no threat to Govt: Moily
Government ruled out providing 'quota within quota' for OBCs and
Muslims in the Women's Reservation Bill and said there was no
deliberate delay in bringing the measure to Lok Sabha on perceived
threat to its stability.
Unfazed by threats of withdrawl of support by allies like SP and RJD,
the Government is absolutely confident and has no worries about
numbers in Lok Sabha or about passage of the money bills in the lower
house.
"There is no provision for sub quota for OBCs or minorities under the
present scheme of things in Constitution and also because there is no
data available even today on communities and castes under the census,"
Moily said.
BPCC suspends Lalu's relative, Tytler says no
Congress in Bihar suspended RJD chief Lalu Prasad's relative Anirudh
Prasad alias Sadhu Yadav for reportedly speaking against Women's
Reservation Bill, but AICC general secretary in-charge of state
affairs, Jagdish Tytler, said no such measure was taken against him.
"He does not stand suspended as announced by BPCC president Anil
Sharma earlier in the day," Tytler told reporters in Patna.
Yadav had personally explained his position to him stating that he
believed in the policies and programmes of the Congress, Tytler said.
"Yadav has explained to me that he was not averse to the party line on
the Women's Reservation Bill. "I have asked Yadav to explain his
position in writing to which he has agreed," Tytler said.
Yadav, brother-in-law of Lalu, said, "I have not said anything on the
issue. Since the assembly elections are around the corner, some vested
interests in the party are playing dirty politics to malign me."
Earlier in the day, the BPCC chief said, "We have taken a serious note
of Yadav going to the extreme step of violating the party lines on the
bill and suspended him with immediate effect."
According to reports, Yadav had threatened to resign from the Congress
to protest against its stand on the Bill. He had switched over to
Congress following differences with Lalu on allotment of party ticket
before the last Lok Sabha election.
AP Cong demands Bharat Ratna for Sonia Gandhi
Hailing AICC president Sonia Gandhi for getting the Women's
Reservation Bill passed in the Rajya Sabha, women wing of the Andhra
Pradesh Congress demanded that she be awarded Bharat Ratna for her
valuable contribution for the empowerment of women in the country.
"We have faxed our demand to President Pratibha Patil already. We will
meet her soon and request her to confer Bharat Ratna on madam
Soniaji," state Mahila Congress president K Ganga Bhavani said in
Hyderabad.
She said a resolution has also been passed in this regard by the
Congress' women wing.
Gandhi Bhavan, the headquarters of the state Congress Committee, wore
a festive look with party members distributing sweets, bursting
crackers, lighting sparklers and dancing with joy over the passage of
the women's reservation bill in the Rajya Sabha.
The party members hit out at RJD chief Lalu Prasad, Samajwadi Party
supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav and Janata Dal (U) president Sharad Yadav
for opposing the bill.
"The behaviour of MPs who tried to snatch away and tear the papers was
abominable. If Lalu has so much love for dalits, then why had he made
his wife (Rabri Devi) chief minister. He could had made a dalit leader
the chief minister," T Venkata Ratnam, a woman Congress leader, said.
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ASK PRABHU
India Today ASK PRABHU Story If the Congress starts supporting Common
Civil Code, eliminates Article 370, terminates all the casts/religion-
based reservations, where would you be?
March 3, 2010
None of these changes would affect my life. I trust democracy and
nationalist secularism.
-Asked by Shivram Gopal Vaidya
vaidyas...@gmail.com
More stories from ASK PRABHU
Why do you avoid answering the question that might put Muslim
hooligans and Congressmen in tight spot? Are you afraid of them? Do
they hamper your channels' day-to-day work?
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89191/ASK%20PRABHU/Why+do+you+avoid+answering+the+question+that+might+put+Muslim+hooligans+and+Congressmen+in+tight+spot+Are+you+afraid+of+them+Do+they+hamper+your+channels'+day-to-day+work.html
Pakistan plays with our govt, like cat plays with a mouse, bleeding us
regularly. Yet our ministers run to defend tapori like pro-Pak
statements of some celebrities. What message does Pakistan get out of
this?
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89190/ASK%20PRABHU/Pakistan+plays+with+our+govt,+like+cat+plays+with+a+mouse,+bleeding+us+regularly.+Yet+our+ministers+run+to+defend+tapori+like+pro-Pak+statements+of+some+celebrities.+What+message+does+Pakistan+get+out+of+this.html
How to elect honest politician where elections are based on money
power?
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89189/ASK%20PRABHU/How+to+elect+honest+politician+where+elections+are+based+on+money+power.html
I take extra care of my children studying in convent as I see so many
improper tricks are applied to make them deviate religiously. Everyday
after school I force them into Quransharif. Am I communal to defend
our beliefs?
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89188/ASK%20PRABHU/I+take+extra+care+of+my+children+studying+in+convent+as+I+see+so+many+improper+tricks+are+applied+to+make+them+deviate+religiously.+Everyday+after+school+I+force+them+into+Quransharif.+Am+I+communal+to+defend+our+beliefs.html
Sir, recently, I heard that India was rebuffed and snubbed in Tehran
and in Istanbul. Is this true? Why were we treated like this
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89187/ASK%20PRABHU/Sir,+recently,+I+heard+that+India+was+rebuffed+and+snubbed+in+Tehran+and+in+Istanbul.+Is+this+true+Why+were+we+treated+like+this.html
ASK PRABHU
India Today ASK PRABHU Story Mumbai is a part of India. Any Indian
can settle there. What about Kashmir? Do you and your channel support
the scrapping of article 370?
February 20, 2010
Why don't you read the Constitution of India? Many of us can't buy
land in many states in North East and even in Himachal. Article 370 is
part of our Constitution and it can be changed only by the state
assembly.
AIMPLB begins a new journey from Lucknow
Farzand Ahmed
March 21, 2010
The 38-year-old All India Muslim Personal Law Board [AIMPLB] that
stands for the protection of Shariat and Muslim Personal Laws seemed
to be rewriting its own history on the banks of Gomti in Lucknow when
it elected when it elected four new female members to the 51-member
executive committee. With this number of elected members of Board
increased to five. [There were 25 nominated women members in the 201-
member general body].
The AIMPLB representing all Muslim sects and schools of thought is
currently in session for the first time in Lucknow which once
threatened its existence.
It was on the ground of gender bias within the Ulema-dominated
organisation and deliberate neglect of growing plight of women that a
parallel all-women All India Muslim Women Personal Board [AIMWPLB]
headed by Shaishta Ambar was set up in Lucknow some five years ago.
Later Hazrat Tauquir Raza Khan, the spiritual head of powerful Barelvi
school of Sunni Muslims split the Board and floated AIMPLB [Jadeed].
It was followed by third split in January 2005 in Lucknow when well-
known Shia cleric Khateeb e-Akbar Maulana Mirza Athar set up a
separate All India Shia Muslim Personal Law Board. The founders had
alleged that AIMPLB had been neglecting views of Shia community and
not doing much for the Indian Muslims as a whole.
Despite splits and criticism AIMPLB stood firmly. However, many
members viewed the direct election of four women members---Rukhsana
Lari, Safia Naseem [both from Lucknow], Noorjehan Shakeel [Kolkata)
and Asma Zehra [Hyderabad] was seen as sign of Board's acceptance of
the fact it could no longer ignore the growing pressure from Women.
Naseem Iqtidar Ali Khan was till now the sole woman member in the
executive committee. She continues to be on the panel.
Earlier in January this year AIMPLB Secretary Maulana Wali Rahmani had
held the first ever direct dialogue with women in Lucknow and faced
their anger over various issues including the issue of Talaq
[divorce].
Expands to NE States
Maulana Rabey Hasni Nadwi, head of the Dar-ul-Uloom Nadavat-ul-Ulema,
the Lucknow-based Islamic Seminary, was unanimously elected the
president of the Muslim Law Board for the third successive term.
According Board Spokesperson Zafaryab Jilani another significant
feature of elections was the Board's attempt to expand its
representation in the north-eastern States and Ladakh. The
representatives from these regions were elected as term members.
While, Maulana Bilal was elected from Meghalaya and Syed Ahmed from
Tripura, the Independent MP from Ladakh (Jammu and Kashmir), Ghulam
Hussain and Maulana Ata-ur- Rehman, AUDF (Assam United Democratic
Front ) MLA from Badarpur in Assam were elected term members from
Ladakh and Assam.
Announcing the results of the elections, the AIMPLB spokesperson,
Zafaryab Jilani said the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, K. Rahman
Khan and retired justice, Mohammad Qadri were made the life members of
the board. Jilani said these appointments were made against the eight
vacancies among the 102 founder members of the Law Board.
Kamal Farooqui, Qasim Rasool Ilyas, Saifullah Rahmani, Maulana Atiqur
Rehman Bastavi and Syed Athar Ali of Mumbai were the new faces elected
as term members. Besides, 10 members would be nominated by the Board
chairman.
History
All India Muslim Personal Law Board was established at a time when
"the then Government of India was trying to subvert Shariah law"
applicable to Indian Muslims through parallel legislation. Adoption
Bill had been tabled in the Parliament. Mr. H.R.Gokhle, then Union Law
Minister had termed this Bill as the first step towards Uniform Civil
Code. Ulema, leaders and various Muslim organisations convinced the
Indian Muslim community that the risk of losing applicability of
Shariah laws was real and concerted move by the community was needed
to defeat the conspiracy.
"It was a historic moment" claims Board adding "this was the first
time in the history of India after Khilafat Movement that people and
organisations of Indian Muslim community belonging to various schools
of thought came together on a common platform to defend Muslim
Personal Law.
First such meeting was convened at the famous Islamic Seminary at
Deoband on the initiative of Hazrat Maulana Syed Shah Minnatullah
Rahmani, Ameer Shariat, [Bihar & Orissa] and Hakeemul Islam Hazrat
Maulana Qari Mohammad Taiyab, Muhtamim, Darul Uloom, Deoband. The
meeting held a convention in Mumbai on December 27-28, 1972. "The
Convention was unprecedented. It showed unity, determination and
resolve of the Indian Muslim community to protect the Muslim Personal
Law".
All India Muslim Personal Law Board was born
The Board came into limelight for the first time when it intervened in
the Shah Bano case and pressured the Rajiv Gandhi government to blunt
the Supreme Court rule. The government had asked AIMPLB then headed by
highly revered Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, then Chief of Darul Uloom
Nadvatul Ulema [Lucknow] to come out with the amendment in sections in
the Criminal Procedure Code [Cr PC] relating to the issue of alimony
[that was against Shariat]. And the law was changed which the Sangh
Parivar took up as an example of Muslim appeasement. Later Board
intervened in the Babri Masjid movement too. But so far the Board has
confined itself to the cause of Shariat. It also launched movement to
reform the Muslim Society in 1986 against misuse of Talaq, vulgar
display of wealth in functions like marriage, dowry, female foeticide,
illiteracy among women and also to spread the understanding of Shariat
[Quoranic laws] among men and women.
Its campaign includes revival and strengthening of Dar-ul-Qaza [the
court of Qazi] to deal with the disputes relating to Muslim Personal
laws.
Failure
Critics say that the male & cleric dominated organisation has
neglected the plight of women and failed to take any effective steps
to protect the women from the curse of Triple Talaq [uttering Talaq
thrice in one sitting verbally]. However, Senior Board member Zafaryab
Jilani [also Board's legal advisor] said though the Board was aware of
misuse of Triple Talaq, the question was how to abolish it. He said
different sects and schools have different practices but all the main
four Schools among Sunni sect were almost unanimous in favour of
Triple Talaq. Scholars, he said, also quote numerous Hadis [rulings
and sayings of the Prophet] on this.
Its role in the Imrana case was criticised everywhere. Imarana of
Muzaffarnagar was allegedly sexually assaulted by her father-in-law
but when the issue was highlighted a Fatwa had declared her husband as
her "son". This had led to hue and cry by women groups. The Board had
sent an investigation team but it tried to cover up the issue.
It also failed to bring out an effective Model Nikahnama that could be
acceptable to women groups too. Yet this time again it evaded the
Women Reservation Bill which was being projected by a section of
Muslim political leadership that it was against Muslim women. The
Lucknow session focused on Librehan Commission report stressing that
all the people found guilty of destroying the Babri Masjid should be
prosecuted and punished. It has also opposed the proposed Communal
Violence Bill. The Board was of the view that the proposed Communal
violence Bill was 'most harmful' for Muslims as it would not fix
responsibility of the police and administration. AIMPLB spokesperson
Mohammad Abdur Rahim Qureshi told mediapersons "Muslims have been the
sufferers be it riots in Bhiwandi, Meerut, Nalanda, Bhagalpur or
anywhere". Qureshi said the proposed legislation would be discussed in
detail. The Board has also opposed the setting up of a Central Madarsa
Board.
Having done this, scholars attending the 21st Session in Lucknow would
spell out the future plans at public meeting on Sunday evening.
Abolish 370, says Bhagwat, Advani
Arvind Chhabra
Madhopur (Pathankot), March 20, 2010
Different leaders including RSS chief Mohan Rao Bhagwat and former
deputy prime minister L.K. Advani today raised demand to abolish
Article 370 from the constitution as they paid glorious tributes to Dr
Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, described as the first martyr of independent
India, who laid down his life for the principle of one nation, one
flag and one constitution. Various leaders had splurged in Madhopur in
Pathankot on the occasion.
Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, BJP president Nitin
Gadkari and Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal were
among thousands who had gathered at the border point of Punjab-Jammu
and Kashmir (J&K) as it was here in 1953 he had started his campaign
to make J&K integral part of India and to make it possible for every
Indian citizen to visit J&K without permit. His life size statue was
unveiled and the place was named as Ekta Sathal.
Mohan Bhagwat gave a call to launch a second struggle to abolish
Article 370, the "last remaining symbol of disintegration." He also
demanded respectable rehabilitation of 3.5 lakh Kashmiri Hindu
migrants back in Valley, who are suffering in different parts of the
country.
Advani said that the struggle of Dr. Shayamal Prasad would be complete
only if Article 370 was repealed from the constitution. He said that
we became victim of British policy of disintegrating India even after
partition.
Gadkari, who also demanded repealing of Article 370 said that talks
with Pakistan would be futile till Pakistan continue to foment
terrorism from its soil.
More stories from North
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Bhilai: Principal sends lewd SMSes to students; thrashed
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India ok with life term for Headley: Govt
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89024/India/India+ok+with+life+sentence+for+David+Headley:+Govt.html
Getting official access to Headley will help India: BJP
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89000/India/Getting+official+access+to+Headley+will+help+India:+BJP.html
Batla autopsy: Police in the dock
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/88969/India/Damning+Batla+autopsy+findings.html
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89176/India/Abolish+370,+says+Bhagwat,+Advani.html
Courtesy: Mail Today
Damning Batla autopsy findings
Aman Sharma
New Delhi, March 19, 2010
Eighteen months after the controversial Batla House 'encounter'in the
aftermath of the Delhi serial blasts, the post-mortem reports of the
victims are out and are drilling gaping holes in the police version of
the incident.
The post-mortem reports reveal that both the slain suspected
terrorists, Atif Ameen and Mohd Sajid, had injuries inflicted by a
blunt object, other than the numerous gunshot wounds on their bodies.
Sajid's post-mortem report also confirms he was shot three times in
the head with the bullets travelling vertically downwards, which was
visible in the photographs of Sajid's body published by MAIL TODAY
earlier.
The report says these three bullets having their entry wounds in the
scalp led to cranio-cerebral damage to the brain, causing Sajid's
death.
One of these bullets fired in the head exited from the back of his
chest, another came out near his jaw and the third one exited from the
back of his right shoulder.
There was another bullet shot behind his head.
How the police managed to shoot Sajid from above during an encounter
remains unexplained.
The report also confirms that Sajid has another bullet entry wound on
his right shoulder, which went vertically down and lodged in his
chest.
There were two more injuries on Sajid's body, which are non-firearm
wounds. How these wounds could be inflicted when bullets were being
fired from both sides, according to the police version, remains
unanswered.
These are injury numbers 13 and 14 specified in the post-mortem report
- the former is a four by two cm abrasion over the midline on Sajid's
back while the latter is a muscle-deep laceration wound of 3.5 by two
cm on the right leg. It is unexplained how Sajid could have got such
wounds before his death in a shootout.
The post-mortem report of Atif reveals his body was riddled with 10
bullets in the chest, abdomen, thighs, shoulder, neck and lower back.
He also has a nonfirearm injury - specified as injury number seven
which is an abrasion on his right knee.
The post-mortem reports have been furnished by the National Human
Rights Commission (NHRC) in response to an application filed under the
Right to Information (RTI) Act by a Jamia Millia Islamia student Afroz
Alam.
The Delhi Police had persistently refused to share these reports over
the last 18 months. Even the NHRC had skirted the issue initially in
their report on the Batla House encounter though it went to great
lengths to explain the fire-arm injuries to Delhi Police inspector
Mohan Chand Sharma that caused his death.
The NHRC, in its report, had merely said that the post-mortem reports
of the two suspected terrorists mentioned injuries other than fire-arm
injuries but did not disclose more or investigate how injuries by a
blunt object could have been inflicted in a shootout. The autopsies of
Atif and Sajid were done three days after the encounter by a panel of
three AIIMS doctors of forensic medicine.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, who had been fighting to get the post-
mortem reports made public, said the autopsy reports reveal what the
Delhi Police have been desperately trying to hide.
"Blunt injuries mentioned in the autopsy could not have been caused in
a shootout. Obviously, there was some scuffle or the two boys were
beaten up before they were shot.
How can anyone explain the top of the head bullet injuries or the one
in the top of his (Sajid) right shoulder - with all bullets going
vertically down in the body?" Bhushan asked.
He added: "Pictures of the bodies had exposed these injuries. The
police were hence desperately trying to hide these post-mortem
reports.
The non-firearm injuries on both the back and leg of Sajid cannot be
explained. That is why we have been demanding an independent
investigation into the alleged encounter." A senior doctor at AIIMS,
who was associated with the autopsies, said he could not explain the
nonfirearm injuries on Sajid's body.
"But the other three or four gunshot wounds on Sajid's head and
shoulder is possible in a shootout… for example, the terrorist may
have fallen after taking a bullet in his leg and could have been
firing at the police lying down. So, such a pattern of injuries is
possible in such a volley of fire," he said.
But Bhushan rubbished the explanation.
"If Sajid was lying down and firing, there should be a hail of police
bullet marks on the walls of the room. But there was none in the room
where the shootout happened," he said.
The Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association also reacted strongly to the
contents of the autopsies. "Almost all entry wounds on Atif's body are
in the region below the shoulders and at the back of the chest, which
point to the fact that he was repeatedly shot from behind. In Sajid's
case, the entry points of the gunshots and the fact that all but one
bullet travelled downward suggests he was held down by force (which
also explain the injuries on the back and leg), while he was shot in
the back and head," said Manisha Sethi of the association.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/88969/India/Damning+Batla+autopsy+findings.html
Getting official access to Headley will help India: BJP
PTI
New Delhi, March 19, 2010
With extradition of Pakistani- American David Coleman Headley now
ruled out after he pleaded guilty to terror charges, BJP today said
this was a loss but official access to India to question him would
help prove to the world about Pakistan's involvement in the Mumbai
strikes.
"It (consequences of his pleading guilty before a US court) is a mixed
bag. As we cannot get extradition, it is a loss. But, at the same
time, we can get official access and can officially question him so
our dossiers (against Pakistan) will be more weighty," BJP
spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said.
He asserted that though Pakistan may ultimately dismiss Headley's
confessions as "mere papers" and not evidences, the involvement of the
neighbouring country in the 26/11 terror attacks would be established
more firmly and be "very clear" to the world community.
"Now the trial of Ajmal Kasab (lone surviving terrorist in the 26/11
case) is winding up. So, I think we can expect the result in that case
also," he said.
Javadekar took a dig at the UPA government for making a "unilateral
offer" of foreign secretary-level talks to Pakistan inspite of its
continued support to terror.
"The real test of India lies in how it deals with Pakistan because
Pakistan has not changed a bit. It has not done anything, not taken
any credible steps....Terror continues, infiltration is growing. Still
government did a sudden U-turn and unilaterally offered talks," he
said.
This move had emboldened the Pakistani establishment, especially the
ISI, to simultaneously do business with India and plot terror,
Javadekar alleged.
He said it was ISI's policy to inflict a thousand cuts and wound
India.
Bhilai: Principal sends lewd SMSes to students; thrashed
Raghunandan Panda & Sunil Namdeo
Bhilai/Raipur, March 19, 2010
Parents of a Bhilai school students beat up its principal after he
allegedly sent lewd messages on their mobiles.
K.S. Chhabra, principal of famous school Maharishi Vidya Mandir, a
well known school in Chhattisgarh's steel city Bhilai, has been
accused of making obscene phone calls and sending lewd short messages
(SMSes) on some of his students' mobiles.
Chhabra even called them to his office in the school and at home, the
parents alleged. A victim recorded her principal's sickening demands
on her mobile and reported to the parents.
Enraged over the principal's gesture, the parents beat him black and
blue. They alleged that Chhabra's disgusting behaviour was going on
for a few years. They thrashed him all the way to the police station
until the policemen rescued him.
The police have started an enquiry into the matter and have recorded
calls by Chhabra as proof.
Bahadur, one of the parents of such students, said, "The principal
used to say that your children are failing. If you want them to pass
you will have to do everything I say."
Thank God, we don't have a Thackeray here: Dikshit
PTI
New Delhi, March 20, 2010
"Thank God, we don't have a Bal Thackeray," said Chief Minister Sheila
Dikshit on Saturday while calling Delhi a unique city where people
from across the country can live comfortably.
"We have varied culture and true cosmopolitan people. People from
Kerala to Jammu and Kashmir and to those from the North-East can live
here comfortably.
"Everyone knows what is happening in Mumbai (anti-north Indian
campaign). It certainly does not happen here. Thank God, we don't have
a Bal Thackeray here," she said about the anti-North Indian campaign
by the Shiv Sena and MNS.
Dikshit was speaking at an interactive session at a summit organised
by CII and the Wall Street Journal.
The chief minister also spoke about the uniqueness of Delhi, where
everything including its weather, is imported and the number of
heritage structures it has.
Related Stories
Mumbai: Sena chief targets Guv
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Bal Thackeray lashes out at IPL
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Bal Thackeray flays Tendulkar
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Video/71045/42/Balasaheb+flays+Sachin+on+Marathi+remark.html
Sena chief attacks Chavan, Rahul
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ASK PRABHU
India Today ASK PRABHU Story As per our Constitution, an Indian can
stay or live in any part of India except Jammu and Kashmir. But some
political leaders, for their political gains, are opposing this. Is it
correct? I think the electronic media is more powerful to spread this
message.
March 3, 2010
The state of J&K enjoys a special status under Article 370 of the
Constitution. It doesn't permit people from other parts of India to
buy property in J&K. The BJP has been agitating for scrapping Article
370 but all other parties are opposed to such a move unless it is
proposed by the state assembly itself.
-Asked by Anil Kumar
anilkuma...@gmail.com
BJP believes in one nation one constitution: Nitin Gadkari
PTI
Saturday, March 20, 2010 21:37 IST
Madhopur (Punjab): Asserting it stands for "one nation one
constitution", the BJP today said the party is firm in its resolve to
scrap article 370 of the Constitution providing special status to
Jammu and Kashmir.
"The party stands for one nation one constitution slogan given by
Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mukherjee," BJP president
Nitin Gadkari said here on the occasion of unveiling of a statue of
the late leader.
He said the BJP will not dilute its stand on abrogation of Article 370
and there is a need to emulate Mukherjee, who "fought for scrapping of
permit system prevalent in those days which debarred people to enter
and move freely in Jammu and Kashmir".
Gadkari said his party is opposed to the Centre's policy on Kashmir,
which is mere appeasement to those who pose a threat to the nation,
and its mild approach to tackle Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.
Addressing the gathering, he said Pakistan continues to wage a proxy
war against India by sponsoring terrorism in J-K, while Naxalism is
posing an internal threat to the country.
The Centre has not yet come out with adequate measures to meet these
threats. The Government seems to be softening its stand on Pakistan
due to pressure of some foreign powers, Gadkari alleged.
"Kashmir is an integral issue and no talks with Pakistan can be
resumed unless it gives ample proof of striking hard on militants
operating from its soil.
"Pakistan should stop aiding and abetting terrorism in India," Gadkari
said.
Former deputy prime minister L K Advani in his address said while
Vallabh Bhai Patel and Mukherjee had a common resolve to see a strong
India, the British gave independence but with a rider that the rulers
of the erstwhile princely states could use their discretion on staying
with India.
Apparently referring to the "Mumbai for maharashtrians' issue, RSS
chief Mohan Bhagwat, who unveiled the statue, said Hindus were forced
to migrate from Jammu and Kashmir but the country belongs to all
Indians and regional chauvinism does not hold any place.
Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, who was also present
there, said Mukherjee's photographs would be put up in the gallery
here.
Himachal Pradesh chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal, state BJP president
Shanta Kumar, Punjab industry and local bodies minister Manoranjan
Kalia, Amritsar BJP MP, Navjot Singh Sidhu
were among those present on the occasion.
The place where the life-size statue of Mukherjee was erected was
named as 'Ekta Sthal'.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
A possible deconvolution for the convoluted logic of RSS: What Mohan
Bhagwat could have said ....
In a recent blog entry the chief of RSS, Mr. Mohan Bhagwat (MB) was
criticised for saying: He who is an Indian is a Hindu and he who is
not a Hindu is not an Indian.
A long and winding debate ensued. It was desirable to retain the
informal notions related to the words Hindu and Indian, and yet
certain specificity was needed for precision, unambiguousness and
substantiveness.
Mr. Thammayya, in one of his comments, had asked: Hey, I have another
suggestion. What do you think, MB should have told? Interesting to
know this.
I have recently outlined an abstract version of Hindu-WOL (Hindu Way
of Life), terming it, for various reasons, Sanatana Dharma. In light
of this article, here is my take on what MB could have said:
One of the essential underpinnings of an open and free mind regarding
religious truths is: There can be points of view regarding the Truth
and the ways of attaining the Truth which are seemingly quite
different from the ones I uphold but are equally valid.
Hindus pursue and practice such openness and freedom.
A belief in exclusive monopoly regarding religious truths and/or
insistence on one's concrete details regarding the same, is
inconsistent with this notion of freedom.
India, in our view, is a home-nation for Hindus. Those who are not
Hindus are not legitimately Indian.
Remarks:
0. The term Hindu is not defined comprehensively here. And yet,
whatever is essential for for the political debate is captured in
terms of the concepts of openness and freedom.
For example:
a. The term Hindu is free from geographical, racial, linguistic,
regional connotations and overtones.
b. So there can be Hindus residing as citizens of other nations.
1. Similarly, India, although not defined comprehensively, is hinted
in the last sentence, to be the current geopolitical entity, whose
citizens we are. This suffices for the political debate.
For example:
a. The term India is free from racial, linguistic, and regional
connotations and overtones.
b. Those, who are currently residing in India as citizens but do not
honor this openness and freedom are termed illegitimate citizens.
This allows us to use the terms "Hindu" and "India" with specificity
necessary for the relevant aspects of political debate, while
retaining the same informal notions regarding these words, which most
of us may entertain.
Nonetheless, this is still a tentative version, and is open to be
improved upon. Readers' suggestions are welcome.
Interestingly, a Dutch Politician, Geert Wilders has said many things
which RSS could have, and should have articulated long long ago. Some
of these are, I have provided links obtained from the same wikipedia
page: "not tolerate the intolerant", "Ban Koran like Mein Kampf", and
"There might be moderate muslims, but there is no moderate Islam".
However, as I have repeatedly alleged, owing to intellectual lethargy,
among those who are supposed to provide India with political
leadership, these things have not happened here in India.
Posted by samAlochaka
http://medsyn.blogspot.com/2010/03/possible-deconvolution-for-convoluted.html
Sid Harth
from Delhi University
Religious conversion has become the subject of passionate debate in
contemporary India. From the early 20th century onwards, it has
surfaced again and again in the political realm, in the media and in
the courts. During the last few decades the dispute has attained a new
climax in the plethora of newspapers, journals, and books whose pages
have been devoted to the question of conversion. Apparently, a large
group of Indians considers this to be an issue of crucial import to
the future of their country.
Generally Speaking, Religion is s system of faith and worship of
supernatural force which ordains regulates and control the destiny of
human kinds.
The Merrian Webster Dictionary defined , Religion as an organized
system of faith and worship, a personal set of religious belief and
practice, a cause, principle or belief held to with faith and order.
The Oxford Dictionary defined, Religion the belief in a super human
controlling power, especially in personal God or Gods entitled to
obedience and worship.
Swami Vivekananda perceives religion as - it is based upon faith and
belief and in most cases consist only of different sect of theories
that is the reason why we find all religion quarreling with each other.
1
According to Sage Aurobindo, The quest of man for God is the
foundation for religion & its essential function is the search for God
and the finding of the God. 2
Hinduism in the view of Dr. Radhakrishan is The main aim of the Hindu
faith is to permit image worship as the means to the development of
the religious spirit to the recognition of the Supreme who has his
temples in all beings.3
We can conclude from the above discussion that no universally
acceptable definition as to what exactly "religion" is. There appears
to be near unanimity that religion, generally, is a belief or faith in
the existence of a Supernatural Being and the precepts which people
follow for attaining salvation.
Religion may be regarded as belief and patterns of behaviors by which
human try to deal with what they view as important problems that can
not be solved through the application of known technologies and
techniques of organization. To overcome these limitations people turn
to the manipulation of supernatural beings and powers.
Religion consist of various rituals, prayers, songs, dances, offerings
and sacrifices, through which people try to manipulate supernatural
beings and powers to their advantages. These being and power may
consist of Gods and Goddesses, ancestral and other spirits or
impersonal power either by themselves or in various combinations . In
all societies there are certain individuals especially skilled at
dealing with these beings and powers and who assist other members of
society in their ritual activities. A body of myths rationalizes or
explains the system in a manner consistent with peoples experience in
the world in which they live.
Every individual has a natural entitlement of religious faith and
freedom of conscience , a right to adopt or abandoned any faith of his
own choice. In this sense freedom of religion and freedom of
conscience is fundamental right both constitutionally and
conventionally.
The freedom of religion and freedom of conscience has been recognized
under the international law. The General Assembly of united nations
adopted without dissenting vote on 10th December,1948 the Universal
Declaration on Human Rights recognizing fact that the entire humanity
enjoys certain alienable rights which constitute the foundation of
freedom, justice and piece in the world.
In order to give effect to the Universal Declaration of human rights
the members of the united nations of also adopted the two conventions
in 1966 in this concern:-
1. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
2. International covenant on Civil and Political rights.
The Government of India by its declaration dated 10.4.1979 had
accepted Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two
international covenants with certain reservations which do not cover
the right to freedom of religion. Apart from this the Constitution of
India also enshrines the freedom of religion and freedom of conscience
as fundamental rights under Article 25,26,27,28,30.
Religious Conversion is multifaceted and multi dimensional phenomenon.
Indian society is a pluralist and heterogeneous society with
multiplicity of races, religious cultural, castes and languages etc.
Religious Conversion has always been a problematic issue in India.
Every incident of conversion causes lot of hue and cry in society;
especially it causes nostalgic feelings to Hindu organization because
of its inherent socio- political. Rigid and Stringent caste system
prevailing in Hindu Religion is one of the most significant factors
behind the religious conversion. This is because of this caste system
Dalits ( in most comprehensive and inclusive sense the word Dalit
includes Untouchables, Shudras and Adivasis) are the most susceptible
section of the society to religious conversion . The other causes of
conversion are
1. Polygamy which is prevailing in Islam
2. To get rid of unwanted matrimonial ties.
3. To get reservation benefits.
Polygamy is a system wherein a male person his authorized to keep more
than one wife/wives where all the other wife/wives are still alive, or
where a male person is authorized to solemnize more than one marriage.
Polygamy is just opposite to the system of monogamy. In the past
almost all the societies in the world have been either polygamous or
polyandrous. Monogamy was never a rule but an exception. Amongst all
the religions resourceful persons were allowed to keep as many wives
as he can afforded. But Islam has been exception to his general rule.
The Prophet Mohd. ( 571 AD-632 AD) the last messenger according to
Quaran laid down the principle for his followers that a person may
keep as many as four wives only and that too only in exceptional
circumstances prevailing in those days. The Prophet had allowed the
followers of Islam to keep four wives at one time because of the
contemporary reasons. During the life of Prophet the Arabian society
was the society of innumerable tribal communities and war was constant
phenomenon of those days in Islam. Hundreds of wars were fought
amongst those tribals can themselves, sometimes in the name of Jehad,
sometimes in the name of religion, sometimes for the sake of
established political hegemony. Only men were allowed to participate
in the wars and not the women. One of the obvious consequences of
these wars was that innumerable women became widows. One of the most
burning problem before the prophet was that how to manage the lives f
these destitute widows and the children. Nobody was there take care
for these helpless widows and children. So the prophet evolved out a
workable solution of the problem. He permitted the men that every man
would keep as many as four wives along with their children. So that no
widow or child would die out hunger starvation or illness. Through the
system every widow and her children were taken care of.
Here two important points are worth mentioning that:
1. The permission given by the prophet to keep more than one wives was
not a permanent prescription for all the times to come. But it was
only a temporary provision just to manage the cotemporary problems.
Along with the provision of keeping for wives the prophet imposed a
mandatory conditions upon the persons who might keep more that 1 wife
that if a person keeps more than one wife he must have an equal eye
upon all the wives. That is the principle of equality which was to be
observed and not to discriminate on any grounds whatsoever.
2. Keeping more than one wife was not prescribed as general rule. But
only an exception and that is only to deal with the above mention
contemporary problem. But after the life of the profit, the Muslim
leaders especially in India have misinterpreted the dictates of the
prophet in his concern and started receiving undue advantage of this
dictate of the prophet. Muslim religious leader and Ulemas have
maintained that the dictate of the prophet to keep four wives was not
a temporary provision rather it was a permanent dictate for all time
to come. This is how they have misconceived the dictates of the
prophet and justified and legitimized polygamy almost 1500 years after
the life of the prophet.
It is significant to mention that the practice of polygamy has been
abolished even in the constitutionally declared Islamic states long
ago but in India this practice is still valid under the Muslim
personal law. It is also pertinent to mention that the practice of
polygamy is anti feminist and it is discriminatory against Muslims
women because polygamy is a unilateral right provided only to Muslim
men. Therefore, it is suggested that the privilege of polygamy should
not be given Muslim community under their personal laws and uniform
civil code is the need of the hour.
The Impact Of Religious Conversion
The religious conversion into Islam by a person from non Islamic faith
is not valid if the conversion is done for the purpose of polygamy.
Neither Islam nor the law recognizing any such conversion in India. In
the case of Sarla Mudgal vs Union of India4 a married Hindu male
converted in to Islam for the sake of solemninising another marriage
as polygamy is permitted in Islam. The Hon’ble SC held that conversion
in to another faith Ipso-facto does not dissolve the first marriage
because no one is allowed to take the benefit of his own wrong.
Moreover the court held that the married person converting into Islam
is not entitle to marry another woman after conversion. It was held to
be an act of bigamy prohibited U/S 17 of Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 and
punishable U/S 494 of IPC and it was further observed that the second
marriage is void.
In Vilayat Raj vs Smt. Sunita 5 it was observed by the court that if
both the parties to the marriage were Hindu at the time of marriage ,
pre-nupital law i.e. Hindu Marriage Act applied even after conversion
in Islam.
In Lilly Thomas vs Union of India 6 it was observed that an apostate
husband is guilty of bigamy U/S 494 of IPC if he marriage another
woman after converting into Islam. It was observed that holding such
person guilty of bigamy is not violation of freedom of religion U/
Article 25 of the Constitution, hence, Section 17 of H.M.A. 1955 is
applicable.
From the above it is clear that after the pronouncement of the
aforesaid judicial verdicts, polygamy is no more a valued person for
religious conversion into Islam.
A person does not ceases to be Hindu nearly because he declares that
he has no faith in his religion. A person will not cease to be Hindu
even if he does not practice his religion till he does not renounces
his religion or starts living and behaving like an atheist or agnostic
or starts eating beef or insulting God or Goddesses. He does not
ceases to be member of the religion even if he starts expressing his
faith in any other religion , he continuous to be a Hindu Chandra
Shekharan vs Kulundurivalu7
If a person converts from Hindu religion to Sikh , Budhism or Jainism
he does not cease to be Hindu since all these religions do not fall
beyond the definition of ‘Hindu’ in the relevant section of Hindu
Marriage Act . He ceases to be Hindu if he converts into Islam
Christianity or Jews or Zoroastrain, conversion into these religion is
a ground for desolation of marriage for the other spouse and not for
the spouse who converts into any such religion ( U/S 13 H.M.A)
Under Section 80 of the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 if
the husband gets converted into Non-Hindu faith wife is entitled to
live Separately without forfeiting her right of maintenance but if she
herself also ceases to be Hindu, she looses her claim of maintenance
under the section, But she is entitled under section 24 of H.M.A in
1955 for pedente-lite and permanent alimony.
Special Marriage Act 1954 reflects the true sprit of Indian Secularism
as it is in consonance with India ‘s heterogeneity and multiplicity of
religious faith. Conversion does not make any effect on matrimonial
ties as the Act is the secular legislations and itself contemplate
inter caste and inter religious marriages.
The Indian Divorce Act, 1869- If the husband gets converted into non
Christian faith, wife is entitled for divorce but vice versa is not
possible. If wife gets converted into non Christian faith husband can
not apply for divorce. NANG vs LABYA8
Under Dissolution of Muslim Marriage Act, 1939 Section 4 says if a
wife renounces Islam, the marriage does not Ipso-facto dissolve unless
the circumstances warrant otherwise.
The picture is complete if we account for the fact that most of these
laws are aimed to keep the low caste Hindus within the fold of
Hinduism. And so while law prohibits conversion, 're-conversion' of
low caste Hindus is permissible. If a low caste Hindu who had
converted to another faith or any of his descendants reconverts to
Hinduism, he might get back his original caste In Kailash Sonkar. 9
Major Events Of Conversion
Major events of conversion are not reported unless they are
highlighted by media or a hue and cry is made by Hindu Organization.
Following are the major incidents of religious conversion in post
independence.
Nagpur:- The Ist and the biggest mass conversion which the country has
ever witnessed, took placed on the 14th day of October 1956. Place
Nagpur, Maharashtra, the city where the headquarter of Rastriya
Swayamsewak Sangh is situated. About a half a million Dalits said good
bye to Hinduism from their life and embraced Budhism under the
leadership of the greatest social reformer, the great visionary and
the prophet of Dalit emancipation Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.
Meenakshipuram:- The significant event of religious conversion took
place on Feb 19th 1981 at Meenakshipuram of Kanyakumari District in
Tamil Nadu. Where 280 families got converted to Islam. All of these
280 families cited social reasons behind their conversion. These
reasons were persecution, ill treatment and humiliation they
constantly had to face at the hands of upper caste of Hindus which
made their lives miserable and worst than animals.
Dulina :- Another significant even t of religious conversion which
created a lot of hue and cry in the society took place at Gurgaon,
Haryana 2002. This all had happened after a very pathetic incident of
burning Five Dalits Alive by a mob of upper caste people in a police
station at Dulina in Jhajjar District in Haryana. Police remain silent
spectator. Now nothing was left for the families of these massacred
Dalits to remain in such a violent and hatred preaching system of
faith, where in Dalit have no place. All the five families of
massacred Dalits got converted in to Buddhism at Rabidas Mandir,
Gurgaon, Haryana on 28th October 2002 under the banner of All India
Confederation of SC/ST organization and the Lord Buddha club in the
presence of famous film director, All India Christian Council , Jamait
Ulma-I Hind and in the presence of Media Persons.
Another dimension of this event of conversion is that after these
event of conversion all the Saffron Hindu Organizations rushed to
these families and threatened them to face dire consequences on
account of the above said conversion. Due to assaults and threats and
under the pressure of these Hindu Organization, ultimately, these
sacred Dalit Families broke down and had to make a public statement
that we did not leave Hindu religion , we did not convert.
In July 2002 another incident of religious conversion took place
Guntur distt. Andhra Pardesh were 70 Dalits converted in to
Christianity.
Delhi:- In the year 2002 Udit Raj the Chairman of All India
Confederation of SC/ST Organizations and the Lord Buddha Club give a
national wide call for conversion. This conversion ceremony was
supposed to be performed at Ram Leela Maidan of Delhi . Around one
million Dalits were supposed to get convert into Buddhism.
The preparation regarding the conversion programme were on . This
nation wide call for the conversion got an unprecedented coverage in
national and international media. Dehydration to saffron Hindu
organization regarding such a massive programme of conversion, was
oblivious. These organization resorted all means to shut of the mouth
of media , so that this call may not reach the public at large. The
Ram Leela Maidan , where the programme was supposed to be organized ,
declared as prohibited area and Section 144 of Crpc was imposed in and
around the area, all borders of Delhi where from influx of Dalits, to
take Diksha, was possible were sealed. The Government was determined
to ensure by hook or by crook let the programme may not be organized.
Finally, the organizer had to change the spot for the proposed
programme . The Government could not succeed to curb the enthusiasm of
dalits and ultimately more than 10,000 Dalits succeeded to say good
bye to Hinduism and embraced Buddhism.
Right to freedom of faith is not a conferred right but a natural
entitlement of every human being. In fact law does not assign it but
it asserts, protect and insurers its entitlement. Indian Society has
nourished and nurtured almost all the established religion of the
world like Hinduism , Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism
etc. from it s time immemorial. Article 25 incorporates right to
practice, profess and propagation of faith not only this , the Article
guarantees the freedom of conscience. Right to possess adopt abandoned
faith is ascribed by a person since his birth. India is a
heterogeneous and pluralist society with multiplicity of faith and
cultures. India most fundamental code of governance. i.e. The
constitution of India also asserts, protects and ensures this right to
all individuals irrespective of their religions, under its various
provisions especially Art. 25.
Every human being has a natural entitlement of religious faith and
freedom of conscience and right to adopt or abandon any faith of his
own choice. This being so , the freedom of conscience has been
recognized as a basic human right both constitutionally and
conventionally.
The Constitution of India aims at securing freedom of religion and
freedom of conscience under Article 25 ,26,27,28,30 and at the same
time it seeks to create a harmony among all religions. Being suitable
to the pluralistic society and historical lineage . Such freedom needs
to continued. Any other policy will not be unconstitutional but also
extremely harmful and suffocative for the public. It. However, need to
be realized that an incessant process of transformation and change is
also going on as change is the rule of nature. The ideas , faith,
psyche, behavior and attitude of people have always been subject to
change, though, the factors of change are spatial and temporal. An
important aspect with respect to change of faith is the state of One’s
awareness and ignorance. More awareness and enlightenment does
definitely have an impact on the thought, belief and action of a
person, faith and elements of conscience. Thus as regards conscience ,
state of knowledge is itself under a constant process of change and
every human being is undergoing a metamorphosis of understanding with
continuing with continuing process of experience of life and
learning . Therefore , it is advisable to tie up someone to a
particular faith for all the times.
But in Indian perspective , an aspect of freedom of conscience which
has attained a problematic dimension , is the right to propagate
faith. The meaning of propagation is to promote , spread and publicize
one’s relating to his own faith for the edification of others. The
term propagation implies persuasion and exposition without any element
of fraud, coercion and allurement. The right to propagate one’s
religion does not give a right to convert any other person to one’s
own religious faith. It may be pointed out that the right to convert
other person to one’s own religion is distinct from and individual
right to get convert to any other religion on his own choice. The
later is undisputedly is in conformity with the freedom of religion
and freedom of conscience under Article 25 of the constitution while
the former is the subject of long prevailing controversy with
reference to propagation of faith.
Religious conversion has always been a very sensitive social issue not
only because of the reasons that it has psychological concerns of
religious faith but also because it has wider socio-legal and socio-
political implications. It has also been revealed by the recent
incident of conversion in Haryana, Madhya pardesh , Tamil Nadu,
Gujarat , Orissa and in Delhi ( in Delhi according to official sources
around 20,000 dalits got converted in to Buddhism in the year 2002
under the nation a wide call for conversion by Udit Raj , the leader
of Justice party). On the one hand due to these recent incidents of
conversion the Hindu Safforn Organizations like R.S.S., V.H.P., Shiv
Sena , Bajrang Dal. etc. have made a lot of hub-bub and not only this
Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former prime minister call for a nation
wide debate on conversion
The legislative history relating to the issue of conversion in India
underscores the point that the authorities concerned were never
favorably disposed towards conversion. While British India had no anti-
conversion laws, many Princely States enacted anti-conversion
legislation: the Raigarh State Conversion Act 1936, the Patna Freedom
of Religion Act of 1942, the Sarguja State Apostasy Act 1945 and the
Udaipur State Anti-Conversion Act 1946. Similar laws were enacted in
Bikaner, Jodhpur, Kalahandi and Kota and many more were specifically
against conversion to Christianity. In the post-independence era,
Parliament took up for consideration in 1954 the Indian Conversion
(Regulation and Registration) Bill and later in 1960 the Backward
Communities (Religious Protection) Bill, both of which had to be
dropped for lack of support. The proposed Freedom of Religion Bill of
1979 was opposed by the Minorities Commission due to the Bill's
evident bias.
However, in 1967-68, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh enacted local laws
called the Orissa Freedom of Religion Act 1967 and the Madhya Pradesh
Dharma Swatantraya Adhiniyam 1968. Along similar lines, the Arunachal
Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 1978 was enacted to provide for
prohibition of conversion from one religious faith to any other by use
of force or inducement or by fraudulent means and for matters
connected therewith. The latest addition to this was the Tamil Nadu
Prohibition of Forcible Conversion of Religion Ordinance promulgated
by the Governor on October 5, 2002 and subsequently adopted by the
State Assembly. Each of these Acts provides definitions of
`Government', `conversion', `indigenous faith', `force', `fraud',
`inducement' (and in the case of Arunachal, that of `prescribed and
religious faith'). These laws made forced conversion a cognizable
offence under sections 295 A and 298 of the Indian Penal Code that
stipulate that malice and deliberate intention to hurt the sentiments
of others is a penal offence punishable by varying durations of
imprisonment and fines.
As early as 1967, it became evident that the concern was not just with
forced conversion, but with conversion to any religion other than
Hinduism and especially Christianity and Islam. In the Orissa and
Madhya Pradesh Acts, the punishment was to be doubled if the offence
had been committed in respect of a minor, a woman or a person
belonging to the Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe community. 10
Moreover, Jayalalitha government in Tamil Nadu has gone to the extent
of enacting ant-conversion legislation (Tamil Nadu prohibition of
forcible conversion ordinance 2003) to put a check on the incidence of
religious conversion. In April 2006 The Rajasthan Dharma Swatantrata
(religious freedom) Bill, introduced by the BJP government, was passed
by a voice vote. The Chattisgarh Government passed an anti-conversion
bill in form of Chattisgarh Religion Freedom (Amendment) Act, 2006
providing for a three-year jail term and a fine of Rs.20,000 for those
indulging in religious conversion by force or allurement. The Madhya
Pradesh Government also passed a controversial bill to amend the
state's Freedom of Religion Act of 1968 to prevent religious
conversion by force or allurement.
The contention of the Hindu organization is that most of the minority
religious organization, especially, Christian Missionaries are
actively involved in the activities of mass religious conversion in
the name of social service. According to them the target groups of
these Christian missionaries are generally illiterate and poor Dalits
and Poor tribes.
On the other hand many dalit organizations and Dalit thinkers have
perceived these recurrent incidents of religious conversions as great
events of Dalit emancipation from the clutches of the vicious Hindu
Caste System which is and has been a constant stigma on the face of
Indian society. According to them, Hindu Caste System is founded on
rigid and the stringent Caste hierarchy . Due to this inhuman and hate
worthy Caste system Dalits and Shudras (Untouchables) have always been
treated inhumanly, they have been subjugated, oppressed and persecuted
by the so called upper caste Hindus or Manu vadis in the name of
caste. Dalit thinkers also allege that Hindu Soceity could not make a
adequate reforms in Hindu religion during last more than 3000 years ,
so that a lower caste Hindu could not live with human dignity in Hindu
religion. According to them majority of Dalits and shudras
(untouchable) are illiterate deplorably poverty stricken and living in
sub- human conditions. They have been denied basic human rights even
after 59 years of independence, Moreover, in day today life they often
to face atrocities and exploitation at the hands of upper caste Hindus
in the name of caste. Hindu religion does not treat its all follower
alike, Hinduism discriminates against one segment of its followers vis-
à-vis the other and does not treat all of them equally. It has failed
to provide social dignity to dalit and shudras. Therefore, they think
that it is better to kick our such an obnoxious and suffocating
religion from one’s life and to convert in a religious which does not
discriminate against them in the name of caste and which given them
equal treatment and dignified human life. That is why Dalits and other
progressive minds have supported the incidence of mass religious
conversion and consideration them to great events.
We can conclude from the above discussion that any protest against
religious conversion is always branded as persecution, because it is
maintained that people are not allowed to practice their religion,
that their religious freedom is curbed. The truth is entirely
different. The other person also has the freedom to practice his or
her religion without interference. That is his/her birthright.
Religious freedom does not extent (sic) to having a planned programme
of conversion. Such a programme is to be construed as aggression
against the religious freedom of others.
Finally, as far as Hinduism is concerned, besides it being vindicated
as a way of life, efforts must be made to augment its role as a form
of religion, that is, Hinduism must be practiced as a religion that
upholds the principles of personal freedom, self-dignity, social
equality and economic security. This will reduce the chances of
transgression by way of conversion in any manner. Scriptures like the
Vedas, Upanishads and the Gita should gather larger weight age and
reach the necessary quarters for sufficient lobbying to match the
access and emotional respect gained by the Bible and the Koran. The
image of a Hindu will go up not by blaming others for conversion but
by creating conditions that will make conversion by and large
unnecessary for the fellow members of his religion.
Foot Note:-
1. The Complete Words of Vivekananda, (1),P. 127
2. Shri Aurobindo-The Life Divine , P. 699
3. Dr. Radhakrishnan-Religion and Society, P. 103
4. AIR 1995 SC
5. AIR 1983 SC
6. AIR 2000 SC
7. AIR 1963 SC 185
8. AIR 1924 , Rangoon , 263
9. (1984) 2 SCC 91
10. http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?file=2002121700110200.htm&date=2002/12/17/&prd=op&
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Anti Superstition Law
Pritha Jha - IVth year law student - ILS law college, Pune
I
Introduction:
The history of the anti superstition bill began in 2003, when the
first draft of the anti superstition bill was tabled. It was called
the Jadu Tona Andhshradha Virodhi bill of 2003. This was the first
bill of its kind ever to be tabled anywhere across the country.
However, the bill was met with strong opposition by most parties as
the definition of superstition was considered too vast. What was
superstition and blind faith to one could possibly be belief and faith
to another. Amidst these arguments, the bill was finally passed with
some amendments. Although the bill was pending before the central
government for its approval for almost seven months, problems arose
when the elections began. The governor was of the view that since the
government was going to change, it would not be appropriate to put a
new law in place. Hence, as fate would have it, the bill did not come
into force. That however, was not the end of the journey and 2 years
later a new draft was tabled in March 2005 much like the one that was
tabled in 2003 with subtle differences and an amended version was
finally passed on the 16th of December 2005. This review examines both
the bills of 2005. The bill of 2003 was unavailable. Whereas the bill
of 2003 had been drafted by Mr. Narendra Dabholkar of the Andhashradha
Samiti, the bill of 2005 was drafted by Mr. Shyam Manav.
The Bills:
A first reading of both the bills gives one the feeling that the new
draft has included a lot more people in its purview and has also made
mild, some of the provisions of the older draft. The March draft uses
the words to protect the poor and ignorant people in the society
Against blind faith, ignorance and customs born out of blind faith in
the name of god...black magic by so called god’s men. The December
draft however uses the terminology of application to common people
customs thriving on ignorance and completely removes the usage of the
words blind faith...in the name of God and so called God’s men. It is
thus quite clear that the present bill recognizes the fact that it is
not just the poor and the ignorant who can be victims of tantriks and
babas but also the people of the upper classes that may be affected.
It also wishes to avoid opposition over the usage of the words God’s
men and in the name of God because practices and rituals practiced in
the name of God may be an expression of faith to some.
Short Title, Extent and Commencement:
The March draft of the bill was called the Maharashtra Eradication of
Black Magic and Evil Practices and Customs Act, 2005 whereas, the
final draft is called the Maharashtra Eradication of Black Magic and
Evil and aghori Practices Act, 2005.
The word Customs has been removed from the title and the word aghori
has been inserted possibly because of the difficulty in defining the
word Custom as would cater to the needs of this bill.
Definitions:
The definition clause has been severely shortened in the December
bill. The earlier bill included definitions of Black Magic. Magical
remedy. However, this has now all been covered in one clause. All the
words have the same meaning as they have been defined in The Drugs and
Magic Remedies (objectionable advertisements) Act, 1954 and the
criminal procedure code, unless, they have been expressly defined in
the bill. However, there are still certain terms such as Aghori, jaran-
maran, buvabaaji, devi mata or dev devaski which find no definition in
the Bill.
A rather large definition had been provided for in the March bill for
practice of Black Magic or blind faith. It included practice by a
person or through another by claiming to possess supernatural powers
or divine powers or power of the spirit for treatment or for curing or
for healing physical and mental ailments thereby causing material or
financial loss to a human being. This definition would have thus
included other varied practices such as Voodoo, Wicca and Reiki. This
however has completely been removed from the present bill. This is
probably one of the biggest reasons why the present bill was labeled
as anti-hindu, because it does not seem to cover the practices of
other religions such as Islam and Christianity.
A noticeable change is that of the inclusion of Doctors and medical
practitioners in the present bill. The earlier bill expressly excluded
this class of people. This would have given a license to doctors to
practice black magic; hence it has rightly been included.
Registered medical practitioner as defined under the Drugs and Magic
Remedies Act 1954, means any person, -
(i) who holds a qualification granted by an authority specified in, or
notified under Section 3 of the Indian Medical Degrees Act, 1916 (7 of
1916) specified in the Schedules to the Indian Medical Council Act
1956 (102 of 1956); or
(ii) who is entitled to be registered as a medical practitioner under
any law for the time being in force ;in any State to which this Act
extends relating to the registration of medical practitioner;
Prohibition of Black Magic:
Both the bills prohibit the promotion, propagation and the practice of
Black Magic. The December Bill also prohibits the promotion, practice
and propagation of aghori practices. This also included people who
abet or attempt to commit any act punishable under this Act.
The March Bill provided that any person who contravenes the provisions
of the Act would be punishable with a term extending to seven years or
with a fine extending to fifty thousand rupees or with both. The
revised version of the bill however provides a minimum sentence of six
months extending to seven months along with a fine, the minimum limit
of which is provided at fifty thousand rupees. Hence the amended bill
comprehensively necessitates the imposition of both imprisonment and
fine.
Jurisdiction to try offences:
Both bills declare the offences punishable under the Act as cognizable
and non-bailable. No court inferior to that of a Metropolitan
Magistrate or a Magistrate of the First Class is permitted to try any
offence under the Act.
Offences by companies:
Both bills provide that if any offence is committed by a company then
every person in charge of and responsible to the company at the time
of commission of the offence for the conduct of its business would be
deemed guilty. It however, expressly excludes people who did not have
knowledge of the commission or people who had exercised all diligence
to prevent its commission. It also provides that if such an act is
committed with the consent or due to the neglect of any director or
manager or secretary or any other officer of the company who is
responsible for the exercise of due care then such a person would also
be deemed to be guilty under the Act.
A separate definition has been provided for a company under both the
bills which includes firms, an association of persons or body of
individuals, whether incorporated or not. Where the March Bill
includes trusts in the definition of a company, the December bill does
not. The reason for the exclusion of the same is unclear.
Vigilance officer:
There is a slight difference in the manner of defining the vigilance
officer in both the bills. The March draft provided that the vigilance
officer, who would be one or more police officers of the rank of an
inspector of Police, would be appointed for the whole State or such
part of the State as may be specified. However, the December draft now
changes this to one or more police officers for one or more police
stations as may be specified. The December bill thus does away with
the ambiguity of appointed police officers for parts of the State.
Where the duties of the Vigilance officer are concerned, most of the
duties remain the same. The earlier bill however, empowered the
officer to detect and prevent the contravention of the Act and to
report cases to the nearest police station within his jurisdiction.
However, the present bill lays a greater duty on the vigilance officer
because it requires him to take quick and speedy action in case a
complaint is filed at the police station by a victim. It also requires
him to give necessary advice, guidance and help to the concerned
police station. The rest of the duties such as collection of evidence,
performance of other duties as notified from time to time remain the
same under both the bills.
The March bill however, provided that the Vigilance officer shall
associate himself with the members of recognized organizations within
the area of his jurisdiction and co-ordinate with such organizations.
It further goes on to state what these recognized organizations would
be and what their duties would be. The bill stated that any social
organization which had been established and registered for not less
than two years under the provisions of the Bombay trusts Act, 1950 or
the societies registration Act, 1860 may apply to the state government
for recognition. It further provided that the government may accord
such recognition after due enquiries. It appears that the
Andhasharadha Samiti, being an organization which would fit in this
category wanted to be at the forefront of such activities while
drafting the bill. Being a recognized organization, the Vigilance
officer would then be forced to work in co-ordination with the
organization by virtue of section 6(3). This provision has been
deleted from the December Bill.
Power of Entry, Search etc:
The Act will give tremendous powers to the Vigilance officer as he
will have the power to enter and search any premises in which he has
reason to believe that an offence has been or is being committed. He
will also have the power to seize any instruments or material or
advertisements which he has reason to believe were being used for the
commission of the crime. It also gives him the power to seize any
other objects which according to him would help prove the crime. The
provisions of the criminal procedure code would apply to any search or
seizure under the Act as would apply to any search or seizure made
under the authority of the warrant issued under section 94 of the
Criminal Procedure Code.
Protection of action taken in good faith:
Common to both bills
The provisions of section 159 and 160 of the Bombay Police Act, 1951
shall apply to acts done in good faith by the Vigilance Officer as if
he were a police officer within the meaning of that Act.
Application of the provisions of the Code:
Common to both bills
The provisions of the Code shall apply to the investigation and trial
of the offences under this Act. Both the bills also go on to state
that this Act shall be in addition to and not in derogation of any
other law for the time being in force.
Publication of the fact of conviction:
Both bills make provisions for convicting courts to order the
publication of the name and the place of residence of the person
convicted in the local newspaper where the offence has been committed.
No such publication however, may be allowed until the appeal has
finally been disposed of.
Rules:
Both bills also make provisions for the making of rules to carry out
the purposes of the Act by notification in the official gazette. The
procedure for the making, modification and the annulment of such rules
has also been provided for under the Bill.
Power to remove difficulty:
This is an extremely ambiguous provision that had been put forth in
the bill of March which was removed in the new bill. It provides that
in case the State government encounters any difficulty in giving
effect to the provisions of the Act then the Government may take such
steps by notification in the official gazette as it may deem necessary
to remove such difficulty. Such an order, however, could not be given
before the passing of two years of the commencement of the Act.
Savings:
The bill of December 2005 provides for a provision which clarifies
that the Act would not apply to acts involving religious rites and
rituals which do not affect any person mentally or physically. This
has been done in order to avoid a religious uproar. It at the same
time however, also creates certain ambiguities as many acts can be
committed under the guise of being a religious act or a religious
ritual.
Schedules:
The schedule to the bill of March specified the acts which were
considered as offences. This has almost completely been changed in the
new bill and very little of the old bill has been retained. Whereas
the first bill listed out 27 practices, the new bill lists only 12.
The schedule to the March Bill included:
1) Under the pretext of expelling the ghost, assaulting by tying a
person with rope or chain, beating by stick or whip, to make the
person drink footwear soaked water, giving chili smoke, hanging a
person to the roof, fixing him with rope or by hair or plucking his
hair causing pain by way of touching heated object to organs or body
of a person, forcing a person to perform a sexual act in the open,
practicing aghori acts by chanting mantras, putting urine or human
excretion forcibly in the mouth of a person.
This clause has completely been retained. Only the words by chanting
mantras have been removed from the new bill in order to avoid
religious opposition. Chanting mantras need not necessarily be in
connection of aghori practices and is also used for religious
practices and to connect it with aghori would have caused religious
uproar.
2) Display of so called miracles by trying to create an impression of
existence of the things beyond or contrary to proven scientific rules
and to deceive, cheat or terrorize any person by propagation and
circulation of such practices. The wording of this section has
completely been changed and it now reads as follows:
Display of so called miracles by a person and thereby earning money
and to deceive, defraud and terrorize people by propagation and
circulation of so called miracles.
The intention of the legislators here appears to be that it is not the
belief of the people that should be attacked but only the people who
want to derive monetary gain out of display of miracles who should be
attacked. Even God is beyond scientific proof but the impression of
His existence cannot be challenged. Beliefs such as these cannot be
challenged under the guise of deception or terrorism. Another question
which arises is would magicians now be allowed to display their magic
for entertaining people? Although magic is not used always to
terrorize people, it does have that effect during the performance of
certain tricks.
3) Doing any inhuman act for search of precious things, bounty, water
resource in the form of karni, bhanmati and making or trying to make
human sacrifice by making jaran-maran, buvabaaji, devi mata or dev
devaski.
The following clause has been more appropriately drafted in the latest
bill and it now reads as follows: Doing any inhuman act in search of
precious things, bounty, water resource or for similar reasons in the
name of karni, bhanamati and making or trying to make human sacrifice
in the name of jaran-maran, or dev-devaski or to advice, instigate or
encourage committing of such inhuman acts.
The words buvabaaji and devi mata have been excluded and the other
words highlighted have been included. Thus not only the act itself but
also the instigation or the propagation of the act would comprise the
offence.
4) In case of dog bite, knowingly committing the act of giving
unscientific treatment of mantra tantra, gandadora and herbs, etc. to
a person infected with rabies instead of modern medical treatment or
preventing him from accepting the same.
Only a part of this clause has been retained and other bites such as
those of a scorpion and a snake have been included. A separate clause
had been put for snake bites in the earlier bill. This has now been
included in the same clause. Thus if a person is bitten by any of
these and such a person is treated by mantra tantra and ganda dora, it
would be an offence. The usage of herbs has been excluded. It is a
proven fact that herbs have medicinal value and hence its usage has
been allowed under the present bill unlike its prohibition in the
earlier one.
5) Piercing needle, and nails or other such objects in the arm,
tongue, chicks or any other part of the body, pricking pointed objects
in the body, whipping oneself, to bang oneself on the wall of temple
with intention of fulfilling the prayer made before God or commitment,
cutting oneself with a sharp instrument on one’s forehead and on any
other part of the body or to inflict self injury or committing any act
in public place which causes pain to normal human being in the name of
religious customs or traditions. This provision has completely been
removed from the present bill.
These acts need not be committed in religious faith. People pierce
their tongues even in the name of fashion. Again, a practice which may
not make sense to a person may make sense to another because he has
faith in it. Hence, such exhaustive provisions cannot be put into the
Bill.
6) Defrauding people, in the name of God and faith to have illicit
sexual relationship with women or men either natural or unnatural,
with or without consent of the person involved.
This provision has been deleted from the present bill because these
acts have already been declared to be illegal under the Indian Penal
Code and hence they are not necessary.
Instead, the following provisions have been included:
To create an impression that oneself is having special supernatural
powers, incarnation of another person or holy spirit, or that the
devotee was his wife, husband or paramour in past birth thereby
indulging in sexual activity with such person.
To keep sexual relations with a woman who is unable to conceive
assuring her of motherhood through supernatural powers.
7) Create or to propagate of inviting spirit of God or Goddess through
any person as a medium. This has been removed from the present bill
and the following has been included:
To create an impression by declaring that a divine spirit has
influenced one’s body or that a person has possessed such divine
spirit and thereby create fear in the mind of others or to threaten
others of evil consequences for not following the advice of such
person.
This provision makes clear that it is not merely the practice of
inviting a spirit that is causing harm but the fact that it is being
propagated in society causing fear in the minds of the people. This
needs to be stopped.
8) Assuring any woman to perform gopala santan ritual in the fourth
month of her pregnancy for birth of a male child, operating stomach by
fingers, diagnosing disease by placing stone, farshi (tile) on the
head, making use of improper and harmful methods to diagnose and treat
diseases and illness; claim to have divine remedies for abortion,
contraception, enhancement of physical satisfaction in the sexual act
for men and women, increasing their sexual powers, menstruation
problems, conceiving, etc.
In the disguise of offering motherhood by performing some divine act
or magical remedy keeping sexual relations with women who are unable
to conceive, deflowering them, keeping illicit sexual relations with
them.
This has now been removed and a short provision stating that claiming
to perform surgery by fingers or claiming to change the sex of a
foetus in the womb of a woman, has been put in place.
9) To spread threat amongst the people by way of invoking by mantras,
putting up a false show to make a person free from poisonous
infection, creating an impression that there is ghostly or divine
wrath causing physical injuries and stopping a person from taking
medical treatment and instead diverting him to practice aghori acts or
deeds.
The following provision in this regard has been included instead:
To create panic in the mind of public in general by way of invoking
ghosts by mantras, or threaten to invoke ghost, putting up a false
show to make a person free from poisonous infection by invoking
mantras or similar things, creating an impression that there is
ghostly or divine wrath causing physical injuries and preventing a
person from taking medical treatment and instead diverting him to
practice aghori acts or treatment, threatening a person with death or
causing physical pains or causing financial or psychological harm by
practicing or tend to practice mantra-tantra (chetuk), black magic or
aghori act.
10) In the name of jaran maran, karni or witchcraft (chetuk),
assaulting any person, parading him naked, excommunicating or
declaring any person as outcast or to expel a person from society or
put a ban on his activities, declaring such person as possessed by
evil spirit or incarnation.
To appear in the state of complete nakedness in the public place and
misbehaving with women by treating oneself as awaliya baba or baba
with divine power.
This has now been substituted by the following two acts:
By declaring that a particular person practices karni, black magic or
brings under the influence of ghost, or diminishes the milching
capacity of a cattle by mantra tantra, or create suspicion about such
person, or similarly accusing a particular person that he brings
misfortune to others or is responsible for spread of diseases and
thereby making the living of such person miserable, troublesome or
difficult, to declare a person as Satan or incarnation of Satan.
In the name of jaran maran, karni, or witchcraft assaulting any
person, parading him naked or put a ban on his daily activities.
11) To create an impression that insanity has been caused to a person
due to influence of ghost or divine power and to conduct mantra tantra
to cure him by way of sacrifice of hen or goat or any other animal.
Cheating people in the false hope of providing freedom from madness,
offering treatment to patients of serious or terminal illnesses by
offering stones with the powers of mantras, finger ring, bangle,
jogstick or thread, tait, ganda dora, etc, with such false hope.
This has now been replaced by: To create an impression that a mentally
retarded person is having super natural power and utilizing such
person for business or occupation.
The following provisions have also been removed:
Causing disturbance in society in general or creating panic or cause
intimidation by way of chanting Mantra or Tantrik action in the name
of exorcising a ghost or to free a person from the influence of ghost
or evil spirit.
By declaring that Devi, a spirit has influenced one’s body, create
disturbance by shouting and thereby spreading threat and disturbing
the general peace, declaring the names of the persons who has done
karni, etc, thereby making the living of such a person miserable of
difficult, to provide unscientific cure to psycho somatic conditions
such as giving angara, pendant, etc. to the people. Haunting a person
with an influence of ghost by practicing witchcraft which cannot be
proved with the help of modern science. Treating any disease with the
help of mantra tantra without authorized or recognized medical degree
under the law for the time being in force. Threatening a person with
death or causing physical pains or causing financial or psychological
harm by mantra tantra (witchcraft), Black Magic or by practicing
aghori treatment.
Trying to make believe burning of things, vanishing of things,
appearance of cross marks on the body, etc, as effect of bhanamati and
claiming treatment for the same. Claiming to perform miracle by
burying oneself in the ground. Under disguise of offering God’s
blessings, cheating people by way of accepting money or any other
belongings, by unlawful means. In the name of religion, Holy
Scriptures, God and Goddesses, display of false extraordinary powers,
indulgence in free sexual relations, adopting unethical and corrupt
means for cheating and duping people. Compelling women to enter into
prostitution and committing atrocities against them, by cheating them
under blind faith.
The following other provisions have been included:
With a view to receive blessings of super natural power to follow the
evil and aghori practices which cause danger to life or grievous hurt;
and to instigate, encourage or compel others to follow such practices.
Conclusion:
This is a noble effort of the legislators to put an end to the
atrocities being committed in the name of religion. Throwing people in
burning flames to cure people of Chicken Pocks, writing Ram on the
doors of the house to prevent the unholy ghost from entering the house
is becoming increasingly common these days. Although the intentions
are good, as has been seen in the past, not all legislations score
high marks where implementation is concerned. Some fail more so
because people refuse to follow them and because it appears to be
against the customs and traditions of the people. Literacy drives
would have been more appropriate for such a personal subject. No
committee has been put in place under this bill that would go around
educating people about the evil effects of these practices. Another
thing that comes across is that most of the acts named in the bill
would be offences in itself, the only difference is that their
commission under the guise of religious practice would henceforth also
be termed as an offence. Nevertheless, the success of the bill still
remains to be seen.
The author can be reached at :prit...@legalserviceindia.com
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WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India
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to all its citizens...
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Articles:
(*) Uniform Civil Code
http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/ucc.htm
(*) Principles of Jermy Bentham and S.C of India
http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/case.htm
(*) Repeal Of POTA - Justified
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(*) Politics Of Constitutional Amendments In India
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http://www.legalserviceindia.com/constitution/const_home.htm
Written By : Deepika Bansal - Student Law
The Constitution of India is the supreme law of the land, which is
fundamental in the governance of India. The Constitution of India was
enacted on 26th November, 1949 and was adopted on 26th January, 1950.
The Draftsmen of the Indian Constitution took inspiration from
Constitutions all over the world and incorporated their attributes
into the Indian Constitution. For example Part III on Fundamental
Rights is partly derived from the American Constitution and Part 1V on
Directive Principles of State Policy from the Irish Constitution.
A Constitution should be a dynamic document. It should be able to
adapt itself to the changing needs of the society. Sometimes under the
impact of new powerful social and economic forces, the pattern of
government will require major changes. Keeping this factor in mind the
Draftsmen of the Indian Constitution incorporated Article 368 in the
Constitution which dealt with the procedure of amendment. Due to
Article 368 the Indian Constitution can neither be called rigid nor
flexible but in fact it is partly rigid and partly flexible. Articles
of the Indian Constitution can be amended by a simple majority in the
Parliament (Second Schedule, Article 100(3), 105, 11, 124, 135, 81,
137), or by special majority that is majority of the total membership
of each house and by majority of not less than two thirds of the
members of each house present and voting , or by Ratification by the
State Legislatures after special majority (Article 57, 73, 162,
Chapter 1V of Part V, Chapter V of P!
art V1, Seventh Schedule, representation of the State in Parliament
and provisions dealing with amendment of the Constitution).
During the 50 years of the Constitution, more than 80 amendments have
taken place. The founding fathers of the Indian constitution who
granted more rights to the people without balancing them with their
duties, perhaps did not foresee the emergence of present political
environment, wherein the political players of various segments in the
country are more interested in fulfilling their individual aspirations
than the aspirations of the people. There is an element of truth in
this
criticism. The fact is that the ease in the amending process of the
Indian Constitution is due to the one party dominance both at the
Centre and the State .Yet, on close examination it will be seen that
there were compelling circumstances which led to the constitutional
amendments. While some amendments were a natural product of the
eventual evolution of the new political system established under the
Constitution in 1950, there were others necessitated by practical
difficulties. The first amendment! took place in June, 1950.
The question whether Fundamental Rights can be amended under Article
368 came for consideration of the Supreme Court in Shankari Prasad v.
Union of India . It challenged the validity of the 1st amendent to the
Constitution. In this case it was held that a constitution amendment
will also be held valid even it abridges or takes away any of the
fundamental rights. A similar decision was given my the honble Supreme
Court in Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan which challenged the
validity of the 17th amendent. In Golaknath v. State of Punjab , the
validity of the Constitution (17th Amendment) Act, 1964 was again
challenged, which inserted certain State Acts in Ninth Schedule. The
Supreme Court in its landmark decision overruled the decision given in
the Shankari Prasads and Sajjan Singhs case. It held that the
Parliament had no power from the date of this decision to amend Part
III of the Constitution so as to take away or abridge the Fundamental
rights. Eleven judges participated in this decision with the ratio
being 6 : 5. The judges were worried about the numerous amendments
made to abridge the fundamental rights since 1950. It apprehended that
if the courts were to hold that the Parliament had power to take away
fundamental rights, a time might come when these rights are completely
eroded. The Chief Justice applied the doctrine of Prospective
Overruling and held that this decision will have only prospective
operation and, therefore, the 1st, 4th and 17th amendment will conti!
nue to be valid.
It means that all cases decided before the Golaknaths case shall
remain valid. In order to remove difficulties created by Golaknaths
decision parliament enacted the 24th Amendment.
The amendment has made the following amendments :
(1) it added a new clause (4) to Article 13 which provides that
nothing in this Article shall apply to any amendment of this
constitution made under Article 368 .
(2) it submitted a new heading to Article 368 power of Parliament to
amend the Constitution and Procedure therefore. Instead of Procedure
for amendment of the Constitution.
(3) It inserted a new sub section (1) in Article 368 which provides
that notwithstanding anything in the Constitution, Parliament may, in
exercise of its constituent power may amend by way of addition,
variation, or repeal any provision of this Constitution in accordance
with the procedure laid down in the Article. Thus the 24th amendment
restored the amending power of the Parliament. The validity of the
24th amendment was challenged in the case of Keshavnand Bharati v.
State of Kerala . It challenged the validity of the Kerala Reforms
Act, 1963. but during the pendency of the petition the Kerala Act was
placed in the Ninth Schedule by the 29th Amendment. The question
involved was the extent of the amending power conferred by Article 368
of the Constitution. A Special bench of 13 judges was constituted to
hear the case. The Court by majority overruled the Golaknaths case
which denied Parliament the power to amend fundamental rights of
citizens. It held that the 24th amendment merely made explicit which
was implicit in the unamended Article 368. The Court held that under
the Article 368 Parliament is not empowered to amend the basic
structure or framework of the Constitution. After the decisions of the
Supreme Court in Keshavnand Bharati and Indira Gandhi cases the
Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976, was passed which added two
new clauses , namely, clauses (4) provided that no constitutional
amendment (including the provision of Part III) or purporting to have
been made under Article 368 whether before or after the commencement
of the Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976 shall be called in any
court on any ground. Clause (5) removed any doubts about the scope of
the amending power. It declared that there shall be no limitation
whatever on the constituent power of Parliament to amend by way of
addition ,variation or repeal of the provisions of the Constitution
under this Article. Thus by inserting this clause it was made clear
that the basic structure of the Constitution could be amended. In
Minerva Mills v. Union of India the Supreme Court by 4 to 1 majority
struck down clauses (4) and (5) of Article 368 inserted by the 42nd
amendment, on the ground that these clauses destroyed the essential
feature of the basic structure of the Constitution. Since these
clauses removed all limitations on the amending power and thereby!
conferred an unlimited amending power, it was destructive of the basic
structure of the Constitution. The judgment of the Supreme Court thus
makes it clear that the Constitution not the Parliament is supreme in
India. The Parliament owes its existence to the Constitution and it
cannot take priority over the Constitution. Therefore this landmark
decision ended the long controversy between the Courts and the
Executive.
The amendment process was incorporated in the Constitution by the
Draftsmen of the Constitution to help India adapt itself to the
changing circumstances. Society is never stagnant. It is ever-
changing. Therefore the amending procedure was made partly flexible so
as to make it easy for the Legislature. But the Parliament started
thinking that it has unlimited amending power. It assumed itself to be
the supreme law when the Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
The Parliament started making amendments which were destroying the
basic structure of the Indian Constitution. But after the landmark
decisions of Keshavnand Bharati and Minerva Mills the Court by its
power of judicial review has curtailed the amending power of the
Parliament. The amendments made by the Parliament can no more affect
the basic structure of the Constitution. But, looking at the ease with
amendments can take place depending on the whims and fancies of the
ruling government and the POLITICS IN THE POLITICS OF INDIA we cannot
say how long the rights of the citizens are safe and unobstructed.
http://www.legalservicesindia.com/articles/pol.htm
Written By : Sachin Mehta
On 26 March 2002, the controversial anti-terror law, the Prevention of
Terrorism Act (POTA) was passed with 425 votes for the Act and 296
against, after a 10-hour debate in the parliament. The intensity of
the effects of the bill could be seen very clearly by the rejection of
the bill by the upper house of the Indian Parliament leading to a
Joint Session of Parliament, a measure that had taken place only the
third time in the past. The Indian Ministry of Home Affairs justified
the initial Ordinance after the September 11,2001 terror attacks by
claiming an upsurge of terrorist activities, intensification of cross
border terrorism, and insurgent groups in different parts of the
country, despite the fact that the state of Jammu and Kashmir
witnessed a decrease in the terrorist incidents taking place in that
state.
POTA, though now has been repealed, lives as an example showing the
bold step taken by India in its fight against terrorism. The POTA had
during its days and even after its downfall, has made India a silent
spectator to serous ongoing debates between political parties, the
media, social activists and NGOs on certain provisions seen to be
draconian, within POTA.
Two years from the enactment of the POTA, a number of issues as to the
possibilities of misuse of the provisions of the anti terror law
including the targeting of minorities and using it against political
opponents had arisen. In Gujarat, all except one of the POTA detainees
are from the Muslim minority and in Tamil Nadu and UP too the
ostensible anti-terror law has been abused to book, without lucidity
and accountability, political opponents and underprivileged
communities respectively.
A decade long experience with a previous national anti-terror law, the
infamous Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention (TADA) that
was in force between 1985-1995 gives legitimacy to the fear that the
misuse of such laws evoke among human rights activists, political
dissenters and minorities. Under the TADA, the conviction rate was
less than 1%, despite the fact that the confessions made to the
police, even though being given under torture, were admissible as
evidence.
The developments after the enactment of the POTA, including the
responses received by the POTA review committee show that the POTA is
worse then TADA. POTA provides for criminal liability for mere
association or communication with suspected terrorists without the
possession of criminal intent (Section 3(5) of the POTA). Section 4 of
POTA is similar to Section 5 of TADA in laying out a legal presumption
that if a person is found in unauthorized possession of arms in a
notified area, he/she is automatically linked with terrorist activity.
Section 48(2) provides for the option of pre-trial police detention
for up to 180 days. As under the TADA, where 98% of the cases never
reached the trial stage, this Section 48(2) could also be misused by
the police by keeping an accused for long periods of detention without
charge or trial. Special courts for trials are established under POTA
which are given the discretion to hold trials in non-public places,
like prisons, and to withhold ! trial records from public scrutiny,
thus preventing the independent monitoring of special court sessions.
Section 32 provides that confessions made to police officers are to be
admissible in trial, which has increased the possibility of coercion
and torture in securing confessions.
The provisions contained under the POTA were mostly contained in
existing laws, except those, which were contained in the Criminal
Procedure Code, the Indian Penal Code, the Evidence Act or the
Constitution of India. The Act effectively undermines the fundamental
tenet of the criminal justice system by putting the burden of proof on
the accused. But the Act also had some provisions, which were not
attacked for being against human rights. These provisions stated that
Confessions must be recorded within 48 hours before a magistrate, who
will send the accused for a medical examination if there is a
complaint of torture. Further a legal representative of the accused
can be present for part of the interrogation. Moreover police officers
can be prosecuted for abusing their authority. The POTA also provided
that victims could be paid compensation.
But these provisions could not act as an effective shield to protect
the Act from the criticism it received for its other provisions
abusing human rights. Those opposed to POTA had argued that existing
laws were sufficient to deal with terrorism. Within a year POTA had
already built up a dubious record and in some states it was already
dreaded as its predecessor. State governments, including opposition-
ruled ones, had not hesitated to use POTA to fix political opponents.
At the Peoples Tribunal on POTA and Other Security Legislation at the
Press Club in New Delhi on July 16,2004 a 629-page report based on
depositions made before the Tribunal by victims and their families
from ten states in India, as well as expert depositions by lawyers and
activists, showed that such security legislations grant sweeping
powers to authorities, which has led to misuse of these powers and
severe restriction of basic rights. At the same time, such
legislations do not address the political, social and economic roots
of the problem.
The tribunal concluded that the review of victim and expert testimony
showed that the misuse of the Act is inseparable from its normal use.
The tribunal stated that the statute meant to terrorise not so much
the terrorists as ordinary civiliansand particularly the poor and
disadvantaged such as dalits, religious minorities, adivasis, and
working people. Thus the tribunal recommended that POTA be repealed
and that too in such a manner that the POTA charges are deleted from
all existing investigations and trials. But, if the state so desires,
these may continue under other laws and charges.
Finally on September 17, 2004 the Union Cabinet in keeping with the
UPA government's Common Minimum Programme, approved ordinances to
repeal the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002 (POTA) and
amend the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. Home Minister
Shivraj Patil said that the government would provide a sunset period
of one year during which all cases pertaining to POTA would be
reviewed by the Central POTA Review Committee. He added, There would
be no arrests made after the ordinance is promulgated. To fill the
lacuna that have been created due to the repeal of the Act, adequate
amendments were being brought to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act, 1967 to define a terrorist act and provide for banning of
terrorist organisations and their support systems, including funding
of terrorism, attachment and forfeiture of proceeds of terrorism, etc.
All terrorist organisations banned under POTA would continue to remain
banned, under the Unlawful Activities Act, after the repeal of the
Act. Some of the clauses contained in POTA, which will be completely
dropped in the amended Unlawful Activities Act, are: the onus on the
accused to prove his innocence, compulsory denial of bail to accused
and admission as evidence in the court of law the confession made by
the accused before the police officer.
The BJP government has slammed the Cabinet decision to repeal POTA as
politically motivated and compromising of the essentials of national
security. BJP spokesperson and former Law Minister Arun Jaitley said
if the amendments brought out under the existing laws after the repeal
of POTA are found to be inadequate, the BJP-ruled states would be
asked to come out with their own legislations filling up the lacuna.
But till such a step is taken many innocent victims of the POTA can
take a sign of relief and thank their stars that the reign of terror
under the stringent anti terror law POTA has come to an end.
http://www.legalservicesindia.com/articles/pota.htm
Written By : Sandeep Pathak, III year B.B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) National Law
University, Jodhpur
Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (herein after referred as
Olga Tellis) was decided in 1985 by the five Judges Bench of the
Supreme Court of India. The Hon'ble bench comprised of C.J., Y.V.
Chandrachud, J., A.V. Varadarajan, J., O. Chinnappa Reddy, J., S.
Murtaza Fazal Ali and J., V.D. Tulzapurkar. This case came before the
Supreme Court as a writ petition by persons who live on pavements and
in slums in the city of Bombay. It was prayed by the petitioners to
allow them to stay on the pavements against their order of eviction.
The majority judgment (concurring by all the five Judges) was
delivered by Hon'ble Chief Justice Y.V.Chandrachud.
Factual Score of Olga Tellis
The writ petitions were filed by the slum dwellers and pavement
dwellers before the Supreme Court of India. This class of people
constituted nearly half the population of the city of Bombay. The
respondents - State of Maharashtra and Bombay Municipal Corporation
took a decision that all pavement dwellers and the slum or bust
dwellers in the city of Bombay will be evicted forcibly and deported
to their respective places of origin or removed to places outside the
city of Bombay section 314 of the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act,
1888. Pursuant to that decision, the pavement dwellings of some of the
petitioners were in fact demolished by the Bombay Municipal
Corporation. The petitioners challenge the order of the Bombay
Municipal Corporation of eviction as being unreasonable and unjust
without providing with alternative living facility. The petitioners
claimed right to livelihood as a part of their right under Article 21
of the Constitution that is right to life under Article 32. Moreover,
petitioners contended that sections 312, 313 and 314 of the Bombay
Municipal Corporation Act are invalid as violating Articles 14, 19 and
21.
Issues Considered by the Apex Court
1. That the order for the eviction of the pavement is the infringement
of their right to livelihood and in turn the encroachment over their
right guaranteed under article 21 of the Constitution.
2. That the impugned action of the State Government and the Bombay
Municipal Corporation is violative of the provisions contained in
Article 19(1) (3), 19(1) (g) and 21 of the Constitution.
3. That the procedure prescribed by section 314 of the Bombay
Municipal Corporation Act, 1888 for the removal of encroachments from
pavements is arbitrary and unreasonable.
Decision of Supreme Court
The decision of the Supreme Court in this case was based on the
humanistic approach of the judges and the Apex Court stepped into the
activist role. The Hon'ble Supreme Court held that the slum dwellers
must get the alternative shelter if they are evicted from the
pavements.Although, the eviction orders were held to be valid under
article 14 and 19 of the Constitution. Infact, the right to life was
once again enlarged to engulf the right to livelihood as being a part
of liberty of an individual. The decision of the Court also focused on
the concept of the welfare state and reliance though not expressly but
impliedly was placed on the Directive Principles of the State Policies
under the Constitution.
Rationale, Reason and Jurisprudence of Olga Tellis
The decision of this case essentially falls back on the premise of the
positivism. The judgment delivered by C.J., YV.Chandrachud is solely
based on the concept of the analytical positivism of Britain. The
letter of law was considered to be paramount. The Supreme Court
focused on both the premises, that is, reformation and superiority of
the law. In Para 28, Justice Chandrachud took the approach propounded
by Hans Kelson, where he considers constitution as a highest norm or
the Grundnorm. According to Kelson, Grundnorm is the basic norm which
determines the content and gives validity to other norms derived from
it. On this basis, Justice Chandrachud, observes in Para 28 that,
There can be no estoppel against the Constitution. The Constitution is
not only the paramount law of the land but, it is the source and
sustenance of all laws. Its provisions are conceived in public
interest and are intended to serve public purpose.
Furthermore, it is the theory of the "Father of the English
Jurisprudence" - Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) that was reiterated by
the Apex Court in true sense. Bentham talked about the reform of the
substantive law by the way of reforming the structure of law.
1. Law in the Reformative Process
This case can be said to be a decision that leads to the reformation
of the substantive law. Bentham divided the jurisprudence into two
parts, that is, expositorial (what law is) and censorial (what law
ought to be) .Olga Tellis has shifted the focus from censorial
jurisprudence to the expositorial jurisprudence by enlarging the scope
of article 21 of the Constitution and including right to livelihood
and right to shelter as a part of right to life. Justice Chandrachud
in Para 32 of his judgment states,
An equally important facet of that right is the right to livelihood
because, no person can live without the means of living, that is, the
means of livelihood. If the right to livelihood is not treated as a
part of the constitutional right to life, the easiest way of depriving
a person of his right to life would be to deprive him of his means of
livelihood to the point of abrogation.
This view of the Hon'ble Court clearly indicates the follow up of the
Bentam's philosophy of reforming the law through its structure. The
law as defined by Bentham is, an assemblage of signs, declarative of
violation, conceived or adopted by the sovereign in a state,
concerning the conduct to be observed in a certain case by a certain
person or class of persons, who in the case in question are or are
supposed to be subject to his power .Therefore, this although focuses
on the aspect that law is certain and laid down that is, positum, but
at the same time this definition is flexible enough to be cover a set
of objectives so intimately allied and to which there would be such
continual occasion to apply the same proposition . Therefore in the
present case when Justice Chandrachud states that ,"no person can live
without means of living" ,he is applying the Bentamite jurisprudence
to reform the law laid down under article 21 and at the same time also
utilizing the flexibility of his definition of law to equate the
intimately allied occasions of life, liberty and livelihood.
2. Hedonist Utilitarianism
Olga Tellis brought the concept of Benthamite philosophy of the
Hedonist Utilitarianism. Justice Chandrachud in Para 1 states that the
petitioners form almost half the population of the city. The fact of
such a large number of pavement dwellers in question caused the
decision to fall in their favour.The principle of utility by Bentham
stated that, out of various possibilities in a given case, one must
choose that option that gives the greatest happiness to the greatest
number .
The Bombay Municipal Corporation Act, 1888 laid down the law relating
to the pavement dwellers under section 312-314. It stated many
prohibitions on the housing and depositions of various items on the
pavements by the dwellers. Justice Chandrachud while deciding this
case entirely followed the PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY as given by Bentham
and held that the end aim of the legislator should be HAPPINESS of the
people and the GENERAL UTILITY must be the guiding principle. Apex
Court by making a balance sheet between the happiness or the utility
of the slum dwellers with the aim and object of the particular
legislation came to a conclusion that justice must be done only by
giving the redressal to the poor and needy pavement dwellers. Justice
Chandarchud in Para 49 states that,
Hearing to be given to trespassers who have encroached on public
properties? To persons who commit crime? There is no doubt that the
petitioners are using pavements and other public properties for an
unauthorised purpose. But, their intention or object in doing so is
not to "commit an offence or intimidate, insult or annoy any person",
which is the gist of the offence of 'Criminal trespass' under Section
441 of the Penal Code. They manage to find a habitat in places which
are mostly filthy or marshy, out of sheet helplessness. It is not as
if they have a free choice to exercise as to whether to commit an
encroachment and if so, where. The encroachments committed by these
persons are involuntary acts in the sense that those acts are
compelled by inevitable circumstances and are not guided by choice.
Here, as elsewhere in the law of Torts, a balance has to be struck
between competing sets of values.....
Therefore, the Apex Court had drawn a balance sheet and analysed the
Happiness and utility of the petitioners and the respondents. The
Court relied upon the Pelican book in Para 56 and states,
Malnourished babies, wasted mothers, emaciated corpses in the streets
of Asia have definite and definable reasons for existing. Hunger may
have been the human race's constant companion, and 'the poor may
always be with us', but in the twentieth century, one cannot take this
fatalistic view of the destiny of millions of fellow creatures. Their
condition is not inevitable but is caused by identifiable forces
within the province of rational human control.
In the above-mentioned finding by the Hon'ble Supreme Court it is
evidently clear that the reliance was placed on the "destiny of
millions of fellow creatures". It signifies the application of the
Bentham principle of utility in the outcome of the judgment of Olga
Tellis.
Bentham's justification of his utilitarianism is founded upon four
propositions. These are as follows,
1. All agents (as agents) seek a personal good.
2. Ultimately, all self-conscious agents aim at the same goal
(irrespective of the particular context in which the particular action
is performed).
3. That same ultimate goal is always the maximization of personal
pleasure (and the avoidance of personal pain).
4. The proper role of the state is to promote the greatest aggregate
pleasure within its community.
The four commands of utility for civic society in the Bentham's
Utilitarianism, upon which the aggregate happiness depends are
security, subsistence, abundance and equality. Out of the above,
security was the most important. Subsistence, abundance and equality,
however, all depended, in Bentham's view, on the paramount directive
of security. The decision given by the Supreme Court heavily relies on
the entire four propositions given by Bentham (above-mentioned).
Justice Chandrachud in the Para 2 of the judgment lays down the
emphasis on the slum dwellers right to life and reside in any part of
the country with dignity as other citizens of the nation. He stated
that an individual can live without security but cannot live without
"subsistence" the Supreme Court in the instant case holding that the
Right to livelihood and shelter as being an important component of the
Right to Life again establishes a nexus between subsistence and right
to livelihood once again confirming the abidance of the Benthamite
principle of utility. Moreover when the court established that if the
petitioners were evicted from their dwellings, they would be deprived
of their livelihood.
The due recognition is given to the fact that the number of the
pavement dwellers was huge and it constituted almost half of the
city's population. Therefore, the test greatest aggregate happiness
for the greatest number is also fulfilled. According to Jullias
Stone , by happiness of the community Bentham meant simply the
aggregate of individual surpluses of pleasure over pain. The greatest
happiness of the greatest number states that the pleasure and the
pains of the society are to be weighed at same plane. In this case
also the pleasure of the society was upheld and also the pain of
another section of the society (slum dwellers) was brought down.
Then Bentham's principle of utility becomes the principle that we are
always to act in such a way as to give as many people as possible as
much as possible of whatever it is that they want. I think that the
interpretation in Olga Tellis preserves the essence of Bentham's
doctrine, and it has the advantage of making it independent of any
special psychological theory.
Conclusion
To conclude, the whole Benthamite principle applied by Justice
Chandrachud on behalf of all the brother Justices can be summarized in
one sentence stated in Para 46 of the judgment, Human compassion
(happiness) must soften the rough edges of justice in all situations.
Thus, it can be concluded the Supreme Court adopted the Utilitarian
Principle in terms of the pleasure and pain calculus or the hedonistic
calculus of Jermy Betham.
Authored by Sandeep Pathak and can be reached at :
pathaksa...@rediffmail.com
http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/case.htm
"Uniform Civil Code"
Written By : Gauri Kulkarni - Vth year law - Symbiosis Society's law
college, Pune
Introduction:
The mere three words and the nation breaks into hysterical jubilation
and frantic wailing. These three words are enough to divide the nation
into two categories - politically, socially and religiously.
Politically, the nation is divided as BJP, which propagates
implementation of the Uniform Civil Code (hereinafter referred to as
the UCC) and the non BJP including the Congress party, Samajwadi
party, who are against the implementation of the UCC. Socially, the
intelligentsia of the country, who analyse logically the pros and cons
of the UCC and the illiterate who have no opinion of their own and
succumb to the political pressure are at opposite poles. And,
religiously, there is a dangerous widening schism between the majority
Hindus and the minority community mostly the Muslims. Being a law
student, I would like to consider the legal implications of UCC.
I strongly support the crusade for the implementation of UCC and
homogenising the personal laws. I support it, not because of any bias,
but because it is the need of the hour. It is high time that India had
a uniform law dealing with marriage, divorce, succession, inheritance
and maintenance.
Indian case law:
Recently, the Supreme Court of India again called for a UCC. The
Supreme Court first directed the Parliament to frame a UCC in the year
1985 in the case of Mohammad Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum[1],
popularly known as the Shah Bano case. In this case, a penurious
Muslim woman claimed for maintenance from her husband under Section
125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure[2] after she was given triple
talaq from him. The Supreme Court held that the Muslim woman have a
right to get maintenance from her husband under Section 125. The Court
also held that Article 44[3] of the Constitution has remained a dead
letter. The then Chief Justice of India Y.V. Chandrachud observed
that,
"A common civil code will help the cause of national integration by
removing disparate loyalties to law which have conflicting ideologies"
After this decision, nationwide discussions, meetings, and agitation
were held. The then Rajiv Gandhi led Government overturned the Shah
Bano case decision by way of Muslim Women (Right to Protection on
Divorce) Act, 1986 which curtailed the right of a Muslim woman for
maintenance under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The
explanation given for implementing this Act was that the Supreme Court
had merely made an observation for enacting the UCC, not binding on
the government or the Parliament and that there should be no
interference with the personal laws unless the demand comes from
within.
The second instance in which the Supreme Court again directed the
government of Article 44 was in the case of Sarla Mudgal v. Union of
India[4]. In this case, the question was whether a Hindu husband,
married under the Hindu law, by embracing Islam, can solemnise second
marriage The Court held that a Hindu marriage solemnised under the
Hindu law can only be dissolved on any of the grounds specified under
the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Conversion to Islam and Marrying again
would not, by itself, dissolve the Hindu marriage under the Act. And,
thus, a second marriage solemnised after converting to Islam would be
an offence under Section 494[5] of the Indian Penal Code.
Justice Kuldip Singh also opined that Article 44 has to be retrieved
from the cold storage where it is lying since 1949. The Hon’ble
Justice referred to the codification of the Hindu personal law and
held,
"Where more then 80 percent of the citizens have already been brought
under the codified personal law there is no justification whatsoever
to keep in abeyance, any more, the introduction of the ‘uniform civil
code’ for all the citizens in the territory of India."
The Supreme Court’s latest reminder to the government of its
Constitutional obligations to enact a UCC came in July 2003[6] when a
Christian priest knocked the doors of the Court challenging the
Constitutional validity of Section 118[7] of the Indian Succession
Act. The priest from Kerala, John Vallamatton filed a writ petition in
the year 1997 stating that Section 118 of the said Act was
discriminatory against the Christians as it impose unreasonable
restrictions on their donation of property for religious or charitable
purpose by will. The bench comprising of Chief Justice of India V.N.
Khare, Justice S.B. Sinha and Justice A.R. Lakshamanan struck down the
Section declaring it to be unconstitutional. Chief Justice Khare
stated that,
"We would like to State that Article 44 provides that the State shall
endeavour to secure for all citizens a uniform civil code throughout
the territory of India It is a matter of great regrets that Article 44
of the Constitution has not been given effect to. Parliament is still
to step in for framing a common civil code in the country. A common
civil code will help the cause of national integration by removing the
contradictions based on ideologies."
Thus, as seen above, the apex court has on several instances directed
the government to realise the directive principle enshrined in our
Constitution and the urgency to do so can be inferred from the same.
Secularism v/s UCC:
The spine of controversy revolving around UCC has been secularism and
the freedom of religion enumerated in the Constitution of India. The
preamble of the Constitution states that India is a "secular
democratic republic" This means that there is no State religion. A
secular State shall not discriminate against anyone on the ground of
religion. A State is only concerned with the relation between man and
man. It is not concerned with the relation of man with God. It does
not mean allowing all religions to be practiced. It means that
religion should not interfere with the mundane life of an individual.
In S.R. Bommai v. Union of India[8], as per Justice Jeevan Reddy, it
was held that religion is the matter of individual faith and cannot be
mixed with secular activities. Secular activities can be regulated by
the State by enacting a law.
In India, there exist a concept of "positive secularism" as
distinguished from doctrine of secularism accepted by America and some
European states i.e. there is a wall of separation between religion
and State. In India, positive secularism separates spiritualism with
individual faith. The reason is that America and the European
countries went through the stages of renaissance, reformation and
enlightenment and thus they can enact a law stating that State shall
not interfere with religion. On the contrary, India has not gone
through these stages and thus the responsibility lies on the State to
interfere in the matters of religion so as to remove the impediments
in the governance of the State.
Articles 25[9] and 26[10] guarantee right to freedom of religion.
Article 25 guarantees to every person the freedom of conscience and
the right to profess, practice and propagate religion. But this right
is subject to public order, morality and health and to the other
provisions of Part III of the Constitution. Article 25 also empowers
the State to regulate or restrict any economic, financial, political
or other secular activity, which may be associated with religious
practice and also to provide for social welfare and reforms. The
protection of Articles 25 and 26 is not limited to matters of doctrine
of belief. It extends to acts done in pursuance of religion and,
therefore, contains a guarantee for ritual and observations,
ceremonies and modes of worship, which are the integral parts of
religion.[11]
UCC is not opposed to secularism or will not violate Article 25 and
26. Article 44 is based on the concept that there is no necessary
connection between religion and personal law in a civilised society.
Marriage, succession and like matters are of secular nature and,
therefore, law can regulate them. No religion permits deliberate
distortion[12]. The UCC will not and shall not result in interference
of one’s religious beliefs relating, mainly to maintenance, succession
and inheritance. This means that under the UCC a Hindu will not be
compelled to perform a nikah or a Muslim be forced to carry out
saptapadi. But in matters of inheritance, right to property,
maintenance and succession, there will be a common law.
Justice Khare, in the recent case[13], said,
"It is no matter of doubt that marriage, succession and the like
matters of secular character cannot be brought within the guarantee
enshrined under Articles 25 and 26 of the Constitution."
The Chief Justice also cautioned that any legislations which brought
succession and like matters of secular character within the ambit of
Articles 25 and 26 is a suspect legislation. Article 25 confers right
to practice and profess religion, while Article 44 divests religion
from social relations and personal law.
The whole debate can be summed up by the judgement given by Justice
R.M. Sahai. He said,
"Ours is a secular democratic republic. Freedom of religion is the
core of our culture. Even the slightest of deviation shakes the social
fibre. But religious practices, violative of human rights and dignity
and sacerdotal suffocation of essentially civil and material freedoms
are not autonomy but oppression. Therefore, a unified code is
imperative, both, for protection of the oppressed and for promotion of
national unity and solidarity."[14]
Codification:
The biggest obstacle in implementing the UCC, apart from obtaining a
consensus, is the drafting. Should UCC be a blend of all the personal
laws or should it be a new law adhering to the constitutional mandate?
There is a lot of literature churned out on UCC but there is no model
law drafted. Many think that under the guise of UCC, the Hindu law
will be imposed on all. The possibility of UCC being only a repackaged
Hindu law was ruled out by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee when he
said that there will be a new code based on gender equality and
comprising the best elements in all the personal laws.
The UCC should carve a balance between protection of fundamental
rights and religious dogmas of individuals. It should be a code, which
is just and proper according to a man of ordinary prudence, without
any bias with regards to religious or political considerations.
Here is an overview of the essentials of the UCC:
Marriage and divorce:
The personal laws of each religion contain different essentials of a
valid marriage. The new code should have the basic essentials of valid
marriage which shall include:
(i) The new code should impose monogamy banning multiple marriages
under any religion. Polygamy discriminates against the women and
violates their basic human rights. Thus, monogamy should be imposed,
not because it is the Hindu law, but because it adheres to Article 21
of the Constitution[15] and basic human values.
(ii) The minimum age limit for a male should be 21 years and for a
female should be 18 years. This would help in curbing child marriages.
Punishment should be prescribed for any person violating this
provision. Also, punishment for other persons involved in such an act,
like the relatives, should be prescribed which would have a deterrent
effect on the society.
(iii) Registration of marriage should be made compulsory. A valid
marriage will be said to have solemnised when the man and the woman
sign their declaration of eligibility before a registrar. This will do
away with all the confusion regarding the validity of the marriage.
(iv) The grounds and procedure for divorce should be specifically laid
down. The grounds enumerated in the code should be reasonable and the
procedure prescribed should be according to the principles of natural
justice. Also, there should be a provision for divorce by mutual
consent.
Succession and inheritance: This area throws up even more intractable
problems. In Hindu law, there is a distinction between a joint family
property and self acquired property which is not so under the Muslim
law. The Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), formed under the Hindu law, run
businesses and own agricultural lands. Under the UCC, this institution
of HUF, peculiar to the Hindus, has to be abolished. There are also
fetters imposed on the extent to which one can bequeath property by
will under the Muslim law. Considering all these, the UCC should
include:
(i) Equal shares to son and daughter from the property of the father,
whether self acquired or joint family property. There should be no
discrimination based on sex in the matters of inheritance. The
provisions of the Hindu Succession (Maharashtra Amendment) Act, 1994
can be taken as guiding principles wherein the daughter of a
coparcener shall by birth become the coparcener in her own right in
the same manner as a son and have the same rights in the coparcenary
property as she would have had if she had been a son, inclusive the
right to claim by survivorship and shall be subject to same
liabilities and disabilities as the son.
(ii) Provisions for inheritance of the property of mother, which she
has self acquired or acquired through her father or relatives.
(iii) The provisions relating to will should be in consonance with the
principles of equity. There should be no limitations imposed on the
extent to which the property can be bequeathed, the persons to whom
such property can be bequeath and the donation of the property by will
for religious and charitable purpose.
(iv) The essentials of valid will, the procedure for registration and
execution of the will should be provided for.
(v) Provisions for gifts should not contain any limitations, though
essential of valid gift and gift deed should be specified.
Maintenance: The maintenance laws for the Hindus and Muslims are very
different. Apart from personal laws, a non-Muslim woman can claim
maintenance under Section 125 of Code of Criminal Procedure. A Muslim
woman can claim maintenance under the Muslim Women (Right to
Protection on Divorce) Act, 1986. Apart from maintenance of wife,
there are also provisions for maintenance of mother, father, son and
unmarried daughter under the Hindu law. The UCC should contain the
following with regards to maintenance:
(i) A husband should maintain the wife during the marriage and also
after they have divorced till the wife remarries.
(ii) The amount of alimony should be decided on basis of the income of
the husband, the status and the lifestyle of the wife.
(iii) The son and daughter should be equally responsible to maintain
the parents. The reason for this being that if she claims equal share
of the property of her parents, she should share the duty to maintain
her parents equally.
(iv) The parents should maintain their children - son till he is
capable of earning on his own and daughter, till she gets married.
Thus based on these fundamental principles, an unbiased and fair UCC
can be framed which will be in consonance with the Constitution.
Working of UCC and the Indian scenario:
How foolproof will be the UCC? Will there be more abuse and less
obedience of UCC? Will UCC have negative effect on the society? Such
questions are bound to be raised after the implementation of the UCC.
All laws are formulated to be obeyed, but they are abused. This
doesnot mean that law should not be implemented. Similarly, there is a
great possibility of the UCC being abused, but this should not eschew
the Parliament from enacting the UCC; the social welfare and benefits
resulting from the implementation of UCC are far greater.
While explaining the reason for including Article 44 in the Directives
Principles, it was observed,
"When you want to consolidate a community, you have to take into
consideration the benefits which may accrue to the whole community and
not to the customs of a part of it. If you look at the countries in
Europe, which have a Civil Code, everyone who goes there forms a part
of the world and every minority has to submit to that Civil Code. It
is not felt to be tyrannical to the minorities."[16]
Some legal experts argue that progressive law is welcomed but a
suitable atmosphere must be created in which all sections feel secure
enough to sit together and cull out the most progressive of their
personal laws. But this can be answered by an example of Hindu law.
When the Hindu Code Bill, which covers Buddhist, Sikhs, Jains as well
as different religious denominations of Hindus, was notified, there
was a lot of protest. And the then Law Minister, Dr. Ambedkar, had
said that for India’s unity, the country needs a codified law. In a
similar fashion, the UCC can be implemented, which will cover all the
religions, whether major or minor, practiced in India and any person
who comes to India has to abide by the Code.
Not many know that a UCC exists in the small state of Goa accepted by
all communities. The Goa Civil Code collectively called Family Laws,
was framed and enforced by the Portuguese colonial rulers through
various legislations in the 19th and 20th centuries. After the
liberation of Goa in 1961, the Indian State scrapped all the colonial
laws and extended the central laws to the territory but made the
exception of retaining the Family Laws because all the communities in
Goa wanted it. The most significant provision in this law is the pre
nuptial Public Deed regarding the disposal of immovable and movable
property in the event of divorce or death. During matrimony, both
parents have a common right over the estate, but on dissolution, the
property has to be divided equally; son and daughters have the equal
right on the property. As the procedure involves compulsory
registration of marriage, this effectively checks child and bigamous
marriage.
The philosophy behind the Portuguese Civil Code was to strengthen the
family as the backbone of society by inculcating a spirit of tolerance
between husband and wife and providing for inbuilt safeguard against
injustice by one spouse against the other.
Commenting that the dream of a UCC in the country finds its
realisation in Goa, former Chief Justice of India Y.V. Chandrachud had
once expressed hope that it would one day "awaken the rest of bigoted
India."[17]
Conclusion:
The section of the nation against the implementation of UCC contends
that in ideal times, in an ideal State, a UCC would be an ideal
safeguard of citizens’ rights. But India has moved much further from
ideal than when the Constitution was written 50 years ago.
But to conclude, I would like to say that citizens belonging to
different religions and denominations follow different property and
matrimonial laws which is not only an affront to the nation’s unity,
but also makes one wonder whether we are a sovereign secular republic
or a loose confederation of feudal states, where people live at the
whims and fancies of mullahs, bishops and pundits.
[1] AIR 1985 SC 945
[2] "(1) If any person having a sufficient means neglects or refuses
to maintain- a) his wife, unable to maintain herself, or b) his
legitimate or illegitimate minor child, whether married or not, unable
to maintain itself, or c) His legitimate or illegitimate child (not
being a married daughter) who has attained majority, where such child
is, by reason of any physical or mental abnormality or injury unable
to maintain itself, or d) his father or mother, unable to maintain
himself or herself, a magistrate of the first class may, upon proof of
such neglect or refusal, order such person to make a monthly allowance
for the maintenance of his wife or such child, father or mother, at
such monthly rate not exceeding five hundred rupees in the whole, as
such Magistrate thinks fit, and to pay the same to such person as the
Magistrate mat from time to time direct: Provided that the Magistrate
may order the father of a minor female child refereed to in clause (b)
to make such allowance, until she attains her majority, if the
Magistrate is satisfied that the husband of such minor female child,
if married, is not possessed of sufficient means."
[3] "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform
civil code throughout the territory of India."
[4] AIR 1995 SC 153
[5] "Whoever, having a husband or wife living, marries in any case in
which such marriage is void by reason of its taking place during the
life of such husband or wife, shall be punished with imprisonment of
either description for a term which may extend to seven years, and
shall also be liable to fine."
[6] John Vallamattom v. Union of India AIR 2003 SC 2902
[7] "No man having a nephew or a niece or any nearer relative shall
have power to bequeath any property to religious or charitable uses,
except by a Will executed not less than twelve months before his
death, and deposited within six months from its execution in some
place provided by law for sak\fe custody of the Will of living
persons."
[8] (1994)3 SCC 1
[9] "(1) Subject to public order, morality and health and to the other
provisions of this part, all persons are equally entitled to freedom
of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate
religion. (2) Nothing in this Article shall affect the operation of
any existing law or prevent the State from making any law - a)
regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other
secular activities which may be associated with religious practice; b)
providing for social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu
religious institutions of a public character to all classes and
sections of Hindus."
[10] "Subject to public order, morality and health, every religious
denomination or any section thereof shall have a right- a) to
establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable
purposes; b) to manage its own affairs in matters of religion; c) to
own and acquire movable and immovable property; and d) to administer
such property in accordance with law."
[11] Acharya Jagdishwaranand Avadhut v. Commissioner of Police,
Calcutta (1984)4 SCC 522
[12] Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India AIR 1995 SC 1531
[13] John Vallamattom v. Union of India AIR 2003 SC 2902
[14] Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India AIR 1995 SC 1531
[15]"No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty
except according to procedure established by law"
[16] Constitutional Assembly Debates Volume VII pg. 547
[17] Mohammad Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum AIR 1985 SC 945
Authored by Gauri Kulkarni and can be reached at :
miss...@hotmail.com
http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/ucc.htm
chhotemianinshallah
By Kanchan Lakhani
A state-level function was organised here today to pay homage to Dr
Shyama Prasad Mookherjee. Addressing a mammoth gathering, former
deputy Prime Minister LK Advani said: “Dr Mookherjee laid down his
life for the unity and integrity of the nation. He not only opposed
the permit system introduced for the people from outside J&K, but also
defied the permit restriction by entering the state on May 11, 1953.
The system itself was instrumental in creating differences among the
citizens of independent India.”
Stating Article 370 as dangerous for the unity and integrity of India,
Mohan Bhagwat of the RSS said the Article should be scrapped at
earliest to ensure safety of the people of Jammu and Kashmir from the
evil designs of terrorist outfits functioning from across the border.
He also dedicated the samarak of Dr Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, named as
Ekta Sathal, at Madhopur bridge on the Punjab-J&K border, near here.
BJP national president Nitin Gadkari also rued the fact that India had
failed to settle the J&K issue even after 62 years of Independence. He
alleged that the appeasement policies of the UPA government were
encouraging terrorism in the country. Demanding immediate repealing of
Article 370, he said Dr Mookherjee’s sacrifice would not go in vein.
Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, in his brief address, said
martyrs belonged to the nation and not to any religion, cast or
region. Also present on the occasion were Himachal Pradesh CM PK
Dhumal, former CM Shanta Kumar, MP Navjot Sidhu, MP Avinash Rai
Khanna, BJP state chief Ashwani Sharma, BJP in charge (Punjab affairs)
Balbir Punj, and state ministers like Manoranjan Kalia, Master Mohan
Lal, Tikshan Sud, Luxmi Kanta Chawla and Swarna Ram.
via The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Main News.
http://amritsarmetro.com/2010/03/21/scrap-article-370-bjp-rss/
Researcher in new BJP vanguard
Poornima Joshi
New Delhi, March 21, 2010
BJP leaders aren't known to be "overqualified". But Nirmala
Seetharaman seems to have changed that image when she set foot in the
party headquarters on Saturday afternoon.
The saffron camp's media cell acquired a new profile with
Seetharaman's inclusion as spokesperson in BJP president Nitin
Gadkari's new team of officebearers.
An international trade expert with an MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru
University's (JNU) Centre for Economic Studies and Planning,
Seetharaman was a researcher in the world's largest professional
services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, in the UK.
Since she came back to India and settled in Hyderabad, the BJP's new
spokesperson has been engaged in research work in health, education
and rural employment. She is also part of running a model school
called Pranava in Hyderabad, and was a member of the National
Commission for Women. "I had finished PhD as well on textile trade
between India and Europe under the GATT regime, but could not submit
it," said Seetharaman.
So how did someone from JNU, known as the fourth bastion of the CPM
after West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, end up in the BJP? "I was anti-
Left and part of the free thinkers in JNU. But I never joined any
political party. In fact, till 2006, I was engaged in research. But
when the chance came, I signed up with the BJP," she said.
At a time when Gadkari is facing criticism about sacrificing quality
in favour of the glamour quotient in his team, Seetharaman was propped
up by the party to parry queries in this regard. "What is wrong if
women from the film world or any other profession join politics?
It will only add fresh ideas so essential for the growth.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/89207/India/Researcher+in+new+BJP+vanguard.html
Cong has defied Nehru in its RS nominations: BJP
22 Mar 2010, 0726 hrs IST, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: BJP on Sunday kept up its attack on Congress for nominating
two of its defeated Lok Sabha candidates — Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar and
Ram
Dayal Munda — to the Rajya Sabha. BJP said the action amounted to
defying Jawaharlal Nehru’s stand on the issue.
“Pandit Nehru, in his speech in the House of the People on May 13,
1953, had categorically stated that such nominees (to Rajya Sabha)
should not represent political parties. There should be a high water
mark of literature, art or culture,” BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap
Rudy said.
“By nominating two active party members, Congress has defied the stand
taken by their guiding leader,” he said. Both Mr Aiyar and Mr Munda
had lost the 2009 Lok Sabha polls while contesting from their
constituencies in Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand, respectively.
“It seems the RS has become a refuge for defeated Congress candidates.
Congress is making a mockery of the nomination category,” he said. He
quoted Gopalswamy Iyengar, a Constituent Assembly member, to drive
home his party’s point. “Iyengar in his speech in the Constituent
Assembly on July 28, 1947, said that those seasoned people who may not
be in the thickest of political fray, but who might be willing to
participate from art and culture should be given an opportunity
through such nominations.”
IANS
BJP leader calls for Hindu state again in Nepal
2010-03-22 17:20:00
A little-known Hindu organisation's call for reinstatement of a Hindu
state in Nepal received an unexpected support here from a visiting top
leader of India's Bharatiya Janata Party.
Former BJP president Rajnath Singh, who had arrived in Nepal Sunday to
attend the last rites of former Nepali prime minister Girija Prasad
Koirala, who was also the architect of a secular Nepal, said at a
press conference in Kathmandu Monday that he supported a Hindu state
in the Himalayan republic.
'We used to feel proud that Nepal was the only Hindu kingdom in the
world,' Singh said. 'I will be happy when Nepal is a Hindu state
again.'
The Indian leader said that there were other theocratic countries in
the world - including in the European Union and in South Asia.
'But no one is opposed to them,' Singh said. 'No one is appealing to
(the Islamic states of) Pakistan and Bangladesh to become secular. But
it was done in Nepal.'
Singh, who met Nepal's Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal and President
Ram Baran Yadav Monday prior to his departure, said Hinduism was a way
of life and tolerant of other religions.
'That is why India is secular,' he said. '(But) Pakistan separated
(from India) to become theocratic and look at the state of the country
today.'
Asked about the sectarian riots in western India's Gujarat state under
a BJP government, the BJP leader said his party condemned violence.
Singh also made a veiled attack against Nepal's former Maoist
guerrillas, who waged a 10-year war for a secular state and are now
the biggest party in Nepal following the election in 2008.
'Weapons belong to defenders of the state, not the masses,' he said,
obliquely referring to the allegation against the Maoists that they
have still retained weapons.
'In a healthy democracy, there shouldn't be arms in people's hands.'
The Indian leader said he had urged Nepal's leaders to implement the
new constitution on the basis of consensus within the May deadline.
Singh's remarks are likely to fuel a controversy in Nepal at a time
when several Hindu organisations are calling for a Hindu state.
A little-known group called the Vishwa Ekata Parishad set two buses
and a motorcycle on fire in Kailali district in farwestern Nepal
during a general strike called by them in western Nepal Monday.
The group is seeking to reinstate Hinduism as the state religion. An
anti-monarchy campaign led to parliament declaring the country secular
in 2006.
The new constitution is expected to consolidate the nature of the
secular republic.
However, ahead of the new constitution, Hindu groups have begun
raising demands for a Hindu state.
Last week, a National Religious Revival Campaign kicked off in
Kathmandu, attended by lawmakers and veteran politicians, making the
same demand.
There has also been a series of visits by Hindu preachers, including
controversial Indian Chandraswamy, who have been attending rituals
calling for a Hindu state.
The last of them, a nine-day ritual, was attended by three former
prime ministers of Nepal and deposed Hindu king Gyanendra himself.
Nepal's only openly royalist party, Rastriya Prajatantra Party
(Nepal), is demanding a Hindu kingdom.
Kamal Thapa, who was home minister in king Gyanendra's regime and
heads the royalist party, has warned of protests against the new
constitution unless the government holds a referendum ahead of it.
Thapa says people should be allowed to decide if they want a king and
a Hindu state through the referendum.
In the past, the party called a general strike in Kathmandu valley to
show its clout and also blockaded major ministries.
SEARCH http://sify.com/topics/Nepal.html
Advani blogs against Kashmir's autonomy
2010-03-22 15:20:00
Opposing autonomy for Jammu and Kashmir and restoration of the
pre-1953 status to the troubled state, senior Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) leader L.K. Advani has said the party won't allow the
constitutional clock to be turned back and vowed to get Article 370
completely abrogated.
'All that the country wants is to move forward to the complete
abrogation of Article 370,' Advani said, referring to the
constitutional provision that gives special status to Jammu and
Kashmir in India.
'The nation will not allow the constitutional clock to be turned back
in respect to the state's integration with India,' the veteran BJP
leader blogged.
Before 1953, Jammu and Kashmir had a separate head called prime
minister. The Supreme Court, the Election Commission of India, and the
comptroller and auditor general had no jurisdiction over the state.
Only three departments, defence, currency and foreign affairs were
controlled by the Indian government.
Any Indian citizen wanting to visit the state had to acquire a special
permit to enter Jammu and Kashmir.
However, the permit system was later abolished and gradually the
clauses, which Advani called 'separatist provisions', were changed and
the article diluted.
This, Advani wrote, 'brought (Jammu and Kashmir) at par with other
states in these matters'.
'When in the name of Kashmir's autonomy, it is nowadays said that the
dilution of Article 370 that took place post-1953 must be undone, it
is all these wholesome provisions of the Indian constitution which are
sought to be once again scrapped in their application to the state of
Jammu and Kashmir,' he said.
'The nation's clarion call to the powers-that-be is that India will
never forget Shyama Prasad Mookerji's sacrifice,' he said remembering
the Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder who entered Jammu and Kashmir in 1953
defying the permit system. Mookerji was taken to a prison where he
fell ill after a hunger strike. He later died.
http://sify.com/news/advani-blogs-against-kashmir-s-autonomy-news-national-kdwpubjefbh.html
BJP leader weighed in blood
NDTV Correspondent, Monday March 22, 2010, Ahmedabad
Weighing your leader in gold and silver is passé. How innovative can
your welcome be after Mayawati's money garland caught the eye of
everyone in the country?
A silver chair for Haryana Chief Minister Bhupendra Singh Hooda. A gun
salute for BJP general secretary Narendra Singh Tomar. Now try this.
The new state BJP chief in Gujarat, RC Faldu, was weighed in blood, 75
litres of it for his 75 kg of body weight. All that blood has been
kept in Vadodara for donation "to the needy".
The leader looked quite happy at the innovation as he sat on the giant
weighing scale. For the more conventional, he was also weighed in
coins.
Tomar, the BJP MP from Madhya Pradesh and general secretary, was
felicitated over the weekend with followers firing gunshots in the air
in Morena and a district-level office-bearer ended up injured.
Chief Minister Hooda said no to the silver throne and, it is reported,
a golden crown. But then Hooda belongs to the party that is taking its
austerity drive very seriously. In neighbouring UP, Chief Minister
Mayawati shall soon be accepting her third garland made of money.
Watch Video
http://www.ndtv.com/news/india/bjp-leader-weighed-in-blood-18227.php
BJP general secretary’s show of gun power injures partyman
22 Mar 2010, 1010 hrs IST, ET Bureau
NEW DELHI: Even as BJP president Nitin Gadkari battles to contain the
fall-out of a fresh burst of dissidence within his party following
the
announcement of his team of office-bearers, one of his chosen few
decided to exhibit his clout by a brazen show of gun power and might
at Shivpuri in his home constituency.
Mr Narendra Singh Tomar’s first visit to his Lok Sabha constituency —
Morena in Madhya Pradesh — after being named a national general
secretary of BJP left at least one party activist injured during the
101-gun salute given by his followers. In a brazen show of strength
and muscle power, Mr Tomar, who’s also the outgoing state BJP
president, chose to exhibit his might by parading 101 gun-totting
supporters on the occasion. This act clearly violated the law, but no
could dare taking any action against him for the fear of inviting the
state government’s wrath. MP is ruled by BJP.
What is more shocking is that the incident took place in the very
presence of police and district officials who were there during the
controversial ceremony . Most of the arms used in the ceremony were
said to be illegal.
Mr Tomar’s action has added to the woes of the BJP president, who is
already facing a lot of flak for his non-application of mind in the
selection of his team of office-bearers and the members of national
executive. The process flew in the face of his opt-repeated assertion
that he would go strictly by performance-audit while naming persons to
head important organisational posts. It now turns out that allegiance
to party satraps played an important role in team-selection exercise .
Factors such as regional and castebalancing were completely
jettisoned.
With Mr Gadkari faltering in his first big test, doubts are already
being raised about his next major hurdle — that of appointing
presidents to head the party in politically crucial states of UP,
Bihar, MP and Maharashtra. With a rejuvenated Congress gearing up to
challenge BSP in Uttar Pradesh and the JD(U)- BJP combine in Bihar, it
remains to be seen whether Mr Gadkari goes purely by merit in
appointing leaders to head the party in these states, or falls victim
once again to the pulls and pressures being exerted by powerful
chieftains.
Madhya Pradesh: Gun salute goes wrong, BJP leader injured
Press Trust of India, Sunday March 21, 2010, Morena (Madhya Pradesh)
A BJP leader was seriously injured on Sunday after he was accidentally
hit by a bullet fired to welcome party's newly-appointed general
secretary Narendra Singh Tomar at a town near Morena in Madhya
Pradesh.
Tomar was being given a gun salute by party workers on his arrival at
Ambah town when one of the bullets accidentally hit BJP's divisional
unit vice president Subhash Sharma in the leg causing serious
injuries, police said.
Sharma was rushed to primary health centre and then to Morena district
hospital, which finally referred him to Gwalior Medical College
Hospital.
Watch Video
BJP dreams big for Bangalore
Express News Service
First Published : 22 Mar 2010 06:18:17 AM IST
Last Updated : 22 Mar 2010 08:58:03 AM IST
BANGALORE: There was confusion in the run -up to the BBMP elections.
Ticket distribution was chaotic and there were allegations that
candidate selection was not transparent.
There was no confusion. We had been discussing ticket distribution for
three months and finalised the candidates based on the suggestions of
the party workers. There may be minor differences but no major
problems.
Despite your promise of not letting it happen, people with criminal
background have gotten into the fray from the BJP.
There is no such instance. We have not given ticket to any such
elements.
What are the issues that the BJP feels could fetch votes? i) The
incomparable development work our party has done in Bangalore in the
last two years.
ii) The party is committed towards the development of Bangalore, well
reflected by the allocation of Rs 3,500 crore in the state budget.
iii) Our decisions have pleased Bangalore voters. For instance, take
our decision to bring in a legislation banning cow slaughter.
iv) People know that JD(S) and Congress have been playing a drama over
NICE, they have been shedding crocodile tears.
All international airports or important industries were all built by
acquiring land. Why oppose only NICE? BJP has been an urban party for
a long time, but you still have no single leader who can claim to
represent Bangalore.
Why such a void? There is no such void. We have many leaders. Such
problems exist in the Congress, which is why they had to go away from
Bangalore to decide on ticket distribution. We did it sitting in
Bangalore.
Mention five things you will do on a priority basis if you are voted
to power.
Ensuring drinking water in all the areas; laying underground
draianage, roads and necessary infrastructure in the newly-included
areas under the BBMP; developing and conserving lakes; making
rainwater harvesting compulsory; making Bangalore greener.
How many seats do you hope to bag? I am confident of getting a clear
majority.
What would the BJP do if it falls short of majority? Will it sit in
the opposition or engineer another ‘Operation lotus’? The first
question does not arise because we are confident of getting a clear
majority. If the Congress and the JD(S) make any political conspiracy
we are ready to counter them by manoeuvring the situation.
BJP, Bollywood Ishtyle13 Comments | Post Comment
Tavleen Singh
Posted: Sunday , Mar 21, 2010 at 0140 hrs
This has been a most depressing week when seen from the perspective of
a political columnist. The new president of our main Opposition party
announced his new ‘dream team’ to revive the BJP and his list would be
hugely funny if it were not so pathetic. There are three actresses, a
cricketer, a fashion designer, a sprinkling of ‘youth’ leaders and a
former chief minister who is a misfit among the actresses.
Vasundhara Raje is the BJP’s only leader in Rajasthan and instead of a
desk job in Delhi, should have been left as a formidable Opposition
leader in Jaipur. She lost the election by inches. But, it seems as if
the BJP has decided not to be a real Opposition party, only a
Bollywood version of one. It has to be said in Nitin Gadkari’s defence
that from day one, when he burst into song at that first convention in
Indore, he indicated that despite his ample girth, he is a
lightweight. Not a bad singer but pointless since we have enough real
musicians; what we need desperately is a real Opposition party.
If we had a real Opposition party, six million tonnes of food grain
would not be rotting in Punjab while Parliament is in session. In a
country in which nearly half our children are malnourished, it is
beyond sickening that the Government of India can get away with stupid
excuses like ‘not having enough warehouses’. Just put the wretched
grain in trucks and send it to organisations like Akshay Patra or just
give it free to village shops. Our TV channels did an excellent job
last week in emphasising that the grain is being eaten by rats while
children starve, but there is only so much the media can do. The rest
is in the hands of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet and why should
they do anything as long as there is no Opposition party to rub their
nose in the dirt?
If we had a real Opposition party, we would not be putting another Rs
30,000 crore of taxpayers money into ‘cleaning’ the Ganga and the
Yamuna until we know why twenty years of expensive effort failed to
clean our most sacred rivers. Before throwing more of our money down
the drain, should we not first be given some answers? One example. Why
was our money spent on building sewage treatment plants that do not
work when everyone knows that the only solution is to not allow any
sewage into these rivers in the first place?
But, what is the point in my depressing myself further with these
questions when I know that it is futile asking them until we have a
real Opposition party? If you need proof that we do not have one you
only need to have watched this last session of Parliament. In neither
the Lok Sabha nor the Rajya Sabha did we see the BJP raise any real
issues. Sushma Swaraj’s interventions have been heavy on elocution and
low on content. She ends up sounding like someone trying to win first
prize in a college debate. Arun Jaitley supported the Women’s
Reservation Bill as if his heart was really not in it. There is no
reason why it should have been. The Bill, as I pointed out in this
space last week, undermines the fundamental principles of Indian
democracy and should be strenuously opposed.
Even as I write those words, I slip further into gloom as the face of
Shri Lal Krishna Advani floats before my eyes. Not in the form of the
Hindutva hawk on that chariot to Ayodhya that left so much death and
hatred in its wake. But, as the tired, old man he now is. A tired, old
man who has nothing new to say, no future prospects, but who clings
shamelessly to the few crumbs of power that remain with him. In doing
so he destroys any chance the BJP has of renewal or even survival.
What was the point of him giving up his job as Leader of the
Opposition in the Lok Sabha if he refuses to give up control of the
parliamentary party?
The reality is that he has given up nothing. Mr Gadkari can take his
‘dream team’ of actresses and sportsmen and sing all the way back to
Mumbai and it would make no difference. There remains only one leader
in the BJP. He is a worn-out, jaded old man who appears determined to
destroy what remains of the party he once helped build. With only the
Commies on the Opposition benches, the Government can lapse safely
into complacent non-activity while we the people rely on our own
efforts to withstand a certain decline. Forgive me if I sound
seriously gloomy but it is a seriously gloomy time.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter at tavleens
13 Comments |
Rotting Grain
By: K.C.Sharma | Monday , 22 Mar '10 16:51:07 PM
Rotting grain is really a shame when so many starvation deaths are
happening.But if the real figures can somehow, may be through RTI be
extracted from the Govt it will be found that so much money has been
spent on construction of go-downs and on the Food Corporation of India
that if the same money was spent by private traders there would be no
shortage of storage space.And grain would be available where required
through cash coupons distributed to the really needy. But the Govt
babu's and the socialistic politicians would have even then found a
way to pocket that money and the grain meant for the poor. You have
every right to rubbish the BJP but most of the blame lies at the door
of the socialistic dreams of our great leaders of fifties and sixties
who still control the mindset of our present leaders of the GOP.
Will BJP bounce back?
By: Neetu Banga | Monday , 22 Mar '10 12:16:43 PM
The party needs to stop talk on hard-line Hindutva and focus on
emerging as a true secular party.By inducting educated and positive
attitude people does not mean party will come back to power, it still
have long way to go to win the hearts of the people.
UNBALANCED CRITICISM
By: B.V.SHENOY | Monday , 22 Mar '10 11:56:56 AM
Tavleen Singh seems to have written this article with the editor
holding the secular gun to her head. The criticism of Gadkari and his
new team seems to be pointless and cheap. If Sunil Dutt can be a
politician, and the congress government can honour a dead actor
(M.G.Ramachandran) with Bharat Ratna (nothing less!), what is wrong
when Gadkari selects intelligent actors like Kiran kher for his
youthful team? Sidhu is a world reknown cricketer, a good human being,
a witty orator and a successful parliamentarian. Any party would feel
proud to have him in its national management team, But Tavleen has
nothing but derisive words for these young, politically savvy public
figures. By using vile language for Advani, you are only be exposing
your own lack of balance. Once in a way you may attempt writing about
the lady who runs the country from behind closed doors of 10 Janpath,
who doesn't know the A,B, C or D of Indian politics but lords over the
country. And please mind your language.
Corrupt Officers of FCI
By: Shiv M | Monday , 22 Mar '10 11:06:07 AM
FCI and its ministry has been making mockery of food storage System.
Dont they see how developed world store their grains in sylos and not
even a piece of grain goes waste and they can export same wheat to we
Indians with cheap prices with their so high labour cost. FCI
officials show these food grains as gone waste but at the same time
sell them to black market and pocket in 1000s of crores rs. this must
come to an end and no government agency should be allowed to buy and
misappropriate tha tax money of we common Indians. it's high time we
must stop these unchecked corruption or we and out chilren will die
out of malnutrition while these thugs and rats will get fatter and
fatter day after day.
TRUE OPPOSITION
By: NIRANJAN | Monday , 22 Mar '10 8:54:44 AM
OPPOSITION IN OUR COUNTRY IS ALWAYS TOO BUSY PULLING DOWN THE RULING
GOVT. BUT IT IS ALSO BUSY TRYING TO MAKE SURE THAT WHEN THE RULING
GOVT. COMES DOWN THEY HAVE THE BIGGEST BOWL TO COLLECT THE FALLOUT! I
WISH THE PARLIAMENTARIANS WOULD LOOK AT SOME DECENT COUNTRY'S SYSTEM
AND TRY NOT EMULATE POORLY RULED DICTATORSHIP LIKE COUNTRIES! ATRUE
OPPOSITION WOULD THINK FIRST OF THE COUNTRY AND THEN OF THE PARTY AND
THEN FOR INDIVIDUALS. IN OUR COUNTRY THE ORDER IS REVERSED.
How
By: Neelima Choahan | Monday , 22 Mar '10 7:53:38 AM
Dear Ms Singh, I am a great a admirer of yours. I have read you since
I was a child. I think you are the byword in Indian politics
commentary but what I cannot understand is how is that you manage to
criticize BJP even when you are berating the Congress. Or is it the
other way around? I hope we get rid of this useless government and of
course that cannot be done without a strong Opposition.
Professor Emeritus
By: DR. D. Prithipaul | Monday , 22 Mar '10 5:40:51 AM
Mrs. Tavleen Singh does not seem to get it. With the Prime Minister's
office sponsoring a third rate Bollywood actor with a Padma, it is
proof that the Government acquires its understanding of social
realities from Bollywood fillums. This being so Mrs. Singh's laments
function like mere whispers in the wind - however much she may be
right, as she always is. Is there a debate on the nature of the
reasons, for example, which she marshals against the allotment of a
third of parliamentary seats to women? How will the rural electorate
field its women candidates and what will be the criteria for the
selection of the latter?
STANGE TRUTH
By: V.K.CHAWLA | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 23:11:43 PM
IF THE BJP TAKES A ISSUE & MAKE RUCKUS IN PARLIAMENT , THE SO CALLED
MEDIA CRTICISE IT . EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT UPA GOVT. IS NOT WORRIED &
THEIR LEADERS ARE SAYING IT OPENELY THAT THEY GIVE TWO HOOTS TO ALL
THOSE WHO ARE CRYING - MEHANGAI - PRICE RISE, BECAUSE THEY KNOW HOW
THE THE POOR PEOPLE ARE FORCED TO VOTE FOR THEM BY CLAIMING ONLY THEY
ARE SECULAR
Nitin Gadkari is not an outstanding leader at any stretch of
imagination.
By: Jay | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 20:15:55 PM
When the top level of any organization is occupied by mediocre people
they tend to choose mediocre or below people to work under him/her.
With more efficient and talented people they feel threatened. Nitin
Gadkari is not an outstanding leader at any stretch of imagination. He
is neither a good orator like Vajpayee-Advani nor have we read good
scholarly article from him unlike many other BJP leaders like Arun
Shourie. He may be a points man for RSS within BJP, but he can never
re-invent or re-energize the fast declining BJP party organization and
establish it as the main viable opposition.
Bashing BJP
By: R. Kapoor | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 19:15:41 PM
Only yesterday a Bollywood person, Shatrugan Sinha, a BJP stalwart and
a cabinet minister in NDA bashed Gadkari for neglecting some senior
members in the 'dream' team. Bollywood influence in BJP goes back many
years and is nothing new, however, recently it has become fashionable
for parties to exploit its presence. Didn't MNIK score one over the SS
and MNS in Maharashtra recently? We should not forget how SP tried to
enrope Sanjay Dutt, while already having Jaya Prada and Jaya Bahaduri
Bachachan being MPs. Why should we not forget Raj Babbar winning in
general elections as a Congress party candidate. Bollywood or in other
words the cinema world in India has been very prominent in politics,
especially in the South. So, it is wrong to criticise BJP vis-a-vis
Bollywood influence. I do agree with Tavleen, however, that BJP is in
'gloomy time.' Was Gadkari a racehorse that is expected to win the
Derby? With all the pessimism around BJP, can these dark clouds
disappear. I think they would.
bitter truth
By: savita | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 18:45:38 PM
very well said tavleenji
Nitin Gadkari is not an outstanding leader at any stretch of
imagination.
By: Jay | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 18:25:03 PM
When the top level of any organization is occupied by mediocre people
they tend to choose mediocre or below people to work under him/her.
With more efficient and talented people they feel threatened. Nitin
Gadkari is not an outstanding leader at any stretch of imagination. He
is neither a good orator like Vajpayee-Advani nor have we read good
scholarly article from him unlike many other BJP leaders like Arun
Shourie. He may be a points man for RSS within BJP, but he can never
re-invent or re-energize the fast declining BJP party organization and
establish it as the main viable opposition.
bitter truth
By: vikram | Sunday , 21 Mar '10 3:17:46 AM
Bitter truth. Tavleenji, you are great.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bjp-bollywood-ishtyle/593498/0
Not summoned by SIT on March 21: Modi
Agencies
Posted: Monday , Mar 22, 2010 at 1813 hrs
Gandhinagar:
Modi's letter came following reports that he had boycotted the SIT
summons.
In an open letter, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi on Monday said
he shall respond to the SIT probing the 2002 Gujarat riots ‘fully
respecting’ the law, as he refuted reports that he had skipped
appearance before the panel on Sunday.
"SIT had not fixed March 21, 2010 for my appearance. To say that I was
summoned on March 21 is completely false. I shall respond to the SIT
fully respecting the law and keeping in view the dignity of a body
appointed by the Supreme Court," he said in an open letter.
Modi's letter came following reports that he had boycotted the SIT
summons. He said, "Truth cannot be suppressed. It is now my duty to
place before you the facts that brings out the importance of
understanding what the truth really is."
Elaborating his stand, he said, "After the 2002 Godhra incidents, I
had categorically said in the Vidhan Sabha and in public that no one
is above the Indian Constitution and the law, even if he happens to be
the chief minister of a state.
These are not mere words. My actions have reflected this statement in
its true spirit. I assure you that this would be my stand in the
future."
However, sources in the government said that Modi was seeking legal
help for which senior party leader and BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha from
Gujarat Arun Jaitley, who is a senior lawyer of the Supreme Court, has
arrived in the city.
BJP sources claimed that Jaitley would be looking into the summons
issued to Modi and give his legal opinion on what steps should be
taken. On Sunday, when Modi was summoned, SIT office was kept open
during the office hours from 1030 hrs to 1810 hrs.
In connection with Zakia's complaint, SIT has already recorded
statements of a number of persons named in her complaint which
include, former minister of state for Home Gordhan Zadafia, BJP leader
I K Jadeja, former BJP MLA from Lunawada Kalu Malivad and sitting MLA
from Mehsana Anil Patel, former IPS officer R B Sreekumar, social
activist Teesta Setalvad, IG Shivanand Jha, some other senior police
officers and political leaders.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/not-summoned-by-sit-on-march-21-modi/594116/0
'Marathi vs non-Marathi' narrow political agenda: Chavan
Agencies
Posted: Monday , Mar 22, 2010 at 1636 hrs
Mumbai:
Ashok Chavan reiterated that his govt was committed to the welfare of
all people who live in the state.
Describing the "Marathi versus non-Marathi" issue as the narrow
political agenda of few politicians, Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok
Chavan on Monday said a placement agency owned by one such leader had
recruited 150 non-Maharashtrians.
"Their party's public stand says something and the leaders act
otherwise. I am not complaining," Chavan said without naming any party
during his reply to the motion of thanks to the Governor for his
address to the joint sitting of the state Legislature.
When the opposition benches asked Chavan to name the party and the
leader concerned, he said, "I would reveal the names at an appropriate
time."
Chavan said his government had an all-inclusive approach in its vision
for developing the state.
"Maharashtra belongs to all. My government is committed to the welfare
of all people who live here," he said.
Opposition members staged a walkout at the end of the Chief Minister's
speech criticising him for not spelling out the government's stand on
extension of statutory development boards whose term expires next
month.
He said his government was committed to the development of Marathi
language, art and culture.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/marathi-vs-nonmarathi-narrow-political-agenda-chavan/594098/
RSS feed: New BJP chief spikes journalists
21 March 2010
Coomi Kapoor in the Indian Express on the journalists’ contingent in
the new team of BJP office-bearers.
This entry was posted on 21 March 2010 at 10:07 am and is filed under
A bit of fun, Magazines, Newspapers, People, Television.
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/rss-feed-new-bjp-chief-spikes-journalists/
Sunday, September 13, 2009
BJP laments stab by ‘insider journalists’
PNS | New Delhi
It may still be trying to recover from the jolt dealt by insiders, but
the BJP believes that it has got another problem: ‘friendly
journalists’, who cannot remain ‘insider’ for too long.
An editorial in the latest issue of the party’s organ Kamal Sandesh
has dwelt on the issue. It says, “There are journalists who wish that
BJP should run as per their whims. Any person — journalist included —
has a right to offer advice and opinion but how can it be that a
political party should follow, without exception, the diktats of some
journalists. If that doesn’t happen, the political organisation turns
bad in their considered opinion.”
That is not the only complaint of the party. “A scenario in which
journalists should turn a tool in the hands of an individual
politician does not augur well for either of the two. Our effort
should be to create a healthy balance in which neither the journalist
is a weapon in the hands of a politician nor should the latter have to
act as a shield for journalists.”
Rajya Sabha MP Prabhat Jha, who is a former journalist and editor of
the party’s magazine, stops short of taking names. “This write-up is
not against an individual. This is what an aam karyakarta (normal
workers) of the BJP feels.”
The BJP has already made its displeasure widely known over some of the
articles and TV interviews by journalists and former journalists, who
had been closely associated with the party but later started behaving
like an ‘independent entity’.
Jha says, “Even while working in a political party, they (friendly
journalists) wish to maintain their separate identity, something
special and different from the rest of the lot. An impression also
gains ground among karyakartas that these people originally from
journalism are senior karyakartas.”
The BJP leaders would admit that this impression is not wrong too,
because they (friendly journalists) move about and communicate only
with higher echelons in the leadership and not with the lower rung of
political workers. “The respect and attention they get subject of envy
to others,” the editorial in Kamal Sandesh reads.
The same write-up adds, “It is true that it is their duty to report
but the questions remains: how, when and where. This is a matter that
these wielders of the pen should ponder over. They have to ensure that
in the process of the performance this onerous duty to present the
ideology to the nation, mutual confidence, faith and respect does not
fall a casualty.” And, the last word from the party organ: “We do
understand that journalism cannot be a synonym for bosom friendship
between a journalist and a politician. Yet, we have to stand firm at
our respective post of duty.”
http://dailypioneer.com/202162/BJP-laments-stab-by-‘insider-journalists’.html
Who are the journos ‘running & ruining’ the BJP?
25 August 2009
PRITAM SENGUPTA writes from New Delhi: Former Indian Express editor
Arun Shourie’s explosive interview with the paper’s current editor,
Shekhar Gupta, while revealing the deep schisms within India’s
principal oppostion party, the BJP, has also once again thrown light
on the less-than-professional role political journalists have been
playing.
For the second time in two months, Shourie targetted “The Gang of Six”—
a pack of half-of-dozen journalists who, says the Magsaysay Award
winning investigative journalist, have been used (abused? misused?) by
various different sections of the BJP.
On Gupta’s Walk the Talk interview for NDTV on Monday, Shourie said
his letter to the BJP president Rajnath Singh demanding accountability
in running the party had been dubbed as an act of indiscipline even
though that letter had remained confidential.
There were leaders, he says:
“…who had been planting stories against L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh and
others through six journalists (and yet it’s not called
indiscipline)”.
At the BJP’s national executive meeting in mid-June, shortly after the
party suffered a “nasty jolt” in the general elections, Shourie had
gone so far as to say that “the BJP was being run by six journalists”
who were “damaging the party interest“.
On both occasions, Shourie hasn’t named “The Gang of Six”, but by
repeatedly talking about them has set tongues wagging.
However, the questions remain: is the BJP so feeble a party to be
felled by mere pen-pushers? If BJP leaders are using them to “plant”
stories against one another, are the journalists exceeding their brief
by allowing themselves to be used?
Is ex-editor Shourie sanctimoniously crying wolf or is this par for
the course in other parties too? Are editors and publishers of the
publications where the “Gang of Six” work aware of their journalists
being so used?
And if so, is it OK?
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/who-are-the-journos-running-ruining-the-bjp/
The sad and pathetic decline of Arun Shourie
16 February 2009
SHARANYA KANVILKAR writes from Bombay: Arun Shourie is one of the
strangest cases on the Indian intellectual landscape if not its most
disappointing. A living, walking, moving advertisement of how rabid
ideology can addle even the most riveting of minds, stripping it of
all its nuance and pretence; its very soul and humanity.
***
Once a fiery critic of Reliance Industries as editor of the Indian
Express, he was happy to deliver a eulogy at Dhirubhai Ambani’s first
death anniversary; even changing the law as minister to benefit
Reliance Industries, as alleged by the son of Girilal Jain, the former
Times of India editor who held shares in the company, no less.
Once a symbol of middle-class integrity and probity for various scams
unearthed his watch, his stint as disinvestment minister was
pockmarked with allegation after allegation (although an unattributed
Wikipedia entry claims he was ranked “the most outstanding minister of
the Atal Behari Vajpayee government” by 100 CEOs).
A slow, scholarly, Chaplinesque demeanour hides a cold, clinical mind
that piles the rhetoric and the stereotypes on the poor, the
marginalised and the disenfranchised while taking up high faluting
positions on terrorism, governance, internal security and such like,
through long, meandering essays whose opacity could put cub
journalists to shame.
And, as always, selectively twisting and turning the facts to fit his
preconceived conclusion, and hoping no one will notice.
To paraphrase Ramachandra Guha, Shourie has become the Arundhati Roy
of the right:
“The super-patriot and the anti-patriot use much the same methods.
Both think exclusively in black and white. Both choose to use a 100
words when 10 will do. Both arrogate to themselves the right to hand
out moral certificates. Those who criticise Shourie are characterised
as anti-national, those who dare take on Roy are made out to be agents
of the State. In either case, an excess of emotion and indignation
drowns out the facts.”
But what should disappoint even his most ardent fans, and there are
many young journalists, is how easily and effortlessly a pacifist
penman has regressed from “a concerned citizen employing his pen as an
effective adversary of corruption, inequality and injustice” (as his
Magsaysay Award citation read) to a hate-spewing ideological warrior
with fire blazing through his nostrils.
A son of a Gandhian who now openly advocates “two eyes for an eye and
a whole jaw for one tooth” with barely any qualms.
***
At a series of lectures in Ahmedabad on Saturday, Shourie bared his
fangs some more:
“India is still a passive country when it comes to taking a stand
against terrorism….
“It should, in fact, take an extremist stance and must prove that it
can also create a Kashmir-like situation in Pakistan.
“There are many places like Baluchistan, where a Kashmir-like
situation can be created but, “hum abhi bhi Panchsheel ke pujari hain
(We still worship the tenets of Panchsheel)”….
“Pakistan has been successfully carrying out destruction in India for
the last two decades and has still managed to escape problems, while
India on every occasion has failed to present a unified response to
terrorism and has suffered as a consequence….”
Really?
An eye for an eye? Two eyes for an eye? A jaw for a tooth?
In the name of Vivekananda, should India do unto Pakistan what
Pakistan has done to us? Is this a sign of vision on the part of a man
who some believe should be the next prime minister, or tunnel vision?
Is such barely disguised hatred and vengeance, hiding behind vedas and
upanishads, going to make the subcontinent a better place to live in?
Should the people of Pakistan, the poor, the marginalised, the
disenfranchised, pay the price for the sins of the generals?
Should a great, ancient civilisation become a cheap, third-rate,
neighbourhood bully?
Has Arun Shourie lost more than his soul and humanity?
Has Arun Shourie just lost it?
Photograph: courtesy The Hindu Business Line
http://wearethebest.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/the-sad-and-pathetic-decline-of-arun-shourie/
chhotemianinshallah
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
New Delhi, March 22: BJP President Gadkari denounced as propaganda
that Hindutva was against Muslims and said facts were misrepresented.
Terming Hindutva as the "spirit" of BJP, party President Nitin Gadkari
today said it cannot be a subject of political debate and lamented
that its image had overshadowed its real meaning.
"Whether someone likes it or not, the subject has been a matter of
debate for the last 40 years in politics. I feel people should know
the reality (of what Hindutva means) after serious thinking.
"It is a tragedy of image versus reality. Letters can change but not
the spirit. Hindutva is our philosophy, it is our spirit... which
cannot change," Gadkari said during the 'dedication ceremony' of over
100 professionals as volunteers for the BJP.
The function was followed by a talk on 'politics and Hindutva' in
which Gadkari said Hindutva cannot be a subject of political debate
and it can never be an agenda for any political party.
He termed as "propaganda" that Hindutva was against Muslims and said
people were "misrepresenting" the facts to further their vested
interests.
Maintaining that BJP was in favour of equality in social and economic
spheres for all, he said "We believe in the philosophy of 'vasudev
kutumbhkam' (world is one family)."
Gadkari alleged that "pseudo secularists" were deliberately attaching
religion with a terrorist and said the term 'secularism' is now being
used for minority appeasement.
"... terrorist has no creed, caste or religion.
Image of Hindutva overshadowed real meaning
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
A god fearing Hindu will not kill an innocent Muslim and similarly, a
god fearing Muslim will not kill an innocent Hindu, and if he is doing
so, then he is a terrorist who does not belong to any religion," he
said.
The BJP president said in a secular country, the government, the
judiciary and the media should be secular but an individual cannot be
secular.
He said it was necessary that the new generation was taught the real
meaning of Hindutva, adding, "A proper focus on the issue is the need
of the hour".
Speaking on the issue, RSS ideologue M G Vaidya said he had expressed
"concern" when Sudhendra Kulkarni, the close aide of BJP leader L K
Advani wrote after the party defeat in general elections that it
should distance itself from Hindutva.
He lamented that the "spirit" remained ignored but at the same time
appreciated that it was being remembered once again in 2010.
Vaidya said for BJP, distancing itself from Hindutva would mean
distancing itself from RSS and its core values.
He recalled that when the issue of BJP's relations vis-a-vis Hindutva
was being debated in 2004, he had said that BJP has moved along a
particular line from where it would not be appropriate to pull it
back.
"I had said that if BJP disassociates itself from Hindutva, then the
RSS would take a call on whether to keep Hindutva in politics or not,"
Vaidya said.
The BJP president said in a secular country, the government, the
judiciary and the media should be secular but an individual cannot be
secular.
He said it was necessary that the new generation was taught the real
meaning of Hindutva, adding, "A proper focus on the issue is the need
of the hour".
Speaking on the issue, RSS ideologue M G Vaidya said he had expressed
"concern" when Sudhendra Kulkarni, the close aide of BJP leader L K
Advani wrote after the party defeat in general elections that it
should distance itself from Hindutva.
He lamented that the "spirit" remained ignored but at the same time
appreciated that it was being remembered once again in 2010.
Vaidya said for BJP, distancing itself from Hindutva would mean
distancing itself from RSS and its core values.
He recalled that when the issue of BJP's relations vis-a-vis Hindutva
was being debated in 2004, he had said that BJP has moved along a
particular line from where it would not be appropriate to pull it
back.
"I had said that if BJP disassociates itself from Hindutva, then the
RSS would take a call on whether to keep Hindutva in politics or not,"
Vaidya said.
---IANS--
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/image-hindutva-overshadowed-real-meaning
Nityananda files writ in Karnataka High Court
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Bangalore, March 23: Self-styled godman Nityananda Swami, facing
allegations of involvement in sleazy activities, has filed a writ
petition before the Karnataka High Court seeking quashing of cases
filed against him by the Ramanagar district police.
Nityananda, who is at large ever since the video clippings of his
alleged sleaze activities involving an actress were telecast by
private channels on March two, contended in his petition yesterday
that he was innocent. 32-year-old Nityananda, alias Rajasekharan,
charged that one of his former discipline and driver Kurup Lenin had
conspired to defame him and his Ashram by levelling such allegations.
The whereabouts of Nityananda are a mystery. However, the followers of
Nityananda at his Ashram at Bidadi on the city's outskirts claim that
he is in Haridwar attending the Kumbh Mela. The writ is yet to come up
for the High Court registry, according to sources in the High Court.
Tamil Nadu police, which had registered cases under various sections,
including rape, against Nityananda, transferred them to the police in
Ramanagar, as the Ashram falls under it. Ramanagar police had re-
registered the cases against Nityananda.
-PTI
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/nityananda-files-writ-karnataka-high-court
No decision on direct access to Headley yet: US envoy
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
New Delhi, March 23: The US said Tuesday there had been no decision to
give India "direct access" to David Coleman Headley, the Pakistani
American terror suspect who has confessed to his role in the 26/11
Mumbai terror strike.
In a statement issued by the US embassy here, Ambassador Timothy J.
Roemer clarified Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake's
comment in Delhi Saturday. Blake had been asked by reporters if Indian
investigators would be allowed to quiz Headley. "My answer would be
yes," he said.
"As the Assistant Secretary indicated, the US is committed to full
information sharing in our counter terror partnership. In fact in this
case we have provided substantial information to the government of
India and we will continue to do so. However, no decision on direct
access for India to David Headley has been made," Roemer said in a
statement.
He added that the US department of justice will work with the Indian
government "regarding the modalities of such cooperation".
Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram had been upbeat about getting
access to Headley, after a phone call with US Attorney General Eric
Holder.
"It is my understanding," Chidambaram said, "that India would be able
to obtain access to Headley to question him in a properly constituted
judicial proceeding. Such a judicial proceeding could be either pre-
trial or during an inquiry or trial."
The National Investigation Agency was asked to form a team which will
travel to the US to interrogate Headley, who confessed in a Chicago
court to his role in the Mumbai terror attack that left 166 people
dead.
--IANS
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/no-decision-direct-access-headley-yet-us-envoy
Foreigners in Maharashtra will have to undergo a 'character' check
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Mumbai, March 23: The government has come up with the idea of
assessing the character of foreigners staying in the state and keeping
a strict vigil on their activities.
"We will check the records of foreigners and seek character
certificates from their respective countries," home minister RR Patil
said in the legislative council on Monday. "If we find that they have
a dubious record, we will ask their countries to take them back."
Patil was replying to a calling-attention motion on last month's
German Bakery blast in Pune. The issue of foreigners was raised by the
Shiv Sena's Neelam Gorhe. "What steps has the government taken to keep
a check on foreigners," she asked.
Patil said, "We have already started checking foreigners' visas and
taking action against suspect people." He appealed to citizens to
alert the police if they spotted anything suspicious.
The police already have a rule in place that requires flat-owners in
Mumbai to inform them if they give out their premises toforeigners.
Hotels and lodges in the city have also been told to inform the police
about guests from abroad. The owner of a South Mumbai flat, where US
terrorist David Coleman Headley stayed for more than six months, had
failed to inform police about his presence in the city.
Patil admitted in the council that the state had received specific
intelligence alerts about a possible terrorist strike at Chabad House
and Red Temple in Pune. On the day of the blast, chief minister Ashok
Chavan had said the state had had no inkling about a possible attack.
The Centre, however, said it had issued an alert in October 2009.
Patil asserted that the state police was competent to investigate the
German Bakery blast but would not hesitate to seek the help of other
agencies like the National Investigation Agency, CBI, IB, and the anti-
terrorism squads of other states. Last week, he had rejected an
opposition demand to hand over the probe to the CBI.
“Terrorists are changing their techniques every time," Patil said.
"We can neither deploy police everywhere nor frisk every single
person. There is only one solution — to strengthen the intelligence
system. For that we have set up the Maharashtra Intelligence Academy.
The first batch of this academy has completed its training and will be
operational soon."
---Agencies
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/foreigners-maharashtra-will-have-undergo-character-check
Muslim marriage age issue: Bombay HC notice to Centre
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
Mumbai, March 23: The Bombay High Court today issued a notice to the
additional solicitor general who represents union government in a case
where marriageable age of Muslim girls has become an issue.
The notice was issued after the petitioner has the challenged the
constitutional validity of Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA),
saying it violates freedom of religion.
The division bench of Justices D B Bhosale and A R Joshi also directed
that the girl, who is currently 15 years old, be produced in the court
on March 29, so that the judges may interview her.
Zakia Begum, the girl's mother, moved the High Court in January after
police took the girl into custody at the behest of child welfare
committee.
The girl's uncle had informed CWC that she was going to be married
off, in violation of PCMA. Police also filed a criminal case against
her parents for violating the act.
The parents have sought the custody of their daughter -- who is
currently in a shelter home and quashing of the criminal complaint.
Today, petitioner's lawyer Prakash Wagh told the court that the girl's
parents are ready to give an undertaking not to marry her off till she
turns 18. Similar undertaking has already been given to CWC, he said.
The judges said that before ordering her release from shelter home,
they would like to talk to her.
The judges also restrained the girl's family members from meeting her
till she is interviewed by them next Monday.
The Judges said that they would like to deal with the larger issue
involving conflict between Muslim personal law and PCMA. As per PCMA,
a girl cannot get married before she is 18 years of age, but according
to Shariat law, she can marry on reaching puberty.
All India Muslim Personal Law Board too has been impleaded by the
petitioner. Appearing for the Board, senior counsel Yusuf Muchhala
said the court will have to see if the issue involves "core beliefs"
of the religion.
Advocate Mihir Desai, representing two NGOs who have intervened in the
case to oppose the petition, said, "It cannot be said that if I do not
get married before 18, I am not a Muslim."
"Well, I did not get married before 18 myself," advocate Muchhala,
himself a Muslim, remarked, evoking laughter. He, however, said that
he would have to study original Islamic scriptures to formulate his
response to the petition, and that will take some time.
The hearing has been adjourned till March 29.
-PTI
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/muslim-marriage-age-issue-bombay-hc-notice-centre
‘Islamist extremists can destabilise Bangladesh’
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
New Delhi, March 23: Most of the Muslim population in Bangladesh
supports the secular state and abjures violence but Islamist
extremists have the potential to destabilise that country, say experts
from a leading Dhaka-based think tank.
“The Islamist extremists represent a minuscule proportion of the
population; nevertheless, the potential for Bangladesh to be
destabilised by these extremists is fairly strong,” says a paper by
Humayun Kabir and Shahab Enam Khan.
It speaks about the causes of militancy in that country. Titled
“Understanding the threats from Islamist Terrorism in Bangladesh”, the
paper was presented at a security dialogue organised here by the
Observer Research Foundation (ORF) and the Bangladesh Enterprise
Institute (BEI).
Kabir is a senior research director and Khan a project director at the
BEI that has partnerships with many international agencies.
The paper says Islam in Bangladesh has always been defined by
tolerance, moderation and pluralism. Muslim-dominated Bangladesh has a
population of 160 million.
“In general, most of the Muslim population in Bangladesh support(s)
the secular state and abjure(s) the violence and distorted
interpretations of Islam that have plagued countries like Pakistan,
Afghanistan and some in the Middle East.”
Noting that Bangladesh has witnessed a sharp rise in terrorism
primarily from the mid-1990s, the paper points to four complex forms
of terrorism in the country - political, anti-state, ethnic and
social.
It says there exists a nexus between terrorist groups and smuggling
syndicates, criminal gangs and politically sponsored cadres to nourish
a supporting network for each other.
Citing 2007 statistics mentioned in a BEI report, the paper says
Bangladesh has 1,027 organised criminal groups, two insurgent groups,
five outlawed groups, at least four ideologically digressed groups
with militant intent, 16,062 criminals operating in various gangs and
762 politically sponsored criminal groups.
“Extremist groups such as Hijbut Tahrir, Harkat ul-Jihad-I-Islami-
Bangladesh, the militant jihadi Jamat-ul Mujahdeen Bangladesh or their
dissident groups are at the forefront of promoting religious terrorism
in Bangladesh,” the paper says.
The paper mentions that Bangladesh continues to be a transit and
launching point for Pakistan-based terrorist groups that target India
and Southeast Asia.
“Groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami retain
a significant presence in Bangladesh and have used its territory to
launch terrorist attacks against India…there is ample evidence to show
that the student front of Jamaat-i-Islami Bangladesh, Islami Chhattra
Shibir, also acts as an extremist group that resorts to violent
activities.
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/%E2%80%98islamist-extremists-can-destabilise-bangladesh%E2%80%99
Watch Five Videos: About 45 minutes worth of viewing. (Hindi, English)
Nation pays tribute to first martyr of independent India-Shyam Parsad
Mookherjee
JAGMOHAN SINGH
Monday, 22 March 2010
MADHOPUR(PATHANKOT): The Nation paid glorious tributes to Dr. Shyama
Prasad Mookherjee, first Martyr of independent India, who laid down
his life for a principle of one nation, one flag, one constitution.
Thousands of people led by Mohan Rao Bhagwat, Sar Sanghchalak,
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, Lal Krishan Advani, former Deputy Prime
Minister, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Deputy Chief Minister Punjab, Nitin
Gadkari, National President BJP and Prem Kumar Dhumal Chief Minister
of Himachal Pradesh fondly remembered the selfless sacrifice of Dr.
Mookherjee at the border point of Punjab-J&K border, from where in
1953 he started his campaign to make J&K integral part of India, to
make it possible for every Indian citizen to visit J&K without permit.
To perpetuate the contribution of Dr. Mookherjee towards unity and
integrity of the country, his life size statue was unveiled here by
all leaders naming the place as Ekta Sathal.
Speaking on occasion Mohan Bhagwat gave a call to launch a second
struggle to abolish Article 370, the last remaining symbol of
disintegration.
Bhagwat also demanded respectable rehabilitation of 3.5 Lac Kashmiri
Hindu migrants back in valley, who were suffering in different part of
country. Appreciating the Punjab Government for making glorious
attempt to perpetuate the memory of Dr. Mookherjee, Bhagwat criticised
Union Govt. for soft peddling Pakistan on issue of terror. Bhagwat
gave a call to launch second struggle to complete the integration of
J&K with India.
Speaking on the Occasion former Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan
Advani said that the struggle that Dr. Shayamal Prasad started in 1953
would complete only if Article 370 was repealed from the constitution.
He said that we became victim of British policy of disintegrating
India, even after partition of Pakistan. He recalled the contribution
of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, then Home Minister for integrating
princely states back into India. He said that the demand for autonomy
for J&K or restoring pre 1953 status would be suicidal for the
integrity of the country.
Paying glorious tributes to Dr. Mookherjee, Nitin Gadkari, National
President BJP rued the fact that India has failed to settle J&K issue
even 62 years after independence. He said that appeasement policies of
UPA government were encouraging terrorism and naxalism in the country.
Flaying UPA for starting talks with Pakistan under pressure of foreign
countries Mr. Gadkari said that talks with Pakistan would be futile
till Pakistan was fomenting terrorism from its soil. Demanding the
immediate repealing of Article 370, Gadkari said that Dr. Mookherjee’s
sacrifice would not go in vein.
Paying his humble tribute, Sukhbir Singh Badal Deputy Chief Minister
said that the present generation indebted to freedom fighters who laid
down their lives in the prime of their youth so that we could all
breathe in peace. He said that this statue of Dr. Shayama Prasad
Mookherjee would continue to guide and motivate present generation
about the value of his sacrifice in keeping India intact. Badal said
that Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal was eagerly waiting for this
momentous day but could not come here personally due to ill health.
Earlier, the leaders unveiled the statue of Dr. Shayama Prasad
Mookherjee that has been erected at the joint border of Punjab,
Himachal and J&K. A photo gallery showing the pictorial history of Dr.
Mookherjee’s contribution in freedom struggle was also inaugurated on
the occasion.
Thousands of people from Punjab, Haryana and J&K paid glorious
tributes to Dr. Mookherjee.
http://www.punjabnewsline.com/content/view/24361/38/
To attract youth, Gadkari seeks new Hindutva idiom
Express News Service
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 23, 2010 at 0222 hrs
New Delhi:
BJP president Nitin Gadkari said: ' Hindutva cannot become any
political party's agenda.
BJP president Nitin Gadkari on Monday stressed on the need for a
modern idiom to articulate Hindutva for the youth, even as he said
that the Supreme Court’s 1995 description of Hindutva (wherein it
described it as “a way of life”) must be the touchstone while
explaining the idea.
“Hindutva cannot become any political party’s agenda,” Gadkari said by
way of explaining that it was “more of a way of life”. This was the
first time he spoke at length on Hindutva after taking over as party
president.
“From Vivekananda to the Supreme Court definition, the idea of
Hindutva has been variously discussed. Hindutva is not against any
religion. While Hindutva is our philosophy, there’s a need to employ a
new idiom to articulate it to connect with the youth,” Gadkari said
while speaking on “Hindutva and Politics” at a function to mark the
launch of an association of volunteers “that will promote the BJP
among the youth”.
“Our credo has always been ‘justice for all; appeasement of none’. A
true Hindu can never attack a Muslim, and a true Muslim can never
attack a Hindu. A terrorist, on the other hand, has no religion,
caste, or creed. It’s the pseudo-secular brigade that has unduly
highlighted the religion of terrorists who happened to be Muslims,”
said Gadkari.
The BJP president said that while a “democracy would always need truly
secular institutions”, individuals “can never become secular”. After
taking over as the party president, Gadkari has attempted to bring
about certain changes in the organisation, something that won the
approval of RSS ideologue M G Vaidya.
18 Comments |
Be agressive in highlighting the failures of UPA
By: R.C.Mohan | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 13:00:38 PM
BJP a party with great leaders at the top are still to win the
confidence of people in India although the party too advocate the
policy of secularism in its own way.Gadkari as president of the party
must come forward to highlight the failures of the present UPA
government in several areas. Manmohan Singh has failed in all fields
except in the economic arena thanks to his vast experience in the
affairs. In spite of a global recession, India could withstad the
melee because of Mr.Singh. But in all other fields he has miserably
failed and this fact should be highlighted by the BJP. In Law & Order,
Agricultural, Food Distribution,Controlling terrorism, external
affairs etc the present UPA Government has let down the people to a
pathetic state of affairs.Dividing the hindus and appeasing other
religions made them comfortable in hoodwinking the people to an
extend.Hence Gadkari has to be progressive by being agressive in
highlighting the failures of the UPA.All will get attracted naturally
Indian Prestorika for UPA
By: J.A. Mansuri | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 12:58:42 PM
Both UPA & NDA could reshape by learning for future strategies about
co-existence with & without difference in plural society. Observing
specific areas of SC and Constitution will lead to further polarize
society & national polity. Observing judiciary on Babri Masjid will
bring national integration. Vaccum in philosophy and cadre is on
surface amongst both groups.
Observing Judiciary
By: Ananth Seth | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 13:38:48 PM
Effective and just National Integration can only come after the
followers of Islam give up their false claim on Ayodhya and disown
pseudo-secularists and pseudo-intellectuals. Any other talk is nothing
but an "under cover" attack on the history and civilization of this
great country.
BJP back to winning trajectory
By: Chirag K. Shahc | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 12:58:34 PM
I sincerely wish that BJP wins next elections both in Banglore polls
and Bihar. It is high time a nationalist party gets its due.
BAD PERSONS
By: yusuf ahmed | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 12:39:36 PM R
a bad person is a bad person - a thug is a thug - let us not brand him
- region religion have nothing to do with badness - the new BJP
President is right - his thought process his mind set is on target -
reflects a mental over haul -
Gadkari seeks new Hindutva idiom
By: subramanian | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 12:05:50 PM
The party's Top leadership is making good and sincere attempts to
rejenuvate BJP. The party has to attract down trodden and weaker
sections of Hindus to retain BJP as the main opposition party. Involve
all Indians across religious lines to become the ruling party.
Kangress bhagaoe,desh bachaoe
By: birju | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 12:02:36 PM
Gadkariji,way to go! demolish the evil party ruling us and install the
patriots in power!
Hindutava
By: Parminder Singh | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 11:35:17 AM
My dear brothers and sisters. If a particular word creates
misunderstanding, notwithstanding the intentions behind it, we should
reconsider modifying it. Suppose Akalis say that in Punjab, Sikhutava
be practised or christians in NE States say Christianava be practised
and Muslims say in J&K, Muslimism be way of life, it would definately
not be acceptable to others. I would suggest to Mr Gadhkari that he
should use the word Bharatism as the slogan and moto. While one may
have reservations or objections to any word which in any way seem to
be linked to a particular community or religion, none can have
objection to the word reflecting the country in which he or she lives.
Hinduvta
By: DRJ | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 11:57:24 AM
Can u advocate the same philosophy for Pakistan which is driving
hindus and sikhs out. India is perhaps the only country where
affiliations of Muslims and Christians are outside the country i.e
Mekka and Rome. Nothing wrong in beliefs. But the basic interest to
rest with the country which is missing and hels overseas interest to
destabilise the country.
Hindutva and Hinduism
By: soumik pal | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 10:52:50 AM
Nitin Gadkari's comments are better thought than the usual fare dished
out by the likes of Narendra Modi. But one should realize that
Hinduism, after all, is just a discursive field open to debate and
discussion. It is not monolithic. It is not a religion, it is a dharma
(there's a difference). And by all means is Hinduism inclusive unlike
the brand of Hindutva being promoted by BJP and it's more hardcore
allies like the RSS, VHP etc. Godhra riots and countless other events/
incidents bear testimony to that. And "Mantra", India is not a Hindu
nation.
What is the final solution
By: mun | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 10:13:58 AM
Whilst all these comments are true, there is still the real problem
India faces not now but about 100 years from now. By that time the
proportion of Hindus and others in particular Muslims will have
changed to a point that unrest becomes more frequent and violent. The
reason is Hindus might continue to say India is secular and indeed
practice religious tolerence, but unfotunately, Islam does not give
any choice to muslims. That is, there is only one way of being muslim,
which is the way quran preached originally. No muslim can accept a
State which is not based on quran. That means India can never enact a
law restricting muslims from marrying more than one wife, practice
family planning or any other practices even if they are archaic and
irrelevant to 22nd century. Is there a way out of this? If muslim
population is proportionately, more than Hindus will they allow Hindus
to live they want to live? No convincing answers to this yet.
Hindutva
By: MRR | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 10:01:19 AM
It is good start and it is upto verybody to ensure that they do not
elect the Pseudo secular's back to power in next election and give
this ideology a another chance to put in practise. Good luck
To attract youth, Gadkari seeks new Hindutva idiomNew Delhi: BJP
president Nitin Gadkari on Monday stressed on the need for a modern
idiom to articulate Hindutva for the youth, even as he said that the
Supreme Court’s 1995 description of Hindutva (wherein it described it
as “a way of life”) must be the touchstone while explaining the idea.
“Hindutva can ....Read more
18 Comments |
Let and Let live - Hindutva idiom
By: kulmohan | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 9:52:41 AM
Let and Let live - Hindutva idiom. Nothing else would define the
essence of hinduism better
Let and Let Live
By: Indian | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 10:20:14 AM
Yea that is exactly what is happening with terrorirsts. We are letting
them leave and forgetting ourselves to protect. We are letting
terrorirsts live by voting politicians who are very careful not to
hang them despite of SC judgement
Hindutva
By: Mantra | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 9:38:19 AM
While the Honorable Supreme Court is absolutely correct in defining
Hinduism as a way of life, Hindu's also have certain beliefs and value
systems, which are unique to them. Hindu's like any other religion
believe in the supremacy of god,life and worship. It is therefore a
way of life to practice the three epitomes of any religion. Now
Islamic and Christian nations do give Bonus points to people or
citizens who practice the religion as endorsed by the state. Prime
examples are Malaysia,Israel, France, Australia, whole of Middle East
and to a great extent US and UK too. Now, as a nation, what is wrong
being a Hindu nation? What is wrong in being a Hindu? At the end of
it, India and Nepal are the only two Hindu nations! The consitution
does not need to hurt the religious sentiments of others, nor should
it curtail the rights of other minorities, however, it should not also
give bonus points and additional privileges to citizens of India of
minority beliefs.
Right
By: India | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 10:00:06 AM
Very good. Very rightly said.
Hindus-Divided
By: DRJ | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 11:02:47 AM
Nitinji is making good and sincere attempts to rejenuvate BJP. The
main flaw in BJP's policy is that it recognises only certain sections
as Hindus and rest all as sub servers. This discrimination is being
exploited by Congress. BJP has to learn to recongnise all sections of
Hindus.
Thanks to Indian Express
By: Swanand Bodas | Tuesday , 23 Mar '10 9:35:52 AM
This has been BJP's agenda from JanSangh time. Hindutva by virtue is
comprehensive. The culture here is tolerent and harmonious but of
course is capable to teach a lesson to pseudo secularists who have
been dividing the country for their vote-bank politics. Whatever SC
had said was exactly stated by Veer Savarkar by defining Hindus as
those loving this country and being part of the culture of this
country. But due to Pseudo secular people and even worse media this
has always been prohibitted to come forward. So I must congratulate
Indian Express which at least has made it a news unlike almost other
media channels who are more worried about Rahul Gandhi's whereabouts,
where does he stay what does eat, whether Priyanka was with him or not
etc. than any other intellectual process. This country needs to bring
all religions, states on same level with no special religious laws to
Muslims and no special status to J&K. Only then the country becomes
united
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/To-attract-youth--Gadkari-seeks-new-Hindutva-idiom/594388
Info on 'cash at judge's door' case confidential: SC
Agencies
Posted: Tuesday , Mar 23, 2010 at 1247 hrs
New Delhi:
In the midst of a raging controversy over closure of the 'cash-at-
judge's-door' case, the Supreme Court, which had denied that CBI had
approached the Chief Justice, now says the information is
"confidential".
The Court's interesting reply came on an RTI petition seeking details
whether the Chief Justice of India was approached by the CBI wanting
permission to prosecute Justice Nirmal Yadav of Punjab and Haryana
High Court in the case.
"I write to inform you that the information sought by you...is
confidential and is exempted from disclosure under the section 8 (1)
(e) and (j) of the Right to Information Act, 2005, you have no right
to access the said information."
"Further as the information is not held by or under the control of the
CPIO, Supreme Court India, your request cannot be acceded to..." Raj
Pal Arora, Central Public Information Officer of the Supreme Court
said in an RTI reply.
The reply is in sharp contrast to a statement earlier issued by its
Secretary General M P Bhadran who said CBI did not approach the Chief
Justice of India in the case.
Justice Yadav's name had figured in the alleged scam after the
recovery of a mysterious bag containing Rs 15 lakh at the door of
another Punjab and Haryana High Court judge Nirmaljit Kaur, which was
said to have been delivered there due to confusion over names.
Justice Kaur reported the matter to the police. Later, the probe was
given to CBI on the orders of administrator of Chandigarh.
The CJI had also appointed a three-judge committee to look into the
matter. The then Attorney General Milon Banerji had reportedly advised
the Law Ministry that there was not enough material to proceed further
in the matter.
A CBI court observed that the probe agency filed the closure report
after it failed to get sanction from the Chief Justice of India to
launch prosecution against her. Meanwhile, Justice Yadav was
transferred to Uttarakhand High Court after the decision of
collegium.
Applicant Abhishek Shukla had sought a reply from the Supreme Court
whether the CJI was approached by the CBI seeking permission to
prosecute Justice Nirmal Yadav.
Section 8(1)(e) of the RTI Act cited by CPIO Arora exempts disclosure
of information which is held "fiduciary relationship" whereas the
section 8(1) (j) exempts disclosure of information which is
"personal". In both cases, information can be given, if larger public
interest is served.
The Supreme Court has also refused to disclose the report of Justice
Gokhale Committee, constituted by the Chief Justice of India to probe
the allegations, a document which is reportedly accessed by some RTI
applicants already.
The apex court did not give the minutes of collegium meeting which
recommended the transfer of Justice Yadav to Uttarakhand High Court
after allegations of corruption surfaced against her.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/info-on-cash-at-judges-door-case-confidential-sc/594537/0
Tue, Apr 6 2010
NEW DELHI 6 Apr 2010 Right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party marks 30th
anniversary
The Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, India's main opposition
party, marks 30 years with plans for introspection. New party
president Nitin Gadkari aims to analyze the two successive defeats of
the BJP, which takes credit for the nuclear tests in 1998, for
starting the Indo-United States nuclear talks and for diffusing the
tensions of the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. The BJP dilemma
is whether to pursue the cultural nationalism (Hindutuva) agenda or to
move to the center to widen its political base.
The BJP and its political allies suffered a shock defeat in the
general elections in 2004 and failed to muster a parliamentary
majority. The party lost strength again in the 2009 general election.
The defeats were attributed to the bad performance of the party in
Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh.
The party’s growing disciplinary problems were magnified with the
expulsion of former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh in Aug 2009 for
writing a book on Pakistan's Founding Father Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
The BJP, in alliance with several other parties, was in power from
1998 to 2004, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the Prime Minister and Lal
Krishna Advani as his deputy
The BJP was formed on 6 Apr 1980. It succeeded the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh, which merged with the Janata Party. The BJP was formed as a
separate party in 1980 after internal differences in the Janata Party
resulted in the collapse of its government in 1979.
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RELATED READING:
I have never spent a night in Delhi before (Nitin Gadkari’s interview,
DNA newspaper 20 Dec 2009)
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_i-have-never-spent-a-night-in-delhi-before_1325477
GenNext takes centre stage in BJP, 2 GenNext Sushma replaces Advani
(Hindustan times 17 Dec 2009)
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http://www.bjp.org/
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http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Op121209bjp_nitin.asp
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Dec 20009)
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India urges caution as US mulls N-deal with Pak
Yesterday
New Delhi: India on Monday reacted with palpable unhappiness to
reports that the U.S. was willing to discuss a civil nuclear deal with
Pakistan, with External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna drawing
attention to its “clandestine activities” in the field.
Union Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna
Mr. Krishna was guarded in his comments, but Opposition parties like
the BJP and the Left cautioned the U.S. against such a move. “The U.S.
should think whether this help is going to create more terrorism in
the world,” BJP president Nitin Gadkari said.
“I think, the U.S. would always look into the track record of every
country with which they are going for certain understanding or signing
a treaty.
“I am sure that the U.S. will constantly remember that the
proliferation of nuclear weapons was because of certain indiscretions
of certain countries and more particularly Pakistan and the
clandestine activities which they carried on,” Mr. Krishna said. He
said this aspect “will have to be kept in mind…I am sure the U.S.
will”.
Reports that the U.S. was willing to discuss with Islamabad a civil
nuclear deal, similar to that with India, were based on remarks
attributed to U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson who was
quoted as saying the U.S. was “beginning to have a discussion with the
Pakistan government” on the country’s desire to tap nuclear energy.
She noted that earlier America’s “non-proliferation concerns were
quite severe” but, “I think we are beginning to pass those and this is
a scenario that we are going to explore”. But there was no
confirmation of these moves from Washington.
U.S. Ambassador to India Timothy J. Roemer sidestepped a question on
the issue, saying he was working on implementation of the Indo-U.S.
nuclear deal.
Mr. Gadkari also noted that Pakistan supports terrorism, and there
would be problems for the world if the U.S. gives nuclear technology
or defence help to it.
CPI leader D. Raja said the U.S. move reflected its “very narrow,
selfish vested interests”. He said the U.S. had so far been
encouraging arms race but now it was going to promote nuclear arms
race because of its “large business interest”.
Keywords: nuclear deal, S.M. Krishna, Nitin Gadkari, D. Raja, Timothy
J. Roemer, Anne Patterson, non-proliferation
- News Agencies
http://www.awamimarkaz.com/2010/03/india-urges-caution-as-us-mulls-n-deal-with-pak/
Nitin Gadkari draws flak from 3 BJP leaders from Bihar
PTI
Friday, March 19, 2010 20:24 IST
New Delhi: Four months after being appointed BJP president, Nitin
Gadkari faced his first challenge as discontent grew over composition
of his new team with atleast three senior leaders from Bihar making
their unhappiness known.
BJP set to defy whip over Women's Reservation Bill PM apologises for
Cong MP's remarks on Vajpayee Scuffle in RS,anger in BJP follows as
Liberhan report tabled
While former union minister Shatrughan Sinha aired his grievance
yesterday for being ignored, another former union minister C P Thakur
criticised Gadkari today saying the new team was "not balanced" and
"injustice" has been meted to out to him.
Another leader Shahnawaz Hussain, who was made one of the seven
spokespersons much below his expectations, also made
known his unhappiness by not attending a meeting of spokespersons
convened by the top leadership today.
With Bihar assembly elections due in October this year, these leaders
as also veterans like Yashwant Sinha were hoping for important
positions in the newly-constituted team.
Purnea MP Udai Singh is also said be disenchanted with his exclusion
from the list but has not come out in the open.
Gadkari, however, was unfazed, saying there were thousands of office
bearers and he could not satisfy everybody.
"As far as what I personally feel, I tried to accommodate everybody. I
can't satisfy everybody. As the president of the party, if anyone has
any problem, he has the right to discuss it with me," Gadkari told
NDTV.
Shatrughan Sinha was the first one to speak against the composition of
Gadkari's team when he announced yesterday that "most deserving"
candidates like Yashwant Sinha have been left out while some not so
competent people figured in the list.
Continuing to sulk, he said the goings-on in the party "did not augur
well" for NDA before the crucial Bihar elections. He also spoke of
"bossy and vested interests" asserting "I cannot compromise with my
dignity".
Though Shatrughan Sinha used Yashwant's name, he is himself
disgruntled.
CP Thakur went public today saying the team should have been balanced
and Maharashtra has been given more importance.
"Injustice has been done to me. My contribution to the party is
definitely not less than that of others...It should have been a
balanced team. The list should be revised," Thakur said.
Hussain, who was tipped to be a general secretary, is also unhappy as
he would have to work under chief spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad.
Hussain was a union minister in the NDA regime while Prasad was a
minister of state and the former
considers himself a senior.
Moreover, Prasad has been made a general secretary addingsalt to
Hussain's wounds.
Interestingly, Shatrughan, Thakur and Hussain are from Bihar which
goes to polls in October. Their personal grievances may affect the
party's prospects, feel some party leaders.
Hussain kept away from a meeting of the spokespersons convened by
Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj at the behest of Prasad. Sources
said when Swaraj called him about the meeting he said he was unwell
and could not attend.
However, his grievances are known to the party top brass. Sources said
Hussain himself is planning to take up the matter with Gadkari when he
arrives in the capital.
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_nitin-gadkari-draws-flak-from-3-bjp-leaders-from-bihar_1361000
SIT summons: Lies & falsehood, cries Modi
DNA
Monday, March 22, 2010 19:13 IST
Last updated: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 1:38 IST
Gandhinagar: Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on Monday struck
back at his detractors and claimed that the special investigation team
(SIT) set up by the Supreme Court to look into the Gujarat riot cases
had not summoned him to appear before it on March 21.
Even as activist Teesta Setalvad was busy distributing copies of the
2007 Tehelka tapes in which various people were seen implicating Modi
in the riot cases, the chief minister issued a “carefully-worded
letter” stating that the “SIT had not fixed March 21, 2010, for my
appearance. The date… was invented by some vested interest”. But
Modi’s letter made it clear that he would respond to the SIT “fully
respecting the law and keeping in view the dignity of a body appointed
by the Supreme Court.”
Speaking on his behalf, senior BJP leader and Supreme Court lawyer
Arun Jaitley told a hastily-convened press conference that there had
been “no direct or indirect, or any form of request, by the SIT to
appear” before it. Emphasising repeatedly that “Modi will comply with
all legal obligations, show full respect and respond to the SIT as and
when a time is fixed,” Jaitley said the March 21 date had been wrongly
“leaked to the media by some vested interests trying to intervene with
the process of law”.
Jaitley did not spell out the date that Modi had been asked to appear
before the SIT or whether he would go in person for the meeting.
Neither did Modi’s letter clarify any of these facts. But he did
indicate by implication that he had been summoned by the SIT.
While Jaitley bashed the vested interests and the media repeatedly,
the fact remains that news of Modi being called was confirmed by SIT
chief RK Raghavan himself on March 11 to DNA as part of a telephonic
talk.
Jaitley, who flew down to Gandhinagar on Monday morning, held an
urgent media conference at the chief minister’s office to clarify on
his behalf. “The media has been misleading the people by disseminating
incorrect information that Modi was summoned by the SIT on March 21,
and that he did not appear,” said Jaitley.
“There have been campaigns running for the past eight years to defame
the Gujarat government and the chief minister.”
Taking a side swipe at the NGOs which were fighting for the cause of
the 2002 riot victims, Jaitley said as petitioners in the SC, these
NGOs should “ensure that there was no interference with the process of
law”.
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_sit-summons-lies-and-falsehood-cries-modi_1362099
Watch lots of Videos:
http://article.wn.com/view/2010/03/19/Nitin_Gadkari_draws_flak_from_3_BJP_leaders_from_Bihar/
BJP reshuffle: What is Nitin Gadkari thinking?
March 20, 2010 17:15 IST
Sheikh Chilli is a well-known character in South Asian mythology. He
abounds in vision, dreams, and knows how to inspire people with his
talk. He is brimming with futuristic ideas, but has no idea how to
realise them: The most famous Sheikh Chilli story is how he decided to
cut a branch off a tree when he needed firewood, except that he was
sitting on the branch while cutting it.
Several in the Bharatiya Janata Party [ Images ] are reminded of
Sheikh Chilli while evaluating the team that the party's new
president, Nitin Gadkari [ Images ], announced earlier this week. Some
inclusions are inexplicable, omissions even more so. Promotions and
demotions don't seem to indicate any larger strategy the new president
may have in mind for the party.
First, the party amended its constitution to have a 120-member
national executive, up from 80 earlier: This is fine, as the president
thought he would benefit from wider consultation. But, see the list of
members in the executive, including a mysterious category called
'others' (for which there is no provision in the party constitution).
The resultant national executive has 190-plus members. It can only be
an insecure president who has to subvert the constitution, presumably
to have an executive packed with his supporters.
Now, the team itself. Of the 190-plus members, more than 25 are from
Maharashtra [ Images ]. Actor Vinod Khanna's [ Images ] wife Kavita is
an 'other'. But the party's former foreign and finance minister
Yashwant Sinha [ Images ] has not even been found worthy of being an
'other'. He's been dropped altogether. So has been another National
Democratic Alliance Cabinet minister, Jagmohan.
Those from Maharashtra are neither thinkers, nor professionals, nor,
in any way, expanding the intellectual frontiers of the BJP. They are
politicians mostly from the municipal and local body levels. So, no
doubt the BJP expects to sweep the local body elections in Maharashtra
-- but to build a national executive on the back of that talent?
It is clear that Gadkari wanted to end factionalism in the party and
thought that he would be able to do so by making the national
executive a rainbow coalition. So he has appointed Vasundhara Raje as
the general secretary. But he has also appointed Bainsla, her greatest
detractor and the biggest pain in her neck in Rajasthan [ Images ]
during her tenure as the chief minister, as an 'other'. Bainsla
represents the Gujjars in Rajasthan -- the caste in counterpoise to
the largely Congress-leaning Meenas. Why insult the Gujjars by giving
Bainsla an ornamental representation in the executive?
If the national executive is the vehicle for policy decisions by the
party, it makes sense that members from the state where elections are
due should have been chosen in larger numbers and with care. The
Bhumihars in Bihar (which goes to the polls in a few months) are the
biggest supporters of the Janata Dal - United-BJP-led government
there, and are seriously disenchanted with Nitish Kumar. The BJP could
have snapped them up if it had taken a little care. But, there isn't a
single Bhumihar from Bihar in the national executive. Instead, Kiran
Ghai, a Punjabi from Bihar, who has been a nominated member of the
legislative council, has been elevated as an office-bearer. In Bihar
politics, what is she expected to bring to the table?
At least two members from Uttar Pradesh [ Images ] (where the party is
all but finished) -- Ram Bux Verma and Ravi Kant Garg -- left the
party when they were denied nominations. Verma was a Rajya Sabha
member and the party could not give him another term because it didn't
have the numbers to renominate him. He quit the party and returned
later. He's a member of the executive. Garg represented Mathura and
left the party not once but twice after he was denied a re-nomination.
He, too, is in the executive. What sort of message does this send?
Assam has sent 14 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Rajan Gohain is an MP who has
served three terms. He, however, is not an office-bearer. Instead,
Tapir Gao from Arunachal Pradesh, which sends two MPs to the Lok
Sabha, is a secretary. Moreover, Gao represents the scheduled tribe
quota. So, the voice of the North-East region is heard through these
two and Bijoya Chakravarty, who has been appointed vice president.
The Parliamentary Board -- the highest forum of the party -- has 12
members, of which one is reserved for a scheduled caste and the
organising secretary's post is filled by an Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh representative. So, that leaves the president with 10 members
whom he has the freedom of choice to appoint. Of these, seven are
Brahmins. What happened to the BJP's big other backward class project
of social inclusion ?
No doubt, Nitin Gadkari has a plan for the BJP. It is not clear what
it is.
Aditi Phadnis Source:
Discussion Board
Showing 1-10 of total 57 messages
http://news.rediff.com/report/2010/mar/20/bjp-reshuffle-what-is-nitin-gadkari-thinking.htm
BJP chief whip spills it out: 70% of MPs oppose Women’s Bill
J P Yadav
Posted: Thursday , Mar 11, 2010 at 0148 hrs
New Delhi:
Betraying the anxiety among MPs on how the women’s reservation Bill
will play out in their constituencies, the BJP chief whip in Lok Sabha
today claimed “at least 70 per cent of MPs” were against the Bill
while a senior BJP MP said he would defy any whip to vote in its
favour even though his party had offered it “unequivocal support” in
the Rajya Sabha.
Ramesh Bais, BJP chief whip in Lok Sabha, said there was strong
resentment among Lok Sabha MPs over the Bill and his party leadership
was engaged in placating MPs.
“At least seventy per cent of MPs are protesting against the women’s
reservation Bill and the way the party supported the Bill despite
marshals being used in Rajya Sabha. Top leaders of the party have
assured that grievances of the MPs will be taken into account,” Bais
told The Indian Express, adding that Murli Manohar Joshi and Yashwant
Sinha had already held the first round of discussions.
Hukumdeo Narayan Yadav, senior leader and BJP MP from Madhubani in
Bihar, declared he would defy any party whip in Lok Sabha and vote
against the Bill.
A former Union Minister, Yadav told The Indian Express: “If they issue
a whip (to vote in favour of the Bill), I will break it and vote
against it. Let them end my membership, I am not bothered. I am a
socialist and I cannot compromise on issues of social justice.”
He said he had asked the BJP leadership not to issue a whip in Lok
Sabha and allow MPs to exercise their choice. He also slammed the use
of marshals in Rajya Sabha to evict seven MPs who were opposed to the
Bill.
Yadav said the use of marshals amounted to “martial law” and his party
had been a “mute spectator”.
“History will not spare the BJP. The BJP was like Bhishmapitamah and
Dronacharya in Mahabharata who remained mute spectators to the
disrobing of Draupadi,” he said. Attacking the policy of his party to
support the Bill, he said the BJP would “decline further” if it
ignored the backward classes.
Yogi Adityanath, MP from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, too aired his
protest, wondering why the party had shown such eagerness to back the
women’s reservation Bill when there were more pressing matters on
hand.
Madhusudan Yadav, a first-time BJP MP from Rajnandgaon in
Chhattisgarh, too objected that the party leadership had not protested
the use of marshals to evict MPs from Rajya Sabha.
“The allies and supporters of UPA are protesting against the Bill.
They used the support of the Opposition to use marshals and bulldoze
the Bill through Rajya Sabha. We will not tolerate the use of marshals
in Lok Sabha,” Yadav told The Indian Express.
29 Comments |
BJP is in winning position
By: Danendra jain | Friday , 12 Mar '10 5:32:16 AM
There is no doubt in it that BJP will ultimately gain in election due
to their support to woman reservation bill .Details cannot be
mentioned but realised by true thinker of BJP cadre. It needs some
time to ponder over the issue and merely supporting or opposing for
the sake of support or for opposition will serve no purpose. When they
supported in Rajya sabha there a reason behind it.There is no change
in any part of the bill , they why BJP members have suddenly changed.
It means they did not apply mind in first case and nor they have
applied mind for their next course of action in Loksabha.However I am
of different view.Quota has not served any interest of SC ST or OBC
during last 60 years of freedom and it cannot be imagined that woman
quota will turn the table and bring about overwhelming change in
Indian administration which is ailing from corruption, or give relief
to Indian common men who are suffering from price rise or provide
safety to Indians who are afraid of terror attack or Naxal attack or
help Indian youth who are suffering from unemployment.
women's reservation bill
By: karan | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 13:55:11 PM
Is there any guarantee that the selected women in the parliment will
perform any better than men.Is there any assurance that they will
behave better than men. If one looks are likes of Indira , mayavati,
jayalalitha,sonia, renuka choudri, jayanti natarajan, rabri devi etc,
nothing gives us hope that they are here to change anything that is
happening today.This resrvation bill is a real wastefull exercise.This
only will become an extended family mater spilling in the public
domain with no commensurate benefit to the tax payer's money.One can
not forget the money that this lady renuka choudri splashed on
telephone bills, hotel bills etc only to be reprimanded by The then
Finance minister.
What a mess !!!
By: rao | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 13:05:22 PM
It has taken, as per one of the TV channels (probably govt mouthpiece)
14 long years, after the bill's inception. There must have been
various reasons why it could not come through,except that now as Mrs
Sonia Gandhi (the almighty of India) has taken it as a personal
challenge, the first hurdle was crossed. This is to say the least the
most pathetic situation, whichever way you look at it. Did any one
consider as to why it took 14 long years and would the same factors
(possibly justifying that time, the said reservation -- God knows
which factors) still hold good? We divide the country on all counts,
caste, religion and now gender basis. What is the point in having
reserved seats, which any way would be contested only by the clones
and controlled 'remotely' by others - whatever be the type of
reservation. Improve the lot of the deserving (irrespective of caste,
religion and gender) and the country would automatically prosper. Most
of the women feel such reservation as a disgrace
WOMEN'S BILL
By: kkjha | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 12:20:55 PM
every political party is exploiting the situation -some in the name of
religion,some caste ,others group of castes,look into the
history,yadavs were the most influential upper caste-now they are
backward,thanks to politicians,REMOVE ALL SORTS OF RESERVATIONS AND
WORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY
HAS THE COUNTRY PROGRESSED?
By: N.ASTI | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 12:12:38 PM
Under the leadership of Congress,UPA is trying to divert the mind of
public and sail smoothly thro' current session of Parliament without
addressing the burning issues of PRICE-RISE,SECURITY,DEBACLES IN
DEALING WITH PAK and so on.If a Govt is really working for the Nation
and not only Party-interest AT ALL COSTS,then Congress which ruled the
country for half a decade ,would have brought the living of
SC,ST,OBC,Minorities,Women at a level that none of them need
reservation and all Indians would have been at par in the
progress.Awareness was needed to be created among these masses for
removal of ignorance,Poverty and population rise(which is the biggest
hurdle in the progress).In its stead Indian Politicians ate away the
resources meant for AAM AADMI and throws on the bread of RESERVATION
to different categories,treating them as street dogs,and foolish
Indians enjoy this and get satisfied.
QUOTA BASED ON POVERTY IS IDEAL
By: B S GANESH | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 12:06:10 PM
My frank opinion is any type of quota other than for alleviating
poverty and improving the quality of life of poor people is a sort of
fraud on the nation. B S GANESH
No need of Reservation
By: Sanjay | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 11:46:43 AM
Why Reservation ? Sonia ,Mamata ,Mayavati ,Jayalalita ,Sushma swaraj
are Indias leading politicians without any
reservation.Presindent ,most influential politician of India are
women .They will come up by their merit.
100%
By: George P. Joseph | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 11:38:43 AM
Psychologically and the past experiments arrive at 100%, that is the
truth.
Women's bill
By: Bhaskar Kolnad | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 11:28:13 AM
It should have been 50% reservation for women ,not 33% as now now they
proposing.Even for this ,there is so much of opposition and
reservation.What equality are these top leaders preaching then . Sonia
says it is her husbands dream and many others also speak so much about
it. Double standard.
True face of Women-Bill
By: mohan | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 11:25:10 AM
It is not only the BJP but also many in the Congress Party is against
the bill. It is only due to the insistance of Sonia Gandhi it could be
moved in the RS.
True face of Women's-Bill----
By: romesh.sharma | Thursday , 11 Mar '10 14:55:38 PM
By now SoniaGandhi has known and is assured by her boot-lickers that
there will be some kind protests,agitations,yammering and blabbering
which won't last longer and the anti-bill people will cool down and
forget.This had always happened in India.Too susceptibles with very
short-memories.India is nomore or say was never real Democracy under
Congress rule.How a bill can get through which needs Constitutional
Amendment withough 2/3 majority support is clear sign of despotic
regime exercising colourful powers.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bjp-chief-whip-spills-it-out-70-of-mps-oppose-womens-bill/589444/0
bademiyansubhanallah
Post by Sachhidanand on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:20pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news1_02.html
Trivedi must have been sanctioned by Didi
Post by Mahesh shah on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:21pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news2.html
Main points of disagreement
Post by Lets talk in open on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:21pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news4.html
Five areas of contention between Pankaj Trivedi and Didi.
According to Mahesh shah old Swadhyayee and good friend of Pankajbhai
there were five main areas of disagreement.
1. If Swadhyay claims to rebuild 40,000 houses, where are this houses.
Only 4-5,000 houses were rebuild.
2. Bhav Nirzar is a temple and should be accessible to any devotee.
3. Accounting of various trusts that hold funds from Swadhyay
activities. What is the purpose of accumulating wealth?
4. Dada had promised all the money received from Templeton Award to
use of Swadhyay activities, why it was diverted to family?
5. Love letters between Ashok Joshi and Didi - both were married at
the time of letters.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Archana on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:23pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news7.html
another foreign trip for Jayshree T ? Let us see if she goes to
Gujarat or runs away?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ranjeet on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:25pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news15.html
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Dear Vijaybhai on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:26pm
FYI ... The "BAHURUPIA" person who assumed more than half a dozen
names on YAHOO PUBLIC GROUPS for SWADHYAY is compalining about someone
else using his name...
Herambuster=Trueswadhyayi1=HIRDIP=MukundM=mptshah=Janmohammed2003 just
to name a few.
Nilesh, do you want me to post the threatening messages you had posted
on YAHOO PUBLIC GROUPS?
Review of last 50 posts have revealed that
Post # 384, 408, 413 posted under "Paying tribute to Pankajbhai'
Post # 389, 403, 407, 410 posted under Mukesh,
Post # 391 posted under "Indian Citizen"
Post # 385 posted under "Asheet
are likely to be one and the same person according to my webmaster.
Please refrain from posting under different names. I am sure others
are doing the same thing. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by The swadhyayee on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:28pm
Dear Brother A SWADHYAYEE(Brain Washed),
Still you want to say police will catch the culprits; police already
declared they caught hands and they are looking for Brains....Iam
sorry yours already washed out
next she want to face it calmly coz now she cant be able to give
threaten or what?
next you cant do whatever you want just see what's happening around.
Bahurupia..
Post by Roma on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:29pm
on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:26pm, Guest-Dear Vijaybhai wrote:FYI ... The
"BAHURUPIA" person who assumed more than half a dozen names on YAHOO
PUBLIC GROUPS for SWADHYAY is compalining about someone else using his
name...
Herambuster=Trueswadhyayi1=HIRDIP=MukundM=mptshah=Janmohammed2003 just
to name a few.
Nilesh, do you want me to post the threatening messages you had posted
on YAHOO PUBLIC GROUPS?
Please post those messages and let people know how nilesh has adopted
to swadhyay thoery in real life. Let people know how swadhyay
represntative talk to others.
You are also posting under Roma # 445, Ajay Doshi # 446; Rakesh # 447
and Rajesh Parikh # 448!
Why can't you post all that in one post?
- Vijay Mehta,
Jayshree's love letters were not a script
Post by Ajay Doshi on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:35pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news13.html
Bhagawanano Bhag used for helping criminals
Post by Rakesh on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:38pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news20.html
Swadhyay now fighting in court to save thier people. Kona baap ni
diwali? Who will pay to fight the case? They could not use the trust
funds for earthquake relief but now to protect Jayshree from going to
jail the Swadhyay is spending money like there is no to morrow.
Hitesh Chudasama goes underground
Post by Rajesh Parikh on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:42pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060707/guj/gujarat/news6.html
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 6th, 2006, 5:13pm
Dear Vijaybhai,
Why two of my last messges were deleted?
Sorry, I can not tell you out of many that were deleted what post urs
was. Please send to me at vija...@aol.com or post it again. Please
make sure to avoid name calling and discussing topics not related to
Pankajbhai. Remeber one man is dead and his family and friends do
visit this frequently. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 6th, 2006, 5:57pm
Is there any internet savvy person who can make sure that articles
published by Gujarati Newspapers on "Pankaj Trivedi Murder" comes in
search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN.
There are lot of non-Gujaratis interested in these articles.
Link to Information In English:
http://www.swadhyayee.org/download/EnglishDocs/
http://www.gujaratglobal.com/nextSub.php?id=808&cattype=NEWS
http://www.gujaratglobal.com/nextSub.php?id=809&cattype=NEWS
http://www.gujaratglobal.com/nextSub.php?id=814&cattype=NEWS
http://www.gujaratglobal.com/nextSub.php?id=804&cattype=NEWS
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Swadhyayee on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:01pm
I
Re: Bahurupia..
Post by Swadhyayee on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:05pm
Vijaybhai - thanks for exposing these Bahrupia who has posted messages
under different names in your forum.
on Jul 6th, 2006, 4:29pm, Guest-Roma wrote:Please post those messages
and let people know how nilesh has adopted to swadhyay thoery in real
life. Let people know how swadhyay represntative talk to others.
You are also posting under Roma # 445, Ajay Doshi # 446; Rakesh # 447
and Rajesh Parikh # 448!
Why can't you post all that in one post?
- Vijay Mehta,
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Nilesh Sahita on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:12pm
Vijaybhai,
Yes - indeed it was a nice conversation that we had a while ago.
Yes, please send me IP addresses of messages that were posted under my
name (I will email you my email address separately).
I will arrange to speak with a US Attorney to see what action I can
and should take.
I appreciate your prompt and firm action with respect to this.
To all who are posting messages under my name:
We all live in post 9/11 era and do not think you can not be found
out. You have committed act of "Identity Theft" which is a crime and
you may have landed yourself into a legal mess without realizing it.
Just remember ignorance is not an excuse and Prison has no broadband
service
Regards,- Nilesh
on Jul 6th, 2006, 2:49pm, Guest-Nilesh Sahita wrote:Dear Vijaybhai,
Someone has been using my name to post article like below to defame
me.
As the owner of the forum I trust you will take necessary action to
act on it and remove from your forum immediately.
Regards,
- Nilesh
Dear Nileshbhai,
I have posted a clarifying message on that post. Obviously you feel
totally differently than the post under your name. If you need we may
be able to give you the IP address of that person using your name.
Thank you for nice conversation. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:39pm
Vijay...you have been doing a great job moderating this discussion
board..keep up the good work.
Nilesh, you're quite a tough guy. Threatening lawsuits sometimes works
just fine, but remember, the USA is the land of litigation. You're
going to contact and pay a US based lawyer to file suit against
somebody who posted a single message on an anonymous message board, a
message that was nowhere near dangerous? Good luck...
If you have something to say, then say it without making empty
threats....oh wait, you probably have already using one of your many
alias usernames, since I highly doubt you just started monitoring this
thread.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:50pm
Here are few illegal doing of one of the swadhyayi MOTABHAI Chandrashi
Jadeja involved in kiling of Pankaj Trivedi. Can some one translate
the into english Please?? Are all so called Motabhai in real
Khotabhai?? Where did they learn to snatch land from others? Is this
topic included into swadhyay Parivar 101 teachings, or are they doing
the same what KAVRAV did 5000 years ago!
As I understand back in June, 1992 There was a prime land in
Padadhari. There was 750 Sq ft of prime land. Panchayat voted for
15x10 size cabins. Chandrasinh Jadeja, a Motabhai and Swadhyayi (who
now in jail for Pankajbhai’s murder), applied under different names
and got the land for 11 months. Now many years later he owns a complex
valued at 40 Lakh Rupees!
Ravi Patel
ravi_pa...@yahoo.com
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Nilesh Sahita on Jul 6th, 2006, 7:50pm
Dear Unbelievable,
Identity Theft is a crime.
Whoever is committing this crime - stop it or be prepared to face the
music.
Let me repeat - post 9/11 - there is no such thing as 'anonymous'.
Every thing can be tracked.
My suggestion to Vijaybhai is - please do not allow anonymous posting
on this forum. Let people who are willing to write their name and who
are willing to stand by what they write participate in this forum.
It will make this forum truly useful and beneficial to everyone.
- Nilesh
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 6th, 2006, 8:11pm
Nilesh,
The only reason most people are posting anonymously is that they don't
want the same fate (for themselves and their families) as Pankaj
Trivedi or the 10 others.
If the threat of physical or emotional backlash towards my family was
not there, I would be the first to use my real name.
P.S Someone posting a message on an anonymous board using your name is
not identity theft. Who says there aren't other Nilesh Sahita's out
there?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 6th, 2006, 8:35pm
Can we list all trust that were and are operated under "swadyay
Parivar" those currently in operation and those closed after filing
bankruptcy (in this case the money or land was transfered to another
trust owned by the owners of swadhyay parivar main trust or sold for
profit). I want the location or the town name where the trust were
registered or were just run.
Thanks
Ravi Patel
ravi_pa...@yahoo.com
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Nilesh Sahita on Jul 6th, 2006, 8:46pm
Brother Unbelievable,
I will be more than happy if you can find another Nilesh Sahita in the
world
Seriously speaking - posting message on my name is a serious matter
and once again I request all indulging in such acts to think carefully
before what they do.
on Jul 6th, 2006, 8:11pm, Guest-Unbelievable wrote:Nilesh,
The only reason most people are posting anonymously is that they don't
want the same fate (for themselves and their families) as Pankaj
Trivedi or the 10 others.
If the threat of physical or emotional backlash towards my family was
not there, I would be the first to use my real name.
P.S Someone posting a message on an anonymous board using your name is
not identity theft. Who says there aren't other Nilesh Sahita's out
there?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 6th, 2006, 9:28pm
1.How about all the false cases filed against Pankajbhai which your so
called 'Parivar' lost and got a stricture from High Court Judge for
misusing the system? Any apology or slightest of remorse will show
that you have some 'swadhyay' quality left.
2. For moral matters-Dadaji has more standing than anyone else. You
are entitled to your opinion. However this is again a characteristic
of a typical cult memeber who does not want to see any evil of a
person for whom he has been brain-washed.
3.I have spoken to many villagers myself who go to swadhyay and they
speak good about everybody who go to them with any religious pretext.
That type of ignorance is what makes business of religion thrive in my
beloved Gujarat. I have also spoken to villagers who go to
Swaminarayan in Gujarat and they do not speak well about Swadhyay.
Today it will be your worth before you open your mouth and go to
villages in Gujarat and find out what villagers are talking about Didi
and her brand of Swadhyay.
I am only hoping that Gujarat Government does not succumb to greed(as
some media have reported that crores of rupees bribes are offered to
remove Didi's name from chargesheet) as I am sure that by now they
have realized that there is nothing to fear from Didi and her blind
faith follower like you.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 6th, 2006, 9:45pm
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Nilesh Sahita on Jul 6th, 2006, 9:59pm
1.How about all the false cases filed against Pankajbhai which your so
called 'Parivar' lost and got a stricture from High Court Judge for
misusing the system? Any apology or slightest of remorse will show
that you have some 'swadhyay' quality left.
Please refer to the statements issued by Swadhyay Parivar in this
matter.
2. For moral matters-Dadaji has more standing than anyone else. You
are entitled to your opinion. However this is again a characteristic
of a typical cult memeber who does not want to see any evil of a
person for whom he has been brain-washed.
As I said before you are entitled to your opinion and so are we.
3. I have spoken to many villagers myself who go to swadhyay and they
speak good about everybody who go to them with any religious pretext.
That type of ignorance is what makes business of religion thrive in my
beloved Gujarat. I have also spoken to villagers who go to
Swaminarayan in Gujarat and they do not speak well about Swadhyay.
I do not want to go in to Swadhyay v/s Swaminarayan war here. They do
what they think is best and we do what we think is best. This may not
be zero sum game - may be society needs both.
It is clear to me that you have never put a foot in any Gujarat
village in your lifetime. Let me tell you this - Swadhyay message has
reached each and every village in Gujarat. Obviously some part of the
population has picked it up and some part has not. For those people
who are part of Swadhyay Parivar - this latest crisis has not affected
them. For those who were not part of Parivar (for whatever reason and
we respect their choice) - obviously this has given them one more
reason to do so and that is fine with us.
4. Today it will be your worth before you open your mouth and go to
villages in Gujarat and find out what villagers are talking about Didi
and her brand of Swadhyay.
Do not give me Bull!$#@ of what villagers are talking about, OK?
Instead of relying on cheapo Gujju media, it will be worthwhile for
you to go to villages and check the situation yourself.
In any case - Swadhyay has never been afraid of what some section of
society is talking about.
I remember that even back in 80's also there were Swadhyay Critics and
there will always be sections of society which doesn't find Swadhyay
acceptable because Swadhyay doesn't allow them to fulfill their
personal ego. For e.g. if one goes to Swadhyay and do Swadhyay work
for 10/20 years - no where his/her name is mentioned on the stage but
even if someone give $1,000/- to local community, they are happy to
announce his/her name on the stage. To some people this (prestige)
gives more gratification than path that Dadaji has shown - and they
should follow the path according to their level of development/
understanding.
In Swadhyay one has to sublime their ego and work with everyone in the
Yagniya spirit which is not everyone's cup of tea.
5. I am only hoping that Gujarat Government does not succumb to
greed(as some media have reported that crores of rupees bribes are
offered to remove Didi's name from chargesheet) as I am sure that by
now they have realized that there is nothing to fear from Didi and her
blind faith follower like you.
Hmmm.... crores of rupees bribes offered to remove Didi's name from
chargesheet? Are you nuts? Do you think Indian state machinery and
judiciary is Timbuktu state?
You can call me blind faith follower and I can call you blind faith
critic and we can keep doing this namecalling until cows come home. I
suspect you have not met many people who are in Swadhyay and you like
to believe all of us in Swadhyay are because of blind faith follower.
Well... I leave it for your wisdom to decide and in any case I and our
Swadhyayees do not care about your certificate anyway.
I have said enough about what I wanted to stay and I am going to be
away for few days. If time permitting I may revisit this forum after
few days / weeks.
Thank you and May God bless us all.
Jay Yogeshwar.
PS - Vijaybhai once again thanks for your help. I have emailed you
separately.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 6th, 2006, 10:06pm
Nileshbhai,
How about all the false cases filed against Pankajbhai which your so
called 'Parivar' lost and got a stricture from High Court Judge for
misusing the system? Any apology or slightest of remorse will show
that you have some 'swadhyay' quality left.
Please refer to the statements issued by Swadhyay Parivar in this
matter.
Before you go away for few days/weeks, Pl. post these statements by
Swadhyay Parivar.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by OO7 on Jul 6th, 2006, 10:39pm
Does anyone know where is Jayshree Talwarkar? She was in Tamilnadu and
supoosed to go to Gujarat. Is she going? It is raining hard here so I
feel she may not come. I think she should make another foreign
trip
you Dont know anything
Post by Kamal on Jul 7th, 2006, 12:37am
dear Vijaybhai,
Just read below whatever you have posted......
Five areas of contention between Pankaj Trivedi and Didi.
According to Mahesh shah old Swadhyayee and good friend of Pankajbhai
there were five main areas of disagreement.
1. If Swadhyay claims to rebuild 40,000 houses, where are this houses.
Only 4-5,000 houses were rebuild.
2. Bhav Nirzar is a temple and should be accessible to any devotee.
3. Accounting of various trusts that hold funds from Swadhyay
activities. What is the purpose of accumulating wealth?
4. Dada had promised all the money received from Templeton Award to
use of Swadhyay activities, why it was diverted to family?
5. Love letters between Ashok Joshi and Didi - both were married at
the time of letters
This is the proof that you dont know about Swadhyay. Why are wasting
your time here. (see No.5)
Here, 99 % men (?) are against swadhyay. only 1% used to read you
'Bakvas' forum. and by your forum , 'Kai tuti sakvana nathi' (nothing
will break). We have no any effects by your 'bakvas' . Anybody can
understand You are all FAKE swadhyayee. Everybody from you tries to
draw out Ego.
Brothers, Just stop this 'bakvas' and go to Indian Village and see the
spirit of swadhyay, result of the swadhyay.
The aim of this forum is only to show Ego.
By your all post anybody can understand you are most egotistic.
You are only barking. and remember barking dog never hurt you.
Dear Kamal,
The five contention I have listed is from that article for those who
can not read Gujarati.
This is the forum to discuss the Murder of Pankajbhai and assult
(beating up) of more than 12 people. If you think this is Bakwas than
we hope you wont come here anymore.
This 'ego' line is getting old as is the 'asking the people from
village.' Ask the people from Padadhari who found out that one of the
murder has a 40 lacs complex on land obtained illegally and he was a
motabhai close to Didi.
Even if you have done everything you claim to do, that does not
justify killing of maiming anyone disagreeing with you.
Many years ago, there were more than 700 people killed by Jim Jones in
Guana, and few years ago 87 people burned to death in Waco. Texas. All
these followers had what they thought God leading them. Of course he
lead them to death. History is full of people who thought they had a
Godly leader only to find out the truth later on. Sometimes too late!
We are simply curious - just as any good God loving Swadhyayee would
be - what happened to 40,000 new houses that were to be built. Can
anyone give us the address?
Why with every passing day more and more motabhai in India are found
to be corrupt and using public land and money for their own purpose?
If the Swadhyay was as strong and pious as you guys claim why it did
not stop Motabhai's (Khotabhai) from committing fraud, theft, assult
and violence?
We are not interested in harming Swadhyayee movement but we are
interested in giving a voice to those who want to speak up. Apprently
speaking up in Swadhyay has dire consequenses.
'Kai Tuti Sakawana Nathi" line was used by Manishbhai who is enjoying
the hospitality of prison system for past two weeks, it was used by
these five goons who thought they had to commit murder to protect
Swadhyay. If the movement is good it does not need any Gujdagiri to
protect it. It should not need any Dhamaki and Dadagiri. It should not
be afraid to listen to dissenting voices. Unfortunately, so far anyone
speaking against party line has been threatened and punished.
Like it or not .. Pap no Dhado Futi Gayo Chhe. There comes a time when
your sin catches up with you.
Good Bye and go find another forum where you can sing virtues of Didi
and others - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by You Have Got to Be Kidding on Jul 7th, 2006, 03:38am
Kamal, are you serious?
The truth doesn't really matter anymore - ego would drive one to prove
that they are right. Do you really think it matters whether Pankaj
Trivedi was correct or whether Didi is guilty of conspiring to kill
him?
The damage is done. Over done.
Didi is hiding, Swadhyay is telling everyone around the world what to
say, people are relating the situation with other religious wars
likening Swadhyay to Krishna and Ram, the Pankaj Trivedi crowd is
saying everything negative about Didi and Dada that they can come up
with.
We are just going to sit around and whine that "you are a barking dog"
or that "you don't know the truth" or that "Didi must be innocent"
WHY? so that we can feel like we didn't waste our life by going to
Swadhyay?
Yes, Swadhyay has been a tremendous influence in villages. By
recognizing that the Swadhyay organization isn't perfect and that Didi
may have flaws in her ability to lead, we are not reducing the value
of Swadhyay.
This is not "all or nothing"
But the very fact that intelligent people are not willing to look at
facts that suggest how desperate Swadhyay is to be in control shows us
exactly how ridiculous Swadhyay is becoming.
Don't be a loyalist to the people, be a loyalist to the idea.
Respecting free speech is important, and the only 'bakvas' around here
are those who believe everything they hear from Swadhyay as something
that cannot be questioned.
I agree. If there is gangrene of the foot and you realize that foot is
beyond repair. You must amputate the foot to save the rest of the
body. Vast majority of Swadhyay is great. But if the gangrene is
allowed to spread the bacteria and poison to rest of the body the
whole body may suffer.
This forum is to encourage everyone who loves Swadhyay to
constructively think and speak as to what are the different option the
gangrene can be cured. What can be done so that few bad apples do not
use name, fame and power of Swadhyay for their selfish reason. The way
many of motabhai (khotabhai) have used their connection to Swadhyay
will open eyes of many. Only thru ope dialogue a new more powerful
movement will emerge. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 05:57am
True Believers or so called brain washed swadhyayi,
There is no way to educate true believers. They judge information by
whether it agrees with what they already believe. (And this of course
is by definition prejudice.) The right-wing of conservatism continues
to provide true believers, and Political Correctness has given us a
new generation of true believers. Islam is another prime example of
true believers.....
None of these people want anyone to know what prejudice is. This is
why prejudice is no longer talked about or taught to swadhyayee
although they hear ad nauseum about racism. And since students are
taught to reject the concept of evidence, and fooled in the name of
GOD.
I was born and raised in a small village in Gujarat, so I know the
psychology of poor and uneducated villagers. Most of them dont even
know the meaning of psychology, their brains are been hijacked by
mastermind Sadhu's and Dadaji's (grandfather's or big brother's) or
Bhai's. Even if we get rid of dadaji's(grandfather's or big brother's)
ideas off their mind there is another Didi(sister) or kaka(uncle)
ready to take his place.
Read the Paragraph below its from swadhyay.org
http://swadhyay.org/krishi.htm
"It is the practice of collective farming of a single field (normally
of three to five acres taken from poor villagers in the name of GOD
transfered the land into trusts name and sold later, most of the farms
used for "yogeshwar krishi" are sold, and poor villagers dont even
know where the money has gone to) in a village by the villagers who
each offer devotional labour, possibly for one or two days per
cropping season. The resulting crop belongs to no one except God."
Which GOD?? Who is GOD?? Where the money goes?? and above all you
canot ask questions to GOD, let him do whatever he wants to.
Ravi Patel
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 7th, 2006, 06:24am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 03:38am, Guest-You Have Got to Be Kidding
wrote:Kamal, are you serious?
Yes, Swadhyay has been a tremendous influence in villages. By
recognizing that the Swadhyay organization isn't perfect and that Didi
may have flaws in her ability to lead, we are not reducing the value
of Swadhyay.
This is not "all or nothing"
But the very fact that intelligent people are not willing to look at
facts that suggest how desperate Swadhyay is to be in control shows us
exactly how ridiculous Swadhyay is becoming.
Don't be a loyalist to the people, be a loyalist to the idea.
Wow...I cannot agree with you more..these paragraphs probably are the
best written and to the point of any other message that exists in this
thread. Again....Wow.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by RAVI PATEL on Jul 7th, 2006, 06:28am
GUYS I WANT YOU TO DISCUSS IT HERE TOO, LET THE WORLD KNOW THE SINS...
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewforum.pbs?f=152
RAVI PATEL
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 06:48am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 06:28am, Guest-RAVI PATEL wrote:GUYS I WANT YOU TO
DISCUSS IT HERE TOO, LET THE WORLD KNOW THE SINS...
http://discussions.pbs.org/viewforum.pbs?f=152
RAVI PATEL
I think you have what is termed an unhealthy fixation. Where you not
even good enough to become a krutishil ? was bhavpheri too daunting
for you ?
Its not even about pankajbhai for you is it ?
Its more to do with pushing your own personnel crusade. Its all to
abudnatley clear theres some thing missing in your life.
May you find peace if not in this life than the next.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by reality on Jul 7th, 2006, 07:11am
Hi,
It is not like that nobody know about Didi.
But, Lac of people still in Swadhyay. Why ?
They are not blind follower.
The reality is, Everybody from Swadhyay is Selffish.
Everybody sees their developement under swadhyay.
They dont care about your coments, they dont care about DIDI, they
want to remain in swadhyay.
We know what is the foundation of this quarral, Two love letter.
TJust a few minutes ago you posted as Kamal and thought this forum is
a Bakwas and now you can not keep away form it? Come and write here
again? Why dont you go back to your prayers?
No you do not see anything. Foundation of quarrel is that many people
dedicated their Tan Man and Dhan for a very long time thinking that
Dada & Didi were embodiment of virtues and knowledge and decent human
beings. They started suspecting otherwise, they started asking
questions. That lead to "How dare you ask any question."
So same Pankajbhai who was addressed as a captain by Dada lovingly
became a Rakshash.
Pankajbhai was not to be intimidated. He knew that there might be
danger pursueing truth. He kept questioning, kept wanting Bhav Nirzar
Mandir for all devotees. He must be getting close to the nerve center
so after five years few people decided to kill him. He became such a
big threat from nuisance.
Now that there is so much light on every aspect of Swadhyay, many of
facts are coming out such as the Hitesh had illegally seized prime
land in Padadhri and made a complex there worth 40 Lacs. You think his
position as Motabhai helped him get this?
I hope you would not waste your time with all this Bakwas and people
with ego!!!
Jai Yogeswar - Vijay Mehta
Then what ??????
Post by Kamal on Jul 7th, 2006, 07:29am
Yes, You are right and Didi may be wrong, then what ?
you u believe Didi is killer and must be arrested and send to jail.
Then what
Re: Then what ??????
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 07:34am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 07:29am, Guest-Kamal wrote:Yes, You are right and
Didi may be wrong, then what ?
you u believe Didi is killer and must be arrested and send to jail.
Then what
then the healing begins, by looking back at what is wrong on a
national and kendra level. What the key elements that worked and which
were good what they were and going back to them and refocusing on
them.
The only way forward now is for Mrs talwaker to resign and then let
people answer the finacial questions. Before moving forward. If that
happens the parviar will be in a much stronger place in years to come.
As long as Mrs Talwaker is the head, these matters will keep cropping
up and taking focus away from the actual good that the parivar does.
Didi must step down or come to terms that she is holding back the
parivar. Resign resign resign......
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:08am
Dear Nileshbhai,
Before you go away for few days/weeks, Pl. post these statements by
Swadhyay Parivar.
I believe your motabhai ( in a typical cult style) have asked you to
stay away for few weeks as from whatI read in Akila, Didi and her 27
cronies are in big trouble.
Honestly, I think, Nileshbhai you are a good person but like many
others still in Swadhyay you are too shocked at the turn of events on
Pankajbhai's killing and finding Parivar members involved in it.
Jayshree finds out being a 'Don' has downside
Post by Ramki on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:41am
Jayshree loses sleep.. Will she be spending time in big house? Would
government have guts to put noose around her neck?
DADA was a 'Don' too but no one knew it!
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:41am
Dada was a smart manipulator and he spared no effort to crash any
opposition during his life time. He had perfected the technique of
Sham - Dam -Dand - Bhed and anyone trying to question him was swiftly
given punishment that no one else would even dare repeat the mistake.
JAY YOGESHAR
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by GUEST on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:46am
We all should be focusing on the THE REAL ISSUES here.
Lets make sure that Late Pankajbhai's sacrifice does not go in vein.
I know that Swadhyayi people will not answer any questions in an
HONEST and STARIGH FORWARD manner but they always try to use tactics
such as "personal attacks", "character assasination", "lies",
"abusive language" etc to derail the discussion so these questions can
be avoided.
Can you prove it to me that 100% of the money collected in USA for
earthquake victims were sent to INDIA and used to BUILD houses?
Can you deny the FACT that the cash balance on DAY's books had been
consistently inceasing for over a decade? What is DAY's current cash
balance?
Can you tell us who gets the profits made by selling books, picture
frames, audio cassetts and CDs?
Can you deny the FACT that "SHRADHDHA" trust exists and only Athvale
family members are sole trustees in this trust?
Can you tell us how many different trusts Swadhyay has and who are the
trustees?
Can you tell us how many crores Swadhyay has accumulated in different
trusts?
Can you tell us the total value of land, including Bhav-Nirzar land
that Swadhyay acquired?
Can you deny the FACT that questions are not allowed in any meetings
and if someone dare to ask questions, he or she is intimidated to set
an examples so other people do not even dare to ask questions in
future?
Can you deny the FACT that brainwashing, manipulation and exploitation
have been going on for years?
Can you deny the FACT that fabricated stories are feed to the innocent
followers to potray Athvale as an "AVATAR"?
Can you deny the FACT that DAY's financial books were NEVER opened for
the followers for inspection?
Can you deny the FACT that if someone writes a letter to DAY asking
for the detailed information on earthquake donation issue, DAY's
attorney replies and denies the request for information?
Can you deny the FACT that Shibirs and camps are used mainly for
brainwashing and recruit more volunteers?
Can you deny the FACT that Dada's Putri-Moha is the same as
DRUTRASHTRA's Putra-Moha and Dada's act of GADI-PRATHA establishment
is fundamentally wrong and is betrayal of trust of unsuspecting
followers?
Who pays for Didi's frequent trips overseas every year in summer when
it is hot in INDIA?
Can you ADMIT that it is inappropriate that you use poor swadhyayis
for FREE MARKETING, I mean LAV-FERI and Didi spends charity money
collected as a result of hard work, dedication and bhav-samarpan of
poor fellow swadhyayees?
Has Dada ever worked in his life? How did he managed his finances?
Has Didi or her husnabd ever worked? How do they manage their finance?
What kind of business Didi's husband is in?
Can you prove it to us that the drama "TUMHARI-AMRITA" was ever played
by swadhyay?
Please answer these questions FIRST in CLEAR TERMS and a STRAIGHT
FORWARD manner before I ask many more questions.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by motabha on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:54am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:51am, Guest-the irish robin hood wrote:so whats
the point of asking ? . unless you happen to like the sound of your
own voice, like some sort of broken record.
Great reply. As per swadhyay policy, we do not answer real questions
but confuse people by telling rubbish.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by RAVI PATEL on Jul 7th, 2006, 08:59am
Can you deny the FACT that swadhyay Motabhai's in Gujarat and
Maharashtra were bain washed by Dada and Didi, who filed false cases
in court against Pankaj Trivedi and others trying to expose the Land/
Money making scandal Dadaji started in the name of GOD. Ultimately,
resulted into death of Mr. Pankaj Trivedi by few swadhyayi's who were
made to think they were doing God's deed. Whats different between
Islamic Jihad and swadhyayi Jihad??
If the killers of Mr. Pankaj Trivedi are compared to Mohmmad Atta (and
others) who flew into WTC in new York, Swadhyayi leaders are no less
then Osama Bin Ladin.
Ravi Patel
ravi_pa...@yahoo.com
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Hindustani on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:01am
I agree with you. I hope swadhyay leaders will get punished by law.
Lets see.
cover up to protect Bharat Bhatt
Post by RAVI PATELS DADA on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:02am
Murderers are hiding their whereabouts to protect big wigs in
Swadhyay. Now that they have already admitted to committing murder why
are they not telling the truth as to where exactly they all were in
hours preceding the murder. Police strongly suspect they are trying to
cover up big wigs in Swadhyay who apparently met them to give final
instructions.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:13am
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:15am
on Jul 6th, 2006, 2:25pm, Guest-Come ON Guys wrote:I am detecting lots
of messages from USA and also from India.
Where are the guys from UK
Have they worn 'BANGLES' & SAREES so that they are shy/frightened to
come out and express their anger/view/opinion??
Or they think what's happening is all fine as long as it does not
affect them.
Come on gyus..........at least ......be brave enough, to expree your
solidarity.....
Didi will not kill you by doing so.
Well if they are wearing bangals and sarees, they are alsready
expressing themselves you muppet
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:24am
Who are Yatin Oza and Reshmi jani? trying to defend the killers of Mr.
Pankaj Trivedi. Are they Brain wahed swadhyayi or mean lawyers wanting
more money? See what the killers have to say "we are innocent, we are
into police's trap only because of our negative image from the media"
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:30am
Yatin Oza is lawyer by profession and a politician by brain. I guess
he is trying to defend the killers in order to get voted from
swadhyayi's. He has already shown his way of politics by jumping from
BJP to Congress...
http://www.rediff.com/election/2002/nov/28guj.htm
Also he is known as "Giant Killer" How appropriate for a lawyer to be
known as Giant Killer and defend most famous murderers! - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:31am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:24am, Guest-Ravi Patel wrote:Who are Yatin Oza
and Reshmi jani? trying to defend the killers of Mr. Pankaj Trivedi.
Are they Brain wahed swadhyayi or mean lawyers wanting more money? See
what the killers have to say "we are innocent, we are into police's
trap only because of our negative image from the media"
[img]http://www.akilaindia.com/daily/news_img/main019.gif[/mg]
Well the police caving into solving a crime as quickly as they can due
to media pressure never ever happens. Well not in your world. As long
as the mob gets justice ..who cares about civil liberties....damn
human rights....just put someone in jail and make us feel safe in our
homes.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Hindustani on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:33am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:30am, Guest-Ravi Patel wrote:Yatin Oza is lawyer
by profession and a politician by brain. I guess he is trying to
defend the killers in order to get voted from swadhyayi's. He has
already shown his way of politics by jumping from BJP to Congress...
http://www.rediff.com/election/2002/nov/28guj.htm
I thought killers of Pankaj Trivedi already admitted crime. I saw it
on TV. Now what happened?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:39am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:33am, Guest-Hindustani wrote:I thought killers of
Pankaj Trivedi already admitted crime. I saw it on TV. Now what
happened?
they admitted to the crime under duress
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:40am
on Today at 09:30am, Guest-Ravi Patel wrote:Yatin Oza is lawyer by
profession and a politician by brain. I guess he is trying to defend
the killers in order to get voted from swadhyayi's. He has already
shown his way of politics by jumping from BJP to Congress...
http://www.rediff.com/election/2002/nov/28guj.htm
I thought killers of Pankaj Trivedi already admitted crime. I saw it
on TV. Now what happened?
May be the lawyer defend them did not see it!
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by ravi patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:49am
"they admitted to the crime under Pressure"
May be they Murdered Mr. Pankaj Trivedi under Pressure, they might
have not even knew that they were actually killing him.
Thanks
-Ravi
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Hindustani on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:52am
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by the irish robin hood on Jul 7th, 2006, 10:00am
on Jul 7th, 2006, 09:52am, Guest-Hindustani wrote:May be killers
realised mistake they made and now talking as lawyer told them. Lets
wait and watch now what happen next. I am sure Jayshree is keeping
close watch on this case.
Well lets see the next time your beaten into a making a confession,
lets see how strong your resolve is. The police through their own
incompetnace may have screwed up the case big time.
Dhongi ko Gujarat Bhalo
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 10:01am
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Chitralekha on Jul 7th, 2006, 10:07am
I read inChitralekha too about corruption and misuse of power in
swadhyay. Now atleast follwing media has written about swadhyay case
and exposed them
1> Aarpar
2> Gujarat Samachar
3> Akila
4> mumbai Samachar
5> sandesh
6> Times Of India
7> Divya Bhaskar
8> Zee TV
Lets see if swadhyay leaders decide to take any action against them.
Root cause of this evil was the greatman himself
Post by Chitralekha on Jul 7th, 2006, 10:13am
Chitralekha did an expose of Swadhyay back in July 2002. Documenting
as to what was going on behind the closed doors, how Dada transferred
millions of rupees to his adopted daughter and suddenly all those long
time dedicated Swadhyayees like Mahesh Shah and Rudhani etc became a
target of 'hate campaign' Even Chitralekha took a big risk of standing
up to the big bully. Link may not work, please see the images posted
http://www.chitralekha.com/content/Friday1.asp#3
http://www.chitralekha.com/content/Friday1.asp#4
http://www.chitralekha.com/content/Friday1.asp#1
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by An Observer on Jul 7th, 2006, 11:09am
1. People listed by Pankajbhai as potential killers are banned by
court, not to leave India. Is this true?
2. Manish Savsani is in Jail. Does anybody have his photo behind the
bars in Jail uniform?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Sunil on Jul 7th, 2006, 11:28am
Check all the preachings of DADA & analyse his acts you will find them
exactly opposite.So there are no opponents of DADA as he himself is
his biggest opponent.
All the procedures of funds collection are devised ,applied & followed
up by DADA why to blame DIDI only
Before this present crises in DADA's reggime people like Haribhai
Kothari,Dayhabhai Jani,Manibhai Amin etc. were tortured, threatened &
excommunicated.They were called asuras & were also beaten by the then
blind followers of DADA.
DADA is the mastermind behind all false stories like Japan
Conference,Invitation of Mr.Compton,Vinoba etc.
He had copied other's books (Hindunche Samajrachna Shastra,Gita Tatwa
Vimarsh,Geeta Purusharthprabhodini,Geeta Pravachans by Vinoba,Kuransar
etc.He copied it To To but never mentioned their Names (Krudanyata?)
but the blind swadhyayi is forced to say after the Chintanika that all
the thoughts are of DADA & nothing is mine.
So dear open your eyes, study the history, find out why all the old
vetrens have left Swadhyaya.
If you want to continue Swadhaya nobody can stop you because Swadhyaya
is Study of self & is not owened by greedy Athawales.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 12:28pm
Sunil says.. "DADA is the mastermind behind all false stories like
Japan Conference,Invitation of Mr.Compton,Vinoba etc."
I Truely agree with Sunil, not only that but some followers say that
his leg was 300 years old and he is Avtar of Krishna.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by You Have Got to Be Kidding on Jul 7th, 2006, 12:49pm
Let us all take a step back for a second and wonder what we are out to
do:
(1) Do we want Didi to admit to all of these things? Would that make
everything better?
(2) Do we want all of the Swadhyay leadership to resign? Is that
possible? All of these years we beamed about Swadhyay's structure-less
structure and now that we don't like the way it works we scream
treason?
(3) Do we want Swadhyay to disappear? Would that make us feel like we
succeeded in bringing something down that was making us feel down?
Trying to make everyone believe that Didi is awful and she has cronies
(who are intelligent people) is just as ignorant as what you fight.
Trying to make it seem like Pankaj Trivedi and crew are ideal martyrs
is also just as ignorant - they don't have a spotless record of
integrity in the language or methods they use.
Is it true that things in Swadhyay's operations and governance should
be better? Absolutely.
Whether directly responsible or not, is Didi responsible? If a good
leader, she should feel so (even if she has nothing to do with it).
Is all of Swadhyay a big hoax? Of course not. Use your own brain, you
weren't duped by going to Swadhyay - you just feel like it now.
It is our philosophy as much as it is Didis or anyone else. Step and
say something useful that we keep the best of Swadhyay intact and the
worst of Swadhyay less damaging.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by An Observer on Jul 7th, 2006, 12:51pm
Avtar Of Krishna?
I think people should know the facts re" Kusumbahen" and "Kum kum
Pagla"
Lord Krishna was known for paltonic love and not..
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by You Have Got To be Kidding on Jul 7th, 2006, 12:58pm
Irish Robin Hood:
All confessions in India come with a beating; police brutality is
tolerated and acceptable, it is not an excuse for a technicality to
make it seem like this was a conspiracy.
Would a technicality vindicate Swadhyay/Swadhyayees from being party
to the conflict with Pankaj Trivedi?
It doesn't matter whether they killed him or not. Say he was still
alive: Is it acceptable to you that Swadhyayees wanted him dead?
Is it acceptable to you that die hard Swadhyayees will do anything
(including deferring their own intellect) to prove Swadhyay's
innocence? Are we puppets?
The problem isn't his murder, it is the escalation and obsession with
this conflict that is ruining the essence of Swadhyay.
One more kendra is closed
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 1:53pm
Aaradhana School in Amadawad shuts down the Swadhyay at their
property. They had given permission to conduct Swadhyay meeting under
impression that it was for a good cause but after the arrest of
several of prominent leaders they have decided not to allow Swadhyay
meeting at their place. Article in Gujarati.
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060708/guj/gujarat/news3.html
Shocking report by auditors..
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 1:55pm
Suryakant Mehta Institute of Charter Accounting has revealed
sensational and damaging information.
They were auditors for project "Matsya Gandha" Basically there are
four trusts under this project - Arnav Mandir, Agasti Pujan, Ratnakar
Pujan, Arnan Pujan.
Matsya Gandha Project was started with a vision of upliftment of
fisherman community. Expert fisherman and women were to work on
fishing boat and the income generated was to be used for loan and
scholarship of fisherman community. It was said that there will be 100
boats for this purpose.
But the real fact is..
There is not a SINGLE fishing boat under the name of any of these
trusts. All fishing boats are under the name of one person (Swadhyay
leader) and he is using them as his personal property. Not a single
instance of loan or scholarship is evident in any of the four trusts.
All these fishing boats are being used as commercial properteis but
they have not paid any income tax.
They found no evidence of any prior audit of any of these trusts and
if it was audited there is no evidence of any publication of it.
On Feb 27, 2004 it was announced at Tatognan Vidyapith after the Aarti
that " We have 100 boats in Arabian sea in Gujarat and Maharashtra, in
one more year we shall have 100 more."
Not a single trust has shown any income from fishing.
Charity commissioner, tax authorities and general public are entitled
to know
Whose name are all these boats under?
What is the registration numbers?
Where is the office?
Who if anyone has audited accounts and where has it been filed?
Partial translation of sensation article in Gujarati. - Vijay Mehta
So it seems like poor fisherman thought they were helping community by
fishing to help scholarship for their community but they were helping
some Motabhai?
For full article in Gujarati go to:
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060708/guj/national/anu.html
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 3:56pm
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/c1.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/marinajare.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/c2.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/c3.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/c4.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/kankarichalo.pdf
http://www.aarpar.com/web%20246/pdf/newsium.pdf
Shrutiben's Interview
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 4:11pm
Pl. read Shrutiben's interview on Sandesh. When you are a victim of
Mafia, victims often choose to stay quiet rather than seek justice.
Same way Shrutiben and Himanshu did not have the courage to stand up
and ask for justice. How much fear they must have to control their
anger and frustration. This gives you some idea of what Swadhyay is as
seen by those who really know it.
Didi is the mastermind behind the murder - Shah
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 4:24pm
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Amit on Jul 7th, 2006, 6:05pm
Does any one have recorded interview of Didi which was aired on Star/
DirecTV? I was asked by one swadhyayi to record today but I don't have
STAR/DirecTV.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 6:47pm
Translation of Didi's ( with two D's) interview on Star TV as given on
Akila:
1. Me and Swadhyay Parivar is sorrowed by Pankaj Trivedi's death!
However as matter is in court she refused to say anything more!
It is a brutal murder and we all know you ordered it.
2. Love letters are part of drama script.
Sure! You must be a very relaxed person to write drama script than to
worry about how to instill 'sanskars' in millions of people.
3. Swadhyay Parivar have not lost its cool in spite of many incidents.
Sure! You never expected such a back-lash from Society and Media. It
is not coolness! You have become speechless.
4. All our accounts are audited and hence there is no financial
irregularities.
Sounds like audited accounts of 'Enron' to me!
5. I am not President of Parivar. I am part of it.
Sure. The same way Dawood is part of 'D' gang.
6. Swadhyayees are showing tremondous patience and unity.
They all are so shell -shocked. Because of her they are branded Goonda-
Parivar by Sacchidanand. What unity she is talking about? That
Swadhyayees are not talking against her? It is a false assumption.
The way she has spoken smells of 'understanding' between Gujarat
Government and her.
Well, she can escape Gujarat Government but she will not escape God's
anger for killing an innocent man.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 7th, 2006, 6:55pm
So true...karma's a b**ch, as they say...
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 7th, 2006, 7:52pm
The way she has spoken smells of 'understanding' between Gujarat
Government and her.
Well, she can escape Gujarat Government but she will not escape God's
anger for killing an innocent man.
Aagee agee deekho hota hain kya.....
I cheated on you,
YOU cheated on me
I can't believe we are still together,
how can this be?
I suppose to leave you,
you suppose to leave me.
But cheating on eachother didn't set us free.
Now we are here, screwing everybody.
No it doesn't hurt and we don't mind,
cuz that what they say, Beliving is blind.
So you honestly think this is true SWADHYAY or
just a MASS MOVEMENT? Beacause cheating on
eachother really proves alot.
-PUJYA DIDIJI
Heat is on!!!
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 7th, 2006, 8:02pm
27 Motabhai's have been served summons. They had filed identical
wrongful cases against Pankajbhai. Police is suspecting higher up in
Swadhyay behind the murder.
Amadawad: Ex Swadhyay member Bhupendra Patel has written a letter to
Chief High Court Judge and demanded justice. If not on Aug 1e has sent
a copy of this letter to President of India, The prime minister, Ch he
will start "fast until death" at Income Tax Circle.
Hief minister of Gujarat, Chief justice of supreme court of India and
Governer of Gujarat.
Based on the sensational information obtained from five people so far
arrested f
or Pankajbhai's murder Police commissioner and DCP has met with Home
Minister of Gujarat. On other hand rumors are flying that Didi might
be on verge of getting a notice. Didi was said to have given a speech
at Madhav Baugh in Mumbai on Friday July 7th.
27 Motabhai's in Gujarat have been told not to leave the country.
(partial translation)
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by RAVI PATEL on Jul 7th, 2006, 8:20pm
Mukhda Dekh Le DIDI jara darpan main..
http://www.musicindiaonline.com/p/x/pVm7Q6IxUt.As1NMvHdW/
The Greatest swadhyayi of all time.... Every swadhyayi musty listen
this.
God Bless Us all..
Ravi Patel
ravi_pa...@yahoo.com
To listen more songs from this great swadhyayi click this...
http://www.musicindiaonline.com/l/29/s/album.5581/
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 8:46pm
http://www.divyabhaskar.co.in/newsfromgujarat/newsfromahmedabad/ahmedabadnews_03.asp
Didi's show of Power. Will Gujarat Government be scared?
Didi said 'We need to continue Manushya Gaurav Work'.
Is she planning to make more people 'Krantikari' and 'Shahid' like
Pankajbhai?
When will Police take action?
US Based Swadhyayee speaks...
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 7th, 2006, 8:54pm
US based swadhyayi blasts Gujarat Global in defense of Parivar
2006-06-27 23:50:54
Gujarat Global News Network, Ahmedabad
For last couple of days we have been receiving number of e mails and
telephone calls about the activities of Swadhyay Parivar, both for and
against. A day before, we received a letter which shows the approach
of those who claim that there is nothing wrong with the Parivar and it
is being wrongly dragged into a controversy involving the murder of a
swadhyayi, Pankaj Trivedi.
We have nothing to say since the tone and tenor of the letter shows
prejudiced and parochial approach which is very characteristic of
followers of sects. What we have reported is already on our website.
But to claim that only loyalists know the truth is to give a go by
progressive and open minded outlook which is necessary for the healthy
growth of anyone whether an individual or an organization.
We would like to quote Osho to describe the situation of the followers
"In thousands of years we have made Gautam Buddha, the Buddha, Christ
a Christian, but we have remained same!" Deification of a person or
organization leads only to hypocrisy and all other associated evils.
Here is an e mail Shreyas Patel of Bank of America Charlotte NC USA
has sent to me the editor ofwww.gujaratglobal.com.
Since the death of Mr. Pankaj Trivedi you have published articles
blaming and defaming the entire Swadhyaya Parivaar. You have not tried
to verify your information or print it objectively. One would expect a
newspaper to print only facts and not unduly prejudge. You have not
taken into account a clean track record of Swadhyaya work and its
service to people. Your articles have hurt all the members of
Swadhyaya Parivaar and we are pained to understand the motive behind
this. I am submitting this response aimed at answering some of the
questions and clarifying facts.
Swadhyaya is a spiritual movement founded by Rev. Pandurang Shastri
Athavale, fondly known as "Dadaji", which means elder brother. Born in
1920, Dadaji took a resolve to uplift human life through the means of
self-introspection ('Swadhyaya'). He looked deeply into the problems
that plague humanity. He noted that these problems were the result of
alienation of man from his creator. His solution to these inherent
issues, therefore, included the concept that we are all sons and
daughters of the same god. Hence the Swadhyaya philosophy and work are
based upon the belief that god is present in each of us and we are, as
a result, related by this divine relationship. Dadaji has coined this
concept as "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God"; hence
it is indeed a parivaar, a family, which now includes tens of
millions.
It strongly emphasizes dignity of all human beings. It transcends the
boundaries of caste, creed, and religion. It welcomes anyone to join
unconditionally, without any membership requirements, and it allows
any member the total freedom to leave at any time. It has brought
about a multifaceted revolution encompassing all aspects of human
life; these include spiritual, social, economical, emotional, and
political elements. Dadaji calls this the five-colored revolution.
This is a peaceful revolution that has been described by a prominent
educator as "a silent yet singing revolution". It does not support,
encourage or condone any violence. It has never solicited any money
nor has it accepted funds from anyone who is not an active member.
Dadaji and Didiji have always preached and practiced love and unity of
all. They have never sought any recognition, prestige or awards.
Swadhyaya work has been studied by many research scholars, economists,
politicians, and social thinkers. The United Nations (UN) has also
taken a keen interest in this work. Many laurels and awards have been
given to Dadaji and Didiji from around the globe, including the Sir
John Templeton Award for Progress in Religion, the Ramon Magsaysay
Award from the Phillipines, and the noteworthy Padma Vibhushan title
from the government of India.
Dadaji single-handedly started his work by visiting the entire Indian
subcontinent, along with many other areas of the world. It has
transformed countless lives in tens of thousands of villages in India.
Dadaji worked incessantly through his demise, which occurred in late
2003. During all these years of work, as Dadaji went from "heart-to-
heart" and "hut-to-hut" in thousands of villages of India, Mrs.
Dhanashree Talwalkar, Dadaji's daughter, was his constant companion.
With her own efforts, love, and dedication, she has become the heart
and soul of the "Swadhyaya parivaar". In his later years, Dadaji
delegated the full responsibility of his work to Mrs. Talwalkar,
affectionately known as "Didiji", which means "elder sister".
Unfortunately, when Dadaji delegated Didiji to take on the
responsibility of the massive Swadhyaya work, there were a few members
of the Swadhyaya family who did not accept this decision. Because of
their longstanding relationship with Dadaji, they felt a sense of
entitlement to this responsibility. Begrudged by the appointment of
Didiji to take the responsibility, they and a few of their cohorts
began a concerted effort to destroy Didiji's image and tarnish
Dadaji's life.
The main purpose of these people, the "anti-Swadhyayees", was to usurp
the control of the work. Once it was clear that this purpose would not
be served, persons like Mr. Pankaj Trivedi set out to destroy the
verywork they were once a part of.
Mr. Trivedi and a few others chose to engage in antagonistic activity
and false accusations against Didiji and the Swadhyaya parivaar. They
alleged that the Swadhyaya parivaar and Didiji asked for funds during
the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat (a state in India). This is an entirely
false statement. To begin with, Dadaji and Didiji have never solicited
funds from anyone, directly or indirectly. They have also instilled
this mentality in the entire Parivaar. In the aftermath of the
earthquake in 2001, a total of 5058 houses were built through the
efforts of 76 non-government organizations (NGOs). Of these, 4534
houses were built by the Swadhyaya Parivaar alone, according to a
report by the United Nations Development Board. In addition,
accusations that have been leveled at the management of trust funds of
Swadhyaya Parivaar are completely unfounded.
Further efforts to damage Swadhyaya work led a few anti-Swadhyayees to
allege to the home ministry of India's central government in 2002 that
"Swadhyaya is a terrorist activity". In response, the Indian
government's intelligence bureau conducted a thorough investigation in
Swadhyayee villages throughout India. This investigation revealed
absolutely no basis for the accusation. Other facet of anti-Swadhyaya
propaganda has included the repeatedfiling of police cases against
many devoted Swadhayees over the last five years. Police
investigations have found each and every one of these complaints to be
completely untrue and without merits.
The media has reported that Mr. Trivedi was a prominent Swadhyayee,
that he donated 1.5 crore (15 million) rupees, and that Pujya Dadaji
used to visit him at hishome often. All these reports are completely
untrue. At the current time, it is the media's responsibility to
report only the truth, instead of reporting and sensationalizing
completely baseless allegations in an attempt to tarnish the image of
Dadaji, Didiji, and Swadhyaya work. It is important to consider who
benefits by misleading the police and by harassing the Swadhyaya
Parivaar. In the end, it is society and devoted Swadhyayees who are
hurt when attempts are made to tarnish the image of holy work such as
Swadhyaya.
Link to lots of articles in English
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:03pm
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=swadhyay&btnG=Search+News
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:10pm
Aaj to Brahmin ki bhi hatya hoti hai........
Dur Kahin Kone mein Majhab Rota hain.............
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:19pm
Daes Liya (bite) Sare Desh Ko Jahrili Nagin (poisonous snake) Ne...
Ghar Ko laga di Aag Ghar Ke Chirago ne...
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:37pm
It is very important that future generations remember Pankajbhai's
sacrifice and learn a lesson of not falling in a trap of any organized
religion.
Please write to Government of Gujarat to dedicate a monumnet in the
memory of "Krantikari Pankajbhai".
May be rename Ellisbridge to "Pankajbhai Trivedi Bridge."
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:53pm
I believe Swadhyay should start " Krantikari Pankajbhai Trivedi"
Scholarship for needy students and open up a college and dedicate it
to " Krantikari Pankajbhai Trivedi".
I am sure that even after doing that, crores of rupees will be
available which can be used to build a charitabl hospital dedicated to
Pankajbhai.
Shri Satya Sai Baba had been doing noble humanatarian work for decades
and its time that Swadhyay learn some lessons on humanity and charity
from this organization.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:56pm
I think it will be a great disservice to soul of Pankajbhai if we go
the route of naming any bridge or other monument after him.
All we know is that he wanted Society to know true face of Didi's
brand of Swadhyay.
When Government of Gujarat does not listen to person of Swamiji's
stature, I doubt if they will ever pursue justice for Pankajbhai's
killer.
May be some investigative Journalist can find out real story behind
tall claims of Didi's brand of Swadhyay, and issues which Pankajbhai
have raised and reported elsewhere in this forum.
Only 'fourth Jagir (Press)' can take up this challenge and show the
true face of Didi's brand of Swadhyay to Society.
Didini Diary
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 7th, 2006, 9:57pm
Gunawant Shah on Pankajbhai's Sahidi
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 7th, 2006, 11:10pm
Renowned philosopher and writer Gunawantbhai Shah appeals public to
wake up. The degree of blind following in Swadhyay is a black mark
against Hinduism. Back in 1992 he wrote "Blind faith manufacturing
company unlimited is Swadhyay" Dada had put his image between Shiva
and yogeswar and everyone would offer Aarti to DADA. He was the one to
criticise this deification of Pandurang Athawale. How lacks of
Swadhyayees can not see the difference between God and Pandurang and
now Didi? No wonder this has given Didi an opportunity to do anything
she pleases.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Karan on Jul 8th, 2006, 05:25am
Aaj yeh shehar kaisee sanwar aayee hai,
Har taraf bikeree ek khaak nazar aayee hai!
rang lagee hai ye khoon-e-jiger (pankaj bhai)ki taaseer,
yaad jab aati hai to aankhe bhar aayee hai!!
ye aag har khafan ko jalaakar rakh karegi,
dhuvaan ek din teri galee(madhav bagh) me aayegi!
ek ek saans me yahaa behroopiya (khota bhai)mile hai,
ye sholey lipte rahee saneeha ka khabhar aayee hai!!
tumharee nakse-kadam ne sab ko gumraah kardiya,
kitna behtar ye kaary tha usko mitti me milaadiya!
kaise maafi milega bhagwan ko bhee parwaa na kiyaa,
sang-e-lehad pe tumne jhootee aansu bahaadiya!!
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by An Observer on Jul 8th, 2006, 06:54am
I hear that Gujrat Govt is in the process of changing the name of
A'bad to either Pandurang Sastri Nagar or Pandurang Sastri Dham (as in
Gnadhi Nagar / Gandhi Dham).
Is it true??
Prime reason given is that it is a tribute to DADA & its present
leader. They have worked tremendously hard to uplift the communities
of Gujarat and the whole state of Gujrat. and have succeeded in doing
so.
After Gandhiji, its now DADA, the only person who can be said to
deserve this tribute!
Although Gujrat has so many prominent Kathakars and is home to one of
the most famous religious sect - Swaminarayan, but so far they have
failed to match the sort of upliftment DADA gave to this state.
It is for this reason Ahmedabad will now have a new name.
Please share your hearsay here.
You have a great sense of humor or imagination! - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Unbelievable on Jul 8th, 2006, 07:43am
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Karan on Jul 8th, 2006, 08:14am
Sunil posted a nice msg
Swadhyaya is not just to follow some one blindly
Swadhyaya's literal meaning is study, self-study
But at the same time a Swadhyayee should be cautious
Instrumental Devotion means .... its not anybody can use him atleast
he should know that he is not getting victimised in an organised trap.
Now its the time to have a kind of transperancy in all trusts, The
governement should work on it atleast Gujarat government.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 8th, 2006, 08:44am
Gujarat Global News Network, Ahmedabad
Jayshree Talwalkar 'Didi' suddenly surfaced on Friday night in a TV
News Channel where she spoke about some controversies and Swadhyay
Parivar but refused to speak about the famous Pankaj Trivedi murder.
She said that she was pained by the murder but avoided questions on
the issue saying that the matter was sub-judicious.
Describing media reports as her character assassination she said that
people who are against her and wanted to remove her were indulging in
such activities. Didi who spoke for the first time 24 days after
murder of Trivedi said that she was not the head of Swadhyay Parivar
"I am a member of the Parivar. I, my family and the entire Swadhyay
Parivar is sad over Trivedi's murder and we protest the incident. No
individual has the power in Parivar but all the members work in co-
operation", she said.
About funds in Pariver she said that the accounts of Parivar are
audited regularly. People asking about Rs.2,000 crore should first ask
NRIs where they have sent this money, Didi said in an irritating
tone.
About her alleged love letters Didi said that they were letters about
a project and her opponents had misused them. "I have not written any
love letter to anyone", she said.
Furious over media reports Didi said that they are hammering
Swadhyayis. They are misleading people. She appealed Swadhyayis to be
tolerant and spread the message of peace. "Parivar members are
brothers and sisters and I am one of them. I am not a saint", Didi
reiterated
Parivar members are brothers and sisters and I am one of them. I am
not a saint", Didi reiterated.
'We all know you are not a saint but you are not even a good human
being'.
You shall be with 5 Parivar memebers in Jail for killing Pankajbhai.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 8th, 2006, 09:08am
"After Gandhiji, its now DADA, the only person who can be said to
deserve this tribute!"
If Gandhiji is BAPU is he was DADA (most of Gujarati's following him
blindly dont even know y he is called DADA) It means Big Brother in
Marathi, they think it ment Grandfather.... lol
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 8th, 2006, 09:16am
"Swadhyaya is not just to follow some one blindly
Swadhyaya's literal meaning is study, self-study"
If it means self study! selfstudy could be done in the corner of ur
room, bringing 10000 or 15000 people together for selfstudy!
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 8th, 2006, 09:23am
It is a known fact in Madhav Baug Pathshala since 2001 that people are
called from distance so when Didi gives her 'Bakwas' hall looks full.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by An Observer on Jul 8th, 2006, 09:47am
I think Ravibahi & Unbelivable have missed my point.
Gujrat Govt is considering changing name of A'BAD.
No other state Govt is even thinking of doing this & why should they?
On of the reasons given is that the mass upliftmnet has taken place in
Gujrat, not in Mumbai.
Therefore Guj Govt feels that this is the best tribute they can bestow
on DADA.
This is what I have heard and may not be true.
Maharashtra state has not seen the so caled upliftment in its state.
Its the Gujratis who have benefited from this movement and therefroe I
think modi govt (sarkar) may be correct in thinking on this changes.
May be DIDI has MADE some FINANCIAL (or otherwise (promised to use her
VOTE Bank) as part of POLITICAL deal to change the
name.............who knows!
This is wild speculations.
I am simply asking if anyone has heard about this.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 8th, 2006, 10:13am
WE ARE AL EQUAL IN SWADHYAY, DO I NEED EYE CHECKUP?
-Ravi Patel
ravi_pa...@yahoo.com
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Paying Tribute to Pankajbhai on Jul 8th, 2006, 10:18am
I think Didi is in the process of doing something like Sonia Gandhi,
Bal Thackeray etc.
Denounce that she is dictator of Parivar. Appoint group of cronies
till controversy dies down and control every thing from behind the
curtain.
These group of cronies will later day come out and tell that since
Dada have appointed you, you must take it over again!
This way she can fool her blind faith followers that she is Tyag ni
Murti.
I hope before she succeds in doing so, Gujarat Government does
something rather than renaming Ahemadabad as 'Andheri nagari' and CM
as 'Gandu Raja'.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 10:20am
I have heard that all khotabhais are considering changing their last
name to "Athvale".......
How many khotabhais call their REAL elder sister "Didi"?
How many khotabhais from US went to India for their parents "ASTHI-
VISARJAN"?
How many khotabhais helped their needy relatives in India?
How many khotabhais who worked for FREE at MADHAV KENDRA farm had
helped their relatives on their farms in India?
How many khotabhais went to see their relatives when they were in
Hospital?
How many khotabhais went to attend a Birthday Party of their relatives
in India?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 8th, 2006, 10:23am
DADAJI SAID
"BETI MAIN BHI INKA DADA HU, KAISA ULLU BANAYYA DEKH, KAHA DEKHNA AANA
WALLA HAIN YEAH GORA INDIA MAIN ......JO LEKHKER DIYA INHONA MAAN
LIYA"
DADA EK NUMBERI TO BETI DUS NUMBARI..
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 10:31am
Lies, Lies and more Lies...
Most of the khotabhais had been feeding lies and fabricated stories to
potray Athvale into an " AVATAR" for YEARS.
Some of the stories are so ridiculous that even any one with a half
brain can tell that it is an outright lie.
One person told me a story about the Murti of Yogeshwar. Read this
funny story.
Once, Yogeshwar Bhagavan appeared in Dada's dream and talked to him.
The way Yogeshwar Bhagvan was standing in Dad's dream is exactly the
same as the Murti of YOGESHWAR is made. Dada had called an expert
artist to make the MURTI and described the pose that he saw in his
dream.
While the artist was making the MURTI, Dada stopped him many times and
corrected his mistakes. After so many iterations and trials, the final
shape of the Murti was developed.
This person also claimed that no one in this world has an exact
imagination of Yogeshwar as Dada had as he had seen Yogeshwar Bhagvan
in his dream.
Propaganda is so powerful that any one can take an ordinary Pandu and
trnsform him into an "AVATAR".
Like Mirza Galib said,
"Murkhon kin Kami Nahi Galib,
Ek dhundho Hajar Milte Hein.........."
We shall rape you in front of ur Sasara - Swadhyay
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 8th, 2006, 11:59am
Jalgaon,
Retired professor S. K. Joshi shared terror on his family during a
visit with Gujarat Samachar.
S. K. Joshi had worked with Dada and Swadhyay for more than two
decades. Back in 1995 several tall and heavy men entered his house. In
front of everyone including women in the house they told my daughter
in law, "We shall rape you in front of your husband and your father in
law. Tell your father in law to keep his mouth shut about Swadhyay."
One time Mr. Joshi was travelling in his car with his son and suddenly
at one stop they found themselves surrounded by 8-10 men. Luckily his
son used his quick judgement and steered his car away from this
goons.
Article in Gujarati.
Jagruti - staunch Swadhyayee are wondering
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 8th, 2006, 12:17pm
Last night Didi finally gave an interview to media- setting was
interview by a private channel at an undisclosed location.
She said that there is a conspiracy against Swadhyay. She has nothing
to do with murder of Pankajbhai.
There is no financial irregularities in Swadhyay.
She is just another member of Swadhyay and everyone is equal in
Swadhyay.
She is saddened by the death of Pankajbhai but she can not talk about
it due to the legal process.
She appealed to all the Swadhyayees to stay focused.
Some of staunch Swadhyayees were totally disappointed that:
1. Interview was from an undisclosed location. Why?
2. If she is innocent, why she does not come out and say that she &
other members of Swadhayay are willing to co-operate with poilice
investigation in any way they can.
3. Why it took so long to come out and make a statement.
4. Why interview was given to a private channel.
It seems that many Swadhyayees are disappointed and now wondering as
to what is being hidden? There is a possibility that of current
members there will be two groups, one supporting current stratagy to
"keep quiet and it will go away" and the other group supporting "those
who do not have any thing to hide - hide nothing!"
Jagruti continues. Biggest challenge will come not from police and
outsiders but from true Swadhyayees within.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 12:31pm
http://www.gujaratglobal.com/nextSub.php?id=814&cattype=NEWS
Swadhyay parivar has become goonda parivar: Sacchidanand
2006-07-06 10:05:42
Gujarat Global News Network, Ahmedabad
At a meeting held in the city on "Religion Terrorism" number of
leading personalities launched a scathing attack on Swadhyay Parivar
and described its head, Didi, with a variety of adjectives like a
tigress donning the skin of cow. These persons were of the view that
the mafia of religious leaders was more dreadful than the underworld
of Dawood.
Referring to the murder of NRI swadhyayi Pankaj Trivedi, Swami
Sacchidanand said that Swadhyay Parivar had become goonda parivar. The
fear of terror created by it can never be tolerated, he added. Pankaj
Trivedi, a staunch critic of Didi , was murdered on June 15 and police
have arrested five swadhyayis in this connection.
He said that the fault of Trivedi was just that he had sought details
of account of the Parivar, a multi billion rupee voluntary
organization founded by Pandurang Shastri. He also blasted the Modi
government for not responding to the requests of Trivedi for
protection though he had feared attack from members of Swadhyay
parivar. He said people worshipped Didi as a holy cow, but in the skin
of cow she is a tigress.
Noted activist Prakash N Shah said that the activity of spreading
terror in the name of religion should be checked. He suggested that
there should be a social audit of such organizations. Writer Rajnikant
Joshi said Dada, founder of Parivar, was a good man but not a straight
man.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Karan on Jul 8th, 2006, 12:33pm
Dear Vijay Bhai
Jagruthi will be there, atleast some "Yuwan" will think and an in-side
revolt will be there. But what do you say this Khota Bhai will
realise?
They may be forgot The Virtues which (said) will acquires by Swadhyay
1) Gratitude (Kritaznata) : Told to appreciate saints but they are
busy in appreciating ****
2) Asmita (self-awareness): but unfortunatly they are not aware of
their own ability, it was told in last shibir that you are a
donkey ,who is carrying statue.
3)Brilliance (Tejaswita): He should not be a puppet but they feel
Chamchagiri is not puppetism.
4)Boundless love: in this situation we dont want to talk about any
Love!!!!
5)Samarpan(offering); yah its going on
so i think they wont change
Unlike you, I think there will be radical changes in Swadhyay. It may
come by design or default. Now that more and more stories come out,
true swadhyayee (majority of them) will suddenly wonder. This may
prompt them to do one of two things. 1. Move away from Parivar and
join some other group. 2. Be bold enough to address the irregularity
and make parivar stronger.
At least in USA Parivar I have found that this bond and sense of
common goal is extremely strong. How can one walk away from the
family? I shall venture to predict that most of them will be in group
2 here. Currently they are behaving as if nothing has happened. But in
their head and conscious the debate has started. Next, they will feel
comfortable with discussing their feeling to nearest Swadhyayee
friends followed by discussion with rest of them. Process will take
time but it shall happen.
Of course now after being duped before the flow of money will slow
down tremendously and when it start they shall demand voice in it.
For the Khotabhai's back home this was like Mafia. Too much power just
by having the title. They will have to be thrown out by others to save
the movement. I think process will take 1-2 years but it will bring
accountability and Samaj seva back in the focus.
Unlike India, I shall venture to predict that it is much less likely
that the Motabhai's abusing power here. With very small tight neat
community, people do know who you really are. There are lot more ways
for people to earn then to resort to deceit in this country.
I am sure other sampraday's are also looking at this and doing some
introspection as how they can avoid same fate. I think devotees of
other Sampraday's might develop courage to ask, what is being done
with the money.
Sahid Sri Pankajbhai has served Hinduism as very few people in recent
history has. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 12:58pm
I agree with Karan. The puppets WILL NOT CHANGE.
They choose to poke in their own eyes and became BLIND FOLLOWERS, they
are beyond repair.
If they were to wake up, they would have done so in past when
countless newspapers and magazines published countless articles on all
wrongdoings and when Justice B.J.Diwan resigned. But no, they THINK
know Athvale more than Justice Diwan and Pankajbhai Trivedi.
The funny thing is that most of the swadhyayis have not even spent
five minutes with Athvale, then how can they know him that well? The
false image of an AVATAR in their BHAVUK mind is the result of years
of Brainwashing, propaganda and manipulation.
We can only help people who are starting to develope "cataract" (Not
blind yet) and have their cataract surgically (thru open discussion).
It is much easier to be an Avatar by minimizing contact. Human being
has weakness. It is much easier to hype someone up by edited videos
and managed exposure to general public. Only the inner group knows
real person. And you can keep inner group quiet because they have a
vested interest in Avatar. I am impressed with how many staunch
Swadhyayees are now asking questions, not openly of course. I think
this is defininig moment in the life of Swadhyay. - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 1:06pm
Maheshbhai Shah consoling Shrutiben Trivedi. Maheshbhai is concerned
he might be next on the list.
How to tell a spiritual movement from cult?
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 8th, 2006, 1:38pm
Here is an issue of Aar Paar. This may offend you if you are not able
to handle the truth. Your motabhai may say 'they' are jealous of our
success - the fact is no one has to be jealous of your success, if
Swadhyay is indeed the movement of uplifting the human spirits we all
are beneficiary of it being one of you. The motabhai may tell you not
to pay attention to media - you need to wonder why all the media have
tried to expose the wrongdoings or more important you may tell your
motabhai -why not we publish our point by point rebuttal of all these
concerns. If we have built houses why not make a website with the
pictures of all those houses, roads, schools and hospitals. In this
day and age it is not too expensive to put your information on network
(and they have crores rupees sitting in several trust accounts) for
everyone to see and decide for your self. Remember, the way mind
control works is to avoid answering question and tell followers to
have faith or shradhha in Dada. That is your cue to run out of that
movement no matter how good it may feel you to belong to it at
present. -Vijay Mehta
http://vmehta.conforums3.com/index.cgi?board=Religions&action=print&num=1150555879
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Mailesh on Jul 8th, 2006, 1:46pm
Vijaybhai,
First off, you have done a commendable job of creating and moderating
this board.
This unfortunate event has exposed pariwar internals big time and am
optimistic that this WILL trigger a change
First thing that comes to mind is the fact that now media and public
in general know more and have more questions than the so called
motabhai's actually know
Due to their blind follower mentality, they have never questioned
their superiors and so on and now they will feel awkward facing
members and outsiders. Once this questioning starts, the ball starts
rolling
I doubt if someone in US can think, plan and pull off a criminal act
against someone who asks questions as easily as it may be possible in
India
Simple questions like
1. why the focus on 'others' and not 'me'
2. why the focus on numbers
3. why are some members more previlaged to inside information than
others
4. what happened t the norm of taking joint decisions
5. why huge gatherings for events
6. Does a local motabhai ever question their superiors?
7. Who makes those large sankalps? Sankalps should be from within -
when someone else tells me to achieve some number it is called target
not sankalp
8. how can I access local financial accounts?
Answers:
1. Focus on others and not me: If there is not much good about me, I
can distract you by talking bad about others like Pankajbhai, they are
out to destroy us etc. It keeps focus away from me.
2. For some of them it was all about the numbers. Problem is that more
they got more they wanted. Had they only taken out 10% of Bhagawanano
Bhag no one would have ever been able to prove anything.
3. Motabhai's have invested more and are williing to do more for
Swadhyay than Chhotabhai. They are willing to maime or kill anyone for
parivar. If you are not that loyal why should you have the same
privilege?
4. Joint decision: Trust me they are taking joint decision. But you
and I are not at that level to be part of decision making. Remember
humility is a virtue.
5. Large gatherings are good for morale and publicity. It impresses
people in thinking - if so many people believe in it ... it must be
great.
6. If you start questioning the superiors you are not right material
to be a Motabhai in first place. And if you do, we need to make Asura
out of you, You can not go back to Chhotabhai from Motabhai because
now you know too much. Many of victims of violence had to suffer
because they knew too much. Had they been ordinary Swadhyayee they
could have been easily ignored as common ashuras. Loyalty and ability
to understand without asking anyone is important qualifying
characteristics for Motabhai.
7. There are some chosen devine among us and they help us by making
Sankalps on our behalf. The mere fact that we joined the group without
ever asking or questioning shows that we are not capable to making
independent decision. They are just being helpful.
8. Forget asking for local accounts. They were simply forwarded to
head quarter. Once you offer coconut to God you do not inquire what
happens to it, do you?
I have a feeling that Swadhyayees from USA eventhough in numbers we
may be miniscule compared to those in India, will be instrumental in
providing leadership.
Living in this open society does change who we are. There is more
courage to ask questions. We have learnt that open society is
strength. We have witnessed Jim Jones and David Kuresh. We have seen
financial or sexual scandals destroying prominent churches. Hopefully
we have learned that you can not suppress disinformation too long once
it starts coming.
I think at this time asking financial account will be taken as you
being a traitor or Swadhyay destroyer (Ashura).
What you can do is to generate discussion as how in future we can
establish credibility? What checks and balance do we place to prevent
abuse by select few? At the end of the day, your future depends on
credibility among young Swadhyayees. With all the horror stories that
has come out and likely to come out let me tell you, your younger
generation is confused and concerned. Their loyalty to what we fed
them so far can only last so long.
Good luck. Keep us posted if you have any ideas or how your attempts
are received by others. Remember, the spirit should be one of "I love
Swadhyay there for I am willing to speak up" - Vijay Mehta
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 1:56pm
Now people have all kind of question...
look at this
I think now police have to open them eye..
I have heard this theory too and it may make sense.
Dadaji worked all his life to start his projects. People show a man
with ability to interpret Gita at the same time man with passion to
uplift the poor and backward communities. Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga
to gather is a strong combination. No acquisition of real estate in
terms of Mandir basically made the expense side of balance sheet very
small. Money grew, fame grew. He must have thought for a long time
that this all can be turned over to some one with same passion.
Then came the aging, failiing health and amputation left him in hands
of his daughter. She suddenly realizes the opportunity to step into
his chair. She has to remove all good Swadhyayees surrounding him. The
access to Dada is limited. Basically he is in "Nazar Ked" so only
message Dada can get is what is approved by Didi. Tai would also like
the power go to someone in family than outsider. Only the inner core
can see the change. Because for millions of them all they see is the
video that comes in mail.
Dada behaves in un-Dada like fashion and suddenly claims that
Swadhayay belongs to him. Now all loyal Swadhyayees needs to be thrown
out one by one. Some of them knew too much. So they became threat. One
by one they were disgraced and thrown out. If they kept posing threat,
they were threatened and to teach a lesson bones were broken.
Earthquake in Gujart proves to be a windfall. Large amount of
donations flowing from all over, no need to account for it. Everyone
at the top could get a piece of the pie as long as they keep the mouth
shut. Few trouble makers need to be silenced.
Arrogance lead to mistakes. We can get away with anything. Police or
Government and Media will think ten times before doing anything
against us. Few people with broken bones became a lesson for many
others who were thinking of speaking their mind. Well it all went well
until...
Until one fateful day.. Pankajbhai Trivedi was brutally murdered. And
suddenly 'Jan Prakop' is beyond anyone's expectation. Police was lucky
to find a strong clue by one cell phone, he opens his mouth and now
the amount of information that out is too much to cover it all up.
Daily headlines exposing more and more stories. Many Swadhyayees start
seeing a pattern. As much as they do not want to believe all these
they have to admit that there are some problems.
The question is how this moves on from this point...
-Vijay Mehta
Would Didi run to USA if noose comes closer?
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 2:01pm
Didi might have avoided being questioned or arrested for this crime
more than three years. But there is no statute of limitation on
murder. So all her life she will have to worry, what if some evidence
pops up? What if someone talks? There are many many crimes in history
books where years after the crime the law catches up with you. Let us
be patient and pray to God at the end justice may prevail and
sacrifice of Panjakbhai does not go in vein.
Na Muh Chhupake Jityo...
Post by Guest on Jul 8th, 2006, 2:04pm
Didi has paid a price for Pankajbhai murder. Now she avoids limelight
and media.
Na Muh Chhupake Jiyo
No Sar jhukake Jiyo
Jo paap kiye hai tumne
woh Karmoki Kimat chukake Jiyo..
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by sunil on Jul 8th, 2006, 2:16pm
Dear NRI Swadhyayees,
Please listen to what DIDItold to SAHARA SAMAY TV
She said we recd.Rs.1 crore & spent 1.5 crores for Kutch EQ relief.( I
have seen this twice)
Now isn't this a lie? They have collected alltogether 37 crores
+cash(only Yogeshwar knows the amount)
You still want to call her a Satyanishtha?
who siphoned the money?
Will you dare to ask your motabhais about this?
In an another reply on this forum today these blind fellows are still
saying that the pariwar constructed 4534 concrete houses in Kutch when
it is very clear to everybody (exceot their Blind counterparts in
India)
that the pariwar has not constructed even a single house is this
another example of Satyam Vada?
The Pariwar has become so proficient in lieing & so shameless that
even after the murder of Pankajbhai they published a nivedan is all
gujarati news papers on
19th June stating that they have constructed 5058 houses if this is
Swadhyay then why someone should join or if has joined stay?
Earthquake Relief by Swadhyay Gujarati Article
Post by Vijay Mehta on Jul 8th, 2006, 4:34pm
http://www.gujaratsamachar.com/gsa/20060625/guj/national/anu.html
How much money was collected by Swadhyay and how much was used for
actual house building in Kutch area has been the biggest point of
argument. Swadhyayees will point that they have built 4500 plus
houses. While others will say that there is not a single house by
Swadhyay! This Article looks at what could be the explanation.
Gujarati article.
Partial translation to follow;
According to the letter by Pankajbhai Trivedi to Chief Minister of
Gujarat DAY Trust, Chicago had deposited 2,4000,000 (2.4 Million
Dollars( between 1978 to 2000. Due to the Gujarat Earthquake 3,890,000
(3.89 Million Dollars were collected from Swadhyay in USA) While Vinoo
Sachania (Who was later beaten up) sent Two Crores from England.
On 6/24/2006 Dr. Rajesh Parikh said in response to a question that
"Swadhyay Parivar has built 4534 houses in Kutch, and there is no
doubt about it." When asked if he had seen personally this houses
being built he said he has not. Than based on what is he making this
statemet? In response Dr Parikh showed a report by UNDP and 2003
report by ILO (International Labor Organization), where it was
mentioned that Swadhyay Parivar had built 4534 houses. Dr. Parikh was
asked if Swadhayay has their report of all these houses? He responded
that Swadhyay Parivar has a report of work performed at 112 villages
and that report is in Mumbai and we are getting in Amadawad. But in
this report we do not have details of work performed, just which
village had how many houses is mentioned.
Sri Mansi Anand fron Navnirman office in Kutchchh, Bhuj explained that
ILO report has no value since it is a copy of UNDP report. He
explained that in June of 2001 when Prime Minister came to visit
Kutchchh we asked all the organization to report of relief work. We
put an ad in the paper asking everyone to supply the information.
Based on what they reported we published those figures. We DID NOT
CHECK ACCURACY OF ANY OF THESE FIGURES!
Based on the information received (that was never varified by anyone)
we published reports. Few months later we published updated report
again based on the information received. This way by 2003 we had
published five reports.
September 2001 report had 75 organizations reporting. All of them
combined reported 4272 houses while Swadhyay ALONE REPORTED 4534
HOUSES!
When questioned in this regard Bhav Sarjan Trust informed that they
merely provided 'MATERIAL FOR CONSTRUCTION"
Abhiyan felt that if only material was provided than how many houses
were built? were they earth quake proof? In contrast to all other
organization Bhav Sarjan trust did not have any M U (? Memorandum of
understanding) with GSDMA of Gujarat Government.
Based on all these facts mention of Bhav Sarjan Trusts was taken out
of alphabetical order and placed last. And it was noted that this
organization is working independently (polite way of saying that we
can not varify facts)
Kutchchh Navnirman Abhiyan had asked for detail report from all the
organization but Swadhyay did not provide this list. (I guess they
believe that when right hand donates left should not know!). They had
also asked them to provide with financial report of earth quake
related activities (how much received and how much spent) but that was
not provided.
Of note is the fact that In any Government report there is no mention
of a SINGLE HOUSE BUILT BY BHAV SARJAN! COLLECTOR AND MAMLATDAR IN
KUTCHCHH HAS REPORTED THAT BHAV SARJAN TRUST - SWADHYAY PARIVAR HAS
NOT BUILT A SINGLE HOME.
According to Dr. Ramesh Parikh after the earthquake all the
responsibility was managed by Sri Vasanbhai Aahir. According to
Kutchchh Nirman Abhiyan Mr Aahir has been supplying all the
information.
When Mr Aahir was asked on 6/24 he said all the Parivar had provided
all the roofing material, wood, cement etc and laborers came from
Maharashtra. When he was asked to give specifics he answered from
moral high ground When a brother helps another brother in times of
need, do we need to keep an account? When he was asked as to how come
Swadhyay was able to build more houses than all other 75 combined in
such a short period of time? He said "DADA" wanted us to build quickly
so we did!!!
Basically what he is saying is trust me, if we say we built than we
built. Of course we can not tell you which particular house we have
built.
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Fabricated Stoies about Dadaji on Jul 8th, 2006, 7:09pm
1)Dada had once gone to USA. Dada used shaving soap and brush to
shave. During this visit, Dada forgot to take along with him, his
shaving soap and brush. Dada was habituated to use shaving soap and
brush and so he was un-comfortable. He mentioned it to one of the
Motabhais of USA while they were driving on a trip to Ohio. They
started looking for shaving soap and brush. They tried about 15 stores
but could not find it. When they were passing through a small town,
Dada pointed to a store and asked to inquire there for shaving soap
and brush. Fortunately this time, it was available in the store.
The whole story seems like fabricated and this common incident was
glorified and told to all swadhyayees of USA as and when chance came
by one of this Motabhai. He used to tell, he did not believe in
miracles, but narrated the story driving the point that Dada was
Avatar - incarnation of Lord and hence he could tell where the shaving
soap and brush was available?
Question: when followers were trying to find the brush at different
places and if an AVATAR knew that they were not going to find it
there, why he didn’t stop them in first place? An AVATAR can not
adjust with the situation and use shaving cream instead?
2) The second incident is related to Anuts
I-VANDANA program in BHARUCH. One of the motabhai told fellow
swadhyayees in a meeting that we don’t believe in miracles but since
we are a FAMILY (What a Joke), he would like to share this incident.
At the end of the program, NARMADA Maata changed the flow direction,
the water level raised up to the stage where Dada was sitting, NARMADA
Matta touched Dada’s feet and then slowly water level came down. I am
sure you should have a video to prove this as you take video of every
little thing and won’t forget to capture this “miracle”, right?
(Swajan Re Juth Mat Bolo, Khuda Ke pas Jana Hein)
If you were an Avatar, would you choose failing health, amputation of
leg because it was not treated in time and your followers in disarry
after your death?
Re: Krantikari Pankajbhai pays ultimate price
Post by Ravi Patel on Jul 8th, 2006, 7:12pm
"Last night Didi finally gave an interview to media- setting was
interview by a private channel at an undisclosed location.
She said that there is a conspiracy against Swadhyay. She has nothing
to do with murder of Pankajbhai."
DADI HAS BEEN TELIN HER FOLLOWERS TO STAY AWAY FROM THE MEDIA BECAUSE
THEY LIE, IS SHE LYING TOO?
http://vmehta.conforums3.com/index.cgi?board=Religions&action=print&num=1150555879
This material presented is but one/tenth of what is presented in the
link above. Most is in Gujarati and some in Hindi. It is a sad saga of
Hindu morality breakdown under the very haughty noses of Gujarati,
Marathi Hindu hoodlums parading under a panoply of real and phony
nomenclatures. Hindutva brigade led by self styled protectors of
mytholoy based religion keeps a close score of who is an "Un-Indian,"
" A Traitor," "A Terrorist," "A Pseudo-Secular," "A Secular," and by
bunch of other pet-names these Hindu hound dogs give to anyone and
everyone who speaks, writes and expresses their opinions, truthfully
and with all the evidence under the sun, yours truly included.
These bastards don't want the truth to be told. Not privately, not in
words or actions.
"Viswa Hindu Parishad" and their paid and unpaid co-conspirators fish
out all the dirt that they can find on other religions and spill all
over the creation, especially, on the internet newsgroups such as this
one. These concerted efforts on the part of such idiots as Dr Jai
Maharaj, and especially him has put the free speech in jeopardy.
This low-level skunk, a slum-dog, takes words from Ashok Chowgule, an
industrialist from Goa. A very rich man and very vicious man indeed.
This man is a Vice-President of the "Vishwa Hindu Parishad." The
another is S. Kalyanraman. This hoodlum is portrayed as a former
director of the World Bank.
There are many who are either of high ranking "RSS" members or their
famous "Parivar." It is not necessary to make a list of who they
affiliate with. Their venom is deadly and dangerous. Why would Hindu
religion or the religious beliefs of almost eighty-three million
people be defended? If they are as good as they claim to be, why, all
the sane people of the world would want to be Hindu in a jiffy.
The lies these fake Hindus tell may become their coffins.
bademiyansubhanallah
By Our Staff Correspondent
MYSORE, JAN. 20. Members of Sri Digambara Jain Samaj here have
expressed anguish over reports of animal sacrifice at Girinar Hills in
Gujarat, which is associated with Bhagawan Sri Neminatha Tirthankara.
The community members observed a fast on Thursday to protest the cult
of animal sacrifice at Girinar Hills, which is gaining in prominence
in recent times.
Girinar Hills is a sacred pilgrim centre for Jains for it was here
that Sri Neminatha attained his salvation having preached non-violence
and compassion. It is customary for the Jain community members to
visit the spot at least once in their lifetime.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2005/01/21/stories/2005012114200300.htm
Out on a mission
As she takes yet another daring step, this time to set right the
disharmonious political system of Assam, Indira Goswami, the
celebrated writer, talks about her experiences to NITI PANTA.
BE IT a life threat for her controversial writings or a face-to-face
encounter with the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), nothing
daunts this intrepid explorer to continue writing on social or
political issues that the State has been grappling with for so many
years. One of the most celebrated writers in the vernacular and a
Jnanpith Award winner, Indira Goswami, talks about her experiences as
she takes yet another daring step to contribute to solving a
disharmonious political system of Assam.
Q: You are penning a book on the United Liberation Front of Assam
(ULFA). How did the idea hit you?
A: I accidentally visited the ULFA transit camp around 12 years ago.
Since I've had a great association with students all my life, some of
the students in Assam invited me for a talk by Bishnu Rabha, where I
discovered that those students were ULFA members. I was also invited
to visit their transit camp, which terrified me at first but I was
touched to see them involved in welfare activities despite having
taken up arms. A few days later, I learnt that all the boys I met were
killed in a military encounter, except for one, who was imprisoned and
continued to write to me. This incident inspired me to pen a book on
their life, which is still in progress.
Q: From a caste riddled world in "The Shadow of Kamakhya", and an
impassioned plea against animal sacrifice in "Chhinamasta" to life of
ULFA militants. It's a complete transition.
A: Most of my writings have a humanist theme. Animal sacrifice has
been an age-old tradition in Assam and surprisingly no one has ever
protested against such gruesome practices in the name of religion.
There was a hue and cry when I wrote against such an inhuman practice.
Although the priests of the Kamakhya temple protested the theme of my
novel and one of my old publishers even refused to publish my book, I
had the support of a large section of Assamese society and people like
Anuradha Barpujari - editor of a weekly. ULFA too has been a serious
problem in Assam for 25 years and there has been so much bloodshed. We
Assamese have witnessed a lot of killing in our State and I personally
have lost some of my colleagues and a close friend. This has to end
somewhere. All that is required is awareness among people which can be
effectively brought about by writing on such social and political
issues.
Q: You now play an intermediary between the Centre and ULFA.
A: It was a personal desire to help in this situation and if this one
step could change things I was most willing to take the plunge. I
don't like to be termed as a `mediator' but have simply requested the
government to talk to the militant group and my role ends here. Q:
There have been several attempts for negotiations earlier. Sanjay
Hazarika and even singer Bhupen Hazarika have sent appeals but in
vain.
A: It is for the first time in 25 years that ULFA has agreed for talks
with the Centre. I am not aware of the strategy of other people or do
not know why attempts of people like Sanjay Hazarika or Bhupenda
failed to show results. I saw ULFA Chief, Paresh Barua, who approached
me for the same - probably because I have known them for some time
now.
Q: Do you think your effort will bring results? Is your strategy any
different?
A: My strategy is a simple appeal to the government written after
consulting senior professors and my colleagues in Delhi University and
it requests the government to invite ULFA for negotiation.
Q: Are you positive about the negotiations taking place? How has the
government reacted to your plea?
A: The State government has agreed to support me, though the Centre's
approval is still awaited. Since ULFA is ready to negotiate it makes
things easier for the government. Q: Don't you think regional writing
is yet to make a mark in Indian literature?
Well regional writing has come a long way though it's still underrated
by Indian publishers. I can vouch that there are any number of
regional books through which publishers can popularise good writing.
I personally feel that English writers in India don't cover the
experience of real India. Without knowing the regional languages they
cannot write with a true sense of feeling.
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 13, 2005
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2005/01/13/stories/2005011301350300.htm
Cuttack temples set to restart animal sacrifice
Correspondent
At least two goats are sacrificed every year, they say
Sacred places are turning into slaughterhouses, says social
organisation
CUTTACK: Notwithstanding the fact that animal sacrifices have stopped
in all Cuttack temples during Durga puja, the oldest Kali temple in
Bidyadharpur locality of Cuttack city is all set to restart the age-
old practice from this year.
“At least five persons have wished to offer sacrificial goats at the
altar of the Goddess on Friday night when the rituals of Kali puja
would begin around 12 O’clock midnight”, said the temple priest
Santosh Kumar Chatterjee.
Kali puja in Bidyadharpur is believed to be the oldest in Cuttack and
arguably began much before the Durga puja concept invaded into the
millennium city.
Like Durga puja, Kali puja too began here by Bengali communities.
Age-old practice
Following instructions from the district collector in 2003, the age-
old practice to propitiate the Goddess here had reportedly stopped. In
fact the local administration had claimed that no animal sacrifices
are done at any of the places of worship in the city.
But Chattarjee who has been associated with the Kali temple of
Bidyadharpur since 1973 pointed out that although, the number of the
goats sacrificed at the altar had reduced marginally, the practice was
never discontinued. “At least two goats of the local puja committee
are sacrificed every year”, he said.
Chatterjee said never ever the district administration has stopped us
from doing so. We have also not received any communiqué form the local
police station in this regard. “In fact a senior officer of the local
police station offered a goat for sacrifice last year which has
encouraged other common people to come forward to do the same”, he
asserted. Local puja committee head Mahendra Kumar Panda when
contacted said: “animal sacrifices in the Kali temple here is an age-
old practice and it has been continuing for the past 500 years”. How
can we stop it now, he asked?
Police denial
But the Chauliaganj police station inspector S.N. Behera when
contacted, he claimed that animal sacrifices are not done at
Bidyadharpur temple. It has been stopped since long, he said.
Meanwhile, People for Animal, a State-level social organisation which
has been campaigning against the animal sacrifices in places of
worship has taken strong note of the ill-practice. “In the name of
animal sacrifices to propitiate the Goddess, the sacred places of
shrines are turning out to slaughter houses which is sending a wrong
message in the society”, said Sanjib Das, the member secretary of the
social organisation.
http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/10/stories/2007111058300300.htm
Karnataka - Bidar
‘No’ to animal sacrifice sparks violence in Bidar
Staff Correspondent
People prevented from sacrificing goat
Four police personnel injured in stone throwing
Village residents allege police
high-handedness
BIDAR: Violence erupted after a few people were prevented from
performing animal sacrifice on the premises of a temple in Karpakpalli
village of Humnabad taluk in Bidar district on Monday.
The police said that they had prevented the people from sacrificing a
goat on the Gali Maramma temple premises. The ritual was part of a
three-day “jatra”. Irked by this, they started throwing stones at the
police. The police lobbed teargas shells and resorted to lathi-charge
to disperse the crowd. Four police personnel were injured and two
police vans damaged in the stone-throwing incident.
Superintendent of Police A. Subramanyeswara Rao said here on Tuesday
that the police had not fired in the air to disperse the mob. No
arrests had been made in connection with the violence. But cases had
been registered against more than 50 persons. The situation in the
village was under control, he added.
Additional police personnel from Humnabad, Bidar and Chittaguppa have
been deployed as a precautionary measure. Police officers have been
stationed there to assess the situation.
Deputy Superintendent of Police P.A. Korwar held a meeting in
Karpakpalli on Tuesday, urging the residents to maintain the peace.
The village residents said that they had not performed any animal
sacrifice. They alleged that the police had stopped them from
performing puja. The police had resorted to lathi-charge unnecessarily
and even women had been beaten up, they added.
About a month ago, some associations appealed to the people of the
village not to perform animal sacrifice during the “jatra”.
They had also sought the help of the police in this regard.
The police held meetings with the people of the village and asked them
not to perform animal sacrifice. The local police were told to take
steps to put an end to animal sacrifice in the village.
http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/13/stories/2008021356960400.htm
Opinion - Letters to the Editor
Ban animal slaughter
Sir, — It has become a fashion to condemn sacrifice of animals in
yajnas and temples. This is looked at by some groups as cruelty to
animals. If the whole country becomes vegetarian and adopts ahimsa as
a policy such a stand is justifiable. On the other hand, when millions
of animals are reared to be killed for being consumed as food, it is
sheer hypocrisy to criticise animal sacrifice.
There is greater need to condemn seafood export and meat export,
killing of cows and beef-eating. If animal sacrifice is done as per
religious beliefs, it should not be condemned unless we ban all animal
slaughter for any other purpose.
V.V.S. Sarma,
Bangalore
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2002/07/01/stories/2002070100021006.htm
Should we ban animal sacrifice in temples?
DO WE need to ban the practice offering animals and birds as sacrifice
during prayer in Hindu temples?
Does the State have the authority to police and ban animal sacrifices
of one religious group while allowing another to perform offering of
animals at prayer time.
Lord Krishna while listing the types of devotees based on the kind of
offering/kind of rituals one performs categorises them into (1) satvic
(peaceful, compassionate and calm), (2) rajasic (aggressive and
restive) and (3) tamasic devotees (very selfish and not concerned
about hurting others for one's own joy) based on the sankalpa
(intention), devatha invoked (name and form of the god invoked),
offering to the Lord and the method of prayer.
Not all devotion is satvic; therefore not all offerings are satvic.
From time immemorial the practice of offering animals during worship
as sacrifice is prevalent.
If one is allowed to kill a bird or an animal for his personal
consumption, there can be no extra harm to the animal or bird if it is
killed for the sake of offering.
The only thing that must be debated is the sensibilities of the satvic
person, who may be offering his prayers at that time, being offended
by the offering of animals or birds by those who choose a non-satvic
method based on his sankalpa and nature.
This is certainly very important. Just as smoking in public places is
banned, offering animal sacrifice in temples where predominant style
of praying is satvic is perfectly in order and needs to be done.
Just as certain places are reserved exclusively for smokers, certain
temples where traditionally animal sacrifices are done should be
allowed to continue the practice.
We should accept the fact that it takes all kinds of people to make
the world and we should frame rules and regulations taking this fact
into consideration.
If persons from other faiths can offer animals, if we can display
skinned animals sometimes with its tail intact in meat shops in public
shopping area in villages and small towns, how can we prevent animal
sacrifice in village temples where it is a time immemorial tradition?
What is necessary is proper regulation so that the majority of the
temples where the persons offering prayers choosing the satvic method
are free from animal sacrifices and allow the practice to continue
where traditionally it is much prevalent.
Hinduism is an all-inclusive way of life and therefore cannot exclude
non-satvic methods of offering prayers.
MANIKAM RAMASWAMI
http://www.hindu.com/op/2003/09/09/stories/2003090900130300.htm
Sacrificing an age-old practice
According to popular belief, the animal or bird sacrifice is only a
symbol of their `Nerthi Kadan' (thanksgiving), which, if not
fulfilled, would be construed as `unpardonable'.
THOUGH NOT far away from the Temple City, the Pandi Muneeswarar
temple, `Pandikovil' in local parlance, is located in an area free
from the humdrum of the urban life. Surrounded by lush green
paddyfields, an eerie silence prevails in and around the temple
complex now despite hundreds of devotees continuing to throng the
shrine.
"Animal or bird sacrifice is not allowed here!" screams a notice
board, put up by the temple administration at the entrance to the
complex, which had been a scene of ritual killings for decades
together.
Some of the devotees, who shun slitting or hacking animals and birds,
continue with the symbolic puja by offering pongal, flowers and money
to the deity. Still many are at a loss to understand how they can
propitiate the temple deities -- Pandi Muneeswarar, Andi and
Samayakaruppasamy -- without offering them goats or roosters.
Till August 30, scores of goats and fowls were sacrificed,
particularly on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays by the devotees who
thronged the shrine from different parts of the State, including towns
and villages in Madurai, Tiruchi, Virudhunagar, Theni, Ramanathapuram,
Sivaganga and Chennai districts, as a mark of fulfilment of their vow
to the deities. The blood-splattered mud floor around the Pandi
Muneeswarar temple stands a testimony to the age-old practice.
Now that the ritual has come to a grinding halt, the crowd of devotees
comprising mainly small and medium farmers and farm workers has also
grown thinner, thanks to the Government's order on August 28 banning
animal and bird sacrifice in temples. As it has been publicised, the
immediate provocation for the ban was the sacrifice of 500 buffaloes
at a village shrine in Tiruchi district recently. The Chief Minister,
Jayalalithaa, has written to the district authorities, asking them to
prevent the killing of animals and birds in the name of seeking the
blessings of gods. Calling for stringent action against the
`violators', she has pointed out that the Tamil Nadu Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals Act, 1950, and its subsequent amendment, also
banned such cruel acts on the temple premises.
The Government clamped the ban close on the heels of the Madras High
Court ordering notices to the Home Secretary and the DGP on a public
interest petition seeking the ban.
But ritual killings are not confined to the Pandi Muneeswarar Temple
alone, though it is a well-known fact that animal and bird sacrifice
is common in the State, more particularly in the southern districts.
It is practised in other parts of the country and prevalent among
different religious sects in many parts of the subcontinent from time
immemorial, historians point out.
The village deities, otherwise known as `folk gods', with regional
character, are installed mostly in roofless outdoor temples. As many
of these deities attract people in the lower strata of society, the
devotees have a `direct access' to them.
Unlike classical temples, where pujas are held as per `agamas', meat,
cigar and liquor are permitted for worship here.
As the relationship between the devotees and the deities is `personal'
without even a minimum role for intermediaries including the temple
priests, people believe that their god will help them fulfil any wish.
Childless couple seek the deity's grace to bless them with children
while unmarried persons plead for fixing elusive weddings.
Solution is also sought for family problems arising out of socio-
economic conditions. According to popular belief, the animal or bird
sacrifice is only a symbol of their `Nerthi Kadan' (thanksgiving),
which, if not fulfilled, would be construed as `unpardonable'.
Animal sacrifice, followed by common dining, is part and parcel of the
worship at the folk shrines. Till the enforcement of the ban, if
affordable sections sacrificed goats, the poor and downtrodden offered
the less expensive roosters.
Separate enclosures were installed near the temple for cooking the
carcasses returned to the devotees after the sacrifice was performed.
However, the head and a leg of the goat would be handed over to the
butcher, who slaughtered the animal. A fixed fee was also collected
from the devotees for chopping off the heads of goats, besides
skinning and de-boning the meat.
The Government's action has been given a new twist as it has come
close on the heels of its decision to support the demand for a ban on
cow slaughter. Several opposition parties have dubbed the move as yet
another proof of the ruling party's `pro-Hindutva slant', even while
systematically depriving the Dalits and backward communities of their
age-old cultural rights.
The ban will only pave the way for performing the sacrifice
clandestinely within four walls, they claim, citing the example of a
ruling party MLA, who reportedly offered `annadhanam' with the meat of
goats slaughtered near his residence in Dindigul district.
But the ban has been hailed by animal and bird lovers, apart from some
religious personalities, who claim that no book says ritual killing is
religious.
But there are many, who believe that the age-old custom will disappear
only through persuasion and education rather than through an official
ban.
S.DORAIRAJ
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 08, 2003
Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU
RIVERS: JULY 01, 2001
Requiem for a river
M. T. Vasudevan Nair
The author is a winner of the Jnanpith award and is a Malayalam film-
maker and writer.
When the bridge across the River Bharatapuzha was completed in 1954,
the late Edasseri who had blazed literary trails with his poetic
force, looked at it with wonder and later wrote the poem "Kuttipuram
Bridge". It is a famous work, often quoted in the context of the eco-
aesthetics of Malayalam poetry. The poet marvelled at the engineering
skill. The bridge cost twenty-three lakhs of rupees, a formidable sum
at that time. He could visualise the thousands of vehicles about to
fly through the new highway. But he did not conceal his subtle fear
that the serenity of the riverside village might vanish in the near
future. The poem concluded on an apprehensive note:
S. Ramesh Kurup
"Oh Mother Perar, will you also change
Into a miserable gutter eventually?"
Perar or Nila (pet names of Bharatapuzha) did not turn into a gutter.
The poet never foresaw the calamity of sand-mining and he could not
imagine it as the desert strip, which it is now. Huge thickets grow on
the small mounds in the sand bed in several places. One can even see a
large casuarina grove right in the middle of the river between
Kuttipuram and Tirunavaya. They are partially hidden only during the
few days of heavy monsoon.
The river had inspired many of our major poets like Vallathol, P.
Kunhiraman Nair and Edasseri. For the commoners it was the sacred
Dakshina Ganga. Vallathol established the illustrious Kerala Kala
Mandalam on its banks in the village of Cheruthuruthy. A whole lot of
writers, singers and Kathakali artistes grew up in the villages close
to the river from Kalpathy to Ponani. So the river was often described
as the cultural stream of Malabar.
I have seen the terrifying form of the river during the floods of 1942
and 1944. We were safe in the ancestral house as it was built on an
elevated area beyond the stretch of paddy fields. The elders said the
worst flood was in 1924 when waters touched the foot hills.
The flood of 1944 is vivid in my memory. I was sent to the provision
shop to get something in the afternoon and instead of the short cut
through the fields I returned by the road bordering the river. The
river was alarmingly full. Elders were watching from several points.
Somebody shouted to me: "Run, boy, run. Any moment the water may rush
in through a breach." I ran at a terrific speed. By the time I reached
the steps to the house, water had gushed into the field. This flood
lasted for four days. There were so many relatives in the house who
had vacated from their riverside houses.
R. Prasanna Venkatesh/Wilderfile
We all took our daily baths from the steps below the main gate. During
the heavy monsoon the river hissed during the days and roared at
night, threatening to cut across and overflow. Yet we were not afraid
of the river. The dark misty mountains in the distance and the
ascending rolls of thick rain clouds were giving the necessary
warnings. Of course the flood damaged the dwelling of low lying areas.
Plantains and vegetables of those greedy farmers who encroached the
riverbed and did unauthorised cultivation, suffered. The villagers
generally kept the flat lands on either side of the river as flood-
plains. This minimised the force of the flood and incidentally
collected and stored large quantities of fertile top soil.
Bharatapuzha once boasted of a water transport system from Palakkad to
Ponani. Twin boats carrying agricultural produce to Ponani port used
to halt for the night at our ferry point. The oarsmen cooked their
food on the banks and rested till daybreak. From our courtyard we
could hear their friendly quarrels late in the night. An occasional
Mopla ballad also floated in the night air.
The whole village, except the very old, took their bath in the river
during summer. The water in the tanks was not good enough while
compared to the crystal clear running water, even though it was not
deep. The families without their own wells made their private water
holes in the riverbed for potable water.
During the summer, guests and relatives came to all the upper middle
class house from distant villages or towns like Calicut or Trichur.
For the adolescent males it was a festive occasion to watch discreetly
the sophisticated maidens chaperoned by elders going to certain
protected areas of the river for their evening ablutions.
The cattle also enjoyed a bath in the river - there were areas marked
for cattle - after a hot day's toil. If you could drive the cattle to
the river without their taking a bite from the paddy fields on either
side of the bund, then the grownups deemed you fit to enter the farm
work. (If you could read Ezhuthachan's Ramayanam without faltering,
your Malayalam education was complete!)
For me, the moonlit riverbed in the summer is a distant, but vivid
dream. We were never allowed to go there as it was a favourite
playground for the celestials. Villagers who got down at Pallipuram
Railway Station from a night train had to be careful while crossing
the river. If you did not disturb them, they would not bother you.
That was the perfect understanding between divine beings and mortals.
K. Ananthan
Our family deity was in Kodikunnath Temple, six kilometres away across
the river. We all believed in a legend that at some time in the past
there was only a poor widow and three children in our house. She used
to keep cows and every morning she would take the milk to the temple.
In return she got enough cooked rice for the day. Once the river was
full and the boatman did not dare to make it across. The widow
returned and told the children that there would not be any rice till
the river subsided. She gave boiled milk to the children and put them
to bed. At midnight someone knocked on the front door and she opened
it. There was an old woman on the door step all covered up and
drenched. The nocturnal visitor placed a brass vessel full of rice in
front of the widow and commanded: "Wake the children and feed them!"
Then the figure vanished. After the flood receded, on the fourth day
the widow went to the temple with the usual milk. She had kept the
rice vessel also with her to discuss the incident with the priest. The
priest was astonished. The vessel had been missing from the sanctum
sanctorum for the last three days.
So we all grew up loving and adoring the Mother Goddess who once
brought rice to our hungry ancestor.
We have a grandmother too, the mother of Kodikkunnath Goddess. She is
in the temple Muthassiar Kavu (grandmother's temple) near Pattambi.
According to one legend the Grandmother Goddess and her three
beautiful daughters (including the mother of Kodikkunnath) were
strolling along the river bed on a summer night. They saw a dance
festival by the Harijans and the youngest daughter was so carried away
by it, that she refused to go along when it was time to leave. The
mother ordered her to be with the Harijans and perform as their
guardian deity. This is the popular belief on the origin of Kanakkar
Kavu (Kanakkar is a sect of Harijans).
On another occasion the two sisters quarrelled after witnessing the
ritual of an animal sacrifice. As the younger one was so much
engrossed in the gory scene, the elder one parted company and settled
down in Kodikkunnath. The younger sister shifted to Kodungallur where
blood sacrifices were a common ritual until the immediate past.
Coming to the present, hundreds of lorries now wait in queue at every
point of access in every Panchayat all along the river. Roads are laid
right into the midrib of the river for quick mining and loading. The
thickets have grown into mini jungles in many places. They shield the
gamblers during the day and the illicit distillers at night.
It is not an unusual spectacle now in April and May to see, while
travelling through some villages by the river, long queues of women
with their coloured plastic pots waiting patiently for the water
lorry. The sub-soil water has receded so much that the wells on the
river belt have gone dry.
The river Bharatapuzha set the stage for many battles and historical
spectacles like Mamankam in the past. Noisy scenes are enacted even
now on the riverbed over territorial rights of mining and loading and
validity of official licenses. Long rows of heavy lorries block every
access to the river. You can no longer get a panoramic view of the
river. Instead, it is a vast scattering of mining pits.
To us, the river was another benevolent Mother Goddess. She discreetly
guarded our intimate dreams. Her deep chasms painfully received the
frustrations and shame of some of the erratic children. The departed
dear ones accepted the rituals of our obeisance under her watchful
eyes and left peacefully for their heavenly abodes.
The river which has often inspired me and which has witnessed my
growing up, affectionately tolerating my contradictions within, is
breathing her last.
I feel one of my filial bonds is about to be cruelly snapped. The
village is losing a colourful historical past, a nostalgic glory and a
cultural legacy. Yes, we have lost all of them, almost.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/folio/fo0107/01070480.htm
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2003/09/08/stories/2003090800700100.htm
A case for satvic food
CHENNAI, OCT. 15. How can food have any relevance to a person's
ultimate goal?
According to scriptures, eating is akin to conducting a homa, and
technically we are observing vaishvanara yagna when we are consuming a
meal. It is in the pit of the stomach that hunger, a sensation akin to
fire, is produced. This can be quenched only when we partake of food.
However, the nature of the ingredients of the food is important and
careful adherence to vegetarian meal is more in consonance with a
seeker's spiritual journey. In the Ramayana, sage Viswamitra sought
from Dasarata the assistance of Rama and Lakshmana to protect a yagna
from the evil forces which were showering entrails into the
sacrificial fire. Similarly, we are guilty of indulging in meaty food
in our daily diet which is but a reflection of the evil forces in our
spiritual life, said Sri Vidyasagara Madhva Theertha in his address at
the Indian Vegetarian Congress.
One should resist the temptation of eating meat, polluting the system
in the name of nutrition. Don't the Vedas sanction animal sacrifice,
some ask. Saint Madhwacharya argues against superficial study of
scriptures and prescribes analysis by exclusive application of "maha
vyakarna," the superior grammar. It will then be found that the cow
that is to be sacrificed is nothing more than a composition of flour
and ghee (clarified butter). Detailed analyses are found in the works
of the exponents of the Madhwa school of thought, such as Sri Vijendra
Theertha and Sri Narayana Panditacharya.
Some argue that whatever is offered to God should be consumed by the
seekers. Since the Vedas sanction animal sacrifice, consumption of
animal flesh is considered a just course of action by some. A few
others compromise when caught in a dilemma over meat — while adopting
animal sacrifice at yagnas, they are strict vegetarians in their food
habits. However, Sri Madhwacharya argues that there cannot be two sets
of rules for yagnas. The sacrificial fires at the visible homakunda
and the invisible fire pit (the stomach) are in principle the same.
The Vedas are for the uplift of people and as such they will not
advocate anything retrograde in a person's quest for liberation. To
the evolved, there is no dichotomy.
Over eons, violent modes of worship have been replaced with more
satvic methods. The scriptures have to be read and interpreted
carefully in both letter and spirit, and harmful practices should be
given up.
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Oct 15, 2004
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2004/10/15/stories/2004101500070900.htm
Beef eating: strangulating history
While one must respect the sentiments of those who worship cow and
regard her as their mother, to take offence to the objective study of
history just because the facts don't suit their political calculations
is yet another sign of a society where liberal space is being
strangulated by the practitioners of communal politics. [text Tag=blue-
tint][/Text]PROF. D. N. JHA, a historian from Delhi University, had
been experiencing the nightmares of `threats to life' from anonymous
callers who were trying to prevail upon him not to go ahead with the
publication of his well researched work, Holy Cow: Beef in Indian
Dietary Traditions.
As per the reports it is a work of serious scholarship based on
authentic sources in tune with methods of scientific research in
history. The book demonstrates that contrary to the popular belief
even today a large number of Indians, the indigenous people in
particular and many other communities in general, consume beef
unmindful of the dictates of the Hindutva forces.
It is too well known to recount that these Hindutva forces confer the
status of mother to the cow. Currently 72 communities in Kerala - not
all of them untouchables - prefer beef to the expensive mutton and the
Hindutva forces are trying to prevail upon them to stop the same.
Not tenable
To begin with the historian breaks the myth that Muslim rulers
introduced beef eating in India. Much before the advent of Islam in
India beef had been associated with Indian dietary practices. Also it
is not at all tenable to hold that dietary habits are a mark of
community identity.
A survey of ancient Indian scriptures, especially the Vedas, shows
that amongst the nomadic, pastoral Aryans who settled here, animal
sacrifice was a dominant feature till the emergence of settled
agriculture. Cattle were the major property during this phase and they
offered the same to propitiate the gods. Wealth was equated with the
ownership of the cattle.
Many gods such as Indra and Agni are described as having special
preferences for different types of flesh - Indra had weakness for
bull's meat and Agni for bull's and cow's. It is recorded that the
Maruts and the Asvins were also offered cows. In the Vedas there is a
mention of around 250 animals out of which at least 50 were supposed
to be fit for sacrifice and consumption. In the Mahabharata there is a
mention of a king named Rantideva who achieved great fame by
distributing foodgrains and beef to Brahmins. Taittiriya Brahman
categorically tells us: `Verily the cow is food' (atho annam via gauh)
and Yajnavalkya's insistence on eating the tender (amsala) flesh of
the cow is well known. Even later Brahminical texts provide the
evidence for eating beef. Even Manusmriti did not prohibit the
consumption of beef.
As a medicine
In therapeutic section of Charak Samhita (pages 86-87) the flesh of
cow is prescribed as a medicine for various diseases. It is also
prescribed for making soup. It is emphatically advised as a cure for
irregular fever, consumption, and emaciation. The fat of the cow is
recommended for debility and rheumatism.
With the rise of agricultural economy and the massive transformation
occurring in society, changes were to be brought in in the practice of
animal sacrifice also. At that time there were ritualistic practices
like animal sacrifices, with which Brahmins were identified. Buddha
attacked these practices. There were sacrifices, which involved 500
oxen, 500 male calves, 500 female calves and 500 sheep to be tied to
the sacrificial pole for slaughter. Buddha pointed out that aswamedha,
purusmedha, vajapeya sacrifices did not produce good results.
According to a story in Digha Nikaya, when Buddha was touring Magadha,
a Brahmin called Kutadanta was preparing for a sacrifice with 700
bulls, 700 goats and 700 rams. Buddha intervened and stopped him. His
rejection of animal sacrifice and emphasis on non-injury to animals
assumed a new significance in the context of new agriculture.
The threat from Buddhism
The emphasis on non-violence by Buddha was not blind or rigid. He did
taste beef and it is well known that he died due to eating pork.
Emperor Ashok after converting to Buddhism did not turn to
vegetarianism. He only restricted the number of animals to be killed
for the royal kitchen.
So where do matters change and how did the cow become a symbol of
faith and reverence to the extent of assuming the status of
`motherhood'? Over a period of time mainly after the emergence of
Buddhism or rather as an accompaniment of the Brahminical attack on
Buddhism, the practices started being looked on with different
emphasis. The threat posed by Buddhism to the Brahminical value system
was too severe. In response to low castes slipping away from the grip
of Brahminism, the battle was taken up at all the levels. At
philosophical level Sankara reasserted the supremacy of Brahminical
values, at political level King Pushyamitra Shung ensured the physical
attack on Buddhist monks, at the level of symbols King Shashank got
the Bodhi tree (where Gautama the Buddha got Enlightenment)
destroyed.
One of the appeals to the spread of Buddhism was the protection of
cattle wealth, which was needed for the agricultural economy. In a way
while Brahminism `succeeded' in banishing Buddhism from India, it had
also to transform itself from the `animal sacrifice' state to the one
which could be in tune with the times. It is here that this ideology
took up the cow as a symbol of their ideological march. But unlike
Buddha whose pronouncements were based on reason, the counteraction of
Brahminical ideology took the form of a blind faith based on
assertion. So while Buddha's non-violence was for the preservation of
animal wealth for the social and compassionate reasons the counter was
based purely on symbolism. So while the followers of Brahminical
ideology accuse Buddha of `weakening' India due to his doctrine of non-
violence, he was not a cow worshipper or vegetarian in the current
Brahminical sense.
Despite the gradual rigidification of Brahminical `cow as mother'
stance, large sections of low castes continued the practice of beef
eating. The followers of Buddhism continued to eat flesh including
beef. Since Brahminism is the dominant religious tradition, Babur, the
first Mughal emperor, in his will to his son Humayun, in deference to
these notions, advised him to respect the cow and avoid cow slaughter.
With the construction of Hindutva ideology and politics, in response
to the rising Indian national movement, the demand for ban on cow
slaughter also came up. In post-Independence India RSS repeatedly
raised this issue to build up a mass campaign but without any response
to its call till the 1980s.
While one must respect the sentiments of those who worship cow and
regard her as their mother, to take offence to the objective study of
history just because the facts don't suit their political calculations
is yet another sign of a society where liberal space is being
strangulated by the practitioners of communal politics. We have seen
enough such threats and offences in recent past - be it the opposition
to films or the destruction of paintings, or the dictates of the
communalists to the young not to celebrate Valentine's Day, etc., -
and hope the democratic spirit of our Constitution holds the forte and
any threat to the democratic freedom is opposed tooth and nail.
Prof. RAM PUNIYANI
A member of EKTA (Committee for Communal Amity), Mumbai
Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, August 14, 2001
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/08/14/stories/13140833.htm
Volume 21 - Issue 06, March 13 - March 26, 2004
India's National Magazine
from the publishers of THE HINDU
COVER STORY
The spread in the South
Hindutva has percolated to the nooks and corners of South India, and
the routes taken have often been socio-cultural and educational rather
than political. Reports from Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka.
S.R. RAGHUNATHAN
At the Mahamaham in Kumbakonam, the VHP makes its presence felt during
the holy dip in the Kumbeshwara temple tank on March 6.
TAMIL NADU
A multi-pronged approach
"Tamil Nadu today is under the spiritual rule of Jayalalithaa." This
is a pious declaration made by P.C. Ramasami, Minister for Hindu
Religious and Charitable Endowments in the Jayalalithaa-led All India
Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government in the State, at
Kumbakonam in Thanjavur district on March 6 after a ritual "holy dip"
to mark the Mahamaham festival. About 10 lakh devotees are estimated
to have taken a dip in the tank of the Kumbeshwara temple, along with
"priests carrying trishuls". The Sankaracharya of the Kanchi mutt,
Jayendra Saraswati, inaugurated the festival, which is described as
the "Kumbh Mela of the South" and is held once in 12 years. Numerous
Saivite and Vaishnavite mutt heads participated in the festival.
Ramasami told mediapersons that under the Jayalalithaa regime 2,822
temples had been renovated. The Minister's observations are indicative
of not only the government's priorities, but also the congenial
atmosphere in the State for the Sangh Parivar to exploit the
religiosity of the faithful to advance its communal and political
agenda.
The Hindutva forces were helped by the fact that they had the
Bharatiya Janata Party in power at the Centre and two successive
friendly governments in the State, the first headed by the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), an ally of the BJP until recently, and the
second by the AIADMK, an erstwhile ally of the BJP which is keen to
build bridges with the Sangh Parivar. The Sangh Parivar has been
largely successful in its attempt to make the best of the situation
because of the competitive political lines taken by the DMK and the
AIADMK in support of the Hindutva forces in order to make electoral
gain. Political observers criticised the Dravidian parties' tactical
line as a significant deviation from rationalism and self-respect, the
cornerstones of the Dravidian movement founded by `Periyar' E.V.
Ramasami. The Dravidian parties' competitive political support to the
Sangh Parivar gave legitimacy to the actions of the Hindutva forces
and contributed to their growth. Jayalalithaa's AIADMK has been the
more enthusiastic of the two in supporting the Hindutva cause. While
in power the DMK extended only passive support to the Parivar, without
concealing its reservations on issues such as a common civil code and
the construction of a temple in Ayodhya. The AIADMK government has had
no qualms in not only supporting many of its causes but also wresting
the initiative from the Hindutva forces by launching certain
legislative measures that even BJP-led governments in other States did
not resort to.
When, in 2002, the Jayalalithaa government brought in an Ordinance,
later made into a law with legislative approval, banning "forcible"
religious conversions through "financial allurement" or otherwise, the
move drew protests from many parties, including the DMK, then an ally
of the BJP at the Centre. The anti-conversion law was seen as one more
of the many pro-Hindutva measures taken by the Jayalalithaa government
since it came to power in 2001. These included the provision of
substantial financial assistance to renovate temples, grant of pension
to poojaris, and the `Annadhanam' scheme to feed poor Hindus in
temples. The government also introduced a scheme to conduct spiritual
classes in over 150 Hindu temples. Jayalalithaa also arranged for a
mass wedding ceremony for a hundred Hindu couples.
Even during her first term as Chief Minister, in 1991-96, she took
several measures that pleased the Hindutva forces. Apart from
renovating temples, she started Vedic colleges to benefit the priestly
class. She brought in an Ordinance to facilitate government
interference in minorities-run educational institutions, but had to
withdraw it amid protests. Her support to the kar seva at Ayodhya,
expressed at a meeting of the National Integration Council in November
1992, a fortnight before the demolition of the Babri Masjid is only
too well known.
Another controversial move by her government was the directive to the
administration to enforce strictly the law against animal sacrifice in
temples, which had been in cold storage for five decades (Frontline,
October 10, 2003). The Hindu orthodoxy had for long been demanding a
ban on such sacrifices on the grounds that the practice "polluted"
places of worship, most of which were even denied the status of
temples. The government's move to enforce the Act met with stiff
resistance, particularly from the oppressed people such as Dalits.
They claimed that it violated their constitutional right to worship
and sought to interfere with the form of worship of the disadvantaged
sections. The government order was also challenged in the Madras High
Court. The government, however, kept on justifying its action with the
support of the heads of religious mutts and State BJP leaders.
Ultimately, Jayalalithaa was forced to bow to the people's wish and
even annul the Tamil Nadu Animals and Birds Sacrifices Prohibition
Act, 1950.
The State government's willing cooperation in implementing some of the
priority issues on the Hindutva agenda has helped the Sangh Parivar in
the task of consolidation in the past five years. For instance,
Vinayaka Chaturthi processions organised in Chennai by the Hindutva
forces, which had in the first few years led to violent confrontations
with religious minorities, have spread to other places in the State.
Even the activists of the two principal Dravidian parties are now seen
in the Chaturthi processions with their own Vinayaka idols decorated
with party flags. Although their potential to cause violence has shown
a significant fall in recent years, the processions still cause
tension.
Another major step taken by the Hindu Munnani and the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) was to organise non-Brahmin poojaris of village temples
and secure governmental assistance for them. This was done in
pursuance of their plan to wrest control of thousands of village
temples, meddle with the existing forms of worship and ensure the
loyalty of lakhs of people in rural areas. According to A.
Sivasubramaniam, a researcher, the idea is to Brahminise these temples
by robbing Dalits and other backward communities of their natural
rights over these places of worship built by their ancestors mostly in
honour of slain heroes.
The VHP claims that it has built 120 temples in Dalit areas of Tamil
Nadu, where "persons from all communities can worship". It further
claims that because of this action untouchability has been "reduced to
a great extent in these areas". In fact, what Dalits in Tamil Nadu and
other States are demanding is not separate temples, but a reassurance
that their constitutional right to enter the mainstream temples will
be honoured. Dalits in many parts of the State have launched struggles
to assert their right to temple entry, but on no occasion has the VHP
or its allies thought it necessary to intervene on behalf of these
helpless people. In many parts of the State, the Parivar's workers are
not sympathetic to Dalits' struggles against casteist oppression; they
often depend upon leaders of the oppressive castes to carry out their
activities.
Education is another area in which Hindutva forces have made
substantial headway in recent years. In Tamil Nadu about 150 schools
are functioning under the guidance of the Vidya Bharati Akhil
Bharatiya Shiksha Sansthan, a Sangh Parivar organisation that aims at,
among other things, evolving "an integrated system of education in
conformity with the aims of Indian culture and its ideals of life". Of
these schools, 24 are Hindu Vidyalayas run by the VHP. Other schools
are under the control of many organisations, including the Vivekananda
Educational Society and the Vivekananda Educational Trust, both based
in Chennai. There has been a substantial increase in the number of
schools run by these institutions during the past five years. For
instance, schools under the Vivekananda Educational Society increased
from 10 in 1998 to 16 in 2003. Last year, the Society added a
residential school run on the "gurukula" model.
Most of these schools, located in the suburbs of Chennai, cater to
middle-class families. Over 17,000 students of the schools run by the
Vivekananda Educational Society are trained in music, dance, yoga,
physical exercise and so on. Besides Hindi, Tamil and English, they
are taught Sanskrit as a compulsory fourth language. In the name of
moral instruction they are taught Hindu epics and the Puranas.
An interesting practice in these schools is that the applications of
the students writing public examinations are taken to a temple nearby
and placed "at the feet" of the deities, invoking their blessings. All
students, irrespective of their religion, are compelled to participate
in this ritual. Teachers and students are expected to attend camps in
the name of "refresher courses" or "in-house training". At a certain
stage, students are taken to the Vivekananda Kendra in Kanyakumari for
a 21-day camp run on the lines of a `shakha' of the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). This camp is believed to serve the purpose of
recruiting cadets for the RSS. All schools have a prayer hall
displaying pictures of Hindu deities. One significant development with
regard to the Vidya Bharati schools in recent years is that they have
been increasingly using textbooks prepared by the National Council of
Educational Research and Training (NCERT), unlike in the past when
they used them only for the 10th and 12th standards. This may be
because NCERT books have now been doctored to suit the needs of
saffronised education. These schools, with the assistance of a trained
RSS worker, organise thiruvilakku poojas for women in temples and lend
space for holding RSS camps.
In university education, too, attempts are being made to introduce
subjects such as Vedic Astrology and Vedic Mathematics. However, these
face stiff resistance at university bodies such as the Academic
Council, the Senate and the Syndicate. For instance, when the
University Grants Commission's suggestion to start courses in Vedic
Astrology and Vedic Mathematics came up for implementation,
representatives of the Madurai University Teachers Association in the
various university bodies protested against the move and stopped it.
In the University of Madras, an M.A. degree course in Natya (Dance and
Theatre) was sought to be introduced with the blessings of Sangh
experts. At a meeting of the Academic Council, the proposal was
opposed on the grounds that the project had no scientific basis and
contained retrograde features in the name of "incorporating the
learning advantages of the centuries-old guru-sishya parampara along
with research and training methodologies of modern education". The
Vice-Chancellor had to shelve the proposal pending detailed
discussion.
There is no doubt that the increased activities of the Sangh Parivar
in recent years portend dangerous consequences for the communal
harmony in the State. However, these efforts do not seem to have
enabled the BJP to expand its political space in a big way. Its
influence does not appear to have spread to areas other than its
traditional strongholds, Kanyakumari and Coimbatore districts.
S. Viswanathan
KERALA
A switch in strategy
The supreme confidence, if not the menace, in the statements was
unmistakable, as the leader of the Marad Arayasamajam, the Sangh
Parivar's fishermen's organisation in the communally volatile Marad
village in coastal Kozhikode, introduced himself to Frontline in his
office in October 2003: "I was born here. I was brought up here. I am
a fisherman and have been a member of the Arayasamajam from the
mid-1970s. I have held all the important positions in the Samajam,
except that of the president. I rose through the Rashtiya Swayamsewak
Sangh (RSS). When my work proved a hindrance for everyday RSS `shakha'
activity, I joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, a party in which I have
held several important local responsibilities. Now I am the secretary
of the Arayasamajam. I have no hesitation in saying that all members
of the Arayasamajam (the entire fishing community at Marad) are RSS
supporters. Nobody sings a different tune here. Our activities are
fully supported by our leadership."
C.RATHEESH KUMAR
In Thiruvananthapuram, a Ganesha festival procession organised by the
Shiv Sena.
For months on end, after nine fishermen, eight of them Hindus, were
brutally done to death in a frenzy of communal revenge killings at
Marad in May last year (Frontline, November 7, 2003), T. Suresh, the
leader of the small Hindu fishing community in the village, literally
became the face of the Sangh Parivar in Kerala, making demands, posing
threats, rejecting proposals and keeping the State government
machinery on tenterhooks before agreeing to proposals that eventually
launched a peace initiative in the Muslim-majority village in north
Kerala. The Muslim families that fled the village fearing reprisals
have since returned and the tenuous peace holds. The Arayasamajam
office in the village is a veritable fortress secured by Sangh cadre.
During the strife it was the virtual government in the village, where
political parties feared to tread.
The Arayasamajam leader and the men who surround him perhaps symbolise
what the Hindutva combine is up to in Kerala.
The violence at Marad in May was a clear indication that the
intervention of a large number of majority as well as minority
communal organisations had started showing its ugly results in Kerala.
The leader of the Hindu fishermen in Marad was a symbol of a growing
body of men and women in Kerala who "bore the same vision and the same
dream and moved forward as one" in their belief that a "Hindu Kerala
is not a myth", that each one of them has to "take such a glorious
vision to heart" to bring to reality a Kerala that will become a
"laboratory for the Hindu way of life and vision, if not immediately,
soon, in future".
Recently, the Sangh Parivar announced an ambitious target for such men
and women: of spreading the activities of the Parivar to all regions
in the State by 2006, the birth centenary year of RSS leader Madhav
Sadashiv Golwalkar. The focus of its recent activities has been on
extending its influence among all sections of Hindus, especially
Dalits, fisherfolk and Adivasis, and gaining acceptance in the State
through persistent socio-cultural interventions (Frontline, December
2, 2002 and February 28, 2003).
In Kerala, the RSS-led growth of the Sangh Parivar has overshadowed
the activities of its political arm, the BJP, especially in the years
since the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The number of RSS `shakhas'
has increased from 4,300 in 2001 to 4,800. Its organisers claim that
the `Sangh' is active in all the 14 districts of the State, the
weakest links being the Christian belt of the high-range Idukki and
Wayanad districts and the predominantly Muslim areas of north Kerala.
According to RSS activists, over 10,000 locations have been
"identified" for active work and in 1,329 of them daily drills and
discussions take place for an hour each in the morning, evening and
night.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), too, has established its
organisational network in all parts of the State, resorting to emotive
actions such as the distribution of tridents and the controversial
construction of a temple within the Idukki dam area. More important, a
myriad RSS-backed socio-cultural organisations promoting communal
ideas in the field of education, literature, theatre, science and arts
and actively involved in the renovation and protection of temples have
made a visible presence in the State within a short period.
The Kshetra Samrakshana Samiti, a Parivar unit with the declared aim
of "building a temple-based organised society" and a "temple-based way
of life", actively promotes the renovation of small family temples
dotting the State and has gained control of the management of the day-
to-day affairs and conduct of festivals of a number of big ones.
`Balagokulam', a mass organisation for children with over 1,300 units
in the State, organises the high-visibility "Srikrishna Jayanti rally
and celebrations" in various cities and towns every year. Thousands of
children participate in the event. In addition, it runs Balasamskara
Kendras (children's cultural centres) at five centres; `Sowrakshika',
an organisation for the protection of children's rights; Mayilpeeli, a
magazine; and `Amrita Bharati Vidya Peetom', a centre for the
promotion of Sanskrit and Hindu culture.
Balagokulam claims a membership of over 26,000 children, who attend
weekly catch-them-young classes. The aim is to groom them as
leadership material for other Hindutva activities. As part of its 30th
anniversary, Balagokulam has announced the establishment of an
`International Sri Krishna Centre' in Kerala, to be developed as a Sri
Krishna pilgrimage centre in the State.
The Bharatiya Vichara Kendra, an intellectual forum for debate with
political opponents, was established in Kerala in 1982 after a sudden
spurt in RSS activity following frequent clashes between the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) and RSS activists in north Kerala. It has
more than 30 units in the State and brings out a magazine. Among other
activities, it conducts Gita, Yoga and Sanskrit classes.
Perhaps the most prominent and effective Sangh Parivar organisation is
the one that is involved in education, the Bharatiya Vidya Niketan. It
runs about 375 schools in all the districts with no government support
and purely on the initiative of the local Parivar cadre. Fifteen
schools, the majority of them in districts that have a sizable Muslim
or Christian population, follow the syllabi of the Central Board of
Secondary Education (CBSE), with English as the medium of instruction.
The rest follow the State syllabus. Teachers are required to undergo
special training under a five-point programme, which includes physical
education, Sanskrit, yoga, value education and art and culture, all
meant to acquaint them, and eventually their pupils, "with the Hindu
way of life". Key organisers in such schools are from the RSS, even
though the organisation does not have any direct involvement in its
running.
In addition to Janmabhoomi, a daily newspaper, and Kesari, a weekly,
the Parivar has 10 regular publications in the State. The Swadesi
Science Movement, which has as its declared objective the development
of an "Indian approach to science" (it recently organised an
international conference on Ayurveda), and `Tapasya', an organisation
promoting art and culture, are also prominent Sangh Parivar
"recruitment agencies".
In the past few years, the Hindutva combine's voluntary activity has
had a new focus: the tribal and coastal areas of Kerala. Providing
free medical aid and education and running informal, single-teacher
schools for tribal children are some of the activities it undertakes
there. A 33-bed hospital at Kalpetta in the predominantly tribal
Wayanad district, for example, offers free food, medicines, in-patient
facitlity and diagnostic services to the tribal people. The Vanvasi
Kalyan Ashram has established its units in 52 tribal areas of the
State and is now engaged in meeting the "challenge" of Christian
missionary activity in those areas, offering competitive healthcare
and educational facilities.
Early last year, the attack on an American missionary, Joseph William
Cooper, in Thiruvananthapuram, almost coincided with the two-day
`Vanavasi Sangamom' organised by the Sangh Parivar at Mananthavadi in
Wayanad district, to promote the all-India game plan of "Hinduising"
tribal people. The high-profile conference, attended by top Sangh
Parivar leaders, was itself preceded by events orchestrated by the VHP
and other Hindutva organisations to "celebrate the reconversion of (a
few) Adivasis to Hinduism". The Matsya Pravartaka Sanghom, another RSS
family unit, recently started a mobilisation initiative, organising
`Sagara poojas' (worshipping the sea) and Hindu maha sammelans at
select centres in the coastal areas and near freshwater lakes.
This is but an example of the vast infrastructure the RSS-led Hindutva
organisations have established in Kerala, which it considers a sunrise
region for interventions tailored to bring about a fundamentalist
shift in the thinking of Hindus. But the Hindu community, whose
loyalties are divided among various political parties and coalitions,
castes and caste-based political groups, has so far given no
indications of helping the Parivar realise its dream.
For three days from January 24, the RSS held a "Pranteeya Karyakarthru
Sibiram" in Kollam, its first in 25 years in Kerala, where the
Hindutva vision and dreams were reiterated. Nearly 16,000 delegates,
ranging from leaders of 4,800 shakhas in Kerala to the top leadership
including Sarsanghchalak K.S. Sudarshan, participated in it. The
address to the delegates of the conference by P. Parameswaran,
director of the Bharatiya Vichara Kendra, was a clear exposition of
the Sangh Parivar's vision of the challenges it faced in Kerala and
its long-term prospects in the State. The following are certain
significant excerpts from his speech:
1.Compared to other States, Kerala has a "substantial population of
Muslims, organised Christian missionary activity and support for deep-
rooted, `anti-national' Communist way of thinking". The State's Hindu
population came down in a decade from 57 per cent to 55 per cent,
while the Muslim and Christian populations increased to 23.34 per cent
and 19.32 per cent. "Even while we take pride in the fact that Hindus
form 55 per cent of the population, we should not forget that the
`other side' is 45 per cent. Even though Hindus are described as the
majority, they should remember that they are neither organised nor
strong. That is why they do not have influence or participation in any
sector in the State."
2.The formation of united Kerala (from the erstwhile Malabar, Cochin
and Travancore regions) "had also created an imbalance in terms of
population", along with changes in the structure of government and
politics of the State. (From then on) Hindu society lost the position
and influence it had before. It lost its predominant position in the
economy, politics and the educational sector in the State. "Other
sections" came to prominence. "Minority community organisations
transformed themselves into political parties. An organisation that
was once described as a "dead horse" (the Muslim League) increased its
number of seats, its position and influence. It gained the strength to
shake Kerala to the core. It threw ordinary laws to the winds. The
result was that along with their pre-eminence in the politics of the
State, they gained in the fields of education, industries as well as
economically. Land came under their control. The state of Hindus
became pathetic. They did not get even the benefits due to 55 per cent
of the peopulation."
3.Though the RSS has grown in strength in Kerala with its extremely
complex social climate, it is unable yet to put the stamp of Hindutva
in all walks of life, even though "anti-Hindu, anti-national" forces
remain strong but divided among themselves. It is unable yet to spread
the message of Hindutva among such forces that continue to fight among
themselves.
4.The intention of the Sangh Parivar is not to create a Hindu
organisation, but the strengthening of Hindu society... to have its
influence in all fields of life, including the economy and education.
Its aim is to bring about a social transformation by organising Hindus
in all walks of society and grow as an organisation of Hindu society.
5.The Parivar finds it encouraging that the Hindu revivalism taking
place all over India "is finding its echo in Kerala too"; that "people
who once sabotaged such efforts were seeing them with respect now";
that "a new spiritual climate" is developing in the State; that the
number of `spiritual gurus' is growing in Kerala ; that the number of
believers too is growing; and that "the various religious and cultural
activities it organised in the hundreds of temples in the State are
being widely welcomed. It believes in cooperating with the spiritual
revival efforts controlled by organisations that have no link with the
Parivar. "Ours is not an isolated stream, but a huge Ganga that
accepts all such efforts."
6.The Sangh Parivar believes that the present climate is ideal for its
growth in Kerala. It believed that the people are waiting eagerly to
accept the Hindutva message. Critics have disappeared and the sound of
criticism has vanished. "Kerala today has two political coalitions
which are bereft of ideas and are ideologically in a state of vacuum
and need not be a hindrance for the Sangh Parivar's activities."
Parameswaran's statements are the clearest exposition yet of the
concerns, goals and strategies of the RSS in relation to Kerala from
its own leaders. Clearly, it is because its political goal often
seemed so elusive in Kerala that the Hindutva combine had, ever since
the 1990s, subtly shifted its fight onto a new battlefield - that of
winning the hearts and minds of Hindus through non-political,
religious and socio-cultural mediation, using a vast network of
organisations. It is a platform where it finds itself left to its own
winning deeds by secular formations, including the Left parties and
the Congress(I).
R. Krishnakumar
KARNATAKA
Mutts as political players
What will be the likely role of the mutts in Karnataka in determining
the outcome of the elections in the State? Though defined legally as a
religious establishment headed by a pontiff, the mutt plays a role
that extends well beyond the purely religious. The mutts in Karnataka
are sharply divided along caste and sectarian lines. They have emerged
as major and not-to-be-ignored political players in the present
milieu, offering direct or indirect support to political parties and
candidates.
The Madhwa mutts in the coastal belt have been vehicles for the spread
of Hindutva, both as an ideology and as an electoral force. There are
eight Madhwa mutts, which are the joint custodians of the Krishna
temple in Udupi - the Palimar, Adamar, Krishnapur, Puttige, Shirur,
Sode, Kaniyur and Pejavar mutts. The reigning pontiffs of the mutts
conduct worship at the Udupi temple by a system of rotation. The two
most prominent mutts that have long been the standard-bearers of the
Hindutva cause are the Pejavar and Adamar mutts. The pontiff of the
Pejavar mutt, Sri Vishwesa Tirtha Swamiji, is a founder-member of the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and has been associated with the Ram
Janmabhoomi movement from its inception. He was present in Ayodhya
when the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 and is a prominent figure
on all Sangh Parivar platforms both in Karnataka and elsewhere in the
country.
Speaking to Frontline from Udupi, the octogenarian head of the Pejavar
mutt said he actively propagated the message of Hindutva and spread
the aims of the Ayodhya movement by addressing meetings, rallies and
samaveshas (mass meetings). "I speak about it and answer questions. If
there is any wrong writing on these issues in newspapers, I reply
immediately. I know from the reactions at my meetings that the message
has spread very well in Karnataka." As a margadarshi for the VHP, he
had ensured that his mutt worked with the VHP on many activities, he
said, although the mutt also worked through its own organisations,
particularly in providing education and healthcare in tribal areas and
inaccessible hilly regions.
The Pejavar mutt, in particular, has given active patronage to the
samavesha, which has, in recent months, become the most popular method
of Hindu mass mobilisation in the coastal belt. Following the Gujarat
riots, the samavesha has become a frequent event, spreading now from
the cities to small towns and villages of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada
districts. "The town or village is first covered with plastic saffron
flags of the VHP. The meeting is usually held near a minority-
dominated area. Leaders of the VHP, like Pravin Togadia, spit fire and
venom in their speeches, which threaten the minorities and exhort
Hindus to build a Hindu Rashtra," said H. Pattabhirama Somayaji,
Professor of English at University College, Mangalore. "Mutt leaders
like the Pejavar Swamiji are frequent speakers at these meetings. In
fact, in the last 10 years the mutts have become the standard bearers
of Hindutva rather than formal political parties. Political leaders
depend more and more upon the Swamijis to get their message across."
With the emergence of the mutts as the rallying points for Hindutva in
this region, the distinction between the religious and the political
as different spheres of public activity has all but disappeared. "Most
religious functions have been saffronised," said Somayaji. Take
paryaya, a ceremony held every two years to mark the passing on of the
authority to conduct worship in the Krishna temple amongst the
pontiffs of the eight Madhwa mutts. From a ceremony confined to a sect
of Madhwa Brahmins in Karnataka, paryaya has virtually become a State-
level function for all Hindus and a major expression of the power and
prestige of the mutt concerned. This year's paryaya ceremony was
attended by a galaxy of persons prominent in public life in the State.
Even the myriad `little traditions' of Hinduism, like the Bhootakulas
- a popular form of spirit worship practised in the villages of
Dakshina Kannada district by members of the lower castes - have been
permeated by the colour, sound, speech and symbolism of Hindutva, said
Somayaji.
"I have lived here for the past 50 years and was saddened to see the
Udupi Krishna temple founded 7,000 years ago by the great
Madhwacharya, flying the flag of the VHP," said G. Rajashekhar, an
employee of the Life Insurance Corporation of India and an active
member of the Souharda Vedike, an organisation that has been fighting
communalism. According to him, the Pejavar Swamiji welcomed and
blessed Pravin Togadia at a mammoth samajotsava held recently in
Udupi. The banners at the rally glorified Gujarat Chief Minister
Narendra Modi, and Togadia and hailed Dara Singh, the murderer of the
Australian missionary Graham Stains and his two sons, as the "saviour
of Hinduism". "We protested to the District Commissioner, after which
Dara Singh's name was removed from the banners," said Rajashekhar.
"The Pejavar Swamiji says he condemns the violence in Gujarat. Why
does he then continue to patronise Hindutva outfits that supported
it?"
Vishwesa Thirtha Swamiji of the Pejavar mutt with Karnataka Chief
Minister S.M. Krishna in Bangalore in February.
The Pejavar Swamiji told Frontline that though he might share a
platform with Modi or Togadia, he did not hesitate to disagree with
them publicly on some issues. "I argue with them and oppose them
whether it is the Gujarat violence or the issue of war with Pakistan
which Togadia supports and I oppose, or with Giriraj Kishore Acharya
who recently said that the life of a cow was more precious than the
life of a Dalit. I opposed them on all these issues," he said.
Although until very recently each Madhwa mutt had its own location of
caste influence, in recent years the mutts have tried to propagate
Hindutva across the caste divide. Mahatma Gandhi refused to enter the
Krishna temple on a visit to Udupi in the 1930s because untouchability
was practised there. Today, however, the mutts realise that for
Hindutva to have any relevance for the lower-caste segments of the
population, it has necessarily to be given political articulation and
distanced, at least in its rhetoric, from Brahminism. The mutts
realise that they cannot do this on their own and must associate
themselves with the political outfits of the Sangh Parivar, which use
the samaveshas as fora to make the call for the unification of Hindu
society.
One of Hinduism's attributes was its sanction for a plurality of forms
of religious practice. This non-threatening and accommodative element
of Hinduism is being erased systematically by the votaries of
Hindutva. Today, economically vulnerable castes like fisherfolk,
weavers, carpenters, barbers, cobblers and potters are being drawn
into the ambit of a militant Hindutva worldview. "It is clear from the
attendance at their rallies that the appeal of the Hindutva parties is
no longer to elitist Hindus but to Hindu society at large," says
Rajashekhar. Here too it is the Pejavar mutt that has shown the way.
Its pontiff has considerable influence with leaders both at the Centre
and in the State.
An influence far greater than that of the Brahmin mutts is exerted by
the Veerashaiva or Lingayat mutts on social and political life in
Karnataka. Veerashaivism grew out of a revolutionary 12th century
reform movement started by Basava against the stranglehold of
Brahminism on religion and society. Lingayats, or the followers of
Basava, are converts from various castes, and all castes have their
Lingayat converts.
The mutt became the functional nucleus of Basava's philosophy where
religion met its social purpose of providing free education and food
to all sections of the social order regardless of caste. Veerashaiva
mutts, which spread and consolidated themselves in the last decades of
the 19th century and in early 20th century, grew with state patronage
after Independence. Today, many Veerashaiva mutts are powerful
commercial entities that run hundreds of educational institutions.
They also control bulk votes and are therefore sought after by
political parties.
"The Veerashaiva mutts have, by and large, resisted the growth of
Hindutva in Karnataka as their founding philosophy is anti-
Brahminical," said K. Marulasiddappa, a well-known Kannada writer and
literary critic. On the other hand, the need for state patronage and
cordial relations with the party in power exerts a contrary pull on
them, which is why some Veerashaiva pontiffs have been less outspoken
than others against the politics of the Sangh Parivar. Some of the
major Veerashaiva mutts, like the Tumkur Siddaganga mutt, the Mysore
Suttur mutt, the Chitradurga Sirigere mutt, the Sanehalli mutt and the
Nidumamidi mutts and Belimath in Bangalore, the Gadag mutt and the
Muragha mutt in Chitradurga, have not endorsed the politics of
Hindutva. Some of the pontiffs of these mutts have actively opposed
it. "However, the hard fact is that it is caste, and not politics,
that eventually determines which party or candidate a particular mutt
supports," said Marulasiddappa.
"Political Hindutva is the new face of Brahminism, which the vaidika
mutts are spreading," Sri Veerabhadra Chennamalla Swamiji of the
Nidumamidi mutt told Frontline. "While on the one hand they say that
Hindu society is one, they embrace casteism, patriarchy and
untouchability. They are using Dalits and Sudras for vote bank
purposes."
Scoffing at the samaveshas organised by the Sangh Parivar, where
"ready-made crowds comprising VHP, RSS and Sangh Parivar activists"
are ferried, the Swamiji, who is a frequent speaker on anti-communal
platforms, believes that a majority in all religions are peace-loving
and will defeat the designs of the communal forces.
"Lingayats believe in casteless, classless, secular principles," the
pontiff of the Gadag mutt, Sri Jagadguru Tontada Siddalinga
Mahaswamiji, told Frontline. The Swamiji was a recipient of Communal
Harmony Award 2001, instituted by the Government of India.
"Lingayatism differs radically from Hinduism. We are naturally against
the Hindutva concept and oppose its onslaught against the people at
large. On the other hand, the Vedic mutts, which are Hindu mutts,
support the Sangh Parivar and indirectly the BJP," he said.
Several leading Veerashaiva mutt heads were associated with the
founding of the VHP at its first Dharma Sansad in 1984, according to
Sri Shivarudra Mahaswamy, the pontiff of the Belimath Maha Sansthana
in Bangalore. "At that time, the VHP focussed on social reform within
Hinduism, which we supported. It was only after the Ram Janmabhoomi
movement started that these swamijis became disenchanted and left," he
told Frontline. The Swamiji himself stayed on in the VHP. He was
present in Ayodhya during the destruction of the Babri Masjid ("none
of us knew this would happen," he claims) and slowly began distancing
himself from the Sangh Parivar after that. "The final break with the
VHP for me came with Gujarat. I was the only Lingayat swamiji who
participated in all their functions, but after Gujarat I left out of
conviction. They think they are building a Hindu society - they are
only building hell," he said. Although wary of the BJP, the
Veerashaiva mutts are likely to support Lingayat candidates if they
are fielded by the party. The electoral outcome, particularly in north
Karnataka, will be influenced strongly by the way Lingayats vote.
The only religious caste leader of the Vokkaligas is the Swamiji of
the Adichunchungiri mutt, a powerful establishment with assets running
into crores of rupees. The Swamiji is as much of a political figure as
a religious one and is known to be close to the ruling Congress(I),
although he also accepts invitations to speak on Sangh Parivar
platforms. At a recent samavesha in Bangalore, the Swamiji is reported
to have said that just as Muslims and Christians have their own
countries, Hindus need theirs. He later retracted the statement,
claiming that he had been misquoted.
With his sizable wealth and vote base, the swamiji is much-sought-
after by political parties. Except on the coast, where the BJP will
have the backing of a sizable section of the mutts, in the rest of the
State the major non-Brahmin mutts appear to be tilting towards either
the Congress(I) or the Janata Dal(S). This will certainly have an
impact on the electoral chances of the BJP in this region.
Parvathi Menon
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2106/stories/20040326004900900.htm
Ashvamedha
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ashvamedha (Sanskrit: अश्वमेध aśvamedhá; "horse sacrifice") was
one of the most important royal rituals of Vedic religion, described
in detail in the Yajurveda (TS 7.1-5, VSM 22–25[1] and the pertaining
commentary in the Shatapatha Brahmana ŚBM 13.1–5). The Rigveda does
have descriptions of horse sacrifice, notably in hymns RV 1.162-163
(which are themselves known as aśvamedha), but does not allude to the
full ritual according to the Yajurveda.
Gayatri Pariwar have been organising performances of a modernised
version of the sacrifice, not involving actual animal sacrifice, since
1991.
The Vedic sacrifice
The Ashvamedha could only be conducted by a king (rājā). Its object
was the acquisition of power and glory, the sovereignty over
neighbouring provinces, and general prosperity of the kingdom.
The horse to be sacrificed must be a stallion, more than 24, but less
than 100 years old. The horse is sprinkled with water, and the
Adhvaryu and the sacrificer whisper mantras into its ear. Anyone who
should stop the horse is ritually cursed, and a dog is killed symbolic
of the punishment for the sinners. The horse is then set loose towards
the North-East, to roam around wherever it chooses, for the period of
one year (or half a year, according to some commentators). The horse
is associated with the Sun, and its yearly course. If the horse
wanders into neighbouring provinces hostile to the sacrificer, they
must be subjugated. The wandering horse is attended by a hundred young
men, sons of princes or high court officials, charged with guarding
the horse from all dangers and inconvenience. During the absence of
the horse, an uninterrupted series of ceremonies is performed in the
sacrificer's home.
After the return of the horse, more ceremonies are performed. The
horse is yoked to a gilded chariot, together with three other horses,
and RV 1.6.1,2 (YV VSM 23.5,6) is recited. The horse is then driven
into water and bathed. After this, it is anointed with ghee by the
chief queen and two other royal consorts. The chief queen anoints the
fore-quarters, and the others the barrel and the hind-quarters. They
also embellish the horse's head, neck, and tail with golden ornaments.
The sacrificer offers the horse the remains of the night's oblation of
grain.
After this, the horse, a hornless he-goat, a wild ox (go-mrga, Bos
gavaeus) are bound to sacrificial stakes near the fire, and seventeen
other animals are attached to the horse. A great number of animals,
both tame and wild, are tied to other stakes, according to a
commentator 609 in total (YV VSM 24 consists of an exact enumeration).
Then the horse is slaughtered (YV VSM 23.15, tr. Griffith)
Steed, from thy body, of thyself, sacrifice and accept thyself.
Thy greatness can be gained by none but thee.
The chief queen ritually calls on the king's fellow wives for pity.
The queens walk around the dead horse reciting mantras. The chief
queen then has to mimic copulation with the dead horse, while the
other queens ritually utter obscenities.[2]
On the next morning, the priests raise the queen from the place where
she has spent the night with the horse. With the Dadhikra verse (RV
4.39.6, YV VSM 23.32), a verse used as a purifier after obscene
language.
The three queens with a hundred golden, silver and copper needles
indicate the lines on the horse's body along which it will be
dissected. The horse is dissected, and its flesh roasted. Various
parts are offered to a host of deities and personified concepts with
cries of svaha "all-hail". The Ashvastuti or Eulogy of the Horse
follows (RV 1.162, YV VSM 24.24–45), concluding with:
May this Steed bring us all-sustaining riches, wealth in good kine,
good horses, manly offspring
Freedom from sin may Aditi vouchsafe us: the Steed with our oblations
gain us lordship!
A coin created by Samudragupta I to commemorate the Ashvamedha ritual.
[3] The tethered horse is depicted on the left; the queen, carrying
ritual equipment, is on the rightThe priests performing the sacrifice
were recompensed with a part of the booty won during the wandering of
the horse. According to a commentator, the spoils from the east were
given to the Hotar, while the Adhvaryu a maiden (a daughter of the
sacrificer) and the sacrificer's fourth wife.
The Shatapatha Brahmana emphasizes the royal nature of the Ashvamedha:
Verily, the Asvamedha means royal sway: it is after royal sway that
these strive who guard the horse. (ŚBM 13.1.6.3 trans. Eggeling 1900)
It repeatedly states that "the Asvamedha is everything" (ŚBM 13.4.2.22
trans. Eggeling 1900)
Known historical performances
Pusyamitra Sunga is said to have performed the Ashvamedha rite after
he toppled Mauryan rule in 185 BC.
A historically documented performance of the Ashvamedha is during the
reign of Samudragupta I (d. 380), the father of Chandragupta II.
Special coins were minted to commemorate the Ashvamedha and the king
took on the title of Maharajadhiraja after successful completion of
the sacrifice.
There were a few later performances, one by Raja of Kannauj in the
12th century, unsuccessfully, as Prithviraj Chauhan thwarted his
attempt and later married his daughter. The last known instance seems
to be in 1716 CE, by Jai Singh II of Amber, a prince of Jaipur[4]
Performances in Hindu epics
illustration of the Ramayana by Sahib Din, 1652. Kausalya is depicted
slaying the horse (left) and lying beside it (right)Performances of
the Ashvamedha feature in the epics Ramayana (1.10–15) and
Mahabharata.
In the Mahabharata, the sacrifice is performed by Yudhishtira (Book
14), his brothers guarding the horse as it roamed into neighbouring
kingdoms. Arjuna defeats all challengers. The Mahabharata says that
the Ashvamedha as performed by Yudhishtira adhered to the letter of
the Vedic prescriptions. After the horse was cut into parts, Draupadi
had to sit beside the parts of the horse[5].
In the Ramayana, Rama's father Dasharatha performs the Ashvamedha,
which is described in the bala kanda (book 1) of the poem. The
Ramayana provides far more detail than the Mahabharata. The ritual
take place for three days preceded by sage Rishyasringa and
Vasista(1.14.41,42). Again it is stated that the ritual was performed
in strict compliance with Vedic prescriptions (1.14.10). Dasaratha's
chief wife Kausalya circumambulates the horse and ritually pierces its
flesh (1.14.33). Then "Queen Kausalya desiring the results of ritual
disconcertedly resided one night with that horse that flew away like a
bird." [1-14-34].[6] The fat of the sacrificed horse is then burnt in
ritual fire and after that the remaining parts of the body with spoons
made out of Plaksha tree branches(1.14.36,38-39). At the conclusion of
the ritual Dasharatha symbolically offers his other wives to the
presiding priests, who return them in exchange for expensive gifts
(1.14.35). The four sides of the Yagna alter is also donated to
priests who had done the ritual and it is exchanged by them for gold,
silver, cows and other gifts(1.15.43-44).[7]
The ritual is performed again towards the end of the poem, but in very
different circumstances. It figures centrally in the uttara kanda
(book 7) where it leads to the final major story in the poem. In this
narrative, Rama was married to a single wife, Sita, who at the time
was not with him, having been excluded from Rama's capital of Ayodhya.
She was therefore represented by a statue for the queen's ceremony
(7.x[citation needed]). Sita was living in Valmiki's forest ashram
with her twin children by Rama, Lava and Kusha, whose birth was
unknown to Rama. In its wanderings, the horse, accompanied by an army
and Hanuman, enters the forest and encounters Lava, who ignores the
warning written on the horse's headplate not to hinder its progress.
He tethers the horse, and with Kusha challenges the army, which is
unable to defeat the brothers. Recognising Rama's sons, Hanuman sends
them to Ayodhya where they are reconciled with their father, who also
accepts Sita back at court. Sita, however, no longer wishes to live,
and is absorbed by the earth. It is never stated whether the sacrifice
was completed, but after Sita's death Rama is said to have repeatedly
performed the Ashvamedha using the golden statue as a substitute for
his wife.[citation needed]
Some historians believe that the bala kanda and uttara kanda were
latter interpolations to the authentic form of the Ramayana, due to
references to Greek, Parthians and Sakas, dating to no earlier than
the 2nd century BCE[8]
Indo-European comparison
Main article: horse sacrifice
Many Indo-European branches show evidence for horse sacrifice, and
comparative mythology suggests that they derive from a PIE ritual. The
Ashvamedha is the clearest evidence preserved, but vestiges from Latin
and Celtic traditions allow the reconstruction of a few common
attributes.
The Gaulish personal name Epomeduos is from *ek'wo-medhu- "horse
+mead", while ashvamedha is either from *ek'wo-mad-dho- "horse+drunk"
or *ek'wo-mey-dho- "horse+strength". The reconstructed myth involves
the coupling of a king with a divine mare which produced the divine
twins. Some scholars, including Edgar Polomé, regard the
reconstruciton of a PIE ritual as unjustified due to the difference
between the attested traditions (EIEC s.v. Horse, p. 278).
Vedanta and Puranas
The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (a mystical appendix to the Shatapatha
Brahmana and likely the oldest of the Upanishads) has a creation myth
where Mṛtyu "Death" takes the shape of a horse, and includes an
identification of the Ashvamedha with the Sun:[9]
Then he became a horse (ashva), because it swelled (ashvat), and was
fit for sacrifice (medhya); and this is why the horse-sacrifice is
called Ashva-medha [...] Therefore the sacrificers offered up the
purified horse belonging to Prajapati, (as dedicated) to all the
deities. Verily the shining sun [ye tapati] is the Asvamedha, and his
body is the year; Agni is the sacrificial fire (arka), and these
worlds are his bodies. These two are the sacrificial fire and the
Asvamedha-sacrifice, and they are again one deity, viz. Death. (BrUp
1.2.7. trans. Müller)
The Upanishads describe ascetic austerities as an "inner Ashvamedha",
as opposed to the "outer" royal ritual performed in the physical
world, in keeping with the general tendency of Vedanta to move away
from priestly ritual towards spiritual introspection; verse 6 of the
Avadhuta Upanishad has:
"Through extreme devotion [sam-grahaneṣṭi] he [the ascetic] performs
ashvamedha within [anta]. That is the greatest sacrifice [mahā-makha]
and the greatest meditation [mahā-yoga]."
According to the Brahma Vaivarta Purana (185.180),[10] the Ashvamedha
is one of five rites forbidden in the Kali Yuga.
In Hindu revivalism
In the Arya Samaj reform movement of Dayananda Sarasvati, the
Ashvamedha is considered an allegory or a ritual to get connected to
the "inner Sun" (Prana)[11] Dayananda in his Introduction to the
commentary on the Vedas[12] rejected the classical commentaries of the
Vedas by Sayana, Mahidhara and Uvata as medieval corruptions "opposed
to the real meaning of the Vedas" (p. 443) in order to arrive at an
entirely symbolic interpretation of the ritual: "An empire is like a
horse and the subjects like other inferior animals" (p. 448). Thus,
VSM 23.22, literally "he beats on the vulva (gabha), the penis (pasas)
oozes repeatedly (ni-galgaliti) in the receptacle" is interpreted not
in terms of the horse and the queen, but in terms of the king and his
subjects, "The subjects are called gabha (to be seized), kingly power
called pasa (to be penetrated)" (p. 454). This interpretation is
apparently based on a verse from Shatapatha Brahmana [13].
Following Dayananda, Arya Samaj disputes the very existence of the pre-
Vedantic ritual; thus Swami Satya Prakash Saraswati claims that
"the word in the sense of the Horse Sacrifice does not occur in the
Samhitas [...] In the terms of cosmic analogy, ashva is the Sun. In
respect to the adhyatma paksha, the Prajapati-Agni, or the Purusha,
the Creator, is the Ashva; He is the same as the Varuna, the Most
Supreme. The word medha stands for homage; it later on became
synonymous with oblations in rituology, since oblations are offered,
dedicated to the one whom we pay homage. The word deteriorated further
when it came to mean 'slaughter' or 'sacrifice'."[14]
arguing that the animals listed as sacrificial victims are just as
symbolic as the list of human victims listed in the Purushamedha[15]
(which is generally accepted as a purely symbolic sacrifice already in
Rigvedic times).
Other commentators accept the existence of the sacrifice but reject
the notion that the queen lay down with the dead horse. Thus Subhash
Kak in a blog posting suggests that the queen lay down with a toy
horse rather than with the slaughtered stallion, due to presence of
the word Ashvaka, similar to Shivaka meaning "idol or image of
Shiva"[citation needed]
All World Gayatri Pariwar since 1991 has organized performances of a
"modern version" of the Ashvamedha where a statue is used in place of
a real horse, according to Hinduism Today with a million participants
in Chitrakoot, Madhya Pradesh on April 16 to 20, 1994.[16] Such modern
performances are sattvika Yajnas where the animal is worshipped
without killing it,[17], the religious motivation being prayer for
overcoming enemies, the facilitation of child welfare and development,
and clearance of debt,[18] entirely within the allegorical
interpretation of the ritual, and with no actual sacrifice of any
animal, nor any sexual connotations.
Criticism and controversy
The earliest recorded criticism of the ritual comes from the Cārvāka,
an atheistic school of Indian philosophy that assumed various forms of
philosophical skepticism and religious indifference. A quotation of
the Cārvāka from Madhavacharya's Sarva-Darsana-Sangraha states:
“ The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons.
All the well-known formulae of the pandits, jarphari, turphari, etc.
and all the obscene rites for the queen commanded in Aswamedha, these
were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to
the priests, while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by
night-prowling demons. [19] ”
The mock bestiality and necrophilia involved in the ritual caused
considerable consternation among the scholars first editing the
Yajurveda. Griffith (1899) omits verses VSM 23.20–31 (the ritual
obscenities), protesting that they are "not reproducible even in the
semi-obscurity of a learned European language" (alluding to other
instances where he renders explicit scenes in Latin rather than
English). A. B. Keith's 1914 translation also omits verses.[2]
This part of the ritual offended the Dalit reformer and framer of the
Indian constitution B. R. Ambedkar and is frequently mentioned in his
writings as an example of the perceived degradation of Brahmanical
culture.[20]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C4%81rv%C4%81ka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhavacharya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yajurveda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_T.H._Griffith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._B._Keith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_India
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._R._Ambedkar
See also
Horse sacrifice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_sacrifice
Animal sacrifice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice
Purushamedha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purushamedha
Somayajna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somayajna#Somayajnas
Ashva
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashva
Notes and references
^ Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith, The Texts of the White Yajurveda.
Translated with a Popular Commentary (1899), 1987 reprint: Munshiram
Manoharlal, New Delhi, ISBN 8121500478.
^ a b Keith, Arthur Berridale (trans) (1914). The Veda of the Black
Yajus School Entitled Taittiriya Sanhita, Oxford, pp. 615-16
http://books.google.com/books?id=N1WiQzJutqkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false
^ Hoernle, August Friedrich Rudolf; Stark, Herbert Alick (1906). A
History of India. Cattuck: Orissa Mission Press.
http://books.google.com/books?id=d4MqAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false.
^ Bowker, John, The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 103
^ Draupadi of great intelligence ... to sit near the divided animal."
Ashvamedha Parva, Section 89 [1]
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m14/m14089.htm
^ Translation by Desiraju Hanumanta Rao & K. M. K. Murthy
http://www.valmikiramayan.net/bala/sarga14/bala_14_frame.htm
^ Online version of the Ramayana in Sanskrit and English
http://www.valmikiramayan.net/bala/sarga14/bala_14_frame.htm
^ The cultural Heritage of India, Vol. IV, The Religions, The
Ramakrishna Mission, Institute of Culture
^ implicitly, in eṣa vā aśvamedho ya eṣa tapati "verily, that
Ashvamedha is that which gives out heat [tap-]"
^ Quoted in Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, A.C. (1975). "Srimad-
Bhagavatam". The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust.
http://vedabase.net/sb/5/7/5/en. Retrieved 2006-07-31.
^ as a bahuvrihi, saptāśva "having seven horses" is another name of
the Sun, referring to the horses of his chariot.; akhandjyoti.org
glosses 'ashva' as "the symbol of mobility, valour and strength" and
'medha' as "the symbol of supreme wisdom and intelligence", yielding a
meaning of 'ashvamedha' of "he combination of the valour and strength
and illumined power of intellect"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahuvrihi
http://www.akhandjyoti.org/marapr05/article12.html?Akhand-Jyoti/2005/Jul-Aug/Ashvamedha/
^ Dayananda Sarasvati, Introduction to the commentry on the Vedas,
Meharchand lachhmandas Publications; 1st ed. (1981), Sarvadeshik Arya
Pratinidhi Sabha; 2nd ed. (1984) [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayananda_Sarasvati
^ [3] Sh.Br 13:2:9:6 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbr/sbe44/sbe44091.htm
^ The Critical and Cultural Study of the Shatapatha Brahmana by Swami
Satya Prakash Saraswati, p. 415
^ ibid., p. 476
^ Hinduism Today, June 1994
^ Ashwamedha Yagam in city,The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/2005/10/13/stories/2005101316990400.htm
^ Ashwamedhayagnam.org http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://www.ashwamedhayaagam.org/whyamy.html
^ Madhavacarya, Sarvadarsana-sangraha, English translation by E. B.
Cowell and A. E. Gough, 1904 quoted in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
(ed.), Carvaka/Lokayata: An Anthology of Source Materials and Some
Recent Studies (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research,
1990)
^ B.R. Ambedkar, Revolution and Conter-Revolution in Ancient India
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashvamedha"
Ashwamedha Yagam in city
Staff Reporter
HYDERABAD: A ritual that is termed by Vedic literature among the most
powerful and beneficial yagams, the Ashwamedha Yagam, will be
performed in the city from December 11 to 18.
The event, titled Vishwa Santhi Vishwa Kalyana Yagna, will have the
founder of Aananda Ashram P.V. Sesha Sai taking responsibility as the
`yaaga kartha'.
To be performed with the blessings of Sri Ganeshanada Bharthi
Mahaswami and several other `peetadhipathis' and Mutt pontiffs, the
Ashwamedha Yagam will be on the bright eleventh day of Margasira
maasam, coupled with Sunday and the Revati star, which falls on
December 11, 2005.
Contrary to popular perception, the said yaagam will have no animal
sacrifice. Instead, it will be a "satvik" yagam where animals will be
worshiped, according to the organisers.
Individuals and organisations interested in participating in the yagam
and other related activities can contact P.C. Sesha Sai over phone
numbers 27661613, 55581368 and 94404 22613 or email him at
shoda...@rediffmail.com, shoda...@yahoo.com and
shoda...@hotmail.com.
http://www.hindu.com/2005/10/13/stories/2005101316990400.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashvamedha
chhotemianinshallah
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Hindu demon. For other uses, see Kali
(disambiguation).
Not to be confused with the goddess Kali.
Kali
In Hinduism, Kali (IAST: káli; Devnāgari: कलि; from a root kad
"suffer, grieve, hurt; confound, confuse") is the reigning lord of
Kali Yuga and nemesis of Kalki, the 10th and final avatar of the Hindu
god Vishnu. According to the Vishnu Purana, he is a negative
manifestation of Vishnu, who along with his extended evil family,
perpetually operates as a cause of the destruction of this world.[1]
In the Kalki Purana, he is portrayed as a demon and the source of all
evil. In the Mahabharata, he was a gandharva who possessed Nala,
forcing him to lose his Kingdom in a game of dice to his brother
Pushkara. His most famous incarnation is the Kaurava King Duryodhana.
Kali is the prototype for the demon Kroni and his incarnation Kaliyan
of Ayyavazhi mythology.
Mahabharata
See also: The Gandharvas mentioned in Mahabharata
Damayanti speaking with a celestial swan.According to the Mahabharata,
the gandharva Kali became jealous when he was late to Princess
Damayanti's marriage ceremony and discovered she had overlooked the
deities Indra, Agni, Varun, and Yama (and ultimately himself) to
choose Nala as her husband. In anger, Kali spoke to his companion
Dvapara, the personification of Dwapara Yuga:
"I am ill able, O Dwapara, to suppress my anger. I shall possess Nala,
deprive him of his kingdom, and he shall no more sport with Bhima's
daughter. Entering the dice, it behoveth thee to help me." [2]
Kali traveled to Nala’s kingdom of Nishadhas and waited twelve long
years for the right moment to strike. Because Nala had rendered
himself impure by not washing his feet before his prayers, Kali was
able to bewitch his soul. Kali then appeared before Pushkara and
invited him to play a game of dice with his brother, guaranteeing
Nala’s downfall. Dwarpa took the form of the Vrisha die that would be
used in the fixed game. Kali forced Nala to lose and, each time, he
would raise the stakes higher despite the protest of his advisors and
wife. Finally, Nala lost his kingdom to Pushkara. Both he and
Damayanti were exiled to the forest.
Duryodhana as depicted in Yakshagana popular drama from
KarnatakaDuring their exile, Kali drove Nala to abandon Damayanti, who
later enacted a curse against everyone that had caused the downfall of
her husband. She eventually returned home after a short time as a hand-
maiden to the Princess of Chedi. Nala, meanwhile, saved the Naga
Karkotaka from fire (where he was cursed to suffer by sage Narada).
Intending to exorcize the devil within him, the serpent bit Nala,
injecting him with deadly poisons that forever tortured Kali. The
venom also changed Nala into an ugly dwarf named Bahuka. He later
became the charioteer of the Ayodhya King Rituparna, who was a master
mathematician and dice player.
Years later, King Rituparna revealed to Bahuka the supreme skill of
controlling the dice in exchange for horsemanship lessons. This skill
awakened Nala from Kali’s control and allowed him (with the help of
Damayanti’s curse and Karkotaka's venom) to exorcise the demon;
vomiting him in the form of poison from his mouth. Nala forced the
Kali’s trembling spirit into a Vibhitaka tree. He then counted the
fruits of the tree and left in search of his wife and later regained
his true form. Kali returned to his abode as well.
Kali was later incarnated as king Duryodhana, eldest of the one
hundred Kaurava brothers. His companion Dvapara became his uncle
Sakuni. The day Duryodhana was born, he unleashed a donkey-like scream
which the donkeys outside the home replied to. Despite the advise from
Vidura to discard the evil baby, Duryodhana's father Dhritarashtra
kept the child because demons had received a boon from Shiva that the
future king would be invincible.[3][4]
Puranic accounts
The Kalki Purana describes him as a huge being, the color of “soot,”
with a large tongue, and a terrible stench. From his birth, he carried
an Upaasthi (worship) bone. The Kalki Purana says this demon "chose
gambling, liquor, women and gold as his permanent abodes."[5] The
Sanskrit-English Dictionary states Kali is "of a class of mythic
beings (related to the Gandharvas, and supposed by some to be fond of
gambling)".[6] The Bhagavata Purana describes him as a sudra wearing
the garments of a king.[7] An early 20th century anti-beef eating
pamphlet protesting the slaughter of the sacred cow in India portrays
Kali as a brownish-skinned demon with a dog-like face, protruding
fangs, pointed ears, long green bushy hair and wearing a red loin
cloth and golden jewelry. (See Religion and politics)
The names of the four yugas of time—Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali—are
named after “dice throws” from a game of dice popular during the Vedic
period. Their order coincides with the favorability of each throw:
Satya is the best throw, whereas Kali is considered the worst.[8][9]
During the Mahabharata, king Nala exorcises the disembodied spirit of
Kali to a vibhitaka tree,[10] the nuts of which were used to create
the dice for the vedic dice game.[11] Therefore, not only Kali’s name,
but his penchant for gambling and reputation as being evil comes from
this dice game.
The churning of the ocean of milk
According to a lesser known Madhva version of the legend, during the
churning of the ocean of milk, a great poison known as halahala was
produced, which Vayu, the god of wind, rubbed in his hands to reduce
its potency. Then a small portion was given to god Shiva, turning his
throat blue. The rest was collected in a golden vessel and digested by
Vayu. (One source states he drank the Kalakuta poison of Vasuki nāga.
[12] Still others more commonly state that Shiva drank alone.[13]) A
little portion of poison that wasn't swallowed by Shiva became the
body of Kali. From this poison also came, "cruel objects like snakes,
wolves, and tigers."[3]
Later, when the asura Rahu was decapitated by Vishnu's Mohini avatar,
the demon’s allies attacked her and all except Kali were killed.
Having the power to possess the bodies of immortal and mortal beings,
he entered the hearts of man and escaped death.[14] He occasionally
entered Shiva and caused him to write evil scriptures, which created
great confusion and misconceptions. Because Kali was “invisible,
unimaginable, and present in all” the only way to correct the chaos
born from the miswritten texts was to completely renew the sacred
scriptures entirely. Thus Vishnu descended to earth as Vedavyasa, the
compiler of the sacred scriptures Vedas and the writer of the Puranas.
[3]
Markandeya Purana
According to Markandeya Purana, the Brahmin Pravara was given a
magical ointment that allowed him to fly. But when he flew to the
Himalayas, the ointment was washed away from the bottoms of his feet
keeping him from returning home to his wife. During this time, the
nymph Varuthini fell madly in love with him and begged the Brahmin to
stay with her forever. But eventually, he rejected her. He prayed to
Agni who returned him home safely.
The gandharva Kali was in love with Varuthini and had been rejected by
her in the past. He saw how she hungered for the Brahmin, so he took
on the appearance of Pravara and came before the courtesan. He led her
into the bedchamber and told her to close her eyes during their shared
pleasure [sambhoga]. (Another version of this tale explains the reason
he told her to shut her eyes was because gods revert to their true
forms whenever they do the basest of things, such as eating, sleeping,
and making love (including dying for demons).) As they made love,
Varuthini noticed that his body became flaming hot and believed it was
because his Brahmin spirit was infused with the sacrificial fire.
After climax, Kali, still-as-Pravara, left the apsara and returned to
his abode. Varuthini soon became pregnant and nine months later gave
birth to a human child that not only looked like the Brahmin but
possessed his soul as well.[15] The authors of the book Science in
Culture comment this was an example of the Sanskrit phrase "from his
semen and from her thinking," meaning the child was indeed Pravara's
child because she believed it was his.[16]
In another version, Kali stipulates he will only marry the apsara if
she keeps her eyes closed while they are in the forest (presumably
making love). However, Kali leaves after their marriage and the birth
of their son Svarocisa. Svarocisa grows up to become a very learned
scholar of the Vedas and learns to speak the languages of all
creatures from one of his three wives. He later marries a goddess and
fathers Svarocisa Manu, one of the progenitors of mankind.[17] (See
Progeny)
Bhagavata Purana
The Bhagavata Purana states the very day and moment god Krishna left
this earth, Kali, "who promotes all kinds of irreligious activities,
came into this world.”[18] Thus, Kali simply came into being because
the prosperity brought by Krishna left after his death.
After setting off to wage war against the evils of the world with his
armies, Emperor Parikshit, the grandson of Arjuna, came across a Sudra
dressed as a king who was beating a cow and an ox with a club.
Parikshit immediately lead his chariot over to the scene and angrily
berated the sudra for abusing the sacred cow and her mate. However,
this was no ordinary sudra and these were no ordinary bovine, for the
sudra was Kali and the cow and ox were embodiments of the earth
goddess and Dharma. The Emperor noticed the ox was standing on one of
his legs because the other three had been broken by Kali. Dharma
explained his four legs represented "austerity, cleanliness, mercy and
truthfulness", but he had only the leg of “truth” to stand on since
the other three had been broken by kali over the preceding yugas.[7]
Kali was intent on breaking all the legs that supported the reign of
dharma so he could effect the expansion of his own dark reign on
earth. The earth goddess cried for she had once been plentiful, but
when Krishna died and ascended to heaven, she was forsaken and all of
the prosperity left from the world. She feared evil kings like Kali
would continue to lay waste to the earth.
When Parikshit raised his sword to kill Kali, the sudra stripped
himself of his royal garments and prostrated himself at the emperor’s
feet. The emperor knew Kali tainted the world with his evil and so had
no place in it and raised his sword once more. But Kali interceded
again and begged the emperor to spare his life and allow him a place
to live within his empire. Parikshit decided that Kali would live in
“gambling houses, in taverns, in women of unchaste lives, in
slaughtering places and in gold”.[19] And as long as Parikshit ruled
India, Kali stayed within the confines of these five places. This act
allowed Dharma to regain his legs and the earth to be relieved of much
burden. However, Parikshit was later cursed to die by snake bite after
hunting in the forest and throwing a dead snake on an unresponsive
sage practicing austerities. Upon the emperor’s death, “Kali made his
way to other places like wild fire and established his power
throughout the length and breadth of the whole world.”[19][20]
In another version of the tale, Kali enters into the Emperor’s crown
when Parikshit gives him permission to reside wherever there is gold.
Upon returning home after offending the sage, Parikshit says to
himself, "Kali-yug’s abode is in gold; this was on my head; hence I
had so evil a thought that, having taken a dead snake cast it on the
sage’s neck. Therefore, I now understand that Kali-yug has taken his
revenge on me. How shall I escape this grievous sin?"[21][22]
Kalki Purana
KalkiMain article: Kalki Purana
The beginning of the Kalki Purana describes Kali’s lineage starting
with the creator-god Brahma, his great-great grandfather, and ending
with the birth of his children’s children. Instead of being born of
poison from the churning of the ocean of milk, he is the product of a
long line of incestuous monsters born from Brahma's back. (See Family
Lineage below) Kali and his family were created by Brahma to hurry the
dissolution of the cosmos after the pralaya period was over. When his
family takes human form on earth, they further taint the hearts and
minds of mankind to bring about the end of Dvapara Yuga and the
beginning of Kali Yuga. During the first stage of Kali-Yuga, the
Indian caste system breaks down and god-worship is forsaken by man.
All through the second, third, and fourth stages, man forgets the name
of god and no longer offers Yagya (offerings) to the Devas. It is at
this point when god Vishnu reincarnates as Kalki in the name of the
Devas and all of mankind to rid the cosmos of Kali's dark influence.
The remainder of the tale describes Kalki's childhood, military
training under the immortal Parashurama, his marriage, his preparation
for war against Kali, and the decisive war between the two. Kalki
kicks off his campaign by performing the Ashvamedha sacrifice and
leading his armies behind the horse as it runs freely from kingdom to
kingdom. If any evil king tries to stop the horse, Kalki engages them
in combat. After defeating them, he continues to follow the horse
until all evil kingdoms are vanquished. When Kali finally faces
Kalki's forces, his entire family blood line is wiped out by the
avatar's generals and he presumably dies from wounds inflicted by
Dharma and Satya Yuga personified. Kalki, meanwhile, battles and
simultaneously kills the demon's most powerful generals, Koka and
Vikoka, twin devils adept in the dark arts.[5]
Death
Kali dies one-third of the way through the Kalki Purana. During the
decisive battle between Kali and Kalki’s armies, Kali tried to face
both Dharma and Satya Yuga personified, but was overwhelmed and fled
on his donkey because his chariot had been destroyed, leaving his owl-
crested war flag to be trampled on the battlefield. Kali retreated to
the citadel of his capital city of Vishasha where he discovered his
body had been mortally stabbed and burned during his battle with the
two devas. The stench of his blood billowed out and filled the
atmosphere with a foul odor. When Dharma and Satya burst into the
city, Kali tried to run away, but, knowing his family had been
destroyed, coupled with his grevious wounds, he "entered his
unmanifested years".[5] This might lead some to believe he died, but
one version of the Kalki Purana in the book The Origins of Evil in
Hindu Mythology states Kali does not die but, instead, escapes through
time and space to live in the Kali Yuga of the next Kalpa. The author
comments, "Unlike most battles between gods and demons, however, this
apparent victory is immediately undercut, for Kali escapes to reappear
in 'another age'—in our age, or the next Kali Age."[23] Since he had
the power to manifest himself in human form on earth, he was able to
forsake his dying corporal form to escape in spirit.
Family lineage
Kali is the great-great grandson of Lord Brahma. He is the son of
Krodha (Anger) and his sister-turned-wife Himsa (Violence). He is the
grandson of Dambha (Vanity) and his sister-turned-wife, Maya
(Illusion). He is the great-grandson of Adharma (Impropriety) and his
wife, Mithya (Falsehood). Adharma was originally created from Lord
Brahma's back as a Maleen Pataka (a very dark and deadly sinful
object).
B.K. Chaturvedi, a modern translator of the Kalki Purana, states in a
foot note that the growth of this dark sinful object into Adharma
seems to, "convey the growth of Kaliyuga and its obnoxious
offshoots."[5]
Vishnu Purana
Kali's family lineage is told differently in the Vishnu Purana, which
is a father purana to the Kalki Purana:
The wife of Adharma (vice) was Himsá (violence), on whom he begot a
son Anrita (falsehood), and a daughter Nikriti (immorality): they
intermarried, and had two sons, Bhaya (fear) and Naraka (hell); and
twins to them, two daughters, Maya (deceit) and Vedaná (torture), who
became their wives. The son of Bhaya and Máyá was the destroyer of
living creatures, or Mrityu (death); and Dukha (pain) was the
offspring of Naraka and Vedaná. The children of Mrityu were Vyádhi
(disease), Jará (decay), Soka (sorrow), Trishńa (greediness), and
Krodha (wrath). These are all called the inflictors of misery, and are
characterised as the progeny of Vice (Adharma). They are all without
wives, without posterity, without the faculty to procreate; they are
the terrific forms of Vishńu, and perpetually operate as causes of the
destruction of this world. On the contrary, Daksha and the other
Rishis, the elders of mankind, tend perpetually to influence its
renovation: whilst the Manus and their sons, the heroes endowed with
mighty power, and treading in the path of truth, as constantly
contribute to its preservation.
In this version, Himsa is Adharma's wife instead of his granddaughter.
[1]
Bhagavata Purana
According to the Bhagavata Purana, Adharma is the husband of Mrishá
(falsehood), and the father of Dambha (hypocrisy) and Máyá (deceit),
who were adopted by Nirritti (Hindu god/dess of misery). The series of
their descendants is also somewhat varied from our text; being in each
descent, however, twins which intermarry, or Lobha (covetousness) and
Nikriti, who produce Krodha (wrath) and Hinsá: their children are,
Kali (wickedness) and Durukti (evil speech): their progeny are, Mrityu
and Bhí (fear); whose offspring are, Niraya (hell) and Yátaná
(torment).[24]
In this version, Mrisha is the wife of Adharma and not Himsa or
Mithya.
Linga Purana
The Linga Purana enumerates Adharma among the Prajapatis (Lords of
Creatures).[24]
Dharma Personified
Since Dharma is one of the major antagonists of Kali, it is important
to note this personified deity has his own line of offspring that work
against the demon and his family to bring balance to the world. The
following comes from the Vishnu Purana:
The progeny of Dharma by the daughters of Daksha were as follows: by
Sraddha he had Kama (desire); by Lakshmi, Darpa (pride); by Dhriti,
Niyama (precept); by Tushti, Santosha (content); by Pushti, Lobha
(cupidity); by Medhá, Sruta (sacred tradition); by Kriya, Danda, Naya,
and Vinaya (correction, polity, and prudence); by Buddhi, Bodha
(understanding); by Lajj, Vinaya (good behaviour); by Vapu, Vyavasaya
(perseverance). Santi gave birth to Kshema (prosperity); Siddhi to
Sukha (enjoyment); and Kírtti to Yasas. These were the sons of Dharma;
one of whom, Kama, had Hersha (joy) by his wife Nandi (delight).
Again, the Bhagavata Purana gives a different account of his
children's names.[25]
Progeny
Kali’s sister-turned-wife, Durukti (Calumny), gave him two offspring:
a son named Bhayanak (Fear) and a daughter named Mrityu (Death). His
son and daughter gave him two grandchildren: a boy named Naraka (Hell)
and a girl named Yatana (Torture).[5] Again, there are some
discrepancies here. The Vishnu Purana says Mrityu and Bhayanak are his
brother and sister. Mrityu is even represented as male instead of
female.[5]
Kali is the grandfather of Svarocisa Manu, one of the progenitors of
mankind.[17] As previously mentioned, Kali had a son named Svarocisa
with the Apsara Varuthini. Svarocisa once traveld to Mt. Mandara and
was met by Manorama, a cursed-woman being chased by a demon. In the
past, she had made fun of a sage practicing Tapasya austerities on Mt.
Kailas and was cursed to be captured by a demon. When her friends
Vibhavari and Kalavati berated the sage for enacting a curse for such
a minor offence, he cursed one to be a leper and the other a carrier
of diseases. Manorama had knowledge of a powerful spiritual weapon,
but did not know how to wield it, so she taught it to Svarocisa. When
the demon leaped out of the forest and grabbed a hold of the woman,
Svarocis called forth the weapon. But the demon stayed his hand and
explained he was actually Manorama’s father, Indivara. He had also
been cursed to become a demon by the sage Brahmamitra because he tried
to covertly obtain the secrets of Ayurveda medicine without the sage’s
knowledge. The sage told him that the curse would end when he was
about to eat his own daughter. Once he regained his true form,
Indivara taught Svarocisa the Ayurveda medication, which he used to
cure Manorama’s friends. He later married the three and had three sons
with them. He learned the languages of all creatures from Vibhavari
and the Padmini vidya from Kalavati.
Despite his prosperity, Svarocis was unhappy in his life and could
hear the ducks and deer talking about him behind his back. One day he
went hunting and took aim at a boar, but a deer came through the
clearing and asked to be shot in its place. When he enquired why, the
deer told him that she was really the goddess of the forest and wished
to marry Svarocisa. So he embraced the deer and she turned into a
beautiful woman. Together, they had a son named Dyutiman, who later
became the Svarocisa Manu.[17]
One source states, "Kali's wife Alakshmi and her sons who supervise
evil also came from Kshirasagara [the ocean of milk]."[3] Alakshmi is
the elder sister of the goddess Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu.[26]
Since the Kalki Purana states his wife Durukti is his sister, Alakshmi
would be a second wife because she is not directly related to him.
There are a number of connections and similarities between Kali and
Alakshmi. First and foremost, Alakshmi’s sister is the consort of Lord
Vishnu, who sent his Kalki avatar to earth to defeat Kali.[26] Second,
legends say she was born either from the churning of the ocean of
milk, the poison from Vasuki (who helped churn the ocean) or the back
of Prajapati.[26][27] As previously mentioned, Kali is said to have
been born from the halahala poison created from churning the ocean or
from a lineage created from Lord Brahma’s back.[3][5] Third, Alakshmi
takes the form of an owl.[26] Kali's emblem on his war flag is of an
owl.[5] Fourth, whenever Alakshmi enters a house, families fight and
turn on one another.[28] The presence of Kali and his family on earth
causes mankind to fight and turn on one another. Finally, Alakshmi is
said to ride a donkey.[26] Kali also rides a donkey in the Kalki
Purana.[5]
Role in modern communalism
Further information: Communalism (South Asia) and Religious violence
in India
Anti-beef eating pamphlet (1890 CE) showing Kali (far right)
attempting to slaughter a sacred cow.
The color version ran by the Ravi Varma Press (c. 1912).Kali’s image
was used in several pamphlets circulated by various Agorakshanasabh
(“cow protection leagues”) and “wandering ascetics” as a protest
against the Muslim practice of beef-eating during the British raj.[29]
[30] These pamphlets were produced in a time when Hindu-Muslim riots
over cow slaughter occurred in several areas of India; including
Azamgarh district (1893), when a total of 100 people died in similar
conflagrations throughout the empire; Ayodhya (1912-1913); and
Shahabad (1917).[31] One such pamphlet entitled “The Present State”
showed a cow being slaughtered by a trio of "Muhammadan" butchers.[29]
[30] Another portrayed Kali raising a sword above the head of a sacred
cow, whose body was illustrated to be a microcosmic paradise in which
all the Hindu gods resided. There were many different editions of this
version. For instance, one showed a woman labeled "The Hindu" waiting
with bowl-in-hand for the cow's calf to finish suckling before she
could get milk. A form of Krishna labeled Darmaraj ("Ruler of Dharma")
stood behind the cow and Kali was, again, harassing her with his
sword. Still, a different one deleted the woman and calf and instead
portrayed Dharmaraj in front of the cow pleading mat maro gay sarv ka
jivan hai ("don’t kill the cow, everyone is dependent on it"), while
Kali rebuts he manusyaho! Kaliyugi Mansahari jivom ko dekho ("mankind,
look at the meat-eating souls of the kaligyug").[29]
Some Hindus considered Kali’s presence in the picture to be a
representation of the Muslim community.[29][30] When one of the
versions of these pamphlets came into the possession of a state
official in 1893, he commented that the image “contained a
representation of a Musalman [Muslim] advancing to slay the cow ...”.
[29] One book states, “The Magistrate [at Deoria] found Muhammadans
excited because they heard a picture was in circulation representing a
Muhammadan with a sword drawn sacrificing a cow, and this they
considered an insult.”[29] In 1915, a color version of this picture
ran by the Ravi Varma Press[32] caught the attention of the colonial
censors and was presumably censored in some way.[29]
In popular culture
Nala Damayanti (1921): This big-budget film depicts a famous episode
from the Mahabharata, starting with Narada's ascent of Mount Meru. It
shows Swarga, the Heaven of Indra, the Transformation in the Clouds of
the Four Gods into impersonations of King Nala, Swan Messengers of
Love, the Transformation of Kali into a Serpent, the Meeting of Kali
and Dwarpa and the Four Gods amidst the Blue Air.[33]
Notes
^ a b CHAP. VII http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp041.htm#fr_212
^ SECTION LVIII http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m03/index.htm
^ a b c d e Chapter X Samudra mathana
^ SECTION XXXI
^ a b c d e f g h i Chaturvedi, B.K. Kalki Purana. New Delhi: Diamond
Books, 2004 (ISBN 81-288-0588-6)
^ Monier-Williams, Monier, Sir.Sanskrit-English Dictionary ISBN
0-19-864308-X
^ a b Canto 1: Creation, Chapter 17 http://vedabase.net/sb/1/17/en1
^ CYCLICAL TIME AND ASTRONOMY IN HINDUISM (See page. 3)
http://www.achaloza.com/docs/AchalOza_CyclicalTime.pdf
^ Glass, Marty. YUGA: An Anatomy of Our Fate. Sophia Perennis, 2004
(ISBN 0900588292)
^ "Terminalia belerica (Combretaceae) is a large deciduous tree
growing to a height of 25 – 30 meters, occurring throughout India up
to 1000 meters elevation, except in the dry regions of western
India ..." [1]
^ Smith, Frederick M. The Self Possessed: Deity And Spirit Possession
in South Asian Literature And Civilization. Columbia University Press,
2006 (ISBN 0231137486)
^ Mutalik, Keshav M. Jagannath Dasa’s Harikathamrutasara (Quintessence
of Hari’s Saga). Bombay: Focus (ISBN 81-7154-787-7)
^ In another version given by Shaivites, Shiva alone drank the deadly
poison, but his consort Parvati squeezed his neck to keep it from
reaching his stomach.[2] Still, some traditions state Vayu drank first
and Shiva last and that Vayu himself is an aspect of Shiva.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaivites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parvati
http://www.advaita-vedanta.org/series/11_names_of_shiva/11_names_of_shiva_bhagawan-1.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vayu
^ The same source says Kali can never enter the bodies of Vishnu, his
consort Lakshmi, or Vayu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi
^ Doniger, Wendy. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade.
University Of Chicago Press, 2000 (ISBN 0226156427)
^ Graubard, Stephen R. and Everett Mendelsohn. Science in Culture. Ed.
Peter Galison and Stephen Graubard. Transaction Publishers, 2001 (ISBN
0765806738)
^ a b c Prasad, Ramanuj. Know The Puranas. Pustak Mahal, 2005 (ISBN
81-223-0912-7)
^ Canto 1: Creation, Chapter 18 http://vedabase.net/sb/1/18/en1
^ a b Sastri, Natesa S. M. Hindu Feasts: Fasts And Ceremonies: Fasts
and Ceremonies. Laurier Books Ltd., 2003 (ISBN 8120604024)
^ See chapters 16, 17, and 18
^ The Prema-Sagara: Or the Ocean of Love (PDF ONLY)
^ Bahadur, S.P. Gitavali: Complete Works of Goswami Tulsidas (Volume
III). India: Prachya Prakashan, 1979 (ISBN 8121506697)
^ O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology.
University of California Press, 1980 (ISBN 0520040988)
^ a b See 55:14 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp041.htm#fn_212
^ See 55:13 http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/vp/vp041.htm#fn_211
^ a b c d e Pattanaik, Devdutt. Lakshmi: The Goddess of Wealth and
Fortune-An Introduction. Vakils Feffer & Simons Ltd, 2003 (ISBN
8187111585)
^ Krishna, Nanditha. The Book of Vishnu. Penguin Global, 2001 (ISBN
0670049077)
^ Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Princeton University
Press, 2000 (ISBN 0691049092)
^ a b c d e f g Pinney, Christopher. Photos of the Gods: The Printed
Image and Political Struggle in India. Reaktion Books, 2004 (ISBN
1861891849)
^ a b c Gupta, Charu. Sexuality, Obscenity, And Community: Women,
Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan,
2006 (ISBN 0312295855)
^ Paradox of the Indian Cow: Attitudes to Beef Eating in Early India
http://www.indowindow.net/sad/article.php?child=17&article=11
^ A lithograph press founded by Indian artist Ravi Varma in 1894.[3]
^ Plot Summary for Nala Damayanti (1921)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0154931/plotsummary
External links
Look up Kali in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Places of Kali – Podcast of Kali’s tale from the Bhagavata Purana.
કલિયુગનાં ચાર આશ્રયસ્થાન (Kaliyuga's mainstay) – The tale of Kali and
Parikshit in Gujarati.
http://www.swargarohan.org/Bhagavata/Chapter01/09.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavata_Purana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujar%C4%81ti_script
Srimad Bhagavatam: Cant 1 – See chapters 16 and 17.
http://www.srimadbhagavatam.org/canto1/c1-contents.html
A very large detailed painting of King Parikshit about to kill Kali.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali_(demon)
/ History / Myths of Origins /
Paradox of the Indian Cow:
Attitudes to Beef Eating in Early India
By DN Jha
Renowned historian writes on beef eating in ancient India and
associated issues
An average Indian of today rooted in what appears to him as his
traditional Hindu religious heritage carries the load of the
misconception that his ancestors, especially the Vedic Aryans,
attached great importance to the cow on account of its inherent
sacredness. The ‘sacred’ cow has come to be considered a symbol of
community identity of the Hindus whose cultural tradition is often
imagined as threatened by the Muslims who are thought of as
beefeaters. The sanctity of the cow has, therefore, been announced
with the flourish of trumpets and has been wrongly traced back to the
Vedas, which are supposedly of divine origin and fountainhead of all
knowledge and wisdom. In other words, some sections of Indian society
have traced back the concept of sacred cow to the very period when it
was sacrificed and its flesh was eaten.
More importantly, the cow has tended to become a political instrument
at the hand of rulers over time. The Mughal emperors (e.g. Babar,
Akbar, Jahangir and Aurangzeb etc) are said to have imposed a
restricted ban on cow slaughter to accommodate the Jaina or
Brahmanical feeling of respect and veneration of the cow[1].
Similarly Shivaji, sometimes viewed as an incarnation of God who
descended on earth for the deliverance of the cow and brahmin, is
described as proclaiming: “We are Hindus and the rightful lords of the
realm. It is not proper for us to witness cow slaughter and the
oppression of brahmanas”[2].
But the cow became a tool of mass political mobilization when the
organized Hindu cow protection movement, beginning with the Sikh Kuka
(or Namdhari) sect in the Punjab around 1870 and later strengthened by
the foundation of the first Gorakshini Sabha in 1882 by Dayanananda
Saraswati, made this animal a symbol to unite a wide ranging people,
challenged the Muslim practice of its slaughter and provoked a series
of serious communal riots in the 1880s and 1890s. Although attitudes
to cow killing had been hardening even earlier, there was undoubtedly
a ‘dramatic intensification’ of the cow protection movement when in
1888 the North-Western Provinces High Court decreed that a cow was not
a sacred object.[3] Not surprisingly cow slaughter very often became
the pretext of many Hindu-Muslim riots, especially those in Azamgarh
district in the year 1893 when more than one hundred people were
killed in different parts of the country. Similarly in 1912-1913
violence rocked Ayodhya and a few years later, in 1917, Shahabad
witnessed a disastrous communal conflagration.[4]
The killing of the kine seems to have emerged again and again as a
troublesome issue on the Indian political scene even in independent
India despite legislation by several state legislatures prohibiting
cow slaughter and the Directive Principles of State Policy in the
Indian Constitution which directs the Indian state to “…to take steps
for… prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and
draught cattle”. For instance, in 1966, nearly two decades after
Indian independence, almost all the Indian communal political parties
and organizations joined hands in masterminding a massive
demonstration by several hundred thousand people in favour of a
national ban on cow slaughter which culminated in a violent rioting in
front of the Indian Parliament resulting in the death of at least
eight persons and injury to many more. In April 1979, Acharya Vinoba
Bhave, often supposed to be a spiritual heir to Mahatma Gandhi, went
on a hunger strike to pressurize the central government to prohibit
cow slaughter throughout the country and ended it after five days when
he succeeded in getting the Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s vague
assurance that his government would expedite anti-slaughter
legislation. Since then the cow ceased to remain much of an issue in
the Indian political arena for many years, though the management of
cattle resources has been a matter of academic debate among
sociologists, anthropologists, economists and different categories of
policy framers.
The veneration of cow has been, however, converted into a symbol of
communal identity of the Hindus and the obscurantist and
fundamentalist forces obdurately refuse to appreciate that the
‘sacred’ cow was not always all that sacred in the Vedic and
subsequent Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical traditions and that its
flesh, along with other varieties of meat, was quite often a part of
the haute cuisine in early India. Although the Shin, Muslims of
Dardistan in Pakistan, look on the cow as other Muslims do the pig,
avoid direct contact with cows, refuse to drink cow’s milk or use cow
dung as fuel and reject beef as food,[5] the self-styled custodians of
non-existent ‘monolithic’ Hinduism assert that the practice of beef
eating was first introduced in India by the followers of Islam who
came from outside and are foreigners in this country, little realising
that their Vedic ancestors were also foreigners who ate the flesh of
the cow and various other animals. Fanaticism getting precedence over
fact, it is not surprising that the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangha
(RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and their numerous
outfits have a national ban on cow slaughter on their agenda and the
Chief Minister of Gujarat (Keshubhai Patel) announced some time ago,
as a pre-election gimmick, the setting up of a separate department to
preserve cow breeds and manage Hindu temples.[6] More recently, a
Bajrang Dal leader has threatened to enroll 30 lakh volunteers to
agitate against cow slaughter during the month of Bakrid in 2002.[7]
So high-geared has been the propaganda about abstention from beef
eating as a characteristic trait of ‘Hinduism’ that when the RSS
tried to claim Sikhs as Hindus, it led to vehement opposition from
them and one of the Sikh youth leaders proposed, ”Why not slaughter a
cow and serve beef in a gurudwara langar?”[8]
The communalists who have been raising a hullabaloo over the cow in
the political arena do not realise that beef eating remained a fairly
common practice for a long time in India and that the arguments for
its prevalence are based on the evidence drawn from our own scriptures
and religious texts. The response of historical scholarship to the
communal perception of Indian food culture, however, has been sober
and scholars have drawn attention to the textual evidence of beef
eating which, in fact, begins to be available from the oldest Indian
religious text Rgveda, supposedly of divine origin. H.H. Wilson,
writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, had asserted:
“the sacrifice of the horse or of the cow, the gomedha or asvamedha,
appears to have been common in the earliest periods of the Hindu
ritual”. The view that the practice of killing of cattle at sacrifices
and eating their flesh prevailed among the Indo-Aryans was put forth
most convincingly by Rajendra Lal Mitra in an article which first
appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and
subsequently formed a chapter of his book The Indo-Aryans published in
1891. In 1894 William Crooke, a British civil servant, collected an
impressive amount of ethnographic data on popular religious beliefs
and practices in his two-volume book and devoted one whole chapter to
the respect shown to animals including the cow[9]. Later in 1912, he
published an informative piece on the sanctity of cow in India. But he
also drew attention to the old practice of eating beef and its
survival in his own times.[10] In 1927, L. L. Sundara Ram made a
strong case for cow protection for which he sought justification from
the scriptures of different religions including Hinduism. However he
did not deny that the Vedic people ate beef, [11] though he blamed the
Muslims for cow slaughter. Later in the early forties P. V. Kane in
his monumental work History of Dharmasastra referred to some Vedic and
early Dharmasastric passages which speak of cow killing and beef
eating. H.D. Sankalia drew attention to literary as well as
archaeological evidence of eating cattle flesh in ancient India.[12]
Similarly, Laxman Shastri Joshi, a Sanskritist of unquestionable
scholarship, drew attention to the Dharmasastra works, which
unequivocally support the prevalence of the practice of flesh eating
including beef eating in early India.[13]
Needless to say that the scholarship of all of the scholars mentioned
above was unimpeachable, and that none of them seems to have anything
to do with any anti- Hindu ideology. H.H. Wilson, for example, was the
first occupant of the Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1832 and was not
as avowedly anti-Indian as many other imperialist scholars. Rajendra
Lal Mitra, a product of the Bengal renaissance and a close associate
of Rabindranath’s elder brother Jyotindranath Tagore, made significant
contribution to India’s intellectual life, and was described by Max
Mueller as the ‘best living Indologist’ of his time and by
Rabindranath Tagore as “the most beloved child of the muse”.[14]
William Crooke was a well-known colonial ethnograher who wrote
extensively on peasant life and popular religion without any marked
prejudice against Hinduism.[15] L. L. Sundara Ram, despite his
somewhat anti-Muslim feeling, was inspired by humanitarian
considerations. Mahamahopadhyaya P.V. Kane was a conservative Marathi
brahmin and the only Sanskritist to be honoured with the title of
Bharatratna. H.D. Sankalia combined his unrivalled archaeological
activity with a profound knowledge of Sanskrit. Besides these scholars
several other Indian Sanskritists and Indologists, not to mention a
number of western scholars, have repeatedly drawn our attention to the
textual evidence of eating beef and other types of animal flesh in
early India. Curious though it may seem, the Sangh Parivar, which
carries a heavy burden of “civilisational illiteracy”, has never
turned its guns towards them but against historians who have mostly
relied on the researches of the above-mentioned distinguished
scholars.
While the contribution of the scholars mentioned above cannot be
minimised, the limitation of their work lies in the fact that they
have referred to isolated bits of information on beef eating
concentrating mainly on the Vedic texts without treating it as part of
the flesh eating tradition prevalent in India. Unlike their works,
therefore, the present paper seeks to draw attention to the Indian
textual evidence of cattle killing and beef eating widely dispersed
over time so as to indicate its continuity for a long time in the
Brahmanical society and to suggest that the idea of cow’s supposed
holiness does not tie up with practices current in Indian society.
II
The early Aryans, who migrated to India from outside,
brought along with them their earlier cultural traits. Therefore, even
after their migration into the Indian subcontinent, for several
centuries, pastoralism, nomadism and animal sacrifice remained
characteristic features of their life till sedentary field agriculture
became the mainstay of their livelihood. Animal sacrifices were very
common, and in the agnadheya, which was a preparatory rite preceding
all public sacrifices, a cow was required to be killed.[16] In the
asvamedha, the most important of public sacrifices, first mentioned in
the Rgveda and discussed in the Brahmanas, more than 600 animals
(including wild ones like boars) and birds were killed and its finale
was marked by the sacrifice of 21 cows, which, according to the
dominant opinion were sterile ones.[17] In the gosava, an important
component of the public sacrifices like the rajasuya and vajapeya, a
sterile spotted cow was offered to Maruts and seventeen ‘dwarf heifers
under three’ were done to death in the pancasaradiyasava.[18] The
killing of animals including the cattle figures in several other
yajnas including caturmasya, sautramani and independent animal
sacrifice called pasubandha or nirudhapasubandha.[19] These and
several other major sacrifices involved killing of animals including
the cattle, which constituted the chief form of the wealth of the
early Aryans. They, not surprisingly, prayed for cattle and sacrificed
them to propitiate their gods.
The Vedic gods, for whom the various sacrifices were performed, had no
fixed menu of food. Milk, butter, barley, oxen, goats and sheep were
offered to them and these were their usual food, though some of them
seem to have had their special preferences. Indra had a special liking
for bulls (RV, V.29.7ab; VI.17.11b; VIII.12.8ab X.27.2c; X. 28. 3c;X.
86.14ab). Agni was not a tippler like Indra, but was fond of animal
food including the flesh of horses, bulls and cows (RV, VIII. 43.11;
X. 91.14ab). The toothless Pusan, the guardian of the roads, ate mush
as a Hobson’s choice. Soma was the name of a heady drink but, equally
importantly, of a god and killing of animals including cattle for him
(RV, X.91.14ab) was basic to most of the Rgvedic yajnas. The Maruts
and the Asvins were also offered cows. The Vedas mention about 250
animals out of which at least 50 were deemed fit for sacrifice and by
implication for divine as well as human consumption. The animal food
occupied a place of importance in the Vedic sacrifices and dietetics
and the general preference for the flesh of the cow is undeniable. The
Taittiriya Brahmana (III.9.8) categorically tells us: “Verily the cow
is food” (atho annam vai gauh) and the Satapatha Brahmana (III.1.2.21)
refers to Yajnavalkya’s stubborn insistence on eating the tender
(amsala) flesh of the cow.
According to the subsequent Brahmanical texts (e.g. Grhyasutras and
Dharmasutras) the killing of animals and eating of beef was very much
de rigeur. The ceremony of guest-reception (known as arghya in the
Rgveda but generally as madhuparka in subsequent texts) consisted not
only of a meal of a mixture of curds and honey but also of the flesh
of a cow or bull. Early lawgivers go to the extent of making flesh
food mandatory in madhuparka --- an injunction more or less dittoed
by several later legal texts (AsGS, I.24.33; KathaGS, 24,20; SankhGS,
II.15.2; ParGS, I.3.29). A guest therefore came to be described by
Panini as a goghna (one for whom the cow is slain). The sacred thread
ceremony was not all that sacred; for it was necessary for a snataka
to wear an upper garment of the cowhide (ParGS, II.5.17-20).
The slaughter of animals formed an important component of the cult of
the dead in the Vedic texts as well as in later Dharmasastra works.
The thick fat of the cow was used to cover the dead body (RV, X.14-18)
and a bull was burnt along with the corpse to enable the departed to
ride with in the nether world. The funerary rites included feeding of
the brahmins after the prescribed period and quite often the flesh of
the cow/ ox was offered to the dead (AV, XII.2, 48). The textual
prescriptions indicate the degree of satisfaction obtained by the
Manes depending upon the animal offered---- the cow’s flesh could keep
them contented for at least a year! The Vedic and the post-Vedic
texts also often mention the killing of animals including the kine in
several other ritual contexts. The gavamayana, a sessional sacrifice
performed by the brahmins was, for example, marked by animal slaughter
culminating in an extravagant bacchanalian communal festival
(mahavrata) in which cattle were slaughtered. There was, therefore, a
relationship between the sacrifice and sustenance. But this need not
necessarily mean that different meat types were eaten only if offered
in a sacrifice. Thus in the grhamedha, which has been discussed in
several Srautasutras, an unspecified number of cows were slain not in
the strict ritual manner but in the crude and profane manner.[20]
Archaeological evidence also suggests non-ritual killing of cattle.
This is indicative of the fact that beef and other animal flesh formed
part of the dietary habits of the people and that the edible flesh was
not always ritually consecrated, though some scholars have argued to
the contrary.[21] Despite the overwhelming evidence of cattle killing,
several scholars have obdurately held that the Vedic cow was sacred
and inviolable on the basis of the occurrence of the word aghnya/
aghnya in the Atharvaveda and the use of words for cow as epithet or
in simile and metaphor with reference to entities of highest religious
significance. But it has been convincingly proved that if the Vedic
cow was at all inviolable, it was so only when it belonged to a
brahmin who received cows as sacrificial fee (daksina).[22] But this
cannot be taken to be an index of the animal’s inherent sanctity and
inviolability in the Vedic period or even later.
Nor can one make too much of the doctrine of non-killing (ahimsa) in
relation to the cow. Gautama Buddha and Mahavira emphasized the idea
of non-violence, which seems to have made its first appearance in the
Upanisadic thought and literature. But despite their vehement
opposition of the Vedic animal sacrifice, neither they nor their
followers were averse to eating of meat. The Buddha is known to have
eaten beef and pork and the texts amply indicate that flesh meat very
well suited the Buddhist palate. Asoka, whose compassion for animals
is undeniable, allowed certain specified animals to be killed for his
kitchen. In fact, neither Asoka’s list of animals exempted from
slaughter nor the Arthasastra of Kautilya specifically mentions cow as
unslayable. The cattle were killed for food throughout the Mauryan
period.
Like Buddhism, Jainism also enthusiastically took up cudgels for non-
violence. But meat eating was so common in Vedic and post-Vedic times
that even Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, is said to have eaten the
meat of a cockerel. Perhaps the early Jainas were not strict
vegetarians. A great Jaina logician of the eighth century,
Haribhadrasuri, tells us that the monks did not have objection to
eating flesh and fish, which were given to them by householders,
though there is irrefutable textual evidence to show that meat eating
became a strong taboo among the followers of Jainism. The
inflexibility of the Jaina attitude to meat eating is deeply rooted in
the basic tenets of Jaina philosophy, which, at least in theory, is
impartial in its respect for all forms of life without according any
special status to the cow. Thus, although both Buddhism, and, to a
greater extent, Jainism contributed to the growth of ahimsa doctrine,
neither seems to have developed the sacred cow concept
independently.
III
Despite the Upanisadic, Buddhist and Jaina advocacy of ahimsa, the
practice of ritual and random of killing animals including the cattle
continued in the post-Mauryan centuries. The law book of Manu (200 BC-
AD 200), which is the most representative of the legal texts and has
much to say on the lawful and forbidden food, contains several
passages on flesh eating, which have much in common with earlier and
later Brahmanical juridical works. Like the earlier law books, it
mentions the animals whose flesh could be eaten. Manu’s list includes
the porcupine, hedgehog, iguana, rhinoceros, tortoise and the hare and
all those domestic animals having teeth in one jaw only, the only
exception being the camel (V.18); and, it is significant that the cow
is not excluded from the list of edible animals. Eating meat on
sacrificial occasions, Manu tells us, is a divine rule (daivo vidhih
smrtah), but doing so on other occasions is a demoniac practice (V.
31). Accordingly one does not do any wrong by eating meat while
honouring the gods, the Manes and guests (madhuparka ca yajne ca
pitrdaivatakarmani), irrespective of the way in which the meat was
procured (V.32, 41). Manu asserts that animals were created for the
sake of sacrifice, that killing on ritual occasions is non-killing (V.
39) and injury (himsa) as enjoined by the Veda (vedavihitahimsa) is
known to be non-injury (V.44). In the section dealing with rules for
times of distress, Manu recalls the legendary examples of the most
virtuous brahmins of the days of yore who ate ox-meat and dog-meat to
escape death from starvation (X.105-9). Manu’s latitudinarian attitude
is clear from his recognition of the natural human tendency of eating
meat, drinking spirituous liquor and indulging in sexual intercourse,
even if abstention brings great rewards (V.56). He further breaks
loose the constraints when he says: “the Lord of creatures (Prajapati)
created this whole world to be the sustenance of the vital spirit;
both the immovable and the movable (creation is) the food of the vital
spirit. What is destitute of motion is the food of those endowed with
locomotion; (animals) without fangs (are the food) of those with
fangs, those without hands of those who possess hands, and the timid
of the bold. The eater who daily even devours those destined to be his
food, commits no sin; for the creator himself created both the eaters
and those who are to be eaten” (V.28-30). This injunction removes all
restrictions on flesh eating and gives an unlimited freedom to all
desiring to eat animal flesh and since Manu does not mention beef
eating as taboo one can infer that he did not treat cow as sacrosanct.
Manu contradicts his own statements by extolling ahimsa (X.63), but
there is no doubt that he permitted meat eating at least on ritual
occasions (madhuparka, sraddha etc) when the killing of the cow and
other cattle, according to his commentator Medhatithi (9th century),
was in keeping with the Vedic and post- Vedic practice
(govyajamamsamaproksitambhaksyed… madhuparkovyakhyatah tatra
govadhovihitah).[23]
Yajnavalkya (AD 100-300), like Manu, discusses the rules regarding
lawful and forbidden food. Although his treatment of the subject is
less detailed, he does not differ radically from him. Yajnavalkya
mentions the specific animals (deer, sheep, goat, boar, rhinoceros
etc) and birds (e.g. partridge) whose flesh could satisfy the Manes (I.
258-61). According to him a student, teacher, king, close friend and
son-in-law should be offered arghya every year and a priest should be
offered madhuparka on all ritual occasions (I.110). He further enjoins
that a learned brahmin (srotriya) should be welcomed with a big ox or
goat (mahoksam va mahajam va srotriyayopakalpayet) delicious food and
sweet words. This indicates his endorsement of the earlier practice of
killing cattle at the reception of illustrious guests. Yajnavalkya,
like Manu, permits eating of meat when life is in danger, or when it
is offered in sacrifices and funerary rites (i.179). But unconsecrated
meat (vrthamamsam, anupakrtamamsani), according to him, is a taboo (I.
167, 171) and any one killing animals solely for his own food and not
in accordance with the Vedic practice is doomed to go to hell for as
many days as the number of hair on the body of the victim (I.180).
Similarly Brhaspati (AD 300-500), like Manu, recommends abstention
from liquor (madya), flesh (mamsa) and sexual intercourse only if they
are not lawfully ordained[24] which implies that whatever was lawful
was permitted. The lawgivers generally accept as lawful all those
sacrifices, which, according to them, have Vedic sanction. The
sacrificial slaughter of animals and domesticated bovines, as we have
seen, was a Vedic practice and therefore may have been fairly common
among the Brahmanical circles during the early Christian centuries and
even well into the later half of the first millennium AD. It would be,
however, unrealistic to assume that the dharmic precept of restricting
animal slaughter to ritual occasions was always taken seriously either
by brahmins for whom the legal injunctions were meant or by other
sections of society.[25] It is not surprising, therefore, that
Brhaspati, while discussing the importance of local customs, says that
in Madhyadesa the artisans eat cows (madhyadese karmakarah silpinasca
gavasinah).[26]
The evidence from the epics is quite eloquent. Most of the characters
in the Mahabharata are meat eaters and it makes a laudatory reference
to the king Rantideva in whose kitchen two thousand cows were
butchered everyday, their flesh, along with grains, being distributed
among the brahmins (III.208.8-9)[27]. Similarly the Ramayana of
Valmiki makes frequent reference to the killing of animals including
the cow for sacrifice as well as food. Rama was born after his father
Dasaratha performed a big sacrifice involving the slaughter of a large
number of animals declared edible by the Dharmasastras, which, as we
have seen, sanction ritual killing of the kine. Sita, while crossing
the Yamuna, assures her that she would worship her with thousand cows
and a hundred jars of wine when Rama accomplishes his vow. Her
fondness for deer meat drives her husband crazy enough to kill Marici,
a deer in disguise. Bharadvaja welcomes Rama by slaughtering a fatted
calf in his honour.[28]
The non-vegetarian dietary practices find an important place in the
early Indian medical treatises, whose chronology broadly coincides
with that of the law books of Manu and Yajnavalkya, and the two epics.
Caraka (1st-2nd century), Susruta (3rd –4th century) and Vagbhata (7th
century) provide an impressive list of the variety of fish and flesh
and all three of them speak of the therapeutic uses of beef[29]. The
continuity of the tradition of eating flesh including that of the
cattle is also echoed in early Indian secular literature till late
times. In the Gupta period, Kalidasa alludes to the story of Rantideva
who killed numerous cows every day in his kitchen.[30] More than two
centuries later, Bhavabhuti (AD 700) refers to two instances of guest
reception, which included the killing of a heifer[31]. In the 10th
century Rajasekhara mentions the practice of killing an ox or a goat
in honour of a guest[32]. In the 12th century Sriharsa mentions a
variety of non-vegetarian delicacies served at a dazzling marriage
feast and refers to two interesting instances of cow killing[33],
though, in the same century Somesvara shows clear preference for pig
flesh over other meat types and does not mention beef at all.
IV
While the above references, albeit limited in number, indicate that
the ancient practice of killing the kine for food continued till about
the 12th century, there is considerable evidence in the commentaries
on the kavya literature and the earlier Dharmasastra texts to show
that the Brahmanical writers retained its memory till very late times.
Among the commentators on the secular literature, Candupandita (late
13th century) from Gujarat, Narahari[34] (14th century) from Telengana
in Andhra Pradesh, and Mallinatha[35] (14th-15th century), who is
associated with the king Devaraya II of Vidyanagara (Vijayanagara),
clearly indicate that, in earlier times, the cow was done to death for
rituals and hence for food. As late as the 18th century Ghanasyama, a
minister of a Tanjore ruler, states that the killing of cow in honour
of a guest was the ancient rule.[36]
Similarly the authors of Dharmasastra commentaries and religious
digests from the 9th century onwards keep alive the memory of the
archaic practice of beef eating and some of them even go so far as to
permit eating beef in specific circumstances. For example, Medhatithi
(9th century), probably a Kashmirian brahmin, says that a bull or ox
was killed in honour of a ruler or any one deserving to be honoured
and unambiguously allows eating the flesh of cow (govyajamamsam) on
ritual occasions[37]. Several other writers of exegetical works seem
to lend support to this view, though some times indirectly.
Visvarupa[38] (9th century), a brahmin from Malwa and probably a pupil
of Sankara, Vijnanesvara[39] (11th century), who may have lived not
far from Kalyana in modern Karnataka, Haradatta[40] (12th century),
also a southerner (daksinatya), Laksmidhara[41] (12th century), a
minister of the Gahadwala king, Hemadri[42] (late 13th century), a
minister of the Yadavas of Devagiri, Narasimha/ Nrsimha[43] (14th
century), possibly from southern India, and Mitra Misra[44] (17th
century) from Gopacala (Gwalior) support the practice of killing a cow
on occasions like guest-reception and sraddha in ancient times. As
recently as the early 20th century, Madana Upadhyaya from Mithila
refers to the ritual slaughter of milch cattle in the days of yore.
[45] Thus even when the Dharmasastra commentators view cow killing
with disfavour, they generally admit that it was an ancient practice
and that it was to be avoided in the kali age.
V
While the above evidence is indicative of the continuity of the
practice of beef eating, the lawgivers had already begun to discourage
it around the middle of the first millennium when the Indian society
began to be gradually feudalized leading to major socio-cultural
transformation. This phase of transition, first described in the epic
and Puranic passages as kaliyuga, saw many changes and modification in
social norms and customs. The Brahmanical religious texts now begin to
speak of many earlier practices as forbidden in the kaliyuga –
practices which came to be known as kalivarjyas. While the number of
kalivarjyas swelled up over time, most of the relevant texts mention
cow killing as forbidden in the kali. According to some early medieval
lawgivers a cow killer was an untouchable and one incurred sin even by
talking to him. They increasingly associated cow slaughter and beef
eating with the proliferating number of untouchable castes. It is,
however, interesting that some of them consider these acts as no more
than minor behavioural aberrations like cleaning one’s teeth with
one’s fingers and eating only salt or soil.[46]
Equally interesting is the fact that almost all the prescriptive texts
enumerate cow killing as a minor sin (upapataka) and none of them
describe it as a major offence (mahapataka). Moreover the Smrti texts
provide easy escape routes by laying down expiatory procedures for
intentional as well as inadvertent killing of the cow. This may imply
that that cattle killing may not have been uncommon in society and the
atonements were prescribed merely to discourage eating of cattle
flesh. To what extent the Dharmasastric injunctions were effective,
however, remains a matter of speculation; for the possibility of at
least some members eating beef on the sly cannot be ruled out. As
recently as the late 19th century Swami Vivekananda was alleged to
have eaten beef during his stay in America, though he vehemently
defended his action.[47] Similarly in early twentieth century Mahatma
Gandhi spoke of the hypocrisy of the orthodox Hindus who “do not so
much as hesitate or inquire when during illness the doctor …
prescribes them beef tea.”[48] Even today 72 communities in Kerala--
not all of them untouchable perhaps--- prefer beef to the expensive
mutton and the Hindutva forces are persuading them to go easy on it.
[49]
VI
Although cow killing and beef eating gradually came to be viewed as a
sin and a source of pollution from the early medieval period, the cow
and its products (milk, curds, clarified butter, dung and urine) or
their mixture called pancagavya had been assuming a purificatory role
from much earlier times. The Vedic texts attest to the ritual use of
cow’s milk and milk products, but the term pancagavya occurs for the
first time in the Baudhayana Dharmasutra. The law books of Manu,
Visnu, Vasistha, Yajnavalkya and those of several later lawgivers like
Atri, Devala and Parasara mention the use of the mixture of the five
products of the cow for both purification and expiation. The
commentaries and religious digests, most of which belong to the
medieval period, abound in references to the purificatory role of the
pancagavya. The underlying assumption in all these cases is that the
pancagavya is pure. But several Dharmasastra texts forbid its use by
women and the lower castes. If a sudra drinks pancagavya, we are told,
he goes to hell.[50]
It is curious that the prescriptive texts, which repeatedly refer to
the purificatory role of the cow, also provide much evidence of the
notion of pollution and impurity associated with this animal.
According to Manu (V.125) the food smelt by the cow has to be
purified. Other early lawgivers like Visnu (XXIII.38) and Yajnavalkya
(I.189) also express similar views. The latter in fact says that while
the mouth of the goat and horse is pure that of the cow is not. Among
the later juridical texts, those of Angirasa, Parasara, Vyasa and so
on, support the idea of the cow’s mouth being impure. The lawgiver
Sankha categorically states that all limbs of the cow are pure except
her mouth. The commentaries on different Dharmasastra texts reinforce
the notion of impurity of the cow’s mouth. All this runs counter to
the ideas about the purificatory role of the cow.
Needless to say, then, that the image of the cow projected by Indian
textual traditions, especially the Brahmanical- Dharmasastric works,
over the centuries is polymorphic. Its story through the millennia is
full of inconsistencies and has not always been in conformity with
dietary practices prevalent in society. It was killed and yet the
killing was not killing. When it was not slain, mere remembering the
old practice of butchery satisfied the brahmins. Its five products
including faeces and urine have been pure but its mouth has not been
so. Yet through these incongruous attitudes and puzzling paradoxes the
Indian cow has struggled its way to sanctity. But its holiness is
elusive. For, there is no cow- goddess, nor any temple in her honour.
[51] Nevertheless the veneration of this animal has come to be viewed
as a characteristic trait of modern day non-existent monolithic
‘Hinduism’ bandied about by the Hindutva forces.
[1] L.L. Sundara Ram, Cow Protection in India, The South Indian
Humanitarian League, George Town, Madras, 1027, pp.122-123, 179-190.
[2] Siva Digvijaya quoted in Sundara Ram, op. cit. p.191.
[3] Sandria B. Freitag, “Contesting in Public: Colonial Legacies and
Contemporary Communalism”, in David Ludden, ed., Making India Hindu,
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996, p.217.
[4] Idem, Collective Action and Community: Public Arena and the
Emergence of Communalism in North India, Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1990, Chapter 6; Gyan Pandey, ‘Rallying round the Cow’, in
Subaltern Studies, Vol.. II, Ranajit Guha, (ed.), Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983, pp. 60- 129.
[5] Frederick J. Simoons, “Questions in the Sacred-Cow Controversy”,
Current Anthropology, 20(3), September 1979, p.468.
[6] The Times of India, 28 May 1999, p.12.
[7] Frontline, 13 April 2001.
[8] Rajesh Ramachandran, “A Crisis of Identity”, The Hindustan Times,
7 May 2000.
[9] W. Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 2
Vols, Delhi: 4th reprint, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1978.
[10] W. Crooke, ‘The Veneration of the Cow in India’, Folklore, 13
(1912), pp.275-306.
[11] Sundara Ram, Cow Protection in India, Madras: The South Indian
Humanitarian League, 1927, p.8, passim.
[12] H.D. Sankalia, “ (The Cow) In History”, Seminar No. 93, May 1967.
[13] “Was the Cow Killed in Ancient India?” Quest, (75), March-
April 1972, pp. 83-87.
[16] J.C. Heesterman translates a passage of the Kathaka Samhita
(8.7:90.10) relating to the agnadheya as: ‘they kill a cow, they play
a dice for [shares in] her, they serve her up to those seated in the
assembly hall’: Broken World of Sacrifice, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993, p.283, note 33.
[17] Louis Renou, Vedic India, Varanasi, reprint, Indological Book
House, 1971 p.109.
[18] R.L. Mitra, Indo-Aryans: Contributions to the Elucidation of
Ancient and Medieval History, 2 Vols, Varanasi: reprint, Indological
Book House, 1969, p.363.
[19] A.B. Keith, Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanisads,
Delhi: Indian reprint, Motilal Banarsidass, 1970, p.324; P.V. Kane,
History of Dharmasastra, II, pt.2, Chapter
XXXII.
[20] J. C. Heesterman, op.cit., pp. 190-93, 200-02.
[21] For different views see Hanns-Peter Schmidt, ‘Ahimsa and
Rebirth’ in Inside The Texts Beyond The Texts: New Approaches to the
Study of the Vedas, M. Witzel (ed.), Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997,
pp. 209-10; Cf. J.C. Heesterman, ‘Vratya and Sacrifice’, Indo-Iranian
Journal, 6 (1962), pp. 1-37.
[22] William Norman Brown, ‘The Sanctity of Cow in Hinduism’, Madras
University Journal, 27.2 (1957), pp. 29-49.
[23] Medhatithi on Manu, V.27, 41 see Manava-Dharma-Sastra, ed., V.N.
Mandalik, Bombay, 1886, pp.604, 613.
[24] Brhaspatismrti cited in Krtyakalpataru of Laksmidhara,
trtiyabhaga, ed., K.V. Rangaswami Aiyangar, Baroda Oriental Institute,
Baroda,1950, p.326
[25] Contra Francis Zimmermann (The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, p.180ff) asserts that
only consecrated meat was eaten and Hanns Peter Schmidt seems to be in
agreement with him
(‘Ahimsa and Rebirth’, op.cit., p.209). But the evidence from the
Buddhist Jatakas, Kautilya’s Arthasastra, and Asokan inscriptions etc
does not support this view.
[26] Brhaspatismrti, 128b, Gaekwad Oriental Series, Baroda, 1941.
[27] For further references see S. Sorensen, An Index to the Names in
the Mahabharata, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1963, pp.593-94.
[28] R. L. Mitra, op.cit., vol.I, p. 396.
[29] Caraka Samhita: Sutrasthanam, II.31, XXVII.79: Susruta Samhita:
Sarirasthanam, III.25; Astanga Hrdayam: Sutrasthanam, VI.65.
[30] Meghaduta, with the commentary of Mallinatha, ed. and tr., M. R.
Kale (ed. & tr.), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1979, I.48.
[31] Mahaviracarita, Rampratap Tripathi Shastri (ed. with Hindi tr.),
Allahabad: Lok Bharati Prakashan, 1973. III.2. Uttararamacarita, with
notes and the commentary of Ghanasyama, P.V. Kane and C. N. Joshi (ed.
and tr.), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962, Act IV.
[32] Balaramayana, of Rajasekhara, Ganagasagar Rai (ed.) Varanasi:
Chowkhamba, 1984. I.38a
[33] Naisadhamahakavyam, with the commentary of Mallinatha, Haragovind
Shastri (ed.) Varanasi, Chowkhamba, 1981 XVII.173, 197.
[34] Naisadhacarita of Sri Harsa, K.K. Handiqui (tr. with
commentaries), Poona, Deccan College, 1965, p.472.
[35] Naisadhamahakavyam, p. 1137.
[36] Meghaduta, Kale’s edn, p.83.
[37] Medhatithi on Manu, V.26-7,41. See Manava-Dharma-Sastra (with the
commentaries of Medhatithi, Sarvajnanarayana, Kulluka, Nandana and
Ramacandra), V. N. Mandalika (ed.), Bombay: Ganpat Krishnaji’s Press,
1886, pp.604, 613.
[38] Visvarupa on Yajnavalkya, I. 108. See Yajnavalkyasmrti (with
the commentary Balakrida of Visvarupacarya), Mahamahopadhyaya T.
Ganapati Sastri (ed.), Delhi: 2nd edn, Munshiram Manoharlal, 1982, p.
97.
[39] Mitaksara on Yajnavalkya, I. 108. See Yajnavalkyasmrti with
Vijnanesvara’s Mitaksara, Gangasagar Rai (ed.), Delhi; Chowkhamba
Sanskrit Pratisthan, 1998, p.54.
[40] Haradatta on Gautama, XVII.30.
[41] Krtyakalpataru, Niyatakalakandam, trtiyabhagam, K.V. Rangaswami
Aiyangar (ed.), Baroda: Oriental Research Institute, 1950, p.190
[42] P. V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra, III, Poona: Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, 1973, p.929.
[43] R. L. Mitra, op.cit., p.384.
[44] Mitra Misra on Yajnavalkya, I. 108.
[45] Palapiyusalata Gourisayantralaya, Darbhanga, Samvat 1951.
[46] Atrismrti, verse 314 in Astadasasmrtyah (with Hindi tr by
Sundarlal Tripathi, Khemraj Shrikrishnadas, Venkateshwar Steam Press,
Bombay, Saka 1846.
[47] Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekanada and the Universal Gospel,
Advaita Ashrama, Calcutta, Eleventh Impression, August 1988, p.44 fn.
3.
[48] M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments
with Truth, Navajivan Trust, Ahmedabad, 1927, reprint 2000, p.324.
Gandhi saw a five-footed “miraculous” cow at the Kumbha Mela at
Allahabad in 1915, the fifth foot being nothing but “a foot cut off
from a live calf and grafted upon the shoulder of the cow” which
attracted the lavish charity of the ignorant Hindu (ibid., p.325).
[49] India Today, 15 April 1993, p.72.
[50] Visnusmrti, LIV.7; Atrismriti, verse 297, etc.
[51] A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, Delhi, Rupa & Co., 27th
Impression, 1996, p.319.
http://www.indowindow.net/sad/article.php?child=17&article=11
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with
Bhadrakali. (Discuss)
For other uses, see Kali (disambiguation).
"Kalika" redirects here. For other uses, see Kalika (disambiguation).
"The black one" redirects here. For the 2005 drone metal album, see
Black One. For the male choral group, see The Black Ones.
Kali
Kali (Sanskrit: काली, Bengali: কালী, both Kālī), also known as Kalika
(Bengali: কালিকা, Kālikā), is the Hindu goddess associated with
eternal energy. The name Kali comes from Kāla which means black, time,
death, lord of death, shiva etc. kAli means "the black one". Since
Shiva is called Kāla - the eternal Time, Kālī, his consort, also means
"the Time" or "Death" (as in time has come). Hence, Kali is considered
the goddess of time and change. Although sometimes presented as dark
and violent, her earliest incarnation as a figure of annihilation
still has some influence. More complex Tantric beliefs sometimes
extend her role so far as to be the "ultimate reality" or Brahman. She
is also revered as Bhavatarini (literally "redeemer of the universe").
Comparatively recent devotional movements largely conceive Kali as a
benevolent mother goddess.
Kali is represented as the consort of god Shiva, on whose body she is
often seen standing. She is associated with many other Hindu goddesses
like Durga, Bhadrakali, Sati, Rudrani, Parvati and Chamunda. She is
the foremost among the Dasa-Mahavidyas, ten fierce Tantric goddesses.
[1]
Etymology
Kālī is the feminine of kāla "black, dark coloured" (per Pāṇini
4.1.42). In the Mundaka Upanishad Kali is mentioned as one of the
seven tongues of Agni, the Rigvedic God of Fire (Mundaka Upanishad
2:4), thus giving rise to Kali's tongue, seen in images. It appears as
the name of a form of Durga in the Mahabharata 4.195, and as the name
of an evil female spirit in Harivamsa 11552.
Kāla means black and also time, death, lord of death, shiva etc. kAli
means "the black one". Since Shiva is called Kāla - the eternal Time,
Kālī, his consort also means "the Time" or "Death" (as in time has
come). "कालः शिवः । तस्य पत्नीति - काली । kālaḥ śivaḥ । tasya patnīti
- kālī" - [from Shabdakalpadrum]. The association is seen in a passage
from the Mahābhārata, depicting a female figure who carries away the
spirits of slain warriors and animals. She is called kālarātri (which
Thomas Coburn, a historian of Sanskrit Goddess literature, translates
as "night of death") and also kālī (which, as Coburn notes, can be
read here either as a proper name or as a description "the black one").
[2]
Kali's association with blackness stands in contrast to her consort,
Shiva, whose body is covered by the white ashes of the cremation
ground (Sanskrit: śmaśāna) in which he meditates, and with which Kali
is also associated, as śmaśāna-kālī.
Origins
According to David Kinsley, Kali is first mentioned in Hinduism as a
distinct goddess, related to war, around 600 CE. Scriptures like Agni
Purana and Garuda Purana describe her terrible appearance and
associate her with corpses and war. The oldest mention of Kali dates
back to Rigvedic age. The 'Ratri Sookta' in Rigveda actually calls her
as Goddess 'Ratri' and regards Ratri as the Supreme force in the
universe. In the Tantras, she is regarded as the Shakti (Power) of The
Great Mahākāla (a form of Lord Shiva). Her portrayal on dead bodies in
crematorium symbolizes her presence in the hearts of devotees who have
killed their Earthly desires and want Supreme Consciousness in the lap
of the Ultimate Mother, Kali. In another form, she is regarded as the
destroyer, the Mahakali as Kali Tantra says-"kāli kālanāt" meaning
Kali is the one who finishes. Kalika Purana depicts her as the "Adi
Shakti" (Fundamental Power) and "Para Prakriti" or beyond nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agni_Purana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda_Purana
In Tantra
Kali Yantra
Goddesses play an important role in the study and practice of Tantra
Yoga, and are affirmed to be as central to discerning the nature of
reality as are the male deities. Although Parvati is often said to be
the recipient and student of Shiva's wisdom in the form of Tantras, it
is Kali who seems to dominate much of the Tantric iconography, texts,
and rituals.[3] In many sources Kali is praised as the highest reality
or greatest of all deities. The Nirvana-tantra says the gods Brahma,
Vishnu, and Shiva all arise from her like bubbles in the sea,
ceaselessly arising and passing away, leaving their original source
unchanged. The Niruttara-tantra and the Picchila-tantra declare all of
Kali's mantras to be the greatest and the Yogini-tantra, Kamakhya-
tantra and the Niruttara-tantra all proclaim Kali vidyas
(manifestations of Mahadevi, or "divinity itself"). They declare her
to be an essence of her own form (svarupa) of the Mahadevi.[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantra
In the Mahanirvana-tantra, Kali is one of the epithets for the
primordial sakti, and in one passage Shiva praises her:
At the dissolution of things, it is Kala [Time] Who will devour all,
and by reason of this He is called Mahakala [an epithet of Lord
Shiva], and since Thou devourest Mahakala Himself, it is Thou who art
the Supreme Primordial Kalika. Because Thou devourest Kala, Thou art
Kali, the original form of all things, and because Thou art the Origin
of and devourest all things Thou art called the Adya [primordial
Kali]. Resuming after Dissolution Thine own form, dark and formless,
Thou alone remainest as One ineffable and inconceivable. Though having
a form, yet art Thou formless; though Thyself without beginning,
multiform by the power of Maya, Thou art the Beginning of all,
Creatrix, Protectress, and Destructress that Thou art.[3]
The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming
aspects of reality. As such, she is also a "forbidden thing", or even
death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to
confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a
vehicle of salvation.[5] This is clear in the work of the Karpuradi-
stotra[6], a short praise to Kali describing the Pancatattva ritual
unto her, performed on cremation grounds. (Samahana-sadhana)
He, O Mahakali who in the cremation-ground, naked, and with
dishevelled hair, intently meditates upon Thee and recites Thy mantra,
and with each recitation makes offering to Thee of a thousand Akanda
flowers with seed, becomes without any effort a Lord of the earth. 0
Kali, whoever on Tuesday at midnight, having uttered Thy mantra, makes
offering even but once with devotion to Thee of a hair of his Sakti
[his female companion] in the cremation-ground, becomes a great poet,
a Lord of the earth, and ever goes mounted upon an elephant.[5]
The Karpuradi-stotra clearly indicates that Kali is more than a
terrible, vicious, slayer of demons who serves Durga or Shiva. Here,
she is identified as the supreme mistress of the universe, associated
with the five elements. In union with Lord Shiva, who is said to be
her spouse, she creates and destroys worlds. Her appearance also takes
a different turn, befitting her role as ruler of the world and object
of meditation.[7] In contrast to her terrible aspects, she takes on
hints of a more benign dimension. She is described as young and
beautiful, has a gentle smile, and makes gestures with her two right
hands to dispel any fear and offer boons. The more positive features
exposed offer the distillation of divine wrath into a goddess of
salvation, who rids the sadhaka of fear. Here, Kali appears as a
symbol of triumph over death.[8]
[edit] In Bengali tradition
Kali Puja festivalKali is also a central figure in late medieval
Bengali devotional literature, with such devotees as Ramprasad Sen
(1718–75). With the exception of being associated with Parvati as
Shiva's consort, Kali is rarely pictured in Hindu mythology and
iconography as a motherly figure until Bengali devotions beginning in
the early eighteenth century. Even in Bengali tradition her appearance
and habits change little, if at all.[9]
The Tantric approach to Kali is to display courage by confronting her
on cremation grounds in the dead of night, despite her terrible
appearance. In contrast, the Bengali devotee appropriates Kali's
teachings, adopting the attitude of a child. In both cases, the goal
of the devotee is to become reconciled with death and to learn
acceptance of the way that things are. These themes are well addressed
in Ramprasad's work.[10]
Ramprasad comments in many of his other songs that Kali is indifferent
to his wellbeing, causes him to suffer, brings his worldly desires to
nothing and his worldly goods to ruin. He also states that she does
not behave like a mother should and that she ignores his pleas:
Can mercy be found in the heart of her who was born of the stone? [a
reference to Kali as the daughter of Himalaya]
Were she not merciless, would she kick the breast of her lord?
Men call you merciful, but there is no trace of mercy in you, Mother.
You have cut off the heads of the children of others, and these you
wear as a garland around your neck.
It matters not how much I call you "Mother, Mother." You hear me, but
you will not listen.[11]
To be a child of Kali, Ramprasad asserts, is to be denied of earthly
delights and pleasures. Kali is said to not give what is expected. To
the devotee, it is perhaps her very refusal to do so that enables her
devotees to reflect on dimensions of themselves and of reality that go
beyond the material world.[11][12]
A significant portion of Bengali devotional music features Kali as its
central theme and is known as Shyama Sangeet. Mostly sung by male
vocalists, today even women have taken to this form of music. One of
the finest singers of Shyama Sangeet is Pannalal Bhattacharya.
In Bengal, Kali is venerated in the festival Kali Puja - the new moon
day of Ashwin month which coincides with Diwali festival.
Mythology
Slayer of Raktabija
In Kali's most famous myth, Durga and her assistants, Matrikas, wound
the demon Raktabija, in various ways and with a variety of weapons, in
an attempt to destroy him. They soon find that they have worsened the
situation, as for every drop of blood that is spilt from Raktabija,
the demon reproduces a clone of himself. The battlefield becomes
increasingly filled with his duplicates.[13] Durga, in dire need of
help, summons Kali to combat the demons. It is also said that Goddess
Durga takes the form of Goddess Kali at this time.
The Devi Mahatmyam describes:
Out of the surface of her (Durga's) forehead, fierce with frown,
issued suddenly Kali of terrible countenance, armed with a sword and
noose. Bearing the strange khatvanga (skull-topped staff ), decorated
with a garland of skulls, clad in a tiger's skin, very appalling owing
to her emaciated flesh, with gaping mouth, fearful with her tongue
lolling out, having deep reddish eyes, filling the regions of the sky
with her roars, falling upon impetuously and slaughtering the great
asuras in that army, she devoured those hordes of the foes of the
devas.[14]
Kali destroys Raktabija by sucking the blood from his body and putting
the many Raktabija duplicates in her gaping mouth. Pleased with her
victory, Kali then dances on the field of battle, stepping on the
corpses of the slain. Her consort Shiva lies among the dead beneath
her feet, a representation of Kali commonly seen in her iconography as
Daksinakali.[15]
In the Devi Mahatmya version of this story, Kali is also described as
a Matrika and as a Shakti or power of Devi. She is given the epithet
Cāṃuṇḍā (Chamunda), i.e. the slayer of the demons Chanda and Munda.
[16] Chamunda is very often identified with Kali and is very much like
her in appearance and habit.[17]
Daksinakali
Bhadrakali (A gentle form of Kali), circa 1675.
Painting; made in India, Himachal Pradesh, Basohli,
now placed in LACMA.In her most famous pose as Daksinakali, it is said
that Kali, becoming drunk on the blood of her victims on the
battlefield, dances with destructive frenzy. In her fury she fails to
see the body of her husband, Shiva, who lies among the corpses on the
battlefield.[18] Ultimately the cries of Shiva attract Kali's
attention, calming her fury. As a sign of her shame at having
disrespected her husband in such a fashion, Kali sticks out her
tongue. However, some sources state that this interpretation is a
later version of the symbolism of the tongue: in tantric contexts, the
tongue is seen to denote the element (guna) of rajas (energy and
action) controlled by sattva, spiritual and godly creatures who served
as assassins.[19]
One South Indian tradition tells of a dance contest between Shiva and
Kali. After defeating the two demons Sumbha and Nisumbha, Kali takes
up residence in a forest. With fierce companions she terrorizes the
surrounding area. One of Shiva's devotees becomes distracted while
performing austerities, and asks Shiva to rid the forest of the
destructive goddess. When Shiva arrives, Kali threatens him, claiming
the territory as her own. Shiva challenges Kali to a dance contest,
and defeats her when she is unable to perform the energetic Tandava
dance. Although in this case Kali is defeated, and is forced to
control her disruptive habits, there are very few other images or
other myths depicting her in such a manner.[20]
Maternal Kali
Another myth depicts the infant Shiva calming Kali. In this similar
story, Kali again defeated her enemies on the battlefield and began to
dance out of control, drunk on the blood of the slain. To calm her
down and to protect the stability of the world, Shiva is sent to the
battlefield, as an infant, crying aloud. Seeing the child's distress,
Kali ceases dancing to take care of the helpless infant. She picks him
up, kisses his head, and proceeds to breast feed the infant Shiva.[21]
This myth depicts Kali in her benevolent, maternal aspect; something
that is revered in Hinduism, but not often recognized in the West.
Ekamukhi or "One-Faced" Murti of Mahakali displaying ten hands holding
the signifiers of various Devas
Mahakali
Main article: Mahakali
Mahakali (Sanskrit: Mahākālī, Devanagari: महाकाली), literally
translated as Great Kali, is sometimes considered as a greater form of
Kali, identified with the Ultimate reality of Brahman. It can also
simply be used as an honorific of the Goddess Kali,[22] signifying her
greatness by the prefix "Mahā-". Mahakali, in Sanskrit, is
etymologically the feminized variant of Mahakala or Great Time (which
is interpreted also as Death), an epithet of the God Shiva in
Hinduism. Mahakali is the presiding Goddess of the first episode of
the Devi Mahatmya. Here she is depicted as Devi in her universal form
as Shakti. Here Devi serves as the agent who allows the cosmic order
to be restored.
Iconography
Statue from Dakshineswar Kali Temple, West Bengal, India; along with
her Yantra.Kali is portrayed mostly in two forms: the popular four-
armed form and the ten-armed Mahakali form. In both of her forms, she
is described as being black in color but is most often depicted as
blue in popular Indian art. Her eyes are described as red with
intoxication, and in absolute rage, her hair is shown disheveled,
small fangs sometimes protrude out of her mouth, and her tongue is
lolling. She is often shown naked or just wearing a skirt made of
human arms and a garland of human heads. She is also accompanied by
serpents and a jackal while standing on a seemingly dead Shiva,
usually right foot forward to symbolize the more popular Dakshinamarga
or right-handed path, as opposed to the more infamous and
transgressive Vamamarga or left-handed path.[23]
In the ten-armed form of Mahakali she is depicted as shining like a
blue stone. She has ten faces and ten feet and three eyes. She has
ornaments decked on all her limbs. There is no association with Shiva.
[24]
The Kalika Purana describes Kali as possessing a soothing dark
complexion, as perfectly beautiful, riding a lion, four-armed, holding
a sword and blue lotuses, her hair unrestrained, body firm and
youthful.[25]
In spite of her seemingly terrible form, Kali Ma is often considered
the kindest and most loving of all the Hindu goddesses, as she is
regarded by her devotees as the Mother of the whole Universe. And,
because of her terrible form she is also often seen as a great
protector. When the Bengali saint Ramakrishna once asked a devotee why
one would prefer to worship Mother over him, this devotee rhetorically
replied, "Maharaj, when they are in trouble your devotees come running
to you. But, where do you run when you are in trouble?"[26]
According to Ramakrishna, darkness is the Ultimate Mother, or Kali:
My Mother is the principle of consciousness. She is Akhanda
Satchidananda; indivisible Reality, Awareness, and Bliss. The night
sky between the stars is perfectly black. The waters of the ocean
depths are the same; The infinite is always mysteriously dark. This
inebriating darkness is my beloved Kali.
-Sri Ramakrishna
Throughout her history artists the world over have portrayed Kali in
myriad poses and settings, some of which stray far from the popular
description, and are sometimes even graphically sexual in nature.
Given the popularity of this Goddess, artists everywhere will continue
to explore the magnificence of Kali's iconography. This is clear in
the work of such contemporary artists as Charles Wish, and Tyeb Mehta,
who sometimes take great liberties with the traditional, accepted
symbolism, but still demonstrate a true reverence for the Shakta sect.
Popular form
Classic depictions of Kali share several features, as follows:
Kali's most common four armed iconographic image shows each hand
carrying variously a sword, a trishul (trident), a severed head and a
bowl or skull-cup (kapala) catching the blood of the severed head.
Two of these hands (usually the left) are holding a sword and a
severed head. The Sword signifies Divine Knowledge and the Human Head
signifies human Ego which must be slain by Divine Knowledge in order
to attain Moksha. The other two hands (usually the right) are in the
abhaya (fearlessness) and varada (blessing) mudras, which means her
initiated devotees (or anyone worshiping her with a true heart) will
be saved as she will guide them here and in the hereafter.[27]
She has a garland consisting of human heads, variously enumerated at
108 (an auspicious number in Hinduism and the number of countable
beads on a Japa Mala or rosary for repetition of Mantras) or 51, which
represents Varnamala or the Garland of letters of the Sanskrit
alphabet, Devanagari. Hindus believe Sanskrit is a language of
dynamism, and each of these letters represents a form of energy, or a
form of Kali. Therefore she is generally seen as the mother of
language, and all mantras.[28]
She is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the
covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss
and far above prakriti. She is shown as very dark as she is brahman in
its supreme unmanifest state. She has no permanent qualities — she
will continue to exist even when the universe ends. It is therefore
believed that the concepts of color, light, good, bad do not apply to
her — she is the pure, un-manifested energy, the Adi-shakti.[29]
[edit] Mahakali form
The Dasamukhi MahakaliKali is depicted in the Mahakali form as having
ten heads, ten arms, and ten legs. Each of her ten hands is carrying a
various implement which vary in different accounts, but each of these
represent the power of one of the Devas or Hindu Gods and are often
the identifying weapon or ritual item of a given Deva. The implication
is that Mahakali subsumes and is responsible for the powers that these
deities possess and this is in line with the interpretation that
Mahakali is identical with Brahman. While not displaying ten heads, an
"ekamukhi" or one headed image may be displayed with ten arms,
signifying the same concept: the powers of the various Gods come only
through Her grace.
Shiva in Kali iconography
In both these images she is shown standing on the prone, inert or dead
body of Shiva. There is a mythological story for the reason behind her
standing on what appears to be Shiva's corpse, which translates as
follows:
Once Kali had destroyed all the demons in battle, she began a terrific
dance out of the sheer joy of victory. All the worlds or lokas began
to tremble and sway under the impact of her dance. So, at the request
of all the Gods, Shiva himself asked her to desist from this behavior.
However, she was too intoxicated to listen. Hence, Shiva lay like a
corpse among the slain demons in order to absorb the shock of the
dance into himself. When Kali eventually stepped upon her husband she
realized her mistake and bit her tongue in shame.[30]
The Tantric interpretation of Kali standing on top of her husband is
as follows:
The Shiv tattava (Divine Consciousness as Shiva) is inactive, while
the Shakti tattava (Divine Energy as Kali) is active. Shiva, or
Mahadeva represents Brahman, the Absolute pure consciousness which is
beyond all names, forms and activities. Kali, on the other hand,
represents the potential (and manifested) energy responsible for all
names, forms and activities. She is his Shakti, or creative power, and
is seen as the substance behind the entire content of all
consciousness. She can never exist apart from Shiva or act
independently of him, i.e., Shakti, all the matter/energy of the
universe, is not distinct from Shiva, or Brahman, but is rather the
dynamic power of Brahman.[31]
Kali in Traditional Form, standing on Shiva's chest.While this is an
advanced concept in monistic Shaktism, it also agrees with the Nondual
Trika philosophy of Kashmir, popularly known as Kashmir Shaivism and
associated most famously with Abhinavagupta. There is a colloquial
saying that "Shiva without Shakti is Shava" which means that without
the power of action (Shakti) that is Mahakali (represented as the
short "i" in Devanagari) Shiva (or consciousness itself) is inactive;
Shava means corpse in Sanskrit and the play on words is that all
Sanskrit consonants are assumed to be followed by a short letter "a"
unless otherwise noted. The short letter "i" represents the female
power or Shakti that activates Creation. This is often the explanation
for why She is standing on Shiva, who is either Her husband and
complement in Shaktism or the Supreme Godhead in Shaivism.
To properly understand this complex Tantric symbolism it is important
to remember that the meaning behind Shiva and Kali does not stray from
the non-dualistic parlance of Shankara or the Upanisads. According to
both the Mahanirvana and Kularnava Tantras, there are two distinct
ways of perceiving the same absolute reality. The first is a
transcendental plane which is often described as static, yet infinite.
It is here that there is no matter, there is no universe and only
consciousness exists. This form of reality is known as Shiva, the
absolute Sat-Chit-Ananda — existence, knowledge and bliss. The second
is an active plane, an immanent plane, the plane of matter, of Maya,
i.e., where the illusion of space-time and the appearance of an actual
universe does exist. This form of reality is known as Kali or Shakti,
and (in its entirety) is still specified as the same Absolute Sat-Chit-
Ananda. It is here in this second plane that the universe (as we
commonly know it) is experienced and is described by the Tantric seer
as the play of Shakti, or God as Mother Kali.[32]
Kali and Bhairava (the terrible form of Shiva) in Union, 18th century,
NepalFrom a Tantric perspective, when one meditates on reality at
rest, as absolute pure consciousness (without the activities of
creation, preservation or dissolution) one refers to this as Shiva or
Brahman. When one meditates on reality as dynamic and creative, as the
Absolute content of pure consciousness (with all the activities of
creation, preservation or dissolution) one refers to it as Kali or
Shakti. However, in either case the yogini or yogi is interested in
one and the same reality — the only difference being in name and
fluctuating aspects of appearance. It is this which is generally
accepted as the meaning of Kali standing on the chest of Shiva.[31]
Although there is often controversy surrounding the images of divine
copulation, the general consensus is benign and free from any carnal
impurities in its substance. In Tantra the human body is a symbol for
the microcosm of the universe; therefore sexual process is responsible
for the creation of the world. Although theoretically Shiva and Kali
(or Shakti) are inseparable, like fire and its power to burn, in the
case of creation they are often seen as having separate roles. With
Shiva as male and Kali as female it is only by their union that
creation may transpire. This reminds us of the prakrti and purusa
doctrine of Samkhya wherein prakāśa- vimarśa has no practical value,
just as without prakrti, purusa is quite inactive. This (once again)
stresses the interdependencies of Shiva and Shakti and the vitality of
their union.[33]
Gopi Krishna proposed that Kali standing on the dead Shiva or Shava
(Sanskrit for dead body) symbolised the helplessness of a person
undergoing the changing process (psychologically and physiologically)
in the body conducted by the Kundalini Shakti.[34]
Development
In the later traditions, Kali has become inextricably linked with
Shiva. The unleashed form of Kali often becomes wild and
uncontrollable, and only Shiva is able to tame her. This is both
because she is often a transformed version of one of his consorts and
because he is able to match her wildness. The ancient text of Kali
Kautuvam describes her competition with Shiva in dance, from which the
sacred 108 Karanas appeared. Shiva won the competition by acting the
urdva tandava, one of the Karanas, by raising his feet to his head.
Other texts describe Shiva appearing as a crying infant and appealing
to her maternal instincts. While Shiva is said to be able to tame her,
the iconography often presents her dancing on his fallen body, and
there are accounts of the two of them dancing together, and driving
each other to such wildness that the world comes close to unravelling.
Shiva's involvement with Tantra and Kali's dark nature have led to her
becoming an important Tantric figure. To the Tantric worshippers, it
was essential to face her Curse, the terror of death, as willingly as
they accepted Blessings from her beautiful, nurturing, maternal
aspect. For them, wisdom meant learning that no coin has only one
side: as death cannot exist without life, so life cannot exist without
death. Kali's role sometimes grew beyond that of a chaos — which could
be confronted — to that of one who could bring wisdom, and she is
given great metaphysical significance by some Tantric texts. The
Nirvāna-tantra clearly presents her uncontrolled nature as the
Ultimate Reality, claiming that the trimurti of Brahma, Visnu and
Rudra arise and disappear from her like bubbles from the sea. Although
this is an extreme case, the Yogini-tantra, Kamakhya-tantra and the
Niruttara-tantra declare her the svarupa (own-being) of the Mahadevi
(the great Goddess, who is in this case seen as the combination of all
devis).
The final stage of development is the worshipping of Kali as the Great
Mother, devoid of her usual violence. This practice is a break from
the more traditional depictions. The pioneers of this tradition are
the 18th century Shakta poets such as Ramprasad Sen, who show an
awareness of Kali's ambivalent nature. Ramakrishna, the 19th century
Bengali saint, was also a great devotee of Kali; the western
popularity of whom may have contributed to the more modern, equivocal
interpretations of this Goddess. Rachel McDermott's work, however,
suggests that for the common, modern worshipper, Kali is not seen as
fearful, and only those educated in old traditions see her as having a
wrathful component. Some credit to the development of Devi must also
be given to Samkhya. Commonly referred to as the Devi of delusion,
Mahamaya, acting in the confines of (but not being bound by) the
nature of the three gunas, takes three forms: Maha-Kali, Maha-Lakshmi
and Maha-Saraswati, being her tamas-ika, rajas-ika and sattva-ika
forms. In this sense, Kali is simply part of a larger whole.
1947 TIME Magazine cover by Boris Artzybasheff depicting a self-
hurting Kālī as a symbol of the partition of IndiaLike Sir John
Woodroffe and Georg Feuerstein, many Tantric scholars (as well as
sincere practitioners) agree that, no matter how propitious or
appalling you describe them, Shiva and Devi are simply recognizable
symbols for everyday, abstract (yet tangible) concepts such as
perception, knowledge, space-time, causation and the process of
liberating oneself from the confines of such things. Shiva,
symbolizing pure, absolute consciousness, and Devi, symbolizing the
entire content of that consciousness, are ultimately one and the same
— totality incarnate, a micro-macro-cosmic amalgamation of all
subjects, all objects and all phenomenal relations between the "two."
Like man and woman who both share many common, human traits yet at the
same time they are still different and, therefore, may also be seen as
complementary.[35]
Worshippers prescribe various benign and horrific qualities to Devi
simply out of practicality. They do this so they may have a variety of
symbols to choose from, symbols which they can identify and relate
with from the perspective of their own, ever-changing time, place and
personal level of unfolding. Just like modern chemists or physicists
use a variety of molecular and atomic models to describe what is
unperceivable through rudimentary, sensory input, the scientists of
ontology and epistemology must do the same. One of the underlying
distinctions of Tantra, in comparison to other religions, is that it
allows the devotee the liberty to choose from a vast array of
complementary symbols and rhetoric that which suits one's evolving
needs and tastes. From an aesthetic standpoint, nothing is interdict
and nothing is orthodox. In this sense, the projection of some of
Devi's more gentle qualities onto Kali is not sacrilege and the
development of Kali really lies in the practitioner, not the murthi.
A TIME magazine article of October 27, 1947, used Kālī as a symbol and
metaphor for the human suffering in British India during its partition
that year.[36]
In New Age and Neopaganism
An academic study of Western Kali enthusiasts noted that, "as shown in
the histories of all cross-cultural religious transplants, Kali
devotionalism in the West must take on its own indigenous forms if it
is to adapt to its new environment."[37] The adoption of Kali by the
West has raised accusations of cultural misappropriation:
"A variety of writers and thinkers [...] have found Kali an exciting
figure for reflection and exploration, notably feminists and
participants in New Age spirituality who are attracted to goddess
worship. [For them], Kali is a symbol of wholeness and healing,
associated especially with repressed female power and sexuality.
[However, such interpretations often exhibit] confusion and
misrepresentation, stemming from a lack of knowledge of Hindu history
among these authors, [who only rarely] draw upon materials written by
scholars of the Hindu religious tradition. The majority instead rely
chiefly on other popular feminist sources, almost none of which base
their interpretations on a close reading of Kali's Indian background.
[...] The most important issue arising from this discussion – even
more important than the question of 'correct' interpretation –
concerns the adoption of other people's religious symbols. [...] It is
hard to import the worship of a goddess from another culture:
religious associations and connotations have to be learned, imagined
or intuited when the deep symbolic meanings embedded in the native
culture are not available."[38]
Gerald Gardner was reportedly particularly interested in Kali whilst
he was in the far east, before returning to England to write his
seminal works on Wicca[citation needed].
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^ Mahābhārata 10.8.64-69, cited in Coburn, Thomas; Devī-Māhātmya —
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^ a b D. Kinsley p. 122.
^ D. Kinsley p. 122–123.
^ a b D. Kinsley p. 124.
^ Karpuradi Stotra, Tantrik Texts Vol IX, Arthur Avalon (Sir John
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^ D. Kinsley p. 125.
^ D. Kinsley p. 126.
^ D. Kinsley p.125–126.
^ a b D. Kinsley p. 128.
^ MantraOnNet.com:Text & Images of Kali
^ D. Kinsley p. 118.
^ Devi Mahatmyam, Swami Jagadiswarananda, Ramakrishna Math, 1953.
^ D. Kinsley p. 118–119.
^ Wangu p. 72.
^ Kinsley p. 241 Footnotes.
^ D. Kinsley pp. 119, 130.
^ McDermott 2003.
^ D. Kinsley p. 119.
^ D. Kinsley p. 131.
^ Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls By June McDaniel p.257
^ The Art of Tantra, Philip Rawson, Thames & Hudson, 1973.
^ Sankaranarayanan. S. Devi Mahatmya. p 127.
^ David Gordon White (ed.), Tantra in Practice, ISBN 81-208-1778-8
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^ Tantra in Practice, David Gordon White, Princeton Press, 2000, page
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^ Tantra in Practice, David Gordon White, Princeton Press, 2000, page
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^ Hindu Gods & Goddesses, Swami Harshananda, Ramakrishna Math, 1981,
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Oxford Press/Ganesha & Co., 1918.
^ Tantra in Practice, David Gordon White, Princeton Press, 2000, page
463–488, Shakti and Shâkta, Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), Oxford
Press/Ganesha & Co., 1918.
^ Impact of Tantra on Religion & Art, T. N. Mishra, D.K. Print World,
1997, V.
^ Krishna, Gopi (1993)Living with Kundalini: (Shambhala, 1993 ISBN
0877739471).
^ Tantra (The Path of Ecstasy), Georg Feuerstein, Shambhala, 1998,
Shakti and Shâkta, Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), Oxford Press/
Ganesha & Co., 1918.
^ The Trial of Kali, TIME Magazine, October 27, 1947.
^ McDermott, Rachel Fell, "The Western Kali", in Hawley, John Stratton
& Wulff, Donna M., Devi: The Goddess in India, p. 305.
^ McDermott, Rachel Fell, "The Western Kali", in Hawley, John Stratton
& Wulff, Donna M., Devi: The Goddess in India, pp. 281–305.
Shakti and Shâkta, Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), Oxford Press/
Ganesha & Co., 1918
Sri Ramakrishna (The Great Master), Swami Saradananda, Ramakrishna
Math,1952
Devi Mahatmyam, Swami Jagadiswarananda, Ramakrishna Math, 1953
The Art of Tantra, Philip Rawson, Thames & Hudson, 1973
Hindu Gods & Goddesses, Swami Harshananda, Ramakrishna Math, 1981
Sri Ramakrishna: The Spiritual Glow, Kamalpada Hati, P.K. Pramanik,
Orient Book Co., 1985
Hindu Goddesses, David R. Kinsley, University of California Press,
1988
Kali (The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar) Elizabeth U. Harding, Nicolas
Hays, 1993
Impact of Tantra on Religion & Art, T. N. Mishra, D.K. Print World,
1997
Indian Art (revised), Roy C. Craven, Thames & Hudson, 1997
A Dictionary of Buddhist & Hindu Iconography (Illustrated), Frederick
W. Bunce, D.K. Print World, 1997
Tantra (The Path of Ecstasy), Georg Feuerstein, Shambhala, 1998
Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker, Oxford
Press, 2000
Tantra in Practice, David Gordon White, Princeton Press, 2000
Encountering Kali (In the margins, at the center, in the west), Rachel
Fell McDermott, Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003
[edit] Further reading
Shanmukha Anantha Natha and Shri Ma Kristina Baird, Divine Initiation
Shri Kali Publications (2001) ISBN 0-9582324-0-7 - Has a chapter on
Mahadevi with a commentary on the Devi Mahatmyam from the Markandeya
Purana.
Swami Jagadiswarananda, tr., Devi Mahatmyam Chennai, Ramakrishna Math.
ISBN 81-7120-139-3
Elizabeth Usha Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar ISBN
0-89254-025-7
Devadatta Kali, In Praise of The Goddess, The Devimahatmyam and Its
Meaning ISBN 0-89254-080-X
David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the
Hindu Religious Traditions ISBN 81-208-0379-5
Rachel Fell McDermott, Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the
Center, in the West (ISBN 0-520-23240-2)
Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force ISBN 0-89281-212-5
Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Kali Puja ISBN 1-887472-64-9
Ramprasad Sen, Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair: Selected Poems to the
Mother Goddess ISBN 0-934252-94-7
Sir John Woodroffe (aka Arthur Avalon)Hymns to the Goddess and Hymn to
Kali ISBN 81-85988-16-1
Robert E. Svoboda, Aghora, at the left hand of God ISBN 0-914732-21-8
Dimitri Kitsikis, L'Orocc, dans l'âge de Kali ISBN 2-89040-359-9
Lex Hixon, Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric
Hymns of Enlightenment ISBN 0-8356-0702-X
Neela Bhattacharya Saxena, In the Beginning is Desire: Tracing Kali's
Footprints in Indian Literature ISBN 818798161X
The Goddess Kali of Kolkata (ISBN 81-7476-514-X) by Shoma A.
Chatterji
Encountering The Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a
Study of Its Interpretation (ISBN 0-7914-0446-3) by Thomas B. Coburn
Dictionary of Hindu Lore and Legend (ISBN 0-500-51088-1) by Anna
Dallapiccola
Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar (ISBN 0-89254-025-7) by
Elizabeth Usha Harding
In Praise of The Goddess: The Devimahatmyam and Its Meaning (ISBN
0-89254-080-X) by Devadatta Kali
Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious
Traditions (ISBN 81-208-0379-5) by David Kinsley
Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine (ISBN 0-520-20499-9) by David
Kinsley
Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West
Bengal (ISBN 0-195-16791-0) by June McDaniel
Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West (ISBN
0-520-23240-2) by Rachel Fell McDermott
Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the
Devotional Poetry of Bengal (ISBN 0-19-513435-4) by Rachel Fell
McDermott
Kali: The Feminine Force (ISBN 0-89281-212-5) by Ajit Mookerjee
Seeking Mahadevi: Constructing the Identities of the Hindu Great
Goddess (ISBN 0-791-45008-2) Edited by Tracy Pintchman
The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (ISBN 0-7914-2112-0) by
Tracy Pintchman
External links
Hinduism portal
Find more about Kali on Wikipedia's sister projects:
Definitions from Wiktionary
Textbooks from Wikibooks
Quotations from Wikiquote
Source texts from Wikisource
Images and media from Commons
News stories from Wikinews
Learning resources from Wikiversity
Kali at the Open Directory Project
http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Hinduism/Gods_and_Goddesses/Kali/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_Project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
Goddess as Kali - The Feminine Force in Indian Art
Article of the Month - August 2000 Printer Friendly Version
PDF (Acrobat) - 382 kb
Share this Page with a friend The worship of a mother goddess as the
source of life and fertility has prehistoric roots, but the
transformation of that deity into a Great goddess of cosmic powers was
achieved with the composition of the Devi Mahatmya (Glory of the
goddess), a text of the fifth to sixth century, when worship of the
female principle took on dramatic new dimensions. The goddess is not
only the mysterious source of life, she is the very soil, all-creating
and all consuming.
Kali makes her 'official' debut in the Devi-Mahatmya, where she is
said to have emanated from the brow of Goddess Durga (slayer of
demons) during one of the battles between the divine and anti-divine
forces. Etymologically Durga's name means "Beyond Reach". She is thus
an echo of the woman warrior's fierce virginal autonomy. In this
context Kali is considered the 'forceful' form of the great goddess
Durga.
Kali is represented as a Black woman with four arms; in one hand she
has a sword, in another the head of the demon she has slain, with the
other two she is encouraging her worshippers. For earrings she has two
dead bodies and wears a necklace of skulls ; her only clothing is a
girdle made of dead men's hands, and her tongue protrudes from her
mouth. Her eyes are red, and her face and breasts are besmeared with
blood. She stands with one foot on the thigh, and another on the
breast of her husband.
Kali's fierce appearances have been the subject of extensive
descriptions in several earlier and modern works. Though her fierce
form is filled with awe- inspiring symbols, their real meaning is not
what it first appears- they have equivocal significance:
Kali's blackness symbolizes her all-embracing, comprehensive nature,
because black is the color in which all other colors merge; black
absorbs and dissolves them. 'Just as all colors disappear in black, so
all names and forms disappear in her' (Mahanirvana Tantra). Or black
is said to represent the total absence of color, again signifying the
nature of Kali as ultimate reality. This in Sanskrit is named as
nirguna (beyond all quality and form). Either way, Kali's black color
symbolizes her transcendence of all form.
A devotee poet says:
"Is Kali, my Divine Mother, of a black complexion?
She appears black because She is viewed from a distance;
but when intimately known She is no longer so.
The sky appears blue at a distance, but look at it close by
and you will find that it has no colour.
The water of the ocean looks blue at a distance,
but when you go near and take it in your hand,
you find that it is colourless."
... Ramakrishna Paramhansa (1836-86)
Kali's nudity has a similar meaning. In many instances she is
described as garbed in space or sky clad. In her absolute, primordial
nakedness she is free from all covering of illusion. She is Nature
(Prakriti in Sanskrit), stripped of 'clothes'. It symbolizes that she
is completely beyond name and form, completely beyond the illusory
effects of maya (false consciousness). Her nudity is said to represent
totally illumined consciousness, unaffected by maya. Kali is the
bright fire of truth, which cannot be hidden by the clothes of
ignorance. Such truth simply burns them away.
She is full-breasted; her motherhood is a ceaseless creation. Her
disheveled hair forms a curtain of illusion, the fabric of space -
time which organizes matter out of the chaotic sea of quantum-foam.
Her garland of fifty human heads, each representing one of the fifty
letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes the repository of
knowledge and wisdom. She wears a girdle of severed human hands- hands
that are the principal instruments of work and so signify the action
of karma. Thus the binding effects of this karma have been overcome,
severed, as it were, by devotion to Kali. She has blessed the devotee
by cutting him free from the cycle of karma. Her white teeth are
symbolic of purity (Sans. Sattva), and her lolling tongue which is red
dramatically depicts the fact that she consumes all things and denotes
the act of tasting or enjoying what society regards as forbidden, i.e.
her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world's "flavors".
Kali's four arms represent the complete circle of creation and
destruction, which is contained within her. She represents the
inherent creative and destructive rhythms of the cosmos. Her right
hands, making the mudras of "fear not" and conferring boons, represent
the creative aspect of Kali, while the left hands, holding a bloodied
sword and a severed head represent her destructive aspect. The
bloodied sword and severed head symbolize the destruction of ignorance
and the dawning of knowledge. The sword is the sword of knowledge,
that cuts the knots of ignorance and destroys false consciousness (the
severed head). Kali opens the gates of freedom with this sword, having
cut the eight bonds that bind human beings. Finally her three eyes
represent the sun, moon, and fire, with which she is able to observe
the three modes of time: past, present and future. This attribute is
also the origin of the name Kali, which is the feminine form of
'Kala', the Sanskrit term for Time.
Another symbolic but controversial aspect of Kali is her proximity to
the cremation ground:
O Kali, Thou art fond of cremation grounds;
so I have turned my heart into one
That thou, a resident of cremation grounds,
may dance there unceasingly.
O Mother! I have no other fond desire in my heart;
fire of a funeral pyre is burning there;
O Mother! I have preserved the ashes of dead bodies all around
that Thou may come.
O Mother! Keeping Shiva, conqueror of Death, under Thy feet,
Come, dancing to the tune of music;
Prasada waits With his eyes closed
... Ramprasad (1718-75)
Kali's dwelling place, the cremation ground denotes a place where the
five elements (Sanskrit: pancha mahabhuta) are dissolved. Kali dwells
where dissolution takes place. In terms of devotion and worship, this
denotes the dissolving of attachments, anger, lust, and other binding
emotions, feelings, and ideas. The heart of the devotee is where this
burning takes place, and it is in the heart that Kali dwells. The
devotee makes her image in his heart and under her influence burns
away all limitations and ignorance in the cremation fires. This inner
cremation fire in the heart is the fire of knowledge, (Sanskrit:
gyanagni), which Kali bestows.
The image of a recumbent Shiva lying under the feet of Kali represents
Shiva as the passive potential of creation and Kali as his Shakti. The
generic term Shakti denotes the Universal feminine creative principle
and the energizing force behind all male divinity including Shiva.
Shakti is known by the general name Devi, from the root 'div', meaning
to shine. She is the Shining One, who is given different names in
different places and in different appearances, as the symbol of the
life-giving powers of the Universe. It is she that powers him. This
Shakti is expressed as the i in Shiva's name. Without this i, Shiva
becomes Shva, which in Sanskrit means a corpse. Thus suggesting that
without his Shakti, Shiva is powerless or inert.
Kali is a particularly appropriate image for conveying the idea of the
world as the play of the gods. The spontaneous, effortless, dizzying
creativity of the divine reflex is conveyed in her wild appearance.
Insofar as kali is identified with the phenomenal world, she presents
a picture of that world that underlies its ephemeral and unpredictable
nature. In her mad dancing, disheveled hair, and eerie howl there is
made present the hint of a world reeling, careening out of control.
The world is created and destroyed in Kali's wild dancing, and the
truth of redemption lies in man's awareness that he is invited to take
part in that dance, to yield to the frenzied beat of the Mother's
dance of life and death.
O Kali, my Mother full of Bliss! Enchantress of the almighty Shiva!
In Thy delirious joy Thou dancest, clapping Thy hands together!
Thou art the Mover of all that move, and we are but Thy helpless toys
...Ramakrishna Paramhans
Kali and her attendants dance to rhythms pounded out by Shiva (Lord of
destruction) and his animal-headed attendants who dwell in the
Himalayas. Associated with chaos and uncontrollable destruction,
Kali's own retinue brandishes swords and holds aloft skull cups from
which they drink the blood that intoxicates them. Kali, like Shiva,
has a third eye, but in all other respects the two are distinguished
from one another. In contrast to Shiva's sweet expression, plump body,
and ash white complexion, dark kali's emaciated limbs, angular
gestures, and fierce grimace convey a wild intensity. Her loose hair,
skull garland, and tiger wrap whip around her body as she stomps and
claps to the rhythm of the dance.
Many stories describe Kali's dance with Shiva as one that "threatens
to destroy the world" by its savage power. Art historian Stella
Kramrisch has noted that the image of kali dancing with Shiva follows
closely the myth of the demon Daruka. When Shiva asks his wife Parvati
to destroy this demon, she enters Shiva's body and transforms herself
from the poison that is stored in his throat. She emerges from Shiva
as Kali, ferocious in appearance, and with the help of her flesh
eating retinue attacks and defeats the demon. Kali however became so
intoxicated by the blood lust of battle that her aroused fury and wild
hunger threatened to destroy the whole world. She continued her
ferocious rampage until Shiva manifested himself as an infant and lay
crying in the midst of the corpse-strewn field. Kali, deceived by
Shiva's power of illusion, became calm as she suckled the baby. When
evening approached, Shiva performed the dance of creation (tandava) to
please the goddess. Delighted with the dance, Kali and her attendants
joined in.
This terrific and poignant imagery starkly reveals the nature of Kali
as the Divine Mother. Ramaprasad expresses his feelings thus:
Behold my Mother playing with Shiva,
lost in an ecstasy of joy!
Drunk with a draught of celestial wine,
She reels, and yet does not fall.
Erect She stands on Shiva's bosom,
and the earth Trembles under Her tread;
She and Her Lord are mad with frenzy,
casting Aside all fear and shame.
... Ramprasad (1718-75)
Kali's human and maternal qualities continue to define the goddess for
most of her devotees to this day. In human relationships, the love
between mother and child is usually considered the purest and
strongest. In the same way, the love between the Mother Goddess and
her human children is considered the closest and tenderest
relationship with divinity. Accordingly, Kali's devotees form a
particularly intimate and loving bond with her. But the devotee never
forgets Kali's demonic, frightening aspects. He does not distort
Kali's nature and the truths she reveals; he does not refuse to
meditate on her terrifying features. He mentions these repeatedly in
his songs but is never put off or repelled by them. Kali may be
frightening, the mad, forgetful mistress of a world spinning out of
control, but she is, after all, the Mother of all. As such, she must
be accepted by her children- accepted in wonder and awe, perhaps, but
accepted nevertheless. The poet in an intimate and lighter tone
addresses the Mother thus:
O Kali! Why dost Thou roam about nude?
Art Thou not ashamed, Mother!
Garb and ornaments Thou hast none;
yet Thou Pridest in being King's daughter.
O Mother! Is it a virtue of Thy family that Thou
Placest thy feet on Thy husband?
Thou art nude; Thy husband is nude; you both roam cremation grounds.
O Mother! We are all ashamed of you; do put on thy garb.
Thou hast cast away Thy necklace of jewels, Mother,
And worn a garland of human heads.
Prasada says, "Mother! Thy fierce beauty has frightened
Thy nude consort.
... Ramaprasad
The soul that worships becomes always a little child: the soul that
becomes a child finds God oftenest as mother. In a meditation before
the Blessed Sacrament, some pen has written the exquisite assurance:
"My child, you need not know much in order to please Me. Only Love Me
dearly. Speak to me, as you would talk to your mother, if she had
taken you in her arms."
Kali's boon is won when man confronts or accepts her and the realities
she dramatically conveys to him. The image of Kali, in a variety of
ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are
not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them
away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of man's life so
thoroughly that to deny them is ultimately futile. For man to realize
the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human
being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence. Kali's boon
is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is
won only after confrontation or acceptance of death. To ignore death,
to pretend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one's ego
is the center of things, is to provoke Kali's mocking laughter. To
confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of
being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept
one's mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance,
and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects
them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them
their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely,
releases them from the incredible, binding web of "adult" pretense,
practicality, and rationality.
We hope you have enjoyed reading the article. Any comments or feedback
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http://www.exoticindiaart.com/kali.htm
bademiyansubhanallah
The importance of Hindutva in the context of nationhood is yet to be
understood by many and remains unexplained to the youth. This needs to
change.
At a recent programme we had organised to induct youth volunteers as
supporters of the BJP, veteran RSS ideologue M.G. Vaidya and BJP
National President Nitin Gadkari presented their view of the specially
chosen topic for the day, ‘Hindutva and Politics’. In bringing up a
third dimension, I attempted to present the dilemma that is poised
before the younger members when they are confronted with the term
‘Hindutva’.
What emerged was that there is agreement on the need for
transliterating Hindutva for the younger set, if not all, although it
would seem that there is ample scope for including many more segments
within the reference.
My opening argument was about the conflict and complexity caused
around the term Hindutva and how the youth, particularly the more
modern in their outlook, were turning diffident about the concept
itself under the weight of popular public discourse. The President of
the BJP – and a lot of people thought he would duck the issue – made
short shrift of any illusions people had of any duality in his mind
about the subject declaring with clarity that the spirit of the BJP
was an embodiment of the spirit of Hindutva and it was not up for
debate. Having got that out of the way, his most remarkable
achievement on the day, seen from the viewpoint of the youth present,
was to project an integrated vision of the meaning of the term and its
relevance in the context of the political outlook of the BJP. His
brief remarks came before the redoubtable M.G. Vaidya and yet it did
not come as practiced or played to the gallery but with an easy
conviction and unpretentious verbiage. The outcome was deservedly
calming, as he con
cluded that understanding Hindutva in the context of an anti-muslim
mindset had to be eroded and the quintessential element of Hindutva –
of vasudhaiva kutumbakam – be reinforced within that mind space.
M.G. Vaidya evoked the essential nature of Hindutva as a ‘joiner’ and
reiterated the aspects that make nationhood synonymous with the
integral concepts of Hindutva – as derived from the way of life of the
people within the geography of what was called ‘Hindustan’. He
emphasized the seminal difference between nation and state and his
arguments buttressed that a commonality of views necessary on certain
issues of critical importance to the nation must not be confused with
or be given a communal twist.
The cumulative impact of the views from three polarities was an
interesting exercise in that all of us, almost serendipitously, felt
the lacuna in engagement on the issue, and at the same time hit upon
the importance of extending these dialogues as its very solution. Both
M.G. Vaidya and Nitin Gadkari emphasized the need to carry on this
series on the subject.
The moot point remains that the entire horizon of discourse on
Hindutva and its relationship with politics in public discourse for
very long has been slave to big media and the pseudo-liberal cartel.
Equally, that it will take a long term effort to engage the new youth
and reintroduce the subject with an eye on the realities of the time
to have some success. Consequently there is now a growing realization
among many people within and out of the party that Hindutva must be re-
interpreted in the context of the contemporary and that the symbiotic
relationship between Hindutva and the BJP must be explained in more
rational terms to an increasingly discerning youth.
The political ramifications of the unprecedented growth of the BJP
and its conjoined relationship with Hindutva remain one of the most
tenuous arguments of our time. But my early conclusion remains that
Hindutva needs to be owned more fully rather than less by the BJP.
This would help to speed up the process of denouement that would de-
mystify the term, the concept and the comprehensive meaning of the
word, and extend to explaining its rationale in political terms.
Hindutva is the life force of our civilization. It defines us as
distinct from the rest of the world – not better or worse, just
distinct. This sense of identity is necessary, both for reasons of the
concept of nation hood and also as an ideal we give our self. It does
not dismiss anyone’s personal faith: it merely posits a practical
reality of the general tenor of this land, its philosophical moorings,
its largest, most visible and expansive palette of beliefs and belief
systems.
The common weakness, to see Hindutva as an assertion of Hindu
dominance is mistaken not because it is patently irrelevant, but
because it is a regular feature of newly created nations to struggle
with a self image, much like an adolescent. Consequently, what is
erroneously called and reviled as Hindu pride is merely a growing
political consciousness of a people, as the ideas associated with
nationhood leach into the idea of statehood. It is not only a natural
process of growth, but actually invaluable in the management, and
protection, of the state.
One of the crucial realities of our times is the fact that national
integration is still a work in progress. This is hardly ever attended
to but the frequent conflagration of regional and linguistic or
geographical demands of identity are only symptomatic of the problem.
That allows us only two options as we struggle for an effective means
of integration : either a more federal structure that allows
increasing freedoms to states, or finding newer points of aggregation.
Hindutva is merely the latter until the state figures out what to do
with itself on the former.
But more than just an interim arrangement, as the earlier statement
might suggest, investing in the most common denominator of commonality
would sound to most reasonable people to be a logical step to take to
knit up the tapestry of diversity that we call our country. It stands
to reason that a common refrain like traditionally inherited
scriptures, or a cultural continuity of mythical beliefs is a sensible
palette to try and integrate otherwise distinct people. Hindutva
provides just that medium and barring the difficulties that we have in
a few states, this applies across the board. It takes a lot longer to
make a man in a remote village in Orissa or Jharkhand to understand
the idea of India and it takes no time to make him recognize his
common Hindu heritage. Hindutva is thus an overarching natural
strategy to unite, using the largest common denominator of cultural
affinities, that comes out of the lay of the land, not out of any
figment of imagined Hindu supremacy.
But half a decade of cocky secularism and the damage it has done is
only now beginning to heal while the essence of Hindutva has begun to
take root. It is both, a miracle and a testament to the indigenous
religious logic of the common beliefs of the people at large of India
that the country has not splintered. Those who would like to place the
credit for this feat at the door of a Nehruvian vision or Gandhian
thought would do better to remember that both streams intrinsically
emanated from the fount of Hindutva as well.
This blog post has appeared as an article in The Daily Pioneer of the
27th March 2010
~ by sanjaykaul on March 27, 2010.
http://sanjaykaul.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/hindutva-and-politics-time-for-a-three-dimensional-view/
Hindsight, Happenstance and Hindutva – Part 2
The evolution of Hindutva as a political instrument is a work in
progress.
While its opponents go berserk deriding Hindutva, they might be losing
sight of a critical development taking place before their eyes.
Put coarsely, the origins of the BJP’s growth, all through the muddled
years of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jana Sangh and the Janata Party, can
be traced back to a sense of outrage at the successive political
regimes that sought to undermine the brilliance of India’s indigenous
culture at the altar of electoral advantage, in the guise of a well
crafted concept that has been variously referred to as secularism, or
more recently, as pseudo-secularism.
Secularism, in the Indian context, turned out a strange concoction of
tolerance based around a rejection of religion in political space – a
muddled version of gross Gandhianism bred with spotty western
liberalism and which for various reasons became an anthem for most of
the newbies of post independence India. Later it manifested itself as
a side-effect of the faux socialism of the Nehruvian age, through an
imposed sense of egalitarianism in a country unprepared for such
largesse when it had still to deal with immense inequities of almost
every conceivable parameter, particularly social and political.
Somewhere down the line, secularism degraded into a negation of the
implicit commonality of the identity of India with Hindu thought and
culture and became an armour to ward off any threat to the Congress’
hegemony of political space, using, most ironically, religion as its
most potent instrument when applied to minorities, particularly
Muslims.
While it can be argued that this was a natural corollary to Congress’
near total control of legitimate political space in post independence
India, it was, in fact, a typical abnormality of post-emancipation
political processes that left India without any alternate party for
governance after independence. Every nation that has had such a long
struggle for freedom and has negotiated with an occupying foreign
entity has roughly had the same experience, where the reactionary
forces which were more amenable to the occupants, slipped into post-
freedom slots of governance or political prominence. In effect, the
more fundamentalist the opposition to the foreigners, the lesser the
chances of such groups having a shy at political legitimacy, which in
most cases went to more middle of the road, ambivalent, malleable
combination of forces that made the evading foreign power’s loss look
more respectable.
Without going into the reasons for such phenomenon, for that is an
involved subject on its own, it was clear that an unorganized group
such as the pro-Hindutva votaries with such a strong streak of socio-
cultural nationalism, was always going to struggle for large scale
legitimacy when the engine of the freedom movement was all but
monopolized by better organised structures like the Congress and led
by pan-India leaders like Gandhi, later Nehru and others who secured
cross voter support due to an ambivalent approach to the issue of
nationalism, its meaning and its forms in a country still coming to
grips with the concept of pan-Indian aggregation.
Progressively, this feeling among Hindus of being marginalized in the
country of their origin – not socially, but politically – by using
almost every trick in the book of the British – emphasizing diversity
instead of commonality, underlining the divisions rather than the
overlapping cultures – began subtly, but in ensuing years, with
successive Congress governments more or less using the old Nehruvian
model for electoral profit, resulted in a consolidation of the sense
of cultural compromise – where to seem fair to a one legged man,
others were expected to limp too. The Congress’ avowed and much
vaunted secularism therefore has had less to do with a genuine
ideological belief in non-partisan religio-cultural expression and
more to do with electoral expediency, year after election year.
But the continuous corrosion of this theory, and its masterful re-use
and revitalization under Indira Gandhi until it became an alternate
dharma, caused much of what is seen as Hindu revivalism. In that
sense, the BJP is really a byproduct of the Congress – even as it is
its nemesis, and the rise and rise of this party over the last two
decades is truly spectacular in a historical perspective.
Whatever the debate suggests and however one may look at it, the
undeniable and interesting fact is that it took a modern time like the
twentieth century to see the Hindutva theme take centre stage. What
explains that? If democracy has only seeped in more penetratingly into
our socio-political system, if education has produced more aware,
liberal and rights-conscious people, if we have integrated even more
into a global system of liberal values, how do we explain the rise of
a party that is so often cornered by intellectuals and left wingers
and centrists as being a neophyte Hindu, rightist party with a lunatic
fringe and now even an extremist wing!
The question need not be whether the rise of the BJP is good or bad,
right or wrong: the question is, what explains the growing legitimacy
of the Hindutva theme, if it’s so bad for the polity and so dangerous
for democracy ?
~ by sanjaykaul on July 28, 2009.
3 Responses to “Hindsight, Happenstance and Hindutva – Part 2”
sanjaykaul said this on January 12, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I am not able to find Part 1 of your article. I want to read all 3
parts before I post my views.
Suresh Gupta said this on January 10, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Dear Sanjay,
I thought that I need to communicate with you on your blog because it
seems to me that whatever things I mailed to you could not be
understood. Let me be a little harsh to make you realize that as far
as I know, people in your organisation do not seem to be worth making
an impact on AAM AADMI’S mind. I heard that the BJP is looking to
transform it’s leadership by inducting the young brigade in the party.
But where are the youngsters in your party who could mitigate the
charisma of Mr. Rahul Gandhi, a leader blessed with royality, glamour,
goodwill and more.There are countless curses your party is facing at
the moment. Frankly speaking just like Congress (I), even your
Organisation comprises a bunch of selfish and greedy foxes. Mind it if
you do not transform your party and it’s agendas, beliefs, vision and
the people then it will be impossible for your Organisation to even
survive in the present context because the Italian Mother and her
Indian Son are growing stronger day by day. It is important that you
include the youth in your top creed. But caution! The young brigade
needs to be visionary who should spread the aroma of magnatic values,
integrity and farsightedness. Just like leaders of other political
parties, most of you are in politics to attain power, money and
influence, more precisely personal welfare and not the welfare of
people and generations to come.
Now only one agenda remains for you in the next elections which is
GOVERNANCE WITH A DIFFERENCE or BETTER GOVERNANCE because it is very
difficult now to prove the ruling pary bad as their leadership is in
clever hands. So think for the future once you get free from your
internal disputes.
Mann said this on August 13, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Heart Life
February 11, 2010
Why are liberals so condescending?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/04/AR2010020403698_pf.html
Gerard Alexander: Why are liberals so condescending?
By Gerard Alexander
Sunday, February 7, 2010; B01
Every political community includes some members who insist that their
side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But
American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear
committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-
evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions
are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of
serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship
notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have
joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.
It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic
fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost
nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their
troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative
misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care
reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the
country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so
busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that
sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their
core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a
recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or
deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).
This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations
has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the
functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when
dialogue would be more valuable than ever.
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency
encapsulated by Lionel Trilling’s 1950 remark that conservatives do
not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable
mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” During the 1950s and
’60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement.
Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at
the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering
conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In
1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to “the Manichaean style of thought,
the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance
of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind.”
This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the
economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy
Carter’s presidency, buffeted by economic and national security
challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-
doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain
for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic
expression in politicians’ speeches, top-selling books, historical
works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four
major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and
function.
The first is the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” a narrative made famous
by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision
maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not
because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they
deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of
professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such
as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate
information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein
crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush’s
presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational
factors.
This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically
driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For
example, Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science” argues
that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by
conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of
industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly
shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation,
conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only
cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is
waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care
reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.
This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the
Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities
of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the
decision will “open the floodgates for special interests” to influence
American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union
address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support
conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.
It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance
conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories
they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as
incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the
duplicity he found evident in 35 years’ worth of Wall Street Journal
editorial writers: “What do these people really believe? I mean,
they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they
know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that
their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is
that higher truth?”
In Krugman’s world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments
of “these people” — only to plumb the depths of their errors and
imagine hidden motives.
But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-
file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid
at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension,
exemplified in Thomas Frank’s best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the
Matter With Kansas?” Frank argued that working-class voters were so
distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into
voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard
Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that
theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had
succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on “guns, God and gays”
instead of economic redistribution.
And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-
presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis
when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns “cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations” about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama
backed away from their tenor but insisted that “I said something that
everybody knows is true.”
In this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters’
underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these
are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal
condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of
false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall
meetings or “tea party” gatherings, it might be politically prudent
for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually
listen.
The third version of liberal condescension points to something more
sinister. In his 2008 book, “Nixonland,” progressive writer Rick
Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican
strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some
Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, “Chain
Reaction,” Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon
and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to
cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article
of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because
they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.
Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South
whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the
liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then — recall
former president Carter’s recent assertion that opposition to Obama
reflects racism — even though survey research has shown a dramatic
decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the
intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both
parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices,
whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.
Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say
conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety — including
fear of change — whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to
evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in
his 2007 book, “The Assault on Reason,” in which he expressed fear
that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious
fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed
to “any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals.” This
right-wing politics involves a gradual “abandonment of concern for
reason or evidence” and relies on propaganda to maintain public
support, he wrote.
Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George
Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a
consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike
conservatives, “still believe in Enlightenment reason,” while Drew
Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant,
argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional
side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual.
“They like to read and think,” Westen wrote. “They thrive on policy
debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right.”
Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site
Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed
to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial
beliefs — including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their
states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that
Republicans are “divorced from reality” and that the results show why
“it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to
improve our country.” His condescension is superlative: Of the
respondents who favored secession, he wonders, “Can we cram them all
into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan,
and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America
illegally?”
I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that
revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average
Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to
conservatives for his “Jaywalking” interviews?
These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of
conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant — they insist on it. By
no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in
left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House
Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers
their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same
breath.
“There may be other ideas that you guys have,” Obama said. “I am happy
to look at them, and I’m happy to embrace them. . . . But the question
I think we’re going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward,
are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what’s good
for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be
trying to position ourselves so that come November, we’re able to say,
‘The other party, it’s their fault’?”
Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior.
But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically
mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological
dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty
members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for
instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth
ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are
always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or
media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.
In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators
and leaders — from Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to Obama’s White House,
with many stops in between — have developed or articulated narratives
that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.
To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely
limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps
most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over
American poverty for nearly two generations.
Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as
Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of
inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for
decades — until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their
views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils
of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as
insincere and mean-spirited — until public opinion insisted they be
addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the
1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that
discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in
place, with devastating effects.
Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today.
Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in
contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush’s aw-shucks
style, Sarah Palin’s college-hopping and the occasional conservative
campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact
is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal
theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary
on American life and policy as they do today.
Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is
the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs
often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been
busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in
financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts
want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest
and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical
research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But
public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made
in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost
always trump other goals.
Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on
innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by
legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice
would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at
all.
Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the
University of Virginia. He will be online to chat with readers on
Monday, February 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments
before or during the discussion. On Monday, he will also deliver the
American Enterprise Institute’s Bradley Lecture, “Do Liberals Know
Best? Intellectual Self-Confidence and the Claim to a Monopoly on
Knowledge.”
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
FD HIDDEN DIV
http://climber.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/why-are-liberals-so-condescending/
March 1, 2009...9:11 PM
What’s the Difference Between a Liberal and a Conservative?
We hear this question often in our lives, if we are a political person
ourselves.
I recently heard a response to this question that I disagree with but
I still believe desires to be heard. I am afraid I cannot offer it as
anything but anecdote.
Response: “Think in terms of kind and unkind.”
While this sentiment starts to address the huge gap between these
ideologies it only touches the most bare and stereotypical edges of
the matter.
It is hard to identify one single clear ‘line in the sand’ on this
issue to illustrate and thus it becomes a little troublesome to answer
simply.
The truth of the matter is more that historically both liberals and
conservatives morph and relocate themselves throughout the political
spectrum in all nations. Only certain key values and standards define
each group and it is easier to grab one specific location and
timeframe than to just say all liberals or conservatives are so.
Modern American liberals are clearly defined against modern American
conservatives in terms of their views of separation of church and
state.
Modern American liberals are clearly defined against modern American
conservatives in terms of their views of the use of military budgets
and international policies.
These kind of statements are the only real response to this question
and it is obviously verbose to try to answer this question with what
sounds like reading a textbook at someone.
It is said sometimes that these groups are defined by the members they
attract. I believe this only partly defines the ideology and the
group. The common views and desires are the true backbone of every
movement.
Some claim the liberal movements to attract the more ‘fringe’ elements
of society while conservative attracts a more ‘common’ element of
society.
That may have been true in days past but in our world, right now, the
conservative movement has attracted the truly fringe elements of our
society in the past national campaign and to this day on talk radio
and certain websites. Unquestionable willful destruction of non-
partisan debate is expressly un-American.
I think my answer to this question is more like an answer one might
get from Yoda or some wandering mystic.
“Ask me again when you know which one you are.”
I think if someone is even asking they are just fresh into politics
and all political types, even myself, must claw backwards into our
memories to a time when we were apolitical and remember that nobody
comes out of the womb with a position on taxation rates.
We form all these things we call ‘opinions’ as we go. So cut a break
to people who were spacing out on their nation when we needed them the
most because we still need them now that they are paying attention.
http://ericlightborn.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/difference-between-a-liberal-and-a-conservative/
Focus TV_22.03.2010
Watch Video: (Hindi)
http://vodpod.com/watch/3296074-focus-tv22-03-2010?pod=sanjaykaul
P7 News_23.03.2010
Watch Video: (Hindi)
http://vodpod.com/watch/3296073-p7-news23-03-2010?pod=sanjaykaul
Left is Right. Right is Wrong.
How leftists and pseudo-liberals have crowded out debate in public
discourse in an attempt to muzzle the right by their obdurate head
butting. But things are changing.
These two pithy statements are actually modern aphorisms, and as
attractively poised in their contradiction as they may look, there is
a seminal synonymity between them if we were to go by the modern
version of liberalism – a stark polarization where, without much
evidence, leave alone logic, conservative is taken to mean retrograde
and liberal, progressive.
The liberal occupies centre stage in public discourse not because he
or she represents the larger, more popular or truer view of things but
because he or she has claimed to occupy – from the time of Moses, it
might seem – what is called the moral high ground. And since
occupation is nine tenth of the law, dislodging them has not been
easy. To that extent it is also anomalously interpreted that there can
be only one moral high ground, viz., the ground beneath their feet,
which in a reasonably diverse environment of views and counterviews
would seem absurd because it contradicts itself – morality is not an
absolute idea – one man’s….you know, all that.
But idealism is a fine art, and the liberals excel at it. Ah!, the
glorious irresponsibility of articulating an unattainable objective,
of painting a surreal picture, citing an impossibility. As a matter of
strategy, liberals always deal in larger issues, macro positions and
paint landscapes that arch from biblical rhetoric to genteel fussiness
but the arguments posited by them almost always fail in real time, in
the context of real life values. The rightist, on the other hand,
deals with the actual – his views are more realistic – the behaviour
of man in his relationship with others – the physiological, the
psychological or the spiritual dimensions of what affects him and his
life directly, socially, politically and which shapes his operating
opinions, not subjective views.
The constant lecturing by the liberals, the centrists and left of
centrists, sooner or later transforms into a symphony of agreed,
standardized, boxed and labeled views that have the potential of
paralyzing the body politic by their sheer sonority. Then there are
trained liberals who have spent years spinning on the wheel of western
value judgements until their rules apply to all. In the Indian context
particularly, most of what we know as liberalism is an acquired taste
– remnants of a political regime that was constantly at odds with its
self image and tried to impose a new reality on the consciousness of
the people even though it militates against the grain of the people.
It was part of the new servitude to a new culture, an imported,
contrived philosophy that got its respectability from the west but
only after cauterizing the flavour of the celebrated liberalism of the
Hindus.
The brotherhood of liberals is as much a multinational burger chain as
anything, for it is sustained by a commonality of view that breaches
borders irrespective of applicability and indeed, raison d’etre. A
conservative [rightist] in the context of the west – say the US or UK
– is epitomized by highly polarized views on specific issues –
taxation, abortion, security, immigration, religion – and an equal
intolerance for the opposite. India never had a tradition of such
intolerance due to the syncretic nature of Hinduism and to that extent
it could be argued that peddling liberalism in India has actually
served only to push people into more rightist positions than were
necessary, had a natural course been followed. For evidence I present
to you the rise of Hindutva, the celebrated term ‘pseudo-secular’ and
the attendant political diffusion that had since given rise to the
forces supporting the BJP.
But the liberal is not singly powerful. They hunt in packs. They act
in concert, being a cartel as I have argued, paralyse debate with
their pre-programmed, regurgitated content that is inbuilt with a
machinery of psychological keys, subtle inflexions and caustic
innuendos designed to shock and awe, but mostly to hawk and shove,
being peddlers essentially.
As is always the case with equal and opposing forces, Liberals too are
nothing more than an international cartel, intolerant of any view
other than their own and in a democratic milieu they exhibit
illustratively anti-democratic, even phobic behaviour. Liberals, it is
said, argue for freedom and choice – they actually subvert it, for
while their motive scould be assigned to a childish love of variety,
with their extremist commitment to the idea of freedom they are
eventually beholden to encourage splinter groups, even separatists and
insurgents, rendering the state susceptible to balkanization,
weakening it and endangering the very freedom that comes with secure
boundaries and which they love so much to uphold. It is suggested that
liberals represent openness to change and new ideas – I propose that
it is in fact the exact opposite. Liberals refuse to see change except
from where they stand, in which case it is not a predilection for
change at all – more a resistance to it unless it conforms to their
pre-existing views and stand point.
It is also not as if all of this were harmless banter. The liberal
with his lack of realism, insensitivity to time and effort, muddled
understanding of intent and subject often debauches the dialogue to
the detriment of entire nations, not to speak of people. This
intractable linkage predicts that the liberal will trade tomorrow’s
disaster for today’s relative peace. Remember he does not deal in
solutions, but in positions; not in time but in relativity, not in
qualifiable transactions, but in genial intransigence – anything, in
other words, to not disturb the status quo, even if it means sleeping
through a crisis, with the gumption of calling a more concerned fellow
citizen alarmist should he raise a cry.
History is replete with examples of how much damage this can do – we
don’t have to look far – our most prominent military and foreign
affairs failures have stemmed from this weakness. Now the spectre of
tangoing with Pakistan at the Foreign Secretary talks even as they
blow up bakeries in town is yet another shining example of the
paralysis of independent thinking that liberals induce. To the
argument, so should we stop talking to Pakistan is the answer: at
least have the same self respect that the US reserves for itself. Our
law and order and internal security apparatus is also moribund for the
simple reason that the stranglehold of the liberal lobby won’t allow
progress. Look at the priorities of the liberals who sweated blood at
the thought of a recent movie screening being blocked, against the
backdrop of the blood that spilled in Pune merely because once again,
the liberals forced the government to take its eye off the target.
Guarding cinema hall premiers became a greater testament to our
nationhood than guarding our cities.
It would be naive to suggest that the rise of the liberals is merely
due to the junta or the sheer brilliance of their methods or the depth
of their cadres. The right too, in India has for long served their
interest in as much as not speaking up, not speaking up enough, or not
speaking up in a language that would challenge their methods. They
have been in thrall of the liberals for some time now and some are
finding it difficult to maintain the balance and poise required to
counter their subtle tactics while some are still hesitating to come
out of the closet, or having come out, have frequent bouts of
withdrawal and keep rethinking positions worrying about their approval
ratings – in a strange quirk – among the very liberals they decry! –
the same dodgy professors in moth eaten tweed jackets and scruffy
jhola wallahas who revel in their penury of new ideas.
Leftist, and left of centre demagogues have wreaked havoc on the
intellectual temperament of the Indian people for close to half a
century, where the state’s writ, composed by them, has run riot with a
people’s conscience, their sense of self and identity – the vein and
sap of personality.
The earlier success of the liberals and the left liberals in crowding
our text books with their version of Indian social history is also a
classic reason for this: most of my generation had to lose thirty
years of conditioning to even emerge from the chrysalis and find in
the kernel of Hindu thought the real tone, tenor and import of
liberalism. It took that much time to also realize that we don’t need
to be at odds with who we are and how we think and that we can’t be
judged or judge on the basis of western thought and philosophy.
Besides it could be said with some certainty that a large body of
western liberal philosophical theory is beholden to the tenets of
Hindu thought for the very version they come back to sell back to us
through their re-sellers. Consequently, it is a fact that it takes a
longer growth curve to find oneself before being lumped as a rightist:
the liberal has merely to walk the course set by his predecessor
masters: the rightist has to take a u-turn after all is said and done
and come back to his roots and almost start again.
The Hindu’s traditional aversion for conflict, a quality not many
cultures can claim, is also part of the misconception that his views
are in subtle consonance with the liberals as they preen around in our
country in borrowed clothes. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
It is intrinsic in the make of our people to be able to revel in
dichotomy: what looks like a contradiction to a westerner is often
merely two sides of the coin to an Indian. Remember the Hindu can
handle two kinds of truths; and at the same time too! To people with
one God, the idea of many Gods is abhorrent. And there starts the
trend of intolerance that is spawned by undercover fascism,
masquerading as liberalism.
The marginalization of pseudo-liberals in India is a given not because
of rising rightism, but because it was never a really original product
and its moorings were always suspect. It is for just that reason that
the scope of such liberals has constantly reduced and now their most
celebrated festivals are things like valentine’s day, a Gujarat riot
court hearing, a shahrukh khan flick or some cute indo-pak music
festival.
But this trend is changing and a new breed of ‘write-ists’ must
emerge, who will redefine liberalism vis-à-vis conservativeness, left
from right, and right from wrong. They must underline that in the
Indian context, the right is more centre than the liberal. They must
shift the fulcrum of the equation and lay down the new fundamentals of
bipolar debate in the context of India, where moderation must now be
tempered with a bias for self preservation, where centuries of socio-
political erosion must be stemmed with a new apparatus of definitions,
where indigenous political awakening must sear through the mask of
pseudo-liberalism and give birth to a more realistic version of active
liberalism, more commonly called the middle path, more commonly known
as our gift to the world.
This piece has also appeared in an edited version under a different
headline in The Daily Pioneer of 20th Febryary, 2010
~ by sanjaykaul on February 20, 2010.
One Response to “Left is Right. Right is Wrong.”
Absolutely brilliant!
A piece of advice, though unsolicited,the entire media [print and
electronic] is not only anti-BJP but also anti-Hindu. Therefore I wish
BJP projects articulate people on TV and rebutts all the trash written
in the print media.
R SUNDERARAJAN said this on March 20, 2010 at 11:00 am
http://sanjaykaul.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/left-is-right-right-is-wrong/comment-page-1/#comment-62
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‘Modi has said nobody is above law and he has kept his word’
Express news service
Posted: Sunday , Mar 28, 2010 at 0253 hrs
New Delhi:
After Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s questioning for over five
hours by the SIT on Saturday, the BJP said Modi, by his action, had
proved that he believed in supremacy of law of the land, even as the
main opposition party made a strong case for “autonomous functioning
of institutions in the country”.
Modi has twice been mentioned as prime ministerial material by BJP
president Nitin Gadkari, and at the recent party conclave, Modi’s name
(along with a couple of other leaders) were described by the BJP
president as party’s “future prospects”.
After Modi’s appearance before the SIT, two divergent currents were
seen in the central BJP on Saturday.
BJP spokesperson Rajiv Pratap Rudy spoke more in terms of Modi’s
personality. Rudy said Modi (through his appearance before SIT) “had
demolished mischievous speculation about him” and that his “graceful
action vindicated BJP’s position” and that it appeared that “SIT team
is tired, Modi is not”.
Another spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman, who was officially fielded by
the party to address the media after Modi’s deposition, talked in
terms of “supremacy of institutions”. “Modi has said that nobody is
above the law and he has kept his word,” Sitharaman said. “The SIT was
formed by the Supreme Court. We should allow the courts to function
and learn to respect institutions,” she said, adding that Modi was
assisting SIT in the probe and that he had not been summoned by it.
She also reminded the Congress about its track record on “respecting
institutions” in the country.
She also slammed Union Law Minister M Veerappa Moily for reportedly
suggesting that Modi should co-operate with SIT, implying that one
institution must not interfere in the functioning of another
institution. She also reminded the Congress that “there were hardly
any convictions in the 1984 riots” whereas “several people have
already been convicted in the 2002 riots in Gujarat”. The main
opposition also accused the media of being driven by activists
pursuing the 2002 riots case.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/modihassaidnobodyisabovelawandhehaskepthisword/596606/0
Babri demolition: Cong reacts cautiously to testimony of IPS officer1
ANI
Posted: Saturday , Mar 27, 2010 at 1211 hrs
New Delhi:
An IPS officer incharge of Advani's security during the Babri
demolition has said that the leader gave inflamatory speeches.
The Congress party has reacted with caution to the deposition of
senior Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Anju Gupta, who was L K
Advani's security officer during the demolition of the Babri Masjid on
December 6, 1992.
Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said Gupta's statement
before a court in Rae Bareilly is crucial in convicting the guilty.
"This (Anju's deposition) is the first official, direct eyewitness
testimony in legal and technical sense in this (Babri mosque
demolition case) matter. We must exercise restrain and respect the
process of law," said Singhvi.
"But, it is extremely serious and, it is extremely important and
provisions (of law) involved are extremely serious," he added.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) refused to comment saying the matter
is subjudice.
"This kind of issue (eyewitness account) has also come before the
Liberhan Commission. We would not like comment on the judicial process
and her (Anju's) testimony in the court," said Ramnath Kovind, a
spokesperson of the BJP.
Earlier on Friday, Anju Gupta told a Rae Bareilly Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI) court that Advani delivered incendiary speeches on
December 6, 1992, asserting that the temple would be built at the same
place.
"She (Anju) has told in the court in detail all the happenings of that
day (December 6, 1992). I have completed my (process of witness)
examination. I think nearly 60 questions were asked which have been
replied. Now, the argument has begun. The honourable court has fixed
23 April for further hearing," said Public Prosecutor P K Chaubey.
Immediately after the riots in 1993, Gupta had told the Central Bureau
of Investigation (CBI) how Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti and
the rest had expressed delight over the demolition of the mosque.
CBI Director Ashwani Kumar had reportedly written to Cabinet Secretary
K Chandrashekhar urging him to release Gupta for the important hearing
on the Babri Mosque demolition case.
A special Ayodhya court in Rae Bareilly had earlier discharged Advani
on the plea that charges against him were based on mere suspicion. The
CBI dropped the charge of criminal conspiracy - Section 120 B of the
Indian Penal Code (IPC) - in its revised charge sheet submitted before
the Rae Bareilly court on the directives of the Allahabad High Court.
The revised chargesheet contained relatively milder sections under the
Indian Penal Code - Sections 153-A, 153-B (propagating communal
violence), 147, 149 (rioting) and 505 (spreading ill-will). This was
believed to be the result of CBI''''s failure to press the charges
strongly.
4 Comments |
congress is staging this drama
By: MT | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 21:05:43 PM
congress is staging this drama to divert peoples attention from
inflation and nuclear liability bill
Why 18 long years ?
By: Gopal | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 20:43:17 PM
Why did this IPS officer wait for such a long time to tell the court,
when the case has been going on for years. If she really stands by
law, she should have deposed long back.Was she under pressure then or
is she now, is a mute question. In any case, 1984 is much prior to
1992.
Anju Gupta Rizvi
By: desi nerd | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 19:55:00 PM
Why dont they publish the full name of the IPS officer and the fact
that her husband Rizvi is the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) of P
Chidambaram.
Court decision is all and above
By: Ravishkumar | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:11:22 PM
Court decision should be all and above,however as the matter is under
subjudice,so one should avoid oneself from making any public comment
about it.As it has become customary in our country that everyone try
to take political benefit anyhow.But it should be avoided as far as a
serious matter is under consideration.So,just don't think only about
your political benefit,go deep inside the seriousness of the subject
matter.
Iron Man Advani
By: V.Narayanaswamy | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:50:43 PM
Advani is in politics for his self interest. When Babri Masjid was
demolished he had shed crocadile tears is evident from the testimony
of the IPS officer. As Home Minister he was not aware that Jaswant
Singh was to accompany the terrorists to Kandahar. In the Jinnah
episode he wanted a good Character certificate from Pakistan to be
trumpted in India. When Mohan Bhagwat appointed Sushma Swaraj as the
Leader of the Opposition in place of Advani, it was widely believed
that he would hang up his boots. The Rath Yatri Advani has accepted
the superfluous post of Chairman of the Parliamentary Party. He is
BJP's Bhishma Pitamah. He truely deserves a Bharat Ratna. If tomorrow
Sushma Swaraj becomes Prime Minister, he may accept of Param Mukhya
Pradhan Mantri.
Advani is Patriot
By: Pankaj | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:28:41 PM
Mr Advani is true patriot. He lived his life for the country. I wish
people of this country acknoledge his service to this country and give
respect he desrves. Hai Hind!
Fake Secularism
By: Nishit Desai | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:18:01 PM
How has the Congress started blaming the BJP despite the fact that it
itself was in power at the Centre in 1992. In that case, PV Narsimha
Rao and the entire Congress cabinet are all equally responsible which
also includes the present Prime Minister. If they were so much
concerned about security, they could have very well taken over the
entire city of Ayodhya. But they did not since it was in their own
interest not only to get the mosque demolished and pave way for a
temple thereby supporting Hindus but at the same time to discredit the
BJP.Poor secular Congress.
Is Anju a Gupta?
By: Ajit | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:06:44 PM
Anju Gupta is no longer so, she is married to a muslim and converted
to islam obviously she will not hesitate in denigrating BJP and Hindu
faith. What about over 100 temples demolished in Kashmir after 1985
and over 1000 demolished in Pakistan after 1947. Is secularism only
for Hindus?
BJP bashing?
By: srinivas prasad | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:59:31 PM
the media goes tom toming when it comes to babrimasjid and Gujrath.why
does not attack 1984 riots with the same vigor?
what about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots?
By: Nariman Mistry | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:57:21 PM
If demolishing an abandoned structure is so bad, what about the
genocide of 5000 Sikhs in 1984? Barring one (that too after 25 years),
how many Congressmen have been prosecuted?
What about what?
By: Shatruj Jain | Sunday , 28 Mar '10 1:06:14 AM
It has now become a pet habit of Sangh Parivar to hark about Sikh
Riots whenever Babri Masjid issue comes in press, while conveniently
reminding us to forget and live on the Gujrat Massacres.
Babri Demolition
By: Shanti Patel | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 19:29:15 PM
Advani went on to become Deputy PM. Sadhvi Uma Bharti and Ritambhara
who were bosom partners at the time are believed to be rivals now and
do not talk to each other. Uma has been junked by her own party.
Ritambhara being the crafty and conniving type used the Ram Janmabhumi
Andolan as a stepping stone to create a throne for herself, cleverly
transformed her image from a hate spewing monger into an image of
motherly love (Vatsalya)- fake of course. Today she is milking crores
of Rupees from gullible Hindus and leading a life of unfathomable
luxury. She goes on cruises and travels the world by first class and
being worshipp[ed as a "Saint". It is believed that she wields great
power within BJP's inner circle. What a travesty of justice in India!
Baberi Demolition
By: Varind | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:13:16 PM
As the case is in court hence it is inappropriate to comment so much
but certainly Congress has no right to comment on this issue who
itself is involved in attack on Golden Temple. The memory of the
Indian people is not so weak as Congress thnks. Nevertheless if
demolition of Baberi Mosque was violation of constitution so is the
attack on Golden Temple.
Hide outs in holy places
By: karunakar | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 22:25:06 PM
If criminlas hide in temples,gurudwaras or mosques , the goverment has
the constitutional right to flush them out
1984 riots case accused seeks transfer to another court
Agencies
Posted: Saturday , Mar 27, 2010 at 1233 hrs
New Delhi:
A co-accused of Congress leader Sajjan Kumar in the 1984 anti-Sikh
riots cases on Saturday pleaded before a Delhi Court to transfer the
matters to a judge having territorial jurisdiction to try them.
Special CBI Judge P S Teji reserved the order on the application of
accused Khushal Singh in the riots cases.
In a plea, Singh submitted that Karkardooma court did not have
jurisdiction to try the cases as the offences were alleged to have
been committed at Sultanpuri and Delhi Cantonment.
"Karkardooma court where the matters are being heard are not the
competent court as per the law with regard to territorial
jurisdiction," Singh's counsel submitted.
He further said that Delhi has been divided into nine judicial
districts and the matter should be heard by a court either at Rohini
or at Tees Hazari district courts.
"The very purpose of dividing Delhi into nine judicial district was to
make justice available at the doorsteps of the public and to ensure
convenience," he said seeking transfer of the cases.
He also referred to section 177 of the CrPC, stating that any criminal
matter should be heard by a competent local court having territorial
jurisdiction.
CBI prosecutor Y K Saxena, on the other hand, opposed his plea stating
that there was no question of territorial impropriety.
"No prejudice is caused to the accused whether the matter is tried at
Tees Hazari or Karkardooma. This is the only designated court of the
CBI," he said.
He also said that the probe into riots cases was transferred to CBI
from the Delhi Police.
Sajjan Kumar and others, who have been chargesheeted by the CBI in two
riots cases, were present before the court to which the matter has
been transferred to initiate the proceedings related to trial.
On March 20, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate had declined to
take on record an application of Kumar seeking certain documents
related to the chargesheet filed against him in riot cases, saying it
was aimed at causing hindrance in the progress of the case.
The ACMM had sent the case against Kumar and others before a Special
CBI Court.
CBI had filed two chargesheets on January 13 in the riots cases
registered on the recommendation of Justice G T Nanavati Commission
which had inquired into the sequence of events leading to the riots in
the aftermath of the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi.
Comments (2) |
Indian Judicial System
By: Anant | 27-Mar-2010
Judicial system in India is non-existant for the general public. Kumar
will try to shift courts where his friends are. It will take another
26 years before the courts decide where the case should be heard. Long
live politicians in India and two fingers for the sufferes of
injustices.
Long Live Congress!
By: Loyal Congress | 27-Mar-2010
Hope Sajjan Kumar gets acquitted soon and this witch hunt stops! Let
the terror be defeated. Let's hope the nation never again witnesses
the like of tragic assassination of one our greatest leaders Mataji
Indira Gandhi!
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/1984riotscaseaccusedseekstransfertoanothercourt/596404/0
Guj riots: Modi questioned by SIT for over 9 hours
Agencies
Posted: Saturday , Mar 27, 2010 at 0926 hrs
Gandhinagar:
SIT summoned Modi to depose in connection with a complaint of Zakia
Jaffery, widow of Eshan Jaffery, who was killed in the riot.
For the first time since the riots in Gujarat eight years ago, state
Chief Minister Narendra Modi today subjected himself to marathon
questioning by the Supreme Court-appointed SIT in two sessions lasting
for more than nine hours.
The controversial BJP leader, who faces allegations of omission and
commission with regard to the mob attack on a housing society in which
a former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri and 68 others were killed, drove to
the SIT office in the heart of Gandhinagar where he was questioned by
a team of officers headed by A K Malhotra, a former CBI DIG.
After a marathon session lasting over five hours from 12 noon to 5 PM
Modi left the SIT office telling reporters that he would come back in
the evening.
Modi, 59, returned to the SIT office at 9 PM and faced a second round
of questioning for four hours ending at 1 AM because he was keen that
the entire exercise be completed today itself.
Emerging from the second round of quizzing at the SIT office at the
old secretariat building, the Chief Minister told mediapersons that
the investigators told him that his question was over.
"I have been told by SIT that your work is over", Modi said.
Though there was no official word on the questioning, Modi is said to
have replied to 62 of the 68 questions put to him in the first
session.
This was the first time that Modi was probed since the carnage eight
years back.
"This was the first time in eight years that someone wanted to speak
to me on the issue and I attended that", Modi said.
Taking a dig at his critics, he said "God give good sense to those who
said I have not spoken for eight years".
"I hope that today's incident will give good sense to those who are
keen to spread misinformation and those who spread lies", the Chief
Minister said.
Modi claimed he had anwsered all questions put by the SIT and that he
recalled to the extent possible the sequence of events that had taken
place eight years ago.
The Chief Minister said his statement was recorded by the SIT
investigators after which he signed it.
Asked what sort of questions he was asked, Modi said "I cannot share
that with you because the SIT has to submit its report to the Supreme
Court.
When pointed out that he had been in the dock for the last eight years
over the riots, a smilig Modi said "you have still kept me in the
dock".
"Vistaar se batcheet ki (we spoke in detail)," he said adding "under
the Indian constitution, law is supreme. As a common man, CM, I am
bound by the Indian constitution and law. No one can be above the
law."
After the first round of questioning, a smiling Modi emerged from the
SIT office at the old secretariat building and told mediapersons that
"I am taking a break from questioning".
SIT Chief R K Raghavan was not present in his office when Modi
appeared in the first session in response to the panel's summons.
Modi became the first chief minister of any state to be questioned in
a criminal complaint of mass murder after he and his administration
were accused of aiding and abetting riots in one area in Ahmedabad.
Ending the suspense as to where and when he would appear after he was
summoned for questioning in connection with a complaint of Zakia
Jafry, widow of Eshan Jafry, Modi reached the SIT office at around
noon.
The complaint filed by Zakia among other things alleged there was a
wider conspiracy by Modi and his administration and that he had
instructed officers not to take action.
"My appearance here is a "karara jawab" (fitting reply) to my
detractors. I have given a resounding reply to those who doubted my
intentions. I hope such talks by vested interests will stop," Modi
said.
Asked if the questions put to him related to Gulburg Society riot
case, Modi said "questions ranged from February 27 till the
elections".
To a question about number of questions asked by SIT, he said "I have
not counted them".
Asked if he was satisfied with the SIT investigations, Modi said "the
Supreme Court has to be satisfied."
The Chief Minister repeatedly said the SIT was appointed by the apex
court and it did not have a single officer from Gujarat.
"I have fulfilled my words given to the people of the country. Nobody
is above the Indian constitution and law", he said,
Modi said "we should create a conducive atmosphere to work within the
ambit of law and so that law can take its own course".
54 Comments |
Congress should learn
By: abhijit | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 22:17:42 PM
I congratulate Mr Modi for his conduct..and hope that he will come
clean after this.. congress and congress supported Media should
learn.. this media doesn't talk about mr. Sajjan Kumar.. doesn't talk
to SIkh riots but always ready to portray Modi as a villan.. in the
process not giving him for any credit for his work.. keep it up Modi..
we support you
Sajjan and Modi
By: anil bharali | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 22:14:30 PM
Both Modi and Sajjan are wrong doer in the eyes of law.There is no
pint justifying someone at this point of time.Let the law takes its
own course.
Exemplary Conduct
By: Patali | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 21:34:09 PM
Great, Modiji for upholding the law of the land and for showing by
exemplary conduct how people's representative should behave. He has
again demonstrated how he is different from the despicable lot that we
have as politicians and political leaders. Jai Hind!
MODI-SIT
By: N.ASTI | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 21:13:42 PM
Whatever may be our differences with Mr.Modi,we should appreciate his
meeting with SIT which was without finding any excuse in the matter.He
has not acted like Mr.Sajjan of Congress who went underground to get
bail and save himself from the procedure.Indians should remember that
unlike Mr.Rajiv Gandhi who tried to justify Sikh massacre of 84 which
took place under the guidance of his party leaders(In one way
indirectly state-sponsored atrocities),Mr.Modi never tried to justify
Gujarat riots but also expressed grieved about the riots.Hence Modi's
today's step is a good thing for our law-abiding society.
Rajiv Gandhi's Role In 1984 Riots
By: Arun | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 20:47:03 PM
Hope the SIT now probes Rajiv Gandhi's, Tytler's & Narasimha Rao's
role in the 1984 Sikh Riots and the role of the Congress Party in the
Bhagalpur riots and also the Maharashtra government's role is abetting
the Mumbai riots.
Modi will be safe
By: Raj Bhatti | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 19:11:32 PM
Nothig is going to happen to Modi. Remember, Advani tricked this
Supreme Court and the nation very wisely and got the mosque
demolished. Nothing happened to him. So, our Modi also will be safe
too as we have have majority in this Hindu nation.
Jai Indian Judiciary
By: Dr.Sanamdxb | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 19:06:56 PM
This once again proven the no one is above law. As well, it is very
disappointing that a CM could have become reaching such situation for
massacre case. It would have more glitters if peoples court could have
thrown him out from the power and politics. Gujrat has missed such
chance number of times. We all decide the one who come to rule us
should clean politicially and personally. Then India will be shine
much and fly its flag in very height. Let us all pray for it.
Nobody is above the law - finally modi had to bow down to law for his
deeds
By: Dinesh Patel | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:54:43 PM
narendra modi has been compelled to be present in front of SIT for
being questioned for his involvement in Gujarat riots. This has
happened for the first time that Gujarat Chief Minister had to appear
for criminal involvement. It is a shame for Gujarat State and
"Deshvasion". It has been the tradition in Indian and Gujarat politics
to resign first and then to support legal matters. He also tried to
play gimmicks few days before regarding receiving summons to appear
and he had blamed the media. Ultimately, media reports proved to be
correct about the SUMMONS to modi.
Good for BJP
By: Rajesh | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:54:28 PM
It is a good disicion from Modi. its means the law of INDIA is equal
to everybody.This disicion will give good political career for modi
and also BJP.
Modi
By: Mahendra | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:51:23 PM
The Msulim congress party has nothing better to do than target Hindu
people. Hindus should boycott Congress Party else you culture, people
and wealth will not exist. Indian Govt is controlled by Nehru's
Pakistani Muslim relatives.
Atatck on Democracy
By: DILIP/FRANCE | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:45:16 PM
Modi is being demonised and de legitimised by the immoral media and
their commmunal lackeys.This nonsence will not wash,so back off.
to enginner shareef
By: HOTSPICY | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:45:05 PM
so mr so called shareef what we should do with people who has done
mumbai attack and blastsevery where in INDIA I will give vote to MODI
again in election and want to see him as pm if he promise to do it at
national level bahot ho gaya desh dhrohiyo ko khilana
No vilification
By: Gus | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:41:43 PM
Modi, do not cower in front of these vicious communal idiots.Fight
fire with fire,days of turning the other cheek is bygone.We are ready
to bank roll, with loads,loads of bucks.You are being framed by the
ferals and the communal deliquents.
Long Live Shri Narendra Modi
By: Muhammed | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:38:08 PM
Shri Narendra Modi is incarnation of Lord Shri Ram. Opponents of Shri
Narendra Modi are Ravans. Manmohan Singh, Sonia Maino, ChidamUlla, M
Oily all shall get slayed and we will celebrate Deepawali! Jai Shri
Narendra Modi, Jai Shree Ram.
Prosecute all
By: cb | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 18:30:16 PM
All polititions involved in rioting should be relentlessly prosecuted.
Only then will they think twice before indulging in it. Its a matter
of country's survival.
manager
By: patel dharmendra | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 17:59:27 PM
Modiji is a second chanakya and india need and got after long long
time such person to set the india againg for another golden period of
the another era. In indian history only chankya settle governance has
called a golden period of indian history and second side chanakya has
done lots of things no one can agree but goel was clear and was only
united hindustan only.so so call this media or and journalisam can say
anything but in the real world modiji is real hero which india needed
long ago.No one can stop him to be a prime minister of india and time
will prove my words which had said 3 years ago. D Patel
Indian Judiciary
By: Anant | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 17:03:51 PM
Indian judiciary is so irrelavant that any politician can commit any
crime, even in the presence of these judges, will get away free. These
rogue politicians will always find their own judge in their own state
who will give them bail and eventually, after 30 years, find them not
guilty. It is the people of India who are at fault by letting these
undesirables to exploit peoples prejudices and divide the communities.
Not a single Hindu Gujarati will ever think that Modi has done
something wrong. Gujaratis feel that it is okay if the Muslim
community suffers. It is no different than the 1984 sufferings of
Sikhs by Hindus. Nothing has happened to those politicians and you can
bet nothing will happen to Modi. All these dramas are for the foreign
countries to show that India is better than Pakistan.
Narendra Modi proved far greater than Rajiv Gandhi.
By: Hemant ; Hyderabad. | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:44:54 PM
Narendra Modi proved greater than Rajiv Gandhi.Rajiv Gandhi always
hide from facing any even; smallest enquiry about Delhi Riots{in which
He was far more villinous than Modi} and Bofors{in He was far more
villininous than Advani in Babri}Rajiv always hide. Her Highness
Sonia , pretending great sacrifice in refusing any post. No. Real
reason is She does not have any courage to reply or justify any work;
any decision , any act. To her great fortune She got puppets like
Moily & Chavans; who shamelessly ready to do anything. Now shall real
thing come out that - Victim Jaffery has made many more calls to Sonia
to save his life. She just ignored and refused to take her calls.
clueless
By: premila | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:34:36 PM
the erstwhile media channels are clueless and have no sense of
direction. The way CNN IBN clarified that they were the only news
channel to mention the correct version for the appearance of Modiji
for inquiry shows that they want to make a cake and eat it too. They
are going to chew more than they can swallow. If a fallen tree can
shake the earth so also the burning of humans can shake the earth!
Modiji, the best administrator
By: Vishak | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:26:44 PM
The media at large blames present Chief Minister of Gujrat for all the
happenings in the year 2002. Shri Narendra Modi is the elected
representative with majority in the Gujarat state. Why nobody is
referreing to the pre-era of Modiji when almost every day the cities
of Gujarat were under communal riots created by vested interests. That
situation has been changed and people of Gujarat experience peace at
large including mintority communities for the last nine years because
of Mr Modi. Why nobdoy appraise the good work done by the C.M. of
Gujarat? Nobdoy will blame Modiji for all the communal riots took
place in the country since 1947. The C.M. of Gujarat is the best
political figure available in the country.
Ichha Dhari and BJP leaders
By: Dr.Jhanki Prasad | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:04:40 PM
RSS Baba Ichha Dhari types have been running India and one one side
they were chanting Ram Ram and on other burping tax payers money.RSS
Baba Ichha Dhari is a mirror image of BJP.RSS Baba Ichha Dhari and BJP
leaders are like two sides of one coin.
Ichha Dhari Baba likes ran India under BJP
By: Gulvinder | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:01:14 PM
The justice system of India seems to run on the feeling of the
politicians or else why were those who were caught red handed in
different scams were not taken to task? Jaswant Singh had provided so
many informations to the media about Advani and rset of Ku Kux Klan
like Sanghparivar, but no one has taken anyone to task. Madan Lal
Khurana openly accused Advani and Sushma Swaraj for having connections
with Dawood Ibrahim, but no one has investigated this serious matter
which has concerns to the security threats to India if this
information is correct.
NGOs and Media tirade against Modi
By: Mukesh Goud | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:55:10 PM
Not all media are funded by Evangelists but certainly many of the
leading Media houses in India has a clear christian Evangelical agenda
and they are in particular are after the blood of Modi. Now they will
come up with some crooked and cooked up stories to malign Narendra
Modi. He is one of the very few politicians in India who has the
courage to lead India and Indians.
Modi Vs SIT Vs Media
By: Girish Adhiya | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:52:44 PM
Media has given too much hype to this issue. Under the freedom
umbrella, media is playing villain role sometimes. Modi is superstar
of Gujarat & India. Since Congress is worried about rise of Modi, they
are doing all these things thro' NGO etc to keep this issue alive and
brand themselves as non-communal. This is very dirty and bad politics
of Congress. Hindus have major weakness that they are not united and
hence evil forces takes benefit of this. Hindus are not united bcoz
they are fighting within themself for God, Devi-Devta, caste, creed,
language, region etc. I pray to Lord to give good sense to Hindu so
they can unite and fight against evil forces. Muslims and Christian
are united and hence nobody will speak against them. Even media is
afraid of their "Fatwa" so all will keep quiet.
As a head of state ut was his responsibility to protect all
gujaratis.....
By: kranti | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:52:11 PM
Whatever happened in godhrakand was very bad and culprits should be
punish harshly but whatever happened aftermath of Godhrakand was worst
as gujarat government failed to control law and order.As a head of
state modi should take responsibility.
Modi the New Sardar
By: Indian | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:41:14 PM
This Naqvi,Shareef apni jaat bata rahe hain...Gujrat has shown its
Muslims the right way back in 2002...this bloody Congress and
secularist shit are conveniently ignoring what they did to the Sikhs
back in 1984...Modi is a TRUE Indian...those who cannot accept truth
may please migrate to UP or Delhi or other Congress ruled
states...Congress has screwed India by protecting people like
M>F>Husain..
Float a new party.
By: Dr.Jhanki Prasad | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:07:42 PM
A new political party is needed, because Bharatiya Jansangh Party is a
failure. We Hindus and everyone else from all religions and castes
should form a party to stop political corruption and serve the
children of India with just. This partys agenda must be to provide
roti, kapda, makaan and good education to every child of India.The new
party should wipe out types of terrorists and fascists.Jai Hind
MODI MUST BE HANGED FOR KILLING INNOCENTS.RSS/VHP/BJP MEN HAVE
CONFESSED ON TEHELKA THAT THEY WERE BACKED BY "BUTHCER MODI"
By: Engineer | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:52:24 PM
GUJARATH KA KASSAI NEEDS TO BE PUNISHED.HE DESERTED WIFE AND HAS NO
CHILDREN THAT'S WHY HAS NO FAMILY OR HUMAN VALUES AND CONSPIRED TO
RAPE AND KILL MANY INNOCENTS. IS THIS THE FACE OF HINDUTVA? THOSE
SUPPORTING RAPES AND KILLINGS ARE PSEUDO HINDUTVADIS.
A Step Forward In Right Direction For Mr Modi
By: anupam | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:47:22 PM
although little late but finally our law delivers the truth, also hope
Mr Modi will cooperate in making it more effective. politically or non
politically it is a right step for Mr. Modi
Modi appears before SIT
By: VOX INDICA | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:45:11 PM
One does not understand all the media hoopla about it. To quote two
examples that easily come to mind, President V.V.Giri appeared before
a High Court and Indira Gandhi appeared before the Shah Commission.
Modi at SIT
By: M.K.B.Nambiar | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:35:36 PM
Mr Narendra Modi appearing before the SIT to give his testimony is
prrof enough that the Gujarat CM respects the law and does not try to
circumvent the summons as politicians generally do.The Congress
sayying that he haslowered the prestigee of the high office of the CM
is laughable as their Primiister Mr Narasimha Rao had appeared before
the Supreme court as an accused in a bribery case.
Mr Modi and the media
By: RP Mehrotra | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:03:53 PM
Mr Modi has exhibited that he is a man of principles and belongs to a
political party of proven ideologies. He has shown that he is a law-
abiding citizen and open to scrutiny (unlike Congress' absconding
stars in garb of Sajjan Kumars and Tytlers). Media which has been
unnecessarily hounding Mr Modi must show restraint.
Irresponsible
By: Umakant Kapoor | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 17:15:07 PM
Thanks Mr. Mehrotra for calling a spade a spade, unlike many other
victims of the Congress propaganda machine.English media lives in a
world of its own and has been corrupted by the Corporates.
gujarat chief minister appearance to SIT
By: K Balakrishnan | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:55:38 PM
law should take it course and nothing wrong in his appearance to SIT.
What should be avoided the media trial by the TV channels. Souces of
these channels and so called human justice organisations NGO funded by
vested politicall parties should be enquired by SIT also.
NaMOji n SIT
By: Ananth Seth | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:53:09 PM
Ho gaya! I wonder what the media will do now. They have been robbed of
a spicy topic by this polite n appreciable act of Modiji. Please note
that Modiji, unlike Sajjan Kumar of "oh so secular, non-corrupt, and
law abiding" congress, who chose to go underworl...oops underground!
has chosen to cooperate with the judiciary. HAts off ModiJI!
Mr.
By: Aravind | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:29:24 PM
The the murder of innocent Sikhs on the incdence of Indira Ghandhi's
murder should also be dealt with; Would Teesta also take the same
interest and make the same comment? None one justify provocative
actions leading to heinous crime. But everyone should believe in
equality and should not expect a preference due to being a particular
community.
MODI and Sit
By: paresh joshi | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 22:15:59 PM
No teesta does not care about any Indians. For her only muslims are
the victims. Rest of the Indians does not matter to her. This is the
typical hypocracy of the leftists and the pseudo-seculars. PKJ
MODI/BLATHACKERY/ADVANI AND TOGADIA MUST BE TREATED ON PAR WITH
TERRORISTS
By: Engineer Shareef | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:13:05 PM
IF INDIAN JUDICIARY IS NON-BIASED IT SHOULD PUNISH, WITHPUT FURTHER
DELAY, ALL THOSE RESPONSIBLE OF MASS MURDERS AND DEMOLITIONS.
we stupid
By: dbhatt | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 23:20:48 PM
so if modi get panish then indian judiciary is non biased and if he
will not punish then it is biase. so what do you want to say
Treating all terrorism alike
By: ramkesav | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 21:00:58 PM
How will you explain the non-execution of Afsal Guru despite SC order.
Who issleeping on the file? Mr Engineer Shereef, why you are silent on
Afsal Guru 's non execution. Why the 26/11 terrorists are not yet
convicted? why they are give five star food etc. You may have
forgotten that the Imam of Delhi Majid Abdulla Bukari is still facing
a trail in Kerala HC for giving host to covicts from Arab countries
who came to Delhi on fake passports and visa. This case dates back to
the seventies and not Teesta or Pranab will care about this case as
the case relates to a muslim leader.
engineer who ru
By: CHANDRA SHEKARA REDDY NAGARA | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:51:41 PM
first of all muslim clerics who instigate riots against the hindus
should be hanged in public
Reply to fake engineer
By: Ananth Seth | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:50:41 PM
Shareef, now this is what is called wishful thinking, hallucinating,
day dreaming and what not. Anyways, sochtay raho coz thinking duznt
cost anything.
Narendra Modi : A True Nationalist
By: Aravinda Rao | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:01:40 PM
Narendra Modi is a true nationalist and a Hindu Champion. If he has
advised his officials to remain in-house and not do anything to stop
the Godhra riots, there is nothing wrong in it. Notice that nobody is
crying for the Hindus who were burnt prior to the Godhra riots. What
is wrong if the Hindus vent out their anger against the muslims. Where
was Teesta Setalvad and what has she done for the cause of the Hindus.
This Nation belongs to the Hindus (2 Nation theory). The muslims got
what they wanted. Whoever stayed back are second class citizens. That
is why they have never reconciled to the idea of being Indians. They
harbour/shelter terrorists, provide logistic support etc. and allow
them to strike mahyem on our soil. Media is to blame for this, 'cause
they provide wide coverage to people like Teesta. The Tax dept. and
the enforcement should verify the source of her funds. But as long as
the congress is at the centre, not possible, 'cause Teesta and Sonia
are both Christians.
Appalling
By: Satish Haldankar | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 17:14:08 PM
You are justifying violence. Everything is wrong if one section of the
society vent out their anger on another. Here is some food for
thought. If you had a differences with someone and God forbid he/she
chooses to use violence your family to settle scores, would that OK
with you? No one is allowed to take law into his/her own hands. Next,
you can fight for the cause of the 'Hindus', why do you want Teesta
and others to do so? No, this nation does not belong to the Hindus
alone, it belongs to all the citizens of the country, irrespective of
their religion and caste.
your mind is corrupt
By: indian | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:33:42 PM
you are inhuman. Had you been in the chair of chief minister, you
would have murdered more innocents. This country is devided because of
idiots like you. start treating human as human. Those who burnt the
train and human in it must be punished and modi must also be punished
for intentionally not taking anu action. his hand and face is coloured
with blood of thousand sof innocent muslims murder.
Arvinda Rao, you will feel the pain if your family suffers rapes,
killings and burning alive.
By: Indian Engineer | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:46:27 PM
The so called Pseudo Hindutvadis, are justifying the killings, Rapes,
and burning alive of human beings in the name of Hindutva. The PAK
sponsored terrorists too have the similar reasoning for their terror
acts, then where is the difference between External and internal
terrorists? Just forget India belongs to Bc's/Sc's/ST's and
minorites.The so called RSS and Manuwadi theory is no more
applicable.Those who do not want to live in secular India they must
leave to Nepal.
The Hindu has always been the victim of Islam
By: Sunil Sharma | Sunday , 28 Mar '10 0:55:25 AM
Hey let us look into our Indian history and see how many thopusands of
Hindu Temples were demolished by the Mughals and how many were
forcibly converted into Islam. And the Muslims are still crying for
the demolishing of the Invader Babar's mosque? Is their loyalty with
an invader or with Indians? Let the Islamic world acknowledge all the
atrocities inflicted on the Hindus through centuries of repression
before they expect any sympathy from the Hindus!
Love him ,Hate him .cannot Ignore him
By: Shaym Kishore | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 12:08:35 PM
Congress is treating all Gujratis as untouchable . This is a serious
concern . Narendra Modi is the elected representative and choice of
millions of Gurjarhis . Under his leadership Gujrath has flurished and
become example to other states of India . Attitude like this are the
cause of seperatism in the country . You can love or hate Modi . You
cannot Ignore him . He is an Icon of gujrathi pride
Modi is not doing any favor
By: Naim Naqvi | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 11:42:23 AM
The media is projecting as if Narendra Modi is doing any favor for the
country by appearing before SIT. He is an accused and that is the
beginning and that is the end. He should be treated like an accused.
He has been given a long rope by Weak Central government till date and
needless to say - he is sitting at the top of Gujarat administration.
You can't expect an accused to do justice to himself. Till today it
was something like one Urdu poet had said: Khud hi qatil, khud hi
muqbir, khud he munsif theray, Aqraba kis pe karen qatl ka dawa
merey ? I'm still not very sure that justice will finally be given to
Modi. However, at least the misdeed of inept and prejudiced
administration which is headed by Modi is exposed to the world. From
this juncture any failure to bring Modi to the book would be the
failure of fair-play of the country, a mockry of justice and the
victory of brazen power of wealth. Modi had always been a non-entity.
It is putrid idelogy behind him which is to be dealt with.
modi is not.......
By: indian national | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 19:24:38 PM
pls read about what aurangazeb did to Hindus, then compare it with
modi. Your poet's words will fit for A'zeb only. So be happy in India
or take next flight..OK?
You ae right but you are also biased
By: Shaukat Aziz | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 17:19:56 PM
You are right, Naqvi sahib, but he is proving many like you to be
wrong. He has shown respect for the constitutional institutions,
unlike many Congressmen.
Modi is not an accused
By: M.N.S.Nampoothiripad | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:39:06 PM
Modi is not an accused in any case. The ATS is just examining if there
is any substance in the allegation against Sri Modi filed by Mrs.
Jafri as per the direction of the supre court. But the question is
will an ATS be set up to question Sonia in the umpteen scams in which
she is directly involved.
Modi is not doing any favor
By: Haria | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:49:15 PM
Modi is definitely not doing a favour by appearing before SIT, but
like a responsible citizen of this country, obeying the prevelent
laws. How about those congressmen who are involved in mass murders of
Sikhs, and all the muslim terrorists in India who have scant respect
for the laws.
Good Gesture
By: DRJ | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 10:11:03 AM
It is good gesture on the part of Modi to appear before SIT
irrespective of the political advantages/disadvantages. Prima facie,
it appears the law enforcing bodies are selective in making charges.
Similar actions on other persons should also be carried out
irrespective of political affiliations. I feel such issues cannot be
brought within the rule book of judiciary. Issues date back to
historical blunders and plunders. It should be left to the judgement
of people of Gujarat and India.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/gujriotsmodiquestionedbysitforover9hours/596382/0
BJP hails Modi's appearance before SIT as political victory
Agencies
Posted: Saturday , Mar 27, 2010 at 1427 hrs
New Delhi:
Congress may not regard Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's
appearance before SIT probing the 2002 riots as anything extraordinary
but BJP leadership on Saturday stood strongly behind him, hailing this
as a political victory and one deserving the highest commendation.
As many as three BJP spokespersons saluted Modi's much- awaited
deposition before the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation
Team (SIT).
"By appearing before SIT, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has
demolished all mischievous speculations and scored a political
victory. BJP has great faith in the chief minister of Gujarat. This
graceful action vindicates the BJP stand that the chief minister of
Gujarat has the highest respect for law of the land," party spokesman
Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.
"The dignified action deserves the highest commendation and millions
of BJP workers repose highest faith in his leadership," he added.
Another BJP spokesman Prakash Javadekar blamed the media for
speculating on Modi's non-appearance before the SIT.
"It was the media that created an impression that he (Modi) was not
keen on appearing before the SIT. Modi respects the judiciary. He
abides by the law as also the institutions set up by the Supreme
Court," Javadekar said.
Newly-appointed spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman denied suggestions
that Modi's appearance before the probe panel was an embarrassment for
the party.
"I don't think it is any embarrassment to the party. The chief
minister had said in the Gujarat Assembly and also in his public
letter last week that nobody was above law, including the chief
minister," she said. Sitharaman also pointed out that no FIR was
registered against the Gujarat Chief Minister.
However, Congress was not impressed with Modi's appearance and
maintained that he should be brought to justice.
"In public perception, Modi has been held guilty. I don't think he has
done anything extraordinary by appearing before the Special
Investigation Team probing the Gujarat riots. He should be brought to
justice," Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan said here.
communal riots
By: BABU PATEL | 27-Mar-2010
Y People are making Ghodhra as a big issue.Is any one can tell us how
many communal riots has been investigated so far and identified the
culprits.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bjphailsmodisappearancebeforesitaspoliticalvictory/596413/0
Thackeray defends Amitabh in Sea link row
Agencies
Posted: Saturday , Mar 27, 2010 at 1223 hrs
Mumbai:
Amitabh hasn't committed a crime by attending the event: Thackeray
Coming out in defence of old friend Amitabh Bachchan, Shiv Sena chief
Bal Thackeray on Saturday said the actor has done nothing wrong by
attending the inauguration of the second phase of the Bandra-Worli Sea
Link.
"Amitabh hasn't committed a crime by attending the event," Thackeray
said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.
Lambasting Congress for "treating the actor as an untouchable",
Thackeray said "Shah Rukh Khan, who took cudgels on behalf of
Pakistanis, will do for Congress, which is allergic to Amitabh."
"Amitabh attending the function only added to the prestige of the
event," Thackeray said on the actor sharing the dias with Congress
leaders at the sealink function. Bachchan is not a thief, dacoit or a
terrorist, Thackeray said.
The presence of Bachchan at the inauguration of second phase of the
Sea Link a couple of days back had sparked a controversy with Congress
leaders from Mumbai taking objection to Chief Minister Ashok Chavan
sharing platform with the actor who is a brand ambassador for BJP-
ruled Gujarat.
"Amitabh is targeted because he is brand ambassador of Gujarat. Ambani
and Tata who live in Mumbai have invested heavily in Gujarat. Will
anyone from Congress ask them why were they investing in Narendra
Modi's Gujarat," Thackeray said.
The actor belongs to the nation and will remain so, he said.
9 Comments |
Amitabh
By: ASHOK PRADHAN | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 21:13:00 PM
I'm sure the Shiv Sena and all others know pretty well that the
handicap of not being able to speak marathi or not acting in Marathi
movies has'nt come in the Actor's way to generate Crores of rupees
inflow to the Maharashtra. Let each individual be allowed to do what
he or she could do most productively. Contributions come in different
ways, cannot just beguaged by the ability to speak a particular
language.
Amitabh at sea link.
By: Singh S.L | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:11:59 PM
Divisive attitude of congress is not acceptable at all.They have
divided nation in the name of cast,religion for political gains.To
congress Amitabh is untouchable.By this action they have insulted
nation since Amitabh is national ikon.His presence makes the place
glorified.There is no match to Amitabh in Congress party.Today they
are in power, tommarow they can be thrown out but Amitabh remains
same. He is national hero. Congress should learn some thing from Amit.
should not support him
By: CHANDRA SHEKARA REDDY NAGARA | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 16:01:58 PM
balasahebji is making mistake in supporting amithab a up wala they don
not know value of morality except to dance for getting some bucks,
where was amithab when dirty sharukh called paki's good neibhours,
amithab ate marathi salt but did not imbibe our pride, let him be lame
duck up walas who have no courage to stand against jihadis
Why this?
By: Giri | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:34:40 PM
People ask why this defence of Bacchan by Thackeray Sr! it is because
the so-called Big B goes and falls at the feet of this mafia boss
Thackeray at every opportunity and is scared to his core and has no
self respect and pride whatsoever. All this suits the Thackeray clan
mafias who only want to line their pockets with extorted money.
Politics does not come into this, only money and more of it!
big B controversy
By: PREMCHAND JAIN | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:21:47 PM
are we so intolerant to any social functions, where people of all view
and crew come. do we have no social sense that to make big uss of
small things. P.M. meets Modi, Bhattacharji in so many functions, that
time there no talk and why so much fuss on Big B..
Thackeray defends
By: s s iyer | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 15:12:23 PM
Compared to the Ministers of Maharashtra Amitabh Bachchan is a self
made man without using any props to come up in life to the present
position.Actually it is below his dignity to join with the ministers
in the sea way opening ceremony, who have done nothing for the people
of Maharashtra.
What more....
By: Roy | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 14:12:24 PM
does this has been of an ICON to the extreme right wing need...he is
now accepted as one of them & now goes out of the window
socialism..Ram Manohar Lohia & in comes the Bhagwat's, Thackeray's.
Togadia's et al....with open arms comes along with baggage to the
already blighted BJP an Amar Singh...Jaya Bachan. Have been &
wannabe's are welcome into the BJP..incl the Kalyan's & the
Uma's...from where to where.
Balasahib can talk sense some times..
By: Johnson Kuriakose | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:27:57 PM
atlast some thing which makes sense has come from Balasahib whom i
respect a lot....
Loss for Marathi Manoos
By: Vikas Sethi | Saturday , 27 Mar '10 13:14:50 PM
To answer Why Tata & Ambani shifting to Gujarat, Thackerays - Raj,
Uddhav & Bal must look inward & answer honestly. It is their narrow
divisive thinking on Marathi Manoos that has compelled these and many
more industrialists to shift to Gujarat. Both Gujarat & Maharashtra
offered same scopes. infact Maharashtra was a touch better for Tat's
Nano. But the shutdowns and goondagardi on Marathi Manoos has actually
hurt the Marathi cause and so many jobs have now gone to Gujarat. But
how does all this matter to the Thackerays? They are concerned only of
their own politics. Maharashtra's loss is Gujarat's gain. The one to
loose out is the Marathi Manoos.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/thackeraydefendsamitabhinsealinkrow/596402/
May I know why Amitji should say sorry? Asks Jaya Bachchan1
ANI
Posted: Friday , Mar 26, 2010 at 1622 hrs
New Delhi:
Bollywood actor and Rajya Sabha member Jaya Bachchan on Friday said it
is wrong to ask for an apology from Amitabh Bachchan with regard to
the Sea Link controversy surrounding the superstar.
“Why should Amitji say sorry?” she said.
Jaya Bachchan, who was addressing the media at the Women”s Press Club,
said, “I am not here to speak for Amitabh Bachchan. He can speak for
himself.” “In a democracy anyone can go anywhere,” she added.
Miffed over resentment in the Congress about his presence in a
government function, Amitabh Bachchan on Thursday night hit out at his
detractors, saying he was invited and that the whole controversy was
manufactured.
The megastar also said there were half-page advertisements in the
media that he will be taking part in the function, an apparent dig at
Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan, who said he would not have
attended the function if he had known that Bachchan would be present.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mayiknowwhyamitjishouldsaysorryasksjayabachchan/596091/
Madhya Pradesh in Gadkari’s team
Posted by: N D Sharma on: March 27, 2010
At least in the case of Madhya Pradesh, Nitin Gadkari’s star-studded
team does not reflect the dynamism the BJP president had promised to
inject into the organisation at the Indore conclave of the party’s
national council. The new executive does not even give representation
to all the regions of the State.
The only striking feature of Gadkari’s exercise is his subtle attempt
to put a check on the chief minister’s influence, which was unhindered
so far.
That the State BJP president, Narendra Singh Tomar, was going to be
made general secretary at the national level was in the air for quite
some time. But Gadkari has somewhat diminished Tomar’s stature by re-
inducting Thavarchand Gehlot as another general secretary. Madhya
Pradesh is thus the only State to have two general secretaries of the
BJP at the national level. To add to Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s
discomfiture, Gehlot has been made a member of the Parliamentary
Board, the party’s highest decision-making body.
Tomar, a staunch pro-Thakur leader in the BJP, is virtually Chauhan’s
alter ego; the two have been together in all major operations, not
necessarily aimed at helping the lot of the poor and the deprived
classes. Gehlot is a Dalit leader who could never aspire to be
admitted to the chief minister’s inner circle. Chauhan’s
administration has been anything but pro-Dalit or pro-tribal, the
chief minister’s loud screeds to the contrary notwithstanding. The
dalits and the tribals, who had reposed faith in the BJP and helped it
to drive out the Congress government of Digvijay Singh in 2003, have
gradually been getting disenchanted with the BJP.
In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had won in all the four
Scheduled Caste constituencies and in four of the five Scheduled
Tribes constituencies — and had left only four seats for the Congress
out of a total of 29 in the State. In 2009, the BJP could retain only
two of the four SC constituencies and only two of the six ST
constituencies (increased from five to six during the delimitation).
The Congress had increased its overall tally from four to 12, in spite
of the party being in utter disarray.
Gehlot was among the defeated SC candidates of the BJP. Satyanarayan
Jatiya, another defeated SC leader has been included among the
permanent invitees. Nirmala Bhuria, daughter of Dilip Singh Bhuria (a
former MP as well as a former chairman of the SC/ST Commission), has
been made a member of the party’s national executive. She had lost the
Assembly election from Petlawad (ST) in Jhabua district in 2008. She
owes her politics more to her father’s standing than to her own
“grassroots” level work (at which Gadkari had repeatedly harped at the
Indore conclave).
With all that, the representation of Madhya Pradesh in the national
executive is heavily, almost entirely, tilted towards the Madhya
Bharat region. Tomar, Gehlot, Sushma Swaraj (MP from Vidisha, though
she belongs to Haryana), Sumitra Mahajan, Kaptan Singh Solanki,
Chaitanya Kashyap, Tanveer Ahmed (a minorities leader from Ujjain),
Satyanarayan Jatiya, Maya Singh, the three former chief ministers
(Kailash Joshi, Sunderlal Patwa and Babulal Gaur) along with chief
minister Chauhan are all from the Madhya Bharat region. The sole
representative of the Mahakoshal region is Faggan Singh Kulaste, a
tribal leader of Mandla, who had lost the last Lok Sabha election. The
Bundelkhand region also has only a nominal presence in Virendra Kumar
Khatik, an SC member of Lok Sabha. The Vindhya region stands
altogether ignored.
Now all eyes are on who takes the place of Narendra Singh Tomar as the
State BJP president. Two are in the forefront, going by the media
reports. Prabhat Jha is lobbying hard. Originally hailing from Bihar,
he worked at the BJP office in Bhopal when Patwa was the chief
minister, more as Patwa’s spy than the spokesman of the party. He was
taken to Delhi to look after the party’s publications when the things
in Bhopal became hot for him after the Patwa-Lakhiram Agrawal hegemony
over the organisation came to an end. In Delhi he ingratiated himself
with Lal Krishna Advani who got him into Rajya Sabha from Madhya
Pradesh. He was also made a secretary of the BJP. Gadkari has not re-
inducted him, giving rise to the speculation in the media in Bhopal
(where he has many friends) that it has been done to make him the
State party president.
Another strong contender for the post is Anil Madhav Dave, also member
of Rajya Sabha. Chauhan’s government had been a bit too much liberal
in doling out the public money for his Janabhiyan Parishad, an NGO,
and for his Narmada Parikramas. The government had almost allotted to
him hundreds of acres of fertile land on the bank of the river
Narmada, which the government had fraudulently acquired from the
unsuspecting farmers. The game was scuttled by Akhand Pratap Singh,
then a minister in the Chauhan government, by creating a big ruckus at
the cabinet meeting which was to formally allot the land to Dave.
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RSS backs temple entry for all, inter-caste marriages
Express news service
Posted: Sunday , Mar 28, 2010 at 0255 hrs
New Delhi:
The RSS has said that border security, infiltration, terrorism and
Naxalism are the key challenges being faced by India at present.
At its Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha meet at Kurukshetra, the RSS
stressed on inter-caste marriages and temple entry for all, to address
some of the challenges being faced by the country.
The RSS, in its yearly report, also stressed on the expansion of its
shakhas (the basic building block of the organisation). The number of
RSS shakhas has seen a sharp decline (by around 4,000) in the last one
year, to a figure of 39,823.
After the Sangh, under the leadership of Mohan Bhagwat, said some
weeks ago that Mumbai and (Maharashtra) belonged to everyone, its
report again underlined the fact that “people speaking various
languages live in Mumbai”.
The report also said that after Jammu and Kashmir, “Hindus were being
forced to flee another state - Manipur”. About J&K, the report said
that after a period of relative calm, “anti-India forces were again
getting active in the region”. The Sangh also warned against the
“expansionist designs” of China.
On the domestic front, the RSS warned against the “growing
regionalism” in national politics. It stressed on a “village-centric
developmental model” and “agro-based industries”. It drew satisfaction
from its recent Gau Gram Yatra, in which Swami Ramdev’s Patanjali
Yogpeeth also actively participated.
Among its recent activities, the Sangh argued that its volunteers
actively participated in cleaning the Shipra river.
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/RSS-backs-temple-entry-for-all--inter-caste-marriages/596607
Horseplay in Harappa: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/f9b738e079fef9fb/29e89ff9c3ac525d
Troubled Tribal: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/e728acc31e0d52d7#
Indian Morality Meltdown: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/ec479835613abd41#
Hindus'Tantrum: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/8a1efe054a3bf157#
I Write, Therefore I am: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/4cb1ce65c9d8f4c5#
Indian Morality Meltdown: Sid Harth
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Sex and CD Scandal: Sid Harth
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Not Required Indian, NRI: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/672c3ae8cc9b567c#
Why 'Marathi'?
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/4be9d2a2e20ab43f#
Telangana Tempest: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/b7da74ebd932a5fa#
Of States and Statesmanship: Sid Harth
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Sa for Sanskrit Pop: Sid Harth
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Indian Power-Pow-Wow, Wow!: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/54cba427083f4e4f#
26/11 Saga Continues: Sid Harth
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Superpower Syndrome: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/008ed3e81dbcd9cc#
Of Justice and Injustice: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/dc3ba7935f641e60#
Sangh Parivar Pageant: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/a91a817395e54639#
Stop this terroristic activities of Shiv Sena
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/93908482518b9228#
BJP RIP: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/20def0d930fc511f#
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Sangh Parivar Pageant: Sid Harth
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Sudharma, Sanskrit Newspaper: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/51f22c78acbc72b1#
Hindu Worldview: Sid Harth
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.indian.marathi/browse_thread/thread/c8a515cc34f18a5a#
Shimla Shenanigans: Sid Harth
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Sid Harth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thuggee (or tuggee, ठग्गी ṭhagī) (from Hindi ठग ṭhag ‘thief’, from
Sanskrit स्थग sthaga ‘cunning’, ‘sly’, ‘fraudulent’, ‘dishonest’,
‘scoundrel’, from स्थगति sthagati ‘he conceals’)[1] is the term for a
particular kind of murder and robbery of travellers in India.
Thuggery
The English word "thug" comes from the Hindi word "thag", meaning
"conman". It is one of many Indian words borrowed into English during
the British colonial period. The English connotation of 'thug' is
synonymous with terms like hoodlum and hooligan, indicating a person
(who may or may not be anti-social) who harasses others, usually for
hire.[citation needed] People regarded as thugs might commit assault
(or 'menace'), battery, even robbery and grievous bodily harm, but
they usually stop short of murder. Additionally, "thugs" usually
travel in pairs, though they can work alone or in groups of four to
six members, and are typically open about their presence (except to
law enforcement officials); while "Thuggee" were covert and operated
as members of a group, often called a "Thuggee cult" by the British.
Hence, the word "Thuggee" is capitalised while the word "thug" usually
is not; which enables distinction of a "Thug" (here, a short form of
"Thuggee") from a "thug".
In the heyday of Thuggee activity, travellers were typically part of a
travelling group, so the term Thuggee typically referred to killing of
a large number of people in a single operation. This aspect
distinguishes Thuggee from similar concept of dacoity, which means
simple armed robbery.
Dacoity has similarities with the terms brigand and bandit from
European and Latin American experience, but there appear to be no
exact Western parallels for Thuggee. Perhaps the closest concepts
would be the format of piracy, though this is solely maritime robbery
(usually with murder), and the earlier, but similar, format of raids
on coastal settlements by Viking seafarers. Some aspects, however, are
reminiscent of the Mafia group of organisations.
Between them, these classes of criminal activity illustrate some of
the mystique that attached to the Thugs and the complex mixture of
fear and dread of these murderous men that was felt by the ordinary
people who might well be their victims.
There is some question as to the extent of the religious dimension of
Thuggee. Most contemporary sources described Thuggee as being a
religious cult, but some modern sources feel it was merely a
specialized form of organized crime or paramilitary activity, with no
particular religious dimension beyond the normal piety of the
villagers from whom its members were recruited.
Time period
The concept of Thuggee is known from the 17th century, though the term
and/or activity possibly dates back as early as the 13th century.
Thuggee was actively practiced at least through the end of the 19th
century. If remnants of the Thuggee tradition survived into the 20th
and 21st centuries, they did so very covertly. The film Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom is based on the premise that Thuggee cults
survived covertly into the early 20th century.
Stern suppression by the British was important in reducing Thuggee
activity but more significant was the introduction of modern methods
of travel, in particular the displacement of travelling on foot or by
horse in groups by the railway, which effectively rendered Thuggee
obsolete.
The nature
The particular groups, as well as the general concept, were often
equally durable and would outlive the 'careers' of individual members
to develop into a crime family lasting generations. These groups
progressed from being simple gangs into becoming 'fraternities' or
even 'cults', featuring the initiation of new members, either through
the heredity of a criminal underclass, or through an apprenticeship,
such as normally associated with skilled or learned professions or the
training programs of elite military units. Other sources describe the
Thugs as a criminal 'tribe' or caste. Over the course of generations,
the secrets must be kept within the 'family'. The marriage of
offspring within the group both safeguards the secret knowledge,
allowing it to be imparted steadily to the children without the risk
of uninitiated neighbours overhearing, and reinforces the exclusive
and selective nature of the organisation. This preserves the mystique,
which is in itself part of the formula of success, and creates an
elite aura around it. At the moment of attack, the sudden revelation
of the identity of the assailants produces a shock that disables
defensive manoeuvres, at least for a few, vital moments, while the
reputation for invincibility engenders a defeatism that results in a
fait accompli.
The practice
Thugs were active all over the Bengal region of the Indian
subcontinent. Maps showing the possessions of the British East India
Company in 1765 and 1805Thuggee is described as a cult of people
engaged in the multiple murder and robbery of travelers. At the time,
most travelers in India would travel in caravan for mutual support and
security, since travel meant the crossing of difficult terrain before
the coming of metalled roads, the passing among different races,
religions and castes, at a period before police forces were formed. In
order to attempt the massacre of an entire caravan, the Thugs needed
to be numerous and well-coordinated. They also needed to be
sufficiently stealthy, at least in the early stages, to begin their
slaughter without rousing all at once. This required a high degree of
planning, organization – including props and patter – timing, teamwork
and discipline. With anything less than complete success a survivor
could escape to raise a hue and cry. These horrendous but
sophisticated operations lay somewhere between organized crime and
paramilitary activity and were far removed from the ordinary criminal
in the audacity, magnitude, and ruthlessness of the enterprise.
The modus operandi was to join a caravan and become accepted as bona-
fide travelers themselves. The Thugs would need to delay any attack
until their fellow travelers had dropped the initial wariness of the
newcomers and had been lulled into a false sense of security. The
Thugs first needed to befriend the travelers and win their trust. Once
the travelers had allowed the Thugs to join them and disperse amongst
them (a task which might sometimes, depending on the size of the
target group, require accompaniment for hundreds of miles), the Thugs
would wait for a suitable place and time before killing and robbing
them.
There were obviously variations on a theme. When tackling a large
group, a Thuggee band might disperse along a route and join a group in
stages, concealing their acquaintanceship, such that they could come
to outnumber their intended victims by small, non-threatening
increments. If the travelers had doubts about any one party, they
might confide their worries to another party of the same Thuggee band.
The trusted band would thus be the best placed to deal with these
members of the caravan at the appropriate time, but might also be able
to advise their colleagues to 'back off' or otherwise modify their
behavior, to allay suspicion.
The killing place would need to be remote from local observers and
suitable to prevent escape (e.g., backed against a river). Thugs
tended to develop favored places of execution, called beles. They knew
the geography of these places well—better than their victims. They
needed to, if they were to anticipate the likely escape routes and
hiding-places of the quicker-witted and more determined of the
travelers.
The timing might be at night or during a rest-break, when the
travelers would be busy with chores and when the background cries and
noise would mask any sounds of alarm. A quick and quiet method, which
left no stains and required no special weapons, was strangulation.
This method is particularly associated with Thuggee and led to the
Thugs also being referred to as the Phansigars, or "noose-operators",
and simply as "stranglers" by British troops. Usually two or three
Thugs would strangle one traveller. The Thugs would then need to
dispose of the bodies: they might bury them or might throw them into a
nearby well.[2].
The leader of a gang was called the 'jemadar': this is an ordinary
Indian word and is now used as the rank of an Army officer
(Lieutenant), who would command a similar number of men to a Thuggee
gang-leader. An English equivalent term might be 'the Boss' or 'the
Guv'nor' (Governor).
As with modern criminal gangs, each member of the group had his own
function: the equivalent of the 'hit-man,' 'the lookout,' and the
'getaway driver' would be those Thugs tasked with luring travelers
with charming words or acting as guardian to prevent escape of victims
while the killing took place.
They usually killed their victims in darkness while the thugs made
music or noise to escape discovery. If burying bodies close to a well-
traveled trade-route, they would need to disguise the 'earthworks' of
their graveyard as a camp-site, tamping down the covering mounds and
leaving some items of rubbish or remnants of a fire to 'explain' the
disturbances and obscure the burials.
One reason given for the Thuggee success in avoiding detection and
capture so often and over such long periods of time is a self-
discipline and restraint in avoiding groups of travelers on shorter
journeys, even if they seemed laden with suitable plunder. Choosing
only travelers far from home gave more time until the alarm was raised
and the distance made it less likely that colleagues would follow on
to investigate the disappearances. Another reason given is the high
degree of teamwork and co-ordination both during the infiltration
phase and at the moment of attack. This was a sophisticated criminal
elite that knew its business well and approached each 'operation' like
a military mission.
Use of garotte
The garotte is often depicted as the common weapon of the Thuggee. It
is sometimes described as a rumal (head covering or kerchief), or
translated as "yellow scarf". "Yellow" in this case may refer to a
natural cream or khaki colour rather than bright yellow. Most Indian
males in Central India or Hindustan would have a puggaree or head-
scarf, worn either as a turban or worn around a kullah and draped to
protect the back of the neck. Types of scarves were also worn as
cummerbunds, in place of a belt. Any of these items could have served
as strangling ligatures.
Religion and Thuggee
Thuggee groups might be Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, but Thuggee is
particularly associated with followers of the Hindu Goddess Kali (or
Durga), whom they often called Bhavani.[3][4][5] It was noted, even at
the time, that only a very small minority of the followers of Kali
were Thuggees. Many Thuggees worshipped Kali but most supporters of
Kali did not practise Thuggee.
Some Thuggee groups claimed descent from seven Muslim tribes[citation
needed], but the majority of Hindu followers only seem to be related
during the early periods of Islamic development through their
religious creed and staunch worship of Kali, one of the Hindu Tantric
Goddesses. At a time of political unrest, with changes from Hindu
Rajput rulers to Muslim Moghul emperors and viceroys, and possibly
back again, a wise group would display allegiance to both creeds, but
its ultimate loyalty was probably only to itself.
"There seem to have been very few Sikh Thugs. But Sahib Khan, the
Deccan strangler, 'knew Ram Sing Siek: he was a noted Thug leader - a
very shrewd man,' who also served with the Pindaris for a while and
was responsible for the assassination of the notorious Pindari leader
Sheikh Dulloo." Sleeman, Ramaseeana I, 239-40.
Some sources view the Thugs as a cult or sect. Given the extent of the
problem, in geographical scale and in the duration of time, it is
likely that many groups would wish to keep their secrets from betrayal
from within and from intrusion by outsiders and would have evolved
into secret criminal fraternities. It also follows that if they were
repeatedly successful, then they must have 'divine blessing' and would
wish to give thanks to, and worship, the deity to whom they ascribed
their support. In the West, as well, criminality and religious
observance are not always mutually incompatible.
Origin and recruitment
A group of thugs, ca. 1863The earliest recorded mention of the Thugs
as a special band or fraternity, rather than as ordinary thieves, is
found in the following passage of Ziau-d din Barni's History of Firoz
Shah (written about 1356):
In the reign of that sultan (about 1290), some Thugs were taken in
Delhi, and a man belonging to that fraternity was the means of about a
thousand being captured. But not one of these did the sultan have
killed. He gave orders for them to be put into boats and to be
conveyed into the lower country, to the neighbourhood of Lakhnauti,
where they were to be set free. The Thugs would thus have to dwell
about Lakhnauti and would not trouble the neighbourhood of Delhi any
more." (Sir HM Elliot's History of India, iii. 141).
Membership was sometimes passed from father to son, in what would now
be termed a criminal underclass. The leaders of long-established Thug
groups tended to come from these hereditary lines, as the gang
developed into a criminal 'tribe'. Other men would get to know a Thug
band and would hope to be recruited, in the way that one might aspire
to join an elite regiment or university: they were the best operators
in "the business" and, like a regiment or college fraternity, once in
the group, there was a camaraderie of numbers and shared experience.
The robbery became less a question of solving problems of poverty and
more a profession, like soldiering.
Sometimes the young children of the travelers would be spared and
groomed to become Thugs themselves, as the presence of children would
help allay suspicion. A fourth way of becoming a Thug was by training
with a guru, similar to an apprenticeship for a guild or profession,
during which the candidate could be assessed for reliability, courage,
discretion and discipline.[2]
The magnitude of the problem
Estimates of the total number of victims vary widely, depending on the
author's idea of the length of existence of the Thugs (for which there
are no reliable sources). According to the Guinness Book of Records
the Thuggee cult was responsible for approximately 2,000,000 deaths,
while British historian Dr. Mike Dash estimates that they killed
50,000 persons in total, based on his assumption that they only
started to exist 150 years before their eradication in the 1830s.
Yearly figures for the early 19th century are better documented, but
even they are inaccurate estimates. For example, gang leader Behram
has often been considered the world's most prolific serial killer,
blamed for 931 killings between 1790 and 1830. Reference to
contemporary manuscript sources, however, shows that Behram actually
gave inconsistent statements regarding the number of murders he had
committed. While he did state that he had "been present at" 931
killings committed by his gang of 25 to 50 men, elsewhere he admitted
that he had personally strangled "only" around 125 people. Having
turned King's Evidence and agreed to inform on his former companions,
furthermore, Behram never stood trial for any of the killings
attributed to him, the total of which must thus remain a matter of
dispute.[6]
Suppression
The Thuggee cult was suppressed by the British rulers of India in the
1830s.[2] The arrival of the British and their development of a
methodology to tackle crime meant the techniques of the Thugs had met
their match. Suddenly, the mysterious disappearances were mysteries no
longer and it became clear how even large caravans could be
infiltrated by apparently small groups, that were in fact acting in
concert. Once the techniques were known to all travellers, the element
of surprise was gone and the attacks became botched, until the hunters
became the hunted.
Civil servant William Henry Sleeman, superintendent, 'Thuggee and
Dacoity Dept.' in 1835, and later its Commissioner in 1839.Reasons for
British success included:
the dissemination of reports regarding Thuggee developments across
territorial borders, so that each administrator was made aware of new
techniques as soon as they were put in practice, so that travellers
could be warned and advised on possible counter-measures.
the use of King's evidence programmes gave an incentive for gang
members to inform on their peers to save their own lives. This
undermined the code of silence that protected members.
at a time when, even in Britain, policing was in its infancy, the
British set up a dedicated police force, the Thuggee Department, and
special tribunals that prevented local influence from affecting
criminal proceedings.
the police force applied the new detective methodologies to record the
locations of attacks, the time of day or circumstances of the attack,
the size of group, the approach to the victims and the behaviours
after the attacks. In this way, a single informant, belonging to one
gang in one region, might yield details that would be applicable to
most, or all, gangs in a region or indeed across all India.
The initiative of suppression was due largely to the efforts of the
civil servant William Sleeman, who started an extensive campaign
involving profiling and intelligence. A police organisation known as
the 'Thuggee and Dacoity Department' was established within the
Government of India, with William Sleeman appointed Superintendent of
the department in 1835. Thousands of men were either put in prison,
executed, or expelled from British India.[2] The campaign was heavily
based on informants recruited from captured thugs who were offered
protection on the condition that they told everything that they knew.
By the 1870s, the Thug cult was extinct, but it led to the
promulgation of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. Although it was
repealed upon independence of India, the concept of 'criminal tribes'
and 'criminal castes' is still prevalent in India.[7][8] The
Department remained in existence until 1904, when it was replaced by
the Central Criminal Intelligence Department (CID).
Possible misinterpretation by the British and scepticism about the
existence
In her book The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs
of India (2002), Martine van Woerkens suggests that evidence for the
existence of a Thuggee cult in the 19th century was in part the
product of "colonial imaginings" — British fear of the little-known
interior of India and limited understanding of the religious and
social practices of its inhabitants. For a comparison, see Juggernaut
and the Black Hole of Calcutta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_of_Calcutta
Krishna Dutta, while reviewing the book Thug: the true story of
India's murderous cult by the British historian Dr. Mike Dash in The
Independent, argues:[9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent
"In recent years, the revisionist view that thuggee was a British
invention, a means to tighten their hold in the country, has been
given credence in India, France and the US, but this well-researched
book objectively questions that assertion."
In his book, Dash rejects scepticism about the existence of a secret
network of groups with a modus operandi that was different from
highwaymen, such as dacoits. To prove his point Dash refers to the
excavated corpses in graves, of which the hidden locations were
revealed to Sleeman's team by thug informants. In addition, Dash
treats the extensive and thorough documentation that Sleeman made.
Dash rejects the colonial emphasis on the religious motivation for
robbing, but instead asserts that monetary gain was the main
motivation for Thuggee and that men sometimes became Thugs due to
extreme poverty. He further asserts that the Thugs were highly
superstitious and that they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, but
that their faith was not very different from their contemporary non-
thugs. He admits, though, that the thugs had certain group-specific
superstitions and rituals.
Aftermath
The discovery of the thuggee was one of the main reason why the
Criminal Tribes Act was created.
In popular culture
This "In popular culture" section may contain minor or trivial
references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's
impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and
remove trivial references. (November 2009)
In literature
The story of Thuggee was popularised by books such as Philip Meadows
Taylor's novel Confessions of a Thug, 1839, leading to the word "thug"
entering the English language. Ameer Ali, the protagonist of
Confessions of a Thug was said to be based on a real Thug called Syeed
Amir Ali.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Meadows_Taylor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_a_Thug_(novel)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protagonist
John Masters' novel The Deceivers also deals with the subject. A more
recent book is George Bruce's The Stranglers: The cult of Thuggee and
its overthrow in British India (1968). Dan Simmons's Song of Kali,
1985, features a Thuggee cult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Simmons
The 19th century American writer Mark Twain discusses the Thuggee
fairly extensively in chapters 9 and 10 of "Following the Equator:
Volume II", 1897, THE ECCO PRESS, ISBN 0-88001-519-5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
Christopher Moore's novel, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff,
Christ's Childhood Pal, describes a Thuggee ritual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb:_The_Gospel_According_to_Biff,_Christ%27s_Childhood_Pal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Moore_(author)
The 1976 science fiction novel Strangler's Moon by E.E. "Doc" Smith
and Stephen Goldin is based on the Thuggee (book #2 in the Family
D'Alembert series).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangler%27s_Moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Smith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Goldin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_D%27Alembert
Sci-Fi/Fantasy author Glen Cook uses an India-like setting and Thuggee
as a plot vehicle in his books Shadow Games (June 1989), and Dreams of
Steel (April 1990). The books and later ones that continue the
storyline form part of Cook's Black Company series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Cook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_of_Steel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Company
The Serpent's Shadow by Mercedes Lackey has a Hindu villain, whose
minions are Thuggee, almost without exception.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes_Lackey
Author William T. Vollmann draws upon Sleeman in his story The Yellow
Sugar, which is one of two tales in his collection The Rainbow Stories
dealing with the colour yellow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Vollmann
In the pre-Holmes short story "The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy's
Household" (1887), Arthur Conan Doyle centres the narrative on a
beautiful female Thuggee in England who has "occasional fits of
fanaticism" and "horrible conceptions of religion".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle
Italian writer Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) wrote about thugs in I
Misteri della Jungla Nera (1895) and Le Due Tigri (1904) and other
short stories.
George Macdonald Fraser's novel Flashman in the Great Game (1975)
makes references to the "cult" of Thuggee, while the phrase: "pass the
tobacco" is used as a verbal signal for the killing to begin.
The DC Comics character Ravan is a Thuggee assassin who kills to delay
the return of Kali. He is the enemy of Kobra who seeks to bring about
her return.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Comics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravan_(comics)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobra_(comics)
In the novel The Thirteenth Manifestation: the Song of Kali Ma (2006)
by Josephine Dunne, thuggees appear as assassins who operate from an
ancient subterranean Kali temple under the mountains between the
Pakistan and Indian line of control in Kashmir.
In film
The two most popular depictions of the cult in film are the 1939 film,
Gunga Din, and the 1984 film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The Indiana Jones movie is notable for Amrish Puri's villain, who is
shown chanting lines such as "maaro maaro sooar ko, chamdi nocho pee
lo khoon" - literally "Kill, Kill the pig, flay his skin, drink his
blood". Temple of Doom was temporarily banned in India for an
allegedly racist portrayal of Indians. Both films have the heroes
fighting secret revivals of the cult to prevent them from resuming
their reigns of terror, although Temple of Doom included features that
were never part of the Thuggee, such as cardiectomy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_and_the_Temple_of_Doom
In the 1956 film Around the World in Eighty Days, starring David
Niven, Passepartout rescues a princess captured by the Thuggee and
sentenced to burn to death in the funeral pyre with her deceased
husband. (In the original Jules Verne novel, Thuggee are mentioned
only briefly, and not directly in connection with this princess.)[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days_(1956_film)
In 1960 British horror studio Hammer Film Productions released The
Stranglers of Bombay. In the film, Guy Rolfe portrays an heroic
British officer battling institutional mismanagement by the British
East India Company, as well as Thuggee infiltration of Indian society,
in an attempt to bring the cultists to justice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_East_India_Company
The 1968 Bollywood film Sangharsh, based on a story by Jnanpith Award
winner, Mahasweta Devi, presented a fictionalised account of vendetta
within a Thuggee cult in the holy Indian town of Varanasi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunghursh_(1968_film)
The 1988 film version of The Deceivers, produced by Ismail Merchant
and starring Pierce Brosnan, is a fictionalised account of the initial
discovery and infiltration of the Thuggee sect by an imperial British
administrator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deceivers
The 1954 film I Misteri della Giungla Nera directed by Gian Paolo
Callegari and starring Lex Barker, where a group of religious fanatics
in India, the Thugs, prey upon European and natives alike by capturing
and offering them up in sacrifice to their frightful goddess, Kali
(from imdb.) Adapted from Emilio Salgari's book by the same name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilio_Salgari
The 1965 film Help! directed by Richard Lester and featuring The
Beatles parodies the thuggee as the cult that tries to steal Ringo's
sacrificial ring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help!_(film)
In television
In an episode of Highlander: The Series, "The Wrath of Kali", Duncan
MacLeod deals with immortal Kamir (played by Indian actor Kabir Bedi),
last of the Thuggee.
The fifth episode of the short-lived Clerks: The Animated Series
featured a plot twist where the Little League World Champions were
kidnapped by the Thuggee, where they were forced to chip rock away
from walls (much like the Thuggee in Temple of Doom).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_League
In the episode "The Yellow Scarf Affair" of the series The Man from
U.N.C.L.E., Agent Napoleon Solo uncovers a revival of the Thuggee cult
while investigating a plane crash in India.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_U.N.C.L.E.
On It Ain't Half Hot Mum series 2, episode 8, "The Night of the
Thugs", the concert party take refuge from a rainstorm in a ruined
Thuggee temple. NB - Rare unscripted "giggle" from Captain Ashwood
when Colonel Reynolds discuss stealing the ruby from the statue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodes_of_Highlander_(season_4)#The_Wrath_of_Kali
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Ain%27t_Half_Hot_Mum
See also
Highwayman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highwayman
Notes and references
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
http://www.1902encyclopedia.com/T/THU/thugs.html
^ Thugs 1902 Encyclopædia Britannica'.Pali-sthag.
^ a b c d Dash, Mike Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult
ISBN 1-86207-604-9, 2005
^ Dash, pp. 284-286 in the Dutch translation of the book
^ Dash, pp. 247 in the Dutch translation of the book
^ Dash, page 329 of the UK edition - notes to Chapter 16
^ James Paton, 'Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee', British Library
Add. Mss. 41300
^ "Thugs Traditional View" (shtml). BBC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/thugs.shtml.
Retrieved 2007-09-17.
^ Sinister sects: Thug, Mike Dash's investigation into the gangs who
preyed on travellers in 19th-century India by Kevin Rushby, The
Guardian, Saturday, June 11, 2005.
^ Dutta, Krishna (2005) The sacred slaughterers. Book review of Thug:
the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. In the
Independent (Published: 8 July 2005)text
^ Verne, Jules (August 18, 2005). Around The World in Eighty Days.
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=34998. See
page 38, where the Thuggee chief is mentioned, and page 46, where the
bride is referred to as a suttee.
Bibliography
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Eleventh_Edition
Dash, Mike Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult ISBN
1-86207-604-9, 2005
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dash
Dutta, Krishna (2005) The sacred slaughterers. Book review of Thug:
the true story of India's murderous cult by Mike Dash. In The
Independent (Published: 8 July 2005) text
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/thug-the-true-story-of-indias-murderous-cult-by-mike-dash-497902.html
Paton, James 'Collections on Thuggee and Dacoitee', British Library
Add. Mss. 41300
Woerkens, Martine van The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and
the Thugs of India (2002),
External links
Acting in the "Theatre of Anarchy": 'The Anti-Thug Campaign' and
Elaborations of Colonial Rule in Early-Nineteenth Century India by Tom
Lloyd (2006) in PDF file format
http://www.csas.ed.ac.uk/fichiers/LLOYD.pdf
Parama Roy: Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee. In: idem, Indian
Traffic. Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India.
University of California Press 1998. (in html format)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee"
Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee
Acknowledgments
This book owes a great deal to the critical perspicacity and
generosity of friends, colleagues, mentors, and institutions, whom I
am grateful to be able to name and thank. These pages would have been
impossible to bring to fruition without the encouragement and
intellectual support of Sandhya Shetty and Carole-Anne Tyler, who
consistently asked the difficult questions and who taught me through
the inspiration of their own scholarship. I am also grateful to
Lalitha Gopalan, who so often told me what I was thinking before I
knew it myself. I am grateful too to the many other friends and
colleagues who read the manuscript, either in full or in part, or who
responded to my work at conferences: Katherine Kinney, Joe Childers,
R. Radhakrishnan, Inderpal Grewal, Vincent Cheng, Daniel Boyarin, Kim
Devlin, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Bette London, Ron Inden, Robert
Goldman, Aditya Behl, Gayatri Spivak, Jennifer Brody, George Haggerty,
Lawrence Cohen, Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Foster. I am
indebted to the readers for the University of California Press,
especially Caren Kaplan and Sangeeta Ray, for their meticulous,
constructive, and sympathetic evaluation of the project. My editor,
Doris Kretschmer, has been unfailingly helpful and patient. I am also
grateful to Dore Brown and Diane Jagusiak of the University of
California Press, and to Sarah Myers, for their scrupulous editing. I
am indebted above all to my parents, Amalendu and Ramola Roy, as well
as to Bharat Trehan for (among other things) his recall of a youth
productively spent watching Bombay films.
This project has been funded by a University of California President’s
Research Fellowship in the Humanities in 1991–1992, a fellowship in
the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society
in the spring of 1994, and by two pretenure faculty-development awards
from the University of California, Riverside. I am grateful for this
support.
2. Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee
I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I have thugged
with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its work.
He had met hundreds of other Deceivers, and the notes were a complete
tale of all he had seen and heard and done; of all the Deceivers who
had engaged in any action, with their descriptions, habits, and homes;
of each murder, and how it had gone, and how it might have been
prevented—or improved upon. The words could be read for either
purpose, according to the spirit of the reader.
At the time that Burton was impersonating Mirza Abdullah in the
bazaars of Sind, another important narrative of disguise,
surveillance, and racial crossing was being written in the
subcontinent, this one under the auspices of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department of the East India Company’s government. This was the
narrative of the exposure and extirpation of a form of hereditary
criminality called thuggee; it was to form a significant constitutive
component of the authoritarian and interventionary reform of the 1830s
and 1840s and to contribute to the still-emerging project of
“discovering India.” “It was with the flourish of mystery unveiled and
mastered,” writes a contemporary historian, “that a group of officers
of the Political Department had lobbied for special operations against
[a] ‘murderous fraternity’ and for special laws to deal with it.” [1]
It is that tale of thuggee that this chapter will take up, at least in
part as a counterpoint to the Burtonian record of the Englishman as
native. It examines the phenomenon designated thuggee by colonial
authority in nineteenth-century India, a phenomenon whose emergence,
codification, and overthrow was to become perhaps the founding moment
for the study of indigenous criminality, as a problem of
impersonation, visibility, and the transactions of reading. I use the
example of thuggee to explore one of the various and often mutually
discontinuous kinds of identities that were created, fixed, or
rendered ambivalent for Indian colonial subjects. In approaching the
problematic of thuggee in the colonial context through the optic of
identity formation and subjection, I broach a nexus of concerns that
cohere around the epistemes of representation and knowledge: the
problematic of the formation of colonial knowledge, the contested,
changing, and uneven definitions of law, order, criminality, and
reform in early-nineteenth-century India, the theorization of colonial
identities (Indian and British), and the discursive problems
associated with generating the moral subject of the civilizing mission
of British colonialism.
This chapter has three sections, with significant amounts of overlap.
The first examines the official records of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department (first established in the 1830s), a cluster of documents
that I have perhaps rather arbitrarily designated the thuggee archive.
This includes first and foremost the files on thuggee and dacoity in
the India Office Library and the National Archives of India. Also
incorporated in this thuggee archive are the works (Ramaseeana, or a
Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugs [1836]; Report
on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary
Profession [1849]; Report on the Depredations Committed by the Thug
Gangs [1840]) of William Henry Sleeman of thuggee fame, as well as of
other officials associated directly or indirectly with the antithug
campaign: James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (1920); Charles
Hervey, Some Records of Crime (1892); Edward Thornton, Illustrations
of the History and Practices of the Thugs (1837); and the anonymously
authored The Thugs or Phansigars of India (1839), an abridged version
of the Ramaseeana for an American audience. This inventory of thuggee
materials also includes a number of biographies, fictionalizations,
and nonofficial accounts of the “discovery” of the phenomenon and its
eradication: James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits,
the Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (1857); A. J.
Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (1959); George Bruce, The
Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and Its Overthrow in British India
(1968); Francis Tuker, The Yellow Scarf (1961); and Philip Meadows
Taylor, Confessions of a Thug (1839). These are collectively
designated the archive in this chapter, despite the incommensurability
in their generic status; this has been done because there appears to
be very little significant difference between one text and another in
this collection. Each seems to repeat the others in an uncanny
fashion; each narrates the same incidents in almost exactly the same
rhetorical mode; and each looks to W. H. Sleeman’s productions as the
founding texts of the thuggee narrative. (Meadows Taylor’s novel
differs from these only in its focus on a single thug and its
accumulation of additional [fictional] detail.)
The second section focuses on the special juridical procedures that
had to be instituted in order to deal with some of the most
intractable problems associated with a bizarre and enigmatic variety
of criminality. The final section provides a reading of the 1952 work
on the thugs by John Masters, The Deceivers, a novel that was
popularized in the 1980s in a film of that name by Merchant Ivory.
What sets this novel apart from the rest of the archive is the turn it
gives to the always already familiar narrative of thuggee through its
focus on the tensions of the investigating subject and its interest in
the English impersonation of Indianness and Englishness. It allows us
a way of (re)visiting and (re)inflecting the thuggee archive through
its stress on the colonizing male’s desires and identifications, and
thus forms an apposite corollary to the accent on Indian impersonation
that informs the discourse of criminal law.
At this point I should add a note about the limits of the enterprise
undertaken in this chapter. In the first place, I do not wish to
furnish another account of thuggee or to enter the traffic in
competing narratives of what might have constituted a material thug
organization or practice. Nor am I interested in reinscribing the
practices of the thugs in the register of subaltern insurgency,
though, given that subalternity is most properly construed as a
relational rather than an essential category,[2] I am not unwilling to
grant the thugs’ subaltern status. I am certainly sympathetic to
Ranajit Guha’s model of reading subaltern insurgency (as a “turning
things upside down”) through the texts of counterinsurgency.[3] But,
given the exclusions listed earlier in this paragraph, for me to read
thuggee as resistive, anticolonial, protonationalist, or even
antistate may be philosophically not discontinuous with the reading
practices that produced the thug as a demonized and completely
irrational entity. My object here is not to recuperate a subaltern
consciousness, even one that is acknowledged to be ineluctably
discursive, “a theoretical fiction to entitle the project of
reading,” [4] though I concede that the question of “subaltern
consciousness” cannot be completely bypassed.
I shall confine myself instead to examining the performative
subjectivity of the thug, as it is constructed in the discourse of
thuggee, as a way of teasing out, extending, and transforming some of
the implications of representation, mimicry, and visibility in the
colonial context. What I will engage are the models of reading that
are provided by the thuggee archives—how they are formed,
consolidated, or (partially) interrupted. And what I do argue is that
the reading of the uncovering of thuggee as an enabling moment for the
colonial state in its quest for the consolidation of judicial power
needs to be, if not displaced, at least complicated, by the
acknowledgment that thuggee forms an especially intransigent moment
within the colonial construction of criminality; it is a moment that
confounds and unsettles the received wisdom about identity formation,
truth production, and meliorative possibilities in early-nineteenth-
century India. What I also argue is that the discourse on and around
thuggee can be instrumental in opening up our present understanding of
the theorization of colonial identity, especially as it engages
questions of familiarity, visibility, and reproducibility. The text of
thuggee provides, for instance, a point of entry into a wider range of
mimic desires, identifications, and positions than someone like Bhabha
explicitly engages[5]—for instance, the colonizer’s fascination with
going native, the English miming of Englishness, or the indigenous
miming of indigenous subject positions—as well as foregrounding
questions of class, gender, and sexuality.
• • •
The Thug
The first thugs were not arrested by the British until 1799, after the
defeat at Seringapatam of Tipu Sultan, one of the most potent threats
to the expansionist ambitions of the East India Company; it was not
evident to the British at the time, though, that the stranglers were
thugs or hereditary killers. The first mention of the law-and-order
problem posed by thugs occurs in 1810, in the commander-in-chief’s
instructions to sepoys proceeding on leave about the dangers of
traveling at night and carrying large sums of cash instead of bills of
exchange;[6] but thuggee as a significant social arrangement or
discursive formation does not feature in this caution to the sepoys.
Thornton reproduces some correspondence between British magistrates
and police officials of the Western Provinces in the years 1814–1816
on the subject of thugs; at this point knowledge about them appears
very fragmentary, with no reference to shared religious rituals or
language or an idiosyncratic form of murder. It appears that the
notion of thuggee as a system rather than a disarticulated set of
violent acts was first broached in 1816 by Dr. Richard Sherwood, who
wrote an essay detailing its genealogy, organization, and argot for
the Madras Literary Gazette.[7] It proved, however, enormously
difficult to compel belief in the existence of such a fraternity (this
was to remain a problem in the decades to come), even among British
political officers, magistrates, and law-enforcement officials.
Meadows Taylor describes the capture of large numbers of thugs in
Bundelkhand and Malwa in the 1820s, an event that failed to “[excite]
more than a passing share of public attention.” [8] It was not until
Captain W. H. Sleeman undertook the exercise of decoding and exposing
thuggee in 1830, after the unexpected confession of the captured
bandit Feringheea, that a grand narrative of thuggee began to emerge.
Despite this relatively recent discovery, however, thuggee as praxis
and as identity was always represented as being of almost
inconceivable antiquity, conceived in the precolonial past and
sanctioned by long duration and popular Hindu mythology, if not
textual doctrine. A. J. Wightman, echoing his nineteenth-century
predecessors, asserts that though evidence of the existence of thuggee
is first found in records of the late thirteenth century, “it is
obvious that they must have been well-established at a much earlier
date.” [9] Some writers, like Sherwood, traced its origins to the
Arab, Afghan, and Mughal conquests of India of several centuries
earlier; James Sleeman and others traced the thugs back to the times
of Herodotus. The thug Feringheea is said to have claimed that the
sculptures at Ellora, which included representations of all the
professions on earth, featured a depiction of a thug plying his deadly
trade.[10] All the reports without exception demonstrate a tenacious
need to generate a creation myth, to locate not just a point of
discovery but a point of origin, and to establish a precolonial
genealogy. But at the beginning, as Geoff Bennington has said about
national histories, is also the myth of a beginning; and the origins
of thuggee keep receding into a more and more distant historical/
mythological point of inauguration.[11] In fact, several of the
accounts end up locating its beginning in a Hindu myth of creation.
The thugs, as they are represented in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century colonial representations, were a cult of professional
stranglers who preyed on travelers—though never on Englishmen—as an
act of worship to the popular Hindu goddess Kali. They were
represented as hereditary killers drawn from all regions, religions,
classes, and castes, united by their devotion to Kali and the act of
strangulation, which was, in this reading, quite literally sacralized.
The thugs were bound to their calling—and to each other—by shared
signifying systems: a language, a belief in the divine origin of the
practice, and a dizzying array of minutely observed rituals,
prohibitions, and superstitions. The thuggee system functioned as a
quasi-religious fraternity that, paradoxically, would accommodate just
about every Indian. It was defined as a compelling and
characteristically Indian form of social (ir)rationality, and the
practice was represented as resting upon an interlocking network of
constitutive contradictions.
Though the thugs robbed their victims and the confessions usually
demonstrate a very lucid recall of the division of the plunder,
thuggee was not conceived as having any economic base, particularly
because those involved in it appeared to have fixed abodes, peaceful
occupations, and a respectable place in the social and caste
hierarchies during those times when they were not engaged in killing
and plunder. While Sherwood does speculate, albeit briefly and
unevenly, on the proximate material causes of thuggee, the question
becomes progressively leached out of subsequent, and more hegemonic,
exegeses of thuggee. All the writers on the subject are insistent, to
greater or lesser degrees, that the thugs must not be regarded as
exigent, dispossessed, or rebellious subjects; they are unlike the
bandits of folk myth in being devious, unmartial (“cowardly” is the
adjective most often used), and almost obscenely respectable.[12] They
are characterized instead as hereditary killers whose “joyous
occupation” was, paradoxically, not only a matter of caste duty and
therefore ontological necessity but also a prime instance of
unalienated labor. By the time we come to James Sleeman’s hagiographic
account of his grandfather’s exploits, the act of strangulation has
not only been uncoupled from the usual motives for murder but has
acquired a quasi-libidinal charge: “The taking of human life for the
sheer lust of killing was the Thugs’ main object: the plunder, however
pleasant, being a secondary consideration.…Here was no body of amateur
assassins, driven to crime by force of circumstance, but men of
seeming respectability and high intelligence, often occupying
positions of importance and responsibility in their normal lives,
secretly trained from boyhood to the highest degree of skill in
strangulation.” [13] Sleeman is not alone in this reading of the
combined erotic and religious investment in murder. Taylor, in
Confessions of a Thug, hints at the homoerotic subtext of a thug’s
murder of a handsome lad; and George MacMunn explicitly couples the
left-hand Tantrism (including exorbitant and unauthorized sexual acts)
of Kali worshipers with behaviors like thuggee and nationalist
violence:
The murder trials that have followed on the sedition and secret murder
cult in Bengal, and indeed throughout India, show in their records how
the Hindu student depraved and often injured by too early eroticism,
turns to the suggestiveness of the murder-monger, and worships the
nitro-glycerine bomb as the apotheosis of his goddess [Kali].…The
student and the assistant editor of the rag, that but exists to
inflame students and pays its way by advertising the potent
aphrodisiacs among them, are the nidus of the bomb-cult.[14]
Katherine Mayo also locates the worship of Kali, premature and
excessive sexual activity, and acts of anticolonial terrorism within a
single perceptual grid.[15] This confluence of violence, illegitimacy,
and homoerotic desire is to resurface in The Deceivers.
Some twentieth-century scholars of colonial history have sought to
posit alternative, materialist histories of the phenomenon called
thuggee. Hiralal Gupta traces the development of thuggee or banditry
in the early nineteenth century to the success of the East India
Company’s expansionist policy, speculating that a significant number
of people captured as thugs by the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in
the 1830s and 1840s were erstwhile soldiers or officials in the employ
of rulers whose states had recently come under British control. These
people were among those who had lost their employment or fallen from
favor as a result of the annexation or reconfiguration of the Indian
princely states.[16] Sandria Freitag on the other hand points to the
displacement of peripatetic groups as a result of the ousting of local
settled rulers who had traditionally provided some protection to such
groups and to the establishment of the land-revenue-based state as a
possible explanation for the instances of collective acts of violence.
She also glosses the violence of dacoits—as of similar groups—as bids
for power and upward social mobility that would have been acknowledged
as such and accommodated by precolonial Indian state formations.[17]
Stewart Gordon argues that the large number of marauding groups that
were jockeying for political power in Malwa (where most of the thugs
seemed to be based) in the late eighteenth century posed a threat to
the stable sources of revenue in the region and necessitated the
creation of external sources of revenue. Those designated thugs were
“locally recruited, locally based” marauders hired to plunder outside
the neighborhood, as it were, in order to make up for revenue that
might have been lost to larger marauding groups.[18]
As I have already mentioned, Englishmen were never targeted by the
thugs; a few of the written accounts attribute the unsolved murder of
a Lieutenant Maunsell (or Monsell) in 1812 to thugs (as does the film
version of The Deceivers [1987], which opens with that killing), but
most of the thuggee texts point to the fact that the British had no
personal investment in the problem. Almost unfailingly these accounts
point to the antithug campaigns as exemplary instances of the active
benevolence of British rule, so often unjustly maligned or compared
unfavorably with indigenous rule. James Sleeman, who is particularly
apoplectic on this issue, argues that twentieth-century Indian demands
for independence were in effect a call for a return to the days of
thuggee: “Had this small handful of British officials, scattered like
poppies in a corn-field, shown the slightest timidity in grappling
with this gigantic task, they would surely have fallen victims to the
Thugs at the outset, in which case millions of Indians alive to-day
would never have been born, including possibly those who now agitate
for a restoration of the conditions under which Thuggee thrived and
battened.” [19]
Colonial accounts thus represent thuggee as outside a realm of
political and economic rationality (since it is religiously
sanctioned, grounded in caste, and linked to exorbitant pleasures).
Nonetheless, as the obsessive invocations of the Mutiny of 1857 and of
the Bengal revolutionaries of the twentieth century indicate, thuggee
was simultaneously addressed (even if not overtly acknowledged) as a
peculiarly potent threat to the authority and benevolence of the
empire in India. “To the colonial regime,” writes David Arnold, “crime
and politics were almost inseparable: serious crime was an implicit
defiance of state authority and a possible prelude to rebellion;
political resistance was either a ‘crime’ or the likely occasion for
it.” [20] Freitag points to the departures of British police action
from those of their Mughal predecessors; while the Mughals delegated
responsibility for containing collective crime to local functionaries,
the British felt such corporate criminal behaviors were nothing other
than a defiance of the state itself.[21] She points to the fundamental
distinctions, in terms of both the allocation of resources and the
formulation of legal procedures, that the Raj made between crimes
committed by individuals (“ordinary crime”) and those committed by
collectivities (“extraordinary crime”):
Elaboration of legal codes and police establishments to deal with
individual crime conveyed the impression that “the rule of law” had
been introduced into British India; yet the annual compilation of
crime and police statistics makes clear the minimal state resources
committed to policing individual crime. Unless such crime grew
alarmingly in a short period, or its policing fell significantly short
of what came to be seen as the norms of efficiency (for an inefficient
force), the state did not reckon individual crime to be of great
importance. By contrast, however, the British perceived collectively
criminal actions to be either directed against, or weakening, the
authority of the state. As a consequence, the British repeatedly felt
the need to launch centralized police forces against “extraordinary”
crime and viewed their inefficacy as a measure of the Raj’s impotence.
[22]
The thuggee records (including the confessions of thug approvers)
endeavor to provide—through the dominant tropes of ritualized,
religiously ratified, and libidinally charged slaughter—a tightly
knit, seamless, and self-validating account of an exceptional Indian
criminal practice. Yet, even as the record invokes the unvarying
trademarks of thug practice, it inescapably registers the
provisionality of its own categorization. The thug’s signature—murder
by strangulation, using a (silk) handkerchief—does not appear in every
act labeled thuggee; swords and poison feature as agents of
destruction quite as much as the talismanic rumal (handkerchief). Such
wide variations along a continuum of criminal activity were to lead,
after the 1830s, to an expansion of the provenance of thuggee: the
term came to include all kinds of organized and corporate criminal
activity (including poisoning and the kidnapping of children) that was
understood to be hereditary and/or itinerant. The confessions also
seem to demonstrate that at least some thugs were initiated into
professional practice not in adolescence or early manhood by older
male family members but later in life, most typically in response to a
situation of financial exigency.
Not only was it difficult to isolate certain crimes as the acts of
thugs, it was never easy either to establish the exceptional and
profoundly aberrant character of thuggee. The common complaint in all
the thuggee accounts without exception is that the activity of the
thugs seemed to mesh with exasperating ease into existing indigenous
networks of wealth and power, since they were supported by zamindars
(landowners), Indian princes, law-enforcement officials, merchants,
and even ordinary people. As Freitag suggests, “among organized
criminals the thags may have been the group most thoroughly embedded
in local society.” [23] The worship of Kali (also called Devi, or
Bhawani) could not easily be coded as an eccentric religious practice
either. Though some narratives do interpret the thugs’ invocation of
the goddess on the scaffold as proof positive of guilt (“Their
invocation of Bhawani at the drop was a confession of their guilt, for
no one in such a situation invokes Bhawani but a Thug, and he invokes
no other deity in any situation, whatever may be his religion or sect”)
[24], they also point to the widespread adoration of Kali across
regions and religions, among those identified as law-abiding as well
as those constituted as criminal.[25] Finally, while Thug beliefs and
rituals, especially those enacted at the start of an expedition, were
elaborately detailed, it was also asserted that in India expeditions
in quest of plunder were qualitatively no different from expeditions
undertaken for territorial aggrandizement; rulers and robbers alike
took the auspices after the Dasehra festival, before setting out on
their badshashi kam (kingly work).
Hence at least two contesting readings emerge: one defines the thugs
as a community apart, existing in enmity against law-abiding,
scrutable, and locally anchored subjects; the other identifies them as
natural to indigenous society, aided and abetted by all, and mirroring
and reproducing that society’s values. The uneasy fit between the
contextualizing move and the essentializing one was productive of an
aporia, which could only be resolved by invoking that most powerful of
all Indological epistemes—that of caste.[26] All the contradictions
and the seemingly endless heterogeneity of the subject category of the
thug are subsumed within that category, which is reified as coherent
and inflexible and emptied of any possibility of subjective freedom.
Once thuggee as social alliance was taxonomized as homologous to, if
not identical with (and the slippage from homology to identity occurs
without any apparent discursive strain), a caste, the thug could
simultaneously inhabit what had earlier been discrepant subject
positions: he could simultaneously be an exceptional criminal and a
representative Hindu, or Indian, since in the colonial imaginary the
territory of Hinduism is often coextensive with that of India.[27]
Even this reconciliation was not without its tensions, of course,
since thuggee as a philosophical system and a social formation seemed
to work strongly against the grain of the received colonial view of
India as irrevocably fractured along the fault lines of caste and
religion.
Nor was the caste explanation completely adequate to the great and, as
it seemed, illogical hybridity of thuggee. As a socioreligious
formation thuggee seemed to colonial investigators to be aligned with
popular, indeed demotic, forms of Hinduism in its reverence for Kali,
except that it attracted a large number of Muslim adherents, who
seemed to pay homage quite unproblematically both to the goddess and
to the strictures of the Koran. Here it is important to point to the
varied, contingent, and often irreconcilable constructions of Hindu
tradition in colonial discourse; the representation of Hinduism in the
discourse of thuggee is, for instance, quite discontinuous with that
which is operative in the discourse on sati, which was formulated in a
roughly contemporaneous moment. In the case of sati, as Lata Mani has
argued, colonial officials made energetic and systematic attempts to
establish Hinduism as a religion of the book; and Brahmanical readings
and textual authorities were privileged over custom and local
religious and social practice.[28] But in the instance of thuggee,
Hinduism is defined entirely as and by custom. Moreover, at the
popular or subaltern level, Hindu and Muslim forms of worship and
systems of belief may well have been less distinct than they were to
become (especially for more elevated castes and classes) later in the
century. The whole question in fact of Hindu doctrine and praxis and
its relation to thug identity is notoriously murky and ill defined.
Further complicating this discursive construction of thuggee was the
fact that professional thugs cultivated the appearance of the most
civic-minded of citizens and were conscientious about the discharge of
familial, social, and religious obligations. The very characteristics
that made them successful con men—their polish, their social and
rhetorical skills, their extraordinary capacity for duplicating
identities—also ensured their immense respectability in civil society.
But what rendered thuggee particularly elusive and frustrating to
British observers was its relative invisibility, its skill at
camouflage, and the difficulty of establishing it as a pervasive yet
eccentric form of lawlessness. Thug murders were typically performed
without shedding blood and without using identifiable offensive
weapons of any kind: they were performed far from the victims’ homes,
and the bodies were carefully buried. Because of the care exercised in
the killing and the disposal of the corpses (victims were buried with
great dispatch, and their graves were filled with rocks to keep out
any marauding animals) and the hazards attendant upon travel in
nineteenth-century India, these murders generally failed to register
as murders. Local landowners, rulers, and policemen connived at these
murders for their own benefit, or because they were prompted, it was
argued, by the heavy demands of superstition; and the peasantry, we
are told, simply ignored the bodies that occasionally appeared in
fields and wells. This raised the question of how far the circuit of
criminality actually extended: if local officials and the police
tolerated and even encouraged thuggee and ordinary folk made no
complaint about it, who could be said to remain unimplicated in it?
Under the circumstances, everything and everyone was liable to
suspicion, since the system of thuggee was both remarkably inclusive
and remarkably discreet in its operations. Hence British thuggee
inspectors were in the discomfiting position of focusing on crimes
that no one else acknowledged, certainly not (from the evidence of
these writers) most Indian princes or zamindars or even common folk
and generally not even the majority of the British magistracy or the
civil service. British scholars of thuggee were thus involved in a
detective project hobbled by an almost-fatal lack of empirical detail.
All natives were potentially thugs, since the system of thuggee was
remarkably inclusive; and the most seemingly innocent objects, like
handkerchiefs or gur (unrefined sugar, ritually consumed at the
commencement of an expedition), could participate in a diabolical
signifying system. And while British ignorance of thuggee (at least
until the 1830s) might contrast favorably with Indian knowledge—and
therefore complicity—it was susceptible of more objectionable
interpretations; in Masters’s novel, there is the danger that British
“ignorance” of thuggee can be read by the natives in a particularly
unflattering light: “In the nine years of the English Company’s rule
nothing had been done against the Deceivers. But William realized now
that most Indians knew at least of the existence of the Deceivers;
and, knowing, they could not believe the English did not also know;
therefore the English officials too were sharing in the spoils; so
what was the use of informing?” [29] (In the film version, the Indians
have good reason to be suspicious: George Angelsmith, the exemplary
servant of the East India Company, has full knowledge of the
activities of the thugs and profits from it.) Here it is not simply
the natives who are the object of investigation, codification, and
supervision; an alternative modality of interpretation is imaginable,
in which colonial authority is itself open to variant readings,
including those it has not authorized.
All these factors made the retrieval of information and the policing
of thuggee particularly vexing. And creating an archive and
standardizing reader response was not easy either. Though each thuggee
expedition and each act of thuggee was performed by the book, attended
by minutely detailed rituals and scrupulously observed omens, and was
immediately identifiable as such to those who could read the signs, it
was not immediately visible as such to those who could not or did not
see thuggee as a semiosis. Even in the 1860s, when knowledge about
thuggee had been codified, circulated, and reproduced and was
underwritten by wide-ranging institutional and legal support, Charles
Hervey complained that his subordinates were yet imperfect readers of
the complex and mysterious text of thuggee,
some correctly recognizing Thuggee in instances which were palpably
the deed of experts, although death should not have taken place;
others only doing so where death had resulted; some classing certain
murders as cases of “Thuggee” without reference to the means resorted
to in the perpetration thereof; others who wholly pass by cases of
poisoning whether followed by death or not, although they bore
evidence of being the acts of class criminals; some who restrict their
notice to selected cases only of its occurrence, passing by other
similar instances; some who endeavour to distinguish between different
degrees of poisoning, some calling “murder by poison” Thugee [sic],
others not doing so[;]…others who lump all such kindred offences under
round numbers without any narration of the attendant circumstances,
contented only with quoting against them the sections of the Penal
Code under which they were triable or were tried.[30]
With all the discrepant valences of this discourse, one factor
remained crucial in the determination of thuggee: the idea of
hereditary criminality. This was not a particularly novel reading of
corporate criminal activity in colonial India; as far back as 1772,
the dacoits of Bengal were strenuously and repeatedly characterized
not as individual or collective subjects responding to socioeconomic
transformations engendered by the sudden ascendancy of the East India
Company or indeed to any other material circumstance, or even to
chance, but as fulfilling a hereditary calling, if not a genetic
predisposition.[31] And, as Sanjay Nigam has convincingly
demonstrated, the colonial reification of caste as coherent and
inflexible, combined with the received notion of hereditary
criminality (most fully exemplified in the instance of thuggee), was
to have a long and ominous history in colonial and postcolonial India;
the Criminal Tribes and Castes Act of 1872 was to designate (without
any possibility of appeal) a number of vagrant and impoverished
“communities” as “criminal by birth” and thus subject to surveillance,
control, and attempted rehabilitation.[32] I am struck here by the
considerable (though not complete) overlap of this discourse with
Michel Foucault’s description of the emergence of the homosexual as a
distinct ontological category in the nineteenth century:
The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case
history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life
form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and a mysterious
physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was
unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the
root of all his actions because it was their insidious and
indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body
because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was
cosubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular
nature.…The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual
was now a species.[33]
Because thuggee was such a slippery issue, a kind of legal,
disciplinary, and discursive apparatus was brought to bear on it that
did not occur in the case for instance of sati, another retrograde and
horrific practice apparently authorized by Hinduism. This is not of
course to assert that sati as a discursive formation was unproblematic
for colonial administrators and reformers; Lata Mani has pointed that
the abolition of sati in colonial India was preceded by its
legalization and has drawn attention to the valorization of the
“voluntary” sati in colonial and nationalist discourses. But thuggee
was not so much spectacular—as sati was (at least until 1829)—as
invisible. As a result it was much more difficult to discursively
track its trajectory and to determine the success of the pacification.
Sati was abolished in 1829, and there are no official records after
that date of the practice; it was presumed that it had simply been
legislated out of existence. But in the instance of thuggee, such
faith in the efficacy of legislative sanction is much more uncertain.
In the juridical domain, thuggee was defined as an “exceptional case”
in the name of a colonial contingency, since thuggee by definition was
exorbitant to standard law-and-order discourse and marked at all
points by immoderation.[34] This enabled the establishment of a
discursive and juridical system that was entirely self-referential and
self-validating, in which it was sufficient to be identified as a thug
or “hereditary criminal” through an approver’s testimony, without
actually being convicted of a specific crime, to be liable to arrest,
trial, and, almost inevitably, conviction. I will return to this
shortly.
Knowledge of thuggee as an essence then had to be constructed,
crucially, around an absence; and all the confessions, all the subject
effects produced by the testimony of approvers, were a strenuous
effort to recover a “consciousness,” a consciousness that would
provide the foundation for the revelations that ratified the antithug
campaign. But if thuggee was as far-reaching and as subtle as W. H.
Sleeman and his associates insisted, and if thug ontology and practice
was determined by birth, how could an Englishman ever hope to know the
whole truth and nothing but the truth? How could one verify the
confessions of the approvers and establish checks over their control
of the official record? Thornton registers exasperation at the
contaminated nature of the confessions: “Few things are more difficult
to a native of India than to tell the truth, under any circumstances;
and the confessions of criminals, in all countries, may be expected to
contain a mixture of truth and falsehood. The deposition of Moklal is
not consistent with the rest; nor even with another statement made by
himself, made in conversation with Captain Sleeman.” [35] He also
cites (as do other accounts of thuggee) the instance of an approver
who functioned as a double agent, beguiling his English employer into
believing him committed to the capture of thugs while providing
information and English passes [documents authorizing unimpeded travel
within, and between, designated territories] to his criminal comrades.
[36]
While James Sleeman claims that W. H. Sleeman and his colleagues, in
the 1830s, “resolved that this trade of Thuggee should no longer be
any more a mystery than tailoring or carpentering, began to initiate
themselves into all the secrets of the craft, and were soon, in their
knowledge of the theory of the profession, little behind the
professors themselves,” [37] the “secrecy” of thuggee never
disappeared as a threat. W. H. Sleeman—speaking of course with the
superior wisdom of his newfound knowledge—records a state preceding
revelation with combined horror and incredulity:
While I was in the Civil charge of the district of Nursingpore…no
ordinary robbery or theft could be committed without my being
acquainted with it; nor was there a robber or a thief of the ordinary
kind in the district, with whose character I had not become acquainted
in the discharge of my duty as magistrate; and if any man had then
told me, that a gang of assassins by profession resided in the village
of Kandelee, not four hundred yards from my court, and that [in the]
extensive groves of the village of Mandesur, only one stage from me…
was one of the largest Beles, or places of murder in all India; and
that large gangs from Hindustan and the Deccan used to rendezvous in
these groves, remain in them for many days altogether every year, and
carry their dreadful trade along all the lines of road that pass by
and branch off them, with the knowledge and connivance of the two
landholders by whose ancestors these groves had been planted, I should
have thought him a fool or a mad man; and yet nothing could have been
more true.[38]
Indeed, the entire discourse of thuggee is troped by figures of
darkness, mystery, inscrutability, unpredictability, and unexpected
menace, even as W. H. Sleeman and his assistants are inserted into a
heroic narrative of battle against evil. “Secrecy is indispensable”
for thug ceremonies, and “[a]n impenetrable veil of darkness is thrown
over their atrocities”;[39] “danger was everywhere, unseen and
unexpected” [40] for the Englishmen involved in the anti-thuggee
enterprise (even though Englishmen were known never to be attacked by
thugs); they were like “men isolated in the midst of a dangerous,
trackless and gloomy jungle, without map or compass”;[41] and “[the]
old Thug Associations, which have been now effectually put down in all
parts of India,…would assuredly rise up again, and flourish under the
assurance of religious sanction,…were the strength of the special
police, employed in the suppression, hastily reduced, or its vigilance
relaxed.” [42] Once again, Foucault on the discourse of sex and
sexuality is apropos: “What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact,
is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they
dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting
it as the secret.” [43]
This very obscurity, this elusiveness that characterizes the thug as
discursive object, could and did function as an enabling moment for
the colonial law-and-order machine. Since it could never be decisively
established—given the terms of the discourse—that thuggee had been
extirpated, the need for endless vigilance was ratified. The moral
viability of the civilizing mission, indeed the very ground of its
possibility, is the never-satisfied, endlessly proliferating need for
reform. In the case of thuggee, colonial officials were confirmed in
their belief that the work of civilizing is never done. Thus many
writers warn repeatedly of the dangers of celebrating the demise of
thuggee prematurely; in 1893, Charles Hervey, successor to Colonel W.
H. Sleeman of thuggee fame, was still chasing after thugs. These
officers point not only to the hypnotic lure of thuggee for its
practitioners but also to the fact that native policemen and landlords
are only too anxious to conceal evidence of thug crimes from credulous
British officials overeager to congratulate themselves on the
cessation of this practice and overoptimistic about the all-
encompassing vigilance of colonial power. Thuggee never really goes
away as a present problem as sati might be said to do; it may almost
be said to function as a trope for all that is uncontrollable in the
law-and-order situation. In fact, the construction of hereditary,
pervasive, and socially or religiously sanctioned criminality
inaugurated in the discourse on thuggee reappears throughout the
nineteenth century in the discourse on dacoits, buddhuks, dhatoora
poisoners (all of whom came to occupy the same criminal category as
the thug), and specifically designated criminal tribes and castes.
How else might we understand this absence or unknowability that tropes
the discourse of thuggee? Certainly this simultaneous fear of and
pleasure in the duplicity and omnipresence of the thug deserves some
consideration, especially in light of the questions it raises about
the status of knowledge, subject positions, and representation in the
colonial state. Bhabha’s model of the emergence of shifty civil
subject of the colonial polity through mimicry can be extended here,
it seems to me, to some of the other possibilities of mimicry in the
colonial theater.[44] The situation of the thug is analogous to but
certainly not identical to that of the not quite/not white native—the
thug after all is not mimicking colonial ontology—though his capacity
for traffic in identities and positions is staggering. The instance of
thuggee intimates, I think, that the colonized subject’s mimicry need
not necessarily have the colonizer as its focus in order to function
as menace; mimicry, even if it is mimicry of indigenous subject
positions, frustrates the colonial desire for homogenized, duplicable,
and knowable native subjects in whom subalternity is sought to be
reproduced through the authorized version of mimicry. If there is one
thing that characterizes the thug of the archives, it is the
multiplicity and unpredictability of his manifestations. As we have
seen, it was what was perceived as this faculty for disguise and
invisibility that had to be criminalized by the laws designed to
convict thugs; theoretically there was no such entity as an honest
thug, and many so-called thugs were convicted who were, according to
the official records, engaged in “honest labour.” There is an ongoing
and strenuous endeavor in the discourse of thuggee to interpellate the
thug as an essence, a move which attests to the anxiety of rupture
that subtends the totalizing epistemologies of colonialism. Yet the
thug as discursive object is strikingly resistant to such fixity; he
is all things to all people. If native identity can be staged, can be
plural, then what are the implications for colonial authority and
colonialism’s project of information retrieval? Thuggee, I would
suggest, introduces a disturbance in the paradigm of information
retrieval that often seems dominant in texts like Kim and A Personal
Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, as well as the
notion of native authenticity and ontological purity that is a
governing trope of colonial discourse. The thug, through his capacity
for disguise and impersonation and his skill at negotiating multiple
and competing identities, usurps the colonizer’s privilege of complex
subjectivity and of movement between subject positions and thus can be
read to assume some control over both the construction and flow of
colonial knowledge. So he never becomes fully naturalized as the
disciplinary subject or, in other words, the knowable subject, of the
colonial polity. And thuggee, later rewritten as dacoity, continues to
function within the law-and-order context in the colonial and
postcolonial state formations as a trope for the unruly and
unreformable energies that cannot easily be accommodated to the needs
of the civilizing mission.[45]
• • •
The Law
The writings and reports of W. H. Sleeman, which form the core texts
around which the tale of thuggee is orchestrated, represent a
concerted and monumental effort to illuminate and classify the
obscurity of thuggee. Sleeman emerges, in both nineteenth- and
twentieth-century accounts of thuggee, as the hero of his own story.
Even those works, like George Bruce’s The Stranglers and James
Sleeman’s Thug, or A Million Murders, that purport to be histories of
the thugs rather than biographies, present the account of thuggee as
coextensive with the life of Sleeman. Sleeman emerges from these texts
(and his own, of course) as an exemplary figure in nineteenth-century
criminal and judicial procedures, who undertakes a self-appointed
messianic task of uncovering and reading. Nothing in his story happens
by chance. The discovery of the scope of thuggee as a result of
Feringheea’s confession is (re)written as an inevitability in the task
of reconstructing thuggee, and Sleeman’s anti-thuggee efforts traced
back to the moment of his arrival in India in 1809. All of Sleeman’s
life and work before 1830 is thus written as a prelude to the
climactic scenes of thug hunting and as a preparation for reading the
mysteries of this esoteric Indian cult. Sleeman above all is
transformed in this telling into an almost Saidean figure of
knowledge; he is the shikari (hunter) who, with his gift of languages,
long residence in India without being “Orientalized,” and experience
in war and in settling newly conquered territories, can present an
ideal model of the exegete. Though a crime like thuggee is quite
literally inconceivable to those “living under an efficient
government,” Sleeman is no Inspector Clouseau, no naive Englishman who
stumbles unaware upon a vast organized conspiracy. He knows what he is
looking for; indeed, Tuker’s biography imagines Sleeman becoming the
butt of his colleagues’ jokes during his early years in India because
of his eagerness to “discover” thuggee.[46] In this telling, thuggee
predates Sleeman; indeed, it is as old as India itself. Yet the text
of thuggee remains unread until Sleeman, the reader-as-savior,
provides the hermeneutic key to the mystery. He establishes the
exceptional quality of thuggee, distinguishing it from outlawry,
banditry, and other illegalities necessitated by privation; he
establishes the story of thuggee as a moral narrative and embeds it in
the culture of an Orientalist India.
The man whose ideal was, like that of a Sherlock Holmes, “to be
everywhere, and to see everything,” [47] proved phenomenally successful
—in his own terms—at cracking the code of thuggee. He showed a
remarkable capacity—far greater than that of Sherwood or even that of
the few officers who had harassed the thugs in the early decades of
the century—to globalize and codify discrete accounts of crimes in
different times and places into a metanarrative of hereditary crime.
On the evidence of approvers, he created gigantic and detailed “family
trees” of captured and uncaptured thugs that provided copious details
of each man’s crimes, place of origin, place in the caste hierarchy,
and personal and professional antecedents; he also mapped out all the
bhils (places of slaughter and burial) in central India. Every thug
could then be located on Sleeman’s gigantic grid, and information and
operations were centralized. The local knowledge of the approvers now
became part of a giant signifying chain. For the thug, there was no
escape: his history and his nature were always already known to the
all-seeing eyes of the colonial bureaucracy and criminal-justice
system; his experience formed a narrative even before he made his
confession and was in no way dependent on it. As Ameer Ali says in
Confessions of a Thug, “The man unfolded a roll of paper written in
Persian, and read a catalogue of crime, of murders, every one of which
I knew to be true; a faithful record it was of my past life, with but
few omissions.” [48] Sleeman also prepared a dictionary of Ramasee,
the secret language of the criminal fraternity, with a vocabulary made
up entirely of descriptions of criminal actions. This linguistic,
geographic, and genealogical grid left out little that was germane to
the needs of criminal justice in colonial India:
I have, I believe, entered in this vocabulary every thing to which
Thugs in any part of India have thought it necessary to assign a
peculiar term; and every term peculiar to their associations with
which I have yet become acquainted. I am satisfied that there is no
term, no rite, no ceremony, no opinion, no omen or usage that they
have intentionally concealed from me; and if any have been
accidentally omitted after the numerous narratives that I have had to
record, and cases to investigate, they can be but comparatively very
few and unimportant.[49]
The doctrine of thuggee was not simply a novel yet apposite way of
reading Indian criminality at a moment when the pressures to reform
the East India Company by reforming India were particularly marked.
The consequences of the discovery of thuggee were, in other words, not
simply a philosophical reconstellation of Indian criminality. Thuggee
also gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of policing and
surveillance techniques, as well as ethnographic documentation. Like
the system it purported to study, the discourse on thuggee was
totalizing in its scope. In the juridical domain, thuggee was defined
as an “exceptional case”; this enabled the establishment of a
radically new machinery of arrest, conviction, and punishment in thug
trials. The production of penal truth in thug trials proved, as we
have seen, notoriously difficult. Since thugs were peripatetic
operatives, who always committed their crimes far from home and
disposed of their plunder quickly, evidence was not only destroyed but
questions were raised about jurisdictional authority. Local
functionaries were not just uncooperative; many were allegedly bound
by a utilitarian calculus to thug gangs. In addition, the relatives of
the putative victims displayed no zeal in the punishment of crime or
the redress of wrongs; the vast majority refused to identify those
missing as murdered at all. This uncooperative behavior was attributed
to their fatalistic acceptance of all disasters (including,
apparently, cholera, poisonous snakes, and sudden death). Even when
thugs were captured, convicting them was rendered even more
troublesome by the fact that Muslim criminal law disallowed the
testimony of approvers.
The lack of independent witnesses, the unavailability in many cases of
both bodies and booty—the sheer paucity of positivist evidence, in
other words—could only be resolved in one way. The most important
criminal conspiracy of the century (of all time, some of the authors
claimed) could be adequately engaged only by a new conception of law.
Many of the tactics adopted by those spearheading the antithug drive
were not novel but had been pioneered earlier in Bengal; however, it
was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department’s use of these tactics that
proved not only successful but replicable.[50] Since the law as
currently defined made the complicity of individuals in particular
crimes almost impossible to establish, specific criminal acts were no
longer punishable as such. Instead, it was a subject position, or
rather, an ontology, that was criminalized. It was enough to be a
thug, without actually being convicted of a specific act of thuggee,
to be liable to the exorbitant measures of the Thuggee and Dacoity
Department. As Radhika Singha wrote, “The strangest feature of this
enactment was the use of a cant term ‘Thugs’ without explaining what
precisely the offence of ‘Thuggee’ was. That such a term was
acceptable at a time when a penal code upholding precision and
exactness was on the agenda is an indication of the success of a
publicist campaign in official circles.” [51] Act XXX of 1836 directed
that any person who was convicted of “having belonged to a gang of
Thugs, [was] liable to the penalty of imprisonment for life; and
[that] any person, accused of the offence, made punishable by the Act,
[was] liable to be tried by any Court, which would have been competent
to try him, if his offence had been committed within the district
where that Court sits.” [52] (Act XXIV of 1843 extended the punitive
sanctions of the thuggee laws to those found guilty of belonging to
dacoit gangs.) Act XXX also dispensed with the last vestiges of Muslim
criminal law (which is said to have provided greater protections for
the accused and greater clemency for the convicted than the Thuggee
and Dacoity Department thought advisable for those standing trial as
thugs) by doing away with the necessity for the fatwa (formal legal
opinion) of the Muslim law officer. It applied with retrospective
effect, and it established special courts for the trial of thugs—
including those captured outside company territory, within the
kingdoms of the Indian princes—often with special magistrates
appointed by the governor-general. It permitted the arrest of entire
families, including women and children, as legitimate means of
entrapping active (male) thugs; since thuggee was supposed to be a
family affair anyway, transmitted in the genes and passed on from
father to son, wives and children were also fit targets for the
colonial state’s punitive and corrective measures. The act admitted
the testimony of approvers in lieu of the testimony of independent
witnesses (which had been disallowed under Islamic law), a move which
created a remarkable mechanics of truth production and conviction.
(Act XIX of 1837, under the direction of Macaulay, did away with this
“dual standard of evidence” in criminal law by making the testimony of
approvers admissible in all courts of law, not just those prosecuting
cases of thuggee.)[53] Yet it is by no means to be assumed that
empiricism and observation were peripheral to the process, though it
was observation of a very carefully demarcated kind; there is in the
colonial archive an overwhelming weight given to the experiential
dimension of the knowledge of such canonical figures as Sleeman. All
disagreements encountered on the British side are attributed to
inexperience, to the lack of a proper interpretive framework within
which to place certain kinds of discoveries, or to a willful
ingenuousness about the success of British rule.
The definition of thuggee as a form of hereditary, corporate, and
religiously sanctioned identity allowed for no appeal by a thug
convicted under its special decrees; in theory—and in practice—there
was no such entity as an innocent thug. All those identified as thugs
by approvers’ testimony were automatically guilty, even if no specific
crimes could be proved against them and even if there was no (other)
evidence of their ever having associated with other thugs. Once the
thug hunts began, criminal activity was not always necessary for
arrest and conviction; even those “thugs” engaged in “honest
labour” (a theoretical impossibility, given the terms of the
discourse) were rounded up, tried, convicted, and imprisoned since the
compelling, hereditary lure of thuggee was always latent in the thug.
An overwhelmingly high proportion of those arrested were convicted, a
fact which validated, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department believed, the
thoroughness of its efforts and the justice of its cause.
Confessions were key to the discursive constitution of thuggee; not so
much at the actual thug trials as in the manifold accounts of thuggee
that were produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Meadows
Taylor’s novel, as far as structural organization is concerned, reads
not very differently from the nonfictional official accounts of
thuggee: a brief introduction followed by hundreds of pages of
confession, interspersed more and more intermittently by the
narrator’s moral commentary. The confessional mode lent itself nicely
to the narrative conventions and imperatives of the nineteenth-century
English novel, which encompassed both the Newgate novel and the
spiritual autobiography.
One of the best approvers, Bukhtawar, provided a confession (which I
quoted at the beginning of this chapter) that was a model for all thug
confessions: “I am a Thug, my father and grandfather were Thugs, and I
have thugged with many. Let the government employ me and I will do its
work.” [54] The confessions serve not to elicit what is not already
known but to authenticate and authorize official knowledge of thuggee
in general and specific crimes in particular, as well as to produce
the thug as (colonial) criminal subject. For Foucault, the confession
“transcend[s] all other evidence; an element in the calculation of the
truth, it [is] also the act by which the accused accept[s] the charge
and recognize[s] its truth; it transform[s] an investigation carried
out without him into a voluntary affirmation. Through the confession,
the accused himself [takes] part in the ritual of producing penal
truth.” [55] In the eyes of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, a
failure to confess was evidence less of innocence than of hardihood
and an acquaintance with the byzantine ramifications of Indian
criminal law.
And yet these confessions that dominate and drive all accounts of
thuggee are not confessions as such, but approver’s testimonies; the
two, as Shahid Amin so appositely reminds us, are not identical. For
while the confession proper seeks to dilute the guilt of the
confessing subject, the approver’s testimony, to be fully credible in
the eyes of the law, must implicate its speaker as fully as possible
in the illegality being described.[56]
The fact that approvers’ testimony was “tainted” and that they might
either wittingly or unwittingly implicate the innocent was undeniably
an issue, though anxiety on the score was aired only to be promptly
shown up as unfounded. The thuggee records continually stress the ways
in which the truth of each approver’s testimony was tested against all
the others. But even in these official accounts, it does not escape
remark that the approvers’ testimony regarding dates and other details
do not always match,[57] though all discursive contradictions are
always sought to be smoothed away. Bruce, who is the only one to raise
overtly the possibility of the conviction of the innocent, blames not
the system but its most visible instruments, the approvers: “Were
innocent men convicted upon the evidence of revengeful informers?.…
Those Thugs who were no longer free to strangle on the roads may have
conspired together to send victims to the gallows instead, for by
killing in this way they could at once show Kali their continued
devotion and save their own lives.” [58] These testimonies were not
required, under Act XXX, to be matched against the reports of
independent witnesses or against the weight of circumstantial
evidence; and none of the accused had the benefit of counsel, so the
approvers were never cross-examined by anyone other than the officers
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department.
Even though the approvers were indispensable for forming the text of
thuggee and for prosecuting thugs, their own status remained somewhat
nebulous. On making “a full and ingenuous confession,” an approver
would be eligible to have his sentence of hanging or transportation
commuted. But an approver could never be released, since the lure of
the rumal made him irreclaimable for honest society. It was also
necessary that all approvers be convicted (not just arrested) thugs,
since it was contrary to the nature of British justice to hold its
subjects indefinitely without trial. How, though, could the government
convict approvers when it had no evidence except for what they
provided? The solution was to advise approvers to plead guilty to the
general charge of being thugs, under the provisions of Act XXX, rather
than to plead guilty to the charge of committing specific capital
crimes (which could result in the death penalty); this would ensure
their conviction, and then they could be held for life without
questioning the authority that held them.[59] It was easier and more
useful to hold approvers than to hang them; and they needed to be held
forever in order to ensure the uninterrupted production of truths
about thuggee. The above proceeding did away with the necessity of a
regular trial (that is to say, one conducted under the special courts
established by Act XXX) by having one whose outcome was known in
advance; and it guaranteed that there would be no escape from the
government’s mercy.
Truth production and conviction was only part of the job of the
Thuggee and Dacoity Department. Rehabilitation was also part of the
program, though the official wisdom on rehabilitation was marked by
considerable ambivalence. To be a part of a moral narrative, the
antithug campaign could not be purely punitive in nature, especially
in the instance of those prisoners who had not been convicted of
particular capital crimes. At the same time, if thugs were hereditary
murderers who found the call to blood irresistible, they were not
reformable subjects. The government’s response to the problem of
identity and rehabilitation was, even in its own terms, a markedly
uneven and patently hierarchized one. Some of the most distinguished
among the thugs were recruited into the police force. Some others were
rewarded by W. H. Sleeman by being allowed to live near him with their
families and followers in his compound, an arrangement about which
Freitag observes: “The similarity between the spatial and
psychological configurations of his compound and those of thag-
landlord relations in a village is not coincidental.” [60] Other thug
approvers and prisoners and their families were settled in colonies
and put to manual labor; from being dishonest and itinerant, they were
compelled to be poor and settled. The focus of reform was the children
of the thugs: they were taught various skills, though not taught to
read and write (because it would make them dissatisfied with their
condition). The sexuality of the sons of the thugs was strictly
regulated; they were not allowed to marry and breed a new generation
of thugs. (A female thug was a rarity and was, presumably, a less
potent conduit of the genetic material of hereditary criminality than
was a male.)
Mature thugs, however, were less easily assimilable into a regime of
morality and normalcy. Even captured thugs and informers emerge in the
reports as notoriously impervious to all efforts at moral
transformation. They repudiate repentance and reform, ascribing their
cooperation entirely to pragmatic motives and describing their
activities in professional terms, without the obligatory change of
heart normally central to the confessional narrative. Not only that,
they understand their present circumstances in terms of their failure
to observe omens and follow proscriptions and to be fully professional
about their work; the official success against themselves is simply
the result of the East India Company’s iqbal (good fortune), not its
moral or religious superiority or even its greater strategic skill.
They seem to refuse in other words to be drawn into the moral
narrative of the civilizing mission (though it must always be
remembered that the production of the thug as unreformable subject was
not necessarily contrary to the aims of the discourse on thuggee). The
following is a typical exchange; the questioner is presumably W. H.
Sleeman, the respondents thug informers:
Q:
If Davey’s displeasure visits all who punish Thugs, how is it that you
all escape so well?
Moradun:
Davey’s anger visited us when we were seized. That was the effect of
her resentment; she cast us off then and takes no notice of us now.
Q:
And if you were to return to Thuggee, she would still guide and
protect you?
Moradun:
Yes, but what gang would now receive us?
Q:
And are you not afraid to assist in suppressing Thuggee?
Moradun:
No; we see God is assisting you, and that Davey has withdrawn her
protection on account of our transgressions. We have sadly neglected
her worship. God knows in what it will all end.
Q:
True, God only knows; but we hope it will end in the entire
suppression of this wicked and foolish system; and in the conviction
on your part that Davey has really nothing to do with it.
Nasir:
That Davey instituted Thuggee, and supported it as long as we attended
to her omens, and observed the rules framed by the wisdom of our
ancestors, nothing in the world can ever make us doubt.[61]
• • •
The Englishman
This section, on The Deceivers, John Masters’s novel about thuggee,
serves as a (deconstructive) supplement to the official narrative of
the thug, in taking up some of the questions and figures that occupy a
recessive status in that account. Here we see that if the thug of the
archive provides one (admittedly slippery and fixed at the same time)
model of staging identities, there is another model that is crucial
for a comprehension of the thug-English engagement. This model is the
obverse of the process that generates the mimic man of colonial
discourse; it is the lure of going native. The term here both
resonates with and fails to correspond to the mimetic model provided
by Burton in the last chapter.[62] The will to mimicry governs
(Indian) thug and Englishman alike, as we shall see in The Deceivers,
where the plot is driven—as is the thug archive—by a fascination with
the absent and never fully recuperable thug. In engaging this
scenario, the novel also recasts the paradigmatic narrative of
mimicry, in which the native may mimic the colonizer but without any
access to essential Englishness, while the colonizer can trade
identities freely, with no strings attached, without actually being
interpellated as a colonized subject. The Deceivers makes manifest the
precariousness of such self-possession.
The dialectical dependence of the fantasy of complete knowledge on the
paranoid fear of native inscrutability is staged in this novel, where
there is a suturing of the ostensibly antithetical figures of the
English policeman and the thug approver. This novel allows for an
examination of the tension between the received wisdom about thuggee
and some of the marginal issues located at the pressure points of the
official discourse. This novel tells the story of William Savage, a
mediocre and distinctly unheroic English magistrate. Wracked by sexual
and professional anxieties, an alienated subject of the British
colonial machine in India, and sneakingly sympathetic to such Indian
customs as sati, he transforms himself into the exemplary colonial
officer by taking on—albeit temporarily—the calling of the thug. At
the urging of his young wife, Mary, he initially takes on the persona
of the absent Gopal the weaver in order to save Gopal’s wife from
sati; he, however, meets the renegade thug Hussein and decides to
continue as Gopal in order to track down the thugs. Once he assumes
the role, he finds himself powerfully drawn to the practice and goes
on to become a noted thug leader. He does not continue as a thug, of
course—even though at one point Hussein suggests to Savage that the
East India Company become a sponsor of thugs, like the other rulers of
the land; with a little help from his newly (re)constructed
Englishness and his friends, he returns to propriety at the end. (The
Merchant Ivory film production is even more skeptical than the novel
is of the progressivist teleology of the civilizing mission, as well
as of its “success”: in the film, George Angelsmith is led off in
chains, but Savage, estranged from his wife and his Christian god and
unable to prevent the sati that he has actually made possible, is
destined to be perpetually haunted by Kali.)
The Deceivers considers the unspoken and unspeakable possibility that
subtends so much of colonial discourse: what if identity can be
unhinged from race and national origin? And if (racial/national)
identity is unstable and subject to negotiation with each crossing of
a frontier, then in the name of what telos or destiny does Englishness
speak? What if, as R. Radhakrishnan so compellingly asks, on the
subject of diasporic, transnational culture, “identities and
ethnicities are not a matter of fixed and stable selves but rather the
results and products of fortuitous travels and recontextualizations?…
Is ethnicity nothing but, to use the familiar formula, what ethnicity
does?” [63] In the more lurid enactments of this alternative history,
a Kurtz, representing the loftiest intellectual and ethical
possibilities of the Enlightenment, can “go native” in the Dark
Continent. But, closer to “home,” there were, as Arnold has revealed,
more troubling English subjects—those poor white orphans and vagrants
(who were to have their own moment of glory in Kim) who lived lives
not often distinguishable from those of lower-class Indians.[64]
William Savage, the protagonist of The Deceivers, is located somewhere
between these two subject positions.
Despite the putative restoration to wholeness, Englishness, and
legality of William Savage at the close of the story, the narrative
nonetheless opens up a space for investigating the “double and split
subject” of the colonial enunciation, for what Bhabha calls—in the
context of the nation’s fissured enunciation—“dissemi-nation”: “a
space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the
heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic
authorities, and tense cultural locations.” [65] As in the case of so
many other Englishmen, Savage will have to turn to Indianness in order
to return to or consolidate or improve his English self; in doing so,
he will come back as a new and more English Englishman, but he will
also, temporarily at least, be transformed into a border subject,
changed by his experience of Indianness, surrendering illusions of
full autonomy and Englishness in the crossing of boundaries. Here I
invoke Burton again as a point of reference. Burton had an
occasionally vexed relationship with national identity: his ancestry
was partly Irish and Welsh, and he grew up on the Continent, only
coming to live in England in his late teens. Yet for him identity,
whatever guises it might assume and however far it might roam, is
usually more persuasively anchored than is that of Masters’s
protagonist in an imperial Englishness. Burton can be, at different
times, a West Asian merchant or a Muslim hajji, but his identities are
clearly hierarchized and more manipulable than Savage’s. While the
success of his passing is always, in a sense, conditional upon his
being a man from elsewhere/nowhere, he can also claim nativeness as
his own production, wrenching an (imaginary) autonomy from the
dominion of necessity. Savage passes through Indianness en route to
Englishness, but, unlike Burton, he cannot pass in and out without
constraint. Indianness, while indispensable to Englishness, must also
be violently cast out if Englishness is to be secure(d). In The
Deceivers, identity is the locus of strain and contradiction. For
Savage, identity cannot be expansive, assimilationist, and pluralist;
each new identity competes with and displaces the last. That is why
Savage can at the end afford to take no prisoners or recruit any
approvers from among his erstwhile comrades; the thugs whom he has led
and who are now pursuing him must be wiped out in an act of punitive
and frenzied brutality that not only precludes the need for approvers
but also does away with any witnesses against, and rem(a)inders of,
his own thug self.
The Deceivers stages, indeed foregrounds, the positionality and
politics of that ordinarily self-effacing hero of thug narration, the
investigator, and the plurality of determinations that produces him.
In this context, Gayatri Spivak’s cautionary reminders about the
urgent necessity of disallowing the neutrality of the intellectual or
investigator should be borne in mind. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
she proffers a critique of the sanctioned myopia of the Foucault and
Deleuze of “Intellectuals and Power,” who are unable or unwilling to
acknowledge the complicity of the intellectual in the mechanisms that
produce representations of subaltern subjects and groups and who fail
to recognize that subaltern subjects are constrained to fashion
themselves in terms of already scripted epistemologies.[66] Her
introduction to Mahasweta Devi’s “Draupadi” resonates with, and
provides another useful point of entry into, this problematic of
reading and engagement; the usefulness of deconstruction, she tells
us, lies in “the recognition,…of provisional and intractable starting
points in any investigative effort; its disclosure of complicities
where a will to knowledge would create oppositions; its insistence
that in disclosing complicities the critic-as-subject is herself
complicit with the object of her critique; its emphasis upon ‘history’
and upon the ethico-political as the ‘trace’ of that complicity—the
proof that we do not inhabit a clearly defined critical space free of
such traces.” [67] Where in the archives the English scribe was
progressively effaced from the scene of the crime as well as the scene
of writing, no such modesty is permitted the protagonist of Masters’s
novel. The novel accents above all his position of enunciation. He
cannot be, as in the normative thug account, the neutral conduit of
something clearly identified as a thug consciousness: the thug’s voice
cannot but inscribe Savage as both subject and object of his own
discourse.
The central aspect of Savage’s mission is not merely to bear witness;
he must above all produce a record, transform that irreducible
obscurity, that absence that is Indian corporate criminal activity,
into what Spivak terms an “interpretable text.” This of course was the
primary gift of Sleeman and his associates to the criminal justice
system in colonial India—to synthesize various and discrepant
occurrences as a semiosis under centralized control; against thuggee—
conceived of as a vast, well-articulated, and centralized conspiracy—
could be opposed the concentrated power/knowledge of the state. What
is required is a text and a model of reading that is reproducible in
the different temporalities and contexts of the colonial polity in
India. However, the novel intimates the limitations and complexities
of authorial intention. Savage produces his account in a condition of
profound subjective instability, opening his text up to multiple and
mutually contentious readings: “He had met hundreds of other
Deceivers, and the notes were a complete tale of all he had seen and
heard and done; of all the Deceivers who had engaged in any action,
with their descriptions, habits, and homes; of each murder, and how it
had gone, and how it might have been prevented—or improved upon. The
words could be read for either purpose, according to the spirit of the
reader” (p. 223). Above all, Savage’s account draws attention to the
transactional nature of reading. What ought to be a classic of
information retrieval and a master text on thuggee for colonial
authority is also a text for other thugs, a manual for reproducing
thug practice. Savage’s text (within the text of the Masters novel),
even though cast in the model of strict representational realism, is
susceptible of an Other reading; its meanings are ambushed, deflected,
and augmented en route to a destination it can never reach. The
Thuggee and Dacoity Department strove to produce, in its extensive
records on thug affiliation and activity, a text without nuances or
fissures, something that was not susceptible of any misreadings or
contesting interpretations. It sought, in its meticulous record
keeping and its attempts to square all the approvers’ testimonies with
each other and make them speak with one voice, to produce a record
that would have what was presumed to be the authority of material
fact. But for Savage, at least, it is impossible to engage in such an
enterprise without also inscribing his own complicity in his
testimonial. In this respect, he does approximate the classic approver
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, who cannot bear witness against
others without simultaneously bearing witness against himself.
While the novel insists that only impersonation can yield the truth,
it also illuminates the heterodox desires that underlie the exercise
of going native. Moreover, this impersonation is quite detached from
any agency on the part of William Savage and from any sense of
originary identity. Forced into the disguise of the Indian weaver
Gopal (by the patel [village headman] Chandra Sen) in an unwilling and
ultimately fruitless attempt to save a would-be sati, he is recognized
as an impostor by Hussein. Hussein is ideal material for an approver:
he has brains, courage, and resourcefulness, and he is remarkably
eager to undo the institution of thuggee, but his testimony alone is
not enough to compel belief in the practice. So he recruits an
Englishman to the anti-thuggee cause, knowing that only he can be
fully convincing as a figure of knowledge. And this knowledge can only
be acquired experientially, and by going outside the law as currently
constituted, as Savage learns when he follows the more conventional
methods of information retrieval. As Hussein says,
Several times some English official or other has got hold of
information about us. Then he has chased us out of his district, and
reported, I suppose. But they’ve never worked together, and it always
blew over. They’ll never destroy us until one of them finds out
everything, and forces the Lat Sahib [the governor-general] to believe
everything, and plans a campaign to cover all India. And that one who
finds out must fear Kali, or he will not understand her. But he must
not love her. (p. 208)
Unable to ignore the thugs as the other English functionaries are
ready to do, eager to discard the Englishness he so uncomfortably
inhabits, and pressured by Hussein and Mary, Savage decides to
continue as Gopal the weaver, who, as it turns out, is also Gopal the
thug. For an unsuccessful and insecure man like Savage, wracked by
anxieties about (heterosexual) masculinity and Englishness, it is the
very abdication of authority involved in playing a thug that is
peculiarly attractive; inhabiting the subject position of the most
criminalized and most scrutinized indigenous subject holds out the
promise of psychic satisfactions not ordinarily available to colonial
authority.
The novel dallies with the idea (as many crime fictions often do,
though less explicitly) of the fragility of the barriers that separate
the custodian of law and morality from the criminal. It actually makes
available the proposition (though it has to drop it at the end) that
Savage is at heart a thug and that his initiation into thuggee by
Hussein is no accident. He takes naturally to the trade, is attended
by good omens, and enjoys a facility of thought, speech, and action
that is alien to his English self. The idea of mimicry itself is
transformed in his performance of it and begins to assume to assume
the contours of possession, if not those of originary identity. There
is no difference for him between the mimicry of an identity and the
identity itself.
In order to pass for an Indian or a thug (ultimately these two
categories are collapsed, as we have seen in the other narratives of
thuggee) Savage must slough off certain normative aspects of
Englishness in the tropics—the militant Christianity, the revulsion
against disease and cruelty, the reforming impulse. He must instead
embrace what is described as the nondualistic moral economy of
Hinduism that sees both creation and destruction as suffused with the
divine. Needless to say, the psychic territory of “India” is always
coextensive with Hinduism, despite the fact that Muslims as well as
other religious groups are shown to practice thuggee as much as do
Hindus; and this Hinduism is consistently and exclusively fetishized
as blood lust and hyperbolic sexuality. As an Indian, and Hindu, and
thug, Savage must participate in a series of paradoxes. He must be
Indian, and thug, to return more securely to Englishness, and
legitimacy; he must allow evil to be done in order to do good; and,
since the contexts of legality are always shifting and are
particularly in need of redefinition in India, he must go outside the
law in order to uphold the law. Always relatively indifferent to the
finer points of legal procedure and defendants’ rights (here written
as an inaptitude for “paperwork”), the antithug drive allows him to
rethink the concepts of justice and legality in the colonial context,
where it is notoriously difficult to punish crime anyway:
“What does justice mean?”…“Fair trial, the rules of evidence, no
double hazard, no hearsay, and so on and so on? Or protection against
injustice, against violence? The means, or the end?.…Oh, I know we
have no evidence about them yet. That’s just what I mean. I tell you,
sir, they cannot be run down within our rule of law. Indians aren’t
English. “No man dies by the hand of man,” they think, so they won’t
give evidence because they are not angry with the murderers. They
think men who kill are driven by God to kill. And there are too many
jurisdictions, too far to go to give evidence, too long to wait. We’ve
got to go outside the law to catch them, to prevent more
murders.” (pp. 128–29)
Caught between a colonial government and an Indian populace unwilling,
for different reasons, to do what is necessary to end thuggee and
pressured, moreover, by Hussein, Savage becomes Gopal again, only more
completely in earnest this time. In his new role Savage discovers that
passing for a thug involves a radical (re)contextualization of his
once and future Englishness. Moreover, as Gopal he has to inhabit a
role and a history that is already in place. Impersonation involves
not freedom but strict adherence to a scripted identity; he cannot
start afresh, or make himself up as he goes along. He discovers that
as Gopal, he is already an expert strangler and strategist, destined
to be “the greatest the Deceivers have ever known” (p. 218). And once
he participates in the sacramental ritual of gur-sharing and tastes
the transubstantiated body of the goddess, his allegiance and destiny
are fixed. Savage is born to thuggee, as his comfort in his role of
thug demonstrates; indeed, his story undoes the usual weighting of
“self” and “role” in the Englishman’s subjectivity, since he is more
convincing (to himself, and apparently to Indians and Englishmen
alike) and comfortable as Indian and thug than as Englishman and
Christian. Hussein, who is more percipient than he about the
complexities of subject formation, reminds him that “free will” is an
adjunct (or an illusion) of Englishness alone. Savage must find out
that intentions guarantee nothing; not even the Englishman, once he
has decided to play the Indian, can escape the formulaic constraints
of Indian/thug ontology: “You are a Deceiver, from this dawn on for
ever. A strangler. Only stranglers may stand on the blanket: you stood
on it. Only stranglers may take the consecrated sugar of communion:
you took it. It doesn’t matter what a man thinks he is. When he eats
consecrated sugar, on the blanket, in front of the pick-axe, he is a
strangler, because Kali enters into him.” (p. 182)
Such a script also demands of course that he confront his double, the
original Gopal. In order to protect himself and in order to wrest some
autonomy for himself, Savage strangles Gopal and thus becomes Gopal
himself. But strangling the “real Gopal” only makes him more fully
Gopal, for he can now develop into his predestined role. From this
point on, all paradoxes are held in abeyance. From being complicit in
murder through inaction Savage proceeds to strangulation himself and
becomes, in an extraordinary take on the man-who-would-be-king vision
that tropes so much colonial discourse, a noted leader of thugs. Like
Burton the Muslim, Savage the thug is characterized not simply by
mastery but by an extraordinary surplus of subject effects. (Unlike
Burton, though, he is tempted, and he is corrupted—although not
irredeemably.)
The desire for Gopal, which is closely articulated with the desire to
be Gopal, is mediated, interestingly enough, through the figure of the
sati who frames the novel and who foregrounds the question of gender
that has been bypassed or placed under erasure in the thuggee
archives. I find the entry into thuggee through sati to be a
particularly productive conjuncture for the problematic of mimicry,
identity, and the colonizer’s desire. The sati, most obviously,
provides an occasion for access to Gopal. The sati has to be set up in
the beginning so that Savage can play Gopal; and then it has to be
deferred so that he can continue to play Gopal and go in search of
Gopal. Her presence in the novel displaces homoerotic desire and
returns Savage to heterosexuality. It also ensures his successful
miming of Indianness and Englishness. But the consolidation of
heterosexuality, masculinity, and Englishness demands not simply her
presence but her death. She is insistently narrativized as a voluntary
sati; she is a romanticized figure, whose sacrifice Savage has no
desire to thwart. He desires her, and his desire for her takes the
form of wanting her to die for him, which he ensures by killing Gopal.
In this way, he can enjoy the satisfactions of Indian as well as
English masculinity. As an Indian, he can have the woman die for him
(and deliver him of his sexual anxieties); but being fully Indian also
means that he himself must die, for the sati requires a dead husband.
As an Englishman, therefore, he can distance himself from the violent
implications of Indianness. The sati’s death releases him from the
exigent identity of the Indianness into which he had temporarily
descended and frees him to enact the rituals of Englishness with
greater plausibility. The most convincing Englishman—as indeed the
most expert thug—turns out to be the mimic man after all.
• • •
Afterword
Masters’s novel serves in many ways as the most apt of epilogues to
the colonial accounts of thuggee, given its excavation of the erotic/
affective and metaphysical seductions of that institution—and of the
thug—for English masculinity in the tropics and given its suggestion
that the lure of the thug for the Englishman may be as compelling as
that of thuggee for the (Indian) thug. It charges the project of
unveiling and chastisement with a profusion of guilty, even delirious,
appetites and obsessions that call for continual incitement and
consummation. It does not, of course, fail to play upon the received
colonial narrative of thuggee as timeless Indian duplicity; but it
also reconfigures it as an erotic tale of the fraternal, closeted, and
homicidal desire that drives Indian and English impersonation. Perhaps
most remarkably, it showcases the seamless self-referentiality of the
discourse on thuggee (as evidenced in an archive composed of
biographies, histories, novels, legal records, and rumors) by
collapsing the thug and the thug hunter into a single figure; with a
literalism quite unprecedented in any of the other texts it confirms
that wherever there is an Englishman there is a thug.
Notes
1. Radhika Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign
of the 1830s and Legal Innovation,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (February
1993): 83.
2. Guha, “Historiography of Colonial India.”
3. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern
Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit
Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). Also see Ranajit
Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Deconstructing Historiography,” in In
Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Routledge, 1987), 204.
5. This is not to suggest that Bhabha forecloses on any of these other
possibilities.
6. James Hutton, A Popular Account of the Thugs and Dacoits, the
Hereditary Garroters and Gang-Robbers of India (London: W. H. Allen,
1857), 90–91.
7. Reproduced in George Bruce, The Stranglers: The Cult of Thuggee and
Its Overthrow in British India (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1968), 13–26.
8. Philip Meadows Taylor, “Introduction,” in Confessions of a Thug
(London: Richard Bentley, 1858 [1839]), 5.
9. A. J. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers (London: Robert Hale,
1959), 15.
10. See Francis C. Tuker, The Yellow Scarf: The Story of the Life of
Thuggee Sleeman (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), 197–98.
11. Geoff Bennington, “Postal Politics and the Institution of the
Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New
York: Routledge, 1990).
12. Sandria Freitag argues that thugs were—in contrast to members of
criminal castes and tribes—regarded as “admirable and awesome
opponents.” See her “Crime in the Social Order of Colonial North
India,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 2 (1991): 227–61. While some of
this horrified admiration does inform Wightman and Meadows Taylor’s
representations, such admiration is more usually carefully repressed;
there is, in fact, an interesting tension between the awe-inspiring
(if damnable) thug of these texts and the contemptible figure that the
other texts strenuously accentuate.
13. James Sleeman, Thug, or A Million Murders (London: Sampson Low,
Marston, 1933 [1920]), 5.
14. Sir George MacMunn, The Religions and Hidden Cults of India
(London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), 172–73. See, too, Meadows
Taylor, “Introduction,” i:
At the present time it [the novel] may deserve a more attentive study;
recent events will have too well prepared the Reader’s mind for
implicit belief in all the systematic atrocities narrated.…It will
scarcely fail to be remarked, with what consummate art such numerous
bodies of men were organized, and for a long time kept absolutely
unknown, while committing acts of cruelty and rapine hardly
conceivable;…Captain Taylor’s Introduction…may…furnish some clue to
the successful concealment of a rebellion, in the existence of which
many of our oldest and most experienced officers, and men high in
authority, absolutely withheld belief, till too late and too cruelly
convinced of their fatal error.
15. Katherine Mayo, Mother India (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927).
16. Hiralal Gupta, “A Critical Study of the Thugs and Their
Activities,” Journal of Indian History, 37, part 2 (August 1959),
serial no. 110: 169–77.
17. Sandria B. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority in North
India,” in Crime and Criminality in British India, ed. Anand Yang
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 158–61.
18. Stewart N. Gordon, “Scarf and Sword: Thugs, Marauders, and State-
Formation in 18th Century Malwa,” Indian Economic and Social History
Review 6 (December 1969): 403–29. It should be noted that Gordon does
not ascribe the activities of the marauding groups to “Oriental
anarchy” or oppose “marauders” to “states,” arguing that both entities
had the same ends in view and were using the same methods of
legitimation, though with differing degrees of success.
19. J. Sleeman, Thug, 108.
20. David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras 1859–1947
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3. He notes the transformation
of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department into the Central Intelligence
Department in 1904; this body shifted its initial focus on wandering
gangs and criminals to “the collation of political intelligence,
relaying information about political leaders and organizations to the
various provinces concerned” (p. 187).
21. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 142.
22. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 230.
23. Ibid., 234.
24. Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque
(Karachi and London: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1850]), 1: 153.
25. Kali became a figure of increasing respectability in the
nineteenth century; before this she was a deity adored (in Bengal at
least) largely though not exclusively by tribal and other subaltern
subjects, including thugs and dacoits. It is not clear if Kali was
identical with other female deities addressed as Devi or Bhawani.
26. See, for instance, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Castes of Mind,”
Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 59: “It is increasingly clear that
colonialism in India produced new forms of society that have been
taken to be traditional, and that caste itself as we now know it is
not a residual survival of ancient India but a specifically colonial
form of civil society. As such it both justifies and maintains the
colonial vision of an India where religion transcends politics,
society resists change, and the state awaits its virgin birth in the
postcolonial era.”
27. This had not, of course, been entirely true for Burton, perhaps
because of his sojourn in Sind or his early studies in Arabic. As
might be expected, the particular discourse being engaged would
determine the Hinduness, or otherwise, of the territory designated
“India.”
28. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions,” in The Nature and Context of
Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
29. John Masters, The Deceivers (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1952),
240. All further references to this novel will be incorporated
parenthetically into the text.
30. Charles Hervey, Some Records of Crime (Being the Diary of a Year,
Official and Particular, of an Officer of the Thuggee and Dacoitie
Police) (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1892), 1: 50–51.
31. Ranjit Sen, Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary
Resistance, 1757–1793 (Calcutta: Ratna Prakashan, 1988), 2–3.
32. Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by
Birth,’” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27, no. 2 (1990):
131–64; 27, no. 3 (1990): 259–87.
33. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 1: 43.
34. Radhika Singha argues that “the introduction of laws dealing with
ill-defined ‘criminal communities’ introduced certain fissures into
the ideology of the equal, abstract and universal legal
subject” (“‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 86, n. 10).
35. Edward Thornton, Illustrations of the History and Practices of the
Thugs (London: W. H. Allen, 1837), 145–46. This frankness is
relatively rare in the writings on thuggee; the issue of the
genuineness of the confessions, though, is an issue in all, judging
from the unfailing vehemence with which the method of conviction
through approvers’ testimony is defended as just, if not
unexceptionable.
36. Ibid., 374.
37. J. Sleeman, Thug, 120.
38. William H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, or a Vocabulary of the Peculiar
Language Used by the Thugs (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Military Orphan
Press, 1836), 32–33.
39. Thornton, Illustrations, 70, 11.
40. Wightman, No Friend for Travellers, 112.
41. J. Sleeman, Thug, 106.
42. William H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk Alias Bagree Dacoits and
Other Gang Robbers by Hereditary Profession (Calcutta: J. C. Sherriff,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1849), 2–3.
43. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 35.
44. Homi Bhabha, “Sly Civility” and “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The
Location of Culture.
45. See Mala Sen, India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi
(New Delhi: Indus/HarperCollins, 1991) for an example of the way in
which the colonial discourse of thuggee (in this instance, Tukar’s
Yellow Scarf) continues, in contemporary India, to frame the way in
which certain forms of collective violence are understood by the law-
and-order machinery of the state.
46. Tuker, Yellow Scarf, 38.
47. William H. Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian
Official, ed. Vincent A. Smith (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford
University Press, 1915), 555.
48. Taylor, Confessions of a Thug, 330.
49. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 3.
50. Freitag, “Collective Crime and Authority,” 146.
51. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 84.
52. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 173. The thuggee act had the
following provisions:
1.Whoever shall be proved to have belonged, either before or after the
passing of this Act, to any gang of Thugs, either within or without
the Territories of the East India Company, shall be punished with
imprisonment for life, with hard labour.
2.And…every person accused of the offence…may be tried by any court,
which would have been competent to try him, if his offence had been
committed within the Zillah where that Court sits, any thing to the
contrary, in any Regulation contained, notwithstanding.
3.And…no Court shall, on a trial of any person accused of the offence…
require any Futwa from any Law Officer.
53. Singha, “‘Providential’ Circumstances,” 136–37.
54. J. Sleeman, Thug, 117.
55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979), 38.
56. Shahid Amin, “Approver’s Testimony, Judicial Discourse: The Case
of Chauri Chaura,” in Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1987).
57. William H. Sleeman, Report on the Depredations Committed by the
Thug Gangs of Upper and Central India (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann,
Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1840). [BACK]
58. Bruce, Stranglers, 154.
59. W. H. Sleeman, Report on Budhuk, 303–5.
60. Freitag, “Crime in the Social Order,” 236. It is said that thugs
had routinely existed in a symbiotic relationship with landlords,
providing military protection and supplying booty from expeditions in
return for land and respectability. [BACK]
61. W. H. Sleeman, Ramaseeana, 186–87.
62. I should add here that the phrase going native is vested in my
paper with a multiplicity of valences; for instance, it encompasses
both the colonialist desire to “pass for” the native and the condition
that signifies racial regression.
63. R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” Transition 54
(1991): 106.
64. David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the
Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7,
no. 2 (1979): 104–27.
65. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins
of the Modern Nations,” in Nation and Narration, 299.
66. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” See Michel Foucault,
“Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and
Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, by Michel Foucault, trans. Donald F. Bouchard
and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205–
17.
67. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi,’
by Mahasweta Devi,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
(New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 180.
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft8s20097j&chunk.id=ch2
turn of the century, is a highly unusual diary of one disciple’s
encounters with his guru and with other disciples over the last four
years (1882–1886) of Ramakrishna’s life. In this text, which is
written in Bengali, Ramakrishna is referred to as thakur, which is
both a common way of designating a Brahman as well as a word meaning
god; “M,” who was a schoolteacher, is called “master” in this work. In
the English translation of 1942 by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of
Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1973
[1942]), “the Master” is the standard appellation for Ramakrishna;
this usage may have been popularized by Vivekananda.
3. Partha Chatterjee, “A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri
Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class,” Subaltern Studies VII:
Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and
Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65.
4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988),
219.
5. Quoted in ibid., 231. For further details, see Swami Saradananda,
Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda, 2 vols.
(Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1978 [1952]).
6. There were many references to the Paramhansa in Keshab’s journal,
the New Dispensation, and in the late 1870s Keshab published
Paramhanser Ukti, a ten-page Bengali booklet of Ramakrishna’s sayings.
7. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (London:
Methuen, 1965), 141. [BACK]
8. Quoted in ibid., 124.
9. Cited in Brian K. Smith, “How Not to Be a Hindu: The Case of the
Ramakrishna Mission,” in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed.
Robert P. Baird (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 343–44.
10. Sumit Sarkar, “The Kathamrita as Text: Towards an Understanding of
Ramakrishna Paramhamsa,” Occasional Paper 22 (New Delhi: Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, 1985), 21 and passim. Also, see Sumit
Sarkar, “‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His
Times,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, 1543–66.
Ramakrishna’s disciples claimed that he had gone through his “Muslim”
and “Christian” phases before he met Keshab; please note that all the
dates in Ramakrishna’s life are culled from accounts by devotees and
admirers.
11. The term heterosexuality is here used catachrestically, since
Ramakrishna seems to be obviously outside the formations within which
we would situate “modern” Indian subjects, including Vivekananda. The
very terms homosexuality/heterosexuality (and, indeed, transsexuality,
which may also be said to resonate for Ramakrishna) are too western
and modern to be completely adequate to the task of analysis. I use
them very provisionally, in the absence of another vocabulary and
epistemology that might enable me to understand premodern, Indian/
Hindu conceptualizations of sexuality. In this context, I am reminded
of Diana Fuss’s generous and sensitive reading of Fanon’s claim (in
Black Skin, White Masks) that there is no (male) homosexuality in the
Antilles (“Interior Colonies,” 33):
Fanon’s insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may
convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if
by ‘homosexuality’ one understands the culturally specific social
formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West,
then they are indeed foreign to the Antilles.…Can one generalize from
the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to
sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such discursive
translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual differences?
Such a caution must be borne in mind, even as one cannot but deploy,
however hesitantly, the idioms of modern western sexualities. See
Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life
and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1995) for a careful and fascinating reading of the
relationship of Ramakrishna’s “homosexuality” to his mysticism. I
regret that I have not been able to make fuller use of the Kripal
text, which was published after this chapter was written.
12. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 60–61.
13. S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 50–71.
14. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 45. Sumit Sarkar
claims, moreover, that the period of Ramakrishna’s popularity
coincided with a “kind of hiatus in bhadralok history,” when dreams of
social reform had been frustrated, official racism was marked, and
liberation through the overthrow of British rule not really
conceivable (“‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti,’” 1547).
15. It is interesting to note that the disciples of Ramakrishna,
notably Vivekananda, preferred the term kamkanchan, “lust-and-gold,”
over the Master’s kaminikanchan and went to great lengths to explain
that the sage’s “symbolic” use of the term did not imply any
misogyny.
16. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 701. All subsequent
references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text.
17. This insight derives in a general way from Carole-Anne Tyler’s
reading of the ambivalent politics of gay drag (“Boys Will Be Girls:
The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1990]) as well from
Kaja Silverman’s account of the mastery permitted by T. E. Lawrence’s
reflexive masochism (“White Skin, Brown Masks”). In The Inner World: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 103, Sudhir Kakar characterizes Hindu
transvestism thus: “Rituals such as these represent not only the boy’s
attempt to identify with his mother but also the man’s effort to free
himself from her domination. By trying to be like women—wearing their
clothes, acquiring their organs, giving birth—these men are also
saying that they do not need women (mothers) any longer.” For a
sympathetic psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna’s assumption of
femininity, see Kakar, “Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience,” in
The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and
Mysticism (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 1–40.
18. Cited in S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 9.
19. D. S. Sarma, Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Benares: Benares Hindu University,
1944), 237.
20. I am grateful to Gayatri Spivak for pointing out to me the
numerous, and discontinuous, ways in which the English term woman
translates into Bengali (and/or Sanskrit). Even so, it is interesting
to note how often other forms of femininity threaten for Ramakrishna
to collapse into the figure of the kamini. Hence his warning to one of
his young male disciples to beware of women who claim to be actuated
by maternal feelings towards him.
21. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 113.
22. I put this term in quotation marks to indicate that is placed
under erasure. One cannot assume that transvestism was inflected in
the same way for a nineteenth-century (straight?) Hindu male as it
might be for, say, a contemporary straight North American male. One
has to concede that his masculinity might have been constituted
differently, and in a different relationship to femininity, than might
be the case for our hypothetical North American male.
23. I am thinking here of N. T. Rama Rao’s assumption of feminine
attire, makeup, and jewelry, on one-half of his body in the days of
his chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh, apparently in a bid to
consolidate his political/spiritual power. Philip Spratt also provides
detailed anthropological evidence of religious transvestic ceremonies
all over India (Hindu Culture and Personality [Bombay: Manaktalas,
1966]). See, too, Kathryn Hansen’s splendid essay, “Making Women
Visible: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in
Silent Cinema” (unpublished manuscript).
24. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and
Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.
25. Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 319.
26. Ibid., 331.
27. Women could, on occasion, function as gurus; the Bhairavi
Brahmani, for instance, was Ramakrishna’s first guru. Other historical
and contemporary figures like Andal, Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, and
Anandamoyi Ma come to mind as well. Sharada Devi (Ramakrishna’s wife)
herself had several (female and male) disciples. I do not think,
however, that this militates against my understanding of the guru-
disciple relationship as functioning for the most part for and among
males nor against my reading of its gendered significance in early
nationalism.
28. I am obliged to Sandhya Shetty for pointing this out to me. The
gurudakshina (the gift to the guru) is situated outside (economic)
exchange and functions in a symbolic capacity only. The instance of
Drona the archer and his low-caste disciple Eklavya, who had to
sacrifice his thumb to ensure the superiority of the guru’s favorite
pupil Arjuna, only demonstrates that in the guru-shishya configuration
what is offered by the disciple is incommensurable with what is given
by the guru.
29. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 296.
30. Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, ed.
Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953),
13.
31. There is no “secular,” critical biography of Ramakrishna except
that by Max Mueller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). While this inveighs against the
miraculizing tendencies of Ramakrishna’s disciples, not excepting
Vivekananda, and refuses to take Ramakrishna’s avatarhood seriously,
it is nonetheless entirely reverential about the man himself.
32. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, 117.
33. Ibid., 144–45.
34. Ibid., 294.
35. Swami Chetanananda, ed. Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis, Mo.:
Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 1990), 110.
36. Sumit Sarkar notes: “Girish Ghosh confessed that seeing
Ramakrishna ‘playing’ with a young disciple made him recall a
‘terrible canard’ that he had once heard about the saint” (“Kathamrita
as Text,” 103).
37. Sister Nivedita [Margaret E. Noble], The Master as I Saw Him
(Calcutta: Udbodhan Office, 1910), 64.
38. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 204.
39. This is not, of course, to assert that the conflicts were unique
to Naren; as we have seen, in terms of class position and intellectual
training he appears to have been no different from the majority of the
disciples. The others, however, appear to have been less outspoken in
their skepticism than he was. I hardly need add that the memory and
the narrative of these conflicts is overdetermined; if Naren had not
become Vivekananda, we would probably have heard far less of his
interactions with his guru. As it is, in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
his iconoclasticism is not as evident as that of, say, Bankim or Dr.
Mahendralal Sarkar (neither of whom was a disciple). Nonetheless, he
does seem to have been the unequivocal favorite of Ramakrishna. And it
also seems clear that he was accorded a degree of freedom of speech
and behavior not permitted most of the other disciples. (Girish Ghosh,
who was notorious for his drinking, patronage of prostitutes, and
occasional foul-mouthed invectives against the guru, was one of the
very few others who was granted such a license.)
40. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” Sumit Sarkar
emphasizes the saint’s determined pursuit of bhadralok disciples as
well as his reticence about religious practices (of the Baul,
Kartabhaja, and vamachari Tantric varieties) that might have offended
their sensibilities (“The Kathamrita as Text,” 36).
41. Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him, 385–90.
42. My thanks to Inderpal Grewal for suggesting this possibility to
me.
43. Hervey De Witt Griswold, Insights into Modern Hinduism (New York:
Henry Holt, 1934), 58.
44. Nationalism’s dependence on colonialism has been extensively
documented, to some degree by Nandy, Intimate Enemy, but most notably
by Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Certainly nationalism-and-
colonialism seems to function as one category for Vivekananda.
45. Not all Brahmos were as skeptical as Shibnath Shastri, who, much
though he admired Ramakrishna, believed that the saint’s austerities
at the beginning of his spiritual career had had deleterious effects
on his mental state; Keshab for one seems to have been less
incredulous of the spiritual nature of the saint’s trances. Sumit
Sarkar points out, interestingly, that while Ramakrishna’s family and
neighbors in Kamarpukur and Dakshineshwar attributed the trances to
madness or “possession,” his bhadralok disciples and admirers
described them as the samadhi state extolled by high Hindu doctrine.
46. Ramakrishna himself made conflicting assertions about his own
avatarhood; at points he dismissed the possibility derisively, while
at other times he claimed to be an avatar of Krishna, Chaitanya, and/
or Kali.
47. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York:
Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 42.
48. It is not possible to establish whether any of the swami’s
supporters were simply admirers or actually disciples. It is not
inconceivable that they may have become disciples retroactively,
following Vivekananda’s success in the west.
49. Sankari Prasad Basu and Sunil Bihari Ghosh, eds., Vivekananda in
Indian Newspapers 1893–1902 (Calcutta: Dineshchandra Basu
Bhattacharya, 1969), 9.
50. It should be noted that the swami’s Indian reputation was—to some
degree, at least—induced by himself, as a defensive measure no doubt
against the criticisms he encountered not only from Christian
ministers in the United States but also from members of the Brahmo
Samaj and perhaps the Theosophical Society as well. His early letters
to his disciples in Madras were full of exhortations to them to hold a
meeting in his honor and to proclaim him to the west as a true
spokesperson of Hinduism. He was also careful to keep them informed
about favorable reviews in the U.S. press.
51. Rakhal Chandra Nath, The New Hindu Movement 1886–1911 (Calcutta:
Minerva, 1982), 126.
52. Ibid., 129.
53. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”
54. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 115.
55. Vivekananda was rarely consistent in this view; this was typical
of him. At times he deployed the rhetoric of free trade to imply
mutual and equal advantage to east and west; at other times he
insisted that Indians were superior to the west in their indifference
to material things and that in fact the west called out for spiritual
conquest by an “aggressive Hinduism.” In this vacillation Vivekananda
was not untypical of the bourgeois neo-Hindu nationalists of his time.
[BACK]
56. He also enjoined his brother monks in India not to insist on the
acceptance of Ramakrishna’s avatarhood in would-be devotees and
disciples of the new order.
57. Harold W. French, The Swan’s Wide Waters: Ramakrishna and Western
Culture (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), 58.
58. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 230.
59. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”
60. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 114.
61. Ibid., 17. Note that Bankim’s novel was undoubtedly the product of
a distinctly westward-looking nationalism. Nath describes Aurobindo’s
“Bhawani Mandir” as derived from Anandmath (and remarkably similar to
Vivekananda’s own cult of the warlike monk) in its emphasis on
manliness and in its devotion to Kali. [BACK]
62. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity,” 61.
63. Vivekananda, Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, 151.
64. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s cult of physical fitness and
martial arts training has a great deal in common with Vivekananda’s
endorsement of “beef, biceps, and Bhagavad-Gita.”
65. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western
Admirers (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964 [1961]), 347.
66. At this point in Indian history, bourgeois and Hindu nationalisms—
the first represented by “moderates” in the Congress Party calling for
secular and constitutional reforms, the latter by Tilak, Bankim, and
others—have assumed the status of two distinct categories, though
quite often they function as one. I bear in mind also Sudipta
Kaviraj’s important caveat against the conflation of distinct
nationalisms (his own concern is with “early” and “mature”
nationalisms), which must be seen as disjunct rather than articulated
phenomena in Indian history; see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary
Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).
67. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 27.
68. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 231.
69. Ibid., 388 (emphases in the original). [
70. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 252. The speaker in this
instance was a woman, Constance Towne.
71. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 16.
72. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 14.
73. Swami Vivekananda and His Guru (London and Madras: Christian
Literature Society for India, 1897), iv.
74. There is, to the uninstructed viewer, little if anything of the
disarrangement of limbs or clothing that normally marked the sage’s
experience of samadhi.
75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1987),
264.
76. Nivedita functions here as a type of the western female disciple.
77. Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and
Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in Femmes
Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London:
Routledge, 1991), 244.
78. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda: His Second Visit to the
West; New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1973).
79. Kakar, Inner World, 160.
80. See, for instance, Romila Thapar: “[The ascetic] is celibate and
yet, at the same time, the most virile of men. The ascetic’s
demonstration of sexual prowess is not a contradiction in terms: it is
in fact a demonstration of his complete control over body functions,
since ideally the emission of semen is prohibited to
him” (“Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?” in Ancient
Indian Social History: Some Interpretations [Delhi: n.p., 1978], 94).
Also see Joseph Alter: “The whole purpose of brahmacharya [celibacy]
is to build up a resilient store of semen so that the body—in a
holistic, psychosomatic sense—radiates an aura of vitality and
strength” (“Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into
Nationalism in North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1
[1994]: 51).
81. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in The Sexual Subject: A
Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–
87.
82. Ibid., 286.
83. Swami Vivekananda, “The Future of India,” in Lectures from Colombo
to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1956), 267.
84. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 196. Sister Christine
(Christine Greenstidel) goes on to remark on the companionship of
Sadananda and Vivekananda on their North Indian pilgrimage: “Both were
artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in
appearance. Artists raved about them.”
Nivedita also confesses, though far more discreetly, that she was
drawn to the swami by his “personality” rather his philosophy, which
she initially found unoriginal. Her “biography” of him, The Master as
I Saw Him, is remarkable for its reticence about his corporeality.
85. That such a construction of femininity was not necessarily
exclusive to Hindu reformers/revivalists is borne out by Faisal
Fatehali Devji: “[Muslim] reformist literature replaces the aggressive
sexual woman with the pathetic or suffering woman-as-mother” (“Gender
and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim
India, 1857–1900,” South Asia, 14, no. 1 [1991], 151).
86. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s
Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed.
Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1990), 237.
87. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (London: William
Heinemann, 1904), 32–45.
88. See, among others, Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate
on Sati in Colonial India,” in The Nature and Context of Minority
Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds.,
Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Chatterjee, Nation and Its
Fragments; and Madhu Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” Economic and
Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, 1691–1702.
89. Monier Monier-Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (New
Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974 [1883]), 184–85. Also
see David R. Kinsley, “Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place,” in Devi:
Goddesses of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (Berkeley
and London: University of California Press, 1996); and Ajit Mookerjee,
Kali: The Feminine Force (New York: Destiny Books, 1988).
90. Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in
Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian
Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 158.
91. Ramakrishna was married at the age of twenty-three to Sharadamoni
Debi, a child-bride of five. According to custom, she remained in her
natal home, while Ramakrishna continued his spiritual disciplines at
Dakshineshwar, forgetful of her existence. At eighteen she sought him
out at Dakshineshwar and acceded to his request that their marriage
remain unconsummated. Over the remaining decade and a half of
Ramakrishna’s life, she spent extended periods at Dakshineshwar, doing
his housekeeping and cooking and (usually) living in a separate
building in the temple complex. [BACK]
92. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 65.
93. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the
Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York
and London: Routledge, 1987), 244. [BACK]
94. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 83.
95. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 242.
96. Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita
Ashrama, 1964), 167–68.
97. Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922) was a notable scholar and a
Hindu widow who converted to Christianity during a visit to England
and dedicated her life to the uplift of young Hindu widows. Her book,
The High-Caste Hindu Woman (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), as
well as her travels in England and the United States, gained her
sympathy from feminists as well as Christian missionaries abroad and
censure from Hindu conservatives at home. Her shelter for widows, the
Sharda Sadan in Pune, was supported in large part by funds raised by
Ramabai Circles in the United States and England. Her travels in the
United States in the 1880s received extensive coverage in the U.S.
press.
98. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 421–68.
99. This is necessarily a simplification of Vivekananda’s very
complicated responses to the issues of (gender and other) reform,
nationalism, and colonialism. The split was not simply between
“home” (where reform had to endorsed) and abroad (where Hinduism had
to be defended); even at “home” he had decidedly mixed responses to
reform and (religious and social) orthodoxy.
100. The phrase is Nivedita’s (The Master as I Saw Him, 124). In an
interesting departure from the hagiographical tradition in which
accounts of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are produced (and in which
tradition Nivedita’s own work uneasily belongs), she emphasizes not
the continuity of their respective “gospels” but their distinctness
from each other. She does this, besides, in a fashion that highlights
the swami’s struggles and doubts: “Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the
Swami himself said once of him, ‘like a flower,’ living apart in the
garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old
time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought
to dismiss its very memory. It was at one the greatness and the
tragedy of my own Master’s life that he was not of this type. His was
the modern mind in its completeness.…His hope could not pass by
unheeded,…the hope of men of the nineteenth century” (The Master as I
Saw Him, 124–25).
101. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution,” 237–38.
102. She was not, however, recognizably a nineteenth-century British
feminist—at least from the evidence of her early writings—even though
much has been made in the biographies of her feminism and other
“excesses.” Apparently Vivekananda himself made fun of her putative
feminism.
103. Quoted in Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of
Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 32–33.
104. Quoted in Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and
History (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 121.
105. Sharada Devi seems to have been a figure who was not
unequivocally reverenced by the followers of Ramakrishna. Many
devotees visited her at Jayrambati and Kamarpukur, and she initiated
several people into discipleship. She was sometimes spoken of as an
avatar—like her husband—and the heiress to his spiritual kingdom. But
she was also often accused of being excessively worldly. Ramakrishna’s
most prominent disciples visited her only rarely; Swami Nikhilananda
says that this was because they hesitated to “[make] a display of
their spiritual fervour.” See his Holy Mother: Being the Life of Sri
Sarada Devi, Wife of Sri Ramakrishna and Helpmate in His Mission
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Spivak speaks of the way in
which her official biographer, Swami Gambhirananda, staged her as “a
counter-echo to what he perceived as the strong voice of the Western
Narcissus” (“Asked to Talk about Myself…,” Third Text 19 [Summer
1992]: 17). I would argue that this could only happen retrospectively,
and at a later moment from the one that Vivekananda inhabits.
106. See, for instance, Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women
in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante:
Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshashi,
Bangladesh: Sahitya Samsad, 1983); and Kumar, History of Doing, esp.
chaps. 2 and 3.
107. The Indian woman was, obviously, recast in the nationalist moment—
as was the Indian man; but recast and fixed, with little room for
negotiation after the recasting had been effected. For an analysis of
a nationalist woman’s struggles with gendered identities in
nationalism, see chapter 5.
108. Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel,
trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1947),
152, n. 2.
109. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 136–37.
110. Quoted in Pravrajika Atmaprana, Sister Nivedita of Ramakrishna-
Vivekananda (Calcutta: Sister Nivedita Girls’ School, 1961), 30.
111. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 128.
112. Rakhal Nath maintains that the Ramakrishna Mission was the only
non-political body to come out of the “New Hindu” or Hindu revivalist
movement (Nath, New Hindu Movement). [BACK]
113. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 136.
114. Ibid., 150–51.
115. Barbara N. Ramusack, “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal
Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–
1945,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance,
ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 130.
116. S. B. Mookherjee, “Nivedita and Indian Womanhood,” in Nivedita
Commemoration Volume, ed. Amiya Kumar Majumdar (Calcutta: Dhiraj Basu,
1968), 244.
117. She met Gandhi briefly in Calcutta, in the early years of the
century. Gandhi (who in so many ways would grow to resemble the figure
of Ramakrishna) admired her Hindu partisanship but was unable to agree
with her on nationalist politics. The Congress Party under Gandhi had
a profoundly uneasy relationship with militant nationalist women like
Nivedita and the Rani of Jhansi.
118. Lizelle Reymond’s The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (New
York: John Day, 1953) also helped disseminate this image, though its
factual claims have since been contested. Kumari Jayawardena’s chapter
on Nivedita (“Irish Rebellion and ‘Muscular Hinduism,’” in White
Woman’s Other Burden) describes the contradictory ways in which the
disciple of Vivekananda is remembered.
119. My thanks to Carole-Anne Tyler for sensitizing me to this
possibility. [BACK]
120. Foxe’s biography, Long Journey Home, is particularly derisive in
this regard. What had been admirable “manliness” in Vivekananda was
forwardness in the female disciple. [BACK]
121. Ibid., 205. [BACK]
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