Violent Protests in India Over Rape Case

Dec 26, 2012 |

Last week, in New Delhi, India, news stories of a horrific gang rape spread quickly, igniting widespread outrage. A 23 year old woman was attacked by six men on a moving bus and brutalized for 45 minutes, in the most recent and alarming of several high-profile incidents. Protesters have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the growing incidence of rape, and its slow and ineffective prosecution. Riot police have responded, dispersing crowds with forceful tactics including water cannons, batons, and tear gas. India's government has now ordered a special inquiry into the incident to identify any negligence or errors on the part of police. [26 photos]

Let’s ask how we contribute to rape

The Hindu

SHAKING SOCIETY’S CONSCIENCE: It is important for women to raise their collective voice, but it should be for all women and all victims of the violence embedded in our society. Photo: S. R. Raghunathan

As I write this, there are protests going on all over Delhi, and in other parts of the country, against the gang-rape of a young woman on a moving bus a few days ago in the city. People are out there in large numbers — young, old, male, female, rich, poor — and they’re angry. They want the rapists to be caught, they want them to be taught a lesson, many are suggesting they should be hanged, or castrated, but also that the State should act, bring in effective laws, fast track courts, police procedures and more. Not since the Mathura rape case have there been such widespread protests. The difference is that then, it was mainly women’s groups who were protesting; today’s protests are more diverse. Sometimes, tragically, it takes a case like this to awaken public consciousness, to make people realise that rape and sexual assault are not merely ‘women’s issues,’ they’re a symbol of the deep-seated violence that women — and other marginalised people — experience every day in our society.

At a time when every politician, no matter what colour, is crying foul, every judge and lawyer, no matter what their loyalties, is joining the chorus, every policeperson, no matter from where, is adding his/her voice, it is worth remembering some key things. First, more than 90 per cent of rapes are committed by people known to the victim/survivor, a staggering number of rapists are family members. When we demand the death penalty, do we mean therefore that we should kill large numbers of uncles, fathers, brothers, husbands, neighbours? How many of us would even report cases of rape then? What we’re seeing now — the slow, painful increase in even reports being filed — will all disappear. Second, the death penalty has never been a deterrent against anything — where, for example, is the evidence that death penalties have reduced the incidence of murders? Quite apart from the fact that the State should never be given the right to take life, there is an argument to be made that imposing the death penalty will further reduce the rate of conviction, as no judge will award it.

Then, and this is something that women’s groups grasped long ago: a large number of rapes are committed in custody, many of these by the police. Mathura was raped by two policemen, Rameezabee was raped inside a police station by police personnel, Suman Rani was raped by policemen. There are countless other cases: will we hang all police rapists? Put together, that’s a lot of people to hang.

Police action is, in fact, one of the demands. Yet, the police’s record, whether in recording cases or in conducting investigations, is nothing to write home about. On a recent television show, a police officer put his finger on it when he said: how can we expect that police personnel, who are, after all, made of the same stuff as the men who gang-raped the young woman last week, to suddenly and miraculously behave differently? I was reminded of a study done by a local newsmagazine not so long ago of the attitudes of high ranking police officers in Delhi about rape. Roughly 90 per cent of them felt the woman deserved it, that she asked for it, that she should not have been out alone, or should not have been dressed in a particular fashion. Strange that women’s bodies should invite such reactions — could it be that the problem is in the eye of the beholder? Why, for example, does it seem to be more ‘legitimate’ for women to be out during daylight hours, but not at night?

Lawyers and judges too have joined the protests — and this is all to the good for the more diverse the protests, the more impact they will have. But it’s lawyers who use every ruse in the book to allow rapists to get away, judges who make concessions because the rapists are ‘young men who have their whole lives in front of them’ and so on. Do women’s lives not have a value then?

And then there are our politicians. Perhaps we need to ask how many politicians have rape cases, or allegations of rape pending against them. Perhaps we need to ask why no one is asking this question: that here you have an elected politician, your next prime ministerial candidate, someone under whose rule Muslim women in Gujarat were not only subjected to horrendous rape but also to equally dreadful violence. How can we, how can the media, how can journalists — all of whom are lauding the success of this politician, how can they not raise, and particularly at this time, the question of his sanctioning, encouraging the use of rape as a weapon of war? And more, we need to ask: if the politicians are indeed serious about this issue, why are they not out there with the protestors? When Anna Hazare was fasting, there wasn’t a day that went by when one or other politician did not go to see him. Where are they now?

Rape happens everywhere: it happens inside homes, in families, in neighbourhoods, in police stations, in towns and cities, in villages, and its incidence increases, as is happening in India, as society goes through change, as women’s roles begin to change, as economies slow down and the slice of the pie becomes smaller — and it is connected to all these things. Just as it is integrally and fundamentally connected to the disregard, and indeed the hatred, for females that is so evident in the killing of female foetuses. For so widespread a crime, band aid solutions are not the answer.

Protest is important, it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change, it makes them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that the current wave of protests will lead to at least some results — perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also important: we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or Kashmir who had been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way? Very likely not, for there nationalism enters the picture. Remember Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the Rajasthan Rifles raped over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of this, and yet, the people of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women from this area find it difficult to marry — stigma has a long life. Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town near Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did that rape, of a mother and her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and their subsequent murder not touch our consciences in quite the same way.

It is important to raise our collective voice against rape. But rape is not something that occurs by itself. It is part of the continuing and embedded violence in society that targets women on a daily basis. Let’s raise our voices against such violence and let’s ask ourselves how we, in our daily actions, in our thoughts, contribute to this, rather than assume that the solution lies with someone else. Let’s ask ourselves how we, our society, we as people, create and sustain the mindset that leads to rape, how we make our men so violent, how we insult our women so regularly, let’s ask ourselves how privilege creates violence.

It is important we raise our collective voice for women, but let’s raise it for all women, let’s raise it so that no woman, no matter that she be poor, rich, urban, rural, Dalit, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever, ever, in the future, has to face sexual violence, and no man assumes that because of the system and people’s mindsets, he can simply get away with it. And let’s raise it also for men, for transgenders, for the poor — all those who become targets of violence. Let’s not forget that the young rape survivor in Delhi was accompanied by a friend who too was subjected to violence and nearly killed. Let’s talk about him too.

(Urvashi Butalia is a feminist writer and founder of Zubaan, an independent non-profit publishing house.)

How To Live

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2012

For Second Opinion, Consult a Computer?

 SAN FRANCISCO — The man on stage had his audience of 600 mesmerized. Over the course of 45 minutes, the tension grew. Finally, the moment of truth arrived, and the room was silent with anticipation.

At last he spoke. “Lymphoma with secondary hemophagocytic syndrome,” he said. The crowd erupted in applause.

Professionals in every field revere their superstars, and in medicine the best diagnosticians are held in particularly high esteem. Dr. Gurpreet Dhaliwal, 39, a self-effacing associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is considered one of the most skillful clinical diagnosticians in practice today.

The case Dr. Dhaliwal was presented, at a medical  conference last year, began with information that could have described hundreds of diseases: the patient had intermittent fevers, joint pain, and weight and appetite loss.

To observe him at work is like watching Steven Spielberg tackle a script or Rory McIlroy a golf course. He was given new information bit by bit — lab, imaging and biopsy results. Over the course of the session, he drew on an encyclopedic familiarity with thousands of syndromes. He deftly dismissed red herrings while picking up on clues that others might ignore, gradually homing in on the accurate diagnosis.

Just how special is Dr. Dhaliwal’s talent? More to the point, what can he do that a computer cannot? Will a computer ever successfully stand in for a skill that is based not simply on a vast fund of knowledge but also on more intangible factors like intuition?

Read more...

శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2012

 

శ్రీ కౌముది అక్టోబర్ 2012

శ్రీ కౌముది సెప్టెంబర్ 2012

India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012 

During the 1940s, when India won its independence from Britain, the leaders of the newly-formed nation began imagining the Indian Institutes of Technology, otherwise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cultivate some of the world’s top scientists and engineers. And they’d make technology key to the future of India’s economic development.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indian educational system and, like their peer institutions in the US, they’re making a point of putting free courses on the web. Rather quietly, they’ve amassed some 268 courses, giving anyone with an internet connection access to 10,000+ video lectures. As you might expect, the course lineup skews heavily toward science and technology, the stuff that contributes to India’s industrial base – Introduction to Basic Electronics, High Performance Computer Architecture, Space Flight Mechanics, Steel Making, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few contemplative courses to the mix, courses like Contemporary Literature, Quantum Physics, the History of Economic Theory, and Game Theory and Economics.

You can start rummaging through the complete list of IIT courses on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT website, which gives you the ability to download videos straight to your computer. Naturally we’ve added many essential IIT courses to our list of Free Online Courses from Great Universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Related Content:
Yale Introduces Another Seven Free Online Courses, Bringing Total to 42
Harvard Presents Free Courses with the Open Learning Initiative
MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

by Dan Colman

Read other articles at Open Culture

The Birth and Partition of a Nation: India's Independence Told in Photos

Aug 15 2012, 3:05 PM ET

August 15th, 1947, inaugurated one of the cruelest and most enduring ironies of decolonization. India, a British property with over 4,500 years of civilization and a population of 415 million, finally achieved independence. But it was a triumph that opened a social, historical and geographic wound that has yet to fully heal: the new Indian state was partitioned into two. Violent divisions between the subcontinent's Hindu and Muslim communities, and Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah's longstanding campaign for an Indian-Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal, made partition the expedient choice for a weary and overextended post-war British government. On June 3rd, 1947, British Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten announced that, as of August 15, India would be split between separate majority-Hindu and majority-Muslim countries.
The border between the future modern states of India and Pakistan was created under the supervision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister who was given only five weeks to draw the new borders. The resulting armed conflict persists today, from Hindu-ruled yet majority-Muslim Kashmir, to the bifurcation of Pakistan into remote eastern and western haves that later waged war. Millions of Pakistani Bengalis lost access to Kolkata, a regional metropolis that now sits on the Indian side of the border. As political scientist Lucy Chester recounts, the Radcilffe Line was "a failure in terms of boundary-making, but a striking success in terms of providing political cover to all sides."
India was independent, India's Muslim minority had its own independent state, and the British were in a position to leave their troublesome colonies behind. They were incomplete victories: up to 17 million people were eventually displaced, and 1 million killed, in the sectarian violence that followed partition. Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of India's independence movement, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948 over his perceived sympathies toward India's Muslims. A devastating civil war in East Pakistan resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1972. India and Pakistan fought wars over Kashmir in 1947, 1965, and 1999. The Kashmir conflict still serves as an ostensible justification for Pakistan's support of anti-Indian terrorist groups -- as well as for both countries' development of nuclear weapons.
Today, democratic India is a regional power, and Bangladesh is an emerging democracy -- even troubled Pakistan boasts one of the world's top 30 economies. Still, even 65 years later, the full cost of partition has yet to be fully paid. Here is the story of that fateful day, and the days immediately before and after, told in photos.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi in 1944. Gandhi opposed partition, while Jinnah's Muslim League lobbied for some kind of autonomous Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal. He was briefly speaker of Pakistan's National Assembly before his death in 1948. (Wikimedia)

Read rest of article in the Atlantic,  Thursday, August 16, 2012

Captain Lakshmi

Lakshmi Sehgal (“Captain Lakshmi”), doctor and fighter for Indian independence, died on July 23rd, aged 97

Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition

AS SHE moved, pert and bird-like, round her tiny rented clinic in industrial Kanpur in northern India, Lakshmi Sehgal made her patients feel completely safe in her hands. Lightly but firmly, her fingers moved across the swollen bellies of pregnant women, or felt for a pulse, or probed a wound. Her sister said she had always had the technique to reassure. Those same hands, in West Bengal in 1971, had massaged the scrawny limbs of Bangladeshi refugees, and in December 1984 had soothed the burning eyes of victims of the explosion at a chemical factory in Bhopal.

They also knew how to fire a revolver and prime a grenade, change the magazine on a Tommy gun and wield a sword. They were as skilled and ruthless as any man’s, for Dr Lakshmi had been trained beside the men to become a killing machine. From 1943 to 1945, in the jungles of Singapore and what was then Burma, she commanded a brand-new unit of the Indian National Army in the hope of overthrowing the British Raj. The Rani of Jhansi regiment, set up by the independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose (left of her, above), was for women only, the first in Asia. It was named after a heroine of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny against the British, a widowed child bride who cut her saris into trousers to ride into battle. For Dr Lakshmi, another rich tomboy who had married too young, a rider of horses and driver of cars who had eagerly thrown her foreign-made dresses on a nationalist bonfire, the rani made an irresistible model.

Bose, too, was irresistible. She had first seen “Netaji” at 14, in 1928, when she was taken to Calcutta to the assembly of the Congress party by her activist mother. He strode in uniform at the head of his party volunteers, bravely rebellious, his owlish glasses glinting in the sunrise. Fifteen years later, when she had fled to Singapore with a new lover to set up a free clinic for Indian migrant workers, they met again. Bose persuaded her to recruit Indian women from the diaspora in Malaya and Singapore to fight for the cause: to link up with the Japanese, invade India through Burma, and seize the capital. He made her a colonel, although she was always “Captain”. A fine singer, she had already recorded the army song: Chalo Dilli, “On to Delhi!”

Read the full article of Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition, The Economist

శ్రీ కౌముది ఆగస్ట్ 2012

JFK's Overshadowed Crisis

IN APRIL, India launched a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear bomb deep into the Indian Ocean. The successful Agni missile test fulfilled India’s fifty-year quest to achieve the means of dispatching a nuclear weapon to Beijing. Just about fifty years ago, in October 1962, India fought a brief war against China in the Himalaya Mountains. India lost that war—and vowed it would acquire the capacity to deter Chinese aggression.

The Sino-Indian war also posed a crisis for America’s young president, John F. Kennedy, who had entered office determined to build a strong U.S. relationship with India. But his attention that fateful autumn was diverted to a more ominous crisis—the one involving Soviet efforts to place nuclear missiles in Cuba—that unleashed a dangerous nuclear face-off with the Soviet Union. Thus, Kennedy confronted two simultaneous crises, one far overshadowed by the other at the time and also later in history.

But Kennedy’s handling of the 1962 war—in the midst of a far graver national challenge—offers lessons today for those interested in the ongoing diplomatic conundrum posed by India and its mutually hostile neighbor, Pakistan.

 Read full article by Bruce Riedel from July-Aug 2012 Issue of The National Interest

శ్రీ కౌముది జూలై 2012

Think Again: India's Rise

Unfortunately, the fascination with India's growing economic clout and foreign-policy overtures has glossed over its institutional limits, the many quirks of its political culture, and the significant economic and social challenges it faces. To cite but one example, at least 30 percent of Indian agricultural produce spoils because the country has failed to develop a viable supply chain. Foreign investors could alleviate, if not solve, that problem. But thanks to the intransigence of a small number of political parties and organized interest groups, India has refused to open its markets to outsiders. Until India can meet basic challenges like this, its greatness will remain a matter of rhetoric, not fact.

Read full article by Sumit Ganguly .....