'The RSS is conspiring to gain a hold of all academic institutions': Ousted BHU professor

EDUCATION MATTERS

Sandeep Pandey discusses the circumstances of his removal as a visiting professor and alleges that the RSS influenced the decision.

Scroll Staff · Today · 06:30 pm

'The RSS is conspiring to gain a hold of all academic institutions': Ousted BHU professor

 Photo Credit: AFP

On December 21, Banaras Hindu University convened a board meeting and decided to show the door to Magsaysay award winner and visiting professor Sandeep Pandey, allegedly for his “anti-national activities”. Pandey had been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology-BHU for two-and-a half years. He sparked a storm in the academic community with his allegation that his political ideology had him a target of the Narendra Modi government.

Here's what he told Scroll.

    I am an alumnus of BHU only. I did my engineering from the same university in 1992-1996 and I have been teaching here since 2013 as a visiting faculty. My contract here was yearly and on renewable basis. I was teaching a few branches of chemical engineering and a development studies course which I floated during my tenure. There were more than 150 students registered for that course.

    Last night [January 6], I received the formal communication from the university’s end that my tenure has been discontinued and there were no academic reasons given for it.

    Ever since the current Modi government came into power, some sections have been trying to complain about me to the Ministry of Human Resources Development. The HRD minister Smriti Irani also called the Director Rajeev Sangal and told him that I am politically active and my actions need to be controlled.

    In another instance, the Vice Chancellor GC Tripathi got miffed at me for sitting at a protest with 40 contract employees of BHU who were ousted recently. I just supported them but VC asked me why did I feel the need to go there. He even said that if I want to be Jayaprakash Narayan then I should quit the university and join politics.

    In another meeting, Professor Dhananjay Pandey, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, went on to say that people who should be in jail are part of the faculty here but he didn’t take my name. But he didn’t renew my contract and it was delayed for three months before the director acted on it.

    They have alleged that I am a Naxalite and involved in anti-national activities. They had decided long ago that I need to be shown the door, they were just looking for the right opportunity. In the meeting, they forced the director to remove me from my position.

    The director was the one who appointed me and he was in my favour but people with RSS links pushed their way through. They don’t have any proof to back their allegations against me which is why their letter is so cleverly framed that it can’t be taken up in the court. It doesn’t mention any reason whatsoever but I am not going to be quieted down.

    I will use the Right to Information to ask for the minutes of that meeting and if there are these allegations there then I will definitely move court on this.

    Around 2002, I had attended an event of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) from where it all started. Back then, this was an underground organisation. Some families of former Naxalites were being felicitated in that meeting and I was merely on the stage there. And that’s when the RSS activists started saying that I am a Naxalite.

    Moreover, I was in the citizens Defence Committee constituted for Prof SAR Gilani who was accused and later acquitted of all charges of his involvement in the Parliament attacks of 2001. They use that against me to say that I am an anti-national and a terrorist.

    The real problem that the government and the right-wing agents is that I work among the students on the campus and fight on issues. I run a forum in the name of Acharya Narayan Dev who has been a VC of BHU, we discuss social and development issues like farmer suicides, poverty and economic inequality there. The forum was getting popular among the students.

    We worked for small farmers, labourers who need help in fighting for their rights. We raised an agitation against Coca Cola, fought against land acquisition bill and organised marches.

    They think that if I am not here, right-wing elements will be able to gain more ground in the campus. They are worried about securing their support among the students. Students have a nimble brain and they are attracted to the kind of ideologies they are exposed to and they want to expand their territory.

    An ideological battle is being waged in our educational institutions. The RSS is trying to gain control over all institutions to propagate its own ideology. It’s sad that very incompetent people are being brought in at the helm of important institutions. Educational standards have gone out of the window. Nobody discussed any of my academic credentials and all the discussions revolved around just my political record and these baseless allegations. This is a conspiracy to take control over educational institutions and dominate the ideological discourse.

    Going forward, I don't think I will fight for my job any longer even though I want to teach. It was a contractual thing so I don't see the point. But the larger battle for freedom of expression and human rights will continue.

As told to Mayank Jain.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2016

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2016

Why is Ram misogynist, but not the Buddha?

Opinion

The world is conditioned to see the Ramayana and Manu-Smriti as anti-women, but not the Buddhist lore.

Devdutt Pattanaik  · Today · 10:30 am

Hinduism is patriarchal. No doubt about it. So are Christianity and Islam, Sikhism and Shinto, Jainism and Judaism. But Buddhism? It is not the first religion that comes to mind when we talk about misogyny.

The assumption is that Buddhism is rational, modern, agnostic and liberal in matters of gender and sexuality. Book after book has conditioned us to see the celibate and chaste Buddha as a kind of androgynous, asexual, gentle sage with a beatific smile. Yet, some of the earliest and most systematic documentation of rejection of female sexuality in Indian literature is from Buddhist scriptures, especially the rules of monastic discipline (Vinaya pitaka), traditionally attributed to the Buddha himself.

Rules of monastic discipline

Consider this:

* There more rules for nuns (bhikkunis) than monks (bhikkus), 331 as against 227, because while everyone has to control their desires women have the additional burden of not “arousing the desires of men”.

* Monks are advised to sleep indoors, not outdoors, after an incident where women had sex with a monk while he, apparently, was sleeping under a tree. Monks who do not wake up, or do not yield to temptation despite being accosted by women for sexual pleasure, are seen as innocent and not expelled from the monastic order. Monks who voluntarily submit to female charms are declared defeated (parajita).

* In the tale of Sudinna, a young monk breaks his vows of celibacy after his old parents beg him to give his wife, whom he had abandoned, a child so that his family lineage may continue. When this is revealed, the Buddha admonishes him thus: “It is better for you to have put your manhood in the mouth of a venomous snake or a pit of burning charcoal than a woman.”

* In one conversation, the Buddha states, “Of all the scents that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the tastes that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the voices that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the caresses that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman.”

• Buddhist monks, unlike other monks of that period, are not allowed to wander naked for fear they would attract women with their charms, believed to be enhanced because of their chastity and celibacy.

• Monks are advised to walk straight, without moving their arms and bodies too much, looking at the ground and not above, lest they get enchanted by “the glance of a woman”. Monks are also advised not to walk with single women, or even sit in the company of men, for it might lead to gossip.

• In a conversation with Kassappa, Bakulla says that in 80 years he has not only not had sex, he has not even entertained thoughts of women, or seen them, or spoken to them.

• Once a woman laughed and showed her charms to Mahatissa, but he remained unmoved. When asked by her husband if he found his wife unattractive, Mahatissa said he saw no woman, only a heap of bones.

* In the story of Sundarasammudha, who leaves his wife to become a monk, the wife approaches the husband and tells him, in what is an allusion to the ashrama system of Hinduism, that they should enjoy the pleasures of marital life till they are old and only then join the Buddhist order together and attain nirvana (liberation through cessation of desires). The monk replies that he would never submit to such seductions which are the snares of death.

* The texts repeatedly describe celibate monks as embodiments of dhamma (the path of enlightenment) while the lustful insatiable women are described as embodiments of samsara (the cycle of death and rebirths).

* Sangamaji left his wife and son to become a monk. One day, his wife and son come to him and beg him to come back but he does not respond, and shows no sign of husbandly or fatherly instincts and so is praised by Buddha of achieving true detachment and enlightenment. A true monk, for whom “female sexuality is like the flapping wings of a gnat before a mountain” is a vira (hero).

* Buddha makes his half-brother Nanda join the monastic order but Nanda is engaged to marry the most beautiful woman in the land and pines for her. So Buddha shows him celestial nymphs who live in the heaven of the 33 gods (Swarga of Hindu Puranas). Buddha asks Nanda if his fiancée is as beautiful as these nymphs, and Nanda says she is like a deformed monkey compared to these nymphs. Buddha says that if he continues to walk the path of dhamma he would be reborn in this heaven and be able to enjoy these nymphs. Spurred by this thought, Nanda actively and diligently engages in monastic practices. By the time he attains enlightenment, all desires for the nymphs and the fiancée are gone.

* Different types of queers (pandakas) are listed who should not be ordained as monks. These include hermaphrodites, transsexuals, eunuchs, cross-dressers, and effeminate gay men. This is done following stories of monks being seduced, or courted, by pandakas, and also because keepers of a nearby elephant stable mocks a monastery because one of its members is a pandaka, who constantly courts them sexually.

* Female hermaphrodites, women who dress like men, or those of deviant sexuality or simply those who do not look like women and are “man-like” women cannot be ordained as nuns.

* There are rules that refer to bestiality. Monks are warned against too much affection for cows and female monkeys.

The code’s influence

Initially, none of these strictures were codified. There was no Vinaya Pitaka. But as many people joined the monastery (vihara), they started behaving in certain ways that were deemed unworthy of monks and seekers of Buddha-hood. People also started making fun of the Buddhist way. So to protect the reputation of the dhamma and the sangha, Buddha began putting down these rules.

These codes were compiled orally and narrated by Upali (a barber before he became one of Buddha’s 10 chief disciples) in the first Buddhist council, a year after Buddha’s death. This happened 2600 years ago. A thousand years later, these rules were systemised and codified by one Buddhaghosha who lived in the monastery at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka.

By the time Islam arrived, Buddhism had already waned in most of India. But the Buddhist idea equating women’s sexuality with entrapment and pollution informed Hindu monastic orders (mathas), especially those instituted by Adi Shankara. Shankara was often called a Buddhist with Hindu packaging, by his critics. In his monastic order, he went a step further: there were no nuns.

If we believe the theory that “Jesus lived in India”, this code of monks could even be said to have influenced the anti-women stance outside India too – in Christianity as well, for while the Buddha abandoned his wife, Yashodhara, Jesus never married at all. Significantly Buddhaghosa lived around the same time as St Augustine of Hippo came forth with his anti-sex and anti-women trope in the Catholic Church.

The turning point

It is interesting that in all writings of patriarchy and misogyny related to India, scholars quote the Ramayana and the Manu Smriti, yet historically these were composed after the Vinaya Pitaka. Buddha lived in pre-Mauryan times while the Ramayana, with its concern for kingship, was written in post-Mauryan times. Arguments of oral traditions and astrology-based dating that place Ram to pre-Buddhist times appeal only to nationalists, not historians. Manu Smriti and other dharmashastras were written in the Gupta era when Brahmins played a key role in legitimising kingship in much of peninsular India. The pre-Buddhist Vedic rituals speak of female sexuality in positive terms as they are concerned primarily with fertility and wealth-generation. The pre-Buddhist Upanishads do not bother much with gender relations and are more interested in metaphysics. Much of Buddhist literature in Pali was put down in writing long before Sanskrit texts (Ashokan edicts in Pali language date back to 2300 years; the earliest Sanskrit royal inscriptions have been dated to only 1900 years ago). This makes Buddhist writings the watershed of Indian literature, after which womanhood came to be seen as polluting, obstacles to the path of wisdom.

We could, of course, argue that that most educated Buddhists were originally Brahmins and so transplanted Hindu patriarchy into Buddhism, that the Buddha had no such intention. We can insist that Vedas and only the Vedas, are the source of misogyny. This follows the pattern of “good” Buddhism and “bad” Hinduism structure we find in most colonial and post-colonial academic papers.

The complete silence on the subject of misogyny so firmly entrenched in the Buddhist scriptures, and traced to the Buddha, is quite remarkable. Research on this topic is well known but restricted to academic circles. There is ‘Buddhism after Patriarchy’ by Rita Gross and ‘Bull of a Man’ by John Powers, for example. But there is a strong desire in these books to explain away the patriarchy, rather than put the spotlight on them. It is almost as if the scholars are irritated, even embarrassed, that the facts interfere with contemporary perceptions of the Buddha.

Abandoning sex, which effectively means abandoning women, for a “higher” purpose – be it enlightenment or spirituality or service to the nation – has since become a popular model, embraced by religious sects, as well political organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It has been glamourised and valorised as the ultimate indicator of masculinity and purity. We can trace, at least one major tributary of this idea, to the Vinaya Pitaka of the Buddha, who abandoned his wife, without her consent.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

A few things I wasn't able to discuss with BJP leader Ram Madhav during his Al Jazeera interview

Opinion

Kashmiri writer Nitasha Kaul, who was a panellist at the 'Head to Head' discussion at the Oxford Union, lists the Modi government's sins of commission and omission.

Nitasha Kaul  · Yesterday · 08:00 am




The 2014 general election was a watershed moment for post-colonial India since it brought to power a national government that combines Hindu supremacism, economic neoliberalism and social conservatism. Today that government threatens the very idea of India. This has partly been helped by the global scene of unfettered neoliberalism and Islamophobia, a propitious blend for the Hindutva forces who present themselves as the bulwark against problematic Muslims and as exemplary Asian capitalists.

Much blood and ink has gone into reconstructing the Sangh Parivar’s communal Hindutva discourse for post-liberalisation India between the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the Dadri mob lynching in 2015. Somewhere between those horrors came the rise of Narendra Modi, largely owing to the Gujarat riots in which his government was at worst complicit and at best remiss. A recent Yale University political science study of riots in India suggests that Hindu-Muslim riots are electorally costly for the Congress, but riots in the year prior to an election result in an increased vote share for ethno-religious parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Indian politics has been radically reshaped by the twin interests of the proto-fascist paramilitaries and the corporate sector, threatening the secular and socialist aspects of Indian polity. The Sangh Parivar-backed Brand NaMo – a mix of hardcore Hindutva, business interests and facile development talk – was tested in Gujarat (a shining example of what Christophe Jaffrelot calls “a typical case of growth without development for all”) before it was unleashed on the nation in 2014 when the BJP ran the most expensive election campaign in the history of India ($115 million), but managed only a 31% vote share, the lowest of any party that ever won majority. Modi’s corporate backers gained $1.3 billion on the stock markets in the single day when he won the elections (as a hedge fund manager said: “We have a new CEO for the country and he is a good CEO”). Meanwhile, in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, the number of voters pressing the NOTA button on the voting machine was higher than the national average and especially high in tribal areas.

The portents were there before. Before the general elections, in August 2013, some students of the Film and Television Institute were beaten up by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (a right-wing national student organisation) outside the National Film Archives of India building in Pune after the screening of Jai Bhim Comrade (a film about Dalit oppression) and a performance by Kabir Kala Manch (an anti-caste pro-democracy cultural organisation formed after the 2002 Gujarat riots). Calling them Naxalites, the ABVP attackers demanded that the FTII students say “Jai Narendra Modi”. When they refused, they were beaten up. The FTII media release in response said:

“This incident would not be seen in isolation and we are increasingly witnessing that any individual or organisation that takes an opinion contrary to the mainstream, is labeled as anti-national, and all efforts are taken to intimidate them which can also amount to murder, especially looking at the recent case of Dr Narendra Dabolkar.”

Since coming to power, the BJP government has appointed (or attempted to appoint) people with Hindutva links to the FTII, a move resisted by the students who have protested, been on strike for a large part of 2015, and faced police crackdown. Such is the level of repression and paranoia that a few weeks ago, a student wearing an FTII shirt at the International Film Festival of India in Goa was “roughed up, hauled into custody, his wallet searched and his life turned upside down, his cell phone deconstructed, including his email account and picture galleries”.

Or take this case: Modi has consistently refused to wear the skullcap, a Muslim symbol, equating it to “appeasement” of minorities. When questioned about this during the 2014 campaigning, he said that “If a cap is a symbol of unity then why Mahatma Gandhi didn’t wear any“. Within a week of his ascension to power, Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh, a techie from Pune, was bludgeoned to death allegedly by members of the Hindu Rashtra Sena because he was wearing a skull cap and looked Muslim. Subsequently, many Muslims in Pune shunned wearing skull caps for fear of attacks. Despite several calls to do so, Prime Minister Modi never condemned the murder of this young Muslim man.

Appropriation of symbols

The BJP win in 2014 has given India a government where the prime minister and numerous others in it are proud to be lifelong members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an all-male majoritarian paramilitary organisation that purports to be an NGO carrying out voluntary social service with the explicit aim of making India a “pure Hindu nation”. In 2014, an RSS publication in Kerala, Kesari, had an article by B Gopalkrishnan (who contested on a BJP ticket in the Lok Sabha polls) suggesting that Godse should have killed Nehru instead of Gandhi.

The Modi government made sure that Gandhi’s birthday in 2014 was not a holiday but the launch of the Clean India campaign – as an aside, note that his zeal for clean-ups is such that within a month of becoming prime minister, Modi ordered the destruction of 1.5 lakh historical files in the Union home ministry – and an occasion for the state broadcaster Doordarshan to inaugurate a new tradition of telecasting live and in full the speech by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Not long after, Christmas was renamed Good Governance Day in honour of BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee and deemed a working day for the government.

In places, the Vishva Hindu Parishad is opposed to Santa Claus giving children chocolates and has insisted that statues of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati, be installed in Christian schools. The VHP also defended the demolition of a church in Haryana, saying it was the spontaneous reaction of local people, and added that rape of nuns was part of Christian culture.

Building on its success in creating a caste Hindu electorate, the Sangh Parivar is now focusing on courting Dalits and adivasis: by suggesting that Dalits were a creation of Muslim invasion and that Islamic atrocities resulted in the emergence of untouchability, and by Hinduising the tribals through educational institutions that teach them to see Muslims and Christians as enemies.

In the run-up to the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections, this theme is reflected in the suggestion by other Sangh outfits such as the Hindu Mahasabha which wants Gandhi’s image on Indian banknotes to be replaced with Veer Shivaji, Maharana Pratap and BR Ambedkar. An RSS functionary has said that Ambedkar, who had publicly burned the Manusmriti and converted to Buddhism, was an opponent of Hindu conduct but not Hindu philosophy. Such logic is in line with RSS statements that Buddha himself never quit Hinduism. The statements give the sense that Hindutva organisations are in a contest to spread the most vitriol: the Hindu Mahasaha (condemning the RSS as weak) openly celebrates MK Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse by commemorating the day of his death as Balidan Divas (Sacrifice Day) and the day of Gandhi’s killing as Shourya Divas (Bravery Day). In the same vein, the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena celebrate the day of Babri Masjid destruction as Shourya Divas.

Anti-scientific outlook

How can anyone claim that saffron terrorism does not exist when BJP MP Yogi Adityanath has been filmed at a Hindu awareness rally in Uttar Pradesh where his follower refers to his leadership and exhorts Hindu men to exhume the bodies of Muslim women and rape them and still the MP remains an unapologetic part of the ruling party? This is a sitting member of parliament who has not been punished for his part in the proceedings (on the contrary consider this from BJP national secretary Shrikant Sharma: “There is no case to be apologetic about Hindutva. It is a way of life and not a religion”). And who takes the responsibility when such incidents subsequently happen – when a Muslim woman is actually exhumed from her grave? The Indian apologists for the current sociopolitical climate have not a shred of decency that can cover her corpse.

BJP MP Adityanath has also said that those opposed to Surya Namaskar have no right to live in India. This is the context that gives a better picture of the Modi government’s efforts to create International Yoga Day (speaking of health priorities, there is now a Ministry for Yoga, while mid-day meals for malnourished children are being cut, not to mention a mysteriously delayed health survey that shows 41.8% of children in Gujarat are stunted and 43.8% don’t have the all the vaccinations they need). The BJP chief minister in Madhya Pradesh has opposed adding eggs to the diet of school lunch programmes (in a state where more than half the children are malnourished and underweight), saying that “the human body is meant to consume vegetarian food which has everything the human body requires“. This denying of eggs to malnourished children is common in BJP-run states to enforce the ideological beliefs of the ruling party.

Attempts to politicise food have also seen RSS members write to the Union government, demanding that there be separate canteens for vegetarian students at professional institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management – since “non-vegetarian food leaves an adverse impact…leads to development of Tamas (dark and unrighteous) nature”. The Human Resource and Development Ministry forwarded the letter to the institutes asking them to take “necessary” action.

There are other examples of an anti-scientific outlook. A BJP Union Minister has suggested that to prevent AIDS Indian morals are better than condoms. Another BJP MP claimed in Parliament that Sage Kanad had conducted a nuclear test in the 2nd century BC (following the example perhaps of Modi, who has linked plastic surgery and genetic science with Hindu god Ganesha).

A BJP leader and Haryana state agriculture minister has said that farmers who commit suicide as a result of hardship are cowards and criminals not worthy of help from the government. Another BJP MP said that Gandhi’s killer Godse was a patriot (later retracting the statement), that “Hindu woman must produce at least four children in order to protect Hindu religion” and that “the concept of four wives and 40 children will not work in India”. Such attitudes towards women are widely held by Hindutva ideologues (including women), for after all, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of their ideological parent organisation RSS, has clearly said that women should do household chores and men should be the breadwinners, and that rapes do not happen in Bharat (rural areas), they happen in India (which is an urban westernised entity). The BJP home minister in Madhya Pradesh has said that rape is a social crime, “sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong”. The governor of Nagaland and Assam, a BJP politician, has said that all non-Muslim immigrants should be given Indian citizenship with voting rights while those from the Muslim religion can “slog and stay” in the country.

The majority's goodwill

The Hindutva organisations have a self-appointed custodianship of Hinduism which they are enforcing on the body politic, seeking that all Indians identify as culturally Hindu first and foremost (regardless of their religion). This obviously entails that everyone accept their superior identity as Hindu, within a hierarchically ordered Hindu-ness with upper caste affluent Hindus at the peak. The organisations seek to transform Indian democracy so that people do not derive their rights and their access to justice as equal free individuals in a constitutionally guaranteed relation with the state, but from being pliant to majoritarian norms (as RSS/BJP’s Ram Madhav said on the Al Jazeera show where I was a panellist: minorities should earn the goodwill of the majority for their safety). Those who challenge the diktats that follow from a Hindutva notion of identity are labelled anti-national, Pakistani or Western agents. Depending upon the context and the vulnerability of the challengers, they can be killed, raped, physically attacked, maligned, harassed, bullied, or divested of any institutional or other power they may have.

Modi’s India has seen an unprecedented turning up of the volume of violence, intolerance and intimidation against those seen as the ‘Other’ by the majoritarian Hindu nationalists. Far from being accidental, this narrowing of the space of dissent in a democracy has been systematically enabled by a government that is closely aligned to the RSS and various Sangh Parivar affiliates and consciously chooses to ignore, downplay or condone the attacks against the person, property, beliefs and symbolism of those who are marginalised.

The regulatory norms of the Hindu body politic are focused both on identifying the Hindu self and guarding it against the enemy Other. There must be promotion of Hindutva values and a cleansing of cultural pollution. Thus, notwithstanding the principles of a liberal democracy or a secular nation, Hindus must take offence at the consumption of beef (which accounts for nearly 70% of protein intake of the poor in a country that is the world’s top exporter of beef), at live-ins, at gay rights, at certain freedom-affording behaviours of women and so on. They must avenge their “honour” in word and deed when Hindu women marry Muslim men (in addition to combating such “Love Jihad” by all means – including VHP/Bajrang Dal campaigns such as Bahu Lao-Beti Bachao – Hindu women must also have as many children as possible to counter the “overpopulating Muslim”); when anyone is suspected of being involved in cattle trade or beef consumption (as an RSS spokesperson said: “killing or smuggling a cow is equivalent to raping a Hindu girl”); when there is “appeasement” of Muslims, Christians, or other minorities; when Dalit bahujan rights challenge savarna hierarchies.

In order to carry out this agenda successfully, they must be helped by institutions pliable to their aims and instruments to actuate their threat of force against non-compliance. Hence, the heads of organisations are replaced by (often under-qualified) sycophants; textbooks are sought to be censored and rewritten (‘saffronisation of education’); writers and scholars are intimidated or killed or worse; and camps are organised to provide weapons training to the youth of both genders.

In addition, there have been problematic political moves such as bans on various activities; policy-making through the use of ordinances; central directive to clear forest land permission for Adani’s power project in Maharashtra; reinstatement of a suspended accused IPS officer in the Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case by the Gujarat BJP government, reinstatement of another IPS officer accused in the Sohrabbudin Sheikh fake encounter case by the Rajasthan BJP government; successful recommendation to the Supreme Court of lawyer Uday Lalit (who represented Amit Shah in criminal cases) after the rejection of Gopal Subramaniam (who had assisted the government in the Sohrabbudin Sheikh case); considering P Sathasivam for appointment – contested by lawyers since he isn’t just the former Chief Justice of India but also a BJP appointed Governor of Kerala – as chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission; the passing of a bill to change the law and allow the appointment of former head of a regulatory body (Nripendra Mishra, retired telecom regulator) to the Prime Minister’s Office as Principal Secretary after retirement.

The Great Leader

Independent scrutiny of these policies is increasingly minimised. For instance, restricting the functioning of civil society organisations is a big plus, and so, 10,000-plus NGOs have recently had their licences cancelled or limited in scope (including a crackdown on some well-known ones such as Amnesty, Ford Foundation, Greenpeace and others); while RSS-linked NGOs can claim at government-backed seminar that LGBT orientation is a psychological disorder caused by Western/American lifestyle and can be cured by alternative medicine. Community radio stations are being disciplined. India now tops the Facebook content restriction request list. Moreover, journalists who question the right-wing agenda are labelled presstitutes (in itself a telling phrase in its gendered and sexual connotations) and, along with those in the wider public who raise questions, called “pseudo-sickular”.

Perhaps to address this comprehensively, the Modi government plans to spend Rs 200 crore to establish a journalism university based on the Chinese model (institutes that are an arm of the state where journalists can be trained – into propaganda machines). If all this fails, there is an army of virtual devotees, the Modi bhakts, who take it upon themselves to combat opposition by resorting to insult, innuendo or worse.

Contrary to the assertions of the Hindutva brigade, the atmosphere of violence, intimidation and narrowing of dissent is not a mere figment of the imagination. Rights activists have documented at least 43 deaths in over 600 incidents of communal violence in the first 300 days of Modi government, 149 targeting Christians and the rest Muslims. Recently, the former Navy chief Admiral L Ramdas wrote an open letter to the prime minister and the president reminding them of the oath to uphold the Constitution and saying that he felt shame at the RSS’ attempts to create a monocultural Hindu rashtra in India. The Hindutva response to such voices of conscience is whataboutery (ignoring conveniently that what we are witnessing now is not just violence, but a consistent and cohesive multi-spectrum attempt to enforce a fascist Hindutva agenda where the BJP government and the RSS have revolving doors) or the argument that this happens elsewhere too (Saudi Arabia is their favourite example).

The Hindutva ascendancy over the recent years will create a terribly toxic legacy for the future of India with a generation of young people inculcated in hate towards fellow citizens. New authoritarian traditions are being created, such as one where students are forced to listen to the prime minister’s speech on Teachers’ Day every year. A recent survey of 10,000 high school and college students from 11 cities all over India found that half would prefer military rule over democracy, 65% agree that boys and girls from different religions should not mingle, over half believed that women “provoke” men by how they dress, close to half believe that women have no choice but to accept violence and that migrants should go back home. One student is quoted as saying that the country needs an authoritative leader.

There is a Great Leader now. A leader who wears clothes emblazoned with his own name in gold, who jets around the world to spread his message but does not have 15 minutes in Bhopal to meet with the NGOs seeking justice for the biggest industrial gas leak disaster in his country. A leader with followers who are so enamoured of him that they make a temple to him where devotees recite Modi Chalisa. They make picture books of him as a child – Bal Narendra – that present him as a valiant hero in the making who can do no wrong. The chief of the national censor board makes a hagiographic video of him, while government-appointed head of the national cultural diplomacy organisation repeatedly says that the Leader is an incarnation of God.

Though there is an active resistance on several fronts, there are still many in India who are, for the moment it seems, willing to overlook everything around them – including the postcolonial state capture by fascist crony capitalism – in the name of building a powerful Hindu India serving elite class and caste interests while oppressing the religious minorities, secularists and critics.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

A brief history of religious intolerance in India

Opinion

From very early times, India has witnessed religious and sectarian antagonisms.

DN Jha and Mukul Dube  · Today · 05:30 pm

At a time when religious bigotry has vitiated the air around us, it is worthwhile to investigate how old the idea of tolerance is and remind ourselves of the intolerance of our ancestors. Although early India had strong traditions of cultic and religious syncretism, there is plentiful evidence to prove the prevalence of religious and sectarian antagonisms from very early times.

In the 2nd century BC, Patanjali tells us that the relationship between Brahmins and Buddhists is like that between the snake and the mongoose; and its actual violent manifestation is supported by a plethora of historical evidence. Similarly, there is copious proof of the Shaiva-Vaishnava antagonism. The persistent animosity between Shaivism and Jainism, and the persecution of the latter by the former, is also well documented. In the 11th century Alberuni tells us that the Hindus are “haughty, foolishly vain and self-conceited” and “believe that there is no religion like theirs”.

But ignoring all this, Indian politicians constantly chant the aphoristic statement “vasudhaiva kutumbakam” (the world is one family) out of context.

Privileging Hinduism over others

The construct of tolerant Hinduism seems to be of relatively recent origin and to have first acquired visibility in the Western writings on India. In the 17th century, Francois Bernier (1620-1688), the French doctor who travelled widely in India, was one of the early Europeans to speak of Hindus as a tolerant people. In the 18th century the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Von Herder (1744-1803), the forerunner of the Romantic glorification of India, referred to the Hindus as “mild” and “tolerant” and as “the gentlest branch of humanity”. Around the same time, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said that they “do not hate the other religions but they believe they are also right”. Such views find a more prominent place in the writings of Orientalists like William Jones, according to whom, “the Hindus...would readily admit the truth of the Gospel but they contend that it is perfectly consistent with their Sastras”.

In the 19th century, some Indians also began to speak of the tolerance of Hindus, but they clearly privileged Hinduism over other religions. Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883), who founded the Arya Samaj in 1875, claimed to believe “in a religion based on universal values... above the hostility of all creeds...”. But as a champion of the Vedic religion, he sharply opposed all other religions: to him, Mohammad was an “impostor” and Jesus “a very ordinary ignorant man, neither learned nor a yogi”. His contemporary Ramakrishna (1836-1886) spoke of the equality of religions, but in his view “the Hindu religion alone is the Sanatana Dharma”.

His disciple Vivekananda (1863-1904) also laid emphasis on toleration and picked up the famous Rigvedic passage “ekaüsad viprà vahudhà vadanti” (The wise speak of what is One in many ways) in support of his vision that “India alone [was] to be...the land of toleration”. But this was incompatible with his view that “from Pacific to the Atlantic for five hundred years blood ran all over the world” and “that is Mohammadanism”, even though his Rigvedic quote has become a cliché through being endlessly milked by politicians.

Similar views continued to be held by some leaders in the early 20th century. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920), for example, couched his views in the vocabulary of tolerance and quite often cited the above Rigvedic passage but, in reality, espoused militant Hinduism. Even the Muslim-hater MS Golwalkar (1906-1973) spoke of the Hindus as the most tolerant people of the world, although this sounded like the devil quoting scripture, for he identified Muslims, Christians and Communists as internal threats to the country. It would appear that these leaders, from Dayananda to Golwalkar, used tolerance as a camouflage for Hindu belligerence: they privileged Hinduism over other religions and did not provide enough space to them. Unlike them, Mahatma Gandhi, who lived and died for communal harmony, genuinely found Hinduism to be the most tolerant of all religions even if his excessive pride in its inclusivism may have tended to make it exclusive.

Emphasising the syncretism

Many historians and social scientists have also spoken and written about the inclusive character of Hinduism and have produced much literature which highlights its syncretic traditions. Several instances of mutual accommodation among the various Hindu sects have been cited.

It is rightly held that the Buddha, founder of a heretic religion, emerged as an avatara of Vishnu around the middle of the 6th century AD. He figured as such in several Puranas and other texts including the Dashavataracharita of Kshemendra (11th century) and the Gitagovinda of Jayadeva (12th century) as well as in inscriptions and in the Kitabu-ul-Hind of Alberuni (11th century). Even sacrifice to him was recommended for those desirous of beauty. But, interestingly, he was also reviled as a thief and an atheist, and Shiva is believed to have appeared on Earth in the form of Shankara to combat the Buddha avatara, even though Shankara himself is described as an illegitimate child in a 14th century Vaishnava text.

The Vedantist philosopher Madhava Acharya (14th century) is often said to have displayed an exemplary tolerance of opposing points of view in his Sarvadarshanasamgraha (Collection of All Systems), which begins by presenting the school of Charvakas, criticises it and ends with Shankara’s Advaita “as the conclusion and crown of all philosophical systems”. But it is forgotten that this was in keeping with the traditional Indian practice of presenting the opponent’s view before refuting it.

Further, Adinatha (Rishabha), the first tirthanakara of Jainism, was accepted as an incarnation of Vishnu in the Bhagavatapurana. Christ was sometimes included in the incarnations of Vishnu, and the Muslim sect of Imam Shahis believed that the Imam was himself the tenth avatara of Vishnu and that the Quran was a part of the Atharvaveda. Akbar was sometimes thought of as the tenth avatara of Vishnu and Queen Victoria too was accepted as a Hindu goddess when a plague broke out in Bombay following an insult to her statue by some miscreants.

It is, however, missed in all this that neither Adinatha, nor the Imam, nor Christ, nor Akbar, nor even Victoria occupied an important place in the Brahmanical scheme of things. In other words, non-Brahmanical religions were not treated on par with Brahmanism but as religions which, although unwelcome, did exist and so had to be tolerated. It is difficult to say that the status of Islam and Christianity is no different in present-day India, although there is the argument that the attacks on them by the proponents of Hindutva do not represent Hinduism and Hindus.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

What did Jesus really look like?

Religious Matters

We all know his name, but the face of Christ remains frustratingly elusive... doesn't it?

Meredith J C Warren, The Conversation  · Yesterday · 11:30 pm 

Currently making the news is a report on a reconstruction of what is being called Jesus’s face. The reconstruction, by British anatomical artist Richard Neave, is actually more than a decade old, but it recently has started doing the rounds again – fitting given the time of year. Rather than intending to show precisely what Jesus might have looked like, the project sought to demonstrate what an average Judean in the first century of the Common Era might have looked like.

While this impression, of a dark-haired, brown-skinned, and brown-eyed man whose face appears weathered from a career of physical labour outside, is probably not identical to the appearance of the historical Jesus, it is likely a closer approximation than many of those that frequently appear in popular culture.

Jesus Christ Superstar’s lead, Ted Neely, is a good example of the typical Western Jesus: long, blondish hair, pale, wrinkle-free skin, and a placid expression. But what evidence do we have to support any reconstruction of what the historical Jesus actually looked like?

An elusive face

 

A contemporary icon
Source: Christian Cable/flickr, CC BY

The question of what Jesus looked like is complicated by the absence of any description of his physical qualities in early Christian texts. This isn’t because appearance in general wasn’t important in antiquity; indeed, we have a description of the apostle Paul in a third century narrative about his work.
  

Acts of Paul and Thecla (2.3), an apocryphal story of Paul’s influence on a virgin woman named Thecla, says that Paul was “a man little of stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, with eyebrows joining, and nose somewhat hooked, full of grace: for sometimes he appeared like a man, and sometimes he had the face of an angel".

 

Cristo Redentor, Rio de Janeiro
Source: Phil Whitehouse/flickr, CC BY

When Jesus does appear in literature, people seem not to be able to recognise him, even in the New Testament. The Gospel of John includes two examples. First, Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener when she goes looking for Jesus’s body after his crucifixion; it is only when she hears his voice that she realises the man is Jesus.

Then, after his resurrection, Jesus meets his disciples as they are fishing. Again, they don’t recognise him when they see him. One of the characteristics of Jesus in later Christian literature is that he appears to his followers in many different forms, for example in Acts of Peter (3.21), one of the first apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.

Have you seen this man?

The earliest pictures we have of Jesus come from frescoes painted on the walls of catacombs and carvings made to decorate stone coffins. These pictures generally come from the third century, about 200 years after Jesus’s death, so none of them could have been done by an eyewitness to the living Jesus.

 

Church at Dura Europos, ca. 235 CE; depiction of Jesus healing the paralytic.Marsyas

This fresco, painted on the wall of a third-century church in Dura Europus, Syria, shows the story of Jesus healing the paralytic. While it is difficult to see facial details, this Jesus has short hair and is clean-shaven.

Jesus’s appearance reveals quite a lot about how portraits of him begin to function in early Christian communities. Jesus is wearing a garment typical of Roman men: a tunic with pallium. Jesus is usually depicted, regardless of his facial features, as conforming to Roman expectations about how virtuous men appear.

Jennifer Awes Freeman writes more about how imperial iconography might be at play in the earliest depictions of Jesus in her article: “The Good Shepherd and the Enthroned Ruler: A Reconsideration of Imperial Iconography in the Early Church.”

As the Christian churches grew and expanded, people began creating icons, images of holy men and women. These icons were not just decorations but were objects of veneration. The oldest surviving icon depicting Jesus comes from the sixth century CE (below). We can clearly see the emerging tradition of depicting Jesus as longer haired, pale-skinned, and bearded. Here he is also wearing the dark brown garment typically associated with monastic communities, illustrating the shifting values imbued in depictions of Jesus.

 

Christ the Saviour (Pantokrator), a sixth-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai.

One of the main things we can take away from these early images of Jesus is that from the very earliest images, Jesus’s appearance is imagined as matching up with societal expectations of what people ought to look like.

Normalising the extraordinary

It is no surprise that many contemporary depictions of Jesus show him as representing what is upheld by Western standards of “normative” (that is, culturally imposed and valued) male beauty. This goes equally for formal portraits displayed in places of worship and for the phenomenon of pareidolia, images of Christ (or other revered figures) that people claim “spontaneously appear” on everything from Marmite to tortillas and windows.

Our images of Jesus, then, say more about us as a society than about his historical appearance.

 

Is this him?
James Shepard/flickr, CC BY

 Will we ever know?

Finally, why do we keep asking the question, what did Jesus look like? As Michael Peppard notes in his article, “Was the Presence of Christ in Statues? The Challenge of Divine Media for a Jewish Roman God”, the desire to know what Jesus looked like is far from uniquely a post-modern quest; in the 19th century, Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, imagines Anthony himself yearning to be able to visualise his saviour.

Today, our images of Jesus more often reflect the diversity that has always been a part of our world; in turn, the high value our culture gives to the careful process of scientific discovery is part of why this reconstructed image of a first-century Jew has caught our collective attention.

Meredith J C Warren, Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies, University of Sheffield

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: srollin

Joshua Dubois: What the President secretly did at Sandy Hook Elementary School

Below is an excerpt from The President’s Devotional by Joshua Dubois, the former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He’s recounting events that occurred Sunday, December 16, 2012 — two days after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. Dubois had gotten word the day before that the President wanted to meet with the families of the victims:

I left early to help the advance team—the hardworking folks who handle logistics for every event—set things up, and I arrived at the local high school where the meetings and memorial service would take place. We prepared seven or eight classrooms for the families of the slain children and teachers, two or three families to a classroom, placing water and tissues and snacks in each one. Honestly, we didn’t know how to prepare; it was the best we could think of.

The families came in and gathered together, room by room. Many struggled to offer a weak smile when we whispered, “The president will be here soon.” A few were visibly angry—so understandable that it barely needs to be said—and were looking for someone, anyone, to blame. Mostly they sat in silence.

I went downstairs to greet President Obama when he arrived, and I provided an overview of the situation. “Two families per classroom . . . The first is . . . and their child was . . . The second is . . . and their child was . . . We’ll tell you the rest as you go.”

The president took a deep breath and steeled himself, and went into the first classroom. And what happened next I’ll never forget.

Person after person received an engulfing hug from our commander in chief. He’d say, “Tell me about your son. . . . Tell me about your daughter,” and then hold pictures of the lost beloved as their parents described favorite foods, television shows, and the sound of their laughter. For the younger siblings of those who had passed away—many of them two, three, or four years old, too young to understand it all—the president would grab them and toss them, laughing, up into the air, and then hand them a box of White House M&M’s, which were always kept close at hand. In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break.

And then the entire scene would repeat—for hours. Over and over and over again, through well over a hundred relatives of the fallen, each one equally broken, wrecked by the loss. After each classroom, we would go back into those fluorescent hallways and walk through the names of the coming families, and then the president would dive back in, like a soldier returning to a tour of duty in a worthy but wearing war. We spent what felt like a lifetime in those classrooms, and every single person received the same tender treatment. The same hugs. The same looks, directly in their eyes. The same sincere offer of support and prayer.

The staff did the preparation work, but the comfort and healing were all on President Obama. I remember worrying about the toll it was taking on him. And of course, even a president’s comfort was woefully inadequate for these families in the face of this particularly unspeakable loss. But it became some small measure of love, on a weekend when evil reigned.

—

From The President’s Devotional. Copyright 2013 Joshua Dubois.

 Children waiting outside the school after the shooting. [photo: Michelle McLoughlin]

Source: Vox Populi

Watch: 'My name is Suzette, I'm not the Park Street rape victim'

Crime Against Women

What Suzette Jordan said when she chose to fight back against her rape and identify the criminals.

Scroll Staff  · Yesterday · 01:02 pm

Satyamev Jayate Season 2 Undying Spirit Inspiring Moment English



Suzette Jordan is dead. All five men accused of raping her in a moving car on February 6, 2012, have been found guilty. Jordan, who died of encephalitis in March 2015, chose not to stay anonymous but to reveal her identity, to fight back.

"I'm a person," she told the host Aamir Khan in an episode of Satyamev Jayate, "and I want my life back." In the video above, Jordan recounts how visiting the site of the rape and murder of another woman in a village near here home – "I could smell the blood" – made her decide not to seek refuge as a victim but to do all she could to ensure that the perpetrators were brought to justice.

The rape was initially dismissed by West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee as a "fabricated incident". On Thursday, a Kolkata court found all five accused – two of whom are absconding – guilty. It's come too late to bring any sort of closure to Suzette Jordan herself, but the judgment vindicates the courage with which she withstood all the pressure to drop the charges, along with the stigmatisation.

Banerjee is yet to respond to the judgment on either her Facebook or Twitter page, on both of which she is quite active.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

53 years after India incarcerated 3,000 of its Chinese-origin citizens, the internees speak out

Sunday, 29 November 2015 - 7:10am IST

Gargi Gupta

India incarcerated 3,000 of its Chinese origin citizens during the 1962 war. Now the 'Deoli Camp Internees' are calling for justice through testimonies in films and books, Gargi Gupta reports.

 1. The Deoli prisoner of war camp in west Rajasthan 2. Yin Marsh and (r) former Deoli prisoner late Yap Yin Shing 3. Effa Ma, mother of journalist Joy Ma (r)

It has taken more than 50 years for them to speak out, but now the small band of 'Deoli Camp Internees', as they call themselves on Facebook, are eager to tell the world their story. Last month month, four members of the community, citizens now of the US and Canada, flew down to India for just this purpose. At public screenings of Rafeeq Ellias's Beyond Barbed Wires: A Distant Dawn, a documentary film that records the testimonies of several of the earlier generation of Deoli detainees and addresses to the media, they spoke about the pain and humiliation they, or their parents went through, and how they'd like the Indian government to acknowledge its mistake, if not say sorry.

But first the details of the story, which has come out in driblets in sections of the Indian media but is still not widely known. During the 1962 war, around 3,000 Indians of Chinese origin - women and young children among them - were picked up from Calcutta, Siliguri, Darjeeling, Shillong and other places in eastern India, and transported to a World War II prisoner of war camp built by the British in Deoli, a town in west Rajasthan. Most of them had lived in India for generations and had prospered as leather or tea merchants. Though none of them had anything to do with the war, their businesses and establishments were seized as "enemy property" and houses ransacked. They were kept at the Deoli camp for four years, before being released. But that wasn't the end of their travails - from being well-off, eminent citizens, they now found themselves poor and needy, shunned and looked upon with suspicion.

It's a story that does not show the Indian dispensation of the time in a good light, but no different from the detention of Japanese Americans in the US during World War II, or of German-origin citizens during World War I. It happened elsewhere too - the imprisonment of 32,000 Germans and and Austro-Hungarians in the UK from 1914 to 1919. The discovery of historical precedent may provide a context, but it does not take away from the pain and humiliation the Deoli internees suffered.

In the absence of government succour or even acknowledgment that it caused grievous harm to innocent citizens, it is art - books or films - that often brings a sense of closure. Think of books like Farewell to Manzanar, the documentaries Topaz and History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige and how they exposed the shocking brutality of meted out to the "Nisei".

The Deoli camp internees are now embarking on somewhat similar project.

Besides Elias's documentary, which has recorded interviews with several very old internees, there's now an Indian edition of Yin Marsh's book, Doing Time With Nehru, which she'd self published in 2012. The book, which takes its name from the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru had also apparently been imprisoned for a time in Deoli, gathers her memories of the camp, where she was sent off when she was just 13.

Canada-based author Kwai-Yun Li wrote An Oral History of Chinese Indians from 1962 to 1966 in 2011, which is also available on the Internet. Joy Ma, a journalist from San Francisco who was born in the internment camp, is now writing a book on her mother's experience.

Disclosure may be necessary, but it's not easy. "I've been writing about the camp and internment in the form of short stories and personal projects for several years," says Joy. "The camp and its aftermath were such a difficult time for my family, it was hard to find the right perspective to write it."

Source: dnaindia

Guardian of the dispossessed: an economic dissident in modern India

By J. Zach Hollo

As India thrives and convulses in its embrace of capitalism, one labor organizer sees himself as the last line of defense for the working class and those being left behind as the country develops.

 Venkateswarlu Manam (right) and his wife Lakshmi Marella (left).Copyright J. Zach Hollo

On a hot, humid afternoon in Visakhapatnam, a large city on India’s southeastern coast, Venkateswarlu Manam had a visitor. It was a young man named Raju, who had come to thank Manam for rescuing him from an abusive episode with his employer.

It had begun when Raju sold company property and didn’t hand over the revenue, like he was supposed to. Raju had admitted his wrongdoing and apologized to his boss, saying he’d pay the company back. But his boss, the manager of a gas cylinder distributor, beat Raju, and chained him to the wall outside the office building.

It was then that Raju’s aunt called Manam, who works for the Indian Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), telling him about the episode and pleading for help. Manam called to the manager, who reluctantly agreed to release Raju and give him back his job.

Raju later told Manam that his thievery was an act of desperation to pay interest fees to private moneylenders. “You fool,” Manam replied. “Why didn’t you come to me earlier?”

Settling disagreements like these is part of Manam’s job. Most of his time consists of sifting through legal paperwork for ongoing labor disputes, but random crises like this one often arise.

As India thrives and convulses in its embrace of capitalism, Manam sees himself as the last line of defense for the working class, a guardian of the poor and those being left behind as the country develops. India has experienced a sporadic flurry of growth since its 1991 economic reforms, when the government deregulated the economy, privatized many sectors, and opened up the country to greater foreign investment. Over the past 24 years, development indicators such as educational enrollment, child mortality, life expectancy, and percentage of people living below the poverty line have consistently improved. But these accomplishments belie India’s somber realities: the new economy has disproportionately benefitted those who are already privileged. Even with great economic growth, an estimated 363 million in India still live in poverty, according to a 2014 report by the Indian Planning Commission.

At the IFTU branch in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Manam serves as the union’s vice president and also advises the Visakhapatnam Slum Dwellers Welfare Association (SDWA). The SDWA provides economic aid and legal services to residents in the city’s poorest quarters, and is led by Manam’s wife, Lakshmi Marella, who shares her husband’s activist bent.

Manam, who is 49, stands hunched over, his left arm twisted and dangling at his side. He walks with a limp, and though he often struggles to move from one place to another, he can get by, even if it takes a bit longer. What Manam lacks in mobility he compensates for in energy. He jumps from one bundle of paperwork to another, his voice serious but chatty as he discusses cases with his colleagues in his home office. He smiles easily under a whirl of hair oranged by the sun.

Manam’s battle for the poor, and against the establishment he sees as their oppressors, began in college. Raised by farmers in a village in Andhra Pradesh, he moved to Visakhapatnam to study law at Andhra University. There, he joined a student group that visited the city’s slums and organized political rallies against income inequality and caste discrimination.

In the early 1990s, while he was nearing the end of his law program, life on Manam’s family farm changed dramatically. As India’s economy teetered on the brink of collapse in the late 1980s, the government acquiesced to a host of structural reforms imposed by the World Bank in exchange for investment loans. Among those reforms was an agricultural policy that deregulated the Indian seed market and brought it under the jurisdiction of the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Seeds that Indian farmers had used their whole lives became the intellectual property of American corporations like Monsanto and Cargill, who collected royalties on their acquisitions and forced seed prices to skyrocket.

Manam’s family had to stop growing their own seeds, which they had normally replanted every year, and were forced to buy more expensive seeds, ones that had been genetically modified so that they could not be replanted in future seasons. The family also had to switch from homemade fertilizer to a more expensive foreign brand. Nationwide, imported food products made cheap by heavy subsidies from western countries flooded the market, driving the price down on the crops that Manam’s family sold.

“My input costs shot up from 4,000 to 15,000 rupees [$62 to $235],” remembers Manam’s brother Veeranjaneyu, who still works as a farmer. “The yield increased a little, but not nearly enough to cover the increase in input costs. And my crops sold for less money than before. I was forced to take out six lakhs [$9,412] in loans from private moneylenders. The loan has been a horrible burden on my life.”

 Photo by Vinay DV/Flickr, CC BY-NC

For India’s farmers, the debt acquired in an effort to cope with the new trade rules has led to an epidemic of suicides in the countryside, which continues to this day. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in the past three years more than 3,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide.

Having watched American multinational corporations extract vast amounts of wealth from the Indian countryside, and having seen firsthand the squalor of the urban slums, Manam decided to dedicate his life to activism. “I knew then I wanted to work for the people,” he says.

In college, Manam met Lakshmi, a likeminded liberal student activist. They fell in love, married, and had two daughters. Together, they help those most vulnerable in their community, one desperate case at a time.

“Seeing the condition of people around us, and knowing the reasons behind why they are suffering, how could we sit back and allow it to continue?” Lakshmi says.

“The system now pits human against human,” says Manam, arguing that capitalism reduces the world to competition and cruelty. “People should always be kind and loving to others. People should help one another, whether that person is family, a neighbor, friend, or complete stranger.”

“I do not like the Chicago School,” he volunteered to me recently, referring to the University of Chicago’s famously conservative economics department — the onetime intellectual home of Milton Friedman and birthplace for many of the economic theories that justify the World Bank’s and World Trade Organization’s structural reforms. “Globalization is just another word for Western hegemony,” Manam sighs.

Two photos of Bhagat Singh, a socialist revolutionary who violently opposed British rule in the early twentieth century, adorn a long pink wall in Manam’s office. Known as the antithesis of Mohandas Gandhi, the peaceful champion of nonviolent resistance, Singh rose to fame by taking part in the revenge murder of a British police officer in 1928. In prison, he fasted for 116 days, dying at the gallows at age 23. Whereas Gandhi disavowed class struggle in favor of unified resistance to the British, Singh remained devoted to Marxism, studying Lenin until the last days of his life.

“I do not like Gandhi,” Manam says. “I don’t believe India ever became independent. It went from being colonized by the British to being colonized by multinational corporations.”

Manam sees his efforts with workers and slum dwellers as part of a larger effort to manifest radical change in the country. “We need a revolution,” he says. “We need to take up arms against the government if we have to. There is so much suffering and so little relief. Communism is the only way forward. Everyone should be equal. The government should provide for the people. It should make sure people have shelter and food when they are in need. It should give them education.”

 A communist banner is carried during a pro-farmers march through Thiruvananthapuram, India, in 2011.

 Photo by Johan Bichel Lindegaard/Flickr, CC BY.

“Every Monday is grievance day,” says Yuvaraj Narasimhan, the Visakhapatnam collector, a position much like a mayor. “Everyone is free to come and speak to me and my colleagues. And we often address the problems people tell us.”

Manam brushes it aside. “It is a sham!” he shouts when I bring up the “grievance day” sessions. “The government is deceiving the people into making them believe someone is listening.”

“I wanted to be an official once,” he continues. “Before I came to Visakhapatnam for university, I dreamed of getting a law degree and joining the government. I wanted to be a minister. I wanted to help the rural areas. I thought it was possible to serve in politics without corruption, without partiality, in a way that would really help the people. But after I moved here, I learned that idea was trash. It’s not possible to do good within the system.”

On May 30, 2015, three days after Manam had helped Raju, there was an incident involving a worker who transported gas cylinders, which are commonly used in India to provide fuel for cooking. This time, a 32-year-old transporter named Nagababu died on duty, leaving behind a wife and two children.

“Nagababu would only come home on Sundays. Otherwise, he was always working,” says Dhanalakshmi Lalam, Nagababu’s wife. “He would drive all day. At night, he slept in the car to guard the cylinders.”

Manam’s main task was to file a formal complaint to the police detailing the man’s death. Otherwise, he says, the company would have legal wiggle room to claim that the driver had not been on duty, leaving them largely off the hook in compensating his family. “The company has been abusing these workers,” Manam fumes. “They are only supposed to work one eight-hour shift per day. But the company often has them work three shifts straight.”

Before studying the autopsy or drafting the paperwork, Manam had a more personal role to play. He was going to the man’s home to pay his respects to the family, who live in a village two hours west of Visakhapatnam. Manam left his house with two union colleagues at 5 p.m. They’d be there by sundown.

 Photo of Manam courtesy of J. Zach Hollo, who maintains the copyright.

Their small white van shot out of the city and onto a long highway that weaved through thick patches of palm trees, and past thatched-house villages next to sparkling Hyundai dealerships. Even more than the city, the countryside was full of surreal juxtapositions. The thatched-hut communities embodied serenity, but the road itself was a violent organism, with trucks, cars, and motorcycles swerving and honking at one another, surging onward with a ruthless sense of purpose.

Around 7 p.m., Manam and his colleagues turned onto a smaller, more unkempt road, and soon arrived at the village. About a hundred men had gathered in a field where Nagababu’s body lay atop a tall stack of wood, his face covered in orange dust with a thick red bindi mark on the forehead. Night was falling fast. A man lit the pyre.

The group gathered around Manam, shaking his hand warmly and smiling at him with tired eyes. Many men in this village work for the same company as Nagababu, and they all count on Manam’s services. Manam spoke to them, asking about their working conditions and telling them about the case he was filing to get Nagababu’s family more compensation.

Afterward, the van drove to the family’s house, a one-story brick home with a large porch draped by a billowing embroidered sheet. Two candles cast a dim yellow glow over the darkness.

Dhanalakshmi, Nagababu’s young widow, sat on a cot with their two children, a five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, each of whom looked malnourished. When Manam entered, clinging to a colleague’s arm as he walked, Dhanalakshmi began to weep. Nagababu’s mother, short and skinny with long grey hair, was also there. Her eyes were sunk so deep into her face that they were barely visible. She wept, too.

Manam sat on a chair in front of the family. He stayed quiet for several minutes and absorbed the sounds of their grief. His eyes burned holes in the floor. Then he looked up and spoke.

He told them he was sorry for their loss — he couldn’t imagine the pain they must be feeling to lose a husband and son so young. He told them he was filing a police report on Nagababu’s behalf, so the family might get more compensation from the company. He told them he would need help from the family in days to come.

“Don’t be afraid. I know it is hard now, but you must be determined,” he said to them. “You must have courage. Don’t lose your courage.”

Dhanalakshmi paused her sobs and nodded. She thanked him, saying the family would do everything necessary to help the case.

After siting a few more minutes, Manam stood up, took his colleague’s arm, and limped away. As the van pulled out of the village and back onto the highway, one of them turned on the stereo and flipped to a muffled song, a fast number sung by a chorus with strong drums.

“This song was written during the Cold War,” Manam tells me. His eyes stare searchingly out the window; wind sails through his hair as he begins drumming his right hand on his leg.

“It’s about the hegemony of the Soviet Union and the United States — and struggle to escape imperialism,” he says. “They are singing, ‘How are we supposed to view the world? How can we escape this misery?’”

* * *

J. Zach Hollo is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He has reported on migrant labor issues for Doha News, on the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan for Al Bawaba, and is a contributor to the Wilson Quarterly. Follow him on WordPress, or on Twitter at @JZachHollo.

The reporting of this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Source: wilsonquarterly