Memoirs of fifties Akividu or Akiveedu (ఆకివీడు), and neighbouring villages. Educational, geographical, historical, literary, philosophical, religious and social postings included. Copyright Raju (PD). (bondadaa@gmail.com)
Saturday, March 12, 2016
Show Me The Money
In spite of attempts to dress it as one, Aadhaar bill is not a money bill.
Written by P D T Achary | Published:March 12, 2016 12:01 am
In all democratic parliaments, as in India, the Lower House alone has the power to grant money to the executive. A bill that deals with such matters is called a money bill.
The issue of bills being categorised as money bills in an attempt to circumvent the Rajya Sabha has once again become live. On Friday, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley asserted was a money bill. But is it actually a money bill?
In all democratic parliaments, as in India, the Lower House alone has the power to grant money to the executive. A bill that deals with such matters is called a money bill. A money bill cannot be passed or rejected by the Rajya Sabha, which can keep such a bill for only 14 days, after which it will be deemed to have been passed by both Houses.
As per Article 110(1), a bill that contains only provisions dealing with the following qualifies as a money bill: One, the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax; two, regulation of borrowing or the giving of any guarantee by the government of India, or undertaking financial obligation by the government; three, the custody of the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI) or the Contingency Fund of India, the payment of moneys into or withdrawal from them; four, the appropriation of moneys out of the CFI; five, declaring any expenditure as a charged expenditure on the CFI; six, the receipt of money on account of the CFI or the public account of India or the ambit of accounts of the Union or of a state; seven, any matter incidental to the above issues.
Let’s examine the Aadhaar bill in the light of the above definition. The bill does not deal with imposition, abolition, alteration, etc, of tax; nor does it deal with the regulation of borrowing or giving a guarantee by the government or an amendment in respect of any financial obligation to be undertaken by the government. This bill also does not deal with the custody of the CFI, etc. The moneys paid into or withdrawn from such funds are incidental. The bill is not an appropriation bill that appropriates money from the CFI. It does not deal with declaring any expenditure as a charge on that fund. Further, it does not deal with the receipt of money on account of the CFI or the public account, or the custody or issue of such money, or the audit of the accounts of the Union or states. It may also be noted that a bill becomes a money bill when it contains only provisions dealing with any of the above matters. If a bill contains any other matters, it is not a money bill.
The object of the Aadhaar bill is to create a right to obtain a unique identity number, regulate the enrolment process to collect demographic and biometric information, and create a statutory authority for regulating and supervising the process. It also specifies offences and penalties. The obvious purpose of the bill is to deal with all aspects relating to the unique identity number of Indian residents, which will be used for multiple purposes. Clause 4(3) states that the Aadhaar number may be accepted as proof for “any purpose”, not merely for the payment of subsidy or other monetary benefits.
The above analysis clearly shows that the Aadhaar bill is not a money bill. Subtle attempts have been made to give it the appearance of a money bill by referring to the CFI in certain clauses. But this does not alter the character of the bill, which does not deal with the CFI. Further, subsidies, subventions, etc, are not a part of this bill. If the government had introduced a bill exclusively dealing with these, it would have been a money bill. But the Aadhaar bill does not make any provision for subsidies or other government benefits or specify beneficiaries.
The Aadhaar bill comes under the category of financial bills under Article 117, which would inter alia involve expenditure from the CFI. The Constitution stipulates that such bills be considered only after the president has recommended their consideration. However, such bills can be introduced in either House and, as per Article 107(2), need to be passed by both Houses.
Article 110(3) confirms finality on the speaker’s decision on the question of whether a bill is a money bill. But this constitutional provision cannot be seen as a convenient tool to deal with an inconvenient second chamber. The Constitution reposes faith in the speaker’s fairness and objectivity. Article 110(1) provides the touchstone of the decision to be taken by the speaker under Article 110(3). Any decision actuated by extraneous considerations can’t be a proper decision under Article 110(3). The speaker’s decision needs to be in conformity with the constitutional provisions. If not, it is no decision under the Constitution.
The writer is a former secretary general of the Lok Sabha
Written by P D T Achary | Published:March 12, 2016 12:01 am
The issue of bills being categorised as money bills in an attempt to circumvent the Rajya Sabha has once again become live. On Friday, the Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016, which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley asserted was a money bill. But is it actually a money bill?
In all democratic parliaments, as in India, the Lower House alone has the power to grant money to the executive. A bill that deals with such matters is called a money bill. A money bill cannot be passed or rejected by the Rajya Sabha, which can keep such a bill for only 14 days, after which it will be deemed to have been passed by both Houses.
As per Article 110(1), a bill that contains only provisions dealing with the following qualifies as a money bill: One, the imposition, abolition, remission, alteration or regulation of any tax; two, regulation of borrowing or the giving of any guarantee by the government of India, or undertaking financial obligation by the government; three, the custody of the Consolidated Fund of India (CFI) or the Contingency Fund of India, the payment of moneys into or withdrawal from them; four, the appropriation of moneys out of the CFI; five, declaring any expenditure as a charged expenditure on the CFI; six, the receipt of money on account of the CFI or the public account of India or the ambit of accounts of the Union or of a state; seven, any matter incidental to the above issues.
Let’s examine the Aadhaar bill in the light of the above definition. The bill does not deal with imposition, abolition, alteration, etc, of tax; nor does it deal with the regulation of borrowing or giving a guarantee by the government or an amendment in respect of any financial obligation to be undertaken by the government. This bill also does not deal with the custody of the CFI, etc. The moneys paid into or withdrawn from such funds are incidental. The bill is not an appropriation bill that appropriates money from the CFI. It does not deal with declaring any expenditure as a charge on that fund. Further, it does not deal with the receipt of money on account of the CFI or the public account, or the custody or issue of such money, or the audit of the accounts of the Union or states. It may also be noted that a bill becomes a money bill when it contains only provisions dealing with any of the above matters. If a bill contains any other matters, it is not a money bill.
The object of the Aadhaar bill is to create a right to obtain a unique identity number, regulate the enrolment process to collect demographic and biometric information, and create a statutory authority for regulating and supervising the process. It also specifies offences and penalties. The obvious purpose of the bill is to deal with all aspects relating to the unique identity number of Indian residents, which will be used for multiple purposes. Clause 4(3) states that the Aadhaar number may be accepted as proof for “any purpose”, not merely for the payment of subsidy or other monetary benefits.
The above analysis clearly shows that the Aadhaar bill is not a money bill. Subtle attempts have been made to give it the appearance of a money bill by referring to the CFI in certain clauses. But this does not alter the character of the bill, which does not deal with the CFI. Further, subsidies, subventions, etc, are not a part of this bill. If the government had introduced a bill exclusively dealing with these, it would have been a money bill. But the Aadhaar bill does not make any provision for subsidies or other government benefits or specify beneficiaries.
The Aadhaar bill comes under the category of financial bills under Article 117, which would inter alia involve expenditure from the CFI. The Constitution stipulates that such bills be considered only after the president has recommended their consideration. However, such bills can be introduced in either House and, as per Article 107(2), need to be passed by both Houses.
Article 110(3) confirms finality on the speaker’s decision on the question of whether a bill is a money bill. But this constitutional provision cannot be seen as a convenient tool to deal with an inconvenient second chamber. The Constitution reposes faith in the speaker’s fairness and objectivity. Article 110(1) provides the touchstone of the decision to be taken by the speaker under Article 110(3). Any decision actuated by extraneous considerations can’t be a proper decision under Article 110(3). The speaker’s decision needs to be in conformity with the constitutional provisions. If not, it is no decision under the Constitution.
The writer is a former secretary general of the Lok Sabha
Source: indianexpress
Friday, March 11, 2016
Contentious Aadhaar Bill passed with only 73 of 545 members present in Lok Sabha
Aadhaar Card
Contentious Aadhaar Bill passed with only 73 of 545 members present in Lok Sabha
Ruling party overrules privacy concerns and adopts an unusual strategy to pass the legislation.
Scroll Staff, Anumeha Yadav · Today · 08:49 pm
Only 73 of the Lok Sabha's 545 members were present as the lower house passed the controversial Aadhaar (Target Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill on Friday.
With the passage of the bill, the government or any "requesting entity", including a private company, could ask an individual to produce the biometrics-ID Aadhaar card to avail any subsidy, benefit, or service. But critics have expressed concerns over citizens' biometric data ‒ such as fingerprints and iris scans ‒ being collected on a mass scale in the absence of a privacy law.
The listing of the Bill on Friday was unusual because, ordinarily, private members' business (bills and resolutions) are taken up before the weekend. The House was relatively empty because several members had already left for their constituencies.
The process was also noteworthy because this was moved as a money Bill, which does not have to be approved by the Rajya Sabha. This was necessary because the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance lacks a majority in the upper house.
As critics pointed out, money Bills relate broadly to taxes or spending from the Treasury. But the government argued that the Aadhaar Bill qualified as one because it deals with expenditure incurred from the government Treasury. Legal experts pointed out that by this token, most Bills on health, education, railways, transport, agriculture could qualify as money Bills. This strategy, they said, would reduce the Rajya Sabha simply to a rubber stamp on any legislation.
Some clarifications
On Friday, the Bill was discussed only three hours.
As the BJP moved the legislation, several members, including those from the Congress, the Biju Janata Dal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, objected to the decision to classify this as a money Bill and suggested that it be sent to a standing committee.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley clarified some clauses of the Bill. He claimed that biometric data would not be shared under any circumstances. But the Bill actually allows for this data to shared with a joint secretary of the government in the interests of "national security".
BJD MP Tathagath Satpathy had moved several amendments, including on clause 33(1) which permits disclosure of an individual's data on an order by a district judge. Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy had also moved amendments but was not present in the parliament. However, ruling party MPs opposed all amendments by voice vote.
Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge had earlier stated that the Congress would cooperate with the government on Aadhaar, but objected to the Bill being introduced as a money Bill.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
Contentious Aadhaar Bill passed with only 73 of 545 members present in Lok Sabha
Ruling party overrules privacy concerns and adopts an unusual strategy to pass the legislation.
Scroll Staff, Anumeha Yadav · Today · 08:49 pm
Only 73 of the Lok Sabha's 545 members were present as the lower house passed the controversial Aadhaar (Target Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill on Friday.
With the passage of the bill, the government or any "requesting entity", including a private company, could ask an individual to produce the biometrics-ID Aadhaar card to avail any subsidy, benefit, or service. But critics have expressed concerns over citizens' biometric data ‒ such as fingerprints and iris scans ‒ being collected on a mass scale in the absence of a privacy law.
The listing of the Bill on Friday was unusual because, ordinarily, private members' business (bills and resolutions) are taken up before the weekend. The House was relatively empty because several members had already left for their constituencies.
The process was also noteworthy because this was moved as a money Bill, which does not have to be approved by the Rajya Sabha. This was necessary because the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance lacks a majority in the upper house.
As critics pointed out, money Bills relate broadly to taxes or spending from the Treasury. But the government argued that the Aadhaar Bill qualified as one because it deals with expenditure incurred from the government Treasury. Legal experts pointed out that by this token, most Bills on health, education, railways, transport, agriculture could qualify as money Bills. This strategy, they said, would reduce the Rajya Sabha simply to a rubber stamp on any legislation.
Some clarifications
On Friday, the Bill was discussed only three hours.
As the BJP moved the legislation, several members, including those from the Congress, the Biju Janata Dal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, objected to the decision to classify this as a money Bill and suggested that it be sent to a standing committee.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley clarified some clauses of the Bill. He claimed that biometric data would not be shared under any circumstances. But the Bill actually allows for this data to shared with a joint secretary of the government in the interests of "national security".
BJD MP Tathagath Satpathy had moved several amendments, including on clause 33(1) which permits disclosure of an individual's data on an order by a district judge. Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy had also moved amendments but was not present in the parliament. However, ruling party MPs opposed all amendments by voice vote.
Leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge had earlier stated that the Congress would cooperate with the government on Aadhaar, but objected to the Bill being introduced as a money Bill.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
Source: scrollin
How the Sangh Parivar transformed Bharat Mata into a militant goddess
Hindutva politics
The cult has been used to whip up support for a Hindu rashtra and consolidate Hindu votes.
Mrinal Pande · Mar 07, 2016 · 05:30 pm
In 1950, when India became a Republic, I was four and my mother was 25. I grew up hearing how my mother – like most girls from upper caste, middle class families – would have been schooled at home and married off in her early teens, but for an unusually liberal father who packed off my mother and her siblings to Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan. She emerged a graduate after 12 years there and later became a Hindi writer of repute. We were also reminded frequently that were it not for subsidised university education and Western science, my father, a humble village postmaster’s son, would never have acquired a first-class Master’s degree in Chemistry . My parents told my sisters and I repeatedly that our right to a wholesome education and a well-paid job afterwards was absolute. But they never let on that within most families, and on the campuses of India in the 1930s, the bourgeoisie were a very complex and deeply divided phenomena. We were never told about the ideological divide within Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress or even within our own larger family.
My father was an educationist. He set up a chain of state-run schools with local help in a far off Himalayan region after the Indo China war. Did they also have to battle their Brahminical tradition-bound families or the state government? Did they take them on, or did they capitulate on various fronts? Was it worthwhile?
Nationalist discourse
As I watched the repeated suppression of writers, thinkers, intellectuals and, most recently, students, along with the string of lies spewed out by our rulers to justify it, I was reminded of the gap in our understanding of the processes at work in India and was so upset I could hardly speak.
Peace protests, pacifist appeals and a global protest against the suppression of free speech, nothing seemed to work, as our nation entered a long, dark tunnel of fascism with a domestic face – that of lawyers and other right-wing activists, who called themselves proud sons of Bharat Mata, beating up citizens they judged to be traitors.
It was at that point when I began to re-read the literature and popular tracts of the 1920s. That was the period my parents grew up in, and there were two opposing sets of views about the nationalist discourse and cultural identity of the middle classes in India.
On both sides, traditionally embedded and national social values about class, caste and gender fed into each other. So while my mother and her siblings enjoyed their school years in one of the most liberal co-educational campuses in the country under the benign gaze of Tagore, artist Nandalal Bose, Sanskrit scholar Kshiti Mohan Sen and Hindi novelist and historian Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, most girls in their age group were married before they reached puberty to live lives as wives and mothers dependent on men, as laid down by Manu centuries ago.
The perfect woman
In the Hindi belt, the Stri Dharma Prashnottari, a 40-page monograph on women’s duties, published by the Gita Press, Gorakhpur, was a bestseller and did the rounds of middle class families. It recorded a conversation between an ideal woman, Savitri, and her simple acolyte, Sarala, whom she lectured about how to be a good wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Here was a template for an ideal Hindu woman whose morality, purity and chastity were to be the bedrock for the ideal Sanatan Hindu family – deemed the building block of a Hindu rashtra for the Hindu right wing that strongly opposed Gandhi and Ambedkar’s vision of an egalitarian, secular India.
Savitri’s views in the tract were enunciated very clearly – liberal Western education to girls posed a grave threat to the nation and must be opposed. As they matured, women’s strong sexual urges posed a threat to all so girls must be married before attaining puberty so that their sexuality could be contained before it created mayhem. Women only gained importance as mothers of sons – as it was them who would raise obedient and devoted citizens to serve the nation state.
With this template in place, the figure of the traditional Hindu mother goddess was soon invoked. So, in 1936, from Bengal, the land of Durga worshippers, came Anand Math, a novel in Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. The novel laid a solid foundation for the cult of Bharat Mata. In the preface to an English translation in 1992, the translator BK Roy declared that Bankim’s “great achievement for India was that he made patriotism a religion and his writings had become a gospel of India’s struggle for political independence.” He went on to describe how Vande Mataram (I bow to the mother nation), a song sung by a band of revolutionaries in the novel, became the rallying call for nationalists. The translator thanked Bankim profusely for having created a lineage of revolutionaries, who would always be kept alive by Bharat Mata’s militant Hindu nationalist sons and daughters.
The Hindu state
The vision outlined above was evoked on a spectacular scale by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1983 during its Ekatmata Yajna or Sacrifice for National Unity, a month-long yatra that criss-crossed the country. During this yatra, the Hindutva group combined abstract concepts such as gender and religious identity and sought to give them tangible shape by weaving together legends about the Mother Goddess and national heroes, consecrating them through age-old Vedic rituals.
The tapestry thus created became the basis of a Hindu nation state, which in turn was a combination of the European political concept of the nation-state and Veer Savarkar’s 1922 treatise, Essentials of Hindutva, where he set forth his idea of a Hindu nation united by a common Hindu culture.
But invented traditions are not static. They need to be reinvented in specific contexts to produce and challenge newer identities based on class, religion and gender. After the 1950s, justifying Hindu patriarchy’s differentiation of social space into private and public required a new vision of the motherhood of Bharat Mata.
None of the three major Hindu goddesses – Kali, Lakshmi, and Saraswati – are biological mothers. So the state’s apotheosis into a mother goddess required that the image of the mother goddess be trimmed somewhat, and she be presented primarily as a devoted, selfless and spiritually inclined mother of Hindu sons. She inspired her sons to shed the blood of all those who resisted her aura. Her sons would be ready to lay down their lives, if need be, to save her honour and punish infidels – who we are told repeatedly are non-Bharat Mata worshippers, the unpatriotic seditionists who need to be taught a swift lesson by being beaten up and jailed. To inculcate this philosophy, the champions of the cult of Bharat Mata have repeatedly insisted that all citizens – from cinema halls to university campuses – show unequivocal respect for Bharat Mata’s symbols, the national anthem, Vande Mataram and the tricolour.
Bharat Mata temple
A temple to Bharat Mata had come up in in Varanasi in the 1920s, and another came up in the pilgrimage town of Haridwar in the mid-1980s. It was built by Swami Satymitranand Giri, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader praised in temple handbooks for having raised substantial funds from the non-resident children of Bharat Mata. The English guidebook – Bharat Mata Mandir, A Candid Appraisal – said Swami’s decision to build the temple arose from a vision. “In all ancient cultures, the Divine mother is the cause off (sic) Creation,” said the booklet. “It is hoped that the visit to this shrine… will inspire devotion and dedication to Mother-Land.”
Six weeks after the area for the temple was consecrated, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad mounted its Ekatmata Yajna, a carefully planned month-long event during which trucks disguised as chariots doubled up as mobile Bharat Mata temples. These trucks transported images of the mother goddess or Bharat Mata with pots of Ganga water all over India for mass rituals of public worship by all her deemed children (read Hindu nationalists). This made Bharat Mata, or the concept of the nation as a militant goddess, a distinct all-India phenomenon. This was also when it became certain that the political arm of the Sangh Parivar – the Bharatiya Janata Party – would use the cult of Bharat Mata to whip up support for a Hindu rashtra and consolidate Hindu votes in its favour, like it did in the ’90s with the yet-to-be built Ram temple in Ayodhya.
The floors above the Bharat Mata shrine in Haridwar house shrines to shoor (military heroes), sants or saints and Satis or pious widows who chose to burn themselves on their husbands’ pyres. A floor dedicated to great spiritual teachers is dominated by statues of the mystic Ramakrishna, and his disciple Vivekanand. There is also a statue of Sri Aurobindo, but none for his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa, better known as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. The only woman honoured with a statue in the temple complex is Sharada Ma, the wife and disciple of Ramakrishna.
Not the lunatic fringe
The problem is that democracy, like capitalism, is ultimately a numbers game. Today this heady mix of religion and politics has started to generate toxic side effects among the 69% population that did not vote for the Right in the 2014 general elections. This is an unforeseen headache for the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the aftermath of the events at Jawaharlal Nehru University, we saw its hitherto cocky leadership betray a paranoid sense of embattlement, as first intellectuals and then Dalits and students raised their voices against the State. The lesser members of the party immediately delivered hate speeches against the dissidents, calling for war against intellectuals, the Left, all those suspected of being Left sympathisers and those who believe in secularism. As members of the Union cabinet and BJP members of state Assemblies began to articulate a deep hatred for secular principles, gender justice and free speech, it soon became hard to dismiss them as the lunatic fringe.
Something other than a lapse of logic seemed to be at work here. First, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student from Hyderabad Central University, committed suicide after his university stopped his meagre stipend. His friends said that Vemula had been targeted for raising issues under the banner of the Ambedkar Students Association. A few weeks later, a mob chanting Bharat Mata ki jai thrashed students, teachers and journalists within the Patiala House courts because the mob had decided that they were anti-national, Pakistan (read Muslim) sympathisers. Some TV news channels backed these self-appointed children of Bharat Mata, whipping up the hysteria further with doctored tapes and calls for a state crackdown on those who did not support their theory of nationalism. Damage control failed. Dalit leaders, intellectuals and students refused to buy the argument first articulated by the Bharat Mata temple compendium, and later theatrically articulated by the Union minister for Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, in Parliament.
But no political power on earth has been able to muffle public dissent forever. It emerges first within homes and hostels, dhabas and office canteens, then spills over in public places till university campuses erupt like volcanoes. Prescribed normality then turns into a myth. At a point like this, the only way to stay calm is to take each day as it comes, and to use what we know from history. Let them all come: the Right, the Left, the Socialists, the Dalit panthers and Tamil tigers, feminists and LGBT activists. Let our histories mix – anything, as long as they do not set about building a wall.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
The cult has been used to whip up support for a Hindu rashtra and consolidate Hindu votes.
Mrinal Pande · Mar 07, 2016 · 05:30 pm
In 1950, when India became a Republic, I was four and my mother was 25. I grew up hearing how my mother – like most girls from upper caste, middle class families – would have been schooled at home and married off in her early teens, but for an unusually liberal father who packed off my mother and her siblings to Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan. She emerged a graduate after 12 years there and later became a Hindi writer of repute. We were also reminded frequently that were it not for subsidised university education and Western science, my father, a humble village postmaster’s son, would never have acquired a first-class Master’s degree in Chemistry . My parents told my sisters and I repeatedly that our right to a wholesome education and a well-paid job afterwards was absolute. But they never let on that within most families, and on the campuses of India in the 1930s, the bourgeoisie were a very complex and deeply divided phenomena. We were never told about the ideological divide within Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress or even within our own larger family.
My father was an educationist. He set up a chain of state-run schools with local help in a far off Himalayan region after the Indo China war. Did they also have to battle their Brahminical tradition-bound families or the state government? Did they take them on, or did they capitulate on various fronts? Was it worthwhile?
Nationalist discourse
As I watched the repeated suppression of writers, thinkers, intellectuals and, most recently, students, along with the string of lies spewed out by our rulers to justify it, I was reminded of the gap in our understanding of the processes at work in India and was so upset I could hardly speak.
Peace protests, pacifist appeals and a global protest against the suppression of free speech, nothing seemed to work, as our nation entered a long, dark tunnel of fascism with a domestic face – that of lawyers and other right-wing activists, who called themselves proud sons of Bharat Mata, beating up citizens they judged to be traitors.
It was at that point when I began to re-read the literature and popular tracts of the 1920s. That was the period my parents grew up in, and there were two opposing sets of views about the nationalist discourse and cultural identity of the middle classes in India.
On both sides, traditionally embedded and national social values about class, caste and gender fed into each other. So while my mother and her siblings enjoyed their school years in one of the most liberal co-educational campuses in the country under the benign gaze of Tagore, artist Nandalal Bose, Sanskrit scholar Kshiti Mohan Sen and Hindi novelist and historian Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, most girls in their age group were married before they reached puberty to live lives as wives and mothers dependent on men, as laid down by Manu centuries ago.
The perfect woman
In the Hindi belt, the Stri Dharma Prashnottari, a 40-page monograph on women’s duties, published by the Gita Press, Gorakhpur, was a bestseller and did the rounds of middle class families. It recorded a conversation between an ideal woman, Savitri, and her simple acolyte, Sarala, whom she lectured about how to be a good wife, mother and daughter-in-law. Here was a template for an ideal Hindu woman whose morality, purity and chastity were to be the bedrock for the ideal Sanatan Hindu family – deemed the building block of a Hindu rashtra for the Hindu right wing that strongly opposed Gandhi and Ambedkar’s vision of an egalitarian, secular India.
Savitri’s views in the tract were enunciated very clearly – liberal Western education to girls posed a grave threat to the nation and must be opposed. As they matured, women’s strong sexual urges posed a threat to all so girls must be married before attaining puberty so that their sexuality could be contained before it created mayhem. Women only gained importance as mothers of sons – as it was them who would raise obedient and devoted citizens to serve the nation state.
With this template in place, the figure of the traditional Hindu mother goddess was soon invoked. So, in 1936, from Bengal, the land of Durga worshippers, came Anand Math, a novel in Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. The novel laid a solid foundation for the cult of Bharat Mata. In the preface to an English translation in 1992, the translator BK Roy declared that Bankim’s “great achievement for India was that he made patriotism a religion and his writings had become a gospel of India’s struggle for political independence.” He went on to describe how Vande Mataram (I bow to the mother nation), a song sung by a band of revolutionaries in the novel, became the rallying call for nationalists. The translator thanked Bankim profusely for having created a lineage of revolutionaries, who would always be kept alive by Bharat Mata’s militant Hindu nationalist sons and daughters.
The Hindu state
The vision outlined above was evoked on a spectacular scale by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1983 during its Ekatmata Yajna or Sacrifice for National Unity, a month-long yatra that criss-crossed the country. During this yatra, the Hindutva group combined abstract concepts such as gender and religious identity and sought to give them tangible shape by weaving together legends about the Mother Goddess and national heroes, consecrating them through age-old Vedic rituals.
The tapestry thus created became the basis of a Hindu nation state, which in turn was a combination of the European political concept of the nation-state and Veer Savarkar’s 1922 treatise, Essentials of Hindutva, where he set forth his idea of a Hindu nation united by a common Hindu culture.
But invented traditions are not static. They need to be reinvented in specific contexts to produce and challenge newer identities based on class, religion and gender. After the 1950s, justifying Hindu patriarchy’s differentiation of social space into private and public required a new vision of the motherhood of Bharat Mata.
None of the three major Hindu goddesses – Kali, Lakshmi, and Saraswati – are biological mothers. So the state’s apotheosis into a mother goddess required that the image of the mother goddess be trimmed somewhat, and she be presented primarily as a devoted, selfless and spiritually inclined mother of Hindu sons. She inspired her sons to shed the blood of all those who resisted her aura. Her sons would be ready to lay down their lives, if need be, to save her honour and punish infidels – who we are told repeatedly are non-Bharat Mata worshippers, the unpatriotic seditionists who need to be taught a swift lesson by being beaten up and jailed. To inculcate this philosophy, the champions of the cult of Bharat Mata have repeatedly insisted that all citizens – from cinema halls to university campuses – show unequivocal respect for Bharat Mata’s symbols, the national anthem, Vande Mataram and the tricolour.
Bharat Mata temple
A temple to Bharat Mata had come up in in Varanasi in the 1920s, and another came up in the pilgrimage town of Haridwar in the mid-1980s. It was built by Swami Satymitranand Giri, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader praised in temple handbooks for having raised substantial funds from the non-resident children of Bharat Mata. The English guidebook – Bharat Mata Mandir, A Candid Appraisal – said Swami’s decision to build the temple arose from a vision. “In all ancient cultures, the Divine mother is the cause off (sic) Creation,” said the booklet. “It is hoped that the visit to this shrine… will inspire devotion and dedication to Mother-Land.”
Six weeks after the area for the temple was consecrated, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad mounted its Ekatmata Yajna, a carefully planned month-long event during which trucks disguised as chariots doubled up as mobile Bharat Mata temples. These trucks transported images of the mother goddess or Bharat Mata with pots of Ganga water all over India for mass rituals of public worship by all her deemed children (read Hindu nationalists). This made Bharat Mata, or the concept of the nation as a militant goddess, a distinct all-India phenomenon. This was also when it became certain that the political arm of the Sangh Parivar – the Bharatiya Janata Party – would use the cult of Bharat Mata to whip up support for a Hindu rashtra and consolidate Hindu votes in its favour, like it did in the ’90s with the yet-to-be built Ram temple in Ayodhya.
The floors above the Bharat Mata shrine in Haridwar house shrines to shoor (military heroes), sants or saints and Satis or pious widows who chose to burn themselves on their husbands’ pyres. A floor dedicated to great spiritual teachers is dominated by statues of the mystic Ramakrishna, and his disciple Vivekanand. There is also a statue of Sri Aurobindo, but none for his spiritual collaborator, Mirra Alfassa, better known as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry. The only woman honoured with a statue in the temple complex is Sharada Ma, the wife and disciple of Ramakrishna.
Not the lunatic fringe
The problem is that democracy, like capitalism, is ultimately a numbers game. Today this heady mix of religion and politics has started to generate toxic side effects among the 69% population that did not vote for the Right in the 2014 general elections. This is an unforeseen headache for the Bharatiya Janata Party. In the aftermath of the events at Jawaharlal Nehru University, we saw its hitherto cocky leadership betray a paranoid sense of embattlement, as first intellectuals and then Dalits and students raised their voices against the State. The lesser members of the party immediately delivered hate speeches against the dissidents, calling for war against intellectuals, the Left, all those suspected of being Left sympathisers and those who believe in secularism. As members of the Union cabinet and BJP members of state Assemblies began to articulate a deep hatred for secular principles, gender justice and free speech, it soon became hard to dismiss them as the lunatic fringe.
Something other than a lapse of logic seemed to be at work here. First, Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student from Hyderabad Central University, committed suicide after his university stopped his meagre stipend. His friends said that Vemula had been targeted for raising issues under the banner of the Ambedkar Students Association. A few weeks later, a mob chanting Bharat Mata ki jai thrashed students, teachers and journalists within the Patiala House courts because the mob had decided that they were anti-national, Pakistan (read Muslim) sympathisers. Some TV news channels backed these self-appointed children of Bharat Mata, whipping up the hysteria further with doctored tapes and calls for a state crackdown on those who did not support their theory of nationalism. Damage control failed. Dalit leaders, intellectuals and students refused to buy the argument first articulated by the Bharat Mata temple compendium, and later theatrically articulated by the Union minister for Human Resource Development, Smriti Irani, in Parliament.
But no political power on earth has been able to muffle public dissent forever. It emerges first within homes and hostels, dhabas and office canteens, then spills over in public places till university campuses erupt like volcanoes. Prescribed normality then turns into a myth. At a point like this, the only way to stay calm is to take each day as it comes, and to use what we know from history. Let them all come: the Right, the Left, the Socialists, the Dalit panthers and Tamil tigers, feminists and LGBT activists. Let our histories mix – anything, as long as they do not set about building a wall.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
Source: scrollin
Revealed: Why Narendra Modi walked out of his marriage with Jashodaben
Sombhai said the marriage was forced on Modi by his parents when he was a teenager in keeping with the old orthodox tradition of fixing marriages between children and that it was never consummated as Modi walked out of the marriage soon after it was solemnised.
Uday Mahurkar
Ahmedabad, April 10, 2014 | UPDATED 16:25 IST
A day after BJP's prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi declared in his poll affidavit filed in Vadodara that he was a married man and that his wife's name is Jashodaben, his elder brother Sombhai Modi issued a statement here on Thursday to explain that the marriage was forced on a teenaged Narendra.
Sombhai said the marriage was forced on Modi by his parents when he was a teenager in keeping with the old orthodox tradition of fixing marriages between children and that it was never consummated as Modi walked out of the marriage soon after it was solemnised.
Dwelling on the reasons of the Gujarat Chief Minister's act, Sombhai said a young Modi did it in response to an inner call to work for the nation and the society inspired by the teachings of Swami Vivekanand.
In his press statement Sombhai, who runs a home for the old-aged and lives a simple life with his family in Ahmedabad, appealed to the people to see the marriage in the backdrop of these facts.
Modi, who has ruled Gujarat since 2001, has left the field for "spouse" blank in four Assembly polls. Of late, he has also flaunted his single status at rallies, saying that he was single and had no one to be corrupt for.
Modi ended the speculation over his marital status after a long period of silence, perhaps because the Congress had run a smear campaign against him in the last Vidhan Sabha elections and even after that by projecting Jashodaben, a retired teacher living in a north Gujarat village along with her brother, as a spurned wife and a victim of Modi's exploitation.
Modi's declaration of his marital status is aimed at pre-empting such a campaign and also any attempt to drag him to the Election Commission on the issue.
Since 1992, when Gujarati weekly Abhiyan carried for the first time a story on Modi's marriage, Jashodaben and her family have refrained from talking to media, calling it a personal affair, and wishing Modi good luck in his endeavours.
Blogger's comment: Had Modi divorced Jashodaben earlier in his marriage she would have well cherished family life all these years. Now her application for passport was rejected and she was denied information on her security cover. So much for being spouse of PM of India.
Uday Mahurkar
Ahmedabad, April 10, 2014 | UPDATED 16:25 IST
A day after BJP's prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi declared in his poll affidavit filed in Vadodara that he was a married man and that his wife's name is Jashodaben, his elder brother Sombhai Modi issued a statement here on Thursday to explain that the marriage was forced on a teenaged Narendra.
Sombhai said the marriage was forced on Modi by his parents when he was a teenager in keeping with the old orthodox tradition of fixing marriages between children and that it was never consummated as Modi walked out of the marriage soon after it was solemnised.
Dwelling on the reasons of the Gujarat Chief Minister's act, Sombhai said a young Modi did it in response to an inner call to work for the nation and the society inspired by the teachings of Swami Vivekanand.
In his press statement Sombhai, who runs a home for the old-aged and lives a simple life with his family in Ahmedabad, appealed to the people to see the marriage in the backdrop of these facts.
Modi, who has ruled Gujarat since 2001, has left the field for "spouse" blank in four Assembly polls. Of late, he has also flaunted his single status at rallies, saying that he was single and had no one to be corrupt for.
Modi ended the speculation over his marital status after a long period of silence, perhaps because the Congress had run a smear campaign against him in the last Vidhan Sabha elections and even after that by projecting Jashodaben, a retired teacher living in a north Gujarat village along with her brother, as a spurned wife and a victim of Modi's exploitation.
Modi's declaration of his marital status is aimed at pre-empting such a campaign and also any attempt to drag him to the Election Commission on the issue.
Since 1992, when Gujarati weekly Abhiyan carried for the first time a story on Modi's marriage, Jashodaben and her family have refrained from talking to media, calling it a personal affair, and wishing Modi good luck in his endeavours.
Source: indiatoday
Blogger's comment: Had Modi divorced Jashodaben earlier in his marriage she would have well cherished family life all these years. Now her application for passport was rejected and she was denied information on her security cover. So much for being spouse of PM of India.
Friday, March 04, 2016
Kanhaiya Kumar has shown that the government is only for BJP supporters – and against everyone else
Opinion
With his fierce public rebuke of the prime minister, the JNU student leader has shattered the belief that Narendra Modi is to be held in fear.
Ajaz Ashraf · Today · 09:15 am
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will struggle hard to recover from the deadly punches Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union leader Kanhaiya Kumar threw at him in his fiery speech on the evening of March 3, hours after his release on bail in a sedition case.
No doubt, Modi will continue to remain prime minister for another three years and he may continue to win elections here and there. But what he seems to have lost irreversibly – unless he takes urgent corrective measures – is the authority and prestige he commands because of the post he holds.
Modi stands diminished. This is because Kumar has conveyed to the nation through his speech – beamed live on just about every channel – that Modi has chosen to govern not as prime minister of all citizens, but only of the Sangh Parivar and other Hindutva adherents. That he oversees an extremely partisan administration, brooks no opposition and criticism, and that his government has deliberately triggered an ideological war that his party wishes to win by conjuring up episodes to justify the use of state power. Kumar also trained the spotlight on the many promises Modi made to the electorate, but he seemingly never intended to implement.
Previous attacks
Others, too, have criticised Modi by employing more or less the same tropes Kumar took recourse to in his speech. You can count among them Rahul Gandhi, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, and Arvind Kejriwal, who only a couple of months ago tweeted about the prime minister being a “coward” and a “psychopath”. But they are recognised as electoral rivals of Modi. It is their job, perhaps, even their responsibility, to corner the prime minister. In attacking Modi, they only conform to our expectations.
Kumar does not suffer from what can be called the handicap of expectations. He doesn’t have an election to win, power to grab, a political career to fashion – though his speech of March 3 could well become the beginning of one. He is among the many student leaders on our campuses owing allegiance to the Left or Centrist or Right parties. He has been wronged and maligned. To us, therefore, his speech had the fury of the innocent, who is palpably shocked to discover the workings of the system. This was why his speech sounded to us as our voice, that of the common person.
In contrast to the attacks of seasoned political leaders on Modi, Kumar’s seemed selfless, undertaken at great risk. He isn’t, after all, insulated from the blowback of the state, as most politicians are. Only three weeks ago, he had been arrested and interrogated. He had been thrashed on the court premises. Unmindful of his recent tribulations, Kumar still came out with his guns blazing. To his listeners, he came across as a courageous young man willing to take on the country’s most powerful man.
The courage Kumar displayed challenges an enduring myth about Modi – that he doesn’t forgive his critics, that he is a strongman who evokes fear in those around him. When Modi came to Delhi as prime minister, bureaucrats stopped airing views about their ministries over the phone, fearing it was tapped and somebody would be listening in. There were many juicy, but disturbing, stories about Union ministers cowering before Modi.
David vs Goliath
The belief that Modi is to be feared has been shattered by the many barbs Kumar threw at him, each cheered lustily by the audience surrounding him in JNU. He was mocking Modi’s power as well as daring him. It is possible his government may still retaliate against Kumar, but only at its own peril. It would only reinforce the growing impression that Modi is authoritarian, brought out in Kumar’s reference to Hitler. The student leader said, “Modiji was talking about [Joseph] Stalin and [Nikita] Khrushchev in Parliament. When I heard him speaking I felt like saying...Modiji, please speak about Hitler a little.”
But the perceived authoritarian streak in Modi is not only because of his personality but because of the ideology to which he subscribes. The student leader asked Modi to talk about “Mussolini whose black cap you wear, who [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founder, MS] Golwarkar sahib went to meet”. In other words, it is the Hindutva ideology which has Modi, as also the Sangh outfits, embracing an authoritarian style of functioning, being intolerant of differences of opinion.
Scarcely before has a prime minister been rebuked so publicly. It was David taking on Goliath. Kanhaiya’s speech will be seen as a battle between the powerless and the powerful, between the privileged and the common person. Kanhaiya did not let his listeners forget that he belongs to an impoverished family, that JNU has provided him and others of his class an avenue for social mobility, to be educated in the country’s premier educational institute. Modi is the other, the powerful and rich foe. Modi’s chaiwala persona has been denuded of its symbolical meaning.
Sharp polarisation
Obviously, Kumar’s speech will have enraged Sangh Parivar supporters, as it will enthuse their ideological opponents. But this illustrates vividly that the Modi Sarkar has become partisan, commanding the respect and deference of only those who belong to the prime minister’s party and a segment of those who voted for it in the 2014 elections. You will not even have neutral political pundits express dismay at Kanhaiya being disrespectful to the prime minister and diminishing his stature overnight.
They will not do so because Modi isn’t perceived to be just and fair, as is expected of any prime minister. In a democracy, governments do try to execute the agendas of their parties and hope to establish the dominance of their respective ideologies. But this cannot and should not be at the expense of fair play; it cannot and should not lead members of society to win the ideological battle through bloodletting. Modi has forgotten these aspects of governance, choosing to remain silent even as his own party members have tried to light one fire after another through divisive programmes like love jihad, ghar wapsi, cow protection, and the ongoing attempt to crush dissent.
It, therefore, did not come as a surprise that Kumar should have referred to Modi’s tweets and his "Mann ki Baat" radio programme. Over the months, these outlets have come to signify Modi’s refusal to speak on issues agitating the people. These are merely his devices to trumpet his government’s programmes or remember those who constitute the pantheon of Sangh leaders.
Like many others, Kumar too was railing against the prime minister’s style of communication. It is a style which doesn’t establish conversation, refuses to engage critics, and revels in the adulation of his followers. His government has consequently become the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, by the Bharatiya Janata Party, for Bharatiya Janata Party supporters. All other Indians are rivals who have to be fought – and vanquished through means fair or foul.
Kumar portrayed the government as insensitive and hard-hearted, most tellingly by quoting his mother, who had asked, “Why doesn’t Modi speak of Maa [Mother] ki baat [instead of Mann Ki Baat]?” It speaks of a government indifferent to the anguish of mothers, their silent lament. In our collective consciousness, this is now neatly juxtaposed with the prime minister and his ministers who are forever paying obeisance to Bharat Mata or Mother India.
Lessons to be learnt
In many ways, Kumar has undermined the moral legitimacy of the Modi government. He has shown it to be culpable of triggering debates on spurious issues to divert popular attention from its own failings. As Kumar said, “Do not try to separate the constable, the farmer, the soldier, poor people like me, by creating distorted binaries. I salute the soldiers, but have you ever thought of their families, the families of farmers who are forced to commit suicide?”
The distorted binaries, Kumar suggested, have been created to ensure people do not remember Modi’s elections promises of “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (Together with all, development for all), of bringing back black money from abroad, and depositing Rs 15 lakh in each person’s account. From this perspective, it is not only a government for the BJP supporters, but also against the people.
It is likely that Kumar’s speech will be ignored by Modi with his customary disdain. Or he will continue to perceive the growing criticism against his government as a conspiracy of the Gandhis, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, et al. He will, as he did in Parliament on March 3, accuse Rahul Gandhi of suffering from an inferiority complex, of being jealous that he isn’t the prime minister. In his speech, Modi also said, “We need to make an atmosphere of improving trust. If you have suggestions, please do so. The government also needs to improve and this will not happen without your support.”
To improve, the prime minister must heed Kumar's words. His is the voice of the people. Five years after the anti-corruption movement, it isn’t Parliament that has stirred the nation, but a common person, a young man from the backwaters of Bihar. Kumar’s rise, ironically, also reflects the declining significance of Parliament in our lives.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
With his fierce public rebuke of the prime minister, the JNU student leader has shattered the belief that Narendra Modi is to be held in fear.
Ajaz Ashraf · Today · 09:15 am
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will struggle hard to recover from the deadly punches Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union leader Kanhaiya Kumar threw at him in his fiery speech on the evening of March 3, hours after his release on bail in a sedition case.
No doubt, Modi will continue to remain prime minister for another three years and he may continue to win elections here and there. But what he seems to have lost irreversibly – unless he takes urgent corrective measures – is the authority and prestige he commands because of the post he holds.
Modi stands diminished. This is because Kumar has conveyed to the nation through his speech – beamed live on just about every channel – that Modi has chosen to govern not as prime minister of all citizens, but only of the Sangh Parivar and other Hindutva adherents. That he oversees an extremely partisan administration, brooks no opposition and criticism, and that his government has deliberately triggered an ideological war that his party wishes to win by conjuring up episodes to justify the use of state power. Kumar also trained the spotlight on the many promises Modi made to the electorate, but he seemingly never intended to implement.
Previous attacks
Others, too, have criticised Modi by employing more or less the same tropes Kumar took recourse to in his speech. You can count among them Rahul Gandhi, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Sitaram Yechury, and Arvind Kejriwal, who only a couple of months ago tweeted about the prime minister being a “coward” and a “psychopath”. But they are recognised as electoral rivals of Modi. It is their job, perhaps, even their responsibility, to corner the prime minister. In attacking Modi, they only conform to our expectations.
Kumar does not suffer from what can be called the handicap of expectations. He doesn’t have an election to win, power to grab, a political career to fashion – though his speech of March 3 could well become the beginning of one. He is among the many student leaders on our campuses owing allegiance to the Left or Centrist or Right parties. He has been wronged and maligned. To us, therefore, his speech had the fury of the innocent, who is palpably shocked to discover the workings of the system. This was why his speech sounded to us as our voice, that of the common person.
In contrast to the attacks of seasoned political leaders on Modi, Kumar’s seemed selfless, undertaken at great risk. He isn’t, after all, insulated from the blowback of the state, as most politicians are. Only three weeks ago, he had been arrested and interrogated. He had been thrashed on the court premises. Unmindful of his recent tribulations, Kumar still came out with his guns blazing. To his listeners, he came across as a courageous young man willing to take on the country’s most powerful man.
The courage Kumar displayed challenges an enduring myth about Modi – that he doesn’t forgive his critics, that he is a strongman who evokes fear in those around him. When Modi came to Delhi as prime minister, bureaucrats stopped airing views about their ministries over the phone, fearing it was tapped and somebody would be listening in. There were many juicy, but disturbing, stories about Union ministers cowering before Modi.
David vs Goliath
The belief that Modi is to be feared has been shattered by the many barbs Kumar threw at him, each cheered lustily by the audience surrounding him in JNU. He was mocking Modi’s power as well as daring him. It is possible his government may still retaliate against Kumar, but only at its own peril. It would only reinforce the growing impression that Modi is authoritarian, brought out in Kumar’s reference to Hitler. The student leader said, “Modiji was talking about [Joseph] Stalin and [Nikita] Khrushchev in Parliament. When I heard him speaking I felt like saying...Modiji, please speak about Hitler a little.”
But the perceived authoritarian streak in Modi is not only because of his personality but because of the ideology to which he subscribes. The student leader asked Modi to talk about “Mussolini whose black cap you wear, who [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh founder, MS] Golwarkar sahib went to meet”. In other words, it is the Hindutva ideology which has Modi, as also the Sangh outfits, embracing an authoritarian style of functioning, being intolerant of differences of opinion.
Scarcely before has a prime minister been rebuked so publicly. It was David taking on Goliath. Kanhaiya’s speech will be seen as a battle between the powerless and the powerful, between the privileged and the common person. Kanhaiya did not let his listeners forget that he belongs to an impoverished family, that JNU has provided him and others of his class an avenue for social mobility, to be educated in the country’s premier educational institute. Modi is the other, the powerful and rich foe. Modi’s chaiwala persona has been denuded of its symbolical meaning.
Sharp polarisation
Obviously, Kumar’s speech will have enraged Sangh Parivar supporters, as it will enthuse their ideological opponents. But this illustrates vividly that the Modi Sarkar has become partisan, commanding the respect and deference of only those who belong to the prime minister’s party and a segment of those who voted for it in the 2014 elections. You will not even have neutral political pundits express dismay at Kanhaiya being disrespectful to the prime minister and diminishing his stature overnight.
They will not do so because Modi isn’t perceived to be just and fair, as is expected of any prime minister. In a democracy, governments do try to execute the agendas of their parties and hope to establish the dominance of their respective ideologies. But this cannot and should not be at the expense of fair play; it cannot and should not lead members of society to win the ideological battle through bloodletting. Modi has forgotten these aspects of governance, choosing to remain silent even as his own party members have tried to light one fire after another through divisive programmes like love jihad, ghar wapsi, cow protection, and the ongoing attempt to crush dissent.
It, therefore, did not come as a surprise that Kumar should have referred to Modi’s tweets and his "Mann ki Baat" radio programme. Over the months, these outlets have come to signify Modi’s refusal to speak on issues agitating the people. These are merely his devices to trumpet his government’s programmes or remember those who constitute the pantheon of Sangh leaders.
Like many others, Kumar too was railing against the prime minister’s style of communication. It is a style which doesn’t establish conversation, refuses to engage critics, and revels in the adulation of his followers. His government has consequently become the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party, by the Bharatiya Janata Party, for Bharatiya Janata Party supporters. All other Indians are rivals who have to be fought – and vanquished through means fair or foul.
Kumar portrayed the government as insensitive and hard-hearted, most tellingly by quoting his mother, who had asked, “Why doesn’t Modi speak of Maa [Mother] ki baat [instead of Mann Ki Baat]?” It speaks of a government indifferent to the anguish of mothers, their silent lament. In our collective consciousness, this is now neatly juxtaposed with the prime minister and his ministers who are forever paying obeisance to Bharat Mata or Mother India.
Lessons to be learnt
In many ways, Kumar has undermined the moral legitimacy of the Modi government. He has shown it to be culpable of triggering debates on spurious issues to divert popular attention from its own failings. As Kumar said, “Do not try to separate the constable, the farmer, the soldier, poor people like me, by creating distorted binaries. I salute the soldiers, but have you ever thought of their families, the families of farmers who are forced to commit suicide?”
The distorted binaries, Kumar suggested, have been created to ensure people do not remember Modi’s elections promises of “sabka saath, sabka vikas” (Together with all, development for all), of bringing back black money from abroad, and depositing Rs 15 lakh in each person’s account. From this perspective, it is not only a government for the BJP supporters, but also against the people.
It is likely that Kumar’s speech will be ignored by Modi with his customary disdain. Or he will continue to perceive the growing criticism against his government as a conspiracy of the Gandhis, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, et al. He will, as he did in Parliament on March 3, accuse Rahul Gandhi of suffering from an inferiority complex, of being jealous that he isn’t the prime minister. In his speech, Modi also said, “We need to make an atmosphere of improving trust. If you have suggestions, please do so. The government also needs to improve and this will not happen without your support.”
To improve, the prime minister must heed Kumar's words. His is the voice of the people. Five years after the anti-corruption movement, it isn’t Parliament that has stirred the nation, but a common person, a young man from the backwaters of Bihar. Kumar’s rise, ironically, also reflects the declining significance of Parliament in our lives.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
Source: scrollin
Blogger Comment: Must read article!!
Make freedom in India
Translated excerpts of the speech by JNUSU president on JNU campus, March 3
Written by Kanhaiya Kumar | Published:March 5, 2016 12:08 am
Kanhaiya Kumar at the JNU campus on March 3, 2015. (Reuters)
We have faith in the Constitution, in this country’s law and the judiciary, and that change is truth. And there will be change, we are standing on the side of change. I have faith in our Constitution. As is written in the preamble, we stand by socialism, secularism and equality.
The first thing is, I don’t want to say anything about proceedings that are sub judice. I only want to say the entire country truly believes in the Constitution and wants to make Babasaheb Ambedkar’s dreams come true.
The PM has tweeted “satyamev jayate”. I may have a lot of ideological differences with you, PMji; but this slogan is not his, it’s in our Constitution. So I, too, will say satyamev jayate. Truth will win. I want to tell all those who are part of this fight that I will share my experience. So don’t believe that sedition has been used as a political tool against students, understand it like this:
I come from a village. In railway stations, there are magicians. The magician shows magic and sells rings, all kinds of rings, and he will tell you the ring will fulfil all your dreams. Similarly, we have some policy pundits in our country who say black money will come back, Har Har Modi, price rise will come down. Indians have a tendency to forget such things quickly but this time, the “jumla” is so big that we can’t forget these phrases. So their idea is that we should forget these “jumlas”. And how will they make us forget? They will stop fellowships to all research scholars. And what will people say? “Please give the fellowship, please give the fellowship.” Then they will say, okay, the fellowship of Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000 will continue. So the question of raising the fellowship grant will never arise. And who will oppose this? JNU.
So when you get abused, don’t worry. In this country, whoever speaks against this anti-people government, what will its cyber cell department do? Make a doctored video. Abuse you. And count the number of condoms in your dustbin. These are solemn times and we need to seriously understand that the attack on JNU is an organised attack because they want to delegitimise the Occupy UGC movement and also because they want to end the ongoing fight to ensure justice for Rohith Vemula.
I want to tell you one thing: Getting admission to JNU is not easy. So it’s not easy to forget JNU students either. If you try to ensure that we forget things, we’ll remind you again and again. Whenever the political establishment has committed atrocities, JNU has stood up against it. You cannot dilute our fight.
What do they say? On one side, soldiers are dying at the borders. I salute those soldiers. But I have a question. A BJP leader said in Lok Sabha that young men are dying at the borders. I want to ask him, are they your brothers? Or the millions of farmers committing suicide, those who grow wheat for the country and the soldiers, the soldier’s father; what will you say to them? The farmer who works in the fields is my father, the soldier at the border who dies is my brother. So do not try to create a binary and false debate in the country. Who is responsible for deaths of soldiers? And in Parliament, who are you playing politics with? Who will take responsibility for those dying? Not the ones who are fighting, but rather the people making us fight.
So who is responsible for war? And who is responsible for making people fight? How my father is dying and how my brothers die? I want to ask those making these binary arguments on primetime television: Is it wrong to ask for freedom from problems in the country. Is that wrong? They ask, who do we want freedom from? You tell us. Is anyone a slave in India? No. So obviously we are not asking for freedom from India, my brothers, but we are asking for freedom in the country. And there is a clear difference between the two. We are not asking for freedom from the English. That freedom the people of this country fought for, and have already won.
I will now speak of my experiences. The police would take me for food and for medical tests. They’d ask how I survive without talking. So I started talking to them. And it turned out that the policeman was someone like me. In this country, who works in the police? Whose father is a farmer or a labourer or from a weaker section of society? I am also from one of the country’s backward states, Bihar. I also come from a poor family of farmers. And those who work in the police come from such families. I spoke to constables, head constables and inspectors; I did not interact much with IPS officers.
So I spoke to the policemen. They asked me, why do you say “lal salaam”? So I told them, lal means revolution, and salaam is to salute the revolution. So he said, “I do not understand.” And I asked, “Inquilab zindabad?” He said he knew this. So I said revolution in Urdu is inquilab. And he said even the ABVP raises this slogan. Now he understood. Theirs is a fake slogan and ours is real. Please tell me this, the policeman asked, “You people get everything cheap in JNU?” So I asked him why this has not happened with him. He works for 18 hours a day and without overtime. So I asked where he gets the money from? What they call corruption.
They get Rs 110 for their uniform. For this much, you cannot even buy undergarments. The policeman said this. And I told him, this is what we want freedom from. From hunger, from corruption. By this time, the agitation in Haryana had begun. A lot of personnel in Delhi Police come from Haryana. I salute people from Haryana, they work very hard. He said this caste politics is very bad. So I replied that this is what we want freedom from. So he said there is nothing wrong or seditious with this. I asked him who has the most power in the system. He said his baton. I asked if he could use the baton on his own. He said no. So who has all the power? He said the man who makes statements on fake tweets. I told him we wanted freedom from such Sanghi people who make statements on false tweets.
The policeman, like me, is from a common family. He also wanted to do a PhD. But he did not get a JNU. Like me, he wanted to fight the system. He wanted to understand the difference between sakshar and shikshit. But he is now in the police. That’s why you want to stamp us down. Because you don’t want a poor man to do a PhD. Because education being sold is expensive and he will not have the money to pursue it. You want to drown out those voices who can unite. Whether they are on the border or dying in the fields or are asking for freedom in JNU.
Babasaheb had said political democracy alone would not work, we will work towards social democracy. That’s why we speak of the Constitution. Lenin said democracy is indispensable to socialism. That’s why we speak of democracy, freedom of expression, equality and socialism. Because a peon’s son and the son of the president can study in the same school. You want to drown such voices.
Translated by Apurva and Seema Chishti
Written by Kanhaiya Kumar | Published:March 5, 2016 12:08 am
We have faith in the Constitution, in this country’s law and the judiciary, and that change is truth. And there will be change, we are standing on the side of change. I have faith in our Constitution. As is written in the preamble, we stand by socialism, secularism and equality.
The first thing is, I don’t want to say anything about proceedings that are sub judice. I only want to say the entire country truly believes in the Constitution and wants to make Babasaheb Ambedkar’s dreams come true.
The PM has tweeted “satyamev jayate”. I may have a lot of ideological differences with you, PMji; but this slogan is not his, it’s in our Constitution. So I, too, will say satyamev jayate. Truth will win. I want to tell all those who are part of this fight that I will share my experience. So don’t believe that sedition has been used as a political tool against students, understand it like this:
I come from a village. In railway stations, there are magicians. The magician shows magic and sells rings, all kinds of rings, and he will tell you the ring will fulfil all your dreams. Similarly, we have some policy pundits in our country who say black money will come back, Har Har Modi, price rise will come down. Indians have a tendency to forget such things quickly but this time, the “jumla” is so big that we can’t forget these phrases. So their idea is that we should forget these “jumlas”. And how will they make us forget? They will stop fellowships to all research scholars. And what will people say? “Please give the fellowship, please give the fellowship.” Then they will say, okay, the fellowship of Rs 5,000 and Rs 8,000 will continue. So the question of raising the fellowship grant will never arise. And who will oppose this? JNU.
So when you get abused, don’t worry. In this country, whoever speaks against this anti-people government, what will its cyber cell department do? Make a doctored video. Abuse you. And count the number of condoms in your dustbin. These are solemn times and we need to seriously understand that the attack on JNU is an organised attack because they want to delegitimise the Occupy UGC movement and also because they want to end the ongoing fight to ensure justice for Rohith Vemula.
I want to tell you one thing: Getting admission to JNU is not easy. So it’s not easy to forget JNU students either. If you try to ensure that we forget things, we’ll remind you again and again. Whenever the political establishment has committed atrocities, JNU has stood up against it. You cannot dilute our fight.
What do they say? On one side, soldiers are dying at the borders. I salute those soldiers. But I have a question. A BJP leader said in Lok Sabha that young men are dying at the borders. I want to ask him, are they your brothers? Or the millions of farmers committing suicide, those who grow wheat for the country and the soldiers, the soldier’s father; what will you say to them? The farmer who works in the fields is my father, the soldier at the border who dies is my brother. So do not try to create a binary and false debate in the country. Who is responsible for deaths of soldiers? And in Parliament, who are you playing politics with? Who will take responsibility for those dying? Not the ones who are fighting, but rather the people making us fight.
So who is responsible for war? And who is responsible for making people fight? How my father is dying and how my brothers die? I want to ask those making these binary arguments on primetime television: Is it wrong to ask for freedom from problems in the country. Is that wrong? They ask, who do we want freedom from? You tell us. Is anyone a slave in India? No. So obviously we are not asking for freedom from India, my brothers, but we are asking for freedom in the country. And there is a clear difference between the two. We are not asking for freedom from the English. That freedom the people of this country fought for, and have already won.
I will now speak of my experiences. The police would take me for food and for medical tests. They’d ask how I survive without talking. So I started talking to them. And it turned out that the policeman was someone like me. In this country, who works in the police? Whose father is a farmer or a labourer or from a weaker section of society? I am also from one of the country’s backward states, Bihar. I also come from a poor family of farmers. And those who work in the police come from such families. I spoke to constables, head constables and inspectors; I did not interact much with IPS officers.
So I spoke to the policemen. They asked me, why do you say “lal salaam”? So I told them, lal means revolution, and salaam is to salute the revolution. So he said, “I do not understand.” And I asked, “Inquilab zindabad?” He said he knew this. So I said revolution in Urdu is inquilab. And he said even the ABVP raises this slogan. Now he understood. Theirs is a fake slogan and ours is real. Please tell me this, the policeman asked, “You people get everything cheap in JNU?” So I asked him why this has not happened with him. He works for 18 hours a day and without overtime. So I asked where he gets the money from? What they call corruption.
They get Rs 110 for their uniform. For this much, you cannot even buy undergarments. The policeman said this. And I told him, this is what we want freedom from. From hunger, from corruption. By this time, the agitation in Haryana had begun. A lot of personnel in Delhi Police come from Haryana. I salute people from Haryana, they work very hard. He said this caste politics is very bad. So I replied that this is what we want freedom from. So he said there is nothing wrong or seditious with this. I asked him who has the most power in the system. He said his baton. I asked if he could use the baton on his own. He said no. So who has all the power? He said the man who makes statements on fake tweets. I told him we wanted freedom from such Sanghi people who make statements on false tweets.
The policeman, like me, is from a common family. He also wanted to do a PhD. But he did not get a JNU. Like me, he wanted to fight the system. He wanted to understand the difference between sakshar and shikshit. But he is now in the police. That’s why you want to stamp us down. Because you don’t want a poor man to do a PhD. Because education being sold is expensive and he will not have the money to pursue it. You want to drown out those voices who can unite. Whether they are on the border or dying in the fields or are asking for freedom in JNU.
Babasaheb had said political democracy alone would not work, we will work towards social democracy. That’s why we speak of the Constitution. Lenin said democracy is indispensable to socialism. That’s why we speak of democracy, freedom of expression, equality and socialism. Because a peon’s son and the son of the president can study in the same school. You want to drown such voices.
Translated by Apurva and Seema Chishti
Source: indianexpress
Thursday, March 03, 2016
You are not defending the flag when you frighten your own people into silence: Rahul Gandhi in Lok Sabha
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi targeted the government on a range of issues — from JNU to Rohith Vemula, black money to foreign policy. Excerpts from his speech in Lok Sabha:
By: Express News Service | New Delhi | Updated: March 3, 2016 1:09 pm
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi at Parliament house in new delhi on wednesday (Express photo)
On black money
The Finance Minister announced a fair and lovely scheme, saying it was Modiji’s scheme which would convert black money into white. In 2014, Modi had said I will finish black money… I will jail anybody who has black money. But under the fair and lovely scheme, nobody will go to jail, nobody will be arrested, nobody will be asked anything. Go to Arun Jaitleyji, pay tax and turn black money into white.
On economy
Modiji had promised to bring down prices. Dal was Rs 70. And he had promised to bring it down. Today, it is Rs 200. Earlier, crude oil was 130 dollars per barrel. Today it is 35 dollars per barrel. Not even a single rupee is being passed on to the common man.
Watch: Rahul Gandhi attacks Modi in Lok Sabha
On jobs
Modiji had promised 2 crore jobs every year. The Make in India logo babbar sher is visible everywhere. But nobody knows how many jobs have been given. The PM has been criticising MGNREGA, saying he was continuing with the scheme to expose the UPA’s mistake. Arun Jaitley came to me and told me there is no better scheme than MRNREGA. I said, go and tell your boss. Then he did not have anything say. He was silent. I know there is fear. Narendra Modiji is a very powerful person. I know you people are also afraid. But you should all speak up before him.
On Rohith Vemula
Rohith asked was he being harassed because he was a Dalit? Shouldn’t a poor Dalit like me have a future in Hindustan? What does the powerful Government of India do? You crush him and he commits suicide. Your ministers raise questions on whether he was a Dalit.
On JNU
Kanhaiya delivered a 20-minute speech. I have heard it. He did not utter a word against India. You arrested him. If anybody has said anything unlawful, you arrest him, take action. But you have let them go scot-free while you arrest Kanhaiya. Sixty per cent of the students in JNU are Dalits and from backward, minority and OBC communities. Why are you after JNU and Rohith…. neither will you be able to crush JNU nor the poor of this country. Which religion talks of beating teachers and students and media in court? Mr Prime Minister, why haven’t you uttered a single word?
On Tricolour
Respecting the flag means respecting the opinion of every Indian. When I went to JNU, your ABVP workers waved black flags in my face. They taunted me, they abused me. I did not get angry. In fact, I felt proud that I still live in a country, in India where it is possible to be confronted by people who held a different opinion than my own. I don’t agree with their views; I protected our Indian flag when I led people, when they waved those black flags at my face… You cannot defend the Indian flag by destroying the relationships between our people. You are not defending the flag when you frighten your own people into silence.
On PM and BJP-RSS
Whose opinion does the Prime Minister listen to? Does he respect your opinion? Does he respect the opinion of his ministers? You were in silence. I understand. I understand the feeling within you and I want to bring that out; I want you to make him listen. But anyway, that will happen slowly. You have been taught by your teachers in the RSS that there is only one truth in the universe — your own — that nobody else’s opinion matters in the entire universe. This is all you have shown us in the last two years. The Prime Minister cannot run the country on only his opinion. The country is not the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is not the country.
On Mumbai terror attack
Pakistan directly attacked this country in Mumbai on 26/11… The operation to stop the terrorists was on. Our soldiers and citizens were dying. The Government of India begged the Chief Minister of Gujarat not to go to Mumbai. The then Chief Minister of Gujarat decided to go to Mumbai. Did he care? No; he went right ahead to Mumbai, to the Oberoi Hotel itself and disturbed the entire operation. He grabbed his headlines while our people died.
On Pakistan
Mumbai was a horrible, terrible blow to this country… The UPA government worked tirelessly to trap Pakistan. We isolated them internationally. We spent thousands of hours of diplomacy to turn them into a pariah nation. We destroyed their reputation internationally and put them into a little diplomatic cage… What does the Prime Minister do? He decides to have a cup of tea with Nawaz Sharif… Without any thought, without any vision, he decides to take a detour to Pakistan and have a chai pe charcha. The Prime Minister, single-handedly, destroyed six years of our work. In one move, he personally let Pakistan out of the little cage into which we had put them. He gifted them a status equal to our own.
On PM’s style of functioning
There have been others in history who could only see their own perspective, people who saluted the cloth but destroyed the relationship and conversation between their people. Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia, used to salute the flag every morning and talk of patriotism all day long. He broke the relationship between Serbs and Croats and destroyed his country. Nearer to us, Yahya Khan claimed to defend the Pakistani flag. As a soldier, he used to salute their flag every morning… and refused to listen to his countrymen. He destroyed the relationship between Punjabi and Bengali and he tore his country into two. The Prime Minister still has the option to listen to what the country is trying to tell him. The country is gently trying to give him a message. The Prime Minister just has to listen to the message, listen to those around you, listen to Rajnath Singhji, listen to Advaniji, listen to Sushma Swarajji, listen to your MPs, listen to us across the aisle here — we are not your enemies, we do not hate you — listen to the voice of the Indian people, listen to the farmers and workers who have so much wisdom and, especially, listen to the voice of the next generation. They are the future of this country. Allow them the dignity of their voice.
By: Express News Service | New Delhi | Updated: March 3, 2016 1:09 pm
On black money
The Finance Minister announced a fair and lovely scheme, saying it was Modiji’s scheme which would convert black money into white. In 2014, Modi had said I will finish black money… I will jail anybody who has black money. But under the fair and lovely scheme, nobody will go to jail, nobody will be arrested, nobody will be asked anything. Go to Arun Jaitleyji, pay tax and turn black money into white.
On economy
Modiji had promised to bring down prices. Dal was Rs 70. And he had promised to bring it down. Today, it is Rs 200. Earlier, crude oil was 130 dollars per barrel. Today it is 35 dollars per barrel. Not even a single rupee is being passed on to the common man.
Watch: Rahul Gandhi attacks Modi in Lok Sabha
On jobs
Modiji had promised 2 crore jobs every year. The Make in India logo babbar sher is visible everywhere. But nobody knows how many jobs have been given. The PM has been criticising MGNREGA, saying he was continuing with the scheme to expose the UPA’s mistake. Arun Jaitley came to me and told me there is no better scheme than MRNREGA. I said, go and tell your boss. Then he did not have anything say. He was silent. I know there is fear. Narendra Modiji is a very powerful person. I know you people are also afraid. But you should all speak up before him.
On Rohith Vemula
Rohith asked was he being harassed because he was a Dalit? Shouldn’t a poor Dalit like me have a future in Hindustan? What does the powerful Government of India do? You crush him and he commits suicide. Your ministers raise questions on whether he was a Dalit.
On JNU
Kanhaiya delivered a 20-minute speech. I have heard it. He did not utter a word against India. You arrested him. If anybody has said anything unlawful, you arrest him, take action. But you have let them go scot-free while you arrest Kanhaiya. Sixty per cent of the students in JNU are Dalits and from backward, minority and OBC communities. Why are you after JNU and Rohith…. neither will you be able to crush JNU nor the poor of this country. Which religion talks of beating teachers and students and media in court? Mr Prime Minister, why haven’t you uttered a single word?
On Tricolour
Respecting the flag means respecting the opinion of every Indian. When I went to JNU, your ABVP workers waved black flags in my face. They taunted me, they abused me. I did not get angry. In fact, I felt proud that I still live in a country, in India where it is possible to be confronted by people who held a different opinion than my own. I don’t agree with their views; I protected our Indian flag when I led people, when they waved those black flags at my face… You cannot defend the Indian flag by destroying the relationships between our people. You are not defending the flag when you frighten your own people into silence.
On PM and BJP-RSS
Whose opinion does the Prime Minister listen to? Does he respect your opinion? Does he respect the opinion of his ministers? You were in silence. I understand. I understand the feeling within you and I want to bring that out; I want you to make him listen. But anyway, that will happen slowly. You have been taught by your teachers in the RSS that there is only one truth in the universe — your own — that nobody else’s opinion matters in the entire universe. This is all you have shown us in the last two years. The Prime Minister cannot run the country on only his opinion. The country is not the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is not the country.
On Mumbai terror attack
Pakistan directly attacked this country in Mumbai on 26/11… The operation to stop the terrorists was on. Our soldiers and citizens were dying. The Government of India begged the Chief Minister of Gujarat not to go to Mumbai. The then Chief Minister of Gujarat decided to go to Mumbai. Did he care? No; he went right ahead to Mumbai, to the Oberoi Hotel itself and disturbed the entire operation. He grabbed his headlines while our people died.
On Pakistan
Mumbai was a horrible, terrible blow to this country… The UPA government worked tirelessly to trap Pakistan. We isolated them internationally. We spent thousands of hours of diplomacy to turn them into a pariah nation. We destroyed their reputation internationally and put them into a little diplomatic cage… What does the Prime Minister do? He decides to have a cup of tea with Nawaz Sharif… Without any thought, without any vision, he decides to take a detour to Pakistan and have a chai pe charcha. The Prime Minister, single-handedly, destroyed six years of our work. In one move, he personally let Pakistan out of the little cage into which we had put them. He gifted them a status equal to our own.
On PM’s style of functioning
There have been others in history who could only see their own perspective, people who saluted the cloth but destroyed the relationship and conversation between their people. Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia, used to salute the flag every morning and talk of patriotism all day long. He broke the relationship between Serbs and Croats and destroyed his country. Nearer to us, Yahya Khan claimed to defend the Pakistani flag. As a soldier, he used to salute their flag every morning… and refused to listen to his countrymen. He destroyed the relationship between Punjabi and Bengali and he tore his country into two. The Prime Minister still has the option to listen to what the country is trying to tell him. The country is gently trying to give him a message. The Prime Minister just has to listen to the message, listen to those around you, listen to Rajnath Singhji, listen to Advaniji, listen to Sushma Swarajji, listen to your MPs, listen to us across the aisle here — we are not your enemies, we do not hate you — listen to the voice of the Indian people, listen to the farmers and workers who have so much wisdom and, especially, listen to the voice of the next generation. They are the future of this country. Allow them the dignity of their voice.
Source: indianexpress
The Urdu Press: Decoding patriotism
Hasan Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving."
Written by Seema Chishti | Published:March 4, 2016 12:20 am
Hasan Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “Today, spokespersons of the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an anti-national act. (Express Photo by Praveen Khanna)
Recent happenings in some institutions, particularly in JNU, have raised questions on certain basic concepts about the nation-state. Rashtriya Sahara, in an editorial called “What is Real Patriotism!” on February 29, writes: “As far as patriotism is concerned, it is the duty of every Indian [to be a patriot]. It should also be understood that patriotism is not the sole preserve of any particular party or group with certain ideological views and nobody has the right to say that anybody not of a particular viewpoint is
not a patriot…”
Hasan Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93 professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world, including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an anti-national act.
They have not only accepted Parkash Singh Badal as the CM of Punjab, they also defend his party, the Akali Dal, which had burnt the Constitution publicly in 1984. Today, this government suddenly and mysteriously signs an accord with Naga leaders that is described as a shining example of political strategy. These Naga leaders were espousing the cause of an armed struggle for an independent Nagaland… In J&K, the BJP formed a coalition government with the PDP that considers Afzal Guru a martyr… This is not patriotism, this is plain enmity against the country.”
Conspiracy Theories: Etemaad, belonging to the AIMIM, in its editorial on February 23, writes: “PM Narendra Modi has expressed apprehension that conspiracies are being hatched to destabilise his government… The Opposition has never tried to destabilise the Modi government and snatch power. But it’s true that the Opposition would never support a government that doesn’t pay heed to its demands. That’s why many bills in Parliament are not being converted into acts… The PM doesn’t respond to many vital issues and lets other leaders deal with these. This is like the role of an emperor and there is no place for an emperor in a democracy.”
Shakeel Shamsi, editor of Inquilab, writes on the same day: “Who are these powerful NGOs who are creating difficulty for a powerful person like Modi? …[One] realises that it’s not any NGO but his own party members, or members of the Sangh Parivar, who are trying to uproot his government with controversial and provocative statements. Why is Modi not able to identify them?”
Jat Valour: Siasat, in its editorial on February 21, writes: “The government takes a tough line while grappling with any matter. But by bowing swiftly before the agitation of Jats, it has proved that the Modi-led Central government understands only the language of force. If the party using its power against university students in Delhi has been weakened in Haryana, it is a delicate (naazuk) change. The Jat biradari constitutes a very small percentage of the country’s population. But it forced the government to bend and agree… One should applaud the Jat biradari’s valour and courage as… it made the government bite the dust and quickly agree.”
The Jamaat-e-Islami’s Daawat, in a commentary on February 25, writes: “Jat reservation is not easy. How can a state with 49.5 per cent reservations now accord reservation to Jats with the Supreme Court cap of 50 per cent? … Now other castes may also take to the street with demands of reservations.”
Jadeed Khabar, in its editorial on February 22, writes: “One section of the people is being kept under fear and the government is getting afraid of another section… Muslims are also considered among the most deserving for reservations. But whenever the issue is brought up, all sorts of excuses are given.”
Compiled by Seema Chishti
Written by Seema Chishti | Published:March 4, 2016 12:20 am
Recent happenings in some institutions, particularly in JNU, have raised questions on certain basic concepts about the nation-state. Rashtriya Sahara, in an editorial called “What is Real Patriotism!” on February 29, writes: “As far as patriotism is concerned, it is the duty of every Indian [to be a patriot]. It should also be understood that patriotism is not the sole preserve of any particular party or group with certain ideological views and nobody has the right to say that anybody not of a particular viewpoint is
not a patriot…”
Hasan Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93 professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world, including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an anti-national act.
They have not only accepted Parkash Singh Badal as the CM of Punjab, they also defend his party, the Akali Dal, which had burnt the Constitution publicly in 1984. Today, this government suddenly and mysteriously signs an accord with Naga leaders that is described as a shining example of political strategy. These Naga leaders were espousing the cause of an armed struggle for an independent Nagaland… In J&K, the BJP formed a coalition government with the PDP that considers Afzal Guru a martyr… This is not patriotism, this is plain enmity against the country.”
Conspiracy Theories: Etemaad, belonging to the AIMIM, in its editorial on February 23, writes: “PM Narendra Modi has expressed apprehension that conspiracies are being hatched to destabilise his government… The Opposition has never tried to destabilise the Modi government and snatch power. But it’s true that the Opposition would never support a government that doesn’t pay heed to its demands. That’s why many bills in Parliament are not being converted into acts… The PM doesn’t respond to many vital issues and lets other leaders deal with these. This is like the role of an emperor and there is no place for an emperor in a democracy.”
Shakeel Shamsi, editor of Inquilab, writes on the same day: “Who are these powerful NGOs who are creating difficulty for a powerful person like Modi? …[One] realises that it’s not any NGO but his own party members, or members of the Sangh Parivar, who are trying to uproot his government with controversial and provocative statements. Why is Modi not able to identify them?”
Jat Valour: Siasat, in its editorial on February 21, writes: “The government takes a tough line while grappling with any matter. But by bowing swiftly before the agitation of Jats, it has proved that the Modi-led Central government understands only the language of force. If the party using its power against university students in Delhi has been weakened in Haryana, it is a delicate (naazuk) change. The Jat biradari constitutes a very small percentage of the country’s population. But it forced the government to bend and agree… One should applaud the Jat biradari’s valour and courage as… it made the government bite the dust and quickly agree.”
The Jamaat-e-Islami’s Daawat, in a commentary on February 25, writes: “Jat reservation is not easy. How can a state with 49.5 per cent reservations now accord reservation to Jats with the Supreme Court cap of 50 per cent? … Now other castes may also take to the street with demands of reservations.”
Jadeed Khabar, in its editorial on February 22, writes: “One section of the people is being kept under fear and the government is getting afraid of another section… Muslims are also considered among the most deserving for reservations. But whenever the issue is brought up, all sorts of excuses are given.”
Compiled by Seema Chishti
Source: indianexpress
Hasan
Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the
incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started
looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93
professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world,
including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested
against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared
the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of
the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an
anti-national act. - See more at:
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-row-kanhaiya-kumar-jat-quota-stir-the-urdu-press-decoding-patriotism-freedom-speech-democracy/#sthash.j16YMHLE.dpuf
Hasan
Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the
incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started
looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93
professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world,
including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested
against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared
the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of
the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an
anti-national act. - See more at:
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-row-kanhaiya-kumar-jat-quota-stir-the-urdu-press-decoding-patriotism-freedom-speech-democracy/#sthash.j16YMHLE.dpuf
Hasan
Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the
incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started
looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93
professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world,
including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested
against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared
the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of
the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an
anti-national act. - See more at:
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-row-kanhaiya-kumar-jat-quota-stir-the-urdu-press-decoding-patriotism-freedom-speech-democracy/#sthash.j16YMHLE.dpuf
Hasan
Kamal, in his column in Inquilab on the same day, writes: “After the
incidents at Dadri, and now at JNU, the world has once again started
looking at the secular status of India with doubt and misgiving. Some 93
professors and intellectuals from different parts of the world,
including… Noam Chomsky and Nobel laureate… Orhan Pamuk, protested
against the arrest of the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and compared
the JNU incidents with the Emergency of 1975… Today, spokespersons of
the BJP swear by the Constitution and consider an insult to it as an
anti-national act. - See more at:
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jnu-row-kanhaiya-kumar-jat-quota-stir-the-urdu-press-decoding-patriotism-freedom-speech-democracy/#sthash.j16YMHLE.dpuf
Monday, February 29, 2016
'What is happening in India today is similar to the McCarthy era': Partha Chatterjee
There is something ominously new in the manner in which the attack against freedom of thought and expression has been launched this time, says the noted political scientist.
Partha Chatterjee · Feb 27, 2016 · 08:58 pm
Full text of the statement titled by the noted professor of political science to his colleagues and students at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata
This is not the first time that freedom of thought and expression has been attacked in the Indian university. But there is something ominously new in the manner in which the attack has been launched this time.
We know that the sedition charge was applied across the board by British colonial rulers against anyone who expressed anti-colonial or nationalist views. Writers, artists, poets, and thousands of students and teachers were arrested for sedition alongside political leaders and agitators. But the British colonial officers, who were themselves among the best students of British universities who sat in a fiercely competitive examination to enter the highest paid civil service in the world, respected the British principle of the self-governing university. The unwritten rule that the police must not enter a university campus was observed in the early decades of independent India when I went to college. Student agitators engaged in a street fight with the police would often run for safety into the college campus, and the police would unfailingly stop at the college gates. The rule began to be violated from the 1970s. In regions of the country rocked by political agitation, the university campus was drawn into partisan conflicts between the government and the opposition. Students and teachers were arrested on charges of participating in violent agitations. Needless to say, in the North-eastern states or Kashmir, where state repression is long-standing and indiscriminate, the university campus was not spared.
Not since the Emergency
But I cannot remember, except for the period of the Emergency in 1975-77, a national campaign that asserts that certain political questions cannot even be talked about in the university. Are we to accept that national loyalty must be so unquestioned that the origins and present status of the nation and its boundaries, the nature of the constitution and the laws, the mutual relations between different regions and cultures, the demands of oppressed peoples and minority groups, cannot even be discussed and debated among students and teachers? One would have thought that such debates were the very essence of a democratic public life. And of all public places, the university campus is the most precious arena where freedom of thought and expression is the foundation of the vibrant intellectual life of a nation. Even in the United States, that paradise of market-controlled capitalism, university professors are protected by tenured appointments on the specific ground that they must not be exposed to victimisation for the content of what they teach or publish. This demand was recognised after the experience of the notorious McCarthy witch hunt against alleged communists in the 1950s.
What is happening in India today is similar to the McCarthy era. Whether the alleged “anti-national” slogans were raised on the campuses of Hyderabad University or JNU by those who have been charged is, of course, important for the future careers of those students – for Rohith Vemula the matter is, tragically, beyond rectification. But as far as the broader issues are concerned, that is beside the point.
What school of jurisprudence is it that claims that a sentence of capital punishment pronounced by the courts and the subsequent political decision to carry out the execution cannot be debated in a democratic public forum, especially in a university?
What is the constitutional theory that says that the existing boundaries of the nation-state or the structure of relations between the constituent units of the Indian Union are not open to question when only the other day the Indian government transferred dozens of hitherto Indian villages to neighbouring Bangladesh through a treaty and the number of constituent states of the Union and their federal relations are regularly changed by constitutional amendments?
Or is it the claim that while grave matters like these might be left to the mature decisions of politicians, impressionable students must not be exposed to such dangerous scepticism? Is the plan then to turn the university into some sort of patriotic seminary designed to produce brainwashed nationalist morons?
A blanket licence
While we may be forgiven for laughing about the farcical quality of the latest campaign, with such gems as the decision to fly national flags from 207-foot high steel poles on every Central university campus, it is actually spine-chilling in its implications. What has now been sanctioned by the highest political authorities of the country is a blanket licence to every Hindu right-wing vigilante group to target individuals belonging to the Left-Dalit-minority fraternity on university campuses. They can be identified as “anti-national” simply on the basis of their political convictions. Charges of sedition brought by the police would help, but it does not matter in the least if they do not hold up in court. The object is to smear and intimidate. The extreme example was set by the murder last year of MM Kalburgi. What we are seeing today in the attack on Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends in the Patiala House court or on Professor Vivek Kumar of JNU in Gwalior may only be the beginning of a long and bloody series.
A great deal is at stake. We must be strong, resilient and united.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
Partha Chatterjee · Feb 27, 2016 · 08:58 pm
Full text of the statement titled by the noted professor of political science to his colleagues and students at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata
This is not the first time that freedom of thought and expression has been attacked in the Indian university. But there is something ominously new in the manner in which the attack has been launched this time.
We know that the sedition charge was applied across the board by British colonial rulers against anyone who expressed anti-colonial or nationalist views. Writers, artists, poets, and thousands of students and teachers were arrested for sedition alongside political leaders and agitators. But the British colonial officers, who were themselves among the best students of British universities who sat in a fiercely competitive examination to enter the highest paid civil service in the world, respected the British principle of the self-governing university. The unwritten rule that the police must not enter a university campus was observed in the early decades of independent India when I went to college. Student agitators engaged in a street fight with the police would often run for safety into the college campus, and the police would unfailingly stop at the college gates. The rule began to be violated from the 1970s. In regions of the country rocked by political agitation, the university campus was drawn into partisan conflicts between the government and the opposition. Students and teachers were arrested on charges of participating in violent agitations. Needless to say, in the North-eastern states or Kashmir, where state repression is long-standing and indiscriminate, the university campus was not spared.
Not since the Emergency
But I cannot remember, except for the period of the Emergency in 1975-77, a national campaign that asserts that certain political questions cannot even be talked about in the university. Are we to accept that national loyalty must be so unquestioned that the origins and present status of the nation and its boundaries, the nature of the constitution and the laws, the mutual relations between different regions and cultures, the demands of oppressed peoples and minority groups, cannot even be discussed and debated among students and teachers? One would have thought that such debates were the very essence of a democratic public life. And of all public places, the university campus is the most precious arena where freedom of thought and expression is the foundation of the vibrant intellectual life of a nation. Even in the United States, that paradise of market-controlled capitalism, university professors are protected by tenured appointments on the specific ground that they must not be exposed to victimisation for the content of what they teach or publish. This demand was recognised after the experience of the notorious McCarthy witch hunt against alleged communists in the 1950s.
What is happening in India today is similar to the McCarthy era. Whether the alleged “anti-national” slogans were raised on the campuses of Hyderabad University or JNU by those who have been charged is, of course, important for the future careers of those students – for Rohith Vemula the matter is, tragically, beyond rectification. But as far as the broader issues are concerned, that is beside the point.
What school of jurisprudence is it that claims that a sentence of capital punishment pronounced by the courts and the subsequent political decision to carry out the execution cannot be debated in a democratic public forum, especially in a university?
What is the constitutional theory that says that the existing boundaries of the nation-state or the structure of relations between the constituent units of the Indian Union are not open to question when only the other day the Indian government transferred dozens of hitherto Indian villages to neighbouring Bangladesh through a treaty and the number of constituent states of the Union and their federal relations are regularly changed by constitutional amendments?
Or is it the claim that while grave matters like these might be left to the mature decisions of politicians, impressionable students must not be exposed to such dangerous scepticism? Is the plan then to turn the university into some sort of patriotic seminary designed to produce brainwashed nationalist morons?
A blanket licence
While we may be forgiven for laughing about the farcical quality of the latest campaign, with such gems as the decision to fly national flags from 207-foot high steel poles on every Central university campus, it is actually spine-chilling in its implications. What has now been sanctioned by the highest political authorities of the country is a blanket licence to every Hindu right-wing vigilante group to target individuals belonging to the Left-Dalit-minority fraternity on university campuses. They can be identified as “anti-national” simply on the basis of their political convictions. Charges of sedition brought by the police would help, but it does not matter in the least if they do not hold up in court. The object is to smear and intimidate. The extreme example was set by the murder last year of MM Kalburgi. What we are seeing today in the attack on Kanhaiya Kumar and his friends in the Patiala House court or on Professor Vivek Kumar of JNU in Gwalior may only be the beginning of a long and bloody series.
A great deal is at stake. We must be strong, resilient and united.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.
Source: scrollin
Never mind the Budget, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed a crucial test
Saffron politics
As long as Modi keeps silent over cases of incitement by his ministers and members of the Sangh Parivar, he fails to be the Prime Minister of all of India.
Anjali Mody · Today · 08:00 am
Narendra Modi likes to say that he is Prime Minister of all India. But this is mere rhetoric. His ministers and members of Parliament from the party he leads have shown with amazing frequency that they represent the partisan interests of a group they call “Hindu”. While they justify acts of communal violence and incite hatred between communities, Modi has never called them to account. He has instead employed the same vocabulary to garner support for his Bharatiya Janata Party.
As long as Modi keeps silent over cases of incitement by his ministers and members of the Sangh Parivar, he fails to be the Prime Minister of all of India.
Anjali Mody · Today · 08:00 am
Narendra Modi likes to say that he is Prime Minister of all India. But this is mere rhetoric. His ministers and members of Parliament from the party he leads have shown with amazing frequency that they represent the partisan interests of a group they call “Hindu”. While they justify acts of communal violence and incite hatred between communities, Modi has never called them to account. He has instead employed the same vocabulary to garner support for his Bharatiya Janata Party.
On
Sunday, Modi’s colleagues in the government and party were at it again.
Speaking at a meeting in Agra held to mourn VHP worker Arun Mahaur, who was
killed last week, Minister of State for Human Resource Development Ram Shankar
Katheria said: “We have to make ourselves powerful, we have to launch a
struggle” so that “these killers themselves disappear”. The alleged murderer is
a Muslim, and there is no doubt that Katheria's “we” referred to what the BJP
calls “Hindus”.
According
to the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, the minister said that the police should
be under no illusion that being a minister had cooled his anger at Mahaur’s
murder. He said if the police took action (against him), the lathi (associated
with the RSS) would be raised on behalf of society.
So,
here is a minister in the Modi government – who has sworn an oath to defend the
Constitution – who feels at liberty to threaten violence against the police.
Open
season
At the
same meeting, BJP member of Parliament from Fatehpur Sikri, Chaudhary Babulal,
also issued a threat of violence: “Don’t try to test us… We will not tolerate
insults to the community,” he said. “We do not want unrest at any cost, but if
you want to test Hindus, then let’s decide a date and take on Muslims.”
Continuing
in the same vein, the VHP’s district secretary Ashok Lavania equated Muslims
with demons and called for murder. “Revenge for the killing of one brother,
demands the killing of ten rakshas,” he said.
According
to The Indian Express, Lavania set out how revenge would be taken before
the 13th day (a reference to the tehravin or the final day of mourning
for Hindus in North India). It would be done exactly how it was done in
Muzaffarnagar in 2013 and in Ayodhya in 1992, he said.
“Many
have approached me asking why we are not doing anything. They are saying do
something – arson, murder, shootout. These are common Hindus. We are avoiding
this because the organisation (VHP/RSS) is careful about being held
responsible… ultimately it becomes an act of the society. Once people are
galvanised, no question would be raised at all. In cases like Ram Janmbhoomi,
Muzaffarnagar, the party had disappeared. But it is certain that revenge will
be taken before the 13th day is over. Blood will revenge blood. Action will
obviously be in Mantola area (where Mahaur was killed), but also across Agra.
Wherever Hindus are in a majority, it will happen. We are fully prepared. If
they retaliate, then it will be a mahasangram.”
The
police has started its investigation into Mahaur’s murder, but this fact seems
irrelevant to the BJP and the Sangh Parivar.
When
silence speaks
From Muzaffarnagar to Dadri to Agra, by way of several small episodes
that never make it to the national media, there is a clear pattern in the BJP and
Sangh Parivar effort to pit community against community through rumour and the
escalation of local disputes into major conflicts by redefining them as Muslim
attacks on Hindus or on Hindu sentiment. It was love jihad in
Muzaffarnagar, beef eating in Dadri and now, in Agra, the issue
is cow slaughter (Mahaur’s family has said he was killed because he opposed cow
slaughter.)
That
Union ministers, members of Parliament and leaders of organisations linked to
the Sangh Parivar get away with incitement to religious hatred, communal
violence and even murder is clearly because they have the protection of the
central government.
On
February 28, during his monthly radio programme Mann Ki Baat, Modi said
that he was sitting for a test the next day and hoped he would pass. He was
referring to the Union budget. The prime minister may well have passed that
test, but there is another test that Modi has repeatedly failed – the test to
be the Prime Minister of all of India. He has remained silent about incitement
to communal hatred and violence by his ministers, and members of the BJP and
Sangh Parivar. He has himself used the same rhetoric of hurt sentiments as they
do. This can only be read as support for an agenda to divide the country
between Hindus and Muslims, nationalists and so-called anti-nationals, and
those with the Sangh Parivar and those against it.
We
welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
Source: scrollin
Saturday, February 27, 2016
How free can free speech be?
Opinion » Comment February 28, 2016 Updated: February 28, 2016 01:09 IST
K. Venkataramanan
Illustration: Satwik Gade
A lucid and detailed examination of the law of free speech in India, the book also makes a case for ‘constitutionalising’ all forms of speech.
A decade ago, Tamil Nadu was as agog about a looming threat to freedom of speech and a pervasive atmosphere of intolerance as the entire country is at the moment. Assorted groups of Tamil nationalists, protectors and preservers of Tamil culture were policing the opinions of public figures, especially from the film industry. Open threats, street demonstrations and waving of footwear and broomsticks indicated that supposedly offended Tamil society was out to protect its culture from prurient attacks. Actor Khushboo was one of the main targets after she made some remarks in a magazine interview on the prevalence of premarital sex. Nearly two dozen criminal cases were filed across Tamil Nadu by offended complainants charging her with obscenity. The final outcome in her favour in the Supreme Court five years later was a landmark decision on obscenity law.
Reasonable restrictions
Shortly after the controversy broke out in 2005, a public opinion forum for the free exchange of views and ideas was launched in the State, with a rider that the forum’s promoters themselves would not privilege one view over another, and there was no founding philosophy except a general commitment to freedom of expression. “There is no collective policy for the forum, and it will not even publicly defend freedom of expression, as its users need not necessarily be only those who believe in free speech,” they said. It was quite an interesting way to promote freedom of expression — by acknowledging individual autonomy to the point of not expecting its users to even believe in that very freedom.
Does the state acknowledge such autonomy among its citizens and repose faith in them to make their own choices regarding speeches, writings, works of art, films and plays? Obviously not, given the number of “reasonable restrictions” that are placed on free speech in India, many of them reflecting an official philosophy that believes that the government alone can, or at least has a duty to, decide what is ‘good’ for the people. Hence, the many restrictions on expression based on, among other grounds, public order, decency and morality. Gautam Bhatia would classify such curbs as instances of ‘legal paternalism’ or ‘legal moralism’. For, according to this author of a lucid and detailed examination of the law of free speech in India (Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution, Oxford University Press, Rs.750), Indian freespeech jurisprudence has two broad approaches — ‘moral-paternalistic’, a view that sees people as inherently corruptible and prone to violence and who cannot be trusted with too much freedom, and ‘liberal-autonomous’, an approach that sees people as individuals capable of making decisions on their own lives and one that allows only limited restrictions on what they can speak, see or hear.
Does not our Constitution guarantee all of us freedom of speech and expression? If both freedom and its curtailment are in an everlasting delicate balance, what exactly is our free speech philosophy? If freedom is related to politics and democracy, does it come under political philosophy? Or is it moral philosophy concerning the individual and the human self? “We need a theory, or theories of free speech,” says Bhatia. The theoretical framework for his analysis of the evolution of free speech jurisprudence covers a vast expanse. Free speech is a means to the truth; a pursuit of individual self-fulfilment and an important means by which democratic self-governance is made possible, he argues. Its role in personal, social and political life inevitably brings it into conflict with the state, with diverse shades of opinions in the marketplace of ideas and the ways in which free expression impacts the established order.
The title may suggest that the author is arguing for an extreme view of free speech: as the right to do all that these three verbs encompass, but in actuality he is doing something far more nuanced. He is arguing for ‘constitutionalising’ all forms of speech; that is, making as much of the law speech-protective as possible, and what little is incapable of protection must be curbed only in a manner allowed by the Constitution. To put it differently, if some restrictions are inevitable, their basis should be sought only within the values of the Constitution, or in ‘constitutional morality’, as he puts it, and not in vague appeals to transient notions of social mores, decency and morality. For instance, a restrictive hate speech law or one that seeks to protect an oppressed community from insult need not derive its constitutionality from a mere content-based view of the ‘feeling of hurt’ caused by some words or images. Rather, it could be rooted in a notion of moral equality among citizens, and with reference to women, from the angle of prohibition of gender subordination.
Historical context
Many will be familiar with the basic formulation of free speech in India as a set of freedoms matched by a set of reasonable restrictions. However, not many may know that this was not the original framework. The early judgments on Article 19(1)(a) were too speech-protective for the rulers’ comfort, and the ‘reasonable restrictions’ were introduced through the first amendment. It is equally interesting to learn that one of the grounds for curbing free speech was ‘sedition’ in an early draft, drawing derisive comments from some members of the Constituent Assembly. Sardar Patel, who chaired the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, moved for the deletion of the proviso the very next day. However, the word ‘sedition’ made a mysterious comeback in the draft Constitution in 1948. Once again, it required quite a fight from members to get the proviso withdrawn. Thereby hangs a tale of how rulers, colonial or democratic, have always wanted to retain the power to prosecute for sedition.
If one wants to know the working of the law related to dominant free speech issues such as public order, morality, obscenity, film censorship, defamation, sedition, press freedom and Internet curbs, this book will not only provide valuable historical insight, but also the standard tests that courts use to determine the validity of such restrictions. Thus, you can see the shift from the original standard for obscenity of ‘a tendency to deprave or corrupt’ a person susceptible to prurient taste (Ranjit Udeshi, 1965) to more modern ‘contemporary standards that reflect the sensibilities as well as the tolerance level of the average reasonable person’ (Khushboo v. Kanniammal, 2010). “... In the long run, such communication prompts a dialogue within society wherein people can choose to either defend or question the existing social mores,” the Supreme Court said, while quashing all the complaints against Khushboo.
Bhatia suggests that applying some of the recent principles in free speech jurisprudence, there is a clear case to strike down the penal section on sedition to cases, as indeed two high courts had done before the Supreme Court upheld Section 124A in 1962. The Punjab and Haryana High Court had applied the classic test of ‘overbreadth’ (a provision so ‘overbroad’ that promoting disaffection is criminalised both when it would lead to a public order breach — a permissible restriction — and when it would not) and held that it was unconstitutional.
The ‘chilling effect’ of excessive curbs such as the threat of exorbitant awards as damages for defamation, the casual resort to a ‘decency or morality’ standard based on a section of public opinion, or succumbing to the threat of violence by a purported offended section of society — popularly called the ‘heckler’s veto’ — are issues that all citizens should familiarise themselves with. For often, what is at stake is not merely the freedom of political activists, writers and journalists alone, but that of every citizen, voter or resident.
venkataramanan.k@thehindu.co.in
K. Venkataramanan
A lucid and detailed examination of the law of free speech in India, the book also makes a case for ‘constitutionalising’ all forms of speech.
A decade ago, Tamil Nadu was as agog about a looming threat to freedom of speech and a pervasive atmosphere of intolerance as the entire country is at the moment. Assorted groups of Tamil nationalists, protectors and preservers of Tamil culture were policing the opinions of public figures, especially from the film industry. Open threats, street demonstrations and waving of footwear and broomsticks indicated that supposedly offended Tamil society was out to protect its culture from prurient attacks. Actor Khushboo was one of the main targets after she made some remarks in a magazine interview on the prevalence of premarital sex. Nearly two dozen criminal cases were filed across Tamil Nadu by offended complainants charging her with obscenity. The final outcome in her favour in the Supreme Court five years later was a landmark decision on obscenity law.
Reasonable restrictions
Shortly after the controversy broke out in 2005, a public opinion forum for the free exchange of views and ideas was launched in the State, with a rider that the forum’s promoters themselves would not privilege one view over another, and there was no founding philosophy except a general commitment to freedom of expression. “There is no collective policy for the forum, and it will not even publicly defend freedom of expression, as its users need not necessarily be only those who believe in free speech,” they said. It was quite an interesting way to promote freedom of expression — by acknowledging individual autonomy to the point of not expecting its users to even believe in that very freedom.
Does the state acknowledge such autonomy among its citizens and repose faith in them to make their own choices regarding speeches, writings, works of art, films and plays? Obviously not, given the number of “reasonable restrictions” that are placed on free speech in India, many of them reflecting an official philosophy that believes that the government alone can, or at least has a duty to, decide what is ‘good’ for the people. Hence, the many restrictions on expression based on, among other grounds, public order, decency and morality. Gautam Bhatia would classify such curbs as instances of ‘legal paternalism’ or ‘legal moralism’. For, according to this author of a lucid and detailed examination of the law of free speech in India (Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution, Oxford University Press, Rs.750), Indian freespeech jurisprudence has two broad approaches — ‘moral-paternalistic’, a view that sees people as inherently corruptible and prone to violence and who cannot be trusted with too much freedom, and ‘liberal-autonomous’, an approach that sees people as individuals capable of making decisions on their own lives and one that allows only limited restrictions on what they can speak, see or hear.
Does not our Constitution guarantee all of us freedom of speech and expression? If both freedom and its curtailment are in an everlasting delicate balance, what exactly is our free speech philosophy? If freedom is related to politics and democracy, does it come under political philosophy? Or is it moral philosophy concerning the individual and the human self? “We need a theory, or theories of free speech,” says Bhatia. The theoretical framework for his analysis of the evolution of free speech jurisprudence covers a vast expanse. Free speech is a means to the truth; a pursuit of individual self-fulfilment and an important means by which democratic self-governance is made possible, he argues. Its role in personal, social and political life inevitably brings it into conflict with the state, with diverse shades of opinions in the marketplace of ideas and the ways in which free expression impacts the established order.
The title may suggest that the author is arguing for an extreme view of free speech: as the right to do all that these three verbs encompass, but in actuality he is doing something far more nuanced. He is arguing for ‘constitutionalising’ all forms of speech; that is, making as much of the law speech-protective as possible, and what little is incapable of protection must be curbed only in a manner allowed by the Constitution. To put it differently, if some restrictions are inevitable, their basis should be sought only within the values of the Constitution, or in ‘constitutional morality’, as he puts it, and not in vague appeals to transient notions of social mores, decency and morality. For instance, a restrictive hate speech law or one that seeks to protect an oppressed community from insult need not derive its constitutionality from a mere content-based view of the ‘feeling of hurt’ caused by some words or images. Rather, it could be rooted in a notion of moral equality among citizens, and with reference to women, from the angle of prohibition of gender subordination.
Historical context
Many will be familiar with the basic formulation of free speech in India as a set of freedoms matched by a set of reasonable restrictions. However, not many may know that this was not the original framework. The early judgments on Article 19(1)(a) were too speech-protective for the rulers’ comfort, and the ‘reasonable restrictions’ were introduced through the first amendment. It is equally interesting to learn that one of the grounds for curbing free speech was ‘sedition’ in an early draft, drawing derisive comments from some members of the Constituent Assembly. Sardar Patel, who chaired the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, moved for the deletion of the proviso the very next day. However, the word ‘sedition’ made a mysterious comeback in the draft Constitution in 1948. Once again, it required quite a fight from members to get the proviso withdrawn. Thereby hangs a tale of how rulers, colonial or democratic, have always wanted to retain the power to prosecute for sedition.
If one wants to know the working of the law related to dominant free speech issues such as public order, morality, obscenity, film censorship, defamation, sedition, press freedom and Internet curbs, this book will not only provide valuable historical insight, but also the standard tests that courts use to determine the validity of such restrictions. Thus, you can see the shift from the original standard for obscenity of ‘a tendency to deprave or corrupt’ a person susceptible to prurient taste (Ranjit Udeshi, 1965) to more modern ‘contemporary standards that reflect the sensibilities as well as the tolerance level of the average reasonable person’ (Khushboo v. Kanniammal, 2010). “... In the long run, such communication prompts a dialogue within society wherein people can choose to either defend or question the existing social mores,” the Supreme Court said, while quashing all the complaints against Khushboo.
Bhatia suggests that applying some of the recent principles in free speech jurisprudence, there is a clear case to strike down the penal section on sedition to cases, as indeed two high courts had done before the Supreme Court upheld Section 124A in 1962. The Punjab and Haryana High Court had applied the classic test of ‘overbreadth’ (a provision so ‘overbroad’ that promoting disaffection is criminalised both when it would lead to a public order breach — a permissible restriction — and when it would not) and held that it was unconstitutional.
The ‘chilling effect’ of excessive curbs such as the threat of exorbitant awards as damages for defamation, the casual resort to a ‘decency or morality’ standard based on a section of public opinion, or succumbing to the threat of violence by a purported offended section of society — popularly called the ‘heckler’s veto’ — are issues that all citizens should familiarise themselves with. For often, what is at stake is not merely the freedom of political activists, writers and journalists alone, but that of every citizen, voter or resident.
venkataramanan.k@thehindu.co.in
Source: thehindu
Let’s not fight, Jharkhand tribals say, as they pray to Mahishasur
Sushma is a member of Asur, classified officially as a Primitive Tribe Group (PTG) and who number less than 10,000 in Jharkhand.
Written by Prashant Pandey | Ranchi | Published:February 27, 2016 4:04 am
Mahishasur being worshipped in Purulia, Bengal. (Source: Express file)
Over the last two days, HRD Minister Smriti Irani had angrily objected in Parliament to the alleged depiction of Mahishasur by “some students of JNU” as a “martyr” who was lured to his death by Durga.
But amid all the rhetoric over the JNU sedition controversy, the fact remains that there are tribal groups across the country that believe in the counter-narrative and want “the truth to be presented in an unbiased manner”.
“We are all born from the womb of the same mother earth. There is nothing to fight over. But we believe that Mahishasur was our king and he was killed dishonestly by Durga. Why should a biased picture be presented? As it is, we do not have any idol of Mahishasur. We invoke him in our hearts,” said Sushma Asur from Sakhuapani village in Latehar’s Netarhat.
Sushma is a member of Asur, classified officially as a Primitive Tribe Group (PTG) and who number less than 10,000 in Jharkhand. And according to experts, the counter-narrative of so-called demon kings being worshipped and their slaying mourned exist among tribal groups across Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.
“We believe we are the descendants of Mahishasur. We do not celebrate Durga Puja. Our rituals that have been passed on to us through generations tell us that we should take protective measures on the night Mahishasur was killed,” said Sushma.
She added that members of her group “apply oil on their navels, ears and nose, the spots from where blood is seen oozing out of Mahishasur in the popular depiction of Durga piercing her trishul into his body”.
“According to our beliefs, the killing took place in the dark. We don’t want negative energies to overtake us,” said Sushma.
She added that members of her group mourn those nine days when the battle between Mahishasur and Durga is believed to have lasted.
“Not only among Asurs, the narrative exists in Santhals, one of the largest tribal groups. They mourn the deaths of Mahishasur and Ravan,” said Vandana Tete, an activist who has been working on conserving the heritage, history and literature of tribals over the past decade.
Asked whether tribal folklore shows Durga in poor light, Tete said, “We have come across some references in West Bengal, where many tribal groups exist. There are elements in their folk songs indicating the same. But we have to conduct more studies before making a declaration.”
Said Ajit Prasad Hembram from Purulia in West Bengal, who has been organising events to observe Mahishasur Martyrdom Day since 2014, “I don’t understand why it is such an issue with the present government. They have their minds fixed on only one depiction. The tribal people are very much sons of this soil. Their tradition has been handed down through generations.”
Said Ashwini Pankaj of Jharkhand Bhasha Sanskriti Sahitya Akhra, “The problem is that nobody is interested in knowing or conserving the heritage of tribals, which we are losing fast. Their traditions, rituals are part of folklore. We need to record and identify those narratives.”
He said the Akhra, or a meeting place, was trying to come up with a grammar of tribal languages, including the ones spoken by Asurs.
Written by Prashant Pandey | Ranchi | Published:February 27, 2016 4:04 am
Over the last two days, HRD Minister Smriti Irani had angrily objected in Parliament to the alleged depiction of Mahishasur by “some students of JNU” as a “martyr” who was lured to his death by Durga.
But amid all the rhetoric over the JNU sedition controversy, the fact remains that there are tribal groups across the country that believe in the counter-narrative and want “the truth to be presented in an unbiased manner”.
“We are all born from the womb of the same mother earth. There is nothing to fight over. But we believe that Mahishasur was our king and he was killed dishonestly by Durga. Why should a biased picture be presented? As it is, we do not have any idol of Mahishasur. We invoke him in our hearts,” said Sushma Asur from Sakhuapani village in Latehar’s Netarhat.
Sushma is a member of Asur, classified officially as a Primitive Tribe Group (PTG) and who number less than 10,000 in Jharkhand. And according to experts, the counter-narrative of so-called demon kings being worshipped and their slaying mourned exist among tribal groups across Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh.
“We believe we are the descendants of Mahishasur. We do not celebrate Durga Puja. Our rituals that have been passed on to us through generations tell us that we should take protective measures on the night Mahishasur was killed,” said Sushma.
She added that members of her group “apply oil on their navels, ears and nose, the spots from where blood is seen oozing out of Mahishasur in the popular depiction of Durga piercing her trishul into his body”.
“According to our beliefs, the killing took place in the dark. We don’t want negative energies to overtake us,” said Sushma.
She added that members of her group mourn those nine days when the battle between Mahishasur and Durga is believed to have lasted.
“Not only among Asurs, the narrative exists in Santhals, one of the largest tribal groups. They mourn the deaths of Mahishasur and Ravan,” said Vandana Tete, an activist who has been working on conserving the heritage, history and literature of tribals over the past decade.
Asked whether tribal folklore shows Durga in poor light, Tete said, “We have come across some references in West Bengal, where many tribal groups exist. There are elements in their folk songs indicating the same. But we have to conduct more studies before making a declaration.”
Said Ajit Prasad Hembram from Purulia in West Bengal, who has been organising events to observe Mahishasur Martyrdom Day since 2014, “I don’t understand why it is such an issue with the present government. They have their minds fixed on only one depiction. The tribal people are very much sons of this soil. Their tradition has been handed down through generations.”
Said Ashwini Pankaj of Jharkhand Bhasha Sanskriti Sahitya Akhra, “The problem is that nobody is interested in knowing or conserving the heritage of tribals, which we are losing fast. Their traditions, rituals are part of folklore. We need to record and identify those narratives.”
He said the Akhra, or a meeting place, was trying to come up with a grammar of tribal languages, including the ones spoken by Asurs.
Source: indianexpress
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Totalitarian regimes come to power because good people keep silent: Admiral Ramdas
Student Protests
The former Naval chief speaks up about the crisis triggered by police action in JNU, and the question of nationalism.
L Ramdas · Yesterday · 07:45 pm
I have been a proud member of the uniformed fraternity for nearly 45 years, retiring as the head of the Indian Navy in 1993. The present turbulence in our top academic institutions together with continuing manifestations of mob violence, totalitarian behaviour and intolerance, impel me once again, to speak up and share my concerns through this open letter. My two recent letters to the President and Prime Minister have not elicited more than a routine bureaucratic response. I am well aware that I may be one of the few from the fraternity of retired military veterans who continue to take public positions which might not always be in support of government policy. However, I see this is both a right and a duty of a former serviceman and citizen like myself. I am well aware that serving members in uniform cannot express themselves as per the service conduct rules. However, we veterans out of uniform certainly can, and must. If people like myself are quiet today, my grandchildren will ask me, “If not you then who”, “if not now, then when”, Thatha?
I refer to the train of events that began with the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University last month and continues today with the unresolved Jawaharlal Nehru University saga. The unprecedented entry of the police into the campus, the ensuing high-decibel, high-voltage “trial by media”, and subsequent student arrests under serious charges ranging from sedition, anti-nationalism and terrorism, has hit headlines across the country. This has created an avoidable polarisation of views thanks to the entire episode having been handled with a lack of sensitivity. It has been blown into a full-scale crisis where students are being demonised and conspiracy theories abound. Thousands of students, civil society groups as well as journalists have been out on the streets of Delhi taking out some of the biggest, peaceful rallies seen in recent times.
The nation-building effort
Let me briefly rewind to my personal profile to enable you to better understand where I am coming from.
I joined the fledgling Indian Navy in January 1949 – barely 16 months after we gained our Independence. It was a time of great expectations, big dreams and opportunities. The selection for entry into the armed forces of a resurgent India at the end of the sustained struggle against British colonial rule, was heady indeed for a young fifteen year old. Those 45 years in the Navy provided me with a panoramic view of events that have unfolded across the world stage. And I certainly had a ringside view of events in an India that had been traumatised by the unprecedented brutality and slaughter of Partition – the scars of which linger on in my personal, and our collective, consciousness on both sides of our borders.
Brick by brick, step by painful step, leaders and citizens together created and built a vision of a new and a free India. This vision, the product of long and tough debates within the Constituent Assembly, sought to encompass the huge and often conflicting diversities that had to be accommodated within the framework of a path-breaking Constitutional document. Incorporating the often divergent views of an impressive range of thinkers and visionaries, the Indian Constitution firmly rejected a narrow, exclusionary monoculture in favour of a revolutionary definition of nationhood that was inclusive, confident and transformative under the guiding hand of Babasaheb Ambedkar.
Armed forces and the Nation
The armed forces of this newly-independent nation were an equal part of this combined effort of nation-building in a variety of ways – trained as we were to conduct ourselves with discipline and professionalism combined with compassion and a sense of our common humanity and purpose.
The unspoken and sacred credo has been that those in the armed forces will remain apolitical. Indeed, we forgo many of the normal rights as citizens enshrined in the Constitution when we join the armed forces. The accepted practice of honouring the principle of political control over the armed forces has been followed without exception since Independence. However, the quid pro quo of this arrangement, unwritten as it is, implies that the government of the day will discharge its responsibilities towards the people [including the military] with honour and integrity.
After retirement, each of us uniformed persons reverts to being a citizen of India, with all the implications of rights, duties and responsibilities that citizenship implies. The Regulations Navy/Army/Airforce are no longer in force. Whether in or out of uniform – we veterans have valued our right to vote – the hallmark of our democratic polity. Exercising our vote does mean that each of us would also choose a particular political position or perspective. The four decades of service in a maturing yet turbulent democracy most certainly impacted my political thinking post-retirement.
Citizens must engage
After my retirement in September 1993, I moved to a village in Alibag, Maharashtra, where I practice organic farming and continue to live till today. Living in rural India has been a total re-education, and one which has given me profound insights. I have shared the ups and downs of the life of an ordinary farmer – influenced by the vagaries of weather and pollution, local politics, threats of being evicted for so-called development under the Special Economic Zone, and much more. My years in uniform and first-hand experience of two wars, together with a closer understanding of the imminent agrarian crisis which affects some 70% of our population, has directly influenced my belief that true liberation or “azadi” from poverty and hunger, will only come when and if the elites of this land demonstrate greater integrity and less greed. Recent disclosures by the Reserve Bank of India in response to an RTI question by the Indian Express revealed that between 2004 and 2015, public sector banks wrote off bad loans amounting to more than Rs 2.11 lakh crore. It has been reported that nearly half of this amount was written off between 2013 and 2015. Surprisingly, neither this information nor its impact on the economy has yet been divulged by the finance ministry. And yet we have heard strong criticism about the petty amounts granted for education of scholars from weaker sections, in JNU and other universities, as examples of taxpayers money being ill spent! We seldom question the fact that loans too come from taxpayers money.
To achieve a more just society based on sustainable development, we must build peace through better neighbourhood management. This means finding political solutions to existing problems. Then alone can we reduce our spending on armaments, regulate consumption, balance energy demands, and provide citizens with food, shelter, education, health and employment. I have led, and been part of, a sustained movement against Special Economic Zones in Raigad, Maharashtra, and continue to push initiatives for renewable energy. Concerns over safety, cost and waste disposal, have contributed to my active engagement with the movement for Nuclear Disarmament and to end nuclear power by finding carbon free and nuclear free solutions. Efforts to strengthen the peace dividend have led me to take on leadership of organisations like the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy and India Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace. Both these organisations have promoted people-to-people contact and better relations with Pakistan. I am also totally opposed to capital punishment and the death penalty, as also the continued imposition of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act – about which I have written and spoken publicly in several fora.
In my view, each of the above, constitute areas of engagement which we as citizens not only have a right, but a duty, to address, even if it is against the policy of the government of the day. Does any of the above make me, or anyone else, anti national? Or less patriotic? Or a desh drohi?
I believe not.
My stand on this derives from the principle that political parties and governments alike are bound by the Constitution of the land. Every citizen has the right and the freedom to think and express views without fear of reprisal. The obsolete colonial law of sedition has no place in a modern democracy.
Therefore the question arises: Why are we arraigning a Rohith Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar and an Umar Khalid under charges of being anti-national, seditious or indulging in terrorist activities? From available material it appears that these three young men were only acting to further the objectives outlined in our Constitution and not indulging in any anti-national activity.
Who defines nationalism?
In some ways, it is a good thing that the death of Vemula, the arrest of Kumar and the witch-hunt against Umar Khalid, have actually led to a public debate about the definition of national and anti-national, as also of the deeper and more intractable issues around caste, religion and discrimination in our society. The linked question regarding who, if anyone, has the right to decide on my nationalism or lack of it, is equally vexed and needs a longer, more mature discussion. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been done since Independence. The existing laws and practice on this are largely inherited from the colonial period and were never addressed in a contemporary framework. This is critical for a mature democracy. Jingoism, waving the national flag, and shouting slogans, are not equivalent to a certification of patriotism. Upping the ante and making allegations of seditious behaviour and terrorist ties may not pass judicial scrutiny. Many have publicly disagreed with the sloganeering and forms of protest, but none of this is new or radical. Certainly it is ludicrous to think that a few students can threaten the unity of the country, as is sought to be established by some media houses and their invisible paymasters.
If anything has been a matter of deep concern to someone like me, it is the spectacle of alleged members of the legal profession being allowed to run amok in the courtroom and to both threaten and actually assault scribes, students, teachers and Kanhaiya Kumar. All this, while the large numbers of police personnel present apparently stood by and did nothing from all accounts. This is unacceptable from a uniformed, and a so-called disciplined police force.
I have been through the wide range of written reports, and audio-visual material available in the public domain on the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad Central University imbroglio. The real tragedy to me lies in the fact that this entire exercise of raising the alarm on foreign funded, possibly terrorist and seditious activities, has been orchestrated in order to demand the shutting down and “sanitising” such a prestigious institution. One is forced to conclude that this smacks of a “false flag exercise”. And this is serious. By all means investigate the matter – allow the university officials to handle the students with appropriate disciplinary action. But great discretion and caution must be exercised before calling in the police, and worse, to make serious charges of sedition.
The way ahead
Those who are leading the clamour for shutting down and/or “sanitisation” of JNU seem to have no idea of what this implies, and are exhibiting a frightening tendency to follow the mob blindly.
This might be a good moment to remind ourselves that in addition to being held in high esteem internationally, JNU is also among the few universities in India that recognise the courses run by military institutions like the National Defence Academy, the National Defence College, the Naval Academy and others. Ties between service institutions and university departments have been carefully forged in order that our military personnel continue to benefit from these interactions and remain at the cutting edge of the latest strategic thinking. There are several service personnel who have had the benefit of attending academic courses at JNU and indeed are among the alumni. Civil servants and police officers are also in a similar category. I have intentionally mentioned this so that my band of brothers and sisters amongst ex-service veterans will carefully weigh the consequences of any hasty actions such as returning degrees and awards.
I have outlined at some length the many reasons for why I write this note today. It is imperative that senior public figures like myself and others speak out, to raise an alarm, before it is too late. Recent history has shown us that totalitarian regimes have come to power because good people chose to keep silent. Above all else it is imperative that we must preserve our democratic spaces and the freedom, indeed the right, to question, to dissent and to debate – especially in our institutions of higher learning. JNU has been a frontrunner in producing thinkers and professionals who are not scared to speak out. Frankly, after listening carefully to the speech of the young union leader – Kanhaiya – I was left feeling reassured that if a young man in his twenties can speak with such compassion, intellect and passion about the real challenges and dangers we face in this land, all must be well in this complex and disparity-riddled country.
Far more than saluting a flag (which, of course, I continue to do with honour and respect), it is the thoughts articulated by young idealists like a Rohit Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar, a Shehla Rashid and yes an Umar Khalid all of whom together with the many unnamed and unsung women and men across this country, embody the true spirit of nationalism and patriotism. We must collectively ensure that we not only protect those who have not yet been pushed to take the extreme step like Rohith Vemula, but ensure that justice is promised and done to those presently in custody, or forced into hiding, for fear of their lives.
In the ultimate analysis, human security is the best guarantee for national security.
This article was first published in The Citizen.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
The former Naval chief speaks up about the crisis triggered by police action in JNU, and the question of nationalism.
L Ramdas · Yesterday · 07:45 pm
I have been a proud member of the uniformed fraternity for nearly 45 years, retiring as the head of the Indian Navy in 1993. The present turbulence in our top academic institutions together with continuing manifestations of mob violence, totalitarian behaviour and intolerance, impel me once again, to speak up and share my concerns through this open letter. My two recent letters to the President and Prime Minister have not elicited more than a routine bureaucratic response. I am well aware that I may be one of the few from the fraternity of retired military veterans who continue to take public positions which might not always be in support of government policy. However, I see this is both a right and a duty of a former serviceman and citizen like myself. I am well aware that serving members in uniform cannot express themselves as per the service conduct rules. However, we veterans out of uniform certainly can, and must. If people like myself are quiet today, my grandchildren will ask me, “If not you then who”, “if not now, then when”, Thatha?
I refer to the train of events that began with the tragic suicide of Rohith Vemula at Hyderabad Central University last month and continues today with the unresolved Jawaharlal Nehru University saga. The unprecedented entry of the police into the campus, the ensuing high-decibel, high-voltage “trial by media”, and subsequent student arrests under serious charges ranging from sedition, anti-nationalism and terrorism, has hit headlines across the country. This has created an avoidable polarisation of views thanks to the entire episode having been handled with a lack of sensitivity. It has been blown into a full-scale crisis where students are being demonised and conspiracy theories abound. Thousands of students, civil society groups as well as journalists have been out on the streets of Delhi taking out some of the biggest, peaceful rallies seen in recent times.
The nation-building effort
Let me briefly rewind to my personal profile to enable you to better understand where I am coming from.
I joined the fledgling Indian Navy in January 1949 – barely 16 months after we gained our Independence. It was a time of great expectations, big dreams and opportunities. The selection for entry into the armed forces of a resurgent India at the end of the sustained struggle against British colonial rule, was heady indeed for a young fifteen year old. Those 45 years in the Navy provided me with a panoramic view of events that have unfolded across the world stage. And I certainly had a ringside view of events in an India that had been traumatised by the unprecedented brutality and slaughter of Partition – the scars of which linger on in my personal, and our collective, consciousness on both sides of our borders.
Brick by brick, step by painful step, leaders and citizens together created and built a vision of a new and a free India. This vision, the product of long and tough debates within the Constituent Assembly, sought to encompass the huge and often conflicting diversities that had to be accommodated within the framework of a path-breaking Constitutional document. Incorporating the often divergent views of an impressive range of thinkers and visionaries, the Indian Constitution firmly rejected a narrow, exclusionary monoculture in favour of a revolutionary definition of nationhood that was inclusive, confident and transformative under the guiding hand of Babasaheb Ambedkar.
Armed forces and the Nation
The armed forces of this newly-independent nation were an equal part of this combined effort of nation-building in a variety of ways – trained as we were to conduct ourselves with discipline and professionalism combined with compassion and a sense of our common humanity and purpose.
The unspoken and sacred credo has been that those in the armed forces will remain apolitical. Indeed, we forgo many of the normal rights as citizens enshrined in the Constitution when we join the armed forces. The accepted practice of honouring the principle of political control over the armed forces has been followed without exception since Independence. However, the quid pro quo of this arrangement, unwritten as it is, implies that the government of the day will discharge its responsibilities towards the people [including the military] with honour and integrity.
After retirement, each of us uniformed persons reverts to being a citizen of India, with all the implications of rights, duties and responsibilities that citizenship implies. The Regulations Navy/Army/Airforce are no longer in force. Whether in or out of uniform – we veterans have valued our right to vote – the hallmark of our democratic polity. Exercising our vote does mean that each of us would also choose a particular political position or perspective. The four decades of service in a maturing yet turbulent democracy most certainly impacted my political thinking post-retirement.
Citizens must engage
After my retirement in September 1993, I moved to a village in Alibag, Maharashtra, where I practice organic farming and continue to live till today. Living in rural India has been a total re-education, and one which has given me profound insights. I have shared the ups and downs of the life of an ordinary farmer – influenced by the vagaries of weather and pollution, local politics, threats of being evicted for so-called development under the Special Economic Zone, and much more. My years in uniform and first-hand experience of two wars, together with a closer understanding of the imminent agrarian crisis which affects some 70% of our population, has directly influenced my belief that true liberation or “azadi” from poverty and hunger, will only come when and if the elites of this land demonstrate greater integrity and less greed. Recent disclosures by the Reserve Bank of India in response to an RTI question by the Indian Express revealed that between 2004 and 2015, public sector banks wrote off bad loans amounting to more than Rs 2.11 lakh crore. It has been reported that nearly half of this amount was written off between 2013 and 2015. Surprisingly, neither this information nor its impact on the economy has yet been divulged by the finance ministry. And yet we have heard strong criticism about the petty amounts granted for education of scholars from weaker sections, in JNU and other universities, as examples of taxpayers money being ill spent! We seldom question the fact that loans too come from taxpayers money.
To achieve a more just society based on sustainable development, we must build peace through better neighbourhood management. This means finding political solutions to existing problems. Then alone can we reduce our spending on armaments, regulate consumption, balance energy demands, and provide citizens with food, shelter, education, health and employment. I have led, and been part of, a sustained movement against Special Economic Zones in Raigad, Maharashtra, and continue to push initiatives for renewable energy. Concerns over safety, cost and waste disposal, have contributed to my active engagement with the movement for Nuclear Disarmament and to end nuclear power by finding carbon free and nuclear free solutions. Efforts to strengthen the peace dividend have led me to take on leadership of organisations like the Pakistan India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy and India Pakistan Soldiers Initiative for Peace. Both these organisations have promoted people-to-people contact and better relations with Pakistan. I am also totally opposed to capital punishment and the death penalty, as also the continued imposition of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act – about which I have written and spoken publicly in several fora.
In my view, each of the above, constitute areas of engagement which we as citizens not only have a right, but a duty, to address, even if it is against the policy of the government of the day. Does any of the above make me, or anyone else, anti national? Or less patriotic? Or a desh drohi?
I believe not.
My stand on this derives from the principle that political parties and governments alike are bound by the Constitution of the land. Every citizen has the right and the freedom to think and express views without fear of reprisal. The obsolete colonial law of sedition has no place in a modern democracy.
Therefore the question arises: Why are we arraigning a Rohith Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar and an Umar Khalid under charges of being anti-national, seditious or indulging in terrorist activities? From available material it appears that these three young men were only acting to further the objectives outlined in our Constitution and not indulging in any anti-national activity.
Who defines nationalism?
In some ways, it is a good thing that the death of Vemula, the arrest of Kumar and the witch-hunt against Umar Khalid, have actually led to a public debate about the definition of national and anti-national, as also of the deeper and more intractable issues around caste, religion and discrimination in our society. The linked question regarding who, if anyone, has the right to decide on my nationalism or lack of it, is equally vexed and needs a longer, more mature discussion. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been done since Independence. The existing laws and practice on this are largely inherited from the colonial period and were never addressed in a contemporary framework. This is critical for a mature democracy. Jingoism, waving the national flag, and shouting slogans, are not equivalent to a certification of patriotism. Upping the ante and making allegations of seditious behaviour and terrorist ties may not pass judicial scrutiny. Many have publicly disagreed with the sloganeering and forms of protest, but none of this is new or radical. Certainly it is ludicrous to think that a few students can threaten the unity of the country, as is sought to be established by some media houses and their invisible paymasters.
If anything has been a matter of deep concern to someone like me, it is the spectacle of alleged members of the legal profession being allowed to run amok in the courtroom and to both threaten and actually assault scribes, students, teachers and Kanhaiya Kumar. All this, while the large numbers of police personnel present apparently stood by and did nothing from all accounts. This is unacceptable from a uniformed, and a so-called disciplined police force.
I have been through the wide range of written reports, and audio-visual material available in the public domain on the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad Central University imbroglio. The real tragedy to me lies in the fact that this entire exercise of raising the alarm on foreign funded, possibly terrorist and seditious activities, has been orchestrated in order to demand the shutting down and “sanitising” such a prestigious institution. One is forced to conclude that this smacks of a “false flag exercise”. And this is serious. By all means investigate the matter – allow the university officials to handle the students with appropriate disciplinary action. But great discretion and caution must be exercised before calling in the police, and worse, to make serious charges of sedition.
The way ahead
Those who are leading the clamour for shutting down and/or “sanitisation” of JNU seem to have no idea of what this implies, and are exhibiting a frightening tendency to follow the mob blindly.
This might be a good moment to remind ourselves that in addition to being held in high esteem internationally, JNU is also among the few universities in India that recognise the courses run by military institutions like the National Defence Academy, the National Defence College, the Naval Academy and others. Ties between service institutions and university departments have been carefully forged in order that our military personnel continue to benefit from these interactions and remain at the cutting edge of the latest strategic thinking. There are several service personnel who have had the benefit of attending academic courses at JNU and indeed are among the alumni. Civil servants and police officers are also in a similar category. I have intentionally mentioned this so that my band of brothers and sisters amongst ex-service veterans will carefully weigh the consequences of any hasty actions such as returning degrees and awards.
I have outlined at some length the many reasons for why I write this note today. It is imperative that senior public figures like myself and others speak out, to raise an alarm, before it is too late. Recent history has shown us that totalitarian regimes have come to power because good people chose to keep silent. Above all else it is imperative that we must preserve our democratic spaces and the freedom, indeed the right, to question, to dissent and to debate – especially in our institutions of higher learning. JNU has been a frontrunner in producing thinkers and professionals who are not scared to speak out. Frankly, after listening carefully to the speech of the young union leader – Kanhaiya – I was left feeling reassured that if a young man in his twenties can speak with such compassion, intellect and passion about the real challenges and dangers we face in this land, all must be well in this complex and disparity-riddled country.
Far more than saluting a flag (which, of course, I continue to do with honour and respect), it is the thoughts articulated by young idealists like a Rohit Vemula, a Kanhaiya Kumar, a Shehla Rashid and yes an Umar Khalid all of whom together with the many unnamed and unsung women and men across this country, embody the true spirit of nationalism and patriotism. We must collectively ensure that we not only protect those who have not yet been pushed to take the extreme step like Rohith Vemula, but ensure that justice is promised and done to those presently in custody, or forced into hiding, for fear of their lives.
In the ultimate analysis, human security is the best guarantee for national security.
This article was first published in The Citizen.
We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
Source: scrollin
Note: The highlights on this article are by this blogger.
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