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Even as reports last week suggested that the number of Indian student going to the US had increased by 30 percent, the inflow of foreign students to India has declined sharply, according to government data.
According to a report by The Times of India, data from the Union Ministry of Home affairs shows that the number of students coming to India from US, Germany, France, South Korea, Australia, China and Singapore had dropped by 73 percent from 13,961 in 2013 to 3,737 in 2014.
Representational image. AFP
The report also indicates that the number hadn’t just dropped for countries better placed than India, but even from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and African nations fewer people are turning to India for higher education.
Adding to this is a report in DNA which suggested that Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s bonhomie with Barack Obama had seen a huge surge in students from India studying in the US.
According to the report Indian students going to the United States had risen by 29.4 percent within a year, compared to the six percent previous year following three years of consistent decline. There are, as of now, 1.33 lakh Indians studying in universities across the United States.
In fact, it is not just to the US, more and more Indian students are looking to go abroad for higher education. According to a government report, India saw a huge jump in internationally mobile students with only 39,626 students in foreign countries in 1995 to 1,89,472 students going abroad in 2012.
While the US has remained the top destination abroad to go for higher education, the government date shows that UK replaced Australia in 2012 as the second most coveted destination for getting a higher education.
Though the Modi-Obama bonhomie and more students going to the US is well and good, the fact that lesser students are coming to India and more students are going abroad raises several questions about the quality of education in our country.
A Hindustan Times in a report points out, “a part of the reason may have to do with perceptions of insecurity, owing to the attacks on women that inhibit parents from sending their children to the subcontinent.”
Another problem faced by those coming from other countries is racial discrimination. South Sudanese students had complained to Home Minister Rajnath Singh about the issue at Pune’s Symbiosis International University in September. Singh had hence appealed, “From this platform, I want to appeal to all Indian students in Pune as well as in other parts of the country not to discriminate anyone and consider every one as brother. It is very unfortunate if any such incident takes place in our country.”
The Hindustan Times also pointed out that declining level of education because of shortages of capable faculty and lack of government efforts is also a reason why fewer students are coming to India for higher education. This, may also be one of the reasons why more and more students are going out of India for their higher education, apart from may be a more prosperous middle class and easily available education loans.
However, another reason for Indian students going abroad may be better scope and opportunity. As pointed out by Philip G Altbach in a report in The Hindu in 2014, “Not only are overseas programmes and departments more prestigious, they also have far better facilities, laboratories and a more favourable culture of research. Top faculty members are often more accessible and it is easier to become affiliated with a laboratory or institute. Academic politics exists everywhere, and Indians may suffer from occasional discrimination abroad, but overall academic conditions are likely to be better than at home.”
With numbers projecting a pretty bleak picture of the Indian education system, the quickest solution could be government hiring better faculty members in universities, setting up more universities, labs and research centers across the country.
The fear of revival of terrorism has started haunting Punjab again. A spate of recent incidents suggests that the sub-surface disquiet over matters religion is getting intense in the state and it might prove conducive to the growth of radicalism.
The tension in the Sikh community has been surfacing with disturbing regularity over the last few months. It started with the controversy over the pardon granted to Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh by the SGPC. The issue of desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib and the statewide protests over it followed soon. Then there was the Sarbat Khalsa on November 10, during which radical elements demanded Khalistan. Parties have got into political games now.
On November 21, Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal called on President Pranab Mukherjee and accused the Congress of encouraging secessionist forces in the state for petty electoral gains. He accused Rahul Gandhi of “fomenting trouble in Punjab”. Later speaking to the media, Sukhbir charged the Congress leaders with sharing the stage with radical and separatist elements in the November 10 Sarbat Khalsa in Amritsar. He even went to the extent of calling the Congress an anti-national party which was hell-bent on playing divisive politics in Punjab.
Representational image. Image courtesy: PTI
The Congress was quick to dismiss his allegations. In a counter-offensive, the party accused Badal of indulging in a malicious and slanderous campaign. The Congress spokesman said that Akalis have a ‘congenital obsession’ of blaming the Congress for every problem in the state. Capt Amarinder Singh, Congress Deputy Leader in Lok Sabha said Badal was trying to shift the blame for his own failures on the Congress.
“The huge turnout of people at Sarbat Khalsa was an expression of anger and outrage at the Badal government and that is the reason Sukhbir is frustrated,’’ said Amarinder.
Trouble began in Punjab a few months ago when the Akal Takht unexpectedly announced pardon to the Dera Sacha chief solely on the basis of a letter written by him. Sikhs asked why he was not even summoned to the Akal Takht. It was said that the Akalis had pressured the SGPC to take the decision.
The Akali Dal is faced with strong anti-incumbency ahead of the assembly elections in early 2017. Lakhs of Dera followers could have come handy for it to beat the challenge from both the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party.
The Akal Takht later withdrew its pardon in the face of severe all-round criticism. But before the pardon controversy had died down, there were instances of desecration of the holy Guru Granth Sahib in different parts of Punjab. There were large scale protests and anti-government rallies. To control the crowd, the police resorted to firing in one such protest rally, killing two persons. This angered radicals in the Sikh community who called a Sarbat Khalsa near Amritsar.
In a related development, which could be linked to the possible revival of the Khalistani movement, Dal Khalsa released the original Nanakshahi calendar for the New Year at the Operation Bluestar Memorial in the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar in March. The calendar had the photograph of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. It also mentioned the death anniversaries of militants who were hanged or killed in ‘police encounters’.
Similarly, on June 5, some Sikh youth defied prohibitory orders to hold protests against the removal of a picture of Bhindranwale before the Operation Bluestar anniversary. The entire region of Jammu had been engulfed in tension as a reason of protest and police action against the protesters.
Indian intelligence agencies had reported in May that banned terrorism outfit, LeT had been training and assisting Khalistani militants in Pakistan. The plan was to send them to J&K from where they could infiltrate Punjab. This was not surprising at all, as three decades ago also, Pakistan had helped the Khalistani uprising in India.
However, some think the Khalistan movement is not at all a real threat now. Talking to Firstpost, Professor (Retd) Manjit Singh of Swaraj Abhiyan, who was earlier a member of the AAP party, said the present serious crisis in Punjab was a result of the interference of politicians in religious matters. Politicians deliberately allow such controversies to divert attention of the people from the real issues like growing unemployment, rise in prices of essential commodities, power shortage, drugs problem in Punjab, sand mining mafia etc.
Lashing out at Sukhbir Singh Badal, Punjab People’s Party (PPP) president Manpreet Singh Badal, said, “Badal is raising the bogey of Khalistan to cover up the failure of Akali government on all fronts. People are so angry with the present government that at many places, Akali leaders have been chased away,” said Manpreet.
It was an unfortunate coincidence that a few hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized inclusiveness of Sufi Islam in London, terrorists struck in a big way in France, killing over 150 persons. After the murders and mayhem at Charlie Hebdo headquarters, this is the second attack in Paris that put under tremendous pressure on the advocacy of multiculturalism in a society where fault lines are deepening.
Those who study the trend of terrorism across the world define the Paris attacks as distinctly different from the attacks on World Trade Centre in New York and Mumbai. “It seems like an attack perpetrated by the second or third generation of French nationals who abhor the idea of multiculturalism,” they point out. Unlike in New York or Mumbai, where the complicity of external forces was evident, these attacks seemed to have come from within by those indoctrinated and motivated to undertake suicidal missions over the internet.
There is indeed a grim foreboding for the internal security scenario in India where multiculturalism is the essence of the society. As technology penetrates and becomes an effective mode of communication among people, the possibility of a new variant of terrorism called “lone wolf syndrome” has been haunting Indian security and intelligence apparatus.
Intelligence agencies and security personnel across the country are grappling with a situation where parents have been approaching them about the radicalisation of their wards through the internet. Not long ago, a convent educated Muslim girl in Jamshedpur was found to be accessing persuasive incendiary preaching of a Yemini imam Anwar-al-Awlaki , a Jihadi ideologue who was killed in a US drone attack on 30 September, 2011.
French police helps an injured after multiple attacks in Paris. Reuters
Strangely enough, the Indian security agencies have often been alerted by the US intelligence sleuths about increasing downloads of videos of Awlaki, a US citizen and educated in prestigious US institutions, whose seditious sermons have radicalised a section of English-speaking youngsters.
In the Jamshedpur case, Indian intelligence agencies reached the doorstep of the girl but only to beat a hasty retreat. “Yes I like his speech and there is no crime in hearing what I like,” she is learnt to have non-challantly told the police officers who approached her.
Since then, several cases have come up in which youngsters are found to be motivated by internet jihadis to join what they perceive as a religious war to establish the “Islamic state”. In some cases, the Indian intelligence agencies have been trying to reverse the trend by setting up centres to “de-radicalise such youths”.
But in a huge country like India where society is pre-dominantly young, the state apparatus would be hugely inadequate to check the trend of radicalisation and the emergence of a “lone wolf” explosion. However, what is extremely heartening in such a grim scenario in India is the outright rejection of militant political Islam by Indian Muslims. Although Deobandi Islami is recognised all over the world as the fountainhead of fundamentalist Islam like Wahabism, the Dar-ul-Uloom (Islamic university) at Deoband, only 100 km from Delhi, is considered to be a source of “unadulterated nationalism” in the Indian context.
The pro-nationalism discourse in Islamic seminaries or universities is not only confined to Deoband’s Dar-ul-Uloom. In Lucknow, where yet another powerful school of Islamic thought known as Nadwa Islamic university exists, one of the foremost Islamic scholars, Ali Mian, once described nationalism as essential ingredient of the university’s curriculum. Ali Mian was quite perturbed in 1994 when his university premises were raided by intelligence agencies following a tip off that some terrorists were hiding in the student’s hostel. Ali Mian opened the institute for wide scrutiny and held forth his views on patriotism and nationalism.
India can take solace that the social intermingling over the years has generated immense amount of trust and confidence to ensure a peaceful co-existence. A senior intelligence officer once pointed out that the unique feature of Indian society is that deviant behaviour by anyone gets noticed by the neighbours immediately and gets the attention of law enforcers. But with internet and virtual life gradually undermining and weakening this social strength, the situation is tailor-made for ‘lone wolves’.
The stress of multiculturalism in France would invariably have a fallout in India. The threat is real, here and now.
When I asked Robin Cook, the author of an eminently readable fiction, Foreign body, dealing with India’s fledgling medical tourism industry, how he zeroed in on Kashmira Patel as name for one of the key characters, he said without batting an eyelid — telephone directory, stupid! Americans set store by telephone directory for a more serious purpose — drawing persons for the onerous role of members of jury, constituted ad-hoc for a criminal trial — as well.
We in India, too followed the jury system of trial till 1960 but gave it up in favor of trial by the bench alone. The purpose of this article is not to discuss the relative merits and demerits of trial by jury versus trial by bench but to highlight the Supreme Court’s distinct distaste for non-judicial persons and bodies. If the 16th October 2015 order vide which it has junked the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) created in 2014 through a fresh article 124A of the Constitution that junked article 124 is any indication, the SC would have intervened to junk the jury system even if it was not legislatively disbanded in 1960 on the ground that the hoi polloi cannot be entrusted with such an onerous job.
Image courtesy: Agencies
The Supreme Court has taken exception to encroachment into its turf by the executive which in its view amounts to altering one of the basic features of the constitution, held sacrosanct by its own verdict in Keshavanand Bharti case long ago. It was not as if article 124A even remotely proposed to undermine the judiciary by shifting any of the judicial processes from the high courts and the SC to the NJAC. In other words, all that the NJAC was set up for was to appoint judges, period. Is the sharing of power to appoint with the executive amount to undermining of the judiciary or clipping its wings? No because it was not as if the judiciary would not have been kept in the loop in the appointment process. Justice Chelameshwar’s dissenting judgment strongly supports the view that by being a part of the appointment process, the executive would not be stepping on the toes of judicial process so as to compromise the independence of judiciary
It was also not as if the composition of the NJAC was left vague or undefined so as to leave room for manipulation or jockeying which is possible for example had we taken a leaf out of the American system and selected the two eminent persons randomly from telephone directories or other lists of names. After all, the two eminent persons to be nominated was to be done in consultation with the chief justice, the Prime Minister and the leader of opposition by the law minister. The chief justice could always put his foot down if he found the proposed name disagreeable and the leader of opposition can raise a stink in the Parliament and outside.
The majority of the Apex Court bench was right on one basic issue though — conferring veto power on the two eminent persons. Veto powers any day are invidious and invite revulsion be they in the UN Security Council or in boards of companies where a foreign collaborator brings a lot to the table and hence insists on veto power for its nominee. And vesting the eminent persons with veto power in the matter of appointments to the higher judiciary was as irrational as it was mischievous. But then the majority erred by throwing the baby with the bathwater.
The Supreme Court ought to have struck down the veto power of the eminent persons alone and given its thumbs up to the other aspects of the NJAC law. That would have made all the six members equal. Deadlock should have be mandated to be resolved through reference to the President. Veto power indeed smacked of legislative highhandedness with the cynical calculation being in a stalemate the eminent persons would do the executive’s bidding.
So, Ghulam Ali can’t sing in India?
While pondering this eventuality, I look at the collection of vinyl records on my table, the cassettes and CDs in the adjoining cabinet and the mp3 files on my mobile and laptop.
There are Atif Aslam songs in them, so are Rahat and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Salma Agha, Reshma, Noorjahan, Abida Parveen, Mehdi Hassan and, of course, Ghulam Ali.
How many of them can the Shiv Sainiks and their supporters destroy?
Just last night, like on numerous others, the local FM radio stations were jockeying with each other to play the maximum number of ghazals and qawallis from these great singers.
How many radio and TV stations can they shut down?
All of India — its Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Christians; the rich and the poor — listens to the mellifluous voices from across the border that make thousands of compositions memorable. Many of us listen to Ghulam Ali’s raat-din, and not chupke chupke, but with decibel levels turned high.
Ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali. AFP
How many of us can they stop?
Even the Prime Minister listens to Ghulam Ali. Just a few months ago, the legendary singer performed at the Sankatmochan Temple — yes, a temple — in the PM’s constituency.
The PM was invited to the event but he couldn’t attend. “I do wish I get the opportunity to attend such a programme in the future where so many well-known artists will be enchanting the audience,” he had tweeted his disappointment.
“I must share that I have heard Ghulam Ali Sahab in the past that too in person,” he added.
So, did we hear it right when the bigots screamed that listening to singers from Pakistan is “unpatriotic” and an act of “treason” while justifying the cancellation of Ghulam Ali’s concert in Mumbai?
At the risk of sounding repetitive, it must be pointed out that art has no barrier, it is not a prisoner of religion or geography. It has to be kept away from politics of animosity, hatred and bigotry. Art is accepted, appreciated and assimilated in cultures not because it is prescribed by politicians or forced upon us by governments, but because it gives us joy and pleasure, satiates our mind, body and soul. Art is a personal bond between the exponent and his audience; it can be subjected only to the individual’s sense of quality and taste, not to the divisive agendas of politicians and their rabble-rousing cabals. If somebody tries to interfere, they should be told what Michael Jackson famously said when he grabbed his crotch and sang at Bal Thackeray‘s invitation in Mumbai: just beat it.
also see
Using religion and geography as filters for art could lead to disastrous consequences. Should we, for instance, stop singing
Saare Jahan Se Achcha
just because it was written by Iqbal, the pioneer of the idea of Pakistan? Should we reject several famous
bhajans
because they were sung by Mohammad Rafi and composed by Naushad?
Even the argument that stopping Pakistanis from performing in India will stop them from profiting financially, betrays their lack of understanding of market dynamics. Singers and artists get royalties for their work. Everytime a song is played on TV, radio or at a public event; whenever somebody buys a CD, a cassette or legally downloads a song, the singer gets paid. If the Sainiks are really keen on ensuring the singers do not get paid, they will have to knock on every Indian house to ensure they listen only to music made only in India. Can they?
The real threat to Indian music, ironically, isn’t coming from across the border. Most of the singers from Pakistan are known for their finesse — nafast and nazakat — and cultural refinement of their work. Unlike the chaar-botal-vodka and g**#-main-dum-hai-to-band-karwalo type crudity of current Indian charttoppers, the qawaalis of Nusrat and ghazals of Ghulam Ali remind us the purity of art, the pristine joys of soulful music.
Not allowing Ghulam Ali to sing in India — by the way, he sang for free at Sankatmochan Temple in Varanasi — will not make him poorer. But it will certainly deprive Indians of a treasure-trove of music. And the opportunity to remind us what music should be and what it has unfortunately become in the hands of some Indians.
By Sandhya Ravishankar
The phone rings.
“Hello?” says a man’s voice. “Are you well?”
“Who is this?” asks a woman’s voice at the other end. A chuckle.
“I am the one you have cast a net out for and are searching for so frantically,” the man laughs. This is Yuvaraj speaking.”
Yuvaraj is a wanted man. Key accused in the caste-related murder of young Dalit student Gokulraj in Tiruchengode, Namakkal, in June this year, he has been on the run ever since. The lady’s voice, allegedly, is that of the investigating officer in the murder case. Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Vishnupriya, all of 27 years of age, was found hanging in her quarters on 18 September. A note nearby, purportedly written by her, was an outpouring of guilt for taking the extreme step but provided no clues as to the reasons for her suicide.
On Sunday, Yuvaraj released a phone recording via WhatsApp, allegedly of a phone conversation with the late DSP which took place a few days before her death. He had sought the transfer and suspension of a few police officers, who he claims harassed Vishnupriya into taking her own life. He claims to have proved, through his phone conversation with her, that she was distressed at being forced to foist false cases on his aides.
Vishnupriya: “I am fighting to ensure that Goondas Act is not imposed on six people. I am under pressure, there is tremendous mental tension due to this case. What is your problem? You are a law graduate, you know the law. You come and surrender, face the case.”
Yuvaraj: You assure me that you will be able to take action as per law. I was prepared to surrender but in-between two people got arrested on foisted cases so I decided not to.
Vishnupriya: It is because we are not getting hold of you that we’re having to make so many arrests. Do you know how much pressure policemen are facing? I am a new entrant to the department.
DSP Vishnupriya. Image courtesy: Facebook
Yuvaraj: If you had left me alone for one week, I would have surrendered. But there was too much pressure building.
Vishnupriya: I guarantee the law will be followed. You come and surrender. I will give you an assurance. I will cancel all the Goondas cases filed on everyone so far.” Whether the voices on the recording actually belong to Yuvaraj and Vishnupriya will be probed and settled by the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department (CB-CID) which is now saddled with the case.
But the sheer audacity of a wanted man cocking a snook at the police and establishment, taunting and challenging them, is what Tamil Nadu is abuzz about. Assuming the recording is actually that of a conversation between Yuvaraj and Vishnupriya, a few facts stand out. Yuvaraj, utterly self-assured, almost bordering on arrogance, laughs heartily at the investigating officer’s desperate pleas to surrender. The wanted, strangely enough, appears to be in a position of power over the protector of the law, throughout the conversation.
Yuvaraj: I am aware of every single move taking place within the police. You do not know who is informing me and their identities will never come to your knowledge.
Vishnupriya: For one person – you – so many people are suffering.
Yuvaraj: When you are fighting for your community, these sacrifices must be made.
Vishnupriya: You can make sacrifices for a freedom struggle, will you do so for a murder case? You are creating the problem Yuvaraj and the police are reacting. You should just come and surrender and once we catch you, the case is closed. I assure you, I will ensure everything is done legally.”
This is not the first audio recording released by Yuvaraj. Ever since he went absconding, he has frequently been sending addresses to his fellow “community members” of the Kongu Vellala Gounder caste, exhorting them to work to uphold the cause of protecting members of their caste. He issues instructions to them on banal functions via recorded WhatsApp messages. The police, meanwhile, struggle to find this man who has become a political hotpot.
also see
“It is a sheer shame on democracy and on the society,” said C Lakshmanan, Associate Professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies in Chennai, an expert in Dalit studies. “It is ridiculous to claim that there is a rule of law in this state,” he said.
Tamil Nadu police have prided itself on being akin to the Scotland Yard. With allegations surfacing, of murky political connections, illegal arrests and embarrassing floundering in a sensitive murder case, a much lauded force is threatened with imminent loss of face and faith. Politicians in the state have not displayed any redeeming qualities in this issue either, according to experts.
“All political parties except the ruling party have issued statements after the death of Vishnupriya, there is no denying that,” said Stalin Rajangam, author and Dalit expert. “Has anyone released any statements demanding the arrest of the absconding Yuvaraj? The reason this has not happened is that no political party has the guts to speak out against the dominant caste. They are worried that it will affect them in the elections.”
Chief Minister Jayalalithaa took to defending her force at the Tamil Nadu Assembly on September 22, while responding to charges by arch rival Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Karunanidhi, on another issue relating to the police. She holds the Law portfolio and is entitled to a spirited defence.
But a theatre of the absurd is playing out in an almost macabre manner in the state with a murder accused on the run demanding action against senior police officers, giving them deadlines to solve the case and find out causes for the DSP’s death. At the end of the audio recording, Yuvaraj is heard stating that if the CB-CID does not crack the case within a week, he would move the Madras High Court to ensure the late DSP gets justice!
An incredulous public is watching. It is high time the police put criminals in their place, mindless of their caste affiliations and political connections.
Somewhere along the way Uber has done a U-turn. And it does not augur well for the passenger.
Mid-day reports that in a 10 September update of its terms and conditions, Uber has issued, what is in effect, a statutory warning to anyone using the service.
“Uber does not guarantee the quality, suitability, safety or ability of third party providers. You agree that the entire risk arising out of your use of the services, and any service or good requested in connection therewith, remains solely with you.”
This might just be legalese to protect Uber and it does not mean the company will not endeavour to provide the best service it can, but the language still sticks in the throat. What it’s saying is though it might pretend that the customer is king in the end it’s Uber über alles.
Reuters image.
Uber is essentially claiming it is merely an app that facilitates a service between a third party provider like a driver and the consumer. And that’s all it is. It’s a reflection of the society we live where we rely on apps who have become our middlemen. As long as it works without a hitch, it’s great. But as soon as the first problems arise, we understand the hard way what it means to be in a no-man’s land.
At one level, Uber is not without logic. It is connecting a passenger with the closest available car which will come to the doorstep. It won’t argue about the destination, haggle about the fare, demand extra because “I will have to return empty”. That convenience will come at a premium. Should an app be responsible for anything else?
Should a MakeMyTrip be responsible if a flight is delayed or a carrier loses your luggage?
Should a Shaadi.com be responsible if you meet a psychopath while looking for a soulmate?
Should an Olx vouch for everything being sold on its site and every transaction conducted on it?
The difference is these sites are giving you a range of options. The final choice is yours. Uber is assigning a driver to you. It’s not like the passenger has much choice in that matter. The passenger, in fact, is delegating the act of screening and determining a suitable driver to Uber or thinks she is. Now we know better.
It is absolutely true that there is only so much a background check will reveal. When an Uber-driver was jailed in a Gurgaon rape case, it turned out that he had been charged with an attempt to assault and rape in 2003 in Elau, for robbery and rape in Mehrauli in 2011, again for robbery and rape in Elau in 2013. All that along with some arson and illegal weapons. That such a person could become an Uber driver inspired very little confidence in the so-called “background checks” Uber was performing. A colleague whose driver joined Uber says she, as his latest employer, never ever got a call from Uber to check his background.
Then came the molestation case where an Uber driver was accused of trying to kiss a passenger in Gurgaon. Another Uber driver was arrested in Kolkata for allegedly masturbating with one hand and driving with another. Cases like that exposed the limits of background checks. These drivers, for example, had valid badges and licences. There’s no background check that will reveal if one night a driver’s hormones will get the better of him and he thinks he can grope or kiss his passenger. There’s only so much that is in Uber’s control. Uber did try and react with alacrity to those cases rather than issue a “template response”. They stressed their “zero tolerance” policy and insisted “immediate action had been taken with the driver partner while the matter is being thoroughly investigated”. An Uber spokesman told TIME that in the Kolkata case the company immediately contacted the passenger, suspended the driver and helped local authorities with their investigation.
Thus on one hand, Uber wants to create a public image of a responsible and responsive company that is trying its level best to plug all the loopholes and ensure passenger safety. On the other hand, in its legal small print it’s doing its best to not be held responsible for anything at all if push comes to shove. Attention to safety should be part of the company’s DNA, not a perk it offers its customers when convenient.
As per its revamped terms and conditions, if Uber really means what it says, it might as well now have a pop-up warning every time you confirm your Uber pick-up.
“Please enter this car at your own risk. We are not responsible for anything that happens on your ride. Thank you for using Uber. Hope you have a pleasant journey but don’t hold us to it.”
By Ashish Mehta
In 1974, students of an engineering college in Ahmedabad protested a fee hike. They came out on the streets, and they started receiving widespread support in the backdrop of runaway inflation and an allegedly corrupt state government of Chimanbhai Patel. In no time, the protests snowballed into a state-wide agitation, called Navnirman Andolan. Wikipedia claims this to be the only protest of its kind to have led to the fall of a government. Jayaprakash Narayan, who visited Gujarat then, took inspiration from it for his Total Revolution movement, and soon it was time for the Emergency.
If, as JP saw it, what happened in Gujarat was the precursor to what was going to happen elsewhere in India, then the country’s focus today should be on the Patel – or Patidar – community’s big rally in Ahmedabad on Tuesday to press for OBC status.
The Patel community rally in Ahmedabad on Tuesday. PTI image
If you go hunting for a house in any upscale residential area of Ahmedabad or any other city in Gujarat, the broker will tell you with an element of pride that only “Patels, Baniya and Brahmins” are allowed in the housing colony. Patels, in other words, are right at the top of the social hierarchy. But they have had enough of the forward-caste status. Now they want to be backward, and they have been holding peaceful rallies, attended by lakhs, since July to push for it.
It is an irony of our times that the politically, socially and economically dominant community of a state is demanding backward status. It also brings full circle what happened in 1985 – one of the three events that changed politics in Gujarat (the other two being 1974 and 2002).
In the early 1980s, the Congress government, led by inimitable Madhavsinh Solanki, decided to implement quota for the socially and economically backward castes (SEBCs), equivalent to what was to be called other backward classes (OBCs) later, under the Mandal Commission. The upper castes in Gujarat, especially Patels, were not happy with it. The quota decision, and the Patel opposition to it, was in a way an expression of the larger equation: Solanki had come to power with his famous KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi and Muslims) formula. Patels, the traditional land-owning, rich-farmer community (constituting 15 percent of Gujarat’s population, going by the last caste census of 1931), was peeved at being sidelined.
Pride is the first characteristic of a Patel in Gujarati literature. At the village level, their word usually is final. The village head is called Patel, regardless of his community. The two chief ministers immediately before Solanki were Patels.
Upper castes, led by Patels, began protesting and this snowballed into a statewide violent agitation in March 1985, somewhat like what we have seen in the past month. This led to caste riots in Ahmedabad and other cities, with record-breaking long curfews in parts of the walled city. With the Congress on one side and a nascent BJP on the other, it turned into a communal riot, which went on for months. This finally led to Solanki’s fall, and the rise of BJP – first in the Ahmedabad municipal corporation and later in the state assembly.
Thirty years later, the state government’s position is the same. The BJP, banking on the non-KHAM sections – that is, the upper castes, came to power; and its first chief minister, no wonder, was a Patel – Keshubhai. When he lost popularity and had to go in 2001, his replacement was an OBC leader who could deliver what Patels and other upper castes wanted back then: market-oriented, growth-centric administration. They have been largely happy, notwithstanding some small-scale protests, which Narendra Modi quelled effectively. On his departure, the next chief minister was a Patel, and the community should be content. It is not.
Today, in seeking reservation in education and government jobs, the young Patels do not realise this, but they are effectively rejecting all the arguments against the affirmative action their fathers and uncles made 30 years ago. Back then, we used to be asked if one would ever go to a doctor who got admission to a medical college under a quota. Merit was the clinching argument. Today, the socially dominant community of an economically advanced state does not see any merit in the argument, and is joining the queue for quotas.
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If what is happening in Gujarat can be taken as indication of what the nation will see tomorrow, then instead of a rethink on quota, we have a consolidation of quota coming up. Because, a large section of the middle class, it seems, wants the state to take care of their education and jobs.
As for the immediate political fallout of the Patel protests, it remains to be seen how Anandiben Patel responds to the situation – especially when the OBCs too are uniting to hold their own counter rallies. Two of her predecessors, Chimanbhai and Solanki, failed despite their famed political acumen.
The simple course of action would be to form a committee to study the demand, which should take the wind out of the agitation. No matter what the committee recommends, the backwardness is defined by a set of criteria, and it is not an executive’s prerogative. A Supreme Court bench in March this year did strike down the UPA government’s decision to grant OBC status to the Jats.
The writer is Executive Editor, Governance Now
Jai ho.
When @SuhelSeth said on Twitter “Glad that porn and Maggi have been declared safe on the same day!!!” @timukh quipped “What a day for engineering students!!”
But it might be a little premature to break out the champagne (or Old Monk).
A closer inspection of the letter that the government sent to ISPs rolling back the porn ban shows that it has effectively pushed the ball into their court.
MediaNama says that an ISP told them the letter from the government says “The intermediaries are free not to disable any of the 857 URLs which do not have child pornography.”
Reuters image
Now that’s a double negative that can place the ISPs in a double bind.
This means that if anything is unblocked, and child porn happens to be found on that site, the ISP can be held liable for the content under Section 79(3)(b). “Can (an ISP) be expected to watch each and every video, and determine whether someone in the porn video is above or below the age of 18?” asks MediaNama. It’s a job some politicians like certain MLAs in Karnataka and Gujarat might be uniquely qualified for, but it’s hardly in any ISP’s interest to stick its neck out in the interest of what is, in the end, pornography.
Only time will tell how they decide to respond to the government’s reconsidered stand and it might vary from ISP to ISP. But either way what’s being hailed as a “partial lift of the ban” is clearly leaving the heavy lifting to the ISPs themselves. Columnist Rupa Subramanya tweets that this is “typical babu sol(ution): put onus on ISPs. Small ISPS won’t have the resources. Will just block to cover their ass.” And who can blame them?
The Congress is screaming Talibanization now but the whole affair reeks more of blundering than any well-thought out Talibanesque moral policing.
This is what seems to have happened.
Anti-porn crusader Kamlesh Vaswani, he who thinks porn is worse than Hitler, AIDS cancer, and nuclear holocaust, petitioned the Supreme Court to make watching pornography illegal. He came up with the master list of 857 after analyzing the traffic data of porn websites according to The New York Times.
The Supreme Court rejected his petition with Justice Dattu categorically saying that the court could not prevent someone from watching porn within the four walls of their room. But Vaswani gave his blacklist to Pinky Anand, a top lawyer with the BJP government. Ms Anand tells The New York Times she “did not instruct the ministry to block, but more specifically take appropriate action.”
One person’s “appropriate action” is another person’s “block” and it seems that one dogged activist and one over-vigilant lawyer is all it took to create an unnecessary mess.
It’s completely disingenuous of communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to now pass the buck as he did when he told ET, “This decision (to block), an interim measure, has been taken because of the Supreme Court observation in a case pending since 2013. Therefore, it is a legacy issue for us.” He is now claiming that this was “instant action” in “obedience to an observation of the Supreme Court where the court asked the department to take action on the list of alleged porn sites provided by the petitioner.”
Prasad uses the word “alleged” whereas the ministry seems to have taken the list, that too a list coming from a man who compares porn to Hitler, wholesale at face value. Anyway what Justice Dattu had said was “The Centre has to take a stand… let us see what stand the Centre will take” which is clearly not the same as directing the centre to block those 857 websites, a distinction that cannot escape Prasad.
For both Congress and BJP, to now jockey for the moral high ground in this story of online porn would be funny if it was not so hypocritical. Both have sticky fingers in this regard since the Congress, when in power, had banned the homegrown Savita Bhabhi website and more.
also see
This government, once so sharply on message, cannot even get its storyline straight on this issue. Ravi Shankar Prasad is talking about how ISPs are free to disable anything that does not have “child porn content.” On the other hand his party colleague Shaina NC was on television defending the porn ban by
that it is absolutely the “prerogative of the state” to ensure that young children do not have access to “this kind of pornography and that too for free.”
The government has to understand that children’s access to porn is not the same as child porn. Those are different conversations. And its ministers have to figure out which demon they are fighting if they are to stop confusing the matter even more.
Even with the ban itself the government ended up speaking in two voices. It banned the 857 websites terming their content “immoral and indecent”, which by the way, it cannot technically do since as Lawrence Liang explains in this piece on The Wire the grounds for blocking a website (under Section 69A) do not include “decency or morality”. But the ministry while de facto directing the ISPs to disable access to the website also reasoned, as reported by James Crabtree in the Financial Times, that “It isn’t that they are being banned lock, stock and barrel… these sites will continue to be accessible through the mechanism of a VPN.” This is truly a case of Incredible India where the same government that bans these porn websites also provides the workaround to access them along with a handy list of 857 XXX-sites for the curious to explore. This entire episode can pretty much be dubbed the Dummy’s Guide to Scrubbing Internet Porn.
After relentless social media flak Ravi Shankar Prasad must be hoping that the latest announcement about the partial “lifting” will turn the page on this sorry chapter. But it has just further exposed how a government that prided itself on being focused and decisive, as opposed to the flailing flabby UPA sarkar, keeps getting caught in its own vacillation. Online pornography might not be as pressing an issue for the national economy as the Land Bill or GST but by rushing into without thinking it through and then doing a wishy-washy half U-turn with a “lift” that’s not quite a “lift”, the government has ensured that this porn story will not have a happy ending for anyone.
Pakistan’s persistent lies over its involvement in India’s own 9/11 – the Mumbai terror attacks of 26-29 November, 2008 – have been exposed by its own former top investigator Tariq Khosa who has categorically stated that the attacks were launched from Pakistani soil.
Khosa is no ordinary mortal of Pakistan. He had led his country’s investigations into the Mumbai terror attacks in capacity of chief of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), a position he was given weeks after the Mumbai mayhem.
Moreover, Khosa’s views have not come as an interview to a TV channel from which he can later wriggle out, but as a signed article in Pakistani leading English daily Dawn. The damning article “Mumbai attacks trial” can be accessed here .
Reuters
Khosa has cited seven reveal-all facts proving Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai attacks. It is better to read these seven facts in the very words of Khosa himself.
“The following facts are pertinent. First, Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani national, whose place of residence and initial schooling as well as his joining a banned militant organisation was established by the investigators. Second, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists were imparted training near Thatta, Sindh and launched by sea from there. The training camp was identified and secured by the investigators. The casings of the explosive devices used in Mumbai were recovered from this training camp and duly matched. Third, the fishing trawler used by the terrorists for hijacking an Indian trawler in which they sailed to Mumbai, was brought back to harbour, then painted and concealed. It was recovered by the investigators and connected to the accused. Fourth, the engine of the dinghy abandoned by the terrorists near Mumbai harbour contained a patent number through which the investigators traced its import from Japan to Lahore and then to a Karachi sports shop from where an LeT-linked militant purchased it along with the dinghy. The money trail was followed and linked to the accused who was arrested. Fifth, the ops room in Karachi, from where the operation was directed, was also identified and secured by the investigators. The communications through Voice over Internet Protocol were unearthed. Sixth, the alleged commander and his deputies were identified and arrested. Seventh, a couple of foreign-based financiers and facilitators were arrested and brought to face trial.”
It is not just the courage of Khosa which needs to be admired for spilling the beans but “Dawn” also needs to be complimented for fearless journalism. The very fact that such an anti-establishment piece has been published by the Pakistani newspaper shows that the Pakistani press is perhaps independent and bold.
Incidentally, the former Director General of FIA, has balanced his scathing piece by talking about Pakistan’s concerns about “the botched investigation into the Samjhauta Express bombing” and India’s alleged covert support to insurgency in Balochistan and alleged “terror financing” by India in Karachi and FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas).
Khosa has made some very sane suggestions. One, both India and Pakistan should admit their mistakes and learn to co-exist while trying to resolve thorny issues peacefully. Two, Pakistan as a nation should be prepared to muster courage to face uncomfortable truths and fight the menace of terrorism.
It remains to be seen how the Pakistani government, particularly the military establishment, reacts to Khosa’s stinging article. However, the Indian strategic establishment has reasons to grin from ear to ear over his string of disclosures.
New Delhi can now flaunt this article to the US-led international community with an “Ï told you so” kind of template.
The article by Khosa has come ahead of national security advisor-level talks between India and Pakistan due to be held in New Delhi later this month.
This development will take the wind out of Pakistani sails as their NSA Sartaz Aziz is reportedly coming to India to hand over a “dossier” to his Indian counterpart Ajit Doval about India’s alleged sins of omission and commission on the terror front.
However, New Delhi will do well not to gloat over the Khosa missile. India cannot afford to praise the article selectively and damn the rest when it comes to Pakistani concerns, including Samjhauta Express.
If the two sides are genuinely concerned to improve bilateral ties, the two NSAs would have to listen to their prime ministers’ mandate given to them at Ufa, Russia, to “discuss all issues related to terrorism”. But doing that alone won’t suffice.
For how long India-Pakistan engagements would remain a dialogue of the deaf? The two nuclear armed neighbours have to show maturity and move on from bitter past.
New Delhi: Delhi may have breathed easy after they called off their agitation that resulted in some streets being choked with garbage, but the safai karamcharis or sanitation workers of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi are set to go on a fresh indefinite strike from 26 June again over various demands. And they’ve promised to choke the streets with garbage again.
Among the demands of the workers include the disbursement of their salaries for three months, confirmation of contractual employees’ services, payment of arrears to those whose services were regularised in 2003 and 2004, and cashless medical facilities. The 28 workers’unions across the three wings of the MCD have come together to form the ‘Joint Front of MCD Unions’ to press for their demands.
A street filled with garbage after the earlier strike. Naresh Sharma/Firstpost
“We will gherao Vidhan Sabha (Delhi Assembly) on 26 June and will go on indefinite strike till our salaries are credited in our bank accounts and other demands are met. We called off the last 10-day strike after we were assured that our salaries will be released till 15 June. But we were cheated once again,” RB Oontwaal, a member of the newly formed front and general secretary of Delhi Nagar Nigam Safai Majdoor Sangh (MCD sanitation workers union) told Firstpost.
“We have not so far received our salaries. This is not the first occasion when we were given false promises. It has happened earlier as well,” he said.
Around 30,000 sanitation workers of the East and North Delhi municipal corporations had called off a strike which began on 2 June after the Delhi High Court intervened and directed the state government to pay their dues for the last three months by 15 June.
The Aam Aadmi Party which is presently holds charge of the Delhi government claimed it had already given Rs 513 crore to the municipal corporation to pay the April-June salaries on the evening of 11 June.
“We have made the payment of Rs 513 crore for the financial quarter ending June. Rs 180 crore has been given to the EDMC and Rs 333 crore for the NDMC (North Delhi Municipal Corporation),” AAP spokesperson Dilip Pandey said.
Pandey said that the city gives around Rs 1.25 lakh crore to the Centre as taxes every three months but in return gets only Rs 2,000 crore.
“Except this and few other small grants, we do not have any inflow of the Central funds to support the MCD. As set by the Delhi Finance Commission, we have to give the civic body 10.5 percent from our share of the tax collection. We give 9 percent as planned and unplanned budget to the corporations but do not give their 1.5% performance-based share because the three corporations have miserably failed to perform their duties,”he said.
Leader of the house in East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) Ram Narayan Goel instead chose to dub the sanitation workers “Congress agents”, and claimed their salaries for the months of March and April have already been paid. He said the EDMC is in the process of clearing the outstanding for the month of June.
“We have released Rs 32 crore to clear the salary dues of all Group-D employees. We will clear their salaries till June shortly. The sanitation workers have become an agent of the Congress party, which is unnecessarily trying to politicise the issue,” Goel told Firstpost.
The workers have been received support from Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi who joined their protest twice – first at the EMCD headquarters on 12 June and then at Jantar Mantar on 17 June.
“This is not a fight for cleanliness of Delhi or the cleanliness of the country. This is a fight for your dignity,” Gandhi told the protesting workers. I have come here to give my strength to your fight,” he told the protesting workers.
‘While you continue with your cleanliness initiatives, we continue to die’
Apart from their pending salaries, the sanitation workers are seeking timely payment of their salaries in the first week of every month, payment of arrears for those whose services were regularised in 2003 and 2004, cashless medical facilities and the payment of their child education allowance.
“The rule book says if a person who is serving the MCD on contact has 240-day attendance for three consecutive years, he or she will be considered as permanent staff of the civic body. But violating all norms, the MCD regularised the services of those who were appointed in 1996 in 2003 and 2004. We demand that the MCD to give us arrears since 2003,” Naresh Kumar Jha, media in charge of the MCD Mazdoor Congress, said.
Representational image. Reuters
He said that the workers were exposed to different toxic gases when they go inside sewer lines and always face health risks and therefore should be provided with cashless medical facilities so that they can avail of medical facilities at an MCD approved hospital.
“We have not been provided uniforms for the past 20 years. We are to get Rs 17,000 per year for the education of our children, but the amount has also not be given for the last two years,” Jha told Firstpost.
Oontwal, from the joint union, promised that the next strike will have serious repercussions.
“We are ready to face lathis and bullets but we won’t allow the garbage to be lifted. Yeh hamare pet ki ladai hai. Tumhara Swachhata Abhiyan chalta rahe aur hum marte rahen (This is a matter of our livelihoods. While you continue with your cleanliness initiatives, we continue to die),” he said.
When asked what about the residents of the city who will suffer ultimately, he said, “We apologise to them with folded hands. We are left with no option but to take this extreme step.”
“If the government doesn’t have money to pay us, how will it arrange for money to treat people if an epidemic spreads in the city because of piles of rotting garbage lying on roads and bylanes?” Oontwal said.
According to the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment), 2011, the 10.5 percent of the Delhi share in central taxes is delivered to the civic bodies in three quarters (25 percent of the total amount in the first quarter of April-June, 50 percent in July-December and the remaining 25 percent in the final quarter of January-March).
Delhi govt’s funds not enough, say municipal bodies
The BJP-ruled corporations say that the money released by the Delhi government is insufficient.
“The amount released by the Delhi government is not enough. We still need an additional amount to pay salaries and pensions. We demand an additional amount of Rs 100 crore. In addition, our global share, which stands at Rs 300 crore in every financial quarter, must be released without delay so that we can continue our services,” NDMC Mayor Ravinder Gupta told Firstpost.
EDMC Mayor Hardeep Malhotra said his corporation should be allocated Rs 2,000 crore in the April-June quarter of the ongoing financial year.
“We need at least Rs 2,000 crore because our income from house tax, toll tax, conversion, parking charges and advertisement stands at Rs 750 crore but the total expenditure is Rs 1,800 crore. We have to shell out Rs 1,100 as salary,” he said.
When asked why the EDMC hadn’t made any effort to increase revenues instead of depending on the government for funds, he said, “House tax is the main source of EDMC’s income but only 30 percent of the houses in east Delhi are liable to pay the tax. The remaining 70 percent are either unauthorised colonies or slum clusters, which are not required to pay the tax.”
Although post the splitting of the civic body, the Delhi government has partial control over the functioning of the MCD, the three bodies are still administered by the Centre through the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957. The Director of Local Bodies, who reports to the state government, now keeps an eye on the working of the corporations. Earlier, the civic body used to get funds from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly, Vijender Gupta, considers the splitting of the MCD into three separate corporations in May 2012 is the prime reason of the fund crunch. He advised Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to see the financial issues in “proper perspective”.
“The resources in unified MCD were equally divided amongst the entire local bodies without reference to geographical areas. The erstwhile MCD had a loan liability of Rs 1,800 crores and contractors’ liability of Rs 650 crores, which was to be waived off or to be passed as one time grant. Instead of this, the liability was passed on to the newly formed three corporations,” Gupta said.
“In fact, the East, North and South Municipal Corporations should have not been burdened with the liabilities of the erstwhile MCD. This amount is being recovered with 13.5% interest. It is being deducted from grants and revenue sharing,”he said.
While the NDMC has loans to the tune of Rs 2,000 crore, SDMC has dues of about Rs 1,700 crore. On the other hand, the EDMC has loans that amount to about Rs 1,300 crore.
also see
The Delhi government, according to Gupta, owes Rs 1,800 crores to the three corporations for implementing the ‘Unit Area Method’ of property tax. The government in 2004 had assured to compensate the loss caused by the new method, he said.
The EDMC is the worst hit of the three municipal corporations.
“On 1 April 2012 (a month before the trifurcation of the MCD), we were in the deficit Rs 451 crore. Therefore, the corporation sought a subsidy grant of Rs 421 crore. But instead of the grant, the Sheila Dikshit-led Congress government in the state gave only Rs 335 crore at a hefty rate of interest of 10.5 percent. We have paid back about Rs 300 crore in the past three years,” Malhotra, the EDMC mayor, said.
He alleged that the Delhi government was supposed to give a grant of Rs 140 crore to the EDMC in the current financial quarter, but has given only Rs 76 crore.
But with the AAP government sticking to its guns on the release of funds and the Centre remaining mum on the impending strike, Delhi residents may just have to prepare to walk about with their noses covered again if the matter is not resolved by 26 June.
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True to form, even as President Xi Jinping laid out the red carpet for Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday (14 May), China’s state-controlled TV showed an India map with Jammu & Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh lopped off. This was only to be expected as China believes in unsettling guests from whom it wants major territorial concessions.
The Chinese leadership has a way of showing two sets of teeth; the smiling one for official occasions, and the snarling one that resides barely below the surface. When Nehru visited China in 1954, he failed to see the second one. He was overwhelmed by flag-waving crowds all along the route from airport to city, but the Chinese were all the time preparing to annex Tibet fully, and the military campaign in 1962. During Vajpayee’s visit to China as foreign minister of the Janata Party government in 1979, China invaded Vietnam, a friendly country. Smiles and bared fangs went together.
PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Xian on Thursday. PTI
Deceit and duplicity are the hallmarks of Chinese diplomacy and the art of war without actual fighting, as Firstpost explained in this earlier post. Map-making is a key tool in this area. When it suits them, the Chinese will say they will re-examine their maps for accuracy; when it doesn’t, they will publish the maps as they want them to look.
As Arun Shourie explains in this interview to The Indian Express, this attitude foxed Jawaharlal Nehru, who proved very gullible when the Chinese played their games with maps in the 1950s. Apparently, when Nehru brought up the issue of Chinese maps showing parts of India as Chinese territory, Premier Zhou Enlai dismissed them as old maps put out by the Kuomintang. Years later, when these maps still remained unchanged, and Nehru enquired again, Zhou told him they were the correct maps. Zhou was ready for battle.
So when China publishes Jammu & Kashmir and parts of Arunachal Pradesh as regions outside India, we should take the message seriously. These maps tell us how Chinese geopolitical ambitions have changed and how they want the sub-continent’s final maps to look. This is their strategic goal, and they will seek to achieve it through sweet-talk, intimidation, and the use of Pakistan as proxy warrior against India.
The Chinese are unlikely to engage in direct warfare with nuclear India, as this could jeopardise their global gameplan. Too many nations are now unhappy with Chinese sabre-rattling ad bullying. The Chinese may not want a global gang-up against them by militarily engaging a rising India. So they are periodically showing their teeth to keep us in a state of uncertainty. They want to remain friendly enough to prevent us from scaling up militarily too quickly; but they also want to keep us off balance strategically by engaging in verbal belligerence and regular border incursions.
China, like Pakistan, is a greedy nation, and fundamentally wants to change the status quo along our borders. Its ambitions have changed since the time of Nehru, and today, as part of its global power vision, it wants to take more than it is ever willing to give as part of any border settlement. This is why we should be in no hurry to bring up the border issue or seek a settlement.
What has changed about China’s ambitions in the 1950s and now is this: China has effectively withdrawn its old offer of allowing us to keep Arunachal Pradesh in return for keeping the parts it annexed in Ladakh – Aksai Chin. (Read this Business Standard story to understand why)
Its earlier strategic thinking was that Aksai Chin and parts of Ladakh were crucial to its control of Tibet. Hence the need to grab that piece of land from India. Having connected Tibet from that route, its ambitions have grown, especially after its economic rise after the 1990s. It now wants to protect not only its roads and links to Tibet, but also build a corridor to the Indian Ocean through the Baloch port of Gwadar. This needs it to control a part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) – which only a partnership with Pakistan can guarantee, since PoK is in its control. Access to West Asia runs through PoK.
In short, China’s economic rise has expanded its ambitions in Kashmir/Ladakh beyond just access to Tibet. PoK is now crucial to its future economic success and trade with West Asia.
On the east, China has abandoned its old assessment that India can keep Arunachal Pradesh. It now believes it made a mistake in 1962 by withdrawing from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang is psychologically crucial to its hold on Tibet as it was the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama and hosts an important 17th century Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The current Dalai Lama (the 14th) spent some time in Tawang when he fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese takeover. China also believes any Tibetan unrest may have its origins in Tawang.
China considers Tawang and large parts of Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet, and till 2003, even the Dalai Lama seemed to agree. However, the Dalai Lama changed his position in 2008 and said it was a part of India. Reason: he realised that if China were to ever reclaim Tawang, it would mean the end of Tibetan hopes of even limited autonomy within China. China wants to appoint the next Dalai Lama after the current one passes, and as long as some part of Buddhist Tibet stays outside China, there is always the possibility that another Dalai Lama could merge from there, threatening Chinese hold on the region.
China’s India policy thus has three goals – one is to use sidekick Pakistan to bog India down in the sub-continent; the second is to use PoK as its route to Gwadar and West Asia; and the third is to reclaim Tawang so that it can control the future of Tibet and its malcontents.
Shaky control over Tibet is why China plays a Jekyll-and-Hyde game with India. It wants to play Jekyll to see if India will barter Tawang for some pieces of silver or minor pieces of non-strategic territory. It plays Hyde whenever India seeks to strengthen itself. It also unleashes its lapdog Pakistan on us.
Let’s be clear: China will not settle the border issue with India without Tawang and parts of PoK, some of which have already been ceded by Pakistan to China as part of its own border settlement.
This is precisely why we must alter strategy on China and the border.
First, we have to realise that the Dalai Lama and Tawang are our only elements of leverage. Both morally and strategically, these are the top cards we must hold at any cost. On his return, Modi must host the Dalai Lama, and start issuing stapled visas for Tibetans from China seeking to visit India. But China won’t allow too many Tibetans to travel to India, unless they are pet political poodles it can trust. We should expect no Chinese concessions on Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin.
also see
Second
, we should forget about solving the border issue anytime soon. Instead, we should keep strengthening our military and economic presence in Arunachal Pradesh consistently to deter China. China’s economic might will peak over the next 10-15 years; ours will start rising after 2020, when our demographic advantage continues, while China’s dwindles. We have to prepare to hold our ground indefinitely. A 50- to 100-year strategic vision on China is what we need, not a quick border solution. That won’t happen in our lifetimes, unless we cave in inexplicably. If we seek any quick-fix on the border, it will come only at our cost.
Third, we should seek solutions to the lopsided trade balance. China must be asked to buy more goods and services from India to rectify the balance, or spend its surpluses in erecting good quality infrastructure here with long-term payback periods.
Fourth, India should enforce strict cyber security and physical checks on Chinese telecom and electronic products. The fact is we simply import too much hardware from our neighbour. This increases the probability that the Chinese will intentionally embed malware that will compromise our security at some future date. We keep hearing of Chinese hackers breaking into this government system or that every now and then; the fact is this is made easier by our over-dependence on Chinese hardware for everything from laptops to mobile phones to dongles. We should erect non-tariff barriers to Chinese electronic hardware and link it to more Chinese imports from us.
The Chinese are playing both hardball and softball with us because they are scared of our leverage on the Tibetan question. Our strategy should be to ensure that we never lose this leverage ever.
Wrong maps will not change the situation on the ground. Our priority should be to strengthen ourselves on the ground. Just as Pakistan publishes its own maps of India, so does China. We should keep protesting, and raise a ruckus every time – just as they do whenever we shake hands with the Dalai Lama or our PM visits Arunachal Pradesh.
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words and wrong maps won’t do much damage. We should do unto China what China does to us.
True to form, even as President Xi Jinping laid out the red carpet for Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday (14 May), China’s state-controlled TV showed an India map with Jammu & Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh lopped off. This was only to be expected as China believes in unsettling guests from whom it wants major territorial concessions.
The Chinese leadership has a way of showing two sets of teeth; the smiling one for official occasions, and the snarling one that resides barely below the surface. When Nehru visited China in 1954, he failed to see the second one. He was overwhelmed by flag-waving crowds all along the route from airport to city, but the Chinese were all the time preparing to annex Tibet fully, and the military campaign in 1962. During Vajpayee’s visit to China as foreign minister of the Janata Party government in 1979, China invaded Vietnam, a friendly country. Smiles and bared fangs went together.
PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Xian on Thursday. PTI
Deceit and duplicity are the hallmarks of Chinese diplomacy and the art of war without actual fighting, as Firstpost explained in this earlier post. Map-making is a key tool in this area. When it suits them, the Chinese will say they will re-examine their maps for accuracy; when it doesn’t, they will publish the maps as they want them to look.
As Arun Shourie explains in this interview to The Indian Express, this attitude foxed Jawaharlal Nehru, who proved very gullible when the Chinese played their games with maps in the 1950s. Apparently, when Nehru brought up the issue of Chinese maps showing parts of India as Chinese territory, Premier Zhou Enlai dismissed them as old maps put out by the Kuomintang. Years later, when these maps still remained unchanged, and Nehru enquired again, Zhou told him they were the correct maps. Zhou was ready for battle.
So when China publishes Jammu & Kashmir and parts of Arunachal Pradesh as regions outside India, we should take the message seriously. These maps tell us how Chinese geopolitical ambitions have changed and how they want the sub-continent’s final maps to look. This is their strategic goal, and they will seek to achieve it through sweet-talk, intimidation, and the use of Pakistan as proxy warrior against India.
The Chinese are unlikely to engage in direct warfare with nuclear India, as this could jeopardise their global gameplan. Too many nations are now unhappy with Chinese sabre-rattling ad bullying. The Chinese may not want a global gang-up against them by militarily engaging a rising India. So they are periodically showing their teeth to keep us in a state of uncertainty. They want to remain friendly enough to prevent us from scaling up militarily too quickly; but they also want to keep us off balance strategically by engaging in verbal belligerence and regular border incursions.
China, like Pakistan, is a greedy nation, and fundamentally wants to change the status quo along our borders. Its ambitions have changed since the time of Nehru, and today, as part of its global power vision, it wants to take more than it is ever willing to give as part of any border settlement. This is why we should be in no hurry to bring up the border issue or seek a settlement.
What has changed about China’s ambitions in the 1950s and now is this: China has effectively withdrawn its old offer of allowing us to keep Arunachal Pradesh in return for keeping the parts it annexed in Ladakh – Aksai Chin. (Read this Business Standard story to understand why)
Its earlier strategic thinking was that Aksai Chin and parts of Ladakh were crucial to its control of Tibet. Hence the need to grab that piece of land from India. Having connected Tibet from that route, its ambitions have grown, especially after its economic rise after the 1990s. It now wants to protect not only its roads and links to Tibet, but also build a corridor to the Indian Ocean through the Baloch port of Gwadar. This needs it to control a part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) – which only a partnership with Pakistan can guarantee, since PoK is in its control. Access to West Asia runs through PoK.
In short, China’s economic rise has expanded its ambitions in Kashmir/Ladakh beyond just access to Tibet. PoK is now crucial to its future economic success and trade with West Asia.
On the east, China has abandoned its old assessment that India can keep Arunachal Pradesh. It now believes it made a mistake in 1962 by withdrawing from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. Tawang is psychologically crucial to its hold on Tibet as it was the birthplace of the 6th Dalai Lama and hosts an important 17th century Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The current Dalai Lama (the 14th) spent some time in Tawang when he fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese takeover. China also believes any Tibetan unrest may have its origins in Tawang.
China considers Tawang and large parts of Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet, and till 2003, even the Dalai Lama seemed to agree. However, the Dalai Lama changed his position in 2008 and said it was a part of India. Reason: he realised that if China were to ever reclaim Tawang, it would mean the end of Tibetan hopes of even limited autonomy within China. China wants to appoint the next Dalai Lama after the current one passes, and as long as some part of Buddhist Tibet stays outside China, there is always the possibility that another Dalai Lama could merge from there, threatening Chinese hold on the region.
China’s India policy thus has three goals – one is to use sidekick Pakistan to bog India down in the sub-continent; the second is to use PoK as its route to Gwadar and West Asia; and the third is to reclaim Tawang so that it can control the future of Tibet and its malcontents.
Shaky control over Tibet is why China plays a Jekyll-and-Hyde game with India. It wants to play Jekyll to see if India will barter Tawang for some pieces of silver or minor pieces of non-strategic territory. It plays Hyde whenever India seeks to strengthen itself. It also unleashes its lapdog Pakistan on us.
Let’s be clear: China will not settle the border issue with India without Tawang and parts of PoK, some of which have already been ceded by Pakistan to China as part of its own border settlement.
This is precisely why we must alter strategy on China and the border.
First, we have to realise that the Dalai Lama and Tawang are our only elements of leverage. Both morally and strategically, these are the top cards we must hold at any cost. On his return, Modi must host the Dalai Lama, and start issuing stapled visas for Tibetans from China seeking to visit India. But China won’t allow too many Tibetans to travel to India, unless they are pet political poodles it can trust. We should expect no Chinese concessions on Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin.
also see
Second
, we should forget about solving the border issue anytime soon. Instead, we should keep strengthening our military and economic presence in Arunachal Pradesh consistently to deter China. China’s economic might will peak over the next 10-15 years; ours will start rising after 2020, when our demographic advantage continues, while China’s dwindles. We have to prepare to hold our ground indefinitely. A 50- to 100-year strategic vision on China is what we need, not a quick border solution. That won’t happen in our lifetimes, unless we cave in inexplicably. If we seek any quick-fix on the border, it will come only at our cost.
Third, we should seek solutions to the lopsided trade balance. China must be asked to buy more goods and services from India to rectify the balance, or spend its surpluses in erecting good quality infrastructure here with long-term payback periods.
Fourth, India should enforce strict cyber security and physical checks on Chinese telecom and electronic products. The fact is we simply import too much hardware from our neighbour. This increases the probability that the Chinese will intentionally embed malware that will compromise our security at some future date. We keep hearing of Chinese hackers breaking into this government system or that every now and then; the fact is this is made easier by our over-dependence on Chinese hardware for everything from laptops to mobile phones to dongles. We should erect non-tariff barriers to Chinese electronic hardware and link it to more Chinese imports from us.
The Chinese are playing both hardball and softball with us because they are scared of our leverage on the Tibetan question. Our strategy should be to ensure that we never lose this leverage ever.
Wrong maps will not change the situation on the ground. Our priority should be to strengthen ourselves on the ground. Just as Pakistan publishes its own maps of India, so does China. We should keep protesting, and raise a ruckus every time – just as they do whenever we shake hands with the Dalai Lama or our PM visits Arunachal Pradesh.
Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words and wrong maps won’t do much damage. We should do unto China what China does to us.
AIADMK leader J Jayalalithaa’s cup of woes is just brimming over.
Even as her supporters are still celebrating her acquittal, her political opponents and critics have raised doubts that Justice CR Kumaraswamy might have made huge errors in calculations while delivering his judgement on Monday. The errors render the whole basis of the judgement meaningless.
AFP image
Here’s an explanation of the mistake.
As per the table on Page 852 of the judgement, Jayalalithaa and her associates have taken loans worth Rs Rs 24.2 crore, which has been considered by the judge as lawful income. However, a simple addition of all the 10 heads in the table shows that the actual aggregate loan amount was only Rs 10.67 crore. This means there has been an error of about Rs 13.5 crore.
The correct calculation shows that the lawful income of Jayalalithaa would reduce by Rs 13.5 crore to just Rs 10.67 crore. The mistake has been pointed out by the DMK in a statement, according to media reports.
The table on page 852 of the judgement
Further, as per the judgement, about Rs 6 crore has been deducted from the loan amount as the income assessed by director of vigilance and anti-corruption, which reduces the loan amount to Rs 18.2 crore. According to a report in The News Minute, citing the DMK statement, the loan amount has to be Rs 4.67 crore. Here too the error is Rs 13.5 crore, the report says.
The error in the loan amount has a cascading impact as the figure had been used in many other calculations by the judge. On Page 913, in the statement of the income of the accused, the first head, loan as income, has been put at the said Rs 18.2 crore. Once this is replaced with Rs 4.67 crore, it again results in a mismatch of Rs 13.5 crore.
The table on page 913 of the judgement
In other words, with a loan amount of just Rs 4.67 crore, the total income drops to Rs 21.2 crore from the judge’s figure of Rs 34.77 crore.
The same is the case with calculation of disproportionate assets, where total income is subtracted from the total assets.
As per the judgement, Jayalalitha’s total assets stand at Rs 37 crore. Deducting the total income (Rs 34.77 crore) from this, the judge has arrived at a figure of Rs 2.82 crore. This figure shoots up to Rs 16 crore, once we replace the total income with the correct number of Rs 21.2 crore.
As per this calculation, the percentage of disproportionate assets is a whopping 76.5 percent of Jayalalithaa’s income and not 8.12 percent as the judge has said in the judgement, The News Minute report said.
The calculation of disproportionate assets as per the HC
It may also explains why BJP leader Subramanian Swamy termed the judgement a “tragedy of arithmetic errors”.
Next time you hesitate in taking the wheel after getting sloshed, get inspired by the true story of Salman Khan.
But for the minor inconvenience of having a breath analyzer thrust down your throat and getting a small ticket-which can be managed if you are lucky to find somebody waiting for chai paani -there is very little to fear.
Get drunk, drive like a Formula One racer and don’t bother stepping on the brake. In case you notice human beings on the road, don’t worry about Being Human. Bear in mind singer Abhijieet’s advice: ‘kutta road pe soyega, road pe marega.’
Solaris Images.
The latest twist in the story of Salman’s hit-and-run case has just one moral: the faster you can drive, the more money you can burn, the farther you can run from the law.
While the court took 13 years to send Salman to jail, his lawyers took just a few hours to get him out on bail. Indeed, a great advertisement for drunken driving!
The Bombay High Court is justified in suspending Salman’s 5-year sentence. When a convict approaches a higher court with an appeal against a lower court’s judgement, the judge is right in granting bail till the case is decided to ensure that an innocent man doesn’t suffer. This is the established procedure in India and the High Court has followed the standard practice.
But the problem with the system is that it works best for the rich and the privileged. For many others, securing bail is impossible even when they have not been convicted and are just facing trial.
A few years ago, The Hindu had revealed that more than 75 percent prisoners in Indian jails are undertrials. More than 3200 persons out of the nearly 2.8 lakh undertrials have already spent five years in jail.
Compare this with a celebrity like Salman Khan, accused of repeat offences. Around ten years ago, Salman was sentenced to a year in jail for poaching protected animals in Jodhpur. Some months later, he was sentenced again — this time for five years.
also see
The five-year sentence in the hit-and-run case by the Mumbai court means Salman has been convicted thrice so far, he is facing a combined sentence of 11 years. Yet, he has spent just a few days behind bars.
Salman’s hit-and-run case has often been compared with that of Alistair Anthony Pereira’s, who was sent to jail for three years for driving his car over six persons in Mumbai. Though a lower court had let off Pereira with just six months in jail, the Supreme Court had later upheld the tougher punishment granted by the Bombay High Court. It had also commented that the punishment in such cases should be much more. Pereira, like Salman, was found guilty under Section 304 (2) of the IPC.
It would be relevant to quote a part of the SC verdict on Pereira.
“The object should be to protect society and to deter the criminal in achieving the avowed object of law by imposing appropriate sentence. It is expected that the courts would operate the sentencing system so as to impose such sentence which reflects the conscience of the society and the sentencing process has to be stern where it should be.”
The court will be failing in its duty if appropriate punishment is not awarded for a crime which has been committed not only against the individual victim but also against the society to which the criminal and victim belong.
The punishment to be awarded for a crime must not be irrelevant but it should conform to and be consistent with the atrocity and brutality with which the crime has been perpetrated, the enormity of the crime warranting public abhorrence and it should “respond to the society’s cry for justice against the criminal.”
Even the Supreme Court would be wondering if we have learnt the right lesson from its verdict in Pereira’s case: that fear of severe punishment will deter people from drunk driving.
Or, if Salman’s story has a more powerful message: drink, drive; don’t worry about the punishment.
Next time you hesitate in taking the wheel after getting sloshed, get inspired by the true story of Salman Khan.
But for the minor inconvenience of having a breath analyzer thrust down your throat and getting a small ticket-which can be managed if you are lucky to find somebody waiting for chai paani -there is very little to fear.
Get drunk, drive like a Formula One racer and don’t bother stepping on the brake. In case you notice human beings on the road, don’t worry about Being Human. Bear in mind singer Abhijieet’s advice: ‘kutta road pe soyega, road pe marega.’
Solaris Images.
The latest twist in the story of Salman’s hit-and-run case has just one moral: the faster you can drive, the more money you can burn, the farther you can run from the law.
While the court took 13 years to send Salman to jail, his lawyers took just a few hours to get him out on bail. Indeed, a great advertisement for drunken driving!
The Bombay High Court is justified in suspending Salman’s 5-year sentence. When a convict approaches a higher court with an appeal against a lower court’s judgement, the judge is right in granting bail till the case is decided to ensure that an innocent man doesn’t suffer. This is the established procedure in India and the High Court has followed the standard practice.
But the problem with the system is that it works best for the rich and the privileged. For many others, securing bail is impossible even when they have not been convicted and are just facing trial.
A few years ago, The Hindu had revealed that more than 75 percent prisoners in Indian jails are undertrials. More than 3200 persons out of the nearly 2.8 lakh undertrials have already spent five years in jail.
Compare this with a celebrity like Salman Khan, accused of repeat offences. Around ten years ago, Salman was sentenced to a year in jail for poaching protected animals in Jodhpur. Some months later, he was sentenced again — this time for five years.
also see
The five-year sentence in the hit-and-run case by the Mumbai court means Salman has been convicted thrice so far, he is facing a combined sentence of 11 years. Yet, he has spent just a few days behind bars.
Salman’s hit-and-run case has often been compared with that of Alistair Anthony Pereira’s, who was sent to jail for three years for driving his car over six persons in Mumbai. Though a lower court had let off Pereira with just six months in jail, the Supreme Court had later upheld the tougher punishment granted by the Bombay High Court. It had also commented that the punishment in such cases should be much more. Pereira, like Salman, was found guilty under Section 304 (2) of the IPC.
It would be relevant to quote a part of the SC verdict on Pereira.
“The object should be to protect society and to deter the criminal in achieving the avowed object of law by imposing appropriate sentence. It is expected that the courts would operate the sentencing system so as to impose such sentence which reflects the conscience of the society and the sentencing process has to be stern where it should be.”
The court will be failing in its duty if appropriate punishment is not awarded for a crime which has been committed not only against the individual victim but also against the society to which the criminal and victim belong.
The punishment to be awarded for a crime must not be irrelevant but it should conform to and be consistent with the atrocity and brutality with which the crime has been perpetrated, the enormity of the crime warranting public abhorrence and it should “respond to the society’s cry for justice against the criminal.”
Even the Supreme Court would be wondering if we have learnt the right lesson from its verdict in Pereira’s case: that fear of severe punishment will deter people from drunk driving.
Or, if Salman’s story has a more powerful message: drink, drive; don’t worry about the punishment.
Operation Maitri has perhaps redefined the way India responded to a natural disaster, whether within the country or in its neighbourhood. India and Nepal have always enjoyed friendly relations, and are socially, culturally and historically tied to each other. What has changed things now is the alacrity and the scale with which Modi government reacted to a devastating natural tragedy in India’s neighbour.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s quick response has earned him thanks from Nepali authorities and possibly of the people there as well. Modi after all, rose in stature as a leader and as an able administrator when he successfully changed the face of Bhuj, Anjar and other areas devastated by 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. Over the years, he seems to have bettered his instinctive response to such situations.
India’s prompt response may also have been guided by strategic reasons apart from humanitarian ones.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi chairing a meet on relief measures in Nepal. PIB image
“If we had not risen to the occasion and stood by the neighbour then China could have found it an occasion to penetrate in the Nepalese hinterland. Historically we have so much in common with Nepal and we did exactly what we ought to have done under the circumstances”, a senior BJP MP said.
There is a conscious attempt by his party and senior ministers in the government to attribute all the good work that the official agencies are doing to the Prime Minister. Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s statement in Parliament was most revealing in this regard.
“I have no hesitation in admitting this in the House that I was not aware about this till I reached home (after attending inauguration function of National Intelligence Academy where Modi was also present). But the prime minister had already received the information. The prime minister told me that he had called a meeting at 3 pm. A big tragedy has happened and you would have received the information, Honestly, I would admit that the promptness I should have shown as home minister and the information I should have got were not there,” Singh said.
Modi has been holding review meetings almost on a daily basis with top functionaries including finance minister Arun Jaitley, home minister Rajnath Singh, defence minister Manohar Parrikar, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth, Principal Secretary Nripendra Misra, and Additional Principal Secretary to PM PK Mishra, and senior officials from IMD, and NDRF. In the last meeting, Modi also made a broad assessment of the long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction work that would be required, especially in Nepal, and was briefed on the first steps that were being taken. He also suggested that ex-servicemen could be approached to help in the co-ordination effort.
The government is keen that its rescue and relief efforts do not go unnoticed. While transmission of information about rescue and relief measures does give a instil confidence among people stranded in affected areas, it also gives a sense to the world at large that the Indian government was responding adequately to the need of the hour. This time around Modi government seems to be particularly sensitive on this count.
Top bureaucrats including Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar, Home Secretary LC Goyal, Defence Secretary RK Mathur, Member Secretary, NDMA, RK Jain and Director General IMD Dr LS Rathore have been tasked to hold media briefings every evening and give updates on relief work as well as the current situation. It is perhaps for the first time since the Kargil war when the government is organising daily media briefings by such high level officials.
also see
A day before the second half of the budget session began, Modi while speaking at a workshop of BJP MPs, rued that the government had failed to effectively communicate its rescue work in Yemen, from where hundreds of Indians had been safely evacuated. Modi is now putting a system in place that should begin working as soon as there’s a natural or man made calamity, a BJP leader said.
Last year Modi has shown promptness after flash floods struck Jammu and Kashmir or when there was a threat of a flash flood in Bihar due to a possible breach in barrage on river Kosi in Nepal. Earlier, as BJP’s prime ministerial candidate he was involved in rescue and relief during the floods in Uttrakhand and landed in the state to launch a parallel relief and rescue operation.
Among the affected regions of India, Bihar has suffered maximum damage, both in terms of life and property. As per the official figures 57 persons, out of 72 deaths in India, have died in the state. With four NDRF teams already in Bihar and ex-gratia payment increased, both the centre and state are acting as a team. But with assembly elections is the state only six months away, the politics over it will soon intensify.
The reformative foundations of India’s juvenile justice law have been shaken. One of the new proposals in the Union Cabinet’s move to introduce a law to amend the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 will empower the Juvenile Justice Board to determine whether children between the ages of 16 and 18, who have been accused of having committed some particularly serious crimes, should be tried under the regular criminal justice system.
Treating children the same as adult offenders is abhorrent to the philosophy underpinning the law passed in 2000. Through “child-friendly” adjudication and the disposition of matters in the “best interests of children”, this law intended to rehabilitate “children in conflict with the law”. It recognised India’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular, the responsibility to promote the reintegration of such children and their assumption of a constructive role in society.
Reuters image.
The government has not been shy about this. In October 2013, the President of India had said that, “There is demand for a law which has a deterrent effect, where the guilty are punished in accordance with the nature of the offence they commit, irrespective of their age.”
The rehabilitative (and not deterrent) motivations of the 2000 law can be seen in the constitution of the Juvenile Justice Boards — they feature experts in child development and child psychology along with a magistrate, the various orders that the board could pass — such as counseling or releasing a juvenile on probation of good conduct, and the requirement to consider a social investigation report into the juvenile before passing an order.
After consideration of the various factors that led to the conflict with the law, the boards could choose an order to implement the rehabilitation strategy best suited to the specific offence and the specific juvenile.
This differentiated approach to managing different cases also allows the board to take into account, the seriousness of the offence. For instance, if it feels that the offence in question is so serious that it is not in the interest of the juvenile or the other juveniles in a home to place him at that home, and if it feels that none of the other orders available are suitable for such a case, the board can order that the juvenile be kept in a “place of safety” in a manner it thinks fit.
Governments however, have let down these noble motives of the juvenile justice act. The juvenile justice system does not have specialised or motivated staff and the quality of social investigation reports, counselling, and mentoring during probation is reported to be largely abysmal. The JS Verma Committee, which recommended reforms to India’s criminal law, had noted in its report that there had been “a failure to create the requisite infrastructure which would help children to be reintegrated into society.” With the recent proposal, the government is discarding the reformative philosophy behind the law without ever having given it a fair chance to succeed.
Spurred down this path to build deterrence by the violent crimes committed against women and girls by young boys, the government should, instead of discarding an entire system based of reformation, sharpen the differentiated approach of the law to empower the juvenile justice system to implement strategies for the reform of these specific classes of juveniles.
While the law provides for different orders to suit different rehabilitation objectives, there is a gap when it comes to the subjects of juvenile sexual offenders and violent offences.
If they are treated the same as adults accused of crimes, these juveniles will not be able to access the opportunities for reform presented by the juvenile justice law. Any debate on the new proposal should, apart from highlighting the starvation of the juvenile justice system, also acknowledge the significant dangers of trying juveniles in the adversarial criminal justice system and in holding them in prisons housing adult offenders.
Apart from closing the door on reform, it is also doubtful whether the objective of deterrence would be realised by amending the Juvenile Justice Act.
Aju John is part of the faculty at myLaw.net, where he teaches courses on Sports Law and Media Law.
The reformative foundations of India’s juvenile justice law have been shaken. One of the new proposals in the Union Cabinet’s move to introduce a law to amend the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 will empower the Juvenile Justice Board to determine whether children between the ages of 16 and 18, who have been accused of having committed some particularly serious crimes, should be tried under the regular criminal justice system.
Treating children the same as adult offenders is abhorrent to the philosophy underpinning the law passed in 2000. Through “child-friendly” adjudication and the disposition of matters in the “best interests of children”, this law intended to rehabilitate “children in conflict with the law”. It recognised India’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in particular, the responsibility to promote the reintegration of such children and their assumption of a constructive role in society.
Reuters image.
The government has not been shy about this. In October 2013, the President of India had said that, “There is demand for a law which has a deterrent effect, where the guilty are punished in accordance with the nature of the offence they commit, irrespective of their age.”
The rehabilitative (and not deterrent) motivations of the 2000 law can be seen in the constitution of the Juvenile Justice Boards — they feature experts in child development and child psychology along with a magistrate, the various orders that the board could pass — such as counseling or releasing a juvenile on probation of good conduct, and the requirement to consider a social investigation report into the juvenile before passing an order.
After consideration of the various factors that led to the conflict with the law, the boards could choose an order to implement the rehabilitation strategy best suited to the specific offence and the specific juvenile.
This differentiated approach to managing different cases also allows the board to take into account, the seriousness of the offence. For instance, if it feels that the offence in question is so serious that it is not in the interest of the juvenile or the other juveniles in a home to place him at that home, and if it feels that none of the other orders available are suitable for such a case, the board can order that the juvenile be kept in a “place of safety” in a manner it thinks fit.
Governments however, have let down these noble motives of the juvenile justice act. The juvenile justice system does not have specialised or motivated staff and the quality of social investigation reports, counselling, and mentoring during probation is reported to be largely abysmal. The JS Verma Committee, which recommended reforms to India’s criminal law, had noted in its report that there had been “a failure to create the requisite infrastructure which would help children to be reintegrated into society.” With the recent proposal, the government is discarding the reformative philosophy behind the law without ever having given it a fair chance to succeed.
Spurred down this path to build deterrence by the violent crimes committed against women and girls by young boys, the government should, instead of discarding an entire system based of reformation, sharpen the differentiated approach of the law to empower the juvenile justice system to implement strategies for the reform of these specific classes of juveniles.
While the law provides for different orders to suit different rehabilitation objectives, there is a gap when it comes to the subjects of juvenile sexual offenders and violent offences.
If they are treated the same as adults accused of crimes, these juveniles will not be able to access the opportunities for reform presented by the juvenile justice law. Any debate on the new proposal should, apart from highlighting the starvation of the juvenile justice system, also acknowledge the significant dangers of trying juveniles in the adversarial criminal justice system and in holding them in prisons housing adult offenders.
Apart from closing the door on reform, it is also doubtful whether the objective of deterrence would be realised by amending the Juvenile Justice Act.
Aju John is part of the faculty at myLaw.net, where he teaches courses on Sports Law and Media Law.
New Delhi: Gajendra Singh’s life could have been saved, but he was allowed to die. Eyewitnesses say as Gajendra, the farmer from Dausa in Rajashthan, climbed up the tree at Jantar Mantar and seated himself on a branch, there was no serious effort to coax him to come down, neither from AAP leaders nor from the policemen present.
The incident took place in heavy police presence and in full public view at around 2 pm. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and other senior leaders of the Aam Aadmi party were present on the stage when he killed himself.
Here’s the reporter’s version of how the entire events unfolded:
Gajendra Singh, the farmer who committed suicide at the AAP rally. PTI
Gajendra, donning a multi-coloured turban and carrying a broom in his hand, climbed the tree at around 1 pm and started raising slogans against the Narendra Modi government. People present there thought that he wanted to grab media attention or get a better view of the stage.
After sometime, he tied a white cloth he was carrying around his neck. His both arms were wrapped around a branch of the tree. He was fine till he reclined on another branch for support. Then he let go.
The crowd, including several journalists, kept asking the police officials stationed there to bring the man down but cops were acting like mute spectators. A police officer was heard saying, “Marne do s**le ko (Let him die).”
Angry at the police’s inaction, people started shouting and raising slogans. When it was noticed that one his legs were hanging in the air and his tongue had come out, AAP leader Kumar Vishwas took the mic from journalist-turned-politician Ashish Khetan who was addressing the gathering and urged the man to come down. Vishwas also assured the man that he could meet the chief minister if he wanted. But the man was motionless. Then agitated Vishwas asked the police to do their job.
“Aap apna kaam kyun nahin kar rahe hain (Why are you not doing your work?),” angry Vishwas told police but there was no response. Finally, five people, one of them was wearing the AAP cap, climbed the tree, tore the cloth around his neck, and tried to bring him down. They dragged him to a point but had to drop him down because he was bulky.
People sitting under the tree gathered and caught hold of him. Ironically, a fire tender was standing few meters away from the stop. The police could have used it to bring the man down.
Angry people started shouting slogans against the Delhi Police, which resulted in small skirmishes and pushing and shoving. The brutal face of the Delhi cops once again came to the fore. Instead of using ambulances parked there, they literally dragged the man inside a PCR van to take his body to the hospital. He was declared brought dead at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital. His body was sent to Lady Hardinge Hospital for post-mortem.
When the man’s body was brought down and taken away, the AAP should have called off the rally but the leaders chose to continue resume their address.
All allegations are wrong, police took various steps, says a top cop
Defending the policemen on the site, Joint CP MK Meena debunked the charges of police inaction. “All allegation are wrong. The police did take various steps,” he told reporters adding that “enquiry is on. When the farmer climbed the tree, some other people also went behind him, a series of events took place. We are looking into it”. Delhi Police Commissioner BS Bassi has ordered probe into the incident. The investigation will be headed by a joint commissioner of police.
Why did Gajendra Singh take the extreme step?
In a suicide note Singh reportedly threw from the tree before hanging himself to death, he talked about his problem. “I was thrown out of house by my father because my crops were destroyed. I have three children,” he wrote. Before signing off the note with the slogan ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan,’ Singh asks how he should go home.
Srinagar: After the controversy over the ‘pro-Pakistan’ rally held in Srinagar on Wednesday, the Jammu and Kashmir Police on Friday arrested Masarat Alam Bhat, co-founder of the Muslim League, on charges of indulging in subversive activities.
Alam has defended his actions saying it wouldn’t deter them from their goal.
“It was a normal rally. This is not the first time that boys were raising pro-Pakistan slogans or had a Pakistani flag in their hands. It has been happening here since decades. I did not raise the flag. If they want to arrest me for that, let them do it,” Alam told Firstpost on Friday, moments before he was arrested by police from his Srinagar residence.
“The state has been using force against us for decades but it will not deter us from fighting for our goal. For us there is no difference in who is in the government. They are all same,” he added.
Alam’s arrest has sparked anger in Kashmir. AFP image
The arrest made on Friday morning is seen as a major setback to Chief Minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s initiative of “battle of ideas” which aimed to make separatism and separatists irrelevant in Kashmir by following the path of dialogue and reconciliation with them.
Alam, the architect of civilian unrest in the Valley in 2010 which left more than hundred people dead, was booked along with Syed Geelani and Peer Saifullah under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for “provocative activities and hoisting of Pakistani flags.” On Wednesday, Alam organised a rally in Hyderpora in which more than 3000 people, mostly Kashmiri youth including school children, participated and raised slogans in favour of Alam.
Alam had then reportedly shouted slogans like, “Kashmir Banega….” to which the youth responded with cries of “Pakistan”. He also shouted slogans like “Jeevay, Jeevay Pakistan (Long live Pakistan)” at the rally which sparked a furore, following which the Jammu and Kashmir police filed a case against him.
Under pressure from the Centre, the state government gave a go-ahead for the arrest of Alam ahead of his scheduled visit to the Tral area of south Kashmir. Geelani along with other Hurriyat leaders who were to join him have been put under house arrest. The visit was to protest the killing of 25-year-old Khalid Muzaffar Wani, brother of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani, which locals have alleged was a “custodial killing.”
This comes after the chief minister had earlier directed the Kashmir police on 4 March to initiate a process to release all political prisoners against whom no criminal charges are registered.
Although Alam’s release was not ordered by the PDP-BJP government in the state, the PDP had attempted to extract political mileage out of it. But after the arrest of Alam, the issue seems to have backfired on them. On Thursday, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh had phoned Mufti Mohammad Sayeed who assured him of action against those involved in ‘anti-national activities’ during the rally.
Social media was full of people ridiculing the Sayeed-led government for not standing up to promises made to the electorate.
“What happened to Mufti’s battle of ideas? Where is Mufti’s democracy? It is democracy, Indian ISHTAYLE,” Kamran Sayeed wrote on his Facebook page.
As Alam was being taken into custody, many gathered outside his home.
“What happened to Mufti who used to say democracy is a battle of ideas and it should not be held hostage to the agreements or disagreements on issues,” Irfan Malik, a sociology scholar in Kashmir University said outside Alam’s residence in Srinagar.
There is anger on the streets of Srinagar following the arrest of Alam against Sayeed for allowing the Centre to ‘dictate’ terms to the state government with people accusing the PDP patriarch of being a “puppet” Chief Minister installed by the New Delhi in Kashmir.
However, Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra, President of youth wing of the PDP told Firstpost that they hadn’t arrested Alam under pressure from the Centre.
“It is all about procedure, not about pressure. Jammu and Kashmir police works under a system. They thought it as proper to arrest him and they did that. The law took will its own course. But jails can’t be solution to any problem. There was a cognizable offense against him and law took its own course,” Parra told Firstpost.
No one’s buying the ruling party’s explanation though.
“The message that comes out of this case is clear; that in Kashmir, it doesn’t matter whether PDP, which came on the promise of change, is in power, or National Conference led by Omar Abdullah. By arresting Alam, the PDP led government has exposed its own vulnerabilities and that the real power lies in the hands of New Delhi. The chief minister may say that this is the law taking its due course but then there are many cases registered against Army and policemen for rights abuses, why doesn’t ‘law take its own course’ in those cases as well?” Srinagar based journalist Jehangir Ali told Firstpost.
“Peoples Democratic Party has bowed before BJP and they want to choke the voices of dissent. Even if India says there is democracy in Kashmir, is this democracy? It is a dictatorship where media and so called civil society is allowed to issue diktats,” Tariq Hameed, a shopkeeper said in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the best marketing man for a neo-liberal India. Those with limited exposure to Indian realities, get this image of a country that is really surging – efficient, corruption-free, productive, clean, inclusive, skilful, energy-efficient and much more.
Certainly, a country low on these attributes needs to make a lot of noise to make NRIs feel good and attract bilateral treaties and investments. Modi certainly gets it right every time he speaks on western soil.
Speaking in Toronto on Thursday, he also made an interesting claim – that “there is a new atmosphere of trust on our nation.” He didn’t say whose trust, but since he was speaking on foreign soil, his obvious reference must have been to foreign governments. It was an assertion based on his perceptions – we still don’t have any evidence that the world trusts India more now than ever before. Indicators are still very bad with a recent set putting India even behind Nepal. Growth projections are good, but not better than what the country had during UPA-I
Modi during his Toronto speech. AP image
Perhaps he is right – the world trusts India more under his leadership. But does the rest of India believe in the country more than ever before? If trust is a majoritarian idea, probably yes; but if one considers all sections of people, it’s debatable. For a country to progress, it’s not the trust of the world that it needs, but the trust of its people. Is the prime minister sure of this?
A few days ago, Sanjay Raut, MP of BJP-ally Shiv Sena wanted voting rights of Muslims to be withdrawn. Yesterday, the party mouthpiece Saamna wanted ‘family planning’ for Muslims and Christians. Prior to this, Sadhvi Deva Thakur of Hindu Mahasabha wanted an ‘Emergency’ to force Muslims and Christians to undergo sterilisation. Shiva Sena agreed with the idea, but preferred the modern terminology of family planning to forceful sterilisation.
In March, RSS leader Dattatreya Hosabale, had said that all Indians were Hindus, according to their DNA. “Whom do you call minorities? We don’t consider anybody to be a minority. There should be no minority concept in the country because there is no minority.” He asserted that it was also RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s belief.
During the Delhi election, Sadhvi Niranjan, union minister of state,s had claimed that all minorities in India are sons of Ram. She went on to add: “Aapko tay karna hai ki Dilli mein sarkar Ramzadon ki banegi ya haramzadon ki. Yeh aapka faisla hai.” When faced with criticism for her remarks, she went a step further: “Muslims offer namaz in mosques, we do no object. Christians pray in churches, we do not object. Then talking about Ram should not be termed as communal”.
Slamming the minorities and questioning their Indian-ness have become a routine practice for Sangh Parivar organisations, some of the ruling party leaders and its allies such as Shiv Sena. Neither the BJP, nor the otherwise all-powerful prime minister, have been able to rein them in although minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday lamented that the opposition had painted the party as anti-minorities. It looks as if a wilful double-speak of reconciliation and polarisation is employed by the BJP and its allies as a political strategy. Its leaders swear by secularism and protection of minorities, but lose no opportunity to hit at ‘secularists’. In Germany, a few days ago, Modi used an insignificant reference to Sanskrit to take a dig at secularism.
Hindus account for only 80.5 per cent of the Indian population and every time fanatic Hindu leaders target minorities, they are making 20 per cent of Indians insecure. Out of this, about 15 per cent are Muslims and Christians. Every time they are told that they are sons of Ram, that they are culturally Hindus and that they need to undergo forceful sterilisation, they are made to feel unequal and oppressed. Does the Indian state, or the BJP government, have their trust? Has the BJP created a new atmosphere of trust for them?
Or is it that their trust is not worthwhile because they are minorities?
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As PC Joshi, one of the early leaders of Communist movement in India, noted in an article
,
“
the concept of secularism as defined by Gandhi and Nehru constitutes the bedrock of Indian nationalism. It evolved in and through the national struggle for political independence and it was ultimately incorporated and embodied in the Constitution of the sovereign republic of India. The upholding of secularism then became the constitutional obligation of the Indian nation-state.” Unfortunately, this is what the neo-nationalists choose to forget and twist.
For India to have an atmosphere of trust, all its people should feel equal and empowered. Demagogues and fallacious marketing talks cannot create it. Gandhi had said: “Hindustan belongs to all those who are born and bred here and who have no other country to look to. Therefore, it belongs to Parsis, Beni Israelis, to Indian Christians, Muslims and other non-Hindus as much as to Hindus. Free India will be no Hindu raj, it will be Indian raj based not on the majority of any religious sect or community, but on the representatives of the whole people without distinction of religion.”
According to Nehru, “We call our state a secular one. The word ‘secular’ is not a very happy one. And yet for want of better word, we have used it. What exactly does it mean? It does not obviously mean a state where religion is discouraged. It means freedom of religion and conscience including freedom for those who have no religion, subject only to their not interfering with each other or with the basic conceptions of our state…”
Under the BJP rule, concerted efforts are on to defame the secular legacy of Gandhi and Nehru by propping up alternative icons. Unfortunately, this new India cannot have an atmosphere of trust for all its citizens and it certainly doesn’t matter if the world trusts its investment atmosphere or not.
Bhopal: Guns have gone silent in the infamous Chambal ravines that once sheltered dacoits. For nine years now, the mining mafia has emerged as new synonym for terror in the region. Like in the past the crushing of Dharmendra Singh, a constable of Madhya Pradesh Police under a sand-laden truck caused just a brief flutter in the region. Life is coming back to normal at a fairly quick pace. Normalcy means acceptance of mining contractors and traders unbridled reign in the region.
Representational image. AFP
The Supreme Court had ordered a ban on sand mining in the state nine years ago. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has also prohibited mining. The ban exists on paper. Mining department records show no contracts having been offered in the region over this period. But mining has gone on unhindered not just in Chambal region but also in all other river beds in the state. The state illegally exports sand to the neighbouring states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh via Chhindwara and Sidhi districts. Sand mining in parts of Chhindwara district is conducted by Mafiosi from the neighbouring Nagpur district.
With the booming construction industry needing sand and gravel in bulk the state politicians, bureaucrats and police profit more from the ban rather than a regulated availability of these materials. The state government had through a cabinet decision last year announced a policy for supply that would check illegal mining and trade. The policy has not been implemented so far.
In Chambal region murders have become commonplace especially when honest police staff try to chase the culprits. Most policemen have compromised either for money or for fear of lives. A large part of the Chambal river reserved as sanctuary for crocodiles and migratory birds has also fallen prey to illegal mining or quarrying. Stones are quarried to be exported to Rajasthan. Around 300 villages in Morena districts are affected by illegal mining. Villagers who complain against malpractices have to pay with their lives.
A special investigation team of the police appointed on the chief minister’s orders reconstructed the incident and suggested that a posse of armed police force that watched Dharmendra Singh battle with the culprits could have saved their colleague. The two-faced approach of the police was also evident when the murder was first recorded as accident. The Director General of the state police Surendra Singh was among the first to suggest the overturning of the truck was an accident. After a public outcry, however, the government was forced to correct the FIR.
The initial reaction from the government was to just make the driver a fall guy. Sustained public pressure forced the government to book Ram Lakhan Singh Gurjar, the truck owner.
Often accused of being in cahoots with the mafia, the government usually goes through motions, ordering enquiries and granting ex-gratia cash support to the relatives of the victim. But it rarely makes an effort to rein in the elements behind the crime.
In March 2012 Narendra Kumar, an IPS officer who tried to stop a tractor trailer carrying boulders, was crushed under similar conditions. The government avoided order a CBI enquiry despite protracted agitation. The driver of the tractor served a short sentence for causing death by negligence. The government made no effort to book the contractor behind unauthorised quarrying. The police had passed the colleague’s murder as an accident.
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Satya Pal Singh Sikarwar, a legislator from the ruling BJP, says the mining mafia enjoys the support of the police force in the region. “Every police station in Morena district is on the payroll of the miners,” he was quoted as saying. The police on the other hand say the mafia is emboldened by the support from the ruling party. Even in the latest case the driver of the truck that crushed Dharmendra Singh is reported to have contacted a BJP leader for support.
Even the battalion of Special Armed Force (SAF) posted in the Chambal region on the directive of Madhya Pradesh High Court were quietly removed under pressure from the mafia. Neither the police nor the public cared to move the court against the contempt.
In another recent incident on 25 March in the Malakhedi village of Hoshangabad just over 100 km from the state capital Bhopal, Anita Choudhary, a lady mining inspector was attacked when she tried to take action against a group involved in illegal mining in Narmada river.
In June last year, a sub-divisional magistrate Rajesh Rathore was overpowered and shot at while leading an operation against sand excavation in the neighbouring Bhind district. In March last year Vishwanath Singh, another SAF jawan was fired at in Morena when he tried to prevent eight tractor trolleys loaded with illegally mined sand. Singh sustained bullet injury near the spine.
Criss-cross applesauce?
That’s what a school in Encinitas, California, calls the padmasana or lotus position in its effort to make yoga sound more all-American.
It worked. A three-judge panel of the 4th district court of appeal has upheld a lower court ruling that the Encinitas school district could continue to offer yoga programmes to its students.
It’s being hailed as great victory for yoga which it is. The court has basically told a group of paranoid parents that the yoga mat is not some red carpet laid out to usher Hinduism into American schools. And just because they learn to sit in a lotus position, these school children were not being indoctrinated into some exotic Eastern religion.
The courts reassured the parents that not only was the programme “secular” and not about “advancing or inhibiting religion” but it was also now “a distinctly American cultural phenomenon” despite its Indian roots. The school superintendent hailed the original decision calling yoga “21st century P.E.” with “amazing” health benefits as if it was not thousands of years old.
Representative image. AFP
What would Shripad Naik, India’s cabinet minister for yoga make of that?
Narendra Modi has made it quite clear that he’s putting the Indian back in yoga. He went to the UN and asked for an International Yoga Day. He set up a cabinet post. He told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria how he tells everyone to practice yoga. He is a bona fide yoga evangelist. And the Make in India PM wants there to be no question that yoga was Made in India not born out of immaculate conception in a Manhattan studio.
And therein lies the problem of ownership. Could India claim yoga the way a region in France claims champagne and protects it from fizzy fascimiles elsewhere? For that to happen, writes Tanaya Basu in The Atlantic, Modi would need to secure a “geographical indication” which is a formal acknowledgement of a “location’s importance to a specific product”. But yoga, Basu writes “unlike champagne – which is made from grapes grown in a particular region with distinct weather conditions and soil content – yoga can’t be held in your hand.”
While yoga indisputably comes from India, a headstand in Pune is not that different from a headstand in San Francisco. And that says Sonia Katyal, law professor at Fordham University, “makes it a little harder to explain how its Indian origins are always essential to the practice or characteristics of yoga today.” Replace India with Hinduism in this discussion and the “geographic indication” becomes even trickier.
The Hindu American Foundation started the Take Yoga Back campaign after they noticed the Yoga Journal never linked yoga to Hinduism because it told them, “Hinduism has a lot of baggage”. The “Taking Back” idea sparked quite war of words between HAF’s Aseem Shukla and Deepak Chopra in Washington Post and then HAF’s Swaminathan Venkataraman and Meera Nanda in Open Magazine. Nanda argued that it was ludicrous to “draw an unbroken line connecting 21st century yogic postures with the nearly 2,000 year-old Yoga Sutras, and tie both to the supposedly 5,000 year-old Vedas”. HAF responded that “requiring everything Hindu be traceable back to Vedic times is ludicrous” and a driver behind the campaign was not just a Yoga Journal not mentioning the H-word but an attempt by some Christians to create a “Christian Yoga”. HAF’s Sheetal Shah also told The Atlantic that despite the name, it was not about taking yoga ‘back’ from anyone. It was about acknowledging yoga’s Hindu roots instead of burying them under a sticky mat.
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HAF has had to think this through more thoroughly than some of the more gung ho Made in India acolytes who want to have it both ways. They want their yoga to be Hindu-branded AND they are up in arms if a school is prevented from offering it. In a
it issued about yoga in public schools, HAF carefully threads the needle.
“Under the First Amendment, public schools may offer yoga-based programs, such as asana-only programs, as part of their curriculum because asana alone is not yoga. Public schools should not offer programs that go beyond the instruction of asana and other physical components of yoga. As such, community groups are free to offer more comprehensive yoga programs during non-school hours using school facilities on the same basis as other community groups sponsoring religious and secular programs for youth.”
The problem is the asana has been conflated with the larger concept of yoga and now it’s difficult to separate the part from the whole. That’s why a court has to step in. But neither is it easy to maintain that divide. Sharanjit Sandhu, a yoga instructor in San Francisco, told me that she realizes the value of chanting Om to get into the ride side of the brain during yoga class but also understands that it would be problematic to do that in a school gymnasium in California.
What in a way is perhaps more concerning than Yoga Journal’s H-avoidance is an Indian American who confesses he learned more about shlokas in his yoga class led by a blonde instructor than from his immigrant parents. Middle and upper middle-class India has only recently rediscovered yoga and that rediscovery isn’t unlinked to its booming commercial popularity in the West. Meanwhile a Catholic priest in Mumbai, Father Joseph Pereira teaches yoga around the world and calls its Christian opponents “God addicts”. “Yoga is not just a work out, it’s a work-in,” he tells Scroll.in.
Now, the Encinitas school district calls our Lotus position criss-cross applesauce. And while the purist in me bristles at that appropriation, another part of me wonders why that’s so different from Bhavesh becoming Bob in California in order to make it in America.
In that sense yoga too has become the classic immigrant story – born in India and remade in America.
Even as India struggles with crimes against women, we have been flooded with numerous bizarre suggestions from ‘babas’ and politicians on how to battle this threat. And there seems to be no end to this nonsense.
When the whole country was raging over the gruesome 16 December Delhi gangrape, self-proclaimed spiritual guru Asaram Bapu — who himself is in jail on charges of rape — had told the world that the girl should have called her rapists ‘bhaiya’ (brother) to save herself.
Representational image. AFP
Asaram had said, “Only 5-6 people are not the culprits. The victim daughter is as guilty as her rapists… She should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop… This could have saved her dignity and life. Can one hand clap? I don’t think so.”
And now yet another video of a baba, Aniruddha Bapu who seems to have emerged from the woodwork. He is seen in the video telling people that women should chant mantras in his honour to prevent rape.
The Times of India reports, “A 10-minute video uploaded online on January 4, 2013, in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya case was aired on TV channels on Wednesday. In it Bapu urges women and boys to recite the ‘Aniruddha Chalisa’ in his honour 108 times for 11 days and repeat the Gurukshetra mantra five times a day. Bapu says these chants can “keep 100 men at bay and make rapists impotent”.”
Yes, now women can heave a sigh of relief, policemen patrolling the streets can just go on a holiday, and social workers battling to better women’s safety in India can find something else to do. Because, Aniruddha Chalisa is here.
And if you are apprehensive that you can’t mug up the whole chalisa, or if you can’t read, no fear — you can just chant the bapu’s name and that’s it. No more danger of getting raped, says the baba.
This new baba on the block, with a rape-repelling name, is based out of Khar in Mumbai.
And as one is filled with outrage over his remarks, women’s organisations are already demanding an unconditional apology from him. The Times of India quoted former chairperson of the state women’s commission Susieben Shah as saying that he “should tender an unconditional apology to the six crore women of the state, and indeed all women, for propagating falsehood”.
Falsehood it is, and probably Anirudda Bapu will tender a half-hearted apology under pressure from the public, or may be he will say his comments have been misconstrued. But that won’t change the mindset of the people who say these bizarre things or those who follow these people.
In a country where people blame everything from chowmein, mobile phones, jeans to kissing for rape, and where even leaders like Sonia Gandhi are not immune from sexist and racist comments, the fact that these ‘godmen’ thrive is not very surprising.
Unfortunately, this baba is not alone in his fest of stupidity.
Remember Mulayam Singh Yadav saying, “Ladkiyan pehle dosti karti hain. Ladke-ladki mein matbhed ho jata hai. Matbhed hone key baad usey rape ka naam dey deti hain. Ladko sey galti ho jati hai. Kya rape case mein phasi di jayegi? (First girls develop friendship with boys. They when differences occur, they level rape charges. Boys commit mistakes. Will they be hanged for rape).’?
And it is not just male leaders. Politicians in Mumbai had insisted that when men see mannequins in lingerie, the urge to rape is natural.”Lingerie mannequins promote rapes. Skimpily clad mannequins can pollute young minds. After the Delhi rape case, I felt something had to be done,” said Ritu Tawade, the BJP corporator who had put forth the proposal.
It does not end there. The police too reflect the bigoted mindset. Satyapal Singh, the former Mumbai police commissioner, after the Shakti Mills gangrape had said, “We have to strike a balance. On the one hand you want to have a promiscuous culture and on the other hand you want a safe and secure environment for the people…Should couples be allowed to kiss in public?… Should they be allowed to indulge in all obscene things?”
These comments reflect the mindset most men and women still have in our country. While educated women, like those in the Shakti Mills gangrape and the Uber rape case, are able to pursue their case, women in villages or the urban poor are not even aware of their rights. The crimes against women are not just rape but acid attacks, domestic violence, dowry deaths and femal foeticide.
In such a scenario, comments from our ever so enlightened babas and politicians is a step backwards. Apologies are a short-term solution. In fact, such comments should invite penalties. Maybe then people will restrain themselves from making such irresponsible, misleading statements.
By N. Surabhi
I have spent the last ten years fighting animal abuse. It’s been both a personal campaign as well as a professional career. I’ve travelled across India and beyond to understand the circumstances in which animals are mistreated and why there’s so much apathy towards suffering in the land of ahimsa. I have witnessed and documented the agony that animals experience right from the time they are bred, bought, transported and killed – usually in the most horrific of conditions, all to be ‘used’ in various industries.
Reuters image.
Considering my experiences, you’d think I’d be among those who would be happy about the recently imposed beef ban in Maharashtra, but I’m not. I’m an animal rights’ advocate, have been vegan for over a decade and I oppose the beef ban. I am also deeply disturbed by the support and call for support by some stalwarts of the animal protection community.Why? Because vegetarianism fuelled by religion is very different from making an informed choice on animal welfare.
For most in India, vegetarianism does not stem from any kind of ethical belief about how animals are being treated or should be treated. The time that I have spent working in this field has taught me that cow protection, an animal welfare issue, is mostly linked to religious one-upmanship in India. The beef ban is an excellent example. The rationale governing the ban is ostensibly this: the cow, considered sacred by Hindus, deserves ‘protection’ because of its special religious status.
Yet, if you look at the Vedas, the cow was revered but at the same time, beef was relished by all classes and castes of society, including the upper castes.
In ‘Untouchability, The Dead Cow And The Brahmin‘, Dr. BR Ambedkar wrote that the texts suggest Hindus were indeed a beef-eating lot and that the ousting of beef from the Hindu diet was a result of the attempt at hegemony by the Brahmins over the Buddhists. The Buddhists were the ones who opposed animal slaughter and when they started gathering popularity, the Hindu vanguard responded by appropriating some aspects of Buddhism. And so, despite the Hindus’ supposed proclivity for beef, the cow came to occupy a venerable position in Hinduism and cow-killing became sacrilege.
In the 20th and 21st century, the issue of cow protection vis-à-vis slaughter has been used to deepen the fault lines between the non beef-eating Hindu majority and those that eat beef (religious minorities as well as members of “lower” castes). The ban in Maharashtra is an instrument of power play in the hands of the country’s political class and it makes a joke of the real issue of cattle welfare.
If the beef ban has been imposed for ethical reasons – that is, to prevent the suffering of animals – then how is a cow different from a chicken or a goat or even its close relative buffalo? Why aren’t other animals included within the ambit of this law? If your argument is that chicken and mutton comprise a vital part of people’s diets, here is a fact for you to chew on. Beef, which was half the price of mutton, was a cheap source of protein for India’s poor. Simple economics tells us that pulling beef off the shelves will lead to an increase in the prices and demand for other meat especially chicken, which will in turn increase the suffering of countless animals. There’s nothing ethical about the conditions in which most chicken are raised, incidentally. I would argue that of all the animals raised for food, hens and chickens suffer the most.
Proponents of the ban point to the alleged atrocities by the meat industry and the cruelty of slaughter. However, if the cow is sacred because of her milk, her suffering is because of that milk too.
Most cows in India are reared for use in the dairy industry. Those that are fit for milk production are constantly impregnated, separated from their calves and pumped with hormones in order to keep up milk production. Male calves are either abandoned at birth or sold to slaughterhouses. Some may be used as working animals on farmland while selected bulls are used for breeding. However, once these cows and bulls lose their productive value, these ‘spent’ animals are either abandoned or slaughtered for use in the beef and other industries.
If the point of the ban is to uphold the sanctity of the cow and ensure its welfare, then the problem is far from solved. India is the world’s largest producer of milk. In a growing economy, consumption of dairy is bound to increase, which means more cruelty to cattle both during and after their use.
Abandoned cattle are commonplace in India and with a ban on slaughter, this number will only shoot up. In the course of my work, I have visited many gaushalas (independent organisations that take in abandoned/stray cattle). I have found that often the upkeep of these animals is dismal, either because of lack of funds and infrastructure to provide adequate care or because of apathy towards to the plight of these animals. Don’t be surprised if the situation of abandoned cattle gets significantly worse and more cattle show up on the streets in Maharashtra.
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I am not the only one to have seen countless cattle die painful deaths on the roadside because they ingested plastic from the garbage we discard thoughtlessly. Many have had more than 20kgs of plastic removed from their stomachs. These ‘stray’ cattle risk being transported illegally to other states where slaughter isn’t banned. This means enduring horrible journeys. Cattle are cramped into the back of trucks. Often, they’re so tightly packed that they their tails break at the joints. The animals are kept hungry, suffer fatigue and face the risk of disease.
Simply put, everyone who is holding a glass of milk is responsible for the slaughter of the holy cow.
Animal welfare is more than just animal rescue and worship. It’s a fact that our sustenance is derived from the environment, which includes animals. Welfare needs to encompass empathy for these creatures by negating the suffering that we may bring upon them, to the least possible extent. Ethics and moral compass is not a political ordinance. They should guide us to build a society that privileges non-violence – the same ahimsa that we tote internationally – rather than a society divided by religion. If the interests of cattle are indeed our concern, it requires a comprehensive overhaul of the systems that govern industries that depend on cattle; stringent enforcement of animal welfare laws; and most importantly, individual lifestyle changes. All this requires the individual and collective exercise of our will.
This hollow ban on beef does nothing for cattle in India. If anything, it hurts more than it helps because it’s more about a regressive conservatism and politics. Why support a ban that affects only minority communities? Because it serves a political and religious agenda. And if it turns out that the state government will relax the stipulations and allow beef to be imported into Maharashtra, then there might even be an economic agenda.
Sadly, the state of the cow’s affairs, however, is the least of anyone’s concerns.
N Surabhi is an animal rights advocate and has worked in several animal welfare projects all over India.
The plight of 45-year-old Mohammad Faizal is understandable. Already tormented by a tumour in his heart which was fortunately removed, he was put in a rather uncomfortable situation by his very own surgeon.
Representational image. Reuters
The surgeon ad posted pictures of Faizal’s innards on Facebook much to his shock. According to The Times of India the doctor in concern later apologised and removed the pictures from the social media forum.
By uploading the images, the doctor had grossly violated the privacy of his patient although he abstained from giving out his name. It was trauma for Faizal as some poked “fun” while commenting on the images.
The incident throws light on a much larger question on the distribution of clinical photography on social media. The surgeon did not mention Faizal’s name anywhere but it was clearly not helpful.
In this context, what author Avinash Supe wrote in his piece Ethical considerations in medical photography in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics may be debatable.
“For photography of internal organs at operation or in the post-mortem room as well as in endoscopic, pathological or microscopic documentation, permission of the patient is not necessary, as the identity is not revealed,” Supe said.
This practice clearly did not help Faizal. Probably the surgeon also could not presume that the images could be identified. Supe in the same piece said: “The ethics of clinical practice are based on ‘trust’ in the doctor by the patient and other members of the healthcare team.” r
Breaching of medical privacy can lead to serious legal and other problems. In his piece The ethics of clinical photography and social media, that appeared in the Academia, author Ce´sar Palacios-Gonza´lez wrote: “In 2008 a Swedish nurse was suspended from her job after posting on her Facebook profile pictures of a brain surgery in which she was participating (Salter 2008). Two years afterwards, the US Johnson County Community College decided to expel four nursing students for posting on Face-book pictures of themselves posing with a human placenta (Gibson 2011). In a similar scenario a Mexican anaesthesiologist was fired from a hospital in 2012 for publishing on her Facebook account pictures that depicted a child being immobilized prior to an operation, the amputated legs of an elderly woman, and various surgery pictures where the patients’ faces were visible (Vivas 2012).”
There is no legal recourse available that prohibits medical practitioners from going public with private medico images of patients. As it is clearly seen from Faizal’s example, simply not naming the person is not enough.
“While Faizal had chanced upon his photo, in most cases patients are in the dark about their pictures being posted by the people they trust their bodies with.”—The Times of India said.
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What the national coordinator, academic wing of Indian Medical Association JA Jayalal told the national daily is a worrying indication. “… there’s a definite increase in the number of doctors using social networking sites as a forum to showcase their surgeries, caring little about their patients’ confidentiality,” Jayalal said.
Faizal’s surgeon could have possibly landed up in a legal soup had his patient not relented. It was pertinent for the surgeon to explain his images would be used in an online forum and for what purpose. But nothing of that sort was done.
Ce’sar Palacios-Gonza´lez said in his piece: “… informed consent is mandatory for creating, using and publishing all primary and secondary purpose clinical images, and that a case can be made for the use of clinical photography for treatment and educational purposes in addition to social media when informed consent is properly obtained…. Finally, sending clinical images, where the patient might be identifiable, for primary purposes through social media should be a last ditch resort.”
There areloopholes in our country when it comes to proper guidelines regarding use of clinical photographs on social media. Whether it is to show off the doctor’s achievement or to take the method of treatment to another level, it cannot be at the cost of a person who has already gone through an ordeal.
Did IAS officer DK Ravi commit suicide after all?
Amid uproar over his mysterious death, which opposition parties have alleged is not an open and shut case of suicide as claimed by the police, new information indicates that he may have taken his own life after all.
PTI
Hindustan Times has published a series of WhatsApp messages purportedly sent by Ravi to a married female batchmate, where he apparently tells her that he ‘gives up’ this life, so that they can be together in the next, after she rejected his advances. HT says that these are a part of official records and were procured with the help of sources in Bengaluru police. Firstpost cannot vouch for the authenticity of the messages, which have also subsequently been put into the public domain by other media organisations.
The WhatsApp messages reproduced in the newspaper definitely paint the picture of a man obsessed with his friend. He makes outright declarations of love, pleads with her to reciprocate and also hints that he is thinking of taking his own life. “If at all there is a next life, we will be together. I am quitting”, the newspaper quotes one of the message as saying.
The HT report also reproduces excerpts from the police statement made by the female colleague in question, saying she had distanced herself after his ‘tone had changed’.
If this indeed proves to be the case, it will be seen as a vindication of the Congress government in Karnataka which has come under increasing pressure over his death. In the end, it took Sonia Gandhi to convince Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to allow a CBI probe into his death amid louder and louder cries of foul play. In the rush of sensationalism surrounding the WhatsApp messages, the government will be able to shrug its shoulders and reiterate the fact that they had nothing to do with his death.
But can DK Ravi’s suicide (if it indeed was proved to be the casel) merely be written off as the immature actions of a lovelorn man? There is plenty to suggest that his distressed state of mind may have been greatly influenced by the way he was treated by the government.
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The IAS officer was under considerable pressure from the Congress-led state government. Firstpost reporter S Aravind said that when Ravi was prematurely transferred from Kolar, allegedly because of pressure from the sand mafia on the state government, to Bengaluru, the entire district was brought to a complete standstill. “Delegations from Kolar district tried to appeal to the government, but their efforts were in vain. I haven’t heard of any district shutting down for more than two days seeking the retention of a deputy commissioner”, he noted.
Ravi was subsequently posted as the Additional Commissioner (Enforcement) of Commercial Taxes Department in Bengaluru, where he had reportedly detected service tax evasion allegedly by more than a dozen realty firms, totaling about Rs 120 crore. He was in the process of recovering the dues from the firms when he allegedly committed suicide.
However it seems that Ravi’s transfer by the state government took a toll on him as well, especially given that he was effectively penalised for doing good work in Kolar. As Aravind pointed out, “One thing is for sure, Ravi would not have taken the extreme step had the state government not shunted him from one post to another under political pressure.”
The police statement by his friend and fellow lady IAS officer seems to confirm this.
The HT report quotes as her as saying that “he was restless after he was transferred to the commercial taxes department where he felt he did not have enough work”. The fact that according to her own submissions, that his ‘tone had changed’ only in the last few weeks of their acquaintance with one another, shows that his state of mind and actions may well have been influenced by the difficulties he was facing at work. According to the News Minute, which has also accessed a copy of her statement to the police, the “lady IAS officer states that they were friendly colleagues since 2009, and her husband was friendly with Ravi since last year, until he started acting strange in the weeks leading up to his death.”
According to the this Harvard article on stress and suicide, “Many suicides (estimates range from 30% to 80%) are impulsive, with just minutes or an hour elapsing between the time a person decides upon suicide and when he or she commits the act. Yet the stressful events that lead to suicidal thoughts are often temporary, such as losing a job or having a romantic relationship end”
In the case of DK Ravi, the evidence so far points to a toxic mix of both a stressful and disheartening career pressure as well as the rejection of his declarations of love. We may never know the truth of exactly what happened, but one thing remains clear: Even if Ravi’s death turns out to be a case of suicide, it is not a clean chit for the Congress government. The cause of his death neither changes the wrongdoing he uncovered, or the shameful way he was treated for doing his job with integrity and honour.
The Supreme Court is expected to pronounce on Tuesday its verdict on a batch of petitions challenging Section 66A of the Information & Technology Act today. The case has been closely followed, mostly for its implications on how Indians can use the Internet and social media, and because of its implications on the freedom of speech.
Here is all you need to know about section 66A, the cases against it, and what the controversies surrounding it are:
What does section 66A of the IT act actually say?
“Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device,—
(a) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or
(b) any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device,
(c) any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such messages,
shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine.”
AFP
The issues with the wording of the act
One of the main problems with the act is the fact that it is framed in vague and sweeping language, which allows law enforcement authorities to interpret it in a subjective manner. What, for instance is information that is ‘grossly offensive’ and has menacing character’? If someone were pro-life, for instance, they may find an email forward endorsing abortion ‘grossly offensive’. Similarly, if someone were a religious purist who believed God created the world in seven days, they may find a status update on evolution to be ‘false information’. By making the act so open ended and subjective, the government is trying to save itself the trouble of having to define each and every cyber crime, but what they have overlooked or ignored is that in its present form, the act also easily lends itself to prosecuting people who dare to have and express a controversial or different opinion that may not necessarily be dangerous.
This issue was also brought up by the Supreme Court while it was hearing the petitions against the act.
Dealing with the word “grossly offensive”, the bench referred to the judgement cited by the ASG and said, “what is grossly offensive to you, may not be grossly offensive to me and it is a vague term.” “Highly trained judicial minds (judges of the UK courts) came to different conclusions by using the same test applied to judge as to what is grossly offensive and what is offensive,” the court added.
In fact one of the judges on the case, Justice Nariman, even gave an example to the court of how the vague definition of ‘grossly offensive’ could be dangerously twisted. According to a Times of India report, he said in court, “”I can give you millions of examples but take one burning issue is of conversion. If I post something in support of conversion and some people, not agreeable to my view, filed a complaint against me then what will happen to me?”
The petitions against the act
Some of the petitions seek setting aside of section 66A of the Information Technology Act which empowers police to arrest a person for allegedly posting offensive materials on social networking sites.
The first PIL on the issue was filed in 2012 by law student Shreya Singhal, who sought amendment in Section 66A of the Act, after two girls — Shaheen Dhada and Rinu Shrinivasan — were arrested in Palghar in Thane district as one of them posted a comment against the shutdown in Mumbai following Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray‘s death and the other ‘liked’ it.
Most activists and policy experts point out that the Section 66A is loosely worded and puts too much powers in the hands of the police.
Recent controversies surrounding the act
Much of the outrage surrounding section 66A has been because of arbitrary arrests of people posting content on social media against various politicians, with police using the vague language of the act to their advantage.
As pointed out by Firstpost editor Sandip Roy, “There’s nothing in Section 66A that’s specific to politicians, but politicians of all stripes have seized on it as the handy bully club to squelch all kinds of dissent from cartoons to abuse. There’s that old saying jiski laathi uski bhains(whoever owns the big stick, owns the buffalo). For our politicians, Section 66A is the big stick.”
Apart from the two girls who were arrested in Maharashtra mentioned earlier, some other controversial arrests around the act are:
* A tourism officer in Varanasi was arrested for uploading “objectionable” pictures of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav and Azam Khan on Facebook.
* Ambikesh Mahapatra, a Jadavpur University professor, was arrested in Kolkata for forwarding a cartoon about Mamata Banerjee.
* In Goa last year, police booked a young shipping professional for a Facebook post which said that the Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi would start a holocaust in India. Devu Chodankar had written on a Facebook forum on Goa+, a popular forum with over 47,000 members, if elected to power, Modi would unleash a ‘holocaust’. He deleted his post subsequently. Chodankar later apologised for his choice of words but stood by the sum of his argument, calling it his crusade against the “tyranny of fascists”.
* Most recently a class 11 student was arrested for making a Facebook post about UP minister Azam Khan. “A Class XII student made comments against me on FB. Law is enforced with strictness and he has been arrested within 24 hours,” Khan told the media.
* A man was arrested in Puducherry for tweeting that Karti Chidambaram, son of then union minister P Chidambaram was ‘corrupt’.
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The government’s defence of 66A
The main defence of the government has been that the act cannot be “quashed” merely because of the possibility of its “abuse”.
According to a report in Times of India, additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta told the court that “there was a need for a mechanism to put checks and balances on this medium”, because the Internet doesn’t “operate in an institutional form.”
He told the court that, “Considering the reach and impact of medium, leeway needs to be given to legislature to frame rules. On the Internet every individual is a director, producer and broadcaster and a person can send offensive material to millions of people at a same time in nanosecond just with a click of button.”
Mehta also said that the vague wording of Section 66A, which said ‘grossly inoffensive’ content could land someone in prison for three year, was not a good enough reason to get rid of the section.
In the earlier hearings, Mehta had given examples of how the Ministry of Defence and External Affairs, received emails that were designed to hack and steal information from the ministries, in an effort to convince the court that Section 66A was needed to prevent such activities.
What the court has said so far
Apart from raising objections to who could determine what constituted ‘grossly offensive content’, the court has also not been impressed with the government argument that the section was needed to protect government data from hackers, and had pointed out that this eventuality was already dealt with viruses and hacking for which Section 65 of the IT Act was relevant.
The apex court had also on 16 May, 2013, come out with an advisory that a person, accused of posting objectionable comments on social networking sites, cannot be arrested without police getting permission from senior officers like IG or DCP.
The direction had come in the wake of numerous complaints of harassment and arrests, sparking public outrage.
It had, however, refused to pass an interim order for a blanket ban on the arrest of such persons across the country.
As the first anniversary of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 26 May draws closer, he will be looking to foreign nations in order to deliver on many of the tall promises made in the coming months. After his three-nation Indian Ocean tour of Seychelles, Mauritius and Sri Lanka this month, Modi is all set to embark on another three-nation tour next month, this time to France, Germany and Canada, in that order.
PM Modi is likely to be in France on 10 April, in Germany on 12 April and in Canada on 15 April. Belgium too had originally figured in his proposed itinerary but the small yet significant European country, which houses headquarters of NATO and the 28-nation European Union, had to be omitted at the last minute as Modi wanted to prune the number of days of his foreign tour.
In May, PM Modi is scheduled to embark on a crucial visit to China, his first trip there since becoming prime minister.
Representational image. Reuters
In July, PM Modi is scheduled to visit Russia to attend the BRICS summit. A summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization too is slated to take place in Russia around the same time. However, India is not yet a full member of the SCO and enjoys only an Observer status so far.
Of the four countries he is scheduled to visit, France, Germany and China have shown keen interest in his bullet train project. Companies from three other European countries have already entered the race for Modi’s bullet train project: Italy, Spain and Belgium.
Two other big contenders for India’s bullet train project are Japan and South Korea though their companies are yet to enter the race formally.
Japan is already in the middle of a feasibility study for the 534-km-long Mumbai-Ahmadabad high-speed corridor project. The entire project, if work on it were to start immediately, would cost at least $10 billion. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) is conducting the feasibility study for a high-speed project on the Mumbai-Ahmadabad line.
Thus, PM Modi’s upcoming tours to France and Germany in the second week of next month, and to China in May will have a major talking point for PM Modi: bullet trains.
Companies from France, Germany and China have already sent their bids for conducting feasibility study for three corridors of PM Modi’s pet Diamond Quadrilateral bullet train project. The Indian government has sought feasibility studies for high-speed rail corridors on three major routes: Delhi-Mumbai, Delhi-Kolkata and Mumbai-Chennai. The feasibility studies on these three routes will cost at least $50 million.
The entire Golden Quadrilateral bullet train project is to cost well over $30 billion. The project is crucial in PM Modi’s scheme of things as it envisages reducing travel time considerably once the project is completed. For example, a Delhi-Mumbai train journey which presently takes around 16 hours would be halved after the high speed train project is completed.
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In Germany, PM Modi is expected to give a push to his Make in India initiative by reaching out to German industries. He is also likely to get a briefing from the German government on how they are keeping the Rhine River clean, which is expected to be useful for another pet project of his: cleaning the Indian rivers, particularly the Ganga.
For the past ten months that Modi has been in office the prime minister, he has consciously tried to exploit his numerous foreign visits for implementing many of his pet themes and projects. Much more will be on the table when PM Modi engages with his interlocutors during his upcoming visits abroad. But the main pivot of his foreign trips in the coming weeks would be to see how best to harness foreign technology, expertise and funds to implement key developmental projects in India.
The Prime Minister is keen on preparing a viable blue print of his developmental agenda during his foreign visits by the time he completes a year in office. The Modi government is hopeful of pulling off several concrete deliverables during the prime minister’s upcoming foreign visits at a time when the opposition parties are increasingly critical of his frequent foreign trips.
by Aravind S Kamal
Bangalore: With pressure mounting on Karnataka to hand over the probe into the mysterious death of IAS officer DK Ravi to the CBI, the state government is committing one blunder after another, leading to plenty of speculation over Chief Minister Siddaramaiah’s actions. A number of actions by the state government and police, simply do not add up.
Firstly, within hours of the discovery of Ravi’s body, Bengaluru City Police Commissioner MN Reddi declared it was a “suicide” (even before the body was taken to the mortuary for an autopsy)
secondly, the government announced that Ravi had allegedly committed suicide because of “personal reasons,” (again without recording the statement of his family members), which has been trashed by his parents, wife and father-in-law;
Thirdly, the government handed over the probe to the Crime Investigation Department (CID), but the same day, shockingly, it transferred CID Inspector General of Police Pronab Mohanty (segarded as one of the best officers in cracking such sensitive cases) out of the department.
DK Ravi’s parents protesting
The government justified the last decision as “routine”. It is a different subject that transfers of government officers belonging to important departments is a kind of “business” for politicians. But the untimely transfer of Mohanty from the CBI further clouds the issue.
What has been clear over the last few days, is that both Siddaramaiah and Home Minister KJ George are only inviting further trouble with their actions. In the last three days, agitations in the state have spread beyond locations where Ravi served, with people seeking a probe by the CBI.
But the moot question faced by everybody is – why is the government hesitating to handover the case to the CBI when the popular opinion is in favor of it?
Home Minister George came into the limelight because of the business tie-up his family concern (Kelachandra Group) had with real estate developer Embassy Group (which was allegedly being probed by Ravi).
On Tuesday, with George facing the heat, he tried to distance himself from the Embassy Group. The minister went on to claim that his family concern had tied up with Embassy Group for a particular project – Embassy Golf Links – in Bengaluru. It is to be seen how many other ministers make such voluntary disclosures regarding their business interests in realty firms, which were being probed by the officer.
The entry of CBI into Karnataka could make a macro level impact and not everybody will be comfortable answering questions from the sleuths from the central agency.
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Representatives of every firm (real estate, sand business, film producers, theatre owners), probed by Ravi, will undoubtedly be summoned by the CBI for questioning as part of routine investigations. As we have seen in the past, the private sector is never at ease in facing investigation agencies. They do not want their image to be tarnished in public. A lot is at stake for all these companies, including politicians, who have invested in them.
The state government’s actions give out the impression that there is a serious attempt to either cover up the case or derail a possible CBI investigation. Otherwise, the people of the state would not be up in arms against a party that came to power by enjoying the popular support of the masses just two years ago.
Given the speed at which Siddaramaiah became the chief minister, it is clear that the people had very high expectations from the Congress in Karnataka. But in the span of just one year, the Congress government is losing the faith of the people.
Karnataka is among the very few states in India where the CBI cannot take up a probe suo motu. The Karnataka government has to grant special permission to the CBI to probe cases in the state. Though Siddaramaiah appeared confident of handling the pressure being mounted by the Opposition parties, he suffered a major jolt when DK Ravi’s parents staged a demonstration outside Vidhana Soudha seeking a CBI probe into his death.
Siddaramaiah now has no option other than to honour the people’s opinion, moreover that of Ravi’s family. If there is no hidden motive of protecting anybody in the case or concealing the truth and circumstances leading to the death of Ravi under mysterious circumstances, the state government should not waste time in handing over the case to the CBI.
Till it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt that Karnataka IAS officer DK Ravi had indeed committed suicide because of personal reasons as the government now claims, people in the state are justified in their suspicion of foul play because he had taken on the land and builder mafia.
For those who poured out into the streets in anger against his death, this is a typical story of an honest officer biting the dust taking on the mighty and the corrupt. No ordinary effort would convince them because they have heard such stories too often. That the people in Kolar, where he took on the mafia, didn’t want him to be transferred out, and his father’s disclosure that he was under pressure from builders, point to unusual circumstances.
IAS officer DK Ravi. PTI
Although high paying corporate jobs have weaned away a lot of urban civil service aspirants, IAS still has its pride of place in the country. Compared to the past, it’s certainly not the money and perks that attract bright, young minds to the service, but the prestige, power and the possibility of serving the people of the country. After all, it’s the bureaucracy that runs the country. However, increasingly, what awaits them is the plight of Ravi.
The question is, is it really worth the hard work and trouble?
In 1994, the country was shocked when a district magistrate in Gopalganj, an IAS officer, was lynched by a mob participating in a funeral procession of a local gangster. The man who led the attack was an an ex-MP, Anand Mohan. It was little solace to the slain officer’s family that Mohan was convicted to life several years later. Two years earlier, a woman officer in Tamil Nadu, VS Chandralekha, was disfigured in an acid attack because she opposed a state government disinvestment plan. There have also been cases of senior officers facing public humiliation, and even physical threats, from politicians
Although such physical attacks are not very common, IAS officers are constantly under threat and harassment from the politicians they serve. While some have managed the art of ingratiating themselves with at least one political party so that they have a good time when the party is in power, the real upright ones get shunted whenever they try to do their job by the book. Ashok Khemka, the Haryana officer who took on Robert Vadra, has been transferred 45 time in his 20 year old career, while in Tamil Nadu, U Sagayam, who unearthed the Rs 16,000 crore granite scam has been transferred 24 times in 23 years. He also has the unique distinction of being transferred twice within a 48-hour period. In 2014, Rajasthan saw several bulk transfers in a single year.
It’s now public knowledge that these routine transfers are hardly routine, but are meant to shunt out inconvenient officers and to bring in pliant ones. Every state and every political party does it. Those who become heroes in the folklore of people, such as Ravi and Sagayam, end up in miserable lives because these transfers not only kill their spirit, but also disrupt their lives. Khemka, when he spoke out in frustration last year, had said how difficult was his life because of the constant transfers. They also come under direct threat from politicians and their criminal accomplices. For instance, DMK workers had burned the effigy of Sagayam twice because he thwarted distribution of cash for votes during elections.
There is certainly the other side of the story in which officers get cozy with politicians and enrich themselves. All the recent scams during the UPA regime allegedly had senior officers playing lynchpin roles in plundering national wealth. For instance, in the 2G scam, a secretary level IAS officer, who was otherwise known for his efficiency, went to jail with minister A Raja.
If not to share the loot with their masters, is there anything else left for the IAS officers? It takes months of preparation and single-minded pursuit to crack the civil services exam, but what awaits them are straightjackets and bludgeons. Most often, the candidates have to work in a different state, master its language and culture, and live there permanently. If it’s only to serve the interests of the political masters, is it really worth it?
With his engineering degree in computer science, when the discipline was still emerging, and a PhD from TIFR, Khemka could have become one of the top private sector honchos anywhere in the world. Instead, he is still struggling with the burden of 40 transfers and even some charge-sheets. Another IIT topper, Raju Narayanaswamy, has been languishing in minor posts in Kerala for years now whereas his less competent college-mates have made it really big in the private sector.
Reportedly, the service is now attracting more and more rural candidates, possibly because the city elites don’t find it alluring any more. It also makes for inspiring success stories for rural youth who come from challenging backgrounds. Apparently, Ravi also came from a humble family and had a clear vision as to what a civil servant meant for the people in his state. Unfortunately his dreams had to end prematurely.
Politicians and IAS officers may look like strange bedfellows, but in several cases, it works. Wherever it doesn’t work, the officers live a dog’s life. That’s where upright officers end up.
Sharad Yadav, the veteran politician has been a misogynist’s gift that keeps on giving. His latest comments about the complexion of women are hardly that astonishing. Nor is it surprising that he doubled down on his offensive ‘compliments’ of South Indian women despite coming under fire. And when challenged by HRD minister Smriti Irani — who said in Parliament, “I appeal to the gentleman (Yadav) not to make comments on colour of skin of women in this manner. Very wrong message is going.” — immediately and offensively retorted,”I know what you are.”
This is, after all, the man who famously launched an attack on stalking in Parliament by invoking time honoured traditions of Bollywood romance.
HRD minister Smriti Irani and JD(U) leader Sharad Yadav.
“Who amongst us has not followed girls?” asked Yadav, rhetorically no doubt, during discussions on harsher penalties for rape in the aftermath of the Delhi bus gang rape. That Yadav, a politician of long standing, could not distinguish between “following” and stalking was itself noteworthy. But then his equally venerable compatriot launched the “boys will be boys” defence of rapists while arguing against the death penalty.
And a while before that he had lashed out against the bob-cut women when he wanted to argue against the women’s quota bill.
In that light, the Janata Dal (United) leader’s staunch defence of his dusky comments is hardly suprising. “Why is there a song ‘mera gora lele, shyam rang dede’? What did I say that is wrong?” wondered Yadav. Especially because Yadav probably thought that he was paying them a compliment when he said, “The women of south are dark, beautiful, their bodies…their skin …They aren’t made like this here. They know dance..”
The point is that he stands in Parliament and is happy to discuss women as if their main purpose in life is to be Bollywood bimbos – good for dance, a little romantic stalking, eye candy for men. Objectification, in short.
In a land of fairness creams galore, his comments are hardly egregious because they are about complexion. He has millions of Indians for company who care deeply about the complexion of women and plenty of film stars who happily endorse fairness creams and earn enormous amounts of money for doing so.
The point is that even after a woman Prime Minister, a woman President and countless women MPs, Yadav’s remarks (and his doubling down defence indicate) that women are just not taken seriously. Politicians like Yadav think of Parliament as a men’s space and look at the likes of Smriti Irani and Kanimozhi at best with paternalistic dismissal.
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Yadav was actually speaking about the government’s proposal to hike FDI in the insurance sector when he wandered into topics of a different hue. When
protested that this was irrelevant to the topic at hand, she was told, “He was only paying you a compliment.”
Even if that is true, it was a completely needless gratuitous compliment. And Yadav is hardly the only politician who does not realize his misogyny can come in the candy coating of a compliment. The roads in Bihar we were told by Lalu Prasad Yadav would be as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks. Chhattisgarh PWD minister Brijmohan Agarwal followed suit and compared his state’s roads to the Dream Girl in an ad. MP Congress leader Kantilal Bhurya rued that the state’s roads had potholes and bumps like octogenarian BJP leader Babulal Gaur’s cheeks instead of being smooth like — yes you guessed it — Hema Malini’s cheeks.
Bhurya thought he was being witty but hardly realized the actress-turned-MP would hardly appreciate being reduced to a cheek model by her political peers. And all of us remember the Abhijit Mukherjee’s sneering remarks about dented and painted women.
But this is almost worse than downright no-bones khap panchayat style misogyny that demands that women stay at home in the kitchen or not be allowed cell phones. This misogyny is harder to root out because it comes disguised as a compliment. That is why Yadav is doubling down and that is why he learned no lessons from the brouhaha over his stalking remarks. And that’s why other than Derek O’Brien signaling him to stop talking and Kanimozhi protesting he didn’t face an uproar while making the remarks.
At a time when we are up in arms about a BBC documentary on India’s Daughter, it’s sobering to spend a little more time thinking about India’s clueless sons instead. And Yadav’s defence actually invoked Mahatma Gandhi when he said, “There was also a dark man — Mahatma Gandhi who drove the whites (goras) out of the country.”
It’s dark times indeed and perhaps given how his name is taken in vain by the likes of Yadav, Gandhi would not be that displeased with his birthday being dropped from the official roster of holidays like the controversy in Goa right now.
Yadav said not all Parliamentary discussions have to be “serious”. That’s true and his track record suggests Parliament should stop taking Yadav seriously.
That would only be fair for man who is completely in the dark anyway.
The Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow, established by the Uttar Pradesh Government in 1983 must be a top-rated medical facility. Otherwise, when he fell ill at ease, Mulayam Singh Yadav, former chief minister and now an MP, would not have been admitted for even an “overnight stay” earlier this week. Now he has been moved to Medanta, a private hospital in Gurgaon, suspected to be suffering from swine flu.
Isn’t it revealing that politicians who build institutions for the public, and call them top class, do not trust them? Or for that matter, that they are without adequate facilities to meet a patient’s needs? Remember how Vilasrao Deshmukh, twice Maharashtra chief minister, had to be flown to Chennai critically ill with kidney and liver problems in 2012? He had a chance to better the existing facilities in Maharashtra.
File image of Mulayam Singh. PTI Image
Mulayam Singh Yadav was admitted to a private hospital and not even the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi which is touted to be best medicare provider in the state sector and duplicated in other parts of the country. In his recent Budget, Arun Jaitley mentioned the plans to open AIIMS or AIIMS-like institutions in some new regions.
This should raise several questions, one of them being whether what is best for people like us who cannot afford extraordinarily expensive hospitals is just not good enough for the political leaders like Yadav or Deshmukh. The mistrust of the public healthcare system appears to be increasing among the leaders, even as the growth of the private sector and respect for it among them is on the rise.
This is despite the various government hospitals across the country having special sections devoted entirely for the VIPs, which the Times Now has been detailing. It is part of its campaign to end the VIP culture. But it so happens that the VIPs who occupy such facilities in such government hospitals are, relatively speaking, small fry like IAS and IPS officers.
Let me take you back to a conversation I had with VP Singh, whose after his prime ministership was behind him, was a regular visitor to Mumbai. He came with his posse of security men, an entitlement of former PMs, and stayed in the State Guest House when not in a private hospital for his dialysis. When asked why he preferred Mumbai to Delhi, he said, “Dilli ka pani acchha nahi hai (Delhi’s water is not good)”. It was as if the water from the municipality was being used.
My jaw dropped to my knees.
“It is like this”, he explained, “I do not trust the cleanliness of the water used there and hence this visits to Mumbai.”
But you have been in Delhi long enough to persuade the authorities to do things right, what about the people like us, we asked? His bland response was, it takes time to change things.
Things have, indeed changed, but for the worse. And here’s why, as Dr Ravi Bapat, an emeritus professor at Seth GS Medical College and KEM Hospital in Mumbai said on Facebook that he wasn’t surprised to hear of Yadav’s admission in a private hospital. Bapat has dwelt on this tendency in his book, Ward No. 5, KEM, on the steady shift of the VIPs away from public hospitals which should freak out people like us.
He writes:
“Until 1975, all (Maharashtra) ministers and senior government officials would go to the state government-run St George’s Hospital. The municipal big shots and small fries would come to us (KEM); the mayor, the councillors, the municipal officers. Of course, all the best facilities, the most modern equipment and the best doctors of the time were found in these general ‘public’ hospitals.”
And then there was a well-aimed poke at the changing political system, its values and disdain for public hospitals:
“There were special rooms reserved for the VIPs and VVIPs. Also there were few ‘five star’ hospitals then. Or maybe, the kind of money they charge wasn’t available with the politicians of yore. As long as the politicians and officials went to the general hospitals, they were attentive about what was happening there.
“Now things have changed. The workers come to the general hospitals, the leaders go to private nursing homes and the ministers go only to the most expensive, up-market, exclusive five-star places. Central government ministers go abroad. General hospitals have therefore been ignored by the rulers of the land. The same is true about senior bureaucrats and other influential officials Unless and until these people frequent, have faith in and respect general hospitals, the specialists, the equipment and the facilities, they will not be used by the common man without prejudice. They will always be suspect.”
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Dr Bapat, who could have worked in any of the private sector hospitals that were coming up, swore he would stay only with public hospitals and has seen it all. The thing is, even as he remains in that government sector, he has been consulted by decision-making politicians who have been treated in posh private hospitals. But there may be a small flaw in his argument about them not having had money to pay the bills of these hospitals. Chances are, they are seldom billed these days, and if billed, they may remain unpaid.
The last time an Asian country demonstrated collective national outrage against a foreign Television channel was in 2011 when UK’s Channel 4 produced a ground-breaking documentary on the alleged war crimes and human rights violations in Sri Lanka. Since March 4, a much bigger and more democratic India has been gripped by similar nationalistic fever because of a documentary of another public funded UK channel, BBC 4.
Sri Lanka saw an imperial conspiracy in the Channel 4 film, “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”, to scuttle its democracy and the glory of its fight against terrorism, while India thought the BBC 4 documentary, “India’s daughter”, on the infamous 2012 Delhi gang-rape, was a conspiracy to malign the country. Except a handful of moderate voices, Indian parliament reverberated in collective outrage.
YouTube screengrab.
The film, despite the central government’s ban, made into Indian homes and a few lakhs have reportedly watched it. Was it a conspiracy to tarnish India’s image, particularly when it’s inching towards an 8 percent growth or was it a statement of plain truths to mobilise public opinion? Did it break Indian laws by carrying classified information?
Post the YouTube premiere of the film, the country seems to be divided now. Advocates of free-speech and human rights want the film to be screened so that people know what’s in it while politicians want to block it.
Indians should be happy that BBC 4 made and screened this film because it shamed the country just as the way Channel 4 shamed Sri Lanka. Till the screening of the “Killing Fields”, the international community didn’t have an emotional connect with the victims of the alleged war crimes in the island nation although the UN had made the same startling revelations through statistics. The film changed the Sri Lankan cabal’s image forever and led to concerted action by the international community. The message of the film wasn’t any different from the UN report, but the medium told the story differently.
The same thing is happening with “India’s Daughter” as well. It’s no secret that India has a horrible record of crime against women and that the country is the fourth most dangerous place for women in the world. Rape is one of the most common crimes against women in India and the UN human rights chief had called it a national problem.
Still, Home Minster Rajnath Singh and parliamentarians such as Jaya Bachan are hurt by the documentary, which shows nothing more than what has been said a thousand times before. The only difference, perhaps, is that the rape convict and his lawyers are speaking on camera for the first time, but what they are mouthing is the same anti-women attitude that researchers have found among Indian men time and again.
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They are not not saying anything different from what anti-women vigilantes such as Sri Ram Sena and religious bigots regularly say on Indian media – women are the embodiment of family honour and it’s their responsibility to protect it. The convict is saying that good girls should not be on the streets at night and one of the lawyers insist that he will not mind killing his daughter if she violates family honour. India’s record of rapes and honour killings corroborate their regressive views.
By feigning wounded prestige and suspecting conspiracy, what the government, the parliamentarians, politicians and the Indian elite admit to is their thin skin to international criticism even while being thick-skinned to the chilling reality at home. They showed the same shock and rage when VS Naipaul wrote about the “the children, the dirt, the disease, the cries of bakshish, the hawkers, the touts…” in 1964 in An Area of Darkness. He wrote how revulsed he was by the poor Indians defecating everywhere while the rich ones were busy miming the British. Promptly, India had banned the book. Even half a century later, nothing much has changed and half of Indians still defecate in the open and a third of the population are destitute. If one were to make a documentary on Indian poverty and filth, the government will react with the same outrage because they are the ones who suffer of an image problem. Obviously, outrage is an easier response than transformative action.
The elite also has a reason to get outraged because class is what trumps their poor Indianness in front of their international peers, either in their drawing rooms or when they are abroad. A glossy visage of glass, steel and polish is what they will like to present their country as, not as shit-holes or as dens of rapists. Films such as “India’s Daughter” dents their ego just like an epidemic at home makes them vulnerable to airport screenings. The neb-nationalistic Indian diaspora too has the same existential crisis, because it gives the chavs another opportunity to ridicule them. No wonder the urban elite and the diaspora prefer Karan Johar to Anurag Kashyap and Shah Rukh Khan to Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
Ordinary Indians should see through this disingenuousness of the Indian politicians and the elite. India will do better if some of our parliamentarians stop being facetious when faced with issues such as a third of Parliament seats for women and cry foul when somebody holds a mirror to them. Films such as “India Daughter” are important to protect us from the tyranny of the ruling class and the elites. It’s exactly the same way we learn how Saudi Arabia is no better than a Taliban ruled Afghanistan and how democratic movements are crushed by authoritarian rulers even as they make deals in first world capitals.
For the voiceless, naming and shaming is an effective tool of protection and possible reparation. If India is genuinely hurt, let it stop behaving like an ostrich. And don’t make a big deal out of featuring criminals in media; they have been stars in Pulitzer winning journalism.
Hours before External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj’s arrival in Colombo on Friday and a week before Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Sri Lanka (13-14 March), the government of Maithripala Sirisena has taken the bold decision of suspending a $1.5 billion Chinese real estate project in Colombo.
The Sirisena government has walked the talk and it’s a high stake foreign policy gamble by his government. Not many countries have rebuffed China so strongly and that too within two months after Sirisena stunned the world by winning the 8 January presidential elections.
Sirisena has moved in quickly to brace himself up for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka as on Thursday he was made Chairman of Sri Lanka’s largest party Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) which has 126 MPs in the 225-member Sri Lankan parliament. Interestingly, Sirisena had defected from the SLFP just before the presidential election to become the joint opposition candidate.
Modi with Sirisena. PIB image
Needless to say, this political move of Sirisena also has adverse implications for China as it is meant to keep former president Mahinda Rajapaksa out. Rajapaksa was a strong supporter of China and the Sri Lankan opposition parties had repeatedly questioned his pro-China policies which were also at the expense of India’s strategic interests in the island nation.
Swaraj’s two-day visit to Sri Lanka (6-7 March) will set the stage for PM Modi’s visit to this important neighbour. It will be the first time that an Indian Prime Minister will be visiting Sri Lanka in over 25 years. Apart from having structured talks with her Sri Lankan counterpart Mangala Samaraweera, Swaraj will also be meeting Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as well as Sirisena, and brief her Sri Lankan interlocutors about the Indian preparations for the extremely significant upcoming visit of PM Modi.
The last prime ministerial visit from India to Sri Lanka was way back in 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi had visited the island nation. But that visit triggered a growing India-Sri Lanka divide as India got sucked into the cesspool of Sri Lanka’s civil war and Rajiv Gandhi’s policies pitted India against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Just about four years later, Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.
Modi’s upcoming Sri Lanka visit will have many firsts. He will be visiting multiple Sri Lankan cities and will be the first Indian PM to visit Jaffna which was a de facto capital of the LTTE till the rebel group was militarily defeated by Sri Lankan armed forces in May 2009.
Modi will also be the fourth Indian Prime Minister to address Sri Lankan parliament, an honour that his predecessors like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai had. Desai was the last India PM to have addressed the Sri Lankan parliament way back in 1979.
Sri Lanka’s ancient capital Anuradhapura, a stronghold of Buddhists, is also on PM Modi’s itinerary. He is also likely to visit Kandy and inspect ongoing Indian housing projects there.
China will obviously be the elephant in the room as India and Sri Lanka engage with one another at top political levels in the coming days. China has been wooing dozens of Indian Ocean and Asia Pacific littoral states for its $40 billion Maritime Silk Road, which is Beijing’s ambitious strategic project aimed at linking China with to-be-constructed multiple communication lines in Indian Ocean Region and Asia Pacific.
India is wary of the Chinese MSR project and Sri Lanka is a key country for China in implementing its MSR project. However, the Sri Lankan government’s decision to suspend the $1.5 billion Chinese project in Colombo and Sirisena’s emergence as top leader of SLFP have stopped the Chinese juggernaut.
Though the Sirisena government has only suspended the Chinese on environmental grounds and not cancelled it outright, the move may trigger a cascade and may embolden other small nations to take on China. Beijing will inevitably be using its immense diplomatic and economic clout to stem the rot here and now and not allow it to become a trend.
On India’s part, New Delhi will be keen to see that the Sirisena government does not lose momentum in its current policies of purging the Chinese influence in Sri Lanka which had become a major cause of worry for the Indian strategic establishment.This will be the main strategic template for India-Sri Lanka engagements in the coming days and months. The strategic competition between the Chinese Dragon and Indian Elephant has begun in right earnest in Sri Lanka.
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