Shefali Das, a commercial sex worker in India, hopes that legalization will also bring safer working conditions for women in the trade, including protections against harassment from clients and law enforcement officers. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 8 2015 (IPS)

Although forced prostitution and trafficking of women remains a huge challenge in India, health experts, policy-makers and legal advocates say that most of the country’s estimated four million commercial sex workers join the trade of their own free will.

While finding alternative employment and providing economic and social safety nets to poor women as a means of diverting them away from the sex trade, advocates say that a more important step is legalizing the industry as a first step to making it a safer, healthier occupation.

India’s Four Million Sex Workers Demand Equal Labour Rights from IPS News on Vimeo.

Scores of women in India are downloading and using mobile ‘safety apps’ as a way of guarding against rape. Credit: vgrigas/CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Nov 14 2014 (IPS)

It was 9:45 pm when 23-year-old Manira Chaudhury, a final-year Master’s student in New Delhi, who was traveling home in a rickshaw, pressed a button on her smart phone that sent out emergency alerts to two of her closest friends.

Immediately, two frantic calls followed.

“I am safe,” Chaudhury assured her distressed friends. “I was just checking that the app works.”

She uses VithU, a mobile phone app developed by Channel V, which was launched in November last year in India in the aftermath of the horrific rape-murder of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus in the Indian capital on Dec. 16, 2012.

The smart phone app is activated by tapping twice on an icon on the screen, which instantly sends the following message to pre-loaded emergency contacts: ‘I am in danger. I need help. Please follow my location’, along with details of the sender’s whereabouts.

“Fortunately I have never faced a situation where I felt the need to use it,” Chaudhury tells IPS. “But I think it is important to have it. I don’t think girls should have to live in constant fear of an attack but at the same time we cannot live in denial.

“We know bad things are happening out there and it’s wise to take certain precautions,” she explains.

After ‘Nirbhaya’

"I don’t think girls should have to live in constant fear of an attack but at the same time we cannot live in denial. We know bad things are happening out there and it’s wise to take certain precautions." -- Manira Chaudhury, a final-year Master’s student in New Delhi
While dime-a-dozen safety apps are now available in India, mostly launched by mobile phone companies and other private groups, the Government of India plans to launch a safety app of its own later this month, as an auxiliary service to the existing 181 helpline for women, which was started after the fatal Delhi bus rape.

“This new app will also facilitate pre-registering of crimes based on perceived threats,” says Khadijah Faruqui, a women’s rights activist and human rights lawyer who is heading the 181 Helpline.

Safety apps are just one of many responses to the 2012 gang rape, which sparked massive protests around this country of 1.2 billion, with scores of people taking to the streets to demand tougher laws, increased security measures, sensitization of the police force and stronger government action to tackle sexual violence against women.

Lawmakers and politicians responded to the tragedy by pushing out the Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, 2013, which incorporates various sexual crimes into the penal code, and promises stiffer penalties for offenses such as stalking, voyeurism or harassment.

The government also established six new fast-track courts to hear rape cases, and experts say there has been an explosion in public debate about women’s safety.

Still, millions of women continue to live in fear, while the frequency and brutality of rapes appears unchanged despite tougher laws.

The latest figures provided by India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in 2012 point to 24,923 rapes per year, while police reports from various cities show an alarming rise in assaults in 2013-2014.

India’s financial hub, Mumbai, which used to be considered a safe place for women, witnessed a 43-percent rise in the number of reported rapes this year compared to the previous year, according to the city’s police.

Meanwhile, the capital city saw an alarming five-fold rise in sexual assaults in 2013, police records say.

An abundance of apps

Against this backdrop, many women have welcomed the rise in innovative solutions to the constant threat of sexual violence.

For instance, Microsoft India recently released the safety application called ‘Guardian’ for Windows phones, which allows users to select a ‘track me’ feature that enables friends and family to follow the person in real-time using cloud services, among others.

The app also comes with an SOS alert function and a feature that allows the user to record evidence of an attack.

According to Microsoft-IT India Managing Director Raj Biyani, “It is a robust personal security app with more safety features and capabilities than any other comparable app available to Indian smart phone users today.”

Then there is Circle of 6, which won the 2011 Apps Against Abuse challenge sponsored by the Obama Administration and works by offering users a number of icons that send the user’s selected ‘circle’ messages for help, interruption, or advice.

Originally designed to guard against date rapes in the United States, the app’s developers saw a 1,000-percent rise in the number of downloads in India after the Nirbhaya tragedy, prompting them to translate the app into Hindi and tailor it to fit the Indian context.

According to Circle of 6–New Delhi, the app has been programmed in both English and Hindi and it has been designed in a gender-neutral manner.

Says Nancy Schwartzman, a representative of the team who created Circle of 6, “Administrations should make Circle of 6 a priority and should invest in the future of safety with this technology. Circle of 6 is […] a smart and efficient way to centralize both social and emergency communications.”

The app creators said the hotlines have been pre-programmed so that they are in sync with the 24/7 women’s hotline of New Delhi and the women counseling and support service run by the NGO Jagori.

A user of the app, who feels uneasy to contact the police, can also reach out to the Lawyer’s Collective, a leading public interest legal service provider.

Government gets on board

Taking its cue from private initiatives by IT firms and advocacy groups, the government is now pouring resources into the issue of women’s safety.

Under former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the finance ministry approved proposals aimed at streamlining police, mobile and legal services in the country, resulting in the creation of a fund worth one trillion rupees (about 16 billion dollars) to be used exclusively on projects aimed at enhancing women’s safety.

For example, a proposal by the ministry of home affairs, designed in consultation with the ministry of information technology, calls for integration of the police administration with the mobile phone network to rapidly trace and respond to distress calls.

The ministry of information technology also plans to issue instructions to all mobile phone manufacturers to introduce a mandatory SOS alert button to all handsets.

The scheme will be launched in 157 cities in two phases.

Yet another project – known in its initial stage as ‘design and development of an affordable electronic personal safety device’ – being undertaken by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) aims to roll out a self-contained safety system in the form of a wristwatch.

India’s ministry of road transport and highways has proposed a scheme that will cover 32 towns, each with a population of over one million people, where public transportation vehicles will be fitted with GPS tracking devices to enhance law enforcement’s ability to respond to attacks.

Still, an app alone cannot solve the massive problem of violence against women in India, with an average of 57 cases of rape reported every day, according to an analysis of government data by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI).

According to Jasmeen Patheja, founder of a student-led project at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore known as Blank Noise, the “solution is not in the app itself, but its function and role and space for intervention.”

But Rimi B. Chatterjee, a writer and activist based in Kolkata who also teaches English in the prestigious Jadavpur University, which is leading a viral protest against the molestation of a girl student on campus in September this year, is skeptical about the effectiveness of the apps.

“I am personally not sure about their efficacy and I fear that they can actually be launched by companies to bank on the insecurity of women to make money. So I have never advised my students to use them,” says Chatterjee.

“The solution to women’s safety is in the counselling and training of men and not in development of apps. The problem is not with the women, it lies with men and their mindset, as young men are learning to disrespect women from their seniors,” she says.

However, according to Faruqui, an app like the one to be launched in connection with the 181 Helpline on Nov. 25, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the aim will be to address the gaps in the existing apps and ensure that a woman in distress can find timely assistance.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Indian farmer points to his modest plot of farmland, which no longer yields enough to feed his family. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 6 2014 (IPS)

Ramanjareyulu, a 55-year-old farmer from the southern India state of Andhra Pradesh, has been struggling to find his feet ever since inadequate rainfall dealt a blow to his harvest of groundnut and red gram (a pulse crop that grows primarily in India).

A man who once sustained his family of five off his small patch of farmland, Ramanjareyulu now finds himself in abject poverty, and is considering joining a massive exodus of farmers heading for the big cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad in the hopes of finding work as unskilled labourers.

“I don’t know why nature is so unkind to us,” the desperate farmer told IPS.

Dr. Y. V. Malla Reddy, director of the Bangalore-based Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre, which works with farmers in the region, has the answer to that question and is quick to articulate it: climate change.

"How do we adapt to disasters like [...] flash floods, to drought, to unseasonal rains, to multiple cyclones - all of which occurred in 2013-2014?" -- Chandra Bhusan, deputy director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment
“The farmers are now living in dire straits,” he told IPS. “Of the nearly 700,000 farmers in Anantapur [the largest district in Andhra Pradesh], 500,000 are in this situation due to a drastic reduction in the number of rainy days per year.”

All across India, similar warning signs indicate that the country is on a dangerous trajectory. From the disappearing Sundarbans (the largest single bloc of mangrove forest in the world situated in the Bay of Bengal), to the vast tracts of parched farmland in southern, western and northern India, to the plight of all those caught in the disaster-struck Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, extreme weather is taking its toll.

With carbon emissions increasing by 7.7 percent in 2012 – and CO2 emissions from coal plants shooting up by 10.2 percent that same year – the country seems to be contributing towards its own demise.

And the “worst is yet to come”, according to a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that the highly fertile Indo-Gangetic plains are under threat of a significant reduction in wheat yields.

Currently the area produces 90 million tons of grain annually, accounting for nearly 15 percent of global wheat production, but projections indicate a nearly 51 percent decrease in the highest yielding areas due to hotter temperatures.

Such a scenario could be disastrous for the roughly 200 million residents of the plains, whose food intake is dependent on harvests, experts say.

India is also one of the 27 countries that are “most vulnerable” to sea level rise caused by global warming.

According to the Geological Survey of India, a one-metre rise in sea level is expected to inundate about 1,000 square kilometres of the Sundarbans delta.

Nearly half of the 102 islands that comprise the U.N.-protected biosphere reserve have become uninhabitable due to rising seas and coastal erosion over the last four decades.

About a fifth of the southern part of this delta complex, the heart of a major tiger reserve, is already submerged. At the current rate of erosion, scientists are predicting a loss of 15 percent of farmlands and a further 250 square km of the national park.

Increased soil salinity has resulted in miserable agricultural yields and thousands of climate refugees.

Another major red flag for India was last year’s Uttarakhand tragedy, when cloudbursts and glacial leaks caused a flash flood that swept away thousands of pilgrims and tourists in the northern state in what scientists called a ‘Himalayan tsunami’.

International legislation

Against this backdrop, Indian lawmakers are joining some 500 delegates descending on Mexico City on Jun. 6-8 for the second World Summit of Legislators organised by GLOBE International for the purpose of drafting an international climate agreement centered on national legislation.

India Ready for ‘Robust’ Stand on Climate Change from IPS News on Vimeo.

According to Pranav Chandan Sinha, director of GLOBE India, the Indian public is waking up to the realities of climate change, thus pushing the government to seek a balance between development and environmental protection.

Sinha told IPS the new government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has an absolute majority in parliament, is likely to pursue sustainable development goals, in line with GLOBE International’s emphasis on the importance of wealth accounting, valuation of ecosystem services and legislative reforms.

Ever since the Uttarakhand disaster, for instance, GLOBE India has been engaging legislators from various states, particularly in the north, on the need for legislative reforms and combined efforts to tackle climate change.

The purpose of forums like the summit currently underway in Mexico “is not only to educate but to demystify international negotiations on environment, sustainability and climate change and communicate them at the national and state level,” Jayanat Chaudhary, former Indian parliament member and founder of GLOBE India, told IPS.

Although these meetings cannot hope to generate binding action, they serve to inform lawmakers who can push their respective governments to take a more robust stand on issues like emissions targets, said Chandra Bhusan, deputy director-general of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading green pressure group.

Bhusan says India has to meet multiple challenges on the climate change front, particularly due to the centralisation of power that stymies action on a local level.

“One challenge is adaptation itself,” he told IPS. “How do we adapt to disasters like the Uttarakhand flash floods, to drought, to unseasonal rains, to multiple cyclones – all of which occurred in 2013-2014. This has been a period of extreme weather and we have to adapt to the variability,” he asserted.

“There is an energy challenge too. About 800 million people in India still cook on cow dung and firewood stoves. So we need clean energy for all and we cannot say we will not do anything,” Bhusan added.

Still, the forecast is not entirely bleak, with various local governments taking some positive steps towards accountability and sustainability.

Uttarakhand, for instance, recently became the first state in India to start tabulating its gross environment product (GEP) – a measure of the health of the state’s natural resources – to be released annually alongside its GDP figures.

In partnership with Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Economic Systems (WAVES), the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh has begun tabulating costs of timber, water and minerals.

A 2013 report entitled Green National Accounts in India also spells out the Union Government’s plans to include the value of natural resources in its annual economic calculations.

Green activists say these positive steps give India a stronger voice in the international arena, which it should use to press polluting western nations for a binding agreement on carbon emissions.

(END)

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

As hundreds of legislators descend on Mexico City for the second GLOBE Summit, slated to run from Jun. 6-8, many rising nations are taking stock of their national policies in relation to climate change and global warming.

As one of the leading emitters of greenhouse gases, India is preparing itself for a predicted onslaught of climate-related catastrophes in the coming years. Already it is one of the 27 countries deemed “most vulnerable” to sea-level rise, according to the Geological Survey of India.

Last year the South Asian nation saw a 7.7 percent increase in carbon emissions, with emissions from coal growing by a staggering 10.2 percent, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project.

With a newly elected government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India is poised to play a leading role in international climate talks, and will be testing the waters at the World Legislators Summit currently underway in Mexico.

India Ready for ‘Robust’ Stand on Climate Change from IPS News on Vimeo.

The Indian Defence Force rescues a pilgrim after the floods in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

On the outskirts of Rudraprayag, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand whose many temples draw tourists and Hindu pilgrims with magnetic force, visitors often stop for a meal at a popular hotel built right on the river Alakananda.

One of the two head streams of the Ganga, the holy lifeline of India that gushes from the Gomukh snout of the massive Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas, Alakananda is revered as a goddess.

A night in the hotel is cheap, and budget tourists from home and abroad come here for the breathtaking view from balconies overlooking the mountains and glaciers that comprise 90 percent of the state.

As idyllic as it sounds, this hotel unwittingly played a role in one of the worst natural disasters the state has ever seen when, on Jun. 15, flash floods caused by a cloudburst and glacial leaks swept thousands of unsuspecting pilgrims away in what scientists are now referring to as a ‘Himalayan tsunami’.

The state’s chief minister said Thursday that the death toll could exceed 1,000, with 300 bodies found just this morning buried beneath silt beside the largest temple in the town of Kedarnath.

Countless tourists were trapped for days in pitiable conditions until the Indian Defence Force came to their rescue in one aerial sortie after another.

Thousands are still missing and many towns and pilgrimage sites remain inaccessible, as the raging waters carried away whole strips of roads, along with homes, shops and hapless victims.

As the government scrambles to complete a haphazard rescue operation, environmentalists are taking a step back, pointing out that the disaster was not simply a freak natural hazard but a result of unbridled development in the Land of the Gods.

Hydropower projects 

For years, a booming tourist industry, made possible by thousands of illegally constructed guesthouses, has spawned massive hydroelectric power projects on the rivers, while other infrastructure development designed to accommodate hoards of visitors has proceeded at a steady clip, putting undue stress on this fragile ecological zone.

Scientists also say the damming of the Ganga, riverbed encroachment and mining activities are wreaking havoc on the region.

“There (have been) no credible environmental or social impact assessments for hundreds of projects,” Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, tells IPS.

According to Mallika Bhanot, member of Ganga Ahvaan, a public forum to save the holy river, about 244 dams are being constructed along the water channel, while only three were cancelled after a 100-km stretch, from the glacial mouth of Gomukh to Uttarkashi town, was declared an eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) in December 2012.

“Even that notification by the government in New Delhi has been opposed by the Uttarakhand government,” Bhanot tells IPS, despite the fact that it was designed after a thorough assessment of the topography, and with the intention of preserving human lives in a landslide-prone zone.

Frightening footage of the recent disaster captured multi-storey buildings collapsing into the river like a pack of cards, while cars, bridges and shops were easily swept into the vortex. Activists say all of this could have been prevented if the state government had heeded the call to cease construction and encroachment on the riverbed.

The New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has also traced the link between the disaster and the manner in which development has been carried out in this unique region.

Acknowledging the economic importance of energy generation, CSE Director-General Sunita Narain questions whether or not “the Central or state government ever considered the cumulative impact of the hydropower projects on the rivers and the mountains.”

“Currently, there are roughly 70 projects built or (slated to be built) on the Ganga, expected to generate some 10,000 megawatts (MW) of power,” she told IPS.

She referred to this model as “bumper to bumper development”, with one project immediately following another.

Diversion channels and reservoirs will affect 80 percent of the Bhagirathi, the Ganga’s second head stream, and 65 percent of the Alakananda, Narain stressed. During the dry season, large stretches of the river will be completely dry.

Such activities, she said, are fantastically lucrative for developers, making it next to impossible for small environmental groups to have their voices heard.

“There is a strong construction lobby in Uttarakhand,” said Bhanot, adding that many politicians’ election funds come directly from hydropower projects.

Green alternatives abound, including electricity generation using smoke from burning pine needles to propel turbines; biomass; or mini hydro plants, capable of generating two MW of power. But these, less profitable schemes do not sit well with corporations.

Narain says this particular disaster cannot be attributed solely to climate change, but the growing trend of intense and extreme weather events – particularly a heavier, more unpredictable monsoon – is undeniable.

With climate change widely acknowledged to be the result of the burning of fossil fuels and emission of excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is clear that the ongoing tragedy is human-induced, Thakkar said.

The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) that poured down the mountains bringing boulders and rocks is just another sign that the delicate balance of nature’s forces has been disrupted – and Uttarakhand is paying the price.

Regulation required

Tourism may form the backbone of Uttarakhand’s economy, but it is now clear that visitors and pilgrims number too many: according to government data, 42.2 million domestic tourists and 227,000 foreigners flocked to Uttarakhand in 2012.

Those numbers are expected to double by 2017, with the state gearing up to welcome 77.7 million domestic travelers and nearly 400,000 foreigners.

These arrivals will be accompanied not only by increased human waste and pollution from transport, but also by endless construction of hotels and the justification of ever more mega development projects.

Experts like Thakkar insist that the sector be regulated based on a proper scientific assessment of the region.

This will not be easy, since tourism brings much-needed revenue to the state. The government estimates that each tourist spends an average of 38 dollars a day, much of which goes directly to the government via entrance fees for religious sites.

But while this income from “religious and cultural tourism is a lifeline for many, it will not be sustainable…(unless) all development activities take into account the vulnerability of the area,” Thakkar says.

The youngest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas are already prone to erosion, landslides and seismic activity.

“Development cannot come at the cost of the environment in any region of the country; but particularly not in the Himalayas,” Narain stressed.

An Adivasi tribesperson walks down a forest path in India’s Chhattisgarh state. Credit: Virppi Venell/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, May 31 2013 (IPS)

They chopped down trees and used them to barricade the road, then retreated into the dense forests of the remote Sukma district, located in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, to await their quarry.

When the convoy bearing leaders of India’s ruling Congress Party finally came chugging along the road, the rebels activated a landmine that sent cars and people flying in all directions.

Not content to trust the force of the explosion, male and female cadres reportedly belonging to Maoist guerilla groups emerged from the trees and used AK-47s to gun down 24 people who comprise the “top brass” of the Party’s Chhattisgarh leadership.

In doing so the rebels sent a clear message to this country of 1.2 billion people on May 26: the Maoists rebels, thought to number some 22,000, are far from being a spent force.

A decline in attacks in resource-rich eastern and central states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha and Chhattisgarh – where armed groups now under the umbrella of the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) have been operating since the early 1990s – as well as reports of “successful” military operations against the rebels, had, in the last two years, turned the spotlight away from what mainstream media refers to as “India’s Maoist menace.”

But this latest ambush in the southern Bastar region of Chhattisgarh – the rebels’ most politically significant attack in over twenty years – has once more drawn attention to what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has labelled the “greatest threat to India’s national security”, and raised questions about the government’s plans to end a conflict that has resulted in 8,000 deaths in the last decade.

Saturday’s attack is thought to have been carried out by some 500 guerillas who fired bullets and lobbed handmade explosives at the armoured vehicles, killing Congress Party State Chief Nand Kumar Patel, his son Dinesh Patel and Mahendra Karma, mastermind of the anti-Maoist civilian militia movement known as the “Salwa Judum” (Purification Hunt).

When Karma’s lifeless, bullet-ridden body slumped to the ground, eyewitnesses say women cadres danced in celebration, while one rebel stabbed him with a bayonet.

Experts on the conflict have somberly observed that this brutal attack was a tragic reflection of Karma’s Judum, through which thousands of local vigilantes were unleashed into a 40,000-square-kilometre area of tribal forested lands with guns and the license to kill.

What government policy?

Security experts say that unless the government firms up its “Maoist policy”, unresolved issues will continue to fester and erupt in bloodbaths similar to this one.

As Ajai Sahni, counter-terrorism expert at the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, told IPS: “There are no flaws in the government’s policy, because there is no policy to deal with Maoists in the first place.”

One day the government talks of “developing” tribal areas where the Maoists gained ground as a result of grinding poverty – in fact, 90 percent of some 1.4 million people in the Bastar region live below the poverty line – and on the second day they talk of “operations” against the rebels, he said.

“Where is the policy? All this talk of ‘holistic’ and ‘multi-pronged’ approaches is just garbage.”

He believes the answer lies in gathering intelligence and using it to target the Maoist leadership, “instead of continually massacring ordinary Maoist cadre.”

According to the expert, human rights violations by policemen in Maoist areas are a result of poor training, and a flawed policy of wantonly attacking foot soldiers.

Enough is known about the rebels’ command structure – including its politburo and current general secretary, Muppala Lakshmana Rao, who is known as Ganapathy – to attack the highest decision-making body, he said.

He also stressed that the government must never underestimate the Maoists’ capabilities.

“Even while the Indian home secretary announces to a parliamentary committee that security forces are charging Maoists, the home minister is warning the public that Maoists are arming themselves with sophisticated weaponry,” he said.

These mixed messages have allowed rebels to seize upon unsuspecting victims, like the convoy of Congress Party members on May 26.

“This incident was served to them on a platter. They have been after this man (Karma) for years, yet the high-profile ‘yatra’ (political procession) had minimal security.”

His is not an opinion that many in the sphere of national security share.

P V Ramana, an expert on the Maoist insurgency at the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in New Delhi, told IPS that the government’s policy is sound, and requires only “better implementation and monitoring.”

Rooting out an armed force is not like using a vending machine to get an instant cup of coffee, he said. It requires patience, and an understanding that incidents similar to the May 26 attack are to be expected and must not cause “panic” and chaos.

Since 2009, the government has dispatched about 100,000 paramilitary troopers and policemen to fight the rebels.

The root of the problem

Other observers say the “disastrous” results of state-sanctioned policies have given the Maoists more legitimacy.

Blood spilled in the Purification Hunt has created fertile ground for Maoists to recruit angry and impoverished villagers into their ranks.

According to filmmaker Soumitra Dastidar, creator of the documentary ‘Journey Through Camera: My Days with Maoist Guerrillas’, “Between 2004 and 2008, at least 600 villages were torched, tribal people were killed and women were tortured.

“Many were whisked away into camps” in the name of stamping out the Maoist threat, Dastidar tells IPS.

During one such operation, writes Sudeep Chakrawarti in the ‘Hindustan Times’, over 50,000 tribal folk were “herded into little more than concentration camps in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada (South Bastar) district.”

Despite efforts by the Indian Supreme Court to disband the operation in 2008 due to its “illegal” practice of arming civilians to kill at random, various branches of the Judum continue to operate throughout the Bastar region.

Flawed government policies on forests and tribal rights have also fuelled support for Maoists.

Subhash Chakma, director of the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), pointed out that when the Maoists fled into the forests – after their “caste wars” in lower caste states like Bihar were crushed – they walked straight into long-standing disputes between forest-dwellers and forest officials.

With the former dependent on forest produce to sustain a modest way of life and the latter, along with middlemen, anxious to secure profits in an informal timber trade, the forests were already the site of a major crackdown on tribal peoples, with officials “empowered to make indiscriminate arrests,” Chakma told IPS.

Since fear of the rebels now keeps many officials and middlemen at bay, the Maoists have won the sympathies of many tribal villagers here, he said, hastening to add that tribal people often end up as pawns in the war between Maoists and government forces.

Others say the conflict will not end until the government reconciles the enourmous mineral wealth buried in these forests with the poverty of forest dwellers.

According to Sudha Bharadwaj, a human rights lawyer and general secretary of the Chhattisgarh-based People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), “If you overlay maps of forests, of adivasi villages, of minerals – you’ll find almost perfect overlap.

“This state (Chhattisgarh)…holds 19 percent of India’s iron ore and 11 percent of the coal, bauxite (and) limestone,” she said.

In the last decade 26,000 acres of agricultural land have been swallowed up by mining projects and industrial plants.

“Where are the people to go?” she asked, indicating that if the government does not attend to these outstanding issues, the Maoist threat will continue to hover like a dark shadow over the world’s “largest democracy.”

Little girls play outside in India's West Bengal state. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, May 21 2013 (IPS)

When a five-year-old was rescued from the basement of a building in the eastern part of India’s capital, New Delhi, the doctors treating her were horrified to find the little girl had not only been raped by two men several times, but the perpetrators had also inflicted severe perineal injuries by inserting foreign objects into her body.

Tied to a bed for nearly two days, the girl was raped and brutalised by a young neighbour and his friend, even while the police ignored her parents’ repeated requests to trace their missing child.

“Violence against a child, even if it occurs inside (his or her) own home, must not be seen as a private issue. It is violence and it is a public issue." -- Shantha Sinha
“We pleaded with the police. We called the (hotlines). But they did not act instantly and when she was rescued in such a horrible state, cops offered me some money to keep quiet and said I am fortunate that she is still alive,” the girl’s father told IPS.

Coming after a season of anti-rape protests in New Delhi over last December’s fatal gang-rape of a young medical student inside a bus, this latest incident, coupled with police inaction, triggered fresh agitation in the national capital.

In the same month, another five-year-old girl in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh succumbed to her injuries after enduring similarly unspeakable horrors.

Stories of rape and abuse, often involving fatalities, are pouring in every day now, with the latest figures showing that child rapes in India have risen 336 percent between 2001 and 2011.

Human rights activists lament that these figures represent only reported cases, while the actual number may be much higher.

Many of these rapes occur in the confines of the victim’s own household, sometimes by family members or other known assailants, other times by unknown attackers.

According to a recent report by the New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), sexual offences against children in India have reached an “epidemic proportion”.

The 56-page report, citing National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) statistics, stated that rape cases increased from 2,113 cases in 2001 to 7,112 cases in 2011, with a total of 48,338 cases in that period.

ACHR Director Suhas Chakma told IPS these numbers represent “only the tip of the iceberg, as the large majority of child rape cases are not reported to the police”, while other forms of sexual assault against children pass largely under the radar of the authorities.

Chakma attributes the increase partly to the “tremendous rural-urban migration” of the last 15 years that has resulted in a clash of cultures, as migrant workers from India’s remote agricultural belts come face to face with an urban lifestyle.

“Pornography is now at everyone’s fingertips,” he noted, adding that India’s socio-economic upheaval of the last decade and a half have “impacted behaviours”.

The state of Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of child rapes, with 9,465 cases from 2001 to 2011; the western state Maharashtra came a close second, with 6,868 cases; while Uttar Pradesh, located on the northern border, reported 5,949 cases.

The report found that every single Indian state reported high numbers and experienced an increase in cases.

Not a private matter

When it comes to child abuse, said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of India’s National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), there cannot be any distinction between private and public space.

“Violence against a child, even if it occurs inside (his or her) own home, must not be seen as a private issue. It is violence and it is a public issue,” Sinha told IPS.

She stressed the need for citizens to report as many details as possible about such cases to the proper authorities – maintaining anonymity if necessary – such as the countrywide Child Welfare Committee (CWC).

Homes of horror

According to the ACHR, rape is especially rampant in juvenile homes established under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act of 2000.

The government of India supports at least 733 juvenile homes under the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) of the ministry of women and child development; but government oversight has been unable to stem abuse.

“All juvenile homes are centres of sexual abuse,” said Chakma. “There is no supervision whatsoever and the offenders are mostly staff members.”

He alleged that the government has failed to establish proper “inspection committees”, charging that the issue is not even on the agenda for minister-level discussions. Chakam also blasted the NCPCR for being “useless.”

According to a report by NCPCR member Vinod Kumar Tikoo, who visited three such homes in the Ambala district of India’s northern Haryana state after reports of physical and sexual abuse, the conditions of the facilities are “shocking.”

In one of the homes, Tikoo found girls and boys living together but could see “no evidence” of a professional staff, trained caretakers or security measures. The operation seemed to be an “entirely family affair.”

“The husband–wife duo managing one of the other homes seemed unaware of the roles, responsibilities and…the jurisprudence governing child protection in an official child care institution,” he said.

Conditions are particularly threatening to girl children. In one of the homes, the only toilet facility available for girls was located on the terrace, surrounded by water.

According to the report, many of the managers of these homes simply bring in abandoned or runaway children from hospitals, railway stations and bus-stands, without presenting them to the concerned Child Welfare Committee, which exist in every state.

According to Sinha, security in juvenile homes is a complex issue and calls for rigorous government monitoring and intervention. She recommended that the state “redefine” the meaning of these homes, and run them instead as training and resource centres, thereby offering these kids the chance for a more independent future.

Poor legal infrastructure

Other experts believe the answer lies in amending the Juvenile Justice Act, which does not currently provide an adequate support system for families too poor to embark on lengthy legal battles.

Chakma said it is “essential” that the government create a victim assistance fund, which aggrieved parties can utilise to seek justice and punitive measures through the courts.

“India enacts laws without any judicial impact assessments. So the judicial infrastructure has to be upgraded too,” he said.

Her face covered with a maroon  scarf and with large old -fashioned goggles hiding her eyes, Sonali Mukherjee lived one of the most cherished moments of her life when she earned a jackpot on a show hosted by Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan.

Chaperoned by Bollywood actress Lara Dutta, she went on to win the prize money of 2.5 million rupees (46,000 dollars) on the Indian version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’.

But almost blind, she could not see Bachchan. Her eyes were severaly damaged in an acid attack in 2003. She was a sociology student in Dhanbad in eastern India when three men whose advances she had spurned threw acid on her face.

The fate of the 27-year-old is similar to that of many Indian women assaulted by sex offenders in gang rapes and vicious acid attacks.

The London-based Acid Surviors’ Trust International puts the figure of such attacks worldwide at 1,500 a year. But in India it can be a long road to treatment and to justice.

“What my sister is undergoing should not be faced by anyone,” her brother Debasish Mukherjee tells IPS. “What angers us is that the guys who did this got bail and are free. Why are they not arrested and punished?

“People should come out and protest. Society has to awaken. We want to see justice done,” says Mukherjee, whose sister is under treatment in a Delhi hospital now.

“She might be able to see with one eye perhaps after these surgeries. She has had 22 surgeries already and about ten more are to be done.”

Following the gang rape on a Delhi bus in December, acid attack on women has been included as a sex crime. Stronger punishments are now set out for stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks.

In October last year four men threw acid on 19-year-old Chanchal Paswan and her 15-year-old sister after they protested the sexual advances the men made.

“Four men from our district in Patna (in eastern India) had been harassing her for months. One night they got into our house and threw acid on Chanchal and her sister. The four accused have been arrested, but their trial hasn’t started yet,” their father Sailesh Paswan tells IPS.

In an online petition for justice through change.org, the father writes: “I’ve seen how public pressure forced the authorities to take action during the Delhi gang rape case and I want your help to ensure justice for my daughter.

“That’s why I started a petition on change.org telling the district magistrate of Patna to ensure speedy justice and provide adequate compensation. Chanchal narrates this brutal incident to me everyday as she struggles without proper treatment and compensation.”

Women’s rights activist Varsha Jawalgekar says that for the last nearly five months the Paswan family has been going from one court to another.

Moyna Pramanik, 29, of West Bengal state has been living with a scar for a decade now. Her husband and in-laws poured a mixture of acid and kerosene on her over dowry.

“I remember the day they pinned me down, and three of them – my husband, my sister-in-law’s husband and my mother-in-law, poured acid and kerosene oil on me,” Moyna tells IPS.

According to Acid Survivors Foundation India (ASFI), there is no proper record of acid victims. A Right to Information (RTI) petition in the state of West Bengal elicited a figure of only 56 recorded cases from 2006 to 2012.

“We found 53 recorded cases, 77 victims and 19  victims just in Kolkata. We believe there could be 700 to 800 recorded cases across India in the past six years,” says Dr Subhas Chakraborty, executive director of ASFI. The group works in association with the London-based ASTI.

“An acid attack in most cases is no less than a sexual crime. It is because the offender could not physically assault the victim that he throws acid on her,” Dr. Mukherjee tells IPS.

“When the Verma Commission (a panel under former Indian apex court judge Justice Verma formed after the Delhi gang rape) was drafting the new anti-sexual assault recommendations, we requested the panel to include acid attacks under sexual crimes,” says Dr Mukherjee.

Mukherjee says easy availability of acid in the retail market needs to be checked. “You can get a bottle of acid for just 50 rupees (a dollar) from the market.”

A poster of the film Vishwaroopam.

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Feb 21 2013 (IPS)

“I am godless. I am an artist. I will find another country that is secular and will take me…” These are the emotional words of one of India’s most famous and critically acclaimed actors, Kamal Haasan, who ran from one court to another to get his 17 million dollar trilingual film Vishwaroopam (Universe) released in his home state Tamil Nadu in south India last month.

Kamal Haasan, who is not just an actor but an iconic star with a huge fan following, faced the ire of fringe Muslim groups.

The screening of the film on terrorism — called Vishwaroopam in Tamil and Vishwaroop in Hindi — which is set in Afghanistan and the U.S, was stopped.

As the 58-year-old thespian spoke, in capital New Delhi sociologist Asish Nandy awaited police interrogation for remarking that corruption as the great social leveller in a caste-ridden society. Nandy spoke at the Jaipur Literature Festival Jan. 26.

Last year India-born British writer Salman Rushdie was barred from the festival on grounds of security for him.

This year Asish Nandy entered new controversy after some Indian groups and politicians representing the ‘lower’ castes – who are mentioned in the Indian Constitution as the Schedule Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes asked for jail for Nandy. They said his remarks suggested they were more corrupt than others.

Nandy, who has been charged under a law that protects the rights of the ‘lower’ castes, faced up to ten years if convicted.

Nandy says he never called the lower castes corrupt but had defended their rights by suggesting that the corruption of the rich now finds a match in the ‘lower’ caste groups indulging in similar practices.

A police complaint was filed against Nandy in Jaipur. Festival producer Sanjoy Roy could leave town only after police questioning.

India’s free speech advocates say they are appalled that his words at a literary festival could land him in jail.

“There is an Olympics of intolerance going on in India now,” Javed Akhtar, one of the foremost Bollywood scriptwriters who wrote the lyrics for the songs in the Hindi version of Haasan’s film told IPS.

“There is a competition to be intolerant where every group is going for the gold medal. The moment you express your mind you are branded unpatriotic, communal, pro-Pakistan, a Kafir and what not.

“The whole issue over Vishwaroopam is ridiculous since the film was first passed by the Censor Board,” said Akhtar.

“There is now a premium on advocating intolerance and many are also spreading it from the anonymity of social media.”

Kamal Haasan, who only managed to have his film released in Tamil Nadu after several edits, says he is a victim of cultural terrorism.

“I believe that along with my Muslim friends I have been an instrument in a political game. I do not know who is playing it and I am not even hazarding a guess.”

Civil liberty groups say there is a growing tendency in India to criminalise disagreement.

“I would appeal to the authorities to not criminalise disagreement. It is terrible the way politics follows each such incident,” Kavita Srivastava of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) told IPS.

Dancer Leela Samson, chair of the Censor Board, says the new curbs on freedom are scary.

“I feel very badly about it, both as an artist and as CBFC (Central Board of Film Certification]) chairperson,” she told IPS. She said the protests and the legal charades undermined the authority of a body like the Censor Board.

“The controversies distract from the main issue and that is the creativity of artists and the freedom required to be creative.”

But as Indian intellectuals speak out, more incidents follow.

On Jan. 30, Salman Rushdie had to cancel his visit to eastern city Kolkata for promotion of the film Midnight’s Children adapted from his book, and to attend a literary meet at the city’s iconic annual book fair.

Some Muslim groups in Kolkata decided to stop Salman Rushdie, who had angered the Muslims decades ago with his controversial book The Satanic Verses.

A Muslim leader said they were happy the state government did not provide Rushdie security, and that their wish to stop him prevailed.

“We led a protest at the airport and later found that he is not coming. We will not allow a person here who had written blasphemous words,” said Idris Ali who heads the All India Minority Forum.

V.Kumaresan, general secretary of The Rationalists’ Forum in Tamil Nadu says the Indian state must remain neutral and non-aligned. “But the prevailing position is not like that. The State suffocates due to rise of intolerance.”

Protesters gather at a candlelight vigil in New Delhi to honour the 23-year-old rape victim who died last month. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI , Jan 21 2013 (IPS)

On a chilly Wednesday evening, exactly a month after a young woman was gang-raped and brutalised on a moving bus in New Delhi, hundreds of sombre citizens gathered at a candlelight protest in India’s national capital.

They had come to remember the victim who, 13 days after the assault on Dec. 16, succumbed to internal injuries in a hospital in Singapore – but not before igniting a nation to rise against an epidemic of sexual violence that has long plagued this South Asian country of 1.2 billion people.

Anger was palpable among the mourners assembled peacefully at the city’s iconic protest venue, known as Jantar Mantar, to pay tribute to the 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey, who is now referred to as “Braveheart” and “India’s daughter” after her valiant fight against six male attackers.

But the massive wave of protests and insistent calls for justice that followed the tragedy has not been a sufficient deterrent to violence: a series of gang-rapes, including a few inside buses, have been reported across India in the last few weeks.

The brutality of these assaults is almost directly proportional to the passion of the protests, activists and experts here say.

As a result, crowds have gone from demanding justice to demanding death: the “We Want Justice” slogan popularly printed on placards and banners has been replaced by the mantra: “Hang the Rapist”.

Following an explosion of street protests, social media exchanges and politicians’ remarks – ranging from assurances to platitudes and polemics – the primary debate now raging across the country is whether or not the death penalty can end, or at least reduce, such horrific attacks on women.

The debate does not spring from a void, but rather from intense frustration.

For the past month, Indian authorities have struggled to pacify urban protestors with promises of legal amendments and enhanced security for women; but even as politicians spoke from podiums and police poured into the streets, brutal attacks continued unabated.

In the northern state of Punjab, a woman was gang-raped inside a bus in early January, while in the northwestern Rajasthan state a young girl killed herself after police browbeat her for lodging a sexual assault complaint.

In Goa, a seven-year-old was raped inside a school toilet.

The case against the death penalty

The question of rape has forced politicians and scores of citizens to grapple with the limitations of the country’s justice system.

India’s Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath said laws should be changed to include death as a penalty for rape in the most brutal cases that leave the victim incapable of leading a normal life, while India’s leader of opposition in Parliament, Sushma Swaraj, who hails from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), pleaded with the Prime Minister for capital punishment.

Such political grandstanding has found support among many citizens who are angry with the rising number of assaults. A recent survey found that 100 percent of women respondents feel that solving the problem of women’s insecurity is India’s single greatest challenge.

“It’s absolutely rubbish to say that these people (the attackers) are human and deserve to be kept alive at the taxpayers’ expense,” New Delhi-based media professional Sanchita Guha told IPS.

“It (capital punishment) also brings a sense of closure to the victim,” she argued.

However, a majority of women’s groups are opposed to the death penalty or even chemical castration for rapists, demanding instead assurance of rigorous punishment for offenders who almost always get away scot-free owing to legal loopholes and an insensitive judiciary.

Kavita Krishnan, one of the most prominent faces of the New Delhi street uprising against rape and secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, told IPS, “All this talk of the death penalty is a big red herring to divert attention from gender crimes to severity of punishment.”

“The death penalty is no solution for a country with misogynistic laws. There is no evidence anywhere in the world to prove that the death penalty lessens rape or, for that matter, deters anyone from committing any other crime.”

If at all, the death penalty could be a deterrent to harsh sentences against offenders, “since the courts would be overcautious before passing such a verdict,” according to Krishnan.

“In India a large number of sexual assaults also take place at home, by close relations. There would be intense pressure on the victim to not file the complaint in the first place, if there is a death penalty,” she said.

“Conviction rates should go up in India and debate should be about surety of punishment and gender-sensitive laws.”

Currently, rapists face a minimum of seven years in jail under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), a sentence that can extend from ten years to life imprisonment depending on the severity of the case.

Under Section 375 of the IPC, rape is defined only as intercourse involving penile penetration but does not include forced oral sex, sodomy or penetration by a foreign object, which can cause more grievous injury, experts say.

These acts are placed under Section 354 of the IPC dealing with “criminal assault on a woman with intent to outrage her modesty” and Section 377 of the IPC, covering “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”.

According to Ranjana Kumari, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Social Research (CSR), attaching the death penalty to rape could mean that the offender gets no punishment at all, since death row prisoners are allowed to file clemency petitions before the President who has the power to commute the sentence.

“If the death penalty is implemented, the judicial scrutiny will be very long as well. There are already about 95,000 cases pending in various courts and it is impossible to implement capital punishment in large numbers,” Kumari told IPS.

“We want severe punishment, which includes rigorous imprisonment, because otherwise it will be only a choice between no punishment or death as penalty,” she stressed.

Rape cases in India currently have a 26 percent conviction rate, she said. “We also found that no one gets more than three to four years in jail.”

Following the protests over the Delhi gang-rape, the government appointed a three-member committee of jurists to make recommendations on amending laws to increase the quantum of punishment and ensure speedier justice.

Headed by former Chief Justice of India J S Verma, the committee received suggestions from all quarters.

In its suggestion to the committee, prominent human rights group Amnesty International appealed for “penalties that reflect the gravity of the crime, but without recourse to the death penalty, or any other punishment which violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment, such as physical castration or non-consensual ‘chemical castration’.”

As the leading women’s rights lawyer, Flavia Agnes, argues, the death penalty could even prompt the rapist to kill his victim.

“If punishment for rape and murder is the same, many rapists may kill the victim to destroy evidence,” she told IPS.

Instead, “We should find answers from our parliamentarians and experts about how we can make our public places safe for women,” she said.

(END)

Huge numbers of women and even school children have braved police batons, water cannons and teargas shells in a wave of public fury against India's rape epidemic. Credit: IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI , Dec 28 2012 (IPS)

While a 23-year-old woman battles for life in a New Delhi hospital after she was gang raped and brutalised on a moving bus in India’s prosperous national capital earlier this month, women across the nation say they live in constant fear of sexual assault.

The incident sparked widespread protests across New Delhi, with huge numbers of women and even school children braving police batons, water cannons and teargas shells in a wave of public fury.

Anti-rape walks in other Indian metropolises were more peaceful but the turnouts spoke volumes.

Many protesters say they are stalked by the fear of sexual assault each time they venture out of their homes, while rights activists charge that India is devoid of a proper system to deter offenders.

In a nation of 1.2 billion people, where official crime statistics say a woman is raped every 28 minutes, women’s groups say law enforcement and prosecution measures are abysmal.

“The country simply has no infrastructure to protect its women or punish their attackers with investigation and speedy trials,” Sukanya Gupta, coordinator of Swayam, a Kolkata-based women’s rights organisation, told IPS.

“Six decades after independence, we will no longer tolerate these (crimes). The chain of fear must be broken,” she stressed.

Women feel unsafe in big cities, while in rural India rape is rampant, with the victim herself often at the receiving end of punitive laws.

Rampant insecurity

According to a survey released in December by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), 92 percent of working women say they feel insecure, especially during the night, in all major economic hubs across the country.

Among the metropolitan areas, New Delhi topped the list with 92 percent of women respondents complaining that they feel unsafe, followed by 85 percent of women in Bangalore and 82 percent in Kolkata.

Women say they feel insecure working in key industries like information technology, hospitality, civil aviation, healthcare and garments.

The study by ASSOCHAM Social Development Foundation (ASDF) is based on the feedback received from both working and non-working women.

The random survey of women in the Delhi National Capital Region, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Dehradun found that 100 percent of women respondents feel that the problem of women’s insecurity is bigger than any other challenge currently facing India.

ASSOCHAM Secretary General D. S. Rawat told IPS, “Female employees remain extremely concerned and anxious (for their own security) even in places like hospitals.”

Poor infrastructure and response 

ASSOCHAM says a highly effective and responsive GPS system is required to reach out to distressed women using public transport.

To provide safety and security to their employees, especially females, companies and firms should provide small security devices to their workforce to preempt attacks.

Other experts have recommended measures like police verification of cab drivers’ identification.

According to the ASSOCHAM survey, the key issues that contribute to women feeling “unsafe or uncomfortable” are poor lighting, no access to emergency assistance and inadequate police security.

Women’s groups in Kolkata, where many were shocked after a woman was raped inside a car by a group who accosted her on the city’s sunset boulevard Park Street back in February, say they are fed up with this “insensitive system”.

“Close to Kolkata, a suburban town called Barasat has gained notoriety for periodic assaults on women and yet there is no proper deployment of police (to assist) girls reaching home safely,” according to Gupta.

“There is a total lack of action and that encourages the men to be aggressive towards women,” she added.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau statistics for 2011, West Bengal reported 12.7 percent of total cases of crime against women in the country, accounting for 29,133 out of a reported 228,650 crimes registered across India.

The Park Street rape victim, who spoke out on TV channels after the most recent Delhi incident, says she is still awaiting justice, with two accused absconding and the trial yet to begin.

Rape law and trial lacunae 

According to Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research (CSR) in New Delhi, India needs to immediately review its rape laws and the definition of rape itself.

“An amendment to the law has been pending for seven years. The new amendments have been prepared after lots of consultation but the government is not serious about passing it in Parliament,” she told IPS.

“Our rape laws do not define rape adequately. They talk only about penile penetration. There should be an increase in punishment, too, and economic assistance to a raped woman should not be called ‘compensation’,” she added.

“We are also against any kind of reconciliation between the rapist and the raped. Some estimates say 100,000 rape cases are pending in various courts. We have a count of 40,000. But irrespective of the figures there is a need to fast track the cases in special courts,” said Kumari.

India’s young citizens also want to see changes in the laws.

A student group in Kolkata, which recently drew about 6,000 citizens to a rally after the Delhi rape, says it will continue to demand a change in the system and the country’s laws.

Altamash Hamid (21), a student in the mass communications department in the city’s ivy league St. Xavier’s College, who led the Kolkata march, told IPS, “We want to keep the movement going and petition the President of India to change the rape laws, inculcate the fear of law in people and provide more security on the streets.”

Anti-trafficking, anti-prostitution activists demand an amendment to India’s existing laws regulating the sex trade. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, Dec 21 2012 (IPS)

In a small dingy room on the edge of a brothel in west Kolkata, capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, a 42-year-old former sex worker is trying to eke out a living selling cooked food in her neighbourhood, while tending to her sick husband and a paralysed son.

Despite the hardships of everyday life, Rubiya Bibi (not her real name), who was trafficked to India from neighbouring Bangladesh when she was a teenager, knows one thing for sure – she does not want to go back to prostitution.

Recalling the days when pimps and madams would force her to sleep with men even when she was sick, Rubiya Bibi says: “Poverty forced me to prostitution. But once in the trade’s vicious cycle, I faced even more atrocities.

“I was never allowed to say ‘no’ to those who ran the brothels. I was only 18 when I (tried) to escape but was caught and tortured,” she told IPS.

“I am now trying to live a life by other means though it is very difficult since my son is both physically and mentally challenged and my husband is also ill.”

In India, girls form the majority of the country’s 1.2 million child prostitutes, according to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s leading federal investigation agency.

Though no exact data is available, government officials and NGOs have tentatively placed the number of sex workers in India at about three million.

In addition, the U.S. State Department says India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking.

‘Cool men don’t buy sex’

In an effort to raise awareness about prostitution, Rubiya Bibi is now working with an ongoing anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking campaign, called ‘Cool Men Don’t Buy Sex’.

Spearheaded by the anti-trafficking NGO Apne Aap (meaning ‘on our own’), sex workers, trafficked women and students of Indian colleges and universities, the campaign brought under one umbrella women like Rubiya, sex workers’ children and young people from prominent educational institutions, in an effort to reach as broad of a spectrum of the public as possible.

Celebrities have also shown their support by endorsing the campaign.

The idea for ‘Cool Men Don’t Buy Sex’ first came from students of Symbiosis College in Pune, a city in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, earlier this year, but the campaign really started to gain momentum this December with the collection of thousands of signatures on a petition calling for a change in laws regulating the sex trade.

The students who started the project wanted to take a stand against the idea that women can be bought and sold, while simultaneously putting pressure on the Indian government to punish pimps and johns instead of stigmatising the victims and survivors of the sex trade.

The campaign has spread to various campuses across the country. Anuja Bhojnagarwala, a third-year student in the human development department at the J D Birla Institute in Kolkata, feels strongly about the issue and invited Apne Aap members on to campus to educate her fellow students.

“I wanted people to learn about the reality of sex trafficking and prostitution,” she told IPS.

“I know that it will not be easy to abolish prostitution, and it cannot happen until women can be offered (an alternative) livelihood,” she added.

According to Apne Aap Founder Ruchira Gupta, the Indian Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (ITPA), an anti-prostitution law, has consistently failed to protect girls and women from sex trafficking.

“It criminalises and stigmatises trafficking victims and allows the true perpetrators of crime – traffickers, pimps, johns – to exploit women and children with impunity,” Gupta said.

Earlier this month, Apne Aap presented President Pranab Mukherjee with more than 10,000 signatures on a petition calling for amendment of the existing anti-trafficking law that would deter the purchase of sex by increasing punishments for buyers and traffickers, and protect the women and girls that fall victim to the industry.

According to Apne Aap, the Cool Men Don’t Buy Sex Campaign shifts the focus away from victims and highlights the force that fuels the trade itself – the male demand for sex – without which traffickers, pimps, and brothel owners will be driven out of business, activists say.

“We (also) recently got a letter from the ministry of women and child development to say that the our suggestions would be taken on board,” Gupta told IPS, adding that this brings the movement closer to its goal of securing both societal and legislative change.

“Cool Men Don’t Buy Sex enlists both men and women to put pressure on the Indian government for the amendment of the proposed Section 5C of the ITPA (that seeks to punish clients found in brothels). This amendment will shift the burden of criminalisation from women and girls in prostitution to the men who buy sex and the pimps who profit from violent exploitation,” she added.

However, India’s largest sex workers’ body, which is also opposed to certain aspects of the ITPA that have failed to prevent harassment of sex workers, does not see eye to eye with the demands of organisations like Apne Aap.

“Those who are spearheading this campaign do not (seem to understand) that criminalising the buyers of sex will be an attack on the livelihood of sex workers,” according to Bharati Dey, secretary of the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) – a collective comprised of 65,000 female, male and transgender sex workers based in West Bengal.

“We are against trafficking of minor girls too. Since 2000 we have rescued 941 girls who were being forced into the profession. We did this through our self-regulatory board,” Dey told IPS. “But if you get rid of brothels, you cannot fight HIV/AIDS like we did by spreading awareness in the brothels of Kolkata.”

Indeed, DMSC’s method of HIV/AIDS prevention has served as a model for other major global health organisations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Back in the 1990s, the sex worker collective taught its members how to resist attempts to force unprotected sex on them. By 1998, after a long battle, condom use reached 90 percent, an unprecedented increase from just three percent in 1992.

Dey stressed that if brothels are banned, underground sex work will thrive, with more people affected by sexually transmitted diseases.

Small retailers in Kolkata keep their shops closed in protest against FDI in retail. Credit: IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA/NEW DELHI, Oct 2 2012 (IPS)

Thousands of shopkeepers in Sir Stuart Hogg Market in Kolkata, the business hub of eastern India’s biggest city, are all talking about one thing: what they will do when multinational companies invade their ancient marketplace.

Also known as the New Market, this shopping centre was opened in 1874 when Kolkata was still the capital of British India, and has since been a haven for local vendors and traditional retailers.

Now its streets are abuzz with questions about the impact of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent decision to pass reforms that will allow 51 percent of foreign direct investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, effectively opening India’s many doors to giant supermarket chains and other multinational retailers.

Singh’s government says its decision to allow investment in the country’s retail, aviation and broadcast sectors is a bid to revive growth and confidence in Asia’s third largest economy.

But local retailers feel it will pave the way for big brands like Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour to exploit the huge Indian consumer market, currently estimated at roughly 500 billion dollars.

“I am absolutely against it (the reforms) – it will kill us,” said Rajkumar, a retailer in south Kolkata’s Dhakuria whose cramped shop boasts every stationery product imaginable.

“When a Spencer’s supermarket (a leading retail chain in India) came up in our neighbourhood South City Mall some years ago it definitely hit our retail shops since we have no sprawling space to (allow customers to) cart purchases in trolleys and shop in style. Now FDI in retail will be a final blow,” he said.

Opposition

Besides opposition groups like the Communist Party or the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the announcement last month also sparked a strong backlash from the ruling coalition’s second biggest constituent, the Trinamool Congress, which announced withdrawal of support for the Singh government over the issue and ordered all its central ministers to resign.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) are also extremely concerned.

According to Anil Sharma, CAIT’s FDI research committee convenor, a few retailers might prosper as result of the reforms but many others will perish.

“The government must clarify how (the reforms) will impact traders, farmers, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and consumers,” Sharma told IPS. “There should be a regulatory authority with enough teeth to ensure that small traders do not suffer and that (adequate) cold storage facilities and warehouses are constructed to ramp up the infrastructure.”

According to Sharma, the government’s prediction that FDI in retail will create around 10 million jobs in three years, with four million jobs created directly and the rest in backend logistics, is “highly imaginative”.

“If four million jobs are to be created in India in three years, even Walmart, which has the largest average (number of) employees per store, will need to open over 18,600 supermarkets in India, which means 644 retail stores in each of the 53 metropolitan cities where they are permitted to operate.

“Global experiences of organised retail have clearly shown that instead of creating employment, mega retail corporations actually reduce employment,” he added.

One of India’s leading economists, Jayati Ghosh, agrees.

“Walmart’s global operation is capital intensive. They will completely transform the supply chain and it will be no good for jobs,” Ghosh, a professor at the New Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IPS.

“There will be a negative impact on the employment scene, since the majority of the 40 million people (currently) employed in retail trade in India are self-employed, and they will not be able to compete with large supermarkets.

“One Walmart can displace about 1,400 small shops that create 5000 jobs,” she added.

“What we can demand from the government now is the (creation) of infrastructure to store post-harvest produce. There should be more cold storage (facilities) and warehouses.”

Government defense and public support

Deputy Chairman of India’s Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a strong advocate of the reforms, said in an interview with the CNN IBN channel on Sept. 24, “We are running a very inefficient retailing system in which the farmer gets very little and the consumer pays too much.

“If you want the modernisation of the retail sector, you want upward pressure in the quality of employment. Modern retail produces better quality jobs. If the labour growth is going down to one percent or so and GDP is growing at eight to nine percent, jobs will be created in many different sectors,” he argued.

Various big industrial players also support the move.

According to Rajkumar N Dhoot, president of the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), the decision to allow FDI in multi-brand retail will also improve India’s image in the eyes of foreign investors.

“Today, we live in a globalised environment. We all know how precarious the global economy is and how our own exports, both goods and services, are being hit in the western markets,” he said in reference to the need for increased FDI.

Even some local shopkeepers in New Market seem unfazed by the imminent arrival of massive competitors.

“I do not think a Walmart can completely kill us,” Subir Saha, who runs a crockery and utensil shop in New Market, told IPS. “When the shopping malls came up in the city (they) did affect our business, but we survived it and are still here.”

Farhad Ali, a garment-store owner, echoed his sentiment: “People come to us for many reasons, from low price tags to unique collections,” he told IPS.

But experts claim the belief that huge retailers will not destroy the local market is optimistic.

According to Ghosh, “In the beginning the situation will be better (for some job-seekers and consumers). But this will be part of a strategy by these companies to establish themselves in the market. Once it is done, they will start doing the unpleasant things,” she said, citing examples of Thailand and Malaysia, whose local retailers and farmers were hit hard by the entry of multinational retailers into the domestic market.

(END)

Image of Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers, which merge to form the holy River Ganga at Devprayag in the Himalayan Uttarakhand state in India. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
HARIDWAR, India, Jul 19 2012 (IPS)

Every year Yogesh Mudgal treks miles through the mountainous roads of the Indian Himalayas during the holy Hindu month of Shravan, in July.

The 54-year-old pilgrim hails from Alwar in northern India’s Rajasthan state. For the last 27 years, he has joined the millions of other Kanwarias – devotees of Lord Shiva –entering Uttarakhand state on the uphill trail of the holy river Ganga, to collect or take a dip in its soul-cleansing waters.

But this July, Mudgal is more than just a devoted pilgrim: he is also an environmental activist, visiting village after village in an effort to spread awareness about the severe pollution of the Ganga, and the destructive impact of big dams that environmentalists claim are destroying India’s “lifeline”.

“We are a group of 12 people visiting each village on our way and raising awareness about pollution of the Ganga,” Mudgal tells IPS in the holy city of Haridwar.

Mudgal is a strong supporter of Rajendra Singh, a Ganga activist popularly known as the ‘waterman of India’ who is using his prestige to mobilise countless Kanwarias to save the sacred river from the impacts of hydel power projects that discharge enourmous amounts of pollutants into the water.

Running for 2,510 kilometres, the Ganga is India’s longest river, irrigating 40 percent of the country’s land and providing fresh water to 500 million people who live along its banks.

But a study conducted by the Uttarakhand Environment Protection and Pollution Control Board (UEPPCB) in 2011 slotted the Ganga’s waters into the most polluted “D” category, owing to the steady flow of human faeces, urine and human and industrial sewage into the river.

Activists say ‘no’ to dams

India’s leading Ganga activists believe big dams are to blame.

“Dams on the Ganga are destroying the river and pollution is changing its very character,” Singh, who heads an organisation called Ganga Mukti Sangram (Struggle to Save Ganga), tells IPS.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of activists like himself, pilgrims are now arriving shouting slogans like, “Ganga ko bachana hai” (We have come to save the Ganga).

The River Ganga at Gangotri in Uttarakhand state in the Himalayas. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

“The dams cause an excess of silt deposits upstream, leading to algal growth that changes the character of the water,” he says.

People who live around the confluence of the river with the sea, at Ganga Sagar in West Bengal where the holy river empties into the Bay of Bengal, are extremely concerned about the situation.

“The Ganga Sagar islands, which are already threatened by climate change, are now more vulnerable than ever because there is no longer enough silt in the waters to buttress the landmass,” Singh tells IPS.

He says construction of the Tehri Dam for a hydel project in the Bhagirathi river, one of the Ganga’s two headstreams, has almost killed the river.

“Even the river Alaknanda (the Ganga’s source stream) could (suffer) as a result,” says Singh.

Green activists have already challenged government clearance of a hydel project on the Alaknanda river, three kilometres downstream from the Hindu pilgrimage centre Badrinath.

Singh says the campaign will continue until the Indian government stops the proposed building of 39 dams across the sacred, ancient river.

“It is going to be a long journey,” he predicts.

In March this year Singh and other key members of the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGBRA) resigned in outrage over the government’s insensitivity towards Dr. G. D. Agrawal, an environmental engineer who started a fast-unto-death in protest of proposed hydel projects on the Ganga’s Himalayan tributaries.

Agrawal was eventually taken to hospital and force-fed by the authorities.

“The government has neither political will nor any executable plan. Though the NGBRA was convened three and a half years ago and tasked with restoring ancient pride and respect for the Ganga, it has met only twice,” says Singh.

Massive pollution

According to India’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the Ganga is unfit even for bathing in cities like Kanpur due to industrial effluents and human sewage.

According to the control board, chromium levels in the water have reached a staggering 248 miligrams per litre (mg/l), against a permissible level of two mg/l.

Surveys undertaken by government agencies say the concentration of chromium at Kanpur is 124 times the permissible level.

India’s environment ministry estimates that 2,900 million litres of sewage flow into the Ganga every day from towns along its banks but the existing infrastructure is only able to treat 1,100 million litres per day.

In April this year, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured swift action to save the river, but activists are sceptical and have taken matters into the own hands.

“We will go from village to village to raise awareness,” Singh swears.

Pro-hydro activists push back

Just as determined as India’s leading Ganga activists are the environmental groups who support hydel projects over other, more harmful alternatives like thermal, gas or atomic power projects.

Avdhash Kaushal, who heads the Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK), a non-governmental organisation based in Uttarakhand’s capital Dehradun, says the government called off several projects at the behest of “foreign-funded” monks and activists.

“In 2012, state and central governments succumbed to pressure tactics of individuals (with personal agendas) and abandoned other hydro power projects in Uttarakhand purely on religious and political grounds,” he tells IPS.

“We shall not allow the state’s environment and natural resources to be degraded by thermal, gas or atomic-based power projects,” vows Kaushal, who has moved court against the suspension of dam projects.

He says countries like the United States and the UK are putting tremendous pressure on the government to pursue power projects that will devastate the environment.

Furthermore, “People in the state are facing severe shortages of water and power. Those responsible for this include state and central governments, (holy men) and these foreign funded agencies who, in the name of Nadi Bachao (Save the River) are hell bent upon the closure of these hydel power projects,” he says.

(END)

A young professional in India’s burgeoning IT hub Gurgaon, a major satellite city of national capital New Delhi, Manideepa Moitra works as a software content writer not just to make a living but to secure a career in the demanding sector that catapulted India on the global outsourcing  industry map.

Manideepa, 28, who got married early this year, says she has no plans to conceive in the foreseeable future.

“Parenthood is not in our scheme of things now and we cannot even say when is a suitable time to start a family. It is simply because I am busy with my career, and there is no support system here after we relocated from Kolkata, leaving our parents there,” says Manideepa.

“It is a conscious choice to give more priority to our career now, and my husband agrees that we will not have a child in the coming years.”

It is becoming common in India for urban women to focus on their career first, according to a survey released earlier this month by India’s leading industry body, the Associated Chambers of Commerce (ASSOCHAM).

The ASSOCHAM Social Development Foundation (ASDF) carried out a random survey of about 1,200 married, young full-time working women without children and about 800 stay-at-home mothers in the 24-30 age group years in cities.

It found that more than half (650) of married, young working women said they have shelved plans to start a family. They said career advancement and higher education is their priority, and they cannot sacrifice this to raise kids.

“Ambitious working women in India are not willing to give up their career for the sake of family as they are apprehensive about dealing with stress and emotional distress associated with issues of work/life balance,” says D.S. Rawat, secretary general of ASSOCHAM.

The findings about urban women professionals are significant in a country where the average childbearing age for women is very low in rural areas, and the maternal mortality rate is still a high 212 per 100,000 births, according to the Registrar General of India.

According to Dr Ranjana Kumari, Director of New Delhi-based Centre For Social Research, there is a perceptible shift in the approach to childbirth in urban areas, and many metropolitan women are choosing to delay both marriage and childbirth.

“There are a range of external conditions that enable women to make the choice to delay childbirth. These include high education levels, support from their family and community, good and secure employment, and comfortable living conditions,” she tells IPS.

“Priorities are definitely changing for urban women. As women become higher educated and more economically independent and secure, they gain more self-confidence and dignity, and are more empowered to make life decisions including choosing when and if to marry and have children.”

Of the women interviewed in the ASSOCHAM report, about 10 percent said they work to lead a better lifestyle and need to accumulate enough wealth before they start a family and cope with the rising costs of childcare. About 20 percent of the women surveyed said they and their husbands had taken the decision mutually.

Young professionals like Manideepa Moitra say motherhood is an impediment on the career path.“If I take a break from career for two three years, it is very difficult to come back and have the same position.”

However, some women studies groups and experts are not willing to draw any broad conclusion from such studies.

“Having a child, when to have one and when not to have one is and should be a woman’s right, in consultation with her partner at best, but, this in fact is seldom the case in countries like India where women’s ability to exercise choice in decision-making remains restricted, and there are enough studies to show that,” Dr. Indu Agnihotri, Director of New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), tells IPS.

“Any such report has to be seen in the context of hard data and facts. The work participation rate for women in India is very low and even more so for urban India,” she says.

Dr Agnihotri says that the last round of National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data shows that the proportion of women workers nationally is on average as low as 25 percent. NSSO is an organisation in the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Indian government.

But, says Dr Agnihotri, “deeper analysis undertaken by my colleagues in the CWDS showed that actually only 15 percent of women were in paid work. The work participation rate for women in national capital Delhi for the year 2007-8 stood at 7.1 percent in the age group of 15 and above.

“So the real issue is unemployment, unavailability of work and loss of existing work, since I think in the last round of recession some 27 million women lost their jobs but there is no discussion on that.”

According to CWDS, the story of India’s growth is one of jobless growth along with high levels of poverty where women are disproportionately high in numbers among the poor, and in the most low end and insecure jobs, mostly in the informal sector. She says they have poor wage rates and little bargaining position.

According to her, given the few jobs that women have even at the level of those surveyed, and the insecurity prevailing, the private sector largely follows an unstated policy of sacking a woman employee when informed of a pregnancy, and maternity leave is almost never granted in the climate of hire and fire.

While India’s largest left outfit, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), was licking its electoral wounds, a newly-elected regime in West Bengal was busy chopping chapters on Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution out of high school syllabi, in celebration of breaking CPI-M’s 34-year stronghold over the state.

The axing of Marx and Engels on Apr. 6 was a highly symbolic gesture in a state that had hitherto been the last standing citadel of mainstream communism in India and signaled the rise of the ragtag Trinamool Congress, now in alliance with the ruling Congress party of India, whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, is desperately trying to uproot a decades-old communist legacy in the eastern state.

The CPI-M’s decline has been swift. Its unpopular decision to forcibly appropriate 1000 acres of farmland on behalf of the motor industry in 2006 led to the communists’ defeat at the polls in May 2011, where they secured just 61 of 294 seats, down from 235 seats in 2006.

The Left Front in India still holds an enclave of influence in a small northeastern state called Tripura, but losses in its showpiece West Bengal, a state of 90 million people, as well as in Kerala, have been colossal.

So when CPI-M leaders met in Kerala’s Kozhikode from Apr. 4-9 for the 20th Party Congress, everyone expected a public declaration of a ‘roadmap’ to regain lost ground and identify new areas of support besides Kerala and West Bengal.

No visible ‘roadmap’

The biggest question on the table was: can communists reinvent themselves in the Indian context after the electoral debacle of the 2011 assembly elections?

Experts believe that the communists still have a big role to play in India, if they can leverage on mass opposition to globalisation and general dissatisfaction with the ruling powers.

However, though the party came out with reports that were self-critical, analysts say the communists only paid lip service to reinventing themselves at the brainstorming session.

No concrete roadmap was visible, they say.

CPI-M’s top decision making Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechury said the party will toe the same Leninist line, but adapt policies to address India’s specific needs.

“It is not a copy of (the) Chinese or Russian path. We have analysed the trends in socialist countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and South Africa. We are learning from their experiences so that we can implement the good aspects in accordance with the situation here,” he said.

The congress also adopted a political resolution to forge a new Left democratic alternative to the ‘neoliberal’ policies of the ruling Congress party in New Delhi and the ‘communal’ agenda pursued by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the two forces that have intermittently ruled India throughout the past two decades.

But many believe these were empty promises, unsubstantiated by specific action plans or targeted policies.

Addressing the needs of the voter base

Monobina Gupta, a renowned journalist, said that even if the Left refuses to accept the globalisation model, they do not have to keep looking back to the Socialist model either.

“There (is) no movement forward. There is only talk about giving new directions but it is couched in the same (old) language and it is superficial,” she said.

The congress did not discuss issues close to the heart of CPI-M’s constituency, such as the plummeting standard of education and paltry healthcare, nor the root causes of discontent with the party, such as its policing of communities, interference in family life and land disputes, and its unilateral decisions on industrialisation at the expense of the peasantry.

According to Kolkata-based political scientist Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury, the only positive outcome of the congress was a sign of maturation, “a semblance of an independent line emerg(ing) out of a colonised mindset”, he said, referring to CPI-M’s hitherto blind following of the Russian and Chinese models.

But the Congress neither highlighted issues like caste, prevalent in northern states where the Left has no presence, nor of tribal oppression and rights, an issue championed by the barrels of Maoist guns, he added.

Failure to address these burning concerns partially explains why, over the past three decades, communists have only been able to consolidate themselves in pockets like West Bengal, Tripura or Kerala where caste politics do not dominate the political scene and where liberal ideas already have deep roots.

The party’s patron, former West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the man responsible for wresting farmland from peasants on behalf of the industrial titan Tata Motors, was conspicuously absent at the congress, citing health reasons.

According to an editorial entitled ‘The Man Who Stays Away’, which appeared in the Kolkata-based Telegraph, Bhattacharjee’s decision to stay away sent a strong message to central leaders based in New Delhi who “call the shots using the alibi of democratic centralism.”

Bhattacharjee has also openly criticised the “unpragmatic” decisions of central leaders like Prakash Karat.

Yet the congress failed to apologise for interference “by armchair theoreticians” like Karat in the work of mass-based leaders; nor did they present “new faces that carry no previous baggage,” said Basu Roy Chowdhury.

“Leaders like Karat (who got a third term as general secretary) or Sitaram Yechury have never been (involved in electoral) politics outside of University or college campuses,” he added.

CPI-M’s leaders in Bengal blame losses in the eastern state on Karat’s policies. For instance, his decision to withdraw support for the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in 2008, over an India-U.S. civil nuclear deal, brought the Congress party and its breakaway but dominant faction, the Trinamool Congress, together in a victorious alliance at the polls.

However, at the congress last week, CPI-M endorsed the 2008 decision to withdraw support for the UPA, thus missing a chance to truly reflect and re-group before moving forward.

“West Bengal is a unique case of surviving 34 years in power by winning elections,” said Gupta. “That model, too, is very flawed, though (it) started initially with (positive) initiatives like land reforms”, famously called Operation Barga, in which the rights of poor sharecroppers to own the land they tilled was protected.

In the end however, the communists proved completely incapable of loosening their stranglehold over social functions and were unable to democratise their approach, she added.

“They took over the cultural space and the political space. (There was) daily intimidation and a politics of retribution prevailed along with the arrogance of power,” Gupta said.

In the absence of a solid roadmap that carves a new path through India’s distinct social, economic and political terrain, and a projection of new leaders who can bring fresh ideas and vision to the group, talks about reinventing the party will remain a shallow promise.

By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA , Mar 25 2012 (IPS)

Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn a decent income.

A resident of Mousuni village in the Namkhana area of the Sundarbans, Sahara has lost her home twice in seven years owing to erosion caused by the rising sea level as a result of the severe impact of climate change.

Declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO and home to a highly unique ecology – including the world's largest mangrove gene pool and the endangered royal Bengal tiger – the Sundarbans (spread across a 9630 square kilometer-area in India and covering 16,370 square kilometres in Bangladesh) face a drastic threat from global warming and attendant climatic change.

Here, the sea level has been rising at a rate higher than the global average for years now, wreaking havoc on the archipelago’s population of roughly 4.37 million people, according to 2011 provisional data released by the Indian census department.

Furthermore, a new study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), one of India’s leading environment pressure groups, in partnership with the Kolkata-based South Asian Forum for Environment (SAFE), has revealed a double whammy for the region’s people – not only loss of habitat from climate change but also a complete lack of climate-sensitive development planning.

According to "Living with Changing Climate: Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation challenges in Indian Sundarbans", inadequate development planning is forcing people in this fragile region to migrate to other parts of India in search of livelihoods, while the number of climate refugees in the area swells and vast swathes of agricultural land is either devoured by the encroaching sea or rendered unfit for cultivation.

When Sahara’s younger son Sahzahan went to the Southern Indian state of Kerala to work as a mason, she was shattered. But now her son earns 300 rupees (roughly six dollars) a day and persuades others from their village to join him as a migrant labourer. Since migration is dependent on networks and acquaintances, Kerala is quickly becoming a depot for scores of workers fleeing their ravaged home in search of minimum-wage jobs.

When the CSE quizzed Sahara about the efficacy of government schemes for alternative livelihood in her region, she said she had heard nothing about it.

Nor has she been provided with any information about the perils of climate change in the Sundarbans, despite being a climate refugee herself. All she knows is that the number of pre-seasonal cyclones has only increased in the Sundarbans, with the worst – Cyclone Aila – causing utter devastation and massive deaths in May 2009.

Unlike Sahara, Saikh Rustam (52), also hailing from the Namkhana area, is better informed about government schemes but is unable to avail himself of their benefits.

Rustam’s home has been devoured by the rising sea level thrice in just 12 years. The advancing sea robbed him of his livelihood as a farmer and he was forced to become a fisherman.

However, "during the monsoon, when the river is dangerous, there is no livelihood even as a fisherman," he told IPS.

Rustam says he has heard about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), a flagship government rural poverty alleviation plan promising 100 days of wage labour per financial year to rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

"But I prefer not to get engaged in MGNREGS because the payment is made in a bank account. I did not have an account earlier, while even now one has to lose a day’s wage to go to the bank located far away," he said.

Urgent need for climate-sensitive development

According to official statistics, sea surface temperature (SST) in the Sundarbans is increasing at the rate of 0.5 degrees centigrade per decade, compared to the global increase of 0.06 degrees centigrade per decade.

The Sundarbans is losing land rapidly and soil salinity is increasing fast, posing a dire threat to the future of agriculture in the region.

The Indian part of Sundarbans has been losing land at the alarming rate of 5.5 square kilometres per year over the past ten years.

In the same period, the frequency of cyclones increased by 26 percent, according to the CSE.

The joint CSE-SAFE research report also warned that one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world is getting pummeled not only by a changing climate, but also by the complete lack of development planning.

"With a growing population, there is a constant conflict between conservation and livelihood needs. The costs of conservation are globally dispersed but not locally enjoyed. With a growing subsistence economy, no global market for the produce from the region and little benefits from tourism, a majority of the population is forced to suffer grinding poverty," says lead researcher and author of the report, Aditya Ghosh.

CSE-SAFE researchers also report that broad development planning for the region has failed to envisage how people will continue living in the island with a sense of security and dignity.

"There is a piecemeal approach that can, at best, serve a short term agenda. Population pressure and diminishing returns from natural resources are at loggerheads (and) the sustainability of the island itself is threatened," Ghosh added.

The report goes on to claim that many families in the Sundarbans are now entirely dependent on remittances from migrant family members for all major household expenses.

According to Chandra Bhushan, head of CSE’s climate change programme, development planning in the Indian Sundarbans has never included the impacts of climate change impacts in its purview.

"This is quite evident in the way everything from electrification to land management is being done here. A decentralised distribution network for renewable energy has not been promoted," Bhushan lamented.

According to SAFE chairperson Dipayan Dey, the paradigm for sustainable development in the Sundarbans must shift from disaster-based hazard mitigation to community-based climate adaptive intervention.

"Before it is too late, (strong) political will to advocate community governance of natural resources must emerge," he stressed.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar and - -
NEW DELHI, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

India’s premier political dynasty – the Nehru Gandhi clan – has failed to charm voters in elections held across five states in the country, including the key Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh.

Rahul Gandhi, the 42-year-old poster boy of India’s ruling Congress party cradled by the famous dynasty for over six decades, was media’s favourite child for months during the rough and tumble of the election campaign.

But this week when the results were counted finally, the scion of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and one of the biggest crowd-pullers faced a stark reality – rejection of the voters.

While political analysts say the results were influenced by various factors, they agreed that the voters were indifferent to the glam quotient of the Gandhis this time.

The electorate voted with expectations of development and clean governance.

“People were indifferent to the Gandhi family magic. This is not the complete rejection of dynasty, but voters proved that the magic of Rahul Gandhi can work only if it is backed by a strong organisation,” says analyst Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury.

The elections in five states – Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur – also showed multi- polar trends in Indian politics as against the bipolar trends manifested in the 2009 general polls.

Centre-left Congress and Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are the two big national parties in India that have ruled the country alternately for the past decades, but increasingly in alliance with regional parties.

“This election indicates that the regional parties will rise further,” says Basu Roy Chowdhury.

For the Gandhis, most heart-breaking was the loss of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in a nation of 1.21 billion plus.

Amethi and Rae Bareli regions in this state, bastions of the Gandhi family since the days of India’s most powerful prime minister Indira Gandhi, saw a rout of the Congress party. The paarty could win only two seats out of the ten here. Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi along and her daughter Priyanka Vadra (Gandhi) had joined the campaign trail of Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul Gandhi.

Rahul Gandhi is the son of Rajiv Gandhi and grandson of Indira Gandhi, both of whom were prime ministers assassinated by terrorists.

Dependent on the Gandhi dynasty for unity, Congress leaders chose Sonia Gandhi, widow of Rajiv, to spearhead the party after he was killed in 1991.

Ameeta Singh, a Congress candidate who lost in the region that had seemed like a pocket borough of the Gandhis, admitted on a television channel that times are changing and family legacy alone cannot win seats.

The big winner in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party (SP) too is a family-run political party founded by former wrestler Mulayam Singh Yadav. The credit for the party’s victory was given to his son Akhilesh Yadav’s meticulous poll campaign and grounded ideas.

“Rahul Gandhi despite his dynastic aura failed because he seemed like an outsider in Uttar Pradesh compared to Akhilesh Yadav. The Gandhis, after all, do not live here,” says Basu Roy Chowdhury.

Regional political parties will now rule the two most politically important northern states in India – Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

Punjab saw the return of the Akalis, who are ideologically inspired by the state’s predominant Sikh religion.

Manipur in the northeastern part of India is the only state where Congress won decisively. It got a wafer thin edge over the BJP in another northern state Uttarakhand.

In Goa, once a Portuguese colony, Congress was trounced by the Hindu nationalist BJP which again fought the polls in alliance with the regional Mahrashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP).

Many political analysts say dynastic politics is not the deciding factor any more, but it is not deliberately rejected either. This verdict is the coming of age of Indian voters, they say.

Alka Pande, a political commentator from Uttar Pradesh, says: “Rahul Gandhi’s magic failed because of his disconnect with the masses. The illiterate people of Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the most backward states of India, could not relate to Rahul’s sophistication and high ideology.

“On the other hand there was instant rapport between the crowds and Akhilesh Yadav, who the masses could relate with and who appeared one of them. People looked alienated at Rahul’s rallies whereas the crowd appeared involved at Akilesh’s rallies.”

Political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta says while Rahul Gandhi was seen as an outsider, the elections also showed a trend of multi-polarism in Indian politics.

“After the 2009 general elections it had appeared that politics is again bipolar in India – with the two big outfits Congress and BJP on either sides challenging each other. But now we see the emergence of a multi- polar democracy. The big issue now is the issue of governance and not any dynasty.

Akhilesh Yadav, he says, “also belongs to a political family, but he won the polls for his political maturity. He rid his party of the rowdy elements and came across as a young modern politician. He is all for i-pads and computers unlike the past when the same party had opposed such technologies and gadgets.”

The issues of caste and religion appear to have taken a backseat in this election. So in Uttar Pradesh, outgoing chief minister Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a party of the lower castes, was not voted back since it got mired in countless corruption scandals and instances of bad governance.

Rahul Gandhi, who had put his reputation at stake over a good show in Uttar Pradesh, accepted the defeat. “Fundamentals of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh are weak,” he told reporters. “I take it in my stride.”

Eyes are now on the 2014 general elections when the rise of the regional parties and the dynastic aura would be put to the test again.

Excerpt:

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.

The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age.

When she was first brought to the hospital by a 15-year-old sexual abuse victim, Baby Falak was almost dead and covered in bite marks, apparently inflicted by the young girl who brought her in.

In medical terms, Falak is suffering from battered baby syndrome, in which an infant sustains injuries as a result of physical abuse, usually inflicted by an adult caregiver.

Internal injuries, cuts, burns, bruises and broken or fractured bones are all possible signs of battered child syndrome and Baby Falak has suffered it all.

As her story unfolded and a harsh media spotlight prompted an in-depth investigation, it transpired that the baby had changed several hands to end up with the 15-year-old who is herself a sexual abuse victim of the man with whom she eloped to escape an abusive father

In anger and frustration, the teenager beat up the infant quite brutally before dropping her off at the hospital.

While the police hunted for the baby’s birthmother Munni, who had been separated from her children, they stumbled upon a sordid story of India’s treatment of its girl children.

Though India’s electronic media hijacked Baby Falak’s story to highlight the plight of the girl child, social workers say she is but one of countless infants who suffer similar trauma and whose stories almost always go unreported.

In the first two months of 2012 alone, four baby girls between the ages of two days and six months were found abandoned on trains and roads across Indian cities like Bhopal and Asansol.

Meanwhile, activists also claim that while newborn girls live an insecure life and fall prey to atrocities, countless girls in India are eliminated even before they see the light of this world.

“According to the 2011 Census and other national statistics 700,000 girl children are missing at birth (due to termination of pregnancy once a foetus’ sex is confirmed) and experts say this may reach the 1 million mark in this decade if serious effort is not made to reverse or halt it,” Akhila Sivadas, executive director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Advocacy and Research (CAR) told IPS.

Sivadas’ remarks come in the wake of a new United Nations study indicating that India is the world’s most dangerous place for girl children.

“Sex Differentials in Childhood Mortality,” a project of the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), reveals that a girl aged between one and five years is 75 percent more likely to die than a boy in India, marking the world’s most extreme gender disparity in child mortality.

Global infant and child mortality rates have been on the decline in recent years, with a large portion of the world seeing young girls experiencing higher rates of survival than young boys; but India remains the exception to this positive trend.

“The issue of gender discrimination and precarious survival of girls where there is (already) prevalence of foeticide is a matter of grave concern and requires urgent action,” said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in India.

According to Sivadas, the number of girls missing at birth can be attributed to the advent of ultrasound technology that has made it possible for even rural women to determine their child’s sex before birth.

She said that new technology must be regulated, or else it will become a double-edged sword.

Activists also say that Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is being used to conceive male children now.

Sivadas claims that all these technologies first became available to the “educated” class between 1991 and 2001 in the rich of Punjab and Haryana states, resulting in the queer phenomenon of higher female mortality rates or less girl children altogether.

Now that the technology is freely available, its effects are much more widespread.

“There is a deep seated ‘son preference’ in this country; (thus) we are directly paying the price of development as technology makes it possible to eliminate the unborn girl child,” Sivadas stressed.

“And even when the child is born she is subjected to early neglect. Neonatal child mortality is also linked with the problem of malnutrition. All forces combine to create life precariousness,” she added.

She believes that the dismantling of India’s public distribution system (PDS), through which essential food items were made available to poorer families at subsidised rates, is an important factor in the crisis, since parents who cannot feed their children often grow desperate.

“If we can at least prevent (sex-selective abortions), the way (they were stopped) in the Northern states of Haryana and Punjab, at least the girl child has a fighting chance when she is out in this world,” Sivadas said.

But while the number of sex-selective abortions is a grave phenomenon, Baby Falak is a reminder of the other side of the coin: the plight that awaits a newborn girl in a society that does not welcome her, or objectifies her.

“The Falak incident reminds us of the need to expand and deepen the presence of institutions that are meant to offer protection to children. This includes a secure family,” Sinha told IPS.

She added that Falak’s story, which has aroused the national conscience, has reminded the nation of the inadequacy of the reach of the system in safeguarding the most vulnerable populations.

“There is a lot that has to be done. We need greater cooperation between the police, the child welfare committee (CWC), health ministries and the media if we want to protect every child who is left abandoned and uncared for,” she said.

“Unless there is a sincere endeavour based on the non-negotiable principle that children should enjoy all their rights, it will be difficult to reach out to them,” she added.

According to Sivadas, India now needs a response similar to the one instituted back in the 1960s in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“In Tamil Nadu a basket of change was brought in for health, nutrition and childcare, with good results. We need that today,” she stressed.

(END)

A pregnant mother and her daughter in the rural Purulia district of West Bengal state in India struggle against the country's "son preference" Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Mar 1 2012 (IPS)

At the intensive care unit of the state-run All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) hospital in New Delhi, a two-year-old battered baby girl is fighting to survive.

The doctors attending to her have waged a six-week battle to keep her alive, but they are quickly losing hope that she will ever live a normal life after the torture she endured at such a tender age.

When she was first brought to the hospital by a 15-year-old sexual abuse victim, Baby Falak was almost dead and covered in bite marks, apparently inflicted by the young girl who brought her in.

In medical terms, Falak is suffering from battered baby syndrome, in which an infant sustains injuries as a result of physical abuse, usually inflicted by an adult caregiver.

Internal injuries, cuts, burns, bruises and broken or fractured bones are all possible signs of battered child syndrome and Baby Falak has suffered it all.

As her story unfolded and a harsh media spotlight prompted an in-depth investigation, it transpired that the baby had changed several hands to end up with the 15-year-old who is herself a sexual abuse victim of the man with whom she eloped to escape an abusive father

In anger and frustration, the teenager beat up the infant quite brutally before dropping her off at the hospital.

While the police hunted for the baby’s birthmother Munni, who had been separated from her children, they stumbled upon a sordid story of India’s treatment of its girl children.

Though India’s electronic media hijacked Baby Falak’s story to highlight the plight of the girl child, social workers say she is but one of countless infants who suffer similar trauma and whose stories almost always go unreported.

In the first two months of 2012 alone, four baby girls between the ages of two days and six months were found abandoned on trains and roads across Indian cities like Bhopal and Asansol.

Meanwhile, activists also claim that while newborn girls live an insecure life and fall prey to atrocities, countless girls in India are eliminated even before they see the light of this world.

“According to the 2011 Census and other national statistics 700,000 girl children are missing at birth (due to termination of pregnancy once a foetus’ sex is confirmed) and experts say this may reach the 1 million mark in this decade if serious effort is not made to reverse or halt it,” Akhila Sivadas, executive director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Advocacy and Research (CAR) told IPS.

Sivadas’ remarks come in the wake of a new United Nations study indicating that India is the world’s most dangerous place for girl children.

“Sex Differentials in Childhood Mortality,” a project of the U.N.’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), reveals that a girl aged between one and five years is 75 percent more likely to die than a boy in India, marking the world’s most extreme gender disparity in child mortality.

Global infant and child mortality rates have been on the decline in recent years, with a large portion of the world seeing young girls experiencing higher rates of survival than young boys; but India remains the exception to this positive trend.

“The issue of gender discrimination and precarious survival of girls where there is (already) prevalence of foeticide is a matter of grave concern and requires urgent action,” said Shantha Sinha, chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in India.

According to Sivadas, the number of girls missing at birth can be attributed to the advent of ultrasound technology that has made it possible for even rural women to determine their child’s sex before birth.

She said that new technology must be regulated, or else it will become a double-edged sword.

Activists also say that Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) is being used to conceive male children now.

Sivadas claims that all these technologies first became available to the “educated” class between 1991 and 2001 in the rich of Punjab and Haryana states, resulting in the queer phenomenon of higher female mortality rates or less girl children altogether.

Now that the technology is freely available, its effects are much more widespread.

“There is a deep seated ‘son preference’ in this country; (thus) we are directly paying the price of development as technology makes it possible to eliminate the unborn girl child,” Sivadas stressed.

“And even when the child is born she is subjected to early neglect. Neonatal child mortality is also linked with the problem of malnutrition. All forces combine to create life precariousness,” she added.

She believes that the dismantling of India’s public distribution system (PDS), through which essential food items were made available to poorer families at subsidised rates, is an important factor in the crisis, since parents who cannot feed their children often grow desperate.

“If we can at least prevent (sex-selective abortions), the way (they were stopped) in the Northern states of Haryana and Punjab, at least the girl child has a fighting chance when she is out in this world,” Sivadas said.

But while the number of sex-selective abortions is a grave phenomenon, Baby Falak is a reminder of the other side of the coin: the plight that awaits a newborn girl in a society that does not welcome her, or objectifies her.

“The Falak incident reminds us of the need to expand and deepen the presence of institutions that are meant to offer protection to children. This includes a secure family,” Sinha told IPS.

She added that Falak’s story, which has aroused the national conscience, has reminded the nation of the inadequacy of the reach of the system in safeguarding the most vulnerable populations.

“There is a lot that has to be done. We need greater cooperation between the police, the child welfare committee (CWC), health ministries and the media if we want to protect every child who is left abandoned and uncared for,” she said.

“Unless there is a sincere endeavour based on the non-negotiable principle that children should enjoy all their rights, it will be difficult to reach out to them,” she added.

According to Sivadas, India now needs a response similar to the one instituted back in the 1960s in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu.

“In Tamil Nadu a basket of change was brought in for health, nutrition and childcare, with good results. We need that today,” she stressed.

Excerpt:

By - - and Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Feb 2 2012 (IPS)

After India’s agriculture minister Sharad Pawar was slapped by a young Sikh man at a function in New Delhi, to record his protest against corruption in high places, social media sites went viral with musical spoofs and caricatured images of the incident.

It helped the spoofing artists that the assault on the minister, in November 2011, roughly coincided with the bursting on media channels of a chartbusting song, ‘Kolaveri, Kolaveri, Why this Kolaveri Di?’ (roughly meaning ‘Why this rage?’ in Tamil language).

Almost instantly, news channel footage of the slapping incident, set to the tune of the peppy chartbuster and with added effects to enhance the resounding slap, became a widely circulated status update on ‘Facebook’, the popular social networking site.

The spoof circulated further after someone posted the link on the Facebook wall of ‘India Against Corruption’, the organisation demanding enactment of a strong anti-graft ombudsman law through a movement led by the Gandhian leader Anna Hazare.

Following this demonstration of social media power the Indian government announced plans to formulate a framework to regulate “blasphemous and disparaging” contents posted on social networking platforms like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

India’s telecom minister Kapil Sibal asked representatives of major Internet firms to come up with a solution to prevent the posting of material that may hurt religious sentiments. But they remained non- committal, forcing the government to begin taking steps to formulate a regulatory mechanism.

The judiciary stepped in after a lawsuit filed in the Delhi High Court by a Hindi-Urdu magazine editor demanded that laws banning the sale of obscene books and objects be made applicable to Internet companies.

The judge hearing the case warned that offending Internet sites could be blocked, as in China, if they failed to come up with a way to avoid publishing religiously “offensive and objectionable” content. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Justice Suresh Kait was quoted as saying.

With social media platforms fast turning into a breeding ground for ideas that propel civil society movements, free speech advocates say the move by the Indian government to censor postings is aimed at gagging public opinion under the guise of safeguarding religious sentiments.

“Any such control is based on fear and insecurity. Rising discontent is being taken seriously by the government, so there is an agenda behind the crackdown on the Internet firms,” says Gaurav Bakshi, a Delhi-based citizen journalist active in Anna Hazare’s anti- corruption movement.

“The government is looking out for potential threats to its power, and now that media is covering such issues as corruption we feel concerned,” Bakshi told IPS.

Vinay Rai, the magazine editor who had filed the criminal lawsuit against the Internet companies, says Internet firms can easily develop mechanisms to block offensive content.

“If they can do business here in India and earn so much, why cannot they also take responsibility and spend something on building a mechanism to block disparaging information?” Rai asked, speaking with IPS.

“We are enjoying freedom of speech, but it does not mean you can hurt religious sentiments of people, or do something that the freedom we enjoy is taken away from us,” says Rai.

Media activists already see the government moves as a ploy to curb free speech, especially on the raging issue of corruption.

“It is a myth that the Indian government cannot be like China,” says Bakshi, who feels that a move by the government to restrict the number of SMS (short message service over mobile phones) that can be sent in a day was a response to Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement.

Jillian C. York, director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, in a column on Indian censorship attempts published on Jan. 20 in Al Jazeera, wrote that “unlike books and paintings, online expression cannot easily be hidden from view.

“Try as it might, the Indian government has not managed to succeed in limiting speech it finds distasteful; the offending content, even when blocked, remains accessible to savvy internet users through use of simple proxies,” she wrote.

According to York, censorship of social media has the potential to push India’s Internet users over the edge, like the street protestors in Tunisia.

Blogger and independent journalist Divyanshu Dutta Roy believes that “the independence of the web is what truly makes it wonderful.

“When it comes to offending religious sentiments, I think it will only offend someone if they are looking to be offended,” Roy said. “The Internet is not the property of some sensitive religious faction; if they don’t like what is being published online, they can simply avoid such web pages.

“A search engine works by letting loose little robot programmes on theIinternet called crawlers that index content on websites,” said Roy, an expert on technology issues. “I think we are still quite far from the day when these robots can be trained enough to judge what is religiously offensive.”

While the government’s faceoff with the Internet giants rages, a top official from Google said that considering the volume of data posted online daily, it is practically impossible to prescreen it.

Senior vice-president and chief business officer of Google Nikesh Arora told an Indian TV channel at the World Economic Forum in Davos late January that they are “still open to requests for taking down offensive content once it has been reported by the government or anybody else.”

“I think what we are trying to explain is the enormity of what is being asked. You are asking to not just censor the web in India, you are asking to censor the entire world wide web. The web has no borders,” Arora said.

Excerpt:

In the eastern city Kolkata, a tourist just back from a holiday in India’s Andaman islands last week boasts he threw bananas to Jarawa tribe members and secretly photographed them when their car passed through a jungle.

This was days after a London newspaper group posted a video of waist-up naked women members of the vanishing tribe of 403 dancing before tourists at the behest of tour operators. Visitors say it is common to spot a Jarawa on the Andaman Trunk Road, take pictures, and make them perform.

This is an attraction tour operators offer on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Many visitors return with trophy images and video footage of the tribe.

“There are sometimes mild protests from the local drivers. But they do dance before tourists, who throw food items at them from cars,” says Rajkumar (name changed), a tourist from Kolkata.

Andaman is home to primitive tribes like Onge, Sentinelese, Jarawas, Great Andamanese, Shompen and Nicobarese. Among them Jarawas are the most threatened.

According to international NGO Survival International, that earlier exposed the vulnerability of the tribe to a nexus of corrupt police and tour operators, the ancestors of the Jarawa and the other tribes of the Andaman Islands are thought to have been part of the first successful human migrations out of Africa.

It says the Jarawas hunt with bows and arrows, and gather seeds, berries and honey. They are nomadic, living in bands of 40 to 50. About 1998, some Jarawas started coming out of their forest to visit nearby towns and settlements for the first time.

NGOs say the principal threat to the Jarawas comes from encroachment onto their land sparked by the building of a highway, the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR), through their forest in the 1970s. This exposed them to disease and poachers.

The controversial video on the site of The Observer and The Guardian was procured by British journalist Gethin Chamberlain. “The video is circulating among tour operators. I’m told it was shot in recent years, though we don’t have an exact date,” he tells IPS.

As the story triggered national outrage and invited the flak of activists and anthropologists, the government ordered a probe and promised action.

“It is absolutely disgraceful and shameful. I am going there to take stock of the situation first hand,” India’s Tribal Affairs Minister V. Kishore Chandra Deo tells IPS from New Delhi.

Tribal rights activists slammed Andaman authorities which tried to pass the video as taken in 2002 even though the file betrays the claim.

“The tribe is very threatened and at least a few people should be indicted for contempt of court since the ATR was ordered to be closed down to tourists by the Supreme Court of India way back in 2002,” says Prof. Shekhar Singh, who was appointed ten years ago by the court to head a one-man commission to recommend measures to protect the tribe.

“All the 403 Jarawas are not there on the roadside. Some 20 to 30 hang around. But they are susceptible to diseases from us. So the road must be closed,” Singh tells IPS.

“There were some 46 recommendations from us, including closure of the ATR, but hardly any were implemented. They are exposed to diseases like measles, and they should have access to healthcare rather than be made to perform like animals before visitors.”

Singh says it is important to know their language and then offer them a choice on their welfare. “They should have a choice rather than we imposing ourselves. A Jarawa mother should decide if her child will be treated with herbs or be taken to a modern hospital.”

According to Survival International, “the road brings settlers, poachers and loggers into the heart of their land. This encroachment risks exposing the Jarawa to diseases to which they have no immunity, and creating a dependency on outsiders. Poachers steal the game the Jarawa rely on, and there are reports of sexual exploitation of Jarawa women.”

According to Samir Acharya of the Society of Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE), the controversial road is not actually a lifeline for the farmers to transport their produce as claimed by the authorities.

“The major use of the road is by tourists and government officials. The farmers use boats and prefer the waterways,” says Acharya, who lives in Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

“It is difficult to keep tourists away from the tribe if the road is open. So it is better to close the road to tourists, honouring the 2002 Supreme Court direction.”

The activist says there has been an onslaught on the lifestyle of the Jarawas, and mainstream society is almost forcing them to change their way of living.

“They are living here for over 60,000 years and we have seen through experiments that an average Jarawa is much fitter than an average policeman. A Jarawa member’s metabolism is different from ours and their bodies are made for rough life, our world’s onslaught is causing them harm.”

He says the Jarawas are getting malaria and other diseases from their contact with mainstream people. “We have made them wear clothes, but have not been able to teach them that those clothes should also be washed. We rob them of their traditional knowledge, but simply do not know how to deal with them. We can at best leave them in their 700 square kilometres territory.”

By - - and Sujoy Dhar
LALGARH, India, Dec 27 2011 (IPS)

This small town, barely 150 km away from the bustling eastern metropolis of Kolkata, hit news headlines in December 2008 when adivasis (indigenous people) led by Maoist rebels briefly captured it.

By June 2009 security forces had recaptured Lalgarh, though the forested surroundings called ‘Jangalmahal’ have continued to be under the sway of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), banned as a terrorist group since June 2009.

The Maoists claim to be defending the rights of the adivasis in mineral-rich central and eastern India against the interests of mining companies. Most of India’s estimated 100,000 indigenous people are concentrated in this region including Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal states.

Extreme poverty and deprivation among the adivasis – which drive them to join armed Maoist cadres – are visible in Lalgarh, as also official apathy towards their plight.

“I have never heard of the Below Poverty Line (BPL) scheme for the poor that you are talking about,” Rajan Gharai, an emaciated adivasi who lives with his wife on the streets of Lalgarh, tells IPS.

In one village outside Lalgarh, a young tribal man, Sohan, told IPS that in the summer months when drought-like conditions prevail the government does not care to even sink a simple tube well, let alone implement the BPL programme.

According to rights activists the Maoist problem has roots in the non-inclusive model of development which has left adivasis and other marginalised people out in the cold. Few are surprised at their resorting to violence.

“Owing to corporate greed, indigenous people are being displaced across India. These people are dependent on common property resources and now that their very survival is under threat, they are putting up a resistance,” says human rights activist Binayak Sen.

“This resistance takes place under a rainbow range of colours, but it is being tagged with a particular political label,” he added, choosing to avoid the word ‘Maoist’.

According to Sen – a noted physician who spent several years in jail on charges of acting as a courier for imprisoned Maoists – large parts of India may be said to be in a perpetual state of famine.

“The World Health Organisation says any person with body mass index (BMI) below 18.5 is suffering from chronic undernourishment,” Sen tells IPS.

“Official data acknowledges that 36 to 37 percent of our population has a BMI below 18.5. Among marginalised groups this may be as high as 60 percent,” says Sen, who was jailed in spite of his status as vice-president of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, a leading Indian rights group.

Sen decries the government’s ‘law-and-order’ response to the problem, sending in armed police to quell the Maoist-led adivasi rebellion. “We as human rights workers condemn all kinds of violence – whether it is by the state or by those challenging the state.”

On Nov. 24, after talks between the Maoists and the government broke down, paramilitary and the police forces shot dead top rebel leader Koteswar Rao, also known as ‘Kishenji’, under circumstances that drew condemnation from rights activists.

The rebels responded to the killing of their leader with more violence and forced shutdowns of businesses and establishments.

Early December at least eight policemen and two civilians were killed in West Bengal’s neighbouring Jharkhand state in blasts triggered by the rebels. Schools and railway infrastructure came under attack in other eastern states.

A Maoist spokesperson, who identifies himself as Akash, issued a statement blaming the state government’s continuing security operations as the reason for calling off the ceasefire in West Bengal that lasted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 3.

Speaking to IPS, Sujato Bhadra, one of the two interlocutors appointed by the West Bengal state government to talk to the Maoists, said: “The government did not appreciate the ceasefire. They should have taken it forward because there would have been a de-escalation of the violence.

“There is an extreme lack of trust on both sides now. Instead of seizing the opportunity presented by the ceasefire there is political rhetoric from the government side,” Bhadra said. “Only patience will bear fruit and perhaps the Maoists in India can go the Nepal way and join the electoral process,” Bhadra said.

The Maoist rebellion in India is nourished by rapid urbanisation and corporate greed backed by political patronage in what activists describe as a flawed developmental model that ignores the rights of indigenous and marginalised people.

An example was the permission given to British mining giant Vedanta Resources Plc’s to extract bauxite in the largely tribal Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa state which adjoins West Bengal.

In this case, however, tribal activists and green groups were able – with support from India’s former environment minister Jairam Ramesh – to stop the project and save the homelands of the Dongaria Kondh and Kutia Kondh tribes.

As far back as 2006, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described the Maoists as the biggest internal threat to the country. Since then, however, he has on several occasions acknowledged the economic underpinnings of the rebellion and called for rapid development as the best tool to contain it.

Excerpt:

Children with congenital disorders linked to the Bhopal gas leak at a candle-light vigil. Credit: Chingari Trust/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar and - -
BHOPAL, India, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

India’s sport stars have joined the survivors of the 1984 gas leak tragedy in this city, capital of the central Madhya Pradesh state, to protest against a sponsorship deal between Dow Chemical and the organisers of the 2012 London Olympic Games.

Children with congenital disorders linked to the Bhopal gas leak at a candle-light vigil. Credit: Chingari Trust/IPS

Dow said in a recent statement that it “never owned or operated the facility in Bhopal” and that it acquired shares in Union Carbide after 470 million dollars were paid up by the original owners, in a settlement approved by the India’s Supreme Court.

But, survivors of the tragedy that occurred on the night of Dec. 2-3, 1984, accuse Dow of sheltering Union Carbide and failing to rectify toxic contamination of soil and groundwater in and around the plant.

A study conducted in 2009 by the Centre for Science and Environment, a leading Delhi-based non-governmental organisation, showed pesticide contamination in the groundwater in a three-km radius of the plant.

“As 100 percent owner Dow Chemical is sheltering Union Carbide that is absconding from charges of culpable homicide in Indian courts for the last 19 years,” said Rashida Bi, a former union leader and activist seeking justice from the perpetrators of the tragedy.

“Dow Chemical is also violating Indian laws by refusing to clean up the toxic contamination of soil and groundwater caused by reckless dumping of hazardous waste by Union Carbide,” said Rashida who has, since 1984, lost six of her family members to cancer.

“We have requested the prime minister and the Indian Olympic Committee to register protests with the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) for accepting Dow’s sponsorship of the Olympics, but they have not moved so far,” she said.

Balkrishna Namdeo, leader of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Nirashrit Pension Bhogi Sangharsh Morcha, a leading organisation representing the victims, said, “We are not against the London Olympics, but we are opposed to the tarnishing of the games through association with a criminal corporation.”

Activists have threatened to block trains in Bhopal, an important railway hub, from Saturday unless the central government records its protest with the organisers of the games.

The state’s Chief Minister Shivaraj Singh Chauhan has joined hands with the protestors and written to the union sports minister Ajay Maken demanding that India boycott the Olympics if Dow continues to be a sponsor.

“They have not met their liabilities and hence, such a company should not be allowed to be associated with the most prestigious sporting event of the world,” Singh said in his letter.

Support has also come from leading Indian sports stars. “They have gotten away with murder. For such devastation caused to our people I am protesting,” said Ashwini Nachappa, who holds national records in track and field events.

Dhanraj Pillay, former captain of India’s hockey team, said Dow should be spending money on improving the lives of the survivors of the tragedy rather than on sponsoring the Olympics.

“The Games should go on, but cannot the Olympics committee change their sponsor? If this company can spend millions on sponsorship, they can pay the victims who are suffering till today,” Pillay told IPS.

In a letter, 21 of India’s Olympic-level athletes have urged LOCOG to cancel Dow’s sponsorship of a fabric wrap around the Olympic stadium in London.

Britain’s shadow Olympics minister, Tessa Jowel, was reported to have written to the chair of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 asking for all documents relating to the decision to award Dow the sponsorship of the Olympic stadium wrap to be made public.

“It’s better that we have an unwrapped stadium, rather than a stadium wrapped in the continuing controversy of Dow Chemical’s sponsorship,” Jowell was reported to have written.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar and - -
NEW DELHI, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer.

A girl at school with a laptop provided by a new scheme. Credit: Sujoy Dahr/IPS

But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project of the Miami-based non-profit One Laptop per Child Association Inc., which aims to digitally empower youth in the global south – Zore and 25 other students in his nondescript village school can now vie with their technology-savvy peers in urban India.

“Attendance to the school has gone up since the launch of the laptop scheme. Students are so self- confident now,” Sandip Surve, a teacher in Khairat told IPS.

Sadly, the story of Zore’s school bridging the digital divide remains an exception in India’s rural hinterland.

A recent survey of digital access in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – found that India ranked the lowest in digital inclusion.

A study released earlier this year by the risk analysis firm Maplecroft supported this claim, revealing that Asia’s third largest economy, home to 1.2 billion people, is stifled by a lack of access to even the most basic information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, internet or even mobile phones.

Maplecroft’s digital inclusion index showed that, among the BRIC nations, India is the only country to be classified as an ‘extreme risk’, meaning that the country’s population currently suffers from a severe lack of digital inclusion.

China, Brazil and Russia were rated as ‘medium risk’ countries.

Despite huge economic growth, the BRIC nations are still significantly outperformed by developed nations in the digital inclusion index.

Sumanjeet Singh, professor at Delhi University’s Ramjas College, who recently authored a paper on India’s digital divide, found that only 1.2 percent of people in rural areas had Internet access, compared to 12 percent access in India’s urban centres.

“Urban users continue to dominate Internet use, comprising 40.34 million of the roughly 49.40 million users,” Singh told IPS.

Inadequate Internet and telephone connectivity in India’s rural areas, where more than 70 percent of the population lives, is a key challenge for all those working to narrow the digital divide, he added.

Attempting to address the issue, India’s human resources minister Kapil Sibal last month unveiled a low- cost computer tablet, which will be deployed to village schools and universities in an effort to lift large segments of India’s rural population out of poverty.

Priced at roughly 35 dollars per unit, the new ‘Aakash’ tablet, developed by the UK-based DataWind in partnership the Indian Institute of Technology in Rajasthan, is being touted as the cheapest new gadget to close the digital gap, and was distributed to 500 children during the month of October.

“Aakash will help in eliminating digital illiteracy,” Sibal told IPS, adding that there is still an urgent need for support and partnership from a broad range of stakeholders in order to further reduce the cost of the device.

To ensure a level playing field, India’s national mission on education through information and communication technology tasked one of the Indian Institutes of Technology – the country’s ivy league engineering and technology training institutions – with the job of procuring and testing these devices.

Sibal said that the government will provide price subsidies to students and distribute the tablet through various academic institutions around the country.

The project is still in its pilot stage, during which 100,000 tablets are being procured, distributed and tested in a range of climatic and usage conditions.

“The feedback obtained from the testing will inform decisions about the design of the device’s updated version,” Sibal said.

The government is not acting alone in its efforts to bridge the digital divide.

Chandrasekhar Panda and Saswat Swain, two young student-innovators from the eastern state of Orissa, recently came up with a scheme to provide laptops for less than 5,000 Indian rupees, which works out to about 100 dollars.

Their ‘iWEBLEAF’ laptop is equipped with a basic 320-gigabyte hard drive and one gigabyte of memory.

The two young innovators have approached various ministries to initiate the process of research and development in Orissa, but are yet to receive a positive response from the authorities.

Blasting the government for its apathy and criticising Aakash as “shockingly inadequate for the student community”, the duo said they are working on “an extraordinary device, now at ultra low cost.”

Other experts, while applauding individuals’ and the government’s efforts to achieve affordability, believe that accessibility still remains a challenge.

“The development of Aakash is a good step forward, it is cheap and affordable, but infrastructure challenges like lack of power and Internet access in villages offsets such efforts,” Singh told IPS.

“Simply providing cheap devices is not enough. The government also has to provide rural students with ‘e- skills’ and work to remove language barriers for users.

“Affordability and accessibility should go hand in hand,” he said, adding that, though India lacks a sound ICT strategy, the digital gap is definitely getting narrower.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
BHOPAL, India, Oct 11 2011 (IPS)

Ajay Shrivastav from Bhopal, the central Indian city that witnessed one of the worst industrial disasters of the world in 1984 from a deadly gas leak, is an angry man seeking justice.

A year ago, Ajay learnt that his father Ramadhar Shrivastav, a victim of the toxic gas that had engulfed Bhopal in 1984, has been subjected to clinical trials in a hospital that was meant to treat the gas victims.

“We were shocked. We are planning to move legally now against such unauthorised clinical trial,” Ajay Shrivastav told IPS.

A Bhopal court last year sentenced eight former top officials of the Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp (UCC) to two years imprisonment each for the 1984 gas leak that eventually killed about 20,000 and left many more incapacitated.

Several of the victims were under prolonged treatment, and some of them fell prey to unauthorised clinical trials without their knowledge.

Ramadhar Shrivastav was part of the Astra Zeneca (a global biopharmaceutical company) trial. He is too sick to speak to anyone.

“At this site in India (Bhopal), some patients were not properly consented,” a spokesperson of the company told IPS, admitting that clinical trials indeed took place without patients’ consent.

“These errors were discovered by AstraZeneca through monitoring processes we employ for all of our clinical studies and promptly corrected by the investigator,” the spokesperson said.

“Good clinical practice requires investigators to obtain study patients’ informed consent,” the company said.

Earlier, Indian health activists in Bhopal gathered proof that the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC), which was built with funds from Union Carbide shares confiscated as part of the criminal case on the gas leak, carried out clinical trials on gas victims without their knowledge.

Official documents show that hospital director K. K. Maudar has admitted to the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) that there were drug trials. The official documents show that 80 percent of those subjected to clinical trials were victims of the 1984 disaster.

“We have documents showing the details of deaths in the three trials – Fondaparinux (cardiology) and Tigicycline (gastro surgery) and Televancin trial (anaesthesiology) – that took place at BMHRC,” Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action told IPS.

“It clearly mentions that almost all people who died were gas victims.”

According to the DCGI, six trials were carried out at the BMHRC while the activists say there were more such trials.

“We believe that as many as 10 drug trials were carried out by BMHRC. In their own account statement which was submitted to DCGI they clearly show that they received money for 10 different trials,” says Dhingra.

The trials were conducted on 215 gas victims, according to the figures mentioned in the letter of the hospital director to the deputy drug controller of India, Dr R. Ramakrishna, on Feb. 22 this year. The letter also gives a breakdown of the drug trials.

Dr Chandra Gulhati, editor of the New Delhi-based Monthly Index of Medical Specialties, said the BMHRC was set up in 2000 to provide super-specialty care to survivors of the tragedy and carry out research on long-term effects of the methyl-isocyanate (MIC) chemical that caused the deaths.

“But instead of concentrating on MIC-related issues, the hospital became a hot spot for conducting clinical trials on untested drugs that were primarily designed to help pharma companies,” he said.

According to a World Health Organisation (WHO) bulletin report in 2008 titled ‘Clinical trials in India: ethical concerns’, transnational drug companies are moving their clinical trials business to India, giving a new urgency to clinical trials registry reform.

India’s powerful industry association Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) says the country is set to grab clinical trials business valued at approximately 1 billion dollars by the end of 2010, up from 200 million dollars the previous year, making the subcontinent one of the world’s preferred destinations for clinical trials.

FairDrugs.org, a campaign by a worldwide coalition of health organisations and scientists led by Wemos Foundation in the Netherlands, says people living in countries like India run a high risk from pharmaceutical companies testing drugs on them unethically for the Western market.

An Indian research report published in 2009 shows several pharmaceutical companies’ disregard for ethical rules.

“The Indian Centre for Studies in Ethics and Rights has examined, among other things, the way GlaxoSmithKline tested a breast cancer drug on seriously ill women in India,” said Annelies den Boer of the Dutch Wemos Foundation, co-commissioner of the study with the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO).

Sandhya Srinivasan, a researcher who along with Sachin Nikarge documented the report for the Centre for Studies in Ethics and Rights, Mumbai, said it was found that “these trials exploited the fact that most Indians do not have access to good quality and affordable care and therefore may accept offers that might provide better quality and free treatment.”

Gulhati says the clinical registration process in India should be more stringent.

“The Drugs Controller General of India should make it obligatory for all trials to be registered on the Clinical Trials Registry site before permission is granted to conduct them.”

He said failure to do so should carry a penalty. “In addition, while registering trials, the composition of hospital ethics committees, which approved the trial, should be disclosed. Fewer than 40 ethics committees in India are properly constituted and functioning, which means that the safety of the subjects of clinical trials is on the back burner.”

An increasing number of hospitals are now owned by drug companies, he said. “Clinical trials at such hospitals should carry a statement of disclosure about the relationship.”

According to den Boer of Wemos, “time after time we see that patients in developing countries are used to test drugs that are primarily intended for the European market. Contrary to the ethical guidelines, these patients do not benefit from the research results.”

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Aug 22 2011 (IPS)

In his Independence Day address to the nation on Aug. 15 Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh vowed to fight corruption, but nationwide agitations since then demanding an effective ombudsman to check graft showed an unconvinced public.

Singh’s government appeared to have underestimated the public mood by arresting, the next day, Anna Hazare, 74, the face of a growing anti-graft movement focused currently on getting a strong Lokpal (ombudsman) Bill passed through Parliament.

By the evening of Aug. 16, with crowds swelling around Tihar jail, the capital’s main prison, the government was compelled to release Hazare and concede to his demand to be allowed to sit on a fast at a public venue.

It was after a first round of fasting by Hazare in April that the government set up a joint law drafting panel consisting of ministers and civil society members.

However, when the government was seen to be pushing its own watered-down version of the draft, quickly dubbed the ‘Jokepal Bill’ by Hazare and his supporters, that a fresh and even more vigorous season of protest began.

Hazare’s Jan Lokpal Bill (People’s Lokpal Bill) would bring even the powerful prime minister’s office and the judiciary under the purview of the proposed ombudsman law.

On Sunday, an estimated 100,000 people gathered in the capital’s Ramlila Grounds, where Hazare is sitting on his fast, in a show of solidarity that reminded many of the days of India’s independence movement which peacefully ended the British colonial rule in 1947.

“We are here to support the only true Gandhian left in India,” said Rajkumar Goel, who left his drugstore to join the rally. “They have siphoned away large amounts of money in the name of liberalisation so that the gap between rich and poor is widening faster than ever before.”

As people across Indian cities and towns and villages rallied in support of Hazare, it was a warning to not just the centrally ruling Congress party but the entire political class that India’s civil society was truly fed up with their corrupt ways.

The conflict between the government and civil society is taking place as Asia’s third largest economy grapples with unprecedented levels of corruption that is said to be undermining the liberalisation-led growth of this nation of 1.21 billion people.

According to the estimates released last year by the Indian government’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), a single financial scam involving issuance of second generation telecom licenses cost the exchequer about 39 billion dollars.

Former telecommunications minister Andimuthu Raja, who presided over the award of the telecom licenses, was sacked and sent to Tihar jail after a preliminary probe.

The telecom scam was followed by a huge financial scandal over award of contracts and purchases during the organisation of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in the national capital, confirmed by the CAG.

Investigations have traced proceeds from such scams to offshore accounts and tax havens, suggesting that large amounts of money being generated illegally were siphoned away abroad.

Indeed, a report released last year by the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity said India could be losing at least 19.3 billion dollars annually in illegal flows out of the country.

Protests from the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appeared feeble as the party was itself bogged down by massive financial scandals in southern Karnataka state where it runs the provincial government.

With political parties of all shades losing credibility, the field opened up for civil society to move in and Hazare’s campaign for a strong ombudsman gained extra power.

“In recent years political opposition has become weak. The BJP’s attack on the Congress party-led coalition government was blunted by a major mining scandal in Karnataka that forced the resignation of chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa,” said Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a prominent commentator on political and economic affairs.

“That vacuum is now being filled up by a section of civil society,” said Thakurta. “This is Indian democracy evolving.”

Opinion surveys showed the Congress party losing popularity and the BJP not gaining from it. The results of a poll released last week by Nielsen, the internationally reputed research group, showed a 5.6 percent drop in electoral support for the Congress party over the last year.

While that has prompted the BJP to call for fresh elections, another poll conducted by the New Delhi- based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies showed that 38 percent of Indians would still vote for the Congress-led ruling coalition, rather than the BJP.

Thakurta added that rising food prices may have added to public ire. “India has a huge food inflation on top of corruption scandals. So naturally there is popular discontent that we see surfacing as mass support for Hazare’s movement.”

Kalikesh Singh Deo, one of India’s younger lawmakers representing the regional Biju Janata Dal party that rules eastern Orissa state, admits that people are losing faith in politicians. “Perhaps the churning will bring better democracy,” he observed.

According to T.R. Raghunandan, activist and founder of the Bangalore-based anti-corruption website Ipaidabribe.com, the battle-lines are now clearly drawn between a Gandhian-style peaceful, non- cooperation movement led by Hazare and a fidgety and insecure government.

“Anna Hazare-led group is right in wanting a strong Lokpal bill. Yet, politicians, however despicable they might be, are right, too. We have a parliament and a draft bill is now before our elected representatives.

“It is for them to decide, and beyond a point they ought not to be pressured by fasts-unto-death. But then persuading Parliament is not an easy task,” said Raghunandan.

However, bolstered by people power, Hazare served an Aug. 30 ultimatum to the government on Sunday. “The government will have to accept the Jan Lokpal Bil because the people have awakened. If not, you (government) will have to go.”

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
MUMBAI, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

Hastimal Sen mistook the deafening sounds of explosions that shook his office in Mumbai’s crowded Zaveri Bazaar Wednesday evening as cars backfiring.

Aftermath of bombings at Zaveri Bazaar in south Mumbai. Credit: Courtesy of IBNS

Sen, haunted by the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, knew his city was once again a target of terrorism.

“I got many of them in cabs to take them to the hospital. It was a scene I would never forget,” says Sen, a gift shop owner in Zaveri Bazaar, the hub of diamond trade in India’s financial heart of Mumbai.

“But I am angry. This is the third attack in this area and there is no regard for our security or lives as it happens again and again,” he says.

A day after three coordinated blasts tore through Mumbai, whose mostly migrant population tops 20.5 million, anger and hopelessness are overpowering grief and resilience.

“We are called resilient. But the famous Mumbai resilience is forced upon us. We are angry and helpless at the same time,” Jayesh Labdhi, a committee member of the Mumbai Diamond Merchants’ Association, told IPS.

“Life is cheap in Mumbai. I saw it myself yesterday,” says Labdhi. “People lying dead all over and running helplessly. We bring prosperity to Mumbai, but our own lives are valueless since it is happening again and again and the government fails each time.”

Prithviraj Chavan, chief minister of Maharashtra, the western Indian state of which Mumbai is the capital, says the city is targeted because it is the financial heart of India.

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Thursday that the perpetrators of the attack would be brought to justice. Meanwhile the opposition blamed the ruling government for its policy failure in dealing with terrorists and security analysts expressed that India is woefully lacking in capacity to fight terror.

Ajai Sahni, a counter-terrorism expert with the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said intelligence is of no use till India builds a nationwide capacity to fight terror.

“Even if you fortify Mumbai, there would be countless other Muffasil towns in India where the network will thrive and bombs will be assembled to take them to cities like Mumbai for blasts,” Sahni says.

“Since the 2008 November terror strikes in Mumbai, the city police have made arrests, especially in recent times Islamist terrorists were apprehended, but it cannot stop terror unless that capacity building is extended across the country,” Sahni explains. “You have to dismantle the terror network across India. Terror cannot be contained at the point of delivery.”

While India’s home minister P. Chidambaram said there was no intelligence failure in the case of the latest terror attacks in Mumbai, Sahni said intelligence networks have to be extended nationwide.

According to B. Raman, director of the Chennai-based Institute for Topical Studies and former chief of India’s intelligence agency’s research and analysis wing, any successful terror attack is an intelligence failure.

“These attacks are not matters of providing physical security. Here it is happening in a crowded public place,” Raman says, pointing out that Mumbai was attacked first in 1993, then in 2003, 2006, 2008 and now again in 2011. “While we blame Pakistan for it all, we have to bring concrete evidence of Pakistan’s involvement. Till that time we have to keep talking with Pakistan.”

According to Sahni, talks with Pakistan are meaningless for India’s security because they have got nothing to do with building internal capacity to fight terrorists.

“Pakistan is exporting terror to India since 1984 and there is no reason to believe that it will ever change its policy,” Sahni says.

L. K. Advani, the leader of India’s main opposition party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said India should not be ambivalent towards terrorism.

“It is not a failure of intelligence, it is essentially a failure of policy,” Advani says. “The Government of India must shed its ambivalence toward terrorism and follow a zero tolerance policy,” he says, hinting at the Manmohan Singh-led central government’s decision to resume talks with Pakistan after they broke down over the 2008 Mumbai attack.

No terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attacks of Wednesday.

While there is suspicion that a home grown group called the Indian Mujahideen (IM) – said to be a part of the Pakistan-based militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) – is at fault, Indian authorities have not yet named any outfit.

“All are suspected. We are also interrogating some recently arrested members of IM, but there are no special leads yet,” said U. K. Bansal, internal security secretary under India’s Home Ministry.

LeT was blamed for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack in which 10 gunmen laid a three-day siege to a Jewish centre and two luxury hotels killing 166 people, including foreigners, and wounding more than 300.

While the politicians bicker and the blame game continues, Mumbai residents are livid.

“This is a repeat telecast of the past such attacks. The debate over intelligence failure is a sham and the word resilience is nothing but a cover for our impotency,” said Ashok Pandit, a filmmaker and social activist in a television debate here.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
BENAPOLE, Bangladesh, Jun 28 2011 (IPS)

Thirteen-year-old Jamal is a Bangladeshi bootlegger who carries goods from Haridaspur town in the Indian state of West Bengal to the border district of Jessore in southwest Bangladesh, playing cat-and-mouse with Indian frontier guards every day.

Children such as these are used as smugglers across the India-Bangladesh border. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS.

As Jamal tried to free himself from the wire and cross over to Bangladesh, the burly North Indian sentry pulled him back to the Indian side. The barbs dug into Jamal’s skin, drawing blood and scooping out a shred of his flesh in the tug of war.

“The border guard then stomped over my palm with his heavy boot,” recalls Jamal (not his real name). Wounded and bleeding, he managed to return to the safety of his side of the border, Bangladesh, suffering no more than the physical pain. But he was worried about the day’s losses of about 300 taka (four dollars).

Life along the India-Bangladesh border has become a dangerous game for poverty-stricken children trying to make the most of their location by bootlegging. On either side, poverty has produced a large number of young local smugglers, transporting anything from cattle to fruit and narcotics to chocolates.

But children pay a high price for earning a living. “Many children face abuse – physical or sexual – while women engaged in the trade often end up offering sexual favours to border guards to avoid legal hassles and prosecution,” says Tariqul Islam of Rights Jessore, a group working to protect the children and trafficked women of Bangladesh.

The abuses, said to be mainly perpetrated by Indian troops of the Border Security Force (BSF), continue despite criticisms from human rights groups.

Last December, an 81-page report titled “Trigger Happy: Excessive Use of Force by Indian Troops at the Bangladesh Border” by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch found numerous cases of indiscriminate use of force, arbitrary detention, torture, and killings by the BSF. But very few of the cases were investigated and none of the perpetrators punished.

The BSF guards the Indian side of the border, is better armed and outnumbers its Bangladesh counterpart known as Border Guards Bangladesh (previously Bangladesh Rifles or the BDR).

These two forces are tasked with guarding the porous 4,096-km border, including more than 1,100 kms in the southern part of India’s West Bengal, which has its share of child smugglers.

One of them is Raju Barman, who lives near the border town of Hili in South Dinajpur district in West Bengal. “I have to avoid the eyes of four to five Indian border guards every day to take my consignment to the other side,” says Barman, a fifth grade dropout. “I earn 70 rupees (1.5 dollars).”

Barman explains he delivers Indian goods to his Bangladeshi counterpart, a boy named Selim, on the other side of the border, and makes as many as five trips on any given day. And then he would also take Bangladeshi goods from Selim to sell in India, although Indian goods are more in demand on the other side. “We are often caught and get beaten up, but we still go. We are poor,” says Barman.

While the BSF usually lets the younger boys go after roughing them up, the teenaged boys and young women in the trade are vulnerable to sexual assault too, rights activists say.

Authorities in Bangladesh acknowledge the abuses on the border but admit to helplessness. “We know of the trafficking and the child carriers, but our resources are limited,” says Mohammad Nurul Amin, the Jessore district magistrate and deputy commissioner.

“We are offering some monetary support for families to send their children to school and (also) offering free books,” he says.

On the Indian side, the BSF’s new South Bengal Inspector General Ashok Kumar says they are also encouraging children to go back to school.

“We are also adopting one school under every border outpost to bring the children back to school and provide them facilities,” Kumar says.

But asked about the abuses, Kumar, who had been commended for his humane approach to problems in previous postings, could only say, “I will try to find out the truth and see what can be done.”

A senior BSF official requesting anonymity says unless the governments of both countries take up the issue, nothing can be done to stop the violation of child rights.

“The big bosses are not paying serious attention to the problem. If they are not serious about stopping smuggling, they should make it an open border,” the official says. “It is a tragedy of the system.” The volume of trade in the border areas is substantial. A Central Law Commission Report in India back in 2000 said illegal trade between India and Bangladesh was around five billion dollars. Official trade between the two countries amounts to less than three billion dollars.

Locals allege that border guards of the two countries are in cahoots with smuggling syndicates. Human rights activists say the border is dotted with illegal “ghats” (ports) through which smuggling takes place. Every ghat has an owner or group of owners called “ghat maliks” (port owners) controlling the trade. Ghat maliks, activists say, are shadowy figures that appear to be connected with powerful and influential people.

The goods smuggled from the Indian side are mostly cattle, fruits, fertilisers, pesticide, salt, spices, sugar, and “bidi” (hand rolled local cheap cigars). Then there are also medicines and narcotics, such as the popular intoxicant Phensedyl, a cough syrup Bangladeshis drink as liquor. Other goods include garments, electronic equipment (often those which reach India from China), DVDs, and motorcycle engines.

Smuggled from the Bangladesh side are usually fish, oil, mobile handsets and soaps besides gold, fake currency, metals and small arms.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 24 2011 (IPS)

Fourteen-year-old Satikanta Sahu loves going to school, but these days, he would rather spend his time manning the barricade and facing down policemen in the sandy coastal village of Govindpur in India’s eastern state of Orissa.

Villagers hug the ground to stop construction of the steel plant. Credit: IPS.

His slogans rebuke the Orissa government for plotting to wipe out their village to give way to a 12- billion-dollar steel plant. The plant, to be built and run by South Korea’s Pohang Steel Company (POSCO), will have a capacity of four million tonnes and is touted to be the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in India, Asia’s third largest economy.

The Orissa government says the plant needs a total of 3,719 acres, of which only some 150 acres are private land, the rest being forest and government land. But it is the 150 acres that are highly contentious, because they are home to 613 families whom the plant will displace.

These families are concentrated in Govindpur and the neighbouring village of Dhinkia, where they make a living growing betel leaves.

At the forefront of the protest are women and children, Sahu among them. “I love going to school. But I have been here for many days now, because this is our livelihood,” he says. “We want POSCO to go back. We will not allow the designs of Naveen Patnaik (Orissa’s chief minister) to succeed.”

As India tries to industrialise and attract foreign investment, it faces resistance from villagers and farmers reluctant to part with land on which they are rooted. According to a study last year by leading business chamber ASSOCHAM, delays in land acquisition are threatening investments worth 100 billion dollars, while at least 22 major steel projects worth 82 billion dollars are stalled because of protesting farmers and activists.

As the protest of more than 2,000 people against POSCO continues, the Orissa government has deployed over 800 police to the site.

The villagers, under the umbrella of POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti (PPSS, which means Group to Resist POSCO) have formed a three-tier barricade at the entry to the village and keep a round-the- clock vigil.

The Orissa government has called the acquisition move a peaceful process. Protesters and activists say, however, that the government is coercing them into giving in by deploying a huge number of police officers to the area.

“Of the total 3,719 acres needed for the project, 2,958 acres is forest land for which we have got required clearance from the federal government’s environment ministry,” Orissa Industry Minister Raghunath Mohanty told IPS.

“About 608 acres are revenue land (government land). We need to acquire only 152 acres of private land where about 613 families will be displaced,” informs Mohanty.

While the government decided to temporarily halt land acquisition in the face of protests, the villagers say they will fight to their last breath and keep continuous vigil. From Jun. 8 onwards, over 400 students have joined the protest meetings, along with more than 2,000 women and elderly members. Now, the activists are planning to hold classes on the frontlines, so that students can keep protesting and not miss their studies.

“The government calls it a peaceful land acquisition programme, while the truth is that meetings are on in the administration and a blue print is being prepared to enter Govindpur forcefully,” says PPSS leader Prashant Paikray.

The activists fear the government is planning a repeat of Kalinganagar, another area in Orissa’s Jajpur district. There, in January 2006, tribal people protested the construction of a steel plant by India’s iconic Tata Group and were fired upon by police, resulting in the death of 12 people.

“Why is the government and the state upset over the so-called biggest FDI, when we for generations to come could remain happy and prosperous with our vibrant economy of pan (betel), mina (fish) and dhan (paddy) without any such project which promises only to destroy everything around us?” asks Abhay Sahoo, one of the leaders of the protest movement.

“This is one area in the country where the Forest Rights Act (FRA) 2006 has been grossly violated and various government appointed committees even corroborated that,” says Sahoo.

Earlier this year, India’s Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh gave clearance to the POSCO project on certain conditions. Yet a panel set up by the ministry itself suggested last October that the project violated coastal regulations and forest rights laws.

The four-member panel, headed by India’s former environment secretary Meena Gupta, probed the issue and differed in their views. But a majority of three panel members recommended the revocation of the environmental clearance given to POSCO in 2007.

The majority of the panel said POSCO-India Pvt. Ltd has not been able to address all the issues relating to Coastal Regulatory Zone notifications, and identified a number of serious lapses and violations, including suppression of facts.

Later, in a press statement, POSCO said it “never violated any law or procedure for obtaining any governmental clearance whatsoever required for the Project.”

“After five long years of MOU (Memorandum of Understanding), we have not been able to commence any operation, owing to our commitment to obtain all necessary statutory clearances before commencing any operation,” POSCO said.

While POSCO seems to have overcome the environmental clearance hurdle despite the views of the panel, for now, only the human barricades and steely resolve of the villagers stand in POSCO’s way.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
MUMBAI, May 27 2011 (IPS)

More than a decade ago, when India’s first lesbian-themed film – ‘Fire’ by Deepa Mehta – was released, it was booed and met with protest and vandalism, forcing many fear-stricken theatre owners to take the film off their screens.

Kashish festival ambassador Celina Jaitley (right) and Shyam Benegal, the festival patron. Credit:

KASHISH 2011 is the second edition of India’s largest queer film festival that showcases LGBT films, and it is passing without a murmur of protest from any moral brigade.

Cinema buffs are queuing up to watch 124 films from 23 countries on offer May 25-29. KASHISH is screening in a mainstream multiplex this year, with the full approval of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Growing social acceptance of homosexuality in India is evident in the recent film festivals and releases of gay-themed films that draw a mainstream audience.

When two gay-themed films debuted in Kolkata recently by openly gay Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, the audience was overwhelmingly heterosexual.

But pride of choice also goes hand in hand with lingering prejudice over homosexuality in India, say the organisers of the Mumbai festival who have mixed feelings on the issue.

“Last year when we organised the festival, it was a great success. We also found after a proper survey that at least 28 percent of the audience in the festival was from outside the LGBT community, from the mainstream,” filmmaker and festival director Sridhar Rangayan told IPS.

“The participation of people at large shows a change in social attitudes – gays are not seen as ‘criminals’ anymore. The image of a gay man or woman is changing,” Rangayan says.

The time is ripe to create spaces for homosexuals and their behaviour in mainstream society, not only and not always through an amorous relationship, said director-turned-actor Ghosh.

“I think the reading of Article 377 of Indian Penal Code [a vestige of India’s outdated British era laws which criminalise gay sex] by the Delhi High Court in 2009 contributed to the changing perception. Our festival is a spin-off of that favourable judicial verdict decriminalising gay sex,” Rangayan says.

There is no total acceptance yet, but it is surely changing. “A pure Bollywood movie like Dostana [a movie featuring two of the most famous male Bollywood stars playing gay roles, which also ends with their bonding] helped a lot in the changing perception,” according to Rangayan.

The filmmaker, however, regrets that some filmmakers who have made movies incorporating gay themes have shied away from screening them at the KASHISH for what appears to be their reluctance to have their films labelled as gay films.

“This is another kind of prejudice,” Rangayan says.

“All minorities in this country need representation and sexual minorities are one of them. KASHISH is a move in the right direction to create awareness through the medium of films,” says Shyam Benegal, one of the most respected Indian filmmakers, who is also a patron of the festival. “It is a step forward in the gay movement.”

According to Ashok Row Kavi, one of the veterans of the gay rights movement here who also founded India’s first gay magazine ‘Bombay Dost’, the participation of filmmakers like Shyam Benegal lends the festival a mainstream flavour.

“The issue is now getting mainstreamed. Homosexuality is so much part of the social landscape now,” says Kavi. “But stigma still is a question. Though the situation has changed for the better, it has to be seen how and when the stigma of being homosexual fades away.”

According to Rangayan, the festival will help change public perceptions since it offers cinema as a means to understand what being queer means today. “The festival will foster better understanding of queer thoughts, desires and expressions.”

Last year the festival drew a crowd of 1200 people. The organisers expect that number to swell to 2500 this year.

“The festival this year is bigger, bolder and queerer,” says Rangayan. “We have a bigger theatre with twice the seating capacity, we have more films and better films, we have international filmmakers coming to the festival and we have lots of allied activities.”

“Market forces are at play here too. Society has become more individualistic and co-existence and tolerance is also a result of that, and not necessarily a change of mindset towards gay people,” says S. Parasuraman, director of Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

“Globalisation has made polarisation among various groups strong. So they can co-exist. It is also an ‘I don’t care about you’ attitude as people are more concerned about opulence and other material things than other social groups.”

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar
MUMBAI, May 27 2011 (IPS)

In a secluded hospital bed in this bustling Indian metropolis, a woman who has lain brain dead for 37 years after a brutal sexual assault is at the centre of a national debate on mercy killing.

India’s Supreme Court has ruled that Aruna Shanbaug should live, while at the same time supporting passive euthanasia – or the withholding of medical treatments that are keeping her alive.

The court’s decision to rule out euthanasia of any kind for Shanbaug gladdened her former colleagues – nurses at the King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital – who have taken care of her since the day in 1973 when she was sodomised and strangled with a dog chain by a hospital custodian whose advances she had spurned.

The decision saddened Pinki Virani, the journalist who petitioned the court to allow euthanasia for her.

Virani also recognised the importance of the landmark decision in a country where euthanasia of any kind had previously been unlawful. This did not stop Virani from criticising Shanbaug’s fellow nurses who want to keep her alive. “Because of Aruna Shanbaug – this tragic woman who has been denied the choice because of those who profess to ‘love’ her by touting her bedsore-less ‘life’ – no Indian hereinafter need suffer the way she does,” Virani said.

The Supreme Court verdict came as a first step toward the passage of a law in India on euthanasia – allowing passive euthanasia in certain cases, based on merit.

According to the judges, since “there is no statutory provision in our country as to the legal procedure for withdrawing life support to a person in PVS [permanent vegetative state]… passive euthanasia should be permitted in our country in certain situations.”

According to court euthanasia should not be permitted to Shanbaug because her caregivers are ready to tend to her medical needs. The hospital is taking care of her and as such the court decided that unless they want it, it will not be granted. Shanbaug’s family has shunned her since the incident. Virani’s petition was also rejected, as she is neither Shanbaug’s kin nor caregiver.

The court said it disagreed with the government’s legal advisor, the attorney general, that euthanasia should never be permitted.

“A decision has to be taken to discontinue life support either by the parents or the spouse or other close relatives, or in the absence of any of them, such a decision can be taken even by a person or a body of persons acting as a next friend,” the court said.

India’s Law Minister Veerappa Moily immediately said, “There is a need for a serious debate regarding the matter. It has to be examined, it has to be debated upon.”

Proponents of voluntary euthanasia in India hailed the court’s decision. “This court verdict is path- breaking and it has legalised something which is actually already in practice in many hospitals by the doctors. We need a law making voluntary euthanasia – both active and passive – an option,” said Surendra Dhelia, a medical doctor who is also joint secretary of the Mumbai-based Society for Right to Die with Dignity, which is affiliated with The World Federation of Right to Die Societies.

Dhelia said a person should make a living will or give someone a power of attorney under which he or she can be denied treatment in case of terminal illness or vegetative state.

“As an individual, I support euthanasia for Aruna since [she has been] in a vegetative state for 37 years. But since she does not have a living will we cannot support it legally,” said Dhelia.

Virani said the Indian Parliament must add to the Supreme Court guidelines to further protect individual rights. “Meanwhile, individuals could examine the possibility of writing their living will and also talk to those they trust about the DNR or ‘do not resuscitate’,” said Virani.

Harmala Gupta, founder of CanSupport, India’s first cancer support group, said it is premature to talk of euthanasia in a country which has yet to make basic health care available to its citizens.

“It is not fair to ask someone who does not have reliable and affordable access to proper symptom control for unrelenting pain and other distressing problems, including mental depression, whether they want to take their life,” said Gupta.

“The wishes of the family, if the patient is unable to communicate, will also have to be considered,” said Gupta, who also believes that allowing death to take its natural course either by not intervening to interrupt it (euthanasia) or by prolonging it (using a ventilator) when it is clear that a patient is dying is the right way forward.

“For this we need to make palliative care a part of basic health care in this country,” Gupta said.

With too few support groups like CanSupport in India, and the healthcare system in dire straits, euthanasia is often a heartless choice for the poor, according to Gupta.

In a village in eastern India’s Bihar, shopkeepers Mukesh Kumar and Asha Devi had once asked the court to allow the mercy killing of their two terminally ill children. When the courts refused them, they appealed to the prime minister and the state’s chief minister for help to bear the cost of treatment.

Their two sons, 15-year-old Nitin and 13-year-old Anshu, suffer from muscular dystrophy, a hereditary disease that weakens the muscles. The brothers are unable to do anything on their own since they are paralysed from the chest downwards.

“Either the law should allow us to practice euthanasia or assist us in treating them,” said the parents who have made the rounds of courts and government hospitals with their plight and prayers.

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By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, India, May 23 2011 (IPS)

When it comes to sports, India has always cheered for Brazil in soccer. Now come another three cheers, this time for South Africa in cricket. The reason: a South African named Gary Kirsten who coached India to win the Cricket World Cup this year, for the first time in 28 years.

Kirsten is back home in South Africa, now that the 2011 Cricket World Cup is over, but parting with his Indian fans and teammates was not easy. “It has been one of the hardest goodbyes I have had to say,” Kirsten told journalists before he left.

It is here, on the field and on the street that ideas about IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) are coming alive.

Kiran More, former Indian cricketer and chief of national selectors, says what Kirsten brought to Indian cricket and its team is incomparable, and he could do so because he understood the culture of the country.

“He is from South Africa and there are lots of Indians living there. So he knew our culture and he did a wonderful job,” says More, speaking to IPS. “He now enjoys the highest respect from Indians. Gary has his own style of functioning and the way he handled the senior players is praiseworthy.”

Kirsten has made South Africa a focus of adulation in cricket, which people here liken to a religion. South Africa will now share centre stage with Brazil, the country Indians root for when it comes to soccer.

During soccer World Cup games, the soccer mania turns violent, as in the clashes of the fans of two archrival clubs – East Bengal and Mohun Bagan. But Brazil unites the people when it comes to international soccer and World Cup allegiance.

In India’s eastern city Kolkata, the palette of soccer is yellow-green, the colours of Brazil. Barring the hysteria over Argentina’s Diego Maradona, the West Bengal state of 90 million people of which Kolkata is the capital, soccer fans live, drink and sleep Brazil during the World Cup games.

A walk down the streets of Kolkata during the World Cup will be like strolling down the streets of Rio de Janeiro, as the walls are covered in graffiti of yellow-green and Brazilian soccer stars.

It is not just the walls. During the World Cup and on the days of Brazil’s encounters in the field, youngsters paint their faces yellow and green, gripped by the Samba fever.

A famous visit by Brazilian soccer legend Pele in 1977 is still etched in the memory of every Kolkatan— from the fans to the soccer players of the town then who recall those emotional moments more than 34 years ago.

In 2006, Brazilian Carlos Roberto Pereira Da Silva was appointed the head coach of Kolkata’s glamour outfit East Bengal. Djair Miranda Garcia, a Brazilian, is now physical coach of another famous soccer outfit of India—the Chirag United Sports Club.

But India wants more and has formally requested Brazil to send soccer coaches for the development of football in India. When Brazil’s foreign minister Antonio Patriota met his Indian counterpart S. M. Krishna in New Delhi in March this year, the latter asked him to send coaches to India for training players here.

They even issued a joint statement that said, “The Ministers reiterated the need for enhancing cooperation in sports under the MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) signed in February 2008 between India and Brazil and welcomed the initiative to celebrate the decade of sports in Brazil. They also welcomed the proposal of sending football coaches to India for training of Indian players.”

Former football player and now expert commentator Prasun Banerjee says “Only a Brazilian can take Indian soccer forward. It is because we are both skill-based and we have many things in common.

“No other country can help us more in soccer than Brazil,” Banerjee adds. “We need Brazilian coaches. Our food habits are similar – Bengalis are sold on fish and rice— while we genuinely love Brazil.”

Aside from common food preferences, soccer experts attribute this affinity to the physical similarity between the players of Brazil and India.

With South Africa, that affinity is cultural. Cricket pundits feel Kirsten successfully coached India owing to the understanding of Indian culture, something he perhaps imbibed from the large Indian diaspora in South Africa.

Kirsten himself was effusive about the victory and the love he received from India.

“I’m very grateful to have played a part in this victory, which means so much to all of India,” he says. “The past three years have been a privilege for me as I have learned about India and got to know not only the talented cricketers but also the many, many wonderful people I have met over this time.”

Now, it is not just trade and commerce, but sports as well, that binds the people of India with South Africa and Brazil, like they do in few other countries.

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By Sujoy Dhar
KOLKATA, India, May 13 2011 (IPS)

The cheapest car in the world proved the costliest for a 34-year-old Left Front CPI-M government in India’s eastern state of West Bengal, as the communists lost the elections here by a wide margin.

Victory celebrations outside the house of Mamata Banerjee. Credit: Avishek Mitra/IPS

A sweep by a regional party – Trinamool Congress – led by Mamata Banerjee, a firebrand and frugal- living woman leader who is now India’s railway minister, brought to an end 34 years of Marxist electoral politics in this state of 90 million people.

The Trinamool Congress, in alliance with India’s ruling Congress party, won 226 of the 294 assembly seats, leaving only 61 for the Marxists – who had captured 235 seats in 2006.

The communists, who used to consider West Bengal a flagship state of the red movement and political power in India, survived the fall of Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Union, but a land war against villagers and farmers here finally cost them their seats.

“The left had distanced itself from the people. Now it is going to be a long haul for them to regain lost ground,” political analyst Paranjoy Guha Thakurta told IPS. “They have to be far more concerned about people and their aspirations.”

According to Thakurta, the left in India still have an important role to play owing to the many negative effects of globalisation, but arrogance of power brought their downfall. “All the good work they did got negated by their arrogance,” he says.

After assuming power in 1977, the Left Front in West Bengal carried out a land reform programme that distributed patches of land to millions of small farmers in the state, thus endearing itself to the rural poor and earning accolades worldwide.

It is this same land that they forcibly tried to seize for industrialisation recently. Their latest slogan was “agriculture to industry”.

In 2006, after winning a huge mandate for a seventh consecutive term, the Left Front, led by its reformist Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee decided to boost industrialisation and move away from the trade unionism of the past.

It seized about 1,000 acres of land in a fertile region called Singur – barely 40 kilometres from the state capital Kolkata – against the wishes of the farmers and handed it over to one of India’s top carmakers, Tata Motors, for a factory to manufacture the ‘Nano’ – billed as the cheapest car in the world priced at just over 2,000 dollars.

“It was a wrong decision,” says the outgoing government’s Land Reforms Minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah. “I had warned them [the senior leaders and the chief minister] then, but they did not listen and now they face the consequences.”

The left government unleashed policemen on the farmers of Singur who protested the land-grab. The farmers were beaten mercilessly, triggering a public outcry, and offering a weapon to the opposition.

In another southern constituency called Nandigram, the fear of land acquisition turned into a yearlong turf war between the communists and their political rivals – led by parties like Trinamool Congress.

On Mar. 7, 2007, at least 14 people were killed in a police shooting in Nandigram, while the armed cadres of the left simultaneously brutalised and raped women.

The battles of Singur and Nandigram were seized by Banerjee, whose image was a leader with a clean image and Spartan life.

She found steady support in the revolting intelligentsia of Bengal who were until then aligned to the left.

“This is finally the victory of people, of Ma, Mati and Manush [Mother, Soil and People],” said Mamata Banerjee, after the win Friday, as celebrations broke out outside her humble dwelling in a south Kolkata neighbourhood.

While the people celebrate the victory, some political analysts are concerned about the loss of mainstream communist relevance, especially in light of the rise of leftist extremism championed by the Maoists in India.

“It is sad that mainstream left is losing its power while the Maoists gain strength,” says political scientist Sabyasachi Basu Roy Chowdhury.

“The ideology of left still has relevance in India owing to the large number of marginalised people being left out of the economic prosperity and progress of India, Asia’s third largest economy. Poverty and unemployment are affecting a large majority still in India,” Chowdhury says.

“The left in India has to reinvent themselves and that is their biggest challenge. In Europe there are so many experiments going on now, but the left in West Bengal did not catch up with anything happening in other parts of the world. They thought their model is the ultimate model of communism in present day. They were in a permanent mode of denial and complacency and wanted people to bow before them,” he says.

“They politicised the education system, appointed party members in key posts and only the cadres of the party prospered. They did nothing in areas where now the Maoists dominate,” according to Thakurta. “Everyone has to be a CPI-M man to be a beneficiary in West Bengal.”

Meanwhile, vast swathes of underdeveloped land in West Bengal and neighbouring states were overrun by the Maoists, whom Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the biggest internal threat in India.

The Maoist movement began in the late 1960s in a northern town of West Bengal called Naxalbari, from which the word ‘Naxalites’ or ‘Naxals’, as the rebels are also known, is derived. It subsided in the early 1970s only to resurface as a more violent force that now operates under the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Lalgarh town in West Bengal became a symbol of the growing Maoist expansion when they captured the police station there and adjoining areas in early 2009.

When this correspondent visited Lalgarh, he found no development work whatsoever done for the poor in the region. The impoverished people broke down in tears narrating their plight.

“This result is a slap in the face of the communists,” says Thakurta. “It is time for introspection and correction. The Left in India should find out what went wrong and not live in fool’s paradise.”

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