Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Censorship, the Emergency and Himmat

June 23, 2015

It's almost 40 years since the Emergency was declared.  Those of us who lived through it have many memories.  We should have recorded them.  But we got caught up in events and I plead guitly for not having taken the time to write about that period while memories were still fresh.

Here's something I've written in Scroll.in that gives a flavour of those times:

'Himmat' during the Emergency: When the Press crawled, some refused to even bend

When Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution, some journalists maintained their independence despite State repression. Why can't today's journalists find ways to resist corporate control to tell readers the truth?

Photo Credit: Kalpana Sharma
Forty years ago on a rainy evening in Mumbai, a group of friends met in an apartment overlooking Grant Road Bridge. It was June 26, 1975.  We knew that a State of Emergency had been declared. We also knew that there would be press censorship. But what on earth did that mean?

All India Radio did not explain. We had to turn to BBC World Service to get a sense of what exactly was happening. That is how we learned that thousands of opposition leaders and political workers had been arrested under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act.

Some of us in that room were journalists. We worked with a small English-language weekly, Himmat, edited by Rajmohan Gandhi. What would censorship mean for us?

When we went into work the next morning, we heard that the government had sent out “guidelines” that the press had to follow. Number one on the list was: “Where news is plainly dangerous, newspapers will assist the Chief Press Adviser by suppressing it themselves. Where doubts exist, reference may and should be made to the nearest press adviser.” Clearly we had to decide what is “dangerous”.

The guidelines also instructed us not to reproduce rumours or anything “objectionable” that had been printed outside India. Given that only newspapers outside India were reporting what was actually going on in the country, this pretty much foreclosed reporting on anything.

Roller-coaster ride

The next 20 months were a roller-coaster ride, but one that formed us as journalists. The principle lesson we learned was that freedom of the press is not a luxury that the rulers bestow on you: it is a lifeline in an unequal society like ours. Without it, the poor would become invisible because it would deprive them of their basic right to be heard as citizens in a democracy.

As the majority of Indians today were not even born when Emergency was declared and this also applies to most of the journalists in the trade today, let me just briefly recount my own experience with censorship.

In the initial days, there was confusion in the press about what censorship would involve. The office of the Director of Information and Publicity of the Maharashtra government had been converted into the Censor’s office, employing around 15 people. Binod Rau, a former resident editor of the Indian Express, was the Censor. An official from this office was sent to each daily newspaper in the evening. But by September 20, 1975, it became evident that it would be impossible to pre-censor every single word that appeared in print. Hence, we were informed that we were expected to “self-censor” and abide by the guidelines.

White-out protest

In the two issues that came out after the declaration of Emergency, Himmat chose to leave its Editorials blank. Thereafter, we decided that we would write as we always did until we were informed that we had violated some guideline. That didn’t take long. In our issue of October 24, 1975, we had carried a report about a prayer meeting at Raj Ghat held on October 2 at whic Acharya JB Kripalani had spoken. The police broke up the meeting and arrested those who refused to leave, including our editor-in-chief Rajmohan Gandhi and his brother, Ramchandra Gandhi. Although they were released later, some of the others spent several months in prison.

By then, I was the editor of Himmat. I was summoned to the office of the Special Press Advisor (as the Censor was known) and informed that as Himmat had violated the guidelines, we would be under pre-censorship with immediate effect. When I asked which guideline, there was no answer. Finally, one official told me that they had been berated by Delhi for allowing the item on the Rajghat meeting to appear.

Despite this, we found ways to dodge the censor. Additionally, the Bombay High Court ruling in April 1976 in the Binod Rau vs MR Masani case on censorship provided some breathing space. Amongst other things, the Court ruled that “if there is a right to praise either an individual or the government, there is equally a right to criticise the individual or the government…”

For a couple of months, everything was quiet. Then in July 1976, someone from the Criminal Investigation Department turned up at our office with a notice stating that the printer and publisher of Himmat (Rajmohan Gandhi) had to deposit Rs 20,000 within 15 days with the Commissioner of Police because there were “prejudicial reports” in three issues in April. No details were given. These details were provided only when we went to court challenging censorship guidelines. Apparently, we had quoted Mahatma Gandhi saying, “The restoration of free speech, free association and free press is almost the whole of Swaraj” was considered “prejudicial”.

Arbitrary rules

I give these details to illustrate the arbitrariness of censorship during those times. Yet, we had decided that we would rather continue to push the envelope and take risks than buckle under censorship. Such bravado meant that the press where we printed was served a notice to stop printing Himmat, andno other printing press would touch us. Of course, we did not have the money to buy our own printing machines. In desperation, we put out an appeal to our readers. Amazingly, hundreds of readers responded, sending us contributions as small as Rs 5 and going up to a few thousand rupees.  We managed to collect over Rs 60,000 and with some additional funds bought two small printing machines and rented a space in an industrial estate in Prabhadevi. This allowed us to have our own print line and take the risk we felt we must.

Unfortunately, this arrangement was also busted when the authorities found that the bulk of the magazine was being printed elsewhere. So finally, in December 1976, we were left with no option but to go every week to the Censor’s office and be subjected to the irrational and arbitrary slashing of copy. To fill these spaces at the last minute was virtually impossible. Yet we had to because leaving blank pages was also a crime!

The Emergency ended in March 1977 after the spectacular election that threw Indira Gandhi out of office. Although on paper censorship continued during the election campaign, no one paid any heed to it.

The lessons of 1975

Looking back now, four decades later, has the Indian press learned anything from that experience? Do we value the freedom that was snatched away from us?

Some of us as journalists certainly learned important lessons. The 1970s was still a time of idealism. I can count many of my contemporaries who came into journalism believing that our job was to seek the truth and write without fear.

Once the Emergency ended, many such journalists took it upon themselves to unearth the stories that had been suppressed, stories that above all denied poor people their rights. These included slum demolitions in many cities, forcible sterilisation campaigns, torture of prisoners, fake encounters and many others.

Instead of merely reporting on these atrocities, and others like bonded labour, trafficking, denial of human rights, the rights of pavement dwellers and more, journalists followed up these stories by filing Public Interest Litigations in the Supreme Court. No one charged them with being “unprofessional” or “activist journalists”. In the mood that prevailed then, it was accepted that even as we are journalists, we are also citizens and cannot stand by and watch such egregious violations of rights.

If you survey the Indian press of the late 1970s into the 1980s, you see the results of such a commitment by scores of journalists. Newspapers gave space for such writing, even encouraged it. And even though several smaller publications like Himmat closed down because the economics did not work out, many mainstream publications took up the task of unearthing the developments that were hidden during the Emergency.

New priorities

Since the 1990s, there has been a visible change in the Indian media. For one, print is not so dominant, yielding space to the electronic media. In the last few years, the Internet has opened up new spaces.

The growth and variety of the media suggests that there should be greater freedom, that it would be virtually impossible today for the State to control the media. Certainly the kind of censorship regime imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975 would never work today.

Yet, has the space for the kind of writing spawned by the experience of Emergency shrunk or expanded? This is a question we still have to ask.

While the expansion of the media space would suggest that there would be much more room for writing on poverty, on human rights, on the invisible and marginal parts of India, on communities that are forgotten, the reverse is true. In a media driven by the market, such news has no value. So while earlier, falling foul of the government restricted the pursuit of such stories, today the belief that such news will not sell your product denies them space.

Secondly, how do we define “free” in relation to the media? “Free” of what or whom? Perhaps the State does not have the same ability it had in the past to control the content of even privately owned media, but today there are other forces that do. When politics and business come together, and define what can or cannot be reported, is this not a form of covert censorship? The increasing consolidation of media ownership in a few powerful hands, and the nexus between some of these owners and the people in power, gives an entirely different spin to the concept of a “free” media.

What remains the same is the choice that journalists have to make. During the Emergency, as LK Advani famously noted, although the press was asked to bend, it chose to crawl. Yet many journalists chose not to do so, at considerable risk to themselves and their careers.

That choice is one that we still have to make.  If even under overt censorship, some publications managed to communicate the truth to their readers, why can't journalists do it under the indirect forms of control that exist today?

Kalpana Sharma was editor of Himmat from 1976 to 1981 when it closed. She has worked with The Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindu and is currently consulting editor with Economic and Political Weekly.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in
To read the original click here.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

India’s 'everywoman'








The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 21, 2015
This woman is also ‘everywoman’, or rather every poor and elderly woman living in a poor urban settlement anywhere in India.
The Hindu Archives

An old woman lies in a hospital in Mumbai.  No one knows her precise age — perhaps 80, perhaps 90. She was born in a village near Ratnagiri.  Her date of birth was never noted.  So we don’t know.

What we do know is that she was widowed young, has a daughter who survived but who is also a widow.  The two women look after each other.  Their lives have followed an eerily similar pattern. 

 And both have spent their entire lives caring for others.

Years of standing at the kitchen stove, going down on their haunches as they swept and swabbed, picking up heavy buckets of water and doing all the other chores that domestic helps do has meant that both women have developed acute arthritis.  Their joints are stiff and swollen.  Yet they have no choice but to continue to stress these unyielding joints, forcing them to bend a little as they go about their daily tasks.

Although she does not work as a domestic help anymore, the older woman has suffered unbearable joint pains for years.  With age her condition has worsened. She lives in a 15x10ft house in a Mumbai slum.  There is no running water.  It has to be collected when water is released each evening and stored in a drum.  And there is no toilet.  The nearest public toilet is a 15-minute treacherous walk up and down narrow slippery lanes.  For an elderly woman with unmoving limbs that is a mountain she simply cannot climb. The only option is the indignity of open defecation in the drain outside her house.

Sadly, even as she lies inert in her hospital bed, hooked on to an oxygen tank, she is probably better off than she has been for many years.  The women’s ward has six beds; only three are occupied.  It is substantially larger than the room in which she sits, sleeps and eats in her own home. In the hospital, someone washes her, changes her clothes, puts clean sheets on her bed and brings her nutritious food to eat every day. In her own home, her daughter, already frail and still working as a domestic in two households, has to seek the help of neighbours and family members every time she has to help her mother sit up or move a few feet. It is humiliating and frustrating for both.  

Yet, a hospital bed is obviously not a permanent solution.  It is a temporary respite until a diagnosis is presented. And even when that happens, there will be no easy choices about what to do next.  Can a bed-ridden elderly woman, without access to running water and to a toilet, be nursed back to health in a claustrophobic slum dwelling?

I tell this story not only because the woman is someone I know, love and respect; a woman who has cared for me and my family; who has laughed with us, cried with us, scolded us and fought with us.  And who has never said ‘no’ to anything we asked for; who cared for us in a way we can never repay.

This woman is also ‘everywoman’, or rather every poor and elderly woman living in a poor urban settlement anywhere in India. Her condition illustrates the challenge that poverty, illness and age presents to those living in impermanent housing.

An estimated 26 per cent of people living in urban India live below the poverty line.  Yet, this poverty is not just about numbers, about rupees and paise.  It is the poverty of absence — the absence of basic necessities.  It is the poverty that forces families to make the heart-breaking choice of not treating the elderly, of taking them to their villages to die because they cannot afford to treat their ailments in the city.  It is the poverty that exacerbates the indignities that most elderly people suffer, regardless of their economic situation.  It is the poverty of hopelessness that you see reflected in the eyes of this ‘everywoman’.

I realise that these conditions will not change overnight, that many more like this woman will, and indeed do, suffer a fate worse than hers.  But it does strike me as ironical, and vulgar, that we should obsess about building “smart” cities and “global” cities while forgetting that for the largest number of people the solutions are simple and local.  

Affordable housing, so that people like this woman have an option to be cared for at home, should be the topmost priority if we want to build really smart cities.  With such homes will come water and sanitation.  This is not rocket science.  And is surely not beyond the capability of our “smart” urban planners.

Instead, we are deluged with plans to make our cities Internet compliant, with advertisements about dream housing where every desire is fulfilled (at a cost that only a tiny sliver of India’s population can afford) and of health care that means being permanently in debt as the medical industrial machine churns out profits.

A compassionate society is one that cares for the indigent and the elderly.  We are nowhere near the mark.

Link to the original article: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/indias-everywoman/article7337652.ece

Sunday, June 07, 2015

When women seek help...

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 7, 2015


Why do governments feel compelled to ‘celebrate’ one year in office and use the occasion to boast of their ‘achievements’? Yet, when criticised, they protest that one year is too short a time to pass judgment. If that is true, then why bother to mark one year?

Since May 26, when the Modi government completed a year in office, we have been subjected to a familiar litany of ‘success’ stories by the government’s acolytes and the predictable trashing of its claims by the opposition. Obscured by the screaming matches, particularly on television, is the real story of how difficult it is to be successful in many of the areas that the government wants us to believe that it has done something.

Take the promise of making women more secure and safe in this country. All political parties had to pay heed to the demand for changes in the law that arose following the December 2012 Delhi gang rape. And every party supported the amended rape law that incorporated some of the suggestions of the excellent Justice Verma Committee report. One concrete outcome was the creation of a Rs.1,000 crores Nirbhaya Fund by the previous government.

Not be left behind, the Modi government allocated another Rs.1,000 crores to the Nirbhaya Fund. But the last allocation has still not been utilised. So, merely adding more money to a fund that is not being used will not make much difference for women.

What will make a difference is if some political heft and will is put behind the concept that led to the creation of this fund.  One concrete plan was to use it for one-stop crisis centres, to be called Nirbhaya centres. These institutions, which could be either standalone or part of an existing health facility, would provide a rape survivor with the kind of help she needs when she decides to report the crime. Instead of running from one institution to another — the police, a hospital, a lawyer etc. — she could go to one centre that would provide multiple services: medical, psychological, police, legal and forensic.  Such centres exist in many countries and have proved hugely beneficial.

In the absence of such places, imagine what happens when a woman reports a rape. First she narrates her story to the police. Then she goes to a hospital, where she is taken to the casualty section. Often she has to wait. The doctor in-charge is usually a man. She has to go over all the details again. There is no rule that a woman doctor or nurse should be present. Eventually, she sees a gynaecologist who has to collect samples that could be crucial evidence. Ideally, she should also have the services of a counselor, although in India this is rare. In addition she needs sound legal advice on how to proceed further.
All this constitutes just the first step in the long fight for justice. If rape cases fail — the rate of conviction for rape cases in 2013 stood at a paltry 27 per cent — it is precisely because all these facilities are not in place when the woman seeks help. And, even if forensic evidence is collected in a hospital, it is often not stored properly. As a result, it fails to be useful when called upon during a case. So, clearly, such one-stop centres are essential.

Yet, as we are discussing this government’s first year in office, what is its record? When it came to power last year, it promised 660 Nirbhaya centres. Despite additional allocations, the number has been whittled down to just 36 centres.  What sense does this make? Is the government doing this in phases? Is there a long-term strategy? How will it decide where to locate these few centres? No such details are available making one suspect that this is another of those plans where action does not match the rhetoric.

To make the amended law work, the government has to put in place structures that will aid those seeking justice. A stronger law will not result in a conviction if the prosecution does not make an effort to pursue the case, if the survivor does not get proper legal advice on how to proceed, if the medical and forensic evidence is not properly collected and stored, if witnesses are not protected so that they don’t change their stance at the last minute and most importantly, if the woman’s right to privacy is not respected. There are gaping holes at every step that clever defence lawyers exploit. The result is humiliation and defeat for a woman already traumatised. Every such case that is dismissed deters other women from pursuing the legal option.

The real test of intent lies in the details — not the broad-sweep catch phrases so loved by politicians, including the Prime Minister. The ‘acche din’ for Indian women are a long way off; the ‘burre din’ continue.