Has Priyanka Chaturvedi failed women by joining the Shiv Sena – or shown how to survive in politics?

First published in Scroll.in

 


Priyanka Chaturvedi has failed women in politics. Or perhaps she is showing them the only way to survive.

On April 17, Chaturvedi, then the Congress spokesperson and a familiar face on TV debates, expressed disappointment with her party for having reinstated eight members she referred to as “lumpen goons”. She had accused them last October of misbehaving with her. Pending an inquiry, they were suspended. But earlier this week they were taken back, apparently after they apologised.

The next day, Chaturvedi sent her resignation letter to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi. “What saddens me is that despite the safety, dignity and empowerment of women being promoted by the party…and your call to action, the same is not reflected in the action of some of members of the party,” she wrote. “A serious incident and misbehaviour by certain party members while I was on official duty for the party has been ignored under the guise of all hands needed for the elections.”

However, in less than 24 hours, Chaturvedi did a virtual double backflip and on Friday landed in the lap of the Shiv Sena, which is at the other end of the ideological spectrum from her former party. By doing so, she not only provided an escape hatch for the Congress, which was being questioned about not treating her charges seriously, but also provoked considerable scepticism about her own motives.

Coincidentally, the same day, a veteran woman politician, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, demonstrated that pragmatism can trump old fissures by sharing a stage with her former arch rival, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, for the first time since 1995.

Mayawati had sworn never to forgive Yadav after his party’s workers attacked her at a Lucknow guest house in June 1995, almost battering down the doors of the room in which she had locked herself.

Just another day in Indian politics, you might say, especially in an election season. But apart from demonstrating the malleability and flexibility that seems to be the hallmark of Indian politics and politicians, these events remind us of the anomalies and contradictions of a woman’s role in this country’s politics.

Take Chaturvedi. Though originally from Uttar Pradesh, she is a typical Mumbai person. She is well-spoken and articulate and appeared to be an asset for the Congress in its attempt to project itself as a modern and progressive party in contrast to its main opponent, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

At the April 19 press conference where she announced her decision to join the Shiv Sena and serve it in any capacity, Chaturvedi was asked whether she quit the Congress because she was denied a ticket to contest the parliamentary election.

Chaturvedi acknowledged she had hoped to get a ticket, but insisted that was not the main reason for her resignation. She spoke of her concern for women’s rights even as she sat on a dais with only male leaders of the Shiv Sena, a party which is not exactly an exemplar either of good behaviour or of upholding women’s rights. She appears to have missed the irony entirely, or perhaps deliberately.

A misogynistic culture

For a moment, though, if we set aside the pragmatism displayed by Mayawati in putting aside her resentment and sharing the stage with her bitter adversary, and Chaturvedi’s nifty ideological cartwheel, the two women illustrate the challenges women in politics face in India.

Mayawati’s struggles are now well known. She has confronted the double burden of being a Dalit and a woman, been called all kinds of names, criticised and mocked for her dress sense, her taste, her looks. She has received barely any appreciation for her ability to negotiate the snake pit of politics. A man in her position would have been lauded as clever, strategic, even brilliant. But Mayawati is called devious, corrupt, unprincipled and much more because she is a woman.

Mayawati with Mulayam Singh Yadav and his on Akhilesh Yadav at a campaign rally in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh, on April 19. Photo credit: Twitter/Samajwadi Party

Chaturvedi is fairly new to politics and has had a relatively easy run. She was picked out to be a spokesperson because she speaks well and knows how to handle the medium of TV. In the last five years, with the BJP in power, she has been targeted as a woman, viciously trolled and even threatened. Her apparent reason for quitting the Congress was also misogyny. That men in the party felt they could get away with the kind of behaviour that Chaturvedi alleges with a prominent woman functionary speaks to male entitlement and a misogynistic culture that is virtually a norm in Indian politics.

Mayawati and Chaturvedi are not the exceptions by a long shot. Go back in history and remember the kind of treatment J Jayalalithaa received, especially shortly after MG Ramachandran’s death in 1989, when she was assaulted and almost stripped in the Tamil Nadu Assembly.

Similarly, Mamata Banerjee has been physically assaulted and received the choicest sexist epithets from her male opponents.

Smriti Irani may have laid herself open to criticism with her imaginative descriptions of her educational qualification, but she too has had to endure sexual and sexist comments by male politicians.

The most recent illustration of the special treatment reserved for women is what Jaya Prada, until recently with the Samajwadi Party and now a BJP candidate, has had to endure from former party colleague Azam Khan. Even when they were in the same party, Khan did not spare her.

Par for the course

Sexism, it seems, is par for the course if you are a woman stepping into the male world of Indian politics. The women who have survived have all had to face this in some form or another. If they have a male protector, in the form of a relative or a mentor, they are sometimes spared. But that too is no guarantee. Nor is the party to which they belong. So, the list includes, among others, Sonia Gandhi, Renuka Chowdhury and Priyanka Gandhi from the Congress; Sushma Swaraj, Smriti Irani and Hema Malini of the BJP; and Mayawati and Jaya Prada.

As Scroll.in reported this month, it is no different even in a state like Kerala, with high female literacy and more women voters than men. There too women hesitate to enter politics and political parties have historically been extremely parsimonious about encouraging women to be a part of electoral politics. Since 1957, the state has elected only 11 women to Parliament. And the handful of women who are standing for the Lok Sabha this time have not been spared sexist remarks from male politicians.

Chaturvedi claims she quit the Congress because it failed to act against sexism. Yet, by joining the Shiv Sena she has behaved like any male politician looking out for the best chance would. She has also reinforced the belief that for the moment, if women want to get ahead in the male world of politics, they have to be a little like them. The misogynistic and masculine culture that dominates Indian politics remains undented by the presence of such women.

Goodbye Darryl

I should have posted this last month but here it is anyway, my tribute to my friend and former colleague, an exceptional journalist and human being, Darryl D'Monte. (Published in Indian Express, March 19, 2019: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/goodbye-darryl-5632792/)

I never thought I would be writing an obituary about a friend and a colleague. Darryl D’Monte — journalist, author, environmentalist, human rights activist, and, above all, a good human being has passed. He died on March 16 in a hospital in Mumbai, a city he lived in, loved and fought to save from environmental destruction.

I knew Darryl for decades, as a fellow journalist with whom I worked for a short period in a newspaper, but more than that as a person with whom I shared many common concerns. Apart from his stints as an editor in Indian Express and Times of India, it is Darryl’s pioneering work as an environmental journalist that will be long remembered.

When he wrote about the Silent Valley controversy in the 1970s, where a dam would have destroyed precious biodiversity including the habitat of one of the world’s rarest and threatened primates, the Lion Tailed Macaque, the concept of “environmental” journalism was unknown. Yet, it is the controversy surrounding the dam in Kerala, and the prospect of habitat destruction, that yanked the issue away from conservation to questioning developmental policy. Eventually, the campaign to save the area led to the creation of a national park that would be excluded from the project area of the dam. In his book Temples or Tombs: Industry vs Environment (1985), Darryl has recorded this early environmental battle between the interests of saving the natural environment and the demands of development.

Although Darryl worked for much of his life in mainstream media, he never gave up his convictions on environment, human rights, civic and urban issues and on the rights of the most marginalised. Indeed, being a “committed” journalist was a label Darryl wore unapologetically. Through his reporting, he established that even if we, as journalists, have strong convictions, we can report with rigour and professionalism. His environmental reports stood out for the absence of polemics and for the thorough research that they contained. This kind of reporting set a gold standard for generations of journalists that have followed in his footsteps.

Darryl consciously mentored others. In the cut-throat competitive world in which journalists operate, this stood out then, and stands out even more now, as an unusual trait. But he was more concerned that the issues — whether to do with loss of biodiversity, destructive developmental policies, or climate change — were addressed by many more journalists than just those of his generation. By setting up the Forum for Environmental Journalists (FEJI), Darryl extended support and opened up opportunities for scores of journalists, many from outside the big metros who are not plugged into professional networks, to be trained in environmental reporting.

It is the city of Mumbai, with which Darryl was closely engaged, where he is most remembered and cherished. In Bandra, where his family has lived for generations, he was a known person, actively engaged in civic and cultural affairs — always ready to battle against insensitive and environmentally destructive developmental plans initiated by the municipality or the state government.

His book Ripping the Fabric: The Decline of Mumbai and its Mills (2002) is especially important from the perspective of the city’s maldevelopment: Darryl captured the indifference of the government to the rights of workers and its willingness to accede to the millowners and land sharks who only saw Girangaon (the area in central Mumbai once known for its flourishing textile mills) as prime real estate. In hindsight, what began then in terms of myopic city development has now cascaded into a situation where Mumbai has become a city in perennial crisis.

Till the end, Darryl never tired of raising the red flag on this. His most recent intervention was questioning the wisdom of building a coastal road to accommodate the needs of a small, well-heeled population owning private vehicles at the cost of the livelihoods of Mumbai’s fisherfolk, its coastal environment and the needs of the majority who have to contend daily with crumbling infrastructure. Unfortunately, the state government is determined to push ahead with the plan and the courts, so far, have not been sympathetic to the pleas of the fisherfolk.

There is never a good time for anyone to go, but this was not a good time for Darryl to go. His sane voice is needed today more than ever before. As this country hurtles towards becoming a violent and fractious society, where the voice of people at the margins is drowned, and where saving the environment is just empty words as policy forges ahead to destroy it, the passion of journalists like Darryl D’Monte is irreplaceable. One hopes the legion of younger journalists he mentored will carry forward his legacy.

Here’s proof that the print media in India is alive and kicking

My column in Scroll.in

The print media in India is alive and kicking. If there were any doubts about this, the last few weeks have dispelled them.

Two of the biggest exposés this season have come from print. One from Somesh Jha of Business Standard, published on January 31, on the jobs data in the National Statistical Commission’s employment survey 2017-’18 that the government has been desperately trying to hide because it reveals the extent of unemployment, the highest in 45 years.

And the other, a story that is still unraveling every day, is the series by N Ram in The Hindu about the controversial Rafale deal between France and India. Both Jha and Ram have produced documentary evidence that has put government spokespersons on the spot while trying to explain their side of the story.

The two stories are a reminder of how journalism needs to be done, slowly and painstakingly until what is put out to the public is convincing.

While no one yet has faulted the facts in these stories, sometimes complex stories like the Rafale imbroglio pose a challenge to the lay reader. For instance, the first story in The Hindu on the pricing issue was dense and contained information that the uninformed reader would have struggled to follow. Did India under the current government pay more for each of the 36 fighter jets than it would have for the earlier deal of 126 jets negotiated by the previous government? Now, according to the report tabled in Parliament by the Comptroller and Auditor General, it did not. But the documents emerging in the public realm suggest that this is not yet a settled fact.

However, the two stories that followed this one were clearer and unravelled several important aspects of the deal, such as a set of parallel negotiations being conducted by the Prime Minister’s Office without the official negotiating team from the Ministry of Defence being informed, and changes in certain clauses that allowed the seller to get away without giving a sovereign guarantee. The latter has been confirmed by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

Jha’s stories on the jobs data could not have been clearer and the reader would be left in no doubt about why in election season, a government would not want such facts to be in the public domain.

Calling out the bluff of the government is the job of the media in a democracy. That is the importance of these two exposes.

It is also the job of the media to fact check and point out the misinformation, and sometimes lies, put out by the people in power. When politicians, like the prime minister, receive widespread coverage for all their public events, what they say at these occasions is out there without any questions being asked about the veracity of the statements being made.

 

Death sentences in India

One such statement was made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a meeting in Surat at the end of January where, according to ANI, he said: “There used to be rapes in this country earlier too, it is a shame that we still hear about such cases. Now, culprits are hanged within 3 days, 7 days, 11 days and a month. Steps are being taken continuously to get daughters justice and results are evident.”

This statement, posted on Twitter by ANI, brought forth a number of adverse comments, calling out the inaccuracy of Modi’s statement. Even Scroll.in carried an article on this.
However, another fact check by Mumbai Mirror pointed out that in the translation of Modi’s speech, ANI had erred. Where the PM had spoken of the death sentence, the agency had used the word “hanged”.

The paper also pointed out that indeed, there had been judgments in lower courts awarding the death penalty to rapists within a short period. The cases quoted are all from Madhya Pradesh: one was awarded in July within 22 days, another in the same month within 46 days and one in August within three days. There have been no hangings in India for rape since 2004, when Dhananjoy Chatterjee was executed for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.

What is worrying about the prime minister’s statement is not that it was not factual, but that it was, at least partially, true. If judges are handing out death sentences so rapidly, should we not be worried? Not only those of us who are principally against capital punishment. But because such hasty decisions are precisely the reason there was opposition to the introduction of the death penalty for rape by the Justice Verma Committee in its 2013 report. It had argued then that “in the larger interests of society, and having regard to the current thinking in favour of abolition of the death penalty, and also to avoid the argument of any sentencing arbitrariness, we are not inclined to recommend the death penalty”.

In any case, official data from the National Crime Records Bureau (only available until 2016) illustrates that the introduction of capital punishment for rape has made no difference to the crime rate.

Second, also of concern is the prime minister taking credit for these rulings. “Steps are being taken continuously to get daughters justice and results are evident,” he said. What steps are these that his government is taking that are resulting in such rulings? Are public prosecutors being incentivised to push through rape cases? Are lower court judges being nudged into delivering quick rulings?

The law was amended in 2013, and the death penalty was introduced for the “rarest of rare” cases, before his party came to power. One would really like to know what the prime minister meant. But no one has asked him. And in any case, he is not available for pesky questions from the press.

 

India’s sex ratio

Take another similar claim that the prime minister made about the sex ratio improving under his watch.

On more than one occasion, Modi has lauded his government’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme, crediting it with having improved the sex ratio and female literacy levels in Haryana, Rajasthan and several other states. While that might be true in the case of specific districts in these states, the reality is somewhat different as an editorial in The Telegraph points out. Indeed, even if there is an improvement in some states, in the southern states with better female literacy rates, there has been a perceptible decline in the sex ratio.

Another report in The Telegraph illustrates this by giving data from Bihar where in a district like Vaishali, although the female literacy rate has improved from 50.49% in 2001 to 68.57% in 2011, the sex ratio has declined from 937 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001 to 894 in 2011.

And overall, the sex ratio at birth in India has declined from 887 in 2014 to 877 in 2016.
This is something not just the government, but Indian society as a whole needs to worry about. Clearly, governments cannot pat themselves on the back if female literacy rates increase and assume that this will inevitably result in an improvement in the sex ratio. The roots of son preference, and therefore sex selection, are embedded in a patriarchal culture that appears not to be dented either by government literacy programmes, or by stringent laws.

(Click on the link above to read the original)

Why We Should Remember Gauri Lankesh

First published in The Wire on January 29, 2019

If she had lived, Gauri Lankesh would have been 57 today. Even as we note this, we should remember that she disliked the way we, in India, celebrate birth anniversaries of people long dead. In her view, jayantis were unnecessary.

Coincidentally, tomorrow is January 30 – which marks 71 years since Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead. The ideologies of the man who shot Gandhi and the one who killed Gauri are mirror images.

That said, and with apologies to Gauri, this is as good a day as any to consider why we should remember her. Not just for the deadly manner in which she was assassinated on September 5, 2017. Not for her outspokenness, her willingness to confront people she knew were dangerous when opposed and her determination to continue doing so even when voices of caution and support around her suggested she go easy.

It is because the message her murder sent was that journalists or even anyone willing to take a stand, speak the unpalatable truth or ask uncomfortable questions need to be confronted and opposed.

In his book A Free Voice, Ravish Kumar of NDTV India recalls someone asking him at the condolence meeting held for Gauri in Delhi, “What are you here for?” Amongst the many reasons he lists in response, he writes that people like him were at the meeting “to remind ourselves that despite the best efforts of that National Project of Instilling Fear, we should not give in.”

He said this in the latter part of 2017, and by the ‘National Project of Instilling Fear,’ he was referring to the threats and intimidation – and deaths – of journalists who raised their voices. Has this project worked as far as the media is concerned?

To be clear, Gauri was not a part of mainstream media, except when she began her career. She could not have survived there. She could do what she did because she owned and published the journal in which she wrote her trenchant critique of the followers of Hindutva. So her death was not a message to the majority of journalists in mainstream media who have nothing to fear. But certainly to the exceptions, like Ravish Kumar, who continue to speak the uncomfortable and unpalatable truth to those in power today.

Mainstream media has not suddenly become quiet because of a project to instill fear that involves attacks on journalists. It has willingly conformed. It has chosen, without any coercion, to wear blinkers. What it does not see, it does not report. So if the government claims that all is well, that the nation is in good hands, that the economy is doing well, that poor people are happy and that there is no caste or religious discrimination, then this is what the media reports.

The Indian media falls short in fulfilling its job as the fourth estate not because it is fearful. It does so in large part because its financial survival is premised on it being seen as less than adversarial towards the powerful, in government and in the world of business. This was true even before the BJP and Narendra Modi came to power.

Information is the enemy

Also, as Siddhartha Deb correctly pointed out in his essay in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, Gauri’s killing represented a threat not just to journalists. “Sometimes, it appears as if the enemy is information itself, along with transparency, exposure, critical thinking—anything and everything that might be seen as characteristic of a free, open society,” he wrote.

With information seen as the enemy, it is not surprising that there is a growing list of RTI activists who are attacked and killed. Their number exceeds that of journalists.

The actual project to instill fear began well before Gauri Lankesh’s murder. Credit: Reuters

Within months of Gauri’s assassination, Nanjibhai Sondarve was clubbed to death in Manekvada village in Gujarat for demanding transparency in a road construction project.
A few days later, on March 20, Poipynhun Majaw became the first RTI activist to have been killed in Meghalaya. In April 2018, Jayant Kumar from Vaishali district in Bihar was killed for taking on the liquor mafia. In Bihar alone, in 2018, five RTI activists were killed.

And even as navy divers struggle to retrieve the bodies of the 15 unfortunate miners who died a terrible death in the long-banned rat-hole mines in Meghalaya, we must not forget that just weeks before this tragedy, two women who were exposing the coal mafia in the state were almost killed.

RTI activists Agnes Kharshiing and Anita Sangma are still recovering from that attack.
Also read: Trapped Meghalaya Miners Are the Latest Victims of Years of Labour Exploitation

These people are not journalists and do not attract the same kind of attention that scribes do when they are attacked or killed. Yet, they are doing what journalists are supposed to be doing – holding people in power accountable and demanding transparency.

The actual project to instill fear began well before Gauri’s murder. But it has grown in these last four years. This consists of the growing impunity with which individuals and groups take law into their own hands to attack, lynch and kill anyone they find coming in their way. They do so with confidence that they will not be caught.

On the contrary, some of them are hailed for their actions. Such lawlessness by design is far more intimidating than a planned effort to inject fear because those targeted know that there is no recourse to justice.

So it is not just the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh that are aimed at instilling fear in those who dissent or ask questions. It is every lynching, every attack on a student leader, or on an RTI activist, and every arrest of persons conveniently labelled “urban Naxal” that is part of this larger project.

Fortunately, despite this, there are still individuals – journalists, RTI and human rights activists, others – who are willing to ask questions of the powerful, who are not easily intimidated, who believe that in a democracy, every citizen has the right to demand accountability from the powerful.

On being a Readers' Editor

I was appointed Readers' Editor for the digital platform Scroll.in, which turns five today, last month.  This is what it means:

"Scroll.in’s Readers’ Editor has three main responsibilities:

1. To inquire into and respond to readers’ concerns and complaints.
2. To advise the editor on where corrections and clarifications are necessary.
3. To advise on how to improve standards in the magazine across a wide swath of areas.

The Readers’ Editor reports to Scroll.in’s readers. The editor and publisher have no say in what the Readers’ Editor takes up for investigation and cannot influence her findings."

I am posting below the links to the four columns I have already written, for those who are interested in media related issues:

A conversation with the readers:
 
https://scroll.in/article/904883/the-readers-editor-writes-i-look-forward-to-a-conversation-with-the-readers-of-scroll-in

Newsrooms must begin conversations about how we discuss caste:

https://scroll.in/article/906569/the-readers-editor-writes-newsrooms-must-begin-conversations-about-how-we-discuss-caste

More than 'pliable',  journalists must condemn attacks on colleagues:

https://scroll.in/article/908536/the-readers-editor-writes-more-than-pliable-journalists-must-condemn-attacks-on-colleagues

This election, media should give voice to the poor, not just politicians: 

https://scroll.in/article/910432/the-readers-editor-writes-this-election-media-should-give-voice-to-the-poor-not-just-politicians







 

Vanishing -- our hills and our wild creatures

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

The Indian Express today carried an editorial on October 31 that speaks of a sobering reality, one that should damp down some of the political and media generated hysteria about the unveiling of the world's tallest statue.

That reality is that one of India's oldest mountain ranges, the Aravallis, which has been around for three billion years, is literally disappearing.  Quoting from the Central Empowered Committee, set up by the Supreme Court to advise it on forest-related issues, the editorial states that "31 of the 128 hills in the Aravallis 'have vanished'."  Not by natural erosion, but because humans with no respect for nature have literally clawed and eaten their way through these hills and reduced them to nothing.

Despite a ban on mining in this range, the Rajasthan government has done little to nothing to stop it. Now that the Supreme Court has stepped in to reprimand it, perhaps something will happen.  But even that will not bring back the 31 hills that have vanished from a range that extends 700 km from the east of Gujarat to Haryana, traversing Rajasthan and Delhi. 

This denudation is not just accelerating the spread of the desert, but also affecting the virtually irredeemable air quality of our nation's capital city and its surroundings. 

What is it about our country that we care so little for our natural heritage and instead waste money, time, emotion on cooked up ideas of "tradition" that must be preserved at all costs?  Who will pause and understand the connections between this kind of destruction and the disaster zones that represent most of the urban habitats in India?  How will tall statutes, superfast trains, energy guzzling construction compensate for this kind of loss that can never be replaced?

Also in the Indian Express today is a report based on the World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Living Planet Report 2018.  Apart from an alarming loss of animal and plant diversity, India also faces "loss of above ground diversity, pollution and nutrient overloading, intensive agriculture, fire, soil erosion, desertification and climate change."  That is a long list of problems. Who is going to address them?

The one species that faces absolutely no danger of extermination is that of the politician. The Indian politician must be special breed.  I can bet there are no more than a handful who actually understand what the WWF report is saying, or can come up with one concrete policy prescription for stemming the rapid destruction of India's natural environment, its true and only long-lasting heritage that deserves to be protected and preserved.

Sexual Harassment: The more things change, the more they remain the same

With all the stories of sexual harassment, sexual assualt and inappropriate behaviour by men that are pouring out on social media as part of #MeToo, I was reminded of an article I wrote in 1989 on the subject in Times of India.  

This came to mind when I read the interview with Rupan Deol Bajaj, an IAS officer who was publicly molested by a celebrated police officer, the late KPS Gill, famous for his ruthless putting down of the Punjab insurgency.  Bajaj fought a protracted legal battle against Gill, that she finally won.  But her coming out at that time, when there was no social media, drew attention to the reality of sexual harassment even of powerful women like her.

This article, which appeared before the days of the internet, provoked some strange responses from my male colleagues of that time.  The senior editor, who looked after the edit page, wrote to me after it appeared, that he was surprised to see me writing on such a "tired old subject".  To which I sent back a sharp response, by way of a typed letter as there was no email then, reminding him that women did not think of this as a "tired old" subject even if men did!  Of course, the editor of the paper rapped me on the knuckles for being so cheeky with a senior colleague!

Just for interest, I am reproducing the piece which was published on July 8, 1989 in Times of India on the edit page.

There is one subject which even the most liberal amongst professional men and women prefer to avoid thinking about, leave alone discuss.  That is the uncomfortable fact of sexual harassment in the workplace which thousands of women accept silently as an occupational hazard.


A woman who so much as mentions this unmentionable subject is likely to be called rigid, militant, lacking a sense of humour and, worst of all, a "feminist".  In any case, the majority of women who object to the constant innuendos, propositioning and other forms of harassment reserved for their sex learn to smile their way through life.  The joke, of course, is most often at their expense.  But they believe there is no option.

If a woman holds a fairly senior position in an organisation, she may encounter nothing more than a few off-colour jokes or unnecessarily personal comments about her looks or about what she is wearing during a business meeting.  But, if she is lower down in the hierarchy, for instance, a secretary or a receptionist or a telephone operator or even a sub-editor in a newspaper, then she must learn to bear with much more.

This issue comes into focus everytime a woman picks up the courage to counter it.  When a senior IAS officer, Mrs Rupan Deol Bajaj, objected publicly to the behaviour of the Punjab director-general of police, Mr. K. P. S. Gill, at an official party, predictably she found few supporters.  It was suggested that not only did she lack a sense of humour and was too easily offended but that she was actually playing into the hands of terrorists by casting aspersions on the character of someone so central to national security.

Mrs Bajaj's case is now history.  But it illustrated only too graphically the problems that even a woman in as senior and powerful a position as she is will face if she dares to raise this most uncomfortable of issues.

More recently, Ms Tasneem Sheikh, a lecturer in a Bombay college, has once again drawn attention to this problem by filing a police complaint against the vice-principal of the college where she worked as a lecturer, for allegedly harassing and molesting her.  She bore up silently to several months of propositioning and finally decided to go public when the man allegedly made physical advances towards her.

Tasneem's reward is considerable sympathy from other women, who know what her stand represents, but not much else.  She has lost her job, has had to face the predictable questions about her own character, is facing a one-man inquiry set up by Bombay University to investigate the incident and is awaiting a decision on a case she has filed in the Bombay High Court. It is significant that, like others, Tasneem too first hoped that the issue would be sorted out following a private discussion with the principal of the college. Only when that approach failed did she go to the police and subsequently to the court.

Just as the question of the depiction of women in the media was considered a relatively minor issue until a few years ago but has now been accepted as integral to the struggle to enhance women's status in society, so also the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace will have to be faced squarely by women's groups and others concerned about women.

The issue is trickier than the more obvious ways in which women are ill-treated and harassed. How do you define sexual harassment? It is not just a question of physical assault on women.  The definition should include the constant verbal attacks in the form of innuendos and remarks which are aimed at a person merely because she is a member of the female sex.  It is true that there are similar attitudes reflected towards people of different communities and castes.  But most often, such remarks are made when a person of that particular group is not present for fear of causing affront.  But it is taken for granted with women that they will not fight back.  And, if they do, they are likely to be faced with an even stronger barrage of such remarks.  So many prefer to hold their peace.

Also, if women demand stringent safeguards against behaviour which demeans their status, could it not be used against them to limit their employment opportunities as has already happened with the provisions in the Factories Act which are especially designed for working mothers? Even big industrial houses are limiting the number of women they employ as managers because they do not want to be forced to abide by provisions such as providing creches if they employ more than 30 women.  In their view, employing women is a more expensive proposition and their numbers should, therefore, be kept below the statutory figure which mandates such provisions as creches.

Such a problem cannot be solved by law alone as it reflects the most fundamental prejudices against women that persist despite efforts to bring about an attitudinal change.  While a woman, who dares to make an issue of sexual harassment at work, can take recourse to certain exisiting provisions in the law, such as section 509 of the Indian Penal Code which considers any "attempt to outrage the modesty" of a person/woman a crime, in the long run only a sustained campaign to fight for women's dignity in every respect can make a difference on this question.

Here the role of women, especially those who are in positions where they can afford to raise their voices without fear of losing their jobs, is crucial.  Too often, women have attained high office by diluting their convictions on these issues and by distancing themselves deliberately from those of their sex who are openly fighting for the rights of all women.  That is why you constantly hear prominent women, even those who are onsidered progressive, hastily assuring their audiences, "I am not a feminist".

The issue is simple.  Women are demanding the basic right to be treated with dignity at home and at work.  This right is granted to them by law. Surely society should safeguard this right. 

And meanwhile, there is climate change

In a week when one of the main talking points in India has been the #MeToo campaign and the outing by a dozen women journalists of the sexually predatory behaviour of M. J. Akbar, with whom they worked at the various publications that he edited before entering politics, there is something even more urgent that we need to address.

Last Monday, October 8, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with a Special Report on what would be needed to keep the earth's temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius.  It contains much that we in India need to address, and urgently, apart from the steps that must be taken by the older industrialised countries, the USA in particular, that have brought us to this stage of crisis in the first place.

But sadly, there is little attention being paid to this report in India.  It occupied a few column inches the day after it was released, and since then has virtually disappeared.

Climate change is a mantra our leaders repeat every now and then, usually to assuage the concerns of international bodies, without really acting with determination on policies that we need to put in place here.

This article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, with whom I worked for a short period in 1998, shows us that the situation could become even more alarming than what the IPCC has predicted:

https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/climate-report-understates-threat/?utm_source=Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_medium=iContact%20email&utm_campaign=October12

As the authors of this thought-provoking piece point out:

"Climate change should not be a divisive political issue. It is an issue of fundamental, data-driven science, an issue of human tragedy, and an issue of planetary ecosystems in peril. But above all, it is an issue we can still do something about."

#MeToo in newsrooms will have achieved its purpose if Indian media houses simply enforce the law

We must foster a newsroom culture where everyone is respected for what they bring to the table as professionals, irrespective of their gender, class or caste.

It started two weeks ago with the actor Tanushree Dutta going public with her accusations of sexual harassment against the filmstar Nana Patekar. Now a small leak in a dam is close to bursting. While Bollywood remains an impregnable fortress, with the big names ensuring they protect each another, the code of silence is breaking elsewhere, particularly in the media, of which I have been a part for over four decades.

#MeToo has not come a moment too soon. Sexual harassment in newsrooms has been the elephant in the room and all media managers, including editors, have been skipping around it.

Sexual harassment is a term of fairly recent coinage. In the 1970s, when I started out as a journalist, we did not have the language to describe what we experienced. Many of us shrugged off the strange behaviour of some men, not used to seeing women in a profession that was largely a male bastion, as just another occupational hazard. You took precautions (dressing down, being one of them), tried being as invisible as possible and hoping people would not notice you were a woman! This applied in particular to those of us women who were reporting – very few in those years.

Concepts of feminism regarding the right of women to be treated equal to men were still trickling in and had not yet permeated our ranks. Still, we did feel that it was unjust that merely because we were women, we were repeatedly denied certain beats, certain stories, and were mostly relegated to the editing desk or features sections.

As for off-colour jokes, as we called them then, we would attempt a weak smile and pretend we did not mind, or had not heard. Our desire to be treated as equals meant we had to try and be “one of the boys”, especially if we wanted to report and write on subjects that were exclusively male domains.

Not only was the media different then (it was only print), our society was as well. The most significant factor missing back then in the context of what we are discussing today was social media, and the parallel space it has created for politics, argument, discussion, as also slander, threats and name-calling. Also, the male-female ratio in newsrooms, at least in the English language media, has changed dramatically, although the top positions are still dominated by men.

 

Relevant experiences

Over the past few days, story after story by women journalists recounting their experiences of sexual harassment at the workplace has come tumbling out. And there have been a few instances of media houses instituting inquiries and asking the named men to step down or go on administrative leave.

Not all of these accounts qualify as sexual harassment in the strictest sense of the term as defined by the law. But even if women are venting about their bad sexual experiences with men outside the workplace, using the anonymity social media offers, we should not dismiss them as silly, a word used by at least one senior woman journalist.

How can a story of sexual assault be silly just because it happened outside the workplace? Why are some senior women journalists infantilising their younger colleagues by referring to them as “girls” and dismissing their experiences? What these women narrate is relevant to them and to many others who identify with what they write. This is what is germane. Not whether their experiences fit in the hierarchy of sexual misdemeanours that we artificially create.

Furthermore, these personal narrations should not be used to discount the very real accounts by women journalists, many of them prominent in the profession now, naming specific editors and senior journalists.

Some senior women journalists have suggested that “creepy behaviour” by men, even in office, should not be seen as sexual harassment. What is termed “creepy behaviour” – not just in office but when women are on assignment, at functions that are an extension of work – is simply not acceptable and has no place in a newsroom. It does mean sexual harassment. The onus is not on women to push off the “creeps”. The onus lies on men, and the managements of media houses, to make sure such behaviour is unacceptable.

Even if the #MeToo campaign in newsrooms subsides after a while, it will have achieved its purpose if media houses wake up to the fact that they need to follow the law and institute mandatory redress mechanisms against sexual harassment. There is no data available on how many media houses actually have functioning internal complaints committees, as required by the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act of 2013.

But even if media houses have such systems in place, how many work towards implementing the spirit of the law, that is, to ensure women can work as equals without having to, literally, watch their backs? How many have devised ways to inform all employees about the law, about what constitutes sexual harassment, whom they should contact if there is a problem, and how the system works? From conversations with young women journalists, one gets the impression that such diligence is the exception and not the rule.

So, if as a result of #MeToo, media houses, big and small, get their act together and simply implement the law, it will represent a positive step forward.

 

Time is up

One also hopes this moment will act as a deterrent not only to existing sexual predators in the media, but potential ones as well. They need to wake up and realise that the times have changed, and that their time is up.

On the downside, there could be a backlash against assertive and confident women in the media. There is already talk that employers might be wary of hiring women who come across as such, even though in journalism these are essential qualities.

There is also the danger – and some of it is already happening – of this movement being misused by those who want to target certain men on the opposite side of the political divide.

I am also aware that social media is a bubble restricted mostly to the English language media and, therefore, the urban upper class. The story in the Indian language media is vastly different as has been reported here and here. Yet, even if these women feel they cannot speak out, they are aware of the injustice and they are finding support.

Editors and senior journalists in all media organisations need to wake up and understand that there is now an entire generation of women in the workplace who know their rights, who want to be treated as equal, who are not prepared to put up with being demeaned. These are angry young women and they cannot be pacified with paternalism, or denial.

It will make a difference if we, men and women, and those who own and run media houses, have a conversation – not a slanging match – and work towards putting in place systems that deal with harassment.

At the same time, we have to figure how how to change the atmosphere in our newsrooms, which several younger women journalists describe as “toxic”, so that everyone is respected for what they bring to the table as professionals, irrespective of their gender, class or caste.

I know we are a long way from achieving that in this country, but the media is a place where this can begin given that we think of ourselves as people who try and uncover what is wrong with our society. When the rot lies in our own institutions, we are not exactly well placed to deal with what happens outside. Hence, it is time to deal with this elephant in all our newsrooms.

Published in Scroll.in: https://scroll.in/article/897797/metoo-in-newsrooms-will-have-achieved-its-purpose-if-indian-media-houses-simply-enforce-the-law

 

The man we would like to forget

Some thoughts on Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary

October 2, 2018. Not just another Gandhi Jayanti.  It is the 150th birth anniversary of Mohan Karamchand Gandhi, aka Mahatma Gandhi, aka Father of the Nation (that is India) etc etc.

There is no blaring music in my neighbourhood. Not even a recording of Gandhi's favourite "Vaishnavo jan to".  It is a day off.  In the middle of the week.  Nothing more it would seem.

So in the middle class apartment block where I have lived for almost five decades, which has been home to Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and non-believers, a new generation is turning the clock back.  From a place where tolerance was practiced without effort, they are bringing in rules that divide us on the basis of caste and class, and before long I am presuming on the basis on creed.

My day began when my part-time domestic help informed me that "servants" were not being allowed to use one of the elevators.  Why?  The manager apparently said that henceforth this was the rule.

When I went down to the building office to inquire and register my protest, I was told that a resolution had been passed by "the majority" at the Annual General Meeting to disallow "servants" from using one of the three elevators.  In the 50 years that this building has existed, such a rule had never been introduced.

I found it tragic, and ironical, that on a day when we were commemorating a man who spoke of peace, of tolerance, of compassion for the poor, of building an inclusive India, there is now a generation that thinks nothing of doing precisely the opposite.  Far from having any respect or gratitude towards those who make our lives so much easier through their paid (although often grossly underpaid) work, we want to make sure they are reminded daily of their lower status.  And the justification is that "the majority" voted for this.

The majority -- the same "majority" that is making life impossible for those of us who believe in a just society, where women and men are equal, where you don't discriminate on the basis of caste, class, creed or gender, where you respect those who work with their hands, where people are not divided into "higher" and "lower" castes, a terminology that we continue to accept unquestioningly.

In 2018, not only has India forgotten Gandhi, it doesn't deserve Gandhi.  Without elevating him to a god, or even a mahatma, can we not acknowledge that a good deal of what Gandhi said is relevant for our troubled times?

Fortunately, the anger and sadness I felt at the state of affairs in my building was dissipated when I stepped out to see whether Gandhi was being remembered elsewhere in the city. 

Early this morning,  a motley group of women and men, young and old, met at Chowpatty and then walked to Shantashram, where the Mumbai Sarvodaya Mandal and the Gandhi Book Centre are housed.  Established in 1956, after Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan campaign was launched, Shantashram has been a presence in the Nana Chowk locality for decades.  Since 1972, the one name that is associated with it is that of Tulsidas Somaiya, who has nurtured and developed the place with a dedication that is rare. 

I vividly remember meetings held there during the Emergency in 1975-76 when those of who who wanted to resist and fight authoritarianism met to plan, or just to vent.  It was a safe place, and a welcoming one.  The bonds we forged then have stood the test of time.

Shantashram is a house, unlike the buildings all around it.  It still has wooden balconies and windows, and an old tiled floor.  It is overwhelmed by the noisy and busy Bhaji Galli (vegetable market) on one side, and fronts a really busy road that is virtually impossible to cross.

Across it used to be Shankershett Mansion, where my grandfather lived on the third floor.  That building has disappeared making place for a tower, Orbit Heights and Annexe.  But the sugarcane juice vendor at the top of Bhaji Galli, who would go running up three floors to deliver the frothing, delicious juice whenever my grandfather clapped from his balcony to draw his attention and then gesticulated the number of glasses he wanted, is still there.  So there is change, but there is also continuity.

Today, Shantashram is busy.  In the courtyard as you enter, there is a group of mostly older people.  The oldest of them is the indefatigable, doughty almost 94-year-old socialist and Gandhian, Dr G. G. Parikh.  Along with others, he has decided to fast for the day.  Not just to remember Gandhi, but to remind us of the relevance of Gandhi's actions for these difficult times. 

Dr Parikh asks how many of us, after all these years of knowing about Gandhi's endeavour to build an inclusive India, have Muslim or Dalit friends, have lived in a slum and understood how the poor survive, have felt the need to reach out to people who are not like us?  He points out that this is the way to remember Gandhi, to realise that even after 71 years of Independence, the Dalits still live in a separate section in the majority of villages, that Muslims feel insecure, that there is more hatred between communities.

A floor above sits another indefatigable fighter, Aruna Roy.  She has come to the city for the day to show solidarity with people like Dr Parikh and others.  She has just finished talking with a group of women, led by Shabnam Hashmi, who are travelling from Kerala to Delhi to talk about harmony and healing, something Gandhi would have done had he been alive today. 

Meeting Dr Parikh and Aruna Roy, after the depressing start to my day, was not just uplifting but also humbling.  Their work and commitment remind me that it is possible to be realistic and yet not cynical, that you can be passionate and hopeful about the possibility of change if you set out to do what you can, what you must, even when the problems seem insurmountable.

In the Indian Express today, Avijit Pathak has written a really thoughtful article titled, "Gandhi for the young" in which he writes of his discomfort with the "official" Gandhi that is celebrated while not finding the real/living "experimental" Gandhi anymore.  The article is worth reading in its entirety but let me end with his concluding paragraph that, I believe, says it all:

"On January 30, 1948, when he was walking to attend the prayer meeting in Birla House in Delhi, he was trying to see sanity in the insane Subcontinent.  It is, however, a different story that Nathuram Godse, or the militaristic ideology of nationalist that created him, thought otherwise.  Do the youth realise that killing Gandhi is like killing a dream, a possibility; and this demonic force has not yet disappeared from our society?"

ABP resignations: This isn’t the Emergency – so why are many media houses falling in line?

On Scroll.in

The ruling dispensation is determined to ensure that the Indian media is completely in sync with the dominant narrative. 

If you read only the print media, you would be oblivious to the news that two top executives of a leading media house have suddenly chosen to step down. Whether or not it is deliberate policy to avoid reporting such developments in the media, these resignations are ominous enough to invite introspection about the future of the Indian media.

It should come as no surprise that the resignations of two top executives, editor-in-chief Milind Khandekar and popular anchor Punya Prasoon Bajpai of APB News network, the television arm of the Ananda Bazar Patrika group, more than hint at government interference. This government is doing it; previous governments have also done it, albeit in other ways.

But should this be cause for worry for members of the media and larger civil society that believes a democracy needs a media that is reasonably protected from direct or indirect government interference? They should. For even if this development is not new or unusual, it is disquieting.

These days, each time such an instance comes to light, the almost-predictable response is to invoke the Emergency of 1975 when the Congress party government of Indira Gandhi imposed press censorship on the media. Today, even if government or ruling party pressure on the media does constitute indirect curbs on the freedom of expression, the comparison ends there. Indira Gandhi used existing laws to impose and justify press censorship. There was a face to the censor – an official who sat in a government office, or representatives who were sent to newspaper offices. The government felt compelled to issue what it termed “guidelines” that the media was supposed to follow.

There is no such structure in place today. There is no official censor. You have a government that swears by the freedom of the press. And yet there is increasing evidence that the long arm of the government is finding ways to compel media houses that question or expose its wrong-doings to fall in line.

This government deflects criticism or conjecture about pressure on the media to conform by constantly emphasising that the Congress party was much worse, especially during the Emergency. Yet there is a big difference between the events of the past and the developments today.

This generation, which gets its news on smart phones and will probably never know the joy of the tactile feel of holding a newspaper, is probably be unaware that despite the guarantee of freedom of expression in the Constitution, India passed a law in 1956, the Newspaper (Price and Page) Act. This restricted the number of pages a newspaper could print and the price it could charge the customer. It was legislated on the premise that smaller newspapers needed to be protected from the large media houses that could charge less for bigger papers because they had deep pockets. So the ostensible purpose was salutary – to protect the small against the big.

Subsequently, in 1972, under the government’s newsprint policy, a cap was placed of a maximum of 10 pages that a newspaper could print each day. Following the same argument of protecting smaller papers, in 1981 the government also introduced graded duties on imported newsprint, charging bigger circulating newspapers more. This was challenged in the Supreme Court by several large newspaper houses who argued that the policy impinged on their fundamental right to freedom of expression. They won the case.

 

Facilitating diversity

This history has to be seen against the background of the belief that prevailed in those bad old “socialist” days, as some would have it, that the media space should accommodate the small players and that the state should facilitate this. The state saw its role in interfering, if you will, in the infrastructure of the media. It even laid down the ratio of advertising to editorial content, something that one cannot imagine being policy in this day and age. Despite this, the bigger newspaper houses continued to prosper (although they constantly complained about government restrictions).

In fact, given the hostile relations between the government and some of the big media houses, it is an irony that even though they chafed at government restrictions on the grounds of freedom of expression, they quietly fell in line when actual censorship was imposed during the Emergency. On the other hand, some of the smaller publications, which should have been beholden to government for “protecting” them from the big media players, vehemently fought against censorship.

 

Job security

The other area where media houses resented government policy was in labour practices. Under the Working Journalists and other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1955, which the court upheld in 1958 and again in 2014 when newspaper owners challenged it, journalists had job security. They could not be hired and fired without notice and reason. Wage boards were set-up to determine the salaries newspaper employees should be paid according to the size of the media house.

All this is history now with the majority of journalists hired on short-term contracts that can be terminated at short notice. This lack of job security ensures that on the whole, individual journalists avoid falling foul of the owners of their establishments. Although those with a higher profile and greater social capital can take risks, not many do.

In 21st century India, media houses are free to expand, hold cross-media interests in print and television, and flood their newspapers with so many advertisements that you have to hunt for the articles. As a result, the business of news is no more “all the news that’s fit to print”, but only the news that sells the “product” in the “market”.

If there is government interference today with media content, it is entirely covert. You cannot prove any quid pro quo. For instance, it was widely suggested that last year the former editor of the Hindustan Times, Bobby Ghosh, was asked to leave because the owners got word that the party in power was unhappy with some of the paper’s coverage, in particular the Hate Tracker that recorded hate crimes that had taken place since 2014. There is no way to prove what leverage the ruling party or the government used on the owners of the paper. But the coincidence of Ghosh’s departure and the pulling down of the Hate Tracker online could not be missed.

As an aside, it is worth remembering that in 1975, even before Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, the much-respected BG Verghese was asked to step down as editor of Hindustan Times because of an editorial he wrote that was critical of India’s takeover of Sikkim. The paper then was known to be close to the party in power. 

 

Unanswered questions

In the case of the recent development in the ABP News Network, we do not know what kind of pressure was put on the owners to nudge the two top journalists to step down and a third to go on leave. The Ananda Bazar Patrika group is a family-owned business with its primary interest in media. It also owns Ananda Bazar Patrika, the leading Bengali newspaper, and the English language, The Telegraph. ABP News Network is the result of the merger of Star News, which was owned by Star India, and ABP Ltd when the two set up a joint venture, Media Content and Communication Services in 2012. Subsequently Star India pulled out.

ABP News Network has a national profile, unlike the group’s print publications that are largely restricted to the east, as it owns Hindi, Bengali and Marathi television news channels. Yet, it does not have the reach or spread of some of the larger media houses. Also unlike The Telegraph, which has been consistently critical of the Modi government, ABP News was not known to be so. Hence why this pressure on it after just one report about how a woman farmer was tutored to tell a positive story during the Prime Minister’s Mann ki Baat interaction with farmers in Chattisgarh? And why did it succumb? The answers will remain in the realm of conjecture.

The reason this latest attempt to force a media house to fall in line is worrying is that it establishes, if indeed that were needed, that we have at the helm of affairs in India a party that wants not just a Congress-mukt Bharat, but also a free-media-mukt Bharat.

There is little doubt now that through encouraging friendly corporations to take control of the media, and by way of some arm-twisting, the ruling dispensation is determine to ensure that the Indian media is completely in sync with the dominant narrative and that His Master’s Voice, or rather his Mann ki Baat will resonate across media houses.