Making sense of Election 2009

Election 2009 must be one of the most confusing elections in India's history as an independent nation. Nothing is predictable. No party, regardless of the postures it takes, is confident. And the lines between allies and enemies are so blurred as to be non-existent. We wait for May 16, when this month long process of voting ends and the votes are counted.

But till then, most depend on the media to make some sense of the process. And is the media doing that? Or is it adding to the confusion? The electronic media, in particular, seems content to put together talking heads who shout at each other. What we need to hear is the voice of the average voter. That voice is heard sometimes, but most of the time we are treated to the same old men and women who hog the television screen through the year.

This time, print has proved that it is more reliable. Many newspapers are bringing out some of the real concerns of the average voter. These articles give us an insight into what is really going on in India beyond the metros.

Here's a link to my column in The Hoot that discusses the media and elections:

Poll time reality check

April 17, 2009

http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3786&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=10&valid=true

Also my take on the elections, written for The New Statesman, and therefore necessarily simplified:

The son also rises but all bets are off

April 23, 2009

http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2009/04/congress-party-india-bjp-prime

Memories of violence

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 19, 2009

THE  OTHER  HALF

This election might be more peaceful than past elections although it is too early to tell after just the first round. But an important thread that runs through it is the role of memory of past wrongs and the violent history of some political parties that refuses to be erased.

The withdrawal of Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar by the Congress Party as candidates for the Lok Sabha is only one illustration of how people do not forget or forgive that easily, especially when there is no closure, no reassurance that a genuine attempt has been made to bring justice. The Sikhs have not forgotten 1984 even if the rest of the country has. This is now clear.
Justice denied

The Muslims in Gujarat have also not forgotten 2002 because the perpetrators of those horrific acts of violence are still at large. Some of them have also won elections. There is no remorse, no genuine attempt to ensure justice. This might not impact the election results in that State this time, or perhaps even the next time. But in the long run, the Bharatiya Janata Party will be held accountable just as the Congress Party has been forced to face the cost of attempting to erase history. People are not likely to forget, or forgive, the BJP’s flaunting of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its chief campaigner in this election even if its manifesto speaks of development and security. The images of Gujarat 2002 live on in the memories of more than just the people who were directly affected by the violence.

Orissa 2008 is another example of political violence that will linger on and come to haunt its perpetrators. The victims of the terrible violence in Kandhamal just six months ago, Orissa’s Christians, are still living in camps. Most of them have lost all their identity papers, including their voters’ identity cards. According to newspaper reports, not only are they afraid to leave the camps but they are also afraid of voting because they fear that their choice will be known to those who tortured them, people who hold the reins of power. Their only choice is not to vote at all. One of the residents of a camp told a journalist, “Unless the booths are set up right here, it is not possible to vote. We will not step out on polling day as we expect further violence after the polls as the polarisation has been complete”. (Hindustan Times, April 13, 2008)

The BJP’s candidate from the site of the worst violence, G. Udayagiri, is Manoj Pradhan who was directly implicated in last year’s violent attacks on Christians. And its Lok Sabha candidate is a former policeman, Ashok Sahu who is now the State President of the Hindu Jagaran Samukhya, a group that makes no apologies for the attacks on helpless Christian communities. He was recently quoted as saying, “What happened in Kandhamal is no reason to be ashamed about, at least not for me. Today Kandhamal symbolises Hindu culture.”

Divisive politics

The BJP’s support of people like Manoj Pradhan and Ashok Sahu, and not to forget Varun Gandhi, reminds us yet again that its true ideology remains unrepentantly majoritarian, communal and divisive. Elections are the best time to test what percentage of the Indian population really believes what Ashok Sahu has stated, that the massacre of innocents in Kandhamal symbolises Hindu culture.
A timely reminder of the lingering memory of violence in the lives of people who have lived through it is the thought-provoking film by Nandita Das, “Firaaq”. The film has been released at an important time, for, it illustrates what happens to ordinary people, their relationships and their lives when communal violence seeps into every crack and crevice of a society. No one is untouched. Victims of violence discover that all relationships, including the closest ones, become vitiated by suspicion and fear. Those on the other side of the divide either live with the guilt of not having done anything, or with the fear that their role in the violence will be discovered. And even those who believe in the strong syncretic traditions of Indian music and art are forced to face the ugly reality that the delicate threads that have held different communities together for centuries cannot survive such vicious communal violence.

Double-edged

What I personally found particularly interesting was how the director brings out the double-edged sword that many women face. Thus, the wife of a Hindu bigot, who is tortured by her inability to help a Muslim woman in distress, faces violence in her own home as does the wife of a Muslim who has lost everything because his community was targeted by Hindu mobs. Neither woman knows the other. They are on opposite sides of the communal divide. Yet their experience of violence, within and outside the home, places them virtually on the same side.

A film like “Firaaq” reminds us during an election that many complex factors dictate people’s choices and actions. As Indians get used to the idea of elections where their vote can actually lead to a change, it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict outcomes. What makes election 2009 especially interesting is the fact that people are now beginning to understand the value of their vote. They also know that one election is not the end of their ability to make a choice.

A young scholar doing her Ph.D. research in Madhya Pradesh narrated to me her experience of talking to a very poor woman in the town where she is working. This woman compared her vote to a single grain in a fistful of grain. Even one grain, she pointed out, could shift the scales.

Many more Mayawatis

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, April 5, 2009

THE OTHER HALF



Rajeshwari Nora in her beauty parlour in Narnaul, Haryana



They cannot compete with Mayawati, or Jayalalitha or Sonia Gandhi. But the new breed of women politicians springing up in India’s small towns will become a political force to reckon with in the years to come.

Take Rajeshwari Nora, the owner of a beauty parlour by that name in the town of Narnaul in Haryana’s Mahendragarh district. Her 6 ft by 10 ft beauty parlour has mirrors on two sides and large posters of a host of popular Hindi film stars ranging from Rani Mukherjee to Katrina Kaif on the back wall. Two swivel chairs and a bench for those waiting their turn completes the furniture. All the film stars are dressed in bridal finery. Rajeshwari tells me she specialises in bridal make up. Beauty parlours are a flourishing business in this small town of under one lakh people, she says.

At home in politics


But Rajeshwari is not just in the beauty business. She is also into politics as a nominated member of the local municipal council. And she takes her task seriously, worrying about the water supply and garbage clearance. She already speaks like a veteran politician. “My family was in the BJP. I was also in the BJP. Right now I’m in the Congress. But I can change,” she tells me without the slightest hint of embarrassment.

In Mirzapur in U.P., a town on the banks of the Ganga that also hosts the carpet industry, Mamta Yadav is enthusiasm personified. This 28-year-old MA in history has been elected to the Mirzapur municipal council. She got the largest number of votes and says she won because “people thought we should vote for an educated person.” Mamta also heads the standing committee on education and she loves every minute of the importance and attention she is getting. “Rajneeti bahut achchi cheez hai (politics is a very good thing)”, she tells me as we sit in her home in Mirzapur town.

Mamta lives in a middle-income colony with paved paths and unexpectedly clean drains. Her husband, a cable operator in five wards, supports his wife’s efforts. Unlike other husbands of elected women representatives, he defers to her and lets her do all the talking. “I’m a fan of politics,” says Mamta, a mother of two children, a boy aged nine and a girl aged five. Earlier, she had considered becoming a teacher. But now she has been bitten by the rajneeti (politics) bug and intends to continue.

Mamta says she draws inspiration from Mayawati, Pratibha Patil and Sonia Gandhi. “Whatever you say, women are proud that a woman and a Dalit has reached such a high position,” she says of Mayawati. An interesting comment coming from a woman who is not a Dalit and who is close to the Congress Party.

In Rajnandgaon in Chhatisgarh, a Dalit doctor is a member of the municipal council. Dr. Rekha Meshram is a Mahar. She runs her clinic and her office as a councillor from her home, located in a colony of Mahars. Her education helps her, she says, to understand her duties and her rights as a councillor. She can read the budget and discuss it unlike other councillors, many of whom are barely literate.

But Rekha has a different spin on educated women entering politics. “I understand why educated people don’t want to enter. We need to be patient, to be articulate. Being educated is the biggest handicap in politics. You can’t get ahead on your own talent. Till you have a godfather, you can’t go all out. Women get caught, entangled in this web. Party politics is very difficult for women members.” Rekha is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Although she believes that women have a difficult time, she too is convinced she will continue to be in politics.

(To read the rest of the article, click on the link below.Many more Mayawatis)

Disturbed in Manipur

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, March 22, 2009

THE OTHER HALF


The votes from Manipur in distant northeastern India might not determine which party comes to power in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. But one thing is certain. The women of Imphal, its capital, are clear what must happen if any party wants thei r vote. “We have had enough. If the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is not removed, we will not vote”, said an impassioned 78-year-old Ima K. Taruni.

Taruni and dozens of other elderly women, the Meira Paibi or Torch Bearers, were waiting quietly and patiently outside the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital in Imphal on March 7, expecting Irom Sharmila, the iconic human rights campaigner who has been on an indefinite hunger strike for eight years, to be released from the security ward of the hospital. Sharmila and the Meira Paibi, who were also on a relay hunger strike, have one demand — remove the AFSPA. They hold this draconian law responsible for the insecure lives they lead in their own State as over 55,000 members of the Indian armed forces are granted total immunity for any of their actions.

Still in place
Despite Sharmila’s eight years of fasting — and being force-fed through a tube inserted in her nose — the AFSPA remains in place. But Sharmila will not give up. On March 7 she was released, and received by her “mothers” who tended her as they would an exceedingly brave daughter. But two days later, she was re-arrested, on charges of attempting to commit suicide, and sent again to the security ward to be force-fed.

The Meira Paibi will also not give up. Amongst those who waited for Sharmila’s release was a smiling 58-year-old woman who looked older than her years. Ima L. Nganbi, a mother of four children, felt no sense of embarrassment in telling me that she was one of the 12 women who held the dramatic,naked protest in July 2004 in front of Kangla Fort, an area occupied by the security forces in the heart of Imphal. The photograph of these women holding a banner that said, “Indian Army, rape me” sent ripples around the world. It drew attention to a State that has lived under the sword of terror — from the security forces and from multiple militant groups — for decades. And a State where people, and especially the women, are not willing to take it anymore.

Ima Nganbi is the Vice President of Apunba Manipur Kanba Ima Lup or Mothers’ Association to Save Manipur. The naked protest was sparked by the arrest and subsequent murder by security forces of Manorama, an activist. “We wanted to say this openly — come take our prestige, rape us, take our flesh”, says Ima Nganbi. They could not sit back and be silent any more after the Manorama incident. They felt there was no purpose to life if they had to live “without prestige” or respect. “We can’t live like this. All of us women in Manipur are mothers of women who have been raped by security forces. We want to fight to protect our prestige and the removal of black laws like the AFSPA”, she says.

But Ima Nganbi and her colleagues are glad that their protest had some impact. It led to the opening up of the Kangla Fort to civilians. This vast area, surrounded by a moat, was once the palace of the Manipuri king. In 1891, after the Anglo-Manipuri war, the British Army occupied it and after Independence it was taken over by the Assam Rifles. On November 20, 2004, after 113 years, it was handed over to civilian authority and opened up to the public.

That year, the Manmohan Singh government in Delhi promised it would remove the AFSPA and as a first step the municipal limits of Imphal were placed outside it. Yet, it continues to prevail in the rest of the State till today. The central government also appointed a five-member committee headed by Supreme Court Judge B.P. Jeevan Reddy to examine whether AFSPA was required. The Committee, whose report was never made public, was unequivocal in its recommendation that AFSPA should be withdrawn and pointed out that the Act, “for whatever reason, has become a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and high-handedness”. The government has neither accepted nor rejected the report. It has been silent.

(To read the rest of the article, go to: https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/Disturbed-in-Manipur/article15941265.ece)

Steel magnolias in Manipur

Irom Sharmila joins the Meira Paibi in Imphal, Manipur on March 7, 2009

Curfew is a hated six-letter word not just in Srinagar. It has been a reality in many parts of Manipur, including its capital Imphal, in the northeastern corner of India for many decades, a reality that we who live in metropolitan India would find difficult to comprehend.

A few days in Imphal and you realise why people curse the curfew. At the moment, curfew has been “relaxed”. It begins at 7 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. But since February 19, Imphal was under curfew from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.

This means, that in a city with a population of over three lakhs, the streets are jammed from 4.30 p.m. onwards as people desperately try to get home. Every form of public transport is under siege. Shopkeepers hurriedly pull down shutters before the police and the army come along to enforce the curfew.

At the famous Ima market in Imphal run entirely by women, hundreds of them can be seen hurriedly tying up their goods and rushing out to make their way home. In so-called “normal” times, their main business was in the evening hours.

And after five? You can do nothing. In any case, there is also a perpetual power-cut. “We get power for barely four hours a day”, says a local journalist, “when we desperately try and charge our phones, our laptops and hope that the battery will last for the rest of the day.”

There is also little water. Everywhere, in the non-curfew hours, people can be seen collecting water from any source they can find.

Absence of power and water are a reality elsewhere too. But not the presence of over 50,000 members of the armed forces. Or the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 that gives members of these forces complete impunity.

On March 7, on the eve of International Women’s Day, a 36-year-old Manipuri woman, Irom Sharmila, who has become an iconic figure, ended the eighth year of her indefinite fast demanding repeal of the AFSPA. Sharmila has been repeatedly arrested and released for attempting to commit suicide, a charge under which she can be detained for a maximum of one year. For most of this period she has been force fed through a tube inserted in her nose.

Sitting patiently on the steps leading to the security ward of the Jawaharlal Nehru Hospital is 78-year-old Ima K. Taruni, one of the “mothers” of Manipur, the Meira Paibi who have been on a solidarity relay fast for 88 days. “Let’s save Sharmila by removing AFSPA”, she says. “If the Act is not removed, we will not vote. We have had enough.” The quiet manner in which this is said is typical of the determined non-violent struggle against the oppressive AFSPA by women like her.

After hours of waiting patiently, even as the evening sky begins to darken, Irom Sharmila steps out of the security ward. She is dressed in Manipuri dress, a pink diaphanous shawl around her shoulder. She winces at the light of the flash bulbs that pop as she steps out into media scrum. Taruni and the other Meira Paibi form a protective ring around her and while supporting her on all sides slowly walk out with her. People clap, some weep on seeing this pale woman who is barely able to speak or smile.

But each step seems to give her strength. Instead of going into a vehicle, Sharmila walks with the group of women a distance of at least 500 metres to the tent where they have been fasting. She tells the women later that she was ready to walk through the entire city of Imphal.

Once they reach the tent, the women help her sit down on the mattresses, cover her with blankets, lovingly massage her feet and put socks on them, rub her back and coddle her.

Sharmila then turns to the waiting media and speaks. Her voice is surprisingly strong for a woman who has been on a protest fast for eight years. “While the whole world will be celebrating International Women’s Day, no one will know that in a land called Kangleipak, where the land is very fertile and there are so many resources and the people are very friendly, and the wind blows very sweetly, the women of the land are facing so much oppression,” she says. She talks slowly and clearly for over half an hour, never flagging. And as darkness descends, she gets ready to spend the night in the tent with the Meira Paibi.

The release and re-arrest of Irom Sharmila has become an annual ritual. Even as this was being written, she was arrested yet again. Yet, it is an important ritual, one that the rest of India has not fully understood.

Manipur is tucked away in a distant corner. A beautiful land that is being destroyed by strife that is far more complex than the one in Kashmir. A state where the daily hardships of life are compounded by what people feel is an oppressive system. A state where you cannot but be impressed by the determination not to lose hope in its women, its Meira Paibi like K. Taruni. And where the sight of a pale 36-year-old holding on to her demand despite years of arrest and force-feeding has to touch even the most cynical heart.

Manipuris tell you that they have noted how the Indian media gives blanket coverage to any terror attack, be it in Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur or Ahmedabad. Yet although they in Manipur face terror every day, from the armed forces, from the scores of militant groups, hardly any of it is reported, except by their own media.

The current clampdown is the consequence of the murder of a bright young dedicated officer of the Manipur Civil Service, Thingnam Kishen, who was abducted and brutally killed in Ukhrul district on February 13 along with his driver and guard. Kishen, like many young Manipuris, was educated in Delhi and returned to the state in the hope of making a difference.

Despite strong laws like AFSPA, the government has failed to keep people safe in Manipur. Almost every day four or more people are killed in violent incidents involving the rebel groups or the security forces. The most recent was the shooting of a 13-year-old boy in Imphal. The demand for the removal of AFSPA is not likely to disappear. Nor will Irom Sharmila or her determined women supporters stop their protest.

(Also published in Mumbai edition of The Indian Express, Op-ed page, March 12, 2009)

This must stop

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, March 8, 2008

The Other Half


On International Women’s Day, Indian women have every right to call for a halt — to violence, to intimidation, to threats, to insults that are so quickly becoming the norm. I had hoped that I would be able to write something celebratory t his year. But there is just too much bad news that overshadows even the positive developments taking place in many corners of India.

The media reported these incidents in brief. They did not merit the attention that the Mangalore pub attack of January 24 elicited. The goons who hit out at these individual women did not take along television crews. But on just one day, February 17, in three different locations in the so-called “international” city of Bangalore, women who were minding their own business and just going about doing what any citizen is entitled to do — go to work, walk on the street, take public transport — were suddenly pounced upon by men who spat on them, hit them, chased them, hurled insults at them and even tried to pull off their clothes.

Two men on a motorcycle followed one of these women in her car in the afternoon in a crowded part of the city. They spat on her and forced her to stop. She ran into a building to escape them. They followed her and stopped only when she shouted back at them in their own language, Kannada. But as they left, they threatened her saying they had noted her car’s licence plate number.

Four men accosted another woman as she walked on the road at 10 in the morning. They attacked her, accusing her of being part of the Pink Chaddi Campaign by women who challenged the Sri Ram Sene and their Right-wing agenda. She was saved because an army van stopped and two soldiers intervened.

On the same day, a third woman, a young woman filmmaker was attacked. The men chased her to an auto-rickshaw and tried to drag her out. She managed to escape and registered a complaint with the police. And on February 28, a woman journalist on her way home from an assignment was punched on her face as she was getting into an auto-rickshaw. It just happened that on that particular day, these women had worn “western” clothing.

Distressing indifference

What is even more distressing about these incidents is that even though people saw what was happening, no one, except the two soldiers, intervened. They just watched.

What is happening to our society? Why are we breeding a combination of indifference and cowardly violence? How do we bring a halt to this?

Bangalore women are incensed and have launched the Fearless Karnataka campaign to fight against this onslaught from men who are so cowardly that they pick on individual women who are in no position to fight back. But this is a campaign that should be mirrored all over this country. Today it is women in Karnataka who are being targeted. Tomorrow it will be women in any other city or town in this country. While the safety of women in the public space has been a concern in many cities, this new aspect of being deliberately targeted by men who want to inject fear and keep women at home is a new and disturbing development.

The other face of violence is what women face even within the ostensible safety of their homes. Two recent studies have reiterated the extent to which Indian women face domestic violence, a fact already established by two consecutive National Family Health Surveys.

The study by the Indian Institute of Population Studies and the Population Council assembles more evidence that establishes the extent of violence women face in their marital homes. Based on interviews with 8,052 married men and 13,912 married women in the age group of 15 to 29 years in six States — Bihar, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu — the study notes levels of violence ranging from as high as 30 per cent in Bihar to 18 per cent in Rajasthan.

The study defines physical violence in specific terms, consisting of any of the following: twisting arm, pulling hair, pushing, shaking or throwing something at the woman, punching with fist or something else, kicking, dragging or beating up, attempting to choke or burn on purpose, threatening attack with knife, gun or any other weapon. And sexual violence as forced sex anytime during the course of marriage including the first night.

Continuing evidence
Women registered a lifetime experience ranging from 18 to 30 per cent of physical violence and between a third and half of them spoke of forced sex including on the wedding night. Women usually bear all this in silence. They do not revolt until it is too late — when they are grievously injured or even die.

Deaths amongst young women due to fire-related injuries could be six times higher than official estimates. Prachi Sanghavi, Kavi Bhalla and Veena Das, in their study released in the respected international medical journal, The Lancet, have used national hospital registry data for urban areas and a representative survey of causes of death for rural areas to arrive at this conclusion. Looking at fire-related deaths in specific age groups, the researchers estimate that there were 68,000 urban deaths and 95,000 rural deaths caused by fire in 2001, a total of 1.63 lakhs. Of these, 1.06 lakhs, or 65 per cent, were women. And more than half of these were women between 15 and 34 years of age. There could be other explanations for these deaths but the probability that many of these women were injured or died due to dowry harassment or domestic violence is not a far-fetched conclusion.

Studies and data simply confirm what we already know: that despite so-called “progress” on many fronts, women in India continue to be subjected to unconscionable levels of violence – on the street and at home. This has to stop.

(To read the original, click on the link above)

Speaking out

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, February 22, 2008

The Other Half


Two days before February 14, in Rajnandgaon in Chhatisgarh, a group of young girls and boys met for a dinner at a local restaurant, one of only two in this non-descript small town. The restaurant served the ubiquitous selection of “Punjabi/Chinese”. On the lawn behind the restaurant, a party was in full swing with loud Bollywood music blaring out.

Ten years ago, would we have seen boys and girls meeting like this in a town with just over one lakh people? Unlikely. Some of the girls wore western clothes, one wore a salwar kamiz. I asked my host whether this gang of boys and girls were from outside Rajnandgaon, a place with several educational institutions in and around it. He said it was a possibility but they could also be local girls and boys. The presence of the lively group went virtually unnoticed by others in the restaurant. It seemed as if such meetings were commonplace.

In many ways, that group of young people represents the changes taking place in several parts of India, where education and economic mobility are allowing young women to lay claim to the public space as they never could before. They can be seen riding bicycles to high school and scooters to college and work and meeting in mixed groups without fear of being attacked or rebuked. Their mothers would never have dared do this, even if they had wanted to. Perhaps these girls will go on to earn degrees and then get married to the men their parents choose for them. Perhaps some of them will decide to move out of the small town and seek work elsewhere. Perhaps a handful will even be bold enough to decide whom they want to marry. None of this is beyond the realm of possibility.

This is a generational change that the loony fringe who train their guns on hapless couples on Valentine’s Day fail to understand or do not even wish to think about. It has nothing to do with an imposition of another culture. It has to do with education, opportunity and urbanisation.

This year February 14 came and went with the predictable reports of some shops being attacked, random couples being humiliated and demonstrations about “decency” and “culture”. The awful case of the brother and sister being beaten up in Ujjain because the Bajrang Dal gang thought they were a romantic couple was a particularly distressing incident as also several other cases where couples had their faces blackened and one in which the boy was “married” to a donkey. Yet, compared to previous years, this time some state governments did act and the preventive arrests of likely trouble makers managed to dampen the enthusiasm of the “morality brigade”.

But this year was different for another reason. In the bigger cities, for the first time, people decided to fight back. As one television channel dubbed them, the “Love Sena” also came out with assertions of why they had a right to express themselves as they wished in a free country. For instance, students of Delhi University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Indian Institute of Mass Communication and the Jawaharlal Nehru University took out a march in the Delhi University campus and then went on to perform street plays in Kamla Nagar market, an area where the Sangh Parivar’s activists had attacked shops selling Valentine’s Day cards in previous years. “Love is not a crime. So why fear the Sanghi terrorists?” they shouted.

(To read the rest, click on the link above)

In the name of culture

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Feb 8, 2008


The attack by the Sri Rama Sene on five women in a Mangalore pub on January 24 was an assault not just on those five but on all Indian women. And on Indian society. And on Indian “culture”, however we might choose to define it.

Since that widely televised crime, that has been repeatedly aired, showing men in saffron pulling women’s hair, pushing them to the ground and openly molesting them without a trace of fear, a great deal of anger, frustration and outrage has been expressed by women’s groups and others.. We have also witnessed the meekness with which even ostensibly “liberal” politicians quake when “Indian culture” comes into the picture. Note the strange responses from people like Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, for instance.

The attack on the women at the Mangalore pub is not the first such incident.. It has been preceded by many others, in and around Mangalore, in Karnataka, and in the rest of the country. What we need to think about is what these incidents say about our society, our systems of governance and our politics.

Collective responsibility
Why is the burden of upholding “tradition” and “cultural values” placed exclusively on the shoulders of women, young or old? Do men and their behaviour have nothing to do with the degradation of “culture”? And what exactly is this “Hindu” or “Indian” culture that the men from the Sri Rama Sene claim to protect? Is it Indian culture to publicly thrash and molest women? Is it Indian culture to kill women — and the men they choose to marry — if they are from a different caste or community? Is it Indian culture to torture and kill women who fail to produce the desired amount of dowry? Is it Indian culture to gang rape Dalit women who dare to challenge regressive traditions like child marriage? Indeed, is it Indian culture to sit back and accept that mothers will die during childbirth without feeling a sense of outrage at the inequity in our society?

If we wanted to find reasons for so-called “moral outrage”, there are plenty. But “pub culture”? Boys and girls going out together? Public displays of affection? Even Valentine’s Day? In any case, what is “pub culture”? Is it a disapproval of alcohol being served in public places? Or is it only about women?

The real reason for such an attack, and previous attacks, is that outfits like the Sri Rama Sene have no understanding or commitment to anything that could be understood as “culture”. They represent a primitive patriarchal mindset that is all about control — particularly over women. At a time when more women in India are getting educated, becoming economically independent and gaining the confidence to make their own choices — a process that has extended now to even smaller towns and cities — our own version of the Taliban feels emasculated. They have lost control.

So how should they assert it? By making a public and violent display of intolerance. The founding member of the Sri Rama Sene, Pravin Valke, a 40-year-old school dropout, is quoted in a newspaper (Indian Express, February 3, 2009) saying, “Why should girls go to pubs? Are they going to serve their future husbands alcohol? Should they not be learning to make chappatis? Bars and pubs should be for men only. We wanted to ensure that all women in Mangalore are home by 7 p.m.”.

In that quote you have a clear explanation of the mindset of these men who speak in the name of culture. Women should stay at home and make chappatis while men can go out and drink, rape and molest women, cheat, murder or do whatever they wish. Thereby our “culture” will be preserved!

(To read the rest, click on the link above)

Requiem for Uma Singh

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Feb 8, 2008

The Other Half

Whenever we in India use the phrase “neighbouring country”, we refer to Pakistan. We forget that there are other neighbours. Nepal, for instance, our northern neighbour, a country that has gone through immense political convulsions in the last three years, has faced decades of internal war and conflict, and is emerging now as a tentative democracy.

The press in Nepal has reported fearlessly through this difficult period. It has known the curbs on freedom. It is now relishing a release from past curbs that only a democracy can guarantee.

Other threats
Yet, despite democracy, the press in Nepal faces a more serious threat, that of violent attacks by dozens of armed groups that continue to flourish with impunity. As a result, those who do not toe the political line set by such groups end up paying a heavy price. One such was 26-year-old radio journalist Uma Singh, who was hacked to death by over 15 men in her home in Janakpur on January 11, 2009.

A recent visit to Kathmandu revealed how strongly a cross-section of journalists there feels about Uma’s brutal murder. Yet little is known in this country about it. In fact, little is reported about the developments in Nepal unless there is an India angle.

Uma was one of a growing breed of independent-minded journalists in Nepal. Unlike India, FM radio in Nepal is an important part of the media scene as it covers politics and current events and not just popular music. Uma reported for Janakpur Today FM radio and also wrote columns in print media. According to her fellow journalists she was fearless in reporting social and political crimes.

Uma Singh lived and worked in the southeastern Tarai region of Nepal bordering India, and reported on problems specific to that region such as the dowry system and caste discrimination. At one point, she was forced to move house because of the threats she received for some of her writing.

Uma Singh belonged to a wealthy landowning family in the Tarai. Three years ago, Maoists kidnapped her father and brother. They have not been seen since and are presumed dead. Uma was determined to track down the perpetrators of that crime. Since her murder, an attempt is being made to dilute the seriousness of the crime by passing it off as a property dispute between members of her family. Yet, the threat she posed was not because she was involved in a family dispute over property but because she did not hesitate to speak plainly about political crimes, including the one involving her family. Nor was she cautious about taking on those close to the people now ruling Nepal. A neighbour, who heard her cries for help when she was attacked, overheard one of the killers saying, “This is for writing so much.”

(To read the rest, click on the link above)

Mothers and “motherhood”

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 25, 2008


THE  OTHER  HALF


In the recent Hollywood film directed by Clint Eastwood, “Changeling”, actress Angelina Jolie plays the role of Christine Collins, a telephone operator in Los Angeles, California, whose nine-year-old son, Walter, disappears while she is at work. The story, set in the 1920s, brings out not just the callousness of the police department, who refuse to investigate for 24 hours insisting that the child will turn up, but also the attitude of the police towards single mothers like Christine. When another boy is produced after a few months, and she refuses to accept that he is her son because she can clearly see that he is not, she is told by the police that she is purposely not accepting the child because she has got used to her “freedom” from motherhood. She is also accused of being a bad mother for having left her child alone in the house. In today’s America, it is unlikely that any police department would go on record with such outrageous statements even if individual policemen might still think along these lines.

The film reminds us of the constant challenge that women face as they shoulder the primary responsibility of motherhood. In our context in India, it is also a reminder that just the process of becoming mothers, of producing children, is fraught with grave risk for millions of women.

Last fortnight, several newspapers carried stories on this reality on their front pages. The unlikely stories about maternal mortality, given that such news rarely merits any serious attention from the media, was prompted by the release of UNICEF’s 2009 State of the World’s Children report. Amongst other facts, the report reminded us that 1,500 women die every day in the world due to complications arising during pregnancy and childbirth. The chances of a woman in developing countries dying before or during childbirth are 300 times greater than for a woman in an industrialised country like the U.S. Such a gap does not exist in any other social indicator.

Dismal scene

The largest number of maternal deaths in the world is in South Asia. In India alone, an estimated 1,41,000 women die each year during pregnancy or childbirth. This is a result of a variety of factors: child marriages where girls giving birth before their bodies are ready, poverty and poor nutrition that results in high levels of anaemia in pregnant women, unsafe abortions by women who are unable to access legal facilities, unattended deliveries, often in unhygienic conditions, leading to infections and complications, and unavailability of affordable healthcare post delivery to ensure that the mother and child pull through the first hours and days. One of the abiding mysteries of our country is why, when our growth rate is still reasonably high despite the global recession, is our progress so slow in ensuring that millions of women do not die in the process of something as routine as giving birth.

The solution has been known for years. The problem is the will to make it work. We also know that the solution would benefit everyone, not just women. Yet, affordable and accessible health care, for instance, has not received the thrust that is needed. Despite efforts to increase the number of women who can have trained help during delivery, one in every four women in India who was pregnant or delivered a child received absolutely no care in the last five years. The chances of such women developing complications, and even dying in the process, are extremely high.

The UNICEF report underlines the need to improve not just health delivery but many other aspects of living that would benefit the larger community. For instance, the absence of safe water and sanitation has a direct impact on poor women who are pregnant. Even if they survive the pregnancy and childbirth, they risk infection and even death because of the conditions in which they live and deliver.

The UNICEF report contains little that is not already known. But one of the important points it emphasises is the importance of creating what it calls a “supportive environment” for maternal and newborn health.

“Creating a supportive environment for maternal and newborn health requires challenging the social, economic and cultural barriers that perpetuate gender inequality and discrimination. This involves several key actions: educating women and girls and reducing the poverty they experience; protecting them from abuse, exploitation, discrimination and violence; fostering their participation and their involvement in household decision-making and economic and political life; and empowering them to demand their rights and essential services for themselves and their children. Greater involvement of men in maternal and newborn health care and in addressing gender discrimination and inequalities is also critical to establishing a supportive environment.”

Cultural issue

What this underlines is that reducing maternal mortality is not just a technical matter — that of providing enough trained help for women during delivery, or access to healthcare during pregnancy. It also means taking steps that would make our society as a whole more just and humane, where poverty will not exclude you from access to education and health, where gender will not deny you the right to participate in economic and political affairs, and where being a woman will be equivalent to being a human being who has rights and is valued by society. It is indeed ironic that in a society where “motherhood” is virtually deified, we pay so little attention to making sure that women don’t die in the process of becoming mothers.

Shantytowns of the mind

Indian Express, January 14, 2008



I have not yet seen Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle’s film that has picked up four Golden Globe awards. No, not even a pirated CD of it. I only watched some trailers on the net and read reviews. Like others, I wait for its release in India. Whether it now goes on to win one or several Oscars is anyone’s guess. What is certain is that the film has placed the Mumbai slum, and more specifically Dharavi, at the centre of the world’s entertainment stage.

Is that a bad thing? Remember the film City of God, the 2002 Brazilian crime drama set in the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro that exposed the dark underside of the violent existence of the urban poor? It got four nominations for the Oscars and one for the Golden Globe although it did not win either. But the film, although fiction, brought home a reality that perhaps Brazilians don’t necessarily want publicized.

Another “slum film”, so to speak, was Tsotsi, set in Soweto, the large sprawling settlement outside Johannesburg in South Africa, which won several awards in 2005. Again, like City of God, through a work of fiction, the life of people in that “slum” came alive to audiences across the world.

So what about our slums – constituting half of Mumbai and more than one third of most other cities in this country? Is it a bad thing that they are now the subject of films that go on to win awards? Perhaps not. Is there only one way of looking at the life of those who live in these wretched conditions? Or is it possible to show the worst but also appreciate the difference, the grit? If an “outsider” like Boyle depicts this difference, should we celebrate? Or be critical?

Slumdog Millionaire is a story, a gripping one we are told. And if through it the world gets a peek at an India inhabited by millions of people who continue to live their lives without clean water, or sanitation, or electricity, what is the problem? After all, everyone knows that even as we concentrate on fraud at the highest level in our most “shining” sector, and write about the recession that will affect the salaried class, the majority of Indians inhabit another space without the Sensex or job security.

If the film had not won awards, been feted in the West, what would have been our response? Would we have been angry that an “outsider” has dared to make a film about our poverty? Would we have lambasted Boyle and the scriptwriter for not really understanding urban poverty? Would we have dismissed the film as silly and superficial? Possibly.

But now that will never be so because Slumdog Millionaire is a hit. And even before it opens in India, its place in cinematic history has been assured. A few critics here might well slam it. But our middle class will lap it up. It is poverty couched in romance. It doesn’t challenge our beliefs. It leaves us celebrating the “spirit” of the poor and downtrodden much as Mumbai’s “spirit” is constantly celebrated after a terror attack when the city picks itself up and gets back to work.

But Slumdog Millionaire’s success raises some deeper questions. How do we depict poverty as writers, filmmakers, journalists? Is it fair to expect us all the time to give a full, balanced, sensitive portrayal? Or is it inevitable that we write, film, for our audiences? And if, as a byproduct, people are sensitized, so be it. Also, if they are annoyed, so be it. If we are considered exploitative, so be it.

When I wrote my book on Dharavi, (Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum) I was surprised to come across many stories of people who had done well for themselves despite the system. I also found no self-pity in the people I spoke to. They did not expect charity. They knew what they needed to do. Should I not have written about such people just because the problem that Dharavi represented, that of crushing urban poverty, still remained unaddressed? By writing about these rags to riches stories, was I romanticizing poverty, taking away the edge from it, allow people’s consciences to be assuaged? Or was it my task as a writer to depict as honestly as I could both the highs and the lows of the issue of urban poverty, and of the lives of the people who told me their stories? Who was I to judge whether the story of someone who remained condemned to remain in poverty was superior to someone else who had managed to pull herself up by the boot straps and make something of her life?

In the end you realise as a writer, a journalist or a filmmaker, that the best you can do is to shine a torch, a searchlight, on an entrenched problem. But the solution will not be found merely by that illumination. For that, there are many more steps to be taken.

Slumdog Millionaire has focused its lens on the children of India’s slums through a work of fiction. What we do to change their future is the non-fiction that has yet to be written.

Making visible the invisible

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 11,2008


The Other Half



They sweep, they swab, they wash, they cook, they take care of our children and our pets, they look after our elderly. We see them every day. Yet they are invisible. Yes, millions of women, men and children — India’s large force of domest ic workers, or “servants” as most people call them — remain unseen, undervalued and denied rights that all workers deserve.

This is a subject to which we are forced to return every now and then. Sometimes it is a tragedy that forces us to think. Sometimes a positive development. In June 2006, when 10-year-old Sonu was sadistically tortured and killed by her employers in Mumbai, the invisible world of the domestic worker, and especially of the child worker, lay exposed in all its brutality. With the New Year, the possibility of changing the conditions of work and life of such people comes in the form of the Maharashtra Domestic Workers’ Welfare Board Bill that was passed by both houses of the legislature during the recently concluded winter session. Although the law has many shortcomings, it is important because it recognises the rights of these “invisible” workers.

Beyond legislation

Of course, laws alone cannot deal with a problem that constantly plays hide and seek. For decades, groups like the National Domestic Workers’ Movement have campaigned for recognition of domestic work as a form of labour. The diligence and persistence of such groups has resulted in some States initiating legislation. For instance, both Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have included domestic workers in the legal provisions for minimum wage. Tamil Nadu has included domestic work in the Manual Labour Act and in January 2007 set up the Domestic Workers’ Welfare Board. Kerala has taken some steps in this direction, as have Bihar and Rajasthan. The Central government has included domestic workers in provisions under the Unorganised Sector Workers’ Social Security Act that was passed in January last year. And now Maharashtra has passed its own law.

Most labour laws face the challenge of implementation but amongst the most difficult must surely be the ones linked to domestic work. To begin with, there are no clear statistics of the number of people working as paid labour in people’s homes. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), “A domestic worker is someone who carries out household work in a private household in return for wages.” The estimated number of domestic workers in India is 90 million but this is probably an underestimate as there has been no systematic study to document such workers throughout the country.

From the data that exists, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of domestic workers are women and girls. There has been considerable documentation of the abuse young girls, in particular, suffer at the hands of their employers. Sonu’s was not an exceptional story. It was just a reminder of what goes on behind many closed doors.

An estimated 20 per cent of domestic workers are children below 14 years of age. Under child labour laws, these children should not be employed. Yet those who do employ them, get around the law by claiming that they are “looking after” these children when in fact it is the children who look after them, usually with little or no pay. Such child workers slip between the cracks of labour laws as most laws cover workers over the age of 18. The Maharashtra law, for instance, addresses domestic workers between the ages of 18 and 60 who are now eligible to register themselves at district welfare boards. But what happens to those under 18?

(To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

Woman of steel

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 28, 2008

The Other Half



The State of Jharkhand, that mineral rich southern part of the former State of Bihar, which was hived off into a separate State in 2000, has become famous recently for the achievements of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the Indian cricket captain who seems to be on a permanent winning streak.

But Dhoni is not the only remarkable individual from this State. In the wake of the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai, when the media was understandably concentrating on developments surrounding that tragic incident, a woman from Jharkhand was honoured at a ceremony in New Delhi. This went virtually unnoticed. She is not part of the glitterati, the “beautiful people” who seem to dominate our television screens these days. She will not be invited to television chat shows to give a sound byte. She will not feature on the front pages of our magazines and newspapers.

Yet, this exceptional 44-year-old tribal woman, a journalist and an activist, could probably teach even Mahendra Singh Dhoni a lesson or two about how to fight back even when you are down and everyone expects you to lose.

Worthy recipient
Dayamani Barla was chosen for the Chingari Award for Women Against Corporate Crime 2008. The award itself is remarkable because it has been instituted by two women who took on one of the biggest corporations in the world, Union Carbide in 1984 after one of the worst industrial disasters killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Rasheeda Bee and Champa Devi Shukla won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004 for their work in Bhopal to get justice for the victims. Instead of using the sizeable award money for their needs as they could have given that they were victims of the gas disaster, they decided to invest it in a trust that would recognise each year a woman struggling on the same issues as them.

In Dayamani Barla they have found a worthy recipient for the award. Like Rasheeda Bee and Champa Devi, Dayamani knows the cost of fighting against the powerful. Born in a village in Gumla district of Jharkhand to a landless family, Dayamani’s father was forced to give up his house to usurious moneylenders when she was still young. Her mother had to find work as a domestic in Ranchi and Dayamani had to work to supplement the family income from the age of nine. But she also continued to study, and worked to support her family by giving tuitions and typing, at the rate of Rs. 1 per hour. Many children under such circumstances would have given up education. But Dayamani persisted and cleared not just high school but even university. She did her Masters in Commerce from Ranchi University and went on to be an award-winning journalist and author. She was clear from the start that she wanted to use her pen to give a voice to those who are otherwise not heard.

(To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

No time for revenge

I am not the first person to recommend peace and restraint since the terror attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Yet, within minutes of my column appearing in The Hindu, the hate mail has already started pouring in. One reader has called me "asinine", and writes: "India can do without weak sisters like you. Perhaps, they can be offered to the terrorists in exchange, if that will placate them." Others are more polite but suggest that I am completely wrong, and I am steeling myself for much more. But why does talk of peace at a time like this provoke such a violent response? Are we in the media partly to blame for drumming up these feelings of revenge each time there is a terror attack?

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 14, 2008

THE OTHER HALF

No time for revenge

Ever since the terrifying terror strike in Mumbai on November 26, many of us have strained hard to find some voices advocating peace. The overwhelming chant is one demanding war and revenge. It is reminiscent of other times, in other places. In the United States post 9/11. And an echo of that is heard in the India of today.

But after 9/11, there were also strong, public, prominent voices calling for peace, for sanity, for restraint. Some of these individuals were pilloried for flowing against the tide. Yet, they stuck to their convictions. Many of those who spoke out were women.

Robin Morgan, an award-winning American feminist writer wrote in the days after the terror strike, about the mood in New York. “The petitions have begun. For justice but not vengeance. For a reasoned response but against escalating retaliatory violence. For vigilance about civil liberties. For the rights of innocent Muslim Americans. For ‘bombing’ Afghanistan with food and medical parcels, NOT firepower.” She urged people to write to newspapers, use the Internet to talk about the root causes of terrorism. “Ours are complex messages with long-term solutions — and this is a moment when people yearn for simplicity and short-term, facile answers.”

Manufacturing consent

In India too, we have seen how our media forces facile answers. You are compelled to answer “yes” or “no” to questions that have pre-determined answers. You are asked to express “in 30 seconds” why you believe it would be wrong to provoke a confrontation with Pakistan. Then, what you say is misinterpreted and before you can respond, the subject is changed.

As a result, we have been inundated with expressions of aggression, often born out of ignorance. We are being forced to listen to opinions of people who have rarely engaged with issues that confront Indian society outside such times. And we are being informed that the “mood” of people is for “decisive action” to deal with terror. If there are voices saying something different, they are either not heard, or cut short.

Real security

Much of this is the media attempting to manufacture consent. Much of it is limited to the urban middle and upper classes. Proof of this has already been evident in the results of elections in five States where the party that used the “terror” message did not sweep the polls as expected. In rural India, the issue that remains the most relevant is development — sadak, bijli, paani. This is what security means to the ordinary woman and man, not war with Pakistan, not rule by the military, not stronger anti-terror laws, all of which are being demanded by some people in our cities.

Also, while there are voices seeking better governance, better intelligence, better training and equipment for the police, few are speaking out for better relations with Pakistan. Yet, with the backing of civil society groups on both sides of the border, India and Pakistan have made great strides in taking small but important steps to improve relations. The Mumbai terror strike appears to have wiped all this out.

(To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

Sixty hours of terror

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 7, 2008

Sixty hours of terror



The sounds of gunfire and grenades have died down. The dust
has settled. The shards of broken glass and plaster are
being cleared. The blood has been washed away. And the eerie
silence has given way once again to the reassuring urban
chaos that is Mumbai. But 10 days after the nightmare began
in Mumbai, one that seemed not to end, that extended for
three nights and two days, the scars are still raw, the
images still sharp and the questions still unanswered.

On Wednesday night, November 26, the gunmen struck. They
were not masked. They were like young people we see on our
streets. By Thursday morning, Mumbai was paralysed. Why?
This is a huge city, sprawling way to the north of where the
attack took place, in the southern tip of the city. Trains
and buses were unaffected. Yet, no one moved on that day.

Staying put



Two factors were principally responsible. One, the apparent
randomness of the attack. Images of armed gunmen spraying
bullets at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), a building as
beautiful as it is important for the city, and thereafter
all the way down the street to the junction where another
landmark, the Metro cinema stands, forced people to stay off
the roads. Any of us could have been on the street when the
gunmen opened fire. Any of us could have been walking around
the popular Colaba causeway, buying bags and scarves from
the hawkers that line its pavements when the gunmen barged
into Leopold Cafe and opened fire. Any one of us
could have been like the man who stepped out of his shop to
find out what the noise was about only to be shot by the
gunmen as they made their way to their ultimate target, the
Taj Mahal hotel.

The second reason was the non-stop television coverage. The
terror attack might have been far from our homes. But
television brought to us its terrifying sights and sounds.
And the faces of the gunmen. No one slept that night. Few
could summon up the will power to just turn the television
set off and wait until the next day. As a result, the city
was hooked onto this continuous horror show being played on
all channels.

But the massacre in Mumbai also brought home to the people
of this city a version of urban warfare they had never seen.
The sight of commandos landing by helicopter on the roof of
Nariman House, a little known Jewish centre in the crowded
heart of Colaba, was even more unreal. You only saw such
sights in Hollywood movies. Could this really be taking
place in one part of our city?

To read the rest of the article, click on the link above.

Why toilets matter

Another toilet story that should have been posted earlier but got overlooked. Here's the link to the original: http://www.infochangeindia.org/component/content/article/216-urban-india/cityscapes/7438-why-toilets-matter

Open defecation in urban India is declining very slowly, with over 5 million people in Indian cities still defecating outside. Could this be because the urban middle class monopolises the existing basic services like water supply and sanitation and therefore does not impel change, asks Kalpana Sharma

At the recent G8 meeting in Japan, world leaders discussed oil prices and climate change. They did not, however, address what is being called a “development emergency” in some countries -- the chronic absence of improved sanitation among large sections of the population, particularly in poor communities, that is contributing to the spread of disease.

Even as countries like India boast of a consistently high rate of economic growth, they cannot hide the abject failure to tackle the consistently low rate of growth in access to improved sanitation.

Year after year, while the number of those getting access to safe water climbs, the equivalent figures for sanitation remain stubbornly low. This is a constant reminder of the failure of many governments to evaluate the importance of improved sanitation and to put enough political will and investment into bridging this deficit.

One of the more unsavoury facts that the government in India would most certainly not want advertised is the fact that one out of every two people in the world who are forced to defecate out in the open is an Indian.

According to a recent report of the Joint Monitoring Project on Drinking Water and Sanitation of Unicef and the World Health Organisation, 18% of the world’s population, or 1.2 billion people, still have no access to sanitation and are compelled to defecate out in the open. Of these, an astounding 665 million live in India.

What is even more depressing is that the rate at which this situation is changing, in India, is slow. Overall, the rate of open defecation has declined from 73% in 1990 to 58% in 2006. However, while in rural India the rate of open defecation has declined from 89% in 1990 to 74% in 2006, in urban India it has gone down by only 10% in 16 years, from 28% in 1990 to 18% in 2006. This means that even today, over 5 million people in Indian cities defecate out in the open. If evidence of this were needed, one has only to take an early morning suburban train in Mumbai to witness the spectacle of people using the open spaces around railway tracks as a vast open-air toilet.

This is the extreme end of the spectrum. What sanitation is available by way of toilets is also generally far from satisfactory. Shared toilets, or community toilets, are generally poorly maintained, leading to contamination of soil and water sources. The problem is exacerbated in urban areas as the settlements where the urban poor live are tightly packed, with few open spaces. In such conditions, open defecation and leaking toilets greatly enhance the danger of contamination and the spread of waterborne diseases.

The link between sanitation and health hardly needs to be emphasised. Yet, although progress has been made in the realm of supplying drinking water, for some reason provision of adequate sanitation continues to lag behind in India. As of now, India is not on target to meet the Millennium Development Goal of providing 46% of its population ply with adequate sanitation by 2015.

The international charity Water Aid put together data on this issue for the recent G8 meeting and emphasised yet again the need to renew commitment and investment in sanitation. According to its report, 40% of the world’s population lacks access to improved sanitation and this, in turn, kills more children than malaria, HIV/AIDS and measles put together.

Water Aid also suggests that as many as 910,000 child deaths from diarrhoea could be avoided each year through the provision of improved sanitation. An estimated 85% of the 1.6 million deaths due to diarrhoea each year can be linked to poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water, it says. Also, the underlying cause of the 5 million child deaths each year is chronic malnutrition. Recurring bouts of diarrhoea in children already malnourished means that nutritional supplements have no impact on their chances of survival, as their weakened digestive systems simply cannot absorb them.

The key input to enhancing child survival is not necessarily more and better food or medical interventions but conditions of living that ensure that children do not get ill. There is simply no shortcut to providing sanitary living conditions and an adequate supply of potable water. Such interventions do not provide instant results that are demonstrable. But they are a long-term investment that pays enormous health dividends for all, poor and rich.

The cost of poor sanitation and unsafe water is borne disproportionately by the poor living in urban or rural areas. However, sometimes the health status of urban poor communities is worse than their counterparts in rural areas.

‘Our cities, our health, our future’, a report to the WHO commission on Social Determinants of Health (the final report is due to be released worldwide in August this year) by the Knowledge Network on Urban Settings, illustrates this point with data from Kenya. The infant mortality rate (IMR) in Kenya is 74 per 1,000 live births -- 76 in rural areas and 57 in urban areas excluding Nairobi. But in the country’s capital city, while the IMR in high-income areas in likely to be under 10, in the slums of Kibera and Embakasi it is 106 and 164 respectively. In Nairobi as a whole, it is 39. This clearly shows that the health status of the urban poor, living in wretched conditions, is much worse than the status of those in rural areas who also live in poverty.

In India too, the data shows that the health status of the urban poor is either the same or worse than that of people in rural areas. For instance, the percentage of underweight children in the urban poor population is 47.1%, compared to 45.6% in the rural population, and stunting is seen in 54.2% of urban poor children, compared to 50.7% of rural children (according to NFHS-3 data). Apart from children, women in poor urban communities are almost as badly off as their rural sisters, with 58.8% of women between the ages of 15-49 years being anaemic, compared to 57.4% of rural women. NFHS-3 data also reveals that there is little difference in the figures for the number of children with diarrhoea in urban poor communities and those in rural communities. This data merely underlines the reality that while urban areas as a whole might have better medical facilities and piped water and sewerage, these facilities do not extend to the urban poor.
In fact, urbanisation should lead to better health for all. That is the lesson drawn not just from richer countries like Japan, Sweden and the Netherlands but also countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea. Here, healthy urban living conditions that include provision of housing, water and sanitation have changed the health statistics quite dramatically.
Susan E Chaplin, who did her doctoral thesis on ‘Cities, Services and the State: The Politics of Sanitation in India’ from La Trobe University, Australia, draws a comparison between sanitation in post-Industrial Revolution England and Indian cities, in an essay in the journal Environment and Urbanisation (April, 1999). She looks at the policies pursued in mid-19th century England and now in India, and brings out several useful points.

Sanitary reform in Britain really took off only in the 19th century when the spectre of disease haunted the entire population, rich and poor. Conditions in industrial cities like Liverpool and Manchester were not very different from those that prevail in the slums of Kolkata or Mumbai today. Chaplin quotes Friedrich Engles on these English cities. He wrote that they had “...streets (that) are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead”.

The pattern of urbanisation in the two countries has also been similar, with the advent of work and industrialisation drawing in the poor from villages. But in England, Chaplin writes, three factors contributed to sanitary reform. “These were the campaigns by medical practitioners along with reform of local government, advances in science and engineering, and the presence of a ‘threat from below’, in terms of diseases and organised labour.”

Chaplin argues that in India the urban middle class has not been interested in bringing about any change in conditions because it has successfully monopolised the existing basic services like water supply and sanitation. The British built sewers only in areas they inhabited; the native towns were left to manage with the scavenger system that, shockingly, persists in some of the smaller towns. The better-off Indians today live in areas that have benefited from the colonial sewerage systems, while the poor mostly live in unserviced plots.

Furthermore, science and medicine have reduced the possibility of the spread of disease ‘from below’. And the rich really do not need to fear any revolution ‘from below’, as did the rich in England, because the urban poor are mostly unorganised. As a result the urban middle class, and one might add the policymakers, can continue to be indifferent to the conditions of the poor. Combine this with an ineffective local government and you have the situation we see in most Indian cities today.

In England too, the rich were initially not interested in reform that would benefit all classes. The single factor that altered this situation was the prospect of their getting cholera. An epidemic in the 19th century established the link between sanitation and health as nothing else could have done.

Also, the militancy of the working classes prompted the rich to accept that providing them with basic services was a wiser proposition than risking the disruption that would inevitably follow an attempt to overthrow the hold of the ruling classes.

Between 1880 and 1891, urban authorities in many cities in Britain provided sewerage and clean water supply under the Sanitation Act of 1866. This step benefited all citizens, not just the rich.

In India, the provision of improved sanitation, especially for the urban poor population that is estimated to grow at an annual rate of 5-7%, requires similar action and political will. Already, one-third of the country’s population lives in cities and towns. Of this, anywhere between a quarter and a half live in slums and informal housing with inadequate provision of water and sanitation. Health parameters of the urban poor are uniformly worse than those in formal housing, for the obvious reason that, besides poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions expose this population to ill health. Compounding the situation is inadequate and affordable healthcare.

Health data in India has shown that the poor turn to private healthcare wherever the public health system is inadequate. In urban areas, the absence of adequate public health outposts in slums and the presence of private practitioners guarantee that people turn to the latter rather than seek free healthcare from the public system. The pressure on the budgets of people living on the margins is enormous and often unbearable. For instance, a 2003 study of 850 households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, found that increased expenditure on healthcare due to illness had forced many families to take loans, sell assets and even resort to begging to meet the costs of ill health. This pattern is evident in most developing countries with large populations of urban poor, including India.

“Lack of investment in sanitation reveals a blind spot in development policy: a failure to recognise sanitation’s integral role in reducing poverty,” the Water Aid report rightly points out.

In these times of political turmoil, such issues are not high on India’s priority list. Nor is the media interested in highlighting them. Yet, economic growth cannot be sustained if almost half the country’s population lacks access to something as basic as sanitation. Boasts of being an economic power -- or even a nuclear weapons state -- seem quite hollow against this ugly reality.

The toilet test

Posting this article now. I've just attended Sacosan III, the South Asian Sanitation Conference. Despite the importance of the subject, the conference was more or less ignored by the so-called "national" media.


Published in DNA, Mumbai, September 12, 2008


As a traveller, you often judge a country by its public toilets. India fails this toilet test miserably. For even as our country appears poised to become an economic giant at some future date, one of the many appalling statistics that brings us down to earth is our toilet story, or rather the lack of toilets story.

A recent joint monitoring report prepared by the World Health Organisation and Unicef found that out of the 1.2 billion people around the world who are forced to defecate in the open, half live in India. An estimated 665 million Indians, one in every two, lack access to a toilet. That is not a pleasant statistic. Yet, few Indians would challenge it, as the embarrassing evidence is before our eyes everywhere we look.

While public facilities like bus stations, railway stations and airports have distressingly inadequate toilets, even institutions like hospitals, schools and offices, both government and private, often fail the toilet test. Ask women who work in these places. Even highly placed professional women in India will have at least one toilet story about an office where they have worked.

The problem, of course, is not something to joke about. We know that the absence of sanitation has a devastating impact on health. It affects women and girls more directly as they have to wait sometimes an entire day until dark to relieve themselves. But this unmet need also has another fall out. It is negating efforts to increase female literacy.

The city of Mumbai, which has a high overall literacy rate, provides us with a vivid example of this. According to a report in this newspaper, six out of ten municipal schools do not have adequate or any toilets for girls. As a result, the dropout rate of girl students after Std V is 50 per cent.

The story is worse in rural schools. Little wonder then that India’s female literacy rate is not advancing at the rate at which girls are being enrolled in schools. The answer is simple: give them toilets that are clean and can be used and they will attend school.
The sanitation story is not just about toilets. It is about investment in sewerage systems.
This can only be done by the State. So why, if water supply is given a priority, is sewerage neglected? Is the government not too concerned because while people riot when there is no water, you don’t see demonstrations demanding toilets? In the water-sanitation duet, the latter is forgotten or overlooked.

What will it take to get the State to act? Before the days of modern medicine, the absence of sanitation would mean the spread of diseases that could afflict everyone, rich and poor. As a result, sanitation could not be neglected. Today, those who can afford medicine, and also have clean water and sanitation, can generally avoid some of these diseases. As these very people also make policies, the problem seems less urgent as it does not impact their lives.

Susan E Chaplin, who did her doctoral thesis on “Cities, services and the State: The Politics of Sanitation in India” from La Trobe University, Australia, draws an interesting comparison between sanitation in the post-Industrial Revolution England and Indian cities. In an essay in the journal Environment and Urbanisation (April, 1999), Chaplin points out that sanitary reform in Britain took off only in the 19th century when the spectre of disease haunted the entire population, the rich and the poor.

Between 1880 and 1891, urban authorities in many cities in Britain provided sewerage and clean water supply under the Sanitation Act of 1866. This step benefited all citizens, and not just the rich. In contrast, in India, the middle class has monopolised those areas where the British built sewers while the poor living in slums occupy low-lying, unserviced areas. As a result, the class that could have taken the initiative to press for sanitary reform remains indifferent to it.

Additionally, in India sanitation also has a caste dimension. As long as there are people available to clean up the dirt, we can pretend it does not exist. In many smaller towns, even a rudimentary underground sewer system does not exist and the disgusting practice of manual scavenging continues. This is something that should shame all Indians.

The toilet story exposes the hollowness of the “India prospering, shining India” imagery. More than the real numbers of India’s poor, this illustrates the daily deprivation and lack of dignity that marks the lives of millions of people in this country. We need to urgently think of a Sanitation Act that makes it incumbent on local authorities to address the issue of sanitation and restore dignity to people’s lives.

Faceless Citizens

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, November 16, 2008

The Other Half



Every alternate day, for as long as I can remember, a vendor selling vegetables loaded on a handcart parked himself in our neighbourhood in Mumbai. He would push that cart several kilometres from the wholesale market and arrive in our neighbourhood early in the morning. In a few hours, his handcart would be emptied of its load as he made his return trip.

Many people bought small quantities of fresh vegetables from him. Few knew his name. Yet, when he spoke, you could tell he was a “North Indian”. And if you asked, he told you he was from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh. This nameless vendor provided fresh vegetables at reasonable prices to a middle class neighbourhood. He also delivered the goods to your home, free of charge. If you didn’t have enough change to pay him, he would readily agree to wait until the next day. If you complained about the quality of something you had bought the previous time, he could immediately replace it, free of charge.

Our friendly neighbourhood vegetable vendor has disappeared. Without a trace. No one is able to tell me what happened to him. I ask the man who sells bananas. He also comes every day by taxi with a basket load of bananas. In a few hours, his basket is empty. But he doesn’t know what happened to the vegetable vendor.

But we do know what happened. There are two possibilities. He could be one of the many “North Indians” who is now too frightened to live in Mumbai after the launch of the anti-outsider tirade by Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. Even if they did not attack him directly, he would have seen the images of hawkers being attacked, their goods splayed on the street.

Another reason could be economic. A new retail store has opened in the area selling fresh vegetables at marginally lower prices than what the vegetable vendor charged. So, even though his vegetables were decidedly fresher than those sold in the store, and people had an old relationship with him, the majority graduated to the novelty of going to the store and buying vegetables wrapped in plastic. The store used economies of scale to lower prices. The neighbourhood vendor could not compete. He tried by coming an hour earlier. He tried by reducing the amount of vegetables he brought on his cart to cut his losses. In the end, he gave up and disappeared.

I narrate this story, which will have echoes in most other cities across India, because it tells us of the largest number of people who are losing jobs and livelihood. The media runs front page stories when airlines staff are laid off. We hear about redundancies in the private sector. Raj Thackeray sends his MNS cadre to beat up Biharis trying for jobs in the railways.

The people who are paying the price for the changes in the economy and the slowing down of the growth rate are people like this vegetable vendor. While the spurt in retail in perishables has destroyed the livelihood of thousands of men and women who survived on their daily sale of fruits and vegetables, the slowdown has resulted in closing down thousands of small manufacturing units that were a part of the informal economy.

Yet, these people remain invisible. Economic problems always mean stock exchange news, or news of some big factories closing down or stopping production for a few days. But what will happen to people who did not have security in their employment, could never dream of a salaried job, but survived nonetheless on their wits and by providing a much needed service? Who is counting these losses? Is anyone even bothered? The tragic part of the agitation launched by Raj Thackeray is not just that it is irrelevant — he is only bothered about the minuscule minority of Maharashtrians who are seeking jobs in the formal sector — but that it is obscuring the real crisis that is facing millions of people in our cities.

(To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

Going public

The Hindu, November 2, 2008

Sunday Magazine


THE OTHER HALF



On Friday, October 24, a nun from Orissa did something incredibly brave. In full view of television cameras, she went public. For months, no one knew her name or what she looked like. Yet, everyone knew that in the ghastly sectarian violence that has gripped Orissa, one of the foulest acts was the gang rape of this nun. We also knew that the local police failed to follow up the case, despite her having filed an FIR in her traumatised state. We now know that the police tried to dissuade her from filing the FIR. Also, despite the medical report having confirmed the rape, nothing was done.

Now there is some movement, but only as a consequence of concerted pressure from media and civil society. The nun has said she does not trust that there will be justice if the same police that includes men who did not hesitate to warmly greet the men who had attacked and raped her, are entrusted the task of investigating the crime.

We have to salute the courage of this woman. Few if any women are prepared to speak out after they are raped. Hundreds never report rape. Yet, Bilkis Bano from Gujarat did. And as a result, the men who raped her were convicted. But then Bhanwari Devi in Rajasthan did. But the men who raped her got away. So going public comes with risk of never getting justice, and living forever with the shame.

Not a random incident

Yet, it is important to realise that this is not just the story of one woman, a nun, who was raped. It is a reminder that rape continues to be used as a weapon of war. This woman was raped because the men waging war against the Christians in Orissa wanted to teach them a lesson they would not forget. So apart from burning homes, beating up people, including a priest, and burning churches, they decided that the rape of a woman who had committed herself to serve the church was the most effective way to make their point. They believed that this would silence their “enemy” forever.

This weapon of war has been wielded for centuries. And women, regardless of race, class or creed, have been its principal victims. For the majority, there has been no justice, no closure to the wound on their bodies and their souls that can sometimes never heal.

Ten days before this press conference in Delhi, another public event took place thousands of miles away — in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Africa’s west coast. Here is a country that has been at war with itself for years. Government forces are fighting many different rebel groups. Every day you hear stories of thousands being displaced as they flee the fighting. Peace seems nowhere in sight despite 17,000 UN peacekeeping forces being stationed there.

The U.N. acknowledges that women in the Congo are experiencing more sexual violence than in any other country in the world. According to a recent survey, one out of every four adults in eastern Congo had witnessed sexual violence and one in six had actually experienced it. Twelve per cent of those surveyed said they had been sexually violated more than once.

Even in such a horrific theatre of war, women are finding the courage to go public, to speak about being raped in the hope that this will put pressure on the government to act against the rapists. Like the nun, these women have little faith that they will get justice. Yet they are willing to try, as there is no other option.

Here are the words of one of these women who spoke at the meeting (as reported in The New York Times, October 18, 2008): “There was no dinner. It was me for dinner because they kicked me roughly to the ground, and they ripped of all my clothes, and between the two of them, they held my feet. One took my left foot, one took my right, and the same with my arms, and between the two of them they proceeded to rape me. Then all five of them raped me.”

Worse than murder

You feel sick when you read this, just as many of us did when we read the full statement of the nun from Orissa. What kind of men are these? How do they get away with such crimes? Why is sexual violence of this kind less important than dozens of other crimes that our law-enforcers seem to have the energy and time to pursue?

The war in erstwhile Yugoslavia at the end of the 1990s was another that exemplified the use of rape as a weapon of war. Hundreds of Croatian women were brutalized by Serbian soldiers. Some of these women found the courage to speak out, once the war ended.
Dubravka Ugresic, an author from the region who has lived in exile in Amsterdam, writes in her 1998 book The Culture of Lies: “The war in Yugoslavia is a masculine war. In the war, women are post-boxes used to send messages to those other men, the enemy. And enemies who were their brothers until a short time, at that.”

And then she quotes one of her colleagues, a writer, telling her: “Rape in war is quite a normal thing, it’s part of the male psychology, it’s irrational. I hope you won’t get me wrong, but it’s a kind of a negative compliment to a woman, an ugly sexual blunder…”

“An ugly sexual blunder?” I don’t think the nun from Orissa, or the women from the Congo, would see the violent assault on their very being as “a blunder”. These acts are not random. They are not driven by the emotion of the moment. They are part of an entrenched mindset that considers the “enemy” as less than human, particularly women who belong to that “enemy”. Killing or raping them is not a “blunder”. It is considered an act of “valour” in what they believe is a righteous war.


(To read the rest of the article, click on the link above)

Crime and the media

Chief Justice of India K. G. Balakrishnan has once again reminded the media about its role in reporting crime and on-going investigations. Speaking at a workshop organised by the Bombay High Court on Sunday, October 19 on “Reporting of Court Proceedings by Media”, he said, “Privacy of the person must be protected. Sometimes damaging information is revealed during the investigation. It adversely affects people’s right to a fair trial” (as reported by Express Newsline, Oct 20, 2008). He also reportedly criticised police officers revealing information to the media during investigation and said that this encroached upon the right to privacy.

The Chief Justice’s comments come at a time when there is a great deal of chatter, particularly on the Internet, about the relationship between the police and the media. Author Arundhati Roy has also been critical on this count in her recent interview to Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN. It is an issue that we in the media have to consider seriously particularly in the light of the on-going investigations by various police agencies into the string of terror attacks in different cities.

The point that has to be debated and considered is not whether the media should report what the police reveals about a crime under investigation but how it should report it. We also need to question whether the police should leak to a few chosen journalists, or publicly release, incremental information on investigations into crimes. Sometimes the information is not just incremental, it is also unsubstantiated and later contradicted by the police. But in the meantime, the individual involved is victim to grievous injustice, judged without a fair trial.

As far as the media is concerned, the norms of reporting on crime, or terror, should not differ. If suspects are picked up for a crime, they are precisely that – suspects. Until a case is made out that will hold in a court of law, we in the media cannot name them as “murderer”, “thief”, “cheat” or even “terrorist”. Regardless of what the police reveal to the public, based on their investigations or confessions of these suspects, the media must qualify what it reports. That is the only guarantee for the innocent amongst these suspects to have any chance of rebuilding their lives if they are proved innocent, or if the police are unable to establish their guilt. These norms have been well established and just because we now live in a more competitive media environment, they surely should not be abandoned. Yet, even a cursory survey of both print and broadcast would reveal how easily some of these norms have slipped or even disappeared altogether. Their absence does nothing to enhance the credibility of the media.

We should be equally disturbed at the way various police units are rushing to the media with information. During the Arushi murder case, the police was shown up clearly to have crossed the line. The media could argue that it had no option but to report what the police said. But it is also evident that some of the media used the police information to dramatise the ghastly murder to increase their viewership. In the process, where was the individual’s right to privacy or a fair trial?

The rash of media briefings, official and unofficial, continues unabated in the terror investigations. Why are they necessary? Do people need to know every detail about on-going information or is it more important to investigate and produce credible results? Today, ordinary people are genuinely confused about what really is going on and inevitably, there are questions raised about the credibility, and even efficiency, of the various police forces. This is not the result of some inherent suspicion in the minds of people about the police. It is the consequence of the manner in which the police have exposed themselves by putting out half-baked information into the public domain through the media.

Apart from the terror investigations, media briefings are gradually becoming the norm amongst police in different cities even for minor crimes. For instance, earlier this month, the Mumbai police held a media briefing where they paraded a 10-year-old boy suspected of being responsible for spreading a rumour about people being kidnapped as part of a kidney racket. The boy apparently confessed. His father was also present at the briefing. The juvenile offender was photographed and the police officer gave his name and other details even though this is prohibited under the Juvenile Justice Act.

This particular briefing cannot be dismissed as an aberration, the action of a police officer bitten by the publicity bug. It raises the same questions as in the terror investigations -- is the police using the media because the media feeds off such information or is the media’s aggressive demand for information on crime forcing the police to go public?

Another offshoot of the issue emphasised by the Chief Justice impinges on women who are victims of violence. When the rape of the nun in Kandhamal, Orissa, was first reported, no paper gave away her name or identity. And rightly so. Even when she spoke to some television channels, there was no hint of where she was, or who she was. But in subsequent days, some newspapers tracked down her family, carried photographs of the village where they lived, gave details of the location of the village, quoted her father and brother, giving their full names. In other words, every bit of information short of the name of the victim was reported. Can this be explained away as the inevitable consequence of a competitive media? How does such reporting conform to the Chief Justice’s appeal for the individual’s right to privacy? Should we just conform to the letter of the rule of not revealing the identity of rape victims or do we also have a responsibility to adhere to the spirit that informed that rule?

These are questions that the media must address. We need to seriously interrogate our approach towards crime and justice and ensure that we are not abetting the former and negating the latter.