Category Archives: South Asia Bulletin

Anti-democratic colonial heritage

 

OPINION » EDITORIAL

An anachronistic law

The police in Bengaluru have registered an FIR, under Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, against Amnesty International India, highlighting once again the anachronism of the sedition law and its potential as a tool for harassment. Amnesty India had organised a function as part of its campaign to seek justice for “victims of human rights violations” in Jammu and Kashmir, an event that ended in heated arguments and pro-azadi sloganeering. The FIR was lodged on the basis of a complaint by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, a student body affiliated to the RSS. Although the Karnataka Home Minister has clarified that the police would proceed against the rights group only if “evidence is found to substantiate the claims made”, the incident draws attention to the danger in retaining a law that should have no place in our statute books, one that Jawaharal Nehru himself had described as “highly objectionable and obnoxious”, back in 1951. Although the courts have repeatedly held that the operation of Section 124-A is limited to cases where what is spoken incites violence and public disorder, the limitations of the section have rarely stopped prosecuting authorities from using it as a tool to stifle dissent and criticism.

Unfortunately, a focus on the use of the sedition law by both public intellectuals and the media has been largely limited to high-profile cases such as those involving JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar (for supposedly raising anti-national slogans), Tamil folk singer Kovan (for criticising the government’s liquor policy), Hardik Patel (for rallying Patidars to demand reservation) and Aseem Trivedi (for anti-corruption cartoons). But it is important to also keep sight of the countless cases that do not receive individual attention and which expose the full extent of the misapplication of the sedition law. Most sedition cases do not result in trials, leave alone convictions, but it is a sobering thought that as many as 58 people were arrested in 2014 under Article 124-A — a vague and dangerously inexact provision that punishes those who by use of words, signs or visible representation “bring into hatred or contempt” or “excite disaffection” towards the government. That people continue to get charged with an offence added to the IPC a decade after its promulgation in 1860, to help a colonial government hold sway over its subjects, is a matter of shame. India failed to scrap the law in the first few years after Independence, after which it was upheld, albeit with caveats, by the Supreme Court in Kedarnath Singh v. State of Bihar in 1962. In the intervening years, countries including Britain have abolished their sedition laws. It’s time India joined their ranks.

Corporate Imperialism

 

ASIAN AGE, AU6 10TH 2016 – THE STANDARDISED DICTATORSHIP

Vandana Shiva

The only way to counter globalisation just a plot of land in some central place, keep it covered in grass, let there be a single tree, even a wild tree.” This is how dear friend and eminent writer Mahasweta Devi, who passed away on July 28, at the age of 90, quietly laid out her imagination for freedom in our times of corporate globalisation in one of her last talks.

Our freedoms, she reminds us, are with grass and trees, with wildness and self-organisation (swaraj), when the dominant economic systems would tear down every tree and round up the last blade of grass.

From the days we jointly wrote about the madness of covering our beautiful biodiverse Hindustan with monocultures of eucalyptus plantations, which were creating green deserts, to the work we did together on the impact of globalisation on women, Mahaswetadi remained the voice of the earth, of the marginalised and criminalised communities.

She could see with her poetic imagination how globalisation, based on free trade agreements (FTAs), written by and for corporations, was taking away the freedoms of people and all beings. “Free trade” is not just about how we trade. It is about how we live and whether we live. It is about how we think and whether we think. In the last two decades, our economies, our production and consumption patterns, our chances of survival and the emergence of a very small group of parasitic billionaires, have all been shaped by the rules of deregulation in the WTO agreements.

In 1994, in Marrakesh, Morocco, we signed the GATT agreements which led to the creation of WTO in 1995. The WTO agreements are written by corporations for corporations, to expand their control on resources, production, markets and trade, establish monopolies and destroy both economic and political democracy.

Monsanto wrote the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of WTO — which is an attempt to claim seeds as Monsanto’s invention, and own seeds as “intellectual property” through patents. It has only one aim — to own and control seed and make super-profits through the collection of royalties. We have seen the consequences of this illegitimate corporate-defined “property” right in India; with extortion of “royalties” for genetically modified (GMO) seeds leading to high seed prices.

Cargill, Inc wrote the WTO’s agreement on agriculture. As a result, India, the largest producer of oilseeds and pulses, has become the biggest importer of both these produce. The edible oils being imported are GMO soya oil and palm oil — both extracted with hexane through solvent extraction; both leading to massive deforestation in Argentina, Indonesia and Brazil. We are importing dal from Canada and Mozambique, while our fertile pulse growing lands are being handed over to foreign corporations for growing bio fuel. This model destroys agriculture and food systems everywhere. We are thus destroying our health as well as the health of the planet.

The junk food industry wrote the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) agreement of WTO. Our Prevention of Food Adulteration Act 1954 was replaced with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which is being used to shut India’s rich and diverse, small-scale, home and cottage industry-based food businesses, under pseudo-safety laws.

All new FTAs take away the sui generis option in TRIPS in WTO and are aimed at giving fangs to International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which establishes rules of uniformity, at a time when we know that diversity is vital to nutrition as well as climate resilience.

Twelve countries, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam, signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA in February 2016. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) is an FTA between the Asean nations and their six trading partners — India, China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Since Asean countries are the most populous, RCEP will affect a greater number of people than other FTAs. And through RCEP, these countries may be dragged into the TPP under pressure of harmonisation, especially on issues related to seed.

The TPP requires all its signatories to join UPOV 91. It allows patents on “inventions derived from plants” which would open the floodgates of bio-piracy, as in the case of neem, basmati and wheat. The TPP has sections on “biologicals” which covers biological processes and products, thus undoing the exclusions in the WTO TRIPS agreement. Given how there is a rush to patent and impose untested and hazardous vaccines, and new GMO technologies like gene editing and gene drives, it is clear that the TPP is the instrument for the next stage of bio-imperialism.

At WTO, India managed to ensure countries could exclude plants and animals from patentability, which translated into article 3(j) in our patent laws. India ensured that UPOV could not be forced through WTO and countries had a sui generis option for plant varieties. This translated into the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act 2001, for which the writer was a member of the expert drafting group.

Not having achieved total monopoly on seeds through the WTO, chemical corporations (biotechnology and seed corporations) are trying to impose patents on all living organisms and all production systems based on living organisms through new FTAs. They are also trying to further destroy our local food systems and replace them with industrial junk food by changing food and health safety as well as bio-safety, through “harmonisation”.

Finally, global corporations, and those who control them, are trying to define corporations as having personhood through investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) systems, which are secret tribunals where corporations and investors can sue governments for acting according to their constitutional obligations in the interest of their citizens.

Thus, corporations are trying to replace our democracies with secret agreements and secret courts controlled by the 0.01 per cent super wealthy. The time is ripe for a planetary freedom movement that defends and protects the freedoms of all beings from this 0.01 per cent.

Originally posted at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/free-people-dictatorship-001-379

Cow politics in India

In the present mood, one can go to the TV debate, even critique Narendra Modi but not gau mata. If one does that, he/she may come out with his/her skin peeled.

Written by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd | Updated: August 1, 2016 9:23 am

Hundreds of members of India's low-caste Dalit community take a pledge not to remove cattle carcass as they gather for a rally to protest against the attack on their community members in Ahmadabad, India, Sunday, July 31, 2016.Dalits have been protesting after four men belonging to their community were beaten while trying to skin a dead cow in Una in western Gujarat state early this month. Placard in Gujarati, front, reads, "Long Live Dalit Unity". (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)Hundreds of members of low-caste Dalit community take a pledge not to remove cattle carcass. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)

 

India is a unique country. This is the only nation in the world to have passed laws that protect one animal and its progeny even if it means the death of human beings, Dalits and Muslims. The first incident of the killing of Dalits when they skinned a dead cow took place during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s rule, in Jhajjar. Now in the Narendra Modi regime, the beating of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow that was killed by lions in Gujarat and of women for possessing buffalo meat in Madhya Pradesh, is part of the spreading narrative. Abusing Mayawati is also part of the same pattern. If Dalits are part of the nationalism professed by the Sangh Parivar, why have there been so many incidents in the short period of their rule? Is Dalit skin equivalent to cow skin? Where lie the roots of this ideology?

Thanks to B.R. Ambedkar and the Dalit movement, the unique status of this social force that constitutes about 200 million people is known all over the world. When birth-based discrimination against these groups was sought to be taken to the United Nations Organisation Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia in 2001, in search of a global solution to the problem of untouchability and caste discrimination, there was huge opposition from upper caste forces. The then NDA government strongly resisted the effort (I was part of the team that made the effort), arguing that this problem would be solved by using constitutional tools, within India.

At that time, the non-Hindutva upper caste intellectuals, considered to be liberals, argued that taking the caste and untouchability issue to the UN is morally unethical and politically anti-national. The main opposition party, the Congress, also argued on similar lines.

Sadly, the Congress itself initiated enactment of cow protection laws in different states that have negative implications for Dalit and Muslim livelihoods. But the Congress did not implement such laws forcefully as long as it was in power at the Centre and the direction to the states was to wink at them. The police must have also been given a direction to go slow on the implementation. Not that there were no “gau raksha” minded officers who did not book cases with the help of cow protection squads. There were some, but they were few and far between.

The serious implementation of the Congress cow protection laws with some new BJP cow protection laws started during NDA I. A new ideology called “skin for skin” (like eye for eye), if Dalits skinned a dead cow, took shape. The underlying message: A dead cow’s skinning is equivalent to the skinning of living Dalits. The first major case of “skin for skin” was that in Jhajjar, Haryana. On October 15, 2002, five Dalits were killed for skinning a dead cow. Till today nobody knows what happened to those who killed the Dalits.

Under NDA 2, the gau raksha programme assumed force because now the BJP is in full control of the levers of power. This time gau raksha means Dalit bhakshan. In state after state, very strong laws of cow protection have been brought in, affecting Dalit and Muslim economy and employment.

The Sangh Parivar networks deploy a large number of private armies as gau raksha samitis with full powers and weapons to implement the programme. They are provided resources that help these armed squads run after the suspects with lathis to beat them up. In fact, if Dalit youth skin the dead cow as part of their economic activity, the “Start Up” teams of gau raksha beat them till their skin peels off. Several such incidents have been reported in the last two years. The cow has become a metaphor for the strategy of skin for skin.

If anyone opposes these private squads, they will be dubbed as anti-gau mata and anti-Bharat mata. These new codes of abuse have impacted civil society. I encounter BJP spokespersons on English TV channels, who deny the link between the gau raksha force and the democracy raksha party. Their English-speaking spokespersons are soft, sometimes sophisticated too, but those in other languages shout and scream and generally win the argument. The TV owners are happy. The more they shout, the more TRPs they get. In the process, Dalit bhakshan is guaranteed. In the present mood, one can go to the TV debate, even critique Narendra Modi but not gau mata. If one does that, he/she may come out with his/her skin peeled.

The skin for skin approach is dreadful. But the gau rakshaks believe that gau mata democracy is like that only. It is our culture and heritage, they say. Indian democracy itself is conceptualised by gau mata, they say. If Ambedkar were alive and were to oppose these laws of cow protection, he too would have been declared “anti-gau mata” and therefore, “anti-Bharat mata”.

One can see Modi is a changed person ever since he embarked on his prime ministerial campaign. He focused his campaign around development and Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas. That was the reason why many Dalits and Muslims also voted for him. How is it that private squads roam so freely after he became prime minister?

BJP spokespersons argue that the country was run with “no PM” during the 10 years of the UPA regime, and that now every citizen will be safe under “our” strong PM (he is PM of the Dalits and Muslims too). But where is the strong PMO when such skin for skin ideology is in operation on a daily basis? Yes, vikas is the PM’s agenda. But is it the agenda of the whole Sangh Parivar?

The parivar network was never trained in the issues and vocabulary of economic development. Except for a small English-educated section, they were trained to do gau raksha, desh raksha, varna raksha. Some Non-Resident Indian ideologues imported from the West know what it is because they have some training in vikas raksha in the West — particularly in the US. But the foot soldiers of the Sangh Parivar were never taught about human raksha as the key link in development.

The moment a Parliament session begins, the programme of skin for skin, the abuse of Dalits, begins from its ranks, reflecting the training of decades. At least now, when the abused have voted them to power, is it not possible to re-train the Sangh’s cadre to respect humans more than animals?

(This column first appeared in the print edition under the title Cow Democracy)

The writer is professor and director of Al Beruni Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.

July 31, 2016

Tearing the curtain of darkness

  • Author and activist Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) Photo: The Hindu Archives

    Author and activist Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) Photo: The Hindu Archives

  • Illustration: Satwik Gade

    Illustration: Satwik Gade

The story goes, not apocryphal, that every time Mahasweta Devi visited Jharkhand, she would demand that Birsa Munda be unshackled. In Ranchi, on Birsa Munda Chowk, there’s a statue of this fiery tribal leader who died in jail during British rule in 1900. The statue shows him wearing a turban and dhoti, his hands in chains. Officials would tell her that the British photographed him in chains and that perhaps became a reference point for all depictions of the tribal hero who died at 25. The chains also symbolised his struggle for freedom, they claimed.

An old Ranchi hand recalls her saying: “Shaddhin deshe keno shekole bandha (why is he still in chains when India is free)?” as she gathered for a meeting of bonded labourers in the 1980s. Last month, the Jharkhand government decided to free Birsa Munda of his shackles, 116 years after his death, and several years after the writer and activist voiced her demand. She may not be around to see a “free” Munda, but the downtrodden — tribals, dispossessed, marginalised, landless — and those who are fighting against injustice and are still in chains know that she is there in spirit.

Sudipta Datta

Mahasweta Devi had woven a historical fiction around the legend of Birsa Munda in her 1977 novel Aranyer Adhikar (Rights of the Forest), which chronicles the turbulent period of the late 19th century, and particularly the tribal armed uprising against the British led by Birsa Munda to rid the forests and hills of “usurpers”. She received the Sahitya Akademi award for it in 1979, though Mahasweta Devi, the political and social activist and conscience-keeper, wouldn’t bother herself too much with awards and accolades (Padma Shri, Padma Vibhushan, Jnanpith, Magsaysay) bagged by Mahasweta Devi, the writer.

Yet her books sold well. Her stories of the subaltern will live forever as long as there’s oppression in the world and the poorest of the poor need a voice. In today’s atmosphere of growing intolerance, it’s imperative to read her work and remind ourselves of her lifelong fight for those who are sought to be silenced.

“Her compassionate crusade through art and activism to claim for tribal peoples a just and honourable place in India’s national life” got her the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1997. Accepting it, she had said: “My India still lives behind a curtain of darkness. A curtain that separates mainstream society from the poor and the deprived.”

For justice and honour

As justice and honour still elude a large slice of tribal peoples across Wet Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, and the north-eastern States, her narratives on their shackled lives are more relevant than ever.

Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084), one of her most widely read books, was adapted for theatre and film. Even though it was written in the turbulent 1970s at the peak of the Naxalite movement, its message is perhaps even more powerful in the prevailing atmosphere of a million mutinies between state and people.

The novel begins with the death of a son and his mother waking up to the terrible fact of him being reduced to a number. It’s a chilling portrayal of a social movement that wasn’t quite successful, put down by brutal force; and we suffer along with the mother, Sujata Chatterjee, who tries to understand a revolutionary movement that took her son Brati. Her journey is also one of self-discovery and her place in a feudal world.

Writing and activism were in Mahasweta Devi’s genes. Her parents were writers, her uncle Ritwik Ghatak, her husband Bijon Bhattacharya, a radical Left playwright and a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). At 28, she toured parts of backward Rajasthan alone, to research for a biography on Rani of Jhansi, her first book. From the bonded labourers of Palamu to the denotified tribes of Bengal — Lodhas of Medinipur, Khedia Shobors of Purulia, Dhikaros of Birbhum — Mahasweta Devi spent three decades of her life listening to them to tell us about these lives, outside the margins of society.

As Irom Sharmila decides to call off her fast in Manipur, with the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act yet to be repealed, we are drawn to another of Mahasweta Devi’s famous stories, “Draupadi”. In a powerful retelling of this Mahabharata character, we have Draupadi, or Dopdi, as a rebel who is cornered by the police in a bid to suppress forces she represents.

“Draupadi” begins with a short exchange between two men in uniform. “What’s this, a tribal called Dopdi? The list of names I bought has nothing like it! How can anyone have an unlisted name?” The other man responds: “Draupadi Mejhen. Born the year her mother threshed rice at Surja Sahu’s at Bakuli. Surja Sahu’s wife gave her the name.”

Since Mahasweta Devi rooted her stories and plots on events she saw or read about, her writing incorporates tribal languages and dialects, folk tales and oral histories. She elevated these stories with her imagination, using various genres and styles. Her prose is brutal and lyrical, her tone ironic, sarcastic.

The power of Dopdi

No miracle can save Dopdi, and she doesn’t want it either. As Dopdi is pursued by her abusers, she stands up to them, laughing hysterically as she tears up her sari, exposing her nakedness in a chilling act of defiance akin to what we saw in Imphal in 2004 when women protested the killing of Thangjam Manorama.

In another story, “The Breast Giver”, the protagonist Jashoda is paid to nurse a brood of children of her master and mistress. This helps her to support her poor disabled family. In yet another story, “Pterodactyl”, she explores why Adivasis are so misunderstood. For her, the Adivasis were civilised and cultured, and her own class hypocritical.

Throughout her life and her writing, Mahasweta Devi tried to ensure that the plight of “suffering spectators” of a fast developing country didn’t go unnoticed. She was drawn to people who led a “subhuman existence”, people with no access to education or health care or roads or income. Many of them may not be able to read her work yet, but it’s because of her that their stories are out there.

She was not one to shy away from the difficult path. Despite her obvious Left links, during the Singur and Nandigram agitations in West Bengal, Mahasweta Devi, well in her 80s, launched a vehement protest against appropriation of land by the state. Her frail frame at a rally in Kolkata against police firing in Nandigram helped energise the Opposition and Mamata Banerjee to bring about “poribortan” in the State. But then again, when the newly elected Mamata Banerjee government refused permission to the Association for Protection of Domestic Rights to hold a rally in Kolkata against government action against Maoists in Lalgarh, she protested.

For Mahasweta Devi, it was imperative to “make an attempt to tear the curtain of darkness, see the reality that lies beyond and see our own true faces in the process”. With her writing and activism, Mahasweta Devi holds up a mirror to society.

But are we looking?

Sudipta Datta is a Kolkata-based journalist.

Copyright Tne Hindu, 2016