From Kafila.org

Statement On Sterilsation deaths in Chattisgarh by Public Health groups

NOVEMBER 13, 2014

by Nivedita Menon

The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, Sama Resource Group for Women and Health, Commonhealth and National Alliance for Maternal Health and Human Rights are shocked at the death of 11 women and the critical condition of 50 other women due to the callous negligence of the Health Department, Government of Chhattisgarh. The deaths and morbidities are a result of a botched-up sterilization operation camp organized by a private hospital under the National Family Planning Programme in Takhatpur Block of Bilaspur District on 8 November 2014. Horrifically, during this camp, 83 women were subject to surgeries in a short span of 5 to 6 hours. Amongst those who have died are Dalits, tribals and Other Backward Classes, leaving behind shattered families and young children. This has resulted in gross violation of the reproductive and health rights of the women.

This tragedy raises grave questions about the unsafe, unhygienic conditions and the slipshod attitude under which these operations were conducted. Moreover, the women who are presently critical continue to get treatment in dismal conditions exposing them to further risks and danger.The surgeries were conducted in complete violation of the Supreme Court orders (Ramakant Rai Vs Govt. of India, 2005 and Devika Biswas Vs Govt. of India, 2012). These orders instruct that a maximum of 30 operations can be conducted in a day with 2 separate laparoscopes only in government facilities. Also, one doctor cannot do more than 10 sterilizations in one day.  Despite this, the surgeon in Chhattisgarh performed about three times the permissible number of surgeries (83) in less than 6 hours in a private hospital which has reportedly remained closed for 15 years. This is evidence of how these operations were not done under standard protocols.

The announcement of Rs 4 lakh compensation and suspension of officials (Director–Health Services; State Family Planning Nodal Officer; BMO,Takhatpur; the operating Surgeon; and Bilaspur CMHO) are not adequate to ensure that such incidents do not happen again. The systemic failures which led to this incident need to be addressed. While understanding the specific lapses in the way the sterilization camp in Chhattisgarh was organized, one should not forget the role played by the wrong policies and practices of the governments in the area of family planning services. Such ‘Camps’ keep getting routinely organized everywhere in the country in an irresponsible manner.  Health providers in many parts of India, universally confess that they are under pressure to fulfil unwritten targets coming from the top.  The state still focuses on permanent methods of family planning rather than temporary methods. In addition to this the two-child norm significantly contributes to the pressures for sterilization.

All this despite the Government of India’s promises of ‘Repositioning Family Planning’ – to move away from permanent methods to spacing methods, to increasing access to safe and effective contraceptives.At the London Summit on Family Planning (2012), the Government of India committed to additionally providing 48 million women and girls with access to contraceptives by 2020. However, around 1 in 5 women of reproductive age do not have access to contraception such as condoms and OC pills. India’s promises at the Family Planning 2012 Global Summit will reinforce the pressures of meeting ‘targets’, which has dangerous and long-term implications for the health of the people.This incident must be declared a disaster/emergency, and we demand that:

* Immediate responsibility be fixed in terms of criminal negligence not only on the medical team which performed the operations, but also in identifying higher officials of the state who sanctioned this particular camp.

* A proper epidemiologically-sound investigation into this incident be carried out. A three-member probe team has been constituted but these members are a part of the state, which signals a serious conflict of interest and thus, there should be an independent inquiry committee.

Further deaths and damage should be minimized. It must be ensured that technically the most competent medical care is provided to the women to avoid further deaths.

* The ‘camp method’ of sterilization be stopped with immediate effect as quality of care is seriously compromised in mass sterilization programme to meet earmarked targets.

* Women, adolescents and men be provided with safe choices for contraception. Emphasis should also be placed on male sterilization such as vasectomy, which involves comparatively lesser health risks.

* Quality of contraceptive services, including counseling, be monitored both from within the system and from outside through community monitoring.

* The family planning programme be overhauled from its foundations in order to protect the reproductive and health rights of women.

From aljazeera.com

Hindu right rewriting Indian textbooks

Raksha Kumar
Last updated: 04 Nov 2014 11:29

Ahmedabad, Gujarat – You cannot blame Bhavana Vaja, 12, for telling you that the first aeroplane was invented during the mythical Dvapara Yuga, when the Hindu God Ram flew from Sri Lanka to Ayodhya in India with his wife Sita and brother Laxman in a Pushpaka Vimana – a swan­-shaped chariot of flowers.

By claiming that they familiarise students with India’s ancient heritage, some books printed by the education department of western Gujarat state teach children that aeroplanes existed in India since Lord Ram’s era. And that is just a sample of how religious content is included in science, history, environment, and mathematics books.
“Every week we are asked to do projects in our science and social studies classes. We refer to these books then,” says Saras Solanki, age 9.

The Gujarat government has introduced nine new books this academic year for classes 1 to 12. These books, written by Hindu nationalist ideologues, have been delivered to 42,000 elementary schools across the state free of cost.

Eight out of the nine books have been penned by Dina Nath Batra, founder of the Hindu nationalist organisation, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti. Batra was responsible for forcing Pengiun India Publishers to withdraw all copies of Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus in February this year.

Enthused by its success, Batra went on to force two other publishers – Aleph and Orient Blackswan – to withdraw books that he deemed “hurtful to Hindu religious sentiments”.
‘Supplementary reading.

Taking a leaf from Batra’s book, India’s prime minister and former chief minister of Gujarat state, Narendra Modi, last week said that genetic science existed in ancient India.
In fact, Modi wrote a foreword in Batra’s books saying his “inspirational literature will inspire students and teachers”.

Education in India is the responsibility of both the state governments and the federal government. A state textbook board formulates curriculum based on the guidelines specified by the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT). However, these nine books deviate vastly from those guidelines by relying heavily on religious subjects and mythology.

Hence, they have been introduced as “supplementary reading” for the students. These books are stored in the libraries and are made available to students any time they want. Use of these books for extracurricular projects and presentations are encouraged.
“I find that children want to show off their knowledge. More often than not, they are averse to textbooks. Though, they are happy to sit in the library and leaf through other books so their presentation can be better than others in the class,” said Jayashree Ben Solanki, a 6th grade teacher at a municipality school in Ahmedabad, the capital city of Gujarat state. “Therefore, these books end up being read more widely than textbooks.”

“Gujarat is an experimental ground,” said Gaurang Jani, a professor of sociology at Gujarat University. “The BJP and the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] will test their methods in the state and if found successful, will replicate it throughout the country,” he told Al Jazeera.

“The move to infuse right-wing ideology in mainstream curriculum has been started by printing books with a religious bias using taxpayers’ money. If the books are received without major opposition in Gujarat, they will introduce such books at the national level as well,” Jani said.

‘Saffronisation’

There is already some talk of changing the school and college curriculum at the national level.

In Indian political context, “saffronisation” is used to refer to the policies of right-wing Hindu nationalist organisations, which, according to critics, are divisive. The term refers to the saffron-coloured robes worn by Hindu sages.

Barely four days after India’s new right-wing government was sworn in this May, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, a former TV actress, issued her first statement saying the Vedas, the Upanishads and other ancient Hindu texts should be introduced in the classrooms.

Consequently, in July, a consultative body called The Bharatiya Shiksha Neeti Ayog (Indian Education Policy Commission) was constituted by the Hindu nationalist organisation, RSS and is mandated “to study the present education system and suggest corrective steps to make it Bharat-centric.” Bharat is the Hindi word for India.

“The problem is that they are equating India to Hindus. What about the India that houses the Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs and other religions? India’s defining character is its diversity – including religious. That will be subtly and efficiently destroyed by introducing religious content in school books,” said Sveta Joshi, a former professor at Delhi University who has done extensive work on the 2002 religious riots in Gujarat.

One of the nine books in question urges students to visit Hindu pilgrim places like Jagannath, Badrinath and Rameshwaram to “cleanse themselves”.
“Students who are slightly older do question the lack of any Muslim or Christian places of worship,” Solanki, the elementary school teacher, said.

“Four of the nine books are titled Prerna Deep, they are meant to have short biographies of ‘inspiring Indians’.” Dalit, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist heroes are mentioned prominently. The mention of Muslim and Christian heroes is almost negligible though,” said Jani of Gujarat University.

Questioning perspectives

Since 1952, when it founded the first Saraswati Shishu Mandir (nursery school) in Gorakhpur in northern Uttar Pradesh state, the RSS, the ruling party BJP’s mother organisation, has always had schools that propagate its ideology. In subsequent years, the RSS founded Vidya Bharati, an umbrella body for thousands of educational institutions based on Hindu values, from the nursery to the post-graduate levels.

“Until now, the Hindu system of education was running parallel to the regular NCERT curriculum, which was formed collectively by eminent scholars from all walks of life. But now, the danger is that they want to merge the two,” said Jani. “The Sangh ideology is slowly becoming the state ideology,” he adds.

If children are taught from a young age about Hindu supremacy and glory, they will not question it at a later stage in their life,” said Lila Visariya, a scholar at the Gujarat Institute of Development Research, at a conference organised in Ahmedabad last month.

Achyut Yagnik, founder of the Centre for Social Knowledge and Action, said that the “saffronisation of education” began in Gujarat slowly and subtly since the BJP established power in the late 1990s.

A report by NCERT states: “While communal perspectives have been present in textbooks in earlier periods too, studies done of textbooks rewritten from this perspective, for example in Gujarat, highlight their ready potential to contribute to a culture of divisiveness between religious communities …”

Gujarat was witness to gory religious riots in 2002, which killed about 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. Religious faultlines in the state, however, go back several centuries.
Last year, the Committee for Resisting Saffronisation of Textbooks protested against the textbooks in another Indian state, Karnataka, which, they said, strengthened stereotypes of Muslims and Christians and subdued the voices of women, Dalits and non-Vedic traditions. The textbooks remain unchanged.

“If anyone has problems with any of the books, I urge them to go to court,” said Harshad Patel, the media coordinator for Gujarat BJP. “Let them do what Dinanathji did. Get the court to pass orders to withdraw the books,” he told Al Jazeera.

Follow Raksha Kumar on Twitter: @raksha_kumar

Source:
Al Jazeera

From Economic and Political Weekly

Balraj Puri (1928-2014)
An Extraordinary Socialist Democrat
• Vol – XLIX No. 42, October 18, 2014 | Manoranjan Mohanty

For more than half a century, Balraj Puri was a journalist, political thinker, federalist, human rights activist, socialist democrat and much more. He spoke for Jammu and Kashmir and of Jammu and Kashmir to the rest of the world and was widely respected in the state. A tribute by a friend of many decades.

Manoranjan Mohanty (mmohantydu@gmail.com) earlier taught Politics at the University of Delhi.
India lost a political thinker, a socialist democrat and a radical federalist in the passing away of Balraj Puri in Jammu on 30 August 2014 after a prolonged illness. The loss has been mourned not only in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) cutting across regions and communities, but all over India among human rights activists, autonomy movements, socialists and other left groups and above all by forces of secularism and communal harmony.

Balraj Puri pursued certain democratic values of politics and social transformation for over six decades of activism and intellectual work that inspired generations of youth and anticipated many of the central concerns of the 21st century.

Activist-Intellectual

Like many of the leaders of India’s freedom struggle, Puri was both an intellectual and a political activist. Starting off as the young editor of the Urdu weekly, Pukar in 1942, he remained a journalist, among other things, all his life. In fact he set up the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Jammu for the training of competent journalists. Almost all important dailies and weeklies of India carried his articles from time to time. The Economic Weekly and later the Economic & Political Weekly carried many of his seminal pieces providing a valued perspective on crucial junctures of Indian polity as well as on the critical points in the history of the Kashmir question. Policymakers and the public were equally anxious to get the Balraj Puri perspective on major political issues. He set up the Institute of Jammu and Kashmir Affairs in 1986 to systematically promote research and writings on J&K. In a rare way he combined activism with scholarship, directly participating in people’s mobilisation while writing analytical articles presenting his critical assessment of the actions and policies of governments and parties. Historical depth and a theoretical grasp with a close eye for details charactised Balraj Puri’s writings which included not only commentaries but a number of books. Besides his well-known books on Kashmir, Puri’s scholarship on Muslims of the subcontinent set high standards in objective analysis as was reflected in the book Muslims of India since Partition (latest edition in 2007).

Balraj Puri and the Kashmir Question

From 1947, when he was in the forefront of the efforts of the Jammu Students Union to maintain communal harmony in the wake of the armed conflict, and until the end of his life he had a clear perspective on the Kashmir question. He asserted that full play of freedom and participatory democracy with regional autonomy was the only way to address the aspirations of the people of J&K. He worked to realise this objective all his life and confronted ruling parties and opposition groups with clear democratic alternatives. That earned him the goodwill and respect from all sections of people of J&K – something which very few could claim. He played a key role in the making of the Delhi Agreement of July 1952 persuading Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to accept autonomy for J&K under the popular leadership of Sheikh Abdullah. He strongly condemned the subsequent steps taken by the central government to curb democratic space and erode the autonomy of J&K which was guaranteed under Article 370 of the Constitution.

In 1964 it was on his initiative that Sheikh Abdullah was received by Nehru and a fresh understanding was in the making when Nehru passed away. Balraj Puri mediated between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Abdullah, setting up the dialogue between G Parthasarathi and Mirza Afzal Baig in 1975 that paved the way for democratic politics in J&K, only to be disrupted once again a few years later.

Balraj Puri insisted that free and fair elections must take place in the state and the three regions – Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir – be given adequate autonomy to manage their affairs. In his book, Jammu: A Clue to the Kashmir Tangle (1966) he spelled out his thesis. When Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah constituted a Committee on Regional Autonomy with Balraj Puri as chairperson in 1999, he got the opportunity to put his idea into practice. But to his disappointment he found that Farooq Abdullah was not prepared for that line of action, and so he resigned. His statement on that occasion is a blueprint for regional autonomy for J&K providing a framework of relationship not only between the centre and the J&K but also among the regions within J&K.

He was consistently critical of the way the Praja Parishad in Jammu frustrated all the democratic initiatives that Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah undertook in the early years of Independence. Later, the Jana Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) persisted in their demand for scrapping Article 370 and went slow on it only under the pressure of coalition partners. Once when L K Advani blamed Nehru for not allowing the Indian Army to establish control over the whole of Kashmir in 1947 and Indira Gandhi not doing the same in 1971, Balraj Puri retorted that much of the present crisis was caused by the communal politics of the Praja Parishad and its successors, while Nehru and Indira and other central leaders did share the blame for denying the full play of democratic politics in Kashmir.

In his monumental work, Kashmir: Towards Insurgency (1993) he gave detailed reasoning as to how this process took a violent turn and how the secular foundations of Kashmir society were ruptured.

Radical Federalist

Balraj Puri was respected by all the political forces of J&K, including the various Hurriyatfactions because he pointed out the root cause of alienation of the Kashmiri people, namely, lack of access to political power. His famous formulation that “development is no substitute for political aspirations of people” was true of not only J&K, but for all autonomy movements in the country. He was extremely critical of the way the United Progressive Alliance government wavered for long on the issue of the formation of Telangana State.

Puri’s notion of federalism was one of multilayered structuration of power, right down to the panchayat level. He believed that the regional level of democratic funtioning would guarantee protection of minority rights at every level. All regions had diversities which needed to be respected. That was possible by decentralised self-governance. He succeeded in the campaign for the formation of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council that the central government under the prime ministership of P V Narasimha Rao granted in 1993.

Balraj Puri was upset by the fact that J&K took a long time to amend the 1989 J&K Panchayat Act to adopt the statutory provisions of the 73rd amendment of the Constitution. When it finally did in 2011, the law turned out to be a disappointing   framework that placed nominated members at the district and block levels while allowing direct election of ward members only at the lowest level of the halqa panchayat. In contrast to the 73rd amendment which provided election of not less than 33% women the J&K law stipulated the nomination of only two women to the rural councils. Puri strongly criticised the whole exercise as another form of continuing centralisation of governance rather than promoting decentralised participatory democracy.

Debates over systems of federalism in the contemporary world veer around types of distribution of power. For Balraj Puri, however, the key question was whether the central leaders devolved power as a management strategy to secure conformity in implementation of the central policies at local levels or sharing of substantive power at every level which made them interdependent. The radical federalist in Balraj Puri did not accept the regional unit as a subordinate agent but as an agency of self-determination with decisive power over local resources and having a right to plan its own development. That is what makes Balraj Puri such a relevant thinker in the 21st century.
Socialist Democrat-Human Rights Advocate

Balraj Puri remained a socialist throughout his life. He was an activist and an office-bearer of Praja Socialist Party and stayed as such, refusing to follow Ashok Mehta and others and merge the party with the Congress. For Puri the essence of socialism was the pursuit of equality and human rights through a democratic polity. He was not attracted to either JP’s partyless democracy or M N Roy’s radical humanism which were the centre of much debates in the 1960s. Freedom of expression, competitive party politics and independence of judiciary – the basic postulates of liberal politics were dear to him. But at the same time he was a sharp critic of capitalism and was therefore critical of policies of the Congress Party which according to him favoured big business in India.

The human rights agenda formed the mainstay of Balraj Puri’s political and intellectual outlook. He was one of the founding-members of the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberties) along with V M Tarkunde and remained active in the organisation till his very end. He published a human rights journal – first as occasional papers from the mid-1990sand later regulaly as the J&K Human Rights Perspective till 2012 where he copiously documented the human rights violations in J&K by the security forces. He did not spare the militants either and condemned the atrocities committed by them. This journal remained for a long time as one of the rare sources of documentation of the field reports on the conditions of the common people in the long years of militancy in J&K. The bulletin also reported on the human rights situation in the rest of India. It also took note of the findings of various human rights organisations in India and abroad, thus making it a comprehensive source of information on human rights in the subcontinent. In 1995 Balraj Puri was awarded the coveted M M Thomas Award for his contribution to the human rights movement in India.

In 1963 when a crisis situation broke out when the Holy Relic was stolen from the Hazratbal Shrine, Balraj Puri was in the Committee for the Recovery illustrating the trust that he enjoyed among all sections of people in J&K. He continued his work for social harmony without interruption. In 1993 in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Mosque he was very active in the Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity working for peace throughout the country. He was an active member of the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy right from its founding in 1994, as he realised how important it was to address the political issues involved in order to promote peace and understanding in the subcontinent.

Balraj Puri enjoyed as much goodwill and respect in Pakistan as in India. Government awards can hardly capture the full import of the contribution of such a human rights activist. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2005 and the Indira Gandhi National Integration Award in 2009.

For me personally he was Balraj Bhai, my friend and classmate Yogesh Puri’s elder brother whom I first met in 1962 and was captivated by his intellect. When he took a few of us to meet Sheikh Abdullah in Nehru’s Teen Murti house in April 1964 to give our suggestions on what should be done on Kashmir I saw glimpses of the daring democrat early in my life. Since then the extraordinary socialist democrat never ceased to inspire me.