On any given dark foggy morning at an open ground in South Mumbai’s dhobhi ghat off Transit Camp – one of the myriad dhobhi ghats that India’s financial capital is known for – it’s easy to find at least twenty-odd slum-dwellers defecating, all in a row.
There’s a wall that shields direct viewing and joggers and morning office-goers rush through their day on the other side. Senior executive Sudhir Jadhav, who lives in nearby Ambedkar Nagar, too joins the defecating lot every morning, ironically, with his iPhone 5 and a Bluetooth receiver hooked on as he briefs his team members about the day’s work, all through his morning ablution.
Sudhir is an established telecom company’s team leader and earns Rs 35,000 per month. He handles a team of 15 sales staffers who are supposed to ‘hit the field’ before he reaches office. “There’s no other time to discuss work with them. It’s only in the mornings that I manage to talk to six of my team members, get the previous day’s report and plan their tasks for the day ahead,” he says. Sudhir has lived in Ambedkar Nagar all his life and by most urban standards, he has had a good life.
But with a wife, three children and an aged mother, there’s no more room in his 10ft by 12ft home for anyone else, forget constructing a toilet. That said, Sudhir rides a Yamaha FZ-S, possesses a 32-inch flat-screen TV, a laptop and three mobiles, no financial liabilities to boot and has a social standing among his circles. That Sudhir goes to defecate in the open despite Ambedkar Nagar having public latrines constructed for residents may come across as a surprise.
However, many residents refuse to use the latrine and prefer to defecate in the open. “Who has the time to stand in line for one’s turn?” he says. “My mother, wife and children use the latrine, but I prefer coming out in the open,” adds Sudhir. The man could be blamed of being disregardful of issues of public hygiene and civic legality but to attribute his behavior to ‘urban poverty’ is completely missing the point.
So, when the newly-released Census data revealed that one in every six urban Indian residents lives in a slum, it was open to convenient interpretation. It may be noted that the Census defines a slum as “residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation” because they are dilapidated, cramped, poorly ventilated, unclean, or “any combination of these factors which are detrimental to the safety and health”.
The definition does not touch upon the economic status of the slum-dweller. For the first time, the Census had helped the authorities get an accurate view of the numbers that mattered. For one, the percentage of slums in urban areas was assumed to be much higher than revealed in the survey. In Mumbai, it was widely considered that half of the population lived in slums but the figure is closer to 40 per cent.
The total Slum Enumeration Blocks (SEBs) in Census 2011 is about 1.08 lakh and Maharashtra leads the number of slum dwellings at 21,359. As against 789 lakh households in the urban areas, the total number of households that live in slums is 137 lakh, the Census revealed.
Quashing popular myths, the Census also revealed that slum residents had the basic amenities like drinking water and electricity and even facilities like mobile phones, internet and private vehicles. The only service missing is sanitation, already globally popularised by the widely-discussed sequence of a young Jamaal getting locked in a public latrine in Slumdog Millionaire, only to jump into a pool of human excreta in his excitement to meet his idol Amitabh Bachchan. “Yuck!” the world exclaimed in unison, and pitied the millions in India living in slums for a poverty that didn’t quite exist. They missed the very point, the Census makes.
Now, the Census revealed some very strategic facts. In urban areas, barely 70.6 per cent people have access to tap (drinking) water whereas in slums a whopping 74 per cent have access to the same. Where power is concerned, 92.7 per cent of urban zones are lit with power with slums closing up with 90.5 percent. The difference in the reach of amenities in urban zones in comparison to those in slums is almost negligible.
For the purpose of the Census, slums were categorised and defined as notified slums, recognised slums and identified slums and, for the first time, all the 4,041 statutory towns (those with municipalities) were covered. It was revealed that of the lot, only 2,542 had slums.
Sudhir Gaikwad harbours a pricey hobby – photography. He has three SLRs with professional lenses and flash guns worth Rs five lakh, a professional video-camera, a high-end washing machine, a Samsung laptop, a television, a huge refrigerator and a split air-conditioner too. He pays an electricity bill of nearly Rs 4,000 every month. His wife Shivani Gaikwad wears heavy gold jewellery every day. That said, the Gaikwads technically live in Colabawadi, a slum zone. They don’t have any loan liabilities. Save some indicators like sanitation, the popularly perceived ‘poor’ in slums, are financially on par, sometimes even better off than their loan-ridden urban counterparts. Displaying slum poverty is an industrial-like activity with more benefits than drawbacks. It provides the perfect agenda to ‘sensitive’ film-makers, ‘concerned’ political parties and ‘affected’ tourists.
Embarking on a statistical collection of data of this magnitude was a gargantuan task but the first step towards righting a popular wrong. Of the wrongs that need to be corrected, is the urgent need to address the issue of sanitation which directly threatens public hygiene, women and child safety of those affected and gives an opportunity to the motivated to flay the nation’s image as one with skewed human living logistics in the long run.
Are the twin power centres of the Indian state, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leading the government and Sonia Gandhi holding the reins of the Congress party, a concept ahead of its time? Congress party spokesperson Janardhan Dwivedi definitely believes that this is the case.
“In the last nine years, the kind of relation between the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh is not one that is seen normally…it will become a model style of working one day,” Dwivedi was quoted as saying in television reports.
He pointed out that in any coalition government in a democracy, multiple parties compete and come together to form a government and it was these same political parties that dictate government policy.
“There are often differences that are either visible or invisible, but in this case the relations and the manner in which they have been maintained is a model style of functioning when you look at any other democracy in the world,” Dwivedi said.
Ironically, Dwivedi’s praise of this model of functioning comes just days after senior party leader Digvijaya Singh said that having two power centres, one of the Prime Minister and the other of the party chief, had not worked well.
“Personally, I feel that this model hasn’t worked very well. Because, I personally feel that there should not be two power centres and I think whoever is the Prime Minister must have the authority to function, although Sonia Gandhi has really never interfered in the functioning of the government,” Singh had said.
He isn’t the only one saying so. Much has been said about the problems of having two power centres with Sonia Gandhi said to be the final authority on the government’s major policy decisions despite Manmohan Singh being the Prime Minister.
In a detailed analysis, Firstpost‘s editor-in-chief R Jagannathan had observed the pitfalls of having multiple power centres in the government, especially when one has absolute veto powers over the decisions made by the other.
Dwivedi may have merely sought to soothe any discomfort that may have arisen from Digvijaya Singh’s statement, but whether it will continue to be a form of government the party will endorse remains to be seen.
Pigeons may use ultra-low-frequency sounds to navigate—a strategy that could steer them off course in the face of infrasonic disturbances, such as sonic booms.
On October 5, 1998, more than 2,000 homing pigeons went missing, some straying from their lofts for weeks. They had been released at the start of two races—one from northern Virginia to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and another from western Pennsylvania to Philadelphia—but more than 90 percent of them didn’t fly directly home, as they normally do. “The race was a ‘smash’—the birds [didn’t] come back,” says Jonathan Hagstrum, a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey. “Normally, a smash is due to weather—if it’s raining, the birds land—but the weather was fine, everything was great, the birds just didn’t show up. . . . Nobody could explain it.”
Curious, Hagstrum, who read about the mysterious disappearances in his local newspaper, started poking around for possible explanations. It had previously been reported that pigeons could sense very low-frequency, or infrasonic, sounds. And Hagstrum knew that low-frequency sounds are continually being produced by collisions between waves in the deep ocean, which can generate vibrations in the earth that are transferred to the atmosphere and reflected from landmarks like hills and cliffs. “I think it’s going to produce a sound with a distinctive signature,” he says—something that might signal “home” to a pigeon. Perhaps there was some sort of sonic disturbance the day of the 1998 races, he thought.
He called the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, but it had not been performing any blasting in the area of the races that day. He also contacted a nuclear power plant located near where the two races crossed paths “to see if they had conducted any high pressure gas release, or other acoustic disturbance, around midday on the day of the races,” Hagstrum says. “I was even thinking Civil War enactments.” Then, he read about how researchers sometimes used sonic booms emanating from the Concorde—the supersonic passenger airliner which was then still shuttling the wealthy across the Atlantic Ocean—to study how infrasound travels. Sure enough, the Concorde had flown on October 5, and was running a couple of hours late—meaning it had broken the sound barrier, producing a sonic boom, during the races. Hagstrum was also able to trace a handful of other smashed pigeon races to the travel schedule of the Concorde, and he began to feel more confident that pigeons used low-frequency sound to orient themselves with respect to their lofts.
Two tools are key to successful navigation—a compass, to find your bearing, and a map, to know where you are relative to home. Pigeons were known to use a variety of compass systems, most notably the position of the sun. But, “the map part has been more contentious,” says neuroethologist Cordula Mora of the J.P. Scott Center for Neuroscience, Mind and Behavior at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Some studies suggest that pigeons use the Earth’s geomagnetic field to navigate, “but we can show at the same time that the birds can orient without the geomagnetic field,” says behavioral and sensory ecologist Roswitha Wiltschko of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Other pigeon mapping hypotheses have included the use of landscape features, gravity, and even smell. “If you cut the olfactory nerve in a pigeon or if you plug its nostrils, its ability to home falls way off,” says Hagstrum.
But these factors couldn’t explain some famously bizarre pigeon behavior. In Hagstrum’s senior year at Cornell University, he had attended a talk by pigeon researcher Bill Keeton, then the chair of the Cornell biology department, who spoke of some particularly strange behaviors he’d observed at his release sites in Upstate New York. At one site, called Jersey Hill, the birds would consistently get lost, most never returning home at all—except for one day, August 13, 1969, when all the birds flew home just fine. At two other sites, Castor Hill and Weedsport, the birds regularly took off at a consistently wrong bearing. “[Keeton] said, ‘I have no idea what’s going on at these sites,’” Hagstrum recalls. “‘Do you geologists have any suggestions?’” Years later, Hagstrum’s Concorde discovery affirmed his hunch that the answer could be sound.
The idea that pigeons may be using infrasound to navigate was actually first proposed by Keeton in the 1970s. Hagstrum revisited this idea, turning to a public record of Keeton’s data, collected on thousands of releases from 200 sites over a period of 14 years. Hagstrum also collected weather information for the dates of Keeton’s pigeon releases, including August 13, 1969, and ran the data through a computer program to calculate how the patterns might have influenced sound travel. Sure enough, the simulations showed that on most days, little to no infrasound from the Cornell loft area ever arrived at Jersey Hill—it’s in what’s called a sound shadow, Hagstrum says. But on August 13, 1969, the day the birds all returned home without a problem, the sound was refracted in such a way that the shadow was lifted.
Sound patterns also explained the disorientation of the pigeons from Keeton’s other sites, Hagstrum says. “The pigeon behavior seemed to correspond with the way sound was moving through the terrain within the weather constraints. This is compelling evidence that the pigeons are actually using sounds [to navigate].” After several years of working on this project in his off-hours—his full-time research is devoted to studying paleo-, geo-, and rock magnetism—Hagstrum published his results in January.
“I think that infrasound is also an important factor,” agrees Wiltschko, though she doubts it’s the only factor. “The pigeon’s map is redundant,” she says, with multiple signals likely influencing navigation. Furthermore, because pigeons learn their maps when they are young, the signals they focus on will likely depend on what’s available at their home loft. “Pigeons are probably rather opportunistic,” she says. “If a pigeon finds a factor useful, it will include it into its map.”
Whatever they’re using, there’s no doubt the system is “very sophisticated,” Hagstrum adds. “People look at a pigeon, and think it looks kind of dumb, but I’ve come to realize these things are just incredibly sophisticated. They do incredible things in a seemingly miraculous way.”
A day before Sajid Khan released his film 'Himmatwala', a remake of an 1980's film with the same name, he was fairly confident that he knew the pulse of Indian film audience. He went as far as to say "I knew my film will be a hit when I started writing it."
Khan, who has repeatedly clashed with film critics, said he did not even want a half-star review for 'Himmatwala'. "I will not even read one review. I don't hate critics, but I feel that 90 percent of them don't love cinema". If there is one thing he was absolutely sure of, it was the audience's response to Himmatwala.
But from the box office collection reports coming in, it seems Khan may have spoken too soon. Which brings up the question - can Khan or any director making cinema for the masses really claim to know 'what the public wants'?
The best and most awarded films of last year were the ones that had intelligent writing, a tight plot and great performances. 'Barfi', 'Vicky Donor', 'Kahaani', 'Paan Singh Tomaar' and 'English Vinglish' were both critically and commercially successful. It wasn't nearly an indication of the changing taste of Indian audience as it was a testimony to the fatigue that seemed to have set in for senseless gore and slapstick fests.
Khan is a successful filmmaker. He has scored hits such as 'Heyy Babby', 'Housefull' and 'Housefull 2' in the past, all hinging on loud, garish comedy. His confidence in his own ability perhaps led him to overshoot this time. He announced even before the film's release that 'Himmatwala' would be Ajay Devgn's biggest grosser till date. Devgn, on the other hand has been quoted in many media outlets as saying that "Critics are like eunuchs, they know how to do it but they can't do it themselves." Classy.
There's no denying that escapism is a big reality for filmmakers transporting their audiences to a make-believe realm of destiny, crime, romance and retribution. But arrogance has been the cause of downfall of bigger and better filmmakers in the past.
"If 80 per cent of the audience in a theatre doesn't whistle and clap during Ajay's entry, I will change my name. It will be among the top three hero entries in Hindi cinema," Khan had said.
'Himmatwala' is a testimony to the fact that sometimes a director can misread his audience. But the race to score Rs 100 crore at the ticket window is also to be blamed for recent directors focussing more on the collections than on the soundness of their content. The first weekend collection- which filmmakers consider as the most crucial one - has been dismal. Film critic and trade analyst Taran Adarsh said the film collected Rs 31.1 crore nett in its opening weekend.
"In view of the fact that UTV has given Himmatwala a wide release, the weekend numbers are shockingly low," he said. The overseas collection of the film has been poor and the film hasn't been received well in the multiplexes.
Khan has clearly overplayed his hand this time. But this is also a good time to revive the debate on the collective taste of a nation as vast and divided culturally as India. What is good cinema? Granted that Khan knows his art but can he claim to dictate whether his form of art is what is most acceptable to a country of billion?
A school teacher in Rayapuram village of Mahabubnagar district in Andhra Pradesh, summed up the sentiment of the village: “Without a sarpanch [an elected village-chief], this village is like a rudderless ship. The implementation of government schemes has gone from bad to worse. The government has appointed special officers, who hardly have any bonding with villagers in each panchayat.” Recently, the state government of Andhra Pradesh (AP) decided to conduct the panchayati elections in April-May 2013, which have been overdue since July-August 2011. What were the reasons for this postponement?
First, the Backward Classes (BC) demanded 60.55 per cent reservation in the panchayats in AP. However, in September 2011, the High Court of AP upheld the 50 per cent ceiling in local bodies. After this verdict, the government of AP promised to hold the elections, but reneged on it. This was followed by the Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed in the Apex Court by the State to raise the ceiling of the reservation for the BCs. The SLP was disposed in favour of the AP government.
Secondly, the demand for reservation dovetailed well with State politics. Seemingly, the demand for further reservation was an alibi for the Congress to postpone elections. How? The Congress has felt challenged since the emergence of Jagan Mohan Reddy, who swept the by-elections in 2012. Sensing an imminent rout in panchayats, the Congress sought to postpone the elections to the local bodies.
In addition, parallel structures at the panchayat level have rendered the elected local bodies redundant. Bodies such as Water Users Associations and School Educations Committees were set up by Chandrababu Naidu when he came to power in the 1990s at the local level with strong financial support. Later, the Congress government continued this practice under different names. These parallel structures at the panchayat level have proved detrimental to the functioning of panchayati raj, encroaching upon the PRIs’ mandate.
Historical Lessons
Devolution of power has always been at the heart to establish local autonomy. These efforts date back to the Bengal Local Self-Government Act, 1885, the Bengal Village Self-Government Act, 1919, and the Government of India Act, 1935, and laid the foundation for divesting powers to the lowest but potentially the most powerful rung of the political administration. Article 40 under the Directive Principles of the Indian Constitution stipulated that “The state shall take steps to organize village panchayats and endow them with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government.”
Rajiv Gandhi was a vocal supporter of conferring constitutional powers upon local bodies, and his aborted effort to pass the 64th and 65th Amendments Bills in 1989 laid the foundation for the 73rd and 74th Amendments Acts for rural and urban local bodies during the Narasimhma Rao’s government in 1992. It enabled the insertion of Part IX (panchayat) and IXA (municipalities) in the Constitution. These insertions ensure regular elections, functions, finance and revenue for the local bodies.The 73rd Amendment, 1992 enlists 29 subjects for Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs).
In AP, the allotted functions for local self-government institutions under the Andhra Pradesh Panchayati Raj Act, 1994, Chapter III, are far less than what may be expected (with only 19 subjects under it). It has become a fertile ground and excuse for politicians to form parallel structures at the local level. If entrusted with all 29 subjects, the financially-empowered panchayats can implement welfare schemes efficiently and responsibly. Denying Constitutional functions and mandate to panchayats has made a mockery of the devolution of powers to the lowest rung of governance.
Power-less Panchayats in Andhra Pradesh
Despite the Constitutional provision, the government of AP has failed to conduct elections (AP is not the only outlier in this case). Since panchayati raj is a State subject, the Centre cannot intervene.
How does the virtual suspension of elected local self-government affect the people in AP? How do Special Officers (SOs), who have been given the mandate of an elected village sarpanch, perform their duties and function in the face of enormous challenges at the village-level? The State government has extended the term of the SOs by six months before the state announced its intent to conduct elections. The Minister of Information and Public Relations D.K Aruna said, “We have appointed Special Officers (SOs) in panchayats on ad hoc basis. They have the mandate to ensure the implementation of welfare schemes.”
Are these officers fulfilling their job? To give you a sense of bureaucratic apathy towards villages, take the example of Ghatuu Mandal of Mahabubnagar in Andhra Pradesh. It has 24 panchayats (one panchayat has between 2-5 villages under its ambit) with only four SOs. People are disenchanted with conspicuous-by-their-absence officers. Their occasional visits (once in a month) have rendered the welfare-schemes worthless.
The stalling of panchayati elections in Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry (which has administrative problems) has become a stumbling block in the implementation of flagship rural schemes–Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, National Rural Health Mission, pension schemes for the elderly and the disabled. For example, the AP government organizes camps to avoid forged health certificates, but hardly anybody is informed about these camps. Thus many continue to hopelessly hope to receive Rs 400 as pension without possessing a “camp certificate”.
In this case, the folly of assuming that the bureaucracy can indeed replace people’s voices has been exposed and the need for elected representative running local self-government is evident. The pride and dignity of electing their own representative encourages villagers to pitch for their legal rights. Another drawback of not holding elections is that AP and Puducherry are losing out on grant-in-aid for the panchayats given by the Central Finance Commission. For AP, the losses are as high as Rs. 1740 crores.
Unhealthy precedent
The AP model of appointing special officers at local level may be followed in West Bengal and Karnataka, given the dithering of these governments over local elections. The officers are appointed on temporary basis by collectors, but no one knows how long they will continue flexing their muscles in the local bodies. As mentioned earlier, the implementation of welfare schemes is left to the mercy of the officers who the State governments consider capable of filling the shoes of elected representatives.
In the case of AP, the least that people can expect from the State government is the regular conduct of elections to the local bodies without much deference to the pressures of party politics. Panchayat elections are not fought on party lines in AP, but even then, political parties do not spare them.
A possible headway may be made if local bodies can be brought under the Union or Concurrent List. This will ensure that the powers regarding all the 29 subjects listed in the Eleventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution; that all the powers needed for planning for economic development and social justice, and the implementation of development and welfare schemes, will rest with the elected local bodies. Equally important, this may ensure that regular elections to the panchayati raj institutions will not be bogged down by murky state politics.
For AP, it will be an achievement in itself if the state indeed holds elections in April-May, because the expectation of people has been belied so many times, stalled by political calculations of the Congress — of possible political dividends or fears of hara-kiri — in the face of impending Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
Panchayat polls in April-May
Andhra Pradesh Panchayat Raj Minister K. Jana Reddy announced that the government will conduct panchayat elections by April-end or the first half of May by following the “existing framework of rules”.
It will complete all preparatory work within 45 days, including the lists of the panchayats to be reserved for the Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
Elections would be conducted on non-party basis for the 21,840 panchayats and on party basis for 1,097 mandals and 22 zilla parishads.
The Minister’s announcement at a media conference followed the Supreme Court order earlier, deposing in the State government’s favour a special leave petition (SLP) filed by it for conducting these elections with an overall reservation of 60.55 per cent as was done in 2006.
Panchayat elections are overdue since 2006 when the five-year term of the elected bodies ended.
“We will prove our sincerity to re-establish democracy at grassroots level, by completing the spadework in 45 days and submit the list of reserved panchayats to the State Election Commission along with recommendations on the dates convenient for polling.
Failure to conduct the elections had resulted in the Centre freezing an amount of Rs.1,700 crore due to the Sate under various schemes.
In line with the existing framework, the basis for which was an order issued for the 2006 elections and reissued again last year, 34 per cent reservation would be provided for BCs, 18.3 per cent for SCs and 8.25 per cent for STs.
The announcement removes the uncertainty about these polls following litigation over the upper limit for reservation. K. Ramgopal, Commissioner, Panchayat Raj, recalled that the Supreme Court, in its landmark judgment in 2010 dealing with a petition from Karnataka, had stipulated that the overall reservation should not exceed 50 per cent.
The litigation in AP followed a GO re-issued by the government to conduct the elections with 60.55 per cent as in 2006, but this was suspended by the High Court dealing with a petition.
The government then filed SLP before the apex court against the HC order as recommended by a Cabinet Sub-Committee.
A 33-year-old married woman was allegedly kidnapped and raped by a temple priest and his accomplice at a village in Chhatarpur and then sold off for Rs 40,000 to three brothers, who also gangraped her, police said on Tuesday.
The victim, a resident of Kawar village in Chhatarpur district, had been missing since 17 January and the offence came to light on Monday after her brother traced her, along with her five-year-old child, in Pipra village of Madhya Pradesh’s Tikamgarh district, they said.
The woman was allegedly kidnapped by the priest Bala Prasad Shukla on 17 January and was raped by him and his accomplice Devendra Shukla at Patharva village in the district, police said. On 30 January, Shukla sold off the woman for Rs 40,000 to three brothers – identified as Vimlesh Yadav, Pappu Yadav and Virendra Yadav – of Pipra village.
The three brothers allegedly gangraped her after keeping her in confinement, police said. After the victim’s brother traced her, she approached Bamitha Police Station in Chhatarpur district following which a case was registered against the five persons, they said, adding that a search has been launched to arrest them.
You know what gets us going? What is the world weary Indian woman’s espresso, Deepak Chopra and pranayam rolled into one? It’s a packet of detergent. The killer one with jasmine fragrance or the other one that leaves the hubby gawking at his underwear like he’s spotted Lady Gaga in a tandoori chicken dress.
You can be in denial but you can’t hide from the great Indian advertising business. They know all your deep dark secrets. How you fancy not a man, but any man who wears deodorant. How, deep inside your hearts, you’re a Fair and Lovely ninja. How it’s not sex, but the sight of a bowl of grapes, chocolates or whatever condom makers fancy, that’s enough to make women sit alone at home and moan like its their favourite pastime. How the best thing that happened to you after Pink Floyd is a gaggle of girls cooing ‘Hi handsome, hi handsome, hi handsome’ (each with a baffling cadence resembling a shriek).
Strange, but true.
The world is up in arms against a JWT poster for Ford that went viral – one that shows Silvio Berlusconi flashing a victory sign and a bunch of skimpily clad girls bound and gagged in the back of a car – and has accused the Indian advertising firms of being obnoxiously sexist.
The case, as an article on The New York Times points out, turns the spotlight on the conflicts that populate the Indian advertising industry today. It points a finger at enthusiastic young ad professionals going to great, shameful lengths to win awards. (The JWT ad was uploaded on a website and was an entry to some award). It explains how Indian ad professionals these days have little sense of political correctness.
The furor is not all misplaced maybe. NYT points out, how the ad, in the backdrop of the recent incidents of abuse against women in India, comes across as one that is of bad taste. It is sexist, it stereotypes the woman and is outright insulting.
What, however, is unfortunate is that it takes the image of a bunch of scantily clad women, bound and gagged, to wake up to the fact that Indian advertising’s gender view is more than just a little skewed.
We obviously don’t froth at our mouths when in commercials after commercials, women (some of them, celebrities) are seen lighting up at the sight of XYZ washing powder the way Nigella does at the sight of a gorgeous piece of steak.
Now there is little that is wrong with washing clothes. However, to suggest that a woman would run to blow dry her hair and dance around lines of just-washed clothes, at the mere sight of a lemon perfumed washing powder and with no help from any narcotics, needs incredible amounts of imagination. Of a healthy kind I’m sure. Because look at how many people agree to it – first, all the bright minds in the agency who make the ad, then the visibly pleased manufacturers of the said powder, then the TV channel people who run the ads every 5 minutes and those thousands of women, and men, who sit through them patiently. Without complaints. Remember this gem of an advertisement that featured actors Salman Khan and Prachi Desai?
Just a month or so back, Indian women’s activists wrote a strong letter protesting the Harvard College Women’s Center’s announcement that they’ll suggest ways to tackle gender violence in India. No, they couldn’t lie down and take the symbolic assault of the West on the Indian’s woman’s sense of self and independence. Obviously, ads like these, which suggest Indian women are a bunch of pretty nutcases who can be manipulated with a bar of soap, aren’t that offensive. Or the world has stopped paying attention to TV.
According to NYT, the JWT case saw a big name in advertising step down, a team of ten people being shown the door. On the other hand, we all yawned and looked away when this enlightening ad of Merino Laminates surfaced on TV.
Angry young woman enters husband’s house seeking a divorce. And since husband knows the loony he was married to pretty well, he has done up his house with Merino Laminates. Woman gawks, swoons, drools over the wardrobe, caresses the kitchen cabinet, blushes at the sight of newly laminated drawers and changes her mind about the divorce.
Now there isn’t anything creepy about salivating over a kitchen table right? Obviously not. There isn’t anything vaguely disturbing about suggesting that women would walk out of a marriage over bad looking kitchens? Obviously not. For, there wasn’t as much as a ‘yuck’ over the said ad on even Twitter, forget firing people for making it.
Let’s look at the target audience here. People to have access to TVs, people who will spend on deodorants, will buy two hundred rupees a kilo washing powders, laminates to do up their homes etc. People, we can expect, who don’t struggle with money all that much, who have had decent access to education. Don’t know about the men, but women who don’t spend their evenings washing clothes of the joint family or sniffing out men wearing the right deo.
But who cares?
These are small casualties of watching the test match or the dance reality show. Not noxious enough to take up cudgels against. Only when, carried away by the tradition of vile stereotyping, someone does what the JWT guys did and the world takes notice, that we solemnly join the Indian-ads- suck chorus. Till the IPL match starts that is.
If Akbaruddin Owaisi, who had been arrested and subsequently released on bail for making a hate speech in December 2012, is to be believed, there would have been no jihadi terrorism in India if the Babri Masjid had not been demolished or Muslims massacred or raped in Gujarat.
Many Muslim organisations, including Owaisi’s Majlis Ittehad-e-Muslimeen, allege that many Muslim youths are being routinely arrested and tortured even though they are later discharged for want of evidence, and this is a theory that the Indian liberal elite has been willing to buy.
Earlier this month, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) decided not to charge charge three suspects in the Bangalore jihad case registered late last year: among them, defence scientist Aijaz Ahmad Mirza and journalist Mati-ur-Rahman Siddiqui. The fate of the three men has been widely read as part of a police-led persecution of Muslims. Indians liberals have tended to agree.
The facts, however, suggest the need for a more nuanced reading of these instances of Muslims who are released for want of evidence. In fact, the liberal elite assumption that these are really instances of discriminatory police attitudes is imposing serious costs on India’s ability to frame a serious response to jihadi terrorism.
Let’s test the assumptions against the facts in the Bangalore case. Focused on the release of Mirza and Siddiqui, media accounts have mostly skimmed over the fact that 12 of the 15 alleged Bangalore jihad conspirators held have actually been charged. The NIA’s charge-sheet outlines perhaps the most ambitious jihadist project since 26/11, and the first Indian case involving online self-radicalisation.
In 2011-2012, it alleges, Bangalore residents Abdul Hakeem Jamadar and Zafar Iqbal Sholapur visited Pakistan, drawn by online jihadist literature to join the jihad in Afghanistan. In Karachi, though, fugitive jihad organiser Farhatullah Ghauri persuaded them to fight against India. The two men, the NIA says, were then introduced to operatives of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and the Lashkar, who trained them in “intelligence, cyber-crime, handling and shooting of weapons”.
The NIA alleges that the Bangalore jihad cell plotted to assassinate a string of figures associated with the Hindu-right wing, as well as journalists and police officers. Its members, the NIA says, also planned to conduct armed robberies to fund its jihadist plans, and conduct espionage for Pakistan.
No evidence was found to link Aijaz Mirza, Siddiqui and Yusuf Nalaband to this plot – but was it unreasonable to hold them on suspicion? The men shared the very room from where Shoaib Mirza is alleged to have used his laptop to stitch together the plot. Jamadar and Sholapur are alleged to have been tasked with conducting intelligence operations; Aijaz Mirza had access to sensitive information. Siddiqui visited jihadist websites.
It is true this writer and every other journalist covering national security issues also does this regularly – but then, no terrorist plot is being planned from my room. Put together, these surely constitute questions for investigation.
The NIA and the Bangalore Police did the right thing: they arrested suspects, examined the evidence, and decided not to prosecute men against whom there was none. They did not fabricate evidence or coerce confessions.
Incarceration indeed caused harm to three men, as it would to any innocent caught up in the criminal justice system. Mirza has given a heart-wrenching account of the hardship caused to his family. However, the harm caused to him has to be read against the possible harm to the community caused by the investigators’ failure to arrest – which in this case, might have been several deaths. This is precisely why police forces across the world are allowed, by law, to arrest suspects during investigation. No demand of pre-arrest certitude is made in other kinds of cases, notably last year’s Delhi rape-murder: the suspects were held long before forensic evidence became available.
Eyes wide shut: So, why are élite liberals so reluctant to maintain an open mind on the NIA case? For one, they argue that investigations are driven by anti-Muslim bias. It is simply untrue, though, to argue – as Siddiqui has done – that the police would not have carried out the arrests “if I was not a Muslim”. Last year, in June, Lokender Sharma and Devender Gupta were granted bail in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blasts case because the NIA failed to file a charge- sheet against them in the prescribed time. Bharat Rateshwar, accused in the Mecca Masjid bombing, was also granted bail for the same reason. There are several similar cases from the NIA’s north-east investigations.
Police forces across the world face this dilemma. In the United Kingdom, over two-thirds of suspects arrested in terrorism investigations were let off without being charged; only 14 percent of those arrested, or less than 50 percent of those charged, were eventually convicted.
The claim that the police targeted Muslims for the Mecca Masjid bombing has been repeated so often as to become received truth. Journalist Sagarika Ghose, not unfairly, tells the graphic story of “Imran Syed, a Hyderabad student arrested for the Mecca Masjid blasts in 2007, given third degree torture and electric shocks”. Kuldip Nayyar accused the police of “tormenting Muslims”, pointing again to the fact that “21 Muslim youth from Hyderabad were wrongly implicated in the Mecca Masjid blast”.
The truth is that 22 Muslim men were indeed arrested, and found innocent during trial. However, anyone who has takes the trouble to read First Information Report 198 filed at the Gopalapuram Police Station in 2007 knows not one of the arrests had anything to do with the Mecca Masjid case.
Police officers driven by malice, or seeking to cover-up their incompetence, could have initiated false prosecutions linking these men to the Mecca Masjid attack. They did not – and went on to uncover the Hindutva terrorist network now blamed for the attack.
There’s no doubt, of course, India’s overstretched and under-resourced police forces get it wrong plenty of times. It is worth noting, though, that the sword of incompetence cuts in all directions. I haven’t, for example, heard any outrage from Delhi-based human rights groups about the case of Hindutva hardliner Pragya Thakur – charged by the Madhya Pradesh Police with having murdered alleged Samjhauta Express bomber Sunil Joshi, and allegedly tortured. The case was handed over to the NIA in 2011, and is now focused on different suspects.
Yet, police don’t get it wrong as often as most people assume. Last year, the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, a human rights lobbying group, published an apparently damning study of 16 prosecutions brought by the Delhi Police’s elite counter-terrorism Special Cell, showing that each case ended in acquittal amidst charges of illegal detention, fabricated evidence and torture. The Delhi Police, however, pointed out that they secured convictions in 68 percent of terrorism cases – and, notably, had done so in six of the 16 cases the JTSA flagged. In the US, with enormously better-resourced police, the figure is around 87 percent
This writer has argued elsewhere that Indian police forces have a poor conviction record for serious crimes, due to poor training, bad forensic resources and human resource shortages. Conviction rates for murder have hovered around 40 percent, and rape at below a third. They’re even more abysmal for kidnapping. There is no reason to believe that conviction rates for terrorism will be higher.
Failing prosecutions, thus, are a cause for concern for everyone – but not evidence that the police are out to get Muslims, or Hindus, or anyone else. It is entirely possible that police officers share the same biases which suffuse our society. Look through the authoritative South Asia Terrorism Portal, though, and one fact is evident: a lot more Hindus, Christians and animist tribals are being arrested on terrorism charges than Muslims.
In 2012, 914 Maoists were arrested; less than a tenth of that number were held in cases related to Islamist terrorism. This isn’t even counting-in arrests in two states where there are mainly Hindu-led insurgencies, Assam and Manipur.
Police, politics, and ideology: The problem isn’t, however, that élite liberals haven’t stumbled on the data. It is, rather, that their ideological blinkers have led them to reject their import. Part of the problem may be that our intellectual life has moved, too easily, from primitive fable to post-modern text, bypassing the stage of evidence-based appraisals altogether.
More important, though, this apparent position of dissent fits well with powerful establishmentarian tendencies. Congress leader Digvijaya Singh is one such pole; his hangers-on include Feroze Mithibhorwala, who alleged that the role of the “CIA, FBI & Mossad in fomenting and planning the Mumbai 26/11 terror attacks are proved beyond doubt”. The Congress’ view is that the kinds of Muslims Owaisi represents will be drawn to its ranks by this kind of drivel. Left-liberals who loathe the Hindutva movement – people not unlike me – thus see assaulting the police on jihad-related issues as a defence of secularism.
This is perverse politics, which has had the signal consequence of communalising our national conversation on terrorism. There is, indeed, a serious national conversation to be had on investigative incompetence, deficits in police capacities and the breakdown of the criminal justice system – crises which gave birth to prison torture and a culture of casual extrajudicial execution. Liberal critiques of India’s struggle to contain jihadi terrorism rarely engage with this challenge.
I’ve sometimes wondered if the problem isn’t deeper: whether the cultural memes inherited by English-medium liberals, including myself, cloud our judgment. The figure of the martyr Christ, rebel against tyrannical power, is profoundly seductive; it is the the unacknowledged foundation-stone for the western human rights movements. Yet, the Romans were right to caution against the seduction of the martyrs’ voice.
There is a real threat to this country of a communal conflict that could tear it apart along its faultlines. Keeping our eyes wide shut to the reality will ensure the secular-liberal state loses.
