Anything That Moves: How The Indian Left Lost The Plot On The Uniform Civil Code

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

The Muslim Women’s Bill passed by Rajiv Gandhi’s government exactly 30 years ago had a range of unexpected consequences.

My disenchantment with the Indian Left was gradual, but if I had to pick a single moment when it crystallised, I’d point to an evening in the mid-1990s, a room in Bombay’s St Xavier’s College, a monthly study circle meeting of activists, academics, journalists and students, which, at one point, turned to the issue of personal law. I mentioned the need for a secular civil code applicable to all citizens, and was met with looks that ranged from quizzical to derisory.

After the discussion got bogged down in details of implementation, I asked: “Let us suppose there was no protest from citizens of any faith to the enactment of a common civil law that guarantees equal rights for women. How many of the people here would be in favour of it?”

There were about a dozen people sitting in a ring of chairs in that room, and mine was the only hand raised.

Over the next few years, a number of prominent feminists lined up against the idea of a uniform civil code. Flavia Agnes of the Majlis Legal Centre, whose work I respect greatly, has ranked the agitation against a Uniform Civil Code among Majlis’ major achievements of the past 25 years. How did champions of women’s rights come to believe that the interests of Indian women would be best served by continuing to be ruled by manifestly discriminatory laws?

It was not a direct consequence of feminist discourse, but a by-product of the politics of communalism, which became the central concern of the Indian Left in the 1990s.

The Shah Bano case legacy:
Almost exactly 30 years ago, on May 19, 1996, The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, gained the assent of India’s President and came into force. It was shepherded through Parliament by Rajiv Gandhi, who enjoyed an unprecedented majority in the Lok Sabha. The law had been formulated in response to protests from Muslim organisations against a Supreme Court verdict, pronounced a year previously, which commanded a well-off Muslim man to provide maintenance to the wife he had divorced – Shah Bano Begum – who had been reduced to penury. Since Muslim law has no provision for alimony, community leaders saw it as an abrogation of their religious rights.

The Supreme Court judgement in the Shah Bano case based itself on Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which capped maintenance at Rs 500 a month, a measly amount even in the 1980s. It was very far from granting alimony on par with the income of the husband.

The Muslim Women’s Act, on the other hand, made a provision for judges to provide far larger amounts in alimony payments. Despite that deliberately created loophole in the bill, conservative Muslim organisations welcomed it, and it came to be seen, not without justice, as the perfect example of a nominally secular party pandering to sectarian activists.

The narrative of minority appeasement and pseudo-secularism that grew around the Muslim Women’s Act fuelled the movement in favour of the Babri Masjid’s demolition, and sparked violence against Muslims across the country, the deadliest conflagration being the Bombay riots of January 1993. The bill laid the groundwork for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ascent to power a decade later.

Uniform civil law, not codification:
As communal divisions widened in the country after the promulgation of the Muslim Women’s Act, an unlikely ideological switch took place. Hindutvavadis, who in the years following independence had been the most obdurate opponent of pro-female reforms proposed by Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar, began using phrases like “gender justice” in arguing for a common civil code. The Left, which had backed the Nehru-Ambedkar thrust to ensure equal rights for women, and which had criticised Rajiv Gandhi’s bowing before regressive Muslim clergymen and politicians, now lined up alongside those very leaders to oppose reform.

Hindutvavadis had been exercised for decades by the asymmetry of civil law reform. A series of bills passed in the 1950s – the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956, and the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 – had endowed Hindu women with rights they did not traditionally possess. Unfortunately, Hindu conservatives could not be denied fully, and though Nehru fought and won a general election on a platform of reforming civil laws, the final bills, like India’s Constitution itself, were some distance from the egalitarian texts their primary sponsors desired.

The most glaring drawback of the legislation was that it denied women rights to ancestral property. This was finally rectified in the Hindu Succession Amendment Act, of 2005. There remain dozens of provisions relating to issues like divorce and adoption that require updating. Nevertheless, if one compares the laws governing Hindu women as they stand today with the situation that prevailed a 100 years ago, the change is revolutionary.

We can go on refining laws for Hindus, but at some point there has to be movement towards changing laws for Muslims as well. Nehru should have taken it up in the years following the passage of the Hindu Marriage Act. It was always meant to be a three-step process: Hindus first, Muslims second, and then Hindus, Muslims and everybody else together. That second step has yet to be taken, and the failure isn’t down to the Indian government not caring about Muslims, as some suggest, but because of the obduracy of powerful conservative Muslim factions.

Injustice to women:
People on the Left now promote reform and codification of Muslim laws instead of a uniform civil code. This is a red herring. Codification and reform could help on the margins, but any such new laws would still be deeply unjust, because sharia is fundamentally unfair to women.

At this point, there will be objectors asking, “Which sharia? Islamic law is not a monolith." It isn’t, but all schools of Islamic jurisprudence are unfair to women, and all agree on certain fundamentally important issues.

Take inheritance for instance. Each school of sharia law accepts that female children inherit only half the portion of their male siblings. At a seminar once, I was on a panel with the social reformer and Islamic scholar Asghar Ali Engineer who was arguing against the idea of a uniform civil code. I asked him if there was any instance in the rich and varied history of Islamic jurisprudence of women being granted equal inheritance rights. He could not name any, nor have I heard or read of one in the years since that debate. The same applies to provisions for divorce: No school of sharia law gives women anything approaching the privileges men possess.

In light of these facts, the logic favouring a secular, universally applicable civil code seems incontrovertible to me. Fact: A liberal country should guarantee equality to women. Fact: A cornerstone of such equality is the provision of equal rights to divorce and inheritance. Fact: There is no tradition in Islamic law allowing anything close to equality in these respects. Conclusion: The only way India can guarantee equal rights to Muslim women is by foregoing religious personal laws in favour of a secular law.

It is legitimate to fear that a common civil code promulgated by a BJP government will be unfair. But surely the solution is to generate a just, secular code, rather than settling for unjust religious. We already have working templates on which such a code could be based, from Goa’s uniform civil law to clauses in the Special Marriages Act. These will need to be updated to account for half a century of progressive legislation elsewhere in the world, and will still be far from perfect. It is too early, for example, to include gay marriage in any Indian civil code, since homosexuality itself is still criminalised. Nevertheless, framing a substantially egalitarian set of laws is hardly rocket science.

The worst argument against the uniform civil code is that it the time isn’t right for it because resistance from Indian Muslims will be too great. If there is only one path to equality, the state is duty bound to fight those who block the way. If we wait for resistance to die down, we will wait forever, and Indian Muslim women will forever be denied equality before the law.

Disowned By Their Own: The Disturbing Pattern About The Murders Of Independent Journalist

By LIKHAVEER | INNLIVE

When stringers are attacked or killed, the struggle for justice begins with determining whether they are journalists at all.

Last week, television journalist Akhilesh Pratap Singh was shot dead in Chhatra, Jharkhand. Barely than 24 hours later, in neighbouring Bihar, Hindustan journalist Rajdeo Ranjan was gunned down in Siwan.

The murders have exposed the faultlines in the media, not least the most basic, which is the ability to access and swiftly disseminate authentic information.

Journalists scrambled to get information on the two incidents. In the absence of independent information, political parties quickly stepped in and traded allegations on the breakdown of law and order in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Jharkhand and Bihar, where the Rashtriya Janata Dal is part of the coalition government.

Meanwhile, five days on, no clear motives have emerged with regard to either of the killings.

Political games:
Three journalists have been murdered in India this year. On February 13, Karun Mishra, the bureau chief of newspaperJan Sandesh was shot dead by unidentified persons in Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh. Five days after the incident, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav ordered a probe and police arrested five persons from the mining mafia.

Akhilesh Singh, locally known as Indradev Yadav, was a journalist with a news channel. Unidentified persons gunned him down at Dewaria in Chatra district of Jharkhand that borders Bihar and where a faction of a Maoist group called the Tritiya Prastuti Committee is active. The group, police said, indulges in extortion of money for petty contractors and local businessmen.

On Monday, police claimed a breakthrough in the case, arresting two persons. On Tuesday, a third person – Suraj Sao, the aide of BJP MLA Ganesh Ganjhu – was detained. The police said the journalist also took up civic works on contract and was killed over a dispute with members of the TMC and the MLA’s aide over the levy of money to be paid in exchange for a contract awarded to him. The police have discounted the involvement of the MLA in the killing.

But less than a day later, when news came in of the murder of Rajdeo Ranjan, the BJP were quick to denounce the “Jungle Raj” in Bihar.

In March, a photograph of jailed RJD leader Mohammad Shahabuddin sharing snacks with Bihar minister Abdul Ghafoor inside Siwan jail went viral. Rajdeo Ranjan was reportedly behind the leak. According to BJP leader and former Bihar chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, Ranjan’s murder was revenge.

While police are still investigating the charge, Ranjan’s wife Asha Yadav has gone on record to say that her husband was killed for a series of news reports against Shahabuddin's interests. She further claimed that Ranjan figured on Shahabuddin’s “hit list”, which police were privy to at least two years ago. Fellow journalists were divided on these claims, but said there was definitely more to the murder than meets the eye.

On Monday, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar announced a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into Ranjan’s death, even as the motive for his murder remains unclear.

Existing gulf:
Almost every time a journalist is murdered in India – 29 since media watch website The Hoot began tracking free speech violations in 2010 – there is the involvement of politicians or local business people or the oil, timber and sand mafias, or those involved in illegal felling of forests, land grabbing, exploiting child labour, chit fund scams, or even cases of medical negligence.

By now, that’s a given.

It’s after the killing that a pattern quickly emerges. When journalists are attacked or killed, the struggle for justice begins with determining whether they are journalists at all, whether they died for their journalism and not owing to any “personal” dispute or business links. Before the crucial questions of who killed them and why can be asked, the case is over.

There currently exists a gulf between the journalists employed on contract in mainstream media and journalists such as Ranjan, who work independently or are associated as stringers with local or national newspapers and broadcast channels. Unprotected and unorganised, the plight of journalists in the regional media is much more precarious.

While the nexus between local politicians and business interests is hardly surprising, what is disturbing is the role of media houses in refusing to acknowledge these footsoldiers. Often, the mainstream media publications they may work for or contribute regularly to, may wash their hands of them, denying completely – even in the face of incontrovertible evidence – their employment, that they worked for them or had anything to do with them.

The dirty secret in the media is the manner in which journalists are constrained to work as advertising agents too. Often, the commissions they earn from advertising may be more than their salaries, points out senior journalist and media analyst Anil Chamadia, who worked for years in Bihar before he shifted to Delhi to set up a media watch organisation, People’s Media Group.

Discredited as journalists for working as advertising agents, they occupy a grey zone in an already fractured mediascape. It becomes far easier to isolate and target them when their journalistic reports ruffle the feathers of local power centres, politicians and businessfolk. Shooting these messengers of unsavoury and unflattering information, who refuse to remain plaint and push invisible boundaries, also serves another purpose – it will silence others as well.

Those responsible also know that they can get away with it. They can easily prevail upon local police and administration to drag their feet in the investigation. Is it any wonder that demands are now routinely made for a CBI probe in almost every instance? Invariably, the poor investigation, compounded by interminable trials, end up in acquittals. In all the killings of journalists so far, there has not been a single conviction.

And the struggle to secure some justice for their killings, left to family members or colleagues, becomes a long and solitary battle.

Why The Side Effects Of NEET Are Much More Damaging Than The Disease It Claims To Cure?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE 

The common entrance exam may spell doom for the majority of medical aspirants and state boards.

The Supreme Court of India has revived the spectre of a common entrance examination for all medical colleges. Ostensibly, the National Eligibility Entrance Test is aimed at creating a level playing field. However, many fear that the effect will be exactly the opposite, as demonstrated by widespread protests, rail-rokos and even clashes with police across many non-Hindi states including Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, among others. There has been vehement opposition from students, doctors (especially rural doctors associations and state units of the Indian Medical Association), parents, non-commercial educationists, political parties and even social justice organisations. The governments of non-Hindi states have also opposed the move.

The overarching fear is that NEET will provide a huge advantage to students of Delhi-headquartered boards such as the Central Board of Secondary Education. Students from these boards also tend to be more urban, upper caste, rich and less likely to be from non-Hindi states, apart from the principal language of non-Hindi states not being their first language.

In short, they will be unrepresentative in a way that will deepen already existing inequities which exist along various axes of class, caste, language, location and rootedness, among others. In addition, many fear that the common medical entrance exam will destroy prestigious state boards as we know them.

Debunking myths:
While the NEET judgement was in response to admission-related corruption in private institutions, other reasons have also been offered in its support. There is a belief in some quarters that a common exam will provide relief to students appearing for multiple entrance tests and that supervision by the Medical Council of India and CBSE will curtail corruption in admission tests. And then there is the purported desirability of a common syllabus, which will ensure that physicians of similar pedigree are produced all around (this a ridiculous idea, since medical entrance exams do not make doctors, rather it's the MBBS exams after admission that do).

However, these arguments, do not hold water.

Firstly, most major states were already conducting their own medical entrance exam. Private medical colleges are not located in the air, but on the soil of these states. A simple solution would have been to admit students on the basis of the already-existing state medical entrance exam. States such as West Bengal, among others, have been conducting transparent medical entrance exams for nearly four decades. It is beyond comprehension why corruption in some places was used as an excuse to change admission policies everywhere.

Capitation fee corruption involving the management quota of private institutions is a headache only for people who can pay in tens of lakhs and even crores – in short, not even 5% of the students who take medical entrance exams. It is a problem of the upper middle class and the super-rich, which obscenely fancies itself as the “common man”.

Numbers tell a story:
As for relief to students who take multiple exams, a reality check is in order. Who exactly are these students and what percentage do they comprise of all medical entrance test takers across all states? It is astonishing that no such data has ever been presented – likely because anecdotal experiences suggest that this is a very small proportion of students.

Let us take some statistics into consideration. Across multiple All India Institutes of Medical Science, the common entrance test attracted about one lakh students last year. This figure is under 10% of the medical college admission seekers across all states. In Maharashtra alone, about four lakh students took theCommon Entrance Test exam this year. And when we compare the number of all Class 12 science students across all states, irrespective of entrance-takers, the percentage becomes negligible.

Even among that small minority, CBSE-like central board students are hugely over-represented in this multiple entrance test-taking class. The fact that the NEET judgement might imply science syllabus changes across many boards tells us how the stupendous majority is being victimised and marginalised for the convenience of a tiny minority.

Quality queries:
Among the major characteristics of this minority mentioned earlier, what stands out is the board – CBSE.

It is the CBSE syllabus that will be followed for NEET. Is this the largest board in the Indian Union? No. The Maharashtra state board alone has more Class 12 students than the all-India strength of the CBSE. If that statistic comes as a surprise, we need to seriously question our sense of standard and get out of our metro-centric, Anglo-Hindi bubbles.

Is CBSE the “best” board in some academic sense? Hardly so. Are Class 12 students studying science in the CBSE syllabus uniquely equipped with an understanding that is unparalleled by the state boards? Or in other words, if the state boards are being forced to emulate the CBSE (in the name of aligning syllabi), is it something worth emulating?

Following rigorous research (published in Current Science, 2009) that reviewed the comparative performance of students from different boards, Anil Kumar and Dibakar Chatterjee of the Indian Institute of Science showed that when it comes to science proficiency, CBSE is not numero uno.

West Bengal board students did better than CBSE students in all four science subjects – physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Andhra Pradesh does better than CBSE in mathematics and physics. By the same metric, Maharashtra is hardly the worst performing state, as it was in the NEET that was held in 2013 before it was scrapped.

Tellingly, neither West Bengal nor Andhra Pradesh were top performing states in NEET. Independent, non-CBSE excellence has thus become an albatross around their neck. The CBSE syllabus “pattern” has become the standard, even though research shows it isn’t the best.

Clear hierarchy:
On corruption and the Medical Council of India, the less said the better. Its former chief Ketan Desai was charged with accepting a bribe for granting affiliation to a private medical college. Last year, the CBSE-organised All India Pre-Medical Test was cancelled because of widespread cheating.

When a body such as the Ketan Desai-tainted MCI approaches the Supreme Court to fight corruption, and the Supreme Court employs the cheating scam-tainted CBSE to ensure a fair and free examination, we have to understand the deeper games being played.

CBSE schools are naturally very excitedabout NEET as it hands their students a huge and undeserved competitive advantage over the stupendous majority. After the NEET judgement, we are sure to see a mushrooming of CBSE schools everywhere and an exodus from state boards of the class who can pay for such private CBSE schools.

There is already a surge in the business of CBSE syllabus-based coaching institutes – all of this is big and often corrupt business, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

Therein lies the danger, where the Supreme Court ruling is already creating a caste system between boards and forcing everyone else to align with the Centre, which isn’t necessarily the best as described earlier.

Reducing importance:
Framed from Delhi, after “consultation”, the CBSE-based NEET syllabus favours those who have undergone their schooling and training in the CBSE/Indian School Certificate framework, the syllabus being a vital component of that framework.

State boards with syllabi that differ considerably from the CBSE are at an unfair disadvantage – they have to change or perish, for absolutely no fault of their own.

The viability or “worth” of a board of education’s science syllabus then is not in how well it teaches the subject to the students but incredibly, by how well it has adapted (or not) the basic framework of a Delhi-based board's syllabus. This will reduce the importance of the Class 12 exam, and we will increasingly see coaching institutes operating under the legal shell of a school.

The schools affiliated to the state boards will rapidly become low-grade holding pens for the rural and the poor, while the urban middle class will detach itself from them – taking educational apartheid to another level. By completely disregarding the percentile obtained in Class 12 board exams, multiple choice question-solving is privileged over detailed concept development, something boards such as the ones in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu have been historically proud of and is evident in the over-representation of these boards among faculty members of science institutions, where the CBSE “advantage” evaporates. We cannot even fathom the damage that this development will do to science education.

Explicit bias:
This Delhi-headquartered board and Anglo-Hindi bias in so-called “all India” medical entrances is not new. Central board students (comprising less than 10% of Class 12 students) have till now enjoyed a de-facto 15% reservation in all medical colleges, as the syllabus of the AIPMT exam (held in Hindi and English only, though no MBBS courses are taught in Hindi) through which these seats were filled, was modeled on the CBSE syllabus and conducted by the CBSE.

So much so, that in West Bengal, students coming through this “all-India” were from Hindi belt central board schools almost to the last man and in West Bengal were referred to simply as "CBSEs" or "Delhi boards".

Such a naked violation of the principle of natural justice and fairness went unchallenged as the positive beneficiaries of this provision constituted the unofficial first-class citizens of the Indian Union – typically well-to-do, urban, largely upper-caste Hindu males from Hindi-speaking areas studying in Delhi-headquartered school boards.

Since Hindi areas have much fewer medical colleges per capita, the AIPMT is a system to lodge North Indian students in South and East India in disproportionately high numbers, under the innocuous dissent-stopping fig leaf of "all-India".

The NEET seeks to create a hugely expanded version of this unjust dominance over all seats of all medical colleges in the Indian Union. Given the explicit bias, it is pertinent to ask to which board do the grandsons and granddaughters of the Supreme Court judges belong?

To which board do the sons and daughters of the lawyers defending the NEET, the functionaries of CBSE and the MCI head office, belong? Does this class more closely match the social profile of people studying in central boards or state boards? What is the definition of conflict of interest in such cases?

The Supreme Court ruling of holding a test under CBSE syllabus thus violates the fundamental legal principle of fairness. A state board student in a non-Hindi state will have to compete against a CBSE student who has studied for 12 years of incremental science syllabus learning. For example, in Tamil Nadu, the biology syllabus is about 70% different from that of the CBSE. Can a state be forced to change its board syllabus to align with central syllabus or otherwise risk playing in an unfair non-level playing field? It makes a mockery of the federal structure of the Constitution of India.

Popular Culture: Centuries Before Weather Satellites And Crop Science, Farmers Turned To A Poet For Sowing Advice

By MRINAL PANDEY | INNLIVE

Through his poems, Ghagh handed down tried and tested formulae for growing good crops. Even today, his poems help illiterate villagers understand the world.

For the last four centuries and more, Ghagh, literally “the sly one”, has been undoubtedly one of the most popular poet philosophers for farming communities in the Indo-Gangetic plains. An environmentalist centuries before the word was coined, Ghagh was no romantic adventurer looking to project his longings and needs through poetry. His pithy couplets that have been handed down generations through the oral tradition, are based on time-tested linkages between weather and the moon’s path through various star constellations. As an astronomer and agricultural guru, Ghagh was engaged in a struggle for exactitude – for a language free of Sanskrit punditry to discuss crop cycles, seeds, various tips for buying healthy cattle, and sound reflections on vagaries of both man and nature, all without scientific meteorological systems and instruments. His poems still remain invisible pathways for illiterate villagers to understand the world around them. It enables them to access pragmatic tips to read the signs for a good crop year or a bad one.

Since 1900, when inexpensively printed copies of vernacular poetry and popular folk songs became available all over the northern plains, Ghagh has remained a perennial bestseller. At every rural fair, railway station book kiosk and with every roadside bookseller in the vast Hindi belt, little paperbacks on Ghagh ki kahavatein(Sayings of Ghagh) are available. Like the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, most literate rural families will have a dog-eared copy of Ghagh’s poems tucked away somewhere. Little is known about this enigmatic itinerant poet’s personal life. To the academe though, Ghagh remains something of a country mouse. And they tell us it could also be somewhat rash to presume that all the poems ascribed to him are indeed his, and not interpolated at a later date. But isn’t that also true of a large part of Vyas’s Mahabharata, Kabir’s Bijak and Guru Nanak’s writings? Then how does the same academe ascribe these works as theirs?

Hasty conception:
Legend has it that Ghagh was born in village Chaudhary Sarai near Kannauj in what is now central Uttar Pradesh during emperor Akbar’s reign in the 16th century. This is supported by the fact that the poet is believed to have settled a village called Ghagh Sarai, a few kilometers away from Kannauj, on a piece of land gifted to him by Akbar.

Legend has it that Ghagh’s father was a Brahmin scholar who was also renowned as an astute astrologer at the court. The astrologer, once going through his own horoscope, calculated that the hour to conceive a miraculously bright son was near, and decided to rush home to his wife. He soon realised that there was no way he could make it home in time for the required act. So he decided not to let the precious seed be wasted. He found a young woman working in the royal harem as a maid, whom he quickly impregnated with his genius-engendering seed. Thereafter, as in the case of Ved Vyas, Vidur, Tulsidas and Kabir, out of this illicit encounter between a man and woman from different ends of the caste scale, the great poet-philosopher Ghagh was born. He was named Bhaddar.

By this time the astrologer, in the manner of the fathers of the above-named poets, had abandoned the impregnated maid and returned to his court life and domestic bliss. So the precocious young Bhaddar, alias Ghagh, was brought up by his mother in what must have been fairly austere circumstances. Guided by his genes, by the time Bhaddar was six, he knew all about the movements of the various astral bodies and, based on those, began to forecast coming events. His fame as an astronomer-cum-astrologer (in those days they were identical) grew after he made various precocious, but correct predictions, for the palace folk. When he heard of this, Bhaddar’s father came rushing to claim the miracle child as his, and forcibly removed him from his weeping mother. Bhaddar refused to walk so he was carried upon his father’s shoulders. On the homeward journey, the two came to a field where a farmer was scattering seeds almost half of which were being carried away by a strong wind to the neighbouring field.

“When the crop is ready, who will reap the crops that will grow out of seeds being blown into the neighbour’s field by the wind?” asked Bhaddar.

“Crops, son,” the father said, “no matter where the seeds blew in from, will always belong to the land owner, not to the scatterer of the seeds.”

Bhaddar leapt off his father’s shoulders and ran off shouting, “Then I too must leave this man and go back to my mother, whose womb bore your seed for nine months and brought me into the world.”

“Jo har jotey kheti taki, aur nahin to jaki taki (The field belongs to one who tills it, otherwise anyone may come and grab it)” runs one of Ghagh’s famous sayings, inspired perhaps by this early initiation on reproductive rights and wrongs.

Man of many parts:
A lonely precocious child will often invent imaginary companions. We see in some couplets that Ghagh too has an alter ego, whom he addresses as Bhaddari. Since most of the poems ascribed to the poet known as Bhaddari are the same, it is safe to presume that Ghagh was born as Bhaddar or Bhaddari and continued to address his lost self after he took the pen name Ghagh.

As was natural for a fatherless boy, Ghagh developed a deep and compassionate insight into the female psyche and grew up to be something of a ladies’ man. The poems hint that at some point he found himself a devoted and vivacious wife whom he lovingly addresses as his confidant Ghaghini, in some of his couplets.

Like Aesop, a tanner by profession who was jailed later in life, Ghagh too was a man of many parts – scholar, astronomer, astrologer, lover of women and vet. His poems, for instance, offer a cornucopia of information on how to tell a good horse, bullock or a milch cow, or gauge the temperament of an animal before buying, based on certain subtle physignomical details.

In a feudal age dominated by the nobility and major landowners, Ghagh had watched the spectacle of power closely. As a witness-turned-participant, Ghagh was not arrogant but stoutly refused to suffer fools or bullies. “The biggest landlord, if he is no use for tackling my woes, can go hang himself for all I care,” he said. Farming, Ghagh was convinced, was the best among all professions for a self-respecting commoner, giving him the supreme authority of the self-employed. Trading came next. It may uproot a man, but helped him retain financial self-sufficiency. At number three was service, an infinitely worse choice than the first two, but better than begging: “Uttam kheti madhyam baan, nikhid chakri, bheekh nidan.”

Farming, according to Ghagh, was of three kinds: the self-sufficient one, where the owner himself tilled the land, the fraternal kind, where one’s brothers looked after the fields, and the last was the kind where serfs were left to handle all affairs, and even if the land was going to the dogs, they could not care less.

Common wisdom:
As an abandoned son Ghagh turned his face firmly away from a certain sort of classical learning favoring instead the age-old wisdom of the ordinary farmer. He borrowed his authority from the simple folk among whom he lived and loved – farmers, housewives, widows, barbers, cobblers, makers of simple farming tools, farm laborers, tarts, witty thieves and scoundrels. They all revealed to him their hidden desires and secret lives: “Teetar kari badri, vidhawa kaajar rekh, yeh barse, vo ghar kare, ismein na koi mekh,”(If the cloud is the colour of partridge feathers and a widow sports kohl in her eyes, the first, have no doubt, will bring rain, and the other will shack up with another man.)

“She eyes you, then looks at herself suggestively, touches her ornaments, lets her head covering drop to reveal her midriff, after this the harlot does not need to beat drums to get attention.”(Parmukh dekhi apan much govey, choodi, Kankan, besari tovai/Aanchar tarey pet dikhavey, ab chhinari ka dhol bajavey.)

Ghagh also makes some shrewd pronouncements on the downward slide of worldly power and/or natural degradation: “Ochho Mantri raja nasey, Taal binasey kai/saan sahibi foot binase, Ghagha pair bivai “(A foolish minister is the death of the ruler, moss destroys a pond, a flashy lifestyle is killed by insider trading and a foot is destroyed by cracks in the heel).

According to Ghagh, there are four things that may cause sorrow unless one watches out – A pretty wife, a servant who knows your secrets, a well-worn silk garment, and a period of bad governance.

To the farmer, Ghagh handed down many tried and tested formulae for growing good crops. Sow jowar (millet), he said, at a distance covered by a frog in one leap, sow bajra and cotton at the distance of a footstep, and cucumbers at the distance covered by a deer in one leap. Sugarcane is best sown in clumps close together where water is plentiful.

There is also oft quoted advice from Ghagh on a healthy diet for men and women – Jaggery in chaitra (late February, early March), oily food in Baisakh (April and early May), and bel juice in Asadh (July). Food to be avoided during specific seasons are greens during the monsoons, curds during Bhadon (August), buttermilk in Kartik (early winter), cumin in Aghan (late spring), coriander in winter, sugar in Magh (early winter), and chana (gram) during Falgun (early February).

A curious composure exists in Ghagh’s poems, despite occasional cynicism and a sardonic sense of humour. Moralists, theologians, merchants and philosophers may often ignore experience, being exclusively concerned with actions and products. Literature, therefore, will be mostly created by the disinherited or exiled who, even after four centuries, seem to be sitting cross-legged under a tree and smiling at you as they define true happiness:

“Khet hoye goinde, hal hoy char

ghar mein grahasthin, bhains dudhar

ann mein gehun, dhan mein gay, agal bagl baithey do bhai

Hans ke anda as dadhi hoye

banke nayan parosey joye

rhreek padti, jdhaney bhat

galgal nimbua aur ghee taat

Oonch atariya bahey batas, Ghagh kahey ghar hee Kailas.”

(Says Ghagh, who would wish to move to another heaven if the family farm lay close to the village, and one owned four pairs of bulls for ploughs, a milch cow, a duo of blood brothers always by his side, and finally a wife, who still gives her man an arched glance each time she serves him a good meal: a ladle full of arhar dal on fragrant and freshly cooked rice served with side helpings of hot butter and slices of lemon, and all topped with a bowl of rich yogurt solid as a duck’s egg, topped with raw sugar.)

Do You Understand Me? Translation In India After The Classics

By NEWSCOP | INNLIVE

A poet and scholar offers bird’s eye view of how translation has progressed from colonial times to the present.

Most of the pre-colonial translations were what Gianfranco Folena would call “vertical translations” where “the source language has prestige and value which transcends that of the target language”. The translator here often feels humbled by the superior power of the original forcing, for example, Jnaneswar who translated Bhagavad Gita into Marathi, to compare himself to a tiny titibha bird trying to sound the ocean’s depth.

“Horizontal translation” on the other hand is what happens “between languages of a similar structure and strong cultural affinity”. In this case there is no apparent hierarchy; the languages are considered equal. This is what happens between modern Indian languages, though even here translation to a less known or recognised language, like Bhili, Santhali, Garo or Gammit, may involve a power-relationship.

Sisirkumar Das observes that there were only a handful of translations from one Indian language to another at the beginning of the nineteenth century, produced mainly to meet the demands of pedagogy. There were plenty of translations from Bengali into many other Indian languages.

Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas found an Urdu translation and the first Marathi novel,Yamunaparyatan was translated toKannada. Das also notes that geographically contiguous literatures were translated to one another more often like Kannada into Marathi or Marathi into Gujarati; he also says South Indian languages got translated more to one another than into the languages of the North. But this is not always true, as for example, Malayalam has more works translated from Bengali and Hindi than from Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

The entry of English:
The translation scenario in India underwent a major transformation with English entering India’s linguistic landscape. Three areas of translation prospered during the colonial times: translation of Indian literary texts into English; translation of English language texts (as also the European language texts available in English versions) into Indian languages and finally translation from one Indian language to another.

Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translationhas studied the working of the colonial ideology in the translations done during the period. Translations of texts like theBhagavad Gita, Manusmriti andArthashastra were mainly meant to help the British understand the Hindu ethos and practices while old literary texts likeAbhijnana Shakuntalam, besides being excellent literature, also satisfied their orientalist mind-set with its conceptual landscape of the wild, exotic East and its coy, vulnerable and beautiful women (see Romila Thapar, Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories wherein she contrasts Kalidasa’s frail heroine with the brave and independent Sakuntala of theMahabharata) in the West.

If first the translations were made by Western scholars like William Jones, by the late nineteenth century, Indian scholars like Romesh Chandra Dutt (Lays of Ancient India in 1894, Mahabharata in 1899 and Ramayana in 1902) also joined the effort, sometimes with the noble intention of correcting Western perceptions of Indian texts.

This has continued as a living tradition as we realise from the practices of P Lal, AK Ramanujan, Dilip Chitre, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Arshia Sattar, HS Shivaprakash, Ranjit Hoskote, Vijay Nambisan, Bibek Debroy and several other poets and scholars. The translation between Indian languages during the period of the freedom struggle was no more just a literary exercise; it helped in the building of a nation.

These translations during the late colonial period and the early years of independence were not profit-oriented; dedicated translators emerged in many languages making a Tagore, a Sarat Chandra Chatterjee or a Premchand household names across the country.

Institutionalising translations:
Translation came to be institutionalised in independent India as a consequence of the State’s perception that integration of India on an emotional level would be possible only through the arts and literature had a major role to play here. The idea of translation thus got linked all the more to the idea of the “nation”. If the “nation”, as Benedict Anderson says, is an “imagined community”, literature plays a role in forging and sustaining that community. India’s linguistic economy underwent a change after 1947 and one’s mother-tongue was perceived to be the chief marker of identity and carrier of tradition.

Inter-language translation continues to be one of the chief activities of the Sahitya Akademi and National Book Trust, two public institutions created in the times of Jawaharlal Nehru’s liberal and progressive regime. Today, we also have other national projects, like the National Translation Mission, meant to translate knowledge-texts from English into Indian languages (and hopefully vice-versa) and Indian Literature Abroad meant to make significant Indian literary texts available in foreign languages.

Inter-language translations have played a major role in creating movements across linguistic territories. Horizontal translations of patriotic and social-reformist work during the Independence movement played a role in shaping our national consciousness. The same is also true of Progressive writing where the translations of the likes of Premchand, Manto, Krishan Chander, Amrita Pritam, Jayakantan and Thakazhi played a pivotal role, encouraging an egalitarian ethos.

This flourishing of translations was repeated during the Modernist movement, wherein the works of Mardhekar, Muktibodh, Gopalakrishna Adiga, Nakulan, Dilip Chitre, UR Anantamurthy, Nirmal Verma and other regional writers were translated into Malayalam during the 1960s. Today, this phenomenon recurs, contributing to Dalit and feminist literary movements in many languages. The translations of Marathi Dalit writing have been crucial in the creation of a similar body of literature in other languages like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Gujarati. Many of these languages discovered the existence of early Dalit writing in their own language. Translations have also played a role in the creation of genres in languages where they had not originally existed.

Excerpted with permission from the essay ‘Do You Understand Me? The Culture Of Translation in India’, K Satchidanandan, from Translating India, Reading India, edited by Neeta Gupta, Yatra Books.

Better tomorrows: Could the Niti Aayog's 15-year vision document actually transform India?

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

It will depend on whether it's a shared vision or a vision shared.

The media have reported that the government of India is abandoning the five-year planning process that the country has used for over 60 years. Instead, the National Institution for Transforming India (the NITI Aayog), will prepare a 15-year vision document.

This a good idea. A process of making five-year plans and allocating resources from the Centre may have been appropriate in the years immediately after India’s Independence; when the country’s resources were scarce, and were largely with the public sector – the private sector being small then; when the Indian states were weaker than they are now; and when India was, and could be, isolated from the global economy. The replacement of five-year budgetary plans, with another process fit for a more open country in a dynamic global economy, was overdue.

It has been reported that the 15-year vision document will formulate ways through which India can achieve its broader social objectives to meet the United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This is welcome too, though this will not be a radical change because the goals of the last two five-year plans already were sustainable and inclusive growth.

The radical change is the replacement of a five-year plan combined with resource allocations with a 15-year vision without budgets. Prima facie, this seems a fuzzy idea. Firstly, if five-year plans were becoming untenable because they could not anticipate changes in the economy beyond the first couple of years, how can 15-year long projections work? Secondly, if a plan with budgets attached could not compel sufficient action, how will commitment to the vision be ensured through the changes in government that can happen with several elections over 15 years? In short, will the vision be just a document – a piece of paper with even less effect on the course of India’s development than the fve-year plans had?

It's how you get there:
The answer is, it depends on the process used to produce the vision and to develop pathways to it. Visions are useful for what they do. Powerful visions align people voluntarily towards shared goals they aspire for. The power to align themselves comes when the vision is their own. Moreover, in dynamically changing situations, internally and externally, while a vision may remain stable, plans to achieve the vision must be changeable. Therefore, rather than providing maps with pre-defined paths, the outcome of planning should be a compass with which leaders can steer systems through change.

There is a big difference in the powers of a shared vision compared with a vision shared. A vision developed by experts, or a leader at the top, and then given to the rest, is a vision shared. It can point to an attractive star. But such a vision does not have sufficient gravitational force to compel action that a shared vision, in the development of which people have participated, can have. Whereas a vision shared must be translated to the people, a shared vision is shaped in their own terms as it is evolved.

The last Planning Commission had searched for methods of planning for 21st century India. It tested new methods of scenario planning to supplement the conventional five-year plans it was required to make. Scenarios are not predictions. They are plausible views of what the country will be like, 10 or 15 years out, depending on the directions big forces in the environment may take, and on the policies adopted by the country. Thus scenario planning helps policy-makers to steer, and to determine which policies will produce the most favorable outcomes in a dynamic environment.

The most desirable of the three plausible scenarios of India, projected by the Planning Commission, was titled “The Flotilla Advances”. It produced the most inclusive outcomes as well as the fastest growth. The other scenarios, which produced slower, as well as less inclusive and less sustainable growth, were called “Muddling Along” and “Falling Apart”. The titles of the scenarios point to the processes by which inclusive growth must be produced in diverse and democratic India. The states and private sectors cannot be directed from the center any more. Their leaders steer their own ships. All must share a vision of where they are going. And scenarios suggest to them the paths they should follow to get there. An architecture of policies required to align the flotilla and to produce the best outcomes was also derived from the systems’ analysis.

What experience shows:
The Bertelsmann Foundation of Germany has made a world-wide study of “Winning Strategies for a Sustainable Future”. It studied 35 countries around the world that appear to be leaders in developing strategies for sustainable growth. It examined the quality of their strategies, the frameworks for implementation, and results so far. Bertelsmann found two essential features in the processes used by the leaders.

The first is that sustainability policy derives from an overriding concept and guiding principles that are made to permeate significant areas of politics and society. And the “best practice” to make this happen is to get specific in national debates on a new score-card of progress. The UN’s 16 development goals with their 169 sub-goals cannot be imposed on the people. Countries must develop their own specific score-cards for their own conditions albeit conforming with the goals.

The second requirement for success, Bertelsmann’s study found, is that sustainability policy must be developed and implemented in a participatory manner. Therefore, the task for countries is to develop new participatory formats for planning. Not only must large numbers of people be engaged, but different constituents must listen to each other to develop an integrative vision of the future of the country.

For a 15-year vision to keep successive governments on course, it must be a vision that people believe in. It must be the people’s shared vision with their participation in it. The vision cannot be just a good document which a new government can tear up and write another. The goals must matter to people and be expressed in terms they understand. Then only will pressure from the people compel new governments to stay on course towards it.

Also, a process based on systems thinking, rather than linear planning, is required to understand the interplay of social, political, and economic forces to foresee the scenarios they will produce, and to describe the paths for the flotilla to steer towards its vision through dynamic changes in the environment.

The conclusion is that the NITI Aayog’s 15-year vision document will not matter as much the process by which the vision and the directions to it will emerge. The process used will determine whether the vision, and the programmes and policies it recommends, will accelerate the progress of the country towards its goals of sustainable and inclusive development.

New Technology: Sleep Is No Longer A Relaxing Activity – It Is An Industry

By M H AHSSAN | INNLIVE

From smart phones to smart mattresses, technology has permeated the sleep industry.

A few months into his new job, Dilshad Karmakar found his sleep becoming fitful. The stress of the day would keep him up at night and the student would get out of bed feeling hung-over. So he did what any 28-year-old today would do – look to the internet for answers.

Why It’s No Conspiracy If Courts Intervene In Muslim Personal Law?

By TAHIR MEHMOOD | INNLIVE

The Constitution protects citizens' rights to religion, but also empowers courts to ascertain if any religious practice is repugnant to constitutional ideals.

“Look! What he is saying – triple talaq will effect only a single revocable divorce – he is guilty of insulting the sacrosanct law of Islam.”