The top court has never shied away from instituting policies on everything from the organisation of cricket to the auctioning of coal. What gives here?
Wouldn’t the world be wonderful if we could all just get along? Unfortunately, people don’t always achieve that ideal, which is why we have laws and courts. Imagine now, that organisations which don’t get along at all have been fighting each other in court for decades, as sometimes happens in Indian trials. Nearly 70 years on, individuals among the original petitioners have all died of natural causes, hundreds of citizens unconnected with the case have died of unnatural causes as a result of the dispute, and the nation’s Supreme Court finally gets ready to pronounce a verdict. Having listened to all sides, and considered the complex issues carefully, the most senior judge in the country addresses the litigants. Why do you need courts at all, he asks, can’t you just sort this out by yourselves? Can’t you all just get along? He offers to play mediator, but is reluctant to play the role assigned to him, the role for which tax payers provide him a salary and perks, that of a judge.
That’s what Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar did on Tuesday in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case. He might as well have entered the field of Kurukshetra and asked the Kaurava and Pandava armies to sort things out amicably. Barack Obama was fond of saying that every decision he made was complex and tough because anything simple would already have been done by somebody else.
Supreme Courts of every country are in the business of making difficult decisions. Ours, though, shies away from matters pertaining to law and basic rights while instituting policies on everything from the organisation of cricket to the auctioning of coal.
Babur to Babri
For those who came in late (which is a majority of Indians, since half of those alive today were yet to be born when the Babri Masjid was demolished, and about 15% more had not got to secondary school), here’s the gist of the back-story. The Central Asian king Babur defeated the army of Ibrahim Lodi in 1526 CE, founding what came to be called the Mughal dynasty. He spent four years consolidating his rule before losing the unequal battle against Indian bacteria. In 1528, his governor in Awadh province, a Shia general named Mir Baqi, constructed a large mosque in Ayodhya town, which came to be called the Babri Masjid.
From the middle of the 19th century, there were attempts by Hindu groups to take over the site under the pretext that it was Ram janmabhoomi, the birthspot of Lord Rama. A local akhara forcibly wrested a part of the complex for itself and commenced prayers in the open. Later, it sought legal sanction to build a shrine on the platform. Muslims protested and successive layers of the colonial administration ordered maintenance of status quo, with a section of the land held by the akhara, and the bulk of it controlled by the mosque’s caretakers.
The dark night
In December 1949, a group of Hindu activists entered the mosque at night and placed idols of Rama and Sita inside. The following day, the Akhil Bharatiya Ramayana Mahasabha declared the idols had appeared miraculously. As credulous devotees flooded the venue, the state administration locked the gates, disallowing both Muslims and Hindus from praying there. Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel tried to reverse what the trespassers had accomplished by ordering the state to remove the idols, but the district administration refused to do it, fearing riots. Within a year, the issue ended up in court, and there it has stayed ever since.
In the 1980s, right-wing Hindu organisations launched a political movement to construct a temple where the mosque stood. They claimed Mir Baqi had demolished a Rama temple and built the Babri Masjid over its ruins. On December 6, 1992, a Hindu mob broke through the paltry police cordon placed at the site by Uttar Pradesh’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, and reduced the Babri Masjid to rubble. A criminal case related to the demolition against BJP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and Vishwa Hindu Parishad Hindu leaders has been stalled for years.
In 2010, an Allahabad High Court judgement divided up the land where the mosque had stood, giving a third to the Sunni Waqf board, a third to the Nirmohi akhara, and a third to the human representatives of the infant Lord Rama. The court based its judgement substantially on a 2003 report by the Archaeological Survey of India which claimed to have found ruins of a temple under the erstwhile Babri Masjid.
The great red herring
The demolished temple has been the great red herring in the Babri Masjid saga. Secularist commentators played into Hindutvavadi hands in the 1980s by allowing it to become the centrepiece of the debate. The secular position should have been something to this effect: Islam’s iconoclastic streak is one of the repugnant aspects of the faith from a liberal perspective. A number of Hindu temples were, indeed, demolished by Muslim rulers in centuries past. There is no evidence that the Babri Masjid was built on one such demolished temple, but it shouldn’t matter anyway. A modern state cannot turn back the clock of history, and should restrict itself to addressing contemporary injustices.
Since the Allahabad court, like most left-wing commentators and all right-wing ones, accepted the notion that the mosque’s history counts, here’s a summary of the facts. Babur is renowned for his remarkable memoir, Baburnama, in which he put down details about everything from his drug use to his wars. Unfortunately, not long after the Babri Masjid’s construction, a sudden storm brought down Babur’s tent in the midst of a campaign, drenching his books and manuscripts. He saved what he could, but most of his 1528 and 1529 entries were probably lost at this time, and he died the following year before he could rewrite them.
In the parts of the memoir that have survived, Babur expressed no fondness for demolishing Hindu shrines. We know he left temples intact in forts he took over from Hindu rajas. At the same time, he wasn’t above the odd act of vandalism against places of worship that offended his sensibilities, even Muslim ones, and may not have objected to a general’s proposal to bring down a temple and build a mosque in its place. The contemporary record, in other words, is of no help whatsoever in resolving the Babri Masjid question.
The Archeological Survey of India’s report to the Allahabad court isn’t much better. The ASI asked a private company to map the area using ground penetrating radar, and drew conclusions on the basis of that data. The radar detected a few anomalies, which the ASI concluded were remnants of a temple’s pillars. If it was a temple, it was a pretty small one, far from the grand monument to Lord Rama’s birthplace we were led to expect. The report provided hints that the Babri mosque was built on the ruins of another mosque, which in turn might have been built on the ruins of a temple or after demolishing a temple.
Irrelevant history
Whether it was mosque on demolished temple, or mosque on ruined temple, or mosque on ruined home, or mosque on ruined mosque on ruined temple, or mosque on ruined mosque on demolished temple, cannot be ascertained on the basis of a radar scan.
Which is fine, because, as I’ve said, the history is irrelevant to the case. The Supreme Court ought to set aside myths of the birth of an avatar, and dubious archaeological reports, and treat the matter as a dispute over property rights. In such a dispute, it is difficult to envision the infant Rama as a beneficiary. The property ought to be divided unequally between the Waqf board and the akhara (since squatters gain some rights if they occupy land for long enough). This would return the site to the status quo of the 19th century with one difference: no mosque stands on the spot any longer.
At that point, a BJP government could use eminent domain to take over the land and construct the temple it’s been promising for decades. Or a secular government could build a hospital there, on the basis that Ayodhya’s Hindus and Muslims have plenty of places to pray, but inadequate health care. But neither secular parties nor religious will make such a move. The secular parties are weak and scared, while the BJP prefers to keep the pot of the public’s emotions simmering.
Who can blame them for indecisiveness when the nation’s highest court is reluctant to pronounce verdict on a property dispute?
By ALI JEFFERY From KARACHI
Let's move beyond the discourse of 'You started it!,' 'No, you started it!'
I find myself increasingly upset at the abuse and hatred tossed from both sides of the border, with little rationale apart from the 69-year-old chips on our shoulders.
These chips have, over time, turned into boulders.
Yet, we have an affinity with India.
When Amitabh Bachchan is in the hospital, we pray for his good health.
When Ranbir Kapoor’s film is a hit, we’re prouder than Neetu and Rishi.
We can’t deny that no one sings about romance like Kishore and Rafi.
When we meet Indians abroad, they’re desi just like us.
Our history is their history. Our language is their language.
But it’s complex, our relation.
Like siblings, we know each other’s soft spots very well.
We retaliate to each other’s provocations like children, impulsive and emotional.
“You attacked us first in Uri!”
“You started it!”
“No, you started it!”
Like trust-fund babies, we feel entitled to demand things from others, yet have no idea how to cope and be responsible for our own actions.
Mistakes on either side
They don’t accept that Muslims and other minorities are sometimes attacked on the mere suspicion of eating beef.
And us? We turn a blind eye when Christians and Hindus are assaulted for eating before Iftar in Ramazan.
They’re occupying Kashmir, we say.
But we forget how we imposed ourselves on the Bengalis. Why did we force Bengalis to accept Urdu as their national language? We never talk about that, do we?
When I think of some of the best moments during the last ten years, most of them include my brothers and sisters from across the border: food, music, laughing, dancing, singing – a refusal to be separated by political boundaries.
I think we are wrong to look to the West for support. In the past, foreigners succeeded in making sure we saw each other as enemies. And boy did we fall for it.
We carry the burden of our past mistakes.
We should look to each other for support. What I find strange is our reluctance to acknowledge that we have each other.
What’s absurd is our blindness to the immense opportunities that lie before us if we work together and the desolation if we continue to be enemies.
What characterises our relation are the ever-changing roles we occupy.
To the world, we are siblings at loggerheads, each trying to get daddy’s attention so that he may buy us toys and increase our allowance.
At other times, we are like a divorced couple constantly bickering over who lost out in the settlement, unable to come to terms with the fact that it’s over.
It seems that the scars of our separation are still so ripe, so painful, that we only find solace in making sure that the other is just as hurt as we are. And so we put in our all our resources, our best efforts, to do exactly that.
When I read that India had carried out a surgical strike inside Pakistan, it felt like a personal setback. The Pakistani rhetoric has been no less disappointing. As we each take the moral high ground, point fingers, and beat the war drums, we forget how much is wrong with each of us.
I hope that very soon, these ugly scenes will disappear.
I, for one, don’t want to remember them.
I long for peace, not war.
Better days
What I will keep in my memory instead are the moments that embody love and respect for each other:
Prime ministers of both countries using cricket as a tool of diplomacy.
Indian players acknowledging that there is no better fast bowler than Wasim Akram.
Shoaib Malik marrying Sania Mirza.
Our tennis players teaming up at international tournaments, calling for us to stop war and start tennis.
What I am saying is that I want Uri to be history, confined to textbooks. I want Uri to be remembered as an event when the cold war between India and Pakistan did not turn into a hot war.
I hope it turns out to be no more than just another episode that provides for good banter with my Indian friends.
But what is not a mere episode is our past, our shared histories and the fact that we used to be one, before we were divided.
And what is comforting is that when I messaged one of my closest friends across the border, expressing concern over the megalomaniac tendencies of our governments, he responded: “it doesn’t matter what they do, you know I will always love you.”
I want to be optimistic and believe that our next generations will turn to our ancient scriptures and holy books. It won’t take them long to see that since time immemorial, there is only one message they have been trying to convey: the message of love.
I truly believe that it’s possible for love to triumph.
By MITHILESH MISHRA | INNLIVE
Unbanked blood transfusion is illegal. But short of blood, rural hospitals in Chhattisgarh say it is not unethical.
In April, a woman walked into a hospital in Baitalpur in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh, bleeding heavily. She was in her thirties, and had ruptured her uterus while delivering a baby at home in a nearby village. She needed urgent medical attention. When a van dropped her off on the highway, she trudged two kilometres to Baitalpur's Evangelical Mission Hospital – only to be turned away.
The hospital had an operation theatre and a gynaecologist, but no blood.
With buses plying only once in two-three hours from Baitalpur to Bilaspur, the district headquarters, getting blood from the blood bank takes at least four to five hours, if not a day. Without a quicker way to access blood, the hospital is not equipped to handle an emergency.
“She had a ruptured uterus and was anaemic," said Dr Kusum Masih, the medical superintendent of the hospital who is also a gynaecologist. "We could not operate without blood."
The doctors sent her to Bilaspur about 35 km away – but she died on her way there.
Eleven districts with no blood banks
There are 16 blood government-run blood banks and 30 private ones across 27 districts of Chhattisgarh.
The deficit of blood in the state is about 48%, said Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council. According to the World Health Organisation, a country should have a stock of blood equivalent to 1% of its population. By this standard, Chhattisgarh alone needs 25 lakh units of blood at any given point – but it usually collects 16 lakhs units a year.
What's more, 11 out of 27 districts in Chhattisgarh do not have blood banks – the largest deficit in any state in the country. In all, there are 81 districts in the country without blood blanks, according to data from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Most of them are concentrated in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and the North East.
For Chhattisgarh, a state with very high rates of anaemia, especially among women and children, the shortage of blood throws up multiple challenges.
According to the National Family Health Survey, more than half of the women of the state – about 57% – suffer from anaemia, as do nearly three-quarters, or 71.2% of children aged 0-5. About 2% of both women and children have severe anaemia, with a haemoglobin level below seven grams per decilitre of blood, for which most patients need blood transfusions.
Apart from this, about 60,000 children are estimated to have sickle cell anaemia, a severe form of the condition caused by a genetic blood disorder.
Anaemic women additionally face a higher risk of postpartum haemorrhage, which is a leading cause of maternal mortality in India. The maternal mortality rate of Chhattisgarh is 230 deaths for every 1,00,000 live births, as compared to the national average of 178.
Unbanked blood
For a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, there is just one option in case of emergencies where blood is required – to refer a patient to a bigger facility. This often means that the person reaches the hospital in a critical condition, or dies on the way, as in the Baitalpur case.
Some hospitals are countering this by opting for an illegal way of giving blood, called unbanked direct blood transfusion. Under this, the blood of a willing donor’s that matches with the recipient’s group is collected, tested for infection with a rapid blood kit and then transfused without roping in a blood bank.
Take the case of a 40-year old woman from Shahdol district in Madhya Pradesh, who had been having extremely painful menstrual bleeding for nearly four months.
“Khoon girat rahe [I was bleeding all the time],” she said. “But, I would still have to work in our fields. How can I stop?” She was also not able to eat or walk and had severe chest pain.
On June 28, she somehow made it to a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, which shares a border with Madhya Pradesh, travelling more than 200 km by train and bus with her husband and son.
When the doctors examined her blood, they saw she had a haemoglobin count of 4.6 – the normal range for women is between 12.1 and 15.1 – which meant she needed immediate transfusion. She also required an abdominal hysterectomy, as she had a large fibroid in her uterus.
In all, she needed three units of blood.
“I do not know how she managed to travel so far,” said a doctor at the hospital. “There is barely any oxygen reaching the organs. We have patients coming in with haemoglobin count of one as well. We can't direct such patients to other hospitals as their condition is already critical.”
The names of the hospitals and the doctors have been withheld because it is illegal to get blood from any other establishment other than a blood bank.
In this case, her son gave one unit of blood through unbanked direct blood transfusion, while two other units were arranged legally.
Doctors have been arrested in the past for using unbanked blood in other states.
Hospitals that practice unbanked blood transfusion usually have a list of donors in the community who can come and give blood when required. These donors are usually not paid – unless they demand payment and the situation is dire.
Insufficient blood
In 1996, the Supreme Court outlawed professional blood donation – that is, donating blood for money – and ordered the establishment of National Blood Transfusion Council to oversee and strengthen policies and systems governing blood transfusion in the country. In 1998, unbanked directed blood transfusion was disallowed.
In 2002, the council allowed the setting up of blood storage centres that were allowed to keep blood from licensed blood banks (but were not authorised to collect it). These storage centres could come up in villages and towns, while the mother blood banks would usually be in the district headquarters or cities.
In Chhattisgarh, there are 60 such storage units, mostly in community health centres, many of which do not use the blood at all and direct patients to go to other healthcare facilities. For instance, the community health centre in Gaurella, attached to the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences in Bilaspur, has never approached the storage unit for blood. “I am not even sure it [the centre] functions,” said Dr VP Singh, who is in charge of the blood storage centre in the Bilaspur college.
Patients from community health centres often make their way to Jan Swasthya Sahyog, a non-profit in Ganiyari, near Bilaspur city. “Often, we see patients who are bleeding copiously after childbirth and are referred to us in that condition,” said Dr Yogesh Jain, one of the founders of the hospital.
Even hospitals that do use blood storage units, such as Jan Swasthya Sahyog, Shaheed Hospital in Dalli Rajahara in Chhattisgarh's Balod district and the mission hospitals, said they get insufficient units of blood.
“Our storage centre is attached to a mother blood bank in Durg,” said Dr Saibal Jana, chief physician of Shaheed Hospital. “We need about 150 units per month, but have barely about 35 units from the bank. Last month, they gave us only 10.”
Jan Swasthya Sahyog has an understanding with a private blood bank in the city, which gives them blood nearing its expiry date for free. This they use for scheduled surgeries, when the blood requirement is known.
Replacement donation
For every unit of blood taken from the bank, hospitals are supposed to send a replacement donor to the mother blood bank. This unwritten rule holds true even for hospitals that send relatives of patients to collect blood from a blood bank – private or public – for a planned surgery.
This is against the country’s National Blood Policy, which prohibits coercion in enlisting replacement donors and aims to phase replacement donations out.
Dr SK Binjhwar, from the State Blood Transfusion Council in Chhattisgarh, said that the state has 80% voluntary donation. Public health activists, however, said this figure is highly debatable and that more than 99% of the blood is likely collected through replacement donation.
“A hospital that has a blood storage unit organises blood donations camps for mother blood banks,” said Bhinjwar. “This is enough to meet the demands of the districts.”
The demand for a replacement donor for the mother blood bank hangs like a sword over the heads of patients’ family members.
Many donors from the hinterlands are not willing to travel to the nearest blood bank in the city to replace blood. It’s also difficult to find eligible donors in the immediate family – if a patient has anaemia, it’s likely that members of her family would also suffer from the condition.
Many also have an apprehension towards donating blood, fearing it causes weakness.
In such a scenario, touts who can provide ready donors for a price thrive. There are many such businesses in operation near blood banks in the state that provide donors for a sum of money to provide replacement units to the banks.
Rajesh Sharma, who runs the laboratory in Jan Swasthya Sahyog said that touts realise that people are looking for donors for replacement donation when they see an icebox in their hands. To combat this, Jan Swasthya Sahyog sends a patient's relative for replacement donation, they now send a letter (pictured below) that has to be signed by the blood bank.
People who are unaware about the dangers of remunerative blood donation – which has higher chances of infection – are willing to pay for the blood, despite having meagre resources.
In a rural hospital in Chhattisgarh, a 76-year-old was diagnosed with nectrotising fasciitis – a severe bacterial skin infection that spreads to the tissues quickly – on her arm. She had to be operated upon immediately to remove the infected tissues, but her haemoglobin count was just 6.3. During the surgery, the hospital collected blood via unbanked direct blood transfusion. But they were short of one unit.
“I do not know who will donate now...can we buy the blood?,” asked her daughter, who was tending to her.
While admitting that most units of blood are given only after a replacement donation, Dr Singh from the Bilaspur college's blood storage unit said: “We give blood to people who do not have replacements too."
"Usually if someone is an orphan with no family support, or someone comes without attendants, we give the bank without exchange too (referring to replacement donation)," he added.
Dr Singh said he had instituted a rule that no sickle-cell patients should be asked for replacement donors as he found out that the patients' families were bringing in professional donors, especially when the patient needed immediate treatment.
Unbanked blood ethical?
In a scenario where lack of access to blood banks has resulted in deaths that could have been avoided and helped touts flourish, doctors and healthcare activists practicing in rural areas have pushed for unbanked direct blood transfusion to be legalised, even as other activists argue that it shouldn't.
In June, Dr Yogesh Jain and Dr Raman Kataria from Jan Swasthya Sahyog wrotein favour of the practice in Indian Journal of Medical Ethics. They said that unbanked directed blood transfusion, if done by trained and certified healthcare teams, meets ethical standards and helps fulfil emergency blood requirements in rural areas.
In 2014, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare met a delegation from the Association of Rural Physicians that sought to legalise this practice. Though the Drug Technical Advisory Board considered the proposal, it was eventually rejected.
The delegation argued that there the Drugs and Cosmetics Act allows unbanked directed blood transfusion for Armed Forces in border areas and peripheral hospitals, which should be extended to the same in emergency situations in rural areas too.
The Drug Technical Advisory Board, however, said that testing of safe blood requires a lot of infrastructure and trained manpower, without which the blood is likely to be infected. Besides, they said, it would be difficult to monitor them. They also said that the exemption given to Armed Forces cannot be given to rural hospitals.
“Are soldiers' life more important than a woman giving birth?" asked Dr Jain. "The implication of this policy is that either people go to the cities for treatment, or choose to die wherever they are. People who have to handle emergencies have to be equipped with technology and regulations should look into the ethical requirement of safe blood.”
An ideal solution, said doctors, would be to increase blood availability in the country by having a central blood bank in each district, with well-equipped storage centres.
However, activists working towards ensuring voluntary blood donation said that unbanked direct blood donation should not be allowed.
“All hell will break loose," said Vinay Shetty, from Think Foundation, Mumbai and a member of Voluntary Blood Donation Committee of Maharashtra State Blood Transfusion Council. "There will be no control over the blood in this country and we will go back in time."
The state has to take responsibility for the shortage of blood and has to ensure that no bank is short of blood, he said.
“The only answer to this is blood sufficiency," said Shetty. "Organising blood is not the responsibility of the patient. It is the responsibility of society at large. This is happening because there is no value to human life. Somebody in the state has to take charge."
