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News Digest

IAMC Weekly News Roundup – May 14th, 2012

by newsdigest on May 15, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup

Announcements

News Headlines

Opinions & Editorials

Announcements

Coalition Against Genocide condemns SIT’s shoddy report on Gujarat violence

May 11, 2012

Coalition Against Genocide (CAG – http://coalitionagainstgenocide.org/), a broad coalition of over 40 organizations dedicated to the cause of justice and accountability, condemns the report filed by the Special Investigations Team (SIT) as shoddy investigation and a deliberate distortion of evidence.

The Supreme Court appointed SIT’s closure report, on the complaint brought forth by Mrs. Zakia Jafri, is replete with inconsistencies, contradicting inferences and devoid of any substantial effort to examine all the records that can throw light on the alleged crimes. “The line of investigation seems focused on finding excuses to discard the available evidence by casting doubt on the credibility of the victims and those that have come forward with evidence.”, said Biju Mathew, one of the founding members of the coalition. On the other hand, a report by Mr. Raju Ramachandran, who was appointed by the Court as amicus curiae, has declared that there was sufficient evidence to charge and prosecute Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

CAG expresses its dismay that the SIT has summarily dismissed the testimonies of two senior police officials that had made specific allegations against the Gujarat state government and Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Whistle-blower cop Sanjiv Bhatt had alleged that he was present at a meeting held at the Chief Minister’s residence in which Mr. Narendra Modi instructed senior state and police officials to “allow Hindus to vent their anger.” The same allegation has been corroborated by another high ranking police official R. B. Sreekumar in a separate affidavit. In that affidavit he has alleged that the then Director General of Police K. Chakravarty conveyed that similar instructions were given in that meeting by Chief Minister Modi.

It should be noted that the destruction of the minutes and other official records by the Modi administration that would have conclusively clarified Sanjiv Bhatt’s presence in the said meeting, was ignored by the SIT.

Instead of probing these allegations with the seriousness they deserve, the SIT made the following outrageous claim in its report:

“The interpretation made on alleged illegal instructions given by the Chief Minister by [former DGP R. B.] Sreekumar and [suspended police officer] Sanjiv Bhatt appear to be without basis. Further, even if such allegations are believed for the sake of argument, mere statement of alleged words in the four walls of a room does not constitute an offense.”

In other words, the SIT does not hold it an offense for a sitting Chief Minister to give overt approval for sectarian violence by instructing police officials to look the other way. It is a sad day for Indian democracy when a body appointed by the court to unearth the truth, itself conducts its proceedings in a manner that reflects clear bias and prejudice.

CAG believes that SIT’s twisted interpretation of the law has monumentally disastrous implications for the foundational principles of the Constitution including the guarantees to the right to life for every citizen. CAG further believes that the SIT has lost all legal, ethical and moral standing to continue the investigation in a free and fair manner.

The Coalition appeals to the Supreme Court to intervene to:

  • Reject the SIT report and its line of investigation, especially in light of amicus curiae’s diametrically opposite conclusion based on the same evidence.
  • Appoint a separate investigative body, with an explicit mandate to probe the role of the state administration, law enforcement personnel, politicians and other accused in the perpetration of violence and subsequent subversion of justice to the victims.
  • Order the new investigative body to probe allegations brought against the SIT, since its officers are themselves accused in some instances.

Coalition Against Genocide affirms its solidarity with the survivors of the pogroms and the civil society groups in their continued struggle for justice and reparation.

RELATED LINKS:
Narendra Modi found partisan in 2010,cleared in 2012
Indian Express, May 10, 2012
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/narendra-modi-found-partisan-in-2010-cleared-in-2012/947344/

SIT says illegal instruction given in private is not an offence
The Hindu, May 11, 2012
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3405602.ece

Did Narendra Modi govt pay for SIT chief Raghavan’s foreign trips?
Times of India, May 10, 2012
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-10/ahmedabad/31654977_1_amicus-r-k-raghavan-gujarat-chief-minister

SIT says Ehsan Jafri ‘provoked’ murderous mob
The Hindu, May 11, 2012
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3405416.ece

Modi’s SITcom
Times of India, May 9, 2012
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-09/ahmedabad/31641245_1_riot-victims-zakia-jafri-relief-camps

 

CONTACT:

Biju Mathew
Tel: (917) 232-8437
Email: biju2u@gmail.com
(East Coast, USA)

Dr. Hyder Khan
Tel: (612) 889-7334
Email: hydermkhan@yahoo.com
(Mid West, USA)

Girish Agrawal
Tel: (408) 398-4885
Email: lawgir@gmail.com
(West Coast, USA)

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Gujarat riots: Amicus curiae says Modi can be prosecuted (May 7, 2012, Indian Express)

In a jolt to Chief Minister Narendra Modi, a Supreme Court-appointed amicus curiae has held he can be prosecuted under various sections of the IPC for “promoting enmity among different groups” during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The report by Raju Ramchandran on the complaint of Zakia Jafri is in sharp contrast to the report of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) which had earlier given a clean chit to Modi and others. “In my opinion, the offences which can be made out against Shri Modi, at this prima facie stage, are offences inter alia under Sections 153 A (1) (a) & (b) of IPC which means promoting enmity among different groups on grounds of religion and 153 B (1) which says assertions prejudicial to national integration,” Ramchandran said in his report.

“He (Modi) should also be prosecuted under IPC 166 which says public servant disobeying law, with intent to cause injury to any person and 505 (2) meaning statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will,” the amicus curiae said in the report. The SIT in its report had rejected suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s allegations that Modi had given instructions in a meeting held on February 27, 2002 to “allow Hindus to vent their ire and teach Muslims a lesson” in the wake of the Godhra train burning incident. Bhatt had filed an affidavit before the Supreme Court in this regard. Regarding Bhatt, the amicus curiae (adviser to court) said that “in my opinion, despite the aforesaid background (SIT rejecting Bhatt’s claims), it does not appear very likely that a serving police officer would make such a serious allegation against Shri Modi, the Chief Minister of the State, without some basis”.

“There is no documentary material of any nature whatsoever which can establish that Shri Bhatt was not present at the meeting on 27.02.2002. In the absence of the minutes of the meeting, there is again no documentary material available as to the participants in the meeting and what transpired at the said meeting. “Therefore, it is the word of Shri Bhatt against the word of other officers, senior to him. The SIT has chosen to believe the word of the senior officers,” Ramchandran said in his report. As a result, he said it was difficult to accept the conclusion of the SIT that Bhatt’s statement is motivated, because he has an axe to grind with the State on the issues of his career. “Though the SIT, as the investigating agency, has taken a view, the question whether Shri Bhatt was present at the meeting on 27.02.2002 and whether Shri Modi had indeed made such a statement (as spoken to by Shri Bhatt) can only be decided by a court of law. It would not be correct to disbelieve the version of Shri Bhatt, at this prima facie stage,” Ramchandran further said.

“Hence, the question to be examined is whether the making of the statement by the Chief Minister in the meeting on 27.02.2002, by itself, is an offence under law,” the amicus curiae said in his report which was submitted to the Supreme Court on July 25, 2011. The complainant Jafri was today handed over the SIT report, along the with report of the amicus curiae, by the SIT in the court of the metropolitan magistrate. Jafri’s husband and former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was among the 69 people killed at the Gulberg Society during 2002 post-Godhra riots. Zakia had accused Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 57 others of alleged criminal conspiracy in the 2002 riots.

The SIT report was handed over to Zakia in the court of metropolitan magistrate M S Bhatt here. The report has 68 volumes, 2,200 annexures, 25 CDs and 89-page index and runs into 541 pages. The document also included the independent report filed by amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran in this case. The metropolitan court has now posted the matter for hearing on May 10. During the last hearing, which was held on April 10, the court had directed the SIT to give its report, with all the related documents to Zakia before May 10. The court had also said that in the report, the SIT had given a clean chit to Chief Minister Narendra Modi and 58 others. Zakia can now file a protest petition against the closure report given by the SIT.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/946400/

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A long legal battle ahead (May 9, 2012, Hindustan Times)

Relief for Narendra Modi at being exonerated by the special investigation team (SIT) may be short-lived because the report on the Gujarat chief minister given by the amicus curiae (friend of the court), Raju Ramchandran, recommends his prosecution. “These two reports have only compounded the matter because both have given reasons for their stated conclusions. It’s a legal battle that will go on for years now,” a senior lawyer who is involved in the case said.

“This is for the first time that a lawyer appointed by the Supreme Court has recommended the prosecution of Modi. So far, we had activists, victims and the media baying for his blood. Now, the amicus curiae in his official capacity has provided grounds for prosecution,” he added. Seeking Modi’s prosecution, Ramchandran has held that the “stage for believing or disbelieving a witness arises only after the trial, once the entire evidence is placed before the court for its consideration”.

On the other hand, the SIT, seeking closure of the case, said the allegations made by the complainant (Zakia Jafri, wife of slain Congressman Ehsan Jafri) did not stand scrutiny because there was no “prosecutable evidence” and the investigation it carried out had “revealed that most of the allegations are not established or proved to be correct”.

The SIT had relied on oral statements of the Gujarat government officials, retired and serving, and other documents such as demi-official letters and fax messages. “Even if the magisterial court decides to close the case, the Supreme Court has given the complainant the first right to be heard, which means a protest petition. Subsequently, it will go to the high court and the Supreme Court, so a lengthy legal battle will continue,” the lawyer added.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/852836.aspx

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Former Guj DGP’s SIT statement belies his amnesia claim (May 10, 2012, DNA India)

Former director general of police (DGP), Gujarat, PC Pande’s memory has been playing tricks on him. He is unable to recall details of an incident two years after the event but can recollect minutiae of the same event after eight years. Pande was made chairman of the Gujarat Police Housing Board after he retired as state DGP. He was the Ahmedabad police commissioner during the horrific communal riots of 2002. In his statement before the SIT on March 24, 2010, he was able to answer some important questions about the Godhra train fire of February 27, 2002 and the two gruesome massacres that had taken place in Ahmedabad the following day. However, he was unable to recall details about the same events during his cross-examination on August 18, 2004 before the Nanavati commission of enquiry. Incidentally, in its final report, the SIT has exonerated Pande of all charges levelled against him in Zakia Jafri’s complaint.

Pande had filed a detailed affidavit before the commission in July 2002 and, in 2004, he was cross-examined before the probe panel by lawyers representing victims of the 2002 riots. According the lawyers who had cross-examined him, Pande had then claimed amnesia and declined to give clear answers to some vital questions. The SIT had taken Pande’s statement on March 24, 2010 in connection with Zakia Jafri’s complaint that it was investigating. In her petition filed before the Supreme Court, Zakia had accused chief minister Narendra Modi, state BJP leaders (including ministers) and top IAS and IPS officials of complicity in the riots. In his statement before the SIT (a copy of which is with DNA) Pande had denied Zakia’s allegation that many phone calls were made to him when the Gulbarg society was surrounded by rioters. Zakia’s husband, former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was among the 69 people killed by rioters at Gulbarg society in Ahmedabad.

“Late Ahesan Jafri, ex-MP, did not contact me either on my landline phone or mobile phone on 28-2-2002, seeking help. No one from Gulbarg society contacted me either on my landline or my mobile phone seeking help,” Pande had said in his statement to the SIT. However, during his cross examination before the Nanavati commission in August 2004, he had said: “At present, I cannot say whether I received direct distress calls from Gulbarg society at 12:25 to 12:55 noon that day because there is no noting of it and I do not remember anything about that.” He had claimed that he could not recall receiving any calls from anybody during the massacre that was taking place at a site close to his office in Shahibaug. Teesta Setalvad of Citizens for Justice Peace, the NGO which has supported Zakia in her fight for justice, has alleged that Pande had feigned amnesia during his cross-examination in 2004. However, 6 years after the cross-examination, he was able to recall all details before the SIT, Setalvad told DNA.

“How can a senior police officer do this? Why did he refuse to answers many questions before the commission by saying ‘I do not remember’ or ‘I cannot say’? Strangely, six years after the cross-examination, he was able to the answer the SIT’s questions regarding the massacres,” said Setalvad while talking to DNA. Setalvad further said that Pande had not submitted the records of the Ahmedabad city police control room before the Nanavati commission but he gave them to the SIT in 2011. “He had feigned amnesia before the Nanavati commission but was able to recall all details about the riots before the SIT. He should be prosecuted for perjury and hiding government records,” Setalvad said.The former Ahmedabadpolice commissioner had told the commission that at the meeting on February 27, 2002 at the chief minister’s official residence, Modi had no discussion either with him or the then DGP about a large-scale reaction by Hindus to the Godhra train carnage. “It was not discussed in that meeting as to what would be the fallout of the incident at Godhra and what would be the effect of the bandh that had been declared,” Pande had stated before the riots probe panel However, he demonstrated total recall before the SIT on the same issue.

“The chief minister was of the view that there could be repercussions to the Godhra incident and, as such, sufficient police bandobast should be made and all other necessary steps to maintain peace be taken,” Pande stated before the SIT. He also rejected IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt’s allegation that Modi had instructed the police to allow Hindus to vent their anger against Muslims. Pande said Bhatt was not present at the meeting. “As regards the Naroda Gam and Naroda Patiya incidents, the police dealt with the crowds outside but, unfortunately, could not know about the killings that had taken place inside as they were not visible to the police outside.” When DNA contacted him for his comments on his statements, he said: “I don’t want to speak anything about that (his statement before the SIT). Please do not waste my time.”

http://www.dnaindia.com/print710.php?cid=1686933

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Modi throws ‘sadbhavana’ in dustbin, moves SC against HC order (May 12, 2012, Twocircles.net)

Is Chief Minister Narendra Modi really sincere about ‘sadbhavna’(amity)? In September-October 2011, he held a daylong fast at all the district headquarters as also some of the taluka places with a view to strengthen harmony among communities. He also ensured that all his ‘sadbhavna’ programmes were attended by ‘topi’-clad Muslim men and burqa-covered Muslim women. In Ahmedabad from where he commenced his yatra, a controversy arose after he declined to wear a skull-cap offered by a cleric though he had put on the turban offered by other religious groups. But nobody took that incident seriously as it was dubbed as a political gimmick of Modi to show to the world that Gujarati Muslims were not against him and he had their support.

But he got a chance to prove his seriousness about ‘sadbhavna’ when the Gujarat High Court in February 2012 directed for restoration/repair of religious properties damaged or destroyed in 2002 riots. Modi is largely held responsible for the anti-Muslim pogrom that took the lives of about 1186 persons, mostly Muslims, besides destruction of properties worth hundreds of crores of rupees and displacement of about half a million of population. The order was given despite the Modi government opposing the petition filed by the Ahmedabad-based Islamic Relief Committee of Gujarat (IRCG). It had argued that as it was the responsibility of the state government to protect the life and property of its citizens, it was also the responsibility of the government to repair and restore the damaged/destroyed religious properties or pay the compensation on the pattern of the compensation paid in case of residential and commercial properties damaged or destroyed during riots.

Despite the fact that the state government had strongly opposed the IRCG plea, a two judge bench headed by Chief Justice Bhaskar Bhattacharya had ordered the state government for repair and compensation of religious places. The court had also observed that “inadequacy, inaction and negligence on the part of the state government to prevent the riots resulted in large scale destruction of religious structures across the state”. IRCG had submitted a list of over 294 such properties. Instead of implementing the order, Modi government moved the Supreme Court challenging the Gujarat high court order. Modi government’s action is in sharp contrast to the message he apparently wanted to send to the people all across the nation through his ‘sadbhavna’ fast.

Commenting on the state government moving the apex court, IRCG representative, Dr. Shakeel Ahmed said that the destruction of religious properties of Muslims during the riots had also harmed the amity and the high court order was an occasion for Modi to show that he really cared for amity by taking concrete measures to implement the order. But by challenging the order in the apex court, Dr. Ahmed said that he had made it clear that he was not sincere about ‘sadbhavna’ and his ‘sadbhavna’ programmes held in 2011 were just a political gimmick. PUCL(Gujarat chapter) president Prof. J S Bandukwala commented: “Challenging the high court verdict shows inherent bias of the Modi government against the Muslims. It is in line with his (Modi) government’s approach not to implement central sponsored pre-matric scholarship for Muslim students in Gujarat”.

http://twocircles.net/2012may12/modi_throws_%E2%80%98sadbhavana%E2%80%99_dustbin_moves_sc_against_hc_order.html

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Mecca Masjid blast accused in Nepal? (May 12, 2012, Times of India)

Two key conspirators of the Mecca Masjid bomb blast of 2007 who have remained untraced so far have reportedly fled the country and gone underground in Nepal. Efforts by sleuths of the National Investigation Agency to nab the two – Sandeep Dange alias Paramnand and Ramchandra Kalsangra alias Ramji – have met with failure. “One of the NIA teams that went to Nepal came back empty handed.

But the agency has not given up hope and is pursuing all leads in the neighbouring country,” police sources said. The NIA had issued look-out notices for the two and announced a reward of Rs 10 lakh on each. Dange and Kalsangra were RSS pracharaks hailing from Indore, Madhya Pradesh. They are alleged to have been involved in planting a bomb in Mecca Masjid that exploded on May 18, 2007, killing nine persons and injuring several others.

The two are also wanted in bomb blasts that took place on Samjhauta Express and at Ajmer dargah, Malegaon and Modasa. Earlier the CBI that was investigating the case before it was transferred to the NIA had arrested three accused – Devendra Gupta, Lokesh Sharma and Naba Kumar Sarkar alias Swami Aseemanand.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/13104089.cms

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Two accused persons of Madannapet riots surrender (May 10, 2012, Siasat)

Two persons allegedly involved in Madannapet communal riots, namely Srinivas alieas Salman Srinivas and his companion Mr. Niranjan Yadav surrendered themselves in Nampally criminal court yesterday. Special Investigation Teams of city police had declared them absconding. The other four persons namely N. Nagaraj, K. Kiran Kumar, N. Ramesh alieas Chinna and K. Sri Yadav were arrested earlier. These arrested persons, in their confession statement had admitted their guilt and had told the police that they had kept the legs of the cow in the Hanuman Temple of Madannapet and sprinkled green colour on its walls.

They further told that they had done this heinous act at the instance of SIT told that the inspecting agency will file a petition in the court to take these miscreants into its custody for further investigations. It may be noted that after keeping the legs in the Hanuman Temple, communal riots had spread in the area and the police officials were forced to clamp curfew for a week.

http://www.siasat.com/english/news/two-accused-persons-madannapet-riots-surrender

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Court orders registration of case against Nirmal Baba (May 9, 2012, Indian Express)

A local court today directed police to register a case against godman Nirmaljet Singh Nirula alias Nirmal Baba for allegedly cheating people. Chief Judicial Magistrate Rajesh Upadhyaya while accepting an application moved by two children– Tanya Thakur and Aditya Thakur — directed Gomti Nagar police to lodge a case against Nirmal Baba.

The CJM directed the police to submit investigation report before the court as per the law. The applicants alleged that Baba was fooling lakhs of people by creating fear of religion and his acts were promoting superstition. The court in its order said that submission made by the applicants regarding Baba was surely against the scientific and logical thinking of humans and falls in the category of misleading the society, superstition and cheating.

The complainants had alleged that ‘darbars’ or ‘samagams’ (meetings) of Nirmal Baba were being held in different cities, including Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, and these were being aired through various channels across the country. They alleged that people come with their problems in these meeting and accused Nirmala Baba of cheating the poor and illiterate people of the country.

The petitioners alleged that a fee of Rs 2,000 was being charged from every person attending the darbar. They said that they gave an application at Gomti Nagar police on April 10, but it was not received. The application was received next day, but no FIR was lodged. The applicants prayed that an FIR should be lodged and the matter be investigated. The court said that allowing entry into ‘samagams’ by depositing money directly into account and giving baseless and superstitions solutions amounts is not only cheating individual but the entire society and this act should be probed.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/947332/

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Supreme Court imposes interim ban on sale of Wakf properties (May 12, 2012, Times of India)

The Supreme Court on Friday imposed an interim ban on any transaction related to Wakf properties in Maharashtra and directed all parties to maintain status quo. “We direct that in relation to Wakf properties, as distinct from trusts created by Muslims, all concerned, including the charity commissioner, Mumbai, shall not permit any of the persons in management of such Wakf properties to encumber or alienate any of the properties under their management till a decision is rendered in the pending special leave petitions,” said a bench of Justices Altamas Kabir, J Chelameswar and Ranjan Gogoi. The special leave petitions had challenged the Bombay high court’s decision to vest powers of management and supervision of Muslim Wakf estates in Maharashtra in the charity commissioner. The HC had noted that the state Wakf board had not been properly constituted and that there could not be a vacuum in administering Wakf and the properties vested in them. The three-judge bench said the question before it was whether the HC had the jurisdiction to make such orders in the writ jurisdiction and vest the management of all Wakf properties in the charity commissioner.

It said there was a vast difference between Muslim Wakfs and trusts created by Muslims. While Wakf properties are dedicated to “God” and the dedicator does not retain any title over it, in the trusts, the property is not dedicated to “God” and the owning trust retains title over its property. The bench said: “In the present case, the difference between trusts and Wakfs appears to have been overlooked and the high court has passed orders without taking into consideration the fact that the charity commissioner would not ordinarily have any jurisdiction to manage Wakf properties.” “In our view, it would be in the interest of all concerned to maintain the status quo and to restrain all those in management of the Wakf properties from alienating and/or encumbering the Wakf properties during the pendency of proceedings before this court,” it added.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/13103283.cms

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Senior Indian policeman in honour killing row (May 9, 2012, BBC)

The authorities in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh state have ordered an inquiry into reports that a top police officer supported honour killings. Satish Kumar Mathur was caught on camera advising a father to kill his daughter if reports that she had eloped were confirmed. “If she was my sister, I would have either killed her or shot myself,” he is overheard as saying. Mr Mathur is the most senior police officer in the Saharanpur region.

“I have ordered a fact-finding inquiry into the comments,” the state’s Additional Director General of Police for Law, Order and Crime Jagmohan Yadav told the BBC. He said he would speak to Mr Mathur to find out in what context he made the comments. The police officer’s comments, shown on news television channels, have caused outrage across India with the National Commission for Women calling for his suspension.

“This is a matter of great shame,” Mr Mathur told a man who had come to him to report his 14-year-old daughter as missing. Mr Mathur’s comments suggested that he believed that the girl had eloped, but the girl’s father has insisted that she was kidnapped by two men. Hundreds of people are killed each year in India by their families or relatives for falling in love or marrying against their families’ wishes. Last year, the Supreme Court advocated death penalty for those convicted in honour killing cases.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-18005916

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Abducted Odisha police officer shot dead by Naxals (May 8, 2012, IBN)

Abducted police officer Krupa Ram Majhi has been shot dead by suspected Naxals in Nuapada in Odisha. The police recovered Majhi’s body from Nuapada. A team of 10 Maoists had abducted the ASI and had let off the constable accompanying him on Tuesday. ASI Krupa Ram Majhi of the Dharambandha Police Station was abducted by suspected Naxals in Nuapada on Tuesday in retaliation to a combing operation that was being carried out by the police in the Nuapada forests.

Krupa Majhi was escorting a water tanker to a CRPF camp at Goudha when he was taken away by armed men. This comes days after two hostage crisis in Odisha in a month. SP Nuapada Uma Shankar said, “The Killed ASI was not abducted. Naxals wanted to stop supply chain and after realising support of ASI to vendor, they killed him. Body has been recovered and sent for post-mortem.”

The Ministry of Home Affairs has sought a report from the Odisha government on the alleged abduction and killing of the police officer. This is the third hostage crisis in Odisha in the past two months. Earlier BJD MLA Jhina Hikaka was released on April 26 after being in the Naxals’ custody for over a month. Days before that, abducted Italian Paolo Bosusco was released by the Naxals in Odisha on April 11, after being in captivity for 29 days.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/abducted-odisha-police-officer-shot-dead-by-naxals/255974-3.html

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Opinions and Editorials

No closure – Editorial (May 11, 2012, Indian Express)

Ten years after the riots in Gujarat, many answers are still to be wrenched out of the system. However, the judiciary has shown its determination to ensure a thorough accounting – last month, a judgment on the Ode killings convicted 23 people. The Supreme Court, in particular, has taken extraordinary measures to make sure that the legal process remains untouched by powerful interests.

In 2008, responding to the petition of Zakia Jafri and the NHRC, it went out of its way to set up a special investigation team to examine nine of the most critical cases in the 2002 violence. This SIT, headed by a former CBI director, conducted exhaustive investigations, and submitted its report to the SC. However, the court, not fully satisfied, asked amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran to conduct his own investigations, and fill in some of the gaps in the report.

Now, the situation remains fraught as ever. The SIT’s findings, which exonerate Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi of any complicity in the riots, clash with the amicus curiae’s report, which says he could be prosecuted under 153A, for promoting enmity between different religious groups and 153B, for making assertions against the national interest. According to the SIT, even if Modi did say, “within the four walls of a room”, that Hindus should be allowed to vent their anger, it does not constitute an offence. This startling conclusion defies logic – how can a statement allegedly made by a chief minister to his top brass in a tense situation be brushed aside with such ease?

This when the SIT’s final report contradicts its own preliminary findings – based on DIG A.K. Malhotra’s report – about Modi’s attitude after the riots. These are not minor differences. The entire edifice of justice for 2002 hinges on these interpretations. The SIT was set up by the Supreme Court to find answers, insulated from all pressures and fears. The SIT’s glaring contradictions and lazy logic do little justice to the spirit in which it was set up making closure seem farther away than ever.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/947857/

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No cakewalk for Narendra Modi – By Achyut Yagnik (May 9, 2012, The Hindu)

The political elite of Gujarat have already set the wheels in motion for the State Assembly elections scheduled in December 2012. Both the national parties, the ruling BJP and the Congress, have started grassroots mobilisation, and their leaders have intensified verbal duels at various levels. Both have completed the first round of constituency-wise reorientation after the new delimitation of seats. Out of a total of 182 constituencies, at least 60 constituencies have either been redrawn or turned into reserved or de-reserved categories as a result of the delimitation. Such alterations in nearly one-third of constituencies have posed new challenges for both parties. Significantly, some senior Ministers holding important portfolios like Finance, Revenue and Urban Development in the State government, as well as the BJP State president, have been affected by the new delimitation of constituencies. All of them have had to relocate themselves and come to terms with new demographic equations. In the light of this, Chief Minister Narendra Modi undertook and recently completed a constituency-wise assessment to analyse the caste-class composition of voters. This is an indication that he intends to micro-manage the party’s planning for the third Assembly election under his leadership. He has already declared his intention to win 151 of the 182 seats and create a milestone in Gujarat’s political history.

However, current predictions are that it would be a tall order for him and the BJP to surpass their own earlier record of winning 127 seats in 2002, and 117 seats in the 2007 Assembly elections, even in the likelihood of his winning a third term. While the delimitation is one challenge, three other factors can frustrate Mr. Modi’s plans of achieving the record numbers he is dreaming about. The first is the rejuvenation of the Congress party in Gujarat. In the last one year, the Congress has become proactive in the State and through various ‘yatras’ and campaigns it has established new links with the people. The party’s new aggressiveness is visible at many levels – in the Assembly; in university campuses; in the local media. No doubt it is still far from putting in the shade Mr. Modi’s manoeuvrings and theatricals but the present leadership has been certainly trying to join battle with the Chief Minister on every count. Just a few weeks ago, the Congress won the by-election in Mansa, a constituency contiguous with the capital Gandhinagar, by more than 8,000 votes. As Mansa was earlier represented by a senior BJP leader and the Speaker of the Gujarat Assembly, it was a rude shock for the ruling party.

The Congress leadership has also joined hands, though on a limited scale, with grassroots struggles carried out by farmers and tribals to protect their rights over local natural resources. At another level, recently, it represented the case of cotton farmers of Saurashtra and mainland Gujarat to the Central Government and succeeded in getting the ban on cotton export lifted. Although the Congress leadership hardly takes up issues related to landless labour or marginal farmers, its support base among big and middle farmers has become stronger in recent times. Realising the growing discontent among the upper sections of farmers, the State BJP president undertook a “Kisan Yatra” but was unable to get a positive response even in his own area in Saurashtra or from his own community of Patidars, the dominant caste in Gujarat society. The second factor is widespread disaffection among poor rural communities such as pastoralists, fishworkers and labourers who depend heavily on common property resources. In the name of “development” and to project himself as “Vikas Purush,” Chief Minister Modi has handed vast tracts of coastal land and pasture land to big industrial houses. Similarly, water bodies in a number of districts in Saurashtra and Kutch, including the creeks that punctuate the coast, have been taken over by big industries, either legally or surreptitiously. It is common knowledge that pastoralists and fisherfolk have enjoyed traditional rights over such natural resources for their livelihood. They now feel deprived and distressed. Though no organised struggle has taken root, except the farmers’ struggle against the Nirma cement plant in coastal Saurashtra, many villages of Kutch and Saurashtra have knocked the doors of the Gujarat High Court for justice. Their cases are pending before the court. Perceiving the growing resentment among pastoralists, the Modi government recently announced a plan to develop pasture lands in the first phase of the coming monsoon. But leaders of the Rabaris and Bharwards – cowherds and shepherds – have called it a purely cosmetic plan. Even the Gujarati media have termed it a gimmick by the Modi government.

Mr. Modi’s personality, specifically the authoritarian and autocratic streak in him, is the third factor that can foil not only his plan to capture 151 seats in the 2012 election but may even reduce the BJP’s strength in the Gujarat Assembly. His style has seen some sangh parivar outfits, mainly the VHP and the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, distancing themselves from the present leadership. Two former BJP Chief Ministers, Keshubhai Patel and Suresh Mehta, have expressed their displeasure and disagreement with him on public platforms, either openly or metaphorically. Local BJP leaders such as Kanubhai Kalsaria have raised the banner of revolt against Mr. Modi’s development agenda in the last two years, and led the successful farmers’ movement against the Nirma cement plant. In spite of his open revolt, the BJP leadership has not been able to expel him from the party or initiate disciplinary action against him. Even as the RSS headquarters supports Mr. Modi and may project him for national leadership, local RSS leaders and workers have been resentful and may not throw themselves into Mr. Modi’s re-election campaign. While all the three factors could play a negative role in the coming elections, Mr. Modi’s development agenda makes him a hero in the eyes of the powerful and ever-expanding middle class of Gujarat, which is also magnetically attracted to his style that puts off others including his own partymen. Earlier, the middle class was made up of the upper and middle castes but with rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, the ever-growing middle class means a combination of the upper, middle, OBC and Dalit communities in Gujarat.

To make his appeal more attractive to this broadening middle class, Mr. Modi who started with the Hindutva plank added ‘Golden Gujarat’ aimed at pandering to Gujarati parochialism, and market-oriented “development” to his plans and propaganda. Such a mix of three messages has granted him phenomenal popularity among the middle class in the State; with its unconditional support, he equates himself with Gujarat and any criticism against his actions is perceived as criticism of Gujarat and Gujaratis. It is noteworthy that while the Hindu middle class does not constitute the majority of Gujarat’s population, its social composition coupled with the State’s human geography give its members a decisive say in the urban and rural areas of Gujarat. There is no one in the Congress leadership who holds comparable attraction for the middle class, or enjoys its confidence in the same way. Also, compared to the BJP’s deep penetration in local power structures – the panchayats, city municipal corporations, the extensive cooperative networks or educational institutions – the Congress has limited influence. Neither is the Congress articulate enough to change the terms of the debate set by Mr. Modi. The party has not been able to question the development model or propose alternatives or bring up issues of justice for the victims of the 2002 carnage. Nor does it have influence with the Gujarati diaspora which is campaigning relentlessly but unsuccessfully to get Mr. Modi a U.S. visa and validating his non-inclusive development model in the western world. Yet, with its recent burst of energy in the State, the Congress may improve its performance in the next Assembly elections. Still it does seem unlikely that it will be able to dislodge the BJP from power. It is certain that after the 2012 Assembly elections, Mr. Modi will start focussing on his next challenge, the 2014 national elections. Whether the national middle class would extend wholehearted support to him and establish him as a national leader is an open question.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3398216.ece

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Marching to different tunes – Editorial (May 7, 2012, Hindustan Times)

At the end of each tunnel, rather than there being light, there seems to another tunnel for the BJP. In recent times, it has had its hands full with the Karnataka crisis, now it has the Rajasthan mess to contend with. Rajasthan BJP leader Vasundhara Raje has threatened to quit primary membership of the party and 60 of the BJP’s MLAs in the assembly have offered to quit in support of her. The bone of contention was a proposed yatra by senior leader Gulabchand Kataria ostensibly to highlight the failures of the Congress both at the Centre and the state though many feel that the actual intent was to project himself as the future chief minister. The yatra has now been called off.

For BJP president Nitin Gadkari who is seeking a second term at the end of this year, the political stars have been out of alignment for a while now. The Central Bureau of Investigation has insisted that former president and future prime ministerial hopeful LK Advani must face conspiracy charges in the Babri Masjid case. Another former president Bangaru Laxman is in the clink on corruption charges. All these are political upheavals Mr Gadkari could have done without. But the fundamental contradiction that he needs to resolve to get the party back on track is that between the vision of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP. It is no secret that Mr Kataria is being backed by the Sangh.

It is also clear now that the BJP will, under pressure from the RSS, amend its constitution in or after its national executive later this month to pave the way for a second term for Mr Gadkari. So, it is clear that Mr Gadkari cannot really strike out on his own and take the party in a direction which contradicts the RSS’s gameplan. The RSS is clear that it wants the BJP to stick to its core competence, that of Hindutva. But seeing that it is fetching diminishing electoral returns, many in the party’s leadership want to project the BJP as an inclusive and modern alternative to the Congress. The UPA government is severely hobbled on many counts. Yet, apart from reacting to developments, the BJP has not been able to either come up with a vote-catching issue or fashion itself as an attractive option.

There are undercurrents of tension within its top leadership and despite the fact that many do not favour another term for Mr Gadkari, they will have to go along with the RSS diktat. A supposedly apolitical formation dictating terms to a political party cannot work at the best of times. The result of the RSS’s backseat driving has been to prevent the BJP from evolving its own unique brand. There is no doubt that Mr Gadkari wants to shake up the party and make it fighting fit by the time the general elections take place in 2014. But with the RSS cramping his style, his efforts amount to running a one-legged race. It would seem that he will have to go through several tunnels, if he is re-elected, before he glimpses the light.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/852251.aspx

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Last shot at justice – Editorial (May 2, 2012, The Hindu)

The Supreme Court’s ruling on the requirement of previous sanction to prosecute soldiers accused of committing crimes may have clarified matters as far as the legal provisions of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act are concerned but for the families of the five innocent men who were killed in a fake encounter at Pathribal, Jammu and Kashmir, in March 2000, it is still not clear whether or not they will receive justice. According to the chargesheet filed in the case by the Central Bureau of Investigation in 2006, the five Kashmiris were picked up at random by the security forces from in and around Anantnag and taken to a desolate place where they were killed in cold blood.

An FIR was filed by a detachment of Army men from the 7 Rashtriya Rifles in which the claim was made that the five slain individuals were the terrorists who were responsible for the massacre of Sikh villagers in Chittisinghpora a few days before the ‘encounter’. The bodies of the five were exhumed and claimed as their own by villagers who had complained about their family members going missing just before the ‘encounter’. DNA testing was done to establish their identity in two stages. In the first stage, the samples were deliberately switched to thwart the investigation. When this was exposed, a second test was done which conclusively fixed the identity of the five. This was in 2003. A case of murder was then registered and the matter entrusted to the CBI.

The CBI quickly established the sordid facts and filed a chargesheet in a Srinagar court in 2006. Six years had already elapsed. That court offered the Army the chance of trying its men before a court martial but the offer was not accepted. It has taken another six years for the legal battles which ensued to finally be resolved, with the Supreme Court upholding the claim of the accused soldiers that Central government sanction was needed to prosecute them. By asking the Army to take a decision on whether it intends to court martial the accused, the Supreme Court has cut through the careful posturing of the Ministry of Defence on the matter. It bears noting that at no stage did the Ministry seek to discharge its own obligation to ensure justice under the Army Act in the face of the cold-blooded killing of five innocent civilians by senior officers. That obligation can no longer be shrugged aside.

The CBI has been directed to seek sanction to prosecute from the government if the court martial option is not exercised within eight weeks, and a decision on that request has to be taken within three months. For the families of the victims, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. For their sake, and the sake of Indian democracy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must do the right thing and ensure that the prosecution gets to have its day in court.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article3374520.ece

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The comic republic – Editorial (May 14, 2012, The Hindu)

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul”, B.R. Ambedkar said in a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, just before putting the Constitution of India to vote. “But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”. If only the parliamentarians who vented their anger against a 1949 cartoon last week had bothered to read and understand the hero in whose unnecessary defence they sprang up, Indian democracy would have been spared the degrading spectacle of the government banishing a sixty-year-old sketch from the classroom.

The sight of our parliamentarians cutting across the political spectrum foaming at the mouth in simulated rage, vying to outdo each other in their pious indignation, and sporting their ‘hurt’ sentiments like badges of honour was like watching a bad soap opera gone worse. That they could have spent the day grandstanding over a totally inoffensive cartoon is not merely deplorable. It is also downright dangerous, if we pause to consider that these are the men and women we elect to safeguard our constitutional democracy, of which the freedom of expression is a fundamental and inviolable part. Disrupting Parliament would have been unjustifiable even if the cartoon were repugnant. But to create a controversy over a comment on the slow speed with which the Constitution was being drafted, on the absurd ground that the cartoon “insulted” Ambedkar, was downright ridiculous.

The demand that criminal action be taken against those who permitted the cartoon’s publication is reflective of a larger malaise among many of India’s politicians. Apparently, they think there is more political mileage in creating controversies over irrelevancies than addressing genuine issues facing Dalits such as backwardness and discrimination. Predictably, the Centre’s response was one of total capitulation, reflected in HRD Minister Kapil Sibal’s craven apology, his agreement that the cartoon was “shameful,” and his promise of even criminal action in the matter. That there is a slippery slope between hostile speech and violent behaviour was manifest when the office of one of the scholars involved in the production of the textbook was ransacked by vandals.

The argument that the cartoon could be misconstrued by the 11th standard schoolchildren who read the textbook is bogus and an insult to their intelligence. It is our MPs who showed a total lack of acumen and wisdom by wasting the nation’s time on a complete non-issue. Worse, they have ensured that public life in India, already awash with hurt sentiments of one kind or another, will now be inundated by a torrent of demands to ban more and more expressions of culture, art and knowledge.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article3415779.ece

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Politics Through Food Habits – By Ram Puniyani (May 12, 2012, Countercurrents)

In the middle of April 2012 Osmania University (OU) witnessed an unusual violence on the issue of eating beef. A section of dalit students’ were demanding that University Hostels should have beef on the menu. They also organized a beef festival in which a large number of students ate beef biryani. The festivity was not to last long as the ABVP, the student wing of RSS, created rampage, a student was knifed, a bus was torched and ruckus was created in the university. The Vice Chancellor of OU knelt to the aggressive cow protectors and said that beef will not be introduced in the menu. Just a month ago the in the Kurmaguda area of Hyderabad a group of youth associated with Hindu communal group were arrested for throwing beef inside a Hanuman temple, who later spread the word that Muslims have defiled our temple and turned their guns against the hapless minority, torched few buses. A little while ago the ruling BJP government in Madhya Pradesh had introduced a bill prohibiting the consumption of beef in the state. Other BJP ruled states in one form or the other are introducing legislations, which prohibit the slaughter of cow. The place where Muslims were butchered mercilessly under the Chief mastership of Modi the ‘care of cow’ has gone one step up and state has opened centers for cataract and dental surgery of the Mother Cow. The goal of the Hindu state of Gujarat under Modi is to open more such centers so that Mother cow does not have to travel more than three kilometers for accessing these services, this while innumerable victims of Gujarat carnage, are yet to recover from the trauma of the carnage, aided by the apathy of state.

So far most of these legislations and the accompanying propaganda have been directed primarily against Muslim minority, which is demonized as the butchers and eaters of ‘our holy cow’. The OU episode shows the other side of the agenda of cow politics. While there had been cases of murders of dalits on the pretext of skinning a dead cow (Jhajjar, Haryana) and VHP defending the act saying that cow is too holy to spare the dalits. Still primarily it is the Muslim community which has been the target of propaganda emanating from RSS- Combine stable. With dalits, the other target of RSS combine, the issue is not just of identity. It is related to the livelihood and food habits of dalits-Adivasis. The cow as a symbol of RSS combine has been in the fore since the rise of communal politics during the British rule. As such the cow has been in the forefront of communal battles of upper castes in India earlier also. The Brahmanical reaction to rise of Buddhism was countered by putting forward the symbol of cow. Some Dalit scholars hold that cow was cleverly chosen and one of the reasons cow stole a march over the equally useful buffalo was its color. It is not a coincidence that the dark skinned people have faced the wrath of the elite in one form or the other.

The scholars of Vedic India Prof D.N.Jha, Dr. Pandurang Vaman Kane and champion of social justice Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, all have pointed out that cow was verily eaten during Vedic period. With the rise of agricultural society, and need for preserving cattle wealth; the religions-ideologies promoting non-violence in the form of Jainism and Buddhism came up and campaigned against senseless sacrifice of cow in Vedic yagnas (sacrificial ritual). The current communal politics has twin agenda. At surface it wants to subjugate the minorities and is using the emotive issues to create a mass hysteria against minorities. Lord Ram and Cow are the major tools of communal political mobilization. While the supporters of RSS combine generously donate for the welfare of cow, it is the dalits who practically take care of the grazing and other needs of Holy mother. Last some time a pressure is being built up culturally and politically that beef eating communities give up this integral part of their habit. The food patterns are changing under intense propaganda still as of now the consumption of beef in India is higher than that of mutton and chicken put together. Its export is also a major business. The RSS combine on one side aims to subjugate the Minorities and on the other wants to maintain the status quo of social relationship of caste and gender. These are subtle and overt maneuvers implemented through political and cultural conduits. Attitude of communal politics to dalits has been a complex one.

The anti dalit violence of 1980 against reservation, the anti OBC violence of 1986 against promotion of OBCs in jobs, and its strengthening of Kamandal politics (Rath Yatra and the Babri demolition) in response to Mandal were a part of this. At another level the strategy is to co-opt dalits into Hindutva fold. From middle of decades of 1980s RSS has activated Samajik Samrasta Manch (Social Harmony Forum) which has been mobilizing dalits around that. The Gurus like Sri Sri Ravishanker have been saying that there should be harmony between upper and lower caste, while he keeps quiet about the prevalent social injustice in various forms. The aim of the communal politics is to maintain the status quo of caste and gender. Through Samajik Samrasta Manch the message of undermining caste atrocities and social injustice is actively propagated. Supplementing this is the cultural assertion and imposition of elite norms on the whole society. Food habits are a part of culture and for large sections of dalits and Adiviasis beef had been an integral part of their food. Incidentally there is a vigorous campaign to promote vegetarianism and denigrate non vegetarian food practices.

While the large section of dalits is struggling for social and economic justice, a section of dalits is undergoing the process of sanskritization as well. It is in this light that the symbols of dalit assertion in the matters of food habits and cultural expressions are being attacked openly. The compromised state apparatus is not able to stand up to this onslaught of communal politics to preserve the social and democratic rights of dalits and other marginalized sections of society, be it the matters of their physical security, questions of equity and food habits. It is a blatant attempt to manipulate culture, to impose elite norms, through influencing the food habits, which are so much cultural in their nature. It seems Mother Cow may be the major emotive weapon to be used for the politics deriving its legitimacy from Hindu religions’ identity. Interestingly it reveals the twin goals of this politics. At surface it is to reduce the minorities to a status of second class citizen and at deeper level to subjugate dalits at social, political and cultural level.

http://www.countercurrents.org/puniyani120512.htm

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – May 7th, 2012

by newsdigest on May 7, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup

News Headlines

Opinions & Editorials

Book Review

Modi NOT eligible for diplomatic visa: US embassy (May 4, 2012, Rediff)

The United States consulate in New Delhi has informed US Senator Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi is not eligible to receive a diplomatic visa. Aziz Haniffa reports. On the urging of his Indian American constituents, led by activist Tarun Surti of Nashville, Tennessee – one of Modi’s staunchest supporters in the US – and several senior members of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, the majority of whom have origins in Gujarat and are ardent fans of Modi, Corker had contacted the US embassy in New Delhi to explore the possibility of Modi being granted a diplomatic visa to visit the US. But Surti said he had received a call from Corker’s office “notifying me that the ‘Diplomatic Visa’ is not available to Sri Narendrabhai Modi.” He said, “The US embassy in Delhi informed the senator’s office that such visa are reserved for federal government employees only and not available to state government officials.”

Surti said, Corker’s office had also been notified by “The US embassy in Delhi that it is unwilling to address the illegal revocation of Sri Narendrabhai’s visa and now wants him to reapply for visa.” “He will be insulted a third time assuming that the US embassy in Delhi again rejects his visa application,” Surti complained, and added, “Narendrabhai has been insulted twice before and does not need another insult.” An aide to Corker, confirmed to rediff.com that the senator had been informed that Modi is not eligible for a diplomatic visa and that if he applies for a visitor’s visa “it will be considered on its merits,” but that there “is no guarantee that he will be issued one.” Evidently, seeing the writing on the wall, the hierarchy of AAHOA, which had been considering inviting Modi to keynote its annual convention last week in Atlanta, Georgia, had given up on the idea, fearing that he would be embarrassed once again by being refused a visa. In March 2005, Modi was denied a visa for his alleged complicity in Gujarat’s sectarian violence in 2002 – which left nearly 2,000 people, mainly Muslims dead – when he had applied for a visa to attend the annual convention of the AAHOA, where he was to deliver the keynote address. Interestingly, the refusal at the time came just two days after the visit to New Delhi of then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and although the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance government had no love lost for Modi, it summoned Robert Blake, the then US deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Delhi, and lodged a strong protest over Washington’s decision called it “uncalled for.”

The External Affairs Ministry at the time said, “The action on the part of the US embassy is uncalled for and displays lack of courtesy and sensitivity towards a constitutionally elected chief minister of a state of India.” The US embassy at the time said Modi’s tourist and business visa issued in 1998, had been revoked and there was no chance he would be issued a diplomatic visa either. Earlier, the US embassy said Modi’s tourist and business visa, issued in 1998, had been revoked and he would not get a diplomatic visa either. At the time, an angry Modi called the US decision “an insult to the Indian constitution and an attack on Indian sovereignty.” But the US held firm and did not issue him a visa, saying the decision had been taken under the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “under which any foreign government official responsible for serious violation of religious freedom is ineligible for a visa.” The state department said, “The US law is clear that states or government officials responsible for carrying out serious violations of religious freedom are ineligible for a visa.” Last month, Surti had called upon AAHOA to invite Modi to keynote AAHOA’s annual convention and the past and present leadership of AAHOA has contacted several US lawmakers on this issue and urged them to prevail on the State Department to permit Modi to visit the US. It was on their urging that last month a US lawmaker, Congressman Joe Walsh had launched a campaign to prevail on the Obama administration to grant a diplomatic visa to Modi.

Walsh, who is vulnerable in his district in the upcoming November elections and needs all the financial support he can muster as he has been targetted by Democrats as one of the most vulnerable Republicans, wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to “consider granting a diplomatic visa to Chief Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian State of Gujarat.” “Ten years have passed since the violence in Gujarat and much progress has been made. Mr Modi has been recognised across the world for establishing Gujarat as the most business-friendly state in India and is widely believed to be a serious contender for the 2014 election for Indian Prime Minister,” he added. Last November, Blake, while acknowledging the economic progress and the exponential growth in Gujarat, which has made it an attractive state for investment by American business and industry, said that there has been no review on the issuance of a visa for Modi to travel to America. “No, there are no new developments on that,” Blake said. “But as you say, Gujarat itself remains a very important place for American investment. It’s shown itself to be a very welcoming environment for American business to flourish. And we’ll continue to promote investment, encourage investment into that state.” An incensed Surti, on hearing of Corker’s unsuccessful attempt to get the US embassy to grant Modi a visa, said, “I do not know if Narendrabhai really needs US visa because he is busy taking care of his people and country.” “He has brought prosperity, stability and social harmony among the people of Gujarat and therefore Gujarat has become the best examples in the nation. And, now the world has recognised him as the most beloved leader of India,” he added. Surti declared, “Don’t we all wish that US embassy in Delhi will wake up and recognise the truth.” He said, “The US embassy in Delhi has insulted all of us by failing to correct a decision that was based on false accusations,” and described such action as “totally un-American.”

Surti argued, “It is wrong of US embassy to make a decision based on false allegation that is not supported by any judicial branch of India or the US. Besides, he has proven during last 10 years that he is not a monster as portrayed by the US embassy and his opponents who condone Islamic terrorists.” “Second, the current population of India, including all minorities, is in favor of him being the next prime minister of India,” he claimed. Surti warned, “It is time that US recognise this fact and correct its mistake before Modi becomes the next prime minister of India.” He called for “A day of fasting on October 2, 2012 by all India-American and people of India to protest the unwillingness of US embassy to correct their mistake by reinstating Modi’s visa.” Surti said, “As a tax paying citizens of this country we have a right to demand from our government a fair and responsible attitude. Let us all join together and hold a gathering in every town in peaceful and non-violent manner to bring this issue to the American people and politicians.” He said he was currently contacting community leaders “who are willing to take part in this event.”

http://m.rediff.com/news/report/modi-not-eligible-for-diplomatic-visa-us-consulate/20120504.htm

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9 get life term in Ode riots case (May 5, 2012, Deccan Herald)

A special court in Anand on Friday awarded life imprisonment to nine people and acquitted 31 for killing three members of a Muslim family during the 2002 post-Godhra riots in Gujarat. Pronouncing the judgement, Judge R N Sareen convicted 9 of the 41 accused on charges of murder, rioting and criminal conspiracy. This was the third riot case in Ode village of Anand district in which the verdict has been delivered.

Last month another special court had convicted 23 accused in a separate riot case which had resulted in the death of 23 persons. Of the 23 convicted in the case 18 were sentenced to life in prison. The case was probed by the Supreme Court appointed special investigation team headed by former Central Bureau of Investigation director R K Raghavan. Three Muslims were killed in the Malwa Vagol area of Ode village on March 1, 2002, following the Godhra train carnage. The SIT had registered cases against 41 persons based on the complaint filed by Rehana Yusuf Vohra. One of the alleged accused had died during the course of trial. Those killed in the incident were identified as Ayesh Vohtra, Nooriben Vohra and Qadir Vohra.

During the course of the trial, the court had examined 67 witnesses and almost 100 documents were scrutinised by the court. Sixteen of the witnesses had turned hostile. Public Prosecutor B C Trivedi said: “The court had upheld its argument on the criminal conspiracy charges against the accused in the case. “However, the court rejected the arguments of the prosecution that since it was the rarest of the rare case capital punishment should be handed out.”

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/246888/9-get-life-term-ode.html

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’4 Maharashtra blasts, Malegaon linked’ (Apr 30, 2012, Times of India)

The National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing saffron terror cases, has found evidence that blasts in Purna, Parbhani, Jalna and Nanded between 2003 and 2006 are all connected with the perpetrators of Malegaon blasts, although in a peculiar way. All these blasts, in Marathwada region of central Maharashtra, were carried out by proteges of Sunil Joshi, the mastermind of the Malegaon and Samjhauta Express blasts. The agency has found that Himanshu Panse, Sanjay Chaudhari and several of their associates, all accused in the series of blasts through 2003-2006 in central Maharashtra, were actually trained by Joshi’s group that allegedly executed the Malegaon, Samjhauta Express, Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid blasts.

In fact, it was Joshi’s group that had taught Panse how to assemble bombs and arranged for his training in Pune’s Singhgadh area and other places including the Bhonsala Military School, sources said. A senior NIA official said, “There is evidence that Panse and some others from his group used to frequently go to Madhya Pradesh, particularly Dewas, and had some connection with Sunil Joshi. We have learnt that Joshi’s group was in fact training them since early 2000 as part of their larger plan to target Muslims across the country. Panse and others were Joshi’s foot-soldiers.” Despite this close connection, however, NIA says the Marathwada blasts were not sanctioned by Joshi or Abhinav Bharat. “Joshi’s group had trained these men as a sleeper module, who would be used later when the group was fully prepared to execute big attacks. However, the overenthusiastic Panse group started making bombs and attack plans on its own, much to the detriment of Joshi’s plans,” said the official.

“After the first couple of blasts, they were even reprimanded by the Joshi group for executing what the group called ‘chillar blasts’,” another official said. Sources said Joshi’s group also feared that with their reckless blasts, Panse’s group was likely to expose the larger designs of Hindu terror. “And that’s exactly what happened in the 2006 Nanded blasts in which the bomb meant to be exploded in Aurangabad went off in the house of one of the accused, killing Panse. Thankfully for Joshi, his group’s name did not figure on the radar then.” This development has now brought all Hindu terror cases, except the recent attacks and arrests in Mewat district of Haryana, under one umbrella of the Joshi group. While the Nanded blast has been investigated by the CBI, the other Marathwada blasts have been chargesheeted by Maharashtra ATS.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/12929722.cms

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Advani must be tried for Babri Masjid conspiracy: CBI to SC (May 7, 2012, Times of India)

The CBI has told the Supreme Court that it was not only against dropping of conspiracy charges against BJP leader L K Advani in the Babri Masjid demolition case but also wanted him and other leaders to face trial along with the accused kar sevaks. In the demolition incident, two FIRs were lodged. FIR No. 197/92 was against kar sevaks who allegedly demolished the mosque while FIR No. 198/92 had named Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Uma Bharti, Vinay Katiyar, Ashok Singhal, Giriraj Kishore, Vishnu Hari Dalmiya and Sadhvi Rithambara for making provocative speeches to instigate kar sevaks.

The CBI in its recent affidavit said, “It is not possible to separate some of the accused persons from 197/92 because they did not have a personal hand in the actual demolition of the disputed structure and be transposed as accused in 198/92.” The agency added, “It is incorrect to state that case crime no. 197/92 and 198/92 are two different cases and facts and the place of occurrence are different. The investigations by CBI had disclosed that there was a single larger conspiracy to demolish the disputed structure on December 12, 1992 and various accused so charged in the consolidated chargesheet in all the 49 cases played their own roles in achieving the object of the said criminal conspiracy.”

On Advani’s role, the CBI said, “Before the demolition started and during the course of demolition, various accused persons including the eight named in the FIR of crime no. 198/92, made provocative slogans from the manch (dais) causing the assembly to turn unlawful resulting in rioting and storming of the structure by the kar sevaks.” In its 30-page affidavit, the CBI said, “As and when the domes fell, the accused leaders and others on the manch celebrated the same by clapping, hugging each other and distributed sweets on the manch which was at a visible distance of 175 metres from the disputed structure.

“All the offences of shouting of provocative slogans creating enmity between two communities, affecting national integration as well as the demolition of the structure and assault on media persons not to create (sic) record of what was going on, formed part of the same transaction and could not be separated from each other.” It also quoted a February 12, 2001 judgment of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court. Through the affidavit, the CBI at one go challenged the HC’s 2010 judgment putting its stamp of approval on dropping of conspiracy charges against Advani, separation of trial of the two FIRs and the dropping of charges altogether against Bal Thackeray and 12 others on the ground that they were not present in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/13026859.cms

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Staged shootout: Charges framed against Rajasthan IPS officer (May 1, 2012, Yahoo)

A court here Tuesday framed charges against suspended Indian Police Service (IPS) officer A.K. Jain in the case of killing of criminal Dara Singh in a staged shoot-out, a lawyer said. Jain had surrendered before a court in Jaipur on Feb 27, nine months after he disappeared fearing arrest by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). “After the cognizance of his chargesheet was taken, the district and sessions court, Jaipur determined charges against him under various sections of Indian Penal Code. Trial against him will be held under these sections,” said CBI’s special public prosecutor Sarfaraz Haider Khan.

IPC sections against Jain include section 120B (criminal conspiracy), to be read with sections 302 (murder), 346 (wrongful confinement) and 364 (kidnapping in order to murder). Jain is among the two IPS officers who are accused in the case. IPS officer A. Ponnuchami had been arrested in May last year. The CBI has also arrested Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Rajendra Singh Rathore at whose alleged behest, Dara Singh was gunned down in the fake gunfight on Oct 23, 2006.

Apart from Ponnuchami, the CBI arrested ten other policemen – Additional Superintendent of Police Arsad Ali, Inspectors Nisar Khan, Naresh Sharma and Subhash Godara, sub-inspectors Satyanarayan Godara and Munshi Lal, assistant sub-inspector Surendra Singh, constables Jagraj and Bardi Prasad and driver Sardar Singh – in the case. Three other policemen – Rajesh Chaudhary, Zulfikar and Arvind – are still on the run.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/staged-shootout-charges-framed-against-rajasthan-ips-officer-154450004.html

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BJP MLA booked for inciting communal violence (May 1, 2012, Times of India)

The Uttarakhand police on Monday booked BJP MLA Rajkumar Thukral for fanning communal violence in Udham Singh Nagar on October 2 last year, in which four people were killed and 35 others, including 12 policemen, wounded. In the riots that followed, several shops were set ablaze and curfew was imposed for more than a week.

“Civil judge Reena Negi directed the police to book Thukral on the basis of an application filed by one Suhel Ahmed,” said DIG, Nainital, Deepak Jyoti Ghildiyal, adding that the application was filed a few days after the communal violence broke out. Ahmed had alleged that Thukral, 45, had incited anti-social elements into firing at members of the minority community and burn their shops. Apart from the BJP MLA, 17 others were booked under similar charges. Thukral was elected from Udham Singh Nagar on January 30 this year.

A senior police officer said that the process to investigate cases against the BJP MLA has been initiated. Asked for his reaction, Thukral told TOI, “It’s strange that the cases have been registered seven months after the violence. This has been done at the ruling Congress’s behest. My image is being tarnished.” He added, “I have full faith in the police and the judiciary.” Thukral has been booked on charges of murder, inciting violence, provoking communal attacks and indulging in loot.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/12945377.cms

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Mining greed behind Rajasthan mosque demolition: report (May 4, 2012, The Hindu)

A fact-finding report on the recent demolition of a century-old rooftop mosque at Pur in Rajasthan has held “crony capitalism” and “mining greed” responsible for the incident. It demanded a judicial inquiry into the role of a corporate house, ruling Congress leaders and a section of the clergy in making the deal for sale of the place of worship. Jindal Saw Limited, owned by the O.P. Jindal Group, bought the mosque from the Anjuman Committee of Pur for Rs. 65 lakh and demolished it on April 19 to make way for mining on the Tiranga hills where it was situated. The Anjuman had stated that it had obtained “guidance” for the act from the State Waqf Board.

Jaipur-based Irada Society, working for the socio-economic uplift of Muslims, released the report here on Thursday following its president Prof. Mohammed Hasan visit to Pur. It said the demolition was the end result of a “nexus of interests” for exploitation of precarious community resources. Prof. Hasan said the lease was given ignoring the presence of religious and archaeological heritage and natural resources in the area. The report had raised questions over the controversial fatwa issued by an Imam stating that the structure was a cluster of graves and the speed with which the correspondence was conducted between the Anjuman and the Waqf Board two days before the demolition. Interestingly, Waqf Board Chairman Liaqat Ali Khan was the first to rush to the Pur site after the mosque was razed.

Prof. Hasan said there was a “marked contrast” in the language of two letters written by Mr. Khan on the issue. In his letter dated April 18, he advised the Anjuman to act “in the interest of Waqf and in accordance with the Shariah provisions.” Later, he wrote to the Bhilwara Collector on April 23 asking him to reconstruct the mosque and take stringent action against the violators. Muslim groups here have alleged that bribes over Rs. 65 lakhs had changed hands. The reconstruction of the mosque is in progress. Prof. Hasan, who taught at the Harish Chandra Mathur State Institute of Public Administration here, is a member of the State Government’s Rajiv Gandhi Social Security Mission.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3381462.ece

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Petition filed in SC against Haraze, team members (May 3, 2012, Hindustan Times)

A petition has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking action against anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and his team members for allegedly showing disrespect to national flag during his agitation for lokpal bill.

The petitioner LK Venkat, a Chennai resident, alleged that during the agitation in December last year the associates of Hazare had shown disrespect to the national flag and the government failed to take any action despite a complaint filed against them. He has made Hazare and his associates Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal parties in the case.

“During the course of the agitation, Hazare and his associates had flown the national flag at half mast in public and also shown the flag on the ground in public and also mutilated and defaced the flag,” Venkat said. “The petitioner had already made the representations before the concerned authorities but they failed to take any action in the matter against them.”

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/850184.aspx

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Rights of tribals at the core of Maoist conflict, says mediator (May 6, 2012, The Hindu)

The conflict between the Government and the Maoists in the tribal areas didn’t start with the abduction of Sukma Collector Alex Paul Menon and it would not end with his release, observed B. D. Sharma, the mediator who secured Mr. Menon’s freedom after two weeks in captivity. Addressing a Press conference here on Saturday, Mr. Sharma said: “At the core of the clash between the governments and the Maoists lies the question of ownership of jal, jangal and zameen of the tribals, who used to be the owners of the mineral-rich region, and the model of development which the governments, State as well as the Union, are thrusting upon them.”

Referring to the “understanding” reached between the Chhattisgarh Government and Maoists, he hoped the temporary ceasefire in Operation Green Hunt will lead to an era of peace. However, he added: “Only astrologers can predict the longevity of the current ‘ceasefire’.” The former District Magistrate of Bastar talked about the situation prevailing in the tribal region while highlighting the government’s failure in protecting the rights of tribals.

“When I asked a local tribal in Bastar about the difference the Maoists’ presence has made to his life, he replied that the tribals don’t get troubled by the patwari and the daroga ,” Mr. Sharma said. Talking about the “inherent contradiction” in the government’s policy on tribals, Mr. Sharma said instead of resolving core issues like rights over forests, forest produce, people’s rights over land and resources, and the trader-contractor-politician nexus, governments have signed hundreds of memoranda of understanding with foreign and domestic companies for exploitation of minerals without the consent of the local people.

“Our Prime Minister calls the tribal people poor! How can you call the community poor which historically and naturally used to own and cultivate the mineral-rich region and its resources?” he said. Mr. Sharma regretted that the Bhuria Committee’s 1996 recommendation regarding community ownership of industry had not been adopted still.

He said tribals had not been given any stake in the present model of development despite the Centre having envisaged carving out a zone to ensure the partnership of tribals in development. He highlighted the “open violation” of the provisions of the Panchayat (Extension to Schedule Areas) Act, 1996 (PESA) – the PESA had envisaged that “every Gram Sabha shall be competent to safeguard and preserve the tradition and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community resources and the customary mode of the dispute resolution.”

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/article3389875.ece

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Constable awarded life imprisonment for rape of Dalit woman (May 3, 2012, DNA India)

A local court here has awarded life sentence to a constable for raping a Dalit woman four years ago. Constable Akhilesh Yadav has been awarded life imprisonment for the rape of a Dalit woman in Samrakhapur village under Asandra police station area of February 5, 2008.

The constable in an inebriated condition barged into the house of the victim when she was alone with her two minor kids while on patrol duty and raped her at gun point, sources said.

After hearing both the sides, Special Additional District Judge Kalpana Misra pronounced the verdict yesterday.

http://www.dnaindia.com/print710.php?cid=1684127

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Opinions and Editorials

Modi’s Gujarat: Propaganda masks below-average growth – By Neena Vyas (Apr 20, 2012, Deccan Herald)

‘Gujarat is poised to lead national reconstruction … promoting growth and development and excellence in all walks of life.’ – www.narendramodi.in. The celebrations have begun. On April 10, it was officially disclosed in court that the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team has recommended closure of the Gulberg Society massacre case finding no actionable evidence to prosecute Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. Immediately, political pundits started predicting Modi’s ascent to the national political stage. The last hurdle in Modi’s path had been crossed. He could now get on with the task of doing for India what he has already done for Gujarat: make it shine. Modi has been anxious to leave behind the 2002 pogrom and metamorphose into the ‘development man.’

One could be forgiven for mistaking Modi’s new mask to be his real face, for had not ‘Time’ magazine’s Asian edition cover story on Modi last month endorsed him as the new ‘vikas purush.’ Indian media institutions have made it a habit to praise Modi for efficient governance, as have corporate honchos, who hail him as the most investor-friendly of all chief ministers. Modi was the winner of ‘best chief minister’ title in a recent Mood of the Nation survey by India Today-Nielson. He was declared the favourite for the prime ministerial position in 2014. Click www.narendramodi.in to read the long list of awards and accolades he has won over a decade. If in 2005 Advani tried unsuccessfully to play the ‘I love Jinnah, therefore I am secular’ role in the hope the country would forget his support to 1992 Talibanesque act of razing to the ground the Babri Masjid, Modi has been desperately trying to emerge as the ‘development man,’ putting behind him the 2002 carnage, even as he repeatedly trips over the many skeletons of ‘encounter’ killings that pop out of his state cupboard. The question is: has he made Gujarat shine? Is Gujarat shining more than Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Haryana or Karnataka? Has Gujarat under Modi achieved something that no other state has?

The hard fact is Gujarat has not been able to bag top position for even one of several key socio-economic indicators: life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, literacy and investment – although in 2001 when Modi took charge, Gujarat was already a well developed state, holding 4th state rank for per capita net state domestic product in mid-1996. Currently Haryana holds top rank, while Gujarat is at 6th position as it has mostly been since 1970s. Last year, the National Council of Applied Economic Research reached the disturbing conclusion that hunger and malnourishment levels in Gujarat were higher than in Uttar Pradesh. The 61st National Sample Survey established that 44.6 per cent children in Gujarat were malnourished and 66 per cent in 0 to 5 age group were anaemic. A larger percentage of children went to bed hungry in Gujarat than in Uttar Pradesh. Life expectancy is a good indicator of nutrition and health services. In Gujarat it was two years shorter than the all-India average of 66.1 in 2006-10 (Registrar General of India). The average Gujarati dies two years earlier than the average Indian and ten years before a Keralite, where at 73.9 years, life expectancy is the highest. Several states, including Maharashtra, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, have bettered the national average.

In Modi’s ‘garvi Gujarat,’ infant mortality rate fell 10 points from 60 to 50 from 2001-08, when the national average IMR fell 13 points from 66 to 53. States that ought to be compared to Gujarat performed better: Maharashtra IMR down 12 points from 45 to 33; Tamil Nadu lower by 18 points to 31 and Karnataka down 13 points to 45. The sample registration system showed mothers in Gujarat fared no better than their newborns. Between 2004 and 2009 maternal mortality rate in Gujarat fell by 12 points from 160 to 148. Many states did out-shine Gujarat: in Kerala MMR was down 14 points from 95 to 81; Tamil Nadu lowered it by 14 points to 97 and Maharashtra 26 points from 130 to 104. The national average came down by 40 points from 254 to 212. These statistics are a telling beam of light that dissipate the fog of Modi’s propaganda. Take literacy. The latest census figures showed Gujarat dropping one state rank over the decade: from 17th in 2001 to 18th in 2011, a far cry from Modi’s 2001 ‘vision’ of a 100 per cent literate Gujarat by 2010.

Truth has been the principal casualty of the hyper-active Gujarat state publicity departments.Surely the prize for the most bombastic claims must go to the website www.vibrantgujrat.com. This site would have us believe billions of dollars worth of foreign direct investment have flowed into Gujarat creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and wiping out hunger and poverty. In the first three Vibrant Gujarat summits: 2003, 2005 and 2007, a total of $186 billion was garnered as MoUs for FDI, the official website claimed. Of these, 84 per cent proposals ‘had been implemented or were under implementation,’ it said. In the next two biannual events, MoUs worth $240 billion and $450 billion were signed taking the total to a staggering $ 876 billion! If 60 per cent MoUs had materialised – not 84 per cent as claimed – Gujarat would have matched China’s FDI inflows of $600 billion plus! Such extravagant claims were punctured by the Reserve Bank of India: a total of $7.3 billion was all that flowed into Gujarat in this period, a mere 5 per cent of total India’s total FDI. As against this, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka cornered 6 per cent of the national pie, while neighbouring Maharashtra garnered a massive 35 per cent. The Modi PR machine is skilled at blowing its own trumpet to the orchestral accompaniment of a thrusting Gujarati diaspora.

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/243330/modis-gujarat-propaganda-masks-below.html

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After Eleven Years, It Stings To Say This – By Mathew Samuel (May 14, 2012, Outlook)

Like the rest of the nation, I too sat before the idiot box and watched former BJP national president Bangaru Laxman being taken to prison last week. Wasn’t it just the other day when I was actually sitting before him and handing over those bundles of one lakh rupees in cash? He had offered to help clinch a defence deal in what has come to be known as Operation Westend, little suspecting that it was a sting operation. Bangaru’s conviction and imprisonment left me with mixed feelings though. I did feel vindicated at one level, this being the season of defence scams and scandals. But I was also disturbed by the question of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) fast-tracking the case against the BJP’s Dalit icon and not against equally or even more influential people like Jaya Jaitly, R.K. Gupta, R.K. Jain and others, all caught by me on camera, accepting bribes just like Bangaru Laxman did. The CBI was clearly in a hurry to bring the case against Bangaru to a closure. In September last year, they were desperate enough to request me to fly back from Goa for a final deposition in court. They even offered to reimburse my plane fare but afterwards, the agency denied making any such offer. I wish the CBI had shown as much urgency in pursuing the other politicians, businessmen and brokers. Why the agency has dragged its feet in the other cases, only the CBI can say. It all began on a train journey, on the Deccan Queen in fact. I was on my way back to Mumbai from Pune. A casual chat with a co-passenger – who turned out to be a supplier to army canteens – led us to plan the Westend sting operation for the portal, Tehelka, where I was then a special correspondent. The organisation, after some initial hesitation, backed and funded the operation. We created fake brochures for a fake firm in London, ostensibly dealing in equipment for the armed forces. Visiting cards were printed and I began by meeting the juniormost babus in the chain and worked up the ladder to try and sell hand-held thermal imagers. Anil Malviya, the canteen stores department (CSD) contractor who first gave me the idea, was also the one who paid the first bribe, just two thousand rupees, to a junior official of the defence ministry. He had brought an entire list of equipment that the army was looking for. We met scores of officials, in the ministry and from the army. We met wheeler-dealers and minor politicians. We called on fund-raisers of the BJP and the Samata Party and taped our conversations and used spy cams to record our meetings. Although I personally recorded 99 of the 105 tapes, nobody suspected anything. All of them told us that no defence deal could be clinched without wine, women and cash.

I met Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitly because defence personnel made it clear that procurement over Rs 50 crore needed clearance by the cabinet. Jaitly was a prominent Samata Party leader and close to the then defence minister, George Fernandes. And Laxman, of course, was the BJP president. I was advised to meet both and solicit their help. I had earlier met the BJP fund-raiser, R.K. Gupta, who was close to the RSS. He had also accepted cash and promised to help. I had gifted a gold chain worth Rs 10,000 then to Satyamurthy, who was in charge of giving appointments at Bangaru’s house. The reference to Gupta and the gold chain convinced Satyamurthy of my credentials and an appointment was finally fixed with the BJP president. When I reached his house, Satyamurthy, who brokered the deal, insisted on Rs 10 lakh as initial payment to Bangaru. I offered to pay Rs 1 lakh in cash immediately and the rest later, saying truthfully that I did not have Rs 10 lakh on me. The entire sting operation, I believe, cost Tehelka around Rs 11 lakh. The money would be handed over to me by Aniruddha Bahal, then the editor (investigations) of the portal, and I was expected to actually pay the money and record the encounters. Catching Bangaru on camera turned out to be easier than I expected. I was using a briefcase device, which had a horizontal lens and a vertical one. Since he was seated and the briefcase was placed on the table in front of me, the horizontal lens was actually turned towards me as I took out the cash. So, while handing over the cash to him, I had to turn the briefcase the other way, towards him. I was apprehensive that he would notice the awkward movement but he did not react. To hide my nervousness, I asked whether he wanted the remaining cash in Indian currency or in US dollars. He asked for dollar bills.

It turned out to be more difficult to catch Jaya Jaitly on camera. Madam, I was told, would not allow any briefcase inside the defence minister’s house. But she had no problem with cash, of course. She possibly knew about spy cams and the briefcase device. I was told that an Indian cricketer may have shown her how the briefcase-camera worked. I therefore arranged for a spy cam on a tie-pin. The trouble was that the battery was tucked inside my underwear and the remote was in my pocket. And when I switched it on, the battery would start vibrating inside my underwear. The few minutes I spent in her presence were among the most uncomfortable moments I have ever had. I was spared the trouble of recording the sexual escapade of Brigadier Iqbal Singh with a high society callgirl, arranged by a former Indian cricketer. She turned out to be a good sport and offered to record her romp with the brigadier. In court, both Jaitly and Bangaru first claimed that the tapes were fake; their images had been superimposed; pictures were morphed; their voices did not match; that the tapes were doctored. Once forensic tests established that the tapes were genuine and their voice was on them, they pleaded that they were honourable persons and collected donations for the party. They fabricated receipts as an afterthought and claimed they had given receipts for what they received. They also claimed that since Westend was a fictitious firm and as I was posing as a representative of this non-existent firm, there was no real deal and, therefore, the charges against them were not tenable and should be dropped. In Bangaru’s case, the court held that the tapes showed he had taken me to be a serious vendor, had accepted real cash and had promised help in securing defence deals. And that was sufficient to convict him.

My cover as the representative of the fictitious London-based firm had been blown even before the tapes were released. I had rushed to Kerala to attend to my ailing father. But there was no mobile connectivity in Kerala then and my increasingly suspicious contacts were constantly calling me for the rest of the amount. On receiving no response, they approached the service provider, secured the office address and a few casual questions there led them to my rented flat. Some of those contacts had been suspicious from the beginning. One of them insisted on learning where I lived so that he could drop by for a drink. Luckily, I knew of an eccentric recluse who lived alone in Janakpuri with as many as 20 dogs. I gave out his address and said that I lived alone in a part of that house. He visited the house only once but left quickly, thanks to the ferocious dogs. In retrospect, I now believe Operation Westend has been a wasted exercise. Nothing has changed. If anything, things have become much worse. Corruption in procurement for the armed forces has become endemic and more money is changing hands than ever before. The Tatra trucks, which is in the news following army chief V.K. Singh’s allegation that he was offered a bribe of Rs 14 crore for clearing the purchase of 600 of the trucks, figured in many of our recorded conversations in 2001. Officials openly spoke of deficiencies in the truck and how deals were being struck and how much money was being paid. Ravi Rishi’s name also figured in several of those conversations. The CBI has been in possession of those 105 tapes for the past 11 years. I wonder why the country’s premier investigating agency ignored the evidence on Tatra all these years. Is it possible that nobody heard the tapes or failed to read the transcripts? As a prize prosecution witness, I have been forced to spend months together in various cantonments and depose before courts of inquiry. When you spend three months at a stretch in the officers’ mess in a cantonment, you hear stories. Almost every evening, someone or the other would be talking of the corruption involved in defence procurements. Sub-standard equipment, rations, medicines, arms, ammunition—the list was endless. A few senior officers actually cried and said they felt ashamed and helpless. That the jawans were being taken for a ride by some black sheep in the army and the politicians. But there was little they could do. The six serving army officers, and four retired ones, who were convicted for their crimes, were surprisingly stoical. Calm and resigned, they would sometimes chat with me and ask, with a wry smile, whether the sting would stop at ruining only their lives and careers or whether it would also expose the politicians with their dhotis down.

The CBI had registered 12 cases in all on the basis of the tapes. The case against Bangaru Laxman was just one of them. The agency had also filed cases against us in Tehelka for violating the Official Secrets Act. They also filed cases against two officials of the Central Secretariat Service, Neeraj Kumar and Thomas Mathew. Both of them were suspended and charged, possibly because they had interacted with me. But they had played no role in the sting. I am not really surprised because the CBI also linked me with Sonia Gandhi and her secretary Vincent George (remember, it was the NDA government in power then), two people I have never met or spoken to. I have not done a single sting operation since 2001. I even discourage others from undertaking any sting, citing my own experience. The day after the Tehelka tapes were released, on March 13, 2001, my landlord in Delhi’s Greater Kailash locality threw us out of his house. Police and Intelligence Bureau sleuths had turned up the heat and he could not bear it. My wife, who worked for a private firm, had to quit her job because it became impossible for her to continue, with police and the IB constantly arriving at her office to make inquiries. Sleuths from the IB even went to my village in Kerala and interrogated my father. The Tehelka portal had by then been shut down (for two years). I have not held a permanent job since then due to my preoccupation with the cases. For eight months, I worked for the portal without any payment. While the army provided hospitality and transport for deposing before courts of inquiry, the CBI paid me Rs 250 per day and Rs 25 extra for lunch. The parking fee at the courts in Delhi is Rs 50 and the rest was spent on food and transport. How was I expected to maintain my family? A labourer in Delhi receives Rs 450 per day under the NREGA. But when I met the CBI director to plead for a reasonable amount so that I could give evidence as a witness, he asked me to get the money from Tehelka. The reply was the same when I spoke to V. Narayanasamy, the minister at the PMO. The CBI director now, A.P. Singh, asked why I got involved in sting operations and advised me against doing such reports in future. I have now stopped going to the court to depose as witness. I cannot afford to do it any longer. Ironically, I cannot leave Delhi either because of the case against me. I cannot afford a lawyer and I am threatened with the prospect of a non-bailable warrant if I do not turn up to depose. It’s a Catch-22 situation from which there seems to be no escape.

http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280773

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Who Strains On A Short Leash? – By Uttam Sengupta (May 14, 2012, Outlook)

It is striking that demands to regulate the media are coming from institutions like the judiciary, the executive and the legislature. Each views its privileges and privacy to be ‘in national interest’ and is rarely willing to share info or insights with the media. Now, they would like to lay down what the media can report, what they cannot and how far they can go. As it is, the media does not venture very far due to ‘reasonable restrictions’ placed on them. The meetings of the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament, to cite an example, is not public. The legislature can pull up the media for breach of privilege. The judiciary has always had issue with court reporting, invoking ‘contempt of court’ even for humour columns. As for the government and India Inc, the less said the better. They have over the years perfected the art of starving the media of information and keeping it under control.

The fuss over a ‘reckless’ media is all the more surprising since much of our serious journalism involves taking dictation from politicians, bureaucrats, industry bosses, policemen and judges. They expect stenographers in the garb of journalists and rarely welcome probing questions, much less an investigation. Who then is afraid of our media and why? The Press Council of India chairman, Justice Markandey Katju, a votary for more regulation, makes familiar points. The media, he says, has grown so powerful that it “can strongly impact people’s lives”; that while judges “can be impeached” and the licences of lawyers, doctors and accountants “can be suspended and cancelled”, why should the media shy away from being held accountable?

Somebody should respectfully point out that very few judges, accountants, doctors and lawyers have actually been punished in this country for professional misconduct. The ones that have, you can count off on your fingers and even Justice Katju would agree that the vast majority of them get away with unprofessional conduct every day. Neither the Bar Council of India nor the Medical Council of India have exactly been proactive. Action against an R.K. Anand or one Ketan Desai can’t gloss over the thousands of other cases that are overlooked as a matter of routine. Law firms cannot be sued for professional negligence and even in the worst cases, the Bar Council has suspended licences of lawyers for only a few months at best.

The nexus between lawyers and judges is hardly a state secret; its intersections are even more brazen and rampant in the lower judiciary. When lawyers are said to charge as much as Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1 crore every day for appearing before the apex court, surely the fees would cover a lot more than professional advice? Bribes are given to court clerks openly all over the country. Many of these clerks prosper by looking after the interests of judicial magistrates. The administrative jurisdiction of the higher courts has made very little or no difference to these conditions. A fairly large number of media professionals, on the other hand, lose their jobs for reasons ranging from plagiarism, soliciting favours and misquoting sources to blackmail and sexual harassment at the workplace. At any given time, the number of defamation cases against media organisations runs into the several thousands. Most are meant to harass and bleed rather than secure any specific relief. And after all, statutes and regulations do not seem to have worked with other professionals. There is nothing to suggest they will work in the case of the media either.

http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280783

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The real paralysis – By C.P. Chandrasekhar (May 5, 2012, Frontline)

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA)-II, the argument goes, is afflicted by paralysis in policymaking, especially on matters relating to the economy. Not without reason. There are few new initiatives that are being implemented with vigour, and many that began during UPA-I, including the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), languish under the current regime. But all those who identify the government as being overcome by paralysis are not referring to the same policies. “Paralysis” of the kind that preoccupies the financial media, corporate India and international investors refers to the failure of the government to deliver fully on its explicitly or implicitly stated commitment to so-called “economic reform”. When in Washington recently to attend the spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Kaushik Basu, his Chief Economic Adviser, realised that the sources of such criticism were not just domestic. Moreover, the term economic reform means different things to different people: deregulation of various kinds, reduced taxation or more tax concessions, privatisation, public expenditure cuts, measures to curtail subsidies and reduce the fiscal deficit, a lax monetary regime with low interest rates, dilution of labour laws, and many combinations of these. The fact remains that successive governments since the early 1990s have gone a significant way down this path of liberalisation, privatisation and so-called reform of the fiscal and monetary regime. But there seems to be no end to the demands for further liberalisation. Each round is followed by a campaign for a new generation of reforms, so much so that now it is impossible for advocates to put a number on the next round. Further, since the interests of foreign investors in manufacturing, of different components of the domestic corporate sector, and of foreign and Indian finance capital differ, the specific set of reform policies being emphasised by each sectional interest also differs.

However, faced with criticism from these economically powerful circles, the government has turned defensive. It sometimes accepts that the slow pace of reforms under UPA-II is because of the constraints set by coalition politics or by the intransigence of the opposition. Many accepted that argument when the Left was supporting the government under UPA-I, but it is less credible now. Sometimes government officials attribute the slow pace of liberalising reform to the indecision that results from repeated allegations of corruption. That is seen as constraining other officers from taking responsibility for government spending. And at yet other times, just the fact that some set of elections is imminent (which is always true) is cited as reason for tardy implementation of the so-called ‘consensus’ over reform. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has at times used such excuses to explain the inability to implement reforms. But, since the consensus among the elite that constitutes the state-capital nexus is that these reforms are good, officials like the Chief Economic Adviser who reportedly advanced such arguments sometimes come under attack and are forced to retract. The problem with this version of the policy paralysis argument is that it presumes that the neoliberal version of reform is right and that democracy (in the form of elections, coalition governments, opposition and dissent) is not all good since it constrains or slows such reform. What is missed here is the evidence that reform in India has been accompanied on the one hand by a significant worsening of income inequality and on the other by a fall in the rate at which welfare improvements for the poorest are realised. Whether it be poverty incidence, malnutrition and hunger, reasonably stable and remunerative employment or a host of other indices of deprivation, the pace of progress has slowed after liberalisation. This association between reform and inadequate advance on the human development front has challenged the legitimacy of the liberalisation process.

In the event, sections of the opposition, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which advocate similar policies when in power, are constrained to oppose the government in some form when new measures of liberalisation are pushed. The real problem is that neoliberal reform has no legitimacy in the perception of the majority of Indians. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is not just neoliberal reform but also the economic programmes of the parties that push such reform that have lost their legitimacy. They may be all for the poor on paper, but the evidence on the ground is too stark now for the electorate to ignore. That loss of legitimacy is compounded by the evidence that the growing state-capital nexus has resulted in huge transfers of surpluses in favour of capital, facilitated by associated payments to a section of the political and bureaucratic elite. Neoliberal reform has served as a mechanism for a drastic, engineered redistribution of income and wealth in favour of the rich. Hence, with two decades of reform behind us, the majority of the people in India are no longer persuaded that it can make much of a difference to their lives. Despite this, the push for reform persists because a vocal section of the middle class that has benefited from liberalisation has joined the elite’s clamour in its support, because electoral politics is increasingly influenced by money power, and because the political parties and movements that oppose such reform are yet to gather adequate voter support. But democracy does impose some constraints on parties and their programmes. There has to be a semblance of concern for the majority, even if action points to neglect. It is for this reason that the UPA has had to declare its commitment to and make a feeble attempt to implement programmes such as the NREGS. They are even showcased as flagship programmes though some of the UPA’s leaders had initially dismissed such initiatives as populist and a waste of money. But the support for such programmes has been more in rhetoric than in practice, with implementation neglected or consciously reined in. Nothing illustrates this better than the fact that real allocations of resources for the NREGS have stagnated or declined in the years when it was reportedly being geographically expanded and strengthened.

This disease of divergence between rhetoric and practice is of course not new. In terms of outcomes, a longer-term paralysis of policymaking in certain areas has characterised governments of the post-Independence period. As a result, India ranks high in the hunger index; malnutrition and stunting are overwhelming despite their being considered a national shame even by the Prime Minister; and six and a half decades after Independence we have not been able to put into school all children in the relevant age group. Official assessments harp on the slow progress with respect to most human development indicators, rather than on the persisting shortfall after so many decades of development. Rather than recognise this long-term failure in addressing deprivation and allocating additional resources and improving delivery to accelerate progress on the human development front, there has been a slowing down in this area during the reform years. What is disconcerting is that it was in periods when GDP growth had accelerated relative to the first three decades after Independence, as in the 1990s, and even boomed, as during 2003-04 to 2007-08, that success in overcoming deprivation has flagged. One obvious reason for this is that the government was not able to appropriate the resources required to compensate for the inequalising effects of growth despite rising profit shares in organised industry and services and in incomes of the rich.

Clearly, a combination of fiscal conservatism, a rising tendency to favour capital in the name of private sector-led growth and an ideological inclination against state action in support of the poor was responsible for this setback. There are many elements reflecting that ideological inclination: control over economic policy in the hands of those who are neither able nor willing to fight and win popular support in elections; celebration of a neoliberal economic policy package as technocratically correct despite its hugely adverse distributional implications; justification of engineered shifts in the distribution of income in favour of the corporate sector, finance and the rich in the name of incentivising private savings and investment; and the refusal to treat woefully inadequate progress in the battle against deprivation as a failure while arguing that the inability to push neoliberal reform is a sign of malfunction. This, then, is the true paralysis that characterises the UPA. It is a paralysis that is visible in governments across the world in the age of finance, including in Europe. In some of them austerity is being implemented by unelected governments, and in all of them ordinary citizens pay the price for a crisis engineered by finance and the rich. But the impact of such paralysis in a country with the scale of deprivation that India reflects is a shame. But that is not the paralysis that most commentators are pointing to today and which was being referred to in Washington. Rather, the paralysis they speak of is the inability of the government to push further ahead with policies that would redistribute incomes from the poor to the rich. What they implicitly lament is the fact that India’s democracy still retains some of its early representativeness and vibrancy. The challenge then is not to the Indian state but to democracy itself.

http://flonnet.com/fl2909/stories/20120518290903300.htm

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Kidnap as strategy – By Prafulla Das (May 5, 2012, Frontline)

A group of armed Maoists kidnapped Alex Paul Menon, the first Collector of the newly formed Sukma district in Chhattisgarh, on April 21, confirming the fact that the rebels are able to strike at will wherever they have a presence. The abduction took place even as a beleaguered Naveen Patnaik government in Odisha was trying to ensure the safe release of Jhina Hikaka, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) legislator representing the Laxmipur Assembly constituency, by acceding to the demands of the Maoists, and close on the heels of the release of two Italian citizens who were abducted by another group of Maoists in Odisha’s Kandhamal district in mid-March. Alex Paul was kidnapped in a manner similar to the kidnapping of R. Vineel Krishna, the Collector of Odisha’s Malkangiri district, in February last year. A few weeks after Krishna was released, his services were sought by a Central Minister. The abduction of Alex Paul, the fourth major abduction carried out by Maoists in the region in a little more than a year, came at a time when a number of battalions of Central paramilitary forces were engaged in anti-naxal operations in both Chhattisgarh and Odisha.

Alex Paul was taken hostage when he was returning from a farmers’ meeting in Kerlapal village on National Highway 221, along with administration officials. (The farmers’ meeting had been organised as part of the Gram Suraj Abhiyaan, a village contact programme under which officials and people’s representatives hold meetings with rural residents to assess the progress of the government’s welfare schemes.) The Left extremists gunned down two of his personal security guards who tried to intervene. The Maoists ascertained the identity of the 32-year-old Collector before they took him away into the nearby forested area. The other officials were spared. Alex Menon was kidnapped just a day after suspected Maoists struck in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh. Three persons, including two Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) activists, were killed when the rebels triggered a landmine blast as an official convoy passed through the area. A BJP legislator, Mahesh Gagda, and Bijapur District Collector Rajat Kumar escaped unhurt, but one of the eight vehicles in the convoy was blown up. Interestingly, the attack took place when the officials were monitoring the implementation of the Gram Suraj Abhiyaan project in the rural areas of the district, indicating that the Maoists are against official teams gaining entry into the areas where they have a strong presence.

The abduction of Alex Paul came soon after the release of the two Italians who were abducted on March 14, Bosusco Paolo and Claudio Colangelo. The Maoists reportedly demanded that the Odisha government stop Operation Green Hunt, a combing operation by Central paramilitary forces in the naxal-affected areas of the State, and initiate a dialogue with them. They wanted the Odisha government to act on long-standing demands such as the release of political prisoners. The Maoists first released Claudio Colangelo on humanitarian grounds. They set free Bosusco Paolo, who had been running an adventure travel agency for the past 19 years in Puri, after the Naveen Patnaik government accepted some of their demands. The Italians were freed after the Odisha government agreed to release several persons who had been jailed for their alleged links with the Maoists. The government accepted the Maoists’ demands for the release of the hostages after negotiations were held between three government officials and two social activists, B.D. Sharma and Dandapani Mohanty, whose names were suggested as mediators by the Maoists. The 37-year-old tribal leader Jhina Hikaka was kidnapped in the dead of night on March 24 when he was returning home from the district headquarters town of Koraput. The Maoists released Hikaka on April 26 although no negotiations were held between government officials or any interlocutors named by the Maoists. In fact, no dialogue was held between the government and the Maoists for Hikaka’s release as right from the beginning the abductors had refused to hold any talks. While the government did keep the media informed about its stand, the Maoists released information about their demands through the media and through Nihar Ranjan Patnaik, a Koraput-based lawyer who had been fighting the cases of Maoist cadre as well as activists of the Chasi Mulia Adivasi Sangha (CMAS). The Maoists finally released Hikaka on the outskirts of Balipeta village in Narayanpatna block of Koraput district after extending the deadline for the release of 29 political prisoners.

Before Hikaka’s release, the Andhra-Odisha border special zonal committee of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) had said that the legislator would be released as per the decision taken at a people’s court held at an undisclosed location in the district. The Maoists had said that the decision to release Hikaka had been taken after he had given an undertaking before the people’s court that he would try to get their demands fulfilled and that he would resign from his post if he failed to keep his promise. It may be recalled that the Maoists had organised a similar people’s court before releasing Collector Vineel Krishna. The abductors of Hikaka had demanded the release of 29 prisoners, but the government agreed to facilitate the release of 25 persons. But none of the 25 prisoners has been released so far despite the government reiterating that it is taking the necessary steps to facilitate their release. The Odisha government had not made any commitment to release the remaining four persons, including Gananath Patra, adviser to the CMAS. Interestingly, the different groups of Maoists who abducted Vineel Krishna, the two Italians and Hikaka had demanded the release of Patra. The Patnaik government faced severe criticism from the opposition parties for its alleged failure to handle the twin cases of abduction.

In the case of Alex Paul, the Raman Singh government acted promptly and started the process of negotiations to facilitate his release. First, it sent essential medicines for the Collector, who is an asthma patient, to the Maoist hideout through former Communist Party of India (CPI) legislator Manish Kunjam, when negotiations were about to begin between Nirmala Buch and S.K. Mishra, the former Chief Secretaries of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh respectively who acted as the government’s negotiators, and B.D. Sharma and G. Hargopal, the two mediators named by the Maoists. Sharma is a former Chairperson of the National Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe Commission, while Hargopal, a social activist, was one of the three mediators who held talks with the Patnaik government for the release of Vineel Krishna. The abductors of Alex Paul have demanded the release of eight of their jailed leaders, including two women prisoners; a halt to Operation Green Hunt; and the withdrawal of the paramilitary forces from the Bastar region. The immediate fallout of the recent abductions is that the anti-Maoist operations in the three contiguous States of Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand have been hit badly. While the combing operations were carried out in the forested districts of Koraput, Malkangiri, Ragayada, Gajapati and Kandhamal in Odisha, the exercise was affected in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, one of the major hotbeds of Maoist activity.

http://flonnet.com/fl2909/stories/20120518290902900.htm

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India’s Battle Over Beef – By Tripti Lahiri (May 2, 2012, Wall Street Journal)

In recent years, political pundits have been saying that voters are tiring of religious partisanship. Issues like the Babri Masjid verdict, in which both Hindu and Muslim groups laid religious claim to a particular spot, no longer appear to have the political weight they used to, judging by the muted reaction to the court decision to split the disputed land. But while the temple-versus-mosque quarrel at Ayodhya may be receding, the sectarian battle seems to be shifting to another ground: beef. In recent years, several Indian states have, well, beefed up their cow protection laws. The southern state of Karnataka, led by a government of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, passed a cow slaughter ban in 2010; it still has to tweak the law in order to get presidential assent. In January, meanwhile, the President gave her assent to a Madhya Pradesh amendment that increased jail time for those found guilty of cow slaughter. In Gujarat, which will hold state assembly elections by the end of this year, a law that increased jail time for killing a cow, or even transporting a cow to the slaughter, from six months to seven years went into effect in October.

Prakash Sharma, a spokesman for the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), says a sustained campaign around the cow, which is considered sacred in Hinduism, has been underway since 1996 and is now paying off. A key part of it involved setting up an institute to develop and promote health products from cow milk, dung and urine. “Slowly this issue is progressing,” he said. “In the last 15 to 20 years people’s awareness has been raised.” A previous attempt to enact a nationwide ban on cow slaughter failed, but Mr. Sharma says he is hopeful that one will eventually be passed. Dalit activists and other groups aren’t happy about the trend. Two weeks ago, students at Hyderabad’s Osmania University organized a beef-eating festival on campus to stake their claim to steak. Or rather, beef biryani. (Taking it a step further – since most universities or state-run institutions serve neither beef nor pork, to avoid offending either Hindus or Muslims – students at the left-wing Jawaharlal Nehru University have set up a “beef-pork eating campaign.”) The Hyderabad beef eaters met, predictably, with opposition from members of a Hindu student political outfit, leading to violent clashes between both sets of students. Dalit poet Meena Kandasamy, who participated in the event, criticized the Hindu protesters.

“There is no point getting offended if someone enjoys beef in all its juicy glory,” she wrote in the April 30 issue of Outlook Magazine criticizing what she calls “food fascism.” “Since nobody is being force-fed, tolerance means digesting the idea that just as cows are meant to be milked, cows are also meant to be meat.” In her piece, Ms. Kandasamy cited an essay of the father of the Constitution B.R. Ambedkar, who theorized that upper-caste Hindus who owned cattle designated those who disposed of dead cattle – and ate their meat – as untouchables. Eating beef, she says, is “an act of Dalit assertion.” Ms. Kandasamy’s piece and tweets on the topic met with such irate and threatening comments online, that one women’s group issued a statement of outrage on her behalf. In a phone interview, Ms. Kandasamy said that if Hindus in countries like the United States and Australia are able to make peace with abstaining from beef while those around them consume the meat, they should be able to do the same in India. She also said she disagreed with Hindu groups who equate their stance on beef with the Muslim prohibition on eating pork, noting that Muslims don’t demand that all Indians give up pork. In addition, she said that in several cases Dalits and Muslims have faced attacks from cow protection vigilantes.

Retired history professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha, whose book “The Myth of the Holy Cow,” upset Hindus with his findings that beef eating wasn’t uncommon among Hindus prior to the arrival of Muslim rule, says there isn’t as clear a stance among Hindus on beef eating as right-wing groups insist. Mr. Jha had to go to class with a police escort after his book was published in India in 2001. “In my view one has to draw a line between Dalit stance and Hindu stance on beef; for not all Hindus are averse to eating beef,” he said, via e-mail. “Seventy-two communities in Kerala eat beef openly and regularly and they call themselves Hindu.” But those who would like to prevent beef consumption by other people have a potent tool on their side – the Indian Constitution includes the prevention of cattle slaughter as one of the directive principles of state policy, although this is ostensibly for agricultural purposes, not religious ones. The cow slaughter laws pretend not to be about religion either, one law blogger has noted. The Gujarat law, for example, is called The Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, 2011.

In recent years, the VHP, on its website, has urged Hindus to vote for politicians who say they’ll support a nationwide cow slaughter ban. “Let every voter calmly and with understanding scrutinize the past performance and present promises of every person and party and exercise his right judiciously so as to be able to achieve the cherished goal of full protection of the cow species,” says the site. But Mr. Jha says that the beef issue could be a double-edged one for politicians. Since the beef that is eaten in India often comes from old, scrawny cattle that are past their prime, it can be fairly cheap. S. Anand, head of caste-focused publishing house Navayana, wrote recently in a piece called “The Right to Eat” that beef prices are comparable to the prices of some vegetables. If Hindu groups “oppose eating beef by a large section of the Indian people, they will be alienating themselves from them,” said Mr. Jha. “Alternatively, if they approve of eating of beef, which is poor man’s food, they will violate the dietary norms developed by the Brahmins over centuries.”

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/05/02/indias-battle-over-beef

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Book Review

Lives of Muslims in India: Politics, Exclusion and Violence

Author: Abdul Shaban, Ed.
Reviewed by: Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed
Available at: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Books India Pvt Ltd, 912 Tolstoy House, 15-17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi, India. http://www.amazon.com/
Review:
On the margins (May 5, 2012, Frontline)

Ever since its publication in 2006, the Sachar Committee Report has been a rich source of raw material for studies on Muslims in India by academics and policymakers. It provided, for the first time, detailed data on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims. It also comprehensively demonstrated the backwardness of Muslims in India vis-a-vis followers of other religions. Lives of Muslims in India: Politics, Exclusion and Violence, an edited volume of 12 chapters, cites the report several times, highlighting its importance. Abdul Shaban, the editor of the volume, has brought together a wide variety of essays that deal with issues confronted by Indian Muslims. There is a vehement concurrence among the 12 essayists that the Indian Muslim is a marginalised citizen (when he is treated as one), lags behind others on all indices of development, and is vulnerable to a variety of threats, both physical and emotional, that need to be specially addressed. One of the strengths of the book is the balanced mix of contributors that it has managed to line up – journalists, activists and academics from disciplines across the social sciences. This makes the work a truly interdisciplinary exposition of many of the concerns of Indian Muslims. The first essay, by M.J. Akbar, provides an entry point to the subsequent ones. Laying out the historical context of the status of Indian Muslims, Akbar succinctly reiterates many of the theses that he has discussed more extensively in his other works. Considering its short length and the broad scope of the subject, the essay does become a bit sketchy as he skims quickly over several themes, ranging from the meaning of “minority” to the modern history of Muslims in the subcontinent to the loose connections between Islam and modernity. Akbar excels as a raconteur, as a weaver of narratives and as a pithy epigrammatist (for instance, “The idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani and the idea of India is stronger than the Indian”).

This essay is followed by a discussion on the idea of analysing the “Muslim in India as a representative of India itself”. In this essay, Markha Valenta nudges the boundaries of conventional thinking about Muslims in India and provokes readers into reassessing their understanding of Indian Muslims. She does this by extending the scope of religion beyond its social and political role and writes that “religion in India is as much an economic activity as a social and political one”. Commenting on the diversity within Indian Islam (a point that many other contributors also make), she states that the category of Muslims in India is sustained by politics rather than facts. She also comments extensively on the “significance of globalisation in shaping the analysis, politics and lives of India”, an area that is generally ignored in our understanding of Indian Muslims. In the third essay, Ranu Jain argues that the Indian modern liberal framework does not provide adequate space for “… critical multiculturalism or recognising cultural rights of those minorities who resist assimilation or hegemonic integration”. Calling this a failure of the modern Indian state, Ranu Jain argues that liberalism, the guiding ideology of modern Indian democracy, denies social recognition to the individual’s identity. This attitude extends to the proposed Equal Opportunity Commission, the setting up of which was recommended by the Sachar report as well, which, while having great potential, is still limited by its approach to addressing Muslim grievances.

Ram Puniyani’s essay on “Muslims and the Politics of Exclusion” dwells on Indian Muslim history through the 19th and 20th centuries. Discussing the incidence of communal riots, he writes that the nature of communal violence has changed, with even affluent Muslims being targeted after the 1990s. On the pattern and effect of the riots, he writes: “The trajectory of violence is as follows – it begins with pre-violence biases, stereotypes, then violence, post-violence neglect, isolation, ghettoisation and finally leads to the partitioning of the national community at the emotional and physical levels.” He laments the worsening condition of Indian Muslims at the economic, social and political levels. Irfan Engineer’s essay looks at the question of how the Muslim leadership has fared in India, the various trajectories it has taken and how it has responded to the crises of identity faced by the community in India. In a similar vein, Nistula Hebbar, a senior journalist who has covered the Bharatiya Janata Party for several years, analyses that party’s engagement with Muslims. She does so by profiling and interviewing two senior Muslim members of the BJP, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Shahnawaz Hussain. Examining their motivations for aligning with a party that is perceived to be anti-Muslim, she evaluates their role in the BJP.

Taha Abdul Rauf’s paper examines the reasons for the pervasive backwardness of Muslims in India and locates this in the continuing violence against them leading to their exclusion and subsequent marginalisation. He classifies violence against Muslims to be structural, cultural and direct and shows how consent is manufactured for such violence, including through notions of a demographic paranoia and the alienness of Muslims encouraged by right-wing groups and parties. R.B. Bhagat provides a detailed demographic breakdown of the incidents of Hindu-Muslim riots in India. With the introduction of the census in India in 1872, the notions of “minority” and “majority” became clearer. His findings reveal some interesting features of communal riots. He writes that Hindu-Muslim riots mainly occur in urban areas, that communal riots have erupted more often in medium-sized cities than in metropolitan cities, and that riots happen more often in cities where Muslim artisans and businessmen have achieved a relative degree of economic prosperity. Interestingly, Bhagat points out, “Cities with lower female-to-male ratio are more violent, meaning that the masculinisation of cities as a demographic process has influenced Hindu-Muslim violence.” Jyoti Punwani’s essay looks at the conduct of the police during the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai. Drawing extensively on the Sri Krishna Commission Report on the riots, she makes a strong point about the inherent prejudice in the police against Muslims. Another essay on Mumbai, by Abdul Shaban, looks at how the gradual spatial segregation of communities has led to Muslims being consigned to ghettos, which are pejoratively described as “Pakistans” in Mumbai. Littered with interviews and poignant anecdotes, Shaban’s essay looks at how urban spaces are gradually divided between castes and communities.

Sanjukta Sattar looks at the relative backwardness of Muslims in Kolkata. Since 1977, when the Left Front government led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) came to power in the State, Muslims in Kolkata have not suffered from communal riots as much as Muslims in other big Indian cities have, but in economic terms they lag far behind their non-Muslim counterparts in the State. Plotting their status historically, Sanjukta Sattar brings out how prejudice against Muslims remains a serious hindrance to their development. Ghettoisation is one of the banes of their existence in Kolkata. The last paper, by Noorjehan Safia Niaz and J.S. Apte, looks at the lamentable state of Muslim women in India, who “… suffer from the triple burden of their class, community and gender”. Delineating the legal history of legislation affecting the rights of Muslim women, the authors make an interesting point about how Muslim women are caught in a bind between the interests of their gender and the interests of their community when it comes to the implementation of the uniform civil code. While the uniform civil code will give Muslim women greater autonomy in the domain of family law, the beleaguered Muslim identity resists any effort at its implementation. Lives of Muslims in India is an important book not only because it adds to the literature on Indian Muslims but also because it confronts head on many of the issues facing Indian Muslims. The immense importance of the Sachar report in this context also becomes evident.

http://flonnet.com/fl2909/stories/20120518290907600.htm

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – April 30th, 2012

April 30, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Announcements US’ reaffirmation of visa denial to Modi welcomed by IAMC News Headlines A dead CM’s account of his 2002 encounter with Modi, now with rights panel NO change in US stand on denial of visa to Modi Gujarat riots: Witnesses want convicts to be tried for conspiracy [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – April 23rd, 2012

April 23, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Communal Harmony Sangareddy riot: JIH relief work bridging communal divide News Headlines Special Investigation Team too challenges acquittal of 31 persons in Sardarpura case State can recover compensation for custodial death from cops: HC Dalits beaten up by ABVP activists for holding beef festival Nirmal Baba exposed as [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – April 16th, 2012

April 16, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Communal Harmony Inter Faith Forum to clean places of worship News Headlines ‘Clean chit’ for Narendra Modi? Not yet SIT nails 2 cops in ’02 riots case Gujarat’s Ode massacre: 18 convicts get life imprisonment, 7 years in jail for five It was a conspiracy: Court Custody death [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – April 9th, 2012

April 10, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Announcements Convictions in post-Godhra carnage a step on the road to justice says Indian American Muslim Council News Headlines Post-Godhra riots: 23 convicted in Ode massacre Narendra Modi tops negative votes in global poll Muslims rising against terror arrest of innocent youths Bihar Police spray bullets on mosque [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – April 2nd, 2012

April 2, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Announcements Indian American Group strongly condemns Bihar government’s stand on Forbesganj firing, reiterates demand for justice for victims Communal Harmony Punjab Intellectuals Call For Communal Harmony News Headlines US City Council passes resolution condemning 2002 Gujarat riots Both Nanavati sons are govt lawyers! Now Modi govt gets it [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – March 26th, 2012

March 27, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Announcements US Congressional Hearing highlights the plight of Indian Minorities, Gujarat victims Gujarat Pogrom of 2002 condemned by City of Harvey, IL Resolution News Headlines ’02 riot victims, activists testify, in-camera before UN body Modi’s role falls within Nanavati probe ambit, argues Manch In face-off with Modi, top [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – March 19th, 2012

March 19, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup Announcements TIME’s cover story on Narendra Modi a distortion of truth, says Indian American group News Headlines ‘General perception of public is that Narendra Modi is communal’ Denial of SIT report to Zakia Jafri violation of SC order ‘Same weapons in 2 encounters’ Mumbai constable among five arrested [...]

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IAMC Weekly News Roundup – March 12th, 2012

March 12, 2012

In this issue of IAMC News Roundup News Headlines Vigil marks 10th anniversary of 2002 Gujarat riots Indian-Americans hold demonstrations against Modi Gujarat Riots: No Reconciliation before Justice: ex-CJI Modi must spend rest of his life in jail: Owaisi RSS ‘infiltration’ into state apparatus worries Digvijaya Liquor mafia, BJP MLA men attack IPS officer in [...]

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