Academia’s meek surrender

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Political opposition and civil society have raised their voice against a perceived attempt by the Narendra Modi regime to impose its Hindutva ideology on institutions of higher learning. The real issue is academia’s readiness to surrender meekly to political masters.

The cause of the uproar is the decision of the elite Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (Chennai), to derecognise the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle, a year-old campus forum that upholds the principle of social justice.

The action followed a complaint sent to the central government by casteist elements operating surreptitiously.

APSC bears the names of national Dalit icon BR Ambedkar (1891-1956) and Dravidian ideologue Periyar EV Ramaswamy (1879-1973), the foremost advocates of social justice in the last century. Additionally, Ambedkar is revered as the Father of the Indian Constitution.

After APSC marked its first anniversary in April with a lecture by a distinguished speaker on the contemporary relevance of Ambedkar, the Union Human Resources Development Ministry received an anonymous complaint levelling a number of allegations against it, including “trying to create hatred against the Honourable Prime Minister and Hindus”. An Under Secretary forwarded the complaint to the Director of IIT-M and sought his comments.

A week later the Dean of Students informed APSC that it had been derecognised and would not be allowed to use campus facilities for its activities.

Political parties condemned the action as a wanton attack on free debate in the campus. They pinned the blame squarely on the government. Demonstrations were held outside the residence of Human Resources Minister Smriti Irani in Delhi and near the IIT campus in Chennai.

IITs, set up under a scheme initiated by Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, are supposed to be autonomous institutions. Their governing councils are headed by eminent persons. However, those in charge of the day-to-day administration look upon themselves as minions who must pay heed to the ministry’s wishes.

Customarily the government ignores anonymous communications. The complaint against APSC received attention because its contents were in tune with the thinking of the ruling establishment. Yet there was no directive to act against APSC. All that the government did was to seek the Director’s views on the complaint.

The IIT authorities used the occasion to demonstrate their loyalty to the masters in Delhi. They took punitive action against APSC without even giving it an opportunity to reply to the charges.

The views propagated by APSC are those that were articulated by Ambedkar and Periyar in their lifelong campaigns against casteism in Hindu society.

The move against APSC needs to be viewed against long-standing complaints of caste-based discrimination in the IITs.

IIT Delhi expelled 12 Dalit students in 2008 on grounds of low academic performance. Following the intervention of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, it revoked the expulsion of two students, making some relaxation in grade requirements, and appointed a committee to look into complaints of discrimination. The IIT later claimed the students did not place before the committee any case of discrimination, but the students said the committee did not entertain their complaints.

In a survey conducted among students of IIT Bombay, following the death of a Dalit student in mysterious circumstances last September, more than half of the Adivasi, Dalit and other backward classes respondents said they experienced discreet discrimination and were subjected to higher academic pressure than other students.

Ten years ago, IIT Madras had a faculty of 480 staff members, of whom 462 belonged to the advanced communities, prompting activists to characterise it as a Brahmin enclave. Ten Dalits, one Adivasi and seven OBC members made up the rest. In 2008, the government ordered reservation of 15 per cent of the faculty positions for Dalits, 7.5 per cent for Adivasis and 27 per cent for OBCs. The staff strength has now risen to over 500 but the reservation targets remain a distant goal.

MS Ananth, who became its Director in 2001, quit in 2011 following allegations of caste bias and corruption. Dr E Muraleedharan, an alumnus, said Ananth had denied him a teaching post because of caste bias. Dr WB Vasantha Kandasamy of the Mathematics department, who belongs to a backward caste, vigorously pursued the case of a Dalit candidate, SR Kannan, and foiled the bid to deny him a staff position.

In the process, Vasantha Kandasamy invited the ire of her superiors. She secured overdue promotions as Associate Professor and Professor only after a court battle that lasted 16 years. While deciding the case in her favour, the Madras high court ordered a CBI probe to determine the legality of all appointments made in IIT Madras between 1995 and 2000. The authorities appealed and got a stay on the probe order. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 2, 2015.

Coping with rape crisis

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The shame of rape is weighing India down again. Barely 18 months after the gangrape and murder of a young woman in New Delhi provoked street protests and made headlines the world over, the country is coping with the fallout of another case involving sexual assault and killing of two teenaged girls in an Uttar Pradesh village. 

Pictures of bodies of the girls hanging from a tree sent shock waves across the globe. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon expressed horror over the incident. So did a US State Department spokesperson.

The US had no reason to be horrified. According to a UN report published last year, that country has an annual rape rate of 28.6 per 100,000 people. The Indian rape rate is 4.3. Even after allowing for varying rates of under-reporting in the two countries, the situation in India does not appear to call for a response of that kind from the US administration.

However, India has cause for concern. The rash of rape cases being reported daily points to a critical situation. Clearly the vociferous protests of 2012 and the subsequent toughening of the law to the extent providing for the death penalty have not made any appreciable difference to the situation.

Uttar Pradesh, where the recent incident occurred, is India’s largest state. If it were an independent country it would be the world’s fifth most populous, after China, residuary India, the US and Indonesia. In 2012, the last year for which official data are available, close to 24,000 cases of crimes against women were registered in the state. This was about 10 per cent of all such cases registered countrywide.

Until 2012 UP was ruled by the Bahujan Samaj Party and its leader, Mayawati, a Dalit woman, was the chief minister. In that year’s election the Samajwadi Party, whose support base consists primarily of the backward Yadav caste, came to power and its supremo, Mulayam Singh, installed his son, Akhilesh Yadav, as the chief minister. In this year’s parliamentary election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally, Apna Dal, bagged 73 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats, stunning both the BSP and the SP.

The rape incident inevitably got entangled in political warfare. Mayawati said the law and order machinery had broken down and asked the Centre to dismiss the Yadav government. Uma Bharati, a member of Modi’s cabinet, indicated readiness to consider the suggestion but Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh only said steps would be taken to improve the situation in the state.

Both Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav accused the media of targeting the state, overlooking the fact that rape was more common in some other states. The neighbouring BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh was mentioned in this connection but there were fewer than 17,000 cases in that state in 2012. The state that topped in crimes against women that year was West Bengal, with more than 30,000 cases.

Since the states vary in population, comparison of absolute numbers can give a distorted picture. Ironically, when the population figures are factored in, backward states like UP and MP appear to be safer for women than supposedly progressive states like West Bengal and Kerala.

UP, with 16.5 per cent of the country’s population, accounts for only 9.65 per cent of the crimes against women and MP, with 9.3 per cent of the population, for 6.89 per cent. West Bengal, with 7.5 per cent of the population, recorded 12.7 per cent of the crimes against women and Kerala, with 2.8 per cent of the population, accounted for 4.47 per cent of the crimes.

Rape has long been a caste war tool, and dominant castes have used it to assert their social authority. First reports had identified the attackers as Yadavs and the victims as Dalits. Official sources later said the girls belonged to the backward Maurya Shakya caste. Almost all the police personnel of the area were said to be Yadavs.

Mulayam Singh belongs to a breed of politicians who have been seeking to reinforce patriarchy. He had once talked about rape as a mistake for which a boy cannot be hanged. Along with Lalu Prasad, Yadav leader of Bihar, he played a major role in scuttling the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s attempts to introduce reservation for women in Parliament and the state legislatures.

Since the political leadership remains insensitive to gender issues, the fight against rape is bound to be a long drawn one.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 10, 2014.

Injustice remains an impediment to the Indian republic, says AHRC

The following is a statement issued by the Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong:

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) congratulates India on its 63rd Republic Day. From a nation that suffered the brutal consequences of colonisation and the lasting wounds of separation, for the past 63 years, the country and its people have brilliantly shown the resilience to hold close to heart the promise they made more than six decades ago, to remain a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic. The Indian experience of democracy is of immense value in Asia, since for the most of the continent; the concept has only made cameo appearances.

Despite this, the concept of democracy and republic is incomplete, as reiterated in the Constitution, unless justice, liberty and equality are ensured to the people, without exceptions. The integrity of the nation and the dignity of its people depend on this. It is in that the country has to shed its colonial hangovers, and if required reinvent itself, as a nation where these fundamental notions implied in the term 'democratic republic' remain not just as mere words mentioned in the basic law, but realisable guarantees, for which the state should not spare any of its resources.

A recent video that was mentioned in the country's media, of the officers from the Border Security Force (BSF) brutally assaulting a suspected cross-border cattle smuggler is to the point. The nationality of the victims apart, such an incident should not have happened on the first place. That it happened shows that the country's elite border guards have no respect to the country's basic law or to their operative mandate. The video is an exception only to the extent that it was probably for the first time that such an act by the BSF stationed along the Indo-Bangladesh border has been video documented. The AHRC and its partner organization based in West Bengal, MASUM, on more than some 800 separate occasions, reported similar incidents to the authorities, urging them to take action against the BSF officers, and suggesting that the incessant practice of manifest forms of custodial violence - ranging from torture to extra-judicial execution and rape - shows the moral wilt in the force which in itself is a threat to the security of the nation. The incident is ample proof to the fact that the agency today operates in an environment of impunity. Impunity has no place in a democratic republic.

Despicable forms of impunity are enjoyed not just by the BSF. Widespread practice of torture by the state police officers casts a dark shadow upon the very notion of the republic. The country is yet to wake up to the reality that the practice of torture, in its entire manifest forms, is incompatible with what has been guaranteed in the Constitution. While a considerable number of people in the country, including some respectable officers within the Indian Police Service, reiterate that the present state of affairs within the law enforcement agencies cannot coexist with the demands of a modern democratic republic, there is hardly any debate within the country as to what should be done to bring about a change to this unacceptable status quo. Even the country's civil society has ignored to engage with the subject, but for a few exceptional human rights organizations, which is a minority, in relation to the large number of human rights groups that operate in India, enjoying the relatively free space that the country guarantees for human rights work. Fair trial guarantees and the basic presumption of innocence cannot coexist with the practice of torture.

When the law enforcement agencies become incompatible to undertake their responsibility according to the demands of a democratic state, it challenges not only the very concept of democracy, but also encourages inequality and therefore injustice. The recent incident reported from Balangir district, Orissa state of the torching of 40 Dalit houses by the members of a militant dominant caste is an alarming reminder to the fact that prejudices based on inequality still haunts the realization of the true republic. The fact that an alarmingly high percentage of children from the marginalized and minority communities living in the impoverished rural backdrops of at least five states in the country do not have, nor do they expect, any hope to be saved from the certain death due to starvation and malnutrition reiterates that injustice is the practice though justice is the guarantee. A country with its law enforcement agencies enjoying impunity cannot be of any use to check this injustice.

So is the situation of the country's judiciary. That the judiciary too, and with that the country's justice framework has failed, is today no more the 'hyperbole' of human rights organizations. The country's law minister himself has reiterated this reality. In a country where its judiciary cannot expect the prosecution to be capable of assisting the court in its quest to find the truth, or a court where the trial can take anywhere between two to ten years to conclude, or worse, where the judiciary itself can guarantee that only seventy percent of its judges are honest, justice has no life. There cannot be percentages awarded to justice. There can only be either justice or injustice.

The annual remembrance of the day in which the country and its people declared for themselves a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic should not remain a day on which parades are held and speeches made. It must be also a day of introspection. Of what it implies by the sovereignty of the people, and by it, to what extent is India truly a democratic republic.

So far injustice has remained an impediment to the complete realization of the republic. Failing to address it is as bad as undermining the republic.

For information and comments contact:
Bijo Francis
Telephone: +852 - 26986339
Email:indiadesk@ahrc.asia, southasiadesk@ahrc.asia