Opinions and Editorials

Embracing the darkness – By Jyoti Malhotra (Oct 23, 2012, The Hindu)

In the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament, Judas Iscariot agreed he would hand over Jesus to the priests for 30 pieces of silver. Last week when the British government agreed to embrace Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, it should have lent an ear to one of its own citizens, Yusuf Dawood of West Yorkshire, two of whose brothers were lynched by a rampaging mob in the Gujarat riots of 2002. Saeed Dawood, 42 at the time, and Sakil Dawood, 37 at the time, were travelling to Surat along with Mohammed Aswat and Imran Dawood on February 28, 2002, when their car was attacked by a mob about 70 km from Ahmedabad. All four were British citizens.

Aswat’s body was found alongside Imran Dawood in a field, but at least Imran was alive. He was flown back to the United Kingdom, while Aswat was buried in a village near Surat. The other two went missing, but a month later in March, DNA from bone fragments found in an abandoned factory supposedly near the site of the attack was matched to a sample from Saeed Dawood’s mother. The Andhra Pradesh Forensic Science Laboratory, in a report to the British High Commission on May 8, 2002, concluded that Saeed Dawood had been killed by a mob. The BBC reported last week that “an internal British report at the time (had) described the violence as pre-planned with the support of the state government.” Clearly, the David Cameron-led government has now decided that 10 years is long enough in the life of a nation to wipe the tears from the eyes of one of its own – and move on.

The British Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire didn’t forget to pay lip service to Dawood and his friends killed in Gujarat 10 years ago, when he commanded the British High Commissioner to India to visit Gujarat and meet Modi. “This will allow us to discuss a wide range of issues of mutual interest and to explore opportunities for closer cooperation…The U.K. has a broad range of interests in Gujarat. We want to secure justice for the families of the British nationals who were killed in 2002…” Swire said. Perhaps, the fact of being condemned to lowly economic growth, between 1-1.5 per cent since the recession kicked in four years ago, is enough to alchemise your principles; and, all the big names, from Ratan Tata to Mukesh Ambani and even Amitabh Bachchan have been successfully wooed by Narendra Modi, so why should the British be left behind?

Modi has recently returned from Japan where he was treated like a prime minister-in-waiting. The Gujarat investment summit in 2013 lists the Australia India Business Council, the U.S. India Business Council and the Japan External Trade Organisation as partners. It’s clear the U.K. is just about broke – remember the furore some months ago when Britain lost the $11 billion contract to sell 126 fighter jets to India to the Europeans? – and seems ready to sacrifice human rights at the altar of common commerce. Maybe it will now stop meddling in Kashmir? More than likely, the British move on the eve of the Gujarat elections in December, is meant to anoint itself as one of Modi’s cheerleaders, since he is expected to win the vote hands down; all that remains to be seen is the margin of victory, and if this is respectably large, then not even the naysayers inside the Bharatiya Janata Party today can deny him his move to Delhi as prime ministerial candidate for 2014.

The British can then say to their friends and allies the Americans who continue to hold out, that we were there first. The irony is that London is reaching out to Modi within weeks of the jailing of one of his closest aides, Maya Kodnani, for 28 years for her role in the Naroda Patiya riots in which 97 people were killed. Suffice to say Britain’s got it all wrong. This is a common problem with former powers who somehow fail to read the present correctly. Even if Narendra Modi wins the elections in December, his fourth after the Gujarat pogrom, the fact is that India is changing. Yusuf Dawood may have been betrayed by his own government, but India will remember and one day, avenge the injustice.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/embracing-the-darkness/article4023194.ece

SEE ALSO:

• “British gesture at odds with Rights Declaration” – By Manas Dasgupta (Oct 24, 2012, Press Display)
  http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx

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Gadkari’s Bad Company – By Ashhar Khan (Nov 3, 2012, Tehelka)

BJP President Nitin Gadkari is facing what is perhaps the worst crisis of his political career. Though his party had agreed to appoint him for a second term at its national executive meeting at Surajkund last month, it already seems quite unlikely. Questions are being raised about the funding of Purti Power and Sugar Limited (PPSL), of which Gadkari was the chairman till last year. Ideal Road Builders (IRB), a Maharashtra-based construction firm, has made major investments and given loans to PPSL. IRB is alleged to have bagged several contracts for infrastructure projects in 1995-99 when Gadkari was Maharashtra’s PWD minister. As media reports have recently exposed, most of the companies that invested in PPSL had fictitious addresses and directors who were associates of Gadkari or his family. Gadkari was the RSS candidate for BJP president. When his name had come up, senior BJP leaders raised concerns about his business interests in Maharashtra, but Gadkari suited the RSS very well. A swayamsevak all his life, he had no qualms about openly accepting the RSS’ influence over the BJP.

Soon, however, things started going wrong. In 2010, when Gadkari called RJD President Lalu Prasad Yadav a “dog”, it had the RSS squirming. Then, just before the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, despite opposition within the party, including from LK Advani, Gadkari allowed Babu Singh Kushwaha into the BJP, a former minister of the Mayawati government, who had been removed on corruption charges. This was later counted among the reasons for the BJP’s abysmal performance in the state. Again, during the Rajya Sabha election, though both Advani and Sushma Swaraj were keen on having SS Ahluwalia, the then BJP’s deputy leader in the Rajya Sabha, to be re-elected from Jharkhand, Gadkari scuttled Ahluwalia’s chances by nominating his close acquaintance Anshuman Mishra, an NRI businessman little known in politics. Following protests within the party, the RSS intervened and Mishra was dropped like a hot potato.

Things got worse when Mishra started attacking senior leaders like Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi and Arun Jaitley. Jaitley even filed a defamation suit against him. Finally, Ahluwalia was made the candidate, but he lost the election. After that, Gadkari got his close associate Ajay Sancheti elected to the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra. This marked a new low in Gadkari’s relationship with his senior party colleagues. The RSS, too, was not pleased with these developments. Then came the allegations by Anjali Damania and Arvind Kejriwal. Surplus land acquired by the Maharashtra government to build dams had been given to Gadkari’s firms and not returned to the farmers. Gadkari was allegedly working in collusion with then irrigation minister of Maharashtra, NCP’s Ajit Pawar. In the current mess, the media has been agog with reports of Gadkari’s PPSL having dubious investing companies.

The shadow over Gadkari forced senior BJP leaders to meet the top brass of the RSS individually, asking them to intervene and stop him from assuming the office of party president for a second term. Murli Manohar Joshi even told Bhaiyyaji Joshi, the RSS second-in-command, that the BJP was getting a bad name with Gadkari as president. The RSS leaders are reportedly working out a strategy to deal with the Gadkari situation. After all, he was the organisation’s choice as BJP president. With allegations flying thick and fast, he has now become a soft target – someone who could embarrass the party as well as the Sangh Parivar.

On his part, Gadkari met RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat to put his point across. “As a swayamsevak, probity in public life is a must. An investigation may clear the air, but till that happens, any swayamsevak in an important post should quit,” says a senior RSS functionary on condition of anonymity. There are indications from the RSS that Gadkari ought to be given a face-saver. This could mean that he won’t go in for a second term till the time his name is not cleared. The final decision will not be taken till December when Gadkari’s term actually comes to an end. But it is clear that the BJP president’s image has taken a major hit.

http://tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne031112People.asp

SEE ALSO:

• How the plots thicken – Editorial (Oct 19, 2012, The Hindu)
  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/how-the-plots-thicken/article4010133.ece
• The Ravana of Corruption is Still Alive – Editorial – Editorial (Oct 28, 2012, Peoples Democracy)
  http://pd.cpim.org/2012/1028_pd/10282012_1.html
• A price has to be paid, and has to be seen to be paid, if mainstream political parties are to recover ground – By Ashok Malik (Nov 3, 2012, Tehelka)
  http://tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Op031112Editer_cut.asp

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A Sting On Media – By Vidya Bhushan Rawat (Oct 28, 2012, Countercurrents)

The Jindal expose of the Zee TV has actually brought into limelight the delicate media industry relationship. It has also highlighted that how media has been selective and using the news to make and unmake people, tarnish reputation and develop perception without doing its home work. Sting operations are not acceptable legally but then media never cared for that and finally became its own victim. The Zee TV-Zindal episode has raised serious question about the working of the media and its ‘underworld’. For years, this factor is a known fact that ‘paid news’ became an accepted feature in major news organizations and one of the biggest newspaper chains in the country actually mentioned shamelessly that news is a product. The press council also worked on it but the major news organizations did not bother except for late Prabhas Joshi, the indefatigable founder editor of Jansatta, the Hindi daily who would always question it and strongly wrote against it.

There are grave realities are about media and it need to be understood in today’s world. That so called national media is not ‘mission’ as many of them used to do their journalism under a ‘mission’ whether they belong to any particular thoughts but there were nationalistic concern. Those serious people would not sit with the political leaders to seek favors or demonize them if the favor is not done. There was a quality in the class of their writings. But in the post 1990s, journalism has passed through serious changes and now after the advent of electronic media, it look seriousness is gone and media has assumed role of middle class upper caste protagonist. Media’s reach has grown and now there is a cut throat competition among them hence to strengthen their TRPs, they have to resort to all the nonsensical gimmicry using superstition, religion, films, cricket and crime stories. In fact, middle class crime stories are a huge hit if it has sex in it.

As happens, the Media particularly the electronic media and its programmers are suffering from a manglomanic disease about their ‘influence’. There is no doubt about their reach which has grown but today they are not just reporters and anchors but they consider us their Gods. Many of them speak intimidating language and ‘cross examine’ people in the ‘witness box’ crudely. Ofcourse, those who accept the invites also understand that they reach the large masses but the fact is people do not remember so many faces unless somebody informs them that they appeared on the media but them middle class hunger for appearance on visual medium is too high and is used. That media can make and unmake political leaders and set the agenda for the country is the new threat which has been unleashed by them. In their zeal they have continuously ignored the ethics and gone like a propagandists for a particular thought and persons. The campaign against corruption has a strange irony. It had support of media as well as ‘industries also. It is also a well-known fact that the campaign targeted the political class only and never bothered about the hugely corrupted and equally powerful other sectors such as business world, cinema, cricket etc. It was not for any reasons that many of those who claim to be part of the campaign may not be that clean in their public life.

The anti-corruption movement helped the media to strengthen its grip over the power structure. None can deny the fact that media is a business today and is used to blackmail, pressurize and safeguards the interest of the owners and their vast business empire. It is not for unknown reasons that many of the newspapers and news channels are surviving not because of their circulations and reach but because their owner want them to run to exert the political pressure on the powerful people. It is not for nothing that many powerful individuals leave the big media houses and join the nondescript ones just to work as PR for their companies and business interests on huge remunerations. The anti-corruption movement has not helped the people and it was never meant to help those who are victim of corruption but to help the middle classes who actually bribe the officials. The media has over rated their influence and hence it became a victim of its own practices. Long back, I had an opportunity to interact with a hugely reputed international channel to work with on a particular issue. The task was difficult and a good footage would only have been possible through hidden camera. They categorically rejected the idea and in fact asked us to ensure that each interviewees who is being interviewed or filmed would give in writing or those who were illiterate would speak on the camera about their voluntary interview and being informed fully about the issue. In India it has become a fashion to do a sting on your opponent and blackmail him. Sting is a disease and should be used in rarest of the rare cases. Media must stop using public forums to Kangaroo trials in their TV studios. They are not having any reasonable debate as the anchors want you to respond to them according to their perceptions. Many people after coming out from the studios inform how they were sidelined. It is clear, the media has already decided who they should give time and who they should not, who is an authority on certain issue and who is not. And they do not go beyond those few ‘experts’ who themselves are nothing more than mouthpieces and using media to build their own ‘brand values’. Sting operations are mostly done with an idea to create public perception as sting is not really acceptable in the court of law. It is a conversation between different people and not a legal signed deal between the two parties and you can call it is ‘off the record’ talk. But then media has always violated this principles and journalists used the ‘off the record’ information to blackmail the people resulting in untimely end of political career of many.

The Jindal group sting operation of Zee TV is a perfect example of media being trapped by the monster it had created. Definitely, Jindals are equally powerful and too can run a media house. The big companies do not require media but media require them more as the salaries, remunerations of the journalists rise too high and once they are part of market, how would they critique a structure which they are so closely associated and enjoyed every bit of it. Now, the Zee News is completely rejecting the sting operation and saying that Jindal tried to purchase them. Of course, when the news is a purchasable commodity then there must have been bargained and when they fail the operation is actually called sting. Now, the media particularly electronic media will have to think more on desisting targeting people without ample evidences and starting a public trials. There are due processes in India and if media has them, they can give those evidences to the lawyers. News cannot be edited according to the conveniences of the editors and owners. The image of a person cannot be tarnished and crucified of an event which you have recorded. That is building a perception for your political purposes. Now, how can the media reject the sting operation conducted by Zee News if they have used sting to crucify others. Media is the watch dog of democracy and its role has broadened now from just providing information to entertain and also build up perceptions but it is also being watched by the people. Now, it is possible that when media people go to meet a political person to seek a favor or anywhere, they may also face sting as the wall of trust is breached now. …

http://www.countercurrents.org/rawat281012.htm

SEE ALSO:

• Reporting terror: Fasih’s story – By Kashif-ul-Huda (Oct 23, 2012, Twocircles.net)
  http://twocircles.net/2012oct23/reporting_terror_fasih%E2%80%99s_story.html
• Some Thoughts on the Syed Kazmi Case – By Mukul Dube (Oct 21, 2012, Milli Gazette)
  http://www.milligazette.com/news/4415-some-thoughts-on-the-syed-kazmi-case
• Symbol Of Communal Harmony In Faizabad Attacked – By Sandeep Pandey (Oct 29, 2012, Countercurrents)
  http://www.countercurrents.org/pandey291012.htm

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Protecting India’s Sunshine Law – By Shailesh Gandhi (Oct 25, 2012, Economic& Political Weekly)

India’s Right to Information (RTI) Act has been rated as the second best in the world by international agencies. However, the actual implementation of the law leaves a lot to be desired. RTI users across the country have been trying to ensure improvement in its functioning. Concerned citizens have adopted the Act as their own, and zealously warded off government’s attempts to weaken it with amendments so far. While institutions of the state are supposed to implement laws, in this case it is citizens who are enforcing the law. They badger public information officers (PIOs), the first appellate authorities and commissioners to ensure that the Act works properly. RTI exposures are responsible for unearthing many of the scams that have been making the headlines of late. However, two events in the recent past are very disturbing as far as the future of RTI is concerned.

The first was the Supreme Court’s (SC) judgment in the Namit Sharma vs Union of India in wp (C) 210 of 2012 on 13 September. It says Information Commissions (ICs) will have to hear all appeals and complaints in two-member benches, one of whose members has to be a retired high court judge. The RTI Act provides for a maximum of 11 commissioners (and thus 11 benches). The SC’s judgment reduces these to a maximum of five benches. The other alarming event was the prime minister’s (PM) speech at the Central Information Commission’s annual convention on 12 October. The PM voiced his concerns regarding frivolous and vexatious RTI applications, citizens asking for information to highlight mistakes committed, voluminous information being sought which, in turn, means taking up a lot of official time and intruding on the privacy of individuals. Besides this, the PM also expressed worry at citizens seeking information about public private partnerships (PPP) that might discourage private enterprise.

These two events are separate but coming within a month of each other, they should serve as a warning for concerned citizens. I decided to look at four judgments of the SC in the last one year, which appear to reveal its mind on the RTI Act. I am listing the main points in the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Namit Sharma case that may have a very damaging impact on the implementation of the RTI: (1) The judgment reduces the number of benches under which commissioners can hear cases to a maximum of five (11 earlier). There are serious practical problems in getting retired judges for this task, which the Court does not appear to have thought about. (2) The reduced number means that it is unlikely they will clear over 3,000 cases per bench, i e, 15,000 cases per commission annually. The Central Commission, the Maharashtra Commission and the Uttar Pradesh Commission get over 20,000 cases each year and the number is only growing. The aam admi, in whose name we profess to act, will no longer use RTI, just as he/she has moved away from consumer forums and the judiciary. In that event, the potential of the RTI Act to change the face of Indian democracy will be lost. It will also result in the pressure on public servants to respond to RTI queries being reduced considerably. …

http://www.epw.in/commentary/protecting-indias-sunshine-law.html

SEE ALSO:

• Stop Criminalising The Activists Fighting For People’s Rights – By Vidya Bhushan Rawat (Oct 26, 2012, Countercurrents)
  http://www.countercurrents.org/rawat261012.htm
• ‘The RTI journey has shown us why citizens must remain vigilant’ – Aruna Roy with Shonali Ghosal (Oct 27, 2012, Tehelka)
  http://tehelka.com/story_main54.asp?filename=Ne271012RTI.asp

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The Armed Forces Special Powers Act : The Lawlessness Of A Law – By Anshul Kumar Pandey (Oct 26, 2012, Countercurrents)

Despite being a state in the throes of modernization, the Indian law and law enforcement agencies have had a soft corner for its colonial legacy. Many of these colonial era laws have made a splash on the national scene recently, the most famous of them being the Sedition act of 1870 which was used to put India against Corruption cartoonist Aseem Trivedi behind the bars. It was also slapped on Booker prize winner and respected writer Arundhati Roy for her remarks on Kashmir as well as on eminent pediatrician Dr. Binayak Sen for his alleged links with Maoists. There are many other colonial era laws that the Indian state uses with depressing frequency to muzzle dissent within its borders. However, the most draconian law that exists in the rulebook of the Indian state is a gem of its own creation. The Armed Forces Special Powers act was passed first through an ordinance in 1942, and was then polished and passed as an act in the parliament in 1958. Originally intended to apply only to the states of Assam and Manipur, the act was later extended in 1972 to cover all the seven states of the North East. In 1990, in the face of utter chaos, the act was also imposed on Jammu and Kashmir. Currently it is applicable in two districts of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Tripura and Jammu and Kashmir.

Contrary to what its name suggests, the act does not glorify the armed forces in the north east. Rather, it has over time reduced them and the law to an embodiment of much that is wrong with our internal security. Far from restoring order to the “disturbed” areas where it has been brought into effect, AFSPA has instead fuelled popular anger and discontent. The brutality of the law is manifest from the examples of inhumane ruthlessness that it has helped produce. The sweeping powers that the act gives to armed force personnel in a “disturbed” area has thrown up blood curdling instances of rape, torture, extrajudicial and summary killings etc. Consider these examples. On 2nd November 2000, as Sinam Chandramani and nine other civilians waited at a bus stop in Malom, the troops of 17 Assam Rifles, who had been attacked earlier in the day by “insurgents”, opened indiscriminate fire. The 1988 National Child Bravery Award winner was immediately killed along with all the other nine civilians. The reverberations of this gross atrocity were felt across the state and on 4th November, Irom Sharmila Chanu, a Grade IV Veterinary worker from the state started her indefinite fast to protest against the killings and to demand a repeal of AFSPA. Having spent more than 500 weeks on the fast, the Iron Lady of Manipur would complete 12 years of her protest this year, making it the longest hunger strike in the entire documented human history, with no signs of ending soon.

Later in July 2004, the body of a 32 year old woman named Thangjam Manorama was found riddled with bullets in Ngariyan Maring Village. She had been picked up by the personnel of 17 Assam Rifles (again) in the middle of the night for her alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army and had been brutally tortured and summarily executed. Bullets and wounds were found on her chest, on her buttocks and even in her vagina. Demanding a proper investigation into the circumstances leading to her death and punishment for her killers, Manorama’s family has refused to take her body and it lies, till date, in the morgue of Regional Institute of Medical Sciences in Imphal. Manorama’s brutal execution brought the simmering discontent against the armed forces in the state on the surface. Major women groups across the state announced a 48 hour shutdown and brought life in the state to a grinding halt. In what turned out to be the most powerful protest against the law, hundreds of women protested in front of the headquarters of Assam Rifles naked, holding placards that read “Indian Army, Rape Us!” The enormity of these crimes and the subsequent ignominy heaped upon the victim’s kith and kin can be gouged by the fact that the Home Ministry has consistently denied requests for sanction to prosecute army personnel believed to be involved in these crimes.

It is an irony that AFSPA is a legislative act for it violates both Indian as well as International Law. As pointed out by the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, AFSPA runs afoul of Article 21 (Right to Life), Article 22 (Protection against arrest and detention), The Criminal Procedure Code, The Army Act etc. under the Indian constitution and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Customary Law and International Humanitarian Law under the International Law. However, for the “mainland” politicians of this country, who are pressurized only by the popular two minute fasts like that of Anna Hazare and are connected to the land of Chinese and Bangladeshi looking people through the “chicken neck” coverage in the mainstream media, this hypocrisy and lawlessness has taken a backseat in the favor of more appealing jingoist nationalism. AFSPA is in the interest of “national security”, they say, and national security is a sensitive issue which acts as a vacuum pump for the voices of disagreement. Sucked in this vortex of national security against human rights, individual concerns do not find much air to hold on to.

For a country that takes immense pride in the procedure and justice meted out by its judiciary, these glaring legal anomalies only serve to rake up more dirt on a legislation that gives powers even to a non gazette officer to shoot any person on mere suspicion. It is no wonder then, that in the Wikileaks cables the then Governor S.S. Sidhu is caught describing these north eastern states to the then American Consul General in Kolkata Henry Gardiner, as “more of a colony and less as a part of the Indian state”. In March this year, Christopher Heyns, the UN Special Rapportuer on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions asked India to repeal the Armed Forces Special Powers act. For a country whose Prime Minister heeds foreign media and agencies than the domestic ones, this recommendation too has gone unheeded. In fact, the government has been sitting on the recommendations of a committee that it had itself appointed (Jeevan Reddy Commission) and which had also recommended a total repeal of the act. Despite having promised back in 2004, to replace the existing law with a more “humane” law, all that the people affected by AFSPA have got till now are empty words and death packed bullets. Max Weber said that State has a monopoly on violence. While this dictum may hold true in the contemporaneous sense, the protests and fasts of people like Irom Sharmila have added more color to it by conveying that the state may have a monopoly on violence but the monopoly of resistance still lies with its free thinking citizens.

http://www.countercurrents.org/pandey261012.htm

SEE ALSO:

• Progress in Nagaland – Editorial (Oct 27, 2012, Economic & Political Weekly)
  http://www.epw.in/editorials/progress-nagaland.html
• A long journey to peace – By Sanjoy Hazarika (Oct 29, 2012, The Hindu)
  http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/a-long-journey-to-peace/article4041286.ece

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Haryana’s Rapist Regime – By Anand Teltumbde (Oct 25, 2012, Economic& Political Weekly)

After the Manesar incident that exposed the unlawful labour practices of Maruti Suzuki and other leading capitalist enterprises in Haryana, backed by the state government, the province is once again the focus of attention, this time for its feudal traits. There have been 19 gang-rapes of dalit girls, one more gruesome than the other, in a single month. While the government’s response has been lethargic, the notorious khap panchyats of the dominant caste, the Jats, have, in a way, justified these rapes by advising that girls should be married off before they reached the age of puberty to avoid rapes. Important politicians unashamedly endorsed this shocking solution in public; some of them even dismissed the rapes as basically consensual acts turned sour. These are not one-off examples of reckless statements by some discredited individuals; the sexual assaults and the care-a-damn attitude of the state’s political establishment represent an abiding pattern that makes the state a veritable hell for dalits. …

Recall the 16 October 2002 lynching of five dalits by a large and violent mob on the main road outside the Dulina Police Post, near Jhajjar town in full view of the police and several senior district officials. The victims were accused of skinning a cow, the killers were glorified as heroes who had avenged the death of “our gau mata”. The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Parmanand Giri had openly stated that those who had killed the “gau-hatyare” (killers of the holy cow) must be honoured. The VHP President Giriraj Kishore justified the killings, saying that “the life of a cow is more precious than that of a human being”. Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and Sarva Khap Panchayat openly lent support to the killers and opposed any action against them. Such is the terror of the Jats, who take pride in their valour (read criminality), that the then district commissioner of Jajjhar had expressed his helplessness to a visiting team of activists of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, saying that no administration could function in the area without pacifying the sentiments of organisations like the VHP, and negotiating with the khap panchayats.

On 27 August 2005, 55 to 60 dalit houses were burnt down by a violent mob of 1,500 to 2,000 Jats in Gohana with full support of local police. On 21 April 2010, two dalits were killed in Mirchpur and their houses set ablaze. Last year, 70 dalit families of Bhagana village in Hisar were ousted following their social boycott by the Jats. In all these cases, there was arrogant support for the perpetrators of crime. The khap panchayats’ honour killings, public justification of such killings by Jat spokespersons and politicians, their passing of a resolution against the struggling Maruti Suzuki workers’ union, and several such actions are nothing but a manifestation of the naked roguery of the rich Jats of Haryana.

Dalits live in perpetual fear of Jats in Haryana. On account of worsening of the female sex ratio (there are just 877 females per 1,000 males, far below the national average of 940 as per census 2011) the incidence of incest is high. But when the khap panchyats issued a fatwa against the within-clan marriages, dalit girls increasingly became the victims of sexual assault. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reports show that the number of rape cases where dalit girls/women are the victims has consistently gone up from 21 in 2007 to 56 in 2011. While at the national level, the number of rape cases wherein dalit girl/woman are the victims went up by 15% over the period, the increase in Haryana was 167%. In September 2012 alone, there have been 19 cases of gang-rapes of dalit girls. Among these, there was the case of a 16-year-old girl who was gang-raped by a dozen upper caste men in Darba village of Hisar district on 9 September. The rapists had filmed the horrific act and circulated the video. Unable to cope with the situation, her father committed suicide. Another dalit girl of the same age, who was also gang-raped in Sachcha Kheda village in Jind district, burnt herself to death. A five-month pregnant dalit woman was abducted and raped by two youths in Kalyat. Practically, the gangs of bahubalis, with the patronage of politicians, can rape and kill dalit girls with impunity. Haryana has witnessed such rape cases in several districts, including Rohtak, Hisar, Jind, Bhiwani, Yamunanagar, Panipat, Sonipat, Ambala, Karnal, Faridabad and Kaithal in September this year.

Unlike the dominant Jats, the dalits are poor and without protection. They can be easily terrorised by the upper castes, which exert pressure on the family of a rape victim not to report the matter to the police. If the family still approach police, the latter dissuade the former and do not easily register the case. Only under public pressure do the police seem to register crimes against dalits and arrest the culprits. When the case is registered, most victim families are coerced by the Jats to go in for an out-of-court settlement, and accused of destroying the village’s inter-caste harmony if they refuse to succumb. While the victim’s family incurs the wrath of the powerful Jats of the village, the police do everything to weaken the case. Traditionally dalits have relied on the state as a neutral arbiter and hoped it would do them justice. The colonial state created this hope and the postcolonial state, pretending to conduct itself as per the Constitution, which dalits believed to be the code of Ambedkar, reinforced this reliance. Despite persistent disillusionment over the last six decades, this trait appears intact, perhaps for the lack of any better alternative. The state has not only been callous; it has also itself been a perpetrator of atrocities. In every atrocity that has come to light, the complicit or active perpetrator’s role of the state has been evident. Besides, the state has consistently acted against the poor of which the dalits have been a preponderant part. In recent years, the security syndrome has come handy for the state to label them as Naxalites and persecute them. The state is completely exposed in its anti-dalit role. The anti-people col¬lusion of the legislature and the executive apart, even the judiciary – that was held in high hope – with its biased judgments, has failed to create confidence in dalits. …

http://www.epw.in/margin-speak/haryanas-rapist-regime.html

SEE ALSO:

• Rape: Patriarchy And Selective Historiography – By Ram Puniyani (Oct 27, 2012, Countercurrents)
  http://www.countercurrents.org/puniyani271012.htm

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