Aatish's blog
The spectacular brutality of the violence perpetuated against women during Communal Riots has been documented since the days of Partition. Though all are subject to the force of the mobs, women’s bodies are specifically targeted for both physical and sexual mutilation, rape and murder. This attempt to defile and destroy the female members of a community is another characteristic that lends the violence of Gujarat 2002 to be accurately termed genocide. The foeticides, rape and mutilation of women undoubtedly have long-term impact on the psychology of the attacked community, which obviously has important social implications for the women of that community. These social implications are rarely commented upon by human right’s reports, as they can be only discerned well after the riots have subsided.
Noor Jehan, a female activist who has just started the Bharitya Muslim Mahila Andolan (Indian Muslim Women's Movement), came to identify and elucidate these effects. After stating that over 250 women who are still alive have been raped, and further that only a single case is pending in court, Noor Jehan said:
Seeing this situation the people who were staying in the camps married off the raped girls, some only 15 or 16 years old, to any random guy in the camp. They did not consider anything whether the boy is decent chap or not, whether he earns or not, whether he is a drunkard or gambler. Nothing. Now after one or two years if you look at the condition of those women, they are in a pathetic state. They are confined to homes and some of them have even committed suicide, others have gone for a divorce, some of their husbands have taken another women…after 2002, the Gujarati girls who are Muslims, their lives were changed overnight. Some of them were even from well off families; they used to wear jeans and t-shirts, now they have been confined to the veil. After the Muslim girls were raped, their parents said that the times are bad, you must remain in the veil, do not go out of your house
Among the many promises made by the UPA government during their 2004 campaign was the enactment of meaningful legislation to prevent the occurrence of "communal riots," effectively deal with them when they do occur, punish those involved, and provide for the compensation and rehabilitation of victims after the fact. For the past two years, several drafts of the Communal Violence (Prevention, Control and Rehabilitation of Victims) Bill (2005), have been released. However, not a single one adequately fulfills any of the purported aims of the Act. Instead, in its current form, it could easily become another instrument by which the Hindutva agenda can be carried out.
The central problem of the Act is very simple, most other deficiencies in the bill flow from straight from that source. The Act fundamentally misunderstands what a "communal riot" is; it operates on the premise that a communal riot is a condition of mutual violence between two communities in which the state is a neutral actor. This view has been proved false by nearly every report commissioned by the government from Justice Mishra to Justice Srikrishna, in addition to numerous reports by human rights organizations, NGOs etc. Communal riots are better characterized as the attack of a community by another with the full or partial collusion and complicity of the government at a local, district and state level. This really should not have to be repeated over and over and over and over and over and over. The impunity with which the State acts before, during and after each major riot is becoming increasingly severe. If one sees communal riots as mutual violence in the context of a neutral State, then obviously the natural response is to increase State power and discretion in order to control and mediate the violence. However, when one sees "communal riots" for what they really are, i.e., state sponsored genocide, then the augmentation of State power (particularly at the level of individual states) becomes a greater weapon in the hands of those committing the genocide.
Thus,
In order for the Act to even be invoked, individual State governments have issue a notification and further declare particular areas "communally disturbed." This means that if another 2002 was to take place in Gujarat, Narendra Modi would be responsible for the invocation of the Act and have the discretion to designate which areas were "communally disturbed." Once an area is declared "communally disturbed," then the State government is endowed with special powers to control and quell the area. Again, if the State government in question is of the Hindutva variety, it could then designate a Muslim area "communally disturbed" and deploy the police to do what it likes with full impunity.
In case you were thinking the Central government could act as a counter and deploy the army, it is powerless to do so unless requested to by the State government (Section 55).
Yesterday, the southern city of Hyderabad was rocked by a bomb blast immediately following the Friday namaz, killing nearly at least 13 people and injuring 50. Police claim to have diffused two more bombs located near the bomb that exploded inside the Masjid. There was mass chaos around the Masjid following the explosion, and the police clashed with protestors who felt the police were not providing adequate security. The police fired tear gas, and it has been alleged that they also fired live ammunition into the crowd, killing several people.
I found this pic in a random middle school friend's Facebook album. I thought it was adorable, and I wanted to share.
In my first post on PTR, I expressed some genuine hope regarding Manmohan Singh’s response to the Minority Commission’s report identifying Muslims as India’s most disadvantaged community, i.e., claiming that Muslims should have the first claim on resources generated from an ‘ascendant India.’ And what better candidates than those who have lost their next of kin in an abominable attack by the Bajrang Dal, ‘unknown terrorists?’ I mean, what more fitting a time to kill 38 Muslims then on Shaab-e-Baraat, the day when Muslims commemorate their dead. And what more fitting a group to blame than Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the infamous Kashmiri separatist group (which I might add, the BJP government had a hand in creating by giving in to the demands of the Qandahar highjackers and releasing jailed militants). If I were a member of a Kashmiri separatist group, obviously my main targets would be poor Muslims on a holy day in the middle of a state with India’s longest history of communalism. The other group whom the Anti-Terrorism Squad blames is the now defunct Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), whose objectives are to promote Islam and propagate an Islamic State a society based on Islam. Notice how the Hindutwadi argument of ‘they kill their own people to raise communal tension’ falls apart here. In a state that is so communally fragile already, why would any group claiming to represent the interests of Muslims (though LeT claims only to represent the interests of Kashmiri Muslims) attack Muslims and throw suspicion on themselves? Why would a group wanting an Islamic State attack Muslims in a state where if there were to be any mass violent response on the part of Muslims, they would be annihilated by the well embedded structures of the Sangh (Shiv Saina, VHP, Bajrang Dal etc)? Oh right, I forgot, they make that argument because Sanghis think in categorical imperatives (Godhra).
But I digress…here is the core issue. Malegaon is a very poor community, seventy percent of which are Muslims who fled the partition riots in Hyderabad and Delhi to resettle in bumfuck bucolic Maharashtra. Since the attack, the police have mainly harassed and arrested local (and non-local) Muslim youth in connection with the bombings and have as a result of the RDX explosive used in the blast, blamed LeT, their local operatives (SIMI), and of course Pakistan. No substantive or believable arrests have been made the in case, and police ignorance is partially what allowed the attack to occur in the first place. Just the week before, security was extremely tight for Ganesh Chathurthy, but all that simply vanished during the Muslim holiday [link]. This is obviously based on the police presumption that Muslims are primarily responsible for causing communal disharmony, and thus there is no need for security on their communal holidays. Regardless, curfews were imposed, mass rioting didn’t follow (read: Muslims, in a place in which they are in the majority, didn’t go on an animalistic rampage essential to their character) and secular India patted itself on the back, doling out Rs. 1 lakh to each ‘next of kin’ of a deceased victim [link]. This is all well and good, in that it is the best we could have possibly expected (how sad is that?). 1 lakh is obviously unsatisfactory, but honestly, so is the whole idea of imputing to suffering and loss a market value (in this case, $2,200), which pretty much alleviates any further responsibility on the part of the government to the victims, survivors and the problems that caused the suffering and loss in the first place.
I’m not sure whether the very writing of this post invalidates its basic point that this is a non-issue transformed into a matter of international consideration by bored and opportunistic politicians (catering to a bored and opportunistic Indian middle class, both in India and in Britain)…you decide.
It has been my experience (and perhaps your's) that white people can be occasionally racist, and in this age of reality TV, sometimes white people are caught on camera being racist, offending the politically correct (who like to pretend that racism doesn’t exist) on either end of the political spectrum. This level of shock is usually limited to a few articles, rarely requiring the comment of senior government ministers or concerned brown MPs.
But what happens when you throw an erstwhile Bollywood starlet into the mix? A news story that leads the headlines of two major Indian dailies, BBC South Asia and requires discussion between Chancellor Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh! Just to put your mind at ease, the leader of the world’s largest democracy and the chancellor of the UK both agree that India and Britain are against “racism and intolerance.” Here according to the BBC is the type of abuse Ms. Shetty had to endure:
The doctrine of multiculturalism (i.e., the half-hearted attempt to justly coexist with the scary brown people now living among ‘us’) has recently come under great scrutiny in Britain. Politicians, journalists, and other talking heads are starting to wonder whether the cultural openness of both the British state and society has made possible the radicalization of Britain’s immigrant youth, particularly Muslims, thus leading to spectacular events of terrorism like the 7/11 bombings. Perhaps we have simply been too tolerant, these pundits argue, too free with the vast dark masses that we have imported as a source of cheap labour (after extracting the natural and human resources of their home countries for the last four hundred years). Perhaps they must be made more like ‘us,’ so they don’t do things essential to their own cultures, like bomb, rape and steal. Responding to these criticisms as well as the concerns of the immigrant communities, Prime Minister Tony Blair gave the following comments:
For the first time in a generation there is an unease, an anxiety, even at points a resentment that our very openness, our willingness to welcome difference, our pride in being home to many cultures, is being used against us; abused, indeed, in order to harm us." [link]
"When it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common. It is what gives us the right to call ourselves British.”[link]
Yesterday, the extremely committed politicians of the Lok Sabha worked themselves into a frenzy over PM Manmohan Singh's recent remarks regarding the distribution of 'the fruits of development.' By 3pm, the 'pandemonium' had gotten so bad, that Parliament (at the behest of the BJP) had to adjourn itself, having as usual, accomplished absolutely nothing. Lets try to trace this debate from its beginning only a few days ago, in order to understand what could possibly cause the Lok Sabha, the legislative body of over a billion people, to abandon its work.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on December 8th addressing the 52nd National Development Council, the interface body on development policy comprising the central and state governments:
Ignoring the fact that this statement is embedded within a larger narrative of 'development,' in which, particularly under the regime of liberalization's messiah (Singh), all steps toward 'development' are a priori goods, regardless of their consequences (displacement, deprivation, suffering) on India's vast masses, this statement actually seems pretty sound. Particularly after the minority commission's recent report singling out Muslims as the most deprived and disadvantaged of India's minorities, this statement could be seen as the Prime Minister's attempt to seriously engage with attempts at equitable distribution. But who has such expectations of Indian politics? Lets examine the responses of the opposition, while keeping in mind that the PM said 'particularly the Muslim minority,' not 'only' or even 'primarily' the Muslim minority.
My personal favourite Sanghi L.K. Advani:
"What is this if not rank communalism...it is in violation of the spitir of the constitution."
