In one of his stand-up clips, comedian Kunal Kamra called out Mumbaikars for their arrogance. He went on to say that Mumbaikars (residents of Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay) have nothing to be proud of and should stop making fun of Delhi.

Manu Joseph (former Editor-in-chief of the Open magazine), in his weekly column, wrote, ”Like a rich man’s son, Delhi is a beneficiary of undeserved privileges. That is at the heart of Bombay’s contempt for Delhi.”

The conflict is better described as a physiological state of war between Mumbai and Delhi. Their respective intelligentsias lashing out at each other through their creative spaces is a riveting conversation to look at. And to be a part of.

Delhi, for long, has been taunted and looked down upon for holding the clout in policy formation and taking decisions for the rest of the country. This is very well reflected in the nature and the behaviour of its citizens. It is indeed like the rich man’s son, as rightly pointed out by Joseph. People in Delhi parade a sense of social superiority over the rest of the country. That is because most of its citizens are just two degrees away from the centre of power.

Mumbai, on the other hand, is merciless. Mumbai is more real. Mumbai does not hide behind the larger ideological arguments of the so-called intellectuals in Lodhi Gardens. Mumbai is in the face.

Mumbai is like the tough patriarch who does not give away too easily. Mumbai is like the patriarch who made it through the terrific political and social turbulence and respectfully earns a penny or two and is more than happy and content to merely be able to feed his family. Mumbai is not about the class struggle but about the consciousness of its class. It is conscious of its immense power and accompanying limitations. Simply put, Mumbai is fiercely middle-class.

Delhi is pretentious. Its debates tick all the social parameters which would make the larger liberal democratic class to place it on a social pedestal. However, its actions don’t seem to. Delhi’s intellectual narrative is embedded in hegemony. It is controlled by only a few, considered to influence decision-making much more than any other socially and morally uplifted, educated PHD holding individual in any part of the country. No wonder the anger of a fiercely led movement by a certain Periyar in erstwhile Madras was certainly directed at the Capital or rather the power brokers in that city.

The reality of Delhi, however, reeks of a deep sense of caste discrimination, sexism and a distinctly built class structure. Delhi is like Aziz Ansari or the contemporary desi Jat feminist boy. Come morning, he talks about the emancipation of women and women’s struggle for equality. But at night, he goes back on what he says and does what his community is largely stigmatised and accused of.

Mumbai doesn’t give you space which Delhi does. For an aspiring journalist who is largely looking at spaces that afford one the leisure to spend long periods of time socialising, debating and discussing academic nuances and other pressing issues, Delhi hits the jackpot. The city gives you this option without making you ponder much over your rent, about traversing with thousands of others, crunched on a train bogey. It doesn’t make you think that you probably can’t afford a first class ticket and have to hang on there till you reach home amidst ten other aspiring professionals from different fields, fighting over who is going to answer nature’s call first.

Gossip is an integral part of both the cities’ discourse. Karan Johar and Bollywood. Arun Jaitley and the Delhi Gymkhana. Knowing a big-wig from Bollywood in Mumbai and someone from the executive in Delhi adds a silver lining to your social status. ‘Mera baap kaun hain pata hain?’ and the unwanted display of societal capitalism has different interpretations in either city but is close to both of them.

Intellectuals like that of Joseph in his column, argue for the case of Mumbai and not much for Delhi. In reality, both these great cities are run by families who have, for long been in these businesses. They form the topmost rung in the societal and economic food chain. In Delhi, being the Prime Minister of a country is the job of a single family. In Mumbai, Tiger Shroff becomes the heartthrob of the nation, and a certain Rajkummar Rao is still lingering and trying to find himself a space in the world’s largest film industry, run by the smallest group of people. Hence, the central question remains. If both the cities display a certain similarity of character, then who really runs the country? Who sets the discourse? Modi from Delhi? Or Ambani from Mumbai?

Well, currently it’s Gujarat. Dhokla, without a doubt, is definitely on its way to becoming the country’s favourite food. Gujarat’s ‘khushboo’ is now ‘desh’ ka khushboo.

For years, the significant similarity between the cities has been the contempt its indigenous citizens have towards the system and anyone who is not a real ‘Delhite’ or a ‘Mumbaikar.’ The reality of being one has several parameters, but the most important one is linguistics. ‘Marathi’ will indeed save you from the daily nuisance of haggling with your landlord in Mumbai and the surname of a ‘Pandey,’ ‘Saxena,’ ‘Malhotra’ or one from the upper caste Uttar Pradesh or Haryana region will do the same for you in Delhi.

The indigenous people have underlining anger against the outsiders, leading to cases of racial hatred and anger. The dominance of Shiv Sena and the rise of Arvind Kejriwal justifies this argument. They are the symbols of anger of the indigenous population trying to regain their lost ground and be the dominant voice in the discourse of the cities. Is it then right to address these cities as ‘cosmopolitan?’

Picture Courtesy – dilwallokidilli.wordpress.com

The post Delhi Vs Mumbai: Who Runs The Country And Who Sets The Discourse? appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

The old religion, the old gods; Wicca draws from the Old Traditions of Witchcraft. This is true that Witchcraft and Wicca are similar in many respects yet they are not the same. One can be a Witch, without being a Wiccan, just as a person can be a Christian without being a Baptist. Wicca is a recognized religion, while Witchcraft itself is not considered more of a path. It’s best to describe Wicca as a modern religion, based on ancient Witchcraft traditions.

Contrary to what many believe, Wicca is a very peaceful, harmonious, and balanced way of life which promotes oneness with the divine and nature and all which exists.

Wicca is a deep appreciation of the sun rising or setting, or the forest in the light of a lustrous moon.  It is light and shadow and all that lies in between. It is the balance. It is loving Mother Earth, Nature, and being humble. To be a Witch is to be a healer, a teacher, a seeker, a giver, and a protector of all things.  If this path is yours, may you walk it with honor and integrity

This belief system is a reconstruction of pre-Christian traditions originating in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. While much of the information of how our ancestors lived, worshiped, and believed has been wiped out from history by the medieval church, we try to preserve those beliefs to the best of our ability with the information that is available.

Thanks to archaeological discoveries, we now have basis to believe that the origins of our belief system can be traced further back to the Paleolithic peoples who worshipped a Hunter God and a Fertility Goddess. Wicca is a fertility religion, contrary to popular belief of it being a earth religion. With these discoveries of cave paintings, estimated to be around 30,000 years old, depicting a man with the head of a stag, and a pregnant woman standing in a circle with eleven other people, it can reasonably be assumed that Witchcraft is one of the oldest belief systems known in the world today. These archetypes are recognized by us Wiccans.

Witchcraft in ancient history was known as “The Craft of the Wise” because most who followed the path were in tune with the forces of nature, had a knowledge of Herbs and medicines, gave counsel and were valuable parts of the village and community as Shamanic healers and leaders. They understood that humankind is not superior to nature but instead we are simply one of the many parts, both seen and unseen, of the whole. These wise people understood that what we take or use we must return in kind to maintain balance and equilibrium in nature. Clearly, modern man, with all his applied learning and technology, has forgotten this.

For the past several hundred years, the image of the Witch has been mistakenly associated with evil, heathenism, and unrighteousness. In my humble opinion, these misconceptions have their origin in a couple of different places.

To begin, the medieval church created these myths to convert the followers of the old nature-based religions to the church’s way of thinking. By making the Witch into a diabolical character, and turning the old religious deities into devils and demons, the missionaries were able to attach fear to these beliefs which aided in the conversion process.

Secondly, the women healers threatened the position of men in the medical community. Unfortunately these fears and superstitions have carried forward through the centuries and remain to this day. This is why many who follow this fertility- and nature-oriented belief system have adopted to hide, to escape the persecution, harassment and misinformation associated with the name of Witchcraft and Witch, not to mention the bad publicity the press and Hollywood has given us!

This is a spiritual system that fosters the free thought and will of the individual, encourages learning and an understanding of the earth and nature, thereby affirming divinity within all living things. Most importantly however, it teaches responsibility. We accept responsibility for our actions and deeds as a result of the choices we make. We do not blame an exterior entity or being for our shortcomings, weaknesses, or mistakes. We acknowledge the cycles of nature, the lunar phases, and the seasons to celebrate our spirituality and to worship the divine. This allows the Witch to work with the intent of living in harmony and achieving balance with all things. Some of the spells that we do are for healing, love, harmony, wisdom and creativity. The potions that we stir might be a headache remedy, a cold tonic, or an herbal bath.

Wiccans believe that the spirit of The One, Goddess, and God exist in all things. In the trees, rain, flowers, the sea, in each other and all of natures creations. This means that we must treat all things of the Earth as aspects of the divine.  We also revere the spirits of the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, from which we obtain insight to the rhythms of nature and understand they are also the rhythms of our own lives.

Because Witches have been persecuted for so many centuries, we believe in religious freedom first! We do not look at our path as the only way to achieve spirituality, but as one path among many to the same end. We are not a missionary religion out to convert new members to think the same as we do. However we are willing to share our experience and knowledge. Anyone who is meant for this path will find it through their own search as the Goddess speaks to each of us in her time and way.

Wiccans practice the ‘Harm None’ Policy; the Wiccan Rede. Wicca is not a cult. We do not worship Satan or consort with Demons. Satan is a Christian creation and they can keep him. We do not need a paranoid creation of supreme evil and eternal damnation to scare us into doing the right thing and helping others. We do not sacrifice animals or humans because that would violate our basic tenant of “Harm None.” We have no need to steal or control the life force of another human to achieve mystical and supernatural powers. Wiccans have a very strict belief in the ‘Law of Three’ which states that whatever we send out into our world shall return to us three-fold, either as good or bane.

Remember to read with your heart, for it is when you see life and the world with your heart and spirit that you truly gain an understanding of what Wicca is.

Blessed Be!

The post I Practice Witchcraft, And I Wish People Knew These Things About My Religion appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

Youth in conflict zones are most commonly depicted as either passive victims of trauma who are emotionally volatile, or active security threats. There is fear breeding amongst the government and societies that write off a generation as prone to militia and violent behaviour. As a result, wide swaths of youth are dismissed , isolated, or more often portrayed as militants and insurgents just by virtue of being from a war-torn region. Such depictions of the youth of Kashmir leads to a hostile outlook towards them, and creates a huge gap between them and youth in other parts of our country.

The most renowned description of how war traumatises children (which includes adolescents or those at the lower end of the youth category) is Graça Machel’s landmark 1996 submission to the UN General Assembly—the Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. The report describes the ruinous effects of war on all children. Machel has since conducted a follow-up study, which reasserts that “Children spared the direct experience of violence in armed conflict still suffer deep emotional distress.” All children, she added, “who have lived through conflict need psychosocial support”. However, not to deny war’s negative effect on young people, this dominant trend that emphasizes child and youth “vulnerability rather than resilience” spontaneously puts them in a category of damaged humans.

We are as far from conflict as one can be and our conceptions of childhood tend to regard children as “vulnerable, passive beings who need to be protected and cared for”, instead of active community members. These young people are capable of understanding their community far better than any outsider making an attempt to improve their situations. They collectively make an effort to deal with their current scenarios in a more holistic, productive manner than resorting to guns and pelting stones, as Kashmiri youth (or for that matter youth from any conflict zone in the world) are portrayed by media. What we seldom fail to notice is how this youth is also capable of rising above violence to nurture peace through their art, music, and knowledge, to forge ahead in life.

The growing fear of Kashmiri youth or youth in other conflict areas of our nation in popular media poses a barrier against carrying out programs to assist them or to reach out to them. Such fear does not inspire people to try to understand and work with youth. Instead, it encourages the idea that one must protect themselves against such young people. This is a preposterous idea, and it deeply affects the youth movement at large.

This lack of engagement with most youth aggravates the feelings of many youth that they are insignificant castaways. And as Graça Machel puts it:

“Youth need to connect, work together, developing synergies, identify the commonalities they have, what their mission is, a common agenda, define priorities so that they have collective engagement and they will be able to reason clearly what are the impact they are looking at making. Change requires big movement , a youth movement based in common vision and agenda. We need a youth movement, not a small initiative or movement in isolation. Recognizing the need to work together and how we can work together.”

Popular depictions of youth as security threats also arise, for the most part, from Western sources. For instance, American author Robert D. Kaplan has famously characterized male youth in urban West Africa as “out of school, unemployed, loose molecules in an unstable social fluid that threatened to ignite”. This notion is widely believed and has many supporters. Such menacing descriptions were supported by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s argument that societies are particularly vulnerable to war when people aged 15-24 (that is, youth) comprise at least 20% of the population. His thesis basically illustrated the demographic dangers created by these ‘youth bulges’, also defined as “extraordinarily large youth cohorts relative to the adult population” by Henrik Urdal, another political scientist. Urdal’s statistical analysis neither supported Huntington’s argument regarding a 20% threshold nor Kaplan’s argument that the world is “moving toward a new age of insecurity” with the increase in young population in underdeveloped countries. Instead, it depicted high numbers of youth as “a blessing and a curse.”

A large youth population can “boost an economy”. But poorly performing economies and weak governance, when mixed with a youth bulge in the population, may lead to violence. What we need to take cognisance of here is how best our government along with the youth in peaceful contexts can create means for our youth in conflict areas, in order to turn them into productive assets instead of fighting them as a vessel of disruption. We need to start focusing on the ‘pull factors’ (religion, group norms, ideology, education and more) rather than the ‘push factors’ (conditions that alienate people, or cause them to reject mainstream society, such as poverty, youth unemployment, endemic corruption, elite impunity, and vastly inadequate public services).

We Need To Recognise Youth Resilience

The idea that perpetuates a certain kind of mistaken image of young talented Kashmiris that are granted the status of belligerents have to be dismantled. War’s impact on youth is complex, but a one-dimensional idea is easily co-opted by the media or the government to sideline them or have them controlled by the military in the nastiest of ways one can imagine. Additionally recent research indicates that child and youth experiences of warfare are far more varied than had previously been assumed.

It’s an arbitrary decision to call a youth violent by society at large, and brand them as ruthless rebels, instead of giving them a chance. This has as severe an effect (if not more) on them as war. Our government needs to recognise this youth, provide for them better, and give them the environment that they rightfully deserve, rather than push them towards a dead end by fearing them and acting in an hostile manner. The intention is not to underplay the prodigious damages of warfare on children and youth, it is indeed well worth contemplating the multitude of ways that children and youth are exploited as porters, domestics, sex slaves, spies, human shields, minesweepers, miners, military policemen, and suicide bombers in addition to soldiering mostly because they lack viable education or deprived of employment options. Poverty, loss of families in war, and peer group pressure is additional motivations for enlistment in armed militia.

Heavy youth involvement in conflicts puffs up civilian fears of youth as menacing destabilizers. Nonetheless, if we expect a positive outcome we need to stop brandishing them as potential terrorists, as well as view them less as damaged victim, but more as fairly adept actors in difficult war and post war realities. We need to tap into their resilience and harness it.

Jo Boyden & Joanna Berry in their book, “Children and Youth on the Front line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement”, talk about “shifting the paradigm” away from “accepted wisdom” about war’s punishing effects on young people to argue that “age is not necessarily the critical determinant of vulnerability.” “Even when confronting by appalling adversities,” Boyden and de Berry explain, many youth “are able to influence positively their own fate and that of others who depend on them” . Part of the authors’ critique is that “Too often programmes for war-affected children are dictated by adults’ perceptions of the impact of war on young people.”

Therefore, programs must start with “children’s and young people’s definitions of constraints and opportunities” when policies and programmes are developed for them. It is important to give them agency and see them as core formulators of their own assistance. After all, they are the primary building blocks for peaceful futures.

The post The One Thing You Haven’t Considered About ‘Stone Pelting’ Kashmiri Youth appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

हमारे देश का दुर्भाग्य है कि सच बोलना जितना कठिन है उससे भी अधिक दुखदायी है, उसके बाद की यातना झेलना। यह यातना और भी ज़्यादा बढ़ जाती है जब मामला सिस्टम में रहकर कोई छोटा कर्मचारी उठाये।

यह बात है आईआईटी मंडी में कार्यरत सुजीत स्वामी की, जो मूलतः: कोटा राजस्थान के निवासी हैं और आईआईटी मंडी में जूनियर असिस्टेंट के पद पर नवंबर 2016, से कार्यरत हैं।

सुजीत एक सरकारी कर्मचारी होने के साथ-साथ सामाजिक कार्यों को भी ज़ोरो से उठाते हैं, इसीलिए जब उन्होंने आईआईटी मंडी ज्वाइन किया तो वहां के कर्मचारियों ने थोड़े दिन बाद ही वहां पर चल रही अनियमितता, जैसे कि भर्ती में भाई-भतीजावाद, करोड़ो का हेरफेर, चहेतों को मनचाहा इन्क्रीमेंट, एडमिशन में घोटाला, निर्माण कार्यों की घटिया गुणवत्ता और छोटे कर्मचारियों के शोषण के बारे में उनको बताना शुरू किया और उम्मीद लगायी कि सुजीत आईआईटी को इस बीमारी से मुक्त करवा सकते हैं।

उसके कुछ दिनों बाद ही सुजीत ने इस बारे में विभिन्न स्त्रोत से जानकारी मालूम की और सूचना के अधिकार के तहत भी जानकारी जुटाना शुरू किया। जब सुजीत को जानकारी मिलने लगी तो वो चौंकाने वाली आयी। उसमें पता चला कि किसी एक के लिए अलग नियम है तो किसी दूसरे के लिए अलग।

किस तरह से चहेतों को नौकरी देने के लिए बाकायदा कमिटी बैठती और विज्ञप्ति उनके अनुसार निकलती है। यही नहीं पेपर से लेकर साक्षात्कार तक पूरी सेटिंग की जाती है कि किसको टॉप करवाना है और किसको फेल।

इन सब घोटाले को जब सुजीत ने सरकार के सामने रखने के लिए उक्त मंत्रालय से समय मांगा तो उनकी कही सुनवाई नहीं हुई। उल्टा आईआईटी को भनक लगने पर वो सुजीत को परेशान करने लगे। उनको एक विभाग से दूसरे विभाग में बिना उनकी ज़रूरत के तबादला कर दिया गया। उनपर अन्य कार्य करने का भी अनैतिक दबाव बनाया गया, विरोध करने पर उनको डांट दिया जाता।

सुजीत परेशान होने लगे क्योंकि सरकार उनकी बात सुन नहीं रही थी। आईआईटी के कर्मचारी नई विज्ञप्ति में होने वाले घोटाले के प्रति चिंतित थे और सुजीत को आकर बताते और उम्मीद लगाते। इधर आईआईटी सुजीत को परेशान करने में कोई कसर नहीं छोड़ रहा था। इन्हीं सब उलझनों के बीच सुजीत तनाव में आ गएं। इसके बाद वह आईआईटी मंडी के ही डॉक्टर को दिखाने पहुंचे। चूंकि डॉक्टर आईआईटी के थे तो खुलकर अपनी मन की बात तो नहीं बता सकें, लेकिन उनको परेशानी का ज्ञान दे दिया और डॉक्टर ने मनोचिकित्सक को दिखाने का सुझाव दिया।

सुजीत जब छुट्टी पर घर आएं तो उन्होंने अपने घर के एक डॉक्टर से सलाह ली। उन्होंने आईआईटी से कुछ महीने रेस्ट और मन और दिमाग को शांत करने एक थेरेपी लेने का सुझाव दिया। सुजीत ने मेण्टल अनफिट बोलकर आईआईटी तीन महीनों की छुट्टी ली, लेकिन आईआईटी में चल रहे गोलमाल की टेंशन अभी भी पीछा नहीं छोड़ रही थी। तबही उनके डॉक्टर ने सुझाव दिया कि आपको जो ठीक लगता है आप वो कीजिए।

दिनांक 21 मई 2018 सोमवार, को सुजीत ने मंडी ज़िले में प्रेस वार्ता करके सारे सबूतों के साथ आईआईटी मंडी के काले कारनामों का चिट्ठा खोल दिया, जिससे पूरे हिमाचल के साथ-साथ आईआईटी में हड़कंप मच गई। उसके बाद ही एक और अधिकारी ने सुजीत का समर्थन करके आईआईटी के ऊपर सुजीत के लगाए गए आरोपों को मज़बूत कर दिया। लेकिन अब आईआईटी के पास सुजीत के आरोपों का कोई जवाब नहीं सुझा तो उन्होंने मीडिया को सुजीत के मानसिक रोगी होने का हवाला देना शुरू कर दिया और कहा कि उसके आरोप मानसिक संतुलन की वजह से हैं, उन पर ध्यान देने की ज़रूरत नहीं है।

जबकि सुजीत ने बताया की उनके पास सारे सबूत हैं, और अधिकारी भी उनके समर्थन में हैं। इसके बाद वहीं के बीजेपी के सांसद ने मीडिया के सामने आकर आईआईटी में हो रहे भ्रष्टाचार की पुष्टि की और जांच करवाने की मांग केंद्र सरकार से की है।

इसी बीच एक सवाल ज़हन में चुभ गया कि क्या वाकई में देश के हालत ऐसे हैं कि जो सत्य की आवाज़ बुलंद करते हैं, उनको इस तरह की यातनाएं झेलनी पड़ती हैं। सुना तो यह भी जा रहा है आईआईटी सुजीत के ऊपर कड़ा एक्शन लेने की तैयारी में है।

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बात अक्टूबर के आखिरी दो दिनों और नवम्बर के पहले 10 दिनों की ही नहीं है, ये बात विगत 9 वर्षों की है। 4 सितम्बर 2009 से अब तक की, आज तक की, आज मेरे द्वारा लिखे जाने तक की। एक मानव बस्ती को उजाड़ दिया गया उसे फिर से बसाने के लिए। बसाने के लिए, जैसा सरकार चाहती थी, जैसा सरकार द्वारा अधिकृत कोई निजी संस्था चाहती थी। कोई भला बस्ती में रहने वालों से पूछ के समय और धन क्या खराब करे?

गरीब के अलावा सब को गरीबी का पता है, उनके अलावा सबको पता है कि उन्हें कैसे रहना चाहिए। एक अंतर निहित है आवास की कमी तथा आवासीय संकट में। आवास की कमी हमेशा आवासीय संकट नहीं होता ऐसा सिर्फ दिखता है। या फिर दिखाने की कोशिश की जाती है। ये कोशिश की जाती रही है। ताज़ा मामला कठपुतली कॉलोनी का है। वो बस्ती जो किसी के लिए घर था, किसी के लिए फील्ड वर्क, किसी के लिए डॉक्यूमेंट्री का लोकेशन, किसी का प्रोजेक्ट और बहुतों के लिए चोर-गुंडों का ठिकाना। परंतु असली में कठपुतली कॉलोनी क्या है? ये किसी ने जानने की कोशिश ही नहीं की।

कोशिश करते तो पता चलता क्या होता है अपना घर जो वर्षों की मेहनत से बना था उसे अपनी आंखों के सामने टूटता देख। पुलिस की लाठी देख भागते कैसा लगता है? कैसा लगता है अपने परिवार को लेकर चुपचाप छोटे से टिन-शेड ट्रांज़िट कैम्प में रहना। कैसा होता है पलायन? कैसा होता है वो पूरा समयचक्र जब आप अपने घर के मलवे से यादें जुटा रहे हों और एक तरफ पुलिस की लाठी हो और दूसरी ओर मीडिया का कैमरा और पीछे कहीं से आपके बच्चे के चीख़ने की आवाज़ आ रही हो? बहुत मुश्किल है समझना।

कठपुतली कॉलोनी पर इतने रीसर्च पेपर छपे हैं कि ज्ञान का पूरा भंडारण हो सकता है परंतु यहां आवश्यक शहरी गरीबी और शहरीकरण की थ्योरी पर माथापच्ची करने का समय नहीं है। बात करते हैं उस दिन के बाद से जब कठपुतली कॉलोनी पूरी तरह टूट गयी, लोग भगा दिए गये (इसे पुनर्वासित भी पढ़ सकते हैं) और मलबा साफ करके हज़ारों मकानों को मैदान बना दिया गया।

पश्चिम दिल्ली के शादीपुर में बसी कठपुतली कॉलोनी 5 दशकों से भी पुरानी बस्ती है। यहां अलग-अलग 14 समुदायों के 4000 से भी अधिक परिवार रहते थे। यहां के लोग मुख्यतः कठपुतली के खेल, लोक कला, संगीत, मज़दूरी और कूड़ा बीनने आदि का काम करते थे। राजीव आवास योजना के अंतर्गत वर्ष 2009 में कठपुतली कॉलोनी को “पब्लिक-प्राइवट पार्ट्नर्शिप” में इन-सीटू स्लम पुनर्विकास (यथा स्थान निर्माण) के लिए चयनित किया गया। इस हेतु कॉलोनी की पूरी ज़मीन रहेजा बिल्डर को 6 करोड़ रुपए में दिया गया। राहेजा और डीडीए के बीच पुनर्विकास को लेकर हुआ करार मुंबई के बस्ती पुनर्विकास योजना को ही आधार बनाया गया। जिसमें पूरे परिक्षेत्र के 80% हिस्से पर घर बनेंगे और बाकी 20% पर बिल्डर किसी अन्य आर्थिक कार्य में उपयोग में ला सकते हैं। राहेजा ने उस स्थान पर 2800 इकनॉमिक वीकर सेक्शन हेतु आवास बनाने की परियोजना बनायी और साथ में 170 प्रीमीयम फ्लैट्स भी।

ये आवास सभी मूलभूत सुविधाओं से लबरेज़ होंगे और इस योजना की मुख्य बात ये थी कि इस योजना के पहले किसी तरह का सर्वेक्षण किया ही नहीं गया था। फिर 2800 फ्लैट्स की संख्या कहां से आयी? उसके बाद जब 2011 में पहला सर्वेक्षण किया गया तो कुल घरों की संख्या थी 2641। इस सर्वेक्षण में कई परिवार अलग-अलग कारणों से शामिल ही नहीं हो पाए थे। लोगों ने इस सर्वेक्षण को आधार मानने से मना कर दिया। इस सर्वेक्षण के आधार पर डीडीए द्वारा पहले दौर का इविक्शन शुरू किया गया। इस दौरान पुलिस की क्रूरता सामने आई जिसमें लोगों पर लाठियां बरसाई गयी, आंसू गैस का उपयोग किया गया, लोग डर के कारण आनंद परबत स्थित ट्रांज़िट कैम्प में शिफ्ट होना शुरू हो गये। वहीं बड़ी संख्या में परिवारों ने जाने से मना कर दिया।

फिर लोगों ने दिल्ली उच्च न्यायालय में याचिका दायर की और अगले सर्वेक्षण तक किसी भी तरह के तोड़-फोड़ पर रोक लगा दी और यह कहा कि जो लोग स्वेच्छा से जाना चाहते हैं वो जाएं किंतु किसी को भी बल प्रयोग अथवा विवश करके वहां नहीं भेजा जाएगा। 2015 के आते-आते फिर से सर्वे करने की मांग तेज़ हो गयी। 2016 में उप राज्यपाल ने दिल्ली में पुनर्वास के नियम में कुछ बदलाव किए और बस्ती के पुनर्वास की समय सीमा बढ़ा कर 2015 कर दी। इस कारण सर्वे करने की मांग और तेज़ हो गयी। 2017 जनवरी के बाद फिर से सर्वे किया गया।

25 अक्टूबर को नोटिस मिलने के बाद डीडीए के विकास सदन स्थित कार्यालय के बाहर योग्यता को लेकर 3 लिस्ट चस्पा किए गये। पहली लिस्ट उन 2800 परिवारों की जो इन-सीटू पुनर्विकास के तहत उसी स्थान पर आवास मिलने के लिए योग्य हैं, दूसरी लिस्ट उन 492 परिवारों की जो नरेला में पुनर्स्थापन के लिए योग्य हैं और तीसरी सूची उन 771 परिवारों की जो किसी भी तरह के पुनर्वास हेतु अयोग्य हैं। इन परिवारों के निर्धारण तथा सर्वेक्षण में कई खामियां थी और इन सूचियों को लोगों ने मानने से मना कर दिया क्योंकि इस सूची को चुनौती देने का उन्हें समय ही नहीं दिया गया और ना ही इस सूची में सुधार का। कारण ये था कि कोई भी सूची पूरी तरह से सही नहीं थी। सूची में दिए गये अयोग्यता के कारण गलत निकले, वहीं नरेला में घर आवंटन की विधि को भी चुनौती दिया गया। यह कहा गया कि 2011 जो कि पिछली योग्यता समय सीमा थी, से लेकर 2015 तक के दस्तावेज़ वाले परिवारों को लौटरी के माध्यम से नरेला में घर आवंटित किए जाएंगे। परंतु यह सूची पूरी तरह से इस पर आधारित नहीं थी।

बेदखली का दौर: हिंसा और अन्याय।

30 अक्टूबर 2017 को शुरू हुआ तोड़-फोड़ का सिलसिला अगले दो सप्ताह तक चला जिसमें 4000 के करीब घर तोड़े गये। सबसे अधिक घर 31 अक्टूबर की कार्रवाई में तोड़े गये थे। इस दौरान पुलिस ने लोगों को घर से बाहर निकालने और सामान खाली करवाने के लिए लाठी चार्ज से लेकर आंसू गैस के गोले तक का प्रयोग किया। दरअसल कॉलोनी के लोगों को 26 अक्टूबर के दिन सामूहिक रूप से कुछ पर्चे बांटे गये और कुछ पर्चे जगह-जगह चिपकाए गये कि 5 दिन के भीतर बस्ती ख़ाली करके उनको आबंटित जगह पर चले जाएं वरना कार्रवाई की जाएगी। दिल्ली विकास प्राधिकरण द्वारा चलाए गये पहले दिन की कार्रवाई में 100 से भी अधिक घर तोड़े गये जिसमें 5 बुलडोज़र और 100 से भी अधिक पुलिसकर्मी का प्रयोग हुआ था। इस पूरे कार्यवाहीं के दौरान पुलिस की बर्बरता तथा मानव अधिकार उल्लंघन की कई घटनाएं सामने आयीं। 31 अक्टूबर की रात को एक वर्ष के एक बच्चे की भी मौत हुई जिसका कारण स्थानीय लोग आंसू गैस का प्रयोग बताते रहे, हालांकि इस बात की कभी पुष्टि नहीं हो पायी। लोगों के साथ संघर्ष करने वाले सिविल सोसाइटी तथा अन्य आंदोलनों के साथियों को भी बुरी तरह पीटा गया, उन्हें कॉलोनी में अंदर घुसने से रोका गया और अदालत द्वारा स्टे मिलने के बावजूद लोगों को उनका काम करने से रोका जा रहा था। कॉलोनी के लोगों का संघर्ष जारी रहा और अब तक जारी है। उन्होंने इस दौरान दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री से लेकर, उपराज्यपाल और भारत के प्रधानमंत्री तक के सामने अपनी बात रखी। महिला सुरक्षा, बाल अधिकार और आवास के अधिकार का हनन एक बड़ा मुद्दा बना रहा।

कानूनी संघर्ष: उच्च न्यायालय, दिल्ली में जनहित याचिका।

31 अक्टूबर को दिल्ली उच्च न्यायालय में जनहित याचिका दायर की गयी जिसमें इस असंवैधानिक तथा गैरकानूनी उजाड़ीकरण को तत्काल प्रभाव से रोकने की मांग की गयी। न्यायालय ने तत्काल प्रभाव से यथास्थिति का आदेश दिया। आदेश के बावजूद तोड़-फोड़ पर रोक नहीं लगी। एक दिन बाद डीडीए द्वारा पुनर्विलोकन याचिका (रिव्यू पिटीशन) डाली गयी जिसके बाद न्यायालय ने अपने आदेश में कुछ संशोधन किए, इस संशोधन के मुख्य बिंदु थे

• जो भी कोई अपनी स्वेच्छा से घर खाली करके जा रहे हैं सिर्फ उन्हीं के घर तोड़े जाएं
• 4 नवम्बर से पहले मलवा नहीं हटाया जाएगा
• जिन लोगों का नाम भी “इनेलिजिबल लिस्ट” में है उनके घर नहीं गिराए जाएं।

परंतु इन आदेशों का खुलकर उल्लंघन किया गया। लोगों को ज़बरदस्ती उनके घर से निकाला गया तथा उन्हें स्वेच्छा से खाली किए घर घोषित करके उन्हें गिरा दिया गया। इसी तरह मलबा साफ करने के नाम पर कई घरों को गिराया गया। इनेलिजिबल लिस्ट में कई परिवार ऐसे थे जो एक बहुमंज़िल घरों में रहते थे और निचले मंज़िल का परिवार एलिजिबल लिस्ट में था। इस तरह के गड़बड़ी के बावजूद उनके घर तोड़ दिए गये।

इन सब गड़बड़ियों को लेकर कई बार अदालत में आदेश के अवमानना का मामला लेकर दलीलें रखी गयी और ऐसी ही एक सुनवाई में 6 नवम्बर को अदालत ने एक 3 सदस्यीय दल का गठन किया जिसमें अलग-अलग सामाजिक संस्थाओ के प्रतिनिधि थे और उन्हें यह कार्य सौंपा गया कि वह इस बात की जांच करे कि ऐसे कितने परिवार हैं जो इनेलिजिबल लिस्ट में हैं परंतु नियमों के अनुसार वो पुनर्वास के लिए योग्य हैं, कितने परिवारों का घर उनकी इच्छा के विरुद्ध तोड़ा गया, कितने परिवारों का घर सुनवाई का मौका दिए बगैर अदालत के आदेश के बाद तोड़ा गया इत्यादि।

इस आयोग के कार्य करने में भरसक रुकावट पैदा की गयी। कई बार तो आयोग के सदस्यों को बुलडोज़र के आगे आकर तोड़-फोड़ रुकवाना पड़ा। इस सब के दौरान जब आयोग का रिपोर्ट गया तो उसके आधार पर 5 दिसम्बर 2017 को अदालत ने बाकी बचे गये घरों को ना तोड़ने का आदेश दे दिया। लेकिन तब तक काफी देर हो चुकी थी और 4200 के करीब घरों में से सिर्फ 53 घर ही बच पाये थे। अब तक आदेश के अनुसार किसी भी तरह के निर्माण पर रोक था परंतु रहेजा बिल्डर्स ने पूरे परिक्षेत्र को घेरकर टीन की चारदीवारी लगा दी, पूरी भूमि समतल कर दी और कई जगहों पर पानी की बोरिंग भी कर दी।

इन सभी घटनाक्रम में जो पूर्णतः नदारद थे वो थे दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री

1 नवम्बर को अरविंद केजरीवाल ने कॉलोनी का दौरा किया और हर संभव मदद करने का आश्वासन दिया। मदद कई अलग-अलग माध्यमों से पहुंचता भी रहा। परंतु ये मदद लोगों की मुख्य मांगों से जुड़ी नहीं थी, उनके आवास से जुड़ी नहीं थी। फिर सामाजिक संस्थाओं से संवाद के बाद उन्होंने उपराज्यपाल को एक चिट्ठी लिखी जिसमें उन्होंने रहेजा द्वारा बनाए गये प्लान को लेकर दिक्कतें गिनायी तथा यह बात रखी कि चूंकि दिल्ली में स्लम पुनर्विकास तथा पुनर्वास की ज़िम्मेदारी दिल्ली शहरी आश्रय सुधार बोर्ड की है अतः उन्हें पहले यह अवसर प्रदान किया जाए कि वो भी कॉलोनी के पुनर्विकास की कोई योजना सामने रख सके।

यह चिट्ठी अदालत में भी रखी गयी परंतु शुरुआत के दिनों में इस पर खास जिरह नहीं हो पाई। इस दौरान 7 फरवरी को हुए सुनवाई के दौरान न्यायालय ने बचे हुए 53 घर भी गिराने का आदेश दे दिया। बांकि घरों के टूटने के बाद लगभग रास्ता साफ हो गया था और निर्माण कार्य प्रारम्भ होने की सुगबुगाहट भी तेज़ हो गयी। हालांकि निर्माण कार्य पर रोक अभी भी लागू है। अंततः 20 मार्च को हुई सुनवाई में मामला जुलाई तक स्थगित कर दिया गया और तब तक स्टे कायम है। एक अच्छी बात यह रही है कि दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री के आग्रह तथा अदालत में बार-बार रहेजा बिल्डर की योजना में खामी की बात पर अदालत ने यह आश्वासन दिया कि यदि एक बेहतर योजना का विकल्प तैयार होता है तो उस पर ज़रूर बात की जा सकती है।

इस हेतु दिल्ली सरकार के आग्रह पर बस्ती बचाओ संघर्ष समिति के साथियों ने स्थानीय लोगों के साथ मिलकर डिज़ाइन के ऊपर काम करना शुरू किया। करीब 1 महीने में एक योजना तैयार की गयी। लोगों को ये योजना ठीक लगी। और लोगों ने कहा कि इस योजना को दिल्ली सरकार को सौंपा जा सकता है। इस याचिका के साथ कुछ अन्य याचिकाएं ट्रांज़िट कैम्प के बदहाल, वर्तमान योजना को बदलने तथा तोड़-फोड़ के दौरान महिलाओं तथा बच्चों के साथ हुए अत्याचार व उनके प्रजनक अधिकारों को लेकर की गयी थी। जिसमें कुछ याचिकाओं को जनहित याचिका के साथ ही संलग्न कर दिया गया तो कुछ को आगे नहीं बढ़ाया गया।

अदालत में हुई कार्रवाई से एक बात स्पष्ट थी कि सब बहुत जल्दी में हैं, वो बहस जैसी बेकार चीज़ों में समय व्यर्थ नहीं करना चाहते। स्थिति-परिस्थिति तथा अधिकारों को लेकर अदालत 15 से भी अधिक सुनवाइयों में चुप रही। बच्चों की शिक्षा, महिला सुरक्षा और यहां तक कि ठंड में छिन्न-भिन्न हो रही जिंदगियों पर भी अदालत सुनवाई स्थगित करता रहा। इसका एक कारण यह भी था कि सब कुछ इतने सुनियोजित रूप से प्रायोजित था कि लोग इस असमंजस में रहे कि वो अदालत तक अपनी बात रखें, या घर की रक्षा करें, डीडीए के कार्यालय जाकर पर्ची की कतार में खड़े हों या फिर सड़क पर बैठे अपने परिवार को ढांढस बंधाए। खैर, इस समय अदालती कार्रवाई जुलाई तक स्थगित है और अदालत ग्रीष्म अवकाश पर जाने को है। अधिकांश लोग ट्रांजिट कैम्प में भर दिए गये हैं, बाकी अभी भी ठंड से गरमी की करवट में आस-पास ही करवट ले रहे हैं।

ट्रांजिट कैम्प की स्थिति: समाप्ति के ठीक पहले वाला संघर्ष।

रहेजा बिल्डर की योजना का एक बड़ा हिस्सा और खर्च 2800 परिवारों के लिए ट्रांज़िट कैम्प का निर्माण तथा संचालन का था। परंतु 7 एप्रिल को अदालत द्वारा नियुक्त समिति के दौरे के बाद यह स्पष्ट रूप से निकल कर आया कि ट्रांजिट कैम्प कुछ भी है परंतु मानवीय पर्यावास के योग्य नहीं है। बनावट, रख-रखाव, सुविधाओं तथा सुरक्षा सब कुछ एक बड़ा मुद्दा है। कॉलोनी जहां मेन रोड पर दो मेट्रो के बीचों-बीच बसा था वहीं ट्रांज़िट कैम्प मैं रोड और मेट्रो से करीब 2 किमी की दूरी पर बसा है जहां मुख्य मार्ग से जाने का मात्र साधन ऑटो-या ई-रिक्शा है। कैम्प के आस-पास पूरा इलाका पहाड़ी पर बसा हुआ है।

एक ओर जहां कैम्प का स्थापन एक अहम मुद्दा है वहीं कैम्प के अंदर की स्थिति उससे भी अधिक चिंताजनक है। सबसे चिंताजनक है लोगों के अंदर असुरक्षा का भाव।

करीब 4 साल से कैम्प में रह रहे लोगों के अंदर भी और पिछले कुछ महीनो में आए लोगों के अंदर भी। क्या होने वाला है, उनके टूटे घरों

 के बदले क्या उन्हें कभी कुछ मिल पाएगा। साथ ही साथ कैम्प के अंदर भी सामाजिक सौहार्द में कमी आयी है। 7 अप्रैल को हुए दौरे के बाद यह निकल कर आया कि लोग बहुत परेशान हैं। पीने के पानी की स्थिति सबसे खराब है। लोग बीमार पड़ रहे हैं, कैम्प के घरों में रोज़गार नामुमकिन है। जीविका पूरी तरह नष्ट हो चुका है। स्कूल दूर हो गये हैं, बहुत सारे बच्चों ने पढ़ाई छोड़ दी है। जो स्कूल जाते भी हैं उन्हें घर पर पढ़ाई का ना ही स्थान मिल पाता है और ना ही समय।

वर्तमान स्थिति: अभी आशाएं बाकी है।

अधिकांश लोगों तथा देश की कई सामाजिक संस्थाओं ने इस पूरी परियोजना के विकास योजना को लेकर प्रश्न खड़े किए। इन प्रश्नों में लोगों के रोज़गार के मुद्दे को लेकर, उनकी जीवनशैली, सांस्कृतिक परिदृश्य को लेकर और देश में विकसित हो रहे “वर्टिकल स्लम” को लेकर थे। लोगों के साथ मिलकर सामाजिक संगठन “बस्ती बचाओ संघर्ष समिति, दिल्ली” के कार्यकर्ताओं द्वारा बनायी गयी योजना कई मामलों में राहेजा बिल्डर्ज़ के योजना से बेहतर विकल्प है। सबसे महत्वपूर्ण तो यह है कि पूरे क्षेत्र को आवास के लिए ही उपयोग किया जा रहा है। इसके साथ वहां के लोगों का रोज़गार तथा जीविका पूरी तरह ठप्प पड़े हुए हैं। पिछले महीने 24 अप्रैल को केंद्रीय आवास एवं शहरी कार्य मंत्री हरदीप सिंह पूरी द्वारा शिलान्यास भी करवा दिया गया।

यह हैरान करने वाली बात है कि जब निर्माण पर सभी तरह के रोक लगे हुए हैं और योजना अभी भी अदालत में प्रश्न के मध्य है, ऐसे में केंद्रीय मंत्री का एक अदालत के विचाराधीन मामले में इस तरह आकर एक परियोजना का शिलान्यास करना कितना उचित है? मीडिया द्वारा भी इस बात को खूब फैलाया गया कि लोगों को अब अच्छे मकान मिलेगा और लिफ्ट जैसी सुविधा मिलेगी। परंतु समझने योग्य बात यह है कि 15 मंज़िले भवन में लोग अपना रोज़गार चला कैसे पाएंगे। यदि रोज़गार ना रहा तो लिफ्ट और घर का मेंट्नेन्स कहां से होगा? ये कुछ ऐसे महत्वपूर्ण प्रश्न हैं जो हम वस्तुतः पूछने से कतराते हैं। सामाजिक संस्था लोगों के साथ उनके संघर्ष में लगे रहे, लोग लड़ते रहे। भीषण ठंड में ज़मीन छोड़ने को तैयार नहीं थे, पुलिस गश्त पे रहती थी। सब कुछ किस के लिए?

वर्तमान स्थिति यह है कि कठपुतली कॉलोनी के पास बसे न्यू पटेल नगर के घरों को भी तोड़ने का नोटिस जारी कर दिया गया है। ये वो घर हैं जो ना परियोजना का हिस्सा हैं और ना ही इन घरों में रहने वाले लोगों के लिए किसी तरह का पुनर्वास तय किया गया है। अब इन घरों में रहने वाले लोग भी अपना संघर्ष तेज़ कर रहे हैं। फिर भी प्रशासन अडिग है, घर तोड़ने हैं, क्योंकि वहां सड़क का निर्माण करना है। क्या फर्क पड़ता है? लोग समझौता कर लेंगे। विकास किसी के अधिकार और सुविधा जैसी मामूली मुद्दों से कैसे समझौता कर ले? विकास की एक एक कीमत होती है। परिवर्तन के लिए आहुति तो देनी ही पड़ती है। कठपुतली कॉलोनी कीमत भी चुका रहा है और आहुति की तो कोई सीमा ही नहीं है।

हिमशी सिंह के इनपुट के साथ अंकित झा
फोटो – अंकित झा, अंशुल वर्मा, हिमशी सिंह, अमित कुमार

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HD Kumaraswamy’s swearing-in ceremony at Bengaluru was expected to be a watershed moment in the millennial politics of India for two reasons. One, for the first time, constituents of the much-discussed “United Opposition” showed up on the political stage. Two, despite being the major alliance partner, by acquiescing to JD(S) and settling for a Deputy Chief Minister, the Indian National Congress (Congress) has politically ceded to regional forces across the length and breadth of India.

Admittedly, the objective of this union at Bengaluru, less than twelve months before the General Elections 2019 is two-fold. One, to communicate to the BJP that its spectacular electoral performances have not been able to faze out the energy of opposition parties. Two, to reach out to their traditional vote-banks and cadres, whose motivation and conviction have repeatedly been challenged by the Modi-Shah juggernaut. As India heads into a vivacious political year, it is only becoming to assess the impact of the rainbow coalition on the BJP, on the members of the coalition themselves and on the electorate.

United Opposition Makes Modi Taller

The United Opposition is a bitter-sweet reminder of the Grand Alliance that was stitched up in 1971, to halt Indira Gandhi’s victory lap. On the one hand, her motley of opponents including old Congress, the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party, the Samayukta Socialist Party, Jana Sangh, and Bhartiya Kranti Dal cried “Indira must go”. On the other hand, she cried “poverty must go, disparity must diminish, injustice must end”. Like the Grand Alliance which could only boast of having a common hatred for Indira Gandhi, the only commonality within the United Opposition is its common dislike for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

I am afraid, just like the Grand Alliance, the United Opposition is also destined to meet the same fate, primarily on account of lack of alternative story to offer to the electorate. While the opposition will talk about how mercilessly Modi has murdered democracy and thus attempt to create an atmosphere of dread and dismay within the minority communities, the astute cadre of BJP will invest time in reaching out to voters and build an on-ground consensus. Imagine the euphoria on roads when the Prime Minister will fold hands, and appeal for votes – “Main kehta hoon garibi hatao, who kehte hain Modi hatao”. It is rather regrettable that BJP mastered Indira’s politics far better than her own party.

It is only naïve and unjaded politicians who will believe that the United Opposition, by sheer virtue of common resistance to Modi, will be able to bruise BJP, let alone make a dent in 2019. If it takes everyone in the business to beat a single competitor, clearly the latter has a lot going for him.

United Opposition Is A Divided House

As mentioned above, multiple members of the United Opposition have nothing in common, save their agenda to put a brake on BJP in 2019. All leaders are fiercely competitive, and it is wishful thinking that any of them would agree to follow the other. This is essentially a coalition of equals who will not cede power or position for the team. While Akhilesh Yadav refused to comment on Rahul Gandhi’s PM candidature, Mamata Banerjee categorically said that she was present to support HD Kumaraswamy and not Congress. Before even estimating the modalities of the United Opposition, one is forced to question its very viability. With regional leaders brimming with national aspirations and a grand old party struggling to be the “sutradhaar”, my immediate apprehension is whether this team can sustain under the same roof till 2019 General elections. I suspect, the rainbow coalition will be plagued by a spectrum of individual goals, and crumble under its own weight.

United Opposition Will Not Unite Electorate

It is undeniable that perception and messaging dominate political outcomes. It is immoral optics when the Congress or Samajwadi Party in their bid to defeat Modi and not necessarily govern the nation, appropriate brazen mis-governance by signing up with Mamata or share the stage with outdated left ideologues like Sitaram Yechury. The coalition, blinded by its prejudice has seemingly compromised its ethics and ideology – all for an individual. The underlying current of this coalition itself is resistive, not conducive. Even the coalition is called United “Opposition” and not a “Coalition”. Unless this team moves on from the negative end of communication, laced with caustic criticism of an individual to a healthy approach of highlighting governance lapses and provide solutions, it is unlikely that this rainbow of leaders will cut any ice with the voter. In fact, by aligning with certain forces, parties stand to lose some of their otherwise loyal supporters.

One of the high points of the 84th Plenary Session of Congress was, where Rahul Gandhi drew the Mahabharata analogy. He compared Congress with Pandavas and the BJP with Kauravas. Less than two months ahead, this analogy stands on its head. Let us not forget that Pandavas were guided by Krishna alone, while Kauravas lost despite the assorted brain-pool comprising of Drona, Ashwatthama, Jayadratha, Kritavarma, Shalya, Sudakshina, Bhurishravas, Bahlika, Shakuni, Bhagadatta and so on.

The post The New Karnataka Government Is United In Opposition, Divided In Ambition appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

India as a democracy has seen many ups and down in her journey of seven decades. All her four pillars—the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and the press—have also acknowledged different seasons of success and crisis. The most discussed controversial chapter among them remains the censorship of press during the 21-month long National Emergency from June 1975 to March 1977. The central government abolished the press council and imposed a ban on the publication of anything that seemed ‘objectionable’, and only pro-government news was allowed to be published. During this severe crisis also there were vocal media stalwarts such as Janardan Thakur, Nikhil Chakraborty, and Romesh Thapar, who did not bow down to extreme pressures of the central government though the gag was removed on March 21 1977 to restore civil liberties. But now, decades later, slmost the same “Unofficial Intimidation of Journalists” is happening in contemporary India.

The telecast of “Left, Right and Center” on NDTV on May 25, 2018, disturbed me as a citizen of world’s largest democracy.  It was an hour discussion with the confessions of journalists Rana Ayyub and Ravish Kumar about the assault on their freedom of expression. Ayyub had expressed the unimaginable outrage of her modesty over critical views she keeps on the Modi government by online goons who are paid to abuse her. She said, “A pornographic video was circulated with my face morphed on to the body of another woman. The online mob asked me to pack my bags and leave for Pakistan, some threatened to tear my clothes and drag me out of the country.” It is impossible to even image what she and her family would have undergone by seeing such unleash of rape culture. The matter was of such intense gravity that it had attracted the attention of the Office of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. They had called on Indian authorities to protect Ayyub, who has received death threats following an online hate campaign.

Ravish Kumar, one of the most lauded journalists of this country, is known for raising most critical issues which students, youth, farmers, and the oppressed sections of this country are going through. He along with his family are facing hate, insult, and death threats. Despite this daily trauma, he has many such deeds which garnered immense attention of the common man. These include continuous 28 episodes of Prime Time on rising unemployment; many episodes on the worsening situation of government universities like Allahabad University; questioning die hard right-wing elements who malign the achievements of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and a sustained character assassination of the man.

A Subjugation Of Truth, And By Whom?

These incidents with journalists are definitely not the first of their kind. Elected government, whether it was the UPA under Congress or now the NDA under BJP, both have tried to suppress freedom of press. Since 2014, when the Modi government assumed power the method of suppressing the press has undergone a two-dimensional shift.

First to target those who are constantly protesting the anti-people policies the government, and the lag of development loaded with divisive agenda on religion and caste. The second is to target those who question the fake propaganda of BJP’s IT Cell.

For example, in 2016, journalists at the Kerala High Court were prevented from covering a case involving a government pleader by a violent mob of lawyers. Alok Singh and Kaunain Sheriff of the India Express were attacked by lawyers inside premises of Patiala Court. Ashad Ashraf, Anupam Pandey, and Vinay Pandey were arrested in Hanumangarh while investigating arms-training camps allegedly being conducted by the Bajrang Dal.

A mob lynch, or bullet will decide your tomorrow; if you speak or write against one ideology which is in power with majority support, be ready to suffer. It’s as if we elected a God-like human being, not a leader who is above criticism, questions and accountability.

The brutal murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh on September 25, 2017, is a fresh instance. She was most vocal against the Hindutva brand of politics. After her murder, social media was flooded with vocal criticism against this gruesome act. But at the same time, a man on twitter named Nikhil Dadhich, tweeted: “Now a bitch has died a dog’s death, all the puppies are mewling in one voice.” Our Prime Minister follows this man. In the same manner, union minister like Piyush Goyal and many others follow serial abusers, rumor-mongers, misogynists, and various handles brimming with communal venom. Celebration of Gauri Lankesh’s murder, character assassination of Rana Aayub, death threat to Ravish Kumar and his family are not from anonymous trolls. These individuals enjoy an established political patronage. They have been awarded with posts in different outfits such as the Bajrang Dal and the Gauraksha Samiti. The pattern of threat is noticeable, and the bedrock is religious fundamentalism and bigotry. The Prime Time show on NDTV, independent YouTubers, and journalists who are busting fake news are severely hurting the fake news machinery of the BJP IT cell. Raising questions about our nation’s top-most leader for not having a single press conference makes cut-throat supporters of the ruling party feel furious.

The Divided Indian Media

In a democracy there media people should have full liberties, without any sort of subjugation, but there’s a section of the media fraternity who seem happy to be co-opted by the government. Here is the divide in media—one who is a “Watchdog”, and the other a “Lapdog”. The former is “Anti-National”, and the target of death threats, abuse, and character assassination, for keeping critical views on government. The latter is termed to be “Nationalists” who are tight-lipped about the government, and its functioning for its people. They even love to maintain pin-drop silence on how interviews with the prime minister are conducted. Here is how it is done. Aset of questions from the interviewer is sent by mail to the PM’s or his aides. They will examine them and pick the ones which are convenient.

Instead of the Press Information Bureau (PIB), the fashion of hiring a PR enterprise (through which the Government of India spends ₹4,343.26 crore on advertisements and publicity) indicates lowering transparency. The position of India in the World Press Freedom Index 2018 is really disheartening in which we have slipped from 136 to 138, out of 180 countries. Figures also indicate shrinking space for the press under the Modi government. Targeting journalists on different spheres often by ‘troll armies’ in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s payroll is now an open secret.

Threats and attempts to subjugate journalists is not the same as India’s past experience of “National Emergency”, but it is more a socialised phenomenon which aims to normalise hate and instill fear both among journalists and viewers or readers. We the people of India need to stop this assault by expressing solidarity to democracy’s fourth pillar without delay. Journalists who are speaking and seeking the truth from an elected government deserve all support and strength from every section of society.

As in words of Malcolm X, “If you stick a knife in my back 9 in and pull it out 6 in, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is there.“

The post Censorship, Propaganda, Cold-Blooded Murder: The Future Of Indian Media? appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

My full name is Ayesha Aleem. Ayesha, as I’ve been told and I’ve learnt through the years, is a popular, “pretty girl” name. Khaled and Outlandish have sung about it. Sonam Kapoor has played a rich fashionable character of this name in a Bollywood movie of the same name, for an Indian version of Hollywood’s Clueless, both inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma. So it’s “cool” by mainstream pop-culture standards. I like the original Arabic meaning as well, which is “life”. I also like that it was the name of the Prophet Muhammed’s favourite wife.

But my last name was a little more problematic. While I knew Ayeshas who were Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Sikh, my last name, Aleem, was a dead giveaway. Once someone knew my last name, I could not be seen as anything else other than who I was – a Muslim. With this came all the stereotypes associated with Muslims. Not always, but often enough. And however “woke” someone may have been, it was hard to resist the “Aleem-haleem” jokes.

It didn’t help that my father, whose name this is, didn’t like his own name either. My sister and I remember how he wanted to change his name while we were growing up. When our father didn’t like his name enough to keep it, why did we have to suffer its burden? All three of us even discussed coming up with a brand new last name that we could share. And then realising that it would mean too much paperwork, and would probably never stick, just daydreamed about what the perfect last name might be. We even debated why we need a last name at all. Couldn’t we just go through life with a first, given name?

But now that I’m older, I know that what I was running from wasn’t my name, specifically. It was my Muslim identity. Attending an all-girls Catholic convent school in India, where I was usually one of maybe three or four Muslim girls, my friends were almost entirely from other faiths. This wasn’t deliberate. It just was. I didn’t wear the burkha or headscarf and neither did any of the women in my immediate family. My father didn’t have a beard. We didn’t eat biryani every day of the week. In other words, although we were a practising Muslim family, I wanted to distance myself from the tired perceptions that plagued the larger community.

That part hasn’t changed, and it doesn’t need to because pre-conceived notions never did anyone any good. Our world is rich and textured and beautiful because of its varied people who need to be seen for all that they are instead of the lazy ways in which they are widely portrayed. But there’s no need to feel ashamed of my last name either. When I was younger, I thought this problem of feeling no connection, no love, for your name, was uniquely mine until I heard this speech by an American Muslim student and thought how interesting it was that as an Indian-origin person growing up in India, my desire to “fit in” was as strong as someone at a similar time in their life growing up away from their country of origin, these experiences taking place on opposite sides of the globe.

In the past few years, my relationship with my name has made a complete turn. In fact, I love that it comes from the root word “ilm” in Arabic, which means knowledge because education changed my life. The speech by the American student is from graduation day this year at the university I attended – a life event that had seemed impossible at the time, as recently as a decade ago, because unmarried Muslim girls did not travel overseas to pursue master’s degrees in my social circles. But it was precisely in this multicultural and foreign environment of a New England campus that I grew into my own skin, much like the American student, because for the first time, I was introduced to the idea of celebrating individuality instead of trying so hard to “fit in.” This helped me see the transformative power of education, which continues to influence my choices and decisions.

As a Muslim woman today, I understand the value of context with greater clarity. My struggle at making peace with my last name came partly from a lack of context to engage with my identity, from viewing it through a narrow prism based on the trending narrative, which included painting the picture that all Muslims are conservative, rigid in their beliefs and unwilling to integrate with mainstream society – which could not be further from the truth.

Many young Muslims have trouble navigating a non-Islamic society because everything outside of religion is peddled as so evil and sinful. This is such a disservice because it is from an interaction with a world outside of Islam that informs a better understanding of the faith. Nothing can be studied, much less understood, in isolation. Bacteria hindered from multiplying will die, plants and animals are observed in their natural habitats, it’s difficult to grasp current affairs without looking at history. Similarly, closeting ourselves as Muslims from the rest of the world that doesn’t think and live like us takes us further from the life that we want to get closer to.

Parts of the world are still resisting diversity, denying plurality, insistent on creating a suitable brand of homogeneity.  But people are not homogenous. Our lives are not the same. No one is meant to live only with their kind. The beauty of humans is in their differences. It’s easy to practice whatever kind of “-ness” you choose to – vegan-ness, Muslim-ness, American-ness – when everyone around you is exactly like you. But practising what’s important to you while participating in a context that’s not entirely like yours: that’s what determines identity.

So after years of trying to wish away my last name, I’m finally embracing it fully because I’m finally comfortable with who I am. I’m still Ayesha Aleem. And I still love my first name because it’s “cool”. But I love my last name too – because it stands for ideals I believe in with all my heart, because it’s my identity, because it’s “cool” too.

The post I Never Liked My Last Name. But It Was My Muslim Identity I Was Really Running Away From appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

They talk George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to discuss labour rights and quote Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Feminist Ted Talks. They discuss “To Sir With Love” and its central theme of racial issues in a city school while rooting for more representation of people of colour in mainstream media. They chat, drink, argue and deliberate. Progressive and strong-willed, proudly carrying around tags of “you’re highly opinionated”. Quick to call out sexism and problematic behaviour – the Indian millennial is not what it used to be on most days.

This woke Indian millennial of today’s day and age might have adopted the universal messages of social justice that erupted as a by-product of a series of political campaigns for reforms that took place worldwide, like the Feminist Movement or the Anti-Racist Movement, but – this same woke Indian millennial, as for now, is far out of touch and out of sight of the extremities of social injustice that plagues every nook and cranny of this vast country called India.

Years and years of unprecedented systematic conditioning and subconscious prejudices passed on from one generation to the other has instilled acute senses of casteist and classist undertones to the ways in which this new woke Indian millennial speaks, perceives, eats, reads and believes. More often than not, becoming a woke Indian millennial (and I do speak from personal experience here) also has to do with the fact that they come from an immensely elevated ground of privilege, with its edges fenced with elitism.

If and once, they recognise the grossly inadequate and unjust society that they are a part of – they do not fail to call out the sexist and patriarchal concepts that surround them, even though they are the ones spearheading the class hierarchy. However, what they do fail to do is, look down on the pedestal that they stand on and realise that a lot of their own behaviour and words on a day to day basis, drip in decanters of “us versus them” behaviour and comes from the caste and class discrimination that India has been subject to over hundreds of years. Us vs Them because they perceive themselves to be part of the norm and the less fortunate as deviations of it.

So, even though the woke Indian millennial is well accustomed to the universal equation of building social capital by being an intersectional feminist and avoiding instances of cultural appropriation on their part – they have yet to stop teasing their peers and acquaintances by using “Bihari” as an insult. The woke Indian millennial is yet to stop grooving to jazz numbers played by a band called “Bhangijumping” in an affluent South Delhi Jazz Club or frequent a certain high-spirited club in Pune that is well known to be run by sexual offenders.

The woke Indian millennial is yet to realise that the factual inconsistencies, grammatical errors, awkward “faux pas” they pick up in the things around it and tries to, so vehemently, correct – is only possible because their privilege allows them to do so. It is also highly disturbing, how much time and energy the woke Indian millennial (myself included) spends in trying to correct people on spellings and punctuations, and the general use of language in casual conversation, online or otherwise – a practice you could only undertake if you’ve tasted the perks of elitism and believe that by somehow demeaning the linguistic capabilities of your peers, you one-up them.

The point is, this activism of the woke Indian millennial may be complacent and pleasing to the eyes and ears of those at the receiving end of their Twitter accounts, at first. However, the activism is far from being anything but truly intersectional, especially when it is looked through the Indian societal kaleidoscope.  

The air-conditioned schools and college classrooms that these woke Indian millennials sit in and use as conference halls to discuss and support internationally acclaimed social justice movements are often times built on the blood, sweat and tears of those at the lowest rung of the hierarchy. The “invisible” masses who remain so, to the eyes of the persuasive few. The persuasive few, who are #NotInMyName activists by the day, and snap at their domestic help for taking ‘x’ number of leaves by the night.

So, no matter how “woke” this new Indian millennial is in its speech and thought on social media on issues of equality, liberty and justice of the world – unless and until it recognises the recurringly gross class and caste disparity that occurs time and again in the affluent circles around them on an everyday basis, the activism remains perfunctory and shall remain so, for as long as it takes for the millennial to be truly “woke!” 

The post The Art Of Being Woke: An Attempt By The New Indian Millennial appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

On March 11, 2017, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly elections decisively. The BJP and its allies won 325 out of the 403 assembly seats.

On the same day, when it became clear that the BJP was set to form the government with a huge majority, the Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati addressed a press conference. She said, “Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand election results are very shocking. They are very hard to swallow by anyone… This suggests that voting machines did not accept votes cast in favour of parties other than the BJP, or that votes cast for other parties were also registered as BJP’s…” After this allegation, the opposition has periodically targeted the BJP for allegedly tampering with the Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) in order to win different elections in the country.

Similar allegations surfaced again in the by-elections which took place in different parts of the country on May 28. The opposition has accused the BJP of tampering with the EVMs in the bypolls which took place in Noorpur and Kairana on Monday. The Opposition also complained of EVMs malfunctioning in the Palghar by polls which took place in Maharashtra on the same day.

This begs the question – Can EVMs really be tampered? To understand this, we first need to understand when and why EVMs were set up and their arrival in India.

Electronic Voting Machines were introduced for the first time in the 1998 general elections and the state elections held in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and NCT of Delhi in the same year, in some of the constituencies.

On its website, the Election Commission lists down three reasons for using EVMs – they save costs (of paper, printing, transportation, storage and distribution), quicker counting and absence of invalid votes.

The Election Commission website also claims that it is impossible for anyone to tamper EVMs in such a way that the vote goes to only a single candidate or a political party.

What Do Experts Have To Say About EVM Tamperings?

In a research paper by academics Zuheir Desai and Alexander Lee titled “Technology, Choice, and Fragmentation: The Political Effects Electronic Voting in India”, they write, “EVMs are associated with dramatic declines in the incidence of invalid votes, and corresponding increases in vote for minor candidates. There is ambiguous evidence for EVMs decreasing turnout, no evidence for increases in voter error or fraud, and no evidence that machines with an auditable paper trail perform differently from other EVMs.” The research was based on data from three Lok Sabha elections – 1998, 1999 and 2014.

According to an article in The Hindu, there is no possibility of EVMs being tampered to influence the election outcome. In the article, it is pointed out that the EVM has a pre-programmed set of instructions which only selected devices can read through a wired connection. The only way to tamper with the EVMs is if the single-chip unit which the EVM possesses is dismantled altogether. However, in newer machines, it is not possible to do that at all and in others, it can be detected. So, in no way can the EVMs be tampered with, the author argues.

What Do Those Who Claim EVMs Can Be Tampered Say? And How Do They Explain EVM Tampering?

Every electronic voting machine consists of two units:

1. Control Unit
2. Balloting Unit

The control unit is with the polling officer. They press the ballot button, making it possible for the voter to cast their vote by pressing the blue button on the balloting unit.

However, there have been allegations that it is possible to change the internal circuit of the EVM. The Election Commission did not deny the possibility of that happening but did point out that doing so was akin to ‘changing the whole device itself, after which it is no longer the same device’.

But the Election Commission pointed out that there was absolutely no way that the ‘motherboard’ or the ‘internal circuit’ of the EVM could be tampered with since they are subjected to a first level checking in front of the representatives of the political parties.

And according to the Election Commission, after the first-level checking is done, it is safely secured in rooms with 24X7 armed security.

During the 2017 Gujarat assembly elections held in December, Congress candidate from the Porbandar assembly constituency had claimed that three of the EVM machines were connected to some sort of a bluetooth device. He had said, “A device named ‘ECO’ shows up when you switch on Bluetooth on mobile phones.”

Chief Electoral Officer of Karnataka Sanjiv Kumar had said in March, “…Neither do they have any provision for Bluetooth or a platform to sync with wi-fi or internet. The chip or machine cannot be infected with any virus too. An apex scientific committee screen these machines before they are sent out of the manufacturing units…”

In The Hindu article, the author had rubbished such allegations and had compared it to him setting an open bluetooth connection on his device titled ‘Narendra Modi’s personal phone’. He had said that wouldn’t imply that anyone would get access to ‘Narendra Modi’s personal phone’.

These are the arguments put forward by the Election Commission and the Opposition. However, one thing that needs to be pointed out since the opposition is majorly accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party of tampering with EVMs. The parent company of which Narendra Modi as the CM of Gujarat had allegedly favoured has a similar ownership pattern with the enterprise which is in the business of supplying microchips to Indian EVMs. The Indian exchequer suffered a loss of nearly ₹20,000 crores when the BJP government in Gujarat under Narendra Modi’s leadership had favoured GeoGlobal Resources.

Some Questions Regarding Ownership Patterns

GeoGlobal Resources is a controversial company which was the technical partner of the Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation in extracting gas from the Krishna Godavari basin during Narendra Modi’s tenure as Gujarat’s chief minister. The Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation had borrowed ₹19,720 crore from 13 public sector banks from 2008 to 2015 to fund the drilling of the basin. All this is based on a Comptroller and Auditor General of India report. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh had written that this was worthy of being investigated by a Supreme Court judge.

GeoGlobal Resources is a subsidiary of Key Capital Corp. While Microchip Inc, USA is the enterprise which is in the business of supplying microchips to Indian EVMs.

Janta Ka Reporter in a report pointed out how the ownership patterns of Microchip Inc, USA and Key Corp are very similar. Enterprises such as Vanguard Group Inc, Blackrock Inc, Price Trowe Associates INC/MD, Barrow Hanley Mewhinney and Strauss LLC, State Street Corp and JPMorganChase & Co have stakes in both Microchip Inc, USA and Key Corp.

In the same article in The Hindu, the author had pointed out that the ‘ownership matter’ is something to look into’.

However, there is no evidence yet which suggests that Microchip Inc, USA is involved in tampering with microchips in a way such that it benefits a particular political party.

It is absolutely justified for the Opposition to question the EVMs in a democracy and even ask for a return to the ballot paper. Even European countries such as the Netherlands have actually reverted back to using ballot papers instead of EVMs since it was believed to not be foolproof. However, it must be pointed out that there is not sufficient evidence yet which may suggest that there has been a large-enough scale of fraud in EVM voting to change the electoral outcome in any election.

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Image source: Arijit Sen/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

The post The Opposition Accuses BJP Of Tampering EVMs. Is That Even Possible? appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

It is in the ‘slow kitchens’ of traditional communities with ingredients from one’s field or their neighbour’s gardens, where varieties of cuisines and healthy food was once cooked. However, the rapid pace with which a handful of companies around the world are brutally destroying our food systems stands in sharp contrast to the slow manner in which we once cooked and consumed food. In nations that have seen shifting and settled agriculture for more than 10,000 years, the modern-day corporations consider themselves to be the right candidates to bring in quick-fix solutions.

Genetically modified crops (GMO crops) now fill the plates of most consumers. Even in countries such as India, where people’s resistance has so far kept GMO food-cultivation illegal, GMO food imports have increased rampantly. Movements have clamoured for the labelling of GMO products, but the companies lobbying on the other side have always struck this demand down.

The following photo-essay juxtaposes the kitchens in Asia, Africa and Latin America (where varieties of chemical-free and nutritious food, full of flavour, was cooked) with GMO, chemical-filled and exploitative food items that are now making their way into people’s kitchens. Food sovereignty and sustainability are being killed by systematic land-grab policies and free trade agreements, which make communities (that have historically produced thousands of varieties of corn, millets, beans, bananas, coffee, chocolate and spices) highly dependent on GMOs and the low-quality processed food items of Unilever, Nestle, Kellogs, Tesco, Chiquita, ACE, Hersheys, Nutrela and Starbucks.

A traditional Umqombothi (corn beer) is being brewed before a ritual of the Xhosa people/ACE, the producer of maize meal sold to the poor black population in South Africa, is contaminated with as much as 80% of GMO corn.

Rotis made from wheat are being cooked on a chulha after which dadi will layer them with homemade ghee/Especially after the Europe-India FTA, the French dairy Danone is systematically destroying local Indian dairy cooperatives.

In the resistance camps of the MST (Movement of Rural Landless Workers) in Brazil, pots of beans and rice cooked by the communities  lie unwashed/The Tesco Company is brutally destroying the Amazon rainforest and the lives of indigenous people, while it ironically washes its hands clean by marketing and selling products such as ‘organic’ Brazilian nuts.

Tortillas, made from freshly-ground corn, are cooked on the comal/After the NAFTA agreement, cheap GMO corn in the form of products such as Unilever’s Maizena, are flooding Central American kitchens.

In a small farmstead in Tanzania, varieties of banana dry in the sun. These will be eaten during the off-season or be sold in local markets to generate extra income/Chiquita, a Swiss brand, are forcing their way into farmers’ fields in East Africa, where traditionally, more than a 1,000 varieties of bananas have been grown.

Homemade tacos are made of several varieties of corn, often for lunch/The Kellogs company, one of the largest food monopolies, uses palm oil grown in plantations, destroying people’s lives while also making use of  child labour in Far-East Asia.

Roasted millet rotis are cooked on an open fire/Companies such as Nutrela illegally import refined soya oil (containing high quantities of GMO soya) into South Asia, destroying local oil systems.

Pozol, a traditional foamy chocolate drink, is prepared in Chiapas, Mexico/Ferrero Rocher stands accused of using child labour in their chocolate factories in West Africa.

Coffee is grown locally and filtered overnight for sale to local consumers/The Starbucks mermaid logo, a symbol of exploitation of coffee farmers, workers and animals across the globe.

The post The Poisonous Secret Behind Products Made By Brands Like Starbucks, Nestlé And Danone appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

I first discovered porn as a 12-year-old, rummaging through my brother’s desk, possibly trying to find things which I could snitch to my mom about. The unassuming plastic covers gave away nothing about the contents of the CDs. But an intuition told me that this detective had finally struck gold.

What I discovered was lesbian porn. Two white women, having sexy times on a beach, their moans filling my head (and heart) with both thrill and dread. The all-girls Catholic school upbringing never made me realise that such a thing was even possible. We were never taught about sex, let alone allowing the possibility of unabashed displays of passion and desire between two women. Did it mean I could fall in love with my best friend?

I didn’t let that thought linger as I moved on to the other CDs which featured men and women shagging like there’s no tomorrow. Their private parts shot in extreme close-ups, almost normalising the process for a shy seventh grader who couldn’t remember the last time she spoke to a boy.

In her book, “Cyber Sexy”, Richa Kaul Padte describes a similar experience of coming across porn on her laptop which her housemate had borrowed, “…I opened it to discover Jackie and Michelle, gorgeous, topless, shaking their massive breasts at me… And I am equally sorry to confirm that, yes, ‘Big Tittied MILFs’ was my first encounter with porn.”   

 We live in a country where men and women are expected to bottle up their sexual desires, where porn was almost on the verge of being banned, where consent is exploited by spurned lovers, where CCTV cameras take advantage the privacy of women in waiting rooms and where internet access is still few and far between. How do we then, even begin to recognise and claim that messy, unadulterated, fun part of ourselves which values intimacy and wants to channel their desires in a safe, non-judgemental space?

“Cyber Sexy”, which explores what it means to seek pleasure (in its varied forms) on the internet, starts by challenging the very definition of porn. It is derived from the word ‘prostitute’. Of course, any creative work, which challenges our so-called morality, must be warranting a comparison to a promiscuous woman. What business does a woman have thinking about sex, anyway?

But from fan-fiction to nudies, homemade videos, social networks to virtual reality platforms, Indians on the web are sharing content they have created and what they have liked. They are making choices and developing their preferences – they don’t care for a definition as long as they are able to access supportive spaces online.

For someone like me who operates in her own bubble of watching an occasional “Fifty Shades” movie and listening to her friend lament about her partner watching “too much” porn, this book was a revelation in so many ways. While researching for this book, Padte had at least 10 men confessing their fear of developing an addiction towards porn because they were watching it once or twice a day. She writes, “It is something they are learning from what they see and read and hear around them. From a global society that is collectively drawing arbitrary, alarmist lines around how much porn is too much, and then scaring everyone into thinking they are pervs.”

And she astutely observes that women don’t even have to worry about watching too much porn. With our low necklines and our bare backs and our short dresses, we are always on the verge of crossing the line. I’ll admit, I did have a seething anger against the pop music industry for fetishising young women and ensuring that what they wore in their music and live shows left very little to the imagination. What I conveniently didn’t realise was that this could also be an act of self-expression, of feeling empowered in the way these powerful ladies carried themselves in front of thousands.

Padte writes about rapper Nicki Minaj and her video “Anaconda” which her friend saw as porn and didn’t think was ‘acceptable for a music video’. “She is an extraordinary rapper but she also unsettles a lot of people. Not because she’s doing something new (even though in many ways she definitely is) but because she’s often doing what male rappers have always done: featuring women as super sexual.”

I read this book in the metro, on a flight, during a quick trip back home. With every page, I let loose the inhibition of reading about something which is essentially perceived as ‘taboo’ in a public place. In the penultimate chapter titled ‘Mass Intimacy’, the author regales in the glory of sweaty dance floors, theatres showing adult films (most of which have already shut down), the camming website Chaturbate (‘The act of chatting while you masturbate’) and virtual reality platforms. She asserts that a mass of people frighten those with power, and a sexual mass, ‘even more so’.

“The mass is about ‘undesriable’ groups coming to together, and as a result, their intimate unions are often seen as a threat to institutional power. And often, this power is trying to regulate and order sexuality as a means to regulate and order a population.”  

So, the personal is indeed political. And in many ways, “Cyber Sexy” is a call to action. So that a breach of consent and the act of producing porn in an ethical manner, is not charged under the same obscenity clause. So that people get to have a say in what they want to watch and feel a sense of accountability in reporting instances that look like consent violations. So that everyone has the freedom of sexual expression, which could perhaps offend, but not harm anyone.  

The book mentions the famous quote of American judge Potter Stewart, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”

Yes, you can’t and no you don’t. Padte leaves the reader with a sense of empathy and an understanding of human emotions – someone’s porn could be your erotica, their nude photo could just be perceived as a selfie. Desire can’t be contained in a box and locked away. It is sweating, heaving and thriving inside you. So…

“What ‘counts’ as porn? Screw them, you tell me.”   

The post From Erotica To Savita Bhabhi: This Book Smashes Notions About How Indians View Porn appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

Our nation spends an ample amount of time talking about what dresses celebrities wore at the Cannes, which actor is dating whom, and how much Bunty, ‘Gupta ji ka beta’, scored in his exams. But talk about the things that really matter, and people will turn a deaf ear.

Try telling them that your daughter is being harassed for dowry, and they will tell you that dowry is a custom every father has to bear. Tell them about a girl being harassed by hooligans on the street, and they will ask you to protest your family’s ‘honour’ by ‘commanding’ your daughter to stay indoors. If you are a man, try hinting that you are being solicited by a woman, and comments like “mard bano” will be bombarded at you.

In a country where a rape victim’s face is ‘covered’ (because apparently, her name is blemished by a crime she did not commit), our voices are trapped beneath layers of mistreatment and fear. “If this story gets out, if it gains the public attention that Nirbhaya’s story did, nobody will marry me. But then again, given my dark complexion, nobody would marry me anyway. So why fear?”

Imagine a 10-year-old girl. A child with dreams, which she naively believes, will find the light of the day; a child who cries every time she watches “Titanic” – and who believes, like a million others, that her ‘knight in shining armour’ will arrive. Imagine a girl hitting puberty – the idea of her first kiss not lost in her mind – who has flown across the world in her head, and travelled through the mountains and oceans, who finds wonders in the form of the earthworms she catches.

My name is Ayushmita Samal. But I prefer to go by Ayushmita Krishna Samal – Krishna being my mother’s name. And I want you to know who exactly I am. You see, when I sat down to write this, I needed strength – a lot of it – which is now being defined by you knowing my exact identity. As to why I speak today – it’s because someone told me once, that every story counts, every account matters, for you never know, who might resonate with it.

I am the only child of my parents – and while living and growing up in a nuclear family with working parents, I learnt to race my cars and groom my dolls alone. When alone, my best friends were books like the “Panchatantra” and the “Tintin” – my favorite being the “Tell Me Why” series published by Manorama every month. When you are a 10-year-old, even ₹20 can buy you happiness. It is only 10 years later that I developed the habit of hiding cheap earrings (bought from Kamla Nagar) under the bed. Back then, however, I used to cherish those books.

Along with these books came an uncle – a man in his 50s – a trusted newspaper-wala who used to throw the newspaper at our door every morning, and rang the bell only once a month, to collect his pay. This man, old enough to be my grandfather, knocked at my door every month for three years – almost always during the afternoon, when I was alone at home – and made me believe that he loved me. By ‘love’, he meant sliding his hands down my clothes onto my breasts, reaching between my thighs and violating my body. By ‘love’, he meant kissing me on the lips, many a time – enough to cause bleeding. By ‘love’, he meant pressing his 50-year male hardness onto my body. By ‘love’, he meant 10 minutes of silent torture every month for three years. By ‘love’, he meant grabbing my tresses in his fists and making me afraid of ‘love’ – forever.

There is no glory in being a victim of child sexual abuse. These is no path to self-love and discovering that you were never wrong, but that the world was very much in the wrong. As a victim, since the past 10 years, I has been about trying to find the strength to tell my parents about what had happened under their very own roof – and I have been failing at this. These years have been about visuals from my past, which reminded me of my pain, whenever I was in the company of my on-and-off boyfriends. These years were also about shedding silent tears while watching Aamir Khan’s “Satyamev Jayte” – because I never found the courage that Cinderella did.

It is one thing to brush off your past to the farthermost corners of your brain. Accepting it when it faces you, right across, is a completely different story. It is ineffable how ten minutes can change your life; it is unimaginable how three years can grab your nerve endings, and become a rotting, stagnant pool of dearth in your brain; it is sad how an entire life can be shaped by one single person.

So, if you ask me why it is important to talk about sexuality, abuse and sex – in a world which is rampant with issues like terrorism and poverty – I will tell you. It is because a 10-year-old doesn’t know what wrong they might be going through. It is because the child, after being molested, will come back to their room, kneel down in front of the idols of the Gods and Goddesses that so gleefully adorn Indian households, and beg for it to stop. It is also because, as children, we are taught about the customs of religion, but never about the demons who live around us – and the swords we have to pick, in order to fight them. My sword today is my story, as is my the urge to share it – because we need to talk more, than we need to ‘protect our dignity’.

I never found the faith to tell my parents about it. I never found the guts to look into their eyes and tell them that I was molested as a child. I feel that they do not need to know, for I don’t blame them and I never will. But I also think that all mothers, including mine, need to know that the men groping their daughters and staring at their breasts wouldn’t haunt them half as much as being told to ignore them. Each time we ignore them, each time we turn away from them rather than retaliating, we make way for another girl to be harassed in a similar way. Every time we come across a case of child sexual abuse where the felon is a family member, rather than just cutting off all ties with them, it is important to report the crime and make sure they are punished. This is a necessity, not just for the one victim, but for the dozen others who might fall prey to the criminal.

Strength is subjective. For some people it might come from being able to lead a normal life after a traumatising experience. For some, it may be about building a persistent wall around them, preventing people from coming into their lives. For me, my strength lies in ignoring the people who will stare and point at me after reading this. It lies in the hope that some parent, somewhere, might have read it, and understood the importance of talking to their child about physical boundaries. Maybe a boy, who has been similarly molested, will forgive himself, because the people committed mistakes, not him.

So when and if you read this, share it with three people – and I hope that at least one of them will have a conversation with their children, because we need more Amazons to fight the wars, when there are no knights.

_

Featured image used for representative purposes only.

The post My Strength Lies In Speaking Up About My Experiences Of Child Sexual Abuse appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

“Are you on Whatsapp?”

Ah yes, those trademark millennial parting words. Who among us doesn’t feverishly scroll through our WhatsApp, send GIFs, and update our ‘stories’ with some inane shenanigans and banter?

Well, there’s a new kid on the block, attempting to rival the Facebook-owned messaging service, and it was launched by Baba Ramdev’s very own Patanjali Ayurved. It’s called “Kimbho”, with the tagline “Ab Bharat bolega (Now India will speak)!”

Now, I’m not sure what traditional medicine has to do with texting your BFFs or sending nudes (solicited and consensual, please!), but here’s what Patanjali spokesperson S K Tijarawala said to the Economic Times: “Big technology-based apps in India are being run by MNCs; Patanjali believes it is time there is a swadeshi app run and developed entirely by our own people.”

But it’s not just ‘Make In India’ type swadeshi swag. As Facebook and WhatsApp faced many security and privacy issues, Patanjali tried to swoop in and claim a slice of that technology pie.

Not that there’s anything inherently bad about an Indian app. I mean, Russia has VK, its answer to Facebook. And China has WeChat. So why not India? It’s just that the Kimbho story is brimming with second-hand embarrassment. Let me explain.

First off, “Kimbho” literally means “What’s up?” in Sanskirt. It’s kinda cringey when you remember how Patanjali is trying to compete with WhatsApp (also, did you or did you not just have flashbacks to some older relative confidently calling it the “whatsupp” app? Be honest).

Second, it was taken down hours after being launched on Google Play Store. In that short span of time, it had been downloaded more than 1,50,000 times, and that’s when its glaring errors became obvious. A French security researcher had this to say:

Third, as Business Today reports, “The screenshots used in the application’s homepage had a Pakistani actress Mawra Hocane.” Uhhh, forgive me if I misunderstood, but I thought this was about chest-thumping nationalism, and keeping “videshi” stuff at bay, but did they just… #GoToPakistan?

Fourth, Kimbho appears to be a rip-off of one California-based startup’s app, Bolo Messenger. How do we know this? Well if you had downloaded and used the app even briefly, you would have seen the shoddy replica work:

Tijarawala tried to do some damage control by insisting that the app was only launched for a test-run. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t look like these faux pas can be fixed.

Elliot Anderson’s tweeted facepalm emoji is the only accurate descriptor of Kimbho’s short and chaotic lifespan. Given how poorly the company’s debut in software has gone, perhaps its best that they stick to herbal soaps.

Thanks for wasting everyone’s precious time with your antics, Patanjali! Until then, I’m just here, shaking my head, arms a-kimbho (heh heh), wondering when to expect the next round of drama will hit. Stay tuned.

The post Baba Ramdev Tried To Out-WhatsApp WhatsApp And It Went Horribly Wrong appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

कल अपने कमरे से लगभग सौ फर्लांग दूर बने मजेंटा लाईन दशरथपुरी मेट्रो स्टेशन के अपने पहले सफर के लिए मेंट्रों परिसर में दाखिल हो ही रहा  था कि वाट्स-अप के मैसेज वीरों का एक मैसेज मिला,

“आज वाकई बड़ा खुश हूं, कैराना की हार पर सुबह से दुखी था लेकिन जैसे ही कैराना से सांसद चुनी गई तसव्वुर बेगम ने कहा “यह इस्लाम की जीत है और हिंदुओं की हार है” मज़ा आ गया, वाकई मज़ा आ गया, यह उन लोगों के मुंह पर तमाचा है जो मोदी के विरोध में और जाति की राजनीति को स्थापित करने के लिए तसव्वुर बेगम को वोट दे आए थे और तसव्वुर बेगम ने एक मिनट में उनके भाईचारे में से भाई निकाल कर उन्हें चारा बना दिया और उनकी औकात दिखा दी, वाकई मज़ा आ गया।”

अभी यह मैसेज पढ़ ही रहा था कि दूसरा भी आ गया कि “ये अल्लाह की जीत है और राम की हार है- तसव्वुर बेगम” समझने वाली बात यह है कि  कैराना लोकसभा से उपचुनाव में रालोदा की संयुक्त गठबंधन प्रत्याशी का नाम तबस्सुम हसन है न कि तसव्वुर बेगम।

पर, वैमनस्य की राजनीति में जिसे शत्रु माना जाता है, उसके खिलाफ हर बात सही लगती है फिर तथ्यता और सत्यता की जांच कोई मायने नहीं रखती है क्योंकि राजनीति में जीतना ज़्यादा ज़रूरी लगता है इसलिए समाज को इस तरह के भड़काऊ मैसेज की उत्तेजना से बचना होगा।

यकीन तो था ही इस तरह के बयान कहां से बनते हैं और कैसे वायरल किए जाते हैं, फिर भी तसल्ली के लिए दशरथपुरी मेट्रो स्टेशन की सीढ़ियों पर बैठा और तकसीद करने के लिए ऑल्ट न्यूज़ और समाचार एजेंसी की बेवसाइट देखने लगा। किसी एजेंसी ने इस खबर की पुष्टि नहीं की थी और ऑल्ट न्यूज़ से इस खबर को फेक न्यूज़ घोषित किया जा चुका था।

साथ ही, तबस्सुम हसन का बयान भी इस तरह के मैसेज पर था “हम तो सब धर्मों का सम्मान करते हैं, हमारा ऐसा कुछ अलग नहीं है। हमेशा जो है हम ये चाहते हैं कि भाई सब इंसानियत में रहे हर इंसान एक-दूसरे से प्यार मोहब्बत से रहे। इनलोगों को जब कोई रास्ता नहीं मिला तो ये फेंक मेसेज से चला चला कर 2019 के लिए रास्ता बनाना चाहते है। हम ऐसे लोग नहीं है न ही हमने ऐसा कुछ कहा है कभी। अल्लाह और राम में फर्क क्या है, मानने वालों की बात है आस्था की बात है जो मानता है दिल से मानता है, दिल से मानने की बात है।”

मेजेंटा मेट्रों में घुसते समय यह खयाल बार-बार ज़हन में उभर रहा था कि इस तरह के फेक न्यूज़ से कैराना के संदेश को धूमिल करने की कोशिश कितने बड़े स्तर पर हो रही है। इसको समझना अधिक ज़रूरी है कि कैराना के वोटरों ने इस लोकसभा में देश के सबसे बड़े प्रदेश उत्तरप्रदेश से पहली मुस्लिम महिला जन-प्रतिनिधि को मौजूदा लोकसभा में भेजा है। चिंता यह होनी चाहिए थी कि कमोबेश 19 फीसदी आबादी में उनका कोई चेहरा उनकी खुदमुख्तारी के लिए लोकसभा में नहीं था। 2014 के लोकसभा चुनाव में उत्तरप्रदेश से एक भी मुस्लिम प्रत्याशी जीत दर्ज नहीं कर सका था। तबस्सुम हसन मौजूदा लोकसभा में इस राज्य से पहली मुस्लिम महिला सांसद बन गई।

तबस्सुम हसन उस आबादी की महिला जनप्रतिनिधि के रूप में चुनी गई है जिस समुदाय के मुस्लिम महिलाओं की साक्षरता दर का राज्यवार आकंड़ा तक उपलब्ध नहीं है। बेहतर तालिम के अभाव में मुस्लिम महिलाओं की बड़ी आबादी भावनात्मक लगाव से पारिवारिक भूमिका में बंधे रहना उचित मानती हैं।

फिर ये सवाल भी मुनरिका मेट्रो स्टेशन पहुंचते-पहुंचते ज़हन में उभर चुका था कि इन सवालों पर बहस या विचार तो तब ही किया जा सकता है जब देश का सामाजिक महौल शांत होने के साथ हिंसा मुक्त हो। अशांत महौल के सामाजिक परिदृश्य में इन सवालों की प्रासंगिकता बेहद ज़रूरी होते हुए भी गुम हो जाती है और यही शायद उन्मादी ताकते चाहती हैं कि समाज में हिंसा का महौल बना रहे। एक चिंगारी भर सुलगे और समुदायों को एक-दूसरे से भयभीत कर दिया जाए।

इस माहौल में हमको और हमारे समाज को इतिहास की उन घटनाओं से सीख लेने की ज़रूरत है कि उस राजनीति से बचा जाए जो भले ही हमेशा के लिए नहीं है, पर लंबे समय तक सामाजिक सौहार्द, सद्भावना और लोकतंत्र को नुकसान पहुंचाने की कोशिशों में सक्रिय है। समाज का यह संघर्ष अब स्वस्थ्य लोकतंत्र के लिए ज़रूरी है।

The post कैराना में तबस्सुम हसन की जीत पर आखिर क्यों फैलाई जा रही है फेक न्यूज़ से नफरत? appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

The Ramayana, arguably the most influential text in all of Hinduism, is many young Indian men and women’s first introduction to gender roles on the Indian subcontinent. The story is centred on Sita and Rama, the narrative’s protagonists who were exiled from their home in Ayodhya as a result of a family dispute. Their role as two of the most beloved Godheads in Hinduism is rooted in what is often painted as their purely devotional love towards one another.

Beyond the picturesque Ram-Sita bond lies the reality that even Hindu Goddesses had to fight for equality in their relationships with their husbands. In the historic tale, when the verdict of Rama’s exile was reached, Sita was adamant that she accompany him. Rama, aware of his wife’s deep beauty claimed that her “Lotus eyes attract even sages” pointing to the fact that her existence in itself was a liability under patriarchy.

On the most fateful day of the entire story, Sita was inside of the Lakshmana Rekha that she had been forbidden from leaving when a beggar appeared asking for food. As she bravely stepped out of the circle of safety to do what was morally just, the beggar’s true identity as Ravana, the Demon-king of Lanka, was revealed. He abducted Sita to Sri Lanka where she was exiled until Rama, Lakshmana and their army of allies saved her.

Many generations later, Rama is still always cited as the undisputed hero of the Ramayana, after all, the entire epic is named after him and his journey through exile and saving his wife from abduction. Yet, Sita’s capture and survival under the constant threats and harassment from an almighty Demon never seem to be highlighted in the same way. For a woman who plays an equal role in the famous Sita-Ram jodi, one who took on her tormentors alone while Sri Rama had a whole army, she does not get equal credit for her victories.

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has cited Sri Rama numerous times in their fight for Hindutva, or the political ideology of establishing hegemony of the Hindu way of life in India. The controversial demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Sri Rama’s birthplace, has lead to issues that still cause conflict between Muslims and Hindus in India today. The BJP’s continual obsession with correcting historical facts and trying to defend Sri Rama’s legacy has only reinforced the most extreme readings of Hindu texts under the Patriarchal gaze. With the BJP currently controlling 21 of the 29 Indian states, their anti-minority and anti-women stances are only projected to grow and become more relevant in India’s everyday politics.

The Sita-Phenomenon

The “Sita Phenomenon” that originated in the Ramayana is still something that happens in present-day India, and just as Sita’s kidnap was the first act in the string of long and intense warfare between Rama and Ravana, women are often the first targets of violence in the disputes of patriarchy. In power systems that hail men as the almighty protectors of the “poor and helpless”, the threat of sexual exploitation of a particular group’s “women” is a favourable tactic because its success is a direct insult to the function of manhood.

In 2002, communal violence erupted in Gujarat as a result of events stemming from the 1992 Babri Mosque Demolition in Ayodhya. In the three-day bloodshed that took place in attacks from radical Hindu mobs on Muslim villagers, women were the first targets and suffered through gang-rape, mutilation, molestation, and murder. Hindu women who were caught fraternizing with or helping their Muslim counterparts were also subject to rape and torture in public, some were even stripped naked of their clothing and left with nothing. Perhaps such Hindu women should have known better than to step out of the circle of safety that was drawn into the sand by their radical husbands, brothers, and fathers.

In the days that followed, women who were brave enough to report their rapists to the justice system were met with considerable amounts of resistance. Gauri, a Hindu woman, was who was raped in front of 30-40 villagers during the riots could not find anyone to testify for her in court aside from her young daughter. She described her experience with the court system as isolating, “[Gauri] said she got angry when the defence lawyer suggested in the court that she had not been raped. I shouted back that the rape did take place,” she said, adding that Bhanubhai, the activist supporting her in her struggle for justice, then helped to calm her down. She felt the entire court was hostile to her and that the judge did not believe her.

This climate of silence and brutality towards Hindu women in the court systems was directly reflected by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, whose lack of response to the violence against Muslims and women has been highly criticized. Despite the fact that he provided no words of consolation to the state’s women and that further court rulings showed his party’s involvement in the massacre, he went on to be elected Prime Minister in 2014, proving how little the plights of women have impacted the majority of the country’s citizenry

The Anti-Feminist Patterns Of India’s Legal System

The events that happened in Gujarat have showcased that there are major structural changes that are needed to make India an equal and fair place to live as a woman. With the current BJP government’s influence over regional politics, hope is dwindling for many of India’s women’s rights activists.

Despite current fears, there have been past victories for women throughout the history of the country, one of which was introduced as Indian Penal Code 498A in the 1980s, also commonly known as the “Dowry Law.” Among the many facets of this legislation includes the highly controversial “immediate arrest” provision, which states that anyone who is accused of committing a dowry-related crime will be considered guilty without a full trial. Many men asserted that such swift action was simply not fair, and that women were abusing the law in order to retaliate against perceived injustices created by the groom’s family.

Among the various ways that women are controlled by Patriarchy, dowry is one of the best-known and most obvious examples. This practice has been integral to the South Asian identity for centuries and is the formality that requires the family of a bride to pay the groom in cash or other gifts before their daughter’s wedding. According to a 2017 study, over 20 dowry-related deaths occur daily in India and these casualties might come as a result of suicide, harassment or outright murder. Staggeringly, only one-third of all criminals who are charged with dowry-related crimes are actually convicted.

While an innocent man being immediately arrested for a false conviction or complaint submitted by a female is troubling, the amount of women who die yearly from dowry-related fatalities is an epidemic. It is important, even pivotal, to acknowledge that the Patriarchy harms and exploits many men, but it would be problematic to ignore that the brunt of the burden is placed on the backs of women. Not only do women have to deal with sexual harassment, income inequality and dowry-related harassment, but they also have to live with the reality that one of their peers gets raped every 15 minutes on average.

The BJP’s Culture Of Male Impunity

Since March of 2009, 19 BJP members have been accused or convicted of some form of sexual assault against women, and while many of these cases lead to arrests and penalties, the BJP has created a culture of virtual impunity for its associates in regards to such crimes.

In 2017, Vikas Barala, the son of a BJP leader in Haryana was convicted of stalking a woman named Varnika Kundu with one of his friends, and according to the victims account he had even tried to forcibly remove her from his car.

When Varnika tried to lodge a report against Barala, the police did not include abduction as one of the potential charges on her behalf. As the case proceeded, the power of Barala’s ties to the incumbent BJP party slowly started to be revealed, as police asserted that the monitoring cameras that were along the route of the crime scene had all stopped working the day of the attempted kidnapping.

In a pattern that is alarming and problematic, Varnika Kundu’s case only received the proper respect and care that it deserved after the entire country started to show outrage, only then through an “act of God” was the police able to find the “lost” footage of the incident. Many even assert that if Kundu’s father wasn’t a civil servant the case would not have been taken as seriously as it has been.

Today, Vikas Barala is out on bail even though his offences are considered serious and his potential to affect the outcome of the case given his status is unlimited. In order to counteract the possible say Barala might have in the final ruling for his charges, the victim petitioned the judge to complete the case in a time-sensitive manner, aiming to prevent it from dragging on for months, as many of India’s cases that claim violence against women do. The judge has not yet honoured her request.

The BJP has wielded an unprecedented amount of power in India over the last years, allowing many of its members, such as the 19 accused, and their associates to live in a state of virtual impunity. In the environment of fear that the BJP seems to continually be cultivating, the structural oppression that women and minorities face is only intensifying. In Delhi, where law and order is considered to be the most just among all places in the entire country, the rape conviction rate dropped by twenty points from 2014 to 2015.

In every great democracy, citizens should be able to count on law and order to aid them in ensuring that there is equality among the masses. Regardless of age, caste, creed or religion, legal measures are supposed to apply to the citizenry equally, however, this has not been the case for India’s women. In a case that shocked the entire nation this past April, news broke that an 8-year-old was held captive and gang-raped for a week in a Hindu temple by numerous men, and four police officers have been linked for their involvement in the crime.

The girl was born and raised in the turbulent region of Jammu and Kashmir where her nomadic Muslim community was thought to be a threat for their encroachment on Hindu land. Her rape was a political tool that was used to “send a message” to her family that their presence in the region was considered unacceptable, and they hoped that this action would scare other Muslim families away as well. However, for many Indians seeing a young girl eventually succumb in collateral damage as a result of egotistical pursuits of men didn’t come as a surprise, because in India that tale is as old as the Ramayana.

The environment of fear, hatred, and lack of acceptance of minorities in the subcontinent has created a climate where the rape and murder of an 8-year-old child was considered to be a conspiracy theory by many Right-wing politicians. Instead of unanimous outrage all across India in response to the devastating news, a number of BJP leaders marched in support of the accused, claiming that the suspects were being attacked because they are Hindus.

Through the use of dowry, rape, and sexist interpretations of Hindu texts, men have learned how to carefully control women and remind them that they are here to serve the Patriarchy. While Hindu nationalists boast of being gatekeepers of India’s largest religion, with equal fervour, psychosis, and hatred, they have come to embody Ravana himself. The heartless gang-rape and murder in Kathua has proved to Indian women that they no longer have to fear some exotic demon-King from Lanka to end their lives in exploitation and torture because now Ravana lives at home.

The Triumph of India’s Sitas

In an article written by Amnesty International in 2017, India was voted the worst place for a woman to live amongst all the countries in the G20. The report has cited female infanticide, rape, and the discrimination of women as chief reasons why being born the “lesser gender” in India means automatic marginalization. Despite the daily struggles that women face, they have continually fought to destroy the “Lakshmana Rekha” that has been drawn for them in the sand through grassroots organizing and coming up with their own ways to hold men accountable.

The Gulabi Gang, in particular, has empowered and created a sisterhood of over half a million women who are emboldened by stopping domestic violence against women in rural areas, proving that they can be their own guardians. The vigilante group aims at providing abused women open spaces where they can come and talk about their experiences, and the Gang will confront their abuser with the threat of lethal force, much like the police might.

On a larger and more structural level, nari adalats, or women’s courts, have emerged in the northern part of the country to counteract lapses in India’s judicial system regarding violence against women. These informal arrangements help women by informing them of their rights so they can require intervention from the police and other mediators, and today in India such courts serve over 40,000 villages.

Despite all the odds being placed against them, women are continuing to rise out of their shackles in India and are braving the psychic enslavement of Hindutva-honoring men. While members of the BJP are distracted by the belief that Sri Rama was the real hero of the Ramayana, they are allowing for the silent rise for India’s Sitas who are coming together to undo the injustice, lies, and betrayal of their brothers, fathers, and husbands, and the best part is that this time, they aren’t alone.

The post From Sita To Kathua: How Hindutva Waged A War On Indian Women appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

Growing up, all that I had heard from the mainstream English media and through hearsay was how Lalu Yadav, the former chief minister of Bihar was corrupt and that lawlessness was rampant when he was in charge of the state, directly or indirectly, from 1990-2005.

Bihar had become synonymous with lawlessness and his reign was described as ‘jungle raj’ by many. Movies like “Apaharan”, a 2005 kidnapping thriller starring Ajay Devgn became the definitive film which described the contemporary socio-political scenario in Bihar.

Then came Nitish Kumar. He became the chief minister of the state in November 2005. Under his leadership and his party Janata Dal (United)’s alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, the state was largely able to shed its notoriety for lawlessness that it had acquired under the leadership of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi.

The mainstream media projected a version that Nitish Kumar had successfully managed to change all that had gone wrong during Lalu Yadav’s reign.

Then came the 2015 Bihar elections. Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Indian National Congress got into an alliance to stop the BJP from coming to power. And they succeeded. However, the thing to note was that Lalu Yadav’s RJD managed to secure 80 seats while JD(U) got 71. The vote share of the RJD was 18.4%, while that of the JD(U) was 16.8%. Candidates of both political parties had contested in 101 seats each.

Few questions came to my mind. How was it possible for a leader convicted of corruption in a scam which was worth around ₹950 crore to be so popular amongst the masses? Was it merely a case of good marketing or were there certain things which took place in Bihar from 1990-2005 which makes Lalu Yadav the most popular leader of Bihar in the history of independent India.

How Subalterns Benefitted From Lalu Yadav’s Rule

If one wants to understand the success of the politics of Lalu Prasad Yadav, one needs to go beyond the conventional understanding of terms such as ‘development’. His rule was not about building schools, hospitals, roads, providing electricity or improving infrastructure in general.

It was largely about three things: Shaking down the caste order which had plagued a feudal Bihari society, social justice for people not belonging to upper caste communities and ensuring security for the Muslim population in the backdrop of the Ram temple movement in the 1990s and its aftermath.

His Role In Shaking Down The Caste Order

Lalu Prasad Yadav was famous for saying that even if he could not provide ‘swarg’ (heaven), he did manage to provide ‘swar’ (voice) for the weaker sections of the society. And that is what he, as per journalistic and academic accounts did. Academic Jeffrey Witsoe argues that Lalu Yadav’s politics was about an intentional breakdown of state institutions such as the police and the bureaucracy since it was dominated by the upper castes and putting power in the hands of lower-caste politicians (many of them criminal) who could muster enough resources to help the lower castes in their respective constituencies.

Witsoe calculates data from the year 2002: there were 133 IAS officers of the four main upper caste communities – Bhumihar, Brahmin, Kayastha, Rajput, out of the 224 in the entire Bihar cadre. However, there were only seven belonging to the Kurmis, Koeris and Yadavs – the three largest OBC communities.

However, when it came to the representation of lower castes in the legislative assembly, it was a different case altogether. Out of the 234 MLAs, only 54 of them belonged to the four upper castes and 100 were from the three largest OBC communities.

How Did The Lower Castes Benefit?

In a report in The Caravan, it is written that the Yadav community in Barbigha, Bihar got a sense of psychological empowerment. Before the coming of Lalu Prasad, Yadavs had to put a shoe over their heads before passing through a Bhumihar (upper caste) house. Earlier, the police refused to register complaints of the people belonging to the Yadav community. But all that changed after Lalu Yadav came to power in 1990.

According to the 1995 news report in India Today, a 45-year-old landless labourer from Sitamarhi district in Bihar talks about how he no longer had to bow down and touch his forehead to the ground when his landlord walked past him. He said, “Now I don’t do this when my landlord walks by… Because Laloo said so.”

Princeton historian Gyan Prakash writes in an article on Al Jazeera, “As chief minister, he walked into Dalit quarters, megaphone in hand. He opened his bungalow to crowds of the poor and unprivileged castes. The privileged castes saw this as disrespecting the office, but Lalu Yadav became a nationwide household name.”

In an article on Scroll, journalist Saba Naqvi describes Lalu’s reign as this, “…The anarchy he presided over was, to my mind, a deliberate shake-down of the old order. The insults to the upper castes, the breakdown of old structures were part of his political and social strategy…”

The sense of psychological empowerment which lower castes experienced after centuries of oppression by upper caste landlords was perhaps the essence of the politics of Lalu Yadav and why people in Bihar continue to aggressively defend and vote for him.

For them, the first emancipation that they wanted was a sense of dignity, self-respect which had been snatched away from them due to the entrenched caste system which dominated Bihari society. And that is what Lalu Yadav by breaking down state institutions, empowering lower-caste criminal politicians and creating a sense of lawlessness managed to give them.

However, it must be pointed out that large section of the benefit did end up being taken by certain castes such as the Yadavs. They became exploitative, the ripples of which are still felt today in Bihar. Earlier this week, in Tejashwi Yadav’s own legislative constituency in Raghopur, people from the Yadav community allegedly burnt down Dalit homes due to a land dispute. According to the 1995 India Today report, Lalu Yadav turned a blind eye when caste massacres were allegedly committed by people belonging to the Yadav community.

But by and large, in many pockets of Bihar, his was an alliance which managed to stitch together a broader coalition involving OBCs, Muslims and the Dalits.

Security Provided To The Muslim Community

After the Bihar election results were declared in November 2015, a video of Lalu Yadav in a rally asking LK Advani to end his Rath Yatra to build the Ram temple in Ayodhya in 1990 went viral. His government would eventually go on to arrest LK Advani in the same year and Lalu would overnight become a hero to the Muslim community in the state.

In 1989, the Bhagalpur communal riots had resulted in the Muslims deserting the Congress and they had found a replacement in Lalu. While this is the most famous incident of him being a secular leader, there are other instances too.

A journalist narrates in Scroll how Lalu Yadav had picked up a call after midnight by an ordinary resident to quell a communal disturbance in Patna. He would personally visit communally sensitive areas and threaten the police with terrible consequences if riots took place in the region.

Throughout his political career, he has refused to work out any alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party. If one goes through his interviews from the 1990s to 2017, he categorically mentions that compromising with the BJP is out of the question for him.

While it is true that his regime brought about a sense of lawlessness in many parts of Bihar, the empowerment of many marginalised groups under his watch is also a reality. Why else would millions throng to vote for a man and his party who is alleged to have been involved in so many corruption scandals over the years?

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Image source: Saxena Sharad/ The India Today Group/ Getty Images

The post Lalu Yadav Is Corrupt. But Here’s Why Millions Still Vote For Him appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

पूरे देश के सात राज्य मध्यप्रदेश, राजस्थान, गुजरात, पंजाब, उत्तर प्रदेश और हरियाणा में आज किसानों के “गांव बंद” कहे या “किसान अवकाश” का दूसरा दिन है। किसानों ने कर्ज़ माफी के साथ, अनाज की कीमत का भुगतान स्वामीनाथन आयोग के सिफारिश के हिसाब से किया जाने, किसानों की ज़मीन कुर्क के जो नोटिस भेजे गए हैं वो वापस लिए जाने, दूध के लिए कम से कम 27 रुपये प्रति लीटर का भुगतान और फलों व सब्ज़ियों का न्यूनतम मूल्य तय किए जाने की मांग की है। इन मांगों के साथ किसानों ने केंद्र की किसान विरोधी कथित नीतियों के खिलाफ इस “गांव बंद” या “किसान अवकाश” आंदोलन की शुरुआत की है।

किसानों का दस दिनों का “गांव बंद” सिरे से मीडिया के बहसों से गायब है, कल सारा दिन मीडिया और सोशल मीडिया सीता माता पर टेस्ट ट्यूब बेबी, अधेड़ प्रोफेसर के डांस, कैराना के हार पर गलत बयानी को वायरल बनाता रहा।

नींद तब टूटी जब मंडियों में फलों, सब्ज़ियों और दूध के कम आवक से एक ही दिन के भीतर इनके दामों में बढ़ोतरी हुई। कमोबेश सारे न्यूज़ बेवसाइट और मुख्यधारा के अख़बार, चैनल सबों में एक सी ही छवी दिखाई जा रही है, किसान सड़कों पर दूध फेंक रहे है, किसान अपनी सब्ज़ियां फेंक रहा है।

यह एक नैरेटिव सेट किया जा रहा है आंदोलन के खिलाफ कि आपके बच्चे दूध के लिए मोहताज हैं और किसान दूध सड़क पर बहा रहा है? आगे रहकर यह बताने का प्रयास तक नहीं है कि ऐसा किसान कर क्यों रहा है? ज़ाहिर है किसान की बात या मांगों पर बहस सिरे से गायब है। कहीं भी यह सवाल नहीं है कि किसानों को इस तरह सड़कों पर क्यों आना पड़ा? क्यों “गांव बंद” आंदोलन करना पड़ा? और “गांव बंद” आंदोलन क्या है?

पिछले दफे जब महाराष्ट्र के किसान पैदल मार्च करते हुए मुबंई में जमा हो रहे थे तब घिसी हुई, मरम्मत की हुई चप्पलें, फटी हुई एड़ियां, सूखे खेतों की धूल, बदरंग होते कपड़े, माथे पर गहरी पड़ती लकीरें, धीमी चाल चलता आसमान की ओर ताकता किसान सोशल मीडिया पर हैशटैग के साथ खूब दिखाया गया था पर इस दफा वो भी खामोश है। क्या सच में किसान की तकलीफ हमारे आधुनिक समाज में महत्व नहीं रखती?

आधुनिक समाज में मुंह फेर कर खड़े रहने के कारण “गांव बंद” आंदोलन पर कृषि मंत्री ने “पब्लिसिटी स्टंट” का बयान ज़रूर दिया “मीडिया में आने के लिए अनोखे काम करने पड़ते हैं, देश में करोड़ों किसान है मीडिया में आने के लिए अनोखे काम करने पड़ते हैं।” यह बेहद शर्मनाक है किसानों की बदहाली का भद्दा मज़ाक बनाने की कोशिश भी है। हरियाणा के मुख्यमंत्री ने कहा कि “उनके पास कोई मुद्दा नहीं है, इसलिए वो इसतरह का रास्ता अपना रहे हैं। सामान ना बेचकर किसान अपना ही नुकसान करेगें।” गौरतलब हो, कि मुंबई में किसानों के जमावड़े पर शहरी समाज के समर्थन में उतर जाने से महाराष्ट्र सरकार घुटने पर आ गई थी।

किसानों की मांगों को समझने की कोशिश करें तो उनकी प्रधान मांग है कि उनको अपनी पैदावार का उचित दाम मिले जिसकी बातें स्वामीनाथन आयोग की सिफारिशें भी करती हैं। गौरतलब है कि 2006 में सरकार को सौंपी गई स्वामीनाथन आयोग की रिपोर्ट, फसल उत्पादन मूल्य से पचास प्रतिशत ज़्यादा दाम, अच्छे गुणवता वाले बीज कम दामों पर मिले, किसानों के लिए चौपाल, महिला किसानों के लिए क्रेडिट कार्ड, प्राकृतिक आपदा के लिए कृषि जोखिम फंड, खेतीहर ज़मीने और वनभूमि को गैर-कृषि उद्देश्यों के लिए ना दिए जाने की सिफारिश के साथ, खेती करने के लिए कर्ज़ की व्यवस्था कम ब्याज़ दरों पर उपलब्ध कराने की बात करता है।

इन सिफारिशों से यह समझ में आता है कि ये ऐसी मांगे है जिनके पूरा होने के बाद अन्य मांगे मसलन, “कर्ज़ माफी” का महत्व खत्म हो जाता है। क्योंकि इन सिफारिशों के सही तरीके से ज़मीन पर उतरते ही किसान खुद ही कर्ज़ चुकाने में समर्थ हो जाएंगे। वैसे भी देश के बैंकों की 13 खरब डॉलर की पूंजी डूबने के बाद देश किसानों की कर्ज़ माफी के स्थिति में है भी नहीं।

हां, किसानों की “कर्ज़ माफी” के मामलों का एक राजनीतिक जुमला अगले चुनावों के लिए ज़रूर बन सकता है कि जब जिओ सीम के आने से एयरटेल, आइडिया और वोडाफोन को नुकसान हुआ है, तो उन्हें स्पेकट्रम शुल्क माफ किया जा सकता है, लेकिन किसानों का कर्ज़ा माफ नहीं किया जा सकता है।

वास्तव में, किसानी के लिए ज़रूरत इस बात को समझने की भी है कि किसानों को खेती से कोई न कोई तरीका इंजाद करना ही पड़ेगा जिसमें कर्ज की जरूरत ही नहीं पड़े। क्योंकि कैश क्रॉप(नगदी फसल, जिस जगह की जमीन है, उस जगह की प्रकृत्ति के विपरीत फसलों को पैदा करने का तरीका) के नाम पर जो व्यवस्था कायम की जा रही है वह किसानों को कर्ज़ की तरफ ढकेल रही है।

इस वक्त किसानों की सबसे बड़ी ज़रूरत है कि उनको फसलों के उत्पादन का उचित भाव मिले। जो भी भाव तय हो, उस भाव पर फसल बाज़ार में बिके। उसको बाज़ार में व्यापारी फायदा उठाकर कम दाम पर बेचने के लिए मजबूर न करें।

सरकारों को यह भी समझना ज़रूरी है कि पशुधन के धीरे-धीरे खत्म होने पर, पशुधन पर आधारित किसानी जीवन-यापन भी चौपट हो चुका है। इसलिए अनाज पर उचित मूल्य ही उनके जीवन-यापन का मुख्य ज़रिया मात्र है।

प्रकृति के मिज़ाज से लड़ता किसान, क्योंकि प्रकृति कभी भी उसके नियम से नहीं चलती, सरकारों की बनाई व्यवस्था भी उसके प्रतिकूल नहीं रहती, किसानों को किसानी के लिए इससे भी लड़ना-भिड़ना पड़ता है, किसान की मौजूदा परिस्थितियों को दुरुस्त करने के लिए सरकारों को स्वामीनाथन कमेटी की सिफारिशों को गंभीरता से लागू करना होगा, क्योंकि यही एक मात्र विकल्प किसानी की समस्या को फौरी राहत दिला सकता है।

खेती पर लगातार बढ़ते बोझ और लागत से कम मुनाफा, बदलते मौसम की चुनौतियों और आर्थिक नीतियों में निजी क्षेत्रों को प्राथमिकता मिलने वाले दौर में किसानों के हितों को समझना भी जरूरी है। देश को यह महसूस करना ज़रूरी है कि किसानी और किसान दोनों ही मुश्किल में है।

The post किसान मुश्किल में हैं, उन्होंने शौक से बंद नहीं बुलाया है appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

Adivasis or as the name translates in the Sanskrit language, “natural inhabitants” of India have been a relatively socially outcast community of Modern India.

In today’s times, Adivasi people are unfortunately referred to as primitive beings. But they are one of the few communities who have lived during every stage of Indian history. We can surely learn a few tips from our Adivasi brothers and sisters to ensure a sustainable future for ourselves, can’t we?

If one thinks of these communities and the way they function, one might applaud the fact that they have been sustaining in the society despite all the hindrances for so long. And rightly so, because we can all learn a lot from them as a society. Here’s a list of five things that we believe we can learn from these communities to live sustainably:

1. Interdependence Between Nature and People

Adivasis have mostly resided within or around the periphery of jungles. This can be seen by their dominance in forest-covered areas of Central India. Adivasis do not live a resource-intensive life, hence they do not depend on mining for their needs. They consider the forest as their “mother” and it is often personified in the form of a goddess.

One doesn’t have to go back many years to understand the bond between adivasis and nature. The most well-known example is that of the “Niyamgiri hills”. This place is home to the Dongria Kondh adivasis who consider the hills called Niyam Dongar to be the abode of their divine god. Their habitat came into danger when Vedanta Aluminum Limited agreed to establish an aluminium refinery as a part of the industrial development in Odisha. Despite suspicions over the environmental impact of the project, the Supreme Court granted clearance to Vedanta in August 2008. The decision led to a mass movement by the Kondh community who marched into the streets of Bhubaneshwar. After a long struggle against the government, the Kondh community won the battle in 2010 when the potential environmental violations by the company were exposed. The community was successful in preserving their home and nature.

Adivasis have been included in forest protection activities by state governments as well. This is the case with the Kokrebellur village of Karnataka where the state government defined roles for the local community to ensure reduction in bird poaching and encourage recreational activities to make the Kokrebellur bird sanctuary a tourist spot.

Compare this to the current situation of deforestation, global warming, and animal extinction, Adivasis teach us the need to be in harmony with nature.

2. Self-Sufficiency In Food and Farming

Despite the introduction of modern techniques in agriculture, many states and farmers suffer from low productivity. And the ones that produce a sufficient quantity use a heavy dosage of fertilizers and pesticides doing little good to human health.

The traditional farming methods of Adivasis have been successfully feeding their communities without the use of harmful substances. For example, Adivasi farmers in Dhaarav village of Madhya Pradesh practice the “utera” system. They save seeds from the previous harvest, sow several seeds at the same time, use animals to fertilise land and involve zero use of chemicals. In addition, mixed farming helps to recover the loss by failure of one crop.

It would not be wrong to say that adivasis have a very diverse cuisine. They have food festivals of their own and showcase the variety of cooked and uncooked food collected from the forest. According to Vikalp Sangam, a food festival held in Cuttack in 2014 by Adivasis consisted of more than 1500 food varieties among which over 900 were uncultivated forest foods.

Adivasis still practise the ancestral act of foraging from forests. As much as 30% of their diet comes from the forest. In a world obsessed with processed foods that are packaged in plastic, Adivasis teach us how to have a diverse cuisine from readily available plants.

3. Strong Sense of Collective Identity

We have a complex composition of different castes, sub-castes, cultures, religion etc. that form our social hierarchy. Needless to say, such bifurcations lead to conflicts among different groups of people resulting in mishaps. Perhaps we can learn a bit from the tribal culture on how to define identity. Collective identity of tribal people does not mean that they don’t have classifications; rather they have a different set of measures that dictate the structure of their societal composition.

A tribal society is characterized by cohesiveness, habitat, stress on clan structures, ethnicity bonds, higher position of women, and a strong sense of identity.

The lack of global recognition as ‘Indigenous people’ acted as a boon in disguise to help Adivasis unite as a whole, upholding their values and laws. The absence of differentiation on the basis of social-class is a major learning. Maybe we can improvise on this system by uniting ourselves as a collective human race rather than fragmentation of people into various groups?

4. Ethnomedicine

Indian pharmaceutical industry is worth 27 billion dollars and is the third largest in the world, by volume. Increasing diseases have led to an increase in the advancement of medicines and technology to cure diseases. But these medicines contain chemicals and have harmful side-effects. The occurrence of side-effects is a big drawback in the health industry and masses are suffering from it. This is yet another field where Adivasis stand out with their use of ancestral plant-based medicine.

Ethno-medicine is the belief and practice relating to health and diseases, which are products of indigenous cultural knowledge of the particular communities. The “Adis” of Siang, Arunachal Pradesh involve the use of herbs, plants and roots of some trees for healthcare. They have distinct ways of treating different diseases using a variety of herbal medicines. Their medicines are used to cure some common diseases such as fever, malaria, jaundice, etc. As per a report published in Science Direct, Natural Products Alert (NAPRALET) contains nearly 2500 species used in traditional medical systems in India alone.

If we inculcate the use of this practice in our system of healthcare, minimizing the use of chemical-based medicines and choosing ethnomedicines can be a good alternative to the recurring diseases among masses.

5. Associating The Self With Nature’s Elements

We know forests are sacred to Adivasis and they have a co-existential relationship with nature. They associate their existence with land. This is not only because agriculture is their primary profession, but also they think of nature as their “mother” i.e. a divine entity. The land is their pride.

Nature is personified in different tribal literatures as different beings. They have emotions. They measure happiness of the self in terms of nature. For example, the Oraon tribes measure their happiness by cattle, crops, and children. One example that depicts the devotion adivasis hold towards nature is that of the Gonds. They are the largest ethnic Adivasi community of India and add up to around 14 million people in total. Their principle god is the “Bada Dev” whom they consider as the creator of the universe. He is believed to control life and death. In Gond culture, god resides in the Saja tree and this is why it is most sacred to the community. They ensure complete protection of the tree and use it for ceremonial purposes.

Associating nature with human emotions can help us develop a bond with them so that we start respecting nature and stop draining the environment of resources in the long run.

Adivasi may be seen as a backward community today, but that is because the popular culture involves living in an unsustainable manner. Society looks down upon people who do not live a credit-based lifestyle, hoarding products of capitalism and living a life full of debt. Adivasis show us a far nobler way of life, one that does not extract resources mindlessly, treats the community members with more respect, is rooted in ancestral plant-based knowledge and worships nature instead of decimating it. Aren’t these the virtues worth celebrating?

The post Called ‘Backward’, 5 Ways Adivasis Are Far Ahead Of Us In Protecting The Environment appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.

पिछले दिनों आमिर खान और उनकी बेटी की एक तस्वीर पर चले बवाल से तो आप वाकिफ होंगे ही। कितनी प्यारी है वो तस्वीर। एक-बाप बेटी के बीच के अटूट प्रेम को दिखाती हुई।

लेकिन, इस समाज में नफरत फैलाने और प्यार को अपना दुश्मन मानने वालों ने इस तस्वीर पर विरोध जताना शुरू कर दिया। ज़ाहिर सी बात है उन्हें प्रेम शब्द से ही डर लगता है, इसलिए कभी प्रेमी जोड़ों के बीच के प्रेम को वो गलत ठहराते हैं तो कभी बाप-बेटी के रिश्तों को।

अब आपको लगेगा कि मैं इतने दिनों बाद इस बात को क्यों उठा रही हूं। दरअसल, ये नफरत फैलाने वाले लोग जाने-अनजाने में एक भला काम कर गए हैं। उन्होंने एक ऐसी बहस शुरू कर दी है, जिसपर बात होनी बहुत ज़रूरी है। वो बहस है एक बाप-बेटी के बीच के रिश्ते की। आप मेरी बात गलत दिशा में ले जाए उससे पहले मैं आपको अपने और अपने पापा के बीच के रिश्ते के बारे में कुछ बताना चाहती हूं।

आमिर खान और उनकी बेटी की तस्वीर देखकर मुझे बिलकुल भी कुछ विचित्र नहीं लगा, आमिर खान की बेटी का अपने पापा की गोद में बैठना मेरे लिए कुछ अलग नहीं था। वजह, मैं भी तो अपने पापा की गोद में बैठती हूं। जी हां, आज भी 26 साल की उम्र में मैं अपने पापा की गोद में सुकून के साथ उनके प्यार को एन्जॉय करती हूं।

आमिर की बेटी की तरह मैं भी अपने पापा के साथ खेलती हूं। कभी उनके पेट पर चढ़कर बैठ जाना, कभी कंधे पर लटक जाना, कभी पेट पर तबला बजाना, तो कभी उनके सर को तबला बनाकर मज़े लेना। और हां, कभी उनके बचे-खुचे बालों से चोटी बनाना।

मैं उनके गालों को प्यार से खिंचती हूं तो कभी गालों में किस करके अपने प्यार को ज़ाहिर भी करती हूं, और जब मन हुआ तो उनसे एक प्यारी सी किस की डिमांड भी करती हूं। बचपन से लेकर अब तक, और आगे भी ये सिलसिला जारी रहने वाला है।

हमने अपने मां-पापा के साथ एक दोस्ती का रिश्ता कायम किया है, जहां हम अपना विरोध जता सकते हैं, अपना प्यार ज़ाहिर कर सकते हैं। अपने करियर, अपने बॉयफ्रेंड, अपनी पीरियड्स के बारे में चर्चा कर सकते हैं। इस दोस्ती वाले रिश्ते में सहमती-अहसमती सबका स्पेस है।

दरअसल, हमारे समाज में पिता के बारे में एक ऐसी इमेज बनाकर रख दी गई है कि पिता गुस्सैल होने चाहिए। हमें अपने पिता के सामने सर झुकाकर रहना चाहिए। आपने कई बार अपने बड़े-बुज़ुर्गों से ये कहते सुना होगा कि हम तो अपने पापा के सामने कभी सर उठाकर बात भी नहीं करते थे। आज भी कई लोग अपने पिता के सामने टीवी तक देखने को बुरा मानते हैं। और ध्यान रहे ऐसा अमूमन बेटी और पिता के बीच होता है, बेटों को कई बार इन चीज़ों की आज़ादी होती है।

लेकिन, समाज के कुछ दकियानूस लोग ये समझने को तैयार नहीं कि अब पिता सिर्फ पिता नहीं बल्कि वो एक दोस्त भी है। ना सिर्फ अपनी बेटों का बल्कि अपनी बेटियों के भी।

आज कई पिता और बेटी की बेहतरीन जोड़ियां आपको देखने को मिल जाएंगी जो दोस्ती का रिश्ता कायम करने में विश्वास रखती हैं। अब चुकी बहस बॉलीवुड स्टार को लेकर हुई है इसलिए यहां उदाहरण के रूप में बॉलीवुड स्टार्स को ही ले सकते हैं। शाहरुख खान, अक्षय, अमिताभ बच्चन जैसी कई हस्तियों को आप अपनी बेटियों के साथ एन्जॉय करते देख सकते हैं।

महेश भट्ट और पूजा भट्ट के बारे में बेतूकी बातों की तो मानों लिस्ट ही बना दी जाए। आपको वो तस्वीर शायद याद होगी, जिसमें दोनों एक दूसरे को किस कर रहे हैं। उस पोस्टर को लेकर भी बड़ा बवाल हुआ, लोगों ने दोनों को भरपूर गालियां दी। और वो गालियां आज के समय में भी लगातार जारी है। लेकिन, बावजूद महेश भट्ट ना सिर्फ पूजा भट्ट के साथ बल्कि अपनी छोटी बेटी आलिया के साथ भी फोटो शेयर करते रहते हैं।

हाल ही में गुड़गांव में रहने वाले अजीत बजाज और दीया बजाज की जोड़ी माउंट एवरेस्ट को फतह करने वाली पहली भारतीय पिता-बेटी की जोड़ी बन गई है। अगर हम पिता और बेटी के रिश्ते के बीच हमेशा एक गंभीरता की दीवार बनाकर रखते तो शायद भारत को ऐसी पिता-बेटी की जोड़ी नसीब नहीं होती।

आमिर और उनकी बेटी की फोटो में कुछ लोगों ने आमिर को यह भी नसीहत दी कि आप अपनी बेटी को कपड़े पहनने का सलीका क्यों नहीं सिखाते। लेकिन, आमिर की बेटी को शायद ही इन नसीहतों से फर्क पड़ने वाला है। क्योंकि जब बेटी को उसके पिता का साथ हो तो दुनिया के तमाम नकरात्मक कमेंट्स उसको कोई चोट नहीं पहुंचा सकते हैं।

मेरे साथ भी कई बार ऐसा हुआ। कपड़ों को लेकर मुझे अकसर कमेंट्स मिलते रहते हैं। मगर हर बार उसी फोटो को पापा ने फेसबुक पर लाइक करके मेरा हौसला बढ़ाया है। डिस्क या क्लब जाने पर भी कुछ लोगों से ताने सुनने को मिले, मगर मेरे पापा ने कभी विरोध नहीं किया। बल्कि एक बार उनके दिल्ली आने पर मैं क्लब से 2 बजे रात को अपने दोस्तों के साथ वापस आई थी। यहां तक कि मैंने पापा को डरते हुए एक कपड़ा दिखाया, “पापा ये कैसा लग रहा, पहन कर जाऊं।” पापा ने झट के बिना किसी शिकन के कह डाला, हां अच्छा तो लग रहा जाओ पहनकर।

हम बेटियों को अपने पिता से इस तरह के सपोर्ट मिलने के बाद दुनिया की फिक्र नहीं होती है। और मुझे पूरा यकीन है आमिर की बेटी भी ऐसे दकियानूस लोगों को इग्नोर ही करेंगी। बल्कि मैं तो कहूंगी, करो जितनी फोटो शेयर करनी है अपने पिता के साथ, उनके साथ खेलते हुए, उनके साथ शरारत करते हुए। और आइए हम सब अपने पापा के साथ एक मस्ती भरी फोटो शेयर करके ऐसे दकियानूस लोगों को एक करारा जवाब देते हैं। बल्कि 17 जून को तो फार्दस डे भी है, तो आइए इस बार फार्दस डे पिता और बेटी के प्यार को नफरत की निगाह से देखने वालों को एक करारा जवाब देते हुए मनाते हैं।

The post मैं भी अपने पिता की गोद में आमिर की बेटी की तरह ही खेलती हूं, इसमें हैरानी क्यों? appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.