Editorials

Home > Editorials

Editorials - 19-02-2022

The controversy over disallowing girls in hijabs in classrooms, citing a uniform dress code, is no longer confined to Karnataka’s coastal districts. K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj explores the genesis of the row in Udupi and the context of its rapid spread across the State

As the sun set on the coastal town of Udupi in Karnataka on Tuesday, 17-year-old Aliya Assadi sat on the steps of Jamia Masjid, her mind racing in different directions. She wants to be a wildlife photographer. She’s worried about her board exams. But her thoughts keep circling back to the violence and anger over her choice of attire: the hijab.

Assadi is one of six students of the Government Pre-University College for Girls, Udupi, who has been barred from the classroom since December 27, 2021, for wearing a hijab. “I have been wearing a hijab since I was six years old. It is religious and it gives me a sense of security and confidence. I am uncomfortable removing it. What I don’t understand is why I am being forced to choose between the hijab and education,” she says.

Her fight for the right to wear the religious headscarf, in addition to the prescribed uniform, to school, which she has taken to the Karnataka High Court, has exploded into what is called the “hijab controversy” in Karnataka. This has spread like wildfire, further exposing the communal divide and the growing lack of trust between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

Fuelled by social media, television channels, and Hindu and Muslim student orgranisations, there is a deadlock across the State with the defining image being of teachers closing college gates on girls clad in hijabs. This comes at a time when five States are holding Assembly elections with all eyes on communally rife Uttar Pradesh.

How it began

While the local Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders insist that Assadi and her peers have been “brainwashed” by radical student organisations, the students themselves say otherwise.

According to K. Raghupati Bhat, BJP MLA from Udupi and Chairman of the College Development Committee (CDC), in December 2021, eight girls tried to enter classes wearing hijabs. “There are over 80 Muslim girl students in the college who attend classes without any issue as we have a prescribed uniform. Students wear their hijabs till they reach the college premises, but remove them in classrooms. Eventually, two of the girls removed their hijabs, but the rest refused to budge,” he says.

Bhat argues that the hijab-wearing girls were not allowed to enter classrooms as their attire violated the uniform norm in the college. “These students have been trained by the Campus Front of India [CFI, a student organisation dominated by Muslims and growing from strength to strength across campuses in coastal Karnataka],” he alleges.

Another member of the CDC and a national BJP office-bearer, Yashpal Suvarna, says, “The girls were part of a rally organised by the BJP’s student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), against the rape of a student in October 2021. The photos of that rally went viral. According to the information we received, CFI approached the families of these girls and reprimanded them for participating in an ABVP rally, brainwashed them and provoked this campaign,” says Suvarna, who was an accused in a lynching case in 2005, but was later acquitted.

The girls tell a different story. Their petition to the High Court includes testimonies by some of their seniors who claimed they wore hijabs in the classroom as well. Assadi says her seniors had reportedly been facing harassment over the past three years for wearing the hijab. She alleges that there were even instances of some teachers asking pupil leaders to pull the hijabs from girls’ heads. “Sometimes, when they did it, the safety pin worn to keep the hijab in place hurt the girls,” she says. Despite this, because her first year was entirely online, Assadi was under the impression that the authorities would not find anything irregular about her wearing a hijab.

“Due to the pandemic, my entire first year was online, including exams. Once physical classes resumed in September 2021, some of us were taken aback when we were asked to remove our hijabs in classrooms. Our parents met the principal and requested him to allow us to wear our hijabs. He dragged the issue for two months. During that time, we did not wear hijabs in the classroom. Fed up with this, our parents asked us to wear hijabs anyway, resulting in this confrontation,” Assadi says.

The college principal, Rudre Gowda, says it is true that the girls had made repeated requests to be allowed to wear their hijabs inside classrooms, but he did not give them permission as the CDC was clear on the rule for uniforms.

The six girls were made to sit outside their classrooms for over a month. “When I once tried to enter the class, a teacher shut the door on my face. I felt so humiliated,” Assadi alleges.

The CFI took up their issue and petitioned district and State-level authorities, but to no avail. “The girls and their parents approached us and we have been supporting their cause. That is no secret. But it is baseless to say we provoked the row,” says Ataullah Punjalkatte, State president, CFI.

The organisation claims to be independent, but sources say it is closely associated with the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its political arm, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI). The BJP has locked horns with the PFI and SDPI in Karnataka and Kerala.

Assadi, who was one of the girls who had participated in the ABVP rally and is seen in the photograph with a hijab, alleges that the college principal mobilised students and sent them for the protest without revealing that it was organised by the ABVP. “Not all the six girls now seeking the right to wear hijabs were part of the protest. I was the only one there. Many Muslim girls were part of the ABVP rally and are attending classes without hijabs. These are unconnected incidents. But it is true that I faced a lot of pressure from parents, relatives and the community for unwittingly being part of the ABVP rally,” she says.

How it spread

On January 7, a group of Hindu students from the same college as Assadi petitioned the management threatening to wear saffron shawls if female students were allowed to wear hijabs.

As the deadlock continued, Minister for Primary and Secondary Education B. C. Nagesh sided with the college management. Calling the students’ demand an “act of indiscipline”, he said educational institutions were not places to practise religion. “I agree that there are no fixed codes for uniforms for colleges, but wherever the CDCs have prescribed a uniform, it has to be followed,” he said. The Department of Pre-University Educationset up an expert committee to look into the uniform row in the Udupi college on January 25, and asked for the status quo to be maintained until a decision was taken.

The Minister’s comments stoked communal tension in the coastal district. In the neighbouring town of Kundapur, local BJP MLA Haladi Srinivasa Shetty, who heads the CDC of the 145-year-old Government Junior College, introduced a ban on hijabs. This was a campus where students had been wearing hijabs for several decades. “I did nothing proactively. I only implemented the government order of January 25,” Shetty insisted, defending his decision. However, the government order clearly pertained only to the Udupi college.

The Kundapur college campus has an Idgah arch and students have been wearing hijabs for several decades. Thairin Begum, a second-year pre-university student, says her mother graduated from the college wearing a hijab.

But on February 1, everything changed. Fathima Bushra, another student from the college, recounts the events of the day. “Muslim girl students were asked to gather at the library where the principal announced that from now on, we won’t be allowed into classrooms if we wear hijabs. When we protested and asked why there was a sudden change of rules, he cited a government order,” she says.

The next day, Shetty chaired a parent-teacher meeting to announce the new rules. As students and parents arrived at the college, they were greeted by a group of over 50 students wearing saffron shawls. This was the first “saffron-shawl protest” that would quickly become a recurring scene across many campuses in Karnataka. The MLA and the principal used the example of students in saffron shawls to further argue for a ban on hijabs, sources say. The principal of the college, Ramakrishna, refused to speak toThe Hindu and said he was under strict instructions from the MLA not to speak to the media.

By February 3, hundreds of students – both boys and girls – all wearing saffron shawls gathered outside the college. The principal closed the college gates on 28 Muslim girls who had arrived wearing hijabs, triggering protests. The footage on news channels and social media further fuelled the debate. “We sat in front of the gate demanding our right to education. We were treated like criminals. The college authorities refused to let us use the washroom. We went to the government hospital nearby to use washrooms,” says Begum.

Akshay (name changed), a student from the same college who had donned a saffron shawl for the protest, claims the idea was organic, taking root in student-run WhatsApp groups. “Since the Udupi row broke out, we became uncomfortable with girls wearing hijabs in our college. Moreover, many more girls started wearing hijabs. If they were asserting their religion, why can’t we assert ours,” he asks, denying the involvement of any Hindutva organisation behind the protest. “We want uniformity on our premises, and hijabs mark out the girls as special. We are only asking for equality on campus,” he says.

So, where did all the students find saffron shawls? “For most Hindu households in this region, finding a saffron shawl is no big deal. For instance, I attend a weekly bhajana mandali where I wear a saffron shawl,” says Sachin, another student.

All the students claim that they are not members of any Hindutva organisation, but the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, a right-wing Hindutva group that is part of the Sangh Parivar, was in touch with some of them.

It did not take long for the saffron shawl “response” to spread to other colleges in Kundapur. Within a day, similar protests were held at the Bhandarkars’ Arts and Science College and the R.N. Shetty Composite P.U. College. These colleges, which had until now allowed students to wear hijabs in classrooms, turned them away.

Bhandarkars’ Arts and Science College specifically said in its diary distributed to the students that girl students were allowed to wear a scarf. “We have always worn hijabs to classes, but we were suddenly denied entry,” says Fathima Sana, a student of the college.

However, College Principal Dr. N.P. Narayana Shetty says the rules only mentioned “scarf” and it was wrong to interpret it as “headscarf.” If that was the case, why did the college not object to hijabs earlier? “Rules are interpreted when they are challenged,” he says.

The “saffron shawl protest” spread to Udupi’s Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College. Shodhan Kundapura, a second-year BA Journalism student, associated with the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, was one of those who led the protest. “We observed an uptick in the number of girls wearing hijabs. Some even wore burqas. We asked students to bring shawls, but keep them in their bags. We also told Hindu female students that when their Muslim peers were so keen on their religion, they should also contribute to the assertion of Hinduism. When the girls wearing hijabs entered the college, we sported shawls and saffron headgear. With the girls wearing saffron, it became viral,” he says, denying the involvement of any organisation.

However, the media spotted Prakash Kukkehalli, Secretary, Mangaluru Region of Hindu Jagarana Vedike, and Suvarna near the college as the students in saffron shawls argued with their hijab-clad peers. Kukkehalli and Suvarna denied any role, but videos of students handing over saffron headgear after the protest also went viral.

Suvarna says Hindutva had become part of the consciousness of the coastal belt and required “no organising anymore”. K.T. Ullas, State president of Hindu Jagarana Vedike, also claims that the protests were spontaneous and that the organisation had maintained a neutral stance.

After the order

On February 5, the State government intervened and theDepartment issued a government order mandating that students must follow the rules in colleges where the CDC had prescribed uniforms. It cited orders by the Kerala, Bombay and Madras High Courts to conclude that it was not illegal to ban hijabs on campus.

This set the ground for further protests on February 7 when colleges resumed after the weekend. The conflict, which was restricted to Udupi district, spread like wildfire to over 54 colleges in 15 districts including Chikkamagalur, Mandya, Kodagu, Bagalkot, Belagavi and Shivamogga. Until then, these confrontations had been limited to colleges that had prescribed uniforms. But on February 7, degree colleges and other institutions with no rules were drawn into the controversy.

Stone-throwing incidents were reported in Shivamogga, Madhugiri and other places. Students in saffron shawls hoisted a saffron flag at a government college in Shivamogga. A young woman clad in a burqa was gheraoed by a group of male youth in saffron shawls while she walked to her college in Mandya. The young woman stood her ground facing the students.

In an unprecedented move, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai announced a three-day holiday for high school and college students across the State following these incidents. This was extended for nearly a week, before the institutions reopened.

Professor K. Phaniraj, who teaches at the Manipal Institute of Technology and is a prominent civil society voice in the region, points out that there is no student organisation that could unite youth from all communities under one banner. “The communal polarisation of campuses in the coastal region has only been made worse by the almost vanishing act of the National Students’ Union of India, associated with the Indian National Congress that once held sway over campuses in the region, and the Students’ Federation of India, associated with the Left parties,” he says.

“The Hindutva hegemony in the country, especially in coastal Karnataka, has successfully criminalised so many aspects of Muslim life. Their cross-faith interactions are termed ‘love jihad’. Hijab is the latest. Now, the hijab has also morphed into a symbol of resistance against this onslaught,” he says.

Political context

There has been a series of confrontations targeting minorities in the State over the last eight months. The People’s Union for Civil Liberties recorded 39 attacks on members of the Christian community alleging conversion in 2021, mostly in the latter half of that year. This was followed by the passing of the “anti-conversion” Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Bill, 2021, in Karnataka’s Lower House. The Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum, which keeps track of every communal conflict in the coastal region, observed a sharp spike in 2021 with 120 communal incidents targeting both Muslim and Christian communities in the region.

The BJP has also suffered several setbacks in urban local body polls, bypolls and council polls recently, with the Congress giving the party a tough fight. With just over a year to go for the Assembly polls, the BJP faced a challenge from the Congress when the latter took out a ‘Swabhimana Nadige’, with a tableau of Narayana Guru, a 19th-20th century social reformer from Kerala, who enjoys a demigod-like status among the Billavas of coastal Karnataka, a major support base of the BJP. The Kerala government had alleged that the BJP-led Union government rejected a tableau of Narayana Guru for Republic Day.

“The Narayana Guru controversy has disturbed the social base of the BJP among the Billavas. Fearing a backlash, even Hindutva organisations joined the march. The BJP always seeks to hold elections on the plank of religion and not caste. The hijab issue that was limited to one college in Udupi spread across the State days after our programme. This was done to bring the conversation back to the religious polarisation plank not just in coastal Karnataka, but also in Uttar Pradesh,” says senior Congress leader B.K. Hariprasad, Leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Council. A Billava leader, he too led the Swabhimana Nadige.

Though BJP leaders rubbish these claims on record, the uneasiness is palpable. “We promptly went into damage control mode, met senior community leaders and showed how the Narendra Modi government granted funds to the Sivagiri Temple started by Narayana Guru in Kerala. We also joined the yatra honouring the social reformer, blunting its political nature,” says a senior BJP leader from the region.

The coastal region has also seen the PFI and SDPI grow rapidly at the grassroots. In the recently concluded urban local body polls, the SDPI won six seats in the region. “PFI-SDPI and BJP and Hindutva organisations have been indulging in competitive communalism, but the BJP has successfully tagged and blamed the Congress for the ills of SDPI, hampering it electorally,” says a senior Congress leader who did not wish to be named. For instance, the Siddaramaiah government withdrew over 175 cases against members of the PFI and SDPI in 2015. This came back to haunt the Congress when the BJP took up a campaign that alleged that 22 Hindu activists had been killed by these organisations in the run-up to the 2018 Assembly polls. The BJP swept the coastal region, where it had lost ground to Congress in 2013.

As politicians across the country wade into the debate on whether a female student should be allowed to wear a hijab in the classroom, Assadi is anxious about the Karnataka High Court order. “I am praying they will allow us to wear our hijabs to classes. I don’t want to even imagine what would happen if they don't,” she says, switching easily between Kannada and English.

On February 11, the High Court passed an interim order that restrained “all the students regardless of their religion or faith from wearing saffron shawls (Bhagwa), scarfs, hijabs, religious flags or the like within the classroom, until further orders” in institutions where uniforms were prescribed. “We were taken aback by the interim order of the High Court. We hope the final order will be in favour of upholding our constitutional rights,” she says.

Following the interim order, high schools in the State reopened on February 14 and colleges on February 16. With media cameras at the gates of most institutions, students and even teachers were made to remove their hijabs before entering the premises, which has caused much heartburn within the community.

Hundreds of Muslim female students wearing hijabs were sent back. Many broke down in front of the cameras asking the same question that Assadi had posed: Why are we being forced to choose between the hijab and education?

Not one of the students at the centre of the controversy in Udupi and Kundapura has returned to the classroom. But what if the High Court doesn’t rule in favour of the hundreds of Muslim students who want to wear the hijab? Assadi, the teenager who dreams of becoming a wildlife photographer, is resolute that she will not remove the hijab to attend classes.

With inputs from Raghava M.



Read in source website

On refugee issues, it ought to be among the most admired nations and not one that has much to be ashamed of as now

This month I introduced a Private Member’s Bill in the Lok Sabha proposing the enactment of a Refugee and Asylum law. The Bill lays down comprehensive criteria for recognising asylum seekers and refugees and prescribes specific rights and duties accruing from such status. It was made necessary by our government’s continuing disrespect for the international legal principle of non-refoulement — the cornerstone of refugee law, which states that no country should send a person to a place where he or she may face persecution — and even more, its betrayal of India’s millennial traditions of asylum and hospitality to strangers.

A slew of examples

The Government has shamefully expelled to Myanmar two batches of Rohingya refugees in the face of a grave risk of persecution in the country they had fled. In conducting this act of “refoulement” in violation of international law, the Government revealed both religious bigotry (the refugees were Muslim) and intolerance. It has attempted to do the same with Chakmas in Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmarese in Mizoram. Today, Afghan students stranded in India by the takeover of their country by the Taliban have not had their visas renewed, and could find themselves in a similar predicament.

My Bill would put an end to such arbitrary conduct by the authorities. The right to seek asylum in India would be available to all foreigners irrespective of their nationality, race, religion, or ethnicity, and a National Commission for Asylum would be constituted to receive and decide all such applications. The principle of non-refoulement is clearly affirmed, with no exceptions, though reasons have been specified for exclusion, expulsion, and revocation of refugee status, to respect the Government’s sovereign authority but limit its discretion.

When I use the word “refugee”, of course, I do so in the internationally-accepted definition of the term, which embraces people who have fled their home countries and crossed an international border because of a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries, on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. This means that people who cross borders in quest of economic betterment, or because they are fleeing poverty, anarchy or environmental disaster, do not qualify as refugees. Nor do those who flee from one part of their home country to another because of war, conflict or fear of persecution.

India has been, and continues to be, a generous host to several persecuted communities, doing more than many countries, but is neither a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, nor does it have a domestic asylum framework. This is ironic, given that our record on asylum goes back millennia, from the Jewish people who fled to India centuries before Christ after the demolition of their Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians and then the Romans, to the Zoroastrians fleeing Islamic persecution in Persia, to Tibetans, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankan Tamils in more recent years, as well as streams of Nepalis, Afghans and the Rohingya. (Indeed, so famed was our reputation as a land of asylum that a defeated Cleopatra thought of sending her son to the safety of India’s west coast, before killing herself. Alas, her son made the fatal mistake of turning back midway to stake his claim to the throne, and met with a gory end, or he might have lived happily ever after in India!)

In fact, it is quite deeply embedded in the Indian psyche that nobody should ever have to face the predicament of being driven out of their home. Our great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, both dwell at great length upon the injustice of the protagonists being forced into exile, and the nobility involved in extending support and succour to the exiles. And the fact that one of our most popular festivals, Deepavali, celebrates the homecoming of refugees after 14 years of exile, demonstrates fully how important the concept of home and the homeland is to an Indian.

Given this history, India ought to be a natural leader on the question of refugee rights on the world stage. However, our present actions and our lack of a legal framework does our heritage no credit, shames us in the eyes of the world, and fails to match up to our actual past track record.

No uniform law

In the absence of a uniform and comprehensive law to deal with asylum seekers, we lack a clear vision or policy on refugee management. We have a cocktail of laws such as the Foreigners Act, 1946, the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939, the Passports Act (1967), the Extradition Act, 1962, the Citizenship Act, 1955 (including its controversial 2019 amendment) and the Foreigners Order, 1948 — all of which club all foreign individuals together as “aliens”. Because India has neither subscribed to international conventions on the topic nor set up a domestic legislative framework to deal with refugees, their problems are dealt with in an ad hoc manner, and like other foreigners they always face the possibility of being deported.

When we speak of refugee protection, we often limit ourselves to just providing asylum. We need a proper framework to make sure that refugees can access basic public services, be able to legally seek jobs and livelihood opportunities for some source of income. The absence of such a framework will make the refugees vulnerable to exploitation, especially human trafficking. In 2011 when India came out with a Standard Operating Procedure to provide Long Term Visas to asylum seekers, I had pointed out that in the absence of a law, the application of these notifications can be easily tampered with based on political and extraneous reasons. Our officials want the freedom to do as they please — for political or other reasons — without being confined by the limits of a law.

We can, and must, do better. India must enact a National Asylum Law, such as the one I have been demanding for years and presented to Parliament earlier this month. India currently hosts more than two lakh refugees but the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s churlish attitude to the Rohingya and other “inconvenient” refugees risks putting us in the global doghouse. My Bill, if enacted, will instead put India at the forefront of asylum management in the world. It will finally recognise India’s long-standing and continuing commitment to humanitarian and democratic values while dealing with refugees.

It troubles me that a country with proud traditions and noble practices remains legally neither committed nor obliged to do anything for refugees, even if we behave humanely in practice. I think it is high time the Government reviewed its long-standing reluctance to sign up legally to what we have already been doing morally. International law involves no obligations that we have not already undertaken voluntarily; to refuse to enact a refugee law that matches the highest standards of the international conventions, out of an anxiety not to be “bound” to the wishes of the international community, is unworthy of a major country like India. After all, we are increasingly moving from being a subject of the international system, a rule-taker as it were, to a rule-maker within it.

Our judiciary has already shown the way forward on this: in 1996, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the state has to protect all human beings living in India, irrespective of nationality, since they enjoy the rights guaranteed by Articles 14, 20 and 21 of the Constitution to all, not just Indian citizens. Based on this premise, the Supreme Court stopped the forcible eviction of Chakma refugees who had entered Arunachal Pradesh in 1995, in the landmark NHRC vs State of Arunachal Pradesh case. The Court held that an application for asylum must be properly processed and till a decision is made whether to grant or refuse asylum, the state cannot forcibly evict an asylum seeker. At the same time, with different judges, come different approaches — as we have seen in the Rohingya case. The enactment and enumeration of refugee rights will reduce our dependence on judge-centric approaches — or even worse, the whims of Home Ministry bureaucrats, police officers and politicians.

Worthwhile aspiration

We should build on the Supreme Court’s vision and pass my Bill, or something very like it. We should be among the most admired nations in the world, not one that, on refugee issues, has much to be ashamed of now. The problems of refugees worldwide are problems that demand global solidarity and international cooperation. India, as a pillar of the world community, as a significant pole in the emerging multipolar world, must play its own part, on its own soil as well as on the global stage, in this noble task. In so doing, we would uphold our own finest traditions and the highest standards of our democracy, as well as demonstrate once again that we are what we have long claimed to be: a good international citizen in an ever-closer knit and globalising world. This is a worthwhile aspiration for all of us who care about what India stands for, at home and in the world. If Mr. Modi’s government wants to be a Vishwaguru, it should behave like one.

Shashi Tharoor, Member of Parliament (Congress) and author, served

the United Nations refugee agency,

the UNHCR, for 11 years (1978-89). He is the author of ‘The Battle of Belonging’



Read in source website

The UGC’s ‘Academic Bank of Credits’ scheme could induce more chaos than positive disruption in higher education

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has recommended a revamp of the higher education scene in India to make education more student-centric and multi-disciplinary. A new initiative stemming from this desire is an ‘Academic Bank of Credits’ (ABC) in higher education idea, which was notified recently by the University Grants Commission (UGC) for implementation. Theoretically, this idea can usher in positive disruption in the jaded higher education sector in the country. But, in reality, this disruption is more likely to usher in chaos.

Why ABC

The idea is very simple and appealing. Any undergraduate or postgraduate student can create an account in the ABC portal and store information of his/her completed courses (i.e., subjects/papers in old terminology) and grades obtained. These grades are stored for a period of five years. Thus, for example, if any student needs to get back to education after a break or has to relocate to another city, they can easily ‘carry’ forward their completed credits. But that is not all. As multiple institutes are connected to the ABC portal, one can be formally enrolled in university ‘A’ but can choose to do some courses from university ‘B’, some more from university ‘C’ and so on and all of these would count towards the student’s degree. In principle, I may be enrolled in a B.Sc. Physics course in a college in Mumbai but find that my college does not offer an elective course in nuclear physics. This is no problem at all. I can enrol myself in an equivalent course from another college in the same city or join online courses offered by other universities; I can even enrol myself in SWAYAM (a programme initiated by the Government of India) or the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and add these credits to my ABC. I could even choose an online elective course, say in Tamil literature or archaeology or pedagogy. Thus, education will truly become flexible and interdisciplinary, without forcing any single institute to float an unmanageable number of courses. Even if the student does not care about interdisciplinary electives, this flexibility will offer them a chance to enrol in a course and learn from teachers from some of the best institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) or the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research.

Now, the problems

However, there are a number of practical hurdles which could make this scheme unworkable. First, let us assume that an IIT offers an elective course which is going to be taught by a fabulous teacher. ABC regulations say that the institute should allow up to 20% supernumerary seats for students enrolling through the ABC scheme. That would mean 20 extra seats if there are 100 regular students. But there are 500 applications through the ABC scheme wanting to register for the course. So, how does the host institute (the IIT in our example) make the selection of 20 out of 500? Would extra human resources be provided to handle all such requests for all elective courses offered each semester? The regulations are silent about this.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platforms such as SWAYAM and NPTEL are ‘supposedly designed’ for large enrolments. So, let us assume that we work out some mechanism to direct all the overflow of requests at the individual institute level to these MOOC platforms. So far we have not found any evidence in the public domain that these MOOC platforms can provide a reliable assessment of learning achievement if there is massive enrolment for a course. There would be some kind of assessment through Multiple Choice Question (MCQ)-based tests alright. But we should remember that one of the metrics for success of these courses is student performance in the final assessment. Thus, it would be in the interest of course coordinators to award scores liberally and paint a rosy picture. This is not a hypothetical fear. Some reputed institutes have already put in place guidelines to ‘adjust’ the score obtained by the students in MOOCs before it is accepted in the institute’s records. Moreover, at a deeper level, can MCQ tests ever be an honest indicator of the learning that (actually) happened?

This also brings us to the next question. The ABC portal will accept courses from a large number of higher education institutes. The filtering criterion in the original regulation was that higher education institutes should have obtained an ‘A’ grade or higher in the latest round of National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) accreditation (that filter has been removed now). But anyone who has seen how NAAC accreditation works will laugh at this suggestion.

On ‘excellence’

The NAAC process now tries to measure ‘excellence’ in education through clerical statistics and bookkeeping. Universities and colleges spend an inordinate amount of time to prepare record books to ‘prove’ compliance with NAAC quality criteria, the time which their faculty could have gainfully spent in improving teaching instead. As a result, there is a zoo of universities with vastly different teaching and research quality all clubbed under ‘A or higher’ grade by NAAC. If I am an average student in an IIT/IISER, I may find it tempting to opt out of a challenging course in my institute and use the ABC scheme to replace it with an equivalent course from another university where it would be far easier to obtain good grades. How would good institutes prevent this from happening?

Lastly, let us look at this scheme from the point of view of small colleges. The ABC scheme specifies that students can avail up to 70% of courses from other institutes while being enrolled in a particular college. If students avail these credits outside the parent college, they need not enrol for the corresponding in-house courses. As the number of teaching posts in any higher education institute are calculated on the basis of student enrolment numbers, what happens when a large fraction of students do not enrol for the courses offered by you? Mind you, this trend will not necessarily hold a mirror to the quality of teaching in smaller higher education institutes. If, as a student, I have a choice between learning the same course from a faculty of IIT/IISER versus learning it from an in-house teacher in a small higher education institute, I would not even care to find out if the in-house teacher in my higher education institute is a competent teacher. The brand name would be an attraction.

As a whole, this scheme has all the right and laudable intentions and would probably work well in a society with a more equitable distribution of resources. But in India, where the quality of education varies drastically from one institute to the next, this can lead to unmanageable academic and administrative issues in higher education institutes with brand names, and lead to a contraction in the number of teaching posts in smaller higher education institutes. With grade inflation being a real and imminent danger, the quality of degrees is bound to deteriorate. The UGC must rethink expeditiously how to implement this scheme.

Aniket Sule is Associate Professor,

Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, HBCSE-TIFR, Mumbai.

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

India must address urban-rural disparities, and not use reservation as a panacea

The issue of reserving private sector jobs for people domiciled within the same State may face its first judicial test soon. The Supreme Court has asked the Punjab and Haryana High Court to decide within four weeks the validity of the Haryana law mandating 75% reservation for local candidates in private sector jobs that pay up to Rs. 30,000 a month. Even though the apex court set aside an interim stay order granted by the High Court, it was only doing so because the stay was granted without assigning reasons. It is a settled principle that legislation cannot be stayed unless there is a preliminary finding that it is unconstitutional or suffers from any glaring illegality. There are quite a few issues that arise when the State introduces a quota in the private sector, especially if it is based on a domicile norm. Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand have also introduced such laws, while the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu had promised 75% reservation in its election manifesto for last year’s Assembly polls. Given the bleak employment situation in the backdrop of the reported loss of millions of jobs during the pandemic, it is no surprise that the leadership in every State seeks to find employment opportunities for its youth. In some States, employers may find it cheaper to use the services of those from a faraway State, while in others there may be an acute shortage of labour within the local population.

The first hurdle that a law such as the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act will face is the constitutional bar on discrimination on the basis of place of birth or residence. Even though the Constitution allows the Government to prescribe a residential criterion for employment to public posts, it is doubtful whether such a measure can be extended to the private sector. In the Haryana case, it covers companies, societies, trusts, partnership firms and individual employers. The industry may feel aggrieved that the residential requirement may adversely affect the hiring of talent from outside Haryana. From an individual point of view, the law may impinge on the freedom of movement, the right to reside and settle in any part of the country, and the right to carry on any occupation. Of course, the Act provides for exemption to any employer if an adequate number of local candidates are not available in terms of skill, qualification and proficiency. And there is a sunset clause: the Act will cease to operate in 10 years. Beyond the question of legality, what is flagged by such developments is the state of the economy, especially the labour economy. Rapid urbanisation and the agrarian situation are behind large-scale migration in search of employment. The real issue to address is the widespread disparities between urban and rural areas, between advanced States and backward ones.



Read in source website

India must show maturity in response to international criticism of internal matters

Close on the heels of the Government’s sharp summons to the South Korean Ambassador over social media posts by private companies, the MEA summoned the Singapore High Commissioner, following a speech earlier this week by the Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, where he had said there has been a decline in political probity in India after Prime Minister Nehru’s tenure. He warned that Singapore must stem any political corruption if it is to not “go down that road”. The speech was an unexpected broadside, despite the high praise for Nehru, the Government felt, and one which merited raising the issue of the “uncalled for” remarks with the Singaporean diplomat. As the South Korean case suggested, South Block appears to be making a pattern of its “zero tolerance” stand towards any criticism of India. To begin with, PM Lee’s comments, where he said that about half of all Indian Lok Sabha MPs face criminal charges, are not baseless. Mr. Lee even added the caveat that many of these cases could be motivated by political rivalry — which indicates some understanding of Indian politics. Second, he spoke of a similar downslide in Israeli politics, and the British “partygate” scandal (as of date, Israel and the U.K. have not raised objections). Finally, the speech was set in a grander context, as he invoked the Confucian guidelines for social behaviour that unite a country: rituals, righteousness, probity and shame. His 5,000 word speech on the subject contained just one Indian example where he had even praised the founding fathers of the independence movement, and then decried a slide in values since then. The comment, while harsh, does not merit a strong-headed response.

It is possible to argue that Mr. Lee’s examples were arbitrary, and contained unusual criticism for a country that has otherwise friendly ties with Singapore. Given that the issue at hand was a breach of privilege matter in the Singaporean Parliament, where an Opposition member had been found guilty of lying in the House, the India mention was certainly not required. It is even possible to argue that Singapore’s very controlled version of democracy cannot be compared to India’s more vibrant democratic traditions. However, the strong reaction New Delhi displayed evinces an insecurity about just these traditions. The fact that it comes on the back of a series of other summons, démarches and statements reacting to other governments for speaking about “India’s internal matters” adds to this impression, especially given that the Modi government frequently comments on the internal issues of its own neighbours. While this event is unlikely to cause more than a ripple across the broader, historically deep bilateral relationship with Singapore, the Government must avoid an international reputation that lends itself to the Shakespearean line — that it “doth protest too much”.



Read in source website

The driving experience

Though unsafe roads contribute to road accidents to a certain extent (Editorial page, “India has still to get a good grip on road safety”, February 18), it is also negligence by vehicle users that accounts for a major share of road accidents in the country. Unfortunately, even after the revision of penalties for violations, many pay scant regard to road safety rules. Violations such as helmet hesitancy, not wearing a seatbelt, mobile phone use while driving (especially while on a two-wheeler), over speeding and overloading with either people or objects, drunk driving, wrong-side driving and even overtaking from the wrong side are the major factors.

S.V.N. Vijayendra,

Hyderabad

Except for four-lane highways, other roads are not meant for high speed driving. Drunk driving is another area of concern now. And, even headlight use. The scant regard for road rules is obvious in India.

Unless speed guns are installed on State and national highways and drivers are fined for violations, a reduction in road accidents in India seems a faraway goal.

V. Lakshmanan,

Tirupur, Tamil Nadu

Singapore PM’s speech

It is a well-known fact that almost half the MPs in Parliament may not be on the right side of the law. Therefore, there is no point in the Indian government frowning at the Singapore Prime Minister’s speech, when he referred to this bitter truth (Page 1, February 18). While our government spokespersons have developed a ‘habit’ of boasting that the world praises the ‘achievements’ of the government of the day, they should also be mature enough to take (global) criticism in the right spirit.

A.A.H.K. Ghori,

Chennai



Read in source website

Assam’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is not one to be upstaged. He has announced a portal that will crowd-source names of places across Assam that are “contrary” to the state’s “culture and civilisation.”

Ease of doing business and all is fine, but have you looked at the leaps India has taken in the ease of changing names index? It’s as if there is a secret Ministry of Renaming whirring away in the crypts of any and every government, unseating Mughal emperors from street-names, scrubbing Urdu from public view and avenging the slights of history — with the stroke of a pen. Nothing is spared, neither cities nor railway stations, not even poets, as the short-lived posthumous baptism of Akbar Allahabadi reveals. Some might argue that what Uttar Pradesh thought yesterday sets the agenda for the rest of India. But Assam’s chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is not one to be upstaged. He has announced a portal that will crowd-source names of places across Assam that are “contrary” to the state’s “culture and civilisation.”

The first suggestion has come from the chief minister himself. A hill that overlooks Guwahati has been put on notice. Its name, Kala Pahar, derives from a Muslim general of the Bengal Sultanate, who is believed to have desecrated the Jagannath temple in the late 16th century, and attacked the Kamakhya temple. There’s a simple binary in that tale — of aggression and victimhood — that plays into the politics of divisiveness. BJP leaders, for instance, have decried AIUDF’s Badruddin Ajmal as Kala Pahar. But the legend of Kala Pahar, as it survives in Odisha, Bengal and Assam, might resist being turned into a Hindutva pamphlet. While in some accounts, he is an Afghan plunderer and iconoclast; in other accounts, he is a Hindu man who falls in love with a Muslim woman and is so humiliated by Brahmin priests that he takes his fury out on the temples.

Sarma’s zealous baptism is not concerned with such nuances. Nor with the criticism that his government must set sights on higher goals than polarisation. For all its history of unrest, Assam has always prided itself on its syncretic culture. The Ministry of Renaming might not agree, but that’s a hill worth dying on.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Ministry of Names’.



Read in source website

The President N Sanjiva Reddy urged parliamentarians to ensure that differences between them do not degenerate into discord.

The President N Sanjiva Reddy urged parliamentarians to ensure that differences between them do not degenerate into discord. Political differences are bound to exist in a democracy but the good of the nation is an objective for which all the members must learn to cooperate, transcending principles. Addressing a Joint Sitting of the two Houses, the President observed that the first two years of the Sixth Plan should be regarded as the years of consolidation. In his eight page long speech which will be his last in Parliament — he retires in July — Reddy spoke of the achievements of the government. He referred to the 20 Point Programme four times.

Cement Scandal

A major cement scandal has unfolded in Andhra Pradesh. The state’s major industry minister Baga Reddy is reportedly involved in the scandal both in terms of the quantity of the cement procured and the questionable means adopted to procure it. Reddy belongs to Medak, the district that returned Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to Parliament. He was also her campaign manager. The quantity of cement involved in the transaction is about 10,300 tonnes.

Laldenga Passport

The government has decided to issue a passport for Laldenga and his family according to a spokesperson of the Mizo National Front. The passport would, however be valid for Western Europe, excluding the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany. Whitehall and Bonn had refused to give the leader and his family entry certificates even on humanitarian grounds.

MP Holds Up Train

The Kanpur-Kasiganj passenger train was detained for 41 minutes at the GT road crossing in Gursaiganj town when a local MP Chotey Singh Yadav allegedly parked his jeep on the track.



Read in source website

The mudslinging in the last few days will hopefully not be the last word in this election. No one in the state wants to be reminded of the dark decade of militancy, mercifully consigned to the annals of history.

As the curtains fell on a hard-fought poll campaign in Punjab, the Khalistan bogey once again reared its head in the state. This time it was raked up by a former AAP leader who came out of the cold to stoke a dead issue. Political parties sensing an opportunity to put down a rival have been quick to latch on to it, with Congress Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi even shooting off a letter at midnight to the prime minister, seeking an investigation into allegations against AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal. Earlier, other leaders and political parties in the fray raised the ante on the ostensible danger to the sovereignty of the border state, even as the AAP tried, unsuccessfully, to get the Election Commission to intervene. With just a day left for polls, this attempted hijacking of the political narrative is extremely unfortunate.

This comes in the closing days of a campaign that has kept a heartening focus on issues of development. Punjab, which is witnessing its maiden multi-cornered contest after over a year-long farmers’ agitation, has seen a clamour for change on the ground, driven largely by accumulated governance deficits of past decades and callous disregard of bread and butter issues in a once prosperous state. The election campaign conducted amid Covid restrictions that imposed a ban on mammoth rallies, which were once the signature of Punjab elections, has been more conversational. Leaders, even those who never stepped out of their fortresses, were forced to attend small street corner meetings where issues closer to the ground replaced rhetoric. The Delhi model of development, promoted by Kejriwal, found frequent mention across a state that is forced to contend with the deepening problems of unemployment, drugs, price rise, and the yawning gaps in health and education infrastructure, forcing other parties to respond. This has resulted in manifestoes that promise world-class schools and hospitals at pocket-friendly rates and a push for agricultural diversification with minimum support price for fruits and vegetables. This is a welcome shift in terms of discourse in a state used to being wooed with freebies for the disprivileged and not-so-disprivileged. Even the emotive matter of sacrilege that had occupied the centrestage in the last elections, and threatened to do so again, was gently pushed aside as issues related to growth and well being took centrestage.

The mudslinging in the last few days will hopefully not be the last word in this election. No one in the state wants to be reminded of the dark decade of militancy, mercifully consigned to the annals of history. Punjab and its people are eager to solve their problems, and embrace the challenges of the future. They certainly do not want to be forced to look over their shoulders by politicians who seek to trade on spectres of fear and distrust in pursuit of votes.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Poll and bogey’.



Read in source website

The government may win brownie points in some domestic galleries for standing up to critics outside, but Delhi should know that it wins no respect internationally when it does this, unless it wants to count itself in the same category as China.

India has protested against Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong’s remarks in the city state’s assembly that “Nehru’s India has become one where … almost half the MPs in the Lok Sabha have criminal charges pending against them, including charges of rape and murder”, saying they were “uncalled for”. It is not quite clear what this protest was meant to achieve. As a matter of fact, many of the winners of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections have criminal charges against them. According to the Association of Democratic Reforms, which analyses affidavits of candidates every election, 233 winners in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, or 43 per cent, self declared criminal charges against themselves, and of these, 159 had self declared serious criminal cases. The criticism from an unexpected quarter — Singapore and India are strategic partners, and are linked by trade and cultural ties — may have rattled the government.

Lee made the remark in the context of declining parliamentary standards during a debate sparked by accusations of lying against a member of the opposition in Singapore. But if the purpose of Delhi’s protest was to convey that India will not take lying down insults to its democratically elected Parliament from the leader of a country that is hardly democratic, even if that country is a friend, it could have been better served by pointing out that the requirement of self-declaration of criminal charges in the election affidavits is a progressive step that empowers the voters to make better choices. As it is, though, Delhi’s response has led to speculation that the objection was perhaps more to the laudatory reference to “Nehru’s India” from which the Modi government has been trying to distance itself actively.

The bigger question is: Can a country that aspires to be treated as a global power afford to be so prickly and thin-skinned? India has “summoned” far too many ambassadors in recent times to hector them on so-called “anti-India” statements made in their countries not just by political leaders but even by private entities or individuals. The Ministry of External Affairs has even used  social media platforms to shout down critics abroad, complete with hashtags. Just the other day, Delhi blasted the OIC for its comments on the hijab row in Karnataka. The government may win brownie points in some domestic galleries for standing up to critics outside, but Delhi should know that it wins no respect internationally when it does this, unless it wants to count itself in the same category as China. By reacting as it does, Delhi does not send out a message of strength, but the opposite — it only makes itself look insecure.

This editorial first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Being thin-skinned’.



Read in source website

Badri Narayan writes: It retains the support of its voter base, has been working hard on the ground to build social alliances.

Recently, while discussing the 2022 UP Assembly election at a Dalit basti in central UP, I mentioned that the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) was missing in the campaign. A Dalit boy responded with a revealing anecdote: “An old woman in a village had three sons. For certain reasons, she did not like the youngest and treated him badly. So, everyday, she would prepare thalis only for her two favourite sons. After serving the food, she would go to the well to fetch water. This was when, each day, a miracle would occur. The two thalis that she served would automatically create a third thali of food.” The BSP is in a similar situation, the boy added: “Even if no one wants to focus on us and recognise us, they can’t ignore our existence. And they will not be able to deny our existence in the future, either.”

Most of the media as well as political analysts are projecting the UP assembly election as a bi-polar contest between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party (SP). They don’t consider the BSP a contender for office this time. Even those who acknowledge the party’s presence on the ground argue that its impact on the outcome is likely to be minimal.

It is true that the BSP has lost the perception battle, but on the ground, it is turning the contest triangular in several constituencies. There are three reasons for this. First, the BSP’s base vote is mostly intact. The Jatavs, who are estimated to be 11 to 12 per cent of the UP population, remain a cohesive force. Most of the Jatav youth are working as BSP cadres. The Jatavs are nearly two-third of the Dalit population in many districts. While it may be true that some non-Jatav Dalit castes will vote for the BJP and SP, a sizeable number of them may back the BSP.

Second, the BSP has distributed tickets as per the caste and social formula that helped the party in the 2007 assembly election that it won. This formula is based on building an alliance of Dalits, MBCs, Brahmins and Muslims within the broader framework of “sarvajan” politics. However, this formula may not be effective this time as Muslims are likely to vote strategically for the party best placed to defeat the BJP. The Brahmin vote may also not split to the extent of favouring the BSP as it did in 2007. Still, the voting percentage of the BSP is unlikely to slide below the 2017 level — it polled 22.23 per cent vote in that election.

Third, as this election is being held in the backdrop of the pandemic, cadres and an aggressive social media presence may matter. BSP cadres have worked all year to reach out to their voter base by organising small meetings and door-to-door campaigns. The BJP and the BSP are the two parties with a strong cadre base in UP. In this election, the party that is able to draw its voters to the booth may emerge as the stronger one. The BSP won’t lag behind on this.

Compared to the BSP’s 22.23 per cent vote in 2017, the SP got only 21.82 per cent of the vote. But as the BSP did not kick off a big rally-centred campaign early enough this time, the media has made out that the fight is a bipolar one between the BJP and the SP. They miss the point that the BSP’s cadres and support base do not need big rallies, although these are needed for attracting non-base votes. With Mayawati starting to campaign aggressively, the BSP seems to be recovering lost ground and seems to be dividing the votes of various non-Dalit communities in its favour. The local BSP cadres describe these votes as “phata hua” (divided). They say that these votes, which may come from both the MBCs and upper castes, are the party’s strength in this election. Moreover, the BSP organisation is working hard, especially in the reserved seats. The party has also opened digital war-rooms and has become more active on social media with online campaigns and digital rallies.

The BSP can influence the result in two ways — it can divide many social communities that are perceived to be sympathisers of BJP or SP. By forcing a triangular contest in many constituencies, the BSP may either reduce the margin of victory of the candidates of the two main contestants or even win them.

The way this election is proceeding, analysts and psephologists who are giving the BSP 3 to 12 seats and around 11-13 per cent vote share may have to review their perception of the party as a marginal force in the electoral discourse.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Elephant in the room’. The writer is professor at the G B Pant Social Science Institute



Read in source website

Antonio Guterres writes: We need to act together in the national and global self-interest, to protect critical global public goods.

As Secretary-General of the United Nations, I spend much of my time speaking with world leaders and taking the pulse of global trends. It’s clear to me that we are at a defining moment in international relations. There seems to be a gridlock on global decision-making. And, a fundamental paradox lies at the heart of it.

On the one hand, many of today’s global leaders recognise our common threats – Covid, climate, the unregulated development of new technologies. They agree that something needs to be done about them. Yet, that common understanding is not matched by common action.

Indeed, divides keep deepening.

We see them everywhere: In the unfair and unequal distribution of vaccines; in a global economic system rigged against the poor; in the utterly inadequate response to the climate crisis; in digital technology and a media landscape that profit from division; and in growing unrest and conflict around the world. So if the world agrees on the diagnosis of these common problems, why is it unable to effectively treat them?

I see two fundamental reasons.

First, because foreign policy often becomes a projection of internal politics. As a former prime minister, I know that despite good intentions, international affairs can be hijacked by domestic politics. Perceived national interests can easily trump the larger global good. This impulse is understandable, even if it is wrong-headed in instances where solidarity is in a country’s self-interest.

Vaccines are a prime example. Everyone understands that a virus such as the SARS-CoV-2 does not respect national borders. We need universal vaccination to reduce the risk of new and more dangerous variants emerging and affecting everyone, in every country. Instead of prioritising vaccines for all through a global vaccination plan, governments have acted to safeguard their people. But that is only half a strategy. Of course, governments must ensure the protection of their own people. But unless they work simultaneously to vaccinate the world, national vaccination plans could be rendered useless as new variants emerge and spread.

Second, many of today’s global institutions or frameworks are outdated or simply weak and the necessary reforms are impeded by geopolitical divides. For example, the authority of the WHO is nowhere near what is required to coordinate the response to global pandemics. At the same time, international institutions with more power are either paralysed by division, like the Security Council, or undemocratic, like many of our international financial institutions.

In short, global governance is failing at precisely the moment when the world should be coming together to solve global problems. We need to act together in the national and global self-interest, to protect critical global public goods, like public health and a livable climate, that support humanity’s wellbeing.

Such reforms are essential if we are to deliver on common aspirations for our collective global goals of peace, sustainable development, human rights, and dignity for all. This is a difficult and complex exercise that must take into account questions of national sovereignty.

But doing nothing is not an acceptable option. The world desperately needs more effective and democratic international mechanisms that can solve people’s problems. As the pandemic has taught us, our fates are tied. When we leave anyone behind, we risk leaving everyone behind. The most vulnerable regions, countries, and people are the first victims of this paradox in global policy. But everyone, everywhere is directly threatened.

The good news is that we can do something about our global challenges. Problems created by humanity can be solved by humanity.

In September last year, I issued a report on these issues: Our Common Agenda. It is a starting point, a roadmap to gather the world together to tackle these governance challenges and reinvigorate multilateralism for the 21st century.

Change won’t be easy, nor will it happen overnight. But we can begin by finding areas of consensus and moving in the direction of progress.

This is our greatest test because so much is at stake. We are already seeing the consequences. As people start to lose trust in the ability of institutions to deliver, they also risk losing faith in the values that underlie those institutions. In every corner of the world, we see an erosion of trust and I fear that we are seeing the emergence of the twilight of shared values. Injustice, inequality, mistrust, racism and discrimination are casting dark shadows across every society. We must restore human dignity and human decency and respond to people’s anxieties with answers.

In the face of growing inter-connected threats, enormous human suffering, and shared risks, we have an obligation to speak up and act to put out the fire.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Our fates are tied together’. The writer is Secretary-General of the United Nations.



Read in source website

Darshan Pal, Harinder Happy write: Only dedicated, full-time activism can lead to results in the current political scenario, as seen in the recent farmers’ protest.

In the run-up to the assembly elections in Punjab, diverse developments are taking place in political parties as well as civil society.

The year-long farmers’ struggle has strengthened democracy and dissent. The contentious farm laws being repealed was the result of the resilience, determination and sacrifice of farmers and labourers. The Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) was formed on November 7, 2020, on a common minimum programme of initiating a struggle against the central government’s farm laws. Farm unions across the nation decided to remain “non-political” and did not allow political leaders on the SKM stage. This was a reflection of the frustration of the masses with mainstream political parties.

The farm protests began in Punjab and were led by its farmers. After going back to Punjab, many farm unions announced an electoral-political party, the Sanyukt Samaj Morcha (SSM). Some claims made by the SSM are incorrect. While it claims the support of 22 farm unions and all the farmers of the state, as many as 21 unions out of a total of 34 are not part of it, including those with a large cadre base like the BKU (Ekta-Ugrahan), BKU (Ekta-Dakaunda), Kirti Kisan Union, BKU (Ekta-Siddhupur), Krantikari Kisan Union, etc.

This decision to enter electoral politics by a section of farm unions is ill-conceived. Surprisingly, the SSM is giving tickets to leaders of political parties against whom they were ranged during the farmers’ protest. The movement was labelled by these leaders as “politically motivated and opposition-sponsored”. The charge did not stick as it was purely a farmers’ movement. Any farmer leader who broke discipline by talking about elections was held to account by the SKM. Being non-political was a major reason for the protest’s success. By opting to fight elections, the SSM has dented farmers’ unity.

Many state governments passed resolutions against the Centre’s farm laws. However, such resolutions are not legally binding. So, even if the SSM does manage to form the government in Punjab, they will not be able to solve the existing crisis. In fact, the state assemblies that did pass resolutions against the farm laws did so after massive protests. The leaders of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) were explaining the benefits of farm laws, and it was only the anger of farmers that forced the party to break its alliance with the BJP.

At a time when there is a need for strong pressure groups at the state as well as national level, it is unwise to enter the electoral process and weaken people’s movements. The anti-people policies of the central government have angered almost every section of society. The farmers’ protest gave a ray of hope and strength to all these movements and people. Some of the farmers’ demands are still pending and there is a need to remain united in this struggle, as well as coordinate with other movements. While some SSM proponents argue that the farm unions, by engaging in the electoral process, can still be a part of people’s movements, they need to understand that elections need a huge amount of resources, time and energy. As was observed during the farmers’ protests, only dedicated, full-time activism can lead to results in the current political scenario.

The past experience of farm union leaders in electoral politics also doesn’t paint a hopeful picture. Union leaders in Punjab like Ajmer Singh Lakhowal and Bhupinder Singh Mann entered electoral politics and were completely rejected by the people. A reason for this failure is the fact that they could not connect to the larger masses and raise their issues. In the process, they lost the support of their own farm union cadres. The SSM’s reach is also limited to farmers and it may suffer a similar fate. Even in the agrarian sector, the SSM seems unable to engage farm labourers, women, rural workers and other important stakeholders.

On the other hand, many farmers who protested against the farm laws under the banner of the SKM were already associated with different political parties. They will be going back to their parties in these elections too. The movement had raised in them an awareness of their rights and the larger political economy. As they return to their old political parties, farmers will be reduced to volunteers who fight with their rivals. The farmers, united in their struggle at Delhi’s borders, are getting divided into political parties in their villages.

What, then, is the way forward for farmers and labourers? The answer is straightforward: Protest for rights and justice. It was not just because of the opposition by political parties or non-BJP state assemblies that the government had to repeal the laws.

Can we say that there is no oppression of adivasis in Jharkhand now that “their Hemant Soren” is CM? Can we say that the tribals of Singur and Nandigram got justice after Mamata Banerjee became CM of Bengal? How sure are we that the problems of Telangana have been resolved after it was made a state and KCR, who was part of the movement for the division of Andhra Pradesh, became its chief minister? A similar critique can be made of Mahendra Tikait, Rakesh Tikait, Gurnam Chaduni and many more farm union leaders who tried to experiment with electoral politics. Ultimately, they had to return to the farm unions. This is the time to stay united in the struggles against crony capitalism, neoliberal policies and communalism.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Picking the wrong battle’. Pal is president, Krantikari Kisan Union; and Happy is a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Both are associated with the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM).



Read in source website

Subhashis Banerjee, Subodh Sharma write: It is an elegant concept whose properties and potential require careful research, but treating it as a solution for all problems without thinking things through is techno-determinism.

Blockchain is a fascinating data structure that generates great curiosity in computer science, the social and political sciences, and public policy. However, there is a lot of hype around the concept and its adoption in diverse fields seems to be faith-based, driven by unsubstantiated vendor and consultant claims. This is both bewildering and risky and stems, perhaps, from an inadequate understanding of the blockchain properties as well as imprecise articulations of their application requirements.

In essence, a blockchain is a sequential append-only public bulletin board of transaction records with two main functional properties. First, what can get added is reconciled by multiple participating peers following a pre-decided consensus protocol. This process cannot be gamed under the assumption that a majority of the unrestricted number of peers are honest. Second, the bulletin board is immutable; once a record is added, it is cryptographically ensured that it cannot be altered. Each participating peer normally has their own copy of the entire bulletin board, with identical content, and they can read and further copy at will.

A “permissioned” or private blockchain has only pre-identified participating peers. Hence, collusion is possible and integrity can only be ensured through regulations. Without political decentralisation, consensus does not imply safety, and this is no different from centralisation in its threat model.

Despite many claims to the contrary, the blockchain structure has nothing to do with the highly-nuanced notion of privacy, or even the limited secrecy aspect of it. To ensure secrecy of the bulletin board records, one has to fall back on traditional and well-established notions from cryptography — like encryption, key management and zero-knowledge proofs — and these techniques are not limited to blockchain. Decentralised consensus is orthogonal to the issue, and privacy is not an ensuing property of a blockchain.

“Consensus” is inapplicable when there is only one authority responsible for the integrity of the transactions, for example, the Election Commission of India when a vote is cast in the privacy of a polling booth or a person is added or removed from a voters’ list. The claims of security based on blockchain are orthogonal to the verifiability requirements in voting, and despite the near-consensus against their use (‘Securing the Vote, Protecting American Democracy’ (2018), Consensus Study Report, NAS), the multitude of proposals on using blockchains for elections are disconcerting. Also, voting is not the only example of the inadequate analysis of the applicability of blockchain, and there are proposals for using them for land records, asset registers, etc. Most such proposals do not pass muster for reasons similar to voting. Indeed, a 2018 study found hardly any successful use cases.

The role of blockchain in RBI’s digital currency proposal is similarly doubtful, and convincing methods independent of “consensus” need to be developed to ensure the correctness and verifiability of transactions while protecting user privacy.

What may help in many of these applications is just the immutable public bulletin board part of a blockchain, with or without encryption and zero-knowledge proofs. This may be simply achieved by the concerned authority periodically publishing the bulletin board in a publicly downloadable forum, and using hash chains verifiable by all to make alterations impossible.

Cryptocurrencies do make valid use cases for blockchains, though the political decentralisation of the participants involved is questionable. It also raises other concerns. Currency properties and monetary policies have evolved over thousands of years of bartering, and it is not clear that cryptocurrencies are consistent with them or that the larger macroeconomic implications of cryptocurrencies are well understood. Crypto assets derive their values from their potential to be exchanged for other currencies. However, since only a limited set of commodities are traded with crypto assets, and that too only by a privileged section of the world population, their price determinations with respect to sovereign fiat currencies are uncertain. Apart from the crucial price stabilisation issues, their potential to further inequality is also considerable.

Moreover, an asset becomes valuable when it is scarce and there is a demand. The scarcity of cryptocurrencies arises from the computational hardness of currency mining, of the process of solving a hash puzzle. And, there is clearly a perceived demand, not unlike gold. However, gold mining not only involves labour, material and energy, but there are also additional requirements like environmental and other regulatory clearances, import regulations, to name a few. In contrast, mining in cryptocurrencies is achieved by spinning the CPUs and thereby consuming electricity. The total carbon footprint of cryptocurrencies is equivalent to that of a few megacities, and it does seem ungainly, energy-inefficient and unsustainable to mine assets this way. Surely, this requires regulation and taxation, especially for the potential environmental impacts and because only a few participate?

It is amazing that cryptocurrency research and deployment has not adequately addressed these concerns to develop sound theories for their regulation.

Blockchain is certainly an elegant concept whose properties and potential require careful research. The hype of treating them as solutions for everything with not-so-thoughtful use cases is perhaps techno-determinism at its worst.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Working with blockchain’. Banerjee is with the computer science department, Ashoka University, on leave from IIT Delhi. Sharma is with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, IIT Delhi.



Read in source website

Menaka Guruswamy writes: At one level, their lives mirror the lives of their grandparents. This has implications for the constitutional promise of a fraternal nation.

I have often wondered: Who and what are Indians? The Constitution adopted by “We, the people” describes India as “a sovereign, socialist, secular democratic republic, securing to all its citizens justice, liberty, equality and to promote among them all fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation”. Be that as it may, the Constitution is rather far removed from most people’s lives. For a moment, let me leave my constitutional lens aside and look more closely at those who adopted this text — the people of the country.

When you are the world’s largest constitutional democracy, and the second-most populated country on the planet, one is justified in being curious about the mammoth undertaking that is India and the people who comprise it.

The United Nations World Population Prospects 2019 report projected the world population in 2021 to be around 7.87 billion. The Worldometers.info site projects that in 2022, India’s population will be around 1.4 billion. To put this in context, Indians will comprise 17 per cent of the population of the planet.

Significantly, even though we are a young person’s country, our population is also slowly declining. The average age of India is 28.4 years. This is in stark contrast to other parts of the world — Western Europe or North America, even China — which have ageing or greying populations.

Since we are a youthful nation, I have often wondered what my younger compatriots think or feel or believe? Is India growing more into the country of her Constitution? A country of constitutional morality — of equality, liberty, and fraternity? Are neighbourhoods more mixed today? Are inter-caste and inter-religious relationships more common?

I am eternally curious about my country. This is one of the primary reasons that I practise law. Every day, litigation provides insights into one life or many lives, a cause of action, a motive of one or many Indians. A courtroom offers you a window into the many stories that comprise our country — whether that is one of commerce, one of a family coming undone (divorce), a murder, or many murders. Last week, one of my more exciting cases involved a triple murder and 24 accused set in a part of the country I had never been to. But it brought alive the context of these many lives undone by an enduring rivalry.

Therefore, I was excited to come upon a book that uses data to explain India and Indians. Rukmini S, a data journalist, is the author of the book titled Whole Numbers and Half Truths – What data can and cannot tell us about modern India. (A note here: It is deeply unfortunate that the book’s publisher Westland books has been closed.)

The book relies on data collected from the Census, National Statistical Office, National Family Health Survey, National Crime Records Bureau and Election Commission, among others. Rukmini S also relies on reputed private sources for data including India Human Development surveys, the Lokniti-CSDS surveys and the Social Attitudes Research survey. A particularly riveting chapter is titled ‘Eat, Pray, Enjoy, Love, Marry — How India Lives Life’. I have reproduced its findings in this portion of the article.

What does India eat? Based on the surveys, Rukmini S reports that the country is only one-quarter to one-third vegetarian. She notes that surveyors reported a reluctance of people to report meat eating. Seventy-nine per cent of people from the Scheduled Castes and 82 per cent Scheduled Tribes eat meat, as do 68 per cent of Other Backward Castes and 65 per cent of upper castes. Importantly, the data shows that meat-eating has been growing in India since the early 2000s.

What about marriage? As of January 2018, 93 per cent of married Indians had an arranged marriage. Just 3 per cent had a “love marriage”, and 2 per cent had a “love-cum-arranged” marriage — they were introduced by their families, fell in love, and got married. Importantly, this is only marginally different from the study of octogenarians, of whom 94 per cent had an arranged marriage. Therefore, the author concludes that young Indians get married the way their grandparents did.

Significantly, the prevalence of arranged marriages means that marriages remain within one’s caste and religion. A 2011-2012 survey found that only 5 per cent of urban respondents had an inter-caste marriage, like the findings of a 2014 survey that reported only 5 per cent of urban Indians had a family member who married outside their religion. The 2011-2012 survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland found that 5.08 per cent of the poorest Indians have an inter-caste marriage and only 4.89 per cent of the richest segment of Indians participate in such a union. Finally, the book points to the 2021 Pew Research Centre study, which concluded that 99 per cent of Indians marry within their religion.

Separate from practice, what of attitudes? In 2016, 55 per cent of young people professed an acceptance of inter-caste marriage. Among the 6 per cent of young people who said they had a love marriage, one-third was inter-caste. There have been other positive trends as well. The legal age of marriage is 18 years for women and 21 years for men. Rukmini S observes that women and men are getting married later. She demonstrates this by noting that “nearly half the married women in their forties were married by the time they were 18 years old, but among women currently in their early twenties, that proportion is down to 25 per cent.” However, the data also suggests that the poorest 40 per cent of women and those who have not gone to school or have only a primary education are the ones who marry below the age of 18 years.

What must we conclude then about this country, whose average citizen is in their late twenties? At one level in their own lives, the lives of the youth of India mirror those of their grandparents. Yet, their attitudes are changing and may prove to be different. The Constitution imagines a fraternal nation — one in which caste, class and gender will not be a determinative factor in shaping choices. To get to that constitutionally promised land, we clearly have much work to do.

This column first appeared in the print edition on February 19, 2022 under the title ‘Who we are’. The writer is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India



Read in source website

It appears that India is under some pressure from the US to take a clear stand on the Ukraine crisis. Hitherto New Delhi has rightly maintained a fine balance, sticking to its stated position in the UN that called for defusing tensions over Ukraine through dialogue. India can’t ignore the history of its bilateral ties with Russia and the deep defence linkages between the two sides. So, what to make of America’s implied argument that India view the Russia-Ukraine matter the same way it views China’s expansionist designs in Asia.

There is obviously a qualitative difference between the two issues for India. While China is an immediate threat for India given geopolitical realities, Ukraine doesn’t fall into the same strategic calculus. This doesn’t mean that Ukraine doesn’t matter. But every country has the prerogative of strategic prioritisation. Remember that America had little time for India’s position on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism when Pakistan was an American strategic priority. Also, China today presents the biggest systemic threat to the international order. Countries from the UK to Vietnam and from Mongolia to Australia, are coming to the conclusion that Beijing’s actions are  threatening global stability. It’s within this framework that the Quad was created as a platform to reinforce the rules-based order.

Russia, meanwhile, simply doesn’t pose the same challenges. True, Moscow and Beijing today have a strategic and economic compact. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t points of bilateral tension. From their own border issues and China eyeing Russia’s Far East region for energy resources to Beijing’s increasing influence in Central Asia, traditionally Moscow’s strategic domain, several fault lines remain beneath the surface. Therefore, tactically, the US should consider creating space between Russia and China, nullifying their combined threat. At the end of the day, principles alone don’t make for strategic choices, aligning interests do. On China, India and US interests align.



Read in source website

An unintended and unjust consequence of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012,  is its widespread persecution of teenage lovers. This law raised the age of consent from 16 to 18 years, while defining persons below 18 years as children. Consequently, when say two 16-year-olds are romantically and sexually involved, but the girl’s family doesn’t approve the affair and files a police complaint, her consent has zero legal validity. And the consensual relationship morphs into a case of statutory rape.

This week the Allahabad high court indicated how its “conscience” is concerned by such severe Pocso provisions being drawn by teenage lovers simply on the basis of family disapproval. The high courts of Delhi, Madras and others have made similar observations in recent years and also pointed to amendments to the law that can help reduce its injustices. One suggestion that has gathered broad support is to push back both the cutoff for childhood and the age of consent to 16 years.

Given that the NCRB data shows around half of Pocso cases falling in the 16-18 years age group, such an amendment is overdue. Minimising the prosecution of consensual romances would also leave a logjammed system with more space to pursue actual sexual assault cases. The broader goal here is respecting the rights of adolescents and young adults. Their romantic and sexual autonomy needs greatly increased recognition in India.



Read in source website

freemiumText">

He who chases two hares, catches neither.

This adage is so old, we can neither be sure who said it first nor when. All we do know is that it rings just as true today. It is not that our ancestors couldn’t enjoy two rabbits, they just understood that they had to get them one at a time.

We live in an age of magical technology and abundant information. News that would’ve taken months to reach our ancestors, reaches us in seconds. Tasks that would’ve taken half a day to do, now happen in minutes. And then, there are ideas that were difficult to imagine even a decade ago (and still have many scratching their heads today) — like a currency with no coins or notes, issued and controlled by no one, just entries on a ledger distributed on many, many computers.

Our reality today is in many ways richer than the imaginations that science fiction writers could dream up. However, they say that a good science fiction writer is not one who predicts the automobile, but one who predicts the traffic jam.

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, could’ve moonlighted as a science fiction writer. When asked, in 1971, about the information age, he offered a prescient observation, “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Most of us are no longer chasing hares, but other hairy goals. Like Simon predicted, blessed with a wealth of information, we’ve all been cursed with a poverty of attention. Especially in the pandemic-induced work-from-home revolution, far too many of us have reported feeling burnt out or overworked. The most common complaint we heard while writing our new book was that people felt they “can’t switch off”.

To understand why, we need to ask what’s really changed.

Even in 1971, ie, before the internet, the volume of books, periodicals, radio and TV shows available was far greater than our capacity to consume them. But, back then, to get the information you needed, you had to go to it. If you were working at your desk in the office, you’d need to go to the watercooler for gossip. Today, tools like Slack do both.

Put differently, the barriers between our different information sources have almost completely vanished. You could be reading up on the new mutation to the spike protein of the Covid-19 virus in one moment, and be sending Shark Tank memes the next. Notifications exacerbate this problem because they demand your attention be redirected at someone else’s will.

Many people try to get around this by separating their digital lives into work and personal. But these boundaries don’t really help us in controlling our attention. Our email, while it is work, can also be a significant distraction from our most important goals. Foregoing our devices may sound like a good idea, but it makes our lives incredibly inconvenient. In our new book, The Art of Bitfulness, we try to offer a simple way out of this problem.

Our ability to focus our attention is inversely proportional to the information presented to us by our environment. In the physical world, this is obvious. Imagine you had to study for an important exam, would you choose a loud party or a quiet library? In our digital environments though, we forget this simple idea. Our smartphones are configured to be everything to us all the time.

There are essentially three modes of attention that all of us seem to switch between — Create, Curate and Communicate. The Create mode is when we are trying to hunker down and focus on one thing. Curate is when we’re consuming information for inspiration rather than creation. You want your attention to wander to what is interesting rather than what is important.

Communicate mode is when we’re trying to be managerial about the information we receive. Replying to emails or texts, where we don’t want to get dragged into the depths of an issue, but still be on top of it.

It is possible to create three different digital environments, each of which is more conducive to the kind of attention you need for the task at hand. It could be as simple as separating your devices — a laptop for Create mode, your phone for Communicate mode and a tablet for Curate mode. Or you could use different identities on the same device — one login for Create and another for Communicate.

This way, when you’re in one mode, you can’t slip into the other. Our book details how you can set these up, and make sure these boundaries stay intact.

However, there’s a subtle point to this separation that is often lost in our desire to be “always on”. There’s no hierarchy between these modes, nor a prescription for how much time one should spend in each. We just want people to be able to pick a mode, and stick to it, without depending on their discipline or willpower.

We don’t recommend splitting attention modes so that you are more productive. We advocate it because it brings peace. If you are calm, productivity follows.

We want to share with you the experience of one of our beta readers who implemented this system. He is a CEO of an up and coming startup, and hence, his phone is always buzzing with email, WhatsApp and Slack notifications.

During the lockdowns, he and his equally busy wife had one bonding ritual — watching Netflix on their projector and eating popcorn. However, whenever he had to pause the series for a break, he would check notifications, and to the chagrin of his wife, get pulled into his phone.

But after separating Curate from Communicate, he now says that when he switches off from work, he actually does switch off. He told us that this little trick, not only saved his attention, but also his relationship.

Nandan Nilekani and Tanuj Bhojwani are co-authors of the book The Art of Bitfulness: Keeping Calm in the Digital World 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

This week was a historic moment for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and India. By inaugurating the new year with the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), our two countries have solidified a truth we have known for years: Through increased cooperation, we will continue enjoying the immense prosperity and opportunity that await us as partners.

CEPA is as much an economic partnership as it is a testament to the brotherly relations our countries have enjoyed since the establishment of our diplomatic relationship in 1972. In fact, the start of our bilateral relations predates our diplomatic engagement, with a history of commerce dating back centuries.

As our ancestors traded goods and traversed the ocean seeking contacts and cultural exchanges, they set the stage for the flourishing relationship that we see today. In fact, India is the UAE’s largest trading partner in terms of exports, comprising $26.8 billion or 10.8% of its total exports in 2019. That same year, India was the ninth largest recipient of foreign direct investment from the UAE with an inflow of $51 billion. Moreover, the UAE and India signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement in January 2017 to set out an ambitious roadmap for political and economic cooperation.

Now, the UAE is taking bold steps to strengthen its economy and that of the wider region by improving and expanding bilateral relations with key partners. We aim to double the size of our economy in the coming decade and attract top human capital. Foreign trade will be an integral pillar of this development.

The CEPA model is central to the UAE’s efforts to build our economy over the next 50 years and solidify our position as a global economic hub. It also reflects our aim to develop partnerships that are mutually beneficial to the UAE and trade partners.

What tangible benefits will the UAE-India CEPA offer? First, it will trigger increased investment flows, lower tariffs, and create enormous new opportunities for key sectors in both India and the UAE, including air transport, environment, investment, digital trade, and more.

Second, CEPA will make it easier for small and medium enterprises to go global by granting them access to new customers, networks, and avenues of collaboration. The private sector will benefit from this as it remains at the forefront of innovation and economic growth.

Third—and perhaps most incredibly—through this CEPA, the UAE and India aim to increase bilateral non-oil trade to over $100 billion within five years.

Prior to concluding the UAE-India CEPA, our two countries signed a number of key economic agreements to boost trade and investment in recent years, including an Agreement on Avoidance of Double Taxation, an Agreement on the Protection and Promotion of Investment, and an Air Services Agreement. These agreements came in addition to the establishment of a Joint Committee and UAE-India High-Level Taskforce Group on Investment.

Economic cooperation as embodied by CEPA forms one part of the deep friendship that our nations share. Today, millions of Indian nationals working in the UAE form a vibrant community that has become an inseparable part of our national fabric. In fact, the Indian diaspora makes up the largest expatriate community in the UAE; 225 weekly direct flights connect India and the UAE and ensure our peoples continue to engage in trade, study, and tourism.

Through this interaction, we have celebrated each other’s festivals and honoured our respective heritage, practised our religious traditions in harmony, and learned about each other’s diverse languages, popular culture, food, and families.

To be certain, the heart of the UAE would not be the same without the contributions of its Indian community.

In this vein, we are truly proud of India’s participation in Expo 2020 Dubai under the theme “The future is in India.” It is no coincidence that the UAE’s National Day was recently named by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as World Futures Day, as both our countries look to invest in advanced industries that will reshape our world.

The vision that our countries share — of economic prosperity, cultural richness, and people-to-people exchange — forms the basis of our partnership. This is only the beginning of this era of cooperation.

Ahmed Ali Al Sayegh is minister of state in the UAE 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

One of the positive trends that the pandemic has brought out in India is the strengthening of community involvement and initiatives. This is particularly evident in marginalised sections which faced several setbacks, and girls, especially adolescents, in education. The pandemic has affected them significantly in terms of access to education, nutrition and health care. For these girls in the rural and tribal areas, online classes are not an option with low penetration of the internet and poor access to smartphones.

This is something that the non-governmental organisation (NGO), Educate Girls, has sought to address. Earlier, it set up the world’s first Development Impact Bond to educate girls and boys from disadvantaged sections in Rajasthan. It has scaled up now. What started as identifying children who were out of school, has now stood the NGO in good stead amid the pandemic.

Safeena Husain, founder of Educate Girls says, “We had boots on the ground in the areas we work in so we were able to assess the impact on households with girl children. We decided that since online classes was not an option for them, we would take learning to them.” So their Team Balika community volunteers fanned out and collected children from these households and brought them to community centres with all Covid-19 protocols firmly in place.

They were given lessons in Hindi and mathematics; they could meet other children and educators and also engage in fun-based learning activities. The success of this has been the fact that the volunteers already had a good rapport with the parents and community elders built over the years. This way, they were also able to keep a check on underage marriages in the communities they were working with. Husain says that in one home, she became aware that a girl, despite her parents being poor, suddenly acquired new clothes. On being questioned, it was discovered that she was to be married under pressure from male relatives. This was stopped in time.

The other reason for the success of this project which aims to cover a million girls by 2024 is the fact that there has been smooth working with governmental organisations at the grassroots. This way, Educate Girls was the interface between people and the bureaucracy. Many people did not know how to access government schemes for themselves and their girl children during Covid as the paperwork was daunting.

Farida from Pakhriyavas in Ajmer says that she had to drop out of school due to the pandemic. Then she came to know of Camp Vidya, a community initiative for learning run by Educate Girls. She met a Team Balika volunteer who convinced her parents that she should be allowed to come to the camp and learn for two hours a day. “Now, I am preparing for my Class 10 and studying regularly at the camp,” she says.

Eight-year-old Ritika from Gawla village in Khandwa district in Madhya Pradesh had never been to school as her family was migrating for daily wage labour throughout the year. When they came back to the village due to the lockdown, she began going to Camp Vidya where she was taught to read and write through innovative games. “Today, I can read and write and am about to go to Class 2 soon,” she says proudly.

Husain feels that such models can be replicated across India to ensure that the girl child emerges from the pandemic with the skills to join formal in-person classes. This community effort has produced incredible results and is something we must build on after the pandemic as a key tool to ensure inclusion.

lalita.panicker@hindustantimes.com 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

The joy of WhatsApp is that you sometimes learn things you could not even have dreamt of. That happened to me last week. It’s a story not just from another time, but you could even call it another world. After double-checking its accuracy, I shall share it with you today. I hope it will bring forth a warm and happy smile.

In 1942, when Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps overran the 3rd Indian Motor Brigade at the Battle of Ghazala in North Africa, 17 Indian Army officers were taken prisoner and, eventually, interned in the Aversa Prisoner of War (PoW) camp in Italy. They were of different faiths and even different ethnicities. None knew at the time how glorious their careers would one day be.

The captured officers included Major PP Kumaramangalam, Captain AM Yahya Khan, Captain AS Naravane, Lieutenant Tikka Khan, and Lieutenant Sahibzada Yaqub Khan. Kumaramangalam rose to be India’s Army chief (1966-69), Yahya Khan became Pakistan’s army chief and then, president (1966-71). Tikka Khan succeeded him as Pakistan’s army chief (1972-76), Naravane rose to be a major general and wrote about the Aversa PoW camp in his memoirs, A Soldier’s Life in War and Peace, and Yaqub Khan became Pakistan’s foreign minister.

In his memoirs, Naravane says Kumaramangalam, as the seniormost, was appointed camp senior officer. Yahya Khan was the camp adjutant. Tikka Khan was the camp quartermaster. I’ve pieced together the story of what thereafter happened to four of these officers both from the WhatsApp message I received and from Pakistan’s Friday Times. It’s a tale with a happy ending.

In the confusion that followed Italy’s capitulation in September 1943, several of the officers, including Kumaramangalam, Yahya Khan, and Yaqub Khan escaped. The Friday Times says, “They moved between the coast and the spurs of the Apennines, avoiding German patrols and frequently hiding in forests”. Yaqub Khan spoke Italian and that enabled them to find shelter with friendly Italian peasant families.

At some point, Yahya Khan separated from the others and, after marching 400 km, made contact with an Indian battalion. He arrived with just one shoe! Kumaramangalam and Yaqub Khan continued to seek shelter and sanctuary with Italian families for a few months longer. When they made their break for freedom, Kumaramangalam was gifted a necklace as a good luck charm by one of the Italian mothers who had become fond of him. Alas, it didn’t help.

A few days later, on a dark night, he slipped and fractured his ankle. The Friday Times says he pleaded with Yaqub Khan to leave him, but the young lieutenant refused. Not surprisingly, they were captured by the Germans and transferred to a camp called Stalag Luft III. Years later, it became famous because it featured in The Great Escape.

The Friday Times story, written by major general Syed Ali Hamid and published in February 2019, takes this enchanting tale of our four musketeers right to the point where they became famous, powerful, and reached the top of their careers. When Yahya Khan visited Delhi in 1966, as commander-in-chief designate of Pakistan, he was received at the airport by General Kumaramangalam, then the chief of the Indian Army. When Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, as foreign minister of Pakistan, visited Italy, he made a point of meeting the family that had sheltered him and his fellow officers during the war.

Now, this is not a big story, and you may well wonder why I wanted to share it with you. Because it’s a vignette of a time when Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims, Pathans and Tamils were not just friends but brothers-in-arms. Partition has sundered us, politicians regularly stoke the embers to keep the fire alight and, sadly, generations have grown up, not just in ignorance of each other, but taught to dislike and hate. Yet, there was a time when we were one, fought for the same Army and were the closest of friends.

Sadly, that world is lost and gone forever.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story 

The views expressed are personal



Read in source website

The last weeks of January were spent in and out of hospitals. A father with a sudden sickness was plunged into that artificial world of strange green lights and beeping machines. Add his family left trying to cope with a lung cancer diagnosis to his getting Covid via an ICU. It’s hard to keep your mind on track to make the right decisions as you plunge further into despair and displacement.

There’s something about the light itself in most hospitals that terrorises you. To be healed is the hope. To have your mind scrambled by a neon light that flashes you into submission is like an additional disease. My very intelligent, articulate Father became completely disorientated and lost, after his first four-day stint in a medical ICU. He had walked in to the hospital and, suddenly, he was unable to even walk to the bathroom?

The doctors, bless them, treated him like an idiot. They would not explain their own diagnosis or their suspicions to the patient but turned to his children. How does it help anyone’s health if they are separated from their loved ones and alone in a hostile environment full of people dying or in desperate straits, and not being told why?

All my father, 84, wanted to do was to get out. The doctors wanted to keep him in, even as they explained that our options were limited. To what end? More machines, less humanity.

To me, a cancer survivor, the pussyfooting around the word “cancer” was the first annoyance. Just say it. It’s a disease. We all know about it. It’s a leading cause of death globally. Not saying the word is not going to change its reality. Explain clearly and for god’s sake, explain it to the person who you think has the disease.
We managed to get Father out of hospital that time and he returned to his normal witty, larger-than-life self the second he was out in the real world. ICU psychosis, as someone within the hospital put it.

What about the Covid he contracted there?

Aah well, lots of shoulder shrugs, “that’s how hospitals are”. “These things happen.” “Occupational hazard. Madam, we’re probably all affected, but when someone tests positive, well, we have to follow the protocols.”

Luckily for us, the Covid was a-symptomatic, whatever I mean by “luckily” here because it was not long before our luck ran out. But until that happened, we went from frying pan to fire as the second hospital — which offered the cancer tests — had the most terrible Covid “care”. The a-symptomatic meant that we got Father home, we got a caring, wonderful nurse and we worked on getting him back on track. All we had wanted was a PET scan to confirm the cancer diagnosis. What we got instead was the virus and the bureaucracy around it.

We thus brought Father home for the first time and it was a good time. Walking, eating, better, in spite of a pigtail. Chatting, reading, even as the oxygen concentrators and cylinders took a bit of getting used to. But he and the rest of us soon became experts at that. It was not the dignified life he was used to, but it was better than lying alone in an ICU ward or alone in a room.

Through this, your mind plays tricks on you. He will get better; we will fight the cancer like I fought it, like my Mother did before me. Medical science has advanced so much. Through this, we know, we have seen first-hand what cancer can do, what the treatment can do. But can you give up hope? All we wanted after all was a PET scan so that we could understand the length and the breadth of the tumour.

We also knew that there’s a price to be paid for a lifetime of smoking. Father did not want to accept that, even though the chain-smoking had long stopped and in his own words, he was now a “bum”, cadging other people’s “fags”. The fights we had over this when I was a child. What use were those now?

We had to go back to hospital and this time, it was bad. One lung was non-functional, the second was struggling. The hospital which gave him Covid now refused to take him back because he had Covid. It was only the kindness of friends that got him back in, and the tremendous personal goodwill he built with everyone wherever he went. As our young nurse was furious and ranted about the impersonality and greed of insurance-based hospital care.

This time, we were cleverer. We spoke the tough words to the doctors who were too tired or scared to say them to us. We explained how impersonal ICUs were not where anyone wants to live their last moments. Isolation at 84, what does that mean? The room he was in had a wonderful view of forests and mountains. But the bed was pushed against the window so all the patient saw was a white wall. A design fatality rather than a design flaw.

We brought him home, knowing that we had no time. We talked and laughed and discussed our happiest times as a family. We never left his side for the 30 hours we had left with him. We knew we wanted him home a day earlier, he kept saying to the doctors “I want to go home NOW”, but they were scared. We signed those LAMA forms, even as they told us we were brave and we were doing the “right thing”. The irony of “leaving against medical advice” when the doctors applaud you for leaving against medical advice!

He left us, a life well lived, a family broken.

But I write this because we have learnt as a family that what we lack most terribly in India is geriatric care and an understanding of the last days of human life. An overstrained medical system, the bartering and money chain, overworked doctors and nurses — and all this is without the additional destructive nature of the Virus — unless addressed now will cripple us totally as a society. Many may have read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, but I have not come across even one medical person who has understood what Gawande wrote or tried to follow the examples given to increase understanding of what most of us will go through. We’re living longer thanks to medical advancements, but at the end of our days, are we living better?

If we don’t answer that question now, the answer will tragically forever be “no”.



Read in source website

The hijab cannot be the symbol of Muslim women’s empowerment. It has no scriptural sanction in Islam, and must be seen as part of custom that has its origin in patriarchy, an instrument for the continued subordination of women to suit the misogynist viewpoint of Muslim men. To defend the rights of Muslim women, which is an entirely legitimate pursuit, should not, therefore, be conflated with the defence of the hijab.

Of course, Muslim women have the right of choice of what to wear. But that freedom of choice cannot be defended by blindly endorsing customs that are an instrument of their sartorial enslavement. Customs are important, but they are not sacrosanct. History is replete with enlightened changes to community practices which had otherwise become entrenched over a period of time for lack of scrutiny or interrogation, or because those whom such changes would benefit were not sufficiently empowered to change them. For instance, in the case of the hijab, it can hardly be argued that Muslim women were sufficiently empowered to do away with this retrograde practice in a male dominant society.

Besides, there is also the factor of reflex conditioning. If women are brought up to believe that certain practices are the norm, and any infringement is tantamount to heresy, and if their choices are determined by what men think is right, then their behaviour will continue to conform to a past that needs to be interrogated. This is a syndrome that can be observed in the way that women, influenced by their perceived notion of “correct” practice, behave. Often women themselves embrace their captivity, and enforce it on their own specie. Patriarchy benefits men; but women get co-opted into the structures reinforced by men to subjugate women. There are enough cases where elder women become aggressive perpetrators of outdated tradition, and seek to enforce it on younger women. For instance, the illegal practice of dowry has often the fullest backing of women, who are complicit in the torture and humiliation of brides for greater dowry.

The essential point, therefore, is that while women have the right of choice about what they wear, that choice does not originate in a void, and is a factor, very often, of regressive conditioning happily perpetrated by men. Women should be encouraged to question such choices, and choose what is in conformity with the dignity and equality that is their right. The perpetuation of the wearing of hijab is thus not tantamount to the empowerment of women, as certain liberals seem to believe. In fact, as has repeatedly been pointed out, a great many Muslim nations have done away with the hijab as an act of reform, in the interests of women, and in sync with the requirements of a modern society. Indian Muslims need to introspect on this.

Reform of custom that claims religious sanctity is not uncommon. In Hinduism for instance, the practice of Sati was abolished in the nineteenth century by the British, even though its votaries argued — wrongly — that it has religious sanction. The Manusmriti was used by a male dominant society to legitimise the subordination of women. The shastra — although not a consistent text — says at one point that “a girl, a young woman, or even an old woman, should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her son’s. She should not have independence”. Such an injunction obviously needs to be, and is being challenged today, not the least by women themselves. Women are also strongly contesting patriarchal stereotypes about chaste Hindu women, that seeks monopoly about how they dress, who they marry, what they drink, and where they work. Much more still needs to be done in Hindu society to grant women full equality. Certainly, tradition cannot be quoted, by men or women, to prevent this from happening.

An educational institution has the right to prescribe a uniform, to enforce uniformity overarching class, creed and caste distinctions. But in a country like ours, enlightened exceptions have to be made. For instance, Sikh students are allowed to wear the turban or a patka, within the structure of a uniform. Similarly, some concession could be considered for Muslim girls, in the nature of a headscarf. The limits of such deviations from the norm need to be negotiated in a sane manner.

However, the manner in which lumpen elements in saffron scarves shouting “Jai Shri Ram” jumped into the fray, is condemnable. How did they suddenly gather in such force? There must be a directing hand behind this quick and organised mobilisation. The BJP parivar, in Karnataka, and nationally, needs to answer this.

A matter that was being negotiated between Muslim girls and college authorities was deliberately communalised as a Hindu-Muslim confrontation. This is the least acceptable way to resolve such issues. Suppose there was a question pertaining to social custom within Hindu society, and hordes of Muslim men surrounded the deliberations shouting Allahu Akbar, would Hindus like it?

Politicisation at one end of the spectrum leads to counter politicisation at the other, leading to the involvement of political organisation like the PFI in support of the Muslim girls. A sensitive issue, that requires all sides to the dispute to seriously think and introspect, became unnecessarily a Hindu-Muslim dispute, quite conveniently for the BJP on the eve of the five Assembly elections.

The hijab dispute is now sub judice, and is being heard by the Karnataka high court. We can only hope that the judiciary will come up with a judgment that protects the rights of Muslim women while allowing the scope of change and reform that challenges patriarchy and liberates women. Meanwhile, liberal opinion needs to realise that this is a far more nuanced matter than black and white positions admit.



Read in source website

As Madhya Pradesh chief minister, senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh had acquired a reputation for creating fissures in the state’s political families. The tensions between his mentor Arjun Singh and son Ajay were said to be Digvijaya Singh’s handiwork. The late Amar Singh was also known for the same. He was said to be responsible for the 2017 split in Mulayum Singh Yadav’s extended parivar. The BJP is the latest entrant to this club. Home minister Amit Shah recently disclosed that he had called up DMK MP Kanimozhi to wish her on her birthday. Similarly, he also rang up Trinamul Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee.

Both Kanimozhi and Abhishek are having trouble with their respective party leaders. Earlier, the BJP had managed to snare Mulayum Singh Yadav’s estranged daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav. She joined the BJP shortly before the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. And then there is the case of Chirag Paswan, Ram Vilas Paswan’s son, whose uncle Pashupati Nath Paras was persuaded to ditch his nephew and join forces with the BJP.

Ever since R.P.N. Singh quit the Congress to join the Bharatiya Janata Party, it is being whispered that whoever is allotted the room occupied by the former office bearer at the Akbar Road party office either leaves or is divested of his or her position. Haryana leader Birendra Singh once functioned out of this room. He left the Congress and moved to the BJP when he was denied a Cabinet berth in the Manmohan Singh government. Party general secretary Shakeel Ahmed, another occupant of this room, has been sidelined by the party while Asha Kumari, also an office bearer, is nowhere on the scene. Rajni Patil, Rajya Sabha MP and party in charge of Jammu and Kashmir, moved to the room but gave it up soon, probably after she heard about the fate of the previous occupants. The space has now been allotted to Raghu Sharma, in charge of Gujarat.

If the Bharatiya Janata Party in Punjab has been let down by Bollywood actor and Gurdaspur MP Sunny Deol, the Congress has its own share of issues with actor Sonu Sood. While Mr Deol has failed to turn up for the party’s poll campaign despite pleas from BJP workers, Mr Sood has not gone beyond canvassing for his sister Malavika who is the Congress candidate from Moga.

When Mr Sood publicly declared his support for the Congress, an ecstatic state party president Navjot Singh Sidhu had described his decision as a “game changer”. Mr Sood had earned considerable goodwill from the public for the help he offered to people in distress during lockdown. Besides opening his Mumbai hotel for frontline warriors, he also launched a food distribution drive for migrants and other needy people. The Congress had hoped that Mr Sood would help drum up support for the party by campaigning across the state for the party. The Congress was particularly encouraged when Mr Sood released a video endorsing Charanjit Singh Channi as the party’s chief ministerial candidate. However, Mr Sood disappointed everyone as he has remained focused on his sister’s constituency and some areas around it.

West Bengal chief minister and Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s high-profile nephew Abhishek Banerjee finds himself in the same position as former Congress president Rahul Gandhi: both want to ease out the old guard in their respective parties and bring in younger leaders who are loyal to them.

Unlike Rahul Gandhi, who has the unstinted support of his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Abhishek was cut to size by his party supremo Mamata Banerjee. Poll strategist Prashant Kishor was also effectively sidelined as Abhishek was said to be acting at his behest. Mamata quickly took charge, dissolved the national office bearers committee and constituted a 20-member national working committee to oversee the party’s functioning. Interestingly, recent entrants to the party like Sushmita Dev and Luizinho Faleiro, who were brought in by the Abhishek-Kishor team, were not included in this committee.

Trinamul insiders maintain that Abhishek overplayed his hand as he owes his standing in the party to Mamata Banerjee and that he would find it difficult to win his Lok Sabha seat without his aunt’s backing.

Congress leaders who have left the party in the recent past invariably take a high moral stand about their decision. For instance, former Union minister Ashwani Kumar who quit the Congress last week, spoke eloquently about how the Congress policies did not reflect the national mood and failed to provide “transformative” leadership to the country. But the real story is something else.

Reasons for their resignation vary from denial of a plum party post, a Rajya Sabha seat or a ticket in an election. Ashwani Kumar is learnt to have called it quits after his son was not given a ticket in the upcoming Punjab Assembly election. It is the same story with former Punjab Congress chief H.S. Hanspal who left the party and joined the Aam Aadmi Party because his son was denied a ticket. Once a diehard loyalist, Ghulam Nabi Azad became a dissident only after he did not get another Rajya Sabha term.



Read in source website