The Kashmiri will accept nothing but freedom, India can give everything but freedom

On 28 May this year, the Economic Times, India’s leading business daily, carried a story titled, ‘Kashmir survey finds no majority for independence’. That is a curious headline. What is ‘no majority’? Either there is majority or there is not. Robert Bradnock conducted this survey for Chatham House, a leading British think-tank, Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control. The survey was conducted in the autumn of 2009, and the copy mentioned that 44 percent in Azad Kashmir and 43 percent in Jammu & Kashmir favoured an independent Kashmiri nation state.

Similar was the reporting of the survey in other Indian papers. They omitted some details, though. They did not mention that the survey was conducted not just in Kashmir but also the Jammu and Ladakh regions. They did not mention that even after factoring in Jammu and Ladakh, the total support for India was 21 percent and for Pakistan 15 percent. So if there was a three-way poll, the whole region’s average figure of those supporting independence (43 percent) would win hands down. Most of the rest (14 percent) favoured making the LoC a permanent border, which means sealing the status quo, something India and Pakistan came very close to doing in 2007. This 14 percent comes only from Poonch (94 percent), Rajouri (100 percent) and Jammu (39 percent).

Further, they did not mention that in the district-wise results the greatest support for independence was in the Indian side of the Valley – an astounding 95 percent in Baramulla, 75 percent in Srinagar, 82 percent in Badgam, and 74 percent in Anantnag. Pulwama and Kupwara were not surveyed. The highest support for India was 80 percent in Kargil and 67 percent in Leh, 73 percent in Udhampur and 63 percent in Kathua. In Jammu district, it was 47 percent – ‘no majority’. In Azad Kashmir, 50 percent wanted to be with Pakistan.

Now read the ET headline again. ‘Kashmir survey finds no majority for independence’. The story does not tell us what they found a majority supporting. If we have to be polite, we can say that such manipulative reporting of a detailed survey amounts to the Indian media being in denial of the fact that Kashmiris don’t want to be with India. If we have to call a spade a spade, we can say that this amounts to telling us a lie. Read More

Pushing the Kashmiri to the wall, again

[An edited, shorter version of this article by me appeared last week in The Friday Times, Lahore.]

In the first week of June, I sat at a shopfront with a group of shopkeepers of Kalarus, a small town in Kupwara district in north Kashmir. In 1999, they collected money and bought land for a martyrs’ graveyard, one of many such in Kashmir. Whenever the Indian army killed militants trying to infiltrate from Pakistan to the Indian side of the Line of Control, they would hand over the bodies to the Kupwara police, who would give it to these people to bury after the autopsy.

“Look up at the mountain peak,” said one of them, “It is snow clad all twelve months. It is the LoC, 70 kms from here. Do you think anyone would cross that wearing the traditional Kashmiri Khan dress?” And yet, most of the hundred odd bodies in the graveyard had come wearing clothes unfit for snow. And, most of them had so many bullet marks on the face that they were unidentifiable.

This May, however, three bodies came whose faces were not mutilated, only one of them had a bullet mark on the face. They got mug-shots taken and gave them to Kashmiri Uzma, an Urdu daily. Some distance away in Handwara their families saw the photos and went to the police station. These were their missing sons; they had been taken to the LoC to work as porters for the army. This case is by no means an aberration, just that it came to light so conclusively it could not be denied by the authorities.

The ‘encounter’ had taken place at Machhil on the LoC on April 29, bodies exhumed after protests on May 30. This is only one of many encounters at Machhil in 2010, and many more have taken place elsewhere. India had maintained over the past few years that infiltration and militancy were down to record levels as Pakistan had turned off its support to the militant groups. What has changed in 2010? India and Pakistan are talking peace despite 26/11 being just a year old, and there is no change in the prevailing internal situation in Pakistan. This can’t surely be the time when Pakistan will re-open its support for the Kashmir insurgents?

What has changed is that the decline of militancy gave people the space to breath and reflect, and they refused to accept the Indian version that after the defeat of militancy all was over, and that we were now in a post-conflict situation. For the third consecutive summer now, therefore, the people of Indian-administered Kashmir have been taking to the streets, demanding azadi and pelting stones on soldiers and policemen they see as “occupying forces”. This is taking place despite that fact that Pakistan’s hold on even the separatists is at its lowest ebb and India has managed to win over and/or discredit various factions of the Hurriyat Conference. In such a scenario, there has been increasing pressure on Delhi to, at the very least, demilitarise in response to the decline in militancy.

The Indian Army is not only not in favour of repealing or amending the Armed Forces Special Powers Act that gives it impunity in all its actions in Kashmir and the north-eastern states, but has also on record stated its objections to be called back to the barracks. This supports widespread allegations in Kashmir that Indian forces have vested interests in Kashmir; earning monetary rewards and medals for killing innocent people and passing them off as militants is only one of them.

As Kashmir was protesting the Machhil fake encounter, a young boy, Tufail Ahmed Matoo, 17, was killed in Srinagar by the local police. They fired at him from such a close range that he died with a half-inch hole in his skull. He was returning from tuition, and even though the local police were chasing stone-pelters, the precision with which he was killed cannot be a mistake.

Why was Tufail Ahmed Mattoo killed? It may just be police frustration, but conspiracy theorists in Kashmir say it could be a way of diverting attention from Machhil.

Far from offering regret and ordering enquiries into Mattoo’s killing, the state government pretended as though all was fine. Stone-pelters had to be dealt with and such mistakes would take place. That’s when a vicious cycle of protest-death-protest started. In 18 days 11 civilians died, mostly minor boys, one of them 9 years old.

Kashmir’s summer of discontent has to be seen in the context of the post-militancy situation. As India was claiming victory in Kashmir, the people rose in revolt in 2008. 62 innocent protestors were killed.  There were protests all summer in 2009 against a double rape and murder case in Shopian, committed allegedly by either the local police or Indian forces. 32 (check) protestors were killed. In Shopian I met one of the members of the local committee asking for justice. They said they did not want to link this to azadi, they wanted justice under Indian laws. But when justice was denied, everybody said the only solution was azadi.

By this summer India has come down very hard on stone-pelters, arresting and killing countless. Protests have been responded to with bullets, curfew, banning media, even arresting those active on the internet. Delhi has made it clear it is not serious about engaging the separatist leadership, even though it has been pretending to be pen to dialogue since 2003. As a result, angry youth are not even in the control of the Hurriyat leaders.

It is clear that Delhi is not going to make any concessions to the people of Kashmir. The troops that Kashmiris see as a problem are for Delhi the solution. The Kashmiri common man feels frustrated to hear about Indo-Pak talks as though the Kashmiri people don’t matter. Not all of the infiltration encounters this summer have been fake, and there are rumours of more Kashmiris trying to cross the LoC into Pakistan. Delhi is pushing people to pick up the gun again, and perhaps it prefers that to non-violent protests for azadi that attract international attention.

Delhi, it seems, prefers to deal with an insurgency. Crushing non-violent protests makes India seem bad even before its own people, and that’s why the disinformation campaign through the Delhi media.

Another round of militancy in Kashmir, however, would mean that India will be able to portray itself as a victim of terrorism, especially if Pakistan re-opens the militant tap to Kashmir after Obama exits the Afghan theatre. It will be easier for India to crush another armed struggle as it is much better prepared to do so now that it was in 1989. Sadly, all signals are that Kashmir is headed for another bloody decade.

Rahul Gandhi and the Dalit votebank in Uttar Pradesh

In May this year, this article by me appeared (.pdf) in the Economic and Political Weekly.

On 14 April this year party general secretary Rahul Gandhi launched the Congress’ biggest campaign to revive itself since 1989. The date was carefully chosen, Ambedkar Jayanti, because he is trying to win over dalit votes in Uttar Pradesh (UP). In 1989 the Congress’ support base in UP was made up of a rainbow coalition of brahmins, Muslims and dalits. The Congress has to woo these communities again to regain power in UP.

The brahmin community took to the now ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in small numbers in the 2007 Vidhan Sabha election primarily because there was no strong brahmin leader after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Atal Behari Vajpayee became politically inactive. Brahmins see in Rahul Gandhi a potential “brahmin” leader. The UP Congress president, legislative leader and Youth Congress president in the state are all from the brahmin community.

Muslim support is no longer enchained to the Samajwadi Party (SP) because their bete noire, the BJP, is powerless these days in both the centre and the state. As a result the Muslim vote is being fought for, as a three-way contest between BSP, SP and Congress. BSP head and Chief Minister Mayawati’s stratagem is to therefore change her party’s core support base constructed out of the “brahmin-dalit” alliance into a Muslim-dalit alliance.

The dalits, wooed away en masse by the Kanshi Ram-Mayawati duo of the BSP for years, would be the hardest to win back for the Congress. In fact, a year ago the very idea would have sounded ludicrous. But today, Mayawati’s angry reaction to the Congress’ bid to woo dalits is indication that the Congress may be winning over dalits. How is this happening?

There are 66 dalit castes in UP. Together they make up 21% of UP’s population. According to the 2001 Census, among these communities, Jatavs – formerly known as the Chamar community – alone constitute 56% of the scheduled caste (SC) population. The Pasis constitute 16% while the third rung, comprising Dhobis, Koris and Balmikis, another 15%. The fourth rung, comprising Gonds, Dhanuks, and Khatiks constitute about 5%.

It was easy for the BSP to win over the Jatavs – Mayawati belongs to this community – but other dalits would have to be wooed by them as well. For that the BSP, in its formative and later stages in UP, organised social movements to bring different dalit castes together, regardless of the hierarchies and prejudices within them. The biggest achievement on this front was to unite Pasis with Jatavs within the party structure.

The Pasis are concentrated mainly in the Awadh region of central UP. Traditionally, Pasis have been perceived as being lathi-wielding guards of zamindars. The Jatavs would often be at the receiving end of that lathi. The Pasis have willy-nilly aligned themselves with the BSP but they always feel like second-class citizens of a Jatav movement. Some Pasis vote for the SP and BJP too, but most find themselves even more neglected there.

Wooing Other Dalits

If at all the Congress can win dalit votes, it cannot be those of Jatavs who are wedded to the BSP like horse and carriage. But the Congress has some hope of winning over non-Jatav dalit votes, especially those of Pasis. There were indications of this in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. According to Lokniti-CSDS data, the Congress won 4% of Jatav votes (as opposed to 2% in 2007), whereas it improved its non-Jatav tally from 5% to 16%.

Addressing the Congress’ student wing National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) workers at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on 30 September 2009, Rahul Gandhi said he goes to meet poor people and it is the media that labels them dalits or adivasis. A week later he repeated this in Thiruvananthapuram: “I ask my office to arrange for my visit to a poor man’s home in the poorest village. You see him as a dalit. I see him as a poor person.”

So by his own admission these visits – which have included dining and staying overnight at dalits’ houses – are pre-arranged.

On 15 March 2008, Rahul Gandhi visited a dalit family in an Etawah village whose five members had been killed by dacoits. They were Jatavs. Next month, Rahul Gandhi visited Ghisauli village in Jhansi, and when told by dalits that fleeting visits did not help, he returned a week later and took a delegation of 300 dalits to the district commissioner to demand fair wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The dalits were Jatavs, known there as “ahirwal”. After the event, the dalits he met, including Shanti Devi whom he had a meal with, told reporters they would still vote for Mayawati, and were shown worshipping a photo of the chief minister on TV. There is no separating Jatavs from Mayawati and her party.

Soon thereafter, on 17 May 2008, Rahul Gandhi took the residents of Banpurwa village by surprise and went straight to a meeting of a women’s self-help group that provides microfinance under a scheme named after Rajiv Gandhi. Rahul chatted there for two hours and then asked one of them for dinner. Her name? Rekha Pasi.

On 25 October 2008, Rahul Gandhi was denied permission to address students at a university in Kanpur. He went to rural schools where, he himself later said, he singled out the backbenchers, who were dalits, for interaction. Then in a speech he gave before the visit ended, he said, “People from different sections of the society are being exploited as votebanks. If the trend continues, it will become a major challenge for the country.”

In January 2009, Rahul Gandhi accompanied the British foreign secretary to a dalit village in Amethi to show him the “strength” of India. In Simra village, he stayed the night (on mattresses provided by the Rajiv Gandhi Trust) in the house of Shivkumari Kori. She works as a manual labourer earning Rs 30-40 a day and belongs to the Kori dalit caste traditionally engaged in cloth-weaving.

Later that month, Sonia Gandhi visited her constituency, Rae Bareily, where she went to the Mahe Fort and assured the locals that she will talk to the tourism minister to help develop it as a tourist spot. The fort was built by a Pasi ruler.

At some point Rahul Gandhi’s “core team” decided to get a dalit member. He was an Indian Institute of Management graduate who left his job abroad to return to UP politics. His job was to “analyse” Rae Bareily and Amethi. His name was Ranjan Chaudhary, a Pasi from Mohanlalganj near Lucknow, and from where his sister Reena Chaudhary had been Lok Sabha member of Parliament in 1999 as a SP legislator but had lost the election on a Congress ticket in 2004. Denied a ticket in 2009, Ranjan left and joined the BJP. The Congress decided to support an independent candidate for the Mohanlalganj – R K Chaudhary, arguably the best known Pasi leader. The SP won the seat thanks to a division of Pasi votes. R K Chaudhary refuses to join the Congress because of his Ambedkarite outlook.

The Congress’ dalit face in UP is Mayawati’s former principal secretary and co-accused in the Taj corridor scam, P L Punia. When he won the Lok Sabha seat from Barabanki (a Pasi stronghold), Mayawati spent 30 minutes speaking against him in a post-election meeting addressing her party workers, and asked them if they knew that he was not from her caste. He was a Dhanuk from Haryana.

In September 2009, Rahul Gandhi kept his own party workers in the dark and reached a predominantly dalit village in Shravasti district and stayed overnight. His host? Chedi Pasi.

On 2 October 2009, the top leadership of the UP Congress decided to mark Gandhi Jayanti by emulating Rahul Gandhi and went on to spend a night in a dalit house in various parts of the state. Party workers arranged for cooks and plates, mosquito nets and mattresses. Congress legislative party leader Pramod Tiwari slept at a dalit gram pradhan’s house in Pratapgarh. His name? Devaki Pasi. These night visits by the state leaders were meant to take place every month but nothing was heard again.

On 6 March 2010, Rahul Gandhi visited the victims of a temple stampede in Pratapgarh. He skipped the hospital and went to the villages whose residents had died. He even gave his mobile number to a survivor. His name? Radhey Shyam Pasi.

On 14 April 2010, Rahul Gandhi started a massive “rath yatra” programme as part of a push to rebuild the party cadre at all levels. Very few dalits thronged the Congress functions as they were busy with their own Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations. Rahul Gandhi said in his speech, “This glorious state has suffered over the past two decades essentially on account of the politics of caste and religion”.

Not an Easy Task

Winning over Pasis and other non-Jatav dalits may not be easy unless the Congress manages to get a major leader from those communities, but the task has been made somewhat easier by Mayawati’s repeated announcement that her successor would be from her own Jatav caste. Taking away even a few of Mayawati’s voters can make a huge difference in a multiparty electoral contest where, unlike 1989 or before, just 50,000 votes or so can win you an assembly seat.

In a sense, Rahul Gandhi is trying to do in 2012 exactly what Mayawati did in 2007. Just as winning over brahmins seemed impossible for her, winning over dalits seems impossible for him. Just as only a small section of brahmins came forward with the BSP (Kanyakubja brahmins, Satish Chandra Mishra’s caste) only a small section of dalits may lean towards the Congress. Rahul Gandhi’s dalit visits are just as highly publicised (the media is often informed in advance) as Mayawati’s “brahmin sammelans”.

Perceptions are not only as important as reality but can shape reality. Voters, particularly fence-sitters, often make their choices depending on the perception of who is winning. It is the hawa – the direction of the wind, they are keen on gauging. Mayawati worked for two years, from 2005 to 2007, to create the perception that brahmins were moving to BSP in large nuumbers, and that helped her win over anti-incumbency votes from all sections. Similarly, Rahul Gandhi has begun preparations for 2012 two years in advance by creating the impression that dalits are turning towards the Congress.

However, the difference is that unlike Mayawati, Rahul Gandhi is not openly holding caste gatherings. Unlike Nitish Kumar, he is not promising a “mahadalit” strategy. Doing so would mean alienating the urban youth gatherings in JNU and Thiruvananthapuram – audiences to whom Mayawati would not appeal at all. In the end, Rahul Gandhi’s biggest advantage is the Congress Party’s ability to be many things to many people, never mind the paradoxes.

Let’s abolish Teacher’s Day

Another Teacher’s Day, another day of children going to school, worrying about how many cards and gifts they should take for which teachers. Teachers and principals will stand on the stage and praise themselves, and students will perform on stage. Teacher’s Day is one of those nauseating remnants of Nehruvian India that needs to be abolished, now. The sanctimonious institution of teacher’s day puts teachers on a pedestal, like gods to be worshipped, thus coming in the way of academic culture where teachers and students are equal, where teachers are judged as professionals. Teacher’s Day only serves to further institutionalise the teacher as figure that commands authority rather than respect, a figure who is to be feared rather than loved. It is certainly not a day that inspires students to mull over Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s tomes on the superiority of Indian philosophy over Western philosophy.

Teacher’s Day is certainly a cruel joke in government schools where teacher’s never turn up, or turn up and make students do their private work. The abolition of Teacher’s Day should be the starting point of changing student-teacher relationships in rural India where, studies have shown, a vast number of girl students drop out because of sexual abuse by teachers. One wonders how the Jaipur’s Maharaja Secondary School will celebrate Teacher’s Day considering the owner of the school is in jail for allegedly raping a 14 years old girl student. One the same day, a class 3 student in Faridabad was stripped for not paying fees. If Teacher’s Day is to be retained, it should be a day when educationists should sit together and ask themselves what sort of student-teacher relationship encourages people like 27 years old Manju, a teacher in a government-run school in Delhi to punish an 11 year old student Shanno so badly that she died two days later. Shanno had been asked to sit like a hen in scorching heat with two bricks on her back. She is not the only one: countless dozens of students die every year in this country because of corporal punishment. Teacher’s Day should be used to remember these students who never got a chance to see what a good teacher could be.

Bazm-e-Bhajapa

By SALMAN USMANI
with apologies to Mirza Ghalib

Ghalib and BJP (quite like Iqbal’s Shikwa and Jawab e Shikwa) in Bazm-e-Bhajpa where the ‘shama’ is lit right in fornt of LK.

Advani to Jaswant:

Yeh kahan ki dosti hai, ke bane hai dost naseh,
Na tu mera yaar hota, na yeh Kaandahar hota.

Jaswant to Advani:

Kahoon tujh se main ke kya hai, Yeh Jinnah buri Bala hai,
Na tu qabr pe jata na mujhe yeh bukhaar hota.

Brijesh (from somewhere in the audience)

Tere waade pe jiye ham, to yeh jaan jhooth jana,
Na yeh interview hota, na tu beqaraar hota.

‘Ek Dhakka Aur Do’

The current crisis of leadership in the Bhartiya Janta Party reminded me of this evocative 2006 photograph published in all papers the morning after a remembrance meeting for Pramod Mahajan.

Readers of this blog familiar with Indian politics will recognize the faces of the BJP leadership. Others unfamiliar with those faces will nevertheless find in the clothes that the people are wearing, and also in their sombre expressions, the presence of defeat. There is no corpse visible. One can guess that the people are waiting for Pramod Mahajan’s body–and that would not be inaccurate–but is that all that fills this space with questions? [Amitava Kumar]

As Siddharth Varadarajan says, it is perhaps our turn now to say, ‘Ek Dhakka Aur Do’.

‘Mayawati hopes to transform Dalit identity from that of an oppressed people to one of a great people capable of building grand monuments’

In an excellent article by an MNC executive, Sudhir Sitapati, there’s the refreshing willingness to try and understand what Mayawati is trying to do with the monuments she is building in Lucknow.

At an estimated expense of Rs 3,000 crore, a criminal waste of resources one could say, but then, how different from the Keynesian nregs which is appositely accused of “digging trenches and filling them up”. Certainly not very different from the baroque and purposeless Bada Imambara here in Lucknow itself. Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah, in response to the 1784 drought, paid people money to build it by day and then break it by night! [Read the full article.]

Here’s my article written some months ago.

Were you secretly happy when your father beat up his second wife?

I am addicted to Sach Ka Saamna. Initially I was skeptical, but with sms-es from friends after  11 pm (“watch sach ka saamna”), I’ve become a regular. Initially I felt there’s no voyeuristic fun to be had with the secrets of an unknown Indian – I mean if you got Amar Singh on the show to admit whether he’s been in a relationship with XYZ, it’s be far more interesting. Or so I thought.

But Sach Ka Saamna gets these ordinary people and politely tries its best to destroy that person’s relationship with his/her family and the world at large. The contestants play on till they lie, knowing they’ll lose the money they came for but the truth became too much to justify the money. Or they just run away with a few lakhs rather than doing the full monty of 21 questions for a crore. If someone goes that far some day and then commits suicide, I won’t be surprised.

The set, sounds and anchoring of SKS seems very similar to that of Kaun Banega Crorepati. Like KBC, the purpose of SKS is to make money. If KBC was middle class India’s way of saying we’re no longer apologetic about wealth, SKS does away with KBC’s reluctant excuse of knowledge as a harbinger of wealth. Sach Ka Saamna is about making money for your best kept secrets, for simply providing millions of viewers the voyeuristic pleasure of knowing whether you’re cheating on your husband. SKS tries to say we’re out to make money by hook or crook.

That is not to take away from the power of that show to show the mirror to an Indian family. There’s something to be said about a show which gets an about-to-be-married woman in an executive job and asks her, in front of her separated parents, “Were you secretly happy when your father beat up his second wife?” I can imagine family members aross India looking at each other, or looking away, and saying nothing, as though an outsider was revealing their secrets.

And so I’m hooked. My only complain is that the show is too slow. I’d just be happy knowing the person, and let’s go past the questions like a rapid fire round. It wouldn’t matter much if I missed the show because I can read the questions on Sach Ka Saamna’s Facebook page. Samples:

Questions that one Zara has successfully answered, with her mother, estranged father, sister and fiancee Imran in the audience:

1. Have you ever used your looks to get work done easily?
2. While out with your boyfriend have you ever worn a burqa just to avoid getting caught?
3. Have you ever secretly been through any of your boss’ personal documents?
4. Do you feel inferior to your sister Sara for being less educated than her?
5. Have you ever tried to convince someone other than Imran to leave his fiancée and marry you?
6. Have you spent a week away with Imran without your parents’ knowledge?
7. Have you ever quit a job in fear of being confronted about your credentials?
8. Do you love your father inspite of him physically abusing your mother?
9. Were you secretly happy when your father beat up his second wife?
10. Would you accept another man in your mother’s life?
11. Have you ever been in a relationship with two men at the same time?
12. Have you lied to Imran about the extent of your physical intimacy with your ex-boyfriends?
13. Have you cheated on Imran since your engagement?
14. Do you regret getting engaged to Imran?
15. Would you leave Imran if you feel that he is trying to control your life?
16. Do you truly love Imran? (Yes, she said, and the polygraph test said yes.)

Whose dome is it anyway?

Over the past four months, some of Delhi’s most important monuments have been swarmed by the faithful offering prayers. The law is clear on the violations, the lawmakers are not

(An edited, shorter version of this article by me has appeared in Open magazine.)

Within the space of a week in March this year, just before Lok Sabha elections, mosques in some of Delhi’s most important monuments suddenly started having namaz again – after hundreds of years. Around 200 namazis broke into the Muhammadwali Masjid at Siri Fort on 17 March for Friday prayers; they did the same at the Sultanate-era Nili Masjid in Hauz Khas and at a small mosque at the entrance of the Qutub Minar complex – inside the ticketed area. On 23 March they started namaz at the Jamali Kamali mosque.

Who could have a problem with the devout following the call of the muezzin? A 1958 law does. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act says that there can be no religious installation or worship where it had ceased. The law seeks to protect such “non-living” monuments for history’s sake. “Once worship or prayers starts, people start affecting the shape of the place,” says writer-filmmaker and die-hard Dilliwallah Sohail Hashmi. Despite FIRs filed by the Archeological Survey of India, the police is allowing namaz to carry on.

The common thread between the imams and maulvis of all the mosques being taken over is that they belong to the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, an organization of nationalist Muslims formed in 1919 in support of Gandhi’s Khilafat movement. All of them are also on the payrolls of the Delhi Wakf Board. The Delhi Wakf Board chairperson, Matin Ahmed, is the tallest Muslim leader of the Delhi state Congress. “Due to migration the Muslim population of Delhi has increased and there aren’t enough mosques,” says Ahmed, “How can I tell people not to pray at a mosque? And the properties the ASI is claiming as protected, we have Gazette notifications showing they are also under the Wakf. Tourists go there wearing shoes, what is the problem with namazis who pray barefoot? ”

The problem is pointed out by Hashmi. “Take the case of four mosques built by Juna Shah Telangani, a noble in the court of Firoze Shah Tughlaq (1309-1388),” Hashmi says. “Two of them are protected and two are not. You can see the difference.”

Kali Masjid in old Delhi’s Turkman Gate and a Jama masjid in Nizamuddin are not protected as they were living monuments in 1958 with daily namaz. Both mosques have been painted green, pink and blue, the Kali masjid has had marble chips added to the front gate, steel brackets with ceiling fans have been added, and so has cement-concrete construction. The domes of the Kali masjid has been painted green and several families live in the basement. “Who will recognize it today as the finest example of Tughlaq architecture?” asks Hashmi. In the Nizamuddin mosque, the ceiling of broken domes has been flattened, women are not allowed inside even to see the mosque and photography is also debarred.

On the contrary are other two of Telangani’s mosques which are under the ASI’s protection – one in Begumpur and the other in Khirki. The restoration work took place only very recently, its malba is still lying outside, people drink on the terrace, smack addicts huddle around a fire on winter evenings. “Such dereliction becomes ammunition for those wanting to revive prayers,” he says.

*

In the late thirteenth century, when South Asia’s greatest Sufi saint Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti was leaving Delhi for Ajmer, he asked his disciple Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki to follow him. The people of Mehrauli, which was all of Delhi then, said they would follow Kaki. Seeing this, Chishti asked Kaki to remain in Delhi. The Mehrauli area came to be known as ‘Qutub sahib’.

Niazmuddin Auliya was Kaki’s disciple’s disciple. It is in Mehrauli that Kaki died and was buried, and everyone from then to the time of Bahudur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler, wanted to be buried near Kaki. Even today there are people who want Zafar’s remains to be brought from Rangoon and placed at the place in Mehrauli, Zafar palace, where Zafar wanted to be buried.

Mehrauli has seen a thousand years of building, and the remains that are being excavated and conserved even now are studied by historians to research such details as the mosque architecture, houses, domes and living practices and how they changed over a period of thousand years.

A number of Mehrauli’s monuments, still be excavated, conserved and studied, are in what is called the ‘Mehrauli Archaeological Park’. The most important is the mosque of Jamali Kamali, where a Sufi saint, Sheikh Jamaluddin is buried. The mosque marks an important link between the Sultanate and Mughal periods. Prayers are being held by around ten people every day, three times a day. On Fridays, there could be as many as 200 people. On Friday 24 July, we found a crowd of around hundred people eating biryani in paper plates. The jumma namaz just got over. Some men rush to us, preventing us from taking photographs. You can’t shoot us while we’re eating, they say, you haven’t taken permission from our imam. Namaz is being offered three times a day and nails have already started being hammered into the walls of the Jamali Kamali mosque. “If this is not stopped you will soon find a maulvi living here with his family,” says Hashmi.

ASI field officers who tried to file FIRs with the police were surprised to see the police inaction. It was only on 30 March after a letter was written to the Delhi police commissioner. On 24 July, when we visited Jamali Kamali and the Qutub Minar, we saw the police allowing namaz to take place. “We have taken legal action against whoever has broken the law,” says a Delhi Police spokesperson. Does this mean they will prevent further worship in these monuments? “We have taken legal action,” he repeats. His reluctance to speak beyond the five authorized words may be due to the involvement of ruling Congress politicians such as Matin Ahmed.

The Union culture secretary has written in this regard to the Lt. Governor of Delhi, Tejinder Khanna. “The LG has asked the Delhi police commissioner to strictly implement the prevailing law and maintain communal harmony,” says Ranjan Mukherjee, OSD in the LG’s secretariat.

With the ASI calling up the police every now and then, the imam at Jamali Kamali, Abdul Raziq, proceeded to meet the superintending officer of the Delhi circle of the ASI, Muhammed KK, explaining that they had been allowed by the Delhi Wakf Board. “He is a Muslim, yet he calls up the police to complain against us,” says Raziq. Muhammed, on his part, gave Raziq examples from his earlier postings, where he has refused to allow people to worship in churches, temples and most crucially, a maqbara in Sasaram, Bihar, where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad wanted to offer puja, claiming it to be a temple. But imam Raziq does not buy any of this. “A masjid is forever a masjid,” he insists, proudly showing a letter by Union Minorities Affairs minister Salman Khursheed asking Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit to look into the problems faced by them in offering namaz.

Around the Mehrauli Archaeological Park, other monuments have also been taken up too. At the Mandi mosque, we even found them cooking. At Rajon ki Baoli, the prayer mats are left even after the namazis leave – markers of a claim. An old, unidentified mosque that INTACH would have restored there is now a madarsa and a grave. Another large, unidentified building was taken over just before INTACH was going to start restoration, and yet another one which was taken over after restoration – whitewashed and painted, all signs of history removed.

At the Qutub Minar, the small mosque which historians say was probably once part of a Mughal-era sarai, has been whitewashed and painted for many years. A maulvi who sits there every day distributed talismans, says an ASI field officer. But the maulvi, Maulana Shair Mohammed, claims he’s been performing namaz for 33 years now, something the ASI denies. “They’re asking the namazis to buy tickets!” complains the maulvi.

There is an added problem at the Qutub Minar. The grand Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque there, on one side, has a small idol of what looks like Hanuman – no surprise because the mosque was built from the ruins of temples. The Bajrang Dal in 2001 wanted to worship the idol, and tp prevent that the ASI covered it with grills so thick the idol is hardly visible. Now again, around 50 Hindus from Mehrauli reached Quwratul Islam and demanded the right to worship the idol because namaz was allowed at the small mosque. An altercation between them and the namazis followed. More recently, the Jama Masjid’s Imam Abdullah Bukhar has also joined the cause.

“This has the potential to open a pandora’s box all over the country,” says the ASI’s KK Muhammed. “There will be demands from Buddhists at Ajanta, Hindus at Konark and Elephanta and in Ellora Hindus, Jains and Buddhists could all lay claim,” he says.

These events have raised the hackles of conservationists and historians. A release from SAHMAT, signed by the likes of Irfan Habib and DN Jha, has appealed to the Prime Minister, who is also in-charge of the culture ministry, to take action. The convenor of the Delhi chapter of INTACH, AGK Menon, points out the case of the Taj Mahal, which is closed on Fridays for prayer at its mosque. “If at all prayer is to be continued then it should be ensured that people don’t make any changes in the monument at all,” he says, adding that often there are encroachments in and around such places once regular prayers start.

*

The namazis even point out that the ASI couldn’t be too bothered about conservation if its own Delhi circle office is inside Madarsa Safdarjung! Incidentally, Friday prayers are also held in Madarsa Safdarjung – they had once been allowed by an order from the prime minister’s office, remembers an old ASI hand. Haji Aminuddin knows very well how that happened. We meet him at his house , deep inside old Delhi’s Pahadi Imli Gali. In 1978 he was 15 or 16, he says, “when 10-12 of us kids got together and offered namaz at the Bhoori Bitiyari masjid”. The mosque was inside the campus of the Maulana Azad Medical College and the doctors would call the police. Prevented from offering namaz there they raised such a movement in old Delhi that the government had to not only allow them to offer namaz, but despite being arrested five times the members of what became the Masjid Basao Committee managed to get the land area around the mosque increased. Members of the committee became big Congress politicians, one became a Wakf board chairman and the Jama Masjid’s Abdullah Bukhari became its patron.

“I have more photographs than my weight,” says Aminuddin. These are photographs, mostly, with Congress politicians – you name them, he has them. He remembers well the day in 1983 when he met Indira Gandhi who asked him to support the Congress. Amongst the people who fought cases pro-bono for him was HL Bharadwaj, who later became union law minister. The Masjid Basao Committee of 1978 managed, over the next few years, to revive prayers in not only old the defunct old mosques of old Delhi but also Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli. He remembers how his group started prayers at ASI-protected Kotla Firoz Shah. “We took a welding machine and cut iron bars and entered. The ASI keeps getting them welded and the community keeps breaking in every now and then, even today,” he says. He is not aware that the mosque’s architecture was liked so much by the invading Timur the Lame that he took a map of it along with Delhi artisans to replicate it in central Asia.

The movement, he says, was later ‘hijacked’ by ‘elders’, but Aminuddin remains a prominent Muslim community ‘face’ in Delhi, invited regularly by politicians. The present Wakf board chairman, Matin Ahmed, is clearly not arguing for something history has not seen.

“I am prepared to die in Delhi”

As Muslim-Han violence recedes in China’s Xinjiang, an exlied Uyghur longs for freedom in Delhi’s bylanes

(A shorter, edited version of this story by me has appeared in Open magazine this morning.)

“Ey pekir Uyghur, oyghan!” (Hey poor Uyghur, wake up!)
- Abduhalik Uyghur (1901-1933), killed by a Chinese warlord for inciting Uyghur nationalism through his poetry

“Kashmir ke peechay hamara mulk hain,” says Abdullah Dawood, 49, sitting in a guest house in Nizamuddin, in a room hired by a fellow-Uyghur visitor from Istanbul. “Just beyond the Karakoram pass,” smiles the vistor, Osman Uzturuk. Uzturuk adds in Turkic, and Abdullah translates: “In the olden days, much before India’s independence, we had great links with India.”

As Uzturuk fills us with information about the riots in Xinjiang since 5 July, Abdullah’s mind returns to that night twelve years ago in the old city of Ghulja, officially known as Yining. 5 February 1997: Abdullah, who ran a grocery store, let go of his reticence about politics and decided to join a rally demanding freedom. The protests were sparked by the execution of 30 Uyghur independence activists accompanied by the crackdown on attempts to revive traditional Uyghur culture such as traditional gatherings called meshrep. The demonstrations were crushed by the People’s Liberation Army, who killed nine.

The trigger for Abdullah to join those protests was the enforcement of the two-child norm. Abdullah had four daughters and had just adopted a son, and though he could get away with bribes, those who couldn’t, had to see their children killed, he says. Plainclothesmen made videos and took pictures, and Abdullah got wind that the army would come knocking in the night looking for all those who took part. Fearing that he may become part of the long list of the ‘disappeared’, Abdullah ran away – first to ürümqi (pronounced Oroomchi), the capital of the province 800 kms away, then to Tibet, and from there to Nepal. In 2003, when Nepal was threatening to deport him to China despite his refugee certificate from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, he came to India.

“Xinjiang” is Mandarin for “new territory”; the local Muslim population still calls it “Turki” and separatists want to establish a new country, “East Turkestan”. This is part of a vast swathe in Central Asia once called Turkestan. The region today is divided between the West Turkestan countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan – countries once part of the Soviet Union. Culturally, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs of Xinjiang are closer to these people. “All the nations Russia had captured are free today,” says Abdullah, “Only we are still chained.” Abdullah looks at a map of China and shows how much smaller China would be without Xinjiang, whose land area is double of Pakistan.

Under the Qing dynasty, even before the formation of the People’s Republic of China under Mao, the Uyghurs tried several times, in armed uprisings, to be free from the control of Chinese warlords. The Chinese Republic’s main strategy of dealing with the separatism of the Turkic Muslim Uyghurs has been, like Tibet, to give incentives to the majority Han to settle in Xinjiang. Today, there are 7 million Han Chinese in the area, and 8 million Uyghurs. The capital ürümqi has 75% Han Chinese and only 16% Uyghurs. “These Chinese census figures are lies,” insists Abdullah, “There are only 2.5 million of us left there.”

Such were the disputes Abdullah had with the news this past week on TV and radio. “The Chinese government says only 184 died. But my friends in Istanbul say it was 3,000.” These were riots sparked on 5 July in ürümqi when the confrontation between the police and Uyghur protestors led to the Uyghurs targeting the local Han population. The Han backlash lasted several days. The riots were caused in the first place by the killings of two Uyghur workers in Guangdong, in another end of China. The Uyghurs claimed that the Chinese did not protect Uyghur workers and let off the Han killers without punishment. The murdered workers were accused of raping a Han woman, charges later found untrue by Chinese authorities.

Abdullah is worried about his family’s safety, though they live 800 kms away from ürümqi. Over the years there has been little contact, and Abdullah doesn’t know English and is not familiar with using the internet. Between the violence that led to Abdullah’s exile and the riots past week, there have been many such instances. “Kashmiris also ask for freedom, but India does not brutally repress them the way China does,” says Abdullah. “There have been instances when they deliberately organise rallies by their informers amongst us to see who comes out, and then those persons disappear. Bodies are found months later,” he says with anguish. “All this never comes out.” He speaks constantly of Chinese brutality, of zulm, claiming that Uyghurs are not even given the right of assembly, their culture is being destroyed and human rights violated on a daily basis.

When on 17 April 2008 the Olympic torch arrived in Delhi, says Abdullah, Tibetans were allowed to protest, but he, a lone Uyghur in Delhi, was detained at a police station in Seelampur in north-east Delhi. “The Chinese had told them that Uyghurs are terrorists. But the police were very nice with me. I called a friend and got addresses of websites that document Chinese torture on us. The officer couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw those images,” he says.

The Chinese have restricted religious freedom. Abdullah says he couldn’t keep a beard, the syllabus in Islamic schools were regulated and only the government-approved version of the Qu’ran that could be published. China, on its part, has found it easier to quell separatism since 9/11, branding them as terrorists. China claimed that some terrorist incidents before the Olympics had Uyghur groups behind them, and suspects that they may be getting help from the Taliban in the Af-Pak region.

The Han migration to Xinjiang has made the Uyghurs feel alien in their own land. The alienation is visible when Abdullah says: “There’s a reason why the Chinese oppression is so brutal. They don’t believe in god and fear no one. They eat rats, frogs, dogs and monkeys!” The disgust changes to ridicule when he adds: “They even eat donkeys!”

Abdullah’s friend from Istanbul is similarly exiled, and both say they’d rather be exiled than live under Chinese rule. Abdullah did not agree to be photographed as he may be recognized and his family back home harassed. A photograph in a Kathmandu paper in 2003 did him great harm. After the newspaper article about Uyghur refugees appeared, Nepal deported four of them under Chinese pressure, he claims; Abdullah and seven others escaped to Delhi. They have since then been re-settled by UNHCR in Sweden; it’s been years and Abdullah is waiting for his turn, too. It’s the heat he wants to escape the most. “My home was colder than Kashmir! ” he says, cutting coriander leaves that he will mix with his soup. “It’ll help against the itch and allergies I get from this heat.”

“In Nepal we got enough money from UNHCR to live by, but here we get only 2,245 rupees a month,” says Abdullah. India does not allow employment for international refugees. He survives thanks to the visiting Uyghur and Turkish businessmen from Istanbul. They come here to buy scarves, shawls and cushion covers, selling them in Istanbul at thrice the price. Abdullah, who has picked up enough Hindustani in all these years, helps the Istanbul businessmen with translation and bargaining, and then takes a commission from them as well as the Indian wholesalers. That’s how he’s able to afford a room in Delhi.

When friends come from Istanbul, they bring traditional naan and cook mutton without Indian spices, and he asks them to take him away. It is from one of them that he got the number of Washington based Rebiya Kadeer, head of the World Uyghur Congress, whom China has accused of fomenting the present riots. “I keep calling her and she has promised help in re-settling me,” he says, “India is good but there’s no Turki here. I get very lonely.” Freedom, he concedes, will never come. “I am prepared to die here.”

My review of Anand Teltumbde’s “Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop”

Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop
By Anand Teltumbde
Navayana, New Delhi, 2008, 214 pp., Rs 190
ISBN 978-81-89059-15-6

[An edited version of this review by me has appeared (.pdf here) in the May-June 2009 issue of Biblio.]

Anand Teltumbde is a noted Bombay-based Dalit intellectual who also wears the hat of a business executive. He has written this book about the lynching of a Dalit family in a Maharashtra village in 2006 to ensure that the incident is not easily erased from memory. He quotes Milan Kundera: “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In other words, he sees this book as being a seminal work on the Khairlanji atrocity.

The book begins with Abel Meeropol’s song Strange Fruit, written in 1936 (and not 1939, as the book incorrectly states) about the lynching of two black youth. It is from this song that the book derives its sub-title, “A Strange and Bitter Crop,” which once again reinforces the book’s ambition. Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit (in 1939) soon became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement in the US, but does Teltumbde’s book achieve its ambitious goal?

Buffalo Soldier

By Shivam Vij in Unnao

“Come in,” says Munisa, “it’s such a large house you’ll be surprised.” The room isn’t big enough for a single person, and Munisa, a widow at 30, shares it with six children and her mother-in-law. She’s trying to turn the courtyard into a room even though she knows the impending monsoons will was away the mud thatch. She works as farm labour, earning Rs 35 a day, and can’t make use of NREGA because the chronic pain in her legs won’t let her do hard labour.

Two years ago, an NGO did a survey in the village and found her to be the poorest. They gifted her a cow. “It gave milk because I fed her. And then, six months ago, she died.” But Munisa is not ungrateful: she will still vote for the candidate who runs the NGO that gifted her the cow. So will her neighbours who didn’t get anything: “Here’s someone who has at least proven her concern for the poor,” says one.

Annu Tandon, the Congress candidate who’s been running this NGO is unabashed about such doles and its contribution in her campaign. She only insists it’s not an NGO: “It’s a private charitable trust set up in my father’s name in 2002, funded entirely by my family.” She won’t give you any figures, because it’s the quality of her work that she wants you to appreciate, she says.

“NGO’s typically take up projects and do them in an ad hoc manner. I do things differently. I establish an emotional connect,” she says, sitting in an old haveli in Unnao town, built by her zamindar-lawyer grandfather. For instance, the cataract operations conducted by Shri Hriday Narayan Dhawan Charitable Trust conducts are followed up with visits and care for a month. “When somebody commits suicide I don’t give money to the family. Instead we buy a milching animal for 20,000 or so that earns them some money and makes sure there’s milk for the children,” she says. “We have distributed hundreds of these,” she says, “to widows and large families.”

A local journalist in Unnao estimates 800 animals have been distributed. That is 1.6 crores for just the animals. And this is just one of many schemes. It can safely be said that the trust must have spent more money in less than five years than the ten crores allotted to MPs for local development.

Free buffaloes. Wonder why no party put that in their manifesto. But there’s more to the emotional connect: anyone in Unnao who invites Annu to their son or daughter’s marriage gets a gift kit worth nearly Rs 15,000. A bed, an almirah, some clothes, some cash.

Her opponents, however, disparage her as a ‘Reliance candidate’. Until eight months ago, she was the MD of a software company floated by Reliance. She is a trustee of the Reliance-supported policy think-tank, Observer Research Foundation, a director with Observer Group of Publications, and most of the 41 crores of wealth declared by her is in the Reliance equity shares she and her husband hold. Her husband, Sandeep Tandon, is one of RIL’s directors, a ‘group advisor’, a confidant so close to Mukesh Ambani that he has been at the forefront of the dispute between the two brothers. A former Enforcement Directorate official, he had once raided Tina Ambani, before she married Anil, and is now the key Reliance man regarding taxation and overseas investments.

“My husband does not work for Reliance. He is a lawyer and Reliance is one of his clients,” Annu says, “And I’m proud about that. Why is corporate considered bad?”

Annu says her corporate experience has helped her in Unnao. “Corporates do research before they enter a marker. Before my trust started work in Unnao, I got local unemployed youth to do a survey of every hamlet to know the district’s problems,” she says. One of the problems was the high incidence of disability caused by fluoride in drinking water, thanks to the polluting leather tanning industries. Countless free crutches and wheelchairs followed.

Ask her if this amounts to buying the electorate, she does not go into defence modeas you would expect. “Who asked my opponent to spend 5 crores buying his ticket from Mayawati? I’m proud of the money I have spent. They don’t know how to spend their money.”

But what about being a ‘Reliance candidate’? “These are just Amar Singh’s ideas,” she says, and stops. “I don’t want to speak much on Amar Singh. He is a creation of the media. You guys should simply shun him,” she says, the only time she gets agitated.

Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh had gone on record saying that the Congress-SP alliance in Uttar Pradesh did not materialize because Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh is refused to leave the Unnao seat for the SP. Amar Singh had also said that this was because he was favouring a candidate who worked for the same company as Digvijay’s son. “This is rubbish. Digvijayji’s son does not work for Reliance,” says Annu Tandon.

“All this is because of the dispute between the (Ambani) brothers,” says Tandon. The political clout that younger brother Anil Ambani has through the Samajwadi Party, some say, is being countered by elder brother Mukesh in ways such as this.

“You will see on 16 May that the people of Unnao will reject money and power,” says the SP candidate Devendra Kumar. But her main candidate is from the BSP, Arun Kumar Shukla alias Anna. If Annu is about money, then Anna is about muscle power. The case against Anna for being part of the group that attacked BSP leader Mayawati in the infamous ‘guesthouse incident’ of 1995 is still going on, even as he joined the BSP last November. The Unnao seat is currently held by the BSP, which is banking on Anna fetching Brahmin votes alongwith the BSP’s committed Dalit votebank. “I found to my surprise that there isn’t so much crime in Unnao as some people have made it famous for,” is how Annu takes a jibe at Anna.

The people of Unnao couldn’t be bothered less about where the Annu Tandon-run NGO’s money is coming from, or what these corporate rivalries are all about. They can’t be thankful enough to her for the schools she runs, the Yashoda Vatikas that employ educated village housewives to take care of children after school, or the support the trust gives to anyone whose house is destroyed by fire.

To be fair, Annu’s trust has been working for several years and her candidature was announced only recently. Such is the impact of her social work in the country’s largest constituency that the electorate is willing to vote for her across caste barriers. A day before the election on 30 April, in the village of Nanda Kheda, people in the Dalit, Thakur and Brahmin settlements alike said they were planning to vote for Annu.

She joined the Congress, she says, on the insistence of friends such as Salman Khursheed and Jitin Prasada. Salman Khan came down to Unnao, but not to campaign, she defends. “Salman came for the Holi celebrations. He’s a friend. There was not a single politician on the stage,” she says.

“Except you, that is!”

“Yes, except me!”

The campaigning has drawn to a close, the poor are still thronging to her haveli with request letters the way they throng outside the DM’s office, and her supporters want to burn an effigy of Amar Singh. “Please stop this, I don’t want any of it,” she says, sipping Diet Coke, her manicured nails looking freshly polished. “I can lose now only if the opponents take to dirty tricks.” Incidentally, they same about her.

(An edited, shorter version of this article by me has appeared in the 15 May issue of Open magazine, where I work.)

Boki, by Nitoo Das

THE ATTIC 36 REGAL BUILDINGS, NEW DELHI TEL: 23746050

wednesday 12th november

5.00 pm Book Release of Boki by Nitoo Das. Publishers: Virtual Artists Collective

Boki, Nitoo Das’ first poetry collection, plays around with given grammars, words and voices. With the skill of a ventriloquist, she gives language to several personae in her dramatic monologues and her soundscapes create a sensory world with words that slip and slide into each other. Das’ painterly eye captures precise and stark visual images that make us look at the ordinary with fresh eyes. Boki–a word that means nothing in English, but in “Doiboki”, the poem it’s in, it stands for a shouted syllable, a taunt, a song, a deconstruction of someone’s name…A ‘nonsense’ word that brings so much from its two syllables is surely what poetry is about–the creation of image from sound. To bok in Assamese, Das’ first language, means to mutter/speak meaninglessly and repetitively. The Sanskrit word, Vak, from which this irreverent Assamese derivative takes its origins, means Speech. And Nitoo Das’ Boki speaks in an explosion of images in which she demonstrates an uncanny ability to create poems that surprise us, hold us and move us.

Boki will be released by teacher, critic, novelist and poet, GJV Prasad and will be followed by readings from the collection by Nitoo Das.

Nitoo Das is a Senior Lecturer of English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She was born in Guwahati, but came to Delhi for her higher studies and decided to stay on and learn various survival skills in this ancient city. She runs a blog that began as an experiment over three years ago while working on a research project on poetry as hypertext. Her interests include fractals, caricatures, comic books, horror films, and studies of online communities. Boki is her first collection.

Blog | Interview | Virtual Artistes Collective

Being Bhaiyyalal

Eight convicted, three let off in the Khairlanji case, the news tells you. The news also tells you of hostile witnesses. But they won’t tell you how and why Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange himself became a hostile witness in a case he wanted justice done tone; the papers and TV channels won’t tell you why Bhaiyyalal is estranged with his own relatives, how some local NCP leaders who were accused in the case were never charge-sheeted, how Bhaiyyalal’s biggest grouse with life is the guilt that he cowardly ran away, as the head of the family, despite knowing what was being done to his family… it’s much more difficult to be Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange than you think.

Bihar blames Nepal for floods, CM orders judicial probe

[An edited, shorter version of this report by me appeared this morning in Sakaal Times.]

Supaul (Bihar) / Sunsari (Nepal): Even as Bihar has ordered a judicial probe into all embankment breaches in the Kosi river since the embankment was built in 1953, water resources minister Vijendra Yadav has blamed Nepal for the August 18 incident.

Yadav has said that the Bihar government was aware of the impending crisis but could not do anything because of lack of cooperation from the Nepalese side. He said that the water resources ministry’s secretary had written a letter to the Indian embassy officials in Nepal, a copy of which had been marked to the irrigation department at the center. He said that on August 14, CM Nitish Kumar had approached external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee requesting him to intervene.

“I did not want to reveal all this earlier because external affairs are under the centre’s jurisdiction but I have been forced to do so because I am being painted as the villain who caused the flood,” he told Sakaal Times.

He listed four reasons to explain how the Nepalese side was responsible. Firstly, embankment repair and flood-fighting work was halted because of a strike by labourers. He said that the strike was instigated by local political elements. At the breach point in Kusaha, however, there were conflicting versions from people about why the strike took place. Some said they were demanding higher wages, some said one group was demanding that no other group be allowed to work, and some said they were striking because they hadn’t been paid wages for five days. One contractor, Babloo Kumar of Surya, who has been hired now to help the public sector company HSCL with the repair work, said that the Bihar government often delayed payments to contractors and water resources department officials used discretionary powers to give contracts to small upstart companies.

Everyone, including local Nepalis, were in agreement with minister Yadav’s contention that flood-fighting was badly hit because Indian officials couldn’t cut trees and work in the night as the area had been decalred a reserved forest. The work was often delayed because officials wouldn’t be given passes to go into the reserved forest, which came up along the embankment India built as per an agreement with Nepal in 1953. “Even the previous water resources minister was once not given permission and had to return,” said Virendra Prasad, the official manning the Kosi barrage at the Indo-Nepal border. Locals there also confirmed that Bihar government officials were often afraid to visit the site for inspection because of the bad law and order situation in Nepal, which has improved drastically.

Prasad also confirmed the allegations that the two engineers had been attacked and firs thus filed. Upstream in Barakshetra, which is the catchment area of the Kosi river, the gauge tower that measures the water discharge, had been brought down by Maoists in May.

“Sharad Yadav, who was invited to Prime Minister Prachanda’s swearing-in on 18 August, had taken up the matter with him, but it was too late,” minister Yadav told Sakaal Times, “The new government in Nepal, however, is giving us all co-operation now.”

When asked about Nepal’s role in the breach, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar told this reporter, “Some questions are answered by time.”

Yadav’s clarifications come in the wake of sever criticism against him from the opposition and local media which blame him for negligence. Union minister of state for water resources, Jai Prakash Narain Yadav, who is from the RJD, has already said that the state government is blaming Nepal to hide its own negligent role, and that it should not have claimed in its daily embankment bulletins that all embankments are safe if they were in the know.

The opposition RJD has also called the judicial probe an eyewash as it does not seek to probe the state’s role in the August 18 floods and divert the attention to all embankment breaches since 1953.