India: Anhad Releases Report on the 365 days (June 2014-June 2015) of the Narendra Modi Government

This report published by Anhad on 18 June 2015 documents the intense and multi pronged attack on democratic rights of citizens and on secular values enshrined in India’s constitution by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report takes stock of the first full year of the Modi Government from June 2014 to June 2015. This 194 page report is edited by John Dayal and Shabnam Hashmi and has been published by ANHAD a Delhi based non profit body.


365 Days Democracy and Secularism Under The Modi Regime - A Report [PDF]
edited by John Dayal and by Shabnam Hashmi
(18 June 2015)

Visit by civil society groups to Atali village in Ballabgarh, Haryana following communal violence: Press Statement 5 June 2015

http://www.sacw.net/article11242.html

Sri Lanka: Continued harassment of Ms. Sharmila Seyyid and her family - Statement by civil society members

http://sacw.net/article11130.html

Trying to cage a Tigress: Roused Civil Society defends Teesta Setalvad against Gujarat Attempt to Humiliate Her

http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article5485.html

by John Dayal
(Mainstream, VOL LIII No 9, February 21, 2015 )

Around noon on Thursday, February 19, Supreme Court Justices Dipak Misra and Adarsh Kumar Goel extended the stay on the arrest of human rights activist and editor Teesta Setalvad and her husband, Javed Anand, in a case of alleged embezzlement of funds for a “Museum of Resistance” at the Gulbarg Society in Ahmedabad, where over 60 people were killed during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots that devastated several towns and villages in Gujarat.

This pauses for some time a convoluted case that has generated interest in international and national human rights circles, in the media, and has become part of the political discourse in the country. And in some ways has also not let the Supreme Court’s own reputation untouched, focusing the spotlight as it did, if only for sometime, on the friendship of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, with a judge on the Bench which on an earlier occasion had heard the case, and been rather curt in his obiter dicta. Chief Justice H.L. Dattu had then assigned the anticipatory bail plea of Setalvad to a new Bench even though none of the two judges on the earlier Bench had sought recusal from the hearing.

“The value of freedom cannot even be compared to the stars in the sky,” the Court said on Thursday as it questioned the need to arrest her. The Gujarat Government had said that Teesta and her husband, Javed Anand, must be arrested to enable an investigation into allegations that they misused the money. “Who the petitioner is, that’s absolutely irrelevant, the question is whether liberty can be put on ventilator or stay in intensive care unit. This isn’t a case of any scam which needs custodial interrogation. This is a case of misuse of funds of NGOs.”

The Gujarat Police have single-mindedly pursued Teesta and Javed on a complaint filed against her by 12 persons who claim to be residents of the Gulbarg Society after the Museum project was reportedly shelved, alleging she raised Rs 9.75 crores between 2008 and 2012 through her NGO and used Rs 3.75 crores for branded clothes, shoes, and foreign travel. The Gujarat Government told the court that the couple had not been cooperative and were trying to influence witnesses. Rejecting their argument, the Court said Ms Setalvad would be asked to cooperate and submit all documents for the investigation. Her bail petition has been rejected by two other courts. Last week, as the police arrived at their Mumbai home, the couple won a last-minute reprieve when the Supreme Court agreed to hear their appeal. They have been told to provide a list of documents and names of donors as sought by the Gujarat Police and if they did not cooperate, the Gujarat Police can file an application for cancellation of their bail.

The police now have to go through several thousand pages of documents and accounts of records to see if they can prove the defalcation. The papers are already with them and their lawyers for quite some time

And that was the point of curiosity with civil society activists who had been following the case for some time, wondering what exactly was it that the police wanted from the couple in custodial investigation which they did not have with them already.

To most it was clear that the objective never was the pursuit of evidence, or even of justice. It was to get Teesta and Javed inside a police lockup, and then in jail, to crush their spirit and humiliate them in the public eye in fulfilment of an agenda that would send out a strong signal to human rights activists, civil society and to the minority communities on the utter futility of resisting, much less challenging, the might of powerful leaders of the government and the Sangh Parivar.

For Teesta, the founder with Javed of that pioneering journal, Communalism Combat, and then a citizens’ group in Mumbai to fight for the victims, had pursued not just murderous hood-lums of the Sangh Parivar and police officers willing to act as henchmen of the state, but the top leaders, including Ministers, party honchos, and their ultimate Boss, Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, and now the Prime Minister of India. In case after case, she challenged them in the legal system, assisted by some excellent lawyers, exposing just about every crime that a state could commit in collaboration with political groups and a subservient, or cowardly, adminis-trative apparatus. For the first time in India, 117 perpetrators of communal violence, including a Minister in the then Modi State Cabinet, had been convicted. Had it not been for her and other rights activists, the victims would been gagged to submission.

It was in not sparing Modi, and his political major-domo and now President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Amit Shah, that Teesta committed the crime of lese-majesty.

“Teesta and Javed are being targeted. In the last 12 years, whenever she got a favourable development from court, the police of Gujarat have become active to target her,” says Indira Jaisingh, former Additional Solicitor General of India, who was among those who addressed public meetings in solidarity with Teesta and Javed. “When all evidences in the case are documented then where is the need to arrest her and personally interrogate her? It is just to humiliate her and teach her a lesson,” said she. Indira Jaisingh also expressed concern over mani-pulation of the system and referred to the clean- chit given to Amit Shah by a Mumbai court in the Gujarat fake encounter case involving three murders. “I am concerned about such ability to manipulate the system. In the case of Shah, three judges were changed. Till today, the CBI has not chosen to appeal against the order of the Mumbai court. Is the CBI a parrot in the cage of the ruling party? When the BJP was in the Opposition it would make similar accusation against the Congress-led UPA. It is not a crime to hold a view contrary to that of the government. But the government of the day thinks so. They have brute majority in the Lok Sabha. We can only speak, but they want to suppress that right too.”

Editor of Hindi daily Jan Satta Om Thanvi wondered as to why the police want to arrest Teesta in a ‘petty’ case while the accused in rape and murder cases are being released and reinstated. He also said Teesta’s case has a symbolic significance. “Teesta’s is a petty case. Several accused of murder and rape are being released and reinstated but Teesta and Javed are being hunted. Our right to speak is being challenged. Most in the media are supporting those who are stifling our freedom of expression. It is not an individual case of Teesta. It is symbolic.”

Teesta has, in interviews with Seema Mustafa of The Citizen.in and other journalists, said only around Rs. 4.6 lakhs was received by the Sabrang Trust for the proposed Museum. This amount, which was highly insufficient for the memorial, is still shown as unutilised earmarked funds in the balance-sheets of the Trust from year to year. The grossly exaggerated percentages allegedly transferred to personal accounts have been arrived at by clubbing together salaries and honorariums and reimbursements for office and equipment.

G. Pramod Kumar, in an article in FirstPost.com, noted that Teesta had clarified that credit card expenses that the NGO paid for were not personal, but official such as travel. It’s not unusual for people to use personal credit cards for official purposes and then get the official expenses reimbursed. But by conflating the personal (wine, groceries, books etc.) and official, the police tried to besmirch their reputation and make out a case. Similarly, additional money used from the account was for salaries and legal expenses.

The police case was based on a complaint by 12 members of the Gulbarg Housing Society, but it curiously refused to take note of the submission by the Secretary and Chairman of the Society that the case was false. The latter had also informed the police that the complainants had misused office stationery. That despite an official clarifi-cation from the Gulbarg Society, the police went ahead with the case, looked clearly motivated. And now their over zealousness in seeking custodial interrogation of the couple nails their intent.

Pramod Kumar noted their track record in foisting spurious cases against her. In 2012, the Supreme Court came down heavily on the state for initiating a probe for “illegal exhumation” of the 2002 riot victims. “This is a hundred per cent spurious case to victimise the petitioner (Setalvad),” said the Court. “This type of case does no credit to the State of Gujarat in any way,” it further said. A year later, the police came up with the embezzlement case, despite the official representatives of the Gulbarg Society affirming that they had no complaint, and wanted to arrest Setalvad. “Obviously, Setalvad is a marked person because she is refusing to give up, along with Zakia Jafri, the complainant in the Gulbarg Society massacre case, against the Gujarat State Government and the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Although a Special Investigation Team had found no prosecutable evidence against him. Setalvad and her supporters, point to the dissenting notes by the Supreme Court-appointed amicus curiae, Raju Ramachandran, who had said that the evidence against Modi was significant.”

In 2005, she was accused of pressuring Zaheera Sheikh in the Best Bakery Case to given evidence against the government. The SC had later absolved Setalvad and sent Zaheera Sheikh to jail for a year. “This is a classic example of a case where evidence were tampered with and witnesses won over,” the Court had then said.

Recently, in an Open Letter to Teesta, writer Malavika Sanghvi made poignant mention of her courage: “Through all the intricacies of the court battles to bring justice to the victims in the Best Bakery and Gulbarg Society cases, through the ascension of Modi from Gujarat CM to India’s Prime Minister, feted on the international stage, through the triumphalism and hurrahs of an India all set to become a world superpower and a utopia of Right-wing policies and practices, you have stood unmoved, unrelenting, reminding us of the sins against humanity that all the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash away. And for this, your life has been turned upside down. Daily court cases to fight; witnesses to protect against threats and bribes; your motives and personal integrity questioned; and what’s worst of all, as a measure of the State’s dirty tricks department, you have been accused of cheating and misappropriation of funds of the very people that you have dedicated your life to empowering!”

The Supreme Court ruling this week, hopefully, will help bring this harassment to an end.

The author is a senior journalist, human rights activist and member of the National Integration Council.

Building a culture of tolerance | Vasundhara Sirnate

The Hindu, April 10, 2014

Building a culture of tolerance

Vasundhara Sirnate

Religious neutrality has become an accepted behavioural script for the state, but not for society and certainly not for individuals even when they are state actors

The framers of our Constitution were well aware of the need for politics that could transform a society rooted in caste and religious tradition. The nationalist struggle was not only a struggle to overthrow the British Raj, but was a moment of manoeuvre to rework a society that had a dismal record and understanding of human dignity and worked on the tyrannical hierarchy of caste that negated self-evident individual rights. It was this awareness that led to a conscious choice of institutions and symbols that formed the basis of such a transformative articulation of politics. For instance, the national flag has Ashoka’s Wheel of Law — a symbol taken from a Buddhist era — which was to function as a reminder for every citizen and the state to commit to dharma. Ashoka’s dharma was a secular one, based on a collective morality that hinged on undoing the worst practices of Indian society. Post-1947, the commitment to secularism in India did not only mean a commitment to freedom of religion, but also a commitment to do away with religious practices considered being at odds with liberalism. In other words, secularism didn’t simply mean state neutrality towards all religions. In India, it encompassed the desire to undertake social reform.
Fate of the secular script

What has complicated the project of secularism in India are two issues. First, the state may be neutral towards religion, but this does not mean that state actors and individuals in society are neutral towards religion. Second, there is no agreement in India that religion should be relegated to the private sphere. In fact, the opposite is true. Indians, of all religions, pray in large numbers in varying frequencies every week and they do so collectively and in public. This has meant that political appeals are often made through religious spaces and spokespersons.

In India, the state cannot afford to be indifferent to religion because societal and individual decisions are still dictated by religious conditioning and imperatives. What has emerged over 65 years of muddling through this issue of secularism and religion is that religious neutrality has become an accepted behavioural script for the state, but not for society and certainly not for individuals (even when they are state actors).

This fate of the secular script is currently in the limelight. As observers have noted, more and more members of the bureaucracy are tacitly Hindutva supporters and some court judgments over the last two decades have emphasised religious morality or interpreted Hinduism in particular ways. Increasingly, the urban middle class in tier-one and tier-two cities, business persons and a growing number of women also support Hindutva, even less tacitly.

Theoretically, there is nothing obviously wrong about supporting any political ideology. If the left can exist and be supported by many people, so can the right. However, Hindutva is not merely the statement of a political ideology. It is also a process wherein there is an attempt to make Hinduism and Indian nationhood almost coterminous. This is something that the Constitution framers were dead against, notwithstanding a massive debate in the Constituent Assembly where elected representatives from the right actively argued in favour of a Hindu nation, but were denied by Nehru and the Congress.
Breakdown of tolerance

Indian society is not yet fully secular, while the Indian state understands secularism as state neutrality towards religion combined with select interventions in the religious domain to safeguard some rights. Perhaps the concept better suited to understanding Indian society and its relationship with religion is more like a “scale of tolerance” — in some places, society is more tolerant of other religious and caste groups, in some places less so, but nowhere in India is society perfectly secular, i.e., nowhere in India do people not care about religion or maintain their distance from it.

The problem is that tolerance is an independent, individual choice and cannot be forced onto anyone. It is also a deeply patronising value. Its exercise rests on perceptions an individual possesses about another community and its implementation then becomes a matter of individual dispensation and benevolence.

In recent years, nothing has testified to the breakdown of religious tolerance in society than the various instances of communal and caste clashes. Riots are manufactured in contemporary India and they, more than anything else, tell us that essentially we live in a society where tolerance has a weak societal foundation, evidenced in the easy way mobs are mobilised by political entrepreneurs to engage in killing. While tolerance is a sought after value by many in India, we have been unable to enforce it in society, or even broaden the appeal of being tolerant in society. Campaign speeches by our politicians that often invoke hate speech against particular groups do not help the matter.

Let me illustrate this with a few examples. First, many people in India do not want to rent homes to Muslims, single women and men and people from the northeast. The logic offered is often that such people may do “bad” things, “immoral” things or may eat food that homeowners don’t want cooked in the spaces they rent out. Often, local society associations decide that certain types of people cannot be rented homes. If they do charge rent from these groups of people, the rents and deposits are usually higher. This intolerant rental discrimination is allowed to work precisely because there is no law that prohibits a landlord from discriminating against people based on religion, race, gender or marital status. In essence, a person’s perception of what a group represents (single women, Muslims, people from the northeast), allows that person to informally institutionalise his intolerance of such groups.

Second, while broadly practising tolerance in public, many parents brief their children that they cannot marry Muslims, a dark-skinned person or a lower caste person. Matrimonial advertisements still exemplify a demand for same-caste marriages although this has decreased over time as a recent study by Ahuja and Ostermann shows. But the people most likely to marry outside their caste are lower castes, Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes (OBC). And while we’re on this subject, khaps in north India have sanctioned honour killings for what they consider bad marriage decisions between people of the same gotra.

Third, conversations and studies of recruiters in private corporations suggest that they reject resumes based on last names, prefer people of the same caste and sometimes profile people based on region. For instance, a call centre recruiter said that she didn’t take people from Bihar because they were bad in English. She also left out the resumes of Muslims. During a study I undertook in Chandni Chowk in New Delhi in 2005, Muslims reported that they were often seen as a credit risk and that banks were unwilling to lend them money. Some also reported that the police had detained them for no reason.
Undercut by the majority

Finally, in recent conversations with educators, many who run private schools are unwilling to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) because it would mean an influx of underprivileged OBC students whose behaviour and language, they suggest, will act as a bad influence on their students. The word used to describe them was ganwaar, or rustic and ill-behaved.

Essentially, what I am trying to argue is that even while the state protects religious and caste groups through various institutional measures, much of this is undercut by a society that doesn’t similarly value the rights of other groups or individuals. Part of the support for the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena and other politicians like Mr. Owaisi, for instance, comes from those who believe that certain religious minorities, majorities or outsiders, need to be “shown their place.”

Such people don’t want tolerance, perhaps because trampling on someone’s rights serves the majority well. It means that benefits and rights, economic opportunity and social equality are not properly extended beyond the majoritarian fold. A case in point being reservations, where only a small percent of reservations go to non-Hindu groups (like tribals); only recently have reservations been extended to Muslims in some States, via an incorporation into the State’s OBC list. So, predominantly one religious group, Hindus, most often capture the benefits of reservation.

There is a grave need to instil, cultivate or build a culture of tolerance in society, broadly through legislation if necessary. Untouchability being deemed an offence went much further than religious reform movements over 200 years in fighting the practice, as did the legal abolition of sati. Creating institutional mechanisms to deal with hate speech is a great place to start.

(Vasundhara Sirnate is the chief coordinator of research at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy.)

India: Appeal to UP Chief Minister to Restore Peace and Harmony in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli by Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (FDCA)

The following is an appeal addressed on behalf of the Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (FDCA) to the Union Home Minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, and the UP Chief Minister, Akhilesh Yadav, for restoring peace and harmony in the riot-affected districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh. It was released to the press on January 28, 2014.

The Forum for Democracy and Communal Amity (FDCA) was established in July 1993. The main objective of the Forum is to promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood among all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic, regional or sectional diversities; assist in the prevention of conflicts, riots and other acts of communal violence; and help the victims of such conflicts or violence to rehabilitate themselves and seek redressal of their grievances.

The FDCA held a meeting in New Delhi on December 30, 2013, to discuss, in general, the existential threat of communalism to Indian society and polity, and to consider, in particular, the possible role it can play to restore peace and harmony in the riot-affected districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli in Uttar Pradesh. At the end of the meeting, a decision was taken to dispatch a delegation of the FDCA to this area in order to study the current situation and the needs of the riot-affected people.

Accordingly, a seven-member team of the FDCA visited the riot-affected areas for three days (on January 4th, 5th and 10th, 2014) and met victims, their families, community leaders and senior members of the local administration. The team's report, which is in the process of being prepared, will be released to the press and made available to the authorities of the Central and State governments and to other concerned as soon as it is ready. However, on the basis of the oral presentation of their findings by the team members in a meeting of the FDCA held in New Delhi on January 20, 2014, the Forum calls upon the Central and the UP governments to take the following measures on an urgent basis:

Conditions must be created to enable those uprooted from their homes in the riot-affected villages to go back to the villages. They have the fundamental right under the Constitution to safe and peaceful stay at their homes and occupation of their properties. This will also be the most effective means of restoring communal harmony and amity in the riot-affected areas of these two districts. Finally, it will restore confidence among the Muslim population not only in the rest of UP but also in India.

The following steps should be taken in order to create the conditions conducive to the return of those displaced by the riots, to their hearths and homes:

(a) A suitable job should be given to a family member of the deceased;

(b) The State Government should forthwith withdraw the condition that those who have been provided compensation of Rs 5 lakhs will have to surrender this amount if they go back to their homes.

(c) Those who have not been given or are not qualified to receive this compensation but have fled their homes out of fear, should be provided, both as a means as well as an incentive, for returning and resettling in the homes/shelters from where they have fled out of fear of life. A sum of Rs 3 lakhs per person could be the appropriate level of such assistance.

(d) An additional incentive should be given as temporary employment until cultivation by those who have land is resumed and the landless on return are able to find jobs. For this, a fund of Rupees five crores should be created urgently either by the State or the Central Government or by both of them jointly. The operation of the fund should be entrusted to a committee consisting of local representatives of affected people, social activists of the area concerned and a qualified officer of the State Government of reasonable seniority.

(e) The State Government should deploy an appropriate number of personnel to liaise with the Gram Pradhans of the affected villages for locating and inviting those displaced to return to their villages. For this, help should be taken of the volunteers of the NGOs active in this area. The FDCA itself will be happy to designate a team for this purpose;

(f) In spite of these measures, the displaced families may not return to their villages so long as justice is not done to them and those directly involved in perpetrating the violence are freely roaming around in the affected villages. It is, therefore, essential that most of those against whom FIRs have been lodged should be arrested without delay and those involved in violence and arrested should not be released without a court order. (By all accounts, 540 FIRs have been registered in connection with the violence in which 6000 persons have been named. Out of this, only 208 have so far been arrested. This is hardly conducive to restoring confidence and doing justice to the riot-affected people.)

(g) Immediate steps should be taken to make special arrangements for the education of the displaced children and special exami-nations should be conducted, if necessary, to ensure that these students do not lose their academic year.

{Signatories:}

Professor Muchkund Dubey (President, FDCA); Kuldip Nayar; Justice (Retd) Rajinder Sachar; Advocate N.D. Pancholi (Life Member, FDCA); Mohammad Salim Engineer (Acting General Secretary, FDCA); Nusrat Ali (Member, FDCA); Professor Prem Singh (Delhi University); Professor K.B. Saxena (Council for Social Development); Professor Imrana Qadeer (Council for Social Development); Shafi Madani (Social Activist); Dr Javed Jameel (Writer and Social Activist); Father M.D.Thomas (Social Activist); Muhammad Ahmed (Social Activist); Ms Rakhi Gupta (Social Activist); Dr Rakesh Rana (Bundelkhand University); Alaauddin (Social Activist); Dr Ashwani Kumar (Delhi University).

India: The dark side of the aam aadmi | A. Srinivas

Business Line, 20 January 2014

The dark side of the aam aadmi
by A. SRINIVAS

AAP’s response to the attack on African women is deeply disturbing.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Delhi seems to have lost it. Drunk with self-righteousness, it violated all laws and basic decency recently by rounding up and humiliating African women in the middle of the night in south Delhi.

The AAP’s defence is that its volunteers stepped in because the police was doing nothing about an alleged drug and prostitution racket.

Does that entitle them to enter women’s homes without a search warrant and, worse still, at night?

This sort of vigilantism is both disgusting and frightening. What makes matters worse is the shrill defence of the episode, with the chief minister simplistically linking rape to sex and prostitution rackets.

His remarks, besides suggesting the arrogance of a person who is riding a ‘people’s wave’, also betrays a conservative mindset.

Is violence on women merely an offshoot of crime and corruption (that mother of all problems)?

Or is it a problem of patriarchy that is within all of us — in families, in the way we think and act?

Arvind Kejriwal, the Gandhian, should have a thing or two to say about the inner being instead of going along with his Law Minister. Running the government is not about being a pugilist all the time.

But his party is drifting on a cloud of moral righteousness and Kejriwal seems to have forgotten Gandhi for the moment. All we see is a here-and-now, 24x7 zeal, the bizarre search for a clean, pure society (in which Africans can find no place?).

It’s frightening to see these lakhs of AAP volunteers burning with impatience to wipe out ‘corruption’. Corruption becomes a metaphor for dirt, an excuse to externalise the prejudices within us.

Who are these internet-savvy volunteers? If their jottings in Facebook and other websites are anything to go by, they abhor complexity of thought, an engagement with ideas, and particularly, a reference to political history.

“We want to remove corruption now, please do not burden us with your baggage”, is the refrain.

They represent the alarming anti-intellectualism of a section of the middle class, and are, in all likelihood, students or products of engineering and management institutes whose biases have remained intact in the absence of an exposure to liberal streams of thought.

One can only hope that the views of this section do not reflect the core sensibility of the AAP.

Kejriwal’s responses on the issue of the African women as well as on the political rights of Kashmiris betray some sort of connect with this section of the middle class.

Will saner elements in the party be able to alter the tenor of the discourse?

AAP’s enthusiastic volunteers want to see the world slotted into neat categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ so that they can actively, if not violently, be part of the solution.

Unable to cope with complexity, they rush to so-called ‘god’men, hyper-personalities such as Kejriwal or Narendra Modi, or, to extend the examples across space and time, the Osama Bin Ladens and even the Charu Mazumdars. They are ‘fundamentalists’.
Insightful views

Salman Akhtar, professor of psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College, has spoken insightfully on the “lure of fundamentalism”.

In his inaugural lecture at the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies, Delhi University, in May 2005, he observed: “Instead of complexity, fundamentalism offers simplicity, instead of moral ambiguity, fundamentalism offers moral clarity… Instead of cultural impurity and hybridisation, fundamentalism offers purity.”

He went on to say: “Fundamentalism lulls us into a sleep of childhood, a sleep of simplicity but it is worse than childhood because a child is always questioning and attempting to come out of its innocence bit by bit.”

The extent of AAP’s ‘innocence’ is disconcerting.

The experienced elements in the party must strive towards moderation.

One way of jettisoning the muck in the flood of new members (to borrow a metaphor used by AAP leader Yogendra Yadav in a recent interview) is to take clear social and political positions.

‘Corruption’ (the slogan, not the issue) should take a backseat in the party’s lexicon in favour of a more enlightened view of social change.

The party may then shed its ‘fundamentalist’ tendencies.

Janvadi Vichar Andolan, Bharat (JAVAB) A National Campaign for Secularism Announced

Today at a press conference addressed by : Lalji Desai (Jameen Adhikar Andolan – Gujarat (JAAG)), Indu Kumar Jani (Editor Naya Marg), Rajnibhai Dave (Editor Bhoomiputra), Gagan Sethi (Janvikas), Manan Trivedi (Anhad) and Shabnam Hashmi JANVADI VICHAR ANDOLAN, BHARAT (JAVAB) was announced.
ANNOUNCING

JANVADI VICHAR ANDOLAN, BHARAT (JAVAB)
A National Campaign for Secularism

Defeat Communal Forces in 2014 General Elections

The general elections are but a few months away. Many of us have been working for years in the field of human rights, health, water rights, land rights, Dalit/Adivasi rights, women’s issues, civil rights. Many of us are writers, academics, teachers, students, activists. While we may think of our work as deeply political, we have not been engaged directly in politics, or at least electoral politics. 2014, however is different. The danger of communalism is imminent. The portends are dark already. As we inch closer to the elections, the façade of development talk is forgotten and an unabashed Hindutva agenda begins to unfold. Uttar Pradesh is the best illustration of this.

As has been said by election watchers, political analysts and commentators, the fate of the avowedly communal political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is tied to its electoral fortunes in the state of UP. The arrival of Amit Shah last year as the BJP’s UP in charge coincided with the heralding of the old style communal propaganda. These are again – as earlier – matched by their real ability to foment violence, engineer riots, and drive vulnerable minority groups out of their homes and villages. Muzafarnagar burnt. But the entire belt of Western Uttar Pradesh remains on edge, the traditional unity between Jats and Muslims fractured because of cynical political calculations.

The success in Muzafarnagar may be attempted to be replicated elsewhere. As communal polarization becomes the sole guarantee of electoral success, tensions will be deliberately infused in places, which have witnessed communal peace and harmony in the past. In such a scenario, we are experiencing a restlessness and anxiety. We feel that we need to intervene urgently to the best of our ability to ensure the defeat of communal forces. Indeed, the danger is far greater than simply the threat of communal takeover. The manner in which activists have been targeted by registration of vindictive FIRs for pursuing the legal process in the case of 2002 pogrom; the muzzling of all dissent, provides a glimpse into the authoritarian vision of this communal force. Indeed, the very existence of liberal, democratic and secular consciousness seems to be under assault.

Activists, academics, artists, writers and social workers are coming together to form a National Platform for Secularism called JANVADI VICHAR ANDOLAN, BHARAT ( JAVAB) with the twin agendas of countering communal forces in the forthcoming elections and advocating for a truly inclusive society, politics and economics. This Platform will be guided by the sensibilities forged in our collective struggles for dignity of dalits, the rights of Adivasis and other marginalised communities (pastoralists, fisherfolk, landless wage labour, informal and casual labourers), gender justice, the battles of the working class, increasingly fissured and invisibilized; mobilizations for a more equitable and sustainable development, environmental movements, as well as the democratic aspirations of peoples everywhere in the country.

While we are not aligning with any particular party, it will be our effort to appeal to all secular forces to ensure that the anti-communal vote does not splinter. But more than that this, the platform will work in some select constituencies to repel any communal polarization through its grass roots campaigns and meetings right up till the elections.

SEE FULL TEXT AT: http://www.sacw.net/article7323.html

India: Independent inquiry into Muzaffarnagar ‘Riots’: Mohan Rao, Ish Mishra, Pragya Singh, Vikas Bajpai

Press Statement on the Report prepared by Mohan Rao, Ish Mishra, Pragya Singh and Vikas Bajpai

December 30, 2013

A team of independent academics and a journalist carried out an inquiry into the communal violence that shook Muzaffarnagar district in UP this past September. The report is based on the findings of the team during its visit to Muzaffarnagar district on the 9th and the 10th of November and again on the 27th November. The members of the team were:

Dr. Mohan Rao, Faculty, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, JNU.
Mr Ish Misra, Faculty, Department of Political Science, Hindu College, Delhi University.
Ms.Pragya Singh, Journalist, Outlook, and
Dr. Vikas Bajpai, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, JNU.

The team also drew upon the assistance of Dr. Subhash Tyagi, Professor of Geography, Machra College, Meerut, and Praveen Raj Tyagi, Principal Greenland Public School, Duhai, Ghaziabad, in the collection of some data and the conduct of the visit.

OBJECTIVES OF OUR ENQUIRY:

To investigate the role of state agencies in either preventing or containing violence, in taking appropriate punitive actions against the guilty and also to investigate some incidents of communal violence.
To investigate the role of the government in providing relief and rehabilitating the displaced and the progress made in displaced people going back to their villages and homes.
To understand economic, social and political reasons that led to the recent spate of communal violence in this area of Western Uttar Pradesh.

SALIENT FINDINGS:

Role of the agencies of the State

The fact that India is Constitutionally mandated as ‘Secular’ State makes it obligatory on the agencies of the State to uphold secular values. However, the communal incidents in Muzaffarnagar, its aftermath and the continuing tragedy of the riot affected persons have been the undoing of the Indian State in this regard. Regrettably, this has been the outcome of deliberate and calculated decisions at different levels as is evident from the findngs:

The affidavits riot victims were made to sign for availing monetary compensation

The Uttar Pradesh (UP) government has made the riot affected Muslim families in relief camps to sign an affidavit (copy attached as annexure) that enforced following conditions on the signatories in order to avail of financial relief:

“That myself and members of my family have come leaving our village and home being terrorized due to violent incidents in ……… village and we will not now return to our original village and home under any circumstances”.
“That the lumpsum financial help being given for my family by the government will only be used by me to rehabilitate my family. By this money I will live with my family voluntarily arranging for residence at appropriate place elsewhere”.
“That in the condition of receiving lumpsum financial help amount, myself or members of my family will not demand compensation relating to any damage to any immovable property in my village or elsewhere”.

The State thus sought to impose a demographic change in the riot affect villages through a legal instrument. The monetary relief being disbursed was not to rebuild the damaged property or lost means of livelihood. This has served to reinforce the terror of communal violence in the minds of affected families besides driving a schism in the composite culture of the area which mars the possibilities of gradual healing. Muslims are now being ghettoized in towns and localities dominated by them.

These aspects were pointed out by the team members to the district administration, The officials however denied that the government was preventing people from going back to the villages and told of an order stating that those who wanted to return to their villages were free to do so. But a copy of the said order could not be provided by the administration.

Nepotism, complicity and inaction of the police in incidents of violence

The shallow credibility of the law and order machinery in Muzaffarnagar is best reflected in the statement of senior police officials that – “both the Jats and the Muslims are complaining against us, so the police must have done something good.” Police itself is at pain to enumerate pro-active and positive actions taken by them against the wrong doers. Establishing credibility in the eyes of minorities becomes all the more difficult when in a region with around 27 percent Muslim population, as per senior police official of the district, the representation of Muslims in police force is less than 3 percent. The officer however maintained that “this did not matter for a policeman is a policeman and religion was not a factor in discharge of his duties.”

The residents at the camps however said that they did not want to go back to their villages as their tormentors were still roaming free and that the government had done little that would have them repose their faith in the law and order machinery. The frequent transfers of the senior police officials in the district have not helped matters either. In 2013 the SSP of the district has been changed five times.

In Qutba village, where from single largest number of Muslim killings has been reported (8 Muslim were killed) a picket of PAC (provincial armed police) was posted in the village at the time of riots. These policemen were having tea in the Pradhan’s house when mobs started rampaging Muslim households. The three Muslim men who rushed to seek their help were said to have been locked up by these policemen in the Pradhan’s house.

The second incident of killings that took place with the police in vicinity was at the Mohammepur Raisingh village on October 30. Three Muslim youth from the neighboring Hussainpur village were abducted from the fields and killed by the Jats even as a picket of the state police was posted in the village. The Hussainpur villagers on learning of the abduction of youth repeatedly rang the SHO of Bhaura Kalan police station, but their calls went unanswered. It was told that the SHO had switched off his phone.

Pradhan of Hussainpur village later told that despite their best efforts many of those accused by name in the killings have still not been arrested and are roaming free in Mohammedpur Raisingh. He further alleged that the police has “declared rates” (of bribe) to weaken the cases against the accused or even let them go scot free.

It appears from the sequence and the circumstances of the incidents of violence in Muzaffarnagar that had the police and the district administration acted with alacrity and a fair sense of judgment in the immediate aftermath of the incidence of alleged “eve teasing” and related murders in Kawal village, the subsequent turn of events could have been entirely avoided.

Outsourcing of relief to the Muslim communal organizations by the State

It would have been best if the State machinery was seen by the riot affected Muslims as a dependable, sincere and caring source of succor and a guarantor of their safety. The State instead chose to outsource relief measures to Muslim communal organizations, principally the Jamiat-Ulema e Hind of Deoband though some other NGOs were also involved.

On being quizzed – why no state agency has a visible presence at the relief camps, the district administration told us that this was in accordance with the policy of the state government. The Shiv Pal Singh Yadav committee set up by the state government post riots had recommended that all relief be provided through community organizations.

This reflects redoubtable wisdom. Communal community organizations cannot be expected to be credible foot soldiers for Secular ideals. The impact of this was evident in the camps. Apart from apprehensions regarding security upon return to their villages, the people also said that they would prefer to live “amidst the security of their own people.”

Different reports before ours have graphically highlighted the pitiable conditions at the camps. We would only reiterate that even the least courtesies like essential medical or civil amenities such as drinking water or functioning toilets have not been provided to the people in the camps despite visits by the mightiest VIPs in the country.

Jamiat dominated committees appeared to tightly control what the people said of the arrangements at the camps. At the Bassi Kalan camp when the residents complained against the government, members of the managing committee tried to stop them. Likewise at camp no 1 at Shahpur a local Maulvi expressed his displeasure when the residents complained of the conditions. We were told by families in the relief camps that up to Rs 20,000 had been taken from them by functionaries of the Jamiat for constructing alternative accommodation.

A close confidant of ours asked the leader of the Jamiat as to why they were not opposing the affidavits that displaced Muslim families were being made to sign. Reply was – “there is nothing to worry about this and that all of them will finally be allowed to return to their villages.” Jamiat further claimed credit for getting handsome relief package for the displaced families. Silence of the Jamiat over the claims of the Samajwadi Party leadership that the Muslims in the camps were agents of the Congress and the BJP is equally deafening.

Any astute observer can note that the Samajwadi Party government of UP will now bank on the certifications of the mullahs to clean up its abominable record of a number of communal riots / disturbances in the state during its rule.

Local administration was categorical in stating that there are no refugees in any relief camp and government aid has stopped. Further insult to injury has been added by the statement of the UP home secretary that ‘people do not die of cold.’ These only undermine the secular credentials of the state.

The communal campaign and the Muzaffarnagar violence

The communal violence in Muzaffarnagar ought to be seen in the context of such violence in different parts of the country in 2013 beginning from Kishthwar (J & K), Masoori and Meerut in UP, Indore and Harda in MP, Bettiah and Nawada in Bihar and Rangpur in Cachar district of Assam. UP has witnessed a sustained campaign at communalization – may it be the ‘chaurasi kos parikrama’ or innovations like ‘love jihad’, ever since Amit Shah took over the reins of BJP in the state. This is pathognomonic of the communal forces represented by the Sangh Parivar. The approaching Lok Sabha elections in 2014 provide the leitmotif of this campaign.

However, equally abominable is the complicity of supposedly ‘secular’ forces in facilitating this communal campaign. The track record of the Akhilesh Yadav government in dealing with communal forces, its attitude towards common Muslims and history of hob-knobbing with Muslim communal forces is a case in the point.

The atmosphere in Muzaffarnagar has been vitiated over several months through sustained communal mobilization. Muslims have been the worst sufferers of communal orgy that swept Muzaffarnagar. Senior Superintendent Police informed that a total of 52 people died in Muzaffarnagar, of which 37 were Muslims and 15 were Hindus (in all likelihood these were all Jats). Unofficial sources put the number of displaced Muslims at 100,000 while by the time of our visit government acknowledged that 50,955 displaced persons had been accommodated in 11 relief camps. 540 FIRs have been registered in riot-related incidents, against approximately 6000 people.

There is an important distinction in the manner of Muslims and Jat deaths. Almost all the Jats who were killed were those who had participated in the Mahapanchayat at Nangla Mandaur village on September 7th. There were accounts of the Jats, in tractor trollies from different villages that went to take part in the Mahapanchayat, raising provocative slogans as they passed by Muslim habitations. Provocations like dogs being dressed in burqa and beaten with slippers were on display along with slogans like – “Musalmano ke do sthan – Pakistan ya kabristan’. Even the Jats we talked to admitted that “these youth have been taken in by the charisma of Modi and they raised slogans in his support” on way to the mahapanchayat.

Jats who died were killed in reaction to this deliberate provocation. Most of these deaths took place on the evening of September 7th in attacks on Jat trollies as they returned from the Mahapanchayat or were of those Jats who got injured in these attacks and died later. The only incident of a planned attack on Jats took place at Pur Baliyan on September 7th in which some Mulle Jats wanted to attack the trolley of Jats from Sohram village out of rivalry borne by a previous incident. However, in the melee of the violence the Jats in the trolley of Kakda village got killed. But none of the Jats from Pur Baliyan village itself were attacked by Muslims.

The attacks and deaths of Muslims have taken place as part of a sustained campaign in different villages. The victims were all innocent lower class Muslims who had no role in attacks on Jats. The handwork of the larger communal design and organization was evident in the well-rehearsed and similar arguments which the Jats from different villages forwarded to rationalize the killings and the displacement of the Muslims. A Jat teacher in Kakda village described the communal violence in the region as – “Yeh hai Amit Shah ka jadoo.” The Qutba village had been witness to a panchayat that was attended by the BJP president Mr Rajnath Singh about 6 months back. This points to the forces that have been at work in the area.

The Jats in villages like Kakda and Mohammedpur Raisingh put forth ludicrous arguments like – “the Muslims were willing to come back to their villages, but decided to stick to the relief camps ever since the government announced the 5 lakh relief package” and that they “themselves destroyed their property to claim inflated relief.” Common communal myths propagated by the Hindutva forces against Muslims – “they have large families and do not believe in family planning”; “they are anti-national” and that “they will create a Kashmir like situation here as well” – were liberally put forth.

Is it Jat versus Muslims or Hindus versus Muslims?

It has been reported that lower caste Hindus also participated in attacks on Muslims along with the Jats in different villages. However, the Muslims whom we interviewed in the relief camps felt that wherever the lower caste Hindus acted against them it was under the pressure of the Jats as the lower caste Hindus had little option but to follow the diktat of the Jats. Distinct caste hierarchies were observed in the villages, and also in terms of the involvement of different castes in the decision making processes. For example in the 35 biradari panchayat that was convened in Mohammadpur Raisingh on the November 10, representatives of all the upper castes were invited but none from the lower castes.

It is however noteworthy that no communal violence has been reported from any of the Muslim dominated villages. Simultaneously, there were Jat dominated villages where the Jats took up the responsibility of protecting their Muslim brethren. Some of these villages were Kheda Gani, Garhi Novabad, Garhi Jaitpur and Kurawa.

THE WAY FORWARD

Despite the constitutional and formal averments of the ‘secular’ character of the Indian state, the de facto reality remains that the state machinery has acted in a highly communal manner which undermines India’s secular credentials. Even as the communal poison being spread by the Hindutva forces need be countered with full force, the role played by the Samajwadi Party government in UP in connivance with the Muslim communal forces and the latest act of forcibly evicting the riot displaced families from relief camps brings into question the advisability of forming alliances with such parties to counter communalism. The stark reality is that despite the fact that Muslims constitute a much larger share of UP’s population as compared to Yadav’s, the propensity of the Yadavization of administrative structure is much stronger while the Muslims can at best expect their lives to be spared in the name of secularism. India’s secularism ostensibly sways between ‘Hindu Rule’ of the “secular parties” of the ruling classes and the ‘Hindu Rashtra’ of the saffron brigade.

Fighting communalism is not merely an electoral issue. The communal forces can be defeated only by ground struggles built by an alliance of the minorities, the working masses, the dalits, the tribals, other oppressed castes and progressive sections of the intelligentsia. In this regard the example held out by the people of Hussainpur, Kheda Gani, Garhi Novabad, Garhi Jaitpur, Kurawa and other such villages is a ray of hope.

OUR DEMANDS

The following demands acquire top most priority in our opinion under the prevailing circumstances:

All the accused named in the FIRs should be arrested.
Decommunalize the state apparatus.
Restore all villagers back to their homes.
Scrap the affidavit which was taken against five lakh compensation amount.

India: Photos of Protest in Defence of Muzaffarnagar Riot Affected at UP Bhavan on 2 Jan 2014

Several organisations came together to protest, outside the U.P. Bhavan in Delhi on 2 January 2014
, the closure of the camps in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli which were the only protection that thousands had from the bitter cold. The photos posted below were taken by Mukul Dube.

India - Muzaffarnagar riots 2013 and aftermath: A list reports and statements by civil society groups, NGO's and womens groups (as on 31 Oct 2013)

1. Muzaffarnagar 2013: Violence by Political Design | Report of an independent fact finding group
[organised by CPA New Delhi, 17 September 2013)
http://sacw.net/article5612.html

2. The communal fire in Muzaffarnagar - An appeal from Aman Ekta Manch
(18 September 2013)
http://sacw.net/article5616.html

3. A Human Tragedy Unfolds: View from Muzaffarnagar Relief Camps
A Preliminary Citizens’ Report [20 September 2013]
http://sacw.net/article5691.html

4. Effective Act against Communal and Targeted Violence Needed | Dr John Dayal’s Statement at National Integration Council
(23 September 2013)
http://sacw.net/article5908.html

5. Evil Stalks the Land: Fact Finding Report on Muzaffarnagar Riots
by Anhad (24 September 2013)
http://www.anhadin.net/article192.html

6. Professor Tripathi’s report from Muzzafarnagar [September 2013]

6.1. Flyers in English and Hindi by Sadbhav Mission

- Build Compassion, Fight Oppression
- Dard Mandi Paida Karo Aur Zulm Se Lado

7. In Aftermath of Riots, Support Sexual Assault Victims | Human Rights Watch (7 October 2013)
http://sacw.net/article5915.html

8. Report of AIDWA visit to Muzaffarnagar (8 October 2013)
http://sacw.net/article6075.html

9. 30 days and counting… - The aftermath of violence in Muzaffarnagar & Shamli Districts, Uttar Pradesh | report by Joint Citizens’ Initiative (JCI)[11 October 2013]
http://sacw.net/article5920.html

10. Muzaffarnagar: Post riot assessment - A report
(15 October 2013)
http://www.secularstore.net/Muzaffarnagar-Post-riot-assessment.html?lang=en

11. CJP Petition on Muzaffarnagar admitted by Supreme Court, Notice Issued
(17 October 2013)
http://sacw.net/article5942.html

12. Muzaffarnagar - A case of ’Institutionalised Riot Systems’
presentation by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta made during a seminar organised by Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) on “Reportage of Sensitive Issues like Muzzaffarnagar Riots, Caste Conflicts and Sexual Assaults against Women”.] [5 October 2013]
http://sacw.net/article5824.html

13. Hinsa, Sazish, Sangeen aur Shanti - A Report by NAPM (October 2013 / Hindi)

14. Independent inquiry into Muzaffarnagar ‘Riots’: Mohan Rao, Ish Mishra, Pragya Singh, Vikas Bajpai (30 December 2013)

15. Status Report on Condition of Persons living in Riot Relief Camps in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli Districts of Uttar Pradesh by PUDR (6 January 2014)

16. Report of fact finding and assessment – Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts by Aman Biradari- Centre for Equity Studies (22 January 2014)

India: Appeal to all citizens - defend democracy, shed communal hatred

Appeal to all citizens

Statement endorsed by participants in a meeting held at SPWD hall, New Delhi on 20th October 2013

A meeting of democratic activists took place in Delhi on October 20, 2013. it was part of a series of meetings conducted over the past six months and more in various centres across the country. The activists issued an appeal to all citizens to resist communal propaganda of all hues and communal violence at all levels. They called upon organs of state and judiciary to uphold democratic and constitutional norms. Communal hatred and violence are a danger to social integrity and if allowed to continue will endanger the security of all Indians. The very fate of our democratic institutions is at stake. The gathering decided to continue the campaign of resistance to communal politics of all kinds and work together with persons, groups and organizations throughout the country who share these concerns.

Ashok Vaishnav
Dipak Dholakia
Dilip Simeon
Dilip Vyas
Harsh Kapoor
Jamal Kidwai
Juned Khan
Kiran Shaheen
Mukul Dube
Mahtab Alam
Nasiruddin H.K
Onkar Mittal
Ovais Sultan Khan
Prasad.V
Praatibh Mishra
Rakhi Gupta
Ritwik Agrawal
Samir Dholakia
Sukhvinder Shahi
Srinivasa Rao
Subhash Gatade
Vipin Tripathi
Viren Lobo
Zulekha Jbin

India: citizens Memo to Govt. to introduce the communal violence bill

Date: October 8, 2013

Memorandum: UPA GOVERNMENT FULFILL YOUR PROMISE TO ENACT A LAW THAT PROTECTS ALL AGAINST COMMUNAL AND TARGETED VIOLENCE

The 2004 Common Minimum Programme of UPA 1, held out the promise of a ‘comprehensive legislation’ that would strengthen the hands of the citizens to secure justice (commonly referred to as the CV Bill).

One main thrust of such a legislation should be to counter impunity by securing accountability of all persons exercising State power, and to ensure comprehensive justice for the victim- survivor of communal and targeted violence.

http://sacw.net/article5836.html

All India Secular Forum statement condemning violence in Faizabad

26 October 2012

All India Secular Forum

We condemn the attack on Mosque, the office of Aapki Takat and Shops of Muslims in Faizabad

On 24 October 2012, when the immersion procession of Durga was going on, a girl was molested by few miscreants. Making this as a pretext few people started stone throwing in the nearby areas. A rumor also spread in Faizabad that Muslims are doing the stone throwing. The mob went on to burn nearly 25 shops of Muslim traders. They also rampaged the office of bilingual (Urdu and Hindi) paper Aap Ki Takat. This paper is continuously giving the message of Peace and calling for Hindu-Muslim unity. They also rampaged the mosque.

According to local activist Yugal Kishore Sharan Shastri, this was a pre-planned attack. The editor of the paper Mehdi Manjar feels, this is an attempt to silence the voice of Peace. The police took long time to reach the spot and did not intervene effectively. Similarly the fire brigade also took four hours to reach, by which time the shops were totally destroyed.

Faizabad, neighboring Ayodhya, is a symbol of Peace. The act of communal forces in targeting the shops of Muslims, the mosque and the office of Aap ki Takat, is highly condemnable. We appeal to the local and state administration to bring in peace and to rehabilitate the violence victims on urgent basis. The owners of shops and the office of paper, Aap ki Takat, must be totally compensated for immediately. Strict action is needed against the police officials for neglect of their duty and also against the fire brigade for such a lapse on their part. The guilty must be punished with the due process of law

Asghar Ali Engineer, L.S. Hardenia, Ram Puniyani, Irfan Engineer Mohammad Arif

All India Secular Forum

Warisha Farasat: Pushing boundaries for justice

(From: The Hindu, October 18, 2012)

People’s tribunals are more effective than official commissions of inquiry in the investigation of rights violations and in formulating effective redress mechanisms

When the Russell Tribunal on Palestine (RToP) held its latest hearing in New York city between October 6 to 7, it once again affirmed that peace was impossible without justice. A civil society initiative, this tribunal documents and exposes the violations of international human rights law against the Palestinian people. Similar sessions have already been held in Barcelona, Cape Town and London on issues ranging from corporate complicity in the Israeli Occupation to the crime of apartheid.

Though the recommendations of the Russell Tribunal are not legally binding on the parties to the conflict, they have played an important role in laying out the context and documenting the evidence of violations of international law by the Israeli government. With a jury of eminent persons such as Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a Nobel Peace Laureate, Alice Walker, American author and poet, and Yasmin Sooka of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now with the Foundation for Human Rights, the findings of such a tribunal will be hard to ignore. This high profile People’s Tribunal on Palestine has also initiated a discussion regarding the role played by such unofficial or civil society processes not only to document and highlight serious human rights violations but also provide a larger basis for action against such crimes.

In South Asia

South Asia, particularly India has a tradition of official commissions of inquiry, generally constituted to investigate communal violence, massacres and other forms of human rights violations. The reports of these commissions of inquiries have, however, repeatedly failed to break away from the legal formalism associated with investigating and reporting crimes by quasi-judicial bodies. Whether it is the Bhagalpur Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate the communal riots of 1989 or the Tewary Commission to establish the violations that occurred during the Nellie massacre in Assam in 1983, the government has avoided implementing even the mild recommendations of these official commissions. The government has not even made these reports public for a debate. Besides, these official commissions of inquiry do not systematically record the testimonies of victims or their families and their demands in their final reports.

With the recent developments in transitional justice and international law, there is growing recognition that victims and their testimonies must be central while ensuring justice for gross human rights violations. Article 68 (3) of the Rome Statute states that the Court shall permit the views and concerns of victims to be presented and considered at stages of the proceedings. This is why people’s tribunals become important.

Unlike governmental commissions of inquiries, these civil society initiatives have broadened the investigation and documentation processes by drawing from mass movements as well as incorporating testimonies of victims of human rights violations themselves. Moreover, they present final reports that not only reflect the legal violations but also the political or social contexts that may have allowed for these violations to happen. For instance, in conflict situations, torture or extrajudicial killings forms a part of the human rights discourse. However, the impact of militarisation, unfair land acquisition or the psychosocial aspects may not get adequate attention. A people’s tribunal or civil society-led processes can contribute to understanding the enabling courses for human rights violations and thus assist in formulating an effective mechanism for redressal.

Even though these civil society initiatives cannot hold perpetrators accountable, they create an exhaustive documentation that can be used for subsequent legal processes. In conflict or post-conflict situations, civil society tribunals add to the existing documentation on violations of civil political rights such as torture, collective punishment, or enforced disappearances, particularly when no genuine official commissions are involved in investigation and documentation. Given the lack of accountability for serious crimes in Sri Lanka, in January 2010, a Permanent People’s Tribunal conducted investigations, heard first-hand testimonies, and held that the Sri Lankan government was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly during the last stages of the war against the LTTE in 2009.

Communal violence

Moreover, people’s tribunals can also help to disseminate the truth about injustice or ongoing human rights violations at the time. The Iraq war and the subsequent World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) organised by the “international civil society” is an example. The moral indictment by the WTI through its public hearings helped to substantiate the claims of gross violations and culpability of the American coalition forces in Iraq.

In situations of communal violence, people’s tribunals can push the boundaries of human rights advocacy and justice. In fact, a Concerned Citizens Tribunal was formed even after the Gujarat pogrom, which documented exhaustively transgressions of international human rights and criminal law committed during the riots in 2002, and made concrete proposals to provide justice to the victims and prevent a recurrence of such violence.

Mode of resistance

Finally, a people’s tribunal can also act as a mode of organised or symbolic resistance. A recent tribunal on fabricated cases was organised in September 2012 by an umbrella of civil society groups in Delhi. It heard testimonies from victims and family members of persons from Manipur, Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and other States besides lawyers, journalists and activists who have been incarcerated for years without sufficient evidence of their involvement. People’s tribunals or oral histories can be effective in bringing out these issues and confronting them headlong in situations where State-led official processes are either unwilling or unable to do so.

The history of people’s tribunals in India and elsewhere is replete with interesting and important ways in which they have contributed to advancing agendas of truth, justice and reparations.

When the RToP convened in New York to hear the testimonies of violations of international law and the rights of the Palestinians, its resonance was felt across the Atlantic to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. If Israel or its supporters, especially the United States, choose to take note of the recommendations this time around, it will provide essential guidance to move forward towards a permanent peace.

At home, the government too needs to engage rather than ignore the legal and policy recommendations of people’s tribunals and the civil society processes because it would only help to deepen and institutionalise justice. For these people’s tribunals are in some ways the upholder of our collective consciousness.

(Warisha Farasat, a lawyer, is currently working with the Centre of Equity Studies on issues of justice and reparations for victims of communal violence in India.)

A Fact Finding Report on Kandhamal Communal Violence: Four Years Later

One of the most severe communal violence took place in Kandhamal in 2008 following the alleged murder of Swami Laxamananda Saraswati, a front-line leader of Sangh Parivar by the Communist Party of India (Maoists). The violence forced 55000 minority Christians to displace, 5600 homes in 415 villages were looted and burnt down, 38 persons were killed, two women were gangraped, several people were tortured, disabled. A Fact Finding Team visited 16 villages during 10th to 14th August, 2012; interviewed about fifty persons including victims, witnesses, leaders of different political and social organisations, District Collector and Superintendent of Police and reviewed various documents and records.

http://www.sacw.net/article2802.html

Report of the Fact Finding Team on Hyderabad Riots - 8th April 2012

Civil Society Organisations of Hyderabad constituted a Fact Finding Team at a meeting held on 12th April to enquire into the riots and disturbances in Hyderabad between 8th to 12th April 2012.

The Team Comprised of Mr. Jeevan Kumar (HRF), Syed Bilal (HRF), Ms. Audhesh Rani, Mr. M.A. Hakeem, (ICAN), Mr. B. Ramakrishnam Raju (NAPM), Ms. Noor Jahan (COVA) and Dr. Mazher Hussain (COVA). The Fact Finding Team received local facilitation from Mr. Azeem Khan (Advocate), Mr. Vijay Kumar (AITUC), Mr. Yadgiri Reddy , Mr. Samad and Mr. Waheed Ansari.

The Team made field visits on 16 and 17 April 2012 and met the following:

Members of the Hindu and Muslim communities in Madannapet, Kurmaguda and Saidabad
Mr. Sahadev Yadav, Local Corporator
Mr. Iqbal Siddiqui- ACP Malakpet
Mr. Amit Garg IPS, Additional Commissioner, Law & Order, Hyderabad City Police
Mr Madan Mohan Rao District Revenue Officer, Hyderabad.6.

Earlier, on 14th April a team of Interfaith Forum had visited all the 7 places of worship that were desecrated between 8th and 12th of April and had met the priests and community leaders of these areas.

Events

At about 6.30 am on 8th April the priests of Sri Abhaya Anjaneya Swami Devalayam located in a by lane in Kurmaguda noticed green colour (associated with Islam and Muslims) sprayed on the walls of the temple and burnt leg pieces of a cow placed on the grill. The priests informed Mr.Sahadev Yadav, the local Corporator from the BJP party who in turn informed the police who reached the spot by about 7 am.

By 7.30 am a crowd of locals started gathering around the temple and by the time the police called the dog squad for investigations, the crowd is reported to have swelled to over 200. The dog covered a distance of about half a kilometer and stopped near the local petrol pump. Time was about 8.15 am. At this point, the crowd got agitated and started pelting stones at some Muslim shops located near the petrol pump and some RTC buses plying on the roads at the time. Police swung into action to disperse the crowds. After retreating, the crowds attacked 4 houses and one shop belonging to the Muslim community. In most cases, it was stone pelting causing damages to doors and window panes. In the house adjacent to the temple that was desecrated, it is reported that the inmates had left in the morning immediately after the incidence came to light (as they had planned to visit a holy shrine), and some miscreants entered the house and damaged some utensils and furniture including a DVD player.

In the mean time, trouble spread to other surrounding areas of Pusalbasti, Zakir Hussain Colony Ameen Jung Colony, Madannapet Mandi and Jaihind hotel including stone pelting on houses, attacks on pedestrians walking by, burning of 2 / 3motorcycles and damage to buses on the Saidabad main road. There are reports of women traveling in buses being assaulted, stabbing of two persons and an attack using boulders on one person. In all 8 persons were injured, two of them seriously.

It is reported that at about 10. 30 am crowds from Pusalbasti had gathered at the Pusalbasti- Zakir Hussain Colony Junction and started pelting stones. Crowds of the two communities gathered at both sides leading to brick batting even though two police vans with 15 to 20 policemen were present on the spot. Situation could be brought under control after about an hour with additional police reinforcement. In all, 6 houses of the area, belonging to both communities suffered damages to the doors, window panes, coolers, water tank and drain pipes due to stone pelting.

It was around 11.30 am- after about 3 hours of trouble in the streets that police was able to bring the situation under control and by about 12.30 pm, curfew was declared in the three affected localities coming under 2 police stations.

Provocations in other Places

Even as the situation in Saidabad- Kurmaguda- Madannapet areas was brought under control on 8th April 2012, reports started coming of desecration of 6 more places of worship in different areas of Hyderabad- 4 Masjids and 2 temples between 9th and 12th of April pointing to a clear and obvious conspiracy to foment communal violence by instigating the religious sentiments of both Hindu and Muslim communities.

Fortunately, religious leaders and elders of both communities in all these areas, along with timely action by the police, diffused tensions in these localities and prevented any untoward incidences from taking place.

Background and Conspiracy

During the past 3 years, the political scenario in Andhra Pradesh has become fluid and uncertain on multiple counts. The most significant seem to be the Telangana agitation, exposure and investigation into a number of scams involving top ranking politicians and bureaucrats and infighting within the ruling party. Past experience has shown that communal conflicts have been instigated and riots engineered in Hyderabad to divert attention from burning political issues to even affect change of government.

Complicating matters are the General Elections to the Parliament and the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly scheduled in 2014- just two years from now and the prospects for some parties to reap political benefits through polarization of votes by engineering communal riots.

In the light of all these factors it is not surprising that concerted and consistent efforts are being made during the past few months to spread disaffection between the Hindu and Muslim communities to engineer communal riots not just in Hyderabad but in other cities and towns of the State, especially in the Telangana and Rayalaseema areas.

Attempt was made in the same Madannapet- Saidabad localities to instigate communal violence during the Ganesh festival in September 2011 by desecrating not one but four Ganesh idols in the area but fortunately the conspirators did not succeed in their nefarious designs due to the good sense shown by the local people and timely action by the police. After this, there was a series of targeted attacks on lone Muslim youth during nights by members of the Hindu Vahini (as per the investigations of the A.P. Police) to instigate communal riots but these attempts did not succeed. This was followed by burning of motorcycles parked outside houses during nights but these instigations also failed to generate any communal backlash. Unfortunately, the conspirators finally succeeded in instigating communal violence on 8th April 2012 through the desecration of the temple at Kurmaguda detailed above. This success was possible perhaps due to the growing communal tensions in the Madannapet- Kurmaguda areas during the past 5 years that the conspirators were able to exploit to their advantage.

Role of Police in Containing Violence

In most cases of provocation in the past few months and during the recent disturbances, the role of the Hyderabad city police was good in containing communal tensions in a short span of time, restricting their spread to other areas and preventing them from assuming proportions of a full scale riot.

In the case of the incidence at Kurmaguda, there was a time gap of at least one and a half hours between the reporting of incidence and the outbreak of mob violence in the affected and the neighbouring localities of Saidabad and Madannapet. Police could have prevented this violence by preventing crowd mobilisation near the affected temple and rushing reinforcement to the sensitive areas in the neighbourhood in the time available. After this initial lapse, police seemed to have acted fast and brought the situation in the area under control within 3 hours.

Failure to Expose Conspirators: The Consequences

However, the police seemed to have failed in matters of investigation and unearthing the conspiracies behind the series of provocations over the months to foment communal violence in the city and other parts of the State. Baring the unearthing of the culprits behind the series of targeted night attacks on the members of a community, the police has not been able to expose the conspirators behind the 2010 riots in Hyderabad, or the desecration of the Ganesh idols or the group behind the series of motor cycle burnings amongst others. Even in the present instance, catching some stray stone pelters will not help and what is required is exposing the entire conspiracy behind the systematic desecration of a number of places of worship of both communities within days ostensibly with the sole objective of fomenting communal riots in the city.

If the police investigations fail to unravel the conspiracies and bring to book all those responsible, irrespective of their power or position, such provocations will continue to occur and perhaps increase in the light of the forth coming general elections in 2014 and the city of Hyderabad along with many other cities and towns of the State could be converted into communal flash points and hotbeds of riots.

Compensation

The Government has given compensation to the 8 persons injured. However, no assessment of the damage to houses and property has been undertaken so far by the revenue department concerned.

Arrests of Muslim Youth

After every incidence of communal violence, the Muslim community cries hoarse at the partisan attitude of the police force and says that despite coming under attack and suffering more injuries and damages, more number of Muslim youth are picked up by the police and implicated in false cases. The memories of Macca Masjid bomb blasts and the arrests of over 100 Muslim youth on trumped up charges, their torture and subsequent acquittal by the courts still rankles fresh in the minds of the community.

In the present instance of trouble in Saidabad –Kurmaguda areas, most of the houses that were attacked belonged to the Muslim community. According to newspaper reports, 14 Muslim youth have been arrested while the number for the youth of the Hindu community is stated to be 4 and 28 Hindu youth are being shown as absconding. Though police officers are stating that investigations are still in progress and eventually every one responsible will be caught, prima facie, from the facts available at the moment, it appears that the police are more vigorous in pursuing the cases relating to the Muslim youth.

This is causing dread amongst Muslim youth about the police force and the recent tragic incidence of a Muslim youth Mr. Syed Ghouse, who is reported to have died while trying to escape from a police party searching for him, illustrates the point. All this is leading to feelings of insecurity, alienation and loss of confidence in the neutrality of police force that is dangerous for all concerned including the Muslim community. Matter have come to a stage when some very respected and highly placed members of the Muslim community have petitioned the State Human Rights Commission to address this issue.

Immediate steps and action should be taken to restore the non- partisan image and functioning of the police force.

Media

The role of some media has been partisan and at times grossly inaccurate leading to increase in tensions and the possibility of spread of violence to more areas. Media gave the names of those injured that revealed community affiliations to further stroke passions and violence. One TV channel wrongly reported the death of a youth injured that heightened tensions at a critical time in many areas.

Observations

· Despite the grave provocations, people in the affected areas belonging to different communities continued to maintain cordial relations and ascribed the disturbances to vested interests

· Cases of members of one community saving members of another community have also been reported- like it happens in most instances of communal disturbances.

· The mobs that had gathered for attacks numbered between 50 to a couple of hundred and comprised mostly of 15 to 25 year olds- with their faces covered with handkerchiefs.

· In many sensitive locations, elders of the area were able to control the groups and prevent untoward incidences even before the arrival of the police.

· Despite the repeated attempt to provoke communal feelings by desecrating places of worship of both the communities, people seemed to have retained their balance and seen through the design to engineer riots for some vested interests.



Appeal


Members of Civil Society Organisations and the Fact Finding Team appeal to all people of Hyderabad and of the State to maintain peace and harmony between all communities and frustrate the nefarious designs of vested interests that seem to be bent upon fomenting communal violence for political gains.

We also demand that the government should immediately table the Recommendations of the Ramana Chari Commission Report of 1991 and take all steps necessary to prevent communal violence and promote inclusive and equitable development of all sections of society.

Jeevan Kumar (HRF)
Audhesh Rani Ramakrishna Raju(NAPM)
Mazher Hussain(COVA)
Syed Bilal (HRF)
Noor Jahan Siddiqui (COVA)
M.A. Hakeem (ICAN)

Civil Society Groups Reject NAC Draft of Communal Violence Bill, Spell out Key Features For A New Bill

Recognizing the urgent and dire need for a law against communal and targeted violence, once again civil society activists called for a National Consultation on April 21, 2012. We, the undersigned, secular and civil liberty activists, women’s rights activists, legal experts, academicians, organizations, while rejecting the NAC draft bill, demand from the Government to draft a new legislation, the primary focus of which should be to secure accountability of public servants and to hold them responsible for communal and targeted violence, as well as make provision for providing reparative justice to the victims and survivors of such violence.

SEE FULL TEXT OF STATEMENT
http://www.sacw.net/article2648.html

Communal Harmony Yatra from Ayodhya reaching Delhi (events on 16-17 Octobr 2011)

COMMUNAL HARMONY YATRA

Reaches Delhi tomorrow, 16 October

New Delhi, 15 October 2011: The Second Communal Harmony Yatra from Ayodhya to Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin is reaching Delhi tomorrow morning, Sunday, 16 October covering a distance of 490 kms by land. It is led by Ayodhya’s famous mahant Yugal Kishor Shastri who last year took out a similar yatra from Ayodhya to Sewagram in Wardha to prmote harmony and brotherly relations between various communities. The purpose of the yatra is to abolish fascism, communalism and untochability and to promote peace, unity and brotherhood among people and in society.

About 20 persons from various parts of the country are accompanying Yugal Kishor Shastri in this mass contact movement which involves conferences, street & press meets and contacting people, especially youth, along the route.

Organisations taking part in this yatra are Communalism Combat (Teesta Sitalvad), Vishwa Yuva Sadbhawana Parishad (Seshnath Dubey), Asha Parivar (Sandeep Pandey), Ayodhya Ki Awaj (Yugal Kishore Saran Shastri), Milli Gazette (Zafarul-Islam Khan), Sarvdharm Sadbhav Kendra Trust (Zafar Saifullah), Confederation of Voluntary Association – Kova (Mazehar Hussain), Jamaat-e Islami Hind (Mohammad Ahmad), Rashtriya Yuva Sangathan (Kumar Prashant), Center for Study and Secularism - CCSS (Asagar Ali Engineer) and Centre for Human Rights & Social Welfare (Saroj Khan), etc.

The yatra started at Ayodhya on 11 October with a number of programmes, and went to Faizabad where too it held a number of programmes of mass contact. It reached Lucknow on 12 October, Sitapur on 13 October, Shahjahanpur on 15 October, will spend the night at Mora[da]bad and will arrive in Delhi in the morning of 16 October.

In Delhi, it will pay tributes with other participants and people to the soul of Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat.

A dialogue on communal harmony will be held at 11 am at BN Pandey Hall, the Gandhi Darshan Samiti at Rajghat, in which various organizations working for communal harmony in different fields and from various perspectives will take part. Speakers at this dialogue, besides the organizers of the yatra are Lalit Kumar (Secretary, National Foundation for Communal Harmony) and Mani Mala of Gandhi Samriti & Darshan Samiti at Rajghat.

A press conference will be held at the Einstein Hall at Gandhi Samriti, Rajghat, at 3.40 pm same day (Sunday, 16 October) in which organizers of the yatra will speak and answer questions.

The concluding function and the major event in Delhi will be held at 11 am next day, Monday, 17 October at Gandhi Peace Foundation at ITO, Delhi, where important personalities and speakers from around the country will speak and interact with the people to put across the message of the yatra. Speakers will include Teesta Setalvad, Asghar Ali Engineer and Yugal Kishor Shastri.


=======================================
For more information, contact:
Shah Alam, 9873672153
Yugal Kishore Saran Shastri 09451730269
Saroj Khan 9891017455
Nadim Ahmad 9968810482

A tale of two movements

From: The Times of India



by Amita Baviskar

September 6, 2011

The agitation for the Jan Lokpal Bill (JLB) is being hailed as ‘unprecedented’ and as a ‘second freedom struggle’. More grounded analysts have likened it to the Navanirman movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan in the 1970s. However, a more apt comparison lies closer at hand.

Less than six years ago, Parliament enacted a national Right to Information Act. This was a major victory for the RTI campaign which aimed to empower people to fight corruption and malgovernance. It mobilised a nationwide network of support, bringing together activists, NGOs and ordinary citizens, and effectively using media and middle-class interlocutors. India Against Corruption (IAC), the coalition leading the present campaign, shares the goals and the networking strategy of the earlier campaign, and its leaders Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan and Anna Hazare were closely associated with it.

Yet, the differences between the two campaigns are striking as well as instructive. The RTI campaign and the JLB campaign both strive for greater government accountability, but their ideologies, modes of organisation, support base and strategies diverge in important ways. Understanding these differences is crucial if the Lokpal Bill, once enacted, is to achieve its stated goal.

The RTI campaign grew out of the experiences of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), the jan sangathan (people’s organisation) in rural Rajasthan which had, for two decades, fought corruption in village development works. The MKSS pioneered the use of jan sunvai or public hearings as a technique to empower villagers to ‘speak truth to power’, challenging an opaque, oppressive and corrupt system of governance. The jan sunvai’s success depended on systematic preparation to mobilise people to testify, collect information and check its accuracy. The groundswell of public anger against abuse of public funds was harnessed to create a coordinated campaign led by trained local activists.

From the villages, MKSS took its campaign to the district and state level, staging determined demonstrations that attracted the middle classes and intellectuals, before leading the national RTI campaign. The national network was more eclectic; it included not only jan sangathans like the MKSS, but also individual anti-corruption activists like Anna Hazare and Shailesh Gandhi. Notably, the RTI campaign aligned itself with the National Alliance of Peoples Movements, sangathans of the rural and urban poor fighting against dispossession. This organisational base gave the RTI campaign a solid political credibility.

The JLB campaign shows a distinctly different trajectory. Even though Kejriwal’s Parivartan, which battled corruption in ration shops in two Delhi slums, was a jan sangathan, its base was too limited to launch a nationwide campaign. The other campaign leaders – Prashant Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and Hazare – also cannot muster a trained cadre of activists. The JLB campaign has mobilised participants in two ways: through social networking and the media; and via regional chapters of Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s congregations.

The coming together of a predominantly young, white-collar constituency that communicates through text messages and Facebook, lower-middle-class followers of Baba Ramdev, and the professional classes that practise the Art of Living gives the JLB campaign the strength of numbers as well as the image of appearing all-inclusive. However, this strength may dissipate once the Bill is passed. Mobilising crowds for a successful agitation is one thing; having a committed and trained activist base to convert that success into long-term institutional change is quite another.

If the RTI campaign embraced sangathans with an Independent Left ideology, the political beliefs of the participants in the JLB campaign are harder to pin down. Eight of the 20 founders of India Against Corruption are religious figures, of whom only Swami Agnivesh can be described as a champion of jan sangathans. The rest voice patriotic sentiments and anti-government hostility without a clear analysis of how the systemic problems that plague public affairs will be tackled. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s previous social initiatives have been of doubtful value (cleaning the sewage-laden Yamuna by picking up garbage from the riverfront) and marked by dubious claims (11,000 Naxalites ‘converted’ to the Art of Living).

While other founders like Hazare and Bedi have a reputation for personal probity and courage, they endorse a form of individualist authoritarian action that’s applauded by a public hungry for vigilante heroes. The JLB thus represents a shift in the political spectrum: from the left-of-centre democratic decentralisation of the RTI campaign, to the right-of-centre legal-technical-fix of India Against Corruption.

The test of any law lies in its implementation. Much disquiet has already been expressed about the overly-centralised design of the JLB and the impracticability of the mammoth bureaucratic machinery it demands. However, making a law work also requires a mobilised public, a dedicated and organised network at every level that will keep up the pressure on public institutions. The ideologies, organisational structure and support base of the JLB campaign do not indicate that it is capable of such long-term and systematic social action.

The RTI campaign’s activist base has allowed it to sustain an arduous struggle against corruption, but the challenges have been formidable. It remains to be seen how the JLB campaign will equip itself to walk the talk, and translate strident demands into effective action.

The writer is a sociologist at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.