A protest, standing in water, for 14 days #Shame #India

Reported by Siddharth Ranjan Das, Edited by Amit Chaturvedi | Updated: September 07, 2012 11:00 IST

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Bhopal: In Madhya Pradesh‘s Khandwa area, 51 people stayed immersed in water for the 14th day today in what’s being called a ‘jal satyagraha’. The protesters are demanding compensation and rehabilitation for villagers whose homes will be submerged under water after the state government’s order of opening all the gates of the Omkareshwar dam in Madhya Pradesh.

With Narmada flowing above the danger levels, the government has little choice. However, the protesters, members of the ‘Narmada Bachao Andolan‘, say the government’s decision to increase the water level of the Omkareshwar on the Narmada without rehabilitating people living in low lying villages is a violation of a Supreme Court order, which says villagers must be rehabilitated at least six months before such a move is implemented.

“Till the time water level comes down to 189 metres and as per court orders we get our 5 acre land, and labourers get Rs. 2.5 lakh, we will die but we will sit here,” said one of the protesters.

For 14 days, these men and women have been in water and this unique protest is beginning to tell on their health.

“In the water, fishes and crabs are biting us, our skin is affected and it is raining also,” said a protester.

A local delegation of CPIM met these protesters and the Congress MP from this area, Arun Yadav, paid them a visit today. But these protesters are angry over the fact that no one from the ruling BJP government has come and met them. They say the government is totally ignoring them.

“We are very angry… the government has turned a blind eye towards us. The government is deaf and dumb. All we want is the water level to be decreased, and that too by just one-and-a-half metre. And compensation for our land. Is it too much to ask for?” said a woman protester.

The local authorities had visited the area and assured all help in their capacity, but the situation on the ground has not changed yet.

“Well, I think the government has no choice but to listen. And if it doesn’t, there are going to be very serious consequences because there are some people in neck-deep water and some response has to be made, both on democratic ground and humanitarian ground. You can’t let people just drown, and I think it’s imperative that the government respond immediately to the demands of these people,” said Aruna Roy, member of the National Advisory Council (NAC).

The water of the Omkareshwar dam has already risen to 190.5 meters and its effects can been seen in Ghogal, Kaamankheda and 30 other villages, where crops have been damaged.

Underneath the water, there is a 20-feet bridge but people are being forced to use boats to reach the other side; the water has also destroyed crops.

“Our farmland is on the other side. That is not in low-lying area but from here, we are facing great difficulty going there,” said Deven Puri, a farmer in Kamankheda.

Since August 25, these 51 protesters are on a jal satyagraha and so far the district level authorities have agreed to give to some of their demands which is in their capacity. But these do not include two of their main demands – that water level of the dam be reduced to 189 metres and proper implementation of the land for land compensation. The protesters are hell bent that till the Madhya Pradesh government does not agree to their two main demands, they will not come out of water.

PL SIGN ONLINE PETITION HERE

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Female cop caned and kicked by mob #wtfnews #VAW

 

TNN | Sep 7, 2012, 10.00AM IST

BHUBANESWAR: Reacting sharply to some Congress supporters assaulting a policewoman during the party’s rally here on Thursday, theConstable and Habildar Association of Odishathreatened to go on a ceasework agitation if the culprits were not arrested within 48 hours.

The female constable, identified as Pramila Padhi of Infocity police station, was pushed to the ground, caned and kicked by a mob during a violent clash between police and Congress supporters on Mahatma Gandhi Marg.

“It is height of hooliganism by Congress supporters. If her assaulters are not arrested within 48 hours, we will boycott duties and hit the streets,” state president of the association Padmanabh Behera said.

The association members also threatened to abstain from the security duties of Congress VVIPs in future. “Some of our members, deployed to provide security to Jagdish Tytler were held hostage and beaten up by Congress supporters. Our van was also damaged. Under such circumstances, we cannot serve the Congress VVIPs in state,” Behera said.

Watch video here

 

Girls fall in love due to hormonal imbalance- download judgement #bhaktavatsala

 

Last year  in a hard-hitting judgment, the Karnataka High Court  dismissed a habeas corpus petition filed by a Bangalore resident seeking reunion with his newly married wife, who he claimed was illegally detained by her parents.

Observing that a girl below the age of 21 years cannot judge the character of a person she marries, the Division Bench comprising Justice Bhaktavatsala and Justice Govindaraju directed police to lodge a suo motu kidnapping case against the petitioner, Avinash of Sudhama Nagar.

The court further observed that a girl below 21 years of age must have the consent of the parents for her marriage. “Parents should choose the boy for a girl aged below 21, as it is they who bear the brunt of an unsuccessful marriage,” the Bench said.

Terming as void Avinash’s marriage with the girl without her parents’ consent, the court levied a cost of Rs 10,000 on him. “The court cannot shut its eyes even when police fail to initiate action,” the Bench said. On the petitioner’s contention of illegal detention, the court said, “Parents keeping the child with them does not amount to illegal detention.”

The girl’s parents had lodged a complaint of kidnapping on February 7, 2011, with the Wilson Garden Police after their minor daughter, a second PU student, went missing on February 2 while on her way to college. Avinash had taken her to Krishnagiri where he married her on March 3, 2011, after she turned 18 on March 1.

On returning to Bangalore on March 28, he appeared before the police, who brokered peace between the two families by ensuring that the boy got to meet the girl twice a day and appeared before the police daily. However, when the girl’s parents refused to abide by the deal and denied him permission to meet his wife, he filed a habeas corpus plea.

When the matter came up for hearing on Thursday, the Bench lashed out at the petitioner saying, “This is (the marriage) nothing but a case of kidnapping. If the marriage fails, the girl will return to her parents who are the actual sufferers.”

The Bench said that parents protecting their child was not illegal detention. “The Hindu Marriage Act is not a contract. It needs permission from parents. (Avinash’s case) is nothing but misuse of the girl and her age,” the court said.

Stating that it would take a decision in the interest of the people, the court observed orally, “If it was love, you should wait. Why should you elope? He (boy) will not carry the sin. The girls are the sufferers.”

Taking the police to task, the court said, “Police don’t behave like human beings. You cannot decide on such matters. Who are you to decide? You are just adding fuel to fire.”

When counsel for the respondents K N Puttegowda submitted that it was the third love affair for the boy, the Bench asked Avinash: “Why did you go to Tamil Nadu? To see tsunami? This kind of people should be hanged.”

The court dismissed the matter and directed the Wilson Garden Police to take Avinash into custody immediately.

 the judgment cited was issued in the high court on May 12, 2011: “We have seen many cases of run-away love marriages and untold misery and hardship of the parents and the girls. All the love marriages are not successful. In the event of failure of the love marriage of the girl, it is the girl and her parents who have to suffer…The girls, later on, realise their mistake that they were hasty in love marriage and repent at leisure. (sic)”

This was the text of the judgment signed by justices K Bhakthavatsala and K Govindarajulu as they heard the petition of a resident of Sudhamanagar, Avinash.

The man had pleaded that the court issue a writ of habeas corpus, directing the father of the girl to produce before the court his ‘legally wedded wife,’ Sanghavi.

Avinash and Sanghavi had married on March 2, 2011, without the consent of their parents.

The father of the girl lodged a missing person complaint, and Avinash, in a bid to have his ‘wife’ returned to him, had filed another complaint.

However, in that case, Avinash had not turned 21 at the time of the marriage, so had not attained the age when a man could legally wed. Sanghavi too had not turned 18, when a woman is allowed to marry legally.

Delivering a judgment in this case, on May 12, 2011  the judges ruled, “In our opinion, the girls below the age of 21 years are not capable of forming a rational judgment… It is relevant to mention that those girls, who are suffering from hormonal imbalance, easily fall prey to the boys and fall in love, marry and repent at leisure… the Hindu Marriage Act does not deal with love marriages … In our opinion, Parliament had not taken into account the love marriages when the Bill was introduced…”

Download the judgement below

Karnataka high court HMA

 

WATCH AN ANIMATION ON THE JUDGEMENT

Love , HORMONES, Marriage- Justice Bhaktavatsala

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Look for justice, not revenge- #DEATHPENALTY must go !

 

The death penalty must go, for it obliterates a distinction fundamental to our existence

Gautam Patel, Mumbai Mirror

In the face of unspeakable horror, resisting what must have been the strongest temptation to lash out, the tone of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Qasab case is calm, gentleandalwaysjudicious.Thereis,too,an uncommon grace and breadth of mind: the decision ends with six paragraphs that are in themselves unusual. The Supreme Court thanks appearing counsel, and makes special mention of the exemplary work of the trial court judge, Justice M L Tahaliyani (now a judge of the Bombay High Court).
This calmness is at odds with the matter at hand.ItishardtothinkoftheQasabcasewithout being driven to instant, unthinking rage: pictures of the blood-smeared floor of the CST train station, of Qasab dressed like a college student but armed to the teeth, and, above all, his apparent complete indifference to what he was doing. The immediate reaction therefore is, always: hanghim.Suggesttheabolitionofthedeathpenalty and the common response is, yes, fine; but only after we hang Qasab.
Should we? Should we hang anybody? Should the law permit this? In an article here in March,Iarguedthatitistimeforthedeathpenalty to go because, apart from anything else, it is both error-prone and irreversible. In July, 14 former judges of the Supreme Court and our High CourtswrotetothePresidentaskingthathecommute to life imprisonment the death sentences of13convicts.TheappealdoesnotseektheabolitionoftheDP,whateverthepersonalviewsofsignatories. It points, instead, to the significant errors and mistakes in administering this law, and to the Supreme Court’s own admission that it went wrong in several DP cases. Specifically, that the standard set by the Supreme Court in Bachan Singh’scaseof1980–thattheDPistheexception tothegeneralruleoflifeimprisonmentasamaximum sentence; that the DP should be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases; and that in imposing it, courts should look at both crime and criminal — was upended in a later case, Ravji (1996), decided by a bench of fewer judges, which said it is the gravity of the crime that is determinative, not the criminal; and that subsequentcasesincorrectlyfollowedRavji.Theresult wasanincorrectapplicationofthelawandtheerroneous sentencing to death of many. That mistake was discovered only in 2009 in yet another case, Bariyar, too late to save two men, wrongly hanged by the law.
This“rarestofrare”standardispuzzling.Itadmits of no absolute or objective measure. What is raretoonemightbecommontoanother.Twoorders from the extremities of the judicial pyramid show how uneven this standard is. A few days after the Qasab decision, a special court in Ahmedabad convicted Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi and sentenced them to long terms of imprisonment for their role in the massacres at Naroda Patiya during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Both have been convicted, among other things, ofmurder.BetweenQasab,whoarrivedasanoutsiderandmassacredpeoplehedidnotknow,and Kodnani and Bajrangi who turned on their own townspeople in ways equally horrific, why is one “rare” and the other not? In the Gujarat riots cases lies yet another contradiction: many of those convicted of the Godhra train massacre received death sentences. Was Godhra rare, but Naroda Patiya not? What nice points of distinction enable us to decide who dies and who lives?
Two of the signatories to the appeal to the President, Justice Ganguly and Justice AP Shah, have in separate interviews expressed their personal views in favour of abolishing the DP. Both make compelling arguments. “The legal safeguards aimed at avoiding a miscarriage of capital punishment have failed to deliver,” says Justice Shah. “I cannot say today that the death penalty isunconstitutional,butfreakishandrandomimposition of the death penalty is certainly unconstitutional,” is Justice Ganguly’s view.
Many writers (including Yug Mohit Chaudhry, the Bombay High Court lawyer who initiatedtheappealtothePresidentandamanofferocious tenacity) have explained at length why it must go: personal predilections, prejudice and bias, and individualistic aberrations show that the DP is inherently unreliable. Justice John Paul Stevens of the US Supreme Court reversed course after 32 years, arguing that “the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes’“. Philosophers, writers and leaders, too, have weighed in. “Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders,” said Albert Camus, and Desmond Tutu felt that “to take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice”.
But perhaps the most striking indictment of capital punishment comes from those to whom it falls to oversee its administration; people like Lewis Lawes, the warden of New York’s Sing Sing prison in the 1920s and 30s: “As if one crime of such nature, done by a single man, acting individually, can be expiated by a similar crime done by all men, acting collectively.”
The death penalty must go, for it obliterates a distinction fundamental to our existence: the distinction between revenge and justice, between being primitive and being civilized, between being human and being inhuman.

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P Sainath- -‘ Biometric data you can buy on streets of Mumbai ” #UID #Aadhar #Nationalsecurity

Photo courtesy- G . N Mohan, Bangalore

P Sainath‘s remarks at the public meeting organised recently  by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis:

(He says, at the end of 45 minutes, that he hasn’t yet touched upon a whole bunch of security issues, naming some of the more well-known civil/violent agitations, and then goes on) Oh yeah, I think that we are also involved in a number of other active processes that undermine [your] our insecurity, including the UID. OK. By the way, that outsourced biometric work. You can buy that data on the streets of Mumbai. It’s already made its way there. What sort of national security will you have when your biometric data is up for grabs all around the planet? You outsourced it to subcontractors who have subcontracted it to further people. It’s now available on the streets of Mumbai, biometric data.

Another thing let me tell you about this stupid, stupid idea. Anywhere in the world, anywhere in the world, there is no-one who has made a success of the UID type of system. The UK started this kind of national ID system, abandoned it in four months. Australia, it collapsed at the discussion stage. No other country has made a success of it, one, and no-one claims that it is is technologically infallible, and three, very importantly, in any society, there is 5 % to 7 % of the population that does not have any fingerprints. In India, that is 15% +, because of agricultural labour: they do not have fingerprints. OK? The washerwomen, they do not have fingerprints. A lot of professions in India: and those are the very people who will get de-accessed from your public distribution system, using the UID. The very people who need your public distribution system, the very people who need your social sector benefits, these are the very people who will be excluded from it, because they don’t have fingerprints. You are asking for big, big trouble, with this project.

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Para-athletes insulted by Paralympic Commitee – Pl sign the petition

 

I , Farmaan Basha  am writing to you from the 2012 London Paralympics Games village. I am affected with polio, but I have been Power-lifting since 2000. I was even honoured with the Arjuna Award

My wife, Antonia sold her jewellery so I could represent India at the Games. She was also supposed to help me get my way around events. She’s my soulmate and I owe my success to her.

Sadly, today she’s stranded outside the games village, because Paralympic Committee of India (PCI) members are using the free facilities meant for athletes and their support staff.

Thats why I started a petition on Change.org telling Sports Minister Ajay Maken to take strict action against PCI members for their conduct and derecognise the body altogether. http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/minister-of-sports-india-stop-treating-indian-paralympians-as-second-class-citizens

Even my coach, Sadanand Malashetti, who has trained me for years now, couldn’t access the Games Village even though his name was in the list of attendees provided by the Indian Govt.

The actions of the PCI members have humiliated me and my fellow athletes.

Prior to the event, I was lifting 170 kg in the 48kg class. When I was informed that my coach and wife would not be allowed to enter the games village my performance was badly affected and I couldn’t even lift 148 kgs.

Overcoming these difficulties, after a lot of hard-work and under emotional trauma, I managed to get 5th place in the powerlifting event. After the event when I asked for a pass for my wife who is legally my escort, I was denied the pass since the PCI wanted to punish me for complaining against them.

Join me in helping Indian paralympic players get the recognition they deserve. Tell Ajay Maken, the Minister of Sports to take strict action against the corrupt practices of Paralympic Committee of India. http://www.change.org/en-IN/petitions/minister-of-sports-india-stop-treating-indian-paralympians-as-second-class-citizens

Thanks in advance for taking action,

Farmaan Basha,

2012 London Paralympic Games Village

 

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‘Marriage not public transport system’- #Bhaktavasala #Gender #Vaw

 

 

Sep 07, 2012 |  AsianAge

Karnataka High Court judge Justice K. Bhaktavatsala’s suggestion that a woman should stay in an abusive marriage for the sake of the marriage and her children, has come in for criticism from various sections. An online petition appealing to Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia to intervene and take action against Justice Bhaktavatsala has been signed by over 500 people across the nation. Some blogs have also publicised the issue and asked for removal of the judge.

Kamayani Bali Mahabal, a Mumbai-based human rights and women’s rights activist on Thursday published an online appeal to Karnataka High Court Chief Justice Vikramjit Sen to look into the gender-insensitive remarks of Justice Bhaktavatsala. “I urge you not to give matrimonial cases to Justice Bhaktavatsala, so that there will be no miscarriage of justice in all cases relating to women because of such biased views,” the petition says. The activist has also sent a petition to the CJI to remove Justice Bhaktavatsala from hearing matrimonial cases.

“If a HC judge can say such atrocious things, what do we expect of the common man? Just goes to shows the ineffectiveness of the DV Act itself. Women first goes through domestic abuse and thereafter judicial abuse,” one of the comments to the petition reads. Many human rights activists have raised their voice against the judge’s comment and a page on FaceBook (www.facebook.com/mcpjudge) calls the judge an “MCP” and asks for his removal. The page, titled ‘Remove Justice Bhaktavatsala’, had received 168 likes till Thursday evening.

Social and human rights activists in Bengaluru are coming together to launch a protest against Justice Bhaktavatsala. A woman lawyer of Karnataka High Court has submitted a memorandum to Justice Kapadia demanding that judges should be given guidelines on how to deal with sensitive cases. Senior advocate and former chairperson of Karnataka State Women’s Commission, Mrs Pramila Nesargi, has written to the Chief Justice of the high court to intervene in this issue.

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