#India – For Kolkata Rape Survivor , a Lonely Wait for Justice #Vaw #Womenrights

By SWATI SENGUPTA

Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA demonstration in Kolkata, West Bengal, on Feb. 14, which was part of the ‘One Billion Rising’ campaign, a global initiative to oppose violence against women.

KOLKATA, West Bengal —In February 2012, a woman was gang-raped in a moving car after she was offered a lift from outside a nightclub on Kolkata’s Park Street. Unlike the majority of rape victims in India, she decided to report the crime, not only to the Park Street police, but also to the media. With her back to the TV cameras, her frizzy hair being her only identifying feature, she fielded questions from journalists.

Not long afterward, as she waited at a bus stop, another person saw her curls and asked, “Are you the Park Street rape victim?”

The woman immediately fled the bus stop. After that, she began to tie up her hair every time she went outside.

Courtesy of Swati SenguptaKatrina at a reporter’s house in Kolkata, West Bengal, on May 14.

“Even my family and friends now ask me to straighten my hair,” said the woman, a 38-year-old Anglo-Indian who asked to be identified as Katrina. “I am constantly identified everywhere I go. But why should I? I love my curls and always like to keep my hair open.”

Since the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi last year shocked the nation, the central government has passedstronger laws on sex crimes and harassment of women, and the suspects are being tried in a fast-track court that was set up for sexual assault cases, which usually take years to conclude.

Katrina’s case is also in a fast-track court in Kolkata, where three of the five men she accused of raping her — Nishad Alam, Naseer Khan and Sumit Bajaj – began their trial in March. However, the Kolkata police commissioner, Surajit Kar Purakayastha, said the police are still looking for the other two men, Mohammad Ali and Kader Khan, the main suspect.

However, tougher laws on crimes against women can’t prevent the ostracization that occurs to rape victims in India, as Katrina has learned.

For example, the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, responded to the initial reports about the rape by saying Katrina had lied in order to make her government look bad. Hours later, an angry mob formed outside Katrina’s apartment building.

Katrina has also been receiving calls from unknown people who have threatened her or offered her money to withdraw the case, the last one as recently as April, which she reported to the police.

The single mother of two teenage daughters decided to not take any chances with her safety. A former call center worker who was unemployed at the time of the rape, she has spent most of the past year at home while she looked for a job.

“I never stepped into a discotheque since then. I hardly go out with friends. I miss my life,” she says wistfully, sipping tea and nibbling on croquettes at a reporter’s house. She agreed to visit only after receiving reassurances that no one else would be home.

Her sense of isolation grew as her neighbors – many of whom used to celebrate Christmas and the New Year at her apartment — began to grumble about her. Katrina often came home at odd hours when she was running a call center, but after she went public with the rape, she said that her neighbors complained about her comings and goings.

“No matter how early I returned, everyone would suggest I got back late – hinting that I was in the wrong and had invited my rape,” Katrina said

Whenever she had guests or her teenage daughters stepped out, she said her neighbors would whisper: “Look! There they go!”

“Luckily, I have very strong girls,” she said. “I know they will protest every injustice, but I am scared out of my wits for them.”

Biswanath Acharya, one of her former neighbors, said the complaints about Katrina were purely for security reasons. “We objected about the odd hours in which she would leave and return home, or some of her friends – usually male – would visit her.”

His wife, Durga, said that while she supported Katrina’s decision to report the rape, she said that they got updates on the case from television and never from her. “We came to know from her landlord that she was facing a financial crisis as she couldn’t pay her rent,” she said. “But we were not close enough to discuss about her job requirements. Frankly, looking at her, you wouldn’t know she didn’t have a job.”

Katrina eventually moved, deciding that she didn’t want to deal with the dirty looks and snide remarks. But even while she was looking for another apartment, she was reminded of her status as a rape victim. She said landlords would take her deposit, make inquiries about her and finally return the money. They would tell her, “We can’t rent this flat to you. Surely you know why,” she recalled.

The government was partly to blame for Katrina’s plight since it didn’t offer her much help, said Bharati Mutsuddi, a senior advocate of the Calcutta High Court, who was also a member of the West Bengal Commission for Women when the Left Front governed the state. “The role of the state could have been to offer her succor, strongly supporting her in the case and to ensure she remains strong, mentally and physically,” Ms. Mutsuddi said.

The current head of the women’s commission, Sunanda Mukherjee, said that the commission was already handling many cases and that Katrina needed to file a case with the commission if she wanted aid.

Katrina ended up finding another apartment on her own, and, after many interviews that never went anywhere, another job. About six weeks ago, she was approached by Santasree Chaudhuri, an entrepreneur and a women’s rights activist, to work at a hotline she founded for victims of sexual and domestic violence, called Survivors for Victims of Social Injustice.

Ms. Chaudhuri, who was out of the country when Katrina’s case was first reported in the media, learned about Katrina after returning to India and contacted her through a nongovernment organization. “She came to my place and immediately offered me this job,” Katrina said.

She started the new job about six weeks ago. “Now I meet so many women and encourage them to go on fighting for their rights, and it feels good to support them in this manner,” said Katrina, who has been inspired to write a book about her own experience.

Katrina said she was hopeful that the next generation will have a more sympathetic view of rape victims, as her daughters’ friends have stood by them. “No snide remarks, no ditching my darlings because of my rape. I’ve been to parent-teacher meetings, and my children’s friends all surround me and chat,” she said.

She said although she had initially regretted coming forward about the rape, those feelings quickly dissipated, and now she was determined to see her case through to the end, no matter the cost.

“Had I died that night – and it’s only a miracle that I am alive – people would have sympathized,” she said. “The fact that I am alive, screaming, protesting with courage no matter how much I am crumbling inside, makes everyone angry. How can a raped, brutalized woman still have so much of courage and voice? They want me to break down.”

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Mumbai bans scantily clad mannequins as they incite sex crimes #Rape #WTFnews #Moralpolicing

Mannequins on the move

Mumbai Mirror | May 30, 2013,

Shanta Gokhale: Separating the best from the banal on Mumbai‘s culturescape

By: Shanta Gokhale

It was reported a couple of days ago, that Ms Ritu Tawade, the BJP corporator from Ghatkopar, had proposed banning lingerie clad mannequins from shop-windows and roadside stalls because “two piece clothes which barely cover the body have led to pollution of minds in today’s generation.” Reading between the lines of Ms Tawade’s becomingly modest statement in which no unspeakable word had passed her lips, our mayor Shri Sunil Prabhu explained that such “scantily clad mannequins do invite unwanted attention of men and result in a surge of sex crimes.” By sex crimes he did not of course mean just touching and groping, crimes for which my aunt, now 86, beat up a man with her umbrella on Dadar bridge in premannequin days. He also meant rape. We now learn that Ms Tawade’s proposal has been passed unanimously by all 227 corporators, cutting across party lines.

It is heartening to know that, whether or not our gutters are cleaned and roads repaired before the rains, our corporators are dedicatedly working towards cleaning up men’s minds. In their utopia, once those scantily dressed mannequins have been bundled off their stands, women will walk free, without having to constantly look before, behind and beside them for signs of unwanted male attention. Like collateral damage during drone attacks, there’s also a collateral benefit attached to abolishing lingeried mannequins. It will drive pollution out of shop and stall assistants’ minds. For remember Ms Tawade, it is they who dress (or perhaps you prefer the word ‘underdress’?) the mannequins. Oh baba! Not just looking looking, but actually touching touching!

One knows of course that corporators’ job specifications don’t include reading and thinking. So Ms Tawade can’t be faulted for not knowing that rape has a more complex pathology and a longer history than can be settled with the mere de-mannequinning of our visual space. We are only talking about dummies here, plastic representations of women. But in Cameroon the fear of rape has resulted in a practice that savagely damages real women’s real bodies. Breast ironing as it is colourfully called, is a part of Cameroon sanskriti. It involves mothers beating their pubescent daughters’ breasts to prevent them from developing. The most widely used implements to achieve this goal are wooden pestles, ladles, spatulas, grinding stones or any other blunt object that’s handy. Breasts are beaten to protect girls from sexual harassment and rape. The collateral benefit of girls not being raped is families not losing their honour because of unwanted pregnancies.

In our country, we have a more radical tradition. In the old days we killed girls at birth, with midwives obliging. Now technology has helped us progress. We preempt birth itself. No girls, no threat to society’s morals.

Returning to Ms Tawade, I had this vision of a simple woman who had been brought up in the traditional way with traditional values. Like the majority of women in this country, she would probably rather die than say bra in public. Developing the picture further, I saw her suffering sleepless nights over the growing crimes against women in her city. Tossing and turning, she hunted for a solution. Then suddenly one day she had it. “Eureka! It’s the dummies, dummy,” she cried and promptly set to work to banish them from sight.

This beguiling picture was destroyed in toto when I saw and heard her on a television talk show on Tuesday night. Far from being simple, she turned out to be an astute politician. Towards the end of the discussion, such as it was, with three representatives of India all yakking in English ranged against this lone representative of Bharat speaking in Hindi, she quietly shifted the goalpost from crimes against women to encroachment on pavements. For a second the other panellists raced on like cartoon characters, skidding to a halt only when they realised that their quarry was no longer before them but had quietly climbed a tree. Making the most of the few seconds of talking time she had wrested from the others, Ms Tawade spoke heatedly about mannequins at roadside stalls eating up pavement space, thereby encroaching on pedestrians’ right to walk on them. Rape? Who said anything about rape?

None of the other panellists had the presence of mind to question her about mannequins in shop windows which didn’t encroach on pedestrians’ rights. Were they to be allowed to pollute the minds of today’s generation? But time was up. Ms Tawade had won the round. Jai political gamesmanship! Jai Bharat!

Liked/hated her column? Write to Shanta Gokhale at mirrorfeedback@timesgroup.com

 

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Pakistani lesbian couple marry in U.K. defying threats

HASAN SUROOR

 LONDON, May 27, 2013, The Hindu

On a day that a French lesbian love story won the top award at Cannes, two young lesbians from Pakistan became the first Muslim women in Britain to marry in a civil ceremony in what the gay community hailed as a “landmark” event.

Rehana Kausar (34) and Sobia Kamar (29) said they decided to go ahead despite receiving death threats because they believed it was “no one’s business what we do with our personal lives”.

Immediately after tying the knot, they sought asylum in Britain claiming that their lives would be in danger if they returned to Pakistan where homosexuality is illegal and gay people live in fear.

The couple, who met three years ago while studying business and health care management in Birmingham, were reported as saying they had been living together in South Yorkshire for about a year but were able to gather enough courage to come out openly only last month.

According to their relatives, the two had been threatened both in Pakistan and in Britain, and could not find an imam to perform a “nikah”.

Ms. Kausar, originally from Lahore, and Ms. Kamar, from the Mirpur region of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, took vows at Leeds Registry Office under Britain’s Civil Partnership Act 2004 which gives gay couples the same rights and responsibilities that heterosexual couples enjoy in a civil marriage.

Personal act

“This country allows us rights and it’s a very personal decision that we have taken. It’s no one’s business as to what we do with our personal lives. The problem with Pakistan is that everyone believes he is in charge of other people lives and can best decide about the morals of others but that’s not the right approach and we are in this state because of our clergy, who have hijacked our society which was once a tolerant society and respected individuals freedoms,” Ms. Kausar told Birmingham’s Sunday Mercury newspaper.

Ms. Kamar described her partner as a “soul mate” and said she loved her.

Praising them for their courage, a relative said: “They have been very brave throughout as our religion does not condone homosexuality. The couple have had their lives threatened both here and in Pakistan and there is no way they could ever return there.”

 

Rs 212 crore for Omkareshwar dam oustees

 

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Author(s): Aparna Pallavi
Date: May 30, 2013

Activists allege farmers being shortchanged; demand strict implementation of rehabilitation policy and Supreme Court guidelines
Last year, people affected by the Omkareshwar and Indira Sagar dams protested the raising of dam storage levels by staying in neck-deep water for over a fortnight (photo courtesy Narmada Bachao Andolan)
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has declared a rehabilitation package worth Rs 212 crore for people displaced by the Omkareshwar dam on the river Narmada. The announcement was made late on Tuesday night. The project has affected five villages and a total of 2,500 families.

The project affected people had been agitating for rehabilitation since July last year when they staged a jal satyagraha after the government ordered the dam reservoir to be filled without providing alternative land or compensation. Following the agitation, the government constituted a complaint redressal cell for the oustees . However, the cell failed to function as desired. A press note of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a people’s front fighting for the rights of those displaced, stated the government even showed displaced villagers land that had already been given to those displaced because of other development projects, which nearly sparked off a conflict between the two groups.

No land in lieu of land taken

The current rehabilitation package promises Rs 2.5 lakh as compensation to landless oustees, while farmers have been promised Rs 2 lakh compensation per acre (one acre equals 0.4 hectare). Though the NBA has welcomed the provision for the landless, it has criticised the package provision for farmers.

Talking to Down To Earth from Khandva district, NBA activist Chittaroopa Palit said that the Supreme Court in its May 2011 order has said that the rehabilitation policy should be strictly followed. The policy says that all farmers ousted should be given minimum five acres of land. The present compensation package, however, does not envisage such a clause and offers to pay farmers only for the land they actually have, which will impact farmers with less than five acres badly. Also, the actual cost of land is much higher – this year Indira Sagar dam oustees have been paid Rs 5.80 lakh per acre. The NBA press note demanded that government either give every displaced farmer five acres of irrigated land, or pay for the purchases made by him.

Another unreasonable clause in the rehabilitation package is that only those villagers who vacate the submersion area by July 15 will be paid compensation. “This clause is illegal, and goes against the spirit of the rehabilitation policy,” says Palit. “Supreme Court has also said clearly in its order that oustees will be given six months to vacate the area after payment of compensation,” she adds.

‘Compensate those displaced by other dams as well’

NBA has demanded that compensation should not be limited to only Omkareshwar oustees, but should also be paid to those displaced because of all dams in the Narmada valley – namely Indira Sagar, Maheshwar, Upper Beda and Mann.

Omkareshwar dam is a multi-purpose project built at a cost of Rs 2,224.73 crore. Its installed capacity is 520 MW; the power is produced by eight power stations. The project is supposed to generate 1,167 million units energy every year, while also meeting the irrigation needs of at least three districts.

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Vina Mazumdar’s Rolling Story

Pamela Philipose

Many known and unknown women have helped build up that seeming inchoate, open-ended, work-in-progress that is the Indian women’s movement. Among this remarkable sorority is Vina Mazumdar, known widely as ‘Vina-di’, who being endowed with tremendous energy, intelligence and an interest in ideas, has contributed immensely to the intellectual growth of this movement.

In her eighties now, Mazumdar has recently written a memoir, entitled ‘Memories of a Rolling Stone’, brought out by Zubaan. To have a woman who was a notable educationist, who anchored the 1974 Report of the Committee on the Status of Women, who is widely seen as the “grandmother of women’s studies in South Asia”, and who remains a feminist/activist/”trouble maker” to this day, set down her recollections of a lifetime spanning eight decades is in itself cause for celebration. So many of her contemporaries have, sadly, passed on leaving their footprints behind, but not their words. In her acknowledgements, Vina-di indicates one of the factors that motivated the work: “I view this book as part of my tribute to the Indian women’s movement to assert the rights they had earned through participating in India’s freedom struggle.”

The freedom struggle certainly helped to shape this young life. When Mazumdar joined the Delhi University, she could sense the political turmoil in the air. The Constituent Assembly was in session, and she would occasionally make her way to the visitors’ gallery to listen to a galaxy of leaders hold forth on their idea of India. One abiding memory was that of witnessing the Union Jack coming down and the Tricolour going up at Delhi’s India Gate, the other was of a caption-less David Low cartoon she saw in a British newspaper as a student at Hugh’s College, Oxford, which appeared soon after Gandhi’s assassination, depicting Socrates with the bowl of hemlock, Christ on the cross, and Gandhi with his ‘dandi’ (stick).

Here then was a women shaped by pre-Independent India, who would go on to try and shape, in her own way, post-Independent India. The challenges Mazumdar faced were many, and they included domestic upheavals caused by professional choices. There was also the backlash from entrenched hierarchies – notably during her courageous attempt to breathe fresh life into the stagnant academic scenario of the University of Berhampur in Orissa.

[ Related: more news tagged with “Feminist movement” ]

Meanwhile, the world began to focus more on women. The United Nations marked 1975 as the Year of Women, and went on to declare 1975-1985 as the decade of women. This meant that UN member-states had to submit Country Reports on the status of women in their respective countries. That was how fate and a visionary bureaucrat called J.B. Naik, conspired to introduce Mazumdar to the subject of gender. She was taken on as Member-Secretary of the committee that was drafting India’s report on the status of its women. The whole experience was to prove a life-changer. As Mazumdar puts it in her memoirs, “My earlier struggles represented an individual woman’s efforts to balance the demands of professional and familial responsibilities. The new struggle was increasingly a collective, ideological one – to rediscover the Indian nation, the world, the past, the present and the future – from the perspective of India’s hidden and unacknowledged majority: poor working women in rural and urban areas.”

The exercise meant, first of all, evolving a framework with which to regard the position of women in the country cutting across castes, classes, economic strata and religion and reorganising existing demographic data to yield its evidence of the large scale “marginalisation, poverty and invisibility” of Indian women caught in a “dual economy” (traditional and modern) – a concept borrowed from Gunnar Myrdal‘s ‘Asian Drama’. It was what Mazumdar describes as a “fantastic experience of the evolution and growth of collective thinking”. Despite occasional personal differences within the Committee, the process was driven by a “collective conscience”, as Mazumdar puts it.

There were major silences in the Report and Mazumdar recognises that the Committee did not pay sufficient attention to the issues of rape and dowry. Yet, it is no exaggeration to say the Committee on the Status of Women in India Report, which came out in 1974, changed the way the country regarded its women. It countered assumptions of the millennia, undermined government mindsets, helped unleash innumerable mutinies, and changed policies and laws. In fact, it was revolutionary in its impact, all the more remarkable for having emerged just before one of the darkest periods of recent Indian history – the Emergency. If the Committee, and its Member-Secretary, did not have friends and supporters in the establishment, it may have never seen the light of day. Today, decades later, Mazumdar, recalls with what one would imagine an impish smile, “Before the rest of the government could realise what the Report contained it was placed before Parliament, a report very critical of the Government of India.”

The realisation of the centrality of gender in society led to another significant process in which Mazumdar again played an important role, and that was the emergence of women’s studies as an academic discipline. Mazumdar sees the women’s movement and the women’s studies movement as “twin movements”, each influencing and furthering the other. The logical outcome of this process was the setting up of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS) in May 1980, with Mazumdar as its founder-director. It was at this point that her concerned elder sister, observing Mazumdar’s penchant for embracing ever new challenges despite the fact that her daughters still needed her attention, termed her a “rolling stone” – the title of the book.

But the stone, despite such apprehensions, rolled on nevertheless and invariably into fresh fields. This included a project that came to define Mazumdar’s contribution as a social analyst-activist. To put it in Mazumdar’s own words, “Our (CWDS’s) real journey of discovery began at the ‘Reorientation Camp for Seasonally Migrant Women Labourers’, organised by the Department of Land Reforms, Government of West Bengal, in Jhilmili village in Banjura district.” That encounter with tribal peasant women proved to be an “unusual alliance of a social science research institution and groups of the poorest, migrant rural women”, and to Mazumdar it showed the possibility of arriving at development with a human face.

The CWDS had its plate full. There were a plethora of concerns that needed scholarly scrutiny, ranging from the resurgence of the practice of ‘sati’ in some pockets to one of the most serious demographic challenges facing India today: the skewed sex ratio.

When ‘Memories of a Rolling Stone’ was released in Delhi, Brinda Karat, senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and general secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s  Association, spoke for many when she observed how Mazumdar helped bring women together. Said Karat, “This was because she was convinced that if things have to be changed on the ground, it has to be a joint effort… Vina-di put things in a wider perspective, which could draw the Indian women’s movement forward. This helped it to retain a dynamism that has petered out in many movements in the West.”

By arrangement with WFS   

 

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#India – Maternal Health Whistle Blower Arrested #Vaw #Womenrights

Published: Thursday, May 30,2013, , http://www.ibtl.in/
By: Dr. Rita Pal

 

Madhuri Ramakrishnasway, a maternal health activist was arrested on the 16th May 2013 outside the court in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh [MP], India. The police had received a complaint from those in charge of a hospital currently under scrutiny for the alleged mismanagement and neglect of maternal health. The background of this complaint is as follows:- On the night of 11th November 2008, a very poor tribal woman from the village of Sukhpuri came to the Menimata Public Health Centre [PHC] during labour. She was admitted by those in charge who allegedly left her unmonitored all night. The hospital then demanded Rs 100, an amount she could not afford. She was asked to leave and the staff refused to arrange transport. Finally, the patient delivered her baby on the street with the help of the local “Dai” (Traditional Birth Attendant), only covered by a cloth held by her father in law. Having witnessed the event, Madhuri took the patient to another hospital to receive treatment. A protest was launched against the unacceptable incident that appears to have been one of many. This case was also part of the writ petition filed in the High Court of MP, Indore Bench in which the substandard state of maternal health services was raised – e.g. the 26 maternal deaths recorded in Barwani District Hospital in 2010 over 8 months were mentioned. The compounder of the hospital was suspended after repeated demands for action but was soon reinstated. It is notable that no one was subsequently held accountable for the dozens of avoidable maternal deaths that have taken place in Barwani. The picture is similar across the rest of the state. The finer points of the case are discussed in more detailed by an excellent Indian blogger and can be read here . “An investigation of maternal deaths following public protests in a tribal district of Madhya Pradesh” [Reproductive Health Matters] states

“We found an absence of antenatal care despite high levels of anaemia, absence of skilled birth attendants, failure to carry out emergency obstetric care in obvious cases of need, and referrals that never resulted in treatment. We present two case histories as examples. We took our findings to district and state health officials and called for proven means of preventing maternal deaths to be implemented. We question the policy of giving cash to pregnant women to deliver in poor quality facilities without first ensuring quality of care and strengthening the facilities to cope with the increased patient loads. We documented lack of accountability, discrimination against and negligence of poor women, particularly tribal women, and a close link between poverty and maternal death”

This whistleblower’s concerns were not without merit. She was subsequently witch hunted as the hospital in question filed a complaint against her, the patient and the patient’s husband. They received a court notice to appear at Barwani Court regarding this case on the 16th May 2013. Apparently, the police filed a closure report but sadly the court remained unsatisfied with this and the report was refused. Madhuri was arrested from the court and imprisoned in Khargone Women’s Jail. The petition completed by her supporters states

“Although the police had filed a Closure Report, it was refused since “clear reasons for closure had not been stated” and Madhuri did not opt for bail since the charges were clearly false[i]; one Section 148 actually refers to “rioting armed with deadly weapons”! She was sent to judicial custody until May 30th 2013”

It goes onto say

“We find unacceptable that the government targets those who work to protect the rights of the poorest Dalits and Adivasis who are suffering due to poor quality of health services; and we demand accountability from the erring officials who are indirectly responsible for thousands of women dying due to preventable pregnancy related causes”

Madhuri Ramakrishnasway is popularly known amongst the tribals of Barwani as “ Madhuri Ben” .She is a leader of Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS), a tribal and Dalit Rights Collective. Various advocacy groups under them often hold peaceful protests with a view to raising awareness of the substandard healthcare during pregnancy and labour. She has been involved in developing a grassroots movement demanding good care for rural maternal and child health in some of the remotest parts of the district. In support of Madhuri Ben’s concerns, it is notable that last year :

“The study, conducted on 819 deaths of a total of 1,065 probably maternal deaths reported in Madhya Pradesh between April 2011 and January 2012, suggests 132 women died on their way home or to a health facility” [Source – The Hindu ].

While recent news reports ran headlines about the sudden miraculous “improvement” in mortality rate in the state [ Times of India ], these reports conflicts with a presentation in the previous year on maternal death reviews in MP. Apurva Chaturvedi, State Consultant, National Rural Health Mission, and Archana Mishra, Deputy Director (NRHM), explained that 32 per cent of the reviewed deaths had occurred in district hospitals, 25 per cent in maternity centres, 13 per cent in sub-centres and 6 per cent in private facilities.

“Only 17.7 per cent of the expected maternal deaths are being reported and analysed while the remaining go unreported. Worse, in 37 per cent of the cases the cause of maternal deaths is registered as ‘other’,” they said.

The questionable statistics and the reasons for this was argued well by Sachin Jain. The government’s position isn’t convincing given the reports on the ground. It is therefore time for a legitimate investigation into the serious risk posed to vulnerable mothers in this state. The first task for the government is to cease harassing its whistleblowers who point out their spectacular failings. Then they should apply their minds more constructively to improving healthcare for patients at risk of neglect and death. They may also wish to improve their ability to collect statistics to avoid being embarrassed further. Click here to Sign the Petition

Author : Dr Rita Pal, Follow her twitter.com/dr_rita39

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Mumbai- A Forum to Hear complaint against Cops #Goodnews

Authority to be set up at state, district level; recommendations to be binding on force

Sayli Udas Mankikar

MUMBAI: Citizens who have complaints about the high-handedness of policemen, unnecessary detention, physical abuse in custody, rape or sexual harassment or corruption will now have a forum where they can direct their grievances and get their complaints addressed.

To keep a check on severe abuse of authority by the police and secure the rights of citizens under the rule of law, the state has initiated the process of forming a police complaints authority.

“The formation of this authority will lead to a tectonic change in the functioning of the state’s police system. What is important is that the complaints authority can take suo-moto cognisance of the case and even forward a case directly to the DGP for action,” a senior government official said. MUMBAI: Citizens who have complaints about the high-handedness of policemen, unnecessary detention, physical abuse in custody, rape or sexual harassment or corruption will now have a forum where they can direct their grievances and get their complaints addressed.

In a bid to keep a check on severe abuse of authority by the police and secure the rights of citizens under the rule of law, the state government has initiated the process of forming a police complaints authority. This authority will also help release pressure off courts that are burdened by numerous litigations related to police issues.

Formed six years after the Supreme Court’s directive on police reforms in September 2006, the authority will deal with complaints against officers of all ranks. Further, it comes with teeth, as its recommendations against police officials will be binding on the agencies.

The complaints handled by the authority will be of specific in nature and include deaths in police custody, grievous hurt or injuries, rape or attempt to rape, arrest or detention without law and allegations of corruption.

The court has directed the state to form the authority by June 20, 2013.

“The formation of this authority will lead to a tectonic change in the functioning of the state’s police system. What is important is that the complaints authority can take suo-moto cognisance of the case and even forward a case directly to the DGP for action,” a senior government official said.

The state will be setting up a police complaints authority at the state level and the district level. While the state-level authority will look into complaints against officers of the rank of superintendent of police (SP) and above, the district authority will look into those against police officers up to the rank of deputy superintendent of police (DYSP).

A retired judge of the high court or Supreme Court will head the state-level authority and a district judge will chair the district panel. Both judges will be assisted by about three to five full-time members who will be retired civil servants, retired police officers or from the civil society.

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Press Release- Stop the cycle of violence in Central India. Halt all violence on Adivasis

DATE: 30 May 2013

 Radical Socialist

 

Radical Socialist calls for a halt to the spiral of violence and counter-violence between the Indian state, political forces of the ruling class, and the CPI (Maoist).

 

This violence is caused by two forces, not one. Following the murder of Mahendra Karma and others in Chhattisgarh, the bourgeois propaganda has gone into a hyper-drive, claiming that this is a great blow to democracy. This attitude shows clearly that for the bourgeoisie, as well as for the reformist and parliamentarist left parties like the CPI (M), democracy does not place equal value for all lives.  In June 2012, 17 adivasis were murdered in cold blood by the CRPF. Two fact finding teams, one consisting of members of several civil liberties organizations and the other including responsible academicians like Nandini Sundar, indicted the CRPF. The national print and electronic media did not turn the incident or even the reports into huge front page information. The Telegraph, which has editorially claimed the recent incident as a great attack on democracy, did not feel the same way on the previous occasion.

 

The entire ruling class, and all its minions, are thus complicit in the recurrent violence on adivasis across a vast part of India. Those adivasis are sitting on high quality real estate that the rulers want to exploit. And those same adivasis are expected to provide the supere-xploited proletariat who will produce surplus value at a high level. 

 

It is for this reason that a notorious figure like Mahendra Karma, who set up the Salwa Judum, was not merely a Congress backed gangster, but actually a principal leader of the Congress. The Salwa Judum set up private, but state backed, terror on adivasis. It set up villages akin to the notorious “strategic hamlets” of Vietnam created by US imperialism, herding villagers there like cattle. Though eventually, in 2011, after a petition by Nandini Sundar, Ramchandra Guha and E.A.S. Sharma, the Supreme Court ordered its disbandment, karma continued to be a principal figure of the Congress.

 

The killing of Karma, as reported, was brutal, and deserves no support. But it cannot be isolated and condemned, while the massive violence on adivasis and the loot of their property continues to be justified by Chidambaram, by the Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, and others.

 

At the same time, we oppose the political and military strategy of the CPI (Maoist).

1. Even if this is seen as a war, then if people surrender they should be seen as prisoners and should not be killed.

2. The strategy of guerilla war using sophisticated weapons, and exposing adivasis to further and extreme state violence, betrays a political mindset that is all about getting or seeking power and not about mass mobilization and power for the exploited.

The CPI (Maoist) outlook is evidently one that if the state kills more adivasis the middle ground will be eliminated and hopefully more people will turn to their line. 

 

At the time of the Dantewada violence Radical Socialist had already expressed its views in clear terms. (http://www.radicalsocialist.in/articles/statement-radical-socialist/183-oppose-green-hunt-condemn-maoist-politics-of-glorifying-violence) We reiterate our stand, and declare that we deny equating the violent Maoists practices, entirely by a self-proclaimed vanguard, carried on for decades, with revolutionary violence by the people in moments of mass upsurge. Maoist violence is not based on any mass politics. Even in the few cases where so-called mass involvement is claimed, especially by urban intellectual supporters of the Maoists, the reality is that gun wielding Maoist cadres dictated the violence. We strongly feel that this sordid violence would fail to bring any radical change even in remote future.

 

We are very clear that big corporates want free access to the forests and mineral rich areas to exploit resources for capitalist expansion. This ruthless capitalist abuse is the root cause for the present crisis that India and its people are facing. We strongly believe that the only force that can lead the struggle against capitalism in India and globally is the organized working class. However, with their current strategy, the Maoists are failing to make any impact on the class.

 

No matter what they say about “encirclement of the cities from the countryside” the bulk of rural India has remained totally out of their reach; forget about the cities where the bulk of the principal revolutionary force – the working class – is concentrated. Hence, the question of encircling the cities with liberated villages shall not apply with the current strategy of the Maoists.

 

Meanwhile, gruesome violence cannot enhance their politics. We call upon their leaders, who claim to be Marxists, to understand the meaning of working class self emancipation, and end their current strategy in the interests of far wider working class revolutionary struggles that have to be built up.

 

Soma Marik                 Sushovan Dhar                    Kunal Chattopadhyay                                     

Trupti Shah                 Amrish Brahmbhatt             Rohit Prajapati

 

Social Media Campaign Finally Forces Facebook to be Less Pro-Rape #Vaw #Womenrights

It took some convincing, but they did it. A feud which started on Facebook ended with the early-morning slaying of a young Tennessee couple, found shot in the head with their sobbing baby still clutched in her dead mother’s arms, police said.

May 29, 2013 |

On Tuesday, after more than 60,000 tweets ( #FBRape) and 15 lost advertisers became a rallying call for change, Facebook announced it would no longer allow its hate speech policy to gloss over violent, misogynistic pages like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” and “Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich.” A Facebook spokesperson had previously told ThinkProgress that this kind of content is just “poor taste” or “crude attempts at humor,” not hate speech or anything that serious. Beating women is totally fine, LOL, says Facebook.

But put a breast on an educational ad explaining that abortions don’t cause breast cancer, and Facebook will shut it down it for violating its ban on ” adult products.” Maybe if the boob were bleeding, Facebook would have just laughed it off. The long-awaited change in hate speech guidelines was prompted by WAM! (Women, Action, and the Media) and Everyday Sexism, which kicked off the campaign to end #FBRape promotion with an open letter and savvy social media strategy last Tuesday. On Twitter and via E-mail, they pointed advertisers (particularly those that cater to women, like Dove) to pro-rape/violence-against-women pages on which their ads were displayed, successfully encouraging many of them to denounce Facebook’s poor content control and demand change.

Dozens of high-profile activists and groups signed their letter asking Facebook to “Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech,” and a coalition of supporters grew to more than one-hundred.

The pressure was enough to make Facebook fold, and reluctantly release a statement outlining new guidelines regarding hate speech. Perhaps now they will patrol misogynistic content just as steadfastly as they do women’s health ads! “We work hard to remove hate speech quickly, however there are instances of offensive content, including distasteful humor, that are not hate speech according to our definition,” the statement said, apparently referring to some of the disgusting pages like those mentioned above. Nonetheless, they are accepting some responsibility for the epic lapse in judgement.

“In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want.

In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria,” the statement said, “We need to do better – and we will.” Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of WAM!, said in a press release that the change is a great victory for female activism. “We are reaching an international tipping point in attitudes towards rape and violence against women. We hope that this effort stands as a testament to the power of collaborative action

#RIP- The Grand Old Lady of Indian Womens Movement, Vina Mazumdar – No More #Womenrights

 

Noted academic and a leading figure of India’s women’s movement, Dr Vina Mazumdar, died early today after a brief illness.

86-year old Mazumdar was suffering from a tumour in her lungs, her family said. She is survived by three daughters and a son. A strong votary of increased women’s representation in Parliament and legislature, Mazumdar was the secretary of the Committee on the Status of Women in India that brought out the first report on the condition of women in the country, ‘Towards Equality’, in 1974. The report became a turning point both for women’s studies and the women’s movement in India.

She was the founding Director of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), an autonomous organisation under the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), where she remained a National Research Professor till the end. Born in 1927 in a middle-class Bengali household in Kolkata, she did her schooling in the city and studied in Banaras Hindu University and Calcutta University, before going to Oxford in 1947, soon after independence. She went back to Oxford University later and received her D.Phil in 1962. She taught in Patna and Berhampur Universities, joined the University Grants Commission Secretariat and also remained a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.

Later she became Director, Programme of Women’s Studies, Indian Council of Social Science Research from 1975 to 1980.

Her memoir, Memories of a Rolling Stone, speaks of her liberal upbringing, Kolkata of 1940s, activism and policy making of 60s and 70s, her rebellious daughters and singer- husband Shankar.

Among her known students in Patna University are BJP leader Yashwant Sinha and former Foreign Secretary Muchkund Dubey, while CPI(M) leaders, Prakash Karat, Brinda Karat and Sitaram Yechury were very close to her.

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