Ishtiaq Ahmed

WHEN Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather’s property even when their own father had passed away.

My recent op-ed, ‘The French burqa ban’ (Daily Times, February 2, 2010), has elicited spirited responses in the Pakistani English-language newspapers. That is a sign of healthy exchange of views. As always the liberal-left defence of reactionary practices is the most hypocritical because it derives from not some deeply held commitment to reactionary culture. When the Taliban or al Qaeda defend the burqa as obligatory dress for pious women and then use the same to carry out terrorist attacks in their twisted reasoning, the burqa has served a double purpose: it has preserved the chastity of their female suicide bombers while enabling them to fight in the jihad. Additionally, if the burqa can be used by men to evade inspection then too it has served a ‘noble’ purpose.

In ‘The French burqa ban’, I had based my opposition to it on two factual bases: one, that it can be used to mortally harm other, innocent human beings, and two, that it was a later accretion to the Muslim female dress code and was not part of the pristine Islamic community founded by the Prophet (PBUH). Nobody challenged my second argument, so I will not go over it again.

I will address the first argument because on that occasion I only mentioned that the burqa can be used for terrorist activities. Now, I will give concrete evidence that should incontrovertibly establish the burqa as a dress code that has been used in recent times on a number of occasions to carry out terrorist acts in not only Pakistan and Afghanistan but elsewhere too. The Kuwait Times of December 12, 2009, under the caption ‘Veiled suicide bomber was Danish says Somali Speaker’ (http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTE5Mjc4MzEwOA) narrates the tragic story of a suicide bomber, allegedly a 26-year-old Danish citizen of Somali descent, who killed 22 people including three government ministers in Mogadishu disguised as a veiled woman. The Speaker of the Somalian Parliament, Sheikh Aden Mohamed Madobe, remarked: “It is unfortunate that a child whose parents escaped Somalia’s conflict and raised him in Europe came home with extremist ideologies and blew himself and innocent people up.” His father denied the charges, but the fact remains that whosoever succeeded in getting close to the Somalian politicians was wearing a burqa.

The Daily Times of February 9, 2010, informed that the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has dispatched eight female suicide bombers to target Punjab. Intelligence reports suggested that they were veiled and wore gloves and socks to conceal their identity. During 2007-2009, the Afghan and Pakistani media have reported several cases of burqa-clad terrorists. I need not labour the point that a similar crime can be committed anywhere in the world, including Europe, with the help of a burqa.

Some years earlier, the French had banned the headscarf in school for girls because it was realised that a concerted campaign of the ulema in combination with mainly young male adults from families were preventing Muslim girls getting a modern education and developing awareness about their rights under French secular law, which upholds equality of both the sexes. The ban did not apply to girls who had become majors or when they were not at school. There were protests on that occasion but when the French government (a socialist one at that time) did not give in, the protests petered out quickly because by and large the young Muslim girls favoured an end to their inferior status in the conservative Maghreb culture.

Another time when the sob-story about a powerless minuscule minority did not hold much water was when cases of female genital mutilation or female circumcision were reported from all over Europe. This barbaric practice was found among both Muslim and Christian immigrants in France from sub-Saharan Africa. I remember some crazy female American postmodernist freak protesting that it was white European men interfering in the cultural autonomy of African immigrants!

When Field Marshal Ayub Khan introduced the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance, he was assailed by all the reactionary ulema because it regulated polygamy, introduced a minimum age for marriage and gave a share in property to grandchildren from their grandfather’s property even when their own father had passed away. The government stood its ground and the first step towards social reform was taken after 1,400 years.

I am reminded of the Shah Bano Case (1985) in India in which cultural rights and freedom of choice were put forth as arguments to disqualify divorced aged Muslim women from claiming financial support from their ex-husbands. On that occasion it was not a question of the freedom of an individual but that of a community. Shah Bano, 64, was divorced by her husband of several decades, Mr Khan. On the advice of some well-wishers she applied for financial help from him as was granted to Indian citizens in such situations. Muslim conservatives took the stand that in Islam the ex-husband has no other obligation to support his former wife beyond iddat (a period of roughly four months to check if pregnancy had not occurred prior to divorce). The Indian Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that had fixed a nominal amount per month.

Conservative Muslims, including the ulema, mobilised the largely uneducated and ignorant Muslim masses against the reform. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi caved in because he did not want to risk alienating the Muslim vote bank. Therefore, the Indian Parliament passed a law exempting Muslim women from benefitting from a progressive change in law. The opponents took the position that the Indian state had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of the Muslim community. On that occasion the Hindu Right came out in favour of abolition of Muslim personal law, but earlier when in the 1950s Jawaharlal Nehru had introduced legislation to reform Hindu personal law to improve the rights and status of Hindu women, the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS had opposed such measures. Their support of the abolition of Muslim personal law was surely hypocritical, but should that have been enough to dissuade progressives from supporting reform? I wonder.

I probed this strange attitude of Pakistani progressives with the grand old man of the Pakistani left movement, Dada Amir Haider, in 1972. I wanted to understand why characters who pretended to uphold the emancipatory ethos of the French and Russian revolutions were no different in practice from those who believe that since the end of the Islamic Golden Age the world is constantly going astray. He gave a wry smile and said, “Such progressives have grown their beards deep inside their stomachs.”

[Ishtiaq Ahmed is a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) and the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. He has published extensively on South Asian politics. At ISAS, he is currently working on a book, Is Pakistan a Garrison State? He can be reached at isasia@nus.edu.sg]
Courtesy http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\02\16\story_16-2-2010_pg3_2

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Education as empowerment tool for children of sex workers

Manipadma Jena

"MAY I come in, Miss?" asks seven-year-old Ajmiri Khatun, her face beaming with her radiant smile. Her teacher, Pujo Roy, gladly welcomes her into the eight-square-foot educational facility designed for Indian children like her. "Thank you, Miss," says Ajmiri, as she enters the Kidderpore ‘Berabhenge’ centre, sits cross-legged on the floor and starts doing her homework.

Every day, from her school, Ajmiri proceeds to the centre where she waits for her mother, a commercial sex worker (CSW), to return from her work. Home for her and her family is a dilapidated shanty by the Sealdah railway in Kolkata city, where the stench of urine and garbage never goes away.

Ajmiri is also a student at the Loreto Day School, a 153-year-old private English medium school in Sealdah, a throbbing commercial hub in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal in eastern India.

She is proud of this opportunity to be able to go to one of the finest schools in Kolkata, and this she owes to the ‘Berabhenge’ (translated as ‘break the barriers of stigma’) children’s education centres, run by a network of CSWs across West Bengal.

Roy, 26, a teacher, friend and mentor to Khatun and other children like her, is herself the daughter of a CSW. After completing high school, she got married and then decided to devote her life to serving as a teacher to CSW children.

The Berabhenge centres, currently numbering 22 across the state, are alternative education providers, operated by the Durbar Women’s Collaborative Committee, popularly known as the Durbar ("The Indomitable").

The Durbar is a network of 65,000 CSWs in West Bengal. Its main office is in Sonagachi, considered one of Asia’s largest red light districts. The non- government organisation was organised in 1995 as part of a public health initiative to control the spread of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

The Berabhenge centres that the Durbar operates are designed specifically for CSW children and are funded by local and international donor agencies, which cover, among others, the salaries of teachers like Roy.

The centres’ services, which are offered for free, include vocational training courses such as embroidery, basic cosmetology and playing musical instruments. There children like Khatun and even young adults, can safely and comfortably wait for their mothers, usually out from 4 to 10 p.m., as they eke out a living on and off the streets, usually in brothels.

Muhammud Sahalam, a 19-year-old gangly Class eight dropout, earns 100 rupees (2.5 U.S. dollars) a day as a perfume salesman but is training to become a beautician at the Kidderpore ‘Berabhenge’ centre.

Others who go to any one of the Berabhenge centres aim to become electricians, television and radio repairmen or photographers.

Sixteen-year-old Rani Khatun (no relation to Ajmiri), who is learning to bead dresses at the Kidderpore centre, is eagre to earn so she could wean her mother away from the flesh trade.

The Berabhenge centres are the Durbar’s answer to the Indian apex court’s controversial proposal to legalise prostitution in order to solve the proliferation of trafficking and the sex trade in the state. In a December 2009 public interest litigation against child trafficking for commercial sex trade, the court said, "if you (central government) cannot handle it, legalise it."

Today there are more than 900 children of CSWs in the Berabhenge centres in West Bengal. About 700 of them go to formal schools while 75 are in residential or boarding schools, which function more like orphanages.

Tanjila Khatun, 15, has found a second home in the Berabhenge centre where she goes.

At home Tanjila, who also bears no relation with Ajmiri, says she tried to escape feelings of being trapped in a cramped space by reading her schoolbooks while in an adjoining cubicle, separated only by a ply board, her mother entertains drunken, foul-mouthed men.

"It can drive you to do insane things," she says. The centre gives her the space she needs and more. But beyond its walls, she faces constant discrimination, as do many children of CSWs like her.

Tanjila, who loves to dance, says no dance group in the city was willing to take her into its fold simply because she was from Sonagachi. So she and her friends – all children of CSWs – formed ‘Komal Gandhar’ (loosely translated as the performing arts), a cultural group that performs across the country. Lead performers transgender Sambhu Das, 21, and Nitai Giri, 41, tell their stories as CSWs in their performances.

"Our theatre pieces are most popular with the public; we present stories of our own everyday experience that we alone can best tell," says Giri.

Tanjila and the others lead the ‘Amra Padatik’ (or foot soldiers) – an army of children of CSWs who spread awareness about children’s rights, exploitation and child labour to communities.

One feature of the Durbar is its peer educator programme. Selected CSWs are informed about HIV/AIDS, STDs and the use of condoms before they are sent to the homes of other CSWs as peer educators. The resulting camaraderie and deep solidarity among them has led to unprecedented campaigns in the state for the rights of CSWs and their children, including legalisation of commercial sex and access to education.

"We realised that we needed to take control of ourselves to counter the everyday harassment (inflicted on us by society) and lead a life of respect and dignity," says Puspa Sarkar, a peer educator.

Besides being witness to constant violence at home and on the streets, the children of CSWs are constantly at risk of harm from police and goons.

"The police themselves are involved in atrocities, and lodging complaints against them becomes impossible. During regular brothel raids, they take away the children (found with their CSW mothers) and bring them to shelters, only to be brought back after the mothers pay hefty bribes to the police officials," says Oishik Sircar, a human rights lawyer who interned with Durbar. "The cycle of violence continues."

Indian law does not explicitly make prostitution illegal, but it criminalises solicitation, running of brothels and renting rooms to sex workers.

Durbar programme director Bharati Dey, who was a sex worker herself, maintains "any criminalisation of sex work reinforces harmful stigmas and creates a black market where child prostitution and trafficking thrive.

"You have local goons and corrupt police extorting money, beating us and forcing us into unprotected sex."

According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development there are an estimated three million prostitutes in India, of whom 40 percent are children aged 17 years and below. Data from organisations working with CSWs reveal that prostituted children contribute over 15,000 crore rupees (3.2 billion U.S. dollars) every year to the annual prostitution business, valued at 55,000 crore rupees (11.7 billion dollars).

The Central Bureau of Investigation says India occupies an important position as a source, transit and destination country for human trafficking, with an estimated 100 million Indian people involved in the trade.

The sheer scale of prostitution in India is reason enough why mainstreaming children of CSWs into schools and the rest of society is a major crusade for her NGO, says Durbar’s programme director Dey. Admitting them into mainstream government schools will help make their lives as normal as possible, she adds.

But that seems easier said than done.

"When I went to admit my son Bapi (now 22 and a bike mechanic) in a neighbourhood government school, the headmaster turned me away, claiming that ‘children of policemen study here; how can your son sit alongside them?" recounts Kohinoor Begum, a 45-year-old peer educator. Others were refused admission to the school because "they would pollute the school atmosphere."

Those who were admitted were told to study hard and "rescue" their mothers from prostitution. The children are often cruelly ragged about the identities of their fathers, making it stressful for them to continue going to school.

Durbar education supervisor Mallika Samatdar says that when her group went to the Loreto School, the authorities refused to register their guardians’ or mothers’ profession as sex work, and preferred the word ‘destitute’. Durbar stood its ground, saying the children must learn to respect their mothers and their livelihood.

Ajmiri, who wants to become a doctor some day, and other girls are now proud students at Loreto. But many more children of CSWs are still waiting for a similar opportunity – and for society to welcome them into its arms.

They can at least take comfort in the thought that the Berabhenge centres have opened their doors to them. [Courtesy IPS]

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The neglected and lost

Gobind Thukral

IT is true that increasingly the presentation of annual budget by the union government is becoming more of an accounting exercise. Since 1991 when the so called reforms began and the pro rich bias became pronounced , the budgetary exercise lost meaning for millions of teem masses, yet its impact on the welfare of people remains relevant.

One clear indication as to whom the budget would benefit is the kind of exercise the Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has done before presenting his budget. he has gone through a detailed exercise of meeting interest groups who have a stake in the budget. And, as every time so far, this year also the finance minister has met the rich, who have a voice that can be heard not only in person but also through the print media, television and glossy reports and documents. This includes big shots of industry associations, bankers and foreign lobbyists seeking concessions. The rich and the powerful have a big stake in the economy and therefore on the budget, and are lucky enough to get their voice heard. Some of them include industry and trade associations, who get a slotted time to meet our worthy finance minister and make their demands. They are lucky ones whose most of the demands get accepted.

Regrettably there are other groups- the poor, the farmers, the workers and those often facing oppression and “Operations” of the government, who do not get the slotted time or a hearing from him. Have you heard the finance minister inviting leaders of farmers, workers and those suffering grinding poverty ever invited by any minister including the prime minister to know their fate. One thing no finance minister ever does every year at Budget time is not to call the scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) MPs for a discussion, even on issues related to the SC component plan and the Tribal sub-plan. Yet the government swears of the name of aam admi day in and day out. This year also the finance minister has not bothered to call any representatives of such groups. Even though the minister may not need to talk to these communities, the suffering poor are desperate to talk to him. The government and the finance minister have to grapple with a post-liberalisation, post-globalisation, and crisis ridden economy. He cannot conveniently ignore the poor and the oppressed suffering people.

If economic growth has accelerated and per capita GDP has shown upward trend, It is a harsh fact that the inequalities have also increased. This is an inevitable result of a pro rich model of development which India is pursuing under the guidance of World Bank and other capitalist institutions. During the 1950s and 1960s, slightly more than one person in two lived below the poverty line and after 1990s it was one person among three. Only marginal improvement. But there is a class of the rich who became extra rich. In fact, some o the top rich people live in the country as does the most poor. A leading English newspaper this week reported from Orissa that more than fifty persons have died of starvation. The entire tribal belt of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Andhra and West Bengal starvation stares people. Experts accuse the Centre for the steep price rise of essential commodities. As many as 4800 deaths in last 48 months have taken place due to starvation in the country.

At least 40 tribal, most of them children, are said to have starved to death last year over a span of a month in Rajasthan. It is a situation of the cruellest irony for even as the death toll from starvation mounts and hundreds waste away without food to eat, India's granaries overflow. In Punjab alone every thousands of procured wheat and rice gets rotten. Over one million tonnes is eaten away by rodents. The government wastes foodgrains worth Rs 5,000 crore every year. Farmers in Punjab and all over India know how hard they work to produce these grains.

These are testing times for India’s hapless adivasis. The government has given a clear instructions to eliminate the Naxals (or to eliminate adivasis?) through Operation Green Hunt. Some view this operation as an attempt to release the full potential of mineral wealth to private parties, a potential otherwise blocked by adivasis. This section accuses the present home minister. P. Cahibadram of having a personal stake in such an operation. The budget would offer no solution to problems of land and other issues bothering the adivasis to wean them from the Maoists.

The unprecedented urgency with which UPA-II has quickly drawn maps of the “red corridor” and the speed with which such an operation is pushed will make the entire effort counter-productive unless there is well thought-out planning and large-scale financing for adivasi upliftment. There is no question of justifying the Naxalites’ ideological and political sologsn of taking the gun. But a simple understanding does not penetrate the core of UPA-II: an operation to eliminate Naxalites will invariably eliminate a large chunk of adivasis.

Therefore, before attempting to flush out the Naxalites to create the free entry of neo-colonial private parties there should be sufficient debate on the ways and methods of liberating adivasis from economic and social exploitation, deprivation and discrimination. Such planning, of course, should start with the finance minister and he should have invited leaders of these poor and Dalit and adivasi MPs for discussion before the budget.

Such facts cannot be denied by the corporate groups and the report of the national commission on enterprises has revealed that 76.7 per cent of the population of the nation is poor and vulnerable. 55 per cent of the population is marginally poor and vulnerable. It is easy to understand that such poverty and vulnerability is induced by the policies of liberalisation and privatisation. Only 11.2 per cent per cent of SC/STs are “middle income” and only 1 per cent fall under high income shows that 87.8 per cent of Dalits and adivasis are poor and vulnerable. Contrary to this 45.2 per cent of upper castes fall under the middle and high income bracket.

The failure of this government to focus on integrating Dalits and adivasis into the economy is glaring. Only 1.4 per cent of adivasis and 2.8 per cent of Dalits have formal skills. The NREGS falls miserably short on work given to Dalits and Adivasis. The government could have used this budget to address the concerns of the poor and suffering people and saved crores of rupees it spends on security forces to control or kill these restless groups. over the years India has been spending more on security than on removing poverty, improving health and education.

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24 years, no final report: Eradi Panel faces axe

THE panel headed by an 88-year-old retired Supreme Court judge to resolve the water dispute between Punjab and Haryana -- the Eradi Commission -- is being wound up 24 years after it was set up. The dispute remains unresolved.

The panel headed by Justice V. Balakrishna Eradi, has so far cost the country around Rs nine crore to the country. Its inter- im report, given in 1987, was not acceptable to Punjab and the final report is awaited since.

The guillotine is also coming down on two other river dis- pute panels -- the Cauvery Tribunal set up in 1991 to resolve a dispute between Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and the Krishna Tribunal set up in 2004 -- to settle a river dispute between Andhra, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

The water resources min- istry is asking all three to sub- mit their final reports in the next six months, said a source, refusing to be identified.

The ministry wants to now fix tenures of such commission by writing it into the enabling law -- the Inter State River Water Disputes Act, 1956.

The move is a part of the larg- er plan of the government to regulate the functioning of tri- bunals and commissions head- ed by retired judges, following the dud report given the Liberhan Commission, 17 years after the Babri Masjid was demolished.

T.K. Viswanathan, Advisor to the Law Minister, confirmed the move. "We are in the final stages of drafting a new bill like- ly to be introduced in the Budget Session for making a fresh law in this regard."

The bill seeks to fix the retire- ment age of former high court judges and technocrats, appointed to such panel, at 67 years. Former Supreme Court judges will retire from these bodies at 70 years. It also provides for banning former Supreme Court and High Court judges from being appointed to head or be mem- bers of various tribunals, and from providing costly legal advice in the form of arbitra- tion in private disputes.

There are at least 40 tribu- nals and appellate authorities set-up under various Acts, by the central government for set- tling disputes related to policy matters and employees rights, concerning various ministries.

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