Sujoy Dhar

ALMOST a year on, Dipali Sahu still recalls with horror the day an operation by the policemen and paramilitary troopers began here in June last year to take back control of the vast swathes of eastern India captured by the Maoist rebels.

"They broke open the door, barged into our house looking for the rebels, and rained blows on us. I was hit in the head. I started bleeding and crying," recalls the fifty-something woman from a village in Pirakata near Lalgarh, a cluster of villages in West Midnapore district of eastern state West Bengal.

Dipali’s husband, Niranjan, looking thin and very frail, was beaten up mercilessly too. Even their son-in-law was not spared.

Many were picked up as suspected Maoists and put behind bars for months as a long, drawn-out trial ensued.

"My brother was lying in a hut by the road. He was picked up by security troops for no reason. He spent months in jail, and after spending nearly 17,000 rupees (about 400 U.S. dollars) for legal expenses, we secured his release," says Sujan Sahu, another villager.

Almost a year since the deadly anti-Maoist operation in Lalgarh, inhabited mainly by tribal people, the scars of the villagers caught between the rebels and the policemen refuse to heal.
As the Maoists periodically launch attacks on police across the country’s central and eastern regions, the innocent villagers become casualties of a debilitating war between the authorities and the rebels, believed to be hovering around 22,000 and living mostly in the forests, with their patrons tucked away in big cities.

While India’s economy has hurtled forward to emerge as the third largest in Asia and many of the fortunate millions lifted themselves out of destitution, regions like Lalgarh in West Bengal remain mired in poverty and chaos.

Impoverished village folk – in Lalgarh and elsewhere in the south Asian country – gripe that both the democratically elected communist government, which has ruled the West Bengal state for 33 years, as well as the various administrations that have held the reins of power in New Delhi have neglected them. Many say this has paved the way for the ultra-left rebels to set up bases in the rural regions and adjoining forests.

The Maoist movement began in the late 1960s in a northern town of West Bengal state called Naxalbari, from which ‘Naxalites’ or ‘Naxals’, as the rebels are also known, is derived. It subsided in the early 1970s only to resurface as a more violent force that now operates under the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls Maoists the biggest internal threat to the country.

Lalgarh became a symbol of the growing Maoist expansion in a majority of the 28 Indian states as they captured the police station and adjoining areas in early 2009.

In June last year, the police regained control of Lalgarh, which is about 170 kilometres west of Kolkata, West Bengal’s capital, as they launched a massive offensive. Reports of human rights violations poured in from Lalgarh following the operation.

While the situation in Lalgarh appears to have normalised, its residents still anguish over their plight. All development activities have come to a halt and water scarcity roils the parched villages.

"We don’t have water in the village. All wells have dried up and no deep tube well was sunk owing to the situation. It is a desert," one villager complains.

"We have lost all business. I have a fertiliser shop, but there is no buyer now. I can only see starvation ahead," says Gautam Mahish, 35, a small trader.

The list of the villagers’ woes seems endless.

Jitman Gharai and his wife Kalpana bemoan their penury. "We live by making brooms. It is not enough and there is no government assistance or subsidised food grains. There is no power in the village, there is no kerosene," they say. It has not helped that they have yet to receive the much-touted Below Poverty Level (BPL) cards for India’s poor.

Under the Indian government’s BPL scheme, only the very poor belonging to the vulnerable sections of society are entitled to the ration cards being distributed by the Food and Supplies Department at subsidised prices.

In Lalgarh not a single poor villager appears to posses such a card.

"We have not heard of such a card ever," says Laxmi Mal, a 35-year-old resident of Hirakuli village in Lalgarh whose son had to run away from the troopers when the operation against the Maoists began.

"In West Bengal the tribal people have lost their faith in the communist government that hardly carried out any developmental work. The Maoists did them no good," says Abhirup Sarkar, an economist with Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute.

"Yet in times of police atrocities or harassment, they are the only forces to which the villagers can turn perhaps. Such dependence nourishes the rebels."

The police forces in Lalgarh, who now live in constant fear of attack, say no progress is possible in Lalgarh until the political process begins.

"Maoists still rule the region. All members of political parties have either fled their houses or are living in fear without any activity. Till the government restores the political process here, no progress is possible," says an official in Lalgarh’s police station, where a huge iron gate is kept locked round the clock in anticipation of another attack by the rebels.

Such fear constantly hounds the rest of the villagers too. [Courtesy IPS]

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Farmers commit suicides as the government looks away

Gobind Thukral

DOES anyone in Punjab know how many farmers have committed suicides in India’s premier agriculture state during the last two decades? No one. Neither the government nor any university, or any non government organization; although each one dishes out its kind of figures. These figures run from thousands to a few hundred and even to less than a hundred. Twice Punjab government sought the help of the police and intelligence wing to carry out the surveys. It was done once. But the figure too was rejected by one and all.

A cornered chief minister Parkash Singh Badal promised to count this tragic incidence of suicides among the Punjab’s otherwise sturdy farmers. A pilot project recorded suicides in two worst effected districts. Later three universities of Punjab were involved to conduct a survey of the whole state so that compensation could be paid and policy changes brought in to end this tragic tale. The government paid in a tardy fashion some grant to two universities and the Ludhiana based Punjab Agriculture University is yet to receive. The survey is yet to take of. Meanwhile, newspapers continue to report suicides all over Punjab.

Former Punjab MLA Inderjit Singh Jaijee, Convener of Movement Against State Repression [MASR] has recorded 1738 suicides in 91 villages from only two sub-divisions of Lehra and Munak of Sangrur in two decades. These are the worst affected areas. He has complied Village-wise statistics and panchayats have singed these records. A recent report by Punjab Agriculture University noted 2,890 suicides in the districts of Bathinda and Sangrur during 2000-08. An Indefatigable Mr. Jaijee estimates 50,000 suicides in Punjab over the past two decades after taking into account that not all districts are as severely affected. Bhartiya Kisan Union estimates 90,000 and Punjab Farmer’s Commission conservatively estimates 2000 suicides per year. During 2000-8 kisan unions count the number of suicides to be around 40.500. MASR puts the figure at 31,500. Farmer’s Commission at 17100, PAU Ludhiana 22500, revenue department for five years only 232 and Punjab police just seven per year. Focusing on the statistics and calling for further multiply-year surveys, as has been done in the past, should no longer be the response of the government.

Why is this confusion? Can we take it that the government that spends billions of government machinery can not even record a simple fact of a farmer committing suicide due to the ever rising debt burden or harassment at the hands of his lenders? The answer is that the politicians that govern from Delhi or Chandigarh know the harsh reality, but would like to sleep over it. If they admit then they have to initiate steps to compensate the farmers who have committed suicides which is an act of internal violence and make policy changes that set right the adverse terms of trade. Over 12 lakh farmers have quit farming in Punjab during the last ten years and joined the ranks of pauperized class.

The confusion that prevails in Punjab also prevails elsewhere, particularly at the central level. Imagine the Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s new count of 3,450 is for the whole country in the last three years. We all know he is more interested either in cricket or in sugar mills. We also know the reasons. Sharad Pawar informed the Rajya Sabha on May 7 that there had been just six farmers' suicides in Vidarbha since January. The same day, same time in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Ashok Chavan said that figure was 343. That is, 57 times greater than Mr. Pawar's count. Mr. Pawar's numbers came in a written reply to a question in Parliament. Five days earlier, Minister of State for Agriculture K.V. Thomas pitched his count at 23 suicides in Vidarbha since January. In the same week and in the same Rajya Sabha why these two different answers. And Mr. Thomas said his source was “the government of Maharashtra.” Whose chief minister says the number is 343.

Meanwhile, before Mr. Pawar gave the figure of 'only six' in four months, the government’s Farmers’ Self Reliance Mission in Vidarbha put the number at 62 for just January alone. Maharashtra Revenue Minister Narayan Rane informed the State Assembly in April that there have been 5,574 suicides in Vidarbha since 2006.

Can estimates of farm suicides — all of them official — vary by over 5,500 per cent? But it doesn't end there. But Parliament is told only six have occurred since January this year. Mr. Rane's count for the whole state since 2006 is 7,786 farm suicides. That is more than double Mr. Pawar's new count of 3,450 for the whole country in the last three years.

That's odd — 3,450 for the whole country? In three years? The National Crime Records Bureau puts the number in the last three years at nearly 50,000. That is for 2006, 2007 and 2008 (the last year for which data are available). And it is the only source for farm suicide data at the national level. Its data also show us that nearly 200,000 farmers have killed themselves between 1997 and 2008. So whose numbers are being fed to Parliament? And how come we have so many wildly varying counts?

Maharashtra's numbers may be the worst in the country. This state has seen 41,404 farmers' suicides since 1997. Of these, 12,493 have occurred in 2006-08. So the pressure to cover up is greater here than anywhere else. Punjab is equally worse. But at the national level, there is no realization as state’s leaders do not wish to talk about this.

Simply put, governments are doing the same things they do with poverty estimates. With BPL counts, APL numbers, ration cards and so on. With farm suicides — real human deaths are involved. The pressure to fudge gets more acute with public revulsion over the plight of farmers.

Yet, the 2011 Census could make things look a lot worse. We shall know how many farmers are there in each state and how many farmers have committed suicides and how many have left farming altogether. That could look a lot worse and the suicides far more intense. But we are sure that the fiddles will keep fudging.

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Phantasmagoria called Muslim women

Ishtiaq Ahmed

WHENEVER outmoded religious laws and practices stood in the way of progress, reformers started an internal critique and ended up recommending that the secular state, respectful of religion as a spiritual and moral code as well as of the human rights of individuals, alone can serve as the basis of a pluralist democracy.

The past few days have been filled with such dramatically contrasting news about the fortunes of Muslim women that one can call them a phantasmagoria. A phantasmagoria is a changing scene made up of many elements in which the changes that take place make it impossible to know what is real and what merely an illusion or a deception.

A couple of months ago, President Asif Ali Zardari signed the Protection Against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Bill 2010, aimed at providing a safe working environment. The ceremony held in the President’s House was attended by a large number of women activists, parliamentarians and members of civil society. He reiterated the government’s commitment to ensuring equal rights for men and women in accordance with the Constitution. Some people would find President Zardari’s solemn words, “We have to create a Pakistan where the coming generations, my daughters, can be proud of the fact that they live as equals” a bit amusing but as we say, ‘dair aye par drust aye’ (better now than never).

The Act is indeed a very progressive piece of legislation. I believe Sherry Rehman was also one of those who initiated the bill though she was not present at the ceremony when the president signed the bill into law. Its various authors are claiming that it is the most advanced legislation anywhere in South Asia. If that be true, I am going to make my colleagues at the Institute of South Asian Studies in Singapore take notice of one area in which Pakistan is ahead of other South Asian societies in a positive way.

However, the effect of the good news was somewhat dampened when I read that a committee of the upper house of parliament, the Senate, has banned the play ‘Burqavaganza’ of the very accomplished Madeeha Gauhar of Ajoka. The play is a critique of the obscurantist burqa lobby. I hope that the National Assembly overrules the reactionary ban imposed by the Senate committee.

It is necessary that laws that demean women are repealed as well. The so-called Law of Evidence remains on the statutes of the Pakistani legal system. Then there are the so-called Hudood Ordinances, which provide the basis for the oppression of both men and women. These draconian laws were passed by a dictator who was privately very fond of Indian films and some Indian film actors were treated as part of the family. Why he imposed such laws, the more learned members of our elite tell me, was because he had no other basis to justify his illegal military coup. That is interesting indeed. Unlike Iqbal, who argued that in times of crisis Islam has saved Muslims, I am convinced that now it is time to save Islam from the iron grip of misogynists of one type or another.

The easiest and most honest way to do this is to follow the example of the rest of the world. Whenever outmoded religious laws and practices stood in the way of progress, reformers started an internal critique and ended up recommending that the secular state, respectful of religion as a spiritual and moral code as well as of the human rights of individuals, alone can serve as the basis of a pluralist democracy. One day we will also reach that conclusion because the evidence around us tells us that Iqbal and the mullahs have had it all wrong. Ours is a culture still bound to scholasticism — a philosophical school and method of reasoning in which verification or testing of propositions is not admitted; rather the skill is to weave fantastic tales in defence of this or that dogma.

Another very heartening news these days has been the election of some Pakistani women to the British parliament. One of them, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, elected on a Conservative Party ticket, has been inducted into the cabinet of Prime Minister David Cameron. She does so in her capacity as Chairperson of the Conservative Party. Baroness Warsi originates from Gujjar Khan. Her father was a mill worker who by dint of hard work and enterprise moved up and gave his daughter the education she needed to attain the high office she has reached now.

Simultaneously, however, as if as a bad joke, someone looted a jewellery shop in Manchester dressed up in a burqa. The burqa can also be a veritable accessory to mischief. Years ago I saw a Punjabi film. In one of the scenes, an overly pious burqa-clad individual joins the company of the heroine and her friends. The burqa-clad person tries to move as close as possible to the heroine, which rouses suspicion. Upon being asked to remove the veil in purely female company, that person says in a very horsy voice that her piety forbids her to show her face even to girls. That makes everyone more suspicious. The girls remove the niqab only to find the late Rangeela perched among them. I think the scene ends with Rangeela receiving a lot of curses and shoes landing on his head.

But the news this week is also thoroughly confusing. The famous Deobandi seminary has issued a fatwa declaring women working for wages and salaries as haram. The noted Shia cleric, Maulana Kalbe Jawad, endorsed that fatwa saying, “Women in Islam are not supposed to go out and earn a living. It is the responsibility of the males in the family.” Earlier I heard him say on television that women should not take part in politics. Their function is to give birth to politicians! That sort of wisdom I have always believed cuts across the Sunni-Shia divide. People waste a lot of time distinguishing between them on doctrinal issues, and fail to see the consensus among them on reactionary social values.

Deoband has subsequently issued a statement that its ruling had been misunderstood and Kalbe Jawad also said that he did not oppose women working if they worked separately from men as in Iran. So, for a while the ambiguity these clerics have created can conceal their real stances on women and women’s rights.

The title of today’s article should now make sense if it did not at the start. Who really are the Muslim women — those who are confined within the four walls of the house, or those who sit in parliament, or those who work alongside men and make an equal contribution to society as thinking human beings? What is real and what is not?

[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 Professor Emeritus 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 Daily Times, Tuesday, 18 May 2010]

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Visa refusals to Indian security officials send conflicting signals

Gurpreet Singh

THE Canadian government's refusal to issue visas to serving and retired Indian security officials has not only created an unnecessary conflict between the two countries, but has also raised too many questions about how Canada views outsiders.

The issue arose with the refusal of a visa to Fateh Singh Pandher, a former constable with India’s Border Security Force. It's a paramilitary force that protects Indian borders.

Pandher was told that the BSF is a notorious and violent organization responsible for human rights abuses.

As the story hit the Indian media, more retired and serving officers from different security agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau, the army, and the police came out with similar complaints against the Canadian High Commission.

These men were declined visas at different times. Some of them were not given reasons while others were told that they or their organizations had violated human rights.

As a result, India reacted angrily, forcing Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to issue a statement expressing regrets.

Certainly, India’s human rights record is not great and there is no doubt that the Indian forces have killed suspects in fake encounters. This includes the alleged mastermind of the Air India bombing that killed 329 passengers and crew in 1985.

Talwinder Singh Parmar’s killing at the hands of the Punjab Police in India in 1992 destroyed an important link in the investigation of the biggest terrorist attack in Canadian history.

Apart from using extra-judicial ways to punish the rebels, the Indian forces are also accused of unfairly targeting minorities. But to paint an entire security force or an agency of any country with one brush by the Canadian visa officers is unacceptable.

In a warlike situation, no security agency can be immune to accusations of human rights abuse, be they agencies in the developing world or those belonging to western industrialized countries such as Canada and U.S.

Aren’t U.S. soldiers accused of violating human rights in Iraq? Isn’t the CIA accused of using extra-judicial methods of investigation and fostering coups and violence? Aren’t Canadian soldiers accused of using extra force in Afghanistan?

Similarly, Indian security forces have also used inhumane methods to accomplish their missions during wars against terrorists in Punjab and Kashmir.

Of course, the individuals who have been targeted by the Canadian visa officials should be held accountable if they have committed any crimes against humanity, but what about those terrorists who have come to Canada after committing mass murders and were given political asylum in the name of human rights?

Both Canada and the U.S. have given refuge to such rogue elements for years.

In a post-9/11 world when the two countries have eaged waged war against terrorists, such an attitude toward the soldiers of other countries sends a very conflicting signal.

In the meantime, the Indian government should also set its house in order. It cannot allow its forces to go on killing people at will in the garb of democracy and freedom much like the big Western powers, which are now seeking to improve their ties with the world’s largest democracy.

[Gurpreet Singh is a Georgia Straight contributor, and the host of a program on Radio India. He's working on a book tentatively titled Canada's 9/11: Lessons from the Air India Bombings.]

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