Voting

So the booth was this government school. Most people were queued up outside the main building but we were directed to a little room at the back where there were no observers, no agents, not even the mandatory policeman. Only some very bored looking teachers on duty who cheered up somewhat when we turned up. They looked at the card, located my number on the list, marked it off, marked my finger with ink (which is manufactured in Mysore, by the way) and made me sign against my name on yet another list and gave me some receipt-like thing which I handed to yet another officer who then pointed me to the Electronic Voting Machine.

It was on a small, rickety table with the voter’s privacy protected by a corrugated cardboard box whose bottom and one side had been removed and the rest placed around the EVM. To make sure it didn’t get blown away, some brown packing tape had been used.

That was it. The nation’s fate hung on one long beep. And the secret ballot amounted to a recycled cardboard box. But the potential symbolism, that went right through the roof.

Conversion

L, the lady who comes to help my mother with chores around the house was crying today. I asked her why and she said her daughter had converted to another religion. Her daughter works at a small scale factory, making some plastic ware. She discovered the religious pendant on her daughter’s chain yesterday.

When confronted by the family, her daughter told her that everyone in the factory had been coerced into converting. Refusal meant losing the job. When I suggested she could find work elsewhere, L sobbed louder and said all factories were the same. They all wanted you to convert.

I am not particularly religious, and don’t see the problem if the whole world were to convert overnight to one or another religion. What does bother me is the use of coercion. Forcing anything on anyone, whether a religion or a food habit or a clothing sensibility, gets my hackles all raised and my neck bristling.

I feel helpless for L, because they need the money her daughter brings home desperately. Buying their religious allegiance is blatant exploitation. Being told if you don’t want to convert, you are free to quit the job is clearly giving you a false choice. But I don’t know what options she has, considering her daughter did not even complete class 8. If anyone reading this has something to suggest, I would be happy to hear it.

Post some Pink Chaddis

The Pink Chaddi Campaign kicked off on 5 February 2009 to oppose the Sri Ram Sena. The campaign is growing exponentially and that is not surprising. Most women in this country have enough curbs on their lives without a whole new franchise cashing in with their bully-boy tactics. Of course, a lot of men have joined the group as well.

The first part of the campaign is to gift Muthalik and his goons with pink underwear on Valentine’s Day. Everyone is invited to mail in their pair of the pinks!

Am sending off a large parcel first thing tomorrow to:

The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road (opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka

Contact persons:
Nithin (9886081269)
Jasmeen (9886840612)
Divya (9845535406)
Nisha ( 09899228060)

Welcome to our police state

From here.

In the name of fighting terrorism governments across the world have been creating new regulations that infinitely augment the state power of surveillance with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate.

The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 passed by the Indian Parliament recently allows the government to intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence.

Any email you send, any message you text are now open to the prying eyes of the government. So are the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.

Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not. It’s the personal morality of the official that will decide whether the picture/content you were looking at was lascivious or appeals to prurient interest.

For worse go read the article. More information on Wikipedia.

Women’s liberation in India: is a revolution possible?

IHT carried a very insightful article by Anand Giridharadas titled “A feminist revolution in India skips the liberation”. I would have posted excerpts, but the piece is worth reading in its entirety, so I suggest you make a quick detour to the IHT site before taking a deep breath (highly recommended) and plunging into my response.

Modernity involves more than sin. It demands irreverence. How many urban young women chop off their hair, or choose not to procreate, or dine out alone?

I’m glad I can say yes to all three! But I am still not sure that defines ‘liberation’.

1. As our Civics textbooks pointed out year after year, we are social animals. Individuals may be liberated in their minds and to some extent in practice, but that practice will always be limited by social contexts. I may not have any hangups about dining out alone, but that freedom in my mind is curtailed by factors that I have no control over – the biggest among them being safety. If I dine out alone, will I get more lecherous looks than if I had company, will I be groped on my way out of the restaurant? There are other limiting factors too – public infrastructure for instance. If I do dine out despite the lecherous looks, how will I get home, if I don’t have private transport?

Often, these very real limitations are mistaken for some sort of conformism, for an absence of feministic assertion. Liberation in women’s minds is all fine, but very little of that can be put into practise without other support structures. Yes, the west has had a feminist revolution, but that change came alongside another kind of transformation – after the two world wars, many many western nations and societies consciously built accountability into their administration and governance. We in India have simply not had that change. In fact, we have regressed greatly in that area.

For a feminist revolution to take place, there has to be a wider sense of rights and entitlement. No, I don’t mean that society in general will or should support a feminist revolution, but that it should actively believe that people have a right to better lives, that those in power should be accountable. To illustrate: most people in India (this is not restricted to women) will not approach a policeman for protection or help. Because you are likely to get further victimised (think custodial rapes, murders, disappearances). Elsewhere in the world, that is largely not the case – if it were there would be outrage, because the public feel entitled to trustworthy protectors. But we simply don’t have this in India – what you see here is acceptance, resignation and an amazing ingenuity in working with and around the ’system’. This is not necessarily bad, it is simply a different kind of adaptation from the one that took place in the West. But one that will not aid revolutions.

Without a parallel revolution in the perception and demand for ‘public good’, whether in law and order, education, health, transport or any other area of public interest, no marginalised group – women, Dalits, religious minorities – can bring about a public revolution. This is not to say no revolution is possible. Of course it is. Only, it will be of a very different kind from the that took place in the west, for it will take place in the absence of other support structures that existed (or were built) in those parts of the world.

2. This alternate revolution is something Anand Giridhardas has already recognised – he speaks of stay-at-home fathers in rural India, of women panchayat leaders, etc. This revolution is a quieter one – being brought about not by the urban empowered, but by those who need the change the most. Women in Arshi’s socio-economic strata do not need the change. They are rejecting the freedoms available to them precisely because they have never experienced what it is not to have that freedom. Perhaps if it were taken away from them, they would begin to truly value what is being handed to them on a platter.

Apologies to feed subscribers – the article was edited several times after posting, hence must have showed up a dozen times on your readers. My mistake.

Read, please

I don’t often post links. In fact I can’t recall the last time I posted a random link and asked people to read. But this one demands it. No, that isn’t right. It does no demanding at all. It simply lies in a corner of a busy news site, unread, ignored and very, very still.

Bihar: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/showcolumns.aspx?id=COLEN20080066718

Shut up.

I don’t know about Vir Sanghvi and TCA Srinivasa Ragahavan but there are dozens of others on mailing lists, blogs and everywhere I seem to (mis)step on the internet who have an opinion on a land they have never been to, on a people they have never met.

For once, can we all just shut up and hear what the Kashmiris have to say?

Update in response to philramble’s post: Of course it is an oversimplification. The valley has suffered enough – both from Pakistan and from India. Have you ever heard the disputed area being referred to as Azad Kashmir by anyone in India? That is what it is, really. They have elections and political parties and leaders. And a government. Just because they are Muslim does not mean they are Pakistani – PoK is a political term and a lie. Kashmiris I know say they just want to be left alone. Without food being smuggled out or drugs being smuggled in. Or their women being raped.

Yes, yes, there is a strategic problem with China being so close, etc. But isn’t it blindingly obvious that it would be better to let Kashmir go, to support the local people’s decisions and to win their trust as a way of ensuring that they back India rather than China during a crisis? Beating the hell of out them seems like a very stupid thing to do, if we really want to have on-ground support, in the event of a conflict with Pak/China.

I am all for separatist movements. The EU set up works best really – many countries but one economic region allowing free movement of goods and labour.

(And thus I disregard my own advice to SHUT UP.)

One world

Many thousand kilometres from my home in the Deccan, I sit under a clouded English sky, ancient hymns playing the background, reading about elections in Israel, chatting with a colleague from Pakistan.

And fail completely to understand why we war.

Bangalore, Ahmedabad

Update: This was written soon after the Ahmedabad blasts, when the toll hadn’t risen beyond 12.

~

I haven’t been reading the reports. I can’t bear to. Yes, they were low intensity blasts, yes, fewer than twenty people died. In a country that regularly loses hundreds to floods, train and bus accidents, and spurious liquor, this seems like nothing. A friend in Bangalore called it a “lame attempt at terror”. Indeed. The dead barely ran into double-digits. When did we become so cynical?

But Bangalore is almost home. Madivala is where the KPN office and pick-up point is. I’ve sat on the steps of that complex dozens of times, unwillingly waiting for the 10.30 pm bus back to Madras. Adugodi is where I took many a flirty walk with a suitor, winding our oblivious way through narrow, noisy, dusty streets where every other shack is a two-wheeler garage. Mysore Road is where, years before the maddening traffic arrived, newly bought two-wheelers were driven way above the speed limit, causing me to feign fear and tighten my grip on his shoulder.

And Ahmedabad. The city of my childhood. Raped and pillaged, not by barbarian hordes from central Asia, but its own people. An Ahmedabad I have been terrified to visit in recent times, for in my mind, rivers of blood still flow on the ‘city’ side of Ellis Bridge. But also an Ahmedabad I knew when it was gentle, laid-back, generous and most of all, safe. An Ahmedabad of summers that began right after the riotousness of Holi, where sand storms blew grit through the windows, into your teeth. An Ahmedabad of spectacular processions and never-ending dandiyas, where, yes, Muslims too danced the night away.

I cannot help but wonder – the Bhajpa is in power in both places. Is that why? Is this revenge? Is this the beginning of a counter strike? In which the targets are so random, so unspecific as to be almost democratic? Is this a message – vote killers into power and prepare to die yourself? The murmers have always existed, haven’t they? But one only begins to hear and fear them, when they are uttered so close to home.

You mean Imphal is not a state?

The closer my deadlines, the stronger the urge to ignore them and blog-surf away, especially when it is late at night. Usually a cloud of all-forgiving benignity settles over me at this time of day and I am willing to overlook the world’s faults rather than get all worked up as I normally do.

But not today. There has been a largish dose of what Krish Ashok calls the Paratha-Parotta war in the world of blogs, and I feel compelled to add momos to the menu.

Despite having lived in the north for more than a decade and having learnt to fight in Hindi before I learnt a single cussword in Tamil, I used to get rather pained by the broad-brush painting of half the country as ‘Madras’ and all the other displays of geographic and cultural ignorance so well-detailed in the blogs linked to above.

But that was until I began working in the north east of the country. Before I went there for the first time, innumerable people asked me if it was safe travelling in ‘tribal areas’. If I would get anything other than raw meat to eat. If there were roads to the places I needed to go. What language would I speak to the ‘tribals’ in? What would I do if I fell ill? And so on. Initially I delivered long lectures on how the north east is perfectly safe, in fact safer than many other parts of the ‘mainland’, told them that the people I was going to work with all spoke not only Hindi but also fluent English, that they have some excellent roads up there thanks to the Border Roads Organisation. After about a week and twenty such encounters, I stopped. I snapped if the mood demanded it or merely smiled and said nothing.

So what is my point? That most of the people asking these questions were supposedly ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘culturally aware’ south Indians. Why is our collective ignorance about the north east somehow less offensive than the Delhiite’s uninformed view of Madras?

We snigger at Americans who don’t know that you can’t drive a Hummer to Eye-rack, but how many of us know the capital of Tripura? Who among us can name all the north eastern states? Hell, do you even know how many there are?

But it doesn’t matter, does it, because all those places and people are really Chinese.

Zimbabwe

Fifteen years ago, in a small country, nearly a million people died. In ten months. Three thousand of them a day. Violent, gory, gruesome, horrific deaths. Swords, spears and daggers butchered them, cut their bodies, disfigured their faces. Few had the luxury of a swift bullet.

When the blood dried, one in every eight Rwandans lay dead.

Years later we justified our silence and our inaction, we assuaged our guilt, we consoled the bereaved with the excuse that we did not know, we had no idea how bad it was while the genocide was on.

But what will we say to Zimbabwe? We have not only known, our editors and analysts have vied with each other to predict how bad it could become. Yet we stand and watch. We say it is Africa’s problem, that the continent’s struggling and barely stable neighbours should help each other. We find an easy scapegoat in Mbeki. He’s a readymade villain already tainted by his theories on AIDS.

The truth is that we don’t care. Zimbabwe has nothing to offer us. Certainly no oil. Not even coffee. Or cocoa. For those we loot other Africans.

Their real estate has no value. They haven’t heard anyone say: location, location, location. They aren’t neighbours with China. Or Russia. Or even Venezuela.

Their bombs are primitive, not good enough to do more than kill and maim a few hundred at a time. Their guns are from European landfills. Not flashy. Not nuclear. Not worth the trouble of taking away.

And oh, they are black. Silly of them. If they were brown, we might have considered looking in their direction. Doing a little more than filling newspaper op-eds with their story. If they were yellow, we might have talked to their leaders. Perhaps sent in the UN.

And if they were white, our armies would be there already.

Oh we know your blood is red, but we can’t see it. It hides beneath your clotted skin.