The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

The crumbling family
Elderly pay dearly for breakdown

An 85-year-old former Chief Justice and his wife have had to approach the Punjab and Haryana High Court for relief from their own son and daughter-in-law, who they allege have ‘made their lives a living hell’. The ageing couple want the son to move out of their house in Chandigarh — to another house they have provided for him. This is a grave circumstance confronting many a family, especially in urban areas. There are certain laws — such as the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act, 2007 — to protect the elderly. However, when it is day-to-day living within the private confines of homes that is at stake, laws and the justice system are often at a loss to address the problems. This could not be better demonstrated than the present case, in which the complainant has been at the top of the legal system himself.

Property or maintenance expenses turn out to be the foremost cause of feud between parents and children. While the best way to avoid these is to have matters such as inheritance, maintenance costs and wills as clearly settled as possible while a parent is relatively independent, legal details do not often work out as planned. That is where the law and government agencies created specifically to address such cases come into play. However, even a basic concept such as tribunals mandated under the maintenance of parents Act has not been implemented meaningfully by state governments and UTs.

The ideal solution for such complications, of course, lies in prevention, i.e., building and raising families in such a manner that they have bonds that will see all members through thick and thin. Sadly, such are the pressures of the extremely material world of the day that even the famed traditional joint Indian family is under strain. The human mind, fortunately, continues to respond to age-old values of love and mutual respect. That gives us hope that if one invests time and love in people that constitute our family and friends while there is still time, life may be more secure than what the law and State can ensure.

Clean up the act in IPL
It’s time to change the system

The credibility of the Indian Premier League continues to suffer. It is getting interred beneath the skeletons — a whole graveyard, actually — that have tumbled out of the IPL’s cupboard. Every possible ingredient that could tarnish the image of sport is present in ample measure — manipulating the events on the cricket field, bribing the players to do it, illegal betting, alleged use of the honey-trap to lure cricketers, large amounts of unaccounted for cash… The list continues to grow. And now one of the nine IPL teams, owned by the under-fire Sahara group, has pulled out of the tournament, though this decision seems to be unrelated to the spot-fixing controversy.

The most interesting aspect of the sleazy situation is that the Indian cricket board (BCCI) and the IPL Governing Council were completely oblivious of the stink in their backyard. The BCCI’s anti-corruption unit, two of whose members are supposed to be present, in a covert manner, at every IPL match has utterly failed. Reports have emerged of them behaving more like fans than sleuths, and being incompetent and unfit for the job. The police, displaying better coordination, determination and method than the previous match-fixing expose of the year 2000, are making arrests everyday. N Srinivasan, the president of the BCCI and the owner of the Chennai Super Kings team, had said after the arrest of three cricketers last week that it was just a case of three bad eggs. That naïve and/or possibly deceitful notion has been completely disproved. The rot, clearly, has set in.

One fundamental problem with the BCCI is that it is not accountable to anyone. Over the last five years, with the participation of private companies in a manner that is not independently audited, money has come in unimaginable amounts. As an autonomous sports body not directly funded by the government, and with powerful politicians from across the spectrum being part of it, the BCCI is able to resist scrutiny. This makes it a fertile ground for corruption. The situation is peculiar — cricket excites millions upon millions of people in this country, yet the sport is run in a completely opaque manner. That needs to change. One Central minister has suggested new legislation on corruption in sport; another has said that the BCCI should be brought under the ambit of the Right to Information Act. Every honest sports administrator would welcome these two steps.

Thought for the Day

I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect. —Edward Gibbon

ARTICLE

Promises by Nawaz Sharif
He deserves a positive response
by G. Parthasarathy

I first met Nawaz Sharif personally in 1982 when he hosted what he had earlier said a "small lunch" for the visiting Indian cricket team. There were an estimated 2000 guests at his "small" lunch in his palatial mansion in Raiwind near Lahore. Nawaz, son of an industrial magnate, was then the Finance Minister of Punjab. He belonged to a group of young politicians being groomed by the country's military ruler, Gen Zia-ul-Haq, to give a civilian façade to military rule and confront Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples' Party. Sharif showed early promise as a political organiser and able administrator, to rise to the higher rungs of the army backed the Pakistan Muslim League. He became Prime Minister in 1990, after the army destabilised the PPP government led by Benazir Bhutto.

Sharif's honeymoon with the army was short-lived. The army acted to remove two of its erstwhile protégés in 1993 — the then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Nawaz Sharif — after mutual bickering between the President and the Prime Minister paralysed the government. Returning to power with a massive mandate in 1997, Sharif gained immense popularity when he matched India's nuclear tests in 1998. But there was an authoritarian streak in Sharif, which led to an ugly confrontation with the Supreme Court and his efforts to introduce Sharia Law in Pakistan, undermining the democratic foundations of the country. Given his fondness for high living and Bollywood music and films of the 1950s, Sharif could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be labelled a religious fundamentalist, or a bigot. He has also been an ardent cricket fan and played club-level cricket quite proficiently.

Despite these attributes, Sharif has a propensity for supporting Islamist causes within Pakistan and beyond its borders. He is deeply distrusted in the US. He was reluctant to meet US demands to act against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, prompting the US to launch cruise missile strikes on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 1998 after US diplomatic missions had been targeted in Kenya and Tanzania and a US naval vessel attacked in Yemen by Al-Qaeda, operating from Afghan soil. It is well known that Sharif was in the loop when his handpicked ISI chief Lt-General Javed Nasir organised the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts in collusion with Dawood Ebrahim. Within Pakistan, Sharif bought insurance from being targeted, while campaigning during the recent elections, from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, by colluding with Taliban-affiliated groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. He enjoys a close family relationship with Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafez Mohammed Saeed. It is doubtful if the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist outrage will be brought to justice despite the glib talk of a "joint investigation".

It will be difficult for Sharif's party and for him personally to discard their erstwhile Jihadi assets which they have patronised for years. A factor playing on their minds could well be that if they discard assets like Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, they could well drive erstwhile allies and assets into the arms of the military establishment and political rivals like army-backed Imran Khan. Sharif knows that while the Indian border will remain tension-free if he halts cross-border terrorist attacks on India, the same cannot be said of Pakistan's porous western borders with Afghanistan. It is not going to be possible for his government to halt infiltration into Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Haqqani network, Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, especially given the strength of the ISI-Taliban-Haqqani-Al-Qaeda nexus. Moreover, with Imran Khan becoming politically influential in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the challenge that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan poses to the writ of the Sharif government will be formidable.

While both General Kayani and Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhury would be out of office by the end of this year, the real challenge that Sharif will face is from a Pakistan army leadership tutored in an era of Pakistan-sponsored "jihad" in Afghanistan and India. Sharif will have to deliver on his promises to set the economy right and promote growth if he is to consolidate his position. For this, he will need goodwill of and assistance from Western donors, the World Bank, and the IMF. Saudi Arabia's rulers will, however, be friendlier toward Sharif than they have been towards Zardari, regarded as an Iranian inclined Shia. It remains to be seen if he can moderate the army's ambitions to establish a compliant Taliban-dominated government in Afghanistan if he is to get the Americans end cross-border drone strikes and open their purse strings for enhanced economic and military assistance. Thus, it is likely that Sharif will attempt to ensure that 26/11 style terrorist strikes are avoided while a "low-intensity conflict" continues in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere, in a calibrated manner that inconveniences, but does not infuriate India.

While ill-prepared and hastily organised summits are best avoided, New Delhi should respond positively if Sharif chooses to seek Indian cooperation in areas like extending its power grid to the Pakistan border in Punjab and providing the power-starved Punjab province of Pakistan with much-needed electrical power. Moreover, if Pakistan so chooses, India could quite easily extend its existing oil pipelines to the Pakistan border for the supply of petroleum products. Oil pipelines and electric transmission towers, across borders, provide more abiding security than tanks and artillery! It would likewise serve us well to relax restrictions on pilgrims and other bona fide visitors from Pakistan. But, at the same time, India cannot afford to lower its guard on terrorism, given the continuing links of the Pakistani military establishment with terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

American journalist Max Boot perceptively remarked after the recent elections in Pakistan: "In Pakistan itself, we should work to bolster civil society and the power of civilians in government, but we should not delude ourselves that such efforts will have much impact in the short run-and possibly not even in the long run. Pakistan's state apparatus is deeply dysfunctional and is unlikely to fundamentally change for the better under Nawaz Sharif." This is an assessment we would do well to bear in mind while hoping that Nawaz Sharif will fulfil the promises he has made.

MIDDLE

Black or white
by Naveen Kapoor

Our flight took off from Dubai for Tehran in the evening and it was my maiden official visit to Iran. I was told that there is a special dress code for women and I need to be careful while dealing with them. There were instructions that I should avoid staring at them, passing sarcastic remarks as it is prohibited in Iran. In case one is caught indulging in such acts, it may lead to immediate imprisonment, death penalty, etc. It is not like our country where you can even rape a girl and it takes years to settle the case.

Since my seat was in the last row, I had to pass by all the rows to reach there. I could not see any dress code among women as most of them were wearing either Western dress or normal salwar-kameez. It was difficult to make out whether women are more beautiful or men are more handsome as all were equally white in colour.

After dinner, which comprised mostly Iranian delicacies, I thought of strolling in the aircraft to make myself comfortable and we were nearing our destination. I was astonished to see that what was looking earlier as pure white turned into black and white, and nearly all women had their heads covered with a black scarf and over-coats up to the knee could be seen. When we landed and reached the immigration counter there was a long queue and I could see the women wearing traditional outfits and I kept on thinking what could be the reason for not following the dress code in the aircraft. I tried to enquire about this from the passenger standing next to me but could not do so as I did not know the local Persian language and my query remained unanswered.

I spent about one week covering various cities there and found out that the dress code was strictly enforced and people were habitual of it without any reservations. While returning I could see the same dresses at the airport what I saw in the past few days. I was astonished when the aircraft was about to land at Dubai that what was black and white during take-off again turned complete white similar to the situation when we flew from Dubai the previous week.

Next to me was sitting a lady in a Western outfit. She was in a black coat and a scarf as our plane took off. I was curious to know why it is so. Hesitatingly I asked her why it is that the dress code is not being followed now.

“In Rome do as Romans do” came the reply, which answered my query.

OPED SOCIETY

Are WE Not adult enough?
Is the belief that porn fuels sexual violence against women a leap of logic? A writ petition has been filed in the Supreme Court to make watching porn a non-bailable offence. The court has asked the government for a response
Namita Aavriti

A withering cascade of funny tweets, sharp and witty counters to a legal petition on banning pornography has been doing the rounds of social media. As much as the idiotic mendacity of Kamlesh Vaswani's petition is indeed amusing, I'm reminded of a distinction made by the feminist Judith Butler, between a judge's pronouncement, and a journalist's diatribe or columnist's droll retort. The judge's words have a direct consequence on someone's life or property, sometimes so effective and swift that the word and the act are inseparable. While the words of the ordinary person or the journalist have the power to suggest, demolish or even ridicule arguments, they do not immediately translate into action and often get absorbed into the stickiness of everyday life.

Adult Act : it's not easy to pin down the relation between porn and imagination, and how we act — Thinkstockphoto

It is the advantage of harnessing legal language that some words just sound more effective than others. The public interest litigation against pornography is one of those examples, with its repetitive, asinine hammering about the impact of porn on peace of mind, porn as cyanide, porn as a security threat, but wrapped up in legalese and demands to ban this scourge that is "directly responsible for increased sexual violence". Even though there is no coherent legal argument, the petition seems to wield a draconian potentiality — a sort of Kafkaesque in-the-wings menacing air, that makes us titter and gulp and chatter. Either that, or we really want to talk about porn?

The basis of the petition is a frightening array of global statistics of how much porn there is on the internet, how much is paid for it, how often 'adult search terms' are entered into search engines. Historically, the term pornography was invented to create a secret museum for erotic objects found in the ruins of ancient Rome. Like the statue of Pan, the god, screwing a she-goat. Everything in this secret museum could only be viewed by men of elevated intelligence, or weak-willed women might start looking at goats enviously, or worse, men of lesser erudition might start imagining goats to be women, or vice versa.

If the same classist and paternalistic logic is what drives State censorship today, then pornography on the internet should hardly be a problem since 90% of the population is not online. The imagined glut of pornography is not much, numerically speaking, and I say this only because the petition relies so heavily on numbers and figures.

Studies about the impact of pornography can be found to support either notion that 'porn is the theory, rape is the practice', or that porn sublimates libidinal urges, and so reduces instances of rape. As Hardik Brata Biswas's historical study of print porn from the 19th century reveals, porn in India largely consists of family scandals and incest, and here the woman is merely a prop — a willing victim or coy seductress. But the Bhadralok woman in 1850s is also the bearer of virtuous sanctity in public discourse. If nothing else, this contradiction reveals that it's not easy to pin down the relation between porn and imagination, and how we act. Biswas also points out that it is not only pornography that can be held responsible for sexual violence because, "Cultures of rape and sexual offences against women emerge equally, if not more, from everyday practices of masculinity which are omnipresent".

Whose porn is it, anyway?

The Indian slice of the global porn pie is limited by the fact that only 10% of our population is online, but 50% have mobile phones. While cyber cafes are becoming less common or are governed by fairly strict rules of identity cards etc. these have been replaced by the ubiquitous mobile phone by which people share, watch and store porn. Porn is implied in the Coke ad with Aishwarya Rai's lips wrapped around a bottle, it is the imagined aftermath of every khatiya and jhatka song. If two ministers are nestled in Parliament to watch a salacious clip, then there definitely is an overflow of smut. Most sexpert columns regularly reply to a boy saying that he watches too much porn and his tremulous enquiry about whether this is bad for 'real sex'; each innocuous wrestling video on Youtube between semi-naked men on a maidan, is followed by a string of likes and comments egging on this masti between men.

I'm not sure those who are objecting to porn have watched the kind that enjoys high circulation in India. Do not let this phase of most touching, breathless, self-involved, literally navel-gazing moment of Indian sexuality pass you by. This is mostly do-it-yourself porn made with phones and cheap cameras. Amateur porn is gritty but grainy, with a kind of in-built censorship that doesn't ever reach levels of salacious detail that industry-produced porn has. That kind of high-def porn that covers all the bases of sexual positions, preferences for bondage and taste for something a little sleazier than the last, seems like test cricket in contrast to this galli cricket played with a plastic ball.

This porn records the tentative beginnings of a sexual act or the failed attempt at a blowjob in a toilet cubicle. There is a nationwide obsession with the idea of kaand (scandal) because in this small piece of video is the story of betrayal and love gone awry. It seems that we make our own cinema these days, whether it is the secret love affair between a teacher and college student, or the sex worker who vengefully records her clients and makes a CD to sell. The first known leaked tape in India was Mysore Mallige and the latest from the rack of amateur porn are so many and plenty, that perhaps they do not need to be named anymore. But even then, there is a sense of real people whose private fecundities have suddenly been exposed.

What we often end up seeing is the ordinariness of our lives reflected back at us. We have even seen politicians, godmen, actors and actresses stumble from lofty heights to stray amongst our follies. But this array of semi-scandalous clips online or spoken about in newspapers, also includes young men who watched porn before committing sexual assault, the gay man whose cybersex video went viral, the teenage girl whose assault was photographed and tweeted, and it is then that the picture starts getting seamier, rather than steamy.

Tell me, where does it hurt?

Amateur porn when it is being watched seems quite harmless, perhaps not even explicit enough to merit the definition of pornography. Yet it often involves a disregard of the impact on lives of the people involved, especially women. There are videos of horrifying assaults, which bring us face-to-face with our ethical and moral failings as individuals who are watching this, and as a society, where the insistence of male and heterosexual needs stripped of any regard of others, is accepted and very rarely condemned.

A young man strips for a webcam while his eyes skitter from left to right trying to follow the typed instructions being given to him. Does he know this semi naked video will end up on some porn blog? Nithin Manayath, an academic writing about sexuality and technology, points out that in the Indian context sexuality is about separated spaces of sociality that we occupy, rather than a fixed sexual identity. In some spaces we are comfortable being queer, even defiant of gender norms, and in others we hide our desires, or pass as something more conventional. In recent times it is technology like the internet that has broken the tenuous barriers between different spaces.

This is what happened with Professor Siras, whose sexuality was known amongst a few people in Aligarh Muslim University, where he taught, and was acknowledged in small circles, including his students. Sting journalists leaked a video of him having consensual sex with another man, and he was unfairly fired from his job as professor of languages. Just after the courts gave him his job back stating that his sexual preference cannot be grounds for dismissal, he was found dead, possibly by suicide. If the video had circulated in only pornographic blogs perhaps, it would have made no difference, but the video was seen by the college authorities and was discussed on national television, especially because of his sexuality. Sympathetic people in the wider gay community attempted to offer solidarity but perhaps were too late or didn't quite understand the complexities of Siras' life.

So the question that is blindingly obvious is not whether watching porn is an offence, but does the law in its scope and implementation, even come close to addressing the real sense of hurt and violation that people experience. The gap between law and a sense of justice is sometimes so enormous that it can only be filled by fantasy, and perhaps in India by cinema, but not so much by the intricacies and failures of legal procedure.

Kanoon ke lambe haath

It is obvious that our desires and longings cannot really be policed. Not simply because the internet is an unmanageable technology, but because the inside of anybody's brain hooked on someone, is a pornographic den. Most of us don't even really need the help of a sexual video or image. But pornography can also be educational sometimes, for the novice, for the young woman who doesn't know how her own body can give her pleasure, for the 40 year old man who hasn't figured out his sexuality, for the man to find out where the clitoris is and perhaps get the wrong idea that its in the throat, and so on. Also you are not automatically connected to a pornographic subterranean, simply because the modem is on. It is through choice and interaction that the internet works, and this includes websites like Youporn where people voluntarily share their videos.

The valid concerns, especially around amateur porn should be about the rights of people who are captured in pornographic images. The new amendment to law for sexual offences, has introduced a section on voyeurism, which is described as capturing the image of a woman in a private or sexual act with a hidden camera or device without the consent of the woman. Disgruntled ex-lovers and boyfriends often circulate explicit clips where the woman may have consented to the making, but not to its circulation. This too is an offence under the same law, and imprisonment can be for 3-7 years, though the problem that remains is, how does the bare text of the law actually translate to the daily use and policing?

The uncomfortable reality is that turning to the law for redressal or reform has often backfired. When women's movement in the 80s asked for laws against indecent representation, they got laws that twisted their own representations and censored their expression. When activists asked for hate speech regulation, they themselves were often charged for being anti-national. When women asked for a law that dealt with offensive messages, that same section 66-A of the Information Technology Act is used by the State to target a tweet that merely refers to Robert Vadra's wealth or to take down Aseem Trivedi's cartoons. Rather than the slippery slope of censorship, it seems more just to criminalize the invasion of privacy and voiding of consent, though with the law one can never tell when it will turn against us.

The writer is a Fellow at Center for Internet and Society, Bangaluru, and has published a monograph titled "Porn: law, video, technology"

Porn- the academic way
* Todd Kendall, an economist at Clemson University in the US, looked at the growth of access to net- porn and made a correlation with rape cases. He found an inverse relationship: rape cases went down.
* Another study at Texas Tech. University showed that porn might fuel positive attitudes towards women. They termed it "benevolent sexism."
* A professor from the Northwestern University, came to a conclusion after his empirical study that the number of rape cases were reduced in states where people had greater access to porn on the net, "…states with the least internet access between 1980 and 2000- and therefore the least access to internet pornography - experienced a 53 percent increase in rape incidence, whereas the state with the most access experienced a 27 per cent drop in the number of reported cases," said the report.