New Delhi, January 9
A Delhi court today summoned eminent painter M.F. Husain to appear before it in a case pertaining to some of his works that have allegedly hurt religious sentiments of some people.

Additional chief metropolitan magistrate A.K. Kuhar directed Husain to appear before it March 29.

“Keeping in view the facts and circumstances of the case, the investigating officer is directed to expedite the investigation, as sufficient time has already been given,” the Kuhar said in his order, directing the police official to produce the final investigation report by March 29.

Ram Pratap Singh, a doctor with the Apollo Hospital here, has filed the case. Earlier, Singh’s counsel complained that there was a deliberate attempt to delay the police probe.

Singh filed a complaint in 2006 accusing Husain of hurting religious sentiments of public by allegedly painting “nude or scantily clad pictures of Bharat Mata, Sita and Draupadi”, which reportedly appeared in a magazine and a national daily.

Husain, currently living abroad in self-imposed exile, is facing criminal prosecution for his controversial paintings .—IANS 

New Delhi, January 9
Four motor cycle -borne persons tried to loot a bag of money from a shopkeeper in the Uttam Nagar area here yesterday. The incident took place at night on Hospital Road when Narayan Das Gupta, 56,was walking back to his home along with his servant after shutting down his general store.

Narayan Das was accosted by four motor cycle riders right next to his house. They tried to snatch away the money bag. Narayan Das resisted, they shot him in the stomach. The bullet was taken out at the Mata Chanan Devi Hospital. According to the police, the looters did not succeed in fleeing away with the money bag.

Narayan Das Gupta servant Shankar said that the motorcyclists had covered their face. “They were four on two motor cycles. One of them got down to snatch the money bag while three kept sitting on their motor cycles. When Sethji resisted, he was shot in the stomach”, said Shankar. The police has found an empty bullet shell from the spot.

According to Gupta’s nephew, Balkrishan, his uncle used to be accompanied by his cousin Pankaj on his way back from the shop ,but yesterday he came early. “It seems the criminals were waiting for an opportunity and struck yesterday when Pankaj was not there”, said Balkrishan.

Attempt to murder: A 20-year -old Pradeep, resident of Mandoli village in Nand Nagri was fired at and inflicted injuries by two persons the previous night.

According to DCP North-East District, while Pradeep was standing with his friend in the street before his house, Akshay and Amit Sharma, came on a motor cycle and had a heated argument with him. The duo shot at him and fled away. Pradeep who received an injury on his leg was taken to the GTB Hospital. He was discharged after treatment.

Suspect Amit Sharma is involved in as many as 11 criminal cases while Akshay in one criminal case. A case of attempt to murder has been registered at P.S. Nand Nagri and a massive manhunt has been launched to nab the suspects.

Chain snatchers held: The Kashmere Gate Police arrested two women on the charge of snatching a gold chain of a woman at Hanuman Mandir, Kashmere Gate,yesterday. According to DCP North Office, the complainant Janakrani came to the temple where both the suspects , Sunita, 35, and Lakshmi, 19 , of Ballabh Garh, Haryana, snatched her gold chain and tried to flee.

The victim raised an alarm . Constable Savitri with the help of passers-by nabbed the two women and recovered the snatched chain from their possession.

One held under Arms Act: Desh Bandhu Gupta Road Police arrested Kishan Babu, resident of Timar Pur and recovered one .38 bore revolver with four cartridges from his possession yesterday. According to DCP North Office, while the local police was conducting bus checking at Faiz Road bus stand, Karol Bagh, the suspect got out of the bus and tried to flee but was overpowered. During interrogation, he confessed to having stolen the revolver and cartridges from the Timar Pur area.  

New Delhi, January 9
When it comes to making personal choices, the NRI women or educated upper class women in India often find themselves as much disadvantaged as their poorer and less educated lot, with such attempt sometimes resulting in the extreme punishment — ‘honour’ killing.

The fact was underlined by two leading women of the country CPI(M) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Brinda Karat and celebrated dancer and social activist Mallika Sarabhai at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here today.

Karat suggested formation of a global network of NRI women to extend them help in their hours of crisis.

She said those who wanted empowerment of women, should first disempower the forces that were destroying the democratic values and perpetuating the patriarchal mindset, those holding power in different echelons and endorsing retrograde values and practices in the name of preserving culture.

She called for creating a global network of NRI women and asked the NRIs to give their suggestions and participate in the formation of such a body.

The CPI(M) leader also urged the government to sign the Hague convention so that the NRI women could avail of the laws of the country they were living in.

Karat said that recent incidents in Kenya and Malaysia had shown the vulnerability of NRI women, and the government should take up the matter with those states.

Sarabhai in her brief, but powerful remarks said no amount of legislation and policing would check the crime against women, unless a fight was taken up against the patriarchal mindset.

Despite education and economic independence, women were yet to enjoy the control over their bodies, she pointed out.

A woman may be a pilot, an engineer or be successful in any other profession, her social acceptability was often measured by whether she observed ‘karva chauth’ (a fast observed for the well being of husband), she said.

The theme of the session was ‘challenges in women’s empowerment and leadership’. Minister for social justice and empowerment Meira Kumar chaired the session. 
— UNI  

New Delhi, January 9
In a small Tamil Nadu village is India’s only living link to a certain colonial past-born in Guyana, 64-year-old C.G. Naresh was a passenger on the last ship that returned home to India with indentured labourers more than five decades ago.

His existence was tracked down just a few months ago by Nalini Mohabir, a 37-year-old Canadian researcher of the Indo-Guyanese descent who has been researching the fate of the 243 passengers on the last boat, MV Resurgent, which left Georgetown in Guyana on September 4, 1955.

The story she unveils is anchored on a crucial clause included in all contracts forced upon mostly illiterate peasants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh before being shipped to work in plantations across the seven seas. Under the “right to return” clause, the colonial government would pay for the passage home for the labourer at the end of his indentureship.

According to Mohabir, who will be presenting her research through photographs at a diaspora festival organised by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts this week on the sidelines of the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas here on January 8-9, only one in four Indians who went to the colonies to work in plantations returned home.

But the advent of Indian independence suddenly spurred the labourers, even those who had lived there for over 60 years and had grandchildren, to clamour to be returned back to the motherland, their visions tinted with the glorious ideal of being part of a new Indian republic.

“The freedom movement and subsequent independence (of India) had fired the imagination. There were protests in Trinidad and threats of mass suicide in Jamaica over demands to return back home,” Mohabir told IANS.

Only the government in British Guyana acquiesced and chartered a ship to take back a thousand passengers. “But the Indian government pasted posters around the city discouraging people to return,” she said.

On that September day 53 years ago, it seemed the entire country had come to see off 243 passengers aboard M.V. Resurgent on Sproston’s No 1 Wharf in Georgetown. The next day’s paper summed it in a poignant headline - “Going Home! To a home they never saw”.

The reference was to the fact that that the majority of the returnees were going back with family, many of them having been born in the South American colony and only knew of India from oral tales and newsreels.

The ship’s manifest lists the name and the home village, which was a vital clue for Mohabir to trace the descendants.

It was through that method that she stumbled across the only passenger of the ship that she could find alive - Naresh, who had travelled on Resurgent as a 12-year-old along with 19 other family members.

“His father had sold off their entire business to return to India. But, as soon as the ship docked at the port at Calcutta (after one month), Naresh’s family realised that they had made a grave mistake,” said Mohabir.

Calcutta was a strange city, already bursting at the seams with refugees from East Pakistan and swirling with chaos due to the festival season. Mohabir remembers that her grandfather, Chhablal Ramcharan, who travelled with Resurgent’s passengers as the Guyanese repatriation officer, telling her of the day after the arrival when he was besieged at the hotel room with mob of 40 passengers.

“They were crying and pleading with him that they wanted to return back. But, what could he do when the passage was only for one way,” she said.

Her grandfather also told her that many of the passengers who couldn’t remember their home villages were put up in a charity shelter called The Refuge.

That organisation still stands at Bow Bazaar, from whose dusty ledgers she was able to find another link to the ship. “I talked to some of the old inmates who remembered a mother and daughter who were not from Calcutta”. Cross checking the files of the old age home and the ship manifest yielded two names - Manraji (in her 50s) and her daughter, Biphia.

“A son, who had travelled with them, was not listed. Strangely, they apparently never went to their village in Gorakhpur and stayed rest of their lives at the Home. Manraji died sometime in the 1970s, while her daughter was alive till the 1990s,” said Mohabir.

She found another missing link in Uttar Pradesh during her visit in the summer of 2007 - in Amrora village in Azamgarh district was the grandson of another passenger, Sant Sewak. “Interestingly, he did return to his village but went back to Guyana. The grandson showed me the letters and a will that they had preserved, complete with the Guyanese postage stamp.”

She came across other stories of other returnees, who unable to cope with an independent India that had changed drastically after 1947 wanted to go back but could not afford the journey back to the colonies.

“Their stories are not about India making them unhappy, but the misery that displacement causes,” said Mohabir. — IANS 

New Delhi, January 9
Immigrant specialist and social worker Anu Peshawaria has proposed an international law to check the abuse of Asian brides in inter-state marriages.

And, her book, ‘The Immigrant’s Dream’, talks in detail about the horror stories of women married to NRIs.

For the US-based lawyer, the battle to ‘prick the NRI groom phenomenon’ among the South-Asian community is a long-drawn one.

It has been 25 years since Peshawaria, a one-time junior Wimbledon champion, has been fighting the cause of Indian and South-Asian women living in the US and trapped in bad marriages and continually abused.

Fighting such legal cases free of cost, Peshawaria has put down 10 such cases, the laws and the rights that women can take refuge in, in her book, which will be launched at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in the Capital on Tuesday.

“In the past 10 years, I have noticed that the number of immigration-related cases in the US have increased drastically. Every other day, an Indian immigrant woman married to an NRI comes to me to fight abuse. They are usually cheated and trapped in bad marriages,” Peshawaria, 45, told IANS in an interview.

“I help these women, but I have written this book to spread awareness among people at the grassroots that one must be careful while choosing a husband for their daughter and not fall for the dollar bait,” she said.

Written in English, Peshawaria plans to translate the book into Hindi and Punjabi in another six months and distribute copies, especially in Punjab, from where most of these cases are reported.

Peshawaria stressed that families, who look for NRI grooms for their daughters, must verify the antecedents of the person, get his details from the work manager, check his immigration status, verify whether the girl will get a work permit. And, most importantly, the girl should go on a work status rather than as a dependent.

“There’s no point in talking about problems and not look for solutions. I would like to point out the serious lacunae in the law.

“Suppose a man gets married in India and seeks divorce in the US, within six months he will be able to get it, while the girl here is trapped in a bad marriage. In India, it is not easy to get a divorce. Therefore, when it comes to inter-state marriages, there should be an international law, which countries must adhere to,” Peshawaria said.

“An international set of guidelines will benefit children the most. I have come across cases, when one of the parents gets custody of the kid in one country and in the other country the other parent has custody.”

“Twins and siblings are separated, when a parent takes one of the children and goes off to another country, leaving the other behind. This is cruel,” she added.

Quite surprisingly, 90 per cent of the women cheated into marriage refuse to come back from the US.

“Besides the fear of facing social stigma back home, these women are more empowered in the US. For instance, according to Section 360 (Violence against Women Act), an immigrant woman is allowed to stay and work in the US, even after she has divorced her NRI husband, who is a US citizen.

“According to the Community Property law, a woman is entitled to 50 per cent of her husband’s property. So after divorcing her husband, she is not penniless. In India, a woman has to fight for maintenance,” she said.

Yet another solution she offers in these cases is amendment of the Indian laws and bending them towards laws like the Community Property law.

“At the end of the day, people have to become more aware and that’s what SevA Legal Aid, my support centre, does by talking about the issue in temples, gurudwaras and other places in the US.

“I come to India every year and I am trying to spread awareness here as well. I will be meeting members of the National Commission for Women,” she said.

The NRI population in the US is close to two million. — IANS