The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

Haryana’s bus business
Public service should be priority

Public transport in Haryana has been a study in contrast: Very efficient on trunk routes, and atrocious in the interiors. Nearly all major bus routes — those connecting the district headquarters to each other or Delhi — are operated by the state-owned Haryana Roadways, while the interiors (read rural areas) are served largely by irregular mini-cabs or jeeps.

The reason has been very few permits given to private bus operators thus far, and Haryana Roadways has been avoiding the ‘non-lucrative’ rural runs. The state’s new transport policy aims to change this. It has proposed 3,500 permits for private buses on these ‘secondary’ routes. Private players can make it lucrative as they don’t have to pay the high government wages to the staff, and, of course, from the sheer efficiency of the private sector.

With such a large number of regular buses coming on to rural roads, the life of commuters would definitely see a vast improvement. Protests against the lack of transport in the state have been common. Now that Haryana is introducing an all-new concept, it may as well make it cartel-proof, unlike Punjab. For now, the state has laid down that one person or entity would get only one permit. Trouble begins when those involved in implementing any policy gain vested interests. Fake companies and permits or more than one bus on a permit are common tricks employed to cheat the system.

Haryana Roadways is one of the few state-owned transport companies in the country that is running in profit. That seems good on the face of it, but a major reason is avoidance of non-lucrative routes, which is a primary role of any public sector undertaking — to serve where those with commercial interests won’t. That brings up the more fundamental question: Should governments be doing businesses that the private sector can well take over? Haryana’s experience with its tourism resorts off the GT Road is also proving to be a failure. To serve should be the first purpose of any public enterprise, profit second.

Rape victims
Compensation alone is not an answer

Over the years, rape has become one of India’s fast growing crimes. In the light of an alarming rise in the number of such cases, any step to reach out to rape victims would be welcome, especially if it is well meaning.

Thus the Himachal Pradesh government’s approval of the Financial Assistance and Support Scheme seems to be a step in the right direction. More so, since the scheme offers more than monetary assistance. It includes shelter, counselling and legal help, among other things. Indeed, it is the state’s responsibility to come forward and help out women whom it could not protect.

This is not the first time victim relief measures are being considered. The Centre had suggested that all states devise compensation schemes for victims of crime and their dependents in accordance with Section 357A of the Criminal Procedure Code. The West Bengal government, too, prepared the plan and decided to compensate the affected women. However, the move to give money to rape victims touched a raw nerve and the government received much flak for being insensitive to their plight. Indeed, when it comes to rape victims, not only is it important to treat them with a great degree of sensitivity, but also to ensure that the measures send out right signals. At the same time, though it might be tempting to dismiss financial help as demeaning to a victim’s dignity, the compensation can be of use to women, especially if it is clubbed with legal help. For that can go a long way in ensuring justice for rape victims.

Sadly, if India’s track record is anything to go by, justice is a mirage for most rape victims. Negligible conviction rate in a large majority of rape cases is coupled with an apathetic attitude towards women at the receiving end. They not only have to live with the indignity of sexual assault, but also social stigma. By strange twist of logic, society continues to blame them for the crime. While an effective law and its proper implementation is a must, society needs to shed its victim blaming approach. Both the government and society have to ensure that women’s human rights are not violated, most importantly through measures chalked out to help them.

Thought for the Day

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature. — George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

ARTICLE

Sectarian violence in Pakistan
State and society are bigger culprits
by D. Suba Chandran

During the last few months, there has been intense violence against the minority communities in Pakistan. Though one could see a pattern in terms of who is being targeted and who is the perpetrator of this sectarian violence, it is essential to find out why this violence has been increasing and why the state and society have failed to take note of this phenomenon.

When compared with the attention that the state and society provides to the attacks by the Tehreek-e-Taliban within Pakistan, sectarian violence has been either ignored or under-noticed. Why?

Consider the following attacks in the last few months. According to an independent estimate, in 2012 alone, there have been approximately 80 sectarian attacks, killing more than 300 people. The following data during this year until September would highlight the expanse of sectarian violence in Pakistan. Early this month, 15 Shias were killed in Parachinar in Kurram Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). In August, on the same date that the militants targeted the Kamra airbase, 25 Shia passengers travelling in a bus in Manshera in Khyber Pakhtunkwa (KP) were off-loaded, identified and shot dead. In July, through a remote-controlled bomb, 12 Shias were killed in Orakzai Agency in FATA. In June, 12 Shia pilgrims were killed in Quetta in Balochistan, when they were returning from Iran, by a suicide bomber. In April 2012, along the Karakoram Highway, near Chilas in Gilgit-Baltistan, nine Shia passengers were offloaded, identified and shot dead. In February 2012, in Kohistan in KP, 18 Shia passengers were killed.

These figures alone would prove the extent, nature and the geographic spread of sectarian violence in Pakistan. Besides the above attacks on the Shias, there have been numerous other attacks on other minority communities, including the Ahmediyas. There have been reports that the Hindu community, the other non-Muslim minority, has been wanting to leave Pakistan.

What is happening within Pakistan? And why is it happening now? On a broad level, two parallel developments could be noticed in terms of sectarian violence within Pakistan. One, it is a struggle for Islam by certain radical groups vis-a-vis the moderate and secular values of the state and society. Two, it is a struggle within Islam, in which a section within the Islamic groups is attempting to emphasise their version of religion within the Shia, Ahmediya and multiple Sunni — Deobandi, Barelvi and Wahabi — groups. Both processes need better understanding and explanation.

The sectarian violence within Pakistan could be mapped in two waves — the first one during the 1980s as collateral of Zia’s Islamisation drive. The above groups since 2001 have started the second wave, coinciding with the TTP and various other Taliban factions within Pakistan. What is referred to as the Punjabi Taliban essentially comprises these sectarian groups with a base especially in South Punjab. The TTP, founded during the last decade, has started a series of violent attacks against the moderate and secular foundations of the state. If Zia’s Islamisation provided these groups a cover in the 1980s, the presence of the US in Afghanistan and the high anti-American sentiment within the country are providing a strong support for their fight.

The struggle within Islam, though was present during the first wave itself, has become more pronounced in the present phase. The first wave started in the 1980s as a part of Zia’s Islamisation policy. Though there were tensions between the two communities, the Sunni-Shia divide hit the peak in the 1980s. The Sunni radical groups got emboldened due to Zia’s support; the regional environment added to this. The differences between the Shia Iran (after the revolution in 1979) and the predominantly Sunni Pakistan had its own fallouts between the Sunni and Shia communities within the country. Radical violent groups such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its later avatars such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi played a violent role in targeting the Shia and Ahmediya communities in the 1980s and the 1990s.

The assassination of Salman Taseer, multiple attacks against the Shia and Ahmediya communities, abuse of the blasphemy law, especially against the Christian community as witnessed during the recent episode of a Christian girl accused of desecrating the Holy Book, are expressions of the expansion of these groups in the second wave.

These communities are being attacked by the Sunni militant groups, for they remain an easy target. Consider the geographic expanse in which these attacks are taking place — in Balochistan, along the Karakoram Highway in and around Gilgit-Baltistan, and in the Kurram and Orakzai Agencies of FATA. The extent of the state’s writ or that of the local administration is very limited. As a result, the minority communities remain helpless. Though there was an effort to form their own militant group, as in the case of the Shias during the 1980s, this was counter-productive for them. With no ability to protect themselves, the minority communities have the state and courts as their only option.

In fact, the state, rather than the sectarian groups, remains the primary culprit in this violence. If the sectarian groups are hyper-active, the state remains absolutely inactive. During the 1980s, the state watched this violence silently or turned its head to the other side, as the sectarian militants were also closely linked to the various jihadi groups fighting in J&K. In the 1980s, the state used them as a part of a larger regional strategy. Now, after helping them grow, the state does not want to antagonise them and open another front. With the TTP seen as the primary adversary, the state does not want to take on the sectarian militants.

The law-enforcement agencies ensure that the culprits are never booked. Even if they are booked, the trial remains either one-sided or inefficient. Consider the case of what happened to Salman Taseer, who was assassinated by his own guard, for raising his voice against the abuse of the blasphemy law. The lawyers showered petals on the assassin when he was brought to the courts, and the judge had to leave the country after delivering the verdict.

The courts, though proactive on other issues — the case of disappearances in Balochistan or corruption by the President and the PPP — remain remarkably silent on this ongoing sectarian violence within Pakistan. If Salman Taseer, as Governor of Punjab, could not get justice, is an ordinary minority community member likely to get even a fair trial?

Finally, society and its media will have to share the responsibility of being silent and doing nothing; look at the rage now within Pakistan following the release of a film in the US, believed to be anti-Islam, or the earlier protests against the Danish cartoon during the last decade. The silence of society in Pakistan vis-a-vis sectarian violence is baffling and hypocritical.

Don’t blame only the sectarian groups alone? The state and society have to take the larger blame for the sectarian violence in Pakistan.

The writer is the Director, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi.

MIDDLE

The missing protective umbrella
by Rajeev Gupta

There has been a great connection between green tea and what in Urdu is called ‘sakoon’ (tranquillity). The green tea prepared and served by my ‘Bua’ reminded me of the closeness each relationship in our family had some 30 or 40 years ago. It was not a question of a cup of tea but a matter of social bonding within our family.

In Jammu city, green tea was popularly called ‘desi’ tea as opposed to the modern Brooke Bond tea in the late sixties. Being a traditional Indian, the health benefits of green tea were deeply ingrained in my mind.

My mother being a school teacher, I had ample opportunities to do experiments in the kitchen. During my high school and college days I could make most of the regular dishes and could easily compete with an average housewife. I was always fond of food and enjoyed working in the kitchen.

Preparation of ‘desi’ tea was quite different from that of the Brooke Bond tea. It needed a lot of patience as it had to be boiled at an optimum temperature. And when tea was ready it gave light pink colour. Its taste was always amazing.

My father’s cousin, Vidya Bua, was an expert in preparing ‘desi’ tea and she made it at least twice a day. She stayed next to our house in Gurha Bakshi Nagar, a resettlement Mirpuri colony, in Jammu. Without hesitation, I could say that in spite of my well-known cutlery skills, I was never able to prepare a proper cup of ‘desi’ tea. It never turned out to be as delicious as made by my ‘Bua’. It never gave a tinge of pink colour and invariably turned brownish and tasted bitter. Finally, I gave up the efforts and stopped experimenting with its preparation.

For years Vidya Bua served me a cup of ‘desi’ tea at least twice a day. On any given day, wherever I was, she would invite me for a cup of tea. This went on for many years till I shifted to the PGI, Chandigarh, to do my post-graduate training in psychiatry.

Vidya Bua is no more today. But her love and affection is still fresh in my memory. Today when I see young people coming to my clinic with behavioural and adjustment problems, I ponder where we as a society have faltered. What has gone wrong with the nurturing of the youth who are feeling alienated and emotionally deprived, and have so many conflicts and unsolved problems. Probably, they do not have people like Vidya Bua. The ones of my age had enjoyed each moment of our growing under the widely protective, loving, caring and colourful umbrella of life like that provided by Vidya Bua. The presence of such souls always gave us eternal peace, a deep sense of security and ‘sakoon’.

OPED

The dark side of JK Rowling
With the Potter days behind her, the author explains her obsession with killing characters
Nick Clark

As JK Rowling revealed the secrets of her hugely anticipated new novel, she told the adoring crowd something her earlier work had only hinted, that she was “obsessed” by death.

The Casual Vacancy, her first book aimed at adults, was released last week and the celebrated writer took to the stage of London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in London some 12 hours later.

They did not come in wizard’s cowls or with lightning bolts felt-tipped on their heads. It was an audience that had grown up into their late teens and early 20s with Harry Potter. And a fair share of older fans as well. Rowling rarely appears in public, but held her poise when met by a standing ovation from large sections of the sell-out crowd of 900. When asked about the adult subject matter in a book that starts with a death, the author said: “Death obsesses me. I can’t understand why it doesn’t obsess everybody.” She later added that writing about death “has made me much less afraid of it”.

Rowling said her view was coloured by her mother dying when the author was 25, and being part of an aged family “people did die a lot in my teens”.

While the release of Rowling’s first novel in five years had met with mixed reviews from the critics, there was nothing but adoration when she spoke.

She was interviewed on stage by BBC journalist Mark Lawson, who kicked off by talking about the author’s involvement with the Olympic Opening Ceremony, where she read a passage from Peter Pan. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever, ever done. I was proud to be part of it.” After 15 years much of the Potter references are “white noise” but the sight of Voldemort rising up gave her “a full body chill. It was a big moment for me”.

Rowling had flown from Edinburgh to London on the morning of the release, spending much of the day trying to avoid reading reviews. She has not always been comfortable in front of audiences of adults. Crime writer and friend Ian Rankin believes she is in her element “in a room of kids”. And she was in her element last night with the questions from her young fans. One had flown in from Spain and got a hug from the author as he gave her a present.

She revealed that she would change “quite a few things” about the Potter series stylistically and a few plot points including giving Harry a map that proved “far too useful”. She revealed Dumbledore as her favourite character from that series but had no regrets over killing off some of the most prominent characters.

The Casual Vacancy is set in the fictional town of Pagford, and follows the chaos that ensues after the death of a local parish councillor. It covers heroin addiction, prostitution, drug dealing and rape. “This isn’t Harry, Ron and Hermione. These are very different teenagers; contemporary teenagers,” she said. “I genuinely think that this is a humorous book. Some of that humour may be dark.”

There is also a strong theme of social justice, about which Rowling herself feels very strongly. Residents of her childhood village of Tutshill in Gloucestershire denied that they had inspired the “snobby” attitudes of the middle class community. “It’s life in a small town and everything that entails,” she said. “Pagford is fictional.”

The Independent’s book editor said that despite being “slowed down by its fussy class geography and wheezing plot-motor, the novel builds into a vividly melodramatic climax”.

—The Independent

Rowling on...

…e-books: “I was hesitant as I didn’t know what they were.”

…printed books: “I’ll always love print. I can’t read an iPad in the bath.”

…the Harry Potter film casting: “They were all too good looking.”

…the swearing in her book: “To depict Christelle without swearing would be ridiculous.”

…the Harry Potter books: “There are things I would change — quite a few things.”

Salman Rushdie’s frank and zestful memoir
Boyd Tonkin

Sir Salman Rushdie began taking notes for his memoir Joseph Anton almost as soon as the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered an “unfunny Valentine” on February 14, 1989. “Within about a week or less of this beginning” — the religious edict, or fatwa, against The Satanic Verses, which called on all Muslims to murder its author and his publishers — its target said to himself, “You’re never going to remember all this. You should start writing it down.”

This was a gesture of hope. “I always had a sense, in a way a kind of optimistic sense, that ‘One day when it’s over I’ll write about it’. Which was a way of telling me that one day it would be over.” Now, he says, “There were moments, depressed moments, when I thought, the last chapter could be so violent that I’m not going to be person telling the story. As depressing was the idea that there might never be a last chapter — that this might just go on and on for ever.”

I can’t be more honest, more open, more detailed, than this. Whatever people make of the book, I hope that they will see that it’s written by somebody who’s really trying to tell the truth —who is not being defensive or revisionist.

Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape, £25) is both a precious historical document, and an immersive, page-turning read. Its author compiled it with the help of 120 boxes of personal papers, donated to Emory University in Georgia and then classified over four years. “After that, I had my whole life catalogued — with bar codes.” The memoir takes its title from Rushdie’s cover identity as an American publisher: a homage to two of his writer-heroes, Conrad and Chekhov.

Names matter in this story. Rushdie himself saw his true identity stolen and grafted on to a detested scapegoat: “It wasn’t just that I had to become another person, but that lots of people were reinventing me.” Moreover, as he tells us in tender reminiscences of his father Anis, the family tradition of liberal, eclectic, Sufi-tinted Indian Islam led sceptical Anis to change his surname in homage to the great Muslim philosopher of medieval Spain: Ibn Rushd.

We talk in his agent’s Bloomsbury office. The knighted author, now 65, looks relaxed, speaks warmly and appears younger than in his hidden decade. Normal service resumed? Not quite. On that very day, violent protests against an apparently blasphemous video convulse the Middle East. A key image in Joseph Anton derives from Hitchcock’s film The Birds, with the fatwa as “a sort of prologue… the tale of the moment when the first blackbird lands.” Now, he says, “We see these storms of birds at the slightest provocation all over the world, chanting their slogans and believing that they can take human life — the lives of people completely unconnected to whatever it is that’s supposed to have annoyed them... When it happened to The Satanic Verses, it was kind of an early harbinger of what later became a storm.”

Joseph Anton exerts a mesmeric hold with its high-octane storytelling, even as the car-crash fascination of its content grips. It names names. It gives addresses — not just streets, but numbers. It annotates his meetings with PMs, presidents and policemen. It tells the story of four marriages (“slightly too many marriages”), of two children, and of bereavement (his first wife, Clarissa Luard, died in 1999). It hands out bouquets, to campaigners, champions, sentinels and even tight-lipped London builders: “An enormous number of people did the right thing.” And it flings the odd curse too — above all, at liberal appeasers of the zealots’ fury: For him, free expression ranks as “the right without which all the other rights disappear”. It is “the bedrock … If you compromise on that, you lose everything else.”

Joseph Anton sits squarely within the canon of Rushdie’s books, a swerve into non-fiction but not an outlier. “That was the thing I most wanted for this — that it should feel like one of my books and not like a freak consequence of something that happened to me.”

I also ask the cliché question: How did his plight — a decade as a dead man walking — change him? He parries with a “cliché answer: ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.” More seriously, “It showed me that I was a more resilient individual that I thought I was. If you had told me the story before it happened and said, ‘How do you think you’ll deal with that?’, I would not have bet on myself to deal with it that way.... But I feel that I was able to come through it, with a lot of help from people who love me. It’s information about oneself.”

Those “people who love me” — his former wives, apart from the unreconciled second, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; his sons Zafar and Milan; his sister Sameen; the agents Deborah Rogers, Gillon Aitken and Andrew Wylie; hosts such as Pauline Melville, James Fenton, Margaret Drabble and Liz Calder — kept him alive, and kicking. “One of things that has been very effective, and has probably done the greatest long-term damage... is the campaign inside the Muslim world to demonise me, and to make me out to be an arch-enemy of Islam.”

He must also battle his own frailty, especially when — in late 1990, close to despair — he committed his “Great Mistake” and briefly made a profession of faith to pacify his pursuers. At this “bottom of the barrel”, he can’t draw on the journals because “it’s clear, reading them, that the person writing them is in bad mental shape.” Yet he knew at once that it was “the stupidest thing I ever did… My body recognised it before my brain. I came out of that meeting literally feeling like throwing up.”

In retrospect, “‘I see it as a turning-point — not just in this story, but in my life.” After that nadir, he chose to fight, embarking on long, weary years of advocacy. Not until 1995, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, did Rushdie the novelist of crossed borders and blended cultures return. What’s remarkable is that the generous, exuberant post-fatwa novels of mingling and migration read so much as natural extensions of a line that stretches back to Midnight’s Children. “One of the things I’m proud of is that early on, I told myself that’s what I should try to do. There are these ... elephant-traps: I could have been frightened into writing inoffensive little timid books, or distracted into writing embittered, angry books. And both of those are destruction for me.”

Joseph Anton not only reveals political secrets, but personal ones. Its frankness about the strain of marriage on virtual death-row — to Wiggins, then to the editor Elizabeth West, and in the aftermath to actress-presenter Padma Lakshmi — will have jaws dropping. Apart from Wiggins, the ex-wives read and, after amendments, consented to these passages. Currently, he plots a return to fiction, and “can’t think of anything nicer than spending a couple of years quietly in a room trying to make up a story.”

—The Independent