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Doordarshan goes to Nagpur Shortage of blood |
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Hindi push: How fair & far reaching?
Of roses and thorns
Muslim women’s struggle for equality
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Doordarshan goes to Nagpur Not
many will buy the explanation of the Doordarshan Director General that the decision on the live telecast of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's customary address on the foundation day of his organisation was taken on merit. Never before has Doordarshan given such importance to an RSS function as now. How did Doordarshan know that Bhagwat would say something of national importance so as to arrange in advance its live coverage? What was new in the speech except perhaps the call to boycott Chinese goods? Even during the NDA government headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee such patronage was not extended to the RSS or any other sectarian organisation. This may prompt demands from other religious groups for a similar telecast of their functions. A bad news judgement is tolerable. But here is a shoddy attempt at cover-up of a motivated political decision not only by BJP leaders, which is understandable, but also by Doordarshan officials. Doordarshan is not known for objectivity. That limits its growth in the face of competition from private channels. The Congress governments in the past too have misused the public broadcaster, funded by the taxpayer, to promote the ruling party's political agenda. During elections, parts of Modi's interview were edited out. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has revived interest in All India Radio with his first-ever direct public interaction, has endorsed what Bhagwat said through a Tweet. RSS workers had openly worked for the success of the BJP in the last election. The pay-back time, it seems, has arrived. Modi was expected to keep the RSS in check as he did in Gujarat. His silence on the criticism of misuse of the government channel to promote the cause of majoritarianism indicates he supports what Doordarshan has done. There have been attempts - not very successful -- to insulate Prasar Bharti from political meddling. It is in the interest of Prasar Bharti itself to become independent and professional for building and maintaining its own credibiity. The protests the Doordarshan action has provoked are not confined to opposition parties. These should prompt a rethink on its functioning.
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Shortage of blood An
initiative of the Punjab Department of Health and Family Welfare to maintain a database of voluntary blood donors available with all the 85 registered blood banks across the state is welcome. A public directory of voluntary donors available on the web works two ways. It allows those in need of blood to mention their requirements which are then made accessible to a wider audience. A comprehensive database on the web helps individuals locate the nearest blood bank too. Many private blood banks provide such data on their websites. Blood transfusion has saved millions of lives, yet the quantity and quality of blood pool available for transfusion continues to be a major concern across the globe, especially in a developing country like India, where misconceptions about blood donation persist. Every year the country requires about four crore units of blood, but only 40 lakh units are available. This is despite the fact that the percentage of voluntary donors has grown phenomenally over the past few years. Statistics can be staggering; every two seconds someone needs blood and to have an ideal situation the country needs more than 38,000 blood donations every day. Unfortunately, blood donation camps contribute only a small fraction of the requirement; most donations come as a result of replacement received from family members of the receiver
of blood. India also accounts for one of the highest number of road accidents which raises its requirement for blood transfusion. Despite having a fairly good infrastructure, with about 2 433 blood banks, the collection comes to only seven million units of blood annually. What adds to the problem is lack of technology to separate blood components at most blood banks which results in a lot of wastage and a poor ratio of using blood components to whole blood. To save precious lives the government needs to upgrade technology at blood banks and mobilise people for voluntary blood donation through counselling and by utilising large pool of human resource.
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Thought for the Day
A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work. —John Lubbock
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THE Indian papers in Calcutta and Bombay support our suggestion for a full and sifting inquiry into the circumstances of the unfortunate rioting at Budge Budge. One point which is not explicit in the Press communique and which requires education is why and under what circumstances the remaining members of the party suddenly grew violent when there was apparently no great trouble in persuading a batch of sixty men to quietly get off and go by the first special train. We hope the Punjab Government will issue a statement supplying fuller information to the people of this Province who are more interested than others in this most deplorable affair. Almost from the commencement, the Government of India were endeavouring to help the Komagata passengers. It was due wholly to His Excellency's intervention that the idea of the use of force was abandoned by the Canadian Government. It is therefore doubly painful that on their own native soil and in the presence of the special officers deputed by the Punjab Government resort to arms should have been found necessary in any circumstances. Recruiting and training for Indian army
ON this subject of recruitment and training of men for the Indian Army, the "Times of India" recently made a two-fold suggestion. The question being important enough, we desire to point out its special significance to two sections of Indians, viz., Khatris and Brahmans. The Bombay paper, it would be recollected, rightly laid stress on two points. India, it insisted, should be prepared to send a steady stream of picked regiments to the front and that the recruitment and training of reserve battalions should be vigorously pushed on.
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Hindi push: How fair & far reaching? The Central Government's Hindi push seems earnest, though it may not be fruitful. The first one came in June wherein officials were instructed to use Hindi while transacting business, and then the recent UGC circular instructing states to teach Hindi as one of the primary languages in undergraduate courses. Both were opposed by non-Hindi speaking states, and outrightly rejected by the southern ones .The move and the reaction both throw up many questions. If it is mere affectation, then it would imply that the aim is to woo those who made up for most of the lotuses in the bouquet. That would spell disappointment for all those upbeat voters who thought they had brought in a government which believes in “appeasement of none, development for all”. It would puncture the enthusiasm of those who voted for change, as they were tired of not just appeasement politics based on one demographic, but that brand of politics in toto. If the “appeasement of none” policy is applied to one demographic, and leaves out others for political expediency, then this half-baked approach would be as unpalatable, if not more, than the appeasement goodies doled out by the previous regimes. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, it could also be inferred that the intention is to bridge the gap between the urban and rural population. Surely, it may put the urban-rural population of the Hindi belt on an equal footing, but would it be of any help to the rest? It would in most probability have the effect of putting the rural population of the non-Hindi speaking belt at an unfair disadvantage vis-a-vis their counterparts in the Hindi heartland and have little or no intended outcome. The only way it could have the wished for effect is, if Hindi is embraced as the mother tongue by all regions. This is what the other regions fear and desist. The threat English poses is very mild when compared to Hindi. The past few decades bear testimony to that and the proof lies in the disparity in the status and health of the languages of the northern non-Hindi belt states and the southern ones. The vibrant multi-thousand media industry of the South is contrasted by a pale, clutching at the straws media industry of the non-Hindi northern states. The Hindi film industry got deeper pockets at the cost of film industries of regions which were more accommodating, but in spite of that it has not been able to transcend global barriers. The “one big market” may have given it the marketing muscle to elbow out smaller regional players, but the stark fact is that success on the world stage still remains elusive. What may be touted as global audience is just the Indian diaspora which even the southern industry has been able to tap. Maybe the one big market mantra which has cost many regional aspirations is not as potent as it is made out to be. On the flip side though, it has led to regional disparities in industry-related infrastructure growth and job creation. If it is an attempt at homogenisation, then it would be another cause of worry. Also, is the purpose promotion of unity or is it just a manifestation of majority hegemony? Just because ten of the 29 states (45 % of the population) speak, read and write a certain language, the rest of the nation should follow suit. If they do not, they are not patriotic enough. All the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into protecting and building the nation lose out to majoritarianism. The contribution, the sacrifices made, the hefty prices paid are of no consequence, only the numbers count. On the other side, the reactions to the Hindi push pose other questions. Why is a foreign language more tolerable to the non-Hindi speaking states? Why plans to make Hindi the sole official language of the Republic have met with resistance time and again? Why is English more acceptable as the lingua franca? The reasons may be more than one. First, it is the only language in the Eighth Schedule which would not put any state/states at an unfair advantage/disadvantage. Secondly, English being the language of business, technology and science in major parts of the world gives English speakers a competitive edge. Even an ultra-nationalistic country like China tweaked its education policies to make English a compulsory subject in primary schools because the fiercely competitive China did not want to lag behind in any respect. Thirdly, the ease with which it can be used on different media makes it a very convenient language. Fourthly, the whole of the Indian civil and criminal law, defence ranks and etiquette, bureaucratic protocols are more or less in continuation with those in the British times. Unless they are thrown out lock, stock and barrel and replaced with something absolutely new, English would continue to be a better choice as the official language for centre-state communication, judicial proceedings etc. Lastly and most importantly, it does not have the potential to replace the respective mother tongues. The 20 regional languages continue to be used for intra-state business and English for inter-state and Centre-state communications. Why not just let it be? Why unnecessarily invite sourness for such a sweet language, by breathing it down the necks of other regions? Let Hindi and its siblings co-exist peacefully. Even if the beauty of cultural and linguistic diversity does not appeal to the policymakers, the unfairness of imposition does not prick them; the economics of diversity should prompt them to rethink.
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Of roses and thorns Aam
lo’, ‘Kela lo’. The shrill teenaged vendors' voices haunt me daily, piercing through my ears, melting my heart and stirring my soul. They have come a thousand miles away from their homes, kith and kin, to hawk a loaf of bread. When in school, our English teacher had an obsession to make us learn by rote more than a hundred English opposites. As I grew older, I realised their practical application in daily life. I wish to quote only three of these English opposites witnessed by me in the case of teenaged vendors: Cruel/ kind, warm/cold, rose/thorn. An innocent unprofessional teenaged vendor shouted ‘Aam lo’ in our street. My kind neighbour came out, purchased the entire lot of mangoes, paid the boy more than he asked for, and told him to go home, buy a bottle of lassi and not to roam about in the heat. ‘What will you do with these mangoes?’ I asked him. ‘You will distribute these to your patients at your slum health centre and gurdwara’, he said. A few days later the boy again came back with mangoes. A tall and hefty man came, bought some mangoes, and paid him two rupees less than the boy had asked for. When the boy insisted, the cruel burly man gave him two slaps instead and shouted, ‘Ab chalte bano’. Many vendors sleep at night in the verandah of showrooms. During severe winter nights, a Gurkha chowkidar, brandishing a lathi, more coldly than the cold night, chased them away. A little later a warm-hearted VVIP would spread a blanket or two on every crouched -up homeless person. On Madhya Marg a rashly driven speeding vehicle knocked down a rickshaw-puller and fled. Coming behind in an ambulance we halted and gave him first aid. The rickshaw was crushed beyond repairs. He was quite dazed and disoriented. In the meanwhile a stately limousine stopped. A respectable person came out, took the victim to the Industrial Area and bought him a new rickshaw. While the thorn injures, the rose emits its soothing fragrance. The other day in agony I heard the voice of an eight-year-old boy selling mangoes, while his father silently pushed the cart. I tried to persuade the man about the boy's free schooling under the RTE Act in any government school. He said in his dialect, ‘Saabji, when your child is five years old, you put him on a computer and he grows up to be an officer. My son has to grow up as a vendor only. So instead of schooling, I teach him hawking’. He pushed forward his cart and the boy shouted ‘Aam lo’. They went out of my sight but not out of my mind, which had a jolt and a conflict, resolved by Guru Nanak's dictum, ‘Ikna hukmi baksees, ik hukmi sadaa bhawayen’ (some are blessed with His bounties, though not others).
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Muslim women’s struggle for equality Winds of change somehow fail to touch the lives of Muslim women, a minority within a minority in India. At the receiving end of all kinds of injustices inflicted by the family and community, they do not know which door to knock to get justice. Not covered under the SC /ST Act, they fail to receive any help from the Minority Commission because largely their issues relate to domestic violence, divorce, alimony, maintenance of children, inheritance etc, which fall under the shariya, the legal framework within which the public and private aspects of life are regulated for followers of Islam in India.
Governed by the Muslim Personal Law (shariya) Application Act 1937, which has no specific provisions to be followed, it leaves every qazi (cleric) free to interpret law as per his understanding of the shariya. The Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act 1939 lays down grounds on which a woman can approach the court, but few can afford to do so. And the memory of Shah Bano case is a real dampener. Interpretation of the shariya, at times, borders on the bizarre. The absurdity of two such major incidents in the past was highlighted when women became victims of the very laws that were meant to safeguard their position in society. In 2005, Imrana, 28, of Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, was allegedly raped by her 70-year-old father-in-law, Mohammed. She was directed to leave her husband by a fatwa (edict) issued by the panchayat of the village, which said she had become the mother of her husband because she had slept with her husband’s father. The issue was treated as adultery and not rape by the clerics. Later, Darul Uloom Deoband, India’s largest Islamic seminary, gave a fatwa similar to the panchayat’s order, though after the issue became a national debate, they denied it. The second case involved Gudiya, a 26-year-old Muslim woman whose life was tragically affected by the Kargil War. Her husband of barely ten days, Arif, did not return from war. Thinking him to be dead, the family remarried Gudiya. Initially Arif was declared to be an Army deserter, until the Army realised he was taken a prisoner of war. When Arif returned, he found his wife married to Taufiq. The Muslim clergy declared Gudiya’s second marriage illegal and she was pressured to return to her first husband. Gudiya’s will remained inconsequential in the drama that led to her untimely death. Stirrings of aspiration
Why no one can touch it These cases were not aberrations, a majority of women suffer in silence because they do not have the means to take on the clergy, whose edicts are biased against woman. Nor do they get legal help. The wall of religious sanction is too strong and sacrosanct to be challenged by even the existing legal framework. Muslim women thus decided to help themselves and Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), an initiative of the Muslim women came into being in January 2007 as a mass organisation of women from across the country to stress upon an alternative progressive voice of the community. This feminine voice with a difference raised the socio-political and economic concerns of Muslim women who find themselves defenceless in the present system. Though initiated by the urban, educated women, who, despite the advantage of education felt equally helpless before the law delivered by semi-literate qazis, the BMMA grew into a movement with the support of women — mostly rural and illiterate. Challenges of modernity The issue largely deals with the aspirations and challenges of becoming a citizen of a modern society as against managing the complexities of a traditional society’s taboos, which are more pronounced for Muslim women. The concept of modern citizenry is participatory by nature which is fundamentally opposed to the traditional belief of man being the master and woman being subservient to him. Both strands of the social fabric being strong tend to pull at each other and women fail to find points of negotiation in this scenario. The upbeat, aspirational sentiment of Indian women in general also leaves its mark on the lives of Muslim women. Beyond the faulty interpretations of shariya that provide a powerful tool to Muslim society to control the domestic lives of their women, BMMA and other Muslim women’s organisation are fighting for the citizenship rights of the women within the framework of shariya, by engaging experts on theology to interpret shariya, in its right spirit, as it was meant to be when the laws were framed to guarantee rights of equality to women. After cadre building they also plan to conduct a national study on dreams and aspirations of young Muslim girls and stress for implementation of the Sachar Committee recommendations In June this year, BMMA came up with a draft law called the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, after seven years of extensive work of gathering information and opinion from mostly poor, uneducated Muslim women, who live in ghettos. They came to realise that it was these women who were desperate for a change, urging them to speed up the process, unlike the middle class women, who were expected to be the pioneer for reform.
The Shah Bano case Daring authority For the first time the draft law has codified Islamic laws pertaining to marriage, divorce, maintenance and inheritance, hoping the government will use this draft law to improve the condition of Muslim women. The draft stipulates the age of the bride to be 18 and of the bridegroom not less than 21, and neither of the two should have a living spouse, thus ensuring that polygamy is stopped. It virtually abolishes oral divorce and triple talaq and states the minimum amount of mehr should not be less than one years’ income of the groom. For non-compliance, the draft law also stipulates punishment; if the stipulated mehr is not paid within six months of marriage, the groom should pay double the amount. The draft also proposes heavy penalty on offenders, including cancellation of a qazi’s licence for repeat offences in failing to ensure fulfilment of all the stipulated conditions for marriage. It calls for action under the Criminal Procedure Code for all those who fail to pay maintenance. In July this year, the Supreme Court said shariya courts have no legal authority and their decisions are not legally binding, and fatwas must not violate rights of individuals guaranteed by law, at the same time the court also refused to declare Dar-ul-Qazas (Islamic courts) or practice of issuing fatwas as illegal, saying it was for the persons concerned to accept, ignore or reject it. Women, dependent on the closely-knit community for survival, often have no choice but to respect the fatwa, as was shown in Gudiya’s case. These little mutinies of women face stiff opposition from the unified force of the clergy. Imam Umer Ahmed Ilyasi, Chief Imam, All India Imam organisation, a representative body of half a million imams of India says, “All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) has representatives of all the four schools of thoughts, and all the laws that govern Muslims in India are given clarity by them, so, where is the scope or confusion about sharia codification or a new interpretation?” As such, AIMPLB has called the demand for a common code “tantamount to tampering with the shariya.” Keeping a brave front Challenging the authority of AIMPLB, which is still considered an apex decision-making body of the community and continues to ignore and isolate problems of the Muslim women, in 2005 All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB) began working extensively with women of the community in states across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Jharkhand, with the help of lawyers, religious clergies and experts to help women get justice. They came up with a Shariya Nikahnama in 2008, that offers equal rights to women, if they choose to demand a divorce on the grounds of husband’s adultery etc. "We framed the new nikahnama strictly in accordance with the tenets of Islam, which clearly prohibit any kind of harassment or oppression of a married woman by her husband," says Shaista Amber, AIMWPLB president, who has the unique distinction of building and maintaining a mosque in Lucknow, a first by an Indian woman. Through their rigorous field work they found that when it comes to legal concerns of Muslim women, all discussions are shunned by the clergy. That forces the Muslim women to initiate and sustain the process of change. AIMWPLB is flooded with many unresolved cases, caught in the web of theological interpretations and the basic need for human dignity, which, they say, does not entail demands of modernity. They have also opposed misuse of Islam for marriage as in the case of 'Chand and Fiza'. When a Madarsa board issued a directive that co-education would not be permitted from classes I to VIII, the AIMWPLB opposed it, stating it is the responsibility of the parents and not the clergy to see that their children behave properly. “We are against all Talibani farmans” adds Shaista. Some of the cases are so critical of the existing law that the women contesting them say, “We know, we are playing with fire.” It is easy to be disgruntled when one is denied rights one feels entitled to, demands of a modern society also entail responsibilities and adopting new practices which may not find religious sanction. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian Muslim who took political asylum in Holland, confesses about the complexities of adjusting in a society where managing money is a crucial part of survival in her book Nomad. For a woman raised in traditional Muslim society, coping with loans, credit cards and banking required re-negotiation with her old beliefs. In her quest for liberation and equality she annoyed many.
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The first is: Does the BJP really believe Hindi to be a spring of nationalist fervour? If the belief holds water, then one should be able to gather, while jogging one's memory, flipping through the pages of history and medal charts nimbler streaks of nationalism in the non-Hindi belt. The information retrieved would reveal quite a few freedom fighters who laid down their lives, spent their best years in tiny, dingy cells in Andaman Nicobar islands, soldiers who fought to the finish in the subsequent wars to uphold that freedom, and sportspersons who brought laurels from regions other than the populous Hindi heartland. 
There are thousands of them in the City Beautiful, slogging in various chores to make us comfortable. They are a disorganised segment of our society. We know little of rigours of their life. I have been closely associated with them for more than two decades. We established a health centre, exclusively for them, in collaboration with the Freemasons of India.