If you are Indian but not a supporter of the present Government, on social media your loyalty to your country will be tested on the following touchstones :
Have you said anything against the CBI’s palpably malicious agenda against Teesta Setalvad or even hinted that, even if the CBI’s allegations are taken on their face value, she is entitled to anticipatory bail ?
Do you think that the decision to hang Yakub Memon deserves one last re-look ?
Have you criticised the manner in which female Muslim and Christian PMT aspirants were told to take off their hijabs and scarfs if they wished to take the test and / or the intemperate language in which the Supreme Court refused to interfere in the matter?
[In the light of a concerted campaign against Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand and their organizations Citizens for Justice and Peace and Sabrang Trust, launched by the Gujarat government and parroted by the media at large, we are reproducing a note prepared by Teesta and Javed, along with the details regarding their statement on finances (which were prepared over four months ago in February 2015 and which are also submitted before the Supreme Court). There seems a veritable media trial on with the versions of CJP and Sabrang Trust virtually blacked out, except for a few honourable exceptions. ]
A NOTE ON CITIZENS FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE; SABRANG TRUST
Concerning the allegations of embezzlement of funds by Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand by the Gujarat police, presented below are some facts:
CITIZENS FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE:
Primary Activity: Legal Aid to victims of mass crimes (communalism, terrorism)
Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) was formed in April 2002 by 11 prominent, law-abiding Mumbaikars, each one of whom had been individually and collectively engaged in building peace and seeking justice in the aftermath of the 1992-93 communal violence in Mumbai. Noted playwright, late Vijay Tendulkar was the founding President of CJP and remained at that post till his sad demise in May 2008.
Bearing in mind that the victims of the 1984 communal carnages in Delhi and in Mumbai in 1992-93 had been denied justice, the founding members of CJP resolved to focus their efforts in legal intervention in the courts to ensure Rule of Law and impartial policing.
The very first activity of CJP was to set-up a Citizens Tribunal headed by the late Justice VR Krishna Iyer, former justice of the Supreme Court of India. Other members of the Tribunal included former judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice P. B. Sawant and former judge of the Bombay High Court, Justice Hosbet Suresh.
We reproduce below the full statement (partially reported in the newspapers) from Teesta Setalvad on the CBI search at her office premises regarding the continuous misreporting that was going on during the search:
As I write this, the search is still not concluded. It is shocking that while over a dozen members of the CBI are still in our premises conducting the search, Delhi spokesperson is misleading the public and our vast supporters by a series of misinformations and official tweets.
In our view, and we repeat no laws have been broken by us. This is a continuation of the persecution and witchhunt first launched by the Gujarat police in 2014 then under the dispensation that rules Delhi. The CBI has taken the same documents that we had voluntarily on inspection given the MHA (FCRA dept). Over 25,000 pages of documentary evidence has been given to the Gujarat Police. When they could not succeed with the bizarre and desperate attempts to gain custody (February 2015), it was the Gujarat Government Home Department that wrote to the MHA and the current round of the persecutions began.
Its is shameful political vendetta. The Zakia Jafri case begins its final hearings on July 27 2015. The Naroda Patiya appeals (Kodnani and Bajrangi) are being heard in the Gujarat High Court tomorrow. This is nothing but a bid to subvert the cause of public justice and ensure that no justice happens in these cases. Continue reading CBI Mis-reporting on Search: Teesta Setalvad→
[A story appeared on 11 July 2015 in some newspapers about the Indian Medial Association demanding deletions from a class VII NCERT textbook. An immediate response appeared in Kafila to some of the issues raised by IMA.
This post, whose authors Sarojini and Deepa were centrally involved in the writing of the textbook in question, here put certain things in perspective. They present this as an initial clarificatory response to the news report. ]
We are writing regarding an article “Docs oppose ‘negative’ portrayal by NCERT” that appeared in the front page of The Hindu on 11 JUly 2015, Delhi edition by Bindu Shajan Perappadan. The article refers to the chapter “Role of the Government in Health” in the NCERT’s social science textbook on Social and Political Life-II for Class VII students. The article reports that the IMA has written to President Pranab Mukherjee, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Ministries of Health and Education, pointing to the “objectionable description” of private healthcare services. The IMA has also demanded “immediate remedial action” stating in their letter that the “matter should be taken seriously and the NCERT should be directed to delete or re-write this chapter”.
In 2007, several NCERT text books were developed, including the textbook in question Social and Political Life-II for Class VII, through a consultative and contributory process in which many of us were involved. The process led by NCERT was a progressive attempt at reviewing and developing content on a range of subject areas and issues in the country, in order to generate knowledge that is as contemporary and comprehensive as possible, and encourages critical and analytical thinking on the part of students. While the issues were complex, authors / contributors as a group attempted to develop chapters that would reflect an understanding that is rooted in social, economic and political realities, while making them interesting and comprehensible for class VII students. The chapters foreground existing inequalities and discuss the issues around availability and accessibility of health care – including some key characteristics of the private and public health sector. Continue reading IMA, NCERT and Existing Inequalities – Issues Around Availability and Accessibility of Health Care: Sarojini N. B. and Deepa V.→
The past few months have been exceptional, in one respect at least, for the Indian press: a serious structural problem has actually been given the attention it deserves. The Economic Times continues to play a prominent part in discussing air pollution in Delhi – there is no other city in the world where it is so bad. Nor is this all: including Delhi, India now boasts thirteen out of twenty cities with the worst air. More recently, the uproar over supposedly high levels of lead in a brand of junk food led to a (very) few articles on groundwater contamination: after all, the reason why lead and other poisons get into food is because they are present in the soil in which crops grow. Another piece, in the Guardian this time, speculated that the recent Sahelian heat wave in the Deccan might be a symptom of climate change (an “extreme” climate event of the kind likely to become all too common).[1]
These stories are only a tiny fraction of those that could be reported, for we are already in the throes of an unprecedented environmental crisis. Large swathes of our agricultural soils are contaminated or saline. Pesticide residues and heavy metals form part of our food. The air of our major cities is unfit to breathe. Freshwater availability is declining; most rivers, especially in the south, do not flow at all, or only seasonally, since their runoff is impounded in dams and used for irrigation (with very high rates of seepage and evaporation loss). Groundwater tables are falling as a consequence of over extraction and the disappearance of vegetative cover enabling percolation. The pattern of weather is being reset with gaps and lags – the available evidence indicates that the onset of the monsoon is changing and precipitation becoming more uneven. Our offshore seas are denuded of marine life thanks to trawler fishing at ever greater distances. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking with obvious long-term consequences for the hydrology of river systems dependent upon snow-melt. Sudden, destructive floods, exacerbated by embankments and dams, the building over of river valleys and floodplains, have become a regular occurrence. Continue reading Who cares about the environment? Some notes on the ecological crisis in India: Shashank Kela→
Manali Shah (name changed on request), a 33-year-old software engineer working in the private sector, lost her savings of eight years in a day when her father, 65, underwent a liver transplant in a private hospital. “Not only did my savings go, I also had to borrow money from the family to foot the bill. The procedure and hospitalisation cost almost Rs 30 lakh, and we have to continue spending Rs 10,000 each month for medicines, follow-up consultations and diagnostics,” she says
Each round of chemotherapy and radiation costs her almost Rs 1 lakh, but she didn’t consider AIIMS because the radiotherapy machine there is booked for the next seven months. [The cost of one round of chemotherapy in AIIMS was just Rs 750/- at that time, hence the overbooking]. From a report in Hindustan Times, 20 October 2013
Doctor, heal thyself, was my initial reaction when I read the front page report in The Hindu that ‘Docs’ were opposing ‘negative’ portrayal by NCERT. The objection raised by them is that the class VII textbook, Social and Political Life II, contained “objectionable description ” of the medical profession. Or so you believe till you realize, by the time you are into the third paragraph of the report, that the issue is not at all about the negative portrayal of the medical profession as such but of its elite practitioners who are making a killing in elite private medical institutions and hospitals at the expense of the ordinary people.
So it is not doctors in general – those who work in trying conditions in government hospitals – who are raising the objection but the Indian Medical Association that professes to be “the only representative, national voluntary organisation of Doctors of Modern Scientific System of Medicine, which looks after the interest of doctors as well as the well being of the community at large”. The IMA says the news report, has written to the President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi “demanding immediate remedial action”. Continue reading IMA’s Promotion of Healthcare Privatization Through Insidious Attack on NCERT Textbook→
In the past decade, the efforts of women in communities of Muslims to claim leadership roles within their communities of worship have animated heated debates around the role and place that Islam ascribes to women. Questions of whether women are allowed to call congregants to prayer (adhaan), deliver sermons (khutba), lead prayers, and participate in mixed-gender prayer with women and men standing side-by-side are religiously permissible acts have been thrown up into the air, gaining support from some Muslims, and intense resistance from others. Within the United States, these contemporary debates can be traced back to a mixed-gender Friday prayer service led by Dr. Amina Wadud at Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in 2005.[1] Numerous women-led prayer sessions have since taken place in cities across the United States, and in various global locations such as Toronto and Barcelona.[2]Widespread condemnation, heresy charges, and death threats swiftly followed some of these acts of defiance by Muslim women who are tired of being excluded from and/or given marginal spaces/roles within mosques for prayer, i.e. usually behind men or in less than ideal spaces where it is difficult to see/hear the sermon (khutba). Nonetheless, voices of support and acceptance are also prevalent—not that the women trailblazing this mode of leadership in ritual practices need anyone’s approval. It is into one such space—a newly created women-only Friday prayer organized by the Women’s Mosque of America—that we made our way on May 22, 2015 in Los Angeles. Continue reading Women’s Mosque of America – Women Carving Out Spaces of Prayer: Azza Basarudin and Khanum Shaikh→
जो लोग कभी नहीं करते और फ़ोटो खिंचवाने के लिए नाटक करते हैं, वे सबसे आसान आसन- पद्मासन भी गलत करते हैं।
मोदी जी के पैरों की मुद्रा देखिए। सही पद्मासन में पीछे वाली लड़की बैठी है। देखिए, दोनों पैर ऊपर हैं। जो कभी नहीं करते हैं, वे नाटक के लिए भी नहीं कर सकते।
जब पद्मासन में बैठने को कहा गया है और सभी लोग वही कर रहे हैं, तो रेगुलर योग करने का दावा करने वाले को पद्मासन ही करना चाहिए। अर्ध नहीं पूर्ण।
56 इंच का सीना नहीं, 56 इंच का पेट है। रामसनेही को अब पूरा यकीन है कि सुनने में धोखा हुआ था।
We write as concerned scholars, many of whom have long been indebted to yoga and pranayama for their therapeutic effects, about the many plans that are being made to declare June 21 as a successful start of International Yoga Day. While mindful of yoga as a most desirable option for health care, we are concerned by the central compulsion driving the directives issued by the present Government, namely about entering the Guinness Book of Records through a show of numerical strength. We are even more alarmed about the government order addressed to university teachers and staff and school students to perform yoga on 21st June in public, and construe this as a compulsion that amounts to misuse of state authority.
The incumbent government has reportedly resolved to build a hundred smart cities in near future. And the concept seems to have taken our world by storm offering little space, if any, for a dissenting voice. Of course, a few tremors of resistance have emerged from areas where the lands are being acquired or have been marked for acquisition. For, resistance is something that is perennial: it never fails to strike back when the forces of eviction and deprivation come together to uproot people from their habitats. Human history stands witness to the fact that it is the mass protest and organized resistance that have compelled the development machinery to re-evaluate its orientation. Arguably, the tendency has actually reinforced and deepened the institution of democracy.
However, let us not overlook the fact that every community or a social group on this globe has taken the course of migration in its quest for development either as a conscious decision or compulsion. As a consequence, the phenomenon has substantially influenced the nature and configuration of habitats, leading the small hamlets to become large villages and bigger villages morphing into towns. Eventually, these very towns end up being cities. This has been quite a predictable trajectory of human development. Historically speaking, the process has involved efforts both at the level of government and the society at large. But, at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that the government has a far more crucial role to play in it – a role, which is always informed by the ideological outlook of various political parties and governments. This role is also conditioned by the fact whether or not the parties and governments in question seek to build an egalitarian and democratic society. Continue reading Cities, Smart or Self Reliant? Rajendra Ravi→
In February this year, Iceland jailed four of its rogue bankers for market manipulation and for defrauding ordinary people. No, the heavens did not fall. Thunder and lightning did not strike. The wrath of God did not descend upon the people of Iceland. On 13 February 2015, Reuters had reported:
Iceland’s Supreme Court has upheld convictions of market manipulation for four former executives of the failed Kaupthing bank in a landmark case that the country’s special prosecutor said showed it was possible to crack down on fraudulent bankers. Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, Kaupthing’s former chief executive, former chairman Sigurdur Einarsson, former CEO of Kaupthing Luxembourg Magnus Gudmundsson, and Olafur Olafsson, the bank’s second largest shareholder at the time, were all sentenced on Thursday to between four and five and a half years. –
Yesterday, Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, announced a plan that will essentially close the books on his country’s approach to handling the financial crisis — an approach that deviated greatly from the preferences of global financial elites and succeeded quite well. Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation, Iceland did just the opposite. And even though its economy was hammered by the banking crisis perhaps harder than any other in the world, its labor didn’t deteriorate all that much, and it had a great recovery.
For those who have seen the brilliant documentary film Inside Job, which exposed the unscrupulous game played by the bankers and the financial oligarchy in defrauding millions of ordinary people and eventually triggering of the financial crisis in the US and the world at large, the story of Iceland’s descent into the dystopic neoliberal world must still be fresh in their minds. Continue reading Iceland Jailed Bad Bankers While Modi Govt Bails Out Defaulting Sugar Mills→
When June 1984 comes up in conversation, the same talking points invariably arise – “it was the state’s burden to attack; they had no choice”, “Bhindranwale had to be taken down”, or “Punjab was already bleeding”.
What these oft-repeated phrases – a product of the tight PR messaging campaign on the part of the government – glide over is the scope of human suffering that occurred in June 1984 – and most glaringly, suffering that was perpetrated by those in power, by those who had been elected in a democracy to uphold the rights and dignity of the people who they killed in 1984.
Anthropologist Talal Asad has noted the “notorious tactic of political power to deny a distinct unity to populations it seeks to govern, to treat them as contingent and indeterminate.”
With the belief that every Sikhs who was alive in 1984 has a story to tell, the 1984 Living History Project is depicting the unity in trauma of a people, who, in 1984, felt attacked as a people. The 1984 Living History Project is working to give a platform to ordinary people who lived through the massacres of both June and November. The project was initiated in 2012 by Sikh millennials. Realizing that the generation who experienced 1984 firsthand was getting older and that time was running out to capture their stories, they began a grassroots effort to capture as many stories and testimonies from Sikhs worldwide, one video narrative at a time. The first videos were their own parents and grandparents, recorded on smart phones and edited and shared rather seamlessly. The Project’s web platform allows easy Steps to make and share videos; something other Sikhs around the world have been doing through the 30th and 31st anniversary years of 1984. Continue reading June 1984 – 31 Years Later, Sikhs Are Mapping Their Stories: Ravleen Kaur→
Guest post by SHALINI GROVER, ELLINA SAMANTROYandNUPUR DHINGRA PAIVA
A recent BBC article, ‘Why Motherhood Makes Indian Women Quit Their Jobs’ (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32377275), examines the factors that prompt large numbers of women to drop out of India’s workforce. Despite the country’s growing international reputation as the “new India,” with its allure of economic prosperity, globalized cities, and modern lifestyles, it is not clear how much of the female labour force is contributing to paid employment. Liberalization has indeed opened up opportunities for an entire cohort of young urban women who work in IT, outsourcing, hospitality, media, beauty parlours, cafes, and malls. Ironically, in a period of high growth and open markets, labour surveys such as those conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) reveal an overall declining rate of female labour force participation, an issue that has become a serious concern for policy makers. A World Bank study (2013) found that only 27 per cent of Indian women over the age of 15 work outside the home. While such surveys have their limitations in that they often do not take into account informal employment, the World Bank study is significant because it indicates that India has the lowest rate of female participation in the workforce among the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries.
What makes the labour force in India so male dominated? And what makes the workplace so hostile to working mothers?
The labelling of the Seshachalam incident as a ‘law and order’ problem by State actors obfuscates the larger underlying problem deriving from lopsided notions of the human-environment relationship, and flies in the face of ecological concerns and social justice
The massacre of twenty people in the Seshachalam forests in a joint operation by the Red-Sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force (RSASTF) of the Andhra Pradesh Police and the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department is reflective of the hegemonic control of natural resources by an increasingly militarised state. It is particularly shocking that such a massacre occurred just as calls are being made nationally for a democratic forest management approach that gives local people more rights and powers to manage forests.
Encounter killings in Seshachalam forests, courtesy Hindustan Times
While the state has chosen to depict the killing of 20 people in the Seshachalam forests as a response to a law and order issue, such a draconian response to the cutting of trees by peasants is indicative of a much deeper malaise in the governance of natural resources in India. On the evening or night of 6th of April, 2015, twenty people, purportedly smugglers of red sanders, were shot to death by ten officials of the RSASTF and one official from the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department. The shooting and killing (using automatic weapons) was supposedly an act of ‘self-defence’ precipitated by an attack on the officials by more than 100 people who ‘rained stones and hurled sickles’ during the raid. Three days after the incident, ‘country weapons’ and ‘firearms’ were added to the list of weapons used by the smugglers. That would work in their favor, because who better than the smugglers to know where to buy AK 47 Rifles and assault weapons.
Observer accounts mention that several of those killed were shot in the face, chest, or back. Nobody was apprehended in an injured state. Official post-mortem reports of those killed remain unavailable. No government officials were reported injured immediately after the operation, although mysteriously, all eleven officials involved were placed in isolation in the A-Class ward of a government hospital four days after the incident occurred. Human rights activists, led by the Coordination of Democratic Rights Organization have labelled the incident as a staged encounter, questioned the use of brute force, and have pointed out several inconsistencies in the official version of events. Continue reading An Encounter in the Forest: Bharath Sundaram and Nitin Rai→
Reports have it that Delhi Police has blamed the AAP for the death of Gajendra Singh at its rally recently – not surprisingly, as we had noted in our previous post on the suicide. We had suggested in that post there seemed to have been prior instructions to the Police from the Central government, under which it functions, not to act. And the reports today about Delhi Police reporting to their higher ups only confirm our suspicions.
Here is what one of the reports has to say:
In a letter to the Home Ministry, the Delhi Police has claimed that the mob including Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers incited Gajendra Singh to commit suicide at a party rally in Delhi. The letter also claims that untrained volunteers climbed the tree which led to Gajendra falling off.
The report states that AAP volunteers and leaders were clapping and raising slogans which incited him to engage in more dangerous acts. It also adds on to say that though police requested AAP volunteers to stop provoking him through clapping and solganeering, neither the volunteers nor the leaders present on the state acceded to the request info.
Another report in a channel known for its BJP connections, says:
As per the Delhi Police report, AAP leaders were making provocative speeches, and the crowd present at the rally venue instigated and provoked Gajendra to commit suicide. The report also alleged that AAP did not heed to the police’s request to change the rally’s venue to Ram Lila Maidan.
Lost on the high seas? Image courtesy CPI(M) 21st Congress site
Far from transparently and decisively resolving the issues which plague the Party and the Left movement in India, the twenty first Congress of the CPI(M) has yielded a schizophrenic outcome. The purported ‘political line’ adopted by the Party Congress and the ‘unanimous’ choice of the new general secretary are quite contradictory, which will only perpetuate the ideological-political incoherence that has gripped the CPI(M) and may further contribute to its organizational disarray.
When the central committee of the CPI(M) met in October 2014 to discuss a medium term ‘review of the political tactical line’ (PTL) in the light of the electoral reverses suffered by the Party, a politbureau (PB) member had moved a dissent note on the document presented by the PB. That note had argued against the very need to review the PTL and had instead held faulty implementation of the political line driven by ‘subjectivism’ of the leadership mainly responsible for the setbacks suffered by the CPI(M), alongside persistent organizational deficiencies. The elevation of the dissident voice within the outgoing politbureau as the new general secretary of the party raises the question whether the ‘review of the political tactical line’ and ‘political resolution’ adopted in the Congress have the support of the majority within the party? Or will the ‘political line’ adopted in the Party Congress give way over time to political opportunism in the name of ‘flexible tactics’, with the CPI(M) joining hands with the discredited, anti-people Congress in the name of fighting the communal, big corporate-backed, reactionary Modi regime? Continue reading CPI(M)’s 21st Congress – A Schizophrenic Outcome: Prasenjit Bose→
[Against the background of Spain’s recent criminalizing of public protests and the first ever hologram demonstration (see Kafila post by Geeta Seshu) against it, this article revisits the major eruption in 2011, that eventually laid the ground for the emergence of a new political force in Spanish politics]
15M, image courtesy El Tecolote
Spain, seems to be a country that is still shaping itself. Somewhat like a nation that wants to come to terms with its past, unlike many other countries that have gone through a traumatic history and have finally emerged through the political passions – admittedly misdirected – of their distant past. Spain seems like it is yet to come to terms with a civil war that forged its legacy in millions of Spanish minds and the future generations of the country. The fascist forces that staged a coup, and consequently, went on to purge about 150,000 of its citizens in summary executions, far surpassed some of the worst dictatorships that the world has witnessed, including that of Pinochet’s in Chile and of Videla’s in Argentina.
The tragic death of a farmer from Rajasthan occurs at a rally organized by the Aam Aadmi Party on 22 April 2015. The farmer, Gajendra Singh, hangs himself from a tree in full public view of the demonstrators, the media, the police. The electronic media had till then been barely covering the event, generally holding forth instead, in studio ‘debates’ among the opponents of AAP. Once this happened, the media spin doctors swung into action, and as Rajdeep Sardesai tweeted later, they seemed to work on an already decided script. Sardesai’s tweet said that there were clear instructions from the BJP to the media to focus only on the hung/ dying (or dead) man, and forget the rally. It seems, on a closer look, that the the second part of the instructions had perhaps already been given in advance – not to cover the rally and if at all, to attack it in sponsored studio debates. And of course, the BJP, which is the architect of the new Land Acquisition Ordinance, is an interested party in this game.
It is not entirely irrelevant to the overall politics of the media-BJP spin doctoring of ‘reports’ that the AAP government in Delhi was perhaps the first in the country to announce what is without doubt the highest compensation to farmers suffering crop losses – Rs 50, 000/- per hectare for all farmers who have suffered damage. Nor is it entirely irrelevant that the Delhi government had lent full support to the anti-land acquisition struggles and Kejriwal had himself joined in the rally held by Anna Hazare and had now taken up the land issue in all seriousness.
Thus it happens that between the BJP and the big media propaganda machine, which has on at least two previous occasions completely blacked out AAP, the stage was set. Also at work in the media-AAP relationship over a longer term now, is the role of Mukesh Ambani’s media empire, given that on a range of issues AAP has directly challenged the latter. As an aside, let me add that a very senior journalist told a friend at the height of the Delhi election campaign, that in CNN-IBN/ IBN7, clear instructions had been issued to the staff not to give more than 20 seconds exposure to Arvind Kejriwal under any circumstances. If AAP swept the Delhi elections despite that, it must say something about the limits of the media game, at least as far as the majority of the population is concerned.
Gajendra Singh being brought down. Image courtesy Oneindia.com
This time round, there was another constituency that was waiting to move into action – the Delhi elite, especially the radical elite whose hatred of Kejriwal is simply visceral, but which had been just about tempered by the presence in his team of People Like Themselves, darlings of the media. The latter had, to use an old Maoist expression, ‘wormed its way into the party’ and was intent on fighting an ‘ethical battle for inner party democracy’ against the ‘fascist Kejriwal’, a battle in which they were fully backed by the Ambani dominated media.
[Frontline carried a historically ill-informed article on Indian calculus which also had mathematical and casteist errors. When the errors were pointed out, the magazine ignored it, contrary to journalistic ethics. Here is Prof Raju’s response to that article.]
Frontline (23 Jan 2015) published an excessively ill-informed article by Biman Nath on “Calculus & India”. The article suppressed the existence of my 500 page tome on Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of Calculus from India to Europe in the 16th c. (Pearson Longman, 2007). This suppression was deliberate, for Nath and Frontline ignored it even after it was pointed out to them. They also refused to correct serious mathematical and casteist errors in the article. That is contrary to journalistic ethics. To understand my response, some background is needed.
According to my above book and various related articles, the calculus developed in India and was transmitted to Europe. The second part of the story is lesser known. As often happens with imported knowledge, calculus was misunderstood in Europe. Later that inferior misunderstanding was given back to India through colonial education, and continues to be taught to this day just by declaring it as “superior”. That claim of superiority was never cross-checked to see if it is any different from the other flimsy claims of superiority earlier made by the West, for centuries, for example the racist claim that white-skinned people are “superior”.Continue reading Frontline’s Calculus of Caste: C. K. Raju→
केन्द्र में भाजपा के नेतृत्व में सरकार बनने के बाद से राष्ट्रीय स्वयं सेवक संघ का राजकीय शिक्षा नीतियों से लेकर शिक्षण संस्थाओं के क्रियाकलापों में बढ़ता हस्तक्षेप किसी से छुपा नहीं है। शिक्षा नीति में बदलाव लाने व इस बाबत मानव संसाधन विकास मंत्रालय को सुझाव व विश लिस्ट सौंपने में संघ ने काफी तत्परता दिखाई है। कई मीडिया रिपोर्टों के अनुसार संघ ने प्रत्यक्ष व अप्रत्यक्ष रूप से उनके लिए काम करने वाले तमाम लोगों की लिस्ट सरकार को भेजकर शैक्षिक व सांस्कृतिक संगठनों में उनकी नियुक्ति की मांग की। आशा के अनुरूप पिछले दस माह के भाजपा सरकार के कार्यकाल में विभिन्न संगठनों मेें कई सरकारी नियुक्तियां की गयी और संघ विचाराकों को अपेक्षा से अधिक सम्मान देकर ताजपोशी की गयी। नागपुर के एक प्रतिष्ठित संस्थान में डायरेक्टर पद पर नियुक्ति पाने के लिए तो एक व्यक्ति ने अपने संघ से जुड़े होने के प्रमाण प्रस्तुत करते हुए संबंधित मंत्री को नियुक्ति हेतु आवेदन किया। आशा के अनुरूप मंत्रालय ने भी उन्हीं की नियुक्ति की।
शैक्षिक व सांस्कृतिक संगठनों में इस प्रकार के हस्तक्षेप के पीछे संघ की बुनियादी रणनीति है। प्रख्यात मानवाधिकार कार्यकर्ता राम पुनियानी के अनुसार संघ पहले से ही प्रगतिशील शैक्षिक व सांस्कृतिक विमर्श को बदलकर अपना राजनैतिक आधार मजबूत करने में विश्वास रखता है। दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय के प्रो0 अपूर्वानन्द के अनुसार संघ की यह रणनीति शिक्षा के अज्ञानीकरण की ओर जाता है। भा.ज.पा. को पूर्ण बहुमत मिलने व संघ के प्रचारक का प्रधानमंत्री बन जाना, उनकी इस रणनीति को आगे बढ़ाने के लिए मुफ़ीद है। विभिन्न शैक्षणिक व सांस्कृतिक संगठनों में पिछले कुछ महीनों से हो रहे इन बदलावों में दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय का उदाहरण काफी अलग है। संघ दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय में शोध, शिक्षण के साथ-साथ छात्रों के मोबिलाईजेशन के जरिये, अपने विवादास्पद एजेंडे को धार देने का प्रयास कर रहा है। संघ की विचारधारा व उनके कार्यक्रम पहले से ही विवादों में रहे हैं। उनके उग्र हिन्दुत्व व अल्पसंख्यकों से वैमनस्य किसी से छुपा नहीं है। ऐसे में दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय में संघ की बढ़ती औपचारिक व अनौपचारिक सक्रियता, विश्वविद्यालय व बौद्विक जगत के लिए चिंता का विषय है। Continue reading हिन्दुत्व की प्रयोगशाला बनता दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय: जीत सिंह सनवाल→
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 