So – here we are folks, in a historic judgement this morning, Delhi High Court has read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to exclude consensual sex among adults. Congratulations to the group of tireless activists who have helped to bring this about, and congratulations to all of us who count ourselves as part of the queer community. Continue reading “The Magic of the Human Spirit and of a Nation’s Passion”: Three Queers for the Delhi High Court!
Anand Teltumbde is a noted Bombay-based Dalit intellectual who also wears the hat of a business executive. He has written this book about the lynching of a Dalit family in a Maharashtra village in 2006 to ensure that the incident is not easily erased from memory. He quotes Milan Kundera: “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” In other words, he sees this book as being a seminal work on the Khairlanji atrocity.
The book begins with Abel Meeropol’s song Strange Fruit, written in 1936 (and not 1939, as the book incorrectly states) about the lynching of two black youth. It is from this song that the book derives its sub-title, “A Strange and Bitter Crop,” which once again reinforces the book’s ambition. Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit (in 1939) soon became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement in the US, but does Teltumbde’s book achieve its ambitious goal?
The book’s first chapter is a narration of the events of 29 September 2006, when Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange’s family was lynched to death. The atrocity is reduced in this narrative to a dry report, as if it were from the file of a district magistrate. Sample this: Continue reading A review of Anand Teltumbde’s “Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop”
Once upon a time, only a hundred or so years ago, and earlier, Iranians were our neighbours. Many were friends, relatives – uncles, grandparents, ancestors, some were husbands, wives and lovers. And cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Murshidabad and Hyderabad spoke Persian better than they spoke English, or even Hindi. The distance from Tehran and Isfahan to Delhi, Lucknow and Lahore, or across the water from Bandar Abbas to Bombay or Karachi, in miles and in the imagination, seemed less than what we can even begin to understand today.
The Bengal renaissance had one of its points of origin in a Persian broadsheet called Mirat ul Akhbar published by Ram Mohan Roy in Calcutta. The first Iranian talking film and the last ‘Irani’ restaurant both have their origins in Bombay. The Sabk-e-Hindi, or the ‘Indian Style’ continued to adorn the more ornate fringes of Persian poetry in Iran. The miniatures painted in the ateliers of Delhi and Agra owed a great deal to the paints, brushes, colours and visions of visiting masters from Tabriz. The sitar and the sarod came from Iran, and stayed on. We shared jokes and stories, poets, prophets and pranksters, wine and spices, surnames (Kirmani, Rizvi, Mashadi, Yazdi) and clan histories, heresies and wisdom and a thousand other things that neighbours, friends, cousins and lovers share.
A few weeks before the national elections, www.SmartVote.in organized an open house where people could meet candidates contesting from various parliament assemblies in Bangalore and ask questions to them. Captain Gopinath was contesting from the prestigious Bangalore South constituency. He was one among the favourite candidates – honest, accountable and upright. Many questions were fielded to him during the open house ranging from what he would do about corruption to how he would improve the conditions in the city. One of the questions raised to him was how would he ensure that people’s opinions were reflected in the passage of important bills. To this, he replied that he would constitute a special committee comprising of people such as Mohandas Pai of Infosys and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, among others, who he would consult on bills and legislation before casting his vote. He seemed to suggest that these persons’ opinions reflected those of the masses and hence, consultation would them would automatically imply obtaining views from the public. This both concerned and surprised me – how and why are corporates considered to be representing my opinion? Continue reading Corporates as Representatives
This is a news flash from rainy Ranikhet, from RUKUN ADVANI of Permanent Black.
Balbir Punj owns a hotel called ‘Windsor Lodge’ on Ranikhet’s outskirts. (When it comes to personal money-making, BJP ideologues seem to have no problems naming their properties after the Queen of England.) Last week Punj came to his Lodge and went to the Kalika temple opposite the property. He did not notice a large bull there, but the bull noticed him: it charged straight for him and before Punj knew what was happening he had been thrown up in the air and gouged in the front. His arm is now in a sling. It being specially embarrassing for a BJP Hindu to be thus cast aside by a cow, Punj has been desperately downplaying his injuries. However, he asked Khanduri to immediately pen the bull, and the bull has been removed from the Kalika temple.
Guest post by a friend via Monica Narula and the Sarai Reader list, with thanks.
June 15th/16th, 2009
I accidentally broke two glasses and a bowl. Yesterday, I was visiting a good friend of mine, K., who lives in the City Center, around the corner from Tehran University, between Enghelab and Azadi Square. I was in the midst of kicking my legs up to stretch out onto the couch and my clumsy foot hit the edge of the small table nearby, knocking two glasses and a bowl onto the tile floor. My head was turned away when the accident happened, so the sound of so much glass breaking really took me and N., who had also come with me, by surprise.
Continue reading Inside Teheran – 03
Guest posted by a friend via Monica Narula and the Sarai Reader list, with thanks. Apologies for formatting.
June 14th, 2009
8:45 PM
It‟s still less than ten days before the official beginning of summer. Although the weather may be warm and the blossoms are gone, it is, according to the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun, spring. Tehran Spring. A period of political liberalization under a Reformist government, backed by popular approval against the Soviet-backed Socialist system in Czechoslovakia in 1968 has come to be known as the Prague Spring. Infamous for the brutality of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into the city of Prague eight months after President Alexander Dubcek loosened restrictions on speech, the media and travel, millions of demonstrators were crushed within seconds, although they remained peaceful the entire time. Czechoslovakia remained occupied by Soviet military forces until 1990, when the Socialist system collapsed. The Prague Spring may have not been successful from a populist, anti-authoritarian perspective, but it indicated a trend, rising in Europe and the world at the time, that unrest existed on many levels: cultural, economic, social, and, most importantly, ideological. The demonstrations in Prague temporarily shadowed the International Marxist movement, popular amongst intellectuals in Western Europe, as the USSR proved once again that the utopian yearning for revolution had seceded to authority hungry for control. During the early months of the Prague Spring, inspired by the Socialist reformist experiment in Czechoslovakia, students in Paris and other Western European cities set the university ablaze, workers went on strike, and the bureaucracy collapsed.
From a friend via Monica Narula and the Sarai Reader List, with thanks.
June 13, 2009
9:05 PM
The satellite signal for BBC Farsi just turned off. I had spoken a few minutes earlier with my father and forgot where I was and that probably my phone call was being monitored. In fact, about 5 minutes into my phone conversation, I heard a faint click on the phone and my father‟s voice all of a sudden sounded very far away, muffled, as if he were on conference call. I was reminded by my friends in the other room that I should be a bit more prudent about what I say and how I say it – maybe it wasn‟t such a good idea to start off my conversation with “There‟s been a revolution”. We‟ve been camping out at home for the past 48 hours. Last night we were awake, in front of the television until 6AM. Slept in until noon and since then, we‟ve been on high alert, full of testosterone, exchanging our disappointment, confusion, worries, nervousness interspersed with information, hear say, opinions and the occasional, very necessary, joke. The house has turned into a news room, all of our computers open and
connected to the internet.
Respected Sharad Ji,
Namaskar.
I read with great interest your statement, as reported in the print media, on your likely future course of action in case the parliament was to go ahead with reserving 33% seats for women in the legislature.
One has been following your arguments against this proposed legislation over the past decade and more and has come to develop grudging admiration for your stand. Continue reading To Sharad Yadav
Twenty years ago, the dictatorship that rules China crushed a peaceful gathering of students and young people in Tiananmen Square, leading to large numbers of deaths. That day, I think I came of age, politically. It taught me, that the realities I held in the highest esteem could suddenly, over night reveal themselves to be monsters. There was no quicker way to grow up, suddenly.
I was an undergraduate student in Delhi University at that time, and a member (not overly active) of the Students Federation of India, a front organization of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I had been following, with close interest, the events unfolding in Beijing, where what seemed to be an entire generation of students and young people had been assembling, peacefully, for more than two months, in support of political reform, openness and democracy. For me, as for many others who identified with the left in India, and elsewhere, the students movement was of enormous significance, as it pointed towards the possibility of a dynamic socialist democracy. We were buoyed by the cheerfulness of our Chinese student comrades, followed every communique, every slogan with care and affection, and said to ourselves, “see, they sing the Internationale”.
Continue reading Remembering Tiananmen Square on the 4th of June
Suddenly the other day, on the 3 of June 2009, in a bizarre flash of memory I went back two decades ago, June 3 1989. As is well known, hundreds of students in Beijing had begun a protest a few months ago with wide-ranging critiques of the regime – more democracy, end to corruption and workers rights. They were joined by workers, office goers, Beijing residents, local party officials, just about everyone else. Soon the protests had spread all over China, there were demonstrations everywhere. A Chinese friend of mine was in Tiananmen Square, the main centre of the protests. He later told me – “we were all giddy, everyone traveled free in trains to Beijing, people helped us with food and water on the streets, we sang the Internationale and all the old revolutionary songs, suddenly they felt real not false…” All went to Beijing.
For many on the left in India, China occupies a peculiar, proximate place. The events of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, when Soviet tanks crushed uprisings, did not cause the storms they did in the European left. But China was different – it was in Asia, a large peasant society with an old civilization, and the site of one of the great revolutionary transformations that had begun in the nineteenth century. China had to be different. When the Naxalite militants scribbled ‘China’s path is our path’ or ‘Listen to Radio Beijing’ on the walls of Calcutta in 1969, they were probably out of their mind, but only just.
Continue reading Chinese memories
Losing Madhavikutty is not easy to bear. I like to rephrase the loss, hoping that it will make the void bearable: something flowery, perhaps, like ‘Kerala’s Ever-beautiful One has escaped captivity in an unkind world’. I like to think that she has become what she wanted to be, described to me many times in our short but intense friendship — a butterfly-princess, blessed with eternal youth, flitting painlessly from one beautiful body to another. The distance that the social scientific eye allows evades me now; and maybe admitting that would be necessary to bid good-bye. All of Kerala is getting ready for a grand funeral; even the middle class which once recoiled with horror from her, is celebrating. But how can one forget what Malayalees did to her? How they hated her because she refused to trivialise the body? How they insisted on reading her subtle defence of aesthetic womanhood as a crass expression of masculinised desire? How they could not see her kinship with Mahadevi Akka and Meera? How they rubbished her as useless to women because she was sceptic of rationalistic feminism? How they heaped insults, calling her a ‘dainty little madam with literary talent’? How her amazing range in short stories was reduced to a tailpiece of modernism in Malayalam literature?
Leave the Malayalees to their fate. They celebrate perhaps because only death could domesticate this woman.
Below is the translation of chapter 16 from Madhavikutty’s autobiography in Malayalam, Ente Katha.
Continue reading Beauty, More Beauty: A Tribute to Madhavikkutty
This is a guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY.
Writing in the Encounter, September 1961, Edward Shils characterizes the Indian student in the following terms:
“Your curiosity, idle or ordered, takes you to an Indian university or college. You walk across the dusty sun-stuck grounds or through damp, dark corridors and past malodorous lavatories; and you see clumps of boys, chirruping like birds, an occasional pair walking hand in hand, sometimes a little knot of girls in pigtails. They look extraordinarily childlike, with all the melting tenderness of children, terribly shy, soft-eyed, gentle, fragile, and very quick to smile…Their voices are low and soft, their movements light, elastic, lamb-like. If one of them, darting about in the suddenly ignited outburst of a boyish prank, nearly collides with you, he aplogises with timorous embarrassment. If you ask one of them where to find a certain professor or the head of a particular department, he will go far out of his way to lead you to the right place, and you will be impressed by his shyness and deferentiality. When he has delivered you to your destination, and you thank him, he will say something like ‘Not to mention’ and will turn and dash off as light-footedly as a young deer.”
This is a guest post by ISHWAR DOST. Ishwar is a Left activist and journalist. He works with Jansatta.
एक वक़्त था जब नंदीग्राम माकपा के बर्ताव से अचंभे और सदमे में था। आज पूरे बंगाल में बुरी तरह खारिज कर दिए जाने पर माकपा की यही स्थिति है। कभी नंदीग्राम पीड़ित के रूप में उभरा था, आज माकपा और उसके साथ और पीछे खड़ी पार्टियों की पीड़ा समझी जा सकती है। नंदीग्राम और सिंगूर के एक स्थानीय घटना बन कर रह जाने की माकपाई उम्मीद अचानक खत्म हो गई। नतीजे बताते हैं कि नंदीग्राम की पीड़ा के साथ बंगाल के देहात ने ही नहीं, शहर कोलकाता ने भी साझा किया है। किसानों के साथ हुए हिंसक सलूक से कोलकाता के बुद्धिजीवी ही नहीं, आम लोग भी हिल गए थे।
नंदीग्राम अब माकपा की पीड़ा और छटपटाहट को समझ सके, इसमें शायद काफी देर हो गई है। ऐसा कभी हो सके, इसके लिए माकपा और उसके पीछे चलने वाली पार्टियों को सारे अहंकार छोड़ कर एक पुरानी पीढ़ी के किसी कम्युनिस्ट की तरह नंदीग्राम तक सिर झुकाए आना होगा। सत्ता और सफलता का अहंकार पीड़ा को समझने और उससे जुड़ने की क्षमता नष्ट कर देता है। इस अहंकार ने कम्युनिस्टों की एक वक्त की नैतिक, ईमानदार और जज्बाती होने की पहचान को कमजोर कर दिया है। Continue reading वाम के खिलाफ अवाम: ईश्वर दोस्त
To the growing voices of peace, return and reconciliation amongst young, exiled Kashmiri Pandits, Rashneek Kher has a revealing response:
I have neither been a votary nor a detractor of the idea or concept of Panun Kashmir but truth be told I have always found it as a perfect counterweight to the secessionists policy of Azad Kashmir. Continue reading Kitnay Kashmir
| Party | Vote-share | Seats |
| BSP | 27.42% | 20 |
| SP | 23.26% | 23 |
| Congress | 18.25% | 21 |
| BJP | 17.5% |
10 |
The higher you fly, the harder you crash. Kumari Mayawati has just learnt this lesson, and is finally giving her ever-expanding fleet of air-crafts some rest. There was clear evidence before the results were out that Dalits were not going to the polling booths to vote; if they did they wouldn’t be able to press any button other than the elephant. Dalit activists in UP had been telling me this for some time now. There were rumours that the UP police has also informed the administration of this trend. Continue reading UP’s Dalits Remind Mayawati: Democracy is a Beautiful
Look carefully at this grey, arrogant and humourless face: The face of the Commissar, who on 22 July went into Lenin-in-October 1917 mode, predicting an uprising in the country if the Indo-US Nuclear Deal was pushed through. However much one might have sympathized with the man and his party on this issue, there was something strange and inexplicable in the game he started playing at that point. At least publicly, that seemed to have been the beginning. For those who have known him and his ways from closer quarters, know him to be an utterly vindictive man with a blood-curdinlingly cold and calculating mind. Ruthless inside the party, he was now playing out this same game outside. His stance on Somnath Chatterjee (and let there be no mistake, it was entirely his), leading to the latter’s expulsion, was just an instance of his style. This time he made a serious error. Continue reading The Commissar in his Labyrinth
In my second year of college we had a paper called Comparative Government and Politics. The syllabus of this paper was faithful to the Cold War – two massive units were dedicated to the United States and the former USSR respectively. The information imbalance between these two heavyweights was such however that ‘good’ books on the Soviet Union were very few in number – they were carefully prescribed in class, jealously guarded in the reference section of the college library, and issued only to the quick and the deserving. When we reached the U.S unit however, the teacher gave up and we were left like a pack of wild dogs to run through the entire general section, and issue what caught our fancy. Continue reading Accidental Labour
२००९ के लोकसभा चुनाव की अगर इसके पहले दो चरणों के आधार पर कोई खासियत बतानी हो तो कहना पडेगा कि समाज के पारम्परिक शक्ति संतुलन में विचलन के भय से तथाकथित ऊंची जातियों के द्वारा पहले जो हिंसा होती थी, वह नहीं दिखी. बिहार और अन्य स्थानों पर चुनाव के वक्त बूथ पर होनेवाला खूनखराबा इस बार नहीं हुआ. फिर भी इस बार हत्याएं हुईं. और ये हत्याएं हिंसक वर्ग-युद्ध में विश्वास रखनेवाले माओवादी समूहों ने कीं. बिहार, झारखंड, ओडीसा, छत्तीसगढ और महाराष्ट्र में इन समूहों के द्वारा हत्याएं की गईं, सार्वजनिक स्थलों को जलाया गया और दहशत फैलाई गई. पूरी ट्रेन का अपहरण कर लिया गया और अपना शक्ति प्रदर्शन करके फिर उसे छोड़ दिया गया. इस बीच उसके यात्रियों को जो भयंकर मानसिक यंत्रणा हुई होगी उसके लिए माओवादियों के पास कोई सहानुभूति का शब्द नहीं है. बंगाल में सी.पी.एम. ने अपने हिंसक अहंकार में सिंगुर और नांदीग्राम और उनके बाद लालगढ में जो कुछ किया उसने माओवादी समूहों को बंगाल में अपनी पकड मजबूत करने का मौका दिया. अब ये खबरें आम हैं कि बंगाल के गांवों और कस्बों में लोगों को सी.पी.एम. की सदस्यता छोड्ने को मजबूर किया जा रहा है और बात न मानने पर उनकी हत्या तक की जा रही है. ऐसी ही हत्याएं पिछले साल बिहार और झारखण्ड में की गयी थी. क्योकि माओवादी मारे गए लोगों को ‘गलत पार्टियों’ में रहने नहीं देना चाहते थे. बंगाल में सी.पी.एम. की हिंसा का विरोध करनेवालों को शायद सी.पी. एम. के कार्यकर्ताओं की हत्या में एक प्रकार का प्राकृतिक न्याय होता दीख रहा हो, वरना क्या वजह है कि अब तक इन हत्याओं की और दल छोडने को बाध्य करने की इस तरह की घटनाओं की कहीं से कोई भर्त्सना नहीं सुनाई पडी है !
“हिंसा को किसी भी तरह जायज नहीं ठहराया जा सकता ,चाहे उसका औचित्य कुछ भी क्यों न दिया जाए.” पिछ्ले दो साल से माओवादियों को मदद पहुंचाने के आरोप में जेल में बंद बिनायक सेन ने हाल में एक पत्रकार को यह कहा जब उसने माओवादी हिंसा के बारे में उनसे सवाल किया. बिनायक जब यह बातचीत कर रहे थे, उनके चेहरे पर वह दाढी नहीं थी जिसने उन्हें एक रूमानी शक्ल दे रखी थी. दाढीविहीन होकर भी बिनायक उतने ही आकर्षक लग रहे थे, हालांकि उसके होने से जो एक रहस्य की आभा उनके इर्द-गिर्द थी, वह नहीं रह गयी थी.
Continue reading हिंसा की राजनीति के पैरोकार
There was this article in the Indian Express yesterday by Mihir Sharma which basically says liberals don’t have to feel guilty about not supporting Mayawati for PM because Mayawati and the BSP don’t have a “programme”. That desire for a new, revolutionary “programme” sounds Stalinist to me. But more than that, it is revealing about the picture of the good Indian liberal that the author has. The good Indian liberal seems to be completely unaware of the five letter word, Caste; s/he does not appreciate what untouchability means for millions, what the monopoly over the power structure by upper castes means for the ‘majority of the oppressed’ (Bahujan). This good liberal sounds like a foreign-educated babalog who is not very different from someone we have met before.
But wait, I don’t have to continue this rant because in the same morning’s HT, Ashutosh Varshney had what could be an excellent rejoinder to the Mihir Sharma piece: Continue reading The Liberals and the Bahujans
guest post by ROHINI HENSMAN
With the military defeat of the LTTE imminent, the terrible plight of civilians in the Vanni has attracted worldwide concern and sympathy, and rightly so. While the circumstances are completely different, the civilian death toll in the Vanni over the past few months (over 2700) is already triple the number of civilians killed in the Gaza massacre of December-January, and is still mounting. The thousands who suffer serious injuries are further victimised by the delay or lack of medical attention, which means, for example, that injuries to limbs which could have been saved with prompt treatment, instead result in gangrene and amputations. Even those who have not lost lives, limbs or loved ones, have lost their homes and livelihoods, and live in appalling conditions which could well claim more lives through disease or even starvation.
Meanwhile, the LTTE and Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) trade charges, each accusing the other of being responsible for the slaughter. What truth is there in their respective allegations? Continue reading Who Is Responsible For The Slaughter Of Civilians In The Vanni?: Rohini Hensman
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 