Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 27.03.14
Dalit boy abused, attacked in school- The Hindu
Manipuri couple assaulted- The Hindu
Can these youth leave the seasoned behind- The Hindu
Bihar’s endless feudal violence- The Hindu
Toilet shame: Girls skip dinner and school- The Telegraph
Note: Please find attachment for HINDI DMW ( PDF)
The Hindu
Dalit boy abused, attacked in school
A Class XI boy of a school in Tirumangalam near here, who belonged to a Scheduled Caste, was allegedly abused and attacked by a group of caste Hindu students.
According to police, the boy had gone to school on March 19, when the caste Hindu students picked a quarrel with him and assaulted him.
The following day, when the victim’s father questioned their act, the cast Hindu boys allegedly attacked him.
Based on a complaint filed by the victim’s father, Santhosam, the Tirumangalam police registered cases against five persons under the Prevention of Atrocities Against SC/ST Act and under Sections 341, 342 and 323 of the Indian Penal Code.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the victim’s kin alleged that the case was not being investigated by the Deputy Superintendent of Police, who was the investigation officer.
A. Kathir, executive director of Evidence, alleged that the issue had not been taken up at an appropriate level by the police.
When contacted, Madurai Superintendent of Police Vijayendra S. Bidari told The Hindu that the enquiry was being carried out by the DSP. Action would be taken against the accused after an enquiry, he added.
The Hindu
Manipuri couple assaulted
In yet another alleged racist attack in South Delhi, a young Army-man from Manipur was attacked and his wife molested by a group led by his landlord’s family at their rented accommodation in Munirka village late on Tuesday night.
The entire incident was the result of an argument over handing a spare key and took place in the presence of the couple's new-born baby. Seven people, including a woman, have been arrested in connection with the case. The Delhi Police have registered a case under sections of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, molestation and others against the accused men and placed them under arrest on Wednesday.
According to the police, it all started after victim Thang Min Len (27) asked his landlord Dharampal Tokas for an extra key of the main gate of their housing complex as he was expecting his mother-in-law who was scheduled to land in Delhi late at night. When Thang approached his landlord requesting him to either grant access to his mother-in-law or give him a spare key of the main gate, Mr. Tokas refused saying no one was allowed to enter the premises after 10 p.m.
This led to an argument between Mr. Tokas’ son and Thang and there was a minor scuffle between them.
However, the matter was soon resolved. The complainant told the police that even after the matter was resolved, the landlord's son returned, joined by his family and a few others. They allegedly launched a collective assault on Thang. The signs of the violent scuffle were visible on Wednesday afternoon in the form of a ransacked room with blood stains all over the walls.
On the contrary, Dheeraj, a local who runs a shop, said that following the hiatus, it was a large group of north-eastern residents of the locality who assembled outside the house and started raising slogans against the landlords accusing him of misbehaving with Thang Min and his family. When asked how did Thang sustain the injuries that his medical examination confirmed, Dheeraj said that those were self inflicted as a ‘drunk’ Thang punched the glass window of his room.
When the police reached the spot, they were told by Thang Min that his landlord and his son had attacked him.
He was admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) from where he was later discharged later.
A senior police officer said they initially rounded up a large number of people present at the spot and eventually zeroed in on seven, including the members of the Tokas family, before naming them as accused.
“We have registered a case under sections 323, 341, 354, 506 (causing hurt and molestation) and SC/ST Act on the basis of the victim's complaint. Six people including the landlord of the victim, his wife and son have been arrested in this connection,” the officer said.
The Hindu
Can these youth leave the seasoned behind
More youth, especially the educated and well-heeled, are taking the poll plunge in the ongoing elections to the local bodies.
Siliveru Jyotsna Rani, who had settled down in London after completing her M.Sc in Biotechnology there, gave up her job to come home to contest the ZPTC elections from Atmakur mandal.
“The contrast between societies [of the East and West] is that we don’t have people with selfless, service orientation. This prompted me to come back and become a public representative,” said Jyotsna Rani, who hails from the Dalit community, and is contesting on a Congress ticket. Her father, Bhaskar, is a leader of the party in the mandal.
Ms. Jyotsna Rani said she had contacted all important leaders of the party – Ponnala Lakshmaiah, Gandra Venkata Ramana Reddy – before taking the decision.
Since the Zilla Parishad chairperson post has been reserved for SC Women this time, she hopes to adorn the post.
Md. Fazal Khan, also of Atmakur, who had been working as a mechanical engineer in Dubai for the past ten years, also filed his nomination for the local ZPTC seat.
However, one has to see if they can muster public patronage, outsmarting the seasoned politicians in the field.
The Hindu
Bihar’s endless feudal violence
The politics of opportunism masquerading as secularism does great damage to the real battles being fought on the ground for justice against communal and feudal bias
In the early hours of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom day on March 23 this year, villagers of Repura in the Ara Lok Sabha constituency in Bihar found the body of Budhram Paswan, secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)’s Charpokhri block committee. He had been killed the previous night, as he was returning to the village for a meeting in preparation for the filing of Lok Sabha nominations by CPI (ML) candidates. The FIR has named several well-known feudal elements of the neighbouring village, including three men accused in the Ranvir Sena’s 1998 Nagari Bazaar massacre.
Mr. Paswan was one of the key activists who helped ensure that witnesses in the case withstood feudal terror and intimidation, and testified in court. This resulted in the conviction of the accused in the sessions court in 2010. The conviction was overturned by the Bihar High Court in 2013 — part of a series of such verdicts discrediting testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, and overturning lower court convictions in Ranvir Sena massacre cases. Mr. Paswan also helped the survivors find courage and determination to appeal against the acquittal in the Supreme Court. On March 23, Ranvir Sena supporters celebrated Mr. Paswan’s assassination, gleefully firing shots in the air. Such celebrations underline the fact that the murder is a political one, intended to terrorise CPI (ML) supporters with a show of feudal muscle on the eve of an election in which the CPI (ML) is a strong contender from the Ara seat.
Spate of terror
Ideologues of the Bihar Chief Minister like to claim that feudal violence is a thing of the past thanks tosushasan (good governance) in the past nine years. Is this true? In the 80s, feudal forces who unleashed terror to stop Dalits from casting their votes had to contend with successful struggles by the oppressed and landless poor under the banner of CPI (ML) to avail of their right to vote. The same forces faced with CPI (ML) victories in Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha seats in Bhojpur in the late 80s and early 90s formed the Ranvir Sena and conducted a spate of massacres with the purpose of terrorising the poor and checking their social and political assertion. Now their strategy is to eliminate leaders and cadres like the CPI (ML)’s Rohtas Secretary Bhaiyyaram Yadav (killed in 2012) and Mr. Paswan. On Independence Day last year, the Dalits of Baddi were subjected to organised feudal violence that claimed a life, injured several people and destroyed a temple of the poet-saint Ravidas, revered by the Dalits.
The continuous thread of feudal violence in Bihar resonates with the hollowness of Mr. Kumar’s claims of ‘good governance’ and ‘development with justice,’ as well as his claims of principled aversion to Narendra Modi’s politics. His government began its first tenure by hastily dismantling the Justice Amir Das Commission that had been set up after the Lakshmanpur Bathe massacre to probe the political linkages of the banned Ranvir Sena. The Commission was at the point of submitting its conclusions, and was likely to name several prominent national and State-level politicians, mostly from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Janata Dal (United), but also some from the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress. Therefore there was, among Bihar’s ruling parties, a tacit consensus on the burial of the Commission. The massacres took place with the open collusion of the RJD government, with Lalu Prasad declaring his willingness to ‘ally with the forces of hell’ to contend with the CPI (ML), and the mass acquittals took place under the aegis of Mr. Kumar.
The BJP link
Mr. Modi, in his recent visits to Bihar, has carefully chosen to project himself as a champion of the backward castes. For Bihar which has witnessed the Ranvir Sena in action, this posture is especially mendacious. At Bathani Tola, the Ranvir Sena butchered women and children from the oppressed castes as well as backward Muslims. The Ranvir Sena distributed election leaflets in the 90s seeking votes for the BJP. Brahmeshwar Singh, chief of the Ranvir Sena, in interviews given close to his death, openly admitted to having been a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre since childhood, and wanting to see Mr. Modi as Prime Minister. Much of the literature of the Ranvir Sena was copy-pasted from RSS tracts, including demands for abolition of Article 370, ban on cow slaughter and shrill anti-communism.
If anyone needed further proof of the intimate ties of the BJP and the Ranvir Sena or any illusions of justice from Mr. Kumar, they should study the aftermath of the killing of Brahmeshwar Singh in 2012. BJP leader Giriraj Singh described Brahmeshwar Singh as Bihar’s Gandhi; Mr. Kumar took a leaf from Mr. Modi’s model of ‘rajdharm’; the police stood mute and allowed Ranvir Sena supporters to run amok in Ara and Patna, unleashing violence on Dalits and on public property. Brahmeshwar Singh’s funeral and shraddh ceremony found several members of Mr. Kumar’s cabinet in attendance, not to mention an array of BJP leaders along with those from the JDU, the RJD and the Congress.
The thread of organised massacres and the quest for justice, of course, extends beyond Bihar. In many ways, the nature of these Bihar massacres presaged what would unfold in Gujarat in 2002. Bihar, Gujarat, and Muzaffarnagar, and of course Delhi in 1984, have all been witness to organised pogroms conducted with political motives with the tacit or open collusion of the government and state machinery.
Development models
On the issue of ‘development,’ the choice between the ‘Nitish model’ and ‘Modi model’ is a dismal and misleading one. Mr. Kumar’s claims of miraculous development (echoed till his party’s recent divorce with the BJP) owes much to a carefully-crafted media campaign. The reality check is provided by the unstoppable flow of Bihari youth out of the State, seeking education and employment that is denied to them at home. And it is ironic that Mr. Modi, bragging to the people of Bihar about the development model of the ‘western states,’ forgets that the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena — both vying to offer him allegiance in Maharashtra — are responsible for thrashing migrant labourers from Bihar and other eastern states, whose labour contributes in no small way to the corporate-led ‘development’ of those States.
Mr. Modi’s campaign has essentially been dominated by ‘theme Gujarat’ and ‘team Gujarat,’ for which the Gujarat government’s resources are being used. With Raj Thackeray’s support in addition to the Shiv Sena’s, Maharashtra’s might has been added to Gujarat’s fuel power. Gujarat and Maharashtra are both arenas of corporate assertion and the corporate model of ‘development,’ and Mr. Modi’s campaign has taken on the overtones of the corporate home base against more backward regions.
If the RJD regime allowed the feudal-communal Ranvir Sena a free run in Bihar, Mr. Kumar’s regime allowed the RSS and the BJP to strike deep communal roots in Bihar.
The BJP’s candidate from Ara is R.K. Singh, former Home Secretary. The spate of people joining the BJP after resigning from top positions in police, intelligence, and the Home departments ought to alert us to the deep-seated communal and political bias that exists at the heart of such institutions, as a result of which saffron—terror linkages are seldom probed while communal profiling is rampant.
The case of Ram Vilas Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party is a fresh reminder of the fact that the politics of opportunism masquerading as secularism, far from being a reliable bulwark against communal and authoritarian politics, does great damage to the real battles being fought on the ground for justice against communal and feudal bias and violence. In this poll, the challenge for progressive forces is to keep the struggles for justice and truth from ‘disappearing’ or being turned into a farce.
(Kavita Krishnan is polit bureau member, CPI (ML) Liberation.)
The Telegraph
Toilet shame: Girls skip dinner and school
- Sanitation call to parties as desperate measures spill out
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OUR BUREAU
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New Delhi, March 26: Hundreds of young girls in a large cluster of households near Jahangirpuri in northeast Delhi have silently adopted a rule — skip dinner to avoid using a crowded public toilet in the mornings.
In Dhulagori village in Howrah, 15-year-old Aklima Khatun misses school during her menstrual periods each month — not because of physical discomfort, but to avoid changing sanitary napkins in the school toilet.
In Varanasi, where the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is fighting AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal in the 2014 general election, Suman, an activist with a women’s organisation called Mahila Jagriti Samiti, wants the next government — whoever forms it — to place sanitation high on its priority list.
India launched a plan named the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) in 1999 to provide sanitation to cover the entire population, but an estimated 620 million people are still forced to defecate in the open, according to activists campaigning for the right to sanitation.
“It’s a big shame that we still have to run this campaign,” said Rajesh Upadhyay, national convener of the right to sanitation campaign in India.
While the NBA has helped install tens of millions of toilets in households and schools across the country, the lack of water or sewage facilities and poor maintenance often make them unusable.
“Toilets are only showpieces in Dhulagori High School,” said Kakali Chakraborty, secretary of the Mahila Samiti in Dhulagori, Khatun’s village.
Khatun, Chakraborty said, skips school at least five days every month during her menstrual periods. The school has two toilets but neither has piped water.
“There is this huge silence over the link between good sanitation and menstrual hygiene management,” said Sudha Goparaju, an activist from Hyderabad. “No one talks about what is needed to resolve difficulties that girls and women face.”
In the cluster of households near Delhi’s Jahangirpuri locality, hundreds of girls skip dinner day after day to avoid using the public toilet in the morning hours, which they consider an ignominy.
The colony has about 60,000 residents and 96 toilet seats in the public facilities. “Girls and some women too prefer to use toilets in the evenings when there is less rush,” said Veermati, a community leader.
About 400 social activists and community leaders from across the country concluded a two-day conclave on the right to sanitation yesterday, calling on all political parties to support sanitation in a “comprehensive, deliberate, and non-compromising manner”.
“We want the government to focus on all aspects of sanitation — water supply, regular management and safe disposal of the waste,” said Murali Ramisetty, an activist with the Freshwater Action Network South Asia, a non-government organisation.
“There are huge health costs to inadequate sanitation,” Ramisetty said. Health economists have estimated that poor sanitation costs India about $53 billion, or about 6.4 per cent of India’s gross domestic product in 2006, when the last such estimate was done.
The right to sanitation campaign officials estimate that about 1,000 children die in India from various illnesses, including diarrhoeal diseases, linked to poor sanitation.
Poor sanitation services also make girls and women vulnerable to sexual assaults. “We’ve seen young girls and women become victims of sexual assaults when they’ve gone into fields,” Suman said.
According to the 2011 census data, the national sanitation coverage was 49 per cent but the rural sanitation coverage is just 31 per cent. The coverage is worse among the marginalised sections like Dalits (23 per cent) and tribals (16 per cent).
The central government has started the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan scheme under which it gives Rs 4,500 to a household to set up a latrine. “This is not enough to set up a facility. Poor people do not take interest in this scheme,” Nafisa Barot, an activist from Gujarat, said.
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News Monitor by Girish Pant
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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