Woman attacked in Assam: what should the press have done?
On the night of July 9, a group of about 20 men groped and stripped a teenaged girl attending a birthday party at a pub in Guwahati.
A local news channel, News Live, whose studio is nearby, recorded the incident and broadcast it. The video went viral on the Internet after the channel posted it on YouTube, shocking the nation. (The original video has been removed from You Tube)
The mob molested the girl for more than 30 minutes until passersby and police rescued her. One of them was a journalist, Mukul Kalita, editor of Assamese-language daily Ajir Asom.
According to the police, 11 of the offenders have been identified and four arrested. Police have been unable to find the prime accused, Amar Jyoti Kalita. An employee of state run IT-agency AMTRON, Kalita has been suspended, according to media reports. One of the accused works as a sweeper at Guwahati Medical College and Hospital (GMCH) while another works for a water tanker service agency.
The story has prompted plenty of outrage about the behaviour of the men, but it also has raised an age-old question about the press. When, if ever, should a journalist abandon the observer’s role and become part of the story? Many people said News Live’s crew failed to live up to its human obligations and was only interested in ratings.
The episode was captured by a News Live employee who was on the spot. In a television interview, meanwhile, the victim appealed to the government and police to arrest the culprits and punish them.
News Live’s reporter, Dipya Bordoloi, while speaking to other media, said that the mob was not listening to anyone, and “it was like a gang rape.” He says he called the police immediately on reaching the spot, but they took about 20 minutes to reach.
Mark of Boucher
In cricket, and in life, a perfect end is a rarity.
Even Don Bradman was bereft of it. Yet a not-so-perfect ending cannot deny a few sportsmen their legitimate place in the sun. South Africa’s wicket-keeper Mark Boucher is one such cricketer.
His remarkably long international career, of almost 15 years, was tragically snuffed out when he was hit in the eye by a bail in a warm-up match against Somerset on July 9 during the ongoing England tour. He was only one short of 1,000 victims — an unheard of feat in the 145 years of international cricket history.
Agonisingly short of a milestone, just like Bradman who could not score the four runs in his final innings to sign off with a perfect test average of 100.
The England series was meant to be Boucher’s last, where he was expected to walk into the sunset having crossed the monumental mark of 1,000 victims and 150 Tests. The plan was perfect, not destiny.
In cricket, keeping is, by far, considered the most thankless job. A difficult catch may get a slipfielder all the plaudits but for a keeper, standing only a couple of feet away, it’s considered a routine job. For him the bar is much higher — nothing short of spectacular gets talked about. And he is expected to pick up every wayward throw of his colleagues and yet script impossible run-outs. That’s not all — conceding a bye is viewed, even by his team mates, as almost criminal.
Life for a keeper is not only unfair but often cruel. Boucher, with his feline agility and characteristic combativeness, transformed this difficult job into a fashionable profession. His celebratory leap into the air after pulling off a stunning catch will remain frozen in the minds of cricket aficionados.
Justice delayed for Punjab beating victim
Burundi national Yannick Nihangaza was brutally beaten in April by allegedly drunk youngsters, and left for dead in Jalandhar, a city in Punjab. Nearly three months later, the 23-year-old Nihangaza lies in a vegetative state at a hospital.
His father has asked the Punjab government to allow him to bring his son back to Burundi. He also wants the state to prosecute the suspects and pay for his son’s medical expenses.
Until today, he has had to beg. Local media reports say Nihangaza’s father has written to Punjab’s chief minister and expressed his disappointment at the government having done little to set things right.
After the Burundi youth’s story received some attention in the local media, the state government on Friday said it will help the family and has instructed the police to probe the incident. It is unknown why it took the government nearly three months to ask for help.
This is in contrast to Australia, where about two years ago, Indian student Shravan Kumar was a victim of what appeared to be a racially motivated attack. Australia granted him permanent residency status, entitling him to various benefits as a result.
In a separate case where an Australian teenager fatally stabbed Nitin Garg, an Indian student, the Victoria state’s Supreme Court sentenced the teenager to 13 years in jail.
When Anuj Bidve was murdered in the United Kingdom and his family complained about delays in the processing of the case, the police sent two senior officers all the way to India to brief the relatives.
Is there no respect or fear for the law? Is it that with money, muscle and political influence, anyone can get away with anything? Or is it a reflection of the moral rot that has set in?
Kashmir: we love you, we don’t love your mini-skirt
Imagine this: some tourists, from India and abroad, fly to Jammu and Kashmir, and are eager to escape the confines of Srinagar airport and to get themselves a lungful of that pristine Himalayan air.
Upon arrival, they are advised to visit the official clothier’s outlet of the Jammu and Kashmir Tourism Department before they hit the streets. They need to make a stop there so they can shed any “objectionable” attire and don a traditional pheran to respect the “local ethos and culture” of India’s northernmost state.
Don’t like it? Go home.
It’s an impossible scenario in most parts of the world, but this idea — already the norm in conservative Saudi Arabia — is something that the Kashmiri religious group Jamaat-e-Islami, would like to import to Jammu and Kashmir.
The Jamaat fears that tourists wearing mini skirts and other objectionable dresses could derail “the [Kashmiri] society from the right track.”
Labelling tourists’ clothing, which often veers to the casual and the revealing (it’s hot out there when you’re visiting five monuments a day!) as “cultural aggression against the Kashmiri Muslims,” the group has accused women tourists wearing short dresses, mini-skirts and other skimpy attire from the West as agents of “immorality and immodesty”.
The Jamaat says it doesn’t welcome these immoral guests, and has asked the tourism department to tell tourists to “honour the local ethos.”
Too poor to buy a car, Mr MLA? Dig into your development fund
For a politician whose party’s symbol is a bicycle and who used the “aam aadmi’s” (common man’s) mode of transport for an election rally, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has stoked all the wrong emotions with a proposal to let lawmakers buy cars using up to 2 million rupees (about $36,800) from their local area development funds.
Opposition parties in Uttar Pradesh have panned the chief minister’s proposal, one that would cost the state exchequer 806 million rupees ($14.6 million) — in case all 403 lawmakers in the state assembly buy cars priced at 2 million rupees each.
Shouldn’t Yadav, who won the assembly polls earlier this year riding on popular sentiment and promises of reform, use the money to develop Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states? Just days ago, his father — Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav — urged the Congress-coalition government to spend money on development there.
Can the government justify spending taxpayer money on luxury sedans even as they support populist measures as giving laptops and tablet computers to graduating students?
Why can’t lawmakers use public transportation to connect with their people? Why do they prefer an air-conditioned car to riding the bus or the train? Isn’t that where they can find most of their constituents every day? Or does mixing with the populace distract them from the business of politics?
At the very least, could they spend less than 2 million rupees on a car? Allowing MLAs to buy cars at a discount when they complete their five-year assembly terms would have even sounded credible — had Yadav not said the offer was aimed at lawmakers too poor to buy their own cars.
MLAs make 600,000 rupees ($11,046) a year — well over the per capita income of a bit more than 50,000 rupees — and get free housing and utilities. If they cannot afford to buy a car, why not give them an interest-free loan instead?
Thirsty Bangalore: all tanked up and nowhere to go
If you live in one of India’s big cities, you share the road with water tankers. They thunder down the streets, delivering water to houses and apartment complexes, often spilling through some invisible leak. Tucked away on side streets, locals throng them with buckets. Tankers are part of an economic ecosystem that are inseparable from a country whose cities teem with millions of people, but whose public utility companies often don’t have enough water to go around.
Bangalore, India’s “BPO” and information technology capital, is full of them because of the city’s population growth in the past 25 years – 1.5 million people in 1971, 9.5 million in 2011, according to census data.
The ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’ cannot satisfy the demand for water. Nor can it always handle routine problems and maintenance. A recent decision by the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) to do some major work on the pumps at the Cauvery river, which delivers much of the water supply from nearly 100 kilometres away, shut down service to large parts of the city for two days.
Enter the water tankers, privately owned. The tanks should be coated in EPI (Ethoxylated polyethyiemine) to prevent hazardous chemical reactions between the tank’s metal and the salts that are dissolved in the water it carries. The supplier also must purify the water so that it is safe for washing clothes, bathing, cooking and drinking. Often, it is not.
Tanker drivers told me that the coating was painted on the tank’s exterior, refreshed to make the trucks look nice. This duty they obeyed as if it were regulated, even if the truck was old and coughed up clouds of soot.
By law, they cannot drill wells in residential neighbourhoods to extract and transport water to other places. They are supposed to apply for separate water supply pipes. Trouble is, following the rules would shut down a large part of the city’s private water supply, as claimed by a number of private operators who say that in order to comply fully with the norms, the infrastructure wasn’t available and would result in shutting their operations that were fuelled by residential bore well units.
Instead, they get fresh water throughout the city, feeding illegally at houses that double as filling stations.
Cleaning up TV’s dirty pictures
I was watching a documentary on Greta Garbo on television. The film was in English with English subtitles for people more comfortable following written English than quick spoken English. Every time the word “sex” or something related to it would come up, the subtitles avoided it. “Heterosexual” became “hetero.” “Her sexuality” became “her femininity.” Dedicated channel surfing revealed similar evasions. In a conversation about breast cancer on an English channel, the station inserted an asterisk to partially mask the word “breast” in the subtitles, even though you could hear it onscreen.
TV stations and networks in India, similar to broadcast TV channels in the United States, remove objectionable content (sex scenes, nudity, some foul language and violence) from movies and other programming (see this recent Reuters story about how it works). This is thanks to the Indian Broadcasting Federation’s Broadcasting Content Complaint Council. The idea is to make sure that public airwaves remain friendly enough for the ears of children and sensitive adults, though it can result in unintentional bloopers like the breast cancer example.
Apply that to film, and it can be an editing massacre. Look for odd leaps forward in the film’s plot and you can see where the chopping happened. It wasn’t always this way. Channels such as Star Movies and HBO made minimal cuts or none at all until the BCCC was established in 2011. Hindi films fare little better. The lovemaking scene between Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta in “Salaam Namaste” was removed from the televised version of the movie. “The Dirty Picture,” the film about softcore actress Silk Smitha that starred Vidya Balan, came in for 59 cuts, but still couldn’t make the cut for television.
Just in case you missed the message about naughty content, messages flash on English channels every once in a while, asking viewers to report objectionable content to the complaint council. After a while, the question presents itself: is this nanny state protection or is it the more ominous “censorship”? Either way, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
Maybe people use the TV to “turn off,” while they use the Internet to “turn on”. How else to explain the protesters who showed up (albeit in small numbers) on the streets of India’s cities when the government shut down file-sharing services that some people use to watch pirated movies and listen to pirated music? The government also put a cap on what it defined as objectionable content that people post on Facebook and other social media sites. That’s a good way to raise some grassroots complaints, but it’s surprising that cutting TV time entertainment hasn’t sparked the same ire.
Maybe TV is like all the other curtailments to freedom of expression that Indians have dealt with. Who spoke up when the importation of Salman Rushdie’s bestselling novel “The Satanic Verses” was banned? Or when Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute library was ransacked by extremists protesting James Laine’s book “Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India.” Or when groups operating under their moral codes impose them on university syllabi or school textbooks?
Have people tacitly waived their right toward censorship by not exercising it? Many of us allow our freedom of speech to be curtailed when it comes to books and TV, but when asked to pay to watch movies and music, we lace up our combat boots … at least for now. The longer-term trend in India seems to be for its young people to plot paths to career success rather than thinking about preserving freedom or fighting for anything other than a religious dispute. Maybe there’s no gauntlet to pick up. Sooner or later, we may find ourselves treating Web surfing the same way we treat watching television — passive and without complaint.
I also believe that sextual portions should be avoided from TV as it often distracts our young operation.
Genetically modified India
The debate over regulating genetically modified crops in India is back after two years of silence that followed the moratorium on the Bt brinjal, a genetically modified eggplant. This is thanks to the government’s wavering policy on agricultural biotechnology. If you study its policy since the eggplant flare-up, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was designed to do two things that don’t quite fit together.
Here is what happened:
The government released its report on the hills of the Western Ghats nearly nine months after the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) submitted it, and then only under a court order. The report, among other things, warned that genetically modified organisms were a threat to biodiversity in India. The government attached a disclaimer to the report, saying that it has not formally accepted the conclusions.
Meanwhile, minutes of meetings of the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) — the central government’s regulatory body for GM crops — reveal that the committee is trying to convince state governments to allow field trials of genetically modified crops.
This is happening as India’s National Biodiversity Authority considers whether it will sue Monsanto and some of the agricultural universities involved in promoting Bt brinjal in India, according to information given by the authority in response to a Right To Information filing.
The authority has said that the agricultural universities and Monsanto are guilty of bio-piracy. That means exploiting the knowledge of India’s indigenous peoples for commercial gain without permission, compensation or recognition.
Here is how we got to where we are:
Dear Gokul,
I really appreciate your article. You have raised the right questions in your blog. Firstly the WGEEP report which is spot on with its recommendations on keeping the Western Ghats GM FREE. This is most important as what we stand to loose is great considering the richness of biodiversity in the area. A precautionary approach to GM will be the sensible step from an economic, social and environmental point of view.
The proposed Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) Bill is a blatant attempt to circumvent the opposition to Bt Brinjal. The BRAI Bill is fundamentally flawed and has faced massive opposition inside and outside the Parliament.
If the BRAI Bill is passed the 71 crops that are at different stages of GM research in the country will get approved with ease. This puts our agro diversity and farming at great risk.
The government needs to stop restricting itself to GM and open its eyes to ecological farming which is the sustainable way forward for agriculture.
Defying Hitler and jostling for Goering’s autograph
- The Dutch broke his stick hoping to find a hidden magnet
- The Japanese suspected his stick was coated with glue
- Cricket legend Don Bradman gushed — “He scores goals like runs in cricket”
- Adolf Hitler was so impressed with him that he offered him German citizenship and a post in the army
If an athlete’s greatness is measured by the number of apocryphal stories about him or her, hockey wizard Dhyan Chand is in a league of his own.
Before every Olympic Games, India indulges in nostalgia about its hockey heyday and revisits the folklore around arguably the greatest hockey player ever.
One such story is about the controversy Dhyan Chand and the entire Indian contingent created by refusing to salute Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
In their book “Olympics: The India Story” (Harper Sports), authors Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta shed some light on the episode.
“The Indians were the only contingent, apart from the Americans, to not perform the raised-arm salute as a mark of respect for the German chancellor,” they wrote in what is considered the first comprehensive book on India’s Olympic history.
“… it was a political act, breathtaking in its audacity, in direct opposition to most other contingents at the Games, including the British,” they wrote in the revised edition of the book which was released recently.
Who is the greatest Indian? (After Gandhi, of course)
What is the correct parameter to gauge greatness? This interesting question becomes more so when you apply it to a person rather than a thing. It becomes especially interesting when a poll asks the people to decide who is the “greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi”.
The poll, sponsored by Anil Ambani’s Reliance Mobile and conducted by CNN-IBN and the History channel, both owned by Network 18 group, is open to Indian citizens and has a simple voting process. Call the number assigned to your choice to register your vote. You can also vote online.
Among the 50 choices are:
Bhimrao Ambedkar, the champion of the rights of India’s disenfranchised, particularly its “lower” and “backward” castes, as well as Dalits, or what the rest of the world knows as “untouchables.” He is also the man behind India’s constitution.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, whose descendants control India’s ruling party and are often considered the first family of the country.
APJ Abdul Kalam, India’s former president and a well known scientist. Kalam is also credited for India’s nuclear programme.
Mother Teresa, the Albanian nun, founder of the Missionaries of Charity and winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.
THE GREATEST INDIAN
He represents all that is Indian. He’s tolerant, patient, spiritual, sensitive, emotional, celebratory, colourful, spicy, gullible, peace-loving, forgiving, forgetting, foolish, trusting, warm, caring, hopeful, loyal, disorganized, chaotic, divergent …..
But what make him the greatest?
For centuries he has absorbed tyranny, invasions, divisive rulers, corrupt leaders and insensitive governments and yet maintains a faith and expectation from the ruling class that one day there will be Ramrajya, a king like Mahabali or an emperor like Akbar – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Even when faced and challenged by religious propaganda of all kinds and colours, despite violent, persuasive, enticing or intimidatory tactics, he has maintained an amazing tolerance for all forms of faiths – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Every single day of his life he struggles for his basic survival and that of his family. He constantly strives to make his life and that of his family better. Every day he faces unemployment, inflation, lack of basic amenities, wrath of the elements, apathy, exploitation … and yet sleeps in peace at night hoping for a better tomorrow – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Despite rising selfishness and self-centeredness in the world, despite the culture of competitive and individual pursuit of wealth, despite being faced by an increasing isolation of people from one another, he will still respectfully look after his old, ailing parents or his unemployed brother and he will still stand for and help his neighbour and brother in their times of need – that’s what makes him the greatest.
In an ever-increasing environment of an emphasis on the material and physical, despite peer pressure, despite the fruits of technology and modernity becoming overly tempting and seductive, he still finds value and dignity in honesty and honour and he still maintains a need to fulfill the needs of his spiritual self – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Despite being cheated, conned, deceived, swindled, defrauded, duped, tricked, taken advantage of. Despite witnessing an increasingly untrustworthy world, he still finds reason to trust his fellow human – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Even in his sorely pathetic condition, helplessness and emasculated life, he finds fulfillment in the fantastic accomplishments of celluloid heroes, soap-opera characters and cricketing gladiators. Even in the darkest of times he will find a source of light, even in the most pitiable and sorrowful seasons he will find reason to smile – that’s what makes him the greatest.
While the world wallows in the sorrows of economic meltdowns, recessions, wars, violence, crime, uncertain future, trauma of globalization … While constantly in the midst of grumbles, protests, criticisms, grievances, objections, moans and cries he still finds reason to celebrate a hundred festivals every year. He still finds reason to enjoy art, dance and music in his daily life. He still finds reason to thank God for the gifts of life, love and beauty – that’s what makes him the greatest.
Despite evolved statistical sciences, intrusive data collection methods, surreptitious mind-reading tactics, mood gauging theories, political networking …. He still manages to surprise and shock everyone by his choice of vote – that’s what makes him the greatest.
For centuries he has been subjected to dominating cultural influences by invaders, imperialists, film makers, writers, governments, religious leaders and giant media conglomerates. Despite his education, despite his branded clothes and gadgets, despite his global outlook, despite his changed lifestyle, despite powerful attempts to dilute his basic Indian-ness through various means he has not only maintained his Indian sensibilities but also spread his cultural legacy throughout the world and that too, without violence, coercion or manipulation. India lives because of this Indian – the common man, the lady next door, the man on the street. He may be nameless and faceless but he’s the strongest Indian, the most powerful Indian and the most stable Indian. He is India’s past, India’s present and India’s future. HE IS THE GREATEST INDIAN.
