Sunday 27 December 2015

Reaction to Ram Madhav's Al Jazeera interview is devoid of facts

Last evening BJP general secretary Ram Madhav was under constant attack from the handles associated to the Congress and others for the interview to Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera. Amidst the different arguments made by different Twitter handles, increasing intolerance, rise in communal clashes since Narendra Modi came to power and the idea of RSS as a Hindu organisation seemed to dominate the atmosphere of dissent. This environment on social media was very similar to the situation created on the sets of Al Jazeera. However, if one were to back arguments with data and objective analysis, the atmosphere appeared lopsided in favour of blatantly wrong facts and figures that rolled out from one participant to the other.
According to the published reply to an unstarred question asked in the Lok Sabha over incidents of communal violence from 2012 to 2015, the year 2014 saw an unprecedented decline in cases of violence. There was a stark reduction of 22 per cent in incidents of communal clashes, a 29 per cent decline in cases of killing and 15 per cent decline in cases of injuries owing to communal violence in comparison with 2013.
However, in contrast to the hard numbers and facts, what found repeated mention in the debate, on the sets of Al Jazeera and beyond, and shockingly here in India, was an emotional pitch for incidents of award wapsi in the name of defending secularism and restoring democracy. The tweets and comments showed a hilarious mixture of memes bordering on propaganda and agenda-driven attempt to vitiate the notion of dissent.
Dissent is an intrinsic part of a healthy democracy. But it also comes with responsibilities. It comes with the expectation of justification if dissent is challenged. Dissent in a democracy is based on rational and logical argumentation backed by incidental evidences against high emotional rhetoric and/or good-in-their-own-right arguments.
It is extremely sad that the Opposition and the champions of democracy today border more on hysteria and less on logical facts.
For the viewers of the interview like me, the debate and its aftermath created a mixed sense of despondency, anger and at times intolerance for the utter lack of constructive opposition in the country today. One feels saddened by the complete lack of an informed debate, even within the country, on a lot of issues raised in the Al Jazeera interview.
Why is it that when one allows space to talk about ghar wapsi, there seems an absolute lack of a platform to discuss religious conversions at length? Why is there an utter silence in discussing uniform civil code amidst such rage on social media? Why is there a complete lack of consensus amidst the Indian intelligentsia in discussing issues of the Kashmiri pundits with as much vigour as that of Azad Kashmir when one discusses Jammu and Kashmir?
Why is it that one cries hoarse on the bias in certain media studios but remains silent on the almost staged interview on Al Jazeera where time and space given to raise issues of alleged attack on democracy and factually suspect data on rising intolerance was disproportionately high? And lastly, why as Indians, do we fail to protest against the waste of public money by an Opposition (read Congress) as small as a WhatsApp group by creating a din in the house?
It is unfortunate that in the age of social media, where information flows freely and internationally, we have allowed lies, misrepresentation and selective bias to trend but forgotten to quote facts and logic and failed to ask the most basic questions.

Wednesday 16 December 2015

Rahul Gandhi's Barpeta Satra row exposes Congress' communal colours

As a massive PR disaster, Rahul Gandhi's Twitter handle revealed his itinerary for Assam visit on December 10 - a day before he was to arrive in the state. There was no mention of any visit to the alleged "temple" in Barpeta.
The controversy centered around a rather impassioned Rahul alleging in front of the national media that the RSS-BJP combine "prevented" him from entering the "temple" premises. And of course, somehow Prime Minister Narendra Modi was to be blamed for it.
Subsequently, in a major embarrassment for the Congress party, their state irrigation minister in Assam, Chandan Sarkar, observed that Rahul was late, could not fulfill the basic ablution rituals required before entering the satra and the satra chief revealed that there was a prolonged wait of four hours before the politician decided to give it a miss.
Ever since then, the debate has been coloured into a communal versus secular argument. However, it is not rocket science to figure that Rahul Gandhi's visit is his typical political pilgrimage in Assam and not necessarily a genuine concern for women SHGs (self-help groups) , young students, leading media personalities and intellectuals, as suggested in his now-removed itinerary on social media.
Also, his choice of audience (population wise) during the choppered-"padyatra" was cherry picked in Barpeta. Any politically conscious citizen could see the vote banks Rahul chose to appease, address and allow his access to in a district seething with Bangladeshi migrants. In such a situation, it is extremely naïve to miss out on the implications of the threads which have laid bare the controversy at hand.
Satra is a cultural entity for Assam. Assamese society has adopted the ways of a satra since its inception some 500 years ago. Satra is now trying to conserve its identity in the wake of illegal migration in the state. Therefore, it is not a temple and definitely not just a religious symbol for Hindus in Assam.
The political severity of mis-representing satra as a temple and imposing a Hindutva identity on it can cost Congress a great deal. By stripping the local sentiment attached to a satra and by trying to communalise the issue to suit a myopic electoral battle, Rahul Gandhi has resorted to a political tactic of revealing his misinformed political personality. Satra is as much a matter of Assamese identity and pride as is the depletion of one-horned Rhinoceros in the state.
Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi preposterously claimed that he would resign if it was proved that even an inch of satra land had been encroached. However, if one were to believe Asom Satra Mahasabha offcials, more than 7,000 bighas of satra land has been encroached upon. Ali Pukhuri Than in Morigaon district has reduced from 17 bighas to a mere 11. Kubaikata satra has just one kattha of land remaining with the satradhikar.
Just a month and a half ago, in Kalsilla Satra located near Mayong in Morigaon district, a village of Bangladeshi migrants appeared overnight. No tangible action has been taken on the agreement which the district administration, this "new" village and the indigenous residents of the area signed.
Around three years ago, in Batadrava Than, out of six police officers visiting to survey the concern of illegal migration, four belonging to a particular community were lynched. In 2011, in the same satra, a mosque construction preparation overnight alarmed the district administration. The 200 metres of land was declared as a new area under social forestry by none other than Tarun Gogoi and state agriculture minister, Rockybul Hussain.
In this context, it is but natural for satra followers to be angry. It is also natural that they will register protest against the entry of a politician of a ruling party. However, it is more natural for the culturally and ethnically threatened followers to get livid by an outsider who does not want to follow the rituals (because he is late).
Therefore, it is also natural for Rahul Gandhi who had visited his vote bank to throw a crumb of appeasement for the satra followers and publicise his photo op on Twitter after realising that his dereliction has snowballed into a major electoral faux pas.
With Assam elections drawing close, even a cursory look at the Congress strategy reveals how communal inclination scripts the overall narrative of the incumbent government. Whether they are "swanky" hoardings with elite, polished "looking" youth raking up the romantic notion of choice and growing intolerance in the state or the recent Barpeta controversy involving INC heir, Rahul Gandhi, the overall atmosphere in Assam Congress politics reeks of communal tendencies.
It is within this light that Barpeta Satra controversy needs to be analysed and conclusions drawn.

Friday 20 November 2015

Stop glorifying Muslim victimhood

The two camps emerging out of the debates since the attacks in Paris seem to discuss the issue in either of the two frames - the first damns Islam and the other denounces power structures. The common thread running through both these mutually exclusive arguments is the circularity of the cause-effect or chicken-egg phenomenon.
The debate around Islam and extremism has been confusingly conflated with the debate around Islamophobia. The merger of these two separate discussions on a skewed and borrowed platform of Western secularism dilutes the seriousness of two independent concerns. So each time someone tries to raise the issue of Islamic fundamentalism after these acts of terror, the arguments are systematically sidelined through a linear narrative of Muslim victimhood. Therefore, while there is enough discussion on Islamophobia, for instance, there is almost none on Kafirophobia. This organised lopsidedness of the debate is so pronounced that even if there are attempts to prise open debates around the sharia or interpretations of the Quran, those endeavours are thwarted by ideologically motivated monolithic voices glorifying Muslim victimhood in perpetuity.
The recently concluded India Ideas Conclave 2015 in Goa, for instance, attempted to define the ambit and direction of the Islam and extremism debate in the wake of the Paris attacks through the session on "Rise of Radicalism - Future of Civilisations". However, in a day and age of increasing intellectual intolerance from the "other" side of the government, this conclave, by and large, went unnoticed by most of us. Some self-proclaimed and politically aligned media pundits categorically denied any discussion on the content of the conclave and instead merited attention to hypothetical conjectures on what the conclave could mean. Even when boundaries of coverage were pushed, sound bites from ministers made guest appearances here and there.
There are three situations that one cannot ignore while discussing the growing scourge of religious intolerance. First, most of the reported acts of terror are rooted in the manipulation of Islamic laws. Second, after an act of terror, heavy criticism of the act comes primarily from non-Muslims with an increased pitch on the need for more and more "moderate Muslim" voices. And third, Muslims across the world have suffered far greater damage to their lives and identities because of the acts of terror and their aftermath.
It takes much gumption for radically progressive Muslim intellectuals like Tarek Fatah to not just speak against their religion but also express something as blasphemous as "ban the sharia". It is our collective shame that despite the symbolic and representative gestures of outrage against acts of terror, we fail to do justice to the few moderate Muslims who choose to speak and express logically against the preposterousness of the various religious diktats. It is deplorable that the liberal intellectual space where there should be excruciating clash of arguments on religion, there is instead a systematic and systemic alienation of any dialogue around Islamic verses -their layering and wrinkling over the ages gone by.
In the book Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue, authors Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz quote an independent survey that 40 million Muslims across the world support active jihad. It implies that the entire population of world's 31st and 32nd most populous country - Argentina or Sudan - might be seething with the agenda of blowing up the world and/or themselves in the name of one of the fastest spreading religions of human race.
No religion, in essence, teaches to kill and maim others. Historically, religion has been misused and abused by the powers that be, to suit the supremacy of one ideology over the other. These two articulations have become increasingly tautological in the recent past. In the event that a space for a liberal and scathing critique of various interpretations of the Quran is almost absent, the highly emotive and rhetorical lamentation over millions of lost lives has not achieved much - either in abetting these acts of terror or even softening the positions of the hardliners within various power structures or beyond.
The liberal sensibilities in us must warrant the actual progressive thinkers and rebels within Islam at least one concrete gesture - a free, responsive and unbiased debate platform without the haste to bracket and slot the articulators for our short-term and myopic political (most often electoral) motives.

Tuesday 15 September 2015

The perceptive, plotless story of the Facebook generation

http://scroll.in/article/755567/the-perceptive-plotless-story-of-the-facebook-generation
At first sight, what absolutely fascinated me about Kaushik Barua’s No Direction Rome was a tastefully conceptualised and designed book cover – understated, subtle, symbolic and stylish. Sombre and dark, it embraced a patina of lost time. Little did I know that this beautiful cover housed a carefully crafted plotless narrative of love, loss, longing and life, enmeshed in the ageless chaos of time – almost as a curse on our incidental birth. What began as a reading meant to satiate my thirst for good literature ended up as food for thought for many days to come.

While undertaking the journey with the protagonist, Krantik, No Direction Rome reminds one of Amit Chaudhuri’s Ananda in Odyssesus AbroadUndertaking a plotless rumination on an expatriate experience – dealing with questions of identity, meandering in the ennui of a modernist creation – they are similar but not congruent.

Chaudhuri’s Ananda is different from Barua’s Krantik in the sense that Ananda has a vision for his redemption – he craves for an idyllic situation in life, seeped in nostalgia and family camaraderie. Barua’s Krantik, on the other hand, rebels (kranti) without reason, asks directions to fancy places without any intention of a visit.

Krantik hates his job, imagines he has a severe medical condition, attempts to love out of boredom, destroys every shred of stability that his life seems to offer him and embraces a condition where he is forever hanging on with a deeply vacant, grim and glum mindspace. However seedy the narrative appears, Barua’s mastery of an exquisite prose, cultured in the inconsequential details of everydayness, architectured by the banality of ambitions, introduces a beautifully and artfully crafted piece.

All the while, a causal hangover and/or a “high” from this borrowed experience from Krantik belies the intense interiority of the protagonist’s mindspace. In fact, the long drawn, sleepy description that Barua sketches while narrating Krantik’s scatological fascination of observing his shit-pot and imagining the crimson of blood painting this scene for him, the writer touches something very deep in a very profound yet offhand way – that which is the running ‘theme’ in the novel.

Going somewhere while going nowhere

The purposelessness of this “Facebook generation”, as Barua prefers to call this frenzied madness, is a subject of intense introspection in No Direction RomeThere is scatology, invective, violence, love, sex, boredom, romance, weed, alcohol. There is life, meaninglessness, repetition, circularity – all making a heady cocktail of something which cannot be missed. It is right there staring at our faces – something that all of us have faced at some point in time or the other. This book offers that which is real, in the most unquestioning yet unbelieving of ways.

Cocooned in the comforting capsules of our timelines, tweeting and dubsmashing fragments of our lives – moments, thoughts, feelings – this book is a quiet refuge for us, “this generation”.  One can identify with the pictures of that lady with Somalian kids, inviting the observer into her intimate world. At the same time it also acts like the other lady in the book who slashes her wrists and never lets anyone in beyond physical penetration – the unreconciled dualism of human experiences. One can identify with Krantik, who meets Pooja, cannot muster up the courage to say no to her, but finds release and mystery in Chiara – the unresolved binaries of a singular identity.

This generation which is the raison d’etre  for Kaushik’s creation, has nothing to grasp and clasp – no ground, not twig. It is a generation lost in the ever dynamic whirlpool of transition and change, bereft of an ideal to decide, whether “to be or not to be”. This is a book which while dealing with existential questions of this generation, generates a steep flip in readers’ consciousness. It is similar to the rise or the fall of a trip the reader undertakes – curled within a smoked-up journey with Krantik, in the alleys of a directionless Rome.

Consuming the reader without a plot

It is remarkable how despite the seeming half incompleteness of the directionless plot, Barua manages to keep the scattered narrative tightly snug and “held up” in peculiar ways. The uselessness of everyday existence and its repetition like Sisyphus, the purposelessness behind a full knowledge that “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes”, like in Waiting for Godot, keeps a consistent hold over the narrative.

It is, as if by embracing the essence of postmodernism, Barua rejects the very idea of postmodernity in a strange structural symmetry. While merging the twin demands of form and formlessness of style, he audaciously challenges the discussed and the accepted “norms” of a postmodern craft.

The book is a self-conscious narrative struggling to remain unexposed behind a plotless plot.  By a seemingly maverick rumination on issues so disjointed yet connected, Barua tickles the faculty of imagination, perception, appreciation and analyses, establishing a “method to the madness”. Its effect is so deep yet unnoticed that all through this fascinating trip, the reader feels consumed with sensations of an artfully articulated cursive craft.

It is this daring experiment that makes Barua noticed among the many writers who slip in and out of today’s literary limelight. No Direction Rome is Kaushik Barua’s second book. Markedly different from his debutant novel, Windhorse, which fetched him the Sahitya Akademi award, this book adds another dimension of discussion on “ways of seeing” the world.  While Windhorse was about research and analyses, No Direction Rome is about feeling and becoming.
http://scroll.in/article/755567/the-perceptive-plotless-story-of-the-facebook-generation

Friday 28 August 2015

Family or predators? I was sexually abused, so were my mother and brother

Nineteen per cent the of world’s children live in India and children constitute 42 per cent of India’s total population. In 2007, the ministry of women and child development, presented the “Study on Child Abuse”, which among many reported facts, stated that 88.6 per cent of physically abused children in the country suffer abuse at the hands of their parents.
It is ironic that in a country which invests childcare in the hands of parents and family, believing that home is a safe and secure haven for the "future of this country", is quite literally a breeding ground of violence and abuse. The recent case of a Delhi University student complaining against her parents for subjecting her to physical and sexual abuse, therefore, should come less as a shock but more as a wake up call for all of us, as citizens of this country and as cohabitants of the society.
I was sexually abused as a child by someone in my family who was as respected as my own grandfather. I know that some of my female cousins have been sexually abused too, by someone or the other within the boundaries of the seeming perfectness of the middle class relatives community.
One of my own brothers was sexually abused as a child by one of our female relatives. Back in college, some of my hostel friends confessed of being abused as children within the confines of what we call "home" or "family".
My mother, aunt, grandmother - all have suffered sexual abuse at some point of time in the past by people as close as their own grandfathers, brothers-in-law and fathers. My previous and current female colleagues at work, at least once in their childhood (at least eight out of ten), have admitted to sexual abuse, covert or overt.
The study conducted by the government, therefore, did not come as a shock to me, when it announced that 50 per cent of child abuse came from people known to the child or from positions of trust and responsibility. Instead, what amuses me the most is a hypocritical sense of hope that we latch on to when it comes to protecting the ideal image of a home, set of family members and our unbelievable trust in the institution of motherhood.
As a society, which knows and faces this harsh reality of child sexual abuse within the cosy confines of homes and families, why are we so shocked to confront that mothers, more often than not, play a pivotal role in letting this abuse happen? By keeping mum and/or by scolding an assaulted child, thereby robbing the child of the basic human security of trust and love, she is as much of a culprit as the one who assaulted her child. The media has reported the recent case of the Delhi University girl registering a case of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother, as being "rarest of rare".
Social media pronouncements have declared this case as "one-of-its-kind" – almost unbelievable and as an aberration. The sentiment behind this lurking shock is the stereotype attached to motherhood that thrust a sense of purity upon the act of being a mother.
It is revealing and telling for us as a society how we choose to discuss an issue as sensitive as child abuse. Almost every day, we watch, hear or feel cases of child abuse reaching us. There is some Sonu lurking at a chai dhaba on our way from Delhi to Himachal on the highway who suffers abuse at the behest of his employer. There is a Chhotu braving it all with his employer behind the wheels of a truck he works on after he ran away from home facing intense economic and emotional abuse. He has accepted sexual abuse as a normal fate.
There is a Shanti from some poor state in some corner of the country who lives and works in a household at one of the metropolitan homes. And however much we would want to shed our tears on the fate of these "street and poor urchins", there is a ghastly reality peeping violently within our own "cute, little, happy home", sometimes with the silent nod or studied silence of the women who allegedly make this home "perfect".
I know an aunt in my neighbourhood who abused one of my childhood friends calling him over to her house on motherly pretexts of "he is like my son and I like to watch him study", "I want to feed my new recipe to him" and "He makes me feel my son is around".
I know my friend’s mother had asked her to shut up and not discuss the issue with anyone when my friend reported that her own brother tried to force himself upon her. I know my cousin’s helplessness when she was branded as a "liar" after she talked about a certain uncle in the family making sexual advances whenever she was alone. I know my own mother had suffered for more than a decade till she got married with the silent ignorance of "nothing is wrong in the grand happy large family" she came from.
It is time we redefine relationships in our lives. It is time we question the apparent good health of institutions like home. It is time we move beyond the definition of a family, uncoiling the strands of our collective social and political DNA and wash away the acids oozing from festering beliefs.


Tuesday 28 July 2015

Why I lost respect for Modi after hearing his speech in Bihar

http://www.dailyo.in/politics/narendra-modi-nitish-kumar-bihar-assembly-polls-bjp-jdu-muzaffarpur/story/1/5287.html

On July 25, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Bihar and addressed the Parivartan rally in Muzaffarpur, in the run-up to the Assembly elections, campaigning for the BJP. In close to a half-hour speech that Modi made, among other statements he made (on Bihari DNA, his political alienation by Nitish Kumar, etc), he talked about the power situation in Bihar.
It is important to highlight this aspect in his speech because in a situation wherein the PM addresses a political and public rally, chooses a core infrastructure concern, and makes a promise full of rhetoric and very low on a concrete plan, he loses a bit of his stature.
I belong to a village in Nalanda district in Bihar. I left the state in 2004 for my higher education. When I visited my village for a month-long stay in April 2004, summers had begun to fester the day. There was very little electricity. Power used to be there during the days and/or light up the nights with a lot of irregularities, but still, was enough for basic sustenance. This was relief because years preceding that time saw almost negligible electricity in my village. Today, when I visit the village, I find all the houses lit up. Students no longer study next to kerosene lanterns and eye-damaging bottled diyas. Households share hot food at ten or eleven in the night and are no longer forced to have dinner by the time daylight lasts. Farmers in my village use surplus power for irrigation and other activities. Older people watch their religious soaps and young women and men their daily dose of youth-centric serials.
Statistics suggest that from almost zilch production a decade ago to a draw of nearly 3,182 MW now, per capita consumption of electricity in Bihar has increased by 70 per cent. In the past decade, 16,000 additional villages in Bihar have been electrified. Today, 96 per cent of the villages in Bihar have almost 16-17 hours of electricity every day and share the same story as that of Narayanapur - my village in Nalanda.
Albeit slow and "just there but not enough", the improved power situation has revolutionised the social dynamics of rural Bihar. It is important to understand this change from the vantage point of what Bihar was to what it is today. Therefore, for a prime minister to totally discount the merits of development in the past decade by a chief minister who might not have a favourable position in his mind space, is not just an error in administrative judgment by the head of a democratic state, but also a faux pas in political communication, especially when, during his chief ministership, Mr Modi had waxed so eloquently on the need for cooperative federalism and cordial dynamics between the center and state.
A prime minister's promises to its audience (even if it comes from his political position in a party) sound vacuous without a roadmap. Modi shied away from mentioning the reasons behind the "abysmal" power situation in the state. In a state where power production is a major concern as of now, by bringing in a parallel from Gujarat, he exposed himself to making a comparison that denotes a clear lack of understanding of resources available to Bihar and the other problems that plague the power situation here. For citizens aware and ambitious at the same time, what was expected from the prime minister was a clear communication of short, medium and long-term goals towards improving the power structure in Bihar, if at all he chose to address this concern in an open rally.
One expected him to mention that being the third largest user of solar power in India and one of the leading names to experiment with organic methods of farming, Bihar has a huge potential to harness the sun and bio-fuel and bio-mass (from sugarcane and paddy, for instance) for power production. One expected the honourable prime minister to speak about the need to aggressively commercialise the model of power distribution in the state when consumers in Bihar have readily showed interest in upping their expenditure to meet their requirements. One also expected him to go beyond the theatrics of public speech and point out at the loopholes and promise the audience towards taking sincere steps  in plugging them, if he so wished to come down heavy on the current political ruling.  
In short, the Muzaffarpur rally fell short of Modi's stature as a leader. As a prime minister who addressed a rally in Bihar amidst other state commitments on his maiden visit to the state after 14 months, a visionary roadmap sans fluff was found amiss. Instead, the hashtags on Twitter, such as #ModiInsultsBihar, reek of a grave faux pas as far as political communication is concerned.

Saturday 25 July 2015

The Aarushi case receives a timely, thrilling investigation

http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbeat/the-aarushi-case-receives-a-timely-thrilling-investigation
Journalism has undergone massive changes after the digital boom in India. Video journalism, backed up by social media, has created a space where the relevance of the old rules is slowly diminishing. The old model had journalists focusing on careful, research-base chronicling and the patient chasing of stories. This has gradually been replaced by a culture of real time, breaking news stories coupled with aggressive analyses in the form of opinion-based content. While one may argue that this has, to an extent, diluted the quality of journalism, it cannot be denied that it has also resulted in a democratisation of media space that has gripped the national consciousness. It is in this context, especially, that I feel Aarushi, Avirook Sen's second book, is an important and timely one: to an extent, it combines the virtues of both the old and the new models of journalism.
Sen's gaze is that of a seasoned and perceptive researcher. He patiently sifts through the documents of the case, a significant volume of criminal files, by any standard. The book raises a series of questions on the investigation. By the end of the narrative, one realises that the manner in which the Aarushi case was hastily finished by the police is unfortunately representative of the police and the legal system of our country. Perhaps the most admirable thing about Sen's endeavour is his never-say-never approach, a must when you have to chase a story set in the murky suburbs of Noida. It is as enthralling for readers as it is inspiring for budding journalists.
Aarushi is written in a gripping style, quite reminiscent of a crime thriller. Sen maintains a remarkable restraint throughout: he does not overly dramatise the story, which is the right call because of the highly volatile media attention that this case has received. At the same time, not a single page in this book compromises readability. This is easier said than done. Here, for instance, he provides us with a small but revealing sketch of Dr B.K. Mohapatra, one of the CFSL scientists who conducted DNA tests on the evidence collected from the crime scene.
"At lunchtime one day I found Mohapatra sitting unaccompanied in the courtroom, minding two large folders on a table in front. He was a short, spectacled man, with a thick Odiya accent that sometimes confused people from the north ('blood', for instance, would become 'blawed'). He looked simple, and so were his concerns. As I sat next to him, he complained about the unpleasant extended summer, and the long waits in court. He then said it must be very hard work for reporters as well. He had seen us standing at the courtroom's door all day because we weren't allowed in. I mumbled something about everyone having to do a job, when he asked me: 'Do you get TA/DA?' I told him we didn't, but he was entitled to allowances, surely. He nodded, and I thought how the government had taken over the scientist in Mohapatra."
In recent years, books like Dilip D'Souza's The Curious Case of Binayak Sen, Chander Suta Dogra's Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story and Ritu Sarin's The Assassination of India Gandhihave given Indian investigative writing a shot in the arm. These books aim to provide some kind of closure to the respective criminal cases they tackle, while pointing a finger at the system. However, books like these also run the risk of losing objectivity due to ideological fervor, in some cases.
Aarushi, when seen within this larger trend, appears as a text striving to make a statement by not just telling an untold story but also trying to establish readers' connection with this kind of writing. So while the book bares the futility and the exasperation of a grimly ambitious legal and social system in India, it is also highly conscious of its literary ambitions; at places, the overall tenor of the book approaches Agatha Christie territory. By doing so, Sen walks a tightrope.
But Sen is no stranger to this style: even his debut book, Looking For America, took quite a few risks with its all-or-nothing style. It had its share of detractors that criticised it for its alleged sensationalism. The uniqueness of Aarushi lies in engaging with this concern headlong. Sen rebukes the insensitive reportage of the Aarushi murder by most mainstream media houses. And he does it like an old school journalist should: by not offering judgment or analysis but leaving enough cues and facts to build an argument. For instance, the section about the narco-analysis (commonly known as the "lie detector" tests) speaks volumes.
"As the story panned out, the Talwars' undisputed presence in the flat that night burdened them with having to not just plead their innocence, but also answer the question 'If you didn't do it, who did?'
They did not know. In fact, investigators knew much more than them; the CBI had enough material to, at the very least, form a plausible alternative hypothesis. This is the material they hid from the Talwars, and prevented from being brought on the record in court.
This material was gathered by investigators in the months of June and July 2008. They are the reports of the scientific tests on the three servants. A few fragments were leaked in 2008, but once AGL Kaul took over, they were just buried."
While chronicling the various gaps in the CBI's final narrative of the case, while explaining the profile of the households which interrogate the case — Talwar's family, relatives and friends, household helps and the government machinery, which ought to help in dire situations — the author all but accomplishes what sociologists and social scientists would aim for in a detailed academic paper. Barring a few editorial overlooks, Aarushi is a highly recommended read.
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbeat/the-aarushi-case-receives-a-timely-thrilling-investigation

Tuesday 14 July 2015

Seven cold questions Aarushi book leaves us with

The nation woke up to a sensational murder case in May 2008. A 14-year old girl, Aarushi Talwar, was found dead in her apartment at Noida’s Jalvayu Vihar. After a five-year long ordeal, the court pinned the "guilty" tag on the Talwars – Aarushi’s parents. Currently, the couple serves their term in Dasna jail.
Despite the haste and drama that accompanied this trial, there were many layers and edges to the murder that has left one of the most intriguing cases of its times "unsolved" till date. Avirook Sen’s book,Aarushi, is an attempt to lay bare the narrative that went unnoticed, or perhaps was deliberately ignored.
Here are a few questions the book raises, which must stir the conscience of someone somewhere – the legal system, society, police and/or the media:
1. The story that charges the Talwars guilty is rife with contradictions – loopholes that have been systematically ignored. Take, for instance, the assertion that Aarushi was raped. Initial medical reports claimed that nothing abnormal was indicated in her sexual organs. By the time the case was closed, her "cervix was found wide open". What is baffling is that no one – neither the media, which seemed to be engaged in a close scrutiny of the case, nor the legal system – raised questions over this extremely contradictory situation. And in the event of this development, the next question is, what was the reason for an apex body like the CBI to seek the help of either this erroneous declaration or the callousness with which they handled this case to establish something as basic as "Who killed Aarushi"?
2. Continuing with the line of many "misjudgements" and "misunderstandings" on the basis of which the case was established, is the equally baffling case of Hemraj’s blood-soaked purple pillow cover. While the CBI claims that the pillow cover was found in Aarushi’s bedroom, the reality is that it was discovered from Hemraj’s own room. It is frustrating and infuriating to see that such carelessness punctuated the narrative around the whereabouts of the pillow case. Even in the end, the CBI’s final version, touted as the "true version", went unquestioned by the various onlookers and custodians of justice.
3. Bharti Mandal, the househelp who worked for the Talwars, gave her first statement to the effect that the door was locked and "I never touched the door". Later, her version changed to "I tried to open the door but the door did not open", peppered by "I am saying what I have been taught to say". All logical construction of the case required a closer look into this departure of statements from something to the other. Unfortunately, no attempt to investigate was made.
4. KK Gautam, the UP police officer who was involved with the case, on being asked if there was any pressure on him, replied, “It is best we do not discuss this… you already know everything already. Please let us not discuss this anymore.”
5. There was no blood on the stairs that led to the terrace. Blood was found only on the railings and the terrace. Hemraj’s blood soaked pillow case was found in his room. The CBI established that he was killed in Aarushi’s room. Why was the opinion that he could have been killed on the terrace not considered at all?
6. Narco analyses of Krishna, Raj Kumar (other servants linked with the case) and the Talwar couple reveal that the former two are guilty and the latter innocent. If scientific analyses are rendered invalid in the court of law, by what supreme logic was the infuriating, sexist and misogynist "story" - the sensational coverage that Aarushi was a serial flirt, that Talwars were a couple with "loose sexual morals" (stereotyped as becoming of all upper middle class households) - given so much weight that the Talwars were pronounced guilty after a humiliating process of character assassination?
Dr Dahiya’s insinuation that Hemraj and Aarushi were involved in a sexual intercourse (not rape, as the later post mortem suggests) on the day of the crime was touted as a prima facie conclusion that led to other interpretations in the case. It is unbecoming of the legal system and the media to not raise any hue and cry over how this was a confident assertion without any evidence.
7. The most astonishing and infuriating information that the book uncovers is that the verdict in the case was written a month prior to the actual announcement of the sentence on the Talwars, even before the defence could conclude its argument. As Judge Shyam Lal’s team revealed, because there were no good scribes available in the area they worked in and because language (English) had to be perfect in putting across a historic judgement, the "writing" had to be done prior to the actual announcement – before Lal retired!
These questions, and many other ignored facts, uncovered by Avirook Sen’s book cry for a fresh and objective analysis of the case that failed not just a teenager, but the entire concept of justice.

Sunday 17 May 2015

When women step out of Indian epics to express real desires and choices in real books

http://scroll.in/article/727933/when-women-step-out-of-indian-epics-to-express-real-desires-and-choices-in-real-books
The Indian novel writing tradition is by and large a postcolonial phenomenon. Right from one of the first novels in English written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay to the deluge of novels written, published and consumed today, the Indian novel tradition has traversed a long distance in terms of scope and expanse.

While we have had novel writing in various languages and dialects of the country, we have also had a defined canon of “Indian Writing in English” taught at universities and colleges in India. Translation of novels from regional languages into English has been continuously shifting the boundaries of Indian writing and destabilising the appropriation of representative Indian novels within the elitist definition of a “canon”.

Traditionally, debates around canonisation and canon formation in India have been dominated by class, caste and gender concerns. Women Writing in India, published in two volumes edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, is a comprehensive collection of women writing in India from 600 BC to the present day. Tharu’s anthology and a survey of the contemporary literary oeuvre of our times reveal the intricate intimacy between literary production of women writers and the temporal contours of their respective histories.

Mythology, mythological characters and myths have informed women’s writings over centuries. Till the early twentieth century, the layers of engagement with history within women’s writings were more nuanced and under the sheets, as if cautious to not unruffle the “said” and the “done”, the “established” and the “systematised”.

Breaking the mould

From the second half of the twentieth century, one witnessed a registering of protests and contrary opinions almost unabashedly. Savitribai Phule’s published writings, or the works of Ambai and Ismat Chughtai were feminist writings that struggled hard to put women’s voices as a legitimate concern of history.

Contemporary writings by women have heralded a different wave of communication for and with women. They not only create strong characters, but also explore contours of literary definitions beyond the limits of the defined canon of feminist writing.  Especially while exploring mythology, they have been informed by this constant political struggle to appropriate their recreated, gendered version as the historical version of a feminine reality.

Sita and Draupadi

Kavita Kane’s Sita’s Sister and Karna’s Wife explore the epics – the Ramayanaand the Mahabharata – in a fashion which is almost a retelling of the two representative beej kavyas of India. The eyes of the two women relegated and tucked away rather dismissively as the wives of two characters, Laxman and Karna respectively, struggling below the massive weights of the epic heroes, refashion the entire narrative in a way which is more real, more fleshed out and more relatable.

The world of Urmi, Sita’s sister – not Laxman’s wife or Ram’s sister-in-law – is one that in its very introduction, the cover of the book itself, discards the male heroic grandeur of the quasi-historical narrative. The book presents a layered representation of Urmi’s identity as an intelligent, ambitious, uncomplicated and matter-of-fact woman who is capable not just of loving madly but also of defining her love with new meanings of intellectual achievements in the absence of her beloved.

She is not the complaining, crying, pining, vulnerable woman who writes love poems while Laxman is away in exile. Urmi utilises the redundancy of a marital life by informing herself of various academic disciplines and earns the position of a sage invited for an annual conference – almost entirely a male bastion.

In Karna’s Wife, the author tries to meticulously lend a voice to the doubly marginalised Uruvi, the second wife of an unsung hero Karna. Uruvi is a fiercely independent woman who makes choices according to what she wants, rather than “what should have been”. And she does so in a logical fashion and not as a statement of protest.

Her alacrity in responding to situations and her deftness in political matters etches out a character which is strong and free – a character which would never ever have been a part of the popular narrative across history.

In the same book, the writer also lends space to the other two marginalised women in the epic – Draupadi and Vrushali, Karna’s lover and Karna’s first wife, respectively. This authorial space to Draupadi’s articulation of her desires for Karna and insights into Vrushali’s thinking after Uruvi shares Karna’s love, make for a far more nuanced, layered and humane narrative than the grandeur of an epic literary style can achieve.

Rati, wife of Kama

Anuja Chandramouli’s Kamadeva recreates the story of Kamdeva and his wife Rati. For the first time in contemporary literary discourse, Kamadeva enters the imagination of the authorial voice. Recreating the lives of the eponymous hero and his wife through a revisiting of his representation in the Puranas and theUpanishads, the is to most diligently expropriate a voice almost lost in epic canonisation. The translation and transcription of characters from mythological narratives into the popular and contemporary idioms of our times make the story more relatable and believable.

These contemporary women authors have not crafted their women characters to challenge the status quo. These characters register their strong presence without jostling for space. It is as if they already belong there. It is natural cohabitation with whatever exists without destabilizing the social order.

The women – Uruvi, Urmila, Rati, Draupadi, Sita – register an acknowledgement of their roles and identities within the larger patriarchal and male-dominated order of the day. They ask relevant questions, demand pointed answers, and ensure their voices are listened to and not just heard. These contemporary characters from mythology are not like Jane Eyre or Bertha Mason or Maggi or Tess or Lolitha who struggle and sometimes lose their sanity or even their lives in the process of seeking their space.

Contemporary writings by women recreating the mythical and mythological characters of the Indian literary tradition seem co-terminus with the rise of a new middle-class woman. The search for an identity and exploration of the self in a postmodern world of shifting definitions around feminism and patriarchy have reincarnated the mythological characters as real women walking around in the contriving corridors of literary history with the liberating ease and comfort that seems almost a utopia.

In the event that a khap orders the murder of a woman over asserting her choice who to live with, Draupadi narrating how she always felt desirous for Karna despite being identified as panchali is a fate almost enviable and ideal.
http://scroll.in/article/727933/when-women-step-out-of-indian-epics-to-express-real-desires-and-choices-in-real-books