[chhattisgarh-net] Digest Number 2243

Sun, 13 Jun 2010 03:32:59 -0700

Title: chhattisgarh-net

Messages In This Digest (6 Messages)

Messages

1.

Live report from public hearing in Dharmajaigarh

Posted by: "CGnet Swara" cgnetsw...@gmail.com

Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:33 am (PDT)



Dear friends

Apologies for this long silence from CGnet Swara. We are up again with
a new temporary number

Please listen to this live report from Ramesh Agrawal Ji from
Dharmajaigarh in Raigarh district on how public hearings are done just
for the sake of it and how they have become a cruel joke on people in
the name of justice

http://swara.no-ip.org/admin/playback.php?play=1111

After clicking this link you will have to also click the play button
on front of those messages to listen. Please bear with us. We are
working on these issues

You can also listen to the report by dialing a new number 08040952044.

If you have any message please dial the same number and record your
message. This number is a temporary one and will change again in next
few days

regards
CGnet Swara moderators

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2a.

Re: Chhattisgarh seeks to free schools from security forces

Posted by: "sebastian" dears...@yahoo.com   dearsaby

Sat Jun 12, 2010 8:37 am (PDT)



Dear all,

Now it is a clear admission by the state government that schools have been occupied by the police and para military personnel who are supposed to fight against the Naxals something which was denied by the government in the past

The Naxals have been claiming that they were only destroying those school buildings occupied by the police and not any school in which children were getting educated.

What gurantee is there if new residential schools are built that will not be occupied by the police as they will have more living facilities?

The statistics shows that there is a big vaccuum of teachers in the naxalite areas and the children were not educated nor the government took any interest in the education of tribal children.

Question is what has happened to all the multi crores that was received in the name of tribal welfare and tribal children education etc.

Another 1000 crore is coming, where will it go?

First four years of the government are used for collecting money for the party for the next election and then in the last one year(5th year) some sops are given to the poor who in meantime forget what happened in the previous 4 years and vote for the party.Party will have plenty of funds to contest the elections which is seen during the election time.Pouring out of money and liquor and get the vote of the public.

In the 63 years of independance how many percentage of the tribals in Bastar has been educated.Even with the reservation how many people got job and how many tribals are employed in the higher strata of the bureaucracy?

And every program is a source of income for the politicians and bureaucrats and the people for whom it has been aimed remains unaware of the same.

Seba
--- In chhattisgarh-n...@yahoogroups.com, "S.Choudhary" <smita...@...> wrote:
>
> Link:
> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Chhattisgarh-seeks-to-free-schools-from-security-forces/articleshow/6034009.cms
>
> Chhattisgarh seeks to free schools from security forces
>

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3.

Bhopal : Please sign the Petition

Posted by: "Dr.V.N. Sharma" vns...@gmail.com   vns44

Sat Jun 12, 2010 11:32 pm (PDT)



Dear all,

The Bhopal judgement is so unfair! The main accused have not been punished
and the punishment for the others is insignificant. Even after witnessing
this injustice the Government is only considering minor cosmetic changes to
the nuclear liability bill so that foreign corporations stay happy.

The bill allows foreign corporations to get away by paying a meager
compensatory amount in case of a nuclear accident in the country. The Bhopal
case highlights how an American corporation remains untouched even after
causing the deaths of over 25,000 people and affecting thousands more.

The liability bill in its current form is another *injustice in the
making*and needs to be changed. You have already signed the petition
asking the
Prime Minister to stop this bill. More signatures will strengthen the
opposition to this bill

Can send this email to your friends and family asking them to sign the
petition?

------------------------------
Even
with the injustices of Bhopal right in front of their eyes, the
government seems to be merely considering cosmetic changes to the nuclear
liability bill, that mean nothing.

The proposed bill appeases foreign corporations by allowing them to get
away by paying a meagre compensatory amount in case of a nuclear accident in
the country. The Bhopal judgment highlights the manner in which an American
corporation has been so easily let off after causing the deaths of over
25,000 people and affecting thousands more.

We cannot let another Bhopal happen! Over 1.8 lakh people have already
signed the petition asking Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to *stop the
bill*in its current form. More signatures will add strength to the
opposition to
this bill.

*Watch this video and then sign the petition to help add more pressure on
the PM.*.

http://www.greenpeace.org/india/stop-another-bhopal<http://links.mailing.greenpeace.org/ctt?kn=8&m=34971445&r=NDU2NjAxODgzMQS2&b=0&j=NzU0NTE1OTUS1&mt=1&rt=0>

The petition says: *"India must hold a public consultation before changing
the liability rules for any nuclear accidents caused by U.S. corporations."*

The main accused for the Bhopal tragedy have not been punished. While the
punishment for the others is paltry.

A nuclear disaster could be worse than what happened in Bhopal 25 years ago.
Yet our leaders have set a compensatory amount lower than what was set for
Bhopal.

If more and more of us sign this petition the government will know what the
people of this country want and prevent another Bhopal in the making.

http://www.greenpeace.org/india/stop-another-bhopal<http://links.mailing.greenpeace.org/ctt?kn=8&m=34971445&r=NDU2NjAxODgzMQS2&b=0&j=NzU0NTE1OTUS1&mt=1&rt=0>

Thanks a billion!

Karuna Raina
Nuclear Campaigner
Greenpeace India

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4.

Help save lives of RTI activists : Petition

Posted by: "urvashi sharma" rtimahilamanc...@yahoo.co.in

Sat Jun 12, 2010 11:35 pm (PDT)



Dear all ,

Please sign the online petition titled " Help save lives of RTI
activists / RTI users to save democracy in INDIA " and circulate it to
all your friends.

the link is

http://www.petitiononline.com/13062010/petition.html

best regards

Urvashi Sharma
http://yaishwaryaj.hpage.com

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5.

Knocks On The Door: It's The Newspaper Boy by Arundhati Roy

Posted by: "CGNet" cgnet...@gmail.com

Sun Jun 13, 2010 2:09 am (PDT)



http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265790

While the Indian government considers deploying the army and air force to quell the rebellion in the countryside, strange things are happening in the cities. On June 2, the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights held a public meeting in Mumbai. The main speakers were Gautam Navlakha, editorial consultant of the Economic and Political Weekly, and myself. The press was there in strength. The meeting lasted for more than three hours. It was widely covered by the print media and TV. On June 3, several newspapers, TV channels and online news portals like rediff.com covered the event quite accurately. The Times of India (Mumbai edition) had an article headlined ‘We need an idea that is neither Left nor Right’, and the Hindu’s article was headlined ‘Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?’ The recording of the meeting is up on YouTube.

The day after the meeting, PTI put out a brazenly concocted account of what I had said. The PTI report was first posted by the Indian Express online on June 3 at 1.35 pm. The headline said: ‘Arundhati backs Maoists, dares authorities to arrest her’. Here are some excerpts:

“Author Arundhati Roy has justified the armed resistance by Maoists and dared the authorities to arrest her for supporting their cause. ‘The Naxal movement could be nothing but an armed struggle. I am not supporting violence. But I am also completely against contemptuous atrocities-based political analysis. It ought to be an armed movement. Gandhian way of opposition needs an audience, which is absent here. People have debated long before choosing this form of struggle,’ said Roy, who had saluted the ‘people of Dantewada’ after 76 CRPF and police personnel were mowed down by Maoists in the deadliest attack targeting security forces. ‘I am on this side of line. I do not care...pick me up put me in jail,’ she asserted.”

Let me begin with the end of the report. The suggestion that I saluted the “people of Dantewada” after the Maoists killed 76 CRPF and police personnel is a piece of criminal defamation. I have made it quite clear in an interview on CNN-IBN that I viewed the death of the CRPF men as tragic, and that I thought they were pawns in a war of the rich against the poor. What I said at the meeting in Mumbai was that I was contemptuous of the hollow condemnation industry the media has created and that as the war went on and the violence spiralled, it was becoming impossible to extract any kind of morality from the atrocities committed by both sides, so an atrocity-based analysis was a meaningless exercise. I said that I was not there to defend the killing of ordinary people by anybody, neither the Maoists nor the government, and that it was important to ask what the CRPF was doing with 27 AK-47s, 38 INSAS, 7 SLRs, 6 light machine guns, one stengun and a two-inch mortar in tribal villages. If they were there to wage war, then being railroaded into condemning the killing of the CRPF men by the Maoists meant being railroaded into coming down on the side of the government in a war that many of us disagreed with.

The maoists are the most militant end of a bandwidth of movements against corporate land grab. But the government has expanded it to include anyone who disagrees with it.


The rest of the PTI report was a malicious, moronic mish-mash of what transpired at the meeting. My views on the Maoists are clear. I have written at length about them. At the meeting, I said that the people’s resistance against the corporate land grab consisted of a bandwidth of movements with different ideologies, of which the Maoists were the most militant end. I said the government was labelling every resistance movement, every activist, ‘Maoist’ in order to justify dealing with them in repressive, military fashion. I said the government had expanded the meaning of the word ‘Maoist’ to include everybody who disagreed with it, anybody who dared to talk about justice. I drew attention to the people of Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur who were waging peaceful protests but were living under siege, surrounded by hundreds of armed police, were being lathicharged and fired at. I said that local people thought long and hard before deciding what strategy of resistance to adopt. I spoke of how people who lived deep inside forest villages could not resort to Gandhian forms of protest because peaceful satyagraha was a form of political theatre that in order to be effective, needed a sympathetic audience, which they did not have. I asked how people who were already starving could go on hunger strikes. I certainly never said anything like “it ought to be an armed movement”. (I’m not sure what on earth that means.)
I went on to say that all the various resistance movements today, regardless of their differences, understood they were fighting a common enemy, so they were all on one side of the line, and that I stood with them. But from this side of the line, instead of only asking the government questions, we should ask ourselves some questions. Here are my exact words:

“I think it is much more interesting to interrogate the resistance to which we belong, I am on this side of the line. I am very clear about that. I don’t care, pick me up, put me in jail. I am on this side of the line. But on this side of the line, we must turn around and ask our comrades questions.”

I then said that while Gandhian methods of resistance were not proving effective, Gandhian movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan had a radical and revolutionary vision of “development” and while the Maoists’ methods of resistance were effective, I wondered whether they had thought through the kind of “development” they wanted. Apart from the fact that they were against the government selling out to private corporations, was their mining policy very different from state policy? Would they leave the bauxite in the mountain—which is what the people who make up their cadre want—or would they mine it when they came to power? I read out Pablo Neruda’s Standard Oil Company that tells us what an old battle this one is.

The PTI reporter who had made it a point to take permission from the organisers to record cannot claim his or her version to be a matter of ‘interpretation’. It is blatant falsification. Surprisingly, the one-day-old report was published by several newspapers and broadcast by TV channels on June 4, many of whose own reporters had covered the event accurately the previous day and obviously knew the report to be false. The Economic Times said: “Publicity-seeking Arundhati Roy wants to be Aung San Suu Kyi”. I’m curious—why would newspapers and TV channels want to publish the same news twice, once truthfully and then falsely?

That same evening, at about seven, two men on a motorcycle drove up to my home in Delhi and began hurling stones at the window. One stone nearly hit a small child playing on the street. Angry people gathered and the men fled. Within minutes, a Tata Indica arrived with a man who claimed to be a reporter from Zee TV, asking if this was “Arundhati Roy’s house” and whether there had been trouble. Clearly, this was a set-up, a staged display of ‘popular anger’ to be fed to our barracuda-like TV channels. Fortunately for me, that evening their script went wrong. But there was more to come. On June 5, the Dainik Bhaskar in Raipur carried a news item “Himmat ho to AC kamra chhod kar jungle aaye Arundhati (if she has the guts, Arundhati should leave her air-conditioned room and come to the jungle)” in which Vishwa Ranjan, the director general of police of Chhattisgarh, challenged me to face the police by joining the Maoists in the forest. Imagine that—the police DGP and me, Man to Man. Not to be outdone, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Chhattisgarh, Ms Poonam Chaturvedi, announced to the press that I should be shot down at a public crossroad, and that other traitors like me should be given the death sentence. (Perhaps someone should tell her that this sort of direct incitement to violence is an offence under the Indian Penal Code.) Mahendra Karma, chief of the murderous ‘people’s’ militia, the Salwa Judum, which is guilty of innumerable acts of rape and murder, asked for legal action to be taken against me. On Tuesday, June 8, Hindi daily Nayi Duniya reported that complaints have been filed against me in two separate police stations in Chhattisgarh, Bhata Pada and Teli Bandha, by private individuals objecting to my “open support for the Maoists”.

Is this what Military Intelligence calls psyops (psychological operations)? Or is it the urban avatar of Operation Green Hunt? In which a government news agency helps the home ministry to build up a file on those it wants to put away, inventing evidence when it can’t find any? Or is PTI trying to deliver the more well-known among us to the lynch mob so that the government does not have to risk its international reputation by arresting or eliminating us? Or is it just a way of forcing a crude polarisation, a ridiculous dumbing down of the debate—if you’re not with “us”, you are a Maoist? Not just a Maoist, but a stupid, arrogant, loud-mouthed Maoist. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous, and shameless, but it isn’t new. Ask any Kashmiri, or any young Muslim being held as a “terrorist” without any evidence except baseless media reports. Ask Mohammed Afzal, sentenced to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society”.

Now that Operation Green Hunt has begun to knock on the doors of people like myself, imagine what’s happening to activists and political workers who are not well known. To the hundreds who are being jailed, tortured and eliminated. June 26 is the 35th anniversary of the Emergency. Perhaps the Indian people should declare (because the government certainly won’t) that this country is in a state of Emergency. (On second thoughts, did it ever go away?) This time censorship is not the only problem. The manufacture of news is an even more serious one.

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6.

An Article by Prof Kancha Ilaiah - Who's afraid of caste census?

Posted by: "Madhu Chandra" fin...@gmail.com   madhuchandrasingh

Sun Jun 13, 2010 2:10 am (PDT)



Who's afraid of caste census?
June 12th, 2010 By Kancha Ilaiah

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/node/145718

Ever since the Centre announced that it would collect data on various castes during the ongoing Census, the media has created a hue and cry saying that this would harm the nation and open a Pandora's Box of caste conflicts. On the other hand, those who seek caste enumeration are of the view that this would clear the cobwebs and deliver proper data on other backward classes (OBCs) that will help implement reservation policies and welfare schemes better.
The collection of caste data was not a decision taken by the government on its own. The OBC leadership across the country has demanded it and the Supreme Court advised the Centre to go for such a Census to ensure that an accurate population database was made available.

Let us not forget the fact that even at the time of the 2001 Census there was a strong demand for caste census. The then deputy Prime Minister L.K Advani, in fact, went on record to say that caste data would be collected. But Right-wing academic forces - particularly a group of sociologists and anthropologists - advised the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government not to go for such an enumeration as it would go against the interests of the ruling upper castes and communities.

It should be noted that the opposition to caste data has been coming from upper castes that still control the levers of power. The lower castes have never opposed such a proposal.

It is fallacious to argue that society would get further divided if the population of each caste is known to the policymakers and to the public.

Caste culture is all around us. In the dalit-bahujan discourse, the upper castes are being shown as constituting less than 15 per cent. This could be totally wrong. Even within the lower castes there are several false claims about numbers. Every caste claims that it is numerically the strongest and keeps asking for its "rightful" share.

How to tell them that their claims are wrong? When caste has become such an important category of day-to-day reckoning it is important to have proper data at hand to tell communities that they constitute this much and cannot ask for more than their share.

It is true that we cannot distribute everything based on caste. But caste census is the right basis for statistics such as literacy rate and issues like the proportion of representation. Once we cite the Census data there cannot be any authentic opposition to that evidence.

The upper caste intelligentsia is afraid that once detailed data on number of people in lower castes is available it would become a major ground for asking for accurate proportional representation in certain sectors, such as education and employment.

For example, once the caste data is available, the 50 per cent limit on reservations imposed by the Supreme Court could be questioned on the basis of numbers. This would in turn help in sustaining the overall system of liberal democracy. The system of democracy would only get deeper with the discourse of numbers.

Democracy is in effect a system of numbers unlike communism, which does not deal with numbers while institutionalising a government. In a democracy, the governing system is institutionalised through an electoral process and in such a system the people must be counted from all angles - sex, race, religion, caste and so on. In a democracy based on numbers, any section of society can come to power.

Based on the counting on the basis of religion, Hindus have realised that they are the majority. And because of that understanding they have claimed power. When Mahatma Gandhi suggested that Muhammed Ali Jinnah should be made the first Prime Minister in order to avoid Partition, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel put forth the argument that India was a Hindu-majority nation and would not accept a Muslim as its first Prime Minister. Where did the notion of Hindu majoritarianism come from? It came from numbers.

With the same logic what is wrong if women, cutting across religious divides, count themselves, and organise themselves to come to power? They constitute about 50 per cent of the population and if they want to fight for gender democracy, they too can come to power. So should there be a demand for abolition of gender enumeration, too?

If caste census is done, the India democracy would thrive on the firm support of the lower castes who keep hoping of getting their share based on their numbers. The upper castes may feel desolate with the system of democracy itself, if this shift begins to take place. They might call such a shift "castocracy". But would they call a state or a nation being ruled by women "womenocracy"?

Cognitive social psychology says all such theories are constructed on a convenience known as "comfort zone". If brown upper castes live in white societies they see brown bashing but black bashing remains hidden in their blind spots. In white societies the browns are not in their comfort zone but in India they are and do not want to see the other's "discomfort zone".

Many upper caste intellectuals say that caste was a construction of the colonial census system. They talk as if caste never existed before the British started an enumerative process. By their logic we should come to the conclusion that before the British enumerated people based on religion, there were no religions in India. There are many such blind spots in India and that is why we still remain backward in theories of knowledge.

Let all castes - not just OBCs - be counted for strengthening our democratic system. I know that even mine is a blind-spot theory but it may have the effect of an antidote.

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