August 2015 Archives

Murder in the Academy: MM Kalburgi’s Dangerous Literary Studies

The context of Kalburgi’s life’s work – and the likely context of his death – is the fraught cultural politics of the Lingayat community in Karnataka.

The context of Kalburgi’s life’s work – and the likely context of his death – is the fraught cultural politics of the Lingayat community in Karnataka

Youth Congress members protest against the killing of former Vice-Chancellor of Hampi University M M Kalburgi who was shot dead at his Kalyanagar residence by unidentfied gunmen in Dharwad on Sunday. Credit: PTI

Bengaluru: The esteemed literary scholar M M Kalburgi was shot dead outside his home in Dharwad today, producing a wave of speculation on the identity and motive of his killers. Kalburgi died in hospital after being shot at close range by two assailants, who arrived at his doorstep at 9 am on Sunday morning.

Gatherings to condole his death, and demand justice for his murder, took place across Karnataka including at the Town Hall in Bengaluru, where outrage over the crime was mixed with ambivalence over who might be behind it.

At the Town Hall, many supporters had turned their suspicion on unspecified right-wing forces, and some were already comparing Kalburgi’s murder with those of the rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare in Maharashtra. Others present cautioned against jumping to any conclusions.

The context of Kalburgi’s life’s work – and the likely context of his death – is the fraught cultural politics of the Lingayat community in Karnataka. Kalburgi, a former vice-chancellor of Kannada University, was a progressive voice among the Lingayats, the middle-caste group that dominates state politics.

The Lingayats originated as a social movement led by the 12th century philosopher Basava. The founding literature of the movement is in the form of vachana verses, of which Kalburgi, as a scholar of Old Kannada, was a leading authority. As a result, Kalburgi’s work had implications not only for the theology of the Lingayat establishment, but for its enormous political and financial power.

Kalburgi frequently riled the Lingayat orthodoxy, most memorably in 1989, when he completed a study of the vachanas of Neelambika, Basava’s second wife. Kalburgi linked them to a minor myth in which Basava, unable to refuse anything to a supplicant, gave away his second wife to a Jangama sanyasi. According to Kalburgi, Neelambika’s own vachanas suggest that she and Basava did indeed cease their conjugal relationship. Another controversial claim was about the virgin birth of his nephew, Channa Basavanna, who took over the leadership of the movement. Conservative Lingayats were outraged and Kalburgi received death threats; eventually, he was forced to apologise and retract his statements.

File Photo of Former Vice-Chancellor of Hampi University, M M Kalburgi who was shot dead at his Kalyan Nagar residence by unidentified gunmen, in Dharwad on Sunday. Credit: PTI

More recently, Kalburgi has declared that the Lingayats cannot be called Hindus – attracting the hostility of the RSS (the Lingayat vote was crucial to the election of the first BJP government in Karnataka in 2004, and its first chief minister, BS Yeddyurappa, was a Lingayat). In June last year, Kalburgi dismissed the sanctity of religious idols, which brought protestors from the Bajrang Dal and VHP to his doorstep. Kalburgi was placed under police protection.

At the Town Hall, some speakers referred to posts on Facebook and Twitter, posted by activists of the Bajrang Dal right after the news came out, which openly celebrated Kalburgi’s murder.

But according to professor K M Marulsidappa, Kalburgi’s murder is less likely to implicate conventional Hindutva groups, and more likely to involve the fine rivalries and high political stakes within Lingayat caste politics.

Speaking to The Wire, Marulsidappa explained that Kalburgi’s work had touched on sensitive questions that divide mainstream Lingayats from the minor subsect of Virashaivas, who believe that their tradition precedes Basava – and blame him for the degradation of the movement. The Virashaiva community is led by the Jangama priesthood from five seats, the panchapeetha. Kalburgi’s work had provoked intense hostility from Jangamas and extremist factions behind them.

Marulsidappa pointed out that Kalburgi’s murder followed the murder of Linganna Satyampete, a journalist believed to be Kalburgi’s disciple and supporter in the district of Gulbarga (Kalbargi’s surname is derived from the name of the area). Satyampete’s body was found semi-naked in a drain in Gulbarga town on July 26, 2012. He was also a fierce critic of conservative elements in the Lingayat mathas (religious schools), whom he accused of abandoning the true spirit of the vachanas.

The scholar M. Chidananda Murthy, seen as a conservative rival of Kalburgi’s within the community, also spoke at the Town Hall meeting. He said he had often disagreed with Kalburgi but never lost respect for him.

M S Asha, who is currently editing a translation of Kalburgi’s writing, told The Wire that she had spoken to him the previous morning. They chatted about his play on Basava, The Fall of Kalyana, translated by M C Prakash; Kalburgi mentioned a critic’s comment , comparing the play to a verse drama by T S Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral.

He also discussed his next work, which would examine the disappearance of women writers from the Kannada canon between the 12th and 16th centuries, that is, in the period that the vachana tradition was suppressed and the priestly class established its hegemony among Lingayats.

Kalburgi was a key organiser of the Dharwad Sahitya Sambramha, or the Dharward Lit Fest. As an example of his liberal mind, Asha said, he invited the controversial right-wing author Bhyrappa to the festival. “When everyone questioned him, his only answer was – ‘He is a writer too’.”

The overarching concern expressed at the Town Hall in Bengaluru was that a culture of lethal violence might overwhelm the hallowed culture of discussion and questioning in Lingayat society. Indeed, one of the first victims of the temptation to violence was Basava himself – martyred at the end of the celebrated period of social reform, when he was thought to have gone too far by marrying a Brahmin girl to a Dalit boy. One protestor on the Town Hall steps had evidently thought of this: “Yesterday Basavanna”, his sign read, “Today Kalburgi.”

Kannada Scholar Kalburgi Shot Dead, Third Rationalist to be Killed in Three Years

Dharwad: Former Vice-Chancellor of Hampi University M M Kalburgi, the well-known scholar and epigraphist who courted controversy for his forthright views on religious, social and other issues, was shot dead at his Kalyanagar residence here this morning by unidentified gunmen. He was 77 years old.

“Dr Kalburgi was shot dead at his Kalyangar residence in Dharwad around 8.40 AM,” Dharwad Police Commissioner Ravindra Prasad told PTI.

He is the third scholar-rationalist to be assassinated in India in as many years. Earlier, in 2015, Govind Pansare, a writer and communist in Maharashtra was shot dead by unknown assailants. In 2013, Narendra Dabholkar, the well-known rationalist was killed.

Kalburgi was shot in his head after he opened the door of his house in the morning, Prasad said.

Asked how many bullets he sustained and who was behind in the attack, Prasad said police are awaiting details.

Kalburgi was rushed to a hospital where he was declared dead, he said.

He was a scholar of Vachana literature and was a recipient of Central and state Sahitya Academy awards.

Last year, he became the target of a campaign by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other right-wing forces, which burnt his effigy and demanded his arrest for remarks he made against idol worship.

In a protest at Puttur in June 2014, VHP leader Arunkumar Puttila said those who get satisfaction out of insulting Hinduism and misleading society should be permanently lodged in jail.

The VHP and others were objecting to remarks Kalburgi made at the time while taking part in a debate over the Karnataka government’s anti-superstition bill. Kalburgi cited U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Bethale Puje Yake Kudadu, in which the Jnanpith award winner narrated his childhood experience of urinating on a stone idol as an experiment to see whether there would be divine retribution of some kind.

The Hindutva organisations accused both Ananthamurthy and Kalburgi of insulting the religious sentiments of the Hindus.

(With inputs from PTI)

A House for Justice Biswas

When sitting or retired judges seek the allotment of personal houses from the government, this gives rise to a fatal conflict of interest

High Court of Gujarat. Credit: gujarathighcourt.nic.in

A recent order of the Gujarat High Court issuing notices to 27 judges of the High Court, the Revenue Department of Gujarat, and the Collector, Ahmedabad, on the issue of the 2008 allotment of residential plots to sitting and retired judges, has raised uncomfortable questions for the state government as well as the judiciary. The order was prompted by letters written by two retired judges, Justice BJ Sethna and Justice KR Vyas alleging irregularities in the allotment of residential plots to sitting and retired judges by the state government and its agencies. These letters were not entirely motivated by public interest, since Justice Sethna’s letter, in particular, questioned the suitability and size of the plot provided to him.Two days later, on August 12, the Gujarat High Court order was stayed by a bench of the Supreme Court led by the Chief Justice, calling it an order passed in “mortal hurry”. The CJI might well have been right— the suo motu nature of the order, the taking of 27 judges by name and the fact that the HC Chief Justice who issued the order was on the verge of retirement, makes its motivations suspect.

The fact remains, however, that the Gujarat matter raises troubling questions regarding the closeness of the judiciary and the executive, not just in Gujarat but elsewhere in the country as well.

At the heart of the Constitution is the doctrine of separation of powers between the judiciary and the government. How can the judiciary be expected to take up scams involving out of turn or cheap land allotments to journalists, media houses and bureaucrats,or adjudicate independently in the thousands of cases where the government is a litigant, when its members are themselves negotiating with the government for post-retirement personal residences? If the separation of powers becomes a tool to be used selectively, when it suits judges, then the independence of the judiciary gets undermined.

Different functions, different expectations

The allotment of housing/residential plots to certain officials, owing to the nature of their office, is common.The Central Government Employees Welfare Housing Organisation provides welfare housing service to serving and retired employees of the Central government; similarly, housing schemes for the benefit of serving and retired railway employees are taken care of by the Indian Railway Welfare Organisation.

For sitting High Court judges, the allotment of an official residence is governed by the High Court Judges (Salaries and Conditions of Service) Act, 1954. This provides every High Court Judge the use of an official residence without rent. Neither the Act nor its rules address the issue of the personal residence of either a sitting or retired High Court judge. Judges, like any other class of society, are free to form their own co-operative housing groups and apply to the relevant land allotment agencies—like the DDA, for example—but these are or should be processed and approved by seniority of application. If judges acting individually or collectively seek or receive preferential treatment from the government concerned, there is always the danger of an unstated quid pro quo.

Governments of all shades have tried to bribe the press with cheap land allotments, a practice that the Press Council has frowned upon as detrimental to the media’s watchdog function. Surely, the same principle should apply to the judiciary.

The judiciary’s conflicting stand

The absence of any established practice with regard to providing personal residential accommodation to sitting as well as retired High Court judges has provided fertile ground for controversy. Different state governments have, accordingly, devised different arrangements. For instance, in 1992, the Rajasthan Housing Board opened a special registration in its already existing Mansarovar Housing Scheme, exclusively for sitting judges of the High Court of Rajasthan. Not surprisingly, this special arrangement was made following a request by some sitting judges to the then Chief Minister of Rajasthan in this regard.

However, allotments to judges under this scheme were challenged for being out-of-turn, arbitrary and discriminatory. In a July 5, 1997 order, a single judge of the Rajasthan High Court held that the judges should have maintained their distance from the executive and should not have approached the “biggest litigant”, the state government, for a “favour”. The single judge in his order did not mince his words when he described the allotment as “largesse” from the state government to the High Court judges, and ordered an inquiry.

Subsequently, however, a division bench of the Rajasthan High Court in NK Bairwa v. Sripal Jain (1997) 1 RLR 129, stayed the operation of the single judge’s order. The division bench did not find any arbitrariness in the allotments made by the government, and did not find the scheme for judges any different from a scheme formulated for any other interest group. The jury is still out regarding the validity of the division bench order.

Are HC, SC judges mere ‘employees’?

A housing scheme floated by the Karnataka State Judicial Department Employees’ House Building Co-operative Society for the purpose of providing residential sites to low paid employees in the judicial department of the state at economically viable rates was similarly embroiled in controversy. Not only did some judges of the Karnataka High Court and Supreme Court become members of this co-operative society, they also procured house sites at nominal rates. In an October 12, 1995 order in Subramani v. Union of India (1995), the Karnataka High Court was firm in its assertion that judges of the High Court or Supreme Court, sitting, transferred or retired, cannot be called “employees of the court”. In fact, the membership of judges in the cooperative society was held to be an “irregularity” in the conduct of the business of the society, and the allotments made to them were set aside. However, in flagrant violation of the High Court’s order, a sizeable number of judges accepted plot allotments under this scheme, which, if reports are to be believed, include the present Chief Justice of India, Justice HL Dattu and the next CJI, Justice TS Thakur.

Public Perception is All

The independence of the judiciary fundamentally hinges on public perception of the judges. By the apex court’s own admission in KK Veeraswami v. Union of India (1991), “a judicial scandal has always been regarded as far more deplorable than a scandal involving either the executive or a member of the legislature.” Judges are expected to keep themselves above suspicion, so as to preserve the impartiality and independence of the judiciary and to retain public confidence. Any negotiation with the government, whether by a sitting or retired judge, in matters of residential accommodation would undoubtedly cast aspersions on the impartiality of the judiciary. On the government’s part, it should make the housing shortage for sitting judges and tribunals its first priority, rather than seeking to influence the judiciary through private land allotments. If the housing nexus continues, only a few judges benefit at the expense of the much larger question of the rule of law.

Ritwika Sharma is Research Fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy

Credit for featured image of children standing inside the house of an advocate: Alex Graves/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Documentary on Modi’s Banaras Election Was All Too Real for Censor Board

Filmmaker Kamal Swaroop’s documentary on the election campaign in Banaras in 2014 does not pass muster with the Censors

A still from the teaser of “Dance for Democracy-Battle for Benares” by Kamal Swaroop

Political rhetoric and name calling in the heat of a election campaign goes unnoticed, but looks “horrifying” when seen later. When Kamal Swaroop presented his film Dance of Democracy-Battle for Banaras based on the Narendra Modi-Arvind Kejriwal electoral fight in May 2014, to the Central Board of Film Certification, they rejected it out of hand. The Board found the comments made by candidates about their rivals during the run up to the elections too hot to handle. They simply refuse to pass the film, saying that even cutting the film was not possible.

“All the candidates were making wild statements and allegations—Phrases like Mukhota, 56-inch-chest, corrupt and many more in that vein, were thrown around liberally. Today when we see all that, it looks stupid and childish but the fact is that these comments were made and shown then on television. I just recorded all of it, without adding any comment from my side” Swaroop told The Wire. “In 2014 it was like entertainment which boosted TRPs; but today it holds up a mirror which we do not want to see.”

But apparently this truthful retelling made the exam committee and the review committee squirm. CBFC chairman Pahlaj Nihalani was quoted in the Indian Express as saying: “My officers told me that it’s a political satire. It speaks against all politicians and is pro-Kejriwal in the way it has been shot.” He called the language in the film “inflammatory.”

Swaroop says he does not take any sides. “All the major candidates have been shown, but obviously Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal dominate, since they were the main contenders. We didn’t interview any candidate, but we have shots of media interviewing people.”

Towards the end, there are interviews with local political analysts who give their assessment of the voting patterns and the results. “It becomes clear there was polarization on religious grounds—Hindu upper caste and Dalit votes went to the BJP, the minorities went elsewhere.”

“The documentary captures the excitement, madness and noise generated during the high octane election battle in the holy city of Benaras, PM Modi’s parliamentary constituency, and in the process, lays bare the politics of the world’s biggest democracy,” said a mailer from the filmmaker.

Started in April 2014 and completed in August of 2015, this is among India’s biggest documentary films, shot over a span of 44 days on rich 4k. “It cost us a lot of money, Rs 40 lakhs (four million) and we want to release it commercially, in the cinemas, not just on YouTube,” says Swaroop. He says once he gets an official letter from the Board he will challenge the decision in a tribunal.

According to him Dance for Democracy is inspired by Nobel Laureate Ileas Canetti’s book “Crowds and Power”. Two teasers have been released on Youtube: the first is a montage of Varanasi visuals with rousing orchestral music, and the second has a portion of a speech by candidate Narendra Modi in which he talks about his happiness at being a candidate from the historic city.

Swaroop, a national award winner last year for his film Rangabhoomi is well known among film buffs as the maker of Om dar ba dar, a “postmodernist” film he made in 1988 which was never commercially released in India but which now enjoys a cult following.

Why We Should Oppose the Aurangzebing of Aurangzeb

The despot is not in fact being executed by the act of renaming a road; he is being brought to life again.

He is not in fact being executed by the act of renaming a road – he is being brought to life again.

Aurangzeb was a despot.

He not only imprisoned his ailing father, the Fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, but had all three of his brothers—the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja and Murad, murdered. ‘Murdered’ is to put it mildly.

Both confident and insecure, Aurangzeb then went on to ensure his hegemony as the Sixth Emperor by having Dara’s son Sulaiman, imprisoned and poisoned in a slow and tortuous procedure that made the future Crown Prince mad before death claimed him.

He also set an example to all dissenters by having the free-thinking mystic Sarmad beheaded at the Jama Masjid, Delhi, for blasphemy, the Sikh Guru Teg Bahadur executed for objecting to conversions and the leader of the Maratha Confederacy, Sambhaji, caught and killed for just being what he was.

Apart from what he did to those he felt were a threat to him, Aurangzeb presided over a Hindustan where Hindus and Sikhs were not just second class citizens but a scared and persecuted people.

Contemporary historians have tried to see Aurangzeb in a more nuanced light than those who documented his tyrannical rule in sharp terms. His later years, they say, were sublimated by a measure of self-pity and even remorse. And he remained personally austere. For his own personal expenses he is said to have sewn caps and calligraphed copies of the Quran.

Contrasting sharply from his father’s architectural marvel, the Taj Mahal, Aurangzeb’s own open-air grave is an austere affair, in a courtyard of the shrine of a sufi saint, in Khuldabad, near Aurangabad where he died. But no historian can explain away Aurangzeb’s sadistic 49 years’ rule.

That the British Raj wanted to feel and be seen as a successor of the Mughals as a royal genre, is clear. The Viceroy’s House , now Rashtrapati Bhavan, facing the Purana Qila, was intended to be a new Fort, grander even, than the Red Fort. That city-planners should have named roads in Lutyens’ New Delhi after the Mughal Emperors is no matter of surprise. With Babur, Humayun, Akbar and Shah Jahan (Jehangir having been skipped in absent-mindedness) Aurangzeb got a road to him as well, a long and leafy road that connected other such roads and led to many important houses, official and privately-owned including Number 10, that Mohammed Ali Jinnah owned.

Many have felt – and suggested – that Aurangzeb’s unfortunate but hugely inspirational brother, the heir-apparent Dara Shukoh, should have a road named after him in New Delhi. The syncretic prince who had the Upanishads translated into Persian and wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain (“The Confluence of the Two Seas”) on the subject of mystical and pluralistic affinities between Sufi and Vedantic speculation, fits seamlessly into the plural ethos of the Constitution of India. To have a road or public building named after him would be as natural in the capital of the Republic of India as naming roads after the Mughal Emperors was natural in Lutyens’ time.

But not even the most ardent of Dara scholars and enthusiasts, whose number rises all the time, ever thought of suggesting that Aurangzeb Road be re-named, much less that it be re-named Dara Shukoh Road. That would be a most un-Dara thing to suggest, apart from being puerile history and childish civic planning.

A proposal to re-name Aurangzeb Road into something , anything, else could have come from Jana Sangh or BJP controlled local bodies in New Delhi in past years. It could have come from the Vajpayee-led NDA government. It is a tribute to the maturity and balance of those administrations that they did not waste their time and complicate road users’ comfort levels by doing any such thing. In fact, it is inconceivable that Atal Bihari Vajpayee would have permitted any such idea to proceed an inch.

The news that Aurangzeb Road is to be re-named now, is both a surprise and no surprise. Surprise because mature people are not expected to act immaturely. No surprise because mature people can act like they have never read history. Decaying dynasties used to see upstarts and putatives issue fresh coins with new insignia, unveil new heraldry, over-write their hollow names and styles on ancient rock, to smudge out the old, using the grand old surfaces to carry a new firman, a new edict. The shallower the claimant, the coarser the metal of the coin, the cruder the new scrawl over the old.

Re-naming roads is about the most immature and least convincing sign of authority. It is invariably the accoutrement of new power. For the first time since India became a Republic, an elected dispensation is being showcased by its smiling pickthank supporters as a Badshah Salamat, no less, a modern Company Bahadur, that is inaugurating not a new government but a new chapter, an era, an epoch.

A new font is being carved, if not a new script, for our nationhood. Dissenters must be on notice, historians on alert. Political scientists on a sabbatical, philosophers on furlough. The age of analysis is over, the age of adherence is come. To question is treason, to accept is wisdom.

Aurangzeb is to be seen as a ghoul not because he was a ghoul but because he was a ghoul on ‘that side’. That cannot, of course, be said too loud. Let us behead him post mortem now, the argument goes, and no one can fault us for he was such a be-header was he not, a murderer of the good and the great who were from….not too loudly…our side. And, really, there has to be a God above. Surely, a God with a sense of Breaking News. Just when we would have liked to do a de-capitation of that road-name, He comes, Praise be to Him, in the shape of a Tribute that we must pay to one from the other side, no doubt, but one who did and said all the right things. And the felicity! We don’t even have to paint the first letter in the name.

What a cleverness hides in that calculation !

The Muslims cannot object. How can they ? If they do they would be both un-faithful and un-patriotic. The Hindus will never object. And after a while all will be using A P J Abdul Kalam Marg as if the road has always been named after that honest son of Rameshwaram. How utterly clever!

But is it really ?

As one who despises everything that Aurangzeb did to his family and to his populace, I add my voice to that of those who oppose the Aurangzebing of Aurangzeb not because Aurangzeb was repugnant but because Aurangzebiyat is repugnant. He is not in fact being executed in this act; he is being brought to life again. Through the hidden but deep sympathies – completely misguided – that this will give rise to among Muslims in India for that bigot. Through the deep antipathies – completely un-called for – that this will occasion for India in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Through fear of a new Aurangzebean censorship that could turn to paint away or overpaint all signs and symbols of free expression that displeases Alamgiri.

In this painting of Sarmad by the Pakistani artist Sadequain, the medieval mystic holds up his head – severed at Aurangzeb’s insistence – while continuing to defiantly be himself.

The re-naming of Aurangzeb Road has little to do with the veena-playing, vegetarian visionary A P J Abdul Kalam. It has everything to do with rites of purification, of shuddhi. This rite will be performed, if the new Divan-e-Khas so wishes, whenever and wherever it wishes, to posit a new code of citizenship, in which all identities are fluxed into a mantra of monochronism, like the kalma Aurangzeb’s ulema demanded Sarmad should repeat and on the mystic’s refusal, had his head chopped of. The mantra is ‘Comply, Conform, Carry On’. We cannot be too vigilant.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former Governor of West Bengal and a former high commissioner to Sri Lanka, is now Distinguished Professor in History and Politics, Ashoka University

How to Wreck a University

Can the MHRD reverse the damage it has inflicted on Pondicherry University?

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Students hold up placard demanding the removal of the Vice Chancellor. Credit: Pondicherry University Student Movement (PUSM)

Puducherry: Even at its bustling best, this south Indian Union Territory retains a sleepiness which its tourism department loves to plug as ‘Peaceful Puducherry’. But just 12 kilometres outside the city, this image of calm is belied by the turmoil at Pondicherry University, which has been besieged by student protests, vandalism and vigilante violence. After a month of disturbances, there is finally hope among students and faculty that the university will return to routine. This follows a communication from the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) ordering Vice-Chancellor (VC) Chandra Krishnamurthy—whose stewardship of the university triggered the unrest—to remain on “compulsory wait until further orders … in the interest of restoring normalcy to Pondicherry University.”

The Pondicherry University Student Movement (PUSM), supported by the Pondicherry University Teachers Association (PUTA), have been demanding the ouster of Krishnamurthy—VC since January 2013—citing plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts in her resume, administrative malpractices and human rights violations.

Campus clouded by fear

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Ransacked office. Credit: PUSM

In the past week, pro-Krishnamurthy sections of the teaching and non-teaching faculty, along with some students, have targeted those protesting against her, ransacking departments, destroying equipment and interrupting classes. Even as cases and counter cases (for instance a case filed by the Registrar against PUTA for harassment) were booked, regional and linguistic tensions surfaced among students. The Joint Action Committee (JAC), which comprises various campus associations, alleged they were an outcome of divisive tactics deployed by the VC’s supporters.

But a deep sense of fear has long lurked in the campus. “We have been walking around in groups even when we go to the mess or the hostel, since the day we launched the protest,” said an apprehensive male student. “In the course of the protest, students have been lathi-charged by cops and roughed up by the VC’s henchmen, said another postgraduate student.

The detention and torture of a male student for 27 hours and the suspension of two female students who complained of sexual harassment on campus in 2014—the NHRC is probing the former while the Madras High Court reprimanded the university for the latter—has aggravated the sense of anxiety over safety on campus. “Anytime anyone has voiced a serious issue, goons have been deployed to intimidate them,” says a research scholar.

Some faculty who have kept away from the protest also say their decisions are shaped by fear. “For many of us, the university is also our home and we fear thugs may turn up at our doorstep anytime,” says a humanities professor. “It is appalling that we do not have the basic right to teach or learn freely, without being terrorised,” adds a senior professor.

Research slackens, reputation nosedives

Faculty members who raised red flags in the administration were transferred out to the university’s other campuses. The VC violated statutes to appoint her coterie to important posts, with one person holding as many as four positions, derailing the administration, said a PUTA member who requested anonymity. Those who dared question irregularities have seen roadblocks introduced in new or existing academic initiatives. “When research projects are put on hold by the administration, grants start drying up and so does research,” says an assistant professor. “When you spend years of effort in building up a department, it is upsetting to see someone ruin everything with a few months of mismanagement,” says a faculty member who has been with the university for 15 years.

A major outcome of the debacle is the beating the academic reputation of the university has taken, at least among staff and students. The university, which had risen in stature over the past decade and which regularly attracts Fulbright scholars, had its ‘Study India’ programme suspended. Its ranking has suffered, as has the number of application it receives. “You cannot hoodwink students. They are aware of what transpires in universities around the country through social media,” says the head of a department.

High-handed leadership

Police drag away a protesting student. Credit: PUSM

The situation in Pondicherry University is a classic case of what can go wrong with poor leadership. According to PUSM representatives, nearly two-dozen student demands have been shot down over the last two years. The last straw was the denial of hostel accommodation to meritorious students.

What infuriated students further was the VC’s refusal to communicate with them or acknowledge their mounting disenchantment. “She did not attempt to address us once during the three weeks of protests, even when students required medical attention during the hunger strike,” said a PG student. Tact and communication instead of high-handed means of dealing with dissent could perhaps have defused the circumstances. Instead, they escalated to a situation that even the MHRD described as “too explosive for her to return”.

The VC neither rebutted claims of plagiarism nor made her resume publicly accessible. However, it was accessed by PUTA using an RTI application.

Getting away with academic fraud

“We started looking into her credentials and found that our academic work was coming to a standstill due to administrative reasons,” recounts N. Dastagiri Reddy, secretary of PUTA. While supporters of the VC allege PUTA members have their own axes to grind, the association lists supporting documents on its website: only one of the three books listed by the VC among her publications is traceable. Even this, according to detection software, appears plagiarised. There is no record of publication of listed articles; and the number of research projects undertaken and Ph.D scholars guided has been falsely ratcheted up. A law professor, Krishnamurthy lists an honorary D. Litt degree from the Open International University for Complementary Medicines, Sri Lanka, an institution whose academic distinctions the UGC has warned universities against.

“How can we expect postgraduate students to heed our warning against plagiarism when they see someone getting away with it at the highest level?” wonders a science department faculty.

That this is Chandra Krishnamurthy’s third run as VC raises questions about the general state of education governance across the country. She was VC of SNDT, Mumbai for five years, and National Law University (NLU), Odisha, for eight months, apart from a brief tenure as acting-VC at the University of Mumbai. Has the higher education system in India become so fallible that someone responsible for validating the degrees of thousands of students, is herself never scrutinised, faculty members ask.

Search committees faulted

A candle-light protest.Credit: PUSM

By statute, VCs of Central Universities are appointed by the Visitor, i.e. the President of India, from among names nominated by a search committee. The committee’s members are in turn chosen by the Executive Council of the University and the UGC.

If anybody is to be blamed for the mess Pondicherry University finds itself in, it is the search committee that shortlisted Krishnamurthy, says M. Ramadass, former MP and a professor at PU who has challenged Krishnamurthy’s appointment in the Madras High Court. The search committee violated the 2010 UGC’s minimum qualifications for a VC: “a distinguished academician, with a minimum of ten years of experience as Professor in a University system or ten years of experience in an equivalent position.”

Krishnamurthy, who served as the Principal of Jitendra Chauhan College of Law, completed her PhD in 2002, before taking charge as VC at SNDT University, Mumbai, four years later. The UGC’s minimum qualifications did not apply to NLU or SNDT during that period.

The committee that shortlisted Krishnamurthy was headed by M. Anandakrishnan, Chairman of the IIT-Kanpur board, who incidentally also headed the Committee to Revisit UGC Regulations 2010 that upheld stipulations such as the minimum qualification of 10 years’ experience required to be a VC. A document accessed by PUTA also reveals that former MHRD Minister Pallam Raju flouted due procedure by recommending Krishnamurthy for the post.

Despite prolonged agitation and various pending probes, it is multiple political connections that have kept the MHRD from acting until now, allege university insiders.

Several senior academicians feel that the entire process of constituting search committees is an eyewash. According to a former VC of Madras University, “There is often one name which the state government or the ministry [in the case of central universities] favours, and they ensure that name is introduced in the shortlist, even if there are better candidates in the fray.”

By virtue of association, VCs shape the reputation of a university. Furqan Qamar, secretary general, Association of Indian Universities (AIU), notes that in order to improve the quality of leadership, the government must start with ensuring search committees are headed by independent chairpersons. To ensure greater transparency, the search committee could make public the shortlisted names, says V. Thangamuthu, former VC, Bharathidasan University. “Reservations backed by solid evidence against any nominee can be brought to the attention of the MHRD rather than bungling up a university beyond redemption by wrong choices”.

Thangamuthu recalls the provisions suggested by the task force of the National Council for Higher Education and Research (NCHER), which never materialised. The NCHER had proposed compiling an updated nationwide registry of academics eligible for selection as VCs. But this move was vehemently opposed by several state governments as an infringement of their autonomy.

While advertisements for the post of VC have become the norm recently, senior academics say they only give a veneer of transparency and have done little to enhance the quality of leadership. The problem that ails academia is not the lack of candidates but reluctance on the part of competent persons to cast their hat into the ring. Search committees must identify and persuade distinguished academics with administrative competence.

Krishnamurthy perhaps is just one cog in the wheel that rewards political clout and the power of the purse over merit. If Indian universities are to occupy their rightful place in the world, they cannot afford to take such a casual attitude towards leadership.

On request, names and departments of students and staff are undisclosed.
Despite repeated attempts, it was impossible to reach Vice Chancellor Chandra Krishnamurty for her response to the allegations against her.

Olympia Shilpa Gerald is a reporter based in Puducherry

Looking At, Rather Than Away

Harsh Mander’s new book is a compelling and readable work that exposes the rigid inequalities of New India

Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India
Harsh Mander
Speaking Tiger, New Delhi, 2015, Rs 495.

I approached this book with some trepidation. I imagined it would be a diatribe against the ruling elite and it would be laborious to plough through.

I should have known better; Mander, as his regular columns show, has a light touch. He is never pedantic and fleshes out his understated criticism of the way things are with human anecdotes. Every point is illumined by one or more cases, all poignant and revealing in a way which academic analysis can’t provide.

Very early in this book, he questions the Tryst with the Market, a different destiny that Pandit Nehru would never in his wildest dreams have imagined. The middle and upper classes are getting seduced by the message Greed is Good, and the rest can go to hell.

A mall is a pretty good exemplar of this tendency, which Arundhati Roy has called the “secession” from the rest of India. When Mumbai opened its first, it was thronged by thousands, even the unwashed, who came in droves to experience the wonder of goods in an air-conditioned, sanitised environment – often foreign – in such a brazen, unprecedented display. They caused traffic jams.

The catch was they came, they saw but were not conquered enough to reach for their wallets. This wasn’t what the promoters planned. So they introduced an interesting innovation: only people with cell phones or credit cards would be admitted into it. Some people are more equal than others.

Poverty is violence

Ela Bhatt in a 2013 NDTV programme showcasing the greatest living Indians asserted that “poverty is violence…perpetuated with the consent of society”. Mander regrets that NDTV chose to celebrate its silver jubilee with this show by including tycoons like Mukesh Ambani “and numerous popular film and sports stars … [that] lead opulent lifestyles and do little public service.” I wonder, in retrospect, whether Ambani had already loaned the channel Rs 400 crores two years ago.

Mandar’s theme is clear from his title and it is reminiscent of Katherine Boo’s brilliant exhumation of a single Mumbai slum: Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. The reference is to a hoarding advertising marble blocks for the homes of the ultra-rich, which obscures the grim conditions in the shanty immediately behind it.

Roy, in essay titled “Listening to Grasshoppers”, traverses not her well-trodden Naxal territory but the “the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes in a country of their own, somewhere in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite… [this] vast middle class, punch drunk on sudden wealth” has created a kingdom with “its own newspapers, films television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals”.

The journalists’ grapevine has it that a former editor of the Times of India was asked by media students why the paper didn’t carry enough about child malnutrition. He replied that the Times’ readers didn’t suffer from it.

Legitimizing inequality

Slums in Mumbai (Photo: Atilla Hargitay)

Mander lists three normative systems which legitimize inequality in our society. The first is the caste system. This reviewer can admit that till he went abroad as an undergraduate, he thought that the caste system had disappeared. At a noisy Cambridge Union debate, when an Englishman harped on it, I declared, to loud acclaim, “You should be castrated!”

In his excellent 1998 book, Words Like Freedom, Siddharth Dube enlightened me that in a typical UP village, boys from landless Dalit families can’t even enter the classroom; they have to bring their own mats to sit outside. When a Thakur’s wife accidentally fell into the village well, and some Dalits fished her out, her first response was to rush home to have a bath.

Mander’s second is the British class system, meant for people with old wealth: the schools’ names, such as one I went to, can trip off people’s tongues. On 26 August, the ToI carried a “top” edit page article titled “Schooling without learning”, alleging that the Right to Education “destroys private schools and destroys standards in public schools”. The old boy/girl network is alive and kicking.

The third is the “celebration of conspicuous consumption associated with the collapse of the socialist world and the rise of neo-liberal, market-led growth…This is the new India which celebrates when India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, follows up his gift of a 60-million-dollar jet-plane to his wife with the most expensive residence in the world, a 27-storey house for a family of four, built at an estimated cost of 1 billion dollars, which boasts three helipads, four storeys of handing gardens, and a staff of 600 domestic helpers.” In a city where six out of every ten people is homeless, this verges on the obscene.

According to the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), not a champion of socialist ideology, only 12% of the population can comprise the middle class. Mander quotes the CEO of Oxfam India to point out that just a 1.5% wealth tax on 65 of India’s uber-rich could lift an astounding 90 million out of poverty. If the country could reduce inequality by just over a third, it could eliminate extreme poverty. However, as anchors on business channels are asking these days, why hasn’t the NDA reduced corporate taxes, as promised in the last budget?

The most telling data on India’s inequality – apart from the recent, suppressed, Socio-Economic Survey, which encompasses caste – is from, surprisingly, the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2014. Since 2000, the share of wealth of the richest 1% in the country has been rising, in contrast to the rest of the world, and it now owns nearly half the country’s wealth. The wealth share of the top 10% as increased by a tenth since 2000, which is when the toxic triad known as “Liberalisation, Privatisation & Globalisation” or LPG kicked in here.

Mander’s book should be prescribed reading in universities across the country. The publishers ought to have included an index, so people can check on each vital piece of information. Hopefully, they will do in the next edition.

And some unsolicited advice: he could consider bringing out another version which has b&w photographs and captions instead of text, somewhat on the lines of John Berger’s co-authored classic, A Seventh Man (1975) which dealt with (the proportion of) migrants to Europe at the time. It would remain a lasting testament to our less fortunate brothers and sisters.

Road Name Changes Deprive People of a Sense of History, Modi Govt Had Said

As recently as April 2015, the government told Parliament that 1975 guidelines did not allow the names of existing roads to be changed.

As recently as April 2015, the government told Parliament that 1975 guidelines did not allow the names of existing roads to be changed

Credit: The Wire

New Delhi: The New Delhi Municipal Corporation decision to change the name of Aurangzeb Road to A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road is a violation of Government of India rules governing the naming of roads in the Capital and if implemented would “deprive the people of a sense of history.”

In reply to a question in the Lok Sabha on April 21, 2015, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, Haribhai Parathibhai Chaudhary said that the nomenclature of various roads, crossings, streets colonies and parks in the NCT of Delhi is governed by guidelines issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India in 1975 (No. 13022/34/74- Delhi of 27.9.1975).

These guidelines make it clear, he said, that “changes in the names of streets/roads etc. not only create confusion for the Post Offices and the public, but also deprive the people of a sense of history. Therefore, it was decided that the name of existing streets/road etc., should not be changed.”

Chaudhary gave his answer in reply to a question by BJP MP Om Birka from Kota, Rajasthan, who wanted to know the government’s criteria for naming roads and streets in the Capital and whether the government was considering any proposals for “renaming the various roads of the NCT of Delhi which are named after foreign invaders” with the names of “revolutionaries, freedom fighters and martyrs of the country.”

The minister said it was government policy that only new streets or existing streets which were “without specific names” could be named after eminent local, national or international personalities as a way of honouring them.

Aurangzeb change specifically denied

Last December, the Modi government told the Lok Sabha that the NDMC had indeed received a letter from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi in October 2014 requesting that the name of “Aurangzeb” Road be changed to “Guru Gobind Singh Road” and also a request from the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee (DSGMC) for the road to named after Guru Tegh Bahadur Road.

“The name of the said road was not changed by the NDMC in light of the guidelines of the Ministry of Home Affairs,” Minister of State Chaudhary said on December 17, 2014.

Apart from the government replies in Parliament, the NDMC itself has repeatedly turned down requests for changing the name of roads in Delhi citing the rules. In this 2007 resolution, for example, the Council stressed two key guidelines [WORD file]:

The names of existing streets should not be changed.
Names which are a part of history may not be altered.

Swamped by Ignorance and Prejudice, But Certainly Not By Muslims

The last thing we need is for reproductive decisions to be dictated by base motives that pit ‘us’ against ‘them’ and for women’s bodies to be used to wage a proxy war in which the only winner is ugly sectarianism.

The last thing we need is for reproductive decisions to be dictated by base motives that pit ‘us’ against ‘them’ and for women’s bodies to be used to wage a proxy war in which the only winner is ugly sectarianism

Credit: United Nations Photo

The recently released 2011 census tables on religion tell us that Hindus now number (that is, in 2011 they numbered) 966 million (966257353 to be precise) and Muslims 172 million (172245158 to be precise); in other words, Muslims have grown by 34 million over the span of 10 years while the now close-to-a-billion Hindu majority has added 139 million to its own numbers. These statistics have generated some anxiety and paranoia among a large number of people on Facebook and Twitter, with only a minority of these social media users being more sanguine that ‘our nation’ is not being taken over by ‘other’ people.

Misleading media coverage

Demographic fear-mongering is not unique to India and not new in India. Even before the release of these census figures, pronouncements on fearsome demographic imbalances periodically hit the news whenever ‘religious’ leaders – Hindu or Muslim – feel that they have not attracted enough attention lately. Our media rush to give them attention and also take it upon themselves to contribute to the cause.

Thus one national daily had a large front-page headline declaring “Hindu Population Falls, Muslims Rise”, while another one declaimed, “Hindu population declined; Muslims increased: 2011 Census.” Only the rare patient reader who went beyond the headlines would realize that it wasn’t the absolute number of Hindus that had fallen (as I said, that number has risen by 139 million), just that their proportion in the country had dropped by 0.7% between 2001 and 2011. At that kind of rate of change—and especially given that birth rates have been dropping for all sub-sets of the population in the country—we will have to be reborn several times before we see any reversal of the Hindu majority in the country, notwithstanding a Vishwa Hindu Parishad spokesperson’s claim that the census numbers were a ‘red signal for Hindu existence’.

Emerging trends

In the coming weeks and months, there will undoubtedly be more sophisticated analyses of some of the interesting details that underlie these broad statistics. Some of it has already begun in the media: on regional differences in religious group growth rates (for example, that Muslims in the south have lower fertility than Hindus in the north); on the socio-economic determinants of religious differences (for example, that once we control for income and education, the Hindu-Muslim gap in birth rates narrows significantly, even if Muslim fertility still remains somewhat higher than Hindu); on religious differences in gender discrimination (for example, that Muslims have much lower levels of female sex selective abortions than Hindus, even if they are in increasing danger of aping the discriminatory practices of their Hindu neighbours); on trends in religious group fertility (for example, that fertility declines are currently sharper among Muslims).

These elaborations are useful for two reasons. One, they are of interest because they help us better understand the micro-level motivations and compulsions and constraints that underlie macro numbers. Secondly, these elaborations have a very useful policy role – if the goal of development policy is to improve the lives of a country’s citizens, then we need to know what their needs are. For example, do Muslim women have an unmet demand for contraception, and if they do, is this a need that cannot be met by the female sterilisation that is the predominant form of birth control offered by our family planning program, in practice even if not in principle?

Data needs analyses for policy, not politics

Policy planners also need to know what the consequences of high or low fertility are, as opposed to the determinants that take up so much of our time; not the rabble rousing political consequences that wilfully exploit these census numbers, but the consequences for women and families in terms of health, education and standard of living, as well as larger level consequences on the environment, savings rates and so on.

However, at the public level, these analytical elaborations of differentials by religion in population growth rates are unfortunately being largely deployed to explain or ‘defend,’ the differentials. This is well-meaning, but it does not address two important matters. First, Indian Muslims do not and should not need to explain or defend, or have explained or defended on their behalf, their preferences or behaviour, whether on childbearing or on cricket teams, to establish their Indian credentials.

Secondly, and more importantly, these analyses do not address the right of all women, Muslim or Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Jain, to control their own reproductive selves and the duty of state and society to help them exercise such control. India is a signatory to the Plan of Action of the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, in which the central commitment is to the rights of women and families to decide for themselves what their family size will be.

Women’s right to reproductive choice

A paranoid and supposedly threatened Hindu majority leadership has no right to tell Muslim women to have fewer children or to exhort Hindu women to have more (as is also often done). And a paranoid and supposedly threatened Muslim minority leadership has no right to tell its women to keep breeding in the larger community’s interest.

As the bearers (and rearers) of children, women everywhere need the freedom, the physical ability and the psychosocial information to work out for themselves when—as well as, if at all—to begin childbearing, with whom to have children, and when to stop. Reproduction – whether any children, many children, or few children – is not a social or religious duty. And it certainly is not a patriotic duty, even if Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini once thought so, and even if worried Japan and Singapore and Italy today, less loudly, think so.

The last thing we need is for something as intimate as reproductive decisions to be dictated by base motives that pit ‘us’ against ‘them’ and for use women’s bodies to be used to wage a proxy war in which the only winner is ugly sectarianism.

Alaka Basu is a social demographer working on reproductive health and family planning and Professor in the Department of Development Sociology, Cornell University, as well as currently Senior Fellow in the United Nations Foundation, Washington DC.

There Is Nothing Shameful About Being a Medieval Indian

The promised liberation from ‘1000 years of slavery’ remains a war-cry to fool the gullible. But those who have some idea of medieval India know that it was not a particularly repulsive place to inhabit.

The promised liberation from ‘1000 years of slavery’ remains a war-cry to fool the gullible. But those who have some idea of medieval India know that it was not a particularly repulsive place to inhabit

Aurangzeb. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

One of the ways in which the British justified the imposition of colonial rule early in the nineteenth century was to pitch the notion of their new western modernity against an alleged pre-colonial barbarity. The picture of medieval India, especially under Muslim rulers, as brutal, barbarous, dark-age was assiduously built by the British as one of the strategies for the legitimation of colonial rule in India, portrayed as meant for liberating and civilising the Hindus.

Historians sitting on Commonwealth chairs have continued to press the claim that Imperialism was a good thing to happen to the uncivilised people of the colonies, who were not only protected from the alleged horrendous violence of medieval Islam, but also modernised in the way they dress, speak in English, and have developed a sense of history, which they had previously lacked altogether. Much of this is false propaganda of the kind attributed to the reactionary right-wing.

The British succeeded in their divisive agenda for some time, but they had to leave as quickly as they had arrived; 150 odd years of colonial brutalities is nothing in the history of an ancient civilisation. The difficulties either created or aggravated by colonial rule, especially uncomfortable community relations, remain a disturbing legacy—faultlines, which continue to be exploited by those who thrive on the politics of hate.

The promised liberation from ‘1000 years of slavery‘ remains a war-cry to fool the gullible. But those who have some idea of medieval India know that it was not a particularly repulsive place to inhabit. And, there is no shame in being un-modern before the spread of the virtues of western modernity which came in the wake of capitalism and colonialism.

At the risk of speaking like an Indian nationalist, if we must use the language of development and market economy that is rage these days, India on the eve of colonial conquest in the 18th century was one of the most vibrant economies with a highly skilled population, and an international balance of payment heavily-loaded in its favour. In knowledge-production and the culture of civility, Indian cities could compete with the best in the world, even when they might not have been that smart in the contemporary sense.

That pre-colonial, early modern world was systematically destroyed within a few years with new weapons and a new language of politics facilitating and justifying brutal conquests as well as severe exploitation. It was only logical for those in power to do what they liked to do. However, if lessons from political theory and history are any indication, exclusive, narrowly-conceived political strategies cannot be sustained for long; only a broad-based, inclusive political theory and practice will find its place in history.

Against the current background of Aurangzeb’s name being effaced from the heart of New Delhi, close to the residence of the Prime Minister, one may possibly submit that the Mughal emperor was certainly not as bad as he is made out to be in both secular and communal-Hindu narratives, nor was he an angel of the kind that Muslim separatist writings present him as. Above all, he was a medieval Indian ruler, part of an entire chapter of national history that one cannot possibly discard just because it does not fit comfortably with the politics of those in power.

Raziuddin Aquil teaches medieval Indian history in Delhi University.