The Wire
Maya Mirchandani discusses the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the NaMo app controversy and how data privacy has become a political issue in India. With Ghanshyam Tiwari, national spokesperson of the Samajwadi Party and Nikhil Pahwa, Founder and Editor at MediaNama.
At Rajasthan’s coaching hub, the police seem to be enforcing an 8 pm curfew on girl students.
Jaipur: Deviating from its objective to ‘ensure women’s safety’, the all-women patrolling squads set up by the local police around coaching institutes in Kota, Rajasthan, are reportedly harassing students, especially girls. Boys and girls found together outside hostels and classrooms, even during the day, are interrogated by these special squads and girls, if seen outside their hostels after 8 pm, are taken to the special cell for interrogation and later released after a warning.
“Most often, girls are not given admission in the evening batches and we can’t move out of our hostel after 8 pm. Even if we have permission from our parents to go out with our friends during the day, the police take us to their office and harass us for being with boys,” said Sudipta Hazarika, a student from Assam, who was in Kota until last week when some women constables beat her up in public for being out after 8 pm.
On March 21, Hazarika was charging her phone at a shop near Allen career institute in the Landmark city area in Kota around 8:15 pm when she was beaten up by some women constables for ‘misbehaving with the police’, she said.
“That day, I had gone to Landmark to return my friend’s suitcase since I was leaving for Assam in a day. After I booked my cab, my phone’s battery got discharged. So I went to a nearby shop to charge it until the cab arrived. Suddenly, two women constables came and started yelling at me for being out after 8 pm. Even when I assured them that I’ll never get late again, they told me ‘Tu yahan dikhni nahi chaiye, din mein bhi (You shouldn’t be seen here even during the day)’. When I told them this was not possible because my friends stayed here, one of them started beating me up,” Hazarika told TheWire.
Kiosk owners, Jatinder Pal Datta and his son Govind who intervened to stop the constables from beating Hazarika were jailed for two days for “voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servants from their duty”.
“She was sitting alone at the adjoining shop when two lady constables came and started yelling at her as if she was some criminal, ‘Tereko pata nahi yahan 8 baje ke baad baithna mana hai. Tereko mana kiya tha yahan nahi aane ko. Samajh nahi aata’ (Don’t you know you can’t sit here after 8 pm? We warned you not to come here again. Don’t you understand?) When Hazarika argued, they beat her up. My son and I rushed to stop them from doing so, instead we were jailed for two days,” Datta told TheWire.
“The coaching institutes here keep students under surveillance. They even check their mobiles to see who they are talking to and what content they are watching,” said Govind, Datta’s son.
“Sardarji (the kiosk owner) always had a problem with the patrolling squad because they did not allow his customers to stay after 8 p.m. The women constables were on routine duty when Jatinder Pal and his son got into a scuffle with them. They grabbed their uniforms due to which a button broke off, so they were charged under Section 323 and 353 dealing with causing obstruction to officers on duty under the Indian Penal Code,” Yogesh Kumar, assistant sub inspector, Kunadi police station, told TheWire.
Speaking to The Wire, Anshuman Bhomia, superintendent of police, Kota, denied that the existence of any rule restricting the movement of girls at night in the city, but added that “individual hostel owners might have their own rules.”
“Abhyas squad is an all-woman patrolling unit meant to ensure women’s safety at coaching institutes and other places. That day, when the lady constables found that neither the girl belonged to that vicinity nor was she a student at Allen coaching centre, they asked the girl for her ID card, but she started misbehaving saying ‘it’s none of your business.’ The question is that these constables didn’t know her. So if she was questioned, she was supposed to behave politely with the police”, he said.
The women patrolling squads were set up by the local police to ensure safety of girls around coaching centres in Kota. Representational image. Credit: NSIT
Without making any reference to the beating up of the girl and justifying the arrest of the two kiosk-owners, Bhomai said: “The people who intervened had misbehaved with the women police so a case was registered against them and they were produced before the court, and the court sent them to the jail. Women constables are not anybody’s enemies. They are meant for ensuring women’s security.”
When asked about a video where a woman constable is seen beating up Hazarika, he said, “It may not be the entire video. A lot of times videos clips are pulled out of context. We are taking out CCTV footage and an enquiry is being conducted by the deputy superintendent of police. Then we’ll see what needs to be done.”
When The Wire contacted Gyan Devi, the police constable who had allegedly beaten up the student, she did not want to speak about whatever happened that day and asked not to be contacted again.
Meanwhile, the police has registered cases against the two kiosk-owners for “deterring public servants from performing their duty.”
It will eventually be up to the courts to decide if enforcing an undeclared curfew on the town’s women is part of the “duty” of the police.
Shruti Jain is a freelance journalist.
Emily Faville’s language guide is provocative and jaunty romp that examines the tricky business of English syntax, punctuation, and changes in the lexicon since the dawn of the internet age.
If you haven’t Neville Longbottomed yet, maybe there is still hope for you. But if you are unaware that Neville Longbottom, a character in the Harry Potter films played by actor Matthew Lewis, became a verb in 2013, then Emmy J. Favilla’s style guide, A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, might be all the self-help you need in an age and time contemplating the banishment of the subjunctive mood.
Neville Longbottoming debuted as a verb when the actor tussled with puberty only to resurface unscarred, “the pinnacle of beauty” as per Favilla. It means becoming attractive after battling the onslaught of teenage hormones, and is a somewhat whimsical indicator of what this handbook, published in November 2017, has set out to achieve, and who it intends to instruct.
Favilla is chatty, honest, and self-deprecatory, informing the reader in the introduction to the guide that she is neither an academic, nor a lexicographer, nor a grammar historian, “I did not study linguistics in my collegiate years. I wasn’t even an English major,” she admits. “I am constantly looking up words for fear of using them incorrectly and everyone in my office and my life discovering that I am a fraud.” Cutesy confessions and persistent horror at her many deficiencies notwithstanding, the former global copy chief of BuzzFeed (she is now senior commerce editor) examines the tricky business of English syntax, punctuation, and changes in the lexicon since the dawn of the internet age, and in subsequent eras when its lower-case usage became acceptable.
A World Without “Whom”: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, Emmy J. Favilla,
Bloomsbury, 2017
The guide is never pedantic, but it does inform the reader about the difference between whet and wet, capital and capitol, stationery and stationary. “Sorry. Low-hanging fruit,” Favilla writes, in the chapter titled ‘Getting Things Right: The Stuff That Matters’. In it, she is unequivocal about the need for grammatical accuracy and sentence clarity: “For professionals who work in the digital space, integrity is especially important; competition is stiff, and there are countless other sources out there clamouring for our attention, their clammy virtual hands outstretched towards our exhausted virtual faces.”
Digital writers and editors are warned against frolicking in the World Wide Web with their thoughts and feelings flashing unedited on websites, blogs, and news portals. To blithely disregard the rules of grammar for the sake of appearing cool or conversational or attuned to millennial audiences is to compromise the integrity of a piece. To capitalise and punctuate correctly, to fret over singular subjects agreeing with singular verbs (and plural subjects with plural verbs), to keep tense consistent, to know when a slash is more appropriate than a hyphen are all hallmarks of responsible editing, and content that is as error-free as it is engaging.
The style guide effortlessly prances into difficult terrain, to examine the language of inclusion and political-correctness with the glee of a smiley-face emoji. Chapter four, ‘How to Not Be a Jerk: Writing About Sensitive Topics’, is disarmingly self-explanatory. It discusses terminology commonly used to write about controversial and emotionally-charged issues like abortion or suicide or rape and sexual assault or disabilities and diseases.
Favilla deliberates upon why certain words and phrases are insensitive; she suggests alternatives that are contemporary and less offensive to politically-aware readers. For instance, when writing about adoption, she proposes: “Avoid any form of the phrase give up for adoption when referring to a child who has been placed for adoption; preferred phrasing is place for adoption, a neutral term that is absent of the implication of abandonment by a birth parent or the idea that the adoptive parents robbed the child of their real parents (e.g., she placed the baby for adoption rather than she gave up the baby for adoption).”
Emmy Favilla. Credit: Twitter
The ease with which Favilla tackles the stylistic quandaries of all that is unsettling or provocative or morally ambiguous is perhaps the greatest achievement of this handbook. It is appropriate, for instance, to use the word slave in a historical context, for, “we don’t want to whitewash the severity of slavery in US history.” In modern contexts, however, Favilla suggests the term enslaved person – “use people-first language when writing about slavery, unless it appears in a direct quote.” When writing about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues, she advises the use of the word queer or the acronym LGBT, when referring to the community, not the word gay. And then again, “LGBT is only appropriate when referring to the broader community or groups of people, not when referring to individuals.”
The style guide has valuable lessons for Indian newsrooms, digital portals, and websites. Squabbling tribes of desk editors, frantically seeking validation for an inelegantly placed em dash, or confused about the basic functions of a semicolon, could benefit from Favilla’s bubbly guidance. There are other transgressions that reporters, columnists, and editors might be alerted to, if they choose to consult this handbook. The word alleged, for instance, which appears frequently in news reports about crime, and in particular, rape, is one that Favilla is wary of: “Much like claims, alleged can imply doubt, though its use is often legally necessary to avoid a libelous statement; try not to overuse it.” She suggests the use of more specific verbs, and establishes her point with these sentences:
Original: The woman looked shaken as she described how the man allegedly pushed her.
Edited: The woman looked shaken as she testified that the man pushed her down.
Several of Favilla’s recommendations have riled grammarians, and others of crotchety temperament. British-American linguist Geoffrey Pullum writes in Lingua Franca, the language and writing blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ And this ‘world without whom’ of which she speaks? In reality, whom already has zero frequency at the beginning of clauses in conversation: Whom are you dating? is something real people simply never say. Yet whom survives immediately after verbs or prepositions, especially the latter: Real people do say things like politicians for whom truth doesn’t matter.”
Real people and real language are preoccupations that Favilla readily admits to, and the style guide embraces ‘real’ words. Concocting words like science-ing or science-y, without feeling guilty or embarrassed, is a practice Favilla describes as “freeing and fun”. Non verbs, when used as verbs, are also similarly liberating. For instance, words like personing and adulting, which represent certain emotional inconsistencies rather than real functions, are common on the internet, and lend a certain casual-silly tone to a sentence that is very real.
A world without ‘whom’ is perhaps a contentious proposition; one with awkward commas and bloated parentheses and en dashes in place of their longer counterparts is downright unbearable. Favilla’s style guide, if acknowledged for its merits and forgiven for its perceived impudence, could speed up the Neville Longbottoming of many a gawky piece of news or literature.
Radhika Oberoi is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi.
An email from Aleksandr Kogan sheds light on exactly how much your Facebook data reveals about you, and what data scientists can actually do with that information.
The researcher whose work is at the centre of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data analysis and political advertising uproar has revealed that his method worked much like the one Netflix uses to recommend movies.
In an email to me, Cambridge University scholar Aleksandr Kogan explained how his statistical model processed Facebook data for Cambridge Analytica. The accuracy he claims suggests it works about as well as established voter-targeting methods based on demographics like race, age and gender.
If confirmed, Kogan’s account would mean the digital modeling Cambridge Analytica used was hardly the virtual crystal ball a few have claimed. Yet the numbers Kogan provides also show what is – and isn’t – actually possible by combining personal data with machine learning for political ends.
Regarding one key public concern, though, Kogan’s numbers suggest that information on users’ personalities or “psychographics” was just a modest part of how the model targeted citizens. It was not a personality model strictly speaking, but rather one that boiled down demographics, social influences, personality and everything else into a big correlated lump. This soak-up-all-the-correlation-and-call-it-personality approach seems to have created a valuable campaign tool, even if the product being sold wasn’t quite as it was billed.
The promise of personality targeting
In the wake of the revelations that Trump campaign consultants Cambridge Analytica used data from 50 million Facebook users to target digital political advertising during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has lost billions in stock market value, governments on both sides of the Atlantic have opened investigations, and a nascent social movement is calling on users to #DeleteFacebook.
But a key question has remained unanswered: Was Cambridge Analytica really able to effectively target campaign messages to citizens based on their personality characteristics – or even their “inner demons,” as a company whistleblower alleged?
If anyone would know what Cambridge Analytica did with its massive trove of Facebook data, it would be Aleksandr Kogan and Joseph Chancellor. It was their startup Global Science Research that collected profile information from 270,000 Facebook users and tens of millions of their friends using a personality test app called “thisisyourdigitallife.”
Part of my own research focuses on understanding machine learning methods, and my forthcoming book discusses how digital firms use recommendation models to build audiences. I had a hunch about how Kogan and Chancellor’s model worked.
So I emailed Kogan to ask. Kogan is still a researcher at Cambridge University; his collaborator Chancellor now works at Facebook. In a remarkable display of academic courtesy, Kogan answered.
His response requires some unpacking, and some background.
From the Netflix Prize to “psychometrics”
Back in 2006, when it was still a DVD-by-mail company, Netflix offered a reward of $1 million to anyone who developed a better way to make predictions about users’ movie rankings than the company already had. A surprise top competitor was an independent software developer using the pseudonym Simon Funk, whose basic approach was ultimately incorporated into all the top teams’ entries. Funk adapted a technique called “singular value decomposition,” condensing users’ ratings of movies into a series of factors or components – essentially a set of inferred categories, ranked by importance. As Funk explained in a blog post,
“So, for instance, a category might represent action movies, with movies with a lot of action at the top, and slow movies at the bottom, and correspondingly users who like action movies at the top, and those who prefer slow movies at the bottom.”
Factors are artificial categories, which are not always like the kind of categories humans would come up with. The most important factor in Funk’s early Netflix model was defined by users who loved films like Pearl Harbor and The Wedding Planner while also hating movies like Lost in Translation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His model showed how machine learning can find correlations among groups of people, and groups of movies, that humans themselves would never spot.
Funk’s general approach used the 50 or 100 most important factors for both users and movies to make a decent guess at how every user would rate every movie. This method, often called dimensionality reduction or matrix factorization, was not new. Political science researchers had shown that similar techniques using roll-call vote data could predict the votes of members of Congress with 90 percent accuracy. In psychology the “Big Five” model had also been used to predict behavior by clustering together personality questions that tended to be answered similarly.
Still, Funk’s model was a big advance: It allowed the technique to work well with huge data sets, even those with lots of missing data – like the Netflix dataset, where a typical user rated only few dozen films out of the thousands in the company’s library. More than a decade after the Netflix Prize contest ended, SVD-based methods, or related models for implicit data, are still the tool of choice for many websites to predict what users will read, watch, or buy.
These models can predict other things, too.
Facebook knows if you are a Republican
In 2013, Cambridge University researchers Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore Graepel published an article on the predictive power of Facebook data, using information gathered through an online personality test. Their initial analysis was nearly identical to that used on the Netflix Prize, using SVD to categorize both users and things they “liked” into the top 100 factors.
The paper showed that a factor model made with users’ Facebook “likes” alone was 95% accurate at distinguishing between black and white respondents, 93% accurate at distinguishing men from women, and 88% accurate at distinguishing people who identified as gay men from men who identified as straight. It could even correctly distinguish Republicans from Democrats 85% of the time. It was also useful, though not as accurate, for predicting users’ scores on the “Big Five” personality test.
There was public outcry in response; within weeks Facebook had made users’ likes private by default.
Kogan and Chancellor, also Cambridge University researchers at the time, were starting to use Facebook data for election targeting as part of a collaboration with Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm SCL. Kogan invited Kosinski and Stillwell to join his project, but it didn’t work out. Kosinski reportedly suspected Kogan and Chancellor might have reverse-engineered the Facebook “likes” model for Cambridge Analytica. Kogan denied this, saying his project “built all our models using our own data, collected using our own software.”
What did Kogan and Chancellor actually do?
As I followed the developments in the story, it became clear Kogan and Chancellor had indeed collected plenty of their own data through the thisisyourdigitallife app. They certainly could have built a predictive SVD model like that featured in Kosinski and Stillwell’s published research.
So I emailed Kogan to ask if that was what he had done. Somewhat to my surprise, he wrote back.
“We didn’t exactly use SVD,” he wrote, noting that SVD can struggle when some users have many more “likes” than others. Instead, Kogan explained, “The technique was something we actually developed ourselves … It’s not something that is in the public domain.” Without going into details, Kogan described their method as “a multi-step co-occurrence approach.”
However, his message went on to confirm that his approach was indeed similar to SVD or other matrix factorization methods, like in the Netflix Prize competition, and the Kosinki-Stillwell-Graepel Facebook model. Dimensionality reduction of Facebook data was the core of his model.
How accurate was it?
Kogan suggested the exact model used doesn’t matter much, though – what matters is the accuracy of its predictions. According to Kogan, the “correlation between predicted and actual scores … was around [30%] for all the personality dimensions.” By comparison, a person’s previous Big Five scores are about 70 to 80 percent accurate in predicting their scores when they retake the test.
Kogan’s accuracy claims cannot be independently verified, of course. And anyone in the midst of such a high-profile scandal might have incentive to understate his or her contribution. In his appearance on CNN, Kogan explained to a increasingly incredulous Anderson Cooper that, in fact, the models had actually not worked very well.
In fact, the accuracy Kogan claims seems a bit low, but plausible. Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel reported comparable or slightly better results, as have several other academic studies using digital footprints to predict personality (though some of those studies had more data than just Facebook “likes”). It is surprising that Kogan and Chancellor would go to the trouble of designing their own proprietary model if off-the-shelf solutions would seem to be just as accurate.
Importantly, though, the model’s accuracy on personality scores allows comparisons of Kogan’s results with other research. Published models with equivalent accuracy in predicting personality are all much more accurate at guessing demographics and political variables.
For instance, the similar Kosinski-Stillwell-Graepel SVD model was 85% accurate in guessing party affiliation, even without using any profile information other than likes. Kogan’s model had similar or better accuracy. Adding even a small amount of information about friends or users’ demographics would likely boost this accuracy above 90 percent. Guesses about gender, race, sexual orientation and other characteristics would probably be more than 90% accurate too.
Critically, these guesses would be especially good for the most active Facebook users – the people the model was primarily used to target. Users with less activity to analyze are likely not on Facebook much anyway.
When psychographics is mostly demographics
Knowing how the model is built helps explain Cambridge Analytica’s apparently contradictory statements about the role – or lack thereof – that personality profiling and psychographics played in its modeling. They’re all technically consistent with what Kogan describes.
A model like Kogan’s would give estimates for every variable available on any group of users. That means it would automatically estimate the Big Five personality scores for every voter. But these personality scores are the output of the model, not the input. All the model knows is that certain Facebook likes, and certain users, tend to be grouped together.
With this model, Cambridge Analytica could say that it was identifying people with low openness to experience and high neuroticism. But the same model, with the exact same predictions for every user, could just as accurately claim to be identifying less educated older Republican men.
Kogan’s information also helps clarify the confusion about whether Cambridge Analytica actually deleted its trove of Facebook data, when models built from the data seem to still be circulating, and even being developed further.
The whole point of a dimension reduction model is to mathematically represent the data in simpler form. It’s as if Cambridge Analytica took a very high-resolution photograph, resized it to be smaller, and then deleted the original. The photo still exists – and as long as Cambridge Analytica’s models exist, the data effectively does too.
Matthew Hindman, Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
In the latest development to the UK-Russia standoff, the Kremlin told UK that it must lay off over 50 of its staff in Moscow
Moscow: Moscow has told Britain it must cut “just over 50” more of its diplomatic and technical staff in Russia in a worsening standoff over the poisoning of a Russian former spy and his daughter in England, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.
As relations continued to deteriorate, Moscow also demanded an official explanation for the search of a Russian passenger plane in London on Thursday and said it could reserve the right to take similar action against British airlines in Russia.
More than 100 Russian diplomats have been expelled by various countries, including 23 from Britain itself, to punish the Kremlin over the March 4 attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the historic English city of Salisbury.
London says Moscow was responsible for poisoning the Skripals in the first known use of a military-grade nerve agent on European soil since World War Two. Russia flatly denies that and has cast the allegations as part of an elaborate Western plot to sabotage East-West relations and isolate Moscow.
Russia had already retaliated in kind by ejecting 23 British diplomats. On Friday, the Foreign Ministry summoned British Ambassador Laurie Bristow and told him London had one month to further cut its diplomatic contingent in Russia to the same size as the Russian mission in Britain. It also expelled 59 diplomats from 23 other countries for backing Britain.
A spokeswoman for Britain’s foreign ministry called the Russian move regrettable, and said it was considering the implications of the measures. It did not say how many diplomatic staff in Russia would be affected, while the British Embassy in Moscow says it does not make staff numbers public.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Reuters the demand meant Britain would have to cut “a little over 50” more of its diplomatic and technical staff in Russia on top of the 23 diplomats who have already gone home.
“We asked for parity. The Brits have 50 diplomats more than the Russians,” Zakharova said on Saturday.
When asked if that meant London would now have to cut exactly 50 diplomatic and technical staff, she said: “A little over 50.”
Separately, Russia’s Ministry of Transport demanded Britain explain why an Aeroflot passenger plane was searched at Heathrow airport on Friday, in what the Russian Embassy in London called a “blatant provocation”.
Britain’s interior ministry was not immediately available to comment on the plane search.
Visits?
Britain’s foreign office also said on Saturday it was considering allowing visits under consular access terms to Yulia Skripal, who is recovering in hospital against all expectations and no longer in critical condition.
Russia’s embassy said that it had contacted Viktoria Skripal, Yulia’s cousin, who would like to see her.
The BBC, citing sources, reported on Friday that Yulia was “conscious and talking,” a factor which may influence the investigation of how she and her father were poisoned.
Britain must now decide how it wants to make the cuts to its Russian diplomatic team and may be forced to lay off some Russian support staff as well as sending home fully-fledged diplomats to satisfy Moscow’s demand.
Russia ordered the closure of another British consulate, in St Petersburg, earlier this month in its first retaliatory step.
The poisoning on UK territory has united much of the West in taking action against what it regards as the hostile policies of President Vladimir Putin. This includes the United States under President Donald Trump, who Putin had hoped would improve ties.
(Reuters)
In an exclusive interview with The Wire, Akhilesh Yadav, Samajwadi Party leader and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, says the defeat of the BJP in recent key by-elections is a taste of what is in store for the party next year.
Lucknow: After his chastening defeat in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav believes the coalition he and the Bahujan Samaj Party’s Mayawati are building will be capable of giving the Bharatiya Janata Party a run for its money in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. In an exclusive interview with The Wire, he discusses the recent setback in the elections for the Rajya Sabha, the failure of the Modi and Adityanath governments to deliver on their promises, the law and order situation in the state, the BJP’s use of communal polarisation and the need to think afresh about the categories of ‘backward’ and ‘forward’.
Excerpts:
Siddharth Varadarajan: Let’s begin by talking about the recent Rajya Sabha (RS) results, where the BJP was able to ensure that the Samajwadi Party couldn’t deliver on your part of the bargain with the Bahujan Samaj Party that had helped you win the by-elections to Phulpur and Gorakhpur. Do you think the way the BJP outmanoeuvred you has shaken the SP-BSP alliance or might it actually end up strengthening it further?
Akhilesh Yadav: I think that going by what Mayawatiji said very clearly at her press conference on Saturday (May 24), perhaps the alliance has become even stronger. Gorakhpur and Phulpur were a people’s election while what the BJP did in Lucknow for the Rajya Sabha seats was an ‘election’ settled by influential people staying awake all night. There is no comparison between the two elections – in the by-elections, the public decided, and here a coterie decided, over dinner. And then they say that I have been defeated! The entire plan was to do what it takes to somehow break our alliance with the BSP or weaken it. The BJP really tried to do that. And when they managed to win the RS seat, the chief minister [Yogi Adityanath] became so happy that he forgot about his fast for Navratri and ate four ladoos in celebration! He forgot about everything over a seat in the RS! But this victory in the Rajya Sabha is not going to give them a lot of success, because they haven’t done anything for the public. Five years of the BJP government are going to pass at the Centre, two years and two budgets in UP later, they are not going to get any benefit as the people on the ground are unhappy. The many promises made have not been fulfilled. There is nothing to show the public.
SV: How easy will it be for you to replicate the win at Phulpur and Gorakhpur on a state level in Uttar Pradesh in 2019? What will your strategy be?
AY: Actually we were making an expressway and we wanted it to extend from Lucknow to Barabanki, Sultanpur, Amethi, Faizabad, Azamgarh, till even Ghazipur. And I had got 70% of the land for this as well, and got tenders as well. If the government had wanted they could have finished the job, but they didn’t. And the work that we had done, the direction we had given, that there should be a mandi (market) – like at the recent the investment meet, the Prime Minister said that Dusheri mangos could be exported directly – we made a mango market, and they stopped that. I made a potato market, and they stopped the work for that. I made a market for grains and vegetables, and they stopped the work for that too. All these markets were to be along the side of the expressway. So the infrastructural support that we were giving, and the help we wanted to give to the agricultural sector, or what the PM was saying in his speech, all that was stopped by Yogiji. Now it’s ‘one product, one district’. But our district has many products, so that means nothing else is going to happen. So there is no point in an investment meet, there is nothing happening for infrastructural development, the quota for electricity has not been increased. And they had promised these things.
We were at work but people [before the 2017 election] told us that none of that would matter, to win you have to have your caste equations in place! I was talking about the expressway because I understood myself to be forward. But the BJP has taught us that we are not forward by our work, but that our place of birth determines whether we are forward or backward. That I will be whatever I was born into. Now I cannot decide which home I am born into, can I? This is what the BJP preaches, and that is what we are now following. For this I would like to thank the BJP.
Dealing with communal polarisation
SV: In the 2014 and 2017 elections, Narendra Modi himself and the BJP generally used the religion card quite frequently. They spoke of Hindu electricity; Muslim electricity, shamshan ghaat and kabristan – and perhaps this had an effect as well. Do you think in the next elections they will follow the same tactic? What will be your strategy to counter this?
Akhilesh Yadav. credit: The Wire
AY: In the last elections of UP in 2017, one thing that became quite clear was that the biggest casteist and communal party of the country – the party that actually runs its politics along communal lines and that spreads hate along religious lines – is the BJP. The public of this country, and especially UP’s public have seen this truth – how they create fights between different communities, and spread hatred between different religions. Now they will no longer believe what the BJP says. Now they will look at the real issues – like poverty, they had said they would erase farmers’ debts but this hasn’t happened and farmers are committing suicide. They said they would give jobs to crores of young people, but no government jobs or employment options are available. They made many promises but none have been delivered on as yet. There is disappointment and anger among the people. This will be go against them in the coming elections – it has already begun to show in the recent elections. The BJP should now be careful, and start fulfilling their promises soon otherwise what the people did in Gorakhpur and Phulpur will happen in all of Uttar Pradesh.
SV: The question of the Ram temple in Ayodhya is being revived, they are keen that something should be done quickly through the courts, so that the issue comes back to centre-stage.
AY: The people of UP, and of this country, know that the BJP can surpass any limit with their lies, and utilise institutions and people to undermine democracy. I believe that this time the people will ask questions and think about their future while voting. Look at the problem of lack of jobs. If things are not fixed in this country, then maybe this generation will all be unemployed. And if the situation doesn’t improve then crores of people will be without a livelihood. So how will the country run? They talk about giving homes but there is no sand for construction.Their MPs and MLAs have done no work. They are fighting over contracts.
‘Ek saal bujhi mashaal’
SV: You say that no work has been done, but as soon as we stepped out of the airport in Lucknow we saw great big posters of Modi and Yogi proclaiming ‘Ek saal behmisal’ (One year unmatched), listing out their achievements. For example they say the law and order situation has been fixed. Are you saying these achievements are only on paper?
AY: This is not ‘Ek saal bemisaal’ but ‘Ek saal bhuji mashal’ (In one year the flame has extinguished). Tell me what work have they done on their own? When you got out of the airport, perhaps you focused only on the hoarding, but if you looked at the streetlights, they are the same ones saved over by the Samajwadi Party government and put up just before the investment meet. Look at the Lucknow metro. Their contribution has been to try and make sure it does not work. They stop the safety and security NOC to the railways. They are making big claims of making a defence corridor, but that can only be done if you give land. And they won’t give land. I had asked the defence ministry for five years for land to make the roads wider, but they never gave us permission. Mayawatiji had started a flyover, and for five years I tried to take it forward, I asked the area commander for land, never got it. So how will they make a defence corridor if it is so difficult to secure even small amounts of land? They are good at making claims but not at doing the work.
Whatever you see in Lucknow, the work has been stopped and no new work has been done. I felt very good during the recent investment meet, when the biggest hoardings were of the expressway. It is a different matter that the pictures on the expressway were of the PM and the CM. Still, if UP gets more investment for the expressway because of this, I will even be prepared to say that they have made it and not us! And they must not have heard the speeches there properly. The biggest industrialist said that he had invested Rs 20,000 crore before and will invest 10,000 crore more. So what is their achievement?
SV:The Wire has been reporting and investigating on the situation with the encounters, and we found out that the police is not always telling the whole truth. When we published our findings, people from the BJP said that the law and order situation had deteriorated to a point where there was no alternative and that extreme measures are required, and that it was good that Yogi Adityanath had given the police freedom to act. What do you think of this?
AY: They are hoodwinking the people. The BJP home ministry’s figures are there. Everything in UP has worsened, the crime graph has worsened, the incidents have also increased. This is not coming from me but from the report published by the home ministry. And they want to scare us, as they carry out encounters along caste and communal lines. I shouldn’t have to say this but am forced to. I want to ask them – Who was Jitendra Yadav that you had to carry out an encounter with him? Because your policeman wanted an award or a promotion. So someone who was just on his way back from a wedding, you shot him. Luckily he was saved, and to silence his family you paid for his surgery. Will his life be the same, after a Rs. 7/8 lakh surgery? What were ministers going and telling his family? Let the nation know. What were they telling the family? And why did the encounter not happen in Lucknow? There was an MLA – his son was killed in front of his father. But the murderer was taken to jail with great respect. During a fight over food in Allahabad, a Dalit was killed. The criminal was taken very respectfully to jail, and I don’t understand this. They want to threaten and scare people. And these encounters do not help. There have been thefts in the BJP people’s houses. I will give you the list. So how is this happening to the BJP people itself if encounters are improving law and order?
Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav joins him in emphasising a point. Credit: The Wire.
Prospects for coalition in 2019 Lok Sabha elections
SV: After Phulpur and Gorakhpur, what is the plan for the Kairana by-election?
AY: The plan for Kairana is to defeat the BJP.
SV: The same agreement and arrangement will take place?
AY: That is what we will try for.
SV: In her press conference Mayawati said the agreement with the Samajwadi Party will continue to 2019. Are you all envisaging a full seat-sharing agreement? How will this happen? How easy or difficult will this be, this alliance with BSP?
AY: I already have the experience of reaching an agreement with Congress so I understand how this is done. I believe that if the aim is big – and this is a big question of saving the country, 2019 is an election to save the country from the communal and caste hatred that has been spread, they are trying to destroy the constitution, – then we will find a way. We wanted to get ahead via our work, and they called us Aurangzeb and called ours the alliance of a ‘snakes and mongoose’ – all this just because we are born in a certain place. We have no control over that. If they talk about us like this, you can imagine the disrespect they have towards the ordinary voter, the poor people of the state. They have opened my eyes to this reality and I thank them for this. We will build a strong coalition and we will try and defeat them.
SV: At the national level, there are two trends among the opposition parties. One is to make an alliance with the Congress, as the RJD believes, and work to defeat the BJP through a pre-poll coalition. Then you have Mamata Banerjee and KCR in Telangana, who talk about a federal front that will fight both the BJP and Congress. You have previously joined with the Congress party but now your main partner is the BSP. How do you imagine you will contest the 2019 elections? Are you looking at a common alliance against Modi? Or do you think there should be some flexibility, and that coalitions can also emerge after the election?
AY: If there is a grand pre-poll alliance, the BJP will say, “Look, this is BJP versus the rest”.
SV: If the alliance is made like that?
AY: Yes, and they will also ask who the leader is then. I think, after the elections we will see who is the best among the rest then. This is the responsibility of the regional parties as well. There is Mamataji, Laluji’s party, we are there, there is Mayawatiji, and other parties. We are all responsible parties. Let us first stop the BJP. The rest we will see later.
In the village, there is this game called ‘pithu’. If there is one stone, how do you make it fall, but if there are many stones piled up it can easily fall. Now the BJP, they have everything – MLAs, MPs, ministers, the Rajya Sabha, the PM, CM, president, what else do they want? But they are still not giving the people anything. The people want results, and they have not delivered on that front. They haven’t forgiven or erased farmers’ debts, they haven’t given jobs.
Cases against Adityanath
SV: The BJP government in UP has been criticised for the withdrawal of criminal cases against Yogi Adityanath. In fact, Yogi decided not to prosecute himself, and why should he not have when you yourself, as CM, did nothing to pursue the cases against him? This was a very important issue from the point of view of rule of law but it was not taken forward. Would you accept that you were lax, that you ignored what was such a serious case?
AY: I think a government has many things to do. I remember there was an incident in Jhansi involving him as MP, where they were involved in a fight along communal lines. I had them arrested and sent them straight to Delhi from Kanpur. It’s true that we should have pressed more and moved faster but now it is out of our hands as we are not in power. However, I also believe that every individual and department in an administration has their own way of doing things and I did not run my government with the aim of targeting individuals and creating enemies. The work was going on as it should rightfully. And may be that is why things happened that way.
Akhilesh Yadav. Credit: The Wire
On the politics of ‘forward’ and ‘backward’
SV: Now in SP, are you trying to distance yourself from the party’s previous policies, such as the MY (Muslim-Yadav) formula, which was once very important for you? The BJP also used this factor to create a negative perception about the SP’s ‘votebank politics’. People say you are moving away from the old formula, and trying for broader politics. How true is this?
AY: In our decisions, work and any level of our party, the SP has always tried to attract the most people, not only two sections or counting castes and doing politics. We want more more people to join. All this is said to defame our party.
Now we are engaging in a different kind of fight. Our PM is taking about digital India. So we are going to say that since everything is linked to Aadhar now – bank account, registry, ration etc, all amenities – let our coming generations not fight, please link us to Aadhaar, count everyone and give us our rights. We are also saying count us in for this, and count us and give us our rights. Now the fight has moved forward, it’s not about Muslim-Yadav, it is about joining with Aadhar and giving to those who are there, on the basis of population, what is their due. This is the fight.
SV: One fight is there within your family, or was. What is the status of that?
AY: Now there is no fight. As you saw in the past election, we all met, ate together, played Holi together. And now there is no kursi (seat/power), so why will there be a fight?! (laughs) There will be a fight only when we get kursi!
SV: Well, there was a fight last year about the alliance with the Congress.
AY: No, there wasn’t a fight about the alliance. That is over.
SV: So now there is no problem in the family or party?
AY: See, all these issues do arise in political parties. But our main ideology/principle has not changed. Someone says you have made the expressway you are not a socialist, or you have made the metro you are not a socialist. What does this mean? Where have we moved from out ideology? When everyone sits in the same carriage that is society. We are giving ordinary people amenities; we are working for the community. We want to create equality in the society, that is our aim. It is not to not make metros. People say we are socialists who know nothing. This is why I saw I am a ‘progressive backward’, a ‘visionary backward’. And if they are ‘forward’, then we ask them to make an expressway in 21 months and then we will accept that they are forward! They are actually backward. Once you count everyone with Aadhar, then what is the place for forward or backward in politics?
SV: But there is a lot of controversy with Aadhar as well!
AY: What I am saying is not in relation to that fight, we just want to be counted.
SV: So you are talking about the caste census?
AY: We just want to be counted, what are we, count us. Why not count us? Don’t let the fighting continue in the next generation. We want to be counted and finish it in this generation itself.
Samajwadi line on women’s reservation bill
SV: One last question, what is the SP’s current stand on the women’s reservation bill? We know the party’s earlier way of thinking on this but what is your view? The BJP is officially committed to women’s reservation but they have not done anything about this. Where do you stand?
AY: We are not against women’s rights, but against the way the manner in which the bill is being conceived. Let parties decide to field women. One of our ex-ministers has said a lot of things because we selected Jaya Bachchan. Did we not decide upon Jaya Bachchanji among so many other potential candidates?
SV: But the fact is that parties do not field enough women.
AY: Why will parties not support this?
SV: Well, that is the reality
AY: I don’t agree. We also have Mayawatiji as the leader of her party, Soniaji is the head of Congress and Mamataji as well– will these three not want other women candidates in their party? If there is any woman candidate who has done the work and is a potentially a winning candidate why will we not support her? Why do you want to fix in the bill the particular constituencies that will be represented by women? Why are you restricting it?
SV: Women’s reservation has worked well in panchayats.
AY: Say for example in Uttar Pradesh, there are 80 seats and so we can nominate 30% women, similarly in 403 seats we will also ensure meritorious women candidate. Why will we not put up candidates? People who oppose us are the ones who say we are against women. We are not. We are tired of saying this, our opponents say we are against women. We are not. I stay at home with three women – my wife and two daughters, how can I be against them? It should not be construed that I am against women; we want more women to join us. Who was giving Rs. 500 pension to 55 lakh women? In UP, I gave laptops to most girls, and gave women the Rani Laxmi Bai award. I honour all women, like the women who went to London from Delhi by road, and even the five French women who toured the whole of UP by auto. Any girl doing well, we gave awards. All we are saying is that we want the party to get the right to decide.
‘We have to come out of the politics of hate’
SV: Apart from the tension and anxiety that unemployment and indebtedness have caused, certain sections of the population are also coming direct pressure. There has been violence against Dalits. And Muslims everywhere are feeling insecure. How will you address this?
AY: The BJP, and especially the RSS, have spread a lot of hate. They should read the book by Rabindranath Tagore on nationhood; they should each get one copy. Whoever is born here is Indian. I studied in an army school, my friends had army backgrounds, my wife, cousins, all have army backgrounds too. My father’s brother was in the armed forces and was the defence minister too. They do not consider me to be a nationalist because I am a backward. This is the poison that the BJP has spread, and now we have to come out of it.
The interview was conducted in Hindi. The transcript and translation was prepared by Devina Buckshee.
The small Muslim community in Zanskar alleges they’ve been facing a social boycott from the majority Buddhist community since 2012, which has crippled their livelihood.
Srinagar: About 450 kms from Srinagar, the Muslim minority community of about 600 people in Zanskar division of Kargil district, Ladakh region, has been facing a “social boycott” from the majority Buddhist community, which makes up over 95% of the population in the sub-division, for nearly six years. Local people from the minority community alleged that the Zanskar Buddhist Association (ZBA) has enforced this “social boycott” after four Buddhist families, comprising of 22 members, converted to Islam in October 2012.
The families continue to live in Zanskar, practising their new faith, but since then, relations between the two communities have deteriorated. Several meeting called by the local administration over the years have failed to end the social boycott. The majority of the population in Zanskar is Buddhist, with Muslims comprising only 600 of the 14,000 people there.
Local Muslim residents say the four families converted to Islam of ‘their free will without any force’. “The Buddhist association had alleged that they were converted by force, which is not true and those families are still living here and continue to practice their new faith,” said Abdul Aziz, a local resident of Zanskar. “We have been facing a social boycott since then and it continues even today.”
Local Muslims say they’ve suffered economically over the years as the majority Buddhist community in Zanskar refuses to trade with them, even boycotting shops belonging to the Muslim community in the Zanskar town market.
“Several shops runs by Muslims were shut over the years as a result of the continued boycott and the government too has failed to give them compensation to meet their losses,” said Aziz. “The Buddhist association in Zanskar had conveyed to their community to not do business with the Muslim community. Hotels, shops and other small businesses owned by the Muslim community suffered huge losses due to this boycott since 2012.”
Abdul Khaliq Wani, a local businessman from Zanskar, said the social boycott is meant to economically punish the local Muslims. “When the Dalai Lama visited this region in 2016, he’d talked to the Buddhist community and requested them to end the social boycott and live in peace and harmony with the Muslim minority but even his appeal didn’t have much impact,” said Wani, who is also disappointed with the local administration for not doing enough to mitigate the suffering of the minority community.
“The local administration is not making efforts to end this boycott. Our business is suffering losses and hoteliers and even contractors are not given work in majority populated areas,” he said. “If labourers from the Muslim community go the Buddhist populated areas for work, they are harassed there.”
Wani said local Muslims are also struggling to get shops on rent in Zanskar. “We can’t buy more stock for shops as earlier stock remains largely unsold,” he said, adding that if a shopkeeper from the minority community was earning about 20,000 per month before 2012, following the boycott, he can hardly make about 5,000 rupees every month.
Deputy commissioner Kargil (DC), Haji Gulzar Hussain, while admitting that a social boycott is on, claimed that the boycott has somewhat eased after the Dalai Lama visited the region and asked the Buddhist community to “maintain peace and brotherhood” and end the boycott. “Today members from both the communities somewhat talk to each other but in the past they would not even talk to each other,” Hussain told The Wire. “The people from the Buddhist community don’t buy any things from the shops belonging to the Muslim community.”
The DC said the local administration tried to hold many meetings with both the communities to reconcile their issues. “We are trying to bring both communities together to end this boycott,” he said. But so far, according to people from the minority community, the local administration has not been successful.
Senior superintendent of police (SSP) Kargil T. Gylapo told a local news agency that the district and police administration had taken up the matter with the Dalai Lama during his last visit to Leh, but the social boycott persisted. “We have been trying to persuade Buddhist leaders to end this socio-economic boycott,” said SSP Kargil.
The president of the Buddhist Association in Zanskar could not be reached for his comments despite repeated attempts. When contacted, Senghey, the vice president of Ladakh Buddhist Association, Zanskar, downplayed the social boycott allegations. “There is no social boycott as such but some of the Buddhists don’t talk to the Muslims due to the earlier issue,” he said, adding that there are no restrictions or directions from the Buddhist association for the social boycott of Muslims in Zanskar. “We hope the relations between the two communities will slowly improve with time.”
“Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had visited here in 2012 when she was in the opposition. The present state government should take this matter seriously and send high level representatives to hear from both sides and resolve the issues which should not be allowed to be further politicised and communalised as this further divides the two communities,” said Sajad Kargali, a local journalist from Kargil.
After Azamgarh and Meerut, this is the third such incident in Uttar Pradesh in March alone.
Close on the heels of the Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh adding ‘Ramji’ to B. R Ambedkar’s name, a statue of the Dalit icon was found beheaded and vandalised in Allahabad on Saturday morning.
This is the third such incident this month, according to a report in the Indian Express.
Confirming the incident, the police said the statue was found decapitated in Ambedkar Park in Trivenipuram area of Jhunsi in Allahabad by “unidentified miscreants”.
“Locals found the head lying a few feet from the statue early on Saturday morning,” police said, according to the Indian Express. According to reports, some locals informed police by which time leaders of Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party and their supporters gathered in the park and began a protest, demanding immediate arrest of the culprits.
“We have registered an FIR under sections 295A (deliberate and malicious acts intending to outrage religious feelings of any class) and 427 (mischief causing damage) and we are investigating the case. The FIR has been registered against unknown persons. We suspect the incident occurred last night”, additional SP (trans-Ganga) Sunil Kumar Singh told Indian Express.
As tension built up in the area, Nagendar Patel, SP leader and the newly-elected MP from Phulpur also landed up at the site. He said he had asked the district administration to install a big statue here and they had promised to do so. “This is the fourth time this statue has been vandalised over the years, so we asked them to establish a police chowki here as well. Unlawful elements keep doing this to the mahapurush of the Dalits, it is a shame,” he added.
As angry SP-BSP supporters (both the parties have recently stitched an alliance to take on the BJP) gathered and started demanding immediate action, BSP’s Allahabad zone president R K Gautam said his party supporters and general public who “look up to” Ambedkar were very “disturbed” by the desecration of the statue, as per the IE report.
Of late, there has been a spurt in incidents of statue vandalism in UP which such incidents reported from Azamgarh, Mathura and Meerut in recent days.
Dalit groups last week lashed out at the UP government for trying to “appropriate” Ambedkar’s name while reminding the saffron party that Ambedkar had in fact shunned Hinduism because of the divisive caste system.
The trend of vandalising statues began in February with the razing of Lenin’s statue in Tripura after the BJP won assembly polls there after defeating the Left Front government.
This was followed by incidents of razing statues of social reformer Periyar in Tamil Nadu, with the latest incident reported on March 20 in Pudukottai district where the much-revered Dravidian movement icon’s statue was found beheaded.
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A round-up of what’s happening in India’s Northeast.
Manipur: Chief minister faces flak for “distorting” history even as govt employees’ strike demanding fulfilment of BJP’s poll promises continues.
Manipur chief minister N. Biren Singh is facing severe public criticism for his speech at a Gujarat government sponsored event early this week, with a powerful students’ body even demanding the BJP leader’s resignation for “distorting” the state’s history, else it would resort to “intense agitation”.
On March 28, taking part in the Madhavpur mela, organised to recreate the mythical elopement and wedding of Rukmini and Lord Krishna in that village near Porbandar in Gujarat, the state chief minister said, “During the time of Lord Krishna, there was no separate Arunachal Pradesh or Assam or Manipur. The entire Northeast was one entity. Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland are bordering China, Lord Krishna made them part of India during his time.” Rukmini was presented in the mela as a woman from the Idu Mishmi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh.
Biren’s speech at once evoked huge disapproval in many sections of people in Manipur as it was seen as an attempt to propagate the Hindutva ideology of “distorting” history for myth and undermining the rich history of the state by combining it with that of ancient India.
In a press meet in Imphal on March 29, Manipur Students’ Federation (MSF) took the lead to the growing opposition against the chief minister’s speech by seeking his resignation for “distorting” the history of Manipur. MSF president Ngariyanbam Milan said, “The statement is nothing but total ignorance of the history of Manipur on the part of N. Biren. The statement was akin to completely distorting the history of Manipur and selling off the entire Manipuri nation in his pursuit to obtain benefits from the government of India.”
Manipur CM N. Biren seen sitting next to Kiren Rijiju at the mela. Credit: Kiren Rijiju/Twitter
Accusing him of linking the history of Manipur with Hindutva, he said, “N. Biren must come out with a clarification. If he fails to do so, MSF and the people of Manipur would launch intense agitation.”
Binalakhsmi Nepram, a well-known social activist from the state, said on Twitter on March 30, “People’s anger/ protests grows; chief minister (of) Manipur asked to apologise to people at Kangla (fort), a historical site where kings of Manipur have been coronated for over thousands of years, for stating lies at Madhavpur Mela.”
Dear PM @narendramodi People of Northeast STRONGLY condemn DISTORTION history/wrong portrayal of NE women at Madhavpur Mela organised by Ministry Culture where ministers tweeted about”Heroic kidnapping”of Idu Mishmi woman by Lord Krishna & bizarre LIES told in speeches of NE CMs pic.twitter.com/UZL40kT2Rg
— Binalakshmi Nepram (@BinaNepram) March 28, 2018
Opposition parties have also joined in to demand an apology from the chief minister in this regard. Erendro Leichombam of Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance wrote on social media, “CM N. Biren Singh should apologise to the people of Manipur. Everyone should be free to follow a religion of their choice but distorting history is a crime, it’s insulting and humiliating to the peoples of Manipur.”
The state unit of the Congress also demanded a public apology for his speech, besides the Manipur People’s Party.
On March 30, a written clarification signed by his media advisor Irengbam Arun, said, “During the age of Gods, i,e, under the reign of Bhagwan Shri Krishna, a woman named Rukamani from the northeast region (now Arunachal) which borders to China, was married to him and kept a good relationship with north eastern states i,e, Assam, Manipur, Nagalnd, etc.of that time (age of Gods). On the other hand, the opportunity to become familiar with each other was not available as we are politically and socially divided. However, Narendra Modi took birth took birth at Gujarat to become the prime Minister and he further strengthened the integrity of a united India and proved to the world that the northeast (region) is a part of India which it has strong ties with and now more attention is being given for its development.”
The clarification was issued soon after an MSF delegation met the chief minister.
Meanwhile, the “indefinite” strike of the Manipur government employees, demanding salaries as per the Seventh pay Commission recommendations, entered its ninth day on March 31. Implementation of the pay Commission recommendation was a promise made to the state government employees by the BJP in its “Vision Document”, issued in the run-up to the 2017 elections.
Led by the joint administrative committee (JAC) of All Manipur Trade Union Council (AMTUC) and the All Manipur Government Employees Organisation (AMGEO), the employees have been carrying out the strike since March 22.
On March 21, JAC secretary general Laitonjam Biken told reporters in Imphal that the committee had submitted a 22-point charter of demands to the state government and had meetings with the chief minister on the issues four times besides meeting the state finance minister, the chief secretary and the fitment committee, which had prepared a report for the government. The chief secretary reportedly told the employees’ committee that though the fitment committee had calculated the sum required to pay salaries as per the recommendations and had submitted it to the government, it was up to the government now to implement it.
However, speaking at the state assembly recently, finance minister and deputy chief minister Yumnam Joykumar said, “There is no immediate plan to implement the recommendations (as) the pay hike will entail an additional expenditure of Rs 1,500 crores.”
On March 26, the chief minister said his government would engage “a few thousand contractual employees” from March 27 to dispose of the pending work related to the financial year-end.
Meanwhile, a number of employees’ organisations, including the Manipur Government Service Federation, have offered their support to the ongoing strike. Besides, All Manipur Municipality Employees and Workers’ Union has also threatened to go on strike from April 8.
In a meeting held on March 25, the Union, which includes employees of 27 urban local bodies, demanded implementation of a notification issued in November 2017 by the Department of Municipal Administration, Housing and Urban Development (MAHUD), stating that the employees would be paid revised salaries as per the Sixth pay Commission from March 31, 2018, passed a resolution that if the department doesn’t transform the notification into action by April 1, the employees would go on mass casual leave for two days from April 2 and thereafter on a strike from April 8.
The Union has submitted a memorandum to the MAHUD minister in this regard.
Assam: AGP ministers in BJP-led state government meet PM Modi; submit memorandum against Citizenship Bill
In the run-up to the panchayat elections in Assam, the two Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) ministers in the BJP-led state government, Atul Bora and Keshav Mahanta, have met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to press on his government not to go ahead with the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, as it “violates the spirit of the Assam Accord”.
The Modi government introduced the Bill in Parliament in July 2016, seeking to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955, in order to grant Indian citizenship to Hindu Bangladeshis, among others, on the basis of their religion. However, it has been a sore point with most indigenous people of the state as the amendment will violate the Assam Accord.
As per the Accord, those found entering the state “illegally” after the midnight of March 24, 1971, would be declared foreigners and measures be taken by the Centre to deport them to their place of origin.
In the local body polls, slated for this April, BJP ally AGP will most likely go without the alliance. Though BJP president Amit Shah reportedly preferred the BJP to contest the Panchayat polls with the AGP and the Bodo People’s Front (BPF), like it did in the 2016 assembly polls, AGP leader and former chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta recently told media persons, “Amit Shah is not my leader. Hence, I am not concerned about what he said. Our course of action will be decided by our party workers. Most of our district committees have already expressed reservation against the alliance with the BJP. They want us to fight it alone.”
Atul Bora (centre) at a conclave in New Delhi in 2017. Credit: Atul Bora/Twitter
Minister Atul Bora, also the BJP president, however, said, “It will be decided in a meeting of booth level workers on April 5.”
Sources in the AGP told The Wire, it “prefers to fight the elections alone against the BJP’s wishes as the sincerity of the BJP is increasingly being doubted by many people in the state on the Citizenship Bill, specially after it attempted to name all colleges after (RSS ideologue) Deendayal Upadhay against the wishes of the people. Many are of the opinion that it has not done much to protect the jati mati bheti (‘home and hearth’) it promised to do.”
AGP’s two-member delegation comprising the party’s president and working president met the Prime Minister at his residence in New Delhi on March 27 and submitted a memorandum stating, “Assam has accepted the illegal migrants who entered the state before March 25, 1971. If this bill is passed and the migrants who came after March 24, 1971, are also given citizenship, it will affect the economic and socio-cultural life and the identity of the indigenous people of the state.”
It said, “We urge upon you in the greater interest of the people of Assam not to proceed further in the matter.” The AGP leaders called the Bill “violation of the spirit of the Assam Accord” and therefore, would be opposed by the people of the state. The leaders also urged the Centre to implement all the clauses of the Accord and convene “a tripartite meeting” to review its implementation.
Following opposition by many organisations in Assamto the Bill, including the All Assam Students Union (AASU), it was sent for a detailed study in end 2017 by a joint parliamentary committee led by Rajendra Agarwal, a BJP Lok Sabha member from Uttar Pradesh. It has since called a number of organization against and in support of the Bill. Various organisations have yet again been summoned by the JPC in New Delhi in the second week of April.
Among some other issues, the AGP also sought restoration of the special category status to the state and scheduled tribe status to six communities of the state, a poll promise made by the BJP in the run-up to the May 2016 assembly polls.
Arunachal Pradesh: State to introduce tribal languages in school curriculum
The Arunachal Pradesh government has decided to introduce tribal languages in the upper primary classes.
The government’s decision was announced in the assembly by finance minister and deputy chief minister Chowna Mein during his budget speech this past March 12.
Though the state government said in the assembly back in 2009 that it was “contemplating” introducing tribal languages in school curriculum, it has come to fruition now.
The then arts and culture minister Mohesh Chai, in reply to a question raised by then BJP MLA Gabriel Wangsu, also said his department had till then had documented 42 languages spoken by major and minor tribes of the state. In the budget speech, Mein said that the Pema Khandu-led BJP government would resume the documentation of the remaining languages.
The need for preserving the tribal languages and imparting education to children in them has been a long-held desire of the people of the state.
An UNESCO survey reportedly conducted in 2008-2009, which Chai had quoted in his reply, listed 33 of the state’s languages as endangered and four among them critically endangered. In 2013, the People’s Linguistic Survey of India report said Arunachal, with 90 languages, is linguistically the richest in the country.
The investigating agency has registered a preliminary enquiry and has collected documents related to a Rs 40,000-crore loan and the setting up of NRPL by Kochhar’s husband and Venugopal Dhoot.
The alleged nexus between ICICI Bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar’s husband Deepak Kochhar and Videocon group chairman Venugopal Dhoot has come under the CBI’s scanner.
Sources said the investigative agency has registered a preliminary enquiry (PE) into the matter. The CBI will now probe into allegations that Dhoot pumped money into a firm promoted by Deepak Kochhar and two relatives six months after ICICI Bank sanctioned a Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon group in 2012. This was part of the Rs 40,000 crore loan extended to the group by a consortium of 20 banks.
The allegations are that in 2010, Dhoot gave Rs 64 crore through NuPower Renewables Pvt Ltd (NRPL), a firm that he had set up with Deepak Kochhar and two of his relatives. It is alleged that he transferred proprietorship of the company to a trust owned by Deepak Kochhar for Rs 9 lakh six months after the country’s biggest private sector bank approved the loan to the Videocon group.
Sources said the PE, which was registered a month ago on the basis of information received, has not named Chanda Kochhar but a reference is, nevertheless, made to “unknown bank officials.”
The dealings between Chanda Kochhar’s husband and Dhoot have snowballed into a controversy over alleged “conflict of interest. Credit: Reuters/Francis Mascarenhas/Files
A PE is the first step to investigate an alleged act of corruption or fraud. The CBI will now see if there is prima facie criminality that will require registration of an FIR. If the investigators conclude that there is not enough evidence to register a case, the PE is closed with approval from the CBI director.
The agency can file a PE on the basis of a complaint, on the directions of central or state governments or courts and also on its “source information report (SIR)”. There is no time limit to complete a PE.
Sources said Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot, along with “unknown” officials of ICICI Bank and other banks in the lending consortium, will be called for examination soon. A decision on whether to call Chanda Kochhar will be taken only after examination of documents, sources added.
The CBI has collected documents related to the Rs 40,000-crore loan as well as documents related to the setting up of NRPL by Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot.
ICICI Bank’s board has come out in support of Chanda Kocchar, saying it has full faith and confidence in her. It also rubbished suggestion that there was a quid pro quo in the loans given to Videocon.
The dealings between Deepak Kochhar and Dhoot have snowballed into a controversy over alleged “conflict of interest”, with a whistleblower accusing Chanda Kochhar of misusing her position to promote her spouse’s business.
Dhoot has clarified that his investment in Supreme Energy— the company alleged to have invested in Deepak Kochhar-promoted NuPower Renewables — was only in thousands of rupees and a temporary one.
He said that no Videocon group company had funded NuPower when he was an investor in Supreme Energy.
