March 2018 Archives

Befriending Menstruation: A Feminist Revolution in Rural Gujarat

Vadgam MLA Jignesh Mevani launched the Maasik Jodey Maitrata campaign to destroy the stigma associated with periods. The Vadgam Vikas Samiti distributed reusable sanitary pads to girls as a part of the initiative.

A feminist revolution broke out in rural Gujarat’s Vadgam, a Dalit constituency, on the occasion of International Women’s Day on March 8. Hundreds of women from this constituency took charge of their menstrual health that day and this topic of social taboo was discussed in an open forum.

Its firebrand MLA Jignesh Mevani led a rally last year to Una, where Dalits were flogged for skinning cow carcasses. He also took up several people-oriented protests, including his recent detention for protesting against the government civil hospital in Dahod, a tribal district in Gujarat, being transferred to a pharmaceutical company on a private-public partnership.

While launching the Maasik Jodey Mitrata or the Befriending Menstruation campaign, he said it was “a tribute to the women who actively participated in my election campaign and voted me to power. Several of them observed fast and roza to see me through the elections. I certainly owe it to them.”

“Girls in this constituency, like elsewhere, have faced far too many problems. I will ensure that every school has separate toilets for girls,” said the gender sensitive people’s representative. This progressive, young MLA, who is also an advocate, has faced strong opposition from the ruling classes, including detention by the anti-insurgency forces, Special Operations Group, for merely taking strong steps.

Mevani felt that far too many taboos are imposed upon women, particularly during their monthly menstruation and at the pregnancy stage. The caste-ridden society considers menstruating women and girls as ‘impure’, excludes them from normal life during their monthly periods and confines them to a room. He found this discrimination very bizarre. Women are also compelled to use discarded or coarse cloth which often creates health problems.

“By launching our initiative, we have started [a] dialogue on this crucial issue. We have launched cost-effective sanitary pads, which will be manufactured in our villages,” he said.

Bharkawada village, in the vicinity of the national highway to New Delhi, with a progressive and positive woman sarpanch, Manjula Parmar, was selected for this pilot project. Her supportive husband helped in promoting the programme. She proudly displayed the eco-friendly sanitary pad. “We distributed one each only to young girls as we fell short. We never expected over 300 women to attend the programme. The washable pads can be re-used for one year,” said the jubilant sarpanch.

“Jigneshbhai presented our village with two sewing machines to enable us to stitch these pads. Along with the government’s ten sewing machines, [this] will facilitate our women sew the pads themselves,” said the delighted Manjulaben. “Our women will be trained to sew them.”

A member of the Vadgam Vikas Samiti presents Manjula Parwar, the sarpanch of Bharkawada, with a sanitary pad. Credit: Priyanka Jain

Kailasben, a young tailor in the village, was very happy with the sanitary pads. “They are very easy to stitch. I can stitch many [pads] provided I can procure the fabric,” which she said was not available in the local market. “We have to look for alternatives. Our women can surely stitch them,” she added.

Meena, Shital and several other girls of the village were all smiles. “We never imagined having such comfort during trying times. We will cherish this day as our best.” They did not think it was possible that men could actually understand their problems. That such sensitive issues were discussed in an open forum empowered them.

Vadgam Vikas Samiti, the local organisation working towards development in the area, also worked on this project for women. Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, the organisation set up by Mevani, spent around Rs 40,000 for this pilot project. This included two sewing machines, each costing Rs 14,000.

“Why can’t the government, which tom-toms of ‘development’, take up such important development works?” Mevani asked. “We shall [conduct] dialogue with people and get financial resources for these crucial programmes in our villages.” he added.

During their survey of the villages, the Samiti “found that women used a synthetic duster type of cloth for their monthly periods,” said Priyanka, who is a part of the Samiti. “We were horrified as these fabrics can create serious health problems. Besides they were strewn all over the fields, as they do not have any garbage disposal facilities.”

After a lot of research, they found eco-friendly sanitary pads from south India and got 150 of them couriered to the village. “We never imagined such an overwhelming response.”

A doctor from the Palanpur Civil Hospital, the district headquarter nearby, cleared all the women’s doubts. “Menstrual periods are a natural process for every women, which enables you deliver children. How could you be labelled impure in that case?” she asked them.

Bhavna Ramrakhiani, who has also participated is Mevani’s other programmes, found the dialogue in this remote rural area very revolutionary.”We challenged patriarchy in this remote village, where the tabooed topics were voiced in the presence of men of all ages and a doctor discussed sensitive feminine issues. Sanitary pads, a taboo, were also distributed in their presence. This enabled the men to participate in the problems faced by women. An attempt to break these taboos began here.”

“Women shy away from drying their menstrual cloth in the open and hide them. They are often found stocked in terribly unhygienic locations of their homes,” she rued. The doctor’s explanation of the dangers of using unhygienic fabrics empowered them.

Kailasben teaching the women to sew a cloth sanitary pad. Credit: Priyanka Jain

“We shall expand this programme to all the villages of the constituency,” Bhavna said. She was confident that good cotton fabric could be accessed locally. “This area has a history of weaving. Kanodar, a village in the vicinity, exported cotton to Dhaka during the Mughal period. The famed muslin was then woven there. We shall revive weaving cotton in these villages which has several vankars, (weaver community). It will be a good source of livelihood for the local populace,” she said.

Despite the programme being a very positive, progressive and a pioneering initiative, a few people cast aspersions on it. Romel Sutaria, an activist working primarily with tribals in south Gujarat, ridiculed Mevani on social media as the ‘Padman’, who was merely aping the film by the same name.

Mevani was very upset to get such negative reaction from a compatriot. “I can’t comprehend such reactions from a comrade!”

“Why does Romel not look into the multifarious problems faced by tribals in his area? Our experience in a tribal village in this constituency was horrendous. They faced tremendous economic problems. In fact we dread implementing this programme there,” Bhavna retorted.

Feminists and women’s groups are very happy with the programme. Such a people-oriented programme has probably not been executed anywhere in our country most of them said.

This chaudasia or progressive constituency can certainly boast of such pioneering feminist revolution!

Tanushree Gangopadhyay is a Gujarat-based journalist

Trump’s Game of Musical Chairs Is Taking a Risky Turn

The appointments of Pompeo and Bolton and the removal of McMaster and Tillerson suggest greater military belligerency and war risks but little substantial change.

The appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton to replace less hawkish members of the White House team comes at the same time as threatened new trade tariffs on China’s alleged theft of American intellectual property, a problem recognised within China, on top of tariffs on steel and aluminium, and the strengthening of US-Taiwan relations.

Those moves appear to be classic Trumpian ‘transactionalism’ – a big rhetorical roar designed to open negotiations and force concessions, or the ‘art of the deal’. This was clearly seen with steel and aluminium tariffs, initially on all states yet from which the European Union, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Argentina, are now exempt pending talks on trade and military spending. The difference, however, is that the latter are US allies while China has been declared a strategic competitor and revisionist power.

The aim seems to be to leverage US market access and military power against other states to shore up the US’ position, to reverse widely perceived ‘decline’ through America First ‘principled realism’ which US President Donald Trump claims will ‘make America great again’.

A risky strategy

After 14 months in office, it is becoming clearer that President Trump operates at three levels: actually renegotiating great power relations; via transactionalist ‘give and take’ tactics; and simultaneously managing the media optics for parties to negotiation and to his political voter base.

The results may well yield a slight elevation of the US position within the international order in the short to medium terms as there is no alternative pole of global power of sufficient strength, at least for next few decades. China has yet to approach credibility as a rival model to the US-led liberal order per se.

Nevertheless, this is a risky strategy from a seemingly risk-taking stylistically-unorthodox administration. At worst, Trump’s approach risks damaging the rules-based order itself due to selective engagement with its core rules and institutions, testing the loyalty of allies, and presenting opportunities for ‘rising’ powers like China to promote at least the possibility of an alternative axis.

Unsurprisingly, this worries the US foreign policy establishment which, since Pearl Harbor, has worked tirelessly to build the international architecture of US-led order – the United Nations system, US-European and US-East Asian security systems, as well as a string of alliances in the western hemisphere and the Middle East. Establishmentarians worry how far President Trump may go; he’s not ‘one of us’.

But the Trump strategy is politically-convenient, distracting attention from basic domestic sources of the political legitimacy crisis laid bare in the historic election campaigns of 2016. By blaming the foreigner, the outsider, the immigrant, Trump sends a loud and clear message to his political base – ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again’!

Thus far, his core support remains solid – at around 80% favourability among his GOP 2016 voters – but as this base erodes, however slowly, we should expect more xenophobic rhetoric and policies as we approach November 2018.

Likely result? In the end, I doubt the damage that Trump inflicts on the international order will bring about its demise – the order is deeply-embedded and has powerful support among global elites. Yet, the crisis of that liberal order, which predates Trump, will continue to deepen for the simple reason that at a very basic level, the order is not serving well an increasingly larger proportion of the world’s people, including in the West. The political crisis is probably more acute inside the US than elsewhere at this time, though the symptoms are evident in the rise of populist right-wing nationalism and the erosion or near-collapse of the political centre across Europe.

But in the US, the rise of the Left is actually the bigger story, launched by the Bernie Sanders campaign, galvanised into mass opposition since Trump’s inauguration by women’s marches, teachers’ strikes, and since the recent Florida school shooting, among school children more generally. Millennials are on the march, in particular, and they have swung left, and passionately anti-Trump.

The North Korea meet

Pompeo and Bolton might be just the kind of men to advise President Trump as he prepares the optics for upcoming talks with Kim Jong-un. They are Trump loyalists; Bolton was a fervent proponent and facilitator of the Iraq war, as President Bush’s arms control under-secretary. They’re hardliners on Iran, Syria, Russia, China, unafraid to counsel pre-emptive military strikes, as Bolton so disastrously did over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Yet, if President Trump is serious about an agreement to denuclearise North Korea, how he and his team handle diplomacy and optics with Iran may be key. The renegotiation of the Iran nuclear agreement, for example, is likely to involve its (non-nuclear) ballistic missile programme, as well as guarantees on regime change, which Iran’s leaders fear drives US policy in their region.

But if the aim is rhetorical fire and fury, and a military build-up to boot, to put Iran and North Korea ‘in their place’ then the likelihood of conflict, especially over Iran, increases. China, which is invested in a friendly regime in North Korea, would not accept a pro-American Korean peninsula.

Shifting power balances

With the sacking of Rex Tillerson, the removal of General H.R. McMaster from the National Security Council and the appointment of John Bolton, even the veneer of diplomacy appears to be giving way to military power and the credible threat of the use of massive force, the consequences of which would be catastrophic. Trump, however, appears to be assembling a war cabinet.

As in other regards, however, Trump is hardly the architect of the broader shift from diplomacy to military force in America’s power projection. Since 9/11 in particular, the power balance in US strategy has decisively shifted towards the military and war, towards the Pentagon and CIA, and selective commitment to international law.

With the rise of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, backed by President Trump’s favourite think tank, the Heritage Foundation – which backs robust US leadership vis a vis Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Isis, Trump would now appear to have embraced a mix of neo-conservative and right-wing conservative nationalism – the very tendencies he attacked and who attacked him as unfit for office during the 2016 election campaign.

President Trump, for all his claims of radical ‘America First-ism’ in foreign and national security policy is now pretty much in the establishment fold. His rhetorical style differs markedly, to be sure, worrying establishment stalwarts, but the substance of President Trump’s policies differs little from theirs.

Inderjeet Parmar is professor of international politics at City, University of London, and the author of Foundations of the American Century. His twitter handle is @USEmpire

CPI(M) to Back ‘Strongest Candidate’ Against BJP in Karnataka, to Field Nominees in 18-19 Seats

CPI(M) general secretary said that the party will support the strongest candidates against the BJP, claiming that the party and its leaders were actively promoting communal polarisation.

New Delhi: Giving a call to defeat the BJP in the upcoming Assembly polls in Karnataka, the CPI(M) today decided to support the “strongest candidates” who would be in a position to defeat the saffron party, besides fielding its own nominees in 18 to 19 seats.

After a two-day meet of the party’s central committee meeting here, its general secretary Sitaram Yechury said the CPI(M) has decided to give an open call to defeat the BJP and the “communal forces” in the poll-bound state.

“In these elections, the main objective of the CPI(M) would be to defeat the BJP. Apart from the seats that we are contesting, we have decided to support the strongest candidate who would be in a position to defeat the BJP. Where we are not contesting, our priority would be to defeat the BJP and communal combination,” he said.

Yechury said the CPI(M), which will contest as part of the Left Front in Karnataka, has decided on its candidates and the final list will be announced by the state committee.

The decision to support the strongest anti-BJP candidates will mean even supporting Congress nominees. The move comes in the backdrop of an intense debate within the CPI(M) on whether to have any electoral understanding or alliance with the Congress.

In reply to a question by mediapersons, CPI(M) politburo member Prakash Karat said, “We will not name any particular party in our campaign for the seats where we do not contest. We will give an open call to defeat the BJP in Karnataka.”

According to a party insider, Karat seems to have softened his stand regarding campaigning for other candidates, including those of the Congress, without naming any party.

The CPI(M) central committee, which met for the last time before the party’s congress due to be held next month in Hyderabad, also expressed serious concern over the “rising incidents of communal polarisation” across the country.

The CPI(M) said after the saffron party suffered a setback in the recent Lok Sabha by-election, “The RSS-BJP has decided that they have no other option but to sharpen communal polarisation, without which they do not think they will be able to even maintain what they have electorally.”

“The worst is that the central ministers are in fact leading communal polarisation through speeches full of hate. They can’t safeguard themselves without creating tension and thereby posing a threat to life and security of religious minorities, Dalits and the very constitutional foundation of our republic,” Yechury alleged.

The Left party also expressed concern over the CBSE question paper leak and said the entire institutional mechanism in the country dealing with education was coming under threat.

Skripal Poisoning Incident: Russia Expels 59 Diplomats From 23 Countries

The Kremlin made this move in retaliation to the sacking of Russian diplomats from these Western countries over the poisoning of ex-Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal

Moscow – Russia expelled 59 diplomats from 23 countries on Friday and said it reserved the right to take action against four other nations in a worsening standoff with the West over the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain.

Russia said it was responding to what it called the baseless demands for scores of its own diplomats to leave a slew of mostly Western countries that have joined London and Washington in censuring Moscow over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

A day earlier, Moscow ordered the expulsion of 60 U.S. diplomats and the closing of the U.S. consulate in St Petersburg, Russia’s second city, in retaliation for the biggest ejection of diplomats since the Cold War.

Preparations appeared to be underway on Friday to close the St Petersburg mission down, with a removals truck making repeated journeys to and from the consulate, which took delivery of a large pizza order for its staff.

Russia summoned senior envoys on Friday from most of the other countries that have expelled Russian diplomats and told them it was expelling a commensurate number of theirs.

Russia has already retaliated in kind against Britain for ejecting 23 diplomats over the first known use of a military-grade nerve agent on European soil since World War II. British ambassador Laurie Bristow was summoned again on Friday.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Bristow had been told London had just one month to cut its diplomatic contingent in Russia to the same size as the Russian mission in Britain.

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office did not say how many British diplomats would be affected, but said Russia’s response was regrettable and Moscow was in flagrant breach of international law over the killing of the former spy.

The poisoning, in southern England, 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.

Russia rejected Britain’s accusation that it stood behind the attack and claimed that it has cast these allegations as a part of an elaborate Western plot to sabotage East-West relations and isolate Moscow.

The hospital where she is being treated said on Thursday that Yulia Skripal was getting better after spending three weeks in a critical condition due to the nerve toxin attack. Her father remains in a critical but stable condition.

The BBC, citing sources, reported on Friday that Yulia was “conscious and talking”.

Expulsions

During the course of Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry summoned senior embassy officials from Australia, Albania, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Croatia, Ukraine, Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Canada and the Czech Republic.

All were seen arriving in their official cars at the Foreign Ministry’s gothic building in Moscow.

“They (the diplomats) were handed protest notes and told that in response to the unwarranted demands of the relevant states on expelling Russian diplomats, the Russian side declares the corresponding number of staff working in those countries’ embassies in the Russian Federation persona non grata,” the ministry said in a statement.

Four other countries – Belgium, Hungary, Georgia and Montenegro – had only “at the last moment” announced that they too were expelling Russian diplomats over the Skripal affair, and Moscow reserved the right to take retaliatory action against them too, it said.

Emerging from the Foreign Ministry building, German ambassador Rudiger von Fritsch said Russia had questions to answer about the poisoning of Skripal, but Berlin remained open to dialogue with Moscow.

The U.S State Department said, after Russia announced the expulsions on Thursday evening, that it reserved the right to respond further, saying the list of diplomats designated for expulsion by Russia showed Moscow was not interested in diplomacy.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in a conference call with reporters on Friday, disagreed with that assessment, saying that Putin still favoured mending ties with other countries, including with the United States.

(Reuters)

Israeli Forces Kill 16 Palestinians in Gaza Border Protests – Gaza Medics

The Israeli military said its troops had used live fire only against people trying to sabotage the border security fence, and that at least two of the dead were Hamas operatives.

Gaza-Israel border: At least 16 Palestinians were killed and hundreds injured on Friday by Israeli security forces confronting one of the largest Palestinian demonstrations along the Israel-Gaza border in recent years, Gaza medical officials said.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians, pressing for a right of return for refugees to what is now Israel, gathered along the fenced 65-km (40-mile) frontier where tents were erected for a planned six-week protest, local officials said. The Israeli military estimate was 30,000.

The United Nations Security Council was briefed on the violence in Gaza on Friday at the request of Kuwait. Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour told the council at least 17 Palestinian civilians were killed and more than 1,400 injured.

Families brought their children to the encampments just a few hundred metres (yards) from the Israeli security barrier with the Hamas Islamist-run enclave, and football fields were marked in the sand and scout bands played.

But as the day wore on, hundreds of Palestinian youths ignored calls from the organisers and the Israeli military to stay away from the frontier, where Israeli soldiers across the border kept watch from dirt mound embankments.

The military said its troops had used live fire only against people trying to sabotage the border security fence, some of them rolling burning tyres and throwing rocks, and that at least two of the dead were Hamas operatives.

Palestinian health officials said Israeli forces used mostly gunfire against the protesters, in addition to tear gas and rubber bullets. Witnesses said the military had deployed a drone over at least one location to drop tear gas.

One of the dead was aged 16 and at least 400 people were wounded by live gunfire, while others were struck by rubber bullets or treated for tear gas inhalation, Gaza health officials said.

Two Palestinians were killed by tank fire, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The Israeli military said the two were militants who had opened fire at troops across the border.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement that Israel was responsible for the violence and declared Saturday a national day of mourning.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an independent, transparent investigation and appealed “to those concerned to refrain from any act that could lead to further casualties and in particular any measures that could place civilians in harm’s way,” his spokesman said in a statement.

A senior UN official told the UN Security Council there are fears the situation in Gaza “might deteriorate in the coming days.”

The United States, a close Israel ally, told the council it was “deeply saddened” by the loss of life.

“We urge those involved to take steps to lower tensions and reduce the risk of new clashes. Bad actors who use protests as a cover to incite violence endanger innocent lives,” US diplomat Walter said.

Right of return

The protest presented a rare show of unity among rival Palestinian factions in the impoverished Gaza Strip, where pressure has been building on Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah movement to end a decade-old rift. Reconciliation efforts to end the feud have been faltering for months.

The demonstration was launched on “Land Day,” an annual commemoration of the deaths of six Arab citizens of Israel killed by Israeli security forces during demonstrations over government land confiscations in northern Israel in 1976.

But its main focus was a demand that Palestinian refugees be allowed the right of return to towns and villages which their families fled from, or were driven out of, when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

In a statement, the Israeli military accused Hamas of “cynically exploiting women and children, sending them to the security fence and endangering their lives”.

The military said that more than 100 army sharpshooters had been deployed in the area.

Hamas, which seeks Israel’s destruction, had earlier urged protesters to adhere to the “peaceful nature” of the protest.

Israel has long ruled out any right of return, fearing an influx of Arabs that would wipe out its Jewish majority. It argues that refugees should resettle in a future state the Palestinians seek in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza. Peace talks to that end collapsed in 2014.

There were also small protests in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and about 65 Palestinians were injured.

In Gaza, the protest was dubbed “The March of Return” and some of the tents bore names of the refugees’ original villages in what is now Israel, written in Arabic and Hebrew alike.

Citing security concerns, Israel, which withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, blockades the coastal territory, maintaining tight restrictions on the movement of Palestinians and goods across the frontier. Egypt, battling an Islamist insurgency in neighbouring Sinai, keeps its border with Gaza largely closed.

(Reuters)

The Mumbai Cathedral That Has Stood Witness to the City’s History

This year, the St. Thomas Cathedral will celebrate its 300th anniversary.

When the East India Company finally took over Bombay in 1668, after a deal with Charles II, among its first declarations was that it would do nothing to impose religion – Christianity – on the natives.

This was a major strategic move – the Portuguese, who had come to western India a century earlier and now controlled a lot of territories, were enthusiastic about spreading Christianity; various Catholic orders were prospering under Portuguese rule and going about conversions with gusto. This had angered the locals who had escaped Portuguese held bastions such as Bassein. The Company did not want to make the same mistake.

Charles Aungier, the second Company Governor of Bombay invited migrants from Surat, where he was the president of the EIC’s factory and trading operations, to come to the seven swampy islands and set up shop there. Businessmen, artisans and skilled workers began moving to their new home, despite its obvious limitations, such as a lack of mercantile activity and unhealthy surroundings.

But there was a need to minister to the religious needs of the small but growing numbers of British soldiers, traders and their families. Aungier announced that a church would be built, very close to Bombay Castle where the Company had set up headquarters, on the island of Bombay. He wrote to the Court of Directors in 1672 and again in 1674 and got a positive response two years later.

A foundation stone was laid, but all work came to a halt for over 30 years – the British were too busy fighting the various marauders – the French, the Marathas and the Sidis of Janjira – all of whom wanted to take over the islands. The authorities also had to face a rebellion by British soldiers. Finally, in 1718, a small church was consecrated for divine service as the first Anglican church in Bombay.

“The entire church was decorated in shades of green for the occasion with palm branches and plaintain trees,” writes Vijaya Gupchup in her official history of the cathedral.

“This year, on Christmas, the cathedral will celebrate its 300th anniversary and plans to include a seminar, walks and an exhibition of rare artefacts,” says Reverend Avinash Rangayya, the church priest.

Kept safely in the deep vaults of a bank, the most precious artefact of them all is a cup once owned by Aungier, who is often called the founder of modern Bombay. It was he who began the fortification of the city, created an early policing system and established a mint and a customs house.

Under Aungier, the population of the islands increased rapidly, and by the time the church was constructed in the early 18th century, the Anglification of Bombay was almost complete. The English population had grown, by the arrival of many women who had come to faraway Bombay, encouraged by the Company which did not want its soldiers marrying Catholic women. The church was now a place for marriages, baptisms and burials of the whole of Bombay Presidency, which included Gujarat, Karnataka, Sindh, Aden and parts of Yemen.

Today, Rev Rangayya proudly says, it has records going back to 1739, all neatly written and stored in large registers that are frequently referred to not just by Indians but also descendants of Company families who frequently visit. “Our certificates are used for official purposes too,” he says.

In 1838, helped by funds raised from the local English community, it was raised in height and also consecrated as a cathedral – it is now the Mother Church of 88 Anglican churches in the city. Because of its height, it was regarded as a lighthouse for ships approaching the nearby harbour.

The Bombay Fort itself – part garrison, part commercial centre, part gated colony – used to be accessible only through three securely guarded gates and came to be called Churchgate, a name that is still used in the city.

The imposing cathedral has been witness to not just the growth of the city but also has been witness to history being made in and around where it stands. It saw the construction and then, in the 1860s demolition of the fort walls, after which the grand Victorian Gothic structures were built, kickstarting the development of a rich, modern metropolis.

Not far away from the cathedral stands the Gateway of India, where King George V landed in 1911 and then, 37 years later, soon after India became independent, the last of the British troops in the country left to return home. And in the late 1950s, the city saw riots as locals demanded that a separate Maharashtra state be created and Bombay be handed over to it. A monument to those who died in the riots stands a few hundred metres from the cathedral.

The cathedral’s interiors too are redolent with history. Several memorials – many of them made of marble and quite elaborate – of prominent British names, including officials, army officers and judges who lived and died in the Presidency. Some names of administrators are instantly recognisable – Carnac, Bellasis, Duncan – because streets were named after them. Indian motifs, including people, clothing, musical instruments, are frequently used in the plaques.

Right in the front of the altar, where the congregation sits, are two chairs that had been used by King George V and Queen Mary when they visited India in 1911 and passed through Bombay on their way to the Durbar in Delhi. Light pours in through stained glass windows.

Because the Cathedral was a very significant structure and situated in the Fort, where most of the British community resided, it was considered the point zero from where Bombay began. “All milestones were measured from here, specifically from the baptismal font,” says Reverend Rangayya. Many of the milestones have disappeared, either buried under road works or simply carted away, though a few of them have recently been tracked down by enthusiasts.

On most days the Cathedral is a quiet, peaceful presence in a busy commercial district, but prayers are held on Sunday and special festival days. But the congregation has been dwindling over the years. “We are in south Mumbai, whose population is declining. Many of our parishioners have migrated to the suburbs and go to a local church.”

The average turnout on a Sunday is around 200 people, though, on Christmas day, this could even go up to 1000, many of them coming from far and wide and not all necessarily Christians. With the anniversary approaching, however, interest has been rising among local history buffs and foreigners who come to explore this hidden gem that is so closely connected with Bombay.

Busting Russia’s Fake News the European Union Way

The Europeans have something to teach the US about protecting citizens subject to Russian internet propaganda. Their effort isn’t just a different form of propaganda. It’s more like fact-checking.

The US has been rocked over the last two years by claims that the Russian government directly attempted to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.

Social media companies initially claimed such efforts must have been limited in scope. But this notion was refuted by the recent indictment of 13 Russian nationals for their actions during the election.

The indictment, brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, revealed a highly organised and sophisticated effort to drive a wedge between Americans through social media.

The recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s potentially illegal harvest of Facebook user information raise further questions about how much American citizens have been manipulated via social media.

Such efforts may be relatively new in the US But they are part of a much larger global push by the Kremlin to affect politics across the European Union and exploit citizens through the internet.

I study computer hacking, malware and the role of the internet in fraud and deception by various actors. And I believe that the Europeans have something to teach the United States about how to protect citizens subject to Russian internet propaganda.

Russia’s mastery of disinformation

The Russians have keenly recognised that they could subvert the modern dependence on social media as a seemingly trustworthy platform for news and information. They have used Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and websites as tools to launch overt and covert information warfare campaigns against various nations.

The internet is a critical tool for spreading false information – or disinformation in the parlance of information warfare – to either manipulate or demoralize a nation and its people. Since most people now find news stories online, whether through traditional news media or on social media, governments can engage in campaigns of disinformation on the internet.

The Internet Research Agency is one of the primary arms of the Russian government’s propaganda efforts. It operates a “troll factory” out of St. Petersburg where individuals create and spread false information. The false information is spread through social media posts, comments in news stories and videos posted on traditional journalistic outlets. It’s also spread via websites the trolls create.

The Internet Research Agency also operates covertly through false online profiles. In some cases, they create entirely false profiles. In others, they have stolen identities in an attempt to seem like a citizen of a specific place and a true believer in a specific ideology.

These efforts seek to turn average people against their governments or against their fellow citizens and sow mistrust and discontent.

The European Union has been targeted with propaganda efforts by the Internet Research Agency for the last decade, as part of a campaign to destabilise European politics and increase Russian power within the region.

There have been repeated attempts to influence the views of Finnish and German voters. The Internet Research Agency has also attempted to whitewash and legitimise the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.

Europe fights back

The current campaign being waged against the US is serious. I believe it merits a response from a trusted source.

Though there are fact-checking websites in the US like Snopes, a threat of this magnitude requires more than just citizen-run or private organisation-operated programs.

A government effort to combat fake news would provide citizens with information about the scope of information warfare. It would also create a clearinghouse about fake news that can inform not only the public, but also government agencies and policy-makers. There is no current effort of this sort in the United States.

The EU created a specialized task force in March 2015 to identify the Russian campaign’s strategies and expose them to the public. The East StratCom Task Force was formed by the European Council to provide information to the European Union and its member states on the extent of Russian disinformation campaigns.

The task force publishes two weekly newsletters. The Disinformation Review is published every Tuesday to show the latest examples and trends in Russian trolling. There’s also a Disinformation Review Facebook page and Twitter account that has 35,000 followers.

The Disinformation Digest is released every Friday. It features what the pro-government media outlets in Russia are saying and compares that to independent media voices. It also presents trends in Russian social media feeds.

In addition, the task force publishes analyses and reports about specific stories that have begun to trend on social media. Those reports appear as close as possible to the time the stories appear. They help illustrate how hashtagging and trending stories may be falsified and why they can both directly and indirectly benefit the Kremlin.

For instance, they have published analyses of the manipulation of trending stories on the Salisbury poisoning. That’s the incident in which a former Russian spy who was living in England, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned by a nerve agent. British Prime Minister Theresa May has accused the Russians of the attack. The task force highlighted Russian disinformation about the incident, including stories that claimed that the “West (was) using it to destroy Russia’s reputation as a peacemaker.”

Lastly, they provide briefings to law enforcement agencies across the EU, as well as lawmakers and the general public. This helps to make the role of Russian propaganda a real, tangible problem that can be understood by anyone.

In fact, the US government is already taking steps abroad to combat Russian messaging via a new service operating via Polygraph.info.

The site acts as a counterpart to the European task force, though it is not currently directed to US audiences. Instead it operates via the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, which serves international audiences. It seems plausible that the US government could adapt this tool to directly service US citizens, which could be a tremendous step forward to counter Russian messaging.

The suggestion that the US engage in efforts to formally counter disinformation campaigns from Russia and elsewhere was recently made in a report by Brookings Institution scholar Alina Polyakova and former State Department official Daniel Fried.

It may seem odd to propose that the government run its own campaign to clarify what is real and fake online. But I believe it is necessary in an era where individuals may not be able to fully separate fact from fiction, and legitimate news sources from the disreputable. An effort like this is not government censorship of the news – or even of fake news. It is government fighting false information by providing context, analysis and facts.

These EU newsletters provide a way to fact-check stories initially released by social media accounts with no apparent journalistic credentials. Further, their reporting communicates practical insights as to how propaganda campaign messaging fits into broader stories being pushed by the Kremlin that in some way benefit Russia.

Creating similar resources within a government organisation like the Department of Homeland Security could go a long way to helping the general public separate truth from reality and become more informed of the real threat America faces from the insidious and manipulative practices of information warfare.

Thomas Holt, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Hanuman, the Ninth Author of Grammar

In Octavio Paz’s book, ‘The Monkey Grammarian’, Hanuman, as Jason Wilson has argued, is seen as “a metaphor of pensée, the total flow of the activity of the unconscious, without control or regulations.”

This article was first published on April 22, 2016 and is being republished on the occasion of Hanuman Jayanti

India is celebrating Hanuman Jayanti, the birth anniversary of the legendary monkey-with-divine-powers. Such a commemoration is bound to be under strict religious norms, with some added patriotic spirit as well, the figure of Hanuman being eulogised as the great disciple and comrade of Ram.

However, there are other interesting ways of looking at Hanuman’s importance. I remember a long introduction by Mehdi Hasan before he started his programme in a London concert, where I first heard of the ‘Hanuman mat’, as one of the four ‘mats’ (or systems) in Hindustani classical music, used mainly in Dhrupad. It is the prominent system used in the singing of the Gurubani. In the Narada Purana, Hanuman is described as a master of vocal music, combining the embodiments of Shiva and Vishnu. It is interesting, in the context of Hanuman ‘mat’ as predominantly sung in the Dhrupad style, that we get the earliest mention of Dhrupad as a musical genre in Abu Fazal’s Ain-i-Akbari (1593), known to have been sung in the court of Man Singh Tomar. The story goes that Dhrupad as a genre found a new lease of life in Mughal court singing.

There is also another fascinating aspect regarding Hanuman – in an unusual book, The Monkey Grammarian, late Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz writes about Hanuman in the capacity of his being the ninth grammarian in Hindu mythology. In this book, Hanuman, as Jason Wilson has argued, is seen as “a metaphor of pensée, the total flow of the activity of the unconscious, without control or regulations.”

Paz invents, Wilson adds, a hieroglyphic universe around the figure of Hanuman. And he also reinvents the ruins of Galta in the book, by following Hanuman. Paz perhaps sees himself as another Hanuman, aping the ape, who apes in turn the act of being a pilgrim and translator of Hindu culture. Paz had undertaken a real journey to Galta, and superimposes that journey with Hanuman’s, whose devices reveal his expertise in, to use a neologism, grammatising the world. What does it mean to grammatise the world? Here is a fascinating quote from the book to begin with:

“(T)he difference between human writing and divine consists in the fact that the number of signs of the former is limited whereas that of the latter is infinite; hence the universe is a meaningless text, one which even the gods find illegible. The critique of the universe is called grammar….”

Cover of Octavio Paz’s The Monkey Grammarian

So unlike French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘grammatology’, or the origin of grammar, of logos, of reason and knowledge as a source of power, the corresponding structures of grammar as rules laid out for language (and us) to follow, Paz gives us the other side of the origin of grammar, as a universe invented by human beings to understand, perhaps, the semiotic (and by extension, epistemological) limits of divinity and of the universe. It is by the limitations in the number of signs we invent and reproduce that we, human beings, are able to create a legible universe. That makes us unlike the gods, who by their infinite capacity to invent signs have moved into the realm of the absurd, of meaninglessness. To be able to possess meaning, to have a world that is meaningful, is then to have a limited universe of signs. Our limitations, unlike that of the gods, have alone allowed us to create a meaningful world. If we stretch the logic we may say, whenever faced by the difficulty or temptation to go beyond the limited signs at our disposal to understand our world, we leap into the universe of the absurd, the divine realm where things are meaningless. Such an understanding of the world then, whether by a Samuel Beckett or a Jean Paul Sartre, seems closer to this idea that Hanuman, and after him, Paz, seems to forward.

But of course there is a crucial difference without which even the slightest of comparisons itself may sound absurd. In Beckett’s idea of the absurd or Sartre’s despairing contention of life being absurd there is a fundamental tragic element. By parodying or dismissing the excesses of realism, showing how human beings are caught in hopeless and bizarre situations where language is reduced to a loss of meaning or of grammar, Beckett takes our attention to the plight of human life under modernity, where new political structures, the often obscuring demands of scientific ‘progress’ and social upheavals, converge.

In the case of Sartre, there is no “ultimate meaning” in life, and hence life is absurd. It is interesting that Sartre holds it is our passion to lose ourselves that throws us headlong into inventing, contradictorily, a god who we cannot become. Sartre’s disappointment with the human race is that it is willing to give up its freedom by inventing god. But even the idea of freedom is ridden with choices which have no meaning for Sartre, except that we are free to choose. It is instructive that the man who was most interested in the idea of human freedom also realised the anguish of our inability to ward off the structures under which we can imagine freedom. If we cannot have freedom beyond the structure (of power) around us, all we are left with is anguish and a chimera of freedom which itself is absurd and meaningless for Sartre. Such was Antoine Roquentin’s life. The other extreme as envisaged by Beckett’s characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who in their waiting for Godot realise the absurdity of their (condition of) waiting.

But from the point of the monkey grammarian, to fall out of meaning into the world of divine or unlimited freedom is precisely the birth of absurdity. Whereas, we may argue, it is in the limited world of our choices, that we hold a semblance of meanings, our little freedoms that we cherish and without which life would be intolerable. And that brings us back to the question of language. Through Hanuman, Paz tries to draw the meaning of life, that is neither real nor writing, but a journey of promise. Paz writes in this strangely devised, poetic story on Hanuman, “Galta is not here: it is awaiting me at the end of this phrase. It is awaiting me in order to disappear.” The place of Galta, a signifier of both travel and destination is a promise that evaporates even as one thinks it. In its whirling vortex, the idea of Galta gives space to imagination, to language, and the possibility of language. In being a possibility, something that vanishes the moment you think, language is also a trickster, a trickster as sharp as Hanuman, who used his burning tail to burn up a whole city. Language, the trickster, can also commit violence, in the name of a game plan not yet discovered. Paz writes, “Stop trying to plan everything in advance. Just get off your butt, get moving, and make it up as you go along.” The road to Galta, Paz discovers in the book, are also ridden with violence. Children throw stones at monkeys in Galta. In the ruins of a place where Hanuman is worshipped, the mirror of correspondence, that world of signs that invents human language, is insurrected by unruly children facing unruly monkeys, a double-reversal of provocations where people ape their ancestors and the ancestors ape their progenitor.

In a striking beginning, where Paz, trying to imagine Hanuman the grammarian tracing his way into Galta, brings together the question of language, journey-as-promise, choice and place together, he writes: “The best thing to do will be to choose the path to Galta, traverse it again (invent it as I traverse it), and without realizing it, almost imperceptibly, go to the end— without being concerned about what “going to the end” means….” It reads like a journey undertaken to reach an end without thinking of reaching it, thus avoiding the end of the journeying forever. Is this how Hanuman, and with him Paz, invite us to undertake all our journeys — into language, love, place and ruins of origins? A place where children throw stones at monkeys? Isn’t then the origin, the place of an originary violence that we have not allowed our language and our actions to be freed from? What shall we need to do before we start being proud of those origins, and reclaim it as our own? Before, so to say, we stop aping our own violence, falsely naming our inabilities in the name of apes?

Changing Rural Dynamics Hold the Key to the Prospects for a Dalit-OBC Alliance

Efforts at building a broad Bahujan alliance failed in the past because of the contradictory class interests of its constituents. But the picture may now be changing.

The extension of support by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to Samajwadi Party (SP) candidates in the recent by-elections for the Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seats and the defeat of BJP on both seats which are considered its strongholds have generated a volley of articles on this new development.

Though some celebrated it and others predicted its doom in the future, an old question of politics is raising its head again – is a Dalit-Bahujan alliance really possible? This question is an important one considering how in the past, similar experiments of bringing Dalits and OBCs together on one electoral platform have consistently failed.

Anti-Brahmin but not pro-Dalit

Being located on the disadvantaged side of traditional caste divide in Indian society, both Dalits or lower castes and OBCs or backward castes had an interest in ending the dominance of upper castes and the ‘Brahminical system’ which provides legitimacy to it. It is for this reason that a number of social reformers and anti-caste crusaders thought them to be allies, like Jyotiba Phule who worked for the unity and the upliftment of shudras and ati-shudras.

While Phule’s efforts remained greatly focused on social reform and could not take the form of a political movement, the Self-Respect Movement of E.V. Ramasamy, popularly called Periyar, did emerge as a strong socio-political force in British India. Periyar united people against the dominance of Brahmins, giving leadership to OBC forces opposed to Brahmin dominance which had already started mobilising OBCs since the second half of 19th century and culminated in the formation of Justice Party in 1916. Once a Congressman, Periyar took over the leadership of Justice Party in later years and injected a sense of pride and self-confidence among OBCs while hitting at the economic and cultural roots of Brahminical hegemony and religion. The Dravidian politics of Tamil Nadu owes a great deal to him.

However, though Dravidian politics succeeded to a great extent in reducing the influence of Brahmins and turning OBCs into the dominant political force in Tamil Nadu, it failed to achieve similar results for Dalits. In fact, the Justice Party failed to gain their support in pre-independence days itself, as the Dalits accused it of serving only the interests of OBCs.

Some scholars allege that the main reason behind this contradiction within the anti-Brahmin movement – that sought equality with Brahmins for OBCs, but discriminated against the Dalits – is the contrary economic interests of both communities. While OBCs or shudras were the landowners, the Dalits or ati-Shudras were agrarian labourers (even bonded labourers in many cases alike the Pariahs or Panchamas) and hence to extract maximum profits from agriculture, the OBC masters needed their Dalit labourers to be underpaid and servile.

Doomed again: the SP-BSP alliance of 1993

But attempts to unite both communities did not stop there. B.R. Ambedkar, who focused upon the upliftment of Dalits, tried to bring Dalits and OBCs together in an electoral front when he turned his Scheduled Caste Federation into the Republican Party of India (RPI) – a party whose constitution said that it was meant to be a political platform for all oppressed sections and not just Dalits.

However, Ambedkar died the same year and the RPI failed in uniting even all the sub-castes of Dalits, ending up as a party restricted to the Mahars only. The political legacy of Ambedkar was then claimed by Kanshi Ram, a Punjabi Dalit government employee and founder of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Though the party primarily focused on Dalits, the idea of ‘Bahujan’ involved all oppressed sections, including the OBCs and Muslims. While the party partially succeeded in this task and started getting the support of ‘extremely backward class’ (EBC) communities like Nishads, Rajbhars and Shakyas, its main support base remained Dalits. The mantle of being a party of OBCs was then claimed by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in UP, which emerged as the biggest party after the Janata Dal split.

To challenge the rise of the BJP riding on the wave of the Ram Mandir movement, both SP and BSP forged an alliance in the 1993 elections, which marked the coming together of Dalits and OBCs (along with Muslims) or the ‘Bahujans’ on one electoral front. The alliance succeeded in halting the BJP from achieving a majority mark even at the peak of the mandir agitation after the Babri mosque demolition in 1993 and also succeeded in forming the government – with the SP winning 109 seats and BSP 67.

However, the bonhomie was short-lived as reports of personality clashes between the then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav and an ‘imposing’ Mayawati (who was called ‘super-CM’ by the media) started emerging while atrocities on Dalits by the police (like the Shergarhi firing of 1994) or dominant OBC castes added to the tension.

Matters culminated in the ‘Guest House Kaand’ of June 1995 when Mayawati was attacked by leaders and supporters of the SP while meeting with her party’s legislators to decide on a strategy for withdrawing support from the alliance government and forming another alliance with the BSP at the helm. The alliance and the much-touted ‘Dalit-OBC unity’ came to an end after this, and since then both parties have become each other’s nemesis.

BSP chief Mayawati visits Katra Shahadatganj village, which shot to national fame when two Dalit girls were found raped and hanging from a tree in May 2014, for a rally. Credit: PTI

The conflict in economic interests

While the personality clashes between the two leaders had been termed as the main reason for this fallout, the clash in economic interests of the support bases of respective parties i.e. the Dalits and OBCs, was the main reason behind the end of the alliance. Justice Party leaders, the OBC castes of UP (and other north Indian states), especially the dominant OBCs like Yadavs, Kurmis and Jats, were land-owners, while the Dalits were mostly agrarian labourers or tenants. Hence, much like what happened in Tamil Nadu – where the OBC landlords wanted Dalit labourers to remain underpaid and be less assertive – the gains made by the Green Revolution (which mainly benefitted land-owning OBCs) increased this division further.

This becomes clear from a number of studies on the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) – a peasant organisation in UP which is dominated by Jats and OBC castes. While the BKU tried to paint its struggles for higher returns on agriculture and cheap inputs as a ‘Bharat vs India’ fight, scholars pointed towards the wide rift between the land-owning OBCs and their Dalit landless labourers and their exploitation and denial of dignity at the hands of the OBC landlords. It was these contrary economic interests and exploitative land relations which led to the ‘impossibility’ of ‘Dalit-Bahujan’ unity in practice. However, changes in the rural landscape since the onset of liberalisation could alter the picture.

Agrarian crisis and changing villages

Currently, more than 85% of India’s farmers are small and marginal, with landholdings of 0.1 to 2 hectares and the average landholding size is constantly declining; as per agricultural surveys, it was 1.33 hectares in 2000, 1.23 hectares in 2005 and 1.15 hectares in 2010. Agricultural income is also decreasing constantly as farmers with two hectares or less land are unable to meet expenses through agriculture alone, according to a 2013-14 Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) survey in 18 states.

Hence, farmers are forced to compensate this loss from other sources and the National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) 70th round confirms that only 47.9% of the income of agrarian households comes from cultivation alone on an average; 8% comes from non-farm business and 32.2% comes from wages/salary, with only 63.4% of total agricultural households being primarily dependent on agriculture as the main source of income. This has severely damaged the old association and pride that farmers attached to agriculture.

According to the 2013-14 CSDS survey, 22% of farmer respondents dislike farming and given a choice would like to quit. Fast paced urbanisation and expansion of real estate markets gives them a chance to do so, using land as a medium for the transition. It is due to this reason that in the past couple of years, a number of farmers affected by land acquisition for expressway or real estate projects in the once assertive and proud farmer belt of BKU (in western Uttar Pradesh) chose to agitate and escalate their confrontation with the state machinery for higher prices.

During my research into these agitations – Ghodi-Bacheda agitation, 2008, Tappal, 2010, Bhatta-Paarsaul agitation, 2011 – I found that almost all of them were aimed not against land acquisition per se but prices, and the participants felt a sense of achievement when the prices were increased.

Emergence of new possibilities

When this is the situation of land-owning, once ‘well-off’ farmers, imagine the conditions of the Dalit landless labourers dependent on them. In the changed scenario, they can’t remain dependent on less profitable agrarian work and this is exactly what’s happening. Masses of Dalits who were once landless labourers in villages are migrating to cities and towns, switching to other forms of employment from construction labour to menial jobs, thela–rehdi based vending, small scale enterprises and a range of market-based opportunities made available by globalisation and liberalisation.

As an example, take the case of Bihar, where agrarian labourers were in significant numbers with most of them coming from the Dalit community. The All India Agrarian Labourers Association (AIALA) is a mass organisation of agrarian labourers, associated with the Liberation faction of CPI (ML). AIALA conducted a survey about the status of its constituent masses in Bihar in 2014 and their findings were startling. They found no ‘pure’ agrarian labourers i.e. labourers solely dependent on agrarian labour round the year, in the whole state as it was not sufficient to make ends meet. Hence, most of the once khet-mazdoors would do agrarian labour (even in other states like Punjab) only for a few months, trying to compensate for the income gap through various other forms of employment in other months.

These developments indicate that Indian agriculture and villages are going through a huge transformation. In the newly emerging scenario, old agrarian land relations which acted as contrary economic interests between the Dalits and the OBCs are drastically changing, leaving old fault lines obsolete. Caste differences and exploitation may continue even in future, but they may not be based upon unequal and exploitative land-relations between the Dalits and OBCs, as was the case in the past. These changes create new possibilities for the emergence of solidarities between the Dalits and OBCs and the ‘second’ SP-BSP alliance in UP may just be an example of this new phenomenon.

Rajan Pandey is an independent journalist and author of Battleground UP: Politics in the Land of Ram.

With Allies Like These, Nitish Kumar Needs No Enemies

Political observers are of the view that the JD(U) leader has made a huge miscalculation as this time he has had to deal with a much stronger BJP.

Organising sword-wielding processions on the occasion of Ram Navami was till recently not a common practice in the plains of Bihar and West Bengal. These religious processions were confined to the Chhotanagpur plateau of Bihar which, on November 15, 2000, became part of a separate state called Jharkhand.

The infamous riots of Jamshedpur in 1979 and Hazaribagh a decade later were two big communal incidents that rocked Bihar. Armed with traditional weapons, such as bows and arrows, people, mostly tribals, enjoying the Sangh Parivar’s patronage, would carry out processions causing communal tension/violence.

While this year Jharkhand was largely peaceful during Ram Navami, in Bihar at least 10 districts and about four places in Bengal witnessed clashes.

The nature and scale of these riots are different from the one that rocked Bhagalpur during the Durga Puja procession in 1989 or the two riots in Jamshedpur and Hazaribagh mentioned above.

Since 1989, Bihar has largely remained peaceful, with some communal incidents in Patna in October-November 1990 (after the arrest of BJP veteran Lal Krishan Advani in Samastipur when his ‘Rath Yatra’ was on its way to Ayodhya from Somnath in Gujarat), and Sitamarhi in October 1992, two months before the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

The credit for the state remaining largely free of communal violence went to then chief minister Lalu Prasad, who ran the government in Bihar for 15 years, followed by his wife Rabri Devi’s tenure after the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader got embroiled in a fodder scam case.

Prasad’s successor Nitish Kumar, who led the first National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government between November 24, 2005 and June 16, 2013, followed a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ towards communal forces. As the Bharatiya Janata Party, Kumar’s alliance partner, was then a weak force, he was able to dictate terms and law and order was totally in the chief minister’s control.

However, things started changing after Kumar snapped ties with BJP in 2013. This coincided with the resurgence of BJP under Narendra Modi.

The saffron party rank and file started flexing muscles and sporadic communal incidents were reported between 2013 and 2015. Meanwhile, Nitish Kumar handed over the baton of chief ministership to his party colleague Jitan Ram Manjhi for nine months.

However, once he was in full control again, he sacked Manjhi and won the November 2015 assembly election in alliance with RJD and Congress. The political comeback of Kumar – that too in alliance with RJD – helped him tackle the communal situation, even though attempts were made to foment trouble in Saran district in August 2016.

In July 2017, the collapse of Grand Alliance government marked the homecoming of Kumar to the BJP-led NDA’s fold.

Political observers are of the view that Kumar made a huge miscalculation as this time he had to deal with a stronger BJP in power at the Centre. As a result, in the changed scenario in Bihar, the BJP is in now control and the chief minister seems to be playing second fiddle to it.

The communal violence in Bhagalpur on March 17, on the eve of the Hindu New Year Day, followed by tension and clashes in several places in the state on the occasion of Ram Navami on March 25-26, was not the first such case of defiance by the BJP.

When the Patna district administration last September issued an order calling for the immersion of all the idols of Durga Puja within the stipulated time as Muharram was to follow a day later, none else but the Union minister of state Giriraj Singh publicly flayed the Nitish Kumar government. The administration withdrew its order.

Union ministers Ashwini Choubey and Giriraj Singh are loyal to prime minister Modi and in a position to prevail upon chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has lost all his bargaining power. Credit: PTI/Election

The involvement of Arjit Shashwat, the son of another Union minister, Ashwini Choubey, in the Bhagalpur violence is another case in point. On March 18, Shashwat was booked for leading an unauthorised procession a day earlier. His father reacted sharply and termed the FIR as a piece of garbage or radddi ka tukra lodged by corrupt officials of Bhagalpur.

Though it was unexpected for a Union minister to openly defy the government, the state machinery remained a mute spectator. Shashwat shifted to Patna to lead another Ram Navami procession on March 25.

It was on March 27 that Janata Dal (United) national general secretary K.C Tyagi issued a statement criticising the utterances made by the Union minister. Nitish Kumar, too, said he would make no compromise on the issue of communalism.

The chief minister may have said so but the fact is that Shashwat was still at large 12 days after the Bhagalpur violence. In these 12 days, riots broke out in many other places across the state, such as Aurangabad, Nalanda, Munger, Arrah, Samastipur and Nawada.

Singh and Choubey were ministers in the Nitish Kumar’s cabinet in the previous NDA government. Both had the image of right wing hardliners then, too.

Today, both these leaders are Union ministers loyal to prime minister Narendra Modi and are in a position to prevail upon Nitish Kumar, who has lost all his bargaining power.

As the BJP wants to keep the communal pot boiling till at least next year’s general elections, such riots suit the saffron party’s political objective. Thus, the party is fully exploiting the situation in Bihar, while a ‘helpless’ Nitish Kumar is reduced to being a bystander.

Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.