The case against death penalty

The Law Commission of India has taken a historic step by declaring that the abolition of the death penalty must become a goal for India. It has recommended, for a start, the scrapping of the death penalty for all crimes except terrorism-related offences and those that amount to waging war against the state. The Commission’s report on the death penalty declares deterrence to be a myth, based on extensive research. It makes a clean break with the ‘rarest of the rare’ principle that was laid down inBachan Singh vs State of Punjab (1980): that judgment noted that the application of the death penalty would remain arbitrary and judge-centric and hence would be constitutionally unsustainable. It has attempted to raise the level of discourse on the death penalty by observing that opposition to it amounts to objecting to the taking of lives, and not to all punishment as a concept. Retributive justice is important, it notes, but it must not descend to the level of vengeance, as numerous Supreme Court decisions that refer to “the conscience of the people” seem to indicate. It has sought a return to the notions of restorative and reformative justice, and urged a change in tenor, in such a manner that victims are not made to think that the death penalty is the only, best or ultimate form of punishment. Most crucially, it has placed the death penalty in the context of India’s flawed criminal justice system, noting that even safeguards such as the right to appeal and mercy petitions do not provide foolproof protection from miscarriage of justice, given the uneven and error-prone application of relief.

But the Commission has not gone far enough. By creating an artificial distinction between terror cases and others despite admitting that there is no penological justification for doing so, it has created an unfair hierarchy of crime and justice. It notes the death penalty is no deterrent for even a terrorist. Some of the most egregious instances of miscarriage of justice that it cites as an indictment of India’s criminal justice system relate to terrorism-related cases; the 2002 Akshardham temple attack case, for instance, in which the death penalty was imposed by the trial court and confirmed by the High Court, was based on what the Supreme Court later ruled was wholly fabricated evidence. The concerns such instances raise about the death penalty disproportionately affecting the poor and marginalised are more sharply in evidence in terrorism cases — 93.5 per cent of those on death row in terrorism cases are Dalits or those from the religious minorities. By holding itself back from recommending a total abolition, the Commission has put the ball in Parliament’s court. The government and the principal opposition are unlikely to support such an abolition at this point. It can only be hoped Parliament will complete the good work the Law Commission has begun.

Keywords: death penalty, Law Commission of India, Yakub Memon, 2002 Akshardham Temple attack

Bolstering skills through PPP model

Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE) in partnership with the World Bank will organise a Google+ Hangout to enable greater engagement of the Indian corporate sector in India’s skill development initiatives.

The Google+ Hangout will have different stakeholders including government, World Bank and CEOs of large Indian Corporations deliberate ways in which Corporate Social Responsibility Funds of Indian companies can be channeled towards skill development initiatives of the government.

This online event will be held on 2nd September, 2015 from 4.30 pm to 6.00 pm. Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy will deliver the keynote address and interact with the CEOs of Indian companies. Chairpersons of Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) such as State Bank of India, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC), and Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) will also participate.

Announcing the initiative Rudy said, “India is expected to have half of its population under 28 years by 2030. While the `ageing economy’ phenomenon will globally create a shortage of skilled manpower of 57 million by 2020, India will have a surplus of 46 million working people. Helping this young population with the right skills will provide India a huge demographic dividend.”

The Hangout will also launch IT-based Skills to Jobs Aggregator Platform. The Skills to Jobs platform – created as part of World Bank technical assistance to MSDE – is a technology enabled multi-stakeholder platform that will effectively channel funds (both government and corporate) towards skills projects and also help Indian companies and skilled trainees to connect, which could lead to better job prospects for the trainees. The entire platform will be driven through a combination of Marketplace and cloud, mobile and big data technologies. All data points will be tagged to Google Maps, thereby, providing exact locations ensuring highest levels of data authenticity. Dashboards will be created to provide a one-stop solution for understanding and evaluating the progress, effectiveness and impact of skills projects across the country.

World Bank Country Director in India Onno Ruhl has said, “The Google+ Hangout will help us brainstorm on how public and private capital can be effectively channeled towards skill development in order to prepare a better skilled workforce for the job market.”

Erasing history

Roads are a city’s arteries, and when they are given new names, the old lose their connect, and with it a part of history is lost. The Bharatiya Janata Party has picked on Mughal emperor Aurangzeb to rewrite New Delhi’s history by renaming a road named after him. Aurangzeb is the archetypal villain in the Hindu nationalist imagination — the cruel ruler who put a sword to people’s heads, offering them a choice between Islam and death. And a despot who hated music so much he ordered it buried deep so that no sound could escape and reach anyone’s ears. Perhaps much of it was true, but often the nuance is lost in textbooks where the process of internalisation of history begins at a young age. Not only cruel, Aurangzeb for the BJP is an outsider, a part of Mughal history, and history it desires to wish away. And when the party decided to replace Aurangzeb with another Muslim, a former President who was the antithesis of the Mughal ruler, a man who loved to play the veena, a benevolent man who pardoned many people from being marched off to the gallows, it was hard not to miss the political statement being made. Mahmood Mamdani wrote in his paper, ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective...’: “Whether in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Pakistan, Islam must be quarantined and the devil must be exorcized from it by a civil war between good Muslims and bad Muslims.” In India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, then, was a good Hindu-Muslim. Twitter broke into applause and exhaled a happy sigh. A piece of history was erased for good, some Twitter handles proclaimed. Of course, once the process of correcting perceived historical wrongs begins, there is no stopping it. Delhi and other cities have many roads named after Muslim rulers, and the clamour for change has only just started.

It is a good question to ask whether the departed President could have some other road named after him. When The Hindu first reported the renaming plan (on July 30, 2015), the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee suggested that Aurangzeb Road be spared to be named after Guru Tegh Bahadur, who died defending the Hindu faith, and another road be chosen to be named after Abdul Kalam. It is fair to ask whether the BJP could have chosen to rename Prithviraj Road or Rajesh Pilot Marg after Kalam. The Congress would then have broken into more than a rash. The party had gone on a spree of relabelling roads named Connaught and Curzon after Indian leaders, and defended the decisions saying it was shaking off the colonial legacy. But Aurangzeb is a part of India’s (pre-colonial) history. A part acknowledged through this road named after him. This renaming is an attempt to excise that part.

Keywords: Aurangzeb Road, APJ Abdul Kalam, New Delhi, BJP, Mughal

FACULTY POSITION VACANCIES AT JNU, NEW DELHI.

Window Advt. . RC/55/2015

Advt. No. RC/55/2015 : Opening for the faculty position at the level of Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor in the areas of specialization as indicated against each.
Last date for submission of applications completed in all respects, shall be 28 September, 2015.

A number of faculty positions at the level of Professor, Associate Professor and Assistant Professor are available in various Schools/Centres of the University. Candidates with good academic record, teaching and research experience and working in related areas, are encouraged to apply. University also solicits applications from candidates with research interests that are interdisciplinary. At present, the number of vacancies at each level are as under: Scale of Pay UR SC ST Total Professor 37400-67000/- (PB-IV) AGP Rs. 10000/- 07 02 01 10 Associate Professor 37400-67000/- (PB-IV) AGP Rs. 9000/- 03 01 01 05 Assistant Professor 15600-39100/- (PB-III) AGP Rs. 6000/- 02 02 01 05 Total 12 05 03 20 For more details on Centre/School, Specializations etc. please visit JNU website www.jnu.ac.in or contact Section Officer, Room Nos. 131-132, Recruitment Cell, Administrative Block, JNU, New Delhi – 110067, Email: recruitment@mail.jnu.ac.in The last date for the receipt of application is 28 September, 2015. Registrar Jawaharlal Nehru Universit









Source: JNU website (careers at JNU): http://www.jnu.ac.in/Career/ (01/09/2015).

A common schooling system would bring us together as a society

The idea of sending all children to the same school is not new, but the recent order given by the Allahabad high court sounds revolutionary. It does so because, during the recent decades, India has taken far too many steps away from the idea of a common school system.

The partition of India into State-run and private school systems is now an omnipresent social reality. The rapid growth of fee-charging private schools is riding the wave of social aspirations. Parents are willing to make any sacrifice to send their children to a private school.

The State-run schools are not competing anymore; they seem reconciled to the common perception that they are no good. Only parents who have no choice are sending their children to government schools. Some are sending them because of ancillary benefits, such as mid-day meals, free uniform, textbooks, and scholarships (for certain categories).

What about teaching? That is what is not happening, according to the popular perception of State-run schools. And why is that so? This last question lands you in front of a complex web of explanations. Some of the answers refer to systemic inefficiency; some refer to the disposition and habits of State-employed teachers.

It is not easy to analyse and make sense of all the available answers. And then, there is the big picture that the government itself loves to project. This picture highlights a vast shortage of teachers across the country, the worst shortage being in the Hindi belt.

In the confusing scenario I have tried to portray in my thumb nail sketch above, the order given by the Allahabad High Court makes eminent sense. The court was responding to a plea made before it in the public interest. The plea was simple: Please intervene and ask the government to improve its schools.

The evidence supporting the plea was as vast and complex as the scenario itself. Instead of going into the nature of the evidence or the truth-value of the reality the evidence portrays, the court has gone for a single-stroke solution.

This solution is logically grounded in a business principle, namely, that we worry about a situation when we have a stake in it. Instead of asking the government of Uttar Pradesh why its schools are in a poor shape, the court has asked it to turn all its employees into stakeholders.

The remarkable order issued by the court says that whoever is earning a living by serving the government should compulsorily avail of the services of primary schools run by the government.

Put differently, the order asks all government employees, including officers and judges, to send their children to a government primary school. Once this is done, the order assumes, government schools will improve. 

This assumption is neither wrong nor ambitious. There was a time when private schools were few and none existed in district towns and villages. Up until the 1960s, the sons and daughters of district magistrates and local politicians enrolled in the local school, and that school was mostly a government school or an aided school.

In those days, a leaking roof or broken furniture would get repaired within a few days. Teachers’ vacancies got filled up swiftly, and teachers were seldom absent. A major reason for this kind of efficiency was the presence of children whose parents had a voice. Parents of that social class and status have now withdrawn their children from government schools.

It is true that at that time, children of the labour class, mostly belonging to the lower-rungs of the caste system, did not enrol at all. Their presence in schools today is one of the biggest stories of India’s democracy.

But it is also the story of social segregation in schooling. Parents belonging to the better-off sections of society do not want their children to mingle with the children of the poor and the lower castes. 

As a custodian of the Constitution, the State has tried to bridge the gap by reserving — under the Right to Education Act — one-fourth of seats in unaided private schools for the children of economically weak sections.

This social engineering has begun to work in many parts of the country; elsewhere, it is facing resistance. The Allahabad order aims to intensify this social engineering by asking State employees and public representatives to send their children to government schools. It is an imaginative extension of the spirit of the Right to Education law.

It is also modest because it does not go beyond the primary grades. Its potential as a socially cohesive move is just as significant as its reformist assumption. Working for the government brings both status and power, creating a palpable hiatus of status between State employees and the rest of the citizenry. A similar chasm divides ordinary people from their elected representatives.

The Allahabad order will reduce these gaps at the level of children and thereby stop, or at least diminish, the perpetuation of social divisions. This looks like a tall order in the circumstances prevailing today.

It is difficult to imagine the labouring children of Firozabad sharing a classroom with children of officials posted there. Uttar Pradesh has not gone through any major social movement of the kind that Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu has witnessed. Caste divisions are endemic and their political expression is shrill.

The same applies to religious divisions. The Allahabad order points to a dream that seems no less than a miracle. The court has given six months to the government to prepare a plan of action. It will be a pity if the UP government responds to the order by filing a review petition or moves the Supreme Court to seek relief from a historic order.

(Krishna Kumar is professor of education at Delhi University and former director, NCERT. The views expressed are personal)

The Speaking Tree - We Need Nature

NAYASWAMI JYOTISH





A yogi told me this story , “I was walking in the jungle with a companion, when I tripped and accidentally gashed my leg very badly . Although we knew it would be dangerous to stay the night, I was unable to walk, and the situation looked bad. My companion, who had been trained as a healer, raised his hands and slowly began to turn in a circle. After some time, he went to a tree, picked some leaves, and made a poultice. As soon as he applied it, the bleeding stopped, and we were able to continue. He explained that he was unfamiliar with the herbs in that area and was asking the plants for help. The tree had offered its leaves and, if needed, would also have transferred its life force to me.“The yogi (Swami Gyanananda) concluded by showing me a faint scar that looked as if it were many years old, although only two weeks had passed.
This story is both true and a metaphor for our relationship with nature. Our lives depend upon the other inhabitants of our planet. They give us the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat and the medicines with which we heal. There are more microbes in a single teaspoon of soil than there are humans on the earth.
Scientists have discovered that even our bodies are not only our own: they contain a microbiome with 10 times as many cells from microbes as from human cells.
Life is not possible without this symbiotic relationship.There is also, beyond the merely physical, a connection of consciousness, which we can deepen if we choose.

30% of women in parliaments: Most countries miss goal

Somini Sengupta

United Nations NYT NEWS SERVICE





The corridors of the United Nations hummed on Monday as hundreds of men, in polished wingtips and natty ties, arrived here for the annual conclave of lawmakers from around the world.By now, the other half of humanity was to be better represented in their ranks. Yet despite a promise made by world leaders two decades ago to have women make up at least 30% of their national legislatures, most of the world's parliaments remain largely the province of men. The conference at the UN reflected just that. Among 190 countries, only 44 legislatures have met the 30% goal, according to an analysis by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. They include Rwanda (64% of members of its lower houseare women) and Bolivia (53%). The US is not among those that met the target. Among members of the House of Representatives, 19% are women, and in the Senate, the figure is 20%.
In India, the world's most populous democracy , women's representation is even lower: 12 and 12.8%, respectively, in its lower and upper houses. Santi Bai Hanoomanjee, speaker of the national assembly of Mauritius, nudged her male colleagues from around the world to take up the cause in their own countries. “Be advocates for gen der equality ,“ she said in her speech to the Fourth World Conference of Speakers of Parliament.
In a draft declaration that had yet to be finalized, the conference of the speakers of parliament agreed to give themselves five more years to reach the 30% target.
The representation of women in parliament does not directly reflect the status of women in that country . In Afghanistan, where measures of women's health, education and well-being are among the worst in the world, 27% of the nation's lower-house lawmakers are female, better than in Australia, where by most standards, women are far better off.