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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

The long march: on migrants march to USA



CaravanaMigrante puts issues in the U.S. mid-term elections in sharp relief

The winding caravan of more than 7,000 migrants from Central America through Mexico has become such a political hot potato that it is likely to thrust the immigration issue to the forefront of the U.S. mid-term elections, barely two weeks away. Already, President Donald Trump, who has not been shy about translating his conservative views on immigration into harsh policy measures, has fuelled fears that the caravan may harbour terrorists from West Asia; he has also attacked Mexico for not stopping the “onslaught”. This, besides the usual sloganeering around “illegal immigration” that will purportedly steal American jobs and threaten the security of an otherwise peaceful American society. In truth, most members of this caravan, not by any means the first of its kind but certainly one of the largest in recent history, are either economic migrants seeking escape from grinding poverty in places like Honduras or fleeing persecution, trafficking or gang violence in the region. Unlike previous such caravans, whose members numbered in the hundreds and which dissipated along the way or upon reaching the border, this one has gathered momentum from sheer media attention and support from advocacy groups. It is not going away any time soon. This puts candidates from both the major parties in the U.S. in a tricky position. Democrats are wary of committing too much political currency to the caravan or undocumented migration as a phenomenon, given the prevailing mood in the country. And the Republican mainstream harbours concerns about the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric against the caravan, and what it stands for, emboldening far-right groups associated with racism and Islamophobia.
At the heart of the shrill debate on immigration is the weight of history. Americans can never get away from the fact that they are and will probably always be a nation of immigrants. As President, Barack Obama took a hard line on undocumented worker deportations, whose number soared through his two terms in office. But he sought to toe a moderate line when it came to delaying the deportation of childhood arrivals, and policed borders with a relatively light touch. Mr. Trump, contrarily, has made every effort to deliver on his radical campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., although he faced numerous legal setbacks in that mission, and then made even immigration hawks squirm over his decision to separate undocumented child migrants from their families. Ultimately #CaravanaMigrante will seek to cross that line in the sand which Mr. Trump and his supporters hope will one day become a high wall. Liberal-progressive Americans who hope that these asylum-seekers will not be rudely rebuffed at that point will have to regroup and focus their energies on the November campaign and use any newfound power they win in Congress to chip away at the immigration agenda of the Trump machine.
Source: The Hindu, 25/10/2018



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The right identity

Evolving feminist narratives in India must resolve the fault lines that have emerged.

A spectre is haunting Indian men, but also the feminist movement. For the latter, it is the spectre of an identity movement. As a moment of catharsis, following a long overdue battle for many women who probably belong to the “nevertheless, she persisted (think Mitch McConnell on Elizabeth Warren)” generation, has come #MeToo. Many of us who nominally belong to the millennial community have watched as our younger sisters have gone about dismantling the apparatus that allows masculine aggression and violence to persist. Empowered to finally inhabit a world that listens in solidarity, many older women have come out to expose their aggressors for the first time or repeat an allegation they had made earlier in a tone-deaf world.
So, what will we be left with, to ask a Gramscian question, when the old world is dead and the new has not been born yet? The feminist movement finds itself in the midst of a generational conflict of early feminist pioneers, veterans of many battles and millennials without patience. The latter “will not be silenced” by those who speak of due process and caution, we are told. As Major Saranoff in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man rued, the generals would not have it that we win a war on a flawed strategy when we could be losing it on account of best practices. Saranoff had led a cavalry directly towards a battalion armed with cannons, but had triumphed because the other side did not have the right ammunition at the right time.
The older generation of feminists have been, of late, attacked multiple times for how they have conducted the feminist movement so far. World over, feminists have been equated to a sex-negative, reactionary group which is also, it is alleged, intolerant of diversity — sexual, racial and ethnic. In the United States, feminists have allegedly treated LGBTQ movements shabbily and, in India, all feminists are labelled savarna, elitist women (even by savarna, elitist people). In both cases, feminists are viewed as a faceless mass of undifferentiated women. They are not individuals who agree on some issues and diverge on others.
LGBTQ groups were perhaps one of the latest entrants to identity movements at the turn of the century. Today, the term identity politics might have negative connotations but these were powerful movements that promoted cohesion to protect group interests, often with aggressive political posturing. Adages such as TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist), seek to delink group rights from the larger feminist movement, and have, probably, helped the cause in some ways. Ironically, I have heard patriarchal white men use TERF more often to discredit individual feminists than any other group.
Identity movements that depend on labelling and discrediting have today reached groups who are not only privileged but also outraged at the gains made by marginalised communities. White nationalists and Hindu nationalists, especially men but also women, combine the aggressive political posturing, moves for cohesion and for insulating groups with the power of the state and the social structures they control.
The #MeToo explosion is born out of this moment. Of the need to push back against an insulating identity movement that seeks to include women without representing women’s interests, or even holding its men accountable for the violence unleashed against those they seek to speak for. Racial, ethnic, caste and LGBTQ movements have done this before — distanced themselves from both the dominant community and feminist women from dominant groups. The #MeToo movement in India is similarly consolidating itself as an identity movement. The Raya Sarkar list was posited, quite misleadingly, as an attack against savarna men and against “savarna feminist apologists”. The #MeToo of 2018 is unapologetically against men, male entitlement and male inability to accord respect to women. Any criticism of #MeToo will be countered with the same posturing and aggression needed to promote group interests of a set of people who subscribe to one tenuous identity — of being women.
The feminist movement in India, after years of vibrant diffusion, is consolidating into an identity movement whether we like it or not, and the fault lines are already visible. Tavleen Singh has questioned the exclusion of marginalised women from the #MeToo space (‘Can MeToo get beyond me’, IE, October 21) while Seema Mustafa has dismissed both Ghazala Wahab’s testimony, in which she was mentioned, and the #MeToo movement itself as a self-indulgent exercise. Embedded in Mustafa’s piece (‘The revolution before #MeToo’, IE October 25) is a derision for millennials with a short “attention span” and for women’s vulnerability (which locates responsibility of escaping harassment on women themselves). This piece also reveals that the author has perhaps missed the entire feminist conversation on the “crisis of representation”. The conceit of speaking for others (those without privilege) and the impatient dismissal of women who take charge of their own narrative is also a function of power, lacking in empathy.
An important question that Mustafa also touches on needs to be pushed forward: Is there no redemption (if explicitly sought) possible for men accused of less severe indiscretions? Also, have we lost our ability to at least listen to someone like Varun Grover who presented his case with precision and pathos (when the response of the person who posted his accusation has been vacuous)? Or, finally, what does one make of the pressure we put on women, especially feminists, to immediately condemn their family members and husbands/partners? Empathy, for me, has always been the cornerstone of feminism and I do not want to see it die with the old world.
Source: Indian Express, 30/10/2018
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Mantra, Mind, Meditation


In all our existential expressional phenomena, it is the mind that steers the psyche, “manah pragraha me va cha”. It is the mind that acts with the present, frames the future and even rewinds the past; with the application of intelligence, intuition and conscience. But the mind, by nature, is always diversified and it runs after hallucinations of the mundane world. In meditation, mantra helps the scattered mind to achieve a state of one-pointedness, absorbing the idea of cosmic super-consciousness that carries within, the mantra itself. Every word in this universe bears an acoustic sound; every utterance possesses a rhythmic vibration and carries a significant meaning. Mantra, too, is a precise and condensed form of all these three aspects and is an essential part of meditation. Meditation is a physio-psychic and psycho-spiritual process of withdrawing the mind from the external world and concentrating in an internal energy centre, or chakra, within our corporal frame. The next step is to sit still like a rock and attune the mind with mantric spirit. In mantra meditation, breathing, which is intimately linked with the mind, becomes slow and deep and, ultimately, the mind becomes introverted, calm and peaceful. By repeated mantric strokes on mental plane, the meditator gradually tries to transform his own rhythmic flow into the cosmic vibrational flow. Ultimately, the mind expands and merges into the eternal cosmic glacier. Mantras are special and potent as the right mantra can lead you to the path of salvation

Source: Economic Times, 30/10/2018
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India tops in under-5 deaths due to toxic air, 60,000 killed in 2016: WHO


 ‘Air Pollution Killed Over 1L Children In ’16’

India’s toxic air has been linked to the premature deaths of close to 1,10,000 children in 2016, with the country witnessing highest number of deaths of children under five years of age attributed to their exposure to ambient air pollution of particulate matter (PM) 2.5, said a World Health Organisation (WHO) report released on the eve of the first-ever conference on air pollution and health. As many as 60,987 children of under five years of age in India died because of their exposure to PM 2.5, followed by Nigeria with 47,674 deaths, Pakistan with 21,136 deaths and Democratic Republic of Congo with 12,890 deaths. In India, the death rate for this age bracket is 50.8 per 1,00,000 children with more girls under the age of five dying than boys due to pollution. About 32,889 girls died, compared to 28,097 boys in 2016, according to the report. Between five and 14 years, India saw the deaths of 4,360 children attributed to ambient air pollution in 2016. Across both these age groups, over 1 lakh children died in India due to both ambient and household pollution of particulate matter 2.5 in 2016. Particulate matter 2.5 orPM 2.5 are fine dust particles in air which are considered highly harmful for health. The report, titled ‘Air Pollution and Child Health – Prescribing clean air’, seeks to caution against the rising levels of pollution causing growing burden of diseases as well as deaths. Over 2 million deaths occur prematurely in India due to pollution, accounting for 25% of the global deaths due to air pollution. Globally, every day around 93% of children under the age of 15 years (1.8 billion children) breathe air that is so polluted it puts their health and development at serious risk. WHO estimates that in 2016, 6,00,000 children died from acute lower respiratory infections caused by polluted air. While in low and middle income countries, 98% of children under five are said to be exposed to PM 2.5, in high income countries, this number is almost half at 52%. The report also highlights adverse impact of pollution on pregnant women and children. Pregnant women, exposed to polluted air, are more likely to give birth prematurely, and have small, low birth-weight children, the report says. “Air pollution is stunting our children’s brains, affecting their health in more ways than we suspected,” said Dr Maria Neira, director, department of public health, environmental and social determinants of health at WHO

Source: Times of India, 30/10/2018
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Monday, October 29, 2018

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 53, Issue No. 43, 27 Oct, 2018

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No is a complete sentence

But sexual predators don’t get it. Because they draw on deep reservoirs of misogyny.

Facing up to what true equality looks like between two genders disturbs the equilibrium of the most enlightened of men. From the time a son begins to absorb the nature of relationships in his home, he learns that in most cases the father is the boss, even if he does a bit of the housework. The father’s voice is usually louder, people listen to instructions and orders from him more willingly, “do it or I will tell your father when he comes home”, is a threat often used by the mother, and boys don’t usually shout bossily at their fathers to find their socks or feed them when they are hungry. Nothing wrong in that, if it is a clearly accepted separation of powers and duties, but have we stopped to ask how “accepted” it is by the woman, or is it simply a situation that has been “understood”? The transition from boss to decision-maker to demanding submission is not a difficult one.
In the public field, it is widely understood that racists have a deeply entrenched contempt, if not hatred, of a particular race because of feelings of superiority and the knowledge that they possess the power to oppress them. Slavery, bonded labour, human trafficking, even prostitution, from the man’s point of view, are all areas in which a man has full power and control over the victim who is helpless and, therefore, bound to be submissive to survive.
The undermining of women stems from the same innate feeling of physical superiority and prowess that older societies easily acknowledged when men went out to hunt and kill, while the women looked after the hearth and home. Protection accorded by men to women obviously seeped into their collective psyches. This earlier consciousness has not yet been fully erased in this age of intelligence, technology, computers and labour-saving machines. Preference for non-violence and peace are the catchwords of an enlightened society. It is in this kind of society that women aspire to stand on their own feet, work as equals and be economically self- reliant, even while aspiring to have families of their own, looking aesthetically pleasing in their own eyes, and, retaining the special female qualities of gentleness and grace.
The tension between the existing world view of men and the promised land seen by women results in faultlines like those emerging out of the #MeToo movement. If one looks closely at the earlier presumptions of men and their responses to the new woman, one detects a common characteristic reaction. In the earlier scenario, men presumed they could be predators as it was their natural right, and entitlement, to demand and get what they wanted from a woman. Sex of course, but also washed clothes, hot meals, healthy sons and submissiveness. What happens when a man is faced with the new woman who believes she has a choice in the matter? He does not say sorry and back off, but uses force instead, because that is what has ultimately made him superior. His mind shuts itself off to the possibility of rejection.
Whether film directors, professors, corporate bosses or editors in all forms of media — all these men are in fields that are now attracting aspiring women who are smart, well-turned out and self-confident, and have certainly not planned to be submissive. When a man with predatorial instincts confronts someone like this, he often turns to undermining her in other ways because he cannot yet understand, as Jane Fonda, in a new Netflix documentary, Feminists: What were they thinking?, says, “‘No’ is a complete sentence”. The man has not yet learned that a woman can really feel and be equal to him, and that if she is not willing to give in to him in his sexual demands that does not mean she is worthless.
Interestingly, politics is not such an easy field for predators because it is usually confident, feisty and articulate women who venture into the political arena. There aren’t many cubby holes or instances of drunken partying. But here is where men with predatorial tendencies find ways of undermining the woman they know they cannot prey upon. During distribution of tickets, women are, generally, always considered “weak” candidates or put up as proxies for men. Men in most “equal” areas, even outside politics, expect women to look attractive and provide the tea at meetings. She is thus constantly reminded of her role as a housekeeper and as someone who must, as in the visual media, look attractive to the male eye. If she challenges a man publicly or even privately, she can be called “horseface” in front of the whole world as Donald Trump did of the stunningly beautiful Stormy Daniels.
If a man knows he cannot get his way with a woman because she feels “empowered”, he will isolate, ignore and undermine her by calling her anything from being a “favourite” (wink-wink), to the mistress-companion-girlfriend of someone in power, rather than acknowledge her capabilities. At social occasions, these predators will talk flippantly for a few moments, and with obvious lack of interest, with intelligent, serious women — if they are bound to, for courtesy’s sake, before moving off for more important conversations with men. All these subtle forms of woman-hating because they cannot accept them as intellectual equals or make them submit to physical advances cannot be termed as anything but closet misogyny.
Source: Indian Express, 29/10/2018
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How fair is social media criticism?

Instant online opinions impoverish our public sphere

Social media activists seem to have different notions about corrective action, justice and fairness. They want retribution, revenge and punishment rather than non-punitive course correction, which is the essential function of a news ombudsman. A news ombudsman adopts a light-touch approach to visibly mend mistakes. I refrain from naming the reporter while reporting errors or the subeditor in case of editing errors because the primary focus is on rectifying the mistake rather than stigmatising individuals who work under deadline pressure. A disturbing element about the shrill criticism of activists is the suggestion of overreach and breach of other rules in their overwhelming focus on a single theme.
Reporting on mental health
At 3.07 p.m. on September 30, there was a tweet that accused The Hindu of breach of law and insensitive reporting on mental health. The reference was to a Delhi report headlined, “Mentally ill woman beheads 8-month-old son”, published on April 21. Within four hours, the reader put out a second tweet saying that there was no action from The Hindu despite his earlier tweet and added that this was a shameful display of indifference. First, this activist assumed that health reporters follow him and hence, his tweet would have been noticed. Second, he did not write to the Readers’ Editor’s office, which has been designated to look into these types of lapses. Third, for reasons best known to him, he failed to mention that The Hindu report, written and edited sensitively, was published in April while the new law, the Mental Health Care Act, 2017, came into force only from July 7, 2018. The new law emphasises that the privacy of a mentally ill patient should be maintained and prohibits naming the individual. Aren’t Indian laws prospective in nature and not retrospective, unless and otherwise stated? How did The Hindu break any law if the law had come into effect after the publication of the report?
The issue gets more complicated with a newspaper like The Hindu because its online archive is available from 2000. Is it right to pull out an old story and take it down because it violates a law that came later? Can we alter our past to reflect the present? Is it right to play with archival material? Can history be moulded in such a way that all contentious issues are eschewed from the public domain? Over the last six years, I have tried to explain in detail why this newspaper generally refrains from altering or taking down a story. Does the non-existence of particular material online mean that it does not exist in any other form in the archives? What about the existence of the physical newspaper, which carries content that some readers want to take down, in not only the newspaper’s office but also various public libraries?
Activists working on a single theme tend to be oblivious to the requirements of a complex, multilayered society, which media scholars term as interlocking public, and come up with solutions that might not empower in the long run but undermine some of the wellsprings of plural coexistence.
Laws related to the newsroom
I would like to share a portion of a recent note from our senior managing editor that lists various laws relating to the newsroom. Apart from the well-documented laws of defamation — both criminal and civil — he listed more than 25 specific laws that govern reportage. For instance, contempt of court where, technically, fair criticism is allowed but there are instances of the courts being inconsistent in interpreting what is fair comment. Legislative privilege, where we are yet to codify the privileges of our elected members, is a powerful tool to keep the media on a leash. The laws relating to sexual crime, juvenile crime and crime against children are explained to every reporter and subeditor during their induction period in the newsroom. Twitter warriors may not know that a newspaper can be prosecuted under Rule 13 of the Aircraft Rules which says that “no person shall take, or cause or permit to be taken, at a government aerodrome or from an aircraft in flight, any photograph”. Instead of studied reflection, many who are active in cyberspace come up with instant opinions and impoverish our public sphere.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
Source: The Hindu, 29/10/2018

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