Lessons from the Paris riots

India, and every other country facing agrarian unrest, would do well to take note of events in France

Paris is burning, and everyone should be worried. Violent protests by the gilets jaunes, or yellow jackets, in Paris over the weekend should set alarm bells ringing everywhere. Some of the protestors sported the Anonymous mask made famous by the Occupy protests, and modelled after the one worn by the protagonist in Alan Moore’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, and which itself was a stylised rendition of Guy Fawkes’ face. The ostensible reason for the protests, simmering for some time, was anger over green taxes and high fuel prices, and although the latter came down by the time of the outbreak last weekend, people are still unhappy with the lack of jobs, the failure of local administration to provide basic services in the French hinterland, and rising prices.

That this happened in France, the most socialist of all First World countries, is telling. It was inevitable, though. Since the financial crisis of 2008, it has become evident that the current model of global business and trade is flawed. Indeed, leaders of the world’s most powerful nations admitted as much at the recent G-20 summit at Buenos Aires. Over the past decade, real incomes have declined across many countries, and even in those countries that do not have an unemployment problem, there are significant numbers of underemployed (simplistically explained as PhDs flipping burgers). The result is a desire for change — the election of Donald Trump in the US and Brexit are both manifestations of this. The result is a wave of protectionism around the globe that threatens global trade. And the result is anger of the sort seen in Paris over the weekend.

India isn’t wholly immune to a similar phenomenon. Sure, the economy has continued to expand over the past decade and incomes continue to increase, but farmers in many parts of the country are in the grip of an agrarian crisis — there have been at least four large protests by farmers in the past six months — and not enough jobs are being created (India needs 10-12 million new ones a year). And according to a recent report by Credit Suisse, the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality in a country, has gone up in India, from 81.3% in 2013 to 85.4% in 2018 (a coefficient of 100% means perfect inequality and 0%, perfect equality). Which is probably why India, and every other country, would do well to take note of events in Paris.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/12/2018

India must re-evaluate its agroforestry policy

The moment a piece of land comes under any kind of plantation, there will be questions about issues of access and community rights.

India on Monday assured the ongoing climate change conference at Katowice in Poland that the country is committed to meeting its climate goals. In 2015, the country, as part of the requirement ahead of the finalisation of the Paris Agreement, listed a series of specific actions it would take to fight climate change. One of the important promises that India made was that it would create 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of additional carbon sinks through extensive afforestation. A key strategy to achieve this goal will be to promote agroforestry or farm forestry, says a report in the Hindustan Times.

This focus on agroforestry, a judicious integration of tree species with agricultural crops and/or animals, is not unexpected since the practice is now recognised as an important one to restore degraded land and improve farmers’ incomes. Trees are valuable and profitable parts of agricultural systems because they provide timber, food and fuel, make soils more fertile, and protect the ecosystem services that agriculture depends upon. Agroforestry, however, is not unknown in India; it is practised across the country. But many farmers are not keen to take it up because of a lack of information on tree rotation and also the legal aspects involved in the trade of matured trees. To streamline the process, the Centre came up with the National Agroforestry Policy in 2014 to bring together various agroforestry programmes of different ministries under one platform.

While the focus on agroforestry to meet the twin objectives of meeting climate goals and improving the livelihood of farmers is laudable, there are concerns. One of the strongest criticisms is the emphasis on involving private players in the afforestation efforts, which leads to the question of benefit sharing between them and the landowners/community. Second, experts say the policy is trying to convert agricultural land into a manufacturing enterprise, which is not an ecologically sound solution. This is because agroforestry, which has a commercial motive at heart, usually leads to planting one particular species of tree. Third, an agricultural plot is not about farming only; it also supports different kinds of wildlife and communities such as pastoralists. The moment a piece of land comes under any kind of plantation, there will be questions about issues of access and community rights.

If India wants agroforestry to be the route to meet its climate goals, these serious concerns need to be sorted out first.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/12/2018

Laughter is Prayer

When you begin your day in laughter and love, your life gets divinely enlivened. True prayer is laughing in the morning from outside and from deep inside. Laughter comes from the centre of our Being, from the core of our heart. Our belly is so full of laughter that the laughter permeates every cell in our body. True laughter is true prayer. When things go all right, everybody can laugh, but when everything falls apart, and yet you laugh, that is evolution and growth. Nothing in life is more worthy than your laughter. Never lose it. Events come and go. Some are pleasant, and others, unpleasant. There is an area deep in you that is left untouched. Hold on to what is untouched. Then you will be able to keep laughing. Sometimes you laugh just to avoid thinking or to avoid looking at yourself. But when you see and feel within that life is present and intense every moment, nothing can bother you or touch you. That laughter is authentic. You might have observed babies, six months or one year old. When they laugh, their whole body is jumping and bouncing. Every cell in the body is laughing. That is enlightenment. That laughter is innocent, pure, without inhibitions. Opinions are the impressions we make on our minds. If we have one experience repeated four or five times, then, for the rest of our lives, we tend to see life through those same experiences. We need to be able to see things as they are. When life’s essence blooms from within, there is true laughter akin to godliness. Laughter opens us up, opens the heart.

Source: Economic Times, 5/12/2018

What is polygyny threshold model in ecology?

This refers to the hypothesis that the practice of polygyny, where multiple females choose to mate with a single male, is the result of the desire to achieve access to resources held by dominant males. Accordingly, societies in which resources are concentrated in the hands of a few males should witness more polygyny. The hypothesis was first proposed by American ecologist Gordon H. Orians in his 1969 paper “On the evolution of mating systems in birds and mammals”. The model has also been used to explain the prevalence of polyandry in certain societies where resources needed for male survival are under the control of dominant females.

Source: The Hindu, 4/12/2018

Sing like an Urban Naxal

He seeks to liberate language and thought for democracy. He is the citizen of the future

The other day, I heard a piece of song, muttered like an irreverent doggerel, with a lovely beat. It was edgy, irreverent, but it captured a whiff of the freedom we miss today, the ease of dissent that the gravitas of editorials cannot capture.

A song for all

It went a bit like this: “I am an Urban Naxal, that is me./ Don’t you see,/ The state has no love for you and me/ Because I am an Urban Naxal./ Delight-full-ee/ I am diversity’s child,/ Growing wild,/ A bungee jumper of the mind,/ Leaving conformity far behind./ I am an Urban Naxal./ I love the forest and the city,/ But it is such a pity/ The government has no place in smart city/ For you and me./ They call me anti-national and full of hate/ Because they think I am anti-state,/ But I must confess till due date/ All I asked/ Was a piece of land/ And a land of peace./ But government will never cease./ I am Suren, I am Sudha./ I am Ram (Guha), I am Krishna (T.M)./ I am Gandhi, I am Nehru./ An Urban Naxal that is me./ Welcome to the land of the free.”

I want to thank that nameless student whose body danced the language of freedom. He was singing bhajans of the mind. His song made sense and it also captured that sense that we often respond to dissent too seriously. We summon ideology to combat ideologically, reducing debate to the level the state wants it to be. The singer and his song refused to play the opposition game, capturing the sense of freedom that dissent entails. The student’s vision must embody the spirit of any response to the label/libel of ‘Urban Naxal’.

McCarthy meets Orwell

Linguistically the word is a clever one. It hides the art of scapegoating, the ritual of witch hunting by sanitising the word into a disease. What the song celebrates is dissent as a grammar of diversity. The word seeks to destroy that world, reworking the margins, the minorities, the pluralism of dissent into one curse word: Urban Naxal. It creates a climate of suspicion which hides the fact that it is an invented word and a constructed world. The state is free to provide the list. It calls for no proof, no fact. All it involves is a pigeonholing of names, which immediately leads to imprisonment, even mob violence. The irony is that each one of the names listed is a crusader for freedom. Freedom and the dream of freedom are distorted into a false utopia of unfreedom. Careers, lives, biographies devoted to freedom are suddenly sentenced to disloyalty. Even McCarthyism could not do a better job. It is as if a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) consultant has combined Joseph McCarthy and George Orwell, the stigma and the witch hunt, to achieve this sophisticated mechanics of labelling. A label becomes a life sentence from which there is no reprieve.

There is a slickness, a sophistication in the label ‘Urban Naxal’ that the earlier charge, pseudo-secular, does not have. The latter has a heaviness of tone, resembling a clerk’s caricature. ‘Urban Naxal’ has the deviousness and maliciousness of a crafty advertisement. It is an all-embracing term which can be stuck on anyone, a writer, a dissenter, a tribal, a trade unionist. There are no objective features. You become objectified by being labelled. The act of enclosure begins after the act of labelling. The act of labelling creates a panopticon under state supervision. Years of idealism, political and ethical struggles get reified into the word, which evokes the logic of anti-national. It is a RSS distortion of the MeToo movement. If MeToo was an act of pain giving a voice of suffering, the state summons an epidemic of names and crucifies them, not appealing to history like MeToo but rewriting history and biography.

The case of T.M. Krishna

Look at the list, T.M. Krishna, Ramachandra Guha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha. One feels honoured to be a part of this group because it sounds like an honours list of dissent and creativity and not a litany of threats.

Take the case of T.M. Krishna, among the latest intellectuals to be named Urban Naxal. He is one of our organic intellectuals, a musician deeply soaked in the culture of Carnatic music, deeply committed to democratising music by going beyond its Brahminic roots. A man who has emphasised, like A.R. Rahman, the syncretic nature of music, be it a bhajan, a ghazal or a carol. He owns up to all by celebrating all, without overplaying the individuality of any. He is a pilgrim through the worlds of music, who understands that every encounter with difference adds to the richness of identity and creativity.

But he is not a fighter for the creativity and diversity of music alone. He wants to extend his sense of music to ecology, and reads nature like music as a commons, accessible to the creativity of all. He does this by showing that a return to the fundamentals is the best challenge to the threat of fundamentalism, using the plurality of the Bhakti music. To accuse such a classical, democratically inclined mind of Urban Naxalism, forcing boycotts and threats on his performance, is obscene.

Urban Naxalism as a label strikes at the root of dissent and creativity. We face a government which wants patriotism, music, culture to march in uniform and utter the language of uniformity. The label Urban Naxalism as a tactic seeks as anti-national what is one of the most powerful pleas for freedom and diversity. It is this prospect of freedom and diversity that the label proscribes.

But the tragedy does not cease there. The danger lies in the shrewdness of the state propaganda, in its ability to name some of the country’s finest intellectuals as threats to security, as devaluers of democracy and culture. The power of propaganda seeks to destroy the creativity of civil society. An officially invented word destroys several plural worlds. One has to recognise that Urban Naxal as a label stigmatises all of them, threatening the world they create.

All about thought control

One has to see this labelling strategy in tandem with the other strategies of the Bharatiya Janata Party. As an acute observer put it, the ham-handedness of party President Amit Shah threatening the Supreme Court over Sabarimala, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat demanding Ram Mandir, and the subtleties of labelling are but diverse tactics in one game of intellectual and political control. Each uses majoritarianism as a tactic to create a uniformity of thought and thought control before election time. All seek to subjugate civil society, creating or imposing a substrate of conformity. The real crime of the so-called Urban Naxal is his lack of conformity, his ability to challenge the crowd and the mob, to stand up to coercive words such as security, patriotism, border. The Urban Naxal seeks to liberate language and thought for democracy. He is the citizen of the future.

Shiv Visvanathan is an academic associated with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination

Source: The Hindu, 3/12/2018

Our understanding of disability must expand to include people with invisible disabilities

The criteria and process for identifying people and certifying people with disability must find processes to recognise the disability of people with fluctuating disability such as that experienced by many with severe mental illness.

People with invisible disabilities continue to be excluded from participation and inclusion by the general public, the media and even the disability movement. Imagine two people waiting at a bus stop. The bus pulls up and someone jumps out with a small box to create an additional step. The woman using crutches uses the step, pulls herself up with the handrail, and is offered a seat in the bus. The bus pulls away. Left behind is the man with a paralysing anxiety disability which stops him from using any public transport. Both are people have disabilities, yet we naturally assume that the person with crutches is the only disabled one.

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The United Nations Convention on the rights of persons with disability tells us that persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full participation in society on an equal basis with others. The Rights of persons with Disability Act of India, 2016, also clarifies that disability includes people with mental illness, epilepsy, intellectual impairment and other disabilities which are not evident to a casual observer.

People who cannot participate fully in society include those with problems such as renal failure, chronic back pain, epilepsy, mental illness and intellectual disability. They are a large proportion of the millions of Indian people who live with a disability. They are disabled as much by the structures that limit their ability to participate such as schooling that relies exclusively on literacy and thus limits learning opportunities for learning for young people with intellectual disability. Such as public attitudes where people shun and avoid conversation with a person with a psycho-social disability who may be dressed in an unusual way.

This year the United Nations has declared the theme for World Disability Day is “Empowering persons with disabilities and ensuring inclusiveness and equality”. Many people with disabilities cannot be identified by a casual observer as they don’t have the identity ‘badges’ of a wheelchair, or a crutch, or a hearing aid. People with epilepsy without access to medication cannot safely cross a road alone yet who will identify and help them? People with intellectual disability can get lost in a train station or city streets yet are not immediately recognised as disabled.

Within the disability movement and disability networks in India and across the world, it is evident that there a hierarchy of disability. People with invisible and psycho-social disabilities are not equally included, represented or given equal voice or resources. Within India, disabled persons organisations are typically led and represented by men who use crutches and wheelchairs. Could it be that the call for inclusiveness, empowerment and equality this year is one that the disability movement could address within its ranks? How could disabled people’s organisations more actively include people with psycho-social disability or chronic pain? How could disability networks ensure they speak for the needs of people with invisible disabilities?

Inclusion and empowerment of people with visible and invisible disabilities must include policy action by the Ministry of Social Empowerment and Justice. The criteria and process for identifying people and certifying people with disability must find processes to recognise the disability of people with fluctuating disability such as that experienced by many with severe mental illness. It must also include active responses to include people with invisible disabilities from agencies working in Inclusive sports, inclusive sanitation and inclusive community-based development are the catch-cries of organisations working in disability. Yet how well does this ‘inclusive’ brand include the people with invisible disabilities? International Disability Day this year must actively represent people with epilepsy, mental illness and intellectual impairment and chronic pain.

Source: Indian Express, 3/12/2018

Beyond binaries

A multi-pronged approach is needed to ensure the socio-economic uplift of the transgender community.

Transgender people have a gender identity or expression that differs from their assigned sex at birth. They are sometimes also referred to as transsexuals if they desire medical assistance in order to make the transition from one biological sex to another.

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Numbering approximately 4,90,000 as per the last count (2011), transgender people in India are perhaps one of the most visibly invisible population in the country. Historically, Indian society has been tolerant of diverse sexual identities and sexual behaviours. The “hijra” community evolved to form a unique subculture within the Indian society, existing alongside the ubiquitous heterosexual unit of the family. They had cultural and social significance across the country in various avatars. The same is evident in Indian mythology and ancient literature such as the Kamasutra, or the epics such as the Mahabharata, in which the transgender community has been portrayed with dignity and respect.

However, transgender people have been increasingly recognised as one of the most socio-economically marginalised communities in the country. Since the late 19th century, they have been pushed to the margins of society, and have lost the social-cultural position they once enjoyed. Often shunned as a menace to society, they are now only visible on the streets and localities where they are found begging, never as a part of the mainstream.

They are subject to extreme forms of social ostracisation and exclusion from basic dignity and human rights. They remain highly vulnerable to gender-based violence. As a direct result of their acute mistreatment, vilification, ostracisation and dehumanisation, they also remain highly vulnerable to fatal communicable diseases like HIV-AIDS.

The typical lifecycle of a transgender person in India can, perhaps, be construed as one of the most painful. Most often, boys who do not conform to the gender construct binary in our society leave, or are forced to leave their families, and live in vulnerable conditions. More often than not, these children or young individuals begin their journey alone and in search of individuals of their kind, a journey that is marred by unspeakable hardships and abuse.

Despite laws, policies and their implementation, the community continues to remain quite marginalised and highly vulnerable. We have numerous examples of higher education institutions providing quota and giving special consideration to transgender people, but the takers remain few and far between. This is mostly because the school education of most transgender people either remains incomplete or non-existent. The lack of basic schooling is a direct result of bullying and, hence, transgender persons are forced to leave schools, which remain unequipped to handle children with alternate sexual identities.

However, an increasing number of activists have continued to work at the grassroots for the welfare of the community and managed to bring society’s attention to its socio-economic deprivation.

In 2009, it was brought to the notice of the Election Commission that some voters weren’t getting registered as they refused to declare themselves as male or female — the traditional gender binary, earlier found on voter registration forms to be filled in order to get registered as a voter. This is especially significant for the local body elections in constituencies which are reserved for women. As a result, in November 2009, appropriate directions were issued by the EC to all provinces to amend the format of the registration forms to include an option of “others”. This enabled transsexual people to tick the column if they didn’t want to be identified as either male or female.

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This decision of the EC also went a long way towards opening the nation’s eyes to the realities of a deprived community that still continues to be at the margins. One member of the community, in conversation with the BBC before the 2014 General Elections, added, “the Election Commission has given us the most important aspect of our life — freedom”.

The Supreme Court in National Legal Services Authority Vs. Union of India (2014) recognised them as the “Third Gender”. In the landmark ruling, Justice K S Radhakrishnan, who headed the two-judge bench, observed that “recognition of transgenders as a third gender is not a social or medical issue, but a human rights issue”.

Only a year after the verdict, it was encouraging to see India’s first transgender mayor of Raigarh, Chhattisgarh, Madhu Kinnar, elected to office, in 2015. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, 2016, has been passed in the Rajya Sabha. It is now pending in the Lok Sabha.

According to a report in April 2018, the number of registered transgender voters nearly doubled in the Karnataka polls. Over 5,000 transgender people cast their ballots in the Karnataka assembly polls, which is historic. The number has doubled from the 2013 figures.

Transgender people are forced to beg, dance at events and religious functions, or, even sell sex. Their vulnerability to fatal diseases can be extreme in the conditions they work in and thus they have a higher prevalence of HIV, tuberculosis as well as a whole host of other sexually transmitted infections.

According to a recent UNAIDS report, the HIV prevalence among transgenders is 3.1 per cent (2017), which is the second highest amongst all communities in the country. But, only about 68 per cent of the people are even aware that they are infected, which is worrying. High instances of substance abuse and low levels of literacy only complicate matters.

World AIDS Day, celebrated on the December 1 every year, serves as a stark reminder to us as a nation that, communities such as that of transgenders warrant special attention from not only the state machinery, but from the society at large.

There are encouraging trends. HIV services for the community are rapidly improving in a targeted manner after the SC verdict. For example, the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) reported that 2,40,000 hijras were provided with HIV prevention and treatment services in 2015, compared to 1,80,000 the previous year.A multi-pronged approach is needed on a war footing in the form of mass awareness campaigns, generating avenues for dignified employment, gender sensitisation and affirmative action. Only then can the trailblazing efforts of the Election Commission and the judiciary for ensuring inclusive elections in the world’s largest democracy also result in a meaningful and inclusive democracy.

Source: Indian Express, 4/12/2018