Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 12.06.14
The body of a 22-year-old Dalit woman was recovered from a field in Nauria area of Pilibhit district - The Pioneer
Union opposes incentive to SC/ST dairy farmers - The Times Of India
Social outfit panel meets Bhagana dalits for resolving caste dispute - The Time Of India
Varsity Posts' Quota: Assembly Passes Bill - The Indian Express
The Pioneer
The body of a 22-year-old Dalit woman was recovered from a field in
Nauria area of Pilibhit district
Thursday, 12 June 2014 | PNS | Lucknow |
The charred body of a 22-year-old Dalit woman was recovered from a field in Nauria area of Pilibhit district on Wednesday.The young woman, adentified as Pooja, had married Nishant belonging to an upper caste barely two months back .
The body was spotted in the fields by some villagers who informed police about it.Pooja’s parents alleged that she killed as they belonged to upper caste and did not like her.
Pooja had eloped with Nishant on April 14 and married him but their relationship was not approved by his family.Prima facie it appeared that the woman was strangulated and then set on fire as a wire was found tied around her neck.
A case has been registered and Pooja’s brother-in-law was detained.Meanwhile, a 30-year-old woman was allegedly gang-raped by three of her neighbours in Lisadhi Gate area of Meerut.
According to reports, Taj Mohammad, Mazid and Imran entered the woman’s house on Monday night when she was all alone and raped her.The woman narrated her ordeal to the police on Tuesday but they refused to lodge a complaint. Later when the family of the victim petitioned their case to senior police officials a case was registered.
“Preliminary investigation revealed that the matter was fake and the further investigations in the case are on,’ the police said. The cops said after the investigation was completed the police will decided the further course of action.
The Times Of India
Union opposes incentive to SC/ST dairy farmers
TNN | Jun 12, 2014, 11.56 AM IST
MANGALORE: A move by the state government to provide an additional incentive of Rs 2 per litre of milk to SC and ST dairy farmers has nonplussed Dakshina Kannada Milk Producers Union Ltd (DKMUL).
Minister for social welfare H Anjaneya had made an announcement to this effect recently.
This incentive is an addition to Rs 4 per litre that is being given to all dairy farmers and will take the total incentive given to SC and ST dairy farmers to Rs 6 per litre.
Opposing the move, Raviraj Hegde, president of DKMUL, said with this the state government is directly creating a division among dairy farmers. "The labour that goes into taking up dairying is the same for any individual who takes up this profession. Providing monetary incentive based on a person's caste does not make sense. Any farmer has to carry out a precise set of task to be successful in dairying," he said.
Raviraj told TOI that instead the government should think of alternative means to economically empower SC and ST dairy farmers. "We are not against the government empowering them. The government can provide them with cows free of cost or provide other incentives including subsidy for machines to clean cow sheds or purchasing fodder," he added.
Citing an open opposition of non SC and ST farmers to the scheme in Matpady, Raviraj said that he was hard pressed to explain to agitated farmers that it is a government scheme and not that of DKMUL. "This will lure farmers to sell milk produced by them using SC/ ST members as proxy in primary milk cooperative societies and lead to misuse of the scheme," he explained.
Officials of the department of animal husbandry told TOI that they are yet to receive guidelines of the new incentive scheme that Anjaneya announced. Citing the past experience where the state government initially provided an incentive of Rs 2 per a litre and later doubled it, officials said the department of social welfare can provide this additional incentive amount to Karnataka Milk Federation from its budgetary allocation for onward disbursement.
Asked if the other milk unions in the state shared his sense of opposition to the scheme, Raviraj said, "They have done so in private."
Observing that presidents of many milk unions are dependent on the largesse of the state government for their survival, Raviraj said, they will not dare to openly criticize this move of the government. "It is totally wrong to differentiate among members at primary milk producers' cooperative society," he reiterated.
The Time Of India
Social outfit panel meets Bhagana dalits for resolving caste dispute
TNN | Jun 12, 2014, 04.31 AM IST
HISAR: To resolve the two-year-old caste row of Bhagana village in Hisar district, members of the Mission Bhaichara Committee (MBC), a group of social activists, met dalit representatives of the village on Wednesday. They even met the district administration officials to help resolve the dispute between dalits and upper-caste residents of Bhagana that has been going on since April 2012.
Krishan Swaroop Gorakhpuria, a member of the 10-member MBC panel, said, "Haryana is known for brotherhood among communities where everyone lives peacefully without facing any discrimination. There was a cast violence in Mirchpur village and then in Bhagana. We have formed a committee to hold talks with the upper-caste residents and dalits of the village."
MBC team also met Virender Bagoriya who is leading the protest of the dalits. Bagoriya told TOI after meeting the social activists that their key demands were removal of encroachments from 'shamlat' (common village land) and returning Rs 1,100 charged from each dalit family by the village panchayat as processing fee for allotment of residential plots to them.
Krishan Swaroop Gorakhpuria, a member of the 10-member MBC panel, said, "Haryana is known for brotherhood among communities where everyone lives peacefully without facing any discrimination. There was a cast violence in Mirchpur village and then in Bhagana. We have formed a committee to hold talks with the upper-caste residents and dalits of the village."
MBC team also met Virender Bagoriya who is leading the protest of the dalits. Bagoriya told TOI after meeting the social activists that their key demands were removal of encroachments from 'shamlat' (common village land) and returning Rs 1,100 charged from each dalit family by the village panchayat as processing fee for allotment of residential plots to them.
The Asian Age
Media or mindset, who’s to blame?
Jun 12, 2014 |
The media has once again been held responsible for the status of women in the country: RR Patil announces 500 police jeeps for working women.
In order to safeguard working women in big cities who travel at odd hours, home minister R.R. Patil said 500 police jeeps with women officers will be introduced to escort them. “Women who feel unsafe while travelling can call the police and ask for the escort jeeps. They will be given the jeep to travel and will be dropped at a safe destination,” Mr Patil informed the legislative council while discussing women’s safety. The facility of jeeps will initially be introduced in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad and Nagpur. The home minister said a few have raised doubts over the success of the initiative, but he was determined to implement it within two months.
Also, 100 bikes ridden by policewomen will patrol in Mumbai, he said. “We will depute 200 women constables with 100 bikes to patrol the city, especially where cases of chain snatching are higher. I will start the facility in one month,” Mr Patil said. Terming women safety as a priority, the home minister talked about various initiatives taken by the state government including fast track courts, counselling centre, committees on women’s safety and help cells in 1,049 police stations.
Mr Patil also claimed that the conviction rate in the state has gone up after measures taken by the home department officials.
“The conviction rate doubled from eight per cent to 17 after measures taken by the officials. We are aiming to make it 40 per cent,” Mr Patil said.
On atrocities against Dalits, Mr Patil assured that officers would be dismissed if they refuse to register complaints pertaining to atrocities. “Many times atrocities are not registered. I announce that the police officers refusing to register such crime will not only be suspended, but dismissed from their jobs,” he said.
Asian Age
Toilets or not, paturiyas always
Jun 11, 2014
The trivialisation of rape by linking it to the lack of toilets is disturbing and it begs the question, why does the middle class curse the police for lack of safety, demand justice for rape, mostly by hanging the culprits?
The first time I ever had to get back to my car within five minutes of stepping out to cover an event was on April 7 this year. Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav was visiting the riot affected areas of Shamli and was scheduled to address a rally as a part of his political campaign. Teenage boys on tractors, young men on the roof of buses, men in the public ground — a total of at least 40,000 men — had gathered to attend the rally. I was the only woman amongst them.
Dressed in a salwar- kameez and dupatta that covered every inch of my body except foot, fingers and face, I was invited, “Aye Ladeej, Come, I will f*** you on the bus roof!” I turned around to answer, “How dare you?”, thinking confrontation will bring shame and pause. But boys on the rooftops of all the buses within my view broke into a roar, “Yay! Yay!” They clicked pictures of me with their cellphone from all possible angles. Their roar followed me as I took the longest walk back to my car, embarrassed, angry. Finally, an old man walked up to me and said, “Beti, please cover your face with the dupatta, these boys are like this only.” Without getting into a feminist debate about how I have the right to walk around the way I want, I followed his advice and, not surprisingly, though full of inner contradictions, I felt safer for the rest of the walk. For the next half an hour, as I sat waiting in the car, I got increasingly angry at my male colleagues for being able to be attend the rally while I couldn’t because I was a woman.
My mother had once told me a similar story. She and her sister, both teenagers, insisted on attending their male cousin’s wedding in a village in Uttar Pradesh in the 1970s. They were the only women in the baraat, traditionally spaces for male celebrations to which very few patriarchs would allow their women to be a part of. News spread in the village that two “paturiyas” were accompanying the baraat and the entire village gathered to take a look at them and started demanding that they dance. Paturiya is a UP word for sex workers who entertain the baraat with their singing and dancing. In those days paturiyas were a must in most north Indian baraats. To the horror of both the sisters, they had to be smuggled out to the would-be-bride’s house and were scolded for their irresponsible behaviour.
After the Badaun twin rapes where two low-caste teenagers were gangraped and hung on a mango tree for everyone to see, and the Bhagana gangrapes, where again low-caste rape survivors have been sitting on a protest in the national capital for close to two months, demanding justice, there was global outrage about how rural Indian women get raped because there are no toilets in villages. Yes, toilets are important and open defecating does lead to a lot of inconvenience and diseases.
But the attribution that only when women step out of their homes to defecate they are vulnerable to sexual violence is naïve, laughable. At the risk of romanticising, I know for a fact that collective crapping is the only time in rural areas when women of all ages get to chat with other women.
According to the UNICEF-WHO Joint Monitoring Programme Report 2010, 720 million people, both men and women, practice open defecation in India. Vidya Balan, the ambassador for the government’s campaign on sanitation, says in a TV commercial, when told by a mother-in-law that she does not have a toilet at home, “You don’t even allow your daughter-in-law to remove her ghunghat and you send her out to crap in the open?” While the message of is well-intentioned, the reinforcement of patriarchal stereotypes to push sanitation issues is regressive. Somewhere there’s a hint that while men can be out crapping in public at any time, women cannot. So while we see attempts to reclaim nights for women in urban areas, especially after December 16, 2012, protests, no such effort is being made for women in rural areas.
The trivialisation of rape by linking it to the lack of toilets is disturbing and it begs the question, why does the middle-class curse the police for lack of safety, demand justice for rape, mostly by hanging the culprits? It should be satisfied and feel safe by buying expensive pepper sprays and patronising real estate agents, like those in Gurgaon, who capitalise on women’s safety by offering exorbitantly price apartments in “women friendly” areas.
Recently, a policeman was following my car at 11 at night. When I stopped to ask him why, he said, “It is not safe for you to be out so late at night, all by yourself.” He was trying to escort me to my destination. When I told him that I will manage on my own, he left with a confused, spurned look.
Rapes cannot be stopped by escorting women or confining them to their houses. Rapes have a lot to do with caste and class. It is the low-caste rape survivor who is forced to withdraw their complaint against the upper caste perpetrators for fear of socio-economic repercussions, and, possibly, more rapes. The police, which is dominated by upper-caste personnel, desists from registering complaints under the Prevention of Atrocities against SC/STs. The last available data with the National Crime Record Bureau suggests that the crime rate against SC/ST is at a heartening 0.9 per cent. A travesty of truth.
We want simple, quick, feel-good solutions to rape like building toilets. At candle vigils at India Gate, uncomfortable, nuanced questions about rapes during communal riots, like in Muzaffarnagar, or the Bhagana rapes — incidents where women’s bodies are used as battlegrounds to establish the supremacy of one community over the other — are not taken up because they do not gel with the soon-to-be-a-superpower image of India. No matter how many rape cases we protest against in the cities, or the fact that incest rape cases have risen by 30 per cent since 2009, sociological aspects are ignored because the happy patriarchal family structures, integral to corporate development model, must not be challenged.
Till the conversation about rape gets real, all women — my mother, I, the Bhagana girls, Badaun girls — who enter public spaces, or stick to their private space, will be vulnerable.
Till the conversation about rape gets real, all women — my mother, I, the Bhagana girls, Badaun girls — who enter public spaces, or stick to their private space, will be vulnerable.
The Indian Express
Varsity Posts' Quota: Assembly Passes Bill
By Express News Service
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Assembly on Wednesday passed a bill, seeking to amend laws governing two universities, in order to evolve uniformity in reservation and communal rotation in teaching and non-teaching posts.
The University Laws (Second Amendment) Bill, 2013, makes amendments to the Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) Act, 1986 and Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University Act, 2013, so as to ensure category-wise communal rotation in jobs, treating all departments under these universities as one unit.
The amendment bill was drafted after the government found that the provisions relating to reservation pattern - for appointment to the teaching and non-teaching posts - in the two universities were not clear and may invite different interpretations.
Since the Kannur University Act of 1996 was more specific in this respect, the government decided to amend the acts governing Cusat and Malayalam University in tune with that of the Kannur University Act.
Participating in the discussion, most of Opposition members spared no chance in targeting the government for appointing “under-qualified persons” as Vice-Chancellors in various universities “on the basis of religion, caste and political considerations”.
T V Rajesh of the CPM alleged that most of the Vice-Chancellors of universities in the state did not have qualifications prescribed by the University Grants Commission (UGC). He sought to know the reason why people who did not have the prescribed qualifications and against whom vigilance cases were registered, were selected to the Vice-Chancellor posts.
“The government, which closed down 418 sub-standard bars, should take action against such sub-standard Vice-Chancellors also,” Rajesh said in a lighter vein.
K T Jaleel from the Opposition camp warned that giving the Chancellor (Governor) the mandate to nominate more members to the Senate and the Syndicate is “fraught with dangers”, especially after a BJP Government had assumed power at the Centre.
“How can we ensure that Governors appointed by the BJP Government will follow the State Government’s advice while nominating members to administer affairs of the University?” Jaleel asked. He warned that those with “Sangh Parivar affiliations” would soon make their way to top administrative bodies of universities.
G Sudhakaran of the CPM criticised the government for favouring academic autonomy to select colleges. “The government should take steps to ensure that all appointments to autonomous colleges are done by the Public Service Commission,” he said. Quoting statistics, the MLA from Ambalapuzha said that aided schools had not appointed persons from the SC/ST communities as teachers even though their salaries were being paid by the government.
However, the Opposition members thanked Education Minister P K Abdu Rabb for incorporating suggestions put up by them in their dissenting note to the bill.
News monitored by Girish Pant-PMARC
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
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