SC pulls up Modi Govt – Wonderful Schemes for poor children but Nothing on Ground!

NEW DELHI — The Supreme Court Friday pulled up the Modi government for the mismatch between the "wonderful" welfare schemes for children belonging to lower strata of society and their implementation, saying the ground reality was "completely different", according to Press Trust of India.

"All the ideas you have seems OK. Government of India has wonderful laws, ideas and schemes but the things are different on the ground," a social justice bench comprising justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit said.

The observations came while Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta informed the court about the schemes which the government has formulated for the welfare of children.

The ASG said the government had introduced a scheme named Sabla in 2010-11 on a pilot basis, which was being implemented in 205 districts across all states and union territories.

Sabla aims at all-round development of adolescent girls of 11-18 years by making them "self-reliant". The scheme has two components of nutrition and non-nutrition with the former aiming at improving thehealth and nutrition status of the adolescent girls, the latter addresses their developmental needs.

"It is a wonderful scheme but what is happening? You people do a lot of work, make plans but what happens? Ground realities are completely different," the bench said.

The apex court also expressed concern over non-filling up of vacancies, including for the post of Chairperson of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR), despite its directions.

Earlier, the court had slammed the Centre for its "casual" approach towards missing children and imposed a fine on it for not complying with its directions like providing the status of such children across the country.

Referring to the statutory provision on vacancies, it had said the Chairperson of NCPCR and its members were required to be appointed within 90 days of the posts falling vacant.–

http://caravandaily.com/portal/wonderful-schemes-but-nothing-on-ground-supreme-court-on-modi-govt-welfare-plans-for-poor-children/

At dawn women miners gather at allocated sites along riverbanks in India's coastal Andhra Pradesh state to oversee the process of dredging, loading and shipping sand. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

GUNTUR, India, Aug 24 2015 (IPS) – Thirty-seven-year-old Kode Sujatha stands in front of a hut with a palm-thatched roof, surrounded by a group of men shouting angrily and jostling one another for a spot at the front of the crowd.

Each of the boatmen, who carry sand mined from a nearby river to the shore every day, wants to be paid before the others.

Sujatha stares hard at them, holds up a piece of paper and says, "If you have a printed receipt of payment, come, stand in the queue. We will pay one by one. Shouting will not help you."

This hard talk and show of nerves is a recurring part of the workday for Sujatha, a farm labourer-turned sand miner in Undavalli, a village situated on the banks of the Krishna River that flows through the coastal Guntur District of the southeastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

She is one of the 18 women who run the Undavalli Mutually Aided Cooperative Society, an all-women's collective in charge of dredging, mining, loading and selling sand.

Dealing with a few angry boatmen is not the last of her problems. Powerful 'sand mafias' that operate throughout the state are another force to be reckoned with, as are the lurking threats of environmental degradation and poverty in this largely rural state.

But Sujatha is determined to make this enterprise work. Overseeing the sustainable extraction and transportation of sand in this village has been her ticket to a decent wage and a degree of decision-making power over her own life.

She also knows that having women like her in charge of this operation is the best chance of avoiding the environmental catastrophes associated with unregulated sand mining, such as depletion of groundwater sources, erosion of river beds, increased flooding and a loss of biodiversity.

'Rarer than one thinks'

Hard as it may be to fathom, sand is increasingly becoming a rare commodity as a result of the massive scale of its extraction and consumption worldwide.

In a 2014 report entitled 'Sand: rarer than one thinks', the United Nation's Environment Programme (UNEP) revealedthat sand and gravel (called aggregates) account for the largest share of the roughly 59 billion tonnes of material mined annually across the globe.

Combined aggregate use globally, including 29.5 billion tonnes of sand used annually in the production of cement for concrete, and the 180 million tonnes of sand guzzled by other industries every year, exceeds 40 billion tonnes per annum – twice the yearly amount of sediment carried by all the rivers of the world, according to the UNEP.

The most severe environmental consequences of the world's insatiable appetite for sand include loss of land through river and coastal erosion resulting in the heightened risk of floods, especially around heavily mined areas; depletion of the world's water tables; and a reduction in sediment supply.

Transporting aggregates is also a hugely carbon-heavy process, while the production of a single tonne of cement using sand and gravel releases 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Estimates from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center(CDIAC) suggest that the year 2010 saw 1.65 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from cement production – nearly five percent of total greenhouse gas emissions that year.

In India, a decades-long construction boom has driven a rapid increase in demand for sand, particularly in cement and concrete production.

The country currently boasts the third largest construction industry in the world, and huge sand mining operations, many of them unlawful or unregulated, are stripping the natural carpets of major riverbeds, deepening rivers and widening their mouths, and contaminating ground water sources.

Thus sand mining is contributing to India's twin problems of flooding and water scarcity.

A grassroots solution to a global problem

For many years a quiet grassroots movement around the country had unwittingly been laying the foundation of what is now an entrenched network capable of fighting illicit mining: women-led self-help groups (SHGs) that have come together over a period of decades to pool their meager savings and generate interest-free micro loans to jump-start small businesses.

In Andhra Pradesh alone, an estimated 850,000 SHGs involving over 10.2 million poor, rural women have generated over 19 billion rupees (287 million dollars) in savings over the past decade.

Solomon Arokiyaraj, chief executive officer of the state-run Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) tells IPS that SHGs' proven track record of community finance and business management made them ideal partners in larger government schemes to both crack down on unsustainable natural resource extraction and alleviate rural poverty.

According to Arokiyaraj, women are now running 300 different mining sites (called 'reaches') across this state of 49 million people. A team comprising 10 or 12 people, who previously earned less than a dollar a day, runs each site on behalf of the government.

Venketeshwara Rao, a government official in Guntur District who oversees the project, tells IPS that the women of Undavalli village are licensed to operate within an eight-hectare area identified by federal environment authorities as part of de-siltation efforts around the reservoir.

At dawn every day the women gather at mining sites and at six am the mechanized dredging begins. Extracted sand is stockpiled on boats and then shifted to a fleet of waiting trucks, while excess water is pumped back into the river

"It takes three hours for the dredger to fill a boat. Each of the boats can carry 10 cubic meters of sand, enough to fill 20 large trucks," Malleshwari Yepuri, a sand miner, tells IPS.

By Rao's estimation, the women-led groups in the eight sand reaches in Guntur District alone have sold over a million cubic meters of sand since November 2014, amounting to some 70 million rupees (over a million dollars).

Prior to taking over management of the mines, the women had earned, on average, just under a dollar each a day as farm labourers. Now every woman miner takes home six dollars a day, and their respective cooperatives receive five rupees (0.07 dollars) for every cubic meter of sand mined under their leadership – a total of about 70,000 rupees (a thousand dollars) every year.

Laws and loopholes

Blessed with two major river systems, the Krishna and the Godavari, Andhra Pradesh boasts a stunning range of biodiversity, from the unique flora and fauna found on the coastal mountain range of the Eastern Ghats to the tremendously fertile plains formed in the rivers' basins.

But its biggest asset has also been a curse, and has long attracted the gaze of major players in the sand mining industry – many of them operating outside the ambit of the law.

Considered a 'minor' mineral, sand falls outside of the jurisdiction of the federal government, which limits its authority to the extraction and sale of 'major' minerals like coal, iron and copper.

Numerous Indian laws – from a February 2012 Supreme Court order to an August 2013 ruling by the National Green Tribunal, a federal environment conservation agency – have banned river sand mining without the necessary permit.

These orders notwithstanding, media reports have consistently drawn attention to the extraction activities of organised syndicates referred to as the 'sand mafia', allegedly responsible for removing truckloads of sand for a nifty profit from Andhra Pradhesh and elsewhere.

Many have reportedly mined without any government permission; others have systematically exceeded the volume specified, or encroached on areas outside the scope of their permits.

In April 2015, Andhra Pradesh Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu told the local press that illicit sand miners had robbed the state of 10 billion rupees (150 million dollars) in the past 10 years.

Even with ample evidence on the destructive environmental impacts of sand mining, including a report by the Geological Survey of India warning against damages to in-stream flora and fauna and devastation of vegetative cover, the state government has been either unable or unwilling to curb the practice.

It was not until 2014, following an outcry by the federal government's own mining ministry about the "menace" of illegal sand extraction, that Andhra Pradhesh cancelled all licenses issued under the 2002 Water, Land and Tree Act and handed power over to the women's self-help groups.

SHGs, meanwhile, are under strict orders to ensure that mining happens only in those areas where massive silt-deposits are causing environmental stress, including over-sedimentation resulting in a reduction of the river's holding capacity.

There are about 40 reservoirs in the state, some over a century old, which hold massive build-ups of sand. Undavalli village falls within one of these reservoirs – the Prakasam barrage, built in 1855, over the Krishna River – where sedimentation has been increasing at the rate of 0.5 percent to 0.9 percent every year, according to officials from the state's irrigation department.

Still, licenses are not granted indefinitely – their duration fluctuates between two and 12 months, depending on the extent of sedimentation and the specific ecology of the area.

The work is not without its challenges. Women are learning how to digitize their operations (with some using computers for the first time), keep their proceeds safe and vigilantly monitor environmental degradation, all under the threat of reprisals from the sand mafia.

Add to this a full working day in 40-degrees-Celsius heat with little shade and no security and you have a task that not many would voluntarily sign up for; yet, few are complaining.

"When I worked in the farm, I was just another labourer," Yepuri Mani of the Undavalli mining group tells IPS. "I was almost invisible. Here, I am showing others what to do. I am in charge. People see my work and they also see me. It is a great feeling."

Putting women in charge is not a magic bullet for the ills of sand mining: the move does not tackle the looming issue of unsustainable global demand for sand that is driving major environmental destruction in India, and elsewhere in the world.

But having rural women at the helm of a hitherto male-dominated industry is certainly a major first step towards a more sustainable, grassroots-based economic model of carefully managing a limited and vital natural resource.

Edited by Kanya D'Almeida

http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/08/shifting-sands-how-rural-women-in-india-took-mining-into-their-own-hands/

Indian Media – This is No Way to Cover a Murder Story #mediaethics

Amidst all the hand-wringing over a woman's, and a society's morals, relatively few bells have been rung about the ethics of the media scrum that has developed around the Sheena Bora murder case

Let's pause to consider this amazing phrase in a news story: 'While Indrani has stood firm and not yet admitted to her role in the crime…'
— Tweet by Ellen Barry, NewYork Times South Asia Bureau Chief

Even though the police has barely begun to establish the facts behind the disappearance of Sheena Bora, hard evidence is scant and there is no clear motive for her apparent murder in sight, there's been an amazing amount of moralising. Much of it is based on crude  judgments, extrapolated at speed from what is essentially raw footage — contradictory, confusing, unsifted testimonies extracted by the media from some of the main protagonists, as well as mostly  unnamed relatives, neighbours and family friends.

Words like deviant, debauched and dysfunctional, uttered with saintly facial expressions and tones of  deep relish, dominate studio patter. Trite comparisons are being aired every day between "good mothers" and "bad mothers", with a former society columnist even congratulating herself on live TV the other day for being a better mother than prime suspect Indrani Mukerjea. Another mother who denied having a daughter in a property case she eventually lost is a daily fixture in this studio morality play. Much of this chit-chatting crowd has, of course, already convicted Mukerjea for killing her daughter, Sheena — this before she has even been formally charge-sheeted.

Journalism of easy virtue

Forget the studio patterers for a moment; or lurid India TV, with its  comic book sketches of a grimacing Mukerjea and her leering ex-husband Sanjeev Khanna closing in on Bora; or the 2015 version of "Aap ko kaisa lag raha hai?" — in which a husband gets to be asked by Arnab Goswami if he believes his wife is a murderer. Even the usually reputable sections of the media have been quick to arrive at  conclusions underpinned, it appears, by deeply conservative notions of what constitutes womanly virtue. Shyamal's Mazumdar's recent column in Business Standard is a virtual primer (for men, clearly) on how to spot, and avoid, the femme fatale, an account that seems to paint every one of  Mukerjea's husbands as her victim. The Hindu, which is normally measured, weighed in, too, with a lofty editorial broadsideagainst "a once-traditional society's speedy metamorphosis into an acquisitive FMCG economy with its attendant attributes of obsessive ambition and ruthless self-indulgence." This, of course, is epitomised by the story of small-town girl turned "jetsetting society lady" Indrani Mukerjea. The woman, The Hindu opines — on the strength of what must surely be meagre information about her exact domestic circumstances — "appears to have had no qualms in abandoning her  first husband and two young children in her search for the good life". Her second, Khanna, was "jettisoned quickly",  says the editorial, relying heavily on his version of why the marriage ended. Moreover, Mukerjea's chronicle and the mores she represents (and you could see this one coming from a mile off) "reject the one value so dear to old India – the sanctity of motherhood".

Since editorials in The Hindu are not taken as lightly, as say, Neeta's Natter, a question to ask, perhaps, is how coloured might a judge's view be by this masterly summation of  Mukerjea's character, lifestyle and conduct, when he one day finds himself presiding over her trial?

Not the same as Jessica Lal

Amidst all the hand-wringing over a woman's, and a society's morals, relatively few bells have been rung about the media scrum developing around this case. Last week, on NDTV's show, The Buck Stops Here, Barkha Dutt asked the journalist Anil Dharkar, "Is this all of India lapping up everyone's private demons or is this a legitimate criminal investigation that journalists must probe?" Revealingly, no one on the panel, not even the anchor, seemed to like Dharkar's answer: "This is a criminal investigation that has to be probed by the police. It is really not something the media has to do." Misplaced comparisons were drawn with the Jessica Lal case, and the claim put forward — with only a lone Dharkar protesting —  that the media was justified in playing  an interventionist role and taking the story forward.

Dharkar said that the media should get involved only when the police is not doing its job — as was the case with the Jessica Lal investigation — and not when the police is actually doing its job, as it is in the Sheena Bora case. But Tavleen Singh and others insisted the media has a very important role to play since the police had ignored this case for three years. Dharkar gamely pointed out it was the police that took it up again, on the basis of an anonymous call, and is actually on top of the job, but his conclusion that there was no reason for the media to get so involved had no takers.

We are, of course, talking about the same media that has hauled up and judged almost every member of Indrani Mukerjea's complicated extended family, with rent-a-quote psychologists, minor Bollywoodactors and chick lit novelists holding forth on "What do you think X is hiding, and do you think Y is guilty?" This is also the media that's been airing on front pages and prime time the so-called "incest theory" about the case, based on leaks from police investigators who are clearly loathe to put this spicy stuff on record, but not perturbed about having it out in the ether. This "incest theory" — contradicted by  a welter of other theories in the public domain — carelessly shreds the reputation of  Indrani's father, Upendra Bora, an 80-year old bedridden man in Guwahati, who has actually had, according to a  report in the Sunday Times of  India, a TV cameraperson climbing up to his window (to avoid his guards) to ask him questions. "Taking the story forward", on Monday, a report in the same paper, basing itself on unnamed family sources, said " ..not many know she (Mukerjea) had a traumatic childhood in a dysfunctional family and was often whipped by her drunken father."

The irresistible pull of a trial by media

Back in the day when the Aarushi case was playing out, with a similarly insatiable quest for the salacious,  journalists like Vir Sanghvi and Shoma Chaudhury were part of the minority that took a stand against trial by media and the purveying  of smut. Is it a reflection on  "our times" (as The Hindu might say) that Catch News, the media website of which Chaudhury is editor-in-chief, was ahead of the pack laying out, in explicit detail, the "incest angle", and Sanghvi was on prime time last Friday, tossing out a tasty morsel to the slavering media beast — that Indrani had told him, and others, that she had been molested by her step-father? Granted, this was not the main burden of his song (he was far more intent on remoulding a media narrative he thought was overly kind to his old adversary Peter Mukerjea), but  it generated more headlines than anything else Sanghvi said in this interview, and became the signal for some newspapers, at least, to lay out in cold print what Catch News had reported. Sanghvi did qualify his statements by calling Indrani  Mukerjea a "fantasist" with a "tenuous grip on reality" but then, if he thought her capable of making up serious allegations against her parent, should he have been repeating them on prime time TV? There is also the little matter of a legal proscription on revealing the identity of victims of sexual abuse.

The Sheena Bora murder may well replace the Aarushi saga as the most talked about, viewed and net-searched case in our times. As before, the media seems to feel hugely secure about stigmatising those caught up, in one way or another, in murder investigations, knowing it will probably never be called to account. As Avirook Sen narrates in his recent book, Aarushi, a false story was planted the media — and picked up by some of the country's major news channels — that the parents of the dead Aarushi, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, were part of a wife-swapping ring. "The CBI issued an official denial," writes Sen. "And the channels? Not a word of the story was recanted. No apology was offered."

No fear of defamation

The media is safe because hardly anyone has the money and the stomach for a legal battle that could last years, least of all those who have been caught up in a murder case. The dead are of course even less likely to go to court, so they can be opened up early on for speculation and defamation. This is already happening to Sheena Bora in the digital "wild west" of the media. For example, the Quint, which is not some tawdry website run out of a bucket shop but a well-funded offering from media mogul Raghav Bahl, is putting out tale after lurid tale without a shred of evidence to offer. But worry not, the site's ace reporter is on hand to "join the dots" in video conversations for the benefit of  readers. This turns out to be a serious looking, bespectacled, middle-aged man, who says with quiet conviction: "They took care to burn the burn the body … The objective was to destroy the foetus that Sheena Bora was carrying in her womb."

http://thewire.in/2015/09/01/this-is-no-way-to-cover-a-murder-story-9687/

The problem with Modi's 'Team India'

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day address this year, though delivered in Hindi, was peppered with English words. Three kinds of English words.

The first kind was as follows — those that were already a part of spoken Hindi, though not quite the norm in formal speech; words such as 'busy', 'injection', 'side-effect', 'request', 'fashion', etc.

Then there were those that belong to a specific semantic cluster — the world of the market, business, management. To this category belong terms such as 'work culture', 'financial inclusion', 'productivity', 'good governance', 'transparency', 'parameter', 'dimension', 'pyramid, 'brand ambassador', etc.

Closely allied to the linguistic milieu of the second is the third set of English usages: 'Start-up India, Stand-up India'; 'per drop, more crop'; and 'Team India'.

In fact, 'Team India' occurred no less than 32 times in his speech of 85 minutes — more than any other catchphrase in either English or Hindi.

What is interesting is that, notwithstanding his Hindu-nativist, cultural nationalist pretensions, Mr. Modi settled on an English term to communicate his vision of the Indian nation as a team.

Why didn't he use a Hindi equivalent for 'Team India'? Is it because 'Bharat Dal' does not have the same ring as 'Team India'? What's more likely, it could be because the Hindi equivalents do not pack the same conceptual or ideological content that the English 'team' does.

Dynamics of a team

But what exactly is a team? What are the implications of imagining the nation as a team, as Mr. Modi did in his speech?

The dictionary defines a 'team' as "a set of people constituting one side in a competitive game", or "a set of people working in combination."

Three aspects stand out as integral to a team: competitiveness, being together, and work. Management textbooks typically add two more: a formal structure, and a purpose.

A team, then, is a group of people who work together in a structured way for a purpose that involves doing better than other teams. Armed with this understanding, we can try to answer the questions. Can a nation be a team? If yes, what then is the purpose of 'Team India'?

In his speech, while introducing the concept of 'Team India', Mr. Modi made two points: one, that the country is "moving ahead" only because of 'Team India'; two, that 'Team India' comprises our entire population of 125 crore people.

The two statements are patently untrue and mutually contradictory. Not every Indian is equally involved in Mr. Modi's project of "moving the country ahead". And the real 'Team India' that is piloting the nation's development does not see eye to eye on many issues with vast sections of the 125 crore people that, as per Mr. Modi's claim, comprise 'Team India'.

To take an obvious example, Mr. Modi in his speech announced his intent to cure the "poison of casteism" with the "nectar of development". But we are yet to hear the Prime Minister suggest that one Mr. Hardik Patel, agitating in Gujarat for reservations for his caste, should drop his demands in exchange for the 'nectar of development'. After all, Mr. Patel and lakhs of his followers would be intimately familiar with the charms of this nectar, having tasted it in its purest form in the famed 'Gujarat model'.

Given the extant fault lines of caste, ethnicity, language, region andreligion that criss-cross the nation, Mr. Modi's 'Team India' is clearly a project rather than a reality. Yet, even as a project, it is deeply problematic.

For instance, in the light of the recent events in Gujarat, are Patels and Dalits batting for the same team? Are indebted farmers contemplating suicide and billionaire investors seeking farmland part of the same team? Are Adivasis and mining companies equal members of 'Team India'?

Furthermore, all teams are hierarchical, with a captain who calls the shots. In Mr. Modi's re-imagining of the nation as a team, it is obvious who the captain is.

The logic of 'Team India'

To understand the underlying logic of the Team India project, one must go back to the core ideas of a 'team': competition and purpose. Teams in the real world are typically time-bound — they come together for a task or activity, and disband once the task/activity is finished.

As the cementing element of a national identity, however, the team becomes an all-encompassing, permanent condition. Mr. Modi's repeated invocation of 'Team India' communicates a vision of nationhood as a 'team' of 125 crore Indians that is in fierce competition for global supremacy with other nations. The task facing this team is nation-building (defined as strengthening the nation-state, not to be confused with the welfare of the poor). It is a task that can never end. Or end only at the level of the individual — with death.

Such a vision of 'Team India' demands a complete merger of the nation with the state, in which the citizen, instead of being a rights-bearing political entity with claims on the state, dwindles into a kind of glorified employee who, like any model employee of the 21st century, would put the interests of the team above self-interest (or any other interest). Here, the team's interest, lest there be any doubt, means national interest.

The flip side of this idea of citizens as members of a national team is that any democratic dissent — or criticism of the captain — signifies 'bad team player'. A bad team player sabotages the team's interests, i.e., national interest. This follows naturally from the absolute subordination of citizenship — which entails rights vested in the individual — to the interests of the state. In other words, civil and democratic rights, such as privacy and freedom of expression, hold no importance from the perspective of the team.

If a media organisation was to report on human rights abuses perpetrated by the state, it could be viewed as harming the national interest. Ditto for non-governmental organisations (NGO). Not surprisingly, the Modi government has been far more draconian in its crackdown on rights-based NGOs compared to its predecessor.

From 'Team India' to 'Team Modi'

The term 'Team India' first gained currency as a moniker for India's national cricket team. Among Indian cricket fans, it was a mode of identification that evoked intense patriotic, and frequently jingoistic, passions. But 'Team India' in this case referred to a specific team of 11 skilled Indians who had come together to represent the country in a global competition. It did not comprise the entire population of India; 125 crore Indians might cheer for 'Team India', the cricket team. They might wear the team jersey, or paint their faces in the team colours. But they could not themselves participate in Team India's World Cupcampaign. They had no say in the team composition, or choice of captain, or match strategy, nor could they themselves go out and play — for they were not members of 'Team India' in reality. They were merely its cheerleaders, and had no illusions about it.

On the other hand, the nation recast as 'Team India' reproduces the same structure of patriotic identification but with an added bonus — the delusion of equal participation. Mr. Modi is the captain leading 'Team India'. The actual 'team' here is the Indian state and those with access to, if not control over, its various levers.

All that the 125 crore 'members' of this so-called 'Team India' can do is cheer the captain and/or obey his instructions. When Mr. Modi asks 125 crore Indians to unite for the cause of 'Team India', he is effectively addressing them as their captain, instructing them to contribute their bit to make 'Team India' win — by offering it their lands, surrendering their rights, giving up their subsidies, all for the greater glory of 'Team India'. It is essentially a top-down, anti-democratic project.

Finally, the very nature of team-centric discourse is such that the captain, sooner or later, becomes a metonym for the team. It remains to be seen whether this invocation of nationhood as a team catches on in public discourse. If it does, and the term 'Team India' as used by Mr. Modi achieves popular currency, it would be natural for it become interchangeable with Team Modi.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-problem-with-modis-team-india/article7596770.ece

Reporter : ArunKumar, RTI NEWS

नई दिल्‍ली : थल सेनाध्यक्ष जनरल दलबीर सिंह सुहाग ने कहा है कि सीमा पर लगातार हो रहे संघर्ष विराम के उल्‍लंघन और पाकिस्‍तान की ओर से की जा रही घुसपैठ की कोशिशों के मद्देनजर सेना को संक्षिप्‍त युद्धों के लिए तैयार रहना चाहिए। गौर हो कि आर्मी चीफ 1965 युद्ध पर हो रहे सेमिनार के मौके पर मंगलवार को तीनों सेनाओं को संबोधित कर रहे थे।

उन्‍होंने कहा कि हम जानते हैं कि भविष्‍य में होने वाले छोटे युद्ध की चेतावनी के लिए सीमित समय होगा। ऐसे में ऑपरेशनल तैयारियों को हर समय उच्‍च स्‍तर पर रखना जरूरी है। यह हमारी रणनीति के लिए अहम हो गया है। सेना प्रमुख ने यह भी कहा कि पाकिस्‍तान की ओर से किए जा रहे संघर्ष विराम के उल्‍लंघन की संख्‍याओं में हो रहे इजाफे को देखते हुए सेना पहले से अधिक सतर्क हो गई है। हमारे खतरे और चुनौतियां पहले से अधिक जटिल हो गई हैं। 

पश्चिम में हमारे पड़ोसी देश की ओर से हो रहे लगातार हो रही घुसपैठ के कारण सीमा पर सतर्कता काफी बढ़ गई है। जम्‍मू-कश्‍मीर में अशांति फैलाने के लिए लगातार नए तरीके अपनाए जा रहे हैं। उन्‍होंने कहा कि 1965 का युद्ध भारतीय सेना के अदम्‍य साहस, असाधारण महानता और दृढ़ संकल्‍प की गाथा है। उन्‍होंने युद्ध के दौरान नागरिक आबादी के योगदान की भी प्रसंशा की और बताया कि सेना के लिए लोगों का सहयोग कितना अहम होता है।

CPDR Condemns Killing of Dr Malleshappa Kalburgi

We are yet to come out from the shock of the assassinations of Dr. Narendra Dabholkar and Com. Govind Pansare in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the Hindutva zealots have gunned down one more rationalist and renowned scholar in Dr Malleshappa Kalburgi, this time in neighboring Karnataka.

In Maharashtra, both the previous Congress and present BJP-Shivsena governments have amply demonstrated by their inaction in apprehending the murderers of Dabholkar and Pansare on whose side they stood and exposed their clandestine relations with the majority communalists. In Karnataka the Congress government is now on test to prove its secular mettle and erase the steins of communalism to some extent from the face of the Congress.

Dr Kalburgi was a Lingayat, the follower of the 12^thcentury reformer Basavanna, who preached against castes and idolatry of Hinduism. It is irony of history that the Lingayats who are not supposed to be Hindus, today flaunt their mantle of Hindutva. They detested Kalburgi's rationalist projection of Basava vachanas. Sadly they will find themselves on the side of the wickedest enemy of Basavanna, who have killed one of the best of his contemporary disciples.  

Last year, the very zealots had attacked another illustrious son of Karnataka U R Ananthamurthy who was a co-traveller of Kalburgi in the same campaign for rational thought. Emboldened by the ascent of Narendra Modi, who had dubious distinction of demonstrating his law of 'action and reaction' with the carnage of over 2000 Muslims in Gujarat, to the throne of Delhi, these zealots have gone berserk killing people who speak against their venomous creed.  

The modus operandi in all the three cases being exactly the same, associated with similar jubilation in the right wing camp, it should not be difficult for the Karnataka government to apprehend the culprits. It has already handed over the case to CBI, may be to assuage resentment of people. CBI or no CBI, however, it should not forget that people are interested in seeing the murderers of Kalburgi convicted for their crime in a reasonable time frame.

CPDR urges people of the country to stand up and speak out against this heinous trend of murderous intimidation of democratic polity. 

Dr Anand Teltumbde

General Secretary,

Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), Mumbai.

31 August 2015

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