State of In-Security

After a longish break away, I have returned to realise many things, anew. We are a country dominated by suspicion, fear and paranoia.  Nowhere else, in even the developed world - with supposedly far more to lose - have I come across these many metal detectors, sniffer-dogs, high level security - just to enter a mall, a movie theatre or some ordinary public space. It seems that we have succumbed to living in perpetual security alert, and co-exist with fears of being terrorist targets in very little, simple things of ordinary life.

But, is this fear wholly of our making? What if this is imposed on us? by the State, by the corporates, or actually their nexus that require that we do not question? A nexus that seeks to manufacture fears to exercise control over our combined lot - for corrupt profit and personal gain? What if this elaborate, unsolicited security charade, is not about preventing us from being blown up, en-masse, by Mujahuddin, Naxals, Separatists, Terrorists, Mafia, but is a deeply manipulative propaganda by an increasingly authoritarian state seeking a blanket public acquiescence on an ever increasing repressive regime that seeks to constantly curb/erode/undermine our expressions of either individual dissent  and collective civil liberties, by keeping us all afraid? What if we are afraid of spooks-in-the-dark that don't exist, but are manipulated to keep away from questioning the dark days of our times?

And, what would happen if we decided to be unafraid?  What if chose freedom over fear? What if? What if?

Hunger

I have been involved with issues related to human rights, for sometime now. I am aware that the world is a hungry place.  A few years back I had been invited to Taj for  conference on abolishing world hunger. Needless to say I did not go.

Today my sister alerted me on the news of adivasi elders dying of hunger in Thane.  I also read about it here, here and here.  I also forced myself to stare at the horrific, violent google images of the 'starving' and face the world that also is - a world of primarily human making. Apparently only 8% of starvation deaths are a result of some natural calamity - we, the human race, can take a collective responsibility for causing the rest.

The point is not - did I personally create this inhuman hunger,  terrible misery? will anything happen if I eat less? I do believe that by eating less, less than I need, I will microscopically experience what it feels like - the gnawing pains of hunger pangs, and this might sensitize me to imagine, how this must be like, if this were not by choice, if eating was not just less, but just not possible at all, for days on end, till one lay ones self down and dies - quietly, without a choice.

 The point is, can I do something, even a tiny bit about it? Can I, as a grown up responsible person, make this a part of my choice? to not avert my eyes - have their starvation penetrate the consciousness of my future actions? Can I cling on to a hope that change is possible, but only with a determined will and lots of hard work? Can I? Will I?

Will You?

A Tear Drop in the Ocean

Sri Lanka sits like a giant tear drop on the expanse of Indian Ocean. Over the last three decades, the country has been terrorized, ravaged, and destroyed by a brutal and horrific civil war where neither side has spared the other. Large areas of the country have seen unimaginable horrors with rapes, tortures and exterminations. The war culminated with state sponsored and large scale ethnic cleansing of its Tamil minorities. Crimes against the minorities continue, but under the radar, unseen and mostly ignored by the world outside. To the outside world, Sri Lanka has reverted to its original identity as a lush tropical island - a drop of paradise, beckoning the lost and the seeking " Buddham Sharanam Gacchami".

I recently went to Sri Lanka. I went as a mind less tourist, shoving aside all that I knew and all that I believed in - to wander over the contours of its cool hills, to plunge into aquamarine depths of its beautiful ocean, to explore the dark emerald cacophony of its still virgin forests; I ignored the human calamity, loss and despair and roamed the country in silence, being just an observer, a traveler. And, there was plenty here to please - from fire eaters and dancers of Kandy, to ancient abandoned cities of Polanaruwa, the rock fortress of Sigiriya to a vibrant cosmopolitan Colombo. I spent most time on the unspoilt, quiet beaches of Mirissa and Hikkaduwa - swimming in silken waters, and walking barefoot, miles along the soft sandy beaches.

What struck me most was the people - and how gentle and pleasant they seemed. No one seemed to be in a mad rush; the country was very clean, with no obvious signs of garbage, dumps, or  plastics; I saw no slums, and the rivers ran clean, dense and tropical brown. There was no honking on the roads, or rarely if ever; the public transport was cheap and frequent, out numbering private cars and autos. People looked at you and smiled, not having yet learnt to avoid gaze while saying " how are you" - in passing. People paused for long chats...the whole mood was unhurried and relaxed.

While I spoke, engaged and listened, and wandered  through the country, I also pondered 'what makes hate?'. I avoided speaking in Tamil, for fear of entering its domain of suspicion, fear and hate and managed to mostly avoid the whole genocide issue. Everything changed at the mention of Tamils, the separatist movement, or the killings, including the state sponsored genocide. I brought up the subject only twice. Once with a young and devout Sinhalese and the next time with a Tamil hotel owner.

The young buddhist, while espousing vegetarianism and non-violence towards animals felt that the killing of tamils was justified for the murders that had been committed - especially of monks, women, and children by the LTTE. He was enraged at the concept of a separate Tamil nation and felt that Sri Lanka belonged to the Sinhalese - and not the hindu tamils or the muslims.

I spoke to the Tamilian at the end of a long day. He must be about forty, thin with a belly, balding, hard working and with an easy laugh. I was dining on a simple fare of masala dosa and filter coffee; the restaurant was empty except for the owner and staff - all of whom spoke to each other in Tamil. The man came and sat down with us for a chat, about his relatives in Tamil Nadu, the cost of things and all the general stuff. He was happy to speak to an Indian in Tamil. And then I asked " what about the killings in the north?" The man went completely silent and then quickly looking around to make sure there were no Sinhalese around said " They are all gone.... killed..everyone, about four lakh people died in a few days..the army went in...killed and burnt everything down. Whatever was left was dumped in the ocean...no one knows how many missing were killed ...our people know, but no one talks about it". He seemed to have great deal to say about India's role in the war including, "She (Sonia Gandhi) did not help..why should she help anyone who killed her husband..?"
The conversation ended abruptly with a late comer walking in for a delayed dinner. The Tamil did not approach our table again.

I left Sri Lanka, as I had entered it, with a heavy heart, and a burden of conscience - denied. I knew of the evil that lurked even in this paradise - of evil in man's heart - which flourished and fractured even while the sun shone, the winds played with waves and forests chanted their evening songs.

BBMP's Large Donation to Maverick

Over the last few days, BBMP and its bulldozers, under the protection of a large and armed police force, have razed about 2000 shelters of the Economically Weaker Section in Ejipura. These actions have been carried out using terrible brute force and in arrogant impunity on the basis of a high court order of Aug. 2012. The Ejipura story is a larger than life greek tragedy unfolding from within realms of India's push for fiscal growth, and its horrific need to hide its all pervasive poverty behind glittering malls - like the one which will arise from the rubble of destroyed homes and lost lives. The photos below are taken by MirnoPasquali

Big Questions that remain: Why a PPP between BBMP and Maverick Pvt Ltd.? Why the diversion of public property, earmarked for our Economically Weak Sections (EWS), to private companies for profiteering? Why the sacrifice of shelters of our poorest, to build Malls of the rich?

Maverick Constructions, via its PPP will get 8 acres of prime property in the heart of Kormangala - one of the poshest localities in the city. According to reports this is valued at anywhere from 200 to 300 crores.
If we take the property cost in Koramangala at Rs.10000/sq.ft (market rate) then 8 acres = 8x40000 sq.ft = 320000sq.ft will cost 320 crores - consistent with the above values.

In exchange Maverick will build 1640 homes of 312 sq.ft each. Even if we adopt a construction cost of Rs.1000/sq.ft (for an average middle class type home) - the entire cost of construction to Maverick is 312x1640x1000=51 crores. So, Maverick Constructions will profit anywhere between Rs. 150 - 250 crores - just by entering into this agreement.

The Govt. claims that it has no money to construct EWS homes, although BBMP's annual budget is more than 4000 crores. Also Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), city's other civic body,  has failed to collect similar sums in rents from its malls, even while earmarking  additional Rs.500 crores more for building new malls.

So..Whose interests does the State really serve? And, how are the EWS displaced families in Ejipura, now on streets, benefited?

Bloody Power!

I have been away. For eight weeks. Really Away - no phone, internet, connection to my regular life or loved ones - to retreat into myself and find connections within and without - in a natural, mostly non-peopled world of things wild, wide and beautiful.

I return to find many things drastically changed in a world that dominates my life i.e. my intense and sometimes obsessive preoccupation with the civil liberties and humans rights challenges and horrors of this country. Foremost among these obsessions , for the last year, has been with the intense, prolonged, passionate and peaceful opposition to the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant mounted by the local communities fighting to preserve their life, health, environment and livelihood in a post-Fukushima, and more enlightened world - at least more aware about real dangers in presuming safety of nuclear technologies.

I left during an impasse between the state and the protesters, the latter having found support from heavy weights like Aruna Roy. I returned and found time to catch up with mails only to find that a repressive state that could charge thousands as seditious had crossed the final line, of reasonable and restrained, to squash protests using brutal violence, with guns and batons. No one was spared, not children, aged, women. Two were killed - and I did not know. All this bloodshed - for electric power? for personal and political power?for national development? with Nuclear Power?

Bloody Power used to shed Blood of the Poor to serve hidden agendas with Nuclear Power - Bloodied Power!

Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant, Democracy and Sedition

The protest over a Nuclear Power Plant at Koodankulam (KKNPP) started soon after India and Russia signed an agreement on the project, way back on November 20, 1988. In May 1989, ten thousand people gathered to oppose the project. Police disconnected mikes and opened fire.

A lull followed due to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and also the assassination of India's PM, Rajiv Gandhi. The project was revived in 1997 and linked to the purchase of T-90 tanks, SU-30 planes and the Admiral Gorshkov submarine from Russia. It took ten years to hold a public hearing on the project - seven thousand people attended. This meeting was abruptly discontinued when people protested that the proceedings were not conducted in the local language.

The protest movement around the nuclear plant, People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE), gained enormously in strength and support, following the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima, leaping into national visibility and much wider public prominence. The protesters set up an independent, technically savvy expert committee of PMANE to challenge the State and India's nuclear establishment with tough questions.  Their opposition to the project revolved around some very simple and basic positions:

Nuclear industry is associated with well documented hazards - even in normal operations -. which are harmful to the health of humans and environment. People living in the vicinity of the KKNPP had a right to protect their own lives, and the lives of their future generations, and rejected this hazardous technology from operating in their backyards - they also opted not to need its benefits.

The heat dump from the nuclear power plant would significantly increase the temperature along their shoreline - where they fished, and endanger the traditional livelihood - on which they were dependent. They intended to protect their livelihood mechanisms, which could not be guaranteed once the reactor became operational.

Safety of any nuclear plant against a serious accident cannot ever be guaranteed. While suppliers of India's planned, imported nuclear plants scuttled behind and demanded further dilution of India's liability clause, Russians were fully exempt from shouldering any liability in case of a future accident at KKNPP - even if due to their own faulty technology. People around KKNPP  realised that they were being required to risk their lives, while the providers of the technology risked nothing - not even a financial loss.

PMANE demanded scrapping the entire project, arguing on the basis of geologic unsuitability of the site, technical issues related water availability - crucial to the running of any nuclear plant,  large and adverse impact on livelihoods of local fishing communities, and the high population density around the plant - making evacuation a virtual impossibility - in case of a catastrophic accident.

PMANE opposed the Koodankulam nuclear power plant with an ever increasing strength and following of women, men, young and old, across religious, caste, class, and state boundaries. It drew observers, and enlisted solidarity and support from students, professionals, scientists, journalists, as also from people's movements and activists spanning  political ideologies, and developmental paradigms. The movement aroused curiosity, interest and sympathies from the thinking and the comfortable, educated class, and thereby initiated a process of inquiry into India's development, and questions of who sacrifices and who gains. It soon became one of the two largest people's movements in India's current history - the other being Anna's movement against corruption. However, unlike the latter, which was fragmentary in nature and confused in goals, the PMANE movement stood out for its singularly clear demand of a Nuclear Free Koodankulam, Nuclear Free India and Nuclear Free World. The movement belonged to those people who were the chosen victims for India's irrational nuclear ambitions; and they had no option, but to fight - to live.

The protesters sat in peaceful dharnas and observed long periods of fasts - en mass - drawing public and state's attention to their plight. Each day drew crowds of thousands, all fasting, to a village center.  All shops were closed - small fraction made it under the shades of plastic awnings - volunteers carried around buckets with water sachets for free distribution. Women with children sat, under scorching sun or pouring rain, sometimes with a sagging umbrella, listening to their leaders talk, and they spoke themselves - on mikes - with a rare confidence in clarity of purpose - to save themselves, their families and their communities from the immediate danger of a monstrous nuclear reactor. It was uplifting to see their faces - alive, alert, listening - after all what was being spoken about dealt with their future, their combined fates.This group of mostly women, young and old,  succeeded in blockading the entry to the KKNPP in Oct. 2011, till the Tamil Nadu state finally agreed to not allow any further work to proceed on the plant - till all their doubts and fears were allayed.

On March 20, 2012, Jayalalitha - the chief minister of the state ofTamil Nadu, in a clearly political bartering with the center, approved the KKNPP for operations. About 6000 heavily armed police force guarded the the entrance to the reactor site and immediately arrested several hundreds, including key leaders of the people's movement PMANE. Overnight, people who were in active dialogue with the state officials and leadership, became criminals with a large number of cases foisted on them. Today, more than 55,000 people have FIRs filed against them, and more than 6800 are charged with waging war against the state and on grounds sedition - more than filed ever before, in a single police station, in such a short period of time. Udaykumar, the coordinator of PMANE is charged with murder, along with many other serious charges and remains in Idinthakerai - the crucible of the protest movement.

People's opposition to the KKNPP and the excessive, repressive reaction by the state against the protesters, requires that we, the citizens of this nation, ask ourselves some tough questions - on rights of the state versus the sovereignty of people - in a constitutional democracy. It demands that we understand and appropriate our constitutional rights which include right to life, right to livelihood, and right to protest - peacefully. This is what the protesters against KKNPP have been doing. Peaceful protests, like the ones conducted in Idinthakerai and other villages around KKNPP are touchstones of any vibrant, active, healthy democracy. These are processes for creating truly representative governments which act in trusteeship of  people and their interests. To demean a movement like PMANE as being either vested, or anti-national, or anti-development, is to deliberately mislead the people of this nation from the real issues that drive these protests. To further criminalize a peaceful, democratic, opposition movement as waging war against the state or as Seditious (i.e. dis-affectionate or dis-loyal to the State) goes  completely against the democratic principles on which this country is founded. One must remember that issues of democracy, do not require and cannot operate on the basis of either affection or loyalty towards state - it is precisely this act of disaffection or lack of loyalty that enables each of us, as individuals to remove, via the electoral process,  persons or party who no longer represent our interests. To charge peaceful protesters in a free and democratic India, with an act expressly constructed and applied by the British to repress India's freedom movement - is indicative of the harsh reality and repressive culture of India's political climate today. If protesters seeking to safeguard personal and community safety are now criminals waging war against the state, then it is time we, we all, really woke up to the reality of the State we live in - a State of Fear!

Gujarat Grief, Gujarat Guilt : Ten Years Old on 28/2/2012

The original blog contained poems reproduced from 'After Gujarat and other Poems' by Seeme Qasim - without permission. Seeme's poems authenticated my imaginations of Gujurat violence; they pained  my waking days and scattered nightmares into my dreamless nights.
With apologies to Seeme, I have now deleted her words.

Whatever caused this...
















also deliberately caused this...




           






















































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Lest we forget....


...we are all born 
from ashes 
of the same stars 
that celebrate our nights, 
and are children 
of the same Sun 
that warms our days... 
We are all the same 
and also the One - 
the Universe 
and also its illusion
We are all One.                           ---- Arati Chokshi
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** all images are taken from a google search for 'gujarat riots'