Month: September 2015

At a meeting earlier this month to discuss a draft bill of rights for women that Delhi’s AAP government wants to introduce, some women express their anxiety over the proliferation of CCTVs that the government has announced as a safety measure.

CCTV surveillance of Sector 18 market to start from Friday, in Noida, India, on Tuesday, September 15, 2015. Sixty two high-end cameras have been installed at 24 locations.(Sunil Ghosh / HT Photo)

At a meeting earlier this month to discuss a draft bill of rights for women that Delhi’s AAP government wants to introduce, some women express their anxiety over the proliferation of CCTVs that the government has announced as a safety measure.

Are there sufficient checks and balances to ensure that footage will not be misused as an excuse for moral policing, they want to know.

Their anxiety is well-founded. At its heart is the question: How do you balance security with freedom, autonomy and privacy — particularly of young women?

Under the guise of ‘protecting our girls’, we’ve seen the ramping up of measures since December 2012. In April this year, the University Grants Commission issued guidelines that call for escalation in wall heights of colleges, barbed wire fencing and CCTV cameras. Teachers will report on students to parents and hostel wardens.

In Tamil Nadu, rules for women students by the Sri Sairam Engineering College go viral: No ‘very high heels and fancy slippers’, no ‘transparent and short dupattas’, no accounts on Facebook and Whatsapp. No talking to boys.

Not true, clarifies the college. Yet, women students must, according to its website, dress in ‘only churidhars with dupatta both sides pinned up. Wearing half-sarees, middies, short sleeve tops, tight pants are jeans are strictly prohibited inside the campus’.

Writing for The Daily O, Vivek Surendran describes life in his engineering college in Tamil Nadu. Without naming the college, he says girls were not allowed outside their hostels after 6.30 pm, mobile phones had to be hidden and the mere act of talking to a boy could lead to disciplinary action. Didn’t the parents protest? Far from it. “The parents of girl students were extremely happy with such rules,” he writes.

As girls step forward to bridge the gender gap in education, parents and their proxies, college authorities, step up the vigilance under the guise of protection. Last month women students at Jamia Millia Islamia, responded to revised hostel rules that are blatantly discriminatory — women must report for a roll call of attendance by the warden every evening and get permission in advance ‘on a request duly recommended by their parents/local guardians’ to stay out after 10 pm (‘late nights,’ restricted to twice a month).

The desire to control his daughter’s autonomy is what leads a retired army officer to contact the National Investigation Agency (NIA) about her activities on the Internet. She is contemplating joining terror outfit Islamic State, he complains. After going through her social media profiles, the NIA concludes there is nothing to worry about. It is her relationship with a Muslim man that has been concerning the father.

This past week, the Delhi High Court ordered the police to provide protection to an 18-year-old Indian student from California who by identifying as a trans man has incurred his parents’ wrath. On a visit to India, his passport, phone and computer were taken away and he was told to marry a man of his mother’s choosing. “This is nothing but bigotry,” Justice Siddharth Mridul observed on a plea filed by the student, who wants his documents back so that he can return to the US.

In their essay Why Loiter, authors Shilpa Phadke, Shilpa Ranade and Sameera Khan argue that expanding women’s access to public spaces has the ability to re-envision citizenship in more inclusive terms. Loitering, they argue, is a quest for pleasure that ‘strengthens our struggle against violence, framing it in the language of rights rather than protection’.

The mainstreaming of a khap panchayat mindset — lock away your daughters, curb their freedoms — is now evident in our cities and universities, ignoring the fact that it is the State’s job to provide safe public transport, street lighting and sensitive law enforcement for every citizen, regardless of gender.

Surveillance guidelines have less to do with safety and more with control. Adult students are adults with rights to privacy and choice. It’s time parents and universities, crucibles of learning and exploration, recognised this.

The views expressed by the author are personalShe tweets as @namitabhandare

The RSS’ antipathy to Nehru is well-known. There is a two-pronged attempt to downplay his iconography. The first is to broaden India’s pantheon of national icons — in this the BJP is right to redress a historical neglect by boosting such figures as Vallabhbhai Patel. But the second effort is to simply negate Nehru and his idea of a secular, pluralistic India

The historian Ramachandra Guha tells an interesting story. Back in 1977 when the Janata government ended 30 years of Congress rule, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the recently appointed minister of external affairs, stepped into office at South Block and saw a blank spot on the wall.

It marked the absence of a hastily removed portrait of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. “Where has it gone?” Vajpayee asked.

“I want it back.”

Now, on Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary, the Narendra Modi government has announced plans to overhaul 39 cultural institutions, including the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), Nehru’s home after 1947 and a memorial since his death in 1964. A report in The Economic Times states that culture minister Mahesh Sharma wants the NMML to be recast as a museum of governance that would showcase contemporary India, including Modi’s campaign for smart cities and the Mars mission.

The absurdity of refashioning an eponymous memorial aside, this move was not going to pass without a political storm. The Congress called it ‘diabolical’. And Congress president Sonia Gandhi declared at a meeting this week: “History is sought to be rewritten with special targeting of Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of modern India and builder of democratic institutions.”

Sharma was forced to backtrack on his plans for a governance museum, muttering that Nehru was a national leader and not a ‘fiefdom’ of the Gandhi family (forgetting perhaps that one branch is now ensconced within the BJP). Meanwhile, the NMML clarified that the recasting would increase, not decrease the emphasis on Nehru.

Despite the clarification, suspicion persists. Partly this is because of a traditional liberal unease of entrusting the BJP with history — a suspicion not without foundation. Murli Manohar Joshi and NDA1 preoccupied itself with rewriting history textbooks on the lines of RSS mythology about a grand Hindu rashtra.

NDA2 seems to have similar priorities. Barely days after coming to power in May last year, HRD minister Smriti Irani declared that Hindu texts would be included in school curriculums. This was followed by the appointment of Y Sudershan Rao as chairperson, Indian Council of Historical Research.

Rao as head of the Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojana (RSS’ history wing), has been engaged in such projects as one that will date the Mahabharata wars. And while Modi’s own public references to the great glories of Hindu civilisation — the elephant-headed Ganesh is proof of plastic surgery etc — were laughable gaffes, they are also indicative of his RSS-prescribed worldview.

But there is another reason for the continuing unease. The RSS’ antipathy to Nehru is well-known. It sees him as an anglicised Indian who insisted that a newly independent Hindu-majority State would be secular and ‘pandered’ to minorities, and — perhaps most unforgiveable — the man who banned the organisation following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

There is a two-pronged attempt to downplay the iconography of Nehru. The first is to broaden India’s pantheon of national icons — and in this the BJP is right to redress a historical neglect by boosting such figures as Vallabhbhai Patel.

But the second effort is to simply negate Nehru and his idea of a secular, pluralistic India. The BJP has promised a ‘Congress mukt Bharat’, and in doing this must diminish the fountainhead of the Gandhi dynasty.

It is this effort that results in the public calling of a book-burning spree of Nehruvian historians by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy in October. And it is this effort that results in the omission in April of even Nehru’s name by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj at the 60th anniversary of the Bandung conference that led to the Non-Aligned Movement.

For Vajpayee, the traditional antipathy of the RSS, an organisation he called his ‘soul’ and ‘family’, to Nehru did not come in the way of basic decency. To occupy the office of India’s longest-serving foreign minister minus his portrait on the wall was an affront. Sadly, his party’s new leadership might not share his views.

(The author tweets from @namitabhandare. The views expressed are personal)

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