Woman Raped by Imposter Cop – New Indian Express
http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/Woman-Raped-by-Imposter-Cop/2016/04/27/article3401575.ece
Neighbour booked for rape bid on five-year-old girl – Tribune India
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/ludhiana/neighbour-booked-for-rape-bid-on-five-year-old-girl/228357.html
Rape of minor: Cancel cross-complaint, Verka tells Tarn Taran SSP – Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/punjab/rape-of-minor-cancel-cross-complaint-verka-tells-tarn-taran-ssp/story-FjkLXCHvn3iwU8FIuazGrO.html
New radicalization of Dalit politics emerging in India: Sri Lankan academician – The hindu
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/new-radicalisation-of-dalit-politics-emerging-in-india-sri-lankan-academician/article8524454.ece
Kanhaiya, others reject JNU probe panel report, to go on hunger strike – Indian Express
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kanhaiya-kumar-umar-khalid-anirban-bhattacharya-shehla-rashid-will-not-pay-fine-vacate-hostels-jnu-students-on-afzal-guru-row-punishment-2771646/
In national capital Delhi, a rape accused has 83% chance of acquittal – Hindustan TimesS
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/in-delhi-a-rape-accused-has-83-chance-of-acquittal/story-2iknxGEDiqRVi196HTQnLJ.html
The RSS BrahmantvaVersus Dalit-Bahujans – Counter Currents
http://www.countercurrents.org/mani260416.htm
New Delhi Man Rapes, Attempts to Strangle Three-Year-Old Girl – Breit Bart
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/04/26/new-delhi-man-rapes-attempts-kill-three-year-old-girl/3
New Indian Express
Woman Raped by Imposter Cop
http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/kochi/Woman-Raped-by-Imposter-Cop/2016/04/27/article3401575.ece
KOCHI: The incident where a woman who was abducted and raped in broad daylight by a fisherman posing as a cop at a beach, reveals the true nature of moral policing directed against women everywhere. The woman, with her eight year-old-son and relative, was enjoying a holiday at the beach when a stranger posing as a police officer suddenly approached them. The three were strolling along the beach about half-a-mile from the other beach-goers at Vakkad, near Tirur, when the abduction and rape occurred.The accused, who was named AmeenulFaris, was not in police uniform when he arrived at the scene. He identified himself as a cop in mufti and ordered the woman and her relative to hand over their cellphones, the police said.Faris told them that he was a policeman and that he had to search their mobile phones since they looked like strangers who had arrived at the beach for an immoral activity, the police added.Though the woman clarified that the man with her was a relative and refused to hand over her phone, the con cop grabbed her by the wrists and took the mobile away. He then made a call from her phone so that he can save her number, she said.
“ We were helpless as he was threatening us. He did not fit the descriptions of a policeman but behaved like one. He asked my relative to show him the driver’s licence. He grilled us for more than 15 minutes at the beach when no one was watching,” the woman said.
Faris questioned the three seperately and told them the details of the address on the licence and the versions given by the woman did not match. He also threatened to beat them them up for lying, the woman added. He told her that she needed to come with him to the police station. When she refused, he grabbed her by the wrists and dragged her into an autorickshaw. Faris eventually managed to take her to an isolated place and raped her brutally while her son and relative were left out at the beach. “ He threatened he would kill my son and throw him away in to the sea if I don’t co-operate. He drove me to an isolated place, leaving my son and relative at the beach. He forced himself on me and when he was done, he hurried away,” she said.
“I could not believe what happened to me and revealed the entire account to my relatives when I got back home. They helped me file the complaint with police,” she added. The Tirur police nabbed Faris soon after the complaint was lodged, by tracking his phone number.
Tribune India
Neighbour booked for rape bid on five-year-old girl
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/ludhiana/neighbour-booked-for-rape-bid-on-five-year-old-girl/228357.html
Tribune News Service
Ludhiana, April 26
The city police booked a person for attempt to raping and sexually harassing a five-year-old girl in the Mehrban area. The suspect has been identified as Sunil Kumar, a native of Bihar who at present resides at HarkrishanVihar, Mehrban.
In his complaint, the victim’s father told the police that his five-year-old girl was playing on the rooftop of her house around 8 pm on April 23 when Sunil, who resides in the same house, tried to rape her.
Meanwhile, the girl’s mother came on the rooftop and seeing her, Sunil fled the spot. The woman did not inform her husband about the incident the same day. Today, she narrated the story to her husband and he filed a complaint at the Mehraban police station. Bhupinder Kumar, investigating officer, said: “We have registered a case under sections 376 and 511 of the IPC and 3/4 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012. Further investigation is on into this case”. No arrest has been made so far.
The hindu
New radicalization of Dalit politics emerging in India: Sri Lankan academician
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/new-radicalisation-of-dalit-politics-emerging-in-india-sri-lankan-academician/article8524454.ece
The emergence of new political and intellectual classes from among “Dalit elites” had shifted the agenda for social justice along new directions.Recent students’ protests at the Hyderabad Central University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University involving young Dalit scholars point to emerging signs of and possibilities for a new radicalisation of Dalit politics in India, according to JayadevaUyangoda, senior professor of political science at the University of Colombo.This trend is quite independent of the established political parties as well as Dalit political elites who have become even political managers of state governments, Prof. Uyangoda said in his lecture delivered as part of B.R. Ambedkar’s 125th anniversary celebration organised by the Indian High Commission last week.Pointing out that Ambedkar’s “harshly critical” writings on Hinduism and caste Hindu elites had “constantly highlighted the experience of humiliation of Dalits,” the veteran political scientist explained that the kind of anger demonstrated by the young students focussed on one theme “that continues to miss the attention of the media – humiliation that Dalits continue to suffer as individuals as well as a social group.” He added that “one has to be a victim of hierarchies to experience social humiliation fully, as Ambedkar as well as young RohithVemula and Kanniah Kumar have told us with great passion.”While electoral mobilisation and expansion as well as weakening of democratic political life in Indian society repeatedly highlighted the relevance and limits of the agenda for social transformation, the movement for equality and justice for the Dalits through political, constitutional and religio-social reforms seemed to have lost its edge.The emergence of new political and intellectual classes from among “Dalit elites” had shifted the agenda for social justice along new directions. The project of India’s Dalit emancipation appeared to have reached a deadlock as reflected in a new political consciousness “in which critique is seen by these elites as negative politics.”Prof. Uyangodavisualised that “in a sort of return to reclaiming Ambedkar’s legacy,” the post-Ambedkar Dalit politics in India might enter a new phase of direct confrontation. However, the efforts to return to Ambedkar’s legacy might be “handicapped by the absence of a new egalitarian-emancipatory hermeneutic that can capture the imagination of Dalit masses once again.”
Hindustan Times
Rape of minor: Cancel cross-complaint, Verka tells Tarn Taran SSP
http://www.hindustantimes.com/punjab/rape-of-minor-cancel-cross-complaint-verka-tells-tarn-taran-ssp/story-FjkLXCHvn3iwU8FIuazGrO.html
Directing the SSP to cancel the cross-FIR, Verka told him to get the case probed by an inspector general (IG)-rank official under the surveillance of the additional director general of police (ADGP, crime). (HT Photo)
Tarn Taran senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manmohan Sharma on Monday appeared before National Commission for Scheduled Castes vice-chairman Raj Kumar Verka at the circuit house here.
Verka had summoned the SSP after the Goindwal Sahib police booked Joginder Singh, a former sarpanch associated with the ShiromaniAkali Dal (SAD), his wife, three sons and a daughter on April 4 for allegedly thrashing, stripping and raping a 13-year-old girl at Tur village in Khadoor Sahib subdivision.
On April 9, however, Joginder Singh’s daughter filed a cross-complaint against the victim and her brother, alleging gangrape.
Directing the SSP to cancel the cross-FIR, Verka told him to get the case probed by an inspector general (IG)-rank official under the surveillance of the additional director general of police (ADGP, crime).
“If the cross-complaint is found to be false, all those involved in getting it registered will be strictly punished,” he said.
Indian Express
Kanhaiya, others reject JNU probe panel report, to go on hunger strike
http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kanhaiya-kumar-umar-khalid-anirban-bhattacharya-shehla-rashid-will-not-pay-fine-vacate-hostels-jnu-students-on-afzal-guru-row-punishment-2771646/
Kanhaiya, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested on charges of sedition in February in connection with an event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.
JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar. (Express Photo: Praveen Khanna)
Defiant JNU students who have been punished in connection with a controversial event on campus on Tuesday asserted they will not pay fine and vacate hostels as ordered by the university and will go on an indefinite hunger strike from tomorrow demanding withdrawal of orders.
“We have rejected the so called high-level enquiry committee right from the day it was set up as an undemocratic and biased one so there is no point accepting the punishment meted out to us on basis of its findings,” JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar told reporters.
Kanhaiya, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested on charges ofsedition in February in connection with an event against hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru during which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised. They are now out on bail.
Hindustan Times
In national capital Delhi, a rape accused has 83% chance of acquittal
http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/in-delhi-a-rape-accused-has-83-chance-of-acquittal/story-2iknxGEDiqRVi196HTQnLJ.html
According to official records, of the 665 rape accused in Delhi between January 2014 to March 2015, only 114 were found guilty. (Ilustration: Aastha Mittal)
A rape accused in India’s capital has an 83% chance of being freed by a court, an HT investigation has found. Shoddy probes, poor handling of forensic evidence and the lack of an effective witness protection program contribute to Delhi’s low conviction rate: a mere 17% lower than the national average of 28 percent.
HT analysed 663 judgments delivered by special courts and posted on official websites between January 2014 and March 2015. Of the 665 accused, only 114 were found guilty. Of those acquitted, 87 rape accused were cleared because the complainants testified they had eloped with them.
Why is the acquittal rate so high in a city that was the epicentre of protests after the December 16 gang rape that yielded a more stringent law? Data analysis shows systemic problems in police investigations and the process of prosecution.
After the December 16 gang rape rocked India in 2012, Delhi Police took less time in framing charges. The cases reached the courts within 71 days on an average, 100 days sooner than before. But HT’s data analysis shows that acquittals too were fast tracked.
(GRAPHIC: Aastha Mittal and Hitesh Mathur)
Prosecutors say poor investigation is a top reason. “I have understood that judges have a target to finish cases, so the moment they get to know that the prosecutrix is going to turn hostile, that case is put on priority (for disposal),” says a lawyer, who works with an NGO that focuses on sexual abuse cases.
“Even if there is DNA evidence glaring at you, screaming at you, nobody questions why she’s (victim) changed her statement before court,” the lawyer said on condition of anonymity because of the NGO’s media policy.
Securing convictions need corroborative evidence apart from forensic tests and the victim’s testimony. In 75% of the cases, the lack of corroborative evidence proved fatal. In other cases — reflective of the immense pressure brought upon complainants — rape victims retracted from earlier testimonies. One judgment even noted a victim as saying she had been pressured by the police to file a case.
Fewer rape victims were put through a medical examination after the 16/12 gang rape. Data analysed by HT reveals that forensic evidence helps courts to deliver a guilty verdict. Of the 663 judgements examined, forensic evidence was mentioned in only 154 cases. Of these, 55 accused were convicted.
“Shoddy investigation is the biggest reason for the failure of justice,” says former Additional Solicitor General Indira Jaising.
None of the 663 judgements mentioned that the courts had sought a reinvestigation. The prosecution too can seek more material from the police but seldom do.
At the end of the ordeal, it is the victim who continues to suffer. One victim told HT about her experience with the prosecutor who handled her case.
“When I approached my public prosecutor to show him that certain aspects of my case weren’t included… he just said, ‘I have no time, we’ll find out in the court… par aapnebhimazeykiyeaurusnebhimazeykiye so what’s the point? Koi baatnahin madam, aagebadiye.’ (You had fun, he had fun, so what’s the point? Never mind madam, move on),” the victim said.
“This is the kind of mentality which is coming, so who will fight with this?”
(District courts data compiled by interns SrishtiJuneja, Vidushi Gupta, TanujDayal. Data checked by Avantika Mehta and Rocky Soibam Singh, calculated by Harry Stevens )
Counter Currents
The RSS BrahmantvaVersus Dalit-Bahujans
http://www.countercurrents.org/mani260416.htm
As the most sinister defender of brahmanical social order under the guise of Hindu nationalism, the RSS-BJP knows that the awakening of Dalit-bahujans and their coming together with the Left and other egalitarian forces will herald a chain of events that will end only with the dismantling of brahmanical power. It is this mortal fear that haunts the RSS-BJP, despite being in power, and this explains their digressive madness of gharwapsi, cow protection, the killings of rationalists and RohithVemula, and the drama of nationalism-in-danger alongside organized attacks on JNU and HCU as centres of ‘sedition’ and ‘anti-national’ activities
What is unfolding in India today in the wake of RohithVemula’s institutional killing and the arising of students and Dalit-bahujans against such violence in the campuses and public places—and the no-holds-barred backlash that this uprising has attracted from the ruling regime and the Hindu right—seems to be a straw in the wind of a looming civil war. And, in all likelihood, this civil war—against the persistence of caste persecution (even in the institutions of higher education) alongside gender-and religion-based discriminations, extreme economic inequalities and massive youth unemployment—is going to be uncivil, protracted and will perhaps dominate much of the 21st century India. Ugly, messy and yet full of emancipatory promises, this battle, has begun, as the egalitarian dissent of Dalit-bahujans, assertive new women and the rebellious students is now reaching the target and bit-by-bit opening up the terribly closed, casteist and patriarchal Indian society.
India is a democratic republic where elections are held regularly, but glaring inequalities and discriminations still pervade all spheres of its social, economic and cultural life. Things have not changed much on this front since Ambedkar’s 1948 caution in the Constituent Assembly that ‘democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.’ Due to the persistence of caste and brahmanism, the Dalit-bahujans—that is, Dalits, Adivasis, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), Muslim masses, other religious and ethnic minorities, and women in general, who together constitute the overwhelming majority—are still demoralized and struggling, often unsuccessfully, to enter the crucial areas of governance, policy-making and public discourse. Since the 1990s, the political mobilization of Dalits, OBCs and Muslim masses along with the emergence of a Dalit discourse generated huge expectations of change in the structures of politics, power and public debate. The spread of mass education and rising political consciousness from below forced the ruling class to change its antics and tactics of politics. The Mandal moment, which came with the rise of Dalit-OBC parties in several states gave the impression that the suppressed majority are finally emerging as a national force to reckon with. This euphoria however fizzled out soon due to the crass opportunism and power politics of the Dalit-OBC leaders that allowed the BJP—a party far more brahmanical and communal than the Congress—to emerge as a mainstream national party and the main alternative to the Congress. Since then, the BJP has been propelled by the corporatization of economy and resurgence of socially reactionary forces, and is now the ruling party with a former RashtriyaSwayamsevakSangh (RSS) propagandist as Prime Minister. As the RSS is the BJP’s godfather and the lynchpin of the most devious brahmanic politics under the guise of Hindu nationalism, the educated Dalit-bahujans resent its poisonous politics and assert their autonomous forms of politics, culture, history and knowledge. Such assertions are getting strident in the university campuses, where more than anywhere else, various strands of thoughts are debated, fleshed out and compete against each other for intellectual and political primacy.
Changing structure of politics and public debate in campuses
In Indian universities, one crucial change has taken place recently and this change is bound to become a catalyst for other liberating changes. For the first time, Dalit-bahujans and other students from impoverished and working-class, semi-urban and rural backgrounds, thanks to their hunger for education and helped by some affirmative action, have started entering institutions of higher education in significant numbers. This has started changing the social composition of Indian universities as well as the structure of politics and public debate in campuses. Such a change has taken place in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and some other universities, and is largely responsible for what is happening there. Till now, the best univesities in India had practically been closed to the likes of RohithVemula, DonthaPrashanth and Kanhaiya Kumar, the kind of students who have brought about a new incendiary debate in the campuses.
An example of this was the formation of forums like the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle at the IIT-Madras and its engagements with the larger social, political and environmental issues, which invited the ire of the Central Government in 2015 and led to its ban, which was revoked only after eruption of a nationwide protest. In recent years, Dalit students’ groups such as Ambedkar Students’ Association of HCU, with which RohithVemula was passionately associated, have been active in the campuses. Similarly, the Dalit-bahujan students of JNU have formed the Birsa-Ambedkar-Phule Students Association (BAPSA) with the understanding that the traditional Left in India has failed to fight brahmanism both culturally and politically. Such subversive fronts have also come up in the campuses of Mumbai University, SavitribaiPhule Pune University and many other campuses across the country.
Moreover, the increasing and assertive presence of women is strengthening the transformations taking place on campuses. At the receiving end of pervasive misogyny in society, women students are better able to see the dehumanizing face of patriarchy and caste and their interconnections with other hierarchies. This makes at least some women from the privileged caste-class background side with the Dalit-bahujans and such socially-engaged women are making their presence felt in public debate. Some of them are now fighting and winning students’ union elections—and not only in the metropolitan cities. In Allahabad University’s century-old history, a woman has for the first time been elected president of the students’ union. Richa Singh, who won this feat, stands for social and gender equality and for this she is being targeted by the Hindu right and the fossilized university administration. To take another example, a year or so ago, the women students of colleges in Delhi launched a protest movement called PinjraTod (Break the Cage) against sexist restrictions imposed on women students, especially the oppressive hostel regulations that fetter their movement. The activists of PinjraTod, many of them fervent feminist, recently came on the streets demanding justice for RohithVemula and also protested against the witch-hunt of the JNU and HCU students.
In other words, the Ambedkarite Dalit-bahujans, a new generation of assertive women and Kanhaiya Kumar-Umar Khalid-type Marxists who are sensitive to the question of caste and brahmanism are bringing their personal caste-class-or-gender-based experiences of discrimination and deprivation and aligning them with the larger social struggles of their families and communities. Such a change is more visible in JNU where almost half the students are from Dalit-bahujan communities, and they have started a debate on caste, culture, history and the need for a renewed Phule-Ambedkarite struggle for social transformaion. They have been organizing meetings and seminars on socio-cultural issues, and challengingly telling the privileged-caste Marxist students to first fight brahmanism and their own caste prejudices before thinking of an alliance with them (i.e., Dalit-bahujans). The differences remain, but it seems that many young Marxists have begun to appreciate the fundamental point of Dalit-bahujan politics that social boundaries cannot be purely drawn on economic lines and the relations of production as the traditional hierarchies of caste, patriarchy and their consequences continue to play a crucial role in influencing status and power in society.
These ongoing churnings among the Dalit-bahujan and Marxist students is indeed a radical development which found expression in the united clamour of Jai Bhim and Lal Salaam. The emergence of Ambedkar from a Dalit icon to a rallying point of different forms of resistances is a development whose importance was not lost on the ruling Hindutva forces which saw in this the seed of a rebellion whose first casualty will be their brahmanical supremacist politics. The instances of subversive rereading of brahmanic myth-history, denunciation of Dharmashastras like Manusmriti and the observance of Mahishasura Martyrdom Day by the Dalit-bahujan students of JNU had earlier incensed the RSS-BJP a great deal. The JNU has become ‘a den of sedition and anti-national activities’, as the RSS mouthpiece Organiser put it, precisely for this reason. Not surprisingly, the top brass of RSS-BJP instructed their students wing AkhilBharatiyaVidyarthParishad (ABVP) not just to keep a close watch on these developments but also launch a Hindutva nationalist counterattack against the Ambedkarite-Marxist students. Under the patronage of Central government and the collusion with the university administration, the ABVP went on to augment its clout in the campuses and started intimidating the students of rival ideologies. The targeting and arrest of Kanhaiya Kumar and other JNU students was done after the ABVP ruffians clashed with the former and lodged formal complaints against them. The story was not very different from what had happened earlier at IIT-Madras where the Ambedkar-Periyar Study Circle was banned and the HCU where RohithVemula and four other Ambedkarite Ph. D. scholars were suspended and evicted form hostel with no scholarship, on the mere complaint of the ABVP and its patrons at the Centre.
Though the police action in JNU and the arrest of the student leaders was ostensibly made on the flimsy grounds of raising anti-India slogans, the real cause of the RSS-BJP fury was the threat posed by the growing assertiveness of Dalit-bahujan students and the budding solidarity between them and Marxist students. The RSS knows that tackling the caste-blind Marxists through tarnishing them with the allegation of adhering to a ‘foreign’ dogma is easy, but directly fighting the Phule-Ambedkarites will completely expose—and emasculate—their brahmanical politics.
Thus, what is happening in the universities across the country is not just the campus protest against the saffronization of education and attack on academic autonomy but also a part of a much bigger struggle for social democracy. The students are demanding freedom for the whole of suffering society—freedom from the exploitation of caste, class, patriarchy, feudalism, brahmanism and capitalism, as their popular and challenging Azadi song puts it. It is this rainbow rebelliousness and the possibility of coming together of the Phule-Ambedkarites, Marxists and other social democrats at national level that has rattled the ruling regime. Obviously, the nationalism that the RSS-BJP represents is not against any other nation or foreign power but against the Phule-Ambedkarites, Marxists and all those who oppose equating brahmanism with nationalism. The RSS hates the JNU-type critical education and wants to impose its stupefying Vedic-brahmanic education and gurukul system. In fact, all those who promote critical thinking and oppose caste and brahmanism are the ‘enemies within’ and ‘anti-nationals’ in the eyes of the BJP-RSS, though they can never dare to say this openly.
RSS is anti-Dalitbahujan and polar opposite of Phule-Ambedkarism
The RSS’s constant bogey of nationalism-in-danger is nothing but a ploy to cover up its brahmnaical conspiracy of suppressing the egalitarian aspirations of Dalit-bahujans. It is an old RSS trick to create a hoax that something terrible is happening, that ‘Hindu India’ is falling apart due to machinations of ‘internal enemies’ such as Muslims, Christians, Marxists. But its Hindu politics actually revolves around reinforcing brahmanical control of power and culture. The RSS knows that it will have to constantly devise more devious ways to tackle the Dalit-bahujans who are now waking up to the oppressive reality and demanding their democratic rights.
Not for nothing the RSS was born in the land of Phule and Ambedkar, the greatest leaders of Dalit-bahujans in modern India. According to C P Bhiskikar, the official biographer of K B Hedgewar who founded the RSS in 1925, the ‘lower-caste assertion’ was a danger on a par with the ‘Muslim threat’ that lay behind the formation of the RSS. Indeed, Maharashtra had witnessed a powerful movement against brahmanism from the 1870s onwards that was pioneered by JotibaPhule and his mass organization SatyashodhakSamaj. Phule’s radical anti-caste ideas and activities were becoming popular among the Dalit-bahujans. And by the 1920s, the Dalits had started organizing themselves under Dr. Ambedkar. Nagpur, the birthplace of the RSS, was a centre of social radicalism and also the venue of the All India Depressed Classes Conference in 1920 where Ambedkar had rejected the paternalistic model of social reform. Later, Nagpur was also to become the Deekshabhoomi (the Land of Conversion) where Ambedkar led half-a-million Dalits to repudiate Hinduism and embrace Buddhism.
The fact that the RSS and its propagandists now present themselves as followers of Phule and Ambedkar to hoodwink the Dalit-bahujans—recently NarendraModi took the contortionist’s pains to show that ‘he is a devotee of Ambedkar’ and DevendraFadnavis, the chief minister of Maharashtra, demanded the Bharat Ratna for Phule—is an example of their vicious perfidy. Anyone who knows the basic ideology of Phule and Ambedkar knows that theirs was the strongest repudiation of the brahmanical Hindu ideology and politics that the RSS represents. They argued that the brahmanic socio-religious system was a most insidious form of colonialism and, therefore, its annihilation must constitute an integral part of nation-building. Phule, the first person to articulate this view, declared war on this internal colonialism and its religio-cultural matrix, which forms the nucleus of RSS nationalism. Later, Ambedkar, Periyar and other Dalit-bahujan leaders took this struggle forward and hammered home the point that the nation is nothing if it is not the people. Unravelling the oppressive structures of caste, class and patriarchy, they argued that a society divided by discrimination could not constitute a genuine nation. The caste elites claiming to represent the nation were actually its destroyers, they insisted, since they not only rationalized or masked the glaring inequalities of the past but also sought to maintain them as their power base in the present. Exposing the oppressive history of caste and its consequences, the Dalit-bahujan leaders held brahmanism squarely responsible for enslaving the minds of Dalit-bahujans and women through a fake religion and a false philosophy. They attacked brahmanism for creating caste ideology to exploit the productive majority and they rejected Hinduism itself by arguing that it was symbiotically bonded with brahmanical tyranny, superstition, and irrationality. They felt that the new India required an egalitarian and rational religion that could not be provided by reconstructed Hinduism.
For this reason, Phule and Ambedkar have been variously reviled by the RSS. It is well known that the RSS’ immediate ancestors dismissed Phule in his life-time as an undeserving ‘shudra teacher’ and the RSS hated Ambedkar for his iconoclastic criticism of Hinduism and for writing an ‘unIndian’ Constitution as well as advocating the reform of Hindu personal laws to give egalitarian rights to women.
The RSS, in contrast to Phule and Ambedkar, fanatically stands by Hinduism and its classical caste system, but pretends to oppose caste divisions. As recently as April 14, 2016, Ram Madhav, a top RSS agent, asserted, “…The varnashrama system never sanctioned any caste hierarchy; nor did it allow any caste discrimination.” Maintaining that the discriminatory caste system has no connection with the tradition of Vedic-brahmanism, the RSS claims that it strives for the unity of all Hindus, and that all castes are equal in its eyes. It even includes Adivasis and non-Hindu communities in its supremacist notion of ‘Hindu’, since anyone living in India is a Hindu! But the unificatory thrust of its ideology revolves around ‘naturalness of hierarchical social order’ that supports caste and renders autonomous Dalit-bahujan assertions as ‘divisive’ and ‘anti-national’.
Behind its endless invocation of ‘Hindu dharma, Hindu sanskriti and Hindu parampara’ lurks visceral brahmanical support for Varna Vyavastha. M S Golwalkar, the second RSS chief, glorified the author of Manusmriti as ‘the first and greatest law-giver of the world’ who taught everyone ‘to learn their duties at the holy feet of Brahmans’. In his Bunch of Thoughts, he reiterated rapturously: ‘The Hindu people is the viratpurusha … Brahman is the head, Kshatriya the hands, Vaishya the thighs and Shudra the feet. This means that the people who have this four-fold arrangement, that is, the Hindu people, is [sic] our god. This supreme vision of godhead is the very core of our concept of ‘nation’ and has permeated our thinking and given rise to various unique concepts of our cultural heritage.’ It is not unnatural for an outfit like RSS that fervently believes in social hierarchy to be terrified of democracy. Golwalkar said, ‘Democracy is not right for India. Hindutva and democracy cannot go hand-in-hand.’
The RSS’ zeal to hide the historical crimes of caste and brahmanism—and its overt or covert opposition to the emancipatory struggles of Dalit-bahujans—shows that its claim to fighting caste is a sham. Its idea of forging ‘Hindu unity’ is built on its violent politics against the ‘other’, especially Muslims, because, as Ambedkar pointed out, ‘Hindu society is a myth. Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes. …A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes except when there is Hindu-Muslim riot.’ Indeed, the Hindu politics of RSS serves its twin objectives of keeping the Dalit-bahujans under the brahmanical umbrella, on the one hand, and fighting Muslims, Christians and other ‘aliens’ with the unity thus achieved, on the other.
Though the RSS hoodwinks many ignorant Dalit-bahujans as foot soldiers for its dirty politics (especially during organizing riots against Muslims and Christians), it is basically a fanatic outfit of the upper-caste Hindus guided by a clique of brahmans. Its founder members—K B Hedgewar, B S Moonje, L V Paranjpe, B BThalkar, and BaburaoSavarkar—and all its early swayamsevaks were brahmans. In his diary, Moonje (himself a brahman) referred to RSS cadres as ‘brahman youths’ and ‘brahman lads’. Its ideological mentor was Savarkar, a brahman; its founder was Hedgewar, a brahman; its organizational builder was Golwalkar, a brahman.
Beginning with Hedgewar, almost all the RSS chiefs—M S Golwalkar, BalasahebDeoras, K S Sudarshan, Mohan Bhagwat—have been only from the chosen caste—brahman. Other foremost leaders whom the RSS holds in great esteem—B G Tilak, S P Mookerjee, DeendayalUpadhyaya, A B Vajpayee and so on—belong to the chosen caste. Behind its Hindu mask, the RSS is an outfit of, for and by the brahmans and allied upper-castes Its minions from the Dalit-bahujan communities have been in the RSS only to carry out the brahmanical politics. See these telling examples: When the RSS-BJP launched the Ram Mandir movement in 1990 under Lal Krishna Advani and the latter openly confessed that it was actually against the acceptance of Mandal Commission recommendations, not a single Dalit-OBC member of the so-called SanghParivar dared to open his mouth against this duplicity; and, a similar silence from the ‘bonded labourers of RSS’—to use Mayawati’s description of the Dalit-OBC leaders in the BJP—was witnessed in 2015 when the RSS chief Bhagwat spoke against the reservation policy.
The RSS functions on the belief that the less the people know about India’s real past and present, the more they believe in Hindutva propaganda. From its very inception, the real game plan of RSS has been to promote brahmanism as nationalsim as well as keep the Dalit-bahujans and Muslim masses uneducated and unempowered by raking up false issues in the name of religion. The RSS resorts to violent politics of religion and manufactures riots against Muslims and Christians to divert attention from the structural violence and exploitation of the caste system. As the Hindu formation is badly fragmented by the hierarchies of caste, communalism becomes the mechanism for the creation of the Hindu identity in which Muslim as full-time villain and scapegoat comes very handy and serves a most useful function. Scholar DilipMenon rightly points out that communalism in India is a deflection of the central issue of violence and inegalitarianism within Hindu society. Indeed, in almost all Hindu-Muslim clashes, there is a displacement of hatred and the conjunction of caste-class interest with communal sentiment and indoctrination. That is why Gujarat’s anti-reservation agitation soon turned into anti-Muslim violence in the 1980s, and upper-caste protests against Mandal in 1990 merged seamlessly with the Ram Mandir movement that generated organized violence against Muslims.
The RSS is an organization shrouded in secrecy; it keeps even its own rank and file in the dark about its real aims and objectives; only its ‘inner circle’ is taken into confidence. Its ideology and politics are both absurd and ominous, as Neeladri Bhattacharya eloquently spells out, ‘The discourse of [Hindutva] communalism criticizes other religions for being monolithic, but aspires to build a monolithic unity. It glorifies diversity within Hinduism as a mark of its superiority over Semitic religions, but seeks to repress this diversity. It identifies aggressiveness as an evil intrinsic to other religions, but attempts to instill the same quality in all Hindus. It talks of patience and tolerance as innate virtues of Hindus, yet sees these traits as the basis of Hindu weakness. It condemns other religions for their politics of religious repression and temple destruction, but organizes itself around the same politics.’ Indeed, the glaring contrast between what the RSS professes and what it practices (talk of Hindu unity but divide the Dalit-bahujans and make them either fight each other or set them against Muslims and Christians) could teach a lesson or two to the likes of Paul Joseph Goebbels.
Crushing the RSS Brahmantva is essential for social democracy
Let us come back to the campus turmoil and its socio-political ramifications. I argued earlier how the root cause of such unrest, which is likely to intensify in the years to come, lies in the fact that the Indian State remains essentially discriminatory against the majority of its own citizens. While the Congress has been negligent of this undemocratic ugliness, the RSS and BJP aggressively celebrate the iniquitous status quo under the fig-leaf of ‘sacred’ Hindu tradition and patriotism. For them, nation is not people and their mutual trust, egalitarian cooperation and the celebration of citizenship but a hoax to exalt the rotten Vedic-brahmanic culture for safeguarding the upper-caste supremacy in the present. To the RSS, the threat to the upper-caste interests becomes the threat to Hinduism, and the threat to Hinduism becomes the threat to nationalism.
It is no secret that the ruling class often brings into play the circus of nationalism to project their petty interests as national interests. The nationalist mask, more than any other facade, gives the elites the license to delegitimize and crush all dissent and resistance to the status quo. The foundation of this devious nationalism in India was laid during the colonial rule when the old brahmanic religion was shrewdly intermingled with the new hegemonic politics of nationalism by the caste elites. This is the kind of nationalist politics that the Congress has been pursuing since the days of Gandhi and Nehru, and this is the game that the RSS-BJP is now playing in an extremely devious and obnoxious manner.
Given the striking upper-casteist similarities that the Congress and BJP-RSS share on economic and social issues, the difference between the secular Congress and the communal BJP-RSS seems to be like the one between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Congress is ‘BJP minus the Lotus’ and the BJP ‘Congress plus the cow’, as some wit put it, but there is one clear divide that separates the two. To be fair to the Congress, its central agenda, unlike the BJP’s, is neither the brahmanic cultural fundamentalism nor the fanatic politics of hate against Muslims and Christians, though it may be flirting dangerously with these things occasionally for petty political gains. The Congress is a bourgeois party of the status quo, but the RSS-BJP is a fascist axis of status quo ante. Save the Shiv Sena and Obaisi’s Muslim party, most other national and regional parties resemble the Congress: like the Congress, they are corrupt and some of them dynastic too but they are not out-and-out communal. And, as the BJP is equally, if not more, corrupt than the Congress means that the RSS progeny is many times more dangerous for India, and especially for the Dalit-bahujans, Muslims, Christians and the people of the North-East.
The RSS often exhibits its sick obsession with Sanatan Dharma and its sanatan obscurantism. To give one recent example, the RSS number two SarkaryavahBhaiyyaji Joshi said on April 2, 2016: ‘… A nation is a cultural way of living that has itself evolved in thousands of years and which never undergoes a change.’ Put simply, a way of life that does not ever change is glorious: any cultural change is dangerous! This is the sly RSS way to glorify the inegalitarian culture of caste and brahmanism. This makes the RSS-BJP the hot favourite of the ruling castes which feel that in the changed situation the Hindutva politics can much better safeguard their vested interests than the Congress. Indeed, the politics of RSS-BJP is far more cunningly organized and oriented than the Congress to serve the upper-caste interests.
Thus, the nationalism that the RSS-BJP stands for is just a ruse for deflecting attention from the people’s real issues and the growing clamour for democratic change that involves the vital questions of education, health and employment. The real motive of brahmanic politics that the RSS represents is to divide, demoralize, and dominate the Dalit-bahujans—a conspiracy that the educated and the awakened among them have begun to see. As I wrote sometime ago, remembering Martin Niemoller’s famous poem on the Nazi atrocity:
They first came to avenge the Love Jihad.
I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Muslim.
Then they came for the GharWapsi.
I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Christian.
Then they came for the saffronization of Sikhs.
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Sikh.
Then they came for the de-Ambedkarization of Dalits,
And ‘purification’ of Adivasis in the caste culture.
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Dalit or Adivasi;
I didn’t speak up because I was an OBC, an enslaved shudra.
Then they came for the erasure of Phule and Periyar from textbooks.
But by that time all the ‘minorities’, 90 per cent of the population—
Muslims, Chritsians, Sikhs, Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs—
Were put in their ghettos, to serve the Hindu nation with its capital at Nagpur,
Allowing the real minority, less than 10 per cent of Indian population—
The racist-casteist-misogynist thugs, led by the Neanderthals of Nagpur,
Hiding behind the deceptive label of Hindu majority—
To fool and rule—and make mincemeat of—the masses.
The dhoti-clad Neanderthals of Nagpur, funded by the Corporate crooks,
Always invoke their Vedic-Puranic ancestors
Who invented supersonic aeroplane before they made wheels,
And who concocted Caste, Untouchability and Varnashrama Dharma
To fool and rule and divide the humanity.
As the educated Dalit-bahujans and the socially-engaged students have begun to see through—and protest against—the vicious power game of the RSS-BJP, the latter have resorted to a more devious politics of nationalism-in-danger. Their Hindu nationalism is in danger because the Dalit-bahujans have started fighting the oppressive tradition of caste and brahmanism. This threat makes the RSS come up with new formulations and frauds to keep the people enthralled to the magic, mystery and power of the VandeMataram and Bharat Mata as well as chalk out a strategy with its BJP government to revive Sanskrit and introduce Vedic education and gurukul system. All these Vedic-brahmanic sermons, breast-beating and hysterical hate speeches against sedition and the enemies within—to give but only one example: Ramdev, the Hindutva zealot, declared recently, ‘had there been no law, we would have cut lakhs of throats who refuse to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai’—are actually intended to deflect people’s attention from the real issues and the everyday mutinies against injustice that we see erupting in India today.
As the most sinister defender of brahmanical social order under the guise of Hindu nationalism, the RSS-BJP knows that the awakening of Dalit-bahujans and their coming together with the Left and other egalitarian forces—the glimpses of which they saw in the JNU and HCU students’ stir—will herald a chain of events that will end only with the dismantling of brahmanical power. It is this mortal fear that haunts the RSS-BJP today, and this explains their vicious targeting of the JNU and HCU as centres of ‘sedition’ and ‘anti-national’ activities. Going by their nasty track record—the killings of three prominent rationalist intellectuals; the lynching of Mohammad Aflaq for the alleged crime of consuming beef; the suppression and silencing of RohithVemula; the brutal attack on Kanhaiya Kumar under the court premises; and sundry other incidents of criminal attacks on the political opponents—the Hindutva forces will resort to dirtier games in the coming days to crush the democratic upsurge. No doubt, they are a formidable force today and capable of perpetrating all kinds of atrocities, but whatever they do they will not succeed in suppressing an emancipatory idea whose time has finally come in India. This hope arises from the fact that the closed society and polity of ours have finally started opening up due to the mounting democratic pressure from below. Also, it is the irrepressible nature of democracy and modernity to unsettle the settled and change the old order, whether of men or institutions. Once the democratic genie—of justice and equality for all—is out of the bottle, the brahmanical forces, however controlling and crafty, will not be able to put it back in the bottle. What we are witnessing today in India is the beginning of the end of dominant brahmanical forces. The twenty-first century will be the century of liberation of the Dalit-bahujans and women.
Breit Bart
New Delhi Man Rapes, Attempts to Strangle Three-Year-Old Girl
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/04/26/new-delhi-man-rapes-attempts-kill-three-year-old-girl/3
Authorities in New Delhi, India, have arrested a man after he allegedly raped and attempted to kill a three-year-old girl.
According to The Times of India (TOI), the child’s grandmother caught Ravi Kumar, 27, attempting to escape and screamed for help. Their “neighbours caught and thrashed him and then handed him over to the the police.”
The grandmother was taking care of the young girl while her parents were at work.
They live on the second floor, while Kumar lives on the third floor with his friends. TOI reports:
Family members said that when the girl was going to her grandmother’s room to sleep, Kumar entered the house and lured her on the pretext of playing with her. He then gagged her and took her to his room.
When Kumar tried to force himself on the girl, she cried out in pain. Unable to stop her from crying, he gagged her. He then tried to strangle her after which she fell unconscious. Kumar panicked and picked up the child to dump her outside the house. However, fearing that he would be caught, he went to her apartment to leave her on the floor and flee. However, the child’s grandmother noticed him and raised an alarm. She also found the girl bleeding from her private parts.
While Kumar was rushing down, he was caught by the landlord and other neighbours who thrashed him before handing him over to the police.
“Ravi panicked when the girl became motionless. He went upstairs, tried to leave the girl on the bed next to her grandmother. But her grandmother woke up and raised an alarm,”explained an officer.
Authorities brought the girl to the hospital, where she remains in critical condition.
“The girl was referred to AIIMS [All India Institute of Medical Science]. Her condition is said to be serious, though she is showing signs of recovery. She had received some injuries in her private parts,” said a police officer.TOI reported that the man “was a drunkard and worked at a nearby factory.” He also could not find a job due to his alcohol problems. He lived at the apartment with his friends for the past two years.Rape victims rarely report the crimes because society often casts them aside or police and relatives pressure them to drop the cases.In 2012, six men gang-raped a woman to death on a bus, which brought to light India’s treatment of women. The case caused massive protests across the country and forced the government to change rape laws.In January, a 14-year-old girl told NDTV that three attackers held her in a “dark room” and raped her for two weeks. They then shot her and dumped her in a well outside of New Delhi.
In March, a 15-year-old girl died after her neighbor raped her and set her on fire on the terrace of her home.
News monitored by AMRESH & AJEET
