Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 06.06.14
Dalit girl raped, murdered in U.P. - The Hindu
SIT formed to probe Badaun gangrape-murder - The Hindu
Savings Scheme for Girls to be Implemented as part of Mission 676 - Indian Express
SC to hear plea against death sentence for four-year-old's rape, murder - Big News Network
Endless wait for justice - The Hindu
Here’s why Congress is scared of revealing the report’s contents - Mumbai Mirror
The Hindu
Dalit girl raped, murdered in U.P.
PTI
A 19-year-old Dalit girl was allegedly raped and murdered in Badhauna village under the Baksha police station area two days before her marriage, police said on Thursday.
The girl, who was to get married today (Thursday), was found murdered with her throat slit open near her house on Wednesday morning.
Later, the body was sent for post mortem examination, the police said.
The medical report received on Thursday confirmed that she was raped before being killed, the police said, adding that the manner in which she was murdered indicated towards the involvement of more than one person in the crime.
Medical report awaited
Chief Medical Superintendent Bhaskar Rai said advanced medical examination report was awaited. Meanwhile, after receiving the autopsy report, the family of the victim sat on fast-unto-death demanding immediate arrest of the accused, proper security and compensation.
The Hindu
SIT formed to probe Badaun gangrape-murder
PTI
Team searches houses of the accused in custody
A four-member Special Investigation Team has been constituted to probe the shocking gangrape and murder case of two cousins in Katra Sadatganj village in Badaun, officials said.
“The SIT headed by circle officer of Ujhani, Mukesh Saxena has been set up for investigating the case”, SSP Atul Kumar Saxena said.
The SSP said that SIT visited the village on Friday and talked to the complainants and witnesses.
The team got the houses of the accused opened and searched them, Mr. Saxena said adding that help of the witness was being taken to prepare sketches of two accused who are yet to be identified and that the entire process was being videographed.
The case is being monitored at the government level and taking the seriousness of the matter for solving it promptly, the investigations have been taken over from local police, the SSP said.
Indian Express
Savings Scheme for Girls to be Implemented as part of Mission 676
By Express News Service
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Scheduled Castes Development Department will implement a savings scheme for girls as part of the ‘Mission 676’ of the State Government.
“The project titled ‘Valsalyanidhi’ involves depositing Rs 50,000 in the name of newborns of economically backward families. The maturity amount could be used for education or marriage of the girl when she attains 18 years of age,” Minister for Welfare of Scheduled Castes A P Anil Kumar said.
He said the department would provide funds to write off loans (up to Rs 1 lakh and those with expired repayment period as on March 31, 2010) availed of by SC persons from SC, ST Development Corporations and Cooperative Banks.
‘Vidyajyothi’, another new project would be launched to eliminate the disparity in success rate of SC students and general students.
Special coaching would be given to students of Classes VIII, IX and X. Primary school students would be given free school bags, umbrella and sandals.
‘Smritivanam’, a financial assistance project to set up crematoriums, would be launched. Rs 25 lakh will be sanctioned for a single unit through the local bodies.
A medical college in Palakkad, self-sufficient village project and a housing scheme for widows are other components of the department’s Mission 676 programme.
Big News Network
SC to hear plea against death sentence for four-year-old's rape, murder
Big News Network (IANS) Thursday 5th June, 2014
The Supreme Court will hear on June 10 a plea by Rajasthan resident Kalu Khan seeking the stay of his death sentence for allegedly raping and murdering a four-year-old girl.
A bench of Justice J.S.Khehar and Justice C.Nagappan directing the hearing of the matter after counsel Asha Jain Madan told the court that the execution of Kalu Khan's death sentence is fixed for June 18.
Replying to a query, Madan said the death sentence was confirmed by the Jodhpur bench of Rajasthan High Court on April 9.
The special judge, SC/ST court, Sriganganagar, convicted Kalu Khan and describing his offence as "rarest of rare", sentenced him to death.
According to the prosecution, Kalu Khan, a resident of Sriganganagar, in May 2012 allured the girl from her father Kashiram's house and brought her to his house on the promise of giving her berries. Upon reaching home, he prompted his son Jumman Khan, a minor, to rape her and then followed him in raping the child.
Finding that her condition was deteriorating, Kalu Khan killed her.
The dead body was recovered when the girl's grandfather, searching for her, saw Jumman burying something in a pit in his courtyard. As Jumman failed to give any satisfactory answer as to what he had buried, the pit was dug up and the body recovered.
Kalu Khan, in his petition, said that the offence for which he has been convicted did not come under the rarest of rare category and the only evidence against him was that of the co-accused and his son who was allegedly found to be burying the dead body. Jumman was tried by the Juvenile Justice Board.
He contended that he could not have been awarded death sentence in the facts of the case where the conviction is based solely on circumstantial evidence and neither the murder was pre-planned as held by the trial court nor did he have any criminal past.
The Hindu
Endless wait for justice
Brinda Karat
Prosecuting the guilty police personnel along with the accused is needed urgently to bring justice to the brutalised young girls and their grieving families in the Badaun case
The searing image of the bodies of two cousin sisters — just 14 and 15 years old — hanging from a tree in Katra Sadatganj village in Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh, brought home to the world the utterly despicable hypocrisy underlying India’s claims to being a democratic nation.
In this case, the girls did not belong to the Scheduled Castes (SC), but this does not mean that caste was not a major factor in the crime. The cousins belonged to a caste considered socially inferior to the one to which the criminals in the case belong. In this village, as in thousands of villages across the country, many men belonging to the dominant castes believe that rape of women or girls of castes lower to them in the hierarchical caste ladder is an inherited and an inheritable right. They also believe that to abuse, demean, defile, harass and exploit the so-called lower castes is part of an unchallengeable tradition.
Symbol of oppression
It is the arrogance of that tradition and inherited caste-based power which told the desperate parents when they were searching for their daughters, “you will get them back in two hours.”After two hours passed, the parents were told: “go to the tree and you will find them.” They were informed of this, not by the families of the accused, but by the policemen of the village police station where they had gone to complain. The police belonged to the same caste as the criminals and were reportedly close friends with the accused. They must be prosecuted for custodial rape.
What did the parents do? They waited for two hours.
The two hours symbolise the utter helplessness of ordinary citizens in the face of criminalisation of politics in U.P. under the Samajwadi Party (SP), the state of lawlessness driven by statements and actions of the leaders of the ruling party and the administration, and the impunity enjoyed by the police at various levels. If ever there was a case to implement the concept of command responsibility to hold senior officers responsible, it is in the Badaun case.
Equally, the two hours symbolise the burden of centuries of oppression, of the destruction of humanity, of a helplessness born out of lifetimes of waiting for justice, of a resigned belief that silence may save the lives of their daughters. They symbolise the horrifying systemic nature of caste-based hierarchies, and of supremacy and subordination determined by birth that remain a marker of social relations in India.
Those who believe that “development” represented by modernisation processes such as urbanisation or industrialisation automatically level out discriminatory caste-based practices, fail to see that caste as an instrument of power has been co-opted and used for modern goals of economic and political benefit. In the established patterns that pass for democracy in India, castes owe allegiance to some political party whose job is to defend members of that caste, regardless of the brutal nature of the crime they may have committed, in return for votes. The dominant castes in Badaun know well that they have the strong backing of the SP, just as the dominant community in Haryana’s politics continues the system of khap panchayats as they have the patronage of the Congress and other parties. In the Khairlanji case in Maharashtra, it was an open secret that the community involved in the dastardly crime had the backing of the Nationalist Congress Party. In the recent caste-based atrocity in Ahmednagar, where a dalit youth was brutally murdered for daring to speak to a Maratha girl in his class, a similar pattern of caste-based political patronage to the criminals emerged.
In the Lok Sabha election campaign, although the issue of women’s security did figure as an important one for most political parties, it is striking that caste-based atrocities on women of oppressed communities did not form part of public discussions. The interface between patriarchy, caste and economic power makes women of the oppressed castes most vulnerable to sexual violence. Yet their voices went unheard, even by those parties who claim to represent them.
It is equally striking that organisations based on religious mobilisations, like the Sangh Parivar which claims monopoly in representing “Hindu” interests, maintain a deafening silence on caste-based crimes against Hindu women. In Muzaffarnagar, the issue of sexual harassment of women became a powerful tool in the hands of the Sangh Parivar to shred a long-standing harmony between Muslims and Jats. This tool would enable the Bharatiya Janata Party to reap the electoral benefits of the communal violence against the Muslim community.
In this diabolical plan, the rape of Muslim women was a justified response to the alleged sexual harassment of Hindu girls. The sweep of seats for the BJP is an example of cold-blooded communalisation of secular issues such as sexual harassment. This issue is now being seen by the Sangh Parivar as having a huge potential to garner votes — the issue of defending the chastity of “our Hindu” women in which the perpetrators are always from the “other” community almost as powerful in its message as the defence of a religious symbol.
But for years in this same area of Muzaffarnagar, there have been within Hindu communities, killings, lynchings, revenge rapes and terrible violence against young couples who have dared to cross the caste barrier to marry people of their choice. In such cases, the boy is usually of a lower caste than the girl and therefore both must be punished. The Sangh Parivar, active in the area, has maintained a deafening silence on these crimes because they too subscribe to maintaining the “purity” of lineage that is so deeply embedded in casteist ideologies. Casteism and communalism not only co-exist, they feed into and strengthen each other.
he economic benefits derived from continuing caste-based professions is well-known. Even today in the so-called unclean jobs, SCs are overrepresented. In fact, a reverse reservation takes place in which some low paid jobs — the jobs of sweepers for instance — are almost exclusively reserved in practice for SCs or for Most Backward Castes. Second, among casual and contract workers, and manual labourers who have no security of service and who earn meagre wages, a disproportionate number belong to SCs and Scheduled Tribes (ST). On whether education can crack caste discrimination, a study conducted by IIM Ahmedabad in 2006 found that graduates belonging to the SC/ST category earned significantly lower wages than those in the general category. This shows how historical inequalities created by caste structures have been strengthened by the present trajectory of capitalist “development” to intensify the exploitation of labour of the “untouchables” for profit.
Fast-tracking the case
In the Badaun case, the fathers of the two cousins owned small plots of land, 2.5 bighas each, which they found unviable to cultivate. They depended on casual agricultural work and one of them also used to ply a rickshaw. On the days they got work, their average earning was around Rs. 150 a day. For the youth of more powerful castes, the children were easy prey.
Fast-tracking the case and prosecuting the guilty police personnel along with the accused is needed urgently to bring justice to the brutalised young girls and their grieving families.
Equally, the case once again highlights the urgent necessity for those who believe in alternative politics to work together to bring about radical social change. This is needed to reverse the present framework of economic and social policies and alter the polluted face of India’s democracy.
Mumbai Mirror
Here’s why Congress is scared of revealing the report’s contents
Mumbai Mirror | Jun 6, 2014, 10.27 AM IST
It took a little over seven months, and a final order by the State Information Commissioner Ratnakar Gaekwad himself, for the Movement for Peace and Justice (MPJ) to get a copy of the Mehmood-ur Rahman Committee report on the status of Muslims in Maharashtra. The MPJ received a copy of the report on June 2, after applying for it in October last year.
It had been submitted to the government in October last year, and was expected to be tabled in the December session of the Assembly, but that didn't happen. Till date, the report has not been officially released. With Assembly elections just five months away, it seems unlikely that it will be tabled, for its findings are a damning indictment on the state, which has been mostly ruled by the Congress since Independence.
The most disturbing finding was the community's loss of faith in the state's willingness to protect it during riots. The community felt police were against it and felt targeted by them. While Muslims were the first to be rounded up, even the perpetrators of violence against them were not arrested. Though the community constituted 10.6 per cent of the population, it comprised 27 per cent of prisoners in the state.
Among other measures such as dismissal of policemen who indulge in communal conduct, the report recommends greater recruitment of Muslims in the police, and a drive both by the state and by community leaders to get more Muslims to apply for police jobs.
One unnoticed fallout of the resultant feeling of insecurity is the restricted opportunities for women, who are often withdrawn from schools and forced to earn within their homes or neighbourhoods, making them subject to exploitation by middlemen and their own families.
Ghettoisation, primarily a result of insecurity, was seen as a major reason for discrimination by the state. Schools, colleges, public hospitals and sanitation facilities were found to be lacking in Muslim ghettoes, in which 90 per cent of the community was found to be living (only eight per cent lived in mixed areas). Even the distance to the nearest bus stop from these ghettoes was found to be 1.3 km away.
The report says that transport authorities admitted that Muslim areas were seen as trouble-prone, and thus few routes were planned through them. Many little-known forms of discrimination have been highlighted in the report. One was discrimination in health care.
Apart from the lack of public hospitals in ghettoes, the experience of Muslim women in these hospitals is a major reason for them to prefer private doctors, even if these were of dubious quality.
Hospital staff was especially rude with burqa-clad women, making remarks about them being 'dirty', 'ladaku' and having too many children. Incidentally, Muslim girls also complained that burqas exposed them to harassment and discrimination in educational institutions, public transport and jobs.
The report breaks some myths about Muslims. Their fertility rate has decreased from 4.11 in 1992-'93 to 3.3 in 1995-'96, and further down to 2.8 in 2005-06, which is better than the rate for Maharashtra as a whole. The immunisation rate (63.9 per cent) is also higher among Muslim infants than the state average.
To overcome the discrimination faced by Muslims, the report recommends an anti-discrimination law on the grounds of the SC/St Atrocities Act, the creation of an equal opportunities commission, inclusion of Dalit Muslims into the SC category, and 8 per cent reservation in public housing, as well as government jobs and educational institutions.
News monitored By Girish Pant
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of “Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC”)
Pl visit on FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/
..............................
Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre- PMARC has been initiated with the support from group of senior journalists, social activists, academics and intellectuals from Dalit and civil society to advocate and facilitate Dalits issues in the mainstream media. To create proper & adequate space with the Dalit perspective in the mainstream media national/ International on Dalit issues is primary objective of the PMARC.
No comments:
Post a Comment