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Wind of Change

2013-07-06T21:00:36Z

Delhi saw widespread protest on the Nirbhaya issue .

I am writing this article on the day when the Headlines reads 'Yet another brutal incident of Rape in Delhi , Bus Driver rapes a 10 year girl of his neighbourhood ' and yet again i hang my head in shame . The Delhi rape case had a quite strong effect on me. In many ways , it startled me from my slumber . The last time around when I felt so disgusted was perhaps when the Taj attack took place in India, the way Shopian rape incident occurred in Kashmir or when I read about the brutal way in which Soma Suri was raped under custody. There are countless incidents such like that in modern times when I have felt disgusted , when I have clenched my fist in anger to smash the culprits but have also been made to realize of my limitations as a ‘Common man’ of the ‘Largest Democracy’ of the world .

What was even more shocking was the apathy of the local people and the police after the act when they even debated at the crime spot where the victim and her friend were fighting for life whether they came under their police station or not rather than rushing them to hospital immediately. Over the years I feel that as we are marching ahead on the path of progress , somewhere our moral grounds have dampen into a sludge.

Cases of violence and rapes are rampant not only in Delhi but also elsewhere in hinterland and lesser known dark corners of the country. Maybe I feel that this problem is a case of the depleting moral values of the modern Indian society. Many conservatives maintain that ‘capitalism and consumerism and growing individualism’ have led to ‘decay in the society’. Often ‘westernization’ is blamed but i tend to disagree , Rapes are solely due to the ebb at which moral grounds have been pushed in India today . After the incident, there was rage in the nation, there were protests all across the nation but will this materialize to anything substantial? That remains a question to be asked.

The problem won’t be solved by having stricter laws or heated debates on the News channels. As even there I found patriarchic and dogmatic opinions doing rounds almost everywhere as Nirbhaya struggled for her life in hospital. In fact some factions of the media was even interested in revealing her name when the Indian Law strictly states that naming a rape victim is prohibited which was appalling . I hope that this incident does not becomes a debating ground for what women should do and what they should wear rather it should raise questions on the mindset of the society which rejoices killing women in fetuses and takes pleasure in branding rape as ‘consensual sex’ most of the times for money and is insensitive enough to even say that ‘She use to dress indecently so she had it coming ‘after someone gets raped.

I believe that we have to take a holistic approach to solve the issue. It’s about time when our education system needs to take up the responsibility of inculcating good moral values in youngsters. In our pursuit of producing Engineers and Doctors, we have overlooked the moral values of our generation and the cases against women are ramifications of such negligence. Rapes happen everywhere whether at workplaces, in Page 3 circles, on roads or in slums- it is not associated with one particular strata of the society but rather with its dogmatic mindset . In fact , many women are daily subjected to 'marital Rape' but the law is yet to recognise that .

Regular Sessions need to be conducted even in workplace to ensure that Women employees do not face discrimination and are treated well. I would also expect those who have been vociferously raising their voice in social media to also come forward and resist any such incidents they come across in real life. Actions are all we need at the moment. Mere words won’t suffice. As the Justice Verma commitee has submitted its report and the new Rape law is passed , I feel that the problem is far too deep entrenched in our mindset that it has almost transcended law and judiciary . In most of the cases , the rapist knows the victim from before . The mindset has to change and it needs to change everywhere from villages to metropolitans. Let us together pledge that we won't let her death go in vain , lets stand together in this fight . A wind of change is all the Indian society needs to feel and it needs the participation of each and every member of the society for the wind to blow. Till then i can just listen to Scorpions and imagine that

"The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change"

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change

- Shashank Saurav

Theatrics surrounding the Uttarakhand Tragedy

2013-07-04T04:24:13Z

In India, tragic incidents have always been marked by theatrics and drama by the political class much to the chagrin of those who suffer at its hands. The mass tragedy caused by the Uttarakhand floods didn’t spared our eminent politicians from trying to hog the limelight in this hour of heart rending tragedy. Be it be the lackadaisical approach of the Uttarakhand Chief Minister who was busy scheduling his Switzerland itinerary or the way Narendra Modi ( our much hailed NaMo ) campaigned for his Gujarat model even while he had gone to visit the flood affected areas . Also the goof up which his PR agency made while announcing that he flew down 15,000 Gujaratis from Uttarakhand on his own. The overenthusiastic Indian media didn’t even cared to check the veracity of the statement and publicized it even more quite zealously. It was quite late that an Article published in TOI made sense enough to rubbish such outrageous claims. Narendra Modi’s offer to help by giving away his helicopters and to build Kedarnath Temple was also shown the door by the Uttarakhand Chief Minister.

Then when Narendra Modi left then we had a famous duel between TDP & Congress leaders of Andhra Pradesh who wanted the victims to fly with them. This is not yet over, the biggest one is yet to come . While till now we kept on talking about how these parties tried to hog the limelight, the biggest of these public gimmicks was done by none other than Sonia Gandhi who waited 72 crucial hours while the survivors died out of hunger and lack of water to ‘flag off’ the trucks carrying relief materials after Rahul Gandhi returned from his Spain trip. This was shambolic and a shining example of the ebbs to which politicians have fallen in modern India that they kept on delaying it so as to gain some brownie points in the eyes of the common public. I am starkly critical of all these incidents as they yet again proved that Politics is a selfish ‘business’ in India and is yet to rise above petty things even in hours of crisis . In the face of this tragedy, the man who disappointed the most was Uttarakhand CM- Vijay Bahuguna. He was busy alleging the centre that it didn’t had any mechanism to deal with such catastrophe rather than taking the blame on himself as to how around 67,000 tourists were allowed in the region even when Metrological Department has issued several warnings. His counter allegations and refusal to accept Narendra Modi’s help of over two dozen helicopters and his offer to help reconstruct Kedarnath Temple was met with widespread angst. However, it can be argued that Modi’s intent was also to gain brownie points by doing this and hence he publicised this quite openly.

Rescue operations by the Army Personnels .

Heroism was in vogue among politicians amidst the rising number of people who were dying and were being rescued at Ground Zero by the real heroes of this tragedy – i.e., the Army personnel who helped them selflessly to ensure that they were rescued safely. Congress MLA from MP Sanjay Pathak claimed that he saved some passengers through his helicopter and this led to almost a stampede at the Dehradun Airport with every politician lining up his aircraft so as to ‘claim’ that he ‘saved’ x number of people. All this was happening when there were not even centres to keep track and information of all the missing people in the tragedy .

I am not a pessimist but my optimism has lost in colour by the incidents that I saw in this hour of crisis. While some leaders were shedding crocodile tears over the issue, they had done less to ensure that more problems do not further arise due to it. Much of the Relief work was even stopped when Sonia Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh were taking an aerial survey of the flood affected areas, quite ensconced in their private luxury jet while people were dying due to hunger. It’s such a shame that while Politics was supposed to be a noble profession to serve the society, it has rather become a selfish and profitable business in the present scenario in the World’s Largest Democracy.

The Rescue operation is over by now and many people are still missing and are trapped within the debris. This tragic incident exposed the vulnerability of our Disaster management Techniques and made a mockery of all the grand claims that the Govt. had made post the 2004 Tsunami which had killed 11,000 people in India. The estimated death toll is expected to touch 3,000 at least with more than that people still missing. Vijay Bahuguna , Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi are mere names , the thing which we need to cleanse the most is the standard at which politics is done in India . While Politicians keep on denying their obligations and continue their blame game , it’s the life of the common man that suffers the most .

- Shashank Saurav

The Pain Of Lost Innocence

2013-06-30T16:27:45Z

Today more than half of Indian children face child abuse at least once in their lifetime. The New Delhi rape of ‘Gudiya’ showed that child abuse is rampant across the country. The use of cyberspace and Internet-information systems has further aggravated the issue - children are not just abused, but even subjected to child pornography.

In January 2013, a brutal child rape in New Delhi reignited the critical issue of child abuse that we as Indians have conspicuously shied away from for several years. Five years-old, Gudiya was raped and brutalized by two men, Manoj (19) and Pradeep (21) living in the same building. They not only abused her, but even slashed her throat and left her unconscious in a pool of blood. Recently, an incident in Gurgaon was reported where a 45 year-old father raped his daughter for three years. In a privately run shelter home in Haryana, children and young women were beaten, sent out for sex work, trafficked and abused in horrible ways. Three years ago, we had the Nithari case, where an influential businessman and his servant were involved in child abuse and murdered 11 children, burying them in their courtyard.

Where our society is heading is hard to say and even fathom. I am deeply disturbed and shocked to read countless stories of young girls subjected to abuse by their nearest ones. Despite ubiquitous protests following these incidents, every day we discover even stranger cases of child abuse. We are also yet to discuss the root of this issue. Instead, we discuss violence against women in terms of rape as a property dispute. Even on news channels I hear patriarchal views during debates, where many blame the dressing style of women for ‘encouraging’ rapists to rape them. The Gudiya incident was a straight slap in the face to this chauvinist mindset and made us swallow harsh realities that we have until now knowingly evaded.

Today 53.4 percent of our children face child abuse at least once in their lifetime. These incidents have gone unnoticed for too long due to our negligence. More often than not, these abuses are perpetrated by a family member, a family friend or an uncle. They are kept private and not revealed as it becomes a ‘prestige’ issue for the family of the victim. I am sometimes appalled and ashamed by such hypocrisy. What about punishing the culprit? Why aren’t we bringing them to justice? According to the National Crime Records Bureau, between 2001 and 2011 there was a three-fold jump in registered child rape cases - from 2,113 in 2001 to 7,112 instances 10 years later. The majority of these incidents are not even recorded in police files.

Child rape incidents have increased by 336 percent since 2001 in India according to a study conducted by the Asian Centre for Human Rights. Our country finds it difficult to talk about sex, let alone sexual abuse. While our movies are full of thigh-slapping oafs dishing out double-entendres, our society’s redress of abuse victims, not to mention police insensitivity, is a travesty. Child sex abuse is a particularly taboo topic - it is not just brushed under the carpet, it is locked away in teak closets and swept under expensive sheets of more homes that you can even imagine. It is this silence that is frighteningly empowering to the culprits.

Recovering and Healing from Incest (RAHI), an NGO that was started by Anuja Gupta - herself a victim of child abuse - carries out extensive research in this field. The following are just a few startling observations:

64 percent of victims are abused between the age of 10-18 years
32 percent of victims are abused between the age of 2-10 years
87 percent of victims are repeatedly abused
19 percent of the abused are currently living with at least one of their abusers

Most of these abused children have their mothers at home. The study was even more shocking, as it showed that this rate does not depreciate according to the strata of the society - in fact, it even appreciates. More than 70 percent of the children from upper class families suffer abuse from family members and people whom they trusted.

The solution in my view lies in the fact that we need to advise and educate our children about their sexuality and about how someone can exploit them. Whether it is the dogmatic society structure or the conservative mindset here in India, we generally do not even talk about the necessary details of what type of touching is wrong and where it crosses line with our children. This makes them even more vulnerable as they do not realize when they are being subjected to abuse. Most are so scared they do not even report these incidents to their parents - many out of fear of being outcast for reporting incidents against influential members of their family. On one hand, they are pressured by the abuser and on the other hand, we disbelieve them so much that they plunge into the darkness of depression.

We should not be paranoid and deprive children of the joy of childhood, but we need to make sure we give them the confidence that they have our full faith when they report such incidents. We need to trust them and instill faith and confidence. These are incidents that haunt the victim for a very long time and can shatter their self-confidence. Let us hope that with time , the society changes and we can stand by our children both compassionately and vigilantly in this hour of crisis.

Opinions voiced by Global Minds do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Global Journal.

What Justice for Lebanon?

2011-09-16T20:58:28Z

We are used to thinking about tribunals as having all the means, and the power, necessary to shed light on criminal acts. This fundamental idea is even more indispensable when it is at the service of an international mandate, and a fortiori in the case of crimes against humanity. Such an ideal was inscribed into the establishment of the international tribunal in charge of the Hariri assassination. However, in the case of Lebanon, a stricter approach prevailed. Why? And to render what justice?

On February 14th 2005, a car bomb containing an estimated minimum of 1,000 kg of TNT tore through former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s motorcade along Beirut’s luxurious seaside promenade, the Corniche. The attack took Hariri’s life as well as that of 22 others, blasting a 10-meter wide crater in the street and damaging buildings a quarter-mile away from the explosion. The death of the man credited with rebuilding – in a literal sense - and restoring Lebanon’s confi dence after a decade and a half of civil war had a ripple effect, which inundated not only the Middle East, but the world. Speculation abounded with regards to the individuals, or states, responsible, ranging from Israel to Iran to Al-Qaeda. It didn’t take long for the international community to turn its gaze towards Syria, who fought for years to maintain dominion over Lebanon. Hariri had been notably embroiled in some not-soinconspicuous differences in the later months of his life with his neighbors: a frequently-cited episode was Hariri’s visit to Damascus in August 2004 regarding a three-year extension, via constitutional amendment, of Syria-friendly President Émile Lahoud’s term in office. The exchange allegedly included an unequivocal warning from Syrian President Bashar Assad: “President Lahoud is me. Whatever I tell him, he follows suit. This extension is to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head…” Following his parliamentary bloc’s approval of the extension and his subsequent resignation, Hariri adopted a hard line towards Syria and its political supporters in Lebanon, planning an electoral win with his Future Movement and refusing to “work with people who stab me in the back”. A mere five days – February 10th– after Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN envoy overseeing the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, which called for free and fair elections in Lebanon and the withdrawal of foreign troops, warned Hariri to be “very, very careful,” his convoy was torn to shreds along the sumptuous seafront landscape he had helped build.

(Photo © Maya Zankoul)

To read the full article, order a copy of the magazine

by Chiara Trincia

Iran Convinced

2011-03-15T15:49:02Z

Iran will be the country to watch in 2011. Convictions that will lead to future action are building up. There is little doubt that the process of peace in the Middle-East will be one of the major brakes to a hardening of positions towards the country which is showing such stubbornness about obtaining nuclear arms – and there is little doubt about Iran’s intentions. Meanwhile, Iran itself, sure of being in the right, of having a place in history, continues to lock up its citizens. In December the film directors Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, were sentenced to six years in prison, with the charge of preparing “a film against the regime, bearing on the post-electoral events”. Panahi and Rasoulof were imprisoned and hit hard by being banned from “making films, writing scripts, traveling abroad or giving interviews to local or for- eign media for twenty years”. ?

Just-ice in Moscow

2011-02-26T01:09:45Z

Upside-down Russia is the scene of betrayal of many principles. While Natalya Estemirova still waits in her tomb for an investigation into her shooting, in Chechnya in July 2009, her former colleague and chairman of the Human Rights Defender NGO Memorial is now himself on trial. Ramzan Kadyrov has put Mr Orlov under a legal siege that could send the human rights defender to prison. Mr Orlov said in public that he knew who had killed the renowned advocate, adding that it was the least he could say in honor of his colleague. Young Kadyrov’s lawyer went as far as to say that “Maybe Memorial itself ordered the killing in order to discredit my client”. If only Dostoievski could come to defend Mr Orlov and question Kadyrov when they meet at the bar this January! At least we would have a moment of real philosophy. And one more reason to say NO to impunity.

Cossacks for North Caucasus

2011-02-26T01:08:45Z

A few weeks ago, Alexander Khloponin, the Russian President’s special envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, said that his first task should be to support and rely on a Cossack revival as part of Moscow’s effort to return ethnic Russians to that troubled part of Russia. When Pouchkine and Tolstoi wrote about the Caucasus, the Cossacks were described as the fiercest enemies of the peoples of the Caucasus. For example, Chechens and Cossacks had already had long talks, as long as their mutual knives. To re-establish Russians today in the region might be like some kind of Crusade to Jerusalem for Mr. Khloponin, but it will certainly not bring peaceful results. The world is looking at the incapacity of the Russian authorities to bring something other than violence to this once-paradise for Moscovites in the south.

Two Euros Please!

2011-02-26T01:07:48Z

Germany is experiencing some difficult moments with the euro. Not only has the quality of its products created the best trade surplus, neck and neck with China, but it must also cope with a single currency in a range of various economic situations where it cannot act. Voices have been raised in Germany calling for a withdrawal from the euro. Other more moderate, but equally dangerous, voices are proclaiming an appetite for two euros - one for the strong European economies and another for the weaker ones. This would be the reinvention of a form of North-South divide on a European scale. Conscious of the difficulties, and aware that it would not automatically find itself in the strong euro zone, France came to calm Germany with a firm hand, and the recommendation to consider a stronger European governance. Weary the initial exchanges between the two driving forces of Europe rapidly turned into a deaf-mutes’ conversation. The proposal was clearly very European in spirit, but if the outcome was going to be a sort of Nice-Treaty (or Nice-Treachery), the larger UE would be profoundly undermined from within. Germany has leaned with all the weight of its inhabitants to gain more authority in European decisions. A change of paradigm which has caused a crack in the edifice. All this is of greater concern than the Portuguese or Spanish deficits.

One Euro please!

2011-02-26T01:06:28Z

On January 1, 2011, euro banknotes and coins were introduced successfully in Estonia, the 17th member State of the European Union to adopt the euro. Until January 14th, it will be possible to pay in cash using either euro or Estonian kroon banknotes and coins. 44.89 million euro banknotes with a face value of 1.5 billion € have been borrowed from the Eurosystem stocks. The 194 million euro coins with a face value of 58.4 million € were produced by the Mint of Finland.

The EPA’s Hand Grenade Will Go Far Beyond the American Congress

2011-02-26T01:01:38Z

The candidate Obama vowed that he would address climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollutants. Copenhagen was an occasion when, besides opposition from the Chinese authorities, every one was able to see a US President handcuffed by its Congress. As the Senate had refused to enact climate change legislation, it would not believe in the President’s bluff to use EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) as a regulation – but indeed this came into force on January 2. President Obama did not have much choice – sometimes a President may enjoy being in such position– his hand being forced by the Clean Air Act and a 2007 Supreme Court decision.

The EPA limit on gases now concerns all those planning to build new facilities in the US, or to make major modifications to existing plants. Over the next decade, the EPA plans to regulate all sources of greenhouse gases, imposing efficiency and emissions requirements on most industries and regions. It would be quite a paradox to see a President without a majority in Congress able to push forward his pre-electoral vows. Such are the ways of the US Democracy. Still, it’s democratic. And despite a lot of opposition, this could bring more jobs to the market and not the contrary.

It is also to the credit of Todd Stern, Special US Envoy to the Climate Change negotiations, who is in charge of all actions on the issue inside and outside the US. It shows that the US administration, which is having a hard time with the Congress, is still moving forward. 2011 is going to be the year that will give birth to the next Kyoto protocol in 2012. Without a clear and concrete advance in the US, many countries, in particular the developing countries, will be reluctant to believe the good words the US are keen to address to them. For everyone to carry out their own commitments and gauge the others’ progress, the US effort will do a lot towards finding the right way to design transparent communication between all parties. This hand grenade will do more than just upset the Congress, it could really mark the starting point for a new multilateral agreement in the months to come. We’ll see what South Africa will bring to the next meeting of the parties.