The law allows it, and the court awards it

                                           Sukumaran C. V.

To
Ghalib, 
S/o Afsal Guru, 
Sopore, Jammu Kashmir.

                                           Afsal Guru's wife and son 
                                                                 
Dear boy,
Your father was hanged to death for abetting the attack on the temple of our democracy.  'The collective conscience' of the nation was outraged and it was impossible not to hang your father.
You and I are the citizens of the largest democracy in the world and we should be proud of that. I don’t forget the fact that you can’t be proud of our democracy as I am, because I live in the southern part of our country where it is easy to live enjoying all democratic rights (and neglecting all democratic duties) and you live under the jurisdiction of the AFSPA which doesn’t allow you any democratic rights. Like you, there are millions of Indian citizens who live in the areas under the AFSPA and are forced to believe that their country is the largest democracy in the world. And I know that you have to face another dreaded thing called STF (Special Task Force, the counter-insurgency wing of the police).
I don’t think that your father was guilty of any crime that is to be dealt with capital punishment. But I think genocide is a heinous crime and the perpetrators of which should be awarded capital punishment. We have seen genocide or pogrom in our country and bone-chilling cruelties have been committed in the name of religion. People were torched alive, charred to death and hacked to death. Pregnant women were raped, their wombs ripped apart and the foetus tossed to the fire.
But neither the people who perpetrated the horrible crimes nor those who abetted them have been punished, because the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged and therefore the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the court did not award any punishment. And the victims are forced to believe that they live in the largest democracy in the world.
Nearly ten years before the Parliament attack for which your father was hanged to death, a 400 years old mosque was vandalized in our country and the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the courts didn’t punish them, because, as usual, the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged.
And in the aftermath of the mosque demolition, in Mumbai, our country’s economic capital, innocent people were hunted down in the name of religion. Rape, arson and murder were committed in large scale. The police, who are supposed to prevent the anti-social elements from committing atrocities against the innocent, let the hooligans slaughter both the innocent and our democracy and many of the police personnel were, as the Srikrishna Commission report points out, ‘found actively participating in riots, communal incidents of looting, arson and so on.’ But as the collective conscience of the nation was not outraged, the law was not allowed to punish the culprits and the courts didn’t punish them. And the victims are asked to believe that they live in the largest democracy in the world.

The Srikrishna Commission report records a large number of gruesome incidents occurred in Mumbai in December 1992 and January 1993. One of such incidents—“On 12th January 1993, a Hindu mob surrounds, strips and assaults two Muslim women. The older woman manages to run away. The uncle of the younger woman, who comes to rescue the young girl of 19, and that girl are beaten and burnt alive by the violent mob. The names of the miscreants are disclosed to the police by a Hindu lady in the locality. Though the miscreants were arrested and tried, they were all acquitted.” (Srikrishna Commission report, Volume I, Chapter II, 1.15) And we live in the largest democracy in the world.
Let me quote one more incident: “Between 1100 to 1130 hours on 10 January 1993, after having arrived at Pathan Chawl, the police forcibly entered the premises of the Muslims and started picking them up. They entered the residence of one Hasamaniya Wagale, terrorized his wife and daughter at the point of rifle, picked up his 16-year-old son, Shahnawaz, and dragged him out, all the while kicking him and assaulting him with rifle butts. Wagale’s daughter, Yasmin Hasan Wagale, saw Shahnawaz being taken towards police vehicle, when one of the constables shot him from behind at point blank range…..Despite overwhelming evidence which, in the opinion of the Commission, clearly indicts the police for cold-blooded murder, the Deputy Commissioner of Police has adroitly white-washed the affair.” (Srikrishna Commission report, Volume II, Chapter I, 5.58)
And your father has been hanged to death even if there was no direct evidence which clearly indicts him for the Parliament attack! But, you see, the collective conscience of the nation was outraged, and that is more than enough reason the largest democracy needed to hang your father. But, believe it, ours is certainly the largest democracy in the world.

Dear Ghalib, I know how irksome it would be to live under the AFSPA, even if I have never had the misfortune to live under it. I know that as far as the people of North East and Kashmir and the tribals of Central India (Dhandakaranya) are concerned, ‘the largest democracy’ means nothing but State-sponsored terrorism or atrocities. And yet let’s believe in our democracy.
Our democracy is certainly a flawed one but still it is democracy. Let’s try to make it flawless and perfect. When you grow up, certainly you will hate the Indian State and our flawed democracy which deprived you of your father, but let that hatred lead you to shun terrorism, because, as long as terrorism exists, our democracy will have excuses to remain as the flawed one as it is. Let’s, the people of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, work together to get rid our nation of both varieties of terrorism—State terrorism and religious terrorism of all hues.

Jingoism rules in the name of democracy

                               Sukumaran C. V.
 
One of our fellow citizens, Afsal Guru, was hanged to death on the basis of flimsy (fabricated) evidence which falls apart if scrutinized even by an individual with average intelligence. There was no solid evidence to incriminate him in the 2001 Parliament attack. The Supreme Court itself admitted that the evidence against Afsal Guru was not direct and yet he was sentenced (and hanged) to death to satisfy ‘the collective conscience of the society’. As the conscience of everybody of us is included in the collective conscience of the society, we have to penetrate the case which, unlike the Mumbai terror attack, seems to be imposed on the collective conscience of the nation.

Thirteen insightful questions in relation to the Parliament attack are asked by the most penetrating writer in our country, Arundhati Roy, in her essay ‘Breaking the News’. Let’s look at two of the 13 questions. “Question 3: The entire attack was recorded live on closed circuit TV. …The chief whip of the Congress Party, Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, said, ‘I counted six men getting out of the car. But only five were killed. The CCTV camera recording clearly showed the six men.’ If Dasmunshi was right, why did the police say that there were only five people in the car? Who was the sixth person? Where is he now? Why was the CCTV recordings not produced by the prosecution as evidence in the trial? Why was it not released for public viewing?
Question 13: Why is that we still don’t know who the five dead ‘terrorists’ killed in the Parliament attack are?” 

Ms. Roy says that ‘these questions, examined cumulatively, point to ...  Complicity, Collusion, Involvement…Governments and their intelligence agencies have a hoary tradition of using strategies like this to further their own ends.’ 

And the terrible news of the hanging of Afsal Guru reminded me of the strategies the most ‘powerful’ Government in the world and its intelligence agencies used in the Rosenberg case. Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel Rosenberg, two U.S. citizens, were charged with espionage in 1950. The prosecution case was that the Rosenbergs passed valuable information on the making of the atomic bomb to the Russians. David Greenglass, the key witness, was a machinist at the Manhattan Project laboratory in 1944-45 when the bomb was being made there and he testified that Julius Rosenberg had asked him to get information for the Russians and he had made sketches (‘of experiments with lenses to be used to detonate atomic bombs’) from memory. 

The prosecution presented Harry Gold as the person (witness) to whom Greenglass gave the sketches, as directed by Rosenberg, supposed to be passed to the Russians.  The people’s historian Howard Zinn asks: “How reliable a memorizer of atomic information was David Greenglass, an ordinary-level machinist, not a scientist, who had taken six courses at Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute and flunked five of them?” 
And ‘it turned out that Harry Gold had been prepared for the Rosenberg case by four hundred hours of interviews with the FBI. It also turned out that Gold was a frequent and highly imaginative liar.’

The Rosenbergs were sentenced ‘to die in the electric chair’. It was revealed later that the CJ of the U. S. Supreme Court Fred Vinson assured the Attorney General that if any SC judge stayed the execution, he would override it by calling a full court session. And at the last moment, stay was granted by Justice William O. Douglas, but the CJ ‘sent out special jets to bring the vacationing justices back to Washington from various parts of the country’ and canceled the stay.

 

                                                The Rosenbergs
The Rosenbergs were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. The husband died with the very first shock, but even after the normal three shocks, the heart of Ethel was throbbing and the heart needed two more shocks to stop throbbing. That was done by the ‘perfect’ democracy in the world! A democracy which speaks of ‘certain unalienable Rights’, (of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). By a democracy which says that Governments are instituted among men to secure these rights. By the country that always boasts of its tradition of free speech and fair trial. And we have seen how ‘fair’ the trial of the Rosenbergs had been!

And the largest democracy in the world also uses identical strategies and fabricates evidence to satisfy the ‘collective conscience’ of the nation, to satisfy the religious jingoism, to appease pseudo nationalism and thus to detract people’s attention from the real issues that torment the nation. 

Afsal Guru has been sacrificed at the altar of religious and sectarian jingoism. And we should not allow ourselves to be part of the collective conscience of the nation, as it is hijacked by all kinds of chauvinistic elements. We have to free the collective conscience of the nation from the grip of the exclusive and sectarian nationalism (of both the fanatical Muslim and Hindu outfits) which is draped in bigotry and fragments the nation.

Flowers that torment the Mahatma

                                            Sukumaran C. V.

And then Gandhi came. … He was like a powerful current of fresh air that made us stretch ourselves and take deep breaths;… He did not descend from the top; he seemed to emerge from the millions of India, speaking their language and incessantly drawing attention to them and their appalling condition. Get off the backs of these peasants and workers, he told us, all you who live by their exploitation; get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery.—Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)


“Everybody agreed to follow the ways of Mahatma Gandhi. But one man didn’t give up his old habit…he went mad…when he offered Rs. 5 in the name of Mahatmaji he quieted down.”
“…a sadhu came to Godhbal village and began puffing at his gunja pipe. People tried to reason with him, but he started abusing Mahatmaji. In the morning his entire body was seen covered with shit.”
“The water of a well in Bikramajit Bazar had very foul smell. Two mahajans took a manauti of the Mahatmaji. By morning the water had become pure.”

All the three anecdotes are quoted from Shahid Amin's paper ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2’ (Subaltern Studies III: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajith Guha)

Gandhi was seen by the peasants as a deity or mahatma who performs miracles on behalf of them and for them. Stories as the above quoted ones gave them strength. All over India, especially in the North, the peasantry followed Gandhi because he was against reforming their age-old means of production and introducing that of ‘modern civilization’. As far as Gandhi is concerned, machinery, the chief symbol of modern civilization, represents a great sin (See Gandhi's Hind Swaraj or the Indian Home Rule).

He wanted India to do what the country had done before the machine-made articles and the machinery were introduced. His vision of development was sustainable. But if we look at his idea of development through the Marxist or capitalist paradigm, certainly it will look like an absurd and quixotic notion, which was/is bound to be a failure. But  look at the problem through the necessities and demands of the National Movement and from the angle of sustainable development (a term that is unheard at that time), then, we can see that the very base and foundation which made Gandhi a mass leader and the Mahatma is his negation of modernity and everything associated with it—the railways, the lawyers, the doctors, the machinery etc. (Chapters 9, 11, 12 and 19 of Hind Swaraj).
Therefore, unlike any other Indian leader, he could talk a language that the illiterate mass and the peasantry could understand. He approached them not to reform them, not to tell them their ways of living and their means of production are inferior to that of the West. He wanted to tell his people that the western ‘civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.’ (Hind Swaraj). How prophetic the Mahatma was!!

The sustainable economy of Gandhi which is anti-western and anti-machinery can be interpreted as the genuine concern of a leader to the welfare of millions and millions of the poor in his country. And this is the factor that enabled Gandhi to bring the vast majority of the people into the whirlpool of the freedom struggle. India’s tragedy is that the sustainable vision of development was also assassinated with Gandhi on January 30, 1948.

                                 The light has gone out of our lives...

Actually, the bigot Nathuram Vinayak Godse had done a good deed for the Indian elites. What they wanted was to usurp the power to exploit the resources of the vast country from the hands of the British and to continue the exploitation. Gandhi and his sustainable vision of development would have certainly come across their way of ‘development’ as an insurmountable hurdle, had he been alive.

Nehru tells us that Gandhi told them to ‘get off the backs of these peasants and workers’ and to ‘get rid of the system that produces this poverty and misery’. But did our politicians in independent India get off the backs of the peasants? Did they get rid of the system that produces poverty and misery?

In his opening remarks at the interaction with newspaper editors (on June 29, 2011) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that ‘we must not bring back the licence permit raj which we sought to abolish in 1991. …our nation has prospered as a result of that. If you look at the list of top 100 firms today you will find a sea change in that list today. New entrepreneurs have come into the list. These are some of the gains of liberalization which we must cherish, we must nurse and we must develop.’

And look at the real gains of liberalization of which P. Sainath speaks: “…over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide.” (Of luxury cars and lowly tractors, The Hindu, Dec. 28, 2010)

Our neo-liberal rulers ask us to look at the list of the top 100 firms and not to look at the millions of farmers who kill themselves. And these people pay floral tribute to the Mahatma at the Rajghat on the day of his martyrdom. Won't that flowers torment the Mahatma?

                                         'The light has gone out of our lives...'
                               Nehru adresses the nation on January 30, 1948

Let’s wage the war against ourselves

Sukumaran C. V.

Two Indian soldiers were killed and their bodies were mutilated by the Pakistani army over the LoC. The Army Chief said, as an army chief ought to say, that ‘we will retaliate if provoked further’. The issue may flare up into a war and if a war ensues, every Indian will think that we are teaching Pakistan a lesson and every Pakistani will think that they are teaching India a lesson.

While we have plenty of internal enemies to wage war against, is it proper to wage war against an external ‘enemy’? And if every nation successfully wages war against the enemy within, will they have external enemies to fight with? Certainly NOT. In our times, a war against other nations won’t make any country a better one. War of weapons is basically an uncivilized and savage business. Instead of waging war against other nations, every nation has to purge itself of the anti-people, anti-social elements and interests within it.
We have seen nude Manipuri women protesters with a banner which read “Indian Army Rape Us”. We have seen the tortured, raped and mutilated dead body of 32 year old Thangjam Manorama who was arrested by the personnel of Assam Rifles which wields enormous power in the North East under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958.  If the beheading of an Indian soldier by Pakistan is gruesome (of course it is), with what adjective can we describe the Indian Army’s act of rape, torture and murder of the 32 year-old woman?
Is it Pakistan which poses a greater threat to our mothers, sisters and daughters in the North East and Kashmir? Is it Pakistan which poses a greater threat to the women and girls in our cities and all public space? Is it Pakistan which deprives our tribal people of their right to live and cultivate on their own lands?

In 1992, the Orissa government allowed the corporate giants Utkal Alumina to mine the bauxite under the Baphlimali hills of the tribal district Rayaguda. 3,000 acres of agricultural land of the tribals was arbitrarily leased to the Utkal Alumina and the protesting tribals were dealt with bullets. Three tribals were killed. All over the central India, this same story continues—the ‘Democratic’ Indian Republic killing the poorest of its citizens and depriving them of their forests and lands for the corporate enterprise! Is it not more than gruesome?

Who is our greater enemy? Is it Pakistan? Pakistan is a country reeling under the blasphemy laws, a country which is pulled back to medieval ages by the obscurantist forces. Let it fight against the fanatic elements which pull the country backward. Let it fight and overpower its greatest enemy—religious jingoism and the jihadi mindset. India is not Pakistan’s enemy number one and Pakistan is not India’s too. Both the countries have their lethal enemies lurking within the borders—the anti-people policies and interests.

Our environment is devastated by the greed of a few, almost all our rivers are polluted by our industries; we use more money to purchase destructive weapons than to build schools and to teach children or to quench the hunger of the starving millions. We write off corporate income tax worth crores of rupees and slash subsidies to the poor and the farmers. We induce thousands of farmers to suicide each year and allow a few corporates to thrive and our PM says that ‘we must do all that we can to revive the animal spirits of our businesses’. What about the broken spirits of the females, the poor, the Environment and the farmers? At first let’s worry about their well-being. To worry about reviving the animal spirits of the businesses at the cost of the poor and the farmers is suicidal for a country like ours.

Kwaja Ahmad Abbas describes (in his autobiography I Am Not An Island: An Experiment in Autobiography) a bizarre killing he has seen in the 1945 Mumbai, which ‘was gripped by a series of communal riots’. From the balcony of his friend Sathe’s office in front of the Harkissandas Hospital, Abbas saw a goonda spying ‘a man in kurta and pajama walking by the side of the road’. The goonda ‘followed him, and taking him to be a Muslim, stabbed him’ to death. While wiping ‘the blood on the knife on the clothes of the victim, a doubt seemed to cross his mind. So he tugged the pajama cord, opened it, saw that the man was not circumcised, and then clasping his knife, he uttered two words that would haunt’ Abbas ‘for years’.

The words the goonda uttered were Mishtake ho gaya.

Even if the man was a circumcised one, the act of the goonda could only be considered as a mistake.  That was in pre-independent India. In the independent India also, we keep committing this mistake in the name of religion. We committed it in the 1993 Mumbai, in the 2002 Gujarat and we are not sure that we won’t commit the mistake again.

We celebrated one more Republic Day with an unwanted display of our military might and we will celebrate more of them in this fashion. (To whom is the State displaying its might?   To its own citizens, the dispossessed millions?). But only when we stop committing gruesome mistakes in the name of caste, class, gender, religion and the State, we will be a real republic—the people’s Republic of India, the real Secular Democratic Republic.

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Did society make Kasab a criminal?

The Hindu : Opinion / Open Page : Did society make Kasab a criminal?

The importance of having people’s histories

Sukumaran C. V.
 
“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”                — Howard Zinn.     

Never have I read a book which tells the history from the viewpoint of the victims till I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Zinn shows us history from the viewpoint of the Native Americans, from the standpoint of the African American slaves, from the perspective of the workers and he helps us to see history through women who are always ‘intimately oppressed’ and conspicuous in all history by their absence. Never have I read a book which has made me sleepless as Zinn's People's History has.

“Total control led to total cruelty. The Spaniards thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. Las Casas tells how two of these so called Christians met two Indian boys one day, each carrying a parrot; they took the parrots and for fun beheaded the boys.” 
Can you sleep peacefully after reading such passages of cruelty committed upon a people “who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing.”? 

Can anybody of us continue to be unperturbed after reading passages like the following?

“(The Africans) were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins, they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs… one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but the huge profits made it worthwhile for the slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish… Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one third of the cargo. Slave traders reported: ‘I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed…”

But all histories we read claim that the Europeans were a civilized lot and the Africans and the Native Indians were savages! All histories speak about the 'Whiteman’s burden', about their ‘civilizing mission’. Even we the Indians were ‘civilized’, we were ‘modernized’, and we do have ‘democracy’, only because we have been 'fortunate' enough to have British Colonialism, we are told both by the European historians and by our own historians! 

In an article titled The British Rule in India, written in 1853, Karl Marx says: "England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?"


But, as Howard Zinn tells, ‘it is enough to make us question, for that time and ours, the excuse of progress in the annihilation of races, and the telling of history from the standpoint of the conquerors and leaders of Western civilization.’ And Zinn continues:
“So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. …Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property.”

In India we are in dire need of writers like Howard Zinn to search and find the people who are not seen in our histories—the Adivasis who were displaced and annihilated by our ‘machine of progress’ (which we borrowed from the West), the people of Niyamgiri Hills, of the Narmada Valley, of the Dhandakaranya. We want histories written from the standpoint of manual scavengers, from the viewpoint of untouchables, from the perspective of the farmers, Dalits, children (especially girls) and women. 

And we also want histories from the viewpoint of the Environment, the flora and fauna. Zinn is too much preoccupied with the cruelty of the so called civilized race against the fellow beings to give attention to their cruelty against the environment and other animals. Look at a mild sample of the savagery of the ‘civilized’: “Dismemberment was provided for in the Virginia Code of 1705. Maryland passed a law in 1723 providing for cutting off the ears of blacks who struck whites, …About twenty-five blacks and two Indians set fire to a building, then killed nine whites who came on the scene. …(all the twenty-seven) were captured by soldiers, some were burnt, others were hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town…one had been burned over a slow fire for eight to ten hours.”

Can the Environment expect a better deal from such a ‘civilized’ lot?
Once in the North America, the passenger pigeons were greater in number than all other birds. They lived together, nested together, and flew together in large numbers. In summer these birds nested in the vast forests of the northern frontier regions of the continent and in winter they migrated into the comparatively warmer forests in the south. In the breeding time, flocks of these birds would land on the trees and would make hundreds of nests even on a single tree. Each flock consisted of at least a minimum of 300,000 birds!

When the white men reached North America, they started hunting the pigeons for their meat and feather. Even after these birds have been continuously hunted for five decades, a flock that flew over the Cincinnati town in 1870 consisted of 20,000 lakh pigeons! The flock had been 510 kilometer long and 1.6 kilometer wide!! In 1878, from the 64 kilometer long and 16 kilometer wide nesting area of the passenger pigeons in the Michigan state, the hunters killed 10,000 lakh of the defenseless birds. 

Today there is no passenger pigeon to fly in the skies.  If the fate of the passenger pigeon, that could fly, was to disappear within decades of contact with the white man, what could have been that of the poor Giant Moa that couldn’t fly? Somewhere in the time of evolution, the Moas lost their wings. They grew up to four meter in height and weighed more than 275 kilograms. These wingless birds lived 1000 lakh years in New Zealand, till the 12^th century when the humans entered the Pacific island. Hunting started for the bird's meat and eggs,  yet the Giants survived till the Europeans arrived and in the 1850s, they were wiped out.

Let me once more quote Howard Zinn: “John Collier, an American scholar who lived among Indians in the 1920s and 1930s in the American Southwest, said of their spirit: “Could we make it our own, there would be an eternally inexhaustible earth and a forever lasting peace.””

Always at the receiving end

Sukumaran C. V.
 
Doesn't Savita Halappanavar's death point to the overwhelmingly patriarchal nature of the laws, religions and customs all over the world? The young woman was stricken with septicaemia and her life would have been saved had the foetus been aborted, but Ireland 'saved' its Catholic belief at the cost of the 31 year old lady-dentist's life. In India abortion is rampant to kill the girl child. In Ireland abortion is denied even to save a woman’s life! In different ways, the female is sacrificed at the altar of patriarchy! When I heard the news of Savita's death, two recent incidents in which also patriarchy is the villain, rushed to my mind.

                                               Savita Halappanavar
 

In December 2011, a marriage was registered in the gram panchayat where I work. The bride’s guardian has come three or four times to the office to correct the mistakes in the marriage certificate. They have made some mistakes while filling the registration forms. The certificate was  prepared accordingly. 

Days after receiving the certificate, they applied to correct the mistakes. I have made the changes. But when I effected the changes, inadvertently some other mistakes occurred. Nobody noticed, and some days after the guardian came again and the clerical mistakes were rectified in the saved data and new certificate issued. 


In the first week of November 2012, the same guardian came to see me and as soon as I saw him I asked, “Is there another mistake?”


“No, Sir,” He replied gloomily, “There is no mistake in the certificate, but the marriage itself was a great mistake. The mistakes you inadvertently made were an omen, Sir. He is having another wife (illegal). When we knew the fact, he is willing to part with his legal wife! Therefore, now I want three certified copies of the certificate to be produced in the court for divorce (with mutual consent).”


Even though I don’t believe in omens, I was stunned. It is hardly one year after the marriage!

Recently, two of our dearest family friends, a couple whom our two daughters affectionately call uncle and aunty, separated legally. They were married even before we were, but they have no children yet. The wife can’t beget. The husband is the only child of his widowed mother and she wants to have a grandchild and has been forcing her son long since to discard his sterile wife and remarry. 

Both our daughters are so fond of this unfortunate woman and I don’t know what to tell them when they ask the reason for the permanent absence of their affectionate aunty. She went to her home and will never return to this place where she has lived for ten years. Even if she married against the will of her parents (it was a love marriage), they accepted her.

I am not blaming my friend the man, and I can’t blame the lady who can’t beget. I can’t but think the other way round. Suppose the sterility is in the man, what will happen then? Will the wife be advised by her parents or her mother-in-law to desert her husband and find a fertile man? And will the woman do it? No. She won’t discard her husband, instead she will discard her longing for a child; and if her parents continue to advise her to divorce and remarry, most probably she will snap the relationship with them forever.

In both the cases, the hardly one year old case and the ten year old case, men have nothing to loose; but the women loose everything. They face an infinite vacuum, experience trauma and know not what to do. They have no financial independence. What will they do? Nobody knows and nobody cares. In our society women are always at the receiving end, the girl child and the female foetus are at the receiving end and the Environment is also at the receiving end. Can a society remain healthy by putting the woman, the girl child and the environment permanently at the receiving end? Certainly it will rot and ruin itself, if not reformed.

The increasing insecurity of women and sexual harassment on them tell us that something is terribly wrong with our system. When a girl is raped, instead of finding fault with the propagated notion of seeing girls and women as mere sexual objects to satisfy man’s lust, and strictly punish the culprit, and trying to change the misogynistic social milieu; we are eager to put the blame on the girl’s behaviour, on her lack of modesty, on her ‘revealing’ dress and thus we abet the crime and the culprit. 

Patriarchal culture and morality don't teach the males not to rape; instead, the females are taught not to get raped! As far as the victim is concerned, insult is added to the injury. Our society successfully makes her believe that it is her fault, and psychologically she is crushed to death.

In the wake of the Hryana gang rapes, a nineteen year old girl, who is an engineering student, told me that "rape is so negatively powerful that even the very threat or possibility of it occurring has cut short the freedom and independence in so many girls' lives.”
A nation or a people can never be a great one as long as it sustains myriad forms of oppression to ‘cut short the freedom and independence’ of more than half of its citizens.