Dalits Media Watch
News Updates 14.10.12
Saffron brigade demands ban on movie 'Shudra-The Rising' - The Times Of India
Dalit outfit takes out rally in Visakhapatnam - The Hindu
The Haryana horrors - Deccan Chronicle
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/360-degree/haryana-horrors-693
The Times Of India
Saffron brigade demands ban on movie 'Shudra-The Rising'
Ashish Tripathi, TNN | Oct 13, 2012, 07.46PM IST
LUCKNOW: Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrag Dal (BD) on Saturday demanded censor board of India to ban release of the movie 'Shudra-The Rising'. They raised questions over the content of the movie and said that it will cause ill will among various Hindu castes, thus vitiating social harmony and peace of the country.
The movie, the two organisations said, as it appears from the trailer, has shown upper castes - Thakurs and Brahmins -- subjecting Shudras (dalits) to atrocities and inhuman behaviour which were prevalent earlier, but things have changed after independence and dalits now have equal rights, Rakesh Verma, Bajrang Dal, Uttar Pradesh coordinator, told reporters on Saturday. He said that today dalits are not only allowed to enter the temple but have also been made priests at several places.
VHP and Bajrang Dal leaders said the movie shows that the Brahmins have banned the entry of dalits in temples and severe the tongue of the son of a dalit for chanting mantras. Similarly, they added, the Thakurs have been showed to be committing atrocities which cannot be said or described in words. Hence, the movie will cause ill-will among upper and lower castes, divide Hindus and may lead to violence, instead of bridging the gap between various castes and sects.
The saffron brigade also asked the Uttar Pradesh government to stop release of the movie, or else will take the shelter of the court and take to streets. However, the two organisations, which are also known for hardliner Hindutava ideology, admitted that there was a time when dalits used to be subjected to atrocities but in today's hi-tech world such things are impossible. "Now upper and lower castes have started visiting each other, sit together and share food," they said.
The Hindu
Dalit outfit takes out rally in Visakhapatnam
Special Correspondent
They charged the government with diverting Rs. 17,000 crore allotted for Dalit welfare during the last 10 years on its publicity programmes.
The Dalita Hakkula Porata Samiti took out a rally from the Collectorate to Ambedkar statue here on Saturday as part of its district unit's 3rd Mahasabha and to express solidarity with the victims of attack at Lakshmipeta in Srikakulam district.
At a public meeting held at the conclusion of the rally, in which a large number of students and women participated, CPI's Legislature Party Leader Gunda Mallesh demanded that the government complete the process of bringing in the SC, ST Sub-Plan Act and sanction budget to Dalits based on their population.
He charged the government with diverting Rs. 17,000 crore allotted for Dalit welfare during the last 10 years on its publicity programmes.
He regretted that many laws made for Dalit welfare were not being implemented and attacks on Dalits continued unabated while the government was not taking stern steps.
Honorary president of the district unit J.V. Prabhakar, secretary B. Venkata Rao, president V. Jayaprakash, CPI's district secretary J.V. Satyanarayana Murthy, MLC M.V.S. Sarma, former Minister Ch. Ayyanna Patrudu, former MLA G. Demudu and leaders of several Dalit organisations and intellectuals spoke.
The meeting commenced after the leaders garlanded the statue of Dr. Ambedkar.
A meeting of DPHS would be held at the Ambedkar Bhavan, Marripalem, on Sunday.
Deccan Chronicle
The Haryana horrors
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/360-degree/haryana-horrors-693
October 14, 2012
By Rashme Sehgal The land of the Mahabharatha continues to be the land of taboos for women, and the land of licence to do their worst for men. Patriarchy, misogyny, Khap Panchayats are all responsible for the attitudes that have made Haryana the 'rape capital of India'. For what else explains the fact that the perpetrators of the 19 rapes in the last one month – their victims ranging from a six-year-old girl to a middle-aged widow – all boldly made videos of their own crimes and threatened to make them public if their victims complained, asks Rashme Sehgal.
At least in this case, statistics don't lie. Pocket-sized Haryana has the dubious distinction of being the 'rape capital of India'. Nineteen girls raped — many of them gang-raped — in the last one month. Forty nine men are reported to have been involved in committing these atrocities.
The horrors are staring us in the face. A 16-year-old Dalit girl set herself on fire and died in Jind last Saturday after having been gangraped. A 13-year-old girl was raped last Monday in Rohtak, home town of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
But those incidents, and the many before them, did not spur the official machinery to swing into action, because two days later, a 15-year-old mentally challenged Dalit girl was raped in the same town.
Each rape incident seems more sordid than the other. A 30-year-old married woman gangraped at gunpoint by three men just outside her home in Pillukhera township in Jind district; a 16-year-old girl gangraped by four young boys in Gohana town last Friday -- the girl had gone to buy groceries and the shopkeeper told her to collect the stuff from a nearby godown, where the shopkeeper and three other boys raped her; a newly married 19-year- old was abducted and repeatedly raped for four consecutive days near Sonepat.
Rohtak, Hissar, Jind, Bhiwani, Yamunanagar, Panipat, Sonepat, Ambala, Karnal, Faridabad, Kaithal -- young girls and women have been subjected to the horror in almost every district of Haryana in the last one month.
Worse, not only are girls being raped, but the rapists think nothing of videographing themselves in the act and threatening their victims that if they complained, they would circulate the videos to everyone in the village – secure in the knowledge that the humiliation will only be the victim's, and no one, not the villagers, nor even the police, will lift a finger against the perpetrators. It's as if Haryanvi society believes that it is men's right to violate women.
One such warning was given to the 16-year-old Dalit schoolgirl in Dabra, and even when though she obeyed and did not disclose how she was kidnapped – blindfolded and gagged – and raped on September 9 as she was making her way to her grandmother's house – the rapists sent photographs of the girl being subjected to their depravity, taken on mobile phones, to her father.
The distraught father committed suicide. Angry Dalit groups camped outside his house and swore that they would not allow the man to be cremated until action was taken against the rapists.
But what should one make of the response of the police and the administration to these crimes? The state's top cop, DGP Ranjiv Singh Dalal, said rape cases were not on the rise, but in fact had come down from last year. "There are 80 cases fewer this year than in 2011", Dalal told reporters.
And the state's Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda had this to say, after alleging that the rapes were a political conspiracy against his government: It's only the prompt registration of FIRs by the state police that had resulted in his state being portrayed in a poor light.
"Our police have been told to register all complaints. This does not happen in other states." Will the DGP's statistics console and comfort the victims of rape? Or, should they console themselves with the Chief Minister's statement that they are not the only victims of that horrific crime, that other women in other states, too, are being raped? Or, is it even true that the Haryana police promptly register FIRs in rape cases?
There are allegations that most rapes are acts of caste vengeance against Dalit women. "Dalits are getting more assertive and articulating their rights. This has resulted in a consolidation amongst the caste panchayats," says Dr Prasad Srivella of the National Dalit Movement for Justice, who has been monitoring violence against Dalit women for the last two years.
Caste, apart from gender bias, is perhaps also why cases don't get registered against perpetrators without pressure from civil society groups. Srivella says it may be time to take the police and government officials to task for their acts of omission and commission that thwart justice to rape victims.
"Not a single case has been registered against the police force for its failure to protect women. Following a series of RTIs done across the country, we have come to the conclusion that not a single case has been registered against any government official under Section 4 the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act".
But Hisar Superintendent of Police B. Satheesh Balan says it's not only Dalit women who are being targeted. "From the 38 cases registered in Hisar, six were false cases, while in 26 other cases the accused and the victim were from the same caste. In three cases, the accused were from a dominant caste".
Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research, cites the testimony of a rape accused to make the case that not all cases of rape are anti-Dalit. "We didn't know the (victim's) caste. If we had known she was a Dalit, we would not have touched her," the accused told her.
Whether caste is a factor or not, gender certainly is, and that prejudice runs deep and society-wide. All-India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) vice president Jagmati Sangwan says the entire machinery of state is anti-women.
The situation is made worse by Haryana's extremely skewed demographics -- 830 girls to 1,000 boys, as per the 2011 Census. A farmer in Rohtak told this reporter, "Women here have become as rare as a grain of wheat in a famine. Men of marriageable age have no jobs and therefore cannot find brides".
Khap panchayats, the traditional court of village elders that's a relic from the dark ages, have only served to muddy the waters further. These male-dominated bodies believe the answer to rape is to lower the marriage age of girls to 16 from 18, a viewpoint supported by, among other politicians, former chief minister Om Prakash Chautala, but not by any evidence of the efficacy of such a move.
Indeed, married women too have been raped in Haryana this month.
Activist Sujata Madhok believes it is not just the patriarchal nature of Haryanvi society that has upped the ante on social conflicts. There is too much money and a new materialism that a traditional agrarian society has not been able to come to terms with.
"There has been a huge influx of funds into the hands of some farmers who have become real estate agents. The result is a profligate, aspirational lifestyle, made worse by exposure to television and movies. The fact is, they lack the social resources to adjust to the changing society even as women are getting exposed to education".
In any other country in the world, politicians would have been scrambling to put an end to the rape horror that seems to grip one city after another in India – Delhi, Kolkata come to mind – but here rape has quickly become a political issue.
When Congress president Sonia Gandhi visited Haryana in the wake of this month's crimes, the party managers seemed more intent on steering her away from any public criticism of her own party's chief minister and use the visit to score political points. They took her to Narwana area of Jind district. Of course, a Dalit minor had committed suicide there after being gangraped, but one suspects she was taken there because the area had a BJP legislator.
.Arun Khote
On behalf of
Dalits Media Watch Team
(An initiative of "Peoples Media Advocacy & Resource Centre-PMARC")
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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.
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