Latest News Update: Oct 1, 2011

Saturday, October 1, 2011

[ZESTCaste] Police kidnap Arun Ferreira, activist for Dalits and tribals

http://www.speroforum.com/a/61310/India---Police-kidnap-Arun-Ferreira-activist-for-Dalits-and-tribals

World: Global
India: Police kidnap Arun Ferreira, activist for Dalits and tribals

Just after he was released after four years of imprisonment and
torture, plainclothes agents stopped him, hooded him and took him away
without a mandate. His lawyers were beaten when they intervened to
stop the kidnapping. For Fr. Allwyn D'Silva, president of the Justice
and Peace Commission of the ...
Friday, September 30, 2011
By Asia News See all articles by this author

Mumbai - "The warrantless arrest of Arun Ferreira once again
demonstrates the state's complete disregard for human rights." This is
the opinion of Fr. Allwyn D'Silva, president of the Justice and Peace
Commission of the Archdiocese of Mumbai and uncle of the activist for
the rights of tribals and Dalits. In prison since 2007 due to an
accusation of being a Nassalite (a Maoist guerrilla), on September 27
a special court in Maharashtra acquitted the man and ordered his
release. Which, in fact, never happened: just after he was released
from Nagpur prison, plainclothes officers stopped him, covered his
face and forced him into an unmarked car, in which they fled. All
under the gaze of his elderly parents, who were waiting for him
outside the prison. His lawyers tried to intervene but were beaten.

His lawyers immediately sent a letter to the Commissioner to ask for
the reasons of the arrest, but have not yet received and answer.

According to Fr. Allwyn, the new arrest – like that of 2007 – is
linked to his struggle to defend the rights of the most marginalized
in society, because "there are many cases like Arun's of false
accusations against those who defend the rights of the weakest".

Fr. Cedric Prakash is of the same opinion. Prakash, who is director of
the Prashant Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace, signed
a petition to the chief minister of Maharashtra, asking that Arun
Ferreira be released immediately.

"This episode", the Jesuit explains, "is a terrible stain on a country
that believes in democracy and in the freedom of each individual
citizen. Arun Ferreira is an innocent man. He fought for the rights of
tribesmen, for their forests and for the Dalits who were killed. He
has been subjected to inhumane torture. A special court had declared
his incarceration null and had cleared all charges."

"Always", continued Fr. Prakash, "the Catholic Church has been the
side of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed and anyone who is
denied his rights and his dignity. Arun Ferreira deserves justice, he
must be able to live as a free man. "

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[ZESTCaste] Road to riches signposted in English

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/road-to-riches-signposted-in-english-20110930-1l1e0.html

Road to riches signposted in English
October 1, 2011

In a village called Banka in northern India, a community of former
Untouchables is building a temple to a new deity, the Angrezi Devi, or
Goddess of English.

As the walls go up, the idol is ready to be installed: a female figure
in robes similar to the Statue of Liberty in New York, only holding a
pen in one hand and the Indian constitution in the other. She stands
on a computer.

The former outcasts, 200 million of India's 1.2 billion people and now
calling themselves Dalits, have long struggled at the bottom of the
Hindu caste ladder, many converting to Buddhism and other religions to
escape. Now they're turning to the English language.
Advertisement: Story continues below

''In 20 years no jobs will go to anyone in India who doesn't know
English,'' the writer who suggested the new deity, Chandra Bhan
Prasad, recently told a BBC interviewer. ''If we don't do something
now the Dalits would not be job-worthy.''

Banka is just one part of a craze sweeping India, as a wry professor
of English at Delhi University, Alok Rai, told a conference titled
''The Reluctant Superpower: understanding India and its aspirations'',
held by Melbourne University's Australia India Institute a week ago.

As Rai and other speakers explained, it is a symptom of a vast
stirring of ambition that contains great risks as well as
opportunities - including for us in Australia. India hasn't shaken
free of the possibility of serious relapse in both its economy and
democratic politics.

In Rai's student days in the 1960s, Indians tended to see English as a
colonial holdover. Now they've swung 180 degrees to a longing for
English ability as part of a ''euphoric embrace of globalisation''.

English coaching colleges are mushrooming. ''Everywhere, all over
India, anyone who has a few square feet of space and something that
sounds like English to people who don't know English can make a
fortune,'' Rai said. ''It's there and it's waiting to be made.''

Rai can't find it in himself to mock the trend. ''What one sees there
is a deeply moving spectacle,'' he said. ''These are people who have
pooled their limited resources in the hope of acquiring something that
is going to make them a part of the modern world.

''They want it; they want it desperately and this is something that is
going to give them not merely call-centre employment - that is the
least of it - more than that, there is international access, the
glowing world of globalisation. Everything waits at the end of that
English college diploma.''

To Rai, it's more than a touch worrying. ''There is this huge
constituency who are ready and wanting, in both senses; both not
having and wishing to have,'' he said. ''This desire is not a kind of
passive, neutral kind of wanting.''

It makes him think of a successful marketing slogan for an Indian
mobile telephone company: ''Aap mera number hai.'' It can mean both
''This is my number'' and ''It's my turn now''.

''The message for someone like me was 'step aside','' Rai said,
adding: ''In this eagerness there is, if not already an anger,
certainly the possibility of an anger; of a kind of rage, of
impatience to inherit the world.''

Which is why Rai is wary of complacent forecasts that India, having
hit a sustained 8 per cent-plus economic growth rate, is also about to
reap the benefit of a youth dividend - a young demographic profile -
that will allow it to make up lost ground to China in coming decades.
''As with the peace dividend [at the end of the Cold War] I am a
little wary of the youth dividend,'' he said.

Isher Judge Ahluwalia, an eminent Indian economist, expressed her
concern about Indian complacency. India dallied for 13 years after
China opened its economy before doing the same in 1991 (in which time
China doubled its gross domestic product), and it needed a balance of
payments' crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union to take the
plunge.

Recently it has slipped back into fiscal profligacy, and a sustained
high growth rate can't be assumed. It now has $US300 billion ($307
billion) in foreign reserves, as against just $US1 billion in 1991,
''but in this frantic and fragile world of foreign exchange reserves,
no amount is adequate if the perception is that the policies are going
the wrong way'', Ahluwalia said.

And India is still to make reforms that would allow rapid growth of
labour-intensive industries. ''While the growth rate of GDP has been
high and sustained, it has not been associated with a high growth rate
of employment,'' she points out. Many saw India hitting a ''sweet
spot'' in its demographic curve, where it could reap the dividend of a
large, young workforce relative to its total population, ''but the
other side of the same coin is that if we don't educate our youth, and
if we don't empower them with human capital, this could become a
demographic disaster'', she said.

The Congress Party has tried to counter this with rural job-creation
schemes but this is only a temporary fix. The other path is investment
in education. ''Both through government efforts and through
public-private partnerships there is now [a] lot of emphasis on higher
education and particularly skills development, for which Australia
really offers a tremendous opportunity,'' she said.

That's our opening. Not just to bring students here, but to open
colleges and campuses in India. Whether anyone can meet the
aspirations of India's young before they turn to a rage that makes the
present anti-corruption furore seem just a prelude, is one of this
century's big questions.

Hamish McDonald attended the conference with assistance from the
Australia India Institute.

twitter Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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[ZESTCaste] Rajnath rules out any understanding with Mayawati in future

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/rajnath-rules-out-any-understanding-with-mayawati-in-future/854305/

Rajnath rules out any understanding with Mayawati in future
Agencies Posted online: Sat Oct 01 2011, 09:58 hrs
Lucknow : Alleging that BSP had "cheated" his party thrice, former
chief minister Rajnath Singh said BJP was firm in its resolve of never
entering into any understanding with Mayawati in future.

"BJP helped BSP chief Mayawati become the chief minister three times
and she not only cheated BJP but also dalits in whose name and vote
she gained strength in politics," Singh said while addressing 'dalit
adhikar mahasammelan' here.

The former BJP chief said that his party would "never have any kind of
alliance or understanding with the BSP in future and in fact it was
the resolve of the saffron party to throw BSP out of power".

Attacking the Mayawati ministry, he alleged that "maximum exploitation
of dalits has taken place under this government."

Stressing that social harmony was a must for the development of the
country and society, Singh said that dalits took active part in the
freedom struggle and once BJP came to power it would see that their
contribution and history finds place in school books.

He also recalled as to how the BJP government headed by him had
launched a drive for filling up backlog vacancies under SC, ST quota.

On the occasion, senior BJP leader Uma Bharti alleged that law and
order situation under the BSP rule was the worst and dalits and
backwards were facing maximum hardships.

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[ZESTCaste] Maya Writes About All Wrongs

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main50.asp?filename=Ne081011Maya.asp

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 40, Dated 08 Oct 2011
CURRENT AFFAIRS
UTTAR PRADESH

Maya Writes About All Wrongs

The UP chief minister has found a new hobby. Writing letters to the
prime minister, says Virendra Nath Bhatt
Pen pusher Mayawati has written to the prime minister on a range of issues

UTTAR PRADESH Chief Minister Mayawati has been waging an epistolary
war against the Congress, having bombarded Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh with over 100 letters since coming to power in 2007. The latest
ones she has written demand reservation for the poor among the upper
castes, Muslims and Jats.

From 17 to 19 September, she shot off one each day. The first demanded
amending the Constitution to giving reservation to Muslims as per
their share in national population. The second demanded reservation
for the poor among the upper castes. The third, and certainly not the
last, asked for inclusion of Jats in the Central list of reservation
for OBCs.

Each of these groups, of course, are seen as vote banks, and are being
wooed by politicians in the runup to the 2012 Assembly poll. "It is an
established fact that Brahmins were instrumental in enabling the BSP
to attain simple majority in the UP Assembly after the 2007 polls and
form the government on her own — the first such government in UP since
the 1991 Assembly elections," says political analyst Ashutosh Mishra.
"Given Mayawati's inaccessibility, her dictatorial style of
functioning and overall deterioration in quality of governance during
her rule, Brahmins are no longer enamoured of the BSP," he says.

Stark realities haunt the BSP. Its vote share in the 2009 Lok Sabha
election plummeted to 27.42 percent against 30.43 percent in the 2007
Assembly elections. Also, against the 206 seats won by the BSP in
2007, Mayawati's party could lead in only 100 Assembly segments
falling under 80 Parliamentary seats in UP, during the 2009 Lok Sabha
election.

Pointing out that writing letters is just posturing, UP Congress chief
Rita Bahuguna Joshi told TEHELKA, "Instead of petitioning the prime
minister, Mayawati should have taken the initiative to implementing
the quota for Muslims in UP as done by Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and few
other states."

Rashtriya Lok Dal's Jayant Choudhary also points out, "The Bihar
government has constituted a commission to assess the educational,
social and economic condition of the poor among upper castes. But
Mayawati only writes letters," says Choudhary.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) also dismissed the missives as a pre-poll
stunt. "Writing letters to the PM is her favourite pastime. After
heaping all sorts of humiliations and injustices on Muslims, she has
suddenly developed concern for their upliftment. She never exerted
pressure on the Centre for implementation of the Sachar committee
recommendations," says senior SP leader Azam Khan adding, "Mayawati is
not even aware of the panel's findings and recommendations."

The barb about writing being just a pastime rings true. Other letters
over the years have touched on piracy off the coast of Somalia, the
murder of Dera Sach Khand leader Sant Ramanand in Vienna, and concern
over the security of AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi. In October
2008, she raised the issue of attacks on north Indians in Maharashtra,
and in February that year, asked the PM to consider removing Delhi's
Lt Governor Tejendra Khanna for allegedly remarking that north Indians
take pride in breaking the law.

Way back in December 2007, Mayawati put forth her views on reservation
for the Mochi community in the SC category in Gujarat. She wrote at
least four letters expressing concern over the lack of development in
Bundelkhand; at other times, she discussed the Right to Education Act,
the Justice Dinakaran episode and the women's reservation Bill.

In 2007, Mayawati wrote 14 letters to the PM. In 2008, she was even
more prolific, writing 41 letters. In 2009, despite being busy with
the Lok Sabha elections, she found time to write to the PM 36 times.

So, is there a ghost writer? Sources close to Mayawati said she writes
all political letters personally. "Since she alone decides her party's
agenda, the topics she writes on are entirely of her own choosing,"
says a senior bureaucrat.

A BSP leader said the CM's letters would stand as a 'historical
record' for the party. "This is necessary for future generations to
know the BSP's views on all these issues," says the leader.

virendranathbhatt@gmail.com