Steve Jobs knew how to make a sales pitch. He sold the future, put a massive prize tag on it, and tempted people too to take the plunge. He knew what to say and how to say it. He was aided, of course, by the knowledge that he had a superior product, that with a sentence and a gesture, he could show the audience something they had never seen.
Joshua Stern’s Jobs has, in the life story of its subject, a clearly superior product. The constant pushing of the boundaries of science over the last century have taken scientific breakthroughs much beyond the realm of our understanding; scientists have to literally recreate the Big Bang to capture our imaginations. In that void, it was natural for Jobs — every bit a commercial figure who, much like Edison, took existing technology and paradigmatically improved how it looked and worked — to be adopted as the great visionary of our age. His pronouncements on life, the universe and everything gave him mythic status and, combined with his compelling life story, meant that the first biopic after his death would be as keenly anticipated and analysed as any keynote speech he gave.
Yet, as one reviewer puts it, Jobs “has all the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation”. It is everything Jobs hated: lazy, halfhearted, shoddy, confused, derivative, with the vision of a blind frog in a very deep well. What it has to say about Steve Jobs the man could just as well be written in WordArt. Though by no means a hagiography, the only critique the film makes of its subject is that he was too driven and anally retentive about minor details. Neither trait is really explored; he bails on his girlfriend when she is pregnant, but his complex relationship with his daughter Lisa isn’t touched at all, while his neurotic perfectionism is only shown through him obsessing with fonts and the board fretting about rising costs.
Ashton Kutcher, much like John Abraham in the similarly superficial Madras Cafe, is earnest in his portrayal of Jobs, but never convincing. He looks and sounds the part — he has Job’s slouching walk down to the T — but like Farhan Akhtar showed with Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, that isn’t nearly enough. He is hindered by the shoddy writing, which gives him precious few lines of dialogue that could ever be accused of being memorable. Inexplicably, for all the reams of eminently quotable Steve Jobs quotes, it chooses the drabest of speeches for its opening scene, setting a precedent for the rest of the film.
What the film chooses to leave out is revealing of the lack of understanding the film has of what went into forming Jobs. It could argue that two hours isn’t nearly as enough to include all the deets, but in that case, the amount of time it spends driving home the same point is a criminal waste. Jobs’ work with Pixar and NeXT is only given montage treatment, but even Jobs’ innovation process, his struggles for perfection and the attendant toxicity are given short thrift. As is his rivalry with Bill Gates; a token voicemail diatribe acknowledges the feud existed, but I suppose a fear of Microsoft’s lawyers causes it to desist from going further.
Throughout the film, there is a sense that you’re on the outside, looking in, and that you’re not alone. There’s another biopic in the works, and Steve Wozniack is apparently involved, so there’s hope that it will be more an inside job. As Apple showed, it is more important to do something right than to do something first. Jobs, like MySpace, bears too much resemblance to something made in someone’s garage.
Madras Cafe is just another well-intentioned but botched exercise
Madras Cafe hasn’t released in Madras, for “alleged portrayal of LTTE in bad light”, as the newspapers put it. For once, the allegations stem not from an overimaginative reaction to a trailer or simple rumours, but empirical evidence: the film was screened for volunteers from pro-Tamil outfits in the hope that they would judge the film on its merits. They did. It failed.
Shoojit Sircar’s film, at first glance, doesn’t seem all that offensive. Anna Bhaskaran (Rathnam), Sircar’s stand-in for Prabhakaran, is no saint, but the film goes to great pains — mostly by having characters reiterate that he is an idealist whenever they mention him — to say he didn’t start the fire. They even have a montage to prove it. But Madras Cafe isn’t really concerned with the whats and wherefores of the civil war. It accepts it as a complex battle of attrition much beyond its ken, and then proceeds to tell the story it wants: that of India’s doomed efforts to undermine the Tigers and the plot to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi (referred to only as PM and, later, ex-PM).
Therein lies much of what has offended Tamil groups. In a spy film, told through the perspective of the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), the Tigers naturally become the antagonists. Vikram (Abraham), a covert-ops agent, is told at the outset to sabotage Bhaskaran’s LTP and install new leadership in Jaffna (though India’s initial support for the LTTE is glossed over). He fails, the LTP consolidates its strength by allying with a vaguely-defined consortium of foreign companies and intelligence agencies and successfully assassinates Ex-PM. Somewhere along the way, the film crosses the lakshman rekha that often defines which side you are on in the murky LTTE debate — it calls the Tigers terrorists.
With the baggage that comes with the word in the post-9/11 era, taking offence at such a characterisation isn’t simply a matter of semantics. (The film does qualify it with the hackneyed “One man’s terrorist is another man’s revolutionary”.) To its credit, Madras Cafe does not take to black and white with the vim of its Western counterparts. There is no moral justification offered for India’s intervention; in fact, the film makes it clear that the primary reason we went in was pragmatic geopolitics. The Tigers are the bad guys, but not inherently bad. The film treats them more as committed revolutionaries being used by external forces, “economic hitmen” from the aforementioned consortium (a charge that may or may not be true, but is convenient for the film’s balancing act). Unfortunately, this angle — like many others — is never explored, just explained away in a line or two of some of the worst exposition ever done in an espionage thriller.
And it is as an espionage thriller, shorn of political blinkers, that Madras Cafe will be remembered. The exposition isn’t the only thing wrong with it on that count. John Abraham and Nargis Fakhri are equally unconvincing as RAW agent and foreign correspondent respectively. Abraham’s performance is earnest, but amateurish, much like India’s peacekeeping efforts in the film. He keeps insisting that he’ll do it his way, but that mostly involves going for the most obvious course of action and getting backstabbed by the most obvious candidate in the most obvious way possible. The supporting cast isn’t much better. Quizmaster Siddhartha Basu’s acting debut as RAW director Robin Dutt is disappointing; he delivers his dialogue competently, but, especially in the film’s more crucial scenes, he lacks the necessary emotions. One scene, where he meets John after his (John’s) wife has been killed, is probably the most sterile I’ve seen in recent times. The pacing is intermittent, and the film loses any dramatic tension it generates by laboriously explaining itself in trying to seem accessible. It’s still better than most Bollywood films of its genre — things happen between the action sequences, after all — but Madras Cafe is just another well-intentioned but botched exercise.
Money Talks. And Bats. And Bowls
Few of us who saw it,” wrote Captain Philip Trevor, “will forget that surging, lowing multicoloured throng. Its reproduction defied the pen and brush. But the faces of those who composed it wore an ugly expression. Of that vast multitude not a thousand knew the name of the thing at which they were looking, not a hundred had even the elementary knowledge of the game of cricket. But they were dimly conscious that in some particular or another the black man had triumphed over the white man, and they ran hither and thither, gibbering and chattering and muttering vague words of evil omen.”
In many ways, Trevor’s description of the crowd of over 12,000 at the Bombay Gymkhana, who witnessed the Parsis beat a touring English side in 1889, is representative of how the cricketing world has viewed the rise of India. The adoption of a bona fide aristocratic game by the working classes as a national religion is as inexplicable as it is curious, and there has been not a little elitist handwringing at the new order’s abandonment of the heritage of the game for the instant gratification of a hitting contest, at the great unwashed and their cults of personality that demonstrate a disregard for cricket’s public-school values, at the black man rising above his station and taking over the white man’s preserve. Obituaries of Test cricket are a dime a dozen; an article or three comparing county cricket and the Indian Premier League (IPL) is de rigueur every May.
James Astill, political editor of The Economist and author of The Great Tamasha, a well-crafted account of Indian cricket, isn’t your typical handwringing elitist. Yes, he bemoans the impending death of Test cricket, a format he “cares about almost to the exclusion of any other”. Yes, he blames the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) capitulation to commercial interests for the format’s decline (“I don’t think the BCCI cares about cricket in any deep way at all”). He also sees in the BCCI’s muscle-flexing the decline of the international game, deploring how the IPL “cannibalised the West Indian cricket team” by offering its players more money than they ever dreamt of. But there is a spirit of enquiry, a desire to understand the real nature of the beast, that sets his book apart. This desire is evident in the various interviews with the various stakeholders in the game: from officials and other profiteers to the people actually working for the improvement of the game. There is much to learn about India, after all, through its national pastime.
“Cricket administration,” Astill writes, “is a study in how power operates in India. It is as revealing of India’s corrupt, combative politics… as party politics, the usual prism through which Indian democracy is understood. It is hard to see how cricket will win from this. Yet for anyone who cares for India, as well as for its favourite game, the explosion of the cricket economy is an uplifting parable, representative — emblematic even — of India’s wider progress.” Representing a publication that has been a cheerleader for that progress, Astill doesn’t pass judgement on the influx of money into the game (which has helped and hurt in almost equal measure). But he is at his vitriolic best when excoriating the men running Indian cricket. Not that it’s particularly hard; one need only turn on the TV to conclude that cricket administrators are narrow-minded, self-serving, brazen authority figures.
And that is, in a sense, the problem with The Great Tamasha. The last few years have hammered the point home incessantly that our sports administrators, even those not sitting on a $1.5 billion war chest, are corrupt; one hardly needs another book to prove that. Astill’s interviews with the game’s satraps, however entertaining, don’t elicit much by way of introspection. The book, and Astill himself, has little by way of solutions beyond the usual call for reforms, which is about par for the course when it comes to issues of misgovernance in India. As an eloquent statement on the ills that plague Indian cricket and a superficial explanation for how we got here, The Great Tamasha is a great read. It’s a pity it doesn’t do more.
ajachi@tehelka.com
'Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara plays out the oldest Bollywood gangster story'
When we left the Mumbai underworld at the end of Milan Luthria’s Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai, Shoaib Khan had the world at his feet. In Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!, the atrociously named sequel, Shoaib has suffered the singular misfortune of metamorphosising from perennially-scowling Emraan Hashmi to occasionally-menacing-but-mostly-gawking Akshay Kumar, even if he has risen to international gangsterhood. What good is an underworld empire if the best you can do to intimidate somebody is awkwardly deliver a line of dialogue that could only have been written by a little copywriter who was banished to his little office and asked to come up with 100 punchlines before dinner?
There is, true, a magnetism to Shoaib that Hashmi wouldn’t have managed, but the film’s obsession with being larger than life hurts its purpose of telling a simple story, which ends up looking thin. The impact of the dialogue, even Shoaib’s unapologetic embrace of his dark side — “Hero marne ke baad swarg jaata hai… aur villain jeete ji swarg paata hai” — is lost by repetition, and the inane catchphrases do for character development what inane catchphrases always do, reducing the protagonists to the familiar trite archetypes that the first movie at least ostensibly tried to steer clear of: Shoaib is the power-that-is, with the attendent hubris, while Aslam (Khan) is the young up-and-comer with a heart of gold.
Which would have been fine, if the film was even attempting to comment on the changing nature of the underworld under Dawood Ibrahim. An old way of life ended when control over Mumbai was centralised, but Luthria isn’t concerned with anything but setting his two alpha males up for the final confrontation. There is none of the philosophising of the first film, none of the subtlety either: Luthria sets up the climax through the wonderfully original device of throwing a woman in to raise the stakes, complete with the wonderfully original casting of Sonakshi Sinha (who, to her credit, delivers a fairly solid, if stolid, performance). Sinha’s Jasmine Mirza, whose arrival on the scene is marked with so much foreboding that Luthria might as well have used large, blinking signs saying “PLOT DEVICE!”, charms both Shoaib and Aslam in what Rajiv Masand rightly calls “the laziest love triangle you could possibly imagine”. It so easily slips into the groove that the saheb-biwi-gangster love triangle follows, that for the most part you’re wishing it is all a hoax, that Jasmine isn’t just a naïve girl who thinks the notorious gangster who rigged the pointless ‘Sankalp Best New Face’ award for her looks at her with a platonic, avuncular eye. It isn’t suspension of disbelief if even the actors are doing it.
Knowingly or not, Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara’s protagonists play out the oldest Bollywood gangster story there is. To some extent, it is even compelling, mostly because the difference in personal styles, however artificial, suggests something better than the obvious conclusion it meanders towards. This difference is accentuated by the lead actors’ inability to turn in anything resembling a convincing performance. While Kumar’s general bumbling nature combined with the dialogue he’s made to deliver makes him sound like something out of a Kanti Shah film, Khan’s gangster act resembles nothing more than a fish out of water. Thankfully, he is a better lover than fighter, and is fairly passable by the end.
Unlike the juvenile and scatterbrained Chennai Express, this week’s monument to mediocrity is, thankfully, a more mature film. But like last week’s atrocity, OUATIMD! is too obsessed with how it looks and sounds to have any sort of substance.
[Film Review] Chennai Express
For months now — though it felt more like years — the gossip rags have gone on and on about the great rivalries, real and imagined, between the makers of Chennai Express and Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai Dobaara!, the two massive Bollywood productions originally scheduled for an Eid release date. Ultimately, like much else in the country, it was a conflict about real estate: getting your movie to as many screens as possible in order to make as much money as possible. Now that Raj Thackeray (PBUH) has intervened and convinced Ekta Kapoor and Co to move their release to next week, the field has been left open to Messrs Shetty and Khan to capitalise. Which they most certainly have done, raking in almost Rs 90 crore by Saturday itself in almost 4000 screens in India and more overseas, the biggest weekend opening ever for a Bollywood film.
But here’s the kicker — none of this was unexpected. The nature of the game means that all a film like Chennai Express has to do is show up. UTV’s savvy pre-release moves have ensured it released in roughly three times as many screens as 3 Idiots did — in some multiplexes, the only competition was that great mass entertainer, BA Pass — which translated to it making roughly three times as much money in the opening weekend. It looks fairly certain to become India’s greatest ever release.
All this is not to start another vague rant about the commercialisation of Bollywood. By all means, Chennai Express is a fairly run-of-the-mill commercial ‘mass entertainer’, and should be judged only as such. It certainly has all the flaws of the genre: a wafer-thin plot, blatant product placement, hammy acting, puerile jokes, ridiculous dialogue, a tendency to present alien cultures (for it treats its Tamil characters as just that) with the subtlety of a sledgehammer and a tearjerker finale that feels unreal, unearned and inexplicable. But even allowing for all that, there is much about the film that, much like three-day-old sambar, seems off.
Maybe it’s the general lack of exploding trucks. Shetty often seems out of his element by having to tone down his Michael Bey act to satisfy Shah Rukh’s sensibilities, and too often relies on the crutch of referencing SRK films (it’s not a running gag if it’s every other joke). Of course, the film more fits the other kind of cinema he knows how to make, the slapstick comedy, with results that are patchy at best; in any case, the jokes — which seem meticulously proportioned between high and lowbrow for both single-screen and multiplex audiences — are a marked improvement from his Golmaal films. Shah Rukh, on his part, plays the blundering buffoon well thanks to his excellent comic timing, especially when he has material to work with, but the numerous catchphrases the script saddles him with make his performance quite tedious by the second half. Padukone looks like she is having fun, even if her accent is a little too Mehmoodesque to be taken seriously.
The mantle of the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever — one that is by no means a given for Chennai Express, whose record-breaking run could well be halted when it hands over 40 percent of its screens to OUATIMD — has been held by some of the industry’s most iconic films. If Shetty’s film does indeed overhaul 3 Idiots and claim it, it will be by far the most forgettable one to do so (say what you will about Gadar; it was anything but forgettable). But these films have been testaments to the times they were made in. Perhaps an era characterised by diminishing attention spans and conveyor-belt films deserves a Chennai Express to define it for posterity.
Educating school principals to enable better schooling
At the head of every good school is a strong, innovative and motivated principal. “To change 1 billion people in India for the better, you need to change the 7 lakh government school principals in our 7 lakh villages,” says Mumbai-born Aditya Natraj, who has set out to achieve just that. His is the classic story of a man who chucked a high-flying corporate career to follow his heart and listen to the nagging voice within that told him to take up a cause.
With an MBA from INSEAD in France and a job as a chartered accountant in London, Natraj’s life seemed set on a course of corporate conquests. But he never forgot the disparity he had seen in his own family. His grandfather was one of 11 children, one of the four to get a college degree. His father, one of 54 first cousins, was one of the few privileged ones to benefit from his parent’s higher education. So, while Natraj and some of his immediate cousins ended up at the higher end of the economic spectrum, others within the same family are below the poverty line. “All because they did not get the kind of education we did,” he says emphatically. “It’s not about ability. We are all from the same gene pool. It’s about opportunity.”
It’s this family history that eventually triggered the shift to social entrepreneurship. Perhaps sensing this leaning, his father voiced his fears to Natraj. “He was worried I would end up a jhola-carrying social activist with no money,” he says.
In 2003, with all his student loans paid off, in a now-or-never moment, Natraj took the plunge. He quit his job to join Pratham, India’s largest NGO in the field of education. Five years of visiting government-run primary schools across the country led him to an interesting statistic: 15 percent of schools that run well have proactive principals; 15 percent with cynics at the top are in the worst shape; and a massive 70 percent just manage to stay afloat because their heads want to do something, but don’t know how.
This led Natraj to the kernel of an idea: to harness the leadership provided by school principals. The idea got set in stone after an experience he had in Kutch, Gujarat, after the devastating earthquake of 2002. That’s where Natraj came across a unique school principal. When most government school staff were getting themselves transferred out of earthquake-hit areas, Saurabh Patel transferred to Kutch’s Rapar city. There were no local teachers and the literacy rate was the lowest in the state. Patel convinced Unicef to give him a tent and restarted the local school. Because of one man’s initiative, the number of students went up to 120, from the 87 enrolled before the earthquake.
In 2008, Natraj set out with a team of seven to educate the principals of government schools in Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district on how to manage schools, work with children on the basis of trust, and motivate teachers. It was the start of what is now called the Kaivalya Education Foundation, with its unique Principal Development Leadership (PLD) programme and the Gandhi Fellowship. The foundation has now expanded to a team of around 400 people, with projects running across Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra.
Funded by corporate donations, Kaivalya works by signing MoUs with state governments, which arrange meetings with government school principals in various districts. “About 93 percent of the principals apply to join the PLD programme,” says Natraj. The programme comprises 12 intensive workshops a year, for three years.
“We have to go beyond the anger to make them at least want to try to change,” says Natraj. The workshops rely heavily on dialogue. The principals are asked to recall moments during their school days when they were discriminated against or beaten by their teachers. These long, difficult and deeply reflective exercises often leave the participants in tears, but help them empathise with their students.
“I used to keep a stick with me all the time. I thought beating a child was the only way to discipline him,” recalls Ramawtar Sadlania, 50, a government school principal from Jhunjhunu. “But they taught me how to sit with children and talk to them, instead of talking down to them.” Sadlania was part of the first PLD programme in 2008. During the programme, Sadlania had many arguments over the necessity of fear for discipline, before he let go of his anger.
A changed principal leads his staff by example. Natraj and his team are trying to create a positive self-sustaining cycle, where principals inspire or cajole each other into doing better.
Pushkar Meena, 40, another government school principal from Jhunjhunu, testifies to this change. He is in his second year of the PLD programme and his school’s enrolment has gone up from 115 to 146. He was inspired by other principals from his district who had been part of PLD.
Simultaneously, Gandhi Fellows are recruited from the top colleges in India and trained to work in government schools in tandem with these school principals. Every Fellow is placed for four weeks with a host family in the village or slum where the school they are assigned is located. During that period, they have to earn their living doing whatever their host does, be it pulling rickshaws, working as maids or herding cattle. They act as channels of communication between the principals and the local community.
Living among the villagers, they understand why the children do not go to school, the problems they face at home, the everyday violence they are exposed to. They learn how to keep the children in school and deal with them without raising a hand. “Biases don’t just exist in schools, they are part of the social fabric,” says Natraj. “That’s what we are trying to change.”
Geetanjali Babbar, 26, a graduate of Jamia Millia Islamia University, was a Gandhi Fellow in 2008. She stayed with a sarpanch’s family in the Rajgarh block near Pilani in Rajasthan. She had to mobilise all the villagers to do something about the local school. The teachers had political connections and didn’t teach at all. The School Management Committee had been defunct for 10 years. “The community shut down the school until those teachers were transferred out,” she says. “The school was reopened only after new teachers were appointed and it runs very well now.” Babbar now runs a school for the children of sex workers in GB Road, Delhi’s red-light area.
Natraj has brought his entire arsenal of management skills to keep Kaivalya growing. They currently work with 1,200 schools. Though there are some obstinate people who refuse to change, Kaivalya’s impact can be felt in all the classes that are now full and all the teachers who have finally stopped beating the children they are supposed to take care of.
‘Rajasthan's local communities have been moulded to honour nature for centuries’
Edited excerpts from an interview:
Photographers are known to be romantics in search of ancient cities, trying to uncover coffers of rich tradition. Is this aspect, how would you define your relationship with Rajasthan?
It’s very special in the sense that it’s the most vibrant, colourful state; the backdrop of the Aravalis, warmth of the villagers, historical setting and of course huge forts and palaces add to the mystique. All of this always attracted me as a child. The landscape and barrenness that the state offers is splendid. It’s a photographer’s paradise but at the same time, a major challenge. Besides, it was my first attempt at doing aerial photography in Rajasthan which added a dimension of freshness.
The pictures reflect an attempt to record the old way of life and how it is now altering. What major changes did you discover have gained root, replacing old conventions?
The whole idea was to discover and travel to areas where the outside world influence is not present or if at all it is, it has a minimal impact on the society. About how it influences their culture, let me tell you about Pushkar. When I visited 30 years ago, there were a lot of Indian tourist photographers and only a few foreigners. But when I visited after a gap of a few years, things had completely changed. I saw a tent colony where one-day charges were around Rs 7,500 and you had helicopter services to see the mela site from the top. More and more people have started making it a commercial affair. This is frightening. You are taking away their culture and depriving these people. Another thing is, every time you lift your camera to click pictures, you’ll find the camel herder asking for bakshish. I think it’s shameful that we have forced these people to behave this way. Rajasthan to me is about the culture which has the least influence of the outside world, and that is how I like it.
What was the idea behind mounting cameras on high-flying kites and taking pictures from hot air balloons?
Growing up, all I could associate Rajasthan with were the heavily bejewelled women, men with turbans and long moustaches, maharajas and palaces. It’s kind of a formula book with postcards and posters showcasing this. When I began travelling around Rajasthan, I kept thinking of an idea to portray my thoughts from a different perspective, one that people have not yet seen. This is where the idea of aerial photography came in. Once you look down from that vantage point, it gives everything a different vision and purity.
The bond between the tribal communities and the wildlife in the area is very evident in the book. How do you go about capturing these intimate details?
Rajesh Bedi
Roli Books
207 pp; Rs 3,995
It’s certain that my first love is nature and wildlife. When you travel in Rajasthan and meet say, the Bishnois, you discover details like they are vegetarians and averse to cutting down trees or killing animals. The Great Indian Bustard, of which there are now less than 300 left in the world, have the highest population in the Thar Desert and that is because of the religion of the Bishnois. They’ve been moulded to love and honour nature for centuries. One of the most moving images I managed to capture was of a Bishnoi woman offering suckle to a young chinkara gazelle found abandoned in a nearby field, along with her own child. So engaging and understanding the community is essential to get a glimpse into their way of life.
Silence is not an option
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On a muggy monsoon evening in a tiny village in Haryana, 16-year-old Manju*, her voice steady and clear, recounts the story of the day she was raped. It is a story that in its horrifying essentials can be heard in villages across the state, across, for that matter, the country. On 6 August 2012, Manju, a Dalit from Kalsi village in Karnal district, was waylaid on her way to school. Two men, Ajay and Krishen, from the upper-caste Rod community, allegedly forced her into their car and took turns to rape her. Warning her to hold her tongue, they dumped her near her school.
It took Manju two weeks to admit to her mother that she had been raped. Her mother already knew. A neighbour implicated in the crime allegedly gloated about her role in the rape, gloated about Manju’s lost honour. Manju’s mother was steadfast in her support for her daughter. Accounts differ about who said what but the upshot is that less than a month after the gangrape, Manju’s mother disappeared.
On 3 September, her body was found in a ditch next to a small canal that runs by the village. Like her daughter, she too had been gangraped. Her murderers, allegedly her daughter’s rapists, had thrown acid on her and strangled her with her own chunni.
It’s hard to look Manju in the eye when she tells you her story, though she compels you to by having no trouble looking you directly in the eye. Her tone is matter of fact, a product of recounting these same events to a barrage of police, lawyers and activists. Her face is pale and since the rape she has fallen ill with alarming frequency. But her voice doesn’t waver, breaking slightly only when she talks about her mother.
Ordinarily, Manju’s story might just have been filed away as another statistic in a state full of terrible crimes against women and Scheduled Castes (to be both is deadly), but she decided to do something radical — seek justice and redress. She is now part of a more heartening statistic, that of young Dalit women in small clusters across Haryana who are standing up and speaking out against the caste-based discrimination and violence that blights their lives.
There is a change happening in Dalit communities,” observes Brinda Karat, CPM leader and vice-president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA). “It stems from young Dalit girls who are challenging the status quo, unlike their parents 10 years ago.” These girls are taking on an entire, entrenched culture of bigotry as individuals and as community organisers, fighting for the right to education, to dignity of labour, to not be silenced. It is a fierce and necessary resistance.
But taking a stand requires deep reserves of courage. Manju and her father Dharampal, who used to work on the paddy fields owned by Rods, recall how when they went to the police to report both the gangrape and the murder, SI Ram Prakash at the nearby Butana Police Station refused to register their FIR. Prakash, also a Rod, allegedly threatened and insulted them because they were Dhanuks, a Dalit subcaste. It took pressure from NGO workers to ensure that the complaint was lodged at all and the accused arrested. Eventually, as is mandated by the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, Dharampal received compensation from the Deputy Commissioner of Karnal: Rs 60,000 for his daughter’s rape and Rs 3.75 lakh for the murder of his wife. The accused are currently under trial for rape in a specially constituted fast-track court. Since the Justice Verma Commission report, each district in Haryana is now supposed to try rape cases in these courts.
The meagre financial compensation is scant comfort for Dharampal, who is no longer employed on fields owned by the dominant Rod community. He scratches out a living now from casual work at uncertain intervals. A job promised to him by the Deputy Commissioner has not materialised. Manju’s illnesses, her need to look after younger siblings and lack of money have forced her to drop out of school. Barring extended family, the Dalits in their village no longer speak to them, angered by Dharampal’s decision to name his neighbour, Kusum — a Dalit woman — as the third accused in the trial.
It was Kusum, who the family say, taunted Manju’s mother about the rape. Kusum, they allege, colluded with Ajay and Krishen possibly for financial gain. Still, Manju remains determined to live life on her terms. She may have dropped out of school but continues to study commerce through tuitions.
“Mujhe yahaan se nikalna hai (I have to get out of here),” she says, gesturing around the little galli where her house stands. After a year, her neighbours still avert their faces when asked about Manju’s rape.
Statistically, violence against Dalits in Haryana, the country’s caste-ridden heartland in the imaginations of many, does not appear as rife as in many other states. According to the 2011 census, Haryana’s population was 2.5 crore and Dalits, a government report calculates, make up 19.35 percent of that population. It’s a significant slice, but according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) figures, last year there were only 252 crimes reported against Scheduled Castes. It’s a rate of only 4.93 crimes per 1 lakh SC/ST people, compared to 29 in Bihar and a national rate of 16.71.
“In Haryana,” says PL Punia, a Dalit leader of the Congress and chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, “incidents against Dalits may be fewer, but they are more brutal. The message from that one incident is intended to spread to the whole community.” But, he adds, somewhat cryptically, “Dalits are not that oppressed. They are getting an education. Administration is a little lax (in dealing with crimes against Dalits) but a proper investigation is always carried out against those who commit crimes.”
The NCRB numbers suggest otherwise. If there are few reported crimes against Dalits in Haryana, the conviction rate, at 7.9 percent, is abysmal, compared to the national rate of 23.9 percent. And at 50.31 crimes reported per 1 lakh people, the state has one of the worst records of crime against women.
Between September to October last year, 21 rapes were reported in just 45 days. It is perhaps a sign of progress that so many cases were reported at all. Asha Kowtal, the general secretary of the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch (AIDMAM), a movement within the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, describes the rash of rapes as putting Haryana in “an embarrassing spotlight and forcing the police to work faster”. The efforts of such organisations to persuade reluctant girls, some of whom say nothing about their rapes for 10-15 days, to press charges and speak out about being raped deserves credit. It requires near constant vigilance to try and achieve a semblance of justice for Dalit women.
Kowtal recalls the case of Ritu*, a 13-year-old girl from Panipat, who was raped by two Sardar Jats in November. She was abducted from a government hospital while visiting her mother. In a cruel irony, she was discovered lying bleeding on a dirty bed by AIDMAM members in that same hospital. The hospital staff ignored the girl, claims Kowtal. Despite protests from the activists, the two-finger test was conducted and the girl was reported to be sexually active. Hospital staff also tried to pressure the family to state that Ritu was mentally challenged, adds Kowtal. The family and AIDMAM also allege that CCTV footage showing Ritu’s abduction had been tampered with.
It is incidents like these that catalysed AIDMAM to go on a 10-day karwan across 10 districts in Haryana. The march was led solely by Dalit women. “For the first time, I think, it was Dalit women at the forefront of such a movement,” says Kowtal.
The women met rape survivors and senior police officers; they demonstrated outside the offices of the Deputy Commissioner of each district, even getting lathi-charged in Karnal. Organisations such as AIDMAM, AIDWA and the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations (NACDOR) are actively working to recruit young women and often men from Dalit communities to travel from village to village, reaching out to young girls who have been raped, their families, and the victims of various crimes and atrocities. Their goal is to spread education and an awareness among people of their rights, that they do not have to tolerate extreme violence as their birthright.
One of the most troubling aspects of these efforts, various activists interviewed for this article said, has been the attitude of the police. Sridutt Sharma, the station house officer (SHO) of the Butana Police Station, told TEHELKA bluntly that “the Kalsi case” (Manju’s rape and her mother’s rape and murder) was the “only Dalit atrocity” in his jurisdiction. He maintained that the police did everything in their power to serve justice and that Dharampal and his family were being protected by two security guards. Throughout the time TEHELKA spent in Kalsi, with Dharampal and Manju, the guards were conspicuous only by their absence. Sharma went on to claim that in his six months as SHO, there had been no caste violence against Dalits. His jurisdiction extends to 56 villages. The claim, when put to lawyers and activists, was met with hoots of derision.
One of the scoffers is Colin Gonsalves, Supreme Court lawyer and founder-director of the Human Rights Law Network. Gonsalves recently ruffled feathers at a gender rights conference in New Delhi by making the polemical argument that the only way to reform the police would be to sack over half the personnel. Gonsalves is handling several Haryana rape cases, including Manju’s, and frequently attends AIDMAM and NACDOR meetings.
He explains how the police systematically collude with the upper-caste accused. Of course, the policemen generally come from these same subcastes. Knowing this, many Dalits don’t even report crimes.
Gonsalves says, resigned, that the under-reporting of crime is why he doesn’t pay much attention to existing statistics, why any statistical analysis is flawed by the skewed data. Policemen often refuse to log FIRs or correctly take down statements. Sometimes, Gonsalves says, the police even inform upper-caste communities about accusations so that victims are met with loud, intimidating crowds when they leave the police station. Bribes, threats and intense pressure to take back or falsify statements are normal tactics.
“If they don’t compromise,” Gonsalves points out, “they lose jobs on lands controlled by the upper castes. They can’t even leave their homes to attend nature’s call in the fields without crossing the landlords’ farms.”
Dismissing Gonsalves as hyperbolic would be easy, if it weren’t for such widely reported cases as that of a 19-year-old Dalit girl in Banwasa village in Sonepat district, who was raped by four men over four days last September. A Dhanuk, like Manju and Dharampal, she reported the rape to the police only to be put, along with her family, under so much duress by the panchayats of the villages the accused men belonged to that she caved to the pressure and changed her statement. On 24 April, she was sentenced to 10 days in prison for perjury.
Gonsalves claims that the police often helps to hide rape, instructing victims, if they report the crime immediately, to wash their clothes, wash themselves, to postpone their medico-legal exam by a week, by which time no traces of the assault may remain. He doesn’t offer specific examples of this blatant dereliction of duty, though he does say he takes his details from cases that are already before the Supreme Court.
TEHELKA tried to reach the SPs of Hisar and Karnal and the Inspector General (law & order), Haryana, to verify these allegations but they did not reply.
Balwant Singh Boundiya, a lawyer in the Hisar district court, does offer an example. He tells of a girl from Shastri Nagar, Hisar, who was abducted by three men, including a Dalit and a Brahmin. The Dalit had promised to marry the girl. In her statement, she said they took her to Mumbai and raped her for a week before she was able to escape. Back in Hisar, she tried to lodge an FIR but was repeatedly rebuffed by the police until, after two weeks, her family approached BS Balan, the Hisar Superintendent of Police. The three men accused of the rape are in custody and court proceedings are underway.
Persistence can result in convictions, however piecemeal and unsatisfactory. Komal*, a 17-year-old Dalit from Dabra, a village in Hisar, was taken by eight men in a car and gangraped for three hours on 9 September 2012. Hers was one of the 21 rapes in 45 days that received sustained media attention. She accused 12 men between the ages of 20 and 50, from her village’s Jat community of being involved, eight of whom were later put on trial. There were eight in the car and four who arrived later, she said in her statement to the police, on three motorcycles. Some of the men owned the surrounding land by a canal on the outskirts of the village. The men filmed the rape on mobile phones and circulated the clips around the village. It was rumoured, although not confirmed, that the men were selling the clip for Rs 200. Komal’s father was shown the clip by an acquaintance, who worked as a “gunman”, according to Hisar lawyer Boundiya, for a well-connected local family. Reportedly, Komal’s father tried to go to the police but was threatened by the men involved. He committed suicide by swallowing poison. Four men were convicted of the gangrape on 4 May, but four others were let off due to lack of evidence. An appeal has been filed at the Chandigarh High Court.
Speaking to TEHELKA, Komal said her father’s suicide forced her to put aside her fear and go to the police. Not that they were particularly helpful. Komal’s lawyer, Rajat Kalsan, a Dalit from Hansi known for aggressively pursuing Dalit cases in the courts, said the police didn’t even record Komal’s statement, preferring to make up their own facts. Komal was unaware of this until Kalsan showed her the statement. Her case caused such a storm among her community and activists that they refused to allow her father’s body to be cremated until the police took action. It was this protest that led to the arrests.
“No Dalit before me ever spoke out about what they (the upper castes) do,” she says, sitting in the small, sparse government flat she, her mother and brother have been given to live in (complete with armed security guards) at an undisclosed location outside Dabra. “I’m going to study law, and fight against these crimes,” she says, her voice subdued but hard, steely with anger and determination. “Perhaps, I wouldn’t have fought so hard if my father hadn’t killed himself, but I will fight now.”
Alongside Komal in her fight stand the civil organisations that Brinda Karat says are “working against the hostility present in the politics, administration and police of a state like Haryana”. Karat describes the police’s application of the SC/ST (POA) Act in the state as a “sham”.
Manisha Devi, a 27-year-old activist working with both NACDOR and AIDMAM, bears eloquent witness to the systemic oppression of Dalits. A Valmiki Dalit from Badarpur, Kurukshetra, Manisha lives a semi-nomadic life, spending one night in a village in Sonepat, for instance, before moving on to another district, another town. She’s on the road for three or four days out of every week. Manisha understood caste discrimination at an early age, seeing the difference with which the teachers in her government school would treat Dalit children and their upper-caste classmates. She says a teacher once even assaulted her for her outspoken criticism. She currently in the final year of a Master’s degree in women’s studies from Kurukshetra University and has been an activist for Dalit rights for eight years, since she was still a schoolgirl.
Manisha was with Dharampal and Manju when they went to file their FIR at the Butana Police Station. “I spoke to one of the officers there,” says Manisha, “and he told me that such problems would only end when there are no Dalit women left.” She quotes the policeman with disgust: “Yeh sab khatam ho jaani chahiyen (These women should cease to exist).”
Her years in the field, on the frontlines of the fight for Dalit rights, has made her an unflagging proselytiser for girls’ education. Her brother dropped out of college and worked as a construction labourer to pay for Manisha’s extensive schooling. She and fellow workers travel from village to village seeking young people to volunteer and help convince others to educate themselves and organise their communities.
Her colleague, 26-year-old Savita, the AIDMAM state coordinator, says with justified pride that “in Haryana’s 21 district, we have volunteers in about 19 now”. Manisha talks about all the people they have mobilised.
Reena in Badarpur, Kurukshetra, for instance, whose land was appropriated by Jat zamindars. While she was in hospital after the birth of her daughter, the Jats loaned 8,000 to her illiterate father-in-law, making him put his thumbprint on a document giving up the deeds to the family’s land. She has been fighting the Jats in the courts for eight years, refusing to be cowed. Her experiences have turned her towards activism. She tutors Dalit children in her village and encourages the women to stand up for themselves and for the dignity of their labour.
It’s the sort of positive, inspiring life lesson all the volunteers seek to impart. One of the youngest volunteers recruited by AIDMAM is 16-year-old Rekha from Nau Munda village in Samalkha tehsil. Though Rekha does not go to school — she is the only earning member of her family — she has been organising girls into groups so that they feel safety in numbers when they travel the 4-5 km to the senior school in the neighbouring village of Kiwana.
“They used to be scared to go that far,” says Rekha, “Gujjar men on motorbikes would follow and harrass Dalit schoolgirls.” Her younger sister Suman is one of those schoolgirls. Rekha is known around her area for her spunk, her fight. Silence, for her, is akin to defeat. “I remember,” she says, smiling with the thrill of her memory, “that the tailor masterji wouldn’t give a Dalit girl her school uniform. I marched up to him and asked for it. He said, ‘De toh rahan hoon behenchod (I’m giving it, sisterf***er).’ It didn’t bother me. I just said, ‘Yeh behenchod nahi hai, choti ladki hai (She isn’t a sisterf***er, she’s a child).’ He hasn’t bothered anyone since.”
Rekha is charismatic. She is wiry-strong, her hands a scarred, calloused mess from her job in the bhindi fields where she earns the 120 daily that keeps her family going. She faces down the taunts of upper-caste men and women. “They laugh in my face: ‘Yeh toh champion hai. Yeh sab karke apne baap ka naam roshan karegi (She’s a champion. She will make her father proud).’” Her father, she says, is a drunk whose addiction drove his wife to suicide.
TEHELKA witnessed some of the ritual humiliation that Rekha routinely faces. Om Prakash, a Gujjar school teacher, has been at the village’s government primary school for 17 years. According to Rekha, there are several allegations against him of sexually harassing Dalit girls. In his speech, he betrays both cynicism and self-satisfaction. He says there are teachers who will not teach Dalit children, “but that is everywhere”. When some students bring chairs and bowls and a large thali of kheer for their out-of-town visitors, there is none for Rekha. “How will it look,” says Prakash, “if a former student sits and speaks with me as an equal.”
If Prakash is sly enough to veil his distaste at sitting with a Dalit girl as guru-shishya propriety, Puran Singh Dabra, former MLA of the Indian National Lok Dal from Dabra, Hisar, is too privileged, too assured of his place in his society to bother. His family is powerful, owning several plots of land and so many houses that asking for directions to his residence proves to be trickier than expected. In an expansive mood, he graciously acknowledges the gap in the fortunes of upper- and lower-caste people.
“Dalits,” he says, “are an exploited people.” He believes though in the natural feudal order of things, a past in which castes lived in harmony because everyone knew their place. “It these organisations that started causing mistrust,” he argues, blaming those working towards empowering Dalits. “Bhadka detein hain woh logon ko (They provoke people).”
He cites, as an example, what happened in Mirchpur in 2010 after Jat men torched Dalit houses and set fire to a Dalit senior citizen and his handicapped daughter as revenge for a quarrel that began over a stray dog. Nearly 130 families were displaced, living in makeshift tents on a small plot of land on Tanvar farms in Hisar. The flimsy tarpaulin that shelters these families gives way during a drizzle.
A government team came to investigate what had happened,” says Puran Singh, puffed up with self-regard, “but they spoke only to the Dalits. Their job was to speak to both parties to ascertain who was at fault. You tell me, won’t Jats be angry at this unfairness?”
As a demonstration for the mutual respect prevalent in his village, he points to his man Friday, saying that ‘Kaka’ was in school with him, his family has served them for three generations and none of Dabra’s offspring speak rudely to him. “My driver’s family has been with mine for seven generations. All my children speak properly to him. Isn’t this mutual respect?” The ‘Kaka’ in question, as old as Dabra’s 67 years, scurries in and out of the house barefoot serving tea in hot, humid evening.
His anger at what he sees as Dalit activism is common in villages in Haryana. Many see it as a breach of the peace, a threat to the status quo or the way things have always been. Many upper-caste men and women even deny that there is an essential inequity to address.
Activists say that in every village meeting, someone from the dominant caste will inevitably stand up and declare that discrimination doesn’t exist. Resentment towards the activists often manifests itself in physical threats. Manisha, when she was helping Manju and Dharampal, was stopped by unknown men on her way home one evening and advised to watch it, in case “Kahin koi tumhe bhi na utha ke le jaye (Hope you aren’t picked up like her one of these days).”
Much is stacked against the activists. Asha Kowtal remembers meeting with Haryana mp Deepender Hooda about the 21 rapes of Dalit women last September and October. According to Kowtal, Hooda’s reflexive response was to blame the rapes on Dalit men. TEHELKA tried to contact Hooda, leaving several missed calls and text messages, to verify Kowtal’s account but to no avail.
Kowtal also said she pressed Hooda on the schemes his government is implementing to uplift Dalits. His uninspired response, she says, was to mention a scholarship for girls in all of the state’s districts. The scholarship is not restricted to Dalit girls and when Kowtal looked for a Dalit recipient of Hooda’s scholarship she says she found none. Again, TEHELKA could not verify Kowtal’s claims, despite repeated attempts to contact Hooda.
The government’s indifference is a national problem, not just one restricted to particular states. On 7 June, at a side event during the 23rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, Navi Pillay, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights declared her “fullest commitment in contributing to the eradication of caste discrimination and untouchability and the correlated deeply rooted exclusion, exploitation and marginalisation of Dalit women”. Her support was the product of powerful presentations made by Dalit women from across the subcontinent, from Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
International attention and support though doesn’t necessarily translate into action at home. The efforts of Dalit activists and, of course, the women who have suffered at the hands of the upper caste are met largely by apathy still largely ignored.
Dalits themselves are strongly divided along caste lines. Surinder Jhodka, chair of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Centre for the Study of Social Systems suggests that Dalits in Haryana have failed to organise effectively. “They have no political momentum,” he says, “particularly compared to Dalits in Punjab, such as in the Doaba region where they have formed very powerful communities.”
Perhaps, in the activities of these young girls is a glimpse of the organisation Jhodka seeks. Jagmati Sangwan, the Haryana state president for AIDWA, says that “Dalit girls are asserting their rights now, especially after the rapes of last year and then the December gangrape in New Delhi.” Sangwan herself has been fighting against khap panchayats for over a decade. She sees it right now as “personality-based rather than cohesive movement” but it is still in its incipient stage.
The scenario may seem bleak but when you meet girls like Manju, girls like Komal, committed activists like Manisha, volunteers like Rekha, it’s hard not to feel hope. The world may be opening up to these Dalit women and they are not afraid to step up and claim their place in it.
aradhna@tehelka.com
In the coalition era, only a weak politician can become the PM
How bright are the chances of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strongman and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to become India’s prime minister? Few politicians have as astute an ear to the ground as Nationalist Congress Party boss Sharad Pawar. Weighing in last week on Modi’s candidature, Pawar opined that regional players would play kingmaker after next year’s General Election. He named Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to that club.
Pawar may be on to something there. After all, no one ever became Indian prime minister by virtue of being an unchallenged leader. Not even Jawaharlal Nehru who, although the most prominent Congress leader after Gandhi, got the job in 1946 in part because of the Mahatma’s preference for him. Indeed, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who led the Congress in negotiations with the British through 1945-46, could well have trumped Nehru had he not, unfortunately for him, ended his tenure as Congress president to be succeeded by Nehru weeks before an interim government was formed.
And Pawar would know a thing or two of the misfortune of being a kingmaker but never the king. After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in the middle of the 1991 General Election, the Maratha satrap was a strong choice to become the Congress party chief, a position that could have nailed the country’s top job for him after the election. But the late Arjun Singh, an equally powerful party rival then who fancied his own chances, scuppered Pawar’s bid. Both then chose a has-been — PV Narasimha Rao — as the party’s interim boss so they could resume their battle after the results were out. Of course, as history famously records, Rao became prime minister and promptly cut both down to size.
Indeed, of India’s prime ministers, only Indira Gandhi and Rao could behave as iron-fisted overlords — and both ended up triggering multiple desertions and splits, weakening their party. With their Machiavellian politics to hound intra-party opponents, both would lose their party political ground in key states forever. Ironically, Gandhi herself first became prime minister in 1966 only as a compromise choice of rival factions of the time who saw her as a lightweight “dumb doll”. Her son, Rajiv, became prime minister because he was, well, her son and heir apparent and she had just been brutally murdered.
Among recent premiers, Atal Bihari Vajpayee spent six years repeatedly giving in to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of his BJP, as well as to recalcitrant allies over whom he had little control. George Fernandes, who quit as defence minister in the wake of Tehelka’s Operation Westend exposé, forced his way back to the job months later despite Vajpayee’s reluctance. More famously, Vajpayee wanted to but could not sack Modi after the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.
And how did Vajpayee become prime minister the first time in 1996? Up until that year, he had been in the BJP’s doghouse since deciding in 1989 to sit out the divisive campaign to build the Ram temple in place of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque. Instead, LK Advani, that campaign’s poster boy, became the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha for 1991-96. But it was Vajpayee’s image of a pliant, non-domineering politician that made the BJP dust him off the shelf to secure allies who loathed Advani.
As for the incumbent, Manmohan Singh is India’s third most durable prime minister ever only because Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s “inner voice” bade her to decline the chance to be India’s first foreigner-turned- naturalised citizen to become prime minister.
How does all this bode for Modi? If the BJP leads the 2014 Lok Sabha but falls short of 200 seats, Pawar’s Gang of Six would come into play. Yadav, Mayawati, Banerjee and Kumar depend on sizeable Muslim votes and hence are antipathetic to Modi. Even Jayalalithaa and Patnaik, who have fewer Muslim voters, harbour ambitions to become prime minister some day. Backing Modi now could haunt later.
An even bigger issue would be Modi’s history of systematically decimating every opponent over the past decade to emerge as the BJP’s prime ministerial aspirant. It would be impossible for Modi to convince the Gang of Six that he would suddenly be humble, pliant and consensual.
So if not Modi, then who? Not for nothing has Advani been positioning himself as a mellowed patriarch, an all-weather friend you can always trust.
ajit@tehelka.com