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Where does the rainforest end and the garden begin?” asks Suprabha Seshan rhetorically, wending her way up a leaf-littered trail through a dense patch of forest. On the slope above her shrubs, trees and ferns vie for space, edging each other out in their rush to capture sunlight. In the dappled shade below, orchids and ferns grow precariously on tree trunks, their delicate flowers adding the finishing touches to this three-dimensional forest garden.
A few decades ago, this patch of land in the Nilgiri mountain range of the Western Ghats of Kerala was barren. Like in other parts of the Ghats, the evergreen forests of this area had been cleared to make way for plantations of tea, cardamom, coffee and ginger.
Cultivation and increasing population pressure have been edging out the region’s endemic inhabitants — 5,000 species of flowering plants, 139 species of mammals, 508 species of birds and 179 amphibian species — which make this one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.
Less than 10 percent of the Ghats’ forests remain intact.
It has taken the gardeners and botanists of the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary more than 30 years of pain – staking work to nurse back this patch of forest to a point where the inklings of the original forests have started appearing. “It would take at least 150 years for an ‘original’ forest to grow back,” says Wolfgang Theuerkauf, 65, a reticent German who set up the sanctuary in 1981, “but even in 15 years some trees have reached a girth of 0.75 m.”
The sanctuary, a 63-acre ‘forest garden’ and refuge for the beleaguered plants of this region, is an experiment in ‘restoration ecology’, the art of recreating the immense complexity and diversity of lost forests. Here in Gurukula, a small team of 10 residents has created a microcosm of the Ghats, which now harbours over 2,000 species of orchids, ferns and trees — more than a third of the total found in the Western Ghats. “The challenge,” says Seshan, 46, director of the sanctuary, “is to compress the diversity of 1,200 sq km into this space.”
Of the sanctuary’s total area, 40 acres have been set aside to regenerate without any intervention, except for the occasional removal of invasive species. Paddy fields and vegetable patches that cater to the residents occupy a little over an acre. A small section centred on an airy, tile-roofed dining area contains greenhouses and display areas for endemic and exotic species. This area is the sanctuary’s ‘school in the forest’, to which thousands of children from schools in the district and researchers working on projects come to learn about the shapes and habits of plants. The plants here come from across the world — there are orchids from the Philippines and ferns found in the Amazon.
A whole row of staghorn ferns, with their majestic green antlers sprouting upwards, hangs like trophies from rectangular boards of bark suspended in front of the dining area. These, Seshan points out, are epiphytic, growing on trees, but collecting their nourishment from their surroundings (rather than the host). In the case of the staghorn ferns, this comes in the form of leaves that fall into a tiny basket that the plant has at its base. The humus that forms when the leaves rot is what the fern lives off.
The nursery for orchids is similarly festooned with orchids from all across the country. An emerald green Malabar pit viper lies camouflaged around the moist base of a Dendrobium barbatulum, an orchid native to the Ghats. For a fleeting moment, the violet spots on the cupped part of the orchid’s white flower look like the head of another concealed snake. “It’s poisonous but not lethal,” Seshan says walking calmly by, “we always find a couple here.”
A massive sheltered bench in the nursery is devoted to carnivorous plants — there are pitcher plants, some with large deep pitchers, others with small curved ones. Some have lids that keep water and debris from falling into the pitchers; others seem to have dispensed with them. Alongside them sits a line of sundews, delicate-looking plants that trap insects in a glutinous liquid that coats their leaves.
The sanctuary now has 600 species of orchids, of which 300 are from southern India and 100 are endemic to the Ghats.
But the heart of Gurukula’s experiment lies in a five-acre patch. Here every single tree, every fern and flower, every shrub, is meticulously tended to and documented. The habits of species here — the amount of water they need, the level of shade or sunlight they grow best in, how wind exposure affects them, and their growth trajectories — are monitored.
Here the gardeners have introduced orchids and ferns onto trees, securing them with string to tree trunks, till they attain their own toehold. Plants in this patch are pollinated by hand until populations attain densities where they can become self-regenerating. Hundreds of species of impatiens, delicate flowers with languid leaves, have been transferred here from the nursery, where they are grown from seeds. They have spread out, inhabiting nooks on the forest floor, peeking out from between rock surfaces.
This looks like a forest, but in its execution and detail it’s a garden, an immensely complex one.
How this patch of forest has grown over the past 30 years, the interventions that have succeeded and those that have failed, how well the forest here mimics the mosaic of an evergreen forest and where it differs — have instructed Gurukula’s lesson on ‘How to Grow a Rainforest’.
“The first trees to appear on the edges of areas that were clear-cut are species like ligustrums,” says Seshan pointing to a medium-sized tree. But soon other species start burgeoning from seeds and remnant roots left in the soil.
A natural progression ensues, with “ligustrums weakening in 3-4 years, and eventually being replaced”. Syzygiums, a family of trees to which clove and jamun belong, appear. As the density of the canopy increases, native jackfruit trees that require shade during their initial period of growth take root.
Over time, the emerging canopy starts stratifying itself into layers. Trees, like those from the elaeocarpus family that form the very top of the canopy, shoot straight up from the ground, branching out horizontally only once they are above other trees. “It’s up there in the canopy that the greatest diversity of orchids is actually found,” remarks Seshan. This, ironically, is where the conditions are the harshest — the winds most buffeting and the rains most pounding.
Every few years the gardeners at Gurukula assess all the species in this area, creating, in effect, a time-lapse snapshot of the forest. “We find that some people like the shade,” says Seshan, smiling at her own intended anthropomorphic reference, “others like harsh sunlight.” “Some do well in indirect sprays of water, others need a steady stream.”
In its welter of habits and temperaments, this forest is, for a gardener like her, like children in a school — each with an individual quirk, aptitude and fancy.
In a slightly higher part of the sanctuary, near the apogee of a hill, Theuerkauf is trying to plant the shola grasslands of the Ghats. These are usually found at altitudes above 1,200 m, far higher than Gurukula at 750 m. So why even attempt it? “There are two other grasslands on the neighbouring hills,” says Seshan pointing to a hill across a valley, “which according to local legends have been around forever.”
So the team is trying to see if it’s possible to create high altitude grasslands found in other parts of the Ghats. “It will,” Seshan says, “allow us to rescue species that are fast disappearing from areas like Ooty and Munnar.”
As part of this effort, patches of grass are occasionally burnt to mimic natural fires. This, says Laly Joseph, the sanctuary’s most experienced fern cultivator, fertilises the soil and gives new species room to take root.
Abutting the grassland, a landscape of rock is being created for Western Ghat species that grow on rock surfaces and cliffs. In the two years that it has been evolving, Theuerkauf has learnt some important lessons. “We’ve found that we need to use large boulders instead of small rocks in the construction of our habitats,” he says. Small rocks heat up faster, and the air pockets between them dry out the roots of these plants.
Even feeding these plants has been challenging — with too much organic matter, termites (which are not a problem at higher elevations) appear on the surface. If soil is used instead, it often collapses, suffocating the plants. The solution lies in using “a mixture of twigs and compost so that the roots penetrate quickly”, after which they can be provided additional nutrition in small amounts. A similar level of detail, care, and learning from endless trials has gone into the propagation of every different species of orchid and impatiens in the sanctuary. For each, different compositions of leaf mould, fibre and stones are created depending on the nutrients and drainage they require.
Testaments to the skills of Gurukula’s botanists emerge in the form of large brown-gold fronds of the tree-like Cyathea crinita ferns that are growing in the artificial stone cliffs above a small secret pond in the sanctuary. These ferns, one of the most endangered in the Ghats, have multiplied here, and now almost shade the pond. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) credits Gurukula with having “established an ex-situ cultivation protocol” for them.
The true test of a forest, the bellwether of its health, is the appearance of ferns. It can take a rainforest up to 15 years to reach a stage where the foliage and the microclimates in different parts of the canopy are right for their appearance.
On the trail that leads through the five-acre, intensively managed patch of forest, there are tantalising, occasional glimpses of them. Oak-leaf ferns, so called because their fronds resemble oak leaves, have started appearing on the upper reaches of tree trunks.
There aren’t as many of them as are found in old-growth forests, but their presence is evidence that India’s oldest experiment in forest restoration is on the right track. “We need a change of mindset,” says Seshan emphatically. “We are always talking about amazing animals. It’s time we started talking about amazing plants.”
akshai@tehelka.com
God’s Own Gardeners
‘Our national tendency is sentimentality’
EDITED EXCERPTS
What inspired The Hope Factory?
The novel is a story of the tremendous opportunities that exist in Indian cities. Life for those chasing a dream is an obstacle course, but the prize is big. The Hope Factory captures that through two protagonists, Anand and Kamala. Neither is an exceptional superhero. All Anand wants is to expand his factory, but he is stuck in a quagmire of complication and corruption. Kamala’s goal is to ensure her son gets an education. But she’s a single, working class mother with no roots in the city. Anand’s story came to me from a National Geographic programme I was watching on the pioneers in America going West. In the West was opportunity, but if something went wrong there was no one to help. If you’re a small businessman in India today, that’s your story. It’s not grand or heroic, but it’s the unsung story of India. Kamala’s story was born when I had to fire a cleaning lady, who couldn’t turn up for work two weeks at a time because she was sick, or had to look after her child. Her 12-year-old son stood outside and watched as I fired his mother. He gave me this look and I knew he hated me.
Your first book was a collection of stories. Was it a difficult transition to writing a novel?
Writing short stories trained me in craft and discipline. Since I was writing about contemporary urban Indians, I didn’t want to trip into stereotypes. I also wanted to avoid that other Indian trope of sentimentality, of moving towards a cheery ending with the family all in one picture. That’s a national tendency; we’ve been doing it since the Ramayana. Writing is a political act. But I don’t want to be standing on a soapbox.
The Hope Factory
Lavanya Sankaran
Hachette
368 pp; 550
You write acutely about different classes. How do you get to know your characters?
It takes a lot of research. A lawyer showed me the mechanics of a land purchase, taking me to the registrar’s office and walking me through the process. I met people in the manufacturing industry to get a feel for Anand’s life. In Indian cities, you have access to all sorts of classes. My responsibility is to use my skill as an observer and bear witness with great honesty. I can’t use my characters for propaganda.
How important is Bengaluru as your backdrop?
It is the perfect representative of the changes happening in India. It’s the great Indian boomtown. But Bengaluru is also the Lindsay Lohan of Indian cities: it’s done some really interesting things and then messed them up. Have you heard the story of the new airport? The private company in charge of building it delivered on time, but the government wasn’t ready so there was no road to get to the airport. The private company guys, in the face of the hundreds of committees ‘examining’ the problem, went ahead and built the road. Then the government began work on a highway leading from the city to the airport road. And then it changed its mind to build the highway to go above the road. But that project got stuck because the guy to whom the government gave the contract got into some corruption trouble. What makes India tick is how we deal with bad governments without losing hope. People like Anand do not let the government get in the way.
How do you use language to distinguish between your characters?
Anand’s world is primarily English-speaking, recognisable to most urban Indians. It was easier to capture his voice. But Kamala speaks in Kannada. There is a way of writing about the East that I didn’t want to adhere to. The language is very simple, making the characters seem mystical to a reader from the West. Indian languages are as complex as the lives they represent. I went back to the pre-industrial Elizabethan English of the 1600s. It’s the language of a complex mind and that’s what I wanted to give Kamala.
Why was Nand Kumar Patel Killed?
Shocking though it is and perhaps unfair, too, the allegation that Congress party leader Ajit Jogi may be complicit in last Saturday’s Maoist massacre in Chhattisgarh of 25 people, including several Congress leaders, has already been a whisper for days. The allegation came out in the open on Thursday when a top leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh reportedly said at an internal party meeting that former chief minister Jogi was “apparently” a part of the “conspiracy”.
In fact, at the funeral of Congress state president Nand Kumar Patel two days after the massacre, a few angry supporters of his reportedly raised slogans against Jogi before they were quickly hushed down. That it happened in the presence of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi rattled the party leadership. Jogi had skipped the funeral.
Jogi was not in the dragging motorcade of the Congress leaders that the Maoists ambushed, bombed and fired at on 25 May in a hilly region 35 km south of Jagdalpur town. Incapacitated in an accident nine years ago, wheelchair-bound Jogi took a helicopter to the public meeting that several Congress leaders had attended hours previously.
The others who had traveled by cars included, besides Patel, Mahendra Karma, a legislator and a bête noire of the Maoists since 2005 when he had created an anti-Maoist militia named Salwa Judum at the behest of the state government. The rebels singled out both Patel and Karma by name and pumped them with bullets on Saturday. In a statement that it issued later, the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), to which the rebels belong, said it killed the two leaders to avenge the excesses of the Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt, a counter-insurgency operation launched in 2009.
Doubtless the allegations against Jogi cannot be based on any evidence as the National Investigative Agency (NIA) has barely begun its probe. But Congress insiders, admittedly hostile to Jogi, base their suspicion on three factors:
- Once close allies, Jogi and Patel had lately become political foes so much so that Jogi had openly held anti-Patel public meetings in the latter’s native region;
- Jogi is believed to have a line of communication with the rebels; and
- Patel had no involvement in the counter-insurgency and had, in fact, been critical of the government’s policies towards the Maoist problem. Yet, the rebels targeted him.
The whisper campaign took wings when BJP leader Narendra Singh Tomar of Madhya Pradesh made the allegation against Joshi and Ananth Kumar, a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP, reportedly repeated the claim. Talking to TEHELKA correspondent Anil Mishra in Raipur, Jogi slammed the allegations against him, calling them “absurd”.
“I have already initiated criminal proceedings against both Tomar and Ananth Kumar for their baseless allegations,” Jogi told TEHELKA. Jogi said that the charge that the route of the motorcade was changed at the last minute, as is being said, cannot be laid at his door, as it was Patel himself who had done so and even so, the police had been informed of it. Another local Congress leader who is a Jogi loyalist pointed out to TEHELKA that the Maoists had already said they targeted Patel because he refused to heed their warning against organising public meetings in the tribal areas.
It is true though that the Maoists rarely target top politicians, using their firepower instead on security personnel, both the police and the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). The biggest politician they have yet attacked was the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in October 2003. He had survived. Four years later, they had killed former Jharkhand Chief Minister Babulal Marandi’s son.
So why kill Patel? A farmer’s son who wound his way up like a creeper as ambitious politicians do everywhere, just what made Patel a high value target for the rebels? And why kill his son, too? That the rebels wanted to kill Patel and his son is undoubted because they spared many others. (TEHELKA correspondent Mishra reported on Thursday that a legislator who was with Patel tried to reason with the rebels telling them that Patel was sympathetic to their cause. Yet, they asked him to run or risk being killed, too.) Indeed, after the ambush, the rebels gave some of the survivors water to drink and bandaged the wounds of a couple of people they had shot. In the statement the CPI(Maoist) issued later, it apologised for the deaths of those besides Patel and Karma.
Chronicle Of A Tragedy Not Foretold
Jogi is in the whisper campaign now because most of the politicians in the motorcade were his factional rivals in the Congress. They include former union minister Vidya Charan Shukla, 84, who received three bullets and is lying critical in a hospital near New Delhi. Jogi’s rivalry with Shukla goes back to November 2000 when Chhattisgarh was carved out of the adjoining Madhya Pradesh as a separate state. Transferred from Madhya Pradesh to Chhattisgarh, the Congress legislators held a majority in the newly minted state assembly and Shukla had expected to become its chief minister.
However, at the last minute, Jogi trumped Shukla and became the chief minister although a majority of the legislators backed Shukla. In the factional Congress contest, Shukla and the others have mostly been a proxy for Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh, a former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh who gives Jogi no quarter. Singh has smarted from the humiliation he faced at Shukla’s house when Shukla’s supporters manhandled him after Jogi was named chief minister.
Patel was once a Singh groupie and held various portfolios, including the home ministry, in Madhya Pradesh when Singh was chief minister from 1993 to 2003. Patel switched sides when Jogi became Chhattisgarh chief minister in 2000 and was made home minister, a position he held until the BJP won the 2003 Chhattisgarh assembly elections.
Many in the party have blamed Jogi for the successive Congress defeats in the assembly elections of 2003 and 2008. They claim the Hindu upper caste electorate in Chhattisgarh rejects the Congress party because Jogi is a Christian and a tribal. “Many die-hard Congress supporters have moved to the BJP as they distrust Jogi,” a Congress operative in Raipur told TEHELKA on the phone. With state assembly elections due in Chhattisgarh in December, Singh and the other Congress leaders have been urging party president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi to sideline Jogi or trim his role.
Opponents say Jogi has continued to hold sway in the party’s Chhattisgarh wing due to an unflinching backing by the Congress president, although her son is not so warm to him. Sensing Jogi’s isolation, Patel had switched back to Singh’s camp a few years ago. That coldness stiffened when Patel was made the party chief in the state in 2011. Insiders say Patel fancied his chance to become chief minister in case the Congress won the forthcoming assembly elections. Jogi could accept Patel as chief minister only at his peril. In any case, Jogi wants his wife, Renu, who is a legislator, to be a contender in the race to be chief minister should the Congress pull off a victory in December.
Patel, a non-tribal belonging to Other Backward Castes (OBC), has traditionally delivered wholesale votes to the Congress in and around his native village in Raigarh district in north Chhattisgarh. He first shot to notice in 1988 when, while only a sarpanch, he secured nearly all the 2,000 votes in his village for Congress leader Arjun Singh, who had contested a by-election to the assembly from a seat in Raigarh.
Arjun Singh was so impressed with Patel that in the 1990 assembly elections Patel got the Congress ticket from the same constituency, sidelining a former long-serving stalwart legislator who had graciously vacated his seat for Arjun Singh’s by-election just two years earlier. Patel won that election and became a minister three years later.
Congress insiders say that despite his meteoric rise, Patel was never a strongman for the simple reason that his caste brethren, who are traditionally milk producers, are limited to only three assembly constituencies in Raigarh. That is why he always needed to hitch his wagon to either Digvijay Singh or to Jogi to punch above his weight.
“Patel would never be caught openly siding with one or the other,” the insider in Raipur says. “He took care never to be seen as opposing or supporting one view or the other.”
Perhaps a fatal flaw, one that confused the Maoists about where his politics lay.
ajit@tehelka.com
Empower tribals or it will get worse: Ex-DG, BSF
EDITED EXCERPTS FROM THE INTERVIEW
The Maoists have claimed that they killed Congress leaders Mahendra Karma and Nand Kumar Patel in Chhattisgarh on 25 May 2013 as a retaliation for the Salwa Judum and Operation Green Hunt. What do you have to say to that?
The answer must be given in the context of the non-application of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. As per the Constitiution, the Scheduled Areas of the country are to be ruled by the Governor by appointing a Tribes Advisory Council which will decide what is done with the area and how it is to be administered.This Tribes Advisory Council has never been constituted by any governor. The chief minister has no role in the administration of the tribal areas and nor does the forest minister. The Tribes Advisory Council will decide whether the area must be given for mining or not. If you give the tribals this power, they will administer the area. If they want to extract minerals, they will have a liaison with the company, they will file an agreement and the company will take out the ore and the Panchayat will get the money.
What does this have to do with what the Maoists have done, in killing 27 people?
The advasi does not have this right. The chief minister of the state signs an agreement with the company and they evict tribals from the area. Is it not illegal and unlawful?
Are you saying that denial of rights to the land is fuelling the Maoist insurgency?
Obviously. The tribals are helpless. They have been evicted from hundreds of acres of land. The Maoists say, “The government is illegal and unlawful. We will have to fight them.”
Why has counterinsurgency been successful in the North-East but failed in Chhattisgarh?
The insurgency has not been successful in the North-East. First, we must ask why are civilians taking up the gun? It is because the government has been illegal and unlawful. If you remove the cause of insurgency, then it will disappear.
On 27 May, an additional 1,000 troops were sent and a combing operation was begun. How do you rate its chances of success?
There is no chance of any success because the leadership of the counter resistance forces is so poor. Besides, the main thing is that you are fighting on the wrong side. How are you going to help the adivasis when they see that the police are conducting operations? Do you know how many innocent people get killed in the process? How do you get the Maoists out of this game? That should be the objective.
Why don’t you answer that question? How do we get Maoists out of this game?
Very simple. Enforce the Fifth Schedule. Let the adivasis administer the area themselves. The chief minister is illegally administering the area by signing a lease with the mining companies. Is that not illegal and unlawful?
Isn’t the Chief Minister also a legally and democratically elected representative?
He may be democratically elected but he is doing an illegal thing. He has no power under the Act to administer the forests. The Fifth Schedule says it must be administered by the Governor of the state reporting to the President of India. Where does the Chief Minister come into this?
A lot has been said about how the route of the Congress convoy was changed on 25 May at the last minute and the fact that not enough route clearance was done, that sanitisation wasn’t done. What are these things – sanitisation and route clearance?
Whenever there is insurgency in a forested area, particularly if there are some low hills and they are thickly forested and the road is passing through that, if any convoy of the Government or a political party is passing through that route, they should inform the Government that the route should be sanitised. There should be a road opening party to go on either side of the road to a depth of 1 km so that an ambush cannot be placed. They should occupy the area at least eight hours before the party is about to move and they should sit there. Secondly, an anti-sabotage party should go through with explosive detecting equipment and sanitise the road. Only after they give the clearance, the convoy should be allowed. I don’t think any of this had been done in this case.
But how can you sanitise a route that is as long as 70-100 km?
You cannot unless you have a large enough force. We have done it in the Northeast. I’m not talking about some fairy-tale. I have done it. If it takes five days to cover 100 km, then take five days and sanitise it. If you are sitting there, then they can’t come and plant an IED.
The CRPF have faced a lot of fire from the Maoists in Chhattisgarh. Last year, the Maoists kidnapped the District Collector of Sukma, where the killings occurred on Saturday. Why are they so capable in that region?
Obviously, the forces have not been effective. The Sukma Collector went to that place with only two security guards. What a fool he is. He is a very important man and the collector of a district. He can’t go with just two men. He should have sent two-to-three companies ahead of him and cleared the area.
But he was trying an outreach among the tribal people.
Nonsense. You don’t have an outreach with two men as your guards. He will get kidnapped. The Maoists are using the adivasis to come to power. You are not treating them justly which is why they are going to the Maoists. The Maoists will promise them that when we get the power you will administer the area yourself. The adivasis are poor, illiterate people. What can they do but agree? The only way out is to implement the Fifth Schedule.
But in 65 years, the Fifth Schedule has never been implemented and it is not going to be implemented in a hurry.
It is the law of the land and if you are not implementing it, then you are illegal and unlawful. I’ll give you the answer why it is not implemented. Because, there are millions of dollars available to the Government under these areas and nobody wants to give that money to the adivasis.
Where do you see the situation headed now in the next two to six months?
It is going to keep going on and on. Continuous fighting will take casualties. A lot of innocent tribals will be killed and the situation will go from bad to worse.
Notes of Dissent
Delhi University has always been political, but rarely has it been embroiled in as much controversy as it finds itself today. On 9 May, the university issued a press release stating that its Academic Council, an elected statutory body, had by an “overwhelming majority” approved a radical new four-year undergraduate programme. The programme, to be introduced in the coming academic session, will be the most radical change in the university curricula in the past few decades. It proposes to replace the standard three-year undergraduate programme with one that stretches over four years, and includes mandatory vocational training and foundational courses – which aim to give undergraduate students a broad-based education. It is hoped that this will make them more “all-rounded” and “employable”. The announcement set of a maelstrom of protest from student and teacher groups that spanned the political and social gamut. The Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) unanimously rejected it, saying it was against the National Education Policy, and asked for the dismissal of controversial Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh. A group of political leaders such as Sitaram Yechury, Ram Vilas Paswan, D Raja and Sharad Yadav also stepped in, claiming that the four-year programme would be “detrimental” to the interest of SC/ST and OBC students, and those coming from “Hindi-medium, weaker sections”. Academics like noted historian Shahid Amin said that the haste with which the changes were being implemented was “self-defeating” and the whole exercise had an “impossible timetable”. Even members from the DU’s Executive Council, its highest executive body, were critical. Dr Abha Dev Habib says that a “nationwide debate leading to a coherent policy must take place” before DU is allowed to go ahead with these changes.
The criticism prompted the VC to react strongly. He reiterated that DU “would introduce the new four-year undergraduate programme from the ensuing academic session”. “The rumour mills,” he said dismissing the criticism, “were rife with baseless propaganda.” Under the new system, the three-year bachelor’s degree with BA and BSc courses in the ‘honours’ and ‘programme’ streams will be replaced with a four-year course that will have multiple exit points. Having chosen a course of study, a student who decided to exit after two years would get a diploma in the subject. Those exiting after three years get a bachelor’s degree; and those who complete all four years get an honours degree.
As part of the broad-basing of education, the new system requires all students to study six different types of courses. Eleven ‘foundation’ courses occupy two-thirds of the first year of study and a third of the second. They range from language, literature and creativity to science and life and business, entrepreneurship and management. These are accompanied by courses on ‘integrating mind, body and heart’ and ‘cultural activities’.
Discipline I courses (of the subject in which the student has chosen to graduate) comprise a third of the first and second years, and the bulk of the third and fourth. In addition, students are required to do ‘applied courses’ or skills-based ones; and Discipline II or ‘minor’ courses.
It’s a system that purportedly builds on and amplifies the controversial semester system that the VC had introduced in 2011. In the semester system, courses have been divided into semesters; and exams that were previously annual have become biannual. The criticism of the four-year programme has been wide-ranging. Most critics accuse the VC of having pushed it through in a hurry, with little thought to how the courses are going to be structured. According to a petition filed by Amin and a group of DU teachers, the new programme was pushed through at an ‘extraordinary’ meeting of the Academic Council in December 2012. The council was given three days to peruse and opine on such major changes. In his defence, the VC has said that he had appointed a ‘task force’ to design the four-year undergraduate programme in September 2012. However, this group was appointed entirely by him – neither were all members of the Academic Council included, not were even the heads of all departments of the university.
On 5 March, the university issued the first official letter asking departments to initiate the syllabus-making process. The teachers were required to frame the syllabus in just two weeks. Even though this deadline was relaxed by a month, it was still unrealistic. Apart from the suspicious hurry in pushing through the course, there were other lacunae. In a letter to the University Grants Commission (UGC), Dr Abha Dev Anand complained that due to the course structure, those “leaving at the end of two years would have studied very little of the major discipline and hardly much vocational training”. Other critics have seconded this, pointing out that by trying to combine different courses and objectives into a single course, the new system ends up falling between stools. Worse, they say that students are shortchanged – those interested in earning a diploma and bachelor’s degree learn far less than what they would in the current system, and are therefore unlikely to be employable (which according to the VC is one of the key objectives of the new system). And those doing an honours degree end up spending a lot of time on (foundation and application) courses that are either irrelevant or repeat what they have already learnt in school.
The system does not match any accepted pattern of undergraduate education. Both the American and British systems keep vocational education and undergraduate degree courses apart, the former by way of community colleges and liberal arts colleges and the latter by way of polytechnics and degree colleges. While movement between the two is permitted, it is conditional.
The touted academic flexibility of the new programme is also elusive – there are fewer optional or elective courses for ‘main’ subjects, and none at all for courses in which a student is getting a ‘minor’. DU also seems to be unprepared with the additional infrastructure the new programme will require. It currently has 3,000 UGC-sanctioned teaching posts that have remained unfilled for the past three years. The semester system has already put the DU under severe strain by compressing courses into fewer teaching days so as to be able to accommodate two rounds of exams.
The four-year programme adds to the pressure by increasing the number of undergraduate students; and requires the teaching of additional (common) courses.
The VC, however, says that DU is in the process of filling up these positions. “We expect to initiate the process for regular appointments of permanent faculty through selection committees by June,” he said. Even if it were possible to fill all these vacancies, it seems unlikely that the teachers will be ready to shift to the new teaching paradigm by the coming academic year.
There have been vague pronouncements on allowing undergraduates from the four-year programme to finish their master’s degrees in a year – but how this will be done, and what it entails, remain unclear. The UGC, which is tasked with reviewing the infrastructure of universities and colleges, does not seem to have looked at these shortcomings.
Neither is it clear how admissions will be impacted, given that admissions to all courses in a particular discipline will now be amalgamated. Nor has the possible effect of a large number of students deciding to exit after either the second or third year, on the viability of teaching the remaining students, been debated. The additional year will also commensurately increase expenditure for students, which according to Udit Raj of the All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations will only make education inaccessible to poor and underprivileged students.
What makes critics even more apprehensive is the VC’s penchant for introducing changes with little discussion. A little over a year ago, he had similarly pushed through a set of multi-disciplinary courses – a BTech in humanities and a BS in innovation – as part of the Meta College (a kind of supra-college) that he started. The idea was to allow students to range across disciplines, choosing in the BTech between areas as diverse as journalism, education, counselling, historical tourism, etc.
Beyond this there was little clarity on the rationale for this new scheme, the costs, or how it would be implemented. It was railroaded through despite 25 Academic Council members submitting notes of dissent. Not surprisingly, the response to it has been lukewarm. The undue haste with which the change is being pushed through is inexplicable. If all 600 universities in India start creating separate rules and courses without wide-scale consultations, it will result “in a chaotic situation in the field of education,” says Ram Vilas Paswan.
“The most puzzling aspect of the four-year undergraduate programme is that a major reform has been initiated without the backing of a national policy statement or white paper examining its rationale,” says the statement issued by Shahid Amin’s group.
Dubious role of police exposed in custodial death of terror accused in Uttar Pradesh
If we accept the official explanation for the death on 18 May of Khalid Mujahid, an under-trial prisoner in Uttar Pradesh accused of terrorism, then India may have just lost a superman. More likely, the police have made up facts and may soon be exposed.
According to the official explanation, Mujahid, 32, was taken ill at 3.40 pm in the eastern district of Barabanki and admitted to a government hospital where he was pronounced dead. This claim was made by none other than the district magistrate of Barabanki, S Minisati, when she visited the hospital. But Mujahid’s lawyer says he had minutes earlier been in another city 65 km away to attend the hearing in one of the terror cases in which he is an accused. “Mujahid left that courtroom at 3.30 pm,” says Randhir Singh Suman, his lawyer. “How did he cover 65 km in 10 minutes?”
Good question. But then, Mujahid’s tragic story is a litany of such irreconcilable facts right from the day he was arrested by the anti-terrorism Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh Police in December 2007. Indeed, the police have been thoroughly exposed as lying about him right from the beginning. Yet, it confounds common sense and offends judicial propriety that successive judges not only did not throw out the case against Mujahid as wholly spurious but also refused to grant him bail that he deserved.
Worse, a trial judge ignored his repeated pleas, including written, that the policemen that ferried him between the prison and the court had explicitly threatened to kill him in an “encounter”, a euphemism for extrajudicial killings by the police. Two months ago, a second lawyer who represented Mujahid in another terror case being prosecuted in Lucknow, Mohammad Shoib, told the state’s jail minister that the several Muslim youths, including Mujahid, being tried for terrorism faced threats to their lives. Shoib was also among the last to see Mujahid alive. “We were together in the court until 3.20 pm,” he says. “Ten minutes later, I saw the police van carrying him leave the court premises.”
And now Mujahid is dead. Here is how the state, its police and the judiciary combined to first frame him and then deny him justice.
On 22 December 2007 police announced the arrest of two “terrorists” from a location 20 km east of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. They were apprehended, police said, from a railway station in the town of Barabanki that is a satellite of the capital. One of the two arrested men was Mujahid, a madrassa teacher in Jaunpur district, 250 km east of Lucknow. The other was Tariq Kasmi, a practitioner of the Unani medicine system in the district of Azamgarh, which is adjacent to Jaunpur.
The police claimed that Mujahid and Kasmi were responsible for simultaneous bombings in the district courts of Lucknow and Faizabad, which is 120 km east of the capital, on 22 November 2007. They said the two men had been arrested with explosives. Subsequently, the two were implicated in three different cases: one each in Lucknow and Faizabad for the bombings, and one in Barabanki for carrying explosives. They were charged with sedition and waging war against the state, both colonial era constructs, as also under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Explosives Act.
Instantly, Mujahid’s family members and well-wishers as well as human rights activists jumped in and demolished the police story. They claimed Mujahid was arrested in broad daylight from a crowded market six days previously, on 16 December 2007. His arrest had sparked protests in his town, Madiyahu, in Jaunpur district. Newspapers had reported both. Local police, civil officials and even the courts were given representations against his arrest. Yet, a judicial magistrate bought the police version that it arrested Mujahid and Kasmi from Barabanki railway station on 22 December 2007.
Could this be dismissed as partisan bickering? If yes, then consider this. In response to a plea filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the police station in Mujahid’s township, too, acknowledged that he had been arrested from the market near his house on 16 December 2007. This evidence directly contradicted what the police had told the Barabanki magistrate, before whom the two men had been presented and who had remanded them to a police custody. Mujahid quickly sought to file the RTI reply with various trial courts in Barabanki, Lucknow and Faizabad and press for justice.
But the courts told him that they can’t accept the RTI document until the prosecution had finished its arguments. That was in 2009. It is 2013 now and the prosecution hasn’t yet finished its arguments. So the defence lawyers decided to try their luck with the high court to at least get him bail. They believed that the discordance in the two versions of police should make it an open-and-shut case in their favour. But the High Court said he was accused of a “heinous crime” and could not be bailed.
In fact, eyebrows are also raised at the role of the then Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) of Barabanki, Anupama Gopal Nigam, who first remanded Mujahid (and Kasmi) in police custody. As per the procedure, the police needed to file an application before the CJM informing of the arrests of the two men and then asking the magistrate to come down to the prison to hear Mujahid and Kasmi’s remand plea because they did not want to bring them to the court for security reasons. “But no such document exists in the court records,” Mujahid’s lawyer, Suman, told TEHELKA from Barabanki. “Did the CJM go to the jail on her own?”
There is more. Suman cross-examined a police officer named Dayaram Saroj when the prosecution called him to depose. As the investigating officer in the case, Saroj should have made that formal request before the CJM. On being cross-examined, Saroj claimed that he himself had handed such an application to the CJM when she visited the prison after the arrests. But in response to an RTI application, prison authorities told Mujahid’s family that Saroj did not visit the prison that day. “This is a serious lapse,” Suman said.
On 19 May, Mujahid’s uncle, Zahir Alam Falahi, filed a First Information Report (FIR) with the Barabanki police alleging that Mujahid had been murdered as a result of a conspiracy. The FIR directly named a total of 42 officers, including a former director-general of police, the highest-ranking police officer in the state, as responsible for it. The question is: why would these police officers want to eliminate Mujahid?
The answer ironically lies in the first real spark of hope for Mujahid. After sustained pressure from human rights groups and various organisations of the Muslims, UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav’s government moved the local court in Barabanki on 3 May 2013 seeking to withdraw its charges against Mujahid and Kasmi. A week later, Additional Sessions Judge Kalpana Mishra of Barabanki rejected the state’s request on a plea from some local lawyers. “These lawyers are from the RSS,” says Suman, referring to the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “She heard them in her chamber and passed the order without the defence being present.”
But the battle may already be tilting in favour of the accused. For three years, a rights platform named Rihaee Manch has vigorously exposed police falsehoods in cases of terrorism in UP and campaigned to seek the release of the accused. The issue picked up steam last year when leading political figures such as Prakash Karat of the CPM, AB Bardhan of the CPI, Bihar politicians Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan, and Congress Rajya Sabha MP Mani Shankar Aiyar came together and demanded an end to what they called the politics of terror against Muslims.
In 2008, then UP Chief Minister Mayawati had asked retired district judge RD Nimesh to probe the allegation that the police had illegally arrested the two men. He finally submitted his report last August. Although Chief Minister Yadav’s government has stonewalled the demands to release that report, it is widely believed that the commission has damned the police for arresting Mujahid and Kasmi and ruled their arrest as illegal.
“The police officers involved in Mujahid’s illegal arrest are obviously worried,” Shahnawaz Hussain, an activist with Rihaee Manch, told TEHELKA over phone from Jaunpur where he had gone to attend Mujahid’s funeral. “Had Mujahid lived, he would have been a prime witness in the case against them and they couldn’t afford that.”
The defence lawyers and rights activists are now worried for the safety of the remaining accused, who include Kasmi and two Kashmiri men, Sajjadur Rahman and Akhtar who were arrested from Jammu and Kashmir on 22 December 2007 and handed over to UP Police a week later. Strangely, the Jammu and Kashmir Police dropped the original charges on which it had arrested the two men before turning them over to UP Police.
The next hearing in the original case in Barabanki will be held on 31 May 2013. The defence lawyers say they would move the court to ensure that the lives of the other accused are not endangered. “Ironically though, greater security would mean a greater threat to their lives as it is the police who want them eliminated,” Suman said.
Pakistan: A House Deeply Divided
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Make no mistake. The 11 May General Election has sharply divided Pakistan. The back-slapping commentariat has been congratulating fellow Pakistanis for democratically voting out a government. Before the end of the next week, Mian Mohammad Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has won the most seats in the National Assembly, will become prime minister. This election is being touted as a deepening of representative democracy in Pakistan because it is the first-ever “smooth” transition from one elected civilian government to another.
But in truth, as with many elections in Pakistan in the past, this time, too, there is widespread belief that the results have been manipulated. Of course, it may never be known if the charge is accurate or not. It must be stressed though that the world would be in error if it believed that Pakistanis see this election much differently from the past ones. They don’t. Perhaps they are angrier than in the past as for the first time the charge that an elector may have rigged the vote is the elephant in the room. In a rush to hail Pakistan’s arrival as a nation of elections, no one wants to talk of vote manipulation.
First of all, the charge that the results may have been manipulated is emerging not only from Pakistan’s former cricket captain, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) party but also from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that led the outgoing government. And they aren’t all tantrums of the crybabies. Dozens of seats across Pakistan saw a surprising spike in the tally of votes cast in comparison with the last elections of 2008.
For example, in one of the 13 constituencies of Lahore, about 1.6 lakh ballots were cast. Five years ago, that figure had been around 90,000. This time, the incumbent, Tahir Shabbir of PPP, lost to Nawaz Sharif’s brother Shahbaz Sharif. “No one reported that there was a dramatic surge in voting this year compared with 2008,” Shabbir’s brother, Tahir, a 50-year-old paediatrician, told Tehelka. “And yet we are told that the number of voters who showed up were almost double of 2008. How is that?” The answer to that question may arrive soon enough when a by-election is called on that seat as the winner, Shahbaz, is likely to resign from it. He is set to return to his day job as chief minister of the Punjab province that he had since 2008. The PML-N has handsomely won Punjab’s provincial polls held simultaneously with the national one.
Another PML-N victor to the National Assembly from Lahore, Sheikh Saad Rafiq, has been all over television since winning for all the wrong reasons. In stills and videos, he is shown to have forced his way into the women’s section of a local polling station. Certainly, as a candidate, he had the legal right to visit it. But he is seen arguing with voters and polling officials. Rafiq, who I hung out with on polling day as he went to vote, denies he and his men threatened electors who were opposed to him. “I have won fair and square,” he told me later. “These are baseless allegations.”
Once again, however, his opponents point to the numbers being put out. Rafiq won about 1.16 lakh votes. The runner-up, a prominent lawyer named Hamid Khan from PPP fetched 80,000. “This is the cantonment area where most residents have their votes elsewhere in the country,” says Adam Pal, 30, a political activist who travelled across Pakistan to observe the campaigns. “The voting couldn’t have been that high.”
PODCAST
Indeed, for hours on 11 May afternoon as Sharif voted in downtown Lahore and returned to his sprawling party office in the upscale Model Town area, I sat with him, his daughter, Maryam, his brother, Shahbaz, and an assortment of family members and close and trusted aides. It was a unique experience to watch Sharif anxiously flip between the television news stations to see which way the wind was blowing. And anxious he was for at least three hours, until the early results began to trickle in, most of which were in his party’s favour. He began to be relaxed much later.
When I asked Sharif right at the start what he thought of his chances, he in turn asked me what I felt from my romp at the city’s polling booths. He would not speak his mind when a trusted former bureaucrat told Sharif that he believed the PML-N would win upwards of 125 seats in the 272-member National Assembly. (Seventy seats are nominated from among women and the religious minorities.) The discussions there did not include any reports of a massive turnout at the city’s polling stations. A couple of aides even said that the morning had seen mostly voters of the PTI turn up while Sharif’s voters had started coming in after lunch hour. Polling closed at 6 pm. Yet, in the end, his party won 12 of Lahore’s 13 seats, defeating even Imran Khan.
Few are thus buying the official national average turnout of 60 percent. The figure is rather difficult to digest because in several parts of Pakistan, such as in the Baluchistan province in the southwest, the turnout has been as low as 10 percent due to threats from a nationalist insurgency that has wracked the region for decades. Similarly, many constituencies in northern Pakistan and along its western borders with Afghanistan also reported a poor response in view of threats from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is distinct from the Afghan Taliban and has run a series of murderous attacks on candidates and their supporters as well as on civilians during the campaign season.
