MUMBAI-BASED scriptwriter Rajesh Devraj, creator of Channel [V]’s Quick Gun Murugun, is about to release his first graphic novel. The collaboration between him and illustrator Meren Imchen, Sudershan (Chimpanzee) is set in Mumbai where anthropomorphised animals and humans work in the film business together. It charts the rise, fall and heartbreak of the titular chimp and Bollywood superstar Sudershan. Harking back to the days of Bollywood’s animal heroes, this is a darkly funny tale of celluloid dreams and the absurdity of humans who will dance like monkeys to other people’s tunes.
The City of the Apes
‘Like films, science uses known facts to create a new world’
Q&A Bedabrata Pain, Filmmaker
AFTER 18 YEARS as a NASA scientist Bedabrata Pain (48) makes his directorial debut with Chittagong, a film about the 1930 Uprising where young men and women, led by schoolteacher Surya Sen, took on the British Empire. Pain talks to Aradhna Wal about recreating history and reaching for the arts via science.
EDITED EXCERPTS
How did Chittagong come about?
As a Bengali growing up in Bengal, I was so familiar with the Chittagong Uprising, I didn’t think a movie could be made of it. I’d read books on it — Suresh Dey’s first hand account of the Uprising’s Battle of Jalalabad. Talking to a Delhi University student in 2006, I realised people from outside the state didn’t know the story. As I started voicing the idea, someone told me about Subodh ‘Jhunku’ Roy, one of the participants in the struggle. I rushed to the hospital he was admitted to and met him two weeks before he died. I decided to tell this fascinating story from a boy’s perspective. Manoj Bajpai (as Surya Sen) and Nawazuddin Siddiqui have meaty roles. But the frail 14-year-old that Jhunku had been, the youngest boy to pick up a gun, is the mainstay of the film.
Why cinema after working with NASA for 18 years?
My mother tells me that I was a great storyteller as a child. I’m a very visual person. Even as a scientist, when I made pitches to sponsors I’d keep seeing what I was saying in my mind’s eye. That’s what cinema is. Seeing and saying come together. My life has been the 3 Idiots story. I was good in studies, told to go to IIT, topped my department and got an Ivy League scholarship. During my PhD, my friends and I invented the active pixel sensor and that set my life for the next 15 years. You get addicted to the work, as one would get addicted to cocaine. One day, my colleagues told me to plan for life as a chief scientist, and I had a vision of myself as doddering 60-year-old at NASA. That scared me. If I wanted to do something different with my life I’d have to do it now. Much as I love science, performance arts have an excitement that science doesn’t.
How has the transition been?
What’s tough is that I’ve gone from being the top person in my field, to scraping the bottom of the barrel. But, luckily for me, in the past five years independent films have been given unprecedented space.
As a scientist, what do you bring to film-making?
Structure. I went through 36 drafts of the screenplay, tracking each character to make sure their arcs aligned. Science is also about creativity, which many people forget. It’s about using known facts to create a new world with its own logic and rules. Force will be mass into acceleration, but you can go beyond that to come up with the theory of relativity. That’s how, using history, I’ve brought a film into existence. Every night, as everyone else slept, I would close my eyes and think of what I wanted to see.
How did you fund the film as a newcomer?
When I came up with the script in 2008, people loved it. Prasoon (Joshi) took it to Reliance who wanted to make the film. But, at the end of the year recession hit and I got caught. We were supposed to start shooting on 15 December 2008, but I was told that it had been put on hold. Then Ashutosh Gowarikar announced his film on the same subject(Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey) and I knew that I wasn’t going to get any money. Early 2009, I got the money from my patents and put every cent into this film. I am the producer director and writer of this film. It’s my baby.
What about the reports that Amitabh Bachchan stalled your film to push Gowarikar’s?
Amitabh Bachchan came and blessed my film. I’ve grown up watching him and Jaya Bachchan on the screen. It was a dream come true. What more can I say?
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
Winning Words
Fresh from another award, writer Dilip D’Souza talks to Aradhna Wal
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
DILIP D’SOUZA does not call himself a journalist. He finds that an insult to other people in the field who have worked hard to get where they are. Nor does he label himself a leftist, rightist, centralist. “I’m just a writer. And a man with opinions,” he says.
The 52-year-old Mumbai-based writer recently won the ‘Newsweek and The Daily Beast-Open Hands Prize for Commentary in South Asia’. His award entails a month-long residency at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in New York. Nominated by his editor from HarperCollins India, he won the award for three pieces — ‘Mr Tendulkar’s Neighbourhood’ and ‘Get to the Top’ forThe Caravan, and ‘A Few Good Doctors’ on rural healthcare in Chhattisgarh, for Fountain Ink magazine.
A graduate of BITS Pilani, D’Souza refers to his days as a software engineer in the States as his “previous life”. Twenty years ago he discovered his passion for writing and came back to India. Since then he has been on the hunt for stories in different parts of the country, from living next door to Sachin, to Muslim neighbourhoods in Mumbai, to denotified tribes. He is, however, keeping his next project under wraps.
He attributes living and travelling abroad to opening his eyes to India. “Growing up you get conditioned to poverty and to filth. After I came back, the first thing I asked myself was, why don’t we keep our streets clean. You get rid of preconceived notions. People in the States grow up with the same family values, if you want to call them that, as we do. And, despite what many undergraduate fresh-off-the-boat students expect, women are not simply going to fall in bed with you.” His book Roadrunner: An Indian Quest in America was his attempt to look at the country without prejudice. “I held up a mirror to America, which reflected both me and my country. Writing is a way of educating myself.”
Label shy, D’Souza laughingly recounts the Wikipedia war over his political loyalties. Different users changed his description from Communist to left liberal and, post-award, to “far-left, Western left liberal” and “follower of Che Guevara”. “Call me what makes you happy,” he says, “I am just trying to keep an open mind.”
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Teheslka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
The art mart
Annurag Sharma, and Johny ML have brought unnoticed art to the masses. Can they sustain it as a truly democratic model? Aradhna Wal finds out
Photo: Shailendra Pandey
HIGHLY ANTICIPATED and massively scaled, the United Art Fair (UAF) began on the wrong foot. On 27 September, at New Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, well-heeled guests were wandering around slightly lost. Almost 600 works of art had been displayed without the artists’ names. The harried organising team muttered something about mismanagement. Curator Johny ML had an explanation at hand: “I don’t want people to look for established names. Let them stumble across works that please or surprise them.” Founder Annurag Sharma concurred, “I want people to form an emotional attachment to works they like, not look for artists they know of.”
UAF’s first edition pegged itself on the democratisation of contemporary Indian art since its inception, calling itself the world’s first “artist-driven art fair”. The selected artists paid no participation fee for the four days (27-30 September). Galleries, who normally pay for space, were kept out of the proceedings — a move that pleased some and perplexed others.
The venue housed a collection of masters’ works — Akbar Padamsee, MF Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon; contemporary established artists — Chintan Upadhyay, Brinda Miller, Subodh Kerkar; and hitherto unknown talent from across the country. Johny travelled to 15 cities, hunting in small art institutes and studios. One centrepiece, a life-size fiberglass replica of a luxury car, worth 45 lakh, was by a young Delhi College of Arts student, Neeraj Rawal.
As the curatorial mastermind, Johny had organised the space like a mini-city. The maze-like-streets were named after great artists of yore, such as Rabindranath Tagore Street and Amrita Sher-Gil Street. Turn left, you were confronted by Gandhi depicted in a series of modern landscapes; turn right and there were photographs of ants crawling over naked human bodies.
“There is shock value and some inherent criticism of art in the way I have curated. We have many first-time buyers picking up works that please the eye. But I want to educate them. Why are they looking at one work in a particular way? Why should we hold some things sacred?” asked Johny.
Yet, he, as the puppet master, could see that larger picture that escaped many. The street names were random. It made no sense to put some artworks under Tagore’s name and not others. An educated viewer would be tempted to look for symbolism that wasn’t there; a less-informed one would believe that there was some. Raqs Media Collective curator Monica Narula expressed her reservation: “Selection is opinion-based.
But to curate is to provoke questions about what is at stake. It’s about custodianship. How democratic is one man managing the space for hundreds of artists, displaying them according to his vision?” She questioned the exclusion of galleries. “The fair takes 50 percent of the sales proceedings, just like galleries. Isn’t it functioning like a large gallery? Galleries promote artists over a sustained period of time. Here, the spotlight lasts four days.”
Sharma put the figure at 35 percent, saying they used the money to frame and transport the artwork for many artists. He also plans to take 100 artists, selected by the fair’s jury, to different cities and abroad.
‘I don’t want people to look for big names. Let them stumble across works that surprise them,’ says Johny
Goan artist Subodh Kerkar happily supported Sharma and Johny: “I’ve never displayed at the India Art Fair as I’ve never been associated with a gallery that would pay for space. If you’re not with a gallery, you’re out.” There is also the danger that market-driven galleries drop artists when they find the next flavour of the year.
Delhi-based art critic Ina Puri was sceptical, but on board. She warned, and Sharma agreed, that commerce and galleries would come into play at some point in the future. As a launching pad, the UAF is a worthy endeavour if it proves its credibility over time. Both the founder and the curator are aware that they have to build a brand.
So far, the inauguration has proved to be a success. As confusing as the first impression is, the fair comes together, organically, over the four days. Just like a city teeming with life, there was a method to Johny’s madness.
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
‘If a shy, gay man born in a Bombay chawl can see this fame, anyone can’
WENDELL Rodricks’ inspirational personal arc and disciplined engagement with his craft make his autobiography an engrossing read. The 52-year-old fashion designer discusses The Green Room with Ajachi chakrabarti.
EDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW
When does one decide that it’s time to write a memoir?
I thought I’d write an autobiography later, maybe 10 years from now, but the opportunity presented itself. Other designers are doing retrospectives, and I was pompous enough to think a book would be more cerebral. I was worried that some things that were being perpetuated about me would go down in posterity. If I am truthful, accept all my flaws as well as my victories, and state it without getting emotionally involved with myself, I could guard against self-indulgence. There were moments when I was skating on thin ice because I spoke about every collection I did. That was a slight indulgence.
Is this your personal story or a history of fashion?
At least a quarter of it is about the fashion industry. I wanted to tell a story of inspiration. Throughout my career, I’d come home and say, “Pinch me, I’m dreaming.” If I, as a shy, stuttering, gay man born in a Bombay chawl could see this fame, anyone could.
Is the perception of fashion as an industry ruled by egos and scandals accurate?
I have seen the real Page 3. But then I go to a party in my village, and there’s a rich person showing off his car, and an auntie from the Gulf doing her thing. Fashion and cinema get a spotlight because of the spotlight they already have. There’s talk about cocaine in the fashion industry, but there is cocaine among bankers, corporations and the media. Every profession has the same cast of characters.
How has Goa affected your sensibilities, your method?
If not for Goa, I wouldn’t be able to give this country minimalism, or resort wear, or eco-friendly clothes. It was Goa that gave me that inspiration, as a result of being close to nature and being with people who did not care where I came from. In fact, my staff had no idea I was famous till they saw me in the papers. But it didn’t affect them. That is what Goa gave me: a very real life devoid of flattery and sycophancy.
Wendell Rodricks
Rupa & Co
380 pp; Rs 595
Your book talks about your partner Jerome, but doesn’t discuss the struggles of coming out.
That’s because I did not have any struggles. I was honest with my family from the beginning. When I introduced them to Jerome, they accepted him because he is a solid person. If I had an outing of sorts, it was Shobhaa Dé writing about it. That spooked my family. They were fine with the larger family knowing, the colony knowing, all of Mahim knowing, but suddenly going out into the public arena was a shock.
You are planning to write a textbook on cutting cloth.
You see students trying to cut a garment, they are going crazy because it is based on this obscure method that requires a lot of mathematical calculation, and all fashion designers are terrible at math. I can throw a pair of scissors to barely half a dozen designers today who will be able to cut a garment in 10 minutes. Indian tailors have a method in their head and they cut in a certain way, but if you ask them what that method is, they won’t be able to tell you. I’ve stumbled upon a formula. If you watch me cut in that method, even you’d be able to cut clothes.
Why isn’t the fashion industry thinking about techniques and disseminating them?
They’re too busy making money (laughs). I think there is a lot of scope for research, if the various levels of this industry come together on one platform. If I could write a book like Moda Goa, I’m sure other designers can do a better job with their states. Nobody can do Kolkata better than Sabyasachi (Mukherjee) and no one can do Kashmir better than Rohit Bal. The problem is that like everything else in India, there is very little R&D. We need to constantly update our syllabus.
ajachi@tehelka.com
A Wry Read on Royalty
Ruskin Bond’s newest book is a detached and amused look at a decadent queen and an age long gone, says Aradhna Wal
AS YOU get older you have more stories to tell,” is how Ruskin Bond explains publishing a book every year. The 78-year-old author’s latest book, Maharani, falls into a familiar groove of chronicling a bygone era. The novella is a charming look at a motley bunch of characters and life in the hills when they were a destination for the elite.
Ruskin, the eponymous narrator, and Neena meet at a school ‘social’. Married at 16 to the older Maharajah of Mastipur, whose signature eccentricity is raising white mice, Her Highness is a grand old dame with a hefty sense of old school entitlement. The narrator and HH, as he fondly calls her, reconnect on a Pondicherry beach, and party at her home in Mussoorie, which overflows with liquor supplied by her many lovers, from Bolivian diplomats and Brigadiers, to a hotel pianist.
“I am a romantic,” Bond admits. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.” “Here” is the slopes of Mussoorie, which he describes sparely, yet evoking lush images of light and shadow, of sunsets and solitary walks that end in chance encounters with the book’s quirky cast. Pablo, the beautiful, beloved young son of the seduced diplomat sticks pins into voodoo dolls, hoping to kill off people he intensely dislikes. His sister, Anna, serenely sketches the ghosts she sees in windows. This infusion of whimsy and the supernatural is as integral to Bond’s writing as it is to the hills. Bond collects eccentrics. “I’ve always gotten along with difficult people. Perhaps growing up in a home with relatives always in strange troubles has something to do with it. Maybe I’m a good listener to these people. Maybe they’re the ones with the best stories,” he says. His romanticism hasn’t divorced him from reality. “The more you are around adults, the sooner you lose your innocence. Perhaps, there are some people in whom it is inbred and stays for life,” muses the author and finds echo in his writing. “This book is about decay,” he says. That becomes nauseatingly obvious in the two-foot-long field rats and the innumerable pet dogs that go astray. They have a grim part to play in the plot. “Animals belong to the wild, it is a little unnatural to keep them as pets. Nature will intrude in some way,” says Bond.
Ruskin Bond
Penguin
192pp; Rs 350
This isn’t the sepia-tinted world of his earlier work. “I think I’ve grown more cynical, and my writing and humour have a sharper edge to them.” Ruskin, the character, professes neither a great friendship with HH nor a strong condemnation of her merry destruction of others’ happiness. Theirs is a happy companionship. HH, though hard to like, is riveting, with her salacious stories, like the one about Jim Corbett’s indifference towards women. Who she really is, Bond is reluctant to divulge. He laughs off the question, saying she is an amalgam of many people he has known. “It is important to preserve these memories, to show readers that such people did exist. It’s a personal aim. As I write them down, fiction takes over.”
His books exist in those blurry boundaries and he finds writing in first person much easier. “Once I wrote about myself as a boy escaping Japanese occupation in Jakarta. And people thought it was true,” he laughs. Dickens, with his own eventful childhood, is Bond’s literary hero. On whether Maharani is reality or fiction, he quotes that other wonderful charlatan, Mark Twain, “Interesting if true. And if not true, still interesting.”
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
The Gavel Sounded Right
Jyotsna Yagnik, who delivered the historic Naroda Patiya judgement, sentencing Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani to life, is no stranger to difficult cases, says Ajachi Chakrabarti
The Naroda Patiya judgement has rightly been lauded as a landmark in the long road to providing justice for the victims of the 2002 Gujarat riots. The 1,969-page verdict, holding former BJP ministers Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and 30 others guilty for the 28 February 2002 massacre in Gujarat that saw 97 people mercilessly killed, has been praised by lawyers and activists alike.
At the centre of all this is a 58-year-old woman, described as a “very upright Hindu”, who spent nearly three years hearing the shocking testimonies of those who had witnessed the wanton violence. Special judge Jyotsna Yagnik is no stranger to high-profile cases involving violence. In 2008, she sentenced Delhi businessman Sajal Jain and four of his friends to life imprisonment for gang raping Jain’s 24-year-old mistress Bijal Joshi on New Year’s Eve in 2003. Joshi had killed herself, naming her rapists in her suicide note. The macabre case involved coercion of witnesses and destruction of vital physical evidence by Jain’s influential family, but Yagnik held firm, ignoring defendants’ pleas that the accused were young and educated. “Money cannot lessen the quantum of sentence,” she had said.
It is this ability to see through false sentiments and tampered evidences that has held her in good stead in the Naroda Patiya case. “Yagnik managed to cull out the best evidence from a weak prosecution,” says advocate Mukul Sinha, one of the petitioners in the case. “It should be noted that from the very beginning of the investigations, the CID made every effort to sabotage the case. When the SIT was appointed in 2009, it made very slow progress, but she managed to take into account the best evidence.”
After the Bijal Joshi case, Yagnik was once again under the spotlight when she was one of three special judges who heard the ISI conspiracy case, filed in 2003, for a Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) court. In 2010, she sentenced 18 of the 44 accused to 10 years imprisonment, three to nine years and one to three years in jail, for illegally crossing into Pakistan for training to organise terror attacks in India to avenge the Gujarat riots. The case was notable in that underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and his aide Chhota Shakeel were among 36 people declared absconding in the case.
Arguably the Naroda Patiya judgement was the first time in India that the jail terms for different offences were made non-concurrent, while Babu Bajrangi was sentenced to life without remission after 14 years. Sinha describes the judgement as sending a signal that she was convinced of the cruelty of the heinous crime. “The language of the judgement and the sentencing show that she was determined to deliver justice to the victims,” he says. So much so, the judge’s decision not to award the death penalty is not being seen as a lenient move. “Even though the death penalty was not given, the judgement is absolutely unambiguous in its purpose,” says Sinha. “The correct message has been sent out to the higher judiciary.”
Yagnik’s judgement weighed the arguments for and against the death penalty, before concluding that with 139 countries having abolished it by 2009, there was a “momentum of general suspension of capital punishment throughout the world,” and that “the progressive society restricts the use of the death penalty… Use of death penalty undermines human dignity.” This opinion is consistent with her career, in which she has fought for human rights through the Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre.
Anand Yagnik, a prominent advocate in the state describes her as having “remained very bold and [possessing] the courage to speak the truth.” A student of judge at the Gujarat Law Society, he says, “She cannot be commanded by the State. You can win her by logical arguments, but never by exerting pressure on her. She is intellectually sound and balanced between her heart and mind. Emotion does not play a part in her judgements.”
Spin to win
The Campaign
DIRECTOR
Jay Roach
STARRING
Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis, Dylan Mcdermott, John Lithgow, Dan Aykroyd
By Ajachi Chakrabarti
THERE IS a point in The Campaign where Will Ferrell punches a baby in the face. He later goes on to punch Uggie, the dog from The Artist. Both times, he is actually aiming for his opponent in a Congressional race. Even with the current fractiousness in American politics, this is over the top. Then again, subtlety isn’t this film’s strong suit, especially since it is directed by Jay Roach of Austin Powers and Meet the Parentsfame.
Unlike those masterpieces of cinéma vérité, The Campaign does have what could pass as subtext (even if written in 50-foot flaming letters): post-Citizens United — the 2010 US Supreme Court verdict that allowed independent political expenditure — Big Money plays a major role in politics. Said Big Money is played by TV comedy veterans Lithgow and Aykroyd as the Motch brothers, a not-so-veiled reference to the infamous Koch brothers. They run a good-hearted doofus, Marty Huggins (Galifianakis, sadly de-bearded), against five-time incumbent and hitherto-unopposed Cam Brady (Ferrell) for a Congressional election in North Carolina. Helping Huggins “not suck” is Tim Wattley (Mc- Dermott), a campaign manager adept in the dark arts of character assassination. Not that there’s much to assassinate, with Brady paying homage to every political scandal that has made headlines. Brady’s popularity is falling because he leaves a sexually explicit message meant for a mistress on the phone of a religious family. The brothers’ nefarious designs also involve getting Huggins to help them set up a Chinese sweatshop, an idea they call “insourcing”.
Hilarity ensues as it only can in a Ferrell film. Scenes resemble Saturday Night Live sketches and the climax could have been written by Frank Capra on some very dangerous drugs. The Campaign works because the jokes are genuinely funny and excellently delivered by a stellar cast. Ferrell and Galifianakis deliver comedically precise performances, well supported by brilliant character actors, such as Karen Maruyama as Mrs Yao, the Huggins family maid, paid extra to effect a Mammy Two Shoes accent to remind Marty’s father of the good ol’ antebellum South.
It may not be highbrow political satire, but the film has its unsettling moments. Because you will laugh when a baby gets punched in the face.
The deceptive lens
Brahm Maira’s first solo show is striking evidence of a sharp, fresh eye, says Aradhna Wal
Photos: Arun Sehrawat
A PANORAMIC blue-green background looks like sky and water meeting. A woman kneels in supplication and prayer. The images have been superimposed on top of each other; a vibrant figure standing out against breathtaking colours. This is Humility, one of the images in Brahm Maira’s upcoming show Traverse. All set to open on 8 September at Delhi’s Stainless Gallery, it is the 26-year-old art photographer’s first solo show.
Traverse has been in the making for years. The art consists mainly of personal work Maira has done while juggling commercial fashion/industrial work, other commissioned shoots, group shows, and studying at the Sydney College of the Arts. “I spent five years in Australia, so I’ve shot the East coast. I travelled the States, so there is work from there. I’d find myself in random industrial towns in India on work,” he says. His images, too, come together post production, where he combines scenes captured from different geographic spaces to create a complete picture; there is an Australian landscape, trees from Kerala backwaters and the Chattarpur Mandir in Delhi. All combine to evoke the serenity and the macrocosmic scope of devotion in Humility.
Maira’s willingness to experiment keeps his art from becoming just another imitation
The medium is called photo manipulation. The words themselves could cause people to doubt its merit. Is it meddling with or taking away from pure photography? Maira seems unfazed. The art is popular in galleries in US, Europe and Australia. It is, however, small in India. “I don’t know how people will respond to it. That remains to be seen.
People are slowly becoming more receptive. So let’s wait till they see the work,” he says.
Maira’s images are trippy. His influences in colour and style can be seen clearly — Alex Grey and Ansel Adams, respectively. Grey’s kaleidoscopic canvas has been invoked in the image Patience. The image of Buddha from Ladakh is depicted in a tunnel from a Scottish castle, that has a floor like a seabed, and its walls are rings of green refracted from the literal light at the end of the tunnel. And the landscapes try to be as sweeping as Adam’s famously were. As the photographer admits, landscapes are his favourite subject. However, Maira’s skill with colours and his willingness to experiment keep his art from becoming just another imitation. Though some images have a lot of components to them, they are not cluttered. A case in point isGlowing Eyes Purple Haze. It could easily be so overwhelming that one cannot take it in as a whole. However, there is a certain cleanness to the lines. The image of the face is sharp, yet if looked at closely, the lines on it form a sort of optical illusion. Playing around with pictures, people and places has taught Maira some tricks of improvisation. For example, in Patience, he uses the spring of a slinky toy on his lens to achieve the tunnel effect.
Traverse is Maira’s solid attempt at making his own statement. He admits it is an experiment in the making and has no one theme. But it brings together five years of travel, work and discovering his skills and preferences with the camera.
Aradhna Wal is a Sub-Editor with Tehelka.
aradhna@tehelka.com
'Government can afford to make the public distribution system universal'
The second day of Jan Manch saw an unanimous demand for ensuring better implementation of the PDS
Ajachi Chakrabarti
New Delhi
Photo: Ankit Agrawal
Roundly criticising the proposed National Food Security Bill, a public meeting organised by the Right to Food Campaign and the Pension Parishad called for the universalisation of the public distribution system (PDS) by removing the concept of targeting distribution on the basis of the poverty line.
“The government has created an artificial wall between APL (above poverty line) and BPL (below poverty line) families,” said Prakash Javadekar, spokesperson of the BJP. “Break down this wall!” he said. He underlined his party’s commitment to ensure food security, citing the fact that they kept their promise of not raising the prices of essential supplies while in power in Maharashtra. He promised to make the PDS universal if the BJP was voted into power.
As he left the stage, however, Prof Jayati Ghosh of Jawaharlal Nehru University said that it was the NDA government that created the divide between APL and BPL. “We cannot simply trust the BJP to meet our demands if they come into power,” she said. “The only thing that seems to work is people putting pressure on the government.”
Sharing the stage with Javadekar was Kavita Krishnan, a member of the Central Committee of the CPI(ML) Liberation, who announced that her party would launch a jail bharo andolan against corruption and the food crisis on 31 August. “The government can afford to make the PDS universal,” she said. “Every other day, we hear of new corruption scandals, where they are giving away the wealth of the nation to private companies. Every year during the budget, the government gives tax breaks to rich corporations. If they can afford to pay for the rich, they should be able to pay for our rights,” she said.
CPM leader D Raja expressed the Left Front’s support for the campaign, citing their nationwide campaign for food security. He said that if Parliament was allowed to function, his party would demand the passage of an amended version of the Bill. “Right to food needs to be made a fundamental right,” he said. “There is enough food to feed everyone, but the government lacks the political will to remove starvation and hunger.”
All the speakers criticised the Delhi government’s proposed cash transfer scheme, with Krishnan saying that it would leave people at the mercy of market forces. “Cash transfers are being offered as an alternative where you have failed to deliver something,” said Nikhil Dey of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS). “It is the easiest way out of everything. I have failed to deliver education, so I’ll give you cash so you can go find your own school. I have failed to deliver health, so I’ll underwrite your bill to find healthcare in the private sector. This does two things: it helps the private sector and undermines the basic responsibility of the state.”
Dey said that he does not support replicating cash transfers in India, despite their celebrated success in Brazil and Mexico. “I have personally seen both cases,” he said. “Cash transfers need targeting, which has never worked in India. Even Brazil hasn’t succeeded. Only half of those who apply in Brazil get the transfers. They have inspectors who personally go and screen applicants. Imagine doing that in India with 120 crore people. Already with the BPL list, they have made a mess of it,” he added.
He did not see the failings of the PDS in India as a rationale for dismantling it, saying that there were examples such as Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu that showed it could work if the system involved the people. “Anything can be made to fail,” he said. He listed universalisation, full transparency, giving people a chance to complain and acting on those complaints as measures to make the PDS work.
‘If watchman is asleep, we should have the right to alert others’
Activists, politicians and journalists voice for protection to be provided to the whistleblower’s family under the Whistleblowers Protection Bill
Ajachi Chakrabarti
New Delhi
“The Constitution says that the people are the masters of this country, and as the masters, we should have all the information on every aspect,” said Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (MKSS) co-founder and social activist Aruna Roy at a public meeting in New Delhi on Monday 27 August.
Delivering the valedictory address to the public meeting on the Whistleblowers (Protection in Public Interest Disclosures) Bill as well as the Grievance Redressal Bill, Roy asked the government to take into account all stakeholders before formulating policy, and that without five pillars – information, public hearing, action, people’s participation and security for all complainants – the Whistleblowers Bill would not be effective. She was speaking at a Jan Manch organised by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), Inclusive Media for Change and Foundation for Media Professionals and Accountability Initiative at the Constitution Club of India in New Delhi.
Also speaking at the meeting were Dhananjay Dubey, brother of slain whistleblower Satyendra Dubey; Mangla Ram and Bhikham Chand, two RTI activists who were attacked for raising corruption issues; as well as senior journalists and politicians. The speakers flagged a number of issues with the whistleblower protection framework, including its limitation of the definition of whistleblowing to only corruption cases, no protection for a whistleblower’s family and flaws in the definition of ‘complainant’.
Bhikham Chand and Mangla Ram spoke about their experience in facing violence for speaking out against corruption. Chand, who filed an RTI application for his gram panchayat’s financial records, had had both his legs broken by goons allegedly hired by the sarpanch. Ram had also been assaulted for similar activism. All the speakers favoured extending the protection under the law to RTI activists, employees of NGOs, journalists and human rights activists.
Vandana Chavan, a newly-inducted Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Rajya Sabha MP, promised to make her maiden Parliamentary speech on the Whistleblowers Bill, and said that it was important to highlight cases such as that of Chand and Ram’s, “so that they know they are not alone.” She felt that the law should also hold private agencies accountable, talking about threats she had faced from the land mafia during her tenure as corporator of Pune. Chavan also spoke of threats to her daughter, and underlined that the family of the whistleblower must be protected as well. Kamal Chenoy, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, rubbished the national security exception in the bill, saying that those who expose the excesses of the armed forces, especially in areas where the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is in force, should also be protected. “If our watchman is asleep, we should have the right to alert other people,” said Aruna Roy in an intervention.
Tehelka Managing Editor Shoma Chaudhury and journalist Aniruddha Bahal spoke about their harrowing experience after highlighting government corruption, while Vinod Mehta, Editor-in-chief of Outlook, said that unless a strong public opinion is built and people stand up and protect the whistleblowers, no law – however well crafted – can work. Senior advocate and anti-corruption activist Prashant Bhushan spoke against the Chief Vigilance Commission (CVC) being the competent authority on whistleblower protection, saying that in the past five years, the CVC had not protected even one whistleblower. He said that since its members were appointed by the government, it was weak and malleable. He said an independent authority was required for whistleblowers’ protection.
The conference also discussed the Grievance Redressal Bill, with organisations that had held grievance redressal camps in Delhi in December coming together and reporting its results. “I live just three kilometres away from the Parliament but we live in such degraded and inhuman condition that for us the Grievance Redress Bill is absolutely essential in order to claim our rights and entitlements as citizens,” said Khursheed of the National Federation for Indian Women. East Delhi MP Sandeep Dikshit, however, held that states did not appreciate the Union government interfering in their internal affairs and that many states had already passed their own grievance redressal mechanisms. Dikshit also offered to start a dialogue between the organisations and the Delhi government.
The MKSS will also organise similar Jan Manch meetings at Jantar Mantar on food security and pensions on 28 and 29 August.
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