India’s Continued Demonization of Rape Victims

This article originally appeared in The Independent.

How should a country respond when its police force is found wanting? That is the question Indians face after a sting-operation carried out by a leading magazine last week exposed widespread rape-denial among a senior stratum of India’s police force. If the media reaction is an index, all that this revelation could muster was a nationwide raised eyebrow. In the embattled history for social justice in India the police dismissal of rape victims and the failure to respond marks one of the lowest points.

The sting carried out by Tehelka involved secretly filmed interviews with 30 Station Holders (SHOs), the policemen in charge of investigating rape claims, in Delhi and the National Capital Region (NCR). Delhi happens to be India’s “rape capital” and 17 of the 30 SHO’s in this area repeatedly insisted that the majority of rape claims they received were false. The approximations varied. “It’s consensual most of the time” was the insistence of one policeman. When asked to put a figure on the number of genuine rape complaints, another suggested 10%. Manoj Rawat, a sub-inspector in a nearby precinct, was less generous: “My personal view is that there are one or two per cent rape cases in [the] NCR”.

There is a tragic chain of causation that this attitude fails to break: without adequate investigations and in the absence of convictions, rapists go undeterred and more women come forward simply to reinforce police perceptions of false victimhood. The policemen can also be heard perpetuating all the retrograde myths about victim complicity. “No rape happens in Delhi without a woman’s provocation”: drinking, “indecent” clothing, flirtatious behaviour and, most absurdly, working with men are all things done by women to “induce” men into violating them.

If not inducement, women are busy profiting from the “rape industry”. According to one policeman, it is the women who come forward as victims that are to blame for turning rape into a profitable enterprise. Those that lodge complaints must be extortionists or short-changed escorts because “real” victims would be too constrained by their modesty to report a rape. By this absurd logic, it’s better to suffer in silence than face the indignity of seeking justice. Caste and class prejudices are also at play. One policeman is adamant that for poorer women, alleging rape is a  “source of income”. Another is certain that all victims from Nepal or Darjeeling are “sex-workers”.

The alarming disregard for the seriousness of rape was made clear last month during theNoida scandal, in which policemen responsible for investigating a complaint made public the identity and the address of a gang-rape victim. In a press conference the policemen went further, accusing the victim’s mother, as a divorcee cohabiting with a younger man, of setting a “wayward” example. The Indian penal code stipulates a two-year sentence for the illegal release of the personal details of rape victims and yet no police officer has been dismissed or charged. Apathy characterises the police’s rape prevention methods: following the Noida scandal, women in the NCR were told to stay indoors after 8pm and a curfew was duly imposed.

And yet, the most disheartening aspect of the exposé is the knowledge that these comments are the products of a much wider and much bleaker cultural attitude. In India, the suggestion that there is such a thing as marital rape is laughed at, and the high incidence of the rape of minors and the failure to report custodial rape all point to an institutional rape-denial complex. The immediate question is to ask, if this is the attitude of policemen in Delhi, a relatively progressive enclave, what is the experience of rape victims in India’s hinterland?

The stigmatisation of rape victims has a grave chilling effect on the number of reported incidents. Some figures suggest that 1 in every 50 rape case in India is reported. Of those, Delhi and the NCR have a conviction rate of just 30%. This problem is one compounded by the gaping disjuncture between law and order. Indian lawyers and activists complain that the problem is one of enforcement and the fact that rape-denial is a front-line issue is perhaps its most pernicious aspect: without the ability to adequately report rapes, women are denied recourse at the first instance.

The issue of rape-denial among India’s police force is also symptomatic of a structural problem: India’s police have long been a sort of vigilante force. Corruption is rife, custodial violence is common and policemen are rarely held to account. In this context, the dismissal of rape-victims becomes but one aspect of the police force’s indiscriminate hostility towards victims. The muted national response to the Tehelka investigation is therefore easily explained. Few, if any, retain faith in India’s police and with their reputation as a rogue force, pervasive rape denial becomes a relatively minor transgression.

Kiran Bedi, India’s Judge Judy and a celebrity policewoman, has come out insisting that a lack of training is the problem. She proposes “brainwashing” the police into taking rape seriously. Other senior figures have offered less risible solutions: have female police officers lead rape investigations or introduce quotas to encourage women to join the force. There are also those that argue that the police must not only be just, but be seen to be just and so dismissals are what are required to rebuild trust.

But each of these proposals falls far short. Just how much training is needed to purge these men of their age-old personal and professional prejudice? Critics are right to complain that training offers nothing by way of a guarantee that these policemen will have changed. Equally, India has an almost catastrophically low police to population ratio. Expunging a senior layer of police officials would only perpetuate the legal void in which rapists already act. And to argue that diversification is needed is to kick the issue into the long grass. Not only does rape-denial need to be addressed immediately, but, there is no reason to hope that the presence of policewomen will change anything: the one female police officer interviewed during the investigation parroted the same misogynistic views.

So how should a country respond when its police force is found wanting? Indians may have failed to react to the news of rape denial, but the pressing need for a viable solution is their cue to finally do something about it.

Ram Mashru

Gendercide and The West

The article was written for It’s A Girl, a film about gendercide in south Asia. It originally appeared here.

Gendercide is the unreported tragedy of our age.

I was one of those guilty of dismissing gendercide as an Asian problem. Surely, unwanted female foetuses were aborted there, in illegal clinics, not here. And surely unwanted daughters were killed there, in forgotten villages, not here. The egalitarian Shangri-La that is ‘The West’ would never allow unwanted daughters to be eliminated in this way. Surely? The shocking truth, I discovered, is that gendercide is a global tragedy.

An Oxford University study revealed that between 1995 and 2005, 1500 girls “disappeared” among Indian communities in England and Wales. Sex selective abortions are the only plausible explanation. If the study is correct, the figures mean that 1 in 10 extra girls, who should have been born according to normal birth statistics, were selectively aborted. Sex-selective abortions are illegal in the UK under the 1967 Abortion Act and yet, as the recent investigation carried out by The Telegraph exposed, families can and presumably have had pregnancies terminated here. Doctors, being secretly filmed, agreed to falsify paperwork to circumvent legal prohibitions even though they recognised the immorality of ‘female infanticide’. Sex-selective abortions are, shockingly, legal in the US and the post-communist states of east Europe all have unnatural discrepancies in their birth gender ratios.

Most, if not all, of the agreed solutions fall away when we understand gendercide as a global problem. Activists have always spoken of the need to economically empower women, to inform women of their rights and to improve legal enforcements. These are all the solutions to problems that don’t exist in the US, Australia or the UK. Those fighting to end gendercide have always kept faith in modernisation as a force that will uproot the “backward culture” of son-preference. But modernisation, though necessary, has been proved to be insufficient.

Gendercide is a problem of supply and demand. Modernisation has failed to root-out foetal gender-preference and developments in technology have facilitated femicide. With sex determination now possible at seven weeksonline, new technologies have had the perverse effect of decreasing reproductive liberty rather than can increasing reproductive control. Logic suggests then, that the process of combatting gendercide must be inverted: eliminate supply before tackling demand. This though, might not be the answer either.  Campaigners warn that those extreme enough to want a gender-selective abortion would “always a find a way”. As Kishwar Desai highlights, Indian families from the UK are prepared to travel to India to end pregnancies, where illegal abortions can be procured for a small price. It is impossible to know how many women each year go abroad to eliminate female foetuses. What is certain is that driving these abortions abroad or underground is counter to all interests.

It’s not only the absence of solutions that complicates the fight against gendercide in The West. Abortion – and controls on it – remains a fraught issue. The risk of talking about gendercide in The West is that it becomes engulfed by the abortion debate. The difficulty, as Cristina Odone notes, is that combatting gender-selective abortion ‘smacks of pro-life’. It is entirely consistent with being pro-choice to argue that gendercide is the not-too-remote consequence of permissive abortion controls. A hijacking of the anti-gendercide cause by either the pro-life or pro-choice lobby would be a huge setback.

Abortion and gendercide are distinct issues and if we are to end gendercide, we must constantly remind ourselves of this distinction. The routine elimination of female foetuses, solely because they are not male, is something we must all work to end.

Gendercide is an issue in relation to which our first and last question must always be: how do we end it? All manner of policy initiatives have been tried. Over concerns of sex-selection, the Council of Europe went as far as to suggest that doctors must now refuse to tell parents the gender of their baby. But technology and culture undermine policy at every stage and no legislation can combat a global cultural malaise. As Evan Grae Davis, It’s A Girl’s director has said, gendercide is one among many issues that is “greater than any single organisation can fight alone”. It is for this reason that the work of Shadowline Films, and similar projects, is vital: where policy falls short, awareness and activism must fill the gap.

Ram Mashru

Listen to women in times of war

This article originally appeared in Prospect Magazine.

Earlier this week, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) held an event at which speakers debated the motion: “Women’s empowerment and sustainable development—have we failed?”

Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel peace prize co-laureate and Liberian peace activist, spoke illuminatingly about the crucial role women play in times of conflict. She highlighted the unique ways in which women facilitate peace in times of war.

Firstly it is women who provide basic services, in the form of food and shelter, to those internally displaced by civil war. It is also women who negotiate and secure safe passage through checkpoints set up by rival factions. And, thirdly, women negotiate peace on behalf of their communities by identifying and validating those that are members of the community. Women carry out these roles in the face of the constant threats of kidnapping, rape and murder.

The paradox of war is that women find themselves empowered during times of conflict to the same degree that they are disempowered in times of peace. When conflicts end, Gbowee explained, women are dismissed as underqualified and so excluded from formal peace negotiations. She has called for recognition of the valuable experience of women during times of conflict. Her efforts as an activist involve encouraging female participation in elections.

The fact that conflict affects men and women differently has only recently begun to influence the peacekeeping and development efforts of foreign governments and NGOs. The constant threat of rape directly inhibits the ability of women to carry out their peace-facilitating roles. Gry Larsen, the Norwegian state secretary for Foreign Affairs, spoke at the debate of the importance of gender-appropriate post-conflict strategies.

Making development and aid projects gender-appropriate often involve simple considerations of logistics, management and communication. Placing food stores, medical tents and toilets, for example, closer to communities, along well-travelled routes or in open spaces significantly reduces the risk of rape. And information relating to when and where fresh aid supplies will be delivered allow women, who most often collect the aid, to arrange safe travel.

Ram Mashru

The Rushdie debacle is an indictment of India’s democracy

This article has been published in The Independent.

It is the complaint of the complacent to argue, “it’s all their fault” and in India the opportunity to argue “it’s them” is ever-present. But with the dust almost settled on the Rushdie fiasco, it’s apparent that this complaint against India’s government is not being made often enough.

The handling of the Rushdie fiasco has led to the accusation that the government showed scorn for democratic values. But a stronger charge can be made. The fiasco exposes the government’s willingness to abdicate its duties to protect freedom of expression and maintain law and order. Much worse than scorn, India’s government has shown disregard for its democratic responsibilities.

The issue was only ostensibly a law and order one. Cutting off Salman’s video-link was necessary to avert the threat of violence, we were told. But a detail in David Remnick’s blog is telling: “The security apparatus [at the festival] was…enormous”, well before Rushdie was due to arrive. Could this “enormous” security deployment not have protected a citizen against threats of “elimination” from, what transpired to be, fictional assassins? And if the concern of the Rajasthani and State administration were that the protests would get out of hand, where was the condemnation and where were the appeals for peace?

Religiosising the debacle is another distraction. Muslim leaders and groups have insisted their protests were always going to be peaceful. The way to solve the intractable conflict between the right to say what you please and the right to be respected is not to entertain more theorising. Debate is necessary but in this instance, redundant. India’s legal system has reached a satisfactory compromise on the issue. The penal code provides a right to free expression unless the speaker intends to incite.  Rushdie’s presence, physical or virtual, was plainly not intended to incite and so religious sensibilities, according to the law, were in no need of protection.

Here, Nick Cohen’s point about power resounds: “few admit that what makes liberal democracies liberal is that “power” will not throw you in prison [for speaking freely]”. Freedom of expression exists therefore only to the extent that the State will protect it. In this instance, the “power” of the radical, militant few was allowed to stifle free discussion because of the absence of political will. This apathy amounts to an abdication of the responsibility, shared by all democratic governments, to safeguard the right of free speech.

The most pernicious implication of the Rushdie debacle is self-censorship. As Nick Cohen points out in his timely book, fear is the greatest threat to open discussion. Extremists, by definition, flout both the moral consensus and the law. The refusal to apprehend the threat of violence and the patent indifference shown towards free expression by India’s government risks establishing a dangerous precedent. The risk is one of fundamentalists filling the power vacuum left by the absence of political will.

Rushdie’s diagnosis is entirely correct. What his silencing marks is the “decline in the liberty of ordinary citizens to engage in discourse”. The failure of free expression in the Rushdie debacle, however, is not absolute. It’s ironic that in silencing Salman at Jaipur, extremists have catapulted his international profile and have pushed The Satanic Verses once again to the fore of international political and literary consciousness. The victim here is India’s free and democratic society.

The most peculiar thing about the Rushdie ‘black farce’ is that Rushdie, since the ban on his book, has entered the country and attended the Festival without opposition. Salman was not being self-effacing when accepting “the vast majority of Indian Muslims…don’t give a damn whether I come or go”. What is different now? The imminent Uttar Pradesh elections. The suspicion is that the ruling Congress party refused to protect Salman’s rights as a citizen out of fear of alienating Muslim voters. The Rushdie debacle rests therefore on the fact of a government reneging on its present responsibilities to focus on future prospects. What the Congress party have demonstrated is political opportunism of the worst kind.

The Rushdie debacle is the kind of national crisis that draws conspiracy theorists and cries of foul government agendas. Even as we dismiss those, the central issue has been abstracted. Protecting the rights of the citizen, maintaining law and order and safeguarding free speech are all basic and fundamental responsibilities of democratic governments. On each account, in the Rushdie debacle, India’s administration failed. The charge is more than one of simply showing scorn for democratic values, the Indian government’s failures amount to political abnegation.

Ram Mashru

The Abu Qatada judgment undermines the fight against torture

This article has been published in The Huffington Post.

The UK for the last 10 years has tried to extradite Abu Qatada, a terror suspect, to Jordan where he faces trial on charges of terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights however ruled last week that such a deportation is illegal because Qatada is likely to face an unjust trial. On these sparse facts, hysterical rights sceptics have re-energised their attack on human rights, as Trojan horse being used to undermine Parliament’s sovereign will. But, it is the human rights community, not panicky politicians, that should be alarmed by the Court’s decision.  The decision is one in which the fight against torture suffers a mighty blow.Chief sceptic is Philip Johnston for whom the judgment was an instance of human rights being manipulated by a terrorist to “fool” Britain. Of all the MPs with an opinion on the matter it’s unsurprising that Johnston quotes Raab, a fellow libertarian and rights-sceptic. It serves as evidence of their thoughtless hostility to human rights that they both miss the implications of the case and miss it so widely.

The Court, for present purposes, decided two issues and in doing so, established a far-reaching rule, from which it carved a narrow exception. The Court ruled that extraditions, to countries suspected of carrying out torture, were lawful provided diplomatic assurances had been procured. By so deciding, the Court ruled in favour of the UK Government. Indeed it praised the detail and depth of the understanding our government had agreed with their Jordanian counterparts. Put another way, a diplomatic assurance is now all that is needed to safeguard a convict from the threat of torture.

This rephrasing is hardly needed to expose the gaping flaw in the Court’s reasoning. Diplomatic assurances, essentially gentleman’s agreements, have now been elevated to the status of substantive rights protections. Far from subverting the will of the Parliament, the Court have struck a death blow to efforts to expose ‘torture treaties’ between states, to the effort to uncover the practice of torture and to the effort to condemn States for turning a blind eye. In what is perhaps its most politically deferential judgment yet, the Court have relegated all concerns about the torture of terror suspects by placing complete and blind faith in the invisible processes of international relations.

Despite the diplomatic assurance, the Court ruled Abu Qatada’s deportation would be illegal under Article 6, which enshrines the right to a fair trial. By taking into account the real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be used to incriminate Abu Qatada, the Court reasoned that to allow the deportation would be to countenance an “immoral, illegal” and “unreliable” trial. Without the risk of corrupt evidence being used against him, Qatada would have been deported and so potential article 6 infringements constitute a narrow defence to the far-reaching diplomatic assurances rule. It is this narrow exception that has been typically mischaracterised by Johnston and is ilk.

There is rightful consternation among human rights groups. The diplomatic assurances rule amounts to an “alarming setback” according to Julia Hall of Amnesty International, and represents taking “one step forward, two steps back”. The “positive development” of the Article 6 exception, she argued, was “eclipsed” by the Court’s decision to substitute diplomatic assurances for binding legal obligations. States, particularly in the anti-terror context, have eroded prohibitions on torture and the European Court’s decision amounts to a “green light” on securing “unreliable” assurances in the place of legal guarantees. Human Rights Watch and Liberty have echoed these criticisms.

Several options remain open in the Qatada case. The quickest solution would be to seek assurances that improper evidence would not be used. Alternatively, there is nothing preventing Qatada going on trial in the UK and Shami Chakrabati has urged that this be done “without delay”. Or, the UK Government could appeal the European Court’s decision. Doing so will add a few more years to Qatada’s already 7 year internment. It should be noted that Qatada has spent this time in the confines of a jail cell, without charge.

The law of human rights is, at its core, the process of balancing competing demands. Abu Qatada’s case is but one example of the effort to weigh the demands of national security against the rights of the individual. With the diplomatic assurances innovation, the Court has eased the process of deporting terror suspects to places where the risk of torture is both real and high. In doing so, they have abdicated their apolitical mediating role and devolved responsibility for protecting potential torture victims to the whispered negotiations of governmental corridors.

Ram Mashru

‘It’s a girl: the three deadliest words in the world’

This article has been republished in The Independent. 

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.

Ram Mashru

The lessons to be learned from India’s unsung protests

The obligatory 2012 predictions have been made and the commentariat are unanimously forecasting doom and gloom. Pessimism, when rife, becomes contagious but these lamentations should be reserved in the case of India, where the greatest political movement since its independence is underway.

India’s anti-corruption protests have gone largely unreported and John Pilger’s recent article is an example. He gravely predicts that India will experience its own Arab spring and yet not once cites the anti-corruption protestsrippling across the country.

With pervasive official corruption, sclerotic parliamentary opposition, an inept Prime Minister and an increasingly menacing financial class, the anti-graft movement faces a near Herculean struggle. But the new year marks new beginnings and now is a chance to reflect on the pertinence of India’s anti-corruption movement.

Anna Hazare, the movement’s elderly figurehead, and the anti-graft movement have returned to the political fore after the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s parliament, failed to pass an anti-corruption law. Parliament is now in recess and the bill will not be reconsidered until March.  Hazare, who threatened to resume his fast in response, has fallen ill and amid claims of changing tack the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement has begun to stagnate. Yet the movement is, for several reasons, a strategic success.

Foremost, the IAC movement is a vindication of organised peaceful protest as an effective political tool. The movement has served as a lens through which focus on corruption has intensified and the pressure on parliament increased. Passing a LokPal (public ombudsman) bill has been tried seven times already since 1968. In the long and old fight to combat graft, the anti-corruption movement now dominates India’s political and popular discourse like never before. In a society so divided by capitalism, caste and creed the movement has become a rallying point.

Hazare’s threats to fast unto death have spearheaded the Jan LokPal bill through India’s parliament. Objectionable as it may be to hold a legislature to ransom with the threat of starvation, in the context of India’s inert democracy such galvanising acts of self-sacrifice are unsurprising and necessary. Though the Rajya Sabah has reached an impasse over the bill’s scope, the movement is making material progress: 21 corrupt ministers from BJP (India’s nefarious nationalist party) have been sacked and major corruption scandals have been exposed.

Parallels can be drawn with OLSX: combatting corruption is as much about changing financial and institutional attitudes as the reform of Britain’s financial sector. And corruption poses the same threat to the livelihoods of Indians as austerity measures. And like Occupy, the anti-graft movement has disavowed representative politics, rejecting associations with politicians and refusing to set up a rival political party.  Yet the IAC movement has been a much greater strategic success.

When the anti-graft protests and the occupy movement are juxtaposed, the former establishes two things. Firstly, political protests (within democracies) do better when working with, as opposed to outside of, political processes (I have criticised the failures of OLSX elsewhere). Secondly, the anti-graft movement shows that reform by increment yields more than absolutist demands for wholesale reform.  The relative failures of OLSX, having achieved little beyond engaging our national conscience, attest to these lessons.

There are further points of contrast. Occupy London has sought to lead by example with its non-hierarchical structure. The anti-corruption protests demonstrate that more conventional models remain viable. Movements need figureheads in order to be effective and to an extent, the mere fact of Hazare’s leadership has facilitated the movement’s success. By capturing the national spirit he has mobilised a cross-section of India’s population, transforming their long held frustrations into active protest. In the process, Hazare has packed out stadiums with supporters lending their voice whilst, in morbid worship, watching an elderly activist waste away.

But where movements attract criticism, figureheads attract scorn. The risk with Hazare, who is both leader and martyr, is one of the person overshadowing the protests. Most divisively, the movement have entertained the claim that Hazare is Gandhi’s heir. Gandhi’s legacy is often invoked in times of civil protest but with Hazare, Gandhi’s image has been misappropriated. He is Gandhian in his politics and his physique but not in his achievements. India’s press have denounced him but in rightly denouncing the comparison the press have wrongly denounced his cause. When criticising Hazare’s dogmatism, India’s press have elided the distinction between his motives and means. The anti-corruption movements is the product of a popular consensus and Hazare’s role is purely catalytic.

The movement remains far short of its targets and the IAC have resorted to the baffling step of asking for suggestions as to what to do next. And though the LokPal bill is yet to become law with regional elections on the horizon the movement, it is hoped, will manifest at the ballot box. Political gains notwithstanding, the scale of the movement is unprecedented and a culture shift and the protest’s practices are harbingers of imminent improvement.

An Indian Spring there may well be, but not for the oft-repeated reasons Pilger lists. India’s poor and working class have long been assaulted by a Molotov cocktail of having their land ‘recolonised’ by corporations, of discrimination and of a denial of basic services. If anything will catalyse a political revolution in India it will be the anti-graft movement. The IAC movement is neither the first nor most imaginative attempt at weeding out the deep roots of corruption in India’s society. But there has never been a more opportune moment and success in eradicating institutional corruption will topple the first domino of India’s many structural evils. If the domino falls, it will have done so by the force of popular will working with and within the law. This is the lesson India’s unsung protests offer.

Ram Mashru

Obama’s Bush-era Bargain

This article originally appeared in Prospect Magazine.

Earlier this month, Obama refused to veto the National Defence Authorisation Act (NADA), which the House of Representatives later passed by a 283-136 majority. The act—which brings into force the indefinite detention of terror suspects before trial, eases the process of rendering American citizens to foreign regimes, and makes the closure of Guantánamo Bay more difficult—marks a new chapter in Obama’s erosion of civil liberties.

Although the White House had threatened to veto the bill, the official line now is that sufficient changes were made to the bill, following the president’s request, to avoid a veto. The reforms gave him the power to grant a waiver in individual cases so that defendants could be tried in civilian courts. But the legislation prohibits spending money in the civilian trials of suspected terrorists, rendering the waiver worthless.

The White House also insisted that, if implementing the NADA jeopardized the rule of law, Congress would be expected to work “quickly and tirelessly” to reverse the damage. But oppressive laws spawn miscarriages of justice, the effects of which persist long after legislation is tweaked.

Commentators have been quick to note the timing of Obama’s volte-face. With less than a year until the presidential election, Obama is being accused of capitulating to Republican factions in an attempt to be seen as tough on terror. But groups across the political spectrum have opposed the act and critics include the justice and defence secretaries and the directors of the CIA and the FBI.

Their refusal to veto the NADA marks a new chapter in a civil liberties record already tarnished by the failure to close Guantánamo Bay, the expansion of Bagram, the detention facility, in Afghanistan, the refusal to investigate or prosecute Bush-era officials complicit in torture, the approval of drone strikes on US citizens and the blocking of numerous public-interest lawsuits challenging presidential abuses.

According to Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, Obama “has proved a disaster” for the “civil liberties cause” in the US. But the implications are much greater. Obama has struck the Bush-era bargain, deciding fundamental rights are a small price to pay for safety. Like Bush, he has failed to learn the post 9/11 lesson that it is counter to national security interests to erode civil liberties. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticised NADA as an affront to American values. And on the international stage, the NADA will damage America’s reputation, delegitimise efforts to combat terrorism and, of course, provide fodder for those who accuse the US of hypocrisy and rights-imperialism.

Ram Mashru

Christopher Hitchens – What Should His Legacy Be?

It’s almost tragicomic that only death brings people the recognition they deserved whilst alive. This is true for Christopher Hitchens who, though increasingly famous in his last days, will only now have his vast catalogue read by the many it should already have reached. As eulogies mount, praising a distinguished writer’s wit and wisdom, one can’t help but wonder what Hitchens would have made of them all.

Before the charge is made, let me declare now that sycophancy is as disrespectful to the memory of the dead as indifference. Death demands honesty and people must be remembered for who they were, not for who we would have liked them to be. Hitchens himself would have wanted no more and no less.

Grief can gild memories with generosity and Hitchens has, in some obituaries, been likened to Voltaire and Orwell. But these comparisons are unsustainable and on two levels.

Firstly, there’s the banal fact that history has yet to certify Hitchens’ work. Even so, Hitchens was many things but philosopher and social commentator he was not. Despite his self-assurance “Hitch” was a humble man and after being flattered by these comparisons he would have swiftly dismissed them. Voltaire, Orwell and Wilson were his inspirations, not his equals and Hitchens said as much in his most recent published exchange.

Secondly, “intellectual” seems an oddly ill-fitting “job title” for someone whose aim it was to provoke us into discussion. It wasn’t Hitchens’ stated aim to enlighten, elucidate or educate. He didn’t cultivate knowledge for the sake of being knowledgeable and Hitchens is better understood as an intellectual pragmatist. The understanding that knowledge should be used not stored is characteristic of Hitchens’ work. What we got when we read or heard from Hitchens was Hitchens. Quotes, facts and arguments were all deployed to inform, test and express his opinions. Erudition was simply a by-product of this reflection.

Notwithstanding the claim that Hitchens doesn’t belong to the esteemed group of enlightenment figures he so admired, we must not diminish his accomplishments as a commentator in an era increasingly defined by sound bites and twitter.

For aspiring writers Hitchens is a role model. To present journalists he should serve as an example. In both capacities what Hitchens represents is the pursuit of perfecting the writer’s craft. During his career, his writing was criticised for at times being boring and at others being overstated. Nevertheless this process of refinement was as important a message for Hitchens as the indictment of religion or the dismissal of despots. It is for this reason that poor journalism has never been more intolerable than when lazy hands wrote lazy obituaries for a man whose ability as a writer deserved better.

It’s offensive to the rigour of his work to describe him as having “scribbled” articles. To do so is to practice the poor journalism that Hitchens’ prolific and incisive work cast a deep and dark shadow over. And to describe Hitchens as a “devout atheist” is to use the sort of obvious and inaccurate oxymoron that would have triggered his irascible rage. But the BBC we were worse, facilely describing Hitchens as “controversial”. “Controversial”, through overuse, is at risk of becoming meaningless. It’s an adjective fit for “X Factor scandals”, scandal being another overused hyperbole. Of course the context in which words are used is important but Hitchens was masterful enough to appreciate that connotations are crucial too. “Controversial” both misstates and understates what Hitchens achieved. More than controversial, Hitchens was an iconoclast. He didn’t merely provoke disagreement; he shook complacently held assumptions at their very foundations. Hitchens deserves respect for relying on reason, not rhetoric and it is for this reason that in a debate Martin Amis said he would back Hitchens over Cicero. If I were on my bottom dollar, I’d do the same.

Between his politics and his prose we must not overlook his personality. Lynn Barber described him as “one of the greatest conversationalists of our age”. He could also, with what Ian Parker at the New Yorker called “the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm”, wound deeply. Youtube is full of videos of “Hitch-slaps”, capturing instances where Hitchens deployed both wisdom and wit to strike down opponents.

What of his legacy? Jason Cowley in the New Statesman predicted that Hitchens would be remembered for his prodigious output, his swaggering, rhetorical style and his lifestyle. I’m inclined to be less pessimistic. Peter Hitchens said that courage is the quality that best defined his brother. To that I would add clarity. Combined, Hitchens’ legacy is obvious and simple but powerful.

Throughout, he urged us to be courageous: to test our beliefs and to voice our convictions. Equally he encouraged us to be clear, not merely when expressing our courage, but when deciding to what our courage should relate. I’ll explain. That Hitchens knew himself is obvious to anyone who begins to read his work. If Hitchens served as an example for anything, it would be introspection. What might seem like hubris in his writing is instead an acute self-awarness, the kind of unapologetic commitment to one’s views that results from having defined oneself. When reading or listening to Hitchens’, this clarity has the effect of a mirror, forcing us to reflect ourselves on our views. It is this that gives value to his courage and it is this that should be Hitchens’ legacy.

Ram Mashru

My Tram Experience: Time To Be Constructive

Viral videos of racist public outbursts should prompt us to reflect on how best to tackle pernicious social problems.

It’s frustrating how short the lifespans of viral videos are. It’s only been five days since the ubiquitous video hit youtube and the novelty has already been exhausted. Internet trolls have trolled, news reporters reported and commentators commented on a story that’s beginning to feel out of date.

But the conversation has been so predictable, so uninspiring. The tram rant served as a nationwide reminder that unprovoked, unashamed racism still exists. Emboldened by this jolt to the national memory, bloggers hurl themselves at their keys and recount their stories, complete with racist slurs, childhood identity crises and adult self-affirmation. Articles abundant in rhetorical questions invite readers to share their own troubled pasts in violent detail.

This mass catharsis, heart-rending as it may be, is just so…fruitless and it’s a distraction. Instances like Emma West’s outburst are rare opportunities for us to be constructive. By being offended ethnic minorities achieve nothing, but by posing questions the conversation can progress.

Sunny Hundal’s terrific piece in The Guardian marks a start. He notes that the law can be the worst possible way of dealing with situations like these and skips through the obvious reasons why: the law is often ineffective, legislation can be a blunt tool, laws can discriminate against minorities and arrest will only stifle racism, not eliminate it. He oversimplifies the case, but with his last point he hits the proverbial nail on the proverbial head.

I don’t accept th the law has no role to play and we must be careful not to elide crucial legal distinctions. She was arrested for racial harassment and no one can argue that there are no laudable reasons for criminalising hateful conduct. If Emma West’s rant were ageist, sexist or homophobic the legal response should be the shame. Law has a role in regulating our conduct, in clarifying society’s accepted morals, in sending a message and the message being sent is simply this: you cannot harass others. But complacent observers are not sensitive to this distinction and so it’s Hundal’s last point that needs to be explored.

Emma West is ignorant and historically wrong but she’s not an anomaly. The deterrent effect of an arrest will only drive those like her behind walls. The corollary of this self-censorship is that it makes her a rallying point, a martyr to the self-declared warriors fighting the immigration invasion.

We need to understand that it’s only once bigots raise their heads above the parapet that they can be counted and only then can they can be asked to explain their prejudice. It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that liberal societies protect themselves from the threat posed by extremism by exposing it. The tram experience should encourage us all to foster an open environment in which more people like Emma West air their grievances, so that more people like Emma West can be held to account.

One of the first commenters on Hundal’s article simply says that Emma West shouldn’t be given ‘the oxygen of publicity’. To ignore racism is to neglect it, and allow it to fester. It’s inherently counter-productive.

Had Hundal been on the tram, he’d have let her know that he was English and then gone back to pretending not to care. I object to this defiant apathy. Racists need to be engaged; Emma West must be criticised and there is nothing more shameful than public condemnation. There is no greater mirror forcing you to reflect, than national criticism. There is no better way to learn the extremity of your views than to be drowned out by a tidal wave of liberal, tolerant disapproval.

Ram Mashru