Category Archives: Politics

“Kya kar rahe ho?”

Posted on by

“Mint”, who reads my diary left a link in its comments section to an “important story” they wanted to bring to my attention. I didn’t think anything of it or have any expectations; I pasted the URL and gave it a cursory skimming. It seemed to be about a woman taking a journey by train in India…

At 3:30 a.m., my Upper Berth neighbour reaches and touches my breast. I don’t know what he was expecting. That I would simper coyly and turn away? That I would ignore him? Encourage him? Mind boggling possibilities.
I’m hugely sensitive to men touching me, often stopping calling people who even casually throw their arm around me (it’s just a thing I have), so this was trauma for me. I was up like a shot; my mind blank in my half-sleep and all I did was scream. It was strange, thinking back on it. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t yelling expletives, or hell, even sentences or words. It was just like an animal-in-pain screaming. Shrill, loud, repetitive. No words, just screaming and screaming till the lights were flicked on, people hurriedly woke up, the TC came running.

WHOA. Suddenly, woman-in-the-train had my undivided attention. She provides, in exquisite and riveting detail, a transcript of her inner monologue as she considers what’s happening to her and how she should react.

Upper Berth man says loudly aggressively, “Kya hua? Kya hua?” (“What happened? what happened?”) and then slowly words formed in my head; the shock, the outrage, the sense of violation was replaced by a hysterical screaming, “Kya kar rahe ho?” (“What are you doing?”) Again and again and again.
The TC, sensing Upper Berth Man’s apparent complete shock turned to me, still shaking in my berth. I could barely see anything, compounding my sense of disorientation. “Madam, you must have been dreaming,” says the TC. No one else is talking. I realised in an instant that the whole episode could quickly turn against me. Everyone would be annoyed at being woken up by a silly, hysterical girl, the Upper Berth guy would be glad to evade responsibility, the TC glad to avert a potential nuisance.

This isn’t just some tale of woe– it’s a story about emotions and epiphanies, guilt and justice. We all know how hard it is for survivors of sexual abuse to come forward in this country, I’ve never thought about what that terrifying experience might be like in India. Consider what came AFTER the victim was abused: I was disheartened by the number of obstacles put in her way, as she tried to “do the right thing”. Continue reading →

HIV Pos, caste no bar

Posted on by

Two satisfied clientsIndia’s first marriage bureau for the HIV + has opened up in Gujurat. This is hard work in India, a country where weddings are cancelled just because one party has an inauspicious birthdate. Nonetheless, Daksha Patel (who is HIV positive herself) has already helped seven couples get married.

Both Daksha and her clients approach marriage with a typical Indian matter-of-factness. They don’t hold wishy-washy “ishq conquers all” sentiments; they know very well that life is hard and money is important.

In one exchange, Daksha interrogates a client who earns 3,000 rupees (roughly US $70) a month:

“You will have to look after yourself and your wife – you are both HIV positive, maybe you will have to spend on medicines,” says a concerned Daksha.

“Will you be able to manage all this with your income?” [BBC]

Similarly, one satisfied client explains:

“I had read about this organization which worked with HIV positive people and ran a marriage bureau. I had come to find out more about the bureau – for the purpose of marriage only … I did not want a very handsome person, or a very rich person. I just wanted a husband who can understand me – and who can provide for three square meals a day.” [BBC]
Continue reading →

Not depressing. At all.

Posted on by

As previously discussed on this blog, a woman in Uttar Pradesh was violated by her father-in-law and then ordered to marry him via an outrageous fatwa, much to the horror of sentient beings everywhere. Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a great ending:

“Me and my husband are willing to abide by the fatwa if the Darul Uloom Muftis want us to,” Imrana said.
Mufti Habibur Rehman of Darul Uloom Deoband said in a fatwa on Sunday that the Imrana’s life with her husband Noor Ilahi has become untenable as per Islamic law after the alleged rape on June 3.
Reacting to the ruling, Imrana, who has been staying with her parents at Kukra village, on Sunday said she has full faith in the Shariyat. Noor Ilahi also said he would take steps as per the fatwa.

You do remember why she was ordered to go home, right? To purify her. Tell me, dear readers, how do you “take steps” so that your wife transitions to the role of stepmother? I’d think about it myself, but I can’t stop shaking my head and I’ve gone dizzy.

Despite the disapproval of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board and the work of women activists, it looks like the local panchayat will win. The victim’s own brothers are fine with the fatwa. While at the protest at the Pakistani Embassy last week, I heard activists discussing how Mukhtaran Mai’s mother supported her as she commenced her quest for justice. I wish Imrana’s family had reacted similarly. If she was brave enough to report this assault to the authorities in the first place, I can’t help but think that she has a flicker of defiance within her. If only someone close to her could fan that tiny flame…

It saddens me to the point of migraine that here’s where the story ends. Though the magistrate who heard this case denied the alleged rapist/father-in-law’s bail, to me, even if he’s convicted of the crime he’s been accused of, it sounds like his daughter-in-law and future wife will never win. Continue reading →

Posted in Law

It’s not just the Catholic Church

Posted on by

At the airport the other day a casually dressed man walked up to me in the security line and said, “you must be active duty or reserve.” Huh? “Excuse me” I politely replied. “Your haircut,” he pointed. Perhaps I had gotten it cut too short. I just love getting haircuts though. Having guessed wrong the man sheepishly walked off. Thirty seconds later he found a group of 3 young men and opened his suitcase to hand them something. Hare Krishna literature. The LA Times reported yesterday on an all to familiar story, but this one isn’t about the Catholic Church:

Leaders of the Hare Krishna faith last week began carrying out the terms of a $9.5-million settlement that closes the books on a long-running child abuse scandal.

Under the plan, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness organization has filed for bankruptcy in Los Angeles while it determines how to compensate 535 former students who say they were abused in the 1970s and ’80s by adults at boarding schools run by the society.

The settlement covers abuses at Krishna temples and schools across the United States and India that resulted in a 2001 class-action lawsuit.

Some Hare Krishna devotees and gurus, including at least one in Los Angeles, were subsequently convicted of child abuse, and others were barred from visiting temples, said Anuttama Dasa, spokesman for the society.

Of course, this isn’t an indictment against all Hare Krishnas, just as the entire Catholic Church isn’t on trial for the actions of some of its clergy, but it’s something to be aware of. There is actually a Hare Krishna temple on my block in LA. Once last year I heard blaring rock music outside my window. When I tried to discern the words I realized it was actually Hare Krishna rock.

Schools, known as ashram gurukulas, sprouted across the country, including Los Angeles.

“I hardly ever saw my parents, but when I did, I would ask my mother every two seconds, ‘What time do I have to go back?’ ” said plaintiff Anya Pourchot, now 37. “I was so fearful that if I did not get back to the ashram in time, they would take away my privileges of seeing my mother.”

Pourchot, a Santa Monica beautician, said she was able to fend off sexual advances from gurus, teachers and other devotees in a Dallas boarding school, but she was frequently beaten. She said she saw other children put inside gunnysacks and barrels as punishment. Children were locked in closets and told that rats would attack them if they moved, she said.

Continue reading →

What makes me swear

Posted on by

In North Carolina, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is requesting that Muslim court witnesses be allowed swear their veracity with a Koran instead of a Bible:

Ellis said there is concern allowing the Koran could create new challenges. He questioned what would happen if a person claimed to worship brick walls and wanted to swear the oath on a brick. [WebIndia123]

They’re right. What if some lone wacko claimed to worship a stone, such as the Qa’aba, a shivalinga, a laughing Buddha or an engraved copy of the Ten Commandments? Blasphemy! I for one would be tempted to swear my oath upon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Of course, since the scripture use is fairly ceremonial, you can already swear without your personal flavor of holy book, and people lie in court all the time, this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering issue. But it’s important to religious literalists who believe morality requires a warden-deity with night vision goggles.

So, taking the question at face value, it does in fact point to a larger issue of ownership. On one hand, it’s courteous to allow the majority religion its ceremonial religious invocations, which are woven throughout the Declaration of Independence, the currency, national holidays, the Pledge of Allegiance and the invocations of Congress and the Supreme Court. This religion and the work ethic it spawned built a great country over the years, and the American separation of church and state is reasonably good relative to most other nations. Those institutions are far more entangled on the subcontinent. Continue reading →

Jailing “witnesses” indefinitely

Posted on by

Last year I blogged about the Justice Department’s abuse of material witness statutes following 9/11. For over a year HRW lawyer Anjana Malhotra has been flying around the country interviewing those thrown into jail indefinitely as “material witnesses,” to terrorist activities. Now a full report [Witness to Abuse: Human Rights Abuses under the Material Witness Law since September 11] has just been released on this practice. Newsweek reports:

Since 9/11, the Justice Department has used a little-known legal tactic to secretly lock up at least 70 terror suspects—almost all of them Muslim men—and hold them without charges as “material witnesses” to crimes, in some cases for months. A report to be released this week by two civil-liberties groups finds nearly 90 percent of these suspects were never linked to any terrorism acts, resulting in prosecutors and FBI agents issuing at least 13 apologies for wrongful arrest.

The report cites instances in which agents used what it calls “flimsy” evidence to make arrests. A 68-year-old Virginia doctor named Tajammul Bhatti was arrested by the FBI in June 2002 after neighbors found magazines about flying and a phone number of a Pakistani nuclear scientist in his apartment. It turned out he had served in the U.S. Air Force National Guard and the Pakistani scientist was a childhood friend. Another “tip” led to the arrest of eight restaurant workers in Evansville, Ind., who were shackled and taken to a detention facility in Chicago. The FBI later apologized—but never disclosed the basis for their detention. “The law was never designed to be used this way,” says Anjana Malhotra, the prime author of the report.

The New York Times has more:

The new study sought to catalogue and quantify the treatment of the witnesses, and it found that a third of the 70 material witnesses it identified were jailed for at least two months. The study found that there might well have been more than 70 material witnesses, but secrecy provisions prevented a definitive tally. Of the 70 who were positively identified, 42 were released without any charges being filed, 20 were charged with non-terrorist offenses like bank or credit card fraud, four were convicted of supporting terrorism, and three others are awaiting trial on terrorism charges. More than a third were ultimately deported. None are still known to be held as witnesses.

Few of the material witnesses made national headlines. Among the notable exceptions were Zacarias Moussaoui, recently convicted of terrorism in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks; Jose Padilla, who was later declared an enemy combatant after authorities accused him of plotting to build a “dirty bomb;” and Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer in Portland who was jailed in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings after the F.B.I. mistakenly matched a fingerprint of his to the scene.

NPR features this on Monday as well.

[disclosure: Malhotra is a friend] Continue reading →

Posted in Law

Terrorist tech support

Posted on by

This tech support parody (warning: sound) has a wild-eyed Sikh wearing an Afghan-style turban surrounded by Hindu icons in southern India (thanks, Avi). The usual bad Indian accent and cow jokes ensue. I supposed we should thank the animator for drawing him in an office instead of squatting on the ground with an abacus. Its dissection of brainless tech support is pretty cute, though.

Screwy Flash animations shouldn’t be politically correct, but they shouldn’t be ignorant either. Team America knowingly poked fun at American stereotyping even while engaging in it, by putting together a Middle Eastern disguise for the protagonist. The ‘disguise’ consisted of stray bits of toilet paper stuck to his jawline and brownface splashed on as if by a 2-year-old. That’s about how well Americans understand the Middle East, the movie was saying.

This animation doesn’t do that — it cheaps out with crude, wildly inaccurate ethnic stereotypes. I’m not saying don’t poke fun at desis. Hell, we do it all the time. I’m saying: Ill Will Press, this creative work is trite and lame. Get it right next time. There are a quarter million of us right in your backyard, the second-largest Asian-American group in NYC, so just ask somebody.

Granted, it might be a strained conversation (‘Say, dude, fact-check this animation and do a bad accent so I can make fun of your country of origin’)… 🙂

Related posts: 1, 2, 3

Continue reading →

The Global Popularity Contest

Posted on by

Most SM readers are news junkies so by now, you’ve probably come across the latest Pew survey on International attitudes towards the US –

WASHINGTON – The United States’ popularity in many countries is lagging behind even communist China. The image of the United States slipped sharply in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, and two years later has shown few signs of rebounding in Western Europe or the Muslim world, an international poll found… In Britain, which prides itself on its “special relationship” with Washington, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.

I guess many Brits prefer China’s real live gulags to our merely figurative ones. Our ever-polite neighbors to the north had the following 3 word view of Americans –

Rude, greedy and violent

Well then. Personally, I don’t read too much into these sorts of polls and they reinforce my view that much of Global Politics basically boils down to one big high school with America being the richest kid on the block.

And we all know how everyone in High School felt about that kid.

In fact, it’s even worse – we’re not just the rich kid (GNP) but also the quarterback (military), prettiest / most popular (Hollywood) and possibly the overly industrious, know-it-all Eagle Scout (Silicon Valley / Religion / Patriotism / Wide-Eyed Optimism) all rolled into one. Talk about a combo that would make the chess team, literature club, & “trench-coat mafia” seethe.

That’s not to say we don’t occasionally screw things up in a “careless” Daisy Buchanan sort of way, it’s just that it’s hard to imagine a world where this measure ever becomes / remains positive for long regardless of our behavior. (Although, in supremely High School-esque fashion, experiencing a 9/11 does appear to replenish global good will).

In the end, this particular global test doesn’t feel very falsifiable. BUT, there is one wrinkle here that’s actually pretty surprising / interesting – preceptions of the US in India – Continue reading →

Join in the chant: “Women’s rights NOT F-16s!”

Posted on by

samia.JPG Yesterday I wrote about a protest on behalf of Mukhtaran Bibi; today, over fifty people and half-a-dozen news organizations (including CNN, Dawn and VOA) showed up at the Pakistani embassy. Samia Khan, a Development Manager for MDRI (Mental Disability Rights International) and a NAPAWF (National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum) volunteer who was at the epicenter of today’s event agreed to answer three questions for the Mutiny. You have no idea how sweet this woman is– she had other plans and she shelved them just so you guys could get the latest knowledge on “the movement”. Samia, you’re my heroine.

Samia speaks:

Was it a success?

It was a success in terms of visibility and raising awareness of the issue and involving different organizations. There were at least 6-7 institutions that got involved, it was a multi-ethnic effort, too. It was a strong beginning.
It would be great if Mukhtaran Mai is free, if she gets her passport and can travel thatÂ’s wonderful, but itÂ’s important to remember that sheÂ’s one voice, that there are thousands of cases like her, and that if policies donÂ’t change thereÂ’s going to continue to be lip service to the international communityÂ…but nothing will change things for women.

WhatÂ’s next?

The follow-up to this needs to involve putting more pressure on the government of Pakistan, the international community as well as the administration here. They need to start holding Mushharaf accountable for having respect for humanÂ’s rights, for women. The U.S. is turning a blind eye by giving him aid, but not questioning his policies towards woman and even children.

Continue reading →