27 May 14 | India, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
The Vagina Monologues performed in Mumbai in 2013 (Photo: BBC News)
“If Chennai doesn’t have vaginas, it is full of a#*holes!” quipped Mahabanu Mody Kotwal in the opening act of The Vagina Monologues when it was staged in Mumbai. The veteran theatre actor and director had good reason for using the pun. In December 2010, when the play was to be staged in the city for the first time, the Police Commissioner played spoilsport at the eleventh hour and declined permission. Earlier this year, a play on the Partition of India wasn’t allowed to be staged in Bangalore, and yes, Chennai. In both cases, it was the police which called the shots in the cancellations. Theatre’s subversive and liberating potential is renowned, and governments the world over have never held themselves back from wielding the censor’s bludgeon, but in India, it is the police which has been vested with remarkably sweeping powers to crack down on theatrical performances.
However, Chennai’s travails might well be over because in January this year, the Supreme Court struck down those provisions of the legislation – The Tamil Nadu Dramatic Performances Act, 1964 which permitted the cops to be the sole arbiters of “suitable” drama in the first place.
The roots of this legislation go back to the days when India was under British rule and the colonial administration remained constantly paranoid about “the natives” being up to mischief. Their fears were precipitated in 1876, when a Bengali play “Neel Darpan” (A Mirror to Indigo) was staged in Calcutta and got a rousing response, even from many Englishmen. The play narrated how farmers in Bengal and other provinces were being forced to cultivate indigo, and if they refused, were meted out the most terrible of punishments. This made the livid rulers who termed the play “scurrilous”, enact a law “to empower the government to prohibit certain dramatic performances”. The stated object of this law was to “prohibit Native plays that are scandalous, defamatory, seditious, obscene, or otherwise prejudicial to public interest”. Of course, “otherwise prejudicial to public interest” was left undefined, further empowering the censors.
It was hoped that independence would free drama from the shackles of this repressive law, but the reverse happened. Different states in India brought in their own legislations to control theatre, and most of them tightened the grip more than the British ever did.
For instance, the present legislation was geared towards proscribing “objectionable” plays and pantomimes. Section 2 (1) defined “objectionable” as anything which was likely to:
be seditious
(i) incite any person to commit murder, sabotage or any offence involving violence; or
(ii) seduce any member of any of the armed forces of the Union or of the police forces from his allegiance or his duty, or prejudice the recruiting of persons to serve in any such force or prejudice the discipline of any such force;
(iii) incite any section of the citizens of India to acts of violence against any other section of the citizens of India;
(iv) is deliberately intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class of the citizens of India by insulting or blaspheming or profaning the religion or the religious beliefs of that class;
(v) is grossly indecent, or is scurrilous or obscene or intended for blackmail; and includes any indecent or obscene dance.”
Thus, one is left in no doubt that the only form of ‘non-objectionable’ theatre would be bland, pantomimes extolling the virtues of mythology and religion; even then, one could never be sure, because religious sentiments in India are nothing short of a communal tinderbox.
If these antediluvian definitions weren’t enough, the police could act against the producer, director, troupe, and even the person who either owned or let out the premises where the play was to be staged. And there lurked the gravest danger- carte blanche powers of pre-censorship. Scripts of plays were to be submitted to the police for approval, and even though an opportunity of hearing was provided before the final call could be taken, it was hollow formality because the history of the legislation’s implementation proves that permission was granted only when the director or the playwright agreed to some of the mandated excisions.
In fact, the government was so unwilling to relinquish control that it told the Court of its willingness to appoint an officer to “guide the police commissioner in the cultural nuances” since literary sensibilities aren’t usually policemen’s forte!
The Supreme Court has broken the police’s stranglehold in Tamil Nadu; the time is ripe for challenging similar laws proscribing dramatic performances in other states and restoring to theatre the freedom it always deserved.
This article was posted May 27, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
23 May 14 | News and features, Pakistan, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
(Image: Aleksandar Mijatovic/Shutterstock)
Shahidullah Afridi’s roots are in a village in the Bara administrative division of the Khyber agency. For the last four years, Afridi has been living in the neighbouring city of Peshawar, but keeps a keen eye on events at home.
He was shocked when he heard that last week, the outlawed militant group, Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) had started a rather strange recruitment drive in his village that asked residents to enrol at least one of their sons to madrassas run by LI or pay Rs 400,000 (£2,397.96) as penalty.
Afridi is glad he left when he could. “I have a five-year old son. I don’t want my son to study in a madressa. I didn’t and I consider myself a fairly good Muslim,” he said, adding: “If you don’t study in a school [as opposed to a madressa], you don’t find work.”
The news was confirmed by Zahir Shah Sherazi, Dawn TV’s bureau chief in Peshawar who also reports on FATA and KPK. “My sources tell me that A4 sized posters have been plastered all over the marketplace in the Malik Din Khel area, controlled by LI, demanding locals put their sons into the seminaries run by them,” he told Index, adding: “They also said admission in madrassas other than theirs would not be acceptable.”
Afridi has not visited his village since he left. “I neither sport a beard nor do I wear a skull cap,” he told Index by phone from Peshawar, where he works as a daily wage earner.
Ambreen Agha, a research assistant with New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management, said Mangal Bagh assumed the leadership of LI in 2007, emerging as a new face of extremism and Islamic fundamentalism. “He imposed his version of the Shariah, issuing diktats against women’s education, making it compulsory for men to keep beards and forced women to wear burqa.”
Neither the Pakistani government nor the army took any actions.
“It shows the incompetency of the establishment,” said Agha, adding: “Eight years of Bagh’s control of the area says enough about the will of the Pakistani state in dealing with the militants. ”
To Farahnaz Ispahani, public policy scholar with the Washington D.C. based-Woodrow Wilson Centre and a former parliamentarian, it’s a “reflection of the virtual end of pluralism and choice in Pakistan”.
“Extremist ideology has partnered with criminality; the so-called Lashkar-e-Islam is engaging in mafia-like extortion but seeking respectability as an Islamist insurgent group,” she told Index.
Sherazi terms Bagh a “criminal” adding that his is not an ideological fight. “He is just doing business — in drugs,” he said.
Journalist Taha Siddiqui, winner of this year’s Albert Londres Prize, has travelled extensively in the area controlled by Bagh as well as written about militancy. Siddiqui told Index: “Locals that I have spoken to tell me that the smuggling trade from Bagh’s area is most lucrative.”
But why has the state allowed Bagh to flex his muscles with such impunity?
Khyber agency is on the last leg of the NATO supply route before it enters Afghanistan. Siddiqui says it suits the Pakistani security establishment to keep the area lawless. “It helps to keep it infested with militants — and using the latter as proxies to keep the pressure on NATO when it’s exiting.”
In addition, he said, Pakistan had often hinted at acquiring the leftover military equipment. “What better way to have their way if the ISAF does not cooperate — keep attacking the supply route — and that is only possible if they have proxies there,” he explained.
At another level, Siddiqui said the state is using militancy to achieve some other objectives. “They created Ansar ul Islam [another banned militant group] to counter LI in Khyber agency. To me, it proves that they do not want to eradicate militancy, but keep arming one group to disarm the others, especially those who have turned against them.”
Bagh’s enrolment ultimatum is just another example of how emboldened the militant outfits have become and in comparison how weak the Pakistani state appears.
However, there is time still and if the state is sincere in protecting the next generation of children from embracing militancy, Siddiqui said, the civilian government should ask the military what it has been doing in Khyber agency for almost half a decade. “If it’s fighting militancy, then this should not be the result. On the other hand, if it is not, those responsible should be held accountable and heads should roll so that an effective counter-terrorism policy is actually implemented which is not limited to paying lip-service to gain international sympathy and aid through deceit and cheating that Pakistan has come to be known for.”
This article was posted on May 19, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
21 May 14 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features, Politics and Society
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
Indians, ever a chatty lot, are obsessed with the idea of being obsessed with social media. That is why, as the BJP’s stunning victory in the Indian general elections was declared, the news media immediately began to examine the impact of social media campaigning in the elections. Numbers aside, the victory over social media has revealed the fault lines of Indian society as it stands today.
India’s online population is small as compared to its offline population – about 213 million users to 1.2 billion people – but it is growing. Though these figures expand and contract depending on whom you ask, we do know that 33 million are on Twitter and Facebook has hit the 100 million-user mark. Given these statistics, it is indeed impressive that India’s newest Prime Minister, Narendra Modi has 4.2 million followers on Twitter already. The would-be leader of opposition, Rahul Gandhi, whose party did not win enough seats to actually assume the seat as leader of the opposition in parliament, isn’t on Twitter. However, his party has an account, with about 181,000 followers. There are other political stars on social media, including individual members of various parties, and notably, members of the newly formed Aam Aadmi Party.
However, when asked the question: “who won the social media war” – because, to be sure, there was one – the answer can only really be Narendra Modi. In fact, his own campaign machinery was so well oiled that his personal profile overshadowed his party. “Ab ki baar, Modi Sarkar” (this time, a Modi government) was arguably the catchiest slogan on the campaign and it inspired many a joke, including a takeover of the nursery rhyme – “twinkle, twinkle, little star, ab ki baar, Modi sarkar!” And according to reports, the BJP was mentioned on Twitter, on average, about 30,000 times a day, with the Congress trailing behind at between 15,000-20,000. Modi’s victory tweet promising a better India after election results were declared was retweeted 69,872 times.
Truthfully, there is no way that social media could have supplanted the traditional route. Modi’s tireless campaigning – 437 rallies, 5,827 public interface events across 25 states that is a distance of 300,000km – is impressive. But, equally impressive was the BJP’s entire digital campaign effort; a “social media war room” that reportedly cost Rs 35 lakh (35,000 GBP), with 30 computers and about 50 volunteers, tracking activities across India’s 92,000 villages. And accounts from insiders, young professionals, many whom took sabbaticals from their jobs to participate in this campaign, talks of a breathless environment, where Facebook was used to crowdsource ideas for speeches, and ‘Mission 272’ (in terms of how many seats they were aiming to win) became a reality. In fact, many creative contributions from BJP’s supporters – videos, jingles, songs and poems – can be found on the website.
At the same time, social media has been very revealing about the state of the Indian majority. The tonality of political discourse over the internet, which was very polarized between the Hindu rightwingers and secularists saw vicious language, trolling and hate speech dotting the landscape. However, the Hindu right, abused as communal in the time of the Congress government have emerged victorious and unapologetic about their political leanings. In public groups on Google Plus, cyber Hindus declare that a “pro Hindu lobby is not an option, but a sheer necessity.” In fact, the ‘liberal’ discourse that sweeps much of the mainstream English media was taken aback at the sweeping victory that the BJP has earned in this election. There is nervousness that the BJP, supported and guided by the RSS – Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—a right-wing, nationalist group espousing strict discipline, martial training and self sacrifice in defence of the Motherland, often derided for being extremist – will work towards a majoritarian agenda where minorities will find less space to exist. These fears are compounded by the RSS’s beliefs – formalized in annual reports – that seek to impose a strict moral code that frowns upon live-in relations, homosexuality and also keeping an eye on minority communities. The RSS has being heartened by educated Indians joining their cause via social media, thereby signaling that their views might no longer be frowned upon as extreme or communal. They do not want to apologize for representing the view of the Hindu right.
And on cue, Narendra Modi, in a rousing speech formally accepting his role as the leader of the majority party in Parliament, promised his fellow BJP MPs that by the birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya in 2016, co-founder of the Bharitiya Jan Sangh that later became the BJP as known today, India shall rise to its promise of being a great nation. Tying down his campaign promises to his deep association with the RSS, the signal is clear. Indeed, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former Prime Minister, had affirmed proudly that “the Sangh is my soul”. The Hindu is back in Hindustan (another name for India).
An analysis in India Today magazine has declared the Indian cybersphere ‘saffron’ (the color associated with the Hindu right) writing, “But their agenda is a mix of post-modern and traditional. They oppose dynasty politics, particularly the Nehru-Gandhi clan and its allies such as Shiv Sena. They call minority appeasement ‘pseudo-secularism’ with such fervour that their sentiment could easily be interpreted as Hindu supremacist or anti-Muslim. They are against lower-caste reservation, particularly because it is poorly implemented. They are concerned about internal security. But above all, they are against corruption.” In deconstructing the ways of the Hindu saffron social media user, the article offers certain clues, such as the words “proud”, “patriot” and “Hindu” appearing in their bios, and often uploading images of Hindu gods as their display picture.
The people have spoken. The media is filled with analysis that people have either embraced Modi for his Hindu leanings, or ignored them in order realize the dream of “development” that is has promised to deliver. The number of Muslim MPs in parliament is down to 21 from 30 in the last session, the lowest number since India’s first elections. The Congress and its allies, who built careers on carefully constructed platforms of secularism – in their first term, they had a Muslim President, Sikh Prime Minister and Christian leader of the party – have been set aside in favour of a openly religious and Hindu BJP. Whatever be the reasons for the vote, for the everyday people tweeting and Facebooking, it appears that being pro-Hindu is slowly being disassociated with being communal. For many, this is a relief.
It seems it might finally be hip to be Hindu.
This article was posted on May 21, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 May 14 | News and features, Nigeria, Pakistan, Religion and Culture
More than three weeks after the abduction of over 200 schoolgirls from the northern Nigerian town of Chibok by Boko Haram (BH), an Islamist militant group, the world is finally awake to the tragedy.
While Michelle Obama tweeted a photo of herself displaying the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, Angelina Jolie said she was “sickened” by the “unthinkable cruelty” and has expressed her anger.
“I heard about it just a few days back when a friend posted an article on Facebook. I was stunned beyond words,” said 19-year old college student Iqra Moazzam, in Karachi, who cannot get over the fact that the girls may have already been sold.
Last week, BH’s leader Abubakar Shekau, threatened to “sell [the girls] in the market” into slavery.
“Not only was the Muslim community slow to respond but the West was also slow to respond,” pointed out Aurangzeb Haneef, who teaches Islamic Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He said there was also some discussion on whether the response would have been quicker had the girls been white.
Boko Haram came about in 2009 in an attempt to impose Islamic law in all 36 Nigerian states. It has been behind killing of thousands of people in Nigeria in recent years and known to have links with other radical Islamist groups in North Africa and Sahel.
“I think they have defiled the name of Islam and added one more stain on the Muslim Ummah. I’m infuriated they are calling themselves Muslims; there is not a shred of Islam in their evil deed,” Moazzam said.
And yet surprisingly, there has been no word of condemnation from any religious institution, no indignation from the pulpit by imams during the weekly Friday sermons and no remonstration from the people in the Islamic world.
In September 2012, video-sharing website YouTube put up a 14-minute clip of Innocence of Muslims, produced by an American that was disrespectful of Islam, Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad, which sent a wave of protests throughout the Muslim world. In Pakistan, complete mayhem broke out: 30 people were killed and over 300 were injured.
The 12 cartoons published on 30 September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of Prophet Muhammad, and which the Muslims found extremely and deliberately offensive, led to attempts on the life of the cartoonist and arson attempt made on the newspaper office.
Khalid Zaheer, an eminent religious scholar and vice-president of Al-Mawrid, a foundation for Islamic research and education, explained: “People come to the streets for issues about which they are sensitised by their scholars. Blasphemy is a topic that concerns the ulema (scholars) more because they have literature speaking against it.”
But he said: “Killing in the name of Islam is either considered an exaggerated propaganda, justified jihad, or atrocities done by some enemies who have conspired to malign Islam.” He said the narrow view of the world that is taught in madrassas and promoted in mosques causes non-issues to be made a matter of life and death and real issues to be ignored as if they don’t exist.
Haneef also attributed the inaction on the street to lack of response to the episode by the religious parties. He added: “Since the victims in this case are not Muslims (although some reports suggested that a few of them were Muslims) and since the accused here claim some kind of Islam, therefore, there has been understandable inertia on the part of Islamic parties to criticise BH.”
Unfortunately, pointed out Haneef: “Common Muslims are reluctant to take up issues involving atrocities against non-Muslims. Few people understand that these atrocities are in the name of Islam — Islam is being hurt here — yet they don’t feel compelled enough to raise their voice against BH.”
The same sentiment was endorsed by peace activist, Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, who is also an academic. “I am sure that most Muslims do not approve of Muslims killing non-Muslims or other Muslims, but this does not raise passions in the same way.”
He also said: “Most Muslims today do disapprove of the mass abduction and sale of the Nigerian girls, but they prefer silence. There is vague discomfort that being too loud might cause Islamic fundamentals to come under scrutiny, something that is best avoided in these dangerous times.”
Hoodbhoy explained that with BH at war with those they consider infidels: “Women captured during tribal wars were part of the war booty and the Holy Quran is completely explicit on the distribution of every kind of booty, including women. Of course, as with slavery, most Muslims regard these verses as meant for those times only.” He said that was the takfiri (a Muslim who accuses another Muslim of apostasy) philosophy of the BH.
Khadeja Ebrahim 12, studying in Class 7, at a British school in Karachi likened the Nigerian militant group to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). “They seem like the Taliban we have in Pakistan, who attacked Malala and believe those seeking western-style education are committing a sin,” she told Index. Asked if she felt scared she nodded saying: “If it can happen in Nigeria, it can happen here in Pakistan and in Karachi too.”
Still, Hoodbhoy, finds the Taliban quite gentle when compared to the BH. “While the TTP does mount suicide attacks, and makes video tapes football matches played with the heads of decapitated Pakistan soldiers, the techniques employed by BH are brutal beyond description.”
This article was updated at 11:46 on 13 May, 2014.
This article was posted on May 13, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
