Shubhranshu Choudhary accepting his award (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary is the brain behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh) a mobile-phone (no smartphone required) service that allows citizens to upload and listen to local reports in their local language.
Shubhranshu Choudhary acceptance remarks:
Over the last few centuries our politics, world over has got democratized, more or less.
But if you look at mass communication, media or Journalism it still remains aristocratic, top down and more power in the hands of few.
We understand that our political democracy can not mature, function well unless we have a democratic, equitable communication.
But is that possible?
That is the experiment we are trying to do in India.
I grew up in Central India amidst hills and forest with Indigeneous people, whom we also call Adivasis, the tribals.
Central India is in the middle of a bloody war between Maoist guerrillas and Indian security forces. Tribals are led by the Maoists.
My tribal classmates once told me “our smaller problems can be solved if we have a democratic communication platform where each has equal right to speak and being heard.
To create a democratic, more equitable media we are using mobile phone in this experiment. Mobile phones have reached deep interiors even in countries like India.
Everyone has a voice and can speak in their own mother tongue.They feel more comfortable speaking rather then writing as many do not know how to read and write. And even if they know they feel more comfortable as they are an oral community.
Though mobile is owned by many but it is a personal communication tool. We use internet to convert mobile phone into a mass communication tool.
Today the same people who had no voice before are picking up their mobile and are telling their stories in their own languages. The messages, songs get recorded in our computer using an Interactive Voice recorder system and people can hear the same messages on their mobiles once they are cross-checked moderarted by some volunteers.
The same messages are also available online for Urban activists to follow with officials if they are about any problem. We are seeing many problems getting solved by making this simple connectivity.
An accumulation of these unsolved simple problems create bigger problems like the one we are facing in Central India today, which our Prime Minister once called India’s biggest internal security threat.
If problems are not being heard, not being solved, they create the “future terrorists”
But to complete this experiment we need your help.
We need help to connect this experiment to Short wave radio to create a duplicatable and sustainable independent communication model which people can own.
India, though, is world’s biggest democracy, we do not allow Radio. We will need help from outside like yours who can give us space in Radio transmitters.
But it will be a different type of radio, new radio. In this democratic radio programs will not be created in studios or newsrooms but they will be created in far off forests and villages where people through their mobile phone will report. Some of us in the middle on computer/internet will work on improving/editing them.
We Journalists will also be elected by the community and not selected by the powerful few.
This way we will create news which is by the people, of the people and for the people.
If we want a better democracy, a peaceful tomorrow we can not leave Journalism in the hands of few any more. Time has come like politics, Journalism also needs to become everybody’s business.
Shubhranshu Choudhary accepting his award (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
Journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary is the brain behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh) a mobile-phone (no smartphone required) service that allows citizens to upload and listen to local reports in their local language.
CGNet Swara is a vital tool giving people who are deprived of a voice and platform in mainstream media, on the wrong side of the digital divide, a chance to have a say on and learn about the issues that affect them the most. Furthermore, CGNet Swara also manages to circumvent India’s strict broadcast licensing laws.
Choudhary estimates that there are some 100 million people in India for whom mainstream methods of communicating news don’t work, whether due to language barriers, low levels of literacy or lack of access to internet and newspapers among other things. This represents a serious barrier to their socio-economic development, as they are not updated on stories of importance to them, and their views and grievances and demands are not voiced and addressed.
CGNet Swara aims to solve this problem. It is a voice-based portal, freely accessible via mobile phone, that allows anyone to report and listen to stories of local interest. “Reporters” call a Bangalore number to upload a news item, and reported stories are moderated by journalists and become available for playback online as well as over the phone. They get around 500 messages per day. Fifty are recorded and about five are broadcast. The moderators are elected by the community, and therefore represent them.
“We are providing a new platform which the villagers can use to talk to each other and the outside world about issues that are important to them,” Choudhary said.
“The book, which is out of stock with us, shall not be reissued until the concerns are addressed for an acceptable resolution of the whole matter,”- says a 10 March statement from Aleph Book Company, publisher of Wendy Doniger’s “On Hinduism”.
A panel of four independent scholars will review the book, and then parley on equal terms with Dina Nath Batra, the same person who vanquished Doniger’s previous book “The Hindus: An Alternative History”.
Aleph’s optimism about some amicable solution is misplaced. Emboldened by Penguin India’s surrender the first time round, Dina Nath Batra’s second onslaught was more strident, and if examined critically, his claims, more preposterous. And nothing in his conduct permits one to hazard a guess about ceding even an inch of territory.
The legal notice slapped by Batra is a bullying rag, littered with random phrases and sentences which cannot be strung together by any stretch of logic. Parsing it, one gets to know how hurtful and offensive the “sexual thrust” of Doniger’s “titillating sexual tapestry” is. In her book which Aleph hails as a “magisterial volume”, a “scholarship of the highest order, and a compelling analysis of one of the world’s great faiths”, Doniger talks about Brahmin men’s monopolisation of Sanskrit, their oppression of women and Dalits (Untouchables), and a religious philosopher’s exhortation to overthrow the caste system and shatter the taboo against beef consumption. Then there is this limerick, whose truth many Indians would grudgingly testify to:
A Hindu who didn’t like kama
Refused to take off his pajama,
When his bride’s lustful finger
Reached out for his linga
He jumped up and ran home to Mama.
Batra and his acolytes’ litany of complaints can go on, and one can continue harping on Hinduism’s inherently pluralistic and tolerant character. But, now the crux of the problem is something different. The bigoted Hindus claim they are “law-abiding citizens” and have only sought to enforce the protection provided by the law, and even Penguin tried to hide behind the charade of “we respect the law of the land”. Which should naturally lead one to inquire -– what do the legal provisions say, and how have the courts interpreted them over the years?
Censorship mavens as “Law-abiding citizens”? Not really.
At first blush, it might seem that Sections 295A, 298, and 153A of the Indian Penal Code demonstrate excessive solicitude for hurt religious sentiments, shut out any independent critical inquiry and punish satire. However, “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage” remains an essential ingredient, and this remains the pivot on which freedom of expression rests. Agreed that Doniger’s telling of the scriptures does employ biting satire, and some of her statements are indeed tongue-in-cheek. Because she challenges the hegemonic interpretation of the self-appointed custodians of the faith, they accuse her of gratuitous provocation and making scurrilous statements.
Fortunately, the law takes a different view, and quite assertively so. Indian courts have a long tradition of protecting and upholding the right to express contrarian views on religion and the scriptures.
In 1924, a pamphlet titled Rangeela (“colourful”, in Hindi) Rasul, claiming to describe the real events of Prophet Mohammed’s life did the rounds in pre-Partition Punjab. Muslims were livid, a communal conflagration seemed imminent, but the Punjab High Court upheld the writer’s right to freedom of expression. Section 153-A, the court held, was intended to prevent riotous attacks against members of a particular religious community, and not to bar polemics, even if the remarks were undoubtedly satirical and scurrilous.
When in 2001 the government proscribed posters depicting the Ram Katha (an alternative narrative of the Ramayana) in the Buddhist and Jain traditions, the Delhi High Court put its foot down on not allowing free speech to be trampled by insular bigotry. Regarding the use of stray passages to demand censorship, the Delhi High Court’s 2001 judgement is illuminating. A single phrase — “that militant Ram used to stoke Hindu Muslim hatred in India today” from a documentary on the Ramayana was picked on by the censors. Not only did the court provide a judicial shield to diversity of interpretations, it asserted that random passages are insufficient to justify restrictions on free speech. Any restriction must be justified “on the anvil of necessity and not on the quicksand of convenience or expediency,” or on the unsubstantiated apprehensions of communal violence.
It would be partially speculative to single out all the real or purported reasons for Penguin’s surrender. But to exonerate bigots on the basis of their disingenuous claim of adhering to the law would set a pernicious precedent, paving the way for more books to be “pulped” and authors to be silenced.
Improbable as it may seem, but 67 Kashmiri university students were briefly charged with sedition for cheering for Pakistan, and celebrating its win over India, during an Asia Cup cricket match in early March.
Sections of the Indian Penal Code that they were charged under were the following:
Section 124a – “Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law..”
Section 153 – “Whoever malignantly, or wantonly by doing anything which is illegal, gives provocation to any person intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause the offence of rioting to be committed shall..”
Section 427 – “Whoever commits mischief and thereby causes loss or damage to the amount of fifty rupees or upwards..”
The students were watching the match in Meerut, at the Swami Vivekanand Subharti University when the ruckus started. According to conflicting reports, the hooting of the Kashmiri students at Pakistan’s win caused those supporting India to chase them and throw stones at their rooms. The Kashmiri students protested the next day, but the university officials suspended them for three days as “resentment was growing in other hostels because of their behavior.” The police charged them under the Indian Penal Code. After a public outcry, the Uttar Pradesh police dropped the charges, however, there is a battle of words between the police and university officials as to who initiated the charges against the students.
The incident, once again, has exposed the fragile faultlines between Kashmir and India – and the perceived disloyalty of the Kashmiri Muslims to India. The controversy has brought about some harsh reactions, including a tweet by famous lyricist Javed Akhtar that said – “Why the suspension of those 67 Kashmiri students who cheered Pakistan is revoked. They should be rusticated and sent back to Kashmir.” Others, like Shivam Vij, took a more nuanced position, stating that, “not taking action against them would have escalated the violence at the university and in the city. The Indian students at the university were responding with the same sentiment that makes Kashmiri Muslims suspect their Hindu minority: the sentiment of nationalism. How acceptable would it be to a Pakistani if some in Pakistan openly and publicly cheered for the Indian cricket team in a match against Pakistan?”
Tidbits from Kashmir also help cement this view of the Muslims from the Kashmir Valley to the rest of India. Reports that firecrackers celebrated Pakistan’s win all night, and that a skirmish between Indian army personnel and local Kashmir youth celebrating the results of the match ended in a stabbing. There have also been defiant editorials from Pakistan countering the action against the students, declaring that, “it is not the win of Pakistan but the loss of India against any cricket playing nation that revives interest for cricket in Kashmir. India’s loss is a temporary relief from all the melancholy and grief that the people of Kashmir go through on a daily basis, inflicted by the Indian state and its military architecture.”
While this incident in question might have, on the surface, been about cricket and extremely ungentlemanly behavior, very quickly it seemed to have translated into politics as usual. A outcry about serious charges against university students – Kashmiris who had travelled far from home to obtain an Indian degree – was raised by many Indians in the media, by the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and international groups. Many of these students were in Meerut given under the PMSSS, or the Prime Minister’s Special Scholarship Scheme, meant to enhance job opportunities for Kashmiri youth, meant mainly for low-income families. This is part of a larger drive to assimilate Kashmiri youth into the mainstream economic and educational life of India.
Indian Express’s Shekhar Gupta lamented the controversy given cricket’s globalized nature where it is increasingly normal to cheer for favourite player from another country. Instead he feels that “India’s majority has a minority complex” and this is coming to the fore “when the BJP is surging ahead, and not because of any mandir, tension with Pakistan, or rash of terror attacks. And when, in fairness, you have to acknowledge that there isn’t even a vaguely communal appeal in its leader Narendra Modi’s campaign message. India has had a 13-year period of total peace, unprecedented in its independent history. There has been a steep decline in terror incidents. Even the Maoists seem to be shrinking slowly. And yet, our level of jingoism is as if we were approaching an imminent war, as if India were under siege, its borders getting violated with impunity, the enemy at the gates.” Many echo Gupta’s view, fearing that those who believe the BJP under Narendra Modi will form government after the elections in April 2014, might be quick to adopt the jingoistic Hindu nationalism the party was based on.
Adding a layer to this incident is an interesting point of view offered by journalist Prayaag Akbar who writes about India’s many Muslims who feel affinity towards Pakistani cricket team, but are rarely called out for it, unlike the Kashmiri Muslims. He writes – “that some Indian Muslims, not just Kashmiris, support Pakistan during cricket matches must be acknowledged. But categorisation is self-fulfilling, some will say, and sport excites tribalism. It does not immediately follow—and this seems to be the consideration at the crux of the issue—that they will support Pakistan in a war against India. Yet it does not immediately follow that they will not, either. No one on either side of the debate can assert their position with complete confidence. What we can say with certainty is there has been a failure of assimilation, that has in part been caused by a rarely acknowledged, yet generally accepted, narrowed definition of what it means to be Indian.”
Cricket, criticisms and cartoons cannot be simply deemed seditious by the Uttar Pradesh police because they are problematic. And, ironically, this is in the shadow of the largest democratic exercise in the world, the Indian elections, a month away.
“The book, which is out of stock with us, shall not be reissued until the concerns are addressed for an acceptable resolution of the whole matter,”- says a 10 March statement from Aleph Book Company, publisher of Wendy Doniger’s “On Hinduism”. 
