SYDNEY/PARIS: India is investigating the
extent to which secrets about French Scorpene submarines being built in
the country have been compromised, its defence ministry said on
Wednesday, after a leak of documents relating to its combat
capabilities.
The leak, which was first reported in The
Australian newspaper, contains more than 22,000 pages outlining the
secret capabilities of six submarines that French builder DCNS has
designed for the Indian Navy.
The newspaper The
Australian reported that the leaked data includes descriptions of what
frequencies the submarines use to gather intelligence, where a crew can
speak safely to avoid detection, and specifications of the torpedo
launch system.
"I understand there has been a case of hacking," Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar told reporters.
"We will find out what has happened."
The
submarines are being built at a state-run shipyard in Mumbai and the
first one was expected to go into service by the end of the year, the
first step in the Indian navy's effort to rebuild its dwindling fleet.
The
massive leak has also raised doubts about the security of DCNS's
submarine project in Australia where it won a US $38.06 billion contract
to build the next generation of the submarines. Australia's government,
which signed a big-budget deal in April with DCNS for 12 submarines of a
different class, said the leak shouldn't affect the Australian ships.
DCNS
beat out Germany's ThyssenKrupp AG and a Japanese-government backed bid
by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, in a blow
to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's push to develop defence export
capabilities as part of a more muscular security agenda.
The
leaked documents cover the Scorpene-class model and do not contain any
details of the vessel currently being designed for the Australian fleet.
DCNS said it could not immediately authenticate the
documents, but would not rule out that the leak was part of an "economic
war" waged by the competitors it beat in the contest for the Australian
contract.
"For now we don't know if the information is
correct," a DCNS spokeswoman said. "The competition is more and more
hard and all means can be used in this context."
"There
is India, Australia and other prospects, and other countries could raise
legitimate questions over DCNS. It's part of the tools in economic
war," she said.
Shipmaker DCNS said in a statement that
French national security authorities are investigating the size,
seriousness and cause of the leak.
Thales, which owns 35
per cent of the shipbuilder, could not immediately be reached for
comment outside normal European business hours. The French defence
ministry declined to make an immediate comment.
Thales was down more than 2pc in early trading, while the wider French blue-chip index was down 0.75pc.
Major strategic problem
The breadth of detail in the documents creates a major
strategic problem for India, Malaysia and Chile, all of which operate
the same submarine, an Australian political source with decades of
experience in the global arms industry told Reuters.
Excerpts
published in redacted form on the newspaper's website contained highly
sensitive details of the submarine including technical manuals and
models of the boat's antennae.
"If it's 22,400 pages, it's a major stuff-up," the source said. “It's a huge deal.
"It
allows them to understand everything about the submarines. What speeds
it can do; how noisy it is; what speeds the mast can be raised at ...
all of that is just devastating."
The Indian Defence
Ministry said it was investigating the impact of the leak on the
submarine programme which it said had occurred from abroad. It gave no
details.
"The available information is being examined at
Integrated Headquarters, Ministry of Defence (Navy) and an analysis is
being carried out by the concerned specialists," it said in a statement.
"It appears that the source of leak is from overseas
and not in India." Uday Bhaskar, a former naval officer, said that if
the leak was established, it would amount to a significant compromise of
the credibility of the submarines.
India has a fleet of
13 ageing submarines, only half of which are operational at any time,
opening up a major gap with China which is expanding its maritime
presence in the Indian Ocean.
Australian Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull sought to deflect concern about the leak, touting the
high security standards in Australia, where the submarine will be built.
The Australian reported that the leak occurred in France in 2011.
"But
clearly, it is a reminder that, particularly in this digital world,
cyber security is of critical importance," he told the Seven TV network.
Pakistan, as we were reminded with the sorrowful news of Qandeel Baloch’s murder a few weeks ago, is not a country that rewards women for taking an active role in their destiny.
Few
countries are, mind you, but Pakistan can be more brutal, more flagrant
in its utter contempt for women than most. Feminism is still considered
the preserve of women too plain to ‘snag’ husbands, or to people who
give it more credit, a tool of the West to undermine the happy Muslim
family unit. It is a testament to our low expectations of Pakistani men
that the media reported with an air of pleasant surprise that Qandeel’s father actually wanted to see his son convicted for her murder.
With
her public profile which continued to divide public opinion even after
her death, Qandeel inspired, at least in the English press, an
unprecedented reflection, the sorry state of women in Pakistan, and its
unforgiving, patriarchal mindset where male egos are Aztec gods
requiring regular human sacrifice.
There are so many
instances of rage and brutality against women that the violence of the
details in the ones that make it to the papers; maiming, torture,
murder, is repeated too often to shock. We’re only reading the tip of
the iceberg and still the occurrence is so frequent that it seems to sap
rather than spur resolve for change — bringing on the lethargy of utter
helplessness.
Qandeel’s death reminded me of another
woman who didn’t let societal convention stand between her and the kind
of life she wanted. Veena Malik, who posed allegedly nude (she insists
her underwear was photoshopped out) on the cover of Indian FHM magazine in 2011.
Numerous
righteous Pakistanis bayed for her blood while also frantically
googling her bosom. It is hard to say which activity accorded them
greater pleasure. Scoffed at by an elite who sing a different tune when
it’s a Hollywood star nude on the cover of Vanity Fair, Malik’s own
father wanted to have her arrested, and in retrospect one considers that
it’s quite good of him to at least abide by the letter of the law,
flimsy as it is, and not just kill her himself.
It is a testament to our low expectations of Pakistani men that the
media reported with an air of pleasant surprise that Qandeel’s father
actually wanted to see his son convicted for her murder.
In a moment of what would have been high comedy in a less
sinister country, the then interior minister stepped in to decide what
action was to be taken against her. It is her good fortune that she had
the means to escape — means not available to Qandeel.
In Taliban-occupied Swat, it was the bullet-ridden body of the dancer Shabana
displayed in Mingora’s central square that quashed any signs of
defiance Swat’s citizenry may have considered showing. Shabana was
killed for ignoring warnings from the Taliban to give up her sole means
of supporting herself; through dance performances at private gatherings.
It is hard to say whether Shabana’s death would have elicited a similar
amount of horror had she been shot not by the Taliban but by a male
relative.
Women who step out of the ever-narrowing bounds
of propriety aren’t often accorded such wholehearted sympathy.
Certainly not dancers and other such purveyors of temptation who might
give people ideas. To be the unwilling recipient of sexualised attention
is to be expected and born without complaint, but to wield feminine
wiles knowingly is unacceptable. One keeps reading that Pakistan is at
war with the Taliban, only it’s just hard to tell who’s who sometimes.
The only Pakistani woman I can think of who not just survived her
deliciously scurrilous private life in the public sphere was the late
great Malika-e-Tarannum, Noor Jehan.
While the line between ‘conservative’ Pakistanis and
militants seems to be just a matter of facial hair and firearms,
Pakistani liberals too aren’t quite what you’d hope. As has often been
remarked, the term liberal has been usurped, along with much else in the
country, by an elite who confuse being progressive with the ownership
of a cocktail shaker and a social life involving women in body-con
dresses.
This is the same liberal elite who routinely
police women in their own circle, beat their wives, set as a condition
of love a woman’s complete submission to their interests and priorities,
and find in sexism and body shaming (while themselves settling into the
comfort of obesity) the fodder for loud, thigh-slapping humour.
They’re
happy to extend unqualified sympathy to the female victims of jirgas,
who could never aspire in any way to undermine their power, but their
own ex-girlfriends are still stupid sluts and when a friend’s wife
leaves alleging cruelty and domestic abuse, we’re told there are “two
sides to the story.”
You should have seen the liberals take a swing at Zahra Haider, a girl who wrote a piece in Vice
about the lack of sexual freedom in Pakistan saying, quite rightly, “if
a woman from a middle-class family or underprivileged background is
caught having premarital sex, serious shit goes down.” When she revealed
that in spite of the rigors of the morality brigade she’d had a number
of sexual partners in Pakistan, the same people who posit themselves as
spirited defenders of women’s rights slammed this honest young girl as a
“bad example” and “promiscuous”, a word which desperately needs to be
retired, along with the people who use it.
The only
Pakistani woman I can think of who not just survived her deliciously
scurrilous private life in the public sphere was the late great
Malika-e-Tarannum, Noor Jehan. I don’t know if we were a different
country then, or if she was pardoned the human impulse for desire on the
basis of her phenomenal talent (it’s too much to ask for women to be
musical geniuses to accord them the respect men get for free).
I
just always loved that of the women behemoths Umm Kulthum, Lata
Mangeshkar and Noor Jehan, who were the beloved official voices of
Egypt, India and Pakistan respectively, ours was the only one who was
also a cheeky, irreverent, unapologetic sexpot. If I hadn’t seen it
myself, I’d not believe it today.
It has been over two weeks since social media star
Qandeel Baloch was killed by her brother and cousin as she slept in her
parents’ home in Multan, on July 15, 2016.
In
the days after her death there has been much debate about the role of
the media in this murder, with many laying the blame of her death
squarely on the shoulders of the media, which tirelessly covered her
titillating public stunts during her short public life.
Qandeel
shot to fame in 2014, when she released a video proposing suggestively
to politician and cricket legend Imran Khan. That video went viral and a
social media star was born.
Emboldened by the response
from a conservative nation, Qandeel moved onto more provocative promises
such as ‘strip dancing’ for the Pakistani cricket team if they won
against India. The girl from a lower middle-class family from Dera Ghazi
Khan soon developed a big following with an audience, that may not have
approved of her, but which waited eagerly for the next titillating
offering from her.
She displayed rare media savvy in the
way she released videos that were destined to go viral from the moment
they were uploaded on social media. In an environment where the lines
between Pakistan’s mainstream and sensationalist media seem to have been
irretrievably blurred, Qandeel was soon invited to popular talk shows
and even shows that discussed current affairs on a regular basis.
It
is still unclear whether Qandeel’s death qualifies as honour killing.
Her murder could well have been the result of a squabble with her
drug-addicted brother Waseem Azeem — who she was supporting — over
money. However if we were to take her brother’s confession to the police
at face value, it raises several questions about the narrative that the
mainstream media had shaped for Qandeel Baloch.
Widely
portrayed during her short public life as a promiscuous, salacious
woman, Qandeel’s provocative proposal to Imran Khan, her promises to
‘strip dance’ and her rendezvous with government cleric Mufti Abdul
Qavi, were covered tirelessly by the mainstream media, infuriating many,
including allegedly her own brother.
She got used to a
jeering crowd that attacked her callously on social media, even
releasing a video asking her haters to unfollow her.
To
be fair, Qandeel basked in the attention the mainstream lavished on her.
It was a symbiotic relationship where she provided the latest
controversy and the media fed and fuelled it, in order to strengthen the
other symbiotic relationship it shared with its consumers, that is, you
and me.
Unfortunately, the jibes did not stop, even when
things took what should have registered as a serious turn. In the days
before her death, the media dug out Qandeel’s ex-husband to further milk
her notoriety and to fill up air time with TRP-worthy fodder.
Despite
going on air and talking about receiving death threats after the Mufti
Abdul Qavi episode and talking about being physically abused during a
short-lived marriage, the media preferred to turn a blind eye and busy
itself with propagating the narrative it had fashioned for her, by
asking her husband pointed questions designed to malign her and to pat
itself on the back for yanking out a skeleton from her closet.
With
Qandeel dead, it is time to ask whether the media can really take the
moral high ground by saying that they are merely supplying what we are
demanding? We may not approve of Qandeel’s ‘rendezvous’ with Mufti Abdul
Qavi, but we were eagerly lapping it up when the ‘news’ broke on TV and
the controversy ran ad-nauseam across our screens.
The
Qandeel-Mufti rendezvous was god-sent for the media, as it strengthened
the popular narrative it had created about her, adding several hundred
thousand eyeballs and more points to the TV channel’s TRPs.
Will
Qandeel’s death change anything? In the past the media has been blamed
for the death of other celebrities, such as Princess Diana. But little
has been done to curb the sensationalism it broadcasts so unthinkingly
and carelessly. If anything, since Princess Diana’s death and despite
much introspection by the media back then, the tabloid business around
the world has only grown.
A scroll down the average
social media newsfeed and it becomes hard to tell the difference between
the mainstream and tabloid media. Also the media’s largely self-serving
stance on public figures becomes obvious.
Will channel
heads and editors accept that they encouraged unchecked coverage of
Qandeel while she lived? Will they accept that they milked the public’s
fascination with her against their better judgment?
With
Qandeel gone, not only is it time to talk about outdated feudal customs
that she may have fallen victim to, it is also time to question the
media’s role in creating a frenzy and appetite around her, her death and
the events leading up to it.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 7th, 2016
Changing women: Moving into public space
by Mansoor Raza
The
murder of Qandeel Baloch, allegedly for the sake of male honour, is
symptomatic of a wider trend in Pakistan. Violence against women — or at
least of its reporting — is on the rise. Be it the case of young
Sumaira of Karachi or the social media star Fouzia Azeem alias Qandeel
Baloch of Multan, there is an emerging pattern: violence will be used to
deny three basic rights of women and indicators of empowerment — what
to study, where to work and with whom to marry.
The horror stories about the rise of violence against women may be
masking a complementary trend: the increasing role of women in the
public sphere
Yet despite all pressures women are actually increasingly
claiming more space for those critical decisions of their lives. The
causes of this change are interesting and even more interesting are the
indicators of the evolving status of women of Pakistan.
Let us have a look at what some of these indicators are telling us.
Numbers
As per various census reports of the Federal Bureau of
Statistics (FBS), around 48 million women were added between 1951 and
1998 (the census years). In 1951 the women population was recorded at
15.6 million where as in 1998 the women head count was approximately
63.5 million.
Between the two census periods of 1981 and
1998, 23.5 million women were added to Pakistan’s population, a number
that is greater than the actual female population reported in 1961: 20
million.
Though the per annum growth rate is slowing
down, women’s share in the total population has increased from 46.22 per
cent in 1951 to 48.05 per cent in 1998.
The population
of young females (between the ages of 15 and 24) has increased from 6.8
million to 12 million between 1981 and 1998, a growth of almost 78 per
cent between the two censuses. This gigantic addition obviously requires
adjustments in policies of state, a task which is yet to be
accomplished.
Education
Female literacy rates have also shown a tremendous increase.
There were 4.2 million literate women in 1981 while in 1998 the number
of literate women had risen to 13.8 million, an addition of 9.6 million
literate women, which translates into a per annum growth rate (PAGR) of
over 14 per cent. The percentage of female literates 10 years or older
rose from 15.60 per cent in 1981 to 32.60 per cent in 1998.
What
these statistics reveal is that the achievements of women in
educational attainment (enrolment from class one to university) over the
last 47 years (from 1947 to 1998) showed remarkable improvement. There
were only 1,335 girls enrolled in universities in 1951, while in 1998
the figure had gone up to 25,469.
In 1998, women
comprised almost 28 per cent of university students. This indicates a
demand for better utilisation of educated females in the economic
spheres as it can help reduce the dependency ratio. Of course, it also
indicates a change in the entire socio-political fabric of the Pakistani
society.
Marriage
There has been a sharp decline in the percentage of married
women. The percentage of married women with respect to the total women
population of 15 years and above dropped by 4.2 points between 1981 and
1998.
This decline was even more pronounced in the urban areas, where the percentage declined by almost 12 points.
The
average age of marriage for women has also risen, with more women
choosing to marry later, completing their education being the most often
cited reason.
In 1981 there were 78,731 divorced women
while in 1998 the figure rose to 154,343, an addition of 75,612 divorced
women. The PAGR of divorce in women was observed as 4.04 per cent while
in males it was 1.48 per cent.
Divorce also appears to
be more of an urban phenomenon in women, since the PAGR is 6.62 per cent
in urban females as compared to 3.20 in rural females. Interestingly,
despite false claims, divorce rates have actually declined since 1972.
Work
The transition from a feudal culture — with its reliance on
an agricultural modes of production, a barter system, dependence on
landholdings and the responsibility on male members to feed the entire
family, with primitive skills — to service capitalism puts more economic
pressures on women to work and become earning partners.
As a result, a high growth rate (in absolute numbers) is observed in the female labour force as compared to the male population.
In
1981 women’s share in the total labour force was only 2.14 per cent. By
1999-2000, although the overall percentage of the civilian labour force
has gone down, female participation has gone up to 6.68 per cent of the
total population of 10 and above. This shows more involvement of women
in public spheres in order to earn a livelihood.
How do
we interpret these statistics? Taken together, these changes in
demographic indicators show that the actual transition that is taking
place is in the priorities of the female population of Pakistan. The
desire for job security is slowly replacing the earlier concept of
security associated with marriage.
Aspiration for mere
literacy has been replaced, overwhelmingly, by the desire for higher
achievements in the educational field. Attire has changed, vocabulary
has transformed and the gender interaction has morphed.
Women have become increasingly more assertive about their ambitions, far more than their preceding generation.
Stuck
in residual feudal norms, the traditional mindset — with the help of
the orthodox establishment — protests against the progress made by women
but this is a failing proposition. Power is slipping away from them.
One
can think of it as the flailing, desperate attempts of a crumbling
order. Urban women through education and technology have developed
cultural linkages with globalisation that continue to dictate their
choices in life. They are unwilling to let go of whatever freedoms they
have achieved and aspire for more.
The unanswered
question is actually whether institutions are geared up to accommodate
this sea change? If they are not, in the days to come we are likely to
see more violence against women.
Figures worked out by the writer from census reports of FBS
The Brave New World Of Pakistan’s Social Media
Transgressions of social norms are seeping from the digital realm into the real world
By Hasan Zaidi
Quite
aside from the horrifying circumstances of Qandeel Baloch’s murder,
those who don’t use social media or those not particularly familiar with
it, might be forgiven for being baffled at the phenomenon that she was.
Qandeel was probably the first true female internet
celebrity in Pakistan, in that her celebrity had nothing to do with any
achievement beyond her provocative presence on social media.
There
have been other social media-aided celebrities — the ‘Eye To Eye’
singer Tahir Shah, the ‘One-Pound-Fish’ man Shahid Nazir, the camp
self-promoter on YouTube from Sialkot Awais Lovely and the
Twitter-braggart ‘Prince’ Affan bin Saqib, for example — but Qandeel was
probably the first woman to achieve fame solely through social media.
Unlike
other women who have used social media as a tool to advance their
existing careers in film, television or music, Qandeel took the opposite
route. She was reputedly a singer but her only known foray into singing
was as a contestant on Pakistan’s Pop Idol programme where she was
eliminated in the initial audition stages.
She was also
said to be a model but had never actually worked as a model in anything
until she became famous through her Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
accounts.
In fact, even her identity as ‘Qandeel Baloch’
was basically constructed through social media — which is why there was
increasing scrutiny about her origins as her notoriety grew: what her
real name was (Fouzia Azeem), whether she was even from a Baloch tribe
(she apparently wasn’t) and her marital history (an apparently abusive,
short-lived marriage that produced a child).
What set
Qandeel apart from other internet sensations in Pakistan was that she
was a flesh-and-blood woman, not simply a faceless, pretend-woman, of
which there are, of course, plenty on social media.
It
was unfathomable to a lot of Pakistanis that a real woman could be as
brazen or shameless about her sexuality publicly, because her entire
persona was built around flaunting her body, talking about sex and being
in-everyone’s face.
The comments on her Instagram feed —
which had hundreds of thousands of ‘followers’ by the time of her death
— were probably 30 per cent from voyeurs getting a kick out of this but
were overwhelmingly from those attacking her for “being a disgrace to
Pakistan and Islam.”
What’s, of course, interesting is
the fact that people would still follow her feeds or make the effort to
come to her pages only to abuse her. Her persona was so unimaginable for
a Pakistani (of course, they are used to such personas from the West or
even from India) that there was even speculation about whether she was,
in fact, originally a man who had undergone a sex change. For many,
that would have explained everything.
What’s interesting,
sociologically, for Pakistan is not that there are constructed personas
on social media — very common phenomena around the world — but how
transgressions of socially acceptable behaviour are seeping from the
digital realm into the real world and influencing how they are viewed
and debated.
This is all the more remarkable given that
internet penetration in Pakistan is still estimated at below 18 per
cent; more than 80 per cent of the country’s population does not even
have access to social media platforms.
Certainly, much of
Qandeel’s output on social media — pictures and videos of herself in
various forms of undress, thoughts about sex and sexuality, commentary
on the hypocrisy of well-known people — is still verboten on mainstream
media or even in polite company.
And yet, people were
discussing her among themselves in private gatherings around the country
and on social media itself; even television and the print media had
been forced to acknowledge her.
Of course, TV and print
referred to the content of her posts only obliquely, if at all. When
they referred to her as ‘a model’ they never clarified what exactly
people might have seen her in. Until, of course, the Mufti Qavi
brouhaha, which allowed TV to run fairly sanitised photographs of her
with the cleric and to peg her as the woman who brought Mufti Qavi down.
Incidentally,
in and of themselves, those photographs — whose ‘scandalous’ high point
was Qandeel donning Mufti Qavi’s karakuli cap — would mean nothing,
divorced from the context of Qandeel’s online persona.
There
have always been transgressive people in society — people who flout
traditional social norms — but they never had the ability to come into
contact with the huge numbers of people that social media platforms now
afford them. Had Qandeel Baloch existed in the pre-social media age, it
is more than likely that most people would never even have heard about
her.
Social media is transforming society and media in
ways that have not been studied at all in Pakistan. Consider Qandeel’s
origins and trajectory: a poor girl from a small village in the remote
and largely feudal Dera Ghazi Khan area, who goes on to become a
national and, to a certain extent, international sensation, purely on
the basis of her force of will and ability to project herself.
Irrespective
of the means employed to achieve fame, it shows the power of social
media to cross class, linguistic and ethnic barriers in today’s Pakistan
and its increasing ability to dictate what the mainstream media — and
thus the larger national population — takes notice of.
It’s a brave new world and mainstream Pakistani media is mostly playing catch-up.
KARACHI: Pakistanis bought property worth three billion
United Arab Emirates (UAE) dirhams (around Rs85bn) in Dubai during the
first half of this year, just behind Indians and Britons who plunked
down 7bn and 4bn dirhams, respectively.
In the last
two-and-a-half years, Pakistanis have invested over 18bn dirhams
(Rs512bn) in Dubai realty market, according to reports based on Dubai
Land Department appeared in the UAE media.
In 2015,
Indian nationals ranked the highest value foreigners, making property
transactions worth 20bn dirhams from 8,756 investors. Britons came in at
second with a total of 10bn dirhams worth of property transactions from
4,889 investors while Pakistanis ranked third with 8bn dirhams from
6,106 investors.
In 2014, Pakistanis were at second
position with 5,079 transactions with a total of 7.59-dirham investment.
Indians topped the list with purchase of 18.1bn dirhams worth of
property on 7,353 transactions, whereas Britons invested 9.32bn dirhams.
“Our
politicians, bureaucrats and some genuine buyers have lifted properties
in Dubai instead of local businessmen,” said Abdul Wahab Parekh, the
owner of Parekh Estate in Clifton. “Businessmen have pulled out their
money from banks after introduction of 0.3 to 0.6 per cent withholding
tax on filers and non-filers on tax returns. They have basically parked
their money abroad.”
However, property dealers in the
local market paint an uncertain future after the introduction of new
valuation rates, saying the real estate market has become inactive.
Mr
Parekh believed that after new valuation rates for property, the local
businessmen were unlikely to take the plunge and started buying property
in Dubai as the prices on that market have been in decline for more
than one year.
The new valuation rates look feasible for
the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) and Clifton, but for other areas of
Karachi the valuation rates seem overvalued, he said. “It’s surprising
that the federal government has decided the valuation rates instead of
provincial governments under the 18th Amendment.”
“The federal government cannot intervene where provincial governments are authorised to take decision,” he said.
However,
he said the property market has been very quite in terms of sale and
purchase deals since July 1 as only 15pc deals were struck which were
mutually agreed before July, but the sellers get 10-15pc less price.
However, many buyers and sellers postponed their transactions mutually.
He also claimed that about 80pc of black money found way into the real estate sector of Pakistan.
CEO
of Citi Associates in Clifton, Mohammad Shafi Jakvani, said the volume
of property transactions has shrunk and only 10-15pc deals have taken
place in DHA and Karachi Development Authority compared to the volume
before the introduction of latest finance bill.
Citing
reasons for huge price difference in official and open market prices, he
said the deputy commissioner valuation table was formed in 1986. Since
then, the market price has risen drastically. The markets saw three
bullish trend periods — first in 1993 to 1996, second in 2001 to 2005,
and third in 2011 till 2016.
The sale/purchase had become
negligible from July 2016 onwards as buyers and sellers had adopted
wait-and-see approach, especially after new valuation rates, said
Mohammad Najeeb, the owner of Nazimabad Estate in North Naziamabad. “The
new valuation rates are overvalued which may keep property buyers and
sellers in an uncertain situation for future deals.”
BEIJING: The number of web users in China — already the
world’s largest online population — has risen over 700 million,
authorities said on Wednesday as they seek to turn the internet into a
new growth driver.
The country had 710m internet users —
defined as those who have gone online at least once in the past six
months — by June, up 3.1 per cent from the end of December, the
government-linked China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) said
in a statement.
The number is more than double the
number of people in the United States and means more than half of the
world’s largest national population are now using the internet.
Beijing
imposes strict controls on online content, while e-commerce is a vital
part of its efforts to transform the economy into one driven more by
consumer demand.
The government is pushing for a
so-called “internet plus” project that aims to expand the application of
online technology in industry as part of attempts to modernise. The
CNNIC said that 92.5pc of Chinese users go online through their mobile
phones.
“The social lifestyle formed by the mobile
internet was further developed and the internet plus project facilitated
the government and companies diversifying and mobilising their
services,” it said.
But the number of rural users
remained low — accounting for less than a third of the total — as
residents in the countryside either have no knowledge of computers or
the internet, or are not interested, said the CNNIC.
Several
Chinese tech firms, such as Jack Ma’s Alibaba, have become
multi-billion-dollar giants in recent years as the country’s online
population has boomed.
slims in India form the largest religious minority in the country. According to the 2011 Census, they comprise 14.4 per cent of India’s total population — roughly 174 million people. To use the word ‘minority’ for them, therefore, is misleading: they are the third-largest Muslim population anywhere in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. Minority status, however, refers to a group’s relative power vis-à-vis other groups rather than to its numbers alone (note the case of women everywhere or blacks in South Africa during the apartheid). In that sense, then, Indian Muslims certainly are a minority, particularly when one considers the growing influence of Hindu right-wing forces since the 1980s.
But just how oppressed are Muslims in India? For Pakistanis – and particularly for those whose families migrated from India – this question is a source of endless curiosity, not the least because the answer either justifies or undermines the very notion of the Pakistani nation-state. If Indian Muslims, in fact, are oppressed then – regardless of Pakistan’s myriad internal troubles – the people of Pakistan can still breathe a sigh of relief that they live in a land of their own. On the flip side, if Indian Muslims are not oppressed, then what exactly was the Partition trauma about? As academic literature produced on Indian Muslims in recent years tells us, there are no simple answers to these questions.
This sense of marginalisation has been steadily increasing since the rise to prominence of Hindu right-wing ideologies
Scholarly interest in Indian Muslims is not recent and can be traced to the colonial period. Orientalist scholars during the British era presented the subcontinent as a patchwork of different religious groups — an understanding that informed the policies of the colonial state and made its task of ruling its Indian subjects manageable. This understanding was echoed by the indigenous Hindu and Muslim elites who used religious identity as a means of shoring up their own power (a practice that continues even today on both sides of the religious divide and, indeed, on both sides of the India-Pakistan border). On the whole, this approach hindered the fluidity of beliefs and religious practices across communal boundaries which has always existed in the subcontinent, and which persists despite hindrances even today.
Saba Naqvi has documented the subcontinent’s syncretic traditions in her book In Good Faith: A Journey in Search of an Unknown India. She highlights many instances of boundary crossing that regularly take place across religious divides despite the best efforts of right-wing forces. For the most part, however, scholarship on religious communities in India has continued to repeat the notion that the most significant divide in that country – and the one that creates conflict most frequently – is the one between Hindus and Muslims. While this simplifies a much more complex reality, it subtly reinforces the logic of the two-nation theory.
Most of the scholarship on Indian Muslims produced in the last 50 years mimics the Orientalist approach in two important ways: it views one of the largest Muslim populations in the world as a homogenous and unified group; and, for the most part, it views that population through the lens of the north Indian urban elite. Books such as Hasan Suroor’sIndia’s Muslim Spring: Why is Nobody Talking about It? deny the vast diversity that exists among Indian Muslims in terms of region, class, sect, gender, and caste.
Hindu extremists demolish Babri mosque in Ayodhya, triggering widespread Hindu-Muslim violence in 1992 | AFP
His work, instead, focuses largely on middle-class, urban, north Indian Muslims as he argues that there has been an “awakening” among India’s Muslims which is driving them away from their supposed historical insularity and conservatism. In order to underscore his argument, he implies that there are two categories dividing the Muslim population of India: “good Muslims”, who are liberal and moderate in their political and religious leanings, and “bad Muslims”, who are conservative and fundamentalist in their outlook. Such a division is not just without any scholarly basis, it is also troubling as it drastically reduces the myriad political and religious views prevalent among Muslims living in different parts of India.
Similarly, Salman Khurshid, a prominent Congress politician since the 1980s, has recently made his own attempt to diagnose the problems of Indian Muslims. His book At Home in India: A Restatement of Indian Muslims is more a memoir than an academic study, but it suffers from a similar malaise as some other books, in that it attempts to represent all Indian Muslims through the experience of a few members of the urban elite. Much of the book is dedicated to revisiting debates over Muslim personal law – which preoccupied many writers throughout the 1980s and the 1990s – along with recounting of the history of Aligarh Muslim University, the quintessential bastion of the north Indian Muslim elite.
Though both Suroor and Khurshid raise the issue of a growing sense of marginalisation among Indian Muslims, neither is able to deal with this question in a meaningful way because their work is not sufficiently grounded in field research. Both are also, sadly, apologetic in tone, taking great pains to prove that Muslims are loyal subjects of the Indian state — a strategy used by minority elites to secure their position within the power structure since the colonial period.
Fortunately, such simplistic approaches to the study of Indian Muslims are waning. A new generation of scholars is emerging from different disciplines whose work is grounded in empirical research. Two recent books, for instance, shed light on the complexity and diversity among Muslims in India through the lens of political history.
The first, Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monuments, Memory, Contestation by Hilal Ahmed takes an innovative approach to understanding the evolution of Muslim politics in north India. The author focusses, in particular, on the discourse related to Indo-Islamic historic buildings such as the Jama Masjid in Delhi and the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya as a means for understanding the construction of Muslims as a political group by a variety of actors. In the process of unpacking how Muslim unity is asserted through these key sites, Ahmed cleverly demonstrates the constructed, contested and evolving nature of Indian Muslim identity itself.
His approach is important in that it does not take the category of Muslims as a given; rather, it traces the construction of this political category as a process that is both contested and continuously evolving. The book also moves away from simplistic binaries such as communal/secular that have plagued many other discussions of Indian Muslims.
One of the most notable recent contributions to the understanding of Muslim histories in India is Mohammad Sajjad’s Muslim Politics in Bihar: Changing Contours. It moves away from the former centres of Mughal power which have generally been the focus of studies on Indian Muslims. Sajjad’s carefully researched work outlines the rich history of political mobilisation among Muslims in Bihar, the third-most populous state in India and one with a significant Muslim population, from the colonial period to the present. The author highlights the resistance amongst Bihari Muslims to the two-nation theory. This has largely been overlooked in studies of the pre-independence period which generally focus on Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Bengal.
Sajjad, however, points out that Muslim political groups in Bihar were both anti-colonial and anti-separatist in orientation and regularly allied with Hindu groups in their political struggles. In the postcolonial period, he describes the movement for the promotion of Urdu – which began in the 1950s and continued through the 1980s – as a mass-based campaign, not carried out in religious and communal terms, but instead, on the basis of the rights guaranteed to linguistic minorities in the Indian constitution.
Sajjad points to another subject hitherto untouched by other scholars: the question of caste among Muslims. Though Muslim elites in India would have us believe that there is no caste system among Indian Muslims, the 1990s witnessed the emergence of two significant movements: the All-India Backward Muslim Morcha and the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz. These two movements campaigned for the rights of lower-caste Muslims in Bihar.
Sajjad’s contribution is important in two ways. First, it focusses on a part of India that is under-researched when it comes to the study of Indian Muslims. Second, it not only highlights the issue of caste amongst Muslims but also focusses on mobilisation among – and also led by – non-elite groups. For this reason, his is a welcome addition to the existing literature on Indian Muslims.
Prayers being offered on the last day of the holy month of Ramzan at Jama Masjid, Dehli | Reuters
Though many Muslims in India occupy various important positions in the state and the society – which mostly depends on where they come from and what are their class, caste, and gender – a growing sense of marginalisation among Muslims across India is hard to deny. This sense of marginalisation has been steadily increasing since the rise to prominence of Hindu right-wing ideologies and organisations during the 1980s, when the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi issue was used to sharpen religious divides across India. While the occurrence of communal violence has declined since the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the alienation felt by religious minorities – including Muslims and Christians – has continued to increase, particularly after the victory of Narendra Modi as prime minister in the 2014 election.
The marginalisation of Muslims in India is, indeed, well documented. In the mid-2000s, the Indian government commissioned two studies — the Sachar Committee Report of 2006 and the Misra Commission Report of 2007. These highlighted a higher prevalence of discrimination towards Muslims and socio-economic deprivation among them as compared to other religious groups. Little concrete action, however, has been taken to address these issues at the policy level. If anything, the situation has only worsened.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its partner organisations in the Hindu right have started a concerted campaign against all religious minorities, including Muslims. The main features of this campaign include protests against the so-called ‘love jihad’ – Muslim men allegedly converting Hindu women to Islam by trapping them in love affairs – and‘ghar wapsi’ (homecoming) initiatives which convert Muslims and Christians ‘back’ to Hinduism. Moves towards Hinduisation have also been taking place across India.
While Hindu nationalist groups are waging a concerted campaign against all religious minorities in their efforts to Hinduise India, Islamist forces are doing the same and even worse to religious minorities on this side of the border.
For example, the government in the state of Maharashtra – where the Shiv Sena has successfully drummed up anti-Muslim sentiments for years – recently imposed a ban on beef trading. This will disproportionately harm poor Muslims working in meat and leather industries. All of these are signs of growing intolerance and a gradual yet steady process of de-secularisation, which do not bode well for religious minorities in India.
As a result of these shifts in the Indian polity, academics have also begun to investigate the issue of marginalisation more seriously. One issue that has received attention in recent years is that of the spatial segregation of Muslims, particularly in urban areas. Two recent books discuss this issue in depth. The first one, Muslims in Indian Cities: Trajectories of Marginalisation, is edited by two French scholars, Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer. It is a collection of studies on Muslim mohallas – exclusively Muslim neighbourhoods or ghettos – in cities across India. Each chapter is dedicated to a different city and includes portraits of major cities such as Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Lucknow.
The book also includes research on cities which are rarely the focus of studies on Indian Muslims. These include Cuttack in Orissa, Kozhikode in Kerala and Bangalore in Karnataka.
By providing detailed studies of such diverse geographical sites, Muslims in Indian Cities draws attention to the vast diversity of experiences that exists among Indian Muslims. It provides a nuanced understanding of the issue of marginalisation, highlighting the fact that the reasons for spatial segregation of Muslims vary in different cities depending on the context. In cities such as Ahmedabad and Mumbai – where large-scale communal violence has taken place in the past – the level of spatial segregation and insecurity among Muslims is predictably high. In cities in southern and eastern parts of India, where Hindu nationalist groups have historically had less of a presence, Muslims are generally in a relatively secure position vis-à-vis other religious groups. This may be changing, however, as the Hindu right wing rapidly makes inroads into those parts of India as well.
An Indian Muslim man walks into a mosque in New Delhi. A portrait of Mahatma Gandhi hangs on the wall of the Delhi Police Headquarters in the background | AP
My own book Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality focusses on the issue of marginalisation and insecurity among women living in Delhi. The book deliberately focusses on the experiences of Muslim women, who had previously only been viewed in a simplistic manner through the lens of the veil and personal law. Based on research conducted over the course of a year in Zakir Nagar, a neighbourhood situated in Delhi’s ‘Muslim belt’, my book highlights multiple and shifting factors that determine one’s experience of insecurity even within the same locality. If a range of experiences can exist within such a small geographical area as Zakir Nagar, one can only imagine the diversity of experiences that may exist within a huge country.
At the same time, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’ demonstrates a growing sense of marginalisation among all Muslims which is tied to the historical memory of various incidents of violence, beginning with the Partition. I conducted my research almost a decade ago and Muslim localities – including Zakir Nagar – have continuously grown since then. This points to the fact that marginalisation amongst Muslims is not decreasing, and may actually be growing as the forces of Hindutva become stronger across India.
The state, too, has contributed to this sense of marginalisation. Since the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008, Muslim men have increasingly become the targets of the state’s security forces. They face human rights abuses during siege and search operations carried out under the pretext of anti-terrorism operations, both within and outside the confines of the law. Two young men were killed in 2008 in the infamous Batla House encounter, which occurred in the same area where I had conducted my research; many others have been arrested without charge from that same area and countless more from across India.
Manisha Sethi’s book, Kafkaland: Prejudice, Law and Counterterrorism in India, carefully documents the dark underbelly of counterterrorism in which fake encounters and illegal detentions are regularly used as a means of asserting state power against unwanted citizens. Such state excesses have only increased the sense of alienation among Muslims — particularly those living in urban areas. Consequently, along with Dalits and Adivasis, Muslims make up a disproportionately high percentage of the prison population, mirroring the situation of African Americans in the United States.
One positive outcome of these negative developments is that there seemingly is a steady decline in generalist studies of Indian Muslims. Most of the recent literature, instead, suggests a growing maturity among scholars marked by an awareness of the diversity that exists within this vast population. There is also a shift towards empirically grounded studies. There are, however, still several areas that require further exploration, which is good news for budding scholars. These include the issue of caste among Muslims (a subject that also requires attention in Pakistan), which has remained a taboo for too long.
There is also a gaping hole in academic literature when it comes to studies of Muslims living in the southern and eastern parts of India – particularly in Assam – which houses the highest percentage of Muslims in the population of any state in India.
Muslims offer Eid prayers at the Jama Masjid, Delhi | Reuters
In order to correct the elite bias that has existed for long within academic literature on Indian Muslims and to properly understand the issue of socio-economic marginalisation among the community, more research needs to be conducted on poor and middle-class Muslims who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim population in India. Finally, more attention must be paid to the gendered experiences of being Muslim, moving beyond the simplistic notion of Muslim women ‘behind the veil’ and taking into account the growing insecurity among Muslim men.
Finally, to return to the fraught question with which I began this essay: just how oppressed are Indian Muslims? Though the formulation of this question is problematic for multiple reasons – not least of which is the assumption of uniformity amongst this group – I will hazard an answer: while Indian Muslims are undoubtedly facing increasing insecurity and marginalisation – particularly as Hindu right-wing forces become more powerful – they are still in a more secure position than religious minorities in Pakistan.
While Hindu nationalist groups are waging a concerted campaign against all religious minorities in their efforts to Hinduise India, Islamist forces are doing the same and even worse to religious minorities on this side of the border. The marginalisation of Muslims in India, therefore, must be viewed within the wider context of growing religious majoritarianism in South Asia as a whole — a process that began picking up steam in both India and Pakistan during the 1980s.
Additionally, India is still officially a secular state where the rights of religious minorities are enshrined in the constitution, despite Modi government’s best efforts to the contrary. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Pakistan where the Objectives Resolution solidified a second-class constitutional status for non-Muslim Pakistanis and where the definition of ‘Muslim’ itself is continuously shrinking. Rightly or wrongly, for many secular-minded Indians who are concerned about the deteriorating situation of religious minorities in their country, Pakistan stands as a warning of what might be in store for them in the not-too-distant future if they fail to quickly correct their path.
“If you were sleeping beauty, what would you do if a prince kissed you to wake you up?”
In
my class of 15 fourth graders, very few respond. They want to know why
they have to think about this. I remain patient, allowing them to
process my question silently.
After all, their parents
kiss them when they’re asleep. Many are forced to hug relatives and
strangers because saying no is considered rude in our culture. And, very
few of us are taught that there are situations where being touched
without consent is not okay.
Most children, in fact, are not aware that they can refuse being touched.
Unlike
adults, children don’t have the tools or comfort to communicate child
sexual abuse (CSA) easily. They give hints, sometimes subtle, sometimes
blatant.
I have seen kids dealing with abuse constantly act up in class, for example, or complain about being sick all the time.
Sometimes
the hints are so subtle that most teachers don’t realise something is
wrong. For example, if a child flinches when touched, that should be
seen as a red flag.
Most people assume it’s a one-time
reaction, not checking a second time, or not wondering why a child who
never minded a pat on the head is suddenly upset by it.
As an educator, I hold myself responsible for teaching children to protect themselves, and in preventing CSA.
Very young children’s minds are tabula rasas,
so teaching them about rights, consent and abuse is not a difficult
task. Children learn through repetition, and when it comes to complex
topics, constant reinforcement is crucial.
But
to do so also requires creative thought that goes beyond any set
syllabus. Luckily, the school I work in encourages and values creativity
in teachers, allowing me to incorporate awareness for children in my
lesson plans.
Hence the question about Sleeping Beauty, a
problematic fairy-tale children and teenagers are exposed to
repeatedly. Its messages regarding consent and gender roles are
detrimental to their well-being, unless analysed critically.
Girls
are taught to idealise the princess as passive recipients who yearn to
be rescued by a prince, thus reinforcing the principles of patriarchal
objectification.
Boys are taught that they can violate
consent with impunity. The message hurts both genders. Boys can be, and
are, victims of child sex abuse.
So, I ask the class to deconstruct the fairy-tale. “What messages do you get from this story?” works well as a prompt.
Their responses are often imaginative; once, a student said the message is about protecting kings from evil fairies.
Other
responses are more disturbing, like students who express joy. “I would
thank the prince and marry him for rescuing me,” is a common one.
Its underlying implication, however, is that children have not been
taught they have rights, or that their body belongs to them alone. That
discussions on consent— in the classroom— are sorely needed.
“What would you do?” the students usually want to know.
My
reply surprises them, “Look, if anyone dares to touch me without my
consent, then I will beat them up and take them to task for it legally.”
Some
students laugh, perhaps out of shock; here is a woman pretending to be a
weird kind of Sleeping Beauty who beats up her prince, and has him
thrown in jail instead of marrying him!
I’m often asked why I would do such a horrible thing. I then show them this image.
Source: Feminist Disney
From here, it is easy to move into a conversation about consent. What is consent? Why is it important?
I
introduce the concept of children’s rights. I tell them they can assert
these rights, such as the right to decide who can touch them. I tell them they have the right to refuse.
I also tell them that they have the right to ask for protection against anyone who doesn’t respect their physical space.
As a concluding activity, we brainstorm phrases that the children can easily learn and repeat. We finish with a slogan like ‘My body belongs to me and I get to decide who can touch it!’ and then take an oath to respect other people’s rights, since rights can’t exist without collective responsibilities.
Build strong children, don't repair broken adults
In my personal experience, a one-time workshop on abuse is
not enough. A word of caution for educators and parents: this concept
must be reinforced, and constantly.
Children don’t have
the language to articulate what is happening to them. Those who are
groomed by abusers, may be aware they are being harmed, yet do not speak
up. They don’t just need to learn how to report abuse, but also to
recognise how grooming plays a part in it.
With multiple
classes, an instructor can design coursework to address these issues.
Most schools do not teach children’s rights, neither are teachers
trained in the topic, but there are plenty of resources available
online.
Unicef provides free online lesson plans; Kaleidoscope and Phuljajri textbooks by Simorgh
include activities that facilitate a comprehensive understanding of
children’s rights, responsibilities and social contracts; videos such as
Komal from Child Line India explain how grooming works; and organisations like Sahil
provide free counselling to victims of abuse, and are useful for
parents and educators because children don’t have the knowledge or
understanding to report sexual violence easily.
Whenever I bring up CSA and abuse in the classroom, children inevitably end up assuming that no one
should touch them. They insist on their right to protect their bodies
from doctors, to avoid vaccinations. They also start yelling “She
touched me!” if a classmate accidentally bumps into them.
When
this happens, teachers need to start a conversation on differentiating
the various types of touch, such as accidentally bumping into someone
versus intentionally hurting them.
These should be
supplemented with discussions, both at school and at home. Helping them
differentiate between types of touches, for example, could be an
effective way to help children understand what consent means.
Rozan is an excellent resource for this concept; it breaks down the different kinds of touches — good touch, bad touch and secret touch — to emphasise on one's right to their body.
According to them, good touch is that which makes you comfortable and loved, for example being hugged by Dadi or kissed by Amma.
Bad
touch is that which hurts you, for example, a slap or a hard push. And a
secret touch is one that makes you feel uncomfortable and embarrassed,
e.g. sexual abuse of any sort, or when the abuser asks you to keep the
touching secret.
It
is important to remember that children need time to learn how to apply
the concepts they are being taught. Simply lecturing them isn’t enough.
Allowing fights to break out in the classroom is essential to the
learning process.
At home, parents need to speak to
their children about sexual abuse repeatedly, and respond to a child's
queries appropriately. While educators can ensure that children
understand concepts, conversations in the space they feel safest are
necessary in order to ensure that they are able to speak up if they are
abused.
Instead of shutting down conversations that make
us uncomfortable, we can help break the very cycles of abuse our
children endure like a rite of passage.
