To link Gujarat malnutrition to beauty conscious girls is a joke; it disguises ground realities: Top gender expert

Counterview Desk
Senior gender expert, Prof Pam Rajput, who chaired the High Level Committee (HLC) on the Status of Women, formed by the Government of India (GoI), has heavily come down on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's controversial statement three years ago, where he attributed malnutrition in Gujarat to 'beauty conscious' young girls.
In an interview with the US daily "Wall Street Journal" Modi, explaining the challenge of malnutrition in Gujarat, had said, "Gujarat is by and large a vegetarian state. Gujarat is also a middle-class state. The middle-class is more beauty conscious than health conscious -- that is a challenge. If a mother tells her daughter to have milk, they'll have a fight. She'll tell her mother, 'I won't drink milk. I'll get fat'."
Talking with newspersons in Ahmedabad, where she had come to attend a workshop organized by a top NGO network, Working Group for Women and Landownership (WGWLO), on women cultivators' right to land, Rajput said, without naming Modi, that those who seek to link malnutrition in Gujarat being beauty conscious are "making a joke and disguising ground realities."
Rajput said, "There are two type of women: Those who are undernourished because they do not get anything to eat, and there are others who do not eat because they want to go on the ramp. The latter in an extreme, minuscule minority. You must go to the interior areas of India to find out whether people have anything to eat and see poverty to understand undernourishment of women."
In an indirect allusion to what is happening in Central Gujarat's milk-rich areas, where women are not fed with milk, as it is a commodity which needs to be sold for want of money, Rajput said, "Today, Punjab is competing with Bihar in undernourishment. Families do not feed milk to girls, because it has to be sold in the market. This is causing anemia among girls."
Rajput, who is former professor of the Punjab University, submitted her report to the GoI in June 2015. She said, the report has been "accepted" by the GoI, and its executive summary has been placed on the website of the Ministry of Woman and Child, while the final report will be uploaded next month. However, a search of of the website suggested that the Page does not exist (click HERE to see).
In July, the ministry organised a one workshop discuss recommendations of the Rajput committee report, attended by representatives of 22 Ministries of Government of India, 10 State Governments and 22 Civil Society Organizations. During the workshop, she reportedly highlighted the areas requiring action, especially legal aspects, financial inclusion, skill development, and so on.
The report wants the GoI to formulate a National Policy and Action Plan to end violence against women, even as strongly insisting that a separate committee should be set up to study the status of Muslim women in the country, which should study the impact of identity politics on Muslim women as such politics leads to communal riots and revives forces that impose outdated values on women.
The report takes strong exception to the two-child norm, saying the norm should be revisited as it is related to missing girl children. Recommending dialogue with Hindu religious leaders to arrest the falling sex ratio, it says, they should be asked to tell communities to include daughters in rituals and practices.
One of the most controversial recommendations of the report is make marital rape an offence, pointing out, this will bring down son preference related to socio-cultural practices. It also talked of allowing marital and sexual choices to be protected through amendments to IPC section 377, thus legalizing same sex relationship.
"We have highlighted in the report that while laws do exist to protect women, sensitivity among government officials, especially at the middle and lower levels, is lacking to implement them", Rajput told newspersons, pointing towards the issues discussed in it -- declining sex ratio, economic disempowerment of women, increasing incidence of violence against women, environmental issues which are linked to increasing incidence of cancer among women, and so on.

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Hindutva founders 'borrowed' Nazi, fascist idea of one flag, one leader, one ideology

By Shamsul Islam*
With the unleashing of the reign of terror by the RSS/BJP rulers against working-class, peasant organizations, women organizations, student movements, intellectuals, writers, poets and progressive social/political activists, India also witnessed a series of resistance programmes organized by the pro-people cultural organizations in different parts of the country. My address in some of these programmes is reproduced here...
*** Before sharing my views on the tasks of artists-writers-intellectuals in the times of fascism, let me briefly define fascism and how it is different from totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is political concept, a dictatorship of an individual, family or group which prohibits opposition in any form, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is also described as authoritarianism.
Whereas fascism, while retaining all these repressive characteristics, also believes in god-ordained superiority of race, cultur…

Gujarat refusal to observe Maulana Azad's birthday as Education Day 'discriminatory'

By Our Representative
The Gujarat government decision not to celebrate the National Education Day on !monday has gone controversial. Civil society organizations have particularly wondered whether the state government is shying away from the occasion, especially against the backdrop of "deteriorating" level of education in Gujarat.

Congress 'promises' cancellation of Adani power project: Jharkhand elections

Counterview Desk
Pointing out that people's issues take a backseat in Jharkhand's 2019 assembly elections, the state's civil rights organization, the Jharkhand Janadhikar Mahasabha, a coalition of activists and people’s organisations, has said that political parties have largely ignored in their electoral manifestos the need to implement the fifth schedule of the Constitution in a predominantly tribal district.

Banned? Indian ports 'received' 38 US plastic waste containers reexported from Indonesia

By Rajiv Shah
An Indonesia-based international environmental watchdog group has dug out what it has called “a global pollution shell game”, stating how officials in Indonesia approved re-exports of “illegal” US waste shipments containing plastics mainly to India, as also to other Asian countries -- Thailand, South Korea and Vietnam -- instead of returning them to the US “as promised.”

Ex-World Bank chief economist doubts spurt in India's ease of doing business rank

By Rajiv Shah
This is in continuation of my previous blog where I had quoted from a commentary which top economist Prof Kaushik Basu had written in the New York Times (NYT) a little less than a month ago, on November 6, to be exact. He recalled this article through a tweet on November 29, soon after it was made known that India's growth rate had slumped (officially!) to 4.5%.

With RSS around, does India need foreign enemy to undo its democratic-secular fabric?

By Shamsul Islam*
Many well-meaning liberal and secular political analysts are highly perturbed by sectarian policy decisions of RSS/BJP rulers led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, especially after starting his second inning. They are vocal in red-flagging lynching incidents, policies of the Modi government on Kashmir, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the demand for 'Bharat Ratna' to Savarkar who submitted 6-7 mercy petitions to the British masters (getting remission of 40 years out of 50 years' sentence), and the murder of constitutional norms in Goa, Karnataka and now in Maharashtra.

Rushdie, Pamuk, 260 writers tell Modi: Aatish episode casts chill on public discourse

Counterview Desk
As many as 260 writers, journalists, artists, academics and activists across the world, including Salman Rushdie, British Indian novelist, Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature, and Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet and novelist, have called upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi to review the decision to strip British Indian writer Aatish Taseer of his overseas Indian citizenship.

Worrying signs in BJP: Modi, Shah begin 'cold-shouldering' Gujarat CM, party chief

By RK Misra*
The political developments in neighbouring Maharashtra where a Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress government assumed office has had a trickle down effect in Gujarat with both the ruling BJP and the Congress opposition going into revamp mode.

Church in India 'seems to have lost' moral compass of unequivocal support to the poor

By Fr Cedric Prakash SJ*
In 2017, Pope Francis dedicated a special day, to be observed by the Universal Church, every year, as the ‘World Day of the Poor’. This year it will be observed on November 17 on the theme ‘The hope of the poor shall not perish for ever’; in a message for the day Pope Francis says:

'Discussed' with Modi, Gujarat Rann Sarovar proposal for Kutch runs into rough weather

By Rajiv Shah
Top Saurashtra industrialist Jaysukhbhai Patel’s by now controversial proposal to convert the 4,900 sq km Little Rann of Kutch area, an eco-sensitive zone – a UNESCO biosphere, world’s only wild ass reserve, and a nesting ground of lesser flamingoes – into a huge sweet water lake, called Rann Sarovar, has suffered a major roadblock. At least three Central agencies have expressed serious doubts about its feasibility.

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