Gujarat Congress MLA 'siding with attackers' of Dalit RTI activist: Fact-finding team

A fact-finding team member with Amit Parmar

A civil society fact-finding team has taken strong exception to a Dalit MLA belonging to the Congress, Pravin Maru, for pressurizing the local administration in Botad district to take back the police complaint concerning brutal attack on Dalit rights and Right to Information (RTI) activist Amit Parmar, belonging to Khopala village. Instead of helping Parmar, the Congress MLA is siding of the attackers, Parmar’s family members alleged while talking with the team.
The attack on Parmar took place following he made an RTI plea on details of budgeted allocation and expenditure made over the last three years from the grant received by the village panchayat for developmental work. The plea insisted, the panchayat give him the name of the agencies to whom the contract was given and the work done.
Consisting of RTI activist Bharatsinh Zala, also a labour rights leader; Minaxiben Joshi of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL); Kantiblal Parmar and Yash Makwana, Dalit rights activists; Pratik Rupala, a Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) advocate; and Noorjaha Diwan of the human rights organization Anhad, the fact-finding team quotes the victim, Amit Parmar, as saying that he was attacked on November 24, 2019, almost a month after he made the plea on funds details.

Pravin Maru

Recuperating from his injury, Parmar told the team that though the village has a woman sarpanch, her husband and their son with the help of “some anti-social elements” were ruling the roost in the village. They had occupied a common grazing land and were using it for their personal gain by doing farming on it. The attack took place after he and his brother, Vinodbhai Jerambhai Parmar, proceeded towards Gadhda town on bike.
At about time 2.30 pm, between villages Lakhanka and Adtala, four persons riding a Hero Honda bike and an Activa scooter, reached up to them. Their mouths were covered with handkerchief, the team was told. They were armed with iron pipes and other weapons. They stopped Parmar’s bike. After abusing him, they began hitting him brutally, asking him to withdraw his RTI plea, otherwise they would kill him.
Injured, Parmar’s brother called for the 108 ambulance, which carried him to the Umrada government hospital for treatment, from where he was shifted to a Bhavnagar hospital. Under treatment, the report prepared by the team says, Parmar’s is not an isolated incident. In all, 14 murders and over 240 attacks on RTI applicants have taken place in Gujarat, even as the RTI Act completes 14 years of its existence.
The fact-finding team report said, Parmar was threatened several times earlier also after he made applications to the district and taluka officials for get the common village land rid of illegal occupation by dominant persons in the village. Copies of the application were sent to the state revenue minister and leader of the opposition in the Gujarat state assembly. He had also made complaints against caste discrimination of Dalits in the village, stating, they were not allowed to enter into the village temple.

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Venkaiah Naidu. The most striking comment came from BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who stated : "When a train derailed in the 1950s, Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned. On the same morality, I demand PM Modi, HM Amit Shah, and Civil Aviation Minister Naidu resign so that a free and fair inquiry can be held. All that Modi and his associates have been doing so far is gallivanting, which must stop." Amidst widespread mourning, some fringe elements sought to communalize the tragedy. One post ...

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog