University Community for Democracy and Equality: January 2013

In Protest of the Brutal Incident of the 16th Dec gang rape

In Protest of the Brutal Incident of the 16^th Dec gang rape

There are thousand and one reasons to rebel, and only one amongst those is enough for us to start making preparations!

From resistance march ahead towards revolutionary change!

Sisters! Comrades!

The courageous girl who had been bravely battling for life for the past 14 days breathed her last on 29^th December. The spontaneous anger of people, especially youth, burst on streets once this incident came to light. Thousands of people have expressed their anger by gathering and uniting at Jantar Mantar and India Gate in Delhi. Undoubtedly, this anger had been cumulating in our heads for a long time now. What this incident did was to spill out the already over brimming cup of our patience and consequently most of us took to streets. The Sheela Dikshit government in Delhi as well as the Union government has now assumed a defensive stance. Throughout the country, the demand for death penalty for rape is being put forth. However, the truth is that the rapists easily get away in 74 percent rape cases. Therefore, in the first place, it must be ensured that at the very least, the rapists are convicted as well as punished. And secondly, the issue of punishment comes later; the most pertinent question is to understand as to why incidents of rape are increasing by the day and what forces are responsible for this trend?

Since 16^th December, right from the government to all opposition electoral parties have shed crocodile tears over the incident. However, these are the same parties who gave tickets to 286 men charged with crimes against women in the last Lok Sabha elections. BJP leader Sushma Swaraj had already declared the victim of this heinous act as a 'living corpse' even before she died! But just yesterday, a girl was raped in a BJP MLA’s office in Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh. Every electoral party can pride itself in having criminals charged with rape, corruption, murder and so on. However, now members of these same criminal electoral parties are discussing amongst themselves about strengthening the provisions of law against rape, installation of CCTV cameras in public transport, or tightening of security as the only solutions for this problem. Clearly, to expect any safety, justice or equality from them in the first place itself would be foolishness. However what needs to be thought over is whether rape or for that matter any other anti-women crime is merely a law and order or safety problem? Why do crimes against women happen in such large numbers at all? Definitely, for a heinous crime like rape, the punishment should be extremely strict and harsh. Especially In this case, the guilty should be immediately as well as strictly punished by setting up a fast track court. Conviction rates in anti-women crimes are very low already. Therefore, in all such cases, fast track courts must be set up and perpetrators be punished swiftly and strictly. This is because, in such crimes the psyche of easily getting away is always playing at the back of the perpetrators' minds. However, even after repeated calls for death penalty for rapes in wake of the 16th December episode, have the incidents of rapes come to a halt? On the contrary, incidents of rapes have been reported almost daily from different parts of the country repeatedly since then.

Friends, in our opinion there are three major reasons responsible for the ever-increasing rise in the crimes against women. Post 1990, as a consequence of the new economic policies of liberalisation-privatisation, a neo-rich class completely immersed in the culture of “Eat-Drink-Enjoy” has come into existence. This new class believes that it can do anything and everything with the power of money. This same small class, blinded by money, harbours the mentality of consuming the 'commodity' called woman whose commodification has already been effected by the decadent capitalist culture. To a large extent, this new class is responsible for crimes against women. On the other hand, a lumpen degenerate petty class, too, has come into existence which has crossed all limits of the capitalist dehumanization, as is evident from the barbarity of the 16^th December incident. The third reason has been present for a long time and that is the patriarchical mentality which permeates every single bit of our society. It considers women as an object to be had and an instrument to procreate children (that is to say, sons!), and thus, reinforces the anti-women psychology every second.

Friends, today, it won’t be enough to vent out our anger, hatred or frustration. Along with asking for women’s safety, safe public transport system with CCTV & GPS system in buses on an urgent basis, we will have to understand that this problem would not be completely resolved through patchwork. Along with these demands for immediate reforms, we must start the long battle for uprooting the entire social-political-economic structure that has turned human beings into commodities; where for the profit of a few, this exploitative system does not even hesitate to sell out in the markets, flesh of common toiling masses, women, children, dalits, and tribals; and where children and women are sacrificed on the altar of the lust of the neo-rich class. If you are asking for anything less than this, then believe us, you won’t get anything. Therefore, we will have to offer a revolutionary alternative to this plundering system which is essentially anti-women, anti-worker, repressive and exploitative. However, this alternative cannot be achieved through any electoral party (not even if it calls itself a party of 'Aam Aadmi'!) but a new revolutionary organization and a revolutionary movement. To build such a system, we will have to gear ourselves from today itself. Only protests won’t help. A revolutionary ideology and a revolutionary organization are needed to march ahead towards revolution! And to understand such an ideology and build such a revolutionary alternative, youth, especially young women will have to come forward because women are victims of dual slavery: of capitalism and of patriarchy!

However, until such a system is built, we cannot sit idle. We will have to fight for our rights in our day-to-day lives; struggle for immediate reforms; take to streets to reclaim our dignity and rights! But sisters and comrades! For this too we will have to unite in organizations, otherwise this immediate upsurge will subside once our anger gets expressed and nothing will change. Therefore, throw the electoral politics into the garbage-bin! However, do not be prejudiced towards politics itself. As opposed to electoral politics, build your own alternative of revolutionary politics. We hereby call upon all our sisters and comrades to come forward to build a revolutionary alternative and revolutionary organization. Come, lets give a direction to our protests. Come, lets not merely vent out our anger and frustration, rather, choke this entire exploitative, anti-worker, anti-women, anti-Dalit, misanthropic system itself, through our unity and organization; come, lets move ahead towards building a new socio-economic and political system!

Inquilab Zindabad!

University Community for Democracy and Equality

Issued on 29^th December 2012

We have to think! Immediately, Right now!

Following the brutal gang rape of a 23 year paramedical student in Delhi on 16th December and the subsequent death of that brave comrade of ours after a gritty fight with death for 13 days, the sensitive and justice seeking youth, women and citizens of the country are still on streets. But the representatives of conservativism, narrow mindedness, superstition, religious fundamentalism and dogmatism have started to put their disgusting thoughts before the world in a totally bare and unscrupulous manner, and in their retrogressive millenarian chorus they are joined by people ranging from leaders-ministers of various political parties to bureaucrats and police officers.

Mohan Bhagwat, who is the supreme of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the flag-bearer of “cultural nationalism” and religious fanaticism in our country, has declared that the reason of increasing incidents of rape is that the Indian tradition where women should only be housewives is not being followed! According to him, only the males should have the responsibility (read freedom) of getting out of the home and earning. He has also proclaimed that the anti-women crimes happen due to the influence of western values and hence these crimes are happening not in ‘Bharat’ but only in ‘India’! All this is factually incorrect and is an example of the cheap retrogressive anti women mentality. But this line of thinking of Mohan Bhagwat’s does not surprise us. What else can be expected from those who believe in the ideology of Hitler and Mussolini? Their fascist thought also considered women to be instruments for managing the household and giving birth to children. Evidently, one can not expect any other outlook towards women from these illegitimate Indian progenies of German and Italian fascism. It could also be asked why all the women leaders of BJP, which considers RSS to be its guiding organisation, do not resign and sit at homes? Sushma Swaraj, Meenakshi Lekhi, Nirmala Sitaraman, Uma Bharti, Smriti Irani and likes should be the first to sit in their homes and start serving their respective husbands and become housewives! Why are they working outside the household? It is clear that RSS wants the courageous and gritty women from the masses to sit at homes, and not the women who are serving the ruling classes!

Now that the Hindu communal fascists had already started to vomit their age old, rotten and nauseating thoughts, why would the Islamic fundamentalist Mullahs lag behind? Thus, the dogmatists of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind propounded that boys and girls should have separate educational institutions from childhood, meaning co-education should be abolished! This kind of Talibanist thought would also drag India to 18th century. As a matter of fact, the segregation and alienation created amongst the boys and the girls from childhood which causes them to become alien and mystical to each other, is also one of the reasons behind various anti-women values, customs and psyche. Hereinafter, this very complex results in anti-women crimes in many cases. However, the mullahs of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind are hell bent on pushing the world to the dark ages and are putting their best efforts to beat their Hindu fundamentalist rivals in this prospect!

Religious guru Asaram Bapu forced even these shameless and disgustful reactionaries to feel ashamed. He said that the girl who was the victim of the gang-rape was herself to be blamed for it; because she chose to fight and protest these brutal criminals instead of pleading for mercy on her knees with folded hands. There are no words to condemn such abominable views! However, we are not surprised too! It is these same religious gurus and contractors in the business of religion who are accused of rapes, murder, sexual assault on their female devotees and running brothels in their ‘ashrams’! Can we expect them to respect a brave, dignified and strong image of a woman?

When the entire country was seething on roads in protest of the rape and murder of a daughter of its own, what were the so called representatives of people sitting in parliament and assemblies doing at that time? Mamata Banerjee said that if freedom meant people roaming about hand in hand at midnight then such incidents were bound to happen; yet another leader of the Trinamool Congress declared that whenever women cross boundaries, they will be raped; a BJP leader from Madhya Pradesh suggested that the women should not cross the ‘Laxman Rekha’; a Congress leader from Rajasthan said that skirts should be banned; a BSP leader demanded ban on use of mobile phones by girls and their wearing jeans! So, after the barbaric crimes and sexual assaults on women happening daily on the streets of this country, the women themselves are being held responsible for them and thereby it is being conspired to put all kind of bans and curtailments on their rights! The mentality of the political leaders of the country is no different from that of religious fundamentalists and conservatives. And these are the same very people who are accused of making porn films, rapes, burning women to death for dowry, molestation, and sexual assaults! There are 286 MPs in the parliament facing trial for anti-women crimes! And these criminals and rapists are preaching to the hard working and dignified women of the country on how they should lead their lives!

The police is no different. What can one expect in a country where a girl trying to lodge an FIR of rape is again gang raped by the police? Where the government venerates the policeman involved in sexually torturing arrested women political activists with gallantry award, what else can one expect? In a sting operation conducted by a magazine, the top police officers of the national capital Delhi area have told that the anti-women crimes occur because women have made sex into a business; because women provoke men; because girls befriend boys; etc. This itself is indicative of the view of women in the eyes of the police of the country.

It is evident that we can not hope that these anti-women, conservative, reactionary, dictatorial and barbaric powers will respect the women’s rights, will grant women the right to equality, will ensure their security or will consider them equal to men in the society! These very same forces are responsible for the slavery imposed on women, these same people are responsible for the anti women crimes and frequently commit these themselves, these are the very same people who consider women to be slaves to men and wish to continue to treat them as doormats! What can be expected of them? Nothing at all! There is only one thing we can do: all the revolutionary, sensitive and just young men and women, working masses and common middle class citizens should uproot, destroy and annihilate the clenches of these criminal contractors of the centuries old dead traditions, narrow mindedness, hypocrisies, humbugs and deceits! These people are not nationalists or patriots but the reactionaries trying to push the country backwards! If even now we give any heed to any discourse of these religious fundamentalists, babas, gurus and die-hard anti women, then there will be no difference between us and flocks of sheep! If we do not stand up against these forces of darkness then we will have to ask ourselves whether we are still alive or not!

Long Live Revolution! Long Live struggle!

Down with Patriarchy! Down with Capitalism! Down with conservatism!

Charter of Demands: Women-centric issues

The Vice-chancellor

University of Mumbai

Mumbai.

Respected sir,

We the students, teachers and staff of Mumbai University demand that in the wake of the rising cases of crimes against women some urgent steps are required to be taken to ensure the safety and security of the women in the university campus. Together with this, attempts ought to be made to create a healthy environment in university campus so that a sense of respect and equality could be developed not only towards women but to everyone. Our concrete demands are as follows:

1.Women cell should be expanded and representatives of students from each department, from teacher’s community and from staff community also should be included in it.

2.Establish a Committee against Sexual Harassment with representatives from entire university community, i.e., students, teachers and karmacharis. Such a committee should be headed by a woman.

3.Install complaint boxes around the campus in different departments and various public places and assure smooth and timely redressal of the complaints.

4. Abolish the rule of curfew hours at the Girls' hostels. Girls should not be penalized and ghettoized for the crimes of perverts. Rather, they should be allowed to collectively claim the streets, university campus, hostels and other public spaces. Such public spaces should not remain a monopoly of men.

5. Include a compulsory non-credit course on gender sensitization in the university curriculum.

6. Outstation girl students who do not get hostels and live in the city on their own should be provided safe means of transport to the university. For this, the University might work with the Transport Department and run University Special Buses from the major student neighbourhoods.

7.Any religious/secular text which promotes misogynist and patriarchal culture should be identified by a university committee of experts and removed from the university syllabus.

8.Promote the creation of a democratic space within the university campus, so that there can be free exchange of ideas between all sections of students. Such a step would do away with the segregation between boys and girls and create a healthy mentality.

Thanking you

An appeal to the fellow students and respected teachers for the establishment of an organic and vibrant social life and political culture in the university

‘Speak up! Your lips are free....’

Our dear friends of Mumbai University,

University life is an important part of our life. It comes just once in our life and moulds our dreams, ideals, principles and thoughts in a new shape forever. As it is clear from the word itself, it originates from the word ‘universe’; university is a place where we get knowledge not only from books and classrooms, but we also learn a lot of things about life, about philosophy of life, about the whole of world. Right from the ancient times to the modern era, university has given rise to the greatest thoughts and philosophies of the world. While the ancient universities of Taxshila, Nalanda and Kandhar were the cradle for our ancient Indian philosophies and philosophers, the ancient Greek university nurtured and nourished the initial science and western philosophy. In modern age too, great values like democracy, liberty and equality were born in universities only. These were the institutions which nourished philosophers and thinkers like Kant, Descartes and innumerable others like them. In the contemporary world too, who does not know about the immortal contributions of the students and teachers of university? Peace movement of American students and teachers against the genocide committed by US in Vietnam, the heroic overthrow of the dictatorship of Suharto by the students of Indonesia, the great May-1968 movement of the students of Paris and Sorbonne university for democratic rights, the May 4^th Movement of 1919 of the Chinese students, movements of the students of Patna, Calcutta and many other universities of our own country against the Emergency…even hundreds of pages will not suffice to accommodate such a list. In short, what we intend to say is that university is not a place for reading textbooks, attending classes and appearing in the examinations only; it is a place for reading the book of the Life, to learn to struggle for justice and equality, to internalize the ideas of democracy and to cultivate the courage to pay any price for the truth. To understand the role of university, it would suffice to cast a cursory glance at the history of universities.

However, at present, if we look at universities, we find that the universities are losing their true meaning. An atmosphere of lull and silence is ubiquitous. The rat-race of careerism is rampant. Instead of being transformed into an instrument to understand and change the world, education has been transformed into a lifeless burden. Three or five precious years of our lives pass into the endless cycle of assignments, semester and attendance just like that and in the end, we graduate from university as uneducated literates. Textbooks have been crammed up, but we become even more ignorant about life than ever before. The teachers who have no dearth of democratic values and spirit, are unable to impart true knowledge, true education to students, despite their genuine desire to do so, due to academic structure and “discipline” imposed from above. At the same time, a kind of coldness and passivity has taken roots among the students, which is a result of the culture of Globalization. But still, we believe that there are students who can express their ideas, can unleash their limitless creativity, only if a suitable platform is provided to them. Unfortunately, at present, there is no such platform in the university and there is an urgent need for such a platform.

Friends! Just imagine, what would have been the picture of our country, had Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev carried on mugging up in the famous National College of Lahore; or, had the likes of Gandhi and Ambedkar kept on cramming up books in their universities? It would be difficult to find a person among ourselves who would claim that everything is alright in our country at present. Anybody can see that our country and our society are based on injustice, inequality and exploitation, and today this whole system is reaching a dead end. In this situation, what will be our role? Where will we stand? What will our partisanship be? Will we stay prisoned silently in our cocoons? Or will we accept the challenges of expressing ourselves and come together on a platform? Shouldn’t we cultivate the habit of thinking-contemplating, debating-discussing, organizing cultural-literary activities, and also of taking the side of truth and justice? To accomplish this, activities like regular discussion circles, study circles, putting up wall magazines, organizing progressive and radical dramatic teams and music bands, lecture series, etc should be initiated. We know that majority of our teachers support us whole-heartedly. We need their guidance and help! And our fellow students! We need your participation. Let’s establish an organic social, political culture in our campus! Let’s share our heartfelt ideas! Let’s share our concerns, inquietude and unrest! Let hundred ideas collide and let thousands flowers blossom! Let us create a new vibrant political culture in this university!

Awaiting your response, support and participation,

With humility,

University Community of Democracy and Equality