 "2014: The year of fear and faith")
Last week, after her SpiceJet flight got cancelled, a friend was stranded at the New Delhi airport. On any other day, the spunky executive would have promptly taken a cab home. This time, she wanted to be picked up. "I will not feel safe in a cab at this hour," she said. It was barely 8 pm. The man who has instilled this fear in urban women, who had found freedom in new-age cabs, is Shiv Kumar Yadav, 32, an aam aadmi from every angle: short, slim, receding hairline, big eyes and thin moustache. Now lodged in Tihar Jail, this Uber cab driver allegedly raped his passenger, an executive, on the night of December 5 and threatened her with dire consequences if she complained.
The backlash brought Uber to a screeching halt in Delhi. Radio cab operators, hit hard by Uber's rising popularity, pounced on the opportunity. It was just an app, and proper background checks on driver weren't carried out, they alleged. State after state banned Uber. This found an echo elsewhere in the world too where taxi operators have lost business rapidly to the San Francisco-headquartered company. This was bad press that the IPO-bound Uber could have avoided. If Indian rivals thought their business would rev up with Uber out of commission, they were mistaken - women dumped all of them. The cab business went into a tailspin.
The incident showed yet again how lax the country's administrative mechanism had become. Yadav, who had earlier served a jail term for sexual assault and was a known "bad character", had managed to find a job that required careful screening. He had even produced a "character certificate" issued by the police! It also highlighted the inadequacies of app- and Internet-based companies. Is it enough for them to create a meeting place for buyers and sellers? Shouldn't they control the environment when this meeting happens? Uber had given all drivers an iPhone for communication and navigation, which could also be used to track their whereabouts. Yadav simply switched his device off. While online service providers grapple with these challenges, Yadav's dastardly act has impacted social behaviour. The moment they get into a cab, more and more women now call their friends and relatives to give them the car number and the driver's name. This information is conveyed also as a warning, loud enough for the driver to hear.
Alarming facts tumbled out. The 2011 census had found that 67 per cent of rural households and 13 per cent of urban households defecate in the open. As much as 60 per cent of the entire open defecation in the world happens in India. The Water & Sanitation Program of the World Bank had estimated that inadequate sanitation cost India $53.8 billion in 2006 - 6.4 per cent of its GDP in that year. Some argued the cost of installing a toilet, Rs 25,000, was too steep for poor households. Others said water scarcity in large parts of the country was the culprit. The Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, in its study across five states (Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), found a behavioural impediment: over 40 per cent of the households with a functional toilet had at least one member who defecated in the open because it was "more pleasurable and desirable".
That is when, showing statesman-like intent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a call to end open defecation by 2019. As business was still in thrall of Modi at that time, Bharti Foundation, the charitable arm of the Mittal family, and TCS announced they would contribute Rs 100 crore each to the cause. The campaign later folded into the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, complete with farcical photo-ops. The cleaning of streets may have taken some focus away from the serious toilet challenge: if all of India's 640,000-odd villages are to be covered by 2019, about 120 million toilets will have to be built - that's 30 million a year.
While there is no sign of the toilet revolution, the mystery around the Badaun deaths has deepened. In November, the Central Bureau of Investigation announced the girls were not raped and they might have committed suicide.
Moneera Begum, 42, doesn't quite know that her husband, Mohammed Ismail, an Agra slum dweller, caused much anxiety in the toniest corporate offices around the world. Once his photograph of holding a Kali idol, with a smile on his face, was splashed across newspapers and the Internet, the row over conversions disrupted Parliament and stalled the legislative changes the Modi-led government had planned to reform the insurance and coal sectors. For a moment, all hopes of reform - and economic recovery - seemed lost. The government was left with no recourse but to promulgate ordinances to get the process moving.
Ved Nagar, a cluster of 25 makeshift houses, has no electricity and the residents have to walk a distance to get water. Dressed in a crumpled salwar-kameez, orange shawl and pale headscarf, Begum doesn't look scared but she is angry - because she feels cheated. What really happened on December 8? According to her, they were promised ration cards and Aadhar numbers (since they migrated from Bangladesh, this would have made them Indians) and better accommodation - all provided by the new government at the Centre. A form was given to all and the illiterate residents filled it up with help from the volunteers of the Dharm Jagaran Samiti, an offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. A havan was held to mark their "return" to Hinduism - ghar wapasi. Begum says nobody knew why it was held, though photographs show them participating in the ceremony. A priest applied tilak on their forehands, tied red thread around their wrists and sprinkled Ganga jal on them. That was it.
"Some people then entered my home and asked for the Quran," she says. "They said I had no right to keep it since I was no longer Muslim." The full import hit her in the evening when someone called on the phone and asked to speak to Rajkumar. She thought the man had dialled a wrong number. He hadn't. "Give the phone to Ismail," he said. "He will be called Rajkumar now." The caller, says Begum, was Nand Kishore Valmiki, the Dharm Jagran Samiti activist who is now in custody for forcibly trying to convert the slum dwellers. The next day, Muslim clergymen waded into Ved Nagar and admonished the residents for abandoning their faith.
It later transpired that the Dharm Jagran Samiti had planned a bigger ghar wapasi at Aligarh on Christmas. A pamphlet was found which sought donations for the cause because it took Rs 4 lakh to convert a Christian and Rs 6 lakh to harvest a Muslim soul. After a public outcry, the event was postponed. Reports of such conversions poured in from other parts of the country, including Kerala. Modi's silence on the matter gave the Opposition ammunition to attack him. Some say it may have played a role in the Bharatiya Janata Party drawing a blank in the Kashmir valley in the recent state assembly elections. Businessmen, Modi's most ardent backers, began to worry that the government was squandering its energy on a non-issue. But the religious kabaddi is unlikely to stop anytime soon: coupled with Love Jihad, the ability of conversions to raise passions and polarise voters is immense.
The issue has also raised an important question: are we becoming a more intolerant society, suspicious and wary of our inherent diversity? "We are not becoming more or less tolerant. These people have always been around and active but no government has ever reined them in," says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. "Their activities are newsy now only because BJP is in power." Others worry about the consequences of these events. The conversion issue will not have much of an impact in urban areas, says Hilal Ahmed, assistant professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. "But the rural areas are getting more polarised, which is my worry."
Faith, and its brute force, was prime-time news throughout 2014. The ashram of Rampal, a former junior bureaucrat who became a godman, in Barwala (Haryana) was turned into a virtual fortress by his followers who were preventing his arrest, following charges of murder and contempt of court. Over 20,000 security personnel were pressed into action. After his arrest, the court was told that the massive operation to locate and arrest the godman cost a whopping Rs 26 crore. For his devotees, Rampal could do no wrong: they happily ate kheer prepared from the milk in which he had bathed. The popularity of godmen, including Ashutosh Maharaj whose followers refuse to surrender his corpse, pointed out the failure of India to provide succour to its tormented citizens.
Most Indians leave nothing more than loose change in their cars. But inside an SUV, parked outside a Noida home, were found Rs 15 crore! The car and the cash, and the house in front, belonged to Yadav Singh, the former chief engineer of Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway, the income-tax department alleged. The sleuths also found diamonds worth Rs 100 crore, 2 kg of gold jewellery and papers that suggest he owns several properties. The department is investigating his role in handing out contracts worth Rs 945 crore. Till the investigation is completed and the courts have decided, these remain just allegations. But the incident brought to light three facts of babudom: the discretionary power in their hands is open to misuse (as chief engineer, Singh had the authority to approve public projects of up to Rs 1 crore); there is a strong nexus of corruption between bureaucrats and politicians; and caste alliances run supreme in government offices. The ease with which black money is parked in jewellery and real estate is sickening. Talk that lucrative postings now get sold to the highest bidder has also started doing the rounds.
The Singh affair may rake up a lot more dirt - why else would BJP decide to make it a poll plank for the state elections in 2017? After Singh's arrest, the Noida Authority decided to award all contracts worth Rs 10 lakh and above through e-auctions. But that may be just a smokescreen: it has been found that these processes too are open to manipulation and foul play. "The only benefit of e-tender is that every contractor will be able to get the electronic form," says Uttar Pradesh Lokayukta Justice (retired) N K Mehrotra.
In a year when somebody who had worked at his father's tea stall as a child decimated all opponents to become the undisputed leader of the world's second most populous country, it is not surprising that ordinary people were at the vortex of all upheavals.
The backlash brought Uber to a screeching halt in Delhi. Radio cab operators, hit hard by Uber's rising popularity, pounced on the opportunity. It was just an app, and proper background checks on driver weren't carried out, they alleged. State after state banned Uber. This found an echo elsewhere in the world too where taxi operators have lost business rapidly to the San Francisco-headquartered company. This was bad press that the IPO-bound Uber could have avoided. If Indian rivals thought their business would rev up with Uber out of commission, they were mistaken - women dumped all of them. The cab business went into a tailspin.
The incident showed yet again how lax the country's administrative mechanism had become. Yadav, who had earlier served a jail term for sexual assault and was a known "bad character", had managed to find a job that required careful screening. He had even produced a "character certificate" issued by the police! It also highlighted the inadequacies of app- and Internet-based companies. Is it enough for them to create a meeting place for buyers and sellers? Shouldn't they control the environment when this meeting happens? Uber had given all drivers an iPhone for communication and navigation, which could also be used to track their whereabouts. Yadav simply switched his device off. While online service providers grapple with these challenges, Yadav's dastardly act has impacted social behaviour. The moment they get into a cab, more and more women now call their friends and relatives to give them the car number and the driver's name. This information is conveyed also as a warning, loud enough for the driver to hear.
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If the taxi symbolised the new risk for urban women, it dawned on all that rural women expose themselves to such risk every time they need to relieve themselves. Open defecation got identified as the biggest cause of rural rape after the bodies of two Dalit sisters, aged 14 and 15, from a village in Badaun (Uttar Pradesh), were found hanging from a tree in May. Their family alleged they were raped by upper caste men and then killed when they had gone to the fields at night. The Bahujan Samaj Party quickly latched on to the issue; even the United States condemned it. Some demanded the death penalty for rapists. Mulayam Singh Yadav, the patriarch of the Samjawadi Party which is in power in Uttar Pradesh, disfavoured such extreme punishment because "boys will be boys".
Alarming facts tumbled out. The 2011 census had found that 67 per cent of rural households and 13 per cent of urban households defecate in the open. As much as 60 per cent of the entire open defecation in the world happens in India. The Water & Sanitation Program of the World Bank had estimated that inadequate sanitation cost India $53.8 billion in 2006 - 6.4 per cent of its GDP in that year. Some argued the cost of installing a toilet, Rs 25,000, was too steep for poor households. Others said water scarcity in large parts of the country was the culprit. The Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, in its study across five states (Bihar, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh), found a behavioural impediment: over 40 per cent of the households with a functional toilet had at least one member who defecated in the open because it was "more pleasurable and desirable".
That is when, showing statesman-like intent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a call to end open defecation by 2019. As business was still in thrall of Modi at that time, Bharti Foundation, the charitable arm of the Mittal family, and TCS announced they would contribute Rs 100 crore each to the cause. The campaign later folded into the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, complete with farcical photo-ops. The cleaning of streets may have taken some focus away from the serious toilet challenge: if all of India's 640,000-odd villages are to be covered by 2019, about 120 million toilets will have to be built - that's 30 million a year.
While there is no sign of the toilet revolution, the mystery around the Badaun deaths has deepened. In November, the Central Bureau of Investigation announced the girls were not raped and they might have committed suicide.
Moneera Begum, 42, doesn't quite know that her husband, Mohammed Ismail, an Agra slum dweller, caused much anxiety in the toniest corporate offices around the world. Once his photograph of holding a Kali idol, with a smile on his face, was splashed across newspapers and the Internet, the row over conversions disrupted Parliament and stalled the legislative changes the Modi-led government had planned to reform the insurance and coal sectors. For a moment, all hopes of reform - and economic recovery - seemed lost. The government was left with no recourse but to promulgate ordinances to get the process moving.
Ved Nagar, a cluster of 25 makeshift houses, has no electricity and the residents have to walk a distance to get water. Dressed in a crumpled salwar-kameez, orange shawl and pale headscarf, Begum doesn't look scared but she is angry - because she feels cheated. What really happened on December 8? According to her, they were promised ration cards and Aadhar numbers (since they migrated from Bangladesh, this would have made them Indians) and better accommodation - all provided by the new government at the Centre. A form was given to all and the illiterate residents filled it up with help from the volunteers of the Dharm Jagaran Samiti, an offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. A havan was held to mark their "return" to Hinduism - ghar wapasi. Begum says nobody knew why it was held, though photographs show them participating in the ceremony. A priest applied tilak on their forehands, tied red thread around their wrists and sprinkled Ganga jal on them. That was it.
"Some people then entered my home and asked for the Quran," she says. "They said I had no right to keep it since I was no longer Muslim." The full import hit her in the evening when someone called on the phone and asked to speak to Rajkumar. She thought the man had dialled a wrong number. He hadn't. "Give the phone to Ismail," he said. "He will be called Rajkumar now." The caller, says Begum, was Nand Kishore Valmiki, the Dharm Jagran Samiti activist who is now in custody for forcibly trying to convert the slum dwellers. The next day, Muslim clergymen waded into Ved Nagar and admonished the residents for abandoning their faith.
It later transpired that the Dharm Jagran Samiti had planned a bigger ghar wapasi at Aligarh on Christmas. A pamphlet was found which sought donations for the cause because it took Rs 4 lakh to convert a Christian and Rs 6 lakh to harvest a Muslim soul. After a public outcry, the event was postponed. Reports of such conversions poured in from other parts of the country, including Kerala. Modi's silence on the matter gave the Opposition ammunition to attack him. Some say it may have played a role in the Bharatiya Janata Party drawing a blank in the Kashmir valley in the recent state assembly elections. Businessmen, Modi's most ardent backers, began to worry that the government was squandering its energy on a non-issue. But the religious kabaddi is unlikely to stop anytime soon: coupled with Love Jihad, the ability of conversions to raise passions and polarise voters is immense.
The issue has also raised an important question: are we becoming a more intolerant society, suspicious and wary of our inherent diversity? "We are not becoming more or less tolerant. These people have always been around and active but no government has ever reined them in," says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. "Their activities are newsy now only because BJP is in power." Others worry about the consequences of these events. The conversion issue will not have much of an impact in urban areas, says Hilal Ahmed, assistant professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. "But the rural areas are getting more polarised, which is my worry."
Faith, and its brute force, was prime-time news throughout 2014. The ashram of Rampal, a former junior bureaucrat who became a godman, in Barwala (Haryana) was turned into a virtual fortress by his followers who were preventing his arrest, following charges of murder and contempt of court. Over 20,000 security personnel were pressed into action. After his arrest, the court was told that the massive operation to locate and arrest the godman cost a whopping Rs 26 crore. For his devotees, Rampal could do no wrong: they happily ate kheer prepared from the milk in which he had bathed. The popularity of godmen, including Ashutosh Maharaj whose followers refuse to surrender his corpse, pointed out the failure of India to provide succour to its tormented citizens.
Most Indians leave nothing more than loose change in their cars. But inside an SUV, parked outside a Noida home, were found Rs 15 crore! The car and the cash, and the house in front, belonged to Yadav Singh, the former chief engineer of Noida, Greater Noida and Yamuna Expressway, the income-tax department alleged. The sleuths also found diamonds worth Rs 100 crore, 2 kg of gold jewellery and papers that suggest he owns several properties. The department is investigating his role in handing out contracts worth Rs 945 crore. Till the investigation is completed and the courts have decided, these remain just allegations. But the incident brought to light three facts of babudom: the discretionary power in their hands is open to misuse (as chief engineer, Singh had the authority to approve public projects of up to Rs 1 crore); there is a strong nexus of corruption between bureaucrats and politicians; and caste alliances run supreme in government offices. The ease with which black money is parked in jewellery and real estate is sickening. Talk that lucrative postings now get sold to the highest bidder has also started doing the rounds.
The Singh affair may rake up a lot more dirt - why else would BJP decide to make it a poll plank for the state elections in 2017? After Singh's arrest, the Noida Authority decided to award all contracts worth Rs 10 lakh and above through e-auctions. But that may be just a smokescreen: it has been found that these processes too are open to manipulation and foul play. "The only benefit of e-tender is that every contractor will be able to get the electronic form," says Uttar Pradesh Lokayukta Justice (retired) N K Mehrotra.
In a year when somebody who had worked at his father's tea stall as a child decimated all opponents to become the undisputed leader of the world's second most populous country, it is not surprising that ordinary people were at the vortex of all upheavals.