place holder will analyse later.from Deccan chronicle 9 August 2005
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It is time the corrupt quit India
By Siddhartha Reddy
On August 9, 1942, Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the Tricolour at Azad Maidan in what was then Bombay. Gandhi was about to launch the Quit India movement and was arrested early morning. From today till August 15, it is time to remember the freedom struggle. In this one week, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi must shed some tears to make amends for the fact that a Congress Prime Minister praised the British.
Sonia Gandhi is the custodian of a dynasty that benefited enormously from Mahatma Gandhi gifting the Prime Ministerâs post to Jawaharlal Nehru. Sonia Gandhi heads the Congress, claiming links with the freedom movement. There is a campaign by political opponents against foreign born Soniaâs participation in government positions. Soniaâs hand-picked PMâs unwarranted utterances might complicate her equation. But her dilemma about voicing disagreement could snowball into a chorus asking for Manmohanâs resignation. However, silence hurts her credibility and Congressâ esteem. Not ready to rock the boat, Sonia chose silence. But the nation expects amends, martyrs deserve homage.
Having got the British to quit India, the nation desperately yearns that others should quit India too: the poor and the lower middle classes want the pro-rich finance minister to quit government. Farmers want better sale price for what they produce by getting rid of middlemen. Students want teachers who donât teach and businessmen parading as educationists to exit the education system.
Patients want the end of corporate hospitals that fleece them. Litigants want corrupt lawyers and judges removed. The common man wants corrupt officials to quit their jobs. The RSS wants Advani to quit. A pro-reform World Bank lobby want the Communists to stop pestering the government. Lok Sabha MPs want the Rajya Sabha to be winded up to prevent the marginalisation of genuine public representatives.
Thousands sacrificed lives and families to secure freedom. The time has come for the corrupt to quit India. Corruption is the root cause of every problem. Unless the apex Navaratnas (the top nine leaders in every political party) are clean, this rapid deterioration in polity cannot be reversed. <b>India desperately needs at the helm men and women of character and integrity, people who are devoted to their work and have the vision to transform India into a superpower.</b>
<b>During the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi turned the concepts of austerity, peace, justice, equality, sacrifice and non-violence into political principles. Gandhiâs creative political thought captivated the people. Gandhi mixed religion with politics to launch the largest ever anti-establishment peaceful mass struggle in worldâs history, the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi was deeply religious, yet secular. But today, no politician is secular. Every politician seeks the vote of some community or the other. So when they foul-mouth opponents as communal, they are nothing but hypocrites.</b>
<b>Before Gandhiâs advent, the Congress was an elitist cocktail club of activists from Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi and Madras. At a party hosted by Jinnah, Gokhale advised Gandhi to tour India to understand and voice peopleâs feelings. Gandhi traversed the length and breadth of the country to capture on his mental canvas the suffering of the common people. Then he motivated the elitists to shed materialism, embrace austerity and be one with the masses. He transformed Congressâ club of few to a party of the masses. To lead the masses, Congressmen had to be one with them. Thousands from the elite responded to Gandhiâs call by becoming Congress workers.
Gandhi unified religious diversity. He converted South Asiaâs diverse humanity into a brotherhood. He combined religion and politics to preach and practice humanism. Through prayer meetings, he inspired the masses to force the British to quit India. He knew that man by nature is selfish and would not risk being brutalised physically. Hence he articulated the principle of non-violent struggle: fast at home, congregate to fast at public places. For Indiaâs poor, fasting was daily habit. Mahatma converted hunger into a political instrument. Satyagraha thus became a powerful political weapon. </b>
While the British feasted, Mahatma fasted in jail, to atone for the death of the British policemen burnt alive by some freedom fighters at Chauri Chaura. The British were consuming but India was fasting, making penance on the death of some British policemen. It played immensely on the British psyche. Then Mahatma asked the British to quit India. And now Indiaâs people want the corrupt to quit India. For that to happen, India awaits the arrival of another Mahatma.
The writer can be contacted at siddharthareddy@deccanmail.com
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu women and law
By Flavia Agnes
<b>The history of Hindu law reform spans a period of 15 years from 1941 to 1956. It was discussed in three Parliaments of historical significance: Federal Parliament, Provisional Parliament and the first Parliament of the newly independent nation.</b> At each phase it went through a dilution of womenâs rights till finally the political interest of the ruling party became the primary consideration. But the rhetoric continued to be liberation of women.
The three important factors which need to be examined in the context of Hindu law reform are (i) the opposition to it within the Congress leadership, (ii) the political impediments which necessitated the reform, and (iii) the veracity of its dual claim of being a code, and of liberating women.
<b>Opposition from conservative forces: </b>Several provisions, including the provisions of monogamy, divorce, abolition of coparcenary and inheritance to daughters, were opposed. It was felt that Hindu society will receive a moral setback if women were granted the right to divorce along with a right to inherit property. The reforms were opposed by the then President and constitutional head, Dr Rajendra Prasad, senior Congressmen like Pattabhi Sitaramayya and the architect of the united Indian nation, Sardar Patel, the president of the ruling Congress, P.D. Tandon among others.
<b>Political impediments which necessitated the reform:</b> The major driving force for the reforms was homogenising the various communities into a broad âHinduâ identity. <b>The integration of Hindus from three different political regimes i.e., British India, the princely states and the tribal regions into one nation could best be done by bringing them under one law.</b>
Hence the primary concern was to define the term âHinduâ in its widest sense and encompass all sects, castes and religious denominations within it. <b>The Hindu Law Committee had defined Hindu as anyone professing Hindu religion. But later the word âprofessesâ was deleted to broaden its scope.</b>
<b>Examining the motive for Hindu law reform,</b> legal scholars like Archana Parashar argue that the hidden agenda was the unification of the nation through uniformity in law. <b>National integration was of paramount importance. Establishing the supremacy of the state over religious institutions was another important consideration.</b> This could be best achieved by redefining the rights given to women.
Through the reorientation of female roles the State could replace the claim of religion and religious institutions over peopleâs lives. <b>While bringing in reforms the state relied upon two conflicting claims of tradition and modernity. While professing that it was bound by the Constitution, the state projected the image of a continuity with the past (by preserving the provisions from the ancient sacred law) to bring in selective reforms.</b>
For the State, the unifying potential of the common code became more important than its potential for ensuring legal equality for women. Hence, several customary rights of women, particularly from the lower castes and the southern regions, were sacrificed in the interest of uniformity. Local customs of matrilineal inheritance and other customary safeguards were not incorporated in the new code.
For instance, most lower castes had a right of divorce and remarriage under the customary law with consent of the parties. Through the Marumakkattayam Act of 1933 (applicable to the Malabar region) the right of divorce by executing a registered instrument of dissolution by the concerned parties was granted statutory recognition.
Further, under the scriptural law as well as customary law, the right of females as stridhana heirs was superior to their male counterparts and that of parents was superior to in-laws. But under S.15 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, sons and daughters were granted equal rights. Further, under the provisions of the Hindu Succession Act, the property of a childless woman devolves upon the husbandâs heirs and only in their absence would it devolve upon the womanâs own parents. A further and unexplainable distinction was made between the heirs of the father and the mother of a female and the motherâs heirs were placed in an inferior category.
The reforms relied upon one school irrespective of its provisions favouring women despite the wide diversity under the Hindu law. The Congress party was dominated by lawyers trained in British law or those who studied law in England, and consequently imbibed all the colonial biases regarding the functioning of Indian society as well as the changes that were supposedly needed to modernise it.
<b>There was a fascination among social reformers with uniformity as a vehicle of national unity.</b> The state as an instrument of social reform to be imposed upon the people without creating a social consensus derives essentially from the norms of functioning inherent in colonialist state machinery and ideology. <b>The English-educated elite had faithfully imbibed the colonial stateâs ideology, projecting itself as the most progressive instrument of social reform.</b>
Madhu Kishwar, a feminist scholar argues that the reforms did not introduce any principle which had not already existed somewhere in India. Despite this, the reforms were projected as a vehicle for ushering in Western modernity. There were, however, several liberal customary practices which were discarded by the Hindu code for the sake of uniformity. In their stated determination to put an end to the growth of custom, the reformers were in fact putting an end to the essence of Hindu law, and yet persisted in calling the codification âHindu.â
Since the political impediment to reform Hindu law was grave, several balancing acts had to be performed by the state while reforming the Hindu law. Crucial provisions empowering women had to be constantly watered down to reach the level of minimum consensus. While projecting to be pro-women, male privileges had to be protected. While introducing modernity, archaic Brahminical rituals had to be retained. While usurping the power exercised by religious heads, needs of emerging capitalism had to be safeguarded. Only through such balancing acts the agenda of law reform could be achieved.
The Acts were neither Hindu in character nor based on modern principles of equality, but reflected the worst tendencies of both. Inheritance rights of daughters, right of divorce for women and imposition of monogamy upon Hindu males were the issues which were severely contended. Due to severe opposition, coparcenary system had to be maintained, which resulted in the denial of rights to women in the ancestral home and property.
When compared to the position of the brother, the sisterâs share was dismal. Since the earlier safeguard provided by the ancient lawgivers to women by way of stridhana, a necessary concomitant to male coparcenary, had been corroded due to judicial decisions, denial of equal rights to daughters only served to widen the gulf of gender divide.
The daughters were granted equal rights only in the separate or self-acquired property of their father. But daughters could be denied a share even in this separate property by converting it into a joint property. It has taken us 50 years since the Hindu Code Bill was enacted, to re-examine the issue of equal property rights to Hindu women and it is as yet anyoneâs guess whether the proposed amendments to the Hindu Succession Act will be passed in this Monsoon Session of Parliament.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So there is a move to amend the shortcoming os the old Hindu Succession Act.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->It is time the corrupt quit India
By Siddhartha Reddy
On August 9, 1942, Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the Tricolour at Azad Maidan in what was then Bombay. Gandhi was about to launch the Quit India movement and was arrested early morning. From today till August 15, it is time to remember the freedom struggle. In this one week, Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi must shed some tears to make amends for the fact that a Congress Prime Minister praised the British.
Sonia Gandhi is the custodian of a dynasty that benefited enormously from Mahatma Gandhi gifting the Prime Ministerâs post to Jawaharlal Nehru. Sonia Gandhi heads the Congress, claiming links with the freedom movement. There is a campaign by political opponents against foreign born Soniaâs participation in government positions. Soniaâs hand-picked PMâs unwarranted utterances might complicate her equation. But her dilemma about voicing disagreement could snowball into a chorus asking for Manmohanâs resignation. However, silence hurts her credibility and Congressâ esteem. Not ready to rock the boat, Sonia chose silence. But the nation expects amends, martyrs deserve homage.
Having got the British to quit India, the nation desperately yearns that others should quit India too: the poor and the lower middle classes want the pro-rich finance minister to quit government. Farmers want better sale price for what they produce by getting rid of middlemen. Students want teachers who donât teach and businessmen parading as educationists to exit the education system.
Patients want the end of corporate hospitals that fleece them. Litigants want corrupt lawyers and judges removed. The common man wants corrupt officials to quit their jobs. The RSS wants Advani to quit. A pro-reform World Bank lobby want the Communists to stop pestering the government. Lok Sabha MPs want the Rajya Sabha to be winded up to prevent the marginalisation of genuine public representatives.
Thousands sacrificed lives and families to secure freedom. The time has come for the corrupt to quit India. Corruption is the root cause of every problem. Unless the apex Navaratnas (the top nine leaders in every political party) are clean, this rapid deterioration in polity cannot be reversed. <b>India desperately needs at the helm men and women of character and integrity, people who are devoted to their work and have the vision to transform India into a superpower.</b>
<b>During the freedom struggle, Mahatma Gandhi turned the concepts of austerity, peace, justice, equality, sacrifice and non-violence into political principles. Gandhiâs creative political thought captivated the people. Gandhi mixed religion with politics to launch the largest ever anti-establishment peaceful mass struggle in worldâs history, the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi was deeply religious, yet secular. But today, no politician is secular. Every politician seeks the vote of some community or the other. So when they foul-mouth opponents as communal, they are nothing but hypocrites.</b>
<b>Before Gandhiâs advent, the Congress was an elitist cocktail club of activists from Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi and Madras. At a party hosted by Jinnah, Gokhale advised Gandhi to tour India to understand and voice peopleâs feelings. Gandhi traversed the length and breadth of the country to capture on his mental canvas the suffering of the common people. Then he motivated the elitists to shed materialism, embrace austerity and be one with the masses. He transformed Congressâ club of few to a party of the masses. To lead the masses, Congressmen had to be one with them. Thousands from the elite responded to Gandhiâs call by becoming Congress workers.
Gandhi unified religious diversity. He converted South Asiaâs diverse humanity into a brotherhood. He combined religion and politics to preach and practice humanism. Through prayer meetings, he inspired the masses to force the British to quit India. He knew that man by nature is selfish and would not risk being brutalised physically. Hence he articulated the principle of non-violent struggle: fast at home, congregate to fast at public places. For Indiaâs poor, fasting was daily habit. Mahatma converted hunger into a political instrument. Satyagraha thus became a powerful political weapon. </b>
While the British feasted, Mahatma fasted in jail, to atone for the death of the British policemen burnt alive by some freedom fighters at Chauri Chaura. The British were consuming but India was fasting, making penance on the death of some British policemen. It played immensely on the British psyche. Then Mahatma asked the British to quit India. And now Indiaâs people want the corrupt to quit India. For that to happen, India awaits the arrival of another Mahatma.
The writer can be contacted at siddharthareddy@deccanmail.com
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
And
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu women and law
By Flavia Agnes
<b>The history of Hindu law reform spans a period of 15 years from 1941 to 1956. It was discussed in three Parliaments of historical significance: Federal Parliament, Provisional Parliament and the first Parliament of the newly independent nation.</b> At each phase it went through a dilution of womenâs rights till finally the political interest of the ruling party became the primary consideration. But the rhetoric continued to be liberation of women.
The three important factors which need to be examined in the context of Hindu law reform are (i) the opposition to it within the Congress leadership, (ii) the political impediments which necessitated the reform, and (iii) the veracity of its dual claim of being a code, and of liberating women.
<b>Opposition from conservative forces: </b>Several provisions, including the provisions of monogamy, divorce, abolition of coparcenary and inheritance to daughters, were opposed. It was felt that Hindu society will receive a moral setback if women were granted the right to divorce along with a right to inherit property. The reforms were opposed by the then President and constitutional head, Dr Rajendra Prasad, senior Congressmen like Pattabhi Sitaramayya and the architect of the united Indian nation, Sardar Patel, the president of the ruling Congress, P.D. Tandon among others.
<b>Political impediments which necessitated the reform:</b> The major driving force for the reforms was homogenising the various communities into a broad âHinduâ identity. <b>The integration of Hindus from three different political regimes i.e., British India, the princely states and the tribal regions into one nation could best be done by bringing them under one law.</b>
Hence the primary concern was to define the term âHinduâ in its widest sense and encompass all sects, castes and religious denominations within it. <b>The Hindu Law Committee had defined Hindu as anyone professing Hindu religion. But later the word âprofessesâ was deleted to broaden its scope.</b>
<b>Examining the motive for Hindu law reform,</b> legal scholars like Archana Parashar argue that the hidden agenda was the unification of the nation through uniformity in law. <b>National integration was of paramount importance. Establishing the supremacy of the state over religious institutions was another important consideration.</b> This could be best achieved by redefining the rights given to women.
Through the reorientation of female roles the State could replace the claim of religion and religious institutions over peopleâs lives. <b>While bringing in reforms the state relied upon two conflicting claims of tradition and modernity. While professing that it was bound by the Constitution, the state projected the image of a continuity with the past (by preserving the provisions from the ancient sacred law) to bring in selective reforms.</b>
For the State, the unifying potential of the common code became more important than its potential for ensuring legal equality for women. Hence, several customary rights of women, particularly from the lower castes and the southern regions, were sacrificed in the interest of uniformity. Local customs of matrilineal inheritance and other customary safeguards were not incorporated in the new code.
For instance, most lower castes had a right of divorce and remarriage under the customary law with consent of the parties. Through the Marumakkattayam Act of 1933 (applicable to the Malabar region) the right of divorce by executing a registered instrument of dissolution by the concerned parties was granted statutory recognition.
Further, under the scriptural law as well as customary law, the right of females as stridhana heirs was superior to their male counterparts and that of parents was superior to in-laws. But under S.15 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, sons and daughters were granted equal rights. Further, under the provisions of the Hindu Succession Act, the property of a childless woman devolves upon the husbandâs heirs and only in their absence would it devolve upon the womanâs own parents. A further and unexplainable distinction was made between the heirs of the father and the mother of a female and the motherâs heirs were placed in an inferior category.
The reforms relied upon one school irrespective of its provisions favouring women despite the wide diversity under the Hindu law. The Congress party was dominated by lawyers trained in British law or those who studied law in England, and consequently imbibed all the colonial biases regarding the functioning of Indian society as well as the changes that were supposedly needed to modernise it.
<b>There was a fascination among social reformers with uniformity as a vehicle of national unity.</b> The state as an instrument of social reform to be imposed upon the people without creating a social consensus derives essentially from the norms of functioning inherent in colonialist state machinery and ideology. <b>The English-educated elite had faithfully imbibed the colonial stateâs ideology, projecting itself as the most progressive instrument of social reform.</b>
Madhu Kishwar, a feminist scholar argues that the reforms did not introduce any principle which had not already existed somewhere in India. Despite this, the reforms were projected as a vehicle for ushering in Western modernity. There were, however, several liberal customary practices which were discarded by the Hindu code for the sake of uniformity. In their stated determination to put an end to the growth of custom, the reformers were in fact putting an end to the essence of Hindu law, and yet persisted in calling the codification âHindu.â
Since the political impediment to reform Hindu law was grave, several balancing acts had to be performed by the state while reforming the Hindu law. Crucial provisions empowering women had to be constantly watered down to reach the level of minimum consensus. While projecting to be pro-women, male privileges had to be protected. While introducing modernity, archaic Brahminical rituals had to be retained. While usurping the power exercised by religious heads, needs of emerging capitalism had to be safeguarded. Only through such balancing acts the agenda of law reform could be achieved.
The Acts were neither Hindu in character nor based on modern principles of equality, but reflected the worst tendencies of both. Inheritance rights of daughters, right of divorce for women and imposition of monogamy upon Hindu males were the issues which were severely contended. Due to severe opposition, coparcenary system had to be maintained, which resulted in the denial of rights to women in the ancestral home and property.
When compared to the position of the brother, the sisterâs share was dismal. Since the earlier safeguard provided by the ancient lawgivers to women by way of stridhana, a necessary concomitant to male coparcenary, had been corroded due to judicial decisions, denial of equal rights to daughters only served to widen the gulf of gender divide.
The daughters were granted equal rights only in the separate or self-acquired property of their father. But daughters could be denied a share even in this separate property by converting it into a joint property. It has taken us 50 years since the Hindu Code Bill was enacted, to re-examine the issue of equal property rights to Hindu women and it is as yet anyoneâs guess whether the proposed amendments to the Hindu Succession Act will be passed in this Monsoon Session of Parliament.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
So there is a move to amend the shortcoming os the old Hindu Succession Act.