NC Suggestions: The Best Opinion Pieces Of The Day

• Wages of vigilantism

In this piece, Zoya Hasan, professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University says that preventing atrocities against minorities is utmost important at the moment or it can cause irreversible harm. The editorial published in The Hindu pointed out how each event of violence has hardened community boundaries and widened the divide between Hindus and Muslims. In cases of cow vigilantes killing people, rather than taking action against those indulging in violence, law enforcement agencies act mostly against the victims themselves, says Hasan. Victims are booked for violating cow protection laws.

Hasan says most of these are not spontaneous acts of violence. It is usually systematic planning behind them. Active support of powerful political figures in the current establishment given to Sangh Parivar outfits helps them carry out such atrocities. It has helped them build networks, gain new recruits, resources and legitimacy that Hindu right-wing groups did not have in the past.

• Will India remain a civilisational-state post 2019, or continue its march to a unitary, ethno-religious entity?
  

Christophe Jaffrelot, author of several books on BR Ambedkar and caste in India writes about how India was defined as a civilisation-state by some historians many years ago, as opposed to what it is called now- a nation-state. A civilization state is one that can amalgamate into one coherent whole a large number of cultural influences. This approach — articulated by a historian in a longue durée perspective — has a clear political implication: India is also a coalition-state, Jaffrelot says.

India unlike European countries or China has governed in a centralized manner and there were also a few ephemeral phases of unity that India experienced from the reign of Ashoka onwards. He explains how “the sovereign” had to build coalitions of regional satraps and maintain them through a constant bargaining process. He gives an example of Akbar who spent half of his life traveling across the Mughal Empire to pacify mansabdars turned feudal lords to retain their support and resist the “fitna” syndrome.

In this Indian Express column, the author explains that coalitions imply transactional mechanisms which have been the essence of the Indian polity and which have been good for federalism and democracy because they limit the concentration of power. Coalitions do not include parties representing only provinces, but also social groups. It is more difficult for the Centre to ignore OBCs or minorities when it depends upon parties claiming that they are their spokespersons in the ruling coalition.

The NDA under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the UPA under Manmohan Singh had one thing in common with the Nehruvian pattern: They forced the Centre to acknowledge the states’ autonomy because the BJP and the Congress depended upon regional forces, Jaffrelot writes.

• Obscenity and the veil of outrage

In this Mumbai Mirror column, Dushyant talks about the Kerala High Court order on PIL against the picture of the breastfeeding woman on a magazine cover. The man who filed the PIL termed the image as obscene, claiming it was a sign of the society’s moral decadence and that by publishing it, the magazine had committed a penal offence under the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986. The court tossed out the petition.

The judgment talks about how the sensuous and the sacred are interlinked. It mentions the Ajanta and Ellora caves and how “gods were always depicted as super-humanly beautiful, for if the image was not beautiful then the deities could not be persuaded to inhabit the statue”.

Another key observation the court made was that it’s critical to not be chained to the past, in the context of looking at what is obscene and what is not, he writes. Many political leaders speak of a glorious past that they want to take us back to. The court ominously reminds us: “That glory, in fact, was a change and almost an abomination for those living then. Only from the prism of the present, that past appears to be glorious. Who knows what we detest now, as our ancestors did then, as decadence may be its very glory, viewed from a distant tomorrow.”

• The row, row, row theory of life

In this Mint column, Priya Ramani talks about Leena Kejriwal’s social activities to crack a particularly vile problem: the trafficking of Indian girls. She does this through art exhibitions which constitute mural walks and paintings. Kejriwal is the founder of the MISSING campaign.

Kejriwal tells girls about teenagers like J, 14, who didn’t think twice when her aunt told her they were going to the big city. Kejriwal teaches girls how to say no, writes Ramani.

Kejriwal’s obsession with trafficking gathered momentum when her public art project, an iron and steel silhouette of a larger than life girl symbolizing a black hole into which millions of girls just disappear every year—starting with sex-selective abortions—was previewed at the India Art Fair in 2014.

• Spare a thought for Kashmir’s women

In this Hindustan Times column, Lalita Panicker says that people should now go beyond territoriality and cross-border politics to compensation and rehabilitation for women victims of the violence. Women suffer the most in all conflict situations. Here, they have to live with the disappearances of husbands, fathers and sons or daughters either to militancy, in violence during protests or incarceration.

There have been reports of extreme physical trauma that women suffer from enduring and witnessing violence over long periods of time. These include depression, miscarriages, spontaneous abortions and an increase in domestic violence. Many of the psychological effects need extensive medical care, which is neither easily available nor indeed an option for many women given the stigma associated with it.

For women living with the grief of having lost children or other relatives, the trauma is compounded. The debilitating effects of grief are not understood or addressed. Many women spend inordinate amounts of time in courts fighting cases of disappearances of loved ones. They are not equipped for this and the long delays just exacerbate their mental distress. As things go back to the drawing board in Kashmir, there seems very little hope of better times to come for women in the state.