Tag: humra quraishi

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Why the Railway Budget makes no sense

Humra Quraishi describes her adventures with the Indian Railways and wonders if travel basics would ever be taken care of.

Whilst reading my daily Thought For The Day a few days ago – Blaise Pascal’s ‘ Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary’, I muttered aloud that this thought seems to fit rather well with Railways Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal’s rail budget.

Typically, the Rail Budget comprised big announcements of bigger trains, especially from his home town Chandigarh, complete with hackneyed tricks of modern-day technology (he was trying to sound technology savvy, I think) without paying attention to the grim fact that e-bookings and reservations are beyond the reach of most of his countrymen. But the Honourable Minister doesn’t seem bothered to look into ground realities. Nor does he seem particularly concerned about the dangers lurking for rail passengers – no, not in the form of terrorists, but rats and cockroaches and stray dogs in and around train compartments.

Mind you, I am not talking of slow passenger trains but those special ones – the Rajdhanis and Shatabdis. I really want to see what the Minister’s new wonder – Anubhuti – will be like.

I’m not much of a traveller; the last time I took the train was the Lucknow-Delhi Shatabdi and the Delhi-Ajmer Shatabdi. There were rats in the coach and the railway staff’s only solution seemed to be to play hide-and-seek with them. We tried putting our feet in a high-alert (and higher-than-ground-level) posture, but you know how it is. After a point, you forget to remain so tense, only to be reminded by another darting rodent. We remained restless for long hours. As if that wasn’t enough, several well-fed cockroaches arrived on the scene, sniffing around the food trays that nobody would bother to take away hours after we’d eaten.

Then there were dogs on the platforms. Not one or two, but several loitering around as though it was their home territory (which it probably was). I was dismayed to see how the railway platform of the capital city was stinking with the filth and the animals around.

The Honorable Railway Minister should undertake a train journey one of these days, one of those unannounced and ‘spontaneous’ ones that his ilk is so fond of taking in the presence of press photographers and news channels, so that he can see the mess in the Indian Railways for himself. It will be even better if he carries a bag or two, preferably containing valuables, and experience for himself the many thefts taking place on station platforms. During one of our journeys, one of our handbags was cut into and left bereft of the last rupee tucked within its interiors; we rushed to the police station situated at the end of New Delhi Railway station, only to hear the paunchy policewallahs tell us that it was next to impossible to retrieve the stolen stuff. Very philosophically they added, “Madam, what is gone is gone.”

Mr Bansal, it is spring…that time of the year when there’s supposed bahaar in and around your bungalow, but do try and move out from your gardens and take a stroll on the railway platforms. Just like in your Budget speech, I am certain that you will utter some more of those moving couplets you regaled us with a few days ago, but this time, you may genuinely feel what you say. If you do take such a trip, be sure to watch out, apart from the filth and the mess, for the little children, some of them battered beyond recognition and several others made to beg. Look out also for the many unscrupulous activities that take place in the Railways’ premises. But no, don’t go as a minister with those sepahis and chamchas hovering around you, but as an average Indian who travels without security convoys.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant. 

(Picture courtesy bryansander.com)

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International Committee of Red Cross turns 150

Humra Quraishi tracks the journey of the ICRC, whose first mission to India had landed in Bombay 96 years ago.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) turned 150 years old on February 17, 2013. It is now more than 30 years old in India. In fact, ICRC’s first mission to India was on February 12, 1917, some 95 years ago, to restore contact between people separated by war.

To give you a background on this:  The International Prisoners-of-War Agency was formed on August 21, 1914. And from December 1914, ICRC delegates began obtaining permission from the different states to visit POW camps not just to check on conditions of detention but also to let the prisoners know that they had not been forgotten by the outside world or reconnect them with their loved ones. On January 25, 1917 in Cairo, the delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had just finished a camp visit of Ottoman Prisoner of War (POWs), that they received a cable from their headquarters in Geneva.

The cable directed them to inspect camps of POWs and civilian internees in Asian countries of India and Burma. The delegates got on to a ship and sailed through the Suez Canal to reach Bombay on February 12, 1917. The arrival of delegates that day
marked the beginning of ICRC’s journey on Indian soil. The mission in India began with the delegates meeting Viscount Chelmsford, Viceroy of India (the head of the British administration in India) in Delhi. In the province of Rajputana, the ICRC delegates visited the first camp in Sumerpur on March 3 to 4, 1917.

Explaining the concrete work of the delegates during such camp visits, Mary Werntz, currently the head of the regional delegation of the ICRC in Delhi, said, “The delegates would dive deep to see if the detainees were treated with dignity. From checking the barrack premises, sleeping, clothing and sanitation facilities, access to exercise and fresh air, medical services,
quantity of food received per person, to mapping the application of order and discipline on inmates by the detaining authority, every small details were observed and noted.

Efforts would also be made to ensure that the detainees had the right to practise their religion, had access to letters and parcels, and could avail the financial support from their own Government.”

Reading these details of ICRC’s work, one thought struck me: there are no formal and full-fledged wars being fought these days, so can’t the ICRC men and women look into the current state of our lockups and prisons, and what the current state of those languishing there is. In the times we are living in, there must be watchdog organisations to monitor and bring about interventions.

(Picture courtesy itu.int)

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‘Being’ a Muslim

Humra Quraishi wonders what it will take for us to break away from the strange stereotypes we associate with Muslims.

In the last few years, I’ve attended several public meetings held in New Delhi that dealt with the growing despair amongst Muslims, and their constant dread of being profiled as terrorists, followed by denials of bail, tortures, biased police investigations and trials, and extra-judicial killings. Not to mention the daily discrimination in education, employment, housing and public services.

Compounding this situation, rightly or wrongly, are the weird stereotypes that prevail about Muslims in India. That they breed like rabbits and eat meat at every occasion. That they don’t bathe. So often, I’ve been asked, “You really a Muslim? You don’t look like one!” What am I supposed to look like? Doing salaams or stuffing meatballs into my   mouth, I suppose, if not cooking and eating biryani every day, or going out of doors on the arm of a bearded, achkan-clad, hatted man with a brood of squabbling children trailing me.

An average Indian Muslim’s lifestyle isn’t very different from that of his fellow Indians’.  There is no difference, except for this – a deep sense of insecurity! Mind you, this does not come from you or me or other apolitical Indians, but from those who are at the very  helm: communal politicians and their allies.

In my parents’ home, like in most Indian homes, dark realities were seldom discussed. At least, not openly, and definitely not in front of children. But what’s happening outside our homes cannot be brushed under the carpet for long, and children are very intuitive and sensitive to undercurrents of something amiss. As I write this, I remember how some snippets of whispered conversations would find their way to my ears, often on a late evening when my two younger sisters and I would lie sprawled under mosquito nets on our beds.

My grandfather, certain we were asleep, would sit discussing things with my grandmother, things such as the horrific rioting in one of the areas of Uttar Pradesh, and of Muslims getting killed or hounded by the PAC jawans. I was very young then, and these stories were difficult to come to terms with. To this day, those accounts of police brutality have stayed with me, imprinting themselves on my mind permanently as I saw for myself those same things taking place, frighteningly and frequently backed by a powerful political-police nexus.

Another reality lay right in front of us every summer, when we’d travel down to Shahjahanpur to spend the vacations with my maternal grandparents. It was here that I first saw acute poverty among Muslims. Around  my nana’s ancestral home, an entire  mohalla lay spread out, housing poverty-stricken Muslims, many of them would come to our home recounting not just stories of their poverty, but of so many insecurities of the worst kind. The Right-wing political mafia often called this township ‘miniPakistan’, because it largely comprised Muslims.

As a child, these things hit hard. As I grew up, it got harder to cope as I saw and sensed  very early in life that I belonged to a minority community that faced some very obvious communal biases. Tragically, these realities have worsened in recent years. I didn’t have to be an investigative reporter to find this out. I didn’t even have to go into Muslim mohallas or bastis. I saw and heard and experienced it all right here, in our capital city.

Soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, it was traumatic to remove the nameplate from outside our home which, at that time, was situated in New Delhi’s high profile Shahjahan Road, a high-security VVIP area. Why did we have to remove it? Because it bore a Muslim name. There were constant rumours of mobs attacking Muslim homes. After all, during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the home of at least one senior Sikh bureaucrat was targeted in Lutyens’Delhi.

After the Babri Masjid demolition, I did an in-depth feature for the Illustrated  Weekly of India on how Muslim children studying in the best public schools of the capital city had to hear snide comments, not just from their classmates but also from some of their teachers. The demolition had several Muslim mothers change their children’s names/surnames to ensure basic survival.

Several Muslim mothers from Ahmedabad, Malegaon and Hyderabad have told me, “The police pick our children up even if a cracker bursts in the area. They are sometimes released after weeks or months, but their names lie forever in police records, so they are picked up again, the next time there’s another crime in the area.” It’s well-known by now that young Kashmiris who step out of the Valley to study or work in different cities of this country, are immediately looked upon with suspicion by the local cops and given a hard time.

I don’t harbor any hopes from the often barbaric policing that happens in this country, but I do harbor hopes from fellow Indians who are determined to fight the system. I firmly believe that our social fabric is still intact because of apolitical men and women of this country, especially those who belong to the ‘majority’ community, and who can see and sense the divisive politics at work. They are doing their utmost to see that good sense prevails. Along the way, they are helping hundreds and thousands of innocents and the disadvantaged survive against all odds.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

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Defending Afzal Guru

What did it take to defend Parliament attacker Afzal Guru in court? In her book, lawyer Nandita Haksar explains all.
by Humra Quraishi

I confess I am appalled by the Afzal Guru hanging. Hanged and buried in absolute secrecy, without informing his family and without sensitivity to basic human rights – but there is also a bigger picture here.

I did not know Afzal Guru and had never met him. A few years ago, I read his lawyer, the respected activist and human rights campaigner Nandita Haksar’s book, Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism In The Time of Terror. Published six years ago by Bibliophile South Asia, I had attended its launch here in New Delhi, where some of our best-known academics spoke as well.

Former Vice Chancellor of Delhi University, Professor Upendra Baxi was one of the speakers, and all of them focused on some harsh realities in terms of human rights violations, biased machinery, communal politics and so on. Reading the book later, several more realities hit me, through the series of open letters that Nandita (in pic on right) writes, including one to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, where she highlights the brutalities this system heaps on its people.

If the top rung of our current leadership would take the time out to read this volume,  they would not be able to sleep at all. The 348-page volume carries all the possible facts about SAR Geelani and Afzal Guru in the context of this case, and the serious offshoots that follow.

I reread this book on Saturday, as the morning brought the news of Afzal Guru’s hanging.  I quote Nandita from her book, more specifically from the chapter, ‘Letter to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’:

‘I am sure you know that I have been part of the defence team of SAR Geelani, the man who was first sentenced to death on charges of conspiring to attack the Indian Parliament, and then acquitted by the High Court of Delhi. I have been accused of being anti-national and people have expressed shock that a daughter of a nationalist father should betray his ideals. I feel the need to explain why I took up the case and what I learnt about our country in the course of this case…

‘I do not know how many Kashmiri prisoners there are in Tihar Jail. Most of these men are locked inside the high security cells of the jail. They are denied basic facilities and are subjected to torture and brutalities inside the jail, and often their lives are in danger. There were at least two attempts on the life of Geelani while he was in jail. More recently, two other prisoners have been attacked inside the high security cells of the  Tihar Jail.

‘I have details of other atrocities, brutalities and crimes committed by the jail authorities. Where do I go and file a complaint? I feel so helpless, despite being a lawyer and well-connected in society, what do you think the Kashmiris feel? Can we win the hearts and minds of the Kashmiri people by treating them like subhuman beings?’

With that start, she takes the reader to what’s been happening inside and outside our jails and prisons, and in the corridors of power and in those international and national conferences. This volume is a must-read for those who want to study the facts around the Afzal Guru case in the context and backdrop of the prevailing political  scenario. Nandita has laid out every single detail, right from the basic ‘why’ she took up this particular  case, to the very system and police machinery, and everything else in between.

I also known Afzal Guru’s other lawyer, ND Pancholi. On two earlier occasions, I had asked him about Afzal’s conduct in jail. He had said, “He keeps reading the Quran and praying…he is kept in isolation, but he is calm.” Pancholi was also of the firm view that Afzal was implicated in the case would never get a fair trial.

After the hanging, our ‘democratic’ setup gagged the protests and mourning in the Valley with a curfew. Here, in New Delhi, right wing goons blackened the faces of left wing protestors, all under the watchful eyes of the cops. Added to this, senior journalist Iftikhar  Gilani (who works with DNA) and his family were detained and questioned for several hours in their South Delhi home.

I end this piece with lines by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who spent 35 years in prison because he was a Communist:

‘The  moment you’re born

they plant around you

mills that grind lies

lies to last you a  lifetime.

You keep thinking of your great freedom

a finger on your temple. Free to have a free conscience.

Your  heart bent as if half –cut from the nape,

your  arms long, hanging,

you saunter about in your great freedom: you’re free

with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country as the nearest, most precious thing to you.

But one day, for example,

they may endorse it over to America,

and you too, with your great freedom – you have the freedom to become an airbase.

You may proclaim that you must live, not as a tool,

a number or a link, but as a human being.

Then at once they handcuff your wrists.

You are free to be arrested, imprisoned and even hanged.

There’s neither an iron, wooden

nor a tulle curtain in your life;

there’s no need to choose freedom:

you are free.

But this kind of freedom

is a sad affair under the stars.’

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Featured image courtesy deccanchronicle.com)

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Reading does save you!

Humra Quraishi is enlightened by her recent acquisitions – three new books that shed light on our lives and times.

I attended two book launches this week. One was Harsh Mander’s (in featured picture) launch of Ash In the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger (Penguin) where the three speakers – Dr Upendra Baxi, Mark Tully and NC Saxena – minced no words as they spoke about how a certain percentage of our population is perishing because of malnutrition and hunger.

The Government of the day is actually killing and murdering its people, slowly and methodically, by not knowing the actual ground realities and not doing enough to deal with them. Yet, its machinery continues to churn out numbers for high growth rates, replete with several exaggerated figures.

The other launch was for Professor Mushirul Hasan’s book on Mahatma Gandhi, which I wrote about last Sunday (see the piece here), where Gopal Krishna Gandhi’s talk on his grandfather, the Mahatma, was very touching. He spoke in chaste Urdu and narrated an incident which showed Gandhi’s strength of character even in the face of personal crisis: when he heard that his teenaged grandson Rasik had passed away in Jamia Millia Islamia, he said that it was some solace that Rasik had passed away in a place like the Jamia Millia, and also that he had been looked after by the well-known physician, Dr Ansari.

And I have recently received two books on Gulzar saab. One is a collection of his song lyrics and verse, titled Umr Se Lambi Sadkon Par (Vani Prakashan) which is compiled by  Delhi-based poet and doctor Dr Binod Khaitan. The other volume is titled  In The Company Of A Poet: Gulzar in Conversation With Nasreen Munni Kabir. Published by  Rupa, this volume focusses on Gulzar saab’s views and viewpoints, complete with his verse…maybe, these lines will help you wake up at dawn!

‘I wake up at five when it is still dark.

I want the sun to look for me instead of me looking for the sun.

Just as the first serve in tennis can be advantageous,

So the first serve must be mine.

The second goes to the sun.’

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Picture courtesy citizensforpeace.com)

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An auction and a film search engine

Neville Tuli launches the first Osianama Series Auction for antiquities, modern and contemporary fine arts, apart from vintage film memorabilia.
by Humra Quraishi

Neville Tuli, founder Chairman, Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art, is known for hosting big-budget, futuristic film festivals in the country’s capital city. With his newest endeavour, Tuli’s going back to the past – earlier last week, he launched the Osianama Series Auction, in the backdrop of the opening of the Osianama Art and Film Museum in New Delhi.

This Auction series is supposedly the forerunner to the upcoming Museum. Speaking to The Metrognome, Tuli says, “With the opening of the Osianama Art and Film Museum in New Delhi imminent, it is important for the public to have a sensibility for India’s fine and popular arts, film-related art forms, crafts and antiquities on many levels. This Auction presents a unique combination of antiquities, modern and contemporary fine arts and vintage Indian film memorabilia.

 

It is important that the collectors’ fraternity begins to view and study Indian arts and culture in a more holistic and integrated manner. The comparability between different art forms is minimal, whether from a historical or economic context, let alone the aesthetic.”

Among the highlights in the cinema section are Hindi cinema’s forgotten and silent era memorabilia from the Zafar Aabid collection, such as pre-independence rare stills including the cast and crew from Himanshu Rai’s 1928 classic silent film Shiraz, a signed year 1930 portrait of the silent era actress Sulochana, photographic stills from 1937’s Gangavataran, the first and the last talkie by the Father of Indian Cinema, Dadasaheb Phalke, one of the first artworks for Kamal Amrohi’s Razia Sultan made many years before the film was completed, an extremely rare and possibly the only existing six sheet poster of the 1980 Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor starrer Do Aur Do Paanch, a rare poster in excellent condition of the Shammi Kapoor starrer Raat Ke Rahi, designed by the famous poster designer of the 1960s, Pradyuman, who also designed the famous BR Films logo.

Apart from these gems is the rare complete set of Pandit RaviShankar’s original LP records of the music he composed for five Indian films – Anuradha (1960), Godaan (1963), Pather Panchali (1964), Meera (1979) and Gandhi (1982).

Tuli is also launching a library and archival collection on Indian arts and culture and the many ‘worlds of cinema’. He says, “We are launching theosianama.com, a dedicated online search engine and educational content for Indian and Asian arts, culture and the worlds of cinema, universally in its beta version before March 14 this year. In its first phase, the online search engine will focus primarily on Hindi and Bombay cinema and the history of Indian modern and contemporary fine arts.”

In this art object-centric site, there is a vast cinematic imagery, covering all forms of film publicity material and memorabilia including more than 2,50,000 original artworks, such as  lithographic and offset posters, lobby cards, show-cards, song-synopsis booklets, photographic stills, handbills, hoardings, glass slides, scripts, costumes and the like, dating back to the silent era.

“Close to 95 per cent of all Hindi films produced have been covered in some form or other, and efforts are on to represent those remaining,” Tuli informs. “As of today, memorabilia representing iconic personalities such as Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, James Bond, Robert De Niro, Tarzan, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and a host of others will enjoy prominence in theosianama.com,” he adds.

 

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