Live Like a Flame

Not many people know that the Indian Copyright Act of 1957 amended 1994 is under review again. Kapil Sibal has introduced a Bill to amend it, which is at present with a Rajya Sabha Standing Committee headed by Oscar Fernandes. Citizens were asked to give their feedback from May 20 to May 30, but lots of people said that was too short a time so opinions are still being taken. It took me a lot of hunting on the net to find the text of the new bill. It’s in the form of a commentary ont he old bill, so I’m posting them both here so you can compare them

Indian Copyright Act 1957 (annotated with amendments till 1994)

Indian Copyright Amendment Bill 2010

A publisher mailed me to say they were worried because this Bill will remove territoriality. Territoriality is where the government preferentially taxes or regulates books from abroad to protect local business. Cheaper foreign books means more competition for Indian publishers, and may or may not be a good thing. I looked through the Bill but couldn’t find any provision that bears on this issue. I’m no legal eagle but I’m guessing it would have to be an amendment to section 40 as that deals with copyright in foreign works. If anyone can make sense of this please tell me.

June 16th, 2010 | Tags: copyright, copyright amendment bill 2010, Indian Copyright Act, Kapil Sibal, Oscar Fernandes, Rajya Sabha | Category: Academic, Politics | Leave a comment

Corrected the typo in the heading. I seem to have become a toltal teetotaller [sic].

I am not at all surprised that Ashley Tellis has been sacked from IIT Hyderabad. The IITs are not like universities under the UGC and unlike in the case of AMU’s controversial and inhumane sacking of S.R. Siras that led to his death, the IITs are not bound by any code that says they have to tolerate people of a different sexual orientation, or for that matter, orientation about anything.

This is because the IITs are under the MInistry of Human Resource Development and are closely associated with defence. It may come as a surprise to those who regard the IITS as Export Promotion Zones that produce fledgling eggheads for the United States, but a large part of India’s defence research budget ends up in their coffers. Hence service rules for faculty include draconian secrecy rules and intrusions into personal freedom.

For instance anything that a faculty member may publish - academic paper, letter to the editor, novel, blog post - is supposed to be reviewed and approved by the administration before publication, and permission to publish may be withheld. Surveillance of email and post is routine. I was careful not to publish Signal Red until after I had left IIT, and had I not waited things would have got very sticky for me. This is in spite of the fact that Signal Red does not disclose a single sensitive technology. However, the fact that it said uncomfortable things about the politics of scientific research in this country was enough to have made it a potential issue. Denial of permission need not come with any reason, and is without appeal.

Hence while there is a slim chance that those who were responsible for  S.R. Siras’s tragic death may be punished, it is highly unlikely that IIT Hyderabad will say sorry for what it did to Ashley Tellis. For the administration, the temptation to misuse IIT’s staff rules is very strong. Offending personal or societal prejudice is, for the kind of people who run things there, as bad as treachery against the state. Writing about sexuality is ‘deviant mischief’, not to mention ‘unlawful behaviour’ and is in fact the same as performing the act. In other words, it is thought crime.

One should remember that S.R. Siras abused no one. He was caught on tape having consensual sex with a rickshaw puller, offending against the so called ’sex rules’ of both gender and class as interpreted by our moral majority. He did nothing illegal, and he was hounded to death. At the time, Aligarh Muslim University did exactly what IIT Hyderabad is doing: it blamed the students. No doubt if public opinion demands justice, those AMU students will be pilloried. But how do students acquire the means, the access and the guts to bug a faculty member’s house? Did they have no backing at all from more powerful people? And again, as in the case of Rizwanur, Siras’s death was ruled ’suicide’ ruling out any chance of a murder prosecution.

IIT Hyderabad is also reported to have ‘cautioned’ students about Tellis, and later said students were ‘annoyed’ with him. What was the nature of their ‘annoyance’, and how did it merit Tellis’s sacking? We shall probably never find out. The irony is that although IIT H has alleged ‘unlawful behaviour’ of unknown nature on Tellis’s part, they don’t actually have to prove anything against him because (a) he was on probation and (b) they are IIT. Tellis says that he will fight. Siras was just a few months away from retirement (it was his enemies’ last chance to pillory him) and was probably too discouraged to drum up support for his cause.  Tellis is famously combative, although why he wanted to join an institution that wanted to snoop into all of his publications before they saw the press is beyond me. The outcome should be interesting.

June 12th, 2010 | Tags: Aligarh Muslim University, Ashley Tellis, Gay rights, human rights, IIT, Indian Institute of Technology, LGBT, S.R. Siras, Signal Red | Category: Politics | Comments (2)

Another act in the long drawn out farce of a court case on Bhopal has come to an end, and the next one begins. The sentence is a farce for three reasons:

1. Warren Anderson, the man who bore the final responsibility for what happened, is beyond the court’s jurisdiction. The seven accused were Indian corporate bosses, supervisors and employees of the plant. They have each been sentenced to two years in jail and a fine of 1.17 lakh rupees each, while the company pays a paltry five lakhs. Which means that the total fines paid by the individuals accused is greater than that paid by the company.

2. This is a civil, not a criminal case, with a maximum sentence of 2 years for causing death by negligence without intent to murder. As a rule civil cases are more about getting compensation for damage than about apportioning blame. Even so, the damages are laughable.

3. The government has managed to bury the real issues by complicating and confusing the case. It has compounded this by harassing the activists and the victims.

4. Very little of the resulting benefit, such as it is, will reach the sufferers.

One huge problem in this country is the absence of any system whereby class actions of the kind seen in the US can be brought. This puts us in the weird position of being able to take action where an individual or a small group is clearly the victim, as in the case of Jessica Lall or Rizwanur Rahman. But where a whole city has been hurt, with more than 25,000 people killed by 40 tonnes of toxic gas, there is no way to bring the company in question to justice. Hundreds of individual cases are too weak; each may get derailed for its own individual reasons: lack of money, lack of time. It’s easy to break one stick at a time.  Surely this cannot be justice?

Warren Anderson was allowed to escape from India in 1984, and has not stirred from his mansion since. He is now 90 years old. There is no point in putting that old man in jail: the company should bleed dollars for this, and pay for the mess it made and is continuing to make. The money it was too stingy to spend on safety and staff training should be paid a hundred times for lives lost and damaged.

June 8th, 2010 | Tags: Animal's People, Bhopal, Bhopal gas tragedy, crime, environmental disaster, Union Carbide | Category: Politics | Comments (1)

Sharon and My Mother in Law

I should write a few lines about my interaction with Suad Amiry, and what it taught me about Palestine and India. Suad was here at the end of last month on the final leg of her India tour, supported by Women Unlimited, who are publishing Menopausal Palestine in India. Suad was extremely charming and wowed audiences, and it was a pleasure to be on a panel with her at Weavers’ Studio, and later to host her at JU.

Suad is half Jordanian, has taught architecture at Birzeit University and now runs her own research centre, and speaks fluent English. She therefore occupies a rare position of privilege in Ramallah’s impoverished and isolated society. Her first book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, is a poignantly funny and ironic account of the 42-day curfew inmposed in Ramallah in 2001. Her mother-in-law was then living right next to Arafat’s headquarters, and Suad had to rush to her in a rare two-hour respite from curfew and bring her to live with them. Thuis began two occupations, she says: Sharon’s outside the house, and her mother-in-law’s within. There are more such funny/bitter incidents, as when her puppy gets a Jerusalem passport but she does not (she breezes through the Israeli checkpoint claiming to be the puppy’s driver), when she stares at a soldier and nearly gets herself arrested, when she suspects a gift from a dodgy friend is bugged, and more. Her style is sharp, witty and astringent, rather like turbo Gerald Durrell with political overtones.

Sharon and My Motehr-in-Law was born out of emails that Suad sent to friends while cooped up at home with her insufferable mother-in-law and the fear of Israeli bombs, where she described their predicament as a means of relief from the horror of it. This gives the anecdotes a charming liveliness and immediacy. This is clearly laughing to keep from crying, with the edge of tragedy always trailing at the edge of the scene. She says at one point that one either has to step outside of the situation and see it as an absurdist play, or one goes slowly mad from the weight of irrationality and prejudice, hatred and harrassment, that is the legacy of every Palestinian.

Menopausal Palestine

The second book, which is published in India by Women Unlimited, is a more serious and self-conscious work. It is the stories of eight of Suad’s women friends, all of whose lives have been touched and sometimes twisted by the conflict in Palestine. This book has a testamentary feel to it: it lacks the explosive wit of the first. The introductory chapter is witty and sharp as before, but the shield of irony that keeps Suad from sentimentalising her own story is absent here. It is hard not to be affected by what has happened to these women.

With characteristic polemic she claims that Palestine, an aging, forgetful, angry, heated, isolated and scatty state, is menopausal, and its predicament is as unmentionable as menopause is. As an illustration of how true this is, her book was reviewed in the inside (ie women’s) pages of national dailies, since the word ‘menopause’ could not appear on the front page. This is regardless fo the fact that the book isn’t really about menopause at all. It is about frustration and disempowerment.

There are resonances also with the predicaments of women affected by conflict here in India, although our disputes are less overt and less clearly delineated than Palestine’s. Think for example of Taslima Nasreen’s continued persecution, such that just the other day two people were killed in protests in Shimoga over something she had written. No other writer in India is kept under such scrutiny or reacted to with such violence.  M.F. Husain has become a citizen of Qatar because India is as yet incapable of taking him back and of assuring his safety if he returned. Shah Rukh Khan is ignoring the memory of Rizwanur Rahman. The strike in Pune on the German Bakery was apparently targeted at Chabad House, a Jewish Centre nearby. Are we any different from Palestine?  In fact the ordinary Jewish and Muslim people of the Levant appear on better terms with each other than we are with our fellow Indian citizens.

March 6th, 2010 | Tags: M.F. Husain, Palestine, Politics, Suad Amiry, Taslima Nasreen | Category: Books, Politics, Reviews, Taslima Nasrin | Leave a comment