Can Indian Women Trust The Police?

The streets of Inderpuri were swamped with mobs of people vandalizing and damaging police vehicles after a woman claimed to be gang raped by police officers.

Although the Crime Branch is yet to conduct an inquiry into the matter, this is not the first time that law enforcers have been accused of exploiting their positions.

In 2005, a 16-year old girl was raped by a police officer in south Mumbai. According to an article Constable Sunil Atmaram More, the accused in the Marine Drive rape case, has admitted in his statement to the police that he raped the teenager after threatening to inform her parents about seeing her in a compromising position with her friend.

http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/may/04more.htm

More was in a drunken state when he raped the girl in a police chowki. He was later dismissed.

On November 28th 2006 a slum dweller woman (name withheld) from Shiv Colony in Karnal was falsely arrested and raped in police custody by constable Ram Kumar and detained for 14 days.

The Chandigarh Police recommended a regular departmental inquiry, and placed the head constable under suspension. The police denied her allegations without any investigation.

http://www.ffdaindia.in/MonthlyReviews/rapes-by-police-and-security-forces-rise/

A high court from central India had issued a notice to the Government of India and 13 other state authorities regarding the gang rape of a tribal woman, while she was trying to register a complaint about her husband's murder.

When registering the FIR at the police station she was gang raped by policemen in front of her parents. She was then forcefully detained in isolated police custody for 14 days being raped by officers regularly.

http://www.ffdaindia.in/MonthlyReviews/rapes-by-police-and-security-forces-rise/

According to the National Crimes Record Bureau (NCRB) courts tried 132 policemen for custodial rape in 2002 but only 4 were convicted.

Does this mean that women are safer not reporting any crimes committed against them?

These examples and statistics show that there are occasions when women who have sought the help of the law have only been met with more disappointment and worse, faced more trauma at the hands of police officers.

According to The Indian Penal Code and Criminal Procedure Code, reports have recognised the ongoing police abuse against women and made amendments to ensure a variety of legal protections to prevent custodial rape.

The amendments state that women cannot be forced to go to any police station for questioning against her will and she must instead be visited at home. The police must request permission to enter if a woman is present where an arrest is being attempted unless she is the person sought for arrest.

The bill also prohibits the arrest of women after sunset and before sunrise except in "exceptional circumstances."

When a woman is arrested, a female officer must do the search with “strict regard to decency and modesty”. However, the females make up only 5.4% of the Indian police force, so the realities of implementing the amendment are assumed not to be so straight foreword.

But how many women know these laws exist? And are these laws implemented?

http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/afse.htm

More women should be aware of their legal rights as the law has made provisions to ensure their safety, even from the lawmakers themselves.

The question remains, has the law done enough?

Racist or Recessionist?

I have been following the Australian attacks on Indian students very closely since they began and as I was skimming through the Times of India this morning I came across a few comments from people across the globe on these attacks. They were in response to a previous article TOI had published on a Sunny Bajaj who was assaulted in Melbourne.

 

One of the comments in particular stood out. The writer said, “ it is really sad to know about the attack on Sunny Bajaj in Australia. However, it could well have been an instance of robbery. Note that a black guy was also involved.”  Yes it actually said that.

 

I was shocked and to some extent titillated. Here was a clear instance of racism. I’m not sure if Mr. Onkar was trying to redeem himself by saying the attacks could well have not been racist when he was clearly making a racist statement.

 

I have been studying in the United States for three years now and till date I have not witnessed any racial attack or slur on Indians or any other nationality, and mind you, my university is very international. On the other hand, I have heard Indian students speaking in Hindi and saying things like ‘yeh saale gore log’ (these bloody white people) many times. Most of the Indian students are always in groups of other Indian students. They hardly ever mingle with the other nationalities, they speak in their native languages and you can often find them speaking loudly in buses or in the library.

 

I am an Indian student too. Yet oftentimes I have felt like my fellow Indian students were being a nuisance, however till today I have not heard a single word against Indians or any other nationality by my American friends. The point I’m trying to make is that you cannot rule out the fact that these people are being tolerant towards us.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that these attacks are entirely the fault of Indian students, but what we fail to see is that these attacks could have taken place anywhere.

 

Another comment made by one Ashwath who has been living in Australia for a few years said, “ Most Indian students here live in the worst suburbs not because they can’t afford to stay at a decent place but because hey can save that extra 25 dollars a week to fund their expensive iPods and cell phones.”

 

That is another issue one needs to take into consideration. Clearly the majority of these students come from affluent families and can afford to live in a safe neighborhood, and if that’s not good enough they can easily live on campus or close to campus where there is a high amount of security.

 

Ashwath went on to say, “ The chance of robbery in these suburbs, like anywhere in the world, especially when you flaunt your gadgets, is very high.” That is not a refutable statement. Every city, town or county has its rough neighborhoods. Take England as an example, yet there continues to be a large influx of students and tourists from India every year.

 

One cannot put a finger on Australia and say it is a racist country. There is racism all over the world. I started this article based on a racist comment made by one of my own people. Even within India there is racism everywhere. We have caste systems, religious stigmas, riots and all kinds of violence over where we’re from, what sect we belong to and what god we affiliate ourselves to. Some have reaped political benefit, like the Shiv Sena, which uses racism as its electoral mascot. 

 

While these attacks are wrong, unjust and unfair, we cannot classify them as racist, at the same time the numbers are too high to classify them as opportunistic too.

 

I have friends living and studying in parts of Australia, like Gold Coast and Melbourne who are bewildered by this sudden racist label. According to them these attacks have been over hyped. As far as they are concerned, nothing has changed. People still treat them the same, yet now there is a sudden increase in phone calls from concerned family and friends, which they deem unnecessary.

 

Another point I would like to make is on these protests that are taking place. One of the rallies, which saw the participation of nearly 1,000 students, was organized by the Federation of Indian Students Association, Sydney Chapter, along with the National Union of Students. Students were chanting 'Vande Matram' and 'Baharat Mata Ki Jai'. While it’s all well and good to be patriotic I think it needs to be noted that after all you are in a different country. Behavior like that could anger people. Think about how we would react if a bunch of English students rallied and started shouting ‘ God save the Queen”.

 

Even community leaders in Melbourne have asked students to put an end to these rallies. Yadu Singh, coordinator of the Indian Consul General's community committee on Indian students' issues, said an urgent meeting in Pennant Hills, "One thing is clear - the rallies have served their purpose and we don't want any more rallies in Harris Park, that is the community's view," Singh said, adding "They are disrupting the normal life of the people in the suburbs."

 

Then there’s the issue of recession. According to an article by Sitaram Yechury for ‘People’s Democracy’ to attribute such attacks as an expression of racism alone, in the present context of global recession would be like missing the woods for the trees.  Racist outrages are an expression of a deeper malaise.  Between January 2008 and January 2009, Australia's GDP growth rate plummeted from 4.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent.  The last quarter saw company profits falling by 7.2 per cent.  Business investment tumbled at a record rate of nearly 9 per cent.  Additionally, this year has seen one of Australia's worst droughts.  As a result of this, unemployment climbed to 5.4 per cent in April 2009 from 3.9 per cent in February 2008.  The Australian Prime Minister has declared, for the first time, that the economy has moved into a state of recession.  Though the Labour government in Australia has begun distributing a whopping 9.9 billion Australian dollars to low income families directly, clearly serious problems of livelihood are affecting its people. 

 

This, coupled with the fact that Indian students often take part-time jobs to help pay for tuition could be seen as another reason for the sudden attacks. Nearly a lakh of Indian students currently study in Australia constituting 18 per cent of the entire student community there.  So there’s no doubt that these students are taking away jobs from locals.

 

These attacks have to stop. There is no question about that. As students we should expect that the environment we go to study in is safe and secure. Yet, we still have to realize that we are living in another country, that we need to respect and follow those laws and that we should also not put our selves in a situation, which could lead to such attacks. Violence can take place anywhere; we need to make sure that we take the necessary steps to stay away from such areas.

 

I’d like to end this on a lighter and slightly ironic note. Bollywood, the Indian film industry has been condemning these attacks and expressing their disapproval through blogs and the rejection of doctorates. They’ve been doing their best to boycott all ties with Australia.  However, filmmaker Mohit Suri has taken things one-step ahead and has begun scripting a movie based on the real life attacks. Is it just me or when Indians were getting attacked in England years back, London based director Puneet Sira came out with “ I proud to be Indian”.

Well if my guess is correct and a similar template is used, maybe not in real life, but in reel life, looks like the Aussies will be getting their just desserts thanks to Suri. 

http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2009/06/19/attacks-on-indians-in-australia-racist-or-recessionist/

The Future of Media

We have already said goodbye to the Rocky Mountain News, which after one hundred and fifty years of serving Colorado, printed its last paper in early February. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased it’s print edition after one hundred and forty six years, and now only serves online readers with a new and improved website called the SeattlePI.com. Many more newspapers are either considering closing shop, or following in the footsteps of the Seattle Post.

 It’s a pressing time for journalists and publishers. I think everyone in the media business was aware that newspapers could no longer be the only source of income for the publications. The Internet is a fast growing source of information and with the improvements in technology everyone is moving online for up-to-date news. Yet, newspapers have always been around, they have played a vital role in the lives of readers and have served as companions at the breakfast table, coffee shops and on the commute to and from work or class. But we have to face the hard cold facts now; maybe everyone in the business was in denial of this decline. The recession however set the deadline and determined the lifespan for newspapers.

 

So what’s next?

 

In it’s March/April edition, the Columbia Journalism Review asked eight reporters from different organizations to write an article on where the news industry will be in the next five years. Two of those articles, “Unchaining the Monitor” by the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, and the other called “ Two Tents” by the editor in chief of Politico stood out. The situations they presented seem plausible, even though they were solely based on mere speculation.

 

Firstly, I think the industry has accepted the fact that major retrenchment will take place in order to sustain a news organization. But this downsizing also has its advantage. It acts like a filter, leaving us with the best in the field. That means better reporting, more efficiency and a multi-skilled work force. This was an underlying sentiment held by all the articles I have read, not just within this publication, but others. Furthermore, experts in the industry share the same sentiment.

 

According to the German publisher Axel Springer’s chief executive Mathias Döpfner, “The number of players will diminish, but the strong players may be stabler after the crisis.”

 

Coming back to the articles at hand, “Unchaining the Monitor,” to me seemed the most plausible situation in the next five years. The article accepts the fact that a lot of newspapers will shut down. However, it turns its focus to the survivors. Their future is bright, they have “ transformed themselves into true multimedia operations with a core editorial group publishing, via newsprint, mobile, the Web and … foldable electronic readers.”

 

There is an understanding within the news industry that print is dying and the future is in multimedia. Convergence is key. David Ng, executive editor of the New York Daily, said, “While I think it’s important for the news room to integrate, it’s doubly important for the business side to converge as well.”

 

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is probably one of the best examples of this transition. Another prediction the article made was the move from a five-day a week print publication to a weekly one.

 

Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Washington Post, shares a similar view. According to him, “eventually you might see most papers with smaller circulations that pay a lot more than 50 cents each day for the serendipity and habit of reading a physical paper.”

 

The transition from print to online is a very realistic scenario, and the article highlights that by saying The Monitor wanted “to retain longtime print subscribers and thought [they] might find some modest growth in a reduced-frequency, twelve-by-ten inch magazine/newspaper hybrid.”

 

The business model described also seems plausible. According to the article, “ traffic analysis told [them] that aggregators and people using search engines liked [their] individual articles but that, like most news operations, [they] had a hard time converting the one time visitor into a return visitor who returned.”

 

In a global context, a leading Indian newspaper publication, The Indian Express is also struggling with the same idea. How to retain readers online is a pressing issue. The business model presented in “Unchaining the Monitor” also addressed this issue saying their goal was “to quintuple page views- then five million a month- in five years.”

 

The article continued to talk about a shift in approach to journalism. The Web being more interactive, would mean ‘conversation, citizen journalism, and other forms of reader/user involvement.” Journalism is definitely going to become more interactive with the move to the Web. Blogs and individual websites have proved this.

 

According to Rick Edmonds, Poynter media business analyst, in a phone interview, “ Print will move to being more analytical and opinion based articles. The news is already available online for free, so now we need to give readers something else.”

 

That is another issue. The news is available online for free and anyone can have access to it. One of the biggest problems online newspapers are facing today is their news stories are being picked up by major search engines like Google and Yahoo. With regards to this issue, in an article in the New York Times, Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell, a media research firm, said, “The A.P. is trying to assert its value to the member newspapers,” by shifting the industry discussion “from fair use to fair share.”

The A.P. and other wire services have licensing agreements with Google, Yahoo and others, for some of their content to appear on those sites’ news pages, while newspapers generally do not. But general Web searches on those sites often turn up wire service material that is not covered by the agreements.

 

Matthew Jackson, a telecommunications professor at the Pennsylvania State University is skeptical about how news organizations are going to tackle this problem.

“There are copyright laws, and although Google are trying to find a solution with news providers, they still haven’t found a way to determine how the shared profits will be determined.”

 

The second article that I felt was plausible was the “Two Tents” article. It described content and also different methods of providing news rather than the traditional method of news articles and stories.

 

The venue of the article was Politico and according to the writers predictions, they “proved that niche publications, producing highly focused journalism for an audience with intense interest in particular subjects, can achieve the same ends- both editorially and financially- that in the past were the sole province of a handful of big newspapers and broadcast networks.”

 

I feel like that is a likely situation given that news is moving towards being packaged as per the consumers’ requirements. It is becoming a product that in itself needs to be marketed and have all the elements of the product mix in order to sell.

 

Narisetti furthers this idea of niche publications as he talked about whether consumers would pay for content online. According to him, “consumers will pay for certain content. The key is to give what is not competitive or what is commodity for free and charge for what is more valuable or unique even as we make the payment experience seamless.”

 

Shifting from America to the international paradigm, Europe seems to be having better luck with getting consumers to pay for content. An article in the New York Times discussed how Europe is trying to generate revenues for online content.

VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper has been doing extremely well. It has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.

VG Nett, like most newspaper Web sites, generates most of its revenue from advertising, but is starting to raise money from users. VG Nett recently started charging up to 780 crowns a year for live streams of soccer matches. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users to upgrade their profiles. Access to news, however, remains free.

 

Both Jackson and Edmonds drew the comparison between the news industry and the music industry in light of making a profit. Few Europeans are unwilling to pay for music directly, through services like iTunes, so the industry is instead bundling music costs into a broadband subscription, like basic cable channels do in the United States.

The Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, however is skeptical of applying micro payments to newspapers, and has suggested providing access to newspaper Web sites for a fee paid at the Internet service provider level. For such models to succeed, newspapers would have to work together.

 

As for the methods of delivering news, I feel like most news organizations will move in the same direction. Consumers are bored of the old way news is delivered, more so the younger generation who are what will sustain the news industry in the future. The youth today are more technologically savvy and access news online. However, moving beyond the Web 2.0, other delivery mechanisms are also available, all mind you, that are based on the Internet. Blackberrys, iPhones and even other cellular devices provide access to the news with a click of a button. All news organizations need to do is make an agreement with the network provider and have them add on a fee to the data package. That fee can go to news organizations providing the news to start with.

 

According to Politico’s predictions, video dispatches from journalists on the road will become wildly popular. They will have daily Web TV program, even though a “little cheesy, perhaps, but damned if it does not routinely get two hundred thousand viewers a day.”

 

The bottom line however, is the news industry is changing. Viveck Goenka, chairman of the Indian Express Newspaper Group is concerned about the possibility of a decline in investigative journalism. “ If news organizations around the world don’t come up with a sustainable business model we might have to cut costs in terms of the kind of content as well,” he said. This is worrying as one of the main roles the media plays in society other than being a news provider, is that of a watchdog.

 

I am hopeful however, that the news industry will collectively come to adopt a business model that will not only retain the key elements of journalism but will also be able to profit from them. The news industry has taken a beating from the Internet. Classifieds have been lost to Craig’s List and other websites and Google and Yahoo have been leeching off news providers.

 

However, having gotten over the biggest hurdle, the acceptance of the fact that print will no longer sustain the media is a big positive for the news industry. As of now one can only speculate, through trial and error I feel a business model will emerge from which the news industry will benefit. Will newspapers be around for another ten to fifteen years? I would like to believe they would. We may be a fast moving society, but I think it may take some time before we cut out a tangible source of news from our lives.