In 2017 Uttar Pradesh swore him in as its Chief Minister. Now, there is no man more powerful, visible, and controversial in India’s most populous state.

Ajay Singh Bisht was born in Uttarakhand, a hilly state carved out of Uttar Pradesh. A mathematics graduate, at 22, he was unemployed and looking for work. So he joined the Gorakhnath Math monastic order, named after 11th- century saint Gorakhnath, in the Gorakhpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The Nath tradition did not believe in idol worship or one God. Rather, its syncretic culture welcomed people from all castes and religions. Even today, the Math has non-Brahmin priests, a break from the Hindu caste order, and runs schools, hospitals, and cow sheds in its large temple complex.

On joining the Math, Ajay took on a new name and a vow of celibacy, shaved his head, embraced saffron robes for life, and officially changed his last name to be similar to that of the head of the Gorakhnath Math, Mahant Avaidyanath.

Four years later, in 1998, he would become the youngest Member of Parliament in India at age 26, representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose claim to fame at the time was the political arm of a national movement to reclaim Hindu god Ram’s birthplace.

In 2017, Uttar Pradesh would swear him in as its Chief Minister. Uttar Pradesh, as the most populous state in India, sends the most people to the Indian Parliament. The party that wins Uttar Pradesh impacts national politics. There is no man more powerful and visible in the state today than Yogi Adityanath. And this is his story.

In 1998, the BJP, a right-wing party that believed in making India a Hindu nation, won enough votes to form a coalition government and install its own prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The party had grown in strength within a decade of starting the Ram Janmbhoomi movement, a nationwide campaign to reclaim the land of Lord Ram’s birth. The campaign’s followers had destroyed Babri Masjid, which they believed was sitting atop Ram’s birthplace, in 1992. The incident sparked sectarian violence all over the country, with thousands dying and millions injured. The event also shaped the future of modern India, turning a secular republic into the seat of Hindu majoritarian, sectarian politics.

In the last century, in a departure from the earlier Math traditions, the head priests of the Goraknath Math have played a crucial role in making Gorakhpur the crucible of Hindutva. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose political wing is the BJP, has long promoted the ideology of Hindutva, which believes in the supremacy of a Hindu nation. Avaidyanath, a four-time member of parliament from Gorakhpur, was a key figure of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.

His predecessor, Digvijaynath, was a member of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, a militant organization whose members included Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi for condoning Partition.

Digvijaynath was in jail for nine months for inciting Hindus to kill Gandhi at a public meeting on January 27, 1948. Two years after Gandhi’s murder, when he became the General Secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, he famously said that if they come in to power, they will take away voting rights from Muslims for five to 10 years. The Math now worships idols of several Hindu Gods.

“Around the time Adityanath became part of the Math, east Uttar Pradesh was in the grips of organized crime,” said Omair Ahmad, a writer who grew up in Gorakhpur.

Unemployment and other low socioeconomic indicators meant that people turned to crime. The city had one of the largest railway hubs in northern India and gang wars would break out over acquiring high-budget railway contracts. Many would call east Uttar Pradesh the “Chicago of the East” and “Slice of Sicily,” and the gang wars, “varchasva ki ladai,” or fight for absolute power. During that period, the police would gun down many gangsters, most of them Brahmins or from Other Backward Castes (OBC).

Adityanath used this dynamic to power his rise in local politics. “Adityanath played his upper-caste Thakur identity, started making public appearances unlike his predecessors, and tapped into the resentment amongst the youth and rose,” added Ahmed. Adityanath was now part of the varchasva ki ladai. Within five years of Adityanath joining the Math, Avaidyanath, at age 77, retired from politics and declared him his heir and candidate for the 1998 general elections for Gorakhpur district.

During his first term as a Member of Parliament, two months after the Gujarat 2002 pogrom that left over 2,000 Muslims dead, Yogi Adityanath formed the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV), a militant Hindu youth organization. HYV members were mostly unemployed, young Hindu men. The group even fielded candidates against the BJP.

The HYV’s agenda included cow protection, ghar wapsi-reconversion drives of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism, and combatting love-jihad, namely the alleged practice of Muslim men feigning love to convert Hindu women to Islam. HYV members beat up Muslims on accusation of cow slaugher, separated Hindu-Muslim couples, and terrorized churches. The HYV also served as a vigilante system. People would watch over others for not towing the Hindutva line and complain to HYV, pitting people against each other to create an endless cycle of terror and violence.

Between 1998 and 2017, Adityanath was elected to serve as the Member of Parliament (MP) from Gorakhpur five times. As MP, he created the template for what a majoritarian Hindu nation could look like: no tolerance for multiculturalism, violation of civil liberties, and repression of political opponents via legal cases against them.

During this period, Gorakhpur saw several sectarian riots. There were advantages to wearing Hindu majoritarianism on the sleeve. So Gorakhpur police stations constructed Hindu temples on their premises and started holding weekly Hindu prayers and celebrations. Gorakhpur changed the names of local places from more Persianized Hindi to Sanskritized Hindi: Mian Bazar became Maya Bazar, Urdu Bazar became Hindi Bazar, Ali Nagar became Arya Nagar. In 2005, Adityanath also led a purification drive, forcibly converting 1,800 Christians to Hinduism in the town of Etah.

In 2008, at the Virat Hindu Chetna rally in Siddharthnagar, Uttar Pradesh — which the HYV had organized — Adityanath claimed that Hindu culture and Muslim culture can never coexist and that a religious war is inevitable. On his official website, Adityanath’s prominent articles include “Khatre Mein Hindu” (Hindus in Danger), “Savdhaan! – Yeh Islami Aatankvaad Hai” (Beware, This is Islamic Terrorism).

In 2015, when Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan joined writers, filmmakers, scientists, and historians in decrying the growing religious intolerance in India, Adityanath compared him to Pakistan terrorist Hafiz Saeed, threatened to invoke the Hindu majority to boycott his films, and suggested that he “go to Pakistan.”

In his election campaign in 2017, Adityanath linked the crime graph of Uttar Pradesh to the religious composition of the state, hinting that the Muslim community was responsible for criminal activities and that criminals should be killed.

By the time he was elected as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in March 2017, Adityanath had been accused of 18 criminal charges, including hate speech, attempt to murder, and instigating sectarian violence. When he became Chief Minister, he dismissed all the cases against him. It was the first time in independent India that an active religious leader was appointed to public office.

Within a year of his appointment, the Chief Minister’s Office, the state secretariat, public buildings, curtains, and towels in government offices, police stations, transport buses, toilets, road dividers, toll plazas, school bags in government schools, felicitation and beneficiary certificates, and even the state Haj office that facilitate the pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims, were colored in saffron, considered holy in Hinduism.

In March 2018, Adityanath said in a state assembly that, as a proud Hindu, he doesn’t celebrate Eid, a Muslim festival. This was a departure from the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, a local phrase denoting the multicultural way of life in large parts of the state. According to the 2011 census, 19% of Uttar Pradesh is Muslim. The state is known for its syncretic fusion of Hindu and Muslim culture, a result of centuries of interfaith exchanges where Muslim rulers with Hindu subjects and vice versa actively participated in each other’s culture and festivals. This is reflected in its cuisines, art forms like Kathak, celebration, literature, clothes, and daily life.

Every Holi, Dewa Sharif, the white shrine of Sufi Saint Haji Waris Ali Shah in Barabanki district, turns red, yellow, red, pink, purple. Waris Ali Shah was a 19th-century saint who believed that all religions are based on love and affection. His followers were Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. To mark this tolerance, he started the tradition of celebrating Holi at the shrine every year, which has continued for over a century.

On November 26, 2017, while campaigning for local elections, chief minister Adityanath used electricity distribution to Dewa Sharif as a poll issue. Dewa, he said, “got electricity 24×7, Mahadeva got none.” He implied that “discrimination has ended in the BJP government” because now both the temple and mosque have electricity.

Lodheshwar Mahadev temple is an hour away from Dewa Sharif on the banks of Ghaghra river. The temple is also known for its syncretic culture. For centuries, shops outside the temple have sold offerings, owned and run by both Hindus and Muslims. The two annual fairs held at this temple, one on Shivratri in March to April and the other, a cattle fair in October to November, are major contributors to the village’s economy. Both Hindus and Muslims participate with equal enthusiasm.

In 2017, Mahant Adityanath Tiwari, a priest in his 30s who fashions himself after Yogi Adityanath, and known as “Chota Yogi” was designated as the chief priest of the temple. Following Adityanath’s statement, Chota Yogi, aided by a local HYV unit, started removing loudspeaker from the 200-year-old mosques next to the temple, and ousted all Muslim shop owners from outside the temple complex.

Police have also arrested several Muslim vendors under the draconian National Security Act (NSA), which empowers federal and state governments to detain a person without trial for 12 months without appeal.

“I want to ask these people, have they forgotten how a Muslim tailor has been serving Ramlalla in Ayodhya for years? Have we not served the Mahadeva by taking care of the devotees who come every year?” ask Shakeela, whose son Rizwan was also arrested, using the colloquial phrase “Ramlalla” to refer to baby Lord Ram.

She says that such arrests of breadwinners are further weakening Muslim communities, who have the worst socioeconomic indicators in the country. According to the Sachar Committee report, a report to study the socioeconomic conditions of Muslims in India, 31% of Indian Muslims were living below the poverty line.

In the first 18 months of the Adityanath government, 160 people were charged with NSA, most of them working-class Muslims: brick kiln workers, rickshaw pullers, street vendors, students. More than one-third of the 120 cases in which authorities in Uttar Pradesh invoked the National Security Act between January 2018 and December 2020 were against Muslims accused of cow slaughter.

Hindutva proponents use cow protection as an excuse to target Muslims. Since Adityanath has come to power, official dinners no longer serve meat, though data shows that only 20% of Indians are vegetarian. Adityanath’s government has targeted the slaughterhouse business in Uttar Pradesh, which contributes about two-thirds of the total exports of buffalo meat from the country; India’s buffalo meat exports are worth more than $3 billion.

The business is mostly run by Muslims. In the past nearly five years, the state government has reportedly shut down 150 illegal slaughterhouses, and arrested 319 alleged cow smugglers in the state.

Apart from arrests, several Muslims have been lynched to death in the state on rumors of cow slaughter. “There was no cow, knife, axe, or blood. We were attacked because we are Muslims,” said Samiuddin, who was brutally injured by a Hindu mob on accusation of cow slaughter in Hapur in June 2018. His friend, Qasim was lynched to death.

By October 2021, the Uttar Pradesh police had killed 151 people and injured 3,473 in pre-planned police shootouts, known as police encounters. Almost all of them are under trial — as an under trial, you could spend several years in prison while the case is being tried in the slow judiciary system in India.

According to National Crime Record Bureau prison data for 2015, 67% of all jail inmates are under trial. Over 55% of under trials across the country are either Muslims, Dalits, or tribals.

The Adityanath government lists the encounter numbers as an achievement in annual reports, celebrating and awarding cops. Meanwhile, family members who demand information on the killings have been threatened, their houses vandalized.

“If we are a family full of such dreaded criminals, why don’t we have any money to feed ourselves even twice a day? Why do we still live in a kachcha house?” asked Nasreen, whose husband Furquan was killed in October 2017.

The National Human Rights Commission has issued over a dozen notices to the Adityanath government. In January 2019, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights wrote to the Indian government expressing alarm. Between 2016 and 2019, the National Human Rights Commission registered 2,008 cases where minorities and Dalits were harassed, including lynchings. Of these, 43% of the hate crimes were from Uttar Pradesh alone, making it the most unsafe state for minorities, Dalits, and the tribal community in the country.

Dalits form 21% of Uttar Pradesh’s population and play a decisive role in the state’s politics. For centuries, they have faced societal marginalization and discrimination.

In April 2017, within a month of Adityanath coming to power, the Dalit community was denied permission by the district authorities to install a statue of B.R. Ambedkar in Shabbirpur village in Western Uttar Pradesh, owing to objections by the Thakur community. Ambedkar was the father of the Indian Constitution, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement.

Within a few weeks, in the same village, the Thakur community was granted permission to take out a procession of Maharana Pratap, a warrior king.

Clashes broke out and the mob burned down 55 houses in the Dalit neighborhood, grievously injuring many. In the protest that followed, over 50 Dalits and only two Thakurs were arrested.

“Adityanath does not want any space for dissent, especially for the Dalit community,” said Meerut-based Sushil Gautam, president of the anti-caste group Blue Panthers. “Most top police officers in his government are Thakurs. There is a blatant upper-caste dominance in his government.”

In May 2017, Adityanath held a public meeting with the Dalit families in Kushinagar district, in east Uttar Pradesh. A day before his visit, the families were distributed soaps and shampoo to clean themselves before attending the meeting. The move was criticized globally.

In August 2018, the Dalit community of Uldepur village in Meerut was denied permission to protest in the Chaudhury Charan Singh Park, at the heart of the city. They had gathered to protest the killing of a Dalit boy by the Thakur men in the village. This was just two weeks after the Thakur men from the same village had gathered at the same place to show solidarity with the accused. Each time, people come out to protest, Section 144, which prohibits the assembly of five or more people in an area in urgent cases of apprehended danger, is imposed.

“Large parts of Meerut have been under section 144 for the past four-and-a- half years. He does not tolerate dissenters,” added Gautam.

While the Indian constitution reserves seats for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Class in government colleges and jobs, Adityanath has opposed the reservation policy. One out of every five Dalit students drops out of school in India because of lack of resources. His government has changed the rules for scholarship for Dalit students: now, students from marginalized communities will get a scholarship only if they secure at least 60% marks.

This year, in January, just a month before the Assembly elections in the state, Adityanath and a couple of BJP members ate at the house of a Dalit family in Gorakhpur. Gautam shared, “We all know that members of Dalit community do not drink mineral water. But Adityanath was sitting with a Bisleri bottle. So it was a photo op, not breaking the practice of untouchability. If he really wants to treat us as equal, he should also enter the gutter with us, the jobs that have been traditionally assigned to us.”

On July 17, 2019, 11 people were killed and 25 injured in Sonbhadra district. The Gond tribe had refused to vacate land claimed by the village headman, Yagya Dutt, who belonged to the dominant Gujjar community. Even though the tribe warned Adityanath’s office in advance, the administration refused to act.

“The Adivasis have been tilling the land for the past seven decades. After the Adityanath government took office, the Adivasis have been threatened by the local land mafia to stop tilling the land,” said S.R. Darapuri, a former Indian police services officer and president of All India People’s Front.

Darapuri says that the Adityanath government is not happy with the assertion of tribal identity, which has its own customs, rituals, and religion. “Assertion of a Non-Hindu identity by the local tribe upsets him and so the tribes are being punished with eviction.”

Women are not capable of being left free or independent, wrote Adityanath in his 2014 essay, “Matrushakti, Bharatiya Sanskriti Ke Sandarbh Mein” (Power of the Mother Figure in the Context of Indian Culture), which he first published on his personal web site. Adityanath firmly believes in providing male protection to women, controlling them, and protecting them from western ideas of feminism that could threaten the social order.

He writes: “If you leave energy free and uncontrolled and unregulated, it may become useless and destructive, similarly ‘shakti shakti swaroopa stree’ — woman as the epitome of power — does not really need freedom.”

“Only such controlled and protected women power will give birth to and raise great men …Else the thoughtless storm of women freedom of the western world will drive them to an even more disastrous condition and it will hamper the creation and stability of the home and family and prevent the glorious rebuilding of the nation and motherland,” he writes.

His ideas have a stark parallel to the idea of an ideal women in Nazi Germany, one who did not have a career outside her home and her most important duty was to be a good wife, raise able son to fight for the Fatherland, and populate the Aryan race.

He also opposes the Women’s Reservation Bill, which allocates 33% of seats for women in Parliament, because he thinks it will impact their roles in the family structure. He writes: “Women who are in active politics and public life like men, whether in this process they may not lose their importance and role as mothers, daughters, and sisters.”

But since women as an electoral block have played a key role in several elections since, Adityanath has since removed the essay from hiswebsite. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s latest report, 371,503 cases of crime against women were reported across India in 2020. Among states and union territories, Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 49,385, followed by West Bengal (36,439), Rajasthan (34,535), Maharashtra (31,954) and Madhya Pradesh (25,640).

In June 2017, just three months since Adityanath took over as Chief Minister, a 17-year-old was gang-raped by a BJP Member of Legislative Assembly, Kuldip Sengar, and his associates in Unnao district. For two years, Aditynath provided patronage to Sengar while the survivor’s family faced threats. In her pursuit for justice, the survivor tried to self-immolate in front of Adityanath’s residence. Instead, her father was arrested and later died in police custody. Her uncle was arrested, two aunts killed in a truck collision, she and her lawyer seriously injured in the same incident.

Only after the Supreme Court recognized the case, after civilian protests, and opposition parties raised the issue in Parliament was Sengar finally arrested and convicted in December 2019. But only two years later, courts discharged Sengar and his associates due to insufficient proof.

In September 2020, a 19-year-old Dalit woman was gang-raped by four dominant caste men in Hathras, hundreds of miles from Lucknow. The violence damaged her spinal cord and left her paralyzed, and her tongue was cut off. She died in a Delhi hospital two weeks later. The state government forcibly cremated the body of the victim, without the family’s consent, in the middle of the night.

The case received widespread media attention and generated nationwide protests. Adityanath claimed that the Hathras incident was being exploited to incite caste violence. Within a week, the Uttar Pradesh government filed 19 law and order cases, including sedition, against people who highlighted the case in public. This includes the arrest of Siddique Kappan, a journalist who was on his way to cover the case and charged with the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and has been in jail for over 16 months.

Adtiyanath’s government hired Concept PR, a Mumbai-based public relations firm, that pushed a clarification note ‘Hathras girl was not raped’ among international media.

“He is not interested in the progress or empowerment of women,” said Subhashini Ali, a former Member of Parliament and politburo member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). “He is only interested when a Hindu woman is involved with a Muslim man.”

In 2017, soon after taking over as Chief Minister, Adityanath formed an Anti- Romeo Squad, a moral policing force that targeted young men and women in public places, forcing them to show their identity cards to check if Hindu women are dating Muslim men. Between March 22, 2017 and November 30, 2020, the Anti-Romeo Squad had arrested 14,454 people.

In November 2020, UP government enacted the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020, called the “love jihad law” in popular parlance. The act makes religious conversion non-bailable with up to 10 years of jail time if undertaken through misinformation and allurement. It also requires that religious conversions for marriage in Uttar Pradesh to be approved by a district magistrate.

In December, 2021, the first sentencing under the new law came about, when a young Muslim man in Kanpur was given a jail term of 10 years and slapped with a fine of ₹30,000.

“It is a tool to arrest Muslim men and control Hindu women… who are seen as the property of the community,” said Ali. 

In May 2021, Hindi newspaper Dainik Bhaskar reported hundreds of unaccounted dead bodies on the banks of Ganges River. Uttar Pradesh had seen a large number of deaths during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Two months later, several bureaus of the newspaper all over India were raided by the income tax department. Opposition parties called it an attempt to intimidate the media.

Over 200 people have been arrested for criticizing Adityanath on social media.

Dr. Kafeel Khan was a lecturer at the Department of Pediatrics, Baba Raghav Das Medical College, Gorakhpur. In August 27, 63 children died after the hospital ran out of oxygen. The deaths attracted national attention. Kafeel spent his own money to buy oxygen cylinders to remedy the situation.

Three days later, the Uttar Pradesh government denied any deaths due to oxygen shortage. Several cases were filed against him, including NSA. He was arrested, incarcerated for over 500 days in several Uttar Pradesh prisons, and terminated from his job. During the pandemic in 2021, Adityanath ordered a crackdown on several hospitals flagging lack of oxygen, asking officials to take action under NSA and seize their property.

“A pseudo euphoria has been created around him because [Adityanath] crushes anyone who brings him bad press and criticism,” Khan told me.

As Chief Minister, like his predecessors, Adityanath changed the names of Uttar Pradesh cities: Mughalsarai became Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhayaya Nagar, Allahabad became Prayagraj, and Faizabad became Ayodhya.

During his Chief Ministership, estimates suggest that the gross domestic product (GDP) of Uttar Pradesh grew only 1.95% per year as compared to 6.92% during the previous state government between 2012 to 2017. In Uttar Pradesh, the urban unemployment rate stands higher than the national average of 7.7%, at 10.6%.

Between 2017 and 2020, sectors like agriculture, forestry, and fishing have displayed satisfactory growth but livestock, manufacturing, transport, communications, and financial services have contracted. Adityanath has spent much of the state’s limited resources — Uttar Pradesh is one of the poorest states in the country — in creating temples.

In March 2020, Adityanath named and shamed anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters by putting up their names, pictures, and addresses on billboards all over Lucknow. The Act fast-tracked Indian citizenship to people of all religions from neighboring countries except Muslims.

“We were not even allowed food, medicines, our spectacles,” said 78-year-old Darapuri, who was arrested for three weeks. “This has been one of the worst periods of suppression.”

“As an MP, he has had no impact on the development of Gorakhpur. His party was voted out of power in the elections soon after he became the CM because he could not keep his promises,” said Ahmad. Yet, Adityanath remains the star campaigner of the BJP.

He is a firm proponent of the Akhand Bharat dream of the Hindu nationalists and endorsed it in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly. Akhand Bharat literally means undivided India. The idea posits that modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Burma are one big Hindu nation.

Many are now viewing him as far more radical and committed to the Hindutva cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, under whose leadership the state of Gujarat saw one of the worst pogroms against Muslims.

After a large number of deaths in the second coronavirus wave in Uttar Pradesh, rumors floated that Modi was unhappy with Adityanath. Many RSS officials even visited the state to do an audit of the government. A few months later, Modi and Adityanath did a photo-op, where both were seen walking the corridors at Modi’s residence.

People are calling Adityanath Modi’s successor. “If he succeeds, our Constitution will be thrown out and Hindu supremacy will be imposed. There will be no democracy, only dictatorship,” said Darapuri.

The cult around Adityanath is not designed to convince or reason. Instead it destroys anyone who questions his leadership.

“His life trajectory is now a guide book for the politically ambitious, who have learned that communal poison and not development leads to advent,” said Ali.

As a Hindu monk promising to replicate the Ramjanmabhoomi model in cities of Varanasi and Mathura, he now enjoys varchasva, absolute power without constitutional limitations.

Assembly elections are currently underway in Uttar Pradesh. The results will be out on March 10. While the Adityanath-led BJP party had an edge initially, the recent farmers’ protest has dented the BJP vote in the sugarcane belt in western Uttar Pradesh. Some are predicting a tie between the BJP and the opposition put up by Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal coalition.

But perhaps the results don’t matter for Adityanath. His eyes are set on a far larger stage.

“[Uttar Pradesh] has been in a state of social and economic Emergency,” said Gautam. “If he comes to the national stage he will use the same methods to create India into a homogenous Hindu society with one religion, one language, one ideology.”

This story first appeared in The Wire

Rajeev Yadav, a civil rights activist who has been working with those wrongfully accused in terror cases, is contesting from Azamgarh in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh.

Sarai Pohi (Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh): On a winter afternoon, young men with floppy hair and old men with long beards surround a petite man in his late 30s in Sarai Pohi village in Azamgarh, a district in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Mohd Javed was arrested for writing letters of love to his beloved in Karachi, Pakistan in 2002. In one of the letters, he drew a heart and inscribed J+M inside it. The police interpreted J+M, Javed+Monobina, as a code for Jaish-e-Mohammmed, a Pakistan-based terror outfit, and called him a member of its sleeper cell in India. He spent 12 years in a Rampur prison as an undertrial, was absolved of all charges and released in 2014.

“While I was in jail, the only person who raised a voice for my release, ran a campaign was Rajeev Yadav from Rihai Manch,” he says pointing towards Yadav, a man his age and an independent candidate from the Nizamabad assembly seat in Azamgarh.

Javed is one among the many star campaigners for Yadav, who speak about their incarceration and lack of political will to intervene in fake cases of terror against ordinary civilians.

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‘Jahan aadmi, wahan Azmi (Where there is a human, there is an Azmi).’ This is a common saying for Azamgarh, which started witnessing large-scale migration almost a century ago. It is said that at least one member of each household works in the Gulf or Middle East. Azamgarh still does not have quality higher education institutions, industrial units or other employment opportunities to stop the migration. It is one of the 250 most backward districts of India.

Although Muslims form just 15% of the population of the district, the region has been at the receiving end of Islamophobia for the past decade and a half. It has been demonised by the media, Indian cinema and even the Hindu right-wing, by dubbing it a ‘terror factory’ to polarise votes on sectarian lines.

Yogi Adityanath, the current chief minister of Uttar Pradesh wrote an article – ‘Atank ka gadh, Azamgarh (Terror hub, Azamgarh)’ – about how he survived an alleged murderous attack in the district in 2007.

In 2008, two students – Atif Ameen and Mohammed Sajid – were shot dead in encounter and another person, Zeeshan, was arrested by the police in the Batla House case in Delhi on charges of terror. All three were from this area.

The Batla House encounter was debated and heavily contested by human rights activists and lawyers. The authenticity of the incident is mired with complicated questions till date. In fact, in 2016, the police claimed that Mohammed Sajid did not die in the encounter but fled and later joined ISIS. This is also heavily debated, since the police could not provide any proof.

In line with global Islamophobia, heightened after the 9/11 attacks in the US, this was the time when the Indian police and state agencies were desperate to ‘root out Islamic terror.’ After the Batla House encounter, the Lucknow Bar Association took a call that none of its lawyer members will take up cases of terror accused.

According to a Supreme Court ruling, Article 21 of the constitution entitles prisoners to a fair and speedy trial as part of their fundamental right to life and liberty. However, a significant number of undertrials are from socio-economically deprived backgrounds and have no access to legal aid. This hampers their ability to defend themselves in court and they end up spending long stretches in jail.

This is when Rihai Manch was formed. It was headed by Mohd Shoaib, a senior advocate in Lucknow. He was brutally assaulted by fellow lawyers within court premises for defending several terror accused.

Rajeev Yadav, a young journalist who grew up in Azamgarh, and as a student leader raised issues of communalism and human rights in the Poorvanchal region, joined Shoaib. Yadav had earlier dipped his toes in activism as a member of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties. He is now the general secretary of the organisation.

Azamgarh was at the centre of global terror conspiracies. In 2008, two young men from Azamgarh were detained by the police. They allegedly hung them upside down and beat them up in order to find out their links with terror outfits in Kashmir. The police asked, “Tell us the names of all the Kashmiris you know!”

They replied, “Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah.” The then chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir and his son. They were thrashed more for this answer.

Yadav points out the silliness of such operations that still continue, “If tomorrow, a person from rural UP, who has not seen the world at all, is asked to name someone from America, they will say Donald Trump and Barack Obama, because those are the only people they have heard of from America in the media.”

The two men were released a week later, following Rihai Manch’s intervention.

“Azamgarh was the scapegoat, and poor, uneducated young men from the city were repeatedly used as fodder by the police,” Yadav says.

Till date, Rihai Manch has managed to get at least 17 people absolved of such cases and released from jail through legal aid, advocacy, protests and media campaigns. This is a no small feat, since the National Crime Records Bureau prison data for 2015 suggests that over two-thirds of all jail inmates in India are undertrials. Over 55% of undertrials across the country are either Muslims, Dalits or tribals; their share among undertrials is clearly disproportionate to their population.

Over the past 14 years, Yadav has been beaten up in public protests and detained for raising questions on fake encounters in Gujarat and UP, arrests of several people in the Akshardham temple attack and organising meetings on the 1984 Hashimpura massacres, Muzaffarnagar riots and the Citizenship Amendment Act. He has been called ‘Pakistani agent’, ‘anti-national’, ‘terrorist’ – labels given to all those who question the establishment in today’s India.

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In the last five years of the Yogi Adityanath government, the UP police has killed 151 people and injured in 3,196 in police shootouts, known as police encounters in popular parlance. Almost all of them are undertrials, nearly 40% of them are Muslims, and the rest are from Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes.

Investigations reveal how the killings were pre-planned and targeted instead of chance encounters where the police fired in self-defence.

Out of these, 13 people who were shot dead or injured in police encounters were from Azamgarh. Only two of them are Muslims, the rest are either from the SC or OBC communities. Though Azamgarh’s Muslim population has been stigmatised, the district has a large Dalit and OBC population.

Bhim Sagar, a young Dalit man from Azamgarh, was a victim of what is now called a ‘half encounter’. In these situations, the police shoot a person’s leg, causing grievous injury.

Sagar had a bullet injury in his leg which wasn’t treated in the prison. As a result, his leg had to be amputated. Many victims of such police encounters have lost limbs in a similar manner.

“Such is the stigma of police encounters in Azamgarh that no politician paid a single visit to the encounter families. Such issues of civil liberties are no longer part of electoral politics,” says Banke Yadav, a Dalit rights activist from Azamgarh.

This is the reason why Rajeev Yadav turned from activism to politics and decided to contest the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. “These questions must be raised in the Parliament,” he says.

Nizamabad has been a secure seat for the Samajwadi Party for years. The party has often portrayed itself as protector of secular politics. The constituency has 2.9 lakh OBC, Muslim and Dalit votes.

According to the UN, every third Dalit and Muslim in India is poor. Nizamabad is produces good quality jackfruit, red chillies and over 36 types of mangoes. But with no aid, farmers are quitting and moving to other professions.

“Even when Yogi Adityanath formed the Poorvanchal Vikas Aayog, a commission to raise the socio-economic indicators of the area, much remains unchanged,” says Yadav.

According to official data, there are 38 lakh migrant workers from Poorvanchal, many of whom walked back home in the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. “Many from Dalit and OBC community have returned to bigger cities for lack of employment locally and the growing dominance and oppression of upper-caste Thakur groups like the Karni Sena,” says Mohsin Ahmed, a local activist.

Similarly, even though Azamgarh has high number of cancer cases every year due to contamination of ground water because of arsenic, there is not one single cancer hospital in the city. “It has not been on any political party’s agenda ever,” says Yadav.

§

It is evening in Sanjarpur village. Pictures of Shahid Azmi, a celebrated lawyer from Azamgarh who was gunned down in Mumbai for defending terror accused, and Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar adorn the table. There is a power cut, it is dark. R.P. Gautam, a Dalit rights activist who was arrested during the 2018 nationwide protest against the dilution of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, says, “You can take a look at Rajeev’s work on Google, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter.” The young men quickly start scrolling online. The area is illuminated by the light emanating from the smartphones.

The Election Commission has prohibited public rallies for election campaigns because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Only door-to-door and virtual campaigns are allowed, putting candidates with deep pockets at an advantage.

“We don’t have money but our work speaks for itself. We are relying on word-of-mouth publicity and the trust of the people,” says Yadav.

In the last few years, at least six people have been sentenced to life imprisonment on terror charges from the village and neighbouring areas. The UP police and Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) has also made several arrests of Muslim young men from the city as part of their official ‘deradicalisation’ project. Hundreds continue to languish in jail on unproven charges of terror.

The village is desperate to shun the terror stereotype associated with it. “Please don’t talk about terror charges. We don’t want any justice,” an old man interrupts Yadav as he speaks about Rihai Manch’s work.

Yadav responds, “Issues of fake terror charges, police atrocities, human rights violation are not Muslim issues, they are constitutional issues which are the same for all Indian communities.”

In the recent past, many Indian activists have contested elections. While Dalit rights activist Jignesh Mevani won in Gujarat, Irom Sharmila, who sat on a 16-year hunger strike against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in the Northeast, and Medha Patkar, who protested against displacement of people from their indigenous land for three decades, lost elections.

Yadav is undergoing the same litmus test of vote bank politics divided over caste and religion, against a feudal patriarchal background.

“In the current elections, many people are saying ‘Let’s not raise Muslim issues’ or else it will polarise the votes on communal lines. We didn’t raise the Kashmir issue enough and now the entire country has become like Kashmir, a prison with no human rights,” he says.

“The trajectory of Azamgarh is the trajectory of ‘New India’. In the earlier political narrative, only Muslims were criminals. Now Dalits, OBCs and even farmers are terrorists. This has to be challenged.”

The older people remain quiet. But the young men start clapping and join Yadav in a march across the village.

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This story first appeared in Aljazeera

With legal services not classified as essential by government, there was little access to bail or a fair investigation, says Neha Dixit

On May 25, the day India celebrated Eid al-Fitr, Talha, 12, and five-year-old Mariam slept with their mother’s mobile phone next to them all night.

They had not spoken to their father, Khalid Saifi, since a nationwide lockdown was imposed in India on March 25 to check the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“They thought he would call on that day [Eid], ” his wife Nargis Saifi told Al Jazeera.

Khalid, in a New Delhi jail since February, is among thousands of prisoners awaiting trial as India’s criminal justice system came to a complete halt during the pandemic.

Under the lockdown, legal services were not classified as essential by the government, which allowed only a small number of “virtual” courts to operate.

With virtual courts only taking up “urgent” cases that were not clearly defined, access to legal representation, bail or a fair investigation became virtually impossible.

Due to the pandemic, visits to prisons by lawyers and families were also banned. The only way prisoners can contact family members is through landline phones, but they have a long waiting list.

Khalid has still not made his way up that waiting list to earn a phone call.

Last week, the Bar Council of India wrote to the chief justice of India’s Supreme Court, asking that the court issue directions to resume physical court hearings across the country from June 1.

“Ninety-five percent of advocates and lawyers are unaware of technology, and virtual courts are only accessible to a few lawyers, which leaves the fraternity briefless or without work,” wrote the council.

Madhurima Dhanuka, who works with the Prison Reforms Programme at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, told Al Jazeera Indian court officials are “untrained and ill-equipped” to hold virtual courts.

“There are internet connectivity and access issues. Thus, most criminal courts are neither functioning nor bail petitions are being heard,” she said.

There are 36 million cases pending in the Indian courts, with the coronavirus lockdown creating a further backlog.

Overcrowded prisons

Another feature of the breakdown of India’s criminal justice system is its overcrowded prisons, which have turned into sites vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

India’s prisons have an average 114 percent occupancy rate, with the “under-trials” – people in custody awaiting investigation or trial – constituting nearly 68 percent of the prison population.

Seventy percent of these under-trials are illiterate or semi-literate, indicating their marginalised backgrounds.

On Monday, the Delhi High Court, while hearing a case related to the religious violence in the Indian capital in February, said prison is “primarily for punishing convicts, not for detaining undertrials”.

“The remit of the court is to dispense justice in accordance with law, not to send messages to society,” said Justice Anup J Bhambhani.

He said keeping the under-trials in prison “inordinately without any purpose” leads to overcrowding and leaves them with the impression that they are being punished before trial and treated unfairly.

On March 21, four days before India’s lockdown was announced, riots broke out in Dumdum Central Jail in the eastern city of Kolkata that left one dead and over a dozen injured.

It was reported that the prisoners were upset with measures taken to slow down the spread of COVID-19, which included delaying court hearings and cancelling visits with families.

Two days later, India’s Supreme Court asked the states to decongest prisons to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The committees set up to determine the release of prisoners on parole or interim bail recommended that those who were convicted or under-trial for offences that carried penalties of seven years or less of prison should be released.

So far, the three prisons in New Delhi have reported nearly two dozen COVID-19 cases, with the number of asymptomatic prisoners believed to be exponentially high.

Sandeep Goel, director general of prisons in the capital, told Al Jazeera a special force for contact-tracing of coronavirus cases had been formed.

When asked why the prisoners are not able to access phones to speak to their families, he said: “We have limited resources.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, in March urged that countries should first release political prisoners amid the global pandemic.

But India has only released 42,000 prisoners so far to unclog its prisons. Moreover, by not releasing the political prisoners, it joined Nicaragua, Turkey, Algeria, Spain and Myanmar in cracking down on government critics.

Targeting activists, Muslims

In fact, one of the hallmarks of the two-month lockdown in India has been a sustained targeting of political dissenters and Muslims by the Hindu nationalist government, which appeared to be using the limited access to legal resources as a handy tool for political vendetta.

Khalid, 38, was arrested for protesting against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed by the Indian government in December last year. The CAA promises Indian citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The law was widely criticized for being discriminatory and violating India’s secular constitution. The UN, which called the CAA “fundamentally discriminatory”, moved an application in India’s Supreme Court to become a party in one of the many petitions challenging the law.

Three weeks after Khalid’s arrest, a video emerged in March which showed him being presented in court on a wheelchair.

At the time of his arrest, Khalid was fit, the wheelchair indicating he could have been tortured in custody.

“During the lockdown, we have not even been able to provide him money to buy nutritional supplements and medicines to heal. After he was brutally beaten up, it is hard to trust the prison authorities,” his wife Nargis told Al Jazeera.

Khalid’s bail has been denied multiple times in the last three months. Nargis fears more custodial torture.

In February, 19 anti-CAA protesters were arrested in the Azamgarh district of the northern Uttar Pradesh state. On March 20, a lower court rejected their bail petitions.

With the nationwide lockdown imposed five days later, travel restrictions did not allow them to appeal in the High Court in Allahabad, officially known as Prayagraj, a city 180km (112 miles) away from Azamgarh.

“When legal representation for one party is not allowed, the person taken into custody is stripped of their rights under Article 21, and all access to justice is blocked,” Rebecca John, a senior criminal lawyer in the Supreme Court, told Al Jazeera.

Article 21 of the Indian Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty.

In August last year, thousands of preventive arrests were made in Indian-administered Kashmir after New Delhi scrapped the region’s semi-autonomous status and divided it into two federal territories.

Ten months later, many Kashmiris are still demanding the release of their family members languishing in various Indian jails amid a pandemic.

‘Continue making arrests’

On March 31, one week into the lockdown, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs told the Delhi Police to “continue making arrests under any circumstances” of people allegedly involved in the February riots in the capital that left 53 dead, most of them Muslims.

So far, more than 1,300 arrests have been made, including some victims and complainants, with activists accusing the police of harassing Muslim survivors.

On May 23, as India’s COVID-19 cases passed a million, two activists, Devangana Kalita, 30, and Natasha Narwal, 32, were arrested by the Delhi Police. Both of them are members of the Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage) feminist movement and were arrested for their alleged role in anti-CAA protests and the Delhi riots.

Kalita was accused of rioting and unlawful assembly, while Narwal was slapped with the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) on May 29.

The UAPA allows investigative agencies to proscribe individuals as “terrorists”. A person charged under the law can be jailed for up to seven years.

Safoora Zargar, 27, a student activist arrested for anti-CAA protests, was also charged under the UAPA days after she made bail. She is four months pregnant and is being held at Tihar, India’s most crowded prison, amid a deadly pandemic.

At least four other anti-CAA protesters – Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Asif Iqbal Tanha, and Shafi-Ur Rehman – have also been charged under the UAPA.

“Under the pandemic, the system of serving notices before arrests has been suspended. That gives no opportunity to the accused or their legal counsel to prepare or later argue their cases in the court when they are suddenly slapped with stringent laws like UAPA,” lawyer Rebecca John told Al Jazeera.

On May 6, a group of UN special rapporteurs wrote to the Indian government, raising concerns over the indiscriminate use of the UAPA and expressed concerns over several human rights violations. They said the law has been used to target religious and other minorities, human rights defenders and political dissidents.

The Indian government paid no heed to their letter.

On May 13, a number of world organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, issued a joint statement, urging governments to release inmates at particular risk of COVID-19.

The list included older people and people with pre-existing health conditions, as well as those sentenced for minor, non-violent offences, with specific consideration given to women and children.

Several activists also appealed to India’s National Human Rights Commission, pleading for Zargar’s release and citing the grave health threats to her and her unborn child.

Yet, on May 26, her bail petition was rejected, and her judicial custody extended till June 25.

It was also during the lockdown that two activists, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde, both above the age of 65 with pre-existing having health conditions, were arrested after the Supreme Court denied them relief.

Similarly, former Delhi University professor, GN Sai Baba, who is disabled, has been languishing in jail on sedition charges for more than five years and denied release.

“The non-functional criminal courts in the lockdown have stripped them of that one thing they survive on: hope,” said Dhanuka of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative.

However, Khalid Saifi’s young daughters Mariam and Talha run to get their mother’s phone each time it rings, expecting it to be their father.

“Children never give up hope. The courts should step up to make sure they don’t,” says Nargis.

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This story first appeared in www.aljazeera.com

In the hypermasculine Hindutva project, when young women are Muslim protestors against CAA- a direct tool of Hindutva-police use violence against them. Like in Jamia. When the young women are assertive & negate the Hindutva narrative of Indian women, police watch as bystanders while they are subjected to violence. Like in the case of Gargi college. Journalist and SAWM India member Neha Dixit writes.

New Delhi, India – Swati Singh describes how excited she was to attend her first college festival in the Indian capital, New Delhi.

On February 6, the last day of the three-day festival, as students were preparing for a concert, hundreds of men barged into the college campus and sexually harassed and abused female students.

Singh says she cannot forget the horror she went through at Gargi college, an all women’s college affiliated to Delhi University.

“I was looking forward to the fest. It means a lot to women like me who come from smaller cities and have never seen such big concert,” says 18-year-old Singh, who hails from the central Indian city of Indore.

Students accuse the police and security guards of doing little as the men molested women at the college, which is located in the affluent south Delhi area of Siri Fort.

“They were drunk men who groped us, pinched us in the crowd. One of them even threw money on my friend in a demeaning way. We couldn’t even move,” recalls Samra Ahmed, another student.

Police stood and watched

Students could not make calls for help as phone jammers were installed at the nearby Siri Fort auditorium.

“I saw some drunk men masturbating while looking at me,” Tanushree, a second-year student, tells Al Jazeera.

Singh says when she approached a police constable outside the college gate, he said, “Don’t you come to the fest to meet boys?”

“Police think women attend a music concert for this?” she wonders.

Several videos of the festival have surfaced that appear to show the police standing by and watching men scaling the walls to enter the college campus.

Samvedna, another student, says a stalker followed her to the metro station on her way home after the festival. When she complained to the police, she says she was told: “Look at the clothes you are wearing. Is this how Indian girls should dress? Should I call up your parents?”

Singh says she was disappointed with the reaction of Promila Kumar, the college head. “She told us that if you feel unsafe in a college fest, don’t attend. Even a woman’s college is not safe for us?”

The students staged a three-day strike demanding Kumar’s resignation and an investigation into the incident.

Al Jazeera reached out to Kumar but she declined to comment on the issue.

Singh says her parents, who had only reluctantly agreed to allow her to move to Delhi to pursue her higher education, are now insisting she returns to Indore immediately. “They say I can join a college in Indore. It’s a punishment for police not doing their job?”

The police arrested 10 people in connection with the incident but they were all released on bail on the same day.

Police have instead found fault with college authorities. “The college was at fault for not making appropriate arrangements,” Atul Thakur, deputy commissioner of police for South Delhi, told Al Jazeera.

When asked why the police did not press charges against the accused, Thakur said: “We are investigating. We still don’t have evidence for assault or molestation.”

Turning a blind eye

Its handling of the Gargi college incident has not been the only criticism of Delhi police recently.

On Sunday, video footage – said to have been taken on December 15 last year – was released that appeared to show police beating students inside the library of Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) University, also located in New Delhi.

In early January, police were accused of turning a blind eye to attacks on students protesting against a fee hike by masked men linked to the governing party inside Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi. More than a month after the incident, no arrests have been made.

Four days after the Gargi College incident, police personnel baton-charged hundreds of students from JMI who were trying to march from the university campus to Parliament in protest against a new citizenship law.

Critics say the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) – passed last December – and a planned National Register of Citizens (NRC) is part of the Hindu-first agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

In the last two months, videos of young women braving police assault to save male protesters have become synonymous with the anti-CAA protests.

Many female students at JMI have accused the police of using excessive force against them during the February 10 march.

Raziya, a JMI student, says she was beaten on her private parts with a flash rod. “They said, ‘These women shield terrorists with their burqa. Take them in a corner and teach them a lesson’,” said Raziya, who is undergoing treatment for a rib fracture.

“Why did they target our hijab. What is wrong with it?” she told Al Jazeera.

Iqra, an 18-year-old student at JMI, says she was also beaten by a male constable with a stick on her private parts and her legs. “It was a preplanned attack specifically targeting young women who have been proactive in these protests,” she said.

Chanda Yadav, another Jamia student, said she was taunted by the police: “You protect men because you think we will not hit you?” She says a male policeman hit her with a flash rod on her thigh.

But the police have denied the allegations, saying “no force was used by the police.”

“All allegations against us are untrue.The entire protest has been video graphed by us,” RP Meena, south east deputy commissioner of police, told Al Jazeera.

“In fact, some of our men were manhandled and they received injuries during the scuffle.”

The recent incidents have raised questions about the safety of women in public spaces, particularly in Delhi which has seen a high number of sexual assaults against women.

“The idea of safety is anyway restrictive,” said Shilpa Phadke, a sociologist and co-author of Why Loiter, a book on attitudes towards women in public spaces.

“Here, safety for women is also conditional on women being ‘respectable’ and ticking the right boxes. Attending a protest or a college fest, both do not fit into any box,” she told Al Jazeera.

Activists and feminists have long highlighted the lack of gender sensitisation among India’s police as patriarchal values still dominate Indian society.

Rebecca John, a lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, says the police’s behaviour at Gargi college is a repetition of how they usually behave with victims of sexual violence.

“They don’t see anything wrong with assault and groping. They dismiss such victims, call them liars. They try to look away. It is the same narrative here,” John told Al Jazeera.

Rehana Adib, a women’s rights activist, said the government is afraid of young women taking the lead.

“Young women are representing all intersections of the society – Dalit, Muslims, tribals, everyone. This has shaken the government. That is why the police has been instructed to break their determination, weaken them and send them home, show their place in a patriarchal world.”

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A ground report from Hong Kong by SAWM India member Neha Dixit where young citizens are fighting for their freedom. But the journalist fell silent when the protesters ask why there is no wide protests when millions of people are under lockdown in Kashmir. A must read.

Hong Kong: On October 6, Tony reached the last intersection of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong at exactly 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Two days ago, on October 4, Carrie Lam, the Chief executive of Hong Kong had invoked Emergency law and announced a ban on face masks. This was going to be the 17th weekend in a row since June this year to coordinate a protest. The schedule for the next ten days was brainstormed over Telegram channels and on this day, everyone had started gathering with masks and umbrellas.

“I have been doing this for seven years and we have come far,” says Tony.

He is 24, medium built, long hair tightly pulled into a man bun. He is wearing a T-shirt, pants and sneakers – all black – just like the thousands of protestors who had gathered at Causeway Bay, the retail heart of Hong Kong, on this day. Surrounded by skyscrapers and malls with some of the highest rent rates in the world, the area is one of the most crowded in the city. It has also been a key protest site in the past few years.

Till 1997, Hong Kong, a global city and an international financial hub, was a British colony. It was handed over to China on some conditions, including the ‘one country two systems’ and the adoption of Hong Kong’s ‘mini Constitution’ called the Basic Law. The Hong Kong Basic Law ensured that the city will retain its capitalist economic system and currency, the Hong Kong Dollar, the legal system, the legislative system and people’s rights and freedom as a special administrative region (SAR) of China for 50 years. This arrangement allowed Hong Kong to function as its own entity and is set to expire in 2047.

While China’s central government in Beijing maintains control over Hong Kong’s foreign affairs and the legal interpretation of the Basic Law, since 2014, the momentum to demand universal suffrage as promised in Basic Law has led to massive pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. A large number of participants are students and young professionals. They often use masks and umbrellas to escape surveillance. “Protests are planned on weekends so that maximum number of people can participate,” says Tony.

§

Tony’s training in activism and protests started at the age of 16 in 2012. He was a high school student when he joined Scholarism, a student pressure group to protest against the ‘Moral and National Education’ school curriculum put forward by the Hong Kong government that year.

Scholarism had 200 members and garnered wide support from students. The curriculum was aimed at instilling patriotism and strengthening Chinese identity among Hong Kong’s youngsters. This is around the time when fears of mainland China’s growing influence in Hong Kong were growing. “The curriculum was clearly designed to brainwash us with Communist Party propaganda. Some parts of it even whitewashed the Tiananmen massacre and tried to present China in a favourable light.”

The Tiananmen massacre took place on June 4, 1989, in Beijing. Thousands of students had occupied the central parts of mainland China’s capital for almost a month. They were demanding reforms around freedom of speech, freedom of the press, democracy and more accountability. The government declared martial law and sent troops to vacate the area. In the process, several thousand protestors and bystanders were killed and a large number were also wounded.

Tony had heard stories about the massacre from his parents, who are both schoolteachers. “Three students from Peking University, who they had worked with closely in 1987 when they came to the University of Hong Kong for an exchange program were killed,” he says. “With the new National education curriculum, I was feeling stifled the same way that my parents’ friends would have felt.”

On August 30, 2012, Tony was one of the 50 protestors from Scholarism to occupy the Hong Kong government headquarters for a month. “We stayed in tents in the public park near the government offices. There was rain, fatigue. We didn’t even shower for weeks on end,” he recounts.

In the next few days, the movement successfully gathered thousands protesting against the proposed curriculum and led to the government backing down. On September 8, the then Chief Executive of Hong Kong, C.Y. Leung, announced the temporary withdrawal of the ‘Moral and National Education Course.’  The course has not been reintroduced till date and the protests by the young students were seen as a success.

This was also the time when Xi Jinping, the current President of the People’s Republic of China assumed office in March 2013. The tremors of the significant increase in censorship and mass surveillance under his office were also felt regularly in Hong Kong.

Most students like Tony, who were part of the movement against the ‘Moral and National Education’, continued to remain active in the social and democracy movement in Hong Kong.

“Once you become conscious of something, it is very difficult to ignore it. Freedom of speech, uninhibited access to the internet and many other things. We were not ready to give them up,” says Tony.

Just two years later, in September 2014, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the highest organ of state power and the national legislature of the People’s Republic of China, proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. The decision was seen as restrictive and a way for the Communist Party of China to pre-screen the candidates for the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. “What kind of fake system was this. It was like, ‘You can vote, but we will tell you who to vote for’,” says Tony.

This time, the mass protests lasted for almost three months, from September 22 to December 15, 2014. Students from various groups led a strike and soon enough, several groups started to occupy several major city intersections in Hong Kong. “I was here at the same spot four years ago as part of the sit-in protests at Causeway Bay,” says Tony, as he points to a traffic light on the other side of the road. Posters saying ‘I need real universal suffrage’ had been put up across all universities and major market areas in the city.

Tony says the police’s tactics provoked more anger among common citizens. “They used tear gas and physical attacks, which made common citizens all the more angry,” he recalls. His parents, who until then disapproved Tony’s fulltime involvement in activism, also joined in. “They were upset that many children like me, who were participating in peaceful civil disobedience, were at the receiving end of police violence. Just like Tiananmen Square,” he says. It is estimated that 100,000 protestors participated in the sit-ins at any given time. The campaign was termed as the Occupy movement, now also interchangeably known as the Umbrella movement.

A large number of protestors started using umbrellas as a tool of passive resistance to the Hong Kong police’s use of pepper spray and tear gas to disperse crowds during this 79-day occupation to demand transparent elections.

After two and a half months, in December police started arresting and clearing several protest sites. Causeway Bay, where Tony stood today, was the last spot to be evacuated on December 15, 2014.

The protests ended without any political concessions from the government. The then-Hong Kong Chief executive Leung and other mainland Chinese officials criticised the campaign as “unpatriotic”. These reactions were seen as a huge assault on academic freedoms and civil liberties of common citizens of Hong Kong.

“They fanned the fire further. The demand for universal suffrage became stronger since then,” says Tony.

§

The events of the past four years have been viewed as repeated assaults on Hong Kong’s freedom. In 2015, five staff members of the Causeway Bay bookstore which sold political books that were banned in mainland China went missing. A year later, Lam Wing-kee, one of the owners, returned to Hong Kong and described how he and his associates were kept under detention in mainland China. Similarly, disqualification of candidates for the legislature and violence against journalists added to the growing dissent in Hong Kong society.

On June 12, this year, the new Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced a controversial extradition Bill that would have allowed the extradition of suspects to China to be tried under the mainland’s opaque judicial system. This was being introduced in the light of the growing pro-democracy movement. The Bill was seen as an attempt to erode Hong Kong’s legal system and its built-in safeguards. This fear was attributed to China’s newfound ability, through this Bill, to arrest voices of political dissent in Hong Kong.

This triggered another round of protests. Under pressure, the Bill was withdrawn on September 4. Yet, protests have continued, spanning more than four months now.

Tony says that the clarion call for the protestors over the past four months has been the famous Hong Kong-American martial arts star, Bruce Lee’s saying, ‘Be water, my friend.’ He says, “The movement is fluid and moves in unexpected waves. Protestors move swiftly from one place to another, unlike in 2014, when the sit-in was the main protest tactic.” They move from one area to another, occupying several key intersections, police headquarters, government buildings, marking their presence everywhere.

“We have first aid teams travelling with us. We take our helmets, laser lights, spare t-shirts, water and snacks along for swift action,” he says.

Most demonstrators are tech-savvy and use online forums and encrypted Telegram channels to coordinate their tactics, canvass views and forge consensus. “Social media, including Telegram, is a big part of our movement but we use it for activism in the offline world, where people show up instead of retweeting,” says Tony.

Tony says that this time, the small organising groups are also using the lessons learnt in 2014. “The idea is to get more citizens involved instead of alienating them. So we make sure that ordinary people don’t get inconvenienced.”

The tactic has been successful and has seen protestor numbers swell up to millions regularly.

The previous protests were also centralised around organised groups like Scholarism, Occupy Central with Love and Peace and their leaders Joshua Wong, Benny Tai and others. These groups and leaders directed the protestors. However, the current protests are leaderless.

Tony says that for now, this is an advantage, “This gives people the flexibility to make their own decisions on how they want to participate. This is the reason why millions are turning up every weekend. Most importantly, the old and the common person who had reservations a few years ago are now joining the protests. It is more organic.”

Tony points out that this time, they are also working at rewarding businesses who support the movement. He says, “In 2014, many common people were upset because of the financial losses caused to them because of road blockades and shutdowns.” He says that they have created an internal list of ‘yellow ribbon’ business firms. An app helps shoppers give these firms business instead of the ‘blue ribbon’ ones. This colour demarcation first came up in Hong Kong during the Umbrella movement in 2014, when protestors started sporting yellow ribbon and also tying it in public spaces. The colour symbolises the campaign for universal suffrage and was previously used in the women’s vote campaign in the US in the 19th century. Those who disagreed with the movement started wearing blue ribbons, the colour of the police uniform, to show their support for the authorities instead.

The battle lines amongst corporate entities are becoming neater by the day, based on political affiliations. And the war is being fought accordingly.

One of the identified blue business in Hong Kong is the American chain Starbucks, which has been repeatedly vandalised by protestors in the past few months. The Hong Kong franchise of this chain is owned by Maxim Caterers. In September, this year, Annie Wu, the daughter of the Maxim Group’s founder, criticised activists as “radical protesters” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

In retaliation, Chinese corporates are building international pressure to penalise voices and organisations supporting the protests. Recently, when an executive of the NBA’s Houston Rockets tweeted his support for the Hong Kong protests, there was an immediate backlash from Chinese authorities. The Rockets apologised, but the government decided to suspend NBA exhibition games in China, one of the largest markets for the association.

Similarly, on October 9, Apple removed an app that enabled protesters in Hong Kong to track the police, a day after facing intense criticism from Chinese state media, plunging the technology giant deeper into the complicated politics of a country that is fundamental to its business.

This has not stopped protestors from coming up with creative ways to take the campaign forward.

In September this year, the hashtag #birdgoldingchallenge trended on Twitter to mark the fifth year of the Umbrella challenge. Protestors were called to fold Origami paper cranes and called the bird  “Freenix” – a reference to phoenix. In Japanese culture, these cranes can wish for recovery from illness and injury. The protestors filled the Times Square in Causeway Bay with hundreds of these birds while sloganeering ‘Liberate Hong Kong.’

These months have also witnessed increasing violent confrontations with the Hong Kong police and arrest of more than 1,000 people. On October 5, MTR, the city’s underground public transport, was shut down for the first time in 40 years as several stations were vandalised. On October 1, a teenager was shot in the upper left part of his body by the police. Thousands gathered in support of him the next day.

“Hong Kong is known as a global city. And here we are being subjected to the worst form of police brutality. We do not deserve it,” says Tony.

While this has been largely a movement of young people, in the past few months, older citizens have formed informal groups to act as a buffer between the police and protestors. They act as the first line of defence.

Protestors have also used bricks to combat police violence. I tell Tony that in Kashmir, which has been under lockdown by the Indian government for 79 days and has faced alleged human rights violations for several years, young protestors also use stone-pelting as a way to protest. “I don’t know much about Kashmir. But it is a sign of people losing complete trust in the authorities. It is the police brutality and the stifling ways of the Hong Kong government that are responsible for the violent methods of the protestors. It is they who should be blamed, not the other way round. If we burn, you burn with us,” he says.

He pauses and then asks, “So is Delhi also jammed with protestors for Kashmir?” I tell him that it is not consistent and massive.

He looks confused, “But we heard in 2013, how so many Indians came together for weeks to protest the rape of a student. So how come they are quiet when millions of people have been under lockdown for 75 days?”

I have no answer.

I ask Tony for his second name. He refuses. “There is no point identifying me. Every single black mask here represents me. We are anonymous and yet focused. I am and will be every young person in the protests till Hong Kong is free,” he says as he bids goodbye and disappears into the sea of umbrellas.

Along with the rain, sloganeering also starts, “Hong Kongers, resist.”

Link to original story

This article was written by Neha Dixit back in 2013. The ruling party in the centre has changed from the following year, but not the social structure. The law is there to protect women’s rights but the social stigma and moral policing at times become instrumental in harassing them, leading them often to critical health situations, in more unfortunate cases even deaths.  Though legal abortion is still a word with which taboo is attached. In this Article the journalist and SAWM member presented the real picture from urban and rural India.

She checked on Google maps. Nangloi was 18 kilometres from the North campus of Delhi University. The metro yellow line got her there in less than an hour. A newly-constructed three–storied building stood behind the mesh of electric wires hanging from a half-bent pole. The exterior was tinted silver glass fitted into copper panels. A yellow board declared the name of the doctor, boasting several international degrees and medals in gynaecology. The receptionist asked her to sit in the waiting room.

“There were three other women there, all in their twenties,” she recalls.

She saw the doctor after half an hour. “He saw my mangalsutra and asked me ‘Are you really married?’, to which I had to confidently reply in the affirmative. I made up a story about how my husband is travelling and that’s why he couldn’t accompany me.”

An ultrasound and a pelvic examination later, the doctor confirmed that she had an incomplete abortion because of pills she had taken before, and that infection had set in. He recommended surgical evacuation. “He said the only option to get rid of it was through some vacuum aspiration method which would cost Rs. 10,000.”

She got Rs. 3,500 per month as pocket money, which included travel to college. Her friend Gayatri lent her Rs. 2,000, and another friend from college contributed Rs. 2,000. “I was still short by Rs. 2,500. I lied to my father. I told him my friend urgently needed money to pay the security (deposit) at her paying guest accommodation.”

Her name is Mitra. She was 20 years old, in her second year of college. Two weeks earlier, she had found out that she was pregnant.

***

In India, a woman dies every two hours because she’s had an unsafe abortion, according to estimates by Ipas, an international organisation that works with the National Rural Health Mission to reduce maternal deaths due to unsafe abortions. In August, health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said data on the number of unsafe abortions in India was unavailable in the Central Health Management and Information System of the National Rural Health Mission. According to government data for 2008-09, however, a total of 11.06 million abortions were recorded that year.

Mitra’s boyfriend, whom she and Gayatri had christened “Big L aka bada loser”, had stopped taking her calls after she told him the pregnancy test was positive. Mitra had heard of acquaintances and friends undergoing abortions and had researched abortion pills online. Armed with that knowledge, Mitra went to a pharmacy and bought Cytotec, an abortion-inducing drug sold for Rs. 32. Misoprostol—the generic name of Cytotec—cannot be legally sold without a doctor’s prescription, but it can be easily bought over the counter, as was done by Mitra.

She dutifully followed the instructions to keep the tablets under her tongue for 30 minutes. Mitra started bleeding within two hours. Over the next two days, she missed college due to heavy bleeding and nausea.

She managed to dodge her parents, pretending that it was the usual cramps she got during her period. From the third day onward, there was mild bleeding. That morning, as she took the metro from Noida City Centre to Vishwavidyalaya, the Delhi University station, the emotion that predominated was relief. “I thought I was done. I felt powerful for not letting Big L trample my self-esteem. I felt in control over my body,” she told me, months later.

Over the next few days, Mitra experienced morning sickness. She thought that it was an after-effect. She couldn’t sleep on her right side as it hurt. A week had now passed.

Mitra’s father was an employee in Delhi University and she decided to look for a doctor far away. Gayatri spoke to some girls in her PG accommodation and suggested a clinic in Nangloi. The day before the appointment, Mitra came over to stay at Gayatri’s place.

That evening, after college, they bought a mangalsutra from Kamla Nagar market for Rs. 100. In the morning, they took the train to the clinic, where they were told about the vacuum aspiration method: a brief (often just 10 to 15 minutes) procedure that is performed under anaesthesia, where the cervix is dilated and the uterus is then emptied through suction.

Two days later, Mitra, running a high fever, returned with the money. She had kept in touch with the doctor. She was given several injections before being put under anaesthesia.

“I was terribly scared. This was the first surgical procedure in my life. I was worried that if anything went wrong, my parents would know what I was up to,” she says. “I was let off after half an hour in the operation theatre. For the next two hours, I was hallucinating.”

It took Mitra more than a month to recover. She had put on weight and her menstrual cycle was still not normal.

A month later, she got a call from a courier company to confirm her address. Within an hour, a police officer with two women constables landed up at her house in Noida. It was evening and her parents were home. The Nangloi doctor had been arrested a week earlier under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act for conducting sex-selective abortions. Mitra’s number was found on the doctor’s phone.

“My mother slapped me in front of the police. I ‘confessed’ to an abortion,” she tells me now, avoiding looking into my eyes. “My mother took me inside and asked me how many men I had slept with. She said if I have had an abortion, I must have had sex also; kissed also; stripped naked also.”

Mitra was not allowed to go back to college. Her father didn’t speak to her for a month, till she started experiencing heavy abdominal pain and excessive vaginal bleeding. A proper diagnosis revealed an infection in her fallopian tubes: damage caused by the irresponsible surgical procedure performed by the Nangloi doctor.

Mitra will never be able to conceive. She was forced to switch to the school of correspondence courses in Delhi University. She and her younger sister are hardly let out alone.

***

Under the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898, abortion was a punishable offence both for the woman and the abortionist till as late as the 1960s. Liberalisation of abortion laws across the globe led to a discussion on changing the abortion law in India in 1964, in the context of the maternal mortality rate. Even though it was illegal, a large number of women were attempting abortions through unsafe methods, often risking and sometimes losing their lives in the process.

As a result, the Shah Committee was appointed under then health minister of Maharashtra, Dr Shantilal Shah, a doctor himself. The recommendations were put together over a period of two years and handed over in December 1966. Several of these recommendations were collated under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, which was passed by Parliament in 1971 and came into effect in 1972.

The Act permits abortion if the doctor believes “in good faith” that “…the continuance of the pregnancy would involve a risk to the life of the pregnant woman or of grave injury to her physical or mental health; or there is a substantial risk that if the child were born, it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”.

The Shah Committee report states that before 1966, for every 73 live births, 25 abortions (or 34.3 per cent) took place annually and of these, 15 were induced (60 per cent). The Act, though revolutionary at that point in terms of women’s reproductive health, was still based on patriarchal frameworks of marriage and motherhood.

As a result, the onus still lies on the woman to explain or prove how it will harm her physically or mentally. It is almost implied that married women must state contraceptive failure and single women must state coercion or rape as a reason for pregnancy. Merely stating that it is an unwanted pregnancy is not enough.

Then, in 2004, the government endorsed guidelines on the appropriate use of Mifepristone and Misoprostol for self-induced abortion. The guidelines were developed jointly by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR).

However, the government has not yet introduced drugs for abortion in public clinics and hospitals.

***

What happened with Mitra is an example of how much female sexuality is controlled, moralised, and stigmatised. On the face of it, abortion is legal in India—unlike in a number of Western countries—but women have hardly any control over their reproductive future.

The MTP Act fails to define terms like “abortion”, “miscarriage”, “termination of pregnancy”, “health”, “substantial risk”, and “seriously handicapped”, making the doctor’s opinion sacrosanct. According to a study by Ipas, 76 per cent of the women who come for first-time abortions are unmarried.

These figures may stir a hornet’s nest. During the implementation of the Justice Verma Committee’s recommendations, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Trinamool Congress objected to lowering the age of consent for sex from 18 to 16, on the ground that this is in conflict with “conservative norms” of Indian society.

“BJP is of the firm view that the bill should be passed in this session itself, but the provision lowering the age of consent to 16 years should be excluded,” a senior party leader said.

Muslim organisations too slammed the proposal. Abdul Rahim Qureshi, assistant general secretary, All India Muslim Personal Law Board, was quoted saying, “It is an irony that government proposes to lower the age of consent to 16 when marriageable age for girls is 18. Sex outside marriage is detrimental to society.”

Statistics collected by Mumbai’s International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), a public health organisation, show that about 21 per cent of males and four per cent of females in rural areas admitted to pre-marital sex against an urban figure of 11 per cent of males and two per cent of females. The IIPS survey sample of 55,000 males and females comes from about 1.7 lakh households in Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh. The age range is 15-29.

***

Nineteen-year-old Jyoti is still struggling to cope with what has happened to her. The tiny, cheerful Jyoti, who studied till class six, belongs to the Ho tribe of Jharkhand and is from Gua village of West Singhbhum district. Covered in Saranda forest, with the largest sal cover, the district has rich iron ore deposits and is dominated by Maoists.

“A boy in my neighbourhood moved to Delhi to work. He used to get me gifts each time he visited the village. He told me that he loves me and wants to settle with me in Delhi,” recalls Jyoti.

When Jyoti missed her period for the first month, she ate unripe papaya with peppercorn. She waited for two weeks with no result. “I ate dry henna powder later but it didn’t help. That’s when I told my elder sister who is already married and lives in another village. She fumed and threatened to tell my parents. I pleaded and that’s when she took me to a dai (midwife) who did not know anyone from my family or village.”

Dais are traditional midwives. Among the Ho tribe, dais are also supposed to link childbirth to their religious faith. The birth of a child is said to bring a risk of attack by evil spirits. This is why all delivery waste is buried, and nobody is allowed to enter the delivery room except the attendant.

The dai diagnosed a pregnancy and asked Jyoti to keep an extract of medicinal roots and shrubs in her vagina for two to three days. She cannot recall the name of the herbs used.

It did not lead to any result.

Two months had passed by this time. The dai then gave her a concoction of boiled betel nut roots and jaggery. “It was bitter and caused immense pain in my abdomen. I could not go to the primary health centre and obviously could not tell my parents. I know they would have killed me.”

It was then that Jyoti decided to call her boyfriend Tarun. “He was shocked but supportive. He came back to the village within four days and met my father, offering to marry me. My father, a farmer, accepted a bride price of Rs. 5,001 and arranged for the wedding in the next two weeks.”

Tarun, 21, is an office boy in Delhi and had to feign a lack of leave from work to hasten the process. By the time Jyoti managed to reach Delhi, she had entered the second trimester of her pregnancy.

A thorough check-up revealed that Jyoti’s embryo had been damaged by the herbal remedy. The ultrasound revealed that a 14-week foetus without a heartbeat was present in her womb. The foetus was surgically removed and Jyoti’s womb was perforated in the process. She can never be pregnant again.

“The entire village goes to the dai. I had to find somebody far enough for my parents to not know. Going to the primary health centre was out of the question,” Jyoti replied, when I asked why she chose to go to the dai.

***

While abortion through pills is considered safe, it often leads to haemorrhage, incomplete abortion, and is discouraged for anaemic women since it causes heavy bleeding. Surgery is a vacuum evacuation process that minimises the chances of incomplete abortion but is costlier, though quicker.

Studies show that a considerable proportion—one-fifth—of young abortion-seekers delayed the termination of pregnancy until the second trimester. The unmarried ones were significantly more likely to have done so than the married: one-quarter of the unmarried, compared to nine per cent of the married, delayed abortion until beyond 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Last year, Savita Halappanavar in Ireland was denied an abortion because of it being a second trimester pregnancy. Irish law denied an abortion and she later died. Though India joined the bandwagon in demanding changes in Ireland’s abortion law, finally introduced two months ago, the Indian state’s attitude towards the abortion rights of women, regardless of class or marital status, remains unchanged.

Second trimester abortions are difficult, life-threatening, and require approval from two doctors. They are also costly and far harder to obtain. Single women are vulnerable; they are often unequipped to detect pregnancy, lack partner support, and have confidentiality issues that delay the process of seeking medical help.

***

Dr Manisha Gupte, a pioneer in advocating abortion rights for women, says, “It is evident that women’s right to control their sexuality, fertility and reproduction were not the basis on which the MTP Act was formulated or interpreted. As a result, no government ever initiated programmes to make single women aware that they have a legal right to abortion.”

A survey by the Guttmacher Institute, which works on reproductive and sexual health globally, suggests that only six per cent of women above 25 are not married in India.

The government of India introduced family planning in 1952, and passed the MTP Act in 1972. It’s been 60 years since family planning was introduced, and 40 years since abortions were made accessible for women on many conditions, except on demand.

MTP centres were opened in several government hospitals or independently to make abortion accessible to women who met the criteria. Yet these centres are often inaccessible and dismissed as an option. The MTP centres originated with the understanding that they would contribute to family planning. Many operate under the assumption that the women who come to these centres are married. Often, abortion services are provided in exchange for promises to use contraceptives; in several cases, contraceptives like Copper T are inserted into the women’s vaginas immediately after abortion.

Moreover, most MTP centres are in urban areas, unavailable to rural women whose minds are in any case clouded with myths about abortion.

In the Seventh Five-Year Plan (1985-1990), the government stated its intention of equipping all primary health centres to conduct abortions. Yet the dearth of such centres continues. Fresh figures state that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have the lowest ratios of MTP per 1,000 persons, even when they have the highest number of abortions. Not surprisingly, Bihar has one MTP centre for every 4,45,000 people.

To avoid the hassle of travelling miles to government MTP centres, and to keep it quiet and avoid forced contraceptives, people prefer private clinics to government facilities. According to ICMR, only 55 per cent of MTP centres provide manual vacuum evacuation, another alternative for termination of early pregnancy. This is a major deterrent.

According to Heidi Bart Johnson, in her paper Abortion Practice in India, “Bureaucracy associated with registering MTP facilities with the government and with reporting and recording MTP procedures contributes to the end result that many physicians provide abortion illegally.”

***

Laila was 23 when she discovered she was pregnant with her brother-in-law’s child. Her husband, a daily wage labourer, had died of tuberculosis three years earlier. She was living with her in-laws in Uttampur village, Aligarh. Her brother-in-law had gone to Qatar where he worked as a tailor, one-and-a-half months before she learnt of her pregnancy. Completely dependent on her in-laws, Laila went through not just psychological but also emotional trauma.

“Islam prohibits abortion. Here I was with a baby in my womb. I wanted to be a mother but being a widow I couldn’t. My brother-in-law was married. There was no way I could keep it,” she recounts. “I had decided to go ahead with abortion but I had to go far off to get it done confidentially.”

Laila, whose parents have since died, was married at 16. She neither had an emotional cushion in terms of confidantes nor the financial means. Her father-in-law was a potato and rice farmer. Laila helped him in the farms. “During pregnancy also, I had to pretend that I was all right and worked for days on end since it was the harvest season.” Laila could not leave the fields to consult a local dai or find ways to see the doctor. Her bump was visible three-and-a-half months later.

“My mother-in-law asked why my stomach was swollen. I denied any knowledge. She didn’t believe me and took me to a local dai. They figured it out and questioned me. I told them who the father was.”

When Laila’s mother-in-law cross- checked with her son, he refused to take responsibility. “They didn’t listen for a second after that. They threw me out of the house late in the evening, cursed me, and said they cannot keep a prostitute in their house.” Pleading didn’t help. By the next morning, everyone in the village knew what happened. Even the local dai refused to help.

A local NGO called Udaan Society came forward. “We got to know through the anganwaadi worker about Laila’s condition. She was deeply traumatised and had nowhere to go. We arranged for the termination of her pregnancy surgically,” says Abdul Basit from Udaan. Laila is now a volunteer for Udaan and lives in Aligarh city.

Laila and Jyoti were lucky to get support from an NGO and a husband respectively, but a large section of pregnant women wanting to abort don’t. The lack of institutionalised abortion rights turns women in vulnerable situations to private clinics. They charge exorbitant fees for low quality services.

However, women are forced to barter quality for confidentiality which the bureaucratic MTP centres with their guilt-ridden and judgmental environments fail to provide.

Also, Mitra, Jyoti and Laila’s cases may give the impression that the problem is limited to women who are economically dependent. This is not the case.

***

Prerna, 28, is a producer with an English entertainment channel in Delhi. “Because I live with my parents, I had to find the farthest possible clinic to get an abortion.” Prerna was working on a documentary on yoga at that point and was in a relationship with Satvik, who is the same age as her and also a media professional.

“When I told him about the pregnancy, he freaked out. He told me that he wants to rethink the relationship since he didn’t expect it to reach ‘that’ level.”

She recalls receiving text messages from Satvik, enumerating the number of successful abortions every year, as well as the number of fatalities.

“I replied to him that instead of sending me these scary statistics, why not work towards sensitising yourself a little bit?” she remembers.

Nevertheless, Satvik took Prerna to a clinic.

The doctor, a woman in her mid-50s, asked, “Are you married?”

“No”, Prerna replied.

“Do your parents know about it?”

“No,” said Prerna.

“It is because of you girls that parents don’t want their girls to go to college. Did you not think of them? How could you submit to a man like this?”

All this while, Prerna was the one responsible, not Satvik. She was then sent for an ultrasound to another clinic. “I didn’t want to think about the relationship, Satvik’s attitude, or the doctor’s moral sermon. I was desperate to get rid of it.” A male doctor conducted the test but could not see the foetus.

“He inserted his finger inside my vagina to check. I felt disgusted and vulnerable. Driven by desperation, I still did not object,” recalls Prerna.

Since Prerna’s pregnancy was detected on time and the foetus was just four weeks old, she managed to get rid of it through pills. “I felt ashamed later. Almost guilty that a lot of women cannot have a baby and here I am popping out one,” says Prerna. “I also felt that though this gynaecologist is well-known, she is probably good only for married women. Don’t unmarried women have an anatomy to deserve a medical right?”

In the months following, Satvik grew distant. He made Prerna take birth control pills but still refused to use a condom. “If my parents find out, I can never show them my face again.”

Prerna has since broken up with Satvik. One day she wants to have a biological child with a “man who understands his role and owns up to it”.

***

Bestowing personhood on the foetus is a popular tool of “pro-life” crusaders in the United States, and Indian politicians are not far behind. Last year in July, Maharashtra health minister Suresh Shetty informed the state assembly of his intention to “send a proposal to the Centre to apply Indian Penal Code Section 302 (murder) on those, including family members and medicos, involved in forced abortions of female foetus”.

He also said that the state was considering placing abortion pills on Schedule X, which would require doctors to give prescriptions in triplicate and for chemists to notify the authorities about their customers.

In protest, a letter signed by organisations such as Stree Mukti Sanghatana, Forum Against Sex Selection, Akshara, All India Democratic Women’s Association, and Population First was submitted to the Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan. They wrote, “According to the PCPNDT Act, sex selection itself is a crime and the doctors involved should be punished as per the provisions of the Act. The pregnant woman on whom sex selection is performed or undertaken is not an offender according to the Act. This should be upheld in Maharashtra.”

In addition, the well-intentioned Aamir Khan show, Satyamev Jayate, discussed “female foeticide” and the declining sex ratio in its first episode. Though any discussion on the issue is always welcome, the discourse was often regressive. Lines like “Beti ko maaroge to bahu kahan se laoge? (If you kill daughters, how will you get daughters-in-law?)” resonated and girls were equated to devis and mothers.

Feminists believe that it played a vital role in the misplaced wars on abortion. With government officials and well-known personalities writing to the home minister to charge parents who abort a female child for homicide, the stigma against abortion grows and further limits a woman’s control over her body. With 66 per cent of abortions in India being illegal, the confusion between the PCPNDT Act for sex-selective abortion and the MTP Act which legalises abortion ended up restricting Mitra’s life.

***

Studies suggest that married women also undergo the same problems: confidentiality issues, lack of awareness, and stigma. According to a report published by CEHAT, a research centre that publishes papers on health themes, in the experience of 60 per cent of married women, doctors providing abortions insisted on the husband’s permission prior to the procedure, and 28 per cent said this was true in government and private hospitals. It should be clear that this is not a mandate under the MTP Act.

In 2007, a sessions court in Punjab observed that a woman’s decision to undergo an abortion without her husband’s consent amounted to cruelty and granted divorce to a man who alleged his “figure-conscious” wife did not inform him before terminating her pregnancy. The court admitted Kishan Chand’s divorce plea, noting that his wife Kanta Devi had treated him with cruelty by not sharing her abortion plans with him, allegedly abusing him and her in-laws, and filing harassment complaints against them.

In his order, Additional District Judge Atul Kumar Garg said, “The behaviour of the respondent (wife) coupled with other facts like getting abortions, taking away money and jewellery of the petitioner’s parents, and lodging of criminal complaints amounts to cruelty.”

The court’s order declared Devi’s abortion as “illegal” even though a woman is entitled to an abortion without her husband’s permission under the Act.

Dr Suchitra Dalvie of Asia Safe Abortion Partnership and Common Health says, “In addition to being seen as ‘immoral’ and ‘heartless’ it makes women feel even worse than they already do about having an unwanted pregnancy. All this turmoil occurs at a time when a woman needs care, support, and reassurance.”

A study among rural women suggests that 75 per cent of the women believe that medical abortion is different and more difficult than delivery. They referred to it as “washing the bag” or “emptying the bag”.

Most of the respondents did not know that it took less than three hours and instead estimated it to be 24 hours or more. A few women also mentioned and preferred local methods, such as inserting the roots of certain plants, still wet with sap, inside the cervix. In their perception, the root eventually “comes out with the whole thing”, which may take just a few hours or a day or more.

“The husband who keeps impregnating us and forces us to carry babies one after the other, refusing to use contraception or allowing us to use either, will never get to know about this,” a woman was quoted saying during the survey. However, some women pointed out that those who would like to preserve confidentiality would not make use of services in their own village.

They said, “If women started getting abortions in the village it might actually reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Men would be frightened that their names would become public if the women openly aborted the pregnancy in the village.”

Dr Apurva Gupta, a gynaecologist in Delhi, says these methods are highly unsafe. “A lot of women had to eventually undergo a hysterectomy due to infection. Quick-fix methods come in handy in the society we live in. It’s high time society treated abortions as a reality.”

While an MTP procedure is free, additional costs like travel and post-abortion care are not. A surgical evacuation at a private clinic may cost up to Rs. 10,000 excluding post-abortion care, according to Dr Gupta

***

Bhairavi, who recently married her longtime boyfriend, had an abortion before marriage. “I had always heard my mother mention to other women with a sense of pride, ‘I never had an abortion. Both my deliveries were also normal.’ As if it’s a woman’s mistake if she has a difficult pregnancy or gets pregnant when she does not want to,” says Bhairavi.

“It’s like a friend’s boyfriend debating with her on the method of abortion when she was pregnant recounting how his previous girlfriend who got pregnant adopted another method, not realising an absolute lack of empathy.”

Independent and forthright, she says, “Even when I had no moral scruples about abortion, the reaction of the gynaecologist made it sound like a sin. She gave me a long lecture on unprotected sex, which it was not. Mine was more of a case of contraceptive failure but because I was unmarried, I felt obligated to listen to her.” Bhairavi was even forced to take a vaccination for cervical cancer. “They were expensive but she justified it in the context of my pregnancy. I was too scared to question it at that stage.”

Most health insurance companies in India, except employees of the organised sector, the ESIS, CGHS, and the Railway Health Scheme, do not cover the cost of abortion. Last year, during the US presidential elections, it resonated across the world when they promised that health insurance policies they would bring in would not treat “being a woman as a pre-existing condition”. This is in the context of health companies overcharging women for the same health policies as men citing biological differences.

On the same lines, health insurance companies discriminate against women in India, keeping MTP procedures completely out of the ambit of the health policy. This continues unquestioned and is deemed unimportant by both the government and private players.

India is party to the Millennium Development Goals that are to be achieved by 2015 and which includes access to safe abortion, but the efforts are nowhere to be seen. While abortion cannot be seen as a substitute to contraception, limited access to contraception for women remains a major issue.

“Have you ever seen the reaction of people at a chemist’s when a girl buys contraceptives? She is scanned by all the eyes present in the shop,” says Bhairavi.

***

Kanti, 26, an ad-hoc teacher in Delhi University, detected her pregnancy within a week of missing her first periods. She and her partner visited the Aruna Asaf Ali government hospital at Rajpur road, in the vicinity of Delhi University. “‘Miss or Mrs.?’ the receptionist at the registration centre asked me. I replied Miss. He scanned me and my partner. This when till this moment, I had only mentioned that I want see a gynaecologist,” she remembers.

The doctor, a woman in her mid-50s, examined her. “The linen on the examination table was spotted. It freaked me out.” After examination, Kanti was told to collect her urine sample.

“The toilet was so littered and filthy that I threw up. I stepped out and left with my partner,” says Kanti. “I have always opposed privatisation of health care. I almost felt guilty consulting a private doctor and going ahead with a private clinic for my abortion.”

Similarly, Vandana, 39, a domestic maid, originally from Kharagpur, West Bengal, and now settled in Delhi, chose a private clinic over the government hospital for her 20-year-old daughter’s abortion.

Vandana’s daughter Chaitra got pregnant within two months of her marriage. “I convinced her and her husband to drop it since there was no source of income for them,” Vandana says.

“It’s been over a year since my neighbour underwent an abortion in the Madan Mohan Malviya government hospital and she is still being treated for infections. That’s why I took her to a private doctor.”

Chaitra underwent a safe abortion and began working as a cook in a South Delhi household to support herself and her husband two weeks after.

Both cases are telling. Even when government MTP centres provide abortion services free of charge, clean toilets, non-judgemental environment and quality services play a very important part in mushrooming private health care and the government’s complete surrender to it instead of pulling up its socks.

Abhijit Das, the director of the Center for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ) in New Delhi, refers to morning-after pills whose sales have increased by 250 per cent compared to last year in India.

He says, “They pushed iPills as an easy way to avoid pregnancy after the act, and so men could easily coax women into having unprotected sex. Such promotion furthers patriarchal values by allowing men to assume positions of power within a sexual relationship.”

Even tools to detect a pregnancy, like the newly-launched pregnancy kits, cost at least Rs. 50. Says Dr Apurva Gupta, “Why is the state not providing these kits free of cost at MTP centres? How many socio-economically dependent women can afford it?”

In a society, where women are raised to believe that becoming a mother is a social imperative, the physical, psychological and socioeconomic outcomes of abortion remain similar if not same for women across classes and matrimonial status. And discussions about abortions fail to evolve.

As Prerna puts it, “You have to first try to bury it and then forget about it. If you manage this much, it’s more than enough.”

(Some names have been changed.)

Correction: The Indian Penal Code of 1860 is referred to as such, although it came into effect in 1862.

Original Story