Communalism Watch: Striving for Justice: Case of Naroda Patia

Communalism Watch: Striving for Justice: Case of Naroda Patia:

September 08, 2012

Striving for Justice: Case of Naroda Patia

Striving for Just Society

Ram Puniyani

The verdict of magistrate Dr. Jyotsna Yagnik, sentencing Dr. Maya Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and others to long imprisonment (31 August, 2012) has come as a big relief to the victims of Naroda Patiya, for whom it was like return of Eid to their houses. Naroda Patiya had witnessed horrific carnage and acts of rape in 2002 and this judgment will give a solace to the victims and their near and dear ones’. This judgment came as a culmination of the mammoth efforts of the human rights activists, the victims, the witnesses and the team of legal activists who stood all the opposition form every conceivable quarter to ensure that justice is done in the case. The adage that ‘there can’t be peace without justice’ has been redeemed with this court judgment.

This judgment also puts right various misconceptions deliberately propagated by communal forces. First and foremost was that the Gujarat violence was a reaction to the Godhra train burning. By now this is believed by most of the sections of society, more so by the communalized sections of society all over and more so in Gujarat. The judge made it clear that “thousands of persons…attacked weaponless and frightened victims with intention, pre planning while sharing common objects”. It was not a spontaneous reaction to burning of train in Godhra. Rather Godhra train burning was used subtly as a justification for the preplanned pogrom. Communal forces tried to pass it off as ‘natural anger’ which the state could not control. Contrary to this perception, now court has ruled that it was a deliberately planned carnage, using the Godhra incident as a mere pretext to consolidate communal polarization in the state of Gujarat.

India has witnessed so many communal riots, acts of violence. Lately these riots have been assuming the form of well organized pogroms. This finding of Human Rights groups and the report of Citizens for Justice and peace gets validated through this judgment, for sure. So far the trend has been that the innocents have been killed in the violence and the perpetrators of violence have gone scot free. Now it seems that with the human rights defenders tightening their belts can set right the adverse trend, where guilty were getting away without any punishment. In this case human rights defenders have put in all the efforts to reverse the prevalent trend due to which the perpetrators of crime were more or less sure that they can get away with their crimes and consolidate their politics.

For once the message is loud and clear that the automatic mechanisms of justice delivery system are not effective and a super human efforts by dedicated human rights defenders like Teesta Setalvad, Gagan Sethi, Harsh Mander, Yusuf Muchala, Mukul Sinha, Govind Parmar and many others like them, working through different angles, supplementing each other’s efforts can ensure that justice is done. They had to plug the leaks in the system to ensure that victims are protected, witnesses are protected, the complaints, FIRs are properly recorded, and to see that all the hurdles to justice are overcome.

The first question which comes to mind is, will this state of affairs continue like this where nothing short of super human efforts, protecting-sustaining the victims and witnesses against heavy odds will be needed for getting justice. Society and the nation needs to plug the loopholes in the policing system, in the bureaucratic apparatus and in the attitude of political leadership so that the justice delivery becomes a matter of routine rather than an exception. Victims of so many riots, pogroms are still awaiting justice, Bhagalpur, Delhi and Mumbai to name the few, still have not got the justice.

This brings to our attention another aspect of the violence, those who led it. Dr. Maya Kodnani came up through Rashtra Sevikasamiti, an organization subordinate to Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, RSS. One notes incidentally that in RSS worldview, women don’t have a swayam (Self) as is manifest in the name of Rashtra Sevikasamiti. Also that Maya Kodnani was sitting MLA, and after the pogrom and her role in it, inciting the mob, distributing fuel and armaments, she was promoted to the level of minister and once she was charged with the role in violence, she was dumped from the ministry and disowned by the state Government. Section of RSS followers in VHP etc. are protesting against the judgment. As such the standard technique for RSS stable is that, once its members-followers undertake the crime, murder of Gandhi, burning of Pastor Stains, or play their part in terror attack, they are declared not to be having any association with the parent organization, whose ideology they are living and breathing through their actions. Kodnani for certain reasons did say that she was victim of politics! What does this mean? While this statement is a mystery, one hopes the meaning of this victimhood comes out one of the days in future.

Babu Bajrangi is another character, whose revelations in Tehelka were nothing less than shocking. He said they have been given time for three days, and that his team-associates are playing not the test cricket but one day match, where high score is to made in short time. And that after killing the hapless Muslims he felt like Rana Pratap. One wishes he knew that Rana Pratap was not killing in the name of religion, he was fighting other kings for power and that in his army there were Muslims soldiers as well. One of the his army generals who died while fighting for Rana Pratap was Hakim Khan Sur, whose tomb is there in the Haldi Ghati even now. How distortions of medieval history are done deliberately to incite hate becomes clear again.

And what is happening to the conscience of Narendra Modi, who has been the major beneficiary of the carnage of 2002? Any remorse, any tears for at least those who were reporting to him during the carnage, whom he promoted for their role in the violence and now are being punished by the due process of law?

One hopes that we recast our laws and system to ensure that the violence is punished in due course and that this punishment acts as a deterrent and ensures that in future such inhuman dastardly acts don’t repeat themselves. This welcome judgment also leaves a few questions, what about those who faulted in the discharge of their duties to protect the innocents, to register their legitimate complains, and to nail the guilty as a matter of their assigned duty? We do need to work towards a system where to begin with such hate crimes don’t take place, and if by chance such a tragedy is engineered by some political forces, we have the system in place which can check it right away and punish those who are either conspiring, or executing or are not controlling those dastardly acts. One hopes that the human rights defenders will be on their tip toes to come forward with such yeomen efforts to have a society with justice and peace.  

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Communalism Watch: Meghnad Desai’s take on Gita irks Bihar Religious Trust

Communalism Watch: Meghnad Desai’s take on Gita irks Bihar Religious Trust:

September 20, 2012

Meghnad Desai’s take on Gita irks Bihar Religious Trust

From: Hindustan Times

Lord Meghnad Desai’s take on Gita sparks row

HT Correspondent, Hindustan Times
Patna, September 08, 2012

Bihar Religious Trust Board chairman Acharya Kishore Kunal on Friday said Lord Meghnad Desai's interpretation of Bhagvad Gita had not only hurt the religious sentiments of millions of Hindus but also 'insulted' martyrs who sacrificed their lives for motherland with Gita in their hands and its

words on their lips.

"If the Gita which was called 'The Celestial Song' by Sir Edwin Arnold when he translated it into English, appears to Desai as 'a short sharp rebuke to Arjun', then one can pity the intellectual bankruptcy of Desai in the field of Indian philosophy, though he may be an intellectual giant in Economics," Kunal said.
In course of a lecture on Bhagvad Gita recently, Desai had said that Kurukshetra war was fought over land dispute and Krishna's sermon to Arjun to fulfill his caste obligation.
Kunal said the sermon to Arjun was not to fulfill his caste-dependant obligation of a Kshatriya but to fight and kill the enemies without thinking the consequence. "Arjun was the main warrior from the Pandava side and he refused to fight in the most crucial war. It was imperative on the part of any higher authority to advise him to fight and fight relentlessly. If in the war against Pakistan Jagjit Singh Arora would have refused to fight in the last moment, thinking that thousands of soldiers would die, India would not have won," Kunal said.
Contending Desai's arguments, Kunal said it was not for land dispute but a right had been denied to the Pandava. "If Desai's argument is followed, India should surrender the territories claimed by China and Pakistan," he said.
Kunal said Desai's conclusion that the Gita was written to praise the top two 'Varnas' and to abuse the Vaishya and Shudras was to provoke caste tension in the country. "Gita is the first text in Indian context which prescribes 'Varna' on the basis of 'Guna' (merit) and 'Karma' (performance) and not on birth. It does not hold any distinction between a highly qualified Brahmin and pariah. Krishna calls himself a friend of all creatures," he said.
"It can be understood that Britishers, who ruled India, tried to divide India socially but it is difficult to pursue the agenda of a person who is enjoying benefits of two countries and is trying to divide the society by such lectures. I fail to understand wherefrom Dr Desai gets impression from the Gita that it is a Brahmanical weapon against Buddhism. It is a pre-Buddhist text and therefore there is not a single reference to any Buddhist term in the Gita," he added.
Dr Desai's contention that the text of the Gita was written in three periods spanning 900 years is the imagination of some western scholars as they have not provided any proof or sound reasoning. It is beyond comprehension that the 18th canto of the Gita which is core to its tenets appears irrelevant to Dr Desai. It shows his superficial knowledge of the Gita. The Emeritus Professor of Economics should desist from giving lecture on a topic which has been so dear to the Indians that Raja Ranjit Singh had wished that the Gita should be placed at his heart at the time of his death.

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FOCUS: Challenging the NDAA: We Won - For Now

FOCUS: Challenging the NDAA: We Won - For Now:

Chris Hedges' Columns

We Won—for Now

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Posted on Sep 17, 2012

AP/John Minchillo

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, who is suing the government over a controversial provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, is seen here addressing a crowd in New York’s Zuccotti Park.

By Chris Hedges

In January I sued President Barack Obama over Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorized the military to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, strip them of due process and hold them in military facilities, including offshore penal colonies. Last week, round one in the battle to strike down the onerous provision, one that saw me joined by six other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, ended in an unqualified victory for the public. U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest, who accepted every one of our challenges to the law, made her temporary injunction of the section permanent. In short, she declared the law unconstitutional.

Almost immediately after Judge Forrest ruled, the Obama administration challenged the decision. Government prosecutors called the opinion “unprecedented” and said that “the government has compelling arguments that it should be reversed.” The government added that it was an “extraordinary injunction of worldwide scope.” Government lawyers asked late Friday for an immediate stay of Forrest’s ban on the use of the military in domestic policing and on the empowering of the government to strip U.S. citizens of due process. The request for a stay was an attempt by the government to get the judge, pending appeal to a higher court, to grant it the right to continue to use the law. Forrest swiftly rejected the stay, setting in motion a fast-paced appeal to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and possibly, if her ruling is upheld there, to the Supreme Court of the United States. The Justice Department sent a letter to Forrest and the 2nd Circuit late Friday night informing them that at 9 a.m. Monday the Obama administration would ask the 2nd Circuit for an emergency stay that would lift Forrest’s injunction. This would allow Obama to continue to operate with indefinite detention authority until a formal appeal was heard. The government’s decision has triggered a constitutional showdown between the president and the judiciary. 

“This may be the most significant constitutional standoff since the Pentagon Papers case,” said Carl Mayer, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs.

“The administration of President Obama within the last 48 hours has decided to engage in an all-out campaign to block and overturn an order of a federal judge,” said co-lead counsel Bruce Afran. “As Judge Forrest noted in her opinion, nothing is more fundamental in American law than the possibility that journalists, activists and citizens could lose their liberty, potentially forever, and the Obama administration has now lined up squarely with the most conservative elements of the Republican Party to undermine Americans’ civil liberties.”

The request by the government to keep the law on the books during the appeal process raises a disturbing question. If the administration is this anxious to restore this section of the NDAA, is it because the Obama government has already used it? Or does it have plans to use the section in the immediate future?

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“A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots [in the Middle East] are likely to come to the U.S. and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran said. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA—so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected. The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.”

The decision to vigorously fight Forrest’s ruling is a further example of the Obama White House’s steady and relentless assault against civil liberties, an assault that is more severe than that carried out by George W. Bush. Obama has refused to restore habeas corpus. He supports the FISA Amendment Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution has traditionally been illegal—warrantless wire tapping, eavesdropping and monitoring directed against U.S. citizens. He has used the Espionage Act six times against whistle-blowers who have exposed government crimes, including war crimes, to the public. He interprets the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act as giving him the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. And now he wants the right to use the armed forces to throw U.S. citizens into military prisons, where they will have no right to a trial and no defined length of detention.

Liberal apologists for Barack Obama should read Judge Forrest’s 112-page ruling. It is a chilling explication and denunciation of the massive erosion of the separation of powers. It courageously challenges the overreach of Congress and the executive branch in stripping Americans of some of our most cherished constitutional rights.

In the last 220 years there have been only about 135 judicial rulings that have struck down an act of Congress. Most of the cases involved abortion or pornography. Very few dealt with wartime powers and the separation of powers, or what Forrest in her opinion called “a question of defining an individual’s core liberties.”

(Page 2)By Chris Hedges

Section 1021(b)(2) authorizes the military to detain any U.S. citizen who “substantially supported” al-Qaida, the Taliban or “associated forces” and then hold them in military compounds until “the end of hostilities.” The vagueness of the language, and the refusal to exempt journalists, means that those of us who as part of our reporting have direct contact with individuals or groups deemed to be part of a terrorist network can find ourselves seized and detained under the provision.

“The Government was unable to offer definitions for the phrases ‘substantially support’ or ‘directly support,’ ” the judge wrote. “In particular, when the Court asked for one example of what ‘substantially support’ means, the Government stated, ‘I’m not in a position to give one specific example.’ When asked about the phrase ‘directly support,’ the Government stated, ‘I have not thought through exactly and we have not come to a position on ‘direct support’ and what that means.’ In its pre-trial memoranda, the Government also did not provide any definitional examples for those terms.”

The judge’s ruling asked whether a news article deemed by authorities as favorable to the Taliban could be interpreted as having “substantially supported” the Taliban.

“How about a YouTube video?” she went on. “Where is the line between what the government would consider ‘journalistic reporting’ and ‘propaganda?’ Who will make such determinations? Will there be an office established to read articles, watch videos, and evaluate speeches in order to make judgments along a spectrum of where the support is ‘modest’ or ‘substantial?’ ”

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Forrest concurred with the plaintiffs that the statute violated our free speech rights and due-process guarantees. She noted that “the Court repeatedly asked the Government whether those particular past activities could subject plaintiffs to indefinite detention; the Government refused to answer.” The judge went on to criticize the nebulous language of the law, chastising the government because it “did not provide particular definitions.” She wrote that “the statute’s vagueness falls far short of what due process requires.” 

Although government lawyers argued during the trial that the law represented no change from prior legislation, they now assert that blocking it imperils the nation’s security. It is one of numerous contradictions in the government’s case, many of which were illuminated in Forrest’s opinion. The government, she wrote, “argues that no future administration could interpret § 1021(b)(2) or the AUMF differently because the two are so clearly the same. That frankly makes no sense, particularly in light of the Government’s inability at the March and August hearings to define certain terms in—or the scope of—§ 1021(b)(2).” The judge said that “Section 1021 appears to be a legislative attempt at an ex post facto ‘fix’: to provide the President (in 2012) with broader detention authority than was provided in the AUMF [Authorization to Use Military Force Act] in 2001 and to try and ratify past detentions which may have occurred under an overly-broad interpretation of the AUMF.”

The government, in effect, is attempting to push though a law similar to the legislation that permitted the government to intern 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. This law, if it comes back into force, would facilitate the mass internment of Muslim Americans as well as those deemed to “support” groups or activities defined as terrorist by the state. Calling the 1944 ruling “an embarrassment,” Forrest referred toKorematsu v. United States, which upheld the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans. 

The judge said in her opinion that the government “did not submit any evidence in support of its positions. It did not call a single witness, submit a single declaration, or offer a single document at any point during these proceedings.” She went on to write that she found “the testimony of each plaintiff credible.”

“At the March hearing, the Court asked whether Hedges’ activities could subject him to detention under § 1021; the Government stated that it was not prepared to address that question. When asked a similar question at the August hearing, five months later, the Government remained unwilling to state whether any of plaintiffs’ (including Hedges’s) protected First Amendment future activities could subject him or her to detention under § 1021. This Court finds that Hedges has a reasonable fear of detention pursuant to § 1021(b)(2).”

The government has now lost four times in a litigation that has gone on almost nine months. It lost the preliminary injunction in May. It lost a motion for reconsideration shortly thereafter. It lost the permanent injunction. It lost its request last week for a stay. We won’t stop fighting this, but it is deeply disturbing that the Obama administration, rather than protecting our civil liberties and democracy, insists on further eroding them by expanding the power of the military to seize U.S. citizens and control our streets.

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Long-Term Care Looms as Rising Medicaid Cost - NYTimes.com

Long-Term Care Looms as Rising Medicaid Cost - NYTimes.com:

With Medicaid, Long-Term Care of Elderly Looms as a Rising Cost

Niko J. Kallianiotis for The New York Times

Rena Lull and her daughter, also named Rena, at Otsego Manor nursing home near Cooperstown, N.Y. Mrs. Lull, 92, spent the last of her life savings on $250-a-day nursing home care.

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: September 6, 2012 314 Comments

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Medicaid has long conjured up images of inner-city clinics jammed with poor families. Its far less-visible role is as the only safety net for millions of middle-class people whose needs for long-term care, at home or in a nursing home, outlast their resources.

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• The New Old Age Blog: Court: You Can Appeal Medicare Decisions About Hospice Services(September 7, 2012)

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Niko J. Kallianiotis for The New York Times

Wendy James, 37, at the Dumont nursing home in New Rochelle, N.Y., with her mother, Elaine, 76, who has dementia.

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With baby boomers and their parents living longer than ever, few families can count on their own money to go the distance. So while Medicare has drawn more attention in the election campaign, seniors and their families may have even more at stake in the future of Medicaid changes — those proposed, and others already under way.

Though former President Bill Clinton overstated in his convention speech on Wednesday how much Medicaid spends on the elderly in nursing homes — they account for well under a third, not nearly two-thirds, of spending — Medicaid spends more than five times as much on each senior in long-term care as it does on each poor child, and even more per person on the disabled in long-term care.

Seniors like Rena Lull, 92, who spent the last of her life savings on $250-a-day nursing home care near Cooperstown, N.Y., last year, will face uncharted territory if Republicans carry out their plan to replace Medicaid with block grants that cut spending by a third over a decade.

The move would let states change minimum eligibility, standards of care, and federal rules that now protect adult children from being billed for their parents’ Medicaid care.

Now, like a vast majority of the nation’s 1.8 million nursing home residents, Mrs. Lull, a retired schoolteacher withdementia, counts on Medicaid to cover most of her bill. But her daughter Rena, 66, also a retired schoolteacher with a lifetime of savings, no longer knows what she can count on in her own old age.

“I get choked up thinking about this,” she said, recalling how her widowed mother had depleted $300,000 on five years of care in the community and one year in the Otsego Manor nursing home, before qualifying for Medicaid. “I’m so scared about what’s going to happen to me.”

The presidential election may decide Medicaid’s future. But many states faced with rising Medicaid costs and budget deficits are already trying to cut the cost of long-term care by profoundly changing Medicaid coverage, through the use of federal waivers.

Waivers sought or obtained by 26 states, including New York, California, Illinois and Texas, would affect some three million people, most of them eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare. Plans vary, but typically they try to cut costs by giving private managed-care organizations a fixed sum for a lifetime of care, from doctor and hospital visits to help at home to nursing home placement, expecting that more care will take place in less expensive settings.

Over all, 31.5 percent of Medicaid’s $400 billion in shared federal and state spending goes to long-term care for the elderly and the disabled. That ranges from less than 8 percent in Hawaii, where nursing home use is low, to more than 60 percent in North Dakota.

Many people assume that Medicare will cover long-term care, but at most it covers 100 days of rehabilitation, not so-called custodial care — the help with activities of daily life, like eating and bathing, that the aged can need for years.

To be eligible for Medicaid, however, a person typically can have no more than $14,800 in assets, and though some lawyers specialize in setting up trusts that shelter certain assets, the federal government has periodically closed loopholes that allowed it.

Mrs. Lull, who married her Ithaca College sweetheart, also a teacher, when he was in the Air Force in 1944, and carried their twin girls home in a laundry basket, is required to pay all but $50 a month of her $969 income from Social Security and a pension toward the Medicaid cost of her shared room. Her case is typical, in that she cared for her husband before his death at home at 83.

Few Americans buy private long-term care insurance, and such insurance was dropped from the Affordable Care Act last year as actuarially unsound or unaffordable.

“More than $80,000 a year on average for a nursing home — who can sustain that?” said Robyn Grant, director of public policy and advocacy for the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long Term Care. “We’re forced, most of us, to go onto Medicaid. People don’t realize this.”

No state has a more ambitious plan to overhaul Medicaid than New York, which has the biggest Medicaid budget in the country — $54 billion — and spends about 41 percent of it for long-term care, almost half on nursing homes. Jason A. Helgerson, the state’s Medicaid chief, calls the redesign “a multiyear march away from fee-for-service” that he says will flatten the spending rate even as the population ages.

By 2015, New York will start requiring some 78,000 nursing home residents to choose one of several managed care plans or be enrolled randomly. The plans are already enrolling tens of thousands of elderly and disabled New York City residents who now receive more than 120 hours a week of government-paid help at home, with those in other downstate counties next.

“We in New York are committed to using this as a force for good,” Mr. Helgerson said, noting that such services, including the largest home care program in the country, have long been exempted from managed care. “By keeping people healthy, by keeping them out of unnecessarily restrictive, institutional settings, we can keep the program sustainable in the long run.”

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The Other Medicaid Beneficiaries

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• The New Old Age Blog: Court: You Can Appeal Medicare Decisions About Hospice Services(September 7, 2012)

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Around the country, however, some health policy analysts doubt that managed care will save money, and advocates for the aging and disabled worry that the sickest and most vulnerable people may be hurt in the process.

“Managed care isn’t going to help — it’s just more money going off the top,” said Toby Edelman, senior policy attorney in the Washington office of the Center for Medicare Advocacy, who has written on the importance of Medicaid to Medicare beneficiaries and their middle class relatives. “The managed care company has to take its cut.”

There is too little evidence available to evaluate whether managed care itself really saves money in long-term care, said H. Stephen Kaye, a professor at the Institute on Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco.

“One of the problems with the rush to do this is there isn’t a lot of knowledge about what measures should be used or how to track this,” Dr. Kaye said, noting that his analysis of 15 years of data from many states concluded that the gradual expansion of home and community services saves modest amounts, but that a rapid expansion can actually cost a state more.

While home care is generally much cheaper than nursing homes, Dr. Kaye said, states may wind up unleashing a pent-up demand for home care from eligible people who would never have entered a nursing home anyway. And, he added, the financial incentives for home care do not guarantee quality.

“It needs to be monitored with a lot of oversight,” he said.

In July, John D. Rockefeller IV, the Democratic senator from West Virginia who came up with the language allowing some of the most ambitious waivers, wrote Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, asking her to “take immediate steps to halt this initiative.” He complained that instead of rigorous demonstrations aimed at improving care, some states were shifting whole populations into untried programs.

A spokeswoman for the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it was “working carefully to develop new ideas to better coordinate care with appropriate safeguards to protect beneficiaries.”

Under the block grant vision of Medicaid, that federal role in oversight would end. Richard J. Herrick, president of the New York State Health Facilities Association, a trade group, says that since Medicaid rates have been cut well below cost, he would welcome a change in rules that would let nursing homes bill families for their elders’ care, in addition to what Medicaid pays.

Advocates for the elderly say that such a change would increase the burden of care already carried by many families.

Wendy James spent nine years and thousands of dollars struggling to keep her mother safe at home with her in Yonkers, in Westchester County. Her big mistake, she says now, was not filing a Medicaid application sooner.

Her mother, Elaine, 76, formerly a secretary in a doctor’s office in Manhattan, had to quit work when she developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. As the illness worsened, Ms. James’s father, now 80, retired from his job in a department store to help care for his wife. When she needed an adult day program in a nursing home, which rose to $2,400 a month, the family paid out of pocket. And Ms. James, 37, who works for a medical billing company, paid up to $1,000 a month for her mother’s medications when she hit her Medicare prescription “doughnut hole.”

A 2009 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that direct, out-of-pocket spending by individuals and families accounts for 22 percent of the $178 billion spent on nursing homes.

Mrs. James is now in a New Rochelle nursing home, where Medicaid pays the bill. Her husband travels daily to spoon-feed lunch to her in the nursing home’s chaotic day room. Ms. James feeds her mother every evening after work, rubbing her cheek to remind her to swallow.

“I did what I had to do for her,” said Ms. James, the youngest of three siblings. “She was the best mom before she got sick.”

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Should Dow Chemical clean up Bhopal mess? Should not it? - sandip.kumar.dasverma@gmail.com - Gmail

Should Dow Chemical clean up Bhopal mess? Should not it? - sandip.kumar.dasverma@gmail.com - Gmail:

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The Naroda Patia verdict has renewed public faith in the judicial system - Times Of India

The Naroda Patia verdict has renewed public faith in the judicial system - Times Of India:

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Kodnani is no less guilty than Kasab | The Asian Age by Antara Dev Sen

Kodnani is no less guilty than Kasab | The Asian Age: "sen@littlemag.com"

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Kodnani is no less guilty than Kasab

Sep 01, 2012

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Antara Dev Sen

Kodnani helped kill 35 kids, 32 women and 30 men. Almost as a reward, Mr Modi made her state minister for women & child development.

Our justice system presented us with two enormously important judgments on Wednesday, August 29. Both were about mass murder. Both were about massacres that had horrified the nation. Both had a sectarian angle. Both verdicts proclaimed that there was a larger conspiracy and meticulous planning behind the mass murders. Both found the accused guilty of pre-meditated mass murder.

But we responded to these two verdicts very differently. Which once again gives away our shameful prejudices, mindless priorities and silent fears.
The Supreme Court verdict on Ajmal Kasab upheld his death penalty awarded by the Bombay high court for the Mumbai terror attacks on November 26, 2008. And the verdict of a special court convicted 32, including two powerful political figures, for the Naroda Patiya massacre in Gujarat in 2002. Sentencing is awaited as I write this. The death sentence is a possibility, but life imprisonment is more likely. Especially given the VIPs convicted, and the fact that as far as I remember no one has got the death sentence for the massacre of Muslims in the post-Godhra violence till now. The only ones sentenced to death for the 2002 violence were 11 Muslims convicted of the Godhra train burning.
The SC’s verdict on Ajmal Kasab, a terrorist responsible for the “26/11” attack on Mumbai, was a foregone conclusion. Kasab was a self-confessed Pakistani terrorist, the only one captured alive of the 10 attackers who killed 166 in Mumbai, and his chance of escaping the death sentence was practically non-existent. But the 32 Indian citizens of Gujarat, convicted of murder and criminal conspiracy in the Naroda Patiya massacre that left 97 dead in 2002, had every chance of getting away with murder, like thousands of their fellow killers. And thus the conviction — especially of sitting MLA, former minister and Narendra Modi’s close aide Maya Kodnani and Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi — made us sit up. Such verdicts were not for powerful folk. Whatever happened to our carefully nurtured political culture of impunity?
So our belligerent baying for Kasab’s blood is in stark contrast to our cautious, measured and often defensive response to the conviction of Kodnani and Bajrangi, along with 30 others. Even the media shows double standards in the way it humanises the ruthless killers who gleefully butchered 97 in Naroda Patiya, while demonising Kasab, who with his partner, shot dead 58 at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST).
We are offered heart-wrenching images of weeping mothers, wives and sisters of the killers of Naroda Patiya. Killers who blocked escape routes and hacked to death little children and women, burnt babies alive, set fire to helpless old people and terrified men, women and children, raped and tortured their victims before burning them alive. Killers who slashed open the belly of pregnant women to carve out the womb and kill the foetus before the mother. Ten years later, when gruesome details of their brutality have faded, must we share the sorrow of these killers’ families hurt by justice? And if we are to look at the human face of inhuman killers, why don’t we witness the sorrow of Kasab’s mother, too? Dear God, no! That would be treason!
Hang Kasab publicly, demanded some of our political leaders, who would clearly prefer lynching to our staid process of justice. The Shiv Sena demanded that he be hanged at CST. “Does the government have the guts to carry out the sentence?” challenged Uddhav Thackeray.
In fact, our netas are falling over each other to insist on Kasab’s hanging right here, right now. It seems to be the only way to assert their patriotism. So BJP spokesperson Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi roars: “Kasab should be hanged without delay! Enough of biryani for him!” We even grudge him the basic jail food. And we hate the fact that Kasab has a right to appeal for mercy. Even a former solicitor-general of India, Harish Salve, raged that Kasab’s mercy plea, if there is one, should not be entertained at all by the government. And the Shiv Sena plans to seek amendments to Article 72 of the Constitution so that only Indians can seek clemency. “Are our laws meant for Indians or Pakistani nationals?” shouts Mr Thackeray.
So go get the hangman. The last hangman in the region, the old, infirm and very retired Arjun Jadhav, has agreed to do the honours. Not necessary, says Swati Sathe, a top cop in Maharashtra and former jailer of Arthur Road prison which holds Kasab. We could do it. Cops could legitimately hang him. “I would not have flinched if I was ordered to hang Kasab,” says she.
In contrast, those screaming loudest for Kasab’s blood practically dismiss the Naroda Patiya verdict as irrelevant. The BJP talks of “progress” and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s “good governance”, and brushes aside lesser “issues like this conviction”. Clearly, mass murders and conspiracy to massacre by an outsider is unforgivable, deserving of the highest punishment. But mass murders and conspiracy to massacre by our own leaders and elected representatives is not. Why is butchering those you are supposed to protect using the state machinery and public money and then using the state machinery to shield oneself less of a crime than murdering unknown people in a no-holds barred suicide attack?
Let’s look at Kodnani. This BJP MLA is a gynaecologist, and has been the trusted representative of Naroda for years. The doctor knew her locality well, and helped kill 35 children, 32 women and 30 men by supplying the rioters with information, access, weapons and fuel. Almost as a reward, she was made state minister for women and child development by Mr Modi.
I am not in favour of capital punishment. But I believe we must reduce our double standards in justice delivery. The SC says it has no option but to hang Kasab because he was part of a conspiracy to wage war against India and fuel communal tension. We leap in joy. But neither we nor the courts talk of waging war against the very idea of India, and fuelling communal tension by ruthless sectarian massacres by trusted state agents. That’s a war that can destroy India from within. And for ever. It is far more dangerous than sporadic terrorist attacks by outsiders.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com

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