[sustran] !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rosa Parks, the Power of Resistance and the Rape in the Bus in Delhi !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Sujit Patwardhan]

An excellent article by our friend Shri Vidyadhar Date.
Do read.
--
Sujit







http://www.countercurrents.org/date050113.htm




Rosa Parks, the Power of Resistance and the Rape in the Bus in Delhi

* *

*by Vidyadhar Date***



4 January, 2013

*T*his year marks the centenary of the birth of Rosa Parks, the young woman
who refused to give her seat to a white man in a bus and sparked the civil
rights movement in the days of segregation in the U.S. in 1955. Rosa
becomes all the more relevant to us in the context of the recent rape of
the girl in a Delhi bus and her murder.

Incidentally, resistance to injustice in public transport has triggered two
epoch making, peaceful protests. The first was Mahatma Gandhi’s in protest
against the humiliation he faced in the train in South Africa.

Rosa became a rallying figure in American history and went on to live for
another 50 years after her act of resistance. The Delhi girl medical
student became a victim at a young age but like Rosa she has triggered a
mass movement.

The nationwide protests in India have focused mainly on the issue of rape.
But these could as well extend to the arena of public transport because the
girl’s rape and death are directly related to the inadequacy of public
transport and the government’s abject failure to provide basic amenities to
the masses.

Rosa Parks, a black woman, was sitting in the rear portion of the bus
reserved for blacks. When a white man came in and the driver of the bus
asked her to offer her seat to him, she refused. For this she was arrested
. In protest there was a prolonged boycott of buses by the black community
which led to the resistance movement of the black people. Her resistance
was not an accident. She was for many years an activist in the movement for
the rights of the exploited people.

The resistance movement in the U.S. is relevant to India particularly
because public transport in the country is deteriorating even while the
government slavishly and brazenly encourages motor cars in contempt of the
national urban transport policy. The government does this by yielding to
the pressure from the car lobby which sees India as a focus area as the
market for cars is declining in the West. The State Bank of India routinely
gives front page advertisements in leading English language dailies
offering incentive loans to push the sale of motor cars. What a cruel irony
that this is the priority area for India’s oldest and biggest and
State-controlled bank. Has anyone ever seen a bank giving advertisements
offering loans for buying bicycles ? There are countless who need these.
But the banks want to bail out the automobile industry which is one of the
biggest drivers of capitalism for decades.

It is not only in the raped girl’s death that the government has blood on
its hand. It is the same story everywhere because of the government’s
policy. Many people are now falling to death from overcrowded trains in
Mumbai, the nation’s financial capital. So bad is the situation in the
Mumbai suburban railway network that the Marathi daily Prahar, controlled
by Maharashtra’s industries minister, described the Central Railway as the
Murderous Railway (Khooni Madhya Railway) in the heading of an editorial on
new year day. The minister Narayan Rane is a Congressman and an aspirant
for the chief minister’s job. The bitter editorial is a reflection of the
extreme anger among the people. It is only that people have not come out on
the streets in Mumbai. The government is extraordinarily lucky that they
have not.

Even the commissioner of railway safety (central circle), Mr Chetan Bakshi
has admonished the authorities for the shoddy `modernization’ work in
progress on the railway tracks. And even Mr Rakesh Saxena, managing
director of Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation, confessed at the urban mobility
conference in Delhi last month that the conditions in the suburban railway
for passengers were inhuman. That was much before the recent public outrage.

India has the disgraceful record of accounting for the highest number of
deaths in road crashes in the world. Most of the victims are poor people.
So what does the government care ? The government routinely observes a road
safety week annually in January as it is doing this week. That this is
routine in the extreme can be seen from the fact that road fatalities are
actually increasing by eight per cent every year, according to the
government’s own figures. And the actual toll may be much higher if one
sees how the police routinely refuse to register cases of road crashes
unless the case is serious . There is collusion at every level. One senior
surgeon in Mumbai had the temerity to enter the morgue of a public hospital
recently and perform an operation on a body and tamper with the evidence of
the accident. He was a complete outsider, he must have bribed someone and
obviously, he was trying to protect someone. That is how deep the rot is.
This means the poor not only lose life and limb their chances of getting
any sort of justice, any compensation become extremely slim because of the
callousness, or shall we say cruelty, of the authorities.

It is estimated that by the year 2030, the annual death toll on roads in
India would rise to 260,000 . This would be equal to deaths caused by
multiple plane crashes and terrorist attacks every month of the year. That
is the magnitude. This is particularly unacceptable because Western
governments have consistently brought down the number of deaths in their
countries.

A report on road safety prepared by a committee headed by Prof Dinesh Mohan
of IIT, Delhi, for the Planning Commission severely exposes several
sectors. It says there is a total lack of commitment on the part of policy
makers, designers, inventors, operators and researchers. There is too much
emphasis on the engineering aspect and neglect of many other aspects.
Safety is the first casualty of the PPP (public private participation)
model. Yet, observers point out this model is trumpeted by the authorities
day in and day out. It is a constant refrain in high level seminars. It is
a fraud. A retired senior government servant remarked recently that PPP was
actually an ATM (any time money) for politicians.

That the authorities have absolutely no regard for the basic rights and
amenities for the people and are obsessed with elitist schemes for the
benefit of the rich is clear from this example. The Maharashtra State Road
Development Corporation (MSRDC) has for its main priority currently a
project to create a Formula 1 racing track on the outskirts of Mumbai and
using hundreds of acres of precious land in the process. Of course, there
is no demand from anyone for this utterly wasteful and unnecessary project.
Such projects are increasingly coming under attack in the West. The
authorities have the gall to claim in their website that this will help
transform Mumbai into a major tourist and sports destination and enhance
its global image. They should know that the country already has one and the
new race track in Delhi has a poor record.

So let the poor fall from overcrowded trains and be run over by the cars of
the arrogant, drunken rich but we will cater to the demands of the
international car lobby and promote the cult of vehicular speed making it
more difficult for people even to cross the road.

The venue of the launch of the road safety week in Mumbai on January 1 at
Marine Drive in Mumbai seems like a cruel joke.It is the most unsafe place
to reach on foot. Since this is a time for some reflection for politicians,
the chief minister would do well to cross the road from Talk of the Town
restaurant to Marine Drive without any escort and go incognito. True, there
are good officers in the police but they are in a minority.

Coming back to Rosa Parks. She is one of the best inspirations in the
present times particularly since women are now coming out into the open to
reclaim their space, their rights. The American right wing tried to
appropriate her legacy. When she died in 2005 , her body lay in state in
the Rotunda of Capitol Hill. A critic bitterly noted that here lay in 1972
the body of J Edgar Hoover who had worked to destroy everything Rosa Parks
stood for. For half a century, he waged a war against blacks, homosexuals
and Communists. Similarly, vested interests will try to appropriate the
raped medical student, the victim. They will try to deflect attention from
the circumstances through some gestures which will be basically empty.

We do have an apartheid though it is of a different kind from the one that
Rosa Parks fought. Delhi particularly is a stark example. It has the most
naked disparities in transport. It has more cars than Mumbai, Kolkata and
Chennai totally have. So while the rich travel in air conditioned comfort
and at breakneck speed in their cars on Delhi’s wide roads, young girls
struggle to travel in constant dread in public transport buses. That is why
the fighting spirit of Rosa Parks is relevant to us.

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*Vidyadhar Date* is a senior journalist and author of the book

“Traffic in the Era of Climate Change: Walking, Cycling, Public Transport
Need Priority”.

Email: datebandra at yahoo.com.



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[image: Inline image 1]

*Parisar*

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Sujit Patwardhan
patwardhan.sujit at gmail.com
sujit at parisar.org <sujitjp at gmail.com>
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