Tag Archive: Dalit

1. Anatomy of an Advocacy Journalism Project

   August 11, 2011 9:46 am Leave a Comment

   Nepali media tends to focus it’s reporting on the political leadership and its business: meetings, speeches, events, power struggles, etc. Most is rife with misinformation and lies – promises and actions occupy two segregated parallel universes in Nepali politics – but is reported nonetheless as is. It’s lazy and easy journalism, and social issues do not get the attention they deserve in the press.

   The Jagaran Media Center (JMC) is a Dalit caste run media house and NGO, focusing most of its activities on Dalit journalism and human rights training. The Dalits they represent are the untouchables and downtrodden of Nepal, constituting 20 to 25% of the population. They are the lowest caste of Nepali society, and are often denied basic human rights like access to land, food, water, shelter, education, honest jobs and wages, information, and security.

   Through the Hindu caste hierarchy system, the lowly Dalits are denied the freedom to marry other higher castes, and families face persecution in communities where inter-caste marriages do occur. Dalits are often raped, beaten, or killed for superstitious reasons, while many Dalit women are accused of witchcraft and force-fed their own feces when natural phenomena interfere with the natural cycle of things (i.e. a diseased cow dies in a community).

   Dalits are underrepresented (if at all) in Nepali politics and media, so their plight is generally ignored. Police rarely provide justice to victims of caste-discrimination cases, politicians languish in establishing enforceable socially equitable laws and upholding those that are passed, while the Nepali press does a poor job in reporting all things Dalit.

   Thus, the journalism project I am leading with Prakash Mohara of JMC comes in. The goals of the project are two pronged. One is to extract Dalit caste discrimination stories and cases out of communities in 10 different districts, while using our new network of grassroots civil society organizations (CSOs) to provide justice and democratic accountability to the community.

   In each of the 10 districts we’re targeting (three in the east, two in the north, five in the west), we have identified a Dalit journalist to report on caste discrimination cases. His or her duty is to report these stories (that would otherwise not get press coverage), and publish them on a blog we have set up and trained him/her on, which will be hosted on JMC’s redesigned website (about to be launched).

   Using this information, our partnered CSO in the district in question will attempt to provide justice and democratic accountability to those affected. Using Nepal’s new “untouchability” bill as legal strength in its investigation, the CSO will attempt to unite the community, police, victims, and perpetrators. The goal is provide justice to cases that otherwise wouldn’t receive it, while promoting a more transparent and honest Nepali democracy.

   The second goal is advocacy, both at a national and international level. By hosting the blogs of the 10-targeted journalists, along with profiles of the associated 10 CSOs, the JMC will have a new network of Dalit media spread across the country, reporting on Dalit issues. The JMC will be able to use these sources to lobby their established network of national media houses to cover the reported caste-abuse cases and follow-up activities. Further, the JMC will be able to more effectively lobby lawmakers in Kathmandu to be more cognizant and equitable in their judicial duties towards the Dalits, having documented cases of Dalit discrimination hosted on JMC’s website that cannot be ignored.

   At the international level, social media tools will be used extensively to advocate on behalf of the Dalits, and will try to attract international attention and pressure to the issues. Through avenues such as Twitter and Facebook, along with the JMC’s established network of international partners and organizations, it will reach out and try to engage the international community. Ultimate goals of these activities are to have Dalit cases brought forward and investigated at various human rights commissions (i.e. U.N.), and receive press coverage by popular international news outlets.

   Ultimately, the JMC aims to be a media hub for the Dalit cause in Nepal, and be the destination for Dalit news that generally gets ignored in most other media. The aim is to firmly establish the project, grow it organically and sustainably into other districts across the country, and partner with an international organization for support.

   The project is ambitious, with many moving pieces operating at once. However, it is realistic in its goals, and can achieve sustainable and influential results over the long run. There is potential for Dalit empowerment and promotion of a more inclusive and accountable Nepali society in the districts it operates, and is a formula that can be replicated through organic growth in other districts.

   If some have suggestions or tips for this project, please share them in the comments section. It’s only the beginning.

2. The elephant in the room, screaming for attention: South Asia’s environmental problem

   June 15, 2011 7:54 am 7 Comments

   You can see it in Kathmandu’s rivers, clogged of garbage and the occasional carcass. Slum kids play and bathe in these waters, sometimes directly below riverside pastures of buffalo, with their leaching refuse and all. If lucky, you can sometimes read it in the papers and hear it on the radio, with word of increasingly erratic monsoons, flash floods, and breached glacial lakes. You can also see it on these river embankments, where marginalized communities and castes are ghettoized into slums – forced to live at nature’s mercy, borrowed time, and within humanity’s excrement. The Dalits, and other untouchable castes, ghettoized to the margins of Kathmandu’s rivers, where nobody else dares to venture – a guaranteed location of untouchability.

   What you can see is the environmental crisis hitting Nepal and South Asia, and the pressures of economic development. Development begets consumption, and consumption begets pollution. As Asia’s population rises, so goes its pollution levels. And with an atmosphere being pumped full of greenhouse gas emissions without restraint by the global community, despite the dire warnings, an unfolding climate crisis is emerging. Social, political, economic, and environmental troubles await, requiring creative thinking by analysts and policy makers of every stripe.

   

   And that is the unfortunate part of articles like David Malone’s recent piece in The Globe and Mail, “India’s and China’s uncomfortable dance.” It neatly summarizes the usual issues of South Asian development, along with the security and political implications of two regional powers located in a volatile region full of nukes. Economic interests bind China and India’s foreign policy, so co-operation will likely emerge, albeit with some degree of competition. A demographic bulge is helping to fuel each country’s growth, which is helping them ease past this global recession. Malone concludes optimistically that, “[t]he continent and the rest of the globe are large enough to accommodate the peaceful rise of both.” Optimism and simplicity are always cherished in political analysis, but they cannot be stuck in a politico-social-economic and ecological environment of yesteryear, uninterested in thinking outside of the “International Relations 101” box. The huge elephant in the room that Malone ignores is the region’s environmental pressures.

   A quick 60-second Google search, or any two-minute phone conversation with an expert on the Asian or global environment will throw ones typical political and economic thinking into the dustbin. In Thomas Friedman’s recent piece “The Earth is Full,” he cites how civilisation’s consumption patterns are using the resources of 1.5 Earths, and growing. Most of the Himalyan glaciers that feed Asia’s rivers are melting faster than expected with global warming, and a water crisis in the region appears to be inevitable. The region’s water aquifers are also being drained at unprecedented rates due to growing agricultural and commercial demands, and nobody quite knows how much water is left. Sana, Yemen – that revolutionary hotbed and host to many Islamic extremists – could become the first major city in the world to run out of water, which could happen in the next few years.

   A recent report by the Norwegian Refugee Council states that 42 million people were displaced by sudden natural disasters in 2010, 90% of which were climate related. Over the past few years, the onslaught of natural disasters has increased substantially, as has the amount of climate refugees. Most of these refugees are unlikely to return home to their devastated and forever changed geographies, and will place their burdens on whichever country they land. And as for the Arab Spring – it’s widely acknowledged that one of the revolutionary sparks were high food prices, in part caused by climate change.

   So with the growing economies in India and China, with all their new factories, cars, clothes, television sets, and food, and consuming more water from the increasingly polluted rivers flowing from faster-than-previously-thought melting Himalayan glaciers and the Tibetan plateau, the world cannot accommodate a rise of both at current levels of growth, unless some miracle technologies present themselves. And for the rest of the region, a growing and consuming China and India present many problems. Many South Asian rivers are but a trickle as they reach some Asian country borders, with upstream dams, agriculture, and cities consuming most of the bounty.

   Malone is right when he says, “[w]hat happens over the coming decades in Asia, as its geopolitics undergo tectonic shifts, could affect us all, not least by either enhancing or disrupting international trade and hence our prosperity.” He’s right for reasons that his imagination dared not to think. They are the reasons why U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently warned of a creeping “new colonialism” in Africa, warning its people and leaders that foreign investors and governments are taking advantage of its natural resources. She warns of unsustainable projects by the Chinese, pillaging Africa’s natural resources, that will leave behind a scarred and empty environment. It’s a “tectonic shift” of transferring the burdens of ecological limits from one country to another, from one people to another.

   Most people in Nepal now talk about it. “Oh yes, climate change and the environment. Big problem in Nepal.” Yet nobody appears to be writing or doing anything seriously about it. In Nepal’s best bookstore, Vajra, I asked the manager if he has anything on the environment and climate change and politics in Nepal or South Asia. “Oh no, nothing has been written. Many people come in, asking about climate change. I know two French researchers are studying it right now, but that’s it.” Books on elephants, Nepali cultural dance, and books on just about anything else can be found at Vajra. But for that elephant in the room, dancing and screaming for attention, whose name dare not be mentioned in certain circles, no such luck in this bookstore. The same goes for most Nepali, and for that matter international, news outlets.

   And so it goes. Our inputs for analysis need to expand to include the ever increasingly polluted and abused ecological world.