BACKGROUND

Chithralekha, a Dalit woman, from Payyanur in Kannur, Kerala, was one of the first woman auto drivers to enter a workplace dominated by men from higher castes. Right from the beginning there was a strong resistance to her and there was a three month delay in giving her a membership of the union. Later, when she went on to become an efficient and extremely popular auto rickshaw driver, the resistance against her took a violent turn. Soon she was subject to many acts of workplace harassment by her fellow auto drivers. On one occasion, the hood of her auto was torn off, she was called derogatory caste names, and a fellow driver even tried to run her over with his vehicle. Chithralekha protested against this, lodging complaints with the police and even managing to get one of the workers arrested with the help of a local Dalit activist. In the course of her protest, she also brought to light the fact that her district and locality still practiced untouchability, albeit in modern forms. Once the issue went outside the purview of the local auto stand, the CITU and the local CPI (M) goons adopted a new tactic and started tarnishing her image with wide spread poster campaigns. Through these posters, Chithralekha was branded as a sexually loose woman, a woman who drinks, whose mother was a sex worker, who talks like a man, who does not listen and who does not know how to behave. With such a campaign, Chithralekha lost all support in the locality.

On December 30th, 2005, they burned down her auto, depriving her of her only source of livelihood. However, Chithralekha continued with her struggle and managed to procure a new auto through her association with various Dalit, Feminists and Citizen’s initiatives in June 2008. Chithralekha had been slowly trying to get on with her life, though she and her husband were often being attacked in various ways by the local CITU. It was at this point that the current incident occurred.

THE CURRENT INCIDENT

On the morning of 20th January 2010, Chithralekha (along with her husband Shreeshanth) who was about to park her auto rickshaw in front of a medical shop, was asked to move her vehicle from the parking spot by one Mr Ramachandran who is an office bearer of the CITU auto rickshaw Union in Payyanur. When Chithralekha protested, an altercation followed between them and the CITU workers started beating her up. Soon, a police jeep arrived and bundled the couple into the vehicle. They were taken to the police station and severely beaten up. Later she was allowed to go without even registering a case!! She has visible wounds all over her body and has had to go to the hospital twice after the incident. Moreover, she is unable to move out of her house or drive her auto as she is afraid of further violence. Shockingly there is very little media coverage of this issue and no local support available to her in defending against the attack.

In this context, we strongly demand the State Government to:

• Take immediate steps to ensure the fundamental rights of Chithralekha to be able to work and live in her own native place, free of mental and physical torture.
• Implement the provisions of the Vishakha Guidelines on Sexual Harassment at the Workplace for Chithralekha, an auto rickshaw driver.
• Take stringent actions against the CITU workers and police officers on duty under the SC/ST Atrocities act, for inflicting violence on Chithralekha.
• Constitute an Independent Judicial Commission to conduct thorough investigation into the whole issue

Chithralekha Solidarity,
Kerala Feminist Network

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On November 5, 39 year old US army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan Malik entered the Fort Hood army base in the United States with an automatic pistol in his hand and started spraying bullets at the crowded medical processing centre for soldiers serving overseas until being shot by a woman soldier. Thirteen people were killed and thirty wounded.

The day after the incident The Guardian in UK appeared with the following headline: “Fort Hood army officer shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before shooting rampage”. By the time the US news broadcaster CNN had begun to air the images that showed Hasan in traditional Muslim clothing, including a prayer cap that it said was taken hours before the killings. (Indian viewers will recollect Delhi police’s act of making the persons arrested on the charges of bomb blasts in 2008 wear kifayah while bringing them to the court. This was in violation of the law that says only black or white mask should be used to cover a culprit’s face). The same day The Telegraph reported that Major Malik “had allegedly called for Muslims to attack Americans over the Iraq war”. And The Washington Post quoted the staffers of Maj. Malik’s previous posting, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as saying that “he (Maj. Malik) embraced his religion with intensity”.

The blog sphere carried even lethal rampages motivated by Islamophobia. Extreme rightist American bloggers like Ralph Peters and Michelle Malkin went further to use the opportunity to annihilate the ‘enemy’. On November 6, even before the investigation moved on its track, Peters declared that “Forthood is 9/11”. He further stated in his blog that “(Maj. Hasan) refuses, in the name of Islam, to be photographed with female colleagues; he had listed his nationality as “Palestinian” in a Muslim spouse-matching program and paraded around central Texas in a fundamentalist playsuit”. Malkin went even beyond that: “Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hassan is awake and talking on the hospital bed. … Wonder if he asked for a Qur’an yet.”

The story went on as the White House ordered an inquiry into the whole incident and the Senate panel and the Pentagon decided to review the matter. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, declared Maj. Malik a “self-radicalised, homegrown terrorist”. Media, meanwhile, began to dig more into the relationships between Maj. Malik and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a radical Yemeni American cleric who allegedly propagates terrorism on web.

It is noteworthy that although similar incidents happened in the United States in previous years as well there had been no such sensationalism on the culprits’ religion at all. On May 11 this year a US soldier had gunned down five fellow soldiers at a US base in Bangladesh. Even in the cases in which extremist Christians (anti-abortionist, anti-Jew) were involved media kept silent on the religious identity. Also undermined was the fact indicated by a family member of Maj. Malik that “he was just normal, loved sports (and) never got into trouble”. Maj. Malik’s supervisor and colleagues had reiterated, “he wasn’t all that bad a guy”. Some even asked, “If a guy was planning this (attack), do you think he’d be drawing a lot of attention?” People close to him said that there was a lot of evidence to suggest that Maj. Hasan was mentally disturbed. And it was noteworthy (but conveniently forgotten by the western media) that such a thing had happened when the suicide rates and post-traumatic stress disorder hitting record highs in US, especially in the soldiers who returning from battlefields outside the country. Since 2007, more than 70,000 soldiers have been diagnosed with severe psychological trauma – more than 20,000 of them this year alone – according to the US Defence and Veterans Brain Injury Centre. (On the same day of Hassan’s rampage there was another shoot-out in Florida and media only discussed the psychic state of the murderer who killed one and wounded five in an office: “his marriage long ago went sour, home was taken in foreclosure, his job lost to incompetence and his finances sunk in bankruptcy.”)

Earlier it was said that “all terrorists are Muslims,” but now it seemed to have been asserted as “all Muslims are terrorists”. The Jewish columnist Jonah Goldberg add onto it by stating that “there’s a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some fringe phenomenon but part of the mainstream Islamic life around the world.” The televangelist Rev. Pat Robertson went further to say that “Islam is a violent — I was going to say religion — but it’s not a religion. It’s a violent political system bent on the overthrow of governments of the world and world domination.” Conservative columnist Cal Thomas bemoans the calamity that the US government “at all levels has hired and promoted Muslims to influential positions. It now requires ‘sensitivity training’ for Federal employees.” Fox News demanded “debriefing” — a euphemism for interrogation — of all Muslims in the US Army. The American Family Association has gone a step further by demanding a total ban on all Muslims in the military. They argued that “the more devout a Muslim is, the more of a threat he is to national security.”

US President Barrack Obama rightly said that “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts”. But the Nobel peace prizewinner now has to live up to higher expectations. The man who asserted, in the Cairo speech, his commitment to build a new peaceful relationship with the Muslim world must now act to tackle the right-wing extremists rising rapidly in his country. As Arab News succinctly put it in one of their editorials “If Arabs and Muslims are extremists in anything, it is in the patience and tolerance they have shown toward persistent Western portrayal of Islam as being a religion of violence and intolerance”.

This documentary film by KP Sasi is a call from coastal communities in Kerala state of south India, who are beginning to see the impacts of global warming and climate change at close quarters. While scientists have yet to establish how exactly weather, wind and waves change, the fisherfolk find an angrier sea carving out more and more of their land. They are concerned about the changing course of ocean currents and disappearance of small fish from the coastal waters. Pollution and construction along the shore make things even worse. Though their carbon footprint is very small, these local coastal communities bear the brunt of mounting emissions worldwide. They call for leaner, cleaner production processes and demand a place in the climate change debate.

if You want to buy Institutional/Individual Copies Contact: kpsasi36 at gmail.com

‘Scientists discover way to convert human hair into high grade fuel’ read the innocuous looking news item tucked away in a corner of the technology pages of my daily newspaper.

At first I didn’t take it seriously and thought it was another self-promoting piece of propaganda from some corporate biotech lab somewhere. Little did I realize this was the beginning of a most bizarre series of events.

If human hair was going to be a valuable commodity in the near or even distant future, every major corporation in the world wanted as much of it as possible. BP, Shell, Exxon-Mobil – announced they were happy that what they had been mining from under the ground all these decades could be replaced by something on top of everyone’s head.

Joining them in the race for ‘strategic control’ of human hair were the mining giants De Beers, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, while Indian multinationals like Reliance, Tata and the Mittal group demanded the government declare Indian hair be reserved solely for domestic companies.

If corporations sought it so much, politicians naturally wanted to become their middlemen, mortgaging their country’s annual output of hair. The Indian government rushed to declare hair as ‘state property’, banning all barbers from practising their profession and directing citizens to have their haircuts in designated ‘inlets’. Cabinet ministers were exempted, but several turned up in Parliament with logos of global corporations proudly stamped across their bald pates. After all these days one is known only by the company that keeps you and not by the company you keep.

Bollywood began churning out different, spiced up Indian versions of the Goldilocks tale, remixing old songs like ‘Teri zulfon se judai tho nahin mangi thi…” with a brand new meaning to them. Movie stars, even if they did not have much hair, started hiring ‘hairguards’ to protect their precious wigs and public image.

The hysterical media typically ran hair raising stories in a bid to keep the corporations tickled, all of course done in the name of ‘pubic …er I mean public interest’. Some wrote editorials claiming India would now definitely become the world’s biggest superpower since Indians had more facial and body hair than the Chinese, who despite their larger population had less to harvest. The Americans and Europeans, they opined, were neither ‘hair nor there’.

The Mumbai underworld moved into the hair business with the notorious Dawood Ibrahim announcing from Dubai that he would pay a million dollars to anyone who could get him all of his rival Chota Rajan’s locks on a platter. Bal Thackeray said in a Saamna editorial that his father had wisely named him ‘Bal’ as he knew that hair would be valuable in the future. His nephew Raj vowed not to let even a single Marathi hair fall outside its ‘mother’ province and advised all his followers to carry nets with them all the time.

Elsewhere, in UP and Bihar, criminal gangs organised ‘hair hunting’ expeditions where they would go shaving hapless citizens at gunpoint. Global corporations started outsourcing the task of collecting hair to these gangs – keeping with the logic that Indian goons were far cheaper to hire than American ones.

It was at this point of my nightmare that I woke up writhing in imaginary pain, clutching my head and screaming, ‘No! This is my hair! It can’t be converted into high-grade fuel. Nobody has the right to take it away! ”

My hair though was happily intact and I found myself in a guest house in Ersama, a small settlement of betel leaf and paddy farmers in coastal Orissa. I had been in this province now for a week to write about the struggle of local farmers to prevent the South Korean steel giant POSCO from taking away their valuable land to build an integrated power and steel plant.

I realized the ‘hair nightmare’ I had was really provoked by what was happening in Orissa with its mineral riches, in particular iron ore, of which the state possessed some of the biggest deposits in the world and that too of very high quality. The soaring price of iron ore around the world in recent years has sparked off a rush of corporations to the state.

Over the past five years the Orissa government has signed over 40 MoUs worth around Rs 1,60,132 crores with global and domestic companies, selling off rights to the over 20 billion tonnes of iron ore believed to be under the feet of the Oriya people. ( Much of the state’s population is anaemic or else the Orissa regime of Naveen Patnaik would have sold the iron content in the people’s blood also by now!)

In its deal with POSCO alone Orissa has given away the company, rights to mine 600 million tonnes over the next 30 years or so. POSCO will pay just Rs 24 per tonne as royalty at a time when global prices have shot up over Rs 2,400 per tonne, a difference that will cost the public exchequer over 1.4 trillion rupees!! This is apart from all the other sops, worth billions, given to POSCO in the form of cheap land, water, tax breaks and so on.

On paper the POSCO project is supposed to bring in US$12 billion worth of investments. Industry analysts will tell you though its real purpose in entering into the MoU is part of the strategy of global corporations of keeping different commodities they need under their control before they dwindle away or get poached by rivals. Grab now use later is the motto.

The Orissa scenario is being played out in other states too. India is also the sixth largest producer of steel in the world with production touching 45 million tonnes in 2005 but this will jump to over103 million tonnes soon thanks to the 102 MoUs signed with steel companies around the country. India is the fourth largest producer of iron ore in the world with its production touching 165 million tonnes per annum in 2005, of which over 90 million tonnes was exported abroad- so a lot of this mining is still about old colony-style export of raw material to developed nations.

As for the social impact, since most of the iron ore is found under land belonging to tribal communities they will suffer the most due to the displacement, pollution and distress caused by the mining process. The steel production facilities will also take away valuable agricultural land and displace thousands of farmers, like in the case of POSCO where the proposed plant will oust 30,000 people in Ersama block of Orissa’s Jagatsinghpur district. Besides all this will be the vast quantities of power and water that steel production requires, that can be supplied only by taking it away from other sectors that need it more.

Reflecting on the madness of Orissa’s fire sale of its mineral resources and replacing the words ‘iron’ or ‘steel’ by ‘hair’ I realized my nightmare had not been so far fetched after all.

I mumbled ‘Mairay Pochchu’ in Tamil and went back to sleep hoping to dream of a day when someone finds out that the livers of politicians and corporate CEOs, if consumed in pill form, could be a sure cure for not just baldness but also erectile dysfunction.

Satya Sagar is a journalist, writer and videomaker based in New Delhi. He can be reached at sagarnama@gmail.com

Rahul Gandhi has instructed congress workers to “spend a day with Dalit household” for commemorating Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary. This approach underlines the party’s assumption that something is wrong with the dalits. “Lets go and work for their betterment.” How many of them say, “let’s go and visit upper castes and change their perception and attitude towards dalits.”

Genuine steps towards bringing about real social transformation are desired and not tokenism and lip service. Rahul Gandhi should begin with visits to upper caste households and persuade them to ensure bringing about notional change resulting in shedding their prejudiced opinions of dalits being untouchable and pollutant.

The present approach of the Rahul Gandhi not only humiliates dalits but also victimises them. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar was convinced that inter caste marriages and notional change would annihilate caste. If Rahul Gandhi is at all sincere in his efforts, he got to undertake challenging work of carrying out mass inter caste marriage drives vis a vis social campaign in order to bring about notional change. Does Rahul have courage to set precedence by marrying a Dalit girl?

United Nations Human Rights Council is set to ratify draft principles, which will recognize India’s caste system as a human rights abuse. Rahul Gandhi pretends to be pro dalit in India and exploits his visits to dalit households for strengthening political grass roots. However, his government at the centre is acting against the interest of dalits and restoration of human dignity. Government of India has lobbied heavily in Human Rights Council for excluding “caste” from the draft earlier this year. How does Rahul Gandhi justify differential stand of the congress over dalit rights and dignity at local and global level?

It only exposes the dual standard congress harbors. Dalits would be better served if concrete and concerted steps were taken not only to deal with caste injustices at the local and national level but also to provide recognition of caste at UN level. And efforts are taken to address inequalities and corrective measures are taken for abandoning prevailing prejudiced victims approach. It remains to be seen weather Government of India ratifies The United Nations Human Rights Council to recognize India’s caste system as a human rights abuse and take a step towards providing dignified discrimination free, egalitarian society. The action of Indian government will also reveal weather Rahul and congress lead Indian government is genuinely interest in development of the dalits or ends up as one of the deceptive, misleading, dualist and status quoits gimmick.

Rahul Gandhi should marry a dalit girl and undertake a mega social campaign encouraging young congress workers to follow his path and secondly Indian Government must ratify UN efforts to recognize Indian caste system as human right abuse which will provide dignity to millions of dalits. Failing to follow either of these two will expose the casteist and hegemonic mind set of congress and Rahul Gandhi’s visits will go down in history as a political gimmick to entice politically maturing dalits.

“You can’t walk to the Maldives”, “We want more planes flying, not less.” : Geoffrey Lipman, Assistant Secretary-General of the UNWTO

It is very clear from Lipman’s statement for whom and what UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is trying to negotiate. The ‘business as usual’ argument is that ‘tourism is a very important economic activity and alleviating poverty’. But the contribution of tourism to climate change has never been comprehensively assessed. In most of the tourist destinations, the tourism related calculations of benefits are at the cost of the free and often overlooked ecosystem services. The cost of the destruction of these natural resources and the consequences for the local economy and people’s livelihoods need to be calculated along with tourism’s economic contribution.

A proper cost benefit analysis with tourism’s actual carbon footprint, ecological, economic and sociological footprints and other negative impacts would disclose the actual situation. It would prove that mainstream tourism often even aggravates poverty and undermine Millennium Development Goals. The price of the destruction and damages are incalculable.

A careful analysis shows that the development of tourism in most of the third world economies work against the principles of economic sustainability. The economic leakages are significant in many destinations. This can be reasoned on the basis of many factors, including the high number of the foreign ownership of tourism supply; level of imports in terms of goods and services; and expatriates employed in these island destinations.

In the Maldives, one of the islands that ‘heavily depend’ on tourism, there is no income; capital gains, value added, or corporate tax. Duties are levied on all imported goods with the exception of fixtures, fittings and building materials for the construction of resorts. The liberal fiscal policies in the Maldives mean that foreign businesses are estimated to be able to repatriate 70 % of their turnover, and expatriates are allowed to repatriate 100 % of their salaries. Officially, the net retention of foreign exchange within the country is thought to be 21 % although in reality this could be much lower, according to a preliminary analysis for the third tourism master plan of the Maldives. Half of the population still earns less than a dollar a day. In other destinations, too, the claimed economic benefits distort the present discussions on tourism’s contribution to climate change.

The lament against the demand for regulation in aviation traffic needs to be challenged. Air transport has relatively high emission rates per passenger-kilometer, especially for short distances (less than 1000 km), because emissions are particularly high during take-off and landing. High altitude emissions contribute more to global warming per unit than other types of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 1999; Lee and Sausen, 2000). According to IPCC report, between 1990 – 2000 global CO2 emissions grew by 13 percent. Over the same time CO2 emissions from aviation grew by 25 percent. And now the sector is ready to grow by double in the next ten years unless stringent restrictions are imposed.

UNWTO forecasts that international tourism arrival will increase from 800 million from 2005 to 1.1 billion in 2010 and nearly 1.6 billion in 2020. If these forecasts are correct, we can see tourist arrivals grow by over 4 percent each year over the next decade with 5 percent growth in tourists travel by air. Airbus, one of the two world aeronautics construction giants, foresees a steady 4.9 % growth in total number of passengers from 2007 to 2026, which would involve a minimum increase of 3 % annually in GHG emissions from air transport. By 2035, the CO2 emissions could be 152 % higher and RF could shoot up 188 % more, resulting from the extraordinary increase in air traffic. Bearing in mind that the worst case scenario for the global increase in GHGs contemplated by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) involves a maximum of + 88 % for the 2000-2030 period, the contrast could not be greater.

Growth and reduction cannot go together. The hard truth is that the only way to reduce aviation emissions is to stop the growth in demand. This would also reduce the scale of some of the other environmentally damaging effects of air transport, such as noise, and loss of land for airports and surface links.

The major omission of the Kyoto Protocol was that it excluded tourism, particularly aviation, from the climate agreement. The responsibility of cutting emissions from this sector was given to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The ICAO did not succeed in doing something meaningful, concrete and barred progress for many years.

An unchecked exclusion of aviation in post 2012 agreement would double or triple the emissions from aviation by 2050. They will then form a significant proportion of global carbon emissions which the world cannot afford. To control global warming to a significant extent, the Copenhagen agreement has to control emissions from all sectors including aviation and tourism.

The arguments of potential sustainability of the aviation sector through carbon offsetting, implementation of more efficient engines and experimenting with biofuels are simply delaying progress. There are many testimonies and studies available to prove that many of these market based solutions do not work and some of them have serious negative impacts.

A recent study of Friends of the Earth states that offsetting is a dangerous distraction and does not work. Instead, the world needs developed countries to cut their own emissions first and fast and pay for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. The report argues that in practice offsetting is having a disastrous impact on the prospects for averting catastrophic climate change. It is vital that the inherent and systemic flaws in the approach are recognized ahead of negotiations. These problems cannot be dealt with by simply reforming the “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM); instead completely new approaches are needed that are effective and just.

Generally, offsetting counts action in developing countries as part of the cuts promised in the developed countries, although the science is clear that action is needed in both developed and developing countries. In practice offsetting programmes are not leading to global emissions reductions or benefits to developing countries. Instead, they are simply leading to more ingenious ways to avoid cutting emissions.

The suggestion for bio fuels needs to be questioned. To replace the current worldwide aviation fuel requirements with Jatropha based biofuel, for example, would require a land area approximately the size of 1 million square kilometres combined. The conversion of large amount of land for bio fuels plantation will be a serious threat to food security and will displace many poor farmers and agriculture workers from their livelihood. The efficiency of bio fuels to bring down the carbon emissions have been questioned by experts. Some experts clearly pointed out that biofuels are the worst of the available alternatives.

The introduction of more efficient aircraft engines is making some impact on emissions per passenger mile, but the rate of improvement is much slower than the rate of market growth. It will take many decades to change the current aircraft designs to more effective ones.

In his statement, Geoffrey Lipman says “we want more planes to fly”. It is interesting to know who is flying the most. Today’s international travel still has an elitist nature. This is not just in developing countries; developed countries are also no exception. Those in the highest income groups are disproportionately responsible for emissions from aviation, too.. On a yearly basis, less than 2 % of people spend their vacations abroad; that is a little over 130 million.

Climate change is not just an issue of mitigation and adaptation. It demands a complete paradigm shift from the current form of neo liberal capitalist development to a people centric approach. The ‘business as usual’ approach is no more valid and cannot continue. What we need is actions for a relevant and concrete regulatory mechanism to reduce the emissions from the tourism sector including aviation. The tourism sector should explicitly be brought under the UNFCCC regulatory framework.

It is very important to decouple the tourism and economic growth argument that is the result of an economic globalization. What is the logic of relying too much on international travel that is contributing to rising sea levels and devastating millions of people’s livelihood through its carbon emissions and ill effects? While tourism may bring economic benefit to few in the shorter term, in many places such benefits are likely to be overshadowed by the impact of climate change and other negative impacts of tourism. Tourism is not a viable option for the poor and should not be promoted as a development model for poor nations. The idea of making poor nations dependent on an industry like tourism that is highly vulnerable to many external factors needs to be scrapped.

Since police and media in Kerala are hand in glove one can trust the front page story published by Mathrubhumi Daily today(Oct 30,09): Policemen at Poochakal police station in Alapuzha district have been going through various calamities since the new station building was inaugurated two years ago; deaths, ill health, transfers…so the policemen unanimously decided to consult an astrologer. Apart from the usual problems with the structural design and all the key sacred diagnosis was that the government land on which the new station has been constructed was owned by brahmins in the past and the heat and pain of their living descendants hover over it.

If the non-brahmin citizens of Kerala (not all, only the ‘real’ citizens) bear in mind that legend regarding the origin of Kerala – land cleared from the sea by Parashuraman and that he donated it to brahmins – they need not squander anything on astrologers to identify the curse that has landed them in the awful mess.

The situation constructed by the media and police have forced the dalits in the pubic sphere –  individuals and organizations – to take uncomfortable positions to prove one is a good dalit and not a bad dalit. Some dalit organizations have suddenly condemned the activities of DHRM, to prove perhaps that they are ‘good dalits’ and thus escaping this new stigma. What is interesting is that most of the dalit organizations always had to face the allegations of foreign funds or naxal connection, but when new organizations emerge the old ones are spared and the new ones are branded as more `dangerous’. Most of the allegations and cases simply vanish into thin air once the condemned organization has been deracinated.

Why is that the actions of dalit (or indigenous people or muslim) organizations are not addressed politically. Some treat it as `fundamentalist’  while the other tends to be perversely patronizing (marginalized communities become `extremist/terrorist’ because of poverty or illiteracy).

Both negate the politics in it, and this is sheer terrorism.