As we celebrate the 141st anniversary of the Girmitiyas arrival to Fiji today, the Fiji Girmit Council is calling on Fijians to learn from the hard work, pains and sufferings of the indentured labourers, and persevere to fight through the current crisis.

On 14th May, 1879, Fiji saw the arrival of the Leonidas, a ship that had travelled many thousands of kilometres from British India, a more than three-month journey that endured crashing sea waves, disease and even death, to finally anchor in Levuka.

The Executive Secretary of the Fiji Girmit Council, Selwa Nandan says the indentured labourers who were brought to Fiji from India faced great difficulties however they worked hard to contribute to the country, and in the end many also decided to stay back and make Fiji their home.

Nandan says the Council had planned to hold major celebrations this year but will not be able to do so because of the COVID-19 restrictions.

He says this year also marks 100 years since the abolition of the indenture system.

[image: girmit.org]

Some 60,500 Indians were transported to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 when the transportation of indentured Indian labourers was finally stopped.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama has shared stories of Girmitiyas.

Bainimarama says that we must never forget the sacrifices that so many ordinary people made.

He adds it is in the stories of individual Girmitiyas that we gain the best insight into what life was like for them.[image: girmit.org]

In the early 1970s, some of the survivors of the era gave interviews to the academic and author, Dr Ahmed Ali. Here are some of the accounts they gave from his book, Girmit. The Indian Indenture Experience in Fiji:

The Story of Lakhpat

[image: girmit.org]

I asked where I would be sent. On being told that it would be Fiji, I Inquired of its whereabouts. I was told that it was close to Calcutta and I could go there willingly. Since it was not a jail I could return when I wanted to. I was scared least these people were merely luring us someplace where they might kill us.

There was a great deal of weeping when we embarked on the ship. People wept because they were leaving their families or their homes. Many of the women were upset because they had been lured away from marketplaces where the recruiters had misled them. I cried because I was leaving everything behind and didnt know where I was going . Nobody knew where Fiji was. These recruiters had misled us and bluffed us into going. I, for instance, had quite a good home. There was no need for me to leave.

From Calcutta we went to Madras and then past Singapore. It took us a month before we reached Fiji. Life was very painful on board ship. For a fortnight I was well, then I became ill and parts of my body began to swell up. When we arrived in Fiji we were all herded into a punt like pigs and taken to Nukulau where we stayed for a fortnight. We were given rice that was full of worms. We were kept and fed like animals.

The Story of Abdul Aziz

[image: girmit.org]

I left India because I was told I would receive a shilling a day for work in Fiji. I went to Naitasiri to serve my Girimit. For a month I spent my time crying. When I got to Naitasiri I thought that I would never see my parents again. But after shedding tears for a month, I decided I must work despite my despair.

On our sugar estate, some who did not learn about cane cultivation were given a thorough beating. Our state was bad enough, but there were others far worse where people were disgraced completely. I did not like the work at all. But I told myself that if I did not work I would die of starvation. There were only two alternatives, work or a thrashing.

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Today marks the 141st anniversary of Girmitiyas arrival to Fiji - Fijivillage

This is the time in April we traditionally fund our nations priorities. There is nothing traditional this year. In the midst of the international COVID-19 pandemic, tax day has been placed on hold just as much of the world has. It is also the time of year that we fund our greatest existential man-madethreat nuclear weapons.

While dealing with the surreal impact of the current COVID-19 health crisis, the nuclear arms race forges ahead, spiraling out of control, as the U.S. pushes to lead the way in building a nuclear arsenal whose sole purpose if it ever were to be used is threatening to end life as we know it on our planet. Climate change is the second human-caused existential threat and is also connected to the threat of recurring pandemics and nuclear war.

The COVID-19 pandemic demands that we reassess our priorities through the lens of caring for one another and our basic human needs addressing income, health and environmental inequities across the nation that are so apparent at this time.

As the planet warms, habitat for animals, bacteria, parasites and viruses change bringing the health of animals, humans and the planet into anew reality. In addition, climate changes human migration and resource availability, causing conflict which under the right circumstances can leadultimatelyto war. We need to rethink how we spend our financial resources to address these interconnected issues.

Each year,Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angelespublishes ourNuclear Weapons Community Costs Program. Now in its 32nd year, the program is used around the country to highlight the fiscal disparities in our communities and build support fornuclear weapons abolition work and for divestment from nuclear weapons similar to what was done in South Africa to end apartheid.

As our nation grapples with the health and economic impacts of COVID-19, we continue to fund nuclear weapons programs by our calculation in the amount of$67.6 billionfor fiscal year 2020.

These wasted expenditures deprive cities, counties and states across the nation of critical funds in the midst of this pandemic, compounding our ongoing daily health crisis dealing with nearly 90 million Americans without any, or with inadequate health insurance. The expenditures vary by community, as do each communitys financial needs.

Our nations capital will contribute in excess of $236 million for FY 2020 toward nuclear weapons programs. Large states like New York, and New Jersey grappling with the devastation of COVID-19 and the inadequate resources to handle it are spending in excess of $4.5 billion and $2.2 billion respectively, while California is spending over $8.7 billion on nuclear weapons programs, robbing their treasuries of critical funds necessary at this time. This is immoral, insane and wrong.

As physicians and health practitioners, we just like our local elected officials are first responders. The current pandemic with all of its global devastation pales by comparison with any nuclear conflict. Cities are being paralyzed as they try to deal with the crisis at hand. In a nuclear attack, there would be no adequate medical or public health response. The outcome is predictable and must be prevented.

The only way to prevent nuclear war is by the complete and verifiable abolition of nuclear weapons.

As with COVID-19, we must prevent that which we cannot cure.

The world is moving to abolish nuclear weapons through theTreaty on The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,adopted at the U.N. in July 2017 and already ratified by 36 nations on its way to the 50 nations necessary to enter into force, like treaties dealing with all other weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. must take a leadership role to support this treaty and abide by our 50-year commitment underArticle VI of the NPT Treatyto work in good faith to eliminate nuclear weapons. The rest of the world has grown weary and skeptical of the hollow promises of the U.S. and other nuclear nations to this obligation and are refusing to be held hostage any longer.

Shame on our legislative leaders for the continued funding of these weapons of mass destruction that have no utility and threaten our continued survival. There are no winners of nuclear war.

In the words of our last great military General, President Dwight Eisenhower, Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

We are one interconnected human family in this nation and on this planet and at long last, it is time to recognize this fact. COVID-19 has made this imminently apparent. It is time to come together to abolish nuclear weapons and to direct the dollars wasted on them to address the economic, environmental and health inequities in our communities. We must all make our voices heard to prevent nuclear war, which would be the last epidemic.

Robert Dodge, M.D., is a family physician practicing in Ventura, Calif. He is the President of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles (www.psr-la.org), and sits on the National Board serving as the Co-Chair of the Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons of National Physicians for Social Responsibility (www.psr.org). Physicians for Social Responsibility received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize and is a partner organization ofICAN, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Price.

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Taxes, COVID-19 and nuclear weapons funding our nation's priorities | TheHill - The Hill

The idea of family abolition may invoke visions of violent interventions into the loving and caring homes that some of us are lucky enough to have. Where its proponents are really coming from, however, is to argue for a society where mutual nurturance and support are not dependent on a genetic lottery. This is not merely about pointing out that a disconcerting number of homes are not actually safe places but hold acute threats of violence particularly to the women who live there. Instead, if we can learn anything from the experiences that Covid-19 has unleashed, it is that the linked ideologies of the home, the nuclear family and neoliberal individual responsibility are ill-equipped to provide the care that we are all dependent on.

In Women and the Politics of Class, Johanna Brenner and Nancy Holmstrom put this point concisely. We all want kinship, love, and good things to eat. Its just that the family as we currently know it is not necessarily the best way to satisfy those desires. More importantly, the family assumes central responsibility to provide for these needs in a society that fails to do so. Specifically, various authors such as Agnes Heller have argued that capitalism explicitly produces needs it cannot satisfy. Rather than disparaging the things that people who defend the family in its current form want to preserve, Brenner and Holmstrom want to build political momentum to extend the values now located exclusively in family life solidarity, respect, and commitment to others development across a society [which] requires the elimination of the family in its meaning as a special place for those values.

The nuclear family does not just hold the promise of fulfilling needs of love and kinship, but as an institution it is built on intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia. As Melinda Cooper points out, for example, welfare restructuring in the United States explicitly enforced a particular model of the married nuclear family that would exclude African-American single mothers from receiving benefits. Defending the monogamous, heterosexual, many-children family is therefore not a neutral act of defending the right to a safe and cozy home but is more often than not tied up in other conservative political goals. Thinking about organizing intimacy and care beyond the family is less about taking away safety and coziness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love.

If the family is supposed to be a haven in a heartless world, what kind of world would be so heartless as to require it? It is here that we need to start thinking about the family in the context of the individualism and precarity that neoliberalism is exacerbating. In their manifesto, Feminism for the 99%, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Battacharya, and Nancy Fraser point towards the imperative of individual responsibility on the back of which many states have carried out neoliberal privatization and deregulation of welfare and care services. In some cases, they argue, it has marketized public services, turning them into direct profit streams: in others, it has shunted them back to individual families, forcing them and especially the women within them to bear the entire burden of care.

Societies which rely on the fact that the family has to be the only site of loving and caring relationships are inherently unequal and undermine solidarity. The family then becomes oppressive because leaving it is made harder and harder which undermines the formal equalities that Western democracies pride themselves on. At the same time, precariously employed migrant workers bear the brunt of the material and cultural devaluing of caring labor beyond the family.

Thinking about family abolition in the time of a global health crisis puts its finger in exactly this wound carved out by our need for care and neoliberal precarity. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch prime minister has called on his citizens to act like responsible grown-ups as we all participate in what he has dubbed an intelligent lockdown. This rhetoric references a particular kind of citizen who is able-bodied and invulnerable. This is the person who in normal times would show up to work even if they have a cold, because to be responsible in this context is really to be unable to afford staying home from work when sick because bills keep piling up and children need to be fed. Now when showing up to work is not possible at all, this potentially challenges business as usual. However, this is disavowed, for example when all the government does is to suggest compensating loss of income through the closing of the service sector merely by taking out more loans, which has been the official recommendation has been for students.

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Family abolition isn't about ending love and care. It's about extending it to everyone - Open Democracy

ByJubin Katiraie

Contrary to Iranian officials claims, the rate of infection with the novel coronavirus among Iranian families has increased. The authorized representative of the Health Ministry in Gilan Province Mohammad Hossein Ghorbani acknowledged 700 new cases in the province over four days.

Abolition of traffic restrictions between the provinces was a strategic mistake, Ghorbani said.

After the normalization of traffic, most of the new patients are in the family area. In fact, citizens have taken part in family gatherings and meetings as normal situations, which led to an increase of the infection with the coronavirus among families, the spokesman added.

He also stated that Given the normalizing of traffic and participating in tourists, the coronas second wave is more likely to emerge. Ghorbani blamed the National Counter Coronavirus Task Force for reopening cities gate on April 19. Reopening provinces gates persuaded the people that the situation has become normal, which caused a peak of infection in several cities like Loushan, Astara, and Roudsar, he continued.

New infections, of course, are not limited to Gilan province alone. Massoud Younesian, a member of the science committee of Tehrans Medical Science University, criticized authorities secrecy. The actual number of the coronavirus victims in Iran is about 20 times more than what is reported [by officials], Setareh-e Sobh daily quoted Yousefian as saying on April 25.

I believe that [official] statistics are systematically much less than the reality [Coronavirus test kits] are not sensitive enough and diagnose only half of the cases. Also, [hospitals] are testing half of the bedridden people. It can be said that the real statistics are about 20 times more than official reports, if we accepted that only 20 percent of patients have been hospitalized and half of them are tested and a half of tested are positive, Younesian added.

On March 9, Hadi Mirhashemi, member of the science committee of Beheshtis Medical Science University, announced that only 20 percent of infected people with the COVID-19 are bedridden in hospitals.

Additionally, Dr. Mohammad Reza Nikbakht, head of the Medical Science University in Lorestan province, blamed the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the Health Ministrys security sector for concealing the real figures about the coronavirus.

In our country, everything is ordered from above. The SNSC and the security of the Health Ministry ordered us not to announce the corona casualties. Now, all provinces do not announce stats, said Nikbakht on April 25.

In this respect, Ali Reza Zali, the head of the counter coronavirus task force in Tehran, realized that the number of new corona patients is increasing in Tehran. Reopening the parks has sent a wrong message to the people while citizens imagined that Tehrans pandemic situations have changed, Zali said on April 25.

On April 19, the head of Tehrans Council Mohsen Hashemi described the Health Ministrys stats about the coronavirus outbreak as fictional in a pubic session of the council. Members of the council are concerned that these stats create the impression of normalization and pave the way for making decisions for removing restrictions, Hashemi said.

Earlier, on April 13, the Social Studies Office of the Parliament Research Center released a report about countering the coronavirus outbreak in the country. At the time, the office estimated the real number of the COVID-19 fatalities at more than 8,600 people, around two times more than the Ministrys stats.

Notably, on the same day, the Iranian opposition group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), announced, Over 27,000 people have died of the coronavirus in 267 cities checkered across all of Irans 31 provinces.

The number of cases reported could represent only about a fifth of the real numbers, said Dr. Rick Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations in the World Health Organizations (WHO) on March 17, after returning from a mission to Iran.

Also, on April 24, a medical worker from Mashhad city, northwestern Iran, reported that the rate of the positive test has soared since last week. The source said, Only in one day, 90 persons tested positive of the COVID-19 among 120 suspect clients.

However, Iranian officials downplayed real figures to send millions of people to work and resume financial activities. In reality, the ayatollahs and their appointees failed to manage quarantine policies and other precautionary measures to contain the coronavirus.

Therefore, they pushed the people to dangerous workplaces and factories and lifted social distancing by making hollow claims. The Iranian government that faces the public ire against its irresponsible policies and wasting national resources on adventurism factually prompted more hatred by the people. Truly, the ayatollahs have ignited a new round of protests and uprisings by resuming their bankrupt economic activities.

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Iran: 30,000 People at Risk of Contracting Coronavirus After Easing of Social Distancing Rules

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Increase in Coronavirus Infections Among Iranian Families - Iran Focus

SUMMARY

This reality of our current existence has lured rogue employers into taking advantage when our attention is elsewhere.

So, while we are trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, employees are equally vulnerable to unfair termination.

Rogue employers dont mind if they kick us when we are down. Thats precisely what we have seen them do as Covid-19 continues to wreck havoc on the employment relationship in the country. Organizations of all sizes have been forced to rearrange their operations and even allow employees to work from home in order to keep some level of business operation.

This reality of our current existence has lured rogue employers into taking advantage when our attention is elsewhere. So, while we are trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, employees are equally vulnerable to unfair termination. Before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the country, employees were already faced with a significant threat to loss of employment through redundancy. For this reason, it is important to know whether your employer is following the law.

Although a significant number of employers have resorted to redundancy, few, if any, are willing to follow the strict procedures provided under the employment laws. But what is redundancy? Simply put, redundancy occurs when an employer reduces the workforce because a position is no longer required.

However, Section 2 of the Employment Act defines redundancy as The loss of employment, occupation, job or career by involuntarily means through no fault of the employee involving termination of employment at the initiative of the employer, where the services of an employee are superfluous and the practices commonly known as the abolition of office, job or occupation and loss of employment.

In Kenya, the basic statutory right of every employee who has been dismissed by reason of redundancy is to a redundancy payment from the employer. However, the employee must prove that there was redundancy, and he or she is eligible to bring a claim for the same. Section 40 of the Employment Act, 2007 provides the procedure for termination of employment on account of redundancy.

Section 40(1) provides that an employer shall not terminate a contract of service of a unionized employee on account of redundancy unless the employer has notified the trade union to which the employee is a member, of the impending redundancy followed by another notice to the labor officer in charge of the area where the employee is employed. The notice must state the reasons for, and the extend of the intended redundancy.

The two notices must be given not less than a month prior to the date of the intended termination on account of redundancy. Further, where an employee is not a member of a trade union, the employer must notify the employee personally in writing and the labor office.

It only becomes redundancy when that particular position disappears. Where an employee is dismissed, and the position is filled by another person, it becomes a dismissal for purposes of unfair termination. An employee who is rendered redundant has a right to a redundancy payment. The payment is not necessarily to give the employee a financial cushion until he or she finds another job but simply to compensate him for a loss of right he had in the job, which has now disappeared.

The employer is also required to have due regard to the seniority in time and skill, ability, and reliability of each employee in the selection of employees to be declared redundant. Seniority here speaks to the length of time served and the age of the employee to be rendered redundant. It is also important to prepare the employee psychologically so as to mitigate the ramification of unplanned loss of income.

The employer must equally take care not to place an employee at a disadvantage for being or not being a member of a trade union. Where there is in existence a collective agreement between an employer and a trade union setting out terminal benefits payable upon redundancy, the employer is obliged to abide by that.

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Unlike normal termination, the procedure under section 40 of the employment is mandatory. Payment cannot be used as a substitute for the procedures provided under section 40. Employers who flaunt this procedure are simply setting the company up for action for unfair termination and or discrimination claims.

By Oscar Onyango

Simiyu Wekesa Advocates

Email: [emailprotected]

Tel:0700578660

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Employee redundancy: Why employers must follow the law even in the time of COVID-19 - The Standard

Economy April 27, 2020 Dimitris Fasfalis

What should we think of the recent praise of the welfare state and public services coming from different voices among the ruling classes in the world? Their conversion is as sudden as miraculous; they recall much better the holy history of the apostles than the secular history of societies.

The Financial Times editorial of April 3rd, entitled Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract, offers an exemplary case. It says:

Radical reforms reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.

Here are words and expressions which had been tabooed over the past thirty years by neoliberal dogma and which have been, and still are, part of the common repertoire of trade unions and social movements: public services, redistribution, privileges () in question, basic income, wealth taxes. Written in the Financial Times, they astonish the reader.

As much as French president Emmanuel Macron surprised French public opinion during his intervention on March 12, 2020, especially when he explained: What this pandemic is already revealing is that free healthcare without income conditions, career or profession, our welfare state, are not costs or burdens but precious goods, essential assets when fate strikes. What this pandemic reveals is that some goods and services must be placed outside the laws of the market.

In the same manner, the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, has called for the cancellation of poor countries debts. Bill Gates and Emmanuel Macron did likewise, more specifically, for poor African states for the latter.

How should we interpret these ideological reversals beyond condemning their hypocrisy?

First, an initial critical reflex consists in not remaining prisoners of ruling-class discourse. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. This means confronting these ruling-class discourses with the exercise of power and the policies implemented. In his time, Nicolas Sarkozy also said he was in favor of a refounding of capitalism, of regulating finance and of a new balance between the market and the state. It was in September 2008 in his speech in Toulon.

Then, a second critical axis of current ruling-class reformism is to reveal its partial, inconsistent and, in reality, profoundly conservative character. Marx and Engels offer an important critical resource in this sense when he describes the features of conservative or bourgeois socialism in The Communist Manifesto (1848):

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhons Philosophie de la Misre as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

The context today is, of course, not the same. The current world is indeed profoundly different from the world in which this text of Marx and Engels is inscribed. However, it is important to remember the following common point which allows us to grasp the news of the excerpt quoted above: today, as in the late 1840s, individuals and groups of the ruling classes are trying to find solutions to the most manifest social dysfunctions which endanger the social body as a whole. Unlike the reforms put forward by the class struggles from below, the reforms proposed by the ruling classes their socialism aim to make temporary concessions and to intervene in social relations in favor of the greatest number in order to save themselves and consolidate the established order and the domination of the possessing classes. Marxs criticism offers the possibility of understanding the blind spots of dominant reformist discourses in order, precisely, to emancipate ourselves from them, and thus, thwart the traps of domination.

Dimitris Fasfalis is a history teacher. He currently lives in Paris and has written for a number of left publications, including Socialist Voice, Links, Presse-toi gauche, Z Mag and Europe solidaire sans frontires.

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Here Comes Bourgeois Socialism Again - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Of course, selective enforcement of the Constitution was not exactly new in the 1920s. The 11 states in the old Confederacy had essentially voided the 14th and 15th amendments through Jim Crow laws and state-sanctioned terrorism by white supremacists. The 14th Amendments right to equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendments abolition of whites-only voting laws were little more than cruel jokes in the South and in other states as well.

But Smiths defiance of the 18th Amendment was of another order, in part because there was greater national support for Prohibition than there was for equal rights for African Americans, and in part because of who he wasa child of the city, a Roman Catholic, and the grandson of immigrants at a time when the country was about to close the country to most immigrants. A newspaper in upstate Auburn said of Smiths flouting of federal law, The opening gun at Fort Sumter did not echo a more outright defiance.

Smiths decision to flout a government order he despised transformed him from a regional curiosity to a national figure just as he was beginning to prepare for the 1924 presidential campaign. He would seek the White House three timesin 1924, 1928 and 1932and while he never won the prize, he became a beloved symbol of the new America that was taking shape in the nations cities as the children of Ellis Island came of age, politically and culturally, in the 1920s. Breaking the rules worked for Smith.

***

The 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation and salebut not consumptionof intoxicating spirits, was ratified in January 1919 and took effect the following January. Congress then passed the federal Volstead Act, which gave Washington the power to enforce the amendment and set penalties for those caught in the act, and it defined intoxicating spirits as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. It became law over Woodrow Wilsons veto in October 1919.

After Republicans took control of Albany in the Warren Harding landslide of 1920, they passed several bills that mimicked most aspects of the federal Volstead Act, empowering police in New York to enforce Prohibition. Many considered the statute unnecessary, but the dry forces in New York were intent on making a statement, and indeed included even tougher language than the federal law. For example, the New York enforcement bills, known collectively at the Mullan-Gage Act, declared that possession of a hip flask containing booze was the equivalent of carrying an unlicensed handgun.

The legislation pleased the powerful Anti-Saloon League and rural portions of upstate New York, where evangelical voters and the Ku Klux Klan looked askance (to put it mildly) at the growing power of Catholics and Jews in the states urban areas, particularly New York City. The dry forces associated drinking with foreign cultures. Prohibition, they argued, would help Americanize these alien peoples.

Suffice it to say, this didnt sit well with people like Al Smith, who embraced city life and all its racial, ethnic and religious complexities. He recaptured the governors office in 1922 after losing reelection two years earlier, and his fellow Democratsmany of whom were Catholics and Jews from the citieswon control of the Legislature, thanks in part to urban opposition to Prohibition.

Lawmakers did not waste time. A bill to repeal Mullan-Gage was introduced on January 3, 1923, as the new session was beginning and on the same day that the newly elected governor of Connecticut, Charles Templeton, declared that Prohibition was one of the greatest sociological experiments ever undertaken by any nation.

The repeal bill passed the Legislature in early Maythe Senates back-slapping majority leader, Jimmy Walker, helped win over some crucial but wavering votes in his chamberand was dispatched to Smiths desk. And thats when the eyes of the nation turned to the governors second-floor office in New Yorks state Capitol.

Smith despised Prohibitionhe continued to serve cocktails in his office in the state Capitoland resented the self-righteousness of its advocates. Passage of the Mullan-Gage repeal would have sent a signal far and wide that New York would no longer enforce laws it detested.

But thats precisely what worried Smith. Smith was a consensus-seeker who, as governor, found ways to work with Republican majorities in the Legislature. But there was no room for splitting the difference now. A Tennessee newspaper compared New Yorks attitude toward Prohibition to South Carolinas assertion in the early 1830s that it could void federal lawsmore specifically, tariffsit didnt like. The bitter nullification crisis was a precursor to South Carolina secession in 1860, and most Americans knew how that ended. While nobody was predicting that Smiths decision would lead to civil war, some feared repeal of Mullan-Gage would lead to more widespread defiance of the Volstead Act, leading to the kinds of bitter divisions Smith preferred to bridge rather than exacerbate.

There was another complication as well. Smith intended to run for president in 1924, and he would need support from the Democratic Partys dry-as-dust factions in the South and West to win the nomination. Then again, his base in the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest expected him to sign the repeal. If he failed to stand up for those who saw him as their champion, theyd be unlikely to stand up for him at the convention.

There was little question that he wanted to sign, but hed have to think it over.

During a month of deliberation, the national press focused intently on the looming rebellion in Albany, and some of the countrys leading political figures warned Smith of the stakes in play.

This disposition of the Mullan-Gage repeal bill will show the mettle of the man, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter wrote to Smiths closest political adviser, Belle Moskowitz. If he vetoes the repeal, he will be damned for a comparatively brief time if he signs it, he would be damned for good.

Franklin Roosevelt, who would one day succeed Smith as governor and would, as president, appoint Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, was more sympathetic to Smiths dilemma. He wrote: Frankly, it is going to hurt you nationally a whole lot to sign the Repealer Bill. On the other hand I well realize that the vote in all the cities of this state will shriek to heaven if you were to veto the Bill.

Ultimately, Smith took the advice of his political mentor, Tammany Hall boss Charles Francis Murphy, a saloonkeeper by tradebefore, that is, his trade was declared illegal. Al, Murphy said at a summit meeting with the governor on Long Island, you must sign this bill. Murphy was a taciturn sorthe saw no reason to explain his reasoning because it was obvious. The people who put Smith back in the governors office knew they were voting for the wettest of the wet, and they expected him to act accordingly, the presidency be damned.

Smith went through the motions of holding a public hearing in the state Assembly chamber in Albany. The dry forces packed the house, some of them bringing along sandwiches and beveragessoft, of courseas they settled in for the political equivalent of a revival meeting. One of the many anti-liquor speakers said the governor had to choose between the Star-Spangled Banner and The Sidewalks of New Yorka song celebrating New York City that was long associated with Smith.

Toward the end, though, a prominent Republican, Thomas Douglas Robinson, a nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, delivered an impassioned speech denouncing the Prohibitionists as bigots who claimed to have a 100 percent mortgage on law and order and Americanism. He had voted in favor of repeal, Robinson said, and did so as an American. Robinsons rebuke was noteworthy given his lineage, for he was saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated the dry movement had no monopoly on the countrys values and culture.

Less than 24 hours later, on June 1, 1923, Al Smith signed the repeal bill. It contained the caveat that New York police would cooperate with federal agents if requested to do so, but officers would no longer enforce Prohibition on their own. In cities across the state, drinkers tripped the light fantastic long into the night. In the heartland, however, New Yorks defiance inspired fear and resentmentlaw, order and the very foundations of what made America great were breaking down in the nations immigrant-filled cities. Smith, thundered the Kansas City Star, had done an anarchistic thing.

William Jennings Bryan, the spiritual leader of the Democratic Partys influential evangelical faction, took to the pages of the New York Times to pronounce his judgment of Smith and his ilk in the cities he had made a career denouncing. Smith, Bryan said, should expect resistance from the defenders of the home, the school and the Church.

Smith had been uncharacteristically silent in the face of the onslaught from beyond the Hudson River, but he couldnt resist taking Bryans bait. He issued a statement condemning the narrow and bigoted dry agenda, and then took note of Bryans three failed attempts at the presidency. Whenever the so-called Great Commoner presented himself to voters, Smith wrote, a wise and discriminating electorate usually takes care to see that Mr. Bryan stays at home.

Frankfurters bleak assessment of Smiths future proved incorrectfor the most part anyway. While Smith did not become the Democratic Partys presidential nominee in 1924, he was reelected as governor in a landslide over Theodore Roosevelt Jr. that year. And four years later, he won the prize that eluded him in 1924, becoming the first Catholic to win a major partys presidential nomination. Herbert Hoover trounced him in the general election, but it was Smiths religion more than his position on Mullan-Gage that became a defining issue of the campaign. Then again, urban Catholicism and defiance of the 18th Amendment were considered variations on the same un-American theme, at least in some portions of the country.

Smith is remembered today not only through the annual charity dinner in his name, but as one of the great governors of the 20th century, never mind that he was assailed as a virtual secessionist in 1923. The current governor, more than most of his predecessors, has kept Smiths memory aliveand not just through a virtual shrine in his inner office.

During his decade in Albany, Andrew Cuomo has overhauled New Yorks archaic restrictions on alcohol sales and production, leading to a tripling in the number of wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries in the state.

And when he issued his stay-at-home orders last month, Cuomo not only declared liquor stores an essential business, but he allowed bars to serve drinks to go.

Al Smith would have signed that one, too.

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The Time a New York Governor Disobeyed the Federal Government - POLITICO

The national drive to reduce jail and prison populations is getting an unexpected nudge from the coronavirus pandemic, as many cities and counties across the country try to reduce exposure to the virus in crammed, unsanitary jails. One of their first targets: bail.

In New Orleans, some city judges are reducing some bail amounts to one-tenth of what they would otherwise be to let some people out. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the jails occupancy has reached a record low as people deemed non-threatening are being released without bail.

To bail-reform advocates across America, this change is a no-brainer: Why incarcerate anyone, pandemic or no, just because they cant post a cash bond? Their movement looked like a national wave just a couple of years ago, as states from Vermont and New Jersey to Alaska and Georgia rolled out new bail policies to reduce the number of people in jail. These ideas ranged from minor tweaks for only the lowest-level crimes to blanket eliminations of cash bail.

But just a few months ago, before the outbreak, that momentum hit a major roadblock. One of the most high-profile tests of bail reform, in New York state, sparked a political backlash and sent advocates into damage-control mode. In 2019, the New York legislature passed one of the most progressive bail-reform packages in the United States, abolishing bail for many misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes. Soon after the law went into effect, in January 2020, the New York Police Department released figures showing a spike in crime, and pointed the finger at the new, looser bail rules.

The crime figures have been disputed, but tabloid headlines and anti-reform voices in law enforcement jumped at the chance to fan the flames, and the new bail policies instantly lost popularity. The percentage of New Yorkers saying the changes would be good for the state dropped from 55 percent last year to 37 percent in January. Prominent politicians, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, backed a new bill to roll back many of the changes, which passed April 3.

Bail reformers across the country have been paying close attention. New York is certainly a cautionary tale, said Alec Karakatsanis, a reform advocate and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, a criminal justice non-profit that has filed lawsuits challenging bail in several states.

Now many reformers across the country have begun regrouping and tweaking their plans in an effort to learn from past mistakes in bail reform packages, and looking hard at how to keep potential opponents in the fold. Even if you win a great legislative battle against them, said Karakatsanis, its not like they'll just go away.

In Illinois and Colorado, where legislators are working onbut havent passedbail-reform bills, proponents have zeroed in on new political tactics like getting more buy-in from police and prosecutors and building in time to educate the courts and the general public to try to stem some of the pushback. Importantly, lawmakers elsewhere are also betting that a quirk unique to New Yorks bail system made the state singularly vulnerable to a blowbackand theyre moving ahead in their own states undeterred.

Now, after the debate spurred by COVID-19, they might get their chance to deploy that new and improved playbook. It was a needed disruption to the direction that we were going in, and further evidence that having so many people in jails, in New York or anywhere, is a threat to public health, said Scott Roberts, senior criminal justice campaign director at the civil rights advocacy organization Color of Change. Thats true under normal circumstances, and we see how that can really heighten at a moment's notice.

Heres how bail works in most jurisdictions across the country today: Most people who are arrested and charged with crimes must put down a refundable deposit to ensure theyll show up for their court date instead of skipping town. This means either putting up their own cash, or paying a fee to a commercial bond company that posts bail on their behalf. People who cant pay bail or a bail bondsman remain in jail.

The commercial side has turned bail into a policy with its own lobby, adding friction to any reform efforts. This is nearly unique to the American legal system: Although the concept of bail has been around for centuries, and is expressly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, the first commercial bail companies in the United States did not emerge until the late 1800s. Today, though many countries continue to use cash bail, the United States, minus four states, and the Philippines are the only ones with a commercial bail industry.

Reform advocates say this creates unequal justice for rich and pooreffectively jailing un-convicted people simply because they dont have access to money at the right time. Staying in jail has cascading effects: While people are in jail awaiting trial, they cant work or spend time with their families; they face pressure to plead guilty just to avoid the misery of being locked up. Jailed defendants also often lose their jobs and suffer physical and emotional trauma.

From a public policy perspective, research suggests that the economic and emotional consequences of being jailed for bail leave people more desperate and unstable than they would have otherwise been, and may actually lead to more, not less crime.

Chicago native Flo, who asked to be identified by his abbreviated name out of concern about finding work, knows those consequences well. After a 2016 arrest for a burglary he attributed to a gambling addiction, he spent about two months in jail, unable to come up with the $7,500 in cash for his bail. He was released after the Chicago Community Bond Fund (CCBF), a non-profit that raises money to pay bail for defendants, tossed him a lifeline and paid his.

Jail takes a toll, Flo said. The turnout of your case can be dramatically different because you're under pressure. And when you go to court, youre ready to jump out of the window as they say, and take any plea deal just to go free.

If Flo hadnt gotten that bail, he wouldnt have been able to help his wife move when the couple was kicked out of their home; he would have been forced to make court appearances in an orange jumpsuit and shackles rather than a suit and tie. He kept working odd jobs in warehouses and construction, rather than staying in jail and costing taxpayers money. He eventually took a plea deal and served two years after credit for good behavior. If Flo had remained in jail awaiting trial, the data suggests he might also have received a longer sentence: Researchers have found that pretrial detainees have a lot less leverage in bargaining with prosecutors when they are in custody versus out of it.

When it comes to the number of people in local jails, bail isnt just a side issue: Its the main driver. There are typically more than 700,000 people in U.S. jails, and about two-thirds of them have not yet been convicted of a crime and are there mostly because they couldnt make bail. Its an expensive policy: According to a 2014 Brookings Institution study, local corrections systems cost taxpayers at least $22 billion a year. And these numbers are completely separate from people serving sentences in prisons.

On these moral and public policy grounds, activist groups and legislators in many parts of the country have been pushing to eliminate cash bail entirely. Some seek to replace it with algorithmic risk assessments, electronic monitoring and other technical innovations. Many just want to see as many people released pretrial as possible, and think the criminal justice system shouldnt try to predict what people who are presumed innocent are or are not likely to do if released. Virtually all reform advocates seek to release defendants on the least restrictive possible means that ensure they show up for courtsometimes simply a signed promise that they will. Dozens of nonprofits have popped up to pay money bonds on behalf of pretrial defendants in a push to empty jails.

Few efforts represented as sweeping a change as New Yorks reform. The law, which passed in April 2019, limited the number of crimes for which judges could set bail, mostly to violent felonies. Almost everyone elsethose who make up 90 percent of arrests in the statecould walk free while they waited for their trial date, though judges could impose strict monitoring conditions. For the first three months the law was in effect, from January through March, New Yorks jail population dropped sharply: At the end of 2019, the jail population across the state was close to 20,000; for the first three months of 2020, it was around 15,000 and continuing to shrink.

And then came news of a crime spike. A number of hate crimes had shaken New York over the holidays, including a woman who was arrested three times for assaulting Orthodox Jewish women in one week in Brooklyn; outlets noted that she had been released from jail under the states new bail reform laws. In early March, the NYPD released a report showing that crime in February 2020 was up 22.5 percent compared to February 2019. In the report, the department explicitly blamed the uptick on criminal justice reforms, including the bail reform law. According to the department, in the first two months of the year, 482 people who had been arrested on charges where cash bail was prohibited went on to commit 846 new crimes.

The reported spike got wall-to-wall coverage in New Yorks tabloids, with headlines like No Bail Madness and Revolving Door Lunacy. Legal aid groups disputed those numbers, pointing out that arraignmentsthe court appearances where bail is generally setwere down 20 percent at the same time, and suggested that perhaps officers were making bad arrests to make the stats look bad and that prosecutors had to ultimately toss out those charges.

Politically, though, the damage was done. Prosecutors joined the police in blaming bail reform, and the governor, who had supported the measure, vowed not to sign any 2020 budget that didnt reform the reforms. Dermot Shea, the New York City police commissioner, took to the New York Times with an op-ed headlined New Yorks New Bail Laws Harm Public Safety. The Senate minority leader in New York, John J. Flanagan of Long Island, issued frequent press releases, connecting grisly crimes to recent reforms.

Bail advocates were furious. As they saw it, the policy hadnt been in place long enough to know what the impact on crimeor anything elsemight be. If we had been able to give those changes time and space to take hold, Im very confident that we would have seen how right we were, said Scott Hechinger, a New York bail reform advocate. The problem was, we didnt have patience. Instead, by Hechingers read, fearmongering took over. Under the old system those same individuals could, and sometimes did make bail, get out and commit a new crimebut news reports did not routinely highlight such cases. According to an analysis by a pair of city councilmembers in Queens, people released under the new law made up, at most, 7 percent of the increase in the crime rate. A group of 45 law professors signed a letter to the New York Press Club calling on the citys media to provide accurate and objective context in coverage of criminal justice reforms, saying the stories were designed to stoke panic and calling them Willie Horton-like claims.

But these advocates couldnt stop the rollback. In early April, the legislature amended the bail reform law with a number of changes set to take effect in July. The changes expand the number of crimes for which judges can set bail to include burglary, vehicular assault and sex trafficking, among others, and crimes committed by a persistent felony offender. And while advocates were crushed by the setback, the move was still insufficient for the most fervent opponents of the law. This approach does not come close to addressing the problems w/ the law. What about serious offenses that didn't make the cut? the Police Benevolent Association, a union for NYPD officers, tweeted in response to the changes in early April.

In other states, some of which had seen years of groundwork on new bail laws, reform advocates watched this backlash and snapped to attention.

Colorado is one state where the lessons of New York could reshape the bail debate. Gov. Jared Polis recently told a justice-system forum that he would like to see Colorado lead the nation in criminal-justice reform, and in 2019, state lawmakers considered dozens of crime and justice billsmore than some lawmakers said theyd seen in any single legislative session.

One bill that failed during that session, though, would have eliminated cash bail for low-level crimes: It passed the state House but died without a vote in the Senate. Lawmakers there are hopeful about reviving the bill this year and see lessons in the way the reforms played out in New York.

Were trying to avoid the pendulum effect, said Colorado Democratic state Sen. Mike Weissman, who was helping draft the law. If youre making a reform change for a year or two, and then, you have that revert when political winds change, then you're not really doing what you wanted. So I think most people around here are trying to dig in deeper and harder, get it right the first time and not have it swing back.

Essays by people in prison and others who have experience with the criminal justice system

Supporters there are also quick to note that, in a state with less than one-third the population of New York, many of the main actors in the justice system know each other, which, some hope, might make the road to reform a little smoother. Several Colorado lawmakers pointed to the broad coalition assembled to help guide the bail reform proposal, including high ranking judges, prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs. While their support is far from unanimous, its more buy-in than existed in New York.

Matt Soper, a Republican state representative in Colorado and sponsor of the bill last year, pointed to the defeat last session as an opportunity to fine-tune the proposal, adding concessions that could appease some of those powerful judicial system actors. Soper highlighted tweaks in the 2020 version of the legislation that include making it a crime for a defendant released before trial to miss a court date. Theres a lot of those little moving parts here that you don't see in New York or California, Soper said. California passed a law abolishing all cash bail in 2018, but its implementation has been delayed pending the outcome of a state referendum on the changes in the fall.

In many ways you make a bill a lot better by having it fail several times, by being forced to work on it. You get to see what it is that causes everyone the most pain, Soper said. He added that the Colorado package will also set aside time and money for training judges and other members of the courts on the new law, something critics have said the New York reform did not sufficiently account for.

I think that New York situation highlights the extreme importance of allowing time for implementation, said Amber Widgery, a policy analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures. She pointed to New Jersey as an example of how to make reforms last. The state virtually eliminated cash bail in 2017, has seen jail populations drop by about 30 percent and hasnt seen nearly the same backlash as in New York.

The rollout in New Jersey included training for judges and their staff on the technical aspects of the new law, like how to use new computerized risk assessment tools, and on the changes to state court rules. The state also built a new pretrial services department to orchestrate and track pre-trial release. Widgery said those efforts across a two-and-a-half-year span before the new law went into effect helped to create a culture change within the state judiciary. That is something that legislators who are eyeing reforms in this coming year are paying a lot of attention to, Widgery said.

But in general, lawmakers in Illinois and Colorado are feeling confident that they wont face the same kind of backlash, arguing that New York has a unique legal environment that contributed to the blowback. Thanks to a 1971 law, New York is the only state in the country where judges dont have the authority to consider a persons possible dangerousness in determining the conditions of their release before trial. When reform negotiations in the state began and the door was opened to modifying that system, some lawmakers wanted to add dangerousness as a sanctioned factor for pre-trial release, in exchange for the total abolition of bail in the state. Progressive reformers bristledarguing that too often, judges ascribe dangerousness in ways that amplify the racial discrimination that pervades the justice system. Ultimately, they pursued a compromise that did not add dangerousness but preserved bail only for the most serious crimes.

This made it easy for reform opponents in New York to argue that dangerous criminals were being let out of jail along with the nonviolent ones, and that the reforms had served to hamstring judges ability to keep the public safe.

In states like Colorado and Illinois, where judges have long had the discretion to consider dangerousness, the starting point for reform negotiations looks different. The Illinois Coalition to End Money Bond, for instance, of which the Chicago bail fund is a member, accepts the possibility of preventative detention on a case-by-case basis to ensure community safety and the defendants appearance in court as a last resort.

Sharlyn Grace, executive director of the Chicago bail fund and an advocate of bail reform in that state, said shes not at all discouraged by the experiment in New York. With the support of Illinois Gov. J.B. Prizker and legislators like state Sen. Robert Peters, she expects the state to pass substantial bail reforms this year, or whenever the legislature returns to business after the coronavirus crisis.

These differences from New York, and the more successful test cases like New Jersey, had advocates pushing forward with bail reform changes with confidence in their own states in recent weeks. And now, those seeking the maximum possible relief for poor pretrial detainees may just have a new wind at their back, one blowing a lot harder than the chill of New Yorks backlash. When I asked Stan Hilkey, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety, if COVID-19 might change the bail reform debate, he said recently released inmates could make a good case.

If they show up for court and dont commit any more crime or victimize people, he said, the data in the coming months and years could write a very supportive story for Colorados efforts to reduce crime and incarceration.

Peters, the Illinois state senator, said the coronavirus pandemic, and the threat to people in jails, strengthens the case for ending cash bond. In his Cook County district, nearly 400 people in jail have tested positive for the virus as of Sunday, out of a population around 5,500, far outpacing the rate of infection in the city. Six detainees so far have died after testing positive.

When we come back in session, advocates can look at how many people died in the jail who should have never been in there.

An earlier version of this story misspelled Stan Hilkey's first name.

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New York Rolled Back Bail Reform. What Will The Rest Of The Country Do? - The Marshall Project

On April 15, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a detailed notification outlining the conditions under which economic activities could be restarted in non-containment zones.

The order imposed a string of mandatory dos and donts such as social distancing, the arrangement of private transportation for workers and medical insurance. The violation of any of these directives, the order noted, could attract severe penalties including imprisonment under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005 (NDMA).

Two days before that, on April 13, Indias central trade unions (CTUs) sent a letter to the Union labour minister that expressed their opposition to a proposal that would amend the Factories Act, 1948 (FA), a move which was reportedly being considered by the Centre.

The alleged amendment would have allowed companies to extend a factory workers daily shift to 12 hours per day, six days a week (72 hours) from the existing eight hours per day, six days a week (48 hours).

This move is controversial, because 48 hours per week is what is mandated by global and ILO norms. In fact, the first convention that ILO adopted was the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1) which India ratified in 1921 and it proclaimed 48 hours of work in a week.

While the Centre hasnt yet amended the FA, at least four state governments Rajasthan (April 11), Gujarat (April 17), Punjab (April 20) and Himachal Pradesh (April 21) have issued notifications in the last few days to increase the working hours as mentioned above.

Incidentally, this has become the most popular strategy of carrying out labour law reforms in India both historically and recently.

Labour market reforms at the national level are often opposed stridently by a rather united trade union movement through massive strikes involving crores of workers and in the tripartite forum also. These are supported, on-and-off, by opportunistic opposition political parties. Reforms such as easy hire-and-fire rules create negative outcomes like unemployment, which have adverse electoral costs for ruling parties. This is why core labour law reforms at the national level then becomes problematic for the Centre. What, then, becomes the way out for the Union government? Since the subject of labour figures in the Concurrent List, the Central government allows willing state governments to adopt these reforms and the presidents assent, which is in essence a Union Cabinet decision, is granted for them.

Thus, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition Act, 1970 was liberalised by the then united Andhra Pradesh in 2003, by Maharashtra in 2017 and by Rajasthan in 2014. Chapter V-B was also liberalised by the Rajasthan government to make it applicable to industrial establishments employing 300 workers in place of 100 in 2014, following which others like Jharkhand did it in in 2016.

The juggernaut of heavyweight labour law reforms therefore moves forward as states dared to effect hard labour law reforms that the Union government otherwise shies away from. The Centre then typically expresses its helplessness by saying that the state governments are well placed to effect these reforms and nothing can be done about it.

A similar strategy has been adopted here with respect to increasing the hours of work during the COVID-19 context.

Legal defects

But there are a few issues with these notifications. Firstly, the legal justifications given for pushing through a 12-hour shift come with their own defects. Section 51 of Factories Act, 1948 (FA) stipulates that no adult worker should work for more than 48 hours in a week and within this framework no worker should be allowed for more than nine hours a day (S.54). In addition to this, the total spread-over time inclusive of rests should not be more than 10.5 hours a day (S.56) and subject to S.51 and S.54, more hours worked will be paid at the rate twice the ordinary wage rate (S.59).

The reasons given by these governments for extending working hours include labour shortage due to curfews because of the pandemic, specifically trying to reduce manpower requirement by 33% and limiting worker movement (Rajasthan) and for safety and social-distancing (Gujarat). In the meanwhile, several industry leaders have been complaining of labour shortages. Himachal Pradesh has not mentioned any reason for the extension in its notification.

Also read: The Streets Are Empty. How Are Hawkers Surviving This Lockdown?

While all of them have increased the maximum working hours to 12 hours a day and 72 hours a week, Rajasthan and Punjab have provided for overtime (OT) pay Punjabs notification specifically mentions that OT pay will be double the normal wage rate as per Section 59 of FA.

Gujarats notification however says, wages shall be in proportion of the existing wages. This means, as the notification points out, that if wages for eight hours are Rs 80, then the proportionate wages for 12 hours will be Rs 120. Thus, the OT wages provided for by Gujarat is less than what is stipulated by S.59 of FA and to that extent it is legally deficient.

While Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh governments have exercised the powers conferred by S.5 and the Punjab government S.65 of FA, Rajasthan did not specify any provision at all. The exercise of S.5 by Gujarat is also questionable as it empowers the state governments on the grounds of public emergency to exempt factories from all or any of the provisions of FA save S.67 (which deals with prohibition of employment of children).

Public emergency means a grave emergency whereby the security of India or any part of the territory thereof is threatened, whether by war or external aggression or internal disturbances (introduced with effect from 26/10-1976). The crisis due to COVID-19 is for biological health hazards and surely is not covered by the definition of public emergency under S.5 of FA even under internal disturbances grounds which must affect security of India.

S.65(2) (3) empower the state governments to amend Sections 51-52, 54 and 56 subject to conditions, viz. (a) the total number of hours of work in any day shall not exceed 12; (b) the spread-over, inclusive of rest intervals, shall not exceed 13, (c) the total number of work-hours in any week, including OT, shall not exceed 60. Punjab only has correctly exercised S.65. However, all the government notifications provide for a total of 72 hours in a week, which is questionable.

Worker health, productivity and employmentopportunity

Apart from these legal issues, serious industrial relations concerns exist.

Shortage of labour and social distancing principles legitimise the extension of working hours as it optimises the deployment of existing workforce and thus partly tackles the extra costs involved in complying with the MHAs order.

But is the extension of working hours needed for all industries? Why arent the existing provisions in the FA adequate to be used to tackle contingencies mentioned above?

After all, where necessary, employers and unions (wherever they exist) could together determine the labour shortage, extra workload and accordingly calculate the over-time that would be required. The issues arising out of labour deployment will differ across industries and cannot be generalised for the manufacturing sector as a whole, which is what these amendments assume.

What is important to remember is that a 12-hour shift effectively reduces the demand for labour. In the absence of company-worker dialogue, employers may unilaterally take calls, and hence provide room for discrimination regarding employee choices and income distribution among workers. These issues may lead to labour unrest. To be sure, social dialogue could mitigate any adverse effects of a 12-hour shift.

Beyond this, there are several practical issues that affect factory workers. Increased hours of work, especially when the tasks are repetitive and mechanical, will raise fatigue and work stress, hence affecting productivity adversely. In cases where workers thanks to social distancing are performing multiple though related tasks, the possibilities of work-related stress will be much higher. It is also plausible that errors could occur, with even accidents at the workplace cannot be ruled out.

Also read: Treat Sanitation Workers Like Health Workers, Pay Them At Least Rs 20,000 Per Month

The most serious setback arising out of a 12-hour workday, though, is that it will place women workers at a disadvantage thanks to their multiple roles in the workplace and homes, and womens employment might be reduced. Women workers are more unlikely to prefer employment which requires them to stay at the workplace, and 12 hours plus travel time will mean less time for family life. Hence, they are least likely to self-select and their economic capacities will be affected.

All these have adverse gender implications. Even for male employees, being away for 12 hours plus travel time in case of travel-based work, scheduling their work-life balance will be affected. Alternatively, in cases of shelter-based work scheduling, their absence from home at a stretch might affect their emotional state, assuming that they will be provided home-like shelter and food.

Also, these notifications will greatly reduce the employment opportunities of precarious workers as when there is a likelihood of non-employment of some regular workers, the question of precarious workers does not arise. However, given the labour flexibility drive of employers, it may be that some cost-optimising employers may prefer these precarious workers.

Taking one step back though, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic slowdown has thrown up a wide range of questions that have grave implications for Indias blue-collar factory workforce.

Also read: Is India Neglecting Its Migrant Workers Abroad?

For instance, what if non-employed workers do not get full wages even if they are ready to offer their services or should they be paid lay-off compensation? Is a pandemic a legally valid clause for lay-offs? Even assuming that lay-offs are legally allowed, as per Chapter V-A of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 workers employed in factories employing 50 or more workers only are eligible for it. One may argue that factories employing less than 50 workers may not start production at all, as some reports indicate.

But as a legal principle, how will the non-employed workers be compensated, whether for eight hours or 12 hours of work? All these could be left to social dialogue at the firm level. Issuance of legally defective and macro-based notifications are ill-advised and should be withdrawn. In these sensitive circumstances, talk of labour law reforms in terms of introduction of labour codes will be injudicious and even counter-productive.

The first socio-economic task is to balance lives and livelihoods. There are better state interventions to consider, like wage subsidies.

The vexatious question is: Why is there not greater engagement with trade unions at this troubling time? This might help with governance of the world of work and the crises brewing in it.

K.R. Shyam Sundar is Professor, XLRI, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur. He can be contacted at krshyams@xlri.ac.in

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Factory Workers Can Now Legally Be Asked to Work 12-Hour Shifts. How Will this Change Things? - The Wire

In Coffeeland, Augustine Sedgewick focuses on a single plantation in El Salvador

Apr 23rd 2020

Coffeeland. By Augustine Sedgewick.Penguin; 444 pages; $30 and 25.

WHAT BEGAN as an obscure berry from the highlands of Ethiopia is now, five centuries later, a ubiquitous global necessity. Coffee has changed the world along the way. A wakefull and civill drink, its pep as a stimulant awoke Europe from an alcoholic stupor and improved useful knowledge very much, as a 17th-century observer put it, helping fuel the ensuing scientific and financial revolutions. Coffeehouses, an idea that travelled with the refreshment from the Arab world, became information exchanges and centres of collaboration; coffee remains the default drink of personal networking to this day.

The focus of Augustine Sedgewicks book is not coffees effect on drinkers but its role in the story of global capitalism, as a commodity that links producers in poor countries with consumers in rich ones. Coffee does more than merely reflect this divide, he arguesit has played a central role in shaping it. It is, he notes, the commodity we use more than any other to think about how the world economy works and what to do about it.

To illuminate this history, and the web of connections between workers on plantations and coffee-sipping consumers, Mr Sedgewick focuses on a single planter in one country: James Hill, a British emigrant who by the 1920s had established himself as the coffee king of El Salvador. By telling the story of El Salvadors emergence as the worlds most intensive coffee economy, and following coffee beans from Hills plantation to American consumers cups, Mr Sedgewick painstakingly shows how shifts in the global coffee market have affected conditions for workers on the ground. The result is a portrait of the political and economic consequences of the worlds addiction to coffee.

He tucks many fascinating details into his narrative. Contrary to popular belief, for example, it was not the Boston Tea Party that led to teas dethronement as Americas favourite hot drink: it was the abolition of tariffs on coffee imports in the early 19th century, as the United States sought to build trade ties and buy influence across Latin America. Imports doubled every decade between 1800 and 1850; during the civil war the average Union soldier consumed five cups of coffee a day. By the turn of the 20th century consumption per person in America was roughly double the level in France and ten times that in Italy. Most of this coffee came from Latin America.

A secondary theme is the relationship between food and labour, and the effort to measure human food consumption and energy output. Hill applied ideas from industrial Manchester, the city of his birth, to wring as much work as possible from his team. By paying mostly in food, and removing all other sources of it (such as wild fruit trees), he could manipulate the degree of hunger among local workers, and thus the availability of labour. The resulting coffee was then used to optimise the efficiency of workers in America, as bosses realised that formal coffee breaks improved productivity. Both coffee producers and consumers, Mr Sedgewick scathingly implies, are mere cogs in the remorseless machinery of global capitalism.

After all this readers might expect his conclusion to be a ringing endorsement of the fair trade model (coffee is by far the leading fair-trade product), which adds a small premium to the price of certified coffees to fund projects to improve workers welfare. In fact, Mr Sedgewick thinks the arguments over fair trade obscure a more fundamental issue, which is the lack of other opportunities in places where the local economy is dominated by coffee. In El Salvadors dictatorship of coffee, where coffee planters enjoyed a virtual monopoly on politics, the only alternatives were migration or revolution, leading to decades of strife during the 20th century that pitted coffee growers against their overlords.

Artfully blending together all these strands, and juggling a wide cast of characters, Mr Sedgewicks book is a parable of how a commodity can link producers, consumers, markets and politics in unexpected ways. Like the drink it describes, it is an eye-opening, stimulating brew.

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "The big grind"

Go here to read the rest:

The story of coffee is a parable of global capitalism - The Economist

Am I going to have to fall out of love with juries? For decades I have defended these curious committees, which can ruin a mans life in an afternoon. It has been a romance as much as it has been a reasoned position. Most people get their best lesson in jury trials from the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men. In that version, a single determined juror, played by Henry Fonda, gradually wins the rest of the panel round to an acquittal, at great cost in emotion and patience. But what really won my heart was Thomas Macaulays account of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, in which a London jury defied the wishes of the would-be autocrat King James II in 1688. It was an astonishing event, a monarchs authority challenged byof all unlikely thingsa collection of Anglican prelates. Their acquittal, perhaps more than anything else, led to Jamess fall a few months later. It was the beginning of true constitutional monarchy in Europe, the genesis of the English Bill of Rights and the forerunner of the very similar American document of the same name. It could not have happened without a jury.

For without a jury, any trial is simply a process by which the state reassures itself that it has got the right man. A group of state employees, none of them especially distinguished, are asked to confirm the views of other state employees. With a jury, the government cannot know the outcome and must prove its case. And so the faint, phantasmal ideal of the presumption of innocence takes on actual flesh and bones and stands in the path of power. Juries grew up in England almost entirely by happy accident, and no government would nowadays willingly create them where they do not already operate. A brief fashion for them in 19th-century Europe was swiftly stamped out by governments that understood all too well how much they limited their power. I believe the last true Continental juries, sitting in the absence of a judge, were abolished in France in 1940 by the German occupation authorities. People in Anglosphere countries, unaware that true independent juries rarely exist outside the English-speaking world, have no idea what a precious possession they are.

I remember actually pounding the arm of my chair with delight as I read Macaulays account of the response of the bishops attorney, Francis Pemberton, when threatened by the chief Crown prosecutor, the solicitor general: Record what you will. I am not afraid of you, Mister Solicitor! So this was England after all, and even the majesty of the Stuart Crown could not overawe the defense. This was wholly thanks to the fact that the trial took place before a jurywhich duly acquitted the bishops of seditious libel, the ludicrous charge by which James had hoped to crush opposition to his plans to reverse the Reformation. Without a jury, the king would of course have won his case, and England would have gone down the road to absolutism (already followed in France, Prussia, Russia, and the Habsburg dominions) with incalculable consequences for the whole world. Instead we had what came to be called the Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution.

And my blood still runs faster when I recall this and other moments at which the mere existence of juries has made us all more free. Yet I also have terrible doubts. Is the independence of juries possible in the modern world, in which the English Bill of Rights is all but forgotten and a new dispensation reigns? All too often, I read reports of trials in my own country that fill me with doubt. I did my fair share of court reporting as an apprentice journalist many years ago, and I have a good understanding of how these things used to work and ought to work. Something has changed. There is a worrying number of sex cases now coming before the courts in which clear forensic proof of guilt is often unobtainable.

The alleged crimes themselves are repulsive, and the mere accusation is enough to nurture prejudice. The defendants have often been arrested in the scorching light of total publicity, in spectacular dawn raids totally unjustified by any immediate danger they present. Pre-trial media reporting has further undermined the presumption of innocence. In England there is still officially a strong rule against the media taking sides before the jury delivers its verdict. But this is not enforced as it once was. The prosecutions are frequently as emotional as they are unforensic, the opposite of the proper arrangement. Yet the defendants are often convicted even so (sometimes by majority verdicts, which in my view violate the whole jury principle). The state seems somehow to have turned the juryoften swayed by emotioninto its own weapon. And it is worse than the alternative. A wrongfully-convicted defendant, pronounced culpable by a jury of his peers, must feel a far deeper despair than one cast into prison by a mere panel of judges.

I had been concerned about this for some time. I knew that, since the introduction of majority verdicts in 1966, and the abolition of the old property qualification in 1974, English juries had not been what they were. Majority verdicts effectively made impossible the stand by the Henry Fonda character in Twelve Angry Men. The judge would simply have accepted the guilty verdict of the majority. The property qualificationwhich required jurors to be householderstended to ensure that they were older and more experienced. But it also meant they were mostly male, and mostly well-off, and it is easy to see why it was removed. The problem was that it was replaced by nothing at all. Nobody, it seemed, could devise an educational or age qualification that did not violate some principle of the new egalitarianism. This means that anyone on the voters roll may now be a juryperson, and your whole future could in theory be decided by a room full of 18-year-olds who have never worked, paid taxes, been abroad, broken a bone, or raised a child. I do not find this reassuring.

In 1907, when the English Court of Criminal Appeal was first set up, there were warnings that it would undermine the authority of the jury, since it could overturn a guilty verdict (though not an acquittal). And it is easy to see why some defenders of juries were worried. A principle can be undermined from more than one direction. But as it happened, the danger to juries came from a different sourcefrom the increasing egalitarianism of society itself, and the resulting politicization of so many trials. Judges became less elitist and more political, as did prosecutors. The sexual revolution created a whole new class of crimes, and created a whole new set of procedures to try them. It granted anonymity to accusers, a change that met with surprisingly weak opposition.

I did not really understand the force of this until I found myself unexpectedly defending the long-dead Bishop George Bell against ancient charges of child sex abuse. Bishop Bell could not be tried because he was deceased. But the Church of Englands treatment of his case very much reflected the new arrangements. He was more or less presumed guilty. His unnamed accuser was designated a victim and a survivor, not an alleged victim, before any inquiry began. The procedure that adjudged him guilty, in private, did not follow the presumption of innocence and made no serious effort to discover if there was a defense (there was). I found to my shock that an inaccurate claimthat he would have been arrested if alivepersuaded many apparently fair-minded, educated, and intelligent people of his guilt, though an arrest is evidence of nothing at all. Thanks to some truly dedicated and determined work by many selfless people, and some very good legal work as well, the thing was more or less set right. But a grudging Church of England has yet to make full restitution.

So when I saw the case in Australia against Cardinal George Pell, it was not just the similar name that aroused my interest. I knew from a recent visit to Sydney that Australia had undergone an anti-religious revolution. I knew very well how powerful allegations of child abuse had been in weakening the Church. My instincts were to believe that George Pell, who behaved like an innocent man, had been wrongly accused. But what if this was just bias? I sought to keep an open mind. I would presume the cardinal was innocent, but would not let my Christian sympathy close my mind to serious evidence against him. I had taken the same view in the Bell case. I resolved at the beginning never to be afraid of the truth. If the evidence against George Bell was convincing beyond reasonable doubt, then I would have to change my view of a man whose brave and selfless actions I had much admired. I would have to accept that the world was a bleaker, worse place than even I had feared. I knew well enough that there were pedophile priests. The same had to apply to Cardinal Pell.

And then a strange silence fell over the trial. I know that there were valid legal reasons for this silence, but it still seems to me that some way should have been found for a case of such moment to be heard openly and reported openly, while it was going on. When Pell was convicted, I felt I had to accept the verdict because I was in no position to dispute it, and had not heard what the jury had heard. But the whole sky darkened at the news. If such a man was guilty of such a filthy thing, and a jury had agreed upon this after a fair trial, then the forces of goodness were in rapid and frightening retreat.

And then, amid the dismal suppression of freedom and the economic lunacy now gripping the world, came a sudden shaft of light. The High Court of Australia overturned the verdict and freed Cardinal Pell. And then I read what they had said. It was startling and disturbing, not because there was any ambiguity in it, but because of something else. A court statement declared,

The judges ruled:

This seems to me to be a very polite way of suggesting that the jury did not entertain that reasonable doubt. I may be very grateful that the High Court took this view, because it seems to me that justice was done when George Pell was freed. But will there always be such High Courts, and will most people be able to reach them? In this egalitarian world, in which a series of inglorious revolutions has wholly changed the nature of justice, I am not sure that the old English jury is much of a defense anymore. And I cannot begin to say how sad this makes me.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for theMail on Sunday.

Originally posted here:

The Decline of the Jury | Peter Hitchens - First Things

By G. M. Tams[1]

As was to be expected, authoritarian governments in Eastern Europe have used the coronavirus epidemic as a pretext to enlarge, to extend, to harden their power and, in the case of Hungary, to finally put the constitutional system out of its misery, where for an indefinite period of time the only source of law is now the supreme leader, Mr Orbn. What a bore.

Like always in such cases, people in richer and cleaner, better appointed and better equipped countries are asking themselves piously, how on earth could East Europeans put up with this sort of annoying nonsense.

Well, one thing is that people everywhere are prepared to submit to a new public order that has no precedent in interfering with individual, even physical, liberty to this extent, in regulating individuals movement and proximate human intercourse, prohibiting work, presence in public places and so on, something no outlandish tyranny would have ever dared to demand in the darkest of ages. In this, apparently voluntary, obedience East Europeans are no worse than anyone else, on the contrary, they are as a rule less disciplined than most Western nations.

But politics is different.

East Europeans are not protesting the loss of a liberty they do not believe in anyway.

It is not a question of the preternatural hypocrisy of the bourgeois order where individual freedom has been contrasted for long centuries with the lack of social justice. This is a little deeper and a little more specific than the old thing that (to quote Leonard Cohen) everybody knows.

In order to defend itself and its autonomy, a civic community will have to know itself as such, but East European societies would not dream of imagining themselves to be civic communities.

This, like most things, has historical origins.

In our backward and hidebound imaginations, we East Europeans have only one memory of a civic community, to wit, the one based on common ownership: not the common ownership of the means of production in the strict old-Marxist sense, but the common ownership of everything that matters. Not only the factory, not only the barracks, not only the university, but also the family apartments in the council estates (orPlattenbauin the GDR or theArbeitersiedlungenin Red Vienna), the summer camps, the workers clubs, the libraries and so on, meaning work and leisure, public and private, social and personal literally, everything that matters.

A civic community, according to East Europeans, existed when the community seemed to own and to rule and to arrange for places to live and to work and to be ourselves together. Obviously, not everybody liked that, but those who didnt, did not like communities either. When what was called, rather imprecisely, real socialism was asked to join the company of everybody else, East Europeans calculated that politics which appeared to them to be a question of commitment and mobilisation has ended altogether. No community, no politics. Individual liberty equals the primacy and the preponderance of the personal. (Compare my earlier essay, 1989: The End of What?)

As long as individual variety with all its quirks and styles did not seem to be touched by state brutality and prejudice was tolerated in its virtual infinity, the East Europeanmalaisewas not thought to be a matter of freedom or not.

Power, of course, belongs to the owners separated from the community as it has earlier belonged to the community of owners hence there is no freedom for people who would constitute a civic community if they had power, the power of ownership. But they dont.

So when people such as myself make a fuss about the abolition of the rule of law, of constitutionalism and such, i.e., about the suppression of civic liberty, East Europeans ask, well, didnt you guys of 1989 say that the state is there to protect us from its own interference. But now it isnt the state that interferes, but the virus. The constitution was put there because there is no civic community which could defend itself even without such pieces of paper if it existed. But it doesnt. So get lost.

It isnt true that East Europeans dont care about freedom. They do. But they were taught by quite respectable thinkers from Aristotle to Spinoza to Hegel that freedom without civic power is not much. If they could be tempted, again, by an idea of liberty, the political seducers will have to answer questions concerning common ownership and the ability of a civic community to furnish our lives work and sex and leisure and study and art and sleep with the ability only property confers, as both real socialism and real capitalism are teaching us without a shadow of doubt.

I am in two minds about this.

Quite apart from my old dissident antipathy for real socialism, I believe without any liberal illusions that under capitalism (especially state capitalism that might take over from neoliberal globalisation which had ceased to function a number of years ago in any case) the guarantee against arbitrary rule can only be a guarantee of paper, that is,a text, deemed to be uncontrovertible, both upholding and opposing the rule of fact which is, as everybody knows, money and firepower. Law is where you can, under capitalism, negotiate liberty without an unmediated regard for property.

Many East Europeans think that this doesnt make a great deal of difference. And it frequently doesnt. However we judge this, arbitrary, lawless authoritarianism is growing, with a true religion of inequality (class, race, nationality, gender, age, health, education, housing, degree of pollution), and socialism real or imaginary is nowhere. But we must admit that constitutionalism is not anywhere, either. It has vanished without eliciting comment. The problem seems to be, whether or not there are enough masks, gloves, protective clothing, disinfectants, intensive-care beds, crematoria, cemeteries and dustbins. Nobody seems to be interested in where would they come from. The civic community is absent, the state functions in a vacuum therefore inefficiently and the increased powers refer to something (such as, say, society) the reality of which is rejected with our distinctive brand of humour.

Meanwhile, people are dying, alone, forced by the current etiquette to eschew saying goodbye to their children.

[1]G. M. Tams(*1948 in Kolozsvr/Cluj, Romania) is a Hungarian philosopher and writer. Forced to emigrate from Romania to Hungary in 1978, he taught for two years at the University of Budapest (ELTE) but was then dismissed for having published (and signed openly) illegal tracts insamizdat. He subsequently became a leading figure in the East European dissident movement. From 1986 to the present day, Tams has held numerous appointments and fellowships Central European University, Budapest/Vienna; Oxford (Columbia); Woodrow Wilson Center, Chicago; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; University of Georgetown, New School at Yale; Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He was elected to Parliament in 1990 and elected Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1991. In 1994 and 1995, respectively, he has stepped down from both. Later, he lost his job at the Academy of Sciences this instigated public protests.Currently, he is Visiting Professor at CEUs Department of Sociology, Budapest/Vienna.

The versatility of Tams political philosophy and theory is remarkable: over the course of his lifetime, his views gradually shifted to the left. He is said to belong to the circle of heretical European Marxists.

Selected works:Essay on Descartes(1977),Trzsi fogalmak(Tribal Concepts, Collected Philosophical Papers, 2 volumes, 1999),LOeil et la main(1985),LesIdoles de la tribu(1989),Telling the Truth about Class(Socialist Register,vol. 42, 2006),Innocent Power(2012),Postfascism i anticomunism(2014),Ethnicism After Nationalism(Socialist Register, vol. 52, 2015),Kommunismus nach 1989(2015),K filosofii socializmu(2016),Komunizem po letu 1989(2016).

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The Nationality of a Virus - Pressenza

Ted: Myrrh Bearing Women /flickr

Time is important. What happens in time doesnt merely have temporal significance, it has eternal significance. The transcendence of eternity is an inclusive transcendence. While, theoretically, the transcendence of eternity could mean that eternity is not shaped by what happens in time, in reality, they are related to each other so that what happens in time shapes eternity even as eternity shapes time. The interdependence of the two, the non-duality which connects the two, is one of the great revelations of the Christian faith. Eternity and time are shown to be united as one in the God-man, Jesus Christ. This is because he is what connects them together. He can be seen as the bridge which unites them and makes them one. In Jesus, temporal things are brought over into eternity. Thus, Bulgakov is able to tell us: The life of the future age is not a rejection or nullification of this age, but an eternalization of all things in this age that are worthy of being eternalized; just as the eternity of the future age is not a forgetting or abolition of time but a cessation of its changeable course. [1] What happens in time is not lost in eternity. The ascension of Jesus shows us that what happens in time is taken up to its rightful place in eternity.

Not all events are equal, but all of them will find they have eternal significance. The central event in time is the incarnation, and central to the incarnation is the resurrection of Christ. Jesus brings all things together as one, not as cold, lifeless facts, but rather, as warming living-realities. Death, and with it, the temporal ending death brings to those who have life, does not have the final say. All that has life will be brought to eternal life, realizing in eternity what they established for themselves in time. Important, foundational events in time will likewise find themselves holding important positions in eternity. Because the resurrection of Christ is what establishes this connection, it also holds a central place in eternity. This means what happened in and around the resurrection event likewise have great significance in eternity.

Who do we find around Christ, both in his death, and soon after his resurrection? Women. From his mother (who tradition says was the first to know of the resurrection), to the myrrh bearing women, Jesus had women around him as the first witnesses of the resurrection:

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you (Mk. 16:1-7 RSV).

It was women who stood by and kept watch over Jesus body. When the Sabbath was over, they came to anoint it. They prepared myrrh and spices, intending on the one hand, to honour the dead, and, on the other, to assuage by their anointing the stench of the body as it decomposed, for the sake of those who wanted to stay beside it. [2]

It was women who first experienced the resurrection event. It is women, not men, who first proclaimed the resurrection of Christ. It was women who first led the church, for there was a time when only women were preaching the resurrection of Christ. We should, therefore, expect women to have a central place in the eternalization of the resurrection event, and therefore, in the church which is centered upon that event.

Despite the fact that the myrrh bearing women are rightfully remembered by the church, rarely are we told to consider the ecclesial ramifications of their actions. But St. Anthony of Padua suggests that we are to do so. The church is the body of Christ. By coming to anoint Christ, they came, in a fashion, to anoint the whole of the church, saving the church from the rot of sin and death. Therefore, St. Anthony of Padua says, when the myrrh bearing women brought spices, they came to anoint the body of Christ, and with it the church, with a mixture made from the blood of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit:

The oil that is with which the infant Church was anointed on the day of Pentecost. It is made, then, from the Blood of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit. From these two ingredients the apothecary must make his ointments, so as to anoint members of Jesus Christ, the faithful of the Church, as did the three women of whom todays Gospel tells us: Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, brought sweet spices, etc.[3]

By their desire to anoint the body of Christ, they spiritually anointed the church. They prepared it so that it can be preserved from all the stench of death. That is, through them, we find that women stand at the forefront of the church and protect it from the sins of its members, from the unbelief of its leaders and the cowardly, if not wicked, actions of its leaders.

Now in these days when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists murmured against the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution. And the twelve summoned the body of the disciples and said, It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brethren, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And what they said pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. These they set before the apostles, and they prayed and laid their hands upon them. And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:1-7 RSV).

Throughout history, we can see a sad fact repeating itself: people within the church, especially its leaders, cause all kinds of harm to the faithful. Even at its inception, it could not get away from such sin. Observe, how even in the beginning the evils came not only from without, but also from within. For you must not look to this only, that it was set to rights, but observe that it was a great evil that it existed.[4] But perhaps this should be expected. At the resurrection event, we know that the church was divided between those who stayed with Christ (which was only a select few), and those who fled, seeking to preserve themselves and their livelihood, fearing the consequences they would face for having been Jesus disciples.

Jesus knew this would happen. He made room for it. But he also knew that would falter and sin, even as he knew many of them would repent and come back to him. He made room for all of this. He made sure that those who sought him out with love would not only receive forgiveness, but that they could experience the fullness of grace found in the resurrection. Not everyone falls in a grievous manner. Some fight and hold strong to the way of love. They might have minor faults, minor mistakes, but they hold on to Christ strongly throughout their life. The church is for them even as it is for those who fall away. Throughout time, the earthly manifestation of the church will find itself filled by both types of people. Those who truly follow Christ and do not fall away should not be surprised at those who fall. They should look to the fallen in the way Christ looks at them, that is with much love and hope. Then, like the myrrh-bearing women, they can go out and preach the resurrection, hoping for the restoration of the fallen.

We must keep in mind, that the first seven deacons were not to be the last; many more we called to such servitude, and we know were women were among them: I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae, that you may receive her in the Lord as befits the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a helper of many and of myself as well (Rom. 16:1-2 RSV). As the earliest deacons helped reconcile the church from the conflicts which had emerged, it should not be surprising that women would be among those chosen for such a rank, because it reflects the work of the myrrh bearing women at the resurrection event. Indeed, it is hard not to see a diaconal role being played out by the myrrh-bearing women. For the service those women rendered to the body of Christ is now rendered by deacons in their own work to serve the church.

You commanded the myrrhbearers to rejoice, O Christ! By Your Resurrection, You stopped the lamentation of Eve, the first mother! You commanded them to preach to Your apostles: The Savior is Risen from the tomb! (Kontakion for the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women)

We must now stop the lamentation of Eve from all the misogyny which women have faced throughout history. Christ shows us the central place they have in eternity by the place they have in the resurrection event. Women should hold more than a place of mere honor in the church. They cannot and must not be ignored.

[1] Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 112.

[2] St. Gregory Palamas, On the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers in Saint Gregory Palamas: The Homilies. Trans. Christopher Veniamin (Waymart, PA: Mount Thabor Publishing, 2009),146.

[3] St. Anthony of Padua, Sermons for Sundays and Festivals. Volume I. trans. Paul Spilsbury (Padova: Edizioni Messaggero Padova, 2007), 227.

[4] St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles in NPNF1(11):89 [Homily 14].

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Women and the Resurrection | Henry Karlson - Patheos

OpinionColumnistsThe NHS is a public service with strengths and weaknesses like any other organisation and has a disturbing trend of stifling whistleblowing

Sunday, 26th April 2020, 5:34 pm

I have returned from my daily burst of exercise, walking around local streets.

Many of the houses I passed have rainbow pictures drawn by children in their windows as elsewhere in the country, saluting the bravery of staff on the front line of the coronavirus fight.

Sweet images say things such as We love the NHS, Thank you NHS and NHS is the best.

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today

i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today

Once a week my neighbourhood largely unites when residents stand outside clapping carers, some banging drums or saucepans. One household last week fired off a few fireworks.

Yet I feel a tinge of concern as I pass these signs and hear the cheers.

Obviously I share the immense gratitude towards carers, doctors, nurses and all other workers performing heroics in challenging circumstances.

When you hear of low-paid carers locking themselves in residential homes to protect old and disabled people, or read about medical teams struggling to save lives as they swelter in protective gear, it is impossible not to be moved by their courage and compassion. They deserve all possible plaudits.

But there is a big difference between praising the people performing heroics and sanctifying the system.

Britain entered this crisis locked in weird relationship with its health service, so bedazzled by its supposed beauty that it was given a starring role in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics to the bemusement of other countries.

Politicians ceaselessly chant the mantra that it is a wonder of the world. During a decade of austerity the NHS budget rose by about 26bn, yet there were constant calls for more cash while the equally deserving care system was quietlyshredded.

Now it is treated like a charity, with millions lavished on heartfelt fundraising efforts, yet real charities such as our incredible hospices are left to struggle.

But behind Britains emotive worship of the NHS lies a more complex reality.

Look at Europe, where alternative models were better at saving lives before this crisis.

A landmark comparative study by four think-tanks with 18 similar nations found that we had lower-than-average life expectancy, with lagging survival rates for eight of the dozen most deadly diseases.

We also had the worst amenable mortality levels (when people die from potentially preventable conditions).

This week Boris Johnson returns to full-time work. His gratitude to health workers, as already seen, will be profound after a frightening brush with death.

This is, after all, a prime minister who won power by exploiting adoration of the NHS as a prop in his Brexit campaign; remember that dodgy slogan on the battlebus?

Like all Tories, he knows this remains his partys weak point for many voters and wants to retain support in the north. He will be even more determined to join theapplause.

But for all the justified admiration for recent efforts by medical personnnel, we do them a disservice if we do not recognise the NHS is simply a public service with strengths and weaknesses like any other organisation.

Yes, some flaws relate to funding shortfalls, which left England with just 4,100 intensive care beds when the epidemic erupted. Some failures relate to political decisions, such as the stupid abolition of bursaries that intensified shortages of nurses and immigration polices that deter carers.

But some are systemic, such as a shocking reluctance to acknowledge mistakes, silencing whistle-blowers even amid a pandemic and disturbing procurement struggles seen in recent weeks.

Already union leaders are muttering about pay rises for frontline workers.

Without doubt, some are deserved such as for nurses and especially in the care sector, so corroded by profiteering private firms that pay peanuts to staff. Yet it is hard to see Tory politicians especially a prime minister whose own life was just saved defying any demands for higher salaries from people, however well paid, fighting this virus.

Having shaken the magic money tree to bail out Britain, ministers will struggle to resist any calls to splash cash on the health system, regardless of logic.

The NHS has performed well to crank up capacity after seeing carnage in Italy and Spain.

I have no problem with trying to innovate on ventilator production.

But we must examine with ruthless honesty and rationality the flaws that proved fatal on testing, protective kit and care homes. Why was the system so sclerotic that ministers had to summon the Army?

Some failures are due to dire political leadership. Others seem down to stifling bureaucracy, systemic inertia, centralised procurement and confused attitudes to private firms. Differing death rates could emerge.

Given the clear struggles of Public Health England, there is a case to sever protection and prevention roles that were unified seven years ago.

Lavishing praise on any institution builds resistance to change and reluctance to learn from others.

But is there any hope Westminster might have the bottle to harvest this wave of emotion to change wider attitudes?

Not just on the health service and social care, along with allied issues of tax and spending, but even on immigration when the public can see in stark terms the role of migrants, some giving their lives in service to our nation.

Certainly ministers must ditch the crass surcharge that forces such staff, including some who treated Johnson, to pay huge and rising sums to use the NHS.

Now we rely on the race to discover a vaccine and effective treatments to find a way out of darkness that has befallen our world. Lifting lockdown is simply the first step on a long, hard road ahead.

This journey will be easier if analysis of our response to the pandemic, with among the highest death rates in the developed world, is shorn of sentimentality. By all means shower praise on people performing heroics.

But if you really want to honour them, do not indulge in shallow worship of a flawedsystem.

Link:

Medics fighting coronavirus deserve to be celebrated but we must not forget that our NHS is deeply flawed and needs reform - inews

Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is situated at the geographic center of Europe. The Gate of Dawn is one of the entrance doors of the city, where there is a chapel dedicated to our Lady of Mercy. It was in that chapel that the image of Divine Mercy was exposed for the first time, 85 years ago.

Not many people know that it was in Vilnius St. Faustina Kowalska - the Polish nun to whom Jesus gave the work of spreading devotion to His Deivine Mercy fulfilled the wish of Our Lordto paint the image that has become known the world over. Jesus had asked her to do that in Plock, according to Sr. Faustina diaries.

The image was exposed for the first time at the Gate of Dawn from Apr. 26-28, 1935.

The image of Vilnius is slightly different from the picture we all got to know.

The famous image of the Divine Mercy is a replica by the Polish painter Adolf Hyla, an ex-voto he made to thank Jesus he was still alive after the Second World War.

Hyla's image has some characters slightly different from the original one. But spread because the original image was believed lost. The story of the image of the Divine Mercy is fascinating and full of turns of events.

Archbishop Grusas of Vilnius says: For a long time, the Lithuanian people themselves did not know much about this picture. Because of the difficult geopolitical circumstances, the world has not known for a long time either of the first picture of the Divine Mercy.

Since 2005, the painting has been in a chapel expressly dedicated to the Divine Mercy, with perpetual Eucharistic adoration. Since the image was transferred there, Archbishop Grusas adds, more and more people are discovering and deeply understanding the Mercy of God, especially in Lithuania.

Why was the image of the Divine Mercy painted in Vilnius?

Sr. Faustina joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady ofMercy in Warsaw in 1926. In April 1929, her superiors sent her to a convent in Vilnius, which was then part of Poland. One year after her return from Vilnius, she was transferred to the convent in Plock, where she stayed from 1930 to 1933.

In 1933, after she took perpetual vows, she was again transferred to Vilnius. There she met Fr. Michael Sopocko, her confessor. She reported to him the visions and the conversations she had with Jesus. She told him that Jesus had asked her to craft an image of His Divine Mercy.

Fr. Sopocko took her to the studio of the painter Eugeniusz Kazimierowski. Although an Atheist, Kazimierowski accepted the commission. It was 1934.

Kazimierowski's studio was not far from Sr. Faustinas convent. She went every day to his studio; she checked and oversaw every small detail of the painting. She wanted to make sure that the picture fully matched the indications Jesus gave her.

Kazimierowski finished the painting in 1935.

The first exposition took place at the Gate of Dawn, whose chapel had been dedicated to Mary, Mother of Mercy, 400 years earlier. For three days, on Apr. 26, 27, and 28, the painting was hung on display in the chapel, and people venerated it. It was a crucial moment: the beginning of the Divine Mercy devotion as we know it today.

More importantly, it took place on the first Sunday after Easter, the very same liturgical moment of the year that St. John Paul II officially set as Divine Mercy Sunday.

In his memoirs, Fr. Sopocko shared a recollection: During the Holy Week of 1935 Sr. Faustina said to me that the Lord Jesus demanded that I place the picture in the Gate of Dawn for three days where the triduum at the end of the jubilee of Redemption was to be held.

The triduum, Fr. Sopocko continued, was planned on the same days as the coveted feast of Mercy. Soon I learnt that the said triduum was going to be held indeed and the parish priest of the Gate of Dawn asked me to say the sermon. I agreed, on condition that the picture would be placed as a decoration in the window of the cloister where the picture looked impressive and attracted more attention than the picture of Our Lady.

In her Diary, Sr. Faustina wrote: On Friday, when I was at the Gate of Dawn to attend the ceremony during which the image was displayed, I heard a sermon given by my confessor Father Sopocko. This sermon about divine Mercy was the first of the things that Jesus had asked for so very long ago. When he began to speak about the great mercy of the Lord, the image came alive, and the rays pierced the hearts of the people gathered there. Great joy filled my soul to see the grace of God.

Things quickly became more difficult.

In 1936, Sr. Faustina had to return to Poland. At first, she went to Walendow, south-east of Warsaw. After she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, she was sent to the sanatorium in Pradnik. Krakow. She died in 1938.

The image of the Divine Mercy stayed in Lithuania, hidden in the church of St. Michael, where Fr. Sopocko was pastor.

The outbreak of the Second World War battered Lithuania. In 1939, Soviet troops invaded the Baltic state and began the process of imposing official Atheism: shutdown of seminaries, the prohibition of teaching religion, seizing of ecclesiastical goods, and the abolition of the State Church agreement all came in fairly short order.

Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania in 1941, and in 1944 the Soviet Union occupied the country again. After the war, Lithuania remained a Soviet satellite. In 1948, the communist authorities decided to turn the church of St. Michael into an architectural museum.

The church was closed then, and all the decorations and furnishings of the church sold, except the image of the Divine Mercy.

The painting remained hanging for three years on a wall of the former church of St. Michael, until two women in 1951 decided the picture was not safe, and carried it away.

They bribed the custodian with a little money and a bottle of vodka, and carried the painting off, leaving the frame. They took only the canvas, wrapped with care, and they hid it in an old cellar at a friends house.

The women were eventually deported to Siberia, while the canvas, after some years its not clear exactly how many - was brought to the church of the Holy Spirit in Vilnius. When the women were given amnesty and allowed to return from their Siberian exile, they went back to Vilnius to recover the image.

Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk has been among those who worked to bring back the painting to Vilnius.

Speaking with Catholic News Agency, he recounts:, In 1956, after five years of imprisonment, Fr. Jozef Grasewicz began searching for the image. He was a great worshiper of the Divine Mercy and a friend of Fr. Sopocko. One day, he visited his friend Fr. Jan Ellert in the church of the Holy Spirit. There, he saw the image, and he asked Fr. Ellert to give it to his parish of St. George in Nowa Ruda, Belarus. Fr. Ellert agreed. The image was then transferred to Nowa Ruda, hanged very high.

Fr. Grasewicz had to leave Nowa Ruda in 1957, and Fr. Feliks Soroko administered the parish for a while, until he was transferred to Odelsk. Nowa Ruda was then without a priest, though the people kept on going to church to pray.

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz also explained what happened when the Soviets turned the church into a storage facility: In 1970, the Soviet authorities closed the church of Nowa Ruda and turned it into a warehouse. All the furnishings of the church were moved to another church, but the image of the Merciful Jesus. It seems there was not a ladder long enough to get to it.

The painting stayed then, abandoned in the church. Fr. Spocoko died in 1975, without knowing what had become of the picture.

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz served as vicar of the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius between 1981 and 1986. Fr. Grasewicz was in the meantime appointed parish priest of St. Anthony and the Epiphany in Kamlonka, Belarus, he recalled. In 1982, [Fr Grasewicz] proposed to move the image of the merciful Jesus to the Gate of Dawn.

The current archbishop of Minsk tells the he "gave the opinion that it was impossible to display the image in the chapel because the walls of the chapel are filled with votiveofferings."

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz then suggested moving the image into the church of the Holy Spirit. Fr. Grasewicz agreed, and so did Fr. Alexander Kaszkiewicz, who was then pastor of Holy Spirit.

The image was moved back to Vilnius during the night a night in November of 1986. A replica was set to replace the image in the parish in Nowa Ruda. The image stayed in the church of the Holy Spirit until 2005, when it was moved to the church of the Holy Trinity, which is now the shrine of the Divine .

This year, therefore, also marks the 15th anniversary of the Divine Mercys translation to its home in Vilnius.

2020 can be considered a Year of Divine Mercy, then, since there are many important anniversaries to be celebrated.

The 20th anniversary of Sr. Faustinas canonization will be celebrated on Apr. 30. Sr. Faustina Kowalska entered the Congregation of the Blessed Mary of Mercy 95 years ago, on Aug. 1. On Aug. 25, it will be the 115th anniversary of the birth of St. Faustina, and, on Aug. 27, the 115th anniversary of her baptism. The 85th anniversary of the revelation of the words of the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy will be celebrated Sept. 13-14.

The original image of the Divine Mercy has a particularity: its face matches the face of the man of the Shroud, but also with the Sudarium of Oviedo and the Holy Face in Manoppello.

All of these images are different, made differently, and still they match: a miracle within a miracle.

Through all these vicissitudes, one message comes through clearly: Europe will be saved only if Christ and his mercy will be at its center.

* Catholic News Agency columns are opinion and do not necessarily express the perspective of the agency.

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The image of the Divine Mercy was exposed for the first time 85 years ago. In Vilnius - CNA Columns: A Vatican Observer - Catholic News Agency

Novels, says writer Saikat Majumdar, come from a wild and unpredictable place, but they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even of the future. The novelist and critic, who is a professor of English and head of the department of creative writing at Ashoka University, said he sees himself as an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. Majumdar, who explores the mesmeric power of religion and the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism in his third novel, The Scent of God, says the present is a muddled continuum the past always contains the future, and future, the past.

History and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form. Archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history. But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God, he said. Excerpts from an interview:

In your novel The Scent of God, you explore the unimaginable hold of religion over a secular democracy and trace the disturbing contours of religious violence, of the kind that recently erupted in Delhi, killing more than 50 people. Unlike your previous two novels, which delved into the lives of women in the past, this novel, based in Calcutta like the other two, has a certain degree of immediacy and urgency. In what ways has this novel been shaped by the rising tide of intolerance and hatred that has now begun to choke us?So far, India 2020 has been a nightmare. The year started off with the worst riot of the decade, and now everything is shut down due to the coronovirus pandemic. Impossible not to see much symbolism here. But thats how it is with history the past always contains the future, and future, the past; the present is a muddled continuum.

During my last visit to Calcutta, I was shocked to see the Islamophobia among bhadralok, middle- and upper-middle class Bengalis, the tenor of conversation in parties, the way they freely mixed class and communal prejudice. Such is how a culture imagined to be liberal reveals itself as otherwise. Now that I look at The Scent of God, I realise I was unconsciously recording the seething intolerance, and the incipient rise of saffron power in Bengal in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It appeared in apparently innocuous things, such as a group of boys in a boarding school cheering for the Indian cricket team playing Pakistan and engaging in an imaginary rivalry with a neighbouring Muslim village. The young protagonist is drugged by the magnetic charisma of the Hindu monk who supervises them in the hostel. The story is based on a real Hindu monastic order in Bengal, a liberal one, that has, of late, tended to cosy up to the ruling Hindu majoritarian government. Novels come from a wild place, wild and unpredictable, but I realise they end up capturing the spirit of the times, sometimes even the future spirit.

While religious violence is at the heart of your novel, it would be unfair to see it as just about that. Though it takes a look into a breeding ground of hate, it is essentially a story of love. The novel also hovers around other ideas like desire and abstinence, and the commingling of the spiritual with the sexual. The coming-of-age novel, set in an exclusively male boarding school of a Hindu Monastic order, depicts your protagonist Anirbans journey to adulthood a journey that highlights how the wedge between communities is driven early on in young minds, preparing them for a life entrenched in hatred by indoctrination. What brought you to Anirbans story, and Kajol, and their quest for an impossible love in an unlikely backdrop?The Scent of God, as I imagine it, is first and foremost a love story. I was more delighted when Times of India listed it as one of the Best Romance Novels of 2019 than when they listed it as a notable book on same-sex love, because the dream remains for the day when non-heteronormative love will get the same status as heteronormative love and wont have to be singled out as different.

I was intrigued by the first arrival of sexual stirrings at puberty, when a human touch is all the body longs, not caring about the sex or gender of the person touching you. Distinctions that come to you later, perhaps conditioned by society. Of course, the inspiration behind this novel is a life I used to know, as a student at a saffron school similar to the one described in The Scent of God. I remember the peculiar intimacies that grew between students there daily, the friendships hard to name all within the smell of incense and flowers of the monastic world.

The novel also pits several worlds and ideas against each other. The monks narrow, stifling and stultifying version of Hinduism is presented in conflict with Anirbans aesthetic perception of prayer rituals. The sensory world of religious worship is shown to be in sharp contrast to the sensory nature of erotic desire. The idea of purity is contrasted against the profane, and love against lust. Sensual meets the sexual. In the school, detachment from the body and its desires is mandatory. In Anirbans choice of defying this lies an act of rebellion, which is in contrast to the blind adherence to the rules of the school by other boys. The school, in some sense, stands as an embodiment of India, a secular democracy where religious strife runs deep. Did you work on sewing these elements into your narrative?Several reviewers have pointed to the paradoxes of contemporary Indian democracy as they appear in the novel. I did not think of it in quite this way, but on hindsight, it makes real sense. After all, the novel is set in a boarding school which aspires to build future citizens. It is also a school that works under a Hindu religious identity, albeit a liberal one.

But the students, for the most part, do not aspire to be monks our protagonist is an exception but they desire lives of secular success, which in India, is often defined by the yardsticks of careers such as engineering and medicine. So these are boys who pray and sing hymns twice daily but their goal is to crack the IIT entrance tests and become normative and productive members of civil society.

The student body, too, is a microcosm of the nation today, with its class and communal prejudice, chronicled somewhat prophetically for the last decade of the 20th century to the terrifying nation we inhabit today.

There is a lot of empathy with which you portray the love between the two boys. Your depictions of their encounters are tender and nuanced. The novel created a lot of buzz as one dealing with gay love. Did you foresee this happening, considering it has rarely been in the Indian contemporary fiction? Could you tell us about some of the recent novels on the subject you have read and appreciated?Naming non-normative forms of sexuality is important for purposes of political mobilisation. But as an artist, I am less interested in names than in forms of intimacy that are rather hard to name. Some of the attention this novel has received has come from the excitement over the abolition of Section 377 of the IPC that was meant to penalise homosexuality. Queer people have celebrated this novel, and some of them have also criticised it for not being activist enough, but that, I feel, is not the essential call of art.

Indian writing, especially in the vernacular traditions, is rich with instances of such hard-to-classify intimacies. Probably the most famous is Ismat Chughtais Lihaaf, [which] tells the stories of powerfully idiosyncratic intimacies that are often reductively described as homosexual. Or think of UR Ananthamurthys story A Horse for the Sun, where the character Venkat gives a massage to his old friend which is therapeutic and also something more. Or Amrita Pritams story The Weed where intimacies, both between and within genders, seem impossibly poetic and dangerously transgressive at the same time.

Among the more recent novels, I thought Amrita Mahales novel Milk Teeth, which I loved, does a great job showing the self-hatred to which queer desire is often unfortunately doomed in middle-class India. Among other contemporary writers, R Raj Rao, Hoshang Merchant, Nemat Sadat, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar and others have created literature that can be more directly identified as representing homosexuality.

In the novel, you also suggest that the violence unleashed by the students and monks studying in the religious school are linked to the denial of bodily desires. In desperation, the hungry boys secretly kill, roast, and eat pigeons. When he is struck by fits of rage, Premen Swami, a teacher, hits students with his whip, studded with metal, for even minor infractions. Do you see a link between the depraved acts of violence and sexually deprived lives of young men?Yes, I think so. One form of research I did while writing this novel was to interview the alumni of the school on which this is modelled and ask about their experiences. One of them told me that he believed there were very clear links between the monks need to practise celibacy and their acts of physical violence, which included sports but also the brutal beatings of the young boys. Physical punishment thus becomes a channel for suppressed sexual desire, especially as flesh hits flesh.

Same with the violent behaviour of the boys, such as when they catch pigeons and roast them live to eat. The monastic austerity imposed on them creates this simmering hunger and violence, which explodes from time to time, to invite an even more brutal regime of discipline and punish by the monks. And so the cycle continues.

Like your previous two novels, your sentences in The Scent of God are evocative and lyrical. Do you think about the elements of style and the texture and structure of the text while working on your novels?A moving sentence, a memorable phrase, for me these are the basic units of currency in fiction. Without these, gripping story, powerful character, all come to nothing. But good style, for me, does not mean flamboyant style, it is style that is honest and real; it can be either simple or complex depending on the call of the moment or the writer, but it must be a call thats honest.

I think over the years Ive moved away from the idea of style as something clever and flamboyant to style that tries to stay bare and honest, but where honesty makes it haunting and lyrical, not straight and flat. I guess I have a natural writing style by which people identify me, but ones style is simultaneously natural and cultivated. I revise and edit my manuscripts obsessively, and sometimes I wish I could revise subsequent editions, as the process never seems complete.

Calcutta has been central to your stories. How has the city shaped your fiction?Calcutta is the city where I grew up, and the city I left. Writing about a place of memory, always half-remembered, becomes an exercise separated not only by time and space, but also by a certain feeling. Ive come to realise that I am an ethnographer of memory, not of reality. Its hard for me to write interestingly about a place when I am physically there it comes much better to me when Ive left that place, and Im groping my way through memory, which acts as a force of natural selection.

And Calcutta is an aesthetes delight. It is a modern city in the historic sense of the term, in the sense in which that modernity is now in decline, or has been for the last four decades at least. This is the modernity that saw its daybreak with the Bengal Renaissance, and which was effectively stalled by the Communist regime inaugurated in 1977. The decay created by that stalled modernity has inspired both first two novels, Silverfish and The Firebird.

The Scent of God is not set in Calcutta but in its penumbra; the school that inspires this novel is just a short drive off the southern tip of the city. The idyll of the ashram makes up part of the novel, but the other part is the dirt and grit of the city streets, and as you know, the protagonist has to make some hard choices in the end, between the city and the ashram and between a heteronormative life and one that promises a different kind of love.

In many ways, this novel, like Silverfish, unravels a writers experience with the real, the raw and the physical. The Firebird, on the other hand, was more visceral, a work where history and memory met. How did you arrive at each of the three? How do you see these stories to be different? Is writing about the now more difficult since there is no luxury of the distanceI like Silverfish, but it now feels very much like a first novel and not the great first novel that some gifted writers write. I feel that there my approach to reality, including that of Calcutta, was a bit anthropological, with a kind of intellectual distance that took something away from its artistic power.

In contrast, both The Firebird and The Scent of God had stories that took me by my throat and demanded to be told, there was indeed a visceral quality to them that I think was missing in my first novel. I think history and memory meet in all my novels. Memory is simply that which is available to you in sensory form; archives outside the realm of the sensory are what we call history.

But our memory is also the memory of others, usually, our elders, and those are the murky zones where history and memory meet, such as with theatre in The Firebird, and religion and sexuality in The Scent of God.

In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of the Empire, you wrote about how the sense of banality and boredom were common elements of the daily experience for people on the colonial periphery, and how this affective experience of colonial modernity has shaped the innovative aesthetics of modernist fiction. In your novels, how do you see yourself straying away from the conventional impulses of narration and its distinct narrative aesthetics?Prose of the World celebrated literatures rootedness in what I felt was the most distinctive feature of Western modernity: modern literatures preoccupation with the banal of stories about marks on the wall and entire novels about men and women just walking along city streets. The prose of the world, as in the title of the book, was disdained by the philosopher Hegel as the trivial stories of daily life, but that was, I argued, the most defining characteristic of literature since Enlightenment and Romanticism, and in a more radical way, with the broken interiority of modernism in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The universe of my first novel, Silverfish, was made up of the pulsation of this modernity quotidian life, the deadening impact of bureaucracy, the throbbing banality of modern cities.

The Firebird was where things started to change. It sought to capture the wilderness of the non-modern in the composure of modern prose. The milieu, as before, was the stalled modernity of the late-20th-century Calcutta. But the real force in the novel, I now feel, is that of the pre-modern. It came through the primal terrors of childhood, the obsession with blood-kinship, the incestuous love for ones mother and sister, and a persisting engagement with the spectacle of death. Most importantly, the novel sought to capture the ritual and energy of performance, which long predates the modern category of literature in print.

In many ways, The Scent of God continues my fascination with the non-modern. This time, it is the mesmeric power of religion. Particularly, it is about the sensory, amoral nature of polytheistic Hinduism, and endless erotic possibilities that lie within its layers. It all comes together in this boys life where spiritual and sexual awakening happen in the same moment, and in the same body. Hence the scent the sensory aura of the ultimate abstract, god.

Shireen Quadri is a marketing and communications professional who has worked with several publishing houses. She is founder and publisher, The Punch Magazine, and Project Coordinator with Mathrubhumi Festival Of Letters. On Twitter and Instagram, her handle is @shireenquadri.

This interview was published on The Punch Magazine.

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I was unconsciously recording the seething intolerance and incipient rise of saffron in Bengal - Scroll.in

Hello, Tom, whats up? I am at your side, Im going to turn on the tape recorder. Yes, of course. I just hope I wont get infected. Tom Holland threw this pullita tongue-in-cheek to this journalist, the past march 3 in the cafeteria of madrid, Hotel Riu, in a scenario radically different from the one in which you write these lines and, probably, the one that will be read.

The writer has come to present Domain (Attic books), essay in which places christianity as a vertebral axis of the western culture, that today, against all odds, it would be affected by a biblical plague. People enter and exit the hotel, laughing and drinking coffee, oblivious to the carnage that is coming. The confining world come slowly a few days after, but for Holland today is a day to chat and stroll.

This Tuesday also has his own surprises. The first, when Holland declares christian and, at the same time, fan broken of the ancient Greek and roman: Contemporary christianity has always seemed to me a bit boring. They are much more charismatic and attractive to the Roman Empire and the Greek deities. I started this book as a study on christian Romebut as we go deep to see the world through their eyes, I realized that some traits of yours at first sight to be saved like this was misleading. There was a haze that prevented me from understanding how they think and behaved like those of the romans, and the mist came out of christianity, shaping my assessment of their ethics, their family structures, their sexuality or their leisure activities, which are completely different from those of today. So I decided to track how it has come to that change, and if, as some historians believe, christianity had been the main agent in transformer. And I have concluded that this is so.

It is risky to ask a believer what you think of the saying that the religions are the cancer of humanity, but the journalistic ethics rules. Those who think they do, in fact, for religious reasons. Criticism western to christianity part of christianity itselfthat today , it is devouring itself because a part of him wants to impose its own rules. Since the Enlightenment confronted the idea of light, which is identified with reason, and the darkness, that related with religion and superstition. Wanted to eradicate the superstitiona principle that today no one questions. What many do not know is that the origin of those ideas is the protestant Reformation. For Luther, the superstition was the roman Church, and advocated for an end to the idolatry of the santoral, and by filling the heart of the spiritual light.

The connection does not end here. In turn, the protestants looked on the christians of ancient Romeand these are in the Hebrew prophets, that they wanted an end to the superstition of egypt. Essentially, in the XXI century, who apostatan of christianity do so for the same reasons that embraced by the first christians. In Hitchhikers guidepublished in 1979, Douglas Adams told us a spacecraft whose fuel was the paradox. Historically, christianity is precisely that.

The historical evolution of christianity is crossed by the paradox. Today, it is devouring itself because a part of him wants to impose its own rules

Of The life of Brian to the cartoonists of Mohammed in Charlie Hebdo, question is a must what is the role of satire in the religionswhose common bond is its essence dogmatic. After the attacks against Charlie Hebdo, some voices said, why you have killed muslims on these comedians if christians did not kill the Monty Python? It is not that christians are more tolerant.

What then? What happens is that the satire of christianity is very deeply rootedespecially from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. And that impulse to drink, again, in protestantism, that revile the icons catholics throwing crucifixes into the river or burying statues of the Virgin Mary in the brothels, quite a bit more aggressive than what they did Monty Python. In all cases, the purpose is the same: to destroy idolatry. On the contrary, in islam there is a tradition of mockery, so that for his faithful aggression to their symbols is much more shocking. The movement of Je suis Charlie, which sought to universalize the values of Charlie Hebdo after the attack, is very culturally conditioned, because The west is the fruit of a christian tradition, which itself has taken on that mock. Blasphemy should never be punished, neither legally nor by any other means, it forms part of the freedom of expression.

For the sociologist, ethnocentrism is the main sin of christianity: They have convinced the world that their values are universal, especially in the last two centuries. The Declaration of Human Rights emerges from the canon law. Bartolom de las Casas defended the rights of native americans as christian, but those ideas were the basis for the abolition of slavery. In the NINETEENTH century, the international law absorbs all that christian traditionalthough the enlightened europeans because they did not recognize its origins. The western values are so conditioned by his culture as the rest of them.

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The writer Tom Holland reflects on how christianity governs everything (even his detractors) in the Domain, his last work - Play Crazy Game

the public authorities in the current situation should almost automatically increase the term of the lease. This will significantly reduce the bureaucratic burden so that the tenants can focus on more important issues of preservation of their business and labor groups, not to waste time on repetitive procedures of preservation of land rights. Should be enough statements from the lessee to extend the lease as soon as possible said Abramchenko RG.

constitutional court decided to change the Forest code

this is the extension of the lease of such land to three years. For any business and individual businessmen is a serious help. And heres why.

In todays challenging environment, many tenants of the land which is in state or municipal ownership, are practically forced to suspend work. However in the Russian legislation says nothing about the possibility to suspend the term of the contract. No rules that take into account the current virus situation when extending the extension of the lease, if it runs out or conditions change.

As explained correspondent RG, now it is necessary to support citizens and organizations that rent public land, to study the possibility of concluding additional agreements extending the lease of their land for up to three years.

the government is confident that such a right must be unconditional. That is, does not depend on whether there was a lease at the auction or not, whether there was a debt on a rent. In such a situation the landlord will not be able to refuse conclusion of the agreement.

the House and the land under it will be one object, not two different

the Exception may be cases where before the introduction of the whole system of restrictive measures, the landlord had already come to court and initiate the termination of the lease. And even this measure of support, according to the government, should not be subjected to unscrupulous tenants, at which the Supervisory authorities to all pandemics found violations, and they are not eliminated.

in addition, in the case of prolongation of the lease meant the abolition of the state duty for carrying out registration actions.

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Abramchenko instructed to protect the tenants of public land - Wire News Fax

The European Commission is calling on member states to work together on the world stage to put an end to capital punishment and torture.

The details are included in the executives communication on the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy for 2020-2024, for which the Commission is seeking the backing of EU governments.

The Commission would like to work towards the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, and in countries where the death penalty still exists, insist on the respect of minimum standards and work towards a moratorium on executions as a first step towards abolition.

In terms of global instances of torture, the EU should strive to eradicate torture globally through prevention, prohibition, accountability and redress for victims, the document states.

Chinas capital punishment record

Currently, more than 60% of the global population reside in countries where capital punishment is legal, including China, the US, and India.

Despite access to official figures being tightly guarded by the Chinese authorities, Beijing is believed to administer more executions than any other nation on earth, according to Amnesty International.

During the EU-China summit last year, the bloc raised concerns with their Chinese counterparts about the detainment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, and an EU delegation reiterated these concerns during the 42nd United Nations Human Rights Council last September.

However, should member states decide to adopt the Commissions approach on its Human Rights Action Plan, any political pressure imposed directly on China is unlikely to come anytime soon, after the EU-China summit, due to take place at the end of March in Beijing, was postponed. The meeting would have been the first coming together of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and European Commission and European Council presidents, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, since they took up their new posts.

A second EU-China summit is still slated to take place in Leipzig in September, under the Presidency of the German Council, with Chinas President Xi Jinping meeting all 27 EU leaders.

Human Rights Action Plan

Elsewhere in the EUs action plan, the role of technology and its proximity to human rights abuses was highlighted, with the Commission stating that certain applications can support abusive, unlawful restrictions on movement and speech.

Social media platforms are used to channel targeted disinformation and hate speech that often violate privacy and undermine democracy and human rights, the communication continued.

In this context, recently the European Court of Auditors launched a probe into the blocs attempts to stifle fake news that can cause public harm.

The investigation will focus on the robustness of the 2018 Action plan on disinformation, in addition to whether the EUs code of practice against disinformation has brought tangible improvements to the state of fake news across the bloc.

The code is a self-regulatory voluntary framework signed by platforms including Facebook, Google and Twitter, which obliges them to take measures to control the surge of disinformation online.

Having been put in place ahead of the 2019 European elections, the code received criticism from certain EU Commissioners, with the former Security Commissioner Julian King describingthe initial compliance reports produced by the platforms as patchy, opaque and self-selecting.

In the digital arena, the human rights action plan also brings into question the use of certain Artificial Intelligence applications, saying that they can carry a risk of increased monitoring, control and repression.

In some countries, mass surveillance of citizens is a reality. Data and algorithms can be used to discriminate, knowingly or unknowingly, against individuals and groups, reinforcing societal prejudices.

However, concerns have also been raised about the EUs funding of questionable AI applications on the bloc, as part of the EUs long-term research and development funding mechanism, Horizon 2020.

These include projects such as the iBorderCTRL technology which detects lying through the reading of micro-expressions, and the SEWA initiative a technology will the capacity to read nuances in human facial, vocal and verbal behaviour.

(Edited by Benjamin Fox)

Link:

Commission charts end to execution and torture in human rights plans - EURACTIV

(Cooking Vinyl) UK release date: 27 March 2020

Alex Paterson and his merry band are back with a new record, this time with a vaguely colonial theme. The album is ostensibly about the British royal familys involvement in the opium trade, although this is not something one would pick up on by actually listening to it.

The whole sonic approach on Abolition Of The Royal Familia is at once a lot more coherent than The Orbs previous record, the transitions between different genres and moods more methodical and well-paced.

The album opens with Daze (Missing & Messed Up Mix), which is reminiscent of DJ Koze with its laidback disco groove, before picking up the pace and heading for house territory. Hawk Kings (Oseberg Buddhas Buttonhole) is the best track in this first section: dramatic strings trilling on top of an incessant bassline, a snaking melody lurking underneath and the titular Stephen Hawking quotes bookending the song.

The second section is ambient, Pervitin (Empire Culling & The Hemlock Stone Version) dominated by orchestral swells and a French monologue while Afros, Afghans And Angels (Helgo Treasure Chest) makes its mark with Vangelis-style synth work.

As the record moves from this to reggae, then to drum n bass the dreamy vibe of The Queen Of Hearts (Princess Of Clubs Mix) is a particular highlight then back to ambient for its final two tracks, the sound design remains inventive and the journey, while long at 78 minutes, is enthralling and a lot of fun.

Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy (Lanse Aux Meadows Mix) brings the record to a close, and while the soundscape is blissful enough with its vapour trail chords, the spoken word sample hits harder than was perhaps intended: stay in your homes no more than two people may gather anywhere without permission.

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See the rest here:

The Orb Abolition Of The Royal Familia - musicOMH.com