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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Left Front discovers responsibility State accepts fiscal regimen


Left Front discovers responsibility
State accepts fiscal regimen

Calcutta, March 22: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's government has tied Bengal to a tight financial diet for the next five years that Mamata Banerjee would inherit if she won the Assembly polls next year.

In the budget presented today, finance minister Asim Dasgupta committed the state to enacting a fiscal responsibility act next year after resisting it for several years, succumbing to the pressure of cleaning up its loan-laden books.

If a state agrees to follow targeted financial discipline, the Centre offers in return loan relief that lowers the interest burden. In Bengal's case, in the revised estimates for 2008-09, interest payments form 97 per cent of the revenue deficit — the gap between revenue expenditure, which doesn't create capital assets, and revenue receipts, or tax and non-tax revenue.

Bengal's decision to follow fiscal discipline translates into a benefit of Rs 1,400 crore in 2010-11 alone when the phased reduction of deficits will start. "This benefit will keep on increasing in the following years," the finance minister said.

In exchange for fiscal tightening, the state receives debt waiver, loan restructuring and interest relief. If a commitment to fiscal responsibility is not in place, state-specific interest-free grants from the Centre become interest-bearing loans.

Once a state enacts what is known as an FRBM (fiscal responsibility and budget management) Act, it gets interest relief in proportion to the amount by which it reduces its revenue deficit every year.

Dasgupta promised to cut the revenue deficit to zero in 2014-15 from 5.6 per cent in 2009-10. Simultaneously, the fiscal deficit has to be shrunk to 3 per cent by then from 6.7 per cent in the current year. The fiscal deficit is the borrowing the government does to meet the gap between income and expenditure.

The Left Front government's commitment to cutting the deficits sharply in five years raises a tantalising political prospect. Given that the Assembly elections are due in just over a year and the possibility that the CPM-led combine faces a serious threat of defeat, it might fall to Mamata to fulfil the commitment Bhattacharjee is making today.

It's not as if an agreement to achieve deficit-reduction targets is sacrosanct. The Union government itself has shown scant respect for its own similar commitments. Mamata, not known as a fiscal fundamentalist, could well cite that as an escape hatch. Better still, she could ignore it completely as a Left conspiracy.

The Front, on the contrary, if it returns to power, would be expected to keep its promise.

Bengal and Sikkim were the only states to have so far refused to commit to deficit reduction. Their argument, as expressed by Dasgupta, was that it would shrink the government's welfare-enhancing role.

The minister cited as reason for the change of mind the buoyancy in state revenue after the introduction of an "improved VAT (value-added tax) system" and another expected boost in 2011-12 when GST, or goods and services tax, is scheduled for debut.

He explained later that the state had resisted for the past six years also because borrowings from the National Small Savings Fund (NSSF), 75 per cent of all central loans to Bengal, were denied the benefit of loan waiver.

"The 13th Finance Commission has recommended the inclusion of borrowings from NSSF under the debt relief scheme," he said.

NSSF loans will carry 8 per cent interest instead of 9.5 per cent, as recommended by the commission, now that Bengal has agreed to fiscal responsibility.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100323/jsp/frontpage/story_12250849.jsp

Strum away the blues, no strings attached

Calcutta, March 23: Welcome to Asim Dasgupta's Sonar — as in sound waves — Bangla where you can listen to Bach after lunch, Beethoven in the evening and Tchaikovsky when depressed.

The finance minister, known to pick a Mozart when in the mood, today struck a chord with musicians and music makers with something as non-sonorous as the state budget.

Dasgupta waived the four per cent value-added tax on "musical strings", with one eye "on the needs of small traders and businessmen" and another on his singer wife.

"I cannot sing but my wife (Shyamali) is a classical Rabindrasangeet singer and she sings well. I'm sure she will be happy on learning of this proposal," Dasgupta told The Telegraph over the phone, on returning to his Salt Lake home after a long budget day. (No, there wasn't Tchaikovsky playing in the background, although earlier in the day the Opposition had cried itself hoarse in the Assembly.)

"I am very fond of western classical music and listen to it regularly," Dasgupta added. "Music is a great healer. After lunch, you should listen to Bach. In the evenings, one should go for Beethoven. And if you are depressed, try listening to Tchaikovsky. I am very fond of their creations."

So was it his love for these composers or his admiration for his wife's vocal chords that had prompted the finance minister to spare a thought for musical strings in his budget?

"I think as finance minister I have the responsibility of addressing the needs of small traders and businessmen. Particularly when anything related to music is concerned. In the last budget, I had given a tax exemption to musical instruments."

This year, it was the turn of musical strings. "This is a good move that is sure to boost our business," said Tapan Sen, younger son of the late Hemen Chandra Sen, founder of the now-legendary Hemen & Co. on Rashbehari Avenue.

Sen's sarods for the masters like Amjad Ali Khan are made of the finest Burma teak and use strings from German makers Roslau. The cost of the sarod is around Rs 60,000 and that of the string about Rs 600.

The slash is not substantial, but sends out a positive signal, feel makers of the sarod and guitar alike.

Peter Remedios, the chairman of the 101-year-old J. Reynolds & Co. on Mirza Ghalib Street, said that in a meeting earlier this year, the proposal to bring down the VAT on all musical instruments was placed before state representatives.

Singer Durga Jasraj and sitar player Purbayan Chatterjee were among the artistes present at the meeting, convened by the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or Assocham, which acts as an umbrella body for professionals in the music industry, from artistes to instrument makers.

"A lot of younger musicians struggling to buy proper instruments will also benefit from this," said Purbayan.

Amyt Datta, guitarist with the bands Pink Noise and Skinny Alley, agreed: "A small gesture like this could eventually mean a lot."


MP Soren faces Assembly heat
- JVM pins CM on bypoll dithering

Ranchi/Dumka, March 22: The Tamar debacle came back to haunt Shibu Soren today with the Opposition cornering him on his apparent dithering over facing the electorate once again to become a member of the state Assembly to continue as chief minister.

It's more than three months since Soren won the Dumka parliamentary seat, but the chief minister has not shown any urgency to become a member of the Assembly — he is obliged to become one within six months of assuming office — prompting speculation that he may hand over reins of the government to his son, Hemant, and opening himself up for attack from the Opposition.

If JVM party leader in the Assembly Pradeep Kumar Yadav raised the issue during Question Hour, his boss, Babulal Marandi, took on Soren in Dumka today, saying that the chief minister was too scared to face elections after his humiliation in Tamar in January 2009 when he lost to Raja Peter, a Robin Hood-like local hero, leading to president's rule in Jharkhand.

"Speculation is rife in the corridors of power that Soren would contest either from Jama or Jamtara, but I am quite sure he will not be able to win from anywhere in Jharkhand," Marandi said.

The JVM chief, in Dumka to preside over a party meet, alleged Soren wouldn't contest a by-election out of fear and hand over his chair to his son, Hemant, who gave up his Rajya Sabha seat after becoming JMM MLA from Dumka.

"It will be a mockery of democracy if Soren hands over his chair to his son," he added.

In the Assembly, Yadav reminded Soren about the constitutional obligation of a chief minister to become an MLA within six months of assuming office. "The chief minister is yet to resign as an MP. Norms suggest he needs to become an MLA within six months. Last time (in 2008-2009) he remained at the helm of affairs without being elected legislator," Yadav said.

Cornered, Soren replied in a hushed tone that he was thinking about it seriously and would take a final decision soon.

But Yadav pressed ahead, talking about an "ulterior motive" being discussed in political circles that he would pass on the baton to his son, Hemant. BJP leader and deputy chief minister Raghubar Das tried to intervene by insisting that such matters should not be raised during Question Hour.

But Yadav maintained that Guruji's indecisiveness was sending a wrong message to the people. "Moreover, his move was going against the spirit of the Constitution," he said, citing the case of S.R.Choudhary and the state of Punjab, in which the Supreme Court passed strictures against him for making a mockery of Section 164 (4) of the Constitution for becoming a minister for a second term without becoming an MLA.

In Dumka, Marandi lambasted the Soren government for its failure on all fronts. "Bhay, bhook and bhrastrachar (fear, hunger and corruption) have became common phenomenon and the government has failed to counter it. Also, the governmnet has failed to curb Naxalites and the common mass is suffering," he said.

LYING TOGETHER
- Some versions of the real

The extent to which the battle to get photography admitted into the Palace of Art, at least of Western Art, has been quite gloriously won was driven home to me by an exhibition that I found myself visiting thrice when I was in Madrid recently . It was called Lágrimas de Eros (Tears of Eros), and was installed in two venues in the city, the ThyssenBornemisza Museum and the Caja Madrid Foundation, and was curated by Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the former. It was an exquisite show about the pain of love and the love of pain. In its effortless sweep from Bernini to Bill Viola, it dissolved the boundaries between periods, nations and media in Western art to bring together a history of what Solana, invoking Freud and Bataille, calls the perverso polimorfo -the phrase taking on a sort of baroque magnificence in Spanish that its English version, with its note of intellectualized hanky-panky , sadly lacks.

What struck me particularly about Solana's learned, eccentric yet unfussy curating was the way he used photography with a kind of unabashed, operatic abandon. The signature image was Man Ray's 1932 photograph, Tears, of five evidently fake celluloid pearls stuck around a woman's upturned and mascara'd eyes in brutal close-up. The image was blown up to cover the entire façade of one of the venues, opposite which was a Counter-Reformation convent still inhabited by nuns — a very Hispanic coincidence straight out of Almodóvar's Dark Habits. Inside, next to the Man Ray photograph and on a pedestal, were Kiki Smith's five glass tears. As you peered into each giant droplet, you saw yourself bizarrely disfigured in its clear, but claustrophobic, world of glass. Then, as you lost and found yourself in the show's visual and thematic labyrinths, you would have run into a bikini-clad teenager on the beach shot by Rineke Dijkstra hung close to a Rodin Birth of Venus, Richard Avedon's Nastassja Kinski cuddling up with a cobra next to a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph of a snake-woman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia's upside-down pole-dancer rubbing shoulders with a Surrealist nude, a Nan Goldin kiss against an Edvard Munch kiss, Sam Taylor-Wood's Beckham (the footballer) sleeping alongside Canova's Endymion (the moon-struck shepherd), or posed cibachrome Pietás and Ophelias by four different contemporary photographers covering dramatic stretches of museum wall.

Yet, as I got used to the jolts and thrills of these juxtapositions of painting and sculpture with photography, and started reflecting on what they made me see in conjunction or proximity, a peculiar sense of disorientation began to well up somewhere between my eyes and my mind. I still find this difficult to pin down or explain clearly; it keeps eluding precise formulation, although, as a feeling in the viewer, it was strangely sharp. This richly disconcerting sense of something not quite fitting together has to do, I feel, with the fundamentally different relationships with the Real that paintings and photographs come to embody when they are installed for viewing in the same space, and on the same interpretative and cognitive plane — that is, when we are made to read them together. Paintings then seem to afford a purer fiction, for they make something out of nothing (as music makes nothing out of nothing, turning air into air), whereas photographs are doomed always to make something out of something. So, the fictions that photographs create seem corruptions of the Real — brilliant deceptions pulled off with varying degrees of ironic awareness — of the sort that would have made Plato angry. Viewed side by side, paintings appear to be curiously more innocent or naïve as liars than do photographs, which, at their best, prey as much on art as on life, and with a new-found sense of entitlement that is at once exhilarating and vaguely disturbing.

*************

I was startled by a PTI photograph on the front page of this paper last year. A woman in a lush sari was standing in front of a distinguished-looking audience seated in a hall, recognizably in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. (I could make out the prime minister and his wife in the front row.) The woman stood there holding her face with both hands. Her face was tilted upwards with the eyes closed. I thought she was singing a song. It could have been one of those soirées that take place from time to time in the residences of heads of state all over the civilized world. There was something operatic about the woman. If the setting were not so evidently Indian, she could have been singing an aria to a select gathering, which looked rapt, but poised, as it listened to her outpouring of song.

Then I read the caption, "Teardrops on a medal". The woman in the picture was an army widow who had come to receive her dead husband's gallantry award from the president. The report began, "A wail breaks out inside Rashtrapati Bhavan's Ashoka Hall…" She was not singing an aria. She had lost her composure in public and was howling with grief. The photographer had clicked immediately after her wail broke out, but before the audience had time to react. So their faces still had that stonily cultured look, which contrasted chillingly with the woman's posture and expression. This made the photograph shockingly, perversely beautiful.

One of the functions of art is to transform suffering and grief into something that we call Beauty for want of a better word. In the process, pain turns into performance, and photography, even when it does not intend to produce art, colludes with this process through its ability to arrest the motion of life at an arbitrary moment. Photojournalism, especially, creates drama out of disaster, sometimes leaving us in a moral quandary. I am often discomfited, for instance, by some of the images that win the World Press Photo awards. They provoke a confusion of response, leaving the viewer unpleasantly suspended between the ethical and the aesthetic. The reverse seems to happen in sports photography and in pictures of performing musicians or dancers: play looks like pain. Straining footballers look like characters in a Passion play, like Christ and his torturers, caught up in a Gothic drama of grimaces and contortions that could be amusing, rather than discomfiting, if viewed out of context. Or think of Annie Leibovitz's famous portrait of Jessye Norman singing: if you do not know what is happening in the picture, you would take her for a woman caught in the process of being destroyed by some terrible personal tragedy.

When we take unthinking comfort in photography's documentation of the Real, we tend to forget its more sinister relationship with the Unreal, for the archives of photography could be as full of fiction as of truth. The reassuringly objective could become the treacherously subjective in photographs, and this is the pleasure as well as the menace of photography. My favourite portrait of myself is a photograph that makes me look inscrutable and profound, as if taken exactly when I was seeing into the life of things. But all that I was doing then was trying to hold myself still at the tilt in which the photographer wanted my head in relation to the rest of my body. I remember my mind being quite blank during those precarious and uncomfortable moments. So, that portrait is at once perfectly fake and perfectly true, making a face that was never there, but a face that is now part of the person I have become.





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Broke or bust

Tshering Tobgay's eagle eye doesn't miss much. And his sharp tongue spares no one. When the Bhutan Opposition leader is not holding forth in the country's first elected Parliament, he is taking the government to task for lapses on his blog that he painstakingly updates every day.

He has reason to. The 44-year-old mechanical engineer from the University of Pittsburg in the United States gave up his job as a bureaucrat in Bhutan to join politics in 2007. The problem is that he could, in the not too distant future, lose his job as a politician in his own country.

For Bhutan seems to be careening uncontrolled towards a parliamentary democracy without political parties.

And that's not a joke. This new political reality is already dawning on the Himalayan kingdom just as it prepares to celebrate the second anniversary of its first elected government.

Bhutan evidently is in an intractable political mess, with its ruling Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) and opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP) facing disqualification for defaulting on repayments of the bank loans they took to fight the country's first general elections on March 24, 2008.

The party leaders stress that they have no money to keep their offices open, let alone pay off the loans. The DPT has shut several of its district offices as the ruling party does not have the funds to pay rents. Only a few PDP offices function in the 20 districts that constitute Bhutan.

The crisis is not just about a financial mess. The parties concede that their membership numbers are nose-diving, posing yet another threat to democratic Bhutan.

The DPT's membership fell sharply from some 12,000 in March 2008 to about 3,800 in July 2009. The PDP has all of 470 registered members. "The two parties are now charging their members less fees than what they did in 2008 in a desperate attempt to hold them back," says Jigme Tshultim, speaker of the elected National Assembly, the 47-member lower house modelled on India's Lok Sabha.

Ironically, the parties cannot even launch a membership drive for they have no funds for it, says Tobgay.

The state of Bhutan's democracy — a gift from its progressive kings who had steered the country to the 2008 election — is an issue that has been rocking India's neighbour for a while now.

"We are deeply worried about a bankrupt political system," Bhutan Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley says. "There can be no democracy without political parties," he adds.

Thinley says the MPs are spending "from their salaries" to try and keep the offices of the political parties running. "It is less than an ideal situation," he says.

To be sure, Bhutan has only two registered parties and the country's Election Commission has now slapped a terse notice on both, asking them to clear their loans or face the consequences.

Thinley's DPT owes Nu 25 million to the banks in unpaid dues, while Tobgay's PDP owes 20 million to its creditors in the Bhutanese currency, equivalent to the Indian rupee in value.

These are tidy sums in impoverished Bhutan, a small country of 6,34,982 people living in an area of 38,394 square kilometres. If anything, the parties' dues, with the interest on the loans accumulating, are ballooning and so are the concerns for the country's nascent democracy.

The two parties spent the money for the elections, and thought they would be able to repay the loans once their political bases grew and more people paid their membership dues. But two years after the election, politicians rue that the Bhutanese people are not very enthusiastic about joining a political party and paying money — however nominal — for it. Used to a benign monarchy, many don't see democracy as something worth paying money for.

In all fairness, Bhutan is new to democracy. And it is only natural that it will go through trials and tribulations before the country ushers in democratic norms and culture, says Nitasha Kaul, a Bhutan expert at the Centre for the Study of Democracy in London.

Indeed, Kaul says, it is not easy to judge if democracy is working in a country that has only just moved from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one.

The parameters — or democracy yardsticks — vary from country to country. But among the prerequisites are free elections, a viable Opposition, a fair judiciary and a vibrant media.

On most of these fronts, Kaul holds that Bhutan has not so far fared badly. Its judiciary is free, and the general election of March 2008 was lauded by international observers. The media is blossoming, with at least five privately-owned newspapers giving the state-run Kuensel, Bhutan's sole newspaper for decades, a run for its money, says Tenzing Wangdi, managing director of the Bhutan Observer, the first private newspaper to hit the stands after Bhutan embraced democracy.

If Phuntsho Wangmo, head of news operations at the Bhutan Observer, a paper often critical of the government, is to be believed, the DPT regime is not doing too badly on the development and economic fronts.

For one, the Thinley government has taken up an ambitious project to connect its 205 blocks with motorable roads — no mean feat in a country with inaccessible mountainous terrain. For another, Wangmo says the government is turning the country around economically, putting it on a path of self-reliance. In fact, Bhutan is now slated to emerge as an energy power house in the region. Under an agreement with India, it plans to produce 10,000 mega watt of hydroelectricity by 2020.

From the Tatas to the Ambanis and the Mittals, Indian business tycoons are flocking to Bhutan as the country relaxes its foreign direct investment policies. "We are talking to big Indian investors as we look at the vast Indian market to sell our products," the Prime Minister says.

All this means a lot to Bhutan's people and its business houses. "An expanding economy means more jobs for the young, educated Bhutanese," says Bhutan Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Topgyal Dorji, who heads the Tashi group of companies, one of the top local business houses.

In its pursuit of a democratic society, Bhutan has not abandoned its guiding principles of gross national happiness (GNH), an index used to measure the "health, happiness and well being" of Bhutan's citizens. "The GNH is now very much part of government planning and programmes," says Centre for Bhutan Studies president Karma Ura, who has spent years creating the index to measure development in Bhutan.

The monarchy remains supreme in Bhutan, but as the head of the state and as the symbol of the country's unity, as envisaged in Bhutan's Constitution, adopted in 2008. "We look to the monarch for guidance. But it is the Cabinet and the elected representatives that run this country now. There is absolutely no interference in government work by the king," a senior minister says.

Bhutan heaves with uncertainty as its political establishment seeks to find a way out of the crisis. "Few are happy in Bhutan with the outcome of democracy so far. No one knows what will happen next," a senior civil servant says.

Clearly, the political parties urgently need funds for their revival. The Bhutan election law permits the parties to accept money only from its members by way of registration fees, membership fees and voluntary contributions. They cannot take donations from outsiders, including businessmen. Foreign donations are prohibited.

To help the parties tide over the crisis, the country's Election Commission recently raised the voluntary contribution amount from Nu 1,00,000 a year to 5,00,000 a year. "But the parties can receive voluntary contributions only from its members under the election law," Bhutan's chief election commissioner Kunzang Wangdi says.

Prime Minsiter Thinley maintains the only way out of the present mess is state funding of political parties, a hot topic of debate in Bhutan. Despite its brute majority, the DPT could not get its proposal through in Parliament as several of its own MPs joined the two Opposition members in shooting the proposal down as unconstitutional.

The speaker acknowledges that Bhutan's constitution has "no provision for state funding of political parties". The 25-member National Council — the upper house of Bhutan's Parliament — has rejected the proposal too, says council chairman Namgye Penjore.

"All this will only push Bhutan's political parties into the hands of private businesses for funds. That would really be a sad day for Bhutan's democracy," Thinley says.

PDP leader Tobgay is opposed to state funding of the bankrupt parties for "constitutional and moral reasons". But he says the crisis raises a more fundamental question. "Do the people really want political parties in Bhutan? If they really did, I don't think funds would have been a problem for us," he says.

Strong words, but the time has come for strong measures. "The parties must clear their dues by 2012, a year before the next general elections," says the chief election commissioner.

The warning is loud and clear. And it's not just to the parties, but to Bhutan's democracy itself.

Sex no bar

They were buddies at the call centre they worked in. Rohit and Shalini would often party together or go out for a drink as a twosome. But gradually, Rohit started feeling uncomfortable. It seemed that Shalini had other thoughts about their platonic relationship.

One day, Shalini — who is married and has a nine-year-old son — moved to the desk right next to Rohit. Rohit, who is also married, would find her gazing at him between calls. She would brush against him when she passed by.

"Even now, she makes no bones about wanting to sleep with me; she says she'll book a hotel for the occasion if I agree," says Rohit, adding that the struggle to stay away from Shalini is taking its toll on him. It worries him that at the call centre in Malad, the two are the daily staple of office gossip.

So far, the story hasn't ended with an ugly bottom line. But if the relationship sours and one of them decides to press charges of sexual assault or harassment, all hell could break loose. But Rohit feels he can't make an official complaint about Shalini for he believes that will end up embarrassing them both.

"It is more difficult for a man to report or prove that he is being sexually exploited by a woman. If he does, his credibility is at stake. We are conditioned to believe that women cannot sexually abuse," says Anjali Gopalan, executive director of the Delhi-based Naz Foundation. "But it is not outside the realm of possibility that women sexually exploit men," adds Gopalan.

As of now, the law backs Shalini. But if the controversial Sexual Offences (Special Courts) Bill, 2010, introduced in Parliament last week, gets a nod, a woman in her position could land in a right legal mess.

The Bill, which is touted as being gender neutral, proposes the introduction of a new section — 376 (E) — to the Indian Penal Code, 1860, on unlawful sexual acts. "Whoever touches directly or indirectly, with a part of the body or with an object, any part of the body of another person (not being the spouse of such person), with sexual intent and without the consent of such other person, shall be punished with simple imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years or with fine or with both," it says.

The Bill does not specify the sex of the victim. So in effect a man can accuse a woman — or another man — of sexual abuse. But ironically, the Bill has its seeds in the 172nd report of the Law Commission of India, and recommendations drafted by women's groups around the country, spearheaded by the National Commission for Women (NCW).

When women's groups lobbied for a stronger law they did not have gender neutrality in mind. They merely wanted to tighten laws on sexual assault. Men who touched women with sexual intent and without consent had to be punished, they said.

"As women's groups we are opposed to blanket neutrality. We believe that sexual assault is a gender-related crime and hence the assault can only happen between two persons who have different gender power in society," says Chayanika Shah, an activist of the Forum Against Oppression of Women.

Shah acknowledges that it's not just women who are sexually assaulted. "But we would like to retain this understanding of sexual assault in the law. If a man is being assaulted by a woman he can file a complaint under a general assault law," she says.

But if the government has its way, the word rape is soon going to be gender neutral. The change proposed follows a government move last year to decriminalise homosexuality. Soon, men can legally have sex with other men, if the Supreme Court gives its nod. And once it is legal, it implies that there can be illegal acts of homosexuality as well. And that is the reason, a government officer explains, why rape is no longer going to be an assault merely against women.

Some would argue that a woman is incapable of sexually raping a man.The National Crime Research Bureau has no statistics to prove otherwise. But voices of dissent do sometimes make themselves heard. Last year, the Save India Family Foundation, a Delhi-based non governmental organisation, was approached by 10 men who complained of being sexually harassed by women.

The amendments proposed by the government underline the point that sexual harassment has no gender either. Indeed, with more and more women joining the work force, there has been a rise in women harassing men. While the number of men who sexually harass women is still several times higher than women who abuse men, complaints from men are no longer as rare as they were even five years ago.

Mahesh, who works at a top information technology firm in Chennai, is one such victim. He says he almost took to his heels when a manager in his company, a woman in her early forties, asked him to spend the night with her after he had driven her home from office. "As I was parking her car, she went in and changed into a low-cut blouse," says Mahesh.

The stage had been set a few weeks earlier, when she asked Mahesh on their way back home in the office cab on two occasions to massage her hurting back. Mahesh obliged, but says he felt used. Yet, even though he feels resentful, he doesn't dare to complain to the management about her, fearing that he would be ridiculed or even lose his job.

"A man would be wary of reporting sexual abuse by a woman, for fear of being labelled a sissy," says Jasmir Thakur, founder and secretary of the Samabhavana Society, a gay rights group in Mumbai.

Samir, 30, would agree. At a party, when a woman made a pass at him, started pawing him and invited him home for the night, Samir felt uncomfortable, but ignored her behaviour. "I pretended not to get the hint," he says.

But that's not all. Men these days complain of another kind of harassment — by other men. Avinash was almost assaulted by a man in a Mumbai local. Stories of men feeling up other men in busy trains are widespread in the city. "I threatened to beat him up," he says.

Soon, people like Avinash won't need to take the law in their own hands. Mahesh may be able to take the senior woman manager to court and Rohit his colleague. A law that women spearheaded to protect women may end up pushing some of them behind bars.

(Some names have been changed)



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Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/

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