Akademos 2014 an Annual Miscellany of Liberal Arts and Scholarship
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Akademos 2014 An Annual Miscellany of Liberal Arts and Scholarship KAMALA NEHRU COLLEGE (University of Delhi) 1 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AKADEMOS enters its ninth successful year as an academic journal. As a community of teachers we thank each other for extending cooperation in every form. We are thankful to our principal, Dr.Minoti Chatterjee for her relentless encouragement in making it a journal of repute. Our sincere thanks go to all the contributors for their excellent articles which have lent quality to this journal. This endeavour owes much to Vice Principal Dr. Rita Malhotra, Namita Paul and Dr. Debasree Basu for investing considerable effort in proof reading and editing the articles and all the faculty members who have allowed us to publish their valuable research. Team AKADEMOS 3 4 Editor’s Note The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. George Bernard Shaw Recently , the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A of the IT Act which allowed arrests for posting offensive content on social media sites. The controversial provision made posting offensive material on social networking sites an offence punishable by up to three years in jail. With this move the Supreme Court upheld the right of the citizens of our country to express themselves freely on the Internet. The question of free speech can be a thorny one. The line between an opinion and malicious vendetta is a thin one. Section 66 A was used to jail schoolchildren for posting on Facebook, but it is also true that the social media has been used to incite riots in the country. So where does the answer lie? Do we allow the authorities to judge every post on the internet, knowing that they have their own prejudices and agenda? Or do we choose freedom of speech at all costs, knowing that words are more powerful than swords? It is lamentable that as a nation we have lost our confidence in our own moral compasses. We fear our own opinions, we are threatened by our own ideas, we are alarmed by our own beliefs. If we give up our right to express, we give up our right to dissent. A democracy that suffers from this combination of self-loathing and self-abnegation, will surely die slowly and painfully. It is imperative to fight this malignant urge and take back control of our own opinions. We live in a world that is changing constantly, at a pace that sometimes seems to be a little too fast. The multiplicity of voices may sometimes seem deafening. However, it is important to remember that change is not always dangerous, multiplicity is not dangerous. Silencing dissent does not remove it, rather it only makes it simmer away unseen, waiting to erupt. That is the real danger of silencing. If we truly want to progress it is important that we become progressive ideologically as well. Namita Paul 5 6 Contents The Public of Protest: Reading Activism in a Digital Age —Amrita Singh 9 Structures of Fantasy: A Study of The Magical Universe of Harry Potter —Neha Singh 28 Voicing dissent through pain: A study of legitimized torture in India —Swarnim Khare 47 Engendering text: Representing popular traditions in the Adi parva of the Mahabharata. —Vinita Malik 66 Democracy, Media and the Question of National Security: The Case of Indian Newspapers —Ritambhara Malaviya 82 Print, Politics and Public Sphere: Understanding Indian Popular Press —Ramesh Aroli 100 Public Policy on the Role of Private Sector in Higher Education: A Global View —Dr. Alka Agrawal, Anuj Aggarwal 123 Do Trade institutions promote international competition? An Analysis of WTO Commitments on Domestic Support Programmes as a part of Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) and Their Implications: —Ashish Kumar Sedai, Abhishek Jha 147 Delhi Auto-rickshaw drivers and Commuter’s Plight —Dr Azka Kamil 164 7 An assessment of the Media Coverage of the 2014 Elections —Jyoti Raghavan 171 Crisis of Secularism in India —Meena Kumari 175 Growing Up In Cities Not All That Easy —Dr. Monica Chutani 183 India’s ‘Audible Past’: —Naresh Kumar 187 Causes of Persistent Backwardness in Rural India —Nupur Kataria 200 The Renewable Energy Challenge —Dr. Pratibha Bhalla 218 The Contribution of Dr. B.R Ambedkar in social justice and empowerment of women —Dr. Rajat Rani 232 “FTE” Fast Track Exit Scheme –“A Short Cut To Strike Off” —Renu Yadav 241 The Angst and Aesthetics in Raudra rasa and the Summer Season —Dr. Rita Malhotra 248 Climate Change and Energy Saving Strategy through Sustainable Development —Dr. Shadab Khan 252 Corporate governance and its impact on employment relations within the firm —Shikha Gupta 259 Social Marketing of “Say No To Plastic Bags” Campaign —Dr. Soma Sen Gupta, Dr. Sona Mandal, Dr. Pankaj Kumar 265 8 The Public of Protest: Reading Activism in a Digital Age The Internet may continue to be a space for democratic practices, but it will be so partly as a form of resistance against overarching powers of the economy and of hierarchical power, rather than the space of unlimited freedom that is part of its romantic representation. The images we need to bring into this representation increasingly need to deal with contestation and resistance to commercial and military interests, rather than simply freedom and interconnectivity. (Saskia Sassen) While delineating a sociology of information technology, Saskia Sassen remarks that electronic space remains a crucial force for new forms of civic participation, owing to its publicness, freedom and interconnectivity. Especially in contemporary urban experience, the Internet has emerged as a powerful medium for non-elites to communicate, support each other’s struggles and create the equivalent of insider groups at scales ranging from the local to the global. New digital technology and cyberspace can offer an inclusive political scene to accommodate a broad range of social struggles and facilitate the emergence of new types of political subjects. The Internet, and not just the physical World Wide Web but all that it represents, has since long been signalling a revolution in information and as a form of resistance as digital media has become the defining characteristic of our age. This paper will attempt to understand the changing demography of public space as electronic, which is a site and catalyst of resistive action. It will look at mediatised forms of contemporary protest1 and raise questions about the audience of protest, both as activist and participant. Who is this public that organises, activates and participates and where do we locate this “public of protest”? What kind of issues does this public try to 9 visibilise? And how do these protests take place, or rather what are the forms it uses, vindicates, condones? It becomes important to interrogate the claim of liberal democracies that pride themselves on participative actions and transparency, and yet make great efforts to control or regulate dissident communities. The Internet relies on the general assumption that increase in communication improves democratic processes, and greater the capacity to disseminate information the greater the propensity of having a democratically empowered populace. The idea of the “demos” alters; the common populace of a state, the people, are now a perceptibly uncontrollable, anonymous mass. The identity of the political citizen is confounded by cyberspace, where any one individual can take on multiple personas and where anonymous participation makes identification of actions with particular citizens difficult. Physical bodies are hardly necessary to the formation of democratic communities as names and tags suffice, with problems of space, time, access and participation foregone in the interaction of physical and virtual social spaces. The speed with which communications occur over the Internet may undermine participatory democracy, since it does not encourage the serious, deliberative contemplation of political issues, becoming a soft target to populism and totalitarianism. It has been argued that this is due to the “privatised” experience of going online, whereby people become isolated from physical contacts and are susceptible to one- on-one persuasion.2 Nevertheless, one cannot discount that what happens in electronic space is deeply inflected by the cultures, material practices and imaginaries that take place in the world outside. Technology is not just about the new techniques or mediums of representation, creation and expression, but about the new configurations of power. Any act of protest presupposes a grievance, a conviction of wrong or injustice and the inability to “correct” the condition directly. The protest is intended to draw attention to the grievances (keeping in mind a target group), arouse 10 sympathy and fear and further provoke ameliorative action on the behalf of the “oppressed”.3 In India the context of protest has largely depended upon the nationalist struggle’s primacy to Gandhian non- violence. The first recorded usage of the term “protest march” is the 1913 civil disobedience movement launched by Gandhi against the restrictions that had been imposed on the Indian population of South Africa.4 The idiom of protests in the digital age has transformed, especially since it can often not be coded in specific political ideology, unlike historical forms of protest that had been socialist, anarchist or anti-racist, but more specifically in terms of space and participation. Yet, the “new” forms of protest continue to use the method and vocabulary of the “older” forms as is evident in marches, bandhs, hartals and demonstrations. Any system of protest that is developed in such a space moves between online and offline activism, both feeding and feeding off each other. For instance, congregations can take place at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar as well as over a Facebook page, and can effect response either way. A protest can take place in physical space and then carried forward in virtual space, which may further engender physical action.