eye THE SUNDAY EXPRESS MAGAZINE Five decades after Shabana Azmi made her powerful debut with Ankur, the actor charts her extraordinary journey KOLKATA,LATECITY AUGUST4,2024 14+4PAGES,`7.00 (`12 IN NORTH EAST STATES & ANDAMAN) DAILY FROM: AHMEDABAD, CHANDIGARH, DELHI, JAIPUR, KOLKATA, LUCKNOW, MUMBAI, NAGPUR, PUNE, VADODARA WWW.INDIANEXPRESS.COM FOUR-PAGE PULLOUT AGRI ECONOMISTS MEET CHOMSKY’S CRITICISM IS RED RAG PM: Agriculture is at centre of our economic policymaking Sri Lankan envoy flagged concern over SAU action against professor Wrote to varsity invoking ‘academic freedom’, said being kept in the dark Says small farmers strength of food security, sustainable farming a model VIDHEESHA KUNTAMALLA NEW DELHI, AUGUST 3 The siblings after being rescued by Kalpetta forest range officer K Ashif, section forest officer Jayachandran, beat forest officer K Anil Kumar and forest rapid response team member Anoop Thomas. Kerala Forest Department The report published by The Indian Express on July 27 search scholar also flagged a private YouTube video of an interview with Chomsky, cited in the scholar’s proposal, in which the linguist is heard saying Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes froma“radicalHindutvatradition” and is attempting to “dismantle Indian secular democracy” and “imposeHindutechnocracy.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Bengal minister threatens to ‘beat woman forest officer with stick’ ATRI MITRA KOLKATA, AUGUST 3 BENGAL JAIL minister Akhil Giri sparked a controversy after a videoof himpurportedlythreatening an on-duty woman forest officer surfaced online on Saturday. The woman officer was heading a team tasked with clearing encroachments in Tajpur, under the Purba Medinipur district. During the operation, Giri reached the spot and had an altercation with the forest department team. In the video, he is seen purportedly telling the woman forest officer, “You are a government employee, bow down your head (in front of me) while speaking. See what happens to you within a week…. These goons… will ensure that you aren’t able to go home at night.Mendyourways,orelse… I will beat you with a stick.” West Bengal jail minister Akhil Giri The woman officer, Manisha Sahu, whom Giri targeted, later told mediapersons, “We went to free forest land which was encroached forcefully even after our repeated warnings.” "Afew shops hadbeensetup illegally on the forest department land near the sea beach in Tajpur. These establishments weresoclosetotheseathatthey got submerged during high tides. On Friday night, these shops were removed," a senior forest department official said. Afterlearningabouttheantiencroachment operation, Giri, accompanied by local traders, reachedthespotandconfronted the forest department officials CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Behind defining image of Wayanad ops: 4 officials, a tribal family, a daring rescue Forest team launches 8-hr op, rescues starving family in water-filled cave SHAJU PHILIP KALPETTA, AUGUST 3 THE IMAGE of a forest official holding a rescued child close to his chest has emerged in Kerala asatestimonytothestate’sefforts tosaveeveryhumanlifepossible after landslides wiped out entire villages in Wayanad on Tuesday. The child, who looks emaciated and terrified in the photograph, is part of a six-member tribal family that was found starving at a cave downstream from Soochipara waterfall, close to the tragedy-hit Attamala. It took a daring eight-hour rescue by a forest department team to save the family, including four children aged below five. The rescue has emerged as a glimmer of hope in the midst of a tragedy that has officially claimed 219 lives, while 200 are still missing. Kalpetta forest range officer K Ashif told The Indian Express that the mission required them to traverse rocky terrain — and to convince the family to leave for their own safety. Ashif was accompanied by section forest officer Jayachandran, beat forest officer K Anil Kumar, and forest rapid response team member Anoop Thomas. The rescued family — Krishnan, his wife Santha and CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 KERALA ANNOUNCES TOWNSHIP FOR SURVIVORS PAGE 8 A glimmer: In Munnar, team forecast landslides — and averted damage AMITABH SINHA NEW DELHI, AUGUST 3 BARELY TWO weeks before the devastating Wayanad landslide, a series of landslide incidents happened 300 km south in Munnar in Kerala’s Idukki district.Theirscalewasmuchlower but another reason these didn’t cause much damage was because they were predicted — allowing for pre-emptive action, including evacuation of at-risk populations. This response by the Idukki district administration came CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Big match today, Lakshya has a secret weapon: Meals by mother E Local works, larger ● challenge ABOUT 13% of India’s landmass, 0.42 mn sq km, is prone to landslides. These have thousands of individual sites, each one with unique local characteristics. Early warning systems are limited in applicability to local conditions and a large-scale landslide prediction model is a challenge. INDIA AT OLYMPICS ARCHERY MUMBAI, AUGUST 3 Deepika Kumari loses in quarterfinal PAGES 12, 13, 14 Lakshya Sen during the badminton quarterfinal match against Chinese Taipei’s Chou Tien Chen on Friday. PTI mother Nirmala’s cooking. She has travelled with him for around a month along with father Dhirendra Kumar and PM Narendra Modi with Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in New Delhi on Saturday. PTI HARIKISHAN SHARMA NEW DELHI, AUGUST 3 PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi Saturday said agriculture is at the centre of India’s economic policy, and that small farmers are the biggest strength of the country’s food security. Inaugurating the 32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE) at the National Agricultural Science Centre complex, Modi said: “Nearly 90 per cent of families have very little land. These small farmers are the biggest strengthof India’sfoodsecurity.” Pointingoutthatasimilarsituation exists in several develop- ing countries in Asia, he said India’s model of agriculture can be useful to them as well. Giving theexampleof sustainablefarming, the Prime Minister said: “Promoting chemical-free natural farming at a large scale has givenusverygoodresults.Inthis year’sBudgettoo,abigfocusarea is sustainable and climate resilient farming.” Highlighting achievements of the farm sector, which has grown at over 5 per cent a year over the last six years, Modi said the government has taken several initiatives in the last decade to ensure that farming is connectedwithmoderntechnology. “We are developing a complete CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Some Governors playing role where they shouldn’t, says SC Judge Nagarathna SHOOTING Manu Bhaker misses out on third medal SHIVANI NAIK & AMIT KAMATH AS HE prepares for the biggest match of his life Sunday — the OlympicssemifinalagainstWorld No. 2 Viktor Axelsen — Indian badminton star Lakshya Sen has his entire family camped at an apartment close to the Port de la Chapelle Arena, with “homecooked meals” and smoothies dispatched to him everyday. The secret sauce for Lakshya, the first Indian man to reach the last-four stage of the Olympics badminton competition, is his EXPLAINED THESOUTHAsianUniversity’sactionagainstaPhDscholarandhis Sri Lankan supervisor over a research proposal on Kashmir that included, among its citations, noted linguist Noam Chomsky’s criticismof theNDAgovernment has prompted the Sri Lankan HighCommissionertocallthesituation“extremelydisconcerting” andurgetheuniversitypresident toresolvethematter“inafairand amicable manner in the spirit of academic freedom,” The Sunday Express has learned. AsfirstreportedbyTheIndian Express,onJuly27,SAUissuednotices to the research scholar in May and PhD supervisor Lankan sociologist Sasanka Perera, in April,demandinganexplanation regardingthechoiceof PhDtopic. The notice issued to the re- brother Chirag. Surprisingly, the fare on offer isn’t always Indian: Lakshya’s staple lunch is a mildly spiced chicken noodle soup, crafted by Nirmalaincoordinationwiththe player’s nutritionist. Nirmala’s presence — be it at CONTINUEDONPAGE2 SANATH PRASAD BENGALURU, AUGUST 3 SUPREME COURT Judge Justice B V Nagarathna on Saturday said GovernorsinIndiawereplayinga role where they ought not to and were inactive when they should be playing an active role, calling the cases against Governors before the top court a “sad story”. Her remarks have come in the backdrop of states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu moving the Supreme Court over their Governorswithholdingassentto Bills and the court, in a separate matter, agreeing to examine the GOVT & POLITICS PEOPLE GET FED UP WITH COURT PROCEEDINGS: CJI PAGE 6 question of immunity to Governors from criminal prosecution,grantedunderArticle361 of the Constitution. Deliveringtheclosingkeynote address at the NLSIU PACT Conference — on “Home in the Nation: Indian Women’s ConstitutionalImaginaries”— in CONTINUEDONPAGE2 This PhD cleans septic tanks in Tamil Nadu, his paper cited in SC verdict PAGE 1 ANCHOR NIKHILA HENRY NEW DELHI, AUGUST 3 BURIED AMONG the footnotes of the Supreme Court’s landmark August 1 verdict on subcategorisation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is a name — Ravichandran Bathran. According to the footnote that appears in Section D of the verdict written by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and JusticeManojMisra,Bathranhad authored a research paper — ‘The many omissions of a concept: Discrimination amongst Scheduled Castes’. WhatthefootnotedoesnotrevealisBathran’sstruggletobreak the shackles of the caste system and why he thinks sub-categorisation of Dalits for the purpose of reservation is important. In Kotagiri town of Tamil Nadu’sNilgirisdistrict,wherehe lives, Bathran is known as ‘septic tank bhai’ — a reference to the job he does and also his religion. Bathran adopted Islam in 2022 and is now known by the name Raees Muhammad. “Like Dr B R Ambedkar adopted Buddhism, I adoptedIslam,”saysBathranaka Muhammad. A post-doctoral fellow who worked in the University of Southampton, South Africa, and a PhD in ‘Language, Caste and Territory: Language spoken by scavengingcastesinSouthIndia’ from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, Muhammad has for the past three years been cleaning septic tanks for a living. In a way, sanitation is the occupationprescribedforhiscaste, the Arunthathiyars of Tamil Nadu, he says. “I realised there are people who employ Arunthathiyars and make Ravichandran Bathran, now known as Raees Mohammed money out of their back-breaking work. I felt, why not start a company,” says Muhammad, talking of how he started Kotagiri Septic Tank Cleaning Services Pvt Ltd in 2021. Muhammad says he initially plannedtomechanisethecleaning process to prevent people from entering septic tanks. That did not pan out. He realised not much investment has gone into innovations that could replace manualscavenging.“If someone has to enter a tank and clean it, I do not let my workers do it. I do it myself,” he says. Muhammad pays his cleaners `30,000 and his drivers `40,000 a month. He has also got a group medical insurance for all of them with a premium of `15,000 per annum. “While I have yearned for dignity in this profession, you cannot imagine how humiliating the work is,” he says. Once, a government official asked Muhammad why he, a Chakkiliyan (another name for the Arunthathiyar caste), had dared to call him on the phone. “I am a Chakkiliyan so I did not tell him that I have a post-doc,” he says. Before he took up septic tank cleaning, Muhammad had workedasanAssistantProfessor at Madras University. He also used to run a YouTube channel namedDalitCamera.Hismother Arukani and father Bathran both worked as sweepers and have supported him in all that he does,hesays.HiswifeKarpagam Allimuthu is a councillor of the Kotagiri Town Panchayat. “The teaching job was not fulfilling forme. I always wanted to do more for my community. I realised it’s important to mobilise Arunthathiyars,” Muhammad says, adding the Arunthathiyarsbadlyneedcommunity leaders. Saying “the root of the caste system emerges from the toilets”, Muhammad quotes Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “As Zizek says, the structure of the toilet is very telling of the culture of a place. In India, toilets were once placed outside the houses. Toilets were always associated with people who were untouchables and outcastes,” he says. He is hopeful that sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes for the purpose of reservation will benefit Arunthathiyars, one of the most backward communities in Tamil Nadu who have faced discrimination and violence even at the hands of other Scheduled Caste communities. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Kolkata