The World is NOT a "Clash of Civilizations"

Ever since Samuel P Huntington's work "The Clash of Civilizations" hit book racks, the usually disinterested members of society have woken up to a new reality.  This perception of reality unfortunately is cynical and furthers the stereotype that difference is bad and that people from different cultures and religions cannot co-exist in harmony.  Nothing can be farther from the truth.  Countries like India have flourished because of their tolerance and respect for difference and therefore have become cauldrons of true and meaningful multiculturalism.  Occasional aggravations happen but they are usually provoked and are the handiwork of anti social elements.  Ever since 9/11 members of a particular religion are more under the scanner with the attitude that every member of that religious community is a potential anti social element.  Needless to say these stereotypes will drive wedges between people. Elizabeth Potter of http://myfellowamerican.us/ has once in the past requested that I put out a link on this blog so that those who believe in social harmony can see what they are doing to further communal amity.  Now yet again Elizabeth Potter has written to me requesting that I post her URL here (which I have now done) so that people who visit my blog can also go to see their site which highlights the work that they are doing.

Here are some caveats from my side.

1. I do not know Elizabeth Potter or anyone else associated with her and the website.  I only put out the link since what they say is broadly consistent with my thinking.

2. I am not endorsing http://myfellowamerican.us/ in any way.  I request readers who visit that side to form their opinions on the basis of what they see on the site and/or by talking to the people behind it.  I have nothing to do with this, since I am a person in India and what happens in America is known only through news and that is insufficient for me to form any opinions.

3. I am not responsible if anything that you read there hurts or offends you.  In such instances please engage in inter locution with those who run this site.

What is a democratic protest?

I started the previous post by saying that the question that I was addressing myself to there was going round and round in my brain.  Let me say that is true of this question as well.  Now you can understand why I am such a huge muddle head.  Too many questions going round and round in my brain are actually driving me insane and all that insanity comes out as these blog posts which you my dear reader have patiently been putting up with.  I request you to continue the same while I try to tone down the insanity in me and make my posts more rational and relevant.  This post too will start with an anecdote and no, please don't stop reading this thinking it is going to be something autobiographical.  

The anecdote that I refer to is actually a conversation that I had with a senior Professor working in a very reputed university.  Since I  have not asked the person for permission to spell out their name, I shall refrain from doing so.  I will only refer to this person as the Professor.  Now that that little formality is out of the way, let me get down to the conversation itself.  This was during the "Sakala Janula Samme" launched by the TRS in the Telangana region. Someone had gone to the Supreme Court (hope I have got this right) of India with a PIL or Public Interest Litigation saying that the strike was violating the rights of people and causing them inconvenience and the PIL asked the Supreme Court to take action against the TRS and its various functionaries.  The Court issued an order asking the agitators for explanation and I don't know what happened after that, but one assumes that it fizzled out just as most things in India do.  But I am not sure.  That is not the point however.  The point pertains to the reaction of the afore mentioned Professor to the idea of a PIL against the agitators.  The Professor felt that this kind of intervention by the Judiciary (I am surprised by the faith that the Professor had in the functioning of the Judiciary) is anti democracy.  Upon my questioning the rationale behind this argument, the Professor said that what characterizes a true democracy is the right to protest.  Interesting language that, the right to protest.  It is certainly not a fundamental right but could be a legal right, I am not aware of that.  I had no disagreement over the idea of protest with the Professor, but I certainly saw a problem in its articulation. In order to understand this better, let us take into consideration the events that occurred as part of the Sakala Janula Samme or All People's Strike.  The Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation's services in the Telangana region were suspended for twenty two days.  Workers at the Singareni Collieries which supply coal to thermal power stations in Andhra Pradesh went on a long strike, though I cannot remember how many days, it was for a couple of weeks at least.  The Non-gazetted officers in Telangana went on a longer strike and paralysed most of the work in almost all departments.  This, needless to say, has a bearing on the exchequer of the State, which was losing money due to the non working of its staff. The State said that it would implement the "no work - no pay" rule.  When the strikes were called off, the striking people took their full salaries which were given to them as "festival advance" since the Dussehra Festival had gone by and Deepavali was about to go by.  People like me took full salaries as salaries for having worked because we did not go on strike, but our students did and also because our support staff was striking.  This meant a casual visit to the place of work and since nothing was open we promptly headed to wherever we wanted.  This went down as work and we took our salaries.  Even those who have taken the "Festival Advance" can consider to be in the same boat as people like me because no time frame has been put for the recovery of the "Festival Advance".  Usually everybody forgets about these things and get on with life as if nothing happened.

The other events refer to the inconveniences caused to people who do not even belong to Andhra Pradesh or even live here.  The Gorkhaland Agitation style three day rail and rasta rokos were introduced during this agitation.  A number of trains carrying passengers from one state to another pass through the Telangana region, Kazipet actually being a very big junction. Trains from the North taking passengers to destinations in the South such as Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram and various other places in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka were either cancelled or were rerouted through some round about routes which made the journey tedious and long.  One of the longest highways in India, the NH7 also passes through the region and is an important connection between states such as Bihar, UP, Maharashtra and the southern States.  Trucks, some of them carrying perishable goods were blocked for days together.  The same was the case with the NH9 which connects the West with the East.  Here too roads were blocked.  Obviously passenger buses on these routes were cancelled as were most trains.  Freight stopped moving, people could not move, food stuffs rotted while "people" implemented the rasta rokos and the bandhs.  I am not sure what the economic losses look like but I am sure they are not a pretty picture.

I drew the attention of the good Professor to these instances and persisted in asking if these things were consistent with the idea of a democratic protest. It would not be proper to reproduce the Professor's answer here as that would be very unethical on my part.  During this time I also had conversations with various other academics most of whom were my seniors in age and service and some who were juniors as well.  In all of my conversations I popped up this question of what constitutes a democratic protest and how can inconvenience to others be justified.  I had most interesting responses, again most of which I cannot reproduce due to ethical compunctions.  But I will reproduce a conversation with a good friend and that should give you a gist of what the others were saying as well.  The person that I had this conversation with belonged to the Coastal Andhra region while I belong to the Telangana region.  Using my familiarity with this person (who is an academician) I decided to play the Devil's Advocate.  I asked the person as to why the person that this was a democratic way of protesting especially since the other person is from the other side.  The answer was that people's desire was sacred in a democracy and therefore it was okay.  So I said that I am also part of the people and that I did not desire division so what happens to my opinion?  In a democracy is there no room for people like me?  I even asked "am I also to resort to some form of inconveniencing others so that my voice can be heard"?  Would it be democratic if I kidnapped children and held them captive saying that I will release them to their parents only if my demands were met?  Would it be democratic if I constructed a wall across the road in front of my house to insist that my demands, whatever they maybe, be met?  Predictability the counter was that here I was only one while the agitation had "people".  So I asked "how many people should one gather to be called "people"?  The argument stopped there with the other person saying that this subject demanded a very, very long debate and that they had not the time, energy or inclination to go on with it.

Most of the people whom I spoke to ended the argument this way.  But here is an interesting fact.  All of them have this perception of themselves that they were leftist progressives and some of them even drew parallels between the French mob that stormed the Bastille and finally guillotined the King and Queen and the agitators asking for a separate Telangana.  Some others likened this to the freedom movement of the country.  Others said to gain some, you have to lose some.  Funnily they had no idea what the gain would be and how that would offset the loss.  Most got tired midway and said that we should talk about what can be a democratic protest on another day.  Their pitch was queered when some of the progressive left elements started characterizing Babu Rao Hazare's movement as a saffron movement or an anti Mandal Commission agitation type of movement, emotional blackmail movement and that it was anti people.  Since I am a persistent kind of person I asked why this was all that, when in reality Hazare was causing a lot less inconvenience to people.  Their response is a friendly chiding that I am too argumentative and that there was no point in talking to me.  So I let it be.

But like I said the question is going round and round in my brain. What worries me is the response of the academicians who are teaching things such as democracy and its content.  Trapped in their little cocoon which they constructed around themselves based in what is fashionably "progressive left", they have become victims of stereotypes that they further every living day.  On the other hand we have the idiot middle class that thinks Hazare will bring back their rightful money from the Swiss Banks where the thieving and conniving politicians hid them away.  The avarice of the middle and rich classes is insatiable.  It is therefore funny that the greedy have become followers of man who says he is like Mahatma Gandhi.  Mahatma Gandhi believed in limiting necessities and distributing social wealth among all members of society and so he said as I quoted in another post "There is enough for every man's need but not for every man's greed".  If the great man were to see the Hazare circus he would go "Hey Ram" all over again.  With the middle and rich classes living in their ivory towers (at different levels) and intellectuals hopelessly trapped in immobility because they have tied their shoe laces from both feet together and refuse to untie them since that may look like they are not progressive, it is but natural that democracy in India has taken the lumpen turn.  So here is the answer to the question that I started with.  Democratic protest in India means the ability to raise mobs that will roam the streets free committing crimes but going unpunished because they are protesting democratically.  Indian intellectuals and the so called educated middle and rich classes have surprisingly proved that Plato was right when he said democracy is the rule by the mob.  The irony of this is not lost on me.  Hope it is not lost on you.

P.S: Many posts today.  None proof read.  Excuse mistakes please. Horn Okay. Everything else we shall save for another day.  

Actually what is developmental backwardness and how does it come into being?

This is a question that has been round and round in my brain (which is a very small one and therefore the question must have a very high speed RPM) and causing me great inconvenience.  With this question whirring around inside my head, not only aiming feeling dizzy but also unable to behave like a normal human being (whoever that maybe).  I do not like to get too anecdotal and bring my family into it but of late, thanks to the nature of my employment and the nature of the institution that I work for, classes are things that are no longer in  not only the real realm but also in the imaginary realm, and that means I am home everyday for lunch and that has become a reason for my discussions with my octogenarian father.  Please indulge me a bit here, when I say something very personal.  My father has always been my hero and has been the one friend who has been constant through out my life.  Most of the things that I learnt early in life were due to him and when we were in the districts of Telangana and where there were no sports facilities, he was my coach for cricket and badminton apart from being a sparring partner in those games.  He even played along with my friends.  It is therefore not very illogical that I have grown confidently about his wisdom and his advice in most things in life.  These days during and after lunch we spend a great deal of time talking about the past.  The past not only includes mine but his (my dad's that is) and that of his hero - his father (my paternal grandfather).  A few days ago, another octogenarian who happens to be my father's childhood friend joined us in these discussions.  Talking to them was fascinating.  They both hail from Hanumakonda (I consider myself a Hyderabadi and Hyderabadi alone and I have said that the only place where I want to live and die is Hyderabad my one and only home) and lapsed into how my grandfather was a great teacher who could teach chemistry in Urdu without taking recourse to even a single term in any other language (this was pointed out by my father's friend).  They were talking of how in those days teaching happened wonderfully in Urdu thanks to the efforts of the Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan and to a lesser extent but significantly the efforts of his father Mahbub Ali Khan Pasha.  They heaped praise on the Nizam for taking up developmental activity and making his Hyderabad State and the City of Hyderabad pretty developed.  My father in fact pointed out that except for Hyderabad till the 1970s, the only other developed cities in India were the once that were developed by the British.  Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras fell into that category and Bangalore was then only a retirement paradise for the British.  He also said that Mysore was also developed but not to the scale of Hyderabad.  This maybe apocryphal but I continue to narrate it for a reason.

You must be wondering by now as to why I am talking about my father and his friend and the Nizam of Hyderabad in a post whose heading is "what is developmental backwardness"?  I promise you dear reader that there is a connection.  Those of you who are regular readers of my blog know by now that my father is a bit of a fan of the Nizam (Osman Ali Khan) and credits to him the development of Hyderabad City and State.  This time around in this conversation with him and his friend a stunning argument came out with reference to the notion of development.  While the two friends were extolling development in the Hyderabad State (Telangana was one part of it), I butted in and asked them as to why people consider Telangana to be a backward region. My father's friend was a retired teacher of economics and he pointed out that economic growth and development are not always co-terminus.  Despite having lesser revenues the culture of Telangana according to him (and my dad) was far superior to the Andhra counter parts.  Telangana farmers, my father contends (he is an agriculture graduate and worked in the Dept of Agriculture, so hopefully he knows what he is saying) are very adept at dry land cultivation and knew how to exploit the land to maximise its productivity.  He says the difference between the Telangana farmers and their counterparts in the Coastal Andhra region was that the latter had access to alluvial soil and also had access to greater amounts of water and that led them to grow crops like rice and also due to the abundance of black soil, cash crops such as tobacco and cotton were grown and the farmers there became rich.  Here he said that that does not make the coastal farmer superior.  My father who knows my love for automobiles gave me an analogy.  He said the Telangana farmer was like the person who built his own car and drove it.  It may look crude, but it is the result of a know how and if it needs fixing, that could be done in a cinch by its builder-driver.  The Andhra farmer according to him was like the chap who goes to a showroom and picks up a car and just drives it and if it breaks down he has to rely on a mechanic to fix it.  I thought that this was a poor analogy and told my father so.  He contends that it is not and that development should be measured in terms of the complexity involved in producing something.  He also said Telangana appears backward from a capitalist point of view since the farmers here were more into subsistence agriculture than commercial agriculture.

I can see the point he is making.  Our mindset is so skewed in the direction of bounties and riches and the acquisition of things that those facilitate, we easily overlook the fact that the philosophy of the region was very different.  People were living peacefully in the resources that were available to them without entertaining notions of grandeur.  This is of course not deny the terribly negative role that feudalism played here and the oppression that it unleashed on the farmers and the miseries it created.  If all things are considered equal then the Telangana farmer showed greater gumption and ability to deal with adversity than the coastal farmer.  Well the argument is an argument and therefore I suppose it could be contentious, but the question is how did Telangana get the badge of a backward region?  This has everything to do with the nature of politicians once India became independent.  My father worked in blocks as he was sent on deputation to the Panchayat Raj department and he says by the early 1960s already structures of corruption had come into being in a big way.  According to him the Samithi President, the Village Sarpanch were all in cohorts to distribute the money given for developmental purposes, among themselves.  Very little went into projects properly and given the fact that this was a region that was not having abundant water, a comeback from setbacks was that much more difficult.  Hence for my father and his friend, Telangana despite having farmers of superior skills and understanding slowly regressed into the backward mode thanks to local level and state level politicians.  Both of them once proponents of a separate Telangana state are now a little sceptical of how things can change even if a separate state is created, because politicians have gone from bad to worse.

This is a story that I have told not to prove my point that Andhra Pradesh should remain as it is.  My father and his friend still do not agree with me.  The only point I am making is that how in the name of democracy people of the country have been dis-empowered and how we are going backwards.  This for me is a story that says that politics should change and for that politicians should change.  Now comes the crore rupee question "how is that going to happen"? especially when more lumpenism is entering politics.  How indeed? I have no answer, but perhaps if we all put heads together we just may find an answer.  So can we think collectively on this?  Let me know.

P.S:  This is NOT a post about the present Telangana movement.  I have invoked the region because we have only ever lived here and because I was drawing mainly on my father's extensive experience about politicians and politics at the grass roots level in this region.  There could be similar stories about many other regions, but I do not want to make generalizations.

P.P.S. Not proof read.  Sorry about that.

Antics Hazare and his cohorts are at it yet again

Babu Rao Hazare is a truly great man.  He is relentless in pursuit of the Congress party and is hell bent on embarrassing the party.  If you have noticed I have stayed away from making any new posts for nearly two months.  It is not because, I had nothing to say.  Remember I am one who loves to rant, so there was a lot to rant about.  However, I held my counsel and decided to stay away from posting because I thought my posts, like Indian politics would become repetitive (truth to be told they have already become repetitive, so I was trying to not repeat what I had already repeated).  In all the time that I was quiet, many things have been happening; and all of them have just repetitions.  In the case of the Telangana question the leaders including the irrepressible K Chandrashekhar Rao and his son have been dishing out the same old threats and the Congress party has been responding with the same old answers which do not mean anything.  The TDP is still sitting on the wall waiting to jump to the side which will begin electoral gains.  The party's supremo's two eyes are carefully watching both the sides from the wall and therefore the mice on either side are also being very alert. So for the time being let us leave this issue and get on with the issue that is the story of this blog.  And dear reader, this post will not be very long and put you to sleep, so just read on.

So we comeback to Babu Rao Hazare, the Great Dictator.  Germany had its great dictator, a man called Hitler, Italy's great dictator was Mussolini and there have been so many tinpot dictators in the world that it is pointless to name them.  General Pinochet, Colonel Qaddafi, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and even Osama Bin Laden.  India too has had its great dictators.  But there are slightly different.  One category of great dictators is the teacher.  But that is the subject of a different post which I hope to make after this one.  But perhaps India's greatest dictator (prior to Hazare that is) was Veda Vyasa.  The popular story that does the rounds is that the great Sage wanted a scribe to write the Mahabharata while he narrated it.  The only one who could write was Vinayaka but he had a condition that he would write only if Veda Vyasa dictated without pausing.  Veda Vyasa put his own condition and that is Vinayaka or Ganapati had to understand what he was writing and that gave Veda Vyasa the time to form his verses.

Hazare has been carved out of a different stone.  He is no Veda Vyasa.  In fact he is the exact opposite of Veda Vyasa.  Hazare neither has the gumption or the education that Veda Vyasa had and therefore depends on others to dictate things.  However, he is not Lord Ganesha either and that rules out his being a scribe.  So the dictators behind his diktats are the four people still behind him, the father and son Bhushan, Kiran Bedi and Arvind Kejriwal.  The first two being lawyers it would be safe to assume that there would be enough scribes to take their dictations.  Kiran Bedi is now maintaining a very slightly low profile since the scam where she showed inflated bills for her NGO apparently so that the organization could be better funded, but still a scam is a scam. Babu bhai (meaning Anna) should not have tolerated this at all.  After all his inspiration and hero, the Mahatma always said there could be no separation of means from the end or ends from the means.  His anathema, Niccolo Machiavelli believed that ends could justify means and it is obvious despite being in the camp of a so called Gandhian, Ms. Bedi is a firm believer in Machiavelli.  So what if the bills were inflated (means), the money thus generated was useful for a noble cause i.e to run her NGO (the end).  In this happy confluence of the Mahatma and evil Genius sits the entire campaign against corruption.  Mr. Kejriwal is yet to find his hero but has successfully found his nemesis.  He has been man handled and was made to look dishevelled in front of the media.  The Gandhian, perhaps under the influence of the Machiavellian heaped approbation on the person who slapped Sharad Pawar and stopped short of asking for an encore.  This in turn earned him well deserved opprobrium from all people who had any sense left in them and that leaves out the middle class and the rich class, so that means that a small group of anonymous Gandhi admiring people was the only section of society apart from some journalists to find this reprehensible.  

However a big figure like Hazare cannot be deterred by small set backs and therefore he is continuing the motto that he learnt while driving jeeps (or trucks) in the army; bash on regardless.  A couple of times he protested in Delhi and was joined in the protests by the BJP biggies.  As is his wont, Hazare (remember he is the great dictator, only that he has to be dictated to first given the absence in him, of the main ingredient that is an absolute necessity for any kind of thought to emerge) has been issuing ultimatums.  Apparently there were many pleasant people in the Congress who have tried to please him a little and included the Prime Minister within the ambit of the Lokpal (this huge extra constitutional demon that Hazare and his cohorts are trying to manufacture).  The BJP though rubbing its shoulders with the Hazare Cohorts, found it difficult to rub the same with the Congress and so has started protesting about it.  To cut a long story short, nobody is happy with the Lokpal Bill.  Babu bhai, fearing the Delhi cold perhaps, has decided to stage his hunger strike sit in at the MMRDA grounds in Mumbai so that he can experience not only the warmer climate of the place but also to show his strength in the form of the middle class idiots who will sport I am Anna topis and enthusiastically go to jail and the younger ones in this class will consequently have police records against their name and hence will find employment with the government difficult if not impossible in the future.  

Babu Rao Hazare shifted to Mumbai, because he can speak in his mother tongue Marathi and there are more middle class people in amchi Mumbai than the babudom dominated Delhi. Now Hazare seems to be equipped with long range missiles, so he will be launching them from Mumbai towards Delhi.  At this point we have to ask ourselves, "what is Hazare's real agenda"?  This lokpal thing looks less and less convincing because the country is now witnessing so many other crises which are tending to make the central government look as if it is experiencing a legitimation deficit if not a full blown legitimation crisis and these crises are a little more fundamental to the country than black money stashed away in Swiss Banks or the bribes that C grade employees are taking.  I have started hearing many conspiracy theories, all of which are amusing and way of the mark (of reality that is).  One theory is that Hazare's inner wear is saffron even though his visible clothes are more in conformity with those of the traditional but non saffron politician.  The second theory is diametrically the opposite of this theory.  It argues that Hazare is a creation of the Congress itself and is using him to divert the attention of the people from issues that are otherwise threatening to explode.  A third theory is that given the propensity of Kejriwal to multinational funding for his NGO, it must be the huge multinational corporations who are in doldrums world wide and are sick of paying huge bribes to our politicians, that are behind Hazare Cohorts.  Nobody has any kind of data to substantiate any of these conspiracy theories so they remain Urban Legends.  Whatever be the real purpose of Hazare and his grim men and whoever maybe the strength behind them, the Hazare antics are no longer amusing.  It is a side show that has becoming repetitive like our politics and my posts, so Hazare needs to move on.  Good thing he has made a start by moving from Delhi to Mumbai.  I hope he will soon confine himself to Ralegan Siddhi and that people there will decide about watching his antics or not.

P.S:  I said that this would be a short post.  It is obvious that I lied.

P.P.S: Not proof read.  All grammatical and semantic errors are mine and mine only.  Please bear with me.

Indian Politics - Caught between fasting and feasting

I have been away from the blog for sometime since I really did not see anything worth writing about.  However, thanks to the separate Telangana issue, Babu Rao Hazare's anti-corruption movement (I seriously do not know if one can call it that) and by elections that are due in some places, political antics have started coming to the forefront of things yet again and I thought I will share some thoughts with you about the way in which politics are moving forward (actually it should be backward).

P. Chidambaram, the honourable Minister of Home Affairs of India has after making two controversial statements on Telangana in the December of 2009, has once again made a statement.  He says post Bakrid a plan of what will happen to Telangana will be revealed.  That has galvanized the politicians and media in equal measure.  The political agenda in the country is very much dictated by how the media, especially TV represents things.  I deliberately call it representation and not presentation. If you look at K. Chandrashekhar Rao's channel, T News the only news that you can see is about Telangana.  It is mainly about how Congress politicians are continuously betraying the separate Telangana cause but there are also instances when one does see a little more in the form of lionising the likes of K. Chandrashekhar Rao, K. T. Rama Rao and Harish Rao. On the other hand if you see ETV2, the news channel of media baron Ramoji Rao, there is the vilification of the Congress for its failure to take care of farmers with additional inputs about how Chandra Babu Naidu and the Telugu Desam are fighting for some worthy causes.  Then there are the sundry news channels that are looking for something to happen somewhere so that they can send their crews to those locations to fill time. So it could be the fire in the building which houses the Reliance Supermarket or it could news of the OU student who gave up his life for Telangana  by jumping in front of a train in Mancherial.  He did so because he was suffering from jaundice and urinary tract infection which he could not fight since he did not have a job which would be due to him if only Telangana was granted.

Then there are fasts.  Today's newspapers are carrying news about various people fasting.  One news is that Acharya Konda Lakshman Bapuji (the first part i.e Acharya is a recent addition and the last part i.e Bapuji was used from many years, but what is interesting are that both the titles are self conferred much like how film stars confer themselves with titles such as King and Prince), a nonagenarian politician, who was fasting in New Delhi has called off his fast.  He started the fast for a separate Telangana but to me the reasons for his calling his fast off are not yet clear.  Acharya K L Bapuji even when he was a septuagenarian was interested in grabbing land around the Hussain Sagar lake in Hyderabad. He grabbed land from Andhra Pradesh Tourism, called it Jala Drushyam and hired it out for various purposes such as weddings, parties, rock shows and other such things and apparently made a pretty big pile before somebody in AP Tourism realized that the land belonged to them and took it back.  He kicked and cried but had to surrender the land back, though he kept the money that he made from that piece of land.

Then there is Komatireddi Venkat Reddy who is fasting for a separate Telangana even after he has been shifted to NIMS in Hyderabad.  Then there was a lady DSP Nalini, who resigned from her post because of daily humiliations from Andhra officers in the police force.  She says she has resigned, she did this once before, but the police department has said that they have suspended her for bringing disrepute to the police force.  I liked that bit because I was not aware that the police had reputation that could be spoilt.  Anyway, she, meaning Nalini, has decided enough is enough and will soon begin a fast in Jantar Mantar in New Delhi for a separate Telangana so that officers from this region will not be humiliated by Andhra Officers.  I request her to also include in her demands a promise from the Central Government that no Andhra persons will be posted in the new Telangana state if they are selected for IPS by passing the UPSC exam.  For those who do not know police officers are posted to various state cadres by the Central government after they clear the Civil Services Exam and only the top get their home cadres.  So it is still conceivable that those from the new Andhra State who are not in the top may pull strings to come to neighbouring Telangana so that they can be near their own state.  In doing so they will once again humiliate officers like Nalini.  So this much has to be ensured.

I think I have written enough about fasts, there have been so many in the last few months.  Mr. Hazare and his team, with their moral superiority over others have gone on fast so many times that I have forgotten to count.  In this illustrious list of blemishless fasters (my coinage, please excuse me for that but I like the sound of it) are the great Narendra Modi, the incomparable YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, the venerable Chandra Babu Naidu, and all those wonderful middle class people of India who joined Hazare's cleansing efforts by fasting at home for one day, two days or many days.  I am stunned and stupefied by the fact that a country which has such morally unquestionable politicians and a middle class with tremendous rectitude, has such abysmal quality of politics.  I guess it is all down to the rich and the poor.

The rich are greedy, very greedy.  That is what Mani Shankar Aiyar (I think that is the spelling he uses) said when asked to comment on the inaugural Formula1 Grand Prix of India, which was being hailed a huge success by the Gaur family that runs the Jaypee group that constructed the circuit and conducted the Grand Prix, Vijay Mallya and Saharasri Subroto Roy Sahara who co-own the Sahara Force India Formula1 team and many more rich and the famous.  Mani Shankar Aiyar who was once the sports minister of this country believes that India hosting a Formula1 GP, a play ground for the rich and the famous, was morally unsustainable since India had millions who had no access to sanitation, nutritious food and decent housing.  Point taken Mr. Aiyar, but what is the Congress the party to which you belong doing about these things?  Why is it saying that individuals can subsist at Rs. 32 per day and be called above the poverty line?  What has the Congress which has ruled this country for fifty years or more (excuse my arithmetic if it is wrong, I am no good at numbers) been doing to alleviate the suffering of the poor and the destitute?

They have been too busy like the politicians from EVERY other political parties, fattening their purposes and feasting on the thousands of crores that they have made and are still making whenever, wherever and however possible.  They have been winning elections (all representatives of ALL political parties) by giving the poor the ability feast on biryani and beer when the elections are due.  The morally superior middle class will not vote and the rich and the famous are too busy feasting to stand in line in the sun to vote.  Maybe they will along with the middle class if the Electronic Voting Machines are carried to their houses by service personnel appointed by the Election Commission of India.  If the Election Commission is proposing such a move it will do well to remember that the service executive should be trained to read out the names of the candidates and himself press the button on the voting machine upon instructions from the rich and the famous and the worthy middle class voters.

It is disgusting to read news of fasts for causes that stem out of personal agendas and make them look like universal causes.  It is offensive the level of politics have come down well below the sea level.  We are free falling into the lightless, bottomless pit of corrupt politics and most of the time people like me and you do nothing about it.  The question is can something be done?  If so how?  I have no answers for those questions but I have a couple of pointers that could well give us some indication about where the answers could be if we made an attempt to look for them.  This is already a very looooooong post, so I will save that for the next post which will come pretty soon.

P.S. The usual excuse of not having time to proof read and asking for your forgiveness is true for this time as well.  Thank you. 

Where is Andhra Pradesh heading?

Perhaps starting this blog was a significant mistake of mine.  Even though I have decided that there is no point in continuing the conversation about Telangana people keep asking me questions and since I have started something, I feel obliged to continue it and answer questions that people ask.  Here are some of my thoughts on what people have asked.

The last few days have been of significance in the State of Andhra Pradesh where life has been paralysed or crippled depending on where one lives.  If you are in Telangana the strike that has been launched by the employees of the Government of Andhra Pradesh in the Telangana region is most mystifying.  Those of you who read my blog will remember that I once quoted my father on development in Telangana and how my views and his do not match on the question of separate Telangana.  I even said that he was the Coordinator of Gazetted Officers supporting a separate Telangana in 1969.  If you are wondering why I am getting autobiographical again, here is the reason.  I asked my father as to what the justification was for gazetted or non gazetted employees seeking a separate Telangana.  His answer was that an overwhelming number of employees in the government were from the Coastal Andhra region and that they had a superior complex and spoke deprecatingly of the local Telangana people.  I am aware that post that agitation, Andhra Pradesh has been divided into zones and all employees up to that of the gazetted level are drawn from within the local zones.  This local zone employment has also come into universities and other quasi government bodies.  So my question is why and what for are the non gazetted employees of Telangana agitating for?  (This time I have spared my father of this question mainly because he is now an octogenarian and a government employee who retired more than twenty years ago).  Why is the separate State so important to the government employees, so much so that they are willing to not work and inconvenience common people?

The answer to that question lies in unions.  The existence of various unions among employees is essentially an advantage and a disadvantage for political parties.  If they are in government, unions are disadvantageous mainly but if they are in the opposition then they can be of great use.  Union leaders can be used for the creation of strikes that are crippling.  In the case of the APSRTC, the unions and mainly the National Mazdoor Union are using this as an opportunity to regularize the services of ad hoc and contract employees.  The coal miners are agitating for something that I do not know, but they are not working exclusively for Andhra Pradesh since thermal power plants in Andhra Pradesh and in the Telangana region are synchronized with national grids and the lack of adequate power generation is not problem for people of this region alone.  Anyway, this strike has meant power cuts lasting more than 12 hours in villages of Telangana and that has been the scourge of farmers who require their pumpsets to run for the saving of the crops.  The APSRTC has accumulated losses and this strike which is making the corporation lose crores of rupees everyday will ensure that the corporation will never recover and will ultimately become a burden on the tax payers.

In all this clamour there are some people who claim that Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar have supported a separate Telangana.  I think some air must be cleared here.  Linguistic states as an idea found support from Mahatma Gandhi but not from Nehru and Ambedkar.  It was the desire of Ambedkar to leave the State of Hyderabad as it was and he believed that having a relatively developed city like Hyderabad as the  capital of a state that had the Marathwada region (now in Maharashtra), the Gulbarga region and the Bidar region (now in Karnataka) would be good for the development of the whole region.  In the reorganization of states these regions have now been integrated into other states.  So where is the relevance of quoting Ambedkar over this. Similarly Nehru had reservations about how composite states based in language would be.  He was in that context talking about how a developed Coastal Andhra region which was under the erstwhile Madras Presidency could dominate the undeveloped Telangana region.  The Madras Presidency has also since been divided into many regions and once N T Rama Rao famously said that Madras (now Chennai) should never have been given to Tamil Nadu since it had an overwhelming number of Telugu speaking people. My problem with the idea of Separate Telangana has always been this.  It cannot be seen as a stand alone issue.

This is where myopic and uneducated leaders step in to queer the pitch.  The problem of this country is mainly that politics have become the exclusive prerogative of muscle and the money that it supports.  Today there are people in sitting in the United States of America arguing about how Coastal Andhra people have colonized Telangana.  If the Americans were to fear the colonizing of America by Indians then that gets categorized as Xenophobia by these very same people.  I would like to see how many of them would be comfortable with "Indians go back".  In all this filth and muck the future of the poor and their children is that which is taking a severe beating because they can never emigrate elsewhere or send their children to other states [(including the United States:-))] and they will be pushed back a few more years and recovering from that pushing back will not be possible.  The education system of this country which is manned by illiterates and scoundrels who want to perpetuate caste politics, is not helping matters.

What is most disturbing is how political parties are least bothered about people but playing games of one-upmanship.  The CPI (M)'s Prakash Karat has questioned the Central Government's indecision and has flayed its attempt to convene all political parties again after the Sri Krishna Committee has consulted all political parties and given out the option of leaving the State of Andhra Pradesh as it is and creating separate legally binding autonomous councils for Telangana with special extra funding as the best one.  This is understandable since the CPI (M) has been maintaining that it does not support bifurcation.  But what confounded me completely was Harish Rao of TRS also saying the same thing. When I talked about this a very enlightened social scientist has said that Sri Krishna Committee has also given the option of a Separate Telangana with Hyderabad as Capital and that this should be pursued.  But that was not the ideal option, as per the committee I said and was told "for us that is the ideal option".  Enough said.  I leave it to you dear reader to draw your conclusions.  I cannot claim that my line of thinking is the best and don't intend to either.  Like I said, I belong to Telangana and have only ever lived in Telangana so I can continue.  My concern is about what parochialism and fissiparous tendencies can do to the future my country.

P.S: Not proof read.  Please excuse errors.

If you listen to fools, then the mob rules

The title of this post is a line from a song by the British Rock Band, Black Sabbath.  That seems so apt to describe the political situation in this country in general and this state (Andhra Pradesh) in particular.  Everyday the newspaper carries stories of scams of different variety where wily politicians have siphoned off thousands of crores of rupees, or about violence and bandhs and threats.  The TV channels are the same.  The sensationalism that the TV channels resort to would make one think that we are living in a war ravaged part of the world.  While that is sensational the underpinnings of what is happening in this country and Andhra Pradesh are probably portends to what might be in the future.  The Telangana imbroglio continues with no signs of any action or serious thought being given to this issue.  Everybody seems to be waiting for Sonia Gandhi to make up her mind and tell us what the future holds for us.  I cannot help but think, who is Sonia Gandhi to decide?  I am not alluding to her Italian origins when I say that.  I am only questioning as to why one individual has to be given the power and authority to decide the fate of people.

Talking of people, it is very disheartening and sad to see rabble rousing of one set of people against the other and the statements of the Osmania University Students Joint Action Committee that they will start an "Andhra Go Back" movement and throw out the "outsiders" and attack their properties are distressing, to say the least.  What kind of a country are we living in when Indian citizens are not allowed the right to live anywhere of their choice without fear and anxiety?  The beating up of various Government functionaries by TRS leaders is indication of the tendencies of fascism creeping into the so called people's movement.  Buses carrying government employees being attacked and government not being allowed to function are all indications of the fascist tendencies and measures of desperation.  Xenophobia levels are mounting and those are being further fuelled by opportunistic politicians.

I have never named people and I will continue that tradition of mine.  But what I find unbelievable is that an academician has decided to become a politician (nothing wrong with that, but he should quit academics and join politics full time and not do this thing of taking leave occasionally, signing the register and go off on jaunts to politic) and has also decided to every half an opportunity warn various sections of the population of "dire consequences" if they do not fall in line with his dictats.  The man who teaches the virtues of democracy has himself become a "Great Dictator".  Perhaps the greatest cause of sadness should be the TRS strategy of emulating the LTTE and bringing small children into the fray.  A little more than a year ago I had seen the TRS bring scores of little children to the famed Arts College in Osmania University.  I had even made a post about that.  Now in newspapers I see little children carrying Telangana flags and shouting slogans.  This hit me much harder when I saw something a few days ago.

I had been asked to travel to neighbouring Karnataka to deliver a valedictory address for a seminar organized by a government college there.  I had to travel by road to get there and the good people from the college said that I can travel by a taxi and that they would pay the fare.  I found that all along the way, there were problems.  People had parked tractors across the road.  When asked as to why they were doing this since there was no rasta roko, they said that their villages were getting erratic power supply and that they wanted the electricity staff to come to them.  They were being told by the police (who were about 2 in number at every place where this was happening) that the electricity department staff were on strike the people kept saying that is not our problem.  Long queues of traffic were forming on either side of the road and at most places ultimately it was brawls that settled matters.  In one or two places, the striking non-gazetted officers of the Government of Andhra Pradesh had pitched tents in the middle of the highway and only letting small vehicles through from one side.  Trucks were parked for kilometres on both sides and I heard some truckers pleading that they were carrying perishable cargo and that since they did not even belong to this state they should be allowed to go and these people were told that they have to endure hardships if we (the agitators) had to have our demands satisfied.  When I finally reached the venue of the seminar, the time for the valedictory was long gone and only a few students were made to sit and listen to me.  One of the people there pointedly asked me why people in Karnataka had to put up with the Telangana bull shit (his words, not mine) when they had nothing to do with it.  Apparently he was stuck there because his train to Bangalore was cancelled due to the rail roko in the Telangana region.  I can go on about these incidents but these will suffice.

If one looks at the anatomy of the problem one can see the cause of all this.  First of all we have politicians who are mainly goons and thugs and are most avaricious.  They require thousands of crores.  Elections and being elected are for them means to satisfy their hunger for power and money.  They are incapable of understanding finer things such as development, people's aspirations etc.  Then there are the upper and middle classes.  The upper classes are so rich that they will not be affected by anything.  If things take a bad turn here they will fly to some other country till such time things are conducive for their return.  The middle classes are very much like the politicians.  Full of themselves, greedy for more of everything and aspiring to be like the upper classes.  What matters to them is which fashion designer is hogging the lime light, which actor is doing what and they are constantly trying to break into the rarefied portals which are used by the glitteratti.  They are also not satisfied with the pay packets that they have.  Their pay packets already run into several lakhs of rupees but it is not enough.  Armed with this stupidity they are quite happy to declare their support to half baked people like Anna Hazare who thinks he has the magic wand to get rid of corruption from this country.  The support of the middle classes to the Hazares of the world (and the Hazares do not have enough intelligence to tell their front from their rear) is also limited to stupid posts on Facebook or the occasional jaunt to a public place where there will be a candle light vigil while a rock band belts out popular songs which have nothing to do with anything.

It is this attitude that has been widening the gap between the rich and the poor and the properly educated and the improperly educated (and the uneducated).  It is in this gap, in this emptiness that the lumpen elements to society grow.  Profile the lumpen person.  He has no access to anything.  No education, no medicare, no comfort of a home, no comfort of a family, nothing.  It is this lumpen person who becomes the mercenary and the weapon in the hands of the politicians who are anyway thugs themselves.  This lumpen person is least bothered about the fact that children are losing education and their future (for him there is only a present, no future), that people are dying due to neglect (death is an everyday occurrence and does not move him emotionally), that the state is losing thousands of crores of rupees (he does not even understand the numbers and sees no reason to try and understand them) and that the country is suffering (so what is new in that? he would ask since that is the one thing he understands).  The self righteous, self consumed and socially irresponsible rich and middle classes have to pay this price.  When there is a fire raging it is stupid to think that it will only consume the others and not the self.  It is this inability of the afore mentioned classes to see beyond their noses that has landed this country in this quandary.  It is these classes that have proved Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill right.  Gandhi said that there was not enough for greed even though there was enough for every man's need in this world. It is the greedy and avaricious attitude of the rich and the middle classes that has made them numb to other people.  So how can they expect the others to be anything but numb to their problems?  Churchill famously said that after independence India would ultimately be ruled by scoundrels and all sorts of silly fellows.  I suppose I do not have say anything more on that.  So the fools are the rich and the middle classes and therefore the lumpen mob (which is their illegitimate heir) rules.

P.S. Short of time did not proof read.  Mistakes maybe excused.  Thank you. 

This is now an anti poor people's movement not a people's movement

I still cannot understand this continuing strategy of targetting and inconveniencing people in the name of an agitation.  This is sheer idiocy.  Crippling road transport, rail transport, rasta roko are all anti poor.  They are the ones who use State Transport buses to go to various parts of the city or to travel to other places.  With no bus services these people are worst hit.  The most shameless and barefaced of the lot or the doctors striking work.  Only emergency services will be attended to.  So the poor have to wait for their illness to become an emergency before they can get the doctors to attend on them.  I keep saying poor people, because the rich can go to private hospitals, they can travel by their own vehicles and if the destinations are far they can use air transport.  Shamefully a university teacher threatens schools and asks them to close down and yet again the first hit are the government schools where again the poor send their children to.  Pensioners are worried that they may not get their pensions on time.  Not all pensioners are rich. Many of them need their pension on the first of the month to pay their grocery bills and medical bills.  It is sickening to see 5 year old and 10 year old children being made to carry Telangana flags.  Instilling hatred from a tender age to ensure that the future generations will also fight the same filthy battles based in caste, religion, region and any other putrid rubbish that one can think of.  There is no sign of governance anywhere.  Traffic police simply turning a blind eye to people driving on the wrong side of the road, without lights....the list can go on.  Shame on the agitators and shame on the government at the centre and the state.  Using common people to settle political scores and to play games of one up man ship.  I had decided not to blog about this nonsense but each time patience is tested.  A good professor says we know how to make up for lost time.  I too know.  Give marks for anything written or unwritten.  These degree holders only need to go out into the world to know that their degrees have no value.  Maybe they already know that. This has nothing to do with people.  These are games that politicians play.  They simply use the shoulders of the people to fire guns at each other.

Communal Harmony

Its been quite a while since I last made a post on this blog.  It is not as if there have been no issues to talk about. It is just that the same issues keep cropping up again and again and my views on those are pretty much established (at least that is what I hope).  In India we have been seeing this communalism debate cropping up again thanks to the verdict of a court of law sending back issues regarding Narendra Modi's involvement in the pogrom of Gujarat.  Modi has taken that as a clean chit to him and his opponents mainly the Congress have said that it is nothing like that. Meanwhile Facebook is witnessing posting of a number of statistics. Some showing the Congress as being responsible for various communal riots and pogroms while others show even more statistics to say that the BJP is communal.  In all this I have no interest in posting about anything because in India given the pragmatism that has set in to politics and since politics have been emptied of any moral or ethical content it is more than likely that both parties have played the communal card for whatever gains that they may have seen.  I do not want to take sides here because to me being on either of the two sides means ultimately the same.  In India politics are such that there are many parties using different names but doing the same thing to either come into power or to stay in power.

I have in the past posted a link sent by one Elizabeth Potter who said that they wanted all religious and ethnic groups in America living in harmony and without mutual suspicion. I posted that link then because I believe that we are all ultimately one people (human beings) and we have this one planet called Earth which is our home.  My views have not changed.  I believe that there is a necessity for us to collectively look inside ourselves and find that humanity in us all.  Elizabeth Potter has sent me yet another link and wants me to post that on this blog.  I am doing that because like I said we should all learn to live in harmony.  Her cause seems to be consistent with my own out look to harmony.  But like I said the last time, I do not know who she is or what her organization does beyond making these documentaries.  If there are Americans reading this post I request you to come to your conclusions about Ms. Potter and the work she and her friends are doing.

Here is the link she wanted me to share with you all.

http://myfellowamerican.us/

Please see this and decide for yourself.  On the face of it, it seems like a genuine thing but as I said I do not know her personally at all.  Please use your discretion about this.  Thank you.

Hazare, Roy and Thorat - A glimpse into how we Indians think

In response to my previous post about Babu Rao Hazare and the Government of India, one of the readers commented to me that there was no reason for me to think that the right that Hazare has to protest about something is invalid.  So let me just state that I did not and do not intend to take away Hazare's democratic and constitutional rights.  The intent of my post was how Hazare's team is not representative of the desires of the Indian society at large and how the man could not subvert democratic institutions which are manned by elected representatives of the people.  I was posing a rather troublesome question which is "what can we do if our elected representatives have all formed into a cartel and have decided to become corrupt"?  One the one hand the corrupt people are those who have found their place in the parliament through an electoral process and therefore have a right to be where they are but on the other hand they are perpetrating something which is not morally-ethically sustainable.  So the situation is challenging to say the least and Hazare and his team have found a rather easy solution to the problem; create a draconian office called the Lok Janpal and make constitutional institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament subservient to this person.  The powers of the Lok Janpal have been decided not in consultation with any broad consultations with social groups but by a handful of people.

I have been arguing again and again that this is no method of tackling a problem that is so serious that he has consequences for constitutional institutions and constitutional democratic practices.  Here let me quote Hazare's hero Mahatma Gandhi.  Gandhi was trained in legalities and had talked about Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience in the context of unjust or unfair laws in the first place.  He did not advocate either of the two strategies to be taken up on a whim and that is what Hazare is doing.  I have already said that the Government of India's sloppy handling of the situation lent credence to Hazare and a number of sceptics also became believers in his cause and methods once the Government cracked down on him as a preemptive strike.  Suddenly the unreasonable stubbornness of the man seemed like the most appropriate strategy to take on a government that was not serious about doing anything about corruption. Popular thinking rarely goes into the nittie-gritties of constitutional issues and other such technicalities and the government's arrest of Hazare led to people suddenly empathizing with the man.  The government was seen as fascist and I find that accusation hilarious because the subsequent acts of the government proved that it was weak willed and weak kneed and folded up in front of the demands of Team Hazare.  The government was trying to be fascist, I suppose one can say that even to be something like a fascist there needs to be strength and this government which is already beleaguered on many fronts is anything but that.

These happenings should be the ideal catalyst for people who do not support the Government or Team Hazare to exercise their minds and take to people the seriousness and the multifarious ramifications of the actions of both the Government and Team Hazare to the people.  I am one of the people who fall into this category.  I have not been able to suggest any remedies to the situation except that there should be greater deliberation on this issue and more and more people should be involved in the process of finding solutions to make the government act.  But I am no activist.  I have been sitting in front of a computer and typing away my views without any effort to convert them into action and that is certainly a failing in me, and a very big failing at that.  I think I do not want to inconvenience myself too much over something and therefore just prefer to write and do nothing more.  Not the ideal strategy to deal with situations such as these.  But what of Arundhathi Roy?  She is an activist and is "supposedly" an intellectual. But as always she chose to firmly put her foot into her mouth.  Let me clarify.  Ms. Roy has the uncanny ability of attracting controversy out of nowhere.  First of all she sat in a dharna fighting against Capital Punishment at a time when Afzal Guru who had master minded the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament had been sentenced to death.  Surely he was not the first person to be sentenced to death but Ms. Roy preferred to let her views on crime and punishment known at this awkward time.  Then of course she went to Kashmir and said something to the effect of Jammu and Kashmir never being an integral part of India.  

This time too Arundhathi Roy lost no time in coming to the forefront with her unorthodox views and this time it is a greater tragedy.  I say that because when I read the article that she wrote in the Hindu dated 22-8-2011 I thought she made great sense when she attacked Hazare (the freshly minted Saint as she called him) and his methods.  Then she lapsed into her old ways.  She started attacking the support base of Hazare's movement.  She talked at length about how people who were joining his protests were employing means that were very similar to the ones employed during the stir against reservations.  She then wanted to know why it is that only certain kinds of issues get support while others don't and wanted to know why the same enthusiasm is not shown to issues of tribal people and the loss of their livelihoods.  I think the point that she made here should be taken well and I must say that what she said is akin to my belief that this movement has suddenly found support of the normally apathetic middle class because in some way they believe that it is their money that the politicians were siphoning of.  However my disagreement with her is that her mention of means that resembled anti-reservation movements could have been avoided for that takes the focus away from the issue on hand to reservations and who is in the right and wrong about reservations.  It becomes a diversion that takes away any serious debate about the rightness or wrongness of Hazare's team's action.  She also attacked Kabir - the organization fronted by Arvind Kejriwal and claimed that it was being funded by Coca Cola and some other multinationals.  She also mentioned Hazare's RSS/BJP links and his admiration of Narendra Modi and by extension the pogrom that the man had unleashed in Gujarat in 2001-2002.  Then she mentioned that in Ralegan Siddhi the native place of Hazare there is a practicing of caste system and a lack of a Gram Sabha.  By doing this she sounded like Manish Tiwari the Congress spokesman who made the exact same allegations. That is why I said she put her foot in her mouth by sounding like she was using the same methods of diversion that the Government was trying to use.  You could not be faulted if you thought she was doing this on behalf of the UPA and the Congress.

Today I read in the Hindu (23-8-2011) a piece written by Prof. Sukhdeo Thorat the former Chairman of the University Grants Commission and present Professor in the Centre for Studies in Regional Development at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  He too attacked Hazare from a perspective given by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar where he quoted the great man as having said that Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience had to be given up in an independent India which was having its own constitution and therefore not unjust laws of another country.  I wholeheartedly agree with that.  There is no need for Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience when you are looking at issues being generated in your own country where the rule of law is to be supreme.  The sad thing however, is that the good Professor Thorat used this opportunity to take pot shots at Gandhi and his methods and how they have ultimately undermined the welfare of Dalits in India due to their not having separate electorates, a suggestion of Dr. Ambedkar over which Gandhi disagreed and fasted.  He also dissected the concept of "Bhakti" and talked of it as hero worship (which is an unfortunate and terrible translation of that term) and used this yet again to take swipes at Hazare and Gandhi. He was cautioning that Ambedkar had said that hero worship is bad.  (One question to him which is an aside; Is Dr. Ambedkar not worshipped in India?).  Now all of these maybe valid questions to debate about but to put out all these at this time would only take away the focus from the issue on hand.  Both Ms. Roy and Prof. Thorat raised valid points and in the case of the latter even raised a point about constitutionality of actions and these to me were diluted in other points which seemed to take the focus away from what they were saying.

This whole thing was very much akin to what I had seen on TV.  The day Hazare was arrested NDTV was doing the usual discussions where the whole thing boiled down to a slanging match.  Sanjay Nirupam of the Congress and Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP.  While Sanjay Nirupam was struggling to defend the government and its actions, Rudy tried to score some cheap brownie points by saying that the UPA Government allowed a hunger strike by the Hurriyat groups in Delhi.  One Nivedita Rao who was apparently brought in as a legal expert since she was a Delhi High Court lawyer joined the slanging by dragging Yedyurappa into it.  In doing so she looked like she had been planted there by the government.  Even if she was planted there, there were enough legal points to be discussed without having to fall into this useless talk.  That seems to our problem.  We do not focus on the issue at hand.  We need to talk about everything under the sun including our pet peeves when we would do rather well to only focus on a certain issue.  When I look at people who are called "intellectuals" and they do this global tourism (a phrase often used by my teacher Prof. Harshe to describe the lack of intellectual discipline) I am tempted to share Noam Chomsky's scathing dislike for people who like to think of themselves thus.  The biggest irony in India right now is to be seen in the actions of 26 MLAs (24 from the Congress and 2 from the Telugu Desam Party) who have resigned in support of YS Jaganmohan Reddy who is being prosecuted for corruption and against the CBI mentioning his father the late Dr. YS Rajashekhar Reddy as an accessory to and facilitator of his son's corruption.  On the one side there is an anti-corruption "movement" happening and on the other side there is a pro-corruption attitude from elected representatives of the people.  But again, stranger things are known to have happened.

P.S: Written in great hurry and no time to proof read so please excuse the errors.

Anna Hazare vs the Govt of India: A story that is going all wrong

This is probably one of the most difficult posts that I am attempting to make.  To most that would seem ridiculous.  What is the difficulty all about?  The Government of India is being Fascist and denying the people the right to protest.  So where is the difficulty? Well I wish the issue was as simple as that, but the truth is that it isn't. One clarification before I proceed further.  I am NOT a supporter of what the Government and the Congress Party are doing.  Now that this particular thing is out of the way let me just get on with it.  Those of you who are familiar with my blog I have always argued that Team Hazare does not constitute Civil Society.  I will not repeat that here except for one crucial point which may figure further in the post.  Hazare and his team have not taken into consideration or consultation a really wide cross section of the people to qualify to be called the torch bearers of Indian society.  It has been an esoteric group of less than ten people who have drafted the Jan Lokpal Bill and the main instruments of the drafting have been Shanthi Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan and I am not fully convinced of their intentions. The same goes for Ramdev who sidles with this group for his own sake.  While Arvind Kejriwal may have been a successful activist who was involved in the movement that led to the passage of the Right to Information Act, we all know that it has already been rendered toothless.  As an aside let me tell you that Pakistan passed the Right to Information Act, before India did and that too during the regime of Parvez Musharaf.  

My reference to the Right to Information Act is to point out that movements can demand something, find it and then see it lose its teeth over a period of time.  In one of my earlier posts I had written that why are we assuming that the Lokpal will be immune to things like corruption.  Is it that all other offices have been created with the intention of ultimately making them corrupt?  The Lokpal is an ombudsman and offices of ombudsman in different spheres of public activity.  Banking, insurance claims, content of newspapers have all got ombudsmen overseeing their functioning.  But very rarely does anyone know what can be an issue that can be taken to an ombudsman and how to go about doing it.  There are two issues that are facilitating corruption in India. First is the nature of the politics of the country and the second is nature of the bureaucracy.  This may seem like an irrelevant interlude in my discussion of the Lokpal, but the fact is that they are most crucial to understanding why I say that movements see changes that become impotent very soon.

First let us deal with nature of politics.  The first thing that we must understand is that all Indian politics is now money and muscle.  The latter facilitates the acquisition of the former.  How many people who have neither can make any impact on Indian politics?  Politicians need henchmen who will execute things for them.  The execution can sometimes be literal as it happened yesterday in the case of lady Right to Information activist in Bhopal when she was on her way to protest against corruption. There are threats of literal execution if someone becomes a thorn in someone else's flesh.  The Lok Satta Party in Andhra Pradesh which was launched with fanfare in Andhra Pradesh as a credible alternative to the Congress and Telugu Desam Party has sunk without a trace except for its high profile chief Dr. Jaiprakash Narayan who makes noises every once in a while.  He too gets some media attention due to his having derived some clout and identity of having been an IAS officer before he resigned and took a plunge into politics.

And that brings me to the bureaucracy.  Red tape perhaps is an understatement.  Several times in my life I have seen people not helping someone even when they have no work to do.  The Indian psyche is strange.  People do not help others when they can and that is most evident in the bureaucracy.  People in the bureaucracy have a different understanding of the expression public servant.  It is to be understood normally as a government functionary who serves the people.  In India though a public servant is one who is served by the public.  People join the bureaucracy with the intention of wielding power and minting money.  All offices of government are misused for that purpose.  This bureaucracy is the interface between the people and the government.  The interface and the end are out of the reach of people.  What makes politicians, bureaucrats and film stars one class of people is the fact that they are there because of the people but yet are inaccessible to those very people.  So what can you expect from a system that is constructed solidly on moral corruption.  Can one fight economic corruption when the whole system and its fabric is tainted by moral corruption.

That is why I am sceptical of Hazare and his team's efforts.  Why are they targetting only economic corruption?  Why are they not trying to cleanse politics first?  Why are they not launching grass root level movements and target panchayat and district level officials and politicians?  It is true what the Prime Minister said about not having a magic wand to cleanse the system at one ago.  But why is the government behaving like a fascist one by denying Hazare the right to protest?  In fact, the government by arresting Hazare made him a hero and suddenly elevated his status.  The means adopted fall in line with what I have said here.  Intimidation and threats.  First they tried to say that the man was corrupt himself.  Then they used police force. There must be better ways of dealing with a man who is being unreasonable and stubborn.   This has now become a battle between two parties both of which claim to represent people, while in reality people are just bystanders.  Even when members of Team Hazare visit various parts of the country, they behave like superstars.  Therefore I am not convinced of them or their intent.  But I am convinced about the government.  It is obviously senseless.  Yesterday's events have proved that much.  That it is also shielding corruption is perhaps the world's worst kept secret.  Here there is no denying its transparency.  Otherwise how else will one explain Kapil Sibal's blatant statement of zero sum situation when the 2G scam broke out in the country?  My only certain conclusion is this: the country will not change until and unless there is a reform more fundamental than the one that is being suggested by Team Hazare.  Irrespective of what happens to the Hazare movement, you can be sure that the fruits of that will be available only to other politicians and their support structure. The common people will see and feel no difference, for in their lives there will be none.

P.S.  I wrote this in a bit of a rush.  I have also not proof read it.  Please excuse all the errors that you encounter, except the sensical ones.  Thank you.

Time to renew some pledges and discard feelings of antipathy to fellow countrymen

It is India's 64th Independence Day today and I take this opportunity to wish all Indians living in India or abroad a very happy Independence Day.  While you celebrate, also look back over your shoulder and see what the last 100+ years have been for India.  Please see the sacrifices upon which the nation and the country have been built. Please pay homage to those martyrs who gave up their lives so that we their progeny can leave in freedom, peace and happiness.  Please realize the importance of freedom and peace that we as people of this country enjoy and don't take them for granted.  These were not always available to the people of this great nation.  I know I am sounding pontifical but there is a reason behind that.

When I was a student of B.A at the Nizam College in the 1980s, one of the subject I studied was English Literature.  In those days the first year of B.A had poetry as the paper to be studied and one of the poems that we were supposed to study was "Lines written a few miles above the Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth.  I am not quoting this to get into an argument of the quality of Wordsworth's writing but to illustrate a poignant point he made in this poem.  We have always been taught that William Wordsworth was Romantic who wrote poems about nature.  It took me many years to realize the true import of the word Romanticism and the meanings that it threw up.  It was then that I understood what exactly the great poet meant when he wrote "behind all this beauty, I can hear the still sad music of humanity".  Brilliant man this Wordsworth.  He describes the beauty of nature as seen from a few miles over the Tintern Abbey, but tells us that behind the beauty is a sadness.

Today when I look at my beloved country I have very similar feeling.  It is undoubtedly a great country with an enviable past, a country that gave a form of mathematics that defies imagination; I see a country that saw many great cultures flourish due to its openness and ability to embrace anything and everything.  The other day I read a piece written by an Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court in the Hindu.  Please treat the other day as a Hyderabadi would.  It could be anything from the day before yesterday to the year before last.  This must have been some months ago.  I apologize for not remembering the name of the said person but he was someone from the not so recent past as far as Chief Justices of the Indian Supreme Court go. After his retirement this man had taken it upon himself to research deeply into India's past and he came up with the conclusion that India centuries ago was what America is today.  I humbly request you to not jump to the conclusion that I am arguing that India is better than America since it was many centuries ago what the latter is today. This conclusion is simply this.  America is today home to so many people of different cultural backgrounds and is still the destination of many people the world over, Indians included (I do not think the downgrading of America's creditworthiness by Standard and Poor will change the aspirations of going and living there, especially for Indians and people from Andhra Pradesh).  What the writer was saying is that people from all over the world came to India and made it their home and even more remarkably they forgot their original homes.  The Parsis in India and the Muslims are a prime example of this.

Now look at the identity called Indian.  When someone says I am Indian we don't know what his/her religion is straightaway, we do not know what language is her/his mother tongue, we do not know which region of the country she/he belong to.  What we know is that this person is Indian even if she/he speaks a language, or practices a religion which is different from what many others do. That is truly the most remarkable thing about India and being Indian.  I know some cynics will chip in with an argument that you can make out a person's region, language and religion on the basis of their features and their attire.  That maybe true in some instances but not in all.  Take me for example. I am today a Telugu speaking Indian from Hyderabad.  Yet at one time the family on my father's side were Kannada speaking people who came to the Warangal region more than a century ago and today very few people in my extended family speak Kannada.  My mother's family were originally Kannada speaking people who later became Marathi speaking people and finally Telugu speaking people. When people look at my dad, they say they cannot make out which region he is from or what his native tongue is.  When people look at me they see a Punjabi and are usually shocked to learn that I am a Telugu.  My wife is half Bengali (father) and half British (mother).  When people look at her they think that she is Malayalee, some have thought that she is Muslim, others just say she does not look like anyone in particular.  But when her parentage is revealed people are surprised; they say she does not look either like a Bengali or like a Britisher.  The point is while some can be identified as what they are, others cannot be.  In either case the identity which is primary is Indian.

Time for me to tell you why I feel like Wordsworth did when he wrote the poem Tintern Abbey. Just as he heard the sad music of humanity behind all the natural beauty that he was seeing, I too hear a sad music when I see what my country is today.  The beauty, grandeur and openness are all there but there is that sad music too.  Perhaps if we had heeded what the great Mahatma Gandhi said, this country would have been a better place.  India lives in its villages, said the great man.  He wanted Indians to lead a life of simplicity, austerity so that everyone could share everything.  He called that Trusteeship.  After the attainment of Independence we killed the great man and along with him his ideals and wisdom.  The same man that was venerated the world over is now seen as a joke by his own country people.  The very people who were recipients of his services today disown him.  We killed him and his legacy.  With the vanishing of the great freedom fighting generation, we have seen the waning of the great emotions and philosophy that were espoused by that generation.

That generation wanted us to be united and live in freedom, peace and prosperity.  But what do we do today? We divide ourselves on every possible lines. North vs South, East vs West, Hindi vs Non Hindi, Hindu vs Muslim, Aryan vs Dravidian, Fair skin vs Dark skin, Upper Caste vs Lower Caste, Sub caste vs Sub caste, and any other thing that one can think of.  We are nation that is increasingly seeing cracks and schisms appearing among us.  Some of them have already become fragments.  Why is this happening?  This has everything to do with our politicians.  Wily, greedy and with the motive to serve themselves at any cost they have and continue to play with the emotions of the people.  In one of my previous posts I have said that the British probably did not divide us.  We were divided already, they just exploited the divisions. During the freedom movement great people like the Mahatma bridged the divides but once the event was over we are lapsing back to our divisive ways.  

The caste system in India is one of the main reasons behind why the nation is always so ready to divide itself.  The caste system is not a product of the ancient order that the cosmology of many thousands of years ago.  It is the chicanery of Brahmins who perpetuated this for purposes of power.  Gandhi was right when he said what "Sanatana Dharma" stood for was different from what he called "Brahminical Religion".  From this schism emanate every other schisms.  Caste system has now found its way into Sikhism, Islam and Christianity.  Our politicians have exploited these divisions to their advantages.  They have also carefully created and are still creating newer schisms to ensure that they remain relevant.  Political leadership now strategises politics as companies would markets. The other very important thing is the uneven distribution of primary social goods (I have borrowed that phrase from John Rawls).  Primary social goods are access to good and quality education, nutritious food, a comfortable and clean environment and hygiene.  These are not properly distributed leading to the dis-empowering of entire communities.  India today does not have the problem of unemployment.  It has the problem of unemployability.  There are legions of people who are armed with useless degrees. Useless, because while the student has been given a degree she/he has been taught nothing.  The academic mafiosi have for years concealed their incompetence by routinely passing students who did not deserve to pass. India has jobs and people looking for jobs but not having the competencies that those jobs require.  We are creating paradoxes such as these.  

The middle classes are quite happy and contented to ape the West.  Reality for them is the number of outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds in their city, the number of pubs that are there for spending their disposable incomes, the number of stores that sell Levis, Lee and Wrangler jeans, and the number of posh hotels like Westin, Novotel and the Marriot.  Some friends have created their own index of development. A city's development and haute culture are to be measured in terms of the number of women who are willing to expose their skin.  The Indian middle class has been irresponsible.  It has forgotten to see the number of people who are going without education, nutrition and hygienic environment.  We are creating enclaves of prosperity that are surrounded by slums caught in abject poverty.  This if not remedied through appropriate measures will in conjunction with the schisms originally created by Brahminical Religion will bring down the nation.  It is for the middle classes and the rich to right the wrongs.  It is time to share the primary social goods and lend a helping him to those who need it.  It is time to remember what Gandhi said. There is enough in this world for every man's need but not for every man's greed.  Let us understand the divisive strategies of our politicians and discard them, for they build feeling of antipathy towards our own countrymen. Let us pledge to throw out that teacher who is uneducated, throw out the corrupt and dirty politician, throw out the casteist, throw out all those who foment religious intolerance and hatred; let us forge a nation yet again built on equality, solidarity, love, compassion and humanity. Jai Hind.  

P.S:  Have not proof read.  Please excuse errors of syntax, semantics and spelling.  They are inadvertent. 

Of games of war and the loss of innocent lives

Surprising as it may seem, I usually have some idea of where I am going with my blog posts.  I must say that today I have no clue how or where this post of mine would end.  But I know what has brought it on.  Today The Hindu carried a story, a very poignant one.  It involves an email sent by an ex Pakistan Air Force officer by the name of Qais M Hussain to the Farida Singh the daughter of Jahangir Engineer whose airplane that the Pakistani officer shot down during the 1965 war fought between India and Pakistan.  The email tells the story of how Mr. Qais was forced by his superiors to shoot down the unarmed 5 seater plane being flown by Jahangir Engineer, that had strayed into the Rann of Kutch on the Pakistan side.  Mr. Qais tells the story of how he was forced to shoot the said plane despite Mr. Engineer flapping the wings of his aircraft indicating that he was asking for mercy.  Though Mr. Qais carried out the orders given to him, he could not live peacefully with what had happened.  For years he tried to contact the families of the people who had lost their lives due to the unarmed aircraft being shot down.  Due to the efforts from officers on the Indian and the Pakistani side Mr. Qais Hussain was finally able to track down the family of Mr. Jahangir Engineer.  Mr. Engineer's wife had passed away in the interregnum between the incident and now and his elder daughter who is apparently blind lives in the USA.  The other daughter Mrs. Farida had married a pilot who went by the name of Mr. Singh.  Mr. Qais Hussain wrote this email explaining what had actually transpired and how sorry he was about it.  Needless to say this was an act of great moral courage on Mr. Qais' part.

Equally poignant or perhaps more is the reply written by Mrs. Farida Singh.  She said "we are but pawns in this game of war" and accepted with great grace and dignity the apology offered by Mr. Qais.  But what really caught my attention was the last line of her reply where she said "we were after all at one time one nation".  This exchange got me thinking about something that a nephew of mine who served in the Indian Army once told me.  He was posted at the border of India and Pakistan somewhere in Kashmir and there was a small stream flowing between two small hills and on either side of the flowing stream on each of the hills were the Indian and Pakistani camps.  The source of water for both sides was the flowing stream.  Therefore there was an understanding that at a certain given time of the day, both sides would come out with white flags and make their way to the stream to fill up whatever whatever they required.  This was a time when there was an exchange of pleasantries and the soldiers addressed each other as "Saathi" (friend).  My nephew told me that one day he was told by a Pakistani soldier that the two sides were like a family since they had only each other for company.  After the exchange of such talk, both sides would go back to their respective stations and raise a red flag and commence hostilities immediately.  My nephew kept saying that apart from the usual jingoism between the armed forces on both sides, there was no real understanding about the pointless shelling and infiltration.

I once again draw your attention to what Mrs. Farida Singh wrote in her reply to Mr. Qais Hussain when she alludes to the fact that both sides were one at a time in the not so distant past.  I have believed in that myself. When I once made a post about how Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims had more in common with each other than they had with Saudi Arabia or Indonesia one friend said that that may have been the case at the time of partition but now there is nothing in common.  When I once argued that people irrespective of religion spoke Punjabi in some parts of Pakistan and India and Bengali in West Bengal and Bangladesh another friend drew my attention to the difference in dialects (he specifically cited Mirpuri). Political haranguing and rabble rousing on both sides have made cultures different but there was a time when all people across the Western side and the Eastern side of India lived together, peacefully.  Acts of war were perpetrated by the various kings and sultans who ruled the land.  But most people crave peace, not war.  Anyone who disagrees with this argument stand to hover dangerously close to endorsing the idea that Hitler and Mussolini represented the true desires of their people and therefore all Germans and Italians were Nazis and Fascists.

Political leaderships when taken in totality the world over have done more harm than good to the world.  They have conquered, plundered and driven wedges between people all over the world.  The politician thrives in that space between two human beings by simply first converting that space into a difference and then building a wall so that the more gentle and civic humanity that is their in every human being is rendered impotent and aggression legitimated.  Hardliners who call themselves realists have successfully brainwashed the world into believing that we should all divide ourselves on any basis that we can.  Colour of skin, eyes, hair, and language.  In dividing ourselves we have also divided lands and always remain ready to fight each other.  The sad thing is that it is the army that bears the brunt of this.  So I remember this wonderful line from the song Us and Them by Pink Floyd whose lyrics were written by Roger Waters.  "Forward he cried, from the rear, and the front ranks died, the Generals sat and the lines on the map moved from side to side".  It is because that people like Roger Waters, John Lennon and the great and peerless Mahatma Gandhi who have dared to challenge the realist and dared to dream of a benign world order that there is still some sanity left in this world. Take such people away, and there are many of them, the dreams will die and along with them humanity and the world itself.

P.S: Not proof read.  Please bear with me.  Thank you.