Education Reform - What can be done - II

In my previous post I have suggested that all education be provided by the State completely free of cost. I also said that there should be no private agencies involved in the provision of education. I have already said that the existing system of education in India is only enabling some while others are simply ignored and that the real reason behind that is the cost that is supposed to be borne for an access to good quality education. Those going to public schools such as the Hyderabad Public School or the Delhi Public School have a snob value. I still recall when a cousin of mine told his father that not everyone could go to a public school (he meant the Hyderabad Public School) when his father said that he did not see any great necessity for such a school. Added to this snootiness is a new variety coming from those who go to the various schools that are based in the Waldorf system of education. These schools are grounded in the idea that examinations restrict the thinking potential of the child and therefore provide an ambiance for them to explore their full potential. In doing so they charge hefty fees and inculcate an elitism which is detrimental to society for the process of differently enabling people is continued by this. They also do not have a system of uniform clothes for children leading to huge awareness of expensive and fashionable brands among even primary school children. The cars in which they are transported to school also become another marker of the social status of the child and the family. Then there are the International Schools resplendent with air-conditioned classes and air-conditioned buses to transport students to school from residence and back.

At the other end of the spectrum is the humble government school with no teachers, blackboards, adequate class rooms. No teaching of any sort happens here. No one complains about the state of affairs here since the intake of students is exclusively from the very poor sections of society. Most (if not all) government schools offer education only in vernacular media ensuring that what their students learn (if at all they learn anything) is hopeless useless right at inception. It is therefore a matter of little wonder that most government school students drop out and go on to pursue menial jobs and in the process lose their childhood. In between somewhere are the most numerous schools that have unquestioningly reposed their faith in the system of examinations. These schools function steadfastly with the belief that a successful student is one who has mastered the art of obtaining high scores in an examination. In these schools there is very little or actually no teaching. Syllabi are completed by the month of November and from then on students are bombarded with one examination after another till such time that they go to the final examination. Even in the time before the month of November these schools examine students on a weekly basis. The training for examinations is also usually spurious. Concepts are not taught and thinking is never encouraged. Questioning is usually met with punishments of varied types and it students are made to mug answers to question. Some of these schools have started calling themselves corporate schools.

I have for years wondered what a corporate school is and how it is different from a regular school until somebody told me that corporate schools do not shy away from a profit motive and that some of them are actually registered as private limited firms. These schools have their origins in Coastal Andhra (from Vijayawada, Guntur, Nellore and some from Vishakhapatnam as well) and have gradually spread to different parts of Andhra Pradesh. Most of them have ambitions of having a pan-Indian footprint. Most of these function from business complexes and encourage students to do nothing but mug answers to questions. They usually start working from six or seven in the morning and go on till seven in the evening after which the student is expected to go home and do homework and comeback early in the morning on the next day. Some of these schools claim to give orientation to students to crack entrance examinations for admission into the IITs from class six!!!There are schools doing similar things to students who aspire to become medical practitioners. I have wondered many a time as to how a sixth class student can aspire to become an engineer or a doctor. Obviously these schools are literally cashing in on the aspirations that parents have for their children and parents are quite happy to promote this nonsensical system of education for the satisfaction of their vanities. By making students study from morning to night and denying them of any recreation or sports both of which are essential for a healthy mind and body.

Around these schools and concepts of education is an ancillary educational industry. Tutorial colleges, residential colleges and private entrepreneurial individuals, all offering to build the students confidence in taking admission tests and examinations. This economy runs into thousands of crores and these vested interests are so deeply buried that it is now proving to be impossible to oust them. A case in point is the EAMCET examination conducted in Andhra Pradesh. While it serves a purpose for the medical part it serves no purpose for the engineering part. Every year anywhere between 15,000-20,000 seats of engineering go unfilled. Yet the exam is held. Why? Regional interests are at the apex of things. The ranks obtained in the entrance are used to decide which student belonging to which region (Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana) will be allotted which college. What is to be noted here is that most of these colleges are run by politicians and none of them have any faculty worth talking about. So it is in the interests of these colleges to have this system of entrance, counselling to fill seats since it is this process that ensures that all engineering colleges have some intake. The coaching centres make the best of this because if a student gets a higher rank the better are his/her prospects of getting a seat in a college in the hometown.

In all this it is very clear that two things are happening. The first is that the education system is more of an industry with profit as its primary goal. The second is that in all this any education (I judiciously avoid using the term meaningful here) is expensive and consequently out of the reach of the poor. So while there are all kinds of provisos for the education and empowerment of all sections of society (including the historically dis-empowered and neglected and abused), in reality education is still a privilege and a prerogative of the upper echelons of society who will send their children to other countries while doing their best to downgrade whatever is here. Therefore I suggest that education without a profit motive must be provided free of cost by the State. At the end of the previous post I said that there are problems with that too, but they can be surmounted. In the meanwhile I was drawn into this rant and so I shall postpone the solution to another post. Please bear with me.

Education Reform - What can be done

Much as this blog of mine is about the separate Telangana agitation, it has also been one about the collapse of the education system in India in general and in Andhra Pradesh in particular. Even in my previous post I have written about the dismal state in which most universities, including the Osmania University find themselves in. The question of good education becomes all the more sharp when one sees it as the main tool of empowerment of people. In fact, I have even claimed that quality education should be provided free of cost to all people of the country. Most of the time our politicians are quite happy to promise a number of things free; but education has never been one of those promises except in one instance. Dr. Y. S. Rajashekhar Reddy, the late Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, promised free education to all belonging to the OBC, SC and ST sections in the 2009 election campaign. I was very happy seeing this but ultimately I was aghast when I found that the promise was made without adequately understanding the financial implications of such a promise. What ultimately came out in the form of realization of this promise turned out to be quite bad strategy. Free education mean 'free reimbursement'of students belonging to the afore mentioned category. And therein lies a huge problem.

We are aware that the a great percentage of education provider fall in the private sector. Except perhaps for the missionary schools that came into being as a social service, all other educational institutions are mainly profit making bodies. I have seen that most businessman find it easy to shift to the running of education institutions after a point because they have a way of sustaining themselves after they have existed for a few years, as against other businesses that need constant and intense attention in order to be profitable. The long and short of this is that ultimately in India, education is a business. In this scenario we must understand that fees collected from the students apart from other forms aid received from various sources becomes the generator of profits. Fee structures therefore are usually quite high in private institutions. Many professional colleges offering engineering, medicine and management education charge very high fees. Various reasons are cited for that; cost of labs, good faculty and the possibilities of high salaries for students after they have completed their education (in India and especially in Andhra Pradesh graduates from these courses also command very high dowries).

In this scenario it is meaningless for the government to reimburse the fees of students. It is so because of the fact, that is not the government's responsibility to ensure that private educational institutions remain profitable. Due to the government committing itself to this scheme it has to pay the said fees to the colleges but does not have the resource to generate the money since it is also subsidizing various schemes such as free power, Rupees Two per kilogram of rice etc. This has thrown the whole education system into a turmoil. The colleges are not happy because they are not getting the money they want. Since the government has directed a certain amount of funds to these institutions it has not been able to meet its traditional commitments to the institutions that it is supposed to fund; universities. With university teachers claiming that they need an increase in their salaries as per the UGC norms most of the funds that are available are being diverted to the payment of salaries. This means that there is little scope for any developmental activity since whatever monies are left are being used for the payment of mess bills, electricity bills etc.

Does this mean that I am arguing against the provision of free education? Au contraire I am very much for free education and vociferously at that. But any scheme before it is implemented will have to be well thought out and all the expenditure that is likely to incurred should be anticipated and a sufficient fund set aside to meet that expenditure. Here I would like to propose that all education from the elementary level to the higher education level should be purely run by the State just as the Universities are being run. There should be no private participation because then the profit motive which pushes up the costs can be totally eliminated. The real reason for this demand of mine is that today there is no equal quality or equality in education. The richer sections of society have access to the expensive and good schools in the urban areas whereas the poor in the rural and the urban areas have either no education at all or have access to pathetic schools which do anything but provide regular education. One cannot expect to have equality of citizens when they are differently enabled or some cases not enabled at all by the education system. I understand that this solution throws out its own set of problems, but there can always be means of overcoming them. I shall talk about those in the next post.

Osmania University - What is the future?

At the beginning of this piece let me say one thing. I am always indebted and will remain indebted to Osmania University, which is not only my place of work, but also my alma mater. My debt is derived out of the fact that it is the one institution that has given my employment as a teacher, a position that I quite badly wanted. My work experience, like almost anybody else's in any field, has been a mixed bag. I have had the opportunity to teach some really interested and sincere students and some indifferent ones. However, the last couple of years have been more upbeat than at any other time. There are many reasons for that. One of them is that I had an opportunity to serve the university in its attempt to generate tie ups with other well known academic institutions of the country and also to participate in the preparation of proposals when the university was looking for higher levels of funding based on its activities. More than all this what gave a great deal of pleasure was my teaching experience which involved not just the local students but foreign ones as well.

The last few years have seen a quantum increase in the number of foreign students in Osmania University. Even though Osmania University is seen as a local university, and it is, catering mainly to the students of the region of Telangana, it has always looked and has been different from other local/regional universities, such as Andhra University (the other big university in the State of Andhra Pradesh), Kakatiya University, Sri Venkateswara University etc. The reason is simple. Its location. It being located in Hyderabad has made a huge difference to what it has been. Hyderabad itself is a cosmopolitan city and this feature of Hyderabad's has found itself even in the Osmania University, which ultimately became a microcosm of Hyderabad, which again was a microcosm of India. It has been a premier institution of higher learning and even today many of its alumni can be found in different parts of the world in different capacities such as university professors, engineers and even CEOs of global corporations. This had given Osmania University a great reputation and I could see it myself, when I had applied for my PhD in universities in the UK. I remember getting letters from Oxford (this was in the mid 1990's) and Cambridge which categorically stated that in order to be eligible for admission there one had to come from good universities in India such as the Central Universities or from Osmania University, Calcutta University or Madras University, in that exact order. It is sad that the university does not enjoy that status anymore. There are reasons for that.

First of all with the establishment of the University of Hyderabad (a Central University) most of the urban students of Hyderabad started seeking admission in that university. What attracted people to that university was the fact that it had a more contemporary curriculum and a more rigorous academic schedule which was rarely ever disrupted. The Osmania University on the other hand has always been more political and has had its academics disturbed for various reasons a couple of times. But the more important factor was the recruitment of bad teachers in the aftermath of the first separate Telangana agitation. The politics of patronage to certain sections that one found in the politics of the state found themselves mirrored in the recruitment of faculty members in the Osmania University. I have talked about this in previous posts where I have said faculty positions were brazenly given to undeserving people without the slightest of hesitation. Over a period of time the faculty went from bad to worse. A parallel development has been the opening up of more specialized universities for engineering, agriculture and even other central universities such as the English and Foreign Languages University and the Maulana Abul Kalaam National Urdu University. This meant that more of the urban students went to these universities or simply to other universities in the country such as the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and the University of Delhi. This slowly reduced Osmania to taking in students only from the rural areas of the Telangana region, which is not a bad thing at all. They too are students and need education and opportunity to do well in life.

But one thing went very wrong. The incompetent among the teaching faculty used the lack of acquaintance with English among the rural students as an excuse to dilute curricula and teaching. A lot of rubbish was justified in the name of rural students and their inability to cope with difficult things. And most of these teachers have never been outside of Osmania University so they did not have a wide view of the world. At a juncture like this the arrival of foreign students meant a good thing. For one there was pressure on the teachers to brush up their knowledge and teaching skills, while providing a window to different parts of the world and other cultures. A foreign student told me that some students had asked him if they speak Hindi in Tajikistan. He was not offended, but only explained what their language was (Persian) and also other aspects of their culture. Foreign students have also been celebrating their national days such as Independence days and their festivals giving everybody an insight into their cultures. Therefore, the last few years have been more vibrant than ever in the recent past and this has benefitted not only the Indian student but also teachers such as me. Now with the agitation and with politicians yet again interfering in academics, I am worried. If an academic year is disrupted or lost, I foresee a situation where foreign students (at least the good ones) not choosing to come to Osmania University. Today the university attracts students from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazhakstan, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Japan, Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania among many other countries. If these students go to other universities instead of Osmania, it will be a great loss for the students and teachers since we all lose these windows which allow us to look into the other parts of the world. The university will survive, no doubt about that, but I would think it would be great if it thrives than merely surviving. I have my fingers crossed. Hopefully, sense will prevail and the good process of the last few years will continue. Amen to that.

Deliberative politics - Hurdles aplenty, so what is the way forward?

"If deliberative/discursive democratic politics are to be feasible, then two conditions would have to hold: (i) those who have more need to recognise that they would have to take less, and give up a significant part of their "usurped" (whether justified by Lockean theories, bastardised Lockean theories or any other metric/ism/theory). Modern predatory capitalism is based on a patent falsehood: that environmental spoilage is neither irreversible, nor threatening to survival. The hubris is that technological progress is definitive and will forestall environmental disasters, thereby enabling ever increasing consumption of nature, and eventually all or everybody would get a suitable slice of the pie (not necessarily equal). Remove the assumption of inevitability of technological progress, and the ability to forestall environmental disaster, and one would be left with inevitability of redistribution. Unless those with much are willing to come to the table with a perceptible commitment to some measure of equalisation, the second condition will not be forthcoming. (ii) the second condition is that those with less have to believe that they will, within foreseeable future get more than what they have. Now one can say that the discussion has to veer away from "consumption", and to some spiritual plane. That would be possible if and only if the first condition holds. Otherwise, it would be a lot of hand wringing on those proposing deliberations (and I don't mean you Satish - but in general). The last three decades of "I, Me, Mine" has substantially torn apart a lot of social ties, and destroyed the potential for discursive politics". - Pramod

I hope my friend Pramod doesn't mind my putting the above passage here. There has been a conversation between him and me after I advertised my previous post on Facebook. The conversation took place on Facebook itself, with a few people chipping in their views as well. I thought I should put this part here on the blog because here I thought was a very important point being made, one that could not be ignored and had to be answered (I am not patronizing Pramod here). What I have put above is only a part of a much longer post that Pramod had made and there were a couple of posts before this as well. ( If any of you is interested in the entire conversation please see it on my wall at www.facebook.com/avsatishchandra). Below this paragraph is my response to Pramod (and it seems as if the response is quite weak). But I hope to build on that response further and hope to make it a little stronger. I claim no ability to surmount all problems since I am only just human, albeit a very large one. But I can assure you that in matters such as these size just doesn't matter.

"Pramod, I would say we have started deliberating on what is wrong with our politics. I take that as a start. More people and especially the leaders do the same, then we may have a beginning of a process. Perhaps I am unduly optimistic here. Talking of the usurpers, Rawls claims that the rich of the society should allow for a more equitable distribution of "primary social goods" (education being one of them) so that the traditionally backward can come into the sphere where they can compete with others and survive. That for him is justice and in more ways than one his whole writing is an extension of Lockean liberalism through Rousseau and Kant". - This response was from me.

The response as I said is quite weak. But as I also said it can be developed further. Before that development can take place, let me make one point very clear. That for anything to improve in Indian politics and society the one thing that is mandatory is that there should be more participation from people in the political process. The political process is not just the holding of placards or participating in demonstrations or rasta rokos or courting arrest. The political process is one that is around as all the time, like air, and we just have to take cognizance of it. The sad part is most of us refuse to do that because we are either so caught up in our individual selves that we do not care about the political process or some of us seem to think that it is somehow infra-dig to get involved in something as "crass" as politics. What has made politics so crass is precisely this unwillingness to consider the political process. It seems we either believe that the brave new world will take care of us or simply karma which will decide what is what. Any which one looks at it, an attitude that smacks of disinterest in our own well being. The political process can be changed by all of us talking about it or deliberating and making ourselves heard. Today the world is teeming with media, and democratic ones at that such as the World Wide Web. We seem to waste the power vested in us by the media by conversing about banalities such as "I am feeling sleepy" or "KFC sucks". In fact, a few days ago to my utter disbelief I saw that 9 people had marked "like" to my message on Facebook requesting all fans of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd to petition him on his Facebook page to bring the Wall Live to India and Hyderabad. Only one actually bothered to petition Waters. The rest simply liked. This attitude is what stands in the way of our starting deliberations upon our society and its requirements and how we can devise ways of meeting them ethically, morally and effectively. This lack of consciousness about ourselves and the unwillingness to develop it is pushing us into this depraved situation that we find ourselves vis a vis politics.

I have been saying that I am an optimist and in that very spirit of optimism I shall carry on with the point that I made to my friend Pramod's response. I had invoked John Rawls and Immanuel Kant towards the end. Let me elaborate on that a bit. Since the sixteenth century of the Common Era, when politics found themselves relatively free of religious control in the West, political philosophers have been trying to find ways of defining good and also finding ways to reaching it. All philosophers have believed that a realization of a common good could happen only through participation of people at different levels to different extents. However, in all that there are some outstanding examples. Jean Jacques Rousseau is one of them. Rousseau was perhaps the first philosopher to identify one big problem with the capitalist civilisation; the creation of poverty amidst plenty. Rousseau and later Kant, another striking example of a philosopher looking for solutions to find a good society, correctly identified that good could only be established through a will of the people. Rousseau called it the "General Will" (not a majority will) and this would be a Will that would include in itself the "General Good" of "ALL" and not just a majority. This point of his has evaded the comprehension of many and it was up to Kant to clarify it better. Kant made the "moral realm" transcendental, in the sense that it was not governed by temporal considerations such as time and space. The moral is the categorical imperative, on which there can be no discussion. It is up to every individual to follow the moral in all actions thereby establishing a Will that is Good in its intention since it aims for the benefit of all. The Good Will of Kant is very similar to the General Will of Rousseau. Capitalism however has successfully evaded all attempts at the establishment of a Good Will, since it is driven by one motive - profit. When profit is paramount, then everything else is secondary, including morality. That is the reason why Noam Chomsky bemoans the fact that liberal democracy has been hijacked by the agenda of capitalist corporations.

For a very long time liberal thinkers and philosophers never addressed themselves seriously to the moral aspects of private property. In my view the first liberal thinker to address that aspect is John Rawls. Rawls is very much a liberal, one who supports the idea of private property. But unlike the libertarians who believe that all private property is the extension of the most primary property which is natural ability, Rawls argued that where one was born in society played an important role in the opportunities that were available to an individual for self development. A person born in a poor ghetto is not in possession of the same kind and number of opportunities that a person born into a well to do family has access to. Therefore Rawls called upon the propertied to part with "primary social goods" so that they become available to the traditionally deprived. The access to primary social goods is what determines a person's ability to make good of opportunities. It is also that which makes the opportunities available in the first place. Top on the list of the primary social goods is education, which is true empowerment. I have argued time and again in various forums that it is high time we start demanding a meaningful free education from the government instead of meaningless sops that ultimately work more to the benefit of politicians than to common people. It is here that we have miserably failed. Even those who are holders of degrees in our country can hardly be called educated. They have no perspective on anything and this lack of perspective coupled with an insatiable urge to earn truckloads of money is a most dangerous trend. For most people in my generation people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela etc were heroes. The present generation of urban college going youngsters want to be the next Bill Gates, Azim Premji and Mukesh Ambani. Sadly they do not know what it takes to be any of these people also. This lack of enlightened perspective is what stands in the way of the realization of a good will or the parting of primary social goods by the propertied to enable the dis-empowered to make good on opportunities and empower themselves socially and politically.

Then the question is about the way out of this situation. What I have as a remedy is not something which is in the way of an easy solution. What needs to be done is that all people interested in changing the society for the better should at every possible opportunity open a dialogue that takes people into discussions about how one can change things. It should be a deliberative process in the sense that people should be encouraged to think and find solutions rather than telling them what to do. The second approach, used by activists of many causes is likely to produce results contrary to what is required and push people more into an aversion for all things political. The dialogue should be exactly that, as opposed to a monologue where one speaks and expects the others to listen. I would like to point out here that the idea of a "public sphere" enunciated by Jurgen Habermas, can become a reality. The public sphere comes into being, for Habermas only if there is a communication process that is "dialogical". Habermas says that two people or more can be involved in a conversation but it could still be "monological" if only person understands the logic of what he/she is saying and that is not transmitted to the others. A dialogical conversation on the other hand implies that people understand each other the way they want to be understood and this creates a public sphere where people intelligently deliberate amongst themselves about what is good for them and for their society. This ensures less dependence on politicians to come out with programmes of action and also puts them under pressure to deliver what people want. For this to happen, a process has to begin and that can only happen when people are optimistic and have the perseverance to pursue a "good" goal based in "good will". It is a time consuming process and daunting, but the history of humanity has demonstrated that when people want to change things they ultimately will. It took more than a hundred years for India to attain its independence. But the great thing is it did. That is why I am optimistic.

P.S; This is a long post, interrupted by several phone calls. I am too tired to proof read it now. Please excuse me for all the grammar and spelling errors. I shall proof read it later and rectify them. As always, thank you.

Liberal philosophy and liberal democracy - A problematic in India

It is not unusual for even teachers of political science to confuse liberal philosophy with liberal democracy. It is usually this confusion that leads to misplaced opinions on the nature of democracy and its operation. I would like to locate this particular discussion in the context of how democracy is perceived in India and the problems that are associated with that perception. In fact, I would like to premise my present argument in one of the aspects of the previous post and also another one where I talked about the political will of the people combined with economic necessity. One of the big problems that exists in India today is a concentration on all things political while neglecting or ignoring the economic aspect. In fact, the moment one invokes the economic category most are happy to brand that as Marxist or Communist thinking. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If one were to look at the philosophies of John Locke and Adam Smith, they have been associated with the beginnings of liberal philosophy. And in this philosophy it is strikingly evident that economy and economic well being is of paramount importance.

The work of Adam Smith usually gets categorized as economics. By doing so the philosophical and political dimensions of his work are ignored. In the case of John Locke exactly the opposite is done. He is primarily categorized as political thinker with smatterings of economic thinking reduced to his defence of private property. However, these days it is well known that both fit into the category of classical political economists. Now that the category is invoked let me use this opportunity to clarify that political economy is not to be associated with Marx and Marxism alone. Marx only took the perceptions of free market economy that were used by Smith and Locke, turned them upside down in order to construct the stateless community. The stateless community of Marx can be seen in substance as the same as the free market. Marx felt that from within the confines of liberal philosophy and liberal democracy the goal could not be reached. Therefore, he suggested the communist society as 'viable'alternative. But that is digressing from the question on hand. Liberal philosophy establishes an indelible link between private property and the well being of citizens. Its basis become even more obvious when it is seen in conjunction with the idea of the 'protestant ethic'as described by Max Weber. Weber opined that Protestantism in Christianity removed the intermediary which was the church in the process of identification of noble and valuable members of society. When faced with this situation, people looked to the proving of their ability and productivity through private property accumulation. So a person with large private property was a reference point for everyone else; a person who reached his status through sheer hard work and perseverance.

The conflation of the protestant ethic with liberal philosophy shows the direction that Western Society especially in the Anglo-phone parts of Europe and later the United States of America took. A turn in this direction led to the pursuit of private property and with that respect in society. John Locke believed that nature had created everyone equally; but there is a difference in the notion of equality. Locke believed that all human beings were equal to the extent that God had endowed all with rationality or reason. However, this does not mean that Locke felt that all human beings had rationality in equal amount. For him it is quite possible that some were more rational than others and those who were more rational performed better than others and that could be gaged from the amount of property that they had successfully amassed. Locke was using the metaphor of a race while saying this. It is well know that in a race everybody has an 'equality of beginning'but not necessarily equality at the end. Races are won and lost on the basis of ability. Those who can run faster, better and longer than others are likely to do well in the race whereas the others are not likely to. The Lockean twist here is that he is clearly specifying that in the process of equality the role of society ends with the provision of an equal start to all. The end of the race which leads to inequality is an "inequality of consequence". Those better equipped win because of their being better equipped and society has nothing to do with how 'nature'has enabled people differently. So inequality of beginning is unacceptable but the inequality of consequence which is seen at the end of the race is acceptable.

The notion of democracy that was proposed by Locke was fairly consistent with this philosophy. For Locke and people like Smith democracy never meant Universal Adult Franchise or Adult Suffrage. These are notions that have been added to democracy over a few centuries as a result of many people's struggles. For Locke and company, democracy or the right to decision making was to be the exclusive preserve and privilege of the propertied. This conception stemmed out of his idea that the propertied had demonstrated that they were rational and capable of taking care of themselves and hence could be empowered. The unpropertied had also demonstrated a lesser rationality by not amassing wealth and also had proved that they were incapable of taking care of themselves. If they were not capable of taking care of themselves, how could they be entrusted with the task of taking care of society? So these people were left out of the process of empowerment. This then is the Liberal Democracy that is consistent with Liberal Philosophy. However, with the passage of time and with the change in perceptions about property after taking the accident of birth into consideration, it soon became obvious that the power of decision making could not be the exclusive prerogative of some. Hence movements for universal adult suffrage came into being all over Europe and in the the United States of America leading to the slow and gradual empowerment of all. In India however, the situation was different. India had no democracy till 1947 when it became independent and immediately gave suffrage to all without exception.

Democracy that was drawn out of liberalism but was altered in Europe already had become even more altered in the case of India. India's exposure to principles of liberalism was through colonial rule and the democracy that Indians envisioned for themselves had very little do with the principles of liberal philosophy and the original democracy derived from it. This newer form of democracy ran successfully in the hands of original freedom fighters who also in a way constituted an elite of sorts. The acceptance of this leadership was in a way a continuation of an old Indian tradition of respecting the educated and also those who were seen as well wishers of the whole of Indian society (like the Universal Legislator proposed by Rousseau). Leadership crises of different varieties started in India with the gradual passing of the generation of educated elites and freedom fighters. With this a great disjunction happened between democracy and its substance. People took their freedom without taking the responsibility that came along with it and began identifying democracy only with procedures, hoping that the content would be taken care of by politicians. This suited the purposes of the upper castes (not to be confused with educated elites) who once again established their social hegemony by subverting the substance of democracy, which is participation in decision making through the process of deliberation. In this attempt to re-establish caste hegemonies, some of the intermediary castes (read that as BCs) were used for the building of lumpen power. Democracy in India therefore took a lumpen turn, something from which it is unable to free itself from. The apathy of the educated has only added to this situation with politics now becoming the domain of leaders and the lumpen powers that prop them up. In this situation, it is unsurprising that issues of politics are manufactured by politicians and their lumpen support structure. Even the consent behind these politics which is every once in a while demonstrated through agitations or public meetings is not a true indication of what people want. It is well known today that the same set of people attend various public meetings organized by different political parties.

This manufacturing of consent is different from the manufactured consent that Noam Chomsky talked about. Chomsky's main worry is the intervention of lobbies of the corporates who can influence politics to fulfill their corporate agendas at the expense of people. In India the situation is more about caste hegemony and for now the capitalist intent has to play second fiddle to this. Lack of proper education and now the collapse of the education system have only added to this problem. One can safely say that in India now there is a new class of lumpen, the lumpen teacher. Armed with degrees that mean nothing and having curried favour with the powers that be to find themselves in the education system as teachers, these people have turned lumpen in order to protect themselves from teaching. Almost all teachers in most universities are unfit to teach even kindergarten students and carry with them biases of caste and religion and now region. Therefore the destiny of the country is in the hands of a lumpen nexus that involves students, teachers, goons and politicians. Politics are played out by these elements to suit their purposes. The rich have nothing to fear straight away and therefore can remain contented with their pursuit of fashion and botox. It is the people at the bottom who have remained untouched by development even sixty three years after independence and it seems will continue to bear the brunt of these pragmatic politics that are dissociated from anything and everything meaningful. It is just a matter of time before the tolerance of these unempowered sections dissipates and India faces challenges afresh. To avoid this, it is necessary that democracy be made deliberative so that no lumpen-ism or coercive politics can take control of society. The Telangana issue is one of the many symptoms of this and by starting a process of deliberation to find a resolution to it, India could see more issues being resolved in that way. As I have said in the past, I live in hope.

Of New States and Finances

Please treat this post as an interlude to the series that I will be posting on deliberative democracy and the true empowerment of people. In a way, even this post can be considered as linked to the question, though a little remotely. I have been meeting a lot of youngsters and all of them see a separate Telangana only as a new horizon which will ensure that all the jobless will get jobs and those who have paltry salaries will get a ten fold (this is no exaggeration, since a person who now gets four thousand rupees per month says that in the new State he will get Rs. 40,000/- and this chap is not even tenth class pass) and everyone will live happily ever after. This is a fairy tale, I would like to draw everyone's attention to George Orwell's Animal Farm again, a fairy tale that tells people how things will go wrong and how promises will be broken.

Apart from this unfortunate bit of information that I have passed on to you, I would also like to bring to light the question of what will happen if a separate Telangana does come into existence. Though the Sri Krishna Committe report is being denounced unequivocally by the protagonists of separate Telangana, I am sure that they will happily invoke it if the decision to divide the State of Andhra Pradesh is taken. Everybody while rejecting the basis of the report is already happy to choose the "fifth option" cited in the report. I am a little stumped by the reasons cited for the division by the protagonists. "We want to rule ourselves" is not an option because right now people of Telangana are not being ruled by foreigners. Any Indian can contest an election from any part of the country, and this has been demonstrated by former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao's election from Ramtek in Maharashtra, the present Prime Minister's election from Assam and Jayaprada's election from Uttar Pradesh. And the ourselves bit implies sons of the soil which is most difficult to establish in a country as old as India where people have always had the liberty of living in a place that was liked by them. Hyderabad is a prime example with former Election Commissioner of India, Lyngdoh choosing to live here. But more than this what worries me is the financial spend that will come into being when two states are made and one will have to develop a new capital.

The development of a new capital is an exercise fraught with all kinds of problems. First, the drain on the country's, and I stress country's exchequer will be massive with lakhs of crores of rupees required to set up the new capital. When such large amounts of money are being spent needless to say, corruption will reign supreme. With proper audits being implausible a lot of private purses will swell while the government and the people will get further impoverished. This is not an issue that is pertinent only to Andhra-Telangana region. Since the money will have to come from the Union Government it means that it is a drain of the tax payers money as well as an additional burden on the tax payers. Given the history of who pays taxes in this country, the burden will fall upon middle class and upper middle class employees whose earnings can be seen in black and white. Film stars, big businessmen, corporates et al will find means of evading at least a part of the taxes. I think therefore the nation will have to consulted when it comes to the undertaking of such an issue. However, given the nature of politics of this country, any consultation at the national level will produce results that will become problems in themselves. Involvement of the nation in such an exercise would mean that instead of looking at the economic viability of this proposal, new proposals for Poorvanchal, Harit Pradesh, Vidarbha and Gorkhaland will gain greater strength and proposals for further divisions will come into being.

As I have consistently argued in this blog for over a year now, these are all designs of uneducated politicians trying to create spaces for themselves and their progeny. And that is in principle a violation of the spirit of democracy. I fear that after the great divide the people and the country will be set back a little more in developmental terms. And that would be a pity, given the fact that our neighbour China is already more advanced than India in most fields except in those that demand a knowledge of English. While we are caught in various jingoisms of our own and fighting to move backwards, the Chinese have already initiated English language learning among their students. If that programme is successful, the Chinese will even take away the advantage that India has in the service industry. But people of no consequence in these matters such as me, can only watch the situation unfold and do nothing about it. This is now an issue in the hands of the politicians and not so much common people. I am worried about that, I admit.

Power and the Substance of Democracy

Let me start with an anecdote here. A few days ago I was asked to go for a recording of a discussion programme on Maoist Extremism and if and how it is a detriment to the developmental process. My co-panelists in this discussion were a retired professor of economics from another university and a professor of communication and journalism from a university which is in the neighbourhood of my university. The moderator was someone who does these programmes as a contractor. I had suggested to the moderator and the other panelists that we have a plan of action in place so that the discussion would be relevant and meaningful. I was told that it would be okay even otherwise, so I let it be. Then the moderator started of the discussion by shooting a question at the communications professor about how extremism can be an impediment to development. To my utter disbelief the professor started off by saying that the proposition was wrong and went on to speak for a staggeringly long time about police atrocities. Then the economics professor let loose about various developmental schemes launched by the government for an almost equal amount of time. By the time my turn had come to speak I was already in a petrified trance, since I had no clue whatsoever as to what this was all about. Before I could say anything meaningful I was told that my time was up since it was time for a break. I was shocked since this was a recording and how could anyone stop me for a break. I was told that the channel preferred not to edit the programme and therefore recorded it as if it were live. Then the second round started. The moderator asked the professor of communications about the role of the media in taking information to the people (what information was not specified) and the good professor rambled on for sometime and then another question was asked of the professor of economics about how the Tatas moved their car factory from Singur to Sanand. He rambled on about a few welfare schemes in Maharashtra and in the districts of Adilabad and Khammam in Andhra Pradesh. Then there was the signal to wind up the discussion and I was asked to briefly speak about why there was unemployment in the country. In the twenty five minutes of discussion that we had, Maoism was never mentioned by the moderator or the other two speakers. Everybody spoke about what they knew and the moderator was quite happy to let them continue since he had no questions. Police atrocities, development schemes of the Union Government, Tatas and Singur and unemployment at the National level were all discussed. If this is how teachers are, it is no surprise that our students write what they know in exams irrespective of the questions asked. But that is not the reason why I started this post with this story.

What came out clearly in this episode was that no one had an idea as to what the State is, what is development and the role of the people in the developmental process. I had a similar experience when I was once asked to speak to research scholars about the role of people in a democracy and the participants were fairly shocked by my starting off with the responsibilities that people have to fulfill in a democracy. They were of the opinion that it is democracy if we just vote and then attack the State for not doing what is expected of it. I simply asked a question there. I asked them as to who was responsible for people breaking traffic laws in Hyderabad when they drive and was told that it was the State. The substantiation behind that was the traffic police were not stopping the law breaking motorists. I said would it not be better if the people did not break rules in the first place and the response was that it is still the responsibility of the State to ensure that people did not break rules.

Put the two episodes together and you can see what I am driving at. We don't seem to have an idea as to what the State is and what its responsibilities are. We also seem to treat it as the 'other' that is distinct from the people and that which is responsible for the miseries and misfortunes that we as people suffer. Institutions such as the police which are seen as enemies are not seen as those which are empowered and legitimized by the State which is itself legitimated by the people. Most people are happy to identify democracy with just procedures such as voting and no more. People do not seem to understand the idea that democracy is self governance of the people in substance, with the procedure of voting put in, to simply identify representatives of the people, who will work for the welfare of their constituents. In my previous posts I have been saying that what is missing in Indian democracy is the deliberative component, which is obviously the key requirement. We do not seem to be able to connect institutions such the Parliament and State Legislative Assembly to the notion of deliberation. We don't seem to realize that these institutions are provided with the idea that they will serve as platforms for people's representatives to discuss the problems and prospects of their constituents, and also to find mechanisms of problem resolution. Contributing to this lack of understanding is the behaviour of our politicians who use the Parliament or the Assembly (if and when they go there) to behave boorishly. My question then is where is the substance of democracy in India? Only in procedures? Add another variable to this and it becomes even more confusing. Could we possibly have societies without power relations in them?

Power is one of the crucial variables that we need to understand when looking at the functioning of society. Otherwise why would we require authority? Authority should be seen as the official and legitimate empowerment of offices and officials so that these can deter naked power. The existence of authority is the acquiescence to the existence of power relations. Democracy seeks to overcome naked power and jungle law through a deliberative process and hence deliberation is at the centre of all democratic thinking. But it seems when judging the functioning of institutions and offices it seems as if we see authority abstracted from the context of naked power in which it exists and hence our disbelief in police and the State. Contributing to this are politicians who use the authority vested in them by their constituents as naked power rather than legitimate authority. How else does one explain the distancing of elected representatives from their people?

This is pretty much the case in Andhra Pradesh today. Politicians have by and large misused the trust of the people to get into manipulations that have very little to do with the interests of their constituents. The interest of the constituents is used as a facade for the pursuance of the politicians own ends, which rely heavily on the politicians ability to extend their naked power. When what should have been legitimate authority begins to act in the manner of naked power, there is a cascading effect that extends to all other institutions as well. We therefore forget that the police and bureaucracy are at one level people like us but those who can go against the dis-empowered people by serving the interests of various contending paradigms of naked power. Separatists movements like the separate Telangana movement or at another level secessionist movements like the onetime Khalistan movement and the present Kashmir movement or extremist movements like Maoism are all conjured by politicians by pitting people against people for the furtherance and fulfillment of their (politicians) own goals of power mongering. In response to one of my previous posts (the one pertaining to Caste at the root of the great divide) my friend Pramod has written a few comments (you can find them at the bottom of the post in the comments section) where among many other things he talked of how it is disheartening to see some people at the bottom of the society having no access to any social and economic goods. In spite of him and I not agreeing on the separation of Telangana into a new State, we have both seen eye to eye about the plight of the truly common and dis-empowered people. His solution seems to be that if the numbers are smaller than the possibility of justice is greater, whereas for me since the problem itself is the making of politicians we need to work at making democracy truly deliberative. That can happen only when we sit down to speak rather than shout at each other. What is urgent now is first the restoration of deliberation at the centre of democracy rather than harping on procedures. People are capable of rational speech and that is the need of the hour. After that if there is still a demand for separation, so be it; that is acceptable since it will be enlightened.

Time for some clarifications!!

The last thing that I want to do is make this blog too personal but under some unavoidable circumstances I am having to make it. My father and some friends of mine who have read the blog are of the opinion that I must spell out a few things. So here goes.

So far I have been discussing the issue of a separate Telangana among many things with my father but never have I specifically mentioned to him as to what my stand on the issue was. My father has only just had a look at my blog and has revealed a detail which I did not know about thus far. He tells me that during the first separate Telangana agitation he was the leader of the Telangana Gazetted Officers Association and later when a formal organization was created he became the President of the association. He later on went on to become the President of the Andhra Pradesh Gazetted Officers Association. He tells me that at that time he supported the idea of a separate Telangana and even now believes in it but his passion is reduced because of his advanced age. He says that the ideal should have been the original Nizam State but in its absence he thinks Telangana is alright. He believes the dislike to Andhra people came out of many factors and most of them boiled down to a superiority complex that the Andhra people had vis a vis the Telangana people. He says that this could be seen even in officers from the Andhra region who treated Telangana people with huge contempt and lost no opportunity to poke fun at them, even if issues were personal. He narrated an incident to me where his superior officer commented on my fathers clothes (which I believe were a little expensive) by saying that he (my father) and many other Telangana people were nicely 'fattened' by the Nizam when in reality they were worthless. He clarified that his position on Telangana was not based on just this one incident but on many. He also says that most of the Andhra officers when they first came to Telangana took the blazer cloth that was used to cover tables and made coats out of them!!! That apart I too am aware of the jibes at Telangana people made by Andhra film makers who cast comedians and villains as Telangana people speaking the Telangana dialect. In fact, they only stopped this after a threat was issued by the naxals who asked them to desist from such fun making. For those of you who are wondering as to why I am narrating this bit, here is the clarification. I have been saying that though I belong to Telangana but I stand for a united Andhra Pradesh. It would be a tad hypocritical on my part to not reveal the fact that my own father does not subscribe to this point of view. I have not revealed it earlier since I did not know about it. I would like to point out that I still stand by my view that in the larger interests of the country there should be no more divisions. I believe that even the separation of Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively should not have been carried out. This is not to deny that they had problems then and Telangana has problems now. I believe that if one reads the Indian constitution the concerns of the founding fathers of the nation was the possibility of the nation fragmenting itself again. And I believe parochialism only contributes to this. To me arguments based in sons of soil or people saying 'we want to govern ourselves' are not valid in the context of the larger Indian nation. I believe there can be power devolutions and other remedies but to accede to something which tries to treat an Indian as a foreigner in any part of the country is down right fraught with all kinds of dangers. There is never only one solution to a problem and all possibilities will have to be properly explored. To me everything should be subordinated to conditions that create a spirit of unity and oneness. Beyond this I will not say much else since I am not a person of consequence in decision making.

My second clarification pertains to an observation made by my father and some friends that I have been politically and socially incorrect in naming castes while talking about power relations in Andhra Pradesh. I would like to clarify here that naming of the castes was not for vilifying any caste or person but simply an academic exercise that saw the roles that various castes played in the creating the nature of society and politics in this region. I would like to point out that I have friends and well wishers from all castes and when I say all I mean all, and it is not my intention to derogate anyone or their history. My request to all is to kindly treat this exercise as perspective building not aimed at anyone or anything for any personal gain.

My many thanks to all people reading my blog and encouraging me. I only wish to clarify that the purpose of this blog is soul searching and opening a possibility of dialogue (not argument) among all the stake holders in our politics with the view to promote larger integration of society so as to keep the nation, the Indian nation intact. I shall continue with my posts not just about this issue but others in politics as well and thank you all for tolerating this rather personal interlude.

Really, what is democracy? A problematique?

I read a piece in the "Times of India" of today, written by Manoj Mitta, an old friend of mine (regrettably with whom I am not in active touch like with many people). I thought it was an eloquent piece which juxtaposed the question of economic growth with that of democracy and the will of the people. He said this in the context of the ongoing Telangana agitation and seemed to have surmised that even if there are problems of the economic variety they should perhaps be set aside for the democratic expression of the will of the people. I had read a similar argument when the UPA was voted into power in the year 2004 and when the Sensex crashed by then unprecedented four hundred points in one day. This crash happened because of the combine of Communist parties had sixty two seats in the Lok Sabha and the fate of the Congress led UPA was felt to be very much in the hands of the Communists. The then Finance Minister, Mr. Chidambaram had to speak to the captains of the industry and allay their fears. Then this piece appeared on one of the websites where the writer claimed that the will of two billion Indians was less significant than the economic activity in a two kilometre radius in Mumbai. My friend Manoj is not saying something like this at all. But if the situation was akin to this, he is clear about where his loyalties are. They are with the people, their will and democracy. How I wish the argument was so simple. Let me tell you a story here. In the year 1998 when I was much younger and hot headed I got into an argument with Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan of the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. I had gone to do a refresher course and Prof. Mahajan was speaking about John Rawls, Multiculturalism and Democracy. She concluded that the definition of democracy should be "fairness". I challenged this notion of hers and when she explained why she felt it was what it was, I accused her (very uncharitably and in a most rude manner for which I apologized to her) of performing mental gymnastics. She told me then that to always stick with the definition of democracy as will of the people was untenable.

Over the years (there have been almost thirteen of them now) I have time and again pondered over this question without getting anywhere close to an answer. The question came back to me again today when I read Manoj's article. Really democracy in operation does not lend itself to any easy definitions. Prof. Mahajan had pointed out to me that it was not easy or possible to establish what the will of the people was. Is it unchanging and always well deliberated? Is it the majority will and in that case what about those who do not subscribe to that majority will? Difficult questions indeed and that is why I have asked myself if democracy is a problematique (as in a source from which a number of problems emanate). And to me it seems that it is. Within the boundaries of a nation state is it possible for one set of people to claim the original sons of soil position and on the basis of it, demand rights for separation? What about the other side? To me this seems like a divorce settlement. If both parties agree, then it can proceed further to things such as settlement of the monetary variety. But if one of the parties refuses, then there is no progress. There is no court that can impose a divorce even if one of the partners refuses it. I suppose the Telangana separation issue will have similar problems.

And to conclude this I have another question (not to Manoj, none of my questions are aimed at him. They are aimed at myself and no one else). It is nice to believe that in the determination of societies, economics should not have a role. But then to me it seems as if the political is generating itself out of the economic, and when it is so, is it possible to separate democracy from economic considerations? Aren't the Telangana people saying that they want economic benefits of their own region accruing to them? And in that case if separation will lead to worsening of the economic condition, is it worth it? It is nice to believe like in the Eagles song that "love will keep us alive". But the question is, really can it? Even in the face of economic adversity? Many questions, many thoughts but no satisfactory answers.

Caste at the root of the great divide

This post of mine is a continuation of what I had written yesterday. If land is one of the reasons behind the divide, then caste is the other and more deeply entrenched variable making the divide so wide. In one of my much older posts, I had already written about how the divide between Telangana and Andhra is also overpoweringly a question of caste; Reddy-Velama combine in Telangana vs the Kamma of coastal Andhra. The Kamma is seen as the usurper of position of power by the Reddys mainly and the Velamas to some extent. I have also quoted the revolutionary balladeer Gaddar who said Telangana should be of the people and not of the feudal lords. In Telugu he said "prajala Telangana kavali, dorala Telangana oddu". The revolutionary zeal has also settled itself into the question of caste, because for Gaddar and the Maoists, caste is something that cannot be overlooked. But that is old hat now and everybody knows about it. However as an academician (a poseur perhaps) I find it necessary to inquire into what makes the caste variable so powerful in Indian society and politics.

In its origins the caste system was cosmological (I have talked about this too in the past) and slowly transformed into a social variable with the passage of time. This is also time when the caste system transformed into a jati system from a varna system. Endogamy, as Ambedkar rightly pointed out became the ruse through which the jati system was evolved and maintained by the Brahmin caste over centuries, giving Indian society its very unique character and identity. The sad and interesting part of this evolution of the social system is that only the top and bottom castes were clearly defined. It should also be noted that from "chaturvarna" the caste system became a "panchama jati" system. The panchamas were the chandalas or the untouchables condemned for ever to live on the peripheries of life, society and village (literally) and only performing abhorrent tasks such cleaning of lavatories, taking care of smashan or burning ghats and working with animal hides. Both in the chaturvarna system and in the panchama jati system the Kshatriya is the second in the hierarchy with the Vysya being the third. Here I would like to introduce M.N. Srinivas and his theory of Sanstkritization of castes which allows for caste groups to claim higher positions in the caste hierarchy even though individual upward mobility was not possible.

It is not too difficult to see why Sanskritization was possible. Rarely in the history of India have the Kshatriyas been identified indisputably. The Vysya caste group too was not as clearly defined as the Brahmin and the Chandala. If one looks at the history of India most of the big dynasties have been either Brahmin or Sudra. With the exception of the Rajputs there is no obvious example of another Kshatriya caste. This looseness in the middle of the caste system is what facilitated the upward movement of entire caste groupings. The Sudra, unlike the Chandala was not too castigated. The evidence of that can be seen in the big dynasties like the Nandas, Mauryas and in Andhra Pradesh the Kakatiyas all which were powerful and belonged to the Sudra category. In fact, in the last few decades one sees an attempt on the part of the Reddys and more specifically the Kammas drawing their past to the Kakatiya dynasty while the Velamas have steadfastly claimed that they are rulers or Rajus and therefore Kshatriya. All these castes are more or less confined only to the Andhra Pradesh region and their origins are relatively new. All of them managed to find themselves in the upper caste category, but the way in which they derived their power was different. The Reddys derived feudal power from the Nizam's legacy and the Kammas derived a power from capital in the Madras presidency region. Though they started off as an agricultural community (not caste) they were able to use the surplus from agriculture to invest first in the film industry in Madras, then in Hyderabad, the hospitality industry and finally the software industry. It is well known that capitalism by nature seeks to expand its constituency for purposes of profit making. In this fanning out process the Kammas inevitably came into the Telangana region and into conflict with the Reddys.

The other castes, especially the ones that are called the backward castes, like the Munnuru Kapus, the Yadavs and the Gouds were incorporated into this arraignment of power in order to take the fight to electoral politics. The proximity to power has made the backward castes power centres in themselves capable of making or breaking leaderships. It is this confidence that has pushed the issue of a social justice Telangana or a Telangana to be led by the members of the backward castes to the forefront of the separate Telangana agitation. By now caste has undergone yet another transformation. It is no longer a simple social variable; it turns political. This transformation is crucial because the social factor now fades into insignificance and political power comes into the open, with different leaders of different groupings posturing. The variable that had cosmological origins and therefore direct consequence to life goes through a mutation that makes it a sociological one that is also the determinant of social power. This power was mainly held by the Brahmins and in that instance it was the hegemony of one collective over others. But when caste takes on a political colour, there is a change in the nature of power. Instead of groups exercising power like the Brahmins did, it now becomes more individual in nature. Individuals are able to leverage various things such as muscle power, political patronage and history and turn into leaders of consequence. It therefore becomes a dialogue now between the posturing leaders (in this case a break down of the dialogue) where the terms and conditions of the dialogue are no longer in the hands of collectives. So the issue of Telangana vs Andhra unsurprisingly is very much rooted in the question of castes among others. What is important is that the question of caste is the one question that defies logical answers and continues to directly or indirectly divide people of this region in particular and the country in general. Sometimes (in my desperation) it seems as if this is a curse that more and more generations will have to suffer. But my heart and mind both cry out to the possibilities of end to posturing and creating a community based in the virtues of communication and dialogue as possible means of solving problems collectively. When shall we learn the truth of the old adage "together we stand, divided we fall"? I shall always live in hope, long live India. We shall overcome, some day. And soon, very soon, I hope.

The problem perhaps is still deeply entrenched in the land

In a casual conversation with some old friends a few days ago, I found myself being asked this question as to why Telugus cannot be one state while every other linguistic state seemed to be doing so just fine. Its not a question that ever came to my mind I must admit, and while in the group I dismissed the question as not significant. I also felt that there wasn't any summary proof of other linguistic states doing just fine and I left it at that. But in the last couple of days that question has comeback to me again and again. Not only that, I myself had written in one of the posts that we Indians have tendency to divide ourselves without any outside help. Einstein called India the cradle of mathematics once. In the cradle we seem to have perfected two things - multiplication and division. We are obviously very fecund so while anything else maybe multiplying or not, our population certainly is and has been for a very long time now. The more the population the greater the possibilities of division since we have one of the highest densities of population in the world (excluding Monaco and the Vatican City) that is consuming resources faster than it is generating them. This isn't just a wise-crack because our natural resources are under great pressure due to the ever burgeoning population requiring more and more land. Marxian economics may talk about the extraction of surplus value from labour - the variable capital - in a capitalist society and not so much from land, but in India it does seem as if land is still an important variable even in the age of capital (and I do think that now is the time when we are definitely in the capitalist era). I will not speak too much about this in the context of the whole of India but only about Andhra Pradesh since my investigation here is about why Telugus are unable to live together.

The hotly disputed statistics put out by the Sri Krishna Committee claim that the lion's share of economic productivity and development is centred on Hyderabad and that the city is now more connected to the national and international economy more than to the local economy. The report also says that most of Hyderabad's workforce is in the service related IT and ITeS sectors. It also cautions that Hyderabad itself will have to be careful because it faces the danger of becoming the worlds service house rather an industrially developed city. But for the moment that is an area that I will not visit. Most of the development figures that have been taken into consideration by the Sri Krishna Committee seem to be from the agriculture sector and that too in the last few years when the state has had bountiful rainfall. It is therefore no surprise that the figures without involving Hyderabad in the developmental process of Telangana, are still comparable with those of the ones from coastal Andhra. But we do know of the saying 'lies, white lies and statistics' and therefore we shall proceed with caution while looking at those figures (here I would like to say that I am not questioning the integrity and honesty with which the Sri Krishna Committee did its work. I am and will always be suspicious of statistics and statistical methods since statistics can be used to speak any language).

Hyderabad which is not so dependent on agriculture is therefore sought after by people on both sides of the divide. The coastal Andhra folks will and have been claiming that they developed Hyderabad with the Telangana people rightly disputing those claims. I apologize for again bringing my father into this but he also gave me an insight when he said that the onus of developing Hyderabad was on the Nizam and that he. the Nizam, was mainly responsible for developing the city and what happened after was only building on that firm base that had already been built. He also claims that the real coastal Andhra presence in Hyderabad increased only during the time that NTR and the Telugu Desam came into power and they only invested in a city that had already been developed. Film industry and much later the IT industry seemed to have been their real initiatives. Before anyone hurriedly celebrates let me point out here that Chandra Babu Naidu only' initiated' the development of the Hitech City which grew from investments from abroad and all parts of India and not just from coastal Andhra. What is more important here is the fact that his administration introduced a new model of corruption based in acquiring lands through benami transactions or through private individuals and then putting projects around those lands and selling them at exorbitant prices. The coastal Andhra people benefited from these transactions. That is one of the problems. In this process the traditional land holding of the Reddy's came down significantly and they realized that they were also losing their traditional power which came from holding of the lands (I confess that the story here is a little over simplified but I assure one and all that this simplification does not alter the true nature of the story). KCR as the insider of the Telugu Desam knew this plot quite well and when he split with the party, he came out with all guns blazing against the coastal Andhra people. In my post yesterday I had said that people had been 'unhappy' in Telangana and that there was a dormant Telangana sentiment. Chandrashekar Rao exploited that sentiment and the rest of the story is there in my post of yesterday. I shall therefore spare you the agony of rereading the same again. However, the intent of todays post is that despite claims (by statistics) to the contrary, doubtlessly, Andhra Pradesh is one of the backward states of India. It is as such not as progressive as Punjab or Maharashtra and therefore in spite of capitalism coming in, the people of the state did not completely lose interest in land. Therefore the Telangana-Andhra divide still has a very strong land component to it. Political leaders will and have made careers out of opportunism in the absence of any ideology and therefore the issue has reached where it has. In my next post I shall talk about another dimension that has been politically exploited for nefarious purposes and that is caste.

Attitudes and agitations

A couple of years ago, I watched an interesting programme on National Geographic Channel. There was a lady anthropologist whose name I cannot remember who conducted an experiment on children of human beings and chimpanzees of a comparable age (with chimpanzee years equated to human years like in one human year is equal to seven dog years). The experiment consisted of putting two blacked out glass boxes one of which had a small opening. Inside the box with opening was a candy bar. What the lady did was to give a small stick to children in the age group of 8-11 years and teach the children a sequence of poking the stick in four different places before poking the hole which would make the candy available. The same sequence was taught to chimpanzees of comparable age. Ten children and ten chimpanzees went through the routine and found the candy bar. The lady anthropologist then proceeded to peel of the black paper which was covering the glass. There was only one aperture for all to see. Then she called the same set of ten children and asked them to take the candy bar. Incredibly all of them went through the four steps of poking before finally poking the aperture and taking the candy. She then called the same set of chimpanzees and even more incredibly all of them just poked the only aperture and went straight for the candy bar. They did not bother with four pokes that were simply not necessary. The anthropologist's conclusion was that this was the most important reason why human society is different from chimpanzee society. Though the chimpanzees displayed greater cleverness in reaching for the candy bar, they displayed a greater amount of individualism. The anthropologist claimed that human children by following the order that was originally set even when the black paper had been removed demonstrated an attitude of compliance with what seemed like a set rule. This for the anthropologist the reason why human society is so successful. If you are wondering what this story has to do with my post, I will only say that it has everything to do with human behaviour including follow the leader. The anthropologist who set the rules was the leader and the children followed her rules without questioning and with alacrity.

Let us now come down to the reality about which I have been blogging. Agitations. Most of the time it is made out that agitations emerge from within people and that it is they who make movements happen. I disagree. People will complain about their condition and become unhappy, but rarely do they spontaneously agitate. Agitations are organized by individuals who rally others around them. There is a reason for this too. Eric Fromm argues that people are afraid of freedom because it brings a certain responsibility with it. The fear of failure and unwillingness to own up to that failure is what keeps people from experiencing freedom. Wilhelm Reich argues similarly when he talks about why fascism was so successful. He gives the example of a Europe caught in the throes of the Great Economic Depression where hunger reigned supreme and yet the poor never thought about breaking glasses of bakeries and other eateries that were displaying food and grabbing that food. The fear of punishment and retribution that comes out of owning up to actions kept people away from food. For Reich this is not only the reason for the success of fascism but also the failure of Marxism. Both Reich and Fromm argue that the idea of class consciousness where every single individual was enlightened about his own place in society and that leading to a revolution was simply erroneous according to the two writers, because it does not take into account the fear factor, even that of freedom. They say that this is also the reason why great dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini succeeded. They point out that most of the Russian peasantry was happy to participate in the Bolshevik Revolution because of the faith that they had in Lenin as somebody who would work for their good. In short all populations look for leaders to take care of their problems. Leaders emerge from valid situations but can go on to become whatever they want, as was demonstrated in history by Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, not to talk of the several dictators who flourished in Pakistan, Bangladesh and almost every African nation. The wisdom of the ages has said that in a war, finishing off the leader was more important than killing a huge number of soldiers.

This concept of leaders setting agendas for people is also quite common in India. Mahatma Gandhi could hold huge sections of people to ransom by fasting. Chauri-Chaura is an illuminating example. He could suspend the entire freedom movement when it was at its peak. That is because people without a leader are like a body without a head. All agitations therefore have a leadership that sets the agendas and goals. They maybe peaceful or they maybe violent. If one looks at what is happening in Andhra Pradesh today, what we see is not people vs people as it is made out to be, but leaders vs leaders. During the Indian Freedom Struggle many such as Rabindranath Tagore, Sardar Vallabhai Patel and even Nehru agreed to a number of things that were suggested by Gandhi even though they did not always see eye to eye with him. That was because the enemy was an obvious outsider and everybody stood to benefit from driving out the common enemy. In the situation that we see in Andhra Pradesh, this struggle for a separate Telangana is happening when everybody's rights are intact but there is a displeasure in the way in which the state is being governed, leading to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of the others. In all this, it is the leadership that decides on what will be the course of action and what will be the settlement of the problem.

Let us go back a few years into the history of the state. Even after the failure of the first separate Telangana agitation and when the state looked steady, there were people who pasted stickers that said Jai Telangana and My Telangana on their vehicles. There were some newspapers in Telugu as well that tried to highlight the problems of the region. So it is not wrong to say there was a Telangana sentiment. But that sentiment did not cry out loud for an immediate splitting of the state. N. Chandra Babu Naidu becomes the Chief Minister and begins a new chapter of manipulations in politics of the state. He denies K. Chandrashekhar Rao a ministerial berth (for reasons unknown to me) and the latter raises cudgels and revives the dormant Telangana sentiment. Initially it is all about electoral politics and stays that way till the December of 2009. Outside appearance is that K. Chandrashekar Rao is keen on keeping the Telangana Rashtra Samithi as a party that is also like a trade union. Use your strength to bargain things for betterment. Over the years his approach loses credibility because of people perceiving that the bargaining that he was doing was benefiting only a few, to the detriment of others. This culminates in his fast, which he was quite relieved to break in a couple of days, but the pressure came piling on from students groups who said he was a fake, and this put pressure on him to resume his fast. This was happening since casteism was coming to the forefront with different Telanganas being demanded by caste groups. For reasons unknown to me the Union Govt/Chidambaram panic and make the now famous statement on 9-12-2009. Then came the backlash from the other side and the appointment of the Sri Krishna Committee on the 5-1-2010.

A year later today there is a rejection of the report of the Sri Krishna Committee by almost everyone. The statistics pointed out in the report are not being disputed, they are being dismissed as fake. The agitations are on again. The Telangana leader have all driven themselves into a corner from which they cannot back out and therefore will have no option but to insist on the bifurcation of the state. In the one year that the Sri Krishna Committee was doing its work, the politicians were trying to be more loyal to the cause than the other. What began as TRS, found its way into the Telugu Desam and the Congress because the Telangana leaders were afraid that their bases will be eroded. The death of YSR and a disinterested Rosaiah ensured that the Congress legislators from the region could start their posturing. The Telugu Desam President found himself in a corner with nothing to say since anything that he said could be used against him by both sides. So the Telangana group in the party tries to drown out the TRS and the Congress. The Praja Rajyam started off grandly by throwing their support behind a social justice Telangana but ended up saying that they wanted a united state. The party has no leadership and therefore no followers as well. So now we are back to where we were in Jan, 2010, only this time the leaders are all now in the holes into which they backed themselves in the last one year. There is no leadership worth talking about even in the central government or in the UPA. The BJP is not believed by anyone. Hence now the saying that anything is possible gains a new credibility. The tragedy is that before that anything happens, lives will be lost, careers will be destroyed, the entire region of Hyderabad, Telangana, Coastal Andhra and Rayalseema will go back by a few decades. Instead of building on what we have today, we will first have rebuild that which we have destroyed and pay for the mistakes of our political leaders who are not even short sighted, they seem to be sightless without even a perception of light. I will quote Roger Waters here, from the song Two Suns in the Sunset from the Pink Floyd album, The Final Cut.

"Finally I understand the feeling of the few,

Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,

We were all equal in the end". - Roger Waters

And now back to agitations

Now that the contents of the Sri Krishna committee are out, it goes without saying that Hyderabad is abuzz with discussions about Telangana, about what is, what could have been, and what should be. My father is an old protagonist of the Nizam State and believes that when India had its independence the erstwhile Nizam State should have been assimilated into the Indian Union as it was, but with a new name. He tells me that identities in those days were of no importance in spite of the many that existed. He says Hyderabad was then a true cosmopolis with Maharashtrians, Kannadigas, Tamilians, Gujaratis, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians all living together in the same localities and not in different groupings. He says India's integration was best seen in the old Hyderabad and that if that province had not been changed, then that would have been ideal. He is opposed to linguistic states because for him that is the beginning of parochialism. In my numerous discussions with my colleagues at the University I have argued on similar lines saying that the articulation of a Separate Telangana was not really the best and that I would be the first to agree to a reverting of the old situation. Yesterday was a continuation of the same discussion with my father. My father also tells me that the Nizam is unnecessarily vilified and that all development that was seen in Hyderabad which was always one of the big cities of India, was only due to the efforts of the Nizam. He assures me that he knows what he is saying since his grand father was the Chief Auditor of the Nizam's treasury and took care of most of the developmental activity such as the Railways and Roadways etc. I cannot disagree with him on all that but I was thinking about what might have been, had the new state just continued with the old contours? I know that social scientific knowledge or for that matter any kind of knowledge is incapable of dealing with conjectures, but still I am drawn to that question. I ask myself if parochial and separatist tendencies would have existed in such a composite state. I am not too sure that they would not have. Some how the unity that we showed as a nation during the freedom struggle is being gradually replaced by a competitive spirit and jealousy. If this is true then does it matter what the contours of the state are? Maybe people would have agitated on some other lines, but then that is only a maybe so we will leave it at that.

But we know what is today and let us get back to that. The Sri Krishna Committee report is something on which I will not comment too much because I have not read the full report and what I saw are various snippets selectively put out in various newspapers. Now we know that the vernacular press (I don't read Telugu newspapers since I am not fluent in reading) and papers such as the Times of India and the Deccan Chronicle are mischievous and in order to increase circulation will take recourse to various forms of sensationalizing. So what I have seen is mainly in the Hindu which is in spite of a big decline in standards still the best available option. A couple of things caught my eye there. One thing pertains to Hyderabad and the figures quoted in there are indisputable and what they say about it becoming a one crore population city in this year and the nature of the economy here needing a non-disruption of the existing Andhra Pradesh are factually sustainable. On one of the pages there was this piece that said that the separate Telangana state would be economically viable since the per capital income of the Telangana region is significantly higher than the national normal. That is a very good thing indeed. But then the question of why the talk of Telangana backwardness arises. I Telangana really backward and does it need to separate itself for further progress? What yard stick will be used to say Telangana will develop more rapidly without Andhra? Like I said, these are bits and pieces of information which should not be taken too seriously since they may have been taken out of context. But still my curiosity is piqued, that I must admit.

It was one year ago approximately that the Sri Krishna Committee was constituted with the explicit purpose of finding out what the people may want and what would be a realistic solution to the problem. The wheel has turned a full circle and we are back to where we began. Agitations. Why did the political parties agree for the appointment of this commission if they were not going to relent their positions? Is it not a waste of time and precious national money to go through an exercise which is now being dubbed a charade? One of the arguments that I have heard on discussions on various television channels is that the constituting of a separate constitutionally valid and empowered Telangana Developmental Council with statutory powers is not the solution to the problem. The reason cited is that a similar thing was tried after the first separate Telangana agitation and that it did precious little for the region. The instance of Gorkhaland is also being cited where this experiment is a failure because the Gorkhas are still demanding a separate state.

A couple of questions here

1. If Gorkhaland autonomy is a failure then are the states of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh successful? Evidence points to the contrary. Then why selectively use the example of Gorkhaland?

2. If a similar experiment was conducted in the past and it failed what could be the reasons? The person who started the separate Telangana movement in the first place, Dr. Marri Channa Reddy, went on to become the Chief Minister of the State of Andhra Pradesh twice. And there were other Chief Ministers such as T. Anjaiah and J. Vengal Rao, also from Telangana. What did they try to do for Telangana and what stopped them from doing what they could do or wanted to do? Some answers here are necessary.

Unfortunately the whole Telangana question is wrapped in layers and layers of political rhetoric and with politicians and journalists misusing the freedom of speech to spread information that is convenient to them there does not seem to be any possibility of any rational deliberation, which as I have said in another post is the only forward. But in all this posturing and fighting for political one up man ship I don't see that happening. KCR and his family (meaning son and daughter) are making Telangana their family heirloom just as the Nehru-Gandhi family is doing with India. Those who oppose KCR are trying to establish their own hegemony. The politicians on the Andhra side are no better. Therefore I will come back to what I said in an earlier post. It does not matter what is said in the Sri Krishna Committee report. It does not matter if there is a United Andhra Pradesh or a Separate Telangana. This is a game of the politicians, for the politicians and by the politicians. Common people are mere pawns who have nothing but sacrificing their own future to do. If a separate Telangana does happen, the Chief Minister and the rest of the ministers will have security, gunmen and posse of cars. The person will be as inaccessible as the present Chief Minister or other ministers. The common man will have to visit and revisit government offices with officials not being available or not doing what he wants. The corridors of political power will have the same power brokers brokering deals for the corporates and other moneyed organizations. The common man will also be the same. The situation will be the same in the United Andhra Pradesh as well. Let me quote the Urdu and Hindi poet Sahir Ludhianvi

"Jalado ise phook dalo yeh duniya, yeh duniya tumhari sambhalo yeh duniya

yeh duniya agar mil bhe jaye to kya hai?" - Sahir Ludhianvi

The poet could leave it at that. I cannot. I therefore hope that there is a fundamental change in the nature of politics of this country. I hope that the enlightened will come to power and guide the country through good and morally sustainable politics. Otherwise demagogues like Hitler can hijack anything and everyone onto things which are very personal and ultimately dastardly. I live in hope and look beyond the Sri Krishna Committee for solutions. Meaningful dialogue is what I think is necessary. That I hope will happen one day and soon.