Lessons on how to loot a university and other such things

Twenty years ago when I joined the teaching profession as a Lecturer at the Osmania University, I thought education was a sacred cow, one that could not be violated.  I knew full well that the University was not in the best of shapes academically speaking.  In fact, if one were to look at the history of the University it is abundantly clear that it was never too strong in the social sciences area with hardly any scholarship among the teachers who taught the various disciplines of the social science faculty.  But even this knowing did not help when I actually joined the University and found people whose scholarship was so pathetic that it was gob smacking.  I do not think that professors in the University are capable of teaching middle school lessons properly.  Most of them are only just literate, capable of signing and small things like that.  To my utter dismay I have now found out that even the science faculty is no better.  The amazing thing is that the University teachers are firmly divided on class lines at one level but are united by the fact that irrespective of being upper caste or lower caste, all are singularly incapable of any teaching, writing or research.  It is for this reason that classes are hardly ever held and students who do not know anything are passed in flying colours.  The reasons behind this pathetic teaching staff I have already written in other posts of the blog where I have said that people were chosen not on the basis of academic ability but on the basis of other considerations and since I have already written about them, I shall not repeat them here.

I must say that the twenty years in the University have been most exciting.  Every time I think things cannot get any worse, I find that something new happens and demonstrates that there are still rungs that the University can go down to.  The Vice-Chancellors of the University have been getting worse successively and corruption is rampant in the University in various forms.  I have heard of rumours claiming that 1 crore of rupees is the fee to become a Vice-Chancellor apart from the now mandatory political connections.  However what is most surprising is how corrupt the UGC is.  Even now there are relics who are above the age of 80 years who are involved in the various committees of the UGC and they have been doling out monies and Centres for Advanced Studies to departments in the University where there is not even adequate number of teachers leave alone good ones and good researchers.  Old connections, socializing, booze binges in the evenings whenever "academic" relics from all over the country meet decide on who gets what.  I would like to say that this malady is present in all universities in this country without exception.

Some of the good teachers and researchers of social sciences who are now found only in Delhi or Calcutta have such swollen heads that they find it difficult to stand upright.  They are so consumed with themselves that they have no time for anyone or anything else.  These people too have learnt the art of making connections and using intimidation to get projects from the UGC.  What they do benefits them immensely and peripherally benefits the academic community at large if they bring out a book, otherwise their contribution too is zero and that is the case in a majority of cases.  Once the money reaches the universities, (thanks only to the largess of the benefactors at the UGC who themselves have educational institutions which benefit from their generosity), it is then a question of how to distribute that money without having to make the person accountable for it.  Usually projects are taken up and nothing done about it and if there is insistence on settlements of accounts and submission of reports, things are concocted it and submitted.  If equipment such as PCs, printers and scanners have to be surrendered post the project completion, the faculty members find something which is condemned and give it off to the university. The monies earmarked for books and equipment are used for personal gain.  Now there is a new way of getting money.  If a foreign research scholar joins the University his fees is split up and a big percentage of that is being given to the scholar's supervisor as his/her "share".  The supervisor's "share" is bigger than the department's share.  This in universities where funds are severely lacking and developmental activity stalled.  I have already said too much and I could get into trouble just like that whistle blower professor at the IIT Kharagpur.

What does YS Jaganmohan Reddy's victory mean?

As is now expected of me, I shall begin this post with an apology.  I said, in my previous post that I will continue with the them of the International System and the Peace of Westphalia.  However, I have suddenly realized that I did not write about something that I wanted to and fortuitously I have found a computer with an internet connection and a little bit of spare time.  So I will write that piece out.  I hope to keep it short and simple.  Let us see how it ends up though.

A few years ago I was watching a programme about British Indians on the Star World Channel.  This was a sit-com designed to generate a few laughs and also had guests actually participating in it.  I think the programme was called Kumars at something.... I cannot remember what it was.  It was one of those stupid comedy programmes.  In one of the episodes the featured guest was a lady (whose name I cannot remember, sorry, old age) who apparently scored the highest in an IQ test in the UK (or was it the world, oops, memory going bad again).  She was asked as to what scoring the highest in an IQ test meant and she said it meant just that, which is she is capable of scoring very high in IQ tests.  Nothing more.  In yesterday's The Hindu newspaper (dated:15-4-2011) there was an article written by one Prof. Hegde (hope I have got the name right) on the whole idea of the "World Heart Day".  The author while saying that this whole world heart day thing was bunkum, also said that if a person is capable of running a marathon, it means just that, that the person is capable of running a marathon.  This did not indicate anything like the person being in a fit, healthy and wellness state.  In fact, he even said that marathon runners were prone to fibrosis (hope this too is right) of the heart, a condition that could be classified as heart disease.

Now let us take this analogy to the victory that YS Jaganmohan Reddy secured in the Lok Sabha by polls at Kadapa.  The same analogy can be extended to the victory that his mother Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Reddy secured for her dead husband's assembly seat.  Both have scored huge victories with record margins.  So what does that mean.  It means just that.  It simply means that YS Jaganmohan Reddy and his mother Mrs. Vijayalakshmi Reddy won the elections with record margins.  Ideally this story should have ended here.  But not so with our friendly neighbourhood journalists.  They have been raising a whole lot of brouhaha about this.  Why? Well if you are a newspaper there are pages to be filled and god forbid if you are a news channel on TV then you have to fill a hell of a lot of time and for that you need stories.  YS Jaganmohan Reddy's victory has spawned out all kinds of stories.  It is a shot in the arm for the separate Telangana movement (how may I ask? Especially since the man himself went to the well of the Lok Sabha to declare support for leaving Andhra Pradesh as it is); it is an indication that all is not well in the Congress (was there a doubt about this before the election was held and was his leaving the party itself indication that all is not well in the party); it portends to Kiran Kumar Reddy's failure as Chief Minister (did someone actually think that the Congress could make the YS Rajashekar Reddy legacy its own and that the voters will leave Jagan and his mother stranded?); S. Jaipal Reddy lost an opportunity to become Chief Minister and to contain Jagan (this dumbfounded me so I will say nothing of this); the Congress could lose the next election (is there a doubt about that? I think the question is more about who will replace the Congress).

My point is do we need this colossal waste of time to state things which are either obvious or simply in the figment of one's imagination?  Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the politics of Andhra Pradesh will know that the late YS Rajashekar Reddy's rule has brought the state to the threshold of bankruptcy.  YSR took populism to new heights (or should that be depths) by promising schemes that nobody asked for.  The revival of the Rs. 2 per kilogram of rice in 2008 was something that nobody can condone.  The scheme was first introduced by the late NT Rama Rao in 1983!!!!! Even then it was a drain on the state's resources and to revive in 2008, I cannot find words to describe it.  The Arogyasri scheme and the fee reimbursement scheme were good in intent but horribly executed.  Giving free education is indeed very noble, but before the introduction of the scheme planning was necessary and that did not happen.  Now the whole education system is on the precipice of disaster.  The Arogyasri scheme was again excellent in intent.  Poor people who are condemned to die without access to health care found access to it.  But the flip side is that private hospitals reaped money at the expense of the state.  I can go on but there is no point.  Even if YSR himself was alive, it is likely that the Congress party would have been humbled in the next round at the hustings

In this background and with the unresolved issue of Telangana still breathing fire, is it necessary to devote so much attention to a politician who as yet is a small timer.  If with time he grows in stature then it makes sense to devote some time to him.  Till then let us take things for what they are without reading all kinds of stupid things into them.

P.S:  Not proof read.  Please excuse all mistakes.

Have we entered a definitive phase in International Relations which can be called "Post Peace of Westphalia"?

This is a post that I have delayed for far too long and may therefore have lost its relevance.  But then I realized that the process that I wish to talk about around the events are older than the events and are still continuing. Therefore I am going ahead with the post.  For those who are not familiar with the system of International Relations let me briefly explain what the Westphalia System is.  International Relations, as is contained within that phrase are relations among Nation-States.  The origin of the Nation-System can be traced back to Europe in the Modern period of European history and to the advent of capitalism (the great scholar Eric Hobsbawm will agree with this).  Nation States were created due to the necessities of capitalism which worked on the principle of expand markets but also at the same time restrict competition.  This system is still in vogue and the number of Nation-States increased exponentially in the twentieth century with many countries throwing off the yoke of colonialism and becoming independent.  When they became independent the Nation-State was the default model.

A good understanding of the Nation-System will also need the understanding of the "Peace of Westphalia" that inaugurated the phase of Sovereignty among Nation-States.  It is not my intention to make this an exercise in pedagogy and therefore I will not go into the various meanings of sovereignty and the debates around it.  What will suffice for our present purposes here is that in Europe before the birth of the concept of sovereignty, there was a tendency on the part of one State to get involved in the affairs of another State, even if there was no reason to do so.  This mutual interference made peace, tranquility and more importantly for capitalism stability, very difficult to achieve.  The realization that this was to the detriment of all was what culminated in the Peace of Westphalia.  All European States signed this Peace by which every State recognized the internal sovereignty of not just itself but also of the other as well.This means that sovereignty gave States the power to resolve issues that concerned their internal matters.  So sovereignty became that supreme power that independence and freedom, characteristics of democracy and self rule.  

This is the system that we have today, or do we?  Ever since there has been an increase in post colonial Nation-States, there has also been increase in the interference of the affairs of the newly independent States.  The end of the Second World War saw the United States of America and Western Europe raise the bogey of communism while the erstwhile Soviet Union and Eastern Europe raised the bogey of capitalist expansion and this led to the formation of blocks.  But that is not all.  Both blocks, one to spread communism and the other to save the world from communism, entered into the affairs of the newly independent States by trying to lure them on to their side.  The USA and the USSR competed with each other to convince the new States about the evilness of the other's intent.  It also is the phase where power in International Relations came to the fore demonstrating that while all Nation-States were sovereign  they were all not equal.  To borrow a phrase from George Orwell "some were more equal than the others".

However, all this was done while furthering a pretense that there was recognition of the lesser Nation-State's internal sovereignty. Most Nation-States in Africa were actually formed by the bigger powers and handed over to puppet regimes.  The African people who were still in the state of tribalism and did not understand the politics of the Europeans found themselves gifted with an institution whose functioning they simply did not understand.  Their lives were either based in tribal cosmologies or in religious systems that were taken to them by Arab Islamists (to coin a phrase) or the Christian missionaries.  The puppet regimes did not have any kind of support from within and survived only because of the support of the erstwhile colonizers.  Though colonialism was gone nothing changed in the lives of the people.  This is also the case of countries in the South American continent (at least here nations were formed on the basis of football) and in the West Asian or the Middle Eastern Gulf which is where most of the world's oil reserves are.

Since oil is such a key to development of the industrial/technological variety, it was but natural that countries such as the USA tried to establish full control over the region.  This they did by installing regimes in the countries of the Gulf and these regimes sought to legitimate themselves by invoking religious sentiments as well as the Divine principle (the right bit has been deliberately omitted since most of the rulers claim that they are only perpetuating the rule of God).  This process has yielded the desired results but it was in the nineties that certain rulers like Saddam Hussain decided to do to small West Asian States what the USA was doing.  So Saddam goes to Kuwait and occupies it.  America realizing his intentions go to war and drive him out of there. However, the Americans are not quite satisfied with the extent to which they thwarted Saddam Hussain.  They wanted the full Monty, that is eliminate Saddam since he is potential threat.  In September of 2011 al-Qaeda gave Americans what they wanted, an opportunity to intervene in the region.  I do not have to tell the now famous 9/11 story.

The Americans were "righteously" indignant that someone decided to interfere in their internal affairs and promptly waged a "War on Terror" and the then President George Bush constructed an "Axis of Evil" that went all the way from Iraq to North Korea.  Even God was not spared in this war.  The Bushes Sr. and Jr. said that God was on their side as did the Taliban and the al-Qaeda.  This became a re-enactment of the Crusades vs Jihad while undermining the whole notion of sovereignty.  George Bush Jr. wanted to finish what his father started and went into not just Afghanistan but also into Iraq to finish what his father started.  He succeeded in ousting Saddam Hussain,capturing him and also getting him hanged to death because of the atrocities he committed on his own people.  The Americans were liberators both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghanistan was liberated from the Taliban, a creation of the Americans when they were trying to get rid of the Soviets from Afghanistan. Most recently the Americans entered Pakistan "without the knowledge" of the Pakistani authorities and carried an operation which led to the killing of America's enemy number one, Osama Bin Laden.

At the same time America has also started bombing Libya to liberate the country from its oppressive dictator Col. Muammar Qaddhafi.  However America has supported the Bahrain Emir family in quelling a popular uprising for democracy.  What is significant in all these instances is the fact that America supported mainly by the UK and to a certain extent France, interferes in matters that are actually internal to the countries where it has been intervening in the name of protection of the people and liberating them.  This is a violation of the principle of internal sovereignty that is based in the Peace of Westphalia.  From this it is clear that in the aftermath of the third wave of globalization that started with the collapse of the Eastern Block and in the context of the emergence of Geo-economics in the place of Geo-politics, direct interventions from bigger powers have become inevitable.  In the era of Geo-politics which existed till the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, ideology served as a veneer and made interventions look less stark than they actually were. With the world becoming unipolar and the USA assuming the role of the global policeman that veneer is gone and only the starkness of things is evident.  So have we entered a new post Westphalia phase?  The answer to that cannot be straight forward.  It maybe a yes, the indefiniteness being due to the fact that there are many countries still that have retained their internal sovereignty on the face of it.  But even that could be under threat from things such as global commons.  That is the subject of the next post, which I hope to make soon, very soon.

P.S:  Have not proof read this piece due to paucity of time. Please excuse all errors.  Thank you.

What is this secrecy of the Chapter Eight of the Sri Krishna Committee report

I had actually decided sometime ago that I will not be talking about the Sri Krishna Committee report since all debates around it have been much washed and ironed and nobody has anything new to say.  Ditto the separate Telangana agitation.  There is, as of now, not much to say that can be construed as specifically new.  While there is nothing new to say about the separate Telangana movement since its main protagonist K. Chandrashekar Rao himself is still saying the same things, there is reason to talk about the Sri Krishna Committee Report.  I have delayed making this post because I do not know if I will be in contempt of some court by saying what I have to say.  In the absence of any clear indication of whether it is right or wrong, I have finally decided to go ahead with this post.  This post of mine has nothing to do with the contents of the Chapter Eight, the infamous chapter which is supposed to give directions to the Union Government on how to manage the situation that has arisen out of the demand for a separate Telangana state.  This post concerns itself with some events that may make the whole judicial process look ridiculous.  Let us briefly recapitulate a few things so that we can talk about the judicial process.  

The Chapter Eight is supposedly a confidential matter meant only for the consumption of the Union Government. But the fact that such a chapter exists was made public and this lead to a petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court seeking that the chapter be made public since it concerns all people.  In response to this petition a single judge bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court asked for the said chapter and it was duly brought by the Solicitor General of India in a sealed envelope.  The Judge saw the chapter and gave his opinion, which was that its contents be made public while also giving the Union Government the opportunity to contest his judgement which the Union Government did.  The matter went to a two judge bench and this bench stayed the previous judgement and asked the Union Government to once again produce the document in a sealed cover and bring it to them for perusal and further judgement.  This is all fine, nothing wrong.  However, certain other events caught me entirely by surprise.

There was a case filed in the City courts of Hyderabad saying that the Chapter Eight was slanderous and a Judge directed the city police that they register a case on Justice Sri Krishna and the other members.  I am a layman and I do not understand these things too well, but how can a case by filed on someone when the document is still a secret?  I am sure there is a legal mechanism that makes this possible.  Maybe the basis for filing the case is the judgement of the single Judge.  But I don't know.  What took me by even greater surprise is the fact that the Osmania University Teachers Association organized a seminar on Chapter Eight and how atrocious it is.  During the seminar (which was held over one day and had many speakers) it was said that the contents of the report are available.  I was even told that the chapter itself is available.  If and I say if, this is true isn't this a mockery of the judicial system?  Are people just wasting time doing seminars on things which are imagined (and that is quite possible) or is there really a leak of some sort?  Whatever the case I am confounded completely.  

If it is a leak and the whole thing is public knowledge then isn't the judiciary wasting its time and money deciding if something should be shown to the public when it is already in the public domain.  Since there is no confirmation that the debates are on things which the said chapter speaks about, I can only hope that these things are not from the report.  But if they are, then somebody should be made accountable for the leak, whoever that person maybe.   And here I stop since anything more may not be appropriate.