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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of games of war and the loss of innocent lives

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

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

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

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

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

It is unbelievable, yet it seems true

Reading the newspaper this morning gave me a huge shock.  There are two things about our country that continue to astound me.  One is the education system and the other is politics.  Just when I think that things cannot get any worse, things go down a few more notches.  These are two areas which are bottomless pits or perhaps in cosmic terms black holes. Let me come back to the point of the shock that the Hindu of today gave me.  The front page carries an article about our Home Minister and his take on the Telangana problem.  Mr. Chidambaram, whose admirer I once was, has started falling to newer and newer depths from the fateful date of 9th December, 2009 when at almost midnight he made this strange announcement regarding Telangana and promptly went back on it in just a few days when there was hue and cry from the other side.  Then the Sri Krishna Committee was constituted and it even submitted its report.  The chapter 8 around which there was a lot of controversy was supposed to be "secret".  Judicial courts were brought into the picture by a petitioner who wanted to know why the contents were not being made public.  Even while the courts were trying to decide whether or not there was merit in the Central Government's stand that the contents of the said chapter should be kept confidential, in Osmania University a seminar was held on the "Chapter 8 of the Sri Krishna Committee".  To my utter surprise I saw not one but several copies of the chapter doing the rounds.  Everybody claimed that they knew the contents and the draconian aspects of the chapter were discussed and condemned.  So what was the secrecy all about?  Why was the time of the honourable courts being wasted by the government?

The Telangana issue has been through many dimensions and the latest utterances of the Home Minister of India, Mr. Chidambaram along with what I just stated in the paragraph above show that this issue is now one that is also exposing the nature of governance in India.  Perhaps a little bit of explanation is necessary here.  The Home Minister has apparently said that the political parties of Andhra Pradesh should come to some kind of an agreement on what they want and then in consultation with them the Centre will decide upon what to do with the demand for a separate Telangana.  The Hindu quotes the Home Minister as having said that this is an issue concerning Telugu speaking people (what about the Urdu speaking people, the Gujaratis, the Marwaris, the Marathi speaking people who have made Hyderabad and various other parts of the state their home) and that it is for them to arrive at some understanding and the Centre is only a "facilitator". That is the word that shocked me.  The government now is a "facilitator"?  This then brings many questions to my mind, but I am not going to unload all of them on to you, dear reader.  I will only put out the ones that concern us all.

I want to know if this facilitator called the Central Government will facilitate secession by some states in the North Eastern part of the country such as Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram just to name a few, if a few political parties or groups demand secession?  Will it also facilitate the independence of or accession to Pakistan of Kashmir if the Hurriyat and other militant groups exert enough pressure on it (the Centre that is)?That is the first concern and my first question is about these concerns.  The second question I want to ask pertains to the idea of democracy itself.  Is democracy nothing but the operation of pressure politics?  If the Telugu people reach a consensus that they want to stand divided and the Centre is fine with that, then what about the demand of the Gujjars that they be classified as Scheduled Tribes?  That is a unanimous demand from the Gujjars, so why does the government not give them what they want?  What is governance then?  Giving what politicians want?  

The Home Minister has said definitively that there are eight political parties in Andhra Pradesh and some of them have made up their minds while others have not.  As per the Hindu of today, the TRS, the BJP and the CPI want a separate Telangana.  The CPI(M) wants Andhra Pradesh to stay as it is.  The Congress, the YSR Congress and the TDP are undecided, while the MIM will wait for the Congress' and TDP's stand before it makes its own stand public.  This is part of the report in the Hindu gave me a second shock.  Let me explain. I will start with the MIM.  Asaduddin Owaisi in the past definitely said that he believed that it is in the interests of the Muslims for Andhra Pradesh to be as it is.  His brother Akbaruddin Owaisi once said that if people from Hyderabad can go and work in other countries such as Dubai, how can you stop anyone coming to Hyderabad in search of employment or business?  Now why is the MIM saying that they will wait for the Congress and the TDP to come out with their stand before they speak their mind?  Next let us consider the BJP.  When Chandrababu Naidu was Chief Minister and when at that time Lal Krishna Advani had visited Hyderabad and was boarding a plane at Begumpet Airport to go back to Delhi, a TV reporter had asked if the BJP was for giving a separate Telangana to which he emphatically said no.  When asked for reasons, he said that Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand were carved out of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh because these regions were far flung from the capitals of the states that they were in and that this was hampering administration while in the case of Telangana, the Capital was right int he middle of Telangana and therefore this issue was different from the other three.  When the BJP and the NDA were voted out of power in 2004, the tune changed completely and the BJP said that it stood for a separate Telangana.  It even made that promise in 2009, but no one believed them and so they won just two seats.  

The YSR Congress now.  After the first phase of polling was done and dusted in the 2009 elections and when the Telangana region had finished voting, the then Chief Minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy, went to campaign in the Rayalseema region where elections were scheduled for the second phase and said that if people did not vote for the Congress (not the YSR Congress), then people of Rayalseema would have to have a passport to go to Hyderabad because the design of the TRS and the idea of separate Telangana was to deprive people of Rayalseema and Coastal Andhra the right to send their children to good schools in Hyderabad and also to work and set up businesses there.  The poor man died and his son YS Jaganmohan Reddy as Member of the Parliament went into the well of the Lok Sabha along with members of the Telugu Desam Party to say that he stood for an undivided Andhra Pradesh.  The man now steers this party called the YSR Congress and says that he is the true inheritor of his father's legacy.  His father's and his utterances in the past are clear, so where is the necessity for new thinking?

The Telugu Desam Party really confounds me.  Its supremo, Chandra Babu Naidu says Coastal Andhra and Telangana are like his two eyes.  In 2004 when he went for elections and was sure that he would comeback to power he said that the TDP stood for "Samaikhya Andhra Pradesh" or "United Andhra Pradesh".  The TDP along with the NDA received a drubbing and since then Naidu has stopped talking of United Andhra Pradesh, concentrating on his two eye theory. What does that two eye theory mean anyway?  Does it mean that they are two distinct entities or does it mean that they have to remain in the same face?  Classic case of sitting on the fence.  I will quote Mark Knopfler's lyric from his song "Once Upon A Time In The West" where he says "sitting on the fence is a dangerous course, you might even catch a bullet from a peace keeping force". 

 In 2004 YS Rajashekhar Reddy just about stopped short of saying that he and his party were open to creating a separate Telangana and therefore had a truck with the Telangana Rashtra Samithi.  In 2009 he did a complete volte face and I have already mentioned what he said.  The TDP had a truck with the TRS in 2009. The TDP and the Congress have two lobbies.  Nagam Janardhan Reddy and Revanth Reddy have promised the people of Telangana that they will make sure a Telangana is created.  Yerran Naidu of the same party has assured people in Coastal Andhra that his party will not let Andhra Pradesh be bifurcated.  Both belong to the same party.  The Congress under leaders such as Sukhender Reddy and Madhu Yashki are striving for a separate Telangana while JC Diwaker Reddy and Kavuri Sambasiva Rao are striving to keep Andhra Pradesh as it is.  The Praja Rajyam Party which is shortly merging with the Congress started by supporting a "Social Justice Telangana" and ended up supporting "United Andhra Pradesh". Now after the merger is completed we will never know what Chiranjeevi who started the party stands for.

Now to comeback to what the Home Minister said, "arrive at a consensus" and then approach the Centre.  Are politicians allowed to do what they please without taking the aspirations of the people into consideration? How can one political party be home to two warring groups?  What kind of democracy is this?  I have written about Team Anna Hazare and said that they do not constitute Civil Society in any sense of the term and that the tactics that they were using were tantamount to blackmail. How different are our politicians from that?  Politicians functioning for individual gain rather than working in the interests of their constituents.  The sad thing is that everybody knows the truth behind "United Andhra Pradesh" and "Separate Telangana".  The politicians are only interested in Hyderabad.  The Rayalseema politicians control land mafias in Hyderabad and surrounding areas (Greater Hyderabad).  The Coastal Andhra politicians control land, educational institutions and various businesses.  They have been making hay for sometime.  The Telangana politicians after they have left the TDP or the Congress now want to create an atmosphere conducive for their taking over Hyderabad and all the goodies that come with it.  Nobody cares two hoots for the rest of the state.  What is sadder is that people despite knowing all this are not willing to teach these politicians a lesson.  The people spectate while the politicians play their game of one up man ship over each other.  The bad thing is that this spectating will prove costly since the politicians are playing with our lives.  If we do not act and let our views be known, we will deserve whatever we get.

How much lower can we fall?

This is going to be a very short post.  I even considered not making it, but I feel terrible about what I saw in the newspapers today and I thought I must share my angst about it.  Today's Times of India, Hyderabad Edition, has put a news item where it quoted TRS leader Harish Rao as having exhorted teachers in the Telangana region to tear the part of their text books that contained the poem "Maa Telugu Talliki Malle Puvvu Danda".  It is very bad on Mr. Harish Rao's part for saying such things first of all to teachers and for dragging a celebration of the Telugu language into the dirt and filth of politics.  

India is a country where books are considered to be sacred and no one even touches books with dirty hands, leave alone tear them.  Politicians like the above mentioned show what kind of education they have had with statements and exhortations as the one he made.  Telangana and its people deserve better.  Telugu is not the sole property of the Coastal Andhra people.  In fact, it is said that the Telugu spoken in the Karimnagar district is the best in terms of its accent and usage of words.  Harish Rao and his uncle K. Chandrashekhar Rao hail from that district but the latter uses abusive Telugu and justifies it by saying that Telangana Telugu is like this only.  Nonsense.  We have illiterate people with no values heading various political outfits and these will do more harm than good to the new generation.  Telugu is the language of Telangana as well apart from other languages such as Urdu, Marathi and Kannada.  I hope our politicians do not drag language, literature and culture into the abyss of politics and set a bad example for students. I hope the teachers will not oblige Mr. Harish Rao and tear up books.