The World is NOT a "Clash of Civilizations"

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

Here are some caveats from my side.

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

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

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

What is a democratic protest?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antics Hazare and his cohorts are at it yet again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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