My personal homage to my hero

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been an enduring hero of mine since my childhood.  I have always felt awed and inspired by the legend of the man who brought the people of India together to fight against the British and bring freedom to India without violence.  As I have grown older and older, I have learnt to separate the fiction about him from what could be fact.  I aver many a time that Gandhi is celebrated and ostracized in this country for all kinds of wrong reasons.  I say this because we either accept him uncritically as a faultless person, a God so to speak, or we focus only upon his weaknesses, neither of which project him the way he should be projected.

Gandhi is no God.  He like us is a mortal but unlike us is a great man.  His concepts of satyagraha, ahimsa and his model of development based in self-sufficient rural communities that solve problems at the level at which they arise itself are what make him the great man that he is.  What saddens me today is that his detractors, of which there are many, project him as a casteist and a communalist or someone who believed in appeasing the Muslims of the country.  Without understanding the true intent of his disagreement with Ambedkar (I have their correspondence in the form of a book and I can assure you while they differed on some issues, both respected each other immensely) he has been now projected as someone who wanted to keep the caste system alive and continue the oppression of the lower castes.  The Hindutva brigade see him as a betrayer of the cause of the majority Hindus for the sake of appeasement of the minority Muslims.  The Muslims on the other hand see in him someone who wanted to establish the hegemony of Hinduism and subordinate Muslims to it.  The reason, he said he would like to see the establishment of a Rama Rajya post independence.  Nobody wanted to see that he was using the concept of Rama Rajya as a metaphor for a society that is based in equality and justice. Sadly Gandhi was the anti-hero in his own life time.  And it is that which made him pay a price with his life.  But for me Gandhi will always be the man who had the courage to speak out his thoughts, had the conviction in the rightness of his thoughts and converted his thoughts to action.  His martyrdom is also an act of courage.  He died because he believed that India should not be divided.  He was killed because he believed that all religions had taught the same morality and that it did not matter if it was a Hindu or a Muslim who was the Prime Minister of the country.  When as a child I first read Freedom at Midnight by Dominic La Pierre and Larry Collins tears welled into my eyes, especially when I reached the end of the book where pictures of the fallen great man were printed.  I have read that book again and again and for me Gandhi became the true apostle of peace and selflessness.  India produced one of the greatest human beings of all time who in turn produced for us, his posterity a free country.  But we do not value him or our country today and that is the irony of life perhaps.

P.S:  I wanted to post this yesterday i.e the day on which his life was taken away but due to paucity of time I could not do that.  Hence I am late as usual.

P.P.S:  The usual again.  Did not proof read. Please excuse errors.

The politics of vandalizing statues

Sometime ago, the protagonists of the separate Telangana state vandalized statues of Thyagaraja, Annamacharya, Sir Arthur Cotton, Salivahana etc because they did not belong to the Telangana region.  Potti Sree Ramulu's statues were repeatedly vandalized during the agitation. When this happened I had posted that the culture of putting up statues should be given up since we don't seem to be in a position to respect those great people who are a part of our history, tradition and culture.  Some reactions to this on Facebook were that  I was being extreme in my thinking and that one should not cite instances such as the ones mentioned above to make a case against putting up statues of great people.

Now at two places in Coastal Andhra, Amalapuram and Dhowleswaram, statues of Ambedkar have been vandalized.  In one instance the statue had its head decapitated.  Mercifully, some of the offenders were caught but what was amazing is the reason that they gave for their act of vandalism.  Apparently the culprits are fans of matinee idol Mahesh Babu and they found that a poster of his film "Businessman" had been defaced.  In an act of revenge they vandalized Ambedkar.  The perpetrators of the offensive act also claimed that their anger was heightened since they were inebriated.  This is to me is an indication of two things.  The first is that we have not yet learnt to value our heritage and respect great people who have contributed to Indian independence. The second is that we are still very much casteists at heart.  I make this point emphatically because across the length and breadth of India, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's statues are vandalized at the drop of a hat.  Those who vandalize his statues are presumably from the upper castes and I can openly throw down the gauntlet and say that these people are not even the equivalent of one cell in the body of the great man.  How can we forget that despite having come from a deprived and oppressed section of society the great man went on to do a PhD from the University of Columbia in 1918 (hope the date is right) something that many or most upper caste people will find to be most daunting even today. What is sad is vandalizing of statues has become a part of "settling" political scores and that is why I have once said that we have goonocracy actively supported by plutocratic politicians.

Yet again I take this opportunity to argue that we should stop putting up statues of great people.  At the Khairatabad junction in Hyderabad there are statues of Mokshagundam Vishweshwaraiah and P Janardhan Reddy.  One is in perennial state of neglect while the other is illuminated.  I guess I need not say much more.  Former Chief Minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy's son YS Jagan Mohan Reddy is putting up statues of his late father at every possible place in Andhra Pradesh.  He is sowing the seeds for future discord.  It is only a matter of time when someone will vandalize those statues and street fights between different political groups will start, bandh calls will be given, examinations postponed and normal life disrupted.  In Uttar Pradesh Mayawati has spent more on putting up her own statues than on anything else.  Again she is also ensuring that politics of statue vandalism will continue to be alive and kicking.  Another reason why I am vociferously against putting up statues is because they are not maintained.  Most of them are unrecognizable with dust and bird droppings all over them.  Our leaders like Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi and Potti Sreeramulu need to be respected, not left to the elements. If we really respect our great people create museums of Ambedkar at Pune (in fact there is one already), Gandhi at Sabarmati, Nehru at Teen Murti House and so on.  Those who really respect these people and want to know about them will make the trip to those places.  They will then earn the respect of the educated and not the contempt of the brainless and lumpen elements of an increasingly schismatic society.

P.S: Not proof read.  Errors may please be excused.

Putting the Nizam's rule in perspective

I promise you this is going to be a short post.  That is because even though the subject is big, it has been dealt with many times at different points in the blog in conjunction with the question of who developed Hyderabad.  The other day the famous Telugu poet and participant in the original Telangana Armed Struggle, Dasaradhi Rangachari was quoted by the Hindu as having said that he was disheartened by the attempts being made to project the Nizam of Hyderabad, especially the last Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan as a person who was responsible for the development of the city.  He is also quoted by the Hindu as having said that the only thing that the Nizam had done was set up the Osmania University and that too with the money of the people which he had collected as taxes.

Without in anyway questioning the credentials of the great poet and his contribution to the reduction of feudalism in the Telangana region, I would like to join issue with his reported utterances.  I am aware that he is an octogenarian and has seen more of life and the region than I have, but I have on my side an octogenarian (yes, my father, I will invoke his experience here again) and also more than forty years of living in Hyderabad to know what was the contribution of the last Nizam to the development of the city of Hyderabad and also perhaps to some areas of the region which was once the Hyderabad State.  After having read the reports in the newspaper cited above as usual it became a subject of discussion between my father and me.  While we have different views on the Telangana question (he believes in separation and I don't) we have agreements on many other things pertaining to Hyderabad.  

After reading the report I sat back thinking and the first thought that came into my head was that when I was a child going to school we were taught that Hyderabad was the fifth biggest city in India.  The other four cities were (in the order then) Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay and Madras.  Delhi was the Capital of not only the British Empire but also of the other big empire that preceded it; the Mughal Empire.  Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were port cities that were developed by the British as connection to the hinterland of India so that they could carry out trade through shipping.  So in effect we are talking of these four cities having been developed due to the necessities of colonialism.  But the fifth biggest city Hyderabad, thanks to the policies of the Nizam was never directly under British Colonialism even though it hosted a British Resident for my years.  Yet it had developed.  It was in the hinterland, not a port, did not have any solid agriculture, but it had started nascent industrial development.  Hyderabad always had wide roads, an underground drainage and sewerage system and an architectural style that was uniquely its own.  Most constructions used the now famed Indo-Sarcenic style and more importantly the city had a unique character that was derived out of its tehzeeb or loosely put hospitality (I cannot find a better word and therefore the loose translation).  It also had a system of drinking water which was a form of rain harvesting and this was done by linking various tanks that were created to hold water.

So where did this all come from?  Obviously it came from the Nizam's rule.  Dasaradhi Rangachari is not right in believing that it was only the Osmania University that was the contribution of the Nizam to development. And which ruler of any kind would do things without collecting taxes from the people?  Let me put it this way; it was possible for the Nizam to collect taxes and do nothing for the people.  But he did do something for the people.  The Osmania University was set up and along with it a translation bureau to translate technical terms of medicine, engineering and agriculture from English to Urdu.  My father tells me that the bureau was fully functional, unlike the Telugu Academy which was set up in the 1970s, which has done nothing except bring out English textbooks now. One cannot forget that even prior to the setting up of the Osmania University, there was the Nizam College set up in 1887 (hope my date is right) which was offering courses in English medium and was affiliated to the Madras University till 1948-49 when it was made a part of Osmania University when the university had switched over to offering education in English.  

The Nizam also gave scholarships to students to pursue higher studies in other regions with the rider that they come back and serve him.  My grand father and his brothers were beneficiaries of this.  The Nizam set up the Hyderabad Administrative Service and paid salaries that were higher than what the British were paying to the Indian Civil Service officers to attract good talent to his state.  He enlisted the services of the famed Mokshagundam Vishweshwaraiah who not only plotted the course of the Isa and the Musi river and created the Himayat Sagar and Osman Sagar (Gandipet) reservoirs but also created a system of interlinked tanks from Medchal tank through the Fox Sagar tank to the Hussain Sagar tank.  I am not even talking of other linkages here since I do not remember them too well.  Then he tried to create a circular railway and did create it actually much like the ring roads of today.  So where is the question of his not bringing about development?  My father tells me there was no religious bigotry either and that many jagirdars were not even Muslims.

I am not lionising the Nizam, but I think it is extremely invidious to accuse someone of having contributed only to backwardness when there are glaring examples of conscious contribution to development.  This post also does not belittle the greatness of people such as Dasaradhi Rangachari.  It has only been made because of a fervent desire to project things as they should be; sometimes even people that we may not like do good things and just because we do not like them we cannot say they never did any good. This post will also not deny the excesses of the Razakars.  That is also a true piece of history.  But this is about the contribution of the Nizam to development and therefore I have only limited myself to it. The State of Andhra Pradesh is passing through a critical phase and at this juncture it is imperative that we do not distort history and create unnecessary antipathies between people.

P.S: I only seem to make these posts in great haste and therefore not proof read.  Errors may please by excused.

Civil Society Activism - A boon or a bane?

    

The last couple of decades of the previous century and the first of this have seen a quantum increase in social activism of different varieties in different parts of the world.  India has not been an exception to this.  The emergence of new media such as social networking such as Facebook on the World Wide Web, newer channels of faster news transmission as seen in Twitter and the consolidation of traditional electronic media like radio and TV in conjunction with print media that has re-aligned itself to newer demands have all contributed to information flying from one part of the world to another.  With the emergence of the new media based in the internet and the World Wide Web we now have a new category of reporter; the citizen reporter.  There is really no limit to what kind of information can be shared between people without the mediation of editorial policies or policies of selective blanking out of information.

This process has tremendous ramifications for society anywhere.  Even in the heart of the conservative world which is the West Asian and North African part there have been spontaneous social and political movements triggered on by information sharing.  The incidents in Egypt, Syria and Bahrain are all testimony to this.  In India too, the information revolution has been playing an important part in the dissemination of ideas.  Thanks to blogging, one need not be at the mercy of the editor of a newspaper or the manager of TV or radio channel to put out one’s views apart from putting out news.  This means that traditional news carriers and the State that manipulate them have fresher challenges emerging in dealing with people’s aspiration for social change, equity and equality.

This has meant that Civil Society as a concept is more empowered than it ever was before.  Even though the original meanings of civil society were very much in consonance with bourgeois liberalism and society, with the empowering of more and more people through information dissemination, civil society is now not a body that is exclusively under the control of any one class or segment of people.  This has repercussions both positive and negative.  But not having a clear class or caste contour civil society as it exists today becomes less susceptible to any form of social, political or cultural manipulation. The flip side is that it becomes difficult to judge as to how big or legitimate a group of people that is demanding something is. This basically queers the pitch as far as the concept of governance is considered.  Most democracies in the world including India are representative democracies that function on the principle of majoritarianism.   

Elected representatives have the backing of a majority of the people of the country and in representative democracy there is transference of sovereignty by the people to their representatives through the process of election.  Without the attribution of mala fides to the elected representatives, if it was considered that they are working for the well-being of their constituents and if there are some civil society activist groups that confront the elected representatives with their demands which go against what the representative believes his constituents desire, then the question of what criteria are to be used to privilege one over the other arises.

India has been witnessing this particular problem in the very recent times with Team Hazare demanding a certain kind of Lok Pal or Ombudsman to curb the menace of corruption in the country.  One can clearly see the problem that Team Hazare poses to those who want to understand civil society activism and the response of the State to it.  The latest count of members in Team Hazare is five.  On the few occasions when Hazare has fasted in support of his demand for a certain kind of Lok Pal, crowds of people numbering some thousands thronged the venues of his fast.  Of this some could be curious by standers while others maybe his genuine supporters.  Despite that the problem would be that how can a team of five people supported by an anonymous crowd of a few thousand people dictate terms to the elected representatives of the country?  This brings in the question of legitimacy.  Can civil society activism claim to be legitimate when it is confronted by the State with a response which rejects its very basis of existence?  If it can claim to be legitimate, then what are the sources that it would cite for its legitimacy?

This therefore is not just a problem, it is a problematique from which emanate many questions of legitimacy of non-constitutional institutions.  Social movements, though often described thus, are usually anything but movements.  Each instance is more akin to an agitation from a certain section of society seeking to change its status or the status of society itself but is usually met with tactical responses from the State that seek either to procrastinate or completely dissipate demands of social change.  What makes this problematique even more complex is the nature of Indian society.  Indian society perhaps has more schisms than most other societies.  Usually people are divided along lines of caste, lineage, language, religion and region.  Therefore, the desire for movement from one state of existence to another by one social group is usually nixed by another group in civil society itself, thereby giving some breathing space to the State.

It is in this context that policy and enlightened leadership gain significance and prominence.  The country requires leaders who are able to overcome pressures of fissiparous and parochial tendencies and work for the holistic good of the society.  But for that to happen, certain structures and processes which are legitimate should first come into place. How does this happen?  I have no answers yet, but I am thinking about the question.  Should I find the answer, I will post it here.

The mythology behind projecting plutocracies as democracies

Please treat his post as an extension of the previous post.  In the previous post I was basically arguing towards the end of the post that democracy was never ever intended to be the empowerment of all.  If one were to take (and one has to take since we do not have any option) John Locke as the progenitor of the modern concept of democracy we can clearly see that the limited government concept also meant involvement of a limited number of people in the democratic process.  Representative democracy anyway is all about limited involvement of a limited number of people.  In a simple majority system of representative democracy, a model that is followed by most number of countries in the world, those who do not vote for a particular candidate are perforce represented by that very candidate, even though they had rejected him as their representative.  The implication of this is that the people who have not voted for a victorious candidate are actually going unrepresented.

Jean Jacques Rousseau the French philosopher was someone who believed in the true equality of all.  And he did not see democracy as a definite means of attainment of this equality.  This much is evident from his writings where he offers two possible models for reaching a society that is based in equity and equality.  The first of this is "direct democracy" as opposed to representative democracy.  For Rousseau democracy is truly a democracy only if it is reflective of the General Will, a concept with which many commentators of Rousseau grappled with for years.  The General Will should be understood as the "good" will which works for the good of "all" (not even one person can be left out of this all) and to borrow a phrase from Immanuel Kant is a categorical imperative.  For Rousseau it was clear that the General Will was in no way co-terminus with majority will, a concept which is central to our democracy today. Suspicious that democracy could always take a majoritarian turn, Rousseau proposed the other alternative, his second, which is even more radical than direct democracy.  This one is based in the "Universal Legislator" a person who is capable of understanding the good of all and therefore creates laws and a system of administration that would be beneficial to "all".  Rousseau believed for either of the two models to work one of the necessary preconditions was a republic consisting of very small populations in the range of five thousand people. 

Take a look at today's democracies and the States that they operate in.  India itself is a prime example of a billion people all participating and sometimes not participating in the democratic process. Non-participation is of two types, voluntary and forced.  The first is self-explanatory but the second needs a little explanation.  In many parts of the country, people are not allowed to vote either by someone else voting for them by the time they reach polling station or preventing people from reaching the polling station.  Now see this in conjunction with the main driving force of modern democracy.  The main driving force of modern democracy is the great capitalist interest.  It is no wonder therefore that Noam Chomsky says that the agenda of democracies is never the welfare of the people, it is the welfare of corporations that are large.  But since that cannot be the ground on which democracy can be made to look legitimate, it is given the veneer of working for the people.  For Chomsky, the consent of the people behind democratic regimes is a manufactured consent.  By calling this consent manufactured Chomsky is exploding the myth that democracies survive on the basis of the consent that people give.

And that brings us to the question of mythologies.  The title here says that mythology is used to legitimate plutocracies and project them as democracies.  What we have seen of Chomsky definitely supports this.  The question however is "how do myths get constructed"?  Here we can take the help of two Frenchmen, an  anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss and a specialist in understanding the construction of mythologies, Roland Barthes.  Claude Levi Strauss uses the example of how descent from one person is usually used in order to perpetuate a kinship.  Let us understand this in the context of India.  Let us take into question the kinship of the Nehru-Gandhi family.  When Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi or now Rahul Gandhi are taken into consideration their descent is traced back to either Jawaharlal Nehru or sometimes even Motilal Nehru.  But when Indira Gandhi is talked of, there is no mention of her mother, Kamala Nehru.  Similarly when Rajiv Gandhi is talked of, there is no mention of his father, Feroze Shah.  In fact, no one remembers the tale that Mahatma Gandhi lent his surname to Feroze Shah and made him Feroze Shah Gandhi when Jawaharlal Nehru objected to his daughter Indira's marriage to Feroze Shah.  Today, there is no Rajiv Gandhi but his wife Sonia Gandhi is alive but both her and her son Rahul Gandhi's lineage is drawn back to Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi.  Now see the myth, none of the people who carry the surname Gandhi today are actually Gandhis.  The descendants of the Mahatma are not rightful "owners" of the Congress Party.  It is these other Gandhis.  This is myth construction as per Claude Levi Strauss, a process that is akin to the sleight of the hand, a process of make believe.

Now for another example and this time to show the notion of "connotation" which becomes myth construction according to Roland Barthes.  We shall use an example that was used by Barthes himself but we will also remember that this example would serve a great purpose in understanding Indian politics.  Barthes talks about a bottle of wine and says that its primary significance is that it is an alcoholic brew that when consumed in large quantities could intoxicate the consumer and also damage the person's health.  However, upper classes in society have imbued the bottle of wine with secondary significations.  A bottle of wine is considered to be the drink of wealthy, those with taste for the 'finer things of life', an elixir that relaxes the mind, body and soul and also stimulates appetite.  Over a period of time according to Barthes, the secondary signification or the connotation takes over from the first and slowly obliterates it so much so that only the finer things of life, relaxation and possession of wealth are signified by a bottle of wine.  In Indian politics, the brew that we should talk about is not wine.  At its worst its some form of hooch and at its best it is cheap Indian Made Foreign Liquor spiked with diazepam or alprazolam to give the consumer a high.  This in conjunction with a local delicacy is enough to buy votes during elections.

During the electoral process, manifestos are released but nobody knows what is in them, speeches are made but nobody listens and developmental agendas are set and nobody gives a damn.  Elections in India are not seen as opportunity to empower oneself, or to change regimes for the better.  They are seen by the lumpen, whose services are bought as opportunities for the consumption of drug spiked alcoholic brews and good food while the election campaigning is on.  Most elections are won or lost on this basis.  Yet the victorious party claims that its developmental agendas have the support of the people.  And if a party comes back to power a second time it is taken as a mandate for the policies that were pursued by the government in the last five years.  However, the money (the most important component of a plutocracy) comes from vested interests such as corporations, business families and the politicians themselves.  It is this money that literally buys votes and the victors then claim that their politics are vindicated.  The agendas based either in ideology, development or identities is the mythology that legitimates the process of buying and selling votes.  This buying and selling of votes is the basis for the perpetuation of plutocracies, but the mythology generated by publicly placed agendas is what makes the plutocracies appear as democracies.

Off late in the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, there is the separate Telangana movement. It started as a movement that premised itself in politics of development and has now wound up as a movement that is premised in identity.  Whenever the Andhra-Telangana issue is raised there is talk of the Gentleman's Agreement and how the Andhra side has reneged on it.  The Gentleman's agreement is not something that anyone knows with any clarity.  Yet it is invoked again and again by both sides who are completely ignorant of its context and content and thereby both sides argue on the basis of a mythology that they seek to perpetuate. Terms such as backwardness, exploitation and self-respect are all firmly aimed at furthering these mythologies. The reality is that what is happening in Andhra Pradesh can be brought down to the feuding among a few families that seek to control the State.  

Till the establishment of the Telugu Desam Party, Andhra Pradesh was the fiefdom of Mrs. Gandhi.  NT Rama Rao challenged that fiefdom with his own by setting up the Telugu Desam.  The mantle was subsequently taken over, rather forcefully, by Chandra Babu Naidu and today NT Rama Rao's progeny are the ones who are trying to control the Telugu Desam Party and with it the politics of Andhra Pradesh.  Queering this pitch is the K Chandrashekhar Rao's family, the saviours of Telangana.  Some of the Telangana upper castes will support Chandrashekhar Rao's Telangana Rashtra Samithi so that they can either continue their domination of the region or snatch it back from the coastal Andhra "settlers" who have taken it away from them during the Telugu Desam rule.  YS Rajashekhar Reddy changed the face of the Congress in Andhra Pradesh by considerably lessening the influence of the Gandhi - Nehru family.  When he died his son Jagan Mohan Reddy decided that he should be the heir to the YSR legacy.  So he falls out with the Congress Party that does not recognise any family other than the Gandhi-Nehru family.  In the meanwhile, somewhere Chiranjeevi and his family thought they can control of the State.  That they failed is now well known and the man has saved his face by plumbing for the Gandhi-Nehru family.

These family feuds will use any language that is necessary to perpetuate their own rule in the State.  The case of Andhra Pradesh is being discussed here but this largely true of all states in India.  Politicians and their think tanks are actively creating believable mythologies which seek to project their own plutocratic agendas as democratic agendas that have the down trodden at the heart of things.  But nothing is farther from the truth, that much is now obvious.

P.S: Long post.  Not proof read.  Excuse errors please. Thank you. 

A fundamental question: What is democracy and how does it function?

On the face of it, the question that I have posed seems totally stupid.  Isn't it obvious in this day and age that democracy's definition and its operation are obvious?  Pardon me, I don't mind admitting to being a bit dense, but to me there is nothing very obvious about the definition of democracy or the ways in which it operates.  This post should have been made a few days ago, but then due to ill health, I was not able to do so.  But sometimes things do work out for the better if they are delayed and this is one of those instances.  By the time I finish writing this piece, it may become an exposition of the theoretical concerns of democracy, but those concerns are very much relevant to our everyday lives.

So let me start with the trigger that got me thinking on these lines, after all thoughts have some trigger or the other, I am sure you agree with me about this.  Yet again this post will be a reaction to the rhetoric of the separate Telangana case. I know that I have said that I do not want to post about this subject and I still mean it.  However, I am not averse to and will not be averse to invoking incidents or comments pertaining to the issue to explore larger questions about politics; be they at the national level or the international level.  The Telangana Political Joint Action Committee or T-JAC as it is popularly called, has been claiming that there is a strong sentiment for separate statehood in the Telangana region and therefore bowing to the will of the people, the Government of India should carve out a separate Telangana state.  This is what the TRS has been saying consistently and at one point the BJP joined this school of thought as did legislators from the Congress party and the Telugu Desam party, hailing from the region.  There have been threats of resignation from their posts and all that in support of the popular sentiment that is supposedly prevalent.

Now let me take the opportunity to refresh your memories about two politicians; Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu, the President of the TDP and Mr. Jaganmohan Reddy, the founder of the YSR Congress.  In the past both made it very clear that they stood for an undivided Andhra Pradesh.  In fact, Jaganmohan Reddy's father, the late YS Rajashekhar Reddy too stood for keeping the Andhra Pradesh state as it is.  The indecisiveness of the Congress party over the issue has fuelled the TDP and the YSR Congress into action in preparation for the next election whether in 2014 or before that due to some breakdown of the administrative machinery.  Once the games of election politics started a few things have changed.  Naidu steadfastly claims that Telangana and Andhra are his two eyes and that he is not anti-Telangana.  Jagan Reddy is maintaining a deafening silence over the issue despite grave provocation from his detractors.  He has been concentrating on his tactical "Odarpu Yatra" (a tour purportedly to commiserate with the people of the state who are still reeling from the shock of his father's untimely demise) to build his own mass base as a leader in his own right.  From two different vantage points, Naidu and Reddy have now been espousing the cause of the farmers in Andhra Pradesh.

To say that the espousal of the cause of the farmers is an electoral gambit is stating the obvious.  Electoral politics by their very nature demand that political parties and their leaders be in touch with their constituents.  Irrespective of the next election in Andhra Pradesh being mid-term or on schedule, it is increasingly clear that the separate Telangana is not happening before that.  This much has been acknowledged by the TRS and by the T-JAC's Chairman.  They have indicated that this may be one issue on which the next elections will be fought.  Therefore, the TRS and the T-JAC have claimed that neither Naidu nor Jagan Reddy will be allowed to tour the districts of Telangana by the people of Telangana since they stand against separate statehood for the region.  Some of the leaders of the TRS and the T-JAC had even dared the two leaders to come to Telangana.  Unsurprisingly both leaders picked up the gauntlet.  Unsurprisingly nobody except for a few members of the TRS did anything untoward.  Naidu travelled through in peace and Jagan fasted for a couple of days in Armoor (a small but affluent town in which I grew up for a while). If the opponents came from the cadres of the TRS, the supporters of both Naidu and Reddy came from the cadres of their respective parties.  For the common people it was life as usual with the now regular minor disturbances to demonstrate that something is happening throwing life a little of gear.

So what does this tell us about democracy?  It tells us that democracy is actually a surrogate for plutocracy, where the rich in order to control society and become richer still co-opt or coerce other sections of the populations in to their scheme of things by promising the earth, sky, moon and the stars.  While touring Telangana and addressing the press, Chandra Babu Naidu stunningly said that there would have been no separate Telangana movement or a party called TRS if he had not denied a cabinet portfolio to K. Chandrashekhar Rao.  I say it is stunning because while this well known all along, the admission from Naidu himself is tantamount to the admission of his guilt in bringing the politics of the state to this rather than concentrating upon developmental activity.  Unwittingly Naidu took credit for what, for once, was actually to be credited to him!!! Jaganmohan Reddy maintained a stoic silence about anything other than the farmer issue since that was what brought his father to power as Chief Minister.  By saying that the farmers of the state were in a state of neglect, the young Mr. Reddy has unwittingly accepted that what his father did for the farmers of the state (he was Chief Minister for 5 years) was nothing substantial and did not change their lives in anyway. Politicians apparently pay lip service to those sections of society that are in distress and chalk out a strategy much like a macro-marketing strategy to draw the votes of those in distress.  So in India, democracy is a plutocracy of people who become legislators by hook sometimes and by crook oftentimes but claim to have the legitimate support of the people.

So is this peculiar to India then?  The answer will be an emphatic no.  The answer is so emphatic not because I have any first hand experience of politics in other countries but because I have studied the evolution of modern day democracy.  The Greeks equated democracy to mob rule, it was only in the modern capitalist period that democracy found some respect.  The champions of modern capitalism such as John Locke and Adam Smith were also champions of democracy, but they never believed in or advocated the concept of Universal Suffrage or Universal Adult Franchise.  What they had advocated was a democratic plutocracy in which only the propertied and the rich would have any rights and say in decision making for society.  It is for this reason that they advocated concepts of free markets and limited governments.  Over the years, some sections from the mobs that the Greek political philosophers feared, were able to find their way into the process of democracy.  Once such people find entry into the democratic process, they lose no time in dissociating themselves from the mobs to which they once belonged and aspire to be plutocrats.  Therefore, theorists such as Hamza Alavi and Samir Amin are right when they say that politicians constitute a separate class much like the traditional intellectuals (to borrow a term from Antonio Gramsci) think of themselves as a distinct class.  The difference is that intellectuals play around with words and concepts and feel gratified if somebody notices what they say (they do not do anything, and I know I am implicating myself here even though I don't see myself as an intellectual in anyway) while the politicians find economic and financial gratification; something that is far more tangible.  People's aspirations incidental to this grander scheme of politicians and some benefits that sometimes get passed on to some people are also incidental and just by products of the games that politicians play.  To conclude then, democracy is not will of the people, democracy is not fairness, democracy is not justice, democracy is not empowerment of all; modern democracy is just a new name, a legitimation for plutocracy and the furtherance of the agendas of the rich, be they individuals or corporations.

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