Education in India has truly withered away

It has been a while since I have made my last post.  The truth is that I have gone on to a new job position and that has come with a great deal of responsibility and work.  I have been enjoying doing work since the satisfaction that comes with doing something useful really has no parallel.  I have been entrusted with, among many things, the task of creating concept notes and blue prints for the future schools and centres that would be established in the new campus of the university that I am now working having taken lien from my old position with my previous employer.  Thinking and working out new concepts that will probably have some effect on the new campus of my present employer has been like an elixir of life with plenty to look forward to.  The sun has been shining and not very hot.  So you are wondering why I am singing paeans of joy in the post while the title of the post itself is so gloomy.  I assure you I have not lost my mind or my senses, it is just that from the setting that I have just described I have rudely been brought back to a situation where I see dark clouds gathering around the silver lining that I had been seeing.  If you have to understand me better then you must know a story; one that is true in every single detail.

I have a niece who is now writing her Board Exams for the tenth standard, a significant point in a student's life in India.  The girl has a problem; she simply hates studies and anything to do with it.  Since it is the tenth standard her parents were concerned and with good reason about how her education would pan out.  Their concern and the girl's complete lack of it had become a source of perennial conflict between her and her parents which only made the parents desperate still.  It was into this situation that I was catapulted and somehow found myself telling the parents that she could come and stay with me since my mother is still actively a maths teacher and I myself am capable of some teaching in various subjects.

The whole thing has been a roller coaster ride for me since I found the girl to be quite stubborn, distracted and prone to throwing horrible temper tantrums.  I am not very good at handling this and after trying gamely to instill some discipline in the girl I lost the plot and told her that I would only help her if she had any specific doubts and I also conveyed my decision to the parents with the disclaimer that if they chose to keep her with me and if she failed in her exams that will not have anything to do with me.  Despite my issuing this disclaimer, for reasons best known to themselves the parents decided to leave the child under my care. Before I had conveyed my decision to her parents, I regularly felt all the symptoms of nervousness which vanished once I told them what I had to.  So for the past couple of months the attitude has been live and let live.

This arrangement suited the girl fine who would very occasionally approach me with some doubts, I suspect with the intention to just keep me happy.  But I did get to see how she studied.  Her text books looked brand new and untouched by anyone.  The only book that she referred to was this thing called "All in one". My curiosity piqued I once looked into the book and was horrified to find that it was nothing but a compilation of questions and answers to those questions.  The question compilation was apparently of various questions that have appeared in the past years and there was greater emphasis on those that appeared more frequently than others.  For sometime now I have been claiming that the schools in Andhra Pradesh have formed into a syndicate and that they provide question banks to the Board of Secondary Education and that every year questions are chosen from that bank.  The existence of this compendium is the proof of this conspiracy theory of mine being bang on the mark. For many days I lamented the fact that this level of rubbish was what school education was reduced to before the euphoria of my own work took me away from this.

The Board exams began on the 26th of March and my niece has shown no nervousness nor any determination to study.  In fact, she has been so relaxed that she has been reading Asterix comics and my Calvin and Hobbes collection even on the days that preceded an examination.  She has also been chatting on the phone with friends on the phone organizing picnics that they would go to after the exams, planning movies and how they could get tickets and reach the theatres and things of that nature. I was well and truly flummoxed when I noticed the perseverance of the same course of action by the girl before her bug bears, the maths and science exams. And everyday the girl comes home with a glint in the eye and face radiating happiness. Unable to contain my curiosity anymore I directly confronted the girl and asked her how she was doing in her exams. My interrogation was met with some mirth and merriment and the answer was that she was doing well and that 90% is guaranteed.  I know for a fact that she knows nothing and I also know that she has not been studying at all. So I asked her if she was copying to which her reply was a resounding 'yes'. Even though I was horrified I still persisted with questioning and asked her why she was so sure that the person she was copying from was writing the correct answers and what came as the reply shocked even cynic like me.  She said that her invigilators were dictating answers not just to her but the whole class!!!! And this in a school which is not even the one where she studies (to ensure that there will be no help from teachers during the exam the Board jumbles up students and sends them to other schools for writing the exams).  When I asked her if she was telling me the truth the girl was quite adamant that she was.

The question that kept bugging me endlessly is why would teachers who do not even know the students they are invigilating dictate answers to them?  I therefore decided to find out more and from other students who were taking the exams, I set about asking the sons, daughters, nephews and nieces if this was a universal practice.  Apparently it is and has been for a few years now.  All the parents are aware of this. Quite a few even had theories about why this was happening.  I will list out the theories:

1. Most schools in Hyderabad are run by managements from coastal Andhra and since the separate Telangana agitation is on, they fear reprisals and are therefore doing this.

2. Goons from various Telangana political outfits are threatening schools and invigilators with dire consequences since they (the outfits) would be held responsible since the academic years are getting disturbed for the past couple of years due to the agitations that they launch.

3. Parents have been demanding that their wards be helped in this way so that they do not get left behind in the race for marks and that this is a standard practice in Coastal Andhra and only now did the Telangana people realize the beauty of manipulating the system this way.

4. Schools have formed cartels.  The jumbling of students happens in a set area and the schools in order to maintain their 100% pass statistics have decided to come together and bail each other out.

5. Teachers take money from rich parents but since they cannot selectively help only some (then they would get caught out as having taken money from so and so) they have decided to extend their largesse to all students.

6. The Government in order to avoid a backlash from unhappy students and parents has issued instructions orally to perpetuate this practice.

There may have been a few more of these theories but I cannot seem to recollect them now.  To me it is not important why this practice is perpetuated.  It is more important that it is being perpetuated and through the perpetuation the education system and the values that it should stand for are being methodically dismantled. All these years I have lamented that students were only being trained to pass exams but now I have realized even that crutch was a false one in the first place. Now, even though, I am teacher, I have lost complete hope and interest in this thing called education.

"We don't know need no education,

We don't need no thought control,

No dark sarcasm in the class room,

Teacher leave them kids alone".

Those are lines of a lyric written by my favourite poet and musician Roger Waters.  He wrote them in a different context though.  But somehow they seem to be as applicable to this context, the one that I am referring to.  God bless our children and God save this country. Amen.

While the Government of India is investigating the source of funds of NGOs why does it not do the same about political parties and politicians?

Today's newspapers have reported that the Government of India agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation have taken up the task of investigating the source of funding of four Non Governmental Organizations that were involved in staging demonstrations against the proposed nuclear power plants at Kudankulam (I hope I have the spelling right, if it is wrong my apologies for bad spelling).  One newspaper has even connected the exercise to a speech that the Prime Minister of the country made a few days ago saying that funding for NGOs that was meant for a certain purpose was being diverted towards organizing protests against the building of nuclear reactors.  Anybody who has been reading my blog knows that while I stand for democracy and for people using their free speech to be heard, they will also know that I do not believe that democratic protest can become obstructive.  In India, in the name of democratic protest, obstructing the functioning of the government, government functionaries and institutions has become a norm.  

I have been saying that the culture of bandhs and protests where common people are put to great suffering is uncalled for.  I have also maintained that we should respect the constitution and act within the boundaries of free space that the constitution provides us with and also etiquette which reminds us of our responsibilities to fellow citizens.  I have been a critic of Babu Rao Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal for precisely these reasons.  But what is a little difficult to digest is the fact that the Government takes recourse to strong arm tactics in order to intimidate and quell any public opinion which is central to any self-respecting democracy.  

We know that corruption is rampant in this country; even among anti-corruption activists.  Kiran Bedi's falsified accounts (she says it was for a good cause, but I believe that ends do not justify means) and Arvind Kejriwal's outstanding dues to the government (public money) are striking examples of this.  Now what miffs me is that the  government will wait for someone to say something against them before launching into the past of these people and organizations.  That can definitely be called a witch hunt.  If people protest and if while protesting they have broken a law, then they should be suitably punished.  But this idea of digging into people's lives and intimidating citizens is definitely a disturbing trend one that is indicative of a legitimation crisis that the Government of India is experiencing and by extension the Indian State as well.  Fascist tendencies do not yield results.  History has taught us enough lessons about that.  The Government and the State have to overcome their legitimation deficit by winning over the confidence of the people and not by scaring them.

While one is on this subject, I shall turn my attention to the speech that the Prime Minister is supposed to have made about funding for agitations.  While the State, Government and their agencies are persecuting non-political (not apolitical) citizens, why do they not extend the same privilege to their colleagues in politics?  Why do they not investigate the source of wealth of a two bit politician who becomes one of the richest people in the country?  There are so many shining examples of this.  Why are they exempt from being investigated?  Why does the State not investigate the source of funding for agitations sponsored by political parties?  Large scale meetings, trucks for people to be transported, food for them, not to talk about booze, they all cost truck loads of money.  Why does the Government not investigate these?  I suppose that is because ultimately all politicians look out for each other and take car of each other.  It is only the common man who thinks a democracy means expression of his position that gets intimidated, threatened and forced to retract.  A bad omen, a dangerous portend to way things will be in democracies now.  Be careful and pay heed to George Orwell.  Big brother is watching you, and needless to say me too.

Why does the Mormon church want to baptize Gandhi?

It was with a deep sense of sadness that I read reports in today's newspapers that Mahatma Gandhi has been baptized by a Mormon Church in the United States of America.  I guess you can understand the reason for my sadness.  I would like to state very unequivocally that I believe in tolerance and respect for all cultures and religious practices. This is a lesson that I have learnt by reading the works of the great Mahatma himself.  But this particular wanton (and I use this expression deliberately and after proper consideration) act is something that defies all logic.  Everybody who knows Gandhi knows that he was somebody who believed in the final message of all religions.  And anyone who knows Gandhi will also know that he was somebody who strongly believed in the concept of Sanatana Dharma. The openness of his mind allowed him to grasp what he thought were great principles of many religions and Christianity was one of them.  Gandhi's introduction to Christianity and specifically the Sermon on the Mount delivered by Jesus Christ came through his reading of  Leo Tolstoy whose writings were morally instructive.  But to think that this openness of mind and the eclecticism that existed in Gandhi as far as religious practices were concerned made him something like, in this instance, a Mormon is really carrying things too far.  

One really does not know if Gandhi subscribed to Christianity in toto.  Just because he agreed with the moral aspect of the said religion does not mean that he also accepted that by birth he was a sinner, not because of some deed that he had committed, but because he was carrying the stigma of the temptation that Eve succumbed to and led to the fall of Man from Paradise.  It is rather amusing that a man who has been dead for a good sixty years and was born about a hundred and forty years ago is today being baptized.  But if you see the act of the Mormon church it can also be inferred that somehow it is trying to convey that Gandhi was a sinner and that he needed to be cleansed of his sins and if this inference can be true (and there is no reason to believe that it is false) it is obviously a deliberate attempt to mock the greatness of Gandhi.  When seen in this light, the act is hardly amusing, far from it, it can also be infuriating. And what makes the issue even more difficult to accept is that the Mormons are known polygamists and their own sect is not something that is treated with any great respect by any other sects within Christianity or by other Orders of the Christian Church.

One can probably delve into the reasons behind this act which is at its most innocent mischievous and when it is not innocent it is positively sinister.  It is sad that apart from Gandhi's grandson no political leader in the country found it necessary to protest against this. When the well known gay rights activist Ashok Row Kavi said something about Gandhi's sexuality in a talk show hosted by Nikki Vijayker on Star World, the country united as one to get that show banned.  Nikki Vijayker never again got to host another talk show.  When the great man is dead and cannot speak for himself it is perhaps time that our otherwise voluble politicians will say something of consequence.  If they do not speak up, their act will perhaps be worse than what the Mormon church did.

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.