Indian Politics - Caught between fasting and feasting

I have been away from the blog for sometime since I really did not see anything worth writing about.  However, thanks to the separate Telangana issue, Babu Rao Hazare's anti-corruption movement (I seriously do not know if one can call it that) and by elections that are due in some places, political antics have started coming to the forefront of things yet again and I thought I will share some thoughts with you about the way in which politics are moving forward (actually it should be backward).

P. Chidambaram, the honourable Minister of Home Affairs of India has after making two controversial statements on Telangana in the December of 2009, has once again made a statement.  He says post Bakrid a plan of what will happen to Telangana will be revealed.  That has galvanized the politicians and media in equal measure.  The political agenda in the country is very much dictated by how the media, especially TV represents things.  I deliberately call it representation and not presentation. If you look at K. Chandrashekhar Rao's channel, T News the only news that you can see is about Telangana.  It is mainly about how Congress politicians are continuously betraying the separate Telangana cause but there are also instances when one does see a little more in the form of lionising the likes of K. Chandrashekhar Rao, K. T. Rama Rao and Harish Rao. On the other hand if you see ETV2, the news channel of media baron Ramoji Rao, there is the vilification of the Congress for its failure to take care of farmers with additional inputs about how Chandra Babu Naidu and the Telugu Desam are fighting for some worthy causes.  Then there are the sundry news channels that are looking for something to happen somewhere so that they can send their crews to those locations to fill time. So it could be the fire in the building which houses the Reliance Supermarket or it could news of the OU student who gave up his life for Telangana  by jumping in front of a train in Mancherial.  He did so because he was suffering from jaundice and urinary tract infection which he could not fight since he did not have a job which would be due to him if only Telangana was granted.

Then there are fasts.  Today's newspapers are carrying news about various people fasting.  One news is that Acharya Konda Lakshman Bapuji (the first part i.e Acharya is a recent addition and the last part i.e Bapuji was used from many years, but what is interesting are that both the titles are self conferred much like how film stars confer themselves with titles such as King and Prince), a nonagenarian politician, who was fasting in New Delhi has called off his fast.  He started the fast for a separate Telangana but to me the reasons for his calling his fast off are not yet clear.  Acharya K L Bapuji even when he was a septuagenarian was interested in grabbing land around the Hussain Sagar lake in Hyderabad. He grabbed land from Andhra Pradesh Tourism, called it Jala Drushyam and hired it out for various purposes such as weddings, parties, rock shows and other such things and apparently made a pretty big pile before somebody in AP Tourism realized that the land belonged to them and took it back.  He kicked and cried but had to surrender the land back, though he kept the money that he made from that piece of land.

Then there is Komatireddi Venkat Reddy who is fasting for a separate Telangana even after he has been shifted to NIMS in Hyderabad.  Then there was a lady DSP Nalini, who resigned from her post because of daily humiliations from Andhra officers in the police force.  She says she has resigned, she did this once before, but the police department has said that they have suspended her for bringing disrepute to the police force.  I liked that bit because I was not aware that the police had reputation that could be spoilt.  Anyway, she, meaning Nalini, has decided enough is enough and will soon begin a fast in Jantar Mantar in New Delhi for a separate Telangana so that officers from this region will not be humiliated by Andhra Officers.  I request her to also include in her demands a promise from the Central Government that no Andhra persons will be posted in the new Telangana state if they are selected for IPS by passing the UPSC exam.  For those who do not know police officers are posted to various state cadres by the Central government after they clear the Civil Services Exam and only the top get their home cadres.  So it is still conceivable that those from the new Andhra State who are not in the top may pull strings to come to neighbouring Telangana so that they can be near their own state.  In doing so they will once again humiliate officers like Nalini.  So this much has to be ensured.

I think I have written enough about fasts, there have been so many in the last few months.  Mr. Hazare and his team, with their moral superiority over others have gone on fast so many times that I have forgotten to count.  In this illustrious list of blemishless fasters (my coinage, please excuse me for that but I like the sound of it) are the great Narendra Modi, the incomparable YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, the venerable Chandra Babu Naidu, and all those wonderful middle class people of India who joined Hazare's cleansing efforts by fasting at home for one day, two days or many days.  I am stunned and stupefied by the fact that a country which has such morally unquestionable politicians and a middle class with tremendous rectitude, has such abysmal quality of politics.  I guess it is all down to the rich and the poor.

The rich are greedy, very greedy.  That is what Mani Shankar Aiyar (I think that is the spelling he uses) said when asked to comment on the inaugural Formula1 Grand Prix of India, which was being hailed a huge success by the Gaur family that runs the Jaypee group that constructed the circuit and conducted the Grand Prix, Vijay Mallya and Saharasri Subroto Roy Sahara who co-own the Sahara Force India Formula1 team and many more rich and the famous.  Mani Shankar Aiyar who was once the sports minister of this country believes that India hosting a Formula1 GP, a play ground for the rich and the famous, was morally unsustainable since India had millions who had no access to sanitation, nutritious food and decent housing.  Point taken Mr. Aiyar, but what is the Congress the party to which you belong doing about these things?  Why is it saying that individuals can subsist at Rs. 32 per day and be called above the poverty line?  What has the Congress which has ruled this country for fifty years or more (excuse my arithmetic if it is wrong, I am no good at numbers) been doing to alleviate the suffering of the poor and the destitute?

They have been too busy like the politicians from EVERY other political parties, fattening their purposes and feasting on the thousands of crores that they have made and are still making whenever, wherever and however possible.  They have been winning elections (all representatives of ALL political parties) by giving the poor the ability feast on biryani and beer when the elections are due.  The morally superior middle class will not vote and the rich and the famous are too busy feasting to stand in line in the sun to vote.  Maybe they will along with the middle class if the Electronic Voting Machines are carried to their houses by service personnel appointed by the Election Commission of India.  If the Election Commission is proposing such a move it will do well to remember that the service executive should be trained to read out the names of the candidates and himself press the button on the voting machine upon instructions from the rich and the famous and the worthy middle class voters.

It is disgusting to read news of fasts for causes that stem out of personal agendas and make them look like universal causes.  It is offensive the level of politics have come down well below the sea level.  We are free falling into the lightless, bottomless pit of corrupt politics and most of the time people like me and you do nothing about it.  The question is can something be done?  If so how?  I have no answers for those questions but I have a couple of pointers that could well give us some indication about where the answers could be if we made an attempt to look for them.  This is already a very looooooong post, so I will save that for the next post which will come pretty soon.

P.S. The usual excuse of not having time to proof read and asking for your forgiveness is true for this time as well.  Thank you. 

Where is Andhra Pradesh heading?

Perhaps starting this blog was a significant mistake of mine.  Even though I have decided that there is no point in continuing the conversation about Telangana people keep asking me questions and since I have started something, I feel obliged to continue it and answer questions that people ask.  Here are some of my thoughts on what people have asked.

The last few days have been of significance in the State of Andhra Pradesh where life has been paralysed or crippled depending on where one lives.  If you are in Telangana the strike that has been launched by the employees of the Government of Andhra Pradesh in the Telangana region is most mystifying.  Those of you who read my blog will remember that I once quoted my father on development in Telangana and how my views and his do not match on the question of separate Telangana.  I even said that he was the Coordinator of Gazetted Officers supporting a separate Telangana in 1969.  If you are wondering why I am getting autobiographical again, here is the reason.  I asked my father as to what the justification was for gazetted or non gazetted employees seeking a separate Telangana.  His answer was that an overwhelming number of employees in the government were from the Coastal Andhra region and that they had a superior complex and spoke deprecatingly of the local Telangana people.  I am aware that post that agitation, Andhra Pradesh has been divided into zones and all employees up to that of the gazetted level are drawn from within the local zones.  This local zone employment has also come into universities and other quasi government bodies.  So my question is why and what for are the non gazetted employees of Telangana agitating for?  (This time I have spared my father of this question mainly because he is now an octogenarian and a government employee who retired more than twenty years ago).  Why is the separate State so important to the government employees, so much so that they are willing to not work and inconvenience common people?

The answer to that question lies in unions.  The existence of various unions among employees is essentially an advantage and a disadvantage for political parties.  If they are in government, unions are disadvantageous mainly but if they are in the opposition then they can be of great use.  Union leaders can be used for the creation of strikes that are crippling.  In the case of the APSRTC, the unions and mainly the National Mazdoor Union are using this as an opportunity to regularize the services of ad hoc and contract employees.  The coal miners are agitating for something that I do not know, but they are not working exclusively for Andhra Pradesh since thermal power plants in Andhra Pradesh and in the Telangana region are synchronized with national grids and the lack of adequate power generation is not problem for people of this region alone.  Anyway, this strike has meant power cuts lasting more than 12 hours in villages of Telangana and that has been the scourge of farmers who require their pumpsets to run for the saving of the crops.  The APSRTC has accumulated losses and this strike which is making the corporation lose crores of rupees everyday will ensure that the corporation will never recover and will ultimately become a burden on the tax payers.

In all this clamour there are some people who claim that Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar have supported a separate Telangana.  I think some air must be cleared here.  Linguistic states as an idea found support from Mahatma Gandhi but not from Nehru and Ambedkar.  It was the desire of Ambedkar to leave the State of Hyderabad as it was and he believed that having a relatively developed city like Hyderabad as the  capital of a state that had the Marathwada region (now in Maharashtra), the Gulbarga region and the Bidar region (now in Karnataka) would be good for the development of the whole region.  In the reorganization of states these regions have now been integrated into other states.  So where is the relevance of quoting Ambedkar over this. Similarly Nehru had reservations about how composite states based in language would be.  He was in that context talking about how a developed Coastal Andhra region which was under the erstwhile Madras Presidency could dominate the undeveloped Telangana region.  The Madras Presidency has also since been divided into many regions and once N T Rama Rao famously said that Madras (now Chennai) should never have been given to Tamil Nadu since it had an overwhelming number of Telugu speaking people. My problem with the idea of Separate Telangana has always been this.  It cannot be seen as a stand alone issue.

This is where myopic and uneducated leaders step in to queer the pitch.  The problem of this country is mainly that politics have become the exclusive prerogative of muscle and the money that it supports.  Today there are people in sitting in the United States of America arguing about how Coastal Andhra people have colonized Telangana.  If the Americans were to fear the colonizing of America by Indians then that gets categorized as Xenophobia by these very same people.  I would like to see how many of them would be comfortable with "Indians go back".  In all this filth and muck the future of the poor and their children is that which is taking a severe beating because they can never emigrate elsewhere or send their children to other states [(including the United States:-))] and they will be pushed back a few more years and recovering from that pushing back will not be possible.  The education system of this country which is manned by illiterates and scoundrels who want to perpetuate caste politics, is not helping matters.

What is most disturbing is how political parties are least bothered about people but playing games of one-upmanship.  The CPI (M)'s Prakash Karat has questioned the Central Government's indecision and has flayed its attempt to convene all political parties again after the Sri Krishna Committee has consulted all political parties and given out the option of leaving the State of Andhra Pradesh as it is and creating separate legally binding autonomous councils for Telangana with special extra funding as the best one.  This is understandable since the CPI (M) has been maintaining that it does not support bifurcation.  But what confounded me completely was Harish Rao of TRS also saying the same thing. When I talked about this a very enlightened social scientist has said that Sri Krishna Committee has also given the option of a Separate Telangana with Hyderabad as Capital and that this should be pursued.  But that was not the ideal option, as per the committee I said and was told "for us that is the ideal option".  Enough said.  I leave it to you dear reader to draw your conclusions.  I cannot claim that my line of thinking is the best and don't intend to either.  Like I said, I belong to Telangana and have only ever lived in Telangana so I can continue.  My concern is about what parochialism and fissiparous tendencies can do to the future my country.

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

If you listen to fools, then the mob rules

The title of this post is a line from a song by the British Rock Band, Black Sabbath.  That seems so apt to describe the political situation in this country in general and this state (Andhra Pradesh) in particular.  Everyday the newspaper carries stories of scams of different variety where wily politicians have siphoned off thousands of crores of rupees, or about violence and bandhs and threats.  The TV channels are the same.  The sensationalism that the TV channels resort to would make one think that we are living in a war ravaged part of the world.  While that is sensational the underpinnings of what is happening in this country and Andhra Pradesh are probably portends to what might be in the future.  The Telangana imbroglio continues with no signs of any action or serious thought being given to this issue.  Everybody seems to be waiting for Sonia Gandhi to make up her mind and tell us what the future holds for us.  I cannot help but think, who is Sonia Gandhi to decide?  I am not alluding to her Italian origins when I say that.  I am only questioning as to why one individual has to be given the power and authority to decide the fate of people.

Talking of people, it is very disheartening and sad to see rabble rousing of one set of people against the other and the statements of the Osmania University Students Joint Action Committee that they will start an "Andhra Go Back" movement and throw out the "outsiders" and attack their properties are distressing, to say the least.  What kind of a country are we living in when Indian citizens are not allowed the right to live anywhere of their choice without fear and anxiety?  The beating up of various Government functionaries by TRS leaders is indication of the tendencies of fascism creeping into the so called people's movement.  Buses carrying government employees being attacked and government not being allowed to function are all indications of the fascist tendencies and measures of desperation.  Xenophobia levels are mounting and those are being further fuelled by opportunistic politicians.

I have never named people and I will continue that tradition of mine.  But what I find unbelievable is that an academician has decided to become a politician (nothing wrong with that, but he should quit academics and join politics full time and not do this thing of taking leave occasionally, signing the register and go off on jaunts to politic) and has also decided to every half an opportunity warn various sections of the population of "dire consequences" if they do not fall in line with his dictats.  The man who teaches the virtues of democracy has himself become a "Great Dictator".  Perhaps the greatest cause of sadness should be the TRS strategy of emulating the LTTE and bringing small children into the fray.  A little more than a year ago I had seen the TRS bring scores of little children to the famed Arts College in Osmania University.  I had even made a post about that.  Now in newspapers I see little children carrying Telangana flags and shouting slogans.  This hit me much harder when I saw something a few days ago.

I had been asked to travel to neighbouring Karnataka to deliver a valedictory address for a seminar organized by a government college there.  I had to travel by road to get there and the good people from the college said that I can travel by a taxi and that they would pay the fare.  I found that all along the way, there were problems.  People had parked tractors across the road.  When asked as to why they were doing this since there was no rasta roko, they said that their villages were getting erratic power supply and that they wanted the electricity staff to come to them.  They were being told by the police (who were about 2 in number at every place where this was happening) that the electricity department staff were on strike the people kept saying that is not our problem.  Long queues of traffic were forming on either side of the road and at most places ultimately it was brawls that settled matters.  In one or two places, the striking non-gazetted officers of the Government of Andhra Pradesh had pitched tents in the middle of the highway and only letting small vehicles through from one side.  Trucks were parked for kilometres on both sides and I heard some truckers pleading that they were carrying perishable cargo and that since they did not even belong to this state they should be allowed to go and these people were told that they have to endure hardships if we (the agitators) had to have our demands satisfied.  When I finally reached the venue of the seminar, the time for the valedictory was long gone and only a few students were made to sit and listen to me.  One of the people there pointedly asked me why people in Karnataka had to put up with the Telangana bull shit (his words, not mine) when they had nothing to do with it.  Apparently he was stuck there because his train to Bangalore was cancelled due to the rail roko in the Telangana region.  I can go on about these incidents but these will suffice.

If one looks at the anatomy of the problem one can see the cause of all this.  First of all we have politicians who are mainly goons and thugs and are most avaricious.  They require thousands of crores.  Elections and being elected are for them means to satisfy their hunger for power and money.  They are incapable of understanding finer things such as development, people's aspirations etc.  Then there are the upper and middle classes.  The upper classes are so rich that they will not be affected by anything.  If things take a bad turn here they will fly to some other country till such time things are conducive for their return.  The middle classes are very much like the politicians.  Full of themselves, greedy for more of everything and aspiring to be like the upper classes.  What matters to them is which fashion designer is hogging the lime light, which actor is doing what and they are constantly trying to break into the rarefied portals which are used by the glitteratti.  They are also not satisfied with the pay packets that they have.  Their pay packets already run into several lakhs of rupees but it is not enough.  Armed with this stupidity they are quite happy to declare their support to half baked people like Anna Hazare who thinks he has the magic wand to get rid of corruption from this country.  The support of the middle classes to the Hazares of the world (and the Hazares do not have enough intelligence to tell their front from their rear) is also limited to stupid posts on Facebook or the occasional jaunt to a public place where there will be a candle light vigil while a rock band belts out popular songs which have nothing to do with anything.

It is this attitude that has been widening the gap between the rich and the poor and the properly educated and the improperly educated (and the uneducated).  It is in this gap, in this emptiness that the lumpen elements to society grow.  Profile the lumpen person.  He has no access to anything.  No education, no medicare, no comfort of a home, no comfort of a family, nothing.  It is this lumpen person who becomes the mercenary and the weapon in the hands of the politicians who are anyway thugs themselves.  This lumpen person is least bothered about the fact that children are losing education and their future (for him there is only a present, no future), that people are dying due to neglect (death is an everyday occurrence and does not move him emotionally), that the state is losing thousands of crores of rupees (he does not even understand the numbers and sees no reason to try and understand them) and that the country is suffering (so what is new in that? he would ask since that is the one thing he understands).  The self righteous, self consumed and socially irresponsible rich and middle classes have to pay this price.  When there is a fire raging it is stupid to think that it will only consume the others and not the self.  It is this inability of the afore mentioned classes to see beyond their noses that has landed this country in this quandary.  It is these classes that have proved Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill right.  Gandhi said that there was not enough for greed even though there was enough for every man's need in this world. It is the greedy and avaricious attitude of the rich and the middle classes that has made them numb to other people.  So how can they expect the others to be anything but numb to their problems?  Churchill famously said that after independence India would ultimately be ruled by scoundrels and all sorts of silly fellows.  I suppose I do not have say anything more on that.  So the fools are the rich and the middle classes and therefore the lumpen mob (which is their illegitimate heir) rules.

P.S. Short of time did not proof read.  Mistakes maybe excused.  Thank you. 

This is now an anti poor people's movement not a people's movement

I still cannot understand this continuing strategy of targetting and inconveniencing people in the name of an agitation.  This is sheer idiocy.  Crippling road transport, rail transport, rasta roko are all anti poor.  They are the ones who use State Transport buses to go to various parts of the city or to travel to other places.  With no bus services these people are worst hit.  The most shameless and barefaced of the lot or the doctors striking work.  Only emergency services will be attended to.  So the poor have to wait for their illness to become an emergency before they can get the doctors to attend on them.  I keep saying poor people, because the rich can go to private hospitals, they can travel by their own vehicles and if the destinations are far they can use air transport.  Shamefully a university teacher threatens schools and asks them to close down and yet again the first hit are the government schools where again the poor send their children to.  Pensioners are worried that they may not get their pensions on time.  Not all pensioners are rich. Many of them need their pension on the first of the month to pay their grocery bills and medical bills.  It is sickening to see 5 year old and 10 year old children being made to carry Telangana flags.  Instilling hatred from a tender age to ensure that the future generations will also fight the same filthy battles based in caste, religion, region and any other putrid rubbish that one can think of.  There is no sign of governance anywhere.  Traffic police simply turning a blind eye to people driving on the wrong side of the road, without lights....the list can go on.  Shame on the agitators and shame on the government at the centre and the state.  Using common people to settle political scores and to play games of one up man ship.  I had decided not to blog about this nonsense but each time patience is tested.  A good professor says we know how to make up for lost time.  I too know.  Give marks for anything written or unwritten.  These degree holders only need to go out into the world to know that their degrees have no value.  Maybe they already know that. This has nothing to do with people.  These are games that politicians play.  They simply use the shoulders of the people to fire guns at each other.

Communal Harmony

Its been quite a while since I last made a post on this blog.  It is not as if there have been no issues to talk about. It is just that the same issues keep cropping up again and again and my views on those are pretty much established (at least that is what I hope).  In India we have been seeing this communalism debate cropping up again thanks to the verdict of a court of law sending back issues regarding Narendra Modi's involvement in the pogrom of Gujarat.  Modi has taken that as a clean chit to him and his opponents mainly the Congress have said that it is nothing like that. Meanwhile Facebook is witnessing posting of a number of statistics. Some showing the Congress as being responsible for various communal riots and pogroms while others show even more statistics to say that the BJP is communal.  In all this I have no interest in posting about anything because in India given the pragmatism that has set in to politics and since politics have been emptied of any moral or ethical content it is more than likely that both parties have played the communal card for whatever gains that they may have seen.  I do not want to take sides here because to me being on either of the two sides means ultimately the same.  In India politics are such that there are many parties using different names but doing the same thing to either come into power or to stay in power.

I have in the past posted a link sent by one Elizabeth Potter who said that they wanted all religious and ethnic groups in America living in harmony and without mutual suspicion. I posted that link then because I believe that we are all ultimately one people (human beings) and we have this one planet called Earth which is our home.  My views have not changed.  I believe that there is a necessity for us to collectively look inside ourselves and find that humanity in us all.  Elizabeth Potter has sent me yet another link and wants me to post that on this blog.  I am doing that because like I said we should all learn to live in harmony.  Her cause seems to be consistent with my own out look to harmony.  But like I said the last time, I do not know who she is or what her organization does beyond making these documentaries.  If there are Americans reading this post I request you to come to your conclusions about Ms. Potter and the work she and her friends are doing.

Here is the link she wanted me to share with you all.

http://myfellowamerican.us/

Please see this and decide for yourself.  On the face of it, it seems like a genuine thing but as I said I do not know her personally at all.  Please use your discretion about this.  Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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