Is a true democracy really possible?

The scholars among the readers please forgive me.  What I am about to write may just be banality or tripe that is already well known to you.  Like all good human beings, I am a narcissistic person who likes to write stuff and feel good about it.  One of the underlying themes of this blog which is now reaching three years, this way or that, has been that of democracy.  This whole thing started with my challenging of the idea that the separate Telangana agitation was democratic and that it was a people's movement.

But over the nearly three years, the posts on my blog have gone in different directions some of them about education while others were about leadership and such issues.  Since I am a pretentious person, I like to think that I can theorize about things and critically interrogate issues to see how much water they hold.  My previous post was about the ills plaguing Indian Nationalism and it ended on a pessimistic note with entreaties on my part to the Prime Minister of India which I am confident have reached nowhere near him.  But there were questions that were whirring in my mind (giving the rate at it which my mind functions the whirring had to be rather slow) and lo behold I have found answers to questions that many had found centuries and millenniums before.  But indulge me and read on my explanation about democracy and its true existence.

For all those of you who are familiar with history of Ancient Greece, the Greek Polis has been seen as the seat of democracy.  You also know that there is nothing true about that particular understanding.  Very few Ancient Greek poleis actually practiced any serious form of democracy.  And if one were to read the Greek philosophers of Antiquity they were particularly contemptuous of democracy as a form of government; the most prominent among this school of thinkers being Plato who likened democracy to mob rule.  If Plato were to see modern India he would have said "I told you so".  But I jump the gun, so let us get back to some sense of chronology.

I do not want to make this a lesson on democracy, so as our American friends would say I will cut to the chase (though I have often thought that chases are dull and dreary affairs).  The revival of democracy happened in the modern period post the Renaissance and the Reformation, concomitantly with the necessities of rising capitalism and the formation of Nation States.  Nation State formation is the natural corollary of spreading capitalism.  Capitalism, everyone tells us is something that encourages competition and tries to enlarge markets all for the benefit of the consumer.  If ever there has been a blatant lie told to the human race this is it.  For the true nature of capitalism is to enlarge markets but restrict competition.  In order to do so some principle is required and that is when the Nation State system was invented.

As opposed to the Greek Polis or the Ancient Indian Janapada or Ganapada, the Nation State system tries to identify capitalists who can be excluded from the competitive process.  Without being disrespectful to social science scholars who spent substantial parts of their life trying to identify the principles on which Nation States were built, I would like to point out that Nation States were formed on pragmatic grounds using any one or more principles to keep competition out.  Language has often been cited as a ground for the construction of Nation States.  But we have a Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland which speak German and are three different Nation States.  France, Belgium and parts of Switzerland speak French but they are different Nation States.  In Spain, Spanish and Basque are spoken yet it is one Nation State.  So it is the pragmatic principle laid down by an oligarchy that decides whether X or Y is a Nation State and then imposes restrictions on competition in trading and selling in those areas on those who do not conform to the pragmatic norms that have been laid out.

This led to wars and constant interference in each Nation States' affairs and therefore the Europeans signed the Peace of Westphalia where they said that each Nation State is Sovereign in matters pertaining to its internal matters.  And thus colonialism was born.  After shutting each other out from their respective Nation States, European Capitalism and Nation State system went in search of new markets.  Here let us take a breather and return to some important concepts.

While this was happening, it was obvious that neither kings nor the Pope could be trusted with authority to monitor the free market in the new Nation States.  Kings had a notorious reputation that ran for centuries to take monetary favours and declare certain markets as being open only to certain products and arbitrarily levied taxes.  The Pope was even more autocratic and more powerful than the king and since he was the representative of God's monarchy that encompassed the whole world, he could not be entrusted with the running of the new and yet fragile Nation State system.  That is when, while the likes of Adam Smith were advocating a free market, the likes of John Locke were advocating democracy.  But democracy did not mean power to the people.  For Locke and most of the European world democracy was the power of decision making given to people who could earn 40 shillings a week without having any encumbrances on that earning.  Women were automatically ruled out of this process.  This process continued into the 20th Century when finally Universal Adult Franchise became a reality; in countries like Switzerland as recently as 1973.

Now that the breather's function has been served let us get back to the idea of spreading capitalism and new markets.  The only problem with spreading capitalism, which is also colonialism is that it required a machinery (a bureaucratic one) to run the everyday activities of administration in the colonies.  So some of the natives were educated and the unintended consequence of this education was that the natives realized what was being denied to them.  And therefore Nationalism and Nation State system became a pan global phenomena.  There were three kinds of colonies; the first two can be lumped together actually but I split hairs for a reason.  The first kind of colony was represented by the United States of America which declared independent from the authority of the British monarch.  It talked about great things but ultimately it was to be an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy.  French aristocrats like Alexis de Tocqueville were very impressed with this oligarchy and called it a democracy only because it was not ruled by a monarch.  The second example is colonies like Australia and New Zealand; home to convicts who could not be trusted to be anywhere near their home country, Britain.  These were quite contended to be ruled by the British Monarch.  

The third kind of colonialism was to be found in India, Africa, China and South East Asia.  Here foreign rulers came and set rules for the natives.  These countries are of interest to us.  I will leave South East Asia from this narrative since its colonial experience is slightly different from the rest of the world. That can be a separate story in itself.  But India, China and Africa are interesting.  In Africa the only loyalties that people had and recognized were tribal loyalties. But the Europeans fought wars there and created national boundaries most of which are not understood by the people of Africa perhaps even today.  That is why there are coup de tats all the time and no semblance of any collective rule.  China chose to go the Communist democracy way.  Which means that it borrowed the Iron Curtain policy from the erstwhile USSR and maintains it even after the disappearance of the USSR and the so called communist democracy from the rest of the world.  What we know about China is what it shows the world.  It show cases Beijing, Hong Kong Shanghai and Guangzhou and nobody knows what happens in the hinterland.

India is interesting.  It is transparent and there are no mysteries about it.  It is corrupt to the point of embarrassment and its politics are a national shame.  Now let me come to the point of this post.  If the USA the second biggest democracy represents an oligarchy, India the biggest democracy in  the world represents unfettered lumpenism and rule of the goons and thugs. The USA by maintaining an electoral college and by not welcoming all and sundry into the decision making process maintains the oligarchy that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Samuel Adams along with the modern day Cincinnatus George Washington wanted to maintain.  The minority white population pretty much sets the agenda of democracy and maintains it by keeping the burgeoning population of Hispanics, African Americans; God bless them because they choose to reinforce the white agenda by prefixing African before American while the white populations do not call themselves British Americans, German Americans or Irish Americans and so legitimately are the REAL Americans and Indians who go there with great fanfare become Indian Americans and so I joke that in America there has been a movement from American Indians to Indian Americans and none of them will be the Real Americans.  

In India it does not matter who you are.  If you are willing to be bought or terrorized or a willing accessory to fraudulent democracy all is fine.  So while an old two hundred plus year constitution in America is amended less than thirty times in India a 65 year old constitution has already been amended more than a hundred times.  A wonderful contrast.  But look at the theoretical aspects of democracy and representations.  Democracy is supposed to one person, one vote.  That is the representation principle.  But it is hugely flawed.  Take the case of America in 2000.  Al Gore is supposed to have got the popular vote, but the electoral college voted George W Bush.  After a legal battle decided by judges who are all appointed by various Presidents at various points of time, George W Bush was declared winner.  One person, one vote?  What kind of representation of constituents is this?  In India we have a simple majority system.  So imagine a constituency of 100 people.  A and B are contesting the elections.  A gets 51 votes and B 49.  One person one vote.  In India's simple majority system A wins the election and represents even the 49 who have voted against him.  So somebody talked about a proportional representation system.  A party which wins a certain number of votes will send a certain number of legislators but in this case people do not chose their representatives, the party does it for them.  So I could be represented by someone who I choose not to represent me.  So democracy is not a solution; it is a problematic.  

In this situation why complain about politicians and politics.  Just go back to where we started.  The Nation State system and capitalism and democracy and the bureaucracy are devices to keep people out of power and not empower them.  Some carry that task out in a sophisticated manner, while others like India do it crassly.  And other countries do not even pretend to have this holy cow as their governing principle.  Ultimately, it is all the same where one section disempowers others, some through sophisticated chicanery, others through brazen transparency and yet others through out right war.  The moral of this story is that there is no just system in the world; only a lot of talk about it.

Not proof read.  Excuse all errors of grammar etc please.  Thank you.

What is happening to Indian Nationalism?

It has been a while since I last made a blog post.  In fact the one that I made the last time was rather emotional and I was well advised by friends and well wishers to remove it from the blog.  But I am sure by then many actually had read that post and therefore I decided that I shall stay away from writing till such time that I was feeling comfortable with life again.  That is precisely the reason behind delaying this post, which I otherwise wanted to make a week back.  

I do not have to tell you about the exodus of people from the North Eastern part of the country leaving the southern states in huge numbers because they feared for their safety.  The genesis of this problem lay in the fact that a couple of months ago students from the North Easter part of India were thrashed by some locals.  And when rumours began to fly that deadlines were given for departure from various states, then people actually started moving out of Maharashtra and the southern states in huge numbers.  The actual trigger for the incident is the killing of a people belonging to a certain religion in Assam by the agitators who have been demanding a separate state for the Bodos.  This act had its echo in Mumbai where members belonging to the religion to which the killed members belonged held demonstrations saying that there was no security for the minorities in this country and that the government was doing very little or absolutely nothing to make them feel secure.  Then there have been reprisals to these arguments and ultimately the whole thing culminated in threatening emails, phone calls and the exodus itself.  What this whole episode demonstrates to me is an increasingly emerging xenophobia within the country.  This particular episode is even more poignant because this time the xenophobia has been directed at people from a region which already feels that they are not treated as Indians.

It is common practice for people to refer to North Eastern people as Chinese due to the fact that they have features which are different from the people of the rest of the country.  I have had many friends from the North Eastern part who have always told me that there are very few people in this country who actually know that they are Indians, most just think that they are Chinese.  It is therefore not a big wonder that there are insurgency groups in the North East and their claims are vaguely recognized by some people.

Now let me come to the point that actually got me started with this blog in the December, 2009.  I have consistently said that though I am a person from Telangana I oppose the movement for a separate state.  I have also unequivocally stated that the argument "we will rule ourselves" is a potential minefield because the constitution of the country says anyone can contest an election from any place in the country and that they can acquire property.  In fact the right to property was originally placed in the list of Fundamental Rights and only later when the constitution was amended and the word Socialist appended that it was converted from a Fundamental right to a legal right. I have argued that this particular argument would legitimise all the other demands for separate states, be they Bodoland, Gorkhaland, Vidarbha etc.  Now this particular incident was a result of the Bodoland agitation continuing. 

Ever the opportunists politicians demanding a separate Telangana have decided to the up the ante because they can now fish in troubled waters.  The TRS and the Coordinator of the political Joint Action Committee who ironically happens to be an academician have seized the opportunity to once again start threats.  The Convenor/Coordinator of the JAC has in fact threatened to call a Million March to the Centre of Hyderabad which happens to be the bund on the Hussain Sagar lake.  Over a year ago he had called for a similar thing (in fact the nomenclature was the exact same Million March) and it resulted in vandalism and desecration of statues of famous Telugu literary, political, devotional and musical figures.  Those statues have not been replaced yet.  So what does the Convenor want?  A finish to what was left unfinished then?

In India politics have taken huge precedence over everything else and in that caste and religion are the two most important variables.  If the Telangana agitation was a Reddy attack on the Kamma people, it has now become a Backward Caste (this is a nomenclature that is NOT recognised by the constitution of India and is a convenient perversion of Other Backward Classes for the creation and maintenance of vote banks by visionless and ill educated politicians of this country) attack on all other castes.  The dimension is beginning to assume even more menacing proportions since there is now a demand that there should be a separate roster of promotions for Scheduled Caste employees and this is being opposed by parties like the Samajwadi Party which claim that the Scheduled Caste people have already enjoyed too many benefits and privileges at the expense of the Backward Castes.  In Andhra Pradesh there is already a movement which calls itself the Most Backward Castes movement and is fighting for recognition as those who are worse off than the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.  Already all Backward Castes are calling themselves Most Backward Castes.

So what we see is this race to be categorised as backward in India. A number of people have argued with me that this happening because the Constitution of India is a fundamentally flawed document.  So everybody can demand reservations or other kinds of sops in the name of backwardness of caste (the BC and the SC movements), in the name of backwardness of regions (the Telangana, Vidarbha, Gorkhaland agitations apart from the Bodoland issue) and backwardness in the name of religion (those fighting for Dalit or Scheduled Caste status from among Christian denominations and those fighting for reservations for Muslims as backward community).  This despite the fact that the State has almost completely (with the exception of UPSC exams) withdrawn from providing employment to people.  I agree that there are a few problems in the Indian constitution one glaring example being the complete lack of definition or guidelines about who constitutes a tribal population.  Loop holes such as this have led to the Lambada people being categorised as Scheduled Tribes in Andhra Pradesh, as Backward Caste in Maharashtra and General in the land of their origin which happens to be Rajasthan.  In fact, most Lambada people draw their lineage to the Rajputs who happen to be Kshatriyas.  But we know that no document in the world is perfect and the problems with the Indian constitution are not any more than the ones with any other constitution. So there is nothing seriously wrong with the constitution.

Even the best constitution cannot support politics that quagmired in chicanery, deception and duplicity.  As long as greedy politicians are going to set the agenda for Indian democracy, irrespective of the constitution problems will arise and persist.  It is perhaps India's bane today that there are coalition politics and that they will not permit any wise decisions to be taken.  But if one were to look at the reason behind coalition politics then one can see that they are a result of the exploitation of fissiparous and parochial tendencies within the mindset of the Indian people.  The success of politicians and their agendas of division of people into vote banks is a natural corollary to the basic intolerance that people in India have to difference.  While it is all well to claim that India has survived as democracy for the last 65 years without interruption since independence, the prognosis need not be seen in this light.  I have claimed before and am doing this again that to divide Indian people is the easiest thing in the world.  That is because each individual and groupings draw their identities from different levels of society which is hierarchically organised.   This has been the most unfortunate contribution of Brahminical Religion in India; a contribution that has become so strongly entrenched in the minds of people that they are unable to break free. 

Centuries of Brahminical Religion and its domination means that it is firmly ingrained in the psyche of people to draw their identities from difference rather than commonalities.  The upwardly mobile caste groups in the country have perpetuated this tendency.  But in the last few years there has been a change.  Thanks to the politics of the DK movement and its various iterations in Tamil Nadu and the Telugu Desam party in the Andhra Pradesh and the defining moment in Indian history when VP Singh to protect his Prime Ministership by introducing the Mandal Commission based reservations in the country, the caste pyramid has got inverted.  Now lower in the pyramid translates to greatest power.  This would be acceptable provided this pattern is consistent. What seems to be the real problem facing the country now is that there is fight amongst various caste groupings to occupy the lowest position in the pyramid and thereby garner most power.  In all this those who do not have the hope of ever being called backward due to their caste or religious status have started taking recourse to the regional card.  Due to the perpetuation of these divisions to gain power or to remain in power politicians have been keeping issues that need to be finished off alive and creating new ones wherever possible.  The result is an increasingly fractured Indian Nationalism.  At the rate at which politics are being played out on the basis of parochial identities, the days when the identity of Indian and Indian nationalism disappear may not be too far away.

I wish I could write to the Prime Minister, for he is a person for whom I have great respect.  I wish I could tell him that he is not a politician and therefore should not act like one.  I wish I could ask him to sacrifice his political career by taking a principled stand on issues which can be detrimental to the National interest of India.  But then as some on said if only wishes were horses.....

I am doing a volte face and I am writing about the politics of Andhra Pradesh in the light of YS Jagan's arrest

Only a couple of days ago I made my shortest blog post in which I stated that I was not writing about the arrest of YS Jagan Mohan Reddy because I had nothing new to contribute, at least not yet. In the two days that passed since that post, enough has transpired to make me change my mind and write a post about it.  Whoever said that the world can change in a matter of hours was right.  In the last two days, things have changed so much that it is impossible to ignore those developments.  Let me tell you here that this post of mine is not just about YS Jagan Mohan Reddy's arrest.  It is all about the politics that surround it; these are politics that demonstrate how institutions in this country have collapsed and how politics have now found a new nadir. I am as a proud Indian totally devastated by the rot that has set into the politics of that country and how that has now percolated to all institutions of governance in the country.  This is worrisome for the future of the nation because while opportunism can never be eliminated from politics it cannot be accepted that opportunism and the complete lack of morality in politics and institutions that driven by those politics will be the sole reason behind the governance of the country. 

I was once hoping that capitalism would do some good to this country.  Though I am by no stretch of imagination a Marxist, I somehow seemed to have accepted his argument that capitalism had a constructive role to play in history and in this case the history of India.  I realize today that I had succumbed unwittingly to the fallacies of Western logic that include the freedom of the individual and its inculcation leading to the collapsing of traditional collectives in traditional societies and thereby  leading to some emancipation.  I was hoping that the introduction of capitalism into India would lead to the dissolving of traditional loyalties of caste, religion and region and free Indian society from the shackles of retrograde thinking.  Today I realize that despite my constant distancing of myself from Marxist thinking and from Orientalism (the ideas that Western societies when they describe Eastern societies from a vantage that is convenient to them) consciously, I have actually accepted both of them without any critical thinking.  My folly with Marxism I have already expressed now let me explain my other folly.  By saying that capitalism and individualism would dissolve "traditional" loyalties, I had unwittingly accepted the Western division of Eastern societies into traditional and modern (also progressive) without too much consideration.  I have walked into the traps that I thought I had been consciously trying to avoid and with my eyes firmly shut, when in reality I was deluding myself into believing that I was considering everything carefully.

If you are wondering what the above paragraph has to do with the subject of this post, I will tell you that it has everything to do with it.  In fact, the change of mind that I have had about posting about YS Jagan and his arrest has everything to do with the realization of my twin follies. First let us consider the idea that capitalism dissolves the individual's links to identities imposed upon him by society. My thinking was that with capitalism and individualism caste based, religion based and region based identities would become redundant.  But if you take the year 1991 as a marker in Indian history for this was when the latest wave of economic liberalization and globalization was initiated and consider the history of the country and its politics one would see that it is in the times of unfettered capitalism that politics of caste, religion and region have been strengthened like never before. Political parties such as the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Bharatiya Janata Party which represent caste, region and religious interests have gained true strength in this capitalist society.  So rather than getting rid of or weakening of primordial loyalties, those have been consolidated and converted into vote banks. Of these caste groupings are the strongest.  It was once contended that Maoism (previously Naxalism) believed in keeping regions and people backward so that roads are not built and development does not take place and this would keep the forest sanctuaries of the Maoists intact.

I do not know for sure if that was the interest of the Maoists, but I now know for sure that this is indeed the strategy of parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.  Keep the Other Backward Castes and Dalits (Scheduled Castes) backward and then you always have an interest to articulate and come to power.  It is not once but many times that both the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party have come into power; and not even once did either of the parties do anything for the people whose interest that they are purportedly supporting.  While the Samajwadi Party provided a platform for the political careers of Mulayam Singh's family, the Bahujan Samaj Party provided several platforms for Mayawati to invest public money in making and placing statues of herself.  The less said about Lalu Prasad Yadav and his Rashtriya Janata Dal the better. What he did for to the politics of Bihar is painful to recall even for writing this blog. 

Capitalism brought regional parties like the Telugu Desam Party to the forefront of things.  The Telugu Desam was interested in the promotion of the business interests of the Kamma caste but brought that interest in the form of regionalism of the Telugu speaking people.  Post the latest wave of capitalist liberalisation of the economy when K Chandrashekhar Rao fell out with Telugu Desam Supremo Chandra Babu Naidu, he used the same principle that was first used by Naidu's father in law NT Rama Rao while founding the Telugu Desam Party.  He dusted the separate Telangana issue which was first used by M Channa Reddy to fight the coastal Andhra interest in the Congress Party.  Unsurprisingly the Telugu Desam Party became a victim of its own strategy and today regionalism has reached a new high with life of people in the Capital of Andhra Pradesh having been disrupted for three years.  All developmental activity is suspended and it is now once again battle of castes which gets articulated as the interests of the region.  The caste politics which were made mainstream by VP Singh have actually strengthened the BJP since VP Singh was following the strategy of Ambedkar in trying to unite the Scheduled Castes with Muslims.  The addition that VP Singh made to this strategy was to bring in the OBCs into the ambit of the caste coalition, something which was done with great success in Andhra Pradesh by the Telugu Desam Party.  This allowed the BJP to talk about Hindutva by saying that Muslims were outsiders and oppressors of the original population of India and that they should be kept out of any coalitions involving Hindus.  In fact, even Muslim had to adopt Hindutva as his motto in order to considered a nationalist. This has met with communalism from within the Muslim ranks exploited by parties such as the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen.  Both the parties has been around for many years before but the strengthening of religion based vote banks has been incredible post these developments.

Capitalism in India strengthened politicians by providing them with new means of earning money.  One must remember that capitalism's primary objective is the realisation of profit and not the sustenance or maintenance of morality.  Politicians have used the necessity of various capitalists to step away from the moral path to their advantage and have built huge fortunes by taking recourse to corruption.  At one point they even realized that it would be to their advantage to create regimes of governance that would bend the capitalists (especially the multinational ones) towards corruption and bribery by introducing practices of governance which made it impossible to have any service without "additional payments".  The money thus earned has carefully been used to spend on keeping vested interests alive by creating caste based, religion based and region based vote banks. The best way to create and keep these vote banks alive is to ensure that issues related to the vote banks are never resolved.  This has also meant that now it is possible to identify politicians as a separate class for themselves despite their public posturing.  This new empowerment of the politicians by capitalism has led to Indian politics taking the Plutocratic turn (something that I had discussed earlier in another post). 

The makings of a Plutocracy and dynastic politics were always there in India but surprisingly capitalism instead of weakening the tendencies has strengthened it.  I would like to point out here that even in an advanced democracies such as America there is some presence of family (read that as dynastic if you like) influence on business, sport (especially motorsport) and politics.  But what we see in India is on an unprecedented scale and has brought new meaning to what the French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had called the paradox of poverty amidst plenty. Families holding power have used that power to turn themselves into corrupt and even more powerful families.  And along with wealth and power comes ambition. This is where the question of YS Jagan Mohan Reddy and his ill gotten wealth comes into the picture.  If there is an innocent reader here who thinks that the arrest of Jagan Reddy is indication of the law of land kicking into action, I would ask that person to desist from thinking along those lines.  YS Jagan Mohan Reddy's and his father's corruption are nothing new.  Yet the prosecution of the surviving son and mudslinging against the dead father are recent activities.  It is here that one should remember plutocracies and family politics and see how within the Congress party two families have come into conflict and how one has been trying to liquidate the other. Of the two families one has history and a past while the other can be compared to a start up company.  So this could be Microsoft vs Google or Google vs Facebook kind of rivalry, the difference being that this is being played out in the political arena.

The two families within the Congress party that I am talking about are the Nehru-Gandhi family which has always had its share of sycophants before PV Narasimha Rao tried to do away with the family's influence when he was Prime Minister.  There are different characterisations of PV Narasimha Rao as a person, most comparing him to Machiavelli or Kautilya and others being charitable to him by saying whatever he did, he did for the party and the country rather than for personal gain.  There is truth in both arguments but for moment we shall not look beyond his attempts to push the Nehru-Gandhi family into the background and succeeding in running a minority government.  But at the first available opportunity sycophants such as Arjun Singh brought the family back into the picture (and for his services Arjun Singh was rewarded with the Human Resource Development ministry which controls education and in typical style Arjun Singh went onto destroy education in his country as best as he could).  However, Andhra Pradesh which has always been a bastion for the congress except perhaps for 15 -20 years saw the emergence of YS Rajashekhar Reddy as the leader who did what he wanted to do (which is amass wealth and power) but by keeping the Nehru-Gandhi family happy and reasonably secure. His death and his son's ambition brought his family in conflict with the Nehru-Gandhi family.  Jagan Reddy saw the victory of the Congress party after nine years of Telugu Desam rule and its coming back to power as the result of the efforts of his father.  Armed with this belief and with the truck loads of wealth, he decided to stake his claim for the Chief Ministership of Andhra Pradesh citing the case of Indira Gandhi succeeding her father Jawaharlal Nehru (not a valid parallel since there was Lal Bahadur Shastry in the interregnum) as Prime Minister and Rajiv Gandhi succeeding his mother Indira Gandhi (valid parallel since Rajiv Gandhi became PM immediately post Mrs. Gandhi's death) as precedents.  

The problem was that there were not many takers for his analogies but his never say die attitude and having enough wealth to want to take on the Congress party and the Telugu Desam kept him going.  When he started becoming a factor in Andhra Pradesh politics and hurting the Congress party's interests, the party headquarters in Delhi which is run by the Nehru-Gandhi family decided to exert pressure on him by trying to expose his and his father's corruption.  But Jagan Reddy has been confident because a share of his family's ill gotten wealth also found its way to the other family. That is when institutions such as the CBI have been brought into the picture and they have come in quite late perhaps due to the headquarters cleaning itself out before slinging mud on YSR's family. In this mudslinging match that has started in earnest now, Chandra Babu Naidu, K Chandrashekhar Rao and anyone else with remote interest in coming to power have started taking part.  This is okay, since this conforms to what we expect out of politicians of today.  But what is startling (at least to me) is the response of the people.  

Even as I am writing this piece Jagan Reddy's mother and sister are touring the State trying to trump up support for their son/brother and there are hordes of people attending their roadshows. Naidu is busy making allegations against both the Congress and Jagan Reddy while the TRS is busy hurling abuse at all three.  News channels and newspapers are faithfully covering all this and in all this yet another murky detail to emerge has been the revelation that a Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court was involved in taking bribes to grant bail to Gali Janardhan Reddy one of the main accused in the Obulapuram Mining Case (he and his brother are supposed to be beneficiaries of the generosity of Jagan's father and that they have returned the favour by parting with some of their wealth and giving it back to YSR's family).  The bribe amount is Rs. 10 crore.  When I wrote a piece on the Sri Krishna Committee report and said that either the Justice who denounced the report in his judgement or Justice Sri Krishna himself were wrong since they were saying contradictory things, I was chided by a lawyer friend for my misdemeanour which he said could be tantamount to me being in contempt of court.  I was glad that he pointed that out to me but today I am saddened that the judiciary which is the last line of defence against corruption, graft and fraud and the final authority that can protect the rights of people has members in its rank who do not mind being flunkies to the rich and corrupt politicians. While lackeys of corruption in the judiciary is a matter of great concern, what concerns me even more is the apathy of the people to this whole process.

When politicians of all hues and cries have meetings there are many paid people who comprise of their audience.  That too is not too serious an issue.  What is of concern is that while the paid audience is at the location of a politician's meeting or the road show is perhaps bad enough but those who sit at homes and watch these numerous TV channels who show these road shows and meeting, as if they are watching a circus. The credibility of TV news is less than zero with every TV channel either being owned directly or indirectly by politicians. Nobody who is seeing these channels is getting news, they are only getting views and yet they are glued to the TV sets.  Same is the case with newspapers.  In this scenario where people are happily spectating the games that politicians play against and with each other and where institutions such as the CBI and the judiciary are not immune from these games and their effects, what hope does this nation have?  What kind of a legacy are we likely to leave for the future generations, for our own progeny?  Look at the choices one has as political parties in Andhra Pradesh.  Congress, YSR Congress, Telugu Desam are the pan AP parties while BJP is not a contender and MIM is a niche party as is the TRS. None of these parties can boast of a leadership with rectitude.  Nationally too the situation is the same.  The UPA comprises of the Congress, Trinamool Congress, DMK, RJD and some outside support of SP and MIM and the NDA consists of the BJP, the Akali Dal, the AIADMK, perhaps the BSP and outside support of TDP if they win any seats that is and numerous other small parties.  What unites both the alliances is that leadership of the constituent parties of the alliances are headed by and comprise of corrupt leadership and cadres.  I am therefore reminded of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 when I think of the future of the country.  Also Hobson's choice comes to mind.  Whatever the metaphor, the net result is the same. I wonder who will save my beloved country and more importantly how?  Time will tell us all.  Till then I wait with trepidation and baited breath.

P.S: My usual apology of not having proof read this long piece.

The case of YS Jagan Mohan Reddy and of Manmohan Singh

Some of my friends have asked me why I have not been writing anything about the arrest of YSR Congress President, Mr. YS Jagan Mohan Reddy.  My answer is simple, enough is being written about him in newspapers and enough is being shown on news channels.  I am not privy to any information about him which will be different from what everyone is getting to see and it is too early to start generating any perspectives about it.  The same would be true for the allegations that are being made against the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by Babu Rao Hazare.  Here of course, I will admit to my exasperation with Hazare and his two buddies and their politics. Calling the PM of a nation Shikhandi is a shameful act and hopefully someone will shut the trio up and persuade them to stop playing the fool.  But then they are not playing the fool and are just being themselves.  All said and done a tedious and unnecessary side show.

This is my shortest post. This must have gladdened some hearts.

Some more about cartoons in text books

The controversy regarding the usage of cartoons in text books refuses to die down with yet another academician with impeccable credentials joining issue with Prof. Prabhat Patnaik for his criticism of the use of cartoons and his comment that academicians are not accountable while parliamentarians are.  Prof. Neeladri Bhattacharya from the Centre for Historical Studies in the Jawaharlal Nehru University and also Chief Adviser to the NCERT for History textbooks has taken objection to the piece written by Prof. Patnaik a week ago by saying that Prof. Patnaik has shifted the focus from "creative pedagogy" to "political accountability" and that in doing so he (Prof. Patnaik) has painted a picture of academicians as irresponsible people since they are deemed to be unaccountable.  He has also questioned defence of parliament based in a liberal (ideology) based system while he, Prof. Patnaik is an avowed critique of liberalism.  There is a great deal of circumlocution in Prof. Bhattacharya's piece but one tangible point is that he has rightly questioned Prof. Patnaik's assumption that textbook writing is an activity that falls under the ambit of the State and the parliament and therefore members of parliament can legitimately seek the removal of content that they find objectionable.  Prof. Bhattacharya's contention is that the NCERT is a semi-autonomous body, akin to a university and is well within its right to choose those that it deems fit as advisers and writers and accountability lies in this process itself.

First let me say that Prof. Bhattacharya's position is far more realistic and logical than the one taken by Prof. Patnaik.  Let me explain the reason for this stance.  What I am saying is limited to the fact that bodies such as NCERT or universities have to remain autonomous and cannot be asked to kowtow the whims and fancies of parliamentarians. Prof. Bhattacharya has rightly questioned Prof. Patnaik when he has said that it is not just academicians who can carry prejudices that arise out of their social position but also parliamentarians. What Prof. Bhattacharya stopped short of saying was that politicians can, if given the power, rewrite certain things in social sciences in a manner that is convenient to them.  This is where I accuse Prof. Bhattacharya or circumlocution.  It is well known that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar have been advocating the rewriting of history textbooks (something that concerns Prof. Bhattacharya since he is a historian). The BJP's avowed agenda is to debunk what it calls the myth of the Aryans as invaders and has been arguing to rewrite history textbooks which show the Aryans as the sons of the soil, a claim that is being consistently contested by the likes of Prof. Romilla Thapar. I am quite sure that Prof. Bhattacharya also would side with Prof. Thapar rather than with the BJP.  He could easily have posed this question to Prof. Patnaik.  If a BJP dominated parliament comes into being and if it can then claim its accountability to the people card and ask that history textbooks be written depicting the Aryans as the sons of the soil, would that position be acceptable to Prof. Patnaik?  Instead of asking a question directly Prof. Bhattacharya beat around various bushes including the now mandatory defence of Dalit writings (which to me is akin to the affirmative action in the USA where there is always a token black playing positive role in a Hollywood film - in fact I would contend that Hollywood if forced to show God in an anthropomorphic form, would choose a black actor like Morgan Freeman), the value of creative pedagogy, the right to self expression etc.

This is the circumlocution that I am referring to.  Is it because that a newspaper demands a certain number of words in an article that academicians take recourse to writing about things which are extraneous to the issue under discussion? Prof. Bhattacharya has said that the politicians are objecting to not one but 150 cartoons in various disciplines.  So the question is why did this particular cartoon become a national issue while the existence while objections to 149 others has not even come into the limelight.  The answer is simple.  This particular cartoon involves a Dalit Icon in the form of Dr. Ambedkar being shown in poor light through a question raised by an upper caste icon Jawaharlal Nehru. So if this is the problem why are so many professors (Prof. Palshikar, Prof. Patnaik and now Prof. Bhattacharya) not addressing the problem directly and talking about creative pedagogy and the right to expression. It does not require someone with tremendous intellectual ability to realize that the cartoon offends Dalit sensibilities and that given the nature of Indian society and politics today, it is right to remove the cartoon from way back in 1949 from a textbook in the 21st Century.  Now what is happening is that Prof. Patnaik is arguing for this above position (and rightly so in my opinion) while Prof. Bhattacharya seems to fight a proxy war on behalf of the cartoonist to establish the point that Ambedkar is not beyond reproach. I would concur with anyone who would say that Ambedkar has made his share of mistakes, for he is human and I am yet to find one human who has been perfect and if such a being is if at all found, then that being is God and certainly not human. As an aside I would like to say here that today a mythology has been created where Gandhi (Mohandas) has successfully been shown as anti-dalit and pro-casteist and not one single academician has ever written anything about this wrong portrayal.  In fact, half baked writers such as Arundhati Roy who cannot differentiate between various orifices in the human body and their functions feels at ease and is completely comfortable taking pot shots at the great man while attacking Babu Rao Hazare, who is as much a Gandhian as Hitler is one.

But to come back to the question of creative pedagogy.  I have always been very uncomfortable with the use of the term creative.  This discomfort of mine arises from the fact that most people including myself have trouble defining what constitutes the creative and how much of anything that is usually considered creative legitimate as in being non-controversial.  Do we set out with the idea that we will do things differently so that we can be called creative or does creativity become an intuitive reaction and a different way of doing things when certain established ways or processes do not produce desired results or when they start producing results that are the opposite of the desired results?  I will leave that as a question and end with another

two with the assurance that you are completely capable of judging things for yourself. Does creativity have to self conscious and does it have to involve drama?  Is the introduction of cartoons into textbooks an act of creativity?  Like I said, you know the answers.

P.S: Not proof read. Errors of syntax etc maybe excused.

Are cartoons from the past necessary in the text books of the present?

Anyone who has been following the news in India will be familiar with the row that has been raised by the incorporation of a cartoon in a newspaper by Shankar from the year 1949 into a class XII NCERT text book of today.  The row led to the vandalizing of the offices of one of the members of the NCERT committee and resignation of the two people involved in the creating of the guidelines for the said textbook.  Both the persons are fairly well known academicians with reasonable credentials.  The politicians have a raised a ruckus over the cartoon since it depicts the impatience of Jawaharlal Nehru with the slow progress of the draft committee headed by B R Ambedkar. Since then there have been many articles and interviews with eminent academicians who have contended against the perceptions of politicians that young adults are incapable of understanding the true meaning of things and therefore can be misled into believing the wrong things and therefore the offending cartoon must go.  In retaliation the academia has said that young adults are fully capable of judging things for themselves and that it is necessary to inculcate a sense of humour in all concerned. Some have even said that a picture speaks more than a thousand words and therefore there is nothing wrong with cartoons in text books and in fact they were much required.

Of the two people who resigned over this issue, Prof. Suhas Palshikar (it was his office that was vandalized) wrote a piece in the Hindu a few days ago defending the insertion of the said cartoon into the lesson.  I read the article a couple of times and I was completely disappointed with the content of the article.  There was nothing in the article that read as a viable defence of the cartoon in the textbook.  In fact, Prof. Palshikar, circumlocuted around how Ambedkar was also a critic of Buddhism and how he cannot be reduced to only one thing which is the defence of the rights of the dalits alone.  In my opinion this had very little to do with the hue and cry that were talking about the denigration of a leader (by some) and of both leaders involved (by a few others).  This circumlocution did not add to any clarity of any kind about the issue.  Dr. Yogendra Yadav the other person who resigned has maintained a stoic silence. 

Today's Hindu carried a piece on the subject by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik a well known economist of the country.  Well I do not share the ideological vantage point that Prof. Patnaik uses for his understanding of things, I have always had great respect for his scholarship and learning.  In fact while studying at the JNU I made it a point to attend his classes whenever I could even though I was not a student of Economics.  His perspectives have always been crystal clear and they are reflected in his writing as well.  And today's article was no different.  The ability of Prof. Patnaik to separate the wheat from the chaff has laid bare some of the issues that actually constitute the noise around the issue.  Prof. Patnaik is very right in saying that things such as creativity, necessity of cartoons in textbooks, freedom of the academia are all issues that skirt the main issue. In his true and mature style Prof. Patnaik has asked the question of how freedom of academia (consisting of people not directly accountable to the people) can be prioritised over that of the Members of Parliament who are elected by the people on the basis one person/one vote (I mention this for a reason which will become evident in the subsequent lines of this post) and are therefore accountable to those who have voted for them. He also questioned, and very rightly, the objectivity of academicians who more often than not carry all the prejudices that their positions in society carry.  He also pointed out rather starkly but in an extremely dignified manner the fact that circa 1949 dalit voices in the country were not yet in a position to be made themselves heard and that in 2012 all that has changed.  This is the actual point.  Those supporting the academicians and those opposing them are all actually talking about B R Ambedkar's position as a dalit leader and Nehru as an upper caste politician criticising him and Shankar drawing a cartoon around this.  So circumlocution has been happening because nobody seems to be willing to take the bull by the horns.  

At this point I would like to say that by making Ambedkar an icon of the dalits his status has also become that of a holy cow that is beyond and above all criticism.  But that is not and need not be contended against. What is more important is why should this controversy become a part of education? What purpose do cartoons serve in textbooks?  I went to school and there never were any cartoons in books and I do not believe that my education is deficient in anyway.  And as very correctly pointed out by Prof. Patnaik what purpose does sense humour serve in education?  Is that an integral part of the curriculum or more importantly should it be a part of the curriculum and if so why?

But I do have a small bone to pick with Prof. Patnaik. And that concerns the issue of accountability.  In theory, elected representatives are accountable to their constituents, but in reality in India as in most parts of the world they are not.  So Prof. Patnaik's observations about a "political class" are not entirely accurate.  Whether he likes it or not, politicians cutting across all lines watch out for each other, irrespective of their public proclamations.  I would say Prof. Patnaik's observations pitting the ideal scenario against the actual situation and that for me is unsustainable.  In his glorifying the idea of one person/one vote Prof. Patnaik has conveniently ignored the problems of the simple majority system that is followed in India and in most democracies of the world. I do not need to tell you this but I will put up a simple example here.  The size of the constituency (imaginary) is 100 people and there are two candidates A and B contesting an election from this constituency.  Let us say candidate A gets 51 votes while B gets 49 votes.  In a simple majority system A represents the whole constituency despite being opposed by a number of people who almost equal those who supported him.  A look at the data available in India about elections shows that parties have come into power rarely with the support of even 50% of voters and sometimes the figure is as low as 34%.  Prof. Patnaik has by drawing the analogy of Babu Rao Hazare's movement and the support it garnered from the middle classes has indicted the middle classes as the cause behind the controversy.  I myself am against the movement of Hazare and his cronies and I believe that they are methodically undermining institutions.  But this situation is not analogous to Hazare's movement and its agenda.  I personally think Prof. Patnaik could have made his points without getting dragged into bigger issues that only confuse people more than clarify.

I believe that the middle class and the rich class in India have been most irresponsible towards the society in which they live and therefore have successfully undermined a solidarity that should be the backbone of the society in which we all live.  And however much we criticize this deliberate and wanton abandoning of their social responsibilities by the rich and middle classes it is not enough.  But the question here is not about the perceptions of the middle class and therefore I believe that while doing the right thing Prof. Patnaik has undermined his own argument by trying to support it with issues of class.  In India the middle class is not a monolith nor is it homogeneous.  In a country where caste matters more than anything it is not possible to talk about a class.  The membership to the middle class as an economic entity has been rising and there are people from the not so upper castes and some lower castes who do belong to the middle class in terms of their incomes and their aspirations.  They would not support the vilification of Ambedkar so this is not a category to be brought out at all.  I request you to read the piece written by Prof. Patnaik (despite my criticism about a couple of aspects) since it is an excellent a lucid piece of writing and make your opinions on it and the issue it addresses.  For the record, I believe that there is no need for cartoons in textbooks, especially at a time when caste identities have become important (sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly).

P.S: Not proof read, please excuse errors of syntax and spelling.

Education in India is not only illiberal but also completely meaningless

I hope to keep this post really short.  However, the key word there is hope and not promise.  My arguments about Indian society and its educational system becoming illiberal have been vindicated by some unbelievable developments concerning the publication in an NCERT text book of a cartoon from 1948 in which the cartoonist has depicted the movement towards creating a new constitution as the slow movement of a snail.  In that particular cartoon there are references to Ambedkar and Nehru. And now that Ambedkar has been elevated to the status of a God, there has been a furore about it and some of the members of the text book committee have resigned and have been attacked by various lumpen elements of Indian society.  Educational institutions and their functioning has been disrupted and academicians who normally lead non-descript lives have started making headlines of newspapers.  What kind of a society are we if we cannot poke a little fun at ourselves and have a good laugh?  The abhorrent caste system has now been inverted, with those at the bottom in the past now at the top and those at the top now at the bottom.  What kind of emancipation is this? Instead of doing away the terrible system that has stratified society and humiliated generations we have only succeeded in iterating a newer version of the same.  

Another development that I would like to comment on is that the topper of the Union Public Service Commission's recruitment is a woman, which is very good.  But she is a qualified MBBS doctor from no less an institution that AIIMS in New Delhi which is very bad.  For those of you still trying to understand what I am saying here is the explanation.  Education in India, especially higher education is very subsidized.  Every student who goes through the educational process for professional courses in higher education is subsidized to the tune of millions of rupees.  Now the top ranker of the said exam studied medicine in arguably the best medical education providing institution in India.  By quitting medicine and become a general administrator the lady in question apart from wasting the nation's money (which was used for subsidizing her education) has also made sure that there is one less qualified medical practitioner.  That means that someone who could have studied to become a doctor and may have become a good doctor probably was deprived of that medical education which would have been of use to the country. 

This yet again vindicates what I have been saying about the Indian education system.  It just trains students to crack entrance examinations without gaining any substantial knowledge.  So if you take the case of this AIIMS student who has spurned her medical education, you can see the story of a person who had no interest in medicine being forced to study it by her parents or whoever and when she gets an opportunity to dump it, she does so without too much of a problem (I assume).  If she was confident about her ability as a doctor and enjoyed being one, she would not have thought about the Civil Services examinations at all.  So now let us take this story one more step forward.  What if the said person is only good at cracking entrance exams?  She could very well have cracked the Civil Services exam but just as she did not have confidence or attitude towards practicing medicine she suddenly finds that she has no attitude for administration either.  Then what?  You take your own thoughts forward from there.

However, I would like all of you to ponder upon this question?  Do we need so many engineering graduates and people unfit for medicine becoming doctors?  Ultimately all of them are writing the civil services exams.  The third ranked person this year is an engineer.  And when some journalist asked him what his plan B was if he did not crack the civil services exams, he said he was focussed singularly on the civil services exams and therefore there was no plan B.  So what was this person doing studying engineering?  Professional courses attract greater subsidies from the government and at the end of them engineers, doctors, lawyers take the UPSC examination with Sociology, Public Administration, Anthropology as their subjects why did they study these professional courses at all?  Why could they not have done a BA which would have cost the tax payer less money to pay for subsidies and helped the government bring more deprived and needy children into the education system.  So I end by reiterating what I have always been saying.  The government should take over education from the Primary to the PhD level.  It should provide it free of cost to all citizens.  It should cut engineering seats by 90% and it should take undertakings from those who pursue professional courses that they will take up research and teaching in their professions.  Look at what happened to the IITs.  They have become graduate shops.  Where is research happening in engineering and medicine?  In the medical field sundry doctors are simply following the protocols laid down by the WHO which is controlled by medical research that is happening mainly in America and to an extent in Europe.  Most of the big contracts for engineering go to foreign companies because Indian companies do not have the knowledge base to take up challenging projects.  Our doctors and engineers are nothing but glorified technicians who are following protocols laid down in other countries and perpetrated across the world through world bodies.  Think about it, especially the young people among you who think the world would shut down without your services in call centres and BPOs. Those who think along those lines are suffering from a delusional and completely false sense of entitlement.