The complexities of Indian Politics and difficulty in putting them into an existing framework

It has been a very, very long time since I have posted here, but this was one of the things that I should post since our politics have been loudly shouting about development but it seems as if the real agenda is the eating of beef and the lynching of those who eat it, ghar vapsi (home coming) of Hindus who converted to other religions, building of world class capitals, playing on regional and parochial sentiments. This time around the voice of dissent seems to have come under threat and people seem to be becoming less and less tolerant to ideas other than theirs. Therefore, I felt it is time to write about the airy fairy nonsense that most academics indulge in and how people doggedly cling to models of explanation that have been proven to be inadequate, antiquated and sometimes downright wrong. In the past some of these models served well in some historical contexts in certain geographies but in the context of India even if they did serve a purpose at some point in time, they no longer due. The explanation for this is simple. Social reality is not static and neither are politics which operate within those social realities which are changing. Social realities change politics, which in turn change society depending upon the way in which they (the politics) are played out. My attempt is therefore to highlight the failures and fortunately there are no completely successful models that I can bring to fore.
One of the well known facts about Indian academics is that it has always tried to use models that were used for the explanation of social, economic and political processes by other countries which were by default countries in the Northern Hemisphere.  Not only have models have been copied but even the proponents of the models have been lionized and almost deified. At the time of India’s struggle for independence the models of Western socialism and specifically Marxist communism were in vogue. After all, the Bolshevik Revolution in the USSR had demonstrated to the world that Capitalism could be bypassed and a society based in equality was in the process of being created. In India, the notion of socialism, albeit Fabian Socialism was quite close to the first PM of this country, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.  The Congress party had even set aside the Gandhian model due to various criticisms from personalities such as B R Ambedkar who called Indian Villages “Cesspools of decadence and casteist thinking” and being educated in the Columbia University, he also threw his weight behind the Western model of development as the blue print for the future of India.

The dominant communist model of thinking at that time believed that the days of Capitalism and the State that came into being in order to support the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists were numbered. Lenin believed that it was the duty of those countries which had successfully accomplished the Communist Revolution to take the word of the revolution forward and support all movements against capitalist tormentors in their fight for freedom.  The history of the middle of the 20^th Century is replete with different parts of the world fighting for freedom from Colonialism which was described by Lenin as the Highest and Final phase of Capitalism.  India too received notional support for the freedom movement from the USSR of then.

Pandit Nehru believed in industrialization and called dams and industries as modern temples. India adopted the 5 year plan model of development for the USSR and embarked upon a programme of modernization and development.  India also developed a public sector for growth and the public sector in its initial years was confined to what was called “mother industry”; steel plants being the best example of the same.  It was much later that Indira Gandhi’s powder puff model of socialism embraced the making of consumer durables by industries set up by the State and employing more and more people at the top levels and less at the lower levels of the industrial hierarchy. All these actions were also supported by a socialist rhetoric which in Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s own time grew shrill.

Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s adoption of socialism and socialist rhetoric respectively more or less negated the necessity of the Communist Part of India (Lenin had believed that every country should have its own communist party) but the entity continued to exist on the sidelines.  In 1964 however there was a split in the party, the original Communist Party of India owing its allegiance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while the splinter group (which later became the dominant group) owing is affiliation to the Communist party of China.

From the time that India became independent till today the scholarship of social sciences has been firmly rooted in the theoretical models of the Western Socialist left. From asking for welfare measures to splitting states the model that came in handy was something which owed its existence to some kind of leftism of the Western variety.  Everyone believed that as the country progressed more and more the traditional ways of thinking would change and new India would emerge from the shadows of its filthy, superstitious and most backward past. It was believed that as the country produced more social wealth and as more people even from the lower castes and other downtrodden sections gained access to wealth their caste identities would be wiped out and replaced with class identities. While caste is a social identity, class is an economic identity. The liberals who were also left leaning believed that development and growth of the Western variety would negate all the other identities which were a throwback to a society that existed in a primitive past. But India’s experience with globalization and liberalization of the economy did not produce the results that all leftists of various hues had predicted. In order to demonstrate this I shall look into the latest round of liberalization of the economy of India which happened in the 1990s and some of the results that it produced.

As is well known, India as a country, has diversity which cannot be fully estimated and this one factor alone is sufficient reason to argue that any proper and complete comprehension of the country’s functioning, its governance and more importantly its politics are played out is a task that probably defies totally clear and precise explanation.  Indian Politics keep throwing up exceptions to any rule that might seemingly appear, thereby nullifying the rule immediately.  The only way to beat this problem is to not believe in any kind of essentialism as an underlying principle of the appearance of the nature of politics. In fact, one can assert that this is probably true not just of politics but of other areas such as business as well. It is a well-known fact that captains of various industries making statements about the difficulty that is associated with understanding the Indian consumer preferences and the dynamics of the market process itself.

At the outset itself, it would be desirable to state that politics in India can be seen in the post liberalization of the economy phase, cannot be seen as a sequence of cause and effect.  However tempting such as exercise maybe, it will not be able withstand stringent scrutiny and provide sustainable answers; on the contrary the cause-effect sequencing will begin to collapse once it is subjected to questioning. Therefore, this will be more about the surprises that defy understanding which say was well used and established in European countries or in the United States of America.  There are myriad reasons for this and as the arguments in the article begin to unravel so will the reasons for the futility of comparison with other countries and their politics become clearer.

Much of what will constitute this article will be about capitalism and what it has done in the case of India. In fact, expressions such as liberalization, integration into the global economy, structural reforms are all in more ways than one concerned with India openly giving up the socialist rhetoric that it once used to describe itself and embracing global capitalism whole heartedly.  It would be prudent to insert a parenthesis here. Usually, in India, even among the social scientists there is a tendency to use globalization and liberalization inter-changeably.  While at a very primary that may not be bothersome, it becomes exactly that when one takes the arguments to higher levels. Equating globalization with the economic liberalization of the 1990s generates a false picture. It verifies in an apocryphal manner that globalization is a phenomenon that came into being in the 1990s, which is completely untrue and causes a huge distortion in the understanding of history of the world in the Modern period itself.  Globalization is a process that can be seen as beginning with the European countries looking out for new markets and subsequently new colonies. If this is the first phase of globalization the second phase is more in evidence in the 18^th and 19^th centuries where populations could move across the world with very few impediments. The story of the USA both in terms of the settling white population and also the black slaves by the whites is testimony to this. The third phase of globalization is perhaps a late 20^th Century phenomenon that emerged with the growth of various forms of technology, especially technology that facilitated the rapid movement of money, which was hitherto not possible. One saw the emergence of the term “Hot Money” in the 1990s which signified that money could be made to move from one market to another depending upon which market offered greater returns on investment. The third phase is more to be seen as the easy movement of money globally. It is in this period that India opened its economy to the world; a process which is termed “liberalization”.

It would be legitimate to raise a question here.  Why did India give up its socialist rhetoric and embrace global capitalism?  How voluntary was this decision?  Those who are in vaguely familiar with world history and the history of India will know the answer.  One of the biggest occurrences of the late 20^th Century was the collapse of the erstwhile USSR and the Unification of Germany; two processes that happened almost simultaneously.  The USSR collapsed into its original independent sixteen republics as a result of the pursuing of the Cold War policy of arms build race with the USA. While USA and the Western European countries did not suffer from shortage of money, the Soviet Union and the Eastern European allies that it had, suffered from acute shortage due to overspend on defence technology.  No intervention from outside was required to engineer the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Many Eastern European countries also start collapsing. Yugoslavia became Serbia, Bosnia and Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia etc. and the Czechoslovakia became the Czech Republic and the Slovakia Republic.  Other Eastern European countries such as Romania and Poland saw movements for democracy which were successful and showed a corruption of unprecedented proportions in Romania under Iliescu.  

On the other hand Germany grabbed this opportunity to bring down the Berlin Wall and unify itself.  Capitalist Europe was so confident that it moved on from being the European Economic Community (EEC) to the Economic Union (EU), wherein there was the adoption of a single currency by all European countries (exception being the UK) and travel in Europe no longer needed visas. For a change it was traditional rivals Germany and France that played a pivotal role in the creation of the EU.  In fact, many scholars of International Relations argued that Europe was building itself as a rival power to the USA and some of these theories which looked like conspiracy theories were later found to have some basis when the EU’s attempt to creating an alternative OIL BOURSE with Iran came to light. The Europeans were aware of the strength of the Petro-dollar since it was the de jure and de facto currency for oil trading. In Russia the situation was the opposite with inflation at one point rising 1500% and people having to stand in lines for hours together to “buy” a loaf of rationed bread. The story of Eastern European countries was not very different except that it had the additional component of Serbs slaughtering non-Serbs.

The Indian story is similar but different. India’s ambitions were not to become a Superpower and though it had its own small problems with Pakistan and China and a certain amount of over spend on military hardware, its main problem stemmed out of a total mismanagement of its economy in the name of Socialism.  During the time that Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of the country, he showed a vision of what the future of India would be like and how the country would be self-sufficient and not depend upon imports. Nehru borrowed the five year plan idea from the USSR and set goals to be reached.  He also emphasized on industrial development and adoption of modern methods of agriculture and he called industries the “Temples of a New India”.  It is not an exaggeration to say that Nehru most definitely laid the blue prints for the India of the future and whatever development we have today is in more ways than one a result of the Nehruvian Vision. There are people who oppose this but the opposition to this theory while not without substance would do injustice to Nehru and his efforts.

This was the time that the Indian National Congress party was functioning without a viable opposition and the country could perhaps be said was being ruled by “Oligarchs”.  Usually, the people thus represented were Nehru himself, Vallabh Bhai Patel, Babu Rajendra Prasad and some eminent jurists as well. While the term oligarchy carries negative connotations, especially in the context of a democracy, it should be understood that since the figures identified above were true patriots with hardly any personal agendas, the oligarchy worked reasonably well for India.  In fact, it was the passing away of this generation of “freedom fighter oligarchs” that set the tone and tenor for the degeneration of Indian politics into murky strategies and the descending of Indian politics into those very quagmires from which it was trying to ascend. The death of Jawaharlal Nehru post India’s loss to the Chinese in the war of 1962 had showed the first chink in Nehru’s planning.  Nehru, ever the idealist, did not desire to spend money on defence, a decision which ultimately led to the defeat of India in the war with the Chinese.

Nehru’s death is attributed to his depression and disheartenment due to the defeat to the Chinese.  Whatever the reason maybe, India’s problems perhaps started after his death. His successor Lal Bahadur Shastri, a man of slight built but immense courage, fought a war with the Pakistanis and defeated them totally. Then came the peace talks at Tashkent at the behest of the USSR and it was in Tashkent that Shastri breathed his last, after having been Prime Minister for a short period. Shastri was not an oligarch. He was a simple man who had just a few thousand rupees as his possession. He had no land, house or motor car. He brought into focus the necessity for monetary austerity and the necessity for moral courage, but the shortness of his reign meant that these could not be ingrained into the psyche of the people.  Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death also inaugurated a new phase in Indian politics; one that relied on manipulation, deception and amorality in order to stay in power.  The Congress party also became a house to a number of factions each trying to overthrow the other. This peculiar phenomenon was mainly due to the fact that there were no opposition parties that could stand up to the might of the Congress party.

The understanding of factions and factionalism is a categorical imperative when it comes to understanding Indian Politics. When the Indian National Congress Party still had the towering oligarchs who were seen as being selfless and dedicated to the growth of the nation, opposition to them or their leadership was negligible; this in spite of the existence of disagreements. Usually the party relied upon using the services of senior leaders to broker peace and bring “unanimity” in decision making.  After the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the vacuum created due to the absence of leaders who were considered to be above selfish agendas, the Congress became a party of squabbles among different leaders. Claimants to the chair of the Prime Minister became many, prominent among them being Morarji Desai. At this time Kamaraj Nadar formed what is today called the Syndicate and sometimes also as the Kitchen Cabinet in order to prop up, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi as the Prime Ministerial candidate. While Kamaraj Nadar saw Indira Gandhi as a pawn that could be moved around by the Syndicate, the lady herself had a different ambition. She wanted the Prime Ministership with all the powers in her hand.

It was this ambition that led to the inauguration of populist policies and emphasis being laid on “socialism” which was perhaps the first big transformation in Indian Politics. Mrs. Gandhi took up programmes such as Nationalization of Banks, easy and low interest based credit to farmers, launching of schemes of daily savings by the poor and increasing employment by expanding the public sector undertakings and opening new ones as well. Though the nationalization of banks was well received, the problems began with many farmers being unable to service the loans that they had taken and Indira Gandhi taking up loan waiver schemes. The employment in the public sector also increased but the patterns of employment saw more people employed in the upper echelons of companies rather than in the lower echelons.  Line workers were far fewer than staff supervisors and this meant that most of the public sector companies had become top heavy and over a time were primed to collapse.

The realization that the top heaviness of the public sector companies and their being ready for collapse was noticed by Rajiv Gandhi who became the Prime Minister post the assassination of his mother.  Rajiv Gandhi was young, dynamic and also had a vision of the future for India. He was also the first to usher in economic reforms in a limited manner by opening up some of the sectors of the Indian economy. The sale of badly managed public sector undertakings was also mooted and investment up to 49% by foreign companies was allowed in some of the sectors. This process was slow, since Rajiv Gandhi faced opposition within and outside his party for allowing the entry of foreign capital and sometimes the pushback was so severe that forward movement slowed down to a snail’s pace. Unfortunately, this also became a time when the verdict was delivered in the Shah Bano case saying that a woman who was a Muslim was entitled to alimony and maintenance.  The Muslim leaders within the party cried foul and said that this went against the spirit of the constitution which gave room for a separate Muslim Personal Law. Rajiv Gandhi yielded to the pressure and this led to the right wing parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mounting pressure on Rajiv Gandhi to introduce a uniform civil code. The net result of this was that Rajiv Gandhi went from hero to zero and his party, the Indian National Congress lost the elections in 1989.

In more ways than one the year 1989 is very significant for Indian politics. India ushered in the era of coalition governments with coalitions being formed after the electoral verdict was delivered.  One of Rajiv Gandhi’s trusted lieutenants Vishwanath Pratap Singh who had abandoned the ranks of the Congress to join the newly formed Janata Dal became the Prime Minister. Unsurprisingly, the first statement that he made to the people of the country on State Television was that the “government coffers were empty”. He was ridiculed by many an economist on the grounds that he was using a non-existing situation to describe an existing one. It was argued that coffers was not something that could be talked about in that day and age, since most governments functioned on the principle of accumulating foreign exchange.  However, Singh was doing exactly the same thing but used an archaic term that was better understood by the people. V P Singh had to deal with not only the problem of forex reserves but also with the rising ambition of his deputy Prime Minister Devi Lal.  Devi Lal was keen to wrest the Prime Ministership from V P Singh on the grounds that the latter was a Congressman and that he himself was always the main opposition.

Devi Lal’s party was called the Bharatiya Kisan Dal and Devi Lal embarked upon a tour of many parts of Rural India (especially in the North) rousing the passions of the farmers and highlighting the fact that farmers were getting a raw deal under V P Singh. When it began to look as if the sentiment against V P Singh was reaching the critical mass, the coterie that advised V P Singh asked him to counter Devi Lal by introducing the Mandal Commission based OBC reservations at the National Level. It must be stated here that only Tamil Nadu and the erstwhile undivided Andhra Pradesh (under the leadership of N T Rama Rao in 1985) introduced OBC reservations. Interestingly enough OBC stood for Other Backward Classes but in usage it was just BC or Backward Caste. It is well known that while class is an economic category, caste is a social division. Tamil Nadu and the undivided Andhra Pradesh were implementing the system on the basis of caste and V P Singh also decided to take the same route. Though it was being called OBC for all practical purposes it was BC.  

It can argued as SC leader Chandra Bhan Prasad did that there was a consensus among the people of India about the necessity for those low caste people who once were untouchables and were deprived of all the social goods that were available to others. But the creation of reservations for OBCs (from now referred to as BC or Backward Caste) disrupted the consensus. This disruption happened for a good reason. Unlike the Scheduled Castes or SCs, many of the BCs were not deprived of social goods. In Tamil Nadu, the Mudaliars and the Nadars are quite powerful, as are the Vokkaligas and Lingayats in Karnataka. The Yadavs and the Gouds in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are also powerful enjoying the patronage especially of the Telugu Desam Party but also that of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and even the Congress Party. In Northern India despite the existence of dominant Brahmins (called Bhumihars) decades the Yadavs and the Khurmis are becoming more powerful than the Brahmins and Rajputs. Toee go back to the argument of the disruption of the consensus on reservations, the anti-Mandal commission agitations that spread across the length and breadth of the country with many students immolating themselves. This was countered by the BCs and the country’s education system came to a stand still for a few months while both the sections sparred with each other. What is important to be noted here is the abandoning of categories such as farmers, factory workers, north Indians, south Indians, Aryans, and Dravidians which were used to essentially to camouflage the language of caste.  Now caste came out into the open and political groups and parties started to be formed along caste lines.

The most obvious part of this exercise (probably better described as the nadir of Indian politics) is when the V P Singh government was forced to face a no confidence motion, one of the MPs Ram Vilas Paswan gave a clarion call to members of the Lok Sabha not to vote along party lines but along caste lines. This was also the time when the BCs decided that like the SCs they too required an icon around whom they could rally. B. R. Ambedkar was the leader of the SCs and starting with Maharashtra and going on to many of the southern states, Ambedkar was deified. This deification of Ambedkar led to the usage of the term Dalit (a Marathi word signifying the oppressed) to describe the SCs. Around this time some of the BC intellectuals dug out the history of Joti Rao Phule and found that he had worked for unity of all people through his Satya Shodhak Samaj and strove for the creation of a “Bahujan Samaj” or society comprising of different people all of whom enjoyed equality.  When the Maharashtra Government included the caste that Phule belonged to in the list of BCs, the BCs made Phule a BC icon and started calling themselves “Bahujans”.

In Uttar Pradesh, Kanshi Ram who was a small time leader started the Dalit-Bahujan Party which was supposed to be a show of unity of the BCs and the SCs. This unity really did not happen but Kanshi Ram’s protégé Mayawati an SC woman became the Chief Minister while the Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh came together as Samajwadi Party or Socialist party and in Bihar the Yadavs united under the banner of Rashtriya Janata Dal which again was a party led by Lalu Prasad Yadav.  Both UP and Bihar came under the leadership of the so called BCs; the Yadavs. It is time yet again to insert another parenthesis for clarity since there was a parallel development happening in the northern part of India with an otherwise fringe political party called the Bharatiya Janata Party using an opportunity to build itself into a viable party. Later history has shown that the BJP did succeed in this endeavour. The success of this endeavour is more to be attributed to V P Singh and his cohorts rather than the BJP itself. So here is the parenthesis.

While this was the main act, a side show also was being enacted by one of the small but deadly players in Indian Politics. The CPI-ML groups (also called the Naxalites since this group took its birth in a place called Naxalbari) believed in the violent overthrowing of the Indian State which according to them was “semi-feudal; semi-colonial”. This rather unusual description was due to the fact that the CPI-ML groups (now called the Maoists since the palace coup in Nepal which was supposedly engineered by this group and in India all the different CPI-ML (Marxist, Leninist) groups came under this one banner of Maoists) attributed private capitalism to those who were in cohorts with multinational capitalism and therefore they were called colonial and the northern parts of the country where feudalism was rampant (according to them) made the Indian State semi-feudal; semi-colonial.  This needless to stay is a description that cannot stand any serious scrutiny and therefore would be as meaningless as saying “this also; that also”. Yet a mention of this has been made albeit in the form of a parenthesis for a reason. Even during the pre-Independence times, specifically in the 1930s Indian Marxists like Rajni Palme Dutt, who was the maternal uncle of assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Svend Olaf Palme, had argued that the most important category of social analysis in India was caste, since it was not only unique to India but it also lent itself to being used in conjunction with other categories. For example upper caste also signified being the more moneyed segment of society, more educated segment of society and being the dominant or ruling segment of society. D. D. Kosambi famously argued as did his followers that Caste in India plays the role of a Class. But the actual politics on the ground were veiling caste with some other name. It could be race, colour or region. The CPI-ML groups were claiming that some of the upper castes had become capitalist and therefore friendly with colonialism the highest form of capitalism (as described by Lenin) and some of them remained rooted in feudalism and therefore semi-colonial; semi-feudal had to be seen as upper caste dominated society.

However coming back to the 1990s V P Singh’s famous Mandal Commission based reservations for the BCs it can be said that not only did this act bring caste into the limelight and without any camouflage but it also strengthened the notion of Hindutva of the BJP which sought to construct Hinduism as a religion or an overarching structure which had smaller components which were the various caste groupings.  In reality however, Hinduism is really not a religion nor are the caste groups its components.  Hindu is a Persian/Arabic term that was used by the Persians to describe the people who lived on the other side of the Indus (Latin), Sindhu (Sanskrit) and Hindu (Persian). In fact, the landmass which is called the Indian Sub-continent was called Hind by the Persians. The name India was derived from Indus. What has been called Hindu was actually a Cosmology, one of many in the world but perhaps more advanced than any. It was in the 19^th Century that Hinduism was formally designated by Raja Ram Mohan Roy though he saw it as perverted due to the existence of caste hierarchy and therefore set up the Brahma Samaj to rid Hinduism and Hindu Society of its perversion.  Mohandas Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi was more charitable. He saw this Sanatana Dharma (ever unchanging Dharma) and as a cosmology and called the Varna or caste “a person’s natural calling. He argued that one family could have members from all the four varnas and this argument has been strengthened by Indologists such as Patrizia Nouvolari who claim that a person’s varna was decided by his horoscope and not by parentage.  Gandhi argued that it was the intervention of Brahminism that perverted Sanatana Dharma and made parentage the deciding factor for one’s caste and also that Brahminism created a hierarchy among castes. Perversion it maybe but this is the model that is accepted today and the BJP was quick to latch on to it.

The V P Singh strategy to survive in power was to talk of SC, BC, ST and Muslims as being those that were deprived of power (a revival of an argument that Ambedkar had originally made) and that they had to come into power in order to experience the goods of democracy. This strategy instead of strengthening V P Singh led to his downfall and gave impetus to the BJP that was arguing that Hindu were all one and problems of caste could be tackled within the family. The BJP was emphatic that Muslims were outsiders and suppressors of Hindus for centuries and therefore the idea that all these people could come together was preposterous. The ground reality of the SCs and BCs also was very different. BCs had proximity to power if not power itself, something which the SCs who were always the heathen never had. The BCs were not very happy to be lumped with the SCs. The fascinating part of the caste system is that its logic runs through the hierarchy where everyone believes that they are superior to someone else. The BCs see themselves as superior to the SCs and even within the SCs the Mahars see themselves as superior to the Chamars.

The BJP coopted the BC groups into the important areas of the structure of the organization and was thus able to break the model that V P Singh had created. V P Singh was out of Indian politics for good and the BJP was suddenly a contender. The elections that followed the fall of the VP Singh government after an extremely short tenure saw that no party had the required majority and the Congress with 240+ seats and with some support of smaller parties formed a minority government in 1990, with P V Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister. After a very long time someone from outside of the Gandhi-Nehru family became the Prime Minister of India.  In his appearance P V Narasimha Rao looked like a mild man who could possibly not be assertive. In reality however, the man proved not only to be assertive but also someone with gumption.  When he took over the forex position of the country was in doldrums with reserves just about sufficient to last a few weeks. Narasimha Rao pulled out Prof. Manmohan Singh from his position as the Chairman of the University Grants Commission of India and made him the Finance Minister of the country. Manmohan Singh was a renowned economist whose economics tended to lean towards those of John Maynard Keynes, but he set aside ideologies and opened up the Indian economy to foreign investments. Narasimha Rao’s greatest achievement is the fact that he was able to, with the help of Manmohan Singh, to run a minority government which pulled the country out from the economic quicksand that its various previous administrations had slowly dragged it into.  Narasimha Rao completed the full 5 years of his tenure and by 1995, the country was well out of the problems and on the road to not just recovery but to development as well.

India has been criticized for the size of its population but ironically enough from the 21^st century’s beginning onwards, it has been China and India (in that order) that have become prime drivers of the world economy. The disappearance of bipolarity and the appearance of India as one of the important economies in the world, also changed the way in which global politics were played out. Till the disappearance of the USSR the world was being seen from the vantage of geo-politics, but with the disappearance of the USSR and the ideology of communism and the creation of an economy based in capitalism globally, what came to the fore was geo-economics.  It is here that the vision of Nehru and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi stood India in good stead. Nehru’s emphasis on modernization and Rajiv Gandhi’s emphasis on computerization along with the fact that India has the second highest English speaking population in the world, gave it a competitive edge to deal with the problems associated with Y2K bug and this made the country virtually the service industry for all big corporations. The Americans with the help of George W Bush the President and Mitt Romney were successful in moving jobs to India so that even large corporations could benefit ensured a windfall of employment for Indians not just in India but in other countries as well.

The politics of the country defied this logic and with good reason. After 1995 when the Congress under Narasimha Rao lost the elections and the NDA or the National Democratic Alliance came into power, one saw the rise of white collar crime rising and cases such as the Harshad Mehta case where the Bombay Stock Exchange was manipulated by the stock broker with a little help from his political friends, were increasingly frequent. In the absence of a strong and powerful Union Government regional parties assumed national significance and the then Chief Minister of the Undivided Andhra Pradesh, N Chandra Babu Naidu was taking loans from the IMF and soon his example was followed by Karnataka and Tamil Nadu as well. Naidu in particular inaugurated a new form of corruption wherein someone from within the ruling party would buy out huge tracts of land at cheap prices and after sometime the government would then announce projects in those areas wherein the prices went up from Rs. 5000 per acre to Rs. 50 lakh per acre. The federalism component of the country was to be built on the principle of cooperation but ultimately it turned out to be competitive federalism which in its wake brought newer and more difficult to detect forms of corruption.

The Southern States had the wherewithal to compete with each other and the manufacturing and service sector grew in them and in the Western State of Maharashtra. The Northern part of the country just did not have the human resource to compete with these states and therefore were falling backwards. In the days of cooperative federalism the north Indian states reaped most of the benefits but when it turned competitive they simply did not stand a chance. This led to the widening of the gap in developmental terms between the North and the South and the Southern part was and is way ahead of the northern parts. In all this the old problem of capitalism aptly described by Jean Jacque Rousseau as the problem of “poverty amidst plenty” came to the fore for the first time in India, since by now India had become a completely capitalist country. The election results of 2004 showed that while the stock exchange was booming the lower echelons of Indian society were whimpering and refused to vote the NDA back into power. The expanding gap between the rich and the poor ensured that the United Progressive Alliance would come to power. The second term of the UPA was a disaster characterized by policy paralysis and it culminated in the loss of the UPA in 2014.  Interestingly the BJP was able to get a majority of 272 seats on its own but continues with the NDA. Whether this is a one-time exception or a future trend, only time will tell.

As things stand today there is a clear division between social and political processes in India.  Socially, there is a reduction in the importance attached to caste but politically there is a greater divide along caste lines. But there is no universality to this principle either. In the north where levels of education are very low and prospect of employment still tied to the UPSC, the emphasis on caste is firm both socially and politically. In the south there is a movement away from government employment to work with multinational corporations who have dropped anchor in cities like Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. In the West apart from the traditional commercial hub Mumbai, Pune has also started emerging as a manufacturing hub. Narendra Modi has been doing his best to attract investments to Gujarat.  Does this mean that caste is not an important factor socially and politically in the south? The unfortunate answer is that it is still very important. Local businesses and industries are still the preserve of caste groupings and the desire to possess political power is very much steeped in caste though now like in the past the caste name is replaced by say a name of region like in the case of Telangana.  Telangana has always been the fiefdom of the Reddy and Velama castes but with the rise of Kamma (from coastal Andhra) caste in the business sector the Reddys and Velamas have found themselves dispossessed of the power that they once held. The separate Telangana agitation therefore signifies the desire of the Reddy and Velama caste groupings to repossess the power that once belonged to them. What helped them here is that this was a backward region with huge unemployed population that could be manipulated in the name of providing them employment.

This brings us back to the question so is there a possibility of establishing cause-effect sequencing in identifying and underlining politics and political processes that came into being in the last 25 years of liberalization. The answer cannot be a firm yes. Given the nature of social, economic, geographic and political diversity of India it is impossible to construct a narrative about politics around one or two issues. In fact most narratives are continuous with the history of the country which again has many constructs. It is possible to see the involvement of corporate money power in Indian politics today, and that perhaps is the only take away from the story of economic liberalization. Other more complicated processes may have nothing or very little do with the liberalization process directly. And given that process are enmeshed over a long period of time, it is impossible to see which strand is effected by liberalization of the Indian economy.  Therefore Indian politics if seen as before and after, show very little difference between before and after liberalization in terms of the social structures changing form but more or less retaining the substance, something which can be described by a German word which was used by Hegel “aufheben” and the process as “aufgehoben” and the English equivalent which is roughly put as “sublation”.

In this endeavour of mine I have tried to show a glimpse of the history of Indian politics from the time of the freedom movement till the recent example of liberalization but I have focused on the post 1990s period so as to establish that the political theories of the West in their left liberal or communist left have not been successful in characterizing Indian politics successfully and explaining the reasons for why Indian society and politics function the way they do. Given the enervation of Western derived political thinking or for that matter even the Chinese derived theories of the CPI (M) it is time to give up this models and theory which has failed in either characterizing or changing Indian society, there can be no better case and an argument for the creation and application of a theory or theories which can understand and change the politics and society of India.

However what I seek is not easy task. In fact, it is not a task that can be achieved even by a group of people. The biggest hindrance to this process is that those who work for change will have to face very stiff resistance from various quarters.  We have deified some leaders like Ambedkar. If any lacunae in his theory are shown that would itself lead to a problem of gigantic proportions. Gandhi is probably the only person who can be walked over, what with even Markandeya Katju calling him a British agent. The problem is for decades both academics and the general population have been viewing the country with tinted glasses that show colours that do not exist. To get these people to take off the tinted glasses and see reality for what it is, is no easy process. It is a road which has land mines and snipers at every given place. Nevertheless, it is a road that has to be taken.  It is imperative to tell people that what has been achieved in the name of demystification of Indian society and Indian politics is actually a re-mystification, meaning moving from one set of existing mysteries to newer ones and in the process completely obfuscating reality completely.
I hope that those who have read this piece can see the pitfalls of imposing models and frameworks upon realities and then selectively picking examples or incidents from history to legitimate their arguments. This is an art that we academicians have perfected. I believe that what is required is an honest, non-egoistic and sincere attempts on the part of academicians of all hue to first start discussions verbally rather than publishing their points of view as articles for that process is deeply entrenched in the culture of rebuttals and their rebuttals ad infinitum. Brain storming sessions between those who belong to different ideologies conducted with open minds and in non-combative ways is what is required. Will we ever do it? I don't think so. Then why post? Only to show why we set out to find solutions to problems and end up producing problems to solutions.

This is the prelude to some of the posts that I intend to put up on this blog

This piece was sent to me by my good friend Pratap Antony who is himself an active blogger. After reading it I felt compelled to put up here and use this as a stimulus to shake myself out of the languid stupor into which I have otherwise fallen and start writing again, especially at a time when there seems to be so much to write. You can expect to see me back to activity very soon. This piece sent by my friend is the prelude to my writing again.

John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff at the NEW YORK TIMES who was asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1953, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly].

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

"If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Copyright of this belongs to whoever has copyrighted the piece (if at all).

The politics and politicians of India have at least become transparent. Maybe that is the good part of an otherwise murky system

I have not been posting on this blog for a long time now. That is mainly due to the fact that my job at another place, where I had gone on lien from Osmania University had given me so much grief that I lost all motivation for anything in life. Even though I started this blog to give my take on the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh, I had long ago said, that I had nothing more to say and therefore, there will be no more posts about that subject. I have been commenting on the wayward ways of politicians, though. But that to came to a stage where there was not much new happening there and so except for the occasional post jesting about them and their ways, I have not said much. All through I have maintained that I am from Telangana and that I will have no problems living in a Telangana State if and when it has become a reality. Well, it has now become a reality, and I have no problems with that or with living here; after all this is my home. But there are a few things that I have seen and experienced which do not portend well for the future of the people of what will now become two states.

I know that politicians have been saying that there will be peace and amity and KCR has even said that people from "Seemandhra" (I personally do not like this expression coined by the media, which most people have taken to as fish do to water) can live in peace without any fear of persecution. So many other politicians have said the same and I think it is a very good thing. Asaduddin Owaisi has even said that the word settler should not be used (this he did a few months ago, when it was clear that there was no stopping the division of the state). The Convener of the T-JAC has even said that the quarrel is not with the people of the other region but with the leadership of the Coastal region who had hijacked all the benefits including those which should have actually come to Telangana. He is probably right, and I do appreciate what he said to assuage the feelings of others who had come to Hyderabad from the other side. 

Let me now come to the point I made about my experiences. I quote these experiences to demonstrate that the politicians' utterances about how there is no divide among the people and that all is well in both regions. Perhaps that is true with a great percentage of people who live on both sides, but there are enough people today who are so aggressive that they do not mind hurling abuse. First let me quote the latest event. I was invited by a TV channel to discuss upon Federalism and its emergence in India. My two co-panelists were advocates one each from the Telangana and the Coastal Andhra regions. The topic was federalism but it took exactly 10 seconds for it to become all about Telangana and the two gentlemen wasted no time in making a slanging match and started shouted at each other calling each other names. I sat through the whole thing silently and came back after having spoken for about 40 seconds overall. I was very perturbed by how the two gentlemen had resorted to name calling. Cheats, land grabbers, unethical fellows, brutes, barbarians etc. Now one of the two gentlemen was from the Telugu Desam Party and the other apparently was leading the Telangana Lawyers JAC. So a party functionary from TDP who is also from Andhra kept talking about how the Telangana movement was rubbish and there were no truth to its claims while the other retorted in a similar vein. My question was what was Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu implying when he agreed to the bifurcation. It is a different matter that he has without withdrawing from the earlier position shifted to the Andhra side, probably for consolidation of his position in that region which was otherwise being captured by Y S Jaganmohan Reddy of the YSRCP. I will return to this point again a little later.

Let me now give you the second of my examples. I suddenly found that was somebody was tweeting that I am a settler ghost writing articles in the Mumbai Indian Express and that I am coward since I did not put my name on that article. I couldn't make sense of that whole thing at all until it struck me that a couple of weeks before I tweeted a URL of an article written by Sanjaya Baru (I am not sure if it is him, but it was someone equally famous if it was not Sanjaya Baru) and that this was what the person was referring to as a ghost written article by me. I tried to tell him that I did not write it at all and then he tweeted with my blog's URL. I told him I am from Telangana and that I am not a settler, but the tweets from his side continued. The man believed me (presumably because he stopped tweeting after this) when I sent out three or four tweets saying that I am originally for Nayeem Nagar, Hanmakonda, Warangal and that my grand father had launched the Brahma Samaj movement there and also the Scouts and Guides movements in schools and that my great grand uncle was the Auditor General of the Nizam's treasury. It took about 10 tweets and some family history of mine to make the man stop tweeting about me. I don't know if he believed me or not but I am glad that he stopped tweeting. But in the meanwhile some three others retweeted his tweets and a few from the other side started their own tweets about the Telangana twitterati. 

Then the third instance is the most bizarre. I had been asked to deliver a lecture on problems of representation which are inherent to democracy and why do they exist and what can they cause as things which are undemocratic. I went into the whole history of liberalism and how it was all about exclusion of people from decision making rather than inclusion and therefore despite the heightened pitch about inclusive politics, the model itself was not capable of supporting inclusive politics. I was saying that there is no accountability to politicians primarily because in a simple majority system those who voted against the winning candidate also get represented by him. Somehow this thing went into electoral politics and a lady kindly brought out the Telangana issue and how it could be seen as representing the people but it was the Coastal Andhra people who were not letting the Telangana representatives represent their constituents. I suggested that in such an instance when the representatives have stopped representing their constituents we could employ mechanisms such as referendum on an issue or recall of non-performing or badly performing elected representatives. Someone then decided to talk about Article 3. These were all teachers of Political Science and the way they were moving from one issue to the other was amazing. Then one man gets up and tell me it is enough (he is a colleague from my department) and tells everyone the session is over. Another persuades a couple of people who were discussing the constitution that they should also come out and bundled them all out. This too is a colleague of mine from the department in which I am employed. Then there was an old student who is now a colleague who also decided enough is enough. What is most interesting here is that I was scheduled to meet this group another time in a couple of days, and in the night I get a call from the coordinator that my lectures were postponed due to some reasons. I knew that this meant cancellation.

Later I was told that the three colleagues from the department were instrumental in cancelling my lectures since I was a settler!!! With this kind of intolerance among people what is the amity that we all live like brothers. One politician said we are only dividing territory not people. If people were not divided why would the question of division of territory come up at all. The general people may or may not be divided (there is no way of telling that with any certainty) but one thing is for sure that politicians are divided and to meet their targets they will divide whatever or whoever will come in the way. The Congress party by protracting the agitation for so long ensured that division percolated to all levels. The TDP supremo's two eyed theory culminated in two states. If he was against the division why did he give the letter of acceptance? He could have specified the terms and conditions on which he would agree to the division. Then there is the case of YSRCP. It was the Late Rajashekhar Reddy who instigated the separate Telangana movement in 1999 when he sent a delegation of elected representatives from the Congress to go to Delhi and ask for a separate Telangana. So why is his son protesting against the division? It is obvious that he seeks political gain. I personally believe that Chandra Babu Naidu may for once have spoken the truth when he said that in Telangana the TRS will merge with the Congress. That seems reasonable, given the speed (and lack of respect for democratic conventions) with which the Telangana Bill was passed. He is probably right when he says post election the YSRCP will merge with the Congress. This is all to shut him out. He could be right for once. That time will tell.

Meanwhile Mayawati wants to use the Telangana creation for bifurcation of UP into 4 more States. Gorkhaland agitators are getting ready to ask for a separate state and Mamata Banerjee is therefore saying that the process of Telangana creation was anti-constitutional. The really good thing to emerge out of all this is that it is now clear that the BJP and the Congress see eye to eye on many issues like smaller states (regionalism), communalism, casteism and any other divisions that are possible. The divisions are the ones that create spaces for politicians to emerge, rake up issues and later flourish. So to say people are not divided for me is nonsense. Politicians have been dividing people for various reasons for decades now and today that is there for all to see. It remains to be seen where all this will ultimately. One thing is for sure that our politicians are working overtime to prove Winston Churchill right, when at the time India became independent the man disdainfully said "India will remain an independent country but slowly it will come under the rule of scoundrels and all kinds of silly fellows whose goal will be anything but the well being of the people or the country". 

Dear Reader, please do not take this as a commentary on the bifurcation of AP. It is not. I am also not lamenting anything other than the nature of politics and leadership in this country. The country requires leaders with vision of development and the will to serve the people, not the other way round. Sadly, what we have is the other way round. I am not going to make doomsday predictions. Like you, I will wait and see which this country goes in the coming few years.

Meet the Politicians

For this post of mine, I draw inspiration from a song that Roger Waters wrote in his last record with Pink Floyd  which was called the Final Cut. The song I refer to is actually called "The Fletcher Memorial Home" which is about how all the tyrants and kings were confined in an imaginary home that was named after Eric Fletcher Waters, Roger Waters' dad who died when Roger Waters was three months old, in the Second World War. In this song there is a brief spoken word section where Waters makes fun of politicians and I have felt that the same lampooning can be done about our own politicians who are bent on destroying Andhra Pradesh first and later the country itself. So that you get the sense of what I am doing here is the spoken word section that Roger Waters wrote:

"Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome,

Reagan and Haig, Mrs Thatcher and Paisley,

Mr. Brezhnev and Party, Mr. Begin and friend,

The ghost of McCarthy and the memories of Nixon,

And now adding colour, here are a group of anonymous Latin American meat packing glitterati".

This song and the album were created after the Falklands War which was seen as a betrayal by Waters of the post second world war dream that England would fight no more wars. I am just going to paraphrase the lyrics with the names of all the great politicians who are doing their best to destroy Andhra Pradesh. Needless to say the names are too many to add into those 5 lines, so I will selectively pick up the ones that I think will make the most sense.

"Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome,

Sonia and Singh, Kiran and Ashok (NGO leader)

Mr. Naidu and party, Mr. Jagan and friend,

The ghost of Indira Gandhi and the memories of Channa Reddy,

And now adding colour here are Prof. Kodand and his group of anonymous state splitting literati".

Do they expect us to treat them with any respect?

I am not going to go into the twists and turns that this sordid drama is taking. All I know is that politicians from both sides are least bothered about common people and all that they want is something to satisfy their power for hunger, which I suppose is this city called Hyderabad. Today all those warring for this city and against each other see Hyderabad as a combination of gold+diamond+coal+mica mine that can be harvested to their advantage. What I see is that while they do this for their own benefit and satisfaction of their greed, for common people who live here the city is slowly turning into a big landmine that will blow up sooner or later and take their lives. How many more twists and how many more terms before anything concrete comes out of this imbroglio. My estimate is that they will be infinite in numbers. One side waits for the other side to get some assurance and then they will start playing their games. First when Telangana was burning, Coastal Andhraites were fiddling, now that Coastal Andhra (including Rayalaseema) is burning, the Telanganaites are fiddling.

I think this is an issue that is being kept alive. It is like a relay race where the baton is passed on to the next member of the team. Here it might appear that there are rival teams that are passing the baton on to each other. That is the chicanery of it all. In reality they are all aligned on the same side and are making hay when the sun is shining. And this is an endless relay race with newer members becoming part of the team. Now that YS Jagan claims that he stands for status quo, it is quite clear that there is a deep strategy here between his party and the Congress. In fact, there has been an allegation for a very long time that it was he and his father YS Rajashekhar Reddy who instigated the movement for a separate Telangana as a strategy to defeat Chandra Babu Naidu and the Telugu Desam Party that seemed invincible. Even now the Congress is using a strategy by which it will not lose too much in the new Telangana state and the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh.

Look at it this way, the Congress has a tie-up with the TRS here in Telangana. So they will sweep the polls in the Telangana region together. By granting a separate Telangana the Congress will have alienated a number of people in the Coastal Andhra side. There Jagan Reddy and his YSRCP have emerged as a strong force since it was Jagan and his mother who did the first volte face and pledged loyalty to keeping Andhra Pradesh undivided once Digvijay Singh made the announcement of a separate Telangana. The law courts have been very cooperative with Jagan Reddy once he has been given bail. He was first told not to leave Hyderabad and later it has come down to he can go anywhere as long as it is in India. So what did the courts now see that they did not in the past? Why did the CBI not oppose bail and all that followed vehemently. It is perhaps ironical that the High Court of Assam has held that the Central Bureau of Investigation is an unconstitutionally constituted body!!! Does this mean that Jagan and company are now free birds? I am waiting for some other court to say that the police in India is an unconstitutional body.

But to comeback to what I was saying, since the first about face was done by Jagan and YSRCP they are now favourites in the coastal Andhra side to perform well in the polls that are just a few months away. So here is the picture. The Congress is not likely to get too many seats from the cow belt. It will have to rely upon Andhra Pradesh to give it enough seats for it to head UPA - III.  We have seen that the Congress thinks that it will do well with the TRS in the Telangana region. Now if Jagan Reddy does well, slowly the cases will all be dropped and he will get a certificate of being squeaky clean, and to fight the communal forces and anti-national forces, he will sink his differences with the Congress party and give the party support either from outside or by merging with the Congress. And who knows he may even get that post of Chief Minister for which there are no great leaders available within the Congress. So the question is why do this? Just for this election?

I think there is another dimension to this as well. The Congress is trying to finish off the Telugu Desam Party and Chandra Babu Naidu in a big way. Chandra Babu Naidu and the TDP have no strategy and have been out of power for 10 years. If they are shut out in this election, it will be very difficult for Naidu to even run his party. Fifteen years of not being in power can hurt politicians very badly and where it matters most; their pockets. That could be the beginning of the end for the Telugu Desam. The MIM is another interesting case. They do not want a separate Telangana but if it is inevitable then Hyderabad should be an integral part of it; not a joint capital or a Union Territory. The reasoning here is simple. The MIM owes its existence to Hyderabad and its surrounding areas. If this becomes a UT or a Joint Capital in the control of the Central Government, where do these people go for their living? So that is why they have now revived the call for a Rayala Telangana so that they will have some constituencies where then can be in politics in the Kurnool and Anantapur districts. And so they are looking after their own interests.

The BJP is the biggest casualty in this. They have shouted themselves hoarse about how they will give Telangana if they come to power. Nobody heard their shouts. Now they have been saying that they will give full support to the bifurcation bill. This was until yesterday when finally someone switched on the light in their office. What does BJP gain by supporting the Congress? Nothing. On the other hand it will facilitate the Congress' strategy and its victory. So the BJP is now dithering on how to make things difficult for the Congress without appearing as if they are doing this deliberately. And ironically enough Sonia Gandhi went to Bastar in Chattisgarh and told the people there that the BJP was dividing them for its (BJP's) own gains. Now what was that English saying. Something about the pot calling the kettle black. Enjoy these games now. But remember they will comeback to bite us all and at least for that let us be ready.

P.S: Not proof read due to paucity of time. All errors of syntax, semantics and anything else may be excused. Thank you.

The politics of Andhra Pradesh are a preview of what is to come in the future of India

I have not been posting for a while because of some personal problems and also because I thought things will be repetitive. So I kept away from the blog even while the agitation for United Andhra Pradesh was on for more than two months. I told myself that there is no need for commentary on the filth that was taking place in the name of politics. However, upon reflection I have felt that if I did not comment on what happened in the last two months in the Andhra and Rayalaseema regions then it would seem as if I was more than happy to castigate things that were happening during the separate Telangana agitation but I did not react when something similar is happening in the other two regions in the name of keeping the State of Andhra Pradesh united. Therefore I shall make a commentary which I hope to keep short because all the things that I said about the separatist agitation in Telangana are valid for the integrationist movement which is still taking place on the other side.

I have always maintained that I stand for leaving the State of Andhra Pradesh as it is even though I come from the Telangana region. For me the games that are being played on either sides are those which are necessarily the ones that politicians want for their own survival. In some of the posts in the past I have said that bandhs and agitations that disrupt the lives of people are not Satyagraha but anti the principles of Satyagraha. I still maintain my position. It is at one level laughable that the so called practitioners of non-violence on both sides of the divide style themselves as satyagrahis who are peacefully agitating for the satisfaction of their demands. And these demands and the methodology adopted for making the demands are non-violent and peaceful. I would like to disagree. The inconveniences caused to the common people even in the Coastal Andhra and Rayalaseema areas due to the strike of the government employees has shaken me just as it did when similar things were done here. 

It hurt to see Intensive Care Units in hospitals not having electricity and water and patients not getting the care that they are entitled to. If this is not violence against people, then what is?  Paralysing the state administrative machinery and making sure that we the people take giant leaps backward in the developmental process is indication of how base and immoral politics have become.  Many people from the other side expressed awe at the way in which the employees kept the strike going despite not getting salaries. It goes without saying that salaried employees need salaries every month to keep their households running. It is obvious that some politicians have been funding the movement on the other side as well. 

One of the things that has surprised me most is the fact that the Congress has become such an opportunist party that it represents both sides, that of separatists and that of integrationists. The Union government wants the state to be divided and the State government does not want it to be divided. The agendas of both sides have been hijacked by Congress politicians making other political parties irrelevant. This is like the left hand fighting the right hand. And when the announcement came that a separate Telangana will be created parties like the YSR Congress Party headed by the son of former Chief Minister YS Rajashekhar Reddy decided that they would throw in their lot with the integrationists so that when the State does get divided they will have an advantage over every other party. 

Innocently or stupidly it is being believed that the Congress along with the TRS will sweep the Telangana state post the division of Andhra Pradesh and that the Congress will be routed out in the Coastal Andhra and the Rayalaseema region. This is nothing but underestimating the power of politics and the potency of the games that politicians play. The Chief Minister of  Andhra Pradesh has suddenly discovered his principles and now says that politics are not important but the lives of people are. Ministers at the state and union levels have sent in notional resignations. Not all only a few, while others like Chiranjeevi have been desperately clinging onto their chairs. Their logic? They need to be in the government to fight the government.

The chief of the TRS, Mr. K. Chandrashekhar Rao is the comedian who comes out occasionally to make terrible statements about the culture of Andhra or about how he is going to kick the Andhras out of Hyderabad and Telangana. Suddenly all attention gets diverted to his comments. While most people see this as a comedic sideshow I suspect is something far more sinister. The MIM and its silence is another thing that is baffling. The only thing that it really contends against is the making of Hyderabad into a Union Territory, for that would mean that the MIM party whose base is mainly in Hyderabad will suddenly become irrelevant. No wonder then that the MIM has been saying that it will reach out to more areas in the country.

The TDP and Mr. Chandra Babu Naidu have become clueless. I am reminded of the line from the Dire Straits song "Once upon a time in the West" which goes "Sitting on the fence is a dangerous course, you might even catch a bullet from a peace keeping force".  Everybody knows what Mr. Naidu stands for. So why not stand by one's own convictions and beliefs and face the people boldly? Mr. Naidu's image as an efficient administrator, as one who stood for some principles have all got eroded with time. I admired him when he famously said "I don't mind losing the elections and sitting in the opposition. It will not be my loss; it will be the loss of the people". Ratan Tata also said of him that "While other people are thinking about the next election, Mr. Naidu is thinking about the next generation". Now these are things only archivists like me remember and for most people he is no different from the regular politician; perhaps only worse, since he has to get into power by hook or crook.

The BJP is one party that has been singing the Telangana tune from the day it lost the 2004 elections. The day after the results came out, Mr. Arun Jaitley said that the reason why the BJP lost is because of the fact that it stood with the Telugu Desam and denied Telangana. And this in the nation wide general elections. Nobody searched their souls to see if the pogrom that they had initiated in Gujarat had any effects on the election results. Today the mastermind behind the pogrom is the party's candidate for Prime Ministership next year. And the candidate that is being pitted against him from the Congress Party's side is Mr. Rahul Gandhi, someone who says politics are so omnipresent that they are there in everybody's pants and shirts!!!

One thing is clear; any which way the fate of the people of Andhra Pradesh has been sealed by the short sightedness and blindness of politicians. Bifurcation or no bifurcation is not a matter anymore. The leadership and its abject lac of vision is the problem. The same political game that has been played out in Andhra Pradesh for the last nine years or so will be played at the national level from 2014 elections onwards. The issues may differ but the players are the same and their tactics in dealing with issues will remain the same, so what you see in Andhra Pradesh today is what you will see pan India starting with the next elections.

Why this mindless violence?

It has been a very long time since I made a blog post. I have been rather busy with a lot of work and so I have really not had the time to make blog posts, though there have been plenty of subjects on which I could have written.  But most of them could have been repetitions of the themes that I have already written about.  This blog post is also a theme that I have written about in the past, but somehow my conscience tells me that I should take time out and make a blog post about this.

This blog post concerns itself with the bomb blasts that took place in my home city of Hyderabad.  Last evening two bombs went of leaving several people dead and many injured, some of them critically.  In all probability some more will join the list of the dead.  The people who died are those who have nothing to do with anything about communal violence or with communalism itself. These are innocent people who were going about their daily life and have families that were waiting at home for them to return back in the evening after a day's work.  There were also some who came to Hyderabad to attend job interviews and thanks to the blasts, have died.  Instead of them going home alive, only their corporeal remains will go back.  Families will be devastated. And the situation could be that some of the people who died may be the sole bread winners of the family.  Some of them could have little children who will get deprived of a father and the love that the father would have given to them.  Some people may have left behind young widows with children and now the life of all of them will become a huge mountain to climb.  Time will heal their wounds, but the question is to what extent?  The grief may come down with time but the hatred for those who have perpetrated this crime will grow.  

The perpetrators have claimed that they are the Indian Mujahideen.  And this means that among the public those who lost people and those who are stunned by the random act of terrorist violence, there will be a growth in hatred for the religion to which the terrorists belong. Since violence begets violence this will reinforce typical stereotypical notions of that community and outfits from the other group will want revenge. So one may see that there is an increase in communal violence at various different levels. Does Indian society require this?  I know for a fact that most people, irrespective of their religion, live their life by being indifferent to other people and their religions.  However, these kinds of terrorist acts will make people notice each other, but in a suspicious way and that will contribute to the overall growth of intolerance in Indian society.

What baffles me is that what do the terrorists think they can achieve by killing people violently?  Acts of terrorism have been and are being perpetrated in India and other countries for many years now.  Have the terrorists ever looked back to see if these random incidents of violence have achieved any results in terms of what they want? How does their cause get helped by these actions?  That is the reason why I say this is mindless violence.  If people were to think about the consequences of their actions, they will see that other than devastating a few families and ensuring that general hatred for people belonging to one religion and making them vulnerable to similar attacks, nothing else is achieved.  As a peace loving person (and most of Indian society consists of people like me) and one with concern for the future of the country, I am dismayed that we are perhaps travelling back in time to the medieval period where religion based intolerance was at its peak.

I am deeply distressed by the fact that India is increasingly witnessing different kinds of violence on a daily basis. There are divisions in Indian society based on caste, religion and region. The caste division is something that is increasing exponentially with the passing of each day and this rate this division will only grow and not get wiped out. Region based intolerance is something that has been afflicting Hyderabad for a few years now. Due to this students who have been drawn into the movement have lost any chance of having some kind of a career. Religious intolerance which has always been the substratum of Indian society is breaking out increasingly into the open and the levels of intolerance have reached alarming levels. I shudder to think of the society in which I live becoming one where one does not know if someone who has gone out for work in the day will come back alive or dead.  Will the people who wait for their loved ones to return find that they have become victims of anxiety since they do not know if their family members will comeback alive?

I am fully aware that writing a blog post does not really change anything.  But I am hopeful that those who read my posts will at least start thinking about this issue as not an inter-religious issue but as something that is only connected with a few people who refuse to think and act as robots for the blood thirsty people whose minds are perhaps convoluted.  I find it ironic, that in the land of the Mahatma (Gandhi) who strove for peace and tranquility, violence is becoming a norm.  What legacy are we going to leave for the generations of the future. Are we going to leave a society in which violence and communal war will become the norm? Will we ensure that lives are lost over causes which are as empty as the heads of people who want to perpetrate violence? I would like to believe that there is hope, but you my dear reader decide if I am right in being optimistic about the future or if I am just living in a fool's paradise.

P.S: Not proof read.  Errors of syntax and any other may please be excused.  Thank you.

Democracy in India=Lumpen elements+extra constitutional authorities

Many years ago, Paul R Brass while studying Indian Democracy opined that the main driving force of Indian democracy were the thugs and goons that rich politicians used in order to take over the agenda of democracy itself.  More recently Amartya Sen made an observation that Indian democracy has little to do with people and their aspirations and that it was something which was run by pressure groups.  The statements emanating from both Brass and Sen have the same content; the difference being that while the former was starkly calling a spade a spade the latter was using a euphemism to describe the same phenomenon.  The creeping in of lumpen elements into the system of democracy is a pretty old phenomenon but what merits some attention now is that while in the past it was something very clandestine, in its latest garb it is out in the open and very proudly so. 

In one of my previous posts I had argued that Indian democracy was actually a legitimating facade for plutocracies.  I still argue the same but I will say that the thin veil of legitimacy that it wore has started tearing and giving insights about the truth of how democracy in India functions.  To explain this position of mine I will take two examples and the use of one of the examples is actually a reneging on my previous position that I shall stop writing about the Telangana imbroglio since there was nothing to gain by it. My retraction of the position has nothing to do with the necessity or the lack of it for a separate Telangana state.  But it has everything to do with the fact that it brings into the open certain disconcerting realities of what democracy and governance have become in India.  The other example pertains to the Great Side Show of Indian Politics that is enacted by Babu Rao Hazare and his cohorts.

Let me start with the latter.  For more than a year now Hazare and his little group of merry men and one woman have been trying to grab the headlines of the news of the country with their agitation for the passage of the Lok Pal bill, which they somehow want us to believe is the panacea for all the problems that this country is facing.  Everybody with an iota of sense will know that the idea if looked at very generously is naive and if seen in a more sinister light is draconian.  Hazare, Kejriwal, Ramdev and Kiran Bedi have no mandate of any sorts from any people to hold the Central Government at ransom however corrupt it maybe.  Ultimately there is no denying that the people have elected this government for right or for wrong (the answer will have to for wrong actually) and it is they who have the power of sending it out the next time out when elections happen in 2014.  That is in fact the logic of having elections at regular intervals so that people can show the way out to those who do not perform up to the expectations of the people (that any alternative to the present government is also likely to equally corrupt is a sad issue that faces the country today).

Despite knowing this Hazare and his group (which is most definitely dwindling from the original half dozen to about three now) persist with their demand for a Lok Pal who is not elected by the people and periodically carry out "Gandhian" Satyagraha methods.  It is a tragedy of epic proportions that in the country of Gandhi his methods which first called for "moral rectitude" before being implemented are freely used by all and sundry, including local goons and anti social elements.  It is not an exaggeration to say that Gandhian methods are now the exclusive prerogative of those type of people that the great man abhorred.  

Now to come to the issue of Telangana.  A year or more ago the "Million March" which comprised of a few thousand people some or most of whom were hired had destroyed the Tank Bund on the Hussain Sagar lake.  Again a few days ago the same strategy of a "Million March" was announced.  Again some thousand came and this time since they had no access to the Tank Bund they vandalized a few vehicles and burnt some.  But the point of this post is not that.  It is about the complete lack of governance in the State.  The Convenor of the Telangana Joint Action Committee is a government servant and yet he publicly not only criticises the government but also gives it all kinds of ultimatums.  What is intriguing is how did the government fall for the assurances that this will be a peaceful Gandhian march when there is enough history to suggest that it would be anything but that.  The timing of the march itself was amazing.

Every year Hyderabad is witnessing a growing nuisance in the form of the Ganapati immersions. The idols are getting bigger and bigger and increasing in number with political parties and religious groups pumping more and more money into the festival.  What used to be a one day peaceful festival has now taken on gargantuan proportions with immersions now exceeding two days sometimes.  On a daily basis idols are brought onto the tank bund and the necklace road disrupting traffic and life for nearly two weeks. So when the march is coincided with the immersion procession, how did the government even believe that the processions would be peaceful?  The poignancy of the whole thing is heightened by the fact that the very next day the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity was set to begin and a number of dignitaries from across the world had reached the city.

Why cannot the government restrict the size and number of idols of Ganapati?   Now the Ganapati pandals are no longer removed.  In a few days the place of Ganapati is occupied by Durga and the process begins all over again.  More processions more immersions, all conducted by gangs of youth who are drunk and throw various things on public who are travelling on the roads.  

So in India a legitimately elected government can be held to ransom by a few individuals like Hazare or by Government servants who have the backing of lumpen elements who number a few thousand or by religious groupings who will show one upmanship by defying the Government and doing the opposite of what it wants to do.  Governments cannot do anything because there are no leaders with rectitude, integrity and honesty in the country anymore.  Everyone has come to be where they are using the same methodologies that are now being used.  Some of them have even forgotten that they have become legislators and therefore feel free to break microphones in the Legislature.  

The picture is grim and those who think that life will go on could be making a big mistake, since increasing lumpenism only signifies a sick society that can collapse.  New festivals like Hanuman Jayanti how have youth on motorcycles marauding across the city with saffron flags and so to counter this youth belonging to the other religion do exactly the same with green flags on the birthday of Prophet Mohammed.  People cannot look for some divine force to come and set things right. They too will have to take some initiative to make their sane voices heard over the din of this insanity.  But I do not see that happening.  Therefore what lies in store for this country is anyone's guess.

P.S: Not proof read.  Errors of spelling and grammar may please be forgiven