The rich, they rage together,
The rich are unionised;
The poor have separate religions,
The poor are well advised.
The rich, they say they want no state,
But know they are the state;
The poor, how they need a state
That might turn round their fate.
The rich, their grievance never ends,
They never have enough;
The poor, they are ready to go
With the least crumb in the trough.
The gods, they do not advocate
Equality, justice, peace;
They favour or disfavour,
Depending upon the fees.
Caring ones write articles,
But what article has worth
If the writer be not of the set
Rich in social girth.
Thus how the tree in my steady ken
Seems always to know better;
As I write of a world in whirl,
Rooted remains his letter.
*
Badri Raina Jan.,31, 2012
Showing posts with label ബദ്രി റയ്ന. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ബദ്രി റയ്ന. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Is Pakistan Coming Full Circle?
What is happening among the Pakistan establishment currently must be regarded as extraordinary by any reckoning.
What had always been known and written about is actually out in the open from the mouths of both ends of a most visible and disabling dyarchy in the power-structure.
The elected leadership feels obliged to go public with the apprehension that yet another coup may be under way to “pack away” the civilian dispensation on behalf of an army establishment that is squarely characterized by the Prime Minister as a “state within the state.”
And, refuting the allegation that the army means to overthrow the legitimate government, the Chief of Staff nonetheless adds the caveat that “security matters” must remain paramount. To wit, the military brass believes security matters must remain its unhindered preserve rather than the concern and jurisdiction of the elected government—a curious position to take within a democratic set-up. And, clearly, “security matters” must be seen to involve most foreign policy concerns of the state.
No wonder that the Defence Ministry in Pakistan has had the abject imperative to say in court that the military establishment does not really answer to it.
This may indeed be an egregious new year wishful leap on the part of this writer, but I see within the collapsing womb of the ancien regime the promise of a desirable rebirth.
That regime has, since the partition of India and the years preceding that event, been predicated on three postulates:
--one, that Pakistan had to come into being as a theocratic state because Hindus and Muslims could not be trusted to live together in harmony in an independent sub-continent; that postulate automatically was to render religion as the chief denominator of what it meant to be a Pakistani, and to construct India into an enemy, since the preponderance of Hindus could not but be the ill-wishers of Muslims;
--two, that given this self-evident enmity with India, only the military establishment in Pakistan could be the chief guarantor of its security; and that any civilian leadership seen to be seeking a normative political relationship with India must be duly despatched in the larger “national interest” of Pakistan;
--three, that, given the larger size and resource base of India, Pakistan had to have allies that would help it withstand any ill design on behalf of a “Hindu India”; thus the early embrace of the United States of America, and security arrangements like the erstwhile SEATO.
The years have relentlessly brought to the fore the bankruptcy of all three of these originary postulates:
--the breakaway of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 was first conclusive proof that religious identity could not be trusted to be the unequivocal glue holding a nation-state together; issues related to other aspects of cultural life—language, and all that goes with that—and concrete economic realities that affect the livelihood of common people came to be decisive progenitors of a new national identity. Interestingly, contrary to some speculation, the so-called “Arab Spring” can infact be seen to be precisely a phenomenon wherein diverse concerns unrelated to denominational identity, and the diversity within Muslim identity itself, are coming to reshape West-Asian and Middle-Eastern nation-states in as yet unpredictable ways;
the birth of Bangladesh, infact, carried another momentous lesson, one that a General Kayani in Pakistan would do well to pay heed to. Far from ensuring the security of undivided Pakistan, it became a chief cause of its dismemberment. The genocide unleashed by General Yahyah Khan on March 25, 1971 left the Bengali Muslims little choice but to seek a separate destiny. A lesson that ought to be kept in mind while dealing with, for example, the province of Baluchistan.
--The events since the attack on the twin towers in Manhattan can be seen to unravel the second foundational myth that the establishment in Pakistan has throughout nurtured: the chiefest enemies of Pakistan can be seen to be after all creatures of its own making. No wonder that wide swathes of the Pakistani intelligentsia have come round to the view that, one, an amicable relationship with India need not rebuke the founding idea of Pakistan, and, two, such a relationship may actually help reverse many shibboleths that have rendered Pakistan a state that constantly remains its own and the world’s anxiety.
--Lastly, a matter of equally profound reconsideration: a celebrity intellectual of Pakistan confided to this writer not too long ago that perhaps the most astute and far-reaching thing that Nehru did with the birth of independent India was to resist all pressures to link India’s destiny with that of the United States of America; and that Pakistan’s folly was to have done exactly the obverse.
Clearly, the imperialist war on Afghanistan and issues emanating therefrom one after the other have brought home with conclusive force the wisdom of that insight. No wonder that the call to disengage Pakistan from what has been its parasitical but also self-destructive dependence on the American establishment—call currently emanating most forcefully from a party on the ascendant, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf led by the ex-cricketer, Imran Khan-- should be drawing unimaginably large public support.
These unravelings ought to bear, seen from a long-term perspective, undifferentiated lessons for both ends of the Pakistani establishment, the military brass as well as the elected civilian leaderships. And, if I say Pakistan seems to be coming full circle, it is for the reason that this indeed does seem now to be happening in embryo.
Nothing could be happier news for Pakistan, for India, for the World.
It is only when the Pakistani state fully ends the ambiguity about its own character which has disabled it over decades, and becomes fully democratic and only culturally Muslim, that too along diverse intra-Muslim axes (with the dominant Sunnis recognizing the right of the Shias, the Ismailis, the Sufis, the Ahmedias, to live without fear of ostracism or oppression, not to speak of the miniscule non-Muslim minority population) with the army establishment fully on board that it can begin to exorcise the ghosts that have haunted its existence.
Given that few Pakistanis, except of course the jehadi institutions and power-structures, now believe that Paksitan is forever at risk of a forced reamalgamation by an evilly disposed “Hindu India,” the Pakistani military brass, fatally at the receiving end both of the monsters it has bred and nurtured, and of the American power elite whose hug, always questionable, has also now come to be life-threatening, must learn in double quick time to jettison myths that it has indulged and lived by, myths that no longer convince.
There is evidence that this may be happening. That its proliferated vested interests notwithstanding, the Pakistani military establishment may no longer be as zestful in seeking an end to the people’s mandate, or in propping up monsters that are now at its own throat. That, coterminously, the democratically elected leaderships may be revising their view of the Pakistan-India equation and the Muslim-Hindu binary in path-breaking ways, and, as a necessary corollary, revising also its hitherto compulsive comprador impulses in favour of greater self-assurance within a sub-continental future.
Astute Pakistani thinkers have also noted the fact that not only have Hindutva communalists within India not succeeded in any consequential way to alter the secular-democratic character of the Indian state, they have also been powerless in preventing the dissolution of the erstwhile Hindu-theocratic state of Nepal. Just as the Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh has failed to reconstitute Bangladesh into an Islamic state.
The frequently enough voiced call from time to time to return Pakistan to the vision of its founder, Jinnah, conveys precisely these constitutive elements—chiefly, a secular state with a tolerant and modernized Muslim majority culture that does not engage with the rest of the world only from the frenetic fear of losing the so-called pristine identity which supposedly made it a country of its own.
2012 may indeed prove a happily decisive milestone in the career of the Pakistani state and polity.
*
Badri Raina
What had always been known and written about is actually out in the open from the mouths of both ends of a most visible and disabling dyarchy in the power-structure.
The elected leadership feels obliged to go public with the apprehension that yet another coup may be under way to “pack away” the civilian dispensation on behalf of an army establishment that is squarely characterized by the Prime Minister as a “state within the state.”
And, refuting the allegation that the army means to overthrow the legitimate government, the Chief of Staff nonetheless adds the caveat that “security matters” must remain paramount. To wit, the military brass believes security matters must remain its unhindered preserve rather than the concern and jurisdiction of the elected government—a curious position to take within a democratic set-up. And, clearly, “security matters” must be seen to involve most foreign policy concerns of the state.
No wonder that the Defence Ministry in Pakistan has had the abject imperative to say in court that the military establishment does not really answer to it.
This may indeed be an egregious new year wishful leap on the part of this writer, but I see within the collapsing womb of the ancien regime the promise of a desirable rebirth.
That regime has, since the partition of India and the years preceding that event, been predicated on three postulates:
--one, that Pakistan had to come into being as a theocratic state because Hindus and Muslims could not be trusted to live together in harmony in an independent sub-continent; that postulate automatically was to render religion as the chief denominator of what it meant to be a Pakistani, and to construct India into an enemy, since the preponderance of Hindus could not but be the ill-wishers of Muslims;
--two, that given this self-evident enmity with India, only the military establishment in Pakistan could be the chief guarantor of its security; and that any civilian leadership seen to be seeking a normative political relationship with India must be duly despatched in the larger “national interest” of Pakistan;
--three, that, given the larger size and resource base of India, Pakistan had to have allies that would help it withstand any ill design on behalf of a “Hindu India”; thus the early embrace of the United States of America, and security arrangements like the erstwhile SEATO.
The years have relentlessly brought to the fore the bankruptcy of all three of these originary postulates:
--the breakaway of Pakistan’s eastern wing in 1971 was first conclusive proof that religious identity could not be trusted to be the unequivocal glue holding a nation-state together; issues related to other aspects of cultural life—language, and all that goes with that—and concrete economic realities that affect the livelihood of common people came to be decisive progenitors of a new national identity. Interestingly, contrary to some speculation, the so-called “Arab Spring” can infact be seen to be precisely a phenomenon wherein diverse concerns unrelated to denominational identity, and the diversity within Muslim identity itself, are coming to reshape West-Asian and Middle-Eastern nation-states in as yet unpredictable ways;
the birth of Bangladesh, infact, carried another momentous lesson, one that a General Kayani in Pakistan would do well to pay heed to. Far from ensuring the security of undivided Pakistan, it became a chief cause of its dismemberment. The genocide unleashed by General Yahyah Khan on March 25, 1971 left the Bengali Muslims little choice but to seek a separate destiny. A lesson that ought to be kept in mind while dealing with, for example, the province of Baluchistan.
--The events since the attack on the twin towers in Manhattan can be seen to unravel the second foundational myth that the establishment in Pakistan has throughout nurtured: the chiefest enemies of Pakistan can be seen to be after all creatures of its own making. No wonder that wide swathes of the Pakistani intelligentsia have come round to the view that, one, an amicable relationship with India need not rebuke the founding idea of Pakistan, and, two, such a relationship may actually help reverse many shibboleths that have rendered Pakistan a state that constantly remains its own and the world’s anxiety.
--Lastly, a matter of equally profound reconsideration: a celebrity intellectual of Pakistan confided to this writer not too long ago that perhaps the most astute and far-reaching thing that Nehru did with the birth of independent India was to resist all pressures to link India’s destiny with that of the United States of America; and that Pakistan’s folly was to have done exactly the obverse.
Clearly, the imperialist war on Afghanistan and issues emanating therefrom one after the other have brought home with conclusive force the wisdom of that insight. No wonder that the call to disengage Pakistan from what has been its parasitical but also self-destructive dependence on the American establishment—call currently emanating most forcefully from a party on the ascendant, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf led by the ex-cricketer, Imran Khan-- should be drawing unimaginably large public support.
These unravelings ought to bear, seen from a long-term perspective, undifferentiated lessons for both ends of the Pakistani establishment, the military brass as well as the elected civilian leaderships. And, if I say Pakistan seems to be coming full circle, it is for the reason that this indeed does seem now to be happening in embryo.
Nothing could be happier news for Pakistan, for India, for the World.
It is only when the Pakistani state fully ends the ambiguity about its own character which has disabled it over decades, and becomes fully democratic and only culturally Muslim, that too along diverse intra-Muslim axes (with the dominant Sunnis recognizing the right of the Shias, the Ismailis, the Sufis, the Ahmedias, to live without fear of ostracism or oppression, not to speak of the miniscule non-Muslim minority population) with the army establishment fully on board that it can begin to exorcise the ghosts that have haunted its existence.
Given that few Pakistanis, except of course the jehadi institutions and power-structures, now believe that Paksitan is forever at risk of a forced reamalgamation by an evilly disposed “Hindu India,” the Pakistani military brass, fatally at the receiving end both of the monsters it has bred and nurtured, and of the American power elite whose hug, always questionable, has also now come to be life-threatening, must learn in double quick time to jettison myths that it has indulged and lived by, myths that no longer convince.
There is evidence that this may be happening. That its proliferated vested interests notwithstanding, the Pakistani military establishment may no longer be as zestful in seeking an end to the people’s mandate, or in propping up monsters that are now at its own throat. That, coterminously, the democratically elected leaderships may be revising their view of the Pakistan-India equation and the Muslim-Hindu binary in path-breaking ways, and, as a necessary corollary, revising also its hitherto compulsive comprador impulses in favour of greater self-assurance within a sub-continental future.
Astute Pakistani thinkers have also noted the fact that not only have Hindutva communalists within India not succeeded in any consequential way to alter the secular-democratic character of the Indian state, they have also been powerless in preventing the dissolution of the erstwhile Hindu-theocratic state of Nepal. Just as the Jamat-e-Islami in Bangladesh has failed to reconstitute Bangladesh into an Islamic state.
The frequently enough voiced call from time to time to return Pakistan to the vision of its founder, Jinnah, conveys precisely these constitutive elements—chiefly, a secular state with a tolerant and modernized Muslim majority culture that does not engage with the rest of the world only from the frenetic fear of losing the so-called pristine identity which supposedly made it a country of its own.
2012 may indeed prove a happily decisive milestone in the career of the Pakistani state and polity.
*
Badri Raina
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Jesus, 2012
Jesus of Nazareth, I tell you
You remain much in my heart.
In moments when the world disappears,
I have sight of you in tattered white robe
And matted shoulder-length hair
Walking the desert towards the sea,
Turning your back on us
Who are now money changers all.
But listen to my short little wish:
May those that are destined to go in 2012
Do so quickly and quietly,
Without pain or regret.
And, may those that last the year
Cease to give to Caesar
What is never Caesar’s,
And may Caesar be obliged to
Yield to them all that Caesar has stolen.
Assure me that much,
And your divinity shall be mine as well.
Smile, O wise one, and be born tonight
Afresh into an innocence timelessly bright.
*
Badri Raina
You remain much in my heart.
In moments when the world disappears,
I have sight of you in tattered white robe
And matted shoulder-length hair
Walking the desert towards the sea,
Turning your back on us
Who are now money changers all.
But listen to my short little wish:
May those that are destined to go in 2012
Do so quickly and quietly,
Without pain or regret.
And, may those that last the year
Cease to give to Caesar
What is never Caesar’s,
And may Caesar be obliged to
Yield to them all that Caesar has stolen.
Assure me that much,
And your divinity shall be mine as well.
Smile, O wise one, and be born tonight
Afresh into an innocence timelessly bright.
*
Badri Raina
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
I am the Electronic Media
America , as you might know, has the Rifle Association. Nobody, but nobody, Republican or Democrat, may touch it. For the reason that the USP of American democracy is that an American citizen, preferably all white, may fire away at any real or imagined threat to the safety of his person or property. The American Constitution, good republicans think, was drafted with the singular purpose of ensuring this right, both at home and abroad.
Well, India now has her own answer to this. Born some forty odd years after India’s independence from colonial rule, India’s private-corporate electronic TV channels have over the two decades of neoliberalism come to be established, with complicit aid from the state, as the Indian Rifle Association. Holy cow, rogue elephant, mythical albino pachyderm that everybody seeks and fears, it has come to be all of these. And it is the untouchable – from- above that rarely ever notices the untouchable-from-below.
Upto this day, this animal that traverses across the plethora of channels a spectrum of production from the occasionally sober and urbane to the habitually sectarian, tendentious, jingoist, gauche, superstitious, reactionary, callously exploitive of base instincts and illiteracies, and obliteratively noisy, remains formally unaccountable within the institutional arrangements of Indian democracy, answerable only—as some very senior Indian journalists recently pointed out in a talk show—to a handful of private paymasters. In its recent fulminations against “corruption,” for example, the secret fount of corruption was rarely mentioned, namely the corporates who crony upto political and bureaucratic allies that may do their dirty work.
Even as they routinely scream to hold all state institutions—the political class, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the state-apparatus-- accountable, India’s electronic TV channels remain blissfully and shamelessly outside the ambit of any regulatory mechanism, unlike the Print media who are overseen by a Press Council of India, however conciliatory and toothless thus far.
But now, something seems set to change. The new Chairman of the Press Council of India is a recently retired justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Markandey Katju. And as he did while he was on the bench, he means business.
Good old Nehruvaian socialist that he is, as well as one who has a nasty courage of intellectual and political conviction, Katju has been expressing what some polls have shown to be a majority view that the fourth estate cannot by any stretch of constitutional arrangement be deemed to be above the decencies that must always be observed in public discourse, or above the livelihood concerns that affect and inform the existence of some three fourths of all Indians, concerns that but rarely ever surface among the coverages of these channels, except now and then as token offerings. Nor may it be permitted the carte blanche to exhibit slanted presentations of events that betray allegiances contrary to one of the “basic structures” of the Constitution, namely secularism. Equally, the channels cannot be allowed to hold this party or that guilty, often in denigrative and abusive terms, before the courts have so pronounced them.
His proposal to the government of the day that the electronic channels also be brought under the ambit of the Press Council of India evoked upon the instant the predictable howl that Katju is not interested in any rational discourse on the issue of regulation but is simply desirous of gagging the fourth estate as it was gagged by the Indira Gandhi government in 1975.
Another instructive historical instance of how a power-structure that acquires the character of fascist domination cries the loudest for democracy whenever its totalitarian hold is sought to be questioned or brought in line with answerabilities that apply everywhere else.
And often accompanied by resonant ironies as Katju has now underlined. Writing to the News Broadcasting Association, Katju has asked its secretary, N.K.Singh,
“I would like to know whether the Association is willing to be placed under the Lokpal, which is proposed to be set up in the winter session of Parliament. You seem to be reluctant to come under the Press Council. Are you also reluctant to come under the Lokpal?”
Further:
“You claim the right of self-regulation. May I remind you that even judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts do not have that absolute right. They can be impeached by Parliament for misconduct. . . Lawyers come under the Bar Council and their licence can be suspended or cancelled for professional misconduct. Similarly doctors come under the Medical Council, chartered accountants under their council, etc.,…In the recent Anna Hazare movement, wide publicity was given to it by the media. What is the demand of Anna Hazare? That politicians, bureaucrats, judges, etc. should all be placed under the Jan Lokpal Bill. By what logic do you claim to be exempt from being placed under the Lokpal?. . .You claim the right of self-regulation. By the same logic, politicians, bureaucrats, etc., will also claim the right of self-regulation. Or do you claim to be so doodh ka dhula (cleansed by milk) that you should not be regulated by anyone else except yourself? What then were paid news, Radia tapes etc.,?” (The phenomenon of “paid news” was uncovered first by that doyen of journalists dedicated to the causes that affect India’s hungry and exploited millions, P.Sainath; it involves politicians paying for sponsored copies of adulation but appearing as news, especially during election times. See The Hindu, November, 9).
These, you might well think, are pretty unanswerable posers that the electronic media houses will predictably seek to meet with self-righteous rhetoric on behalf of democratic principles for which they give not a fig in the first place. Most will stoop, in real life, to however low they must inorder to pick up that Television Rating Point (TRP).
In the days to come, therefore, despite the many discussions that may take place on the theme—and not all disingenuous—Katju must expect a concerted gang-up for his ouster from Chairmanship of the Press Council of India. If the real purpose of the Anna Hazare-led putsch, as I have argued more than once, is to oust the government at the centre that seems chary of jettisoning its social-investment orientations in favour of further reforms calculated to increase private wealth, the corporates, very same ones who bolster the Anna drive, will also leave no gold-leaf unturned to ensure that this new ominous Katju tendency with respect to their captive hold on the electronic media is nipped in the bud. Pitiful are those senior employees and anchors among these channels who will not but continue to make strident assaults on the state so long as their own slavery to the corporates they serve remains well-paid.
And the hope that a majority of Indians who everyday suffer the inflictions of these channels, often as charmed zombies, and who sympathise with what Katju seeks to do may come out in considerable and visible support must be discounted for now.
To those who are hard put to think where their next miserable meal may come from, the Katju cause, however sane and laudable, will seem not of an order of concern that may relegate bread and butter issues. That bread and butter issues may indeed be inherent in the Katju concern about privately-owned electronic media may also seem a thought remote from quotidian congnizance.
So much the pity.
*
Badri Raina
Well, India now has her own answer to this. Born some forty odd years after India’s independence from colonial rule, India’s private-corporate electronic TV channels have over the two decades of neoliberalism come to be established, with complicit aid from the state, as the Indian Rifle Association. Holy cow, rogue elephant, mythical albino pachyderm that everybody seeks and fears, it has come to be all of these. And it is the untouchable – from- above that rarely ever notices the untouchable-from-below.
Upto this day, this animal that traverses across the plethora of channels a spectrum of production from the occasionally sober and urbane to the habitually sectarian, tendentious, jingoist, gauche, superstitious, reactionary, callously exploitive of base instincts and illiteracies, and obliteratively noisy, remains formally unaccountable within the institutional arrangements of Indian democracy, answerable only—as some very senior Indian journalists recently pointed out in a talk show—to a handful of private paymasters. In its recent fulminations against “corruption,” for example, the secret fount of corruption was rarely mentioned, namely the corporates who crony upto political and bureaucratic allies that may do their dirty work.
Even as they routinely scream to hold all state institutions—the political class, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the state-apparatus-- accountable, India’s electronic TV channels remain blissfully and shamelessly outside the ambit of any regulatory mechanism, unlike the Print media who are overseen by a Press Council of India, however conciliatory and toothless thus far.
But now, something seems set to change. The new Chairman of the Press Council of India is a recently retired justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Markandey Katju. And as he did while he was on the bench, he means business.
Good old Nehruvaian socialist that he is, as well as one who has a nasty courage of intellectual and political conviction, Katju has been expressing what some polls have shown to be a majority view that the fourth estate cannot by any stretch of constitutional arrangement be deemed to be above the decencies that must always be observed in public discourse, or above the livelihood concerns that affect and inform the existence of some three fourths of all Indians, concerns that but rarely ever surface among the coverages of these channels, except now and then as token offerings. Nor may it be permitted the carte blanche to exhibit slanted presentations of events that betray allegiances contrary to one of the “basic structures” of the Constitution, namely secularism. Equally, the channels cannot be allowed to hold this party or that guilty, often in denigrative and abusive terms, before the courts have so pronounced them.
His proposal to the government of the day that the electronic channels also be brought under the ambit of the Press Council of India evoked upon the instant the predictable howl that Katju is not interested in any rational discourse on the issue of regulation but is simply desirous of gagging the fourth estate as it was gagged by the Indira Gandhi government in 1975.
Another instructive historical instance of how a power-structure that acquires the character of fascist domination cries the loudest for democracy whenever its totalitarian hold is sought to be questioned or brought in line with answerabilities that apply everywhere else.
And often accompanied by resonant ironies as Katju has now underlined. Writing to the News Broadcasting Association, Katju has asked its secretary, N.K.Singh,
“I would like to know whether the Association is willing to be placed under the Lokpal, which is proposed to be set up in the winter session of Parliament. You seem to be reluctant to come under the Press Council. Are you also reluctant to come under the Lokpal?”
Further:
“You claim the right of self-regulation. May I remind you that even judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts do not have that absolute right. They can be impeached by Parliament for misconduct. . . Lawyers come under the Bar Council and their licence can be suspended or cancelled for professional misconduct. Similarly doctors come under the Medical Council, chartered accountants under their council, etc.,…In the recent Anna Hazare movement, wide publicity was given to it by the media. What is the demand of Anna Hazare? That politicians, bureaucrats, judges, etc. should all be placed under the Jan Lokpal Bill. By what logic do you claim to be exempt from being placed under the Lokpal?. . .You claim the right of self-regulation. By the same logic, politicians, bureaucrats, etc., will also claim the right of self-regulation. Or do you claim to be so doodh ka dhula (cleansed by milk) that you should not be regulated by anyone else except yourself? What then were paid news, Radia tapes etc.,?” (The phenomenon of “paid news” was uncovered first by that doyen of journalists dedicated to the causes that affect India’s hungry and exploited millions, P.Sainath; it involves politicians paying for sponsored copies of adulation but appearing as news, especially during election times. See The Hindu, November, 9).
These, you might well think, are pretty unanswerable posers that the electronic media houses will predictably seek to meet with self-righteous rhetoric on behalf of democratic principles for which they give not a fig in the first place. Most will stoop, in real life, to however low they must inorder to pick up that Television Rating Point (TRP).
In the days to come, therefore, despite the many discussions that may take place on the theme—and not all disingenuous—Katju must expect a concerted gang-up for his ouster from Chairmanship of the Press Council of India. If the real purpose of the Anna Hazare-led putsch, as I have argued more than once, is to oust the government at the centre that seems chary of jettisoning its social-investment orientations in favour of further reforms calculated to increase private wealth, the corporates, very same ones who bolster the Anna drive, will also leave no gold-leaf unturned to ensure that this new ominous Katju tendency with respect to their captive hold on the electronic media is nipped in the bud. Pitiful are those senior employees and anchors among these channels who will not but continue to make strident assaults on the state so long as their own slavery to the corporates they serve remains well-paid.
And the hope that a majority of Indians who everyday suffer the inflictions of these channels, often as charmed zombies, and who sympathise with what Katju seeks to do may come out in considerable and visible support must be discounted for now.
To those who are hard put to think where their next miserable meal may come from, the Katju cause, however sane and laudable, will seem not of an order of concern that may relegate bread and butter issues. That bread and butter issues may indeed be inherent in the Katju concern about privately-owned electronic media may also seem a thought remote from quotidian congnizance.
So much the pity.
*
Badri Raina
Monday, October 17, 2011
So tell me, Who is Collapsing?
The campaign mounted by forces, homegrown and foreign, to discredit, damage and oust the UPA government at the centre has worked essentially along two planks: one, that the prime minister, not being his own man, has been prevented from carrying India into the next generation of “reforms” by Sonia Gandhi and her socialistic civil society spoilers; and, two, that, not doing so, it must be declared that this has been the most corrupt Indian government post-independence.This essentially corporate agenda, buttressed by Rightwing Hindutva organizations, has received thumping support from India’s corporate electronic TV channels day in and day out, to a point where the hypocritical upholders of the freedom of speech have tended to stifle, hound, and heckle dissenting voices on a plethora of debates mounted speciously by the said channels.
The least thing attempted to be said on behalf of a malnourished, jobless, houseless, drinking-water-less, sanitation-less, health-care-less, redress-less India, some seven out of ten Indians if you like, has been sniggered at and dubbed a liberal-bleeding-heart conspiracy to keep the aspiring nation in the backwaters, tantalizingly out of reach of its superpowerly destiny.
And as in the history of Europe preceding the second world war, corporate fascism in India found over the months that “corruption” was that one slogan and platform to which all and sundry, including the habitually corrupt, could be drawn, followed by a sleight-of-hand that declared corruption to reside only and exclusively within the one ruling party! Which, it stood to reason, then needed to be dethroned in the “national interest” long before its mandate ends in 2014.
(Look at what is being said at “occupy wall street,” that what ordinary Americans are now fighting is not capitalism but corporate fascism, since that thing called “competition” has long been hounded out of capitalism by fascist banking and financial institutions in favour of monopolistic loot, all willy nilly buttressed by the capitulation of a so-called democratic state in favour of bailing out not the people but the banks and the corporations.)
Along this route, some stunningly anarchist elements and staunchly fascistic espousers of a militarist state have seemed to hold hands in a marriage of convenience. Alas, all too short-lived, as is already evident.
Thus, it has been dinned into us how the UPA is all set to collapse not because of any putsch against it from the outside but because of the weight of its own contradictions and cross-purposes, and most of all by its irredemiably corrupt character.
Does it matter that this may be the first Indian government since Nehru’s demise to be in the process of carrying out a multi-faceted legislative agenda to curb and punish corruption, both among the political class and the bureaucracy? This includes electoral and land acquisition reform, reform in the existing modalities of assets ownership and sale and purchase of properties, reforms in the judicial arena, including, much as it must hurt, the clandestine world of corporate bonanzas. Even, perish the thought, a look at the phenomenon of “paid news” which bespeaks the double-talk of sections of the media on the subject of corruption. Add to that a whistleblower’s protection legislation now also on the anvil. However reluctant these exertions may be thought to be, they far outstrip anything that the erstwhile NDA government ever conceived or did when it ruled India (1998-2004).
It is also good to remember that it was the UPA regime that gave to the country its first Right to Information Act — one that has become more than a headache to the government and its agencies. A fine example of how measures taken to consolidate democratic legitimacy often redound on the heads of those that take such measures, but advance democracy in relentless ways.
Alas, unlike emperor Ashok, who slaughtered hundreds of thousands at Kalinga but then has come to be eulogised for some two millenia as the apostle of peace, the UPA regime remains vulnerable to an opposition onslaught that is determined to see that the Manmohan Singh government is remembered for the scams that have come to light and not for its unprecedented anti-graft legislations, even as it remains loyal to a class base that disallows any real transfer of wealth or economic and administrative empowerment to democractic formations like the Panchayats or Gram Sabhas at the rural grass roots.
And yet, already it seems that whereas the UPA may or may not be collapsing under its own weight of alleged perfidies, the concatenation of false prophets who have been at the forefront of the putsch against the UPA government may be unraveling, as sundry hypocrisies and attempted joint fronts are shamed and revealed in the light of public glare.
Take a peek.
Advani’s “Anti-Corruption” Toyota Binge
Such is the state of cohesion and moral clarity within the BJP that from day one whisperings began to be heard that LK Advani’s setting out had less to do with an anti-corruption obsession, more with confronting the RSS and his party with a fait accompli: like it or not, he is seen to be saying, I am still the best bet you have for prime ministerial placement.
And much as you might think that boor in Gandhinagar to be the works, and much as I might be obliged to him for my electoral existence, and much as I might publicly defend him against his own dark deeds of 2002, you and I know that he is viewed with fear and trembling both by his own peer group within the party, and by all those Indians who feel any allegiance to India’s secular and constitutional democracy.
Had Advani’s been a statesmanlike crusade against corruption, might not he have started his peregrinations from the state either of Karnataka or Uttarakhand, —states where his own party and governments have been upto their eyelashes in corruption and loot? Indeed, as I write, news comes that the erstwhile chief minister of Karnataka, name of Yeddyurappa, is playing hide and seek with the police who are after him with a warrant of arrest, all bail having been denied.
Think that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is on record as having once admonished the electorate in a segment of Madhya Pradesh not to vote for his own Congress candidate because the said worthy was corrupt! You better believe it.
There was an honest statesman, worthy of emulation. But as we said, having spawned and indulged massive scams during the NDA regime (1998-2004), a corporate-loving, market-fundamentalist party like the BJP (with its canny mercantilist electorate base among the trading classes whose moneys are but rarely accounted for, gigantic inner pockets, and sundry hiding places, including in holy sanctum sanctorums, private and public), Advani’s protestations on behalf of a clean and accounted-for national life convince few.
And, as it has turned out, his contrived pieties on behalf of an anti-corruption awareness campaign—in pitiful and redundant imitation ot Hazare’s exertions-- have taken only a day to crash at the hands of his own BJP-led corrupt government in Madhya Pradesh.
In the city of Satna where his thinly-attended Toyota arrived on October 13, at a press conference organized on his behalf a day earlier, envelopes were distributed among the reporters/journalists present with currency notes worth Rs 5001000, tucked inside each envelope!
Some comment that on the fraternity of journalists who, even as they never fail to fulminate against corruption, seem quite used to these tokens of admiration. One journalist, however, there was from the Hindi daily, Nai Duniya, who raised the shout, and went on to report the news in his paper. Kudos to him, we say.
But, so much for Advani’s and his party’s claims on behalf of probity. Clearly, from here on, despite the silence that the tv channels might visit upon this episode that shows the emperor without clothes, the truth is out; the Toyota may lumber on, but as farcically as a man on one leg might pretend to race on two good ones.
Team Anna and RSS
Good man with simple personal habits and requirements is Anna Hazare. And a man who clearly can go without food for some length of days. But once having served in the army, he does seem to have internalized a militarist-disciplinarian paradigm of “nationalism” which, altogether, fits rather well with the preferred coordinates of the RSS view of things.
Thus, his allegiance is to a state of his imagining rather than to the institutions of Indian democracy as these have evolved over time and through trial and error.
And, from what we have seen, the state of his imagining may be nothing like Gandhi’s paradigm of gram swaraj wherein hardwork, secular humanism, and intellectual tolerance rule the day. And where punishments are not punitive, as in Anna’s Ralegan Siddi, but ethically self-interrogative.
How inevtitable then that Prashant Bhushan’s anti-centrist, anti-nationalist predilection, and a rather anarchist favour of atomist democracy with no need of a state (a predilection that I am unable to subscribe to, although from axes of analysis entirely different from Anna Hazare’s preferences) should have come into stark contradiction with the loadstar of “team Anna.” And, might I guess, with the preferences also of a Kiran Bedi or an Arvind Kejriwal. Even a Santosh Hegde. None of them might endorse Prashant Bhushan’s thing about Kashmir, or about his view generally of the Indian democratic system.
And then to impose on all members of “team Anna” an anti-Congress political agenda. A justice Hegde whose most nascent experience of corruption has had to do with the corruption of the BJP government in Karnataka where he, as the Lokayukt, gave a stunning indictment of the Yeddyurappa ministry, could hardly be expected to swallow the politics that only the Congress is the true home of all corruption. Thus his predictably principled dissociation from that politics.
And what of Anna himself? Having clearly received support from the RSS, on record through letters, and visibly on the ground, what a bind he is in, with the Chanakya of the Congress party asking all the inconvenient questions with uncanny insistence. For example, why is Anna shy of acknowledging RSS support? Anna knows he is damned if he does, and he is damned if he doesn’t. Thus, what better strategy than a “maun vrat.”
Speak not at all, lest you speak that which you should not. Having earlier said that the Chanakya is saying all this inorder to defame him, and that he should be sent to a mental asylum, Anna can hardly be in the good books of the RSS any more; after all, why should he, or anybody, think that any associaltion with the RSS is a matter of defamation?
Indeed, the latest statement issued by Suresh Joshi of the RSS (who had earlier sent Anna a letter of support) is expressly filled with hurt at Anna’s seemingly disingenuous attempt to disown that association and support (see The Hindu, 16th October). It is of course for the RSS to ponder why even such social activists as are closely linked to the organization or to its thinking find it hard to acknowledge that linkage.
Then there is the more considered criticism: Anna seems to think that anyone who questions the Jan Lokpal Bill is ipso facto in favour of corruption; and hence deserving of harassment and ostracisation. Or that, Parliament being chokeful of the corrupt, must yield its processes, prerogatives, constitutional rights to “people’s” wishes. Further question as to who are the “people” draws hardly any more considered analysis from Anna, although Dalit, Muslim, Backward Class organizations—some three fourths of Indians—came out openly to hold that Anna’s disregard of Parliament betrays essentially a Brahminical impatience with an institution that does not exercise its decisions with uncomplicated alacrity in favour of a favoured minority of Indians who have economic and social clout but scant political empowerment. More importantly, the only institution of State wherein these three fourths of Indians have any empowered presence.
Then, on the communal question: how does someone like a Mallika Sarabai who has been in the forefront of the resistance against Narendra Modi’s sectarian-fascist rule, and who has suffered for so resisting, swallow Anna’s espousal of Modi as a “development” icon without regard to his record as an unprecedented human rights violater? Or without regard, indeed, to the actual facts of his alleged record on “development” or incorruptibility, given that the CAG in Gujarat has found malfeasance to the tune of Rs.26,000/- crores attributable to his government? Not to speak of all the skeletons, literally, that keep tumbling out of the Macbeth-Modi closet? Even as other member or two of Anna's team might in their heart of heart share some of Modi’s settled prejudices against Muslim Indians.
So there are contradictions under the visible weight of which both the BJP and “team Anna” seem to be collapsing, while Sonia Gandhi’s Congress party carries on quietly and without fuss.
If only the forces on the Left would come boldly forth on behalf of the lesser evil for the time being.
*
Badri Raina
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Endgame in Gujarat?
“the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power”
(Julius Caesar)
There comes a time in Macbeth’s bloody-minded totalitarianism when, wishing to control every little mite of time, space, and freedom of action, he realizes that in so doing he has infact come to lose all control over everything.
Indeed, the one profound and profoundly enacted truth of Macbeth’s career is to communicate the fearful irony at the heart of all absolutist ambition, namely, that far from achieving any omnipotent security of selfhood or regime, every successive crime calculated to nail opposition leaves a residue which in course metamorphoses into an uncontrollable destiny. All moral compass lost, a madly irrational anarchy overtakes the tyrant, until his only pathetic rationale for going forward or turning back comes to be which end is physically closer and more accessible: “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (Macbeth, Cambridge, ed. John Dover Wilson.)
This seems to be the point at which politics in Gujarat may now have arrived.
Sanjiv Bhatt may well be the “naked new born babe” whose sheer unconcealed innocence and open-ended helplessness bids fair to rouse the “collective conscience of society” (to borrow that redolent phrase from the Supreme Court’s judgement on Afzal Guru), including of the Congress party, into more than just mumbling “enough is enough,” that there truly has been “something rotten in the state of” Gujarat that screams for healthful redress and renewal.
As the remorseless arms of tyranny flail in all directions, to strike, as it were, whoever may lurk in the blinding shadows of gathering justice, Sanjeev Bhatt may just be the reincarnated eighth of Devki and Vasudev, blown in with the winds from nearby Dwarka, deriving a charmed life from the spirit of the moment, from, if you like, a post-Anna Zeitgeist. Imagine that in one leading English Daily today (Gandhi’s birthday fittingly), Anna is reported to say that “Communal Forces are a bigger threat than Corruption” (HT, 2 Oct, 2011). How heartily we agree!
Meanwhile, are you as askance as we are at the constitutional and ethical poverty of a party like the BJP that one segment, it would seem, of its many segments should think, and like us to think, that an intolerant boor, a sectarian warlord, a no-holds-barred extinguisher of non-compliant voices, however selfless and rightful, a rewarder of cronies who trample any and every constitutional or moral principle at his bidding, a democratic pretender who appeals not to the best collective reason but to the basest collective prejudice, is indeed the fittest candidate to be the prime minister of the world’s most pluralist country! O tempora, O mores!
On this hallowed day of the birth of two of India’s noblest souls—Gandhi and Lal Bahadur—do spare us that ugly thought.
Another thing: we in India say “Satyameva jayatei”. From where else but this must Hegel have imbibed the insight that “only the rational is the right.” Never more true than in a democratic system, however flawed, mangled, or appropriated. And, after long years of seeming victory, the rational one day materializes in the shape of a kashmiri-looking IPS officer who, perish the thought, stands up straightforwardly and says that his allegiance is not to the boss, but to the boss of all bosses, namely the Constitution of India as by law established. Ha, the gumption! But there it is: the same Constitution from whence the canny one derives his own wherewithal in the first place, much as he might say no, no, no, Anal Haq, Anal Haq i.e. I am god, I am god. Not Advani, not any other prani. Just me, just me, can’t you see, can’t you see.
Alas, will no one rid me of this fear, meaning not Richard but Sanjeev Bhatt.
The time for that sort of thing to happen may well be past, as Gujarat seems poised to emerge from the heart of darkness into the sunshine of common day.
Time to be humble, and time to pray.
*
Badri Raina
(Julius Caesar)
There comes a time in Macbeth’s bloody-minded totalitarianism when, wishing to control every little mite of time, space, and freedom of action, he realizes that in so doing he has infact come to lose all control over everything.
Indeed, the one profound and profoundly enacted truth of Macbeth’s career is to communicate the fearful irony at the heart of all absolutist ambition, namely, that far from achieving any omnipotent security of selfhood or regime, every successive crime calculated to nail opposition leaves a residue which in course metamorphoses into an uncontrollable destiny. All moral compass lost, a madly irrational anarchy overtakes the tyrant, until his only pathetic rationale for going forward or turning back comes to be which end is physically closer and more accessible: “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (Macbeth, Cambridge, ed. John Dover Wilson.)
This seems to be the point at which politics in Gujarat may now have arrived.
Sanjiv Bhatt may well be the “naked new born babe” whose sheer unconcealed innocence and open-ended helplessness bids fair to rouse the “collective conscience of society” (to borrow that redolent phrase from the Supreme Court’s judgement on Afzal Guru), including of the Congress party, into more than just mumbling “enough is enough,” that there truly has been “something rotten in the state of” Gujarat that screams for healthful redress and renewal.
As the remorseless arms of tyranny flail in all directions, to strike, as it were, whoever may lurk in the blinding shadows of gathering justice, Sanjeev Bhatt may just be the reincarnated eighth of Devki and Vasudev, blown in with the winds from nearby Dwarka, deriving a charmed life from the spirit of the moment, from, if you like, a post-Anna Zeitgeist. Imagine that in one leading English Daily today (Gandhi’s birthday fittingly), Anna is reported to say that “Communal Forces are a bigger threat than Corruption” (HT, 2 Oct, 2011). How heartily we agree!
Meanwhile, are you as askance as we are at the constitutional and ethical poverty of a party like the BJP that one segment, it would seem, of its many segments should think, and like us to think, that an intolerant boor, a sectarian warlord, a no-holds-barred extinguisher of non-compliant voices, however selfless and rightful, a rewarder of cronies who trample any and every constitutional or moral principle at his bidding, a democratic pretender who appeals not to the best collective reason but to the basest collective prejudice, is indeed the fittest candidate to be the prime minister of the world’s most pluralist country! O tempora, O mores!
On this hallowed day of the birth of two of India’s noblest souls—Gandhi and Lal Bahadur—do spare us that ugly thought.
Another thing: we in India say “Satyameva jayatei”. From where else but this must Hegel have imbibed the insight that “only the rational is the right.” Never more true than in a democratic system, however flawed, mangled, or appropriated. And, after long years of seeming victory, the rational one day materializes in the shape of a kashmiri-looking IPS officer who, perish the thought, stands up straightforwardly and says that his allegiance is not to the boss, but to the boss of all bosses, namely the Constitution of India as by law established. Ha, the gumption! But there it is: the same Constitution from whence the canny one derives his own wherewithal in the first place, much as he might say no, no, no, Anal Haq, Anal Haq i.e. I am god, I am god. Not Advani, not any other prani. Just me, just me, can’t you see, can’t you see.
Alas, will no one rid me of this fear, meaning not Richard but Sanjeev Bhatt.
The time for that sort of thing to happen may well be past, as Gujarat seems poised to emerge from the heart of darkness into the sunshine of common day.
Time to be humble, and time to pray.
*
Badri Raina
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Crossing the Line
Sardar Montek Singh Ahluwalia,
He plan my poverty;
Suddenly I am a rich man,
For my income is thirty three.
Having crossed the line by a whole Rupee,
I now have more and more;
I see around my jhuggi things
I never could see before.
That magic buck floats angelic
Beyond my penury;
The thirty two upon the ground
Reach up for the Christmas tree.
The knowledge that this extra buck
Puts me among the haves,
Makes me feel I needed not
The sumptuous fishes and loaves
That I never had nor ever will
Find upon my skeletal palm;
Better prepared I am to starve
With thirty third for balm.
At thirty three the son of god
Suffered fake demise;
Food or no food I too am set
To rise, and rise, and rise.
Dear Montek, he give selflessly
Such healthful advice;
Soon no poor shall remain,
But plenty of rice.
*
Badri Raina
He plan my poverty;
Suddenly I am a rich man,
For my income is thirty three.
Having crossed the line by a whole Rupee,
I now have more and more;
I see around my jhuggi things
I never could see before.
That magic buck floats angelic
Beyond my penury;
The thirty two upon the ground
Reach up for the Christmas tree.
The knowledge that this extra buck
Puts me among the haves,
Makes me feel I needed not
The sumptuous fishes and loaves
That I never had nor ever will
Find upon my skeletal palm;
Better prepared I am to starve
With thirty third for balm.
At thirty three the son of god
Suffered fake demise;
Food or no food I too am set
To rise, and rise, and rise.
Dear Montek, he give selflessly
Such healthful advice;
Soon no poor shall remain,
But plenty of rice.
*
Badri Raina
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Sanjeev Bhatt
May I salute you, officer Bhatt,
For feckless citizen that I am,
However well-meaning,
Your Promethean metal
Fires my feebleness to a blaze;
You are to our home-grown tyrants
As Bhagat Singh was to the Angrez.
Like the Amazon, Setalvad,
On the worst of day
You teach the lesson that
The poet of old taught—
When the sensible-terrified
Slink from your side,
Then ‘ekla chalo re.’
As to success, success is not
Merely the end of things;
Success is in the soul that
Man, woman, or child brings
To what is with mortal dangers fraught.
The success you already have
Is not for a season or two;
It is a flavour that generations
Will savour,
A rod of steel that the fallen
Spine will raise, giving to cruelty
And cunning their due.
*
Badri Raina
For feckless citizen that I am,
However well-meaning,
Your Promethean metal
Fires my feebleness to a blaze;
You are to our home-grown tyrants
As Bhagat Singh was to the Angrez.
Like the Amazon, Setalvad,
On the worst of day
You teach the lesson that
The poet of old taught—
When the sensible-terrified
Slink from your side,
Then ‘ekla chalo re.’
As to success, success is not
Merely the end of things;
Success is in the soul that
Man, woman, or child brings
To what is with mortal dangers fraught.
The success you already have
Is not for a season or two;
It is a flavour that generations
Will savour,
A rod of steel that the fallen
Spine will raise, giving to cruelty
And cunning their due.
*
Badri Raina
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Parliament and the Anna Putsch
It should be obvious by now that a majority of Dalit and Muslim organizations are opposed to the sort of denigration of parliament that seems inherent in the Anna putsch as it has developed over the last few days. Add to that most Other Backward Classes as well whose leaderships may make opportunist statements but who also remain staunchly wedded to parliamentary supremacy against the claims of “direct democracy” made by Anna’s well-endowed backers.
The social character of this polarization is of the highest significance, and must interest all those for whom Indian democracy is a work-in-progress towards the enhancement of equity and non-discriminatory justice.
In one word, Dalits, Muslims, Tribals, and large sections of the Other Backward Classes view the attack on parliament as an attack on the only democratic institution wherein they, thanks to the Constitution, have any empowered presence and clout. Not in the judiciary, not in the bureaucracy, not at all within the media conglomerates, certainly not among the corporates, and negligible among the state-apparatus.
To put it another way, more than three-fourths of all Indians continue to have an enormous stake in the State, especially the legislatures, since their historical disabilities and lack of influence within the privatized productive assets and processes are near total.
The sentient sections of the backers who presently form the informing engines of the Anna event essentially speak for a new middle class whose links with the State, thanks to neoliberal transfers of wealth from the state to private agencies, have not only been atrophied, but have come to be seen as an obstructing nuisance. This reality in stark contrast to the middle classes that either drove the main coordinates of India’s anti-colonial movement, or engaged in nation-building thereafter, till India came to be absorbed into the Washington Consensus of 1990 under the guidance of the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
No surprise then that the products of that all-important policy-shift should today be demanding that the next step in neoliberal thinking be effected without loss of time, namely, the full-scale dissolution of the State as guardian of people’s interests.
Dalits, Backward Classes, and Muslims may seem to be opposing Anna and his Jan Lok Pal Bill from restricted, sectarian interests—Dalits arguing that the proposed Lok Pal idea and the processes leading upto it have, in a studied way, left them out of reckoning as stake-holders as a typical casteist exclusion, and Muslims deeply distressed by Anna’s less than forgettable predilections towards the Hindu Right, and his refusal to condemn Narendra Modi—but, underlying those axes of opposition is the far deeper anxiety about the weakening of the State, and its caving in now not just to private wealth but to the social and denominational leaderships that back private wealth.
Contrarily, the new middle classes are chagrined beyond measure that, despite their social and economic clout, the system of adult franchise should leave them out of political dominance, and entrust policy making to the ragamuffins who make up the non-elite beneficiaries of affirmative action policies of the state. Their strident demand for the next generation of “reforms” is meant precisely to forestall any further trek of the State with socially enabling measures that enhance the decision-making spaces of Tribals, Dalits, OBCs and religious minorities, chiefly Muslims.
It is clear from the twists and turns of the last few days that sections within the political class across party lines do sense this, and do also understand the dimensions of what is at stake for State and Polity. And much of the capitulation of the State to the Anna putsch is to be understood in terms of a recognition of the corporate power behind the putsch. It is to be greatly doubted that an even larger mobilization by non-elite segments of the hoi polloi, indefinite fast included, would send the same sort of jitters down the parliamentary spine as did the Anna event. After all, an Irom Sharmila has been fasting for more than a decade, and when has the State lost any sleep over that one?
It is time, and imperatively so, that segments of the intelligentsia who share these analyses and anxieties also make their voices heard. One would hope, especially, that the Indian Left, instead of piggy-backing a ruling class movement, would devote time, energy and genius to galvanizing an alternate mobilization, and ensure its effective sustenance.
*
Badri Raina
The social character of this polarization is of the highest significance, and must interest all those for whom Indian democracy is a work-in-progress towards the enhancement of equity and non-discriminatory justice.
In one word, Dalits, Muslims, Tribals, and large sections of the Other Backward Classes view the attack on parliament as an attack on the only democratic institution wherein they, thanks to the Constitution, have any empowered presence and clout. Not in the judiciary, not in the bureaucracy, not at all within the media conglomerates, certainly not among the corporates, and negligible among the state-apparatus.
To put it another way, more than three-fourths of all Indians continue to have an enormous stake in the State, especially the legislatures, since their historical disabilities and lack of influence within the privatized productive assets and processes are near total.
The sentient sections of the backers who presently form the informing engines of the Anna event essentially speak for a new middle class whose links with the State, thanks to neoliberal transfers of wealth from the state to private agencies, have not only been atrophied, but have come to be seen as an obstructing nuisance. This reality in stark contrast to the middle classes that either drove the main coordinates of India’s anti-colonial movement, or engaged in nation-building thereafter, till India came to be absorbed into the Washington Consensus of 1990 under the guidance of the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.
No surprise then that the products of that all-important policy-shift should today be demanding that the next step in neoliberal thinking be effected without loss of time, namely, the full-scale dissolution of the State as guardian of people’s interests.
Dalits, Backward Classes, and Muslims may seem to be opposing Anna and his Jan Lok Pal Bill from restricted, sectarian interests—Dalits arguing that the proposed Lok Pal idea and the processes leading upto it have, in a studied way, left them out of reckoning as stake-holders as a typical casteist exclusion, and Muslims deeply distressed by Anna’s less than forgettable predilections towards the Hindu Right, and his refusal to condemn Narendra Modi—but, underlying those axes of opposition is the far deeper anxiety about the weakening of the State, and its caving in now not just to private wealth but to the social and denominational leaderships that back private wealth.
Contrarily, the new middle classes are chagrined beyond measure that, despite their social and economic clout, the system of adult franchise should leave them out of political dominance, and entrust policy making to the ragamuffins who make up the non-elite beneficiaries of affirmative action policies of the state. Their strident demand for the next generation of “reforms” is meant precisely to forestall any further trek of the State with socially enabling measures that enhance the decision-making spaces of Tribals, Dalits, OBCs and religious minorities, chiefly Muslims.
It is clear from the twists and turns of the last few days that sections within the political class across party lines do sense this, and do also understand the dimensions of what is at stake for State and Polity. And much of the capitulation of the State to the Anna putsch is to be understood in terms of a recognition of the corporate power behind the putsch. It is to be greatly doubted that an even larger mobilization by non-elite segments of the hoi polloi, indefinite fast included, would send the same sort of jitters down the parliamentary spine as did the Anna event. After all, an Irom Sharmila has been fasting for more than a decade, and when has the State lost any sleep over that one?
It is time, and imperatively so, that segments of the intelligentsia who share these analyses and anxieties also make their voices heard. One would hope, especially, that the Indian Left, instead of piggy-backing a ruling class movement, would devote time, energy and genius to galvanizing an alternate mobilization, and ensure its effective sustenance.
*
Badri Raina
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
The State of the Left
Consternation
After some thirty four years of undefeated rule in the Indian state of West Bengal—often called the “red bastion” by political pundits of other shades—the Left Front has been voted out of power.
Although the shout has gone up how the Left has been “routed,” the fact is that there is greater disbelief among Left-detractors at the circumstance than among the Left itself, stridently politic pre-result noises notwithstanding. Those that gloat and experience glee barely believe that the beast has been quelled.
And for good reason. However the “rout” may be trumpeted, imagine that even in defeat, the Left Front has polled 41% of the popular vote, a million or so votes more than it polled in the parliamentary elections of 2009! And after more than three decades of continuous rule. The question may be asked: when was the last time that either of India’s major centrist parties obtained a 40% verdict in a regional or parliamentary election? The answer to that might take us all the way back to the first decade after Independence. Indeed, most parties set to form new governments in the five states that went to the hustings in the current round will do so on an electoral base far smaller than the vote the Left still commands in West Bengal. Such are the maverick vagaries of the first-past-the-post system. And yet the Left has lost, due mainly to forms of high-handedness which the Trinamool Congress and Congress combined were able to exploit fully among sections of Bengalis, including erstwhile Left supporters.
Why Has the Left Front Lost?
Having noted the fact that the Left was up against a unified opposition, the question must still be answered: why did such consolidation take place? And, why did a majority 49% vote for the winning combine?
As the Left parties mull these questions, they might find that the answers range from the fairly obvious to the more troublesome and far-reaching, all of which the Left must address without succumbing to self-delusion, or, contrarily, without sinking into any apocalyptic political/intellectual depression. Here are a few thoughts that come to mind:
--thirty four years, a record unparalleled in any democracy, come to think of it, is far too long even for the best of marriages, not to speak of a marriage between governments and people; since, unlike China, the Indian political system makes alternate political choices available, it is hardly any surprise that the people of West Bengal opted for a change of guard; if anything, they are to be thanked for having rewarded the excellent work done by the Left in the matter of land redistribution, grass roots democracy, and social harmony over three decades or more. Yet, although in other states of India governments routinely change complexion after five year terms, the defeat of the Left after thirty four years of rule is sought to be made out to be a catastrophe equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The underlying supposition being that the Left will never return to power, since its governmental defeat is sought to be propagated as the defeat coterminously as the defeat of Leftist ideology per se. This must be seen for what it is: wishful thinking on behalf of India’s newly spawned propertied classes who imagine that history has come to an end with neoliberalism and with India’s strategic embrace with global Capitalism.
--Given the peculiar circumstance that the Left Front, after all, had to operate within the larger national framework within which macro-economic policies are laid down by governments at the centre, there is only so much the Left could do in West Bengal beyond the unprecedented upliftment of incomes in the rural sector; it could have done more in the industrial sector should it have chosen to succumb wholly to the diktats of the neoliberal captains of finance Capital; the Left could hardly be berated for raising the questions that any Left politics must with regard to the social and accumulative consequences of pursuing neoliberalism—consequences which have mightily come home to roost in the developed world itself since the crash there began with the collapse of giant banks and corporations, all bailed out by you know who—the tax moneys of the discredited public treasury; it was inevitable, therefore, that in the current environment of economic thinking spawned by the Washington Consensus, the Left would be faced with aspirational pressures that it would find difficult to negotiate on quite the same terms as some non-Left state governments were willing to. Given the shrinkage of the state-sector, job creation beyond agriculture and state services then came to be a tough ask.
--The Left Front was, therefore, not wrong in determining that jobs could result chiefly from reinvigorating industry, especially manufacturing; as it sought to turn attention to encouraging investments and acquiring land, it ran into a reality that it may have smugly left out of consideration: over time, its equation with the class that it had benefited the most, the small and middle peasantry, had suffered deep ravages. All importantly, land-owning peasants were no longer willing simply to be vassals to the diktat of party cadres. Over long years of control, the cadres had ceased to be one with the people, or to talk with them; a coercive habit of talking-down had set in. Result: despite its pioneering work in installing Panchayati Raj (grass roots democracy), such raj (governance) had come to go out of the hands of the people and into the muscular enforcement of party cadres. Indeed, the malaise stretched beyond the rural sector, encompassing most aspects of public life and service, including the state-apparatus. The cadres came to see themselves and to be seen both as the people and the state. Hegemony had come to yield place to precipitate and overbearing coercion.
Good to remind ourselves that whenever that has happened—no more eloquent instance than the erstwhile Soviet Union—disaster is only a step away. It is my view that the overthrow of the Left in Bengal, even as it had to do with episodes like Nandigram which shocked chiefly the Muslim Bengalis out of a habitual preference for the Left despite little cause for thanks beyond the land they came to possess and physical safety from majoritarian onslaughts, had to do with the little man’s assertion on behalf of self-affirmation against big-brotherly habits that seemed to take their allegiance for granted. The question therefore cries to be pondered: why, and why so often, do people-friendly formations that seek to deepen democracy end up stifling the same?
I have submitted on more than one occasion that the Indian Left must diligently seek to rethink the Leninist legacy of a party in total command, and of democratic centralism itself. These legacies no longer seem conducive to the sort of rapport that Left politics needs to forge with toiling people on whose behalf it thinks and hopes to work. These are legacies that have hubris written into them, and sixty years of political democracy in India have eliminated the room for command or hubris as the operative axes of relationship between political formations and the masses. Given the complex cultural matrices of Indian social and historical life, leaderships that only understand people’s suffering from a safe theoretical distance, however correctly, always have lost to others who share those sufferings on the ground, and on a sustained basis of immersion. There are lessons to be learnt here from the more authentic non-governmental organizations who, slowly but surely, have over the decades, come to substitute the grass roots work that rightfully belongs to organized Left parties. And lessons as well from those communist leaders who, into their ageing days into the end of the sixties, observed patterns of personal living and relationship with the people that were instrumental in setting up an influential politics of the Left in India when in most other democracies the Left had come to shut shop.
Is there a call, therefore, for the Left to rethink not just contingent errors of policy and praxis, but its root organizational principles? I think there is. Not until rigid and robotic forms of affiliation between party leaderships and cadres, and between cadres and the mass of people are loosened and freed from mere cerebrated correctness may the Left now hope to secure a more willing foothold among wider sections of the immiserated who recognize the authenticity of Left concern but who also feel thwarted by high-falutin rebuke.
Thinking Beyond Capitalism
In a recent article, Prabhat Patnaik, the credible intellectual voice of the cpi (m), has rightly argued that the relevance of the Left remains a long-ranging one because, alone among India’s political formations, it thinks of life beyond Capitalism, and has the theoretical equipment to do so.
The question I ask myself is one that Marx would surely also have asked: what does it mean to be fighting Capitalism in the India of 2011? Or, indeed, India per se.
As I seek for answers I find no easy ones. The vanguards of India’s anti-colonial movement, many impeccably rational and seeped in knowledge of ideologies, did not, often could not (because for every rational leader there were two or three who shared irrational habits of custom and thought) battle the social and cultural content of pre-Capitalist material orders. I say that in the plural because there is still little agreement among economic historians as to whether pre-colonial India was uniformly Feudal, or uniformly Asiatic, or indeed offered a spectrum of practices in economic organization.
India’s post-colonial “modernity” thus arrived as a mish-mash of absorptions and compromises. There are those among India’s sociologists who think that a good thing, since thank god such a consequence has saved us from unilinear models of “modernity” and its deracinating effects on subjectivity.
The fact, however, remains that economic considerations did not come to inhabit the chief pinnacle of concern among Indians generally, with the exception of those, of course, who came to, and have come to, appropriate the means of production. More than in any other country, the consciousness of class has remained strangulated by multifarious allegiances that have often succeeded in burying the relations of production beneath piles and piles of debris from what Marx called the “muck of ages.”
One consequence of those concatenations has been that, barring the stipulations laid down in the Constitution of India, it cannot be said that Indians have uniformly achieved the consciousness of “citizens.” And for good reason: to this day the operations of the state and its agencies do not negotiate with all Indians as “citizens.” Apart from considerations of class, such negotiation is everywhere coloured by determinations that may be proscribed by the republican Constitution but remain alive and kicking on the ground. To a point where even the extent of torture inflicted on prisoners, or the nature and quantum of punishment given to them for identical crimes is often conditioned by habits of socialization among law-enforcers and officers of the Bench that run contrary to the stipulations of law and the requirements of justice. Indian Capitalism and the party-political system that represents it, then continues to plough into these fractured self-definitions, never allowed to gel into “citizen” consciousness across the board.
I therefore plead that Capitalism in India now cannot be confronted exclusively on the single plank of exploitation, but that such a fundamental premise of class analysis requires to be arrived at through a diverse spectrum of negotiations. For that reason I doubt much that Indian Capitalism can be fought with any great consequence through a book-ridden route to some pristine proletarian struggle, supposing that anything like a proletariat with a dour class-consciousness exists, or, if it does, carries sufficient clout. I also think that the debate whether or not the Communist parties should formally declare themselves Social Democrats, embrace the irreversibility of Capitalism, and carry on from there is little more than a red-herring, although viewed from a ruling class perspective, of great comfort. For a start, dialectical thought which I hold to be a truer representation of the operations of time, space, and human agency than any other I know, rebukes from irrefutable scrutiny the very notion of irreversibility. But on more practical grounds, embracing such a so-called finality can only have the consequence of debilitating the sternness of conviction without which the work of the Left can only dissolve into a complacency matching that of well-intentioned Liberals.
I think fighting Capitalism at this juncture in India’s history must mean engaging with oppressions of diverse definition (oppressions against tribals, dalits, women, children, religious minorities, relegated ethnic groups, displaced populations, victims of state and social/community atrocity alike), definitions that impinge as forcefully on subaltern self-consciousness as economic impoverishment and seem more, often than not, prior to such impoverishment, and seeking to bring those into a unity of “citizen’s” consciousness against the operations of the state and its supportive social elite who seek both to prevent such consolidation and to profit by its lack. Intending not a snuffing out of the colours of the rainbow, but to syncretise them into a light of shared and common recognition that what seem disparate circumstances are everywhere syncopated into the realities of class society. To wit, the hydra may have many heads, but it is one and the same animal. Even as the heads must need be dealt with each in its own location.
And it means, most of all, not just to take up causes for the record, or for media exposure, but devise organizational strategies whereby the Left is constantly among the affected people, educating itself about the specifities of particular oppressions, and preparing the conditions for mass assertions that may in time come to identify a common adversary. Because, emphatically, such discrete coordinates of attention must, even as they do their work, at all costs be prevented from ossifying into vested enclaves of specialized activity which over time become bureaucracies oblivious of the totalized purpose to which they must all contribute severally. Those that are assigned the task of cutting off each head must never forget that the heads belong to one and the same brute, and it is a conjoint task they perform; nor should they forget that the Capitalist hydra spawns ever new instruments, which sometimes spawns newer heads, especially in so pluralist a venue as India.
Electoral Politics
I have for many years felt that inorder to free itself of the contradictions that participation in state power in a multi-party democracy must entail, Left parties should go wholly over to mass work for a decade or two. The attempt to work from above and below simultaneously may have brought the Left to a point where the loss of a state government seems to acquire the proportions of a calamity. Much as I might wish the Left first to consolidate into a unity grounded in a short list of macro-historical determinations, and then to go over wholly to a revolutionary line of mass mobilisaton and education, including self-education, this does not seem likely to happen. Although we may wonder why not.
It should also be obvious that the Left parties on their own are in no position whatsoever, especially as I write, to determine the course of parliamentary power. Nor is it foreseeable that the Left will become a decisive force in parliament for many years to come, regardless of objective conditions that cry out for Left victories.
A question that has repeatedly cropped up in the conclaves of Left decision-making, then, is how may the Left forge an effective role in parliamentary participation? A question that, like it or not, brings us down to unlovely considerations of an opportunist and contingent nature. Today let me say with brevity that if the two all-important objectives of Constitutionalism are social inclusivity/secularism, and as much material and institutional justice as class society and the state it owns may furnish to the people, the Left must consider with wisdom and without self-pride which parliamentary and party-political forces to align with and which to confront, all within the ambit of Constitutional possibility. Such consideration must need disregard interests limited to specific areas of the nation-state and take a view that keeps the entire body politic in mind. As well as the histories/ideologies of major political players, and their record of governance as instruments of class rule. After all, if the parliamentary exertions and interventions of the Left are to be meaningful and consequential, its negotiations and compromises must follow some order of preference. In that context, the Left may need to take a second look, however painful, at the Indian National Congress in disregard of the fact that the Congress remains its chief electoral adversary in West Bengal and Kerala. Even as the work of the Left among the masses brings, overtime, the Congress to a fresh evaluation of its own policy frameworks. The Left must never forget that forces exist in India that seek stridently to fascicise both state and polity—stridently because wide segments among the new affluent classes support any course calculated to homogenize the nation into a strident social unity, weaken democratic institutions and practices, and set out on a course of abrasive militarism. By common recognition, it is the Left mainly that is rightly seen to be the ideological adversary to such forces. But the Left must in turn recognize and accept the reality that it is a fight in which it needs both democratic mass assertions on an exponential scale, and organized political partnerships from among the contenders for power.
West Bengal
As the adage goes, every loss conceals a gain. The loss in West Bengal affords the Left a fine opportunity to contemplate and interpret. The time to change will surely come in five or less years, given what has taken over in Writer’s Building.
Bengal remains a thoughtful and magnanimous place. Those that write off the Left after the Bengal debacle need to remember that it still runs the best government in the North East—one that has succeeded in righting innumerable wrongs done by earlier dispensations, and that the cpi (m) still remains the largest single party in Kerala where, but for the spectacular show put up by the Indian Union Muslim League (winning 20 of 24 seats it contested in contrast to a Congress score of 38 from 82), the Left Front government would have been ahead by more than a mite. They also need to remember that the BJP once had just two representatives in parliament, but went on in 1996 to form the government at the centre.
In the coming five years in West Bengal the Left must expect to receive provocations galore, and not all non-violent; but as it rethinks its cadres, the Left must not be tempted to reply in kind. As in many other matters, the Left here has lessons to learn from Gandhi.
*
Badri Raina
After some thirty four years of undefeated rule in the Indian state of West Bengal—often called the “red bastion” by political pundits of other shades—the Left Front has been voted out of power.
Although the shout has gone up how the Left has been “routed,” the fact is that there is greater disbelief among Left-detractors at the circumstance than among the Left itself, stridently politic pre-result noises notwithstanding. Those that gloat and experience glee barely believe that the beast has been quelled.
And for good reason. However the “rout” may be trumpeted, imagine that even in defeat, the Left Front has polled 41% of the popular vote, a million or so votes more than it polled in the parliamentary elections of 2009! And after more than three decades of continuous rule. The question may be asked: when was the last time that either of India’s major centrist parties obtained a 40% verdict in a regional or parliamentary election? The answer to that might take us all the way back to the first decade after Independence. Indeed, most parties set to form new governments in the five states that went to the hustings in the current round will do so on an electoral base far smaller than the vote the Left still commands in West Bengal. Such are the maverick vagaries of the first-past-the-post system. And yet the Left has lost, due mainly to forms of high-handedness which the Trinamool Congress and Congress combined were able to exploit fully among sections of Bengalis, including erstwhile Left supporters.
Why Has the Left Front Lost?
Having noted the fact that the Left was up against a unified opposition, the question must still be answered: why did such consolidation take place? And, why did a majority 49% vote for the winning combine?
As the Left parties mull these questions, they might find that the answers range from the fairly obvious to the more troublesome and far-reaching, all of which the Left must address without succumbing to self-delusion, or, contrarily, without sinking into any apocalyptic political/intellectual depression. Here are a few thoughts that come to mind:
--thirty four years, a record unparalleled in any democracy, come to think of it, is far too long even for the best of marriages, not to speak of a marriage between governments and people; since, unlike China, the Indian political system makes alternate political choices available, it is hardly any surprise that the people of West Bengal opted for a change of guard; if anything, they are to be thanked for having rewarded the excellent work done by the Left in the matter of land redistribution, grass roots democracy, and social harmony over three decades or more. Yet, although in other states of India governments routinely change complexion after five year terms, the defeat of the Left after thirty four years of rule is sought to be made out to be a catastrophe equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The underlying supposition being that the Left will never return to power, since its governmental defeat is sought to be propagated as the defeat coterminously as the defeat of Leftist ideology per se. This must be seen for what it is: wishful thinking on behalf of India’s newly spawned propertied classes who imagine that history has come to an end with neoliberalism and with India’s strategic embrace with global Capitalism.
--Given the peculiar circumstance that the Left Front, after all, had to operate within the larger national framework within which macro-economic policies are laid down by governments at the centre, there is only so much the Left could do in West Bengal beyond the unprecedented upliftment of incomes in the rural sector; it could have done more in the industrial sector should it have chosen to succumb wholly to the diktats of the neoliberal captains of finance Capital; the Left could hardly be berated for raising the questions that any Left politics must with regard to the social and accumulative consequences of pursuing neoliberalism—consequences which have mightily come home to roost in the developed world itself since the crash there began with the collapse of giant banks and corporations, all bailed out by you know who—the tax moneys of the discredited public treasury; it was inevitable, therefore, that in the current environment of economic thinking spawned by the Washington Consensus, the Left would be faced with aspirational pressures that it would find difficult to negotiate on quite the same terms as some non-Left state governments were willing to. Given the shrinkage of the state-sector, job creation beyond agriculture and state services then came to be a tough ask.
--The Left Front was, therefore, not wrong in determining that jobs could result chiefly from reinvigorating industry, especially manufacturing; as it sought to turn attention to encouraging investments and acquiring land, it ran into a reality that it may have smugly left out of consideration: over time, its equation with the class that it had benefited the most, the small and middle peasantry, had suffered deep ravages. All importantly, land-owning peasants were no longer willing simply to be vassals to the diktat of party cadres. Over long years of control, the cadres had ceased to be one with the people, or to talk with them; a coercive habit of talking-down had set in. Result: despite its pioneering work in installing Panchayati Raj (grass roots democracy), such raj (governance) had come to go out of the hands of the people and into the muscular enforcement of party cadres. Indeed, the malaise stretched beyond the rural sector, encompassing most aspects of public life and service, including the state-apparatus. The cadres came to see themselves and to be seen both as the people and the state. Hegemony had come to yield place to precipitate and overbearing coercion.
Good to remind ourselves that whenever that has happened—no more eloquent instance than the erstwhile Soviet Union—disaster is only a step away. It is my view that the overthrow of the Left in Bengal, even as it had to do with episodes like Nandigram which shocked chiefly the Muslim Bengalis out of a habitual preference for the Left despite little cause for thanks beyond the land they came to possess and physical safety from majoritarian onslaughts, had to do with the little man’s assertion on behalf of self-affirmation against big-brotherly habits that seemed to take their allegiance for granted. The question therefore cries to be pondered: why, and why so often, do people-friendly formations that seek to deepen democracy end up stifling the same?
I have submitted on more than one occasion that the Indian Left must diligently seek to rethink the Leninist legacy of a party in total command, and of democratic centralism itself. These legacies no longer seem conducive to the sort of rapport that Left politics needs to forge with toiling people on whose behalf it thinks and hopes to work. These are legacies that have hubris written into them, and sixty years of political democracy in India have eliminated the room for command or hubris as the operative axes of relationship between political formations and the masses. Given the complex cultural matrices of Indian social and historical life, leaderships that only understand people’s suffering from a safe theoretical distance, however correctly, always have lost to others who share those sufferings on the ground, and on a sustained basis of immersion. There are lessons to be learnt here from the more authentic non-governmental organizations who, slowly but surely, have over the decades, come to substitute the grass roots work that rightfully belongs to organized Left parties. And lessons as well from those communist leaders who, into their ageing days into the end of the sixties, observed patterns of personal living and relationship with the people that were instrumental in setting up an influential politics of the Left in India when in most other democracies the Left had come to shut shop.
Is there a call, therefore, for the Left to rethink not just contingent errors of policy and praxis, but its root organizational principles? I think there is. Not until rigid and robotic forms of affiliation between party leaderships and cadres, and between cadres and the mass of people are loosened and freed from mere cerebrated correctness may the Left now hope to secure a more willing foothold among wider sections of the immiserated who recognize the authenticity of Left concern but who also feel thwarted by high-falutin rebuke.
Thinking Beyond Capitalism
In a recent article, Prabhat Patnaik, the credible intellectual voice of the cpi (m), has rightly argued that the relevance of the Left remains a long-ranging one because, alone among India’s political formations, it thinks of life beyond Capitalism, and has the theoretical equipment to do so.
The question I ask myself is one that Marx would surely also have asked: what does it mean to be fighting Capitalism in the India of 2011? Or, indeed, India per se.
As I seek for answers I find no easy ones. The vanguards of India’s anti-colonial movement, many impeccably rational and seeped in knowledge of ideologies, did not, often could not (because for every rational leader there were two or three who shared irrational habits of custom and thought) battle the social and cultural content of pre-Capitalist material orders. I say that in the plural because there is still little agreement among economic historians as to whether pre-colonial India was uniformly Feudal, or uniformly Asiatic, or indeed offered a spectrum of practices in economic organization.
India’s post-colonial “modernity” thus arrived as a mish-mash of absorptions and compromises. There are those among India’s sociologists who think that a good thing, since thank god such a consequence has saved us from unilinear models of “modernity” and its deracinating effects on subjectivity.
The fact, however, remains that economic considerations did not come to inhabit the chief pinnacle of concern among Indians generally, with the exception of those, of course, who came to, and have come to, appropriate the means of production. More than in any other country, the consciousness of class has remained strangulated by multifarious allegiances that have often succeeded in burying the relations of production beneath piles and piles of debris from what Marx called the “muck of ages.”
One consequence of those concatenations has been that, barring the stipulations laid down in the Constitution of India, it cannot be said that Indians have uniformly achieved the consciousness of “citizens.” And for good reason: to this day the operations of the state and its agencies do not negotiate with all Indians as “citizens.” Apart from considerations of class, such negotiation is everywhere coloured by determinations that may be proscribed by the republican Constitution but remain alive and kicking on the ground. To a point where even the extent of torture inflicted on prisoners, or the nature and quantum of punishment given to them for identical crimes is often conditioned by habits of socialization among law-enforcers and officers of the Bench that run contrary to the stipulations of law and the requirements of justice. Indian Capitalism and the party-political system that represents it, then continues to plough into these fractured self-definitions, never allowed to gel into “citizen” consciousness across the board.
I therefore plead that Capitalism in India now cannot be confronted exclusively on the single plank of exploitation, but that such a fundamental premise of class analysis requires to be arrived at through a diverse spectrum of negotiations. For that reason I doubt much that Indian Capitalism can be fought with any great consequence through a book-ridden route to some pristine proletarian struggle, supposing that anything like a proletariat with a dour class-consciousness exists, or, if it does, carries sufficient clout. I also think that the debate whether or not the Communist parties should formally declare themselves Social Democrats, embrace the irreversibility of Capitalism, and carry on from there is little more than a red-herring, although viewed from a ruling class perspective, of great comfort. For a start, dialectical thought which I hold to be a truer representation of the operations of time, space, and human agency than any other I know, rebukes from irrefutable scrutiny the very notion of irreversibility. But on more practical grounds, embracing such a so-called finality can only have the consequence of debilitating the sternness of conviction without which the work of the Left can only dissolve into a complacency matching that of well-intentioned Liberals.
I think fighting Capitalism at this juncture in India’s history must mean engaging with oppressions of diverse definition (oppressions against tribals, dalits, women, children, religious minorities, relegated ethnic groups, displaced populations, victims of state and social/community atrocity alike), definitions that impinge as forcefully on subaltern self-consciousness as economic impoverishment and seem more, often than not, prior to such impoverishment, and seeking to bring those into a unity of “citizen’s” consciousness against the operations of the state and its supportive social elite who seek both to prevent such consolidation and to profit by its lack. Intending not a snuffing out of the colours of the rainbow, but to syncretise them into a light of shared and common recognition that what seem disparate circumstances are everywhere syncopated into the realities of class society. To wit, the hydra may have many heads, but it is one and the same animal. Even as the heads must need be dealt with each in its own location.
And it means, most of all, not just to take up causes for the record, or for media exposure, but devise organizational strategies whereby the Left is constantly among the affected people, educating itself about the specifities of particular oppressions, and preparing the conditions for mass assertions that may in time come to identify a common adversary. Because, emphatically, such discrete coordinates of attention must, even as they do their work, at all costs be prevented from ossifying into vested enclaves of specialized activity which over time become bureaucracies oblivious of the totalized purpose to which they must all contribute severally. Those that are assigned the task of cutting off each head must never forget that the heads belong to one and the same brute, and it is a conjoint task they perform; nor should they forget that the Capitalist hydra spawns ever new instruments, which sometimes spawns newer heads, especially in so pluralist a venue as India.
Electoral Politics
I have for many years felt that inorder to free itself of the contradictions that participation in state power in a multi-party democracy must entail, Left parties should go wholly over to mass work for a decade or two. The attempt to work from above and below simultaneously may have brought the Left to a point where the loss of a state government seems to acquire the proportions of a calamity. Much as I might wish the Left first to consolidate into a unity grounded in a short list of macro-historical determinations, and then to go over wholly to a revolutionary line of mass mobilisaton and education, including self-education, this does not seem likely to happen. Although we may wonder why not.
It should also be obvious that the Left parties on their own are in no position whatsoever, especially as I write, to determine the course of parliamentary power. Nor is it foreseeable that the Left will become a decisive force in parliament for many years to come, regardless of objective conditions that cry out for Left victories.
A question that has repeatedly cropped up in the conclaves of Left decision-making, then, is how may the Left forge an effective role in parliamentary participation? A question that, like it or not, brings us down to unlovely considerations of an opportunist and contingent nature. Today let me say with brevity that if the two all-important objectives of Constitutionalism are social inclusivity/secularism, and as much material and institutional justice as class society and the state it owns may furnish to the people, the Left must consider with wisdom and without self-pride which parliamentary and party-political forces to align with and which to confront, all within the ambit of Constitutional possibility. Such consideration must need disregard interests limited to specific areas of the nation-state and take a view that keeps the entire body politic in mind. As well as the histories/ideologies of major political players, and their record of governance as instruments of class rule. After all, if the parliamentary exertions and interventions of the Left are to be meaningful and consequential, its negotiations and compromises must follow some order of preference. In that context, the Left may need to take a second look, however painful, at the Indian National Congress in disregard of the fact that the Congress remains its chief electoral adversary in West Bengal and Kerala. Even as the work of the Left among the masses brings, overtime, the Congress to a fresh evaluation of its own policy frameworks. The Left must never forget that forces exist in India that seek stridently to fascicise both state and polity—stridently because wide segments among the new affluent classes support any course calculated to homogenize the nation into a strident social unity, weaken democratic institutions and practices, and set out on a course of abrasive militarism. By common recognition, it is the Left mainly that is rightly seen to be the ideological adversary to such forces. But the Left must in turn recognize and accept the reality that it is a fight in which it needs both democratic mass assertions on an exponential scale, and organized political partnerships from among the contenders for power.
West Bengal
As the adage goes, every loss conceals a gain. The loss in West Bengal affords the Left a fine opportunity to contemplate and interpret. The time to change will surely come in five or less years, given what has taken over in Writer’s Building.
Bengal remains a thoughtful and magnanimous place. Those that write off the Left after the Bengal debacle need to remember that it still runs the best government in the North East—one that has succeeded in righting innumerable wrongs done by earlier dispensations, and that the cpi (m) still remains the largest single party in Kerala where, but for the spectacular show put up by the Indian Union Muslim League (winning 20 of 24 seats it contested in contrast to a Congress score of 38 from 82), the Left Front government would have been ahead by more than a mite. They also need to remember that the BJP once had just two representatives in parliament, but went on in 1996 to form the government at the centre.
In the coming five years in West Bengal the Left must expect to receive provocations galore, and not all non-violent; but as it rethinks its cadres, the Left must not be tempted to reply in kind. As in many other matters, the Left here has lessons to learn from Gandhi.
*
Badri Raina
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Truth is a Truant Bird
Truth may be a truant bird,
but it is real, real, real;
like radio active uranium,
you may not Truth quell.
You may trap Truth in uniform,
you may wash the ink away,
you may stamp it underfoot,
Truth will have its day.
Nor god nor man can build a cage
of subtle secrecies
adequate to quell the Truth
or bring it to its knees.
It flies past the Commissioner
and his obliging policemen;
it brings the wasted corpse to life,
its death is never done;
it crawls on badly broken wing
into the murderous lap;
it sneaks from out the buried life,
it draws a relentless map
from perfidy to perfidy,
from encounter to encounter;
it winks from the weakest little twig
at the mightiest chief minister.
The Truth, it is Banquo’s ghost,
sending banquet into flutter;
it makes of Macbeth a shivering thing,
it is Justice’s bread and butter.
******
Badri Raina, April, 26, 2011
but it is real, real, real;
like radio active uranium,
you may not Truth quell.
You may trap Truth in uniform,
you may wash the ink away,
you may stamp it underfoot,
Truth will have its day.
Nor god nor man can build a cage
of subtle secrecies
adequate to quell the Truth
or bring it to its knees.
It flies past the Commissioner
and his obliging policemen;
it brings the wasted corpse to life,
its death is never done;
it crawls on badly broken wing
into the murderous lap;
it sneaks from out the buried life,
it draws a relentless map
from perfidy to perfidy,
from encounter to encounter;
it winks from the weakest little twig
at the mightiest chief minister.
The Truth, it is Banquo’s ghost,
sending banquet into flutter;
it makes of Macbeth a shivering thing,
it is Justice’s bread and butter.
******
Badri Raina, April, 26, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
The Intimate Zone
The “Mainstream.”
Ask any ordinary Indian citizen whether the bulk of their elected representatives or members of the administrative tribe ever really can be trusted to square with them on any issue at hand—from the burst water pipeline, to the price of food articles, to any policy issues bearing on domestic or foreign concern.
And you will discover that, among democracies, the Indian political/bureaucratic class scores the lowest worldwide on truth-telling, and absolutely the highest on the fine art of dodge and double-speak.
This is so, Wikileaks now tell us, for the canny reason that India’s “mainstream” power wielders/brokers reserve truth-sharing not for the people of India but for the American Embassy. There is the intimate zone where they bare their hearts out.
Here is a sampling—from the lowly and bumptuous, although not less punishable for that reason, to the venerated sublime:
--in his cable dated August 11, 2009, Timothy Roemer, the US Ambassador, recounting his first ever meeting with the then Indian National Security Advisor, (no less) underlined how the latter had candidly revealed his differences with the Prime Minister, Singh, on issues related to peace with Pakistan; and how Narayanan told him of his retort to Singh’s sentiment about the “shared destinies” of India and Pakistan: “you have a shared destiny, we don’t” Narayanan confided as having said. Presumably, the “you” had to do with Singh being a north Indian and a Punjabi, and Narayanan being a southerner to whom the partition of the country in 1947 carried small resonance. Roemer, with good judgement and reason, concluded that Narayanan’s readiness to “distance himself from his boss” suggested that “Singh is more isolated than we thought within his own inner circle in his effort to ‘trust but verify’ and pursue talks with Pakistan.” With the National Security Advisor of a host country so willing and ready to tell, why would the US embassy need them spooks one wonders.
And not just that; Narayanan left the Ambassador in no doubt as to who he thought was boss: “Narayanan noted that all matters related to nuclear and space issues, defense and foreign policy, should be directed to him.” God knows why the Indian electorate gave itself a cabinet and a prime minister.
--Not to think that any lowly joint secretary in the Indian bureaucracy has less grandiose notions of self-importance or is less willing to enunciate policy to the members of the intimate zone. As Hardeep Puri was appointed the Indian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a mere Gaitri Kumar, joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs, told Ted Osinus that “we should let MEA know if we have any complaints” (against Puri). Making it known thereby that the said joint secretary believed not Bang Ki Moon to be the real thing at the UN but the Americans: Puri, in his turn, went one better, telling the US official how “his specific brief” was to seek a “higher degree of convergence” with the US (meeting dated May,1, 2009). The prime minister of India or his external affairs minister have not spoken. Do the people of India have a right to be told? Forget it. They are too used to being fibbed to be hit with the truth.
--Now to the sublime. Wiki tells us how the redoubtable , Harvard- savvy, home minister of India confided to the heart throbs of the real home, the Embassy of the US, that had there been no north or east to the republic of India, but only the west and the south, her GDP growth rate would have been vaulting sky high. What pity that these laggard and slovenly regions cannot be bombed out of existence, India’s military prowess notwithstanding. Indeed, India, sutably reduced, might then have competed with the most “developed” nations on their own terms. Lost opportunity, you would say.
Now we wonder whether the honourable home minister would ever have publicly shared this his heartfelt view with the people of India. Much to be doubted. So thank heavens there remains an intimate zone where such inward truths may be told, namely the US embassy.
--But, all this is nothing to the BJP- Jaitley’s confession made to the intimate zone and retold by Wiki. That surely takes the cake, and invites millions to rethink India’s major opposition party. Not that the millions did not already know, but coming from the horses’s mouth, ah, that is something else.
Meeting with Robert Blake, the Charge at the US Embassy, on May 6, 2005, Jaitley, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, educated the intimate Charge on the true position of the so “nationalist” Bhartiya Janata Party on the true and profound meaning of “Hindutva.” This is how the Charge reported on the intimate exchange:
“Pressed on the question of Hindutva, Jaitley argued
(whenever any member of this right-wing Hindu party argues,
which they do all the time, understand Goebbelesian spin
without shame, let, or hindrance--added) that Hindu
nationalism ‘will always be a talking point’ for the BJP.
. However, he characterized this as an
opportunistic issue” {cable dated May 10, 2005).
That being so, Jaitley confided to the intimate zone how opportunism dictates an assessment of when Hindutva may or may not have “currency” among the electorate. For example, in India’s north-east, Jaitley propounded, such currency remains intact so long as the issue of Muslim migrants of Bangladeshi extraction also remains intact. Just to share a fact: the BJP has never objected to the entry of Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh, only the Muslim ones. The very soul of the BJP’s sectarian/communalist politics there for show, if one needed a show.
And note this: now that terrorist attacks seem to have halted, especially on the Capital of India, “Hindutva” has rather lost its “resonance” in New Delhi (Jaitley again). But, wait a minute and wonder, “that could change with another cross-border terrorist attack, for instance, on the Indian Parliament,” Blake reported Jaitley as having said. So does that sound like a consummation devoutly to be wished? We leave you to work that one out, even as we also invite you to ponder the logic and objective of the terror strikes now known to have been conducted by groups and individuals affiliated to the RSS.
Do also recall another Wiki gem, wherein the redoubtable L.K.Advani of the BJP is heard to reassure the intimates that the party’s opposition to the nuclear deal must not be taken to heart, since it was meant for public consumption. The intimate fact was that the BJP had no intent to do anything but go alongwith it once they came to wield power in Delhi, or to dilute the strategic partnership with the US.
All very patriotic stuff this, told not to Indians but to the Americans.
But Jaitley, Advani and Wiki are all to be thanked; we now know we were always right. As will, no doubt, many heretofore gullible Indians also get to know that they may have been suckers at the altar of false gods whose commitment to a foreign power and its claims and interests exceeds its commitment to both Indians and to Hindutva.
Indeed, the central tenet of this so “ideological” party turns out to be a mere piece of cold and callous machination, to be deployed where, how, and when gains are to be made, and to which thousands of innocent Indians have lost their unsuspecting lives.
The Left
--Strikingly, but not surprisingly, Wikileaks underscore the reality that it is India’s Left parties, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) directly, who, although everyday maligned for its non-nationalist (sic) sins, shine for patriotism, spunk, and ideological integrity in contrast to the private minds of its ideologically fake, right-wing accusers.
Indeed, to make an important point, where the “nationalists” are shown to have been low both on integrity and patriotism, the Left comes off as truly patriotic in being devoted to what it sees as constituting the good of the people of India, even as it remains an ideological critic of the idea of “nationalism.” Just to recall, this contrast between the vicious nature of “nationalism” and the honourable sentiment of patriotism was nowhere more eloquently addressed in India’s modern history than in Tagore’s justly celebrated lecture on “Nationalism” (see Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917; rptd New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009).
Thus, in his first meeting with US Embassy officials after his election as General Secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, Wikileaks tells us—see The Hindu, March, 23, 2011) shared the same truths and perceptions with Blake (meeting dated May 4, 2005) as he, the party, and the Left overall, have routinely shared with the people of India, and until the break with the UPA, with the government it was then supporting.
In that meeting with Blake, Karat as reported by Wiki, held his own on all matters that came up, namely, the nuclear issue, missile defence, retail trade, FDI policy, Insurance, land reforms, stability of the government, and foreign policy generally. Not one word there that could be seen to be out of line with what the party and the Left have been saying for two decades or thereabouts. One is able to understand why even a Sonia Gandhi is revealed by Wiki to have so much preferred and been so much more comfortable with the Left than with the “regional” parties supporting or willing to support the UPA. For the reason that the Left always told you where they stood so you could know where you stand; and all that without fanfare, deceit, or reckless irresponsibility towards the nation or its governance.
There may have been a time when India’s Left had the same sort of intimacy with the USSR and their Embassy as our major parties of today have with the US Embassy. Always had, infact, after the Nehru-Indira era came to a close. What is of importance and of value to common concerns is that the Left in India today is in all likelihood the one political force most credibly devoted to Indian people’s interests and to the sovereignty of the nation-state overall.
It speaks to the unsentimental toughness of American assessments of men and matters that Blake should have reported of Karat not just that he found Karat “talented and skillful” but, more fully as follows:
“Relatively young (at 57) he will be a powerful figure
on the Indian political scene for years to come, and could
play an increasingly important role in the formation of
future Indian governments.”
Clearly, the assessment of Karat here can hardly be delinked from the politics of the Left in general.
It was to be expected of the Goebbelesian BJP that all derogatory references to others in the Wikileaks exposes would be treated and propagated as gospel truth, and, as to its own, as so much misreporting.
Thus the BJP is busy hoodwinking the nation with the spin that whereas the other things said by Jaitley to Blake may be true enough, the “opportunistic” bit is wholly Blake’s own. It is to be doubted that even the BJP’s dear ones are now willing to credit Jaitley before Blake. Having already been rendered obsolete by so much that has been happening in a young India, the exposure of “Hindutva” as mere gimmick, although a deadly one since lately discovered to be aligned with terrorism as well, may contribute to transformations that the country can do with.
For one, these shaming exposes may oblige India’s “mainstreamers” to square first with Indians before they do with the intimate zone, an eventuality that could put Indian democracy on a rather more respectable footing.
*
Badri Raina
Ask any ordinary Indian citizen whether the bulk of their elected representatives or members of the administrative tribe ever really can be trusted to square with them on any issue at hand—from the burst water pipeline, to the price of food articles, to any policy issues bearing on domestic or foreign concern.
And you will discover that, among democracies, the Indian political/bureaucratic class scores the lowest worldwide on truth-telling, and absolutely the highest on the fine art of dodge and double-speak.
This is so, Wikileaks now tell us, for the canny reason that India’s “mainstream” power wielders/brokers reserve truth-sharing not for the people of India but for the American Embassy. There is the intimate zone where they bare their hearts out.
Here is a sampling—from the lowly and bumptuous, although not less punishable for that reason, to the venerated sublime:
--in his cable dated August 11, 2009, Timothy Roemer, the US Ambassador, recounting his first ever meeting with the then Indian National Security Advisor, (no less) underlined how the latter had candidly revealed his differences with the Prime Minister, Singh, on issues related to peace with Pakistan; and how Narayanan told him of his retort to Singh’s sentiment about the “shared destinies” of India and Pakistan: “you have a shared destiny, we don’t” Narayanan confided as having said. Presumably, the “you” had to do with Singh being a north Indian and a Punjabi, and Narayanan being a southerner to whom the partition of the country in 1947 carried small resonance. Roemer, with good judgement and reason, concluded that Narayanan’s readiness to “distance himself from his boss” suggested that “Singh is more isolated than we thought within his own inner circle in his effort to ‘trust but verify’ and pursue talks with Pakistan.” With the National Security Advisor of a host country so willing and ready to tell, why would the US embassy need them spooks one wonders.
And not just that; Narayanan left the Ambassador in no doubt as to who he thought was boss: “Narayanan noted that all matters related to nuclear and space issues, defense and foreign policy, should be directed to him.” God knows why the Indian electorate gave itself a cabinet and a prime minister.
--Not to think that any lowly joint secretary in the Indian bureaucracy has less grandiose notions of self-importance or is less willing to enunciate policy to the members of the intimate zone. As Hardeep Puri was appointed the Indian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, a mere Gaitri Kumar, joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs, told Ted Osinus that “we should let MEA know if we have any complaints” (against Puri). Making it known thereby that the said joint secretary believed not Bang Ki Moon to be the real thing at the UN but the Americans: Puri, in his turn, went one better, telling the US official how “his specific brief” was to seek a “higher degree of convergence” with the US (meeting dated May,1, 2009). The prime minister of India or his external affairs minister have not spoken. Do the people of India have a right to be told? Forget it. They are too used to being fibbed to be hit with the truth.
--Now to the sublime. Wiki tells us how the redoubtable , Harvard- savvy, home minister of India confided to the heart throbs of the real home, the Embassy of the US, that had there been no north or east to the republic of India, but only the west and the south, her GDP growth rate would have been vaulting sky high. What pity that these laggard and slovenly regions cannot be bombed out of existence, India’s military prowess notwithstanding. Indeed, India, sutably reduced, might then have competed with the most “developed” nations on their own terms. Lost opportunity, you would say.
Now we wonder whether the honourable home minister would ever have publicly shared this his heartfelt view with the people of India. Much to be doubted. So thank heavens there remains an intimate zone where such inward truths may be told, namely the US embassy.
--But, all this is nothing to the BJP- Jaitley’s confession made to the intimate zone and retold by Wiki. That surely takes the cake, and invites millions to rethink India’s major opposition party. Not that the millions did not already know, but coming from the horses’s mouth, ah, that is something else.
Meeting with Robert Blake, the Charge at the US Embassy, on May 6, 2005, Jaitley, leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, educated the intimate Charge on the true position of the so “nationalist” Bhartiya Janata Party on the true and profound meaning of “Hindutva.” This is how the Charge reported on the intimate exchange:
“Pressed on the question of Hindutva, Jaitley argued
(whenever any member of this right-wing Hindu party argues,
which they do all the time, understand Goebbelesian spin
without shame, let, or hindrance--added) that Hindu
nationalism ‘will always be a talking point’ for the BJP.
. However, he characterized this as an
opportunistic issue” {cable dated May 10, 2005).
That being so, Jaitley confided to the intimate zone how opportunism dictates an assessment of when Hindutva may or may not have “currency” among the electorate. For example, in India’s north-east, Jaitley propounded, such currency remains intact so long as the issue of Muslim migrants of Bangladeshi extraction also remains intact. Just to share a fact: the BJP has never objected to the entry of Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh, only the Muslim ones. The very soul of the BJP’s sectarian/communalist politics there for show, if one needed a show.
And note this: now that terrorist attacks seem to have halted, especially on the Capital of India, “Hindutva” has rather lost its “resonance” in New Delhi (Jaitley again). But, wait a minute and wonder, “that could change with another cross-border terrorist attack, for instance, on the Indian Parliament,” Blake reported Jaitley as having said. So does that sound like a consummation devoutly to be wished? We leave you to work that one out, even as we also invite you to ponder the logic and objective of the terror strikes now known to have been conducted by groups and individuals affiliated to the RSS.
Do also recall another Wiki gem, wherein the redoubtable L.K.Advani of the BJP is heard to reassure the intimates that the party’s opposition to the nuclear deal must not be taken to heart, since it was meant for public consumption. The intimate fact was that the BJP had no intent to do anything but go alongwith it once they came to wield power in Delhi, or to dilute the strategic partnership with the US.
All very patriotic stuff this, told not to Indians but to the Americans.
But Jaitley, Advani and Wiki are all to be thanked; we now know we were always right. As will, no doubt, many heretofore gullible Indians also get to know that they may have been suckers at the altar of false gods whose commitment to a foreign power and its claims and interests exceeds its commitment to both Indians and to Hindutva.
Indeed, the central tenet of this so “ideological” party turns out to be a mere piece of cold and callous machination, to be deployed where, how, and when gains are to be made, and to which thousands of innocent Indians have lost their unsuspecting lives.
The Left
--Strikingly, but not surprisingly, Wikileaks underscore the reality that it is India’s Left parties, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) directly, who, although everyday maligned for its non-nationalist (sic) sins, shine for patriotism, spunk, and ideological integrity in contrast to the private minds of its ideologically fake, right-wing accusers.
Indeed, to make an important point, where the “nationalists” are shown to have been low both on integrity and patriotism, the Left comes off as truly patriotic in being devoted to what it sees as constituting the good of the people of India, even as it remains an ideological critic of the idea of “nationalism.” Just to recall, this contrast between the vicious nature of “nationalism” and the honourable sentiment of patriotism was nowhere more eloquently addressed in India’s modern history than in Tagore’s justly celebrated lecture on “Nationalism” (see Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (1917; rptd New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009).
Thus, in his first meeting with US Embassy officials after his election as General Secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, Wikileaks tells us—see The Hindu, March, 23, 2011) shared the same truths and perceptions with Blake (meeting dated May 4, 2005) as he, the party, and the Left overall, have routinely shared with the people of India, and until the break with the UPA, with the government it was then supporting.
In that meeting with Blake, Karat as reported by Wiki, held his own on all matters that came up, namely, the nuclear issue, missile defence, retail trade, FDI policy, Insurance, land reforms, stability of the government, and foreign policy generally. Not one word there that could be seen to be out of line with what the party and the Left have been saying for two decades or thereabouts. One is able to understand why even a Sonia Gandhi is revealed by Wiki to have so much preferred and been so much more comfortable with the Left than with the “regional” parties supporting or willing to support the UPA. For the reason that the Left always told you where they stood so you could know where you stand; and all that without fanfare, deceit, or reckless irresponsibility towards the nation or its governance.
There may have been a time when India’s Left had the same sort of intimacy with the USSR and their Embassy as our major parties of today have with the US Embassy. Always had, infact, after the Nehru-Indira era came to a close. What is of importance and of value to common concerns is that the Left in India today is in all likelihood the one political force most credibly devoted to Indian people’s interests and to the sovereignty of the nation-state overall.
It speaks to the unsentimental toughness of American assessments of men and matters that Blake should have reported of Karat not just that he found Karat “talented and skillful” but, more fully as follows:
“Relatively young (at 57) he will be a powerful figure
on the Indian political scene for years to come, and could
play an increasingly important role in the formation of
future Indian governments.”
Clearly, the assessment of Karat here can hardly be delinked from the politics of the Left in general.
It was to be expected of the Goebbelesian BJP that all derogatory references to others in the Wikileaks exposes would be treated and propagated as gospel truth, and, as to its own, as so much misreporting.
Thus the BJP is busy hoodwinking the nation with the spin that whereas the other things said by Jaitley to Blake may be true enough, the “opportunistic” bit is wholly Blake’s own. It is to be doubted that even the BJP’s dear ones are now willing to credit Jaitley before Blake. Having already been rendered obsolete by so much that has been happening in a young India, the exposure of “Hindutva” as mere gimmick, although a deadly one since lately discovered to be aligned with terrorism as well, may contribute to transformations that the country can do with.
For one, these shaming exposes may oblige India’s “mainstreamers” to square first with Indians before they do with the intimate zone, an eventuality that could put Indian democracy on a rather more respectable footing.
*
Badri Raina
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thus Conscience Can Make Good Indians of Us All
Epigraph:
“During my interaction with Kaleem, I learnt that he was previously arrested in the Mecca Masjid bomb blast case and he had to spend about one-and-a-half years in prison. During my stay in jail, Kaleem helped me a lot and used to serve me by bringing water, food,etc. for me. I was very moved by Kaleem’s good conduct and my conscience asked me to prayaschit by making confessional statement.”
(Swami Aseemanand in his confessional statement to Magistrate. The statement was recorded on December, 18 under section 164 of the IPC, and is thus admissible in evidence. Kaleem, the Muslim boy, has been accused of the crime, namely the blast at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, that Aseemanand says was infact committed by Hindutva terrorists.)
I was asked the other day what kinds of people I thought to be the greatest danger to the “idea of India.” Hopelessly enough, as many in the audience must have thought, I came up with a complicated answer, contradicting the clarity that seems rampant these days.
Yet my simple point was that the answer to the question must depend greatly on how one is placed within the nation-state.
Ask the question of a Tata, a Birla, an Ambani, or those that comprise the country’s land and mining mafia, or those in politics and the bureaucracy who largely do their work, or those in the corporate media who remain busily occupied in peddling with penchant the ever-more avaricious aspirations of India’s upwardly mobile classes, or the endowed non-resident Indians impatient to do away with the uncouth habits of the masses and to pave some ten percent of the “homeland” (which they have deserted) with gold (that they may also own), and the answer you might get is left-wing extremism, trade unionism, NGO activism, wasteful social spending and so forth.
Ask the other eighty or so percent of Indians who sweat in fields, farms, factories, or vend the day for a pittance, forest-dwellers who are told not a tree, a bush, a patch of land, or a drop of water belongs to them anymore, or millions of children who rag-pick, or slave in shops or homes, who feed on crumbs and get roundly abused and beat routinely and die like flies in the cold and heat, and they might not even comprehend the question you ask, being past all conceivable danger all their wretched lives. The “idea of India,”-- what might that be? Ask those who still scavenge for a living, and get treated like lepers for their labours of keeping the rest of us clean, and they might say that the greatest danger is that they may be dispossessed even of the privileges of scavenging which keeps them just this side of starvation.
And ask the same question of India’s religious minorities, and they might say, (however denied they remain in the “developmental” concerns of the super-power-to-be), the greatest danger continues to be the prospect that the Constitution that guarantees to them, as to others, an equality of secular citizenship and the right to freely practice their faiths may yet be dethroned by a putsch from majoritarian fascists who remain to this day unreconciled to the idea of India as a pluralist space, and to the Constitution and to a system of laws which say that all citizens may be treated equally.
To wit, if for ideological convenience, the danger were to be formulated as the danger to the Constitutional regime, leaving aside for now any consideration of the quality of its implementation, such danger lurks not in one quarter but in two.
It may suit the ruler- Indian to say that such a threat comes only from the Maoist communists, but vast numbers of other Indians know, as Jawahar Lal Nehru did, that the greater threat remains embedded in the fascist politics of the Hindutva- right, since its exertions are always liable to be mistaken for sound “nationalism.” And if the first is so obvious an object for liquidation, against which every other sort of considerable Indian might easily be mobilized, the latter is more in the nature of a virus that afflicts even sound secular Indians in some nerve-end or capillary. And being a threat from the economic right, its operations are more prone to be excused, both by the corporate power-houses and by the elites who look upto them. Note how sections of India’s influential electronic media are already debating whether an Aseemanand is a terrorist or only a “zealot” after all. And how ideologues of Hindutva who never tired of dubbing terrorist acts on behalf of Muslim individuals or groups as “Jehadi Islamism,” now suddenly advise that terrorism has no colour whatsoever, despite the fact that all of the Hindutva terrorists who have thus far been nabbed or identified can be seen clad insistently in saffron robes. Or how, in contrast to the stated and proven disapproval of violent Naxalism by India’s parliamentary Left, the parliamentary BJP is out brazenly denying that Hindutva terrorism exists, or that investigations and findings in that regard are anything but a dirty conspiracy against the “nationalist” majority community. Ergo, whereas Muslim perpetrators were to be justifiably held guilty prior even to the most elementary forms of proof, their Hindutva counterparts (which is what they are) are to be thought victims of conspiracy even in the face of piling evidence and confessions made to Magistrates in the full knowledge that such confessions are admissible proof.
Here is the BJP’s problem: so long as the connections that these Hindutva terrorists bear to the RSS remained concealed, their shennagans could be attributed to misguided individuals or to “fringe groups.” But now that Aseemanand has spilled the beans on the lead role of a very senior RSS leader in the series of blasts (Malegaon 2006 & 2008, Ajmer, Mecca Masjid, Samjhauta Express, Modasa, and who knows how many of the others) earlier attributed, per the Pavlovian instincts of the country’s police forces and sundry organs of opinion, to Muslim individuals and groups, there is no way that the puppet-BJP can nod in agreement.
And the Congress, as always, finds itself caught in a cleft stick: it may not be seen to be prevaricating, and it may not be seen to be anti-Hindu. It will be no exaggeration to say that the future of Indian political and Constitutional life may well depend on how the cases against Hindutva terrorists are either carried to lawful conclusions or muffled and erased.
Ever since the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by a man who belonged to the RSS, and, according to the statement made by his brother, Gopal Godse, on his release from incarceration some years ago, never left the RSS, contrary to such propagation by the RSS, this “nationalist” organization whose pioneering scions drew their inspiration explicitly from Hitler and Mussolini, has been found to be complicit by a plethora of official Commissions of enquiry in episodes of communal violence against India’s minorities. Such violence it knows is one sure way of always keeping in the foreground its racialist thesis about what ought to constitute “Indianness”. And, at the least, to keep Indian Muslims in the doghouse for as long as possible. Aseemanand, whose Bengali name is Naba Kumar Sarkar, clearly sought to carry forward, as is implicit in his confession, the tradition first unleashed by another Bengali from the nineteenth century, Bankim Chander Chatterjee, who propagated the view that not the colonizing British but India’s Muslims, descendants of the Moghuls, were the real enemies of the nation. And, after him, with theoretical support from the German Nazis, whom he praised no end, the revered RSS guru, Golwalker, in his two offerings (We, Our Nationhood Defined, and Bunch of Thoughts) wrote India’s Muslims as “Enemy Number One.”
Ironically, but understandably, Indian Muslims increasingly realize that the best course for them is not to resort to violence, (reason why in recent years most Muslim organizations of any consequence have repeatedly engaged in public denunciation of terrorism), but to invoke the promise of Indian democracy and the secular, democratic Constitution from whence it draws breath and legitimacy. It is not for no reason that Muslim vanguards have insistently said that whatever be the ignominies heaped on them both by the Hindutva camp and institutional agencies whose biases make themselves evident time after time, they stand by the rule of law. A course of thought and action which indeed, equally ironically and understandably, do not suit the Hindutva agenda, since such behaviour on behalf of Indian Muslims helps their greater assimilation into the mainstream politics of the country, and facilitates greater approval from that vast liberal mass of citizens who seek to get a leg up without frequent mayhem, however their sympathies may lie with the “Hindu cause.”
Long years ago during Nehruvain India when the secular and humanist, if not wholly socialist, ideal suffused civic and cinematic life (see Meghnath Desai’s “Nehru’s Hero), the great poet, Sahir Ludhianvi,, wrote a stirring song for a movie. In that song, an idealist Indian who has adopted an “illegitimate” love-child, seeks to dream for the future of the young one. From that song I have a minute ago on impulse translated but two stanzas as well as I could on the instant:
Such Creed as teaches hate is not yours,
Such stride as tramples the human pate is not yours,
Such temple as has not in it the Koran,
Such mosque that has not in it the Gita
Are not yours;
Yours will be the yearning for peace and harmony,
Human you were born, human you shall be.
And
These merchants of Creed, these traders of the nation,
These that sell the very shroud for a consideration,
Assassins and looters that reside in palaces,
Those that kill the Garden’s spring instead of its calluses,
To them your breath shall come
As the clarion of death.
Such idle sentiments then gave offence to no one, and were not censored. Keeping in mind the ugly revelations we are witness to, both with respect to the captains of the economy and the vast network of chicanery they seem to have engendered in brand India’s nook and cranny, and now with the revelations of terrorism on “this” side, how nice it would be to call a halt both to the merciless and marauding exertions of exploiters who may not leave a blade of grass in place in pursuit of profit, not to speak of the whole Niyamgiri hill, and to sectarian refusals to accept India as a garden of plural perfumes wherein not the monsters of hate belong but angels of peace, harmony, equity and conscience.
And thus I have sought on purpose to highlight in the epigraph that part of Aseemanand’s confession which relates to the stirrings of conscience. I ask, if a terrorist who set out to unleash “bomb for bomb,” could thus be affected by the power of innocence and service on behalf of the “enemy other,” and feel impelled to make atonement even at the prospect of implicating himself to a judicial sentence of death, what should this say to the rest of us. In this most noble moment of realization Aseemanand conveys a message to all of India, and indeed to the rest of the world, one that invites us to find our own humanity and, thereby, that of all others.
Ultimately, there could be no better or finer idea of India than is contained in that existential moment of redemption that Aseemanand has experienced. The question is, will this act of supreme enlightenment shame the RSS into rethinking its dodgy, abrasive and hate-filled existence and career, or will it continue to thwart and stymie the lives of some 180 million peace-loving Indians because they are not Hindus?
Indeed, after the revelations about Narendra Modi’s ubiquitous intimacy with all the murderous proceedings of the Gujarat episode of 2002, as encapsulated in the report submitted by the Special Investigating Team to the Supreme Court and scooped by the Tehelka journal, what a lasting service Modi could render to the Idea of India as a secular and pluralist paradise and a land of peace and harmony were he to take a leaf out of Aseemanand’s book and confess to his misdeeds, which after all included sheltering the key terrorists of Madhya Pradesh and Indore vintage in the Dang district of Gujarat, most of all, Aseemanand himself, and allowing free play to the carnage that happened in 2002.
Aseemanand is to be applauded on another count as well. In his letter to the President of India he has sought permission to be allowed to travel to Pakistan so that he might attempt a heart-to-heart with the likes of Hafiz Saeed with a view to bringing about in the latter a conversion matching his own.
An aspiration of profound proportions resides in that impulse, one that seeks to do nothing less than to draw the Pakistani Jihadis away from Maulana Maududi, just as Aseemanand’s own confession seeks to draw the RSS away from Golwalker to Gandhi. And this writer for one thinks that the Indian State would rise so far above its own lowly politics of antagonism should it make it possible for Aseemanand to make that trip. That endeavour in itself would constitute a transformative event, regardless of what came of it. It is when the mind weakens in its evil resolve that the sinews go limp as well.
Far from making “cowards of us all’ (Hamlet), an awakened conscience alone can change both personal and collective destinies in ways more far reaching than either realpolitik or the force of arms.
*
Badri Raina
Note: A shorter version of the article appeared in Mathrubhumi Weekly as a commissioned piece.
“During my interaction with Kaleem, I learnt that he was previously arrested in the Mecca Masjid bomb blast case and he had to spend about one-and-a-half years in prison. During my stay in jail, Kaleem helped me a lot and used to serve me by bringing water, food,etc. for me. I was very moved by Kaleem’s good conduct and my conscience asked me to prayaschit by making confessional statement.”
(Swami Aseemanand in his confessional statement to Magistrate. The statement was recorded on December, 18 under section 164 of the IPC, and is thus admissible in evidence. Kaleem, the Muslim boy, has been accused of the crime, namely the blast at the Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, that Aseemanand says was infact committed by Hindutva terrorists.)
I was asked the other day what kinds of people I thought to be the greatest danger to the “idea of India.” Hopelessly enough, as many in the audience must have thought, I came up with a complicated answer, contradicting the clarity that seems rampant these days.
Yet my simple point was that the answer to the question must depend greatly on how one is placed within the nation-state.
Ask the question of a Tata, a Birla, an Ambani, or those that comprise the country’s land and mining mafia, or those in politics and the bureaucracy who largely do their work, or those in the corporate media who remain busily occupied in peddling with penchant the ever-more avaricious aspirations of India’s upwardly mobile classes, or the endowed non-resident Indians impatient to do away with the uncouth habits of the masses and to pave some ten percent of the “homeland” (which they have deserted) with gold (that they may also own), and the answer you might get is left-wing extremism, trade unionism, NGO activism, wasteful social spending and so forth.
Ask the other eighty or so percent of Indians who sweat in fields, farms, factories, or vend the day for a pittance, forest-dwellers who are told not a tree, a bush, a patch of land, or a drop of water belongs to them anymore, or millions of children who rag-pick, or slave in shops or homes, who feed on crumbs and get roundly abused and beat routinely and die like flies in the cold and heat, and they might not even comprehend the question you ask, being past all conceivable danger all their wretched lives. The “idea of India,”-- what might that be? Ask those who still scavenge for a living, and get treated like lepers for their labours of keeping the rest of us clean, and they might say that the greatest danger is that they may be dispossessed even of the privileges of scavenging which keeps them just this side of starvation.
And ask the same question of India’s religious minorities, and they might say, (however denied they remain in the “developmental” concerns of the super-power-to-be), the greatest danger continues to be the prospect that the Constitution that guarantees to them, as to others, an equality of secular citizenship and the right to freely practice their faiths may yet be dethroned by a putsch from majoritarian fascists who remain to this day unreconciled to the idea of India as a pluralist space, and to the Constitution and to a system of laws which say that all citizens may be treated equally.
To wit, if for ideological convenience, the danger were to be formulated as the danger to the Constitutional regime, leaving aside for now any consideration of the quality of its implementation, such danger lurks not in one quarter but in two.
It may suit the ruler- Indian to say that such a threat comes only from the Maoist communists, but vast numbers of other Indians know, as Jawahar Lal Nehru did, that the greater threat remains embedded in the fascist politics of the Hindutva- right, since its exertions are always liable to be mistaken for sound “nationalism.” And if the first is so obvious an object for liquidation, against which every other sort of considerable Indian might easily be mobilized, the latter is more in the nature of a virus that afflicts even sound secular Indians in some nerve-end or capillary. And being a threat from the economic right, its operations are more prone to be excused, both by the corporate power-houses and by the elites who look upto them. Note how sections of India’s influential electronic media are already debating whether an Aseemanand is a terrorist or only a “zealot” after all. And how ideologues of Hindutva who never tired of dubbing terrorist acts on behalf of Muslim individuals or groups as “Jehadi Islamism,” now suddenly advise that terrorism has no colour whatsoever, despite the fact that all of the Hindutva terrorists who have thus far been nabbed or identified can be seen clad insistently in saffron robes. Or how, in contrast to the stated and proven disapproval of violent Naxalism by India’s parliamentary Left, the parliamentary BJP is out brazenly denying that Hindutva terrorism exists, or that investigations and findings in that regard are anything but a dirty conspiracy against the “nationalist” majority community. Ergo, whereas Muslim perpetrators were to be justifiably held guilty prior even to the most elementary forms of proof, their Hindutva counterparts (which is what they are) are to be thought victims of conspiracy even in the face of piling evidence and confessions made to Magistrates in the full knowledge that such confessions are admissible proof.
Here is the BJP’s problem: so long as the connections that these Hindutva terrorists bear to the RSS remained concealed, their shennagans could be attributed to misguided individuals or to “fringe groups.” But now that Aseemanand has spilled the beans on the lead role of a very senior RSS leader in the series of blasts (Malegaon 2006 & 2008, Ajmer, Mecca Masjid, Samjhauta Express, Modasa, and who knows how many of the others) earlier attributed, per the Pavlovian instincts of the country’s police forces and sundry organs of opinion, to Muslim individuals and groups, there is no way that the puppet-BJP can nod in agreement.
And the Congress, as always, finds itself caught in a cleft stick: it may not be seen to be prevaricating, and it may not be seen to be anti-Hindu. It will be no exaggeration to say that the future of Indian political and Constitutional life may well depend on how the cases against Hindutva terrorists are either carried to lawful conclusions or muffled and erased.
Ever since the murder of Mahatma Gandhi by a man who belonged to the RSS, and, according to the statement made by his brother, Gopal Godse, on his release from incarceration some years ago, never left the RSS, contrary to such propagation by the RSS, this “nationalist” organization whose pioneering scions drew their inspiration explicitly from Hitler and Mussolini, has been found to be complicit by a plethora of official Commissions of enquiry in episodes of communal violence against India’s minorities. Such violence it knows is one sure way of always keeping in the foreground its racialist thesis about what ought to constitute “Indianness”. And, at the least, to keep Indian Muslims in the doghouse for as long as possible. Aseemanand, whose Bengali name is Naba Kumar Sarkar, clearly sought to carry forward, as is implicit in his confession, the tradition first unleashed by another Bengali from the nineteenth century, Bankim Chander Chatterjee, who propagated the view that not the colonizing British but India’s Muslims, descendants of the Moghuls, were the real enemies of the nation. And, after him, with theoretical support from the German Nazis, whom he praised no end, the revered RSS guru, Golwalker, in his two offerings (We, Our Nationhood Defined, and Bunch of Thoughts) wrote India’s Muslims as “Enemy Number One.”
Ironically, but understandably, Indian Muslims increasingly realize that the best course for them is not to resort to violence, (reason why in recent years most Muslim organizations of any consequence have repeatedly engaged in public denunciation of terrorism), but to invoke the promise of Indian democracy and the secular, democratic Constitution from whence it draws breath and legitimacy. It is not for no reason that Muslim vanguards have insistently said that whatever be the ignominies heaped on them both by the Hindutva camp and institutional agencies whose biases make themselves evident time after time, they stand by the rule of law. A course of thought and action which indeed, equally ironically and understandably, do not suit the Hindutva agenda, since such behaviour on behalf of Indian Muslims helps their greater assimilation into the mainstream politics of the country, and facilitates greater approval from that vast liberal mass of citizens who seek to get a leg up without frequent mayhem, however their sympathies may lie with the “Hindu cause.”
Long years ago during Nehruvain India when the secular and humanist, if not wholly socialist, ideal suffused civic and cinematic life (see Meghnath Desai’s “Nehru’s Hero), the great poet, Sahir Ludhianvi,, wrote a stirring song for a movie. In that song, an idealist Indian who has adopted an “illegitimate” love-child, seeks to dream for the future of the young one. From that song I have a minute ago on impulse translated but two stanzas as well as I could on the instant:
Such Creed as teaches hate is not yours,
Such stride as tramples the human pate is not yours,
Such temple as has not in it the Koran,
Such mosque that has not in it the Gita
Are not yours;
Yours will be the yearning for peace and harmony,
Human you were born, human you shall be.
And
These merchants of Creed, these traders of the nation,
These that sell the very shroud for a consideration,
Assassins and looters that reside in palaces,
Those that kill the Garden’s spring instead of its calluses,
To them your breath shall come
As the clarion of death.
Such idle sentiments then gave offence to no one, and were not censored. Keeping in mind the ugly revelations we are witness to, both with respect to the captains of the economy and the vast network of chicanery they seem to have engendered in brand India’s nook and cranny, and now with the revelations of terrorism on “this” side, how nice it would be to call a halt both to the merciless and marauding exertions of exploiters who may not leave a blade of grass in place in pursuit of profit, not to speak of the whole Niyamgiri hill, and to sectarian refusals to accept India as a garden of plural perfumes wherein not the monsters of hate belong but angels of peace, harmony, equity and conscience.
And thus I have sought on purpose to highlight in the epigraph that part of Aseemanand’s confession which relates to the stirrings of conscience. I ask, if a terrorist who set out to unleash “bomb for bomb,” could thus be affected by the power of innocence and service on behalf of the “enemy other,” and feel impelled to make atonement even at the prospect of implicating himself to a judicial sentence of death, what should this say to the rest of us. In this most noble moment of realization Aseemanand conveys a message to all of India, and indeed to the rest of the world, one that invites us to find our own humanity and, thereby, that of all others.
Ultimately, there could be no better or finer idea of India than is contained in that existential moment of redemption that Aseemanand has experienced. The question is, will this act of supreme enlightenment shame the RSS into rethinking its dodgy, abrasive and hate-filled existence and career, or will it continue to thwart and stymie the lives of some 180 million peace-loving Indians because they are not Hindus?
Indeed, after the revelations about Narendra Modi’s ubiquitous intimacy with all the murderous proceedings of the Gujarat episode of 2002, as encapsulated in the report submitted by the Special Investigating Team to the Supreme Court and scooped by the Tehelka journal, what a lasting service Modi could render to the Idea of India as a secular and pluralist paradise and a land of peace and harmony were he to take a leaf out of Aseemanand’s book and confess to his misdeeds, which after all included sheltering the key terrorists of Madhya Pradesh and Indore vintage in the Dang district of Gujarat, most of all, Aseemanand himself, and allowing free play to the carnage that happened in 2002.
Aseemanand is to be applauded on another count as well. In his letter to the President of India he has sought permission to be allowed to travel to Pakistan so that he might attempt a heart-to-heart with the likes of Hafiz Saeed with a view to bringing about in the latter a conversion matching his own.
An aspiration of profound proportions resides in that impulse, one that seeks to do nothing less than to draw the Pakistani Jihadis away from Maulana Maududi, just as Aseemanand’s own confession seeks to draw the RSS away from Golwalker to Gandhi. And this writer for one thinks that the Indian State would rise so far above its own lowly politics of antagonism should it make it possible for Aseemanand to make that trip. That endeavour in itself would constitute a transformative event, regardless of what came of it. It is when the mind weakens in its evil resolve that the sinews go limp as well.
Far from making “cowards of us all’ (Hamlet), an awakened conscience alone can change both personal and collective destinies in ways more far reaching than either realpolitik or the force of arms.
*
Badri Raina
Note: A shorter version of the article appeared in Mathrubhumi Weekly as a commissioned piece.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Cairo, Cairo, let the world be Cairo.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young in Cairo was heaven.
That friend who always has something
up his sleeve beyond what seems,
beyond the moment’s magic,
already puckers his canny brows,
and, tragically distant from the glory
in Tahrir Square, counsels caution:
“ok,” he says, “but where will all this lead”?
To him I say, “knowledgeable thou art,
and professional to the finger-tips that will
no doubt type back a cold-blooded column,
full of ifs and buts, and leaks from ‘reliable sources,’
and a construction of events
that will make the millions of secondary import,
I say to you what has happened in Cairo
puts to shame all our ifs and buts, our
cold-blooded columns, our reliably-sourced
wisdoms of conspiracies and stratagems;
in the political history of the world’s darkest
days, Tahrir Square was where
the Second Coming happened;
Jesus came as Gandhi, and smiling ever so
sweetly with the sad pity of judgement,
blessed the peaceful and peace-making
legions of hateless and patient sons and daughters
of the ancient Nile, rewarding
their undaunted faith, made breachless
by common labour and common resolve,
with what they deserved.
At Tahrir that happened which
not the smartest of us in studied proficiency
could ever stipulate or foresee.
Will we now have the sense and the spirit
to take it from here, and for mankind’s sake,
set our hearts, minds, and sinews together
a new earth and a new heaven to make?
Cairo, Tahrir was the site for epiphany;
we either have or do not have
the eyes to see.
*
Badri Raina
badri.raina@gmail.com
But to be young in Cairo was heaven.
That friend who always has something
up his sleeve beyond what seems,
beyond the moment’s magic,
already puckers his canny brows,
and, tragically distant from the glory
in Tahrir Square, counsels caution:
“ok,” he says, “but where will all this lead”?
To him I say, “knowledgeable thou art,
and professional to the finger-tips that will
no doubt type back a cold-blooded column,
full of ifs and buts, and leaks from ‘reliable sources,’
and a construction of events
that will make the millions of secondary import,
I say to you what has happened in Cairo
puts to shame all our ifs and buts, our
cold-blooded columns, our reliably-sourced
wisdoms of conspiracies and stratagems;
in the political history of the world’s darkest
days, Tahrir Square was where
the Second Coming happened;
Jesus came as Gandhi, and smiling ever so
sweetly with the sad pity of judgement,
blessed the peaceful and peace-making
legions of hateless and patient sons and daughters
of the ancient Nile, rewarding
their undaunted faith, made breachless
by common labour and common resolve,
with what they deserved.
At Tahrir that happened which
not the smartest of us in studied proficiency
could ever stipulate or foresee.
Will we now have the sense and the spirit
to take it from here, and for mankind’s sake,
set our hearts, minds, and sinews together
a new earth and a new heaven to make?
Cairo, Tahrir was the site for epiphany;
we either have or do not have
the eyes to see.
*
Badri Raina
badri.raina@gmail.com
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Life Returns to the Nile
For decades your endless waters
flowed quiescent,
all your fertile powers spent,
vassal to far-off matters,
as a despot had you in thrall.
How you have now turned
from slumber, O Nile,
and already spurned
with the memory of ancient might
a regime of cruel guile.
Your children of all ages, both sexes,
and all religions
fill Egypt shoulder to shoulder
and end to end—
their vision not of violence
but something far bolder:
as their conglomerate voice waxes,
they are determined
that in the Egypt to come
not just some, but all
shall feast of peace, prosperity
and democracy.
Children of true Islam,
the revolution you make
bids fair to shame
a world of perfidy that has given
to the faith such a bad name.
Your chant of human liberation
already rings in nation after nation.
Never will either the Arab world
or the rest of us be quite the same.
O Nile, your waters pour a needed balm
on a desecrated world;
do receive our salaam.
*
Badri Raina badri.raina@gmail.com
flowed quiescent,
all your fertile powers spent,
vassal to far-off matters,
as a despot had you in thrall.
How you have now turned
from slumber, O Nile,
and already spurned
with the memory of ancient might
a regime of cruel guile.
Your children of all ages, both sexes,
and all religions
fill Egypt shoulder to shoulder
and end to end—
their vision not of violence
but something far bolder:
as their conglomerate voice waxes,
they are determined
that in the Egypt to come
not just some, but all
shall feast of peace, prosperity
and democracy.
Children of true Islam,
the revolution you make
bids fair to shame
a world of perfidy that has given
to the faith such a bad name.
Your chant of human liberation
already rings in nation after nation.
Never will either the Arab world
or the rest of us be quite the same.
O Nile, your waters pour a needed balm
on a desecrated world;
do receive our salaam.
*
Badri Raina badri.raina@gmail.com
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Binayak Sen Sentenced to Life Term
I
A Sessions court judge in Raipur, capital of the BJP-ruled state of Chattisgarh, has pronounced Binayak Sen guilty of sedition and conspiracy against the State, and sentenced the good doctor to a life term in prison.
So who is Binayak Sen?
An alumni of the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, who had the foolhardiness to turn his back on career both there and in the equally prestigious Jawahar Lal Nehru university in Delhi, follow the lead of the late and legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi—who was murdered some years ago by paid assassins of industrial interests for his dogged and path-breaking, hence dangerous, labours among the unorganized adivasis, dalits, women, and other voiceless denizens of the backwaters of Chattisgarh against some of the most gruesome exploitation that free Indians have known—and devote the last three or so decades of his still young life to serving among the poorest of the poor.
For decades now, this selfless and saintly man has run a weekly clinic deep in the Sal forests of the region that has drawn tribals from as far away as 30 kilometers for healing. Their only other option a two-day walk through the jungles. Sen trained hundreds of tribals to become healthcare workers, an effort whose sterling success found it acceptance as state policy, christened Mitanin Swasthya Yojna (volunteer health programme).
Inspired by Niyogi, Sen also helped set up the Shaheed (martyr) hospital, one that still operates with donations from coal miners.
Indeed much of his work parallels the sort of immersion in ministering to the wretched of the earth that the world associates with the Nobel prize winner, Mother Teresa.
With one all-important difference. Binayak, unlike the good Mother, did not think there was any great purchase in being meek. Thus it is that he made the grievous mistake of standing up and speaking for the “human rights” of god-fatherless forest dwellers in the face of the cruelties and denials vented upon them by the State, by its vigilante agency of goons named “Salwa Judum,” and, if only the judge who sentenced him had listened, by the insurgent Maoists as well.
In particular, Sen’s opposition to the displacement of a hundred thousand tribals from their homes and hearths by vigilante goons of the State made the latter saw red. Ostensibly done to facilitate police operations against the Moaist insurgents and for their own safety (sic) such displacement and any resistance to it by innocent tribals has caused unconscionable brutalities to be inflicted upon them, often on the charge that they were informants to the insurgents, and guilty of sheltering them.
As to Sen himself, does it matter that in repeatedly asking for “equity and peace” whenever querried by the media, he rarely balked from condemning the atrocities perpetrated by the armed Naxalites on innocent men, women, and children.
But in an era of McCarthyism that now seems to accompany the murderous impatience of India’s State and Corporate combine to enhance private wealth, Binayak’s infuriating doggedness of purpose in staying his course in the hinterland among the victims on the ground (had he been, like so many of us, content to combine a lucrative metropolitan career with urbanite activism, things may not have been so dire, either for him or for the State), finally broke the camel’s back, as it were.
The official finger went up, declaring the doctor public enemy number one.
II
His crimes:
Ministering to the sullen malcontents among the dregs of the dispossessed, when the State and its vigilantes had ab initio and without requirement of proof designated them Maoist sympathizers;
Visiting a sick 74-year old Naxalite ideologue in jail in the capacity both of a human rights worker (indeed, as vice-president of the well-known People’s Union for Civil Liberties), and as a doctor—all with due knowledge and permission of the relevant authorities both within the jail and outside; never mind that the said Maoist ideologue has curiously himself never yet been charged for being such, or for belonging to a banned organization. He is in jail on a plain murder charge!
And, ostensibly, (ostensibly because a slew of facts on record point to the fake nature of the evidence here), couriering three letters from the Naxal ideologue to a sympathizer outside; a charge that falls flat in the face of the testimony given by no less than jail authorities to the effect that whenever he met Sanyal, the Naxal ideologue, Sen did so in the presence of the police, and that there is no way in which he could have carried any materials unbeknown to such authorities; further investigations reveal that said letters may indeed have been “plants,” and that the testimony of the lone witness who claims to have heard someone else say that the said letters were couriered remained uncorroborated hearsay. It is germane here to recall that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was let off in the Gandhi murder case on the ground that the approver’s testimony could not be independently corroborated!
III
The Charge
The provision of the charge of “Sedition” was, as anyone would know, incorporated into Indian jurisprudence by the British colonial rulers, like most other punitive provisions as well. And it was under that provision that both Lokmanya Tilak (“freedom is my birthright”) and Gandhi were to come to be tried then.
Not many know that during the deliberations of the Indian Constitution-makers, the overwhelming vote was for dropping the provision of “Sedition” (that Gandhi had called the “Prince” of all black laws) post-Independence. During those formative debates, Nehru had spoken as follows of Section 124-A (Sedition) of the Penal Code as it was bequeathed to the new nation-state:
“Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. Now
so far as I am concerned that particular section is highly
objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place
both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in any body
of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the
better.”
Retained as it was, shamefully, the Supreme Court of India subsequently added an all-important caveat (in the Kedarnath judgement) to it to the effect that NO act of free expression would tantamount to “Sedition” unless there was clear and irrefutable evidence of “incitement to violence” against the duly constituted State.
In the instant case, even if the three fatal letters were indeed couriered by Binayak Sen, none carries within their texts the least hint of any such violent intent.
Which would make sense in the light of the fact that Binayak, as stated above, has throughout his human rights career pleaded privately and publicly for non-violent resistance to the havoc wrought among tribals’ lives and rights by marauding mining and other corporates in violation of a litany of statutory laws, such as Schedule V of the Forest Rights Act.
Binayak’s great mistake here has been to condemn State-sponsored vigilante violence in the same breath as all other forms of violence.
A fact that goes hand-in-hand with some other facts, namely the sly collaboration of many Corporates on the ground in Chattisgarh with the insurgents, to whom they regulary have paid protection-money, and, if reports are to be credited, passing on explosive materials from factory premises as well. All done with careful deniability.
None of which tantamount to Sedition against the State! And for the simple enough reason that during the neo-liberal phase of India’s famed “development” over the last quarter century, the Corporates have come to BE the State. As incontrovertibly simple as that.
IV
Here is what seems to be happening in contemporary India.
Should you have a full-blown fascist under your chassis, you are ok. The fascist after all, as always, is only the political front of the marauding Corporate. That this is no piece of leftward polemics has been recently confirmed by the leak of the Radia tapes wherein all the fine meshings of connectivity between industrial houses, their lobbyists, their political benefactors, and other segments of the brokering power-elite among the media and bureaucracy have come to inglorious light.
But if you have under your bed someone suspected to be red (one of such suspicious circumstances in the Binayak case, would you believe it, is reference to the fact that he and people around him sometimes were heard to accost each other as “comrade”) you are best dead. And, beginning with the water-shed official murder of Shankar Guha Niyogi, the long line of perfectly innocent workers thus liquidated in those regions of India is indeed a long one; not to speak of hundreds upon hundreds who rot in the jails, often without trial.
Another way of saying the same is this: no greater enemy of the republic than the one who insists that the establishment is after all obliged by oath to the Constitution to implement its promises of equity in asset ownership and distribution, redolently enshrined in article 39 (“Directive Principles of State Policy”).
Here is how that pernicious article reads:
--The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing—
(a) that the citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood;
(b) that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good;
(c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment.
Cannily, those that framed the Constitution had the great good sense to stipulate that the “Directive Principles” would not be enforceable by law! Imagine what might have happened to class rule had they indeed been thus enforceable. The pity is that some mavericks like Binayak Sen insist that these pledges to “we the people of India” who chose, don’t you know, “to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic,” promising “Justice, social, economic and political,” ought to be implemented if Indian Democracy is to have substance and true legitimacy.
More fool they.
Especially now when India is set on a path of humongous “growth” and world-mastery. What could be more seditious than to puncture that ruling-class aspiration with reminders of equity and justice, or to conflate “we the people of India” with the Republic and its future.
Thus if it takes our own McCarthyism to hold back an avalanche of menace from below, so be it. Reason that explains the current onslaught on human rights protagonists of any hue. Indeed, the next internationally recognized (and Padma Shree Awardee here at home) human rights worker facing the prospect of arrest even as I write is no less than Teesta Setalvad of the Citizens For Justice and Peace. Currently, the Pioneer newspaper, owned by a Rajya Sabha member of the Bhartiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu BJP) has unleashed a full campaign of calumny against her for the trouble she has taken since 2002 to stand up for the victims of the Gujarat massacres, and to pursue the legal processes of redressal on their side. A campaign of lies aided and abetted by an erstwhile co-worker of her organization, Rais Khan, who has thought it fit for reasons not far to seek to gang up on Teesta on the side of the very Hindutva brigades who remain the accused parties in that massacre.
Indeed, before long, the State might think it fit to go so far in its collaboration with its “strategic partner” as to set up our own Abu Graib and Gauntanamo Bay.
Time will tell.
*
Badri Raina
email id : badri.raina@gmail.com
A Sessions court judge in Raipur, capital of the BJP-ruled state of Chattisgarh, has pronounced Binayak Sen guilty of sedition and conspiracy against the State, and sentenced the good doctor to a life term in prison.
So who is Binayak Sen?
An alumni of the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, who had the foolhardiness to turn his back on career both there and in the equally prestigious Jawahar Lal Nehru university in Delhi, follow the lead of the late and legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi—who was murdered some years ago by paid assassins of industrial interests for his dogged and path-breaking, hence dangerous, labours among the unorganized adivasis, dalits, women, and other voiceless denizens of the backwaters of Chattisgarh against some of the most gruesome exploitation that free Indians have known—and devote the last three or so decades of his still young life to serving among the poorest of the poor.
For decades now, this selfless and saintly man has run a weekly clinic deep in the Sal forests of the region that has drawn tribals from as far away as 30 kilometers for healing. Their only other option a two-day walk through the jungles. Sen trained hundreds of tribals to become healthcare workers, an effort whose sterling success found it acceptance as state policy, christened Mitanin Swasthya Yojna (volunteer health programme).
Inspired by Niyogi, Sen also helped set up the Shaheed (martyr) hospital, one that still operates with donations from coal miners.
Indeed much of his work parallels the sort of immersion in ministering to the wretched of the earth that the world associates with the Nobel prize winner, Mother Teresa.
With one all-important difference. Binayak, unlike the good Mother, did not think there was any great purchase in being meek. Thus it is that he made the grievous mistake of standing up and speaking for the “human rights” of god-fatherless forest dwellers in the face of the cruelties and denials vented upon them by the State, by its vigilante agency of goons named “Salwa Judum,” and, if only the judge who sentenced him had listened, by the insurgent Maoists as well.
In particular, Sen’s opposition to the displacement of a hundred thousand tribals from their homes and hearths by vigilante goons of the State made the latter saw red. Ostensibly done to facilitate police operations against the Moaist insurgents and for their own safety (sic) such displacement and any resistance to it by innocent tribals has caused unconscionable brutalities to be inflicted upon them, often on the charge that they were informants to the insurgents, and guilty of sheltering them.
As to Sen himself, does it matter that in repeatedly asking for “equity and peace” whenever querried by the media, he rarely balked from condemning the atrocities perpetrated by the armed Naxalites on innocent men, women, and children.
But in an era of McCarthyism that now seems to accompany the murderous impatience of India’s State and Corporate combine to enhance private wealth, Binayak’s infuriating doggedness of purpose in staying his course in the hinterland among the victims on the ground (had he been, like so many of us, content to combine a lucrative metropolitan career with urbanite activism, things may not have been so dire, either for him or for the State), finally broke the camel’s back, as it were.
The official finger went up, declaring the doctor public enemy number one.
II
His crimes:
Ministering to the sullen malcontents among the dregs of the dispossessed, when the State and its vigilantes had ab initio and without requirement of proof designated them Maoist sympathizers;
Visiting a sick 74-year old Naxalite ideologue in jail in the capacity both of a human rights worker (indeed, as vice-president of the well-known People’s Union for Civil Liberties), and as a doctor—all with due knowledge and permission of the relevant authorities both within the jail and outside; never mind that the said Maoist ideologue has curiously himself never yet been charged for being such, or for belonging to a banned organization. He is in jail on a plain murder charge!
And, ostensibly, (ostensibly because a slew of facts on record point to the fake nature of the evidence here), couriering three letters from the Naxal ideologue to a sympathizer outside; a charge that falls flat in the face of the testimony given by no less than jail authorities to the effect that whenever he met Sanyal, the Naxal ideologue, Sen did so in the presence of the police, and that there is no way in which he could have carried any materials unbeknown to such authorities; further investigations reveal that said letters may indeed have been “plants,” and that the testimony of the lone witness who claims to have heard someone else say that the said letters were couriered remained uncorroborated hearsay. It is germane here to recall that Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was let off in the Gandhi murder case on the ground that the approver’s testimony could not be independently corroborated!
III
The Charge
The provision of the charge of “Sedition” was, as anyone would know, incorporated into Indian jurisprudence by the British colonial rulers, like most other punitive provisions as well. And it was under that provision that both Lokmanya Tilak (“freedom is my birthright”) and Gandhi were to come to be tried then.
Not many know that during the deliberations of the Indian Constitution-makers, the overwhelming vote was for dropping the provision of “Sedition” (that Gandhi had called the “Prince” of all black laws) post-Independence. During those formative debates, Nehru had spoken as follows of Section 124-A (Sedition) of the Penal Code as it was bequeathed to the new nation-state:
“Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. Now
so far as I am concerned that particular section is highly
objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place
both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in any body
of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the
better.”
Retained as it was, shamefully, the Supreme Court of India subsequently added an all-important caveat (in the Kedarnath judgement) to it to the effect that NO act of free expression would tantamount to “Sedition” unless there was clear and irrefutable evidence of “incitement to violence” against the duly constituted State.
In the instant case, even if the three fatal letters were indeed couriered by Binayak Sen, none carries within their texts the least hint of any such violent intent.
Which would make sense in the light of the fact that Binayak, as stated above, has throughout his human rights career pleaded privately and publicly for non-violent resistance to the havoc wrought among tribals’ lives and rights by marauding mining and other corporates in violation of a litany of statutory laws, such as Schedule V of the Forest Rights Act.
Binayak’s great mistake here has been to condemn State-sponsored vigilante violence in the same breath as all other forms of violence.
A fact that goes hand-in-hand with some other facts, namely the sly collaboration of many Corporates on the ground in Chattisgarh with the insurgents, to whom they regulary have paid protection-money, and, if reports are to be credited, passing on explosive materials from factory premises as well. All done with careful deniability.
None of which tantamount to Sedition against the State! And for the simple enough reason that during the neo-liberal phase of India’s famed “development” over the last quarter century, the Corporates have come to BE the State. As incontrovertibly simple as that.
IV
Here is what seems to be happening in contemporary India.
Should you have a full-blown fascist under your chassis, you are ok. The fascist after all, as always, is only the political front of the marauding Corporate. That this is no piece of leftward polemics has been recently confirmed by the leak of the Radia tapes wherein all the fine meshings of connectivity between industrial houses, their lobbyists, their political benefactors, and other segments of the brokering power-elite among the media and bureaucracy have come to inglorious light.
But if you have under your bed someone suspected to be red (one of such suspicious circumstances in the Binayak case, would you believe it, is reference to the fact that he and people around him sometimes were heard to accost each other as “comrade”) you are best dead. And, beginning with the water-shed official murder of Shankar Guha Niyogi, the long line of perfectly innocent workers thus liquidated in those regions of India is indeed a long one; not to speak of hundreds upon hundreds who rot in the jails, often without trial.
Another way of saying the same is this: no greater enemy of the republic than the one who insists that the establishment is after all obliged by oath to the Constitution to implement its promises of equity in asset ownership and distribution, redolently enshrined in article 39 (“Directive Principles of State Policy”).
Here is how that pernicious article reads:
--The State shall, in particular, direct its policy towards securing—
(a) that the citizens, men and women equally, have the right to an adequate means of livelihood;
(b) that the ownership and control of the material resources of the community are so distributed as best to subserve the common good;
(c) that the operation of the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment.
Cannily, those that framed the Constitution had the great good sense to stipulate that the “Directive Principles” would not be enforceable by law! Imagine what might have happened to class rule had they indeed been thus enforceable. The pity is that some mavericks like Binayak Sen insist that these pledges to “we the people of India” who chose, don’t you know, “to constitute India into a Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic,” promising “Justice, social, economic and political,” ought to be implemented if Indian Democracy is to have substance and true legitimacy.
More fool they.
Especially now when India is set on a path of humongous “growth” and world-mastery. What could be more seditious than to puncture that ruling-class aspiration with reminders of equity and justice, or to conflate “we the people of India” with the Republic and its future.
Thus if it takes our own McCarthyism to hold back an avalanche of menace from below, so be it. Reason that explains the current onslaught on human rights protagonists of any hue. Indeed, the next internationally recognized (and Padma Shree Awardee here at home) human rights worker facing the prospect of arrest even as I write is no less than Teesta Setalvad of the Citizens For Justice and Peace. Currently, the Pioneer newspaper, owned by a Rajya Sabha member of the Bhartiya Janata Party (the right-wing Hindu BJP) has unleashed a full campaign of calumny against her for the trouble she has taken since 2002 to stand up for the victims of the Gujarat massacres, and to pursue the legal processes of redressal on their side. A campaign of lies aided and abetted by an erstwhile co-worker of her organization, Rais Khan, who has thought it fit for reasons not far to seek to gang up on Teesta on the side of the very Hindutva brigades who remain the accused parties in that massacre.
Indeed, before long, the State might think it fit to go so far in its collaboration with its “strategic partner” as to set up our own Abu Graib and Gauntanamo Bay.
Time will tell.
*
Badri Raina
email id : badri.raina@gmail.com
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