Beteille’s condemnation and Ramachandra Guha’s hope

Here is the last sentence from an article of Andre Beteille in EPW (4 October, 2008, which I could get thanks to JSTOR subscription of the Institute):

It would appear therefore that the people of India are destined to oscillate endlessly between the two poles of constitutionalism and populism without ever discarding the one or the other.

I got a reference to the article from Ram Guha, who is hopeful in spite of what Beteille has to say:

But we must live in hope. Perhaps, in reflecting in the New Year on the events of the last half of 2011, elected politicians may be compelled to honour their Constitutional obligations more seriously. And perhaps, on the other side, civil society activists will now act with more sobriety and less self-righteousness. To both sides I urge a close reading of the full text of André Béteille’s essay, published, under the title ‘Constitutional Morality’, in the issue of the Economic and Political Weekly dated October 4, 2008. In my view, the essay should be mandatory reading for all thinking, reflective, Indians, in whose ranks I would (hopefully and generously) include the likes of Kapil Sibal, P Chidambaram, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Arvind Kejriwal, and Kiran Bedi.

Take a look, and if possible, get hold of Beteille’s piece; as Guha notes, he wrote it before the ascendancy of Team Anna!

Degrading democracy or, why Ramlila Maidan is no Tahrir Square

Ram Guha draws some conclusions and has a suggestion too:

Our country has witnessed 15 general elections, and countless elections to states that are themselves more populous than most countries in the world. Moreover, unlike in neighbouring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Myanmar — and unlike dozens of African and Latin American nations too — the military in India has been kept completely away from the political process.

The protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere are fighting for what they have not seen in their lifetimes — namely, for an opportunity to elect their own leaders, and for the retreat of the military to the barracks. Ironically, as the people of the Middle East struggle for their first taste of democracy, Indians are working overtime to degrade the democratic institutions that their forebears built and which have now seen us through 65 testing years of independence.

…

A start can be made by a private, off-camera conversation between a major Congress leader and a major leader of the BJP. Who could these be? The prime minister rules himself out, because by not — even after seven years in office — offering to stand for a seat in the Lok Sabha, he has betrayed his own lack of respect for Parliament.

A more plausible leader of such a initiative is Sonia Gandhi, who has herself won three terms to the Lok Sabha, and who is in political terms more important than Manmohan Singh anyhow. Perhaps she should have a meeting with Sushma Swaraj, also a several-term Lok Sabha MP, and, as it happens, the current leader of the Opposition in the Lower House. This meeting can call for a moratorium on abusive remarks about individuals, and, more broadly, for a regular process of consultation and dialogue between government and Opposition.

Politics is a serious business, whose substance can often be aided or impeded by symbols. In suggesting that Sonia Gandhi and Sushma Swaraj have this meeting I had in mind their respective positions in Indian politics today. But then I remembered that they had fought one another in a Lok Sabha election in Bellary in 1999, an intense, surcharged contest in which some less-than-decorous language was used. For Sonia Gandhi to meet Sushma Swaraj now would thus be resonant with meaning, symbolic as well as substantial. It would be a reaching out, a reconciliation, that may lead in turn to a more civil relationship between their two parties.

The Arabs, who have never had democracy, struggle desperately for it. We, who have had it now for several generations, degrade it in practice and in theory. To restore and renew Indian democracy we must, first of all, restore and renew the dignity of Parliament. For this the suspicion and hostility that mark relations between government and Opposition must be overcome. A ordinary, face-to-face meeting between two women, each with great stakes in this democracy’s future, may be a productive starting-point.

Take a look!

Meaningful bilingualism

Ram Guha on the English question:

A century after Gandhi and Polak debated the question in Johannesburg, arguments about the relevance of English to India and Indians continues. The debate has moved on, of course, since society and history have moved on too. One might foreground three significant changes since Gandhi’s time. First, there are now far more inter-community marriages, particularly among the middle and upper classes. And if a Gujarati marries a Tamil, or a Bengali weds a Malayali, then the default language of their children, and of the family as a whole, tends to become English. Second, although Britannia no longer rules the waves, English continues to be the major global language, its pre-eminence a consequence of America having replaced Great Britain as the great imperial power of the age. Whether spoken in the queen’s diction or in its American or other variants, over most of the world English thus remains the language of choice for communication between people of different nationalities.

The third change is, in the Indian context, arguably the most significant. This is that there is now a real hunger for English among the poor. As many readers of this column will know, from their own experience, domestic servants are determined that their children will not follow them into their profession. They recognize that the best way to escape hereditary servitude is for their children to learn the language of mobility and opportunity, which of course is English. The desire to learn English thus runs deep among all castes and communities. Poor Muslims are as keen to learn the language as are poor Dalits or adivasis.

Whether one approves of it or not, this rush to learn English is unstoppable. Rammanohar Lohia and his followers have lost the battle to banish English from the imagination or learning experience of the Indian child. That said, one might still wish for a sort of historic compromise between the positions articulated by Gandhi and Polak. We live in a land of a quite extraordinary diversity of linguistic and literary traditions. And yet in practice we tend to privilege one language at the expense of all the others. That so many middle- and upper-class Indians speak only English is a shame; that so many subaltern and working class Indians do not have access to decent education in English is equally a shame.

A nice piece. Take a look!

Hazare the good and Hazare the bad

Shiv Visvanathan’s opening lines are priceless:

Imagine the news a month from now. The Anna Hazare group faced its own democratic crisis as other NGOs working on RTI and corruption claimed it was intolerant and deaf to suggestions. The NGOs then conducted a sit-in in front of Hazare’s Mayur Vihar home.

The piece is published at EPW (pdf); take a look; the link will only work for a short while. Thanks to Swarup’s pointer, but for which, I would have missed the piece.

Mukul Kesavan takes sides

Mukul Kesavan begins by telling why he likes Team Anna’s protest; and in the last four paragraphs does a U turn to tell why he has decided to change sides:

I tried hard, therefore, to empathize with Team Anna. But it didn’t last. N. Ram of The Hindu, in the course of a televized discussion, urged critics of the jan lok pal bill to ignore the angularities and eccentricities of individuals in Team Anna the better to appreciate the social significance of the movement. This is easier said than done because it’s harder to read social forces than it is to react to human faces.

So when Anna pointed to the scar on his forehead (which he attributed to hostile Pakistani fire) and declared that he was now engaged in fighting home-grown thieves and then called them traitors for good measure, I was appalled in a shabby-genteel way by the crassness of his rhetoric. But Anna, at least, had an excuse: the Congress’s minions had called him names too. To watch the likes of Arindam Chaudhuri and Om Puri bluster and splutter their way through diatribes about the political class, was to learn that this movement was without intelligence or discrimination.

The clincher, though, was a performance by Kiran Bedi, a member, along with Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan, of Anna’s core group. Arvind Kejriwal is the political strategist, Prashant Bhushan is the in-house legal mind; it isn’t clear to the outsider what Kiran Bedi brings to the inner circle. Annoyed by Parliament’s failure to begin a debate on the lok pal bill on Friday, she began to slag off Parliament in particular and members of parliament in general. They were lazy, callous and unworthy of respect. Even as she was speaking, she spotted an MP in Ramlila Maidan and began heckling him publicly.

In the end, it wasn’t what she said as much as the way she said it that torpedoed the reluctant admiration I had built up for Team Anna’s campaign. Kiran Bedi, pioneering policewoman, pranced around the stage trying to parody the uselessness of MPs. The wisdom of doing this aside, it was the grotesqueness of the performance that was striking. She borrowed a scarf, draped it like dupatta over her own head and launched herself into a little skit, looking for all the world like a talentless schoolgirl bidding for attention. In the end, I turned against the jan lok pal crusade not on ideological grounds, but aesthetic ones. Anna was a star, but his repertory company, it turned out, was full of amateurs and bit players auditioning for lead roles, small people dwarfed by a giant stage.

A must-read piece.

Ram Guha on Anna

Here:

Some television channels claim that Anna Hazare represents the overwhelming bulk of Indians. Print, cyberspace and soundings on the street suggest a more complicated picture. Liberals worry about the dangers to policy reform contained in street agitations led by men whose perfervid rhetoric undermines constitutional democracy. Dalits and backward castes see this as a reprise of the anti-Mandal agitation, led and directed by suvarna activists.

To these political reservations may be added the caution of the empirical sociologist. The population of the Delhi metropolitan area is in excess of 10 million; yet at their height, the crowds in the Ramlila Maidan have never exceeded 50,000. In May 1998, 400,000 residents of Calcutta marched in protest against the Pokhran blasts. No one then said that ‘India stands against Nuclear Bombs’. Now, however, as television cameras endlessly show the same scenes at the same place, we are told that ‘India is for Anna’.

This said, it would be unwise to dismiss the resonance or social impact of the campaign led by Anna Hazare. It comes on the back of a series of scandals promoted by the present United Progressive Alliance government — Commonwealth Games, 2G, Adarsh, et al. The media coverage of these scandals, over the past year and more, has led to a sense of disgust against this government in particular, and (what is more worrying) against the idea of government in general. It is this moment, this mood, this anger and this sense of betrayal, that Anna Hazare has ridden on. Hence the transformation of a previously obscure man from rural Maharashtra into a figure of — even if fleetingly — national importance.

The success of Anna Hazare is explained in large part by the character of those he opposes. He appears to be everything the prime minister and his ministers are not — courageous, independent-minded, willing to stake his life for a principle. In an otherwise sceptical piece — which, among other things, calls Anna Hazare a “moral tyrant” presiding over a “comical anti-corruption opera”— the columnist C.P. Surendran writes that “a party that can’t argue its case against a retired army truck driver whose only strength really is a kind of stolid integrity and a talent for skipping meals doesn’t deserve to be in power”. These two strengths — honesty and the willingness to eschew food, and by extension, the material life altogether — shine in comparison with the dishonest and grasping men on the other side.

Large swathes of the middle class have thus embraced Anna Hazare out of disgust with Manmohan Singh’s government. That said, one must caution against an excessive identification with Anna Hazare. Hazare is a good man, perhaps even a saintly man. But his understanding remains that of a village patriarch.

Read the whole piece!

Debate on Lokpal

Through a colleague’s email alert, I came across this site today — which might interest some of you:

The debate surrounding the creation of the office of Lokpal at the centre has really not been a debate at all. It’s more like a battle of attrition between two entrenched, polarised positions whose proponents seem disinclined to engage in any meaningful way.

Towards creating a genuine debate, the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) has circulated a letter and documents. To this end, resources relating to the genesis, contents and issues relating to the various drafts of the Lokpal Bill are linked below.

Take a look!

An insider account of the destruction of a University

The post makes a very painful and poignant reading:

I spent most of my academic career doing what most of us do—teaching, writing, reading graduate applications and theses, having office hours, reading in my field, doing research. I didn’t pay much attention to the University and its administration. None of us have that luxury anymore. Budget cuts after budget cuts after budget cuts have left us all painfully aware of how the sausage is made, or not made.

Having served in administrative posts for most of the last five years, I have come to know the budget issues very well. We are now past the tipping point. We are on a rapid downhill slide that will have profound effects for our state, our families, our country, and our world.

In the space of less than a single lifetime, the University of California, Riverside went from being a small agricultural experiment station to being one of the top 100 universities in the world. An incredibly dense and elaborate web of specialists across all fields of scholarship, science, and the arts was developed, and it took enormous efforts by thousands of people over those years to make it happen. In less than the four years it used to take to graduate, it is being destroyed.

Read the entire post; it goes on to give the reasons behind the destruction and what can possibly be done about it:

Why is this happening? Political demagoguery and corruption. Thirty years ago UC received 9% of the state budget and prisons 3%. Now UC gets 3% and the prison-industrial complex gets 9%. The legislature is taking the money that should be used to educate the best of its citizens and using it enrich the people who make a profit from the imprisoning the poorest. The percentage of the cost of higher education provided by the state has been cut in half, cut in half again, and is on the verge of getting cut in half a third time. The people in the legislature understand the value of public higher education—the vast majority of them (in any given year over 80%) have degrees from our state system, and many of them have multiple degrees—all made possible by the legislators who preceded them, and who had more courage. They do not protect the University for a very simple reason: if they do, they will suffer a flow of conservative attacks and Tea Party racism, funded by the Koch brothers and their ilk, the standard price if one stands up for anything that is directly devoted to the commonweal.

In my darkest moments, I think the monied interests working against reasonable taxation are doing so because they consciously, actively seek to make sure we do not have an informed, educated citizenry, the better to extract our collective labor and wealth unimpeded. But such intentionality isn’t necessary. Simple, short-sighted, grab-it-now, bottom-line greed explains their destruction of our culture, without recourse to any dystopian conspiracies.

…

I hope you get angry. I hope you get active. Call and write your legislators, get out in the streets, take back your university, don’t let yourselves be the last people to have even this chance.

Do take a look!

Reinforce, and, not undermine, our institutions of democracy

Andre Beteille, befitting his credentials as one of the foremost sociologists of this country, starts his piece with a question/confession:

Who is a civil society member? This question, which has intrigued me for more than 20 years, came up again with the organization of the demonstrations in support of the lok pal bill in Delhi and other metropolitan cities.

Beteille is not willing to blindly accept what he is told, of course:

When I asked a friend who had been with the demonstrators at Jantar Mantar about the social composition of the gathering, he said that they were common people from every walk of life.

That is not how it appeared to me from what I saw on television.

And, there is more reflection, thought and self-appraisal:

I have nothing against the middle class to which I myself belong, but I find it absurd to describe such persons, who comprise a small proportion of the total population, as the ‘common people of India’. I did not see on the TV cameras many people who looked and acted like stone breakers, construction workers and other wage labourers who live in the slums of Delhi and can be easily seen on the thoroughfares of the metropolis. The question that I naturally ask as a sociologist is: are those people not also civil society members? This leads to a more disturbing question: am I myself a civil society member?

And then, there is the hard question:

Is there any kind of objective criterion, other than recognition by the media, which enables us to decide who is and who is not a member of civil society? Or is membership of civil society coterminous with membership of society as a whole so that anyone who declares himself a civil society member should be acknowledged as one?

Beteille does not hesitate to be harsh, when needed:

It is unfortunate that successive governments have shown themselves to be both inept and disingenuous in their conduct over creating the office of the Lok Pal. It is equally unfortunate that rallies and demonstrations had to be organized in order to get the government to do what it should have done in any case and done some time ago. The government now says that it is a good thing that the people have come together, and raised their voice against corruption in public life. If that is so, what was the government doing all these years? And why did the Opposition not do anything but allow the initiative to pass from Parliament to the streets?

Government and Opposition may thunder against each other in public, but they are also complicit in many acts of omission and commission that undermine the legitimacy of Parliament. It is a truism that the successful operation of democracy is the responsibility of the Opposition as much as of the government. When government and Opposition fail repeatedly to do what they ought to do in the ordinary course, people lose their trust in the institutions of democracy such as the legislature, the executive, and the political parties. Then they come together and try to solve through their own efforts the many problems that remain unresolved.

But, his concerns and message are very clear:

Some young persons who had taken part in the gathering said that it reminded them of Tahrir Square in Cairo, and that made my heart sink a little. There is a vast difference between the political orders in Egypt and in India. In India we have had for 60 years an institutional mechanism for the articulation of dissent and opposition that very few countries outside West Europe and North America have had.

…

We may not like the present members of either the government or the Opposition in Parliament. But we know who they are and how they happen to be where they are. They are there as the elected representatives of the people who have voted for them to be in Parliament. They will be in Parliament for a term of five years, and then go back to their constituencies to face the music. But who are the people who gather together in public places, speak in the name of civil society, and then disperse? How will we hold them to account if we find out six months or a year later that some of them, or many of them, have acted in bad faith?

Our situation is quite different from the situation in Tunisia or Egypt or Libya. There the army is waiting in the background to pick up the pieces after the crowds have dispersed. If in India the army stays where it should, it is in no small measure due to the place that the institutions of democracy, both government and Opposition, have created for themselves in the public consciousness. We all agree that those institutions are very weak; our endeavour should be to reinforce and not undermine them.

A nice piece; a must-read piece.

Legislations and social change

Recently, I heard Dr. Andrew Kerr on bridging the gap between good ideas and practical solutions to deliver a low carbon economy. I do not know how much of Scottish experience is relevant or useful in the Indian context — basically because I have no hard data for making comparisons — for example, in absolute terms, what is the energy consumption of Scottland and India? and, in absolute terms again, what is the energy consumption growth rate in Scottland and India and in what sectors are these growth taking place? and so on.

Having said that, I agree with one point that Dr. Kerr made. Legislations hardly ever deliver on these issues; you have to make people see the point, see the advantages of doing things one way and also give them incentives for doing things in a particular way — the best incentive being economic — that it costs less if you do things that way. In other words, we need more activist politicians than legislating parliamentarians to make progress in sustainable economic growth.