[In reply to Aditya Nigam's critique of Prabhat Patnaik's stand on the cartoon row]
None can challenge Aditya Nigam in spitting venom against the organised Left, of any kind! That's bound to be the case for Nigam specializes in nothing else! Now its Prabhat, Earlier it was the rumour of Maoism! Even earlier was that piece in which Nigam documented both his fears and the relief.. To quote him..
"fear at the sight of these hundreds of little Stalins crawling out of the woodwork, and sheer relief that they will never be able to rule over us ever again."
Hundreds of little Stalinists! They must be Indian Citizens as well, ain't they? They must have their right to form associations and hold meetings guaranteed by the Indian constitution itself? Don't they? After all, whatever the argument of some of the organizers of MR, MR did neither issue a call for any sort of violence nor did it stop anyone else, including Nigam, to hold their WSF! Seems the term 'Stalinist' has gotten a whole new meaning!
Let's come to the 'diatribes' of Prabhat that Nigam is so scornful of! Prabhat's article had made a lot of sense to me, and it in my view represented the best possible stance the Marxists, of any kind, should had taken in this ongoing war of positions! Well, one can as well add Laltu's article that was published in Jansatta in the same league. Now, before someone jumps into some conclusions and/or discoveries, I have always been opposed to CPIM's political line all my life and have belonged to the ML camp. I have found many of Prabhat's positions highly problematic, including the ones he had on Nandigram.
But what is wrong with Prabhat's argument here?
He definitely is not treating the Parliament as some sacred and sacrosanct institution that is beyond any critique. He, quite on the contrary, is making it very clear that the Parliament will have to earn the respect it wants. All he is arguing is that the Parliament is a reflection of the collective will of the people and how deficient or efficient it is, is beside the point. He also argues that the power to make decisions cannot be abrogated to any other group that is not accountable to the people unlike the parliament! Is there any problem with that?
Nigam might be well in his right in locating all the Debates that are happening on issues ranging from the Nuclear Bill to Right to Food to the drawing room discourses of these EXPERTS of Prabhat whom he chooses to refer to as Citizens, but then who are the people who are waging their own wars on the grassroots? Are they all really so peripheral to the debate as Nigam makes them out to be? And mind it, I am not talking either of the erstwhile Harmads of the CPIM nor the Little Stalinists! I am referring to struggles like that of the MKSS in Rajashan to the one against Posco in Odisha. They might not be intellectuals but is it so easy to write them off altogether as Nigam finds it! Ah, Nigam did refer to his ‘perverse view of things’, albeit in a different sense, didn’t he?
Perverse. That is the word that defines rather amusing ‘evidence’ of Atal Bihari Bajpeyi justifying the deletion of ten passages from a book that Nigam uses to establish the expertise of Congress in such affairs. And all this while we thought that Bajpeyi belonged to the Bhartiya Janata Party and not Congress.
Apart from maligning all the different strands of Left, Nigam excels in one more thing, that is parrying the real questions away. Prabhat did not merely focus on the rights, and the wrongs, of the parliament. He had scrutinised a few other things as well. For example, the very first thing he argued was that the issue is not about ‘freedom of expression’. Then he buttressed the fact that this is not about any sense of humour either. He also touched upon the issue of sensibilities and how they develop into organised political actions. Yes, the cartoons might not have drawn an immediate protest but then the reasons for that can be located in the strength of the then Dalit movement. It could also have something to with the vocabulary, rather the lack of it, it had.
Even though Prabhat avoided using the classical categories like class and caste, he hinted at the composition of the experts (Citizens for Nigam) being so terribly schewed in favour of the so called upper castes and classes. Now, socialisation does has a role in shaping our sensibilities and perceptions, doesn’t it? Nigam decided to parry this question away as well. Why? For it is not that easy to fault someone on that account. Also, it is far easier to do an Anna Hazare than engage in the rigours that organised Left is all about. Doing Anna Hazare comes with its own middle class benefits is beside the point.
May 21, 2012
Republic on the Rise: Nepal embarks on the road to democracy.
[From my column OBVIOUSLY OPAQUE in the UTS Voice 15-31 May, 2012]
“You must try to contribute to the process of transitional justice, including the constitution making” said the young and cheerful human rights activist I was talking to. “That’s the thing” she added for a good measure. Yep. I nodded for transition is the thing. I could see it everywhere. It was there in the streets and it illuminated the discussions in the restaurants. It was there in the sparkle that lighted her face when she talked of transition. I could see it in the twinkle that swam into her eyes, a twinkle that betrayed her robust belief in the good days ahead for her country.
The last thing many of them would want, I am sure, is a dialogue within different communist parties that opens the possibility of a broad Communist front if not an outright merger. These banners, wall paintings and posters have painted the twin towns of Kathmandu and Patan RED. Even more interestingly, they have been put not merely by many communist parties that dominate the Nepali political scene as of now but also by trade unions like All Nepal trade Union of Restaurent workers (translation mine). A satisfying smile forces its way on my face. The process of trade unionisation is so complete in this country which was an absolute monarchy just a few years back!
Not that the forces of positive, however divided, are the only forces trying to take Nepal their way. There were many a wall writings of a Hindu Party of Nepal as well, with Revolutionary added to its name in brackets for effects, calling for ensuring the safety, survival and dignity of Hindus of Nepal! Hinduism is the majority religion in Nepal is beside the point. Their safety, survival and dignity are not threatened by whosoever seems even more irrelevant to whatever political group this is. Interestingly the Nepali Congress (Koirala faction) is conspicuously absent from the streets despite its huge support that is second only to two of the biggest communist parties. “Ah, they are too elite and too assured of their support to engage in such menial labour” quips another Nepali activist friend of mine.
Transition. The word defines the blossoming republic that was born out of mass protests called Janandolan that swept the monarchy away in its tide. Transition. The word guarantees that this time the republic has come there to stay unlike all those false starts that had come the nation’s way. Of course it would not be a smooth ride; it just cannot be for throwing off the yoke of that dreaded feudal monarchy is nothing less than a herculean task.
Of course it would be fraught with dangers, both from within and without for the influence of the erstwhile monarchy still holds some, even if greatly diminished, ground. Losing respect and power, as it is, does not necessarily translate into the loss of conspiratorial prowess, does it? Couple this with the vested interests that have entrenched themselves deep into the power corridors and the recipe for an impending threat is complete. Their scheming designs have drawn blood in the past and they cannot be believed to sit idle this time.
Not this time though. For the republic has drawn its first blood as well. The first thing it did was turning the then ‘Hindu Rashtra’ into a secular republic and thus correcting a historical wrong committed on Nepali people by the erstwhile monarchy that claimed to be of a divine origin. Unlike its western counterparts, this one was not to be content with a claim of being the ‘march of the God on the earth’ but wanted to be God itself, so it did precisely that. The kings claimed to be the incarnation of incarnation of Lord Vishnu, one of the Holy Trinity that sits at the apex of Hinduism. They claimed, for I am sure that even they themselves won’t be stupid enough to believe that ridiculous assertion of their own.
The republic has cut them, and all their claims, to size. There are no more Gods roaming through the streets of Kathmandu or Lalitpur. People have snatched all their streets, all their roads back. They have taken all those Darbars, or the squares surrounding the palaces, back too. In fact, it was at the Patan darbar where I witnesses one of the most fascinating glimpse of the transition that is seeping into the ordinary lives of these ordinary people. Darbar, at the center of Lalitpur, was abuzz with the people, right from the ‘foren’ tourists to the locals stealing little moments of leisure sitting idle on the steps of countless temples that make the Darbar.
Many of them are young couples lost into one another. In fact, it’s not merely the Patan Darbar but all of Kathmandu valley that young couples have taken by a storm. Quite apparently, they are not merely from the upper echelons of the society. Nepal is in transition. India, the big brother that sits at its borders witnesses act of ‘honour’ killings just at the outskirts of its national capital. Breaking the stream of thought a boy asks me “Will you please click a photograph of us”? The couple looks at each other and then, a little coyly, holds hands. And then I saw the queue, not of human beings though. It was a queue of pots, mostly plastic ones, lined up in front of the two water taps located in the pond like structure with steps that stood at one of the corners of the Darbar.
“What’s that”, I asked SachinGhimre, a Nepali friend of mine who was my junior at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi while I was enrolled there for my PhD. “What’s what”, he asked back. “That queue of the water pots in bright colours that only plastic can come with!” “Oh that”, Sachinlooked at the queue a little forlornly, “They are local people getting water as they don’t have tapped water supply for clean drinking water at their homes.” Were they allowed to do that beforehand? No, that happened only after the ‘janandolan”!
Ordinary, poor people collecting their water at a place that once was a palace! That’s what this transition is all about. People reclaiming their lives and their resources, that’s what this transition is all about. This is the evidence for the fact that the republic is on the move even if a little short on resources. But then, once the will is firmly in place, all that the lack of resources can do is slow down the process a little, it cannot turn the tide back.
Narendra spoke with a definite conviction. A conviction that was shaped by the will to move forward.A Conviction that was born out of the will to demolish all those structures that destined a section of Nepali population to a life of slavery and servitude.A conviction that dreams of turning the former Dalits as equal citizens of the new country, the one that is no more a Hindu nation.The one that has become a republic.
We were sitting in the office of the Jagran Media Center, a non-governmental organization that works on the issues of Dalit rights. “We have a network of seven hundred journalists”, he said and then added with a pause, “and four hundred and fifty of them were trained by us”. There was an unmistakable hint of the fact that he took pride in the success of the organization he is leading. “All of them are Dalits”, added Deependra. His voice was brimming with pride too.
They have just finished with a television serial named Dalan, or repression, which ran with grand success on Nepali TV. They are successfully running many radio channels that are both community based and community owned. They are playing an important role in the constitution making process as well with a pledge of bringing issues regarding Dalit rights to the national forefront. Undoubtedly, the republic is in transition. It is on the rise as well. The window of their office opens into a beautiful skyline dotted with the Himalayas on the horizons.
A memory crosses my mind. The memories of those beautiful days in JNU, marked with late night processions against a thousand injustices committed on the people. The memories of all those slogans including the one I liked the most, the people united shall always be victorious. Some of the victories are coming our way. They so certainly are.
I take a cab back to the guest house. The winding and narrow roads are absolutely similar to any of the roads that one finds in the quaint hill stations of India. What differentiates Kathmandu, though, is the Newari architecture that produces breathtaking beautiful houses of brick and wood. The windows don intricate patterns carved out of the wooden panes.Newaris, by the way, are people indigenous to the Kathmandu valley. They are something like a host tribe, one that forms majority of the capital city but is largely absent or is a tiny minority in the rest of the country.
Newaris love their Stupas, complete with four lions guarding their localities. Something catches my attention yet again. One of these Stupas is taken over by a woman vegetable seller. No, not all of that.another part of it is claimed by one who has a small cycle repairing shop, if one can call it a shop that is.
A smile takes my face over. This is what transition is. A transition where the traditional serves the modern. It is one where people have reined in that block called functional fixedness and can put things, successfully, to use. The one they have taken over is far better kept than the abandoned, decaying ones. That is another evidence for the success of community ownership of public spaces, isn’t it?
Looking at the Kathmandu valley from Swyambhoo, a Buddhist temple on a hillock that overlooks all of Kathmandu valley does not give even a hint of all that is churning within the Nepalese society. Yet, it does give panoramic views of the beautiful city that lays beneath. A city that has a past imperfect, but striving for a future much better than anything that there was.
May 10, 2012
A Didi so bereft of Mamta!
[From my column OBVIOUSLY OPAQUE in the UTS Voice, May 1-15, 2012]
Poor Shakespeare! Good that he is long gone or he would have wanted to die again. He would had to, for that is what people with honour are known to do when they are proven decisively wrong by someone. If only he knew that hatred would never be as strong and self-reinforcing if it came with any other name than Mamata Banerjee. So much for the name, literally meaning love, of the maternal kind on top of that, Mamta, when the woman behind the name is so royally, in a democratic sense, bereft of any feelings of compassion forget love.
Wayward, perhaps, need some explanation here. Waywardness for Mamta might actually be some higher order of consciousness, some higher order of knowledge that we, the lesser mortals do not have access to. She has her own scheme of things. She might have her own, and grand, scheme of the universe as well. Waywardness of Mamta might only be our lack of understanding, or stupidity therefore. Is it really right of us to tear her manners apart instead of thanking for her graciousness in not calling us stupid while hinting at that we were, after all? She did tell us that much, didn’t she? Why else, she would take the decision in ‘public interest’ nothing less?
We should have thanked her for saving us from the ignominy of falling prey to the ‘rumours’ and ‘propaganda’ and the ‘canards’ that these newspapers were found to be spreading. (The charges remind me of similarly worded differently signed press releases of the Left-Front days, but then that is beside the point). We should have broken into an Orwellian chant, something like four-legs-good-two-legs-bad in the Animal Farm style for expressing our joys of finding the liberator, finally. And here we, the thankless people are.
I am sure Mamtadi would have been laughing at the stupidity of those asking about the past of the same newspapers when they supported her and played a crucial role in the fall of the final frontier. Did the Orwellian chant not change into two-legs-good-four-legs-bad when prompted, and of course, required by the need of reassessment of concrete situations. Ok, I concede that for Mamtadi’s lifelong opposition to the ‘Left’ I should had tried to scavenge an analogy from the stables of the Right-wingers. Had ‘intellectually stimulating’ not been used as a synonym for ‘does not exist’ I would have done that. So I did not even try, and I am not sorry for that. Period.
She had much more on her mind, all in order to enlighten us, the lesser mortals, and to deliver us all to a level of higher consciousness. Apparently, she has had enough of our small pleasures of laughing at the cartoons that come tucked at the bottom of the front page, sometime that of the edit or Op-Ed, of the newspapers. Even if not exactly blasphemous, does the act not indicate at our stupidity of deriving pleasure from such trivial things, she must have thought. Add all the loss of working hours these cartoons cause to the nation by making us, the lesser mortals, laugh and share these stupid jokes and only then would one understand the true logic, and vision, hidden in her crackdown on such cartoons.
After all, have not we seen the cartoons tell the same stories, if we could call them stories that is, years after years and decades after decades? What changes did R. K. Laxman’s common man witness while appearing into our lives day after day? Did his life get any better? It did not, so what is the point to invest so much of energy and time into making ones. Similar would be the experience of the cartoonists depicting the politicians and the statesmen though I wonder if there are any left of the latter variety.
What purpose does it solve, then, to draw a silent Manmohan Singh instead of a sleeping Deve Gowda, (what was his full name by the way?) or a Mamta from a Jayalalitha, she would have asked herself. This, for her, must be a criminal waste of time aka the bad old days of the Left Front regime when they engaged in good for nothing strikes. And then there are lesser mortals, like us, who link it all to that abstract concept of democracy and criticise her. This is all a conspiracy against her, she must have thought. Why else the same people who did not go beyond muttering under their breath when Manmohan Singh called all the talks of corruption as mere propaganda are after Mamta’s life now?
So she was absolutely in her right to get that fella, whatever was his name, arrested. One he wasted his time by drawing something he was not paid for, and was mandated to, and then wasted more by spreading that. Creepy creature must be on the CPI M’s payrolls. Ah, CPI M, or as the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is known in our country that is obsessed with the acronyms. CPI M leadership must be happy with that too, or they would have found it difficult to explain the meaning of the term Marxist that adorns their name. I, for one and also for the lesser mortal I am, could never understand if it should be seen as something similar to free in free beer or free as in free speech, but then that is, again, beside the point.
Going by the Mamta Banerjee’s statements, if you could actually call her rants that, CPI M must be terribly happy. If they really wield all that power the CM keeps accusing them of, they have never had it better than this. They are behind everything, from orchestrating gang rapes to malign CM’s image to making and distributing cartoons against her. They are the ones that have been successfully sabotaging her relations with the Indian National Congress and they are the ones who have convinced the media to portray Mamtadi as a buffoon, which, to the best of her knowledge and belief, she is not. Evidently, they have got that proverbial hand (see, that’s the evidence for covert conspiracies of the Congress in tandem with the commies) that is behind everything. They have got that proverbial hand), or is it hammer and sickle, that is bigger than the long hand of the law.
Long hand of the law! That reminds me of the miraculous, almost supernatural, powers of Mamtadi who could successfully make out a rape from an allegation. That too without even any preliminary investigation! She just sees the reality behind all that crops up in front of her eyes. The reality, in turn, is way too easy to make out. It is a rape if the accused belong to any of the shades of the Red that had dominated West Bengal for so long, and is merely an allegation that does not require even an inquiry if the accused have got anything to do with her stable. Simple logic, isn’t it? Just that it’s we, the lesser mortals, who do not have access to those higher level of consciousness that helps one see black from white.
We, by virtue of our ignorance, can actually ask questions like why the police officer in charge of the investigation then refuted the truth revealed by the Chief Minister as against the baseless allegations levelled by the victim. The answer is even simpler. The lady officer has been duly shunted out of her office, of course after telling the media that Mamtadi did not try to influence the investigation.
Perhaps this is the time for us, the lesser mortals, to repent for the sins of launching tirades against such well-meaning person. We can begin with demanding a law that makes scoffing at Mamtadi, including by making a cartoon, a criminal offence. Scrapping the provincial police and bestowing the powers of investigations and prosecution unto her (not in the post for those following her can be fallible) infallible persona. Amen.
May 07, 2012
‘Anonymous’ enemies of the Murderer: Narendra Modi comes an inglorious third in Times the poll
First, the absurd. My wall was painted red by the saffrons. They were writhing in anger against the injustice done to Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat. Wait, I am not referring to the walls of the house I live in, but the one of my profile of that ubiquitous social networking site called Facebook that has come to define us more than what our real existence does. So, the saffrons had painted my, and almost anyone else’s who had something to do with India, red.
They had detected, invented would be the correct word though, a conspiracy against Mr. Modi as well. Ah, the man and his almost paranoid love for conspiracy. Such a penchant Mr. Modi has for conspiracies. I remember, with horror, the ones he has already exhausted. Having done to death part accusations part abuses like pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-liberal, Pakistani/Muslim, Italian/Christian and the likes , he would soon have to invent new ones, I am afraid. The spin- master he is, he may turn even that into propaganda for his vibrant Gujarat by declaring it the new Mecca, nay the New Ayodhya, for the linguists tasked with inventing new words that could ‘qualify’ conspiracy.
So the social media, right from Facebook to Twitter was put on fire by his over-zealous supporters over his ‘dethronement’ from the top position in an online poll for choosing hundred ‘most influential people’ that was being conducted by the Time, a reputed American news magazine. As it turned out, Modi was leading the poll till less than three days before the scheduled closing of the voting. Further, he was not merely leading; he was leading by a huge margin. Such an honour it was for a person who was declared persona non grata by the American establishment not long ago, and was denied visa despite being a ‘democratically’ elected chief minister of a province of the largest democracy of the word. Such a restoration of dignity it was to the persona of someone believed to be a mass murderer in disguise, wasn’t it?
Then came the avalanche. Master divider was pushed, unceremoniously, to the second place by the penultimate day of voting. Not only this, the votes against him were going up slowly but steadily. The number of ‘never, no way’ sayers had reached precariously, of course only for the zealots vouching for Modi, close to those far him. The dream run was going to be over, or was it already? The high hopes of making it big on the cover of the Time seemed to be running out of steam. But then, the bigots were not going to take it lying down, were they? They were working overtime, too, all for finding an excuse that could explain the failure or a hole that could puncture the balloon. How much they wanted something which could save the day for them.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for the sake of the human within me, I do not have any access to the ghettos where these fanatics live. Yet, I think I can pretty much guess what would have transpired in the deep and dark, nay saffron, insides of their mind to come up with what they later did. Here is a fictional account of that. “Eureka, one of them must have screamed at the height of his lung, for screaming comes easy to them anyways. This Anonymous guy, who has pushed our Modibhai to second place is a Hacker he would have shouted. Hacker? That gives us a shot at digging up some conspiracy theory, so close to Modibhai’s heart, his cohorts would have responded. Well then, let’s get down to job and save the pride of Modibhai, that is the pride of Gujarat by extension, and then that of Indian nation, or perhaps that of Akhanda Bharata as Modibhai would have preferred to call it, one of the gang would have exhorted his cohorts into.’
Now , the stupid. Their decision had culminated into an online petition complaining to The Time for looking into the ‘grave matter of ‘Anonymous Hacker’ who has, according to them, ‘penetrated into their system and had pushed Narendra Modi to second place while occupying the first for himself’. They had started a thousand campaigns on Facebook as well, inundating it with abuses for the hacker, anti-Modi secular, Left, liberal intellectuals Muslims and Christians and calls for their patriotic cohorts to ‘aggressively’ vote for Modibhai and save the national honour in the process.
There was something ironically true in their call. They had got it so right while naming all those they believed were opposed to Modibhai, for Modi had in fact given all of them a reason to hate him for. Further, they sounded so ominous in their call for ‘aggressive’ voting, for aggression, it seems, is the only natural reaction inherent to their degenerate systems that are human in form but beastly in nature.
There was something stupid in their call as well, in fact not merely stupid, for it was much more than that. Ok, I concede that no one in his senses would ever accuse a Modi supporter of being corrupted by something as silly as rationality and knowledge. Yet, expecting them to read the thing before launching a tirade would definitely not be too much to expect from them, would it? But then, those who can demolish expectations as innocuous as behaving like humans do can defy anything just as easily, can’t they?
As it came out, they had not bothered to read the description of ‘Anonymous’ as offered by The Time, forget checking it anywhere else. They confused the world-wide group of Anonymous ethical hackers that has proved to be resilient enough to be up and kicking despite an across the world crack down on them with some anonymous hacker operating out of his cubicle to manufacture money out of his malwares.
If only they were following even The Time, they would have known that the term Anonymous has assumed an aura of righteousness, not the pretended one of their sort, but one that denotes the resolute participation of the common person on struggles that started in the Arab Street and ran through the Wall street, engulfing all the dictatorships that fell in between.
If only they had known that this Anonymous was not the anonymous that specialized in the art of hiding himself behind a saffron mask for killing and maiming citizens as they did in Gujarat in that fateful summer of 2002. No, this Anonymous is the one that has kept that space of resistance on the internet up despite regular arrests of its key members in a pan-European witch-hunt much in the same way as the Anonymous citizens who bore the brunt of the first round of army fire to give birth to democracies out of US supported dictatorships.
But then, as I said earlier, can one really expect reason from those who rejoice in killing hapless people? Can one expect calls of harmony and peace from those who refuse to wear a Muslim skull-cap even while flaunting all others in their ‘Sadbhavana’ fasts? Can we expect an attempt of reconciliation from a Chief Minister who was accused of not following the ‘RajaDharma’ by the Prime Minister of the country belonging to his own party?
But can we expect this person to win the race of being most influential person of the world, even if the race does not mean much in itself? Not really, for the blood that they spilt in Gujarat is too thick to be forgotten by even those who claim to be friends of the murderer. No one has forgotten how Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar and a senior leader of National Democratic Alliance, has shooed Narendra Modi away threatening his Bhartiya Janta Party to break the alliance if they bring Modi in for canvassing in Bihar. Can we really forget how stubbornly had he refused to share dais with this sectarian leader?
Forget all this, for even the BJP’s own unit of Uttar Pradesh did not let him canvass there during the assembly elections fearing all the negativity it will cause. Narendra Modi is also just one, according to Nitin Gadakri, President of the BJP, of tens in the race for the post of Prime Ministership in the party. Can such a person, shooed away from Bihar and unwelcome in Uttar Pradesh, be the most influential person even in India, forget the world? No, he cannot. The Time had made a mistake and the Anonymous corrected that.
And lastly, the humiliation. To the grins of his detractors, including two-third of his party members, Mr Modi was not merely pushed to third place by the end of the voting but had also secured the dubious distinction of garnering more negative votes than the positive ones. Perhaps such shameless attempts of forcing oneself in the international arena are fated to end in such exemplary failures. Supporters of Modi, though, can convert this into an opportunity by launching campaign against the designs of a ‘foreign’ magazine that ‘conspired’ to insult a ‘patriot’ Narendra Modi. He loves the ‘C’ word in any case.
May 04, 2012
They don't need a war to get Internally Displaced!
Imagine a community with no place to belong to, in a country that cherishes the idea of motherland. Imagine a community forced to live a life perennially in flux, continuously on the move not in quest of greener pastures but for ensuring mere physical survival. Imagine one which can claim no village as its own, and is condemned to leave their hamlets once in a few years. Not in our country, at least in the ‘normal’ parts, one would tend to think but for a few scattered across the ‘disturbed’ territories.
Unfortunately, that is far from being true. For example, Baghelkhand, in Madhya Pradesh, has not one, but many such communities. Their plight does not reach us despite our persistent pursuit of the deepening crisis in agriculture. We might be aware , thanks to the relentless work of P Sainath, of the frightening flight from rural areas in the form of footloose migration yet that does not really prepare us to grasp the extent of the distress in actual, human terms.
“The walls of Kol houses do never get blackened by the smoke of the hearth, they have to move out much before that!” said Mamta Kol, a 30 year old resident of Gonta hamlet in Jawa block of district Rewa. The statement was so devoid of pathos, melancholy or anything that could get associated with grief or anger. It was no nonsense statement of fact coming out of a person, nay a community resigned to its ‘fate’ of getting displaced every few years.
Yet, the pathos intrinsic to the sentence was unmistakable. She was born in village Chamarahua, in Mau block of district Banda of Uttar Pradesh. Her father had got ‘patta’ or the landlease but never the possession. Despite repeated attempts, the revenue officials never informed the family of the exact location of ‘their’ lands. Failed in their quest and condemned to living the life of a bonded labour, they fled the village one night and landed in Katiya-Dandi a village in Chitrakoot district of Uttar Pradesh. The story repeated itself there as well and the family escaped to Gonta where a few community elders have settled to escape brutal exploitation by their upper caste landlords. This was in 1984. Gonta proved to be quite an unlikely village for the Kols for its continued existence ever since. Not anymore though, for the government is gearing up to acquire the lands for a proposed thermal power plant. The miracle of continued existence of a Kol hamlet cannot be allowed, it seems.
Mamta’s story was in no ways atypical as I were to find during my field investigations for a study aimed at mapping the distress migration patterns. I met Sadhulal in Bishar, a hamlet deep within now denuded forests, who was born in Suhawal, had to move to Barahula followed by Daharan before finally ending up here. He is 62. He likes it here for the inaccessibility of the hamlet provides a sort of refuse from the dadulog, landlords in local parlance and gives him a shot at stability. Quite a genuine justification for people trying to escape generations of bondage, isn’t it?
He, with 56 other residents of the hamlet got a patta as well. Then, the fairy tale ended with and upper caste landlord turning up. He forcibly usurped some land and started litigation claiming that the distributed lands were his private property. Being ‘subjudice’, the lands are left uncultivated ever since. “If the governments give us land leases, does it give us for fighting court cases? Why would we have had to beg for the lands if only we had that much ‘power’?” asked Hiralal, a community elder.
The story remains the same even if the names of the hamlets change from Mohanaiyya plot of Seeganwtola to Nonariof Jawari and from Dondar Colony to Dhakara! The evictions come in different forms; sometimes self-inflicted in search of freedom from bondage, and by getting thrown out by the forest department for ‘illegally encroaching’ the forest lands at other. Displaced from their hamlets, they would find a new place, often inhabitable, for the risk of getting chased out increases with the habitability of the hamlet.
They would make the place liveable, call in their kith and kin wanting to escape structures of bonded labour. This would go on for a while and then, they will fall prey to a new development project or a new diktat of the forest department. Another eviction will come, and the same story will play itself out. In fact, the number of displacements, I found, would often be directly proportional to the age of the protagonist! Older you are, more the number of displacements suffered, sometimes spanning almost all of Baghelkhand!
Ironically, no evictions hint at a fate even worse, for that means that the inhabitant of the hamlet failed to flee from bondage as is the case with Loni, the only hamlet I came across that did not get displaced even once. The predicament of the residents of Loni explains, partly, the reasons behind people putting everything at stake for that elusive freedom. Ramkhelawan of Mohanaiyya seems to buttress the fact when he asserts that “What could be better than being the master of one’s own self. Whether there is livelihood or not, one is independent at least.”
Evidently, the quest for freedom and a life with dignity is not killed by all the hardships their circumstances have unleashed on these people. This is the same quest brought out by lifelong struggles of Shailesh Verma, a Dalit by caste, of Dhakara who chose to adopt a surname belonging to OBCs despite all odds. For him, it was not merely a way of escaping all those ‘insults’ his caste-name brought to him in a feudal society, but also an act of defiance by subverting the system that perpetuates their misery. Being the first ever graduate from his community in that area and then taking up their fight as his own must have done him proud. The defiance glowed all over his face when he told me that ‘Those who make it big become Rawat, while the failed ones remain Kol all their lives’.
Similar is the story of struggles of Ramkripal Namdev, 65, of Nonari, a crusader for hope against all hopes. Though hailing from ‘darji, or tailor community and thus not belonging to Kols or Dalits, he has made establishing villages for the dispossessed a mission of his life. Whenever he would see empty government lands he would invite the Kols, the Dalits or any such deprived group he could find and turn it into a new hamlet. He would, then, become the self-appointed mentor of the hamlet. He would lodge legal cases against the Forest department stopping them from reclaiming the lands and engage in the political struggles including indefinite hunger strikes. Ask him why and all he would, smilingly, offer is that ‘people have a right to live, don’t they?
Yet, stories of such defiance are few and far between as against those of evictions and displacements. The miseries of these communities should be treated at par with that of the Internally Displaced People, for the continuous movement deny them access to all fundamental rights ranging from a right to life with dignity to that of access to education. Is someone listening?
April 23, 2012
Demilitarisation, not divine providence, is the way forward to peace!
[First published by the Asian Human Rights Commission]
A President of one of the two counties almost perennially at war with each other visiting the other, what on the face of mother earth makes news that gets bigger than this? The fact that this is a President on Pilgrimage, and not on another diplomatic mission infused with dry details of that elusive thaw in the relations merely adds to the importance and makes it a stuff of legend.
That is how one can best sum up the recent India visit of Mr Asif Ali Zardari , the president of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The fact that his entourage included his son Bilawal Bhutto, president of the Pakistan People’s Party and the widely believed ‘crown-prince’ only added to the importance of the visit turning it into one more flourish of the ‘track two’ diplomacy, via pilgrimage route this time. It was, therefore, merely fitting on the part of Indian establishment to convert this personal pilgrimage/visit into a semi-official one with a lunch with the Prime Minister, with the crown-prince of this side of the border in attendance. So the President came, lunched with the ‘who is who’ of Indian side, the list including Rahul Gandhi who is perceived to be the ‘crown prince’ of this side of the disputed border. The entourage, then, proceeded to Ajmer and worshipped for peace, among other things I am sure.
The visit assumes an air of significance for something that is much more important than that comes out from such details. Here is a President of Pakistan visiting a Sufi shrine and paying tributes, in the process, to a version of Islam that stands for peace, fraternity and true love as against that radical, militant and intolerant strand of Islam that has been slowly engulfing Pakistan. The message of the visit is too loud to be lost on even the most untrained of the ears. Seen from this perspective, the visits adds sort of insult to the Jihadists already injured by the declaration of a bounty on the head of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the Amir of Jama'at-ud-Da'wah by the administration of the United States of America. Clearly, the political leadership of Pakistan seems to have woken up to the fact that it cannot let the violence simmering within its own territories continue, it cannot let the Jihadis invent enemies to attack and kill when they can find none in their immediate universe..
It is also an acknowledgement that the situation has reached a flashpoint. Pakistan can only ignore the Jihadist designs, often in toe with the rogue elements in the security establishment, at its own peril. Being a deficient, and even delinquent, democracy like India is still not only different but far better than slowly turning into a failed state, isn’t it? Democracies can be mended from within unlike states ruled by military-religious right complex, and it is indeed a very positive signal that civilian government of Pakistan, mobilised perhaps by multiple movements for democracy like that of the lawyers, has awakened to the realisation.
Better still is the fact that it has decided to find the road to redemption in its own glorious history instead of the readymade one that US and its cronies specialise in delivering, more so to the oil-rich countries. One does not need to rubbish the already discredit theory of clash of civilisations, but one can certainly reclaim all that was rich in ‘our’ culture, our meaning the entire subcontinent in this case. Good that Pakistan has lead the way, may the rest rediscover and reclaim everything from the Bhakti movement to the Bauls. That would give one more fillip to the already high on the success of this visit ‘peaceniks’, otherwise believed to be hopeless people on both sides of the border.
Yet, the high profile visit came on the heels of another, far more sadder event that almost got whitewashed. Pakistan had lost more than a hundred of its soldiers in the Siachen glaciers, not to the fire of an inimical army or even the ‘friendly’ drones but to an avalanche. Even more unfortunately, this was happening neither for the first time, nor were the ones killed Pakistani fatigues always. Quite on the contrary India and Pakistan, taken together, have lost more than 8000 soldiers to the furies of nature since early eighties when they decided to establish permanent posts on the glaciers so majorly unfit for human habitation. The glaciers had been disputed, and claimed by both the sides as their own, but remained unoccupied till then.
Files after files of news reports buried in the archives of history have brought in the futility, and also the stupidity, of the decision of occupying Siachen ever since. Reports bring out the fact that India has lost a soldier almost every other day while Pakistan manages a little better by losing one every third day, doesn’t it? Not really, for the reasons lay not in any difference of capacities of the armies but to the sheer fact that India controls two third of the glaciers as opposed to one third controlled by the Pakistan. Add the number of those getting incapacitated for life in this highest conflict zone of the world, the economic and humane cost of this ungainly war becomes apparent. One does not even need to calculate it all over again. Reports put the costs of maintaining military presence in the area at more than 5 crore INR a day and I am sure, Pakistan would not be spending any less.
Come to the soldiers. Other than the colours of the flag they believe to be defending, almost everything else about their lives is similar. They come from roughly similar cultural and economic universe, and are often the sole breadwinners of their impoverished families that must be languishing in the plains of both India and Pakistan. Why, then, the news of their incapacitation and deaths don’t move us? Why, then, we are never made to wonder about this theatre of the absurd where we are losing our soldiers not to enemies, perceived or real, but to the eccentrics of those in power? Our in this case means both of us, again.
As it is, there has not been a single reported attempt of infiltration of terrorists, of Pakistani origin if India wants to claim that as a reason for maintaining its presence on the glaciers, for the climatic and geographical conditions do not allow that. Similarly, it does not seem to gain anything much even on the disputed water front for it does not contribute much to the Indus river system but for a 80 kilometre long tributary the river. Same is the story for Pakistan as I learn from the discourse on the issue. Is not it a criminal offence, for both of the countries then, and not merely one born out of ignorance, to subject our soldiers to such harshness of nature?
Another question that begets our attention is if we can really afford to sacrifice these many soldiers for our erratic war of supposed pride, or whatever else it is? Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan has taken a welcome step in that sense by praying for peace at the shrine of a Sufi saint. It is high time that we, on the other side of the border, respond to that by a call of demilitarisation of Siachen glaciers, and restoring pre 1972 situation, far before the fateful decade of 1980s. It is high time for both the countries to go back to their positions before that time for even otherwise they aren’t getting anything more than body bags of their soldiers. Best part of the story is that even Pakistani Army seems to be in favour of demilitarisation and calling for both the countries sit together for the same. Buzz from Indian corridors of power have hinted of their support for demilitarisation as well. Now, what can get better than this for resolving the issue for once and for all?
Hope, political leadership of both the countries does not waste the opportunity either to paranoid war mongers or to pahle aap (you first) relic of their Nawabi pasts. Hope, they do it at the earliest for it would not merely earn them a lot of goodwill and mutual confidence but also take care of the nefarious designs of those whose interests revolve around putting any process of reconciliation between these two countries into jeopardy. Also, this would be our true, and heartfelt, tribute to those who have lost their lives here. Also, God, of all religions, is believed to reward only those who substantiate their efforts by real work. Demilitarisation, therefore, could be the only way to secure that elusive divine providence for peace in our part of the world.
------------------
A President of one of the two counties almost perennially at war with each other visiting the other, what on the face of mother earth makes news that gets bigger than this? The fact that this is a President on Pilgrimage, and not on another diplomatic mission infused with dry details of that elusive thaw in the relations merely adds to the importance and makes it a stuff of legend.
That is how one can best sum up the recent India visit of Mr Asif Ali Zardari , the president of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The fact that his entourage included his son Bilawal Bhutto, president of the Pakistan People’s Party and the widely believed ‘crown-prince’ only added to the importance of the visit turning it into one more flourish of the ‘track two’ diplomacy, via pilgrimage route this time. It was, therefore, merely fitting on the part of Indian establishment to convert this personal pilgrimage/visit into a semi-official one with a lunch with the Prime Minister, with the crown-prince of this side of the border in attendance. So the President came, lunched with the ‘who is who’ of Indian side, the list including Rahul Gandhi who is perceived to be the ‘crown prince’ of this side of the disputed border. The entourage, then, proceeded to Ajmer and worshipped for peace, among other things I am sure.
The visit assumes an air of significance for something that is much more important than that comes out from such details. Here is a President of Pakistan visiting a Sufi shrine and paying tributes, in the process, to a version of Islam that stands for peace, fraternity and true love as against that radical, militant and intolerant strand of Islam that has been slowly engulfing Pakistan. The message of the visit is too loud to be lost on even the most untrained of the ears. Seen from this perspective, the visits adds sort of insult to the Jihadists already injured by the declaration of a bounty on the head of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the Amir of Jama'at-ud-Da'wah by the administration of the United States of America. Clearly, the political leadership of Pakistan seems to have woken up to the fact that it cannot let the violence simmering within its own territories continue, it cannot let the Jihadis invent enemies to attack and kill when they can find none in their immediate universe..
It is also an acknowledgement that the situation has reached a flashpoint. Pakistan can only ignore the Jihadist designs, often in toe with the rogue elements in the security establishment, at its own peril. Being a deficient, and even delinquent, democracy like India is still not only different but far better than slowly turning into a failed state, isn’t it? Democracies can be mended from within unlike states ruled by military-religious right complex, and it is indeed a very positive signal that civilian government of Pakistan, mobilised perhaps by multiple movements for democracy like that of the lawyers, has awakened to the realisation.
Better still is the fact that it has decided to find the road to redemption in its own glorious history instead of the readymade one that US and its cronies specialise in delivering, more so to the oil-rich countries. One does not need to rubbish the already discredit theory of clash of civilisations, but one can certainly reclaim all that was rich in ‘our’ culture, our meaning the entire subcontinent in this case. Good that Pakistan has lead the way, may the rest rediscover and reclaim everything from the Bhakti movement to the Bauls. That would give one more fillip to the already high on the success of this visit ‘peaceniks’, otherwise believed to be hopeless people on both sides of the border.
Yet, the high profile visit came on the heels of another, far more sadder event that almost got whitewashed. Pakistan had lost more than a hundred of its soldiers in the Siachen glaciers, not to the fire of an inimical army or even the ‘friendly’ drones but to an avalanche. Even more unfortunately, this was happening neither for the first time, nor were the ones killed Pakistani fatigues always. Quite on the contrary India and Pakistan, taken together, have lost more than 8000 soldiers to the furies of nature since early eighties when they decided to establish permanent posts on the glaciers so majorly unfit for human habitation. The glaciers had been disputed, and claimed by both the sides as their own, but remained unoccupied till then.
Files after files of news reports buried in the archives of history have brought in the futility, and also the stupidity, of the decision of occupying Siachen ever since. Reports bring out the fact that India has lost a soldier almost every other day while Pakistan manages a little better by losing one every third day, doesn’t it? Not really, for the reasons lay not in any difference of capacities of the armies but to the sheer fact that India controls two third of the glaciers as opposed to one third controlled by the Pakistan. Add the number of those getting incapacitated for life in this highest conflict zone of the world, the economic and humane cost of this ungainly war becomes apparent. One does not even need to calculate it all over again. Reports put the costs of maintaining military presence in the area at more than 5 crore INR a day and I am sure, Pakistan would not be spending any less.
Come to the soldiers. Other than the colours of the flag they believe to be defending, almost everything else about their lives is similar. They come from roughly similar cultural and economic universe, and are often the sole breadwinners of their impoverished families that must be languishing in the plains of both India and Pakistan. Why, then, the news of their incapacitation and deaths don’t move us? Why, then, we are never made to wonder about this theatre of the absurd where we are losing our soldiers not to enemies, perceived or real, but to the eccentrics of those in power? Our in this case means both of us, again.
As it is, there has not been a single reported attempt of infiltration of terrorists, of Pakistani origin if India wants to claim that as a reason for maintaining its presence on the glaciers, for the climatic and geographical conditions do not allow that. Similarly, it does not seem to gain anything much even on the disputed water front for it does not contribute much to the Indus river system but for a 80 kilometre long tributary the river. Same is the story for Pakistan as I learn from the discourse on the issue. Is not it a criminal offence, for both of the countries then, and not merely one born out of ignorance, to subject our soldiers to such harshness of nature?
Another question that begets our attention is if we can really afford to sacrifice these many soldiers for our erratic war of supposed pride, or whatever else it is? Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan has taken a welcome step in that sense by praying for peace at the shrine of a Sufi saint. It is high time that we, on the other side of the border, respond to that by a call of demilitarisation of Siachen glaciers, and restoring pre 1972 situation, far before the fateful decade of 1980s. It is high time for both the countries to go back to their positions before that time for even otherwise they aren’t getting anything more than body bags of their soldiers. Best part of the story is that even Pakistani Army seems to be in favour of demilitarisation and calling for both the countries sit together for the same. Buzz from Indian corridors of power have hinted of their support for demilitarisation as well. Now, what can get better than this for resolving the issue for once and for all?
Hope, political leadership of both the countries does not waste the opportunity either to paranoid war mongers or to pahle aap (you first) relic of their Nawabi pasts. Hope, they do it at the earliest for it would not merely earn them a lot of goodwill and mutual confidence but also take care of the nefarious designs of those whose interests revolve around putting any process of reconciliation between these two countries into jeopardy. Also, this would be our true, and heartfelt, tribute to those who have lost their lives here. Also, God, of all religions, is believed to reward only those who substantiate their efforts by real work. Demilitarisation, therefore, could be the only way to secure that elusive divine providence for peace in our part of the world.
------------------
April 15, 2012
अमन की असली दुआ होगा सियाचिन का असैन्यीकरण!
[दैनिक छत्तीसगढ़ में 'अमन की असली दुआ' शीर्षक से 14-04-2012 को प्रकाशित.]
पाकिस्तान के राष्ट्रपति का भारत आगमन कभी भी बड़ी खबर होती है, पर अगर वह उपमहाद्वीप में सूफी इस्लाम की सबसे पाक जगहों में से एक पर आयें तो बेशक खबर और बड़ी हो जाती है. आखिर को अमन, भाईचारे और हकीकी मुहब्बत की नींव पर खड़ा सूफी इस्लाम ही है, जो इस्लामिक चरमपंथियों और उनके जेहाद के रास्ते में सबसे बड़ा रोड़ा है.
इसीलिये, आसिफ अली जरदारी साहब का अजमेर शरीफ आकर जियारत करना न केवल अमन की राह में उठा एक कदम है बल्कि वहाबी-तबलीगी कट्टरपंथियों की पाकिस्तान को अपने रंग में रंगने की साजिशों को सीधी चुनौती भी है.
अफ़सोस मगर इस बात का है कि इस खबर के महत्व के चलते एक दूसरी बड़ी खबर दब-सी गयी, वह खबर जिसमे दुनिया के सबसे ऊंचे और मानवरहित युद्धक्षेत्र में 100 से ज्यादा पाकिस्तानी सिपाहियों के बर्फबारी में फंसकर मारे जाने का जिक्र था. यह कोई पहली बार नहीं हुआ है, न मरने वाले हमेशा पाकिस्तानी ही होते हैं. अभी पिछले साल भारतीय सेना के बीसियों जवान भीषण बर्फबारी में फंसकर मारे गए थे. सियाचिन के ग्लेशियरों की भौगोलिक और जलवायुगत दुश्वारियों के चलते इन मारे गए जवानों में से बहुतेरों के मृत शरीर भी नहीं मिल पाते, और यह अभागे सैनिक अपने अपने धर्मों के मुताबिक़ जरूरी अंतिम संस्कार से भी महरूम रह जाते हैं.
तथ्यों की निगाह में देखें तो मोटे तौर पर 1980 तक सियाचिन पर दोनों देशों के दावे के बावजूद कब्ज़ा किसी का नहीं था, न ही कभी दोनों ने मानव जिजीविषा और सामर्थ्य को चुनौती देने वाले इन ग्लेशियरों पर सैन्य चौकियां स्थापित करने की कोशिश की थी. फिर 1980 के दशक की शुरुआत में पाकिस्तान द्वारा सियाचीन में सैन्य चौकियां स्थापित करने की कोशिशों की जानकारी के बाद भारतीय सेना ने ‘ऑपरेशन मेघदूत’ के तहत सियाचिन के ज्यादातर हिस्से पर कब्जा कर लिया. आज की स्थिति यह है कि सियाचिन के लगभग दो तिहाई हिस्से पर भारत काबिज है जबकि इसका एक तिहाई हिस्सा पाकिस्तान के पास है.
स्थिति कि भयावहता का अनुमान लगाने के लिए सिर्फ इतना जान लेना काफी होगा कि 1984 से लेकर 2012 के बीच बिना किसी आपसी झड़प या गोलीबारी के भारत और पाकिस्तान के 8000 से ज्यादा जवान सियाचिन में बर्फबारी से लेकर अन्य प्राकृतिक आपदाओं का शिकार हो चुके हैं. इसको ऐसे भी समझा जा सकता है कि यहाँ हर तीसरे दिन एक पाकिस्तानी सिपाही और हर दूसरे दिन एक भारतीय सिपाही की मौत होती है.
इसमें अगर घायल होने वाले सैनिकों से लेकर स्थायी अपंगता तक का शिकार हो जाने वाले सैनिकों की संख्या जोड़ दें तो 20000 फीट से ऊपर लड़ी जा रही इस लड़ाई की आर्थिक और मानवीय लागत अविश्वसनीय लगने लगती है. यह स्थिति तब है जब आंकड़ों के मुताबिक़ भारत सरकार सियाचिन पर हर दिन 5 करोड़ रुपये से ज्यादा खर्च करती है और बेशक पाकिस्तान का खर्च भी कुछ ऐसा ही होता होगा.
सियाचिन में बेवजह मारे जा रहे ये सिपाही अपने-अपने देश के झंडों के रंग से अलग गरीब परिवारों की रोटी का इकलौता सहारा भी हैं. फिर इनके मरने की, इनके कष्टों की खबर हम तक क्यों नहीं पंहुचती? सवाल यह भी है कि उन हालात में जब सीमा के दोनों तरफ लोग भूख से मर रहे हों तब एक निर्जन और मानव निवास की सम्भावनाओं से रहित एक क्षेत्र पर कब्जे की झूठी लड़ाई में दोनों मुल्क अपने जवानों और धन दोनों को ऐसे बलि चढा सकते हैं?
सीधे-सीधे कहें तो यह राष्ट्रीय सीमाओं की रक्षा करने में जा रही जाने नहीं हैं, सियाचिन से होकर भारत में घुसपैठ करने की आज तक कोई कोशिश कभी नहीं की गयी है. भौगोलिक परिस्थितियों के चलते की भी नहीं जा सकती. इसके उलट, सियाचिन पर कब्जा बनाए रखकर भारत को भी कुछ खास मिलने वाला नहीं है क्योंकि सियाचिन ग्लेशियर पर आधारित नदियाँ मूल रूप में पाकिस्तानी क्षेत्रों में बहती हैं और उनका पंजाब की पांचों नदी-व्यवस्थाओं से कोई विशेष रिश्ता नहीं है. फिर एक ऐसे दुर्गम इलाके पर कब्ज़ा जमाए रखने के लिए दोनों तरफ के सैनिकों की बलि चढाना सिर्फ निर्मम नहीं लगभग आपराधिक भी है.
आसिफ अली ज़रदारी साहब ने ख्वाजा मोइनुद्दीन चिश्ती की दरगाह पर दोनों मुल्कों में अमन की दुआ माँगी है. इस अमन की शुरुआत सियाचिन के असैन्यीकरण से की जा सकती है. सियाचिन में 1980 के पहले की स्थिति बहाल की जानी चाहिए जब यहाँ किसी पक्ष की कोई सैन्य उपस्थिति नहीं थी. यही ठीक भी होगा क्योंकि वैसे भी यहाँ से दोनो मुल्कों को अपने जियालों की लाशों से अलग कुछ हासिल नहीं होता. फिर किसी भी क्षेत्र के असैन्यीकरण से इन दोनों पड़ोसी देशों में परस्पर विश्वास बहाल करने में मदद भी मिलेगी और दोनों ही तरफ बैठे उन्मादियों के खिलाफ यह एक बड़ी जीत भी होगी. फिर, यह एक बेवजह और बेमानी लड़ाई में कुदरत के हाथों मारे गए सैनिकों को हमारी श्रद्धांजलि भी होगी.
April 14, 2012
हथियार लॉबी को ध्वस्त करना होगा.
व्यवस्था की जड़ों को खोखला कर चुके इन भ्रष्टाचारी समयों में भी एक पवित्र और ईमानदार संस्थान, या फिर उत्पीड़ित अस्मिताओं के निर्मम शोषण का उपकरण, लोक विमर्श में भारतीय सेना इन्ही दो रूपों में देखी जाती रही है. इन दोनों नजरियों के देश की सीमाओं से दूरी से लगभग समानुपाती अपने भू-राजनैतिक विभाजन भी हैं. लब्बोलुआब यह कि तुलनात्मक रूप से शांत उत्तर या दक्षिण भारत में सेना को जनता का पुरजोर समर्थन मिलता है जबकि राष्ट्रीयताओं के संघर्षों वाले काश्मीर, मणिपुर या नागालैंड जैसे इलाकों की बहुसंख्यक जनता भारतीय सेना को एक आक्रांता और उत्पीडक सेना के बतौर ही देखती है.
फिर भी, भारतीय सेना इस बात के लिए सम्मान की अधिकारी है कि उसने अपने सम्मान और विरोध के इस भू-राजनैतिक विभाजन पर साम्प्रदायिकता की काली छाया कभी नहीं पड़ने दी. इसीलिये, साम्प्रदायिकता के चरम उभार के दौरों में भी आप उत्तर प्रदेश से लेकर आन्ध्र तक तमाम अल्पसंख्यक समुदायों को राज्य-पुलिस/ अर्धसैनिक बल हटाने और सेना बुलाने की मांग करते हुए पायेंगे, तो मणिपुर के हिंदू आपको सेना हटाने की मांग करते हुए मिलेंगे. मूल चरित्र में हिंसक प्रतिगामी विभाजनों से भरे समाज में ऐसी छवि का निर्माण कर पाना आसान काम नहीं है, और सेना की इस बात के लिए सराहना होनी ही चाहिए कि अपनी धर्मनिरपेक्ष छवि पर किसी भी हमले का उसने तीव्र प्रतिकार किया है फिर चाहे उसे कर्नल पुरोहित जैसे हिंदू-कट्टरपंथियों पर कठोरतम कार्यवाही ही क्यों न करनी पड़ी हो.
ऐसे ही अंतर्विरोध सेना के नागरिक समाज से अंतर्संबंधों को भी पारिभाषित करते हैं. जमीनी सिपाहियों से लेकर उच्च आधिकारियों तक आप सैनिकों के अंदर ‘नागरिक जीवन’ में व्याप्त अवगुणों जैसे भ्रष्टाचार, अकर्मण्यता, भाई-भतीजावाद आदि आदि से उपजा ‘सिविलियंस’ के लिए एक वितृष्णा का भाव देखेंगे. पर फिर आजादी के तुरंत बाद हुए जीप घोटाले, बोफोर्स, ताबूत घोटाले से लेकर हालिया टाट्रा ट्रक घोटाले, और इनकी अंतर्कथाओं में अदनान खशोगी जैसे सौदागरों से लेकर चंद्रास्वामी जैसे ‘संतों’ तक की उपस्थिति याद करें तो साफ़ हो जाता है कि सेना का भी एक हिस्सा भ्रष्टाचार में आकंठ डूबा हुआ है तमाम नैतिक दावों के बावजूद सेना के पास भी छिपाने के लिए बहुत कुछ है.
इसीलिये भारतीय सेना को बहुत सारे पुनार्विचारों की जरूरत है. ‘अशांत’ क्षेत्रों में अपने ही नागरिकों के मानवाधिकार उल्लंघन के आरोपी सैनिकों को बचाने से लेकर भ्रष्टाचारियों पर कड़ी कार्यवाही करने तक सेना को बहुत कुछ साबित करना है. पर इन सबसे कहीं ऊपर, भारतीय सेना का गौरव अपने राष्ट्र-राज्य की लोकतान्त्रिक व्यवस्था के अक्षुण्ण सम्मान में निहित है. पड़ोसी मुल्क पाकिस्तान से लेकर और तमाम असफल देशों की सेनाओं से ठीक उलट भारतीय सेना ने कभी भी नागरिक प्रशासन से टकराने की कोशिश नहीं की है. ऑपरेशन ब्लू स्टार जैसे कठिन क्षणों में भी धैर्य बनाए रखने से लेकर नक्सल-प्रभावित क्षेत्रों में हस्तक्षेप से इनकार तक में सेना ने सदैव अपनी गरिमा बढ़ाई है.
अफ़सोस, कि पहले जन्म-तिथि विवाद में वर्तमान सेनाध्यक्ष के अड़ियल रवैये और फिर सेना की लड़ाकू टुकड़ियों के बिना अनुमति युद्धाभ्यास ने इस गौरवशाली परंपरा को कड़ी चुनौती दी है. किसी भी लोकतांत्रिक समाज में पदासीन सेनाध्यक्ष का नागरिक प्रशासन के खिलाफ न्यायालय जाना अपने आप में में एक गंभीर विचलन है. फिर अगर सेनाध्यक्ष के अनुसार इस विचलन के पीछे सेना के ही कुछ वरिष्ठ अधिकारियों के साथ-साथ हथियार-लाबी की संलिप्तता है तो सवाल बनाता है कि उनकी नाक के नीचे ऐसा संभव कैसे हुआ? आखिर को हथियार लाबी और वरिष्ठ सैन्य अधिकारियों की मिलीभगत किसी भी लोकतांत्रिक समाज के लिए खतरे की घंटी है.
इस खतरे में अगर हम बिना अनुमति युद्धाभ्यास को भी शामिल कर लें तो खतरा और बड़ा हो जाता है. बेशक, सबसे नकारात्मक नजरिये में भी इस अभ्यास में सरकार को लज्जित करने से ज्यादा का कोई इरादा नजर नहीं आता, और तख्तापलट के कयास कोरी बकवास से ज्यादा कुछ नहीं साबित होते हैं. पर फिर उस दौर में जब सेनाध्यक्ष स्वयं मानते हों कि उन्हें रिश्वत देने की सीधी कोशिश पर भी वह कोई कार्यवाही नहीं कर सके थे, कोई नहीं कह सकता कि सरकार को लज्जित करने के ऐसे प्रयास कब तख्तापलट की कोशिशों में बदल जाएँ. आज बात इसलिए संभल गयी है कि सेनाध्यक्ष की कुर्सी पर एक ऐसा व्यक्ति बैठा है जिसकी व्यक्तिगत ईमानदारी और राष्ट्र के साथ साथ लोकतंत्र में निष्ठा सवालों के दायरे के परे है, पर क्या इस आधार पर हम कल के लिए आश्वस्त हो सकते हैं?
शायद यही समय है कि हम सेना और नागरिक प्रशासन के अंतर्संबंधों को मजबूत करने के साथ साथ सेना के भीतर मौजूद लोकतंत्र विरोधी तत्वों और हथियार लाबी को ध्वस्त करने की दिशा में कड़े कदम उठायें वरना कल खतरा सर पर आ जाएगा. साथ ही अब सेना को भी यह सोचना होगा कि क्या इस तरह के तत्वों की उत्पत्ति सीमावर्ती क्षेत्रों में मानवाधिकार उल्लंघन की घटनाओं को छिपाने और दोषी सैनिकों को बचाने की कोशिशों से तो नहीं जुड़ी है? आखिरकार, अगर आप अपने ही राष्ट्र के नागरिकों पर जुल्म कर बच सकते हैं तो फिर आप उसके भी आगे बढ़ने की कोशिश क्यों नहीं करेंगे? क़ानून क़ानून होते हैं और आप अगर उन्हें उत्तर-पूर्व में तोड़ सकते हैं तो फिर वे उत्तर प्रदेश में भी सुरक्षित नहीं हैं. शायद यही अवसर है कि सेना अपने सिपाहियों से लेकर उच्चाधिकारियों तक का लोकतंत्र, मानवाधिकार और क़ानून के शासन आदि विषयों पर संवेदीकरण करे. इससे न केवल भारतीय सेना की आक्रांता छवि टूटेगी बल्कि उसका सम्मान भी बढ़ेगा.
April 03, 2012
Reminiscences: Of a movement that was not and a Mahatma who came with a use-by date!
Anna, the second Gandhi, third JP, fourth what not is back. Just that, this time he is back sans the groundswell of support from those whose agenda he was soft-peddling into the collective consciousness of the country. Evidently, he has been unceremoniously dumped by even the right wingers led by Rashtriya Swyamsewak Sangh and its thou-sands of amoebic arms. Believe me, the very thought of finding myself into agreement with anything Bharatiya Janata Party says sends shivers down my spine!
I have always found their positions to pop-ulate two extremes of the political continuum. Either they are outright absurd and laughable or outright dangerous and inciting violence. Now, someone who has always been accused by his friends to have a ‘sub-standard’ sense of humour will naturally shudder at the thought of laughing at BJP type jokes. My sense of humour may, or may not, be sub-standard, but I would definitely not want to give such strong evidence proving the charges! Needless is to say that only the most inhuman may confirm to the second of their position. Not that there is dearth of them. We have seen quite a few defenders of Gujarat model of development. Haven’t we? I will, though, never stop opposing these merchants of mayhem and murder. Period.
Sushma Swaraj, the Leader of Opposition for the uninitiated, is a text-book case of the first types. Sometimes it seems like she has taken upon her slender shoulders the onerous task of belting out all that is absurd and dare I say silly, in the BJP stables. Her acumen of turn-ing herself, and of course her party, into a laughing stock is so near complete that a mere mention of her makes many of the political observers break into an impromptu smile. Who can forget the ‘I will live like a widow’ state-ment made by this ‘Bellary Behan’ who later graduated to be ‘Bellary-Ma’ of the ‘famed’ Reddy brothers! Or her jig at Rajghat second to none but that glorious ‘feat’- Nautanki by the custodian of national morality aka Kiran ‘one-flight-two-reimbursements’ Bedi!
A history like this did not give much hope but for a cathartic smile or two. This is what made me wait for her speeches whenever I watched the proceedings of the parliament. I know it’s hard to believe, but there still are people who watch that! So when she rose to speak on the censure motion against Team Anna in the Lok Sabha, I geared up myself for surviving a beautiful- in-form but meaningless-in-content speech. Alas, I was proven wrong this time. This was not the same Sushma we had known all this while! For once, she was making sense, a lot of that on top of that! A shiver was building up deep within me, readying itself for a parade down my spine. Was I finally in agreement with a point made by her? Wasn’t my head nodding, even if unconsciously, to her arguments? Maybe it was. I could not confirm more with her.
The irony inherent in her statement was, however, lost on many. It was lost, I am afraid, even on the copycat Mahatma aka Anna Hazare. Listening to her statement would have made Anna tremble for it was almost a repack-aged version of a statement he himself had made a few years ago. I am sure he would want to erase that from the memory of the people, but then if only that was so easy.
Mahatmas do not support murderers. Do they? Here we have one who actually does that. I know it would be hard for many to believe. But then this is what Anna Hazare had to say on Raj Thackeray’s tirade against North-Indians in Bombay (Yes I know it’s called something else now, but I would keep referring to it like this till that criminal wants to force the new name down my throat). Talking to media per-sons in Varanasi, Anna told them that “some ideas of Raj Thackeray were correct, but dam-aging public and national property was not right”. He had not stopped at that. He went on to ‘warn’ the North-Indians to live in their ‘lim-its’ by telling them that “outsiders trying to prove their dominance in the state was not at all acceptable". (Those not wanting to believe this are free to check the link -http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/UttarPradesh/Hazare-backs-Raj-s-tirade-against-Non-Marathis/Article1-368036.aspx or access the archives of Varanasi edition of Hindustan Times dated January 19, 2009).
Mahatmas can be parochial too. Can’t they? Just that, in that case they should know to remain in their ‘limits’ and should not want to ‘dominate’ the national scene under a self-inflicted delusion of grandiose. Delusion, of course, follows its own course. It makes one believe into his ‘supernatural’, ‘super-democratic’ in this case, powers. It makes their followers believe in their ‘miraculous’ powers. And in believing all that they start claiming that the Mahatma is above everything, including the parliament. They were going strong. Electronic Media, in order to wash itself of the stains of Radia-Tapes, was working overnight to make a movement out of corporate-funded campaign.
The copycat Mahatma was bound to be happy. So was his ‘Team’. Then, they made a mistake. Forgetting that their clientele (they loved to call them ‘masses’) hated politics but loved to use ‘contacts’, they sort of jumped into active politics. They decided to oppose Congress openly while clandestinely supporting the BJP. Palpably, whether or not their efforts of deluding the ‘masses’ have succeeded, they have deluded themselves into their invincibility!
If only they knew that Mahatmas too come with a use-by date. This date, in turn, depends upon their capacity of delivering ‘goods’, votes in this case, to their masters. This parochial Mahtama, bolstered by the defeat of Congress where it was not even in the contest, decided to give an open call for defeating the Congress-NCP alliance in the local civic-body elections in his home state. And bingo, the combine won more than two-third of the total seats!
‘Just one’, was what the Mahatma had cunningly asked after listening to the news of Sharad Pawar getting slapped in Delhi. The slap has landed, now, on his face. Unlike the Mahatma, though, I am not interested in count-ing the numbers. The Mahatma had failed to deliver.
Team Anna should have taken that defeat as a wake-up call. They did not. They decided, instead, to gang up openly in support of the BJP, choosing Uttarakhand as the new battle-ground. Throwing any remaining pretensions of impartiality out of the window, they called upon the masses to defeat the Congress. They should have stopped at that for in a state with bipolar politics, the call had effectively meant the same as supporting the incumbent BJP. They did not. They decided to turn themselves into something like court-poet of the incum-bent Chief Minister B C Khanduri and exhorted his virtues in a chorus. The people, who were all Anna and those who were not Anna were with Anna, listened to all this intently and then defeated the ‘honest’ chief minister in his own constituency!
They should have understood that under their carefully woven pretence of a homogeneous crowd lay a thousand fault lines dividing the people along the axes of caste, kinship, clan, religion and what not. They should have known that every single time their leader, the liberator-people-were-waiting-for, would make statements alluding to ‘chandal chaukari’ or Banjh Aurat (barron women), a section of the populace will get a glimpse into real psyche of his herds and will get alienated. They should have known that accommodating those who attend the Dharma-Sansads of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad on their stage will scare life out of the minorities who have as much claim on the nation as anyone else.
They should have known that one can man-age an event, but not a movement. I concede that the politics of our times is drifting towards performances, but it has yet not reached the ebb and there are people who still do politics than perform it.
They should have known that people were to see through the script of Janlokpal sooner than later. They should also have known that people could be hoodwinked into believing into the efficacy of the ‘supercop’ that would emerge out of the legislation, but not forever. Someone was to remember the other Bill Shanti Bhushan, a member of Team Anna, had drafted and successfully sold into an act, called the Anti-defection act. Then s/he was bound to notice how the act had ended in institutionalizing horse trading rather than curbing it. More than any of it, though, people were to see through the real designs of the campaign that pretended to masquerade as a movement.
I recall the prudent words of a Pakistani friend of mine. He has once told me that the only thing that defines the different trajecto-ries of post-colonial India and Pakistan was the presence (absence for Pakistan) of a robust political democratic system, one in which parliament was supreme. Pakistan did not have one and so the deprived and the marginalized did never have a say in the system. Democracy, rather than dictatorship is an aberration in Pakistan’s political life for it did not have a robust parliamentary system.
India did manage to address the demands of its downtrodden, even if rather deficiently, because it had one. If a Pakistani friend knew this, Indians could not be left far behind. Could they? They knew that whatever little, right from reservations to dignity, they have found are because of the system and not despite it. They have seen the rise of the OBCs that came because of their numbers, hitherto impossible. They have seen how Dalits have found a voice even if much more is needed to done for justifying any claims of being the largest democracy of the world. And because they knew, they were to see through the real designs of the Anna-led-corporate-funded campaign aimed at demolishing the democratic system and dump it for the same. After all, scrapping is not a way to improve a deficient system, more so by impos-ing a dictatorial super-cop defined by a casteist and sectarian ideology.
For all these reasons, this campaign was a doomed one. For all these reasons, the messi-ah had a use-by date and that is well past now. Good that Sushma Swaraj realised it, for who has a better expertise of jumping out of sinking ship than her party. Had they not used and thrown the issue of Ram Temple depending on its capacity of delivering votes!
This was the irony lost on many, the irony of the handlers who produced this copycat Mahatma being forced to tell him not to cross the limits. Did I hear someone saying poetic justice? Poetic justice or not, I loved seeing this Mahatma put into his place by those whose hatred for real Mahatma is no secret!
P.S. I still do not agree to anything BJP says or does.
March 24, 2012
Eradicating hunger requires concrete action, not hollow promises!
[Published in Article 2, a journal on human rights published by Asian Legal Resource Center]
One would hardly expect the prime minister of a country that fashions itself as the biggest democracy of the world and hopes to be a ‘superpower’ by 2020 to acknowledge that his country is home to hunger. Yet that is precisely what the Indian prime minister did recently. Harder to believe is that the prime minister did not stop at that but went on to call it a national shame.
He was not off the mark. With more than 42 per cent of Indian children being underweight, a national shame it is. One would be tempted, though, to ask what his government and those of his predecessors have been doing to fight and eradicate this national shame.
The devil lies in the details hidden in the answer to this question. The details expose the paradox of high rates of chronic hunger in a country where millions of tons of foodgrain rot in the godowns of Food Corporation of India (FCI) every single year. For example, while replying to a question in parliament, Sharad Pawar, the incumbent minister for Food and Agriculture, informed the lower house that over 11,700 tons of food grains worth 68.6 million Indian rupees (or approximately USD1.5 million) were found damaged in government warehouses. This wastage of food could be seen as--and dealt with as--a criminal offence in any country, leave alone India with so many hungry stomachs to feed!
Added to this is the fact that at any given point in time the FCI stocks almost double the amount of buffer norms, an amount that hovers around 30 million tons of foodgrain. Evidently, the government is not hard-pressed with any shortage of food. Quite on the contrary, it has more than enough to release not merely to save children from malnutrition but also to save the foodgrain from rotting.
This is not to suggest that the prime minister or his government has woken up to the disturbing fact of malnutrition with a start. The writing has been on the wall all this while. There was enough data to shake it out of its slumber, more so because the data was coming from a multitude of sources including its own agencies, independent economists, research institutions and international watchdogs among others.
For example, India has been ranked in the ‘alarming’ category on the Hunger Index prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Notably, every single country in Asia barring Bangladesh has been performing better, and that includes war torn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq! In fact even Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Rwanda and Zimbabwe were found to be feeding their people better than India. The findings merely corroborated the research of Utsa Patnaik, one of the most renowned contemporary Indian economists, who has decisively shown that an average Indian family in 2005 was consuming a staggering 110kg less grain as compared to that in 1991.
Patnaik has not stopped at that. Her meticulous studies have pointed out that when it comes to food security, India is failing its citizenry on every single count. Never mind the alarming gap between required protein intake and actual consumption, a silent majority was not getting enough for mere physical survival in terms of calorie intake. Backed with solid data, she has gone on to demonstrate that per capita food consumption in contemporary India is worse than that in the colonial times!
The situation on the ground is horrifying to say the least. If one goes by the criteria for famine put forward by the World Health Organisation (WHO), then the world’s largest democracy can be labelled as famine stricken. One of the WHO criteria to determine famine defines a community with more than 40 per cent of its population having a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18.5 as famine stricken. By that yardstick, Indian children as a whole and many other communities, mostly the Dalit and tribal, are in the grip of a near-perennial condition of famine!
About the same time that Paitnak was using the data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO)—an agency reporting directly to the Government of India—to reach her conclusions, P. Sainath, one of the best journalists in India, was demonstrating how frightening the situation in the Indian countryside has become.
The deepening agricultural crisis in rural India has culminated into two separate but entwined scenarios that would be enough to shame any country, let alone, again, the world’s largest democracy. India on one hand has been witnessing the largest documented wave of suicides by small and marginal farmers unable to repay debts, and on the other, a huge exodus from the countryside, in the absence of emergency or exigency.
The crisis has not escalated to this point overnight. It has been long coming. Governments too have been well aware of it. However, they have responded in a fashion that can at best be termed ‘knee-jerk’. Most of them have done nothing and others, precious little. The set pattern of response has included launching welfare schemes ostensibly aimed at bringing people out of the self-reinforcing vicious circle of poverty and hunger, on the premise that such schemes will break the tie between poverty resulting in stunted growth and that stunting in turn resulting in more poverty.
Some of these schemes are almost as old as the republic itself. In order to help the poor and needy through the Public Distribution System (PDS), governments opened fair price shops selling subsidised rations, kerosene oil (and even clothes, in the distant past) in as many villages as it could. Most of these shops remain closed to the needy. Their rations and kerosene get siphoned off to the open market and contractors make a lot of money. Of course there are officials entrusted with the job of fighting such blatant corruption, but then, most of them act in collusion with the contractors and take their own cuts. Such a system is beneficial for everyone. It is just that “everyone” here does not include the poor and dispossessed.
Before rubbishing this argument as consisting of baseless allegations, bear in mind that these are the findings of the Justice Wadhwa committee which was appointed by the Supreme Court of India to study PDS reform.
The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), formulated in 1975 with a mandate of fighting malnutrition among children under six years of age, tells a similar story. Malnutrition among children, as acknowledged by the prime minister himself, runs at 42 per cent. Need one say more about the efficiency and success of the scheme? Not really, barring one fact that begs our attention. A closer look at the budgetary allocation for the scheme brings out that every child is entitled to a grim 4 rupees of budgetary allocation per day, or less than a twelfth of a single US dollar. At the current market rates, the amount would seem to be a cruel joke for any sane person, even forgetting the distressing fact that a significant chunk of even this meagre sum is eaten up by widely prevalent corruption.
The menace of corruption is of course nothing new. Rajiv Gandhi when he was Prime Minister of India poignantly noted way back in late 1980s that 86 paisa out of every rupee earmarked for such schemes was lost to corruption. The figures must be far worse now. But if we account for the four rupees per child using his estimate, we find that the actual money reaching a child through the ICDS entitlement is a mere 56 paisa. One might think of this callousness as a one-off accounting mistake were it not for the fact that the same government is trying to lower the poverty line to an abysmal 32 rupees (USD 0.60) for urban dwellers and 20 rupees (USD 0.40) for rural dwellers per capita per day.
Similarly, policies aimed at inclusion are subverted to exclude the needy and the bureaucracy seems to master the art of administering misery instead of delivering benefits. The exclusionary character of the policy has been lamented time and again, even by those in the system. The Justice Wadhwa Committee identified it as the core problem plaguing the system and asserted that the very basis of adjudging the poverty level at an expenditure of less than 15 rupees a day was ‘too low’. It also submitted to the Supreme Court that nearly half of the poor do not have Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards and are thus disentitled.
Even this disentitlement is not one off. One would find it hard to believe, but the Planning Commission of India had the audacity to put a central cap on the number of BPL families in the provinces and then defend it while acknowledging that it does disentitle those genuinely needy. For the uninitiated, the ‘central cap’ is an arbitrary figure that state governments follow for the purpose of identifying families below poverty lines. Further, it leaves the states to deal by themselves with any population in excess of the cap. It does not give any assistance for that population. Having a significant population in perpetual poverty is no big deal to the central government. It can just be wished away by the magic wand of statistics, it seems.
In a written submission to the Supreme Court the Planning Commission argues that it “is aware that many States complain that people who are indisputably poor are left out of the BPL list because of the cap imposed by the Central Government. It is not denied that this is indeed the case in many states.” What then does it do? It blames it all on state governments, arguing that the problem has been caused by its identification by the states! Any rational person would find the argument not merely baffling but also absurd, as did the Supreme Court. In an order dated 29 March 2011, the court expressed its dismay over the issue and asserted that it failed “to comprehend the rationale and justification of putting a cap by the Planning Commission”.
The fact of the matter is that the state governments, taken together, have identified 111 million Indian families to be BPL, as against the central government’s estimation that puts the BPL count at half of that, or just around 60 million. Interestingly, even the central government seems to know that its own estimate is not merely unreliable but also seriously low. What else would explain the National Food Security Bill proposed by the same government, putting the BPL cap at 46 per cent in rural areas and 28 per cent in urban ones?
Evidently, everyone—including the government, the judiciary and the civil society—is well aware of the problem. The Supreme Court has also been trying its level best to address it, even if it means taking on the role of the executive, because the executive has refused to discharge its duties as mandated by the constitution. Yet, it does not mean much for those fighting hunger on the ground. The Supreme Court is neither that easily accessible to them, nor can it afford to adjudicate on individual cases in a country with a population of more than a billion.
The system, of course, has a grievance redress mechanism at the lower levels, offering remedies to anyone whose rights or freedoms get violated. Unfortunately, this system is no less inefficient and corrupt than its counterparts in the administrative and legislative branches. In fact, even the Supreme Court of India has taken notice of the corruption and inefficiency rampant in the judicial ranks. The situation is far worse at the lower rungs of the judiciary, which often is the first point of contact for a person seeking remedy and the rest of the system.
This is where we can start digging deeper into the real factors that lead to such terrible state of chronic hunger affecting the citizenry of a country claiming to be moving up the ladder. To begin with, chronic hunger does not affect the citizenry as a whole but affects only those who have been condemned to live on the margins of Indian society. Even a cursory glance at any data on hunger brings this fact out. The Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report, whose findings the prime minister based his national shame comment on, underscores that the children from Muslim and Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe households are among the largest numbers of victims, and they suffer more than others.
The finding partly explains the administrative inertia; despite all the urgency that the government shows when talking about the problem. To put things in perspective, this is not the first time that the prime minister has shown such concern over malnutrition affecting Indian children. Taking cognisance of the enormity of the issue and its implications for the nation, the government had set up the Prime Minister's National Council on Nutrition way back in 2008, but then the council did not even meet but once in 2010! Not a single decision taken in that meeting, like the restructuring and strengthening of the ICDS, was ever implemented, despite recommendations from various governmental committees as well as civil society groups.
The government can well afford to ignore hunger. For it does not exist in isolation but is deeply embedded in the social system that Dr BR Ambedkar famously referred to as a system of ‘graded inequalities’. Hunger affects those who occupy the lowest rungs on the ladder, people who are seldom represented in the mainstream discourse. They are the people the government can choose to forget, for their sheer numbers ensure that it would never be in short of labour even if it let a large section of them silently die.
Barring a small but highly committed section of the civil society, these people get a short shrift from larger society, even when it cannot actually do without them. They build the factories and houses, guard gated communities, and run errands as house-helpers while getting systemically dispossessed from their lands and livelihood, as happened in the Narmada Dam project and is happening all over India in the Special Economic Zones.
This is where Indian democracy reduces itself into a terribly deficient and in fact delinquent form of government. In a social system that penalises people for accidents of birth in a particular group instead of giving equal opportunities to all individuals irrespective of their caste, creed or community, primary responsibility for helping those on the margins lies with the state. This is why the state is treated as parens patriae (parent of the citizens) and has the right to intervene in cases of interest to the citizens such as in matters of health, physical comfort and welfare, whenever such interests are threatened. But the Indian state would have none of this. Instead it seems prepared to let its citizenry live with the paradox of a democracy in the political arena rendered futile by extreme levels of socioeconomic inequality, as forewarned by Dr Ambedkar.
The only way to deal with the issue perhaps is to ensure that one fights hunger, social exclusion, dispossession and other such ills through a system of justice. A system of justice, in turn, can only be based on rule of law, ensuring effective, efficient and immediate remedies to people whose rights or freedoms have been violated through the malfunctioning of the system.
What the government and the prime minister need to do is radically restructure the whole system with an emphasis on building an honest delivery mechanism with corresponding mechanisms for addressing grievances. The government would do well to start at the grassroots, say by making the system transparent and giving communities a stake in running the mechanism. For example, the experiences of social audits in the case of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act (MNREGA) have been tremendously encouraging. Not only have the social audits seen massive participation by the community members but they have also helped fighting corruption. Almost all studies on the MNREGA have found that it has been most successful where the process of social audits backed by community-based organisation has become institutionalised.
Devising a mechanism like social audits can actually be a real good beginning that would go a long way in ensuring food security and alleviating hunger. Need one say that in the face of such community action deriving from a right, diverting the foodgrain meant for the community would become far more difficult than it is now? Making the lower judiciary more accessible and affordable may be the next step in the direction for ensuring that those subverting the system are dealt with. Till the government gets its act together on these two counts, all talk will remain empty, words devoid of any meaning.
One would hardly expect the prime minister of a country that fashions itself as the biggest democracy of the world and hopes to be a ‘superpower’ by 2020 to acknowledge that his country is home to hunger. Yet that is precisely what the Indian prime minister did recently. Harder to believe is that the prime minister did not stop at that but went on to call it a national shame.
He was not off the mark. With more than 42 per cent of Indian children being underweight, a national shame it is. One would be tempted, though, to ask what his government and those of his predecessors have been doing to fight and eradicate this national shame.
The devil lies in the details hidden in the answer to this question. The details expose the paradox of high rates of chronic hunger in a country where millions of tons of foodgrain rot in the godowns of Food Corporation of India (FCI) every single year. For example, while replying to a question in parliament, Sharad Pawar, the incumbent minister for Food and Agriculture, informed the lower house that over 11,700 tons of food grains worth 68.6 million Indian rupees (or approximately USD1.5 million) were found damaged in government warehouses. This wastage of food could be seen as--and dealt with as--a criminal offence in any country, leave alone India with so many hungry stomachs to feed!
Added to this is the fact that at any given point in time the FCI stocks almost double the amount of buffer norms, an amount that hovers around 30 million tons of foodgrain. Evidently, the government is not hard-pressed with any shortage of food. Quite on the contrary, it has more than enough to release not merely to save children from malnutrition but also to save the foodgrain from rotting.
This is not to suggest that the prime minister or his government has woken up to the disturbing fact of malnutrition with a start. The writing has been on the wall all this while. There was enough data to shake it out of its slumber, more so because the data was coming from a multitude of sources including its own agencies, independent economists, research institutions and international watchdogs among others.
For example, India has been ranked in the ‘alarming’ category on the Hunger Index prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Notably, every single country in Asia barring Bangladesh has been performing better, and that includes war torn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq! In fact even Guinea-Bissau, Togo, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Rwanda and Zimbabwe were found to be feeding their people better than India. The findings merely corroborated the research of Utsa Patnaik, one of the most renowned contemporary Indian economists, who has decisively shown that an average Indian family in 2005 was consuming a staggering 110kg less grain as compared to that in 1991.
Patnaik has not stopped at that. Her meticulous studies have pointed out that when it comes to food security, India is failing its citizenry on every single count. Never mind the alarming gap between required protein intake and actual consumption, a silent majority was not getting enough for mere physical survival in terms of calorie intake. Backed with solid data, she has gone on to demonstrate that per capita food consumption in contemporary India is worse than that in the colonial times!
The situation on the ground is horrifying to say the least. If one goes by the criteria for famine put forward by the World Health Organisation (WHO), then the world’s largest democracy can be labelled as famine stricken. One of the WHO criteria to determine famine defines a community with more than 40 per cent of its population having a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18.5 as famine stricken. By that yardstick, Indian children as a whole and many other communities, mostly the Dalit and tribal, are in the grip of a near-perennial condition of famine!
About the same time that Paitnak was using the data from the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO)—an agency reporting directly to the Government of India—to reach her conclusions, P. Sainath, one of the best journalists in India, was demonstrating how frightening the situation in the Indian countryside has become.
The deepening agricultural crisis in rural India has culminated into two separate but entwined scenarios that would be enough to shame any country, let alone, again, the world’s largest democracy. India on one hand has been witnessing the largest documented wave of suicides by small and marginal farmers unable to repay debts, and on the other, a huge exodus from the countryside, in the absence of emergency or exigency.
The crisis has not escalated to this point overnight. It has been long coming. Governments too have been well aware of it. However, they have responded in a fashion that can at best be termed ‘knee-jerk’. Most of them have done nothing and others, precious little. The set pattern of response has included launching welfare schemes ostensibly aimed at bringing people out of the self-reinforcing vicious circle of poverty and hunger, on the premise that such schemes will break the tie between poverty resulting in stunted growth and that stunting in turn resulting in more poverty.
Some of these schemes are almost as old as the republic itself. In order to help the poor and needy through the Public Distribution System (PDS), governments opened fair price shops selling subsidised rations, kerosene oil (and even clothes, in the distant past) in as many villages as it could. Most of these shops remain closed to the needy. Their rations and kerosene get siphoned off to the open market and contractors make a lot of money. Of course there are officials entrusted with the job of fighting such blatant corruption, but then, most of them act in collusion with the contractors and take their own cuts. Such a system is beneficial for everyone. It is just that “everyone” here does not include the poor and dispossessed.
Before rubbishing this argument as consisting of baseless allegations, bear in mind that these are the findings of the Justice Wadhwa committee which was appointed by the Supreme Court of India to study PDS reform.
The Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), formulated in 1975 with a mandate of fighting malnutrition among children under six years of age, tells a similar story. Malnutrition among children, as acknowledged by the prime minister himself, runs at 42 per cent. Need one say more about the efficiency and success of the scheme? Not really, barring one fact that begs our attention. A closer look at the budgetary allocation for the scheme brings out that every child is entitled to a grim 4 rupees of budgetary allocation per day, or less than a twelfth of a single US dollar. At the current market rates, the amount would seem to be a cruel joke for any sane person, even forgetting the distressing fact that a significant chunk of even this meagre sum is eaten up by widely prevalent corruption.
The menace of corruption is of course nothing new. Rajiv Gandhi when he was Prime Minister of India poignantly noted way back in late 1980s that 86 paisa out of every rupee earmarked for such schemes was lost to corruption. The figures must be far worse now. But if we account for the four rupees per child using his estimate, we find that the actual money reaching a child through the ICDS entitlement is a mere 56 paisa. One might think of this callousness as a one-off accounting mistake were it not for the fact that the same government is trying to lower the poverty line to an abysmal 32 rupees (USD 0.60) for urban dwellers and 20 rupees (USD 0.40) for rural dwellers per capita per day.
Similarly, policies aimed at inclusion are subverted to exclude the needy and the bureaucracy seems to master the art of administering misery instead of delivering benefits. The exclusionary character of the policy has been lamented time and again, even by those in the system. The Justice Wadhwa Committee identified it as the core problem plaguing the system and asserted that the very basis of adjudging the poverty level at an expenditure of less than 15 rupees a day was ‘too low’. It also submitted to the Supreme Court that nearly half of the poor do not have Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards and are thus disentitled.
Even this disentitlement is not one off. One would find it hard to believe, but the Planning Commission of India had the audacity to put a central cap on the number of BPL families in the provinces and then defend it while acknowledging that it does disentitle those genuinely needy. For the uninitiated, the ‘central cap’ is an arbitrary figure that state governments follow for the purpose of identifying families below poverty lines. Further, it leaves the states to deal by themselves with any population in excess of the cap. It does not give any assistance for that population. Having a significant population in perpetual poverty is no big deal to the central government. It can just be wished away by the magic wand of statistics, it seems.
In a written submission to the Supreme Court the Planning Commission argues that it “is aware that many States complain that people who are indisputably poor are left out of the BPL list because of the cap imposed by the Central Government. It is not denied that this is indeed the case in many states.” What then does it do? It blames it all on state governments, arguing that the problem has been caused by its identification by the states! Any rational person would find the argument not merely baffling but also absurd, as did the Supreme Court. In an order dated 29 March 2011, the court expressed its dismay over the issue and asserted that it failed “to comprehend the rationale and justification of putting a cap by the Planning Commission”.
The fact of the matter is that the state governments, taken together, have identified 111 million Indian families to be BPL, as against the central government’s estimation that puts the BPL count at half of that, or just around 60 million. Interestingly, even the central government seems to know that its own estimate is not merely unreliable but also seriously low. What else would explain the National Food Security Bill proposed by the same government, putting the BPL cap at 46 per cent in rural areas and 28 per cent in urban ones?
Evidently, everyone—including the government, the judiciary and the civil society—is well aware of the problem. The Supreme Court has also been trying its level best to address it, even if it means taking on the role of the executive, because the executive has refused to discharge its duties as mandated by the constitution. Yet, it does not mean much for those fighting hunger on the ground. The Supreme Court is neither that easily accessible to them, nor can it afford to adjudicate on individual cases in a country with a population of more than a billion.
The system, of course, has a grievance redress mechanism at the lower levels, offering remedies to anyone whose rights or freedoms get violated. Unfortunately, this system is no less inefficient and corrupt than its counterparts in the administrative and legislative branches. In fact, even the Supreme Court of India has taken notice of the corruption and inefficiency rampant in the judicial ranks. The situation is far worse at the lower rungs of the judiciary, which often is the first point of contact for a person seeking remedy and the rest of the system.
This is where we can start digging deeper into the real factors that lead to such terrible state of chronic hunger affecting the citizenry of a country claiming to be moving up the ladder. To begin with, chronic hunger does not affect the citizenry as a whole but affects only those who have been condemned to live on the margins of Indian society. Even a cursory glance at any data on hunger brings this fact out. The Hunger and Malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report, whose findings the prime minister based his national shame comment on, underscores that the children from Muslim and Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe households are among the largest numbers of victims, and they suffer more than others.
The finding partly explains the administrative inertia; despite all the urgency that the government shows when talking about the problem. To put things in perspective, this is not the first time that the prime minister has shown such concern over malnutrition affecting Indian children. Taking cognisance of the enormity of the issue and its implications for the nation, the government had set up the Prime Minister's National Council on Nutrition way back in 2008, but then the council did not even meet but once in 2010! Not a single decision taken in that meeting, like the restructuring and strengthening of the ICDS, was ever implemented, despite recommendations from various governmental committees as well as civil society groups.
The government can well afford to ignore hunger. For it does not exist in isolation but is deeply embedded in the social system that Dr BR Ambedkar famously referred to as a system of ‘graded inequalities’. Hunger affects those who occupy the lowest rungs on the ladder, people who are seldom represented in the mainstream discourse. They are the people the government can choose to forget, for their sheer numbers ensure that it would never be in short of labour even if it let a large section of them silently die.
Barring a small but highly committed section of the civil society, these people get a short shrift from larger society, even when it cannot actually do without them. They build the factories and houses, guard gated communities, and run errands as house-helpers while getting systemically dispossessed from their lands and livelihood, as happened in the Narmada Dam project and is happening all over India in the Special Economic Zones.
This is where Indian democracy reduces itself into a terribly deficient and in fact delinquent form of government. In a social system that penalises people for accidents of birth in a particular group instead of giving equal opportunities to all individuals irrespective of their caste, creed or community, primary responsibility for helping those on the margins lies with the state. This is why the state is treated as parens patriae (parent of the citizens) and has the right to intervene in cases of interest to the citizens such as in matters of health, physical comfort and welfare, whenever such interests are threatened. But the Indian state would have none of this. Instead it seems prepared to let its citizenry live with the paradox of a democracy in the political arena rendered futile by extreme levels of socioeconomic inequality, as forewarned by Dr Ambedkar.
The only way to deal with the issue perhaps is to ensure that one fights hunger, social exclusion, dispossession and other such ills through a system of justice. A system of justice, in turn, can only be based on rule of law, ensuring effective, efficient and immediate remedies to people whose rights or freedoms have been violated through the malfunctioning of the system.
What the government and the prime minister need to do is radically restructure the whole system with an emphasis on building an honest delivery mechanism with corresponding mechanisms for addressing grievances. The government would do well to start at the grassroots, say by making the system transparent and giving communities a stake in running the mechanism. For example, the experiences of social audits in the case of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Act (MNREGA) have been tremendously encouraging. Not only have the social audits seen massive participation by the community members but they have also helped fighting corruption. Almost all studies on the MNREGA have found that it has been most successful where the process of social audits backed by community-based organisation has become institutionalised.
Devising a mechanism like social audits can actually be a real good beginning that would go a long way in ensuring food security and alleviating hunger. Need one say that in the face of such community action deriving from a right, diverting the foodgrain meant for the community would become far more difficult than it is now? Making the lower judiciary more accessible and affordable may be the next step in the direction for ensuring that those subverting the system are dealt with. Till the government gets its act together on these two counts, all talk will remain empty, words devoid of any meaning.
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