P.Sainath's latest column from The Hindu newspaper
With 2G, Radia, illicit funds, and a stubborn CVC, the UPA government's scams are multiplying faster than Lemmings, the little rodents that live mostly in and around the Arctic.
One of the most enduring of media-created myths is that of mass suicide amongst Lemmings, the little rodents that live mostly in and around the Arctic. A 1958 Disney documentary film staged scenes of large numbers of Lemmings marching mindlessly off a cliff to their doom in the waters below. Actually, Lemmings can swim. The rodents see major migrations when they multiply rapidly and their population grows. And when this dispersal finds big numbers crossing large bodies of water, some of them drown by accident, not by intent. However, the Disney film — where they were actually forced off a cliff — and earlier articles, created a false notion that still holds: that Lemmings commit mass suicide by leaping off cliffs and drowning in the waters below. This is also the origin of the political slang: ‘Lemming-like behaviour,' to describe a suicidal course of action.
Political scientists in India 2011 can now be forgiven a rethink on the whole fraud. You begin to wonder if there was some truth in it, after all. The ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) seems determined to prove that this instinct of the little creatures was no myth. The race off the cliff is real, with Congress Lemmings leading the charge of the light-footed brigade. The massive hike in petrol prices at a time of raging food inflation was merely one among such efforts. In just seven months, the price of petrol has gone up by over Rs. 10. The new hike came even as the government announced that it was taking the price rise seriously and has formed yet more panels and Groups of Ministers to study the problem.( Another Group of Ministers was to have met in December 2010 to decide on whether to hike diesel and LPG prices as well. Yet another was to take a call on raising APL foodgrain prices.) Lemmings, after all, mostly act in large groups.
Now that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, the impression of a collective rush to mass drowning only grows. Handing the rural development portfolio to a man just trashed by the Supreme Court for protecting moneylenders in Vidharbha while he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra, has a Kamikaze-like courage about it. Not only did the Court admonish Vilasrao Deshmukh in scathing terms, it also enhanced the fine levied by the Bombay High Court's Nagpur bench on the government of Maharashtra in the same case from Rs.25,000 to Rs.10 lakh. Now in normal and non-Lemming circles, this would have led to his unaccompanied exit off the Cabinet Cliff.
Justice A. K. Ganguly in his judgment on the case involving Mr. Deshmukh says, among other things: “The message conveyed in this case is extremely shocking and it shocks the conscience of this Court about the manner in which the Constitutional functionaries behaved in the State of Maharashtra.” The judgment goes on to say “it is clear that the Chief Minister was aware of various complaints being filed against the said family [the moneylenders: PS]. Even then he passed an order for a special treatment in favour of the said family which is unknown to law.”
The judgment notes the debt-induced plight of farmers in that very region and also says of Mr. Deshmukh's action: “This amounts to bestowing special favour to some chosen few at the cost of the vast number of poor people who as farmers have taken loans and who have come to the authorities of law and order to register their complaints against torture and atrocities by the moneylenders.”
Obviously, in Dr. Singh's view, the perfect candidate to preside over the destiny of rural India and its development. A man during whose eight years as Chief Minister of Maharashtra, well over 30,000 farmers took their own lives in the State — a feat unrivalled anywhere in the country. Mr. Deshmukh's most famous remark on the farmers: “Committing suicide is an offence under the Indian Penal Code. But did we book any farmer for this offence? Have you reported that?” (The Hindustan Times, October 31, 2007). Just after the terror attacks of 26/11, he went to the Taj hotel, with his actor son and Bollywood filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma in tow. This provoked outrage in a public which saw them as disaster tourists checking out the rich cinematic promise thrown up by the tragic events. Sacked from his post, Mr. Deshmukh spent some months in cold storage before being elevated to the Union Cabinet.
His successor lost his job over the Adarsh episode and also earned notoriety over the ‘paid news' scandal. On the latter, Ashok Chavan faces a case in the Election Commission and might run into yet more trouble. His successor, imported from New Delhi, gives non-entity a bad name. The NCP, once a declining force, gets a new wind with his arrival. And that party gets more aggressive towards the Congress at the Centre as well, sensing the mess it is in. In Andhra Pradesh, two successive Chief Ministers have spent over a year fighting their own party in a State that contributed 33 MPs to the Congress at the Centre. In West Bengal, the Congress has written itself, with almost Lemming-like fatalism, into a distant third place.
If you watch your Animal Planet you'd expect that, like in other social hierarchies, there are alpha male Lemmings. It requires rare qualities of leadership to guide a bunch of sharp front-toothed mammals off a cliff. Heading the charge means there are lots of large gnawing incisors just behind you. This is no role for the faint-hearted, as Kapil Sibal demonstrated in his stinging attack on the CAG. This was also what happened in the Bofors case, a blistering attack on the then CAG (among other things). The results of that strategy included a government drowning. But history is not the Lemming's long suit. Mr. Sibal might yet learn that the CAG is not a cowering witness in a court room, but the drowning will probably have begun by then. Meanwhile, with 2G, Raja, Radia, illicit funds, and a stubborn CVC, the UPA government's scams are multiplying faster than Lemmings.
Pranab Mukherjee, meanwhile, has made it clear — wagging a finger while doing so — that the government is not about to reveal the names of any tax evaders. Mr. Mukherjee, who heads more Groups of Ministers than have ever been Empowered, suggests there might be one more group soon. That is, to work out Amnesty schemes for tax evaders and those who have illegally siphoned funds out of the country to secret offshore accounts. No one can be named till they are prosecuted, says he. In other words, we will never know the names of those the government chooses not to prosecute.
A Global Financial Integrity Report (The Hindu, Nov. 17, 2010) estimates that India has lost almost half a trillion dollars in illegal capital flight since Independence. As much as $125 billion, or more than a fourth of the total, vanished between just 2000 and 2008. The government plans amnesty for such offenders and arrests for those protesting high prices.
The line has also been laid down on food security: forget about it. There will be neither a universal PDS nor even an enhanced one. Feeding a hungry corporate world takes all the resources we have. Things are about to get much tougher for the whole team. India's premier Lemmings are simply too busy to pay any attention to their day jobs. Even as the onion season winds down, the World Cup Cricket and IPL seasons are about to begin. This means, of course, that we will still see no Agriculture Minister for a further two months. (Unless someone provokes him with a comment on Lavasa.)
Back in 2008, as global food prices soared, Mr. Pawar revealed to the daily, DNA (Page 1, April 2), that the real reason why wheat prices were soaring was that south Indians were eating too many chapathis. In this, he echoed the view of noted nutritionist George W (then also working part-time as President of the United States). Mr. Bush declared that the world food prices were soaring because millions of Indians and Chinese were eating so much more. (Global prices fell sharply just months later. Were millions of Indians and Chinese suddenly starving? Or were big-time speculators giving prices a yo-yo ride?).
Dr. Singh and Montek Ahluwalia have also bought into the Bush Food Doctrine: the huge price rise in food items suggests that the poor are doing better, eating more. The cliff runway is free and the Lemmings have been cleared for takeoff.
Friday, 28 January 2011
Friday, 14 January 2011
Security breach at Rahul Gandhi's vehicle
Rahul Gandhi, from India's Nehru-Gandhi family, was on his way to his ancestral home when opposition youth party members waved black flags at his vehicle and managed to get right up close. It appears he had just one car of security men with him and the footage of the protest, up at www.pressbrief.in, shows the clash quite dramatically. It is part of a political game being played by the state's ruling party, which should provide adequate protection to Gandhi when he is there. It often does not, and the incident shows just how close to danger Rahul sometimes is. A couple of Special Protection group guys hanging off Rahul's jeep were the only thing preventing the protestors from climbing on the vehicle.
Friday, 31 December 2010
British PM message for New Year; belt tightening in order!
Prime Minister’s New Year Message
After eight months in this job, I am acutely conscious of the challenges we face as a country. But I begin this New Year in the same positive frame of mind as when I set out the task of starting a new government back in May.
By nature I am an optimist – about people, about human nature and, above all, about the future of our great country.
If we sort out our problems, and make the most of our many opportunities, we can be one of the international success stories of the new decade.
As for politics, my approach is simple: politics is public service in the national interest.
We all have our dreams, ambitions and principles that we cherish and want to put into place.
But most important of all, particularly at times like this, is to deal with the real problem in front of us.
And there can be no doubt what that is: the state of our economy and the budget deficit.
We have been living seriously beyond our means.
We have to sort this out.
Every sensible person knows this.
The national interest dictates that we do the right thing, which is to act, not the easy thing, which would be to delay.
In doing so, we should be clear: Britain has a really bright future to look forward to.
2011 is going to be a difficult year, as we take hard but necessary steps to sort things out.
The actions we are taking are essential, because they are putting our economy and our country on the right path.
Together, we can make 2011 the year that Britain gets back on its feet.
Eight months ago we inherited an economy in deep trouble.
The previous government had racked up the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history.
We only have to look at what’s been happening in Greece and Ireland to see the kind of danger we were in.
Rising interest rates. Falling confidence. Others questioning whether you are still credit-worthy as a country.
And, remember, the deficit we inherited back in May was actually forecast to be bigger than that of Ireland or Greece – or any other developed country for that matter.
But we’ve pulled Britain out of that danger zone.
Through the Budget and the Spending Review we've taken some really tough decisions to rescue our public finances and fundamentally change the direction of our economy.
The new independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts the economy will grow continuing into 2011 and to rise further in 2012.
So we have a credible plan for restoring confidence in our economy.
But we have to see it through.
A lot of the heavy lifting will happen in 2011.
Each and every Minister in this Government is acutely aware that the plans we have in place are tough, in fact incredibly difficult, but we are clear that the alternative – indecision and delay – would mean taking unacceptable risks with our economy, our country and our people.
I didn’t come into politics to make cuts.
Neither did Nick Clegg.
But in the end politics is about national interest, not personal political agendas.
We’re tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal.
This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country’s problems, not by ideology.
When we talk of building a bigger, stronger society, we mean it.
These debts are not the government’s debts, they are the country’s debts.
We’re all in this together.
As we deal with the deficit we are protecting the things people cherish the most - like the National Health Service and the old age pension that we are re-linking to earnings.
We want to take people with us.
The Coalition - two distinct political parties, working together to tackle a national economic emergency - is the embodiment of that spirit.
Of course Coalition politics is not always straightforward.
We don’t agree on everything. We never said we would.
But I believe we are bringing a new style of government.
A more collegiate approach. One where we’re prepared to argue things out and then act to do what we both believe is in the national interest.
The political risks are greater this way.
But so too are the rewards.
As a Coalition government we are governing to the needs of the country.
And, in the last eight months, I believe that the government has been decisive, bold and determined.
We must maintain that drive in the months and years ahead.
As we start 2011, our priorities should be about enterprise, aspiration, the modernisation of our public services and the security of our people.
First, enterprise.
Uppermost in my mind as we enter the New Year is jobs.
Now ultimately it’s not government that creates jobs, it’s businesses, entrepreneurs, wealth creators.
And that is particularly true when governments are so deeply in debt that they have to cut back their own spending programmes.
So small and growing businesses will be our most important job creators.
And I want us to look at all the reasons why people find it hard to start a business and all the barriers that stop a small business growing and really get tough with ourselves in addressing them.
I want us to create a new economic dynamism in our country.
I want to see more bank lending, particularly for small businesses.
More deregulation.
More investment in the sectors of the future – like with our reform of the electricity markets which will help to create tens of thousands of new sustainable green jobs.
From the start of the year right through to the Budget and beyond, we are resolved to be relentlessly focused on supporting growth and driving job creation across our economy.
Second, aspiration.
In spite of some good measures in recent years – Sure Start and the Academy programme for instance – social mobility has stalled.
Bright children from poor backgrounds do much better in other countries than here in the UK.
That shames us.
It is in the very earliest years of a child’s life that disadvantage really takes hold.
That’s why we are protecting schools spending and enhancing it for the least well-off, offering free nursery education for disadvantaged two-year-olds and introducing a pupil premium, worth hundreds of pounds for each disadvantaged pupil.
But unless we modernise our public services, like education, we will never build a country of real opportunity.
Nor will we ever sustainably live within our means with outdated public services, pensions and welfare.
So our third priority must be to modernize those public services.
We will shift power away from central bureaucracy and give choice to the parents, patients and local citizens who use public services.
This will mean more open public services, more innovative, more responsive to what people want, and better value for money.
Fourth and finally, I want to say something about our national security.
For many years now we have been aware of the threat we face from international terrorism.
Recent arrests show that that threat is still very much with us.
And it is as serious today as it ever has been.
As we enter the New Year our police officers, together with their colleagues in the security and intelligence agencies, are working round the clock to foil plots that would do terrible harm to our people and our economy.
This government will be unstinting in the support it gives them.
But they also depend on the support of the public as they go about their work: together we will defend our values and way of life and defeat those who threaten them.
But we must ask ourselves as a country how we are allowing the radicalization and poisoning of the minds of some young British Muslims who then contemplate and sometimes carry out acts of sickening barbarity.
And the overwhelming majority of British Muslims who detest this extremism must help us to find the answers together.
But in the fight against terrorism we cannot just protect ourselves at home.
We also need to take action with our international partners abroad.
Just before Christmas, the Prince of Wales and I visited service personnel being treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham.
It was a stark reminder of the incredible bravery and sacrifice being made by all our servicemen and women who put their lives on the line to keep us safe.
For those serving in Afghanistan, 2011 is a crucial year in which we will start to transfer security responsibility for districts and provinces to Afghan control.
As the Afghans become steadily more capable of looking after their own security, so we will be able to start to bring our own forces home.
Enterprise, aspiration, public service reform and national security - these are the things that will determine whether in 2011 we take the steps towards the better, stronger, safer Britain that is within our grasp.
I am determined that we will.
That together, we have the right plan to pull through the tough times ahead.
And that if 2010 was the year we stopped the rot, we can make 2011 the year that Britain gets back on her feet.
After eight months in this job, I am acutely conscious of the challenges we face as a country. But I begin this New Year in the same positive frame of mind as when I set out the task of starting a new government back in May.
By nature I am an optimist – about people, about human nature and, above all, about the future of our great country.
If we sort out our problems, and make the most of our many opportunities, we can be one of the international success stories of the new decade.
As for politics, my approach is simple: politics is public service in the national interest.
We all have our dreams, ambitions and principles that we cherish and want to put into place.
But most important of all, particularly at times like this, is to deal with the real problem in front of us.
And there can be no doubt what that is: the state of our economy and the budget deficit.
We have been living seriously beyond our means.
We have to sort this out.
Every sensible person knows this.
The national interest dictates that we do the right thing, which is to act, not the easy thing, which would be to delay.
In doing so, we should be clear: Britain has a really bright future to look forward to.
2011 is going to be a difficult year, as we take hard but necessary steps to sort things out.
The actions we are taking are essential, because they are putting our economy and our country on the right path.
Together, we can make 2011 the year that Britain gets back on its feet.
Eight months ago we inherited an economy in deep trouble.
The previous government had racked up the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history.
We only have to look at what’s been happening in Greece and Ireland to see the kind of danger we were in.
Rising interest rates. Falling confidence. Others questioning whether you are still credit-worthy as a country.
And, remember, the deficit we inherited back in May was actually forecast to be bigger than that of Ireland or Greece – or any other developed country for that matter.
But we’ve pulled Britain out of that danger zone.
Through the Budget and the Spending Review we've taken some really tough decisions to rescue our public finances and fundamentally change the direction of our economy.
The new independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts the economy will grow continuing into 2011 and to rise further in 2012.
So we have a credible plan for restoring confidence in our economy.
But we have to see it through.
A lot of the heavy lifting will happen in 2011.
Each and every Minister in this Government is acutely aware that the plans we have in place are tough, in fact incredibly difficult, but we are clear that the alternative – indecision and delay – would mean taking unacceptable risks with our economy, our country and our people.
I didn’t come into politics to make cuts.
Neither did Nick Clegg.
But in the end politics is about national interest, not personal political agendas.
We’re tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal.
This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country’s problems, not by ideology.
When we talk of building a bigger, stronger society, we mean it.
These debts are not the government’s debts, they are the country’s debts.
We’re all in this together.
As we deal with the deficit we are protecting the things people cherish the most - like the National Health Service and the old age pension that we are re-linking to earnings.
We want to take people with us.
The Coalition - two distinct political parties, working together to tackle a national economic emergency - is the embodiment of that spirit.
Of course Coalition politics is not always straightforward.
We don’t agree on everything. We never said we would.
But I believe we are bringing a new style of government.
A more collegiate approach. One where we’re prepared to argue things out and then act to do what we both believe is in the national interest.
The political risks are greater this way.
But so too are the rewards.
As a Coalition government we are governing to the needs of the country.
And, in the last eight months, I believe that the government has been decisive, bold and determined.
We must maintain that drive in the months and years ahead.
As we start 2011, our priorities should be about enterprise, aspiration, the modernisation of our public services and the security of our people.
First, enterprise.
Uppermost in my mind as we enter the New Year is jobs.
Now ultimately it’s not government that creates jobs, it’s businesses, entrepreneurs, wealth creators.
And that is particularly true when governments are so deeply in debt that they have to cut back their own spending programmes.
So small and growing businesses will be our most important job creators.
And I want us to look at all the reasons why people find it hard to start a business and all the barriers that stop a small business growing and really get tough with ourselves in addressing them.
I want us to create a new economic dynamism in our country.
I want to see more bank lending, particularly for small businesses.
More deregulation.
More investment in the sectors of the future – like with our reform of the electricity markets which will help to create tens of thousands of new sustainable green jobs.
From the start of the year right through to the Budget and beyond, we are resolved to be relentlessly focused on supporting growth and driving job creation across our economy.
Second, aspiration.
In spite of some good measures in recent years – Sure Start and the Academy programme for instance – social mobility has stalled.
Bright children from poor backgrounds do much better in other countries than here in the UK.
That shames us.
It is in the very earliest years of a child’s life that disadvantage really takes hold.
That’s why we are protecting schools spending and enhancing it for the least well-off, offering free nursery education for disadvantaged two-year-olds and introducing a pupil premium, worth hundreds of pounds for each disadvantaged pupil.
But unless we modernise our public services, like education, we will never build a country of real opportunity.
Nor will we ever sustainably live within our means with outdated public services, pensions and welfare.
So our third priority must be to modernize those public services.
We will shift power away from central bureaucracy and give choice to the parents, patients and local citizens who use public services.
This will mean more open public services, more innovative, more responsive to what people want, and better value for money.
Fourth and finally, I want to say something about our national security.
For many years now we have been aware of the threat we face from international terrorism.
Recent arrests show that that threat is still very much with us.
And it is as serious today as it ever has been.
As we enter the New Year our police officers, together with their colleagues in the security and intelligence agencies, are working round the clock to foil plots that would do terrible harm to our people and our economy.
This government will be unstinting in the support it gives them.
But they also depend on the support of the public as they go about their work: together we will defend our values and way of life and defeat those who threaten them.
But we must ask ourselves as a country how we are allowing the radicalization and poisoning of the minds of some young British Muslims who then contemplate and sometimes carry out acts of sickening barbarity.
And the overwhelming majority of British Muslims who detest this extremism must help us to find the answers together.
But in the fight against terrorism we cannot just protect ourselves at home.
We also need to take action with our international partners abroad.
Just before Christmas, the Prince of Wales and I visited service personnel being treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham.
It was a stark reminder of the incredible bravery and sacrifice being made by all our servicemen and women who put their lives on the line to keep us safe.
For those serving in Afghanistan, 2011 is a crucial year in which we will start to transfer security responsibility for districts and provinces to Afghan control.
As the Afghans become steadily more capable of looking after their own security, so we will be able to start to bring our own forces home.
Enterprise, aspiration, public service reform and national security - these are the things that will determine whether in 2011 we take the steps towards the better, stronger, safer Britain that is within our grasp.
I am determined that we will.
That together, we have the right plan to pull through the tough times ahead.
And that if 2010 was the year we stopped the rot, we can make 2011 the year that Britain gets back on her feet.
Monday, 27 December 2010
P Sainath on Farmer Suicides in India
(First published in The Hindu)
Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.”
When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India, offered the buyers loans of over Rs. 40 crore. “This,” says Devidas Tulzapurkar, president of the Aurangabad district bank employees association, “at an interest rate of 7 per cent.” A top SBI official said the bank was “proud to be part of this deal,” and would “continue to scout for similar deals in the future.”
The value of the Mercedes deal equals the annual income of tens of thousands of rural Marathwada households. And countless farmers in Maharashtra struggle to get any loans from formal sources of credit. It took roughly a decade and tens of thousands of suicides before Indian farmers got loans at 7 per cent interest — many, in theory only. Prior to 2005, those who got any bank loans at all shelled out between 9 and 12 per cent. Several were forced to take non-agricultural loans at even higher rates of interest. Buy a Mercedes, pay 7 per cent interest. Buy a tractor, pay 12 per cent. The hallowed micro-finance institutions (MFIs) do worse. There, it's smaller sums at interest rates of between 24 and 36 per cent or higher.
Starved of credit, peasants turned to moneylenders and other informal sources. Within 10 years from 1991, the number of Indian farm households in debt almost doubled from 26 per cent to 48.6 per cent. A crazy underestimate but an official number. Many policy-driven disasters hit farmers at the same time. Exploding input costs in the name of ‘market-based prices.' Crashing prices for their commercial crops, often rigged by powerful traders and corporations. Slashing of investment in agriculture. A credit squeeze as banks moved away from farm loans to fuelling upper middle class lifestyles. Within the many factors driving over two lakh farmers to suicide in 13 years, indebtedness and the credit squeeze rank high. (And MFIs are now among the squeezers).
What remained of farm credit was hijacked. A devastating piece in The Hindu (Aug. 13) showed us how. Almost half the total “agricultural credit” in the State of Maharashtra in 2008 was disbursed not by rural banks but by urban and metro branches. Over 42 per cent of it in just Mumbai — stomping ground of large corporations rather than of small farmers.
Even as the media celebrate our greatest car deal ever as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the subject of many media stories, comes the latest data of the National Crime Records Bureau. These show a sharp increase in farm suicides in 2009 with at least 17,368 farmers killing themselves in the year of “rural resurgence.” That's over 7 per cent higher than in 2008 and the worst numbers since 2004. This brings the total farm suicides since 1997 to 216,500. While all suicides have multiple causes, their strong concentration within regions and among cash crop farmers is an alarming and dismal trend.
The NCRB, a wing of the Union Home Ministry, has been tracking farm suicide data since 1995. However, researchers mostly use their data from 1997 onwards. This is because the 1995 and 1996 data are incomplete. The system was new in 1995 and some big States such as Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan sent in no numbers at all that year. (In 2009, the two together saw over 1,900 farm suicides). By 1997, all States were reporting and the data are more complete.
The NCRB data end at 2009 for now. But we can assume that 2010 has seen at least 16,000 farmers' suicides. (After all, the yearly average for the last six years is 17,104). Add this 16,000 to the total 2,16,500. Also add the incomplete 1995 and 1996 numbers — that is 24,449 suicides. This brings the 1995-2010 total to 2,56,949. Reflect on this figure a moment.
It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don't change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.
Note that these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer's suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman's name.
Then there is the plain fraud that some governments resort to. Maharashtra being the classic example. The government here has lied so many times that it contradicts itself thrice within a week. In May this year, for instance, three ‘official' estimates of farm suicides in the worst-hit Vidarbha region varied by 5,500 per cent. The lowest count being just six in four months (See “How to be an eligible suicide,” The Hindu, May 13, 2010).
The NCRB figure for Maharashtra as a whole in 2009 is 2,872 farmers' suicides. So it remains the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth year running. The ‘decline' of 930 that this figure represents would be joyous if true. But no State has worked harder to falsify reality. For 13 years, the State has seen a nearly unrelenting rise. Suddenly, there's a drop of 436 and 930 in 2008 and 2009. How? For almost four years now, committees have functioned in Vidarbha's crisis districts to dismiss most suicides as ‘non-genuine.' What is truly frightening is the Maharashtra government's notion that fixing the numbers fixes the problem.
Yet that problem is mounting. Perhaps the State most comparable to Maharashtra in terms of population is West Bengal. Though its population is less by a few million, it has more farmers. Both States have data for 15 years since 1995. Their farm suicide annual averages in three-five year periods starting then are revealing. Maharashtra's annual average goes up in each period. From 1,963 in the five years ending with 1999 to 3,647 by 2004. And scaling 3,858 by 2009. West Bengal's yearly average registers a gradual drop in each five-year period. From 1,454 in 1999 to 1,200 in 2004 to 1,014 by 2009. While it has more farmers, its farm suicide average for the past five years is less than a third of Maharashtra's. The latter's yearly average has almost doubled since 1999.
The share of the Big 5 ‘suicide belt' States — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — remains close to two-thirds of all farm suicides. Sadly 18 of 28 States reported higher farm suicide numbers in 2009. In some the rise was negligible. In others, not. Tamil Nadu showed the biggest increase of all States, going from 512 in 2008 to 1060 in 2009. Karnataka clocked in second with a rise of 545. And Andhra Pradesh saw the third biggest rise — 309 more than in 2008. A few though did see a decline of some consequence in their farm suicide annual average figures for the last six years. Three — Karnataka, Kerala and West Bengal — saw their yearly average fall by over 350 in 2004-09 compared to the earlier seven years.
Things will get worse if existing policies on agriculture don't change. Even States that have managed some decline across 13 years will be battered. Kerala, for instance, saw an annual average of 1,371 farm suicides between 1997 and 2003. From 2004-09, its annual average was 1016 — a drop of 355. Yet Kerala will suffer greatly in the near future. Its economy is the most globalised of any State. Most crops are cash crops. Any volatility in the global prices of coffee, pepper, tea, vanilla, cardamom or rubber will affect the State. Those prices are also hugely controlled at the global level by a few corporations.
Already bludgeoned by the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), Kerala now has to contend with the one we've gotten into with ASEAN. And an FTA with the European Union is also in the offing. Kerala will pay the price. Even prior to 2004, the dumping of the so-called “Sri Lankan pepper” (mostly pepper from other countries brought in through Sri Lanka) ravaged the State. Now, we've created institutional frameworks for such dumping. Economist Professor K. Nagaraj, author of the biggest study of farm suicides in India, says: “The latest data show us that the agrarian crisis has not relented, not gone away.” The policies driving it have also not gone away.
Even as the media celebrate the Mercedes Benz deal in the Marathwada region as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the latest data show that 17,368 farmers killed themselves in the year of the “resurgence.”
When businessmen from Aurangabad in the backward Marathwada region bought 150 Mercedes Benz luxury cars worth Rs. 65 crore at one go in October, it grabbed media attention. The top public sector bank, State Bank of India, offered the buyers loans of over Rs. 40 crore. “This,” says Devidas Tulzapurkar, president of the Aurangabad district bank employees association, “at an interest rate of 7 per cent.” A top SBI official said the bank was “proud to be part of this deal,” and would “continue to scout for similar deals in the future.”
The value of the Mercedes deal equals the annual income of tens of thousands of rural Marathwada households. And countless farmers in Maharashtra struggle to get any loans from formal sources of credit. It took roughly a decade and tens of thousands of suicides before Indian farmers got loans at 7 per cent interest — many, in theory only. Prior to 2005, those who got any bank loans at all shelled out between 9 and 12 per cent. Several were forced to take non-agricultural loans at even higher rates of interest. Buy a Mercedes, pay 7 per cent interest. Buy a tractor, pay 12 per cent. The hallowed micro-finance institutions (MFIs) do worse. There, it's smaller sums at interest rates of between 24 and 36 per cent or higher.
Starved of credit, peasants turned to moneylenders and other informal sources. Within 10 years from 1991, the number of Indian farm households in debt almost doubled from 26 per cent to 48.6 per cent. A crazy underestimate but an official number. Many policy-driven disasters hit farmers at the same time. Exploding input costs in the name of ‘market-based prices.' Crashing prices for their commercial crops, often rigged by powerful traders and corporations. Slashing of investment in agriculture. A credit squeeze as banks moved away from farm loans to fuelling upper middle class lifestyles. Within the many factors driving over two lakh farmers to suicide in 13 years, indebtedness and the credit squeeze rank high. (And MFIs are now among the squeezers).
What remained of farm credit was hijacked. A devastating piece in The Hindu (Aug. 13) showed us how. Almost half the total “agricultural credit” in the State of Maharashtra in 2008 was disbursed not by rural banks but by urban and metro branches. Over 42 per cent of it in just Mumbai — stomping ground of large corporations rather than of small farmers.
Even as the media celebrate our greatest car deal ever as a sign of “rural resurgence,” the subject of many media stories, comes the latest data of the National Crime Records Bureau. These show a sharp increase in farm suicides in 2009 with at least 17,368 farmers killing themselves in the year of “rural resurgence.” That's over 7 per cent higher than in 2008 and the worst numbers since 2004. This brings the total farm suicides since 1997 to 216,500. While all suicides have multiple causes, their strong concentration within regions and among cash crop farmers is an alarming and dismal trend.
The NCRB, a wing of the Union Home Ministry, has been tracking farm suicide data since 1995. However, researchers mostly use their data from 1997 onwards. This is because the 1995 and 1996 data are incomplete. The system was new in 1995 and some big States such as Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan sent in no numbers at all that year. (In 2009, the two together saw over 1,900 farm suicides). By 1997, all States were reporting and the data are more complete.
The NCRB data end at 2009 for now. But we can assume that 2010 has seen at least 16,000 farmers' suicides. (After all, the yearly average for the last six years is 17,104). Add this 16,000 to the total 2,16,500. Also add the incomplete 1995 and 1996 numbers — that is 24,449 suicides. This brings the 1995-2010 total to 2,56,949. Reflect on this figure a moment.
It means over a quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995. It means the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history has occurred in this country in the past 16 years. It means one-and-a-half million human beings, family members of those killing themselves, have been tormented by the tragedy. While millions more face the very problems that drove so many to suicide. It means farmers in thousands of villages have seen their neighbours take this incredibly sad way out. A way out that more and more will consider as despair grows and policies don't change. It means the heartlessness of the Indian elite is impossible to imagine, leave alone measure.
Note that these numbers are gross underestimates to begin with. Several large groups of farmers are mostly excluded from local counts. Women, for instance. Social and other prejudice means that, most times, a woman farmer killing herself is counted as suicide — not as a farmer's suicide. Because the land is rarely in a woman's name.
Then there is the plain fraud that some governments resort to. Maharashtra being the classic example. The government here has lied so many times that it contradicts itself thrice within a week. In May this year, for instance, three ‘official' estimates of farm suicides in the worst-hit Vidarbha region varied by 5,500 per cent. The lowest count being just six in four months (See “How to be an eligible suicide,” The Hindu, May 13, 2010).
The NCRB figure for Maharashtra as a whole in 2009 is 2,872 farmers' suicides. So it remains the worst State for farm suicides for the tenth year running. The ‘decline' of 930 that this figure represents would be joyous if true. But no State has worked harder to falsify reality. For 13 years, the State has seen a nearly unrelenting rise. Suddenly, there's a drop of 436 and 930 in 2008 and 2009. How? For almost four years now, committees have functioned in Vidarbha's crisis districts to dismiss most suicides as ‘non-genuine.' What is truly frightening is the Maharashtra government's notion that fixing the numbers fixes the problem.
Yet that problem is mounting. Perhaps the State most comparable to Maharashtra in terms of population is West Bengal. Though its population is less by a few million, it has more farmers. Both States have data for 15 years since 1995. Their farm suicide annual averages in three-five year periods starting then are revealing. Maharashtra's annual average goes up in each period. From 1,963 in the five years ending with 1999 to 3,647 by 2004. And scaling 3,858 by 2009. West Bengal's yearly average registers a gradual drop in each five-year period. From 1,454 in 1999 to 1,200 in 2004 to 1,014 by 2009. While it has more farmers, its farm suicide average for the past five years is less than a third of Maharashtra's. The latter's yearly average has almost doubled since 1999.
The share of the Big 5 ‘suicide belt' States — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh — remains close to two-thirds of all farm suicides. Sadly 18 of 28 States reported higher farm suicide numbers in 2009. In some the rise was negligible. In others, not. Tamil Nadu showed the biggest increase of all States, going from 512 in 2008 to 1060 in 2009. Karnataka clocked in second with a rise of 545. And Andhra Pradesh saw the third biggest rise — 309 more than in 2008. A few though did see a decline of some consequence in their farm suicide annual average figures for the last six years. Three — Karnataka, Kerala and West Bengal — saw their yearly average fall by over 350 in 2004-09 compared to the earlier seven years.
Things will get worse if existing policies on agriculture don't change. Even States that have managed some decline across 13 years will be battered. Kerala, for instance, saw an annual average of 1,371 farm suicides between 1997 and 2003. From 2004-09, its annual average was 1016 — a drop of 355. Yet Kerala will suffer greatly in the near future. Its economy is the most globalised of any State. Most crops are cash crops. Any volatility in the global prices of coffee, pepper, tea, vanilla, cardamom or rubber will affect the State. Those prices are also hugely controlled at the global level by a few corporations.
Already bludgeoned by the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA), Kerala now has to contend with the one we've gotten into with ASEAN. And an FTA with the European Union is also in the offing. Kerala will pay the price. Even prior to 2004, the dumping of the so-called “Sri Lankan pepper” (mostly pepper from other countries brought in through Sri Lanka) ravaged the State. Now, we've created institutional frameworks for such dumping. Economist Professor K. Nagaraj, author of the biggest study of farm suicides in India, says: “The latest data show us that the agrarian crisis has not relented, not gone away.” The policies driving it have also not gone away.
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Cameron's Eid event speech
TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH
GIVEN BY THE PRIME MINISTER, MR DAVID CAMERON
AT NUMBER 10, DOWNING STREET
ON MONDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2010
PRIME MINISTER
Thank you very much for that, and can I say how incredibly welcome you all are.
There are really three things I want to say tonight. The first is that I think we should be a country that celebrates and looks up to faith, rather than thinks of faith as somehow a problem or an embarrassment. I think what Sayeeda has spoken about on this subject is absolutely brilliant, and I am glad that she has made those speeches.
I had a wonderful reminder of the importance that British Muslims attach to their faith, and the importance of faith in general, when I went to stay with a British Muslim family in Birmingham. One of my duties was to take their very wonderful daughter and son to school in the morning, and I found out that I was taking them to King Edward’s Jewish School in Birmingham. When I asked the parents why they were sending their children to a Jewish school, they said, ‘We are all Abrahamic faiths and we want our children to understand the importance of faith, and this is a very good school.’ I thought that was a wonderful example of the important role that faith organisations play in our society.
I think we should try and do more to examine and understand how much our faiths all have in common, because they do have so much in common: teaching us, trying to do good works and live a good life, as well as to worship our God, and I think that is an incredibly important message. So you are very welcome here, it is great to be having this celebration and can I thank everyone who has made it possible.
The second thing I wanted to say is just to celebrate the immense contribution that British Muslims make to our national life. There are two-and-a-half million Muslim people in Britain and – it is not a well known fact – I gather the first Mosque was established in Cardiff 150 years ago. I am not quite sure why Cardiff was chosen but there we are! I think it was something to do with Yemeni seamen arriving in Cardiff and wanting somewhere to worship.
Today, if you look at our armed services they are the largest non-Christian group in our armed services, and serve valiantly in Afghanistan; I have just talked to two brave British Muslims who are serving in the armed forces there. After Christians, British Muslims are the largest religious organisation in our police force as well. A huge amount is given by British Muslims into business life, into cultural life, and we should also remember the huge contribution that Muslim charities like Islamic Relief make to the relief of suffering around the world, as I myself have seen both at their depot in Birmingham, but also their amazing work on the ground. I think tonight is a good opportunity to recognise the massive contribution that British Muslims make to our national life.
The third point I wanted to make – and it has been wonderful that so many people have mentioned it to me just walking from that door to standing here. The point many people have made to me is the important role that British Muslims want to play in building a big society.
I think this is crucial, because what this is about is just asking ourselves what more can we do not just for ourselves and our families, but what we can do to build a stronger community, what we can do to take more control of our lives, what we can do to actually help solve some of the social problems we have in our country. When you look at what British Muslims do think and take part in, I think they have – you have – an enormous role to play in that more generous and tolerant and open society that we all want to build.
So, for all those reasons, a very warm welcome. Please enjoy the refreshments there are and listen to the band, who I think are absolutely outstanding, and I want to thank them for coming all the way from Birmingham today. I think Eid has messages for all of us about family, about friendship and about worship; that whatever religion we belong to we can take very seriously.
I want to pay a huge credit and compliment to my friend Sayeeda, who I think has done more than any other single person to connect British politics with people in the British Muslim community.
To all of you: Eid Mubarak. Thank you.
(END OF TRANSCRIPT)
GIVEN BY THE PRIME MINISTER, MR DAVID CAMERON
AT NUMBER 10, DOWNING STREET
ON MONDAY, 22 NOVEMBER 2010
PRIME MINISTER
Thank you very much for that, and can I say how incredibly welcome you all are.
There are really three things I want to say tonight. The first is that I think we should be a country that celebrates and looks up to faith, rather than thinks of faith as somehow a problem or an embarrassment. I think what Sayeeda has spoken about on this subject is absolutely brilliant, and I am glad that she has made those speeches.
I had a wonderful reminder of the importance that British Muslims attach to their faith, and the importance of faith in general, when I went to stay with a British Muslim family in Birmingham. One of my duties was to take their very wonderful daughter and son to school in the morning, and I found out that I was taking them to King Edward’s Jewish School in Birmingham. When I asked the parents why they were sending their children to a Jewish school, they said, ‘We are all Abrahamic faiths and we want our children to understand the importance of faith, and this is a very good school.’ I thought that was a wonderful example of the important role that faith organisations play in our society.
I think we should try and do more to examine and understand how much our faiths all have in common, because they do have so much in common: teaching us, trying to do good works and live a good life, as well as to worship our God, and I think that is an incredibly important message. So you are very welcome here, it is great to be having this celebration and can I thank everyone who has made it possible.
The second thing I wanted to say is just to celebrate the immense contribution that British Muslims make to our national life. There are two-and-a-half million Muslim people in Britain and – it is not a well known fact – I gather the first Mosque was established in Cardiff 150 years ago. I am not quite sure why Cardiff was chosen but there we are! I think it was something to do with Yemeni seamen arriving in Cardiff and wanting somewhere to worship.
Today, if you look at our armed services they are the largest non-Christian group in our armed services, and serve valiantly in Afghanistan; I have just talked to two brave British Muslims who are serving in the armed forces there. After Christians, British Muslims are the largest religious organisation in our police force as well. A huge amount is given by British Muslims into business life, into cultural life, and we should also remember the huge contribution that Muslim charities like Islamic Relief make to the relief of suffering around the world, as I myself have seen both at their depot in Birmingham, but also their amazing work on the ground. I think tonight is a good opportunity to recognise the massive contribution that British Muslims make to our national life.
The third point I wanted to make – and it has been wonderful that so many people have mentioned it to me just walking from that door to standing here. The point many people have made to me is the important role that British Muslims want to play in building a big society.
I think this is crucial, because what this is about is just asking ourselves what more can we do not just for ourselves and our families, but what we can do to build a stronger community, what we can do to take more control of our lives, what we can do to actually help solve some of the social problems we have in our country. When you look at what British Muslims do think and take part in, I think they have – you have – an enormous role to play in that more generous and tolerant and open society that we all want to build.
So, for all those reasons, a very warm welcome. Please enjoy the refreshments there are and listen to the band, who I think are absolutely outstanding, and I want to thank them for coming all the way from Birmingham today. I think Eid has messages for all of us about family, about friendship and about worship; that whatever religion we belong to we can take very seriously.
I want to pay a huge credit and compliment to my friend Sayeeda, who I think has done more than any other single person to connect British politics with people in the British Muslim community.
To all of you: Eid Mubarak. Thank you.
(END OF TRANSCRIPT)
Saturday, 30 October 2010
Who cares, and what difference does it make?
He writes from his gut, and there are not too many who do, but what difference does it make in India?
Between scam India and slum India
M.J. Akbar
It is entirely appropriate that a nation whose motto is Satyameva Jayate should discover a metaphor for ravenous loot in a Mumbai building society called Adarsh. Greed is the new religion and all are welcome to feed at her trough. Nothing else is sacrosanct; not the highest offices in public service: Chief Minister, Army chief, Navy admiral, or top bureaucrat through whom the file must pass. If there is a flat to be stolen in a housing society sanctioned for the welfare of war widows, then every single one of these crooks is ready to cheat the blood of Kargil martyrs. Thomas Friedman did not know how many puns danced on the head of a simile when he called the world as flat and began his journey in India.
There is no shame left. It is tempting to ask whether there is an India left when most of its ruling class has abandoned every principle in its composite, vulgar commitment to theft, but hopefully India is larger than its ruling class.
Which came first, hypocrisy or greed? Tough question. I would give primacy of place to hypocrisy, since that is the cloak behind which greed flourishes. Hypocrisy is always a great temptation in a democracy, since compromise always begins in the name of either realism or service. The gap between true expenditure in an election and officially sanctioned levels is the principal propeller of corruption since it becomes the justification for taking illegitimate “donations”, which of course is the polite word for bribes.
The stink of hypocrisy now permeates through all levels of authority, and institutions — like our defence forces — which cannot co-exist with corruption. They will be corrupt or a force; they cannot be both. The list of officials who stole from the Kargil dead is almost embarrassing: politicians, senior IAS officers, top defence officers. It was a rigged lottery handout.
It was robbery from the graveyard of Kargil martyrs. Those back-scratching cronies who distributed Adarsh flats between themselves should not be tried for corruption. They should be punished for treason.
But of course that is asking for too much from rulers who have become venal beyond belief. The system believes it can satiate any level of public anger with the meat of a scapegoat. Suresh Kalmadi was the officially nominated sacrifice for the putrid rape of public money during the Commonwealth Games. Ashok Chavan, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, will possibly have to resign because of Adarsh, unless he can, quietly, blackmail his superiors in Delhi by threatening to reveal how much cash he has been passing on to them.
We are being fooled by a clever set of manipulators in Delhi. Ashok Chavan did not become corrupt on the day media discovered that he had not only changed the terms of reference to cheat the “heroes of Kargil operation who bravely fought to protect our motherland” and then calmly stolen at least four of their flats for his family. He was corrupt the day he was made a minister in the Maharashtra government. He was promoted to Chief Minister not because he was competent but because he knew that the formula for upward mobility in the Congress, the happy combination of loyalty and corruption. When Delhi now puts on a mask of high outrage, it is only because it thinks this is the only way in which it can postpone retribution from the voter.
The voter does not live in Adarsh. 62% of Mumbai lives in slums. The distance between scam India and slum India is measured each day in the newspapers, but discomfort prevents us from noticing. Even media seems reluctant to shorten this distance. While the front page of Saturday’s newspapers in Delhi were full, justifiably, of the Ashok Chavan-led pillage, a small story on page 3 told of an unknown mother who left her two children, a boy, Pukar, and his sister Dakshina, outside a “mazaar” [a saint’s shrine] just outside the office of the Election Commission in Delhi, the home of the guardians of democracy. She gave her children all that was left with her, a bag with milk and some clothes, and told them she would return in an hour. She never returned. Her last trust was faith in the shrine. The children, said the temporary caretaker of the “mazaar”, Wazir Shah, cried the whole night. The children are now in a shelter.
They will learn to deal with the hungry, homeless, loveless reality that is the destiny of half of India while a thin skim ravages national wealth, and those in-between are trapped between dreams and insecurity. But will Pukar and Dakshina accept their “fate” and ignore Ashok Chavan and his fellow gangsters in the way that their helpless, nameless mother did? I hope not.
Between scam India and slum India
M.J. Akbar
It is entirely appropriate that a nation whose motto is Satyameva Jayate should discover a metaphor for ravenous loot in a Mumbai building society called Adarsh. Greed is the new religion and all are welcome to feed at her trough. Nothing else is sacrosanct; not the highest offices in public service: Chief Minister, Army chief, Navy admiral, or top bureaucrat through whom the file must pass. If there is a flat to be stolen in a housing society sanctioned for the welfare of war widows, then every single one of these crooks is ready to cheat the blood of Kargil martyrs. Thomas Friedman did not know how many puns danced on the head of a simile when he called the world as flat and began his journey in India.
There is no shame left. It is tempting to ask whether there is an India left when most of its ruling class has abandoned every principle in its composite, vulgar commitment to theft, but hopefully India is larger than its ruling class.
Which came first, hypocrisy or greed? Tough question. I would give primacy of place to hypocrisy, since that is the cloak behind which greed flourishes. Hypocrisy is always a great temptation in a democracy, since compromise always begins in the name of either realism or service. The gap between true expenditure in an election and officially sanctioned levels is the principal propeller of corruption since it becomes the justification for taking illegitimate “donations”, which of course is the polite word for bribes.
The stink of hypocrisy now permeates through all levels of authority, and institutions — like our defence forces — which cannot co-exist with corruption. They will be corrupt or a force; they cannot be both. The list of officials who stole from the Kargil dead is almost embarrassing: politicians, senior IAS officers, top defence officers. It was a rigged lottery handout.
It was robbery from the graveyard of Kargil martyrs. Those back-scratching cronies who distributed Adarsh flats between themselves should not be tried for corruption. They should be punished for treason.
But of course that is asking for too much from rulers who have become venal beyond belief. The system believes it can satiate any level of public anger with the meat of a scapegoat. Suresh Kalmadi was the officially nominated sacrifice for the putrid rape of public money during the Commonwealth Games. Ashok Chavan, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, will possibly have to resign because of Adarsh, unless he can, quietly, blackmail his superiors in Delhi by threatening to reveal how much cash he has been passing on to them.
We are being fooled by a clever set of manipulators in Delhi. Ashok Chavan did not become corrupt on the day media discovered that he had not only changed the terms of reference to cheat the “heroes of Kargil operation who bravely fought to protect our motherland” and then calmly stolen at least four of their flats for his family. He was corrupt the day he was made a minister in the Maharashtra government. He was promoted to Chief Minister not because he was competent but because he knew that the formula for upward mobility in the Congress, the happy combination of loyalty and corruption. When Delhi now puts on a mask of high outrage, it is only because it thinks this is the only way in which it can postpone retribution from the voter.
The voter does not live in Adarsh. 62% of Mumbai lives in slums. The distance between scam India and slum India is measured each day in the newspapers, but discomfort prevents us from noticing. Even media seems reluctant to shorten this distance. While the front page of Saturday’s newspapers in Delhi were full, justifiably, of the Ashok Chavan-led pillage, a small story on page 3 told of an unknown mother who left her two children, a boy, Pukar, and his sister Dakshina, outside a “mazaar” [a saint’s shrine] just outside the office of the Election Commission in Delhi, the home of the guardians of democracy. She gave her children all that was left with her, a bag with milk and some clothes, and told them she would return in an hour. She never returned. Her last trust was faith in the shrine. The children, said the temporary caretaker of the “mazaar”, Wazir Shah, cried the whole night. The children are now in a shelter.
They will learn to deal with the hungry, homeless, loveless reality that is the destiny of half of India while a thin skim ravages national wealth, and those in-between are trapped between dreams and insecurity. But will Pukar and Dakshina accept their “fate” and ignore Ashok Chavan and his fellow gangsters in the way that their helpless, nameless mother did? I hope not.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Not Rani's viewpoint; more a topic for discussion
What do you think of MJ Akbar's opinion, readers? I'd really like to know
The point missed between hyperbole and ridicule
M.J. Akbar
24 October 2010
The question begs to be asked. Has the Congress changed its view of Jaya Prakash Narayan after 35 years, or has the Congress changed its view of Rahul Gandhi after 35 months? An official spokesman of the party has, after all, compared Rahul Gandhi to a national hero, a veteran of the Congress Socialist Party, the leftist group that became a power within the party in the 1930s, and a freedom fighter whose last fight for freedom was to liberate India from the censorship, suspension of democracy and Emergency which Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975 upon the country in order to save her Prime Minister’s chair.
The Congress line on JP, as he was popularly known, was unambiguous: the khadi-clad Gandhian was alternatively a “fascist”, “anarchist”, “anti-national”, and whatever else came into the mind of the Congress leaders after they had read yet another polemical tract written by forgotten Bolsheviks. The Seventies were a decade when it was still fashionable to be of the leftist persuasion. Mani Shankar Aiyar, one of the brightest minds in Congress, would not have been consigned to the doldrums: he would have been an intellectually vigorous colleague of Mohan Kumaramangalam and D.P. Dhar, rather than a mere nominated Rajya Sabha MP. That was a time when “CIA” was a dread acronym, an organisation accused of assassinating unfriendly world leaders, not a building block of an allied security system whose chief could get an appointment with the Indian Prime Minister whenever he sought it. It was an age when Palestine was an ally of India, rather than Israel. Anyone who opposed this “politically correct” left was therefore ipso facto a “fascist” et al. The “anti-national” bit was added not only because JP had the temerity to challenge the rule of a woman who had been equated with India [the Congress president in 1975 famously said “Indira is India”] but because JP in a public speech had come close to asking Indian soldiers to reconsider their oath of loyalty to a government that had become venal. As you can see, that was a tempestuous era.
One presumes that Rahul Gandhi has none of these JP-type political characteristics, at least in Congress eyes. No Congress spokesman would even dare to think of Rahul as a fascist, and even if his political views are a trifle fuzzy they are hardly authoritarian. There will of course come a time when a Congressman will claim that “Rahul is India and India is Rahul” without getting sacked, since sycophancy is eternal, but that is still into the future. So the spokesman must have been, at some internal level, comparing Rahul’s popularity to JP’s. But that too is a radical departure, since JP’s appeal was always dismissed as false.
The spokesman’s enthusiasm for historic parallels has, apparently, been snubbed into silence since it was clear to the high command, a single-person unit consisting solely of Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, that the hyperbole had opened Rahul up to ridicule. But while this is sensible [it always makes sense to cut your losses while the balance sheet is still manageable], the corrective is missing the point. JP’s place in the history of Indian democracy is not going to be determined by political social-climbers. The problem is not what the spokesman said but the impulse that made him say what he did. He was indulging in public sycophancy because he believed that this was the shortest route to promotion.
This disease is not limited to the Congress; most parties have created supra-human icons out of their leaders. This is because the life of the party is about as long as the life of the leader; one-man, or one-woman parties do not cross the lifetime of their creator. But the Congress is 135 years old. It was the torchbearer not only of the freedom movement but also of the values that have become enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Those values eroded, inevitably, and it is no longer the “central fact” of Indian politics, to use a phrase coined by Jawaharlal Nehru. But it remains a dominant force, and its implosion will leave vacant space that will not be easy to fill.
The paradox is that its opponents might do less damage to the Congress than its sycophants. The culture of obedience aborts proper discussion, for everyone around the table is eager to do just one thing: discover what the leader thinks, or wants, and then find a rationale that takes the participant to the same conclusion. This is not a meeting of minds. This is decision-making in a hall of echoes.
Rahul Gandhi has some way to go before he finds a working strategy: philosophy is passé these days, so it is unfair to ask him to get one. A good way to initiate the process is to use the door. A door is not only an entrance but also an exit. He should keep it open for independent thought, and show the door to sycophants.
The point missed between hyperbole and ridicule
M.J. Akbar
24 October 2010
The question begs to be asked. Has the Congress changed its view of Jaya Prakash Narayan after 35 years, or has the Congress changed its view of Rahul Gandhi after 35 months? An official spokesman of the party has, after all, compared Rahul Gandhi to a national hero, a veteran of the Congress Socialist Party, the leftist group that became a power within the party in the 1930s, and a freedom fighter whose last fight for freedom was to liberate India from the censorship, suspension of democracy and Emergency which Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975 upon the country in order to save her Prime Minister’s chair.
The Congress line on JP, as he was popularly known, was unambiguous: the khadi-clad Gandhian was alternatively a “fascist”, “anarchist”, “anti-national”, and whatever else came into the mind of the Congress leaders after they had read yet another polemical tract written by forgotten Bolsheviks. The Seventies were a decade when it was still fashionable to be of the leftist persuasion. Mani Shankar Aiyar, one of the brightest minds in Congress, would not have been consigned to the doldrums: he would have been an intellectually vigorous colleague of Mohan Kumaramangalam and D.P. Dhar, rather than a mere nominated Rajya Sabha MP. That was a time when “CIA” was a dread acronym, an organisation accused of assassinating unfriendly world leaders, not a building block of an allied security system whose chief could get an appointment with the Indian Prime Minister whenever he sought it. It was an age when Palestine was an ally of India, rather than Israel. Anyone who opposed this “politically correct” left was therefore ipso facto a “fascist” et al. The “anti-national” bit was added not only because JP had the temerity to challenge the rule of a woman who had been equated with India [the Congress president in 1975 famously said “Indira is India”] but because JP in a public speech had come close to asking Indian soldiers to reconsider their oath of loyalty to a government that had become venal. As you can see, that was a tempestuous era.
One presumes that Rahul Gandhi has none of these JP-type political characteristics, at least in Congress eyes. No Congress spokesman would even dare to think of Rahul as a fascist, and even if his political views are a trifle fuzzy they are hardly authoritarian. There will of course come a time when a Congressman will claim that “Rahul is India and India is Rahul” without getting sacked, since sycophancy is eternal, but that is still into the future. So the spokesman must have been, at some internal level, comparing Rahul’s popularity to JP’s. But that too is a radical departure, since JP’s appeal was always dismissed as false.
The spokesman’s enthusiasm for historic parallels has, apparently, been snubbed into silence since it was clear to the high command, a single-person unit consisting solely of Rahul’s mother Sonia Gandhi, that the hyperbole had opened Rahul up to ridicule. But while this is sensible [it always makes sense to cut your losses while the balance sheet is still manageable], the corrective is missing the point. JP’s place in the history of Indian democracy is not going to be determined by political social-climbers. The problem is not what the spokesman said but the impulse that made him say what he did. He was indulging in public sycophancy because he believed that this was the shortest route to promotion.
This disease is not limited to the Congress; most parties have created supra-human icons out of their leaders. This is because the life of the party is about as long as the life of the leader; one-man, or one-woman parties do not cross the lifetime of their creator. But the Congress is 135 years old. It was the torchbearer not only of the freedom movement but also of the values that have become enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Those values eroded, inevitably, and it is no longer the “central fact” of Indian politics, to use a phrase coined by Jawaharlal Nehru. But it remains a dominant force, and its implosion will leave vacant space that will not be easy to fill.
The paradox is that its opponents might do less damage to the Congress than its sycophants. The culture of obedience aborts proper discussion, for everyone around the table is eager to do just one thing: discover what the leader thinks, or wants, and then find a rationale that takes the participant to the same conclusion. This is not a meeting of minds. This is decision-making in a hall of echoes.
Rahul Gandhi has some way to go before he finds a working strategy: philosophy is passé these days, so it is unfair to ask him to get one. A good way to initiate the process is to use the door. A door is not only an entrance but also an exit. He should keep it open for independent thought, and show the door to sycophants.
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