"Spindian Express"

Vijay Prashad's article in Counterpunch last week about Sonal Shah's participation in Hindu right-wing activity in the United States (she was national co-ordinator of the dreaded Vishwa Hindu Parishad's America wing in 2001), created a furore. The noise generated after the publication of article at Counterpunch and here, was directly proportional to the hype surrounding Shah's nomination into Barack Obama's advisory transition team - a phenomenon that generally sees chest-thumping at any expatriate Indian's coming to prominence in the United States.

Prashad's article drew a few responses among India's own self-styled "liberal" community. Political Scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta along with CII mentor Tarun Das and others came up with a response that went in essence, thus - Sonal Shah has impeccable credentials, she has never espoused Hindu right wing views, and those who are raising questions about her past "associations" are basically committing an act of witch-hunting.

Nowhere in the statement is it mentioned that Shah was the national co-ordinator and an active member of the VHP-A in 2001. Shah, herself in this statement, asserted that she had nothing in common with the VHP or the RSS, but she did not repudiate the fact that she had worked for the VHP-A (for earthquake relief, for which she expressed her pride). She also called the allegations of her associations with the VHP-A, false and baseless in her statement.

Vijay Prashad in turn came up with a further riposte that elucidated clearly that the allegations against Ms Shah were not on the basis of "mere association" but on the sound basis of "guilt by participation".

So much for the context. Interestingly, the decidedly right-wing paper in the country today (someone would ask me which paper is not, in India today), the Indian Express editorialised on the issue thus.

The funny statement in the editorial is this:

Her participation in collecting Gujarat earthquake relief and an organisation’s invitation to her to speak at its event have been transformed into apparently inarguable evidence of her identification with illiberal politics. This is shocking.

To the dudes at Indian Express, the "an organisation" for which Ms Shah collected relief and acted as co-ordinator was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-America, which co-ordinates activities for its parent organisation in India today for fund-raising -- money which is used to build the hate network that today operates with non-chalant disgrace and monstrosity in Orissa (Kandhamal), Karnataka and elsewhere (Gujarat circa 2002.. do you remember? ). Is this tangential??! And the organisation which invited her to speak was yet another of the RSS' many front organisations - the Ekal Vidyalaya .

Notice the clever use of "an organisation" instead of VHP-A or the Ekal Vidyalaya, by the Spindian Express. Don't you easily fail with a grade of F on accuracy, dudes?

And more:

But in diverse, robust democracies like India and America, judgment calls, especially about potential holders of public office, require a real appreciation of what it means to be a liberal: oppose all witch-hunts.

Oppose all Witch-hunts! That is rich, coming from the Witchhuntian Express! Remember Pratibha Patil's nomination to the post of President? And the daily saga of front page reports claiming her guilt in the failings of the co-operative banks she helped set up in Maharashtra? Here , here , and the best of all, here - Shekhar Gupta makes a case for the application of " due diligence " to vet the process of selection of India's highest constitutional post.

Call it "witch-hunting" or the press' right to explore the past of a public official, depending on where you stand.. there is always going to be questions raised on accountable public officials. If Pratibha Patil (deservedly, in my opinion) can be subjected to this amount of scrutiny for founding co-op banks which later (after 30 years) went bankrupt.. by the newspaper; how can it deny the same due diligence that goes about establishing credentials of a public official in the United States- Ms Shah, who was incontrovertibly, the member of the foreign wing of one of India's most dreaded medieval outfits - the VHP?

Double Standards, anyone? "Illiberalism", no? Well. that comes with the territory of Indian Express, no doubt.

Unionization of BPO Workers, Letter to Indian Express

The Indian media has gone ballistic after hearing that the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has launched a forum which is some type of union of BPO workers.

The Indian Express has published an editorial and op-ed piece on the same. The Op-Ed Piece has quoted an article by Amandeep Sandhu about BPO unionization too. I have made some critical points on both these articles (the edit and the op-ed piece) in a letter to the Indian Express. If time permits, I shall write a longer piece on the issue itself.

Subject: Unionization of BPO Workers in Kolkata.
While your editorial waxes eloquent on the need to keep BPO workers from unionization because of loss of competitiveness, which in itself is a spurious logic, it doesn't talk about the appalling work conditions of the BPO workers themselves. The opinion piece by Saubhik Chakravarti quotes the article by Amandeep Sandhu in EPW, about how unionization has hitherto failed and the lackadaisical attitude of the BPO workers toward the same, but the important reasons for the same are conveniently omitted. BPO workers have been clearly fed the logic that unionization is an activity meant only for the blue collared, eventhough their unskilled work itself doesn't pertain to the white collared. Sandhu aptly quotes another important work done on unskilled workers in Barbados where a similar attitude prevails.
Clearly, there is more to the opposition toward unionization than just loss of competitiveness. Also, there is no sufficient logic provided by your editorial or opinion writer as to why indeed unionisation *will not* help BPO workers tide over unhealthy work conditions. In addition to this, the editorial doesn't deem it necessary to notice that unions and unionization in the form of pressure groups exist in all types of societies to secure wages, good working conditions for workers, of the blue collar or of the white collar type (lawyers, sportspersons, etc). Even the Indian cricket players have a pressure group and a players' union, whose formation your lead writers have lauded in the past in your own newspaper! Perhaps if your editorial and opinion writers had however talked about the unionization of BPO workers under the thrall of ideologically motivated organizations such as the CITU as the primary problematic, it could have carried more sense. Blind opposition to unionization however seems prejudiced and devoid of complete logical veracity.

Sincerely,
V.R.Srinivasan.

IE publishes the letter

To Indian Express' credit, they published my letter.

Indian Express' editorial on JNU

Shekhar Gupta is back to Left bashing and this time, his target is JNU. The editorial is a fallout of what happened in JNU on 14th November, when a few students of Naxalite persuasion, protested using black flags and slogans, when the Prime Minister of India came over to address the students of JNU. This later on created a huge furor in the National Media, considering the fact that a person of the stature and position of the Prime Minister was subjected to such treatment, ostensibly because some students were upset with policies, architect of which, they regarded was Dr. Manmohan Singh, recently referred to as the leading neoliberal intellectual of this country by Prof. Prabhat Patnaik.

The Editorial however deemed it fit to turn its ire on the entire campus for the doings of a few. Shekhar Gupta's left phobia has taken such a toll on him, that he thought he needed to throw some of his ire on the student activists of JNU as well. As a left democratic student activist in my university, I thought it was necessary for me to rebut what Gupta says...and this blog includes my letter to Indian Express, which of course would not be published by Gupta...for sure.

To,
The Editor-in-chief,
The Indian Express

Date: 16-11-05

Sir,
Subject: Editorial on JNU titled, "Little Stalinists"
For all the satire and perverted logic that your editorial spews, the truth is that it is far away from the truth! First, it is essential to refute the factual errors that permeate your odious editorial. You make the mistake of brushing the entire student union and the entire left wing in the campus with the same colour, forgetting unfortunately that shades of opinion exist, resulting in different political outfits with different ideologies. To make things clear, on 14th November, the left groups which do not subscribe to the notion that the Indian state is semi-colonial in nature, did not protest or disrupt the PM's speech. It was only those groups, who subscribe to that ideological understanding, which had disrupted the PM's speech, even as they defended their action as coming under the purview of "right to protest".

Secondly, your comparison of the US Air Force and the entire student activists of JNU is nauseating. A few sample things for you to consider: a) the student elections in this campus are entirely conducted by students alone, with a nominated body of Election Commission members who do this job purely to satisfy their "democratic spirit" unlike the US Air Force who in their endeavor to spread democracy go about pummeling thousands of Iraqis and justify the same by using inhuman “pathetic fallacies” such as “collateral damage”. b) The protests, marches, mess campaigns, public talks that feature in this university night in and night out are done with an objective purpose in mind, to keep the culture of debate and discussion alive, unlike the US who treats the UN with contempt and debates in the Security Council as a waste of time. The campus is forever kicking with sound political understanding of various shades and "bourgeois" culture of aping Western clothing, money power, expensive hoardings, etc, characteristic of other universities is absent.

It is true that a majority of the Civil Service recruits are from this campus, yet you make the mistake of including political activists as being the large chunk of these, which is patently untrue. India's leading Left leaders, Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury were products of this campus. Your lead editor, C.Raja Mohan served both in the capacity of a student activist as well as an academic intellectual. It is also true that the faculty (excellent, by your own admission) is largely comprised of former students of this campus, who were the very same left democratic minded “agitpropists” of yesteryear that this current generation of left-bent activists wish to emulate.

Your deep-rooted left-phobia is already well known; you devote acres of column space just to prove one point: the Left is not right. This phobia is what that has driven you to go ballistic (pun-intended) on JNU's structure itself. Hence your convoluted logic about how JNU's low fee structure should be scrapped because a handful of protestors deemed it fit to wave black flags and shout slogans against the Prime Minister. Your idea of a civilized audience is perhaps a conformist, arm-chair intellectualist, isolationist conglomeration of individuals, least bothered about the effect of the PM's policies on the poor and marginalized of this country, information about which shall be available for your perusal in JNU's libraries and even in the term-papers and academic efforts of JNU's radical student community.

Finally, I don't consider the term, "Little Stalinists", pejorative at all. If we could be given the name of the leader of the Red Army, which defeated Hitler's Fascism and proved that an underdeveloped, worker-peasant nation can take on the might of imperialism and fascism, we are proud indeed. This campus has always maintained its anti-imperialist legacy, coupled with its pro-poor, pro-worker, pro-peasant notions intact. This is precisely why this campus has produced a P.Sainath, India's leading rural affairs journalist, a Gopal Guru, India's leading political theorist on Social Justice, and innumerable other academic, political leaders, who have taken the well known JNU adage, "What JNU thinks today, India thinks tomorrow" to the public sphere, outside the cushions of the red brick walls that dot our campus. It seems impossible for your paper, editored by a person, who seems almost an apologist for neo-liberal capitalism to understand the ethos of this campus, which "empowers" Indians from all backgrounds irrespective of the multiple crippling identities that characterize Indian society to take up lead roles in civil society, be it in the academia, the bureaucracy, the polity or even in radical opposition.