Left in the limelight..

Three columns in the Hindustan Times; each by Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai were written on the Left recently in the aftermath of the Left's positioning on the Nuclear Deal. All three start of, as pious recognition of the presence of probity in the Left leadership and end up questioning the position of the Left on the Nuclear Deal as well as questioning the very basis of existence of the Left. In the course of doing so, blatant falsehoods are peddled. Sample this from Vir Sanghvi: "The CPI didn't play a role in the freedom movement" (Hasn't Sanghvi ever heard of Meerut Conspiracy Case and the about the revolutionaries incarcarated in Kalapani?)and so on.

All the articles are blatantly flawed; not just for their argumentation; but also for their serial lack of objectivity as well as analytical rigour. It is a travesty and a recognition of the mediocrity that peddles television media today. And to say that these three ordinary analysts who have dominated mass media soundbyte in the country today are considered stellar journalists is a further indiction of the quality of the media that prevails in the country today. Why do I say so? Read on.

The Nuclear Deal with the United States cannot and must not be seen by divorcing it from the larger strategic relationship that has been drawn between the two states for the past 9 years. From the NSSP (Next steps in strategic protocol) moves in the NDA regime to the defence agreement signed by Pranab Mukherjee in 2005 with Washington, there has been a clear indication of how India wills on to bandwagon with the unipolar nation that is driving world political economy today. The reasoning offered is that it is in India's interest to do so. Divorced from this understanding is what exactly does India's interest entail? The interests of the middle classes who would stand to gain by this relationship to get immediate visas or the upper business classes who shall get their cut of the bargain when they sign up on lucrative partnership/ investment deals with their American counterparts; should only these interests be considered Indian national interest? How does one define national interest? This question is never asked in the media; the mass media in particular with it's dependence on short term memory and emphasis on formal and personality driven politics is incapable of asking that question.

It is in this regard that one should read the Nuclear Deal. While entering into a strategic partnership with the United States, care must be taken whether this would hamper India's geopolitical interests in the periphery of its environs. During the Cold War era, the balance of power game played between the United States and the USSR drew India toward the latter, even as the country tried to play even-handed and get benefits out of the relationship from both the superpowers.

After the end of the Cold War, there has been a significant turn toward hegemonization of world polity by the US establishment, particularly since the coming to power (in a dubious manner) by the George Bush regime. This neoconservative regime has tried to dominate world polity by focusing its efforts on the energy sector, seriously involving itself in the West Asian region, by launching a phoney war against Iraq and now tries to take that forward in Iran. Even the Horn of Africa wasn't spared.

The redefinition of the relationship with India has to be seen in this context. Ostensibly formal politics defines this relationship as between two democracies (although the content of the rather "formal democracies" is never argued upon). Never is it understood that in the system of international politics, relations are defined between nations as units of power, no matter whatever be the content of power internally in the different units be.

Clearly the United States wants India to be a bulwark against the rise of other powers in the Asian region (read China) and to prevent the multipolar formation of forces such as the Shanghai Co-operation Council (a tie up between Russia, China, Kazakhstan and other central asian powers). The dangling of the nuclear carrot is to be seen in this very particular context.

One only needs to trace the sequence of events since the then Petroleum Minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar notified an energy partnership with Iran and Syria, which has the potential to transform relations between these various units in the Asian region and also had the oeuvre to bring in new markets to these nations. The entry of cheap gas into India was seen to be fruitful not just for reasons of diplomacy and statecraft but also to the aam aadmi, as steady supply of natural gas was bound to help depreciate the pressing necessity for energy consumption in the country. What immediately succeeded this incident was the announcement of a nuclear partnership by Condoleeza Rice, the secretary of state for external affairs of the US. What followed later was the removal of Mani Shankar Aiyar from power and the bringing in of Murli Deora, a person who has a track record of pro-Americanism and corporate cronyism. The pipeline deal since then has been left in the lurch, as many spanners to the works has been brought about by the government itself (witness the PM saying that it would be difficult to get an banking underwriting for the deal even before the deal was conceptualized!). The offering of an alternate pipeline through American cronies in Central Asia (Turkmenistan) also added fuel to the theory that the deal was being sabotaged by American influence.

When George Bush visited (during which time, these very reporters went gaga over his retinue of K-9 dogs, his attire and his body language), the nuclear deal was conceptualized and agreed upon, as a step forward in the Next Steps in Strategic protocol movement launched by the NDA regime. Lets consider the merits of the Nuclear Deal itself, something that has been threshed out a zillion times in the media, but quickly.

The deal promises India a steady supply of fuel (subject to certain conditions, which were debated endlessly from the point of view of nuclear scientists who saw this as a threat to India's unique indigenous three stage nuclear fuel generation process), setting a stimulus for the set up of ancillary businesses in India, while giving nuclear suppliers in the US (who have been stymied domestically because of the stall in nuclear generation) a fillip by giving them a captive market. From all estimates however, this deal would still materialize into a situation when only 8% of the energy generation in the country would come from the stable of nuclear energy in 2020.

Now opposition to this deal (which was consolidated during the 123 agreement, which went ahead to give India-specific commitments, overruling several prior objections to nuclear proliferation in third world countries, in the United States), was hinged on two legs. One leg was the ultra-nationalist one, which saw the deal as a cap on India's nuclear weaponisation programme (articulated by the BJP and its acolytes). The lesser version of the position was that articulated by the scientists, who still felt that the express commitments made were still harmful to the three stage indigenous process and the ability of India to be able to export that indigenous technology as well as reactors. The other leg, while sympathetic to the latter argument of the scientists, looked upon this deal in the angle of strategic partnership as well, seeing the deal as creating a situation where India acts as a junior partner of US imperialism in the South Asian region, thereby creating a dangerous situation where the current battleground against the US (which has been waged through the aegis of terrorism) would shift toward India full time (the theatre has already started playing itself out, witness the multiple terrorist acts in the nation, even by terrorist cells recruiting Indians themselves), as well as the further creation of hitches in India's already estranged neighbors. While countries in Europe, for e.g., had grown from nationalistic divisions after World War II, to form co-operative councils with stout economic relationships through the aegis of the European Union. Such a possibility has not been achieved in the South Asian region, because of the lingering antagonism between the various nations, India, China and Pakistan.

It is in this context that one should view the opposition of the Left toward the nuclear deal. Despite the pronouncements by Manmohan Singh that he would articulate a foreign policy that is considerate of a relationship with other powers as well as the United States, empirical evidence on the ground doesn't say so. The growing nexus with the United States has continued to under-cut relations with the multipolar world bringing a baggage of problems geo-politically, realistically and forcefully. The Left, which has always articulated an anti-imperialist zeal throughout its existence only continues to do so and hence rejects the deal. Its as simple to understand why when seen in this understanding. The Left is criticised by saying that the parties were dictated to by Moscow and were beholden to China. Easily forgotten is the fact that the largest and perhaps the only relevent constituent (the CPI(M)) wasn't recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as a fraternal Communist party till 1978 and which had split from the original CPI, primarily because of the differences in understanding of the nature of the Indian state and the bourgeosie, which were not shared by the right-CPI, ideologically closer to the Soviet party. That the CPI(M) was seen as an independent communist party, just like the Italian one is never mentioned. But I digress.

Let me get back to ranting now. Why do these superficial reporters (Dutt/Sanghvi/Sardesai) fail to understand this or atleast fail to report this? Is it because they lack the understanding of international politics? (Barkha Dutt called the details in the 123 Agreement as gobbledygook, thus disregarding any pretense of understanding things in detail). Is it because they want clearly to see national interest in the lines of what the urban middle class would want to interpret and love to hear? The latter seems to be the most plausible reason.

Why should the Left, whose traditional constituency is NOT the urban elite or the upper middle class, peddle its understanding to suit these very same sections? How are the ordinary Indian citizens who are also dependent on energy in great ways, going to benefit out of a deal which is only to get us 8% of the energy requirements at enormous cost in 2020? Why can't the very same investment made in renewable and environmentally secure sources of energy? Aren't these legitimate questions, which should be asked by a voice, that is not tarnished by the corruption that prevails in bourgeois political parties today in India?

It is but logical therefore that the Left, whose probity is lauded by these columnists, must represent the voice of the ordinary citizen, even if she/he doesn't understand the "gobbledygook" of the 123 agreement.

Taking this argument forward now, let us now understand how this translates into the political positioning of the Left vis-a-vis this government. The current UPA Government was formed as a coalition supported by the Left from the outside, on the basis that this will be a secular and humane alternative to the communal-driven and avowedly neoliberal NDA government that was defeated at the hustings. With 61 MPs, who were primarily elected after being victorious against Congress legislators, how can the Left be part of the government? That would be against the grain of probity that is subjectively installed in the Left consciousness. This is the precise reason for the formulation of the Common Minimum Programme, a catalog of policies that are not very different in content from the Congress party's, which won the most number of seats in the hustings.

So, everytime the Left stopped certain policies from culmination (FDI in Insurance/Retail; Disinvestment of well performing PSUs; pension reforms; others), all of them were in contradiction to the very DNA of what suggested the Left's social policy of increasing equitous development and creating self-reliance. Did the Left ever oppose FDI in manufacturing? No media person talks about that.

It was but sure that a confrontation between the neoliberal-led Congress government and the Left was bound to happen. The Left considers the Congress as a landlord-big bourgeois party which mouths social democracy while articulating the interests of its primary sections. No wonder, the Congress never did sincere land reform to eradicate rural oligarchies and consequently inequities that still plague the nation. Yet the bigger danger of communalism that has an innate fascist form (structurally different to the European version, but consequentially very similar: witness Gujarat) bound these very same antagonist forces. It was similar to the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Allied Powers against the German led axis powers in the World War.

Instead of harping upon the differences in the left-right-centre spectrum that constitutes every democracy, the superficial media sees this differences through the vacuous angle of "ego" and "personalities"; as if Manmohan Singh's reactions to the left's opposition were only driven by his "pious" personality rather than his neoliberal outlook. I see this trend as the biggest example of foreign direct investment from America, where the media plays a similar role in the manufacturing of consent (credit to Dr. Chomsky) and harps on the same meta-analysis in the television rooms without a substantive content.

I hope Sanghvi, Dutt and Sardesai realise their limitations and improve upon their substantive thinking. Anything less and these self-declared national experts are nothing but mediocre hacks who are lucky to get the spotlight that they get. I feel sorry for their viewers.

Betrayal of a Mandate

To use violence against people demanding government action on social and economic issues is second nature for a state that deals with such situations as they were only a question of maintaining “law and order”. The gunning down of six left activists in Mudigonda of Khammam district of Andhra Pradesh on July 28 during a bandh called by the CPI(M) and CPI to protest the failure of the government to redistribute land is only the most recent example of the state showing its brutal face when confronted with genuine demands. This has been how governments at the centre and the states have, since the 1950s, responded to movements seeking redistribution of agricultural land.

It is also very common for political parties to promise land reform during their election campaigns, but to very quickly retract on these commitments. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), when it came to power for a second time in 1994 with a promise to implement welfare measures, took the path of neoliberalism under Chandrababu Naidu (after he was re-elected in 1999), only to be discredited in the eyes of the people and then drubbed at the polls in 2004. It was the backlash against the TDP’s regressive policies in the state that brought the Congress, led by Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, to power, but the present state government has not shown itself to be very different from its predecessor in the manner in which it has addressed the land issue. The inaction of the state government is a betrayal of the mandate of 2004, for redistribution of land was one of the important campaign promises of the Congress Party in the state assembly elections of that year.

The Andhra Pradesh Assignment Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act, 1977 was supposed to enable the state to distribute land to the poor. The Act had been passed to prohibit the sale or alienation of land assigned for distribution, to any third party. But the Congress government has amended the same Act to regularise unauthorised possession of assigned land. From private encroachment of the land meant for redistribution to illegal buying of such land from the poor in the name of “developing the land” and selling it for higher returns, the government has allegedly encouraged all kinds of malpractices. The government claims that it has distributed 4.37 lakh acres of land. However the CPI(M) and CPI allege that concrete steps have not been taken to implement the suggestions of the Koneru Ranga Rao Committee (set up by the Congress government in 2004) that came up with a list of measures to effect redistribution in accordance with already framed laws.

The left parties had demanded that the recommendations made in the Koneru Committee’s report be implemented and an independent authority be formed to monitor the implementation of the redistribution process as well as an ombudsman be appointed for the Indiramma housing project for the poor, which has seen a number of irregularities. The bandh call on July 28 was the culmination of the agitation, which had been going on for nearly three months.

The police were at their most brutal in Mudigonda. The use of AK-47s against unarmed protesters is reflective of what the state really thinks about people’s protests. That the use of firearms must be the last resort and only under extreme duress are rules that are too often disregarded by the police. In the present case, the firing upon the protestors was ordered even as they were being lathi charged. The measures taken by the chief minister after the incident to punish the personnel involved and to compensate the victims will not be enough to mollify the anger that has erupted against this regime.

The drubbing that Rajasekhara Reddy’s predecessor received at the polls should forewarn the Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh. The incumbent government has to demonstrate that it is serious about addressing the issue of land reform. Only that would be a fitting compensation to the activists who lost their lives in the police firing in Mudigonda on July 28. But is the Congress government in the state capable of such action?

Editorial written for the Economic and Political Weekly

My first foray into professional journalism...

This is the first edit piece that I have written. The topic is a bit controversial and there are a lot of opinions on the same. I am trying to be as much responsive to both the sides of the opinion (wherever there is fairness in argumentation) in my piece.

http://epw.org.in/epw/uploads/articles/10840.pdf

Ears to the Ground over Eyes on the numbers

http://flonnet.com/stories/20070601004801500.htm

Vidya Subrahmanian whose reports in The Hindu accurately predicted a majority for the BSP in Uttar Pradesh ..(she called Mayawati the Next Queen of U.P in an article written over a year ago), writes about how Opinion Polls got the picture wrong in UP. ..

America's favorite pastime is now mine too..

Baseball is considered America's favorite pastime; a sport that represents American ethos. Anyone who has watched the movie, "A field of dreams" would definitely agree. The sport started off to be an exclusively American one, with its professional origins as a Major League seasonal sport going back to the late 1890s. The initial years were all about Cy Young, the metronomic pitcher and "small ball" stalwarts such as the abrasive batter Ty Cobb and the consistent Roger Hornsby. What changed the game was the arrival of the "Sultan of Swing", one of the most dominant sportsperson of the century, Babe Ruth. An excellent pitcher who later on turned out to be a master slugger of a batter, Babe Ruth revolutionized baseball and made it extremely popular. The game was indeed popular but the match fixing controversy of the late 1910s tainted it and it took the Bambino (Babe Ruth) to resurrect the image of the sport.

Baseball however didn't really truly American before the introduction of African American players into the sport, who were hitherto denied Major League entries, confining themselves therefore to the Negro Leagues. Jackie Robinson (whose number 42 was prominently worn recently in remembrance of the 60th anniversary of his first game in the Major League) was the first African American to play in the Major League, which became truly representative.

Today's Major League Baseball is a global sport played out in the USA. Large swathes of players are from Latin America (with Dominican Republic dominating the high quality representation) and from Japan (where the sport is followed with equal fervour as in the USA).

The current batch of players in the Major League include some who are among the all time best. If Barry Bonds is chasing the highest Home run total ever, there are pitchers such as Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Randy Johnson who are sureshot considerations in the All time best list. Then there are versatile players such as Alex Rodriguez who define power in batting and finesse in fielding to near perfection and rate among the best ever. Clearly Baseball in America is enjoying a golden era. Or so it seems, for despite the abundance of talent, there are questions being raised about malpractices, in the form of steroid usage and doping. Though there have been few "convictions" (Jose Canseco for e.g.), the swirl of rumours about doping has created a cloud of haze over America's national sport.

It is in this milieu that a cricket lover like me has started to get addicted with Major League Baseball. Apart from getting hooked to the qualitative aspects of the sport, I am also intrigued by the mystique of inter-league play rivalries, and the whole art of Baseball statistics which has contributed a unique term to English vocabulary, "Sabermatrics".

Statistics and statistical analysis is regarded favorably by many sport analysts in a whole array of sports. Statistics in Cricket, for e.g., plays a vital role in defining debates about performances, eat up a lot of space in delineating opinions among chatterati. However, the amount of statistics that is covered in Baseball is mind boggling. There are umpteen categories which are tracked, evaluated and discussed for players and teams in baseball. The art of "sabermetrics" is a science in itself. Some teams such as Oakland Athletics take up Sabermetrics so seriously that it governs their entire philosophy of selecting teams and preparing budgets! Billy Beane, the GM of Oakland Athletics, therefore swears by "Moneyball!", the entirely statistics based tome on baseball and the way its played.

The wide representation in race, ethnicity, nationality and language that characterizes baseball today is a positive indeed. Baseball, in contrast to cricket remains a professional sport that generates wide intra-country rivalry within the United States and is not an international concern as much as cricket is. However, with the addition of the World Baseball Classic to the international baseball calendar has added "international intrigue" to the sport today. The recently held Classic featured the victory of Japan over Cuba in the finals with the United States not even among the top 4 of the tournament.

The election of Mayawati and questions..

The results of the Uttar Pradesh elections came as "mindblowing" (as one of my friends mentioned) and "shocking" to political observers in the country. Mayawati, the autocratic leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party, a party forged through Dalit leadership and support over the years, was able to win the elections with an absolute majority for the BSP. This event was seen as a tectonic achievement in a state that had seen coalition governments since 1991 and which has a fragmented polity like no other state in the country. The number of effective parties in Uttar Pradesh must surely be the highest in the country. Even in such a fragmented polity (with three major parties apart from the BSP: the Samajwadi Party, the Indian National Congress and the Bhartiya Janata Party), the BSP was able to forge an alliance of the Dalits and other sections including the upper castes into a formidable vote coalition that ensured an absolute majority for the party.

Though, this victory came as a shocker, particularly pollsters across the board predicted an hung assembly (the CNN-IBN being the most generous to the BSP handing it a 152-168 seat victory in its "Post-Poll" calculations), it was not that much of a surprise to those readers who had read Vidya Subrahmaniam's articles in The Hindu which emphasized a positive wave for the BSP being created for quite some time (since 2005) in Uttar Pradesh. Subrahmaniam reported how the "Brahmin Jodo Abhiyans" and the multiple campaigns to reach out to other communities by the dedicated cadre of the BSP helped extend its reach to a large section of the voting public as well as its core votebanks among the Dalits which her party had built over the years. While the pollsters were sanguine about the increase in the vote share because of such projects by the BSP, they underestimated the reach of the cadre in building such a formidable unit of support which eventually won the elections with an absolute majority.

Political parties gave their own spin after the elections. For the BJP, it was a matter of anti-incumbency against the SP being reaped by the BSP much more effectively than themselves. This argument doesn't hold much water because the SP was able to hold on substantially to it's vote share despite a loss of number of seats and wasn't relegated below the second position with 97 seats. In contrast, the BJP was trounced and was held victorious in 50 seats alone, suggesting that the victory of the BSP was also a victory against the kind of communal mobilization that the BJP attempted to garner in order to come back to power.

The ruling party at the Centre, Indian National Congress' performance was as bad as the previous elections and it's seat share was reduced further by 3 to 22. This performance was despite a high voltage campaign given full publicity and launched by Rahul Gandhi, the son of party supremo Sonia Gandhi, across the length and breadth of Uttar Pradesh. Invariably the questions asked by the media were directed to the failure of Rahul Gandhi rather than throwing light upon the fact that the INC had lost its hold of the electorate in Uttar Pradesh primarily because of its inability to understand the ground reality that governed the UP society today long before the incumbent elections.

As for the Left, they were completely wiped out. Internally divided and also confused as to what the primary contradiction in UP society was, i.e. communalism or casteism and not organizationally in a position to take on either, the Left parties drew a blank and were left with wooden spoons. The classes that they primarily represent, through the width of their policies chose the BSP over them overwhelmingly. The Left was left in the end with the consolation that the politics of communalism had been soundly defeated in Uttar Pradesh, fearing as they had that the rise of BJP was being made possible through communal rhetoric and disenchantment with the UPA government in recently held State and Municipal elections across the country.

So, how could Mayawati succeed this tremendously? What were the basic calculations she made that worked in her favor and what does this result portend to the whole notion of "caste based politics"? These are the questions one needs to answer.

Mayawati runs a tightly knit ship where she holds the rudder, the wheels, the deck and even the anchor. She has complete control over her organization which is run more as a political movement rather than a party. The party doesn't even have a spokesperson who is accountable to the media nor does it have a voice other than Mayawati's. While this has helped the party concentrate on its primary duty of building its base silently rather than playing itself out in the public arena of the media, it's interesting to note how there exists such complete uniformity of action by its disciplined cadre despite total autocracy practised by its leader. Clearly a system of patronage has been worked out for sections who are the core unit of support for the BSP (i.e. the Dalits). The dominant Jatav community provides near unanimous support owing to the base built by Mayawati (who belongs to this community) and because of the measures enunciated during her previous short-term stints in power. Mayawati therefore could forge an umbrella coalition similar to the Congress system, with the master keys of patronage distribution however held by Dalits. That even the lower OBCs (who were distinct from the Yadavs, the core constituency of the SP) could bind themselves to this umbrella coalition suggests the strength of caste arithmetic that the BSP stitched for itself.

The standard reasons that affect incumbent governments across the country (with their non-involvement in forging genuine social growth projects through public investment and state action) worked in Uttar Pradesh too, but the important point was the channelizing of this anger against incumbency. The channelizing was done through the stitching of the caste arithmetic from the vantage point of the most oppressed. The Left articulates a similar concern with the policies of the incumbent but it failed to win, primarily because it couldnt' channelize the discontent toward building a "class alliance" as demanded by its theoretical praxis.

Will this coalition between the upper castes and the Dalits last? Signs of having to adjust to the pattern of coalition are already in place with Mayawati disbursing ministries to Brahmin candidates who were victorious in the elections. The system of patronage with its inclusivity sounds good on paper, but the primary contradiction lies in India's villages, where there still exist enough areas of antagonism between the dominant upper castes and the Dalits. How this bargepole could be broken by Mayawati remains to be seen. It's one thing stitching up an arithmetic, but it is difficult to maintain chemistry strictly through patronage. In the early 1990s, the SP and BSP were able to formulate a similar arithmetic of the OBCs and Dalits coming together but the primary contradictions between the OBCs and Dalits resulted in the eventual breakdown of the arithmetic arrangement.

A tenuous link between the upper castes and the Dalit is therefore both a blessing as well as a bane for Mayawati's BSP. Unless she articulates a radically different programme of redistribution rather than patronage, which addresses the primary contradictions of feudal Uttar Pradesh society, through fervent State action, it would be near impossible for her to sustain the tenuous short term patnership that she has built upon now. With the composition of the BSP's ministry being consisted of tainted ministers with egregious criminal records and the party's opportunist bases (the BSP's MPs were named in nearly all the scandals that rocked India's parliamentarians in the past few years), it sure looks that politics of pilf and pork remains to stay despite the identity based victory of the BSP.

Another larger question to be asked in the context of the UP Election victory is whether process of regionalization that heralded the previous decade in Indian Politics will continue to marginalize and fragment the National polity to such an extent that the National parties would have their significance reduced to nominal levels and would they be reduced to secondary partners all across the country? The answer to this question is much more clearer. From a centralized centripetal Centre-dominated nation, India has slowly emerged into a much more participatory, decentralized and fragmented polity. Local issues dominate the agenda of choosing representatives more than abstract Central notions. It is almost sure that the regionalization and fragmentation of the Indian polity is here to stay and unless the National Parties themselves adjust to this fragmentation by metamorphosing into decentralized units, it will be difficult for them to maintain their relevance in the respective states.

Will the BSP be able to replicate this form of success in other states too? This question is more difficult to answer. As such, the BSP was able to forge into a formidable unit in Uttar Pradesh because of the efforts it made in creating a well integrated cadre structure that translated political legitimacy into power and power into expanded bases. It currently lacks such a dedicated structure in any other state. A ripple effect of the Uttar Pradesh victory can translate into a few gains in nearby municipal and state elections, but an overwhelming victory can only be possible through the building of a solid organization. For this to happen, Mayawati would have to cede her unanimous control to people who have more grounding in their respective states and the invariable tensions of working across federal units would have their say in the organizational hold of the one-woman party that Mayawati so tightly runs.

Added to all this is the slow but pernicious effect of neoliberalism that has ravaged the project of equity in this country. As withdrawal of the state from its welfare roles deepens and correspondingly, the vagaries of livelihood is made anarchically related to the grossly unpredictable market, the spread of inequality, the increased distances between the haves and havenots and lopsided development across federal regions would have their effects on the polity bringing out new variables that could affect party formation, sustenance and fragmentation. Already the voting percentages in the elections (not going beyond 45-48%) suggest a growing discord against electoral democracy and a rising legitimacy accorded to asystemic forces such as the Naxalites. How these variables will pan out would require further brainstorming.

A Cup of Woes..

For some of my closest friends, its indeed intriguing as to why I didn't take up sport-writing as a career. Truth is, I wanted to, but realized the futility of spending hours writing on sport but never having the pleasure of sharing the sweat, blood and tears as part of the games covered. Therefore, I decided being a sport fan shall be a venture that I shall possess on to death, but I will never make a profession of it.

But, again, in dry times, when the life gets morose and times get still, its sport that enlivens one's daily routine. Unfortunately, the enlivening part has worked for me only through two rather alien sports, Major League Baseball and Basketball of the NBA variety.

Cricket's 4 year extravaganza, the World Cup has on the other hand turned out to be a dam squib. The World Cup is seen as the saving grace for One Day Cricket, which has reached a stage of monotony from which its newest offspring, 20-20 cricket has promised to lift the sport from. Being a Test Cricket fan though, I have never relished a slammer-banger form of slam bang cricket. Yet, the ODI World Cup always turns out to be the exception, as an arena where there is a chance of full play of competition, emotions and achievements.

This World Cup promised to throw up sub-soap-operas in the form of this being a Swansong for senior cricketers such as Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Glenn McGrath, Sanath Jayasuriya, Inzamam Ul Haq and others. But more than being a swan song, the World Cup has been a harsh cup-ful of woeful cries from quite a few competitive teams, primarily India and Pakistan. Both these teams failed to qualify to the Filtered Super Eight, instead being relegated to exit by Ireland and Bangladesh. If the plot meant that these upset-garnering teams would march on to mount more meaningful opposition in the Super 8s, the results of the expectations turned out to be mild.

Meanwhile, Australia went about its juggernaut business and reeled on victory after monotonous victory. They are now unbeaten in a World Cup after last losing a game against Pakistan in the group stages of the 1999 World Cup, which is a long time ago. The only meaningful opposition they face is in the likes of Sri Lanka and New Zealand, who have shown versatility in attack and presence of mind at tough situations to march on to the Semifinals, alongwith the mercurial South African side, which somehow made it after an embarrassing loss to the Bangladeshis.

Achievement wise, Glenn McGrath and Sanath Jayasuriya timed their swansong performances to perfection, the former being the top wickettaker and leading bowler still. The World Cup has been marred by two stigmas, one, the death of Pakistani coach Bob Woolmer, which is widely seen as a murder and the near unending length of the tournament, which has taken the cup to become very dreary indeed.

All in All, this World Cup so far has been a cropper and only some good performances in the Semis can probably salvage some reputation back into the World's Premier competition.

Or else, the Thwacks of Alex Rodriguez and the epic quest of Barry Bonds to reach 756 home-runs in Baseball, the March of the Mavericks in the NBA Playoffs would have to soothe my sport-loving hormones.

Next phase of life..

It's indeed a changed world for me. On 24th of January, I got married. I am still trying to get into the "New Praxis" though.. .

Old Habits die hard..!

Landmark Decision...

Some time back, I had penned this blog entry:

http://srinivasanvr.blogspot.com/2005/12/cash-on-camera-scam.html

..where the Cash on Camera scam which resulted in 11 MPs being expelled, was discussed. Nearly a year later, the Supreme Court decided to upheld this decision by Parliament to throw these legislators out of Parliament, a significantly landmark decision, predictably welcomed by incumbent Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee.

Hopefully this judgement acts as some kind of notice to errant MPs, who still populate the so called hallowed desks of India's popularly elected national legislature.

Saddam's Execution

Only a week ago, was Saddam Hussein, a name that has been on the lips of global watchers and commentators for nearly three decades, executed through hanging. Hussein was still the incumbent leader of Iraq, if one considers the current dispensation a mere puppet of American and British masters who have occupied the country through illegal means and using flimsy lies to justify their assault on Iraqi sovereignty. His execution, which was televised as a grainy video taken through ostensibly a mobile camera, has been followed by responses bordering upon anger in places where ethnic or religious identity of people have been closer to Hussein's and disappointment and outrage in other places. There have also been voices which have welcomed Hussein's execution, voices that are not only emanating from the mouthpieces of Imperia, but also from ethnic identities which were persecuted for certain reasons during Hussein's chequered rule of Iraq.

A friend of mine writes this eloquent piece about how American Imperialism has cajoled, coaxed, apart from throttling and dismantling sections of third world populace to establish hegemony and this very feature dominates reactions to Saddam's execution. He writes as to how, the execution of Saddam, wrought out through the means of "victor's justice" flies at the logic of reason and rationality that the so called liberal world over Iraq based its premise for the continuing occupation of Iraq.

While I agree with his assessment of the structures of hegemony work and how this enforces pliancy of opinion even among those who are oppressed by the very same structures, and while I also agree with his characterization of the aftermath of the Saddam execution, I don't agree with his understanding of Hussein himself.

Hussein has been described by many as a coherent voice against imperialism and a person who articulated pan-Arab nationalism, someone who was a consistent secular voice and someone who upheld these "virtues" for years. This painting of Hussein has been used by anti-imperialists of late, especially after his execution to drum up more noise against the illegal occupation of Iraq.

Personally, though I disagree with this underestimation of the subversive role played by pan-Arab nationalism and its skewed variation of socialism articulated as Baathist socialism, that was propounded and expounded by Saddam Hussein.

Maidul Islam in the aforementioned article says this: "During the Iran-Iraq war, however, Saddam could manage to consolidate a significant Shia population in Iraq under the banner of Arab nationalism where the linguistic and cultural identity of both the Shias and Sunnis of Iraq was made distinguishable from the non-Arab Persian linguistic and cultural identity of Iran besides the use of repressive state apparatus for the mobilisation of war. "

While trying to explain how American duplicity (support to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war while painting Hussein a mass murderer today) has worked, fitting into the patterns of imperialism, Maidul has displayed a correct understanding of the American project in West Asia, his portrayal of the Iran-Iraq war as a battle between Arab nationalism vis-a-vis expansionist Shiaite Islamism with the primary contributing factor being Imperialism seems problematic.

I argue that the dynamic of nationalism and the contours of Islamic conflict over centuries was dialectically processed by Imperialism to achieve certain ends and not vice-versa. One only has to understand the history of conflict and politics in the Arab and Persian West Asia to see the point that I am making. The very history of the Baath party and its Saddamist version after merely a few years after formation, its articulation of socialism and its radical opposition to class based socialism as articulated by the different Communist Parties of these Arabic nations (Syria and Iraq for e.g.), the problematics of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (which was welcomed by the Post-Modernist Foucault who saw different structures of resistance from Marxist resistance) has a dynamic that goes beyond mere imperialist influence.

Seen in this prism, Saddam Hussein's portrayal as an Anti-Imperialist, to put it mildly, is wrong, in my opinion.

The above understanding is important in the context of understanding the response to American occupation of Iraq. Fuelled by an understanding that doesn't divorce from the minutaie of ethnic, sectarian and nationalist responses to imperialism, the resistance to imperialism remains fractured, incoherent and self-defeating in certain respects. The very fact that car bombings and sectarian warfare contribute more to Iraqi casualties rather than American oppressive tactics, proves this argument.

As Aijaz Ahmad had pointed out, until and unless, a clear understanding of the contradiction that imperialism has imposed between the hegemon and the hegemonized, is not realized by those oppressed in Iraq, a coherent response to Imperialism will not emerge. Therefore, even if the American forces withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, ostensibly, due to internal opposition in America, Iraq will not succeed in becoming a coherent nation that Vietnam became. The internal contradictions that plague Iraqi resistance in comparison to the class based articulations that drove Vietnamese resistance will plague the Iraqi identity further.

A Socialist in the American Senate?

Thus spake The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1937064,00.html

He is an unapologetic socialist and proud of it. Even his admirers admit that he lacks social skills, and he tends to speak in tirades. Yet that has not stopped him winning eight consecutive elections to the US House of Representatives.

"Twenty years ago when people here thought about socialism they were thinking about the Soviet Union, about Albania," Mr Sanders told the Guardian in a telephone interview from the campaign trail. "Now they think about Scandinavia. In Vermont people understand I'm talking about democratic socialism."

Democratic socialism, however, has hardly proved to be a vote-winning formula in a country where even the word "liberal" is generally treated as an insult. Until now the best showing in a Senate race by a socialist of any stripe was in 1930 by Emil Seidel, who won 6% of the vote.

John McLaughry, the head of a free-market Vermont thinktank, the Ethan Allen Institute, said Mr Sanders is a throwback to that era. "Bernie Sanders is an unreconstructed 1930s socialist and proud of it. He's a skilful demagogue who casts every issue in that framework, a master practitioner of class warfare."

When Mr Sanders, a penniless but eloquent import from New York, got himself elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, at the height of the cold war, it rang some alarm bells. "I had to persuade the air force base across the lake that Bernie's rise didn't mean there was a communist takeover of Burlington," recalled Garrison Nelson, a politics professor at the University of Vermont who has known him since the 1970s.

"He used to sleep on the couch of a friend of mine, walking about town with no work," Prof Nelson said. "Bernie really is a subject for political anthropology. He has no political party. He has never been called charming. He has no money, and none of the resources we normally associate with success. However, he learned how to speak to a significant part of the disaffected population of Vermont."

Mr Sanders turned out to be a success as mayor, rejuvenating the city government and rehabilitating Burlington's depressed waterfront on Lake Champlain while ensuring that it was not gentrified beyond the reach of ordinary local people. "He stood this town on its ear," said Peter Freyne, a local journalist.

"I tried to make the government work for working people, and not just for corporations, and on that basis I was elected to Congress," Mr Sanders said. He has served 16 years in the House of Representatives, a lonely voice since the Republican takeover in 1994. He has however struck some interesting cross-party deals, siding with libertarian Republicans to oppose a clause in the Patriot Act which allowed the FBI to find out what books Americans borrowed from libraries.

He says his consistent electoral success reflects the widespread discontent with rising inequality, deepening poverty and dwindling access to affordable healthcare in the US. "People realise there is a lot to be learned from the democratic socialist models in northern Europe," Mr Sanders said. "The untold story here is the degree to which the middle class is shrinking and the gap between rich and poor is widening. It is a disgrace that the US has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any industrialised country on earth. Iraq is important, but it's not the only issue."

In a state of just over 600,000 people he also has a significant advantage over his Republican opponent, Rich Tarrant, a businessman who has spent about $7m on his campaign. "Sanders is popular because even if you disagree with him you know where he stands," said Eric Davis, a political scientist at Vermont's Middlebury College. "He pays attention to his political base. He's independent and iconoclastic and Vermonters like that."

More links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders

JNUSU Elections 2006, math, "pre-math" and aftermath

Yours truly was a keen participant in the "Dance of Democracy", the JNUSU Election Festival for the past two years in 2004 and 2005. While both the years saw victories at the President's Post by AISA's Mona Das, this year saw the SFI retaining the President's Post after a gap of 2 years, with Dhananjay Tripathi winning the coveted post defeating the AISA's candidate, Awadhesh Tripathi.

The 2005 Election was a victory of sorts for the SFI-AISF combine. Even though they had lost the President's post, data revealed that this happened primarily because nearly 142 votes from the extreme Right JPF were transferred to Mona Das, a consequence of the hatred of the JPF toward the SFI-AISF and its problems with its organization that it broke off from, the ABVP.

SFI-AISF, however instead of being complacent despite winning 3 CP seats and 16 councillors overall/29, realized that this defeat at the Presidential post was clearly more due to a lack of solid agitations for pressing issues, that were part of their erstwhile glorious legacy established in the campus.

What followed therefore was focus on several relevant issues and emphasis on student mobilization for the same. Be it mobilizing students to protest imperialist policies pursued by George Bush during his visit to India, opposing the entry of the ship Clemenceau into Indian waters, articulating the rights of farmers who were committing suicide in hundreds across the country, all these were also some of the main tasks well accomplished by the SFI.

Yet, its primary task was to identify the level of problems faced by common students studying in the university while undertaking higher post graduate education and research. Palpably, many realized that there were quite a few students dropping out, quite a few having been forced to take up jobs even while having to continue with research etc, all owing to financial pressure. What was needed was a clear scientific survey which could determine how many such people were there in the campus and what were their aspirations with regard to necessary support that they needed to pursue unhindered academic study and research in the campus.

What followed was a dedicated questionnaire campaign by the SFI-led JNUSU which ascertained clearly the necessities of a large chunk of students who were facing financial troubles in the campus. Subsequently efforts were made to pursue the administration to substantially increase the width as well as the scope of the existing financial scholarships that they are providing to students.

All was hunky-dory till now, upto April 2006. What came as a bombshell onto the campus was the announcement by the Government to implement 27% reservation for OBCs in higher education (as mandated constitutionally in the aftermath of the Mandal Commission recommendations' implementation in the early 1990s). The entire focus of the campus changed from issues such as financial assistance, anti-imperialism and solidarity with peasant/worker movements across the country toward this controversial announcement by the Government.

On the face of it, what the Govt had announced wasn't anything new. Ever since the Mandal Commission recommendations were accepted for jobs, it was inevitable that such a ruling was to be implemented in the sphere of education too. The Govt also willed itself to not disturb the existing number of seats available in the open category and promised only to increase the seats substantially (54%) to incorporate the reserved sections.

What followed was a major resentment among a section of students representing primarily upper casteist elements which protested this move; with ample media coverage. The spill over of this motley group of protests led by doctors primarily was the formation of number of groups within an overarching umbrella organization called "Youth for Equality". In JNU, too, YFE, mainly consisted of sections from Science Schools, took up the issue of protest and went ahead with several campaigns (ostensibly inspired by the movie Rang De Basanti), which ultimately culminated in a month long fast with vague demands. The Fast acted as a trigger to mobilize large chunks of apolitical sections of the campus, into one amorphous unit of anti-reservationists.

AISA, on its part, went on a counter fast (against the YFE's fast...fast rendering the idea of fasts as fatuous) and tried to mobilize opinion among pro-reservationists in the campus. The SFI on its part, thankfully didn't take up the route of a fast to generate opinion on the necessity of reservation. It had already released the first response supporting the move for 27% reservation, while necessitating the caveat of a Creamy Layer and appropriate increase of facilities to accommodate the subsequent increase of seats to 54%.

The problem however was that by June 2006, the reservation plank had so much occupied the arena of political contestation, that all other important issues, particularly the financial assistance agitation in the offing were not on the radar of the students at large. Despite this predicament, the SFI-led JNUSU went ahead with the agitation starting from August and into September and valiantly achieved the demands it had strove to achieve. Clearly, if not for the reservation issue being such a campus-mood-clincher, the SFI-led JNUSU's achievement would have earned it enough brownie points to do better than their 2005 performance.

However, come election time, the entry of the so called apolitical YFE into the fray and further noise pitched in by organizations solely focussed on reservation such as the Bahujan Students Front, made the election almost a referendum for reservations.

In this heightened political environment featuring parties of all hues and shades and the presence of organizations solely focusing on reservation (one anti and another pro), predicting the result of the elections became a tough affair. The fact that nearly all political parties were for reservation, clearly established that this election was going to be a personality affair. In essence, for any person, whichever personality belonging to that political outfit corresponding to his/her position on reservation, based on his personality traits and popularity, turned out to be the criteria for election rather than issue based, performance based support that shaded voter opinion and behaviour in the past.

Dhananjay, the SFI candidate for President, owing to his popularity, incumbency and voter identifiability was therefore touted as a sure winner and he did become the winner, after all. The story however was the near consolidation of votes from Science Schools by the YFE candidates. Clearly, the existing composition of Science Schools tilted toward greater upper caste representation in contrast to the far more egalitarian (gender wise, caste wise, region wise) distribution of students in say, the School of Social Sciences was a factor in determining the support to the YFE. Hence the spectacular performance of the YFE in the Science Schools, where they were able to reap 6 councillor posts and managed leads of more than 230 votes against their nearest rivals in the voting for the Central Panel votes.

As regards, the victory of the AISA in 2 Central Panel posts, the reasons were very clear. The Gen Sec candidate for AISA was a person from the School of Social Sciences (and an erstwhile Hindi student from the School of Languages(SL)) who was known pretty well across the campus for his activism (a fame/notoreity that was nurtured with his role in the Prime Minister's visit to the campus in Nov 2005). The AISF candidate pitched against him was someone who was contesting this election after a year of non-activity in Student Union affairs and someone who belonged to the smaller School of International Studies. The factor of voter knowledge and identification therefore worked in the favor of the AISA candidate in this post.

Similar was the case with the Post of Vice President. Tyler Williams, the AISA candidate, an American, had the highest polled votes in the SL Councillor elections in 2005. His name being touted, because of his identity and nationality, in the media was an additional factor. Pitted against him was Murtaza, someone who was contesting elections for SFI after a gap of 2 years of relative inactivity in student politics in the campus. Added to this disadvantage was a malicious campaign on his personal life, which affected his prospects seriously. Again, a case of voter knowledge and identification played a role in the defeat of the SFI-AISF candidate.

In the post of Jt Secretary, Jyotsna, a two time councillor and sitting Convenor from School of Social Sciences, comfortably won against both the AISA and YFE candidates owing to the same factor again.

In essence, from my understanding, this election reaffirmed the Leftist, progressive credentials of the campus. The victory of two candidates from the Ultra-Left in the Central Panel, despite the good work by the SFI in achieving its primary targets for the year, were primarily because of the impact of the Reservations issue in the campus plus the subordination of all other issue based considerations to merely the factors of voter knowledge of the candidate and the voter's opinion on the reservations saga predominantly.

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.

4 years later in Gujarat

A terrific reporter (who happens to be a great friend) working with Himal Mag has come up with a riveting expose of Gujarat 4-years-post-Gujarat-2002.

http://himalmag.com/2006/october/cover_story.htm

Himal have an exclusive cover story on Gujarat:

http://www.himalmag.com/

What un-nerves a secular Indian is the stark brutality exhibited by the Bajrang Dal leaders and the pride that they wear for it.

No wonder, Praveen Swami and Anupama Katakam have shown so forthrightly how Indian Muslims are lured towards fundamentalism because of the clear dichotomization of Indian society in Gujarat under the rule of Narendra Modi.

El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido!

The People United shall always be victorious!

Heartiest congratulations to the SFI-led JNUSU for achieving a landmark deal that seals scholarships that will benefit scores of students pursuing Graduate and Post Graduate Education. After a valiant hunger strike in the campus, which included a one day sit in at the UGC headquarters, the JNUSU along with other students were able to achieve this long standing demand.

I miss being there at both the hour of pain (the indefinite hunger strike) and the hour of pleasure (the victory).

Anand has got a valiant account to narrate.

http://mayookham.blogspot.com/2006/09/hunger-strike.html

On Kanshi Ram

The Hindu's Political Editor, Harish Khare, who FYI is a PhD in Political Science from Yale University, came up with a very good article in The Hindu about Kanshi Ram, after the latter's death.

I had a few things to say about the article and wrote a letter to The Hindu.

The original unedited letter goes as follows:

Subject: Apropos the Article, "The Debt we owe Kanshi Ram" by Mr. Harish Khare.

Mr Khare succinctly points out Kanshi Ram's legacy in forging an independent political identity for the Dalits. In making this point, Mr Khare points out that two seminal developments, that of Market Reforms and the Mandir agitation were responsible for the sudden rise of the BSP, through the means of realignment of forces. Kudos to Mr Khare for this analysis. Mr Khare however, in my opinion, has missed the most important of developments that resulted in strengthening of the "Bahujan" forces, the Mandal Commission Implementation.
Together, the three Ms (Mandir, Mandal and Market) changed the political discourse in India forever. Its a pity however that the "Bahujan" consolidation, that was Kanshi Ram's dream frittered away, because of the nature of the parties that the Samajwadi Party and BSP eventually turned out to be, under the leadership of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati. Far from forging together a representative identity of the historically marginalized, thereby challenging the hold of the upper castes, the two parties went on to articulate the OBC and Dalit identities as requisites for power rather than for genuine redistribution and social change. BSP, under Mayawati therefore has disappointed those who hoped this party would realize the Ambedkarite vision of "Annihilation of Caste". Uttar Pradesh politics of late has only seen a shifting of caste alliances rather than a roadmap for caste-dissipation.

Movie Subjects on the Subjective...

Its been a while since I blogged.. well..things have changed a bit.. atleast the location has.. and there have been some fruits from the change of location..have been able to borrow some really good movies from my university library....Rashomon and "12 Angry Men".. movies, quite a vignette from the past.

"Rashomon Effect": This was a phrase I heard once in a talk given by a former distinguished correspondent for the Frontline, Sukumar Muralitharan..He was trying to use this phrase to describe the spin that was provided by academicians, politicians et al about the verdict of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. Each vested interest was providing an account of or trying to analyse an event of the past from his/her own subjective perspective. An apt term, I believe, the one used by Muralitharan.. which brings us to try to understand why indeed is the term being used?

Rashomon is a brilliant movie directed by Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese film director supposed to have been among the best in the business of his time. The story is pretty simple. A murder is being investigated in court and the people involved, the witness all give a versinn of the murder in their own terms and spheres of understanding. The truth is never revealed. Who killed the man found to be killed? What exactly transpired before his death? No one can tell for sure even after watching the movie. But what is clear is this, the human subjective element has a vital role to play and therefore any "spoken truth" is got to be prejudiced with the perspective tilted in the speaker's memory to show his/her relative 'goodness' in the whole affair of the past.

Surely the flashes from the back is lashed with details that glorify the role of the "telling" subject and therefore any jury hearing the same *must* consider this subjective element to bear upon the testimony. Kurosawa brings out this element beautifully. Even if the movie is a tad slow and has some extravagant acting by some of its actors, particularly the Kurosawa favourite Toshiro Mifune, its enjoyable purely because its a cerebral delight.

Add to the above is the fact that all the flashbacks are themselves narrated in flashback, the present itself showing characters who reveal their undersides. In essence the contours of the whole affair of murder can be reasonably ascertained by considering the present and the past including the subjects.

Yet another movie which relies deeply on the subjective element is the 1950s classic, "Twelve Angry Men". I had been itching to see this film, but never got the chance to see it in New Delhi. I had seen the Hindi remake, "Ek Ruka Hua Faisla" during a cosy channel surfing session in those lazy old days of mine in Hyderabad. The movie featured quite a few of the recognized thespians of today who owe their filming talent to the honing at the FTII, Pune. Names such as Pankaj Kapur, Suresh Raina, Anu Kapoor, etc re-enacted the original, transposed into the Indian milieu, an exercise that was done fantastically, in my opinion.

Getting to the point, "Twelve Angry Men" is a very different movie. Its wholly based in a single room, involving twelve unnamed strangers who argue about whether a person is guilty or not. Facts are reasoned out irrationally by some using the notions of identity or personal opinion. It takes a sharp interrogation by an "unconvinced till its convincing" man, played by Henry Fonda to make all others around him see reason. Reason therefore is played out inch by inch, statement by statement. Deduction and Lateral thinking prevail eventually over primordial notions and prejudices. Its almost the victory of the Enlightenment over the Dark Ages. The movie is brilliant, because it establishes without doubt that no matter how convincing it seems, anything cannot be accepted until its beyond reasonable doubt.

I had a sobering effect after watching this classic. Never again would I jump to conclusions, I tell myself, but perhaps this is just a subjective delight for the present!

I dont want to write a review of the movies, for that would involve trying to explain the story, which I think must be seen by any viewer to make out on his own, for the concern of these movies, is indeed subjectivity.

Tol Mole ke Bol! (Weigh and Tell)

Jaswant Singh always had a funny way of saying things. While the pliant media always spun it to look elegant, yours truly thought that the verbal callisthenics provided by this ex-army man was nothing short of verbal jugglery in the manner of the typical circus clown (no disrespect to the clown intended).I have never been that much enamoured of this person who has served in some of the highest ranking posts for India, ranging from Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission,to the External Affairs and Foreign Minister. Harish Khare himself comes up with an article questioning whether indeed Mr. Singh deserves the kudos that has been invariably reserved to him through a potent mixture of aura-building and spinning yarn about the BJP's honchos that was the name of the game during the NDA's regime.

Getting to the point though, "Jest"want Singh's USP is being a sophisticated version of former US Vice President Dan Quayle. I have always found his verbal gymnastics rather funny and esoteric. Sidd Varadarajan had perhaps reached his end of patience after reading Singh's "A Call to Honour" where maybe Singh went about applying his verbal pyrotechnics to written language. AG Noorani had also pointed out that this "anmol" ratan had his way of explaining things that were more tongue behind molars rather than tongue in cheek. Sample this in this book review of Strobe Talbott's book:

"However, `we explained our diplomacy in public,' he [Jaswant] said, `people will demand of me, why are you even talking to the Americans about matters that are none of their business?'" Rightly. Why indeed? Vajpayee took the easy route, which he followed throughout his term - deceive the public and the press by using flowery and opaque language. In this Jaswant was a willing accomplice. The author does not find fault with his ridiculously stilted language but with the press.

"The journalists dutifully scribbled down the oracular utterances, never asking for clarification or amplification, and then reported them to their readers as though they provided insight into what was going on in the talks." Talbott sees nothing wrong in his phrases - "Calculus of human life involved," said this famous visitor to Kandahar in his defence; "the architecture of the dialogue that had been put in place earlier will be fully implemented". Pray, how do you implement "architecture"? The sayings of Jaswant Singh would make Irish Bulls seem prosaic. Sample one - all along the untrodden paths of the future lie the footprints of an unseen hand. Jaswant Singh is more than capable of uttering such profundities.

Oratory, for the BJP, always borders upon the maverick. They have a Goebbelsian hatemonger in Narendra Modi, a dialectician in dialect, Shri Vajpayee (he always provides thesis followed by antithesis in his speeches), a clown prince orator in Venkaiah Naidu and etc. The loss of foot-in-the-saffron-mouth Uma Bharati, ultrasonic Madan Lal Khurana and Machiavellian Mahajan has reduced their acoustics quite a bit though.

Shri Jaswant, when asked to name the "mole" in his book, said that he was not in the business of "indecent exposure". After being unable to expose the "mole"cular structure of the "mole" he had in mind, his agenda seems now exposed. The mole was merely to get more of his books sold in the Mall. Sanjaya Baru of the PMOle insinuated the very same when he said there were unfortunately no "moles or malls" in his recently released book, much to the disappointment to his publishers. A mellow Jaswant now suggests that what he said has been "molested" by the media. Sample this in rediff.com: "The media misinterpreted me. Perhaps I did not communicate this in the din,".The key phrase is "I did not communicate.."! Maybe, he *should not* communicate.

BJP deputy leader of Parliament, Shri Vijay Kumar "Mole"hotra in the meantime takes offense to the fact that the PM had disrespected Jaswant for not acceding to Singh's request of an one-on-one meeting. I think that the PM would disrespect his office if he wasted time trying to extract information about the mole from the black hole that currently occupies Shri Jaswant's brain right now.

Getting to the issue though, its a known fact that the US has always tried to poke its nose, molars and surveillence teeth into India's or for that matter any country's affairs. Considering the fact that its the sole superpower in the world and is worried about nuclear proliferation, it is clear that there must have been US surveillance in India during the days when India had plans of going nuclear. That India succeeded in exploding bombs despite such a close watch was a success of India's camouflage powers as much as a failure in US' HUMINT (human intelligence). Yet, the Rabindra Singh episode also showed the weakness of India's security apparatus vis-a-vis American pressure and lure. Now this was one real "mole" episode that is to be well researched.

Politics or Corporate War?

Politics of my home state, Tamil Nadu has reached an obnoxious state where ideologies no longer determine the contours of contestation. The two major parties and their organizational makeup reminds more of corporate bodies rather than political parties. The DMK is led by its patriarch Chief Minister M.Karunanidhi who flexes his political muscle increasingly through the propaganda machinery buttressed by a monopoly television network and media empire that virtually reins as the only news network in Tamil Nadu. Combine this clout with the fact that the Information and Broadcasting Minister of our country is part of Karunanidhi's extended family, you see business ruling politics clearly in the case of the DMK.

One promise by the DMK in the recent elections was the provision of a colour TV to every poor household. The economic rationality of this decision can be gauged easily...What other way of promoting your channel than this?

The AIADMK is not far behind in the corporate stakes. It has a propaganda channel of its own, an even more rabidly hagiographic Jaya TV named eponymously after its literal dictator, J.Jayalalithaa. If the DMK has an established patron-clientalistic setup that runs from top to bottom and had been built over the years through effective propaganda and the usage of identity politics, the AIADMK represents the apogee of the very same setup, extrapolated to the highest point of patron-clientalism.

Both these formations have steady votebanks among particular caste groups (which further are entrenched in hierarchical socio-economic positions in villages) and have consanguinous linkages with the regional bourgeosie, an ideal combination of semi-feudal and regional bourgeosie linkages in effect. The ability to forge alliances with other political units which are not part of the above setup makes the difference in elections.

Basically therefore nothing much separates these two formations in the issue of ideology. Both units were formed from the throes of the rationality movement that took a distinct caste identity basis as fundamental for political mobilization and social change. Identity politics in Tamil Nadu has indeed inflicted radical change in the composition and circulation of elites but the basic exploitative tendencies remain and abound even further to certain extent.

The space for parties subscribing to ideologies and clear class groups, and arguing for redistribution, has therefore been narrowed down because of the intermeshing of caste identity and class positions. Political Consciousness starts and ends with identification of patrons from respective identity groups and this explains the rather regressed political scenario in Tamil Nadu.

There is hope for change though. As inequalities have increased and the vagaries of the policies of appeasing the regional bourgeosie have created new contradictions, differentiations on class bases are being intensified. Even in the case of identity groups, the lowest order groups, the Dalits have faced even greater subjugation and exploitation under groups that were mobilized hitherto on the goal and basis of social transformation and rational reorganization of hierarchical society. Perhaps a class combination of the working population (who are getting immiserized by the regional bourgeoisie) and the Dalit people (who are increasingly being targetted and exploited by semifeudal/feudal elements of intermediate castes) could form the basis of the mobilization of the ideologically conscious political outfits in Tamil Nadu.

The latest elections saw the DMK form a minority government, an eventuality that has had no precedence in Tamil Nadu for a long time. This in itself represents a certain change in a new direction, albeit it can be red herring. Despite forming a minority government, the cohabition of the DMK as an alliance partner of great clout at the Centre has helped it retain the fervour that normally accompanies the ruling party in Tamil Nadu (which predominantly wins more than a majority of the seats in every scheduled election).

A Riposte to Surjit Bhalla's riposte

Surjit Bhalla had written a riposte to P.Sainath's article on The Outlook sometime ago. He had quoted data from Economic Survey to show that per capita food consumption had actually *increased* in the so called reform period rather than decreasing. His precise critique of Sainath's article rests on data from Economic Survey and here is the verbatim argument by Bhalla:

So Sainath’s point that foodgrain consumption declined in the 1990s would be consistent with the poor actually having higher incomes after the reforms! But his "fact" that per capita foodgrain consumption has actually declined to the average level prevailing in a famine year is a priori startling.

Actually not that startling, because Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen warned us that the Bengal famine was not due to a shortage of supply of foodgrains. Nevertheless, I do find Sainath’s claim as somewhat of a shocker.

Alas, none of Sainath’s two claims is anywhere near the truth. Per capita consumption (strictly speaking, availability) of foodgrains averaged 364 grams per capita per day in the 1950s, and 391, 398, 420, 441 and 419 in subsequent decades with the last number being for the period 2000 to 2003 (all data from the widely and easily available Government of India, 2004-05 Economic Survey, Table S-17).

Contrary to Sainath, per capita availability of foodgrains peaked in the decade of the reforms. What about the particular year Sainath mentions, 2002-03? It turns out that in that year the availability was a high 457 grams a day!

Utsa Patnaik has written a paper on the decrease in food consumption per capita and the link can be found at :

http://indowindow.com/akhbar/article.php?article=44&category=3&issue=12

The quotable paragraph that shall effectively answer Bhalla's questions is as follows:

There is an estimated projection of commercial feed demand with respect to cereals in India made by three economists under the International Food Policy Research Institute, which we have used to obtain the net output figures in Table1. These figures are correspondingly lower than the net output figures in Table S-26 of the official annual Economic Survey which gives net output and availability every year. Per capita figures are obtained by dividing through by total population. We have used the 2001 Census total population estimate and, comparing it with the 1991 Census total, derived the annual compound growth rate of 1.85 per cent, from which the population of each inter-censal year is calculated.

The official figures of population in the Economic Survey are inaccurate; the same absolute figure of 16 million has been added every year up to 1998 starting with the 1991 Census figure; since the base was expanding but the same absolute number continued to be added, the implicit growth rate of population works out to 1.7 per cent, lower than the actual rate, and the actual effect on per capita output was to that extent understated. Since inconsistency arose, with the demographers predicting that India would cross the one billion mark in early 2000, presumably in order to adjust its figures we find that the Economic Survey suddenly added 23 million to the population in 1998 which was a peak agricultural output year, and then went back to adding 16 million the next year! It is surprising that these ad hoc and inaccurate methods have not attracted comment earlier.

Blasts from the present

I landed right in Mumbai after the exhaustive trip of "homeland". I wasn't around when a) the Shiv Sena lumpens went about their nonsensical rampage after their own maintained statue of Bal Thackeray's wife was supposedly desecrated.. and b) when yet another series of blasts rocked Mumbai and killed innocent citizens.

On b), first, I have nothing much to add to the reams of analysis that has already occupied and dissected the incident(s), yet, I can't resist adding some of my own thoughts to the issue in general.The blasts, most analysts said, exposed the soft underbelly of India's security and yet again showed the resilience of India's "Maximum City", Mumbai to recover quickly again from yet another disaster. Most of the analysts were right. The security situation in my country is weak indeed, not because of lack of effort/cogency among the agencies as such, but because of political reasons, I feel.

We have had religious riots happening before 1992, but nothing of this scale happened, to my knowledge like the Mumbai blasts, the bomb attacks at religious places etc. Much of this has had to do with the political legitimacy that has been gained by ultra-right, radical Islamist and other religious groups because of the vitiation of India's secular atmosphere. Many critics have questioned the stability of Nehruvian secularism and its contours, yet the redeeming factor about this form of secularism was that it kept the balance of peace intact rather much better than the current environment.

Eventhough mainstream India is still "secular" (the usage of the term is very particular to India in contrast to other democracies), the rise of Hindu nationalism (which is dialectically linked to the decline of patron-clientalistic Congress and centralization of power that preceded such a rise) has contributed to the breakage of that delicate balance. The Gujarat riots was a watershed..which precipitated the breakage.

Today, our citizens have been made vulnerable to terror, precisely because of what happened in Gujarat and in other places. Groups like the Lashkar, Jaish and other terrorist cults have drawn recruits within India among Indian citizens with ease since the pogrom. Secular India of the not so past, was able to politically counter this threat by providing the basic liberal tenet of minority protection and liberal rights to all; this fragile balance was wrecked by actions that had already reached an apogee on 6th December 1992.

Many analysts have alluded to the points mentioned above. Very few have added another important point, which I feel needs to be studied and mentioned.

Non-Aligned India was able to cache in on a sort of balance of power that reaped some dividends by keeping India in the green generally with the superpowers and also with other third world countries. (Contrary to perception, despite the OIC being overwhelmingly loaded with Pakistan friendly countries, on Kashmir and other issues, many countries in the OIC were with us). The drift in foreign policy of late (what is called "Crossing the Rubicon" by C. Raja Mohan in his seminal eponymous book), that has entailed a bandwagoning with the US (ostensibly to balance China, according to realists like Rajamohan), has drawn India into the battleground that has largely been a creation of the US. Dangerously, after West Asia, South Asia, with India in the fulcrum is emerging as the new geopolitical zone of American Influence. The policy of neoconservative America to project the American imperialism project in West Asia as a clash of civilizations between "Christian" developed America and "Islamist" non-modern countries and the growing tendency of India to bandwagon with this form of unilateral America is making India more vulnerable, I feel.

Hop, Skip, Travel and Ruminate

The past one month has entailed hectic travel for me. From Delhi to Mumbai to Chennai to in and around the Northern part of Tamil Nadu and the Southern part of Andhra Pradesh...the going has been swift and has been never ending.

My yearly/once-in-two-years jaunt to the state of my roots, Tamil Nadu always brings two aspects, nostalgic memories and beams of ideas about what to do in the future. The pull of my roots is an invariable force that goes along with my peripatetic life. The force reaches irrestible proportions when I reach my ancestral village(s).

This visit to my ancestral village(s) was different in a way, because now I was a social scientist with a 2 year gestation period of learning Political Science (apart from tinges of working economics, history and sociology). Hence this time, my eyes were keenly observing patterns ...such as the kind of political parties that were dominant in these areas..the structure of caste hierarchy that was so clearly visible...the decline of the rural economy and the obvious patterns of migration that seemed so apparent. Tamil Nadu's flourishing trading and service economy was also visible...

The decline of the rural economy was the most distressing aspect that could be discerned from this visit. Clearly farmers and agrarian workers were looking for opportunities beyond rural areas and were migrating in numbers to the flourishing urban areas and getting integrated with the service economy. Urban settlers (for a longer period of time) were in the meantime sending their children to the innumerable engineering and medical colleges and they are in turn joining the software sector in droves. Perhaps a longer stay could help me discern the status of the much vaunted manufacturing sector in Tamil Nadu.

The efficacy of the state as a service provider in the transport sector however has remained intact. Tamil Nadu still looks among the best in roads, essential bus services, a kudos that was always reserved for it for a long time. The education sector also seems vibrant. The explosion of technical and professional colleges seems continual despite reaching critical mass. Perhaps a study of the impact of private college education also needs to be done, the back-of-my-mind keeps reminding me.

Meanwhile the frequent train travel on second class berths across the breadth of the country toward and from Delhi/Mumbai/Chennai is teaching me several aspects too. My interactions with my co-passengers (mostly from the lower middle, middle and lower classes) have earned me rich insights. For example, a talk with a trader in Delhi told me how small traders (the typical constituency of the BJP) were facing trouble due to globalization! A 1 hour talkathon with a retailer put things about FDI in retail in perspective. Listening to woes of co-passenger textile workers in Mumbai gave me inputs about the lives of skilled artisans in the unorganized sector.

A few encomiums to the Indian Railways are also necessitated. Fares on the Indian Railways are very much affordable. The fact that the IR has attained surplus profits without any concomitant increase in fares is telling on how essential social services can be effected in tandem with sound business. An India Today survey on ministers ranks Laloo Yadav high. A IIM A Professor confesses to recommending privatization for the IR, which was heading toward doom in his opinion and is now whisking students to the Railway Bhawan to learn new lessons from the success story of this PSU. Concomitantly, an article appears in the Hindu on the PSU story and the role of the Ideological state apparatus in creating a negative aura about Public sector units.

A fifteen day hiatus in the constant travelling is used to help out with pamphleteering for the reservation campaign. This was perhaps my last contribution to student activism in the role of an insider. Personally, this past two months have been tough on my gray cells. Decisions on what to do in the future have occupied most of the time. From questions on my career goals (whether to remain an activist academician grad student in line to enter politics or become an academician grad student with options to pursue in the future), to the invariable pressures and pulls from friends and family on what to do next, mental stress has never been this tough. In the end, I have caved in to popular pressure and have taken the easier route...to pursue graduate education in the country I that loathe for its international policies, the United States and land up in academics and pedagogy back in my country after completing grad education. The redeeming factor is that there are as much serious and intelligent dissenters about policy making in the United States whom I adore as much there are outside. Perhaps I can make the best out of this decision and keep my heart and mind equally happy.

On the Media by the Media..

Siddarth Varadarajan helps me out by writing on the media from an insider's perspective and thus relieves me of having to scratch my itch to write on the biased nature of the media's coverage of the Reservation saga.

http://svaradarajan.blogspot.com/2006/06/caste-matters-in-indian-media.html

Clearly, the Television Media in India, as Prabhash Joshi of the Jansatta has argued, lacks education in social science. By fielding tyros as reporters and analysts, the Television media is doing gross injustice to coverage of social issues in our country. With the exception of a few, the Television Media-people lack the basic social senses that are required of them. Sample these headlines, "Reserve vs Deserve" in CNN-IBN, "Democracy vs Quotacracy"!..

The CNN-IBN in an eyewash attempt, called upon Vinod Mehta, Naresh Trehan, Purushottam Agarwal and one of the YFE doctors to answer the question whether the media was biased, anchored by Sagarika Ghose. If they had an iota of a sense of fair play they should have called upon an OBC/ Dalit face to put up their case. They didn't.

Barkha Dutt, was no better. I attended one of her "We-the people" shows on the issue and glaringly, Dutt took the debate forward assuming that those who were for reservation were only those who had been benefitted out of the same!. Callousness in a so called star reporter. Dutt perhaps has never heard of John Rawls or the concept of social merit. When a person was placing his views using the conceptual perspective of John Rawls, Dutt interrupted him asking, tell me..you are pro-reservation or not, without giving him space to argue out his position on a theoretical basis. Yet another proof that the mainsteam television media in this country today merely likes to scratch surfaces rather than plumb depths.

In 25 days of hectic reporting, analysing, regurgitating and news-byting, there was no serious effort to show tabulations of OBCs in the country, no serious effort to elucidate on the NSS' findings, no effort taken at all to highlight the positive effects of positive discrimination, as for eg in JNU, clearly tilting the debate in the favour of anti-reservationists. Sagarika Ghose was perhaps right...in a situation where the political class was united in this issue, it was the media that tried to play the role of Opposition, good indeed, only perhaps it would have been substantial and real, if they had provided the voices of the other an equal amount of play.

Jogo Bonito...just a few more days to go..

I remember watching on TV, the 1990 World Cup in Calcutta, the '94 WC in Salem, '98 WC in Chennai and '02 WC in Hyderabad/Tokyo. This time, its destined to be in New Delhi. As the WC caravan moves on from continent to continent, so do I move on from one city to another, a permanent nomad..

Getting to the point though, Jogo Bonito or the beautiful game, football comes suddenly into primetime focus during the World Cup, when the whole world's attention is rivetted on it. Not surprising, for the entire world is represented by nationalities participating in this month long extravaganza. Yet, for me, the World Cup is extravagant indeed in terms of amount of attention it recieves, for I feel that (and I am sure I am in the minority), somehow the quality of the World Cup is lower than say Club Football fought out in say the UEFA Champions League. And I think that this is not a phenomenon that existed previously, but a relic of the present. Ever since the gaze on the players has been immense and their careers linked invariably to their performances in the World Cup, the pressure on the players/coaches has been immense. Teams on the whole have tried to play it safe rather than go full hog with their style of play except for a few traditionally attacking teams like Brazil. Even Brazil, last time around with their conservative coach, Phil Scolari had threatened to deviate from the Jogo Bonito path, but thankfully logic dawned upon Scolari, arguably due to the pressure put upon him by his players, who were loath to play anything else apart from free flowing football (the loss of captain Emerson to injury in the early stages of the WC was yet another factor).

Last WC was a case of bad refereeing and atleast two teams, Italy and Spain had valid grievances with the kind of refereeing their games were subjected to. A resilient and sharp, yet qualitatively lowish South Korean squad forced its way to the semifinals and it had lot to thank the referees apart from their clever coach Guus Hiddink, not to mention their beloved Red Fans, whose vociferous and steadfast support was heartening to see, for an Asian.

This World Cup however, does not really excite me not because of forthcoming referee goofs, but because of the sheer amount of teams that are playing. Every 4 years, there has been a increase in the number of teams playing and this time there are 32 teams, and in my humble opinion, some squads don't actually deserve to be in the Finals. Yet again, the fact that the game needs multiple representation; I agree to that and therefore I am not going to complain about the representation of lowly squads. The trouble however, for me, lies in the fact that increasingly squads have taken a defense-first approach over the years and this World Cup doesn't seem to be different. I hope to be proved wrong. The average goals per match has been on the decrease (1990 was the lowest and 2002 wasn't great enough either).

Coming to the question of support, although I love the way Brazilians play and have a sentimental affection for Argentina, I am a keen infracaninophile and I am hoping Spain comes good at last. Being an aficianado of La Liga football, it is only normal for us La Liga fans to see some of their qualitatively superior players, expert in the virtues of technical football (ball movement, quintessentially passing quickly, taking right positions, and quicksilver moves like dribbling, possession keeping etc) to go up the next level and blend as a team to win it. Spain boasts a very exciting midfield in Xabi Alonso (Liverpool), Xavi and Iniesta (Barcelona), Fabregas (Arsenal), Albelda (Valencia), Senna (Villareal), and Joaquin (Real Betis). All clever, nimble footballers (except for Albelda and Senna who do the dirty work), who promise a lot. The concern for Spain is the forwardline. Raul is in woeful form and was among the worst players in the La Liga this season. Fernando Torres is in my opinion, overrated and David Villa is untested on the national scene. The defense seems way better than last WC and the left wing, the traditional weakness of the Spanish squad over the recent years, has been bolstered by two promising left backs, Mariano Pernia and Antonio Lopez. Spain sound interesting and look good on paper.

As for soccer writers, the evergreen caustic football critic Brian Glanville will be at his crackling best on www.worldsoccer.com, I am sure as well as in the Sportstar. The fact that this WC is to be telecasted on ESPN/Star is also good news. These sport channels have a good bevy of perspicacious commentators well versed in technical stuff and they can add a lot of sense to the proceedings. World Cup football must be a treat to watch yet again, hopefully, so should there be a increase in the average goals per game and the reincarnation of the Beautiful Game.