Civil Obedience

Recently I was watching a video where Matt Damon reads Howard Zinn, and starts off by saying that world's wealth needs to be reallocated. The video got a lot of attention on social media, because everybody thought that those were Matt's own words. I liked it. Not because I like Matt Damon, which I do. But I liked what he quoted. Particularly, the place where he quoted Zinn to say that our problem is not Civil Disobedience but civil obedience, he got my memories working.

When I was young, I used to think of how to make things more equal for people. That was not in the intense way the previous generation dreamt of. I did not dispute or discredit their dreams. But I saw around me, how the philosophy, they thought would bring equality to mankind, failed to do so, and fostered authoritarianism on the other hand. I also realised that market forces are inescapable like nature. But I knew that the answer from the market place couldn't be a sacrosanct one, because the market existed before the Marxist philosophy and brought about huge income and wealth difference and exploitation; and it continued to do so, even after Marxist/ Socialist system of political governance gave away to 'capitalism'. I had dreamt of a new system that will acknowledge the market forces but will have checks and balances that will allow uniform opportunity and improve basic living standards of multitudes who were still at the bottom of society.

But more importantly I was willing to raise my voice for that. I also realised that I was much more muted than my previous generation. But we did rebel and disobey.

Now, I see a large section of the present generation to be totally conformist and harbouring half digested dogma about 'capitalism'. A host people in their late 20s and early 30s, that I know directly or indirectly, display this. I have seen on FB and otherwise, how these people foment majoritarian views, and are hoping for one authoritarian capitalist messiah to deliver their redemption. I find this rather sad. Even the clamour for Lokpal was just a rather ignorant and half-passionate act of incrementalism; the protests were neither sustained nor did they call for any deep understanding of the issue nor personal sacrifice. This was so different from what we knew of our previous generation, and even from our generation. Very few, among the young educated upper middle class is now taking personal risks to bring about a change. And the more one is comfortable in his or her cushy life, bestowed by Mammon, the God of Capitalism, more vocal one is of majoritarian and often repugnantly oppressive social views.

I know that the life I chose, was different from what many from the previous generation chose. I know that I made compromises, when I dreamt of a change without much disruption. In a way, I have started questioning myself and my generation for walking this path, where we just conformed, hoped someone else will bring the change and thus paved way for the next generation, which is steeped into civil obedience and hedonistic selfishness.

My friends, NaMo's friends

(Posted on Facebook as a note on 7 April 2013 at 17:29)

Every time I speak or exchange opinions with people in my milieu in this maximum city, who are in favour of Narendra Modi becoming the prime minister, I become despondent, sad and angry.

Now, first let me acknowledge and admit a few things. I don’t like Modi. And I think that he is a great user and abuser of statistics and the best political PR machine this world has seen since Joseph Goebbels. But that is not the crux of my admission. I do grudgingly admit that he has been a better administrator than most of the present crop of heads of provincial governments or most of the ministers and cabinet members at the central government. And that I do not have substantial reasons to believe that he has an economic rent seeking side, which is now par for the course for almost everybody in public service (aka politics/bureaucracy in India).

In today’s India, having these two qualities, is a compelling qualification. And I do agree that these two are almost sufficient for one to be chosen as the head of a province or for that matter a country, if of course there are no other serious disqualifiers. Now, about probable disqualifiers of Modi, I wish to maintain a bit reticence, on this occasion. My apprehension about Modi is a hunch arising out of his authoritarian demeanour and my reading of the history -history of Germany after WW I and rise of Hitler, history and popularity of Mrs. Gandhi and her emergency and its oppressive excesses and lastly history of Sharad Pawar and institutionalisation of rent seeking politics. And please note that I am have not mentioned Godhra but for this sentence.

While what the examples of Hitler and Indira Gandhi point to, is not difficult to comprehend, but it will suffice to say that both the leader were loved by the middle class and their contemporary constituencies, to emerge as dictators and oppressors later. But I think I should elaborate the Pawar analogy a bit. Growing up in the eighties, in an Eastern province, infamous for phlegmatic response by government, I often heard paeans about this Chief Minister in Maharashtra, which went like, "Sharad Pawar is a great administrator! While he takes bribe, the job gets done."  The business class and common man, completely fed up with the lethargy of the state and bureaucracy of the 70s and early 80s, welcomed this model, whereby a legislator, a representative of citizenry, a head of a province can seek and obtain huge financial gratification. The seeds of wide spread rent seeking which was blessed by the privileged class then proliferated across the country and manifested in Bangarappa, Jayalalitha, Mulayam Singh Yadav, YSR, Yeddyurappa and Gadkari to name a few, sparing no political hue at all.  I suspect that the people who are rooting for Narendra Modi today are ignoring this historic lesson. And hoys, I am told Hitler was not corrupt, as if that is the only evil human beings are capable of.

Another problem of speaking out against Narendra Modi, as the projected leader of the country is the fact that Congress has become completely indefensible in recent time. So, for the time being, I will have to suppress my opinion about him. But the lack of an alternative, between an out of touch, failing (and falling; everyday) and dynastic party which is in a state of total disarray, and an extreme right wing party led by clearly a potential autocrat, is the reason I feel pretty despondent.

But the reason I feel partly sad and partly angry, because over a period of time I have observed the people among urban upper middle class (and unfortunately Hindu) who support Modi as the rightful candidate for the head of state, and I have discovered a set of some common beliefs they hold, which they either express explicitly or imply through winded logic. From this correlation, of commonality of a set of rather pernicious beliefs and approval and patronage of Narendra Modi, I suspect an underlying causality, which points to a severe polarisation of this milieu. For me that is a big loss. Loss of friends, not as friends but as fellow thinkers. To me it is another perilous step in the continual shrinkage of that narrow space that is left for social and economic liberals in this country. And that makes me sad and angry.

As I write this, I realise that I will end up sharing this with some people. And I think that I owe it to them for them to know what these common set of beliefs that I have discovered among those who support Mr. Modi as the next prime minister. Without any further ado I start enumerating them:


NREGS was a rank bad idea because one, few or all of the following,

• People got money without doing work and that is not right
• All the money, or most of it was pilfered away
• It took away cheap labour from city construction sites, their homes and Punjab’s fields
• NREGS did nothing to bring back or save the economy during the slowdown; (Lord Keynes, you faggot, eat your heart out!)

All pro-poor subsidies are bad,because one, few or all of the following,

• Subsidies are evil
• Subsidies foster laziness and inefficiency
• Subsidies never reach the people
• Subsidies are the only reason we have deficit, not tax evasion

Poverty:

• Most poor are responsible for their economic plight, and neither the state, nor citizens who are better off,should 'sacrifice' anything for them.
• Poverty is still largely caused by high population and the tendency of poor people (and Muslims) to procreate indiscriminately. We must have strict China-like rules to contain this (same people, for all you know, are making presentations about demographic dividend of India to their Board and Investors. And ironically, they forget that the Congress that they hate so much, had propagated this thought during Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi era.)

Casteism and affirmative action:

• Casteism is not relevant anymore
• People from lower castes are responsible for their economic plight
• There is no correlation between caste and poverty
• Reservation should be totally abolished; there is no case for affirmative action based on Caste
• Upper caste Hindus are actually economically more hard up now

Muslims:

• Muslims are responsible for their economic plight
• All or most Muslims are planning to raise large families to change the ethnic profile
• Muslims have been unduly pandered by all non-BJP parties
• Muslims are 'mostly'anti-Indian

Privatization is panacea:

• Education should be fully privatized.
• Healthcare should be fully privatized
• The air we breathe, should be privatized (well, not yet, but perhaps not too far)

Corporatization is a panacea and everything can be solved through that

• Country, state, cities,government all should be run as a company
• Politicians should be"incentivised and attracted to this 'sector' ", by large salaries and thus they will not be corrupt (this view is courtesy one Mr. Chetan Bhagat, whois a fiction author parallel to bollywood in quality and popularity, and a commentator on anything under the blue sky, patronised by the Tabloids of India)

Other issues:

• All or most civic problems in Mumbai and NCR is attributable to illegal Bangladeshi Immigrants
• Dual income, less than forty,financial services professionals, having own house in south or central Mumbai,worth more than a million dollar, are true representatives of Indian middle class
• Capital punishment is just and should not be abolished
• They all tend to 'like' one Republican canard going around on the FB about how Obama's 'socialism' is equivalent to giving equal and average grade to everybody in the class and howthat will take the country/ society down. They can be forgiven their ignorance that Obama is not a socialist. But this preference suggests that they believe their socio-economic privilege is entirely on account of their merit and the social milieu they are born into has nothing to do with it. This is why they are against any sort of subsidy, reservation and they believe that the poor are responsible for their plight.

Narendra Modi & Gujarat:

• Befor Narendra Modi, Gujarat was a backward state
• The inherent entrepreneurship of Gujaratis, has nothing to do with Gujarat's growth
• Narendra Modi has not done anything wrong and cannot do anything wrong
• You can't criticise Narendra Modi because Congress is rank bad even if you are not a Congress supporter(what a sterling peace of logic that is!!)

Culpability of Sonia Gandhi/ Narendra Modi:

• In spite of various evidences,statements by senior police personnels who have been in Gujarat those days, the state of Muslim settlements in Ahmedabad and interim pronouncements by various committees and commissions, Narendra Modi is innocent as he has not been declared guilty by any court or the SIT.
• Sonia Gandhi is downright corrupt and has made anywhere between 10 to 100 billion dollars and no court verdict is required for them.

This is not a complete list, but almost complete. I know that the moment I put this out for public consumption, I will have people among the supporters of Modi screaming hoarse "I don't endorse point number 2, 3 and 7, or 1,6 and 9 etc.!!!" Sure. I am not claiming 100% correlation. But, if any of these supporters claim that they do not, in the heart of their heart, support or endorse most or all of the above,then they are lying.

And that is sad.
This piece is not about a choice between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. This piece is actually not even about Narendra Modi, although he embodies the underlying issue. This is about the fundamental beliefs of those who are favoring Modi, and for us to ponder about what that portends.

Of Panagariya and Pappu

If Panagariya was a scion in Congress party, and someone in media got hold of his seminal paper “The Myth of Child Malnutrition in India”, the headline would have been "Panagariya Pappu says there is no child malnutrition in India.” (I have the pdf file of the paper and can share on request; anyway it is available on Google). But then Panagariya is an academic with cultural background of a commercial community, spouting ultra right wing economic theories in the domain of the dismal science and thus the darling of the baby faced urban right wing Hindu middle class.

But we can’t blame Panagariya. He says what he believes to be true.  In our new found devotion to rationality, we think that emotions and cultural influences do not and should not matter. But the fact is they do, and they do more than reason and rationality. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about a set of economic theorists in his celebrated Fooled by Randomness, “They believe in reason and rationality – that we should overcome cultural impediments on our way to become a better human race – thinking we can control our nature at will….”. The fact remains we cannot ignore the overwhelming and all pervading influence of our cultural background.  Thus Panagariya believes that child malnutrition is not an issue because that is what he has learnt from his childhood and/or has inherited as a legacy from his forefathers.

Thus Minhaz Merchant (whoever he is), writes in ET calling Amartya Sen an ayatollah of secularism, “Profs Bhagwati and Panagariya ‘rightly’ argue that economic growth, allied with welfare schemes which build productive capital assets (rather than the NAC-Sen-Dreze formula of handouts which create dependencies) is the most efficient development model for India.” Of course, if your father went to University of Berkeley in 1950 with a future head of state, (when mine was a fatherless youth in Bhagalpur with just a school degree living on one meal a day, with no decent clothes and absolutely no footwear, and rest of the country is in dire poverty) you will surely say so. You are culturally wired to do so. You do not believe your privilege as an act of randomness but rather a right.

One may say that in his paper Panagariya has established through data and reason, the thesis that he has posited. People who take that path are not aware of the academic ways. They are not aware how any term paper, dissertation or thesis is written.  Any such academic work starts with the thesis itself. In case of the work of a younger academic, the idea often comes from her guide or mentor.  In case of a senior academic like Panagariya, the idea starts within, shaped almost entirely by his own cultural influences and his past line of work, which again was chosen because of his background and his psyche. After the thesis is chosen, then goes the data and logic to substantiate it. Thus just because there is data and analysis in an academic paper does not make it unbiased and universal truth.

I agree with much of Dr. Jagdish Bhagwati’s works on trade and globalization, although he pays only lip service to ‘making the human face of globalisation more agreeable’.  I agree with his trade theories perhaps because it resonates with the fact that my father was a sailor and traveled the world and my thoughts are shaped by those stories (there goes my influence). And my own training in the normative sciences and simplistic non-science called “management studies” also shaped my beliefs to develop a liking to those theories. But that is beside the point. I note that Dr. Bhagwati was born in 1934, which makes him exactly the same age as my father. And that he went to Cambridge in the fifties. Now, I would not really like to repeat the gloomy melodrama of what my father was doing in the fifties, but I note with keen interest that in a rough biographical sketch on one IMF website ( http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/09/people.htm) Bhagwati’s family is mentioned to be ‘modest in means’. His father, in pre-independence India was a Chief Justice and they lived in the heart of glamorous-even-then city of Bombay. My grandfather, around the same time, had just left the family profession of land owning and tilling in rural Bengal, and got himself a job in some coal mine in Central India, because the income from the land was not enough to feed 8 children (just one more than the Bhagwati family), let alone sending them to colleges with names of Englishmen in big cities or even abroad.  My daughter, who goes to a school, on the tip of South Mumbai, teaching international curriculum, rightly thinks that we are poor, as most of her friends’ families have more than luxury sedans like Mercs and BMWs, most of them carry expenseive cellphones which neither me nor my wife carry or perhaps will carry and they have around 2-3 holidays abroad each year, not counting the short shopping jaunts to London or Dubai.  But living in West-Central Mumbai, paying a monthly rent that can sustain two families comfortably in an Indian village, I have no such misplaced perception. Thus, if my daughter becomes a celebrated economist like Dr. Bhagwati (no such signs within a lightyear yet) and promotes neo-classical economics while citing ‘childhood of modest means’ I will not be surprised at all. (I am not even mentioning that Bhagwati also comes from a linguistic community famous for their prowess in business and entrepreneurship, knowing that Nagar Brahmins will jump on me, although there are more Nagar business people than there are in my home state across all caste.)

Thus, my point, my friends, is very simple.  Our world views are almost totally shaped by the cultural influences that we have, our upbringing, our socio economic background etc. It is also shaped by some deep rooted biological self interest, which is not exactly the explicit variety of petty selfishness, but more reflexive responses in our overall demeanor and discourse.

We should, thus make no mistake that today’s socio-economic-political debate is just a healthy debate in a plural society.  The virtual world in India, the social media that is, populated extensively by the upper middle class urban and semi urban people from the majority community, is clearly tilting to one side. It is not a debate. It is a war call of the ‘haves’. It is the return of the vested interest, which have been vested not explicitly over a lifetime but seeped in and took roots over generations. It is very clearly the sabre rattling of the powerful for what they think is their claim. It is the assertion of the privileged of what they think is right (as Merchant pronounces in his article in ET) in the economic arena. It is the muscle flexing of the majority community in the political arena, which wishes to reclaim the middle ground lost to secularism, by attaching the prefix of pseudo to it to denigrate it thoroughly into an epithet. But I can’t blame them. It is almost biological and much deeper rooted than they can imagine and thus have no control over them.

Even after me doing an MBA (can you f****ing believe it!!!) and being in the business of money for two decades, I think some at my place of work harbours deep distrust and mild detestation towards me as I am considered an intellectual (which is a serious expletive around here), which I think largely comes from the racial association she makes, and perhaps rightly so. So when Panagariya writes child malnutrition is not an issue, but growth and trade is, we need not blame him, or look into his various degrees and papers, we just need to look into where does he come from and pardon him, as he is just another soldier in this battle being fought on many fronts.