Culture of Bengal - violence?

The longest poll season in the largest working democracy came to an end and the nation heaved a sigh of relief. The tempo and temperature started coming down. One vocal and articulate leader from the potentially victorious party, paid a back handed tribute to the departing prime minister, some people unblocked some others on the Facebook and I came to watch a news channel after a month or so.

While I avoided all the cacophony and vitriolic debates that dominated these channels, I did not miss out the essential information regarding this very important national process, thanks to some selective reading of newspapers and few websites. And one thing disturbed me the most.

Over the long and antsy period of a month and five days of Lok Sabha election, there was only one state from where news of electoral violence flowed in continuously. Before the elections, the infamous riots happened in Muzaffarnagar. While everyone poltically discerning enough, knows that it was orchestrated clearly with the election in the view, it was not around the voting process and it had more the tag of a communal riot, than a political skirmish. A comparatively marginalised Bodo faction massacred Bangla speaking Muslims in Assam, which again was less about the Lok Sabha election than the age old ethnic and migrant strife peculiar to Assam. And then, after the polls were over, the tinderbox of Meerut had a few unfortunate sparks around a water tank. Lastly prennially sensitive Hyderabad witnessed a burnt religious flag and tragic loss of few lives this evening, two days after the voting has stopped.

But across all five phases of the longest election season ever, violence seemed to be the order of the day in my home state, West Bengal. Not the usual Bihar or Uttar Pradesh, but West Bengal. All varieties of it.  Intimidation, heckling, rigging, booth capture, mob attacks, group and finally on the last day a bomb was hurled in Posta, in the city of Kolkata and three lives lost elsewhere in the state. SHAME!!

The history of political violence in Bengal, perhaps goes back to an incident that did not take place in present day Bengal, but in a town which was part of what was the undivided large province of Bengal, and is now part of Bihar. On the evening of April 30, 1908, Khudiram Bose, along with his senior accomplice, Prafulla Chaki, hurled, what was probably the first bomb, during the violent independent struggle of India.  The seed of militant struggle for independence was sown that day and continued with the likes of the trio of Benoy, Badal and Dinesh, Surya Sen of the famous Chattagram Armoury raid, Bagha Jatin and the mysterious master of disguise, Rasbehari Bose. Now, that strife was against the colonial occupier of the land, the British oppressors. It was covered with patriotic glory, sacrifice and not small amount of romanticism.

Then came communism. Formed in the twenties, Marxist movement in India had strong foundational links to Bengal and the armed struggle for independence. M N Roy and Abani Mukherjee, two of the founders of Communist Party of India were from Bengal and were deeply involved in violent anti-British struggle. Post independence, first signs of people's movement emerged - both from the mills and the farmlands. Oppressed by the erstwhile colonial rulers, and then forgotten by the new rulers, capitalists and landowners of their own ilk, farmers and mill workers sought their redemption in the ideology of Karl Marx, which always had an association with violence. In 1967, in a village of North Bengal named Naxalbari, police fired on a posse of protesting tribal farmers. The movement had the backing of a breakway faction of the CPI(M), which itself was a splinter of erstwhile undivided Communist Party of India (CPI). CPIM, or CPM, was very strong in West Bengal and had already replaced CPI in the region. Led by Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal, this movement soon captivated the minds of the educated youth and spread as a violent ideological struggle all. Naxalbari movement thus became post independent India’s first armed insurgency, having wide presence in Bengal. The provincial Government also retaliated with its might and human rights were soon relegated to oblivion. Violence engulfed West Bengal in the late sixties and early seventies.

Meanwhile, as a continuation of the pre independence scenario, mainstream communists continued to be persecuted, although by now they had entered the parliamentary process. The engagement between communists and the government and other parties remained very acrimonious and physical violence became a tool to settle disputes and territorial issues. In 1970, came one of the darkest days in the political history of Bengal, a blot which has still not faded totally and has been exhumed recently. In the communist dominated agrarian town of Bardhaman, a family of Congress sympathizers was slaughtered by a large number of cadres of CPM, in the middle of the night. The gruesome details of the massacre ringed all across the state. But it also became the lingua franca of Bengal politics.

In 1977, the Marxists came to power, and stayed there for over three decades.  Soon violence and intimidation became the standard implement of the ruling forces. Equipped with the well oiled and widely spread cadre network, CPM and its allies, took control of all aspects of the province. The separation between party and administration were totally obliterated and the party became arbiter of all disputes and conflicts – political, social and even familial. Economic situation deteriorated, gradually but in a sure and secular trend.  This translated into despair and soon anger became the prevalent emotion in both private and public discourse, and in group or bilateral engagement. A minor vehicular incident involving a private car and a lesser vehicle or a pedestrian on any street of Kolkata, would invariably degenerate into a mass outrage against the private vehicle as it epitomized prosperity.  Battles between neighborhood soccer teams would see swords being pulled out and blood being spilled and even lost lives. This is still the urban or the semi urban story. In the villages and small towns, total reigns of terror loomed large. Hooligans, backed by political patronage, aggrandized economic benefits, intimidated communities, violated women at large and killed at will. While the leaders at the top looked away, these elements delivered election after election, and this went on, as if never to cease.

In 2011, after decades of strife, Mamata Banerjee and her party finally broke down the left hegemony and came to power amidst slogan and hopes of change, “poriborton”.  Some people who had ears to the ground, had already foreseen this. As they say, when a ship sinks, it’s the rats who abandon it the earliest. Similarly, people who are cognizant of grassroot politics and polity of Bengal, witnessed the changing colours of the lumpen elements, on whose misdeeds rode the CPM juggernaut.  By the time the new government formed, the new party in power, which was anyway very akin in ideology (if it had any) and style to the one they conquered, acquired all these elements.  For a while, the Trinamool leader talked of how there will be no violence or vengeance. But a violent culture which has evolved and emerged over almost half a century is not easy to be done away with, especially if the leadership is not sincere about eradicating it altogether.  Thus sporadic violence continued and showed its ugly face during the Lok Sabha elections. In the backdrop of the longest and perhaps one of the most peaceful parliamentary elections, West Bengal stood out like the proverbial sore thumb with its wide spread incidents of violence.

But it is gone now. On the aftermath of it, lie a centrally decimated Congress, an almost extinct CPM and regionally supreme Trinamool. The leadership of each of these parties has to introspect and act, if they sincerely wish to completely exterminate the language and use of violence and redeem some esteem for the state.  The central leadership should ponder if it is worth maintaining a base, simply based on one strongman, Adhir Choudhury, whose past and present is marked with use of force.  CPM, if at all they would like to remain relevant, should first repent and regret the total subversion of the state machinery and institutions that they did, and did it with force and violence, and make public and corrective actions. And finally the victor should publicly condemn all use of force, bring all perpetrators, including from its own ranks to justice and spread a language which is civil and rational and not angry, rabble rousing, uncouth and inciting.

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.

End of Reason?

First, there was monarchy, where a ruler ruled mostly by force, owned national property, had right to collect taxes but no accountability, and was mostly hereditary. Citizens rarely had a chance to elect/ select/ nominate the rulers.

Then came the Roman Republic, where the senate was nominated/ elected, but mostly by the patricians, the landed gentry.

Then came parliamentary democracy, where people elected their rulers, both local and national, who framed laws and also formed part of the executive.

Parallelly, judiciary was envisaged and established to judge crimes and disputes and enforce laws. Further it was taken out of the influence of legislature and executive to ensure its independence.

That has been the path to the present system. And it is more or less similar across all developed and even a large number of democratic developing countries.

India is a fragmented country – regionally, linguistically, culturally and religiously. At the time of the birth of modern India, Western skeptics believed that it will not sustain as an integral state. But it has survived and grown stronger. The magic glue that bonds this entity is its democracy, its commitment to uphold the institution. Only once in the history of the modern India, in 1975, was it subverted, and the perpetrator suffered the wrath of the people at the hustings.

As a society, as a polity, our moral fibre has been weak for centuries now. In an earlier article I had written about how citizens ignore their own misdemeanors and breaches of law but pounce on the politicians as if the politicians came in a space ship from a different planet. This is hypocritical, escapist and gravely wrong. But batting for political class has never been easy in any part of the world at any point of time, and especially when you are amidst one of the most corrupt lot in recent times. In the backdrop of large scale political corruption, and raging inflation the emotions on the street are understandable.

But blaming it on the weakness of an actually strong and robust system is the second layer of error. We need to understand that creating one more layer of governance is not a panacea because as a corrupt society, we have the pernicious ability to undermine that institution as well. Thus it is unlikely that it is going to be a long term solution. A society, which has thrown up immoral political leaders and corrupted judges, can corrupt the ombudsman and her team as well.

If that ‘civil society’, comprising of 1.5 million people ‘represent’ 1.1 billion citizens, outside the extant norms of democracy, and the media believe it to be so, and thus the government finally capitulates, so be it. But this is not a “permanent” solution, and will have finite and perhaps limited shelf life if we do not change ourselves.

In terms of legislations, a more permanent one has been legislated in recent years. Citizen’s right to know the actions and the thoughts behind those actions, of the executive is an immutable and inalienable right. It is also immensely empowering, even within the present system as has been borne out in our recent experience. While it has not been easy to get the present day RTI legislations enacted, it was done through sustained advocacy and discussion (hallmarks of a developed state), without subverting the fulcrum of our sovereign existence - the parliamentary democracy. Without any brinksmanship, any hullaballoo, any street melodrama and any concentrated public focus on one individual. In fact Aruna Roy got more news print in airing her differences on Jan Lokpal, than her immense contribution towards bringing out RTI.

What is being set here is a dangerous precedent. I do not need to spell it out here, as it has already been outlined by various people who understand the risks of this (here is a sample). And what is being sought, is flawed, and at best temporary.

I am worried and sad about the celebrity worshipping, escapist and herd mentality of the TV watching and Newspaper reading urban milieu. In place of introspection and self correction, what is happening here is witch hunt in the wrong presumption that the political class is completely born and bred in isolation and then imposed upon the hapless citizens who have pristine morals which then gets completely subverted by these extraterrestrials. This cannot bode well in the long run.

My friends on the other side say that “This is the beginning.” I can’t help but agree (disagreeing is not healthy in these days of “either you are with us or against us”). But I am not sure this is the beginning of what. End of reason?

Jan Lokpal Bill - Us and Them

Like all sane and sensible citizen, I am against corruption. Thus, in principle I really do not have anything against Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal and their associates and patrons. However, I have a slightly different take on these mega anti corruption waves, or more anti-politician wave that we see from time to time.


I think, as a civil society we have a found an easy scapegoat in the political class to carry all our sins. As if our pronouncement is that the politicians are a complete different species, having 24 pairs of chromosomes while normal human beings have 23 (dogs – 78, chimpanzee – 48, tomato – 24). We have conveniently ignored the fact that politicians come from the same milieu that we form and belong to. Thus as individuals and as a group, we have become outwardly critical and carping, rather than being introspective, honest and corrective.

While the big corruption of the political class is not to be absolved by any means, ignoring the small but pernicious and seeping misdemeanors of the common man (irrespective of the socio economic strata) in their day to day lives is a bigger risk. Our whole approach has become to correct the design defect of a skyscraper after it has been fully erected and inhabited. I am afraid, that is not a sensible approach, and beware, the casualties will be high.

It is well known that the various super luxury vehicles belonging to a number of Mumbai-Pune based mega industrialists regularly travel at close to 200 kmph on the good stretches of the Mumbai Pune Expressway, traumatizing, few rare drivers in the middle lane, who are trying to obey the speed limits. Where is the influence of political class in this?

Where is the politician, when people break traffic rules – cars breaking signals, stopping on zebra crossings, pedestrians crossing the road at busy junctions on foot in spite of existence of footbridge and subways, pedestrians walking on the road, in spite of some nice pavements which have come up in parts of south Mumbai? Where is the politician when the residents of a chawl dump their garbage regularly on the road, because the nearest garbage bin is 200 mtrs away? Where is the dirty scumbag politician when the paan chewing multitudes of all economic class defile the country without any remorse or second thought? Where is the politician, when the celebs who are standing next to Anna giving voice to his movement and sharing the glory, go back and pay and accept cash as compensation to avoid tax?

Educated urban middle class is the hallowed group which holds the responsibility of being honest and upholding the value system of the society. And it is this class which has taken to air travel in the last decade in a big way. So, when the air hostess announces to switch off the mobile phone, which politician exhorts the executive, the businessman, the good mother and housewife to keep chattering till the plane takes off and then again just before the wheels have touched down? Where is that scoundrel politician in this scene? Who is to be blamed when my engineer, MBA colleague says that “I prefer corruption as an efficiency tax than no action at all” ? Where is the politician when academics eulogise jugaad as our source of innovativeness?

And we expect that one severely flawed, concentrating, counter-democratic and unsuitable bill for a large country like India will solve our entire corruption problem? While the entire society goes about breaking the small rules and laws that small people can break, we believe that putting another law to stop the misdemeanors of the big and powerful will solve our problem of corruption forever? We believe that “our” corruptions, because they are minor (perhaps because we do not have the opportunity to indulge in bigger corruption or we lack the unpardonable daring and chutzpah to commit acts of big corruption) are not of any import, but the corruption of politicians are completely unconnected to the utterly debased moral fibre of the larger society and polity. If politicians were a homogeneously separate species than us, perhaps there refrain would be, “Wah Chachu, tumhara pyaar pyaar, aur hamara pyar sex?”

A society, which has misinterpreted its fundamental advice from its scripture and ignored the probity of means just to justify the goals, and such mindset, which has been exacerbated by last two decades of unbridled materialism and personal profit seeking, will continue to generate politicians, bureaucrats and corporate executives, who are nefarious, corrupt and criminal. A society which does not follow rules will get rulers who do not follow rules. A polity deserves the leaders it chooses.

Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal should ponder over this and exhort their followers to look inward, and around themselves and bring about the changes at home and neighborhood first. Without that, RTI will just become a tool of self seeking motives, and such mega events of fasting, will just be flashes in the pan and festivities for the flower children.

Happy Diwali 2007

Wish all of you and the families a very Happy Diwali and a prosperous year ahead!

My, my, aren’t these prosperous times already!!

Sensex is having its dalliance with 13,000 levels. There are articles abound about corporate salaries going through the roof or through the sky. Most of the people we know are doing very well.

An acquaintance, a high flying executive I met lately, was very disappointed – “Almost everybody is drawing a 1 cr salary!! And I thought I am being paid well.” Profound sadness. Needless to say that he quit his job soon for a salary which crossed that aspirational mark. Recently I visited a friend who has bought an apartment in Mumbai for close to half a million dollars (~Rs. 2.0 crores) and spent at least $100k (~Rs. 40-50 lakhs) in doing it up. And then the Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini Study told us that there are 83,000 dollar millionaires in the country, toting up to an aggregate of US$290 bn of wealth. My colleague pooh-poohed these numbers; according to him, the real numbers should be 150,000 and US$ 500 bn. respectively. Being close to a dollar millionaire himself, he certainly knows better. But given my humble middle class background, I get daunted by these very very large numbers. Okay, go ahead and teach me the effect of inflation and tell me that these are not as large as they seem. Well then, these are very modest numbers. But, I am still incredulous. I am not making as much money and not being a smart man about personal finance, I have much less than I should have, even with my modest income. So, if the evil inflation has made 1 crore a modest number, I and my family should have been destitute. But we are not. I had some muesli for breakfast this morning. By God’s grace!!

Oops!! I am wrong there. Apparently, it’s not by God’s grace. It’s by the grace of Dr. Manmohan Singh and the magic called “Economic Reforms” that he had unleashed on this country. It seems, in real and comparable terms, I am actually quite poor; only the standard of living has gone up. Don’t you remember the startling stories of seventies, when your foreign returned dad, uncle, second cousin (or whoever) used to regale you about how a janitor in a Rotterdam hotel came in a Volkswagen and later bumped into him in a downtown bistro? India is much more developed now and the standard of living has gone up. And thus poor people like me are not exactly destitute – in fact it is so much better, that we can afford to employ a chauffer to drive our cars – at least I can.

And amidst all these, the wretched soul that I am, I suddenly remember the suicidal farmers of Bidarbha, the starving millions in Orissa, the flooded and homeless villagers of Narmada valley, the child laborers who are neither here nor there after a new notification, India’s appalling ranks in Human Development Report and Global Hunger Index, bla bla bla… I think about these and I ponder – if the country has really developed so much that 1 crore is a modest sum and a poor man is employing a chauffer, then why the hell are all these miserable party poopers dying of poverty, hunger and disease.

A kind friend steps in and explains. He starts by stating the truth first. The reason that I am poor is because I am stupid. And that I am stupid is being ratified by the fact that I have not understood how an economy works even after a business degree from a school of repute. He assures me by stating the following:

1. Free market is meritocracy; so people without merit will be poor (I agree with that as it applies to me quite aptly) and people with merit will be rich (can’t say much about this though)
2. All you are witnessing is a temporary phenomenon. Soon another great mechanism called “Trickle Down” will happen and every thing will be, as they say, hunky dory, and the farmer in Bidarbha will soon have a Budweiser at the end of the day. (I am quite happy as long as part of that trickle happens through me)
3. It (the “Trickle Down”) should have happened a little earlier, but for those bas***d politicians, you know. They are very corrupt and they do all those bad things they show in Hindi Movies. (yeah yeah, we all hate politicians, don't we? Somtimes I wonder, without them who will we put all the guilt on?)
4. Actually, this poverty-shoverty is not our worry; it should not be. It’s the job of the politicians to take care of these, but they are f***ing up this great “Indian Story”.
5. So shut up and don’t spoil the Diwali mood. In stead drop in at my place for the card party and to taste the single malt I discovered on my recent trip to Scotland. And I have some Davidoff ciagrs to go with that as well.

Well, thank God, oops, thank “Economic Reforms” – I may be poor, but I have some friends with really “modest” means and superior intellect.

So Happy Diwali to you again and cheers!!