Anna Hazare fasting Lokpal bill

Of a few, By a few, For the few

April 9, 2011

By admin

Bobby Kunhu

I am distinctly uncomfortable with predictions – using either scientific or unscientific tools. For me it smacks of charlatanry – from astrology to psephology to stock market speculation. But with the charade that was unleashed for the past few days on news television by the mainstream media and of course at Jantar Mantar and a few other town squares across the “mainstream” Indian political landscape by Anna Hazare’s fast – I did dare to make an attempt – both at prediction and more comfortably with dissent. I foretold the outcome of the fast tableau at an emergency meeting that was convened by some co-travellers at the Salem Citizen’s Forum to debate on whether and how to show solidarity to Anna Hazare.

For a cricket obsessed national psyche reeling in the inebriation of the recent world cup victory – Anna Hazare was pitted to win this match comfortably – I was willing to place my bet on my prediction. And here I am trying to reckon the how and why of this prediction for me and the numerous friends and acquaintances who have been trying to rope me into joining facebook groups and sign electronic petitions in support of Anna Hazare’s crusade (or is it revolution?). And others who were indignant at my facebook post of Manu Joseph’s irreverent article or at Sudeep’s post in his diary.

Win-win

Well, it is not just Anna Hazare and his team who won this match comfortably. All actors who joined the show have won the match. Everyone – the “civil society” that sat on fast at Jantar Mantar and other places, the Corporate media, the glamour world, the Government, political establishment of all hues and shades – everyone who bothered to join the game. It was like bathing in the Ganges during the Maha Kumbh – everyone’s sins were washed away. And of course nobody in their right minds regardless of political affiliations or ideologies could take a position “for corruption”!!! A veritable Bush-ian position — either you are with Anna Hazare or you are with corruption. And yes, India Incorporated has won the match and it is time for celebrations!

The timing of course was impeccable. The drama was enacted exactly for five days in the interregnum between the cricket World Cup finals and the first Indian Premier League match leaving no scope for other infotainment distractions!

The timing also seems to be impeccable for reasons apart from TRP. India Inc. was facing a credibility crisis and the crisis had managed to drag the office of the most iconic representative of the lot – Dr. Manmohan Singh into every dreadful business. And then every representative of India Inc. seemed to be at the receiving end of the crisis – corporate houses to media icons. From Kashmir to Tamil Nadu – Manipur to Chattisgarh – people in the margins seemed to be mobilizing themselves trying to take their fights into their own hands. Mere cricket was not enough. A more serious national diversion was required – a diversion that would also help in subverting the multiple simmering discourses on democracy.

So what happened?

Anna Hazare announced a fast-unto-death – hold your horses – demanding that “the government agrees to form a joint committee comprising 50 per cent officials and the remaining citizens and intellectuals to draft the Jan Lokpal Bill,” – nothing less, nothing more. In other words Anna Hazare announced a fast unto death till people he thinks are qualified for the job are included in the group that is responsible for a legislation that is within the incumbent Government’s agenda. And going by the tenor of his letter to the Prime Minister dated 6th April 2011 is anything to go by, he would also like to have a say in the composition of the committee/Group of Ministers that has oversight over the process of this particular legislation.

So, what Mr. Hazare is praying for is a corruption free India and he hopes to get there through his version of an Ombudsman Legislation and he is on a hunger strike to ensure the composition of the team in charge of setting this legislation in place. Well, this throws up more disturbing concerns. Physically he conducted this prayer in the backdrop of a buxom picture of Bharat Mata bejeweled to the hilt including the proverbial crown standing on a white flex board Indian map!

So, Mr. Hazare and his friends went on hunger strike to realize this prayer with the blessings of the likes of Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravishankar. This was one particular dais that was truly homogenous in its caste-community-class composition. I was reminded of the historian Bipin Chandra’s analysis attributing the onus of thrusting the Hindutva Right on the Indian political mainstream on Jayaprakash Narayan and his anti-emergency coalition.

What was the response?

Obviously the Prime Minister expressed his dissatisfaction over Anna Hazare’s decision to go on a fast without forgetting to assert his profound respect for the man. Others soon joined the bandwagon. From the ruling United Progressive Alliance allies to the opposition National Democratic Alliance all of them joined the Anna Hazare choir and aptly expressed disgust over the prevailing state of (corruption) affairs. Left parties — mainstream as well as others, could not resist it either. Team Anna Hazare got its first wicket when Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar quietly resigned from the Lokpal bill related group of ministers (there has to be at least one resignation in the recipe for revolution). And once everyone had their fair bit of airtime at the crease – the Government threw in the towel. It accepted almost every demand that team Anna Hazare made and celebrations are afoot with India Inc. on that glorious road to that exhilarating freedom from corruption. At the end of five days of high drama everyone is happy with this victory to democracy and ready to live happily ever after.

So, what am I cribbing about in this hunky dory script of universal happiness?

What qualifies as corruption?

Firstly, the notion of corruption itself in the imaginations of both Anna Hazare’s version of the Lok Pal Bill and that of the Government’s seems to be in tandem – very simplistic and all that it would require to set things in correctional mode would be a school”master”ish cane – oops legislation. In other words, given the quantum of punishment and stringency of the legislation, the Lok Pal will ensure that from the Union Telecom Minister to the lowly Train Ticket Examiner will desist from taking bribes and more importantly everyone from the greedy telecom companies to the eager railway passenger will forthwith stop trying to bribe them regardless of their greed or need. This imagination of corruption somehow seemed to suit everyone who joined the Anna Hazare bandwagon from Lalit Modi to Barkha Dutt to Rahul Bajaj. Because this imagination would effectively prosecute Madhu Koda & Raja, while Manmohan Singh and Chidambaram would remain the knights in shining armour. Somehow the forces or agencies that facilitate structural spaces in which corruption thrives represented for me by the present composition of the Union Cabinet seems to be outside the ambit of these collective imaginations of corruption.

The freedom fighters

Next, the question of agency. Anna Hazare himself dubbed his hunger strike as the second freedom struggle – and of course – his corporate media promoters sold the idea to all like-minded wannabe freedom fighters. Though I am not sure of the numbers, a few hundred or even thousand people expressing solidarity was projected as the entire nation on the road to revolution and this was repeated over and over again reminding one of the adage that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth.

In what can only be described as complete lack of imagination and an insult to both the peoples of Egypt and India – the hunger strike was dubbed as India’s Tahrir Square! The joke is that one of the Anna Hazare acolytes who turned up for the Salem Citizen’s Forum meeting wanted the forum to take up the cause because the local Tamil media had totally ignored the hunger strike!! So much for the national character of the strike.

But Barkha Dutt did one better. She did a special show of The Buck Stops Here on Anna Hazare at Chennai and her voiced reason for the choice of location being 2G scam having become the buzzword for corruption. To add insult to injury – she declared her profound love to the Tamil people! If only she had done a little bit of homework or watched her own channel, she would have realized that the 2G scam hardly plays any role in the Tamil Nadu voters’ choice. Though, corruption does figure in the priority list of the Tamil Nadu voter – but a corruption that neither she nor her colleagues in Corporate Television media would acknowledge and rather would gloss over.

The fences that feed on the crops

Now, at the culmination of the hunger strike drama – a committee has been notified to draft the Lokpal bill. The composition of the committee itself reveals the seriousness of the drama. The government representatives include P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal – lawyers who have represented the interests of Corporate India as individuals (board members) and lawyers in and out of power. The lesser said about the process in which the civil society representatives were arrived the better – for there was hardly a process and all of them are all active participants in the Anna Hazare drama.

In 2003, as the editorial coordinator of the Citizen’s Report on Govrnance and Development (a full-time civil society position), we celebrated the marked shift in the social composition of the Parliament which many of us saw as deepening of democracy. In 2011, a motley bunch of homogenous people claim to be the sole representatives civil society and the Government of the day conveniently recognizes them – it smacks of a shift towards an oligarchic dispensation swinging between a Prime Minister who prefers not to face direct electoral challenges and a self-appointed civil society messiah.

What is even more bizarre and insulting is the repeated argument that there is no one else in the country more eligible to take on corruption than Anna Hazare. The argument insults the multitudes that have been carrying on their struggles in various parts of India.

Overriding the Constitution

More than that the drama insults Constitutional mechanisms and processes thereunder – thereby insulting the very notion of “We, the People”. The need for a Constitutional process is to ensure institutional transparency and accountability. Whatever might be the pitfalls of political culture of transparency in India – the only institutional mechanism of making day to day governance accountable are the Constitutional processes. For instance the Right to Information Act is applicable only to State actors – so regardless of the Government notification and the bona fides of the actors concerned – how do Citizens ensure accountability from the self-appointed civil society guardians – or are they so sacred as to remain outside the scope and need for accountability.

In what can be termed an ironic twist – the draft Jan Lokpal Bill brings in newer categories of eligibility to the selection committee for appointment of Lokpal – Magsaysay Award winners and Nobel laureates of Indian origin. I keep wondering why these awards and why the insistence on “Indian” origin (I hope Sonia Gandhi reads this). Maybe it is mere coincidence that many of the faces that have appeared in this drama have a Magsaysay award tucked under their belt (and a sacred thread over their shoulder).

Meanwhile in its enthusiasm for a corruption free India and prescriptions for stringent punishment and easier prosecution– Anna Hazare and team seem to have no qualms in sacrificing precious civil liberty provisions inbuilt into the criminal justice system and prescribed by the Indian Constitution. While Baba Ramdev, one of the mentors of Anna Hazare’s crusade advocates capital punishment for the corrupt, the draft bill itself blurs the line between investigation and adjudication. It makes the Lokpal a super cop with adjudicatory and delegated legislative powers.

If the Jan Lokpal bill is accepted – it would achieve what the Malimath Committee on Reforms of Criminal Justice System could not – subversion of the Criminal Justice system. At the risk of repetition, I would point out that the bulldozing by Malimath Committee could be stopped because that committee and the implementation of its recommendations were subject to Constitutional procedures. What would emerge would be another draconian legislation which would be used to hound and prosecute political dissent – this time “corruption” would replace “terrorism” and “Maoism”. And this time the law would be presumed to have the sanction of a purported civil society.

Of a lesser concern is the fact that Republic India’s record at social reforms through criminal legislations has been abysmal – if in doubt – look at the implementation of the Dowry Prohibition Act or the SC/ST Atrocities Act. Dowry is as prevalent as ever while India Inc. continues to lynch Dalits and dispossess Adivasi

Who Loses?

The major casualty in this whole drama was democracy itself. Through short cuts and “royal avenues”, the power goes back into the hands of a select few, undoing a process of over sixty years of democratization of the country. Those few decide what is in the best interest of the country, and what is not. No prizes for guessing the class and caste composition of this select few.

Tailpiece

Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is in for stiff competition for the next Bharat Ratna from Kisan Bapat Baburao Hazare – a very difficult choice indeed between before the nation. Or are we looking at two awardees next season? That could be a fitting “double climax” for the viewers of live Indian English Television!

cross posted @ kafila

http://www.countermedia.in/?p=663

 

How D.R. Nagaraj reconciled Gandhi with Ambedkar : Ramachandra Guha

CONTENDING VISIONS – How D.R. Nagaraj reconciled Gandhi with Ambedkar

Politics and Play – Ramachandra Guha

Books do not change lives, but books can change the way we look at the world. As a student of economics, I was a high modernist who believed in transforming rural communities through industrialization. Concern for the poor came with a heavy dose of condescension. Those who lived outside cities had to be improved and uplifted through an infusion of modern technology and what used to be known as the ‘scientific temper’. Then I read Verrier Elwin’s Leaves from the Jungle, a charming evocation of the life of the Gond tribals of central India. This, and his other works, showed me that despite their apparent illiteracy and lack of material wealth, the tribals had a rich tradition of poetry, folklore and art, a deep identification with nature, and a strong sense of community solidarity. In the latter respects they had, in fact, something to teach a modern world that dismissed them as primitive and uncivilized. A little later, I became a Marxist, persuaded into the faith by the scholars who taught me in Calcutta. I was young and impatient; the incremental idealism of my parents’ hero, Jawaharlal Nehru, did not seem sufficient to make a dent in the poverty and inequality that was so manifest a feature of social life in India. Then, on a visit to Dehradun, I picked up from the pavement of the town’s main street a copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I took the book home and read it through the night. Orwell had seen, at first-hand, how the democratic aspirations of the Spanish people had been undermined by the takeover of their movement by a band of cynical and amoral communists, acting under the instructions of Josef Stalin. He communicated his experiences in prose of an uncommon clarity. By the morning, I had abandoned Marxism, and was a social democrat once more. Another book that changed the way I looked at the world was Truth Called Them Differently, published by the Navajivan Trust in Ahmedabad. This reproduced the debates between Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. They argued about many things — India’s place in the world, the role of the English language, whether an hour a day at the spinning wheel was mandatory for the patriot. The exchanges reveal the intellectual and moral qualities of the two men, each of whom had the ability (and courage) to change his views when circumstance or reason so demanded. Elwin was once a well-known writer in India. Tagore, Gandhi and Orwell enjoy global reputations. All had a considerable and varied oeuvre in English. Their books were published by the most prestigious publishing houses. A fourth book whose reading radically altered my understanding of the world was, in contrast, written by an author unknown outside his native Karnataka. And it was published by a totally obscure press. Browsing through Bangalore’s Premier Book Shop in the early 1990s, I came across a slim book called The Flaming Feet. The title was intriguing, as were its contents — a series of essays on and around the figure of B.R. Ambedkar. Published by a local NGO called the Institute of Cultural Research and Action,The Flaming Feet was the first work in English by D.R. Nagaraj, a professor of Kannada in Bangalore University. The politics of the 1930s and 1940s had placed Gandhi and Ambedkar as antagonists — as, more recently, had the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. The Bahujan Samaj Party had launched a series of stinging attacks on the Mahatma, accusing him of patronizing the Dalits and impeding rather than aiding their emancipation. From the other side, the Hindutva ideologue, Arun Shourie, had written a 600-page screed depicting Ambedkar as a toady of the British. D.R. Nagaraj was unusual and — at that time, at least — unique in admiringboth Gandhi and Ambedkar. To be sure, in their lifetime their respective social locations made it hard for these men not to be political adversaries. By the time Ambedkar returned from his studies in the US, Gandhi was the acknowledged leader of the national movement. For a brilliant and ambitious young man from a Dalit background, to join the Congress was to relegate oneself to a secondary role in politics. Thus, as Nagaraj pointed out, “there was very little scope for a Congress Harijan leader to develop interesting and useful models of praxis from within”. So, Ambedkar chose to form his own political party and fight for his people under a banner separate from, and opposed to, Gandhi’s Indian National Congress. In The Flaming Feet, Nagaraj demonstrated how, through their debates and arguments, Gandhi and Ambedkar transformed each other. The Mahatma became more sensitive to the structural roots of caste discrimination, while Ambedkar came to recognize that moral renewal was as critical to Dalit emancipation as economic opportunity. In seeking to honour both men, Nagaraj was, as he put it, fighting both “deep-rooted prejudices” (which urged Indians to follow only one or the other) as well as “wishful thinking” (which made one believe that one or other thinker provided all the answers to the Dalit predicament). Nagaraj insisted that “from the viewpoint of the present, there is a compelling necessity to achieve a synthesis of the two”. “The greatest paradox of modern Indian history,” wrote Nagaraj, was that “both Gandhian and Ambedkarite perceptions of the issue are partially true, and the contending visions are yet to comprehend each other fully”. Reading Nagaraj, like reading Tagore, Gandhi, Orwell and Elwin, was an epiphanic experience. He taught me to recognize that while Gandhi and Ambedkar were rivals in their lifetime, from the point of view of India today the two men should rather be viewed as partners and collaborators. The legacy ofboth was required to complete the unfinished task of Dalit emancipation. After the publication of The Flaming Feet, Nagaraj began writing more often in English. These later essays, like the book, were marked by an unusual ability to bring disparate worlds into conversation: the past and the present, the elite and the subaltern, the vernacular and the cosmopolitan. In 1998, just as he was maturing as a scholar and political analyst, Nagaraj died of a heart attack. Now, 12 years later, his published and unpublished essays on Dalit questions have been brought together in an expanded edition of The Flaming Feet, edited and sensitively introduced by his former student, Prithvi Datta Chandra Sobhi, and appearing this time under the imprint of a more mainstream publisher. Here Nagaraj writes with elegance and insight about a wide range of subjects — on the “lack of a living tradition of militant Gandhianism”; on the self-invention of a Dalit identity (as he points out, in searching for a history outside Hinduism, “the modern Dalit has to seek his rebirth in a state of fearful loneliness. S/he has nothing to rely upon in his/her immediate Hindu surroundings”); on the need to build a united front of ecological, Dalit and tribal movements. Nagaraj was a social scientist as well as littérateur whose mode of writing was sometimes empirical, at other times metaphorical. Here is a representative excerpt: “Babasaheb [Ambedkar] had no option but to reject the Gandhian model. He had realized that this model had successfully transformed Harijans as objects in a ritual of self-purification, with the ritual being performed by those who had larger heroic notions of their individual selves. In the theatre of history, in a play with such a script, the untouchables would never become heroes in their own right, they were just mirrors for a hero to look at his own existentialist anger and despair, or maybe even glory.” This new edition of The Flaming Feet may be the most important work of non-fiction published in this country in 2010. At any rate, it is indispensable for anyone with any serious interest in society and politics in modern India. ramachandraguha@yahoo.in

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110101/jsp/opinion/story_13360497.jsp

THE MYTH OF THE MAHATMA: M.K. GANDHI IN SOUTH AFRICA-VELU ANNAMALAI

THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY

H I S T O R Y   N O T E S

Modern Dravidan girl, India

THE AFRICAN PRESENCE IN INDIAN ANTIQUITY

By RUNOKO RASHIDI

DEDICATED TO DR. VELU ANNAMALAI

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Exceptionally valuable writings reflecting close relationships between Africa and early India have existed for more than two thousand years. In the first century B.C.E., for example, the famous Greek historian Diodorus Siculus penned that, “From Ethiopia he (Osiris) passed through Arabia, bordering upon the Red Sea as far as India…. He built many cities in India, one of which he called Nysa, willing to have remembrance of that (Nysa) in Egypt, where he was brought up.”

Another important writer from antiquity, Apollonius of Tyana, who is said to have visited India near the end of the first century C.E., was convinced that “The Ethiopians are colonists sent from India, who follow their forefathers in matters of wisdom.” The literary work of the early Christian writer Eusebius preserves the tradition that, “In the reign of Amenophis III [the mighty Dynasty XVIII Egyptian king] a body of Ethiopians migrated from the country about the Indus, and settled in the valley of the Nile.” And still another document from ancient times, the Itinerarium Alexandri, says that “India, taken as a whole, beginning from the north and embracing what of it is subject to Persia, is a continuation of Egypt and the Ethiopians.”

It is safe to say that when we speak of the Dravidians as a people we are speaking of the living descendants of the Harappan people of the ancient Indus Valley who were pushed into South India as the result of the Aryan invasions. This is certainly consistent with Dravidian traditions which recall flourishing cities that were either lost or destroyed in antiquity. The term “Dravidian,” however, encompasses both an ethnic group and a linguistic group. The ethnic group is characterized by straight to wavy hair textures, combined with Africoid physical features. In reference to this Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop stated that:

“There are two well-defined Black races: one has a black skin and woolly hair; the other also has black skin, often exceptionally black, with straight hair, aquiline nose, thin lips, an acute cheekbone angle. We find a prototype of this race in India: the Dravidian. It is also known that certain Nubians likewise belong to the same Negro type…Thus, it is inexact, anti-scientific, to do anthropological research, encounter a Dravidian type, and then conclude that the Negro type is absent.”

Dravidian, in addition to its ethnic component, however, is an important family of languages spoken by more than a hundred million people, primarily in South India. These languages include Tamil (the largest element), Kannada, Malayalam (from which the name of the Asian country Malaya is derived), Telegu and Tulu. The term “Dravidian” itself is apparently an Aryan corruption of Tamil.

Ancient Africoid statue of Hindu diety Vishnu

From at least the third century C.E. three major Dravidian kingdoms existed in South India: the kingdoms of Pandya, Chera and Chola. Pandya was the southernmost Dravidian kingdom. The major city of Pandya was Madurai, the location of the famous chapel of the Tamil Sangam (Academy). The Sangam, of which there were three, was initiated by a body of forty-eight exceptionally learned scholars who established standards over all literary productions. The Pandyan rulers received these intellectuals with lavish honors.

It is also important to note that in the kingdom of the Pandyas women seem to have enjoyed a high status. This is the exact opposite of the regions of India where the Aryans ruled. In these lands of Aryan domination it is said that a woman was never independent. “When she is a child she belongs to her father. As an adult when she marries she belongs to her husband. If she outlives her husband she belongs to her sons.” An early queen of the Pandyas, on the other hand, for example, is credited with controlling an army of 500 elephants, 4,000 cavalry and 13,000 infantry.

In 1288 and again in 1293 the Venetian traveler Marco Polo visited the Pandyan kingdom and left a vivid description of the land and its people. Polo exclaimed that:

“The darkest man is here the most highly esteemed and considered better than the others who are not so dark. Let me add that in very truth these people portray and depict their gods and their idols black and their devils white as snow. For they say that God and all the saints are black and the devils are all white. That is why they portray them as I have described.”

To the northwest of Pandya was the kingdom of Chera (present-day Kerala). Northwest of Pandya lay the kingdom of Chola, said to be the place where Saint Thomas the Apostle was buried. The same Marco Polo who visited Pandya referred to Chola as “the best province and the most refined in all India.”

The Dravidians were an unsually advanced seafaring people, with the Cholas, in particular, distinguishing themselves amongst the dominant maritime powers of their era. Through its ports, the great kings of Chola traded with Ethiopia and Somalia, Iran and Arabia, Combodia and China, Sumatra and Sri Lanka, exporting spices and camphor, ebony and ivory, quality textiles and precious jewels.

It seems readily apparent that the Dravidian kingdoms and the Dravidian people were quite well known internationally. When Augustus became head of the Roman world, for example, the Dravidian kingdoms sent him a congratulatory embassy. Dravidian poets describe Roman ships, which carried bodyguards of archers to ward off pirates, while the Dravidian kings themselves employed bodyguards of Roman soldiers. In respect to the ancient East, at least one author has identified a Dravidian presence in the Philippines, noting that: “From India came civilized Indians, the Dravidians from whom the savage Aryans learned. They began at least 500 BC and soon controlled the coast.”