The Lokvidya Standpoint

Amit Basole has edited a useful new volume on Lokvidya. I reviewed it in EPW recently.

BOOK REVIEW

Lokvidya Perspectives: A Philosophy of Political Imagination for the Knowledge Age

Edited by Amit Basole

Published by Aakar Books, Delhi, 2015

The Lokvidya Standpoint

Aseem Shrivastava

Do the people who grow or cook the food we eat ‘know’ something? If so, did they acquire this knowledge at school or college? If not, what is the status of their knowledge? Is there more to their knowledge than skill, pretending for a moment that knowledge is something more than ‘just’ skill? If yes, how did they acquire the knowledge? Do the conditions that generate such knowledge need to be nurtured? Do these conditions involve the living presence of a human community through which the experience behind the knowledge is imparted through multiple traditions, no less than serving as the receptacle for what is produced?

Such are the fundamental cognitive questions prompted by the volume under review. The book brings together a set of valuable contributions made at a conference of the Lokavidya Jan Andolan at Vidya Ashram in Sarnath in November, 2011. The essays in the collection have been grouped under five themes: transition to knowledge society, epistemics and politics of lokavidya, economics of lokavidya, lokavidya and the university, and Lokavidya Jan Andolan.

In his lifelong search for clarity, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had advocated ordinary language therapy for philosophy (and philosophers of course). The authors in the volume under review advocate everyday life and livelihood therapy for those in search of a new philosophy and politics of knowledge (gyan ki rajneeti), appropriate for the challenges confronting India in the 21st century. The goal of the book is to offer a “comprehensive introduction to lokavidya darshan” (LP p.8).

To start with, what is lokavidya? The “lok” in lokavidya is not the same as “working class” or “the poor”. The reference, the editor of the volume Amit Basole clarifies in one of the later pieces in the book, is to the social majority which repeatedly shows up in government surveys as “uneducated”, or lacking any formal training (LP p.455). The category is bound by the nature of knowledge held by people not generally regarded (often by illiterate, no less than by literate society) as ‘knowledgeable’.

What is ‘lokavidya’?

Lokavidya points to a philosophy of knowledge and knowing which emerges from human communities in the course of their negotiation of the challenges of ordinary, everyday life. It is knowledge that lives in them, passed on by tradition, but often amended to address changing circumstances, helping them negotiate real questions of life and livelihood, ecology and culture. It refers to the myriad living traditions of knowledge among peasants and artisans, fisherfolk and forest-dwellers, home-makers and home-builders across the country (and indeed so much of the world).

Just before he died, the lifelong student of the peasantry Teodor Shanin pointed out the redundancy of labour in an ever more robotised industrial world: “the modern formal economy needs only about a quarter of the global workforce. The other three-quarters are engaged in survival through the informal economy. The core of the informal economy is not peasant farming, but family and neighborhood relationships of mutual support. So while the informal economy is seen – if it is seen at all – as the political economy of the margins, when you put it all together, you can see it is not marginal at all.” 

In India, the proportion of the overall population engaged in the informal economy is well over three-quarters. At least 8 to 9 working people out of 10 belong here. It is inconceivable that any of them (or any of us able to read reviews like this) could survive for too long without the enormous labour performed by such people, not to forget in the present context the practical working knowledge that they must have to do what they do. If all the food critics in the country were to suddenly die off, India will survive. But it cannot if the same happened to all the food producers. And yet, such is the astronomical absurdity of the society we have come to live in that the former get paid amounts which are orders of magnitude greater than those earned with so much blood, sweat and tears by the latter. 

Lokvidya Perspectives (LP) is an urgent plea to acknowledge, nurture and reward the vast and varied range of knowledge embodied by the hundreds of millions of working people who enable India and the world to survive from one day to the next. “The cognitive foundation of a people’s strength in the ultimate analysis lies in the knowledge they possess to organise their lives, to understand the world, to resist” oppression (LP p.2).

“The modern university, instead of recognising lokvidya and seeing that society is knowledge abundant, sees itself as being located amidst knowledge scarcity.” This comes with the “denigration of other ways of seeing, knowing and doing that belong to the ordinary people in the colonised countries”, victims as they are of cultures derailed by imperialism. A gyan andolan based on lokvidya darshan is not only possible, the writers who have contributed to this volume call for it. “Unless the University is challenged alongside the State, restorations will recur” (LP p.2).

In deference to lokavidya Basole writes in the Introduction that “that huge store and variety of knowledge…may far exceed the total knowledge content produced and accumulated by universities so far” (p.4). This obvious fact has gone unnoticed because of the ease with which the complexity of the labor performed by hundreds of millions of people has been overlooked even by radical thought. “Radical social and political movements of the 19th and 20th centuries challenged every oppressive structure of the capitalist social order except one: the hegemony of modern science and modern knowledge over other traditions of knowledge. In particular, knowledge traditions of the “uneducated majority,” those millions of peasants, adivasis, artisans, small retailers, and women all over the world who are outside the modern economy, were considered inferior” (LP p.1).

How might one view the politics and philosophy of knowledge at stake? “In the Gatesian age, knowledge itself is being redefined in terms of organizability by machines”, leading to dangerous conflations of information and knowledge, knowledge and wisdom, and so on (LP, p.379). This “juggernaut of virtualisation” - which can only deal with knowledge that can be put down in text and images - can only be challenged by repeatedly asserting the significance of sites of knowledge that simply cannot be virtualised (LP, p.380). How do you virtualise the complex know-how involved in  Lokavidya - referring not just to knowledge but to the associated and underlying ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, a whole weltanschaaung? Lokavidya It does not allow “epistemic reduction” (LP p.16). 

 It is argued that lokavidya is among the few “genuine hopes for a different future” (p.380). As Sunil Sahasrabudhey, one of the intellectual pioneers behind the volume under review, points out, “lokavidya is what it is because it is not organisable through a paradigm acceptable to organised knowledge systems, both traditional and modern” (p.369). It is knowledge difficult, if not impossible, to abstract, commodify and sell. Besides, it is produced at multiple sites, by nature widely dispersed and decentralised. 

The lead authors in the volume argue further that placing the significance of lokavidya at the centre may just provide the necessary missing link between the many movements for social and economic justice taking place today. “The myriad ongoing struggles against displacement and dispossession, inequality and imperialism will acquire a new civilisational significance as well as a sense of solidarity with each other if they are seen as knowledge struggles, struggles for restoring legitimacy to people’s knowledge or lokvidya” (LP p.1).

The social dimension of lokavidya is critical to this quest. “The crises of Lokavidyadhar Samaj (that vast section of Indian society which bases its life and livelihood on lokvidya) is that traditional livelihoods have all but collapsed and the members of this Samaj (largely small and medium farmers, agricultural workers, artisans, tribals, small shopkeepers and home-maker women) are forced to live a life sans basic human dignity” (LP p.450). Most such people have not even had the misfortune of being exploited directly (in the organised sector) by the mainstream, globalised capitalist economy.

The holders of lokvidya are in the overwhelming majority. This lokvidyadhar samaj (the society of lokvidya-holders) are at once the bahishkrit samaj (boycotted society), the vast informal sector in economic terms. Their everyday struggles and movements for survival would be sharper if they make bold and just claims for their own creative traditions of knowledge through a lokvidya jan andolan, instead of merely attempting a modest defence of meagre livelihoods, risking being seen as “anti-progress”.

Women’s lokavidya and the Karigar Samaj

Two of the most incisive pieces in the book (with as many as 36 contributions!) have been written by Chitra Sahasrabudhey. 

In the first essay (published originally in Hindi in 2001), she proposes a lokavidya approach to the women’s movement. The main thrust of the essay is that the spread of imperialism (in independent India, through the destructive mechanisms of state-led development of markets) and the general dynamic of present-day modern society have continuously stolen from women a growing range of socio-economic activities which traditionally came within their domain of creative work. From domestic industries and textiles to agricultural work, healthcare and feeding the family, crores of women have been sidelined by the ascent of commercial and bureaucratic forces, rendering them “inactive, helpless and weak” (LP p.192). Domestic industry has fallen into disarray, while agriculture has been increasingly mechanised and modernized, turning women unemployed. To the extent that women have found work, they have to work outside familial contexts, in “alien conditions” (LP p.197). “Imperialism has made its roots firmer through democracies and development…the great misfortune is that women blinded by the shine and twinkle of modern development, saw this process as one which will make the poor and illiterate women self-dependent” (LP p.195). 

A whole cosmos of valid women’s knowledge - lokvidya - has been repressed as a consequence of the fact that such knowledge has never found due recognition from the modernizers including very often, metropolitan feminists. She contrasts the experience of independent India with the freedom struggle under Gandhi when women’s knowledge was a “leading value”, resulting in far greater presence of women in public life across the country (LP p.198). 

The Lokvidya Jan Andolan must fight then for beginning the process of retrieval of the traditional areas of women’s activity. Even if just food and clothing were to return to the realm of women’s control, “unlimited possibilities” can be envisaged (LP p.200). Thus, “the movement for reorganisation of the production and market of textiles and food materials on the basis of women’s knowledge can become the mainstay of emancipating women from the vicious web of exploitation and erecting a promising challenge to globalisation" (LP p.201). Advocating economic localisation, Sahasrabudhey argues that production by the family must find a just place in the local economy, reinstating the role of women and artisans as knowledgeable people. A sustained campaign for the dignity of women’s lokavidya can “initiate the reorganisation of society such that it gradually inactivates the greedy and exploitative imperialist system” (LP p.205). 

In a related essay Chitra Sahasrabudhey also proposes that the Karigar Samaj, duly restored, could become “the liberator of enslaved societies” (LP p.317). A resurrection of artisanal human creativity - entailing due recognition for the enormous wealth of lokavidya among the country’s myriad artisans, not to forget local control of resources - is called for in order to promote “a just and fraternal relationship between man and man and between man and nature” (LP p.318). 

Underscoring the significance of karigar lokavidya, Sahasrabudhey writes: “minute details of river and ocean waters, its fauna and flora are known to the fisherman but the university professor of hydrology holds the right to knowledgeability and the right to a fat salary. The knowledge of the potter is no less than that of the ceramic engineer, nor that of the weaver any less than that of the textile engineer. But it is not valued more than his meagre wages. This is the injustice that pervades society. The karigar samaj must break it in order to establish a position of honour for itself” (p.334). It must fight for an “autonomous social life” which can regulate an economy built around household industries and localised markets. “There is no escape from the shackles of globalisation without the liberation of the karigar samaj” (LP p.342). One thinks in this context of the importance Karl Polanyi assigned to “embedded economies”.

Echoing the visions of Gandhi and Tagore, Sunil Sahasrabudhey points out in the Afterword to the book that “there is no civilisation where there is no village…it is impossible to realise the Rights of Nature and Mother Earth in a world built around the city.” (LP p.459) He calls for a gaon-shahar samvaad which would initiate the process of renegotiating the all-important, but terribly strained relationship between metropolitan and urban India on the one hand and the countryside on the other.

In a volume of this size (almost 500 pages in length!) one wishes that the ecological dimensions of such  radical proposals were explored further, since a renegotiated relationship between town and country and an alternative - small and dispersed - industrial system, shunned in India since the days of Nehru, is surely a large part of the answer to the impasse of development in 21st century India. Re-embedding economies in a renewable ecology and culture is the key to any future worth contemplating for a world imperilled and defeated every day by, among other things, climate chaos. One hopes that many of the authors who have contributed to this volume will explore these themes in future work.

A few shortcomings of the book may be pointed out at the end. Reading through it, I missed an index. Secondly, the volume could have been edited down significantly, given the repetition of ideas across essays, often by the same author. Thirdly, verbal references to non-Hindi vernacular equivalents of lokavidya would have been helpful for non-Hindi readers. Finally, given an anglophone readership (but even otherwise), it would have been useful to offer many more examples of lokavidya.

Yet, the book is an invaluable and pioneering effort which should provoke far greater research in directions tragically ignored by Anglophone Indian radical thought, which has unfortunately drawn more from a borrowed imagination than is helpful or merited. 

http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/2/book-reviews/lokavidya-standpoint.html

The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation

I am in Mumbai for an audio recording. Yesterday I participated in an hour-long four-way conversation at 'SynTalk' on The Revaluation of Nature. The conservationist Dr. Ulhas Karanth, Bangaldeshi environmental economist Dr. Enamul Haq and Rajat, our host and moderator, were the other three participants. The enjoyable conversation ranged over a number of interrelated themes in Economics, Finance, Ecology, Conservation and Philosophy. It would be interesting to anyone interested in issues connected with the ecological crisis:

The Revaluation of Nature: A Conversation

What Bihar means

The Harvest of Hubris: Kachhe din jaane waale hain

“Bahati Hawa sa thha woh, Gujarat se aaya thha woh, kaala dhan laane wala thha wo, kahan gaya use doondho. Humko desh ki fikr sataati hai, woh bus videsh ke daure lagaate hain, humko badhti mahangai satata, wo bas mann ki baat sunata. Har waqt apni selfie khinchta thha woh, Dawood ko laane wala thha woh, kahan gaya use dhoondo…” 

- Nitish Kumar,  parodying in an election speech a song from the film  Three Idiots

It must have been a sullen birthday for Advani Ji on Sunday. And it will be a dull Deepawali for the Sangh Parivaar, their thunder stolen by the unlettered gwaalaas of Bihar, the former’s greedily anxious patronage of the cow notwithstanding. 

I first came to live in Delhi when I was 16. I was born (in Arrah) and raised in Bihar. It is the part of the earth I still feel closest to. From childhood we were raised on the adage Arrah jeela (zila) ghar baa toh kauun baat ke darr baa? (If Arrah is your home, what can you possibly be afraid of?)

After spending some time traveling in Bihar some weeks before the polls, including a 45-minute meeting with a very self-assured, but watchful Nitish Kumar, I became quite sure that Modiji will meet his match soon. Before the last phase of the polls in November I told a number of people that the Mahagathbandhan would win by a two-thirds majority. Only Laloo himself was crazy enough to make such a prediction. Many went sleepless for a few nights, thinking of Chanakya’s prediction of 155 seats for the NDA. And on the morning of the counting the bluff masters and omniscienti in the national media began counting the NDA’s chickens long before they had hatched. In the event, it was Laloo’s 190 seats for the MGB which came closest to the final result, especially if you take into account the 12 seats that went to candidates other than those of the NDA and the MGB, in which case Laloo's prediction was uncannily spot on! Something for our national pundits and know-all metropolitan journalists to ponder. A thoroughly well-deserved drubbing for the NDA.

It is backward Bihar that has saved India again. Consider the opposite verdict as a counterfactual: Had Modi-Shah’s NDA won 178 seats out of 243, we could have reasonably expected the Indian Constitution to be imperilled by the ruthlessly ambitious communal hate-mongers, their eyes set firmly on winning a similar majority in UP in 2017 and seizing control of the Rajya Sabha - all that stands between them and the rape of the Constitution. Instead Modi-Shah and the RSS find their Ratha-Yatra blocked yet again by the nearly forgotten Laloo Prasad Yadav, back from long political wilderness to haunt the Parivaar’s dreams like a bad penny. His RJD finds itself the single biggest party in the assembly with 80 seats. In the last assembly the party had just 23. It explains in some measure why the BJP-led NDA, which had tasted success in 172 of the 243 assembly constituencies in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, was struck down to a paltry 53.

What does this widely unexpected turn of events mean?

The DNA of the NDA

One thing it clearly means is just how much more politically astute is the unlettered, largely rural, Bihari janta than the educated classes of metropolitan India. Love and hate are passions which any honest human heart can divine. It does not take education. On the contrary, as we often find, it may hinder a clear view of the truth. Bihar has demonstrated this abundantly. If political sagacity lies in recognising the perfidy of a power that seeks to divide a people for political gain, Bihar has it in greater measure than any other part of India. (The Bihar polls also featured over 2000 third gender voters. Wonder how that will compare with an election in the US or the UK!)

While it is true that Nitish’s governance and developmental achievements over the last decade weighed significantly in the voters’ minds, caste, community, and the urgent need for communal harmony and decency in public life have played the decisive role in this election. Campaigning for the RJD candidate at an election rally at Keoti earlier this month, Nitish Kumar said: “Prem aur sadbhav banaye rakhiye. Tarah tarah ke log jhagda lagane ki koshish karenge, ek kanphukwa (rumour-monger) ghoom raha hai. Sama mein jahar gholne ki koshish karenge, haddi phek denge, murti tod denge, mara suar phek denge dharmik sthalon ke paas. Inke uksane se sachet rahiyega.” ("Maintain harmony and peace. People will try to create trouble of every kind. A rumour monger has been doing the rounds. Attempts will be made to poison the atmosphere by throwing bones, breaking idols, leaving dead pigs near religious places. Remain alert, do not get provoked.")

Bihar is perhaps unique in that it has hardly had a communal riot during the last 25 years. The RSS plan of “uniting” Hindus (against all others) across the country has bitten the dust in Bihar, perhaps setting the tone for the rest of the country. Their view that reservations ought to be purely along economic lines betrays a typically modern lack of understanding of the socio-economic complexity of jaati-vyavastha. This is not to endorse the idea of caste in the slightest. It is only to remember the occupational historical correlate of jaati for most Indians and to underscore what should be the bleeding obvious: as the Patel agitation in Gujarat showed, the demand for reservations in education and jobs is only going to get more bitter as the crisis of unemployment (which, a vast amount of data suggests, is impossible to address within the economic framework of the reigning development model) gets worse over the next few decades. This will put paid to any attempt at “Hindu” unity. RSS Hindutva idealism has read the ground completely wrong, leading to electorally costly repeated blurts from the pulpits of Nagpur by sarsanchaalak Mohan Bhagwat. To address the jobs question within the Hindutva ideology is likely to prove utterly difficult, if not impossible, especially since folks like those in the Swadeshi Jaagaran Manch have been totally sidelined by the Modi Manch (of three). When you couple this with the unfettered corporate investment agenda of Modi’s, the writing is on the wall for the present rulers of India. India refuses to shine like this, a lesson they should have learned from the 2004 debacle. Given the depth and range of interests at play, they are unlikely to learn it this time either.

Bihar is also, at a deeper level, a vote against hatred in public life. What we have witnessed over the last six weeks was easily the most vicious of all electoral campaigns in the history of Independent India. Desperate to win at all costs, the NDA went hell for broke in its attempt to communalise and polarise the electorate, divide, for instance, Dalits and Yadavs from Muslims, and Yadavs among themselves. Even Modiji outdid himself when it came to lowering the standards of public speech, especially for a serving Prime Minister. Early in the campaign he found “some problem with Nitish Kumar’s DNA”, a remark which alone may have cost him more than a few seats. At a recent rally in Buxar, keen to divide the opposition’s votes, he did not pause to think before accusing the grand coalition of plotting to reduce quotas for SCs, STs and OBCs in order to benefit “a particular community”. Rabble-rousers like Giriraj Kishore went to the extent of saying “Lalu says that (you should) throw meat in a Durga temple”. Lead campaigner and BJP President Amit Shah said that if Nitish’s coalition won, firecrackers would go off in Pakistan. (There were actually many more in India!) And so on. 

The venom and poison that has been unleashed during the last year should make anyone wonder if this is a civilised society any more. The hate brigade reintroduced a vicious form of beef politics in recent months, leading to the lynching of an innocent man last month, the Prime Minister maintaining a typically cowardly silence. It is not for love of the cow, but for love of the power that the pretence of protecting it is seen to give that the beleaguered animal has found such enthusiastic patrons in recent months. Nobody should miss the point that the surge in beef politics during the last couple of months was scarcely coincidental. It was prime-timed for the Bihar elections. (This happened despite Nitish repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that cow slaughter had been banned in Bihar since 1955). You will see the hype come down sharply now. The attempt was to divide the large Yadav vote in the process. In the event, the divisive tactic proved counter-productive, one more instance of the alertness of the ordinary voter in the state. One finds it hard to imagine if a region like Haryana or Western UP would have responded with the same sagacity.  

The MGB’s victory in Bihar restores the idea of India to its pristine dignity, an idea wounded and imperilled seriously over the last 18 months by a hate-inspired leadership hypocritically more keen to see a Mahabharata than an Akhand Bhaarat.

Fortunately, every seductive slogan of Modiji’s - beginning with the ridiculous DNA slur - was turned around by his Bihari opponents into a jumlaawaar which fractured the NDA strategy. He was outwitted fair and square.

Bihar backward?

It is time people stopped considering Bihar “backward”. Without making any apologies for the rampant corruption (as much a feature of other places), it is important to keep in view the fact that Bihar has been systematically denied its due share of Central funds over the past 25 years, affecting its performance more than any other state perhaps (the dues going into hundreds of thousands of crores, Modiji offering a small fraction of it, as if from his own private kitty), because it has always faced a hostile government in Delhi in these recent decades.

There is also something else to consider. During our meeting with him Nitish Kumar expressed the view that provincial elections in no other part of the country inspire as much wide national interest as a Bihar election. Why is this so?

Bihar has always led the curve in Indian politics, all the way since Gandhiji’s Champaran Satyagraha in 1916, through the JP movement and the revolt against the Emergency in the mid-1970s, to the Mandal agitation and Laloo’s stopping of Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the early 1990s. For anyone who knows the socio-political ground in Bihar (and retains a deep distrust of the political intelligence of metropolitan media savants), it would have come as a huge surprise had Modi-Shah pulled off an upset against the Laloo-Nitish combine, especially after Modiji chose to commit (yet another) folly. Kisne hidaayat dee thhi Modiji ko Laloo se moonhh lagne ki, auur wo bhi Bihar mein? The NDA brains trust also preferred to have Amit Shah give more than 60 speeches while blocking local point-men like Shatrughan Sinha, committing the same blunder they did in Delhi, of preventing the state unit of the BJP to take charge. Somehow, Modiji (and Shah himself of course) believes that the people of India also voted for Amit Shah in 2014. Trying to save themselves from the Delhi blunder of announcing pre-emptively a candidate the state unit of the party had not endorsed, they went for the opposite gamble of not announcing a candidate at all this time. (This is typical of a power-drunk leader without any Plan B, presuming that everyone will kow-tow to him anywhere in the country once he is triumphant). I remember Nitish Kumar saying to us in September “Modiji Bihar ka additional charge lenge kya?”

I have lived in four countries on three continents. Within India I have lived in four different states and travelled to virtually all, except a few in the North-East. I have not come across people with a sharper political intelligence anywhere else. This is the reason for the wide national interest that a Bihar election provokes. There are objective reasons why Bihar - apart from its large population (one out of thirteen Indians is a Bihari) - is of enormous political significance for India, a trend likely to grow in the future.

Biharis and Baaharis

Regionalism played a far greater role in this election than communalism. Parties like the Shiv Sena and the MIM came from outside the state to participate. It was widely noticed that top NDA leaders from out of the state had come to campaign. Amit Shah camped all October in Bihar and addressed over 60 rallies. Modiji himself spoke at more than 30, his party losing in most of the places where he spoke. 

The obvious question this campaign strategy provoked was why local leaders were not given the lead roles in the campaign. The opposition made full use of this lapse, especially since the NDA failed to announce a CM candidate, Modiji himself at the forefront of the campaign. It naturally prompted Nitish to ask voters to choose between a Bihari and a Baahari. Wouldn’t Modiji himself have done the same had Sonia Gandhi aggressively fronted a Congress campaign in Gujarat when he was CM?

Moreover, taking its cue from the Lok Sabha polls, Modi’s campaign was mechanically pitched for urban (and urbanising) India. But almost nine out of ten Biharis live in villages. It was natural for the large rural vote to go against Modi, especially as he mocked at the scale of labour migration from Bihar, forgetting what a major contribution is made my millions of migrant Bihari labour both to the country and to their own households. Our elites and middle classes would find it difficult to believe that even Rahul Gandhi's words about "suit-boot ki sarkaar" had greater traction in so many parts, resulting in 27 seats for the Congress, when it had just 4 last time.

What can we expect now?

First of all, we can expect a lot of national entertainment, now that Laloo is back before the media cameras. He has already promised some fun when he said that he will go with a laal-ten (lantern) to Modiji’s constituency Benares to look for his achievements! From there he threatens an agitation to challenge the regime in Delhi. As the Parivaar knows now, if there is one man in India who is serious about destroying communalism, it is Laloo. He is not a man to be trifled with!

The story is told that after blocking Advani’s Rath-Yatra in the 1990s, when he was Chief Minister of Bihar, Laloo Yadav was giving a speech somewhere in UP, in either Kanpur or Lucknow. Heckled by Bajrangis, he turned the mike off and sat down. When things had quietened, he stood up again, turned the mike on and said into it “Ee Ram Chandra Ji kauno BJP ka card-holder hain ka? Humko cheente hain? (Do you recognise me?) Hum bail (bull) ko seengh pakad ke chadhte hain!”

The political lesson of Bihar is that the man who knows his cow wins. The man who pretends to love it loses in the end. 

Will the Mahagathbandhan hang together, or perhaps dissipate into the sort of factional fights which have been the undoing of coalition governments in the past? The risks are not low, given that the coalition here is between two former rivals, even enemies. Yet, both sides know very well what is at stake. They came together in a moment of national peril, to not only defend Bihar against a perceived outsider, but to kill the deadly virus of communalism before it got worse. The virus is far from gone. And the two leaders know that they must hang together for it to remain at bay. 

For his part, Nitish needs to reflect carefully on the future economy of the state. The country is living through an unacknowledged impasse of development. 'Development' can mean many things. It is for him and his supporters to define afresh what it should mean for Bihar, what would bring the greatest benefit to people long deprived and exploited. 

“Bihar mein bahaar ho!” is a much better direction to go in than “Bihar mein bazaar ho!”, for “bazaar” no longer refers to actual bazaars, like our traditional haats and mandis, but to the “share bazaar”. The latter is the sort of development which will keep most Biharis in a state of deprivation, while narrow elite interests in the cities are promoted. In the long run, such a model of development, unleashing enormously destructive ecological forces in the wake of growing inequalities, especially between cities and the countryside, will bring ruin even to the wealthy in the cities. Sabka swaarth, sabka vinaash.

The election results show that people in Bihar know where to place the blame when it comes to fundamental macroeconomic issues like inflation, especially the price of essentials like daal. Instead of following the arhar Modi model of promoting big business, Nitish could pay due attention to basic services, agriculture and small, sustainable industry to generate livelihoods, deepen his already substantial commitment to renewable energy and pioneer for all of India an entirely new form of ecological development, something which could lay the foundations of a future state of what may be called Praakritik Swaraaj. Such attention to rural Bihar would also allay Laloo’s well-known suspicion of development, helping to keep the coalition together.

Bihar is only 12% urbanised. Instead of succumbing to the dominant view that this is a sign of “backwardness”, it may be wise of Nitish to see this as perhaps one of Bihar’s great long-term ecological assets. A whole new style of development can be pioneered in Bihar which may not be so easy to pursue for highly urbanised states like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat or Maharashtra. This would also require appropriate infrastructural investments (in basic amenities and training) from the government in small (tier 3 and 4) towns, addressing the need for employment amongst educated, mentally urbanised youth, keeping them from metropolitan frustration, while also easing the pressure in the cities. 

Above all, the big lesson of this election is that leaders must avoid the hubris that strong mandates bring. They must read these mandates well. This is the era of extreme verdicts in Indian electoral politics. Speaking solely from the perspective of the country, it would be a lot better if the verdicts were more slender: it would give stronger incentives to the ruling coalitions to behave themselves and stick closely to the tasks within the mandate. If NDA had 75 fewer seats in Parliament they would not have chanced their arm so freely, spouting, encouraging and permitting the scale of communal rubbish that has been served over the past year to seek to make narrow electoral gains.

On the other hand, a mandate like 178 out of 243 can be turned to great effect under astute leadership. Nitish is known for his sober qualities. He will need every bit of this sobriety to stay humble, grounded, and focused. The people of Bihar have waited long. They are bubbling with enormous potential and hopes; they will require at least this from him.

As for Modiji and his vanquished crew, there is just over a year left for the UP elections. After massive defeats in Delhi and Bihar, the RSS may ask for Amit Shah’s head, as against allowing him to take charge in UP too. (Rajnath may be their preferred choice.) If they do so, it will inaugurate a blood feud within the Parivaar. At any rate, if they continue in the same communal vein, forgetting the substance of their real mandate, they will deservedly lose again, given people’s rising impatience on issues that matter. (Beef-eating is hardly one of them.) 

If that happens, the unlikely may come about and Modi may not last the full term in Parliament. Not so long ago, I was the only crazy forecasting such an outcome. Even now, there would be few takers for this view.

For now, let us savour the fact that you can’t fool many people in this country all the time. Those out to destroy dharma will themselves perish in the dust.

Satyameva Jayate!

An Ode to Cowards

You send your unmanned drones to murder babies in Afghanistan.
You rape and impregnate little girls in the name of bringing them
       closer to Allah.    
You murder Mohsin and Pansare, Dabholkar and Kalburgi,
       besmirching the noble name of Ancient India.

All of you should be awarded a desert island on Mars to debauch
      yourselves in toto, murder each other to mutually assured 
      extinction, and make the red planet redder.

Only then will our beloved Earth bring forth the love to bless its 
         soil and its innocent children.
Only then shall there be Christmas on Earth.
Only then shall Jannat appear.
Only then shall the reign of Shaashvat commence.

Of one thing I am sure.
Your kind is the same, though they go by different names.
Our kind are all different, yet one.
You will lose.
And we will win!
Even if we do not live to tell the tale.
And you live to perdition and eternal damnation, cursed with
        infinite regret.

Four Environmental Photo-Essays

I share with you four marvellous environmental photo-essays. The first is my co-author Ashish Kothari's work on Ladakh. 

http://www.frontline.in/environment/despair-and-hope-on-the-roof-of-the-world/article7550148.ece

The second is a moving portrait of the fauna of Kanha National Park. 

http://www.frontline.in/environment/a-new-life-in-kanha/article7489569.ece

The third is actually a set of 30 best images for the 'Environmental Photographer of the Year'. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/06/27/environmental-photographer_n_7677434.html

And the last is a shocking set of aerial images showing the industrial devastation of the earth from the air.

http://www.bernhardlang.de/Website/AV_Coal_Mine_ALL.html

How to render democracy harmless

How to render democracy harmless

Let public and private merge for effective stategraft

“Many of India's billionaires have made money by their proximity to govt.”

- Raghuram Rajan, Governor, RBI. He was Chief Economist of IMF in July 2010, when he made the remark in an interview to ToI.  

Raghuram Rajan spoke, in the same interview, of the “privatization, by stealth, of the State in India.” Privatization is the ruling mantra of the age of corporate totalitarianism that was inaugurated by American and global business elites with the uninhibited backing of powerful governments the world over after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. This takes a hundred forms - from the poaching of lucrative public assets by wealthy corporations when governments are fiscally stretched (often) to the ever growing frequency of use of the “revolving door”, whereby nobody finds conflict of interest objectionable as the public officials of last week become corporate bosses this week, or vice versa, a practice well-learned in this country from our imperial masters two oceans away.

A blatant instance of the phenomenon is illustrated by this image from 8 years ago. It shows Ratan Tata flying a US fighter jet at an air show in Bangalore in 2007:

I wrote about this image 8 years back. The best I can do here is to simply quote what I wrote then:

"Picture this. At an air-show in Los Angeles one of the biggest arms manufacturers in the world, British Aerospace, invites Mr. Bill Gates of Microsoft to have a go at flying one of the latest models of their Hawk fighter aircraft. Would the American media respond by flashing front-page images of a beaming Bill Gates waving to supporters as he was entering the cockpit of the Hawk, following them up with adulatory reports describing the elevated feelings felt by the unexpected new pilot as he conquered the sound barrier? Or would the event not generate a national scandal that a private businessman accepted the invitation to fly a military aircraft, which ordinarily can only be tested by pilots on public duty?

"More than likely the latter possibility would transpire. However, what happened in Bangalore last month was another story, as the Indian national media fell to new depths of celebrity “journalism”…

“…A private fantasy was gratified. Mr. Tata’s dream of flying a fighter jet came true.”

If you have 10 minutes, it may be worthwhile going through the 2000-word piece I wrote then:

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/

or

http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm  

If you wish to grasp the depth of our national illusions and ambitions today, please take a while to watch this video in full, which NDTV chose to show as one of its “Classics” in its silver jubilee year, 2014: 

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special-ndtv-24x7/flying-high-ratan-tata-flies-the-f-16-aired-february-2007/308356

The video not only shows  Ratan Tata in a jacket with the US flag emblazoned on its upper arm, it also shows him performing flying stunts at the Bangalore Air Show in 2007. For good measure, NDTV’s Vishnu Shome is also shown a good time by the US defence contractor firm, Lockheed Martin, eager to grow the potentially vast Indian market. He learns from the American test pilot that the aircraft he is flying has just arrived from combat duties in Iraq. He returns from the fighter jet ride with (in his own words) “a silly smile on his face.” Finally, much closer to reality, the video shows two accidents, one of a helicopter, the other of an aircraft, both manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, at the same air show. One of the pilots was killed during the show.


Public-private-partnerships under Indian corporate nationalism

What is going on here? Neither Ratan Tata nor Vishnu Shome nor any of the scores of media cameramen at the air show show any sign that they understand a distinction vital to the health of a democracy, or even a republic. The time-honoured distinction between the public and the private realm, so sacred to the making and maintenance of democracies across the world for many a century (and perhaps even more to the making of republics since the days of Greece and Rome), has blurred into invisibility. How can the promise of “transparency” or “accountability”, two of the abiding demands made on contemporary democracies, ever be fulfilled if private tyranny dovetails into State power so seamlessly? (I deal with the issue at greater length in the 2007 piece I wrote: 
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/as-india-goes-global-the-public-goes-private-by-aseem-shrivastava/ or
http://www.countercurrents.org/shrivastava300307.htm ) 

The problem is far more widespread and deep-seated than is commonly understood in public life in India. In this century, the “cloud elites” of global finance and the extractive elites in league with mining mafias have taken control of the State in more countries than one can think of. The Untidy State of America has pioneered the trail and conflict of interest has ceased to matter even in the high offices of the Western world, as the bailouts after the Great Crash of 2008 showed. Countries like India have followed the West blindly without pausing to ponder the consequences of such a collapse of the public into the private. 

Additionally, India has a further legacy issue to live with. In general, the Indian State is a soft version of its Western counterparts. The centre of gravity of Western societies is squarely within the domain of the State. If the State collapses, society gets wiped out in a matter of days. Such has never been the case in India, and is not the case even today. Mrs. Thatcher, who believed that “there is no such thing as society”, could not have won even a panchayat election in India with such a nihilist slogan, whose vacuousness would be transparent even to those below the age of voting in India.

Communitarian identity, involving the biradiri (which could be seen variously as caste, region, language or religion, depending on time and place), is central to Indian social and political life to this day. Elections at all levels are conducted under this basic parameter. One reason for the corruption in offices high and low is that everyone’s first loyalty is to their communities and not to the ‘public’ that office-holders in government claim to represent, no matter that oaths are taken when they are inaugurated. Politicians of divergent ideologies are quite unashamed to sponge off public offices for the good of their communities, as they see them, the tax-payer be damned. In many cases, as we have seen in places as different as Bihar or Haryana, politicians are unafraid to admit this before the camera. 

These conditions in India are really a world apart from the situation in Western countries, where individual citizenship came of age many decades ago, and communities of the sort we are talking about eroded (for better and for worse) even farther back in history. 

So, in addition to the trend towards the privatisation of large areas of State activity going on in the West since the days of Thatcher and Reagan (the Second Gulf War saw the powerful re-emergence of private mercenary security companies and fighting units, essentially outsourcing and privatising warfare itself), the Indian polity has the additional issue of a long-standing conflation between the public and the private sphere of existence. In this,  Ratan Tata is closer in mentality to the rickshaw-wallah who spits on the street, than to Bill Gates. In India, unlike in the West of yester-years  public space is not sacrosanct. 

It is this colossally profound conflation and confusion between the private and the public realms that accounts for a thousand failures of Indian public life today. To list just a few here: the coal and spectrum scams of recent years, the way “public-private-partnerships” have created new avenues of graft, the manner in which SEZs were created by UPA-I to exempt corporate economic activity from the Indian Constitution, the manner in which governments have been acting as land brokers for private firms (ab)using the “public interest” clause in the Land Acquisition Act, the casualness with which companies are tasked with ‘self-monitoring’ in the critical areas of environmental regulation (like pollution of air or water) and labour standards. One could go on endlessly.

These are just a handful of the scams that have mushroomed in the last generation as a result of ever-growing intimacy between the State - which has mutated from being a ‘traffic-cop’ to being a ‘player’ in its own right - and India Inc. What we have today is what Ashish Kothari and I describe in our book Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India as an unabashed ‘corporate nationalism’, whose ideology of choice for masking its truth is ‘development’. Developmentality involves the “cultivated failures of cognition” we analyse in the Conclusion of our book as part and parcel of the systematic smoke and mirrors national self-deception needed to mask the enormity of the graft under way in this age of gluttonous power. ‘Development’ is by far our longest living national lie. It is our word for elite denial.

The consequences of the lack of understanding and acknowledgement of the roots of graft in Indian public life will continue to grow at alarming rates in years to come, as the ever-growing mafioso blood-trail in the recent Vyapam scam shows. The fact that social scientists show scant recognition of the location and depth of the ailment is only a sign that even the world of knowledge and the academy has been corrupted by the blinding global and national fog that has settled like a suffocating canopy over our times. 

At an event the other evening at the India International Centre, I brought up the point about Ratan Tata and the fighter jet before a large audience that had just heard a leading figure from the national commentariat trace India’s “aborted transitions” to successful modernity to the conflation of the public and the private realms. There was a hasty nod in response, but no attempt was made to see the invisible social thread that ties Ratan Tata and the rickshaw-wallah into the same spider’s web of living confusion.

This is not an India that anyone can be free, happy or safe in, no matter that ‘prosperity’ has mounted so visibly (and understandably!) in certain quarters. One can only expect rapidly growing business for security outfits and psychiatrists under the conditions of structural anxiety that have come to prevail. This is certainly not the India that the men and women who sacrificed so much so that we, their progeny, could be free, had dreamed of.

Yesterday, there was a mail from Flipkart in my inbox. It wished its customers “Appy Independence Day.” When happiness is no longer possible, or even believable in principle, the best item on the available menu is mobile ‘appiness’. Wah Bhai, India. Aaj Gandhiji zinda hote toh kitne prasann hote! 80 crore logon ke paas mobile phone ho gaye hain, desh duniya ke top investment destinations mein shaamil ho gaya hai, aur Amreeki gola-baarood banaane waali companies ko dher saaraa business de raha hai... 

Independence and Partition - II: Kashmir ka Khat

I had to attend an ecology conference in Ladakh in July. My co-author Ashish Kothari, as well as the environmental group he helped to start, Kalpavriksh, was involved in organising it. It was part of a set of regular meetings that have been happening in different parts of the country that go under the name of Vikalp Sangam. The first one was held in October 2014 in Timbaktu, in Andhra. The second was in Madurai in February 2015. The third one was organised in Leh, Ladakh in July. The idea in these Sangams is to share experiences and exchange ideas on practically viable alternatives to the predatory development model that is ripping through the country's ecology and cultures like a remorseless, self-destructive juggernaut.

I arranged with some friends from Bangalore and Mumbai to meet in Srinagar and take the road route from there to Leh, a distance of 400-odd kilometres, via Zojila and Kargil, to be covered over two days. While I had traveled to Ladakh in 1986, I had flown, and so missed much of the stunning landscapes along the way. This time, armed with a brand new Sony camera gifted to me by my kind brother (the second camera he has gifted me over the years!), I was really excited about traveling to Leh by road.

I spent a day and a night beforehand, by myself, renting a room on a houseboat on Nigeen Lake. It was lovely. I heard from one of the boatmen the story of how the British gradually and subtly inserted themselves into Kashmir. It appears that in the 19th century, there was a British Resident stationed in the Maharaja's kingdom. They were forbidden from acquiring land in Kashmir. On one occasion a British merchant came upon a houseboat with a shop built atop it. He took a fancy to it and asked the owner if he could buy it from him for a price. The owner refused, but promised to build and sell him a new houseboat. This, legend goes, was the first piece of property the scheming Brits bought in Kashmir, without breaking their agreement with the Maharajah about acquiring land! Today a houseboat can cost up to Rs. 2-3 crores.

Enterprising young boys make humble livelihoods on Dal lake.

My friends from Bangalore and Mumbai arrived the next day. One of our colleagues was a friend of Jyoti Singh, daughter of Karan Singh, from the ex-Royalty of Kashmir. Jyoti so very kindly hosted us in her utterly beautiful and hospitable Almond Villa, at the base of Shankaracharya Hill, overlooking the famous Dal Lake. She embarrassed us with the sheer prodigality of her hospitality, serving some truly delectable food, other than the splendour of the rooms we stayed in.

We had a good look at the fabulous mosques of Srinagar one day, seeing some exquisite places.

We were to set off for Leh by jeeps on July 17. However, luck (or rather weather driven by climate change) was not on our side. Ladakh had unpredicted rains because of repeated cloudbursts and two attempts at approaching Zojila from Srinagar were thwarted by mudslides and flooding near Sonmarg. We were obviously disappointed.

On each occasion, we were violently stopped by heavy cordons of CRPF jawaans and J&K Police. They banged the vehicles with their batons and screamed at the drivers of the jeeps for daring to go towards Sonmarg. There were mostly young Kashmiri men among them. When we got off the vehicles to explain the purpose of our visit to Leh, they straightened up, especially when they realised that Jyoti Singh was traveling with us. They showed us pictures of the flooding ahead on the highway explaining, this time gently, why we could not go. The same armed men who were throwing their weight about a minute ago were behaving like obedient schoolboys. Their behaviour was schizophrenic. I was reminded of the TV advertising in Srinagar one evening when I saw ads of mental health counselling. There are many commercials like this. The other ad you see frequently is of cures for infertility among women. It appears the whole valley is sick from the ongoing conflict with Indian security forces. The place is the nearest thing to Palestine I have seen in my life. There are up to 800,000 armed men in uniform in the Kashmir Valley. Armoured vehicles with 'Sadbhavna' written in front of them have gunmen at the ready.

I had visited Kashmir in 1974, with my parents and my brother. I had just begun playing serious golf (briefly contemplated turning professional when I was about 18). I do not remember seeing a single army jawaan on that trip to Srinagar, Gulmarg and Pahalgam. This time, 41 years on, was different. Very different.

There is a construction boom across the Kashmir Valley, very reminiscent of what happens in Palestine. On the other hand the old homes and shops are crumbling. I was puzzled as to what is going on. How come so many new homes and mosques are coming up in such a context? Who is financing them? I was informed by more than one person that land and real estate markets have been very active across the Valley. People are selling off land, forest, and any other assets in order to raise capital to build fancy new homes. Banks are also giving attractively priced loans for home construction and ownership. A lot of mosque construction, it turns out, is being financed by money coming from the Middle East. The new mosques are being built on the Central Asian design, without the big bulbs and minarets familiar from the Sub-Continent.

Next to every mosque is the inevitable CRPF or BSF camp with security forces on the alert. Every few hundred yards on the road to Pahalgam are armed commandos and jawaans, ready to address any exigency that is never too far under the surface. Security arrangements were particularly tight (you had to go through security layers, almost as bad as at Srinagar airport) when we were in the Pahalgam area, since the annual Amarnath yatra was going on. In the Valley, there is hardly a home which has not lost a family member to death or disappearance. At the airport I saw a number of books documenting such tragedies.

This boy grinned from ear to ear when I teased him that he resembled Shahrukh Khan!

As the film Haider (which was shot partly in the basement of Jyoti's lovely house) tried to show, the one thing most palpable across the Valley is suspicion. You can virtually cut it with the proverbial knife. 

A man somewhat older than me I met in Pahalgam's Lavender Park asked me where I was from. I said "Hindustan", which has, revealingly, a better chance of inviting friendship than an answer like "Delhi". He said "Ab toh jenaab hamaara Hindustan se koi waasta nahi hai. Hindustan-Pakistan ab hamaare peechhe hain. Hame toh aage dekhna hai." When I asked him to elaborate, he said "aap ko Hindustan ki kaun si fauj Hindustan mein nahi mil rahi hai? BSF, CRPF, ITBP...yahaan aa jaiyye Kashmir ki ghaati mein, mil jaayegi. Aathon faujein yahaan maujood hain." 
    
Yet, daily life goes on amidst these stiff odds. Big billboards advertise higher education - such as medicine or engineering - in Bangladesh, not in India or Pakistan!

People speak openly against the Indian government, against all Indian political parties and the National Conference, and against Narendra Modi. Our driver Mehraaj Bhai told me that PDP would have won with a far handsomer margin had Mufti not allied with Modi's BJP. Srinagar's leading newspaper Kashmir Rising is openly critical of Indian policies in Kashmir.

We saw something surprising in Srinagar one day: a liquor store busily conducting its trade among the youth of the city, at the base of the Shankaracharya Hill. As soon as the Ramzan rozas finished there was quite a crowd at the liquor store, loud music blaring from cars on the boulevard by the Dal.

At the airport I saw a large number of new books documenting the atrocities and excesses of security forces in the Kashmir Valley. The alienation seems to have got so encrusted that things appear to have passed the point of no return. No maturity or sagacity has been shown by leaders. Gone are the days when one could expect an Indian Prime Minister to quote the great Kashmiri poet Mahjoor and say to militants "agar aap samvidhaan ke daayre mein nahi baat karma chaahte hain toh chaliye hum insaaniyat ke daayre mein baat kar lein." Vajpayee is still the most respected Indian leader in Kashmir.

The last picture I took in Kashmir was of our departure lounge at Srinagar airport. It resembles an army sports arena!

The picture tells us much about why the Kashmir Valley is in the shape it is in, why the BJP could not muster a single seat there. The picture also reveals the immense value of some of the peace and healing initiatives being undertaken in the Valley by citizens. Jyoti Singh organises every year in the last week of August the Annual Dara Shikoh Festival for the Arts, in which a range of Kashmiri artists get a chance to show and discuss their work. 

http://www.almondvilla.in/dara-shikoh-centre-for-the-arts.html

Jyoti's goal is to  address local youth and help revive faith in the great syncretic traditions of Kashmir, ways of community life and philosophical and religious thought and practice, not to forget poetry, that have sustained the people of this beautiful land over the centuries.

Kashmir refuses to be treated as a trifling yo-yo in the predatory politics between India and Pakistan. And in this defence of dignity lies its hope for the future.