Gandhi, Tagore, Modernity

Much is made nowadays of the differences between Tagore and Gandhi. It is true that they saw many aspects of the world — especially when it came to the place of politics and certain forms of mass nationalist protest — very differently. Yet, when it came to their view of human life, the fundamentals of their thinking were remarkably coincident. Here are some points on which Gandhi and Tagore thought alike.

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/main-article/gandhi-tagore-modernity-748957.html

Independence Day 2017: Educating India for true freedom

For this Independence Day, I have written a long 7000-word essay on Thomas Macaulay as the reigning influence on Indian education 70 years after the British left. 

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reviews-essays/biography-macaulay-unwritten-tell-us

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... 

Articles on development written for The Hindu (2007-2013)

'Why this growth can never trickle down', May 20, 2007

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-openpage/why-this-growth-can-never-trickle-down/article2275960.ece

SEZs: 'A betrayal of democracy', September 23, 2007

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/a-betrayal-of-democracy/article2275591.ece

Handlooms: 'Weft and warp of a crisis', December 10, 2012 (with Vivek S.)

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/weft-and-warp-of-a-crisis/article4181700.ece

Developmentality: 'The ruling theology', February 4, 2013

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-ruling-theology/article4377782.ece

AAP's Ghar Waapasi

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/possibilities-of-power

De-criminalise Urban Politics: AAP can transform the city

- ASEEM SHRIVASTAVA

The day after the Delhi election results were declared, I took old friends on a visit from Sweden to the Patel Nagar office of AAP. They got a sumptuous flavour of the fanfare and unpredictable drama of Indian politics. With every fresh victory reported on giant TV screens, thousands of AAP supporters roared in unison, as ‘Paanch saal Kejriwal’—a slogan that turned political failure into stunning success—boomed from big speakers.

When we returned home to Vasant Kunj, the tricolour painted on our faces, we were soon besieged by people from Dalit Ekta Camp, a basti that was all but demolished in December at the behest of the Delhi BJP, the RWA and the DDA. It was saved by an urgent legal intervention via the Delhi High Court, which issued a ‘stay’ order, AAP leader Prashant Bhushan playing a crucial role in court in defending the rights of slum-dwellers. I have yet to meet a single person among the 1,000-odd voters of Dalit Ekta Camp who did not vote AAP on 7 February. The party’s 49-day reign in 2013-14 nostalgically resides in local collective memory here as a time when policemen were afraid to approach common people for routine bribes and favours. The joy on the faces of people from the basti had to be seen to be believed. It felt as though they had all themselves become MLAs in the Delhi Assembly! Celebratory mithai was distributed in the neighbourhood, as taxi drivers, auto-rickshaw drivers, domestic workers, plumbers, electricians and their families danced in glee.

What a fightback AAP volunteers, workers and leaders have achieved!

Did AAP win the election? Or did the BJP lose it? Both, perhaps in equal measure. Full marks to Arvind Kejriwal’s party for faithful persistence. Most others would have given up after the series of political blunders that led to his Varanasi defeat and AAP’s dismal showing in the Lok Sabha polls of May 2014. Credit is also due to him and his party for quickly learning from past mistakes, not getting distracted—for instance, by refusing the temptation to fight the Maharashtra, Haryana or Jharkhand elections last year—and focusing on Delhi and painstakingly building AAP’s organisational structure in the city, something that proved decisively formidable for BJP’s Delhi outfit, which was hardly a pushover. The massive vote-switch from the Congress, and the consolidation of support for the new alternative of course came handy in determining the scale of the AAP win. Since December 2013, AAP’s vote share has risen dramatically from 29.5 per cent to 54.6 per cent. That of the Congress has fallen from 24.6 per cent to 9.7 per cent. The transparent communalism of the ruling party worked against it, as it directed the vast majority of minority votes towards AAP, the most electable alternative to the BJP.

However, the BJP’s own hand in its rout cannot be under estimated either. Sitting on one’s laurels never goes unpunished in Indian politics. Pompous complacency was bound to drown in the AAP tsunami. True to the arrogance of its leadership, the BJP underestimated its rival and overestimated the popularity of its own leader. It hit the ground late and made fatal mis calculations, such as the desperate choice of its CM candidate at an advance dstage once the realisation hit that it was a laggard.

Other than driving a wedge within the party, whose Delhi stalwarts were ignored as a result, how could the party high command imagine that an ex-policewoman would be welcomed by an electorate whose majority are poor and often at the receiving end of police brutality and corruption?

It is hardly excessive to interpret this election result as this city’s referendum on the ruling party’s rock-star Prime Minister, given how much he personally put at stake during the election campaign. It was he who took the risk of saying that the ‘mood of the country’ was also the ‘mood of Delhi’. While he of course retains a hold on the imagination of much of the country’s corporate elite and aspiring middle-class, he has been given a close examination by the Delhi electorate. His rallies have been poorly attended. His negative campaigning against AAP and its leadership was counterproductive. At one of his rallies, when he asked, “Aap kisko vote denge?”, people replied “AAP ko!” His sartorial narcissism, his expensively styled suits (his own name printed unabashedly across them), worth many years of wages for some of the families who have frequented his rallies, have not gone unnoticed.

The Prime Minister’s poor etiquette was also exposed during the Obama visit, when he frequently referred to the American President as ‘Barack’. Many in the media finally seem to have found the spine to mock the follies of men in high offices. The aam aadmi on the street has been getting wise to the ways of the Prime Minister much faster. For instance, my cab driver said to me last month, “Sir, Pradhaan Mantri Amreeka aur Japan hamaare liye toh nahi jaa rahe hain!” Each foreign trip by a leader has a political price in India.

Even more importantly, the divisive communal social agenda of the Sangh Parivar has boomeranged on the BJP. It was widely seen as a distraction from its promised agenda of ‘development’. Ludicrous, misplaced claims about the putative ‘scientific’ knowledge of ancient India, ‘love jihad’, ‘ghar waapsi’, repeated acts of vandalism and church-burning in the capital, the rediscovery of the assassin of the ‘Father of the Nation’ as a national hero, countless taunts and insults hurled at minorities by Parivar members, the occasional riot or communal murder, not to forget the party leader’s own acquiescent silence on each of these occasions, have not gone down well with Delhi’s electorate. No one has time or patience for such nonsense anymore, and the BJP’s ‘achche din’ are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future.

AAP has national ambitions. The last time, however, it fell victim to its own haste. It was rightly seen to have abandoned Delhi in its impatience to make a mark in the Lok Sabha. If it is to emerge one day as “a principled force in national politics”, as Yogendra Yadav puts it, it must do many things very differently this time. To be fair to the leader of the ruling party today, he managed Gujarat for 13 years before staking his claim to Lok Sabha leadership. Rightly or wrongly, he was judged by many—both rich and poor—as having acquitted himself creditably as the Chief Minister of a major state.

By contrast, Kejriwal and AAP are new to politics. They are even newer to governance. Hopefully, the bitter lesson in patience has been absorbed and they will stick to the promise of ‘Paanch saal Kejriwal’. If the party hopes to represent Indians one day, rather than just Dilliwaalas, its leaders would not only need the hard experience of everyday governance (that too without an opposition in the Assembly!), demonstrating to the rest of the country by revitalising Delhi that they have what it takes, they would need to do the hard organisational work of building political bases around the country.

They would also need to think carefully and rigorously through the whole gamut of issues facing India—from ecological crises and their relationship to the workings of a globally benchmarked corporate market economy to defence and foreign policy, not to forget long-standing questions of caste and class, community and gender. None of this, as the BJP is learning, is easy or straightforward. A sectarian, parochial or communal imagination will simply not fly in the context of contemporary India. One needs a vitally fresh all-embracing vision. One needs a vision of the Subcontinent as a living, ancient civilisation, not a decadent, medieval vision of a Hindu Rashtra—which would only enfeeble the spiritual, cultural and intellectual life of India. AAP has to keep an eagle eye open to the perils of mimicking the ways of its main rival among its own rank and file. It needs a leadership that is unafraid to discipline its own workers when the occasion demands. Its track record on this over those 49 days was less than salutary. But Kejriwal has to be given credit for changing the composition of his cabinet this time.

The AAP experiment is best understood as an opening up of a golden opportunity to radically alter the horizons of Indian politics. It has shown that the emperor has few clothes just when he appears overdressed! It is a chance to make politics responsive to the hopes and needs of a beleaguered culture in an ecologically imperilled, globalised world. In its first electoral venture, AAP destroyed the impregnability of the Congress. In its third one, it has shattered in even more spectacular fashion the invincibility of the BJP.

Might it upset both the mainstream parties at the next Lok Sabha polls? Unlikely, but not impossible, especially if AAP is willing to learn from another of its mistakes last year: not welcoming the formation of a national platform—involving hundreds of political groups and formations fighting on a multitude of issues from land and labour to women’s rights and the environment—in which it could take a leading position (as against expecting everyone to join its ranks).

The party emerged from Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement of 2011-12. Its strengths and weaknesses are rooted in this experience. Its organisational model is very different from that of conventional parties, relying much more on young volunteers than on old cadres. This makes it nimbler, but also ideologically less rooted. Impatience and populism have let it down in the past. If the leadership is not watchful, it could happen again. AAP’s leaders would be unwise to prevent a critical and intellectually creative culture from taking root in the party. One reason for the moribund state of other parties is that there is no semblance of intellectual openness and political democracy left in their ranks. If the leader goes blind, so does the party.

Delhi’s electorate has given AAP a mandate to empower communities vis-a-vis elements of the State (such as the police) and the corporate economy, which has been burrowing holes in the pockets of the poor when it ought to be generating livelihoods and affordable goods and services for them. Without much ado, AAP has to get down to meeting the tall promises made in its 70-point election manifesto.

For starters, it might consider two things. One is simple, the other more complex. Given the environmental health disaster that this city is becoming, AAP could begin work by encouraging auto-rickshaw drivers and rickshaw-pullers (two of its strongest support groups) to put on appropriately protective pollutions masks that can be made available. Much research shows that the exposure to pollution of such professional groups in the city is markedly higher than average. This can be achieved without much ado and would have far-reaching positive consequences not just on the health and medical bills of so many families, but also, by visible demonstration, on the attitude towards air pollution in the planet’s most polluted metropolitan area. It would also encourage a readymade business for street hawkers at the most appropriate places for the sale of such masks: traffic signals. The government can encourage this public habit by subsidising their purchase with the help of a small fund collected through an appropriate carbon tax on cars and four-wheeled vehicles. If masks are deemed too expensive, it could encourage people exposed to excessive pollution to consume a few teaspoons of jaggery every morning and evening.

My second proposal is harder to achieve. My suggestion is based on my experience of working with a slum across the street from where I live. In years past, I used to wonder why no political party ever fulfils its promise of legalising unauthorised slums. The answer is simple: once legalised, the slum ceases to remain dependent on the political party that patronises it. The party loses a captive vote-bank (since public memory is short), as also a catchment area both for rank-and- file workers and lumpen elements needed at election time.

If a way could be found to make India’s 50,000-70,000 urban slums legal, imagine the cleansing of the political system that would be achieved at one stroke. By putting a permanent end to what amounts to a politics of vote-extortion, you could begin to decriminalise urban politics in the country, reduce corruption substantially (not just because cops and politicians would have less sway over slums, but also because real estate scams involving slums would be harder to pull off). At the same time, a programme for decent housing for the poor could finally kick off the ground.

All that the AAP leadership now needs to do is push strongly for judicial action on the matter and aim at a Supreme Court order that would apply not just in Delhi but across the country. It would revolutionise the functioning of urban democracy in India. We could be living in a different country within the space of a decade or less.

At stake is not only the renewal of a great city, but that of a great civilisation.

(Aseem Shrivastava is a Delhi-based ecological economist. He is the co-author, along with Ashish Kothari, of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India)