Thoughts on the republic day

I. Modernization project

Every visitor to India, foreigners, NRIs, over the last two decades testify to the positive changes to many of our metro cities, the highways connecting some of these cities, the wide roads, smooth flyovers, the changing skyline with more glass-and-concrete high-rise office buildings and commercial spaces. They also would notice, approvingly, a greater number of smartly turned out people on the boulevards lined with foreign banks, ubiquitous malls and multiplexes, swanky and polished cars of variegated colors, shapes and sizes swarming the well lighted arterial streets of an ever expanding city on a reclaiming and re-development spree. Also, from the sportsmen to the businessmen and bankers, to the politicians and the government bureaucrats you can discern a certain homogeneity in tastes in material accomplishments and a predisposition to bullishness towards attaining higher and higher GDP no matter whatever else happens to the minor matter of the human development indicators.

Be that as it may, the predominantly export and service industry (especially IT and ITES) propelled growth over the last twenty odd years has brought in its wake an unprecedented wave of urbanization, migration of people from the impoverished and no-prospect rural hinterland to the metropolitan areas, being towed to the caravan of aspiration. All these have led to a rapid increase in the demand for housing in the cities and on the municipal facilities that are failing to keep pace with it. One result is a growth of slum-like dwellings and a general increase in congestion, pollution, noise, pressures on the urban social life, rise in the urban poverty and destitution.

Simultaneously, traditional manufacturing centers in and around the cities are folding up having become sick for a variety of reasons. With the space occupied by the old mills fetching much more return simply as prime real estate properties for building new residential and commercial complexes, closing down the mills – and throwing out the industrial workers who used to work there – has made sound economic sense in today’s liberated environment. Apart from growing unemployment, there has been an upswing in the “semi-employment” in mushrooming unorganized informal sector of economic activities (often requiring very little skills) with more scope for exploitation by the entrepreneurs and less for collective bargaining for the workers’ rights. Thus is created a sizable reserve army of low or semi-skilled, partially employed urban poor with no stable job, no dependable income, living in shoddy unsanitary dwellings devoid of any privacy (not even a toilet space) and open to devastation in the next accidental fire or cloudburst.    

Cities are of course not just slums. In a typical city like Pune about 40% population live in the slums. From the descending airplanes the more hopeful and the optimistic disseminator of the modern India story would more conveniently focus on the neatly ordered urban spaces full of gated housing communities enjoying amenities meeting international standards. There are those behemoth highrise commercial buildings where each small cubicle could be servicing offices and private homes in the distant continents with confident and cheeky simulation of the local accents and smart affectation of the customer care. These middle class, predominantly young, men and women, working so hard and earning rather decent salaries by the average Indian standards need avenues for feeling the power of their wallet filled with cash and credit cards from several companies. Thus the city is also dotted with ATM kiosks, multi-brand supermarket chains selling bewildering variety of things of desire, multiplex cinema theatres running ten different movies in a flexible time schedule, fast-food joints and eateries with both local and international cuisine.

    

The more everything changes in our country however so much within us and without seem to remain the same. The growing perception of a lurch towards modernity, for instance, often enough shows up an awkward gait of young unformed legs burdened by a powerful bulwark of a torso controlled by a smallish hard head, not given to flaccid feel-good emotion, but rather compact and quick in calculating where to lease and when to leash those tearing legs.

Even before the deeply hurt country bade fare well last December to the young woman absolutely embodying the aspirational modern India, savaged by hoodlums (members of the reserve army ?) and succumbing to her injuries, India of the hoary traditions spoke up in many voices, from the religious gurus and the godmen to heads of cultural organization, political leaders, not to leave out the spokespersons of the police and the government administration. And these utterances, apart from establishing benchmarks of retrograde misogynic thinking (like the marshland hastily filled up and piled to erect the brand new re-development project) proved beyond doubt, if any proof were required, that India’s modernization project has been conceived in an essentially narrow, superficial and opportunistic manner. After all unleashing the famed ‘animal spirit’ of entrepreneurial zeal (a’ la John Maynard Keynes) in the economic sphere was the limited intervention planned by the political elite. The complete economic fall out of the policies, the social impact including the required shakedown of the die-hard subterranean sensibilities were wishfully thought to be falling in place all by itself !  The tragic rude jolt showed that the task was nowhere near being defined let alone completed.   

(... to be continued)

The new Indian ‘animal spirit’

As a part of his opening remarks made by the prime minister at the interaction with selected newspaper editor on June 29, 2011 he said :

“… frankly speaking in our country this constant sniping between government and opposition or if an atmosphere of cynicism is created all round I think the growth impulses, the entrepreneurial impulses of our people will not flourish and that is what worries me. We must do all that we can to revive the animal spirits of our businesses (our emphasis)”.

What the PM implied was that he was worried that the animal spirit of entrepreneurship of Indians unleashed by him in 1991 might get bottled up in the wake of the corruption controversies, media’s zeal to unearth more scams within government, industry (including proponents and beneficiaries of what has come to be known as crony capitalism), bureaucracy and of course the politicians. Clearly he did not think what he minimally described as “businessmen cutting corners” anything more serious than a weakness in our regulatory system. For him fixing loopholes in the regulatory system is all that is required to address and remedy the clear wrongdoings by parts of bureaucracy, politicians and the beneficiaries in the industry which were pointed out by the CAG, a constitutional body, essentially part of the government. For him too much criticism of the ‘elected government’ would make the bureaucracy hamstrung and lead to impeding or curtailing of the liberalizing economic reforms, affecting the enthusiasm of the entrepreneurs, industry captains and investors. Reviving this ‘animal spirits’, for him, was, has been and is a priority rather than chasing issues of corruption, ‘cutting corners’ by the spirited animals of a new India. 

It may be true that this animal spirit that has helped to drive India’s GDP growth over better part of the last two decades and provided the new-found confidence of Indians in industry, business (especially service sector) and in advertisement, entertainment, fashion and sports. However, one suspects the misplaced spiritedness also having had a hand in the rising rowdiness/arrogance of a certain section of the population highlighted by increasing number of cases of road rage and drunken driving (leading to death and disability to pavement dwellers), kidnapping for ransom, rape, acid attack and other kinds of violence against women, and finally murder for flimsy reasons. The final denouement in the Aravind Adiga novel ‘Last man in tower’ about unsheathed greed goading ordinary people to enact a chilling Macbeth like scenario does not probably appear too contrived in the backdrop of swelling testosterone of animal spirits in a new and almost unfamiliar India.

Though road rage per se is not a cognizable offence under Indian penal code (though often leading to severe assault and death which then becomes one), nor even recorded as a traffic violation, it is probably a very sensitive barometer relating gratuitous violence to apparent economic propsperity (at least to some sections of the population). Roughly 10 million cars, buses, trucks, scooters and motorbikes crowd New Delhi's roads every day, causing long traffic jams and frayed tempers. The city's roads have not kept up with the growth in traffic. While the number of vehicles has grown by over 200 percent over the past two decades, the number of kilometers of road has grown only about 15 percent, as per the transport department. People are on the road for a longer period, and everyone has become impatient. The result is a situation in which even a small verbal confrontation might soon escalate to a physical fight. Vehicles especially new spanky cars, being often a powerful symbol of a newly acquired wealth of a person, if someone on the road even inadvertently scrapes it and leaves a scratch this may feel like an assault on a person's status which is considered unacceptable and a fight ensues. [The above statistics and conditions on the Delhi roads adapted from a write up entitled “Road rage in India growing along with economy” (NDTV.COM ,December 28, 2010)]

There are enough statistics to nail the myth of the benefit of economic growth percolating to poor doing the rounds of government departments, planning commission and their appologists in the press and television. Assuming, however, it is only percolating and not exactly flooding the BPL India with food and fuel, the penetration of the TV and particularly mobile phones, on the other hand, among the Indians in the far corners of the country has been much more noteworthy. Unwittingly for the ruling classes, while these new communication media whetted the economic and social aspirations in the rural hinterland it had also brought home to them the undeniable inequality among ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the growing disparity of incomes. Nor has the growth of employment over these two decades of liberalized economy regime been anything but tardy despite the prime minister’s protestations and promise. Incidences of scams, swindling by the crony capitalists, on the other hand, grew. There has been, in recent years, a rise in the death of whistleblowers, RTI activists (anybody who resists/question cronies and criminals who usurp the spoils of the so-called liberalized economy). And of course the statistics on drunken driving, road rage, rape, kidnapping and murder show an upswing. Whether or not the famed ‘animal spirit’ of the Indian entrepreneurs is in evidence or not the animals in India, including the WHITE TIGERS, are growling. Be advised.

What we the people of India can do about the mindset

There has been a lot of talk about changing the mindset in our patriarchy leaden society, families though there is no clear indication as to how this could be done.

Two points of actions that can be initiated in indvidual homes come to mind  :

a)      Parents (especially mothers through their conditioned instinct and awareness about the patriarchy in action, but fathers no less if only because they provide the theoretical underpinning of patriarchy) should not discriminate, in the real sense, between the boys and the girls. Have you ever seen mothers asking boys to try doing normal household chores (say, helping the mother in the kitchen or taking care of a younger sibling instead of going to school or preparing for a competition) which a girl child is routinely expected to learn and excel ? This also includes the discrimination about norms of gender-appropriate behaviour. Of course significant discrimination about food, nutrition, medical attention and education - sometimes subtle, sometimes open - exists and must be eradicated. This will require the parents to fight their own acquired prejudices handed down through family and strengthened by cultural stereotypes promoted in both real society and in the entertainment world.

b)      Parents must teach their children to accept NO for an answer as a part of the civilised behaviour. And this is not just about the material goodies that they need for their satisfaction. Perhaps it is time the parents bite the bullet and actively educate their children in a calibrated manner about sex, at least as the latter move through their unstable adolescent years. The parents, having the best interests of their children, can be expected to impart reliable information in a matter of fact manner. This should not be left alone to outside agencies like schools. In particular they must also teach the children about the delinquent and sexually deviant behaviour and how society looks upon and how they punish those who inflict such cruel hurt on girls or even small children. This will require a major effort on the part of the parents in removing their own mental block and making the trade off between the prized innocence of childhood against an appropriately organized training and mental preparation in respect of an everpresent threat to their children’s safety. There can be no two opinion about the need to impart, simultaneously, rigorous physical and self-defense training.

Mindset is a devious thing. Most if not all of us imbibe this from our family environment which gets ingrained much before we are equipped to confront it rationally. This also works in an insidious manner through the interstices of a mind given to lazy generalizations, accepting received wisdom and parroting the same without realizing the import of what we are saying. The deep-seated mindset also often causes a divergence between our professed liberal opinion and a not-so rational and anything-but enlightened behaviour, results in our acceding to retrograde suggestions, proposals, requests made by friends, relatives, allows people who by virtue of being in superior or respected position to remain an unquestioned authority for us. If we seriously intend to fight the backlash of the patriarchal mindset we need to root the vestiges of the same within ourselves. The purveyors of false Bharatiya cultural construct and its claptraps would not have been able to withstand our withering gaze if we had chosen to sport one.  

Angst of Bharat in India

Despite outlawing of the prenatal sex-selection tests and voiceferous campaigns by the liberal and the enlightened, the son fetish among the Indian families dies hard. This is a part of the mindset consciously propagated through usual utterances within families (and sometimes publicly) as a piece of conventional (therefore automatically valid) wisdom, and sometimes more insidiously inculcated via suggestions, idioms, mythological stories, legends culled from family, village, ethnic wellspring during childhood and even later, from mothers to children, especially, daughters. The confounding thing (for the social scientists and probably for everybody else who have to deal with the fall out of this home brewed poison) is that despite the wave of modernization, liberalization and even globalization sweeping India this preference is not on the way out. The growing skewed female-to-male ratio in most of the major Indian states is a grim indicator of this trend.

The pervasive son fetish of the Indian families does two things at one stroke. Firstly, discrimination against the girl child is almost hardwired into the family’s evolutionary gene, perpetuating an institutionalized differentiation between the son and the daughter; the practical steps deciding allocation on food, nutrition, medical attention and education then follow. Even in more well off urban and modern families where such brutal daily discrimination is not evident it exists in subtle forms. This also includes the discrimination about norms of good behaviour – girl-like for some or as befitting a boy for others.

Secondly, the girl child, whenever present on the scene, being neither in the scheme of things temporal like property ownership (this has now been somewhat rectified legally) or maintaining family line, nor eligible to perform exit rites for the parents’ other wordly peregrination, becomes like a temporary deposit (the exact synonym for the Hindi word ‘Amanat’ which is how she is conceived in the family and described in common parlance) only to be handed over in marriage to the son and heir to another suitable family in future, sooner rather than later. Till that time the girl has to be raised in due tradition, taught the patriarchal values, often symbolically deified and most importantly, her honour (narrowly conceived as her sexual virginity) is to be protected from being sullied.

Interestingly the burden of protectionism with all its trappings falls to the lot of the girl. There are edicts, explicit and implicit in every Indian family with obvious social sanction, as to what would be the appropriate dress for her, where all she can go, whom she could move with, how she should conduct herself and speak in public, etc. The geometrical space the traverse of so many ‘laksman rekha’s would create, one would imagine, leave very little room for breathing let alone freedom for the ‘precious’ girl child guaranteed by the Indian constitution to everybody including the boys from the same family who suffer little impediment In the end this prescription of gender-appropriate behaviour seems like a big charade whereby even the family and the society (and that includes policemen, everybody knows which society they come from, can one blame them ?) are surreptitiously passing the responsibility of security and protection of the girl to herself, making it conditional to her abiding by the arbitrary and unfair barriers to the exercise of her freedom.

Since the wind of liberalization and attempted globalization of Indian economy started blowing a couple of decades ago the mindset in respect of girls have come under a challenge because of the obvious mobility of both boys and girls from traditional families from villages, semi-rural areas, small towns to metropolitan cities in response to the inescapable urge for economic benefits and aspiration to make it big in the cities. It is becoming practically difficult to manage to keep the girls, who are also earning good incomes and often standing the families in good stead as much as or sometimes better than the boys, within those rekhas in urban centers, offices, public spaces, streets swarming with other fortune seekers and predators imbibing the ‘animal spirit’ of a nation obsessed with economic growth. 

A ghastly rape of such a role model of a girl of new India in a metro city has made the bulwarks of patriarchy, heads of cultural and religious organizations, god-men (whatever that may mean) and last but not the least the politicians cringe more about this loss of control, about becoming irrelevant and prompted them to make such openly ridiculous statements that even many of their followers and supporters feel ashamed about.

What the government and the political parties can do

Calling for nebulous changes in the rape law including death penalty or castration is a cheap populist response that befits the practitioners of opportunist lowest-common-denominator politics, pandering to the emotional street reaction of the public baying for the blood. Activists not given to rhetoric know very well that with a harsher punishment, the conviction rate, already abysmally low (26%), would drop further and therefore they have never advocated death or similar penalty for rape. Even the prescribed minimum sentence of seven years is not always handed out in many cases one is lucky to see conviction. 

That the government means business can be shown, more pertinently, by taking demonstrable actions – not just by token actions against some low level functionaries - but against the gangrenous organs of the state machinery including top-level ‘engineers’ and ‘architects’ responsible for designing and controlling the operations of this machinery, which has cumulatively over a long period of time created this atmosphere of impunity in which the criminals and their apprentices seem to feel at home and be emboldened.

To do justice it would not be enough to promptly arrest and arrange to prosecute the perpetrators in the particular case of the recent brutal assault on the young medical student in Delhi. These hoodlums and sadists happen to be the dregs of the society and not in any way connected with anybody in power. It is unrealistic to assume that the record of police in pussyfooting cases for years in cases the accused is politically well connected (like the abduction and rape of one 14 year old in Lucknow in 2005 by a youngster connected to somebody in the Samajwadi party in power then and now) will be rectified immediately. But that is exactly what the government should aim for if its protestations are to be taken seriously. Also fast tracking this high profile case in Delhi (under the present public pressure) and pressing for maximum punishment for the offences under law – while passing over many thousand other pending cases of violence against women (a large fraction being rape) in Delhi and indeed all over the country, would not help lift the gloom enveloping the democratic edifice the country is justifiably proud about.

Because to do justice would also mean taking serious steps to fill in huge gaps in judicial appointments, not just opening fast track courts today only to let them become nonfunctional over time due to manpower, funds and resources. That will also require massive overhaul of the forensic laboratories languishing all over the country for skilled manpower and infrastructure. Fast tracking of court procedures without due diligence in obtaining scientific forensic evidence will not lift the rate of convictions in rape cases thus undercutting the effectiveness of justice delivery and putting paid to the goal of deterrence.

Naming and shaming the sex offenders (possibly with their pictures and addresses) by police is being suggested as one of the concrete deterrents for the would-be offenders. May be that would be a good thing if the thought ever materializes into actual charts in police stations all over the country, public places, on the web. But what about naming and shaming the insensitive policemen and the politicians ?

During the last two weeks several political leaders made usual statements (about the dress and the character of the victim, advisability of her venturing out, etc) that can clearly be associated with a retrograde patriarchal mindset that, by way of a convoluted rationalization, effectively justifies violence against women. Of course this is not the first time they have been saying these things. Nor are they the only ones who venture to display a penchant for analysis in this context. Many policemen (Noida, park street ..) were equally wise. Can the top leaders of the parties to which these leaders with proclivity to make foot-in-the mouth statements belong, publicly tell them off and remove them from important party positions, deny them election ticket for a period should an election be round the corner ? Can such policemen be publicly reprimanded and punished within the rules for showing disrespect and insensitivity to complainants or refusing to register the FIR ? And this has to happen routinely, not just around December 2012 but through out 2013 and thereafter. These things do not require deliberations in committees, but an acknowledgement about the rotten mindset that, everybody says, should change.

May be that is a tall order. But if such a miracle were to happen, those intrepid protesters who were chanting ‘we want justice’ (whose import the honourable home minister said he did not quite understand) and many others behind closed doors would have started believing that the government finally found a way to start responding.  

Demonisation of the ‘others’

The alchemy of begetting violent outcome from the passion play of identity politics is, to my mind, a poorly understood phenomenon, a dark secret so to speak. That a community of perfectly sane people can be persuaded to sleepwalk into the abyss of intolerance with regard to the another community of people sharing geographically contiguous space and broadly similar cultural values (differing in details that so far were largely ignored), speaking the same language, belonging to more or less similar economic strata, just because of a sudden emphasis on the difference in, say, a religious or ethnic identity is a common enough experience in both pre- and post-independence India. It is also more or less well understood that it is the political class (drawn from most political parties) with the help of the lumpen fringe of the mainly urban poor and professional criminal gangs (this include terrorists, militants of all hues) create these coloured perceptions, set up misunderstandings and eventually inflame passions that often lead to actual violent riots. We have at least two instances of pogroms (anti-Sikh, Delhi, 1984 and anti-Muslim, Gujarat, 2002) where ruling parties either at the center or at the state were widely believed to be complicit.

But the bottom line is that ordinary people could be manipulated, their minds could be poisoned just with a few rumours, a few staged incidents of beatings, killing or rape or desecration of a place of religious worship, or a whipped up misinformation campaign about a bogey (like land holdings coming under occupation by illegal immigrants thereby depriving the indigenous population of their rights in their own land) which had a degree of plausibility. People’s propensity to believe any rumour, dark deeds of ‘others’ (people belonging to the other antithetical community) has been a constant over these sixty-five years since the partition riots. A recent example is the spectacular exodus of people of Northeast Indian origin from the West and South India based on some rumour about a potential plan for attack on these people after a certain date in August 2012 (post the Muharram) as a reprisal for anti-Muslim violence by Bodos in Kokrajhar district of Assam and the adjoining areas (July 2012). Of a same piece is the rumour-mongering based on the doctored (morphed) MMS clippings of anti-Muslim violence in Assam and the Northeast circulating in early August leading to the Azad Maidan violence in Mumbai as well as sporadic violent attacks on the students and workers from North East in Pune and Bangalore. It is just that the new technologies have been harnessed to make the spread of the rumour orders of magnitude faster, lend the rumours a false photographic authenticity giving plain lies a bite of believability and immediacy.   

Vital economic interests, underlying business related rivalry, deep-seated jealousy about the prosperity and economic security could sometime explain this predilection for demonisation of ‘others’. For example, there is this widespread belief among some sections of the Assamese people that the illegal migrants from Bangladesh are occupying lands meant or even reserved for the indigenous tribal population like Bodos and hence are the ‘enemies’ – with the evil intent of occupying and cultivating lands that do not belong to them. Once declared as enemies, any negative image of them or their deed becomes believable. There are definitely many cases of such illegal immigrants, thereby bolstering the plausibility of generalizing this phenomenon as an axiomatic truth. However, what the purveyors of persistent half-truth conveniently forget about Assam’s history for the last hundred odd years is that migration of Bengali Muslim peasants from the erstwhile Pakistan to Assam (both being parts of the then India) happened in many stages, with or without state connivance. Many of them having come and settled in undivided Assam for years could have migrated from one area to another for economic reasons, looking for better or more fertile land (they being basically agriculturists). Their descendants, just because of their religion or language (Bengali) or because they have a penchant for agricultural activity and hence a certain degree of lust for land, should not necessarily acquire the tag of ‘illegal’ Bangladeshi migrant population. These re-settled migrant Bengali Muslim peasants should be differentiated from those migrants crossing over from Bangladesh after 1947 and especially after 1971 (even the Assam accord, 1985, had put 1971 as the cut off date). Moreover, population data (Census) over the last three decades of the last century do not unequivocally show a spectacular swelling of the Muslim population that can only be explained by illegal migration from Bangladesh. But the high priests of identity politics, political elites and intellectuals with vested interests and agenda have no use for such fine distinctions and uncomfortabale details. Having created an atmosphere of hatred for an abhorrent entity called ‘illegal immigrants’ (and thus having demonised them) that is poised to take away people’s livelihood, the land, they would activate the killing fields by staging strategic killings and similar gratuitous violence.

The economic argument, when the context such as above admits it, is a clearly understandable one available for misuse in the demonisation game. Rumour mongering is likely to thrive among the poor who live on the edge and are generally apprehensive about the potential fall out, on their tenuous hold on the fringes of life, of broad economic and/or political policies mooted and executed by the political elite.

Unfortunately, identity politics often enough whip up very deep-seated insecurities among people harking back to historical misdeeds and wrong doing vis-à-vis their identity as a community with a single dominant characteristic like race, ethnicity, language or religion. Demons from the past history are conjured up and morphed (in a conceptual sense) on to the present leaders and members of the other community. It would be interesting to study (I do not know if such studies already exist) the mass psychology of specific communities as regards their implicit belief in the dark ‘deeds’ and ‘character/capability’ of those belonging to the ‘other’ community. What is the long term effect, for instance, of the ‘unspeakable’ partition experience on the Hindu and Muslim (Bengali and Punjabi) families in terms of forming such a subterranean well of mutual mistrust and insecurity passed on from one generation to the future in the form of orally transmitted and restricted access family secrets despite superficial attempts and pretences to forgive and forget.

The last point to touch is the apparent empirical observation made by Ashutosh Varshney in his book “Ethnic conflict and civic life’ which is that the Hindu-Muslim communal strife in India had been much less in those cities and urban centers (he also claims these are essentially urban phenomena) where communal lives of different groups have many linkages, especially economic and professional ones, the rumour mongering and, as a corollary, demonisation having found significantly less takers. Need to revisit the issue.