a cure for that madness

“She is spending Rs 1000 crore on establishing statues of elephants and herself. Can there be something more shameful than this in Indian politics,” he asked.

“Of what use will be the statues in UP. The Rs 1000 crore could have helped wipe out poverty of thousands of people, provide basic amenities and education,” he said, addressing a meeting to thank voters of his constituency Sivaganga last night.

this from the leader of a party which has named universities, museums, planetariums, zoos, sanctuaries, sanatoriums, hospitals, art galleries, theatres, dams, power projects, schools, colleges, awards, streets, highways, bridges, poverty alleviation schemes, employment schemes, farmer support schemes, housing schemes, health schemes, loan schemes, airports, railway stations, bus stations, sanitation schemes, social security schemes, industrial townships, parks, elephants and tigers and other faunae, educational scholarships and fellowships, research grants, stadia, gyms, traffic junctions, office buildings etc after members of one family. with public money. apart from encouraging all kinds of congressmen, once-congressmen, also-congressmen, never-congressmen and all kinds of other slobbering enthusiasts to further spread the disease across the land, christening every kind of recognizable public nook, cranny and wilderness in the country after members of the same family.. pockmarking it with likenesses in stone, cement, plaster, metal..of that holy trinity. with money mostly stolen from the public.

i might not agree with mayawati's method, but she is desperately trying to find a cure for that madness, which is itself a new variant of an ancient plague, i think.

i don't wish to know why manmohan singh or advani is better

while india's brahminized classes, like always, successfully managed to hijack the current elections for their own narrow, grubby ends, a few questions that remained unasked:

*what are they going to do about rural indians? a great majority of them have to move away from agriculture in the next 10-20 years.

*what are they going to do about universal education? more than a 100 million children of school-going age are not in school right now.

*what are they going to do about drinking water? around two hundred thousand children in one district, nalgonda, have withered limbs from drinking groundwater with high fluoride content. that's one district. while one paddy growing district in punjab probably uses/misuses more water, in one season, than the whole of delhi and its satellite towns in one year. or as much water as the whole of rural rajasthan probably drinks in more than one year. and to think that punjab doesn't consume even a fraction of the rice it produces.

* what are they going to do about hunger and malnutrition that over half of india's women and infants, among others, suffer from? luring punjabi farmers to produce more rice, so that more farmers in traditionally rice-producing states in the south and east lose their livelihood, and then looking away when the punjabi farmers commit suicide in droves isn't going to help. anymore.

*what are they going to do about primary health care in 6,00,000 villages? india has over 6,00,000 doctors of whom only 20,000 odd thousand work in the countryside. each doctor caters to around 60 villages, or 50,000-1,00,000 villagers. how about a doctor for every village, a tap and a toilet and electricity for every home? and schools and sanitation systems for every ward? that's primary healthcare according to the u.n. etc.,

*what are they going to do about people who work on medieval occupations like weaving to scavenging? probably around 50-75 million families depend on those occupations. and earn medieval wages.

*what are they going to do about immediate and sustained relief for the vast majority of workers in the unorganized sector (93% of the workforce in the country) who earn less than a dollar a day? social security for them would be useless if it comes in only when they get seriously injured. how about relief for today, this month, next month, next year- for as long as they can't retrain themselves to look for better work opportunities? or until better work opportunities are created?

*how about a mechanism for ensuring people who oppress dalits, women, children and others in every village are brought to justice as fast as ajmal kasab?

why should we blame them?

we're still paying for what people like jagdish tytler did twenty five years ago. we paid for it every year after 1984. bombs, riots, kidnappings, hijacking, plain mass murder-the cbi should've checked all that evidence. the ruling government should've checked all that evidence.

those who shall be planning the next round of bombs, riots, kidnappings, hijacking, plain mass murder would be checking tytler's clean chit. they'll find enough evidence there that they've always been right. and at this moment, i can't really blame them.

the 'national' media's two glass system

if one were to trust the indian media, the ipl and varun gandhi are the only important issues these elections have thrown up until now.

if he wasn't varun gandhi, and the indian police weren't the indian police, he would've been arrested while he was making those speeches and would have earned a mere mention in one of the inner pages of local dailies. and the ipl? if the indian media weren't the indian media, it'd still have been big news, but definitely not on all front pages. or on the best slots on television.

why aren't the careers of politicians like varun gandhi nipped in the bud (because there are enough provisions in the law to do so)? the answer lies in another question: why weren't several others like him stopped earlier? it isn't just indian politics that makes the indian police the indian police but a whole host of other institutions like the indian media etc., and it isn't just indian politics that makes the indian media indian media, but indian media too helps in making indan politics indian politics. all of that is confusing, yes, but this final attempt to explain all might help: indians are behind all this. certain classes of indians.

check what the bbc had to say a few hours ago: indians saddened by ipl decision. and who were the indians bbc's prachi pinglay spoke to? the ipl, i guess, is popular in the villages too- but the question is: would any issues that occupy the minds of the marginalized in india ever really make such a big splash in the so-called national media? definitely not. not as long as even the newsmen who generate reports for the international media too come from certain classes of indians.

madigas, and over fifty other dalit castes in andhra pradesh have been agitating over the last fifteen years for dividing the scheduled castes into categories (as it is done in the case of obcs) to ensure that, according to their view, not all the fruits of reservations are cornered by a couple of castes. there have also been barely covered reports of similar movements across the country. now this demand needs to be debated seriously across a wide range of fora because it involves not just madigas and other castes in andhra pradesh, but dalits, primarily, and all other classes of people across the country. from 300 million to one billion people.

ipl's lalit modi gets almost unhindered access to top elected and other officials in the central government and the states, and at any given moment you'll find him on a couple of television channels. how many newsmen working for the national media have heard of manda krishna madiga? has rajdeep sardesai heard of him? or barkha dutt? or m.j.akbar? or vinod mehta? or pick any other big name. have they ever interviewed him?

but the dalits in andhra pradesh are seriously agitated over the issue, and their demand requires a constitutional solution that could only be found through the parliament. and that'd involve the whole country. yes, it is regional or local news, but only because the national media ignore it.

if indian media started listening to the marginalized, why would the marginalized sit around listening to empty-headed bigots like varun gandhi? wouldn't they be talking instead? and making a citizen's arrest? they face people like varun gandhi every day, in villages across the country- people who demand a two glass system at tea shops, for instance. if those minor bigots go untouched, it isn't because the people like them or think they're right. it is because the people who work in institutions, like the media and the justice system etc., which are supposed to work for all citizens believe in the two-glass system themselves.

"Why should you feel uncomfortable riding in a taxi driven by a taxi driver who belongs to another state?"

why doesn't the government do something about all these dangerous migrants from other states? why don't they go back to their home states? why doesn't the government send them back to their home states?

no, that's not any sena/sene making those demands, inciting those passions. it was the congress cautioning the electorate about sikhs during the 1984 elections. i had pointed out in this post how the congress' narrow interpretation of secularism suits the parivar perfectly, and the parivar's even narrower interpretation makes the congress look very liberal. both these parties together, with consistent help from the communists, have turned all discourse on secularism in india into a purely hindu-muslim divide, ignoring all divisions within those divisions and exceptions that can never fit into that divide. 60 years from 1947, those parties are still almost entirely led by upper caste individuals representing their own narrow interests: i've given up all hopes of those parties ever being afflicted by a sense of shame.

stick to hindus and muslims

But we live in a time when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label.

from this moving piece of writing at space bar's blog. and the comment i couldn't bring myself to post:

i wish i could overlook the presumption here that i can lay claim to the label 'hindu'. a great many people with hindu names can't be hindus even if they wanted to, not even if india today or bajrang dal wanted them to. i wish i didn't have to post this comment, but i've noticed many 'liberal secular hindus and muslims' share this presumption.

why didn't i post it? because the key tenets of the liberal secular ethos in india were defined by nehru, who took great pains to describe his descent in the very first chapter of his autobiography, and later interpreted by his biographers like m.j.akbar who take great pains to engage only with upper caste hindus in all their writing. because even when one has been labelled one doesn't feel invited to these debates.

because my folks come from a village where the muharram procession still starts from lower caste homes. because some of my mother's cousins were named after a holy man called yaqub. because my grandmother always believed the festival of peers was our festival. one could go on, but for any debate to be truly liberal secular, one should stick to hindus and muslims, i guess.

a soul mate

some interesting remarks made by commenter ghulam mohammed here:

The whole community that formed about 30 percent in British India, were divided in three antagonist groups, by Nehru and Indira, both Brahmins. In sixty years of Indian independence, Muslims have been so devilishly persecuted for the alleged sin of partition, that they had no confidence left to challenge the false propaganda of the power grabbers. In United India, one can see that Muslim population percentage with a democratic constitution, would have been ruling the whole subcontinent. I can go on and on, listing the sins of Brahmins and Brahminical conspiracies. The trouble with Sudie is that he cannot see his back. There is no smoke without the fire. If Brahmins are clearly pointed out as the culprits in the plight of the Muslims, one can see how all Brahminical political groups — Congress, BJP, Communists — all led by Brahmins are blatantly perpertrating crimes against Muslims and still hide behind the pious garb of secularism. A day will come, when the 3% Brahmins will not be able to concoct and flaunt the 85% Hindus as majorities.
[...]

If 3% Brahmins can conjure up a majority of 85 percent “Hindus” — by projecting 15% Muslims in Independent India, as the other, the ‘other’ who have supposedly divided ‘Mother India’, then no one should rule out the possibility of a 30% Muslim population of Indian sub-continent, after 60 years of freedom from British colonial rule, could have been overtly or covertly registered its overwhelming presence in Indian (sub-continental) politics and would have been virtually ruling India, just like the present 3% Brahmins, by cleverly organising through propaganda, a 85% Hindu majority and ruling the roost.

Thanks to Mandal, that unity of 85% is now fast disintegrating and all sorts of permutations and combinations are in play. Muslims are in serious disarray, but be rest assured that there is constant churning in their midst to regain their due. The mere mention of that possibility has ignited our friend. That is expected. He had never encountered an Indian Muslim speaking in these terms. It is the monumental scale of demonisation of Muslims, in India and abroad, that the virtues of a peaceful, humane and progressive Islam are not being given any thought to.
[...]

First I will start, with Congress. Pandit Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, PV Narasimha Rao, are all Brahmins. ManMohan Singh is a powerless appointee — the real power lies with Sonia Gandhi, a Super Brahmin, a white from a European country. If Congress had any place for non-Brahmins, we would have seen Sardar Patel at the one end, and Sharad Pawar at the other end of its 60 year history to have become Prime Minister, even from among the Congress members. The top place and total power is reserved only for a Brahmin. Only a Brahmin is eligible.

BJP: All RSS stalwarts, from Hedgewar, Golwalkar to the present Vajpayee and a whole list of leaders are all Brahmins. Advani had been given tough time, just because he is not a Brahmin. There is many a slip between the cup and the lips and we have to see if Advani can ever become PM.

CPM: Namboodiripad, Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb, Prakash Karat are all Brahmins; so is the all the front ranking Communist party.

the congress' end is the bjp's end is the communists' end

the karnataka poll results remind me of a few weeks old post, on by-polls in a few u.p., assembly constituencies, by adnan- an excerpt:

Amid the blue hue that has swept UP, the humiliating defeat of BJP and its absolute marginalisation in the state has been totally overlooked.

In the three Assembly by-polls, the share of votes in Muradnagar, Colonelganj and Bilgram, the party has been extraordinary low. It could get just 1.35%, 3% and 5% votes in the elections, the results for which were announced two days back. The BSP won all the three constituences, as also the two Lok Sabha seats. Surprisingly, the Lotus has wilted in the state where it emerged in the mid-80s pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other. And today it seems both Hindus and Muslims have forgotten this party in India's most populous state.

well, as adnan points out, the four weeks old good news is: the bjp seems to be dying in uttar pradesh. and the bad news, fresh off the presses, is: the bjp has emerged a winner in karnataka, on its own.

i know analysts would interpret the bjp's diminishing stature in u.p., as a triumph of the ordinary indian's secular spirit, and the karnataka results as a major threat to the health of the ordinary indian's secular spirit. in most liberal analysts' minds, the fortunes of secularism in the country are inextricably linked with the fortunes of the congress, the bjp and the communists, the national parties.

how true or tenable is that theory?

if you look at the recent communal history of u.p., and of tamil nadu, you'll notice two similarities: a) the significant absence (or insignificant presence) of the congress, the communists and the bjp in those states and b) the significant absence (or insignificant presence) of communal strife in those two states.

what does that tell you? the indian liberal doesn't usually connect those two phenomena in the way i am going to now: i believe that (a) leads to (b). none of those three national political parties/groups are secular on caste, so i don't think they can be secular on religious issues.

which means the bjp is dying in u.p, because the congress is already dead in the state. and the congress is dead because there are no communists in the state. similarly, in tamil nadu, however hard it may struggle, the bjp has very little chance of creating any waves as long as the congress has very little chance of reviving itself. and again, there are no communists in tamil nadu. what do all these factors add up to? peace across religions. or near total peace across religions.

and peace across castes? caste is much older than the religious divide, so it'd be a longer struggle. and karnataka is essentially playing out struggles against caste. the marginalized castes in india have been voting for alternatives in every election since the sixties, voting in those who seemed to be secular (on caste issues), and voting those alternatives out again when they realized they were not as secular as they seemed (on caste issues)- the process started earlier in some states. this opened opportunities for the janata parties in the seventies and eighties and the bjp later. u.p, tried both the janata parties/dal and the bjp, karnataka flirted with only the janata dal. it has voted for the bjp now- which essentially means, this is the beginning of the end of the congress. and then of the bjp in karnataka, eventually.

here's some advice for the upper caste, indian liberal: true secularism begins at home. check how secular the track record of y.s. rajashekhar reddy, chief minister of the only congress ruled state in south india is. i haven't read a single liberal analyst in the country expressing doubts about his secular credentials until now- but most of them, i do remember, celebrated the return of the congress in the state as a great victory for the secular forces in the country. here's an indicator of how non-secular his government actually is: a majority of top posts in corporations, autonomous oganizations functioning under the aegis of the state government, are occupied by reddies: how secular is that? the marginalized castes don't like this reddy raj which seems to be much more disgusting than the kamma raj of the naidu government earlier. some of them are preparing to vote for new, little known alternatives like the actor chiranjeevi's party- no, he hasn't launched it yet. yes, the marginalized castes are that desperate.

the marginalized castes in india don't understand secularism in the same way as the liberal does. and the secular liberal, of course, isn't interested in the marginalized castes' understanding of these issues. so he doesn't understand that the dalit who voted for the bjp in the recent polls didn't actually vote for hindutva. he was looking for secular (on caste issues) alternatives to the parties that had ruled until now: so, in the not so distant future, when he realizes that the bjp too is not so secular (as he definitely will), he will vote for another, untried alternative. and this will go on...

the illogic of gujarat

a few quotes from a slightly old article on the sachar report by a well-known columnist- who's he?

On Thursday the Lok Sabha approved a bill providing a 27% reservation for "Other Backward Classes" in Central educational institutions by a voice vote, which means that there was such unanimity that there was no need for a vote. These benefits have no economic conditionality: the rich among these castes will be the ones who will of course benefit far more than the poor.

does that sound like arun shourie?

The government, and Parliament, did not need a special commission, and a report with 404 pages of statistics, charts and comments, to tell them to do this. They just went ahead and did it. Other Indian communities get jobs on command. Indian Muslims get commissions. The Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed soon after Dr Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister, is the latest one.

definitely not arun shourie.

The communities who benefit from job and educational reservations are better off than Muslims, financially, socially and psychologically. There are no riots against Other Backward Classes, for instance, that are aimed at terrorising the community and destroying entrepreneurs who may have set up a means of survival.

pratap bhanu mehta?

The reality is that there isn’t much of a cake left. The major growth of jobs is now in the private sector, not the public sector, which is excellent news for the country. To seek reservations in the private sector, as some backward militants insist on doing, would become a negative burden on growth. In a democracy, economics must occasionally pay a price to politics, but that would be a price too high. There have to be other means through which we can straighten the imbalance of decades.

pratap bhanu mehta. definitely.

Will reserving seats for Muslims as a category help? The instant answer is yes: if this is the way the political game is being played, then why should Muslims and Christians be excluded from the game? Almost everyone else has been allotted a piece of the cake, so why not them? Are they paying the price for being "foreign faiths", that is, religions that originated outside the Indian subcontinent? If that is the truth, then the establishment should change the truth before the people change the establishment. If that is not the truth, then someone should let us know what the truth is.

definitely not pratap bhanu mehta. who then? from an older piece of writing by the same author:

Law and order have two enemies: the Full Truth and the Complete Lie. When people realize the truth, they start revolutions. When they are fed lies they begin meaningless riots. Lies are the staple of every communal disturbance. They are spread by people who have a stake in this stupid violence, who have something to gain out of impoverished Hindus and Muslims fighting each other. Businessmen, traders, politicians, goondas, leaders of ‘cultural organizations’(like the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh —RSS) feed the people with lies, watch these lies become convictions in people’s hearts, watch the passions build up, and then these leaders actually set up the events which will provoke a conflagration.

who killed muslims in gujarat? impoverished hindus? listen to someone who knows:

Until Godhra happened, the upper castes would never come out… Baniyas… Patels… they would never come out… But we mobilised them… told them that we had prepared teams from the police and amongst advocates… that if they went to jail, we would get them released.

it was the obcs then who did most of the killing, because very few from the castes higher up were involved. are the obcs impoverished? m.j.akbar, author of the first article, doesn't seem to think so. but m.j.akbar, author of the second article, would agree, i guess.

when you're busy sucking upto the brahmins- when all you want is their approval, their endorsement, their patronage and their acceptance...i guess you wouldn't have much time left to understand either the muslims or the obcs. right, mr.akbar?

my earlier posts on gujarat: [ 1 ] & [ 2 ].

how secular is the secular brigade?

from the article 'holy cow and unholy dalit' by siriyavan anand in the november 2002 issue of himal (which thrust itself again on me today):

While the mainstream media and the ‘secularists’ run shy of such instances of caste-based aggressions, they find it much easier to focus on episodes of violence where the obvious faces of Hindutva – Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Janata Party – are involved. These outfits are seen as representatives of a militant form of pan-Indian Hinduism from which the secular brigade – that otherwise indulges in caste – seeks to distance itself, not realising its own role in creating and sustaining these social monsters. In Thinniam, where no such Hindutva outfit was involved, and where Subramani and his family had no significant affiliation to any political party, the aggression was simply a result of a thevar-supremacism. Subramani and his family do not identify themselves as ‘Hindu’ nor do they act in the name of ‘Hinduism’. If they did, the RSS-type Hindus would distance themselves from such ‘caste Hinduism’ more forcefully than the secularist Hindus would. For instance, the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch chief, S Gurumurthy, viewed the VHP-Narendra Modi actions in Gujarat as un-Hindu and even ‘Islamic’. In his perverse understanding of the carnage in Gujarat, ‘Hinduism is getting Islamised’ (Outlook 23 September 2002).

Ezhavas in Kerala, gounders in Tamil Nadu or jats in Haryana do not victimise dalits to defend ‘Hinduism’ as much as they do to secure their caste supremacy. And when the dalits of Meenakshipuram (in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu) famously embraced Islam in 1981, they did it not to escape Hinduism, to which they anyway did not belong, but to liberate themselves from the oppression of the thevars. The Hindutva groups descended on the area, and on Tamil Nadu in general, only after the Meenakshipuram conversion. The assertion of caste supremacy by the shudra groups is today being increasingly expressed through Hindutva outlets like the VHP and Bajrang Dal – as seen from the experience that the targets of Hindutva are invariably the dalits and Muslims. In fact, Hindutva, as we have seen it since the 1990s, is basically an organised, pan-Indian expression of casteism to which even ‘Dravidian’ parties like the DMK and shudra outfits like the Telugu Desam Party lend legitimacy. A casteism backed by brahmins and other upper castes but acted out by the shudras.

how secular is 'the secular brigade', that, as anand says, 'otherwise indulges in caste'? those castes in india which find it necessary to assert their 'supremacy' do so in their efforts to go up the ladder, to claim the little or mostly unavailable space at the top. and mostly to hold onto their assigned rungs. when the shudras and the dalits went around killing hapless muslims in gujarat in 2002- moments like those, perhaps, are the only times that space at the top seems easily accessible, even welcoming, to them? hindutva and secular politics reign from the same perch.