how the bjp finances the congress or vice versa

The rise of the mining business of the Reddy brothers is a saga of crony capitalism and the close nexus established with politicians and pliant bureaucrats. By bending laws, getting new regulations and enactments to favour them and by blatant violation of forest and environmental rules, the Reddy brothers became a major beneficiary of the Rs 4,000-crore annual profits being reaped through the export of iron ore, taking advantage of the boom in the international iron ore prices due to the huge demand for it in China (the price of a tonne of iron ore shot up from Rs 200 to Rs 2,000).

This plunder, connived with the state, saw the government getting a royalty of only Rs 27 per tonne when the price it was being sold at was Rs 2,000. In 2005-06 alone, 35 mine owners got Rs 3,600 crore in profit. It is this ill-gotten wealth and assets which the Reddy brothers deployed effectively for the BJP. The Reddy brothers have not been shy of flaunting their wealth and influence. One of them is reported to have said during a heated exchange in the assembly last year: "People say we are worth Rs 100 crore. I want to correct it…. we are worth Rs 1,000 crore."

what mr.karat fails to mention is that the so-called reddy brothers funded or financed the congress party too in andhra pradesh. now it's gradually dawning on mr.karat's party which had been a part of an all party fact finding committee which had visited the mines leased out to the brothers in anantapur district of andhra pradesh sometime during 2004-05. his party members from andhra pradesh had not found anything irregular in the company's activities back then- was it because the congress was an ally? now it turns out ysr was one of the gaali or reddy brothers' biggest sponsors and also a major partner, perhaps.

crony capitalism is too poor a description. the same robber barons supporting the bjp in karnataka and the congress in andhra pradesh: we should let sonia gandhi or l.k.advani, both of whom have benefitted from their partymen's association with the reddy brothers, decide on a better phrase. i don't find anything particularly incongruous in the fact that the reddy brothers financed both parties: they both represent the same braminized classes, or hindutva family, if you like, in my view.

this recent turn of events has a lesson or two for both those politicians: the next time sonia gandhi decides to unleash a battery of spokesmen and crony mediamen to target mayawati's extravagant spending on statuary it'd do her a lot of good to check how many dozen times more her favourite chief ministers are stealing (not spending publicly, subject to all public checks, like mayawati) from the public in their own states. and l.k.advani has to admit gaali janardhan reddy is much more of an 'iron man' than he ever will be.

this tyranny is okay

Any criticism of the market as God these past two decades led to being branded a heretic. The market had all the answers. There was no miracle it could not perform. Some, like Swaminathan Aiyer, argued that markets alone could save the environment. Others, like Time magazine, asserted that hunger was but a function of anti-market systems. Want jobs? Leave it to the market. The market wasn’t just good for democracy. It was Democracy. This was the baloney of the last 15-20 years. There were other possible positions. Such as that you might need the market. As a tool, not as a tyranny. As just one instrument amongst many, not as an all encompassing ideology. But that would have been blasphemy. [italics mine]

p.sainath in the essay 'The globalisation of inequality'.

the indian left liberal, or whatever anyone whose politics hovers around the same concerns and interests as sainath voices would like to call himself, is quite a character. he would look away when the market is allowed free play in schools and health, but would object strongly if airlines or hotels owned by the government are privatized. it's okay to throw small change at farmers to get them to ensure your food security, but it's irrelevant how big a role nonexistent public healtcare (or expensive private healthcare) plays in driving farmers to suicide. in a country where the unorganized sector forms 93% of the workforce (almost half of those workers, i think, have to look for a new job, if you could dignify the worst kind of manual labour with that title, every day or week or month or couple of months) the best kind of social security he can offer is a job scheme that involves worse than the worst kind of manual labour (because it offers no scope for learning about new tools or technologies, no training or retraining and not even minimum wages most times) and reaches not more than 2 to 5 percent of that 93%,..the point i am driving at now (as i did many times earlier), is that that the indian liberal is not a mere hypocrite. he is much more lethal.

one reads swaminathan aiyar and understands what kind of people he's concerned about. swaminathan aiyar recommends a bigger role for private players in schools, swaminathan aiyar thinks the family is the best social security an indian worker needs, swaminathan doesn't seem to care about public healthcare because i've never seen a column by him on the subject.

swaminathan aiyar likes private schools because the india he lives in doesn't need government schools (except of the kendriya vidyalaya kind), swaminathan aiyar doesn't care about social security because his kind of indians mostly work in the organized sector where they have job security, pensions and benefits and insurance coverage (insurance penetration is less than 5% in india- most of it is bought by aiyar's india). and they also have urban and rural property-for them private healthcare can never cost the earth because they can always hike its price.

what does sainath think of schools, social security and public health? except in a very general sort of way i don't think he has ever wandered deep into those mostly rural hells- like swaminathan aiyar, he doesn't seem to care. i suppose the tyranny of the market can be an effective tool in those areas?

kapil sibal seems to have stirred no one except a few trade unions.

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.

did hindus kill muslims in gujarat?

the andhra pradesh government runs a programme called 'indiramma' (yes, the chief minister would like to name everything under the sun...no, including the sun, after indira or rajiv). it's a housing scheme- the govt makes available to rural households long-term loans for building homes. each householder is also required to make his own contribution too, of course. well, the scheme works like the first link in this paragraph. one television report showed who exactly it works for - the camera first panned over an upper-caste neighbourhood, in a village, with almost completely built houses, and then moved over to the dalitawada.. the dalit homes couldn't rise beyond the bare foundations. and there were shots of other neighbourhoods with incomplete structures- these belonged to the other castes who couldn't chip in with enough resources of their own. nor borrow enough.

the congress and the communists agree with the bjp that hindus killed muslims in gujarat. did they?

It is, therefore, not very surprising that earlier the Jan Sangh and now the BJP, has systematically used the dalit masses to advance its own political agenda and also have always used them for attacking minorities. The poor dalit youth are always in the forefront of all the riots. The dalit leadership, itself very weak, finds itself almost helpless in controlling the dalit youth to perpetrate communal violence. The job of killing is done usually by dalit youth and upper caste followers of the BJP keep themselves away form this ‘dirty job’

asghar ali engineer, i think, has got it almost right (many of the dalits he refers to are probably obcs) because dhimant bhatt, chief auditor of m.s.university, seems to echo his views:

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.

the congress, the communists and the bjp- they need each other. and they all need the poverty line as much as they need hindus.