India needs a mass movement for banning crackers. For what is considered enjoyment is tantamount to collective suicidal self-indulgence
India is in the grip of a raging COVID-19 pandemic, which is surging forward relentlessly. New cases and deaths are reported every day in alarming numbers. Things are made worse by severe air pollution levels in many places — particularly Delhi. Besides enhancing people’s vulnerability to the Corona virus — these are causing permanent damage to the health of children and the old. One would have thought that all this and the crisis stalking the economy would invoke a sombre mood that would be reflected in the observance of Deepavali, one of the most beautiful events in the country, which is celebrated by a large section of Indians of the diaspora as well, and prompts warm gestures by friendly countries. Witness the lighting up of the Times Square in New York City on the occasion.
One had expected that the emphasis in India would be on observing Deepavali as a festival of lights, dispelling the gloom that has enveloped the country this year, creating an interlude of cheer in the midst of grief and despair. One had hoped that people would abjure crackers, whose use had been banned or severely restricted in many parts of the country. Nothing like this happened. There was not only no decline in their use but they continued to be burst on Deepavali day, which was November 14, and in some cases, even a week later, albeit in diminishing frequency.
Sky-rocketing decibel levels heaped miseries on the old, infirm and the ill. Animals, particularly dogs, suffered terribly, with some going almost crazy with fear. Billowing smoke from cracker bursts severely spiked the already high air-pollution levels that had been playing havoc. Unforgivably, all this happened despite restrictions and bans, exhortations against unrestrained cracker bursts by civil society elements, environmentalists and a growing army of school children pleading that their future be not jeopardised. In fact, over the past several years now, there has been a growing movement calling for a progressive reduction in the explosion of crackers and a ban on the more deafening and polluting kinds of these, without, of course, any significant effect.
Why is it that a large section of Indians is relentlessly trying to reduce what is meant to be a splendid festival of lights into a prolonged orgy of horrid, ear drum-splitting noise? They cannot be unaware of the consequences of what they are doing and the impact this will have on their children and grandchildren, not only in terms of health but of character. Their progenies, and those of the latter, will come to feel that what matters is doing what they want to and not their society’s well-being and future, and that rules and laws can be broken with impunity. The consequences can be serious in terms of maintaining social harmony and law and order if this leads to a generally cavalier attitude towards obeying laws, including those embodied in the penal code in respect of crimes like murder, robbery, serious fraud, printing of counterfeit currency and so on.
People engaged in orgies of bursting crackers cannot be unaware of the consequences of what they are doing. These have been dinned into their consciousness for at least two decades now. Is it that they enjoy bursting crackers so much that they cannot help doing it heedless of the consequences? If this be true, what can be the explanation?
To answer the first question, one needs to look at some of the deeper processes at work. Every action by an individual is fundamentally a result of instinct or an exercise of will. One instinctively jumps out of the way of a truck that suddenly comes across a bend and threatens to run one over. It is the result of the instinct for survival at work. The bursting of a cracker is an act of will, the final one of a series that involves the decision to buy it, the act of buying it, followed by acts of storing it, taking it out and igniting it.
Every act of will is an act of self-assertion. The self wills the action which, in turn, underlines its existence. One can act because one exists. A much-referenced statement by the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, runs, “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” One can see a subconscious extension of the same thought process behind the statement implied in each cracker burst, “I explode crackers, therefore, I exist.” In fact, there is more. One sometimes gets hurt — even badly — while setting off a cracker. This therefore, can also be projected as a testimony to one’s courage. It can be doubly so if the act is in defiance of a ban – or restrictions – on the use of crackers. One can then show oneself as a daring rebel as well.
There are doubtless, other means of self-assertion in the form of producing works of art like painting and photographs, making films, staging plays, writing, dancing, singing, making sculptures and designing and building celebrated works of architecture. Engaging in these requires training, skill, effort and, of course, talent, and the expending of a huge amount of time, which would leave one with little opportunity for going though all the stages of activity associated with explosion of crackers. One may be asked: How does one know that people who explode crackers are not engaged in creative activity? Some of them may. This writer, however, is not aware of any survey, which shows how many or what percentage of cracker enthusiasts are engaged in creative pursuits. The nature of activity required in any form of creative venture and the setting off of crackers respectively are, moreover, totally different and this writer knows of no novelist, poet, playwright, painter, film-maker or stalwart photographer who explodes crackers.
The argument can be that people explode crackers because they enjoy doing it and that those engaged in pursuits that are essential to the functioning of a society but are not regarded as creative — businessmen, administrators, managers, clerks, lawyers, doctors, engineers and so forth, for example — have as much right to enjoy themselves as writers, painters, film-makers, photographers and so on. They certainly do, but not when it causes serious damage to public health and the environment. In such a situation, enjoyment is tantamount to collective suicidal self-indulgence. We are steeped in a culture conducive to it.
Throughout history, most cultures have sanctioned an element of self-indulgence in the form of gorging on food that thrills the palate and consuming beverages that can inebriate. There is nothing wrong with this within limits. It has created demands, the satisfaction of which has contributed to economic, and even creative, activity. In the present instance, the cracker industry employs thousands in the manufacture and distribution of its products.
It is, however, an industry that causes severe damage to society. Year after year, there has been talk of drastically restricting use of crackers during Diwali and a few days before and after it. Virtually nothing, however, has been coming out of it; as almost unrestricted supply of crackers is available every year and, if anything, used on a continuously escalating scale. Since restrictions imposed by the Government on the use of crackers have hardly had any effect, the Union and State governments need to take steps to drastically curtail production, if not close the industry down altogether. It should not be difficult to absorb the workforce thus rendered surplus into the manufacture of fireworks, which will receive a boost as the bulk of the money now spent on crackers will then be spent on these.
Meanwhile, school children and civil society organisations and personnel, who have been demanding severe restrictions on the use of crackers, must step up their efforts. The target must be on building a nationwide citizens’ mass movement whose tidal sweep can be ignored by neither the Union and State governments nor the manufacturers, the distributors or the exploders of crackers.
(The writer is Consultant Editor, The Pioneer, and an author)
It seems that mental slavery has gone into the blood and veins of some Bharatiya people. Some people have still not come out of the hangover of the colonial era. It is time to wake up and smell the coffee and see new reality in Bharat where people want to adopt their own culture and languages.
We all learnt English but that does not mean we have to give up Hindi or mother tongue, especially the coming generations must learn mother tongue and Hindi. Some people want to stay slave forever as they have started enjoying slavery. In response to any Hindi article many people start telling the advantages of learning English and adopting it for ever. They have killed their pride and consciousness instead of promoting their mother tongue and developing any link language for whole Bhaarat. If this happens then how they will get their satisfaction without being mentally slave. Dr. Jhaveri Madhusudan Ji although Gujrati himself has written about 200 articles in Hindi and have proved that Hindi has all the qualities for becoming National and link language of Bhaarat. It is not only in the matter of Hindi but all around Bharatiya people prove their mental slavery. Hindi has pure Sanskritnist pure Hindi words but media use and spread Urdu and English words in Hindi. Mental slavery is not shown in matter of Hindi only but all around in every field mental slavery is shown. Please watch the following program which discusses the mental slavery of Bharatiya people.
Decolonizing the Indian Civil Services: Rajiv Malhotra: (60) Decolonizing the Indian Civil Services: Rajiv Malhotra - YouTube
It leaves the regulatory door ajar for each country to force hard, localisation rules for data without being subject to scrutiny at the multilateral platform
The world has seen a major economic negotiating bloc getting “next to a done deal” in the last fortnight, in the form of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a free trade agreement (FTA) between 10 ASEAN countries and China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. This pact, when ratified, will come to represent 30 per cent of the world’s GDP, impacting almost half of the global population. Most significantly, it is a multilateral trade agreement where China is a leading party. The RCEP has been at the negotiating table since 2012 before it went stagnant in recent years as India resisted opening its industrial and agricultural sectors to increased international competition. Subsequently, given the rise of an “abrasively ambitious and technology-aided” China, India had also pressed for localising data of each country’s citizens, unless the participating nation granted its outbound transfer. India formally withdrew from the RCEP in 2019 due to domestic demands. However, despite the November 15 agreement on the trade deal, New Delhi still has the option to join RCEP.
A post-pandemic world economy gasping to revive, a new regime in the US soon with a strong possibility of rejoining multilateral platforms for trade and strategic cooperation and the vision of a new India are some of the paradigms to be kept in mind before passing any judgment on what works best in our favour at this juncture. New Delhi not joining the RCEP has been received with mixed responses domestically, with those opposing the Government’s stance stating that an isolated India in South East Asia and our sensitivity to China’s imports may be more out of geopolitics than economic realisation. A study found that between 2007-2008 and 2015-16, India’s import of Chinese semi-finished goods and heavy machinery has had a positive impact on our industries, creating jobs and increasing competitiveness.Those who support the Government’s moves of withdrawal have equally strong positions on how importing these goods from China leads to job losses for the unskilled. In the post-pandemic economy, a huge chunk of jobs has to be created for this unskilled category.
The broad tenets of the RCEP agreement aim to achieve zero tariffs on over 90 per cent traded goods between partner countries in 15 years. The economic impact may be dulled by the knowledge that most of these trading partners already have bilateral FTAs in place. However, the geopolitical impact, given a heavy Chinese presence and an ambition to create a counter bloc to the US-led Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), can’t be overlooked. It is often said that China has a huge knack for reverse mastering/engineering the skill sets developed in any successful economy and, therefore, without any significant costs of indigenous development, it can scale up and produce similar goods and services at half the rates offered by original creators. The wordings of the RCEP, in terms of borrowed texts from the CPTPP chapters and approach, seem like a similar exercise. It is here that key emerging technology policy topics like e-commerce, data localisation, as envisaged in the RCEP agreement, have to be studied carefully before India makes any decision.
Electronic commerce, an evolving area of friction on bilateral and multilateral platforms, has found a chapter in the RCEP agreement document. It borrows heavily from the CPTPP. However, on execution, it has bleaker chances as the clauses (at least in their wordings) are less enforceable, ambiguous and too tight-jacketed. The dispute resolution mechanism in case of conflict must be referred to the RCEP joint committee if all other channels of negotiations fail. The contentious issues of source code disclosure requirements, data flows across trading partners and location of data centres and computing facilities have been left for future consultations and agreements. India and the rest of the world economies, including Europe, would be watching this space closely to get cues, before trying to make any overtures. The global policy space is currently staring at tonnes of ideas being floated to control the flow of data beyond sovereign boundaries, thereby acknowledging and equating data as a physical commodity to be traded as a chip on the high tables of multilateral agreements. It would take tonnes of space to argue and potentially arrive at a middle path between different approaches to data regulation globally, except, suffice it to say, this year has been the beginning of national data colonisation policies.
Staying on with data regulations, the text for cross-border data flows and location of computation facilities in the RCEP document leave ample room for subjective and aggressive interpretations. The bloc leaves the regulatory door ajar for each country to force hard, localisation rules for data without being subject to scrutiny at the multilateral platform. This clause may seem to be played to the galleries domestically for each partner but has its own repercussions on global cooperation. India for the time-being has chosen to call for an adjournment on the multidimensional chessboard of multilateral trade/strategic pacts, which is a wise move. It is always better to sleep over the problem and come back with a fresh perspective before going for Sicilian defence or the Queen’s gambit.
(The writer is a policy analyst)
While criticising the Constitution for the failure of those who are responsible in maintaining its sanctity, we are doing injustice to both, the founders and the text
November has by and large been an important month in history. On November 26, 1940, Nazi Germany began walling off the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. In November 1941, the Japanese 1st Air Fleet, also known as the Kido Butai, in a surprise military move, left the Kuril Islands to strike Pearl Harbour during World War II. In November 1944, a German rocket hit a Woolworth’s shop in London, killing 168 people. Simultaneously, on the same day, Himmler, a leading Nazi soldier, ordered the destruction of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria. World politics was in a state of turmoil. Populist leaders, who were born from democracy, and their obsession with expansionism were being severely criticised and held accountable globally.
Back in India, the Hindu-Muslim tension and the differences between the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Muslim League (ML) were growing at an alarming rate. After a failed attempt at the Shimla Conference to mediate between the INC and the ML, the Cabinet Mission Plan was released by a three-member committee set up to decide the fate of an independent India by the Labour Party heading the Government in the UK. Since the Cabinet mission had rejected the demands made by the ML, the league was miffed and had declared the infamous “Direct Action Day”, which had led to widespread violence all across the country.
Among all this chaos, on November 26, 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India formally adopted a Constitution for an independent and democratic country. After hours of debates, discussions and discourses that were held for close to three long years by more than 350 men and women of astute credibility and a proven track record, the Constitution was adopted.
This was not an ordinary moment in India’s socio-political and constitutional history. For a majority of Indians, this was a “break from the past” moment. However, for the founding fathers, the task of framing a Constitution was far more sensitive. They had a dual role. On one hand, they had to justify to the world and future generations reading the text that India was the better of the two nations (the other being Pakistan) that were formed as a result of the Partition and on the other, they had to draft a Constitution that reflected the struggle of the founders. This second role, as Abhinav Chandrachud points out in his book, Republic of Rhetoric, had two competing goals — one was to transform India and the other was to keep things the same. Continuity and change were the two important aspects that rationalised the Constitution-making mandate of the Assembly. Granville Austin points out that the Constitution sought to bring about a “social revolution” while at the same time “trying to preserve national unity and stability.”
The founders were fairly optimistic Indians. They framed a Constitution that wasn’t just ahead of its time but was also a positive and radical intervention in the Indian political scene. For instance, it abolished untouchability, made it unconstitutional for anyone to be granted titles and made a provision for affirmative action for those who had been historically marginalised by society. It granted universal adult suffrage to everyone, irrespective of their religion, caste, creed, gender or race and ensured a fundamental right to equality to every citizen of this country.
All this at a time when the world was still not ready to accept these changes. For example, in the US, despite it being one of the oldest constitutional Republics around the world, it was only in 1954 in the Brown vs Board of Education case, when the “separate but equal” clause was held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Black women were allowed to vote only in 1965 under the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action for Blacks and Browns was held to be constitutional very recently in 2003 in the Grutter vs Bollinger case. The US Supreme Court made inter-racial marriage constitutionally permissible in 1967 and gave students the right to free speech in 1969 in the Tinker vs Des Moines case.
Even as a proud India celebrated Samvidhaan Diwas yesterday, little do we know that the Assembly that framed the most egalitarian and forward-looking Constitution of its times was also criticised by several quarters. There were two kinds of criticisms that were levelled against the founders — moral and legal. The moral criticism was that the Assembly was anti-Gandhian and wasn’t a democratic one. Mahatma Gandhi had espoused the concept of village republics and had stated that power should be vested in the hands of the panchayat whereas the Constitution had followed a highly centralised top-bottom approach to governance.
The Assembly was also stated to be non-representative because a majority of its members were Hindus and members of the INC, too. It was also argued that a colonial mindset prevailed in the Assembly whereby it followed a cut-copy-paste model of framing the Constitution. The legal shortcomings rest on the argument that the Assembly’s functioning was against the State paper and the Indian Independence Act of 1947. Many also felt that the Assembly laid the foundations for a non-secular India. However, there is no doubt that these criticisms had little to no bearing on the sanctity of the document. One-half of the Constitutions across the world don’t even get to see their 20th year. At the least, these criticisms show that dissent was very much a part of the Constitution-making process and virtually every leader in the Assembly had at one point of time or the other registered his/her concerns on issues that they felt strongly about. The Constitution was indeed adopted based on popular support and sovereignty that the Assembly enjoyed from every strata of the society. Today, the document enjoys the status of a holy book for all those who believe in its dreams for this great country.
This is not to say that we have been equally successful in curbing the menace of discrimination, inequality and religious intolerance in India. Arguably so, we might have failed, and the founders would not be very happy with the state of affairs that exist today. Gender inequality, caste-based discrimination, religious fundamentalism, lack of quality public education, criminalisation of politics, corruption, increased blue and white collar crimes, hunger, poverty, population, unemployment, climate change, stifling of dissent and increased populism in politics are concerns that continue to haunt us and our Constitutional framework even today.
But before we hold the Constitution responsible for all that pervades in our socio-political landscape today, let’s take a step back and understand the role that this text is and was supposed to be playing in democracies like the one that exists in our country. Constitutions are inherently symbolic documents and all that they do is reflect the minds and hearts of the people. This is not to say that they include all that is not morally permissible. Constitutional texts assert and reiterate the dreams that a nation saw for itself.
Seventy one years ago, our founders dreamt of a nation that would be free from all kinds of prejudice, hate and stigmatisation. We haven’t achieved this goal. But while criticising the text for its supposed failure we forget that our anger is misplaced. This is precisely because the Indian Constitution places an extremely huge amount of trust on whom it applies, in this case the citizens of this country. While holding the Constitution accountable for the failure of the people, we are doing injustice to the text that works best only when “We, The People” act with complete honesty and uphold principles of Constitutional idealism.
The reason why Samvidhaan Diwas is important is fairly simple, it tells you a story. The story of the rising sun in the history of India’s Constitutional journey. It tells you that the Constitution was drafted by appreciating dissent and favouring intellectual discourse. It tells you that the document was framed at a time when the dynamics of global politics was being reconsidered. It tells you that even in the face of criticism, the Assembly was successful in framing a document that was forward-looking, optimistic and has until now survived the wrath of several populist governments and authoritative leaders. It tells you, most importantly, that the criticism of the Constitution is misplaced and that the failure of those who are responsible to ensure its sanctity does not necessarily mean the failure of the text itself.
The Indian Constitution is a living document and it is going to survive and will continue to stand for those who are vulnerable, downtrodden and have been historically sidelined by a cacophonic Parliament. Let’s promise to shape a nation that aims to build on from where the founders left off.
(The writer is from the National Law University, Visakhapatnam)
Bots Trump Humans in Online Ethics
A study of Twitter data between 2006 and 2017 by a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined 126,000 stories shared by more than 3 million people. They found false news was likely to be re-tweeted 70% more than the truth.
If that doesn’t make you run for cover to hide your face in shame for Humanity, this should: It isn’t bots that are spreading false news, it’s us – live, thinking, breathing human beings. But why would anyone want to spread false news? Sometimes the spreader doesn’t know it’s false but most times, the spreader doesn’t care – it’s just too spicy to pass up.
This is not entirely surprising given the need for human beings to appear “in the know” and to be “the first one to know”. We see this disease even on smaller platforms like What’s App groups where there is inevitably one trigger-happy, fact-free, confident know-it-all who is undaunted by minor details like the truth, discretion and decency. Twitter has just managed to achieve scale. The MIT study showed that the top 1% of false news could reach 100,000 people while the truth reached about 1000.
Early this year in February, Twitter issued a statement to underline its commitment to making the platform more reliable and... well, truthful. “We’re exploring a number of ways to address misinformation and provide more context for Tweets on Twitter,” they said. Good luck with that. At the risk of sounding cynical, Twitter either is hugely optimistic by character or grossly underestimates human ingenuity and motive – despite ample evidence.
The ones who spread false news believing it to be true are usually ready to take down their statements and issue an apology. India’s iconic celluloid hero Amitabh Bachchan has more than once retracted his tweets after finding they were inaccurate. Even the Ministry of Labour in India was recently left red-faced after retweeting an item released from the fake account of a well known singer.
Truth doesn’t always triumph
The revolution in communication technology has been nothing short of phenomenal but that comes with its own flip side. In 2017, BBC asked a few experts about the greatest challenges of the 21st century in the run-up to a program launch. “Many named the breakdown of trusted sources of information as one of the most pressing problems today,” the globally renowned broadcaster reported. Social media is now influencing mainstream media coverage. Both print and television many a time take the lead on newsworthiness from community platforms. News has truly become “of the people, by the people, for the people.”
But what if even a small percentage of these people begin to specialize in baseless character assassinations and shredding reputations that have been established over years and decades? Tragically, social media platforms can be hijacked by a vociferous minority of the bigoted – and there’s little we can do about it. Holding accountable wilful mischief makers is easier said than done – but it has been done. In the first of its kind of libel action involving Twitter in England nearly a decade ago, New Zealand cricketer Chris Cairns sued former IPL Commissioner Lalit Modi after the latter accused him of “match fixing” on Twitter. Cairns won the lawsuit after the Court found that Modi “singularly failed to provide any reliable evidence” for his claims. It ordered him to pay damages and costs running into millions of dollars.
This “happily ever after” ending is the exception rather than the norm. Now that the novelty of Twitter has turned into fatigue for many, victims of Twitter hate and abuse are demanding greater accountability and stricter guidelines from the platform. It is little wonder that the recent #EmptyTwitterTrash campaign found such large scale resonance. The daylong campaign launched by Isha Foundation, an international non-profit humanitarian service organization, shot up the charts to trend at No.1 nationally in India.
A dose of self-awareness, anyone?
Isha’s founder, Sadhguru, has been a target of vicious attack on Twitter – “for what I don’t know, I hope they know” – he characteristically shrugged off when a news anchor commented on the active hate brigade. Most people who spread hate and false news on Twitter have never met their targeted victims personally or professionally. These are the types who are neither placated by evidence nor tamed by common sense. A love for their 15 minutes of fame and the safety of an online platform seems to drive them. Their rants are usually picked up and circulated widely –most times because of their morbidly fascinating murder of the English language rather than for its substance. Anything but the truth.
Kevin Kelly, a technology author and co-founder of Wired magazine says, “Truth is no longer dictated by authorities, but is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact. All those counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.”1 The MIT study backs this theory. It found “Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” Worse, when falsehoods were countered with facts, it didn’t reach all the people or even the same people who spread the falsehood.
Paul Resnick, professor of information at the University of Michigan says, “It is going to come down to the reputations of the sources of the information.”2 In other words, it’s not what is being said but who is saying it. This is both a cause for celebration and concern if you look at the list of the 20 most followed people on Twitter. Former US President Barrack Obama who is largely considered to be of impeccable personal integrity (regardless of whether one may or may not agree with his politics) is the most followed influencer on Twitter. On the other hand, President Donald Trump is at no. 7 with nearly 90 million followers. The President, described by fellow Republican Mitt Romney as “having a relaxed relationship with the truth” is known to be a frenzied and volatile tweeter.
While #EmptyTwitterTrash is a much-needed initiative, the jury is still out on ‘how’. After its study and analysis of online behaviour, the BBC report concluded, “Technology may help to solve this grand challenge of our age, but it is time for a little more self-awareness too.” Sadhguru will agree.
Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party (BNP) – The passion for a city that led to the genesis of a new-age & unique political movement formed by active citizens of Bengaluru with an exclusive focus on municipal governance and an unbiased party working to the true meaning of “polity”.
Srikanth Narasimhan, an entrepreneur with 2 decades of corporate experience, a simple apolitical, apathetic, a nonchalantly living apartment citizen transformed into a passionate political representative for all municipality related activities. An Engineer in Mechanical stream, MBA from IIM Bengaluru and a founder of Veda Corporate Advisors, an Investment Banking company in existence from past 15 years, happens to become the voice of many apartment citizens for many unreasonable demands from the Bengaluru Municipality [BBMP] & Bengaluru civic agencies. Although born and brought up in Chennai, works and believes in Bengaluru and falls in love with the oldest cosmopolitan city – Bengaluru. Attracted by its weather, its capacity to digest multiple diversity, its affinity to adapt to many tastes pouring in from all over the world, Bengaluru we know has the finest balance in retaining its culture whilst accommodating everyone. It is one city known for inclusive living even with its chaos at the ground level. But the very humble phrase “Swalpa Adjust Madi” – “adjust a bit” makes it smooth going for everyone living in Bengaluru. For Srikanth, the “Adjustment” meant to live in a more peaceful society, a friendly environment and wherewithal to be a Bengalurean in true sense. He made his living out of salary, afford an apartment and live to the changing Bengaluru dynamics like every other migrant, while quickly learning the local language to suit himself, until one day everything seemed like a hazy picture.
A series of incidents changed his life from a corporate lifestyle person to a responsible citizen. The civic agencies that run the city like Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), Bengaluru Water Supply & Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM), Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) etc., started imposing unfair and unreasonable rules on citizens. Sometime around 2015 when BWSSB announced a higher tariff for apartment residents on water, using “Bulk consumers” as the tag, it changed the whole mathematics for people living in Apartments. The concept of all residential citizens being treated equally fell apart with this announcement, and this despite the fact that apartments are known to be more efficient with water consumption. BWSSB raised Rs. 6 / litre tariff to Rs. 19 / litre on consumption. This sudden change and the term “Bulk Consumers” were somehow unfathomable to Srikanth whilst the sudden hike in yearly expenses budgeted to a few thousands to over a lakh suddenly. In addition to this, BWSSB further notified old apartments to implement Sewage Treatment Plants, that made no sense to him. As per the maps, all old apartments were already connected to sewage lines. When he tried to find more about these notices, he discovered that it was a story narrated to eye wash the National Green Tribunal, which was infuriating. This is a normal citizen, living an everyday life finally figuring out why he is in love with this city, this country, and its governance.
Srikanth’s resolve to find more details on municipality operations led to a new movement across Bengaluru, the Bengaluru Apartments Federation (BAF). A Federation that has now grown to 6 Lakh residents strong with over 850+ apartments come together to fight a common cause. The true commoner fighting to resolve common problems in locales. His discovery while working as the founding member of the organization was an eye opener. All types of people from all walks of life, and all types of resources were at his disposal but the government. Every plea was discarded, every assurance had a motive, every act to resolve the problems of water, roads, streetlights etc were leading to one point- Voter’s Bank. A blatant statement that slapped Srikanth at every attempt- “We work for vote bank”, apartment residents apparently did not seem to constitute as “Vote’s”, therefore in Srikanth’s view, he wasn’t a citizen at all. How would one determine his status as citizen of a country if his mere residential occupancy is the determining factor? He went back to questioning the fundamental rights as the citizen of this country. But this needed action that speaks louder. Through BAF, he found enough support to exhibit a rally of 10,000 people in December 2017. This rally was one of a few major turning points in his otherwise simple corporate career, which ultimately led him to founding Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party [BNP], Nanna Bengaluru, Nanna Hemme, Nanna Jawaabdaari [ translates to My Bengaluru, My Pride, My responsibility] is their tagline which expresses a personal attachment to all Bangaloreans.
BNP- believes in all citizens belonging to Bengaluru and doing their bit for the city as citizens, irrespective of where one hails from. BNP has used RTI and managed to list BBMP issues related to projects claimed to be completed on records while there are no evidence of any works executed. Starting from nullifying the “Bulk Consumers” tag to “STP on Old Apartments” to remodelling parks to erecting streetlights, to working on potholes, there has been many such projects that are under scrutiny and correction under the list of actionable projects in BNP. This is a routine that BNP has established whilst encouraging more and more volunteers to participate in active local implementations. They have data and insights gathered from various sources that provides insights enough to take reasonable steps to rework the local governance.
The team majorly constitutes, mix of young and old, corporate, businessmen, individuals who have accepted Bengaluru and citizens from across making BNP’s foundation strong and reliable. The goal of BNP is to “connect with citizens across Bengaluru and work along with the government”, irrespective of the party in power or opposition, non- biased on religion or caste, members who care for civilized living, transparent governance, substantial work execution and methodological working mechanism are some of their means. The target of BNP is clearly BBMP and its initiatives, supporting the right cause and opposing the ill-planned activities. In order to ensure the works are corrective, progressive and inclusive of all citizen, BNP has announced a formal admission of candidates from various wards to contest the Municipal Elections. BNP turned 1 years this September 2020 and has already touched mini milestones in achieving some great results and forming an electric team across Bengaluru who are rock solid support in supporting the party. This overwhelming response in a short span of 12 months has attracted the right set of people, professionals, policy makers who are keen on backing BNP, making it the newest Go-To party for coming elections. Citizen’s support in such cause, walking up in a rally who has never stepped out of their comfort zones are also waking up to the new calling, making BNP a party to watch out for CHANGE.
BNP is totally backed on crowd funds. Donations and local funders are pouring in without questions. With transparent books and result oriented activities Srikanth is leading the team towards the new leap, creating right awareness about governance and policies, educating the young and the old alike on strategies and logics that apply to their societies, communities and locales, giving him the requisite to aim more and gain more for the citizens. When asked about the preparations for the inevitable corruption that can creep into the party, or greed for power in whoever within the party gets to win the elections etc., and many such challenges, Srikanth simply says- there is no place for power play or corruption within the party, as the hierarchy of the party doesn’t allow such loopholes within its system. Hierarchy is flat and networked. Core team works on strategies and planning, contesting person can be anyone from any ward and BNP will back up, but the cost of entering into bad politics will be public shaming as BNP is truly about people and their actions. People will have the power to decide on their Corporator. People choose, so people act. If people do not choose then they have no choice, no voice.
As I walked into the room full of volunteers, gathered from various wards to discuss strategy, I spent 20 minutes listening to their strategic plan that was projected for the volunteers’ benefit. The action plan was clear, and the volunteers questioning was valid. BNP seems to be gearing up to the next elections with more actions and more projects to work on. Garbage management, Lake restoration, Park installations and modelling, Streetlights on main road and in lanes, potholes, and manholes etc are part of their actions. Party and its team members were mostly from the educated lots, working in corporates, clearly aggressive about action plans, non-kannadigas [too], multi-religion, multi-caste, self-reliant team. With such an open-minded and thought-provoking team, it is evident that BNP is most promising on-ground team to work. With no intentions to extend into a full-fledged party, clear focus on BBMP and aims to sort out pending matters as top of the priority, they seem to be heading in the right direction to be acclaimed party in near future.
Success has been eluding the saffron party so far as its penetration has been restricted to Karnataka. It has failed in TN, Puducherry and Kerala
After the big win in the Bihar Assembly elections this month, the BJP is now focussing on the South, where Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry are going to the polls early next year. Elections are scheduled for West Bengal and Assam, too. Will the BJP achieve its goal of gaining a foothold in the South? Success has been eluding the saffron party so far, as its penetration has been restricted to Karnataka. It has failed in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala because of historic, religious, social and ideological reasons.
In Tamil Nadu, the BJP firmed up its poll alliance with the ruling AIADMK during the weekend. Eyebrows were raised at this early pact when the State’s Deputy Chief Minister and party coordinator O Panneerselvam announced it at a function attended by Union Home Minister Amit Shah. Though the late AIADMK chief J Jayalalithaa had a good equation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, she did not go for a tie-up with the BJP in the 2016 polls. After her demise, in 2019, the UPA made it in 37 of the 40 seats won. The BJP went with the AIADMK.
The BJP now wants to make a mark in the South, riding piggyback on the AIADMK. The Congress is in alliance with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) while smaller parties like actor Vijayakanth’s Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK), S Ramadoss’ Paattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), Thirumavalavan’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) and others choose the DMK or AIADMK coalition according to the situation.
The BJP has strengthened its Tamil Nadu unit by appointing Murugan, a lawyer, as its chief and has also activated its workers. There has been a recruitment spree in the State since 2014. It has brought to its fold celebrities, bureaucrats and politicians from other parties. Recently, the actor-turned-politician and Congress spokesperson Khushbu’s joining of the party was a significant event. So the big question is why was the BJP unable to make inroads in Tamil Nadu till now?
First of all, the saffron party had no tall leaders to match the iconic Dravidian leaders like M Karunanidhi, J Jayalalithaa and MG Ramachandran. It is likely to be Modi versus DMK chief MK Stalin now. Second, the BJP is perceived to be a North Indian Brahminical party and the word Brahmin is anathema to Dravidian parties. Third, Tamil Nadu saw a huge anti-Hindi agitation in the 60s. The Dravidian parties are against any imposition of Hindi and the Modi Government is in favour of it. Fourth, influenced by the anti-Brahmin movement of the 50s and the 60s, many caste-based parties like the Vanniyars (dominant in north-west parts of Tamil Nadu, Thevars (dominant in southern part of the State in the Madurai belt) and Gounders (in the Kongu belt in the west), have sprung up in the last three decades, resulting in the splintering of votes. Fifth, the BJP’s stand on conversions to Christianity and its hostility to Islam and other religions has no takers in the South. The BJP’s polarising tactics won’t work in the South. Sixth, new parties have sprung up with two untested superstars — Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth — on the horizon.
The DMK has been making poll preparations for some months now and MK Stalin has already announced an alliance with the Congress. In the 2019 Lok Sabha, the Congress-DMK combination swept the polls. The State has been alternating between the DMK and the AIADMK and now it is the turn of the DMK. It was only in 2016 that the AIADMK got a second term.
The neighbouring Puducherry often reflects Tamil Nadu’s politics. In any case, it is a small Union Territory and has just one seat in the Lok Sabha. Currently, the Congress is ruling in the State.
Kerala is a different story. The Left-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) alternate in power. It is the UDF’s turn now. The BJP has not been able to penetrate much in the State despite the groundwork done by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Further, the Kerala electorate consists of a sizeable number of Christians and Muslims and they remain non-BJP voters.
In 2019, the LDF posted a landslide victory, winning 19 of the 20 seats while the UDF won just one seat and the BJP got zero seats. The RSS tried to mobilise support on the contentious Sabarimala issue but the counter-mobilisation presented an effective alternative control.
With more literate voters, Kerala alternates between the Communists or anti-Communists. The BJP is seeing slow growth in the State because of it. While the minority communities in the State have successfully ensured the protection of their respective cultures, the Hindu community has relentlessly ceded its own cultural space. The BJP is taking advantage of it, but it is taking time to translate into votes.
Also, the BJP is facing factionalism in Kerala. The RSS has cautioned the central leadership that the friction in the State unit could impact the performance in the polls.
Kerala won kudos in containing the Covid-19 pandemic. A few months ago it looked as if the LDF could return to power but that came to a screeching halt in July after the Chief Minister’s Office was found to be allegedly involved in a gold smuggling scam. Several protests broke out across Kerala after the smuggling of 30 kg gold worth `14.82 crore through diplomatic channels came to light on July 5. The case is currently being probed by the ED, the National Investigation Agency and the Customs Department. Another nail in the coffin was the recent promulgation of The Kerala Police (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020. Vide this Ordinance, a new Section 118A was introduced in the Kerala Police Act, 2011. This was widely viewed as a brazen assault on freedom of speech.
Though the Chief Minister insisted that “no action would be taken against the media or critics who stay within the limits of the Constitution” and in the end decided not to implement the amended Act, the damage has been done to the Government’s reputation and credibility in a fiercely independent State.
Now, it remains to be seen whether the BJP can consolidate its Hindu votes in the South.
(The writer is a senior journalist)
The oft-used term means a very different thing in countries like Pak. But when Donald Trump uses it for the US, he does it as a ploy to deflect attention from his failures
A friend, settled in the US, recently quipped that never has he heard so many Pakistanis (in the US) use the word “Deep State” as much as they have been doing since the recently-concluded US presidential elections. The polls were won by the Democratic Party nominee John Biden. My friend clarified that the mentioned term was being used mostly by those Pakistani-Americans who actually voted for President Donald Trump.
Even though exit polls published by The New York Times show that a majority of Asians had cast their vote for Biden (63 per cent), up to 31 per cent of them voted for Trump. According to my friend, a majority of these included Pakistanis who believed Trump was good for the current coalition Government in Pakistan being led by Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Centre-Right PTI.
The Opposition parties in Pakistan have increasingly insisted that certain State institutions installed Khan “through an engineered election” in 2018 and were using him as a “puppet.” Pakistan has had a history of State institutions influencing political outcomes, sometimes through direct interventions and sometimes by influencing the results of elections.
This is why my friend was sounding sarcastic, because he added that not once did he hear the term “Deep State” from American-Pakistanis (who voted for Trump) during discussions on the current political arrangement in Pakistan. The term “Deep State”, now being aired so frequently by Trump supporters, was proliferated by the defeated President himself, who is accusing the “American Deep State” of engineering his electoral defeat.
So far Trump has provided no evidence whatsoever of this and is largely sounding like an archetypal conspiracy theorist. The difference between the US and Pakistan in this context is the fact that there is now enough evidence in the latter country to build a substantiated history of the State’s overt involvement in influencing political matters outside of its constitutional obligations. So what really is a “Deep State”?
The scholar Matthew Wills says that the term is a translation of the Turkish phrase, derin devlet. Author and academic Ryan Gingeras writes that “Deep State” generally refers to a kind of a parallel system of Government in which unofficial or unacknowledged individuals play important roles in implementing State policy. According to Gingeras, the idea of a “Deep State” can be traced to the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire.
Gingeras writes that clandestine forces were recruited from paramilitary and criminal elements by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the party that ousted the Ottomans in 1923. Across much of the 20th century, opponents of the CUP claimed that the party had established a clandestine network of military officers and their civilian allies who, for decades, suppressed anyone thought to pose a threat to the secular order established in Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Dexter Filkins, in a March 2012 article for The New Yorker, writes that the former Prime Minister of Turkey (now President), Recep Erdogan, was extremely nervous when he was first elected as Prime Minister in 2003 because he believed that since he was a candidate of an (albeit “moderate”) Islamic party, Turkey’s “Deep State” would never allow him to rule.
But no such thing happened. His party has continued to win elections since the early 2000s and the only coup attempt that his Government faced in 2016, according to Erdogan’s own admission, was mounted by a faction of the military influenced by a clandestine Islamic group.
There is nothing secretive about how, after 1923, the Turkish military continued to directly and indirectly interfere in Turkish politics, and the country’s judiciary and bureaucracy were committed to secure Kemal’s secular Turkish republic. For this military rule, military-backed candidates and constitutional courts were used. But there were no hidden agenda, as such, even though men such as Erdogan believed that shadowy forces were at work and would topple him. Interestingly, all talk of “Deep State” vanished from his rhetoric once he consolidated his power.
So what does this imply? In many countries, certain powerful State institutions do interfere in political processes, but increasingly, it’s being done rather unabashedly. It was always justified as a “necessary step taken to curtail political chaos”, but now the interfering State institutions use social and electronic media to generate support for their actions in this regard. Again, there is nothing clandestine about all this. There has always been “a State within a State” in most modern nation-States.
Recently, the Pakistani Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif used the phrase “State above the State.” This is probably because he knows that the knowledge of Pakistan having a State within a State is now common, and he would be saying nothing new. So he wanted to point towards a much deeper malaise. According to his narrative, the State within the State, which is not quite hidden anymore, is now facing a challenge from within.
But what about the US? Does it have a “Deep State” that, as Trump believes, helped Biden hijack the election? In the January 27 edition of the Business Insider, the American academic Rebecca Gordon writes that the idea of a sinister “Deep State” in the US, popularised by Trump across his presidency, is somewhat different than how it is understood in most other countries. According to Gordon, “rather than referring to a parallel system of Government operating outside official channels, for Trump the ‘Deep State’ is the Government.”
For Trump, any State or Government institution, which stalls any of his orders, is working for a “Deep State”. To him, elements within America’s domestic and international Intelligence agencies, such as the FBI and the CIA, were also working for the “Deep State”. In November 2019, the former Deputy Director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, was amused about Trump’s constant usage of the phrase. In a radio interview McLaughlin said, “There is no ‘Deep State.’ What people think of as the ‘Deep State’ is just the American civil service, social security, the people who fix the roads, health and human services.”
In his 2016 book, The Deep State, the American author and a former Republican US Congressional aide, Mike Lofgren, wrote that the “Deep State” was not some secret, conspiratorial cabal. It is a “State within a State” that is hiding in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day.
As I argued earlier, there is really nothing clandestine about what is understood as “Deep State”. Its actions are in the open because it wants to impose the fact that it will secure its interests in a political arrangement. Governments negotiate a space for themselves with the State as long as that space is not overtly violated by State institutions in an unconstitutional manner.
If and when it is, the Government has constitutional tools to push the State back as much as it can, or just give in and get on the same page just to survive. This is common in most countries. But what if the Government starts to see its own elements in league with the so-called “Deep State”, as Trump saw it? I’m afraid this is then nothing more than either a delusion, or simply a cynical ploy to blame something sinister, intangible and largely imaginary, for one’s own failures.
(Courtesy: Dawn)
Though national policies are often preceded by commitments of political parties in their manifestos, it is for the first time that health infrastructure has become a poll agenda
In spite of the pressing needs of a huge population, healthcare in India has never been an electoral mobiliser unlike in older democracies, such as the UK and the US. Only three National Health Policies (1983, 2002 and 2017) have been promulgated by respective Governments in the last 70 years. Though national policies and promises are often preceded by commitments of political parties in their manifestos, it is for the first time in the history of independent India that healthcare infrastructure has now become a top election agenda. This is all due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Our country should be moving towards a healthcare system that places a high priority on keeping people healthy and out of hospitals. And the primary care doctor should be playing the leading role in this transformation. This, in turn, will lead to a reduced financial burden, diminishing the high costs of emergency rooms and tertiary care centres. Good primary care improves patient outcomes too, yet we have ignored these fundamentals to our detriment. This blind spot is the biggest flaw in our current healthcare system.
Democracy is a system of governance for the people, by the people and of the people. Primary healthcare, similarly defined, is healthcare provided to all, especially the most marginalised, with their participation and for their needs. If the primary healthcare system of a country is not functioning well, it is symptomatic of problems in its democracy itself. Primary healthcare is a public good and in a democracy, public good is publicly funded. The right to health is subsumed under the right to life in the Constitution. Yet, India figures at the very bottom of the global health systems’ rankings. We have the dubious distinction of having the maximum number of tuberculosis and leprosy patients and the highest maternal and infant mortality rates.
With a focus on primary care, our health system should move away from procedures/hospital- based care, in which primary care physicians (PCPs) have been devalued. Such systems depict the PCPs as paper-pushers in a world of specialists.
The Bhore Committee set up in 1946 published a landmark report highlighting the need for a “social physician”, who would be a key player in India’s healthcare system. The report also emphasised the need to recognise the field of Family Medicine as a separate speciality with a post-graduate residency programme in post-graduate medical institutes. Our medical education system, too, needs to encourage medical students to view primary care as a route to creating a more effective healthcare system.
The Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, an organisation working to improve healthcare in the US, says that in order to produce more primary care doctors, who are willing to practise in disadvantaged and underserved areas, medical schools need to change the way they select students. It is seen in India, too, that students, who have strong ties to their community, want to form long-term relationships and commitment to public service, and hence are more likely to choose primary care (if such training is made available in the country) as a profession, than other students. One of the reasons our country or even the US is facing a shortage of PCPs is because the brightest medical students are often told or made to believe that they’re too smart not to specialise, and that attitude is reinforced throughout their medical training. What is special about Japan in the context of successful healthcare services is that it managed to contain the clout of specialists in its healthcare system and accorded a prominent voice to PCPs in its decision-making process.
In the early days of Japan’s modern medicine history, hospitals catered to only an affluent few and the Government limited their funding, restricting them to functions like training of medical students and isolation of infectious cases. Reciprocal connections between doctors in private clinics and hospitals were forbidden, thwarting possibilities of a nexus between the two groups. However, a sturdy lobby of clinic-based PCPs evolved, which tipped the balance in favour of primary healthcare. The Japanese social health insurance was implemented in 1927 and the medical association, that was dominated by PCPs, played the main role in negotiating the fee schedule.
Primary healthcare renewal demands major investments in system transformation and infrastructure (appropriate premises and staffing, information management systems and tools and facilitation to support the coordination of care and the improvement of quality).
Sadly, in India until 2018, only one per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was spent on healthcare and since 2019 this has increased to 3.6 per cent. This is much lower than many non-democratic/poorer nations and is ahead of only five countries, namely Burundi, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sudan and Cambodia. Such low spending, as we know, leads to a perverted pattern of healthcare as our health system is meant to cater to a population of over a billion human beings.
Poor investment in the primary healthcare system naturally under-equips it. Hence, we lack supplies and drugs for comprehensive primary care. For example, of the 709 public health centres (PHCs) surveyed in 2009 by the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai, about 24 per cent did not have electricity and 63 per cent did not have piped water supply. At the same time, PHCs are expected to deliver centrally- designed, targetted, vertical programmes, alienating them further from communities. As a result, even those families that can access PHCs continue to look elsewhere for their critical healthcare needs.
There is empirical evidence that public spending on primary healthcare is the most effective, efficient and equitable approach to improve the health of populations. Higher public spending has always shown decreased mortality and morbidity of the poor. An analysis by the Centre for Economic and International Studies examined the relative efficiency of public and private healthcare spending in 163 countries and reported that the former consistently leads to lower infant mortality rates and the latter, to higher.
India has a large network of PHCs and each is meant to serve a population of 25,000. In poorer States, such as Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand, one PHC covers 45,000, 49,000 and 76,000 people respectively. In Rajasthan, the population is often so dispersed (especially in hilly areas in the south and in the desert in the west) that a family may need to travel 10-20 km to reach the nearest PHC. This means that when a person is sick, s/he may have to wait for many hours or days to reach a healthcare facility.
A few countries in South America with limited resources have managed to design and scale up people-friendly health systems to cover large populations for delivering primary care. Family clinics in Brazil and polyclinics and nurses offices in Cuba are examples of systems with nationwide coverage. Cuba has one of the most effective primary healthcare systems in the world, whose centerpiece is the community-based polyclinic, each of which serves a catchment area, hosting between 30,000 and 60,000 people. The neighbourhood-based family doctor-and-nurse offices further extend care closer to the communities. One such office is for 1,000-2,000 people. Prevention is the cornerstone of these services, complemented by community analysis and treatment. An important requirement of primary healthcare is the active participation of the masses — akin to citizen participation in a democracy. Such systems are likely to be more responsive to public needs. In the States of West Bengal and Kerala, in which primary healthcare is co-managed by panchayats, health outcomes are better than in most other States at similar levels of economic development.
Government healthcare centres even in cities are yet to be able to provide treatment to the sick with dignity. Patients struggling for life sharing beds, children along with parents lying on the floor in hospital wards and women delivering babies in hospital corridors are an everyday sight in Government hospitals in cities. A democratic healthcare system should have facilities located within communities that are equipped to deal with their needs and provide preventive and curative care. They should be staffed by a skilled team of providers, who are empathetic to the people and their culture and treat them with dignity.
(The writer is an author and a doctor by profession)
“The awkward fit of theory to actuality is most vivid for poor women in poor economies. These women may depend on others, but lack the supposed securities of dependence. They are impoverished, but are often providers. They are powerless, yet others who are yet more vulnerable depend on them for protection. Their vulnerability reflects heavy demands as much as slender resources.”
— Philosopher Onora O’Neill
Concerns about inequality and injustice women face in various societies don’t require a league consisting only of economists and policy-analysts. Both historically and contemporarily, philosophers and literary figures world over have reaffirmed their interest through their characters in these overwhelming problems. I will like to initiate this article by bringing into picture two characters: Sissy Jupe from Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times and Vasilisa Arsenyeva from Salman Rushdie’s novel The Golden House. One may wonder what these novelists writing in different centuries have to do with women and a just society. Both Dickens and Rushdie in their own way handled hard facts of life with an unfailing appeal to their readers.
Mr M’Choakumchild was exploring Sissy’s knowledge about national prosperity. “Now, this schoolroom is a Nation. And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?” Sissy pleaded ignorance but nevertheless explained her ignorance. She said she could not answer the question unless she knew, “Who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.” Obviously Sissy Jupe, not happy with sad affairs of distributive justice chose to lament it.
Rushdie, in V Arsenyeva, finds a different version of a woman. Rushdie captured her emotions while she delivered a monologue on poverty, love and need. Let me quote from her monologue. “Please. I require no sympathy regarding the poverty of my origin… Poverty is a disgusting condition and to fail to emerge from it is also disgusting. Fortunately I excelled at all things both physical and mental and so I have been able to come to America… I know my presence here is the fruit of my own labour... The past is a broken cardboard suitcase full of photographs of things I no longer wish to see. I am the general of myself and my body is the foot soldier that obeys what the general commands.”
The two characters share some commonalities. First both are women: one a young school-going girl and the second V Arsenyeva; a relatively older Russian girl with origin in Siberia, and living in America. Next both concern themselves with resources: their distribution and empowerment. Both characters, through their outpourings, set the ball rolling: an emotive story of real agony and anguish of a little girl who would be a woman a few years later and a young woman who was a little girl a few years earlier. Sissy for her age was quite wise; poverty taught her wisdom from very early stage of childhood; it gave her farsightedness early in life. She could distinguish between finer nuisances of micro and macroeconomics and had no qualms in believing macro affluence did not suo motu convert itself into micro affluence and socio-economic comfort. The monologue of V Arsenyeva is a reflection on overcoming paucity of resources and ignorance by dint of “great self-discipline” and the acquired ability to “build a house” so that “one can live in it (this being an example).” Sissy lamented lack of empowerment, Arsenyeva believed in self-determination and relentless pursuance of her dreams.
Both these women used their experiences to remind the world it fell short of being completely just. History bears us out the world has always fallen short of being completely just particularly when it comes to women. The exclusion of women outside the realm of opportunity to partner in building prosperous societies and economies is denial of a just society to them and others too.
Much work both in theory and practice has been done for exploring the methods to improve the lot of the weak, the exploited and the marginalised. Looking at the recent history of empowerment, a conference that took place at World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki in 1988 to deliberate upon issues like what is meant by “quality of life”, and the requirements in terms of socio-economic policy for improving and ultimately achieving it thereby empowering the deprived ones, started a lively discussion on way ahead. Helsinki conference unequivocally stressed on the need to assess a number of distinct areas of human life in determining how well people are doing rather than measuring quality of life by hinging on single index of per capita national income.
From Helsinki conference the world travelled through Millennium Development Goals and reached in 2015 more comprehensive and inclusive Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 5 of Sustainable Development Goals 2015 aims to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against women in the public and private spheres and to undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources and access to ownership of property. Descent work, equal access to education, and representation in political and economic decision making processes are the rights women must enjoy. Investment in the empowerment of women results not only in making progress on Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals but also in fuelling sustainable economic development. Let us have a look at Indian scenario.
On August 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru reminded the nation about the task ahead i.e. “…the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.” But unfortunately for close to six decades (which indeed is a long period) the tasks identified by Nehru remained largely unaccomplished with not much success. Many countries like Cuba, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Costa Rica, etc, following different growth strategies could achieve huge reduction in human deprivation and inequality. In these countries much stress was laid particularly on expansion of basic education and health care. India’s performance was certainly not worth bragging about and not very enthusing in the field of opportunities for women and their empowerment. When it comes to women, where does the problem lie particularly in traditional societies like ours?
Julia Annas, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, in an essay titled “Women and the Quality of Life: Two Norms or One?” tries to answer above question by analysing the existence of “two actual norms for human life”. She gives examples from traditional societies where certain practices have withheld benefits accruing to women. For example, unfortunately it is still believed that resources should not be “wasted” on educating daughters. The reason adduced for this as cited by Annas is “…the women in the traditional society, with their domestic futures, don’t desire education.” Annas further gives similar examples like, to quote Annas, “…women may justly be kept from participation in public life because they are more self-centered and less capable of impartial thought than men.” This example shows how such reasons adduced result in various assertions of differences between men’s and women’s natures. Annas ridicules this reasoning and asserts that “superficial desires” as compared to “informed desires” where all positive aspects of education are known to women must recede and thus women will show desire for education. What the learned philosopher means is, “…injustice results from the existence of two norms,” and harps on mitigating superficial desires “resting on an unreflective view of their circumstances.”
Even now it has been a known practice in many households that the woman who cooks food is the last to eat it and that too whatever meagre is leftover. They are not expected to complain and they are ever ready to confess that their nutritional status and physical heath are good even when they have physical ailments. Thus desires adjust to deprivation and division of functions. This sort of exclusionary neglect needs immediate attention and equipping women with adequate information not justifying “superficial desires” is the first crucial step towards eliminating cases of exclusionary neglect. Annas rightly concludes in any society gender issues are not focused on women alone but the relationship between men and women.
Current efforts afoot in India under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi reflect on concerns expressed by philosophers like Professors Julia Annas and Onora O’Neill. Narendra Modi has visualised through his vast experience as leader of Gujarat and afterwards the nation the use of comparative perspective by going beyond the limited.
For example, the need to understand the nexus between social conditions and economic opportunities has been properly appreciated. He has realised the crucial linkages between creating basic educational facilities and opening up of new economic opportunities and expanding the scope for better use of labour and skills. Most importantly, it has also been recognised that social opportunities are influenced by a host of factors like the state of health and educational services, the nature and availability of finance, the presence of markets, including policies to promote and restrict these markets, presence of middlemen in markets and very importantly gender injustice. Therefore, the Prime Minister insists on unified approach to empowerment and this is reflected in various programmes launched by present Government.
The commitment of India to implement the Sustainable Development Goals was spelt out through the speech and commitment made by Prime Minister of India at the UN Summit for the adoption of post 2015 Development Agenda. In his speech the Prime Minister said, “Today, much of India’s development agenda is mirrored in the Sustainable Development Goals.” Further with reference to empowerment, he said, the attack on poverty includes not only expanded conventional schemes of development, but also a new era of inclusion and empowerment, turning distant dreams into immediate possibilities. He further spoke about new bank accounts for 180 million; direct transfer of benefits, micro enterprises and micro finance, drawing on the strength of digital and mobile applications with the focus on basics, housing, power, water and sanitation for all. These are important not just for welfare, but also human dignity. Development is intrinsically linked to empowerment of women and it begins with a massive programme on educating the girl child that has become every family’s mission.
He clarified these are goals with a definite date, not just a mirage of hope. Thus the broad agenda towards empowerment with reference to SDGs in India is set.
The Prime Minister’s constant emphasis on inclusion and inclusiveness is at the root of developmental efforts progressing in India. Sincere, honest and transparent efforts to achieve overall development for all with no exceptions are clearly visible. The Prime Minister’s historic speech makes it amply clear that overall human development has much to do with making structural changes to conquer the inequities and exploitations that characterise society. This in turn constitutes an efficient and effective blend of meeting “basic needs” and equipping people with “capabilities”. Efforts aim at planning and intertwining capabilities created now with a bigger expansion of capabilities in the future. Possible conflicts between immediately enhancing capabilities i e meeting basic needs and long-term expansion of capabilities in the future i.e economic prosperity cannot be ruled out and need be addressed in time.
Though SDGs cover all human beings, for the purpose of this article and due to paucity of space, I will limit myself with some important schemes launched in recent past to enhance opportunities for women empowerment.
The Government of India has recognised, amid others, two important ways to empower women: Economic empowerment through participation in economic activities and opportunities and second through mitigation of educational deprivations. The schemes chalked out and implemented broadly address these requirements and thereby endeavour to ensure that women gain equal rights, opportunities and access to resources. The first and foremost thing is their safety, security and economic empowerment. Towards that end, schemes like Mahila Police Volunteers (MPV) envisaging engagement of Mahila Police Volunteers in States/UTs who act as a link between police and community and facilitate women in distress; Pradhan Mantri Ujjawala Yojana empowering women below poverty line and protecting their health by providing LPG cylinder free of cost.
Working Women Hostel (WWH) ensures the safety and security for working women by providing safe and conveniently located accommodation. Pradhan Mantri Sukanya Samriddhi Yojna aims at economic empowerment of girls by opening their bank accounts and enabling their parents to save funds for their female child’s education and marriage. Under this scheme the account can be opened at any post office or a branch of an authorised commercial bank in India between the birth of the girl child and till the age of ten by a parent or guardian. The account offers 8.6 per cent interest with the girl child able to operate the account once she is ten years old and the account allows for fifty per cent withdrawal at the age of eighteen for higher education. Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana aims at prioritising housing for women. Launched in 2016, Mahila-E-Haat is a bilingual marketing platform intended to help aspiring women entrepreneurs, NGOs and self-help groups to showcase their services and products. Mahila Shakti Kendra was launched in 2017 to provide women with opportunities for skill development, employment, health, nutrition and digital literacy.
Each Mahila Shakti Kendra working at National, State, District and Block levels, provides an opportunity to women to approach the Government for their entitlements through capacity building and training. Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao Yojana that came into being in January 2015, drives at generating awareness and improving the efficacy of welfare services for girl child. Most important components of the scheme include addressing the issue of declining child sex ratio, gender-based sex-selective eliminations and protecting survival, protection and education of the girl child.
These schemes resonate well with the sustainable targets on gender equality and are marked by inclusionary coherence. For example, the Government has identified ending violence against women and providing security and safety to women as a key national priority. Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme aims at equal opportunity and education for girls; Sukanya Samridhi Yojana aims at prosperity of girl child and Janani Suraksha Yojana provides safe motherhood intervention under National Health Mission with the objective of reducing maternal and neo-natal mortality among poor pregnant women.
The most novel feature of these schemes is generally these don’t flow from a common perception that problems faced by women are cases of more general difficulties of the deprived and marginalised population. Each and every scheme with its distinct identity and full-fledged mission is intended for girls and women and aims at establishment of a just society for women without any discrimination.
The crux of recent efforts in India in the field of women empowerment is reduction of women inequality and injustice by providing them resources and opportunities and equipping them with decision-making power including political powers. Onora O’ Neill suggests, “a serious account of justice cannot gloss over the predicaments of impoverished providers in marginalised and developing countries.” That is an important lesson for policy makers who plan for creating a just society or making society less unjust. An emerging New India very well addresses the issue raised by Onora O’ Neill. The concept of a just society is firmly embedded in the multi-peaked idea of a New India.
(The writer, a retired Additional Deputy CAG, is a poet, writer and columnist. His fourth book “Soliloquy of a Small-Town Uncivil Servant”, a semi-autobiographical account, published in 2019 by Rupa Publications, New Delhi, has been getting international acclaim)
The country needs to reorient policies for a long-term approach without ignoring short-term needs
Keeping China out is the new trade policy of India. Its primary approach is that anything that opens the door to Chinese products is a “strict no-no.” So it’s no surprise that India is keeping out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) free trade agreement (FTA), an initiative New Delhi was engaged in since its inception. Theoretically, it comes at a minimum cost as India already has FTAs with all but three RCEP members.
Home Minister Amit Shah had last month told RCEP member countries that they would have to come around to accepting New Delhi’s terms. “Considering India’s growing stature, RCEP members can’t afford to ignore it for long and will come around to agreeing to the Government of India’s terms. Meanwhile, the country has maintained successful economic relations with ASEAN by the means of FTAs,” he said. The RCEP, too, has kept the doors open for India officially, if at all it wants to join the grouping without having to wait for 18 months, as stipulated for new members. As per the RCEP’s decision, India can still participate as an observer.
India had taken the decision in November 2019 to keep out of the RCEP, with the partnership being seen as China-centric and due to the perception that it would boost sales of cheap Chinese products and harm the country’s industries.
India’s approach on the deal is the result of unfavourable trade balances that it has with several RCEP members, with some of which it already has FTAs. The Commerce Ministry says that the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in trade with such countries was a mere 7.1 per cent. India has trade deficits with 11 of the 15 RCEP nations. This means that while the partners have access to our market, India has not penetrated theirs. Hence, it cannot further open up its market for the advantage of others. Still India has agreements with the ASEAN, South Korea and Japan. It is negotiating deals with Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and there are treaties with Nepal and Bhutan. However, there are apprehensions that RCEP could impact the Australia-India-Japan network in the Indo-Pacific region. India and like-minded nations, particularly the Quad countries — Australia, the US and Japan — are keen to have resilient supply chains. Along with New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam, they are negotiating with each other.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, while delivering the Ramnath Goenka Lecture in 2019, had said that India’s stance was a “clear-eyed calculation” of the gains and costs of entering a new arrangement. He also said that India would continue with its “act East” policy. It should also be remembered that the RCEP decision is linked to China’s aggressive postures in the South China Sea and on the Line of Actual Control, including the June 15 Galwan incident in which 20 Indian and many Chinese soldiers lost their lives. It may be recalled that Jaishankar even in January had said that New Delhi’s doors to RCEP were not closed. But in September, he said, “You cannot be a rising power without being a rising economy, and to do that you have to build your domestic capacities.” His views are not very different from that of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, which had been opposing most FTAs and stressing on improving the domestic economy.
It certainly has not been an easy decision. India would have to weigh the gains of a bulk agreement and individual treaties. A similar concern was expressed when New Delhi chose to opt out of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. It was said that India might be isolating itself. Now after three years, like-minded democracies appreciate New Delhi for its prudent decision, which many now see as an exploitative Chinese diplomacy. Significantly, many members are not enjoying their stay in the BRI. There is the contrary view as well. It says that India’s economic decline occurred even as China’s economically and strategically important BRI went on to cover two-thirds of the world’s population.
Beijing dominates the psyche of policymakers. India is highly dependent on China for imports of lithium ion batteries, antibiotics, personal computers, colour TVs, solar cells, toys and so on. Despite the recent initiatives by the Centre to improve domestic production in many of these goods, concerns remain. What China has done is to consolidate its economy since 1979. Thus, production cost is minimum and it has a pricing mechanism that happens to be the lowest in any country in the local currency.
India has to learn the technique of creating a vibrant domestic system with a market across the world. Chinese merchandise today decides international prices. While India successfully blocked imports of idols of Ganesh, Lakshmi and other deities, it could not succeed in lowering the prices of “Made in India” products. This cannot be considered good economy. Possibly for this reason, China looms large in reports submitted by eight Groups of Ministers (GoMs) formed during the ongoing pandemic. These GoMs have called for a balance between supporting economic performance and geopolitics and most have focussed on ways to counter China. They call for contextualising issues like Chinese aggression on communication tools, need for specialised spokespersons on issues like China and the environment and many other dependencies on Beijing.
The obsession with China is too apparent. Of late, despite all efforts, New Delhi’s policy approaches are China-centric. India may have to revive the planning process it gave up in 2014 as the NITI Aayog has not been a proper replacement. The country needs to evolve a long-term policy prescription. India has to consider moving out of the growth-centric approach and replace it with progress. So RCEP or not, India has to have a holistic approach towards the economy. It needs a wider vision and approach for progress and has to imbibe policies that could give it an edge. India needs to reorient policies for a long-term approach without ignoring short-term needs.
(The writer is a senior journalist)
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