How the past informs the present

 

Currently, Indian society is divided into those who feel that an insidious Western influence has turned us into stunted copycats and that we should carefully reexamine our glorious past to appreciate our uniqueness.

Speaking at an event in Hyderabad recently, Supreme Court Justice S Abdul Nazeer lamented that despite India having a tradition of jurisprudence that can be traced to great sages like Manu, Kautilya and Brihaspati, a British-induced “colonial psyche” persists in the legal system today.

“In England, Western Europe and the US, judges and lawyers receive an education based on their civilisations. Russia’s judicial values stem from their Marxist past, but the Indian judge or lawyer learns about Roman law and the theories of Western jurists,” said Justice Nazeer, adding, “They learn nothing about the evolution of the law in their own land.” Ascribing the weaknesses in the judiciary to a lack of historical perspective, Justice Nazeer stressed that Indian jurisprudence must be included as a compulsory subject in law degree courses.

Currently, Indian society is divided into those who feel that an insidious Western influence has turned us into stunted copycats and that we should carefully reexamine our glorious past to appreciate our uniqueness. The others, a far smaller number, fear that a self-congratulatory ethnocentrism prevails, closing our minds to established facts from around the world. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between. Even in India, the winds of change are impossible to miss. The stories we have been told about ourselves, family diktats on how we should live, seem unconvincing, at odds with a global reality. Laws support LGBTQ rights, single working women are a potent force and you get the sense that the youth are impatiently shedding all inhibition. The ‘wise elder’ of Indian households commands respect but has lost the control he once exerted.

At the same time, if not in legal circles, modern interpretations of Kautilya’s 2,000-year-old Arthashastra are thriving. There are over 25 books by management gurus available on Amazon who have distilled Chanakya’s realist approach, applying age-old principles to everyday conundrums. At some point in our lives, we all seek to know thyself better, to cope. Indeed, there is great value in the ancient texts, expanding our views on existence, and nudging us to discover that whether B.C. or A.D, mankind’s travails remains the same: our goals, peace and prosperity, our frustrations, troubled relationships and financial insecurity. Within these broad truths, Justice Nazeer’s call that each society differs fundamentally and must be evaluated in terms of its own structures is crucial not just for courts to deliver justice but for people to escape the limitations of their environment, which colour their perceptions of the world.

Cultural relativism can best be understood by example, like noting specifically, how differently Indians and Westerners view marriage. A top US newspaper is carrying a piece that has gained a lot of traction online, ‘How I Demolished my Life’. The writer proudly asserts that she walked out of a marriage with three children because her “husband was blocking her view of the world”. Even the most urbane and emancipated Indian would baulk in alarm at such self-indulgence, perhaps because in India, we feel duty-bound to power through situations, disregarding personal costs. Self-absorption versus sacrifice, who is to say what’s the better method to finding one’s way to that ever-so-elusive happiness? It seems both sides have considerable pitfalls; one would benefit by toning down the impulsiveness, the other by occasionally upsetting the status quo.

It was news to me that the word adhikar, my right, does not occur even once in the Arthashastra. However, the word dharma, the obligation to one’s duty, is central to the text, as it is to the Bhagavad Gita. The opinions and ideas of scholars passed down over generations have profound effect on society, so the subconscious baggage of duty is hard to shake off. Perhaps, we need to philosophically agree that our choices are dictated by factors larger than ourselves. Maturity isn’t just taking responsibility for our actions but critically assessing the history that placed us there. The ultimate freedom is having the power to change it.

Written by Leher Kala

Source: Indian Express, 9/01/22

The crackdown on civil society

With the raids and arrests, activists are being penalised for their unwavering vigilance

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the modern democratic state, armed with technologies of surveillance and control, possesses the kind of power that has never ever been exercised by any other state in history. In a democracy, the individual transits from subject to citizen. Yet there is no one more vulnerable and more helpless than our rights-bearing citizen if the, otherwise, democratic state decides to terrorise, kill and drill fear and trepidation in the mind of the body politic. The other dominant institution of our times, the market, is completely amoral. It is supremely indifferent to human suffering. It has neither sympathy nor room for citizens exploited by the state, and by its own need for resources, labour, and profit.

A vital sphere

The only sphere that stands between the individual and the omnipresent and omnipotent state is civil society. In this figurative space, individuals come together in webs of associational life. Associations have the capacity to challenge the brute power of the state through petitions, protests, dharnas and ultimately judicial activism. Given unresponsive political parties, citizens can access centres of power and privilege only through a vibrant civil society.

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Civil society is, of course, a plural sphere, and all manners of associations find space for themselves here, from football clubs to reading groups to film fan societies. Each democratic association is important, but we cannot deny that civil liberty and human rights groups are an essential precondition for human well-being. Some Indian citizens were randomly and arbitrarily imprisoned during the Emergency (1975-77) and the fundamental rights of others were truncated. It is, therefore, not surprising that in the aftermath of the Emergency, the civil liberties movement made a dramatic appearance on to the scene of Indian politics. The movement which developed into, or acted in concert with, the human rights movement took on an extremely significant task, that of protecting the fundamental right to life and liberty granted by the Indian Constitution.

Every political revolution in the world has begun with the rights to life and liberty. These two rights lie at the core of other rights that have been developed and codified as critical for human beings. The two rights stretch from the right not to be tortured or killed, to the right not to be arrested and imprisoned by the lackeys of the state without due cause. The right to life is a basic right, but our lives do not mean anything if we are incarcerated for no rhyme or reason.

In the decades that followed, human rights groups have become the custodian of the Fundamental Rights chapter of the Indian Constitution. They have investigated cases of arbitrary imprisonment, custodial deaths, deadly encounters and coercion of any citizen who dares to speak up against the state or dominant groups. These organisations have carefully documented the causes and the triggers of communal and caste violence, and established an excellent archive on the abuse of power by governments. They have asked questions which few Indians have had the courage to ask. And above all, they have protected the rights of vulnerable sections of our own people, the Adivasis, the Dalits and Muslims.

Civil liberty and/or human rights activists are lawyers, academics, journalists and public minded citizens of India. What matters is their very human concern for the poor and the disadvantaged, the dispossessed and the vulnerable. What matters is that civil society activists protect the moral conscience of our society. Not all civil society groups do so, some are in the sole business of getting funds from the state or others. Not all sections of the media do so, they are often cowered down by their corporate bosses, and the lure of fame and lucre. Unhappily, the majority of Indians keep quiet when their own fellow citizens are tortured by the police, stripped of access to resources and livelihoods, lynched, exploited by corporate India, and neglected by the mainstream media. Human rights activists shoulder the fight for the rights of the oppressed.

The turf wars

Their role is crucial for democracy because today we are ruled by a government that openly defies ethics and morality, that casts itself in the mould of realism, and that is supremely indifferent to the plight of millions of its citizens. We are ruled by leaders who dismiss the need for civil society because the cadres and the front organisations of its ideological backbone, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, seek to dominate the space between the individual, the market and the state. The consequences are serious. Over 10 years ago, during UPA I, we were speaking of the right to food, to employment, to education, to information and to land. We theorised that India was moving towards a social democratic state vide civil society activism. Today there are few organisations that articulate the right not to be lynched, or who struggle for the right to life and liberty. Human rights activists are among these few organisations. They have courageously taken on the challenge posed by corporates, a ruthless state and its venal police, and the cadres of right-wing organisations that specialise in violence.

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Activists have been penalised for their eternal vigilance, which, as Irish lawyer-politician John Curran said in 1790, is the price we pay for liberty. The government and right-wing organisations have pursued and terrorised human rights activists. On August 28, lawyers, poets, academics and activists known for their defence of the dispossessed were targeted by the Maharashtra police. The houses of Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde and Stan Swamy were raided, and some of them imprisoned.

The reasons for the harassment of these warriors in the cause of justice are unsubstantial and unconvincing. The police simply cannot establish that their speeches at the Elgar Parishad meeting in Pune in December 2017 incited the violence unleashed on a Dalit gathering at Bhima-Koregaon on January 1, 2018. It was earlier reported that the peaceful gathering was attacked by activists belonging to two Hindu right-wing organisations: Shiv Pratishthan led by Sambhaji Bhide, and Hindu Ekta Manch led by Milind Ekbote. Mr. Ekbote, committed to Maratha/Hindu supremacy, was arrested in March 2018. Soon he was cleared by the police and the Maharashtra government. Now a completely different set of agents has been brought in and charged with urban Maoism, a term that has neither a history nor a geography. It is simply silly.

Boomerang effect?

This is the latest blow inflicted on civil society by a party that wishes to see only its own organisations dominating the space of associations. The attempt might just rebound on the party. The well-known Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, jailed by the Mussolini government in the 1920s, set out to answer a crucial question. Why had a revolution occurred in semi-feudal Tsarist Russia, and not in the Western capitalist world as predicted by Marx? He concluded that revolutions only happen when the government directly and unashamedly exercises brute power, as in Russia. They do not happen in countries which possess civil societies, for here projects of domination and resistance can be played out. Citizens just do not need to revolt. Is there a lesson our rulers need to learn from this piece of profound wisdom?

Neera Chandhoke is a former Professor of Political Science at Delhi University

Source: the Hindu, 30/08/2018

Why I am not lining up

I am done doing my bit if it means standing in queue.

Since standing in a queue has become the test of patriotism, here is my attempt, dear prime minister, to set the record straight.

At the outset, let me admit I haven’t stood in a queue for cash since November 8. I admit I am among the kind who deputed someone else. I confess I haven’t gone without food either, the last of my family’s scrapped currency went into treating ourselves to a bottle of Blender’s Pride.

That’s not to give people ideas, sir, but while chemists may be sending people away, liquor outlets are not turning any money down.

Getting back to the point, sir, the first time I stood in a queue on my own, without parents doing the legwork, was for admission to Delhi University. It isn’t the best of seasons to be out in the Delhi heat, sir, and we stood in several lines stretching onto the road, only to be told at the small window through which four people thrust their hands together inside, to hand in papers: “It is lunch time”. I confess, sir, that we often stomped out cursing, sat on the sidewalk (when we still sat on sidewalks), spoke about a revolution, and headed straight to the American Centre for university prospectuses.

Our whole college life was about queuing up and waiting, sir. For classes, forms, professors, marksheets, and especially for the rare DTC bus, on broken seats at shelters needing repair. The standing didn’t end with the bus, sir, as you might appreciate, and often involved men pushing against us. I must confess, sir, I may have raced to get a seat ahead of others on the bus, even flashed a victorious smile when I got one.

The first freedom from queues came after 1991, sir, when even with a little money, a world of choices opened before us. We chose not to line up if we could, with the next store, the next restaurant, the next job, the new private buses on offer. I admit, sir, I started questioning the virtue made of “small sacrifices” then. So at the bank where I had an account — all hard-earned money, I assure you — we were thrilled when they devised a system of giving numbers so that we didn’t have to spend the day in queue.

However, phones remained a luxury, and one of my longest-lasting queues was for a landline. The wait for a phone then was long, and longer if it broke down. So one day, my sister and I went to Nehru Place, one of those places, sir, you hopefully will never encounter, barged into an officer’s room and stood there till our work was done.

My other encounter with bureaucracy and queues was at the passport office, where I once queued for six hours and almost got crushed in the stampede at the counter. Yes, that happens, sir. Sometimes queues end in stampedes.

You would well remember, sir, the time before mobile phones, when one had to make what they dubbed a “trunk call”. At the lone phone booth near where I stayed in JNU, I lined up every other night to call my parents in Chennai. It’s a strange place, JNU — you should try it sometimes, sir. As young men played basketball nearby, I never felt uneasy heading out alone at night. However, as the operator’s voice warned about fast-depleting money, and people pressed against the phone booth door looked on impatiently, I couldn’t help but be short with my mother at times, sir. So when you talked about grateful mothers at old age homes giving their blessings to you as their sons had deposited some money in their accounts after the demonetisation, I thought long and hard, sir. About that mother.

The last time I stood in a queue of any consequence was for my children’s admission in nursery school. Standing with the form, in lines stretching out once again onto the road, trying to sneak a look at the papers in the hands of other parents, I never wondered at the absurdity of it. This was one queue which we all accepted without question. I wonder what you think of that, sir.

I don’t stand in lines any more, not by choice anyway. I Uber, I Paytm, I Google, I Amazon, I Kindle, I ATM. The few times I have to stand in a queue, of no size at all, I admit, I almost always pick up a fight with people trying to jump the line. Oh yes, there is that peril too, sir, about queues. Many will jump the line. I wasn’t sure what to call such people. But now, sir, you have told me what they all are: Blackmarketeers.

So no, sir, I won’t stand in a line anymore. I am done doing my bit.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com

Source: Indian Express, 22-11-2016

A sense of only itself

At one level, India’s middle class is now inured to the world outside its own class. At another level, it displays an aggressive nationalism and is completely disdainful of the idea of the community as a nation.

India’s middle classes have travelled a long way since the late 19th century when they planted the saplings of the freedom movement. On the way to India’s Independence, they filled the jails, and while they could not prevent the horrors of Partition, they wrote a unique document for the new nation: the Constitution of the Republic of India.

After Independence, it was the middle class again that supplied the teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, administrators and the other builders of Project India. It was a very imperfect project and there were strong disagreements, but there was no denying the pride these middle-class servants felt in building the Republic.

Middle-class activism

Things have changed in recent decades. Beginning in the 1990s, India’s middle class — many times its size in 1947 and amorphous in its composition — started to have a sense only of itself. Gone is a sense of the nation as a country which, while divided, is still one where everyone has equal rights and where no one should be left behind. In its place, the middle class is now happy to wear a flag-waving nationalism on its sleeve and is concerned only about itself.

The middle class as driving public action is now a thing of the past. The last time India saw mass protest by the middle class was after the horrific rape in New Delhi in December 2012. That did lead to new legislation. But December 2012 was an exception and mostly women marched on the streets. Middle-class activism, as it is now called, is usually only about matters of immediate concern — the neighbourhood, the locality, and the city.

It is not a caricature to say that the better off among the middle class are worried today only about their next gadget, next holiday, next car and next home.

At one level, India’s middle class is now inured to the world outside its own class. At another level, it displays an aggressive nationalism and is completely disdainful of the idea of the community as a nation.

In the initial days after the demonetisation of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 notes, the middle class played to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s script. It was willing to put up with its own inconvenience for what it saw as a larger cause. But the middle class is impervious to how the members of India’s vast informal sector, the rural communities in unbanked regions, the savers of cash holdings and others were going to manage.

Today, when middle-class concerns are expressed in strength, they are expressed on social media — with hate. The voices in anger are overwhelmingly directed against “anti-nationals”, religious minorities, and, if they are reckless enough, they can be casteist too.

Bhopal as a test case

Consider, for example, the shooting in late October of eight Muslim undertrials after they purportedly broke out of Bhopal Central Jail while killing a prison guard. Even a decade or two ago, a shooting of such a large number and so suspiciously in abuse of the law would have attracted a measure of anger from the middle class which is aware of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

Not now.

There has been the isolated statement by a civil liberties group and the odd statement by one or two political parties. Nothing more. In the media few newspapers have either editorialised strongly or sent their reporters in hunt of the true story. It has required the rare and fine exceptions like this newspaper to expose the lies. The silence of TV has been deafening.

Instead, there have been online diatribes against those who question the official version. Here is one posted on Twitter on October 31: “Why [sic] people are raising questions whether the encounter was fake or not? Terrorists should be neutralised wherever found.” And here is one from the Letters column of the digital publication Scroll.in in response to an article questioning the official version: “These law-abiding SIMI terrorists stayed as state guests in a high-security establishment which relies on the tax payers money — and you’re okay with that? These people should have been shot dead a long time back”.

India’s online population remains small, and on social media it is infinitesimally small. But it wields a power far beyond its size. What it says resonates with the political powers in ascendance. And what these political forces say resonates with this vocal social media population — drawn entirely from the middle class.

This is not the first time that the murder of undertrials has evoked the barest of protests from the middle classes. In April 2015, five Muslim terror accused who were in handcuffs and were being shifted from one prison to another in Telangana were shot dead inside a van by the police because apparently one of them tried to grab a policeman’s rifle. (This happened within weeks of two incidents in the State in which two Students’ Islamic Movement of India activists and three policemen were killed.) A few questions from a few newspapers, a few statements, and one state Special Investigation Team probe which has gone nowhere. It does not seem to matter.

Of course, the “who-cares” attitude or the “they-deserved-it” reaction is most obvious when Muslims are involved.

It is not just the professional trolls who are venting spleen on the Net. Visit any story of any English newspaper or magazine and see the comments on a story about India’s Muslims. You can only despair for the future after reading the venom being spewed there. The online comments on “SIMI men had no guns, say witnesses” in The Hindu of November 2 are a representative sample.

Anti-minorityism out in the open

It is time to stop pussyfooting about what the middle class (Hindus) think about some of their fellow citizens. We have to accept that a creeping anti-minorityism has now become full-blown among the middle class. From a whispering conversation among the like-minded it has now entered everyday conversation among families, friends and office colleagues. It is there all around us.

The disdain for everyone else is the outcome of the very successful build-up of Hindu majoritarianism over the past three decades. This has now reached a new peak under the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It threatens to march even higher in the run-up to the next round of State elections in 2017 and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The majoritarianism of the middle class reflects the essential philosophy of the party in power and in return it strengthens this exclusionary philosophy.

It has been a long journey since the beginning of the freedom movement and the drafting of the Constitution.

C. Rammanohar Reddy is Readers’ Editor of Scroll.in

Keywords: Middle-class, Nationalism

Source: The Hindu, 17-11-2016

Sep 03 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

SECOND OPINION - Uncivic sense

Jug Suraiya





More than just physical infrastructure, our squalid cities lack mental infrastructure

The other day i saw a man peeing in full public view. Men relieving themselves in the open ­ not only in the so-called `Millennium City' of Gurgaon where i happen to live, but all over India ­ are a common sight not worth remarking upon.Except that this man was doing it right in front of a glitzy mall.
Had the man taken the trouble to walk just a few short yards, he would have had access to the mall's clean, hygienic public toilets, at no cost to himself. Yet he chose to urinate in the open. Or maybe he didn't choose to do so, but that it just came naturally to him: he wanted to relieve himself, so fine, he might as well do it there and then, right where he was.
I would have forgotten this commonplace incident if it were not for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's proposal to provide indoor lavatories in villages ­ specifically to ensure privacy and security for women, who risk sexual assault by going outdoors at night to answer nature's call ­ and to create a hundred new cities.
The women of India, particularly of rural India, will owe the PM an immeasurable debt of gratitude if he can deliver on his promise. But this sentiment is perhaps unlikely to be shared by their male counterparts.
Indians in general, and Indian men, in particular, have arguably the lowest civic sense in the world. It is this lack of what could be called `mental infrastructure', together with lack of physical infrastructure, that increasingly is turning our cities and towns into living nightmares of filth and squalor.
Indian cities are among the dirtiest and most polluted in the world. Even the `sacred city' of Varanasi is not immune from this urban contagion, daily dumping tonnes of untreated human waste into the Ganga, turning the so-called `holy' river into a sewage drain.
We can, and we certainly ought to, install lavatories in village homes.We can also project creating a hundred new cities, to accommodate the continuing migration from the rural hinterland to urban areas as the country's workforce, slowly but inevitably, turns from agriculture to manufacturing.But these new cities will soon become as derelict and dysfunctional as all our other cities for lack of the mental infrastructure of basic civic sense.
Indians, notably Indian men, pee and crap where they will, even if toilet facilities are available to them. We routinely throw our garbage out of our homes onto the public streets with little or no regard as to who's going to collect it, and what's to be done about its disposal. We flout all traffic rules, resulting in a daily death toll of accidents and lethal outbursts of road rage.
We can plan to build cities, but it seems we ourselves are not planned, or mentally programmed, to live in them, and soon turn them into urban wastelands. And the tragic irony is that the Indian subcontinent boasted one of the earliest and best-designed cities in the world called Mohenjo-daro.
Before thinking of building a hundred new cities, or even one new city , we should think of how we're to reclaim our lost civic sense. How do we citizens of India become its true city-zens?
secondopinion@timesgroup.com http:blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.comjugglebandhi