Make the right connections

 

What do you need to look for and what are the skills you must have to convert that deep-tech internship into a job?

Whether you are a student or professional, you can make your way into deep tech by landing the right internship. These programmes not only offer you a chance to sharpen your resume and make connections but also to learn how a large organisation or a start-up works. Not all internships are equal, especially when it comes to deep technology companies. Here are some factors to consider:

Interest and values alignment: This is one of the most important decisions when choosing an internship. It is more likely that you will put in more effort if you really care about what you are doing. Therefore, look at the company’s vision and focus area, the problem being solved, and whether there are any innovative and exciting projects in the pipeline.

Team, resources and partners: Do a thorough background check on the company and the people you will be working with. Sometimes it is better to work with companies who have already proven their technology. Access to capital, labs or partners for research and development should also be considered.

Role and work: Deep tech companies can have a long period of research before the product is ready for the market (“gestation period”). Knowing your specific job responsibilities in advance can make an internship more aligned with your expectations. Focus on skills that will be useful in the future, not just things you want to learn or want an employer to know. If you are looking for Machine Learning internships, ensure the company does end-to-end model creation and deployment, rather than employing a Data Science team that does the Maths. This will give you hands-on experience with model creation, validation and deployment.

Key interview skills

Remember, internships are not just about getting your foot into the door but also about learning and gaining experience. The most obvious approach is to highlight the contributions and insights that you made during your internship. Artefacts, patents, publications or systems built by the intern or references from an internship go a long way in demonstrating the aptitude for the work and ability to come up to speed and contribute quickly.

The next step is to describe why the work was impressive and who benefited from it. What motivated you to pursue the work and what was your role in completing it? If you did not make significant contributions, then you must show that you had great ideas or insights that led to new directions for exploration or research. If you did a lot of work that didn't result in a product or publication, focus on the work that was most impressive within the context of your internship. Last, people hire for culture fit, so show that you belong.

Whether it is a large/small company or a start-up, deep tech requires a plethora of skills, which can be gained through hands-on experience. So keep your eyes open for opportunities and learn as much about the field as possible.

Source: The Hindu, 7/05/22

Arvind Saraf

Serious job losses are taking place’ 

The truth may ultimately prevail about demonetisation, but the government might be able to maintain the loyalty of a large part of the public for a long time, says Amartya Sen

More than two months after the demonetisation, Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen says that any proper “economic reasoning could not have sensibly led to such a ham-handed policy.” He predicts that the demonetisation will hit the economy quite drastically. In an interview with Suvojit Bagchi at his home in Santiniketan, which he visits every winter, Professor Sen spoke about the motives and impact of the move.

We’ve seen the primary impact of the demonetisation: long queues outside banks and shortage of cash. Now we are seeing the secondary impact, which is on the informal sector. Potato sowing in West Bengal is affected and some other businesses are collapsing. What could be the impact of all this?

What you are calling “the secondary impact” shouldn’t at all be surprising since the availability of money plays a very big part in facilitating business and trade. Particularly for small businesses (farming, for example), money is often used in the form of cash. In the long run, cashless transactions can perhaps be made into routine practice, through organisation and training, but that would take time. To act on the presumption of instant learning and institutionalisation is to place the hard-earned interests of many people without any connection to ‘black money’ in serious risk.Most of what we now call cash is actually promissory notes, the emergence of which reflected a big advance over relying only on precious metals (like gold and silver). Promissory notes played a significant part in building up the financial backbone of industrial Europe. If in the 18th or 19th century, Britain had been demonetised suddenly, it would have devastated British industrial progress.
Given the underdevelopment of electronic accounts and transactions, big parts of the economy are similarly vulnerable. For many, especially among the poor, making efficient and correct use of electronic payments and receipts would remain difficult to master and the possibility of losing one’s money would be hard to avoid, especially given the shortage of infrastructure and the slowness of learning in using cashless transactions. The perplexing question is why some people — those who gave us demonetisation — did not foresee that this would happen and even more perplexing is how the promoters of demonetisation can be so blind even now to the overwhelming evidence of a crisis.

 Why has over 85 per cent of cash suddenly been taken out of circulation?

The Government of India seems to have been caught in a confusion of purposes. Demonetisation has been seen both as a way of catching and eliminating ‘black money’, and as a way of moving towards a ‘cashless economy’. The former has gradually been replaced in the rhetoric of the government by the latter, which is not surprising as demonetisation can make only a very small contribution — at a huge social cost — to the ‘black money problem’. This is because only a very small proportion of black money (it is estimated to be 6 per cent or so, certainly less than 10 per cent) is in cash. Most black money is in the form of precious metals and other assets in foreign accounts. The inconvenience and loss imposed with no black money (workers earning wages; small businesses doing trade or production; people, even housewives, keeping small savings) are much more acute than any benefit from catching relatively small amounts of black money.
 There are going to be huge job losses too, and the recent reports by All India Manufacturers’ Organisation are beginning to show that serious job losses are already happening as a result of what London’s Financial Times has called “a dramatic drop in business in the 34 days since Narendra Modi… announced his plan to scrap 86 per cent of its banknotes.”
The unrealistic governmental expectation that the ‘black money problem’ can be solved, or largely removed, by demonetisation soon became clear even to the government. Then the initially trumpeted objective of getting rid of black money through demonetisation was suddenly changed into a very different objective — to leap rapidly into a cashless society. However, for such a structural change, much more time is needed, and the draconian measures — penalties installed in the hope of catching black money — are particularly ill-suited. The result has been a combination of chaos and widespread suffering rather than an orderly transition to a cashless society.

Do you think there are political reasons behind the demonetisation move? The elections are coming up, so that may have been one?

I don’t really know. Since economic reasoning could not have sensibly led to such a ham-handed policy, it is natural for people to suspect an explanation in terms of political advantages that the ruling parties were expecting to get. It has certainly given, at least for the time being, a great political image to the Prime Minister of being a huge fighter against corruption, even though the policy has done very

These 50 days of hardship will not take black assets out of the economy?

How could it? Only a very small proportion of black money (around 6 per cent, certainly less than 10 per cent) is in cash. How can cleaning up of 10 per cent, at most, of black money clean it all up? Even that 10 per cent is a huge overestimate, since the ‘black money dealers’ are much more skilled in overcoming official barriers than are normal honest people who are simply harassed — or made to lose their money — because of their lack of specialised skill in avoiding transaction barriers.

If it is a bad policy, why do you think there haven’t been protests against demonetisation yet?

The government’s publicity surrounding this inept move has been very strong. People have been told again and again that if you are against demonetisation, you must be in favour of black money. This is a ridiculous analysis, but a readily exploitable political slogan. The persistent crisis created by demonetisation is only slowly becoming clear in terms of hard statistics as well as in public perception.
The false perception of nobility and success can be held up through endless repetition of distorted ‘facts’ and propaganda. The truth may ultimately prevail, but the government might be able to maintain the loyalty of a large part of the public for a long time, certainly until after the U.P. elections.

It is worth remembering that the notorious Irish famines in the 1840s did not immediately cause serious public agitation against the government run from London. That happened only later — much later — but when it did happen, the understanding of blame had a huge long-run impact, making the Irish people deeply suspicious of everything that the government in London did.

Source: The Hindu, 17-01-2017

We exaggerate the lives of our historical subjects’

Author Sunil Khilnani on the challenge of profiling fifty historical figures in his new book

Picking just 50 Indians over a period of 2,500 years to profile is no easy task. In his new book Incarnations: India in 50 lives, Sunil Khilnani, director of the India Institute at King’s College London and author of The Idea of India, gets a fine balance between kings and mathematicians, freedom fighters and poets. The book attempts to complicate the stories of historical figures rather than simplify them and features the well known (Gandhi and Periyar) as well as the forgotten (Malik Ambar). In an interview over Skype, Prof. Khilnani speaks about dispelling myths about historical figures and humanising them, and how Indian history belongs not to political parties but to citizens. Excerpts:

In the introduction to Incarnations, you have written that one of the reasons you decided to write about 50 Indian historical figures was to address the “inevitable simplifications” that involve the defining of India as a predominantly Hindu nation. How have you sought to address this in your book?

The book is certainly directed at taking away from the simplification of Indian history. The aim was to partially demythologise our historical subjects, whose lives tend to get appropriated for political purposes. There is a tendency to simplify the lives of historical figures, be it Gandhi, Bose or Shivaji, by mythologising them, as if they are above human fallibility. That is a deep mistake. Political appropriation of historical figures is often a consequence of such simplification. Individual lives are never so clear-cut, which is why we need to approach history through individual biographies in order to understand their motivations. Complicating the stories of their lives only enriches us.

Aryabhata, for instance, did not discover zero. We have to be critical about these false claims being made about their lives to foster national pride. What I have attempted in this book is to try and bring out a more accurate and realistic view of their lives. Gandhi, I have called a great manager of the media in the book. Saying so was not to diminish him. But unfortunately, with all these historical figures, we exaggerate their lives and achievements, making a joke of it. I have also focussed on their afterlives, to understand precisely how these historical figures continue to live amidst us.

In The Idea of India, Nehru played a central role and you were deeply empathetic to the spirit of nationalism he espoused. So, was the decision to write about the lives of 50 people born out of a desire to look beyond Nehru?

Nehru was an important figure in The Idea of India. In Incarnations I have attempted to broaden the historical panorama, as it were. Nehru is one amongst the many figures that shaped Indian history. Here I have tried to bring in some of the other voices. In fact, Nehru’s own thoughts were shaped by these other voices which he was drawing upon. Nehru was remarkable, but not exceptional, as a historical figure. Both his opponents and his friends tend to overemphasise his uniqueness. The book spans 2,500 years of Indian history so the idea was not just to focus on a few 20th century figures. I have focussed on forgotten figures like Malik Ambar, the Habshi military figure from Ahmadnagar who fought the Mughals, to drive home the point that our current manner of telling history excludes many prominent players like him.

You have mentioned that it was a challenge to research these lives as sources were few. Were there any figures that you wanted to write about but dropped from the list due to lack of material?

The absence, destruction, or loss of sources is a problem, especially when it comes to writing about women. While researching for this book, I found it particularly hard to find primary sources on the lives of women, like temple patrons or even ordinary women. If one were to use real primary sources, then there are only a limited number of women one could write about. Take Mirabai, for example, who I write about. There were only a few fragmentary writings on her. Or take the case of Razia Sultana, the extraordinary woman sultan of Delhi. It would have been interesting to include her, but I didn't feel there was enough reliable information. One of the decisions I took, therefore, was to include descriptions of the lives of women from history into other chapters, such as the essay on the Buddha, who had to be persuaded to bring women into the sangha, or in the chapter on Periyar who worked for women’s rights. And so with Tagore, who talked about giving women the freedom to love whom they chose.

Was there a sense of urgency in writing this book? Do you see a threat to ‘the idea of India’ as many intellectuals have commented on the current political climate in the country, of there being a silent Emergency of sorts, which prompted you to writeIncarnations?

Yes, it does seem like the idea of a pluralist and Hindu nation is under challenge now. But it is also important to understand that it is during these moments of crisis in Indian history that people have shown amazing originality and innovation in how they respond to it. The nation often comes out stronger during difficult circumstances. Think of our freedom fighters like Gandhi, Tagore, etc., who showed the ability to retain their freedom of thought in the most difficult times of colonial suppression. It was that constrained pressure that provoked them to be strong, critical and brave and that should be the positive, inspirational aspect of what is happening in India right now.

Indira Gandhi was blamed for the Emergency, but at the same time she helped to provoke a response from within India which strengthened our democratic institutions, and helped with the re-emergence of civil society as the defender of the nation. I write about that in the book. Therefore, the current sense of threat and danger might precisely provoke a recommitment to democratic rights, to pluralism, and a multicultural ethic. There are a thousand pluralities and different views that comprise the life blood of India. Our creativity lies in how we advance or redefine this.

Often it is within academia, the media, and the arts that such creative work takes place. But the recent incidences of suppression of thought and expression in universities, for instance, has put a question mark on whether controversial aspects of our national present or past can be openly discussed.

It is critical to defend spaces like university and research institutions as spaces for free exchange of ideas. You have to take them seriously. But if you come to think of it, it has always been a challenge to think freely in any society, not just India. We have had a capacity to think freely even in very oppressive societies. Today, for a young historian or scholar in India, to freely investigate the past requires a certain commitment or courage. We need to offer whatever support we can. But trust me we do have sufficiently rebellious minds in our society who can do this.

If you were to look at the language in which historical debates are being framed in the current political milieu, history is either Nehruvian or non-Nehruvian. How do you respond to these developments in your work?

I am not interested in either of these two versions of history. And my work doesn’t fit into any ideological narrative be it that of Congress nationalism or Hindutva nationalism. There is a much more interesting expanse of Indian history if you care to look beyond these ideological narratives, because what they produce are dull, boring national heroes. But look at these figures closely and what you will see are troublemakers, rabble-rousers, and that is what is interesting about them, not the conformist personalities we hear about. The idea of writing Incarnations was to precisely introduce that energy into our historical narrative. Think of a person like Guru Nanak, for example. He was a complete rebel. Take Bose, Gandhi, Jinnah… in each case, the idea was to give them a much more nuanced picture. No one can own them so easily. Vivekananda, who is today being seen as a figure of Hindu nationalism, was in reality also a profound critic of aspects of Hinduism. Bose, again a brave and committed nationalist but with a terrible political judgment, who established affiliations with Hitler and the Japanese. Here is a deeply flawed personality, who showed remarkable personal courage. And then there is Gandhi, a great manipulator of the media, or Jinnah, who is again a very complicated figure. None of them belong to any political party or movement. Indian history belongs to all of us, as citizens.

vidya.v@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: India in 50 lives, The Idea of India

Source:  The Hindu, 21-03-2016

Only Gandhi wrote about paupers’

Jan Breman takes a long view of the changes he’s seen in India over half a century.

Perhaps no other scholar in the social sciences has studied India’s poor and its informal economy as intensively as Jan Breman. The sheer temporal span of his research is mind-boggling. He began his study in south Gujarat 15 years after India’s Independence — in 1962. And he was in south Gujarat in 2014 as well — that’s more than half a century of field work. In his latest book, On Pauperism In Present and Past, published last month, Professor Breman, 79, argues that what is being ‘Made in India’ right now at an impressive rate are paupers. Professor Emeritus at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, Prof. Breman was in Delhi recently, and in a freewheeling interview discussed, among other things, pauperism, the Gujarat model, and the return of social Darwinism to mainstream discourse. Excerpts:

Where is the need for terms such as ‘pauper' and ‘pauperism’ as analytical categories, when we already have ‘poverty’?

There is a difference between poverty and destitution, or what I call pauperism. In poverty, it is difficult to make ends meet. You somehow cope, do your level best to add to your income. So you also have your wife and children working along. In destitution, you are simply unable to cope. You are so utterly poor that it is difficult to even survive. And if you survive, you need outside support. Unfortunately, the poverty debate in India has more or less been appropriated by economists. So we look at income or consumption or employment levels, and not at the social or political dimension of poverty. A category such as ‘pauperism’ is needed to capture these non-economic aspects as well.

“There is a difference between poverty and destitution, or what I call pauperism. In poverty, it is difficult to make ends meet. You somehow cope, do your level best to add to your income. In destitution, you are simply unable to cope. ”

You argue in your book that India’s poverty line is a destitution line. Are you saying that those below poverty line in India are not poor but destitute?

Not all but a good number are. According to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), the poverty line fixed by the Planning Commission is a joke: 76 per cent of the Indian population is living in poverty. If you have such a vast mass of poor, you have to differentiate between levels of poverty. Certainly a big number is close to the poverty line. But in my estimate, about 25 per cent of India’s poor are destitute, or paupers.

So from an economist’s perspective, do we need another line, below the poverty line, to identify the paupers?

The poverty line is a sort of magical construction. If you cross it, you are suddenly out of poverty. So the policy focus is always on those who are able to go past that threshold. As a result, there is absolutely no interest in those at the bottom, those way beneath the poverty line.

So who is a pauper, in sociological terms?

In the first place, the paupers are the non-labouring poor, those who have no earning capacity. They never had or have lost their labour power and therefore can’t make a living. These include the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, but also widows with small children, divorcees without any support from others. Basically, in order to survive in poverty, you need a household. You cannot manage on your own because the flow of income varies with the seasons. You need to pull the household together to bring in the income — this is why you have child labour in India, isn’t it? But paupers also include the labouring poor, especially those whose income and employment are erratic or seasonal.

But Indian economists don’t believe in terms like ‘pauper’.

That’s true. It was only Gandhi who wrote about paupers in an article published in Young India in 1928, when he was in south Gujarat. He argued that we cannot fight colonialism if we do not fight colonialism in our own society. He pointed out that paupers had been around in India for a long time. I use the term pauper to evoke the conditions in Victorian England, where the casual poor were driven out of the countryside to work in the mills during the industrial revolution. In the same way, the casual poor are being driven out of the countryside in 21st century India.

England amended its Poor Laws in 1834 to pauperise the rural labour and drive them to the cities. What is India doing to create an exodus from the countryside?

Your agrarian crisis. Agriculture is not able to provide livelihood for the land-poor and the landless classes, who have lived in the villages from time immemorial. So they are forced to leave the villages. But the city doesn’t want them either.

How can you say the city doesn’t want them? India is building a hundred smart cities. Who will live in them if not migrants?

Talk to policymakers, talk to municipal officials of any city. They will tell you they don’t want the poor around, that they are a burden on our modern, beautified, smart cities. The policy of the municipality in every Indian city has been to periodically evict the poor. I have studied this phenomenon closely in Ahmedabad, where the poor are evicted from their homes that are close to their worksites and displaced to the outskirts of the city where no work is available. They try desperately to find employment but are unable to establish themselves even in the slums. They hang around in the labour chowks, they become pavement dwellers because there is no shelter for them in the night. When weeks pass by without any work at all, they go back to the villages. I use the term ‘circular migration’ to describe this movement — from villages to cities and back to villages, in an endless cycle. This is widespread in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu. But you find it in every State.

Do you see the Gujarat model being successfully implemented across the entire nation?

That is clearly the agenda of the National Democratic Alliance government. Is it possible to do it? We’ll have to see. Maybe some concessions will be made, but they will never be adequate because the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ideology does not permit pro-poor policies.

But the BJP government has an ambitious skill development programme to make the poor employable.

The stated emphasis may be on skill development but what investment is there on skill development? The BJP has cut the public education budget. What I see, among the people living in the slums, is not skilling but deskilling. In Ahmedabad, I meet workers dismissed from the mills where they used to be skilled weavers. They have lost not only their job, wages and the benefits of belonging to the formal economy but also their skills. They are now looking for employment as casual, unskilled labour. Deskilling is a bigger phenomenon in India today than skilling.

But the NDA is not doing anything very different what from the UPA was doing, is it?

Well, I would blame not only the current government but also the former one. We have to understand what’s going on in India in a globalised frame. India’s economic policies are determined by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They are therefore pro-capital, and anti-labour. Today the World Bank is at the end of its tether. Its formula of formal capital in the informal economy failed because the poor don’t own much capital. Then came the whole microcredit phenomenon, which was also a failure. Then came cash transfers, which is about bringing the poor into the market. But all these recipes have failed to raise the incomes of the poor. Having run out of ideas, they have now started blaming the poor for being poor.

How can the poor be blamed for being poor?

If you look at the World Bank’s latest World Development Report, it says that the basic problem with the poor is that they don't save. Really? If you are poor, you are desperately trying to get enough food for your family, you don’t have money for housing, or for education, or for health, and on top of all this, it now appears that you carry the defect of not having an ‘accumulating mind’!

But India is a democracy, and the poor can mobilise politically, can’t they?

Yes, the saving grace in India is democracy. It has given some power to the poor to claim rights. But can democracy continue in an economy where the gap between the haves and have-nots is constantly growing? Around the world, with inequality growing, democracy is also facing a threat.

What are your thoughts on the proposed labour reforms?

India is basically in a race to the bottom in terms of offering the lowest possible wage rates for labour, and thereby attract investors. This policy was already in place under the UPA – it is about outdoing China as far as wage levels are concerned.

How is migrant labour faring in China as compared their counterparts in India?

I visit China every ten years to get a sense of what’s going on there. My first visit was in the early 1990s, and I’ve been doing research among migrants coming to the cities. I found three big differences between the migrant workers in China and those in India. Firstly, the Chinese migrants had some property in the village, whereas in India, they are mostly landless. Second, the Chinese migrants have been to school, but the Indian ones are illiterate. Thirdly, you won’t see children at work in China, and in India, you do.

So when Chinese migrants come to the city, they have some economic holding back in the village, and they are schooled, and this makes a big difference. When I first came to China, the migrant’s dream was to buy a sewing machine or a bicycle. When I went back ten years later, they not only had sewing machines and bicycles, they also had a fridge, an electric rice cooker, a TV set. When I went back a third time, around the turn of the century, they had a motorbike. This was possible because China has been focussing on the domestic market by increasing the purchasing power of the working classes. But the Indian government is not interested in increasing the purchasing power of the poor – this is what I meant by a race to the bottom. India wants to pay its workers the lowest possible wage rate, in the hope that it can compete better with the Chinese in export markets. But this has resulted in there being more pauperisation in India, which is not the case in China.

But today the Chinese economy is in troubled waters.

So is the Indian economy.

Of course not. Haven’t you heard -- we are growing at 7.6%

(laughs) There is so much wishful thinking in Indian policy circles. The Chinese economy is slowing down, yes, but it is not stopping. What is more critical is the slowing down of the economies in the West. In India, prime minister Modi promised a 100 million jobs in his election campaign. Not only is this impossible to deliver, today even the middle classes are insecure about their future. The whole Hardik Patel phenomenon – it’s because they are desperate for work, and they can’t find any because they want work with dignity. The Kanbi Patels don’t want employment in brick kilns or stone quarries or as construction workers.

So how would you describe the present government’s approach to the poor?

Not only are the poor being blamed for their poverty – that it is their own doing, or lack of merit or whatever – attempts are being made to establish that they are a burden to society. So it is not poverty that needs a solution but the poor. The question as framed by policy-makers and urban planners is: how can we get rid of the poor? That is social Darwinism, and that’s why the comparison with Victorian England is so important.

So you see an Indian avatar of social Darwinism?

How else do we understand smart cities? They are basically about social exclusion – they are not meant to cater to the poor. As the state is getting privatised, a new kind of landlordism – as happened in feudal times -- is coming back, but in the avatar of Special Economic Zones, private townships, etc. Another example of social Darwinism at work are slum evictions, where you say we don’t want these people around – they have to be driven out, they are useless, they create traffic problems, they are anti-social -- for instance, the rape cases in Delhi.

How do you understand the recent incidents of rape in Delhi?

I am more interested in how the middle class reacted it, because the accused were young migrants from the hinterlands -- poor and belonging to the bottom of the social ladder. Of course, it’s a horrible crime and must not be justified. But their crime gets portrayed now as the typical behaviour of the scum that is invading our cities, and why the cities should be cleansed of them. I can see a future where India will not allow the workers who gather at labour chowks to settle down in the cities even though there is no livelihood in the villages.

Recently there has been a debate on reservations in the private sector. Is this a good idea?

In fact, it is required because the public economy is shrinking. We talk about reservations already being there in the public sector but we know that government jobs are being slashed, the public economy is shrinking. With privatisation and disinvestment, employment on the basis of reservations only in the public sector is over and out. Given this, private enterprise should make up for this erosion in public sector jobs by being brought under the ambit of the reservation policy.

Then what happens to merit?

Well, here’s a typical social Darwinist argument – that potentially the OBCs and SC/STs do not have merit; it’s just the high castes who have it.

You have been doing field work in India for over 50 years. What would you characterise as the single biggest change in the sphere of development?

The most striking change is the disappearance of the development paradigm itself.

How can that be? We’ve just elected a Prime Minister who campaigned on the plank of development.

By ‘development paradigm’, I mean the promise of development as seen in the West — through modernisation, industrialisation, and a welfare state that offered prosperity for all and an easy life. You were promised that this would be followed in the Global South. Now we know it’s a myth.

The contrast is no longer between nations but between social classes within every nation – whether you are included or excluded. You see this inclusion-exclusion paradigm growing with the informalisation of the economy. If nine out of ten workers in India are in the informal economy, it means not only that the formal economy is shrinking in size, it also means that it is getting informalised.

Can the poor in India hope for inclusive citizenship?

Citizenship is about rights and obligations. It is about being able to make claims on the state, and at the moment this is a privilege afforded by a minority of the Indian population. Also, inclusive citizenship not only means offering employment (inclusion in economic terms) but also creating space for them in terms of housing, health, schooling, skilling, and inclusion in social terms — which means focussing on equality. But we don’t see pro-equality policies, only pro-inequality policies. The mindset of the Indian elite is: the poor are different from me and I don’t want them around.

(email: sampath.g@thehindu.co.in)

Keywords: India, development, Jan Breman

‘There is a kind of deep state in India’

ulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll on how India has changed since the 1990s and its way forward with its neighbours

Steve Coll, one of the foremost foreign correspondents and investigative reporters from the U.S., has won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He is a staff writer atThe New Yorker magazine and the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School. He is the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004), The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008) and Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (2012). Before all that he wrote On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (1994), a mixture of top-notch reporting and analysis based on his time as the Washington Post Bureau Chief for South Asia based in New Delhi. On a recent visit to India, Mr. Coll revisited the book and talked about India’s past, present and future.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q) You reported from India as the Washington Post Bureau Chief in the early 1990s—the time when Nehruvian state was staggering with bankruptcy. From that particular time to now, how much change has taken place?

It’s been dramatic and you are right, I was there at the beginning and some of it was the end of the cold war, the collapse of the soviet union, some of it was internal pressure from emerging middle class for more normal and open relationship with the world economy, and some of it was business class pushing for liberalisation and then you had leadership by Manmohan Singh who at that time was finance minister and started to articulate the way to describe reform without being trapped in the rhetoric of the past. It started from there and changes have been profound in a lot of ways, mostly involving economic world and the change in peoples incomes and mobility and then also in the infrastructure, not as much as the physical infrastructure as the technological infrastructure. And then the other thing on the dark side of development is traffic and the air is much worse.

I was at an event on this trip and someone pulled out that book [On the Grand Trunk Road] from 1994 and read a paragraph at the end of the book that was sort of about this question of reform and the future. It was a description of what I thought the middle class of India was looking for by way of leaving the Nehruvian state behind. And afterwards we were all reflecting on how that statement of what needs to change is still unfulfilled in important ways even though the country has changed profoundly. It’s almost half empty, half full.

Q) You write in The Grand Trunk Road that Indian middle class aspire for a forward looking political party that could lead them to economic progress, eradicate corruption and make things smooth. Two decades later, we saw Arvind Kejriwal led Aam Aadmi Party emerging from an anti-corruption movement…what kind of future does the AAP-style of politics has in India?

Well, it’s interesting because you have seen these movements, sort of middle class led, urban based, outside of reform movements spring up in number of countries. I think their record is pretty mixed. On the one hand they definitely have influence, they force the incumbent parties to shift and they can take office as Kejriwal has in Delhi. But there aren’t too many examples of those parties going all the way to national power building and entirely new organization because I think the incumbent parties can figure out how to co-opt their message and sort of take their agenda but hold on to power to some extent. One of the reasons why that’s the pattern is because the political parties and organizing require to compete in national elections even if they win state elections. It’s not something you can build overnight, it’s a real infrastructure, and it’s not always pretty, but it’s there, it’s permanent, and at voting time you can mobilize it, use it in ways that it’s hard for a new comer to replicate. In Pakistan for example, Imran Khan had a moment of sweeping the power from just the same kind of aspiration of urban middle class, especially in Lahore. I watched his party secretariat trying to come to terms with their own moment of opportunity and all of the administration associated with that moment of excitement choosing candidates all the way down to the provincial legislative district, figuring out how to choose candidates who would be aligned with their values and not be seen as the same old order switching parties. It is a kind of self limiting process. I suppose if you stick with it for long enough and you are good at it BJP is an example of you-can-come-out-of-the-wilderness with a fairly small and marginalized political organization, you can systematically build your way back, but it takes 10-20 years at least and you have to have a sustainable vision.

Q) In the 1970s, we have seen how public resentment against corruption morphed into what’s famously known as JP movement, which produced a new generation of politicians. Unfortunately, after serving various ministerial positions, most of them faced serious charges of corruption. You think the sustenance of political vision is subservient to how much money one can spend? Does that mean if business tycoons like Ambanis are on your side, you have a better chance to succeed?

Having Ambanis on your side is not necessary. It sort of depends on what aspect of the aspiration of urban middle class is you are talking about as the most important one. So let’s list a few: one is corruption, another is equal opportunity in education and economy. Corruption is a subject that politicians are not likely to solve because it is not in their interest to solve it. Otherwise, holding office would just be the same kind of a job as being a teacher; it might be stable, it might be a decent salary but it’s not that exciting, other than the opportunity to hold power and influence others. The people who have an interest in solving the corruption problem by and large are consumers and citizens and to some extent businesses, depending on which kind, small businesses, new businesses. The big ones can figure out how to work the system, they are part of the system. The way corruption usually falls in these kinds of settings, it never goes away, but if you look at the global indexes for perceived corruption around the world and you relate the clean countries to income; you could ask the question which countries are the least corrupt per income. I think you usually need some kind of pressure from outside that involves national laws and rules that force people into compliance and provide a reason why companies can resist demands for bribery and so forth. The more your economy becomes integrated in the international system, more dependent on international legitimacy it is, more corruption goes down.

On the subject of equal opportunity with efficient services there I think the citizens can have more impact faster because you see this in china as well the demands are for clean exams, fair exams standards, clean admission standards, therefore, health, therefore, clean air, clean water. And when you have an open society with a freedom of information laws like India you are empowering this agenda in a way that makes it harder to resist. There the incumbent parties are willing to change, that helps them stay in power if they deliver. I think corruption debate and struggle will probably go on longer than people would like but the politics of middle class can be advanced around government’s performance.

Q)To have that kind of ecosystem I think it’s important to increase peoples participation in governance, empower grassroots administrative systems so that development plans are made bottom up, rather than top down, and that needs a smooth devolution of power. Do you see that happening in India?

That’s a very sophisticated question. I think the particular structure of administrative districts and empowerment of district administrators and so on, that inheritance is a colonial inheritance adopted by the Nehruvian state. It is clearly not an efficient design either from the perspective of corruption or the delivery of services. That aspiration to work around that system through direct delivery of services accountability from the government to citizens through mobile payments, through verification, through other kinds of technological solutions that make it harder for the Nehruvian break off to incur without being nearly breaking on some electronic board. In principle that seems central because there is no constitutional design that’s easy to implement, that is going to get you very fast down that road, whereas transparency and direct contact between consumers and government around service delivery and that has the potential to make it necessary for government to respond to things that they otherwise would not. And India is in a position because it has advanced information technology and very powerful mobile phone network in a relatively dense population, coherent geography compared to certain places. All of these experiments around direct governance, they have potential. Everyone learns how to game systems and so forth. There is no perfect system. Putting citizens in a position to government directly through kind of a contract that connects them through technology to services they require. It is not just subsidies, like distribution of rations, but also things like air pollution….. You have in all over the world lots of models springing up that make it very difficult for governments to ignore. Or annoyances like holes in the roads that should have been fixed momentarily and haven’t been. So then if you put the citizens in a position to kind of have transparent oversight over at least some of the functions of government. Then the structure of the government, constitutional design matters a lot because whoever is in the government will be forced to respond to those demands otherwise they are going to have trouble at election time.

Q)You are suggesting a technology based solution. India is already debating net neutrality because internet freedom will be important for upward mobility as service delivery here is fast becoming IT-driven, which demands easing of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), and which still faces a lot of political opposition. The fear is if we rely on technology that is corporate controlled, there is no guarantee poor people will get access to it…how do you look at that dynamic?

It’s always been the case in India’s independence movement, there has been this between the very deep rooted values of freedom and openness and democratic competition and very powerful static forces, incumbent political parties, other kinds of embedded groups. That’s the distinctive feature of Indian history because of the imperial inheritance but it is also India’s bottom up, sort of checks and balances and its aspirational grassroots attitudes that struggle with the state and the ability to do that without being mowed down by machine guns. That’s part of the history too.

France is another example. They built this system out of the chaos of the 18th century and the inheritance of the feudal system, quasi feudal system. Unlike in Britain and America, they still have that state; it’s still there… Those kinds of structures that come down from centuries they don’t go away that easily. But there has also been an evolution and a kind of a struggle with that state, to try to find an equilibrium that’s good for France, that’s French in character, that’s modern and connected with international economy. You can’t hide from international norms, over time you are going to have to adapt, you are going to have to adapt as far as American advice would wish you to go, and you are going to have to keep responding to these norms and rules.

Here is the thing I would say about the last 25 years. The balance of power in that struggle has clearly shifted away from the state and on the foreign side the ideas of reform are much more fully established, much more broadly based. In 1991, when Manmohan first started making speeches about liberalization which at the time was a very modest opening compared to the ideas that are on the table today. He had to stop in his speech after a few paragraphs and say ‘no we are not surrendering into the neo-colonialism.” This is a different discourse even though the incumbents are still strong and they still fight with some of that language.

Q) I wonder where that power has shifted now?

If I were here, I would have a richer sense of that. But I think the problem is that it has shifted to nifty fifty and their networks more than it has shifted to empower citizens. If you count the largest economic actors in the state as one complex then what’s really shifted is a lot of power has moved out of the bureaucracy and over to the international private sector and of course their agenda is different than the Nehruvian civil service bureaucracy. But it’s still not answering adequately to the demands of urban middle classes. The agenda of that sort of conglomerates is what the law the shareholders apply, which is they want to make money, they want to grow, they want to perform to international standards. And all of that creates good knock on effects but who is going to demand that government action deliver in shortest possible time transitions in the energy economy,

Q) Before coming into power, BJP’s election campaign was based on the idea that development is an idiom of nationalism, which I wonder whether it is a borrowing from China. But Unlike China, the model of rapid development has often triggered social tensions, slowing down the progress…how do you see that parallel?

The cliché about India and China is true. China had a commanding heights-led political economy that force marched transformation of physical structure even though they displaced tens of thousands of villagers and grabbed land, there was corruption, there was over building but they were able to, in the same way that Stalin forced Soviet industrialization, they were able to create a first class physical infrastructure—roads, airports, air traffic control, ports in a remarkably short period of time. We know from economics that investments in physical infrastructure of that type, no matter who makes them, no matter what their motivation is, they bring economical returns, they stimulate growth, so that is their advantage. On India’s side, because it’s an open competitive political system, you can’t just grab things, and land is the most difficult thing to work thing. So a rapid priority of physical infrastructure development was always difficult here and yet the country did find a way to be into virtual infrastructure, through telecom and software and knowledge and at that kind of a global level. That provided solvent for the economy that is comparable to that China experience. But it has left India in a strange place where they have this clear confident strategy for knowledge economy for the 21ist century whereas they don’t have anything for the late 20th century physical infrastructure. That problem was much more glaring in the early 2000s. When you went to china in early 2000s you’d say ‘My God they have separated from India.’

Q) With India’s changing political economy, do you see any foreign policy shifts? Has that middle path of Nehruvian state moved to any side?

Nehru’s foreign policy was born of the need to balance the superpowers of cold war and so it’s the post-cold war foreign policy which still is work in progress….on the region, I see more continuity the way India manages its strength vis-à-vis small neighbours, which is that it does seek to integrate those small neighbours into its political and economical spheres but it is also not aggressive, it’s not going to invade, it uses soft-power to try to create coherent sphere of influence with the big naughty problem of Pakistan stuck in the middle of that. Now, you have Pakistan as a proxy for the 50 year question of China. I think the most important problem in Indian foreign policy is the same one that is the most important problem in American foreign policy, which is how do you assess China’s rise, how do you manage it, how do you prepare for multiple scenarios without somehow making things worse by provoking, giving a sense that you are headed for conflict, or into passive, setting yourself up vulnerable. I think India and US share this dilemma. I think both elites are driven by a belief, a tentative qualified belief that engagement and integration through economic integration can succeed, that the history of rising great powers provoking wars can be avoided. I think a majority of both countries’ elites prefer the optimistic engagement strategy, but I think both countries recognize especially partly based on China’s nationalism they can’t take that for granted so they are going to have to prepare a long-term defensive containment strategy to make sure that if China does become expansionist or radicalized in some way, it can be restrained.

Q) You think the nature of India’s foreign policy changes with the changing governments? When NDA-I was in power the country started off a healthy looking dialogue with Pakistan but when UPA-I replaced the engagement fell apart. Now BJP is in power again, and Prime Minister Narendara Modi recently surprised us with his impromptu visit to Lahore. You think BJP can make significant changes via-a-vis its policy toward its neighbours; or, there is some secret state within India that controls everything from behind and the political actors at the front keep changing?

Well, there is a kind of deep state in India but it is really more than Indian foreign service than it is the intelligence agencies or the military. I think there is such complexity in Indian foreign policymaking system. There is no, in that way similar to the US, you have a lot of constituencies around the decisions. My own thinking is that Pakistani nationalism will always require hedging about India, it will always require relationship with China as a counter to the threat of Indian invasion, or destruction of Pakistani state. In a strategic sense, having a relationship with China is always going to make sense to Pakistan. But it needs to change in order for India and Pakistan to realise their potential even in that framework is for civilian leadership to emerge in Pakistan and to finally as happened in Indonesia, as happened in Argentina, as happened in Brazil, in Turkey; you have countries with long periods of military rule but where eventually because of internal forces and external forces it flips and you get genuine or at least a substantial civilian control over the military. It doesn’t usually lead to sharp departures in foreign policy but it leads to significant ones and in the case of India-Pakistan, if you had civilian leadership in Pakistan that truly had control of the activities of the military and intelligence services you could imagine a much more normal balancing policy and politics that didn’t involve proxy groups and violence and your relationship between Pakistan and China could evolve, and the relationship between Pakistan and India could evolve, you could resolve some of the territorial conflicts, you could start to cooperate on economic and infrastructure issues, you could start to cooperate on energy and water and a lot of shared interests there they have but it would require a different government.

Q) What we are seeing that the civilian government in India is run by a rightwing political party, which has promised to people in the past that if they come to power they will retaliate against Pakistan. Do you see BJP led India heading toward provoking war in future?

I think there is two things—one is the fever about retaliation and the frustrations that people generally have with persistence of terrorism, especially coming out of groups the Pakistani state may or may not control but it’s often collaborating with. The second thing some of it is media age, some of it is frustration about persistence of these attacks but really in the Pakistani relations, unfortunately, a fairly stable in a low burn, you know a mild burn, but there is just enough potential for escalation because of the persistence of these groups and because of the politics in India that requires some response depending on the scale of the attack. I am sure this government will figure out some kind of symbolic response. If you had a Mumbai or something like that then it would be a whole different scale. I mean because deterrence makes the land invasion impossible, because the last two big crises—the parliament attack and the mobilization it followed, the establishment knows that mobilizing for a land that is not going to fight is not a very smart strategy. But they haven’t had a military capability to do something lighter but effective. I think over 20 years, the kinds of territorial responses you would expect to see will be the kinds of the Americans have in such a situation, some kind of special forces helicopter raid against headquarters of Jaish or Lashkar, try to make some arrests, pull the guys away in helicopters, maybe some targeted drone strikes, that sort of thing, and challenge Pakistan…we have been asking you do this for so long and we had no choice but to defend our people by taking these measures. Americans have already established that model but the problem is that it has turned into a PR disaster.

I imagine India will develop that kind of multifaceted capacity because that’s how this challenge of semi-state sponsored jihadi terrorism will present itself probably for 20 or 30 years.

jeelani.m@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Pulitzer Prize, Steve Coll, The Grand Trunk Road, Aam Aadmi Party, corruption in India, foreign policy

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Source: The Hindu, 11-02-2016

Know the rules before you try breaking them'





Last year's Booker winner Marlon James talks about his craft and his Facebook rants

Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. Jamaican-born, US-based James teaches at Macalester College in Minnesota. On the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, he spoke to Mumbai Mirror about rejection, leaving Jamaica, breaking writing rules and that viral Facebook rant.How did you deal with the multiple rejections of your previous novel?
My first novel got rejected and the way I dealt with it was to not deal with it. I destroyed all the manuscripts. I threw it away. I forgot about writing. I went back to my old career [advertising]. I just erased all memory of being a novelist. And it was not until later that a friend somehow insisted I show her my novel and I had to find it in an old computer.
What was your reaction to being nominated for the Booker and also to the eventual win?
It was a mix of surprise and anticipation. I knew it was being entered. Of course I wanted to be nominated. I don't think you enter anything with the idea of not being recognised. But you're surprised. I'm still surprised. There were so many great books.
In a sprawling book like yours, with so many characters and voices, how did you keep track and make sure it was all distinct?
I do what my screen writer friends do. I put a chart up on the wall for characters. And what they have done, where they are, what do they want, how do they talk, where are they at 10 pm, 10: 30 pm, where are they at 11 pm? But I also worked on only one character per day.Because if I were working on more I'll be pressured by trying to move plot along as opposed to inhabiting that character's space. I liked what Atul Gawande was talking about when they are treating the dying. You think how can I make this person's life better today? It's very similar to how I write. What am I going to explore in that person's life today? What is she doing in this scene as opposed to how is this going to keep the machine of the plot moving?
You said you wanted to get out of Jamaica by coffin or by plane. Why did it come to that and do you miss it?
I miss Jamaica all the time. Why did it come to that? Because I'd run out of opportunities. There is a great saying that pastors use and I still believe it: you can reach the end of yourself. Meaning you run out of explanations, you run out of ways in which to cope with living ... and all those things applied to me. And I'd realised I wasn't going anywhere as a person, I wasn't going anywhere as an artist. I think I'd have died the slow death I see so many people living, when they've accepted a diminished life. They've accepted consistency and normalcy instead of happiness.
You've said you wouldn't teach your students to write a novel like you did.Why?
I'm a very mechanical teacher. I'm more interested in how you structure a sentence than what are your concerns as an artist.But I also teach very young students. I think you need to know the rules before you break them. And I think this idea that you can be this natural talent is actually quite ridiculous. Art doesn't work that way. So I teach a lot about the rules which I take great pleasure in breaking myself.But I know them.
Has there been more interest in Caribbean literature since your win?
I hope so. There is a lot of excitement for Kei Miller's upcoming nove. There is a change in the literature of the Caribbean. I think the last time the world paid attention the bulk was in response to Empire.In this new generation, not only do we look at it in a new way, but we have other things to talk about.
Your lasting impressions of India and your time here?
You know I've had a fantastic time in India [and Jaipur]. I love the city, the energy, I love the pulse, the food and the colours. I love how interested and curious the people are.
Did your Facebook post making such waves surprise you? [James put up a critical post after first landing in India complaining about difficulties he faced on landing.]
I was quite surprised because I was just making a joke. Anybody who knows me knows I rant on Facebook all the time.

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 25-01-2016