Less Speech, More Silence

MAULANA WAHIDUDDIN KHAN





Asked why he was so miserly with words, a wise man replied, “The Creator of the world has given man two ears, but just one tongue. This is so that we may listen more than we speak.“ Listening more, we increase our knowledge, have a better understanding of the other person's viewpoint, prepare what we wish to say and encourage in the speaker a greater receptivity to what we wish to say when finally it is our turn to hold forth.When we speak, it is not generally sufficient just to utter the truth. We have to be able to talk persuasively if our listeners are to be convinced. This is where our having listened carefully is an advantage. We get to know in advance what misapprehensions we have to sweep aside, what illusions we have to dispel and what emotional barriers we have to break down.
If we speak without ever listening to others, we shall always find ourselves in a weak, uncertain and ill-informed position. Sometimes we voice opinions that are not well supported by facts. We can save ourselves embarrassment by first hearing the subject discussed from different angles by different speakers. The propensity to talk too much is often a sign of wanting to sing one's own praises than of getting to the matter, and shows a lack of seriousness towards others.
The practice of listening more than speaking is not just the external expression of one isolated personality trait; rather, it reflects a whole state of mind.Indicative of sincerity and humility , it is the essence of a fine character.

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 52, Issue No. 7, 18 Feb, 2017

Editorials

Catching the Corrupt

Make or Break

Azaadi—Freedom from Indian Oppression

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: The Stone Age

Law & Society

Legitimacy of Judicial Review

Alok Prasanna Kumar

Commentary

Boycotting Schools in Nicobar for Education

Ajay Saini

Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones - A Challenge for International Law?

Bharat H Desai, Balraj K Sidhu

A ‘New’ Recipe for Trade

Shalini Bhutani

A Take on Solar Power in India

Kawaljeet Kaur Kapoor, Yogesh K Dwivedi

Book Reviews

Learning the Art of Being a Woman

Meenakshi Thapan

Hindi, Hindu, Horror - Politics of the Bollywood Horror Cinema

Dibyakusum Ray

Perspectives

Education in Mother Tongue - Impact of Multilingual Education in Odisha

Seemita Mohanty

Review of Urban Affairs

Safe and Inclusive Cities - Pointers towards a Research Agenda

Amita Bhide, Anant Maringanti, Darshini Mahadevia

Water and Conflict in Bombay Hotel, Ahmedabad - Urban Planning, Governance and Infrastructural Violence

Renu Desai, Shachi Sanghvi

Resistance and Its Limits - Protesting Urban Violence in Lyari, Karachi

Nida Kirmani

Ecology vs Housing and the Land Rights Movement in Guwahati

Darshini Mahadevia, Aseem Mishra, Yogi Joseph

The Violence of Worlding - Producing Space in Neo-liberal Durban, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro

Himanshu Burte, Lalitha Kamath

Colonising the Slum - Changing Trajectories of State–Market Violence in Mumbai

Amita Bhide

Urban Planning and Violence - Cause or Catalyst for Change?

Alison Brown

Special Articles

Black Money and Politics in India

Jagdeep S Chhokar

Question of Land, Livelihood and Development - Tribal Resettlement and Development Mission, Kerala

Kurian George, Amrutha Jose Pampackal

Estimating Unaccounted Income in India - Using Transport as a Universal Input

Sacchidananda Mukherjee, R Kavita Rao

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Letters

Remembering Srilata Swaminathan

Bharat Dogra

Raghab Bandyopadhyay (1948–2017)

Arup Kumar Sen

Protecting the PCPNDT Act

Niharika Bapna

Appointments/programmes/announcements 

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Web Exclusives

Well done ABBA? - Aadhaar and the Public Distribution System in Hyderabad

Anmol Somanchi, Srujana Bej, Mrityunjay Pandey

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2017/7#sthash.Mr8IJrxY.dpuf

Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey offers master degree in Cyber Security

Saint Peter’s University in New Jersey is launching a Masters of Science in Cyber Security. The master’s degree programme aims to provide students with the advanced skills needed to help protect and defend information systems from cyber-attacks.

The programme will focus on information systems security, assurance, cyber security and computer forensics. The 30-credit hour master’s degree program in cyber security will provide students with the knowledge in theory and practice to understand cyber security threats and vulnerabilities, and to be able to defend computer systems against cyber-attacks. The programme is designed for working professionals and/or students with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, business or criminal justice. The curriculum includes the following courses: Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing, Malware Analysis and Defense, Cyber Crime Investigation & Digital Forensics, Disaster Recovery and more. Applications for the programme are being accepted starting now, February 2017.

“The need for information security experts has been increasing in all industry sectors. By establishing a Master of Science in Cyber Security, with our already established undergraduate programme in cyber security, Saint Peter’s University will be well positioned to further train and educate students on this very important national initiative,” said Mr. Edward Moskal, Director of the master’s programme in cyber security at Saint Peter’s University.

In addition to the programme launch, Saint Peter’s University is opening an on-campus Cyber Security Center. The Center was designed in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Center of Excellence, located in Rockville, Maryland, and will provide hands-on learning opportunities for students to analyse risk across multiple platforms and simulate defensive actions from new and existing cyber threats. Students will learn about software/tools that can be used to protect the cyber environment of an organization. Students will also have access to state-of-the-art technology including Apache: Virtual Computing Lab, CISCO Virtual Labs and Network Simulator, SANSForensics Investigative Toolkit Workstation, Department of Homeland Security Cyber Security Evaluation Tool Kit and much more.

Source: DNA, 16-02-2017

Mapping the crime-politics nexus in India

As elections get under way in Uttar Pradesh, there is apparently reason to cheer already. The Association for Democratic Reforms has reported a drop in the number of candidates with criminal records or cases filed against them. As against 2012, when 32% of candidates had criminal cases against them, this time around the figure is 20%—168 out of 836 aspirants to political office.

Of these, 143 have serious criminal cases: murder and attempt to murder, rape and kidnapping. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which is apparently leading a national crusade against corruption, tops the tally.

Not far behind is the Bahujan Samaj Party, whose leader is supposedly running on her prior record of ensuring law and order but who has no problem inducting a notorious figure like Mukhtar Ansari into the party. The Samajwadi Party and Congress have an equally illustrious record on this count.

The spectacle of such figures strutting about in the world’s largest democracy is a matter for periodic despair and handwringing. Yet there have been few attempts at explaining this flagrant nexus between politics and crime in India. Milan Vaishnav’s new book, When Crime Pays: Money And Muscle In Indian Politics, fills this void with admirable rigour, clarity and elegance. Drawing on an extraordinary database of affidavits of almost all candidates that contested elections between 2003 and 2009 as well as field research, Vaishnav argues that there is something akin to a marketplace for criminals in Indian politics.

On the supply side, there is a growing willingness of political parties to field candidates with criminal records. The costs of elections have burgeoned in recent years. Parties are on the lookout not only for self-financing candidates but those who can also fill the parties’ coffers to help other candidates. But why do criminals want to contest elections in the first place?

Vaishnav suggests that this should be seen as a form of vertical integration. Previously, criminals and thugs did the bidding of parties in order to secure political protection. Over the years, especially as elections got more competitive from 1967 onwards, they have worked out that it was better for them to contest directly and ensure the requisite political cover.

Then again, why do people elect criminals to office? In analysing this demand side, Vaishnav demolishes claims about the ignorance of voters. On the contrary, he argues, people vote for candidates with criminal reputations precisely because of this reputation.

A combination of factors is at work. For one thing, the weakness of the Indian state in upholding the rule of law and in delivering public services compels constituents to turn to local tough-men for ameliorating their problems. For another, where divisions of caste, ethnicity or religion are strong, criminal politicians acquire greater salience owing to the dynamics of voter identification.

It is important to ask when criminalization of politics takes off and why. Vaishnav points to the 1967 election as the point of inflection. This seems plausible, though his reasoning is less persuasive. Drawing on the work of Samuel Huntington, he argues that by the late 1960s there was a combination of institutional decay, primarily within the Congress party, and a spurt in popular participation and consequent demands on the state. It was in this context that criminals came to acquire salience in politics.

There are at least three problems with this explanation. First, the framework of institutional decay and socio-economic change is too broad and vague to be usefully operationalized. An earlier generation of political scientists invoked it to explain everything from the declining fortunes of the Congress in the late 1960s to the imposition of the Emergency.

Second, all these arguments turn on an idealized picture of the Congress party in the period between 1950 and 1965. The notion that the Congress was a well-oiled, internally democratic, decentralized and responsive political machine is a mirage— created by the white heat of Indira Gandhi’s abrasive politics. And it is an image that cannot survive closer historical treatment.

Finally, there is a problem in identifying the role of criminals in the early period only by looking at instances of electoral or other form of overt violence. The best exercise of any power, including musclepower, may actually occur when it is latent and not overtly observable.

Such embedded muscle-power was arguably central to the Congress’ preponderance in Indian politics for the first 15 years—especially through traditional forms of caste dominance in rural India. The political economy of power in such local networks is critical to understanding what went on before the mid-1960s.

Vaishnav’s analysis of the background to the rise of Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, shows that he is not unmindful of this dynamic. But it needs more attention.

The book is spot on, however, in identifying Indira Gandhi’s 1969 ban on corporate donations to parties as a critical turning point. This enabled her at once to block funding to opposition parties and to tighten her own grip on the Congress. By the time Rajiv Gandhi amended the Companies Act again in 1985 to legalize corporate funding, the damage had already been done. Giving and receiving in “black” had become far more convenient to all concerned.

Tackling this problem is fundamental to addressing the crime-politics nexus as well as corruption, more broadly speaking. And Vaishnav’s book is the best map we have in navigating this tricky terrain. Srinath Raghavan is senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Source: Mint epaper, 20-02-2017

Every breath you take

Air in several Indian cities is rated poorly by international studies. Unlike China, India is not trying to clean up its act

If nothing else, a recent graphic in The Guardian, based on data from the journal, Preventive Medicine, and the World Health Organisation (WHO), should awaken the government to the terrifying dangers of air pollution in this country. It shows cities around the globe where the harm caused by cycling or slow jogging — measured in minutes per day — exceeds the benefits of such exercise due to the inhaling of pollutants. These refer to smallest measureable particulates of matter — PM 2.5 that are less than 2.5 micrometers and can bypass the body’s defences; by comparison, particles of 10 micrometers are less than the width of a human hair.

The world map —the graphic — shows India with a crown of such polluted cities straddling the north of the country and extending into Pakistan and Afghanistan, forming the biggest concentration of such danger spots in the entire world. Gwalior and Allahabad top the list (along with Zabol in Iran) where more than 30 minutes of cycling or slow jogging in a day is counterproductive. Patna and Raipur figure in the next band where the tipping point is 45 minutes, while in Delhi — listed as the world’s worst polluted city by the WHO in 2014 — Ludhiana and Kanpur cycling or slow jogging becomes counter-productive after 60 minutes. This means that despite living in the diabetes capital of the world and facing rising obesity levels, Indians will not be able to keep fit by any brisk exercise above these time limits. The American school in Delhi listed only five days in the four months after October 2015 that were safe for children to play in the open.

Obviously, walking is also hazardous, though for a longer time limit. While the journal and WHO address the middle class all over the world, the poor in these Indian cities have no alternative but to walk or cycle to work. A 2008 study by the Institute of Urban Transport (India) estimated that there were a million trips by cycle every day in Delhi. This data comes just before alarm bells rang with the State of Global Air 2017 report by two US-based institutes which shows that there were 1.1 million premature deaths in India due to long-term exposure to PM 2.5 in 2015. Since 2010, India and Bangladesh have recorded the highest such levels in the world. While China registered slightly higher figures, it has now acted against this hazard — the situation in India, in contrast, is getting worse. China has registered a 17 per cent increase in these deaths since 1990, while the increase is nearly 50 per cent in India. The highest number of premature deaths globally due to ozone is also in India. Might all this qualify as genocide?

To complete the toxic trio of such studies, new research in the journal Environment International shows that pre-term babies (born less than 37 weeks of gestation) face the risk of death or physical or neurological disabilities due to exposure to PM 2.5, among other factors. However, such exposure can also affect babies in the womb. In 2010, as many as 2.7 million pre-term births in the world — 18 per cent of the total — were associated with this fine particulate matter, which can lodge deep in a mother’s lungs. India alone contributed 1 million such pollution-related births, twice that in China.

A recent e-book on air pollution titled Choke by Pallavi Aiyar, who lived in Beijing before the 2008 Olympics, details the measures China took to clean up its act. Like Delhi, Beijing was afflicted by the burgeoning number of cars and rampant construction; like Delhi, it was hit by dust storms (from the Gobi desert, as against the Thar) and is similarly landlocked. Unlike Delhi’s environs, it didn’t face the pollution caused by the burning of agricultural waste. Half the world’s concrete and a third of its steel was used for the games. Construction materials and debris transported in open trucks or dumped indiscriminately contributed the bulk of coarser particles.

Stung by international media criticism, which posed a threat to the games, the government swung into action. It began to enforce the measurement of “blue sky days” in a year, which rose from 241 in 2006 to 274 two years later. However, international researchers alleged that some monitoring stations had shifted to cleaner areas to fudge the figures — always a problem with China’s statistics. Despite this, blue skies were a visible proof of the clean-up.

China spent $17 billion on improving its capital’s environment from 2001, when it won the Games bid, to 2008. On air pollution alone, it spent $557 million. The number of buses doubled, while 50,000 old taxis and 10,000 old buses were scrapped and replaced with new models. It introduced 4,000 CNG buses — something that Delhi did in 1998. Over 200 polluting industries were shifted out — due to the lack of democratic safeguards, China doesn’t face the prospect of protracted law suits. There was a fourfold increase in use of natural gas. Nevertheless, Beijing’s GDP rose four times between 2000 and 2007 with large-scale industrialisation and urbanisation proceeding “at a breakneck speed”, writes Aiyar.

China cracked down on cars that didn’t meet emission standards by preventing them from entering the city. The decline in sulphur dioxide levels was the most dramatic achievement. In a decade from 1998, it “leapfrogged” – to employ the exhortatory title of a tome by the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi – from Euro I to Euro IV standards. Euro IV had gasoline with 50 parts per million (ppm) sulphur, as compared to 800 ppm under Euro I.

By 2012, Beijing restricted the ownership of cars to those who didn’t possess one and bidders had to enter a monthly lottery. Notably, something which Delhi’s mandarins should note, it limited the use of cars by government officials. By 2014, it had cut the number of new license plates by 37 per cent. In 2013, Beijing announced that it would spend a total of $163 billion in five years on tackling pollution. Across China, PM 2.5 levels fell by 37 per cent between 2010 and 2015.

What will it take Delhi to gets its act together to stop being the world’s air pollution pariah? Perhaps international criticism by environmental experts and the media like the controversy over The New York Times correspondent who wrote he was leaving the country for fear of worsening his young son’s asthma. Successive governments have turned a blind eye not only to urban air pollution but also to indoor contamination caused by smoky chulhas. Years ago, Kirk Smith, an American expert now at the University of California at Berkeley, loosely compared such exposure to the equivalent of inhaling carcinogens from two packs of cigarettes a day. He is now researching how LPG can reduce the health risks faced by pregnant women while cooking in India, as well as the contribution of households to ambient air pollution in the country.

The writer is Chairman Emeritus, Forum of Environmental Journalists in India

Source: Indian Express, 20-02-2017

We need democracy because people can be wrong

It’s the only political system that allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make, bloodlessly, and correct them

The people are always right. No? Ah, but then they vote for leaders like Donald Trump and… Oh well, we can add to the list, internationally and nationally!

Does this mean that democracy is a mistake? No, quite the contrary! But we have to hack away at some stubborn centuries-old shrubbery in order to see the foundation of this clearly enough.

One of the greatest myths about democracy — started largely by the Left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and continued with a twist by the Right into the 21st — relates to the most common rationale behind it. The people are always right, claimed the Left in the past. The market, or the consumer, is always right, claims the capitalist Right today, tweaking the Leftist argument cleverly.

Between them, they justify democracy as a form of political organisation based on human beings being basically ‘always right’. Very little in the past — from the picnics at public hangings outside London jails to the genocides of colonisation and Nazism — justifies such confidence in people being always right. Over centuries, people have been horribly wrong at times.

Majority’s mistrust

Way back in 1882, Henrik Ibsen, the great Norwegian playwright, wrote An Enemy of the People (adapted into a film, Ganashatru, by Satyajit Ray in his last years) around one aspect of this perception, arguing that one needs to be morally and intellectually ahead of ‘people’ in order to be right. Ideas and ‘truths’, Ibsen suggests in this play, get dated, habitual and platitudinous, and hence the majority, which lives habitually by grasping on to platitudes, tends to mistrust the truly ethical and intellectual individual. In other words, if you are Jesus, you risk getting crucified.

But even this argument is faulty: a lot of intelligent people can go horribly wrong. Cleverness does not necessarily save you from mistakes, and even ethics can be twisted in painful ways: there are many in the U.S. who claim to be ‘pro-life’ and hence will criminalise abortions, but they spare little thought (and no money) for the plight of women forced into unhappy pregnancies or the future of poor, abandoned and unwanted children.

History is full of brilliant people — ‘great’ leaders, scientists, thinkers, planners — who helped destroy a village, a nation or an age. Sometimes it appears that intelligence, on its own, merely provides a person with an easier ability to make excuses for his or her mistakes, and hoodwink others in the process.

So if people — whether as individual or group, entrepreneur or consumer, tribe or republic, nation or political party, king or voter — seem to make horrible mistakes much of the time, what hope is there for democracy? Why believe in democracy at all?

Actually, one can argue that the main justification of democracy is exactly this: that anyone — ordinary voter or monarch — can be wrong about any given matter. The ability to make mistakes is human — neither power nor riches nor education can eradicate it, though self-awareness might help. A king or dictator can make a mistake as well as the majority of voters in an election who vote in a party or a leader with bad plans. But in a democracy, after a period, during the next elections, such mistakes can be corrected.

A democracy, in other words, allows us to regularly check the mistakes we make — bloodlessly — and correct them when their disastrous consequences become finally clear to us. This is far more difficult, and costly, to do in any other kind of (autocratic) regime, whether justified in worldly or ‘divine’ terms.

Living with one’s opponents

Democracies are not necessary because people are always right: if we were certain of being right all the time, we would not need any political organisation at all, let alone a democracy. We would be gods. Democracy is necessary because people — groups and individuals — can be wrong. Hence, in a democracy one learns to live with one’s opponents, not exile or murder them. This is a political version of the fact that in life we always live with others — or with the Other, the self who is not and cannot be (by definition) entirely yourself.

Democracy is the only political option that allows us to mitigate the effects of our own mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Democracy is necessary not because the people are always right, but because human beings are often wrong. We forget this only at great peril to ourselves and others.

Source: The Hindu, 19-02-2017

Migrants could get a job in any state as domicile quotas may go

Cut off from subsidised ration. Deprived from welfare schemes. Harassed and assaulted for just being “outsiders”.

But the long sufferings of migrant workers in India could be a thing of the past if the government accepts the recommendations of a panel that looked into the working conditions of millions of people who move to other states in search of better opportunities.

In India, migrants constitute approximately 29% of the workforce but are often cut off from government schemes including the benefits of subsidised ration in fair price shops.

Besides, they also face harassment in many states such as Maharashtra where strong anti-outsider sentiments have led to attacks on migrant workers over fears of them usurping job opportunities of local residents.

In its report submitted last month to the ministry, the panel headed by Partho Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, has pushed for portability of public distribution system (PDS) benefits across fair price shop system, affordable housing options and setting up of migrant helpline to provide information about protections and benefits available to them.

Under the PDS, ration cards are invalid in their work state. The panel has recommended “expanding” and “accelerating” portability of PDS as well as healthcare benefits within states with appropriate technology and universal coverage.

The panel was set up by the Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation ministry.

“Many argue that the provisions outlining domicile/minimum duration of local residence are required in order to protect local workers. But these arguments are ill-founded and mischievous…What is needed are strong regulations pertaining to wages and conditions at work, which would prevent all workers -- local or migrant -- from being exploited,” said Indrajit Roy, research fellow, Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Roy, the principal investigator of University of Oxford’s study titled Lives on the Move said that some states are already ahead on the curve.

“For example, Punjab is one of the states to have instituted a migrant welfare board and Kerala inaugurated an inter-state migrant worker scheme, implemented through the Kerala construction workers’ welfare fund.”

The 2017 Economic Survey report has also recommended portability of PDS benefits.

“These migrants depend either on their employer or labour contractor for food provisions or purchase food in the open market. This significantly increases their cost of living and reduces the additional earnings they might hope to remit to their families,” Roy said.

The ministry is yet to take a call on the working group’s report.

“Implementing these recommendations is easier said than done. It is the states, which will have to implement them and they may not agree because of political pressures,” said a government official.

Source: Hindustan Times, 20-02-2017