A Moment Of Rupture

Women are speaking and they are angry. There’s a new language of dissent.

In the weeks since the #MeToo survivor accounts surfaced on social media calling out men in powerful positions in the media and the entertainment industry for their sexual misconduct and breach of trust, most conversations with friends and female colleagues have been about how triggering the accounts of these incidents have been for all of us. Like most migrant first or second-generation workers in cities that we have come to embrace as home, each of us has experiences that we wish were never our burden to bear.

These experiences, however, make for excellent cautionary tales — the deep dark wood and the ogre that you must avoid; except, far too often, the ogre proves to be a wily adversary. He comes not in the guise of a stranger, but as a mentor; a boss; a friend you trust; a co-worker who you get along fabulously with; a man you interviewed; a man with a legacy. A man who could, with a gesture or an act, reduce your self-worth to nought.

The rules of social engagement have changed in new India. What hasn’t is the deeply entrenched sexism in our cultural fabric that refuses to recognise consent as a wide-ranging arc and women as equal partakers in it. For that would require, as a basic premise, a recognition of the other as an adult whose language of desire, agency and comfort needs to be engaged with, negotiated and respected. Our post-liberal approach to the interaction between the sexes is still shackled by outdated moral codes, where even woke men view gender as a power project: Women either need to be rescued — “beti bachao” — or fit into slots that make it easier for men to reduce them into types.

Yet, this time, women are refusing to toe the line. In the year since The New York Times’s investigation outed Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator, and, an Indian law student published a crowd-sourced list of academics accused of sexual misconduct, a dam seems to have burst, taking with it the onus to suffer alone, and, in silence. For far too long, the joke’s been on women. For far too long, they have, like Hannah Gadsby in Nanette, identified as tired.

Women are finally speaking up and they are angry. Their language of dissent is still formulating, still being shaped by the scars they bear, sharpened by fury, shame or revulsion, but they are no longer afraid. For far too long, they have been told how to live their lives. They have been told to adjust, ignore, compromise — at home, in public spaces and at workplaces. They have been told by leaders that “boys will be boys” so the onus of their safety is on them. What sort of work entails hours so disruptive? A drink with a colleague; an office party after work? Was the skirt too short, the smile too inviting? They have been put in their place in the name of power, politics, she-meant-yes-even-though-she-said-no, or, hey-she-asked-for-it; sometimes, for ambition or inexperience. Actually, they have been put in their place for you-name-it-and-for-it.

A new sisterhood is squaring up to the challenges of the bro culture and asking for accountability. They are holding each other’s hands and telling themselves: “We have been there, too. We believe.”

A sisterhood can achieve unusual things. It can take on a (former) minister or a woke artist, a celebrated filmmaker or an actor accused of being complicit in the sexual assault of a female colleague. To know that there are others behind you ready to take up the baton should you falter or be browbeaten by the unequal power dynamics is a gift made possible by the struggles of women who have preceded us at the workplace without the safety valve of the Vishakha guidelines, an ICC, or hope of redressal.

It is now time to extend this solidarity and embrace women outside urban workplaces, in smaller cities and unorganised sectors, where the quantum of exploitation is far more severe and the mechanism of redressal almost non-existent. For this, now, is our moment of rupture, our hour of reckoning — “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread”.

Source: Indian Express, 22/10/2018

A new Other

In Gujarat, violence against migrants represents a reconfiguration of the state’s ideological repertoire.

The rape of a 14-month-old child in Gujarat’s Sabarkantha district, allegedly by a migrant from Bihar, has led to threats and mob violence on Hindi-speaking north Indian migrants in the state. It is widely believed that the promotion of nativist sentiments through a speech by Alpesh Thakor, a Congress party MLA in Gujarat and convener of the Gujarat Kshatriya Thakor Sena (GKTS), played a role.

While the Gujarat High Court has appointed a judge to fast-track the trial of this rape case, at least 50,000 migrants, mainly belonging to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, have left from various parts of Gujarat but mostly from northern Gujarat districts of Sabarkantha and Mehsana. In the last couple of weeks, the police has arrested more than 300 people for mob violence.

This escalation of aggressive nativism relates to economic frustrations due to the job market. It exposes fault-lines in the state’s much-hyped economic model known for its “Vibrant Gujarat” summits, Special Economic Zones and its solid infrastructure facilities such as power and road transportation.

Vibrant Gujarat summits are not making adequate impact on the ground. While Memoranda of Understandings (MoUs) worth more than 20 lakh crore were signed in the 2011 summit, less than 10 per cent of this amount has actually been invested. The Gujarat government has stopped revealing the total investment figure. Not only have actual investments diminished, but they have not created many jobs. In the Socio-Economic Review of 2017-18 by the Gujarat government, it is reported that from January 1983 till July 31 2017, investments worth 2.75 lakh crore have resulted in only 11 lakh jobs through 6, 251 projects.

Over the last decade, the “Gujarat model” is generating more jobless growth because of the promotion of mega projects, which are capital intensive, at the expense of the SMEs, which are more labour intensive. This strategy has something to do with the rise of crony capitalism in the state, at the expense of its traditional entrepreneurial ethos, which the transition of the Patels from farming to industry exemplified in the 20th century.

Micro, small, and medium scale enterprises have been the key provider of jobs in Gujarat employing more than 6 million people according to the NSSO’s 73rd round survey in 2015-16. While the Patels and Jains command dominance in the MSME sector with more capital-intensive units, communities like the OBCs — to which the Kshatriya-Thakors belong — have remained restricted to micro enterprises with lower capital. MSMEs, particularly the micro units, have been most hit by the Modi government’s economic decisions such as demonetisation and by the banking crisis resulting from the decline of the cooperative banks as well as the rise of NPAs.

The growth rate of its industry has made Gujarat one of the most attractive states for migrants from UP, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar. According to the Economic Survey 2016-17, net migration among the 20 to 29-year-old group to Gujarat, stood at nearly 3.5 lakh, which was one of the highest among Indian states. Migrants were prepared to work at lower wage rates and for longer work hours, the feeling of deprivation among the native Gujarati population grew as joblessness increased. Sections of the Patels are asking for the OBC status in order to have access to job quotas, but to no avail.

While violence against the migrants has started in North Gujarat, it has slowly spread to working-class colonies and factories in urban Gujarat at large and the most striking case has probably been Surat city, where a mill-worker from Bihar was allegedly lynched by a mob on October 12 (the police has contested this claim). According to the Migration and its impact on Cities report (2017) by World Economic Forum (WEF), Surat had one of the fastest population growth rates among Indian cities amounting to 55-60 per cent every decade from the 1980s due to internal migration. There are 6 lakh Odiya migrants working in the textile and diamond sectors for instance. From 2001 to 2011, Surat district’s urban population grew by 65 per cent which was a staggeringly high figure vis-à-vis Gujarat’s urban population growth at 36 per cent and the national average of 32 per cent.

The purging of migrants in Gujarat also reflects a transformation in the ideological repertoire of the state. Gujarat has had a strong regionalist tendency as evident in the Maha Gujarat movement which led to the separation of Gujarat from Bombay province on a linguistic basis in 1960.

In the 1980s-90s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan was labelled by both the Congress and the BJP as “anti-Gujarat” because it opposed a dam that would make the river the “jugular vein” of the state’s development. This strong regionalist identity acquired an ethno-religious flavour in the 2000s, when Narendra Modi coupled Hindutva with developmentalism in his definition of the Gujarati asmita. He then projected himself as the protector of the Gujaratis — mostly defined as the Hindus who spoke the local idiom — against both Pakistani Islamists and the UPA government dominated by the Nehru family, which, according to him had never done justice to the Gujarati leaders, including Vallabhbhai Patel.

In current times, regional pride has given space to the kind of nativism the Shiv Sena fostered against South Indians and then North Indians in Bombay/Mumbai. A few days before the rape of a girl child in Sabarkantha, Vijay Rupani had promised to bring a law that would have made it mandatory for firms to employ Gujaratis in at least 80 per cent of its total workforce. This policy — which would imply a definition of “Who is a Gujarati” — not only contradicts the nationalist commitments of the BJP but is also surprising given that the Gujarati community has settled in various parts of the world — such as Africa, UK, USA — for centuries for socio-economic mobility.

Alpesh Thakor is designing a new social coalition which, although it includes Muslims and Christians, rejects the “non-Gujaratis” — especially the Hindi-speaking migrants, who may or may not vote in the state. He is portraying the natives as the victims of development with the construction of migrants as their “other”, creating a new fault-line. In the past, the BJP had portrayed Muslims as the other and, in particular, as the enemies of the Dalits to bolster Hindu unity underpinned by the rising unemployment due to the closure of textile mills where Muslims and Dalits were labourers. Whether Thakor’s strategy will work remains to be seen. In 2012 the Kannadiga pride movement in Karnataka had led to the mass exodus of Northeast migrants from Bangalore without impacting the electoral process.

If the Congress needs an alternative to the brand of identity politics the BJP is exploiting, class may be sufficient, given the rise of inequalities in a state where the number of families living below the poverty line is increasing.

Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s India Institute, London. Laliwala is an independent researcher on Gujarat’s politics and history based in Ahmedabad.

Source: Indian Express, 22/10/2018

Justice must be open, not opaque

The growth of the jurisprudence of the “sealed cover” – which effectively involves the Court in a secret dialogue with (in most cases) the State – is a disturbing trend. We all understand that in a democracy, there is a small set of acts that the State must undertake in secrecy: military strategy, correspondence involving negotiating positions in international trade talks, and diplomatic relations, all fall within this set.

Last week, the newswires were abuzz with how a bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, asked the government to produce the details of the Rafale deal’s decision-making process in “a sealed cover”. This is not the first time that the Chief Justice has asked for material in a sealed cover: in the ongoing case about the updation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam, reports of the State Coordinator have been shared “confidentially” with the court, with neither the government nor the affected parties being allowed to look at them. The “sealed cover” was also at play in the recent, high-profile hearings involving the Judge Loya investigation, as well as the challenge against the Bhima-Koregaon arrests.

The growth of the jurisprudence of the “sealed cover” — which effectively involves the court in a secret dialogue with (in most cases) the State — is a disturbing trend. We all understand that in a democracy, there is a small set of acts that the State must undertake in secrecy: military strategy, correspondence involving negotiating positions in international trade talks, and diplomatic relations, all fall within this set. For obvious reasons, these are also domains that are traditionally believed to be outside the domain of the courts: the manner in which the Executive conducts trade talks or foreign relations cannot be litigated in a courtroom.

The character of the judiciary, however, is very different from the character of the Executive. Alone among the three wings of State, the judiciary is bound by the requirement that for every judgment or order that it passes, it must give reasons — reasons that are open to public scrutiny. The work of the courts is the work of public reason. This is what gives the phrase “open justice” its resonance: the dealing of justice must, at all times, be transparent and subject to public scrutiny. That is what separates justice under the Constitution from the firmans of an emperor.

This does not mean, of course, that there can never be secrecy in the courts. The names of sexual assault survivors are often redacted to protect their privacy, and in-camera trials perform the same function. In those cases, however, there are powerful, counterveiling individual rights at stake: the rights to privacy and a fair trial. There might also be cases of necessity: for example, when the outcome of an election is challenged, the court often asks the parties to hand over the results of the election in a sealed cover, until the final judgment. This, too, is uncontroversial.

The logic of the sealed cover in cases such as the NRC, however, is different: here, the court seems to be operating on the presumption that certain information is too “sensitive” for public scrutiny, and that therefore, it is only the court that is entitled to see it, and to decide. This is deeply problematic: not only does it violate the principles of open justice described above, but it also infantilises the public. Here, the court assumes the role of a universal guardian, the only entity that is capable of wisely and maturely processing the “sensitive” information, which cannot be revealed to the public — and taking a decision on it. When, as in the NRC case, this directly affects peoples’ rights (such as, for example, a decision on which documents can be used to prove citizenship), it is even more problematic: individual rights are effectively being made subject to a court-driven secret and opaque process.

That Indians are too immature to exercise their own rights, and must be governed from above by wiser and benevolent rulers, was the logic of the old colonial regime. This logic was repudiated when India attained independence, and the Constitution came into being. The framers of the Constitution reposed their faith in the people of India: not only did they recognise a right of universal adult suffrage (thus making the people the guardians of their own destiny), but the Constitution as a whole replaced a culture of authority with a culture of justification, where every exercise of public power must be justified to its citizens.

The jurisprudence of the sealed cover — especially when it is utilised in crucial constitutional cases such as the NRC, where the basic rights of millions are at stake — threatens the constitutional values of open justice and the culture of justification. There should be no doubt about this: once the Court admits the case — thereby acknowledging that it is beyond the domain of “reasons of State” and subject to judicial scrutiny — openness must be the universal norm.

Gautam Bhatia is an advocate in the Supreme Court

Source: Hindustan Times, 19/10/2018

When You Stop Slouching

When we keep the spine upright in waking hours, energy flows upwards from the muladhara chakra at the base, towards the medulla oblongata, and to the agya chakra between the brows; ultimately it reaches the sahasrara chakra, the crown, also known as the thousand-petalled lotus, the point where it is believed, we become one with divinity. Notice how a person who is sad, slouches, and his spine is curved. His feet, too, are not firmly planted on the ground and he tends to sway; his emotions do a rock-‘n-roll; they are swirling in his spine, sending him not on a rollercoaster fun ride, but down the pit of misery. On the other hand, when the spine is upright, though energy can flow down, in the next instant it rushes upwards to reach a pinnacle of joy. When yogis talk about living in the spine, they are referring to the ‘astral spine’, the primary channel for life-force in the body located in the centre. But you don’t have to be a yogi to live in the spine. Any positive-minded person can do this. Walk the straight path, in thought, word and deed and your spine will take a cue and follow by being upright as you walk. There are many young people who slouch while they sit or walk; and there are much older people who walk straight, without the aid of walking sticks, so long as they are otherwise enjoying good health. Keeping an upright spine is not an age factor, but depends on how you think and view the world positively and joyfully or negatively and sadly!

Source: Economic Times, 22/10/2018

India needs an industrial policy

State intervention is required to increase the country’s share in global value chains

For India to solve its employment challenge, it needs a big push in manufacturing. This is why the fate of the Make in India initiative is crucial. A study by the ministry of commerce shows that some of the success stories of Make in India could be more optics than concrete gains. Here’s one such example. India’s import of mobile phones from China came down from $6.3 billion to $3.3 billion between 2014 and 2017. This is in keeping with the recent rise in number of mobile phone factories in the country. But the import of telecom parts from China increased from $1.3 billion to $9.4 billion during this period.

These statistics capture the harsh reality of manufacturing in the world of globalised supply chains. Large manufacturers strategically spread their production across the globe to maximise their profits at each stage of production. These decisions could be driven by better availability of cheap and skilled work force in a given sector, spill-over of technological knowledge from similar industries working in that country or significant promises of benefits by the host government. While some of these issues are structural in nature and can only be improved in the medium to long term, it is important to understand that a manufacturing take-off and challenges such as improving skill sets and technological knowledge in an economy are a bit like the chicken and egg problem. A big mobile company might not be willing to bring all its manufacturing activity in a country due to lack of skilled workforce. Workers in that country will not become experts in making state of the art mobile phones by spending a few years at a polytechnic.

Politics too plays a role. Ideas such as calling for boycott of Chinese goods to reduce trade deficit are, to put it politely, completely wrong. The report says that only 20% of India’s imports from China are consumption goods (which can be boycotted); 60% of Chinese imports are intermediate goods, which are used in manufacturing of so-called Indian products. In an age where big companies go venue shopping to set up factories, increasing a country’s share in global value chains cannot be achieved without active state intervention. This needs to be done both at the micro level, such a focusing on a particular cluster or industry, and the macro level, which basically means acknowledging the fact that we need an industrial policy.

Source: Hindustan Times, 16/10/2018

Nations must develop action plans to tackle inequality’

Social spending is almost always progressive because it helps reduce existing levels of inequality. Despite this, in many countries, social spending could be far more progressive and pro-poor.

India has been ranked among the bottom 11 countries in a new worldwide index released on October 9, 2018, on the commitment of nations to reduce inequalities. UK-based charity Oxfam International’s ‘Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index’ ranks India 147th among 157 countries analysed, describing the country’s commitment to reducing inequality as a “a very worrying situation”.

In an interview with Hindustan Times, Amitabh Behar, CEO, Oxfam India, talks about the report and what India needs to do to get its act right.

KD: Inequality is bad for all. Why?

AB: The question to ask is do we believe that inequality is good? Are we happy to live in a country alongside people who are dying of hunger; girls who are being denied education, children trafficked for money, hard-working men and women who despite working for 15 hours a day are unable to buy medicines for their ailing children? The extreme inequalities that divide us are human made and consequence of misguided policies. Inequality is not a sign of a prosperous world, on the contrary, it reduces the economic growth of the country.

KD: What impact does it have on women?

AB: Oxfam’s new index finds that on labour rights and respect for women in the workplace, India fares poorly. While the bulk of farming work is done by women, they own only about 10-15% of the land. The wage gap between men and women in India is 32.6%. If the government ensured women were paid the same amount as men for the same job, women’s incomes would be boosted by almost a third. Women and girls are paying the real price of growing inequality. As things stand today, women living in poverty will never be able to come out poverty, unless the economy is re-build for them.

KD: Nigeria, Singapore, India and Argentina are among a group of governments that are fueling inequality…’ says the report. How is the Indian government ‘fueling’ inequality?

AB: India has a responsibility and accountability as it is one of the largest democracies in the world with a population of 1.3 billion people, many of whom live in extreme poverty. Its inactions affect the world’s commitment to reduce the gap between the rich and poor. Sadly, India ranks amongst the bottom 15 countries on the commitment to inequality index, which means the government is not doing enough to fight extreme inequality. Oxfam has calculated that if India were to reduce inequality by a third, more than 170 million people would no longer be poor. India can lead the global movement and help in creating an equal world. What is required is political will.

Government spending on health, education and social protection continues to be woefully low. Indians are the sixth biggest out-of-pocket health spenders in the low-middle income group of 50 nations. The amount India spends on public health per capita every year is Rs 1,112, less than the cost of a single consultation at the country’s top private hospitals.

India’s tax structure looks reasonably progressive on paper, but in practice much of the progressive taxation, like that on the incomes of the richest, is not collected. India’s low tax GDP ratio (17%) is one of the lowest in the world.

KD: If inequality is so rampant in India, then meeting Sustainable Development Goal No 10 will be a great challenge. What kind of policy interventions does the Indian government need to do for tackling inequality?

AB: The Indian government needs to adopt a multi-pronged approach to tackle economic inequality. This includes – among other policy interventions – increasing social sector spending and regularly evaluating programmes to improve delivery efficiency, building and implementing fairer tax systems, and ensuring workers – especially women workers – are better paid and protected. At the same time, it must also improve the quality and quantity of publicly available data on inequality in India and provide timely and predictable reports on the schemes utilised to tackle it. A full assessment of whether governments are delivering on their commitments to reduce inequality – made when they signed up to the SDG framework – will only be possible if this data is available.

Schemes like the merger of schools under the ‘One School One Campus’ initiative in Madhya Pradesh foster greater privatisation which inevitably hurts the marginalised. The ‘Ayushman Bharat’ scheme, while inclusive on paper, does not help solve the problem of an increasingly strained if not broken public health system which, in turn, results in greater private participation to meet demand. On nutrition, the government’s allocations to key centrally sponsored schemes like the Mid Day Meal scheme rose by a mere 5% from the year before to Rs10,500 crore in the 2018 budget, which is woefully low.

AB: The different levels of inequality that exist from one national context to another show that inequality is far from inevitable; rather, it is the product of policy choices made by governments. There are, of course, contextual challenges to consider in every situation, as well as contextual advantages in some cases.

Currently, no country is doing particularly well. Even top-ranking countries still have large room for improvement. For example, Denmark comes first overall but 126th in the indicator of progressivity of the tax structure; Germany comes second overall but 142th on education spending and Finland comes third overall but 52th in the minimum wage indicator.

All governments must do more to tackle inequality, develop national inequality action plans. These plans should include delivery of universal, public and free health and education and universal social protection floors. They should be funded by increasing progressive taxation and clamping down on exemptions and tax dodging.

Social spending is almost always progressive because it helps reduce existing levels of inequality. Despite this, in many countries, social spending could be far more progressive and pro-poor.

Source: Hindustan Times, 17/10/2018

Okay Not to Understand

We don’t have to understand something in order to change it, any more than we need to understand electricity to be able to change a light bulb. In fact, analysing situations is often a defence mechanism the ego uses to protect itself from needed change. The quest for knowledge has its place. It is helpful on the material plane and can get us a diploma or a job. But, as seekers, we are trying to transcend this plane, and for us, the realm of reason is too restrictive. A hot-air balloon can lift us above the hills, but it cannot take us to the stars. People who are too rational may actually hinder their spiritual growth. What we really need is not mental understanding but wisdom, which entails the marriage of head and heart. Normally, wisdom grows gradually, as the mind learns discrimination, and as the heart becomes expanded by love and softened through pain. A shorter path to wisdom can be found by concentrating at the spiritual eye in deep, silent meditation, and by attuning oneself to a truly wise guru. At times, we need to toss thinking aside and let activity become our teacher. Swami Kriyananda encouraged me to paint because, as he said, “It will help you develop your intuition.” He knew that unleashing the creative flow would lift me above the dry desert of an overactive intellect. Just as a snake must shed its old skin, we grow by casting off old self-definitions. We already have what we seek: we don’t need to learn anything in order to know Him, but only to remember and realise what we truly are.

Source: Economic Times, 17/10/2018