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Monday, December 17, 2018

Art for all: TISS offers its stage to Bahujan artistes


 First Bahujan Art Festival at TISS to promote marginalised communities, Odisha-based Dalit rapper Sumeet Samos and poet Dhiren Borisa among participants from 10 states

The stage was awash with blue light as young rap artist Sumeet Samos belted out the lines, “All you know is five words/Dalit, merit, caste, Ambedkar, reservations.” The 26-year-old Odisha-based Dalit rapper, purportedly the first one from a marginalised community to rap in English, wrote the lines in response to caste discourses on campuses getting confined to these five words. Sumeet was among the 30 Bahujan artistes from 10 states who had gathered at TISS on Sunday for the first Bahujan Art Festival. They represented communities such as the SC, ST, OBC, VJNT and minorities “The festival aims to promote and amplify voices from the marginalised communities. It was important to host this festival on the campus. This is because, you get space for elections and movements at educational institutions, but not for art and artistic discourses and access to artistes,” Aroh Akunth, cultural secretary of TISS Students’ Union, told Mirror. The TISS quadrangle and main campus was abuzz with filmmakers, writers, singers, poets, painters who consciously create art from an anti-caste perspective. “Today, we clearly identify our politics and don’t want to narrate the victim’s story. We have content which is global, which upper caste filmmakers do not have. We will tell our own stories,” said documentary filmmaker and TISS student Somnath Waghmare, whose documentary ‘Battle of Bhima Koregaon: An Unending Journey’, was made much before the January violence. Filmmakers at the fest also underscored the challenges that came with a lack of access to resources and supportive community networks. “We are telling stories that have never been told before. Narratives have always been with the upper castes,” documentary filmmaker Jyoti Nisha said. Poet Dhiren Borisa recited his verses that placed experiences of love and gender within the frame of anti-caste politics. According to him, bahujans, through their art, had “weaponised their fears and memories”. Kadubai Kharat, an Aurangabad-based singer who croons songs of Ambedkar and has become an Internet sensation of sorts among bahujan netizens, also took the campus by storm with her robust contralto notes sung to the ‘dotara’ (a string instrument). Well-known names such as Marathi writer Urmila Pawar and poet Usha Ambore were also a part of the festival. An assortment of paintings by Warli artists and other painters, photographs chronicling occupational inheritance, books and an array of merchandise were the other draw.

Source: Mumbai Mirror, 17/12/2018
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Friday, December 14, 2018

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents


Vol. 53, Issue No. 48, 08 Dec, 2018

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Is it time to abolish the death penalty?


The death penalty is error-ridden, arbitrarily imposed and unfairly targets the poor

As a punishment, the death penalty makes no sense: how does killing a person who has killed a person show that killing is wrong? Most of the civilised world has abolished it. India certainly does not need it as it serves no purpose. No study has shown that the death penalty deters murder more than life imprisonment. The evidence is all to the contrary. For deterrence to work, the severity of the punishment has to coexist with the certainty and swiftness of the punishment. The death penalty has not deterred terrorism, murder or even theft. For over a century, stealing attracted the death penalty in England, where spectators at public hangings often had their pockets picked!
Problems with death penalty
The death penalty is error-ridden. Between January 1, 2000 and June 31, 2015, the Supreme Court imposed 60 death sentences. It subsequently admitted that it had erred in 15 of them (25%). Can this system be trusted to take a life? And that too based on evidence collected, or fabricated, by a police force not known for its probity or efficiency?
The death penalty unfairly targets the poor and marginalised. Those without capital get the punishment. Penurious prisoners on legal aid get it the most, while others with private lawyers remain untouched.
The death penalty is impossible to administer fairly or rationally. The Supreme Court has repeatedly admitted that it has arbitrarily imposed this most extreme punishment. Executions occurred in 5.2 cases for every 1 lakh murders. Such a selection cannot but be freakish. It depends overwhelmingly on the adjudicator’s personal beliefs. Judges opposed to it never gave a death sentence; those in favour doled it out. Abolitionist Presidents (S. Radhakrishnan and A.P. J. Abdul Kalam) refused to reject mercy petitions, while others, differently inclined, readily denied clemency. Should the killing of a human being depend on the philosophy of a particular individual?
Abolishing the death penalty will ease, not enhance, the tax-payer’s burden. The annual cost of maintaining a prisoner is about Rs. 30,000. The hangman is paid more, and we also save on the protracted litigation that death cases involve.
Constitutional, legal and policy issues cannot be determined by the victim’s understandable hunger for revenge without leading to a frenzy where the death penalty is demanded, as it often is, for wholly inappropriate cases (accidental deaths, cheating, etc.). If life imprisonment sufficed for the 99.99% of victims’ families, why not for the minuscule fraction in whose name the death penalty is demanded?
Punish, yes, but why in the same cold-blooded, premeditated and brutal manner as the prisoner killed his or her victim? Punishment should not imitate crime. We do not rape rapists, or maim and disfigure those who have done this to others. Why do we have to kill killers?
A safer country
India’s murder rate has declined continuously since 1991 and is at present the lowest in our recorded history except for 1963. Fearmongering aside, we are safer today than our parents or grandparents ever were. And this is not thanks to the death penalty whose infrequent and arbitrary implementation has made no real difference. It may as well have not been there. Studies show that a more equal sex ratio has more to do with declining murder rates than killing murderers.
Nobody wants to undergo the trauma of administering the death penalty — not the higher courts and not the hapless prison staff who have to see a human being die gasping at the end of a rope. Governments kill prisoners to show that they are tough on crime. There is nothing muscular or tough about killing a man who is at your mercy.
Source: The Hindu, 14.12.2018
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Economic Graffiti: The anti-argumentative Indian

More disappointing than the attacks on Amartya Sen is that leaders in government have not countered the chant of abusive trolls.

Amartya Sen is an iconic world figure. In that treacherous space between economics and philosophy, he may well be the most famous living personality, having published papers in the world’s best philosophy journals and the most highly-regarded economics journals. When he got the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998, it did not come as a surprise to anyone in the profession. I have a confession though. That year, I was visiting the World Bank and there was a Nobel lottery among the staff. Having taken a bet on Sen the previous two year’s and lost, I decided it was time to change my guess. And I lost my money again.
I was fortunate to do my PhD with Amartya Sen. In fact, it was his lectures at the London School of Economics in the mid-1970s in jam-packed auditoriums, with students spilling over on to window sills, that made me change my life-long career plan to be a lawyer.
I first met Sen, fleetingly, in Delhi, when I was a student at St Stephen’s College, and he was a professor at the Delhi School of Economics. But I got to know him properly in London in 1972 when I joined the London School. I did my PhD with him, when he was at the height of his career, working mainly on social choice theory, mathematical logic and moral philosophy.
There is no surprise, then, that Sen has been a major influence on me, and that I often cite his works in my writings. What has been a shocking experience in the last three or four years is the amount of trolling attacks unleashed on Sen whenever he is cited in popular writings; these come almost entirely from India. The attacks do not have any substance. Clearly, those crafting the attacks, if crafting is the word, do not have the capacity for serious debate. So what they unleash is merely a volley of completely fact-free name calling. Sen, they scream, is an agent of the Congress party, he is a slave of the West, a brainless puppet and they go on, using language so crude that it is not worth repeating.
What is sad for India is not that a few people may want to shout invectives at him, but that the leaders in government have not said anything to counter this crazy chant of abusive trolls.
I am not saying that the trolling should be banned. People should have the freedom to express their opinions no matter how inchoate, but we need leaders, even those who oppose Sen’s views, to signal their disapproval of this kind of uncouth character assassination directed at one of the most celebrated intellectuals of our time.
I have known Sen long enough to know not just about his outstanding mind, but that he is totally without prejudice against groups — caste, religion, race. Like Nehru was, he is an atheist, who respects other people’s religion; he is totally secular.
Though Sen has openly said that he does not support the present BJP government, he belongs to no party. In fact, the only time he has been a member of any political party, it was that of the left, when he was an undergraduate student in India, at Kolkata’s Presidency College.
What is ironic about these politically-inspired attacks on Sen is that they come from the very Hindutva groups that are perennially pointing out how Indians do not recognise the contributions of Indians to science, philosophy and scholarship. What they do not realise is that whether or not that has been true historically, their behaviour provides evidence in favour of their own thesis.
Not for a moment would I say that Sen’s ideas must not be challenged, contested and rejected if one is so persuaded. It is through arguments and contestation that democracy thrives. These troll attacks on Sen are unfortunate because they are attacks on the very matters on which India, despite being a poor country, stood out and commanded respect around the world. It is a tribute to Nehru and his self-confidence that he nurtured scientists, philosophers and intellectuals, including those who were openly critical of Nehru’s politics.
If I take my own field, economics, it is a remarkable fact that there are few nations outside America and Europe that are so well represented in the frontline as India. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the talent that came out of India was quite astonishing. There was, of course, Amartya Sen but even apart from him it was a string of personalities who started out in India and were doing cutting-edge research in economics. K N Raj, Jagdish Bhagwati, Sukhamoy Chakravarty, T N Srinivasan, A L Nagar, and if we were to go to a slightly younger cohort, Avinash Dixit and Partha Dasgupta stand out among them.
For a nation’s progress, nothing is as important as the nurturing of science, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. Economics is a relatively young science that is now critical for a nation to navigate today’s complicated, globalised world. And in assessing the power of ideas, we must realise that ideas must be assessed for their own worth. Doomed are societies in which people, after hearing about Pythagoras’ theorem, want to know Pythagoras’ political party affiliation in order to decide whether the theorem is correct.
Source: Indian Express, 14/12/2018
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Fight the good fight for our children

The saying in the Hindi belt – The poor have to suffer in every circumstance – was ringing in my head like a sledgehammer. The question that was bothering me the most: Till when will we allow this dastardly game of turning injustice into an aphorism and the aphorism into infamous tradition to continue?

It was a lazy morning of October 14, 2010 but I was seething with anger. The saying in the Hindi belt: Garib ki har jagah maut hai (The poor have to suffer in every circumstance), was ringing in my head. The question that was bothering me the most: Until when will we allow this game of turning injustice into an aphorism and the aphorism into infamous tradition to continue? My colleagues in Kanpur, Lucknow and Delhi were thinking on similar lines.
By the time it was afternoon we had collectively resolved to prove this saying to be incorrect, at least this time round. What had happened was that a girl student of class six in Kanpur had been assaulted yet had been left outside her residence by the school authorities. Her parents made a living as daily wage workers. The girl was bleeding and was not even in a position to explain who had contributed to this dreadful condition. Short on resources, her parents somehow took the help of neighbours to take their daughter to a hospital. The doctors declared her dead the same evening.
Could there have been a more tragic end to an innocent life?
By this time, her distraught parents had just one recourse left -- going to the police. A report was somehow registered and a police procedure was initiated. The Mayawati government was in power in Uttar Pradesh at that time. She was renowned for following a zero-tolerance policy towards crime and criminals. The administration of the local police was with an officer perceived to be close to the chief minister. Mayawati assiduously followed the principle of implementing procedures irrespective of whether the officer was her favourite or not. The case involved a heinous crime with a girl from a modest background and the media was presenting it in a manner they deemed fit. Therefore, the police had to produce some progress as soon as possible. The easiest option was exercised to achieve this goal. The neighbourhood rickshaw-puller, who sometimes dropped the girl to school, was charged with rape and murder and instantly apprehended. Not just this, mud was flung on her mother’s character in a systematic manner.
Don’t you find this astonishing? The daughter of a poor man is killed and another poor man implicated in the murder. It seemed facing misfortune was embedded in their destiny.
At that time our correspondent interviewed the accused rickshaw-puller in the prison. His version of proceedings was frightening and Hindustan decided to bring it to light. Seeing their so-called good work being put under the scanner flustered the police officers. But, so ingrained was their arrogance that they even implicated two correspondents of Hindustan in false cases. Not just this, a mob was sent to our Kanpur office in order to intimidate the staff.
Despite all this, my colleagues in Hindustan didn’t waver from their path. By pursuing the case of Divya (name changed) we worked towards empowering disadvantaged women. We knocked on the doors of Kanpur city’s biggest intellectuals. We reached out to schools and colleges to raise awareness among young girls and saw the gradual emergence of a mass movement. News about the case reached the power corridors of Lucknow. Not just was a directive issued from the secretariat to suspend the alleged confidant of the chief minister but a number of other officers and policemen were also suspended. Not just this, the probe was handed over to the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department. The newly-appointed officers began the probe on a clean slate. They discovered that the son of the director of the school in which Divya studied had carried out the crime. He was arrested. But the case didn’t end there. Only the first round in the battle for justice had been won. To ensure that probe moved forward logically, the police reached the court with all the relevant evidence and the perpetrator got the punishment he deserved required some more effort. With that unfinished task was linked our morale which still continued to be high.
Ultimately, on December 5 this year, a court in Kanpur pronounced life imprisonment to the culprit. The idea of narrating this entire story to you wasn’t to glorify Hindustan or my colleagues. Even as I write these lines, there is one question that is still bothering me: Divya may have got justice, but when will the judicial process become sensitive in a country where 106 incidents of rape take place every day?
Clearly, justice was delivered to Divya. But the fight for the protection of the rights of women and children is far from over.
Shashi Shekhar is the editor-in-chief, Hindustan
Source: Hindustan Times, 10/12/2018
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More than formalising informal jobs, we need to create productive ones

For the future job market, remove barriers to productivity, ensure that wages rise in tandem, enable voice for workers and expand a portable social protection framework that is de-linked from employment.

India is a complex nation strengthened by geographic, linguistic and resource diversity, but still challenged by social divisions on the basis of caste, gender and religion. Its labour markets are as multifaceted as the nation itself.Yet, the discussion largely hovers around informality and formality.This tidy binary posits informality as always bad with poor quality work and lack of skill with low productivity and wages.
In actuality, the spectrum of employment is a continuum based on graduating levels of productivity, associated wages, social protection and tax compliance. This covers those with contracts, health care and retirement benefits, to those with regular wages but no social protection, to daily wage workers with no written contracts and, thus, who can be dismissed at will. All these categories of workers can be found with all types of employers, whether working for households, family firms, formal registered large enterprises or government agencies.
Going forward, the tech-fuelled changing nature of work forces us to recall the past, which used to have a stable lifetime job with health and retirement benefits. Most jobs in large firms and even government jobs no longer have a defined pension and health benefits are diverted through insurance schemes. With limited employment security, soon there will be little to distinguish such formal work from informal employment with social protection.
Instead of being fixated on the dichotomy between informality and formality, it is time to think of the quality of work as a matrix where one axis reflects various forms of social protection and the other indicates types of employment — from uncertain daily labour to permanent employment.Once social protection is delinked from work, it is possible for a daily wage construction worker to have access to retirement benefits and health insurance, as is already possible, but not widespread, in India.The other imperative is to enable workers to leverage skills acquired without formal certification. For this, recognition of prior learning is key and our existing initiatives need to be improved and scaled up significantly.
Beyond social protection and skill recognition, the challenge of improving productivity and raising earnings remains.This needs support to smaller firms, not through subsidies but by access to reliable infrastructure, affordable and accessible finance and linkages to global value chains.
Much is made of technology and the rise of the platform economy and its flexible work arrangements. A worker who earned a fixed and low wage can, in principle, now earn more as part of the platform — at times, by self-exploiting himself or herself by working longer hours.It is not as if flexibility is absent from traditional work arrangements. Even today, manufacturing is outsourced to home-based workers, often women, allowing them to balance socially constructed domestic responsibilities with income generation activities, bringing a few more women into a workforce from which they are conspicuously absent. A key difference is that the platform enables a direct link to the consumer, enabling workers to retain more of the surplus.
But more than flexibility, a major benefit of platform arrangements is the increase in visibility of the worker. This is also true for contract workers employed through formal suppliers. In addition to better tax compliance, it can be leveraged to connect workers to social security frameworks. Workers like contract manufacturing workers, drivers, delivery persons, carpenters, domestic workers and beauticians are all ordinarily invisible to the social protection system. But once on a platform, they become visible and potential beneficiaries of a universal social protection system, with benefits that continue even if they change jobs or migrate. This breaks the conflation of informal employment with lack of social protection.
Concomitantly, while platform arrangements can be used to skirt tax and labour regulations, it also brings together disconnected, self-employed workers. Despite their uncertain legal status as employees, they can organise to make demands. Some nascent research suggests the emergence of new forms of organising and bargaining in the platform economy. These forms use digital technologies and social media to organise, and find creative ways to subvert the power asymmetries between ‘employers’ and workers, leading to new forms of collective bargaining.
The Indian labour market was already much too heterogeneous to fit into simple dualism frameworks.Technology and migration only make it more complex. Our challenge is not about formalising the informal, but rather the production of more just jobs — work that is productive and remunerative. It is removing barriers to productivity, ensuring wages rise in tandem, enabling a voice for workers and expanding a portable social protection framework that is delinked from employment. Only then can we confidently navigate the transition to the future of work.
Sabina Dewan is president and executive director, JustJobs Network, and senior visiting fellow, Centre for Policy Research. Partha Mukhopadhyay is senior fellow, Centre for Policy Research. This is the second in a series of articles for the CPR Dialogues starting shortly in New Delhi. Hindustan Times is the print partner for the event. For more: www.cprdialogues.org. The views expressed are personal
Source: Hindustan Times, 14/12/2018
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Resolution, Then Action



Life is being and becoming. We exist; that is being. We desire; that is becoming. Each one of us wants to be something other than what we are. So we are not content. Becoming involves effort — a search for new ways of living, ending of laxity and the creation of a new environment. We want to attain the truth, and we long for success, health and growth. It is our nature to be preoccupied with results and it is this that gives rise to problems. Our whole attention is concentrated on achievement; natural aptitude or inclination is often ignored. We tend to have a superficial view of things; we should go deeper to know the truth. We need to distinguish between disposition and essential nature. Do away with anger, evil, ignorance, indiscipline, aggression and acquisitiveness. Don’t be concerned only with removing ills; try to understand it. Violence is an effect, an outward manifestation. So is anger. If the root is not destroyed, the result flowing therefrom remains. Anger arises out of a particular disposition. The inner overcomes the outer. To remove outward ills, bring about a fundamental inner transformation. To resolve to do or not to do something is not enough. If one could ensure nonviolence through mere exertion of one’s will it would be wonderful. Mere utterance of a word cannot accomplish results. With discipline comes fulfilment and nonviolence. So resolve first to spare some time for meditation.

Source: Economic Times, 14/12/2018
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