Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Recently, Booker-winning author Arundhati Roy’s book Walking with the Comrades was removed from the M.A. English syllabus of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, after the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) complained that the book “highlights Naxalism and is anti-Indian”. According to vice-chancellor Dr. K Pitchumani, the committee “decided to withdraw the book as it may be inappropriate to teach a controversial book for students”. Thinkers, activists and leaders of various political parties expressed their strong condemnation of the act, but few academics voiced their opinion.

What is the book, published in 2011, about? Arundhati Roy, who spent months living with rebel guerillas in deep forests, reveals how “under the pretence of battling Maoist guerillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens — a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands”. The book received rave reviews from various sections of people and has the characteristics of good literature: a compelling theme, authenticity, social relevance, a unique literary style, and the potential to make reader think and raise questions.

Will any student become a Maoist by reading the book? Several thousand people across India must have read the book. Have they all become Maoists or violent activists? Have the committee members who read the book become Maoists? The claim by MS University screening committee that the book is “inappropriate” for the students underestimates the intellectual capacity of students. Do educational institutions treat students as mere sponges or thinking individuals?

Studying literature helps people broaden their horizons, understand human beings and society better, appreciate human experience, be sensitive to the needs of people, become good critical thinkers, and shape ideas. So, it is necessary for students to be exposed to a wide variety of literature. This gives them an opportunity to look at issues critically and become informed citizens. Students who are trained to read literature critically do not blindly accept the views expressed by authors.

Academics are expected to be free thinkers and fearless critics. They should not allow themselves to be influenced and remote-controlled by fringe elements. Only those academic institutions that are free from political interference can do justice to the student community and education. By bowing down to the demands of fringe elements and removing the book from the syllabus, the university has set a bad example.

Education that does not expose students to the world of knowledge and deprives them of the opportunity to look at issues critically is not education. Educators who genuflect before politicians and do not speak truth to power are not educators.

Albert P Rayan

The writer is an academic, teacher educator and columnist.

Source: The Hindu, 21/11/20

The promise of CAA, minus politics

Politicisation of NRC over decades obscured the issue of immigration in Assam. CAA, which seeks to help those who have suffered terribly, must not meet the same fate

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is back on the political centre-stage with Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, JP Nadda, Mamata Banerjee, Asaduddin Owaisi, Rahul Gandhi and several other political leaders invoking the Act from various public platforms in the past few weeks.

Separately, incidents of persecution of religious minorities in India’s neighbourhood keep pouring in. The alleged forced marriage of a 13-year-old Christian girl to a 44-year-old Muslim man in Pakistan and the vandalisation of Hindu households in Comilla district in Bangladesh earlier this month led to heated debates on the CAA on social media platforms.

The political outpourings on CAA 2019, expectedly, happened during the election campaign in Bihar and are likely to gather speed as political parties gear up for polls in West Bengal and Assam. The events in Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, were not politically motivated. These incidents came as a reminder that despite being deeply entrenched in politics, the CAA is fundamentally about a bunch of destitute people facing oppression in countries they ended up being citizens of, thanks to the politics that led to the creation of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It is a pitiful irony that these people are victimised in their countries of origin — with the state often looking the other way – because they are followers of a minority religion. As for their country of refuge, because the voters of the majority faith in India were never a concerted vote bank, these people languished on the periphery of electoral politics for decades. It’s the same politics that has made them appealing now.

Indeed, the BJP is pushing the CAA for electoral gains but its politics is no different from the kind that kept the NRC (National Register of Citizens) hanging fire since 1951.

To understand the tribulations of this group of immigrants, we need to look at the chronology, a la Amit Shah, of events that led to the passage of the CAA in December last year.

The CAA wouldn’t have come into being had it not been for the then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, who pushed for updating Assam NRC in 2013, a year before BJP came to power. The Assam NRC was conducted in 1951 after a large number of people, mainly Hindus and Sikhs, crossed over to India from Pakistan after Partition. The register was supposed to have been updated later, as immigration continued in subsequent years and then escalated manifold in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war in 1971. The scale of the immigration can be gauged from the fact that it was described as the largest movement of people in the world in the second half of the 20th century by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Updating the NRC was also the underlying promise that led to the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985, thus, ending the violent Assam movement that started in 1979.

The NRC, however, was never updated.

What is happening in the country today is the fallout of many decades of deliberate callousness and electoral gains resorted to by political parties cutting across ideologies.

It is known that the immediate trigger for the Assam movement was the sudden surge in the number of voters in several Assembly constituencies in 1979. The All Assam Students’ Union, the body leading the protest, was enraged that a large number of illegal immigrants, allegedly Muslims, were included in the electoral rolls, and a large number among them had been clandestinely issued Indian citizenship certificates by the state government with the help of the government at the Centre, both led by the same political party. This, they felt, diminished the significance of local residents besides impinging upon their socio-cultural identity.

No prizes for guessing why any political party would grant voting rights or citizenship status, especially around election time, to disputed immigrants.

It is scandalous that before the Supreme Court-led exercise in 2013, there was no definitive data on immigrants in Assam and other affected states. The final report — though disputed now — submitted in August 2019, for the first time, provided some official data. Tragically, even that data is more confounding than enlightening. For instance, census data reflects that the Muslim population in Assam has grown at a faster rate than the rest of the country over the years. In 1951, Muslims accounted for around 25 per cent of the population in Assam against the national average of 10 per cent. In 2001, 31 per cent of the population in Assam was Muslim against 13 per cent nationally and in 2011, more than 34 per cent in Assam were Muslims against 14 per cent in the country. This is when a large number of Muslim immigrants are known to have moved to West Bengal and other states.

There has been enough debate, without any conclusion, on whether the faster rate of growth in Muslim population in Assam was on account of Muslim immigrants. Against this opaque backdrop, it is puzzling that of the supposed 1.9 million individuals named as illegal immigrants in the “now disputed” final draft of SC-led NRC, a large majority are considered to be Hindus.

Clearly, data and commentary on the issue do not add up. The only thing that is consistent is that the issue of immigrants was never evaluated objectively, keeping politics aside. Sadly, it has been reduced to a Hindu-vs-Muslim debate even by the non-political groups as against an issue of immigration and the reasons behind it.

Since the NRC has been universally politicised, evaluating the CAA without using the prism of politics is pertinent. Because the fate of more than a million individuals who landed at our doorstep for the fear of their lives should count for more than the political leverage their rehabilitation may confer upon a party. They were promised refuge by our founding fathers as well as by most large political parties at different points. These individuals have nowhere to go because they lack economic and religious charm. Hindus among them are the most pitiable. Sheltering Muslims is celebrated as fighting Islamophobia. Concessions to other religious groups is seen as a commitment towards secularism but any allowance to even the most miserable and disenfranchised Hindus is seen as playing majoritarian politics.

Isn’t that bigotry?

Written by Archna Shukla

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist

Source: Indian Express, 24/11/20

Chinese dam projects on Brahmaputra are a threat to lives and livelihoods downstream

Building a decentralised network of check dams, rain-capturing lakes and using traditional means of water capture have shown effective results in restoring the ecological balance while supporting the populations of the regions in a sustainable manner.

With India-China relations hitting its lowest point since the 1962 war, border infrastructure has come under intense scrutiny. The construction of several dams along the Yarlung (Brahmaputra) river on the Chinese side has been a repeated cause for concern for Indian officials and the local people, whose livelihoods and security depend on the river.

The Brahmaputra is a perennial river, with several peculiar characteristics due to its geography and prevailing climatic conditions. Inhabitants along the river have to deal with two floods annually, one caused by the melting of the Himalayan snow in summer and the other due to the monsoon flows. The frequency of these floods have increased and are devastating due to climate change and its impact on high and low flows. These pose a concern for the population and food security in the lower riparian states of India and Bangladesh. The river is in itself dynamic as frequent landslides and geological activity force it to change course very often.

As India and China continue to grow demographically as well as economically amid increased consumption among its citizenry, both nations face water constraints. China, which is home to close to 20 per cent of the world’s population, has only 7 per cent of its water resources. Severe pollution of its surface and groundwater caused by rapid industrialisation is a source of concern for Chinese planners. China’s southern regions are water-rich in comparison to the water-stressed northern part. The southern region is a major food producer and has significant industrial capacity as a consequence of more people living there.

China has an ambitious plan to link its south and north through canals, aqueducts and linking of major rivers to ensure water security. In pursuit of these goals, China, being an upper riparian state in Asia, has been blocking rivers like the Mekong and its tributaries, affecting Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It has caused immense damage to the environment and altered river flows in the region. China sees these projects as a continuation of their historic tributary system as the smaller states have no means of effectively resisting or even significant leverage in negotiations. Chinese projects in the Himalayas have only recently begun to operate amid protests from India.

India is severely water-stressed as well. In summer, a vast majority of urban areas face water shortage. Similar to China, India has 17 per cent of the world’s population and 4 per cent of water. While a majority of India’s population reside in the Gangetic plains, the southern and western regions experience harsh and dry summer and the rainfall is scarce and erratic in the eastern coast. As in China, an equally ambitious north-south river-linking project has been proposed in India, though it has come under criticism for potentially disturbing fragile ecosystems.

There are now multiple operational dams in the Yarlung Tsangpo basin with more dams commissioned and under construction. These constructions present a unique challenge for Indian planners. First, they will eventually lead to degradation of the entire basin: Massive amounts of silt carried by the river would get blocked by dams leading to a fall in the quality of soil and eventual reduction in agricultural productivity. Second, the Brahmaputra basin is one of the world’s most ecologically sensitive zones. It is identified as one of the world’s 34 biological hotspots. This region sees several species of flora and fauna that are endemic to only this part of the world — the Kaziranga National Park houses 35 mammalian species out of which 15 are listed as threatened in the IUCN conservation list. The river itself is home to the Gangetic river dolphin, which is listed as critically endangered.

Third, the location of the dams in the Himalayas pose a risk. Seismologists consider the Himalayas as most vulnerable to earthquakes and seismic activity. Landslides resulting from earthquakes pose a significant threat — the 2015 Nepal earthquake and the resultant landslides wiped out several dams and other facilities. The sheer size of the infrastructure projects undertaken by China, and increasingly by India, poses a significant threat to the populations living downstream. Close to a million people live in the Brahmaputra basin in India and tens of millions further downstream in Bangladesh. The projects in the Himalayas threaten the existence of hundreds of thousands of people.

For both India and China, the Brahmaputra presents a geopolitical opportunity as damming this perennial river would result in water security in an era of unprecedented shifting climate patterns. This security extends beyond water, as there is the potential to significantly change the flow rate during times of standoffs and high tensions. In fact, during the 2018 Doklam border standoff between India and China, China stopped communication of water flow levels from its dams, effectively rendering India blind to floods during the standoff.

There are alternate solutions to solving the water crisis. Both sides must cease new constructions on the river and commit to potentially less destructive solutions. Building a decentralised network of check dams, rain-capturing lakes and using traditional means of water capture have shown effective results in restoring the ecological balance while supporting the populations of the regions in a sustainable manner. It is in the interest of all stakeholders to neutralise this ticking water bomb.

This article first appeared in the print edition on November 23, 2020 under the title ‘Water bomb in the Himalayas’. Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, and professor of Indian politics and sociology at King’s India Institute. Ganesh is a student of politics and governance at Sciences Po Paris

Source: Indian Express, 23/11/20

Friday, November 20, 2020

Quote of the Day November 20, 2020

“A wise man's question contains half the answer.”

‐ Solomon Ibn Gabirol

“एक बुद्धिमान व्यक्ति के प्रश्न में भी आधा उत्तर छिपा रहता है।”
‐ सोलोमन इब्न गैबिरोल

Douglas Stuart’s ‘Shuggie Bain’ wins 2020 Booker Prize

Dubai-based Indian-origin writer Avni Doshi, who was shortlisted among the final six authors for her debut novel ‘Burnt Sugar’, lost out on the top prize

New York-based Scottish writer Douglas Stuart on Thursday won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel ‘Shuggie Bain’, a coming of age story set in Glasgow, beating Indian-origin author Avni Doshi.

“I cannot believe this. Shuggie is a work of fiction but writing the book was extremely healing for me; hugely cathartic,” Mr. Stuart said.

Stuart (44) dedicated the book (reviewed here) to his mother, who died of alcoholism when he was 16-years-old. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York to start a career in fashion design.

He has worked for various brands, including Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Gap. He started writing in his spare time a decade ago.

Dubai-based Indian-origin writer Avni Doshi, who was shortlisted among the final six authors for her debut novel Burnt Sugar, lost out on the top prize. She was in the running for this year’s prize alongside Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga for the third novel in her trilogy This Mournable Body on a shortlist otherwise dominated by U.S. authors — Diane Cook for The New Wilderness, Maaza Mengiste for The Shadow King and Brandon Taylor for Real Life.

Judges speak

The 2020 Booker Prize judging panel was chaired by Margaret Busby, editor, literary critic and former publisher, and consists of author Lee Child; author and critic Sameer Rahim; writer and broadcaster Lemn Sissay; and classicist and translator Emily Wilson.

“We bonded across Zoom meetings. It was a wonderful experience please read all the books on the shortlist,” Ms. Busby, who led the panel through whittling down the finalists from 162 entries, said.

"Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic — a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values. The heart-wrenching story tells of the unconditional love between Agnes Bain — set on a descent into alcoholism by the tough circumstances life has dealt her — and her youngest son," she said in reference to the winning book.

Shuggie Bain can make you cry and make you laugh — a daring, frightening and life-changing novel, she added.

The book was rejected by 30 editors before it was picked up by publishers Grove Atlantic in the U.S. and Picador in the UK.

Stuart has described himself as “a working-class kid who had a different career and came to writing late." He is the second Scot to win the award after James Kelman took the prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, a book Stuart said "changed his life" because it was the first time he saw "my people, my dialect, on the page".

Virtual ceremony

The Booker Prize ceremony this year is very different due to the coronavirus pandemic lockdown. The so-called innovative and globally accessible 2020 winner ceremony without walls was broadcast from London’s Roundhouse.

All six shortlisted authors joined the ceremony via a special screen in the Roundhouse and the event included both virtual and in-person special guests.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about what reading Booker Prize novels has meant to him, and Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, shared her thoughts on the importance of reading during the pandemic, also via videolink.

“I have always turned to writing to try and make sense of our world,”said Obama, whose recent memoir A Promised Land has been making waves globally.

Award-winners such as Kazuo Ishiguro talked about the experience of having won both the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Authors Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo reflected on what they have been up to since they became the first-ever joint Booker Prize winners last year for The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other, respectively.

The Booker Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1969 and is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland.

The rules of the prize were changed at the end of 2013 to embrace the English language “in all its vigour, vitality, versatility and glory”, opening it up to writers beyond the UK and Commonwealth, provided they were writing novels in English that are published in the UK.

Source: The Hindu, 20/11/20

Followers

Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Vol. 55, Issue No. 46, 21 Nov, 2020

One of the ways to do so is to develop critical thinking, which can be achieved by exposure to a wide variety of literature