The New Cultural Revolution

Demonetisation is aimed at a behavioural change necessary for building a new India.

Change is the law of life. Modernity is about breaking stereotypes that govern individual and institutional habits. In today’s world, technology has come to be the main driving force of change. From the steam engine to the electric bulb and internet, technology has defined the evolution of the human mind and civilisation. Should India not keep pace with this momentum?

The demonetisation of high-value currency notes announced on November 8 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has several dimensions. Cutting off money channels to terrorists and extremist elements, weeding out counterfeit currency and driving out black money are the visible, short-term objectives. But the long-term consequences and gains include ushering in a behavioural change at all levels of society. It is a part of the grand “cultural revolution” that the PM is working on. The entrenched old order needs to make way for a new normal. This cultural revolution, impinging on all walks of public and private life amounts to shaking up the system. It ranges from attending office on time, keeping working and living environments clean, accountability, transparency, technology adoption, innovation, etc.

Instead of quibbling over the ratio of our currency to GDP vis-à-vis other economies, the moot question is how and by when can a common Indian make technology an effective tool. Logic suggests it should be as quick as it can be, given the humongous advantages. Why should one carry currency at all? A least cash society needs to be our goal. The major latent benefit highlighted by the recent demonetisation is it has driven home the point that all Indians should be prepared for a least cash ecosystem. This entails a major attitudinal change and a behavioural modification.

Let us examine demonetisation in the overall context of our institutional culture that has evolved since Independence. There may not be too many dissenting voices if I say that the prime contours of the existing decadent culture are corruption, opportunism, nepotism, greed, repression (remember Emergency?), exploitation of power, sycophancy and self-seeking behaviour. Non-Congress governments made sincere efforts to change this culture but the results fell short given their too brief interregnums. So, everyone knows which party is primarily responsible for this entrenched decadent culture.

Vested with an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha for the first time after 30 years, PM Modi has taken upon the responsibility to change this deeply entrenched system. This is an essential pre-requisite for the making of a developed India. What has PM Modi done and what will the consequences be?

One, he has given the clarion call for a “cultural revolution” against the old decadent culture, whose contours have been outlined above. Two, he set in motion a multi-pronged and comprehensive strategy to cleanse the system of all ills that have worked against the interests of the poor, the common man and the middle class, since the system nurtured by the Congress benefited only a few individuals and groups. Three, his efforts will result in a “new normal” in which the financial institutions and systems will serve the interests of the poor, the common man and the middle classes, who constitute the vast majority of the “honest” that our society is made of.

Four, the initiatives of the prime minister and the government, including the latest “remonetisation”, are aimed at a “behavioural change” that is necessary for building a new and resurgent India based on the cleanliness of thought and action. Five, the perception about India from that of being “corrupt” to “clean” will result in increased investments and enhanced economic and business activities benefiting millions of unemployed youth. Six, the new initiatives will herald a modern India on the lines of advanced countries, where financial payments and transactions will not require currency — technology will become a tool in the hands of common people. Seven, targeted behavioural modification will eventually result in the elimination of black money leading to increased revenues to Central and state governments that ultimately benefits the poor, common man and the middle classes. Finally, the new initiatives will soon transform India, erasing the legacy of the old decadent culture and Modi will emerge as the tallest leader of post-Independence India.

This prospect has obviously rattled some parties, families and individuals who stand to benefit from the status quo. This is the prime reason for their so-called aakrosh. But this anger has no justification as it does not echo with the people who have braved long queues since November 8 with patience and discipline despite the best efforts of some parties to provoke them into violence and unrest. People have raised their hands for a new Bharat. The judgement of the people is out. This, however, is not palatable to some. Their worry is how Modi finds such a resonance with the people. So, let us disrupt Parliament.

It is time that such parties stand by the change that people want and vent their aakrosh against status quo instead of seeking to block change with photo opportunities.

Source: 29-11-16

Determination rewarded

King Uthanapada had two wives and each of them had a son. The first wife Suniti’s son was Dhruva and the second wife Surichi’s son was Uthama. Uthanapada, upon the urging of Surichi, ignored Dhruva.

One day, when Dhruva saw Uthama seated on his father’s lap, he ran up to his father wanting to sit on his lap too. But he was pushed away by Surichi, who said since he was not her son, he had no claims either to the throne or his father’s affection.

“Pray to Lord Vasudeva that you should be born as my son, if you want to enjoy these rights,” she told Dhruva. Suniti told her son not to despair, but to go to the forest and undertake penance, said P.T. Seshadri in a discourse.

In the forest, Narada at first tried to dissuade the boy from undertaking penance.

But Dhruva was determined to go ahead. Seeing his determination, Narada taught him the Dvadaskshara mantra, that is Vasudeva mantra.

For the first month of his penance, Dhruva ate fruits once in three days; in the second month he ate grass and leaves once in six days; in the third month, he consumed only water once in nine days. In the fourth month, he took in only air, once in twelve days.

In the fifth month, he meditated on the form of the Lord described to him by Narada. Dhruva was rewarded for his determination when the Lord appeared before him.

Upon seeing Lord Narayana on Garuda, Dhruva offered prayers to Lord, who touched his cheek and then his head with His conch. This is called sparsa deeksha, that is deeksha by touch. Dhruva praised the Lord, and in the Dhruva stuthi, we find the Lord extolled as the granter of everything, including moksha.

 

Facebook and fake news

In a post-truth ecosystem, truth needs its arbiters more than ever. Sites such as Facebook need to acknowledge their professional and ethical responsibilities

In August this year, Facebook replaced the entire team that curated its Trending Topics section with an algorithm. This came soon after news reports claimed the curators where suppressing news from the conservative side of the U.S. political spectrum. Though an internal investigation found no systemic effort to suppress news, a statement from Facebook said the algorithm “allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics”.

There was a hiccup, though. Soon after it went active, the algorithm picked up and promoted a story about a conservative television anchor supporting Hillary Clinton that turned out to be highly controversial, and equally false. The algorithm was designed to look for what most people were talking about or were interested in, and it did its job.

A platform for news

This would not be alarming but for a recent report from the Pew Research Centre which found that 44 per cent of American adults now get their news on Facebook. Read this together with the fact that 64 per cent of them depend on just one site for the news and we begin to grasp the grip Facebook has over the information available to the average, voting-age American.

The political role of Facebook and the other Internet giant, Google, has come under scrutiny, after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential polls. Several fingers are pointing at fake news stories online as a reason for this election going off agenda. According to an analysis by BuzzFeed, a false post saying Pope Francis had endorsed Mr. Trump, put out by a fake news site WTOE 5, had a Facebook engagement of 960,000 (the sum of all comments, likes and shares for a post).

The highest engagement for a real news on the election was 849,000, for Washington Post’s “Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?” According to BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, the top 20 false news items in the three months prior to the election had a collective Facebook engagement of 8,711,000, while the top 20 real news items garnered 7,367,000 engagements.

Facebook’s initial reaction to the allegation was denial, with founder Mark Zuckerberg saying it was “pretty crazy” to think fake Facebook posts could swing elections. They may not have, but the Buzzfeed numbers on false news are no small sums. And the Pew numbers are an indicator of how many people probably consumed those as real news. And, considering the margins at which the election was won, no number is too small.

The impact of false news is much more considering given how Facebook delivers it to us. In June this year, Facebook changed its news feed algorithm to give more weight to ‘friends and family’. That is, if someone on your friends list liked or commented on a post, the chances of you seeing that post are now much higher. Then as you engage with those posts more, Facebook further fine-tunes your newsfeed to show similar posts. This streamlines your news feed to the interests of your circle, limited or diverse as it is. Essentially the algorithm places us in a jury of our peers, locking us in echo chambers of thought, validating each other in an infinite loop. Throw in a false news into this mix and, if it aligns with the ideological tilt of your clique, it goes viral (the disease metaphor being most apt here).

Facebook later accepted the dangers of fake news, with Mr. Zuckerberg posting a blog saying Facebook would “penalise this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.” Both Facebook and Google have also decided to disconnect fake news websites from their powerful advertisement networks, the money from which is the main incentive for fake news and click-bait articles.

However, Mr. Zuckerberg went on to say that the problem was “complex, both technically and philosophically,” and that Facebook did not want to curtail people’s ability to “share what they want whenever possible.” The high point of his argumentwas: “We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves.”

Arbiter of truth

Truth and its arbiters are not a highly regarded lot nowadays. We are now in the ‘post-truth’ era, where truth is “a matter of perspective” and those who seek to tell the truth are “agenda driven”. Mr. Zuckerberg is smart to distance himself from being an “arbiter of truth”. In fact, both Facebook and Google have always avoided taking on a news media tag, though they are for all practical purposes the biggest news media outlets in the world. Being in the news media business brings with it a legal, professional and ethical responsibilities to be an arbiter of truth.

In his mea culpa on fake news, Mr. Zuckerberg has said that he will reach out to journalists and news media organisation for tips on content verification. He is forgetting that the media is already there, fighting it out for a piece of the content distribution pie offered by the platform. These media outlets are putting expensive, fact-checked reports on your platform for free, Mr. Zuckerberg, all you have to do is give them precedence over un-corroborated news. Right now they are pushing listicles and click-baits to break into the aforementioned cliques that Facebook’s algorithms have created.

Of course, trust in the mainstream media is not exactly a distinctive feature of the Internet. We have terms like “presstitute” and “Lugenpresse” to describe the extent to which mainstream media is distrusted by the champions and foot soldiers of the politics of populism that is sweeping the globe. But the fact remains that the journalist who goes out on to the street to physically verify a fact remains one among the best arbiters of truth. And truth needs its arbiters, now more than ever.

george.pj@thehindu.co.in

Source: The Hindu, 29-11-2016

HTLS column by Swapan Dasgupta: Toppling of Nehruvian political order

Political shifts have challenged the reputation of Jawaharlal Nehru as the beacon of modern Indian nationhood. As Independent India approaches 70, many of the fundamentals that defined the Nehruvian consensus have been questioned and discarded. This in itself is not a regressive development. The post-1945 world that defined Nehru’s outlook has changed inexorably. Consequently, it is only natural that attempts to convert Nehruvian thought into a national dogma have faltered.

Yet, there are themes that endure. Nehru’s intellectual vanity and his disdain for those who didn’t share his European modernism helped suppress many indigenous currents of political thought that had shaped the nationalist awakening. However, Nehru never succeeded in killing off all challenges to his Reformation; his undeniable political dominance merely drove awkward alternatives underground, from where they emerged only after his death.

The near-unchallenged political dominance of some six decades led to the Nehruvian consensus becoming common sense among the intelligentsia, particularly those in the liberal professions. This section has guarded its echo chamber fiercely and denied institutional space to those that don’t quite fit into the Left-liberal mould. Consequently, the challenge to the Nehruvian order has come from quarters that have a marked anti-intellectual bias, not least because their relevance stemmed from electoral politics. A caricatured view of the other has often prevented a meaningful conversation between two sides of a cultural and political divide. The tendency to talk at each other has been reinforced by media interventions: the English-language media revelling in condescension and insolence, and the social media falling back on conspiracy theories and outright abuse.

Nowhere are the fault lines more marked than on the touchy question of secularism that has divided India sharply for the past three decades. However, the problem of how best to define national identity and negotiate relations between different religious communities is as old as the Republic itself.

As early as 1958, in a conversation with the French intellectual Andre Malraux, Nehru had identified two of his foremost challenges: “Creating a just state by just means… [and] creating a secular state in a religious country.” In 1976, at the height of the Emergency, in a bid to stymie all debate permanently, Indira Gandhi enshrined these Nehruvian ideals into the Constitution. The 42nd Amendment injected “socialism” and “secularism” into the directive principles.

Far from making either socialism — now almost entirely discarded — or secularism a principle cast in stone, the attempt to codify a nebulous principle involving neutrality in matters of religion and non-discrimination ended up creating more complications.

Whereas the pre-1976 spats over secular principles were over issues such as cow slaughter and Hindu personal laws, the subsequent contests became far more bitter and divisive. The Ayodhya agitation that gripped India for nearly a decade was posited as a contest between “real” and “pseudo” secularism. Since 1996, “secular unity” has entered the political vocabulary and created a new category of untouchables, with Narendra Modi now being the lead pariah.

The problem, it would seem, stems from a novel definition of secularism. In his extremely sympathetic biography of India’s first prime minister, S Gopal noted that “in Nehru’s view the responsibility for communal peace rested primarily on the Hindus”.

Like Sartre, to whom the Jewish question was a gentile one, to Nehru the Muslim question was a Hindu one. The test of social solidarity was the feeling of confidence given to the minorities. Whenever there was a communal disturbance, Nehru presumed the failure of the district authorities and the activity of Hindu communal elements”.

Curiously, by putting the onus entirely on Hindus to safeguard enlightenment, Nehru was not necessarily reposing faith on a tradition of tolerance and open-mindedness. “In practice”, he wrote to Kailash Nath Katju in November 1953, “the Hindu is certainly not tolerant and is more narrow-minded than almost any person in any other country… It does not help much to talk of Hindu philosophy, which is magnificent. The fate of India is largely tied up with the Hindu outlook. If the present Hindu outlook does not change radically, I am quite sure that India is doomed.”

The striking condescension towards the majority who elected him to power apart, Nehru’s formulations — on which the edifice of Indian secularism was built —pointed to a fundamental moral problem. There is a legitimate educative and reforming role that creative elites play in societies, even democracies.

However, when that elite disavows popular mentalities and transforms itself into an autonomous and superior entity based on a sense of entitlement, it invariably generates a backlash.

The legacy of the freedom movement and Indira Gandhi’s political dexterity sustained a Congress monopoly over power for long, but it couldn’t prevent the million mutinies. Once India moved out of the orbit of state dominance and witnessed relative prosperity, questions of national identity began engaging popular attention.

To suggest that India has become more Hindu as it has become more prosperous and democratic does not in any way imply a rejection of the secular idea. What it does imply is that secularism has discarded some of its patronising one-sidedness. The proprietorship of the Republic has been hugely enlarged.

Yet, there are underlying tensions created by a widening gulf between a cosmopolitan outlook and mentalities more rooted in indigenous traditions. These tensions aren’t new but they demand unending conversations between the conflicting sides. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. A big change in Indian politics demands less certitudes and more openness.

(The author is a Rajya Sabha MP, senior journalist, and political commentator)

Source: Hindustan Times, 29-11-2016

Positive Energy

ALOK RANJAN





Most of us like to believe that a divinity guides our existence in this universe. The supreme cosmic force we refer to as God is omniscient, omnipresent and, so, cannot be confined to the four walls of a temple or any other specific place of worship.It is also difficult to believe that certain places have greater presence of God than do others.Continuously , people come to places of worship with immense faith and think positive -in the belief and hope that they shall be granted what they ask for. It is these positive and often uplifting thoughts in the mind of devotees that transform the atmosphere inside a temple into one that creates an ambience suitable for reflection and meditation. It creates spiritual field of energy . This explains how one starts thinking of God inside a temple; how good, positive feelings get generated in one's heart. It is the attitude and mindset of the seeker that creates this field of spiritual energy .
One feels peace, harmony and solace in the premises of a temple as the spiritual energy there uplifts one's consciousness. As for miracles taking place, it has been said that faith can move mountains.
Places of worship serve as psychological outlets as well as psychological reinforcements.The spiritual fields uplift consciousness leading to harmony , peace and a feeling of fulfilment. God is everywhere but in places of worship, an individual is able to raise his consciousness sufficiently to be able to feel His presence, to be able to commune with Him.

Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 51, Issue No. 48, 26 Nov, 2016

Editorials

Checking Conflicts of Interest

Trumping Climate Change

Treat, Do Not Shame

Strategic Affairs

India's Strategic Shift

Ali Ahmed

Commentary

Demonetisation: 1978, the Present and the Aftermath

J Dennis Rajakumar, S L Shetty

Lost Due To Demonetisation

Ashok K Nag

Narendra Modi, Bob Dylan and Demonetisation

Sumanta Banerjee

Migrant Crisis in Kerala

Garima Maheshwari

Town Planning Machinery Enquiry into Staffing Adequacy

Gaurav Dubey

Book Reviews

Voices of Dissent

Arvind Krishnaswamy

A Trader's Journey

Nalin Mehta

Special Articles

Estimation of the Size of the Black Economy in India, 1996-2012

Arun Kumar

Self-fulfilling Equilibrium and Social Disparities in Urban India

Manpreet Singh, Zakir Husain

Law without Order

Kavya Tangirala

Notes

Stray Dog Menace

R Chandran, P A Azeez

Discussion

Learning Deficit toTeaching Deficit

Jayanti Dutta

Current Statistics

Current Statistics

Letters

Demonetisation Crisis

K Koteswara Rao

Bastariya Battallion

P Shankar

It Was on Tony Scott

A K Pat

Appointments/programmes/announcements 

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

- See more at: http://www.epw.in/journal/2016/48#sthash.Zww5AKUZ.dpuf

Who can become an Indian citizen?

Partition’s long shadow is evident on the Citizenship Amendment Bill, which seeks to introduce a religious distinction in the law. It must be debated

It is not hard to guess why the joint parliamentary committee (JPC) reviewing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 decided at the last minute to postpone the public hearings in Assam it had scheduled for the first week of November. The decision apparently was made after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat met Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal. Too much of a spotlight on the citizenship amendment bill, they seem to have concluded, could hurt the party’s electoral prospects in the by-election in Lakhimpur — the BJP won the seat, though with a reduced margin.

No one familiar with the deeply contested history of immigration and citizenship in Assam should be surprised that the citizenship amendment bill would be controversial in Assam. It has rekindled the long-standing foreigner controversy. Opinion is divided along expected lines between the Brahmaputra Valley and the Barak Valley that nurture very different memories of the Partition.

The bill’s staunchest critics are the old guard of the Assam Movement. Since Sonowal himself was one of its prominent leaders, he has been criticised for not openly objecting to the bill. But the vociferous opposition by some of Sonowal’s one-time comrades in the Assam Movement, who are now leaders of regional parties and allies of the BJP-led state government, has made the bill politically toxic for the BJP.

The BJP must reconsider the bill, says the AGP president and Assam’s agriculture minister, Atul Bora, since it had promised to implement the Assam Accord. The controversy threatens to unravel the coalition that brought the BJP-led alliance to power in the state only a few months ago.

Electoral tacticians will have no trouble understanding the decision. But the JPC’s action sends troubling signals: The ruling party appears unwilling and unprepared to engage in a serious public debate on an issue that involves how the membership in the nation is defined. Winning elections by any means necessary is its priority.

Critics of the bill have expressed concern that it could trigger a new influx of Hindu refugees from Bangladesh. Former Assam chief minister and AGP founder-president Prafulla Kumar Mahanta has said that religious persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh is not as much of an issue under the Sheikh Hasina government than what it once was. He points out that more than 29,500 Durga pujas were held in Bangladesh this year and that many of them had received financial assistance from the government.

Mahanta’s statement is entirely consistent with the Modi government’s policy towards Bangladesh. The concern that the change in India’s citizenship laws could trigger a new influx is not out of place. Yet the BJP accuses Mahanta of “causing confusion” on the issue by opposing the bill. A BJP leader has charged that the AGP did little to implement the Assam Accord when it was in power under Mahanta’s leadership. But whatever the shortcomings of the Mahanta-led AGP government, the reason for its failure to implement the Assam Accord is not hard to find. Most people in Assam understand the main obstacle to be the IMDT law: It had severely limited the government’s capacity to act.

When in 2005 the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, it said in its ruling that the IMDT law had created “insurmountable difficulties” for the government in the identification of unauthorised immigrants living in Assam. Indeed the court had agreed with much of what the leaders of the Assam Movement were saying. The IMDT law, said the apex court, encouraged massive illegal migration from Bangladesh to Assam and that it was the “main barrier” to identifying illegal immigrants.

Ironically, the BJP’s evident disinclination to openly engage in a public debate on the citizenship amendment bill reminds people in Assam of the way in which the IMDT law was passed. The seventh Lok Sabha elected in 1980 had enacted the IMDT law in 1983. While the 1980 election is remembered in the rest of India for sweeping Indira Gandhi back to power, the memory of that election is very different in Assam. The Assam Movement had just begun and its organisers had called for a boycott of the elections. Elections could be held in only two of Assam’s 14 parliamentary constituencies — both located in the Barak Valley, where the Assam Movement had little resonance. Thus a law that had more consequences for Assam than for any other part of the country was passed by Parliament at a time when Assam was grossly under-represented. That’s not how a deliberative law-making body should function.

One hopes that Parliament this time will not make the same mistake: That it will do more to facilitate public participation and public input in the course of legislating the citizenship amendment bill. A thorough discussion of the bill, however, requires that its goals be spelt out in a more transparent manner.

The proposed amendment, in its current formulation, seeks to exclude undocumented immigrants belonging to certain minority communities of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians — from the category of illegal migrants making them eligible to apply for Indian citizenship. The list of religious minorities excludes Muslim groups like the Ahmadis, certainly a persecuted religious minority in Pakistan.

It is hard not to read the proposed amendment as being about something else: To deal with what some people have long taken to be a piece of unfinished business of the Partition. They believe that Indian citizenship laws should recognise a right of return of Hindus from Pakistan and Bangladesh to India, similar to the right of Jews to return to Israel, or of ethnic Germans to Germany. Those of this persuasion are unhappy with the Indian Constitution’s rejection of the two-nation theory since Indian law cannot distinguish between Hindu and Muslim arrivals from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The real purpose of the citizenship amendment bill seems to be to introduce this distinction into India’s citizenship laws.

The implications of the amendment are huge, not only for Assam, but for the rest of India and the subcontinent. The Constitution’s rejection of the two-nation theory is crucially important for the status of Indian Muslims as equal citizens. The proposed amendment will impact not only the sense of security of Indian Muslims, but also the future security of Hindus in Bangladesh, and the credibility of India’s historical position on the Kashmir question.

Whatever the form the amendment finally takes, there is no alternative to developing a shared understanding of the issue through a hard national conversation. The implications of the bill are far more profound than the innocuous formulation “persons belonging to minority communities, namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.. shall not be treated as illegal migrants” might suggest.

Source: Indian Express, 28-11-2016