GYANOPROBHA

A TEACHER'S HOPE

As a teacher and a human being, I struggle to be hopeful about the future. But I am close to giving up. I am beginning to think this insistence that teachers need to be hopeful is also a red herring. Teachers need to be truthful above all, but I find it difficult to be hopeful and truthful at the same time. 

And here’s what I have noticed about myself: I have lost the capacity to be surprised by anything in politics any more. Each change appears to be for the worse, in absolutely predictable or explicable ways. What does surprise me is the occasional good news: the growing sense that there is a crisis (accompanied by the bad news that no one has any faith in any solutions any more). Ordinary people – as I discovered on a trip home to an India still recovering from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai – are still surprisingly capable of responding with compassion and empathy, although a disconcertingly large proportion of them still continue to wish for death and destruction on Pakistan, Muslims, Christians, tribals, dalits...and anyone who dissents from their dominant self-image of a resurgent, powerful India. 

Post-communism and post-modernism have left us unable to deal with a post-capitalist wreckage and construct something worthwhile from it, except in small groups. The World Social Forum has lost its way, if it was ever on the way to anything at all. It’s passé to say that there is no left left any more. But do right and left matter any more? Liberal democracy, feeling itself threatened by a terror that it has itself helped create, has quite simply now become the new fascism..."O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!" cried Madame Roland as she passed a statue of liberty on the way to the guillotine during the Jacobin terror. That's an exclamation that has rung like a death knell around the world since the end of the 20th century. 

We are facing a catastrophe as a species, and the most urgent task for us humans is to find a way to survive. I am not quite sure whether we would be good for the earth if we do, but that’s another argument. I am trying to move towards constructing an inventory of ideas that can help us as a species to survive the coming catastrophe. The new test for ideas or ways of living could be: does this help our survival as a species or does it doom us to collapse? For some ideas, the choice seems clear. But for others, how can we be certain in advance? The Green Revolution was once touted as an idea that would prevent hunger for all who suffered from it; now some suspect it may have made hunger worse for some while assuaging it in others. Education - in the sense of schooling - is beginning to look like another idea whose time has gone, except for those, fewer in number every year, for whom it remains a passport to upward social mobility. 

I think the only sensible thing left to do is to prepare – culturally, cognitively, emotionally, materially – for the great cull of the human species that the world is likely to see in the 21st century and the next. Gather together traces of lost knowledge and ways of being and doing that may help us weather the oncoming tragedy, devise creative ways of surviving when we are hit by catastrophe, create repositories of wisdom from whatever we still have access to, pass them on to our children. Education (not schooling) now takes on a more urgent purpose than ever before: the survival of the human species, and the preservation of the impulses that helped us survive and flourish. The question is whether these impulses can be separated neatly from those that propel us towards self-destruction. 

Teaching needs to be de-professionalized, so that every one can be a teacher and learner at the same time. The usual modes of education, which served us well to teach us silence in the face of suffering and obedience to the needs of power, need to be firmly abandoned. Schools as we know them now will either die off into irrelevance or be radically re-structured. But don’t expect our leaders or our existing institutions to lead us in this, because they are part of the problem. 

BINAYAK SEN AND THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION

"How do you fight a rogue state?" asks Ilina, Binayak's wife. 

On a visit with her mother to Binayak in jail, Ilina discovered that the Chhattisgarh government has filed an appeal before the High Court at Bilaspur to re-instate the charges of which he was acquitted by the sessions court. Furthermore, they merely gave Binayak a copy of the appeal, and didn't even bother to inform his lawyers. 

Clearly, this appeal is designed to hedge against the "risk" that a Supreme Court bench may allow bail to Binayak. So even if Binayak is released on bail, the reversal of his acquittal on the charge of waging war against the state could ensure that he goes right back in as soon as he is released. Today, this has just hit the news media, despite the fact that it was already made public on Twitter a week ago. 

Every time you think some new low has been reached in the annals of the Chattisgarh judiciary, they surprise you with yet another legal legerdemain. Amazing, isn't it, that the brains of an entire bureaucratic apparatus are kept pre-occupied with inventing new forms of legal torture...because this is basically what it is. And yet must we keep faith in the Indian judicial system? As much as we must have faith in the compassion and mercy of our torturers. Or have faith that one part of the system still functions with a common sense understanding of justice. 

Here's her letter that appeared in The Statesman, Kolkata. 

A meeting with Binayak 

SIR, ~ I met Binayak this morning, along with my mother. It was great that both the old ladies, my mother-in-law and mother, made the great trek to come this distance and to stand by us in solidarity. Binayak is in good health and reasonable spirits, but there are some developments that I think I should let you know as I rush to catch my train to go back to Wardha.

Following our Special Leave Petition in the Supreme Court, the state of Chhattisgarh has filed a criminal appeal on 28 February in the Chhattisgarh High Court, submitting that the acquittal of Binayak and others under certain sections, in the court of the sessions judge, should be reversed and that these charges should be maintained. This relates to waging war on the State etc. The specific sections are: 121A IPC, 10(A) UAPA.1967, in alternative 10(A)/120B IPC, 21 UAPA 1967, 38(2) UAPA 1967, 20 UAPA 1967.
I came to know about this because a copy has been advanced to Binayak. Obviously we are under obligation to inform them about our legal moves, but the state can get by with giving a copy to a person in prison who has no means of communicating anything to anybody. 

How do you fight a rogue state ? 

Yours, etc., Ilina Sen, Raipur, 14 March.

As this episode illustrates, this entire case, like so much else in the way we govern ourselves, is beset with the problems of asymmetry of information (the state knows more about you than you yourself - specifically, what your rights and obligations are), lack of information (can the state appeal against an acquittal of charges in a judgment that has otherwise gone in its favour?), and questions about the reliability of information (how can the justice system be trusted when the state can simply cook up evidence against an accused, who can be convicted even when the evidence is shown to be false?)

[Now I can already hear the nationalist jackals on the internet howling: Binayak should have known better than to tangle with the state! Now he must pay for it! 

So Binayak was supposed to have been aware that publishing a report critical of the state's policy towards tribals, and exposing the criminality of campaigns like the Salwa Judum, would earn him a life sentence for waging war against the state, even when the judge intially ruled that he was innocent of such a charge. You have to admire the touching faith of these nationalists in the right to free speech that the world's largest democracy enjoys, but also their breathtaking cynicism!]

As Ilina's statement - reproduced entirely below - to the RTI Convention in Shillong makes clear, Binayak's case is a vivid demonstration of the fact that even a Right To Information (RTI) law cannot succeed in shining the light of accountability, responsiveness and transparency on its governance to prevent the state's recourse to criminality in the pursuance of its aims. Who will be held liable for violation of judicial standards, for the waste of state resources and time in erecting a false case, for the suffering imposed on Binayak and his family? Many of these costs are unquantifiable, let alone calculable. But multiply Binayak's case several thousand fold, and you begin to get an idea (but not a measure, except in a metaphoric sense) of the enormity of the lack of reliable information in our benighted country, where thousands of undertrials are kept waiting for justice in our jails, often not knowing what they have been accused of. This must surely be one of the most painful injustices at the heart of our justice system. But what can a RTI law do to prevent such injustice, when so much else in our system allows such systemic criminality to continue? 

Ilina Sen’s Statement for RTI Convention Shillong, March 10-12. 

As I fight the long and painful legal battle  to extricate Binayak from the  clutches of the  penal administration, I realize that this battle is as much mine as  that of any Indian  citizen. Today, at many levels and in many fora including this one, the people of India are struggling  for  the establishment  of  accountability  and transparency  in our governance  structures as befitting our status as the world’s largest democracy. However, it is a sad reflection on our system  that once a false case is registered  in the name of security, it is almost impossible to  turn the clock back , even if facts  stare us in the face that indicate  that the case had no basis. To this ,  if we add  dimensions of face saving, prestige, and drubbing the nose into the ground of uncomfortable critics, we have Chhattisgarh  and Binayak Sen.

Binayak Sen has been convicted of sedition  and of violating sections of the UAPA and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act and sentenced along with two others to  rigorous life imprisonment. His jail ticket notes his  provisional date of release as 2028, The conviction has followed an unfair prosecution and prejudiced judgment  based on confessional statement recorded , according to the judge, during   ‘preliminary investigation’ before the first accused in the case was taken into police custody, thereby defeating the  provision of inadmissibility of custodial confessions. In the absence of any  visible crime, this first arrest  and the so called ‘preliminary investigation’ become the ‘incident’ around which the case is woven. The charges framed are  equally vague  regarding nature , time and place of the ‘crime’. Extensive and expensive police investigations (sadly beyond the orbit of the RTI Act!) into Binayak’s (and mine) homes, places of work and associates failed to provide   any evidence  other than social service in remote rural areas , and obviously was not brought  on record.   The  case against Binayak hinged upon his  33 meetings with jailed  Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal, his supposed couriering of Sanyal’s letters and their passing on to Pijush Guha, through which letters, the death and destruction  being  carried out by the Maoists was supposedly  given effect.

Since the prosecution failed to produce even a single jail official or any other eye witness testifying to any letter or message, oral or written, being passed by Narayan Sanyal to Binayak Sen in their jail meetings, the verdict makes much fuss about certain entries in jail registers referring to Sen being Sanyal’s relative, ignoring the defence contention that these entries were filled in by the jail officials, and not by either the visited or visitor, as apparent from the face of the record. On the contrary, all the applications Binayak Sen submitted to the jail officials, requesting a meeting with Sanyal, were written on the letterhead of his organization - PUCL (a Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights organization founded by leading Sarvodaya leader Jayprakash Narayan). These visits were duly permitted by the jail officials and transpired in their full view and hearing. Binayak’s own statement to the court gives a perfectly rational explanation for these visits and the way in which his intervention was essential in facilitating the hand surgery of Narayan Sanyal at the Raipur Medical College,, but this was not taken into account.

Binayak  is also supposed to have had prior acquaintance with Sanyal and facilitated the hiring of a house by him. This is based on the testimony of a landlord who, while  testifying to this fact also alleges that Sanayal was arrested from his house, which is contrary to the facts brought on record  during this trial.  Sanyal’s arrest was in Andhra Pradseh according  to the testimony of the arresting officer, and how a witness  who perjures himself in one part of his testimony becomes a reliable witness for the other part, beats imagination.

Hearsay evidence from police officers about Binayak’s  presence in naxal meetings , his supposed association with ‘hard core naxals’ who are not even named in any case anywhere in the country , supposed seditious literature pertaining to resistance of US imperialism and atrocities committed during the salwa judum  seized from our  house during police search, correspondence addressed to the ISI  (read Walter Fernandes, Director, Indian Social institute, New Delhi) and the evidence of correspondence with  people bearing Muslim names   constitutes  the rest of the evidence.

While weaving a narrative of sedition against Binayak Sen and other accused in the case, the Sessions court verdict violates a well laid judicial principle of the Supreme Court in matters of sedition. In Kedarnath Singh Vs State of Bihar the Supreme Court has held that the provision of sedition in the Indian Penal Code must be interpreted in a manner consistent with the fundamental freedom of speech and expression guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. In this regard the Supreme Court held that the offence of sedition, which is defined as spreading disaffection against the state, should be considered as having been committed only if the said disaffection is a direct incitement to violence or will lead to serious public disorder. No speech or deed milder than this should be considered seditious. The Sessions court verdict in the case against Binayak Sen and others fails to establish that the words or deeds of the accused were a direct incitement to violence or would lead to serious public disorder. This would be the case even if it was established beyond doubt that Binayak Sen had passed on Narayan Sanyal’s letters to Pijush Guha, or Pijush Guha was likely to pass on these letters to other members of the CPI (Maoist), or that Narayan Sanyal was a politburo member of the CPI (Maoist).   

Both the trial court  as well as the appellate court  (while passing and upholding the maximum  sentence for sedition) have  gone on record that the situation of violence and uncontrolled Maoist bloodshed calls for non-application of any grounds for leniency in sentence.  This is without any clear establishment that Binayak Sen had any involvement in such bloodshed, in fact even the court does not allege this.  How  criminal justice can be based on the doctrine of lateral responsibility is  mind boggling. Clearly the verdict and the sentence are both intended to make an example of a civil society activism, and to send a message to all of us who are asking any kind of questions. The issues in this case  thus go beyond the case itself and the fight for justice for Binayak becomes the struggle of all of us for the Rule of Law  in our polity.

THE TOUCHING FAITH OF LEFT LIBERALS IN THE STATE

Here is a good example of the kind of implicit and unqualified faith placed in the state by apparently left-leaning liberals. 

Sadanand Patwardhan appears to be a blogger with an interest in Chhattisgarh. Recently, he published the following open letter on the Chhattisgarh Net Yahoo group (membership required) from one Arun Agarwal to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with an introductory comment of his own. 

Unfortunately, we are not told what Agarwal's sources of information are. [My inquiries on the internet about Agarwal himself lead me to a PIL activist based in Bangalore, who has filed a petition in the Bangalore High Court urging that the state government be restrained from signing any further MoU's with private mining companies.] How does he arrive at his estimates of the private theft of public assets, and how does he compare the performance of the private companies with NMDC if the private balance sheets are not publicly available? However, having read elsewhere of loot on a similar scale from public resources, I do tend to give some credence to Agarwal's story. 

More substantively, I agree with Agarwal's contention that the extractive industries ought not to be in private hands, since they are essentially profiting from land-based wealth that, according to the Constitution and the Supreme Court judgment that Agarwal cites, is held by the state in trust on behalf of the public. But why this faith in a state that has done so little to protect the interest of the forest tribes and other poor (as Patwardhan himself notes), but has been so anxious to sell off national assets to private interests in the name of development? 

Instead of looking to either state-owned enterprises or private corportations, why not consider innovative forms of ownership and control that will give the people living on the land where the natural resources exist the dominant measure of control over their use and disposition, and a stake in their extraction so that the country as a whole could benefit? 

Of course, the immediate objection I can hear is: what do scheduled tribes living in subsistence forest-based economies know about modern methods of mining? What do they know about returns on investment, cost benefit calculations, project management, global pricing of natural resources, and other sorts of knowledge that have paid such rich dividends to the enterpreneurs and investors? 

This goes to the heart of the development debate: who benefits from this knowledge, and at whose cost? Why have not systems of knowledge been created that factor in the benefits to the people who live on the land from which the wealth will be extracted? The Indian state, despite constitutional obligations to the contrary, has throughout its history been wedded to a model of development that has prioritized the enrichment of the few at the cost of the bare subsistence of the many - never with as much dtermination as since the so-called neoliberal "reforms" of 1991, which has pulled some people out of poverty, accelerated the enrichment of the already wealthy middle and investor classes, and pushed many more down to levels of destitution that rival some of the poorest African countries. 

The question of ownership and control of national assets therefore ought to be at the forefront of social innovation if the country has to break out of the narrow range of choices along the state-private sector continuum. But from what I can tell, this is not part of any public debate or discussion. The increasing immiserization and polarization of Indian society into the rich and poor is apparently no one's urgent concern. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear friends,

The following letter from Arun Agrawal argues with remarkable cogency & with what appears to be firm hold over facts in favour of a policy that would entrust mining solely to public sector and have it rescued from the clutches of crony capitalists & robber barons. He cites the recent Supreme Court judgment over the Ambani Vs, Ambani fight for Krishna Godavari Natural Gas pricing to buttress his case. If his facts are correct about the mining practices of NMDC, then one would have to admit he makes a case that is iron clad. 

Its important deficiency is that it doesn't address the special needs of tribes & other poor, who would be dispossessed of their ancestral lands & livelihoods as they always have been since legends & histories took hold of human imagination, and therefore have to be compensated first with the lion's share of any "development" of mining that takes place in their territory, and part of that share has to go to them upfront even if that means sacrifices have to be made by rest of the Indians in the short run.

Secondly, it also doesn't account for the feasibility (or its absence) of over extending the current development model, which the policy changes he has advocated will still serve but for the hopeful removal of robbing & corruption that is currently rampant in the system, and the needs of harmonising human desire for "progress" with the limitations imposed by nature.

Having said that, kudos to Agrawal for a brilliant case.

Sadanand

From Arun Agrawal

To

The Hon'ble Prime Minister of India, 

Govt of India 

South Block,

New Delhi

6th August 2010

Re:Nationalisation/ Resumption of Iron Ore Mining valued at over Two Trillion

Dollars

Dear Hon'ble Prime Minister,

I write as a citizen, one among the 125 crores, for whose beneficiary

interest you are the trustee in chief, for the minerals resources in general

and iron resources in particular. 

That these resources are covered by the doctrine of public trust has been

clarified by the Supreme Court in RNRL vs RIL and others, (better known as

Anil Ambani vs Mukesh Ambani) . The court held: Our legal system - based on

English Common Law - includes the public trust doctrine as part of its

jurisprudence. The State is the trustee of all natural resources which are

by nature meant for public use and enjoyment. Public at large is beneficiary

of the seashore, running waters, airs, forests and ecologically fragile

lands. The State as a trustee is under a legal duty to protect the natural

resources. These resources meant for public use cannot be converted into

private ownership. This doctrine is part of Indian law and finds application

in the present case as well. It is thus the duty of the Government to

provide complete protection to the natural resources as a trustee of the

people at large.

It would therefore not be wrong to conclude that the doctrine of public

trust extended to natural gas also covers another natural resource - iron

ore- a resource that India is richly endowed with and probably is the

single largest source of mineral wealth. The Supreme Court further held that

it would be ideal for the PSU to handle such projects exclusively. In the

words of the Supreme Court: It is relevant to note that the Constitution

envisages exploration, extraction and supply of gas to be within the domain

of governmental functions. It is the duty of the Union to make sure that

these resources are used for the benefit of the citizens of this country.

Due to shortage of funds and technical know-how, the Government has

privatized such activities through the mechanism provided under the PSC. It

would have been ideal for the PSUs to handle such projects exclusively.

From the foregoing it would not be wrong to conclude that the natural

resource iron ore is covered by the doctrine of public trust, that the

ownership control and distribution of the iron ore should be done in a

manner so as to best subserve the common good ( Article 39(b) ) and that it

would be ideal for the PSU to handle such projects - exploitation of the

resources exclusively by the State. 

The reason for privatizing oil industry, as stated by the Hon'ble Court,

was shortage of funds and technology knowhow. Neither of these reasons are

applicable to iron ore. The PSU engaged in exploiting iron ore is the sixty

year old NMDC. It is 90% government owned. The operating profit margin for

the last three years has been 78%,78% and 80.5%.( after treating royalty

payment of 5% of turnover as expenses for the year 09-10). It has no

debt and has not paid a rupee as interest in the last eight years. It has

reserves of over 14,000 crores. Its one rupee share was recently subscribed

for Rs300/- when the government diluted its stake from 98% to 90%. It

neither needs money from the government nor the bank to make fresh

investments, and is financially and technologically capable of mining the

entire iron ore of the country, In other words it fully meets the mandate of

the Constitution and the Supreme Court judgment, in the above mentioned

case, to exploit the natural mineral resource of iron ore for the benefit of

the people of the country. It is ironic that while iron ore worth Rs 100

crores is being pilfered and looted by private interest each day in a cosy

crony capitalistic relationship, NMDC is looking for fresh investment for

iron ore in Australia! Add to that the proposed allotment of iron ore to

private barons worth trillion of dollars for petty royalty and not to NMDC,

the tragedy of a poor nation suffering at the hands of corrupt politicians

is complete. Unlike private miners NMDC does not indulge in slaughter

mining. It has the best equipment and their method of exploiting of the

minerals are not only better than any private miners but better than that of

the captive mines of SAIL and Tisco.

Both the conditions for privatization applicable to the gas sector, as

stated in the Supreme Court judgment, is not applicable in case of iron ore

There is no other company in the entire private sector which has a higher

operating profit margin than NMDC. It is also among the top ten companies in

terms of market capitalization. In contrast, the private sector companies

engaged in mining of iron ore are over mining , under invoicing the price,

mining without license or mining plan, under reporting their turnover,

paying a small fraction as taxes or royalties (1.5 %), generating large

amounts of profits in cash for pay-offs to various interests. The annual

loot from iron ore by private miners is around 50,000 crores and involves

around 150 families in a relationship which can be best described as crony

capitalism.. If their balance sheet is made public - which it should as they

are dealing with property belonging to the people- it will show that their

profitability ratios and efficiency is one fourth that of NMDC. More

important, almost all the profit goes to the private miners. The amount of

profits on account of illegal mining runs into tens of thousand crores each

year.

For every Rs 100 that NMDC earns, Rs 90 belongs to the government while for

every Rs100 that the private miners earn less than Rs 5 comes to the

government as royalty and tax. The illegal profits of the mining industry

has been used to purchase political power either by the miner barons

themselves or by the politicians who allot the mines. Every state is heavily

into illegal mining and most of them have non congress governments. The

sterling record of NMDC, the 60 year old PSU, engaged in the mining of iron

ore is being contrasted with that of the private sector to show that there

no justification for the government, which is a trustee of the mineral

wealth, not to nationalize ( in fact the mines are owned by the government

and therefore technically cannot be nationalized) / takeover the iron mines

leased to the private barons and earn thousand of crores for the benefit of

the people of the country on whose behalf the mines are held in trust by you

as the Prime Minister of the country. It cannot be the case of the

government or the private sector that the best of the companies in the

public sector cannot be better than the worst of the companies of the

private sector and there must be privitasation of national mineral resources

belonging to the people of the country because the government should not be

in the business of business especially if it is a profitable business and

the profits are used for the benefit of the people. 

Let FICCI, CII, ASSOCHAM and more important Federation of Indian Minerals

Association (FIMI ) who have hundreds of crores to lobby for policies in

their favour, show to the people of the country as to how the private miners

match upto even 30% the performance of the NMDC in terms of profitability,

price realization, royalty payment and income tax payment. This also

includes private steel mills who have been allotted captive mines. The

reason for addressing the issue of nationalization of the iron ore mines

urgently is the attempt made by the BJP government in Karnataka ( a government

by, of and for the mining lobby) to appropriate the entire iron ore wealth

of the State to private interests in perpetuity. The Government of

Karnataka has signed MOU's with various companies (ArcelorMittal , Posco,

Brahamani Industries, Hazira Steel, JSW Steel, Bhushan Steel) for setting up

steel plants of 6 million tonnes capacity each, at the Global Investors meet

on June 4 and June 5. In addition to the MOUs, other applications for

manufacture of steel pending with the government would take the total

capacity to be set up in the State to over 60 million tonnes. The proposed

production signed by GOK in a few months is in excess of the total existing

steel capacity of the country set up in the country in the last hundred

years starting from the first steel plant of Tisco set up in 1907. The

reasons for the iron rush of the state (which surpasses the gold rush) is

two fold : all the profit of iron ore of the state goes to private coffers

and not to the people, and to preempt policy and the provisions of the new

law relating to the allotment of the iron ore. The iron ore lobby knows that

the loot cannot continue indefinitely and it cannot suppress its production

and profits indefinitely. The only way to retain their standalone mines in

the future is to make them as suppliers to the integrated steel plants.

Hence the brilliant scheme to assure the steel barons of fifty percent iron

ore from captive mines on payment of token royalty of 1.5% and fifty percent

from privately leased. It is a win- win situation for everybody. Steel

producers get 50% raw material for free and the standalone mine owners get

to keep their mines and profits. Why the hurry? It is because the new MMRD

Act to be taken up by Parliament in the current session, compels competitive

bidding but exempts existing applicants from the provisions of competitive

bidding. Hence, the need to preempt the operation of the law.

60 million tonnes of steel capacity will require 3000 million tonnes of

iron ore valued at 15 lakh crores [15 trillion rupees, or 300 billion US dollars] 

at current international prices. The benefit of the iron ore will go to the steel 

producers and the private miners and the true owners of the mine-the people- 

will have to make do with the pittance of royalty of 1.5 %. These resources are of the value of over

15 lakh crores at current prices and belong to the people of the country and

cannot be made over to the likes of Mittals, Posco etc on payment of 1.5%

of market value as royalty. It will be a total betrayal of public trust

mentioned in the abovementioned judgment of the Supreme Court. It cannot be

the case of liberalization that when people buy steel capitalistic

principles are applied and they are made to pay international price, but

when the capitalist requires raw material socialistic principles are applied

and they are given the iron ore for almost free. It is pertinent to note

that no steel producers except TISCO, SAIL,JSPL, JSW Steel (in part through

MML a PSU) have captive mines and the rest of the producers purchase their

iron ore from NMDC and some of the private mine holders.. The NMDC price is

30 to 40% cheaper than international price. In spite of the purchase of iron

ore from NMDC, the steel manufacturers make substantial profits because

steel price is linked to international price and price has been decontrolled

and removed from the list of items on essential commodity list. Essar Steel

has steel capacity of over 5 million tonnes, purchases ore from NMDC and

makes substantial profit. If the iron ore is nationalized then the steel

production will not suffer on account of paucity of iron ore. It is a bogey

that the steel producers who have sighed MOUs with various State governments

- Madhu Khoda style- will raise against nationalization (apart from the

usual foreign investment will suffer) because of their MOUs for captive

mines. There will be no scarcity of iron ore because SAIL and Tata Steel,

JSPL and JSW Steel (in part) account for 25 million steel production for

which they have captive mines. NMDC current capacity of 30 to 35 million

tonnes of iron ore is sufficient to take care of another 20 million tonnes

of steel capacity which leaves a deficit of iron ore for around 10 million

tonnes. Steel production of six million tonnes is from scrap, imported and

domestic. The balance ore for 5 million tonnes can be easily provided from

the mines taken over by the government as these mines produce over 100

million tonnes of iron ore and the balance exported for profits to the

government. On economic consideration alone there is a strong case for

nationalization of the iron ore industry. The legal and the constitutional

consideration make it obligatory, more so when you are the chief trustee for

the mineral wealth.

However, it is the political consideration which should be of the greatest

concern to the Congress government. The BJP has reportedly amassed a war

chest of 10,000 crores for the next election through its rule in the mine

rich states and proposes to spend 30 crores in each of 300 constituency. For

thirty crores, three lac votes can be purchased at the rate of Rs 1000/vote

and with 7-8 lakh votes cast per constituency it will be victory for the BJP

and curtains for the Congress. Unfortunately it is the survival of the

corruptest. (sorry for the word which does not exist in the English

dictionary for obvious reason). The manner in which the valuable mineral

resources have been plundered in various states is the greatest economic

scandal of India which includes the period under which it was under colonial

rule. The British had to conquer the country to exploit its mineral resources, the

present day robber barons have to merely pay a small bribe to do so (refer

Madhu Khoda). It may be considered inappropriate to point out to the

greatest living Indian economist of our times, that the situation in India

is no different than that of African nations which are resource rich nations

with poor people. Should we then derive satisfaction from the fact that the

developmental index for eight of our states - mostly mineral rich states- is

worse than the 22 nations of Africa for similar reasons? 

I, therefore beseech you to do right by the people and the constitution

of the country and takeover all the iron ore mines in the private sector.

If you will not do it, who will?

Like the bank nationalization, it will be your legacy to the nation for

which the coming generation will be grateful.

With sincere regards

Arun Kumar Agrawal

([email protected])

HOW TO DESTROY YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM THROUGH OVER-MEDICATION

No, this is not a little disquisition on human physiology. 

In his farewell speech in 1961, US President Eisenhower warned against the insidious influence of what he called the "military-industrial complex" (on the advice of his staff, he abandoned his original intention of calling it the "military-industrial-congressional complex"). Not only have his warnings obviously fallen on deaf years in the nearly fifty years that have passed, but the military-industrial complex has now grown in size and scope to include the congress (as Eisenhower already feared), think tanks, universities, media, and now, as the Washington Post has revealed, also the intelligence. 

In the last ten years, according to this Washington Post report, the so-called "war on terror"has now spawned a self-reinforcing and self-justifying intelligence industry with no accountability, no reality checks, and no quality control - just like the so-called "defence" contractors and private military and intelligence firms that have fattened themselves, often on on no-bid contracts, from the boundless opportunities for killing and destruction. If ever you needed evidence to see how utterly futile, counterproductive and self-destructive the so-called War on Terror has turned out to be, this is it. 

Now that no one seems to know what the heck is going on, no one is responsible for the big picture, or connecting the myriad dots into some sort of pattern, what is to prevent one of the private contractors from starting its own false flag operation, or from purveying intelligence deliberately designed to promote a self-aggrandizing agenda? It's not as if there are no connections between some of these contractors and the most extreme political forces in the US, including some who see themselves as bringing forward the second coming of the Messiah. Think Dick Cheney with KBR, Erik Prince with Blackwater/XE...doubtless there are others I am not aware of. Besides, it's very likely that the loose networking and the information overload will allow in just those firms and individuals who are likely to have such an extreme agenda. 

So, after spending billions trying very hard to (over)protect themselves, the US government now probably feels more threatened than ever - according to the FICKLE logic described by Ray McGovern in his analysis of the intelligence snake-pit in which the US government finds itself. 

Why do I worry about this? Because India boasts of a special alliance with the US, which ties its fortunes to the fate of the US. Now another partner in the eternal war on terror wants to muscle in and create another "special relationship" with India. Almost the entire British cabinet is soon coming to India, and will be feted and dined by the country's business celebrities. But what are they coming for? According to The Telegraph: 

Cameron hopes to secure contracts worth £1 billion (Rs 7,200 crore) for the British defence industry. His team will seek to press British interests in India’s $11-billion (Rs 51,364 crore), 126-aircraft fighter procurement contest.

Six manufacturers are in the running for the lucrative deal, with EADS, the consortium that includes British aerospace company BAe Systems, offering the Eurofighter Typhoon jet. Britain also hopes to sell India 57 more hawk jet trainers, in a deal worth £500 million (Rs 3,600 crore), in addition to the 66 fighters BAe is already contracted to provide.

So much more urgent to keep the killing machine well-fed than fighting the genocidal levels of deprivation and poverty that "shining India" now manages to register! This is a small indication that India is likely to go down the same self-destructive path as its partners and allies like the US and the UK of devoting more and more resources desperately needed elsewhere in feeding the killing machine. Feeling safer already? 

There will still be people who will deride my thinking as simple-minded, soft-headed, or bleeding-hearted. The next terrorist attack from across the border, they will claim, will not induce hysterical demands for opening new schools or for feeding the hungry, but for bombing the country that sent the terrorists back to the stone age. In the present climate of self-induced paranoia, they will probably sound convincing. But they will fail to convince anyone by their arguments - if they have any - that their allegedly more "realistic" solution of continuing to throw billions into the bottomless pit of the war in terror now will make us any more secure in the future, let alone bring about a world we would all want our children and grand-children to live in. 

So...to return to the medical metaphor suggested in the title...have we already medicated ourselves beyond repair? Ultimately, there is no there is no better way to build long-term immunity against terrorism than to disinvest from the industries of destruction, and re-invest in rebuilding vibrant, creative and dignified societies in which everyone has a stake: through promoting learning and creativity, improving public health, protecting the environment, rebuilding the infrastructure, creating jobs for those who can work, and a support system that ensures that people who can't are still able to live in dignity and with respect as members of society. What's more, there is every indication that we are running out of time to adopt this solution. But governments will not do it by themselves: they are mostly the doctors who have been prescribing the wrong medicines because they stand to gain from our helplessness and dependency. It is for people to draw on their instincts for survival to either change their governments, or opt out of the systems that keep us scared, angry and hungering for peace and justice. 

BINAYAK SEN WARNS OF AN IMPENDING GENOCIDE

Dr. Binayak Sen has recently been touring the country, speaking to various audiences about a problem that has kept him pre-occupied for a number of years - the problem of chronic hunger and malnutrition, which has become more widespread since 1991, and has reached what Binayak regards (using UN criteria and definitions) as potentially genocidal proportions for vulnerable sections of the people, such as scheduled castes and tribes. They are related to a more recent concern of his since his release on bail: to highlight the need for a peaceful resolution to the problem of maoist and state violence. 

The problem of the enforced displacement of the most vulnerable people in terms of chronic hunger is seen at its most acute in districts like Dantewada in Chhattisgarh. This displacement has been taking place for some time - earlier under the Salwa Judum movement, now under the military Operation Green Hunt, ostensibly to combat maoist guerillas who have managed to establish bases among the tribal communities and instituted their own forms of governance in defiance of the state. Apparently it is not a coincidence that the most violent displacements have been occurring where international and domestic mining and mineral corporations have been interested in setting up operations.

In an interview with Norman Swan of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at the time of his keynote address to an international symposium at CMC Vellore, Binayak speaks at length about his confluent concerns about displacement and hunger. He also reports on his still continuing trial, and the effect of his two year ordeal on his personal life.

SOME THOUGHTS ON "MORAL EQUIVALENCE"

Human rights activists have often been taken to task by media commentators, government officials and ministers, and even members of the chat-show public, for being equivocal - or seeming to be - in condemning maoist violence, even while the activists condemn state violence. What seems to annoy these people the most is that almost always, the activists' condemnation of maoist violence appears to be phrased with qualifications. "Of course, we certainly condemn maoist violence," activists often say, adding, "But you have to see this in the context of the violence- especially the structural violence - of the state."

At this point, the activists are accused of slyly approving or morally justifying maoist violence by suggesting that state violence could provide an explanatory context for it. Furthermore, activists are accused of creating a "moral equivalence" between the state security forces and the maoists by demanding that maoist violence be "seen in the context of " state violence. Two commentators accuse activists of creating a moral equivalence "between the damage chemotherapy causes and the cancer it treats".

But what does this term "moral equivalence" really mean? Apparently, this term originates from the title of William James's 1910 essay The Moral Equivalent of War. Not having read this essay, I can't quite grasp the connection between the title of the essay and the way the phrase "moral equivalence" is used. But more helpful perhaps is Jeane Kirkpatrick's use of the term in attacking critics of US foreign policy for seeing "no moral difference" between the the actions of the Soviet Union and those of the US government. Applying this sense to the Indian debate between human rights activists and their critics on the issue of maoist violence vs. state violence, it is easy to see what the critics mean: that the activists see "no moral difference" between maoists and the Indian state in the way each side deploys violence in the furtherance of their aims, when in fact there are several moral differences (at least according to the critics of human rights activists)

1. The state is assumed to be in a morally superior position because it is supposed to enjoy a legitimate monopoly on violence. The maoists on the other hand usurp the right to use violence in furtherance of their supposedly heinous end - the overthrow of the Indian state.

2. The state's actions are supposed to be based on the constitution and the rule of law, whereas the maoists reject as oppressive both the constitution and the rule of law that it defines.

3. The state is supposed to have the backing of the demos, expressed through the electoral process. The maoists have refused to engage in electoral politics. Where they do enjoy support, it is sometimes exacted through coercion and fear, and sometimes earned through winning hearts and minds by exploiting the disaffection of their supporters with the agencies of the state, and sometimes through a combination of both.

Against these arguments, it is necessary to note a few others.

a. The state monopoloy of violence often loses legitimacy when it is exercised with little regard for proportionality, for the dignity of the victims, or when it fails to distinguish between innocent bystanders and active threats. The state often deploys its violence in a manner that forces people to turn to the state's opponents for protection from the state. The state's violence thus turns the alleged cure (or 'chemotherapy') into the catalyst for the cancer by encouraging its rapid spread. In the relatively rare cases when the forces of justice and accountability kick in, it takes years for the guilty to be punished, or for the victims to obtain redress. 'Justice delayed is justice denied' is a trite shibboleth that has apparently been forgotten by those responsible for the administration of justice in India, but realized everyday by those are meant to receive justice. It's possible to argue that the state might commit mistakes occasionally in the heat of the moment. But the patent inability of the state to learn from its mistakes - despite National Human Rights Commissions, comissions of inquiry into actual incidents, and the continued recording by human rights organizations of acts of state criminality -  suggests that the criminality of the state is not an aberration, but a structural feature.

b. I have argued earlier that the state's legitimate monopoly on violence - however necessary it might seem - needs to be exercised with the greatest care to prevent it from degenerating into a monopoly on criminal behaviour. In the case of the Indian state, this care seems to be largely absent. So what we have in, for example, Operation Green Hunt, is a state deploying public funds to violently suppress one group of its citizens - usually the most economically vulnerable and socially and politically the least powerful - whose rights under the Constitution are being violated in order to satisfy the desires of another, far more economically and politically powerful, group of citizens.

c. The state's agents are in a sense even more culpable for any criminal behaviour they engage in than the maoists, precisely because their actions need to be held to a higher standard of legality than that of criminals. The state is supposed to be an upholder of the law and a protector of the citizen. It cannot be claimed in defence of the state that the protection of the citizen from the criminal requires criminal action.

d. Far from asserting that there is no moral difference between maoists and the state, human rights activists are in fact insisting on the precise opposite: that the state - by virtue of its basis in the popular will, as well as by having its actions defined by reference to laws - has, except in the most extreme cases when it is itself under attack (such as in Mumbai last November), the obligation of not engaging in criminal behaviour while protecting citizens. Precisely for the reasons outlined in 1-3 above, human rights activists insist that there is, and should be, a normative difference between the state and the terrorists it fights against. This difference is eliminated when the state engages in indiscriminate criminal behaviour.

Critics of human rights activists, on the other hand, seem to be willing to accept all state actions as legitimate and morally justified if they rid society of terrorists and criminals, irrespective of the context or circumstance. It is the critics, therefore, who are drawing an illicit normative equivalence between the terrorist/criminal and the state by insisting that the best way for the state to deal with terrorists is to become terroristic itself. In practice, as I have tried to argue here, there is no moral equivalence, nor should there be.

THE LEGITIMATE CRIMINALITY OF THE STATE?

In the various discussions on the violence of the maoists that I have viewed on Indian TV, one red line that is never crossed is the unquestioned and unquestionable monopoly of the state on violence. This monopoly is supposed to be legitimate and exercised on behalf of the citizens, even if most citizens are unaware of it. Citizens who would not normally grant legitimacy to individuals to exact retribution by murder or torture are perfectly content to allow the state to make a virtue out of extrajudicial torture or killings. In the frighteningly short span of time since terrorism was inserted by supposedly democratic states and their supposedly free media into the public discourse in an attempt to drum up support for an all-out war on terrorism, citizens in democracies have become inured to states attacking entire countries on the basis of wholly manufactured suspicions, or to kidnapping innocent suspects for torture to extract information, or to attacking and killing civilians in supposedly friendly countries by means of remotely controlled drones in attempts to execute suspected terrorists. They are even prepared to remain silent in the face of the whittling away of constitutional rights guaranteed since the Magna Carta - such as a presumption of innocence till guilt is established in an open court in a fair trial, or the right of habeus corpus if arrested. The old rules are supposed to have changed. Democracies are supposed to be fighting a new kind of war, where the enemy the terrorist does not have any regard for life or for traditional rules of war, and recognizes no restraints on the taking of human life. In such a world - say the pundits of the war on terror - it makes sense to preserve democracies by sacrificing a little of the democratic freedoms in whose name the war on terror is being fought - part of the regrettable but inevitable collateral damage of this war.

Citizens in supposedly democratic countries need to become much more careful about what exactly they are signing up for when they implicitly grant the state a monopoly on violence. Unwittingly and implicitly, they not only grant the state the power to exercise violence on their behalf, but also against themselves. And since - at least initally - the state needs to preserve the figleaf of democratic legitimacy, openness and accountability in the exercise of violence, the legitimate monopoly of violence also demands a great deal more: a legitimate (but not necessarily monopolistic) right to opacity, deception and mendacity. Only occasionally do state criminals receive the punishment that is due under the law, long after the commission of the crime. Taken together with deception, mendacity and opacity, the state monopoly on violence amounts to the acceptance of a legitimate monopoly on criminality. What would be regarded as criminal behaviour among ordinary citizens becomes slightly less so when engaged in by corporate entities like companies, and is increasingly accepted as the justifiable and even virtuous protection of the national interest when the criminal is the state. And since the criminal actions of the state are usually beyond the legal reach of democratic scrutiny, there are rarely any means of knowing when the state has turned into a criminal enterprise, apart from tell-tale signs and anecdotal evidence. Why do citizens need to know this in advance, and not after it has happened? Because they need to arrest the growth of criminality before it becomes an irresistible force, as it has in Pakistan.

I may have created an impression in the foregoing that states start out clean, and only become secretly criminal in the rough and tumble of conducting the affairs of state. There may be good reason to believe that the reality is historically worse than that. I suspect a thorough study may reveal that at least some states were originally criminal enterprises that captured enough power to function as a protector, and over time societies may have evolved systems of laws to keep this genetic criminality in check. It may be that Mafia-like protection rackets are actually proto-states, as the maoists are demonstrating in those areas they control with impunity. Even if the state were not a originally a criminal enterprise, it had none of the attributes of wisdom and neutrality that people normally ascribe to a state. Take the Indian state. After 1947, what did Indian politicians do? Simply take over the instruments and structures of the colonial state that Indians fought for years to eject, change a few words, phrases and symbols, and introduce new commitments to democracy and public welfare that have seldom been taken seriously since they were written into the Constitution. The basic structures and mechanisms that allowed the colonial state to oppress its subjects remained largely in place, including the Penal Code of 1860. Would a more thoroughoing revision of the basic framework have dispensed with the legitimate monopoly on violence? Probably not, but many more safeguards would have been in place that allowed the state to deal with internal and external challenges to security without permanently undermining liberty or criminalizing the innocent. This does not mean that the freedom movement was entirely in vain. It certainly was not for the elites who took the places vacated by the British. But it's useful to recall how quickly it became apparent to the masses after 1947 that very little had changed in the terms of how much influence they had on the actual governance of the country, despite the power to elect their own oppressors, fraudsters and criminals, and occasionally, their own representative.

Citizens normally grant the state the exclusive right to exercise violence on their behalf, because they assume - with little thought - that this violence is necessary for their own security and well-being. This makes sense when the state is protecting its citizens from external attack, and especially when such attack is unprovoked. But what happens when the state ends up exercising violence on a section of its own citizens, supposedly to protect the interest of the entire nation? Or (to take the familiar US example) when the state engages in criminal operations abroad without the knowledge or permission of its citizens, who are later surprised when the criminality of their state "blows back" in their face?

Take, for instance, what is happening now in India with the civil war over natural resources, presented by the government and the media as a war against so-called maoists. Some citizens feel entitled to choose modes of well-being that depend on the violation of the well-being of other citizens, such as when forests and other natural resources need to be destroyed for mining, dams, roads, electricity generation and other infrastructure. This involves the wholesale, often violent removal of adivasis and others of the poorest and most powerless sections of our citizens from their traditional habitats. Furthermore, when they resist this violation - whether with violence or without - they are regarded as being anti-national or anti-development, as if all citizens subscribed to the same concept of national development.

The resistance of the destitute to further deprivation has become easier to present as a violent challenge to the state because of the rejuvenation of an armed peasant insurrection that was brutally suppressed in the 1970's. This movement lay dormant these past four decades in the forests of the most mineral-rich regions of the country, and has managed to successfully impose its leadership on the resistance of the deprived, by taking advantage of the colossal failure of the state to govern, or to learn any useful lessons from past resistance movements of peasants and adivasis. In its most active areas, this insurgency - now calling itself maoist - constitutes an alternative state bringing to the adivasis and poor peasants its own brutal version of justice, along with occasional rudimentary social services, and protection from the unwelcome attentions of the police and revenue officials, where formerly there was little other than the arbitrary violence and exploitation of the state. The maoists have been known to be unsparing and brutal in spreading terror both among people seen to represent the state, or people, including adivasis, suspected of collaboration with the state. Beyond the fact that they ultimately intend to capture state power, no one knows for certain what their vision of the good society is. They too, in their own way, claim a monopoly on violence in areas they control.

The term 'blowback' has been used in the US to refer to the unintended consequences of violent intervention by the US government in other countries, when the victims commit their own terrorism in US soil. 9/11 was the most dramatic example among many others. In India, we may be facing an internal blowback in the recrudescence of the maoist insurrection. Why Naxals, and why now? By brutally suppressing the naxalite insurrection in the 1970's, the state felt - mistakenly, as it turns out - that they had solved the problems that gave rise to the insurrection itself. Many commentators rightly trace it to lack of "development" and the failure of governance, but still seem unable to to make sense of this, and plaintively ask: why are they against development? Instead, what they should be asking is: what does development mean for them? And what options and stake do they have in our system of development? The fact is that what the Indian elite and middle classes have understood by development has offered very little by way of a viable stake to the masses.

This is what is happening in our country right now: One section of citizens feels entitled to flourish and prosper at the expense of another. The land, rivers, forests, lakes and other common property resources that made up the environment and source of livelihood of the second group now need to be appropriated even more aggressively than before by corporations to sustain the livelihoods, life-styles and wealth of the first. The fact that there are constitutional protections for the second group of citizens means nothing: contrast the tardiness and reluctance with which the state implements the fifth schedule to the Constitution, or the Directive Principles, with the speed with which laws are passed and implemented that enable SEZ's, set up MOU's, pass anti-terror legislation removing the most elementary democratic rights and allows the state to re-conceptualize any resistance to corporate resource-grabbing as terrorism, and implement other investor-friendly measures. In this, the entire legitimate criminal apparatus of the state is deployed to protect the interests of the elites and associated middle classes.

This is actually part of a larger pattern in which the state and its machinery is much more active and enabling when the interests of the rich and the powerful are concerned: contrast the relative neglect of public housing, public transportation, public security, public education and public health, with the efficiency, relative freedom from regulation and the huge scale of investment that enables the private sector in these areas to flourish while meeting the needs for housing, transportation, security, education, health and infrastructure for the tenuously prosperous middle classes and the more securely wealthy elites in our country. And compare how speedily the the state intervenes with its security forces and intelligence bureaus - i.e. its instruments of legitimate criminality - to protect the interests of the elite and middle classes, through measures such as Salwa Judum or Operation Green Hunt, compared to efficiently administering justice against real criminals when the victims are the poorest and the least powerful among the faceless "public". 

Indian democracy seems to be caught in a grim and seemingly unresolvable paradox: We need the guardianship of the state, but we also need to watch the guardians keenly. How does the public exercise control over the state's legitimate instruments of criminality so that they do not turn into full-fledged criminal enterprises?  Indians need to pinch themselves out of their complacency by looking at the suffering of our Pakistani neighbours and imagining their own potential future. It's true that our institutions are much stronger, and that the role of our military is still controlled by civilian authority. But part of the way that terrorism succeeds is by turning the instruments of liberal democracy against itself. It starts slowly, with corruption and venality gradually pervading all the state institutions, ensuring that their services are allocated to the highest bidder. In other words, the protectors of the public masses turn into defenders of private elite interests. When discontent reaches a sufficiently high pitch, the disaffected organize chaos through bombings and murders, through gangs and assassins. The country comes to the boil as the liberal democratic state turns into exactly what it claims to stand against. State terrorism and anti-state terorrism then compete against each other in a mutually self-reinforcing symbiosis.

How far down this road have we already travelled? Unless we are able to find peaceful resolutions to the range of problems that maoists and other extremists symptomatize, we are going to give an increasingly prominent role to our own legitimate criminals till they start operating free from civilian control in ways that we see in Pakistan. Remember, it almost happened in Punjab in the eighties and nineties before we managed to pull away from the brink. It's happening right now in Kashmir and the North-East, and in those states where maoism is rampant. We take state criminality for granted in a way that we do not for ordinary criminality. We know that the laws of the land exist to bring ordinary criminals to justice, even if in practice the laws may work only very imperfectly. But this assurance of the protection does not exist in the case of legitimate state criminality, because the expectation generally does not exist that the state may behave criminally for the public good. Therefore the need for extraordinary vigilance against state criminality is scarcely ever felt as urgently as it should be.

Apart from the slippery slope down which the legitimate monopoly of the state on criminality can take the country, there is another argument that needs to be considered: What would the defender of the state's monopoly on violence do if he or his family were to be attacked by state security forces? Presumably run away, protect himself or his family, or fight back - exactly what the adivasis are doing. But I would love to see him stand up defending the right of the state to exercise violence on his family. This might seem like an ad hominem attack on the defenders of the state monopoly on criminality, but it is not. I am merely suggesting that the concept of the state's monopoly on criminality may seem a necessary abstraction, but in practice it remains highly problematic. The practical problem remains the difficult one of how to constrain it, especially when the temptation to resort to it is the strongest, i.e., during times of political strife and stress. Our country has faced many terrorist attacks in the past, and will probably continue to face them in the future. How can we remain a democracy if we grant immunity and impunity to the legitimate criminals we have employed to protect us? The only permanent safeguard is a fair and speedy system of justice, and building a society based on values of social justice, equal human dignity and equal opportunity. Free market capitalism, unrestrained as it is by notions of social justice and incompatible with it, is inconsistent in the long run with democracy, peace and social justice. Which is precisely why state criminality is so necessary (and therefore 'legitimate') in free market democracies. The freer the market, the more the state needs its armoury of criminality.

Instead of taking such a dim view of legitimate state criminality performing its traditional mandate of protecting the elites against the uppity people, there may be another more "benign" way of seeing this: as a kind of Blairite public-private partnership. The private provisioning of essential services to the elites can be protected from the deprived and ignorant herd at public expense by the legitimate exercise of state criminality. If we can take an appropriately Brahma-like view of time and calmly absorb as the inevitable cost of progress the visions of a few burnt out villages, a few hundreds or thousands of broken, battered bodies each year, of people who will never know what killed them, or why...then there is no need to subtract the screams of burning mothers and their gasping children from the gains of gleaming trains, punctual airports and six-lane highways.

Perhaps in some not too distant future, we will enter a new phase of our politics when the Indian polity will be seen as a contestable market for the service of governance. Each political party could be regarded as a GSP (governance service provider). A coalition or cartel of GSP's could agree to share governance services in a variety of sectors - health, education, internal security, infrastructure, etc. to avail of economies of scale and information. But the competition between different monopolistic GSP's could always have room for the smaller, more agile and low-cost players such as the kind we now call maoists whose USP will always ensure their success in a niche market consisting of adivasis, dalits and poor peasants.

As the Koda scam illustrates, the resources for such GSP's could come from a variety of different channels. Instead of salting away the bribes from the mining companies into tax shelters all over the world, Koda should have set up private security firms like Blackwater or Executive Outcomes, besides investing in his own infrastructural and other enterprises. In fact, Koda would seem to have been a brilliant tax collector! He could even have created his own GSP for the benefit of the companies that paid him. The adivasis too could have been protected by the maoists more effectively, as the Koda revelations show that they too might be turning into another criminal enterprise with the resources to break the monopoly of the state. Perhaps we should not be speaking of criminal enterprises any more, but the markets for various GSP's.

"Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake!"

 

NITIN, ARE YOU READING THIS?

I have been following the debate on Acorn on the absent voter in the Indian elections. Those who insist that voting is a civic duty (and I agree that it is, but would assert that the conditions do not exist to make it meaningful) have yet to answer the question: How does voting for the least worst candidate between a bunch of thugs and goons help create the conditions for demanding greater accountability, responsiveness and transparency?

Dr. Binayak Sen's case is relevant here. Because he publicly criticized the approach of the Chhattisgarh government in dealing with the problem of maoist terror, he has been in jail for the last two years, despite the fact that (a) there is no difference between the argument he was making and that made by the Chief Justice of India; and (b) that in two years, despite more than eighty odd witnesses, the state has yet to establish its case. This is the BJP's idea of governance: pass a law which criminalizes peaceful public dissent, then throw the dissenters into jail, then throw away the key. Never mind Binayak's record of service to people neglected by everyone else, including the state. Never mind his public advocacy of the due process of law and of clean elections. His problem has been that he was critical of the ugly underbelly of the BJP's style of governance - funding civilians to function as security forces, human rights abuses, neglect of public health and education (to name just a few issues).

The questions of developing institutional mechanisms for fostering the four key P A R Ts of democracy (Participation of civil society in governance and decision-making (not just in elections once in five years), Accountability of the state to the people for its actions, Responsiveness of the state to the needs of the people, and Transparency of all processes of governance to the people who are affected by those processes) are too complex to be settled by means of a vote once in five years. What mechanisms exist for a vigilant citizenry playing an active role in public life? Carefully designed disincentives may discourage abstentions, but may still fail to encourage active participation beyond casting votes. Votes have to be seen to be meaningful, in a sense that has been brought out by this comment from Bobcat in the Acorn discussion:

There is a fundamental flaw in your analysis. You seem to believe that change happens when more people go to the polling booth to vote. There is no good reason to believe that. For one thing, the balance of power between urban and rural areas is dependant on the number of seats falling in each category which in turn is decided primarily by the size of the population in each, not the size of the voting population. So regardless of whether the turnout is 40% or 70%, the number of MLAs/MPs elected from either type of setting will be the same and their ability to influence the political arithmetic too will therefore stay unaltered.

You are right that by exercising their franchise, people can make a difference as to who wins from the constituency. But more people voting will only make a difference if an important condition is satisfied: increased voter turnout is a sign of specific voter expectations that are apparent to politicians and in turn, politicians/parties are distinguishable from one another in some way that makes this difference in voter turnout significant for some politicians/parties but not others. In an election such as the present one without significant issues, there is no telling how those who stayed home would have voted had they ventured to the booth. So loss of the additional 30% or so of voters may very well mean a general loss for all contestants and no particular loss for any single candidate or party. That leaves higher public participation no more effective than lower participation.

But these subtlelties seem to have been lost on other Acorn commenters.

So leaving serious discussion aside, let us read this hilarious comment on the same subject from Mayank Tiwari on the DNA Blog, making the same serious point with greater humour than I can muster (but can only appreciate).

They'll get you! You non-voting naxal
Sunday, May 3, 2009 4:46 IST

Dear Reader,

I am humbled.

Newspapers published detailed articles about the documents you need to have to be able to prove your identity and vote; we explained how the electronic voting machine works, (though they have been around for more than a decade now); we asked you for your opinions and the issues that are close to your heart. Hundreds of hours of sponsored television news debates and talk shows and live reports poured down the tube everyday, but you didn't vote!

Instead you showed us how passive aggressive you are!

Who are you Dear Reader?

Are you a naxal? Well, I think you are.

In India, the middle classes have no constitutional right to boredom or disgust with the system. They are too well fed for that.

The Naxals are the only people who have a right to boredom and disgust with the system (they have earned this right after four decades; the government denies this; says the right was stolen; dispute is on). So if you're bored and disgusted with the system and express it by not voting, then you have to be a naxal. Nothing else explains your behaviour.

You are as much a naxal as Dr Binayak Sen. Okay now don't be all coy. You know who he is. Like you, he is a sympathizer currently lodged in Raipur Jail, waiting to be tried for something that you too, dear reader, one day will be held guilty of --- talking too loudly about a democratic government failing its people.

Surprised? You thought we wouldn't catch on?

Dear Reader, I am no alien to your capricious ways, your sudden need for excitement, your false pretence of boredom; I have seen enough of you. But being in Mumbai only a few months and having seen you in droves holding candles at the gateway monument after 26/11, I confess, I fell into the 'times-they are-a-changing' trap.

And then, maybe a month or so before the D-D day, the incessant drone of the idiot box and the newspapers and the radio and the hoardings took over. Like most papers the DNA too ran campaigns (thankfully we didn't have leadership contests) exhorting you to exercise the one right that appears to be a notch higher than the right to life and liberty. But like a drunken elephant, you refused to move. The middle class is the same everywhere, I guess.

I am aware of your naxal leanings, Dear Reader; make no mistakes. And let me tell you, the government knows that too. They know how much you hate their lot. They know how desperate you are for a system overhaul and they are going to get you! You could have fooled them by keeping appearances and voting. But you did nothing. You showed us how 58 per cent of the voting population, (all of them middle class, secretly naxal, English speaking, anal retentive), can shake up the largest democracy in the world simply by doing nothing. But you haven't shaken anything, let us be clear on that point. You think too highly of yourself, Dear Reader, and you shall pay the price of being a tad too clever for your own good.

What's worse, you and your naxal agenda has been exposed.

The government doesn't need the intelligence bureau to figure out that unlike rural areas, where Naxals have to be physically present to stall the electoral process by violence, the naxal ideas are so deep rooted in urban centres like Mumbai, especially in the middle class pockets, that one doesn't need guns to get people to not vote.

As you read this, Dear Reader, someone somewhere, is making a list of all the times you've gotten drunk and wanted a dictatorship in the country. All the times you've secretly shared your frustrations with the political leadership with friends or colleagues and all the times you've dreamt of slapping a politician on a podium the way Sanjay Dutt slapped Paresh Rawal in Mahesh Bhatt's Kabza.

FYI, Dear Reader, the government may not be able to get you to vote, but it can prove that you're a naxal. The case may take a while to build, but rest assured, it would take less time than the Bandra-Worli sea link. (Visit www.binayaksen.net to know more)

And then, when you're incarcerated for talking too much, you'll have no one to blame, but yourself. No one will raise a voice for you, you middle-class naxal. Even your neighbours won't sign your bail bond (not that you're offence will be bailable in the first place).

You will sign affidavit after affidavit saying all you ever did was do your job but no one will believe you. You will ask your captors where in the world is a simple tax paying citizen a radical communist and they will point to the heart of India on the map.

Dear reader, slowly you will learn how important appearances are. Maybe the solitude of the cell will teach you how to play the game of the happy family in the largest democracy of the world.

Hopefully, the import of what I am saying now will slowly trickle in later. You will realize that in these times of hyper nationalism a naxal is not defined by who he is but by who he is not: a yes man in a capitalist democracy.

Please let me know what you think.

Sincerely,

Mayank

DOES VOTING CHANGE ANYTHING?

Head over to Nitin Pai's  Acorn to read the debate on why we should (or should not) vote.

I have much sympathy with the arguments by commenter TTG, despite his belief in that mythical entity he calls the "free" market.

Why on earth should people go on voting to sustain the pretence that we have a democracy? Well, look at how the BJP and assorted political pundits were caught completely by surprise by the electoral verdict in the 2004 elections. Wasn't that a brilliant example of democracy in action?

It was a brilliant example of elections in action. But what changed for the people who voted the BJP out? Chandra Babu Naidu was chosen Best Chief Minister by the great pundits at India Today right before the elections, where he was trounced convincingly by his rivals in the Congress. But what improved for the people who voted in the Congress? Not much! For the comfortable classes too, not much changed in the way the benefits of our system are routinely captured by them.

Not voting can also amount to expressing a political opinion - not just apathy. The opinion is that the democracy that we have is corrupt and desperately needs to change, before it can properly function to reflect the will of the people. But Pai and company would have us play the role of the useful idiot voter, so that the illusion that we are a democracy is sustained.

The other reason why the urban elite don't vote is also that they don't need to, precisely because the system is designed to take care of their interests through extra-parliamentary processes. Elections are like travelling by train - it is the only alternative for those who use it. Like the vast Indian railway system, which is generally not designed for speed and comfort, but gets passengers and goods to their destinations somehow,  the similarly vast Indian electoral system has many flaws, but does its job of reflecting the opinion of the politically powerless in the only legal way available to them. The only way the powerless in cities and villages of India can show their power is by voting. That is why they have displayed such faith in it, although how long they will continue to do so is an open question. The urban middle classes know better: the system is rigged to work for them, no matter who votes for which party. So why bother to vote?

The only signs of a democracy we have in our country are elections, but their credibility is undermined by rigging in some parts of the country (especially in West Bengal where over the last thirty-two years, it has been carried to a fine art by the con artists that constitute the parliamentary left wing in the country now). We also have a relatively free press, partly undermined by attempts to silence journalists who try and publish the truth. But we will never have a functioning democracy until we have a state that looks upon itself as the servant of the citizens that elect it to power. To exercise the power of government as the agent and trustee of the citizens, institutional mechanisms need to be devised that will promote the four PARTs of democracy - Participation of civil society in governance and decision-making (not just in elections once in five years), Accountability of the state to the people for its actions, Responsiveness of the state to the needs of the people, and Transparency of all processes of governance to the people who are affected by those processes. These four PARTs are currently either absent or utterly weak.

The changes that our democracy requires will not be brought in by the present crop of politicians, or through the ballot box, until the entire electoral system is reformed. I have said this before, and will do so again: we need a second non-violent independence movement for legal and constitutional reform. This time the struggle needs to be for independence from the criminals, thugs and the corporate and military interests that run our country, and who the Nitin Pais of the world insist are the only alternatives we have.  Of course, a second freedom movement, will not automatically solve anything. No system can be guaranteed to be perfect. But how - except through a political movement - can we get the reforms in the Constitution that are requred to prevent the abuses which are now rampant?

"LET THE LAW TAKE ITS OWN COURSE"

Eight months ago, I wrote a longish comment on the desire of some people to "Let the law takes its course" in the case of Dr. Binayak Sen. It was actually motivated by the preference expressed by certain liberal bloggers for a kind of business-as-usual politics.

Today, I see a much angrier comment saying much the same thing from one Gian Inder Singh on World Sikh News, published under the title  "A Search for An Awakened Soul - Justice & the Indian Middle Class".

Singh has forcefully shown how people who express their blind faith in Indian law and justice - mostly the privileged middle class that almost never has to face violations of human rights and justice that routinely occur in full view of the courts - are in fact blind to its politics, either wilfully or through naivete. He notes that the recent spurt of middle class South Bombay political activism a la Meera Sanyal owes its sudden birth and angry media presence to the terrorist outrage on 26 November, yet it has remained unmoved by the far more numerous deaths of farmers in the same state of Maharashtra, or the thousands of people killed in communal riots in neighbouring Gujarat under the "Newtonian" ("every action will have its reaction") indifference of the super-efficient Modi, the same kind of indifference that was expressed in Rajiv Gandhi's musings about a great tree falling as Sikhs were being slaughtered in New Delhi in 1984. The activism of the Supreme Court, argues Singh, is - with few exceptions - very largely a middle class phenomenon aimed at protecting the interests and reflecting the values of the privileged Indian middle class ("well meaning, honest, beautiful people-like-us who want to do good"), the kind that "love the Nano and forget Singur".

For the Nano-loving, Singur-hating Indian middle class, the Supreme Court must stand above politics, and indeed does so, except in those regrettable and rare instances when it tries to protect the interests of what Walter Lippmann would have called the "bewildered herd". But of course, the Supreme Court reflects nothing so much as the values and attitudes of the Indian middle class: the class that is protected by its own prejudices against seeing the obscenity of a SBI ad campaign that urges a "Nano for every Indian" when "Per capita net availability of food grain has fallen dramatically among Indians since the reforms began: from 510 grams per Indian in 1991, to 422 grams by 2005."

As for those who, like the indefatigable P Sainath, plague our increasingly deadened national conscience, Singh sarcastically predicts that the state will have just one solution: "He can rot with Binayak Sen and both [can] discuss the interface between farm impoverishment, lack of land reforms and rise of naxalism."

The big surprise is that Singh's comment is also an admiring review of an unexpected source of criticism: O. Chinnappa Reddy's recently published "The Court and the Constitution of India - Summits and Shallows" (Delhi, OUP, 2008). Chinnappa was a former Supreme Court Judge, and also sat in the High Courts of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. For a former insider to publish criticism of the very system that raised him is a rare enough event, especially in the world of the judiciary, which is why the work must be taken with the utmost seriousness.

Read on....

A Search for An Awakened Soul - Justice & the Indian Middle Class
by Gian Inder Singh

One of the most meaningless phrases uttered in India at a frequency that is almost stupefying is that "the law will take its own course." It is only matched by the astonishing number of times another meaningless sound byte is delivered: "I have immense respect for the judiciary and the judicial system." Men who utter such words include Narendra Modi after Gujarat massacre, L K Advani after Babri demolition, Mulayam Singh and Amar Singh after CBI cases into their shady deals, Lalu Prasad Yadav after fodder scandal, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar as they keep dodging the law in court after court even 25 years after leading bloody mobs to kill, maim, burn Sikhs alive in the national capital.

The higher the court, the more pure their faith in the judicial system. So, the Supreme Court becomes the repository of all objectivity, justice and purest of motives. No wonder that men like Maninderjit Singh Bitta also hail their faith in the judicial system when utter miscarriage of justice is done in Prof Devinderpal Singh Bhullar case. One after the other gross violations of human rights happen right under the nose of India's Supreme Court, but the pretensions of India's ruling elite and the brahamanical Indian establishment about the faith in the judicial system remains ever so high.

The reason is simple. Any decision to recognize the warts is likely to lead to a serious engagement with the issue, and any serious engagement will bring out the hollowness of the sham that the Indian establishment has collectively come to put on when it comes to the ability and the inclination of the courts deliver justice.

When India's middle classes jump to their awakened conscience after 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, the judicial system too joins them. It suddenly awakens from slumber to find that terrorism is indeed a bad thing, and the mayhem involving the massacre of 180 innocent young men and women at five star hotels and a railway station was unacceptable. "Enough is enough," goes the war cry. The middle class-elite-English speaking-TV friendly people initially wanted the most simple of solutions: Attack Pakistan. Shorn of its frills, it said they have killed our innocent rich, let's kill their innocent poor. And in larger numbers.

Well meaning columnists suggested exporting terror. "We should do to Pakistan what Pakistan has done to us," they said. Forgetting that we are doing it to ourselves. Ajmal Kasab could not even buy new clothes, and he dithered into the world of terrorism. Large sections of India's population cannot even buy two square meals, and the apathy of the Indian state translates into what is shamelessly hidden in the umbrella term "naxalism".

But no, all of this does not awaken India's judiciary. The Supreme Court and the not so supreme courts, all sit tight as India goes on violating human rights. Unacceptable levels of poverty, unacceptable levels of malnutrition, unacceptable level of infant mortality rate, unacceptable numbers of farmers committing suicide, unacceptable number of boots in the Kashmir valley, unacceptable nature of atrocities in India's north east, unacceptable role of India in many of our neighbourhoods does not awaken the middle class or the Supreme Court.

But both respond to similar concerns. 26/11 jolts the middle class; 26/11 awakens the judiciary. See, whose interests have come to converge! The rulers, the middle class and the judiciary's concerns are converging, and converging fast. And one outcome of it all is a meaningless reiteration of a non-fact that the judiciary is always above politics, that the courts have nothing to do with politics and that politics per se is a bad word and a bad construct.

India's Supreme Court, and of course the larger judicial system, has singularly failed to recognize, concede or even engage with the fact that while politics is not about law, certainly not all about law, law is all about politics. It is okay to make great claims about objectivity and neutrality of the law off and on, but everywhere in evolved democracies, there is a clear recognition that politics does determine how our law and the idea of justice functions. Guantonamo Bay was not illegal, it was immoral. When it had to be shut down, it had become illegal because a different politics informed our understanding of such a monstrosity. At one time, the "war on terror" phrase had become the catchphrase for patriotism, now those who are bigger patriots and are recognised as such are banishing the phrase. Obviously, this is recognition that there is always politics attached to our actions. But Indian judicial system is extraordinarily thick-skinned to underline this.

As the great American judge Benjamin Cardozo had said: “The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass the judges by. The sooner we recognize this as a society, the better off we will be.”

But will India's Supreme Court ever muster up the courage to do so?

This is the Supreme Court that takes up cases of ban on polythene bag on suo moto basis, that hauls up politicians for their failure to stop someone from splashing paint on hill sides and calls it Rape of the Rocks, but it cannot stop the demolition of Babri mosque, it cannot take suo moto notice of the Sajjan Kumars and Tytlers, or of Narendra Modis or of rapist and murderer self-styled godman like Gurmeet Ram Rahim.

But off and on, one or the other good soul engages with these issues and puts India's judicial system to shame. The system that India's politicians and the ruling brahamanical elite love to praise. Who praises whom is always a good indicator of who serves whom. If the politicians praise the judicial system all the time, surely it is not serving the common man. It is this simple fact that the scintillating new book "The Court and the Constitution of India: Summits and Shallows" by O.Chinnappa Reddy (Oxford University Press) has brought out.

Reddy is the right man to intervene. He is an insider, a former judge of the Supreme Court of India (1978 to 1987) and he was a judge of the High Courts of Andhra Pradesh, and of the Punjab and Haryana prior to that. He is the youngest of the legendary quartet of Supreme Court judges (along with Justices V.R. Krishna Iyer, P.N. Bhagwati and D.A. Desai) who, some three decades ago, changed the course of India’s judicial and political history by seeking to radically transform the Court, in the words of Upendra Baxi in his brilliant foreword to this book, “from the Supreme Court of India into a Supreme Court for the Indian impoverished.”

Reddy's is a judgment on those who deliver judgments for a living. India's top court has been found wanting at crucial times and in crucial cases. Its eagerness to send Arundhati Roy to jail is matched by the near apathy about the killers who roam free. The judicial response to the terrorism on the poor of India being wreaked by the neo-liberal policies has been a poor statement of the politics of law. The judges are sharing the ivory towers with the politicians and claim neutrality because they do not go out for dinner with the local councillor but they have failed to descend to the crowded mud huts and littered pavements to see how their words about participative justice and people’s participation in the judicial process are hollow and meaningless.  

Reddy has narrated in detail a few samples, including the 1967 Supreme Court verdict in the Golaknath case (denying Parliament the right to amend fundamental rights) which he called “a tragedy” whose effect “was to stop Constitutional progress and fossilize the Constitution.” The Emergency-era decision of the Court in the ADM Jabalpur case—holding that our life and liberty were gifts of the State that could be taken back by it at its pleasure—is “dreadful and calamitous”, an instance in which the Supreme Court of India “touched the lowest point that could ever be touched by any court with a conscience.” The decision of the Court in punishing the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad in 1970 was “a serious blot in the Supreme Court’s history.” Justice Reddy takes the view that the Court should not have punished Arundhati Roy. “The demolition [of the Babri Masjid] took place with the Supreme Court almost a mute spectator. The Court failed to take any positive steps to save the situation.” The 50 per cent limit on reservations imposed by judicial fiat “may indeed be considered an amendment of the Constitution by the judiciary which, of course, is beyond its competence.”  

There is a scathing criticism of the Supreme Court cases on Hindutva and on the decisions restricting the right to strike and bandhs; and on matters internal to the judiciary, including current processes for appointment of chief justices. The greatest figures in the judicial pantheon are not spared clinical scrutiny —the late Y.V. Chandrachud, Chief Justice of India for some eight years, is described as having “failed to achieve anything exceptional”; and Chief Justice M.N. Venkatachalliah is described as a judge for “whose judgments one would search in vain.” Whether or not one agrees with his views, his book is a welcome move towards greater openness of judges in discussing the role and work of courts.

The utter blindness of India’s Supreme Court is in keeping with the class that talks of neutrality of law as if the judges exist as human beings outside the purview of values and thought processes that all other human beings are impacted by. The ideals of not be partisan is stretched to claim that there is no place for politics in law and justice. This is nothing but complete hypocrisy of those who know very well that law and justice are heavily political entities and constructs and it is better to recognise this than to be part of the sham.

No wonder India’s middle classes also walk the path shown by the Supreme Court and the self-appointed town hailers of the majesty of the law who demolish mosques, gulp millions in fodder scandals or talk of cutting the hands of Muslims but praise the majesty of the law that always takes its own course. If it has no intention of taking the course of justice to the people, naturally it takes its own course. A course that India’s middle classes being nursed on neo-liberal values and capital love to take themselves on.

So a Sarabhai wants to fight elections and an ABN Amro bank executive wants to change society. Both have a skewed understanding of politics. Sarabhai wants to ask Advani why he did not take up issues of Gandhinagar’s rural areas in Lok Sabha and why he did not spend all of his Rs 10 crore of MP Local Area Development fund. ABN Amro’s Sanyal is angry that Mumbai is not getting enough money from the Centre even though it contributes Rs 95,000 crore to the central kitty of taxes. Sanyal was jolted by 26/11, having failed to be jolted by farmers’ suicides, malnutrition deaths, female foeticide, Gujarat riots or anything else. Sarabhai says she too was jolted by 26/11, and has expressed surprise that slums in Gandhinagar do not have toilets.

How much does it take our good citizens from the middle classes to discover the lack of toilets in slums?  

All these are well meaning, honest, beautiful people-like-us who want to do good. They too, lest you fail to notice, have full faith in the majesty of the judicial process, the neutrality of India’s Supreme Court and the hidden truth in the law’s ability to take its own course. Their politics is simple. It starts with 26/11, or the debate on reservation, or the Jessica Lal case. Of and on, they may sign a petition for building a new India of equal opportunities, and their mantra will be to end the quota system. They will all hail the Supreme Court, and their faith in the neutrality and merit of India’s judicial system will be strengthened. An odd fodder scam will not bother them much, they can always make up by making fun of a Bihari politician in laughter challenge programmes.

They cannot see Hindutva politics but like Navjot Sidhu’s corny jokes. Ideological fights are petty politics for them. They do not believe in the politics of Left or Right; they claim to believe in some higher form of politics in which the ideal is divorced from politics.

They love the Nano and forget Singur. They wish you well. They want everyone to have a Nano at least. They have no problems with State Bank of India issuing advertisements saying “A Nano for every Indian” at a time when India’s per capita food intake is the worst in a decade.

India’s Supreme Court cannot and does not engage with the fact that farmers in India are committing more and more suicides ever since the country’s growth rates are rising. ABN Amro contributes to such a growth pattern. Sanyal works for ABN Amro. There are many Sanyals, and there are many ABN Amros. Sanyal does not come into politics because of suicide rates, Sarabhai is not jolted by the fact that a farmer has to buy food grain from the market for his family. What does not bother the middle class good people does not bother the Supreme Court either.

The official figure of the number of farmers who have committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2007 now stands at a staggering 182,936. It is not enough to jolt the Indian middle class, or the Supreme Court. It is jolted by 26/11.

A country in which a large majority depends on farming, millions of small and marginal farmers are net purchasers of food grain. They cannot produce enough to feed their families. Hunger among those who produce food is a very real thing.

Per capita net availability of food grain has fallen dramatically among Indians since the reforms began:  from 510 grams per Indian in 1991, to 422 grams by 2005. That’s not a drop of 88 grams. It’s a fall of 88 multiplied by 365 and then by one billion Indians.

But we love the progress that India is making. India’s middle classes want to take the country ahead and make it a global power. They are enthused by the progress. Their spirit is not dampened because of the fact that the average poor family has about 100 kg less today than it did just ten years ago; their spirit is lifted by the fact that the neoliberal model that pushed growth through one kind of consumption also meant re-directing huge amounts of money away from rural credit to fuel the lifestyles of the aspiring elites of the cities and countryside. That’s why when private banks like ABN Amro opened the highest number of branches in India ever, India’s national banks shut down the highest number of branches in rural areas. That’s why there were so many people at the five star hotel when 26/11 happened. That’s why so many editors called the five star hotel their second home. That’s why India’s middle classes saw the Taj in Bombay as the icon of India. They cannot and do not want to see that it is an icon of a class. Just as for another class, one of the prominent slogans of freedom struggle was “Tata Birla Hai Hai.”

It is good that people get jolted by something. That India’s law and courts that always take their own course get jolted by something. Mumbai got the attention with 180 deaths on 26/11. It is also the capital of the state which saw, as per official data, 40,666 farmers’ suicides since 1995. Of course, with very little media attention.  

India’s Supreme Court and India’s middle classes want to develop India at a rate much faster than the politicians want to. So the Supreme Court has no compunctions in raising the height of Narmada Dam, and the middle classes want India to have giant corporate hospitals, sky scrapers, flyovers, a Burj Dubai in every town. Talking about networks of small dispensaries is passé, talk rather of the possibility of medical tourism. Let the poor villager die of something as simple as gastroenteritis.

This is our vision of development, and this is how it operates in tandem with the so-called apolitical judiciary. Look Mama, we're world class. Our Supreme Court is devoid of all politics, and 26/11 has awakened our soul. After 9/11, we were all Americans. Now we are all truly Indians. The rest may well commit suicide. Be sure, the Supreme Court will take no suo moto notice. And if a quill moves, the law will send P Sainath to jail. He can rot with Binayak Sen and both discuss the interface between farm impoverishment, lack of land reforms and rise of naxalism. And yes, we do have a jail reforms programme if you think we are apathetic to the rights of the prisoners.

Awakened conscience of a Sarabhai or Sanyal would surely not need the two measly votes of Sainath or Binayak Sen. The middle class has risen above politics, just like our Supreme Court. The ideal is being achieved. Its growth rate matches our ambition to see India as a super power.