Bridging The Gap: Essays on Inclusive Development and Education

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Bridging the Gap

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Bridging the Gap Essays on Inclusive Development and Education

edited by

LATHA PILLAI BABU P. REMESH

Copyright © Indira Gandhi National Open University, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Jointly published in 2011 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA

Indira Gandhi National Open University Maidan Garhi, New Delhi 110 068, India www.ignou.ac.in

Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/13pt Aldine401 BT by Diligent Typesetter, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

ISBN:â•‡ 978-81-321-0752-1 (HB) The Sage Team: R udra Narayan, Puja Narula Nagpal and Vijay Sah

Contents Prefaceâ•… vii Acknowledgmentsâ•… xi Introductionâ•… xiii

Aphasia, Amnesia, and Inequalities: Narratives of Marginalization |â•‡ G. N. Devyâ•‡ | 1 Internal Security in Jammu and Kashmir: Historical Perspective and Emerging Scenario |â•‡ Mukesh Sabharwalâ•‡ | 16 Welfare and Preventive Policing: The Gandhian Way |â•‡ Kiran Bediâ•‡ | 36 Identity and the Notion of the “Other” |â•‡ Nandita Dasâ•‡ | 43 Inclusive Education and Sustainable Growth |â•‡ K. Sankaranarayananâ•‡ | 52 Mass Media—But, Where Are the Masses? |â•‡ P. Sainathâ•‡ | 57 Bringing Them into the Fold: Using the Arts to Bridge the Gap |â•‡ Mallika Sarabhaiâ•‡ | 74 Dalit Contribution to Indian Literature |â•‡ U. R. Ananthamurthyâ•‡ | 83

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Nations within Nations: Living Dialogues on Governance and Culture |â•‡ Abraham Lothaâ•‡ | 96 Prosperity Will Spread, but Happiness Will Not until We Fix Governance |â•‡ Gurcharan Dasâ•‡ | 117 About the Editors and Contributorsâ•… 127 Indexâ•… 130

Preface

I

t is my pleasure to introduce this book, Bridging the Gap: Essays on Inclusive Development and Education, which is based on the Silver Jubilee Lectures organized by the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). The organization of Silver Jubilee Lectures as a regular monthly event was one of the major activities conducted during the one-year-long Silver Jubilee Celebrations of IGNOU, which were inaugurated on November 19, 2009, by Smt. Pratibha Patil, Visitor of the University and the President of India. In this lecture series, we have very eminent people, working in various fields, tell us how they address the central concerns of “inclusion of the excluded” and “education for the marginalized” in their diverse fields of social action including arts, culture, literature, journalism, education, public administration, defense, research, and so on. In view of the long-lasting value of discussions in this series, the compilation of the contents of these talks in a book form was envisaged at the conceptualization phase of the lecture series itself. With a mandated objective of building an inclusive knowledge society through inclusive education, for the last 25 years, IGNOU has been effectively reaching out to millions of people who have otherwise no access to formal and conventional systems of education. Over the years, the University has evolved as a successful model of democratization of education, training, and capacity-building, and it is now the world’s largest university, with over 3 million students on the rolls. As the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Director General, Mrs Irena Bokova, observed: “IGNOU is a living embodiment of the concept of building inclusive knowledge societies in a globalized world.” From its inception, IGNOU has been playing an important role in reducing disparities in education by extending opportunities to

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villages and remote areas and in generating a movement that imparts knowledge and skills to the masses. With its innovative programs and prudent use of technology, the University has moved ahead of times in providing seamless access to sustainable, cost-effective, and learner-centric quality education, training, and capacity-building across the country and abroad. In the area of inclusive education, the University has made notable achievements in the recent past, especially in terms of introducing special education programs benefiting the marginalized and disadvantaged segments of the society. The recently launched Bachelor of Arts program in Sign Language is the first of its kind in the country, which provides opportunities of higher learning for deaf students from all over the world. The University has the largest number of students from socially disadvantaged categories in the country. It also successfully provides educational opportunities to the soldiers in the Indian Army and free education to the jail inmates across the country. The recently launched Community College Initiative expands the reach of the University to remotest regions in the country and offers opportunities for skill-based vocational education, designed on the basis of the needs of local communities. Given this backdrop, the present volume, based on the Silver Jubilee Lectures, provides a lot of insights for strengthening IGNOU’s inclusive trajectory of education, and for planning its growth in the right perspective. These articles provide the reflections of a galaxy of eminent personalities on inclusiveness in the contemporary social contexts; its diverse dimensions; and interlinkages with various sources of social inequalities including caste, class, and gender aspects. The wide spectra of social issues addressed in the volume include issues concerning internal security and welfare policing; space of dalits and their contribution to Indian literature; dissociation of media from the concerns of masses; use of arts for social reforms; problems of differing identities and the resultant fragmentations in civil societies; the need for fixing the governance system; integration of tribal societies to the mainstream; and promotion of education for sustainable growth.

Preface

I have no doubt that this book will be of immense interest and use to scholarly community, social organizations, and academic institutions to engage with the core concerns of inclusive development and education. I thank the organizing team of Silver Jubilee Lectures coordinated by Dr Latha Pillai, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, and convened by Dr Babu P. Remesh for successfully realizing the lecture series and for preparing this anthology. V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai Vice Chancellor Indira Gandhi National Open University

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Acknowledgments

W

e owe deeply to many persons who helped us in various ways at different stages of preparation of this book, which is a collection of essays based on the Silver Jubilee Lectures held at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). First and foremost, we gratefully acknowledge the constant encouragement and guidance of Professor V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chancellor, IGNOU, which helped the organizing team to conceptualize and implement this important lecture series, focusing on two central themes, namely “including the excluded” and “education for the marginalized.” We thank all the authors of the essays contained in this volume—G. N. Devy, Mukesh Sabharwal, Kiran Bedi, Nandita Das, K. Sankaranarayanan, P. Sainath, Mallika Sarabhai, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Abraham Lotha, and Gurcharan Das—for delivering lectures and for preparing the essays for the benefit of a wider spectrum of readers, who are interested in issues concerning inclusive education and development. We would like to specially mention two speakers of the lecture series, K. Radhakrishnan (Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation) and Namvar Singh (eminent orator and scholar in Hindi literature), who provided very rich inputs into the identified themes through their lectures, but preferred not to prepare essays based on those talks. Special thanks are also due to the commendable efforts of the organizing team of the Silver Jubilee Lectures—P. V. K. Sasidhar, Vikash Kumar Singh, Manjeet Barua, Malati Mathur, Nilima Srivastava, Shubhangi Vaidya, Radhika, Sunita Malhotra, M. K. Salooja, and U. S. Tolia (Registrar, IGNOU)—that enabled the successful implementation of the lecture series, involving the IGNOU community. : xi

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Several IGNOU faculty members enriched the open discussions that followed the lectures in their roles as lead discussants. We would like to thank each of these experts—K. R. Srivathsan, Gail Omvedt, Salil Mishra, Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, B. K. Pattanaik, Shambhu Nath Singh, Srikrishna Deva Rao, Malati Mathur, Shubhangi Vaidya, Nita Mathur and Pradeep Sahni—for their valuable inputs. We also thank Jayalakshmi Chittoor for preparing the transcripts of some of the talks, which helped the speakers to prepare detailed essays based on their respective lectures. We would like to place on record our gratitude to Hay House Publishers, India, for permitting us to reproduce some portions from the book I Dare!, written by Dr Kiran Bedi. Last but not the least, we thank the SAGE Publications, Dr Sugata Ghosh, and his dedicated team for preparing this book in its present form. Latha Pillai Babu P. Remesh

Introduction

I. Preamble

I

n India, of late, the issue of social and economic inclusion has become a central concern in development debates. This aspect needs to be understood with respect to the unique dilemmas that have appeared due to the present trajectory of economic growth in the country. By now, it is widely understood that despite the unprecedented and impressive economic growth in the recent decades, economic and social disparities continue to perpetuate, throwing greater challenges. On the economic front, issues such as poverty, unemployment, income disparities, and so on still warrant effective state intervention and public action. Despite a fairly long period of growth, a large chunk of population is still living below the poverty line and there is no decline in their deprivation levels. The life for the poor and even lower-middle class has not changed appreciably (and has in fact deteriorated in comparative terms) over the past decades, even during the phase when the GDP has exceeded 9 percent. As per the recent estimates of National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), despite an impressive growth path (with more than 6 percent GDP growth for the last three decades), even now three-fourths of our population lives below the international poverty line of $2 (in purchasing power parity terms) per capita per day. Income inequalities are widening. On the one

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hand, there is an unprecedented increase in the consumption of the rich, which gave an image of a “shining” India. On the other hand, for well more than half of the India’s total population, per capita consumption has actually declined since 1989–90, as per official statistics. An acute level of unemployment continues to be a serious problem in the country, with millions of educated youth still waiting for gainful engagements in the economy. The massive growth in modern services such as information technology (IT), communication, and financial services is not reflected in the growth of employment. Social deprivation also continues in its various manifestations, with strong interlinkages to a host of factors including caste, gender, and identity politics. Even after decades of planned development, the majority of the population confronts deeply entrenched social identity (caste/community) issues and systemic, hierarchical social segmentation in their day-to-day life. This inter alia pause barriers to their economic progress and affects participation in development process. Social action to realize effective public policies and overall welfare of the masses requires utmost prominence in the present phase of development in India. The priorities at this juncture include better implementation of welfare measures, expanding the reach of education to marginalized and weaker segments of the society, improving provision and delivery of services, and so on. Given this backdrop, the discussions provided in the present volume assume special importance. Organized around two broader themes—“inclusion of the excluded” and “education for marginalized”—the essays in the book offer an exposition to the range of inequalities and challenges in different fields of social engagement such as media, arts, literature, academics, bureaucracy, defense, and governance, and open up possible ways of addressing these concerns. The wide spectra of social issues addressed in the volume include issues concerning internal security and welfare policing, space of dalits and their contribution to Indian literature, dissociation of media from the concerns of masses, use of arts for social reforms, the problems of differing identities and the resultant fragmentations in civil societies, the need for fixing the governance system, integration of tribal societies to the mainstream, and promotion of education for : Latha Pillai and Babu P. Remesh

Introduction

sustainable growth. The subsequent session provides a thematic discussion of some of the core issues addressed in these essays.

II. Concerns in Inclusive Development and Education: An Overview Sainath’s essay emphatically underlines that the fundamental characteristic of contemporary mass media is its growing disconnect from mass reality. The author explains that the media in independent India is among the most exclusionist institutions of Indian democracy. Giving candid examples, the essay elaborates the process of sharpening elitism and structural shutout of the poor and marginalized sections of society and warns about the real and likely consequences of this growing disconnect. Nandita Das’ essay focuses on the question of identity in a globalized world, which is fraught with personal, societal, and political overtones. The author explains that, in a country like India, with its long and complex history of multiple identity structures, the issue assumes greater significance. It impinges upon the individual vis-àvis various divisions, subdivisions, and hierarchical complexities of religion, language, region, caste, class, occupation, etc. Accordingly, the concepts of “them” and “us” have frequently polarized groups and formulated public opinion. The discussion also focuses on the increase of identity politics in the country and the inherent danger of a pluralistic society being subsumed and cast into a rigid, exclusivist mold. G. N. Devy’s paper discusses about another sort of social fragmentation, focusing the special issues pertaining to “tribal” and “notified” communities. It offers a comment on the construction of “knowledge” during the colonial period leading to a loss of correspondence between “production of knowledge” and the cultural context within which the knowledge thus produced came to be situated. The author also explains as to how several inappropriate descriptive categories came to be employed for social narratives— adding new processes of fragmentation to an already fragmented society. The complex spectrum of linguistic diversity in India is also : xv

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analyzed in the paper and certain suggestions are offered to overcome the present challenges of “inclusion” in higher education in India. The essay by Ananthamurthy primarily deals with literature, dalits, and the question of inclusion. The author examines how dalits on their own cultural terms have registered the dominance of the upper castes. It is explained in the essay that dalit themes and narratives have enriched Indian literature considerably. To Ananthamurthy, while the frontyard in literature belongs to the upper castes, the backyard provides a literary space for the dalits, women, and lower castes. Abraham Lotha brings in another dimension of inclusive development while discussing the issues of integration of tribal societies to the mainstream state, with a particular focus on ethnic minorities from northeastern India. The essay emphatically suggests that for postcolonial multiethnic states, successful art of governance requires more than the recognition and acceptance of the different ethnicities or nations within the state. To the speaker, good governance involves a conscious political will for the “inclusion of the excluded” (or those that feel alienated and marginalized). The importance of viewing development from the perspective of the excluded and engaging in living dialogues with the different nations or ethnic groups is highlighted in the essay. The author also underscores the role of academic institutions in pursuing these inclusive objectives. The article by Mallika Sarabhai draws attention to the possibility of using arts as a means for awareness generation and social reforms. While sharing her concerns for the marginalized, she raises the pertinent question as to why the marginalized in India continue to remain so, even after six and more decades of Independence? The author points out that over the years, the quantum of the marginalized in India has grown in absolute terms and their distance from the top echelons of society widened. Profiled in this backdrop, the essay explores the ways in which the arts can effectively be used as an instrument for social change to bring the marginalized into the mainstream of Indian society. The article by Mukesh Sabharwal focuses on internal security problems of Jammu and Kashmir. In the light of his experience : Latha Pillai and Babu P. Remesh

Introduction

as a top army official, the author views that strengthening governance and development in Jammu and Kashmir as one of the important inclusive concerns of independent India. A strengthening of the state police forces and central parliamentary interventions is emphatically emphasized—to ensure internal security in Jammu and Kashmir. Opposing the popular demand of the politicians in the state for revocation of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the author opines that such laws are the only safeguard for security forces and highlights the need for providing for such laws the requisite framework to conduct proactive operations against terrorists. Kiran Bedi shares her experience and views on innovative and welfare policing. The other areas of social interventions and experimentations discussed in the article include treatment of drug abuse; schooling for the children of prisoners; and provision of training, counseling, and health care to the urban and rural poor. The author highlights that the country has not witnessed any police reforms in the past 60 years and there is a dearth of research on policing in the country. Besides providing a framework to follow up the noble objectives of welfare/preventive policing, the paper also points out the desirability of initiating research on police reforms by institutions of higher learning. The essay by K. Sankaranarayanan focuses on the importance of inclusive growth—where all the sections of the society (irrespective of castes, creed, gender, and disability statuses) are not only beneficiaries of growth but also active participants in the process of growth. To the author, in the Indian context, inclusive education must concern with all the marginalized sections of the society, namely, dalits, tribals, religious and linguistic minorities, the nomadic groups, child labor, the differently abled persons, and particularly the females in each of these categories. The central concern of the paper by Gurcharan Das is the problems with extant system of governance in the country. To the author, the answer to inclusive growth in India is not to change the economic growth model but to radically reform the delivery of primary education and health services. The problem is not one of resources but of the accountability of the teachers, doctors and nurses, and indeed of all civil servants. : xvii

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III. To Sum Up On the whole, the essays in this book provide rich inputs for social actors and policy makers to think intensively on the central themes of “inclusion of the excluded” and “education for the marginalized.” Many of the essays suggest a desirable course of action in diverse fields and highlight the need for new educational initiatives that reach the hitherto unreached and marginalized segments of the society. Expanding the contours of education to new spaces and newer heights is also underscored in some of the papers. These essays warrant special attention as the authors draw inputs and insights from their own lives and areas of engagement. Due to this reason, the discussions in this book are more pragmatic, palpable, and communicative to a wider spectrum of readers.

: Latha Pillai and Babu P. Remesh

Aphasia, Amnesia, and Inequalities Narratives of Marginalization Introduction Master of Arts and Doctorate in Economics, Columbia University; Master of Science and Doctor of Science in Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science; Barrister-at-law, Grey’s Inn, London. For anyone to attain so many degrees is impressive, but for an untouchable, born in a small rural town in a colonial country at the end of the nineteenth century, it is even more so.

T

his is how Dr Gail Omvedt’s 2005 biography of B. R. Ambedkar opens. Ambedkar, popularly known as the “maker of India’s Constitution,” was a passionate advocate of education for the marginalized; and the story of his own life has been a phenomenal case of struggle for getting higher education, and putting it to use for a long overdue social transformation. Had he been alive to see the wonderful work that the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has carried out over the last quarter century, providing access to candidates from marginalized social groups lacking access to higher education, B. R. Ambedkar would have entirely approved of this unprecedented public institution. By

G. N. Devy

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B r i d g in g t h e Ga p

Despite achievements of half a century of affirmative action in higher education that Ambedkar had enshrined in the Indian Constitution—a considerable length of time and, one would imagine, enough to bring the policy of reconciliation to its fruition—legacies of discrimination, marginalization, and denial are still enmeshed in Indian social composition. Equality as a fundamental right is guaranteed in India’s Constitution. Accordingly, successive governments have tried to cope with educational and social inequalities. All of the approximately 350 state-funded universities and 16,000 colleges have been trying to provide higher education at a relatively low cost, not entirely unaffordable to students from the poorer classes. In several states, education to all female students is made almost cost-free. Yet, it cannot be said that the state has as yet succeeded in providing wider access in higher education to the marginalized in India. The scale of the problem is huge, and the states’ resources inadequate. The reasons for the denial of access to quality education, however, cannot be ascribed merely to the enormous size of India’s population or a lack of adequate resources. The deprivation caused by these factors is compounded by the long history of caste hatred and the socially divisive legacy of colonialism. It is not surprising then that IGNOU has to surpass its own great achievements over the last quarter century and continue in future the process of discovering for itself the challenges in defining denial and capturing nuances of marginalization. These nuances often go unnoticed when a simple matrix of class and caste is employed to describe Indian society fragmented in over 2,000 castes, 600 tribes, and more than 1,000 mother tongues.

Aphasia The reorganization of Indian states after Independence was carried out along linguistic lines. The languages that had scripts were counted. The ones that had not acquired scripts, and therefore did not have printed literature, did not get their own states. Schools and colleges were established only for the official languages. The ones without scripts, even if they had a great stock of wisdom carried : G. N. Devy

A p h a s ia , A mn e s ia , an d I n e q u a l i t i e s

forward orally, were not fortunate enough to get educational institutions for them. The history of these marginalized communities during the last few decades is filled with stories of forced displacement, land alienation, and eruption of violence and counter-violence by the nationstate. Going by any parameters of development, these communities always figure at the tail end. The situation of the communities that have been pastoral or nomadic has been even worse. Considering the immense odds against which these communities have had to survive, it is not short of a miracle that they have preserved their languages and continue to contribute to the astonishing linguistic diversity of the world. However, if the situation persists, the languages of the marginalized stand the risk of extinction. Aphasia, a loss of speech, seems to be their fate. It is a daunting task to determine as to which languages have come closest to the condition of aphasia, which ones are decidedly moving in that direction, and which ones are merely going through the natural linguistic process of transmigration. It may not be inappropriate to say that the linguistic data available with us is not fully adequate for the purpose. In India, Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1903–23)—material for which was collected in the last decade of the 19th century—had identified 179 languages and 544 dialects. The 1921 census reports showed 188 languages and 49 dialects. The 1961 census reports mentioned a total of 1,652 “mother tongues,” out of which 184 “mother tongues” had more than 10,000 speakers, and of which 400 “mother tongues” had not been mentioned in Grierson’s Survey, while 527 were listed as “unclassified.” Considering how complicated the census operations are in countries that have large migratory populations, and particularly how much the accuracy in census operations is dependent on literacy levels, it is not surprising that the data collected remains insufficiently definitive. What is surprising, however, is that as many as 310 languages, including all those 263 claimed by less than 5 speakers, and 47 others claimed by less than a 1,000 speakers, had started becoming extinct within half a century since Grierson collected language data. In other words, a fifth part of India’s linguistic heritage was lost within just half a century. To appreciate the magnitude :3


of this issue, consider the fact that at present apart from the main 22 languages included in the Schedule, there are nearly 80 languages with more than 10,000 speakers, and nearly 360 other languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. Thus during the last 50 years, we seem to have lost another one-third of our language diversity. Language loss is experienced in India not just by the “minor” languages and “unclassified dialects,” but also by “major” languages that have long literary traditions and a rich heritage of imaginative and philosophical writings. In speech communities that claim major literary languages such as Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Oriya as their “mother tongues,” the younger generations have little or no contact with the written heritage of those languages, while they are able to “speak” the languages as “native speakers.” It may not be inappropriate to assume that people all over the world are paying a heavy cost for a globalized development in terms of their language heritage. This linguistic condition may be described as the condition of “partial language acquisition” in which a fully literate person, with a relatively high degree of education, is able to read, write, and speak a language other than her or his mother tongue, but is able to only speak but not write the language she or he claims as the mother tongue. On the eve of Independence, a serious debate arose regarding the place of the English in Indian administration. It was decided to continue the use of English for a period of 10 years until, as hoped, it would be replaced by Hindi. An official “Schedule of Languages” was included in the Constitution, listing 14 languages (in order of the number of speakers): Hindi, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Assamese, and Sanskrit. There have been three amendments to this Schedule during the last 55 years, resulting in the addition of Sindhi, Konkani, Manipuri, Nepali/Gorkhali, Maithili, Santali, Bodo, and Dogri. English, nonetheless, continues to be not just the language of the judiciary and administration but also the main medium of higher education. At present, it is moving into secondary and primary education, replacing Indian languages. Beyond this, English has also been a passport to lucrative careers. Students whose mother tongues : G. N. Devy


are marginalized must battle with the language disadvantage while competing with “linguistically affluent” students. When a speech community comes to believe that education in some other language alone is the way ahead for it for its very survival, it decides to adapt to the new language situation. It would be pertinent, therefore, to consider if there is something inherent in the dominant development discourse in the contemporary world that requires diminishing of world’s language heritage, a kind of a “phonocide.” The communities that are already marginalized within their local or national context, the ones that are already in minority within their cultural contexts, and the ones that have already been dispossessed of their ability to voice their concerns are obviously placed at the frontline of the “phonocide.” The issue of inequality arising out of location of a person within a regional or national language in the Indian context is not quite analogous to the language tension in bilingual or multilingual countries such as Canada or Spain. The remoteness from formal higher education, and therefore from economic opportunities, is acute in the innumerable linguistic hinterlands in India. The speakers of these languages have to first learn another dominant language, as well as Hindi and English, if they desire to pursue a college-level course. Between the collective consciousness of a given community, and the language it uses to articulate the consciousness, is situated what is described as the “world view” of that community. Preservation of a language involves, therefore, respecting the world view of the given speech community. If such a community believes that the human destiny is to belong to the earth and not to offend the earth by claiming that it belongs to us, the language of that community cannot be preserved if we invite the community to share a political imagination that believes in vandalizing the earth’s resources in the name of development. In such a situation, the community will have only two options: It can either reject the Utopia that asserts the human right to exploit the natural resources and turn them into exclusively commercial commodities, or it can reject its own world view and step out of the language system that binds it with the ecologically sensitive world view. :5


Amnesia Though cultivation of higher knowledge has always remained a part of Indian culture, and even if Indian thinkers in ancient and medieval times have made significant contribution to the fields of mathematics, material sciences, medicine, astronomy, architecture, arts, philosophy and literature, it was not until the colonial times that public institutions of higher learning meant for cultivation of knowledge came to be established in India. The three universities established by the colonial government in 1857 were primarily meant as regulatory bodies supervising the conduct of high school examinations. During the first five or six decades of their existence, the courses offered by them remained restricted solely to what was then known as “liberal arts.” It was only in the early years of the 20th century that a few “nationalist” centers of learning were founded, and it was after the First World War that a few technology schools were opened in India. Thus, through the entire period of high colonialism, from Macaulay’s Minutes of 1835 to the emergence of nationalism, the main objective of higher education in India was to imbibe colonial learning. Colonialism was not only an economic enterprise, though that was at its heart. Forms of knowledge too were profoundly influenced during the colonial experience. That is why it was often described as a “mission to civilize India.” The influence was on both sides engaged in the encounter. On the one hand, colonialism encourages the dominating culture to perceive itself in a larger-than-life self-image, thus turning relatively minor thinkers, poets, and scientists as having universal relevance. On the other hand, even the valuable thinking and reflection generated by the colonized culture, in its past or present, comes to be seen as diminutive and minor. Gradually, the colonized culture learns to internalize the cultural imagery and induces a cultural amnesia in its self-perception. The cultural amnesia affects the colonized culture’s reading of its own history, turning it into an episodic narrative of decline rather than a causally linked story of evolution. The institutions of higher learning, together with other intellectual expressions such as the law, literature, and forms of social exchange, work toward inducing this kind of cultural amnesia. The courses : G. N. Devy


offered in Indian universities when India gained Independence without exception carried the burden of the cultural amnesia internalized during the colonial period. Though the infrastructure of higher education has witnessed an exponential growth during the last six decades, more particularly during the last 20 years, we have not as yet got over the amnesia affecting the course contents. I hasten to add that I am not proposing here that we should return to some arcane and obscure scientific theories drawn from ancient or medieval Indian past, or promote forms of knowledge cultivated in our past in any anachronistic manner. What I am pointing to is the need to reconcile the ecological, sociological, and intellectual requirements of the Indian society with the forms of knowledge cultivated in public institutions of higher learning. Unless we learn to make this the most essential feature of all our higher educational transactions, we are not likely to produce any first-rate research and really world-class models of learning. Alternatively, if we do not accomplish this, we may continue to be merely vendors of knowledge developed elsewhere for meeting the social and cultural challenges in those cultures.

Layered Inequalities I have so far argued that in India higher education has managed to lose touch with languages spoken by Indian communities and, therefore, is not able to fully access the idiom through which life is perceived outside our campuses. I have also argued that amnesiac cultures have a difficult date with intellectual activity. The loss of language and the loss of cultural memory are probably subtler factors in denial of access to higher learning. The more easily noticeable factors need to be located in the social structures and in discriminations embedded in them. In any discussion of affirmative action or social equality, two important factors distinguish India from most other countries. The first of these is the caste system, which has a radically different dynamic from agents of marginalization and inequality in other societies. The second is the enormous backlog resulting from at least :7


2,000 years of social discrimination. For 20 centuries, women in India were not allowed to cast their eyes on sacred books or manuscripts, and more than two-thirds of India’s population—men as well as women—were not allowed to go in the proximity of Brahmins, or those engaged in generation of knowledge. The marginalized, by the very logic of the term, are presumably smaller in number than the more dominant social groups. In India, however, the “marginalized” far outnumber the dominant sectors of the society. The “mainstream” in Indian society is an aggregate of its margins rather than being a well-defined “other” and adversary of those margins. Typically, among every 100 Indians, 6 belong to “denotified” or criminalized communities, 8 are tribals, 21 can be classified as religious minority, 22 form the dalit oppressed groups, and 38 persons represent the aggregate of linguistic minorities. A simple addition of these figures, however, leads to the absurd conclusion that only 5 percent of Indians constitute the dominant “mainstream.” The intertwining of the patterns of domination and victimization of various marginal groups by other marginal groups is typical of Indian society. Layering, not segmentation, is the principle that explains these complexities more adequately. Age-old tensions between one caste and another; between castes and tribes; between one tribe and other tribes; as well as frequent migrations of linguistic, racial, or religious groups, create social sedimentations of these “marginal layers.” Thus, a dominant social group in one part of India can easily count for marginal in another part, or a group empowered at one time can easily slide back to the status of marginality soon afterwards. One major cause of marginalization throughout the country has been forced migration arising out of man-made or natural disasters. The refugees from Bangladesh; the riot-hit Sikhs; the people of Kashmir affected by social strife; small tribal communities in the Northeast at the receiving end of intertribal conflicts; projectsaffected people uprooted and forced to migrate; families of small land-holding farmers vulnerable to crop failures and market fluctuations; and victims of natural disasters such as quakes, floods, and cyclones have to face rather abruptly the situation of denial of access to quality education. The internal displacement due to man-made : G. N. Devy


disasters, habitat uprooting caused by natural disasters, and inconsistencies in patterns of livelihood and food security, all render the map of disadvantage in India infinitely complex. Feudal attitudes and repressive moral codes that result in gender discrimination cut across urban and rural areas, as well as across linguistic, religious, caste, and tribal boundaries. Moreover, the social categories such as the disadvantaged castes (about 1,200), almost all of the adivasi communities (about 650), the “denotified” and nomadic groups (about 190), whose numbers and populations are by no count small, and whose relations with one another do not fit into the definition of a homogeneous “class” add considerably to the perplexing complexity involved in mapping denial in our country. The religious minority groups are another addition to this infinitely complicated social wave. Organizing a reasonably defined hierarchy of disadvantage, or creating a code for measuring lack of access, is thus a daunting task, in a country saddled with legacies of fractured histories; divided society; incomparable linguistic, religious, ethnic, and regional diversity; and an ever-bursting population that has crossed the mark of a billion. The statement of this complexity does not, however, imply that we stop worrying about the marginalized sections at the present juncture of our march toward becoming a knowledge society. If we consider how badly these groups have lacked resources and opportunities, or how little they have benefited by the impressive infrastructure of higher education in the country, it will need no further convincing that these groups must be made the central focus of growth in higher education in India. I need not speak about the denotified tribes (DNTs) and adivasis whose representation in colleges and universities has not crossed a single-digit percent in correspondence with their population size. But think of the Muslim community in India. According to the 2001 Census, Muslims constitute 16.4 percent of the population, or a total of 174 million, but their representation in various professions is dismal. In 2001, in public sector industries and public institutions there were only 4.9 percent Muslims, in Central Administrative Services 3.2 percent, and in the teaching profession only 6.5 percent. These statistics belie the claim of a democratic state that provides equal access to social goods and services. The corresponding figures for adivasis are much :9


worse, and those for the denotified and nomadic communities are so pathetic that any self-respecting Indian should hang one’s head in shame. Cutting across the lines of caste, tribe, religion, or gender, a person born in an Indian village is likely to be deprived of any reasonably decent education—this includes nearly 60 percent of India’s population, living in 650,000 villages. The modern Indian education system has its roots in colonial history, and in colonial production systems Indian villages were low-priority economic entities. Leaving aside some agricultural universities, fewer than 10 of India’s approximately 350 universities are in rural locations. The dramatically adverse ratio between India’s rural population and the institutions of higher education relegates the entire rural population to the category of educationally disadvantaged. During the last 57 years, the Constitution was amended a number of times in order to improve people’s access to the means of empowerment. These amendments have resulted in creation of powerful statutory bodies with semi-judicial and supervisory authority such as the National Women’s Commission, National Scheduled Castes Commission, National Scheduled Tribes Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, and the National Minorities Commission. One would have hoped that the constitutional guarantees and the protection mechanisms accomplish the goals for which they were created. It seems, however, that one must yet continue to hope. In democracies all over the world, electoral politics inevitably envelopes public institutions, and the social or ethical imperatives quickly get subsumed within the political dynamics. The policy of reservations for marginalized sections in institutions of higher education in India has faced this hazard far too often in the recent past. There have been violent demonstrations and intergroup clashes around the question of positive discrimination for the marginalized. Even if there has been no civil war in India on the question of the “quota” system in education and employment, the intensity of the popular sentiment on both sides of the social divide continues to keep Indian society in a perpetual war-like mood on this issue. The number of “seats” in the “quota” system in institutions of medicine : G. N. Devy


and engineering continues to be at the heart of the acrimonious debate. There have been numerous instances of state-wide or national strikes by the entire medical fraternity just to oppose increase in the “quota” by even by one or two seats at the super-specialization level in medical education. As against this, there have also been instances of misuse of the constitutional guarantee by political parties by raising the protection given to the marginalized classes to an unrealistic level, causing harm to the interests of meritorious students. The fact is that after half a century of Independence, the Indian society continues to be deeply divided over the question of affirmative action in education; and it is virtually impossible to arrive at definitions of denial that will satisfy all social classes in India.

The Challenges Ahead During the first half of the 20th century, the infrastructure of higher education grew slowly. When India became a Republic, the government began to build universities, colleges, national research laboratories, and other research institutions. The second half of the 20th century saw unprecedented growth in technical and higher education, from 3 central universities in 1951 to 18 in 2005; and from 24 to 205 state-run universities. Other institutions were also established during this period, including 95 degree-granting accredited universities, 18 officially designated “Institutes of National Importance,” and 7 privately funded universities, bringing the number of universities from 27 in 1951 to 343 in 2005. Over the last five decades, on an average, six new universities were commissioned every year, and growth has been sharper in recent years, according to data from the Indian government’s Department of Secondary and Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development. During just two funding years, 2003–04 and 2004–05, the number of degree-granting colleges rose from 15,343 to 17,625. The University Grants Commission was created as a single authority to coordinate and promote nontechnical higher education in the country. Similarly, several other research councils were created for promoting research in various disciplines such as Medicine, : 11


Engineering, Sciences, and Social Science. The figures for student population receiving instruction in institutes of higher education show that educational institutions increased their absorption capacity between 1986 (5,982,709 students) and 2004 (10,009,137 students) to accommodate nearly 5 million more students. During the same period, the number of institutions offering technical diplomas, degrees, and postgraduate courses increased from 962 to 38,800, a remarkably steep increase. The budgetary allocations for higher education are made primarily by the Higher Education Department of the Human Resources Development Ministry. In addition, there are special-purpose allocations in the nature of affirmative action from the budgets of various other ministries, such as the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Additional funds are made available by various state governments, since education is included in the “joint list” of constitutional obligations. Do these provisions benefit every young woman or man aspiring to seek degree-level or graduate education in India? More pertinently, are these infrastructure and funding provisions adequate to meeting the huge backlog of social justice needs? The answers to these questions are not heartening. For example, the disparity between educated girls and educated boys has been increasing at an alarming rate. The statistics for 2001–02 show that nearly 5 million fewer girls received higher education than boys in the same age bracket. The gap in some states is substantial, as is evident from the examples of Karnataka (11 females: 48 males) and Orissa (11 females: 74 males). This is generally the story, though there are a few states in which the number of females receiving education is substantially higher than the number of males: in Pondicherry, for example, the ratio of females to males is 13 to 10, and in Chandigarh, 40 to 27. The enrollment of students of both genders has increased by 5 million over the last 50 years, but the percentage of girls to boys has moved up from one-tenth to merely two-tenths of this newly educated class. In other words, there are nearly 1,160,000 girls less than there should have been in college enrollment, for a variety of cultural, social, and economic reasons.

: G. N. Devy


A similar disparity exists between students from rural areas who can avail themselves of higher education and those in the urban areas. The picture of higher education varies from state to state, with economically poorer states having a lower percentage of students enrolled in higher education. Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh have not done as well in the area of higher education as some other smaller states, or the union territories such as Goa and Chandigarh. The more recently created tribal states of Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand show a far bleaker picture. The percentage of students who manage to attain bachelor’s degrees in relation to the overall population of the same age group has remained confined to a single digit. The proportion of students from disadvantaged social classes enrolling for degree programs is, predictably, much smaller; and the proportion of such students to students from other classes does not conform to the ideas of affirmative action conceptualized in India’s Constitution and educational policy. Over the last quarter of a century, it has been the lot of regional universities meant for distance education and continuing education and IGNOU to grapple with the legacies of multilayered denials in the Indian society. The achievements of IGNOU have been the most impressive, particularly in that it has accomplished so much in an area and in a manner that were unprecedented in our history. But the challenge is vast in its scope as well as in its complexity. It is a widespread feeling, and to an extent a genuine concern, that the quality of learning and research suffers in the process of providing the marginalized access to higher education on what are seen as considerations that are extraneous to academic activity. One needs to revisit this argument for a careful scrutiny. It is of course true that students coming from villages will fare poorly if the medium of instruction is kept confined to the English language alone. It is similarly true that an adivasi student who has not even handled simple gadgets at home will feel completely lost if asked to face an online computerized session of instruction. It is the same if some urban student were to be asked to appear for a viva examination standing knee deep in mud in a farm. These superficial descriptions of difficulties posed and faced, however, tell us nothing about how

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knowledge is produced, transmitted, and acquired. I would like to have a slightly different take on this issue. Historians of ideas tell us that ideas, and indeed even paradigms, constituting what comes to be recognized as knowledge often undergo radical changes. If the change is merely topical or minor in significance, it acquires at the most the label of “a new theory.” If the shift is really profound, it takes the form of an “epistemic slide.” In history, one notices such radical epistemic shifts taking place once in a few centuries. And when an epistemic shift occurs, all theories resting upon the established episteme start undergoing corresponding changes. We know, for instance, that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers were profound thinkers; but when their idea of the universe as a box-shaped space gave way to the Ptolemaic notion of the universe as a moral symmetry, the sciences and philosophy produced by the ancient Greek philosophers were replaced by other sciences and philosophies. Later, Galileo and Copernicus made these “new sciences” look like idiotic conceits. This has happened in Indian tradition of knowledge as well. Behind all the major epistemic shifts lies a new vision of the cosmos, in its dimensions of space and time or matter and energy, or in terms of its geometry or calculus. Today, faced with the impending specter of climate change and irreversible environmental depletion, the life of earth has started looking decidedly finite with the end of the species and all forms of life close in sight. Consequently, in the field of learning and sciences, a major epistemic shift has been taking place. The French Canadian philosopher Jean-François Lyotard described in his “Report on Knowledge” this paradigm shift with the phrase “The Post-modern condition.” According to him, for us there is no possibility of a single universal knowledge, rather we have to learn to live with many “knowledges,” each of which is no longer an analogy to the “phenomenal world,” but rather a “paralogy,” “a narrative of ” our perceptions of that world. In our country, the communities that we have so far seen as “marginal” communities, the adivasis and the DNTs, the coastal people and the hill people, have with them as yet the collective memories of coping with environment and sustaining it. They still have with them, stored in those languages that our developmental : G. N. Devy


logic is unwittingly destroying, paralogies of the universe that can be of immense help in averting the feared end in sight. Of course, if we continue to insist that they must learn what we have to teach to them, they will not fare well. But, is it not likely that we try to learn from them? Is it not possible that the entire society is seen as a vast university, every community in it an open treasurer of knowledge, as if they were collectively a vast reference library, and the institution of learning a co-curator or a co-supervisor of that knowledge? It is possible that if we think along those lines, howsoever impractical that may appear to one’s mind shaped within the institutional confines and disciplinary boundaries, we will perhaps manage to tune in with the emergent knowledge paradigm on our own terms. This will help us not only to get beyond the amnesia induced by colonialism in our thought, but also to provide solutions to ecological disaster that the disciplines developed over the last few centuries have posed before the world. In other words, the question of “inclusion of the excluded” should no longer be seen as a question of “grudgingly giving something because it is politically correct,” but rather an opportunity before us for shaping new fields of knowledge, novel pedagogies, and genuinely relevant curricula. I am acutely aware of how anxiously the marginalized in this country will be looking up to IGNOU with high expectations, both justified and deserving of a prompt and comprehensive response.

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Internal Security in Jammu and Kashmir Historical Perspective and Emerging Scenario Background

J

ammu and Kashmir, India’s northernmost state occupies a very special place in our minds. The state lies at the very edge of Central Asia, and has historically been a meeting ground for people of different parts of Asia. The state has historically seen several invaders as well as traders pass through its lands. These included people from Central Asia, Afghanistan, and what is now Pakistan, Tibet, and China, besides people from further south of India itself. The state has seen several wars with Pakistan since Independence from the British rule. These include wars fought with Pakistan in 1947–48, 1965, and 1971, besides the Pakistani incursion at Kargil, which was defeated in 1999. Over and above all this, the state has been a victim of a perfidious proxy war waged against the nation for more the past 20 years, since 1989. The people of Jammu and Kashmir, themselves a heterogeneous populace, had shown their preference for peace and tranquility in several unspoken and unstated ways, the proof of which is visible through several indicators.

By

Mukesh Sabharwal

I n t e r n a l S e c u r i t y i n J a m m u a n d K a sh m i r

Situated between 32°15´ and 37°05´ North latitude and 72°35´ and 83°20´ East longitude,1 the total area of the state is 2,222,236 sq. km including 78,114 sq. km under the illegal occupation of Pakistan and 42,685 sq. km under that of China, of which Pakistan illegally handed over 5,130 sq. km to China. The state is bound by Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China from the west to the east.2 Geographically, the state is broadly bound by the River Munnawar Tawi to the south, the Karakoram range to the north, the River Jhelum to the west, and the Tibetan plateau to the east. The lay of the mountains broadly divides the state into plains (Jammu), hills and mountains south of the Pir Panjal range (e.g., Rajouri, Doda, and Kishtwar), the Kashmir valley (between the Pir Panjal, Shamshabari, and the Great Himalayan Ranges and their further extension along River Jhelum), and the Ladakh region. The climate varies from tropical in Jammu plains to semi-arctic in Ladakh, with Kashmir and Jammu mountainous tracts having temperate climatic conditions. National Highway 1-A connects the capital cities of Srinagar and Jammu with rest of the country. Besides, National Highway 21 connects Leh with Manali and further to the plains. The state has many Himalayan rivers flowing through it; the most significant among these are the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab.3 If there is one truly striking fact about Jammu and Kashmir, it is its heterogeneous character. While Jammu is a Hindu-majority area, the Kashmir valley is predominantly Muslim, and Ladakh has a Buddhist-majority population.4 With an annual growth rate of 2.69, Jammu and Kashmir grew at 30.46 percent between 1991 and 2001, as compared to 21.34 percent for the rest of India. (The 1991 census was not held in J&K. The population of India includes the projected population of J&K as on 1.3.1991, made by the Standing Committee of Experts on population projections in October 1989.) The densest populated districts in the state now include Jammu, Srinagar, Anantnag, and Baramulla.5 The population, which was 1,027,015,247 in 1991, is expected to grow to 12,031,825 in 2015 and to 13,809,601 in 2025. Of the total population of the state, the Jammu division comprises of approximately 70 percent Hindus and 30 percent Muslims; : 17

B r i d g i n g t he G a p

the Srinagar division of approximately 97 percent Muslims and 3 percent others; and the Ladakh division of approximately 50 percent Buddhists, 47 percent Muslims, and 3 percent others. Overall, the state comprises of 61 percent Muslims, 34 percent Hindus, 3 percent Sikhs, and 2 percent Buddhists. As regards the demographic pattern in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, this region has a total population of approximately 3.5 million people, 67 percent of who are Punjabi, 7 percent Kashmiri, 5 percent Dardi, 5 percent Chitrali, and 16 percent Balti. As far as Pakistan is concerned, it has had no qualms about having Punjabis settled in the region of Kashmir it has occupied. According to the 2001 census, 54.46 percent of the population was literate in Jammu and Kashmir. The national literacy rate for the same period was 65.38 percent. Among the rural areas, Jammu district topped the table with 71.95 percent literacy followed by Kathua with 62.64 percent. Surprisingly, Srinagar district fell at the bottom. This was due to the impact of the militancy.

Kashmir Issue: The Historical Perspective According to the most popular legend that is also recorded in the two most authoritative books on Kashmir, Rajtarangani and Nilmat Purana, Kashmir was once a large lake and Rishi Kashyap drained the water off, making it a beautiful abode. But geologists have their own theory, which says that geographical changes made way for the outflow of water by subsidence of the mountain at Khadianayar, Baramulla, and thus emerged the Kashmir valley, the paradise on earth. Ashoka introduced Buddhism to Kashmir in the 3rd century bc, which was later strengthened by Kanishka. Huns got the control of the valley in the early 6th century. The valley regained freedom in ad 530, but soon came under the rule of the Ujjain Empire. After the decline of the Vikramaditya dynasty, the valley had its own rulers. There was a synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist cultures. Islam came to Kashmir during 13th and 14th centuries ad. Zain-ul-Abedin (1420–70) was the

: Mukesh Sabharwal


most famous Muslim ruler who came to Kashmir when the Hindu King Sinha Dev fled before the Tatar invasion. Later Chaks overran Haider Shah, son of Zain-ul-Abedin. They continued to rule till 1586 when Akbar conquered Kashmir. In 1752, Kashmir passed on from the feeble control of the Mughal emperor of the time to Ahmed Shah Abdali of Afghanistan. The valley was ruled by the Pathans for 67 years. The state was governed by Dogra rulers till 1947, when Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession in favor of the Indian Union on October 26, 1947.6

Jammu and Kashmir’s Accession to India: Unfolding of Events Partition Since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan has sought to project the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India as invalid and that, as a state with a Muslim majority, it should have somehow become part of Pakistan. The Pakistani argument is that since the state had a Hindu ruler he was surreptitiously persuaded to accede to India, whereas if the wishes of the people had been considered, they would have opted for Jammu and Kashmir acceding to Pakistan. This patently false hypothesis has been used by successive leaders in Pakistan to refer to Jammu and Kashmir as the “unfinished business of Partition.” The two-nation theory was proved fallible even at its inception when a sizeable Muslim community chose to live, and continues to live and prosper, in secular India rather than go to the newly created Pakistan. In 1971, the eastern part of Pakistan broke away after a war of liberation fought by the Bengali Muslims against the oppression of their co-religionists who had hitherto monopolized Pakistan’s governance.7 The fact8 is that Jammu and Kashmir was one of about 565 princely states of India on which the British paramountcy lapsed

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at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. The Government of India Act 1935, as adopted in the Indian Independence Act 1947, to which India, Pakistan, and even Britain were party, gave the choice of joining either of the dominions to the rulers of the states. Moreover, there was no provision for any conditional accession.

Standstill Agreement and Invasion The ruler of Jammu and Kashmir did not exercise the option immediately and instead offered a proposal of Standstill Agreement to both India and Pakistan, which read, “Jammu and Kashmir Government would welcome Standstill Agreement with Union of India/ Pakistan on all matters on which there exists arrangements with the outgoing British India Government.” Pakistan accepted the offer. India did not agree, and advised the Maharaja to send his authorized representative to Delhi for discussion. Pakistan, though it accepted the Standstill Agreement, had an eye on Jammu and Kashmir. Even before Independence, Mr Mohammed Ali Jinnah had once boastfully declared that “Kashmir is blank cheque in my pocket.” In his bid to woo Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, Mr Jinnah visited Srinagar a couple of times, but failed to achieve his objective. Finding their designs not fructifying, Pakistan launched an armed attack on Jammu and Kashmir to annex it. Tribals in thousands along with Pakistani regular troops entered the state on October 22, 1947, from several points and indulged in bloodshed and mayhem. The bewildered people of the state were not expecting an attack from Pakistan, especially in view of the Standstill Agreement.

Accession In the wake of the Pakistani invasion, the Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession in favor of India on October 26, 1947. This was accepted by the governor-general the next day. The Instrument

: Mukesh Sabharwal


of Accession executed by Maharaja was the same which was signed by rulers of other princely states. With Jammu and Kashmir becoming a part of India, troops were rushed to vacate aggression. The first batch of Indian Army troops arrived at Srinagar Airport immediately after the Accession was signed. The Army fought sustained battle with the tribals, and after several sacrifices pushed them out of the valley and other areas in the Jammu region. Meanwhile, the people of Kashmir were mobilized, and they resisted the enemy. Till the arrival of the troops, they were mainly the Muslim volunteers under Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who braved death to fight the invaders. Later, while the Army pushed back the invaders, there are several instances where people put up a gallant resistance and stopped the further advance.

United Nations (UN) On January 1, 1948, India took up the issue of Pakistani aggression in Jammu and Kashmir at the United Nations Organization (UNO) under Article 35 of its charter. Cease-fire was declared on the midnight of January 1, 1949. The presence of Pakistani regular troops in the valley was attested even by United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) documents (UNCIP first report). At the time of cease-fire, Pakistan held 78,114 sq. km illegally, and this continues even today. On March 5, 1948, the Maharaja announced the formation of an interim government with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah as the prime minister. Subsequently, the Maharaja signed a proclamation, making Yuvraj Karan Singh as the regent. During one of the debates at the UN Security Council on February 5, 1948, Sheikh Abdullah said “aggression and not the accession is the issue.” The Security Council, however, passed a resolution on plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir, subject to certain conditions. The resolution had three parts, one relating to cease-fire; while the

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second, the most important and relevant, was a truce agreement which provided the mechanism for plebiscite. As per the agreement, Pakistan Government agreed to withdraw its troops from the state, which has never been done. Only after being notified that Pakistan had withdrawn its forces, India would begin withdrawal of bulk of its forces in stages, but maintain the minimum strength of its forces necessary for the management of law and order. Pakistan, knowing well the fate of such plebiscite, at that time did not take any steps to fulfill its obligations under the agreement and continued to hold the territory.

Article 370 of the Constitution Article 370 was adopted with a view to fulfill conditions as desired by the Maharaja in the Instrument of Accession. This article establishes the link between the Union of India and the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The constitutional provisions of the Union of India are applied to the state of Jammu and Kashmir through the prism of Article 370. The provisions of the Article 370 imply that the powers of the Parliament to make laws for the state of Jammu and Kashmir are limited only to matters in Union and Concurrent Lists, corresponding to those specified in the Instrument of Accession (defense, foreign affairs, and communications), and any other provisions of Constitution, but only after consultation with the state government.

Repeated Pakistani Misadventures in Kashmir Pakistan continued with her plans to grab Kashmir through force. Pakistan waged two wars in 1965 and 1971 to annex Kashmir, but the people gave her befitting reply and repulsed her attacks with the help of the Indian Army like they did in 1947–48.9 Failing to match India’s military power, it launched a proxy war through terrorism in 1989, which took a toll of human lives besides destroying private and public property. : Mukesh Sabharwal


1965 Under the leadership of General Ayub Khan, Pakistan is said to have believed that the Indian Army was unwilling or unable to defend itself against a quick military campaign in the disputed territory of Kashmir, following a loss to China in 1962. Pakistan believed that the populace of Kashmir was generally discontent with Indian rule and that a resistance movement could be ignited by a few infiltrating saboteurs. This was codenamed “Operation Gibraltar.” On August 15, 1965, Indian forces crossed the cease-fire line and launched an attack on Kashmir, marking an official beginning to the war. Pakistani reports cite this attack as unprovoked. Indian reports cite the attack as a response to a tip the Indian forces received from Kashmiri civilians about Pakistani soldiers crossing the Line of Control (LoC) dressed as local Kashmiris. Most of the war was fought on land by infantry and armored units, with substantial backing from both the air forces.10 India won the war. It gained 1,840 sq. km of Pakistani territory.11

1971 On the evening of December 3, the Pakistani Army launched ground operations in Kashmir and Punjab. It also started an armored operation in Rajasthan. In Kashmir, the operations were concentrated on two key points, Poonch and Chhamb. The Chhamb area witnessed a particularly intense battle, where the Pakistanis forced the Indians to withdraw from their positions. In other parts, India made gains along the cease-fire line. The major Indian operation came in the Sialkot–Shakargarh area south and west of Chhamb. Overall, this was the lesser of the theaters of war in 1971, with the main focus being the war in the east, and which led to the liberation and emergence of what is now Bangladesh. This war was without doubt, a victory for India, and a military defeat for Pakistan, which ended up with having 93,000 of Pakistani soldiers taken Prisoner of War by India.

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1999 During the winter of 1998–99, some elements of the Pakistan Army were covertly training and sending Pakistani troops (largely, troops of its Northern Light Infantry) and paramilitary forces, some allegedly in the guise of mujahedeen, into the territory on the Indian side of the LoC. The infiltration was code named “Operation Badr”; its aim was to sever the link between Kashmir and Ladakh, and cause Indian forces to withdraw from the Siachen Glacier, thus forcing India to negotiate a settlement of the broader Kashmir dispute. Pakistan also believed that any tension in the region would internationalize the Kashmir issue, helping it to secure a speedy resolution. Pakistan badly miscalculated the Indian response, which was fierce and evicted the Pakistanis in totality. The plea from Islamabad to allow a safe passage to the trapped Pakistani soldiers12 was an ultimate proof about the capabilities of the Indian Army. Repercussions of this humiliating military defeat still reverberate in Pakistan, and often become a subject of political expedience. Needless to say, the area is now securely under Indian control.

Proxy War “The water,” General Zia-ul-Haq told his spymaster General Akhtar Malik in December 1979, “must boil at the right temperature.” Pakistan’s military ruler was referring then to the need to calibrate carefully his covert services’ activities in Afghanistan: to refrain from pushing the Soviet Union to the point where it would make it worth its while to launch a full-scale war against the mujahedeen’s covert sponsors.13 A similar analogy was carried forward by Pakistan, initiating terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir as well. This has resulted in a low-intensity conflict with a vicious mix of insurgency, terrorism, and proxy war.14 Pakistan has been waging a proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989. This war is being waged, and has been planned, keeping Pakistan’s weaknesses in mind. Proxy war provides Pakistan with an opportunity to wage a low-cost war against India, bleeding the : Mukesh Sabharwal


country through a thousand cuts. Pakistan’s aims in this regard appear to include continuing to wage a low-cost war against India, using terrorists rather than military forces; to bleed the Indian Army through attrition; to project insurgency as indigenous and homegrown, an endeavor in which it has been proved wrong repeatedly, finding it difficult to sustain the terrorism within Indian borders without infusing leadership/terrorists from outside, and without leadership from across the LoC. Terrorist cadres are by and large disillusioned as are the people. Pakistan continues to deny its involvement, while taking all actions to ensure that it continues to fan the flames of terrorism in India, beside spreading fundamentalism in the rest of India as well. Through the years, the Pakistani objective has remained unchanged. Over the 20 years of conflict, from 1989 to 2009, there has been a sharp decline in the levels of violence, infiltration, available terrorists, and violent incidents. In some ways, the decline in these parameters has been actually dramatic. The numbers of terrorists killed declined by 2009 to about one-eighteenth of their 1999 figures, the numbers of civilian casualties to about one-tenth, and the numbers of security forces casualties to about one-fourth in the same years. Owing to the fence coming up along the LoC, infiltration dropped dramatically by a factor of 42 times from 2001 to 2008. As for residual terrorists, the numbers have declined sharply to about one-fifth of their strength between 2000 and 2009. These figures may vary somewhat from the agency to agency. Interestingly, in 2008, players in the northeast of India and Naxalite-affected areas proved more violent than Jammu and Kashmir itself. Infiltration though reduced still continues. This is primarily because the terrorist infrastructure across the LoC and at the international border with Pakistan still survives. Infiltration also continues from other borders. As for violence levels, all parameters that indicate violence levels, which include improvised explosive devices, bomb blasts, suicide attacks, and selective killings of civilians, are at an all-time low and declining by the year. The Indian Army has now adopted a strong counter-infiltration posture all along the international border and the LoC. The antiinfiltration obstacle system or fence, which has now been constructed : 25


all along the international border and LoC, provides an effective means on which to base troop deployment for prevention of infiltration. This fence, constructed at a great cost now runs across almost the entire length of the LoC, often echeloned behind the forward Indian posts, and often forms the second tier of troop deployment meant to prevent infiltration from across the border. This anti-infiltration obstacles system has deployed along its length several sensors and devices to facilitate prevention of infiltration. The figures for infiltration that has occurred speak for themselves regarding the effectiveness of this infiltration obstacle system. The Indian Army deployed in Jammu and Kashmir has been operating with an iron hand in a velvet glove, taking a three-pronged approach, that is, preventing infiltration at the LoC itself, tackling the terrorists through military operations, while simultaneously reaching out to the people through its efforts at winning hearts and minds. The core of military operations has been a series of counterterrorist operations. As regards these, the Army has been laying emphasis on conducting surgical operations based on hard intelligence, and this modus operandi has given the Army great success. Great emphasis is laid on ensuring that no collateral damage occurs, and that no innocent is injured. The net result of these military operations is that terrorist leadership is now in disarray. This fact is borne out by several indicators including reduction in violence levels and intelligence inputs. The Army has also made an earnest endeavor to better the lot of the people, especially in remote areas. “Operation Sadbhavana” reaches out to the people in many different ways, from providing electricity to the remotest of villages through micro-projects, to providing schools and orphanages, and even taking care of those ravaged by terrorism. The Indian Army, as indeed the security forces, has had a major role to play in development of the state. “Operation Sadbhavana” is a holistic exercise aimed at winning hearts and minds, conducted with the full and clear understanding that eventually the solution for defeating the proxy war being waged lies with the people. The exercise is essentially aimed at empowering people, including in the remotest of areas where the : Mukesh Sabharwal


civil administration is hard put to conduct programs. The activities being conducted under “Operation Sadbhavana” includes providing vocational training and education in remote areas, exposing the people in these areas to the larger canvas of India through tours to other states (which includes taking children and opinion makers, e.g., maulvis, for these tours), running hostels and orphanages, providing transport, facilitating construction of community buildings/ playgrounds, and a host of other activity, limited only by imagination. “Operation Sadbhavana” has been a major success by itself and has yielded huge dividends in terms of introducing people to the “peace dividend.”

Prevailing Situation Security Situation There has been no letup in terms of Pakistani support for terrorism, with infrastructure in Pakistan remaining intact. Pakistan retains all options related to calibrated support for the proxy war. There are reports of terrorists continuing to exist in camps in Pakistan, waiting to infiltrate. While infiltration from across the borders (international border and LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir has reduced due to creation of the anti-infiltration obstacle system and due to troop deployment there, infiltration from other borders continues, albeit in lesser numbers. Effective counterterrorist operations have resulted in effective attrition of terrorists, who are now resorting to “low-risk–high-impact” options. Unsure of local support, terrorists have been resorting to desperate acts like targeting political activists, minority community, tourists, and pilgrims. There have been several instances where terrorists have inflicted atrocities against innocents. This has happened as a result of pressure on terrorists, wherein they find themselves avoiding all contact, whatsoever, with security forces. There is a requirement of low visibility, through focused and extremely effective operations, so conducted that no collateral damage or casualty occurs. Emphasis must remain on surgical operations, based on hard : 27


intelligence. Also, very importantly, there must be no attempt to bait terrorists through provocative statements and the like, since these can lead to the terrorists resorting to high-visibility actions, to the detriment of the civil populace. The fulcrum of all operations being the populace, all operations must aim at isolating the terrorists from the populace through “people-friendly” operations, and through combining operations with intelligence and development. The “Fidayeen” attack by terrorists in a hotel in Lal Chowk, Srinagar, in January 2010 is a classic example of low-cost, highvisibility action taken by terrorists. A handful of terrorists in such an eventuality hogged the news for nearly two days. Interestingly, this action came soon after a very senior functionary commented in the press that there had been no suicide attacks in Kashmir. On a positive note, the Indo-Pak peace process is progressing well, and confidence-building measures are in place. Notwithstanding these measures, as already outlined, the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir is now much improved in absolute terms. However the threat of terrorism does linger.

Sociopolitical Situation Elections The state has seen several elections conducted very successfully. Voting percentages have been very high, including in urban areas. Political activity continues unchecked. There is a clamor for seats, and there have been no disturbances. Campaigning, however, has been jerky at times. The people have overall expressed their mood and desire for peace, through these elections. A representative of the Hurriyat, Sajjad Lone, also contested the elections. While 43.69 percent of the electorate voted in 2002, 2008 saw an astounding 61.49 percent people vote at elections in the Kashmir valley—respectable by any national or international standards. By comparison, the national average in 2009 was approximately 60 percent.15 More significantly, all the districts of the Kashmir valley (outside Srinagar) witnessed a : Mukesh Sabharwal


healthy turnout of more than 45 percent. Kupwara and Bandipora, once at the heartland of separatist politics, registered 68.22 percent and 59.66 percent voting, respectively.16

Fallout of the Sri Amarnath Shrine Board Agitation The Hurriyat got a fresh lease of life as a consequence of this agitation. Crowds were seen on the streets and Azadi slogans shouted. Interestingly, these crowds included unemployed youth, 14 to 16 years old, who were otherwise idling on the streets. These crowds were not spontaneous, and there are reports of them having been paid `100 each to participate. There was no call for a bandh from the Byopar Mandal (Jamaitis). The agitation was restricted mainly to big towns. This agitation brought to the fore divisions within the Hurriyat Conference. The Hurriyat, under pressure, staged the bandhs. What emerges very strongly from the outcome of this is the extremely efficient handling by the security forces and the excellent management of crisis by the government. This issue also saw the complete absence of expression of international opinion.

Bus Service—A Feedback We now have two bus services in Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan. These are the Uri–Muzaffarabad and Poonch– Rawalkote buses. Feedback received from passengers who have taken these buses reveals that the grass is definitely greener on the Indian side. Srinagar is far more developed than Muzaffarabad. Economic disparity between the Indian and Pakistani sides is startling. Passengers have reported a great deal of difference between the Indian and the Pakistani sides in terms of democratic and religious freedom. Such journeys have allayed the fears of the people in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. These journeys have enhanced people-to-people contact and a positive psychological impact on locals. Importantly, the journeys across the LoC have helped negate Pakistani propaganda. : 29


Economic Situation Statistics When considering the economic situation, the statistics from 1985 to 2005 speak for themselves. Currently, the per capita income increased six times from `2,874 in 1985 to `17,174 in 2005. As far as people below poverty line are concerned, Jammu and Kashmir has 8 to 12 times lesser people in this category than the national average. As regards trade, the import and export industry increased seven times between 1985 and 2005, with the taxable export value rising from `89,000 lakh to `633,000 lakh.

Tourism Jammu and Kashmir sees a large number of tourists each year, including religious tourists. The numbers of tourists in the Kashmir valley have risen from 1.9 lakh in 2003 to 4.75 lakh in 2009. The Amarnath pilgrimage has seen a rise from 1.53 lakh in 2003 to 3.81 lakh in 2009. Kashmir and Ladakh provide excellent opportunities for adventure sports like mountaineering, river rafting, etc., and for winter sports including skiing, ice skating, and ice hockey. The recent National Winter Games (2008) held at Gulmarg witnessed large participation.

Major Infrastructure Projects The state has a number of major infrastructure projects in progress today. These projects cover all the fields of development, including the construction of a number of roads across mountain passes, including between Rajouri/Kishtwar and the Kashmir valley and between Doda/Kishtwar and Himachal Pradesh. A very important railway line is now being made, beyond Udhampur and the Kashmir valley, tunneling through the mountains of the Pir Panjal ranges. The section up to Udhampur is already operational, as is : Mukesh Sabharwal


the section of this line within the Kashmir valley itself. There are a number of important hydroelectric projects that have also been constructed in the state. These include the Salal Dam Project (690 MW),17 the Dul Hasti Project (390 MW),18 and the Baglihar Project (450 MW) on the Chenab River and the Uri Hydel Power Project over the Jhelum in Baramulla (480 MW)19.

Indicators of Normalcy There has been a perceptible drop in violence levels as has been brought out already. Certain specific signatures in this direction include late closing of markets, higher density of traffic and continuance of traffic even after dark, reduced frequency of bandhs, active participation of youth in recruitment rallies, protests directed mainly against governance-related issues, reduction in diktats by terrorists/separatists, and sights of mourners gathering for local security forces martyrs. There is also a forward movement on return of pundits to the valley. People in Kashmir have made known their yearning for peace and good governance. There are increasing protests demanding better amenities. Several economic development schemes initiated by the government are under way. We now have a situation where the leaders of All Party Hurriyat Conference continue with their rhetoric, merely to remain relevant.

Way Ahead Internal security is a reality and cannot be wished away. To this end what is required primarily is to strengthen the local first responders. This involves capacity-building of the state police forces, to include training of state police and the Central Reserve Police Force. The importance of leadership of the paramilitary forces cannot be overemphasized. All first responders need to be empowered. First responders need to foresee, rehearse, and train for eventualities. Thereafter, we gradually need to reduce the Army’s visibility, : 31


especially in cities and along the roads. Deployment of these first responders requires a grid-based deployment, mobility, coordination, and efficient communications. Each of these issues is really a subject by itself. There is a requirement of having enough security forces, suitably trained, armed, and deployed so as to operate where required within a timeframe, which enables their being effective. This may essentially imply a requirement of two broad patterns of deployment, one for static vital points for prophylactic security and the other based at various operating bases from where they can act in time as required. The latter aspect, especially, of deploying troops for active operations and for sanitization of areas needs to be done on a grid basis, such that the furthest point in the grid is at a distance that permits reaching it in time. Needless to say, areas where such deployment must take place need to be assessed on the basis of the potential for operations. In order that the reaction may be swift, mobility is essential. The form of mobility chosen could vary from vehicle-based mobility to mobility on foot, combining speed with surprise. Excellent communications are essential to enable security forces to operate effectively within their given areas. As regards the security forces operations, the eventual success of these would depend upon the effectiveness of a mix of defensive/prophylactic and active operations. In turn, for these to be effective, intelligence is a must. This is best gathered through the populace, which in Jammu and Kashmir has been largely won over, convinced of the just cause of the nation. Controlling the situation effectively by security forces in Jammu and Kashmir is the way ahead. A functional integration through institutional framework at the unified headquarters and field levels is essential. The polarization of communities is against the interests of amity and peace, and is harmful in the long run. It is vital that ethnic/communal harmony be maintained at all times. In order to operate effectively, security forces need necessary legal provisions to permit them to function/operate. Any dilution of protective laws for security forces could thus be damaging. Such laws are the only safeguard for security forces, and give them the requisite legal framework that permits them to conduct proactive operations against terrorists. : Mukesh Sabharwal


To cap it all, the most important issue that must be given due significance is governance and development. It would be desirable for more industries to mushroom in Jammu and Kashmir, and for the national media to proliferate to an ever-greater degree. The development of the state is perhaps single most important factor, essential for bringing lasting peace to the state. While there is no gainsaying the fact that the levels of development in Jammu and Kashmir outdistance the levels of development in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and the northern areas, increasing levels of development can help the greater cause of restoring normalcy to the state.

Conclusion Jammu and Kashmir, since Independence, has suffered the machinations of an adversary, intent upon realizing its territorial ambitions. The state has seen several wars, and has witnessed a proxy war on its soil for the last 20 years or so. Despite this, the state has witnessed remarkable levels of economic development and growth. The Army, as indeed all the security forces, has helped achieve and maintain a high degree of normalcy in the state despite the allout efforts made by terrorists to disrupt this. Even while doing so, the Indian Army has shown a high degree of professionalism and restraint in its operations, through its efforts to see that there are no collateral casualties. The Army, through its efforts at winning hearts and minds in the state, has also helped induce the essentials of development in the remotest of areas in the state, contributing in myriad aspects ranging from rebuilding of villages after the 2005 earthquake to running schools and sponsoring students/religious teachers for visiting other parts of India, thereby promoting the larger cause of national integration. Many of the Army’s efforts have been targeted toward those areas where the civil administration would find it difficult to reach, simply because of geography. It is always with a sense of pride that one finds any soldier speaking about his efforts at development in his area of responsibility. The people of Jammu and Kashmir have clearly indicated their preference for peace and amity. With increasing levels of normalcy, : 33


the people of the state are already enjoying the increasing dividends of the march toward peace and prosperity. All the efforts of the nation, as well as those of the state, are targeted toward accelerating the pace of this march. Soon a new day will dawn!

Notes â•‡ 1. National Portal of India, Jammu & Kashmir; http://india.gov.in/knowindia/st_jammukashmir.php â•‡ 2. Website of the state of Jammu & Kashmir: A Profile; http://jammukashmir.nic.in/profile/welcome.html â•‡ 3. www.kashmirhub.com/geography-of-kashmir/index.html â•‡ 4. http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/jammu-and-kashmir/demographics. html â•‡ 5. http://planningcommission.gov.in/plans/stateplan/sdr_jandk/sdr_jkch2. pdf â•‡ 6. http://india.gov.in/knowindia/st_jammukashmir.php â•‡ 7. http://www.indianembassy.org/policy/Kashmir/Kashmir_MEA/accession.html â•‡ 8. http://jammukashmir.nic.in/profile/jkhist.htm â•‡ 9. http://jammukashmir.nic.in/profile/jkhist.htm#Accession 10. http://www.indopedia.org/Indo-Pakistani_War_of_1965.html 11. The Greater Game: India’s race with destiny and China; David Van Praagh. McGill-Queen’s Press, 2003; Page 294. 12. http://mod.nic.in/samachar/17/html/ch8.htm 13. Frontline, Volume 22, Issue 19, September 10–23, 2005. 14. General Sinha’s speech at The First Field Marshal Manekshaw Memorial Lecture on “National Security: J&K Perspective,” August 16, 2008. 15. “India’s ruling party wins resounding victory.” CBN News World, May 16, 2009. 16. The Hindu, Tuesday, February 03, 2009; Article “The Jammu & Kashmir Elections and After”; http://www.thehindu.com/2009/02/03/stories/ 2009020354900800.htm 17. NHPC Website Salal Power Station; http://www.nhpcindia.com/Projects/ english/Scripts/Prj_Introduction.aspx?Vid=62 18. NHPC Press Release, April 26, 2008, titled “Dr. Manmohan Singh, Hon’ble Prime Minister of India Dedicates 390 MW Dul Hasti Power

: Mukesh Sabharwal


Station to the Nation”; http://www.nhpcindia.com/English/Scripts/PressRelease.aspx?VId=90 19. The Business Standard, October 03, 2006; http://www.businessstandard.com/india/news/nhpc-plans-to-generate-6000-mw-injammukashmir/260408/. Also NHPC Website http://www.nhpcindia. com/Projects/English/Scripts/Prj_Introduction.aspx?vid=9

: 35

Welfare and Preventive Policing The Gandhian Way1 Relevance of Gandhian Model of Policing

T

o achieve holistic and substantial results, we require a paradigm shift in the manner in which the policing is currently being practiced in India. Such a shift is required in all aspects of policing—be it crime prevention and detection, law and order, traffic, police training, prison management, or general administration. The concept of welfare and preventive policing, which I prefer to call as “Gandhian Way of Policing,” assumes relevance here. To begin with, the planning processes should have active participation of ranks that are closest to the ground. Presently, in the rigid hierarchical system of policing, such ranks merely receive orders to be implemented without their views and opinions being heard. Thus, if change has to be brought about, it would have to begin by co-opting the rank and file, and making them full-fledged stakeholders. Though such a policy change has not taken place in Indian police governance system so far, I have personally lived and practiced and seen its positive results. Implementation of decisions taken with the participation of functionaries at lower levels is definitely qualitatively superior. By

Kiran Bedi

Welfare and Preventive Policing

Involvement of all in the planning process leads to the preparation of action-oriented and practical strategies that ensure effective delivery of police services to the community. It also ensures fixing of tasks and goals for all, besides enhancing accountability and transparency based on team spirit. Such group efforts would help the police personnel to gain by the collective wisdom, without any exceptions. A sense of total commitment to the service would then be instilled in one and all. All these, to me, constitute the real Gandhian way of policing. When everything would be based on collective wisdom, integrity, and a spirit of national service, how could there be discrimination on any basis? How could there be one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for the weak and the marginalized? Would not all be equal before the law? Would not law prevail rather than position? How could there persist negative interference of any kind from any quarter? With enhanced respect for law, would there be not be greater compliance with, and respect for, rules and regulations? Would not such development bring about the following changes: • • • • • •

Enhance the feeling of security Bring people closer to police Strengthen intelligence Prevent crimes Improve detection of crimes to a greater extent Usher in truthful policing

Would we not call this the Gandhian model? Such a model would be simple, transparent, fearless, participatory, truthful, nondiscriminatory, compassionate, yet non-sparing for the saboteur. When such a model is put in place, positive developments will follow. For instance, openness would have developed between the police and the people, leading to mutual trust. Open sharing of inadequacies or deficiencies among the cops will keep them on their toes so that previous mistakes are not repeated. There will not be anything to hide or to be defensive about. People could be equal stakeholders in their security and welfare. Certain citizens could be identified and entrusted with special responsibilities to resolve matters that have the potential to breach the peace in society. : 37

Bridging the Gap

Wherever possible, women, students, senior citizens, and other volunteers could be co-opted to enlarge the resource base. Given such state of affairs, there will not be any room for corruption and related evils. No one will harbor terrorists, as both the police and citizens would be vigilant. Citizens would invariably report suspicious persons and objects and women would fearlessly report violence against them. No one will remain a silent victim of any form of injustice. In such a regime, false arrests and arrests under pressure may not be possible. Presently, the complaints of the poorer sections of the society are treated with apathy. This indifference will change. Complaints will be registered and appropriate follow-up actions will be taken by the police without favoritism, irrespective of the status of the complainant. Use of state-of-the-art technology in registering complaints and recording events/statements will further enhance the efficacy of police services. Civil society too could lend a helping hand in sponsoring the required hardware in case government funds were not immediately available or had been used up. Even corporates could be roped in because they would stand to benefit greatly if crime levels were reduced. Such funding could be part of their social responsibility. All these aspects are Gandhian for me. And they are possible. I am not being unduly idealistic; participative leadership and unflinching determination can achieve the aforementioned objectives.

From Control to Empowerment: The Strength of Welfare Policing The foundation of sound policing lies in the revival of the police beat system, with beat boxes in all police stations. This would mean fixing responsibilities for every inch of a city on the area beat police officers working in shifts and winning the trust and cooperation of the people. All these will greatly help in the prevention and early detection of crimes and also in enhancing the ground intelligence capacity. This will be a paradigm shift from policing by control to

: Kiran Bedi


policing by empowerment. Such an aligned and motivated organization would always be ready to prevent or respond to any terror attack. A sustained police–public partnership would improve communication between both sides, besides breaking the artificial barriers of hierarchy within the police. Such positive developments will also lead to more trust being engendered between the people and the police, and also within the various ranks of the service. The beat system ensures that the people are listened to, their efforts are supported, and the interaction between the police and citizens is strengthened. Most of all, this system stands for “policing as the power to prevent crimes.” Daily field visits of higher authorities to ground units, planned or surprise (to listen to opinions and suggestions), and analyzing/using these inputs to resolve issues (before they become problems) will definitely enhance the efficiency of police services. Such interactions will also empower the ground-level officials. Rewarding good work right then and there will also make a difference to the matters. I have followed this very useful practice in all my field postings in the past and had reaped rich dividends. The focus was on doing and getting things done rather than asking for reports. Traffic police personnel need to be internally inspired to do their duties, and their workload needs to be eased with the help of state-of-the-art equipments and technology, using resources not only from government, but also from all the other stakeholders (including corporate houses). A constant electronic vigil will certainly bring a vast section of the people under the “scanner” and, above all, would provide security on the roads at night. An effective use of electronic evidences for all prosecutions will eliminate corruption and unsubstantiated complaints without being overawed by the “who’s who” of the society. To ensure women’s security, especially for those who work in night shifts, the employers can be directed to link the vehicles for transportation electronically with radio systems, so that the precise location of the vehicle could be traced. It is also desirable to encourage women nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to visit

: 39

Bridging the Gap

neighboring police stations and bring people to understand the diverse aspects of police functioning. Opening the police system and bridging the gap between police and the people are possible through effectively introducing the concept of citizen-police—with the Civil Defence, Home Guards, National Cadet Corps (NCC) cadets, and ex-servicemen to begin with. Along with this, students at the high school and college level could be encouraged to go for “internships” in the fields of patrolling and maintaining security as a part of their practical education, including research. Given such initiatives, there will be a seamless flow of two-way information, where the public and the police would jointly detect and prevent crime. The fear of law along with respect for law could be instilled. Totally free and fearless registration of crime will become the norm, and it will ensure safer and peaceful lives for the citizens. Once all these collective, corrective, and community-based (3Cs) initiatives are put in place, the people too will become the true stakeholders in maintaining and enhancing security. Gandhian methods of policing could also be effective on the investigation front also. Everything could be based on truth as it unfolds. The facts/statements/confessions will have to be videorecorded as a practice for the courts to see, if they wished to do so. The advantages of advanced technology could be appropriately used here to enhance the efficiency and credibility of the police. With a properly nurtured and sustained beat system and with sound and sincere policing, the incidence of crime would be reduced. Also, repeat crimes by professional criminals will come down because of corrective and “close-watch” methods. This sort of a Gandhian model will be the biggest preventor of terror attacks. This is because people’s trust would be with the police, supported by intelligence inputs received and cross-checked at the ground level on a 24×7 basis. Easy harboring of criminals will not be possible in such a regime. Along with safety drills, regular training with the presence of quick response teams (QRTs) and with the people on the side of the police, the safety of citizen could be assured more effectively and in a socially embedded form.

: Kiran Bedi


Some Memorable Experiences and Experiments I have tried out some of the aforementioned concepts and plans earlier, with a marked degree of success. For instance, in the 1980s, we used to have an effective beat system with beat boxes that were built by the community. There were 160 beat boxes in entire west and north Delhi, where I have worked as a deputy commissioner of police (DCP). By giving a beat box, police could trace who is committing what crime, and who is earning through what means. This experiment that we carried out many years ago is one of the measures that is recognized in my citation of the Ramon Magsaysay Award. There were lots of instances in which people actively participated in preventive policing and supported the police—by joining in night beats and donating lands/buildings for police stations and police posts. For instance, in early the 1980s, some land was gifted by resident’s welfare association in the area of Pitampura and Saraswati Vihar in Delhi. Today, on the same land you have a full-fledged police station. Another experiment in preventive policing was involving students for road safety campaigns. In 1981 and 1982—during the Asiad Games—students used to stand at road crossings, holding banners for traffic management, which proved to be very effective in generating public awareness. In yet another preventive policing practice, the traffic cops used to play games with children in each beat and through these games taught the children traffic signals, road safety measures, and importance of crime prevention. During Asiad Games, we set up many traffic booths to facilitate information for people. In those days, we also had a good practice of honoring honest three-wheeler drivers. This was a program sponsored by the tire companies, as a result of which three-wheeler drivers were more diligently obeying traffic rules. We also introduced a system of acknowledgment cards—where anybody writing to us was acknowledged. This was a paid acknowledgment card. You write to a police station and you get an acknowledgment of it. Now it can be replaced by Internet or email acknowledgment. Another measure was introduced for the porters in busy markets. We gave them all green uniforms so they

: 41

Bridging the Gap

could be recognized if they tried running away with goods or luggage. In the crime prevention mode, we experimented rehabilitating members of the Sansi tribe, who were into bootlegging, other crimes, and eve teasing. We put them in a vocational training program to economically rehabilitate them and it did wonders! They are no more Sansi criminals now. This is true preventive policing. These are all great practices, which are disappearing as we do not document and institutionalize these prototypes. We need to revive, regenerate, and reenergize these models.

Note 1.â•…This essay is prepared on the basis of the transcript of the IGNOU Silver Jubilee Lecture delivered by the author titled “Welfare and Preventive Policing for Helping the Helpless” and by appropriately incorporating relevant portions from a chapter on “Gandhian Model of Policing” in the book I Dare!, written by the author, with due permission.

: Kiran Bedi

Identity and the Notion of the “Other”

I

am a woman, an Indian, a Hindu, half Gujarati and half Oriya, humanist, a lover of music, postgraduate in social work, actor, director, born in Bombay, and grew up in Delhi … I could go on with my many different identities. But then why not, as all of them, and more, together make me who I am. Some of these I happen to be born into, some my environment compelled me to acquire, and some I willfully adopted. All these identities can be liberating and limiting. At times, they seem like competing with each other, but most often they coexist peacefully. In all, what bothers me is the fact that even the identities that are simply a given, that we have had no role in choosing, become a matter of dispute. One is made to feel either proud or ashamed of them, even though they are beyond one’s control. I did not choose to be born a woman, or in a Hindu family, or in India, or, for that matter, with the color of my skin. But the society imposes certain preconceived notions on these identities and adds a perspective to it, which then has an impact in shaping our thoughts and values. Often, instead of focusing on our acquired identities, we put more emphasis on the identities we are born with. By

Nandita Das

: 43

B r i d g in g t h e G a p

The inherent multiplicity of identities in the modern world is a challenge not only at a personal or societal level, but also at a political one. The US presidential campaign saw Barack Hussein Obama underplaying his race, his middle name, and the color of his skin. It seemed like he wanted to distance himself from those identities that the society wanted to define him by. In India, the question of identity becomes even more acute and complex because of the long history and vast diversity of groups that one belongs to. There are many more divisions—of religion, caste, subcaste, region, language—that further impact in creating even more divisions of class, color, and occupation. Therefore, not surprisingly, identity politics has played a big role in the electoral battles for power. The divisive and exclusive agendas have plagued our society in fragmenting and distracting people from more fundamental issues. This political exploitation of identities is dangerous not only because it suppresses multiple identities and creates an artificial homogeneous “group identity,” but more so because it thrives on demonizing the “other.” Since my childhood I have heard, read, and seen stories about Pakistan being the enemy, a country full of bigoted people and terrorists, waiting to attack India. Any violent attack in India is assumed to have a Pakistani hand, even before a formal investigation is launched. This by no means is to say that there are no terrorists or bigoted people in Pakistan, but the deeper prejudice and the convenient enemy demonizes the entire country and its people. The preconceived notion disallows us from seeing them and their situation with any empathy. In both countries, the governments play the card of demonizing each other. Both India and Pakistan, home to a large number of poor people, continue to spend record amounts on defense.1 The demonization distracts the public from more pressing issues like food, health, education, and shelter. The irrational fear of the imagined “other” becomes more powerful than the miseries of the real world. The India–Pakistan conflict shows how even nationalism, an often positively perceived identity, can become divisive and jingoistic. It is used as a tool to unify “one’s own people” at the cost of creating : Nandita Das

I d e n t i t y a n d t h e N o t ion o f t h e “ O t h e r ”

animosity with another country. The decades old India–Pakistan conflict over Kashmir is a prime example of how an issue is kept alive to whip up emotions of nationality and pride, while no genuine attempt is made to solve the fundamental issues that concern the people of Kashmir. Is it any wonder then that the people of Kashmir want freedom from both countries, and instead want the right to self-governance? The media has also played a significant role in making it a nationalistic issue and not leading it toward a rational conclusion that would benefit the whole region. Also, if we tried learning more about the “other,” we would be less prejudiced and it would evoke more empathy. One tends to fear the unknown and therefore demonizes it. Moreover, this jingoism is not limited to the governments of the two countries, but has filtered down to the people and other institutions that have internalized it. We can see that in the way media often portrays Pakistan as the enemy, further deepening the prejudice. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, as we must call it now, on 26/11 were whipped in the most sensational manner by the media, especially by the TV channels. The target rating points (TRPs) went higher for the ones that showed the whole operation as almost a fictional drama, laced with music, and over the top commentary. What happened was ghastly and unpardonable, but if the portrayal of it was questioned, it was perceived as being unpatriotic. I remember writing a stream of consciousness piece on the November 27, 2008, as I was in Mumbai, and was going through a range of emotions, probably just as everybody else was. And I was surprised to get so many hate mails when it was posted on my website and parts of it appeared in an English daily. I was accused of not caring about the Indian pride and hiding behind the humanist garb. Patriotism, like many other “isms,” has also been defined within a narrow parameter. I discovered that in Mumbai, before every film screening in a theater, the national anthem is played and everyone has to stand up. There is nothing wrong with that per se, but the fact that it is made mandatory by law seems a bit of an imposition. I think if we were not under this constant social pressure to uphold any of our identities, we would be comfortable with our multiple identities, resolving many conflicts and insecurities. : 45


I got a firsthand experience of engaging with yet another identity that is not much talked about, and even lesser so 14 years ago, in India. My debut film, Fire (1996), was the first Indian film that spoke openly about a homosexual relationship and the lack of choices women have. It also dealt with issues of arranged marriages and patriarchy that are deep-rooted in our society. Fire created a big storm, but neither with the censor board, which to our pleasant surprise passed it without a single cut, nor with the audiences who had their varied responses but still wanted to see the film. It was initiated by the right-wing organizations that felt threatened by the issues the film was raising and wanted to bring attention to themselves at any cost. According to them the film was against “Indian culture and morals,” and so they asked for a nationwide ban. While they managed to stop some screenings, the film was shown in most parts of India. But little did they realize that they actually contributed toward generating a huge debate and brought the subject into public domain, forcing people to engage with it. The positive outcome of the controversy was that it impacted the collective thinking of Indian society that had pushed issues of homosexuality under the carpet. The public debate gave rise to greater acceptability, less prejudice, and more information about what most people did not know, thereby reducing the fear of the unknown. For me, personally, it was an incredible journey of sensitization. I too had little understanding of the issue, and that was also only intellectual. But as people started coming out with their varied responses, I was shocked to see the extent of stigma gays and lesbians faced. Many of them confided in me, perceiving me as the champion of their cause, and I became a spokesperson by default. In the 14 years since I did Fire, I have encountered a range of reactions—from those who see the film as endorsing “sinful behavior” to those who see it as a bold declaration of human rights. All these interactions, good and bad, have made me a more compassionate and sensitive human being. Even today, when I go for any talk at a social forum or university, or even while chatting with a fellow passenger on a flight, there is always a question about Fire. : Nandita Das


What is it that makes us so uncomfortable about the “other?” And how can we so easily believe that something that is different from what we have grown into has to be not “right?” The debate over Fire raised many questions—who defines what is Indian culture and who are these self-proclaimed custodians trying to represent the people? What is “normal” and what is “abnormal?” Can a work of art that reflects reality be subjected to such unconstitutional censorship? Is freedom of expression not a human right? Which of the identities needs assertion, and which one is less important, and why? My pursuit of finding answers to many such questions has been an interesting journey. Fire, in many ways, was my first upclose and personal experience about the struggle with the issue of identity and the notion of the “other.” I grew up in a very liberal, secular, and open environment, where my parents gave me the space to question and find my own path. My father, an artist, stayed at home, cooked, cleaned, and, I thought for recreation, painted. My mother, a writer and editor, went out to work every morning. For a while I thought the norm was that fathers stay at home and mothers go to work! I am glad that the role reversals happened very early in my life and I was not trapped in the “normal” gender-role definitions. Even though my parents were not well versed in the political “isms,” they instinctively believed in equality, inclusiveness, and humanistic values and did not label people. I am glad I got that environment so I could imbibe it without any effort. In my growing-up years, I had many influences that shaped my thinking and reaffirmed my faith in the pluralist identity. During my college days, I was part of a street theater group where we performed plays to raise awareness about gender, economic, and social inequalities, worker’s rights, sectarian violence, etc. After college, I decided to pursue a Master’s degree in Social Work, and later started working with a couple of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that focused on issues of women and child rights. All this has impacted my choices, both personal and professional. My encounters with the marginalized and disadvantaged people, and their struggles and the exposure to realities beyond the one I grew into, have impacted many of my personal and professional : 47


choices. Their heart-wrenching stories of the exploitation and exclusion by the powerful and the advantaged, and the apathy of most people, were difficult to ignore. Anguish, anger, helplessness, and the desire to reach out kept growing and I kept exploring many different means to share and communicate. In fact that is how I started acting in films, and even today strive to be part of stories that I feel need to be told. Films have a wide reach and many of the experiences of the shoots and the interactions thereafter with the audiences have also helped my advocacy work in human rights. The different hats I wear have fed on each other. In the last 10–15 years, people like me, who intrinsically believe in the idea of a pluralistic society, have been increasingly feeling isolated and disturbed by the rise of identity politics in India. Exclusivist ideologies based on religion, caste, region, or language have been used by political parties to gain more and more ground. I have seen how simple conversations around these issues turn into polarized arguments. The concept of “them” and “us” has entered all domains—public discourse and interpersonal relationships. The violence that is generated as a result is evident all over the country. Waking up to newspapers filled with stories of violence has become commonplace not just in India but around the world. Firaaq, my directorial debut film, in many ways, was an outcome of all this and more. It was a cathartic experience for me. I do not remember when exactly the seed of this film was sown, but I do know that it was a response to what was happening around me. That is why the film states in the beginning: “This is a work of fiction, based on a thousand true stories.” I was gradually finding myself in the midst of prejudices, thrusted identities, and the many “isms” that were making me feel alone and alienated. I needed to express my own anguish and helplessness about what was happening. I did not start out by looking for a story that I could direct; instead, all these stories compelled me to want to direct. “Firaaq” is an Urdu word that has two meanings—separation and quest. Set in the aftermath of sectarian violence in Gujarat, of 2002, it traces the emotional journeys of ordinary people—some who were victims, some perpetrators, and some who chose to watch silently. Often, films about violence are full of violence that they set out to : Nandita Das


critique. But Firaaq is about the fierce and delicate emotions that the characters go through in their relationships. I chose an ensemble structure that allowed me to represent diverse experiences across class, gender, religion, and community. It is through the journeys of the characters that we experience the explicit and implicit impact of violence, and their desperate desire for peace. During the process of writing the script, many stories, comments, and events found their way directly or indirectly into the script. I, with my cowriter Shuchi Kothari, took almost three years to write the script, making it more layered and nuanced. In many ways, Firaaq pushed my boundaries, and I do not mean only the creative ones. Just as those who saw the film, I too was faced with many fundamental questions. Why do we have an inherent need to label people? Is it because it makes us comfortable so that we do not have to dig deep and we can move on? Or is it because we do not know how to deal with ambiguity? Or, is it a projection of our own prejudices and biases? Do we all not stereotype? Jews are rich, Muslims are violent, lawyers are liars, women cannot drive, etc. Labeling imposes an identity that may not even be important to one’s life and colors our responses, not letting us look at things objectively and afresh. Also, those who are labeled get pushed into either becoming defensive or aggressive, but either ways, it limits our potential, breeds insecurity, and further forces us to conform to the label. While it is important to be aware of one’s own prejudices, so that we do not fall into the trap of easy stereotyping, the problem is that it is easier to identify other people’s prejudice than one’s own. Firaaq in many ways shows us a mirror and raises some pertinent questions about our own prejudices. From the reactions I have got from all over the world, the audience sees itself in the characters of the film and it evokes a sense of empathy, an emotion we are fast forgetting. A middle-class housewife closes the door on a victim and struggles to overcome her guilt. The loyalties of two best friends are tested in the times of fear and suspicion. A bunch of young men, having suffered violence, seek revenge to fight their helplessness and anger. A modern-day Hindu–Muslim couple struggle between the instinct to hide their identity and the desire to assert it. A boy : 49


desperately searches for his missing father, having lost the rest of his family in the riots. And a saintly musician clings on to his idealism, despite all the violence in the city, until an incident shakes his faith. These are the different stories that are united by the spatial and emotional context. Despite understanding the inherent multiplicity of identities and realizing its divisive potential, there are some specific identities that one still wants to claim. For instance, I often feel strongly about the identity of being a woman. This could well be because of my exposure to gender issues and the stark inequalities that exist that one cannot ignore. It is probably also to do with me being a fairly privileged woman, and therefore the need to be a voice for those who do not have similar opportunities is compelling. As an actress, I have played many “ordinary” women who through their struggles and negotiations transformed themselves into being extraordinary. Being part of their journeys has made me more aware of my identity as a woman and the responsibility of engaging in the gender advocacy work. But sometimes the identity of being a woman is in conflict with my overall desire to be viewed just as a person. I have been asked so many times how it feels to be a woman director. I will never know what it feels to be a male director! When I was directing, I was simply a director and my female perspective was something that I was not consciously thinking of. Just as there is a male gaze, there must be a female gaze, but it is an inherent quality and not a deliberate attempt. So I think it is possible to simultaneously feel close to certain identities and distance oneself from others. I have tried to explore some of the major identities and prejudices around the “other.” Be it in terms of religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation, in the society I live in. William James said it very aptly: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.” And while none of us are above it, if we become aware and honestly confront our prejudices, then there is hope. Our survival, as a world community, depends on creative approaches to conflict resolution and a deeper understanding that racism, bigotry, sectarian prejudice, and religious identity will not serve any purpose. : Nandita Das


I hope to continue to struggle and overcome my own prejudices, my own responses, as that, if nothing else is in my control. And who better than Gandhi can sum it all up, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”

Note 1.â•…India is one of the world’s top arms importers and Pakistan spends more on defense as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than any other large Asian country.

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Inclusive Education and Sustainable Growth

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oday, we are living in a “knowledge society,” a society which rests upon four key knowledge paradigms, namely, knowledge generation, knowledge dissemination, knowledge accessibility, and knowledge application. The ultimate aim of this knowledge society is to turn its human resources into responsible and informed citizens, committed to working for a better society. Higher education has been identified as an effective means to accelerate and to accomplish this much desired goal. Enabling more people to enter the stream of higher education is also essential to meet our economy’s need for higher-level skills and to sustain the economic growth rate of 9 per cent. Realizing the need for revamping the higher education system in the country in tune with requirements of knowledge society, the National Knowledge Commission has identified five key areas for close attention. These are access to knowledge, imparting skills, knowledge creation, knowledge application, and development of better knowledge services. Knowledge accessibility is the first and foremost step toward developing a knowledge society. At the time of independence, there By

K. Sankaranarayanan

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were only 16 universities, 591 colleges, and 228,881 students. Today we have 425 universities, 18,000 colleges, and about 20 million (or 2 crore) students enrolled for higher education. Thus, in a way, accessibility has improved by leaps and bounds. However, the proportion of our population in the relevant age group, that is, 18–23, that enters the world of higher education is only about 11 per cent as compared up to 47 per cent in some of the developed countries. The government has plans to expand the access to 21 per cent by the end of 2017. This is a Herculean task, as the expansion would be the largest in India’s history and will require a dramatic growth in institutions as well as expenditure. Our task is further compounded by the fact that more than 65 per cent of our population lives in rural areas where the infrastructure for higher education is poor. There are suggestions from well-meaning experts to double the existing intake capacity of colleges and institutions of excellence to meet the goal of higher gross enrollment. However, given the inadequacy of infrastructure and staff, such suggestions look wishful thinking at the best. Almost every university is suffering from acute shortage of faculty; many are working on bare minimum staff. Quality of education and research is suffering because of such shortage of faculty. Merely increasing the intake capacity of our existing educational institutions will adversely affect the quality of education, teaching, and research. Inclusive education is considered to be an important means to achieve the end of inclusive growth, wherein all sections of society are participants in the process of growth. In the Indian context, inclusive education must concern with all the marginalized sections of society, namely, dalits, tribals, religious and linguistic minorities, the nomadic groups, child labor, the differently abled persons, and particularly the women in each of these categories. It must take into consideration the cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of the nation. A just and fair knowledge society cannot be established without adequately addressing the serious issues raised by the disparity in access to higher education to weaker sections of society. As a society mindful of these socioeconomic complexities, we cannot afford to leave higher education to the vagaries of the market : 53

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forces while aiming for higher gross enrollment. For, this would result in “elitization” of a basic need and put higher education out of the reach of the millions of underprivileged. The mushrooming of new colleges and private universities, where tuition fees are beyond the means of the common man, cater only to the needs of the upper class, leaving the majority of students without access to education. This trend is not healthy because it will ultimately cause a cleavage between the haves and the havenots. It should be our endeavor to provide equal opportunities to all the sections of people for higher education. This can only be done by ensuring access to education with affordability. Hence, enhancing public access to higher education must receive continued attention in future also. The open universities have helped to bridge the gap between need for education and availability through the classic university system. I am happy to state that the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has been the torchbearer in providing convenient and affordable higher education to millions who could not get access to traditional university education for one reason or the other. I feel that an open university must have an efficient management information system to be effective. It should function like the corporate sector, drawing upon good practices in the corporate world and continuously monitoring its cost-effectiveness and market relevance. It must not only market its courses but also the system of open and distance learning. We need to create a congenial environment for the open university system as well.

Technical Education and Vocational Training Today, the world economy is experiencing an unprecedented change. New developments in science and technology, internationalization of education, and the ever-expanding competitive environment are revolutionizing the education scene. The Indian higher education system has a new role and challenge to provide to the nation and the world, skilled human power, specialized personnel, and well-trained professionals at all levels, : K. Sankaranarayanan

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having breadth of knowledge and confidence to meet the contemporary requirements. Here I would like to quote what the Architect of Indian Constitution, Dr Ambedkar, had said years ago: No plan for the future development of the country can be deemed to be complete which does not provide for technical and scientific training. This is the age of Machine and it is only those countries in which technical and scientific training has risen to the highest pitch that will survive in the struggle that will commence when the war is over, for maintaining decent standards of living for their people.

A major boost is required for technical education and vocational training in the country. The learning needs of the majority of students outside the higher education system would have to be met with strategies that would be appropriate to the situation and as such would differ vastly and widely. Thought will have to be given to integrating skill-based education, technical education, and vocational training, with education right from the high school level; more so in rural areas and in public schools in urban areas. I personally feel that the son of a farmer, if he wishes to continue in the profession of farming, should have access to the kind of programs that would enhance the knowledge of his own profession or that would enable him to venture into related areas like horticulture, floriculture, dairy, fisheries, or animal husbandry. There is no point in offering knowledge in unrelated areas to someone who has chosen a particular profession. I was amazed to know that in Switzerland more than 68 per cent of the youth have access to world-class vocational education and training in the best of trades and disciplines. Not surprisingly, the country is known for its precision industry the world over. This is something we need to do to arm our youths with a set of employable skills. It is imperative for us to make technical education and vocational training an integral part of our higher education also. I wish and hope that IGNOU will take the lead in turning its attention to technical and skill-based education and vocational training. I believe the introduction of technology can be a good solution to the problems of propagating mass education, especially in remote : 55

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and tribal areas. We should use the Internet, television, and radio more aggressively to disseminate knowledge wherever it is needed. I shall give you a very simple example. When an expert in an engineering college, say in Mumbai or Chennai, delivers a lecture in the classroom, his knowledge benefits only a limited number of students sitting in the classroom. But if the same lecture is videographed and telecast, webcast, or broadcast on the TV, Internet, or radio, the benefit is transmitted to millions of seekers of knowledge, and that too according to their own convenience. A populous country like India must opt for intervention of technology in solving many of its problems including education. Distance education offers excellent opportunity to those already in employment to upgrade their knowledge base. We must exploit this largely untapped area of offering education to those who need it for upgrading their knowledge and in-service skills. In conclusion, I will reiterate that while aiming for higher gross enrollment ratio, the crucial area of inclusiveness of education should not be lost sight of. Churning out degree holders with few or no employable skills will create an army of unemployed youth in the country, leading to a host of socioeconomic problems with wider consequences. Vocational education, skill-based learning, and training should become an integral part of our higher education strategy. Market-oriented reforms to rejuvenate the higher education sector without adequate safeguards for the underprivileged could further create the imbalance of inclusiveness. We need to tread the path of such reforms with caution and at the same time infuse an element of vibrancy and dynamism in the public higher education system.

: K. Sankaranarayanan

Mass Media—But, Where Are the Masses?

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he fundamental feature of the media of our times is the very large and growing disconnect betweens mass media at one hand and mass reality on the other. This is a phenomenon that has become extremely pronounced in the last 20 years, in conjunction with other major transformations that have occurred in Indian society in that time—say post-1991. Let me begin with a very contemporary development which gives you an idea of how far removed the media are from what people experience. As you know, a few days ago the government fully decontrolled the price of petrol. This move along with a partial decontrol of the price of diesel and a considerable rise of as much as `3 per liter in the price of kerosene, unfortunately, comes at a time when food inflation is running at 17 percent; general inflation is in double digits, crossing 10 percent; for most Indians, food prices are at their highest in living memory. Two things strike you when you look at the newspapers all over the country. One aspect that is common, with very few exceptions across the spectrum, is that the editorials of almost all newspapers have congratulated the government for its bold decision and wonderful action By

P. Sainath

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in decontrolling petrol prices and highlighted the desirability of ending old anomalies. It is interesting to see that the newspapers are championing the cause in this matter, while even ministers of the ruling party are not very vocal. The media are the cheerleaders in this whole process. On September 20, 2010, I completed 30 years in journalism. And just a couple of weeks before that I saw what I think must rank among the 10 most despicable editorials I have read. This one, I am told, was scripted by the editor-in-chief himself, which basically says about the Bhopal gas tragedy “now let’s move on,” and warns that if we go on living in the past of Bhopal gas tragedy, no company in the world can proudly announce to its investors that we have opened a unit in Bhopal. Further, it has not a word of criticism for Union Carbide or of the crime committed. It says it is a pity that justice took so long, as if justice has been delivered in the first place. The only attack in the whole editorial is on the activists, “who milked this tragedy” dry. There is no attack on the criminals of Bhopal, there are no attacks on who was responsible, and there is no attack on successive governments who betrayed the victims. But, there is an attack on the activists who milked it dry! The editor’s concern is to make Bhopal proud—so that companies can be proud to say that we have opened an industry or a factory there. The entire approach in the editorials on the Bhopal gas tragedy reduced the whole thing to extraditing and bringing back Warren Anderson— the former chairman and chief executive officer of Union Carbide. This, to my mind, is the least important of the issues in order of priority. Once again, it homes in on the fact that how distant the media, mass media, are from mass reality. Coming back to the price decontrol: The Times of India is the largest circulated English daily in the world. For three days after the price decontrol, the amount of space given to protest or criticism of the price decontrol was four or five inches across three to four columns! But, a significant chunk of the front page and entire page two without an advertisement—two full pages on successive days—was given to the suicide death of a former model, whose qualification to occupy two pages was that she was once a model. : P. Sainath

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On the front page, on the first day the model who committed suicide occupied exactly the same amount of space as Saina Nehwal, who brought home three international titles in 10 days. But Saina disappeared after that and was relegated to the sports pages, whereas the entire page two without an advertisement was dedicated to the story of the former model. By the way, in this big newspaper, it is a huge thing not to have an advertisement on any page. There again you get a sense of priorities. The space given to the price decontrol, its implications, its impact on ordinary people, is something quite stunning and testifies the sheer disconnect of media from the actual concerns of the masses. In the building I reside in Mumbai—which is nominally my home for I travel most of the year—there is a bai, a lady who works in about 10 flats in the building. It is worth seeing how she fares over the year across some 20 or 30 items of expenditure. She, by the way, was a farmer. She has got land in Raigarh but it is not enough to support the family. So she works as a domestic servant in Mumbai. And, as you know all the people of this background make it a condition that they will only do indoor work for status reasons— because they are landed farmers. Now, after quite some time, I put out my list of expenses and I found that everything that is a convenience in my life—that is in the life of an urban, upper-middle-class professional—has become dramatically cheaper in the last 10–15 years. Be it is air travel, computers, or cell phones; every convenience in our lives has become cheaper over time. Nearly 17–18 years ago, I was deputy chief editor of South Asia’s biggest tabloid. But each time we travelled, we would debate whether it was worth an air ticket and why not take a train? Air travel would only be undertaken in situations when something big happened. Today, many reporters fly 30–40 times a year, sometimes more. Now, it is very common to fly if there is something that you have to be sent for. Air-conditioners have become much cheaper. Cars have become much cheaper. At that time, 17 years ago, we used to have strikes in the newspaper offices for raising transport allowance or conveyance allowance by `250. Today, those who used to go on strike for that have cars supplied by their companies with drivers or at least an allowance for a driver. Take : 59


the matter of computers. It has become much cheaper for us. The first computer I brought when I was working in a tabloid weekly in Mumbai was a sightseeing commodity in my street in those days. People were terribly impressed that it had a 20-megabyte hard disk—for other brands did not have a hard disk. A 20-megabyte hard disk was something wondrous. Now, no mid-range cell phone has a memory less than 2 gigabytes. The cost of that computer was about 30 times the cost of my cell phone! Now about the bai, absolutely everything that matters in her life has become 300 to 600 percent more expensive. Fifteen years ago, her minimum bus fare was 25 paise; now her minimum bus fare is `5 for single stop. In those 15 years, for her, price of rice has gone up, gone up by several hundred percent. Mind you, she is a producer of rice, she produces paddy, on her field but not enough of it to sustain for the whole year. So she works in Mumbai. Rice, wheat, water, electricity, everything has become more expensive. She has got 2 light bulbs in her house and very few electrical devices, and she pays about `700 a month or so for electricity bill. By the way, now she is an honored Reliance customer! None of these divides, none of these changes in our society, are reflected in or upon within those editorials, within the media. Let me tell you one very interesting manifestation of media power about which most of you will be unaware indeed. The vast majority of journalists are quite unaware. One of the most interesting manifestations of our power is the enforced silence within the media, on what has happened within the media since the financial meltdown of October 2008. If you just look in the last few months, you will find any number of front-page headlines that tell you of our economy soaring, Sensex is zooming up, economy bouncing back. One of the biggest newspapers in the world had a headline saying “Recession! What Recession?” Now in the same period of this tremendous economic comeback, soaring growth, tremendous success, and nonexistent recession, a minimum of 2,000 to 2,500 journalists lost their jobs—have been sacked, laid off, or retrenched—citing economic difficulties since October 2008. I am giving you an extremely conservative figure because these days there are not even unions anymore from whom you can get : P. Sainath

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data. So these are the figures a few of us could confirm in about four or five states. For instance, in Maharashtra, three groups, three TV networks and one newspaper have sacked 450 journalists since October 2008. One of those big groups “vanished” 252 jobs in one day at the stroke of a pen on the grounds of economic difficulty. So obviously our figures are gross underestimates. We suspect that the number of job losses would be around 4,000–5,000 journalists, cameramen, editorial staff, and so on. Have you ever read about this in your newspapers? Or heard about it on television? That this many people have been retrenched from a profession which does not have, you know, one of gigantic staff levels in the first place. Here is the interesting thing, the very newspapers and channels that are retrenching journalists and other media persons in thousands are the ones that are everyday telling you on the front-page that the economy is booming, the Sensex is soaring, and there is no recession. Incidentally, two of the largest newspapers issued a fatwa to their desks in writing—not to use the word “recession” for India. Recession is something that happens in United States. In India, you may use the word “economic slowdown”! Interestingly, in Maharashtra itself, in 36 months before the recession, there was a loss of 2 million jobs in 36 months, according to the economic survey of the state government. That is something like 1,800 jobs a day! This is before the economic slowdown and yet the fatwa was given that you should not use the word “recession”! The impact of what happened was tremendous and the Indian public or the reading public or the viewing public has very little knowledge of all that has happened. Let me give you an example of how a crash in Wall Street devastates hundreds of villages in rural interior Orissa. If you go the right across from Orissa in the east to Gujarat in the west—to the city of Surat, you will find over half a million Oriyas working there. Around 90 percent of these workers are in the power loom industry and 5–10 percent in the diamond industry. These power looms are basically export-oriented units—which are closely linked to demand from the United States and other western nations. At Surat, the karkhanas will extend for half a kilometer, with thousands of power looms, with their unbearable sounds. And people : 61


work in incredibly squalid conditions. Nearly 4 lakh of these workers are from a single district in Orissa called Ganjam, where the town of Berhampur is situated. The most highly congested railway station in the east is Berhampur. About 90 percent of its passenger traffic consists of migrant laborers going to work in Surat. Ganjam workers go all over the country. You will even find them as plumbers in Ladakh. However, 4 lakh of these people work in just Surat alone. Following the “meltdown” in Wall Street, the export lead units in Surat took a big hit—for their demand dried up. Tens of thousands of workers were laid off from the power looms. They went back to their native places, which were never able to give them employment, thus leading to immense social problems within that part of the rural Orissa. None of this appears in the media where you are being told that there was tremendous comeback, the economy is zooming back, etc. Incidentally, I have to tell you that the loss of jobs of journalists on such a large scale is not restricted to India. According to Editor & Publisher, one of the most distinguished media trade journals of the United States—it is a 108-year-old journal—the number of jobs lost in US publishing sector as a whole following the 2008 crash is 35,885— 35,885 jobs lost! Fascinatingly, Editor & Publisher itself shut down its print edition shortly after, leaving a few more journalists jobless. Forward to 2010; please look at the cover stories of some of the leading magazines in this country. When it comes to the marketdriven economy, and especially when it comes to an increasingly stock market–driven economy, in today’s media there is a structural compulsion to lie. You have to lie, there is reason for it. Your life depends on it. Today, we have several magazine cover stories which, of course, everybody feels that they have to cut out or sent to me—because it is on rural India, claiming rural resurgence. “You know, rural India is doing better than ever before, in fact it is pulling the Indian economy forward, etc.” Now, these multiple number of rural India resurgent stories appear at the same time as a discussion is going on with government on three commissions set up by the government. All the commissions have ended up suggesting to government that it needs to revise dramatically upward its rural poverty figure. : P. Sainath

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The most conservative of these groups is the Dr Suresh Tendulkar Committee, which suggested that the figure of rural poverty is 42 percent, which is far higher than the present government estimates. The second of those committees, was the Below Poverty Line (BPL) Expert Group. BPL—I love that term. Actually, elite India is not so bothered or interested in BPL these days, our interest is in IPL. I was also a member of the BPL expert group, led by Dr N. C. Saxena, though I find that position is always a bit disconcerting. One of things I remember we did was to have an energetic debate on whether women-headed households were really poor? There was no woman available within a mile of the room—17 men, all from upper class and mostly from upper caste. At least the committee’s estimate was a big advance over the previous expert group. Let me give you one of the indicators. One of the indicators on that slip for the investigator had tick boxes: Does the household have—1 saree; 1–2 sarees; 2–3 sarees. Now what happens if it is a household of six women? Does that make them well-off if they each have one saree? But these were the exciting discussions that we had in trying to establish whether women-headed households are really poor. Every study that the government of India has done, every piece of evidence we have, shows us that women-headed households are not just poor, they are among the poorest of the poor, what we might call “ultra poor.” No discussion was necessary for this and the BPL Expert Group did move in this direction eventually. Our estimate of rural poverty was much higher than that of the Tendulkar Committee. It was around 50 percent. The third of the groups, again a government-appointed group was Dr Arjun Kumar Sengupta’s National Commission for the Enterprises in the unorganized sector, which says starkly on its first page that 836 million Indians live on `20 a day or less. Out of those 836 million, 237 million live on less than `12 a day. Now you have got this range of views and opinion; range of methodologies. All three are officially appointed government of India committees or government-appointed committees, all three of them are pushing up your baseline—the rural poverty figure— but the media continues with rural resurgence stories. : 63


Take the food security debate, which is my favorite. Minutes of a recent meeting of an empowered group of ministers suggested that “the definition of food security should be limited to the specific issue of the food grain security and be de-linked from the larger issue of nutritional security.” Note the suggestion: “Don’t let’s just mix food security with nutritional security.” The earlier statement acknowledges that nutritional security is the “larger issue.” Allow me to share one point with you which the media will never acknowledge. That all these committees, including ours, were set up with one purpose: to aid the government in its endless search for ways by which to reduce the number of people who are BPL and thereby reduce food subsidies while increasing subsidies to the corporate world and to the very rich in this country. You can see that very easily in the budget within 5 minutes. I think, though, we did not serve that purpose. Ground-level realities often find no reflection in the world’s largest and fastest growing media—the Indian media, which are supremely profitable at a time when the media in the US are in the doldrums and losing lots of money. In India, the crash was on one hand used to lay off thousands of journalists, while on the other hand, for some, profits have soared. Now there is a problem which I call—“a structural compulsion to lie.” Let me also point out something to you about how the media serves you. Do you know of all the branches of journalism, one of the most expensive, one of absolutely the most expensive branches of journalism is financial journalism. It costs a lot more. A lot more money spent on business journalists than people like me. I have a colleague in one very big paper whose only job in life is to cover the futures market. I mean all he does is cover futures. It must be completely soul-numbing, but since he earns many times what I do, I suppose it is profitable. Please look at how much financial journalism (or what we call “financial journalism”) dominates the media. There are separate programs for financial journalism every day; separate programs for the stock market every day; your daily news has a large segment on it; every bulletin has a large stock market segment—independently of the programs that focus exclusively on that. At the same time, : P. Sainath

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your daily news does not have a segment on how labor is doing; on how the peasantry is doing; or how marginal people are doing. But, it always has something on the markets. Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) estimates will tell you that less than 5 percent Indian households have investment linked to the stock market. But there is no half-hour bulletin which does not give them great space—even if it is a nonbusiness channel; even if it is a nonbusiness broadcast. So we are suffused with news of the financial world, of the financial markets, of the stock market, and that kind of financial journalism. By the way, the Wall Street Journal spends more per story than the New York Times does. In my opinion, in terms of reporting, actually the Wall Street Journal is a better newspaper than New York Times. I am not talking about the editorial positions or the ideologies. I am talking about reporting standards. And how, generally, financial journalism and journalists are more pampered. However, could these highly paid superstars of financial journalism give you an inkling of the biggest stock market crash since 1929? Could even one of them give a hint of it? Could at least one of them tell you that you are in serious danger and that there is going to be a stock market crash? What are you paying them for? What do they get such fancy salaries for? What do they spend millions of dollars for flying correspondents around the globe, talking to CEOs and whoever else they talk to? Not one of them could forecast the coming of a crash, the largest we have seen in the world since 1929. Yet, after the crash, the same jokers are trotted out as experts to tell you what went wrong. To tell you why you lost your money, having told you first to park your money there! Every other institution comes under scrutiny but not the media. You do not ask the reporter who yesterday gave you a very knowledgeable analysis of why the stock market tanked. “Why didn’t you tell us when it mattered?” Apparently, that branch of journalism has completely moved away from any semblance of reality or ordinary day-to-day people. I will again say that there is a structural compulsion for media to lie or not to reflect reality. The media often reflect reality wrongly. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, between 1997 : 65


and 2008, 200,000 farmers have committed suicide in India. National Crime Records Bureau is a department in the Home Ministry. It is neither an independent nongovernmental organization (NGO) nor a radical organization. And, the statistics is based on data that is coming from every police thana in the country, through the district and state crime records bureaus. This is the largest wave of suicides ever recorded in human history. Has it caused anything like the kind of debate and discussion it deserves? Here, one model’s suicide could get two pages. Two full pages! But not that of 200,000 farmers! Thus, there is something fundamentally wrong with how the media are functioning and how they are going. Are we sensitized to the fact that the biggest migrations in our history have taken place since 1994–1995? During 1991–2001, if you compare census data, 8 million people have quit farming. Where have they gone? We have no clear idea. We have anecdotal evidence. We have some specific regional evidence. Every year I spend around 270 days in the countryside. I spend 40–60 days each year as a migrant. Because I believe the only way I can write about them is to travel with them. That is why I know about Orissa migrants. Yet, I cannot claim where these 8 million people have gone. We have small fragments of evidence. For instance, in the city of Delhi it is estimated that between 1 and 2 lakh adolescent girls from the small state of Jharkhand are working as full-time domestic servants—on call for 24 hours for the families they serve. Why do 2 lakh adolescent girls get pushed out of Jharkhand? These are tribal children. What are they doing in Delhi? What has happened in Jharkhand that necessitates them being pushed out? We are talking out 80 lakh people pushed out of farming, on which even today close to 60 percent of the Indian population is dependent. Gigantic transformations have taken place around us. But, these changes do not find reflection in the media. India’s media are politically free, but imprisoned by profit. They are politically free, but chained by commerce. Now here are the two processes that are central to understanding why the media function the way they do. Of course there are exceptions, due to the fact that India is such a heterogeneous society. The country always produces its own exceptions and contradictions, which is very good thing. : P. Sainath

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But the performance of the media raises an important question for you: when they keep telling you about rural resurgence, when they inform you about the soaring stock market, this question is raised—why lie about the economy? Particularly why lie about the stock market even when the reality is blatantly to the contrary? There is a very important reason. All your big media groups are heavily invested in that stock market. Not just in terms of buying or putting shares or betting on these or those shares; that is one thing that goes on in a big way and they have become structurally integrated with that. How many of you have heard of the system of “private treaties”? This is one of the biggest developments in the media industry in the last decade. And it has had a decisive and extremely destructive effect on the content of journalists. To ordinary folk, a “private treaty” sounds like some agreement signed between two nations; like a bilateral agreement between two nations. But, actually it is not. Here, we need to note that both Press Commissions (1954 and 1977–1982) in independent India threw up warnings on the business linkages of media houses. A lot of testimony before them asserted that the biggest threat to the freedom of press in India comes from the linkages to big business of the media. In fact, some members of these commissions recommended delinking the media from big business houses. Now, the last of those press commissions finished its job in 1982. By 1983–1984 its report was out. Since then the real process of concentration that has taken place in the media has emerged. The media today are not newspapers and channels looking at journalism in terms of news and information. They are corporations looking at journalism as a revenue stream that has to fit with other goals, with the other targets, with the other needs of the overall corporate structure. At the global level, by the way, the best book to this day on the subject is The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. The author was a former national editor of the Washington Post when it published the Pentagon Papers, and then was Professor and Dean of the Berkley School of Journalism (where I taught for a semester). That book published in 1983 spoke of the emergence of a private ministry of : 67


information and culture. It said that 50 companies dominated the world of news. He was labeled an “alarmist,” and his own former newspaper did not give due importance to his book though he was a two-time Pulitzer winner and the national editor of that newspaper in its glorious days. By the time he wrote the third edition of the book, the 50 companies were down to 23. By the time of the seventh edition of the book was published, six media companies matter at the global level. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is one of them. There are another five, some of the names which people are not familiar with because they operate in such a way, such a complex fashion, that it is impossible to know who owns what. The world of media has changed so dramatically. Consider that by the mid-1990s Encyclopaedia Britannica was being published in America; Encyclopaedia Americana in France, and the new French library in Britain. You are talking now no more about media monopolies but gigantic conglomerates in which media monopolies are one component. Today, at our own national level, the big media are corporations. They have interests in a thousand different things. As I keep saying in Mumbai, it is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between fourth estate and real estate. The commercial interests of media range from jute, tea, shipping, Bollywood film-making to hundreds of other areas. In 2002, a new landmark in the history of the press was set—the private treaties. And yet you are not hearing about this from the media except the Times of India—which very bravely says, yes we do it; we are proud of it. What is the “private treaty?” The private treaty is an agreement between a newspaper and a medium to large corporation. Suppose you are a medium to medium-large retailer of trousers, textiles, or finished goods—trousers or shirts. You want to enter the big league. And the big difference for you between being medium and being in the big league is essentially marketing. So you sign a private treaty with a big newspaper or media group owned by me. Under this treaty, I acquire 10 percent of the shares of your company, in return for a guaranteed advertising space and positive coverage. At least it means that my reporters cannot criticize your product. Imagine the : P. Sainath

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situation when a newspaper signs such treaties with over 200 companies. Then the question arises whether the newspaper remains a newspaper or it has become an equity firm—for it has 7–10 percent of the shares of 200 fairly significant companies. By the way, one company that benefited from such arrangement was Pantaloons—the trouser retailer. Fifteen years ago, Pantaloons was an unknown brand. Then it signed a private treaty with the Times of India—and the rest is history. There were recently major advertisements in the Times of India celebrating their treaty and its success. In this manner, Pantaloons rose to the level of perhaps the most visible player in its field. Other companies soon followed. Now, look at what happens. This is where the structural compulsion to lie comes in. When any media house holds shares in 200 medium and medium-big companies, it obviously finds the global financial crash of 2008 to be a disaster. When that sort of crisis comes, the newspaper knows that the shares which it holds are not worth the paper they are printed on. At the same time, it is committed under the private treaty to promote the products of the retailer (by giving dedicated advertisement space). The shares are at this point worth nothing but the media house still gives the retailer full-page advertisements. Further, the newspaper or media house pays income tax on the revenue it should have earned from that advertising space. With the advent of the crisis, this form of “income” has turned into a huge negative. The immediate necessity for media groups finding themselves in such a situation is to somehow push the stock market upwards. They had to heat those shares otherwise they were losing millions of rupees (as their shares went down). So they had to say— “the economy is zooming; Sensex is soaring; we are on a comeback trail (yes, we have sacked 2000 journalists but that’s alright), the economy is doing brilliantly.” All of you have heard one notorious term in the last one year— “paid news.” From the ashes of the private treaties arises the phoenix of paid news. Paid news existed in smaller forms in various ways in the past, but it became a very serious force in the 2009 elections. I have covered every general election since 1984; and many assembly polls since 1982. Corruption is one thing, individual corruption is another : 69


thing and we know both. Structured institutionalized extortion in the form of paid news is a large-scale industry—now that is a relatively recent phenomenon, which attained maturity in the 2009 elections. What is this paid news? Let us suppose you are an electoral candidate or a political party. You enter into an agreement with a media house, newspaper, or channel and pay it exorbitantly in hard cash to ensure that the latter will provide you an incredible election campaign. There may be pages and pages about you in the newspaper, which will not even mention the name of your rival in the election. If you wish it to, they will indeed name your rival and trash him and his reputation—for a fee, for a little extra payment. The Andhra Pradesh Union of Journalists estimates that in Andhra Pradesh in 2009 the paid news industry’s turnover was anywhere between `350 crores and `1,000 crores. In Maharashtra, my colleagues and I who covered these stories and brought out the paid news stuff estimated that in the print media alone paid news was worth `500 crores in the assembly elections and in the parliamentary assembly elections successively. (Subsequent revelations have shown our figure to be a gross underestimate.) We are talking about very large sums of money. Why does paid news become such a big thing at that particular time? And, why does it fulfill a need that private treaties were not able to fulfill? Paid news is a cash transaction; it is off the books. It works for the corrupt politician; it works for the corrupt media group. It works for the corrupt politician, because you can get around the electoral law limiting you to `10 lakhs for an assembly election and `25 lakhs for a parliament election. You can get around that; you can spend crores of rupees and say: “Look, that is news. I cannot help it if the newspapers wrote all those pages praising me. I didn’t ask them to write, nor did I pay for it.” This is, by the way, exactly the argument that Mr Ashok Chavan made before the poll expenditure rules to win the elections. It works for media because the transaction will not go on to the record books and it is not going to be taxed, unlike under the private treaty. So it works for all. But, it does not work for you. It does not work for the public. Finally, the election commission also defined paid news as a corrupt practice, though it took some months to do that. By then, the : P. Sainath

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paid news became a very important element in the ruin of the contemporary media culture. It appears that there will be paid news even when private treaties stabilize once more because media barons have acquired a taste for that blood. The coming of paid news absolutely devastated media coverage of the last elections. Enormous money was spent with the involvement of the whole apparatus of public relation agencies, advertising agencies, and individual newspapers and outlets. The story of paid news broke when I found that the same narrative praising Mr Ashok Chavan appeared word-by-word in three rival newspapers under different bylines. The excuse they are giving before the election commission is that it might have been a party press release and these newspapers simply tried to play this as an “exclusive” story. Now, we know the rates, we have rate cards, and we know what was charged. We are talking about industry worth thousands of crores now of what is called “paid news.” Thus, paid new news is yet another “structural compulsion” to reflect a reality that has no relationship to your own. And this is part of the process of Indian society’s own changes. The past 20 years, according to me, have been the period of fastestgrowing inequality in our history. Never in independent India have you seen the levels of inequality that we are looking at now. The media reflect that process. Inequality breeds its own mindset. Therefore, you can talk about people of Bhopal in the way that editorial did. Thus, you can congratulate the government for its firm action in decontrolling prices without bothering about what is it going to do with food prices when food inflation is at 17 percent. You cannot look at the media disconnected from the rest of what has been happening in society for 20 years. If you look at it, in the 1960s and 1970s you had massive peasant uprisings and struggles— struggles for redistribution of land—which actually resulted in land reforms in some states in this country. While the 1960s and the 1970s were the period of massive peasant struggles, the 1990s and this decade are the era of massive peasant suicides! Something has fundamentally changed. The game has changed. Some very fundamental and transformational shifts have taken place in state, society, and economy. Earlier the media took its cue : 71


for establishments, now the media is in the forefront, leading the establishment. Egging it on. Because media are no longer an organic social phenomenon, they are a corporate entity—wedded to profit maximization at any cost. When I read these editorials on the Bhopal tragedy and on the petrol price, I remembered Murray Kempton’s definition of the editorial writer. Kempton was one of the editors of the New Republic in the 1960s. And he gave in that decade what I think is the perfect definition of the editorial writer of today. He wrote, “The function of the editorial writer is to go down into the valley after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.” That is exactly what we did so well, whether it was editorials on price decontrol, on Bhopal, and on a number of other issues. The disconnect between media and the masses is massive and it is growing. You can see it in one very fundamental way. Just look at how the coverage “beats” of a newspaper are organized. Some of you are old enough to remember that every newspaper once had a labor correspondent. There is currently no newspaper in the country that has a full time labor correspondent, except I think one. The labor correspondent is extinct. The agriculture correspondent is like the Yeti—sightings are sometimes reported, but confirmation is impossible. I am closest to it, but I do not just cover agriculture. I cover other things too. All the social sector beats have disappeared. At the same time, newspapers (even general interest newspapers) have multiple correspondents to cover business. A general interest daily can have as many as 11 business reporters. But no newspaper in this country has a full-time reporter on the poverty beat though we have largest number of people living in absolute poverty on planet earth. No newspaper in this country has a full-time correspondent on the housing beat. In India, a newspaper or a channel having an education correspondent means it has a campus correspondent—who would have very little to do with primary education. It is an education business correspondent, but one who at admissions time might cover the woes of the middle classes for a week. Let me put this in another way. When we say we will not have labor correspondents and that we have no space for them; when we : P. Sainath

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say we will not have correspondents to cover the peasantry—what are we saying? We are saying, we are declaring structurally and explicitly, that we are not interested in talking to 70 percent of India’s population. That 70 percent of the population do not make news, they do not concern us, and their interests are not our interests. This is also part of that fundamental disconnect. Let me give you one little statistic on how important the employment correspondent is or should be. Look at your employment exchange bureaus (which by the way are not a measure of the unemployment in this country by any means). They are mostly concerned with what they call “job seekers.” If you just take the numbers in the 1990s and 2000s the number of these “job seekers” average between 3.6 and 4 crores at the employment exchange queues. Suppose we put all our employment exchange queues into one queue, how long would it be? It would be three times the length of your coastline which is close to 7,000 kilometers! I think that such a huge and volatile chunk of the population need a correspondent, that they deserve a beat. I think it needs to be covered. Most of those social sector beats have disappeared or have been hamstrung. We are as far as we can be from the mass reality. As Mark Twain put it: Yours was not in the beginning a criminal nature but circumstances changed it. At the age of nine you stole sugar; at the age of 15 you stole horses; at 19 you stole money and at 25 you committed arson; at 30, hardened by crime you became an editor.

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Bringing Them into the Fold Using the Arts to Bridge the Gap

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must have been seven or eight years old when I first went on a junket trip with the Puppet Department of Darpana—our arts academy at Ahmedabad. We had a wonderful puppeteer named Meher Contractor, who had for many years headed the international puppet organization connected to the United Nations, Union Internationale de la Marionnette (UNIMA). The puppet show that she was taking from village to village in Gujarat talked about something to do with a stove. I could not quite figure it out at that age, till after three or four performances at three or four villages. I was made to understand that most Indian rural women cooked using either cow dung or broken twigs in mud stoves inside tiny huts and were likely to get asphyxiated by the smoke. And, that the puppet show was trying to promote the use of a newly developed smokeless chulah (stove). My next encounter with the arts being used for something other than the arts was when a few years later my mother started working and using the most classical Bharatanatyam on a piece about a social phenomenon, which she as a south Indian bride in Gujarat (trying to learn Gujarati by reading newspapers) had come across. By

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And that phenomenon was of young brides in Saurashtra throwing themselves into wells to escape the abuse of their in-laws. My mother was told that these young women were being harassed for additional dowry amounts. They were unable to go back to their own parents, and thus preferred killing themselves. She was horrified by this, and felt that she had to bring it out in some way. Her medium was dance, and so she took Bharatanatyam (otherwise a medium that talks about Shringara, about Bhakti, of love, and of things beautiful and spiritual in life) as the language to talk of domestic violence. At one of her early shows, I am told that Pandit Nehru was in the audience, and after the performance went backstage. He knew the family well, and went on to query, “What is this about?” Amma explained. That is how the first-ever white paper on what we now call “dowry deaths” came into being. So I grew up assuming that everybody uses the arts to talk about things that otherwise could not be spoken about. My own transformation from being a Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancer into somebody who uses all the arts as a language perhaps occurred during my five years of working in Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata. I went in as a dancer and as someone deeply concerned with human rights and social justice. All across the world, over a five-year period, I saw the effect that my interpretation of Draupadi was having on different women—young Sorbonne graduates; aboriginal women from Australia; very liberated Scandinavian women; and big, black mammas in Harlem, New York. I thought, “One character in one performance, and this is the effect it has on women! Why am I not using the arts but using other means to talk about issues that concern me?” I came back in 1990, after five years of performing The Mahabharata, convinced that the arts were perhaps the greatest language to talk about things that were inconvenient truths. A few years ago, both my children were studying in an experimental school, and most of their fellow students and friends came from educated professional families. I have tried to bring my children up by including them in every conversation, every fight, every piece of news that goes around, and I was very surprised to see their friends living in a sort of cocoon, where they seemed to be : 75

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completely unaware of the reality of our country. For many of them, the great choices in life were between one pair of shoes and another or one mobile phone and another. I thought that if these are the people who are going to become our leaders tomorrow, and they are completely unaware of what 70 percent of this country lives with, in, and without, how are we going to have leaders and how are we going to have corporate heads who are concerned about the well-being of the country and not only of the GDP? I instantly knew that I had to do something to reach out to not the excluded population, but also the people who could make a difference to the excluded and make them “included.” I had just then read a book Unheard Voices, written by my friend and colleague Harsh Mander, in which there were 25 case studies of people of the most marginalized kind that he had met over his 20-year career as an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer. Based on this book, I created a performance piece called Unsuni in Hindi and Unheard Voices in English. We took it pro bono to a 100 colleges and schools across the nation, reaching 180,000 students and engaging them in discussions about the current realities and what their responsibilities were. This was a meaningful interaction because when we talk of including the excluded, we are not only talking of including the marginalized, but also talking of bringing back into the fold the rich, the wealthy, and the super-wealthy, who had otherwise given up this country and live in little islands with their own water, their own electricity, their own security services, and their own gold towers. This was in 2007, where on the one hand, the Sensex was zooming skywards, the numbers of new millionaires were surging, shopping malls were mushrooming everywhere, new airlines and never-available seats became the norm, parties attended by celebrities and millions of wannabes were highlighted on page 3s, and the luxury goods market was burgeoning (with Gucci shoes for `1.5 lakhs). On the other hand, 360 million were living on less than `45 per day; 46 percent children under 5 were malnourished; 80 percent of women were suffering from anemia; 49 percent of all children were married when they were still children; 800,000 people, 95 percent women and girls, carried excreta—human excreta—as a : Mallika Sarabhai


profession! India in 2007 was a country in need of a conscience; a country in need of change, new directions, newer solutions to real problems; and a country in need of listening to the unheard voices of her people. Our performances had 7,000 committed individual members, and over 20 institutions, schools, and colleges that became Unsuni schools and even now continue doing great work. Many of them have taken individual projects to make a difference either in their neighborhoods or children in their own homes. We tried to make them understand that they did not have to go out waving flags. We started by saying “Is there somebody in your home who comes to clean, have you found out if they have children? Have you found out if the children go to school? Can you work for a couple of hours in a week improving their education for them? You don’t have to do something big!” There are other children who wanted to be in an institution. We vetted non-governmental organization (NGOs) in cities and found out if they needed volunteers. Then there were the educational institutions where parents, faculties, principals, and students took up projects together. In many parts of the country, people have taken the Unsuni scripts, and have either translated or adapted them—and continue doing so. Thus, it was one major effort that we made in bringing the privileged into the fold—from the top. But that is not enough. We need to make efforts at all levels: the policy level, the upper-class level, the middle level, and the grassroots level. A lot of our efforts happen at the grassroots level. I fought Lok Sabha elections recently, and I think I must be the only Lok Sabha candidate who in 30 days actually went and spoke face-to-face with 2.5 lakhs of her constituents. What I came to understand, even though I have been working at the grassroots level in Gujarat close to 30 years, was a story much worse than I had expected. Every single village that did not have drinking water thought that it was their fault and that all the rest of the villages had drinking water! Every single village that did not have a sewage system thought that it was their fault—that everybody else had the system in place! : 77

Bridging the Gap

That was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that our mindsets are still in the British Raj. We still think that if an elected official—a member of parliament (MP) or a member of legislative assembly (MLA) gives us something, it is a donation, it is a gift, and we have benefited out of it! This attitude is problematic. No kind of inclusive society is possible unless you make every last citizen of this country understand that we are equal citizens, that when we elect somebody they are there to serve us, and not to rule over us! And that we can demand things. We at Darpana work at the grassroots in many different ways. We try first to see in a grassroots situation if there are performers or performing styles there that already exist. We take them into our fold; try and identify issues that plague that section of society; and sometimes with other organizations, like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), World Health Organization (WHO), or the Ministry of Health, ensure having trained portions of these sections into being actor-activists. I would like to share with you some of our experiences on working with the issues of people at the grassroots and the learning from such experimentations. The kind of grassroots work that we normally do addresses issues such as alcoholism, female foeticide, health, issues of gender violence, issues of human rights abuse, and so on. In the very recent past, more and more people are being trained about how to use the Right to Information (RTI) Act, how to use the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), how to access government schemes, how to demand, and how to get. Over these years, we have been running a five-year project with UNICEF to go into tribal villages to pick out young people and to train them to become actor-activists and peer educators. We have tried different ways in which we engage with audiences, different ways in which we scale up the number of people who can go into audiences or villages and engage with the rural population. One of the things that we have found is that when we work in rural or tribal areas if we are seen as coming from the urban areas, and therefore perceived as outsiders, it works much less than if we can work with : Mallika Sarabhai


people they can consider their own, and then they go back with an understanding and an identification with them. In Gujarat, when married women are in their seventh month of pregnancy, a ceremony called the Shreemanth is held—after which these women are supposed to go back to their maternal homes. There are traditional songs that are sung during this ceremony. We went to a particular area of Gujarat, took the folk songs, and changed the lyrics to impart information about nutrition, both for pregnant women and for the newborns. We have similarly spread information about food, vaccinations, breast-feeding, etc., and are happy to know that in many of these villages, our songs have now become the traditional songs. They are sung regularly, at the Shreemanth ceremony, and are no longer subject to any particular curiosity. They have very quickly become a part of the psyche of the people. Often, our messengers are young adivasis. For instance, along with UNICEF we run a PEER project in 14,000 villages, for which we selected, in bunches of 50, many adivasi youngsters. None of them knew each other before they were chosen for this peer project. It was for the first time they were coming to a city. It was for the first time that young women and men from completely different adivasi communities were being thrown together. The difference between the first and the second or third time they came, over a one-year period, was something that was heartening. Their levels of confidence had gone up, and they would come back and say, “You know, we introduced this game, and everybody wanted to play it!” We were talking of cervical cancer, which is such a difficult issue to talk about, through a game, but even then all the women and young girls participated. And all the things that they did not even know words existed for, they had become fluent with. We find that irrespective of whatever the issue that needs to be spoken about, irrespective of who the audience is, given a basic training in the arts, television, and films, and a commitment, one can fine-tune and focus the product or communication mechanism for each individual subject and target group. This is what, in many ways, Darpana considers itself a laboratory for. If we are traditionally an arts institution, we are also an institution : 79

Bridging the Gap

that is committed to social change. Many NGOs certainly specially use theater to talk about issues, but badly performed theater can be extremely boring, and actually in such cases a lecture is often better. Unfortunately, because training in performance is not something that NGOs send their workers for, very often the message gets killed with the unskilled messenger. What we have tried to do is use Darpana as a laboratory to try and create modules. Because we have the great luxury of having all performance mediums, our own television studios, and our own films, we are able to respond to particular needs without these blinkers of “I am a theater institution, therefore, I will use theater!” or “OK, I am a city institution, therefore, I will be unable to talk to people at the grassroots.” There is a third, crucial cornerstone vis-à-vis inclusiveness. That is reaching policy makers, mainstream people, the influencers who are basically us—people who will be emulated, teachers who will be emulated, judges who will decide, professors who will be listened to, Page 3 types who will be emulated by the young. How do we reach these? These obviously need to be reached with a much greater sense of sophistication, and that is what we have tried to do in some of our performances. Gender sensitization is taught in several universities across the world as part of their women’s studies program, and is part of the religious studies program because it reexamines the way our mythological women are passed down to us in a very patriarchal society. In the Colours of the Heart, a musical theater piece jointly created by Samia Malik (a British Pakistani) and me, we explored this aspect. It had an African-American performer, an Italian performer, an Assamese performer, and a Gujarati performer. We toured India with this program, and it became the first piece ever, post-Partition, to be performed in Jammu and Kashmir with Indo-Pak performers. It was the first time that the Srinagar Town Hall had a Pakistani and an Indian performing together! Our theater focuses on sensitization. There is no segment of society that does not need some kind of sensitization, some kind of awakening. If I were to go into a college and say that I have come to talk to you about why you should treat the women the same way as : Mallika Sarabhai


you treat men, I would probably be booed out of the class. Or if I went and told them that I wanted to explain to them about why they should not take dowries, or about HIV AIDS, I would probably be booed. But if I go with a performance that is primarily entertaining, and if in that entertaining performance I either put ideas, seeds of ideas, or other points of view, there is no way that you would be able to get up and leave. Even if at the end of the performance, you disagree vehemently with me, the very fact that you have sat through a performance like that, or a television program like that, means that somewhere there is a new thought or a new seed that has been planted in you. Next time, perhaps, when you read the statistics on female foeticide or the skewed sex ratio, something will make you think again. Over 30 years, I have found that it is “that something” that leads to the most significant changes, given time. Because till we see something that is so deep that it can counter over a 1,000 years of brainwashing, which we call socialization and educational processes, everything else remains at the cosmetic level. I also want to tell you how we have scaled up these performances by using television. Rather than reaching several hundred or several thousand people directly, we have used the most popular genres of television, whether it is chat shows, music videos, soap operas, or quiz performances, to talk of issues that are not normally talked about through these mediums. If Ekta Kapoor can make women completely regressive, then surely we can make the opposite happen! Today, the place of art in our society is similar to entertainment. This was not always the case. If you look at the time when the Natya Shastra is supposed to have been written, the main issues of society were spirituality and values and that is what our arts talked about. The arts talked to us about what was crucial to a good life. But nowhere did it say that our arts needed to be kept in a museum frozen in time. If you read the end of the Natya Shastra, after hundreds of pages of rules, it says these are your alphabets, do with them what you want. This means that the only limitation to our use of the arts is our imagination. To be able to use the alphabet to create and communicate thoughts is surely its most valuable use? : 81

Bridging the Gap

In India today, after 63 years of Independence, problems seem to have increased not decreased, injustices have increased, the gaps between the rich and the poor have increased, and gaps in the educational levels have increased. Education itself has failed us; we have people who have degrees but no knowledge; who do not even know how to be humane human beings, let alone anything else. We need different solutions, we cannot go on churning out the same solutions and hope for better results. I think what you are doing here at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is part of that new solution. But there are other areas that need to be taken care of. And the arts form a crucial part of this. The arts have always been integral to Indian society. Our rites of passage have been taught through the arts. The way a mother teaches her daughter about sex is through songs, and the way the farmers teach their young is though arts, through songs. What are our folk dances? What are our folk songs? What are our folk rituals? They are all about teaching a new generation about life, about the crucial aspects of our life, and yet today we talk about art as “mere” entertainment! We have the blueprint for transforming the country now. Yet, we have not created the fecundity of the land that will nurture these edifices, with what we are doing and what we have the possibility of doing.

: Mallika Sarabhai

Dalit Contribution to Indian Literature

W

hen I say Indian literature, I don’t mean only written literature. I am among the 20 or 30 percent literate people, of whom a smaller number actively engages with the written literature. But a larger number participates in an imaginative world, which is oral literature. So, we have more people for what I call literature. It will include oral literature also as written Indian literature. If I include oral literature, then I include even the Vedas because they were once a part of oral literature. And the Dalits had their own oral literature in Kannada, from 14th and 15th centuries onwards. I am going to include that also. When I talk about Dalit contribution to Indian literature, I am not only including the contribution of those who come with the influence of Gandhi and Ambedkar, but also of those who came under the influence of the great saint-poets of our country. I’m mostly dealing with people from Karnataka because this is the area I am familar with. Nevertheless, when I discuss, the others can include figures from their own languages into the kind of scheme that I am trying to build up.

By

U. R. Ananthamurthy

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B r id g i n g t h e G a p

My first proposition is “literature doesn’t mean merely what is written.” Yet, for many people, literature is that which is written, printed, and can be read from a book. It was so in Kannada from the 10th century onwards. Pampa is the first one who wrote literature followed by Kumara Vyasa. But there is literature other than these. If you come to Mysore, in certain months you will hear women reciting an oral epic for 7 days, and this epic would go into several thousand pages. They are Dalit women. They would also come with big cymbals, they dance and they sing, and it is not merely literature for them, it is a kind of a religious rite also. So it works as an extension to what we normally consider literature. Quite recently these have been collected and even translated into English. Our academy has also brought out the translation of an oral epic, and so it is important not to hegemonize written literature and to think of all literature as basically oral. Most great poets in their true spirit belong to the oral tradition. They are poets when they recite their poems, and it happens with a kind of immediacy. A literature which has lost its oral quality is no longer good literature. The true test of a piece of literature is to see if it has retained its oral texture. When it is dead and forgotten, it is more often than not revived through its oral source, which is by the lowest of low in our society. But with all the Indian languages, as I have sometimes said, they will live because we have enough backward people in India. Regional languages survive because of the backward communities. They retain the languages. And they have kept the languages alive for others to work on, and even elevated them. They are not only gifted musicians, but also the complexity of their articulation leaves us with a fund of proverbs. Proverbs are like Vedas for the poet and also a part of Dalit literature. And many radical progressive thinkers do not take this into consideration. The oral part of Dalit literature, and hence many theories on Dalit literature, is mostly based on realistic renderings of Dalit experiences. I am including it into the oral; then it becomes richer. Why do I want to do that? When I say the oral literature, it has several functions, and one of the functions that many commentators

: U. R. Ananthamurthy

D a li t C o n t r ibu t i o n t o I n di a n L i t e r a t u r e

think is that it helps Dalits to come up in life. This, in other words, is M. N. Srinivasan’s idea of Sanskritization. Dalits also create their own myths and they graft it on the timetested myths, and there is a way to coming up. But if you look closely into the content of it, it is not merely an aspiration to go higher which makes such a reinterpretation possible, but it gives it a depth that is not present in the reading of the upper classes. It has the deeper function—deconstruction. Accordingly, there are several versions of Ramayana. Ramanujam has collected some of these versions of spoken Ramayana, and I keep repeating this story from one of them. It is a Kannada Ramayana that is enacted on a street, featuring an illiterate Sita talking to an illiterate Rama and the two having conversation over whether Sita should also go to forest or not. Sita says “I should go to forest because I am your wife,” and Rama says, “No you are a princess, sweet and tender and there are very wild animals there, so you will not come.” The argument goes on and on; they build up arguments, but nothing is written down. It is all made up, but in the end Sita comes up with very clever argument. She says, “When in every Ramayana Sita goes to the forest how you can deny it to me?” This is a great example of intertextuality. Thus, Dalit epics also have intertextual elements from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata. But, these are sometimes debunked, made fun of, and something else is got out of it. We are told that we should not read them. Text should not be read in a simplistic manner, but in a way of participation and also opposition. Now, I come to my main thesis that Indian literature has a frontyard and a backyard. The frontyard has the upper castes, whereas the Dalits are in the backyard. Here, I use that metaphor of an Indian home which Ramanujam also uses in one of these essays. In the frontyard, you know all the elders come and speak and sit. And they may be talking about present-day politics and the market rates and so on, but as you go into the house, the women’s world is inside the house. In an orthodox family, even the male members can go into the kitchen unwashed and they are as impure as anyone else. The backyard is totally a world of women, abhishudras. If they

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are shudras they can draw water, if they are Dalits they cannot; but, they get water! Some dealings takes place in the backyard, and a lot of our literature and new themes have come from the backyard. Themes like Ramayana, Mahabharata, and heroic themes may come from the frontyard, but the backyard has other kinds of themes that have enriched Indian literature. Thus, Indian languages have a backyard. I think English also has a backyard. If English did not have India as a backyard, English literature would not have grown into its present status. Sanskrit is the only language that has no backyard, but it is itself a backyard to the regional languages. Sanskrit can still be arrived through these regional languages, something in the backyard which is very important for literature. In the modicum of the society that is always there as something that defies all social arrangements so far (as literary imagination is concerned). Literary and metamorphic imagination has that kind of capacity. Now what has happened to new writing in Kannada literature? I will tell you when and where it all began. It began in Maharashtra. I first read about it when my friend Dilip Chitre translated some of the Dalit poets’ works in an English newspaper. It was through the English language that I came to know of Dalit literature in Maharashtra. A thousand years ago or even 500 years ago, the Bhakthi poets would have come to know each other because of the intervention of Sanskrit language. But now it is the English language which brings even the news of the Dalit literature from Maharashtra to Karnataka. In Karnataka, there was a movement—a Dalit movement—as a result of a very simple political statement made by one of our Dalit minister, a very active person named Basavalingam, also called Basavalingappa. In his social thinking, he was deeply influenced by Ambedkar and Buddha, and he was a Congressman. Once when he talked about the Kannada language, he said that he got nothing from Kannada literature. “It is all boosa.” Boosa is a word we use for cow fodder. When the cows are fed with boosa, it makes them yield more milk and also fills their stomach but that is all the contribution it makes. The statement annoyed patriots of : U. R. Ananthamurthy


Kannada language, and there was a movement against what is called Kannada Boosa. It was obviously a linguistic movement, but then it turned into a caste movement. The Dalit boys and girls in colleges were in danger of being beaten up! I am myself a Kannada writer and I dared to do something. I wrote a letter to one of the newspapers and said if I were born a Dalit, I may also have said like Basavalingappa that “it is all boosa for me”—because a lot of Kannada literature is full of religious literature. I need to read Ambedkar to get my strength and my conviction. So there is nothing wrong in Basavalingappa saying so. And one of the major writers in Kannada, who was also a very great poet, also came in support of Basavalingappa’s statement. Then many Dalit writers began to write and express themselves. All these led to a big movement, and it became a literary movement. It begins with what we call “boosa prakharan.” It was a very important event in Kannada in the 1970s, and Basavalingappa was an instrument doing that. At that time, there were two important writers in Kannada. One was Siddalingaiah, who wrote poetry of progressive kind. It is not essentially Dalit in that sense as it was also a progressive literary movement, based on Marxism and communism and so on. It was called bandaya. But the Dalit movement was different from that, according to me. The movement had bandayam, but it also had a medium that the Dalits use in everyday life. That means when you have a new movement it is not only new movement of content but it is also a new movement of medium. The medium changes. So when I go to the 14th- and 15th-century epics, you will see how there is new medium also in them. Devanur Mahadeva was the first Dalit writer using a Dalit variation of Kannada. I am told that Marathi writers also use a variation of Marathi, not the Marathi of the well-to-do. Mahadeva wrote a very poignant story of the middle classes. The Dalit experience of humility, humbleness, and humiliation was often expressed, I think, in three different ways by great writers. One is the high mimetic way. Much earlier than Devano Mahadeva, a great writer in Kannada, a Brahmin writer in south Karnataka named Shivarama Karanth had written a story called “Chomana dudi”—Choma’s drum—which also become a film later on. The : 87


story of Choma’s drum is as follows: Choma wants to own land, but his landlord cannot give him any land to own because he is a Dalit, he can work on the landlord’s land, not become the owner of the land. So Choma goes on dreaming of owning a land and he cannot. Later, one of his daughters becomes a Christian, and he is also enticed to become a Christian so that he could get land. On the one hand he is wedded to his old deities who he worships, and on the other he cannot change the desire for land. Thus, he expresses himself through a drum. I have read “Chomana dudi” as a child, and when you read it, the most important character is the drum which he beats! I come from a Brahmin family, and my ideas of the lower-caste system changed despite living in an agrahara (Brahmin quarters) in Karnataka where there is no newspaper or anything of that kind. It was because of my coming across the novel “Chomana dudi.” It was a very strange experience. Caste system produces very strange experiences! I saw a Dalit everyday in my backyard when he came to the cattle shed to take cow dung, but I have never thought that he would have inner life. I thought he was just some nameless person who came, did his work, and went away without talking to anyone, but when I read of Choma’s drum where Karanth writes about Choma’s agony, Choma’s sorrow, Choma’s anger, it suddenly struck me that a man whom I see every day has an inner life. It was a very strange experience to see somebody who was ignored all your life had an inner life of his own. I cannot describe to you that how this realization made me a writer, just a discovery that somebody whom you ignore socially has an aspiration; has an inner life; can dislike you or hate you, but does not express it. This was what I thought in literature, in high mimetic mode. Choma is almost like king here, those English children and his self-respect, and in the end he dies beating the drum. There was another novel, again penned by a higher-caste Hindu. It is very important now, in which a Dalit experience is embedded by a writer called Khumb. He is a middle-caste man. The upper and the middle castes are the landowning castes. They also have very strong notions of touchability and untouchability. So here is a novel where there is a fantastic character, who goes everywhere with a : U. R. Ananthamurthy


dog of his own. He is called “naayi kutti.” Naayi is a dog; dog kutti! There is one extraordinary passage in that story on what happens within the mind of such a character, in spite of your hegemony and untouchabilty and all that. Literature is always a source where you will find things that you may not have found expressed obviously in society, but expressed within an inner world. There is one small instance. He, the Dalit in the second story, is thirsty; he goes to an upper-caste man’s house and asks for water. This upper caste is a Gowda, which is actually one of the middle castes. A young woman, who is very beautiful, brings some water in a pot but she can’t give it to him; so he stands below, she stands at a higher level and pours water into his hand. Her hand is stretched out. She is pouring water and he is drinking it. This is a gesture of abject humility; bending low and receiving water like this, but you know what is happening. This young woman has never seen a man as handsome as this Choma, as this “naayi kutti.” If she belonged to his caste, she could not have stared at him. This young woman enjoys the demeanor of his body, and he, because she is an upper-caste woman, and even if he looks at her nobody will object to it, also enjoys her beauty. Now, that scene describes an abject act of receiving water from above, but an inner activity of different kind. This is an upper-caste writing, not Dalit literature. Therefore, something really was happening already in Kannada literature. Now let me tell a story by a Dalit writer (written in a low mimetic world with a humorous side to it), in which a poor lady thinks that somebody from a Dalit family must have stolen her lost cock. She goes in search of it. She goes from to house to house, and then in the very process there is the detailed description of a whole society, as she goes into every house smelling whether they have made any different curry. She is a very strong woman, and she can decipher what is being cooked just by smelling, and then you get the idea of whole community as a result of this search. She does not find the missing cock anywhere and comes back home. She has a very small, poor house but it is still property for her. Moreover, she does not want her daughter-in-law to take away anything from her but stay there and be obedient to her. So there is quarrel between the : 89


daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, wherein they play out a property feud typical of the upper classes, as if they own a hundred acres of land. They share all the notions of property ownership just like the upper class. She also has a grandchild, and this child begins to draw a peacock on the wall. Seeing this, this woman also takes a chalk and draws a peacock. The drawing has been done so well that it seems that the peacock is dancing. There is a creation of something new. The grandson comes and she engages in a conversation with him, and starts telling him a story where they pretend that the grandson is a king. This is all in her daydreams, in which he becomes a king. Above all this is because they are hungry. There are many brothers in this family and one of them goes to the field of a rich man in the dark and steals four or five big bags of groundnuts. He brings these bags from the field and they shut their door, build a fire, and all of them sit around it and begin to eat the groundnuts one by one, throwing the husk into the fire. Now it is great metaphorical event. It is like a Yagna being performed—Yagna for the god within you. Hungry, they eat the groundnuts and throw the husk in the fire, and each one begins to tell a story—a story of a conquest in the past, a story where someone goes to a hotel, but is denied a cup of tea because he cannot drink from the cups being used (due to him belonging to a low caste). Then he says: “go to hell, I don’t want your tea.” He might not have said it then, but here he says that he told them so. All the potential of each one’s rebellion comes through in a humorous way. Meanwhile, the rich man finds out that his groundnuts are gone. So he calls the police. When the police come to the house of these people who have been eating groundnuts, not a single groundnut is found anywhere, because they have thrown it all into the fire. When the policemen opens the door, and finds nothing, he punishes the complainant, the rich man. “You lodged a complaint and you brought us here. We found nothing here.” The police officer comes and sees the cock, which has come back, and he says, “Amma why do you want it? I will take it,” and then he takes it away. So finally she is cheated by the police officer and this is the story.

: U. R. Ananthamurthy


The story has such deep insights which makes it possible for multiple interpretation. And so the Dalit literature is not the same kind everywhere and it is different in Kannada for some reasons. I do not know what reasons, but that is what I want to find out. This kind of a story has taken a different sort of a direction in Kannada and it came into the mainstream immediately. Although these stories were very exciting, we never thought of making these kinds of writing consistent, because it is written by a Dalit, though it was as good as, or even better than, what others were writing. Because it was deeply metaphorical and went deeper into social reality and said many more things than realistic literature could have said. With realistic literature you either agree or disagree; with this there is no agreement or disagreement but only participation. That is how the literature came into us. Now I will go into how this was made possible. This happened because there are some things in literature still which can be taught in the oral epic mode, for example, the two epics of Male Madeshwara and Manteswamy from the 14th and 15th centuries. I am to tell you a bad story. In the 12th century, there was a movement in Kannada called the “Veerashaiva vachana” movement. The leader of this movement was Basava, a Brahmin, who abided by brahmanical rules to lead the movement, and for the first time in Kannada’s history, after several years, you found writers from almost every community, who perhaps could not write. They could only speak; that is why it was called “vachana.” “Vachana” is that which is spoken and can be remembered when you speak it because it has enough elements of memorability within the statement. It is the “vachana” movement. In the vachana movement, there was a revolutionary figure called Alamma. We do not know which caste he belonged to, but he was a strange character. He did not even believe in and even made fun of Shiva, because he was a worshipper of that “which has no roop, nirgun, niraakar.” He is the leader of the movement but the others have Shiva as their Lord. And, therefore there is a conflict between him and them. Eventually he moves away from them and made an attempt to make the “self ” into an institution, even then, in the 12th

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century. But “self ” refuses to be an institution, because each one of them is unto himself or herself. There is also a prostitute called Sule Sangavva. She is not ashamed of being a prostitute—as she says: “Basava said worship of any kind is worship of god. You don’t have to be ashamed of any act!” This was a revolutionary movement but it degenerated very quickly within three centuries; and it became another caste—containing almost every caste. They have inner problems within their own communities because the upper-caste converts would not accept the lower-caste converts. Thus, it also developed into a community in Karnataka. The very atrocities against Dalits may be committed by them but within their own theory there is no place for it—as they believe in an ideology very different from what they do. This delivers degeneration. The 15th-century Male Madeshwara is a story of rebellion against the degeneration of the Veerashaiva movement. Actually Madeshwara is a cobbler, a cobbler turned into god. He becomes a powerful person; he destroys his enemy who also is blessed by Shiva but has become dangerous. So he destroys this enemy. I will tell you how he does this. That arrogant man asks Madeshwara: “Make me a pair of chappals,” and he says it in a very arrogant, kingly manner. “Alright Prabhu, I will make you a pair of chappals.” He makes him a pair of chappals, and when he steps on his chappals, they begin to burn him. It is a burning chappal. So he dies. This is an example of how oral epics seek to defy mainstream epics, but end up adopting the usual narrative mode. There also has a samhara of an asura used as a theme but given with a different type of a treatment. In the Veerashaiva movement also, when Alamma goes on a travel, his shishyas had by then become so arrogant that when the guru comes back, almost looking like a hippie (in Shoonya Sampadane, ther is a great description of this), he is recognized by no one. He comes back with his hair matted, eyes red, and clothes torn, looking like a beggar, and they cannot recognize him as their guru. But he has achieved the highest of wisdom, according to the story. The only man who can recognize him was Basava. So also here, Madeshwara and also later on Manteswamy, when they go back to Kalyana; Kalyana is the place where all the great things happened. But in the : U. R. Ananthamurthy


Dalit re-rendering of this, all the great people in Kalyana are cobblers, lower-caste people who have become great saints; and they are not honored there and so they go and reestablish their art. That is what is narrated for seven days. A reassertion of values of the Veerashaiva movement, which has been forgotten by them but stressed again by these people who are illiterate and remember the whole thing; so, for three centuries something is not forgotten but it is redone. Manteswamy is grafting for Alamma. How does Manteswamy come? This is most interesting. Manteswamy comes with a pot of toddy in his hand and a dead calf for meat, for beef on his back. Toddy is what the Dalits drink. It is “kallu.” It is his karma that recognizes him as Alamma, but they are forced to recognize that Alamma has come this way, and he is to be respected. It is a literature for them and so they do it to sing about their own community. Tell me one big difference between literature of the upper caste where we have the maha kaavya, and the literature of the lower castes, the Dalits. The difference is this: in the maha kaavyas the nation is sung about; here it is not the nation, but the community. There is no question of the bahujana kaavya to talk about nation while only the mahajana kaavya talks about the nation. In both these kinds of epics, literature of lower castes talks about the community and the values of the community. It might have something to do with the kind of imagery that it has, and also the kind of metaphoric devices that it uses. A friend of mine, late Dr Nagaraj, has written a very profound book on this whole movement and the way it has been used—on Shaiva Prathmai, and the kaavya Mimamsa. There he uses the metaphor of an ore which has become the golden coin, and accepted in the nation as a coin. Suddenly it has a desire to go back to its origin, and becomes the ore again. Many of these kaavyas have the desire to become the ore again. They know that what has become the maanya, which is used in everyday life, no longer contains the original value of what it was! Hence, there is that kind of a pull within Dalit literature in Karnataka—for it has a past of this kind in 14th and 15th centuries. A modern writer no longer has to go to early literature of this kind for his inspiration. He has his own tradition, an inspiration of : 93


a kind where you can turn your social rebellion into metaphorical rebellion. It is a deeper kind of rebellion, universal kind of rebellion, and these articulations in literature are as deep as anything that upper-class literature can ever produce. Hence it is the Dalits who have made great contribution to literature because they have brought literature back to its original values. In other words, in my metaphor, the backyard has asserted itself and is in the frontyard, and maybe in danger of suffering the same fate as whatever is in the frontyard, and then something else may become backyard even from the Dalits. This may also become nothing, which is repeated quite often, and lose its value. That may happen, but fortunately for us in India there is a great backyard of unspoken things, metaphors, language users in all the Indian languages, and the great source of the literary expression of this kind of pain. What happened in Bhaktipanth? Kabir of that time is Basava of my language. It is very interesting that when you talk of any of these poets, you talk of their trade also, to their assertion of what they do. There is no shame. That was what Basava tried to do: take the shame away from what you do. Actually Basava has a “vachana,” where he says that when a Dalit woman and a Dalit man were working in fields and they had sex, I was born to them as an illegitimate child. He was born to a Brahmin but he talks of himself as somebody born like this because that was an attempt to, at that moment, because of some influence of, I think, Shaiva Pantha, he denigrates himself and Alamma makes fun of him because humility itself can become a kind of pride. So in Basava it becomes a kind of pride because of the show of humility. This is played in many of these epics; where humility is another form of pride. In other words, it was a moment of great depth and great insight in the Dalit literature, but even before Dalits got it upper-caste people also made use of the Dalit epics and wrote poems for printing and reading but they were never as effective as what is delivered even today by word of mouth. I am not talking about something which has disappeared. It is still alive. It is still alive for our writers. Whether they are of upper caste : U. R. Ananthamurthy


or lower caste, there are these women who can sing these songs for seven days, but there are variations of this, you know. Variations because each woman will add something to it from her own experience. It is not something there for you to copy, but you can enter into it also and hence those who have edited it have a very hard job because they had to hear many of these women singing it. Then choose the Patha, text which they think is common to them all and make a part of it. But it is always doubted whether there is another text better than this. On the whole the gist of my discussion is: Can you think of Indian contribution, Dalit contribution to Indian literature? We need not think of it only of our type of enlightenment where they have asserted themselves for a longer time in India at least in what you called medieval India. The medieval in India is not like the medieval in Europe. The medieval India was much more alive than the medieval Europe. It was in the medieval India that the Bhakti poets empowered women. In the Lingaya movement and the Veerashaiva movement, a woman when she menstruates need not sit outside. She can take a bath and be accepted in a society. She can also wear a lingam. And the Dalits have made many transformations. Some examples I will tell you; the Lingaya speak of destiny in the palm, but the Dalit speaks of fire in the palm. When they talk about fire they do not mean merely the fire you see in the sun or in the sky. They also mean fire in the written world, which has light. In other words, they go into everyday detail and find their source of inspiration. That is one difference between the Dalit epics and other epics. Here the details are all different. That is why Alamma comes with a pot of toddy and a dead calf. The everyday life is glorified in the Dalit literature, but grafted on to the older poets; grafted not because they want to imitate the earlier poets, but to contribute to debunk it. And hence it does two things at the same time. One is you begin to belong to the greater tradition; and two, you assert your own identity. These twin jobs are done in Dalit literature. That is why I think it is something unique and very important in modern times.

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Nations within Nations Living Dialogues on Governance and Culture

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n the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales, a revisionist tale of American Civil War, Josey Wales is a soldier who refuses to surrender. As he runs from being caught, Wales comes upon the fierce Comanche who felt that the government reneged on treaties. He then meets Ten Bears, the chief of the Comanche, to negotiate for a peaceful coexistence. The following dialogue takes place between Josey Wales and Ten Bears: Ten Bears (Will Sampson): “These things you say we will have, we already have.” Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood): “That’s true. I ain’t promising you nothing extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another.” Ten Bears: “It’s sad that governments are chiefed by the double tongues. There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of

By

Abraham Lotha

Nations within Nations

life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life ... or death. It shall be life.”

On September 15, 2010, in New Delhi, addressing an all-party meeting to discuss about the dilution of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Kashmir, Sonia Gandhi invited all the members to arrive at a suitable decision to break the vicious cycle of violence and suffering. “Why is there so much pain, in particular amongst the youth?” she asked. “We must give them hope, we must understand and respect their legitimate aspirations. … We need to be magnanimous and mature in our approach, as befits a strong confident and inclusive democracy,” she told the members at the meeting. She further added that the Congress Party is “more than willing” to support a process of “healing and dialogue in partnership” with the people of the state. Union Minister for Renewable Resources, Farooq Abdullah also said that an all-party delegation would visit the state. “The Home Ministry will organize the visit of the delegation,” he said, “and the state government will facilitate the delegation to meet the various groups. A meaningful dialogue must begin.” Sonia Gandhi’s statement is an example of how a multiethnic state such as India governs the nations within a nation. What does such rhetoric say about governance and state-building? Why are we talking such language after seven decades of nationhood? Are the ideological and political differences crippling? How hopeful should we be of a positive resolution? India’s nation-building policy to contain and integrate the numerous ethnic groups or nations has been crystallized in the familiar slogan, “unity in diversity” envisioned by the founding fathers of the state such as Nehru. Yet, how successful has India been in this nation-building endeavor, especially in the current context of globalization that seems to indirectly reinforce ethnic identities which have at times led to tensions with the state? Nations and nationalism as we know them today are of modern origins; even more recent are postcolonial states such as India. Among scholars on nationalism, there are those who are proponents of internal factors as the predominant criteria that create

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B r i dg i ng t h e G a p

nations and nationalism (Armstrong 1982; Smith 1986; Llobera 1994; Hastings 1997; Hroch 1996), and those that propose different external elements—political, economic, or cultural—as the primary factors responsible for the rise of nationalism (Kohn 1944; Gellner 1981; Hobsbawm 1983; Anderson 1983; Greenfeld 1992). These approaches to understanding nationalism find political expression between two broad types of nationalism: ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism. Though not strictly, the former emphasizes the essentialist character of nations, while the latter, influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment, emphasizes the secular, rationalist, and constructed nature of nations. Craig Calhoun (1993: 221) describes civic nation as one that “claims to have superseded traditional identities such as ethnicity by the founding of a true and modern nation, and [while the other] claims to national identity and sovereignty rooted precisely in ancient ethnicity.” Germany, Italy, and Japan are examples of ethnic nationalism, while states such France, Britain, and the United States represent civic nationalism. In its extreme form, the United States of America is one that, at present, has no ethnic core but, instead, has the Constitution that provides the legal processes for nationalism. Among the various types of civic nationalism are those that are multiethnic in character, which are comprised of different ethnic groups or non-state nations that are within states also called “nations without states,” which Montserrat Guibernau (1999: 1; 2000) defines as “cultural communities sharing a common past, attached to a clearly demarcated territory, and wishing to decide upon their political future which lack a state of their own.” The Sami, Inuit, Basque, Kurds, etc., to name a few, are some examples of nations within nations. Some of these non-state nations, as Thomas Eriksen (1991: 265) describes, may be cases of unsuccessful nationalisms transformed into ethnonationalism “whose members reside more or less uncomfortably under the aegis of a state which they do not identify with their own nationality or ethnic category.” These nonstate nations may be involved in ethnonationalism creating tensions with the state in the process. How does one explain the tensions between the ethnic nations and the state in multiethnic states? For Stanley Tambiah, the politics : Abraham Lotha


of the newly independent states “have by virtue of various internal dialectics and differences led to a new phase of politics dominated by the competitions and conflicts of ‘ethnic collectivities,’ who question nationalism and ‘nation-state’ dogmas” (Tambiah 1989: 341). While E. Hobsbawm (1992: 6) argues that “ethnicity turns into separatist nationalism for much the same reasons as colonial liberation movements established their states within the frontiers of the preceding colonial empires.” According to Daniele Conversi (1995: 5), what distinguishes ethnic nationalist movements from other movements is that ethnic nationalism is “reinforced by state intervention,” particularly due to an excess of overzealous centralism. Some ethnonationalist insurgencies can also be explained as a direct response to state repression. Examples of ethnonationalism in India are Kashmir and Nagaland. Marcus Franke (2006) argues that the Naga conflict today is a continuation of the imperial conquest begun by the British, particularly with the problem of subjugating frontier areas: When European states began to erect world-wide empires, many of these former regional empires and states turned into peripheral colonies from the perspective of the European metropolises. The frontier areas of these peripheries were in many cases pacified, but not really integrated into the administration of the colonies, and when these colonies themselves returned from periphery to centre by regaining their independence, they in turn endeavoured to incorporate the former frontiers that represent the peripheries of today. In this way, what was once the colonized periphery has transformed into a metropolis and now exerts imperial policy on the former frontier, its contemporary periphery. (Franke 2006: 69)

In an attempt to get beyond the civic–ethnic dichotomy of nationalism, Michael Seymour (1998) proposes a hybrid notion, which combines the ethnic and civic features, into a sociopolitical concept of the nation, a multiethnic and pluricultural political community. Nationalism, according to this sociopolitical concept, should “be construed as the defense of the collective rights of a pluricultural and multiethnic political community” (Seymour 1998: 4). As Sagarika Dutt (1998: 421) states, “the policies of governments of : 99


multi-ethnic states with regard to national integration can be either pluralist or assimilationist or a mixture of both.”

India, a Multiethnic Nation Unlike nationalism in the West (France, for instance), India lacked the “the essential ingredients of nationality: a common language, a common religious tradition, and a historical shared experience by the majority of the people” (Embree 1980: 1–2). Writing in the late nineteenth century, Sir John Strachey said that …the first and most essential thing to learn about India—that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious. … That men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-Western Provinces, and Madras should ever feel they belong to one great nation is impossible. (Embree 1980: 1)

One might even argue, as C. A. Bayly (1998) rightfully points out, there was no essence of “Indian-ness” let alone “Hindu-ness.” The common shared experience was British colonialism and it was their primary objective to overthrow their common enemy—the British. They may have had different strategies, and even fought each other as it happened between the Hindus and Muslims, but they had a common enemy to fight. National unity of India was formed as anticolonial invention of nationalist movement. Influenced by nationalist movements in other parts of the world, the Indian intelligentsia created what John Stuart Mill called the strongest cause for the rise of a sense of nationality: “the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections, collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connection with the same incidents in the past” (Embree 1980: 3–4). In spite of the absence of a cultural homogeneity, such as a common language, a religious tradition, or a historical shared experience by the majority of the people, Indian nationalism succeeded in gaining independence from the British. According to Francis Robinson (1987: 162): : Abraham Lotha


The achievement of no colonial nationalist movement is as striking as that of the Indian NC: it led the most diverse peoples of the world against the greatest of the imperial powers; it developed new forms of protest which limited the number of lives lost in action against the colonial state; it concluded its struggle with the colonial power in a manner which was both gracious and statesmanlike; it went on to form a constitution which tempered idealism with a sound sense of political reality; it then proceeded to work this framework for political development in a way which seemed to offer a greater degree of constitutional government and a greater degree of respect of the rule of law than most post-colonial societies have experienced.

The multiethnic composition is an important element of the Indian state. But India is not exactly a civic state where the individual is the ultimate; it is a union of ethnic groups. Ambedkar even considered India as a Union of States instead of a federation. Some elements in India try to make India a homogeneous nation-state but that is being unrealistic. The reality is that there are tensions between the ethnic communities or nations and the center, for example, Bodos, Meiteis, Tamils, Assamese, Kashmiris, and Nagas. These have staunch ethnic identity, but are they equally staunch Indian? Separationist tendencies are not a new phenomenon in India. Sub-national and extremist groups in the country have existed in India from the moment of its birth; the protests by the Bengalis and south Indians in the 1950s are cases in point. Commenting on the reactions and dissent of certain linguistic groups to the States Reorganization Commission Report, Satish Arora (1956) pointed out that sub-nationalisms of the Indian peoples have proved to be more powerful than most observers had expected (1956: 30). The riot in Bombay to fight for the formation of Maharashtra state is one such example. Reorganizing the states according to linguistic groups was a strategy used by India for nation-building and containment of ethnic conflicts. In response to the threat of sub-nationalists, a communiqué by the Indian Government read: “The aim and motive behind the reorganization is the formation of units which may lead to greater administrative convenience, facilitating implementation of the national development plans and promoting the well-being of the people of the country as a whole” (Arora 1956: 29). Because of the : 101


multiethnic character of India, unity was paramount. The anxiety for national unity was clearly evident at the time of the reorganization of the states. As Sardar Panikkar, a member of the States Reorganization Commission, asserted that the …readjustment of boundaries would not solve any problems unless the whole problem of unity of India was considered from the point of view of Indian nationalism. There was no such thing as Assamese, Bengali or Kerala culture; there was only one culture—Indian culture—which emanated from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. (Arora 1956: 30)

Among other initiatives, Dutt points out that the Constitution of India “promotes liberal values but gives priority to the unity and integrity of the Indian state” (Dutt 1998: 414). Even though some communities are scheduled and other identities based on ethnicities, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are given selective recognition (Dutt 1998: 414). The Sixth Schedule of the Constitution created communities with wide-ranging powers over local economy, culture, religion, and customs. But state-building is a process. As Walker Connor (1994) points out, nation and nationalism are processes, and nations emerge only when a significant portion of the population has identified with them. For instance, Calhoun’s (1993: 218) modernization theory “predicted that when outlying regions were incorporated into a social system they would gradually be ‘homogenized’ into cultural similarity with the rest of the system,… nationalism centered on the encompassing state would grow and contrary ethnic mobilization would be transitory.” But, in India, this has not happened. What, then, is lacking? Why should India adopt steps toward understanding/dialogue?

Perspective of the Alienated This summary of the theory of nationalism and the nation-state leads to an inevitable conclusion. For postcolonial multiethnic states, successful technologies of governance and nation-building require more than the recognition and acceptance of the different

: Abraham Lotha


ethnicities or nations within the state; the process involves a conscious political will for the “inclusion of the excluded” or those that feel alienated and marginalized. To do this, one has to see from the perspective of the excluded; it calls for a close collaboration with the people most affected. Let me take the case of northeast India as an example. India’s northeast has gained notoriety of being a region defined by insurgencies and political unrests, amplified further by the state. With the region and the Center blaming each other, the northeast has yet to become an integral part of the country. According to B. B. Kumar (1999), the problems in the northeast are due to a “crisis of perception and lack of credible action” by India. For Kumar, the root causes of these problems are due to the colonial policies of unprecedented social, cultural, religious, linguistic, and racial divide in India and isolationist policies in relation to the tribals. On the other hand, Sanjib Baruah (1999, 2003), a scholar from Assam, suggests that India is fighting against itself due to its lack of understanding the issues in the northeast region. Similarly, Sanjoy Hazarika, a journalist-scholar from Assam, also suggests that the root cause of insurgencies in northeast India is “the failure of the government to understand what the local people want” (Hazarika 2005). Ignorance about the northeast still exists in mainland India. This was brought home to me in an e-mail this month by Susmita Dasgupta from the Economic Research Unit, Joint Plant Committee, in which she accurately describes the colonial gaze mainland Indians continue to cast upon the region. Writing to Professor Nongbri on September 12, 2010, in response to Professor Pattanaik’s talk on Nagaland at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Susmita Dasgupta says: To us, Indians, the North east is a strange world; its people look different, the language they speak incomprehensible, cultures meaningless, artefacts purposeless and its political insurgence pointless. In such a backdrop, we imagine that the North east is and should continue its allegiance to India. Whenever we speak of integration we talk of absorbing the people of these states so that in every way they become invisible to the Indian reckoning. If the North east at all asserts itself, then we throw

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some crumbs like acknowledging its uniqueness by means of tourism by which we continue to construct these people as “sights” to be gazed like animals in a zoo and whose ways of existence are objects of our discovery. It is interesting that while Indians so conscious of colonial constructions of their own selves, do exactly the same towards people who do not typically belong to the “mainstream” culture. Scholars and intellectuals from the North east too become trained to look upon their own communities as the “other.”

Closer home, in the late part of 2009, some visitors from Kerala came to St. Joseph’s College, near Kohima. I took the visitors atop the terrace of the college building overlooking a panoramic view. Surveying the view, in a tone of disappointment one of them asked: “Where do the tribals live?” Ignorance and condescending attitude belie such questions. Evolutionist and colonial attitudes are still active so one still hears comments such as “tribals are shy,” or jungli, etc. Because they are not treated as equal partners, “tribal” problems are understood as law-and-order problem, and demeaning laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act are enacted. Let me cite Nagaland as a specific example. The Nagas’ claim is more emphatic. They argue that their relationship with India was center–center in nature and not center–periphery because, though the Naga Hills may have been a periphery and the frontiers of the British India, they are not the frontiers of the Indian state since Nagas were not part of India at any point in their history. This position put them at odds with the Indian state right from the beginning of post-Independence nation-building. Prior to 1947, there was a gulf between the Nagas and India because they did not know each other. In the post-Independence period, the emotional gulf between them widened and deepened further because of the Indian Army’s repression of the Naga people. In the initial stages of the Naga political movement, Nehru and other Indian leaders thought that the Naga National Council (NNC) leaders had no popular support, and Nehru thought by striking “hard and swift” the NNC leaders would lose their support base. The ensuing military repression made a direct negative impact in the intimate life of every Naga villager, and subsequently drew the Naga masses into : Abraham Lotha


the nationalist movement and intensified it. Whether or not Nehru was aware the effect this instruction had on the Naga people, we do not know, but on the ground in the Naga Hills, it was clear, as Franke (2006: 80) says, the “reality had been shaped in the main by India’s major tool for nation-building on the periphery—the Indian Army–which fundamentally resembled its imperial predecessor.” It is not surprising then that Kuldip Nayar (1995), a journalist, echoes a sentiment of many in heartland India. Nagaland, for Nayar, is “too distant and too alienated.” The Indo–Naga relation is complex, one ruled by ideologies that reach back to the colonial age, but which also offers opportunities for mutually beneficial relations in an age of globalization.

Alternate State-building and Governance How do you govern with issues of heterogeneity and diversity in multiethnic states? In multiethnic states, the challenge for both the state and the nations within the state is to realize that there are different ways of being a nation just as there are different ways of sovereignty. Non-state nations have been influenced by popular thinking that each nation should be entitled to its own state. But, homogeneous nation-states are becoming a rarity especially in terms of territory and ethnicity. Besides, “nationhood, or a sense of common identity, by itself does not guarantee that viability of a state” (Ottaway 2002: 17). Donald Horowitz (2003) argues that secession from states as a means to self-determination by ethnic groups is almost never an answer to the problems of ethnic conflict and violence. Except for a few instances like Bangladesh and former Soviet states, the right to self-determination was relevant in the immediate years following World War II as nations were decolonized. For Horowitz (2003: 5–6), “secession does not create homogeneous successor.” The most likely scenario is that the minorities in the new states become oppressed and their rights are not likely to be respected. The creation of a multitude of ministates might “increase the sum total of warfare, rather than reduce it” (Horowitz 2003: 10). The right direction, Horowitz suggests, is for states to seek internal : 105


accommodation including devolution of power by means such as regional autonomy or federalism. Internal self-determination or autonomy can be looked at from the perspective of how an ethnic minority in an ethnically diverse state negotiates its nationalism. An example of such a case in Asia is Bulag’s (2002) discussion of minority nationality such as the Mongols in the context of national unity politics (minzu tuanjie) in China. Outnumbered by the Chinese in their own land, and against the odds of becoming completely subjugated by the hegemony of minzu tuanjie, Bulag illustrates how the Mongol communist movement, led by Ulanhu, “eventually succeeded in collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party, entering strategic alliances against the Japanese and the National Chinese government, in exchange for CCP support of an Inner Mongolian autonomy consistent with the proclaimed communist goals of colonial liberation” (Bulag 2002: 7). Objecting to Anderson’s (1983) argument of Third-World nationalism as a “derivative discourse,” Chatterjee (1993: 5) says, “if nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” Fortunately, there are no modular forms for state-building and all the multiethnic states can innovate according to their particular contexts. India’s state-building need not be a “derivative discourse.” For example, both China and India have numerous ethnicities or nationalities, but their methodologies to deal with ethnic/minorities differ. Whereas China’s ideology is national unity (minzu tuanjie), India’s ideology is “unity in diversity” (sometimes by force in both cases). National unity in the Chinese case is used for both nationbuilding and unity between the various minority nationalities. In another instance of how a state deals with nations within the nation, Terry Martin (2001) describes the former Soviet Union as “An Affirmative Action Empire,” in which the non-Russian minorities were not only accepted into the ideology of the Soviet State but also systematically promoted the national consciousness of the ethnic minorities and established for them institutional forms of the nation-state. This policy was implemented through “the twin policies of promoting national languages and creating : Abraham Lotha


national elites.” In the early years, the majority Russian nationality, seen as the oppressor, was downplayed. However, in 1934, Stalin announced the “re-habilitation of the Russian nationality and traditional Russian national culture,” which gradually led to the Russian nationals as “first among equals.” There is no one-size-fits-all model for all multiethnic states in state-building. Conceptually, as Mark Berger (2006: 5) notes “the term nation-building is increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building.” In multiethnic states, “the goal of nation building should not be to impose common identities on deeply divided peoples but to organize states that can administer their territories and allow people to live together despite differences” (Ottaway 2002: 17). Instead of wars or armed repressions, consensual democratic methods are preferred ways of statebuilding for many. The hegemonic effect of the nation-state sovereignty episteme has made it difficult to think of alternatives to the extent that the nation-state “is in circulation not only as an obligatory but also as a liberatory category in the global public sphere: it structures both political realities and subversive political imaginaries” (Biolsi 2005: 240). Sovereign states as modular form seem the norm and other forms of being a sovereign or nation seem difficult to visualize. But it is clear that just as there is no one definition of nation and nationalism, there is also no one way of being a nation or a state. There can be other ways of being a sovereign state and a nation. As Seymour (1998: 2) points out, failure to “conceptualize nations in different ways, one can then be led to adopt a negative attitude toward legitimate forms of nationalism, and these attitudes may in turn have enormous political consequences, sometimes even leading to violence.” The conventional way of understanding sovereignty can become an impediment for good governance and state-building. As Baruah says, Unlike political scientists of a generation ago that took the modern idea of absolute and indivisible sovereignty as normal and desirable, many today look to shared sovereignty as an aspect of the usable past that could provide a framework for resolving many stubborn territorial disputes of today. (Baruah 2008: 17) : 107


Sovereignty, then, has to be thought of in inventive ways. On a closer examination, we find that there are counterexamples to the old modular form of sovereignty. For example, Aihwa Ong (1999) discusses cases of “graduated sovereignty,” where the state’s gaze is not panoptic. Importantly, for both the state and the nations within it, sovereignty can be understood as a relationship. But what type of relationship exactly? Illustrating the kinds of political spaces imagined by Native Americans in the United States, Thomas Biolsi (2005: 240) points out that “the nation-state, it turns out, is only one among several (perhaps many) political geographies imagined, lived, and even institutionalized under modernity by American Indians.” According to Biolsi, Native Americans exercise four types of sovereignty—first, tribal sovereignty which is recognized as internal selfdetermination or dependent sovereignty (2005: 240). The second type is shared sovereignty or co-management of lands outside the reservation. There are disagreements between the federal government and the states and the tribes for shared sovereignty outside the reservation boundaries, but since the 1990s, there has evolved a policy of “government-to-government” relations, “a framework for allowing tribal governments to have some official role as stakeholders in policy making by the state and federal agencies” (Biolsi 2005: 246). This framework is similar to the “Native-Title” policy recognized by the Australian government with regard to the aboriginals. Even though this is not exactly a government-to-government exercise, Native American tribes “clearly see this procedure as a means for exercising some degree of what they deem sovereignty over offreservation lands” (Biolsi 2005: 246). The third type is the national indigenous space such as the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., which reflects a common experience of the indigenous peoples in the Americas. The fourth type of sovereignty is dual citizenship or a hybrid political space in which tribal citizenship and US citizenship are not mutually exclusive (Biolsi 2005: 252). Sovereignty is also performative (Sullivan 2006). Illustrating how the First Nations in Canada assert their sovereign control over their territories and resources by new reconfigurations, Sullivan reiterates Krasner’s argument that “it is not what is given or gained in negotiations between states but rather the act of : Abraham Lotha


negotiating and the act of being able to negotiate that determines sovereignty” (Sullivan 2006: 45). The flexibility of a state to innovate and explore different type of state sovereignty is shown, for instance, in China’s “one nation two systems” for Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region directly under the authority of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China, which enjoys a high degree of autonomy except for foreign and defense affairs with separate visa agreements and a distinct Hong Kong passport. For the trouble-torn northeast India, Baruah (2008: 18) proposes that “citizenship both of India and of a state can provide an alternative political idiom to that of indigeneity and territoriality.” For Baruah (2008: 19), such statelevel citizenship “could define political communities in civic terms, and introduce a dynamic element of incorporating new members. It could make a decisive break from the notion of ethnic homelands that owes so much to the colonial propensity of fixing tribes to their supposedly out of sync with the actually existing political economy of the region.” Considering these types of sovereignty mentioned above, where the nation-state is only one among political geographies, Biolsi (2005: 254) suggests to “see these heteronomous or nonnation-state geographies not as anomalies or exceptions to the nation-state rule, but as concrete realities in which many people live and think about their rights and interests.” In other words, ethnic driven states can coexist with and not displace a sovereign state model.

People-to-people Dialogues In India, the period from 2010 up to 2020 has been declared as the “Decade of Innovation” by the central government. What sort of innovation can one think about in terms of Indian state-building? A workable method to meet this challenge is to engage in living dialogues with the different nations or ethnic groups within the state. The notion of partnership provides a respectful framework that provides space for living dialogues that can give fruition to successful governance and state-building. : 109


State-building is not only the duty of the governments. Nationbuilding in multiethnic states requires harnessing the cultural resources of the different ethnicities or nations and channeling them to strengthen the integrity of the state. For this, people’s involvement is necessary to complement the role played by the government as portrayed in the movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. In 1961, the National Integration Council (NIC) was set up by Jawaharlal Nehru to promote communal harmony and integration. Realizing that the NIC, composed of ministers and parliamentarians, might give the impression that national integration was the task wholly of the state, Jay Prakash Narayan wrote to Nehru in 1968: “This, as you know, is far from being the case. Indeed, more has to be done at the people’s level than by the state” (Dutt 1998: 422). Thus, in addition to the governmental initiatives, there has to be people-to-people dialogues. It may not be in mainland Indian culture, but in “tribal” societies, people talk and negotiate; everyone’s opinion is heard. Dialogue with a genuine interest for the others’ good will have a win–win outcome. An important condition is that the dialogue has to be as equal partners with mutual respect. In October 2006, I went to observe a festival in Tesophenyu, one of the Rengma Naga villages. As I explored the village, I came upon two monoliths under a small shed. On a closer examination I realized that one of them was the Tesophenyu–Tseminyu Peace Treaty memorial stone. The inscription on the monolith read: We the people of Tesophenyu and Tseminyu had suffered many intermittent warfare before 1874 but through the revelation of God, we the people of the two villages reached peace treaty on this day, the 12th February, 1997 at Tesophenyu Local Ground. … We do hereby solemnly declare in the name of God that henceforth there shall be no more enmity and bloodshed between the two villages till the end of the world.

For the feast, normally a thanksgiving feast, people of two Angami villages—Touphema and Kohima—were also invited in order for Tesophenyu village to establish a friendship treaty with them. Amidst speeches and festivities, the villages signed a friendship treaty that they would support and be friends to each other. These friendship treaties are cultural resources that can be harnessed to : Abraham Lotha


build and expand nation-to-nation relationships. Harmony among the ethnic groups within a multiethnic state can create a peaceful atmosphere for better governance. People-to-people dialogues can eventually progress to nation-to-nation relationships. For example, following the tensions between the Nagas and Meiteis, which led to the economic blockade imposed by the Nagas on National Highway 39 leading to Manipur for more than 69 days, further fueled by the killing of two Naga college students by the Manipur Police on May 6, 2010, there was a threat of economic blockade on Nagaland by some civil society organizations in Assam. The Naga Coordination Team consisting mostly of Naga women visited some of the Assamese leaders in Morani in June 2010 to diffuse the tensions. In a telephonic interview, I asked Grace Shatsang, one of the Naga women leaders in the team, what the mission was about: Grace Shatsang: We must have a good relation with our neighbors. We had a historical tie with the Ahoms and we want to renew that good relationship. We want to dialogue. It was unofficial but they were very happy. They suggested that we must have cultural exchange program. It was about relation building; we want to have a good relationship with our neighbors. I asked her further if that was the only intent of the visit and if problems related to the Mao Gate incident were also discussed. Grace: “Yes, yes, about the Mao Gate incident, the Assamese leaders felt they were reading wrong information from the papers. ‘This must be highlighted properly,’ they said. They even suggested some Assamese journalists to go and cover the story.” “What do you think was achieved?” I asked. Grace: “Personally, misinformation and misunderstanding was cleared. They also wanted to know the role of Naga women in conflict situations and we shared how traditionally Naga women played [important] role.”

Another instance of people-to-people dialogue as equal partners illustrates this point. On September 7, 2009, in Bihubor town of Sibsagar district, Assam, there was tension at the border between the : 111


Assamese and Konyak students. The Konyak Union from Nagaland and Assamese public had a meeting as a goodwill mission to diffuse the tension and a confidence-building measure. Chingkak Konyak, the Naga administrative officer at Naginimora, emphasized that the meeting was “from the public side and not from the Government.” At that meeting, they resolved to maintain peace not only at the border but that there should be peace “between the actual Konyaks and the actual Assamese,” Chingkak insisted. “It is better to involve the public so let the public meet,” he added. According to Chingkak, at the meeting both the Assamese and the Konyaks narrated stories about earlier relationships between the two communities. The Assamese even mentioned that at one point in history their king was in exile in the Konyak area and married a Konyak girl from Wakching. “The meeting cemented and boosted the confidence of both the Assamese and the Konyaks,” Chingkak added. In the narration of histories and earlier stories at such dialogues, there is a process of “burying something between us” (Theindon 2006: 457), which consequently cements relationships and paves the way for smoother governance. As Queen Elizabeth II said in her remark, on September 16, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Briton reminded all Britons of their common Christian heritage and would deepen the relations between the Anglican and the Catholic churches: “We know from experience that through committed dialogue, old suspicions can be transcended and a greater mutual trust encouraged.”

Commitment for Future Nation-building is an everyday commitment, but as Ottaway (2002: 16) says, “it need not become a quagmire as long as the effort has clear goals and sufficient resources.” Because of India’s respect for the different religions and ethnic identities within the state, the task is not to build a nation-state but a strong integrated state. The challenge for India is to complement the strong ethnic identity with an equally, if not more, strong national identity. The concept of dialogue as partners provides a respectful framework that provides space for living dialogues that can give fruition : Abraham Lotha


to successful governance. There has to be good intentions from all parties and certain goals set. It is apt that such living dialogues are initiated by academic institutions such as Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and others that have close proximity to the policymakers of the state. To manage the world’s largest university with 1.8 million students, 15 percent of the country’s 12 million students, sounds like an insurmountable task. Yet, IGNOU has been able to do just this because of its ingenuity in harnessing the technological revolution, especially web- and satellite-based education, which now seems like a normal thing to do and IGNOU can rightly proclaim, “ain’t no task big enough.” Recently, an American friend of mine said about India: “The theme for India is change; it is forward looking.” Such a forward attitude is concretized in IGNOU’s mantra “age no bar, place no bar, pace no bar,” to which I may add, “nations or ethnic groups no bar.” But mantras are one thing, action is another. When “government to government,” “government to people,” “people to people,” “nations within nations,” and “nation to nation” are dialoguing as partners, then INGOU’s effectiveness as a facilitator will be realized. Now is the time to talk, the time for inaction has long passed. As Franklin Field said, “Poor eyes limit your sight; poor vision limits your deeds.”

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Kohn, Hans. 1944. The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Macmillan. Kumar, B. B. 1999. “North East India: Crisis of Perception & Credible Action,” Dialogue (a quarterly journal of Astha Bharati, New Delhi), 1(2, October– December). Kymlicka, Will. 1995. The Rights of Minority Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press. Llobera, Josep R. 1994. The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe. Oxford: Berg. Martin, Terry. 2001. “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (pp. 67–90). New York: Oxford University Press. Mukerjee, Dilip. 1968. “India’s Defence Perspectives. International Affairs,” Royal Institute of International Affairs, 44(4): 666–676. Nayar, Kuldip. 1995. “Nagaland: Too Distant and Too Alienated,” India Abroad, December 15. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ottaway, Marina. 2002. “Nation Building,” Foreign Policy, September/October, 16–24. Robinson, Francis. 1987. “The Congress and the Muslims,” in Paul R. Brass and Francis Robinson (eds), The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885–1985. Delhi: Chanakya Publications. Seymour, Michael. 1998. “Quebec and Canada at the Crossroads: A Nation within a Nation,” Nations and Nationalism, 6(2): 227–255. Smith, Anthony D. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Basil: Blackwell. ———. 1996. “The Origins of Nations,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National: A Reader (pp. 106–130). New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2008. The Cultural Foundations of Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Sullivan, Kathleen M. 2006. “(Re)Landscaping Sovereignty in British Columbia, Canada,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 29(1): 44–65. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1989. “Ethnic Conflict in the World Today,” American Ethnologist, 16(2): 335–349. Theindon, Kimberly. 2006. “Justice in Transition: The Micropolitics of Reconciliation in Postwar Peru,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(3): 433– 457.

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Prosperity Will Spread, but Happiness Will Not until We Fix Governance What Is the India Story?

A

lthough the world has just discovered it, the story of India’s economic growth is not new. But first let us ask, what is the India story? It is a primarily a story of 28 years of high growth. This is unprecedented. In the first 50 years of the 20th century our growth rate was only 1 percent. Then it rose after independence to 3.5 percent till 1980; and from 1980 to 2002 it doubled almost to 6 percent! 6 percent is very high. The industrial revolution in the West took place at the rate of 3 percent. After that in the last six years, India has gone on to become the second-fastest growing major economy in the world, growing at almost 9 percent for a five-year period. This is extraordinary! At the same time, in the last few years population growth has started to slow down. During colonial period, our growth rate was 1 percent but population also grew at 1 percent. So, 1 – 1 = 0 per capita income growth, and we rightly said that we were a stagnant economy in the colonial period.

By

Gurcharan Das

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B r i d g i ng t h e G a p

The growth rate after Independence jumped in next 30 years to 3.5 percent. But the population also grew at 2.2. So, the per capita income growth was at 1.3 (i.e., 3.5 – 2.2). We mourned and groaned and called this the “Hindu rate of growth.” Of course, it had nothing to do with being Hindu. It had everything to do with the Nehruvian, socialist, “License Raj” rate of growth. From the 1980s, particularly after Rajiv Gandhi became the prime minister, growth picked up because of modest liberalization. (Even Indira Gandhi decontrolled cement!) Meanwhile, the population began to decline steadily, to 2.1 in the 1980s and to 1.9 in the 1991; in 2000 period it had come down to 1.8 percent; and currently it is 1.45 percent. At the same time, literacy has been rising and the middle class has been exploding. In 1980, the middle class constituted only 8 percent of the population. Now it is about 32 percent. When the middle class becomes 50 percent, the politics of the country will also change. In this period, 1 percent of the people have been crossing the poverty line each year for 25 years, according to Suresh Tendulkar. This is cumulatively around 200 million people and is worth celebrating. Hence, real per capita income has more than tripled in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. India is now the fourth largest economy, and it will overtake Japan between 2012 and 2014 to become the third largest (in PPP).

The India Model If the story is not new, the model is unique; but what is that model? First, compared to the advanced countries in the world (that created the great industrial transformation), which were driven almost always by exports, the growth in India has been driven by the domestic economy. Secondly, it has been driven by services, rather than by manufacturing. Third, it has been driven by consumption more than investment. Even in the case of industry, it has been driven not by the low-tech labor-intensive industries that create jobs, but by high-tech, capital-intensive industries which create fewer jobs. : Gurcharan Das

P r o sp e r i t y W i l l S p r e a d

What Are the Implications of This Model? The fact that the economy is domestically led is beneficial in a global downturn. In this latest downturn, we saw that India has been less affected than the other countries, and we have also come out of the global crisis faster. However, being services-led raises a few uncomfortable questions. Have we skipped the industrial revolution? And if we have, how do we take people from the farms to the cities? Being consumption-led is actually more people-friendly rather than being investment-led. Only the United States has a higher percentage of consumption in gross domestic product (GDP) among major economies. India is even higher than Europe and certainly much higher than China. It seems also to translate into less inequality. Now this is strange because we believe that have massive inequality. But when you look at the Gini coefficient India, India does rather well. We are among the top 25 percent of the countries in equality. In a perfectly equal society, the Gini coefficient would be 0. So the lower number, the better on this chart. We are at 33 compared to United States 41, China 45, and Brazil 59. Stephen Roach, an economist at Morgan Stanley, hypothesizes that the world needs another big-consuming economy besides the United States, and if India’s consumption numbers hold, it might become that. The present situation, where United States is the ultimate buyer of the world is not healthy—that is why they say that if the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. We cannot have that and people hope that India will become another big consumer.

What Accounts for Our Economic Success? Unlike China, I believe our success has grown from below, from the people and the market. China’s success is induced by the state; India’s growth has been induced by entrepreneurs. This is very hard for Asians to understand, because in most Asian countries, it has been the state which has been responsible for their rise. When I predicted the rise of India in “India Unbound,” even I did not imagine that Indian companies would become globally : 119


competitive so quickly—India has already created almost three dozen globally competitive companies. I met a much-respected Chinese professor from Beijing a few years ago who told me that the Chinese would die to have companies like ours. In China, stateowned companies and multinationals account for 85 percent of organized industry. India is the other way round. Our private sector accounts for more than 80 percent of our industry. India has a vibrant private space. More than a hundred Indian companies have a market capital of over a billion. A thousand companies have received foreign institutional investment; 125 Fortune 500 companies have R&D bases in India, which is a testimony to India’s intellectual capital; 390 Fortune 500 companies have outsourced software development to India. Hence, less than 2 percent of the loans in India (the banking loans) are now bad loans—what we euphemistically call nonperforming assets (compared to more than 20 percent in China). In fact, 80 percent of the nation’s credit now goes to the private sector; in China, less than 10 percent goes to the private sector.

If Our Private Space Is Vibrant, Our Public Space Is a Problem Although we are a proud, dynamic democracy with honest elections and a free lively media and press, we have very poor governance. When I think about governance failures, I am not only thinking of a politician who has been caught with a bribe. I think of the ordinary people whose every single transaction with the state is morally flawed. When Chutti Bai, who works in my house, went to get a birth certificate for her child, she was asked for a bribe. When you are born, you have to bribe to get a birth certificate; when you die, you need to bribe to get a death certificate. I have to get my driver’s license renewed, and I am already worried if I will have to pay a bribe to do that. One out of four school teachers in a government primary school is absent. And, one out of four those present is not teaching. This is when a primary school teacher earns, after the Sixth : Gurcharan Das


Pay Commission Award, more than `20,000 a month—that too in a village. This is five times India’s per capita income—when the norm in the world is one to two times’ per capita income for a primary school teacher! Similarly, two out of five doctors are absent in primary health centers, and one out of three nurses is absent; 69 percent of the medicines in health centers are stolen! The nation’s capital, Delhi, is endowed with more water than almost any city in the world. After we built Sonia Vihar, we have 300 liters per person per day available in India. Paris has a 155 in comparison to our 300; London has 169 liters per person. Paris and London give water for 24 hours in a day. Delhi gives its citizens water on an average for 4 hours per day and in the distant colonies they have to still depend on tankers. Every Indian needs to change the name on his or her property papers when his or her father dies. Every Indian has to pay a bribe to a Talathi or a Patwari or whoever the revenue official is. Twenty-five percent of the earnings of a rickshaw-puller in Kanpur are taken away by police. And I could go on and on with endless stories of day-to-day corruption, but you get my point. In a civilized society, this should not have to happen. Ironically, we used to have world-class institutions for the first 25 years after independence—the bureaucracy, judiciary, and even the police. Our problem was economic growth. Now we have growth, but the institutions of governance are letting us down. That is why we have a saying, with dark humor, that “our economy grows at night, when our government is asleep!”

A Mental Revolution Our success is very largely due to the economic reforms. The reforms are not only what happened in 1991, but what is remarkable is that every government after 1991 has continued to reform (albeit very slowly; frustratingly slowly). But even slow reforms have added up. The question, however, is that 65 countries have carried out the same reforms that India has, why then did India become the secondfastest growing economy in the world? It may have something to do : 121


with the fact that we have vaishya communities in India that have learned historically to conserve capital. India’s success is also due to a mental revolution among our youth, which I discovered on a “Bharat Darshan” around the country in the mid-1990s, and which I recounted in my book, India Unbound. On one of my first journeys, I traveled from Chennai to Puducherry in an Ambassador car along with a Tamil translator. We stopped in a village to have a cup of good south Indian coffee. The coffee shop was under a tree. There were four tables and a 14-yearold boy named Raju served us coffee. Raju told us proudly that he was earning `450 a month. I did not think that was a lot of money but he was very proud of it. He explained that after he finished waiting on tables at 6 pm, he cycles to the neighboring village to take computer lessons. And, they also cost `450 a month. So, for Raju, this was a perfect deal. Next he informed us that his ambition was to one day run a computer company. I asked Raju, “Where did you get this idea, this obsession with computers?” He said, “I saw it on TV, the richest man in the world; his name is ‘Billgay’!” He thought “Bill Gates” was one word; “I am going to be Billgay.” And the way he said it—he looked me in the eye, I could tell he was not just telling me a story, he meant what he was saying! As I was leaving the village café, Raju said that he had figured out the secret of success. I asked, “What is it?” “First, you must learn Windows,” he said. “Second, you must learn four hundred words of English.” “Why four hundred words?” I asked. “To pass TOEFL!” Raju’s story reflects a mental revolution that is taking place in the minds of young Indians. His mind has got decolonized. When I was growing up, we had to speak English properly; people would correct our accent. But Raju feels free to learn four hundred words and that too only after learning Windows. That is liberation of sorts. Secondly, Raju wants to be rich and he is not afraid to admit it. In the Nehruvian days, we loved money; but we didn’t want to admit it. Now, young people are happy to tell you openly that they want : Gurcharan Das


to get rich. This too is mental liberation, and explains in part why we are creating the kind of companies that we are. You only hear of Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), but actually we are creating millions of entrepreneurs every day. Do you remember the days when we had only one TV channel? And the person who read the news had to speak in a particular, boring way. Today, we are more relaxed. Somebody on Zee TV says: “Aaj middle east mein peace ho gayi.” Three words of English and four words of Hindi and she has no problem speaking in that way on television. That is also liberation. The rise of Hinglish is a sign of liberation. For generations we have mixed our regional languages with English, but earlier it was sign of upward mobility. But now Hinglish is the fashionable language of south Bombay, south Delhi, and Bangalore. I look forward to the day when Hinglish will also produce its Shakespeare and become a serious language. This is how languages evolve. Urdu has its origins in the military camps of the Mughal empire.

Convergence in the Future We have entered another golden age of growth, and most economists believe that India will now grow at around 8 percent over the next decade. Our prime minister would like our economy to grow at 10 percent, but I think our democracy will not permit much more than 8. Unless you have a very determined and strong leader who is single-minded about reform, it will not happen. If we can sustain a growth rate of around 8 percent in the near future, some pretty astounding things will happen. The middle class will grow dramatically and income standards will rise fairly quickly. What we are going to see in the 21st century is convergence. The idea of convergence is an old idea. Adam Smith talked about it in the 18th century. It is the notion that in a globalized world, standards of living will converge. If a rich country and a poor country are somehow connected through trade or investment, then the standard of living of the two will narrow and theoretically become equal. Why? Because standard of living depends upon productivity, : 123


and productivity depends on technology. When a rich and a poor country are connected, the poor country does not wait to invent a technology—it just takes it from the rich country. Take the case of mobile phones or computers. We did not invent them in India; and yet Indians have taken to them like ducks to water. And those who use them their standards of living are rising through higher productivity. This is how convergence works. You may ask, why did this not happen in the last 50 years? The rich countries are still rich and the poor countries remain poor. It did not happen because the economies of the poor countries were not linked with the rich countries, and the process really happened only in the 1990s with globalization. In 1969, only 20 percent of the world was linked to world trade. Today 95 percent of the world’s population is linked. India in particular has reaped huge benefits from being linked. Our software and business process outsourcing (BPO) industries are a direct consequence. With the advent of convergence, I believe we are going to return to a world of equality that existed prior to 1750. Most of you may not know but in 1750, before the industrial revolution in the West, standards of living in the world were pretty much the same. The difference between an Indian peasant and an English peasant was only 10 percent in their incomes. Today it is 20 to 1. Now we are going to right this balance. Before 1750 we were all equal but we were poor. Now, we are going to be equal and we are going to be rich. The great event of the 21st century is the rise of China and India, who will together account for 40 percent of the world’s GDP by 2030. India will gradually turn into a middle-class country. And, when that happens, the politics of the country will also change.

What Could Stop This Show? What are the risks that might affect this future? The downsides are infrastructure, fiscal deficit, and governance. However, none of these have stopped the show in the past 25 years. I began with the

: Gurcharan Das


statement that India has been a high-growth economy for 25 years. We have had bad governance, high fiscal deficits, and appalling infrastructure, but they have not come in the way of growth. (May be, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, but then I think we would not be around to talk about it!) I feel that the economy will reach middle-income status—US$5,000–10,000 per capita—but then it might get stuck. I fear that unless we improve governance we might not become a truly developed country. This is what has happened to Latin America. If there is a race between India and China, and if India can repair its governance before China fixes its politics, it might well win that race. People make the mistake in believing that the race between India and China is about which of the two will get rich first. The fact is both countries will become prosperous. Both countries will become middle class. But they will not become developed countries until India can reform its institutions of governance and China can reform its political system. India has liberty but bad governance; China has good governance but little human liberty. Human beings need both. For happiness, you need both. And so whoever fixes its problem faster will be the winner.

How Do We Achieve Inclusive Growth? The way to include the excluded is not to stop or slow high growth as some people think. Growth is an enabling condition to remove poverty. If you stop growth, you will stop the chances of improving the conditions of the poor. To bring inclusion, we need to better schools and primary health centers. And we need to create an industrial revolution. Services have been driving our economy. To take the vast number of people out of low-productivity agriculture, we have to get low-tech, labor-intensive manufacturing to become the driver. We are disadvantaged compared to our competitors when it comes to manufacturing. We have to reform our labor laws; we have to get rid of the “inspector raj.” There is a desperate need today for people with skills—mechanics, plumbers, masons, and retail clerks.

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Democracy before Capitalism India got democracy before capitalism, and this has made all the difference. We got democracy in 1947; we got capitalism only from 1991 onward as we started to dismantle the institutions of state control and state socialism. The rest of the world did it the other way around. Having got democracy before capitalism, we created pressures to redistribute before we had created a production machine. And, therefore, we created, for example, labor laws that were far ahead of the rest of the world. Now we need to reform these laws if we want to create formal employment. Democracy does slow us down. A few years ago my mother asked, “What is the difference between China’s 10 percent growth rate and India’s 8 percent growth rate?” I explained that growing 2 percent faster means that we could get there 20 years faster—20 years is a whole generation that we could lift up out of poverty faster. She thought for a while, and asked, “You mean it is the price that the poor pay?” I nodded. After dinner she said, “You know, we have waited 3,000 years for this moment, so let’s do it the right way. Let’s do it the Indian way, let’s do it with democracy even though we will have to wait another 20 years.” I think my mother was expressing the sentiment of most Indians. Even though India is a chaotic democracy; even though it has got bad governance, no one in India will exchange democracy for a 2 percent higher growth. Besides, my mother implied that if we grew less rapidly we were more likely to preserve our way of life— whatever that may be. The Indian way of life means different things to different people, but most of us would like to preserve it. That is why I believe it is better to be an elephant growing at 8 percent rather than a tiger at 10 percent. The elephant has stamina for a longer period of time, whereas a tiger soon runs out of air. And if we do that, we will be a wise elephant.

: Gurcharan Das

About the Editors and Contributors

The Editors Latha Pillai is currently the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). She is the recipient of Indo-US Visitors Fellowship, and has also received the prestigious Endeavour Award by the Australian government. Babu P. Remesh is Associate Professor at the School of Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies at the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). He is also the Coordinator of the Group on Labour and Development at IGNOU. Remesh is the author of two books, Shifting Trajectories (2008) and Dynamics of Rural Labour (2010).

The Contributors U. R. Ananthamurthy, representative of the Navya movement in Kannada literature, was the Vice Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kottayam, the Chairman of the National Book Trust, and the President of the Sahitya Akademy, Delhi. Professor Ananthamurthy has been honored with the Jnanpith and the Padma Bhushan awards. Kiran Bedi is India’s first and highest-ranking woman police officer recipient of Ramon Magsaysay Award and has also worked as the police advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations. She founded and runs two nonprofit organizations—Navjyoti and the India Vision Foundation. : 127


Gurcharan Das is a public intellectual and the author of the muchacclaimed books such as The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma, India Unbound, A Fine Family, The Elephant Paradigm, and Three English Plays. He writes a regular column for the Times of India and periodic articles for the New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek. Nandita Das is known for her critically acclaimed performances as an actor in over 30 feature films, in 10 different languages, with directors of international repute. Apart from being a renowned actor, director, and activist, she is currently the Chairperson of the Children’s Film Society, India. G. N. Devy is a literary scholar and a cultural activist, who writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati, and English—and has received prestigious literary awards for his works in all three languages. Fr Abraham Lotha is a native anthropologist whose work encompasses ethnicity, nationalism, indigenous people’s issues, media, culture, and museum and religion anthropology. He is presently Principal of St. Joseph College, Jakahama, Kohima; the Director of Chumpo Museum, Dimapur, Nagaland; and a columnist and special correspondent with the Morung Express. Lieutenant General Mukesh Sabharwal has been decorated with Ati Vishist Seva Medal (AVSM) in 2006, the Vishist Seva Medal (VSM as Adjutant General, Indian Army) in 2002, and Bar to Ati Vishist Seva Medal in 2008 in recognition of his distinguished services. He became the Adjutant General on December 1, 2008. P. Sainath, the winner of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts in 2007, is an award-winning Indian development journalist and photojournalist. He is the Rural Affairs Editor for The Hindu, and contributes his columns to India Together, where they are archived.

About the Editors and Contributors

K. Sankaranarayanan is currently the Governor of Maharashtra and Goa. He had also served as the Governor of Nagaland and Jharkhand, and assumed the additional charge of Arunachal Pradesh. Widely travelled, he is keenly interested in welfare and developmental issues. Mallika Sarabhai is one of India’s leading choreographers and dancers, in constant demand as a soloist and with her own dance company—Darpana—creating and performing both classical and contemporary works. In 2010, Mallika received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India.

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Index adivasis representation in professions, 9 All Party Hurriyat Conference, 31 Ambedkar, B. R., 1–2, 55 Amnesia meaning of, 6–7 Andhra Pradesh Union of Journalists, 70 Aphasia meaning of, 2–5 Armed Forces Special Powers Act, xvii, 97 Article 370, 22 Bachelor of Arts program in Sign Language, viii. See also Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) Bhagavata, 85 boosa, 86–87 boosa prakharan, 87 budget allocations higher education, for, 12 business process outsourcing (BPO), 124 capitalism, 126 Chavan, Ashok, 70–71 chulah, 74 civic nationalism, 98 Civil Defence, 40 civil society, 38 close-watch method. See Welfare policing

collective, corrective, and community-based (3Cs) initiatives, 40 colonial period growth rate during, 117 Colours of the Heart, 80 Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII), 65 Congress Party, 97 corrective method. See Welfare policing Dalit literature oral part of, 84 Dalit movement Karnataka, in (see Karnataka, dalit movement in) Dalits Indian literature, contribution to, 83 oral literature, in Kannada, 83 Decade of Innovation, 109 democracy, 126 denotified tribes (DNTs), 9, 14 economic success India, of, 119–20 educational inequality(ies), 2 English, in Indian administration debate on Independence eve, 4 Equality, 2 ethnic nationalism meaning of, 99 ethnonationalism, 98–99

Index

female students free of cost education to, 2 Fidayeen attack, by terrorists Lal Chowk, in, 28 Firaaq, 48–49 Fire, 46–47 Gandhian Model of Policing relevance of, 36–38 Gandhi, Indira, 118 Gandhi, Rajiv, 118 Gandhi, Sonia, 97 Government of India Act 1935, 20 higher education, in India infrastructure for, 11–12 loss of touch with languages, spoken by Indian communities, 7 role and challenges, 54–55 statistics in 2001–02, 12 Home Guards, 40 homogeneous nation-states, 105 identity(ies) political exploitation of, 44 inclusive education, 53 IGNOU achievements in, viii India model, 118 implications of, 119 Indian Independence Act 1947, 20 India Unbound, 119, 122 Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), xi, 1, 7, 54, 82, 113 achievement in, distance education, 13 Indian Army and jail inmates, educational opportunities for, viii reduction of disparities, in education, vii–viii UNESCO on, vii

Jammu and Kashmir accession to India Article 370, adoption of, 22 Instrument of Accession, signing of, 20–21 partition between Indian and Pakistan, 19–20 standstill agreement and invasion, 20 United Nations Organization (UNO), India’s approach to, 21–22 economic situation, 30–31 geographical location of, 17 internal security of, 31–33 literacy rate, 18 population of, 17–18 present situation in decline in violence level, 31 proxy war, by Pakistan in (see Proxy war, by Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir) security situation counterterrorist operations, impact of, 27 decline in infiltration level, 27 sociopolitical situation bus service between India and Pakistan, 29 Sri Amaranth Shrine Board Agitation, fallout of, 29 successful conduct, of elections, 28–29 wars with Pakistan, 16 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali, 20 Joint Plant Committee, 103 Karnataka Dalit movement in, 86 Kashmir Pakistani misadventures, continuation of, 22–23 1971 war, 23 1999 war, 24

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Bridging the Gap

Kashmir issue historical perspective, 18–19 knowledge accessibility, 52 knowledge society aim of, 52 knowledge accessibility (see Knowledge accessibility) language loss India, in, 4 liberal arts, 6 Line of Control (LoC), 23 literature meaning of, 84 Mahabharata, The, 75, 85 Male Madeshwara, 92 marginalization cause of, 8–9 mass media fundamental feature of, xv, 57 Ministry of Human Resource Development, 11 Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, 12 Ministry of Tribal Affairs, 12 multiethnic nation India as, 100–2 people-to-people dialogues, 109–12 multiplicity of identities modern world, in, 44 (see also Obama, Barack Hussein) Muslims representation in professions, 9 National Cadet Corps (NCC), 40 National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), xiii National Human Rights Commission, 10 National Integration Council (NIC), 110. See also Nehru, Jawaharlal

nationalism, 97–98 civic–ethnic dichotomy of, 99 National Knowledge Commission, 52 National Minorities Commission, 10 National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), 78 National Scheduled Castes Commission, 10 National Scheduled Tribes Commission, 10 National Women’s Commission, 10 nation-building multiethnic states, in, 110 Native-Title policy, 108 Natya Shastra, 81 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 110 New York Times, 65 non-state nations, 105 Northeast India insurgencies and political unrest in, 103–5 Obama, Barack Hussein, 44 one nation two systems China, in, 109 Operation Badr, 24 Operation Gibraltar, 23 Operation Sadbhavana, 26–27 Outlaw Josey Wales, The, 96 paid news, 71 Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, 18 Patil, Pratibha, vii PEER project, 79 Pillai, V. N. Rajasekharan, xi police beat system revival of, 38 police–public partnership, 39 politics newly independent states, of, 98–99

Index

proxy war by Pakistan, in Jammu and Kashmir, 24–27 quick response teams (QRTs), 40. See also Welfare policing quota system, 10–11 Ramayana, 85 reservation policy marginalized sections in institutions, for, 10 Right to Information (RTI) Act, 78 Sanskrit backyard to, regional languages, 86 Scheduled Castes, 102 Scheduled Tribes, 102 separatist nationalism, 99 Sir George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, 3 Sixth Pay Commission Award, 120–21 social deprivation, xiv social inequality(ies), 2 States Reorganization Commission Report, 101–2 target rating points (TRPs), 45 technical education, 54–56. See also Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)

technology schools India after First World war, in, 6 26/11 terrorist attack Mumbai, in, 45 Third-World nationalism, 106 Times of India, 58, 68–69 two-nation theory, 19 Unheard Voices, 76 Union Internationale de la Marionette (UNIMA), 74 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 78 United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP), 21 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), vii, 78 University Grants Commission, 11 UN Security Council, 21 Veerashaiva vachana movement, 91, 92, 93, 95 vocational training, 54–56. See also Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) Wall Street Journal, 65 welfare policing strength of, 38–40 World Health Organization (WHO), 78

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