India is revealing its moral vacuum

The National Integration Council has met — 146 individuals representing the cross section of India’s political and intellectual class, including leaders of the government and the opposition. According to the Prime Minister’s summing up, “there is across the board consensus on the need to contain communal discord and violence, protect minority rights and uphold our cherished values of nationalism, secularism, inclusiveness and non-violence.”
If anyone believes this, he also believes in the tooth-fairy. The bald fact is that there is no consensus in this country on the issue of communal peace. The Council may have been unanimous in condemning the wave of communal violence sweeping the land, but neither its deliberations, nor its condemnation matter a whit to those who have been killed, raped, made refugees in their own land. The fact of the matter is that the system has singularly failed to act in the face of a rising nihilistic mood in the country which seems devoid of all human consideration.
Take the behaviour of the Goa police in the latest case relating to the rape of a minor. After the Scarlett murder, we would have thought that they would be hyper active in pursuing similar charges. Instead, they have acted true to form. Because a minister was involved, they dragged their feet, and actually tried to get the mother to drop the charges, and acted only when she went public. So is it surprising that the nun who was raped in Orissa says that policemen watched on while the assault was taking place?

Disorder

The anatomy of the failure of law and order when confronted with inter-religious violence appears to be the same whether in West Asia or India, or for that matter anywhere else — a blind and unreasonable hatred for the ‘other’ that spares neither man, nor woman or child. A hatred that corrodes the police force and the custodians of the law. It has nothing to do with education. Jewish rioters in Israel are highly educated people as compared to their Indian counterparts, but they do not lack in barbarian behaviour when it comes to their Arab counterparts, as was evidenced in the city of Acre recently.
In this situation, parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress are merely fishermen casting their line in the troubled waters to see how many electoral fish they can land. There is a cynicism in their behaviour, and a dangerous degree of opportunism.
As for religion, it is an even more complex issue. Among the founding values of this nation is “secularism”. But the concept of the state being blind to religion has been long abandoned. The result is a pandering to its proclivity by the Congress, and a naked assertion of its primacy by the BJP.
The police are not partisan here in the sense of favouring a religion or caste, but simply behaving like a force belonging to a banana republic. As for the politicians, the less said the better. Take the violence in Orissa, Karnataka and Maharashtra. It is easy to pin it down to a sinister effort by the BJP to stir up the temperature and harvest Hindu votes in the coming elections. But even if there is just a grain of truth in that, it shows how foolish the party is. The social and psychological behaviour of large populations is not something that you turn on and off like a light bulb.
Once a certain pattern of behaviour is given sanction, it becomes the norm. Currently, the ruling party and the opposition are giving sanction for use of violence to: the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena for the assertion of a regional identity; Bajrang Dal activists for the reconversion of tribal converts to Christianity; the Gujjars in Rajasthan for the right of reservation in jobs. Another kind of coercion is being aimed at the Muslim community in the name of fighting terrorism.
The BJP may hope that in this climate they will best the Congress, as they well may. But they will not be able to cool the raised temperatures that easily. Breaking order into disorder is an easy process, but trying to restore order from disorder is not that easy. What has happened in the Kashmir Valley is a case in point. Years of repression and electoral malpractice brought the old order down, but the torn social fabric of the state is not amenable to easy repair.

‘Indian’

India is a land of communities and castes which is striving to make them into a nation of “Indians”. The problem is that we have two major visions of what this means. There is one that can be ascribed to Nehru and Ambedkar which sees an India rid of the taint of caste and functioning on the basis of its principal values —democracy and secularism. There is another vision, authored by Golwalkar and Hegdewar which sees India as a “Hindu” nation. Just what this means is not clear, because neither asserted that this should be based on the Manusmriti or the Dharamshastras, which means that caste would remain as one of its defining principles.
Unfortunately, the Nehru-Ambedkar project is not doing too well. Instead of eliminating caste as a pernicious factor, we are celebrating it — the Gujjar agitation in Rajasthan which was based on the community’s desire to go down the caste ladder, rather than come up, is a case in point. The push for OBC reservations is another instance.
The perverted logic of reservations and its mindless application has brought us to a cul de sac and no one knows the way out. There are protagonists of reservations who no longer see it as a means to get ahead, but to keep others down.

Emptiness

On the other hand, the Sangh Parivar is gaining more and more success in damaging India’s composite culture, though it is not clear whether they will ever be able to achieve their concept of “Hindu” India without destroying the nation as we know it now.
In a recent article in the Economic and Political Weekly, Andre Béteille has referred to the shoddy record of governments and opposition in upholding the Constitution and meeting the demands of the people. He has ascribed the failure to the lack of what he calls “constitutional morality.” To my mind this means they may be observing the letter of the Constitution, but not its spirit.
The problem does not arise because there is no word for “morality” in Hindi or the Indian languages, but that our political class and along with them, the bureaucracy and police, have become totally amoral. Atal Bihari Vajpayee understood this when he urged Narendra Modi to observe raj dharma in 2002, but we know that he did not succeed. So Vajpayee must share the stigma for Gujarat with Modi. What we are witnessing today in Orissa and other states is a consequence of the inability of our rulers and the opposition to observe constitutional morality, or raj dharma, if you will.
This moral vacuum is reflected in a small way in the inability of the Goa police to be moved by the plight of a 14 year old girl who has been raped.
This article first appeared in Mail Today October 16, 2008

The Congress has lost the fire in its belly

According to Michael Ignatieff, Harvard professor and now Canadian politician, “In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success.” What lessons does the Congress need to learn from its defeat in the Gujarat state assembly elections, and what does the BJP need to do to exploit its success ? Obviously the most important thing for the former is to deconstruct its election campaign and see where it went wrong.
Learning from your errors is always a good thing, but easier said than done. There is little unanimity in determining what the Congress’ mistakes were. Was it the lack of an identified chief ministerial candidate, or was it in playing footsie with BJP rebels, including the likes of Goverdhan Zadaphia, whose record in dealing with the 2002 massacres as state Home Minister was shameful, and possibly criminal. Could it have been the “maut ke saudagar” taunt, or the flip-flop thereafter that showed the Congress to be weak-kneed in front of Modi’s fighting retort ? Or was it the inability of the party to put forward boldly a coherent ideological programme, emphasizing its secularist beliefs and aam admi (common man) approach ?

Secularism
But then we are assailed with even more questions. Does the party have the capacity to admit its mistakes? Only if it does, can it correct them. As of now, the Congress is hamstrung by a culture that declares that the leader—whether it was Jawaharlal Nehru in relation to China in 1962, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency in 1975, or Narasimha Rao and Babri Masjid in 1992— is never wrong. Neither, for that matter, is the heir-apparent. Both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi have been beneficiaries of this phenomenon in the past couple of years to the detriment of the party.
The Congress is now confronting a revitalised BJP which is determined to press on with its Hindutva project. Despite its victory in 2004 general elections, the Congress has not displayed any special strategy, or leadership to deal with it. As Gujarat revealed, all that the party did was to try and exploit the BJP’s inner divisions and make a fleeting reference to the 2002 events. Beyond that there was neither intention and nor effort.
Given the Indian tendency towards self-flagellation in defeat-- and boast in times of victory—there is a tendency to overstate the lessons of a single state assembly election. Understand that even before Modi came to the scene, the BJP was the dominant party in the state having won the elections of 1995 and 1998 by a near two-thirds majority, now the Congress has added eleven seats and the BJP lost ten. Even though it has wrested more seats to compensate, its losses of sitting seats have been significant. What Modi has done is what the Left has done in West Bengal—become the vessel for the pride of the citizens of the state. Yet the bald fact is that the Congress was defeated in an election it could have won, and one that took place at a critical time in relation to the dynamics of the UPA government at the Centre.
This must be seen as a defeat of secularists and not secularism, of their ability to deliver their message, not the message itself. Any strategy for an umbrella-party like the Congress which has an all-India, all community spread, must be based on a determined enunciation of secular politics. Secularism is a good intellectual notion, worth pursuing and indeed endorsed by our Constitution. But trying to master the political grammar of secularism in semi-literate country like India is more complex as Rajiv Gandhi, himself no doubt a secular person, realized.
Two decisions by his government in 1986—the opening of the locks of the Babri Masjid and “balancing” it with the Muslim Women’s Act to counter the Shah Bano judgment were both seen by the Congress as their version of secularism which emphasizes equal respect for all religions. But this peculiar definition of secularism has brought disaster for the party. Perhaps the ideal needs to move back to what it was in Jawaharlal’s time—strictly separating state and religion.

Leaders
What the party needed to do in Gujarat was to understand the reality of a state that was, rather than what it should be. Given the fact that the Congress has allowed its secular ideology to erode over the past decades, it could not have pushed a hard secular line overnight. But it needed to make the line itself clear in the first place. The way to take on the BJP was not by trying to outflank it on Hindutva, or make adjustments for it, but to categorically contest that vision and bear with the consequences.
In the coming months, the Congress will have to make many decisions. Whatever some American dons suggest, decision-making is not a science, even of the social variety. Experience does help, but as TS Eliot pointed out, “it imposes a pattern and falsifies.” It pushes you into well-trodden and sterile paths, and prevents you from looking at “out of the box” solutions. So, there is no substitute, really for leadership which is a compound of instinct, experience, intellectual integrity, courage and ruthlessness.
Effectiveness requires all these to be present in the compound. The Congress does not lack experience, but it does have difficulties with the other elements of leadership. Part of the problem is diarchy and part the nature of the party. Manmohan Singh is Prime Minister, while the real leader of the legislature party is its leader, éminence grise and principal campaigner, Sonia Gandhi. No one is clear as to how decisions are taken, in the party but we all know that the process is labyrinthine.
In Singh and Sonia Gandhi, we have prudent and good leaders. But people, whether in India, or elsewhere, also want leaders with vision and daring. They are ready to overlook mistakes, provided the leader is seen to have made them with seeming conviction. In any case as Mao and Indira have shown, bashing on regardless of your mistakes, too, has been the hallmark of great leaders.
The problem, however, is also in the nature of the Congress. If the BJP has a retrograde social and political message, it has a sophisticated management style, one that encourages merit, naturally within certain bounds. While the Congress is a party with a progressive political orientation, but its organizational approach is at present feudal, if not tribal.

Ruthless
The Congress cannot easily change its nature. It is no longer the party of Jawaharlal, but of Indira who changed its DNA irrevocably. It is a family proprietary company and like such firms in the business sector in India and around the world, it continues to have a unique relevance.The problem for the proprietors is that security compels them to remain somewhat isolated and so it requires uncommon instinct to understand issues and take decisions, which in turn need a base of expert ideation and solid conviction to be efficacious. But the firm has yet to get the right mix in combining proprietary concerns with furthering corporate interests. The result is a perception that its top management does not have the kind of autonomy that is desired, and perhaps also not the right mix of executives. Keeping family retainers like Arjun Singh and Shivraj Patil in key appointments, for example, betrays a certain lack of ruthlessness.People have called Sonia many things, but never ruthless. But that missing attribute seems to be the key factor in the Congress’ present make up. This quality runs through the government many of whose principal officers and numerous advisers are sinecure holders rather than shop-floor performers and street-fighters. Three years after the party assumed power, it has taken the lost election in Gujarat to tell us how much things have remained the same, even when they were supposed change.
This article appeared in Mail Today December 26, 2007

Cop Out

India's primitive policing methods and modern democracy can't co-exist. This article appeared first in Hindustan Times June 13, 2007

Last week for a few days, this wannabe superpower looked more like a punch-drunk giant. Violence brought on by the Gujjar community’s demand for an ‘upgradation’ to Scheduled Tribe status brought large parts of north-western India, including for a while, the capital New Delhi, to a standstill. For a while the spectre of anarchy hung over the region as mobs of rival communities took to the streets, blocked roads and rail transport and threatened mayhem against each other. The police reportedly fired in a number of places, killing several protestors. In turn, the rioters lynched a couple of policemen armed with nothing more than lathis. The army sent 4,000 personnel to stage flag-marches. But, in the end, it was neither the police nor the army, but probably fear of what a caste war in every village, kasba and town would mean for their own comm

unity, that persuaded the warring parties to pull back from the brink.

The state police and the top brass were taken unawares. There were not enough policemen to check the protestors; tactics of crowd and riot control were non-existent. The ever-astute politicians kept quiet, the country’s embarrassment was summed up by the Supreme Court, which termed the events a ‘national shame’.

In our recent history, there have, of course, been even greater moments of national disgrace — the Sikh massacres in Delhi in October-November 1984, the Hashimpura massacres in 1987, Bhagalpur in 1989, the Muslim killings in Mumbai in January 1993, the Gujarat massacres of 2002. What was shameful about them was not only that they took place, but that, in each case, the police and the administration failed to intervene effectively, if at all.

There is no doubt that there have been several instances where well-led police organisations have played a crucial role in preventing riots and checking uncontrollable law and order situations in India. Unfortunately, police failure has also led to terrible breakdowns.

Yet, besides establishing the Rapid Action Force to tackle communal violence, the state and central authorities have done little to re-orient their forces to meet the demands of the times. Political pressures, frequent transfers and the like are only one aspect of the situation. Another is that better intelligence, administrative action and aggressive intervention by trained police forces are rarely used to pre-empt and, if necessary, to effectively break up a violent riot or demonstration

One problem seems to be numbers. India has one policeman for 694 people (as of January 1, 2006); Britain has 1:290 and the US 1:334. Earlier this month, at the G8 summit, the German government took extensive precautions to prevent an estimated 30,000 demonstrators. The number of police deployed totalled 18,000 — a little more than an army division. They had 43 helicopters to assist them, and Heiligendamm, a village of 300 souls was fenced in with a 2.5-metre barricade costing 12 million euros.

While no estimates of the Rajasthan Police deployed is known, the army did send in some 37 columns. Rajasthan itself has a grand total of 70,000 police personnel in an area of 342,239 sq kms, an area nearly as large as Germany. There were no fresh recruitments in 2001-04 indicating that the state thinks it has enough forces. In contrast, Delhi had a deployable force of some 5,000 to tackle disturbances in a vast arc spread from Shahdara to the Loni border. While there was some physical damage, the greater hurt was to the national psyche that its capital could be brought to a grinding halt in the manner it was.

There is a need for reforming the Indian police to overcome the colonial mindset and organisational pattern that it follows even to this day. The Indian Police Service functions like a central military organisation rather than a civil police force. The Supreme Court has been pushing the states to reform their police services but to little avail. Politicians who run the states do not appear willing to provide police personnel the kind of autonomy needed to do their job without fear of consequences.

A lot has been written about police commission reports, the grievances of police officers over frequent transfers and so on. However, the real challenge seems to be the very concept of policing and its very important element of crowd and riot control.

All statistics show that besides the vicious communal conflicts, the overwhelming agitations are those relating to grievances of labour, government employees and students. These are the ones that can be handled through proper crowd control measures. The usual riot-control tactic is to warn the protestors, then shoot tear gas and finally lathi-charge rioters. But the recent violence showed that some of the rioters were armed with swords and other dangerous implements and the only way the police could have handled them would have been by firing at them, an action that would have been tantamount to the use of disproportionate force.

Today, modern crowd and riot control tactics are quite sophisticated. Police personnel are provided a considerable measure of self-protection against stones and other missiles. They are organised in well-drilled units led by professionals who also ensure that they do not inflict needless injuries on the rioters. After all, many a protest has become a riot following death or injury of an agitator. But the lack of training and equipment, and in many key instances, numbers, is almost tailor-made to turn many Indian situations into a Police vs Rioters one. The Indian Police needs to adopt the attitude of a fair umpire who will not hesitate to show a yellow card, but also have the mental and physical wherewithal to overawe a recalcitrant player. But the goal of the police forces must always be to protect lives, even those of protestors. To this end, there are a range of technologies that can be used from tear gas, water cannons, 40 mm blunt-force injury guns with a variety of ammunition such as rubber bullets, pepper spray bullets and gas grenades and dyes to mark rioters.

While it is fair for the police forces to demand security of tenure and insulation from the near-criminal interference by our political class, they must also reflect on their own responsibilities. More than technology, what is needed is a policing philosophy based on the need to protect the rights of all citizens. This must be a zero-tolerance process with no favours for Hindus, Muslims, rich or downtrodden. Unfortunately, this is not the message that many Indians have got. Governments and police officials have, at times, been criminally negligent in intervening on the specious plea that action would compound the problem. The result is that the police neither have a clear message about what could be the consequences of their inaction nor is the mob made clearly aware that their acts will bring them condign legal retribution. It is in such circumstances that the many shameful incidents that are a blot on the country’s history have taken place.

In a democracy, the right to protest is paramount. In a country like India that won its independence through a strategy of civil protest, there seems to be a special sanction for protestors. But somewhere down the line, this has led to a dangerous concession to violence and anarchy. While it is easy to pass the blame around for this, all Indians need to reflect where this attitude could lead them.