Pills that won't cure the government's ills

When the body, as much as the body politic, is ill, it sometimes needs to take a bitter medicine. With apologies to those who believe in alternative medicine, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has, in the anodyne reshuffle he has conducted,  taken recourse to passing out those little sweet pills that homeopaths are known to dish out. They can, at best, be a placebo, but they are unlikely to cure the disease. 
Who can deny the seriousness of the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance’s illness? There is something epic in the hubris that the party displayed in the face of repeated instances of malfeasance and corruption that came to light in the last two years. In the short span of one year from its excellent showing in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, it was reduced to a rudderless hulk that has been floating in the political seas, open to pot-shots from everyone— enemies, allies and even its own party members. Just yesterday, the Prime Minister had the ignominy of being talked back to by a junior minister whom he had asked to proceed to the site of Sunday’s railway accident. And, not surprisingly, that minister was not dropped in Tuesday’s reshuffle.
The Prime Minister missed his big opportunity when he did not act against Suresh Kalmadi and his coterie in the wake of the rumblings on the Commonwealth Games preparations.
 
Scandals
Just how wrong the PM and Sonia Gandhi’s political judgment was is evident from the fact that Mr Kalmadi has been sitting in jail for months now. Even as the CWG issue died down, the government was hit by an even bigger tsunami— the 2G spectrum scam. Insiders knew of its existence two years earlier, and it is unpardonable that the government either did not know about it, or, more likely refused to act on the charges. It took a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General to set the law and order machinery rolling.
And once again we see just how poorly the Singh-Sonia duo misjudged the issue—the main accused, former telecom minister A Raja and no less a person than the daughter of a close ally of the UPA, Kanimozhi, are both in jail. In March, Wikileaks raised the ghost of the original scandal—the alleged bribery that enabled the first UPA government headed by Singh to win a crucial trust vote linked with the Indo-US nuclear deal. A US diplomat reported home in a cable that was leaked that he had seen chests of cash that a senior Congress leader said were being used for the purpose.

The other scandals—the Sukhna land scam, the Adarsh housing scam and the loan-bribery scam affecting LIC Housing Finance and several banks—cannot be directly attributed to the UPA, but they speak of the breakdown of governance in the country. On Tuesday, Mail Today carried an investigative report by Headlines Today revealing how the cancer of corruption has spread to the very constituent cells of the country— government functionaries demanding bribes from people at the very bottom of the social and economic pyramid in the country in Bundelkhand.
When Singh began his second term as the Prime Minister, there were expectations that freed from the barracking tactics of the Left, the government would move swiftly to push a series of reforms that were needed at the infrastructural level to unleash the Indian economy. UPA I had, to its credit, managed the economic crisis of 2008 well and there was every reason to believe that it would do what was promised. But early on, within a matter of months the government appeared to have lost its way, and it never really found it again.
 
Rejig
This is the reason why a great deal was set by Tuesday’s reshuffle. From February onwards, when the government had the ignominy of its former minister A Raja being carted off to jail, Dr Singh put out word that once the budget session was over, he would take drastic steps to overhaul his government and make a new beginning. It did not take a genius to realise that the government was in serious need of a makeover. The session got over in May and then we had June and finally in mid-July the reshuffle and in the end it has come to what can, at best, be called a re-jig of the middle levels of the government. Ministers, some of them very senior, who are known to be corrupt remain within the government, others who have proved to be incompetent and actually injurious to the UPA II, too, flourish.
The reshuffle has seen some three or four people associated with Rahul Gandhi enter the Union Council of Ministers. This is too little and too late. Given the dire straits the UPA is in, the time has come for Mr Gandhi to play a far more assertive hand. The few acolytes he has in government, all but Jairam Ramesh having Minister of State rank, are unlikely to make any significant difference to the quality of the government. On the other hand, they risk being tainted by association with a government that does not work. 
 
Leadership
The one big problem that the UPA confronts is that it is the government of a party which, even more desperately than the government, needs a makeover. The governmental system we have inherited from the British has always put politics and politicians in the leadership role of the system. More so than the United States where Cabinet members can be experts and non-politicians, the Westminster system demands a government where ministers are active politicians who are accountable in real terms in the House of Commons, with the Prime Minister himself answering questions from parliamentarians once a week during the period that the house is in session. In the case of the UPA, the Prime Minister himself and his four principal ministers are political light-weights. They may, like the PM, be experts in their subjects, but the Westminster system demands that they be politically savvy, rather than expert.
At the end of the day, of course, it is
Dr Singh and Ms Gandhi’s prerogative to shape their government the way they desire. No doubt they have consulted widely and have had intense discussions before the exercise was undertaken. For reasons best known to them, a minimalist procedure was undertaken. Perhaps they feared that too much energy may bring the ramshackle structure down. Or they were not confident that the UPA would be able to withstand a burst of acceleration.
Remarkably, the prime minister has underscored the status quoist nature of Tuesday’s exercise by emphasising that this is likely to be the last reshuffle of his government whose term ends some two years from now. This is either a brave attempt to impart stability to a shaky vehicle, or yet another manifestation of the hubris that the Congress party seems to be so assiduous in courting.
Mail Today July 13, 2011

Salwa Judum is bad in law, and worse as policy

The Supreme Court order banning outfits like the Salwa Judum ought to enable us to rethink how we deal with threats to the  authority of the state and the security of the citizens of the country.
The prevailing Westphalian state system has come with its corollary—that the state has a monopoly on violence. Under its domain, sedition, murder, and even lesser crimes, can lead to a legal execution of the perpetrator, while the state’s killing of hundreds and thousands through war, or to suppress insurgents, or even collaterally through acts of commission and omission, are provided legal sanction.
States do allow some kinds of private violence, such as that to protect one’s self and property. But this is strictly, and even pig-headedly, regulated. In UK people have been charged and even convicted of killing career criminals, such as burglars, who broke into their homes.

We also have the private violence of insurgent groups. It seeks to challenge, if not overthrow, the authority of the state. You could count the various separatist movements in the country as well as the Maoist militias in this category.
 
Militias
And then, there are semi-official militias like the Salwa Judum which has been given a fig-leaf of legality by its personnel being designated “special police officers” (SPOs), something which has been challenged by the Supreme Court.
Through history, semi-official or officially sanctioned militias have perpetrated horrific violence whenever they have been deployed—one can think of the Black and Tans in Ireland, or the Ustashe in Croatia. Across Europe, in every country under Nazi occupation, informal militias were created to fight the resistance and kill Jews.
Contemporary international law as well as domestic law and custom have been a check on the actions of the armed forces of a state. But militias have been allowed to operate outside the bounds of even the law that the state that employs them swears by.
Insurgencies are a particular target for this kind of activity. In the main this is because insurgents and partisans reside among the common people and gain their  sustenance from them. Militias, comprising people who are natives of the region and familiar with its terrain, are seen as a major  asset in the counter-insurgency strategies of various regular armed forces.
Many militia men are former insurgents, others are from the criminal fringe of society, willing to ignore the bonds of community and humanity that normally bind people living in a common space. Others are motivated by ethnic or communal hatred towards others living in that space. Organisationally, too, they function outside the strict command and control system which makes it easy to pinpoint authority in the case of the official armed forces.
In the last three decades, Indian security forces have used such actors with increasing frequency. It started with SPOs in Punjab, and was followed by a number of counter-militant outfits in Kashmir and Assam and then in Chhattisgarh.
Paradoxically, the existence of private militias like the Maoists, or the Kashmiris and Nagas, actually raise questions about the quality of the Indian state. It clearly reveals that the state is not fully functional. For that state, then, to set up informal militias is an act of supreme folly, one that would only serve to reinforce the conditions in which the private militias—who by their very existence question the efficacy of the state— continue to function.
Many of those who supported the Nazis in World War II did it from ideological impulses in that they were often members of right-wing and proto-fascist organisations that dotted Europe at the time. Many of the present-day Indian government militias are an outcome of the failure of the state to create the kind of forces that are needed to combat insurgents.
Chhattisgarh, which has been asked to dismantle the Salwa Judum, is a prime example of this. The state police itself is in a laughable shape, like most state police forces in the country. The lumbering CRPF, an anti-riot central police organisation, has never been trained or equipped for counter-insurgency which requires highly trained and mobile forces. In the June 2010 ambush, the force lost more men in one action, than any other force had in a counter-insurgency operation in independent India.
 
Consequences
The other paramilitary forces like the BSF are in the same boat. In fact one of the more pernicious aspects of the tactic of using informal militias is that they are not used as supporting forces as one would expect, but as the very cutting edge—in fact as cannon fodder, by the police forces. For that purpose they are provided a thin cover by being designated SPOs.
It is not easy for such an ill-assortment of forces to fight the ideologically motivated and ruthless insurgents who have, in the case of Maoists, developed local roots. The result is that the ill-trained and stressed forces are, more often than not, involved in instances of gross violation of human rights, illegal detention, hostage taking, rape, torture and extra-judicial killing.
The state that permits such behaviour— and the Indian state does by ignoring their actions— is walking on thin ice because the iron law of insurgency is that repression will breed reaction, and undermine the social and ethical cement that binds a society and a nation. The primary blame for this must rest with the Indian political class which has failed to provide the necessary leadership and moral direction to the forces who do their bidding, in the name of the state.
 
Obligations
In this, history is not with us. Sovereignty may have been the foundation of the nation state system, but today we effectively live in a post-Westphalian order. On paper at least, we have ceded the right to make war, pre-emptive, or even defensive, without the sanction of the United Nations.
The Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which India has ratified, declares that even in case of insurgencies, states are bound to apply certain minimum provisions such as the humane treatment of people not involved in active hostilities, including armed forces personnel who have surrendered. Such persons cannot be killed or tortured or subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. They cannot be sentenced or executed without due process of a regularly constituted court.
India is also party to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which commits the parties to respect the civil and political rights of the individual, specifically the right to life, freedom of religion, speech and assembly and the right to due process and a fair trial. India is not one of the 114 member countries of the International Criminal Court that prosecutes genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for the obvious reasons—it cannot legally defend the illegal conduct of the forces under its command.
But there is a larger court that the country must confront—the Indian nation itself. At some point, it will have us weigh our record with our civilisational self-image as a liberal, humane and democratic society. Today, even the most ardent patriot will agree that the scales are tilted against that image.
The Supreme Court has done its bit to right the balance a bit, but, sadly, the leaders of our police and armed forces, and, above all, our babus and politicians, are unable to even see that we have a problem.
Mail Today July 8, 2011

Build an air force for the real world

The reported request to the government by the  Indian Air Force to nominate Air Vice Marshal M Matheswaran as the Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) is not as revolutionary a proposal as it appears at first, though it is an eminently sensible one. Actually, barring the last couple of heads of the HAL, it was the IAF that provided the talent for the top job. A measure of the importance of the position is that at least four of them— Aspy Engineer, P.C. Lal, OP Mehra and AM Katre subsequently went on to head the Indian Air Force itself. Matheswaran may not reach there, but he has rarer commodities—brains and an uncommon go-getting touch. He is highly regarded in the service as a person who has the ability to stem the stagnation in HAL and make it a genuinely excellent aerospace company, something that has been overdue for decades.
 
Company
There is a very important spinoff from any decision to hand the HAL to the IAF—it will free the country’s aviation industry from its military thralldom and help the emergence of a genuine civil aviation industry in the country. As of now HAL is the only aviation design and manufacturing set-up in India and since its focus is overwhelmingly towards servicing the IAF, it has not developed its civilian divisions. Given the enormous expansion of the aviation sector in the country, and the huge offsets that will come with the current multi-billion dollar IAF purchases, there is a good opportunity for us to establish a broader aviation industry. All these years this process has remained stunted; the result is that we buy hundreds of civil aviation jets, and the only payback we get are trivial—making doors or seats of some of them.

The biggest malaise of the HAL has been its failure on the score of production engineering. It is one thing to get someone to design the HF-24 Marut or the Tejas LCA and make a few full-scale engineering models, but quite another to have them on an assembly-line basis to make hundreds. HAL has been spoilt from the very outset when it received the production lines of the Mig-21, the Jaguar and the Sukhoi 30 MKI from abroad, and has basically gone on to make aircraft whose indigenous content is casually  fudged, because it is well known that all important assemblies and sub-assemblies are imported.
This is a particularly opportune moment for the government to push for an IAF man to head the outfit. There is no internal candidate of the calibre of Krishnadas Nair or Ashok Baweja. Indeed, the government short-list, mostly of civil servants, points to the lack of talent—S.N. Mishra, a former Joint Secretary looking after HAL, Pawan Hans chief R.K. Tyagi and MSTC chairman S.K. Tripathi. They’re hardly the kind who could be asked to oversee an aerospace giant that is so vital for our country.
The most telling compulsion for the government to go the air force way is the experience of the Indian Navy. Most of the naval shipyards in the country are run by serving or retired naval personnel. The Indian Navy is also the one service which, through effective coordination between its warship design centres and the dockyard, has indigenised India’s surface warship production. All the stealth frigates, the aircraft carrier and the smaller craft with the Navy are Indian designed and manufactured. If there is a lacuna somewhere it is in the area of making weapons systems and submarines, and for this there have been different factors at play.
 
IAF
In terms of military aviation, the air forces of the world are on the threshold of a revolution, even though, sadly, the Indian Air Force leaders have not quite recognised this. But there are younger elements in the air force who cannot but see that they are headed for a big crash if they go the way things are going. In a recent interview, Air Chief Marshal P.V. Naik boasted that with its 126 Eurofighter or Rafales (the MMRCA), the 214 fifth generation fighters (the FGFA) and some 310 SU30 MKI the IAF will become one of the most modern forces in the coming years. But it will also be a top heavy force. Even while claiming to have effective radar coverage of the medium to high levels, he acknowledged that there were gaps at the lower levels. There are also serious gaps in the missile-based air defence that he did not quite dwell on.
This is important because of the threat  posed by short-range nuclear-tipped missiles like the HATF 9 and the Babur cruise missile. Expensive long-range aircraft such as the ones the IAF will have, will not be suitable for the quick reaction—perhaps of the duration of ten to fifteen minutes—required to deal with these threats. Indeed, what we need is a large number of cheaper high performance aircraft based forward to deal with this. Because of a surface-to-surface missile threat it would be folly to base our $100 million plus per copy of MMRCA or FGFA closer to the border. At the cost of one Eurofighter or Rafale, India can acquire two or three cheaper, but very modern fighters like the Jas 39 Gripen, or the Mig-35.
 
Challenge
The IAF also needs to seriously think about the challenge from unmanned combat aircraft. More than any other force in the world, the IAF still lives in the era of the Battle of Britain and the image of swaggering men in the fighting machines bringing down the mighty Luftwaffe. Actually the nature of air power has become much more complex as indicated by the combination of drones and manned fighters the United States is using in conflicts like Afghanistan. The US Congress mandated report Aircraft Procurement Plan 2012-2041, notes that while in all other categories—fighters, transports, electronic support aircraft, the United States military will retain roughly similar numbers in the future, in the category of medium and large drones, the numbers will double within the next nine years—they will go up from the current 340 to 650 in 2021.
The limits of conventional air power of the type Air Chief Marshal Naik is thinking about have become apparent from the fate of the NATO campaign in Libya where complete air superiority and bombardment of the Libyan forces by NATO has not been able to clinch the war in favour of the rebels. Note there was not a word on robotics in Naik’s interview.
This is the challenge which the Indian defence design and development industry must confront in the coming decades. As it is the HAL record in meeting the conventional requirements of design, development and production engineering has been poor. Considering the fortune we are expending in buying expensive and heavy fighters from abroad, there is need for not just introspection, but a  restructuring of our defence industry, led by the military aviation complex. The industry must come up with products which will meet the demands of real air power, one that is effective and useful, rather than the one that is displayed on Air Force or Republic Day.
Mail Today June 30, 2011

Time to leash India's spy agencies

There is an old Greek saying: Those whom the gods wish to destroy,  they first make mad. I wonder whether it applies to nations as well. If that is so, it would lend the crazy events that have been happening in the country in 2011 with a much more dangerous edge.
It all began quietly with the Lokepal-Jokepal drama where a bunch of civil society activists hijacked the legislative functions of the country’s parliament by getting an old political hustler to go on an alleged fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar.
Then came the bizarre episode where a  popular yoga teacher and ayurveda entrepreneur was invited to discuss the issue of corruption with senior cabinet ministers of the government and permitted to establish a somewhat dubious yoga camp at Ram Lila grounds.
Then, late one night, it occurred to the government that this could well be a coup à la Tahrir Square in the making and so it pulled the plug. The police was asked to clear the camp, which it did with its customary politeness, and the yoga man was arrested, dressed in a natty salwar kameez.
And now, to top the silly season, we have L’Affaire Pranab—the bugging of the offices of the Finance Minister of
the country.
 
Spooky
Make no mistake, that was not chewing gum found at sixteen different locations in the Finance Minister’s offices. In Mail Today here there are a lot of young people, but you are unlikely to find gum adhering to the undersides of our desks; that is strictly for the high schools and cinema halls frequented by the young. If you accept the chewing gum thesis, you are akin to P G Wodehouse’s Madeline Basset who believed that every time a fairy sneezed, a baby was born and that the stars were God’s daisy chain.
Dour babus and corporate heads who haunt the offices and conference rooms of the Ministry are not the kind who would chew gum, and most certainly not those who would surreptitiously stick it on the underside of the desk of the Finance Minister of the country at three different places.




It was most certainly an adhesive which held listening devices which transmitted voice signals to a listening centre nearby. Pranab Mukherjee is not known for levity and would not have written a missive to the Prime Minister complaining of the bad hygiene of his visitors or staff.
Many TV channels, quick to bite a planted story, started putting out that  the bugging operation was an outcome of corporate rivalry. It would boggle the mind to think that corporate spies would be able to penetrate the security of North Block and plant listening devices in rooms which were a stone’s throw away from the office of the Director, Intelligence Bureau.
Ministers’ offices are carefully locked and the key placed in seal. Any breakage would immediately arouse suspicion. The bugs were no doubt planted during working hours, and some of the staff must have been involved. Anyone who has covered North and South Block knows that a certain government agency has a lot of the peons and drivers on their regular pay-roll.
In fact the primary suspect in the operation must be a government agency, or some rogue elements of that agency. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Recall the episode, just last year, when the government acknowledged that some conversations of politicians were “inadvertently” intercepted by a passive listening device of the NTRO. That again was not possible since the device was a portable one and would not simply record thousands of conversations in an area, but only those of targeted numbers. The government’s excuse that some conversations were “inadvertently” recorded stinks as much as the claim that the adhesive in Pranab Mukherjee’s office was chewing gum.   
 
IB
What would point the needle of suspicion towards the IB is the circumstantial evidence. They have the technical skills, the ability to access ministerial and governmental offices and, above all, they have a record of malfeasance on the score of listening into conversations of citizens since they are not bound by any law. Maloy Krishna Dhar’s Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled has listed some of these activities in sickening detail and none of them have been denied or contradicted. The pièce de résistance of his book is the story of how the device to catch telephone taps from the Rashtrapati Bhavan was actually affixed in the Prime Minister’s Office during the period in which Rajiv Gandhi was locked in a conflict with President Zail Singh.
There is a facile assumption, spread by officialdom, that the government only taps phones through a systematic legal process in which permission is granted only by the Union Home Secretary, or his state counterparts, that the process is tightly controlled and conversations recorded are eventually destroyed. Actually, this holds good only for the legal wire-taps which could, serve as evidence, though usually courts are leery of accepting such proof.
The rules don’t apply to intelligence agencies listening to conversations, since there is a presumption that they are doing it for national security, and in that case, specific taps cannot be always requested, and often the aim is to scan the spectrum in the hope of picking up transmissions. There is no statute involved, as is the case in the US, where tapping phones of American nationals, is strictly prohibited, and can be permitted only by special courts, which are the equivalent of our High Courts.
 
Oversight
Indeed, there is no statutory guidance to our intelligence agencies on what they can do and what they cannot. Their acts are outside the limited checks and balances that are imposed by Parliament and bodies like the Comptroller & Auditor General. The Executive has no system for systematic oversight of the agencies, and how they behave depends on their supervisory minister and the moral compass of their own leader. It is no secret that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh does not like intelligence chiefs reporting to him, while his predecessor’s principal secretary Brajesh Mishra kept all the agencies under his control. The present situation is somewhat ambiguous, with the IB firmly under the control of the Union Home Minister, the R&AW reporting nominally to the prime minister through the Cabinet Secretary and the NTRO reporting to the NSA.
The problem in India is that even the Opposition never raises the issue of the systematic political intelligence that the IB gathers, in the main through phone taps. This is because when they are in government they use the same machinery to spy on their rivals. L.K. Advani as Home Minister was well known for badgering intelligence chiefs for the latest on his political rivals.
There is now some movement in the demand for parliamentary oversight over the intelligence services. In January 2010,  the Vice-President, Hamid Ansari, made an eloquent and important plea for imposing parliamentary oversight over our intelligence agencies while delivering the R.N.Kao Memorial lecture. India is perhaps the only democracy where no such oversight exists. Constitutional lawyer, Menaka Guruswamy and some others have been active in pushing for legislation to create a legal framework for intelligence services.
Even while the mid-summer madness continues, we must think of these serious subjects. Indians feel a lot of schadenfreude about the state of Pakistan, perhaps they should begin to feel some pain for their own country which is becoming the butt of ridicule around the world.
Mail Today June 23, 2011

The populist road to perdition

The passing away of MF Husain has brought forth a national angst about the not-so-secret fact that we have become an increasingly intolerant people. It has also provided a terrible mirror for us to face ourselves as we are, rather than as we think we are. Indians pride themselves on their tolerance, but the truth is  somewhat more complicated. The harassment of Husain, the vandalising of cinema halls, the activities of the Shiv Sena in Mumbai and the Ram Sene in Karnataka, the viciousness of the pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, the almost routine killing of couples who marry out of their castes, is very much part of contemporary India.

Tolerance
Quite recently a study by Science magazine sought to quantify the level of intolerance prevailing in the country, and the outcome shows that we are not too distant on that score from the country we love to revile—Pakistan. The study ranked 33 countries for their level of ‘tightness’—where tight societies have strong norms and low tolerance of what is perceived as deviant behaviour, while loose ones have weak social norms and  high tolerance.




 Not surprisingly, the tightness scores were the highest for Pakistan (12.3), but India was not far behind with 11 points, with Malaysia in between at 12.8. Another surprise is that authoritarian China does rather well with a tightness score of 7.9, better than South Korea (10) and Japan (8.6). Tolerance and intolerance are affected by ideologies, but also have deeper roots in history, religions, social systems and even social anthropology.
In some ways perceptions of India’s tolerance are based on the peace that came with the British conquest. With a colonial master strictly ensuring that violence remained its monopoly, society functioned in a stable political arrangement where communities persisted with their respective social customs without much interference by the British, especially after the 1857 rebellion.
In fact, in contrast to its self-image, Hindu society was deeply intolerant. It insisted on people maintaining a rigid social code and any violation of it could invite immediate retribution, even death. As long as those codes were observed, there was tolerance. Within the bounds of the varna system, however, there was a great deal of tolerance for diversity and so you have Vaishnavites, Shaivites, Arya Samajis, Aghoris, and even atheists in the fold of Hinduism. And you had a variety of practices—animal sacrifice, strict vegetarianism, even gods and goddesses depicted in copulation—without anyone being killed for it.
Though we know historically of the conflict between the Hindus and the Jains and Buddhists, the Saivites and Vaishnavites, and Hindus and Muslims, the linchpin of the India that was founded in 1947 was tolerance. For this, one man alone was responsible—Mahatma Gandhi—and his beliefs did not come from the well-springs of his faith, but his real life experiences, especially his  sojourns in UK and South Africa. He strove mightily to break down the barriers of caste and community, and indeed religions. Even his contemporaries like Tagore, Patel, and Jinnah were way behind him on this issue. The result was the Republic of 1950 based on the compact that India would be sovereign and democratic, of course, but above all secular and tolerant. We were lucky once again with the first prime minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru who was, if one may put it this way, an atheist.

Sangh
Modernising India has thereafter seen  many social and religious upheavals, particularly those relating to the assertion of ethnic and caste identities, often targeting what was seen as the establishment dominated by the upper castes. The result has been that the establishment has kicked back, using the fear of change to suppress what it sees as a life threatening event. It is the second kind of intolerance that has caught the attention of the people and drove Husain out of the country. An interesting feature of this intolerance is that it is not as much of a spontaneous affair as is often made out. A lot of this has been associated with organisations that cluster around the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, which is, not surprisingly, an outfit dominated by the upper castes.
But it would be wrong to blame the Sangh Parivar alone for the wave of intolerance we witness in our country. And neither, we must acknowledge, is all intolerance bad. Intolerance of caste and gender oppression has motivated people to organise, protest and fight the established order. Currently we are going through a stage where people who reluctantly acquiesced with every-day corruption are declaring that they are unable to tolerate the situation anymore.
 The more disturbing aspect of the current mood in the country is the association of intolerance with the advance of democracy. Groups and communities who were out of the political system and low on the social scale are now asserting themselves. There is a democratisation of intolerance with these various groups expressing their views about what they feel offended by—a local hero or deity allegedly insulted, a violation of their social mores, and so on. They are also assertive with regards to what they consider their social views, and theseoften clash with those of others who are equally forceful.

Democracy
In our democratic and socio-cultural mélange some of this is understandable, though not always condonable. But it is here that the threat of majoritarianism is manifest, hence the danger of the Parivar type activity. Normally, in a democratic society there is supposed to be sufficient space for everyone’s self expression. But in the current climate, this is precisely what is being sought to be challenged.
Democracy should have been the means through which this incredibly diverse country would mediate the claims and counter-claims of different communities. It hasn’t quite worked that way, yet.
What we have seen, instead, is democracy itself being hijacked by a group which is able to cobble together an electoral majority and uses its position in government to push its narrow agenda to the detriment of other groups. The khaps of Haryana are a case in point where their electoral clout has led to mainstream politicians of all parties refusing to condemn their method of exercising social control through murder.
Countering intolerance is not easy. It took Europe centuries of warfare between Protestants and Catholics to arrive at a concept of religious tolerance. The saying attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, would itself be two centuries before the France of today. Even so, it needs to be pointed out that the European attitudes towards racial tolerance remain a work in progress. 
Yet, as the example of Gandhi and Nehru has shown, it is possible for a charismatic and skilful leader to make huge transformations. The big weakness today is that we have leaders who shuffle half a step behind public opinion. They look right and then left, and first determine what the mob wants, and then give political voice to their demands.
You can call such craven behaviour “populist”, but some would suggest that it is suicidal and self-destructive.
Mail Today June 15, 2011

Saviours robed in saffron

Other countries have a man on the horseback, who comes at the crucial hour to save the nation, India has had the man in saffron. The men on horseback are worldly wise, but our Indian saviours are different. Unlike their counterparts in the other parts of the world—the reborn Bolivar, the imagined Lenin and the Mahdi—  the Indian is usually a person who  shuns the material world and insists that the answer lies, not in seizing power and consolidating the boundaries of a nation or movement, but in rediscovering the power within, call it spirituality or “national character” if you will.
In the contemporary era the man who has spooked many putative saviours of our times is Mohandas Gandhi. He is the gold standard— an ascetic, who had unparalleled command over matters temporal. Not many people could have stopped a communal riot by the sheer application of moral power. We have had many “swamis”, ” sants”, “babas”, even some self-styled bhagwans and avatars. But that no one has sought to set himself up as a “mahatma” is a tribute to Gandhi’s enduring and benign relevance to this country.
 
RSS
But one thing the Mahatma was not, is a man of saffron, that most beguiling colour for Indians. It is the colour of war and sacrifice, of things sacred. It has been for long the colour of renunciation and piety, donned by sadhus through history. Faced with certain defeat, Rajputs donned saffron as a sign that their battle would be to the death.  But over time, charlatans and crooks have realised just how easy it was to fool people by donning this colour. Ravana clad himself in saffron when he lured Sita across the Lakshman rekha.


One of the biggest hijacks occurred when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a proto-fascist organisation, took over the colour and, it has since poisoned our entire approach towards this colour that has meant so much to the people of this country. Over the years it has sought to yoke the mesmeric power of the colour to its political agenda of creating a country whose flag will be saffron in colour—the bhagwa dhwaj. The RSS’s strategy has been to appropriate the Hindu spiritual tradition and harness it for its political goals, so along with the colour, it has also “taken over” sadhus and sants of yore like Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Dayanand Saraswati and even Mahatma Gandhi.
In the post-independence era, the Sangh Parivar sought to use Swami Karpatriji, a learned asetic who had formed the Dharma Sangh to protect orthodox Hinduism in 1940, and later founded the Ram Rajya Parishad, a proto-religious political party. Encouraged by the RSS and its political wing, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, this body took up an agitation against the Hindu Code Bill, a major exercise to codify Hindu marriage and succession law, initiated by nationalists like B.R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru. However, the agitation failed to gain much traction with the masses, and despite opposition in Parliament, mainly from within the Congress party itself, the bills were passed.
The next stage in the RSS strategy was to found the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964 which would act as an umbrella outfit where the various factious sects and swamis could meet in one organisation to follow a single agenda. The issue that was now taken up was the need to ban cow-slaughter, a seeming no-brainer in a country where the pre-dominant population was Hindu.
 
Ramdev
The movement peaked in November 1966 when some one lakh sadhus, some branding their trishuls, met outside the Parliament house where they were addressed by Swami Karpatriji and Swami Rameshwaranand, a Jana Sangh MP who had been suspended from the Lok Sabha because of unruly behaviour. Caught up in his own rhetoric, Rameshwaranand called for an assault on Parliament, even while another MP, Atal Bihari Vajpayee beseeched him to retract his call. The rally degenerated into chaos, hundreds of cars and scooters were set ablaze and the police had to open fire to quell the mob which threatened to physically overwhelm the Parliament House.
The next turn of the RSS was in the Ram Janambhoomi movement, which after initial success, has also petered out. Over time, the quality of the sadhus and sants associated with the VHP, too, has declined. Many of the leaders of the principal sects, such as the Shankaracharyas have become wary of associating with the VHP because they know that it is following the political agenda of the RSS. So, it is not surprising that they have had to create their own sadhu, and Ramdev was ideal for this. Principally a yoga teacher and a yoga-Ayurveda entrepreneur, Ramdev is in some ways a kind of empty slate on which the RSS can write its megalomaniacal schemes to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra.
Over the decades, as people have become more educated and the country more modern, they have learnt to discriminate between secular achievement and Nirvana. That is why Baba Ramdev’s message on the advocacy of Hindi or organic farming has had little resonance. It is significant that Ramdev had to bring his own crowd with him. In Delhi all he got, even from the RSS and others, were event tourists who are wont to pop up anywhere, whether to see the destruction wrought by a fire or a flood.
The RSS’s experiment with trying to foist their man of saffron on the Indian populace is bound to fail. Indeed, in each succeeding cycle it loses that much traction. In fact, most of the causes they have taken up are now defunct. The cow-slaughter issue is kept alive through various BJP state governments. As for the Ram Mandir movement, it has become a weak echo of what it was.
 
Civics
The appeal of the messiah or the guru comes partly from the lack of education and partly from the belief that there are short cuts in life. Salvation, power, money can be had through a mantra. The really powerful are those that dish all of this out. Men in white khadi, or those in saffron. For others it is a desperate belief. This is, in part, the consequence of the challenge of modernisation that we confront. To go through the lengthy process of building institutions and social mores is not for us—the short cut that a man in saffron offers us is so much more simpler.
The Ramdev movement has predictably raised the issue of “civil society.” We have had Anna Hazare and his crew demanding that their role be recognised because they are “civil society.” But what does that mean?
It is a self-declaratory claim of secular sainthood—white outside saffron inside, if you will. Actually by the narrowest definition, civil society relates to institutions and organisations outside government, legislatures and the judiciary.
They are watchdog groups involved with human rights, doctors without frontiers, certain types of professional bodies like the federations of journalists, legal aid institutions, and small NGOs such as the society for prevention of cruelty to animals and so on. For fighting corruption, as indeed crime or lawlessness, the constitutionally mandated body is the state and its organs. There can’t be any short cuts here.
This work cannot, by any definition, be done by groups that aim to displace or bypass our constitutionally mandated system, defined by the elected legislature and the executive and judiciary it creates.
Mail Today June 7, 2011