Making Our Laws -I

A television news channel carried the news report of a clutch of civil society organizations and NGOs getting involved in sensitizing voters in Madhya Pradesh so as to keep the BJP returning back to power in the coming elections. The channel showed the footage of left leaning activist Shabnam Hashmi as among those involved in the exercise. According to her and her fellow activists; a return to power by the BJP would ensure that key institutions would be irretrievably captured and compromised ideologically. Of course, given Hashmi’s political convictions, this thinking is not unusual; but what is important here is to recognize the role and platform that civil society institutions can and do provide to the common man to enter the hurly burly of politics.

Looking at the money and muscle power that seemingly casts a long shadow over the politics of the day, the common man may well feel overwhelmingly helpless in being able to do any thing at all to make a difference. There are many who would love to more involved in the matters of governance of the country than merely casting a vote once in five years or less. Not every one wants to be a parliamentarian or a legislator and be directly involved in governance but a lot of us surely want to influence the ways in which laws and polices are formulated and then promulgated and eventually enforced. Law making is not the preserve of elected parliamentarians or a bunch of elite bureaucrats alone though they make be the ones who are the institutional gate keepers. But to the extent that laws and policies affect directly or indirectly all of us, it should be the endeavor of all of us to try and be engaged in smaller or larger measure.

This is where civil society institutions can play an important role. Traditionally in India, policies and laws have almost been influenced not through open and transparent debate but through backroom intrigue – the reference to dalal salaam by the BJP recently has some background and history attached to it for it is them acting at the behest of powerful business houses (usually) who do all the lobbying and dealing and the wheeling and the dealing.

NGOs and civil society institutions can bring these hitherto hidden matters out of the closet and help shape public opinion by bringing out nuances in various policy alternatives and options and creating an informed voter base. In the ongoing matter of the Indo – American nuclear deal for example, how many of us can really stand up and be counted that we understand all the finer points? The debate has been confined to small sections of the scientific community and the political class and mostly they see and hear what they want to see and hear. For those like former President Abdul Kalaam, the deal is a panacea for the country’s chronic energy ills, while for others the nuclear deal will make us a client state of the Americans.

Now this is not typical NGO work and those who do engage in quasi political activity do so not so much in a evidence based, semi academic way, presenting and then debating all sides of the equation but rather driven by their own ideology and convictions as Shabnam Hashmi is doing. There is nothing wrong with that approach of course – to be driven by the strength of our convictions; but the problem is that many of us simply have not had the chance to develop our stand on many issues simply because we do not know all the material facts at hand on the basis of which we can make up our mind! And this is therefore an arena where we need some sarva shiksha abhiyan!

Brown Man's Burden

Vijay teaches in the English department in a small American town in Prasenjit Gupta’s short story “A Brown Man”. He is single. His mother in India wants him to marry an Indian girl; no foreigners were to be trusted. So Vijay found Asha his girl friend for three years until she – more liberal in her ways than even the white girls his mother worried about, left Vijay for a hippie.

Vijay is single and lonely and his departmental senior Philip and wife Sharon are good friends and they are trying to act match maker; but that is not going to work for Vijay is very conscious of parental authority and won’t do any thing that will offend his mother, but then Philip and Sharon do not know that of course. So they introduce to Vijay, a distant cousin by the name of Amy who is on a short vocation and staying with them. Vijay is not too interested; remember his mother is wary of white girls out to seduce her son, but out of courtesy to Philip and Sharon who are good people, he agrees to spend some time with Amy and “show her around” the town.

Amy is a good enough girl but Vijay is not interested; he has already been hurt once and remember; his mother has warned him to wary of the white girls. “Don’t bring home a foreigner” was the unambiguous message. Though they go out several times and though they get along well enough, there is no trace of romance. He shares about the Indian girl who left him and she in turn tells him about the boy who left her. Slowly he is falling in love with a white woman despite all the warnings that he has received. On one of his monthly phone calls to his mother, he crosses the Rubicon by telling his mother that he has been seeing a white girl. She sighs into the phone. A sigh of hopelessness.

It is the end of Amy’s vacation and they are going out for their last outing. Amy has never looked more beautiful and Vijay knows that if he must propose, this has to be the night. As they are settling into their meal, a white man comes and sits down opposite their seat and looks disdainfully at him and admiringly at Amy. Vijay shrinks within himself as he remembers the many times he has been snubbed at by white people over the years. The dinner ends with the proposal never uttered and Vijay drives a very visibly low Amy back home. The next day, as Vijay drops Amy to the airport, she casually mentions that her old boy friend wants reconciliation and she was open. Vijay shrivels further inwards as he bids her good bye … for the last time and heads back home.

Is racism for real or is it an imagined shadow that Vijay seems to see every where, often without any substantial basis ? His colleague Philip and his wife Sharon cared enough about him to notice his loneliness and try and do some match making and Amy as she went out with him, evening after evening dared to hope that the man she had come to love and to admire would one day propose to her. But though he skirted edgily around the subject, he never did. He was haunted by his own mother’s demons – that white American girl was bad though Vijay’s own experience was to have been let down by an Indian girl trying hard to be “Western”.

Now that racism is no longer institutionalized, it is obviously that much more difficult to track down and identify. And how much of it is real and how much of it is magnified by past experiences, mental imagery, perceptions –true and imagined that we end up interpreting wrongly and often with tragic consequences as happened with Vijay? Vijay’s interpretation of what a white woman would be like was largely conditioned by what his mother whispered on the phone as they talked every month and indeed in India, even before he had left the country’s shores to go to America. Although he had enough caring white people in his life, he still could not bring himself to trust himself and trust them when it came to the defining moment of his life and that moment eventually passed him by.

We talk often of stereotyping – racial and ethnic and religious and others and imagine that these flawed judgments that we make of others harm them, discriminate against them, and deny them opportunities….. But stereotyping is actually like a boomerang it comes back and denies us the very same joys that we imagine others are losing out on.

Rogue Police

Dr. Rajesh Talwar, one of the accused in the now famous NOIDA double murder case was arrested on May 23rd and has since then been in custody. Although he is produced in court every now and then, bail is always denied on the pretext that further questioning is needed or various tests still need to be done. Guilty or not, even before anything is conclusively pinned on him, he has spent a month and more in jail and who knows how long he will have to stay.

What is worrisome is the manner in which he has been detained for so long a time. Dr. Talwar’s situation is not a tangled web full of complexities and spanning counties and continents like say Charles Sobhraj. Till the day of his daughter’s death, he was living a very typical normal and middle class life. There is no criminal record that he had from past days that needs looking into. Dr. Talwar is no hardened criminal who would have learned the art of handling tough interrogation – as police clients go, he would have been among the softest they would have handled, and yet between the NOIDA police and the CBI, his questioning and interrogation seems to be dragging on forever.

We have been fixated on mostly on the human rights violations that the police and other Paramilitary forces supposedly carry out in the form of encounter killings of terrorists and under world dons. These have been even glamorized in ways with Bollywood basing many of their scripts on real life police “encounter specialists” with very little attempts at disguise. Closely related is the phenomenon of torture, custodial deaths and sub human treatment. Largely this happens to people for whom there is little public sympathy or to the anonymous and impoverished delinquent; again some one who has no one to defend them. Dr. Talwar’s case is an interesting one where he has no criminal record, no hardened criminal, not much of a likelihood of him absconding or scooting off to another country. Even so he continues in jail seemingly forever. Even the CBI who are supposedly the wizards in crime investigation are sweating and struggling to question and make sense of the answers of a man like Dr. Talwar who probably had never even seen the inside of a police lock up till now beats reason.

A recent campaign that originated in Mumbai and is now aiming to spread else where to expose inappropriate practices in the police including corruption was started by I K Chuggani. A retired man himself, he began harnessing the potential, energy and the connections of many other retired people in Mumbai to start a campaign against rogue elements in the police. They have a web site, a very strong Facebook presence as well as the infrastructure of a registered non profit based in Mumbai. It is truly a citizens’ movement and one that is looking not merely for money but active involvement and volunteerism, more actively on their Facebook group. Do look them up and join in. Looking at the predicament of Dr. Talwar, I for one paused to wonder for a moment as to what my coping mechanism might be if I were in a situation similar to his and sadly enough, I found none.

The Death of Angrezi Hatao

Angrezi Hatao was once a very potent slogan in the fiftys and the sixties and a campaign which made the destiny of many politicians of the time – both those who proposed it and those who opposed it. Prominent names who come to mind as leaders in the Hatao movement are Ram Manohar Lohia and former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, then with the Bharatiya Jana Sangh. The country had gained independence from the British and the English language was considered the most visible symbol of that rule and one that needed to be abolished as quickly as possible. Indeed, the constitution itself stipulated that English would be in use as a transitional measure for fifteen years and from Republic Day, 1965, Hindi was to be the sole official language.

Indeed with towering figures like Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru wanting Hindi too, it would not have been difficult to impose Hindi and displace English. That it did not happen and indeed the Official Languages Act of 1963 was enacted allowing English to continue was primarily because of one man and one movement, the Tamil Nadu based DMK and the Dravidian movement which loathed Hindi and the North Indian domination that they associated the language with.

With a violent anti Hindi agitation taking a separatist turn, and the DMK coming to power in 1967, on a largely anti Hindi platform, English was finally given some place under the sun as an associate official language with the clear understanding that one day an atmosphere would be created that would allow Hindi to be the sole official language. But the Dravidian parties have held continuous sway since that election victory in 1967 and kept up their unrelenting opposition to Hindi and gradually the fire to impose Hindi died out. Hindi however enjoyed state patronage in the cow belt as did the various regional languages in their respective states, thus gradually chipping away at English by restricting its use in official correspondence, reducing its importance in school syllabi and glorification of the mother tongue.

The turning point for English probably came with Rajiv Gandhi, a man very visibly more comfortable with English than with Hindi. Although he just lived to serve one term, the changes he set in motion outlived him. The next regime to last a full term after his – that of Narasimha Rao brought in reforms that English more or less indispensable. The last nail on the Angrezi Hatao campaign was nailed by Atal Behari Vajpayee, one of the earliest war horses of the anti English movement ran an election campaign based largely on an English slogan “ India Shining” and introduced reforms and policies that has for the moment at least, English virtually irreplaceable.

All these years however, the Hindi states continued to promote Hindi, even as savvy states like Gujarat and slow moving behemoths like the Left Front in Bengal gradually abandoned the emphasis on the mother tongue they had hitherto promoted. Their interest was in playing catch up with the Southern States which promoted English instead of Hindi and where knowledge economy businesses began to flow naturally. Present chief minister Mayawati’s decision to introduce English in schools from Class I itself is in that sense the end of an era with states like Uttar Pradesh, which earlier eschewed English, having done a 180-degree switch, realising that it is increasingly the only way to transact with a wider world.

Today , Mulayam Singh Yadav is the only known figure still to favor Angrezi Hatao and is known to hold the conviction that English has been the major stumbling block in the development of regional languages in the country. He has gone to the extent of terming it as “the language of destruction, which has had a telling impact on the economy of the country”. But considering his principal lieutenants like Amar Singh are silent on the subject and are themselves quite comfortable in English, it is not known how much of Mulayam’s polemics is for the gallery. But come what may, with the silent decline and death of the anti-English movement, which was once an extremely emotive issue has definitely come to an end….. And probably very few are even noticing its passing.

On being a Stooge

One of the views that has been bandied about over the last months as we swing this way and that about the nuclear deal is that signing it will mean that the government would have sold itself as an American stooge and vassal. That is what the leftists are saying. Since then I have been ruminating on the words stooge and vassal – I mean is it such a bad thing after all, apart from the derogatory sounds of the words themselves. Now after listening to a Skype webcast, I am convinced that the nuances are far more complex and that provocative words hide much more than they reveal.

There are two kinds of stooges if we insist on using the word. The Skype webcast that I listened to was dominated by a man from Iraq - a very angry man indeed who is upset that his country is run by brown Americans masking as Iraqis. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has the advantage of producing individuals of every ethnicities and in an occupation situation as prevails in Iraq and Afghanistan, they come handy. They are their master’s voice and because they speak the language and some what understand the culture are useful viceroys. These are the real stooges that every one should be talking about.

Then there are those who believe that their national interests are best served by aligning to a particular power and therefore do so. After all the primary purpose of the government of any nation is to ensure peace and prosperity for their people and achieve it through globally acceptable legitimate means. In the Soviet era, the original Mrs. Gandhi, felt that India’s national interests at that time was best served by aligning with the Soviet block. Many sneered at her and called her a client state or pretty close to being one. But of course she didn’t give a damn and did what she considered right.

Come to think of it, India has its small share of stooges in the neighborhood though having not much to offer, it is losing them pretty rapidly. One of our concerns in Nepal is that the incoming government is likely to be more ambivalent in its relationship with India unlike the monarchy which was beholden to India. Arguably, it was a stooge Sikkim Assembly that passed the resolution to accede to India. Bhutan has no independent foreign policy independent of India and being a land locked country finds it to be in its national interest to remain so.

So what is the problem with being a stooge or a client state of the United States? Looking around, I see that they have done pretty well for some themselves, unless they are plagued by chronic bad governance like the Philippines. But that is an exception. For the prototype, look at Singapore. Look at Thailand. Look at South Korea—and just to compare, look too at North Korea. To look at an even bigger contrast, look at Japan, vanquished and brought to its knees by American nuclear bombs but today one of its strongest allies in Asia.

We need to get rid of a culture of machismo-driven nationalism that talks of self reliance, global domination and ideological neutrality; best exemplified by the so called non aligned movement in which every one right down to the last member was fully aligned. The government’s jobs is to ensure peace, prosperity and security for its people; that is why people it there. At one point of history ensuring peace for India meant being a Soviet stooge; today it might mean being an American stooge. And of course let us get words like stooge which sound so uncouth out of our vocabulary. Then we our self esteem and self respect would not be so badly wounded.

Supriya at Fifty

Supriya Moitro is a girl born in a well to do Bengali civil servant family in Gorakhpur in 1935. She grows up in Moradabad and then goes to college in Allahabad. Against mild parental unease she then moves to Delhi to study for her MA in Hindi. Their unease is partly because of the daughter leaving home and partly that she should have chosen to study Hindi, a language generally looked down upon by the Bengali educated classes. From there Supriya moves to Aligarh where she joins as a lecturer in Hindi and where the first bend in the river occurs. Supriya falls in love with Ashok Dixit, a colleague and a non Bengali. Her parents come rushing down mortified at the thought of their daughter’s cross cultural marriage but return with a reluctant blessing.

Shortly after they get married, they move to the United Sates and effectively settle down there, though they will never admit that truth to themselves. Their only son Subodh knows no other home but the US and on their increasingly infrequent visits to Kolkata, he is distinctly uncomfortable. Not that Supriya herself is very comfortable. Each visit to Kolkata finds her retired parents, older, greyer and frailer and less able to cope for themselves. Though Supriya has a sister and other family, each visit leaves her groping with guilt about the choices she and her husband have made.

Time goes on, Subodh finishes high school and goes on to University. On one of his phone calls, he announces that he is bringing his fiancée Janet home (Oh mom, we met at grad school!). Supriya and her husband grapple with the same perplexity and unease they had gifted their parents all those years ago. Supriya at fifty is the semi autobiographical reminiscence of Prasenjit Gupta masking as a short story through the persona of Supriya looking back on her life on her fiftieth birthday. Gupta is a Delhi University graduate now living and writing from Iowa. Through the character of Supriya, he asks many questions about identity that continually confronts people who have left their roots behind and attempts some answers.

The results for third culture people are mixed. As Supriya would recall, as a Bengali brought up in UP and later settled in the US, she was well versed in three languages: Bengali, Hindi and English: she was as comfortable reading Tagore as with Premchand or later Shakespeare or Wilt Whitman. Quite an accomplishment considering most of her erudite friends and those of her husband knew one language only – English and nothing more. It is possible for her to be equally at home in different parts of the globe without any discomfort ; in her campus apartment in the American university as in the gullys of Uttar Pradesh or the decaying bungalow of her father in Kolkata and that was more than could be said of her son, who had never been to the small towns of UP and found even a week in his grand parent’s house too suffocating.

Yet Supriya realized, she truly fitted nowhere. She lived in the US and yet she was not quite American. In the early years, her husband had encouraged her to switch from saree to skirt but she had demurred. She spoke English fluently and yet taught Hindi in the local university and cooked Bengali food like Doi Mach or mocha ghonto at home. She and her husband had so wanted to find a nice Bengali girl for their son before he surprised them so. Christmas meant nothing to her and yet she felt so nostalgic at the time of Pujo, the Bengali festival corresponding to Dusshera when the whole of Kolkata would dance with delight.

There is a certain intangible part of humanity that is associated with one’s own soil, culture and norms that is irretrievably lost as one moves to be a citizen of the world from being the native of a town. The process is enriching, yet the loss of what might have been, the friendships that might have been cultivated that have been lost, the bonds that have shrunk because distance and geography played their part, the opportunities that have been gained and the opportunities that have been lost all come together in one giddy cocktail. As Supriya would put it “ …her experiences, her culture, her traditions have dissipated themselves in three different ponds, whereas if all her life had been spent in one language, think how large a lake it would be, how deep, how profound ,with all the consecrated wisdom of her ancestors…”.

On the whole, life has been good to her. She has had a good husband, a good son and is on her way to have a good daughter in law for after the initial misgivings, they have grown to be fond of the girl their son would marry and who has gone to great length to accommodate and adjust to her fiancée’s parents. But in reverse, she has been away in the pivotal moments of her family’s happenings in Kolkata, there is a very obvious disconnect that she experiences as soon as she lands in Kolkata. People have married, have had children, the children have in turn married, the older uncles and aunts whom she knew and loved have gradually passed on and to the new generation, she is just another aunty from far away who comes now and then but will never be in any sense ever a part of their lives.

So much has been gained because of the choices that she has made and yet so much has also been irretrievably lost that Supriya at fifty. Half a century into her life she can no longer draw any conclusions. She decides that she will live that for posterity to judge and hopes that she will not be found wanting.

Killed by Inflation

One can meet more people these days at weddings and funerals than at any other place. A couple of months ago, attending the wedding of a niece, I heard the story about one of my aunts. She had been invited to the wedding but was unwell. So she had sent her two sons to attend the wedding on her behalf –with a letter. The letter came with an intriguing stipulation – that it had to be handed to the bride’s mother – her sister-in-law or to the bride herself and no one else. The two sons who made a somewhat hurried exit from the wedding left the letter with the bride’s mother as they hurried out. They stayed quite a distance from the wedding venue and had to return.

In the busyness of the wedding, the letter remained unopened. The wedding guests departed slowly one by one and the letter remained buried in the purse where it was randomly tucked in on the wedding night. There it remained until the news arrived a few weeks later of the death of the aunt in question. At that point, memories were juggled and someone remembered the forgotten letter and after a lengthy search, the letter was finally found and read.

To say that the contents of the letter shell shocked my middle class family is to put it relatively mildly. For in that final letter, my departed aunt, unable to come herself to the wedding and meet anyone had poured her heart out in a letter which she had obviously hoped would be read in her lifetime.

My aunt’s letter described the effects of inflation far better than an economist would be able to, for if inflation is a pandemic, a contagion, then my aunt was one of those felled by it, much as dengue or cerebral malaria or cholera might claim its victims. She described in detail how the modest poultry business her two sons were running for a few years was ruined, first by the onset of bird flu and then the subsequent panic leading to reduced demand in the city. Just when they were beginning to recover and get back on their feet again, inflation began rising and once again the demand failed.

The only steady income in the family was a meager family pension due to my aunt on account of her late husband’s government service. Of late, it was not just the only steady income; it was the only income with her sons’ business in liquidation. The family was faced with a Hobson’s choice - was the pension money to be used to buy provisions and groceries for the family or to buy medicines for my aunt’s several age related ailments.

The decision was made more complex by the fact that the meager family pension would continue only as long as she lived but she finally cast the die and decided that she would wither away so that her sons could live as the little pension money would not allow her to buy any medicines after the groceries were bought. A couple of months later, she was dead. Unlike the many farmers in Maharashtra and else where who need to commit suicide when life becomes unlivable, she was spared that expense. Crude oil prices set somewhere in the New York Stock Exchange and the spiraling inflation took care of that.

Inflation has always been presented to us in newspapers and business media as an economic phenomenon. All the inflation-related fire fighting has been done by macro-economic bodies like the Reserve Bank whose tools are graphs, tables, prediction and politically-laced policy inputs. But these erudite economists need to know that while globally, inflation may be studied as an economic phenomenon, in India’s huts and homes, it is a rapidly spreading infection and potentially fatal among the particularly vulnerable.

In the absence of a prescription, the casualties are rising.