Across the Aisle: A Counter-Narrative Will Emerge
“I am counting the number of people who have thrown in the towel,” begins P Chidambaram in his Sunday column for the Indian Express, sounding a rather sombre note for readers, and fellow citizens in general. Chidambaram starts out by enumerating the people who, in the past juggernaut of a week, have succumbed to a certain kind of propaganda. He talks about Nitish Kumar’s coronation as the Chief Minister of Bihar, the invitation to station an army tank in JNU, the ‘censorship’ in newsrooms, et al. Chidambaram believes that more and more people in the post-truth world are beginning to discard idealism and ideology and asking “what’s in it for me?”
“They believe that liberty is dead. The only liberty that deserves to be recognised is defined in the following words: ‘The only liberty worth having (is) the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State’. It is a minor detail that that definition was propounded by a gentleman named Mussolini. They believe that equality is dead. There was never real equality in India — between religions, between castes, between genders... They believe that fraternity is dead. It is perfectly normal to deny a house for rent to a Muslim or a Christian or a single woman or a non-vegetarian. It is perfectly legitimate to distinguish between non-Bengali maids and Bengali maids.”
However, the distinguished columnist, even in the midst of the doom that he spells out, manages to offer a counter-view:
“I take a contrary view. I refuse to believe that liberty, equality or fraternity are or will be dead. These values are the soul of democracy and I believe that the people of India will never allow these values to die. Nor do I believe that the Indian people will abandon secularism and embrace Hindutva. The people know that secularism is the opposite of Hindutva. They also know that Hindutva will eventually mean a return to the days of domination of the upper castes and the oppression of the other backward castes and Dalits.”
Time to End the Worst Subsidy of All: Kerosene
Swaminathan Aiyar, in his regular Sunday column for The Times of India, blatantly condemns the subsidisation of a product like kerosene. Calling it “the worst subsidy of all time”, Aiyar doesn’t stop here and goes on to describe (rather wryly) how it has been “a sacred cow that no government has dared tackle for decades”. Among the many sufferers, he includes villages using diesel for tractors and pumps, as also the engines which are fed kerosene-adulterated diesel. To the naysayers who claim the poor will not be able to survive without cheap kerosene, he says rather vehemently:
“Many left-wing critics have said on TV that the poor will not survive if kerosene becomes costly. Really? In 2014, Delhi was declared kerosene-free — all sales, subsidised or not, were banned — with consumers having to shift to cooking gas. Chandigarh became kerosene-free in 2016. Did the poor in these cities cease to live? Did they flee to areas where cheap kerosene was available? Not at all. Indeed, thousands kept migrating from kerosene-available to kerosene-free areas. Haryana has just become kerosene-free last April. All such areas have reduced pollution and hit adulterators, without causing mass distress.”
Dowry Harassment: Don’t Ask Your Daughters to ‘Adjust’ to Abuse
Lalita Panicker, in her Sunday column for Hindustan Times, outlines a harrowing reality that is far too familiar in many households across the spectrum: dowry harassment. Beginning with a case she remembers: that of a young CA named Divya who was tormented by her in-laws for more dowry, Panicker traces the inevitable trajectory of that case where the girl’s parents kept sending her back, ultimately causing in her murder. Panicker does not refrain from calling a spade a spade, chalking it up to greed. “The more they (the girls’ parents) give, the greedier the receiving party becomes”. She insists on the one non-negotiable factor: that parents not believe that their social standing is higher than their daughter’s life.
“The most worrying part is that despite all the laws in place, dowry is still socially acceptable. In fact, it is a badge of honour for the bride’s family that they were able to give so much to their daughter. It is demeaning and devalues a woman’s worth. The fact that many of the women killed were highly educated breadwinners doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to greed, as Divya’s case shows or the recent suicide of an IIT graduate. The father’s response in the IIT student’s case was, oddly, that he should not have spent money on her education and rather used it to build up her dowry.”
Fifth Column: Erasing History is No Solution
What is the common thread of thought that links present-day Berlin to present-day India? Tavleen Singh explains the same in her column for the Indian Express this Sunday, as she grapples to understand the extremely communal spirit being harnessed by a large number of people. Worried about the spate of mob lynchings in the country, she rues how Hindus “believe that now that there is a Hindu Prime Minister instead of the secular kind, it is their time to avenge the wounds of history”. This, she believes, is the reason the PM and his ministers have been largely silent or ambiguous on the issue (having recognised the sentiment).
Singh’s Berlin trip, however, was an eye-opener in that she realised how it was a city of remembrance. Almost every nook and cranny had a memorial of some sort, reminding people of the brutalities meted out by Hitler to the Jews. This kind of pointed remembrance is what we need, she affirms.
“So some kind of closure has become necessary and I believe that it can come from remembering history rather than erasing it. The vehicle of remembrance is something that the Prime Minister needs to work on, but he could begin by holding a conference of major religious leaders from all our major religions. To this conference should be invited not just faith leaders but leaders of political, social and cultural organisations. Get them all to define the way forward. Let the historians come as well, from both the left and the right, and let them highlight the erasures and the lies that government historians have told in the name of secularism.”
Out of My Mind: When Facts Change
“The problem of reading ideological meanings into the move is that the facts will not bear the burden of the analysis”. Thus begins Meghnad Desai’s column for the Sunday edition of the Indian Express, where he tries to explain Nitish Kumar’s breakup of the Mahagathbandhan. Believing it is unfair on the part of the media to denigrate Nitish Kumar as an opportunist, he turns to look back at an ‘India Before Modi’. He talks about how the Congress at the time believed the country to be a happy, safe and secular place, with the BJP occasionally acting up as petulant child. However, this changed when Atal Bihari Vajpayee took over, leading the BJP/NDA government in 1998. Nitish Kumar and the JD(U) were part of the coalition.
“After the BJP/NDA went out of power, the JD(U) stuck to its friendship with the BJP, and won the 2005 and 2010 elections. That coalition delivered the most clean and successful regime in Bihar since 1947. Bihar saw law and order restored, growth accelerated and women and girls were placed at the centre. Budgets were as nearly balanced as possible thanks to the genius of Sushil Modi.”
Desai concedes that it all “went awry” when Narendra Modi came to the helm, and Nitish Kumar had his differences, believing himself to be senior to Modi.
“Hence the break in 2013. It was not ideological. It was strategic. It was predictable that breaking up would be a mistake as the good governance in Bihar would suffer. But it was to allow himself the freedom to head a new NDA coalition had Modi fallen short and got only 180 seats, as even his own party was hoping. Modi surprised everyone by delivering an outright majority. The BJP/ NDA route was closed to Nitish Kumar if he wanted the highest political job. He took a gamble in 2015 with the MGB. It was obvious that the alliance with Lalu would not last. The quality of governance delivered by the 2005-2013 government was not matched by the 2015- 2017 coalition.”
Agra’s Mala Devi Was no Braid-Chopping Witch, Just a Soft Target
Shobhaa De, in her column ‘Politically Incorrect’ for The Times of India, pens a heartfelt tribute to Mala Devi, the 60-year-old senior citizen in Agra, lynched on the suspicion of ‘braid chopping’. She also pens the tribute to women, in general, and to the abysmal conditions of sanitation and healthcare which seem to be evading the public narrative of this story. De explains how Mala Devi, of weak eyesight and weak bladder, had gone to the fields to relieve herself and on the way back, ended up in someone else’s home. Here, two men had taken sticks and rods to her, believing her to be a “braid-chopping witch”. When discovered by the police, she was taken to a hospital 30 km away on a motorcycle, as De expresses her disgust at the scheme of things. Mala Devi died on the way, of cardiac arrest.
“Mala Devi was not a ‘braid chopper’. But she paid for these crazy rumours with her life. Her death has once again highlighted the abysmal sanitation conditions in our villages. Agra, the pride of India, host city of the Taj Mahal which is a World Heritage site, is filthy beyond description. Mala Devi’s village is a mere 19km east of the main city. Her village has no latrines. We talk of the tremendous strides made by the Swachh Bharat campaign. We sign on mega stars as brand ambassadors. CMs pose with brooms. Schools and colleges conduct cleanliness workshops. But just 19km from Agra city, in the village of Mutnai, two able-bodied young men attacked a 60-year-old woman with sticks and rods, ignoring her pleas to drop her home and spare her as her eyesight was poor and she had lost her way. Look at the number of subtexts in this single story: no latrines for women, no access to an eye doctor, no convenient transport to the nearest hospital, no required treatment available, no action taken so far against the assaulters.”
Beyond Minorities: Rethinking Secular Politics
An alternative view to the current nature of secular politics is offered by Mukul Kesavan in his Sunday column for The Telegraph. He begins by outlining Narendra Modi-led BJP’s rise to power, stating that the latter aimed for a nation-state “not minority-mukt but minority-mute”. The worrying aspect is that it seems to have worked, going on to elucidate why:
“The BJP’s success demonstrates that in a parliamentary democracy with a first-past-the-post system, it is possible to mobilize a winning plurality of votes on the strength of Hindutvavadi mobilization. One of the founding premises of political pluralism in India has been that diversity - linguistic, social, economic - prevents the consolidation of religious communities into political blocs. The BJP’s success in UP seems to make the point that it isn’t necessary to consolidate all Hindus to achieve political power.”
Kesavan now looks at a particular critique of ‘secularist politics’ that has begun to emerge.
“According to this argument, secularism in contemporary India has shrunk to one of its subsidiary functions: minority protection. The safeguarding of minorities should be a part of any secular politics, but it can’t be its reason for being. The protection of minorities should be derived from larger positions on citizenship and the rights it implies. Otherwise secularism stops being a guide to political action.”
Kesavan, however, goes on to say:
“There is something precious about secularists tiptoeing around religious community at precisely the time when the principal force in Indian politics, the BJP, is giving the goal of a Hindu rashtra its undivided attention. A democratic State should abide by norms that prevent a religious community, or a party acting in its name, from monopolizing the culture and politics of a nation and its institutions. It is salutary and right to insist that secularism is more than the defence of minorities, but a secular politics nervous of calling out bigotry for fear of the electoral cost, doesn’t deserve the name.”
Why Governments Shouldn’t Mess With Private School Fees
A strong advocacy for education, including the education that comes from currently-turmoil-ridden private schools, is the crux of Gurcharan Das’ argument in his column for the Times of India. He begins by breaking down the fee dilemma for a lay person: explaining how a private school has to constantly increase its fees: first, increasing its teachers’ fees to that of government schools, then making sure 25% of its students come from poor families (of whose school fees the government only pays a partial amount which means the school has to cover the rest). Then, teacher salaries rise again according to the pay commission, and parents are furious. Das believes that fee caps are not the solution, as Modi himself has understood. The latter has realised that “there is vigorous competition between private schools, especially in cities, and this has kept private schools fees low — the national median fee today is only Rs 417 per month. You don’t need fee control because competition keeps the prices low".
What is the answer then?
“It lies in the Self-Financed Independent Schools Act 2017 of Andhra Pradesh, which encourages private schools to open, gives them freedom of admission and fees, and removes corruption from board affiliation. To the Andhra model, we should add a requirement for extensive disclosure on each school’s website — giving all fees, staff qualifications, details of infrastructure, strengths and weaknesses — everything that a parent wants to know before selecting a school. With competition, fee control becomes unnecessary.”
Of Unethical Consumption
Pramod Pathak pens a rather philosophical Sunday morning blog for The Pioneer, elaborating on the colossal waste of resources by humankind, and trying to understand what to do about it. Pathak begins on an expansive note, talking inititally about general wastefulness and increasing pollution, then moving on to include religion and caste-based extremism. He also points, more specifically, at the waste seen on trains like the Rajdhani and Shatabdi, where passengers occasionally misuse and exploit the resources given to them.
“Where to make a beginning is the big question. Obviously, that has been the humanity’s main confusion. Waiting for a messiah to show us the way, to lead us. But rather than looking for the role model, there is need to be one’s own role model. Every morning, we look into the mirror to find out how good we look. It is time to change the way you look at yourself and ask what good have I done for society. That messiah is there in everybody. Only, there is a need to awaken him. Human beings were created to be the most supreme of the creatures. It is time to ask where we stand. And that time is now.”
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