www.outlookindia.com | The Great Indian Love Affair With Censorship

Ashis Nandy, “The Great Indian Love Affair with Censorship“

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson said nearly 250 years ago, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” These days in India, the adage can be safely applied to nationalism. There is no other explanation of the threat to arrest and try Arundhati Roy on charges of sedition for what she said at a public meeting on Kashmir, where Syed Ali Geelani too spoke. I was not there at the meeting, but I have read her moving statement defending herself afterwards. I feel both proud and humbled by it. I am a psychologist and political analyst, handicapped by my vocation; I could not have put the case against censorship so starkly and elegantly. What she has said is simultaneously a plea for a more democratic India and a more humane future for Indians.

I faced a similar situation a couple of years ago, when I wrote a column in the Times of Indiaon the long-term cultural consequences of the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002. It was a sharp attack on Gujarat’s changing middle-class culture. I was served summons for inciting communal hatred. I had to take anticipatory bail from the Supreme Court and get the police summons quashed. The case, however, goes on, even though the Supreme Court, while granting me anticipatory bail, said it found nothing objectionable in the article. The editor of the Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India was less fortunate. He was charged with sedition.

I shall be surprised if the charges of sedition against Arundhati are taken to their logical conclusion. Geelani is already facing more than a hundred cases of sedition, so one more probably won’t make a difference to him. Indeed, the government may fall back on time-tested traditions and negotiate with recalcitrant opponents through income-tax laws. People never fully trusted the income-tax officials; now they will distrust them the way they distrust the cbi.

In the meanwhile, we have made fools of ourselves in front of the whole world. All this because some protesters demonstrated at the meeting that Arundhati and Geelani addressed! Yet, I hear from those who were present at the meeting that Geelani did not once utter the word “secession”, and even went so far as to give a soft definition of azadi. By all accounts, he put forward a rather moderate agenda. Was it his way of sending a message to the government of India? How much of it was cold-blooded public relations, how much a clever play with political possibilities in Kashmir?

We shall never know, just because most of those who pass as politicians today and our knowledge-proof babus have proved themselves incapable of understanding the subtleties of public communication. They are not literate enough to know what role free speech and free press play in an open society, not only in keeping the society open but also in serious statecraft.

In the meanwhile, it has become dangerous to demand a more compassionate and humane society, for that has come to mean a serious criticism of contemporary India and those who run it. Such criticism is being redefined as anti-national and divisive. In the case of Arundhati, it is of course the BJP that is setting the pace of public debate and pleading for censorship. But I must hasten to add that the Congress looks unwilling to lose the race. It seems keen to prove that it is more nationalist than the BJP.

It is the hearts and minds of the new middle class—those who have come up in the last two decades from almost nowhere and are middle class by virtue of having money rather than middle-class values—that both parties are after. This new middle class wants to give meaning to their hollow life through a violent, nineteenth-century version of European-style ‘nationalism’. They want to prove—to others as well as to themselves—that they have a stake in the system, that they have arrived. They are afraid that the slightest erosion in the legitimacy of their particularly nasty version of nationalism will jeopardise their new-found social status and political clout. They are willing to fight to the last Indian for the glory of Mother India as long as they themselves are not conscripted to do so and they can see, safely and comfortably in their drawing rooms, Indian nationalism unfolding the way a violent Bombay film unfolds on their television screens.

Read the rest of this article at outlookindia.com

 

Related Articles

• Its Called Dissent, Not Sedition (teabreak.pk)
• Arundhati Roy Offends the Indian State — Again (blogs.wsj.com)
• In praise of Arundhati Roy (newstatesman.com)

Delhi’s Commonwealth Games debacle

I was never into sports when I was a kid. My older siblings were athletic and sporty, but much as I wanted to emulate them, I could not quite keep up. My sister played field hockey at the national level, but after my first experience of the thwack of a hockey stick on my unprotected shins, I trembled with fear at the thought of joining her and her teammates at their practice sessions. I loved watching cricket (who didn’t?), but the sight of that hard leather ball hurtling towards me scared the daylights out of me, so I wasn’t much of a batsman. My bowling sucked–I think I was the only aspiring spinner capable of bowling wide!

Nevertheless, I’d always loved following sports until I came to the U.S., and had to reconcile myself to a life without cricket coverage. (A sad, sad, life, I tell you.) Nearly two decades after I arrived in the land of the NFL and NBA, I am still relatively clueless about American sports, I must admit. Yes, I do try to keep up with who won the World Series (that’s baseball, right?) and whatnot, but that’s about it.

But ask me about my favorite teams and players, or what I think about Barry Bonds and the whole steroids issue, or which pro-football owner funds right-wing Republicans, or which basketball players are also politically left-leaning, and, lo and behold, I’ll likely be able to say something halfway intelligent.

I owe this smattering of familiarity with American sports to one Dave Zirin, sports columnist for The Nation and several other print and online publications, regular commentator on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and Morning Joe (go figure!) whose inimitable knack for blending sports, politics, and hilarity knows no bounds. The guy is being hailed as one of the most exciting sports commentators around, and rightly so, methinks (although I can’t name another!). Read Zirin once, or listen to his XM radio show, and regardless of whether you are an American sports fanatic or a dabbler like me, you will be hooked. Necessarily, most of Zirin’s writing focuses on the American scene, but he has, over the last couple of years, been covering more and more international sporting events.

(Image: Wikipedia)

Zirin’s latest piece in The Nation expertly dissects the politics of the Commonwealth Games, which are slated to begin in Delhi in less than two weeks’ time. The preparations for the games have been, not to put too fine a point on it, an unmitigated disaster. But the Urban Development Minister, S. Jaipal Reddy told reporters, in that cavalier way that Indian politicians do when they respond to crises beyond their ability to manage: ”I am as confident and as cool as ever about our organizing. These are all minor hiccups.”

As Zirin points out, the $6 billion Games “might not go on”:

I don’t know if the CWG [Commonwealth Games] has created goodwill, but as the 2010 Games are set to start in Delhi, we are getting a very good understanding of empire, at least the 21st century variant. The games are teetering on an unprecedented implosion and the problem is not just that India, a country where 46% of the children are underweight, is spending $2.5 billion on athletic facilities alone. The problem is not just that India, a country where 42% of the people live under the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 a day, promised $100,000 to every country’s delegation to secure the games (what is called in less refined circles “a bribe.”) And the problem is not just that this state of affairs raises the question about whether India, with all its nouveau economic might, should be playing footstool for the inert Queen’s “Empire Games.”

The games might not go on because the CWG facilities built at great economic and social cost have been flagged as a serious health hazard. In preparing the various arenas, dozens of workers have been grievously injured in accidents due to faulty materials and equipment. This week alone a ceiling collapsed at the weightlifting venue and a bridge crumbled outside the main staging ground, Nehru Stadium, injuring 27.

Read the rest of Zirin’s piece in The Nation, and if you like what you read, check out his weekly column, Edge of Sports, and his XM radio show, Edge of Sports Radio (which is available as a podcast on iTunes–don’t you love technology?!).

Related Articles

• Commonwealth Games head sees improvement in conditions (independent.co.uk)
• To go or not to Delhi 2010 should be up to individuals (thepunch.com.au)
• Commonwealth Games ‘should not have gone to India’ (channel4.com)
• Bridge collapse adds to India’s Commonwealth Games woe

“India Shining,” indeed

Poverty and inequality continue to plague Indian society, even in these days of corporate partying. While India’s fabulously wealthy rulers are busy acquiring luxury cars and private jets, (not to mention the fact that some of this wealth comes dripping with blood) hundreds of millions continue to languish in poverty and misery.

“Oh come on, Mamu,“ I can hear my niece complain as she reads this. “We all know this, it’s nothing new.” She pouts for a bit, ponders her best line of attack, and settles for this: “Why can’t people talk about something else? Why do you always have to write about poverty?”

Yes, of course we know all this. Yes, of course we’ve seen the stats a thousand times before. And yes, to write about poverty in India is to run the risk of sounding like a broken record. But I do believe that originality in social commentary isn’t as great a virtue as it is made out to be. I think it is just as important to simply keep repeating the obvious over and over again (think Noam Chomsky or Arundhati Roy here), in order to push back against the mind-numbing nature of consumer culture.

I believe that it isn’t so much a matter of saying something original, in this context, as of finding an original pretext to say what you’ve said a hundred times before.

What’s my pretext today? A report in The Hindu refers to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, which has issued a report on “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in Unorganised Sector.” The text of the draft report can be found here. (There are discrepancies between the figures in the Hindu article and those in the draft report, probably because the former is based on the final report, whereas the draft report was issued in April, and was clearly marked “Not to be quoted, for feedback and comments only.”)

Some of the findings of the report, as outlined by the Hindu article:

• 394.9 million workers (86 per cent of the working population) belong to the unorganized sector
• 316 million workers live on less than Rs. 20, or $ 0.49, a day.
• 88 per cent of the Scheduled Tribes and the Scheduled Castes, 80 per cent of the Other Backward Classes and 85 per cent of Muslims belong to this category of people living on less than Rs. 20 a day.
• 90 per cent of agricultural labor households are landless or have less than one hectare of holding*
• agriculture is getting feminized with 73 per cent women being associated with it compared to 52 per cent men.

Then there was this statement in the article that I couldn’t quite figure out in light of the other statistics: “In 2004-05, a total of 836 million (77 per cent) had an income below Rs. 20 a day.” This seems to contradict the second point above, which puts the figure at 316 million. Are they suggesting that the number has actually fallen by nearly two-thirds?!! It seems unlikely. I’d like to get my hands on the report itself to figure this out.

As of 2002-2003, the unorganized sector’s contribution to overall GDP was a surprisingly (to me) high 56.7 per cent, according to the draft report (p. 24).

Poorly paid, super-exploited workers, in other words, are contributing more than half of the overall growth of the Indian economy in these glorious times.

“India Shining”: Does that phrase make you want to laugh or cry? Let me know.

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*On a different note, this statistic really throws into question the characterization of India as “semi-feudal” by Maoists. If 90 percent of agricultural labor is landless, then we are referring here to waged labor, albeit in agriculture. In other words, this is not a “peasantry” ranged against a “feudal” landholding class, but agricultural wage-labor ranged against an agrarian bourgeoisie.

This is obviously a larger debate, and will have to be dealt with separately.

Sorry for the jargon, Pooja! :)

Prejudice, desi style, and its context

Krish’s excellent post raises some very important questions that often get silenced in desi circles, regardless of the continent on which they occur. Why is Indian culture so incredibly intolerant these days? Anti-Muslim prejudice, casteist anti-dalit blindness, anti-Pakistani sentiment…. Racism and sexism run rampant in our society today (and Krish might have included homophobia and prejudice towards transgendered/transsexual community).

A small example of such intolerance can be seen in the knee-jerk objections that are raised against even a mere passing reference to Hindu fundamentalism in an excellent recent blog post on the Lal Masjid crisis.

Troublingly enough, many of these forms of intolerance that Krish outlines are weaving themselves into the fabric of Indian and Indian diasporic commonsense, particularly among the urban, educated upper-middle and lower-middle classes, but not excluding well-paid BPO and call-center workers who see…

What can Rs. 100,000 crores buy?

IN THE 2004 elections, Indian voters threw out the Hindu-chauvinist, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and brought in the Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA). At the same time, the parties of the Left, and the two communist parties in particular, made spectacular gains, winning over sixty seats in parliament, and becoming, for the first time, a major force in national politics.

Activists and intellectuals on the Indian Left were euphoric about the success of the Communist Parties. The fact that the UPA would have to rely on the Left’s support, they claimed, would force the government to adopt more “people-friendly” policies. But this euphoria was misplaced, as recent events have clearly shown.

The Comnunist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)]-led Left Front government in the state of West Bengal has embarked on the same path of neoliberal privatization as that of the UPA, insisting that export-oriented industrialization is the key to the state’s development. Invoking the colonial-era Land Acquisition Act of 1894, the government began to woo investors with free land, tax-free status, and other perks, in an effort to create Special Economic Zones (SEZs). In 2006, it decided to give away 1,000 acres of prime agricultural land in the village of Singur to the Indian corporate giant, Tata. Following this, it announced a similar gift of 10,000 acres of agricultural land to the Indonesian Salim group of companies in the township of Nandigram.

First in Singur, and then in Nandigram, farmers, sharecroppers, and rural laborers rose up in protest against the stealing of their land. They barricaded themselves in, and mobilized mass protests. But in January 2007, the Tatas began construction of their car factory in Singur, ignoring the wishes of the local population.

Then, on March 14, the government of West Bengal ordered its police forces to open fire on protesters in Nandigram, killing fifteen and injuring dozens more. The killings set off a series of protests by Left activists and intellectuals, many of whom had hitherto supported the CPI(M) and its policies. A crisis erupted within the Left Front coalition itself, as other coalition parties joined the protests.

There is, of course, a veritable pantheon of apologists for the Left Front’s policies, including some very learned economists, it seems. See, for instance, the paper by Mritiunjoy Mohanty of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta, titled “Singur and the Political Economy of Structural Change.” The fact that an IIM researcher’s work appears on an “alternative economics” website should speak for itself. Be that as it may, Mohanty’s claims that the Left Front’s acquisition of land in Singur must be seen as a progressive measure; an argument that is reminiscent of the calls justifications for forced industrialization in Stalin’s Russia during the 1930s. I can’t get into the specifics of Mohanty’s article in this post, but will revisit it at some length in a few days.

Well, on March 27, parliament passed a bill that would put an end to the government’s acquisition of land for private companies, in a move that the media dubbed the “Nandigram effect.” However, this comes as little solace to the thousands who have been displaced to make way for some 400 SEZs that have already been approved across the country.

Round Two

And now, the Indian government has approved yet another 21 SEZs, according to a front page article in The Hindu! These innocuously named regions are certainly “special”: for the likes of Mukesh Ambani, the head of Reliance Industries, whose proposal for a petrochemicals SEZ was among those approved today.

Even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), essentially a club of some 20 of the world’s richest countries (plus smaller economies like Mexico and Ireland), recently came out against the tax cuts that the Indian government was offering through the SEZs. (As Deepa Kumar pointed out to me, it is because that puts the OECD nations at a competitive disadvantage. She’s probably right.)

But think about it: According news articles, the SEZs will essentially give over Rs. 100,000 crores in tax cuts to corporations that develop SEZs over the coming years! How much money is that? And what can it buy? My very rough calculations put it at $25 billion. That’s a lot of money to be giving away gratis to folks like Mukesh Ambani.

Poor Mukesh. Perhaps he needs the money more urgently than the well-fed farmers of Singur. After all, his net worth is only $20 billion, and he is only the 14th richest man in the world.

Meanwhile, the working classes and the poor need fairness, equality, and justice.

Can a hundred thousand crores buy that?