Month: March 2014

By B.G. Verghese

The latest opinion polls following announcement of the general elections have forecast major gains by the BJP-NDA alliance at the cost of a floundering Congress-UPA. One need not question the integrity of the major polls though lesser known pollsters have been exposed through a sting operation as willing to trade margins for a consideration, an offshoot of the entirely unethical paid news phenomenon. The 11-Party post-election front remains wrapped in uncertainty while certain players like the AIDMK, Trinamool and even the BJD remain open to post-election alliances, with Jayalalithaa and MamataBannerjee making no secret of their prime ministerial ambitions.

Polls are prone to go awry. Even if the party numbers turn out to be broadly right, there could be upsets in the indicated preference or assumption of who will be prime minister. Modi currently leads the packbut it is not axiomatic that he will be the final choice. He remains controversial and even divisive to some, even within the BJP, witness the inner-party tussle over whether MurliManohar Joshi should give up his Varanasi seat to accommodate Modi.  

Elements within the BJP worry that once elevated, the man may remain entrenched for two or more terms thus putting paid to their ambitions. But the greater concern will be the views of the NDA partners unless the BJP on its own is in such a dominating position that it can dictate any terms. This seems unlikely. So even if Modi is the BJP’s choice (whatever the inner reservations), the NDA will have a casting vote on who is to be prime minister. The constituent parties may well prefer someone less right-wing, tainted and divisive and, more importantly, less influenced by the RSS- Hindutva lobby which has been given or certainly assumed a central role in the forthcoming elections as a matter of “Hindu survival”.

The RSS, a so-called “cultural body”, has been increasingly steering BJP policy of late, wary of losing its operational status as head of the Parivar and keeper of “cultural nationalism”. It will not allowa BJP government to cut loose. In his latest VijayaDashmi speech following its Amravati conclave last year, Mohan Bhagwat has called on RSS cadres to take the field and deliver “100 per cent Hindu voters” to the polling booths. Ashok Singhal, VHP is in fear of Hindus becoming a minority and has urged Hindu mothers to bear five children! NarendraModi has told Northeasterners to welcome Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, Fiji, Mauritius and the US, where they face persecution, but throw out Muslim and Christian infiltrators. In Ayodhya, the repair and construction of mosques within a sacred radius has virtually been prohibited under VHP pressure. Numbers of ex-servicemen are meanwhile joining the BJP on account of its sturdy “nationalism”.

At its latest annual conclave in Bangalore the RSS determined not to compromise on “moral values, social systems and traditions in the name of individual freedom” on such issues as live-in relationships and homosexuality.  Wendy Donniger’s book “On Hinduism” has been pulped under pressure.Elsewhere moral policing continues. The BJP continues to demand passage of a uniform civil code; but what is utterly surprising that the Party does not legislate this in any of the States it rules as is constitutionally permissible and does no injury to personal law. A UCC, already partly extant in the form of the Special Marriage Act, would liberate women from male bondage, make for equal opportunity and cut at the root of the power of fundamentalist clerics of all faiths who now rule the roost. The indifference to such a basic reform across the board, largely born of legal illiteracy reinforced by gender insensitivity, is truly astonishing. The Supreme Court has however just moved to legalise Muslim adoption under civil law, a step towards the making of a uniform code.  

To get back to the polls, aware of the negative vibes caused by Modi’s record in 2002.Rajnath Singh, the BJP president, has said that the party is prepared to apologise to the Muslims in case any injusticewas done to them. Only a sense of inner guilt can explain this dubious apology. A more curious reference to 2002 came thereafter from Venkiah Naidu who sought to prove that the party is stronger than any individual (such as Modi).He argued that when Vajpayee  chastisedModi and called on him to resign, reminding him of his raj dharma as Gujarat’s chief minister, the party collectively vetoed the prime minister. Was Vajpayee then an ill-informed maverick talking out of turn or a liberal statesman deeply anguished by the holocaust?

So the jury is still out on who may be prime minister even if the 2014 electoral outcome indicates a BJPsurge under Modi’s leadership.One must wait to see how the chips fall. However, one does not see the Congress under Rahul Gandhi going anywhere. The Government was busy frantically handing out lollipops hours before the election code came into force. Governors were appointed at 3.20 a.m, the Defence Minister’s achievements were eulogised at 7.30 a.m and the Home Ministry announced that certain Wakf properties would not be acquired just 10 minutes before the election code deadline. Reservations for Jats from the OBC quota were also announced.

In another display of illiberalism, a group of women academics at Aligarh Muslim University celebrated International Women’s Day by extolling purdah. At a private Meerut college, a group of Kashmiri students that cheered Pakistan’s cricket victory over India caused some understandable annoyance.That was then followed by an over-the-top sedition charge against them by the UP police which was fortunately rescinded a day later after Omar Abdullah spoke to AkhileshYadav. We have to become more mature and avoid knee-jerk reactions.

The poll campaign is warming up but the AAP-BJP brawls in Delhi, Lucknow, and in Gujarat are a warning signal. The AAP was wrong to see the Gandhinagar police’s temporary detention of Kejriwal’s motorcade for moving without sanction after the coming into force of the election code, as an “arrest”. This sparked off a fractious Delhi rally by AAP supporters before the BJP office and a retaliatory strike by the BJP in Lucknow. This kind of rowdyism must be put down with a firm hand. Nor should the man who blackened YogendraYadav’s face with ink at Delhi’s JantarMatar be let off on Yadav’s say so. Unless such conduct is dealt with sternly, others will be encouraged to misbehave and plead immunity.

www.bgverghese.com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/poll-surge-vs-pm-stakes/

By Amar Yumnam

Manipur is lovely, lovable and exciting. This is for various reasons. First, we love her for we were born and brought up here. Second, with such a romantic past in every phase of her history, she is lovable to the core. Personally too, this place has made me meet the person I love most and realise why I do so. Third, it is an exciting place for anyone interested in socio-economic issues because of the unique socio-economic lessons to be learnt from the dynamics of the evolving grammar of society in this place.

The global experience has been that the generalisation of trust is an important ingredient for development, or, to put it more emphatically, widespread trust has a causal positive impact on growth of a region. The failure to generalise trust has been a most significant undoing in the Islamic world in recent decades. This generalisation of trust requires an atmosphere and a means for heightened exchange and interaction among the population. This is more so in an ethnically heterogeneous society like Manipur’s because exchange and interaction facilitate the generalisation of trust. But heightened exchange and interaction do not happen in a vacuum; these happen when the development interventions, like roads, are put in place for these to happen.

This is where the emerging grammar of society and evolving picture of Manipur turn out to be very exciting, not from the angle of development of the region but from the perspective of a physician who speaks of a patient with rare ailment as interesting case. The emergence of highway blockades, general strikes and the like as generalised tools of presumably social responses to issues and media for pressuring the authorities for action in a particular way is something to be seriously thought of in contemporary Manipur. In the old days when the infrastructure was as undeveloped as it could be, and exchange and interactions were periodic, there was a kind of generalised trust in Manipur as oral history tells us. But the directions in which the changes have taken place in recent decades are such that the traditional generalised trust has been brutally replaced by individualised trust. In an atmosphere of generalised trust, the social advancement facilitated by it benefits the whole society without discrimination.
But this definitely has not been the case in Manipur.

The deterioration in the nature and strength of generalised trust is to be treated as the cost of the conflicts that has been affecting the region for the last quite a few decades. The governance response to addressing the problems associated with these conflicts has been rather one of satisficing a few individuals instead of addressing the underlying causes of the conflicts. This had the impact of enticing a few protagonists and their followers towards a satisficing approach to life and livelihood with the unfortunate outcome of compromising the generalised trust. This definitely eroded the historical roots of development. More unfortunately, the governance too had satisfied itself with the concentrated approach of satisficing a few individuals instead of addressing the generalised issues of development for the larger population.

Now what happens is that human beings behave in a path dependent way in the sense that they also follow the means which had paid off. In an otherwise negative case, there could be an atmosphere wherein the few individuals who had monopolised the satisfaction become the powerful and articulate groups in such a way that the general population become irrelevant in every socially meaningful arena of action. Something like this has happened in the case of Manipur. The model of the social grammar currently being practised in Manipur is such that one has to be a significant player of protagonists of conflict. Since all the population do not have the inclination for this, only a few specialise in this. The governance also has been following the practice of attending to the satisficing needs of these few individuals rather than adopting a society-wide development agenda. Now the relationship between this approach of the governance and the satisficing few individuals has reached such a level of social strength that the benefits of development interventions are monopolised by these few individuals. The worst part is that the convergence of interests between the individuals and the governance has been such that the general population do not have the courage to complain in the open even if their own privileges have been usurped by the connivance of the few and the persons in governance. Though it is supposedly a democracy in name, the actual practice has been one of exploitative autocracy with the voice of the larger majority finding no place in the grammar of functioning of the polity.

This is the reason why poverty removal schemes have not delivered at all, and these caused the opposite of concentration of benefits in a few hands. Now this requires certain things in place in Manipur sooner than later so that the desired generalised social outcomes are generated. First, we need a definitive governance with social-wide presence in Manipur. The absence of the reach of governance has only provided an opportunity to a select few with pseudo-reform articulations for extracting the maximum from the governance and without in any case allowing the common population to share the outcome of governance interventions. The generalised reach of governance should orient itself to addressing the development needs which could be shared by all without any hindrance. Secondly, it continually serves the interest of these people that governance remains as poor as ever for this sustains their individualised prosperity and limited social relevance. The time has come for the larger population to raise their shared voices instead of succumbing to the periodic noises of the few specialists in pseudo-conflicts. Third, the delivery mechanism of governance for any development intervention should be the primary plank of action.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/individualised-benefits-of-conflict-generalised-cost-of-conflict-and-governance-failure-the-long-term-dynamics-of-manipur-polity/