Confusion Now Hath Made His Masterpiece

We can only hope that the inept handling of the Pathankot terror attack is the worst breach of national security and dignity that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP can inflict on the nation. However, the progressive scale of ineptitude that has been on display doesn’t give much hope.

For too long, it was not clear if all the terrorists had been taken out. Indian Express reported there was a blast even while defense minister Parrikar arrived at the base. Before that:

• The finance minister got into the act saying the siege was over; his statement was followed by reports of more gunfire.
• The home minister put out a tweet announcing the end of the attack and then deleted it.
• The prime minister was purveying wisdom on yoga and Hinduism.
• The defense minister was in Goa, meddling in its seaside politics.

Maybe the terrorists died laughing?

With the BJP, garish spectacle triumphs over quiet diplomacy. In February 1999, Atal Behari Vajpayee took a bus to Lahore with the famous Bollywood actor Dev Anand in tow and signed the Lahore Declaration. In May that year, India faced the Kargil war. With Modi, the Pathankot terror attack came just a few days after his PR stopover in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media appeared clueless. It reported every leak from the multiple agencies in charge, sowing confusion all around.Television news, now bigger and better than in 1999, simply passed off everything as breaking news. The more “intrepid,”not wanting to dig and delve into the hard story, went after the human angle: interviewing grieving relatives of the soldiers who were killed, calling them “bravehearts” like medieval Scots and “martyrs” like Islamic fundamentalists.

The newspapers were no better: they simply bought whatever line the government put out and played up the sentimental angle of sacrifice for the nation. They could not or would not distinguish between reports on the ground from the disinformation being put out by government sources.

In the event, the social media, some uncompromising publications like The Hindu and The Telegraph and a number of hardnosed commentators nailed the truth. Many questioned the national security adviser’s decision to deploy the Defense Security Corps comprised of retired soldiers to assist the National Security Guard at Pathankot. There was widespread derision of Mr Modi’s preoccupation with yoga and Hindu temples.

Mr Modi and his party have failed every test or serious governance so far. Remember: climate doesn’t change, people grow older.  Or Ganesha’s elephant head is proof there were plastic surgeons in those ancient days. Or India can never abuse nature:earth is our mother; moon is our “mama” (mother’s brother), echoing a popular Bollywood song of the 1950s.

This government is also demonstrably incompetent. Never mind Pathankot, even in Parliament, where it commands a majority in the lower house, Mr Modi has been unable to get anything done.Plus he suffered significant political defeats in Delhi and Bihar.Now there’s virtually no hope the BJP can win a majority in the upper house through 2019. As such, the first-ever majority government since the 1980s finds itself stymied.

Mr Modi’sbelligerence swayed many away from their normal predilections to vote for him in 2014; hence the majority. Cocky in victory, he denied Leader of Opposition status to Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress. As such, his no-holds-barred approach permitted no negotiation and compromise with the opposition, a sine qua non in a democracy.

In just 18 months, he has shown he is simply not prime ministerial material. Never mind his obvious shortcomings, including gaffes about the flag in Japan and the national anthem in Russia, his cabinet is a distressingly low on intellect and ethics.

The much-admired campaign in 2014 beguiled the electorate: there was dog-whistle rhetoric about Hindutva; a slanderous paid media campaign against a government that delivered a decade of unprecedented prosperity and social welfare; a quixotic promise of a golden age. 

There’s one more thing in play: during the 2008 Bombay terror attack, Mr Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, showed up outside the Oberoi Hotel to castigate the government as soft and directionless. This was while security forces were still battling the terrorists.  In stark contrast, there has been no dissenting opposition voice in the matter of Pathankot.

Mr Modi’s future suddenly seems to be limited. The narrative of good governance is shown up as“a tale told by idiots, who strut and fret their hour upon the stage, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

(An edited version of this post will appear in DailyO.in, January 2016.)

US Presidential Election: The rise of a millennial left?

Bernie Sanders is the first avowedly socialist presidential candidate in American politics. Whether or not he wins the Democratic Party’s nomination and goes on to become President, his emergence signals a major ideological change in global politics. The credible challenge he has mounted on the global stage has hastened the end of the fraying Reagan-Thatcher model of laissez-faire economics. The main reason free-market economics came under a cloud was because it spawned the Washington Consensus, a set of policy prescriptions proffered to developing countries by Western politicians, government officials, scholars and executives of multinational corporations and multilateral institutions.

The prescriptions were actually very sensible but not the inflexible approach of those pushing them. The Washington Consensus stirred opposition from the Left-dominated bureaucracy and academies in developing countries, especially India, and around the world. It was disparaged as “neoliberalism” and “market fundamentalism.”

Early protests were led in the US during the mid-1990s by a coalition of NGOs, labor unions, student groups and assorted pacifists and anarchists. They initially targeted meetings of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), a group of Pacific Rim countries that advocated free trade in the region. Fast forward to 1999, similar protests rocked the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. These were on a much larger scale and immediately drew global attention.

From what came to be known as “The Battle of Seattle” to the Occupy Movement seemed a logical extension of the activism against globalization. The 2008 global economic meltdown that led to the bailout of large transnational banks was the spark that lit the fire. Starting out of New York City in September 2011, the Occupy protest spread to 951 cities in 82 countries. Its method was simply to take over chunks of real estate in vital areas of major cities, much like the Arab Spring protesters. A similar “Indignants” movement erupted in Spain that October to challenge the government’s “austerity measures” including welfare cuts, joblessness and changes in labor laws. The Indignants movement counted for nearly seven million participants.

The scope of the protests grew to encompass not just “neoliberal” policies and multi-national corporations but the entire phenomenon of globalization and targeted capitalism itself.  Pointing to the growing economic disparities in the world, the demonstrators used a catchy slogan: “We are the 99 %!” This was reinforced by a report issued in October 2011 by the US Congressional Budget Office which said, among other things, that the income of the top one per cent of the population grew 275 per cent in the three decades since the late 1970s. The slogan was instantly popular; that’s because concerns about the distribution of wealth go back a long way to the late 19^th century to Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist who established the 80-20 principle based on his observation that 80 per cent of Italy’s land was by 20 per cent of the population.

For example, in the US, distribution of wealth was fairly stable from the 1940s through 1980, income gains remained roughly the same; after that the gap widened to where today the income of the top one per cent shows 200 per cent growth whereas the bottom 20 per cent report just a 48 per cent increase. Worse, the middle 60 per cent have to be satisfied with just a 40 per cent growth in income.

What research could likely show in understanding the Sanders phenomenon is that the middle 60 per cent, solid supporters of the status quo, have taken a beating in the globalized economy and bought into the 99% slogan. These are level-headed, middle-class people, the bedrock of support for the “American way of life.” Clearly, they won’t buy into the maddening Donald Trump war cry of “making America great again” that appeals largely to the working class. Looking for “change they can believe in,” an aspiration Barack Obama gifted voters; they seem unmoved by Hillary Clinton’s experience and worried by her ties to multinational companies and Wall Street.

This unrest seems only to grow. Just in the past week, France has been rocked by “Nuit Debout” (Standing Night), a massive protest against the Hollande government’s proposal to amend labor laws and promote business-friendly hire-and-fire practices. Echoing the Occupy movement, the French demonstrations have spread to nearly 30 cities involving anywhere from 400,000 to a million people. Already, with the debut of the hash tag #nuitdebout and a television link, TV Debout, live from the Place de la Republique, which the protesters have occupied for over a week, the message has broadened in scope to include a revolt against capitalism.

In mainstream as well as digital media, you can sense a sharp Left turn. The difference is there is no Soviet Union, the orthodoxy; only a growing indignation against inequality, the demonization of the corporate world and a steadfast belief that capitalism is an exploitative system. The current mood is eloquently captured by the slogan of Spain’s Indignants: “We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers.”

Into this souped-up ambience of protest, enter 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, junior US senator from Vermont. Three things are noteworthy about his ascent to highs never before allowed to professed socialists: one, in all the primaries so far, he has claimed more than 70 per cent of the vote of voters between the ages of 19 and 35; two, his emergence is every bit as radical as that of Obama, the first black presidents; at 75, he is five years older than Ronald Reagan when he was elected; he is the first Jewish candidate. Is it any wonder that he’s giving Hillary Clinton nightmares: first woman president pales in comparison to Sanders’ firsts? The third feature is that the platform on which Sanders is articulating a socialist message is unprecedented. It is simply the biggest, most prominent, most widely recognized in the world: the US presidential election campaign.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com, April 8, 2016.)

RSS/BJP’s losing ticket

Universities are the swiftest elevators to social standing; they provide students with the academic wherewithal to find a place for themselves in the world. Higher education also unlocks opportunities: in the professions, academy, high councils of society and the state. A college education for the poor and the working class is a release from daily-wage survival; for the middle class, it offers a vaulting opportunity to achievement and accomplishment; for the upper class, it’s an endorsement of wealth and status.

In the West, especially in the United States, universities have long been propagators of knowledge, innovation and progressive ideas on society and culture. They tend to be busy centres of reform movements that often dovetail into larger groups campaigning for civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, environment protection and human rights.

In India, universities have been what a US professor, my graduate guide, once called “elite selection programs” in which bright students quickly learn that performance and conformism can help them vault to choice corporate and civil service jobs or to universities abroad. They have served also as ritualistic ashrams for long-suffering young people shepherded onto the right path by authoritarian family structures. Such graduates become part of middle management in the private sector, university teachers and self-employed agents of business and financial services. Universities also play a somewhat unsavoury role as factories for misfits who become the cannon fodder of political parties, trade unions and lower civil services.

The word university is not easily applied in the Indian context because it’s drawn from the Latin root meaning “whole”. Whatever else they may do, universities here do not provide a holistic experience, fragmented as they are by caste, religion, ideology but mostly by poor teachers, irrelevant coursework and cursory examinations. They do not offer the kind of insights into the humanities or exposure to the sciences as do their counterparts in the West.

Nevertheless, universities in India have changed from enclaves of elites to highly politicised islands in a society that has been in upheaval since the economic reforms of 1991. A growing consciousness of rights and entitlements, coupled with higher incomes and better opportunities, have transformed the landscape outside varsity campuses. With people demanding instant pieces of the pie, an environment of growing lawlessness and crime posed major political challenges which governments found insurmountable. Between 1996-2004 there were six governments.

Ten years of the UPA government (2004-2014) saw unprecedented and sustained economic growth. The size of the national pie increased dramatically and with it, the number of claimants. Bruised by a no-holds-barred battle over the US civil nuclear deal in 2008 with its own Left ally, the UPA government began to let things slip. Though it was re-elected with a bigger majority in 2009, the bond that provided the base strength, the understanding between the government and the Congress party, began to fray.

In the event, the opposition parties succeeded in rabble-rousing their way to power. In May 2014, the first majority government in 30 years took office; the first one backed by the RSS, an unelected and shadowy group that neither participated in the freedom movement nor accepted the Constitution and its symbols including the flag and the national anthem.

Though it describes itself a ‘cultural’ organisation, the RSS has an overtly political agenda. It’s spurring the BJP government to eradicate all traces of the liberal nationalism that won the country freedom from British colonial rule, and replace it with a Hindu majoritarian order. In practice, the plan is to shred the thinning sliver of civility that has won this country much admiration. India is an example of how despite poverty and a hundred socio-economic ills, it has preserved a liberal democracy that cherishes freedom, rule of law and universal adult franchise.

Whatever their faults universities are crucibles of liberal values. True, they tend to be illiberal on a spectrum of economic issues. But on all matters of equity, justice, compassion, they stand out as islands of liberalism. Over the past decade, the RSS’ student wing ABVP has made its presence felt on campuses to take Left student organisations head-on. It is at the forefront of the current controversy. In seeking to further its agenda, the RSS probably feels universities are both strongholds and weakest links.

To win support, the saffron clan seeks to pin tags on universities: bastions of left liberals, covens of anti-national elements, fornicators, beefeaters, what have you. Meanwhile, the BJP government thinks it has stalled all opposition to this by tying it up in legal knots, where the litmus test is: do you approve of anti-national groupings?

In the end, without resorting to authoritarian rule, the BJP is on a losing ticket. The world over, in constitutional democracies, universities and students have always come out on top in confrontation with governments. To understand that, though, you have to read history, not forever try to revise it.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://http://www.educationworld.in, March 9, 2016.)

Modi is going the Nixon way with JNU crackdown

Contemplating the ham-handed response of the Modi government to the student protest at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), I was reminded of the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University in the spring of 1970. For the record, the Ohio National Guard fired Jallianwala-Bagh-style, 67 rounds in 13 seconds, at a crowd of student protesters, killing four and injuring many more. A few days preceding the horrific events of May 4, president Richard M Nixon authorised the invasion by US troops of Cambodia. The students were protesting this in particular but also the entire war in Indochina (Indochinese Peninsula).

A divisive figure, Nixon became a hate object on university campuses. The realisation dawned on me when a few years later, I enrolled in graduate journalism school some 130 miles south of Kent State and attended my first-ever rock concert. It featured Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, who brought down the house with their tour de force, Ohio, whose lyrics ran: "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming…four dead in Ohio."

Also read: Indian universities need dissent to stay alive

The campus killing followed revelations in 1969 of US military atrocities in My Lai, a South Vietnam village in which US soldiers massacred nearly 500 civilians including women and children. The horror story prompted a significant dip in public support for the war. Plus the reinstitution of the draft lottery that year disrupted suburban homes as youth were forcibly enlisted for a tour of military duty in Vietnam.

In retrospect, the May 1970 Kent State killings proved to be the turning point; they brought Middle America face to face with state-sanctioned violence. In the event, opposition to the war snowballed.

Nixon grew desperate and paranoid about the groundswell of hostility not just to the war but to him personally. He made a series of missteps including orchestrating a huge cover-up to obstruct investigations into the burglary at the Watergate complex headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. Initially, however, Kent State and the previous government decisions seemed not to make much of a difference to Nixon's popularity; he went on to win a second term by a landslide in 1972.

Chuffed by his electoral victory, Nixon failed to read the signs of public revulsion spreading to the "silent majority" that he and his supporters frequently invoked as proof of electoral invincibility. Days into his second stint, Nixon had to confront incessant revelations about the Watergate scandal and then in the fall of 1973, he had to deal with a major international economic challenge: the OPEC oil embargo brought on by his administration's support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Syria and Egypt.

As his popularity plummeted, Nixon was threatened with impeachment by the US Congress. In August 1974, he resigned in disgrace.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems set on a similar course. It started in 2015 with revelations of the scandals surrounding Lalit Modi and the intervention with British authorities on his behalf by external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj; then came the controversy over the cricket impresario's links with Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje and the deadly Vyapam case involving Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan; the prime minister maintained a sphinx-like silence in the probable belief that once the headlines are past, people will forget about these scandals.

Also read: BJP's patriotism or 'anti-national', Modi wants you to choose

But the scandals seem continuously to unfold. The protests by students at Pune's Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) over the appointment of an RSS apparatchik as director continued from June through January. In the interim, there was the murder of a Muslim man in a UP village, Dadri, by a gang of right-wing thugs on the suspicion he possessed and ate beef. Then there was the brouhaha over the beef ban in Haryana. The campaign by Mr Modi and his lieutenant Amit Shah in Bihar also resulted in loss of public support and the subsequent reverse in the Assembly election.

In September last year, the Modi regime was rocked by reports that prominent literary personalities started to return awards to the Sahitya Akademi to protest the murder of a Karnataka scholar by Hindutva goons.

More recent is the controversy over the suicide by a Dalit doctoral student at Hyderabad University over the stoppage of his fellowship money and expulsion from the hostel along with five other Dalit students. It was widely seen as an affirmation of caste discrimination practiced by adherents of Hindutva, the rambunctious assertion of religious bigotry.

Almost immediately thereafter, the government became implicated inthe JNU imbroglio that resulted in the arrest of the president of the students union. It is spinning into a culture war, much like what happened in the US under Nixon. The BJP's goon squads running amok and the intemperate and confrontationist rhetoric of saffron politicians have created disquiet in middle-class and upwardly mobile India where education and careers are indispensable and essential cultural values.

Also read - JNU Crackdown: 4 powerful voices you can't ignore

By taking their stentorian pseudo-nationalist agenda to academic campuses, Modi's Hindu fundamentalists are scaring the parents and wards of students for whom good grades and concomitant good jobs are a holy grail. Such disruptions are hugely unwelcome in the lives of such people whose first and foremost goal in life is to see their children faring well in the groves of academe and later in the job market.

Finally in a striking denouement of the platform on which Modi swept to power in May 2014 comes the news that the Modi government has revived the $2 billion tax claim against Vodafone, the UK-based telecom firm. This is while the case is in international arbitration over the government's retrospective changes in tax laws.

With this impressive list of faux pas, Mr Modi's popularity may now have shrunk to the hard-core base of Hindutva true believers. In the past few days, his party has been rocked by high-profile resignations. The writing, as Nixon discovered 42 years before him, is on the wall.

(An edited version of this post will appear in Education World, February 2016.)