Guest Post by MONOBINA GUPTA
It is jarring, to put it mildly, that Times of India, a leading daily, engaged in a high-profile ‘Teach India’ campaign should publish a front page story mocking the unlettered. This story exhibits a strange callousness in its reporting about the very constituency of people the campaign is hoping to address…or ‘uplift’…
The story published in the TOI on December 20, smacks of arrogance as it speaks disdainfully of an unlettered woman legislator recently elected in Rajasthan’s assembly elections. Golma Devi, elected from the Mahuwa constituency is the butt of ridicule and lament in this article authored by P J Joychen. The author, it seems, cannot get over the fact that an unlettered person like Golma Devi has been elevated to the rank of a minister in the Ashok Gehlot government.
No, she is not a history sheeter; nor does she have a scam hot on her heels. She is nevertheless an offender – in the sense of ‘offending’ your ‘sensibilities’ – in the supercilious eye of the media; an object of ridicule. Her offense: her of lack of reading and writing skills.
For those who wish to ‘Teach India’, it may just be worth keeping in mind that such classist arrogance is the last thing that one expects of a ‘good teacher’.
The front-page anchor begins with a quote from Golma Devi’s husband Kirolilal Meena. “It took three days to teach her how to sign,” said the husband. In the next line the author unleashes a string of judgments on India’s ‘please and appease’ caste politics and the pitiable sight of Golma Devi’s jagged signature on the oath letter.
“But the fact that the woman had to practice putting her signature on her oath letter hasn’t come in the way of her becoming a minister in Ashok Gehlot’s Congress government, thanks to caste politics of please and appease,” says the story.
The induction into the cabinet of a woman who falters signing her name is made out to be a tragi-comic event. The article does not make even a passing critical comment on the elitist system of governance and the crippling lack of access to education and health that has become a hallmark of the lives of the poor and underprivileged. Instead it puts Golma Devi in the dock – as if she, or any person for that matter, would love to suffer the insults (such as this one) that come with not being able to read or write.
Surely the author of the report is aware that India is way behind meeting its commitment to universalisation of elementary education; that ‘lack of education’ and literacy is not always an individual failing. He us surely aware that the education offered in government and a large majority of public schools is so sub-standard that it further widens the ever yawning gap between public school, English educated and large numbers of non-privileged citizens who have to make do with low level, poor quality education. Surely he can’t be unaware of the existence of countless Golma Devis filling every corner of India. Often married off at the age of 16 or even younger they pass through life without ever having sat in a classroom.
The TOI front-page flaunts a largish picture of Golma Devi, her pallu drawn over her head, and the receiver of a telephone pressed to her ear. She is looking straight ahead with a glimmer of a smile on her face. The image, like the script of the story, delivers a judgment on the legislator. Golma Devi is no hip village belle of a ‘Siyaram’ ad – she looks rustic – the kind that makes media hounds suspicious. We are told 59-year-old MLA has been a homemaker. In the photograph she seems to clutch on to the telephone receiver like her new power toy. In a sense the image – and the way it has been framed – has already failed Golma Devi as minister and legislator.
It is as if the MLA has nothing going in her favour. What about the fact that she beat her political adversary in a tightly fought election-the fact that a large number of people voted for her? In any case, studies suggest that ordinary women panchayat members have risen to the occasion, once they have been given the responsibility. Women who were never anything but homemakers have now emerged as a new generation of rural leaders – if haltingly and hesitatingly. But that is hardly of any significance for our author.
The TOI report gets even more bizarre by the time we reach the fourth para “Gehlot, who heads a state which has just shed its ‘Bimaru’ tag and sees itself in the forefront of attracting investments and modernizing, defended the unlettered and inexperienced minister,” writes the reporter.
What does that mean? What does the reference to ‘shedding the Bimaru tag’ and inviting new investments have to do with Golma Devi being unlettered? Will the sight of a homespun Golma Devi, fumbling with her pen, will drive the ‘suited -booted’ capitalists out of the land: Flight of capital – because Golma Devi, minister, did not go to school!
Chief minister Ashok Gehlot certainly spoke sense when he reminded the reporter about former Bihar chief minister Rabri Devi and railway minister Laloo Prasad. Confounding the dark predictions of doom by pundits in the media Laloo has healed a bleeding railway ministry to robust health, though the same cannot be said about his achievements or lack of them during his tenure as Bihar chief minister. Rabri Devi too rose to the occasion once she was entrusted with the chief ministership of Bihar. Rabri Devi’s anointment as chief minister by her husband should of course be opposed, not because of her lack of education and experience but because of a perpetuation of family rule.
The TOI report points a finger at Golma Devi’s ‘inexperience.’ What about Sonia Gandhi, the high priestess of Indian politics, the Queen of dynasty politics? Or for that matter her late husband Rajiv Gandhi who waltzed from the cockpit to the prime minister’s residence at 7, Race Course. Even when we make fun of the ‘torchbearers’ of ugly dynasty politics, we are careful to not to cross the lakshman rekha. This line we can transgress only when we have a woman of ‘lesser breed and no education’ – a woman like Golma Devi on the other side.
And what about Rahul Gandhi, the ‘prince’, who got his Hindi and his politics so badly messed up that he used the word ‘break’ when he actually meant ‘liberate.’ He actually got a ‘soft’ press. At an election meeting in Uttar Pradesh the prince said the Congress always does what its says. To illustrate he said the Congress ‘broke’ (tora) Pakistan just as it had promised! The MP was referring to the liberation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan! A truly irreverent media should have made mincemeat of the ‘prince’ – instead a large section of it seriously debated the argument fed by the Congress: that the use of the word ‘break’ was part of a deliberate Congress’ electoral strategy! Just a reminder of the final outcome of the assembly polls. The Gandhi strategy seemed to have been lost on the voters. The Congress fared poorly in the elections.
Golma Devi’s story could have been treated sensitively. But then it would not have been a ‘fun’ story. Instead the reporter would have had to talk about the not so glorious status of girls and women in this land well known for child marriage and sati. At the risk of sounding ‘morbid’ I would like to point out that contextualising a story does not reduce its worth or appeal.
Joychen’s article reminded me of Phoolan Devi, the ‘Bandit Queen’ and the way the response of the chattering classes and the media to her entry into Lok Sabha in 1996. The MP who was gunned down at her residence five years later was trashed as a transgressor to the lofty Parliament – a bandit who should never have been allowed to contest elections. The exploitative and violent circumstances – played out through caste and patriarchy that turned Phoolan into an outlaw – a bandit-suddenly seemed to have been wiped out of the context. What remained was a supercilious, brahmanical judgment, seeking to bar the entry of a woman who had suffered in the hands of upper caste men and fought back. She served time for 11 years. But the media and the opinion makers wanted her to remain an ‘outcaste’ in more ways than one.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Kafila is getting into predictable positions on every issue (anti-state, anti-media). If Golma Devi can’t read a document that she’s required to sign, what meaning does she bring to her post? The question here is not about general illiteracy, it’s about an illiterate person in power. This also does not mean that literate politicians can be less corrupt, but you need to address at least some basic requirements for a person to be in the cabinet.
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sunny joseph, you seem to not get the point of anything beyond the purely obvious and banal. if you had taken the trouble read the article and the specific report that this post refers to, you would realize that you are really barking up the wrong tree…like when you suddenly began telling us how the workers and aam aadmi felt so comfortable and ‘owned’ Taj hotel?
at one level, all your positions are the most horribly predictable, aren’t they? but just by the way, do you have any idea of how governments are run and how many different kinds of skills are required to do so? signing files is the least of them. even the most literate and indeed highly educated but novice minister can be taken for a ride by the bureaucracy – for tbe briefs to every case that comes up for signing are actually prepared in advance by a series of babus. you have to know how to ask the right questions and smell where possible problems might lie or where foul is being done – and all this requires another kind of capacity. and if the government functions as a team and the chief minister takes the responsibility to ensure that, illiteracy hardly remains the only issue.
but let that pass. you do realize, don’t you, that your elitism is the common thread of your comments and that is the really predictable thing in the world? you can bet that 99 per cent of english educated will say these things, always, without thinking any further than their limited common sense will allow them.
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Thanks for a fantastic post Monobina. I think we will see more and more elite hand-wringing as the political spaces becomes more fragmented. This is somewhat the same disgusting snootiness that accompanies any discussion of ‘merit’ and caste. But more interesting I think figures like Golma Devi force a rethink of classical liberal understandings of the prerequisites of democratic life in which certain sorts of ‘literate’ individuals will come together to produce rationally founded government. Exactly the sort of nonsensical chimeras the elite loves to place before us as an aspirational political space.
It would be interesting to think of the historical trajectories through which ‘education’ comes to acquire a certain overweaning value in the post-Independence generation which has to do with English opening access to the job market, bueracracy etc, and how in the last 15 years with the economic and political space opening up in radical ways ‘education’ is increasingly coming to be both more and less valuable. Maybe the breast-beating around education is the last gasp of a class that knows its time in history is nearing closure….
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Yabasta: I never said the aam aadmi ‘owned’ the Taj Hotel. Your sense of outrage seems to overwhelm common sense. I said there’s no reason to assume they don’t feel a sense of belonging there too. A space means different things to different people; we don’t need to assume that just because one is a staff member, one feels exploited.
As far as Golma Devi goes, isn’t easier for the babus to fool an illiterate minister, rather than a literate one?
But if you are comfortable with an illiterate puppet in office, well, who am I to argue? I guess your ideal world would consist of Mayawati as Prime Minister, Rabri Devi as Home Minister and Golma Devi as Finance Minister.
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>>As far as Golma Devi goes, isn’t easier for the >>babus to fool an illiterate minister, rather than >>a literate one?
dear sunny, do u know there s someone called manmohan, an economist with lots and lots of research publications and world bank hangover rules us and do u know having been cleverly fooled by babus.. (ask anyone close to him for clarifications…i have my own)
Golma Devi must be 100 % better than manmohan….
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By the way, Sunny Joseph, I just read your comment. You say:
Is getting into? We have emblazoned it on our banner ‘Run from Big Media’. Precisely so that you may know what you are in for, before you enter. We don’t force people to come and read us!
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oi sunny oye…mayawati holds a b.ed degree and was actually a school teacher before she got into politics. shows how much you know eh? your elitist biases run so deep that it never occurs to you that someone like her might actually have an education much less countenance someone without an education wielding power…
and she might have been called many things but “puppet” is not an epithet anyone who has followed her career in politics would use for her. so maybe its you who is in need pf some education and i suggest you go back to political science 101 before you canvass your ignorance to the world…
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oye oye
this bias always occur to our “upper” casteist milieus.. it s like Gandhi asking the so naively abt Ambedkar; “is that guy really a Dalit?” (the post-modern shtyle)
the whole issue of marginality of Dalit/bahujan that has trangrssd colonila/postcolonial milieu could be seen freezed in the idiotic statement of Gandhi.. unfortunately there are many elitist followers for gandhi even today..
hail gandhi for sunnys..
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Everybody’s pretty worked up, eh? :) I won’t comment on Mayawati’s BEd degree.
Aditya, I’m disappointed that the site defines itself as anti-something. I mean, the pursuit of truth should be above these narrow definitions. I like much of the stuff that’s here, but to implicitly assume an anti-state or anti-media position smacks of bias, and is inherently counter-productive. I have been part of several newsrooms (print and internet), and I know for a fact that it’s rare that there is a deliberate Capitalist/ Right Wing strategy in covering every news event, as most liberals might assume.
Take Kashmir, for instance. Even before the elections were announced, I had a feeling Kafila would take an anti-election line… and I was not wrong. You even headlined the post: “A cruel joke called elections in Kashmir”. Now, from the post it’s obvious that army jawans tried to intimidate a family into going to the polling booth. I do not condone that, but this doesn’t mean the elections overall were a ‘cruel joke’, more so as 62% of Kashmiris turned out to vote. There is also a difference between asking people to vote, and actually voting on their behalf. The attendance might or might not have been a comment on self-determination, but that’s a different issue.
The point is, you need to reflect on whether Kafila is getting into pre-determined positions (on Islamist terror, Maoist violence, Pakistan, Kashmir, etc), and whether these positions get both sides of the story.
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I think it is rather unfortunate how reader participation is being actively discouraged (in this post, if not on this blog). Sunny Joseph makes a valid point. While I might not agree with it, I still believe it is valid.
The only two people who have anything pertinent to say are Aditya and Aarti. (Aditya about Kafila’s stated POV being anti-statist and anti-big media; and Aarti on Mayawati’s qualifications.) Still, the way even those two put their points across is disappointing.
Aditya’s comment seems to imply a “those who disagree with us needn’t bother reading”. You _don’t_ want an echo chamber. You _want_ dialogue, as long as it is fruitful.
In Aarti’s comment the “before you canvass your ignorance to the world…” is completely unnecessary (apart from being incorrect usage of the verb “canvass”). Perhaps Sunny placed Mayawati as PM precisely because of her B.Ed. qualifications. Who knows? Even if he made a faux pas because of ignorance, there is no need to be rude about it.
It’s strange how illiberal a liberal space can be.
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Dear Anon,
Except for my clarification of Kafila position there is nothing in any of the comments above that are from ‘administrators’ that should warrant your comment that ‘reader participation is being actively discouraged’. Some of the comments you refer to are from other readers and surely good liberals like you (or Sunny) should have the stomach for it. You can’t criticize and expect to be above criticism, can you?
By the way, Sunny, there is no Kafila line on Kashmir or on any other matter. Shivam’s post gives us one picture that you – who so care for both sides of the story – should ideally welcome, as (to the best of my knowledge), this side has been completely blacked out. Thus Shivam draws attention to a Wall Street Journal report (the other side has to come from somewhere else, so objective is our media)! If it is anybody’s line, Mr Joseph, it is the Wall Street Journal’s and we deem it our duty to present all such blacked out reports in the interests of ‘truth’.
This is not to say, of course, that we believe that this is the only truth about the Kashmir elections. In fact, we do intend to follow up with more stuff and we do take seriously the fact that, despite all this, the militant boycott call has been at least partially rebuffed. But that is a claim that requires more than publishing visuals of long queues outside polling booths…for we now know how those visuals can be produced.
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Mayawati has not only a BEd but also a law degree from Delhi University. I was actually going to write a comment here that I hear all the time that Mayawati is not ‘educated’, which is far from the truth. Before I got time do so, sunny joseph showed us his class bias!
To both sunny joseph and anon: The views expressed by Kafila authors and guest writers are their own and not that of Kafila. Kafila is not an MNC or an NGO or a political party that it needs to have a ‘stand’ on everything. We are a collective of bloggers, why must we have a ‘party line’?
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The discussion here has gone from Golma Devi to Kashmir to the liberal space of Kafila. Aditya, if Kafila does not take a line on Kashmir, why is it that the post was headlined “A Cruel Joke called elections in Kashmir”? After all, the WSJ report was a fairly objective piece and did not mention anything about a joke (it was headlined ‘A new tack in Kashmir’). In other words, you used the WSJ article to propagate your own idea that the elections were a cruel joke. But let that pass.
The posts you have chosen generally are along the lines of “look how the Indian nation-state and its army are trampling the aspirations of Kashmiris”, linking this, of course, with most acts of terror in India. The most well-known articulator of this argument is Arundhati Roy. I’m not sure if there has been a serious discussion in liberal forums on what ‘azadi’ might eventually come to mean. In the absence of the Indian army, will there be greater jihadi activity in the valley, as in the rest of Pakistan? (Swat has already fallen to the Taliban.) Will Indian Kashmir go the way of PoK with its terror camps and its repression of women? Will China, with its expansionist designs, aim to get Kashmir under its influence? In other words, will an independent Kashmir manage to maintain its ‘azadi’ given the aggressive politics of its neighbours? Of course, the Indian liberal will say that in the absence of the Indian army, the jihadis will melt away because they won’t have cause to fight! (It’s another matter that they might go around throwing acid on the faces of girls who won’t wear the hijab.) For all your demonisation of the Indian army, you must remember that in every instance, it is Pakistan that fuelled the trouble — most recently with its unprovoked occupation of Kargil. The average Kashmiri has suffered from both the army and the militants, but I wonder if the solution (‘azadi’) would be worse than the ailment. The elections are thus a way forward.
I guess it’s politically incorrect to raise these issues, for then one stands to be branded as a ‘right-winger’/ ‘hawk’ or an ‘elitist snob’. But it’s politically correct for the Indian liberal to link the murder of innocent people in Mumbai with Indian army atrocities in Kashmir.
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You win, Sunny, if that is what satisfies you. Some people must always have the last word. It does not seem to matter what the other has to say. May we now, with or without your permission, close this discussion thread here? At least for the time being? It is clear that you are really objective and care for both ‘sides of the story’ as all your comments eloquently show. Any discerning reader can easily see that…By publishing them, we have now adequate representation of ‘both sides’. Thanks!
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