Monthly Archives: February 2011

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Debates, Government

The myth of India’s Hajj subsidy: Muhammad Farooq

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Guest post by MUHAMMAD FAROOQ

Recently the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutional validity of extending subsidy on air fare to the Hajj Pilgrims. This year Rs.280 Crores were reportedly spent by the Government of India to subsidise the air fare of one lakh pilgrims. This amounts to a subsidy of Rs.28000/- per pilgrim. The subsidy provided to the pilgrims has understandably generated a lot of debate within political and social circles in India. While the right wing political parties, when not in power, consider it as an unnecessary appeasement of Indian Muslims, the governments formed by any party have always seen it as a necessary expenditure to help Muslims perform their religious obligation of Hajj.

Since I have also performed my Hajj this year, I decided to do some quick calculations to check the veracity of the tall claims made by the GoI and the Hajj Committee regarding the subsidy amount (see box). The results were quite shocking. I checked with one of the service providers —‘makemytrip.com’— and it showed up the Saudi Airline’s fare of a little over Rs.26000/- for a return Delhi-Jeddah ticket with a gap of around forty days. It was amazing to find that the total airfare of Rs.26,000 for a hajj pilgrimage is even lower than the subsidy amount  of Rs.28,000 thousand which is allegedly paid by GoI to airlines to subsidise the “high cost” of the air tickets. Continue reading The myth of India’s Hajj subsidy: Muhammad Farooq →

Centre watch, Movements, Politics, Violence/Conflict

Talking to ULFA: Assam’s Peace Myths and Reality: Tanmoy Sharma

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Guest post by TANMOY SHARMA

Last week, when an eight member delegation of the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) returned to Guwahati after the first round of peace-talks with the central government in New Delhi, the response in Assam is a mixed bag of emotions. Arabinda Rajkhowa, the ULFA chairman who led the delegation, while addressing the press, said that they had been assured of an honourable solution to the three decade long Assam conflict by the Prime Minister.  Earlier, on 10th February the ULFA made history by coming to the talks table in New Delhi for the first time with no firm pre set conditions on its agenda.  It is understood as of now, that no substantial talks would begin before the Assam assembly elections which are expected to be held in April-May this year.  However  this ‘familiarisation exercise’ of the centre with one of India’s most influential and violent separatist outfits at such a crucial time is a hugely significant move in contemporary history of  the insurgency-hit election bound Assam. Continue reading Talking to ULFA: Assam’s Peace Myths and Reality: Tanmoy Sharma →

Capitalism, Left watch, Mirror Worlds, Politics, Scams

Hypocrisy beneath hammer-and-sickle sign: Sankar Ray

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Guest post by SANKAR RAY

Sankar Ray is a veteran journalist based in Kolkata

[This article presents the sordid tale of land acquisitions for the New Rajarhat Township and the involvement of important CPI(M) personnel in this game. One of them, the key protagonist of the story below, was mentioned by Pranab Mukherjee in parliament yesterday, taunting the CPI(M) over its claims to be a crusader against corruption, arousing the ire of its MPs. – AN]

Calling it a ‘shocking experience”, after a visiting a segment of oustees in the Narmada Valley in mid- August 2002,  Sarla Maheswari, then CPI(M) member of Rajya Sabha member told the media – as if her heart bled, and with revolutionary conscience ablaze:  “How can a development project create a disaster in the lives of the most downtrodden tribal people and also thousands of farmers of a huge area? How can it ravage their lives without any protest by mainstream political parties?  Truth indeed is stranger than fiction as the same fire-eating  ‘communist MP’s demagoguery is now in a hot soup as I-T sleuths raided  at  her residence, as a sequel to  detection of an unaccounted sum of Rs 31 crores and 26 benami companies, belonging to the Canopy Group whose chairman is her husband Arun Maheswari. And the CPI (M) brass at the Muzaffar Ahmed Bhavan, Bengal CPI(M)’s state headquarters keep up their recalcitrance, not even demanding a ‘show cause’ of the cash-rich ‘comrade’ . Former MP and CPI(M) CC member Mohd Selim, a spokesman of state party leadership too, ruled out any punitive step until specific indictment by the I-T department, leave alone criticizing the shady land transactions in the controversial New Town project at Rajarhat fully with the knowledge of ‘comrade Sarla Maheswari’  and her family.

Continue reading Hypocrisy beneath hammer-and-sickle sign: Sankar Ray →

Culture, Frontiers, Identities, Language

10% Anthology: Tarun Bhartiya

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A review by TARUN BHARTIYA

The Oxford Anthology of Writings From North-East India : Poetry and Essays
Edited by Tilottoma Misra
Oxford University Press
New Delhi, 2011, 332 Pages / Rs. 595 ISBN 0-19-806749-6

If you are on the marginalisation trip, and India’s North East is your illicit high, you should be worried. In the last ten years, trying to make up for the dark fifty years of Indian ignorance, anthologies of literature from the region have begun to appear almost annually.

But before I get accused of an inside job, a disclosure that I am loathe to make:

I know many of the poets (some of whose biographies smell of Shillong) who feature in The Oxford Anthology of Writings From North-East India : Poetry and Essays. We share little magazines, anthologies, dark bye-lanes of love, anger, feuds, booze, and journeys to find our next fix.  So, I promise to dull my taste and leash my judgment. And only occasionally lapse into pointless gossip. Continue reading 10% Anthology: Tarun Bhartiya →

Countryside, Everyday Life, Government, Law, Mirror Worlds, Violence/Conflict

What do the Maoists want?

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The media has by and large focused on the Maoist demand of release of some of their own in exchange of the Malkangiri collector and junior engineer. The list of the total 8 of 14 demands of the Maoists that the Orissa government has agreed to makes for interesting reading:

(1) Orissa government will write to Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to take action on the extremists demand for release of Maoist central committee members Sheela di (jailed in Jharkhand) and Padma (in Chhattisgarh) owing to their ill-health; (2) ST status for the Konda Reddy and Nukadora communities categorized as OBCs; (3) stopping the multi-purpose Polavaram project of Andhra Pradesh; (4) ‘pattas’ (record of rights) to tribals dispossessed of their land in Malkangiri and Koraput; (5) irrigation in Maribada and Maniamkonda villages in Malkangiri; (6) compensation based on HC order to Tadangi Gangulu and Ratanu Sirika who died of disease allegedly due to torture; (7) relevant laws for mining operations in Mali and Deomali bauxite mines; (8) minimum displacement of tribals and adequate compensation. [ToI]

Bad ideas, Excavation, Media politics, Violence/Conflict

Are Ikhwanis back in Kashmir?

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A report by Pradeep Thakur in the Times of India today has stunned a lot of people in Kashmir. The report says that the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Indian Army are reviving Ikhwan units in Kashmir to quell the anti-India movement. Some Kashmiris living in Kashmir feared the era of Ikhwani terror and blackmail will be back. The stunning bit is how openly the effort of the MHA and the Indian Army is being acknowledged in creating a renegade political pro-India militia force in today’s political environment in Kashmir. What is not surprising is that this is happening at all, because it has happened before. At worst, this seemed like a stupid move to publicise an overt political operation of the sort Kashmir has seen no dearth of.

The story, titled, “Two pro-India parties floated in J&K with Army, MHA help” by Pradeep Thakur reads: Continue reading Are Ikhwanis back in Kashmir? →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Ecology/Environment, Media politics, Movements

The Answer My Friend, is Blowin’ in the Wind…

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Even as the western and Indian media go ecstatic over the new democratic upsurges in the Arab world, something else has begun to happen. The Tunisian ‘virus’ that spread rapidly via Egypt, is now finding newer and equally hospital bodies elsewhere – that is to say, bodies made vulnerable by the years of plunder by corporate capital. Now, what precisely, is the connection between corporate capital and the Arab ‘jasmine revolutions’? On the face of it, nothing. However, as the state legislature in Wisconsin sat considering a bill to severely curb state workers’ rights of collective bargaining a few days ago, thousands of state employees descended on the building, virtually occupying it.

And as protests against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights entered the fifth day, the support for the movement has begun to expand. Demonstrators were joined by union supporters from Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as national union leaders and civil rights advocate the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

An interesting article by Dan La Botz, “A New American Workers’ Movement Has Begun“, underlines the connections of the ongoing struggle in Wisconsin with the Arab virus!

Continue reading The Answer My Friend, is Blowin’ in the Wind… →

Bad ideas, Culture, Everyday Life, Identities, Violence/Conflict

Teaching Harmony, Practicing Disharmony

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This was presented as a paper at a symposium on Peace Education organised as part of National Conference on Indian Psychology, on 6 February 2011 at the India International Centre.

This piece seeks to underscore the cleavages that exist in our society, explore the foundations upon which the edifice of intolerance has risen and to look at the tools, like education for peace and harmony, with which we try to dismantle this citadel of intolerance.

Peace education, you would agree, cannot be confined merely to teaching the message of Love and brotherhood, our text books have been teaching this message for as long as I remember and my memories of our text books go back, at least to my senior school days in the mid sixties, almost 45 years ago.

If telling students in their classes that we should all love each other because we are all Indians and that we are all equal was enough then we would not have many of the problems that we are confronting today. Continue reading Teaching Harmony, Practicing Disharmony →

Capitalism, Debates, Movements, Politics

“dissenting dialogues” on Egypt, Sri Lanka and other debates

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The editorial and the list of articles in the dissenting dialogues Issue No 2, February 2011 are posted below. The entire issue can be downloaded as a pdf file from the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum website.

Editorial

As the second issue of dissenting dialogues goes to press, we join in worldwide celebrations of the ongoing democratic revolution in Egypt, itself sparked off by an uprising in Tunisia. The Egyptian uprising, which has tremendous regional and possibly global consequences, came against a background of simmering unrest directed at a dictator who presided over a brutal, authoritarian regime. This regime was distinguished by its incarceration and torture not only of its own dissidents but of prisoners “renditioned” to it by the CIA, the denial of basic democratic rights on the pretext of fighting Islamism, and rising youth unemployment and inflation.

Although the timing and form of Egypt’s popular revolt could not have been predicted, an examination of the recent history of Egypt contextualises the forces at work. For a start, we cannot avoid looking at the recent history of neoliberalism in Egypt, its relationship to the authoritarianism of President Hosni Mubarak’s government, and the regime’s relationship to imperialism. The post-war history of Egypt also charts and indeed defines the historical trajectory of Third World sovereignty. Egypt’s revolt has to be understood in the context of the progressive socialist, anti-colonial struggle for national self-determination of the Bandung era from the 1950s until the liberalisation of the economy in the 1970s, the International Monetary Fund’s “restructuring” in the early 1990s, and the recent capitulation to the accumulation strategy of global finance capital.
Continue reading “dissenting dialogues” on Egypt, Sri Lanka and other debates →

Debates, Movements

National Alliance of People’s Movements: Resolution on LGBTQ issues

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We oppose persecution and discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender orientation in all formsand strive towards full social and political equality of all individuals who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,Transgendered, Intersex and Queer (LGBTQ).

While welcoming the July 2nd 2009 judgment of the Delhi high court to decriminalize homosexuality NAPM recognizes that the LGBTQ community continues to be discriminated against in schools, colleges, workspaces,homes, the streets and before the law. We affirm that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate andcannot be consciously changed and we oppose attempts to convert LGBTQ individuals into heterosexuals orforce them to conform to dominant notions of masculinity or femininity on the grounds of morality, religion ornature. Continue reading National Alliance of People’s Movements: Resolution on LGBTQ issues →

Debates, Everyday Life, Genders, Sex, Theory

The disappearing body and feminist thought

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Presented at conference organized by  Department of English (Delhi University)  February 14, 2011. The title of the  conference was “Postfeminist Postmortems?  Gender, Sexualities and Multiple  Modernities”.

Cross-posted on Critical Encounters

To paraphrase Anthony Appiah’s famous and oft-quoted question – Is the post of postfeminist the post of postmortem? That is, as in postmortem, does “post” mean definitively over, after, having transcended, gone beyond? To those who would answer “yes”, those privileged young women who float through their empowered lives in the wake of over a century of feminist struggles but disown their own heritage, to them I can only say – I’ll be a post-feminist in post-patriarchy. Or – not for a long time yet, baby.

But my answer to that question is “no”. I understand the post of postfeminism in the sense that Laclau and Mouffe understand their postmarxism. That is, post-feminist as indicating “having passed through” that body of thought; having lived through, experienced, feminist theory and politics in such a way that the terrain one now inhabits has been decisively transformed; but also post-feminist in the sense that in the course of this passage new objects have been configured that the old feminism could not have seen, or recognized.

It is in this kind of postfeminist moment that I locate my presentation today.

Continue reading The disappearing body and feminist thought →

Capitalism, Centre watch, Countryside, Ecology/Environment, Everyday Life, Movements, Politics

Anbulla kaadu (My beloved forest): Madhumita Dutta

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Thervoy Kandigai Industrial Complex. The Government issued orders alienating 1127 acres of poramboke land in favour of SIPCOT for formation of a new Industrial Complex in Thervoy Kandigai village of Gummidipoondi Taluk, Thiruvallur District. The land development work is in progress now.

From the website of Industries Department, Government of Tamil Nadu

What this “land development work” involves, and the price that will be paid in human and ecological costs is something that MADHUMITA DUTTA encountered recently.

“A forest that was once ours is now private, a land that was once green now stands barren, a forest where we played, where we wandered freely is now fenced, men in uniform now guard the forest which we protected for generations.”

Thervoy Kandigai. A small nondescript village in Gummidipoondi Taluk of Thiruvallur district, 50 kms north of Chennai.  Surrounded by dense shrubby forests, natural lakes, rice fields and undulating terrain with misty mountain range of Sathyavedu in Andhra as the back drop. This small dalit village of about 1000 families is in the eye of a storm.  A storm that can blow away the dreams of Tamil Nadu government to hand over hundreds of acres of land to French tyre company Michelin, a big ticketed investment worth Rs 4000 crore for the state.   Continue reading Anbulla kaadu (My beloved forest): Madhumita Dutta →

Ecology/Environment, Government, Media politics, Movements, Politics

The ‘Viral’ Revolutions of Our Times – Postnational Reflections

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The Arab Turmoil

According to a  report in The Guardian, the movement in Egypt that overthrew the regime of Hosni Mubarak is “a movement led by tech-savvy students and twentysomethings – labour activists, intellectuals, lawyers, accountants, engineers – that had its origins in a three-year-old textile strike in the Nile Delta and the killing of a 28-year-old university graduate, Khaled Said”. It has emerged, says the report, “as the centre of what is now an alliance of Egyptian opposition groups, old and new.” The April 6 Youth Movement (primarily a Facebook network), came into existence in in 2008, in support of the ongoing workers’ struggle in the industrial town of El-mahalla El-Kubra primarily on issues related to wages. The struggle in the past few years, also moved towards a restructuring of unions with government appointed leaders. The list of demands for the April 6 strike also included a demand for raising the national minimum wages that had remained stagnant for over two and a half decades. Increasing workers militancy over the past few years was a direct response to the World Bank imposed ‘reforms’ that had pushed lives of industrial labour to the brink. It was this sharpening conflict, consequent upon the serious impact of structural adjustment policies, that provides the backdrop in which the middle class youth decided to rally in support of the April 6 2008 strike. It was they who converted the call for an industrial strike into a general strike, according to some reports.  It is virtually impossible to get a sense of any of this in the ecstatic reports of the ‘networking babalog’ making a revolution that is now all over the Indian media.

Continue reading The ‘Viral’ Revolutions of Our Times – Postnational Reflections →

Bad ideas, Centre watch, Government, Identities, Technology

On the fuzziness of Personal Identity: UIDAI and the national identity card of India: Taha Mehmood

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Guest post by TAHA MEHMOOD

I – The spread of Identity cards in Southasia:

An identity card virus seems to be spreading across south-Asia. The pathogen emerged long ago in 1971, when Pakistan established a paper based personal identity system. !971 was also the year when Pakistan was engaged with India in a military conflict which led to the creation of Bangladesh. In 1972, a year later, the Department of Registrations of Persons located at Colombo, Sri Lanka, was entrusted with the responsibility of issuing a national identity to citizens who were over sixteen years of age. In 1972 the name of the island was changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka and Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran formed the Tamil New Tigers (TNT), which later became LTTE or Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The state of Sri Lanka was at war with LTTE for the next three decades. Nothing new happened on the national identity card front for the next two decades. Continue reading On the fuzziness of Personal Identity: UIDAI and the national identity card of India: Taha Mehmood →

Bad ideas, Politics, Right watch, Violence/Conflict

Why does the RSS dread the terror tag?

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1.
Ram Madhav, the bespectacled ex-spokesperson of RSS is not known for his sense of humour.

It is a different matter that some of the media people just could not control their smiles when sometime back (second week of Feb 2011) in a press conference in the capital he enlightened the journos about l’affaire Aseemanand and the broader phenomenon of Hindutva terror.

Giving a completely new and almost unforeseen twist to the Aseemanand episode he said that he (i.e. Aseemanand) had in fact left the RSS in 2006. Of course, as a good spokesperson – although he has become an ex- he had the usual disclaimers in the beginning: RSS does not believe in violence and is a cultural organisation… One does not know whether much on the lines of the School Leaving Certificate, with which lesser mortals like us are more familiar with, Ram Madhav distributed photocopies of ‘Sangh Leaving Certificate’ of Aseemanand or anything similar to give authenticity to his claims or not. Continue reading Why does the RSS dread the terror tag? →

Bad ideas, Debates, Genders, Sex

JNU and the ‘sex scandal’: Aprajita Sarcar

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This is a guest post by APRAJITA SARCAR

As a former JNU student, it is a pity that I have to write this post in order to draw attention to a crisis that needs urgent attention: the inability to talk about intimacy.  I say intimacy, as against sex, as against scandal, as against molestation, as against the “professionally shot” footage that made it to the front pages of newspapers.

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has a crisis to face that has been imminent for a while, and it comes from the inability to talk intimately, about intimacies. Because intimacies are distinct from rhetoric. Continue reading JNU and the ‘sex scandal’: Aprajita Sarcar →

Culture, Debates, Language

A Moment of Revelation: Prasanta Chakravarty

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Guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY

[A Report on ‘The Everyday Life of a Discipline’- a colloquium on contemporary English Studies that took place on February 4, 2011, at the Department of English, University of Delhi]

Unlike the social sciences, humanities in India at least, have been less systematic and meticulous about introspection. This is slightly odd owing to the fact that the onslaughts on humanitities, from both outside and from within its own quarters, have been quite relentless and ballistic of late. Besides, it is a good idea to take stock of things from time to time as disciplines morph and change gear. So, when I was asked to be part of a group of practitioners of humanities who were at the forefront of the last bit of stock-taking that took place during the late nineteen-eighties, I was curious to know how they see their own transition at this point of time and also get a sense about their assessment of English studies now, apart from my own contribution to the current debates.

Continue reading A Moment of Revelation: Prasanta Chakravarty →

Bad ideas

What can Egypt and Tunisia teach us?

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The protests in Tunisia and Egypt have won the first of what will have to be many victories. Mubarak and Ben Ali have fled and dictators have fallen to people’s uprisings – the street and the public square have, at least for the moment, reclaimed their voice from the boulevards and corridors of power. Globally, these have been reported and rightly hailed as victories over entrenched dictatorships. Yet the uprisings have much to teach those of us who live in “democracies” – we must not lose the opportunity to ask what Egypt and Tunisia can teach us, no matter where we are.

I’ve been trying to write something about this for a few days now – nothing quite settles at the end of the pen. So here’s a set of thoughts/questions/ruminations that I think we must take on – in rambles, and intended as a provocation to comments and hopefully follow up posts.

Continue reading What can Egypt and Tunisia teach us? →

Countryside, Everyday Life, Government

The Virtues of Waiting Patiently: Arnav Das and Soumik Mukherjee

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Guest post by ARNAV DAS SHARMA and SOUMIK MUKHERJEE. Photographs by SOUMIK MUKHERJEE

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Peepalguda, Koraput, Odisha: “You see, for the bridge over that rivulet, forty thousand rupees were sanctioned”, the sarpanch of Mossigam gram panchayat starts off emphatically. It is only after a good amount of probing that he confesses that it was foolish of the Public Works Department (PWD) to sanction Rs 40,000 for a bridge when a similar bridge was built seven years ago in another village for Rs 43 lakh. In any case, a slight bureaucratic nudge resulted in even this amount to get diverted to another village in the Lima panchayat. Continue reading The Virtues of Waiting Patiently: Arnav Das and Soumik Mukherjee →

Frontiers, Government, Law, Politics

‘We are aware of India’s interests’: Jhalanath Khanal

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Interview with Nepal Prime Minister Jhalanath Khanal.

After seven months of living with a caretaker government, Nepal’s Parliament on February 3 elected Jhalanath Khanal, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), as the Prime Minister, with the support of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). He spoke to Prashant Jha at the prime ministerial residence in Kathmandu on February 10. Excerpts, as first published in The Hindu:

What’ll be your priorities?

My first priority is to complete the ongoing peace process. Second, my aim is to help complete the Constitution-writing process. Third, I’ll strengthen the institutions of governance, improve law and order, and guarantee security to the common citizens. Fourth, my focus will be on taking the country towards an economic revolution through development, reconstruction and socio-economic transformation.

Your predecessors had similar priorities, and had pledged to complete the peace and constitutional process. What’s different about your government? Continue reading ‘We are aware of India’s interests’: Jhalanath Khanal →