This guest post by SIMI CHACKO and PRATIKSHA KHANDURI is the full text of a booklet released in August 2011. A .pdf version of the booklet (41 pages, 304 KB) can be downloaded here.
Introduction
A. UID: The Basics
B. The Enrolment Process
C. Benefits of UID
D. Concerns: Biometrics, Privacy, Data security, Surveillance
Continue reading A Critical Primer on India’s UID: Simi Chacko and Pratiksha Khanduri
Guest post by HILAL MIR
I woke up this morning in an utterly confused state of mind. During the night I dreamt about having the tour of the Harud Literary Festival. My first astonishment came while in a queue outside the venue. Like the French streaming Parisian streets in teary-eyed joy at the sight of American liberators after having secreted themselves in root cellars for months from the sniffing gaze of Nazi jackboots, I felt similar joy at observing Indian soldiers not hurling ritual abuses from vehicle rooftops while asserting the right to overtake from any side and any crevice on the busy Panthachowk intersection.
The venue, Delhi Public School, is stone’s throw away from the intersection and within the earshot of any moist abuse hurled from those ubiquitous army trucks. Kashmiris finally had a dry day. Continue reading On a Lit Note: Hilal Mir
Guest post by SAROJ GIRI
As I read it, neither Aditya, nor Partha nor Gyan seems to deny that the Anna Hazare movement is populist. The debate here seems to be about: what kind of populism is it? Aditya is saying that this populism can lead to progressive political consequences, ‘by the presence of an anti-institutional dimension, of a certain challenge to political normalization’, while Partha (and Gyan too if I read him correctly) seem to be arguing that this populism is not progressive even if sometimes anti-institutional. And here Aditya reads Laclau contra Partha: that populism may indeed be the royal road to the constitution of the political. Partha and Gyan maintain that this populism works with a notion of ‘we the people’ who are free from corruption defined against ‘they the corrupt enemy’ (the government and netas). This ‘we the people’ can very well gloss over all internal contradictions, social divides and heterogeneities – hence Gyan points out that Dalits and minorities will not be counted or simply assumed away.
Guest post by SUMANDRO
Recent discussion around the issue of corruption in Kafila has generated several references to and logical possibilities of understanding anti-corruption as an ideology, however, without finally drawing that conclusion. In this post I argue that the specific ideological functioning of this idea of anti-corruption is central for understanding the nature of the movement.
Partha Chatterjee writes: “The word [‘corruption’] creates an illusion – a fundamentally false image – of equivalence between two very different practices.” But for Chatterjee, this illusory character of ‘corruption’ is not comparable to the kind of illusion involved in the ‘mystical character of commodities.’ He argues: “But it is this illusion of equivalence that has been achieved, for the moment at least, by the rhetorical and performative adroitness of the Anna campaign and the spectacular bungling of the Congress leadership.” The multivalent illusion of ‘corruption,’ for Chatterjee, is shaped by the skilful performance from the activists’ side and lack of the same from that of the government. I would later argue that on the contrary, the skilful performance by the activists and the lack of the same from not only the government’s side but also that of different left positions are actually made possible by the essentially multivalent nature of the ideology of anti-corruption.
Continue reading The Sublime Object of Anti-Corruption: Sumandro
In a post on the Wall Street Journal’s India Realtime blog, journalist Tom Wright says at one point:
In the open letter, the signatories said it was impossible to have a literary festival in Kashmir [Link]
I asked him on Twitter as to where the open letter says that. He replied:
the opening graph says you can’t hold a literary festival in the context of kashmir [Link]
Given that he was being specific about the location of the “impossible to hold” claim in the open letter, I wondered for a moment if I was wrong. I checked the first two paragraphs of the open letter I had posted but found no such claim: Continue reading Harud Literary Festival: The Misrepresentation Continues
The news of the ‘postponement’ of Harud, a literary festival scheduled to be held in Kashmir in September, should be read with concern by those who believe in, and fight for, the right to express themselves freely. How the self-righteousness of some fighters for democracy actually forecloses any possibility of democracy can be seen from this incident.
In a statement last week, the organizers of Harud explained that they were forced to put off their festival as there was a concerted campaign by some people on the Internet, on Facebook and some other sites attacking the festival. According to these critics, “We fear, therefore, that holding such a festival would, willy-nilly, dovetail with the state’s concerted attempt to portray that all is normal in Kashmir. Even as the reality on the ground is one of utter abnormality and a state of acute militarisation and suppression of dissent, rights and freedoms.” Continue reading Killing poetry and other possibilities of life
Guest post by TAHA MEHMOOD
A pilgrimage to the cave
One day Cleinias, a Cretan invites Athenian and Megillos, a Spartan for a religious pilgrimage. Cleinias proposes to visit the cave of Zeus, just as Minos used to do. Minos was the legendary Cretan king. Every nine years Minos would walk along a path to the cave where he will hear revelations on the laws from Zeus. Perhaps the act of a man going to the cave to seek revelations from God was part of an ancient Cretian tradition. In the islandof Crete Minos played the role of a Lawgiver, in Athens– Zeus, while in Megillos’s state Sparta this role was played by Apollo.
Magnesia: The last idolum of Plato
This was the setting of the last dialog of Plato. He called it The Laws. In this dialog Plato tries to define the legal framework of an imaginary state named Magnesia. Throughout his life Plato was preoccupied with the question of how to name and define things. He believed one could even name abstract entities like numbers and define it as even or odd. In this dialog Plato makes an attempt to name various types of laws and define it.
Continue reading The Utopian Instinct – Aflatoon, Kiran Bedi and Nandan Nilekani: Taha Mehmood
Guest post by SRIDHAR MODUGU
It is no exaggeration to say today that Telangana is burning. Nor will we be far off the mark if we suspect that a paralyzing fear has encased its ‘intellectuals”. Everyone is lost in providing testimonies to prove themselves to be pro-Telangana and everybody is a self-accomplished activist. In fact, the intellectuals have lost themselves as spectators. They have become immune to understand what is happening before them.
The demand for statehood for Telangana is undoubtedly a democratic and judicious demand. It has been held back since 1950s and suppressed time and again. No doubt Mr. Kalvakuntla Chandra Sekhar Rao (KCR), the President of Telangana Rastra Samithi (TRS) did maintain the public talk with occasional tactical moves and has been considered an icon of “Telangana vaadam” as last ten years of Telangana politics are referred to. Since 2009 November the movement could attract large mass of diversified sections of people from all walks of life and engage the attention of the people with hopes of achieving the state any day thanks to the enthusiastic role play of the media and political parties – in power or opposition. It is indeed noteworthy that since November 2009 the movement has been able to attract a large number of diverse sections of people from all walks of life in thousands. They have mobilized voluntarily and have conducted meetings in the most democratic way. That there has been considerable restraint among the people who have been dishonored, alienated and humiliated under the Andhra Pradesh rulers is without dispute. These people have mobilized democratically despite the war-like surveillance and suppression of both the para-military and the state police force. Historical injustice – political, economic and cultural of the people of this region is well highlighted.
Continue reading Let us break the ‘silence’on Telengana movement: Sridhar Modugu
Guest post by SANKAR RAY
The Rectification campaign (RC) in CPI(M) is in practice a PR exercise, vying with top corporate communicators. Take the judgment of killings on 27 July 2000 at Suchpur under Nanoor PS of Birbhum district of West Bengal. Forty-four members and sympathisers, including district committee member Ramprasad Ghosh and zonal committee members Nityanarayan Chattopadhyay, Golam Saror, Golam Mustafa and Badiujjaman were convicted for involvement in the ghastly killings of 11 landless agricultural labourers. None of them has even been suspended, let alone expelling them from the party. Party biggies from the general secretary Prakash Karat to the WB state secretary and polit bureau member Biman Bose often say they have reverence towards the judiciary, although their perception that in a class-divided society, justice is to be ‘class justice’ is judicious. But why should proven criminals be on the party roll, when the mandarins of A K Gopalan Bhavan, party’s national headquarters, boastfully talk of a continuous RC. WB party leaders assured months before the last Assembly polls in WB that hundreds of ‘corrupt’ members be thrown out out of the party. All this is remains on paper.
Continue reading CPI(M)’s Rectification Campaign and a Bit of History: Sankar Ray
It is sad that a literature festival that was to be held in Srinagar later this month has been indefinitely postponed. What is even sadder is that while announcing its postponement on HarudLitFest.org, the organisers of the Harud Literature Festival (the same team that puts up the acclaimed Jaipur Literature Festival) have sought to blame those who signed an “open letter” expressing a set of concerns about the festival. The statement reads, “A few people who began the movement to boycott the festival have no qualms in speaking on and about Kashmir across international forums, but have refused to allow other voices, including writers, poets and theatre people from the Valley and across India to enjoy the right to express themselves at the Harud festival.”
As one of the over two hundred signatories of the open letter posted on Kafila.org, I am dismayed at the deliberate and disingenuous misrepresentation of the open letter as a “movement to boycott” What does such deliberate misrepresentation of dissent by the organisers of a literature festival say about them, their honesty and intent?
Two news reports appeared on 28 July 2011. One, by Agence France-Presse, quoted organiser Namita Gokhale as saying, “it will be an apolitical dialogue concerning literature”. The other report, by Randeep Singh Nandal in The Times of India, datelined Srinagar, did not quote anyone, and claimed: “There is speculation that Salman Rushdie might drop by…”
The term “apolitical” offended Kashmiris, who were seen objecting to it widely on Facebook and Twitter. Some of these were also aghast with the idea of Salman Rushdie, who they consider a blasphemer against Islam, sitting on a stage in Srinagar. Even though some of those named in these and subsequent news reports had told the festival organisers even before the news was in the papers that they would not be able to attend, their names were falsely put out in the media. They were thus forced to publicly state they would not attend a lit-fest termed “apolitical”.
Kashmir is a place where people live under the shadow of the gun, their political grievances against the Indian state silenced with draconian laws, criminalisation of dissent and heavy militarisation. You can get two years in jail without charge for a Facebook status update, a pamphlet, a mass gathering, a call for strike. Around the time the Harud controversy was gaining momentum, the Jammu and Kashmir Police beat up over several hours a photojournalist, allegedly because they didn’t like his work on the Al-Jazeera website.
Now, a group of people from the Indian capital decide to go to the place described above, to hold a literary festival, and announce that the festival would be “apolitical”. Were Kashmiri writers and journalists, including some acclaimed ones, wrong in feeling offended?
On 12 August 2011, Namita Gokhale was quoted as saying in the London-based newspaper The Guardian (no relation to this publication), “There was perhaps some misinterpretation of my use of the word ‘apolitical’.” She chose not to withdraw the word. If by apolitical she meant non-partisan, the choice of venues, Delhi Public School’s Srinagar franchise and the Kashmir University, was not seen as non-partisan in Srinagar. If your intent is to be neutral in a conflict zone, surely, you must attempt to be seen to be neutral?
he open letter, signed initially by fourteen people, including me, was published on 25 August. It said, “Our concerns are also heightened by reports that the festival is sought to be denoted as being an ‘apolitical’ event, that, yet, people will be free to speak what they want and that no one has the right to deny Kashmiris a chance to listen to writers. Beyond the absurdity of asserting that art and literature has nothing to do with politics, our issue is precisely that people are not allowed to speak their minds in Kashmir.” The open letter did not use the word boycott, did not urge anyone to not attend it, did not ask for it to be cancelled. It did say, “We would firmly support the idea of a literary/artistic festival in Kashmir if we were convinced that its organising was wholly free from state interference and designs, and was not meant to give legitimacy to a brutal, repressive regime.”
Two days later, their response on Kafila.org said, “We wish to categorically state that the Harud literature festival is not government sponsored.” It did not withdraw the word ‘apolitical’. An expanded version of this 27 July release, sent to the media, mentioned false rumours spread by a Facebook group about Rushdie coming to attend. Why did it put the blame of the Rushdie rumour on Kashmiris and not on The Times of India, and on themselves for choosing to not deny the rumour for a whole month?
Then, suddenly, on 29 August they announced indefinite postponement of the festival, in a dishonest release that blamed the signatories of the open letter for being against free speech! It also cited security threats emanating from that Facebook page with nearly 5,000 ordinary Kashmiris supporting the boycott call on account of Rushdie’s rumoured attendance.
Given that so many Kashmiris have expressed reservations about the festival’s intent, including many Kashmiri writers and journalists, even young, aspiring, as yet-unpublished ones, it is surprising that we are hearing patronising comments about how Kashmiris have been ‘denied an opportunity’. It is high time Kashmiris started their own literary festival, something they have tried to do before but were not allowed to by the state government. They should do it in Delhi or Jaipur, giving Indian writers an opportunity to learn what it means to be political.
(First published in The Sunday Guardian, Delhi, and The Friday Times, Lahore.)
From Kafila archives:
Guest post by MRIDU RAI
Rahul Pandita has written a misleading piece—in the tone of high dudgeon and ethical outrage no less—in the ‘essays’ section of the 3 September 2011 issue of Open magazine titled “The Autumn of Hypocrisy”. I think it is a piece that, nevertheless, requires some examination mostly because it makes several assertions in ways that queer any possibility of debate around the important question of what a literary festival held in Kashmir today might mean. Whether or not it was the author’s intention to do so, its effect is also to discredit, off-hand, several literary and artistic voices whose greatest sin would appear to be to have disagreed with the kind of literary festival in Kashmir Rahul Pandita and his fellow organizers had in mind. Of course, it is also troubling to hear from Mr. Pandita on this question since he is both an aggrieved party, deprived of his right to express himself at the festival, and also, as the credit at the bottom of his piece elaborates, a former “member of the advisory committee for the Harud literary festival”. I wonder if this conflict of interest bothers anyone other than me. Continue reading Hypocrisy in Any Season: Mridu Rai responds to Rahul Pandita on the Harud Literature Festival
The republic and the legislature look to the public for gauging the mood of the nation during the process of formulating laws that necessarily must tap into the prevailing moral sentiment and ethos of the day. Thus a law against child marriage might have been moot a half century ago, but a necessary devolution of current social perceptions. On such issues, public sentiment can guide, indeed force the hand of the legislature and judiciary to come down particularly heavily on one side of the fence. However, it is parochial of us to invoke the illegal and hare-brained claim that since democracy is popularly, rule of, for and by the people, a representative democracy is inherently bound to genuflect to populist opinion, a case in point being the recent debate over the Lokpal bill that at the time of writing was still raging and occupied prime placement amongst the media of the day.
Continue reading Reflections on a Genuflection to the Vox Populi by Subinay Inder Singh Bedi
Guest post by GYAN PRAKASH
In following the discussion on the Anna Hazare phenomenon, I have found the references to populism very interesting. In response to Partha, Aditya reminds us that populism should not be dismissed as non-political or anti-political. Partha clarified that he does not regard Anna Hazare’s populism as anti-political but as anti party-politics and anti government. Team Anna narrowly defines politics as the domain of party politics and the government, which it then identifies with corruption. Om Puri’s rant and Kiran Bedi’s vaudeville performance expressed this sentiment. Politics means netas, who are corrupt. References to 2G, CWG, Kalmadi, and various land scams refer to politics in this sense. Such a definition of politics allows the claim that the gathering at Ramlila was non-political or beyond politics. Anna as a saintly Gandhian figure who does not seek office, and the status of Kiran Bedi and Kejriwal as civil society members, contributed to the representation that the mobilization of the “people” transcended politics.
Continue reading On Populism – A response to Partha and Aditya: Gyan Prakash
Guest post by SWAGATO SARKAR
I have been trying to make sense of the Anna Hazare event. I agree that it was historical, but was it a tragedy, or a farce? The swift exchange between Partha Chatterjee (PC) and Aditya Nigam (AN) and their reference to Ernesto Laclau and ‘populism’ have given me a familiar frame to enter into the debate around the event. Here, I will concentrate on the question of populism and its normative status. However, unlike PC and AN, I have got nothing to offer to ‘the Left’ (Independent or Dependent), because I am not a leftist, rather one who likes sitting on the fence on a nice arm-chair and this piece will perhaps bear an imprint of that position. Also, apologies are due to the readers of Kafila as I have not read, just browsed through, the two pieces written by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, which have been wildly popular – if Facebook is an indicator – and have been referred to by both PC and AN. Therefore, I might be repeating what Sengupta has already said.
Continue reading Populism and the Anna Hazare Event: Swagato Sarkar
Guest post by JAY MAZOOMDAAR
The 13-day blockbuster— peddled as the second freedom struggle, panned as irresponsible blackmailing, and a lot in between — is over. Anna Hazare accepted honeyed coconut water from two little girls, introduced to the crowd as a dalit and a Muslim, and went on to recuperate in one of India’s most expensive hospitals, one branded after Hindu spiritual literature at that.
News TV is still fighting the vacuum by flogging the debate – so much so that seasoned correspondents are chasing a rather dismissive Dr Naresh Trehan to unravel the mystery of Anna’s endurance. Biker gangs have gone into a sulk and roads at India Gate are looking safer for traffic and women (which is not saying much in Delhi). What is more, India has started taking note that too many Indians have meanwhile drowned in floods. Continue reading Ten lessons of the fortnight that was: Jay Mazoomdar
This is a guest post by ARJUN APPADURAI
Partha Chatterjee and Shuddhabrata Sengupta rightly argue that “corruption” is indeed a new Indian label for “the lives of others”. The East German Stasi also surely saw their vigilance as directed against the politics of “the enemies of the people”, except that in their case the state and the party were seen to contain all the good people, with the bad people choosing to remain in the unmobilized parts of civil society. Hence the pro-Hazare gatherings certainly have some of the disturbing echoes of mass rallies under Hitler and Stalin with the working and middle-classes adoring a mediocre and Chaplinesque figure who promises a new wave of moral cleansing. Continue reading Our Corruption, Our Selves: Arjun Appadurai
‘Sayeen, ham nay toh kabhee 5,000 banday kaa jaloos bhi nahee nikaala. Siyaasat kay liyay aik laash kya, aik zakham bhi nahee hay hamaray paas toh. Aur aaj lag aisay raha hay kay hamaari dheemi dheemi baaton ko sun kar yay Punjab kay tukray karnay lagain hain’ (Sayeen, we’ve never taken out a rally with 5,000 people. Forget martyrs, we don’t even have a bruise to flaunt for political mileage. And today, it seems they’ve heard our whispers and taken them to heart. Today, they’re talking about splitting Punjab.)
While talking to a few last month, I realized that most independent Seraiki activists privately acknowledge that the issue of a new province, or at the very least, a wholesale recognition of Seraiki grievances, was a cause that could only be made actionable when the People’s Party thought it to be worthwhile – and 9 times out of ten, a cause’s worth for a national level party is determined by its weight in the electoral matrix. Continue reading The North-South Question in Punjab: Umair Javed
Partha Chatterjee’s post, following on Shuddha’s Hazare Khwahishein… is something of an eye-opener for me. I will not enter into a debate with him on his reading of Shuddha’s post as Shuddha and I have had our long online and offline exchanges and I have learnt immensely from these exchanges, even if a core of disagreement persists. I do think, however, that Partha is mistaken in thinking that this is the first time the question of corruption has been discussed on Kafila or elsewhere but since I am not interested in discussing that question here, I will leave that matter aside. I think I have said pretty much what I wanted to say on the movement and the myriad issues related to it and so I am no more interested in going over that territory all over again. Interested readers can see the Kafila archives if they so wish.
What has been an eye-opener for me is the way a certain other Partha Chatterjee has emerged, as soon as his theories were brought face to face with the hurly-burly of politics. The imprint of this other Partha is clearly evident in every word and sentence of this post, but most clearly in the concluding sentence where he claims that the indepdent Left has ‘its populist moment in Nandigram’. This sentence encapuslates the gist of our disagreements. It was this assessment that led Partha to write the essay, ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation‘ where, in some elliptical fashion, his own discomfort with popular politics found expression. That is when he extended the definition of ‘political society’ to say that it was the sphere of ‘management of ‘non-corporate capital’ (of course, by capital and government). That Partha links his discomfort over the Anna Hazare movement to his discomfort over Nandigram, is in my view, a sign of the fact that his idea of ‘political society’ lies in ruins, that it collapsed at the precise moment of its encounter with the popular.
Continue reading In the Ruins of Political Society – A Response to Partha Chatterjee
Guest post by DILIP D’SOUZA
Of course everyone has their own take on the movement that’s got us all talking. It raises passions, it polarizes, it shakes the powerful, on and on. I have immense admiration for what Anna Hazare has achieved: the outrage against corruption where we had indifference before, the outlet for such outrage, the renewed hope where we had cynicism before, the way his movement has shamed brazen politicians and forced an entire government to listen.
Yet the movement sometimes reminds me, of all things, of fax machines. Continue reading A fax about Anna: Dilip D’Souza
Guest post by PARTHA CHATTERJEE
Shuddhabrata Sengupta has done a great service by opening up the question of corruption which lies at the heart of the Anna Hazare movement but which has been, surprisingly, accepted quite uncritically as a universally known and universally condemned evil. It is actually quite puzzling how this effect has been achieved. It is a question which, I think, touches the core of the populist mobilization brought about by the Anna Hazare movement.
Think of it. Who are the beneficiaries of corruption? The entire middle class in India (lower, upper, aspirant lower to upper, whatever category one wants to use) seems to think that it is the victim of corruption. “It touches the lives of everybody”, as Nivedita Menon said in her recent piece in Kafila. But then who are the engineers, the accountants, the babus in the offices, the touts who surround the courts and the hospitals and the railway ticket counters? Aren’t they our uncles and nephews and sisters-in-law? The corrupt people of India are blood relations of those who are flocking Ramlila Maidan. But, needless to say, no one you meet there will accept that.
Continue reading Against Corruption = Against Politics: Partha Chatterjee
Guest post by KAVITA KRISHNAN (Editor, Liberation)
The people saying ‘I am Anna’ or ‘Vande Mataram’ are not all RSS or pro-corporate elites. They’re open to listening to what we have to say to them about corporate corruption or liberalization policies. The question is – are we too lofty and superior (and prejudiced) to speak to them?
Throughout the summer, student activists of All India Students’ Association (AISA) and Revolutionary Youth Association (RYA) engaged in this painstaking exercise for months. They campaigned all over the country, in mohallas, villages, markets where there is no visible Left presence. No, these were not areas of ‘elite’ concentration – mostly middle, lower middle or working class clusters, or students’ residential areas near campuses. In most places, people would begin by assuming they were campaigners of Anna Hazare. When students introduced their call for the 9 August Barricade at Parliament, they would be asked, ‘What’s the need for a separate campaign when Anna’s already leading one?’ They would then explain that they supported the movement for an effective anti-corruption law to ensure that the corrupt don’t enjoy impunity. But passing such a law could not end corruption, which was being bred by the policies that were encouraging corporate plunder of land, water, forests, minerals, spectrum, seeds… They learnt to communicate without jargon, to use examples from the state where the campaign was taking place. They would tell people about the Radia tapes, and the role of the corporates, the ruling Congress, the opposition BJP, and the media in such corruption.
Continue reading Are We Talking to the People Who Are Out on the Streets? – Kavita Krishnan
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 