Heptanesian Archives

The collapse of the Bowling Company in Lower Parel after the storm which lashed the city in the past several days perhaps pales in comparison to the larger human tragedies that took place in other parts of the metropolis this week. However, the potential for a tragedy like the landslide which occurred at Azad Nagar in Ghatkopar should not be overlooked. Luckily the entertainment outlet remained closed on Thursday, but had the bowling alleys and the cafe inside been filled to their normal capacity, hundreds of people could have perished, when the rusted stilts and columns which grounded the century-old structure gave way.

Questions have already been raised as to the integrity of the surveys undertaken barely two months ago — by both the Bombay Municipal Corporation engineers and the so-called ‘independent’ engineers hired by the proprietors of the Bowling Company —  which certified the structural integrity and safety of the restaurants, clubs, and discos in the compound. These assurances were made public shortly after the Phoenix Mills was shut by the BMC, following the collapse of a building wall under renovation in late April. Both A D Singh, the owner of the Bowling Company, and the Ruias, the managers of Phoenix Mills, had stated that the constructions were sound, and that the public need not fear another such disaster — one precisely of the type which occurred two days ago. The Bowling Company and the other outlets in the Phoenix Mills re-opened several weeks after this tragedy, in which five labourers were killed and twelve others injured. The offences registered against the Ruias by the Mumbai Police for violating municipal building regulations and stop-work notices were quietly forgotten, and partying at the newly christened ‘Phoenix Garden City’ continued.

These two incidents at Phoenix Mills, raise other pressing questions about our city and its development, questions which are rarely posed in the media. Newspaper accounts stoke our anxieties about encroachments and illegal constructions on public lands, exposing the nefarious links between slumlords, bureaucrats, and corrupt urban officials for whom, it seems, the only answer is the municipal bulldozer. However, the Bowling Company, which opened just over a year ago, is itself an instance of the type of shoddy, unauthorised construction that we see spilling out onto public spaces and footpaths all over the city.

All of the lands of textile mills of central Bombay are reserved for industrial use, and governed by the Development Control Rules of the city, which were amended in 1991 to allow for the lease of portions of mill land. The funds accrued from the lease of these surplus lands were earmarked in Government schemes for reinvestment in the textile mills, to restart production and provide jobs to thousands of workers who were being retrenched by mill-owners-turned-real estate barons. While propagating a myth of ‘industrial sickness’ which served as a ruse to exploit accelerating real estate value in the city in the early nineties, thousands of workers were harassed by mill managements, and thrown onto the streets. In order that mill-owners, their political patrons and underworld sponsors, could profit from the sale of the lands in these once-productive industrial areas.

Availing of relief schemes sanctioned by the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in Delhi, which granted tax relief and gave amnesties on loans for the sick mills, the owners claimed to revive textile production. Siphoning off the money from these revival and modernisation schemes, they sold or scrapped their machinery, withheld the wages and legal dues of workers, subcontracted production to the powerlooms of Bhiwandi, and harassed the workers into leaving their jobs. Phoenix Mills and its owners, Bharat and Ashok Ruia, who had availed of several such schemes from 1977 onwards, in 1995 approached the BIFR to sanction a relief scheme which stipulated new purchases and upgradation of machinery, and reinstatement of its workers. However, from April 1998 onwards, the management arbitrarily shut the gates of the mill, vacated and demolished the departments earmarked for modernisation, and suspended and charge-sheeted workers who had been demanding regular work. All the while the future of the mill-workers was being spelled out in the high-rises, dance clubs, corporate and bank offices which were sprouting in the mill compound — while textile production was stopped, public money pocketed, and the scheme for industrial revival buried. Phoenix Mills was released from the purvey of the BIFR in 1999, by which time all its permanent staff of up to 800 workers was retrenched.

In a letter to the BMC in early 1998, the Ruias sought permission to expand the canteen and recreation facilities of the mill for, they claimed, ‘over 1000 workers’, whom they claim had been demanding such amenities. This fraudulent application, made at a time when the workers were being denied entry into their own workplace, was the guise for the Bowling Company, which opened in May 1999 on the site of the processing department of the mill, which was to be revived under the BIFR scheme. One former worker of Phoenix Mills remarked that the entry fee for the Bowling Company is four times the daily salary of a worker in the small-scale sweatshops of Bhiwandi — where textile production has been shifted in the past three decades, to dodge protective labour legislation and public scrutiny.

Since the collapse of the Bowling Company on Thursday, the BMC has asked the mill-owners to submit the building plan of the mill compound for further scrutiny. If such a plan exists, which is doubtful, it would show clearly that more than two-thirds of the land of the mill has been questionably redeveloped, from which the owners are making quick profits, in violation of the DC Rules and the sanctioned revival schemes. While textiles remain one of the country’s largest industries and foreign exchange earners, bowling alleys are, like real estate, speculative, fly-by-night operations. The scandalous and false statements of both municipal authorities and the proprietors of Phoenix Mills — which was made obvious in the collapse of the Bowling Company this week — should make us wonder whether our city isn’t also being leased out to those just interested in making a quick profit.

Originally published in Lawyer’s Collective Magazine, 13 July 2000

The fate of Bombay’s textile mill industry, its working class, and the valuable swathes of land its mills occupy in the centre of the city, is a fin-de-siècle echo of a familiar urban theme. Claims on land and space have been the narrative thread of the most celebrated and most notorious chapters in the urban history of Bombay. These range from the legendary reclamations that linked up several marshy outposts and settlements to compose the island city in the eighteenth century, to the extension of the railways which promoted suburban development, to the land-grabbing and builders’ mafias of contemporary Mumbai.

The historic mills of the city are industrial dinosaurs dotted around the city landscape, whose textile production has been eclipsed in efficiency and profitability by the sweatshop labour employed in powerloom towns like Bhiwandi and Malegaon. The uncompromising militancy of the great textile strike in the early eighties convinced the city millowners that dealing with unions was unnecessary when production could be maintained in powerloom units in the urban hinterland — small-scale workshops that prevent the organisation of workers, which evade protective labour legislation, and which run on black money, stolen electricity and powerful political patronage.

By the late eighties, the lands of the mill compounds became more valuable for the millowners than the cloth these mills produce, and the workers whose livelihoods they have sustained for several generations. Thus In 1991, the fate of the mills began to be spelled out with the new Development Control (DC) Rules for the city, framed  by Sharad Pawar’s Government, permitting the sale of a portion of the mill lands, ostensibly to channel the funds into the revival of the industry. This reinvestment never in fact occurred, the money earned from the lease and sale of the lands was instead siphoned off by the millowners, and the mills closed and their premises redeveloped into high-rises, office spaces, discotheques, restaurants and bowling alleys. Parallel to this ruthless gentrification, mill workers saw their wages withheld, the gates of their mills arbitrarily shut, and the signing away of their rights by the sole recognised union for the textile industry, the Rashtriya Mill Mazdoor Sangh (RMMS), whose underworld patronage is well-known.

Since 1991, cases filed in the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) in New Delhi, requesting permission to sell surplus mill lands have swelled. Management cited the “sickness” of the mills, when the real reason lay in the skyrocketing real estate values and the chance to relocate production, profiteer from land scams and tax breaks granted by the BIFR, while they closed the units, and sold the machinery and workers for scrap. At the peak of the property boom several years ago, the value of the mill lands reached somewhere around Rs 5000 crores. And though the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance which came to power in 1995 promised to halt the sale of mill lands, restart production and provide jobs, they proved even more enthusiastic partners to the millowners’ profiteering.

With a further revision of the DC Rules on the cards, the new Congress-NCP Government has shown a determination to solve this festering issue and expedite the sale of mill and other reserved industrial lands, 23% of the land of the island city. The mills and working-class chawls of central Mumbai, crushed between the congested business district and the expanding suburbs, have in the past decade come under the combined pressure of the spiralling real estate market, the powerful lobby of builders and politicians, and the burgeoning middle-classes, starved of space. In the past decade, a battery of chattering economists, architects, society journalists and corporate promoters have advanced plans for the redevelopment of the “dead” mills into movie and design studios, five-star hotels, office spaces for multinational and corporate firms, and posh restaurants.

The casualty of these blinkered developments — satisfying the consumption of the few, not production for the many — has been Mumbai’s once-proud working-class, the mill-workers who spearheaded the trade union movement in India, and who today continue to hold out for their salaries and jobs. Historically, they have lent their strength to the calls for swadeshi and azadi, and their culture nestles in the heart of Bombay’s growth into a vibrant industrial city, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Barely twenty years ago, the working population of “Girangaon” — the “village of mills”, a web of industrial units, chawls, markets and maidans which spreads across central Bombay — numbered 2.5 lakhs.

This has now dwindled to less than 50 thousand, and the displaced numbers have not been reabsorbed into the city’s organised workforce. Banished into a life of casual and insecure employment, some have died of trauma or starvation, others have taken to selling vegetables or working as security guards in the gleaming skyscrapers and offices coming up in the old mills. Most notably, it is estimated that much of the underworld’s ranks are composed of former mill-workers and their unemployed sons. Though unrecognised unions like the non-party Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (GKSS) have made significant gains in reopening seven mills since 1989, since Independence the Bombay mill workers have been straitjacketed to the representation of the recognised union. The current president of the RMMS, Sachin Aher, is the nephew of the notorious gangster-politician Arun Gawli.

In these days when the prevailing orthodoxy tells us that state intervention in economic processes is to be avoided, one should think for a moment what this surrender to “market forces” means for our social fabric and overall urban design. With the removal of restrictions on land use that accompanied the 1991 DC Rules, land-grabbing has proliferated, the nexus between corrupt civic and state authorities, builders, and gangsters increased, as has the unregulated expansion horizontally and skywards of new hutments and high-rises.

This privatised city presents a strangely postmodern vista. Advertising agencies, restaurants and bowling alleys, software companies and art galleries are sprouting in the former stronghold of working-class culture and the birthplace of India’s industrial modernity. While these new offices shelter beneath the towering mill chimneys that now jostle with skyscrapers for command of Bombay’s skyline, there is a dark irony not lost on many Mumbaikars. Least of all to the security guard who now tends to the gates of this newly discovered elite paradise.

Originally published in the People’s Reporter, Mumbai, July 2000

The history of Mumbai is a narrative of the struggle over space. The fate of the mill lands of central Mumbai, and its industries and workers, is the latest chapter in this story.

The life of any city is not simply tied to its flows of goods, services and capital, but also to its patterns of work, leisure and movement — all of which revolve on the use of space. Throughout Mumbai’s history, claims on land and space have been the narrative thread of the most celebrated and most notorious chapters in our urban history. These range from the legendary reclamations that linked up several marshy outposts and settlements to compose the island city in the eighteenth century, to the disastrous Back Bay Reclamation Scheme in the 1920s. This scheme to fill in the Back Bay earned the name ‘Lloyd’s Folly’, after the bungling of the then Governor, whose plan ended in failure and infamy because of engineering mistakes, corruption, and the crash in land values during the Great Depression.

The story of the mill lands is a fin-de-sicle echo of this familiar urban theme. The historic textile mills of the city are industrial dinosaurs dotted around the city landscape, whose textile production has been eclipsed in efficiency and profitability by the sweatshop labour employed in powerlooms towns like Bhiwandi. The millowners realised long ago that the lands of the city mill compounds are more valuable than the textiles they produce, and the workers whose livelihoods they have sustained for several generations.

The fate of the mills began to be spelled out with the new Development Control Rules for the city, framed in 1991 by Sharad Pawar’s Government, permitting the sale of a portion of the mill lands, to channel the funds into the revival of the industry. This reinvestment never in fact occurred, the money earned from the lease and sale of the lands was instead siphoned off by the millowners, and the mills closed. In the past several years, the workers saw their wages withheld, the gates of their mills arbitrarily shut, and the intimidation of union activists with underworld support.

Since 1991, cases filed in the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction, requesting permission to sell surplus mill lands swelled. Managements cited the ‘sickness’ of the mills, when the real reason lay in the skyrocketing real estate values and the chance to siphon off the money earned from revival schemes, profiting from the land deals, while they closed the units, and sold the machinery and workers for scrap. At the peak of the property boom several years ago, the value of the surplus mill lands reached somewhere around Rs 5000 crores.

With the further revision of the DC Rules proposed by the three-member committee of the BMC, the Chief Minister has shown a determination to solve this festering issue and expedite the sale of mill and other reserved industrial lands, 23% of the land of the island city. The mills and working-class chawls of central Mumbai, crushed between the congested business district and the suburbs, have in the past decade come under the combined pressure of the spiralling real estate market, the powerful lobby of builders and politicians, and the burgeoning middle-classes, starved of space.

The real casualty of this development has been Mumbai’s once-proud working-class, the mill-workers who spearheaded the trade union movement in India, and who today continue to hold out for their salaries and jobs. Historically, they have lent their strength to the calls for swadeshi and azadi, and their culture nestles in the heart of Mumbai’s growth into a vibrant industrial city, stretching back to the nineteenth century. Barely twenty years ago, the working population of ‘Girangaon’ — the ‘village of mills’, a web of industrial units, chawls, markets and maidans which spreads across central Mumbai — numbered 2.5 lakhs.

This has now dwindled to less than 50 thousand, and the displaced numbers have not been reabsorbed into the city’s organised workforce. Banished into a life of casual and insecure employment, some have died of trauma or starvation, others have taken to selling vegetables or working as security guards in the gleaming skyscrapers and offices coming up in the old mills. Most notably, it is estimated that 60–70% of the underworld’s ranks are composed of former mill-workers and their children.

Recently I met a group of young entrepreneurs, just returned from New York, who are soon to launch a online literary journal, supported by venture capital. When I asked them where they proposed to set up their office, they suggested the Raghuvanshi Mills Compound in Parel, ‘to get that industrial look.’ A statement of postmodern chic, they were perhaps unaware that late last year, the workers of Raghuvanshi Mills took over the unit in the hope of restarting production, which had been halted for the previous three months. The owner of the mill, Hemal Thakkar, had not paid them for several months, and had not complied with a BIFR scheme to restart production to capacity. Instead he continued to sell the land. Two years earlier, Thakkar’s father Vallabbhai was shot in broad daylight by one of Arun Gawli’s lieutenants, in what many have claimed was an attempt by builders to extort money from the millowners.

The murder of the mills and the forcible eviction of their workers is, however, not an isolated instance of rapacious profiteering at the expense of our urban community. The aggrieved residents of Worli Seaface, who are opposing the Bandra-Worli bridge; the unfortunate neighbourhoods where new flyovers promise obstruction and pollution; and even the dying mangroves in Mahim Creek, choked by new roads and reclamations — all can all testify to this. The mills are symbolic of issues facing every resident of Mumbai, rich or poor, big or small. In these days when the prevailing orthodoxy tells us that state intervention in economic processes is to be avoided, one should think for a moment what this surrender to ‘market forces’ means for our social fabric and overall urban design. With the removal of restrictions on land use that accompanied the 1991 DC Rules, land-grabbing has proliferated, the nexus between corrupt civic authorities, builders, and gangsters increased, as did the expansion horizontally and skywards of  new hutments and highrises.

Originally published as Mill on the Loss in the Indian Express Mumbai Newsline, 5 April 2000

In his first few years occupying the Chief Minister’s chair in Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav was found of recalling that, in his father’s village, the local upper-caste leaders would sit in similar thrones, and his father could not dare to come near the Brahmins and sit on a chair like them. That would have signified equality. His father and other backward and lower castes had to approach their caste superiors as humble supplicants, their faces averted and backs hunched, and sit at the feet of the lordly Brahmins.

Laloo’s claim to power, he seemed to be saying, was not just based on the boring details of parliamentary procedure such as the number of votes he or his allies polled. Rather, he incarnated the inversion of the brutal caste and feudal hierarchies of agrarian society, the awakening of the wretched of the earth. His rustic idiom of political expression, the discourse of the masses, was the only language he knew how to speak, and one that he took to the heights of the state, whose all-important symbol was the gaddi of power.

The Symbols and Substance of Power

What he did with this power is another story, one that we all are familiar with. As with the recent Assembly election, the middle-class is always ready to write off Laloo as more symbolism than substance. Our media never tires of representing him and his followers as corrupt and glowering peasants drunk on a power they for some reason seem not to deserve, considering Bihar’s present ills — the massive scandals, caste and class warfare, criminalisation and administrative collapse that have become synonymous with Yadav raj. When several years ago Laloo was hauled off to jail on corruption charges, his wife became an object of similar scorn. She was condescendingly portrayed as a hoodwinked pativratta, running the state from her kitchen, with too many children than is considered decent.

Why this particular hatred and fascination with Laloo, when there are thousands of other equally loud-mouthed and corrupt politicians who are deserving of similar derision? Laloo first came to power standing defiantly alongside his former colleagues in the Janata Dal, all of whom had risen simultaneously with the new politics of lower caste and lower class empowerment, in the legacy of Jayaprakash Narayan’s social justice movement and V.P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission reservations. While early in his reign, Laloo provided housing to the masses and made other pro-poor overtures, most importantly through his example showed them that the could control their own destinies.

Democracy and Insubordination

His irreverance is legendary — planting vegetables and grazing cattle in the prim gardens of the Chief  Minister’s official residence, or chomping a huge paan and regally spitting while conducting interviews with posh journalists from Delhi. A new type of politician of the television age, Laloo craved such opportunities, the chance to caricature himself for the camera, as the unreconstructed Other of the mannered and educated classes, the veritable metaphor of Underdevelopment — the oily and uneducated peasant whose spittle just stained your finely starched kurta.

While the middle-class elites would turn away in disgust and fear of this jungli, it is mistaken to see these performances as signs of a villager who could not forget his backward ways — it was a clear message to the poor that their way of life was as powerful and meaningful as that of the elites.

Laloo always knew that he was both the object of fascination of the better-off — because the Other always conceals the repressed desires and anxieties of the Self — as well as their worst nightmare, because his antics reminded the middle-classes of their irrelevance in a democracy where only numbers count, and even the media can’t hide that depressing fact. If Bihar is, according to the recent NDA slogans, a jungle raj, then Laloo styled himself the jungle ka sher.

Jab tak samose mein aloo rahega, tab tak Bihar mein Laloo rahega

It remains to be seen whether Laloo’s brand of insubordination will ever bring a real change to the lives of the poor. It seems not. But last week, Laloo’s staying power was again roundly underestimated by every political formation in the country.

While unlike the aloo in our samosa, one day Laloo might himself go, he and his ilk have had a permanent effect on our democracy, a change that it would be foolish to ignore. Political and social institutions are never neutral. For the powerless, the state is synonymous with the dominance of certain castes and classes whose hegemony are made to seem permanent. When the hierarchies on which this control of institutions are themselves swept away through the logic of popular democracy, their institutions might similarly be shattered. In regions like East UP and Bihar the social order, based on the brutalities of poverty, casteism and landlordism, is being overturned with an equal amount of ferocity and violence, and not a little showmanship.
Originally published in Satyam Online.

This was a two-part series on the relationship of India and the United States, on the eve of the visit of U.S. President Bill Clinton to India in mid-March 2000.

The rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was the central geopolitical anatagonism of the half-century that followed the conclusion of World War II, fifty years which also parallel the experience of India’s Independence. And with the collapse of the Soviet and state socialist regimes in the early nineties, India and the world have entered a new geopolitical era, an age whose contours are only becoming clear now.

The Policy of Containment

The guiding strategy of American foreign policy-makers and defence experts throughout the Cold War had been the policy of “containment”, premised on a turn-of-the-century geopolitical theory which had in fact been essayed not in America, but in England, by the strategist Halford Mackinder. Adapted to the Cold War, Mackinder’s famous theory of heartland and rimland states was the essential ingredient in American geopolitical thinking.

Briefly, it narrates the geopolitical centrality of the tension between the heartland states — basically Russia and the landlocked countries of the Eurasian continent, then the Soviet Empire — and rimland regions, which controlled access to the seas, like China, Japan and Southeast Asia in the Pacific; Scandinavia and Western Europe in the North Atlantic; the countries of the Mediterranean Middle East and the Gulf. Mackinder claimed that the key to global domination lied in the marriage of the resources, territory and manpower of the heartland state to the naval and trade outlets of the rimland states. To the British Mackinder and his American followers, this alliance of heartland and rimland had to be prevented at all costs.

Assembling the Frontline

This theory was crystallised into the policy of containment by the American diplomat George Kennan, in the fifties, as the U.S. assumed its role of global hegemon in rivalry with the Soviet Union. To this end, the U.S. exercised its influence over the rimland or what it called “frontline” states bordering the Soviet Union by negotiation and offers of trade and military protection, as in Western and Northern Europe through NATO; in the states on the southern flank of the Soviet Empire — Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Sheikhdoms, Iran and Pakistan. In coastal East Asia, Japan and Taiwan were recruited in defence against the joint Soviet-Chinese threat, which was neautralised by the U.S.’s biggest diplomatic coup of the postwar era, the opening of independent relations with mainland China in 1972.This string of rimland alliances was accompanied by the subversion of recalcitrant regimes, as in Indonesia and in Latin America; or outright aggression against hostile countries in strategic areas, like in Vietnam and Korea.

Surrounded by oceans and forming a subcontinent of its own, India was a rimland state, and moreover one friendly to the central heartland power, the U.S.S.R — a dangerous prospect for American strategists. However, India’s Himalayan isolation from the Russian-Central Asian heartland made it less susceptible than China or Western Europe to the dreaded heartland-rimland alliance. Pakistan was within marching distance of Soviet Central Asia, and commanded access to the Indian Ocean — where, after the invasion of Afghanistan, Russian soldiers would often romantically yearn to wash their boots in warm water. Hence Pakistan’s central role as a bulwark of U.S. influence in South Asia since its inception.

Defending Democracy?

This geopolitical strategy of containment was always rationalised to the public in the U.S. and abroad through the moral rhetoric of anti-Communism, or the defence of national sovereignty, democracy and liberal freedoms. With the implosion of the Soviet-socialist bloc, this rhetoric has now been globalised — the language remains the same, but the strategy, and the reality of the world it confronts, is now perceptibly different.

India never much figured in America’s strategic calculations for the fifty years following the war. Thus the recent espousal of a new beginning between the “world’s largest democracy and the world’s most powerful democracy” shouldn’t mislead anyone. Democracy has never been the concern of strategists, who are only too happy to suppress and destroy popularly-elected governments when they step in the way of the balance of power and the maintenance of hegemony by the dominant state. Korea, Vietnam, and numerous regimes in Latin America and Africa bear witness to this.

It is grudgingly accepted in the corridors of power in Washington that, despite America’s designating itself as the “last superpower” in an unipolar world, the central reality of the new international order is multipolarity — that, much like in eighteenth-century continental Europe, responsibility for the management of security will fall on a concert of great powers.

Several years ago former U.S. National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had, in his book Diplomacy, identified these powers as China, Japan, the U.S., a Europe led by France and Germany, Russia, and perhaps India. Kissinger’s vacillation in identifying India as one of the new great powers was reflective of the ambiguity in the early nineties, something clearly reversed by the nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998. The nuclearisation of India and Pakistan vaulted the subcontinent into an unprecedented role in the global balance of power, demanding its engagement with the world on terms which are still being decided.
The international order that is emerging out of the strife and instability that has gripped much of the non-Atlantic world since the collapse of the socialist bloc in the early nineties is still an uncertain one. Some strategists have suggested that global security will now be the responsibility of a concert of great powers, whose regional dominance ensures them a role in security maintenance in their respective neighbourhoods, where before Cold War rivalry would have ensured superpower interventions.

Regional Spheres and Great Powers

Regional spheres of influence are at the moment being informally demarcated by the ad-hoc reactions of regional powers like NATO, Australia and Russia, to events in Kosovo, East Timor, the Caucuses and elsewhere. Indeed the biggest points of friction are with regard to those regions that, with the end of the Cold War, are slipping out of the worldwide grasp of one of the former superpowers, and into their regional orbits. Examples are Taiwan and Japan, which remain under American protection in a continuing standoff with their increasingly powerful regional antagonist, China; large swathes of Eastern and Southern Europe which through the expansion of NATO and the wars in the Balkans and Kosovo are coming under joint European and American control; or Pakistan, falling into the regional orbit of India while desperately trying to salvage its former prestige as a frontline state — a desperation which dangerously inches towards the nuclear option.

The shift from a bipolar to a multipolar system, from superpower to regional spheres of influence, has inevitably challenged the role of the U.S. as well, questioning its relevance to far-flung areas where it had lodged itself in old fight against world Communism. It is probably in response to this that, in the early nineties, the Clinton Administration has undertaken several prestigious efforts at regional conflict resolution, such as in Palestine and Northern Ireland, and since Kargil in the stand-off between India and Pakistan. By entrenching itself in these regions through the brokering and mediation of their regional disputes, the U.S. can continue to claim for itself a larger-than-life role in an international order that increasingly can dispense with it.

Geo-politics and Geo-economics

In the previous article I did not touch on the role of economics in grand strategy. The American strategist Edward Luttwak has lately gained some renown for advocating a shift in strategic thinking away from traditional geopolitical concerns of military supremacy and facts of territory, to a new order revolving around “geoeconomics.”

This shift in thinking is perhaps not so new. Markets in trade, finance and commerce have been one of the motive forces of international politics, especially from the time of the great Western colonial empires, though the postwar era has seen an increasingly direct connection between the flow of goods and capital and the maintenance of international security. Countries like Japan and South Korea, cohabiting under the American security umbrella, became increasingly bound to the global market which was nurtured by the U.S. during the Cold War. In India, the post-Independence policy of non-alignment was as much the result of Nehru’s reflections on international political economy as of the purely strategic concern of remaining autonomous of the superpower rivalry.

More recently, the political fallout of the East Asian financial crisis in 1997–8 — the collapse of Suharto’s rule in Indonesia and the political instability which gripped Malaysia and Thailand — brought home the intimacy of capital flows and global governance.

In fact the the growing popularity of the term “governance” is a result of the discourse of global capital and its supporting bodies, the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation. These agencies’ decisions on lending and borrowing, tariff regimes and aid packages, policies of structural adjustment to the demands of transnational corporations and global capital, control more and more directly the everday fate of millions of people throughout the world. Because of its previous insulation from these global currents, and its autarkic market, India largely remained unbowed by these geoeconomic forces until 1991, when the IMF and World Bank came to the rescue of the bankrupt exchequer in New Delhi.

Globalising India

With the onset of the “second generation” of reforms — the anticipated wave of privatisations of the massive national assets of the public sector, the further opening of markets to transnational companies, the freeing of controls on capital flows — India will become more vulnerable not just to the dictates of structural adjustment that have shackled Southeast Asia, but to the political and military options of those few powers who dominate the IMF-WB-WTO.

It is against this geoeconomic background that we must revise our more traditional focus on geopolitics, and this revision yields a less optimistic analysis of India’s place in the world. The fact of nuclearisation and the increased prestige it seems to carry with it, is largely negated by the new economic policies since 1991, and the happy surrender by the new Government of India’s markets to the forces of global capital.

The intervention of the U.S. in the resolution of the Kargil War in July 1998 sets a distressing precedent for India’s aspiration to regional and global hegemony. Kargil would have been much bloodier affair and less certain in its outcome had President Clinton not instructed Pakistan to withdraw its forces from Kashmir on the threat of cancellation of IMF-WB loans, which keep our neighbour’s economy afloat. What today is the plight of a discarded Cold War ally, hostage to the whims of the U.S., could in fact be the fate of a globalised India in the future.

Constructing contingent memories as authoritative, and transforming the many threads of the past into a coherent narrative, the discipline of history is one of the most important fields of modern social thought. As an endeavour of the present, with its ongoing debates and revisions, history is inevitably concerned with claims to present-day power and representation. The controversies which have recently dogged the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) in the past several years are thus not simply an academic issue, but a fight for control of our collective memory and identity.

Let us not misunderstand this dispute, as many have, as one between the “Western” and “Indian” versions of history. Nor is it really a fight over saffron or secular historiography. While no one can deny that the intensified assault on administration, education and public life by the Hindu Right in the past few months is a terrifying phenomenon, this issue goes beyond simple ideological postures and academic methods.

Sarkari or Sarvajanik History?

Last week, two volumes of the ICHR-sponsored Towards Freedom series of books on the freedom struggle, edited by the noted social historians Sumit Sarkar and K N Panikkar, were withdrawn from publication by the Oxford University Press under official pressure from the nodal ministry for education, Human Resources Development (HRD).

The General Editor of the series, Sarvapelli Gopal — son of Dr S Radhakrishnan and a distinguished biographer and historian in his own right — clearly stated that this was “a violation of the terms under which the project was conceived and executed. It also amounts to an infringement of the academic rights and freedom of the authors who were invited by the ICHR to undertake this work…It is disturbing and unethical that a purely academic exercise should involve intervention by officials.”

While many of the historians and academics who led protests against the HRD and ICHR last week raised the cry of intellectual fascism and saffron authoritarianism, which are undoubtedly valid, there is a larger issue at stake. That is the tendency for more and more of our public institutions to be taken over by small coteries of extremists and sycophants, who are unaccountable to anyone, and into whose hands have fallen many of the most crucial aspects of our polity, public life and historical memory.

Rationality, Nationality, and Public Life

The ICHR was constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1972, with the objectives of giving a forum for historians to exchange views and promote and disseminate balanced and comprehensive historical research, “to give a national direction to an objective and rational presentation and interpretation of history.”

Arun Shourie, BJP MP, Union Minister, and otherwise known for his vitriolic and shoddy tracts attacking anyone opposed to Hindutva, has in a recent book alleged that the historians of ICHR often used the body for nepotistically advance their own academic profiles and publication agendas. Contrary to the lofty principles proclaimed in its charter, it was never a representative body nor was it run democratically, and the protests raised about saffronisation is nothing compared to the corrupt ways of the old Left intellectuals.

While Shourie’s is obviously a motivated attack, in 1998, when the BJP reconstituted the ICHR by appointing new members sympathetic to their communal version of history, a Marxist academic who lectured in Delhi for more than two decades commented to me despairingly that Shourie is in his own way correct. Since its inception, the historians of the ICHR were political sycophants of Indira Gandhi who used the slogan of socialism as an exoneration for crude personal patronage.

According to this lecturer, the real issue at stake is not just one of saffronisation, but of the how we can run our public institutions to avoid control by individuals and coteries who are unaccountable and undemocratic. The larger issue with the ICHR, as perhaps with much of our institutional structures, is of the authoritarian and manipulative habits that have been corroding our public life since Indira Gandhi’s attacks on democracy in the sixties and seventies.

A Battle for Ideology or for Institutions?

B R Grover, recently appointed ICHR Chairman by the BJP Government, has appeared as an advocate for the VHP, substantiating their claim to the site of the Babri Masjid and implicitly justifying the violence at Ayodhya in 1992. Like the previous regime, we can expect that the sycophants and coteries of the Sangh Parivar will use the ICHR for their own purposes of patronage and largesse, at the cost of further erosion of academic integrity, and the independence of our educational and research bodies.

Perhaps the biggest dilemma is one of formulating a public strategy to deal with this situation. Unfortunately, in opposing the new attempts at packing the ICHR, Left-liberal social scientists have raised a hue and cry over the meanings of rationality and nationality in history-writing, and by turning the issue into a battle for ideology. They seem to have avoided the longer-term issue of who controls our public institutions — the small bands of politicking saffronites or socialists, or the people at large.

Originally published in Satyam Online.

In the past several months since the NDA coalition has eased itself into the saddle of governance, our media has waxed eloquent about a newfound stability of the ruling alliance. The easy passage of the bundle of reform bills in the Winter Session of the Lok Sabha was advertised to the public and to the world as a prelude to a new round of liberalisation.

The showcase of the much-awaited “second generation” of economic reforms will be the upcoming Budget Session, to open at the end of February. Compared to the messy coalitions of years past, it seems now that the BJP confidently straddles the centre of the Indian political fulcrum.

However, amidst the booming bourses and the hype around the visit of US President Bill Clinton, we should not be misled. The events of the past several weeks, notably the protests over Deepa Mehta’s film Water, and the announcement of the privatisation of Modern Foods and Indian Airlines, all give clues to the real fragility within the ruling party. The connection between these two events is not just incidental — Arun Jaitley holds both the Information & Broadcasting portfolio as well as that of Disinvestment.

Sanskriti or Swadeshi?

Last week, on the banks of the Ganga, one never heard a whisper of that other inflammatory slogan of the Sangh, opposing foreign economic domination and calling for swadeshi. This would have been truly radical, and dangerous for the new regime. We can rest assured, through Vajpayee’s “liberal” stewardship, that the strident slogans of culture and Hinduism will increase, and the politics of class will be silenced as the next wave of reforms approaches.

Earlier this month, political pundits were surprised to see the Prime Minister hitting out at Pakistan on several counts — for trying to disrupt the economy by flooding the country with counterfeit currency, by claiming that India was ready to match any nuclear threat in kind, and demanding the return of Occupied Kashmir. To this was added Vajpayee’s blessing of the RSS as a cultural and not a political organisation, to which the Governments of HP, UP and Gujarat responded by lifting the ban of their employees participating in the RSS.

Vajpayee’s tilt to the Right had less to do with these issues, than with an internal tussle in the BJP ranks, between the hardline saffron faction controlled by L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi and the so-called moderates, represented by Jaswant Singh, Arun Jaitley and others. Central to the Prime Minister’s calculations now is keeping this unwieldy ship together, to navigate it through the unrest that will be generated by the next wave of reforms.

Sabre-rattling against Pakistan, and the free hand given to the extremist wing of the Sangh Parivar as seen last week in Banaras, has placated the hardline saffron faction. And most importantly, it has wedded them to the agenda of privatisation favoured by the so-called BJP liberals.

Privatisation and Saffronisation

The showpiece of the new economic policies will be the privatisation of the public sector, foreshadowed by the two test cases floated earlier this month by Jaitley, and the further retreat of the state from its basic responsibilities towards the poor — subsidies to basic commodities which are now being cancelled; the WTO-dictated removal of import duties on basic food products which will have disastrous consequences for farmers throughout the country; and the withdrawal of responsibility for primary services like health and education, which the BJP Vice President J. Krishnamurthy has claimed the state has no business in providing.

If, according to Arun Jaitley, the state has no business providing bread for the people, and Krishnamurthy claims that the state should free itself from ensuring their literacy and health, one might ask whose Government is this then?

On the eve of the new Budget, the RSS and VHP could have mobilised its ranks on these issues, which redound most centrally on the livelihood of the masses. Instead they chose a soft target like Deepa Mehta.

This has saved the BJP from a major schism on the eve of one of the most important Budgets to be tabled in several years, one that will crucially determine India’s terms of engagement with the global economy. But one wonders what makes a bigger difference to the beleagured people of Banaras. Is it the rise in the prices of basic commodities, the further erosion of social services, the attack on organised labour — all of which will be floated in the new Budget — or the cultural sensitivity of an English film that will probably never be screened outside of some major Western and Indian cities?

Originally published on Satyam Online.

Even those of us of liberal political convictions must sometimes admit it. Something quite interesting happened in that majestic city by the Ganga this week. In times when it seems that politics is less about principles and ideas than about populism and pay-offs, when someone, anyone, takes a principled stand, it is touching.

Thus when the Sangh Parivar decides to blow up a few bombs to cock a snook at the nuclear monopoly of the great powers, it warms what is left of our nationalist heart. When they take out their ire against the arrogant moral universalism of Christianity by smashing a few churchs and torching a few missionaries, there is some pride in that defiance. Of course, such cynical vandalism is not about defending national sovereignty or our cultural integrity, as we all know. It is more about upper-caste vote banks and simple hatemongering. But we should be  equally aware that neither the nuclear powers, nor the Christian missionaries, nor Deepa Mehta and her snobby liberalism are blameless.

The Controversy over Water

This week the Hindu Right singled out the latest target of the saffron crusade, in Deepa Mehta’s abortive attempt to begin shooting the third installment of her series of films on India, Water. Through constant intimidation, extortion, and attacks, they forced the UP Government to suspend the shooting of the filmon law-and-order grounds. Throughout the controversy, we were treated to Mehta’s anger about how many millions of dollars she was losing everyday, how much she respected the culture of Kashi, and the complaint that the script had been cleared at the highest levels in Delhi. Similarly, Shabana Azmi, playing her favourite role as lecturer to the untutored masses, took the State Government and the District Magistrate to task for violating cultural tolerance, government procedure, and liberal freedoms.

If Shabana was hysterical then Mehta was stupid. She should have known that with the Bihar Assembly elections around the corner, beginning her film shoot at this time was inadvisable. Varanasi nearly touches the UP-Bihar border and has a large seasonal migration of Bihari labourers. The caste and communal politics of Bihar strongly reverberate in East UP, and the political winds of UP also blow down the Ganga to Bihar. For Mehta to descend on the City of Light with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment, crew, and all the glitter that is but the fantasy of the miserably poor people of East UP, was idiotic at this time. To do this in the name of Indian or Hindu culture was offensive.

Using India as a Backdrop

When her last film was premiered at the London Film Festival in late 1998, one of the production assistants for Earth–1947 had, with starry eyes, told me that these films were Deepa’s way of coming to terms with her ideas of India. I found this absurd, because Mehta’s films are hardly seen in India, and are more a chance for her to demonstrate her liberalism to Western audiences ignorant of India.
I saw Fire in the U.S. more than two years before it was released in India amidst much controversy. And while one must condemn the Shiv Sena’s smashing and burning of theatres, at the same time Fire dealt in cheap, essential stereotypes of machos, brahmacharis, or frustrated women turning to lesbianism within a joint family. Earth was little better in its narrative of Partition. Disgustingly elitist, it shows how decent and defenceless Parsis are encircled by the violent passions of the masses, and are left wondering at what has become of rationality. The protagonists spontaneously break out fighting while sharing a meal in a Lahore dhaba, because they know nothing more than temple bells and the azans of the local masjid.

India and Indian culture are as much a backdrop for Mehta’s condescending liberalism, as the Ganges and Kashi are used as a backdrop by the Hindu Right for their fascist political posturing. And if we are comparing their relative skills in appropriating cultures for their own purposes, then the Sangh Parivar won the day hands down.

Perhaps this is the wrong time to attack Mehta, given the dangerous inroads the khaki knicker-wallahs are making into the mainstream in the past few months. But she handed this highly-charged symbolic issue to them on a silver platter (or is it a brass thali?) She probably has as much to gain in terms of pre-release publicity for the film, as the bureaucrats and politicians of UP do in terms of threats and bribes, and the Hindu Right does in pre-electoral rabble-rousing.

Originally  published on Satyam Online.

This week has been an eventful one politically. The arrest of Dara Singh, implicated in the murder of the missionary Graham Staines and his two children, a Christian clergyman and a Muslim trader named Rehman, is of course a welcome, if somewhat belated development, since the attacks on Christians began to intensify more than a year ago. What is curious is not just how long it took to arrest Dara Singh — who, despite being available for newspaper interviews, was able to evade the authorities for a full year — but the timing of the arrest. Some cynics point to the upcoming Orissa assembly elections and the Congress’ impending doom in the state, in the wake of the super-cyclone. To the cynic, this is a perfectly acceptable reason for the speedy arrest of Singh after administrative inaction for more than a year. While this won’t go very far in convincing Orissa’s shattered voters of the promises of “good governance,” equally important was another event announced late this week.

The Timing of the Arrest

The dates for the visit of U.S. President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in mid-March were finalised only two days after the arrest. This was also coincident with Gladys Staines, the murdered missionary’s widow, emerging into the public eye to release a book in Bombay and speak to the press about her husband and sons’ murder by a functionary of the Sangh Parivar. In the politics of U.S. Presidential visits to foreign, especially Asian countries, this assumes significance. In 1998, Clinton was beleagured by pressure groups, many associated with the Christian Right in the U.S., to halt his diplomatic overtures towards China, whose Government takes an exceptionally strong line on the “anti-national” and subversive activities of missionaries and Christians. Short of cancelling his visit, many groups and Congressmen wanted him to meet with Christian dissidents in China. With Clinton’s visit to India imminent, the White House perhaps wants to avoid the similar embarrasment in India, and the BJP-led Government has obliged its new strategic partner, eager to do business with the U.S., without the meddling of lobbies which continue to hound China’s patrons abroad. If Gladys Staines were ever to meet Clinton, it would tarnish the much-touted cliché of India’s tolerant and secular culture.

Proving the Secular Credentials of the Government

The arrest of Dara Singh, then, is no demonstration of the secular resolve of the Central Government. Other recent developments bear out this conclusion. In U.P., the recent statements of Chief Minister Ram Prakash Gupta approving the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and the recent passage by the UP Assembly of the Regulation of Public Religious Buildings and Places Bill, which prohibits the building of any temple, mosque, church, or gurudwara, without the permission of the Government. Additionally, this legislation sanctions the demolition of these structures if they are built without first seeking the state’s permission. Passed in the wake of the IC814 hijacking and amidst the media-generated hysterics about ISI infiltration of the country, it will further enable the harrassment of minorities.

In Gujarat, similar trends are evident in the decision of the State Government to allow its employees to openly claim their affiliation to the RSS, and the equally shocking display of the Gujarat Chief Minister in khaki shorts, accompanied by Union Home Minister L K Advani, swearing allegiance to the Hindutva storm-troopers. We can thus safely assume that next Christmas, when Hindu extremist groups want to terrorise tribal Christians in the Dangs, they police need not even keep up the pretence of protecting all citizens regardless of their religion.

The writings of one of the Sangh Parivar’s senior ideologues should make the core of the Government’s beliefs clear. In his latest book, Harvesting Our Souls, Arun Shourie, a BJP Rajya Sabha MP and Minister at the Centre, comments approvingly on the policies of the Chinese Government towards its minority Christian community. These policies include a ban on all foreign missionaries, the requirement of registering with a State-run Church affiliated to the Communist Party, and the haunting of minority groups as presumably anti-national.

Recently in Orissa, according to reports by John Dayal, convenor of the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, the Centre has been continuously warning Christian organisations and groups in the tribal belts of Orissa to obey the Anti-Conversion Act, a legislation which violates the fundamental right to freedom of religion in article 25 of the Constitution. But considering that this week’s other story, in which the Government showed quiet contempt for the President’s warnings against tinkering with the founding document of our Republic, these new developments seem consistent with the real character of the BJP-led Government.

If one thinks back about the hype manufactured around the golden jubilee of Independence in 1997 — hype which nonetheless failed to create more than a flutter and a grumble in the public heart — it is surprising that Republic Day this year passed with little more than the standard commemoration. In the history of modern constitutional democracies, the fiftieth anniversary of the Indian Republic is an occasion equal to, if not more important than, the attainment of Independence from British rule. But every year, we are treated to the pompous display of newer and more sophisticated weaponry, the silly self-congratulation, decorating of heroes in an ongoing war against our largest neighbour and against  sizeable portions of our own population in the name of “national security.” All of these questionable and disgusting rituals have little to do with the actual meaning of the Republic.

The Democratic Revolution

Writing two hundred years ago, about another newly independent country experimenting with the radical idea of equality, Alexis de Tocqueville formulated his well-known idea of the democratic revolution.

Democracy for him was not something that could be institutionalised in elections, ballot boxes, or grand declarations of liberty. Rather, democracy was for him a concrete process, revolutionising every aspect of our lives through the simple, but powerful, principle of equality. And when the democratic revolution starts, when its principle comes to be applied to all realms of modern life, it is impossible to arrest it. In that way, democracy is ineluctable, permanent, because once the idea of equality percolates to every sphere of society — culture, politics, economics — it necessarily questions and shatters the hierarchies of wealth, race, caste, culture, even appearance.

What it leaves in its wake is a different, and perhaps less inspiring story. In more recent times the successes of the democratic revolution, the mass energies it has unleashed in world-wide struggles for equality — everything from anti-colonial struggles and anti-caste movements to civil liberties and socialism — has resulted in equally ferocious backlashes.

Defending or Destroying Democracy?

This Republic Day, rather than staying at home and watching the parading of empty national pride and machismo, I attended a dharna in the mill areas of central Mumbai. Called to commemorate Republic Day and led by the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, the speakers drew attention to the real meaning of democracy, and the historic role that Bombay’s labourers had played in the building of our new society by fighting for the rights to equal work and livelihood.

Those protesting textile workers, once at the forefront of the Indian labour and trade union movements, the struggle for Independence and for a united Maharashtra, are now being crushed by mill owners who subcontract textile production to the unorganised powerloom sector. In these sweatshops, none of the constitutional guarantees of equality of work and employment apply. Their mills are being closed down and the land sold to corporate barons, all in the name of greater wealth and liberalisation. In this they are supported by a Government that openly espouses the authoritarian idea of Hindutva, a philosophy concocted in reaction to the anti-hierarchical upsurges unleashed by the Mandal Commission, the enfranchisement of previously unequal sections of Indian society.

Tocqueville’s reflections on the American Revolution ring ironic today. The U.S.A., one of the first countries to embrace the democratic revolution, has now become the most oppressive global power today — while still speaking in the name of human rights and liberty. There is an important lesson for India here. While the rhetoric of democracy has increased so much in the past several years, it has now been trivialised beyond meaning. The most recent example of this was during General Musharraf’s coup, when our mainstream press became hysterical about the death of democracy in Pakistan, crowing wildly about India’s liberalism and tolerance, and Pakistan’s medievalism. Why then, on this important national holiday, do we commemorate the golden jubilee of the “world’s largest democracy” by a display of all the violent machinery meant to repress and extinguish the hopes of the democratic revolution?

Originally published on Satyam Online.