Heptanesian Archives

Ahmed Rashid is stirring the pot in his interview on NPR All Things Considered yesterday.

While there is no doubt that Kashmir is in flames, the theory of “strategic depth”, explaining Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan and Kashmir through Islamist proxies such as the Taliban and Kashmiri jihad as a quest for balance against Indian dominance isn’t convincing. Pakistani foreign and military policies are not simply a negative corollary of India’s, and the notion that Pakistan is trying to compete with India for influence inside Afghanistan doesn’t explain India’s complete lack of involvement in NATO or the security situation in Afghanistan.

Rashid’s implicit plea for international involvement, just months after Kashmir has returned to perhaps its worst state in fifteen years, seems somewhat clever given his oustanding scholarship and perspective on South Asia (his Taliban remains the single most valuable book on the rise of the students). Following the cack-handed repsonse of the Indian Government to the Amarnath land dispute making a pitch for US mediation in resolving the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan couldn’t be more poorly times. As for the rumours that Obama may send Bill Clinton as special envoy, he did broker an end to the Kargil War. Whatever Indian nationalists may say, the logical outcome of becoming a nuclear state was an acceptance of international mediation when things get out of hand between India and Pakistan.

What of the Simla Agreement and the famous Indian rejection of third-party mediation? It hit the dustbin of history sometime in the late nineties when Clinton had Nawaz Sharif pull back from nuclear war with India, and Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh had their famous strolls in the Mughal Gardens to bring India to the high table of the great powers. After the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, not only does India get to keep its bombs, it can be assured of a pro-US tilt in any mediation, which will most likely strictly behind the scenes, protestations from the Indian Foreign Office notwithstanding.

Arvind forwarded me this article from today’s Sunday Express in New Delhi, “Are you an American Scholar? You are not welcome in India”. It is well known in the research community here in the homeland that the Home Ministry and Intelligence Bureau (IB) in India have delayed approvals and finally rejected the proposals for research sponsored by American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) and Fulbright, pending for the past two years. This has caused much loss to many friends and colleagues. There is no reason anymore to make sponsored research subject to a bilateral regime, and have everything submitted to the Home Ministry and IB for approval. Apart from AIIS and Fulbright, I do not believe most other funding agencies require one to submit to the research visa regime. Nor should anyone have to in this day and age — this regime is a relic of the early sixties.

Why should scholars seek anything other than entry visas to come to do research in India? Indian law actually permits for much more academic freedom and right to access if you go through other channels such as the university system and approaching officials directly. Perhaps I am painting too rosy a picture. But I believe funding should not be connected to your nationality, whether Indian or not, and apart from these few bilateral programmes under the old visa regime, it isn’t.

One needs to remember that most of these are public documents in state institutions which are, in principle, open to all. Of course access is always negotiated. One can do much through the recommendations of high-level bureaucrats, and the good-will of your average clerk, and I know many American scholars who have learned the ways of the system and taught me very much when I met them in the field in India or on campus here in America. One the other hand, I have had severe arguments with American scholars of South Asia who have seriously contended with me that one cannot access archives and other materials without a research visa.

This is simply wrong, and the perception this generates must be condemned. These same elite institutions in the U.S. play a role in mediating access to state collections in India, and setting standards for research practice globally. Some of the most important collections for doing research on Indian history are located in the U.S. and the U.K. In most cases the fruits of our research work, while sponsored and supported by public institutions in India and the U.S., is privately published, stored and circulated in closed archives and university libraries to which the wider public in India or America has only limited access.

The scholars themselves are trapped inside this system, and gain very little from subjecting themselves to it. I have seen many dear friends and colleagues humiliated by the registrations, inspections, and process of seeking approvals to which research visa holders must undergo. It is degrading once you are in India. But these Fulbrighters were kept waiting for all this time and finally rejected! How many liberals amongst us would seriously submit such sensitive project ideas if they knew that the police intelligence is opening a file on them, which is tied to their conditions of stay in the country, and which will haunt them for the rest of their careers as scholars of South Asia, whether their nationality is Indian or American? The whole idea of dragging oneself through this bureaucratic-police state in India is absurd if it can be avoided.

Download The Urban Turn Transcript

http://www.heptanesia.net/documents/urban_turn.pdf

Transcript of symposium held in December 2002 with historians and sociologists Gyan Prakash, Jairus Banaji, Sujata Patel and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar organised by PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action & Research) at the Bombay Paperie, Mumbai.

Rob Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reforms in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

For better or for worse, in most countries of the post-Cold War world, a fairly generalised packaging of liberal-democratic state institutions and neoclassical market economics has now achieved hegemony as the prescription of the possible future. A host of international financial and trade institutions, aid agencies, global policy elites, and their state and non-state apparatuses now debate the dynamics of making “transitions” to this model, and the “reforms” necessary to “complete” this effort successfully. Neoliberal ideology constructs this as a universal and ineluctable process, eliding the complex politics of market-oriented reform by trumpeting an ideal notion of democracy, almost entirely emptied of meaning.

This recent book attempts to analyse this contingent, political dimension of the change in India’s development strategy since 1991, examining the commitment of governing elites to market reforms in a long-established democracy. Their commitment is by no means inevitable and irreversible, India’s liberalisation being undertaken in a competitive political system, where powerful interests could pose obstacles to thwart market reforms, unlike other “transitional” societies in Eastern Europe, Africa or Asia. In this, Jenkins intervenes in debates on the relationship between democracy and market liberalisation, arguing for the importance of political incentives, political institutions, and political skills.

The book is divided as follows: the first three chapters respectively introduce the book; map the history of economic reform in India — including the failed attempt by Rajiv Gandhi in the late eighties — and discuss methods and approaches to the political economy of reform. The following three chapters unfold the central themes of the argument on the political dynamics and durability of liberalisation.

Firstly, he argues for the incentives available to governing elites through new sources of profit and patronage in a scenario where state control of the economy is receding, and where they can carve out a new role for themselves in the market; additionally, the fluidity of the structure of interest groups makes it clear to politicians that resistance could be manipulated and new, pro-reform groups cultivated.

Second, the chapter on formal and informal political institutions examines Indian federalism and how the logic of reform has provided new life to state-level politics, where resistance to reforms is quarantined, while policy initiatives continue to come from New Delhi. States now compete against each other in the pursuit of more market-oriented policy measures. The salience of informal institutional mechanisms like party political arenas and networks of influence of power-brokers to the reforms process, neglected in analyses of liberalisation, is also addressed here.

Thirdly, the tactical skills of democratic politicians in managing the process of reform, obfuscating its effects, disarming its opponents and manipulating new short-term alliances to buy time for the rooting of the reform process is discussed. The final chapter contextualises India’s reform in a global context, critiques the naïve notions of democracy and good governance in development discourse, and discusses India’s institutional capacities in the wake of liberalisation.

Written at a time when these changes were being put in motion, and while in many ways outdated by the new policy initiatives since the 1999 general elections, this book retains useful insights into India’s democratic institutions and its policy apparatus. Most importantly, Jenkins highlights how liberalisation has been orchestrated by elites without much public fanfare or debate, and implemented in an ad-hoc, underhanded and opaque, but increasingly determined manner, belying the happy rhetoric of “democracy” and “civil society” in neoliberal ideology. The chapters are often plagued by heavy-handed repetition of the central thesis about the sustainability of liberalisation despite the rapid changes in governments in the past five years.

However, with its strong and representative sample data from four different states — Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka and West Bengal — this book is worthwhile reading for students of sociology, economics and politics, and development studies.

Originally published in Contemporary South Asia, vol.10, no.1, Carfax Publishing, Bradford, U.K., 2000

Jan Breman, Karin Kapadia, Jonathan Parry, eds., The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (Contributions to Indian Sociology, Occassional Studies 9). New Delhi and London: Sage Publications, 1999

Marking both a renewal of interest in labour studies and an important disciplinary shift, the publication of this anthology is a significant event. Introduced by Jonathan Parry, the fourteen essays by sociologists, anthropologists and historians in the volume include two “book-ends” — introductory and concluding reviews of the respective literatures on the “organised” and “informal” sectors of the industrial economy in India, both by Jan Breman. These chart the shifts in labour studies from the narrow emphasis on the tiny formal sector of the economy — about workers’ “commitment” to the industrial setting, measures of productivity, the social profile of formal sector workers, and trade union strategies — to the much larger and unwieldy “informal” sector of the economy, incredibly neglected by research scholars. While questioning this dualism in the study of economic activity in India, Breman raises questions about the formation and coherence of the working-class or proletariat as an identity and analytical category, the diversity of forms of wage labour and industrial production — from home-based to small workshops to large factories — and the multiplicity of workers’ identities in both formal and informal occupations.

The essays are as follows. Dilip Simeon offers a history of the coal industry in Jharia, South Bihar, and the changing relations of capital, labour and state in the context of working class and tribal movements. Chistropher Pinney locates a pessimistic discourse on industrial modernity as “Kaliyug” for the managers of a large plant in Nagda, Madhya Pradesh, while for the local workers — the subject of these constructions of rural rusticity and traditionalism — there is a less nostalgic feeling towards the exploitation from which the factory has liberated them. Jonathan Parry examines the Bhilai Steel Plant and takes issue with E.P. Thompson’s thesis on the transformation brought about by industrial work discipline, arguing this effaces the variability of rhythms of industrial production.

Two pieces explore memory and the construction of the past. Douglas Haynes, in a piece on the textile industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, discusses the idioms of industrial relations and their inflection by languages of morality, caste and kinship, in different ways deployed by both employers and workers to articulate contemporary concerns. Chitra Joshi, writing on the crisis-striken textile mills of Kanpur — today mostly closed — explores the narratives of industrial decline of a decimated workforce with a memory of the labour militancy in the 1930s.

Raj Chandavarkar, in a rich meditation on labour historiography — with material on the Bombay textile strikes of 1928–9 — offers a critique of mechantistic narratives of industrialisation and proletarian consciousness, and their insufficient treatment of the contingencies in the formation of class identity. Samita Sen, in a history of the Calcutta jute mill industry, foregrounds the position of women in the urban industrial workforce, documenting how their labour and lives were marginalised and domesticated by colonial capitalism and patriarchy.

Several pieces directly address the “informal” sector. One of the weaker contributions is Arjan de Haan’s piece on evolution of the badli, or substitute, labour system in the Calcutta jute industry, in which he unconvincingly argues that the badli system, labour recruitment, and migration patterns need to be seen as an aspect of workers’ agency, their “choices” and “values”, rather than as a business strategy to retain a flexible and exploited labour force. Peter Knorriga maps the unstable industrial relations in the small-scale, mostly home-based production units in the Agra footwear industry.

Karin Kapadia contests traditional arguments about class formation in her study of the synthetic diamond industry in rural Tamilnadu, arguing that workers’ identities are mediated, and the “flexibility” of the globalising labour market maintained, through gender discourses and practices. Miranda Engelshoven analyses the formation of the urban Saurashtra Patel community through the the production relations of the diamond industry in Surat, and discusses obstacles to workers’ organisation. Geert de Neve analyses the practice of tying labour to maintain a stable workforce in powerloom industry in Tamil Nadu, and how what was once an employers’ strategy of bondage has become a reciprocal relation for workers in search of a better livelihood.

The revival of interest in labour studies in India — distinct from the post-Independence intellectual and policy interest in labour — comes both at a time when the foundational categories of the disciplines concerned with the study of labour are being contested, as well as in a political conjuncture when working-class radicalism is at a low ebb and capital at its most expansive. The contributions to this exceptional volume confront the conceptual challenges faced in the study of the historical and contemporary working landscape in India, and offer exciting new possibilities for research by all social scientists.

Originally published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, Fall 2001.

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.