Thursday, May 21, 2009

Letter to the Prime Minister

Dear Dr. Manmohan Singh,

Firstly, many congratulations on securing a historic second 5 year term at the helm. It pleases me greatly as an Indian to see an acclaimed and renowned economist and intellect par excellence as my Prime Minister.

As the stock markets indicted on Monday, 18th May, it is also an occasion of great optimism that you can now run a government without the Left pulling strings, hampering your every progressive reform. There can be no better opportunity than this to make up for your previous term on economic reforms where frankly you were allowed to do very little. The mandate you have got during this General Election is loud and clear. India has voted for stability during a time when there is global chaos. India has voted for a sitting Prime Minister whose integrity and honesty is beyond doubt. India now needs to see that confidence in you translated into the kind of performance that made you a household name during the early 1990s, i.e. the era of economic liberalization.

There have already been some pleasing reports in the newspapers on government formation and the Cabinet's new members. If they are to be believed, this time round the new government will have a higher representation of young ministers. It is also being mentioned that non-performing ministers from your previous term may not find a berth. It was also pleasing to hear that this time MPs with criminal proceedings against them will not be invited as the bargaining capacity of your allies has reduced significantly. How much of this will materialize will be known soon enough when the Cabinet is announced and all the ministers are sworn in. Nevertheless, the Indian voters can still celebrate the fact that this time you do not even need the support of RJD, LJP, SP and JMM. These parties like the proverbial Shylock and they would have extracted their pound of flesh from you.

As an Indian I have two primary concerns which I hope will get top consideration from your administration.

Fiscal Deficit
India's fiscal deficit is in excess of a mind boggling 45 billion dollars; one of the highest in the world. With revenues falling short of expectations and borrowing higher than expected, it seems this deficit is only getting bigger. It is hoped that your administration addresses this issue and bring down the deficit within the next 2 years. Now the Left parties do not have the same level of influence in Delhi, it is hoped that you can pursue PSU disinvestment aggressively and bring in much needed cash into the government coffers. Also of concern is the liquidity in the market (or the lack it). There are market expectations of the interest rates coming down and I hope these expectations are not without basis.

Security
We live in an increasingly volatile neighborhood. The safety and the well being of ourselves, our families, our local neighborhoods, our cities and of our all our countrymen is of paramount importance. We live during times where our rich diversity is being used against us by vested external and internal forces to drive a wedge between us. The very social fabric of our society is being torn apart. There is an urgent need to implement inclusive and progressive policies, introduce education to the hundreds of millions of our countrymen and to bring the prosperity of a growing economy to the rural population.

I was very disappointed with the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. While I was alarmed and concerned over the attacks, they did not represent my biggest disappointment. I understand that in a country as large and as populated as ours, security checks, intelligence reports and the ability of thwart terrorism is an extremely difficult job. The British Prime Minister once said after the July attacks in London, that if the government raised an alert on every threat perception and gave out information on every threat stopped then the country will come to a complete stand still and pandemonium would ensue. I accept that argument on face value.

What baffled me during the Mumbai 26/11 attack was our response time and our ability to stop an ongoing terror. We watched in amazement for 48 hours as our country was held at random by less than a dozen terrorists. It felt incredible that so much time was taken to mobilize our commandos. Crisis Management, co-ordination and response time was woefully lacking that day. I hope during your tenure, steps will be taken to address these anomalies in our security.

I look forward to a safer and brighter India, to a better tomorrow. This General Election holds great promise for us and in turn it has given me great hope.

Yours sincerely,
M Shariff


Identity Complex

What better place to rant than your own blog. I was just reading an article in the Times on the Indian Peace Keeping Force. It was an interesting article and it details the problems India faced in Sri Lanka during the time the forces were deployed there [1987-1990] with the objective of ending the ensuing civil war. The relevance of the article was that just a couple of days the Sri Lankan army informed the media about the death of LTTE leader Prabhakaran. Now I don't particularly have a problem with the analysis. It was nice and succinct. What ticked me off was the title "India's Vietnam".

Why is it that we cannot see ourselves and introspect without comparing ourselves to other? In the past few months I have seen similar headlines and somehow I feel resentful when I see such headlines.

India's 9/11 – In reference to the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Both were acts of terrorism but forgive me if I think of it as India's 26/11 and not as India's 9/11.

India's Josef Fritzl - In reference to a father being questioned by the police for raping his daughter. Now Josef Fritzl is surely not the first father to commit such unspeakable crimes, neither is the Indian the first such low life scum in India. The headline is a pitiful attempt to draw out the viewer or the reader's attention.

There are far too many issues with the Indian media these days. The satellite era has seen the emergence of many news channels each one competing for the viewer's attention. As a result, they have resorted to sensationalizing issues to hold on the view's attention. The quality of the print media has also gone down steadily. Some of our most circulated newspapers are no better than tabloids.


Sunday, May 17, 2009

BJP’s strategy post 2009 elections.

The 2009 General Elections have concluded and the results are out. The Congress along with its allies has 262 seats, marginally short of a simple majority. In a country that has followed coalition politics for two decades that's as close to a mandate as you are going to get. Dr. Manmohan Singh became the first Prime Minister after Panditji to be reelected after completing a 5 year term. This is an extraordinary achievement for a man who in his own words is a politician by accident. The country has voted for stability and for continuity during a time when everyone feared a fractured verdict and post election horse trading. BJP in the meanwhile are despondent. They fared even worse than they did in the 2004 election when they lost power. In what was supposed to be a photo-finish the Congress led UPA ended with over a 100 seats more than the BJP lead NDA. The BJP's seat count was reduced by nearly 20 MPs.

This almost certainly means the end of the career of L.K Advani. By the time the next General Elections are held in 2014 he will be 85 years old. It would be unreasonable for anyone to expect him to be the party's Prime Ministerial candidate 5 years from now. It will be unreasonable to expect an increasingly young electorate to identity with him. After all, should he win in 2014 and last the full term, he will be in his 90s. Indications are that he wants to step down as the Leader of the Opposition. That should affectively bring curtains to the Vajpayee-Advani era in BJP's history. Where does the BJP go from here? Who among their next generation will be the face of the BJP? More crucially will the BJP further dilute their ideology in an attempt to appeal to a larger vote base or will they harden their stance, their core Hindutva beliefs and strengthen their current vote base?

The answers to these questions will start emerging in the months to come. To start with, if L.K Advani does not reconsider his decision to stand down as Leader of Opposition, then the BJP will need to fill that position with someone else. The current favorites will be Shushma Swaraj, Murli Manohar Joshi or even Rajnath Singh. Will Narendra Modi take centre stage? More importantly, will he be allowed to? Narendra Modi was one of the main campaigners of the BJP in this General Election. It's clear that his shrill rhetoric and personal attacks on his opponents does not resonate with the public outside Gujarat. It is also apparent that outside of Gujarat, he has not been able to translate his popularity into votes for the BJP. It is the state of Karnataka and not Gujarat that has sent most number of the BJP MPs to the Lok Sabha. The bottom line for Mr. Modi is that his state does not send substantially large number of MPs to the Lok Sabha and the myth of his nationwide appeal seems busted, at least for now. Given those permutations, it would be fascinating to see if the central leadership in the BJP gives Modi any elbow space and if Modi himself will risk relocating to Delhi.

Within the minority community, a suspicion lingers on that communal tension simmer when the BJP remains in opposition for long. Now that they are forced to wait another 5 years, the biggest fear of the minorities is that BJP might look to replicate its Gujarat model elsewhere across India. The consolation is that last time a saffron Delhi watched as mute spectators while Gujarat burnt. This time the hope remains that Delhi will react faster if such a situation arises.

It will be fascinating if the internal findings of political parties become public information. Public posturing of all political parties rarely reflects their internal assessments. What would the BJP attribute to its failure? Is their core constituency shrinking? Do more and more urban and rural voters disagree with the politics of divide and hate? Should the BJP adopt an inclusive model or should continue to concentrate on their core Hindu voters? M.J Akbar in the Times of India made a very interesting observation. He said India is not a secular country because that's how the Indian Muslims want it. It's a secular country because that's how the Indian Hindus want it. A large majority of the Hindus in this country do not believe in an exclusive model of politics. This election has also given resounding thumbs down to identity politics. The Hindus and the Muslims of this country, the Brahmins and the Dalits, the North and the South Indians, all of them want the politics want to be based on development and not on identity.

The BJP should be able to recognize this model themselves. Nitish Kumar, their ally in Bihar has had a spectacular victory. His governance since 2005 has been both progressive and inclusive. So successful was he that he has singlehandedly decimated Lalu's RJD and Paswan's LJP. For the first time in Bihar, the politics of development trumped over the politics of identity. The Yadavs, the Jats, the Muslims and the backward classes all voted for Nitish Kumar. That's a big lesson for all political parties to learn from. There are now state governments that are coming back to power on the basis of pro-incumbency. That includes BJP states like Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. That includes Congress states like Delhi and Andhra Pradesh.

The million dollar question is which way will the BJP go? Will they practice a more inclusive brand of politics? Will they succumb to the pressures of an ideology that sees the primacy of one community and culture in what is essentially a multi-cultural society?


Saturday, May 16, 2009

Identities – Part IV – Zeitgeist

Part I - Groups and Affiliation
Part II - Stereotypes
Part III - Ghettos

My history teacher in high school had a very unique way to teach. It's probably on the reasons I enjoy history as a subject and why I am intrigued so much by socio-political issues. She once wrote down ZEITGEIST on the board and asked us to spend some time finding out what it meant. There were brownie points up for grabs. The only hint she was prepared to give was that it was not an English word. Now this was a pre-internet era where personal computers were just coming in. Only one of my classmates had a computer at home and he was the envy of the whole class. Google was almost a decade away. Our history book for the term, our curriculum and indeed those of our seniors contained no reference to Zeitgeist. What the heck did it mean anyway? And what was its relevance to our subject.

Zeitgeist as I was taught that year is a German word and refers to the way a group of people think, believe and behave during a specific time period. During the preceding or subsequent era people would have felt differently. Wikipedia defines Zeitgeist as - the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate, ambience and morals of an era and also notes that Zeitgeist can only be observed for past events. In the previous week while studying World War II, the general consensus in our class was OK Hitler was this total nutcase; a gifted orator and all that but a nutcase nonetheless. He was responsible for the death of millions of people. The only fault of this people was that they had a different identity, they were Jewish, an identity that Hitler hated and he wanted to establish this pure Aryan race. OK Point accepted. But what about the rest of the Germany? Why did they go along? Can you bend an entire nation to do your bidding? Was there no one who felt they were doing any wrong? Yes, we had heard of the Gestapo and yes we knew how humiliated the Germans would have felt during the Treaty of Versailles. We learnt all of it but we could not reconcile to the idea of an entire nation being unable to stop the lunacies of one man. A society contains a variety of people; it contains its intellectual class, its artists, a judiciary, military and policing arm, a representation of people from all sections of society. That variety acts like a fail-safe mechanism. It protects a society and keeps it in line. In the Nazi era however, the fail-safe mechanism did not trigger. How else can one man manage alter the ideological beliefs of an entire nation? Zeitgeist was our teacher's way at offering an explanation. She said Hitler was able to influence the "spirit" of the "times". Zeit is time and Geist is spirit. He was able to channel the resent of the Germans into what he was convinced would become world dominance.

You just have to look behind in the past to see the number of ironies life throws back at us. Somehow we never learn from history. The Jewish community was persecuted for centuries in Europe culminating with the horrific events of World War II. They carved out a nation in the heart of the Middle East and today scores of Palestinians have become victims of a Ghettoized society, forced to live in refugee camps by the very group of people who were themselves victims and survivors of Ghettoism. How can the Jews, a group of people persecuted in the past, have no empathy towards another group? How can they disfranchise and displace the Palestinians and consign them to decades of misery. The irony is that if there is any community that should have understood the plight of the Palestinians, it should have been the Jews. No Arab can even come close to understanding it but a persecuted Jew should be able to understand, because his forefathers have faced much worse, because he has walked down that road before, and he knows the miseries that lie ahead.


Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Identities – Part III - Ghettos

Part I and Part II of the Identities series

It's hard to talk about Identity groups and not mention Ghettos. Although the origin of this term takes us back some 500 years, it's only the last century that the term has gained prominence when talking about social groups. In 1516, Jews in Venice were forced to stay in area called the 'Venetian Ghetto'. The same area, within which the Jews lived in, also contained iron foundries used for cooling slag. Slag in Venetian is "gheta". I read about Ghettos in history lessons about World War II for the first time. A majority group (Germans) rounded up a minority group (Jewish people) and forced them to live in a restricted neighborhood. This as we learnt in school was not the final destination. From here, they were sent to concentration camps.

The Ghettos of the Second World War were neighborhoods, districts even, where people of a community were segregated and forced to live. Seventy years later, the creation of modern day ghettos has not always been by force of law. Ghettos today are created primarily because of socio-economic reasons. You have black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in America. You have Muslim neighborhood in India. While one Ghetto has been formed because of the color of your skin, another Ghetto has been created because of the God you chose to worship. But race and religion are not alone when it comes to Ghettos. You have Chinatowns, Irish, Italian, Hispanic, Caribbean and many other nationalities that formed their own neighborhoods across urban America.

I lived in London for over 4 years. If there is any city in the world that can boast of having a true multi-national population then it must be dear old London. You can't strictly call them Ghettos but they represent broad groups of nationalities, races and religions; living across London in bunches. Wembly has a high population of Gujratis. East Ham has a high population of Tamilians. Southall has a large population of Punjabis. Imagine my surprise when the train stops in Southall station and I am greeted with a signboard that says SOUTHALL in three different languages English, Hindi and Urdu. Most Australians, South Africans and Kiwis living in London would be residing in West or South London. Brick Lane is thickly populated by Bangladeshis. Euston is another place with a lot of Bangladeshis. I was told that a few decades earlier Brick Lane was dominated by Jewish people. Today a large number of them can be found in North London. Ilford has a high Punjabi and Pakistani crowd. Where do the actual British people live? Well, they live all over the place but there are areas in and around London which have your average British population like Romford for example. Most of my work colleagues however preferred the quite life on the countryside and commuted long distances to work. I wonder if the term white flight is applicable here. According to Wikipedia - White flight is a term for the demographic trend in which white people move away from suburbs or urban neighborhoods that are becoming racially desegregated to white suburbs.

So why does the average Bangladeshi arriving in London (or Bengali for that matter) prefer to stay near Brick Lane. You could say that safety and familiarity play a role here. You could say that things like access to local food, language, music and culture play an influential role here. You could say that being surrounded by people of your own community fosters a feeling of home away from home. Since none of these conditions actually are a consequence of socio-economic pressures, it hard to call them Ghettos. The closest I can call them is "Ghetto like".

I have never strictly seen a black neighborhood. I have seen black dominated areas in London without really seeing the problems faced in such neighborhoods. What I have seen is Muslim neighborhoods in India living in abject poverty, epitomized by their narrow lanes, illegally constructed houses sticking wall to wall, in which an overcrowded and often illiterate population attempts to survive and beat the odds of life on a daily basis. One such example of a ghetto is the Sabarmati River in Ahmadabad that divides the city into two distinct parts. The division is not just geographical. It also divides the increasingly affluent Hindus on the West and the economically marginalized Muslims on the East side. This is equally true of other neighborhoods across India that houses the Dalit populations or any other socio-economically backward group. A village in the backdrop of rural India still living with the burden of a caste driven society has a segregated population of 'untouchables' living in one portion of the village.

One of challenges that a society faces and in my opinion often fails in; is to integrate all sections of society as it moves forward. One of India's biggest problems is that sections of our societies are divided not just on a single identity but in multiples. A progress that fails to include everybody is not really a progress. It's a recipe for disaster. What will happen to a society in which one section moves forward at the cost of another? Why does social unrest surprise us anymore? Can a society afford to marginalize some of its constituents? Social, economic and political tensions are direct fallouts of Ghettoized societies.


Monday, May 11, 2009

Identities – Part II – Stereotypes

Part I of the Identities series

Stereotyping of an identity occurs when we come in contact with an individual or a group of people belonging to one particular identity. Our perception of the identity is drawn from the experience we have had with one or more such people. Often it is not even our own experience but the experience of someone else that we know of, perhaps of someone who belongs to our own group. Regardless of whether these experiences are exaggerated, real or imagined, they represent a generalization of an identity. If the member of a particular group happened to be good or bad, it doesn't mean that everyone from his community is good or bad. The perception of an identity however lingers long in our mind and it makes us biased for or against it.

Stereotyping can be applied to any identity group. Think of any identity group and your impression of it. Here are some examples below of statements that I have heard in the past.

Women can't drive.

India is a land of snake and elephants.

Don't be such a Jew.

When I see a group of black people on the road, I normally cross over to the other side.

Lawyers are liars and manipulators that cannot be trusted.

Muslims are fanatical or Muslims are fundamentalists.

Now India is not really a country full of snake and elephants. I have lived more than two decades in India and I don't usually bump into either species. I have met women who drive very competently, thank you very much.

I had never actually heard the expression "Don't be such a Jew" in India though. I first heard it when I working in England. One evening I was in the company of a few friends, a British Asian, a Caucasian male and a Jewish colleague. The conversation was light hearted and my white friend blurted out, "Don't be such a Jew". I had an expression of puzzlement and my Jewish friend was visibility irritated but said nothing. My friend proceeded to apologize and said "Sorry, I didn't realize that you were also there". So would it have been OK to say it if there were no Jewish people around? Well, that was certainly the insinuation. While writing this particular piece, I googled anti Semitic expressions and came up with interesting results. "Eat like a Jew" (manger en en juif) is a French expression and it implies that you are eating alone. "jodenfooi" is a 'Jewish tip' in Holland which means tight fisted. These are expressions that have become part of our linguistic repertoire.

The accusation that Muslims are fanatical is quite common in the decade we live with. 9/11 did not create this perception; it merely cemented it in our living memory. There are over 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, an overwhelming majority of who don't even live in the Middle East or Pakistan where much of the fundamentalism originates from. Even within the Middle East and Pakistan the larger population is peace loving and in tune with this world. Muslim fundamentalism was a political creation to counter the growing influence of the Soviet Union in Central Asia in the 1980s. Yet the rest of the Muslim world is saddled with a perception that all of us are medieval in nature.

A man should be judged by who he is and not by the generalization of his identity. Sadly, all of us are guilty at some level of practicing stereotyping. Even Governments around the world follow it. It's called racial profiling. Stereotyping does more harm than good. It leads to disenchantment, it leads to resentment, in its severity, it leads to hate crimes.


Sunday, May 10, 2009

Identities – Part I – Groups and Affiliations

No man is an island they say. Man has always been part of a pack. There is a sense of comfort, of safety, of belonging and of security being part of a pack. Birds of a feather do flock together after all. Being over 6 billion of us on this planet, there are bound to be an endless number of packs and each such pack assumes an identity of its own. Across the world, we identify ourselves on the basis of our color, race, sex, religion, caste, creed, region, country, language, social standing, monetary worth, education and an assortment of such identifiers. All of us belong to multiple identities. It defines us and makes us who we are for the better and unfortunately for the worse.

When we as human beings segregate ourselves in multiple complex groups we set ourselves up for an Us Vs Them Syndrome. Depending on the nature of the identity group this could be harmless or it could be brutal. Typically the more important the identity the more lethal it could be. The very social fabric of society is threatened when opposing identities clash.

Take India as an example, a country where we were taught about India's unique diversity and its unity despite the existence of multiple complex groups. Tamils and Kannadigas spill blood over river water, tensions on communal lines between Hindus and Muslims is bad enough, now Hindu and Christian issues have started to emerge. The Meenas and the Gujjars clashed in Rajasthan last year over reservation. The Telengana guys want a state carved out of Andhra Pradesh, the Gorkhas are not far being asking for Gorkhaland to be carved out of West Bengal. The Maharastrian Vs North Indian debate rages on in Mumbai making it an important election agenda for regional parties. Then there is the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits and the illegal migration of Bangaldeshis into India. The gulf between the rich and the poor only seems to get wider. The middle class in India is growing into a huge population with disposable income levels on the rise. At the same time, India's heart lies in its poor villages, with a majority of population staying there. You can take any number of large identity groups and you will see associated issues. The list can be exhaustingly long. With our fixation to cricketing stars, India by and large gives a step motherly treatment to its other sport stars and athletes. For a long period doctors and engineers were considered to be the only profession that parents wanted their kids to pursue. Sexual harassment, dowry cases, honor killing, infanticides are all issues that women as a group deal with.

Our ancestors were no exception to identity groups. They gained and lost through their various affiliations. They lived in a society where their social standing was determined by which house they had the fortune or misfortune of being born in. Life would be a lot easier if you were born to a Brahmin or a Kshatriya family instead of a Shudra. The migration to the subcontinent by the Aryan tribes saw the Dravidians being pushed south. India saw migrating social groups, either as invaders or conquerors and if you take the example of the colonial British, then even as traders. Somehow they all managed to co-exist for centuries, ruled successively by one dominant social group or the other. There are times when I think maybe our ancestors where better off because they knew a secret, a secret they perhaps didn't share with us. They have shown high levels of tolerance to each other, learnt to co-exist and even assimilate one another's rituals and habits. There seems to be a common ground somewhere despite all the problems.

However in today's world, tolerance is a word that is fast becoming obsolete. It has no relevance. There is no middle ground. It's our way or the highway.