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Cameos / The Legacy for Tomorrow

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From N.C.'s Writings

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore's 155th birth anniversary falls on Sunday (May 8, 2016). On this occasion we are reproducing two pieces by N.C. on Tagore written 75 years ago, in 1941. Both were published in The Calcutta Municipal Gazette—Tagore Memorial Special Supplement, September 13, 1941 (that appeared after the Poet's death on August 7, 1941). The first piece was carried under the pseudonym Vanguard. Though written during World War II when the global scenario was radically different from what it is today, the relevance of these pieces remains undiminished.

Cameos

Vanguard

It was a wet September evening in 1936. We were driving back home after an interview with Tagore, then staying in a suburb of Calcutta. My companion was an Englishman—a young professor of literature, who had just had his first glimpse of Tagore. He was impressed with the Poet's personality. But he had so many things to ask about him. There was still something that he had yet to figure out about Tagore. After a pause, he asked me how the people, the common people, regarded Tagore. I replied: “Well, we consider him as our national poet. But he is a votary of no narrow nationalism: he has condemned in no unmistakable terms the system that is dominating our country, but he has sought refuge in a broad humanism.”“Yes, but,” he asked once again, “would you call him a People's Poet, a poet who portrays the life, the struggle and the aspirations of the common man—the toiler in the field and the factory?” I do not remember what answer I could mumble out then, but it was not something that fully satisfied either him or me at the time. As I returned home, the question came back over and over again: Is Tagore a People's Poet?

II

Two years later, the scene shifts. This time my friend is an Indian in London, who at one time was a student at Santiniketan. He has settled in England after a struggling academic career. We were discussing Andre Gide who had just come back from the Soviet Union and had started a tirade against that country. It was a shock to the progressive circles and was broadcast all over the world by the reactionary press. What a depressing feeling it was to find the great French writer in the camp of the enemies of the USSR! Little by little our discussion veered round to the favourite topics as to whether it was possible for the intellectuals to be above the battle and retreat into the Ivory Tower like the Eyeless in Gaza: while the world was being enveloped in a desperate struggle of power-politics, and culture stifled all around, nobody could remain neutral without helping the cause of reaction. Particularly was it true in a dependent country like ours, and, I asked, if our intellectuals were alive to their responsibility. Many were not, but how was Tagore? Was he socially conscious? Did he realise the issue at stake? Profit versus the People—does he really know on which side he should stand? My friend kept quiet for a moment, and then, from under a huge pile of books, he drew out a dusty file of type-written pages. It was an English translation of Tagore's Letters from Russia, and he told me the story behind it.

Years back when this young man was absorbed in his research, there came to him a copy of Tagore's Letters from Russia. He started translating it and he did it at a time when he was nearly stranded. But he felt a sense of responsibility towards his Gurudeva and was anxious that Europe should know where Tagore stood in this crisis of progress. The impression that the West retained about Tagore with “the lotus and the crescent moon” was out of date. It was time that they should know him again as the realist who had reacted to the sufferings of exploited humanity. With this end in view, he translated the book, and Bertrand Russell willingly wrote a foreword to the proposed English edition. From the Poet himself came glad consent and everything was arranged but, at the eleventh hour, unexpected circumstances came in the way, and the book was never published.

As I listened to his reading of the manuscript till midnight I realised what an unbelievable loss it was that the book never saw the light of day, for it might have given Tagore a new recognition in the West, more impressive and more significant than what he had received on the publication of Gitanjali. This time he would have received more coveted laurels than the Nobel Prize, the gratitude of struggling millons from Spain to China. With what clear under-standing he could delineate the ruthless working of imperialism in his own country and compare it with the tremendous material and moral progress in the Soviet Union. Here was Tagore as something more than a poet and philosopher. Though not one of them, he had felt with his own heart the misery and starvation of the common people, and he had the courage to admit the great social advance made under a system which destroys the propertied class to which he himself belongs. Here was the great humanist who would never hesitate to condemn exploitation to welcome a better order of things.

III

Summer 1939. An international students' delegation was visiting a concentration camp of the Spanish refugees in the south of France. It was a small party but comprised many nationalities from the Chinese and the Indian to the Yugoslav and the American. The visit was intended to demonstrate the youth's common front against Fascism and Imperialism, and for the purpose of conveying the greetings of the world students to the youth of Spain as the vanguard of the People's struggle against Fascism. The camp was situated right at the foot of the Pyrenees, near the frontier, and had a population of 18,000—mostly from the Army of the Ebro, which included men from all walks of life—writers, artists, doctors, workers, peasants, clerks and shopkeepers—men of the famous International Brigade who came and fought shoulder to shoulder with the Spanish people because they realised that the front of Peace, Freedom and Democracy was indivisible and could be defended not by rival imperialisms, but by toiling millions out to build a new world.

The French commandant did not allow us to enter the camp which was under military control and was surrounded by barbed wire for miles around. He was polite but would not let us go in, lest the French Government should be exposed by the appalling treatment that had been meted out to the sons of the sister democracy of Spain. Daladier and Bonnet, the Chamberlains of France, who with their gang had abetted the Fascist attack on Spain, were now, by imprisoning these valiant fighters, acting as the goal-warders of Hitler and Mussolini. The alternative that was offered to these brave soldiers of democracy was either work in the labour-gangs in France or a passage back to Spain to face Franco's firing squads.

We were allowed to interview about 20 people called out of the camp. There were Brazilians, Poles and Chinese in the International Brigade. Of the Spaniards, most of them in that particular camp were students from Colleges and Universities. One of them had been working in the University of Madrid on a thesis on literature for his doctorate, before the Fascist rising in 1936. We talked to each other in broken French, and he asked me a number of questions about India. He had heard a lot about Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru. Of these, he ruled out the first, for, as he said, “Gandhi wanted to put the hands on the clock back, while we are out to create a new and better world.” But Tagore and Nehru, he continued, were different though they might be under the personal spell of Gandhi. He had read the works of Tagore in French, and had listened to portions of Nehru's Autobiography read out by his comrades at the front. He wanted to know what Tagore's attitude was towards Fascism. Fortunately I had then just read the Poet's reply to Noguchi, and I told him about that. He was happy and remarked: “He might not be coming from the ranks of the people, but he is sensitive and he is honest. He is on the side of progress and justice.”

And he added after a pause: “You know, Fascism can never be effectively fought by imperialist governments—that is why today we are in prison in the so-called democracy of France. These governments might one day stand up against Hitler and Mussolini when their own interests will be touched, but Fascism will never die so long as imperialism survives; and it is for the common people to rise and smash up the present system of exploitation. In that struggle the intellectuals will be called upon to make their choice. Many would be frightened and go over to the side of the bosses. But the better type, men like Malruax, Fox, Cornford and Lorca who fought alongwith the peasants and the workers—and men like Tagore ad Rolland, Toller and Sinclair, who have sent their greetings from a distance—these will all be on our side. Many of them might not take part in the actual fighting, many might abhor the violence that will show itself in the process, but they will at least be honest when, moved by the agonies of suffering humanity today, they will welcome the birth of the new world of peace, freedom and happiness. By themselves they will not be able to build such a world, but they will welcome its construction when the toiling man will be enthroned. They are no doubt individualists and their reactions will be entirely emotional. Yet they will be our valuable allies in the struggle. Would you regard Tagore as one of them?” I did not have to hesitate to give him the proud answer: “Yes, we regard him so”—and was reminded of the foggy night in London when I had read the translation of the Letters from Russia, and of the monsoon evening in Calcutta when the Englishman had asked me, “Would you call him a People's Poet?”

IV

Things have moved since then and moved rapidly. I do not know what has happened to the young Spanish student. Perhaps he went back to the Spain that is Franco's prison, or fell into the hands of the Gestapo after the betrayal of France, or if he is one of the few lucky ones, has escaped to some other part of the world, ever ready to carry on the real People's struggle against Fascism. But Tagore has not belied our hopes, he has reacted magnificently to the suffering of toiling humanity trying to sever the bonds that bind them. Even in this evening of his life, he has shown the alertness of youth in tearing off the mask from the face of Fascism and Imperialism alike. As I read and re-read his New Year's Message, “Crisis in Civilisation”, there came back to my mind the face of the young comrade from Spain behind the barbed wire in the concentration camp, and I remembered the ringing words of Rolland, written on May Day 1934 on the advent of German Fascism: “The decisive conflict has begun. It is no longer permissible to keep aloof..... Appeal to life against death, against that which kills, against these ravages of humanity: the forces of money, drunk with gold, the Imperialisms drunk with power, the dictatorships of the great companies, and the various forms of Fascism, drunk with blood. Working man, here are our hands. We are yours. Let us unite. Let us close up our ranks. Humanity is in danger!”

(The Calcutta Municipal Gazette—Tagore Memorial Special Supplement, September 13, 1941)

The Legacy for Tomorrow

Lenin once asked a group of Soviet students as to whom they regarded as the greatest literary figure of Russia. “Mayakovsky,” they replied. “Yes, but what about Pushkin?” asked Lenin, and added, “Could there have been a Mayakovsky without a Pushkin?” A hundred years from today the people would speak of Tagore in the same way and with more truth. At the moment we are too near to his personality to fully appraise its greatness. You cannot size up a Titan when you stand next to him. Tagore cannot be mesured by our standards, nor can we comprehend the infinite variety of manifestations in which his genius has taken form. He was not a personality, nor an institution, he was an epoch. He was as much the product of an age as the age was his product.

On the changing face of India, personalities come and go in rapid succession. The leader of yesterday is discarded today, and the hero of today slips into oblivion tomorrow. That is not the fault of the nation nor of those who play these fleeting roles. We in India are in the ferment of a dynamic world, the giant is awake, the unchanging East has stirred. But even at this quick Tempo, Tagore tried to keep pace with the times. He was never a back number.

But he was a progressive in more ways than one. On the one hand, he broke away from traditions—in language, music, painting and religion; on the other, he never lost touch with the vital currents of the day, absorbing within his receptive mind all the new ideas and thoughts of his age. A scientific study of the last fifty years would no doubt recognise in him the Pole Star of our national culture.

II

Consider the invaluable legacy that he has left behind. Bengal has had a veritable Age of Tagore. In language, he destroyed the traditional fetters of old Bengali. Take away Tagore and we at once fall back with a thud upon Iswar Gupta, with perhaps the exception of Michael, as our immediate poetic heritage. The hide-bound code of traditional technique had to give way before this wizard of words. He enriched our language with a diction that is at once supple and powerful. This has been a great achievement—a technical revolution—not only for having made the language more elastic and expressive, but also for having destroyed, from the point of view of future progress, the germs that were ossifying our medium of expression. He narrowed the gulf between the spoken and the written tongue, between the language of the man in the street and that of the learned scribe. Bengali has become a living language, ready to welcome new forms and expressions which future generations will bring alongwith them.

When the common man comes to inherit the culture that is today the monopoly of the few, he will have to battle against the age-old conventions of language to make it the true vehicle of his own expression. Tagore played the historic role of making the first assault in this war against outworn literary conventions. The language that he created is now ready to adjust and expand itself to suit the needs of its votaries of tomorrow.

In music and painting too, he played a similar significant role. He tried to give new forms, though never totally rejecting the content of the classical tradition. He realised that no art-from could ever be permanent. A living culture though retaining all that is best in human values would express itself through new forms in every age. That is one of the reasons why the generation that has come in his wake has been so creative in its output. Not only the men of today, but the men of tomorrow too, will pay their tribute to his greatness, for he made our language, painting and music free from the shackles of the past and at the same time set up a new tradition of innovations and experiments.

Technical perfection by itself does not exhaust his great gifts to our culture. The literature that we inherit from him is stupendous in both volume and quantity. To have reaped so much and reaped so richly has seldom come the way of an individual mind. His poetry has given voice to almost all our varied emotions and experiences. Our joys and sorrows, our hopes and frustrations—as individuals or in the collective—find echo in Tagore's writings. He never lost touch with life and recognised that life is always on the move. The poet too moved forward with it, and not backward. He was not afraid to face realities, and that is why he soon discarded the escapist trends like symbolism with which he experimented in the days of Phalguni. Never since the age of Dante has the culture of a generation been epitomised so completely in one man.

Tagore's religion is of no little interest to progressives. He never tried to reduce his idea of values to fixed categories. His God is not the Miltonic Taskmaster, a dispenser of Right and Wrong, nor does He speak in terms of Good and Evil. The Poet created his own God as the God of Beauty. For him, evil is bad because it is ugly, truth is good because it is beautiful. An idealist he no doubt was—for religion itself was the product of idealism—but an idealist of the highest order. Here is a mind freed from the stifling narrowness of a rigid code. It would not be wrong to say that he was never affiliated strictly to any organised religion. He appreciated much that is beautiful in different religious forms. Personal ties might have kept him within a particular fold. But he was no believer in dogmas and ceremonials. To him religion was mostly personal. Born in a country where feudal conceptions of religion still dictate the standards of behaviour, Tagore had the liberality of a mind that seeks after a freer horizon. He played the same role as did the Humanists in Europe in destroying the foundations of a dogmatic religion. Though still confined within the limits of idealism, however beautiful in form, he brought us out of the narrow grooves of orthodoxy. A creed such as Tagore's marks a distinct stage in the evolution of a freer mind.

III

The age of Tagore forms one of the significant chapters of our national history. It relates the story of the rise and fall of a colonial bourgeoisie. This is the period when the Indian middle class came into the political field leading the whole nation against the foreign rule. In the common struggle for freedom the interest of the middle class converged with that of the common people upto a certain point. 1905 was the turning point when the middle class came into the arena of the mass movement, and the climax of this alliance began in 1920. Placed at the vantage point of the movement, the middle class called halt whenever their own leadership appeared to be in jeopardy. This was what happened after the 1920 and the 1930 Civil Disobedience movements, and this is exactly what has been happening for the last two years when the fear of organised masses has kept the national bourgeoisie in a state of coma. Viewed from this perspective the bourgeoisie in a colonial country has certainly a progressive role to play, though the potentialities of that role are being more and more exhausted as the masses are coming to the forefront, and, externally, as the general crisis of the whole capitalist system deepens.

The reflection of this relation of class forces upon the cultural front is clear and unmistakable. With the first stirrings of national consciousness, our writers and poets achieved almost a renaissance and Tagore was its high-priest. The 1905 movement shook off his complacency and he began to take an active interest in the burning topics of the day. Through his songs and poems he inspired the nation, but he went further. His pen became merciless in the denunciation of Imperialism, and in course of his numerous tours abroad, his speeches were equally uncom-promising. At Santiniketan, he never failed to give shelter to the weary soldiers of the nation whenever they had approached him. Under his influence, our intellectuals as a whole have never lost touch with the national struggle.

This living link with the masses brought out the noblest instinct of Tagore's humanism. He did not merely applaud the men in battle from the grandstand. He came down into the arena and responded to the demands of the people magnificently. The renunciation of knighthood was a small thing for a great man, but it brought down upon him the wrath of Kipling's kin. The Englishman at the time wrote: “As if it mattered a brass farthing whether Sir Rabindranath Tagore who has probably never been heard of in the wilds of the Punjab, and who, as a writer is certainly not so popular as Colonel Frank Johnson, approved of the Government's policy or not! As if it mattered to the reputation, the honour and the security of British rule and justice whether the Bengalee poet remained a knight or a plain Babu!” But the plain Babu was not to be brow-beaten by Frank Johnson's fans. His ceaseless denunciation of imperialism continued, drawing him out, once again, of his seclusion to the public platform. Even in his old age he came out to lead the nation's protest against the brutalities of Hijli.

IV

Tagore's reactions during the last ten years were remarkable. These were the years of tremendous activity in the national movement. But these were also the years that saw the nervousness of our national leadership drifting helplessly to a retreat through inaction. In the outer world too, these were the years of the menacing rise of Fascism, of the growing conflict between progress and reaction. For the intellectuals the hour of choice came. Many followed the line of retreat, either openly as advocates of reaction or indirectly by returning to their old discarded shell of romantic escapism. The hard realities were too strong for their frail constitutions to bear. But the nobler minds did not cross the line, they remained with the people. Consciously or unconsciously, they felt that their place was with the people and that there was no going back. Tagore chose this path of progress. He was, perhaps, not conscious of it but it came out of his mighty humanism. The poet who, years ago, realised the futility of Ivory Tower once again remembered his own old prayer: ebar phirao moré,—this time with even greater emphasis. He felt that in this decisive conflict he could not go to Innisfree with its ‘nine bean rows' and ‘hive for the honey-bee'. Even from his sick-bed he showed the daring and indignation of youth in his last public statement in reply to the Rathbone letter. Just when the class to which he belongs was following the line of retreat, the Poet chose to move forward with the people.

It is this which earns him the title of the People's Poet. Though born and bred in the best bourgeois tradition of Bengal, Tagore could move with the times, and the sign of the times indicated that in the alliance of the bourgeoise with the common people, the latter would be asserting more and more. Tagore as the finest cultural product of this alliance was its most worthy mouthpiece. To brand him as solely a poet in the service of the bourgeoisie would be unfair.

Equally would it be wrong to regard him as a declassed intellectual in the service of the people. Tagore had no clear conception of the class forces at work in society. The biggest thing that impressed him in the Soviet Union was not the Revolution, but the liquidation of illiteracy—a thing which was achieved under bourgeois conditions in the metropolitan countries. Even in his care for the peasantry, he started in the well-meaning indivi-dualist fashion with a patriarchal benevolence, believing sincerely that model villages like Sriniketan could eliminate poverty. His first reaction towards constructive national work was to spread education whether through the National Council or the Visva-Bharati, and here too he forgot that education itself is determined by surrounding social forces.

But these do not detract from his greatness. His progressivism lies in the fact that unlike many of his contemporaries, he was bold and candid enough to admit his disillusionment with the bourgeois standards of values. His last Birthday Message was a tragic confession of a class confronted with its own moral bankruptcy. He found out the futility of the philosophy of his class. True humanism, he realised, could come now only through a new philosophy, a new social order with new social values. He could only faintly discern its outline, but he welcomed it. Therein lies his greatness, a greatness that will get its true recognition, not today when the wide world is mourning him, but on the day when such a social order will be realised, when the common man will receive his rightful heritage. They will hail him as the poet of this age, whose rich legacy will be the starting-point of the richer culture of tomorrow.

(The Calcutta Municipal Gazette—Tagore Memorial

Special Supplement, September 13, 1941)


Attack on Bipan Chandra's Views on Bhagat Singh - A Rejoinder

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The following is a rejoinder to the attack on Prof Bipan Chandra for his views on Bhagat Singh. The rejoinder is by the co-authors of the book India's Struggle for Independence.

A vicious attack was launched by BJP MP Anurag Thakur in the Lok Sabha in Zero hour today (April 27, 2016) and in a section of the media on India's Struggle for Independence, a book published in 1988, 28 years ago, by Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, K.N. Panikkar and Sucheta Mahajan. Deliberate misrepresentation of Bipan Chandra's views on Shaheed Bhagat Singh is being done by saying he used the term ‘revolutionary terrorism' to denigrate the martyr.

In fact the first time the term ‘revolutionary terrorism' is used in the book on p. 142, Bipan Chandra, who wrote two chapters on the Revolutionary Movement, clearly said that it is “a term we use without any pejorative meaning and for want of a different term”. In his later writings, Bipan Chandra himself stopped using this term as the word terrorism had aquired a very negative meaning in recent years. For example, in his introduction to Bhagat Singh's Why I am an Atheist, published in 2006, Bipan Chandra does not use the word terrorism and says: “Bhagat Singh was not only one of India's

greatest freedom fighters and revolutionary socialists

, but also one of its early Marxist thinkers and ideologues.” Chandra added further: “Unfortunately, this last aspect is relatively unknown with the result that all sorts of reactionaries, obscurantists and communalists have been wrongly and dishonestly trying to utilise for their own politics and ideologies, the name and fame of Bhagat Singh and his comrades such as Chandrasekhar Azad.” (Quoted fromThe Writings of Bipan Chandra: The Making of Modern India, From Marx to Gandhi, Orient Blackswan, 2012, p. 465)

He had also wanted to make the change in India's Struggle for Independence and had said so publicly. However due to ill health and failing eyesight he could not revise the book as he had planned before his death. The co-authors had planned that the volume in its revised version will use the formulation that Bipan Chandra himself made in his later writings.

To attack a great scholar when he is no more, a scholar who did so much to bring Bhagat Singh to centre-stage, appears to be part of a larger design to silence critics. He was the person who first found and published in 1970 as a pamphlet at his own expense Bhagat Singh's now famous essay, Why I am an Atheist. His last public lecture was the Inaugural Lecture for the Bhagat Singh Chair at JNU in April 2011, in which he said that Bhagat Singh, if he had lived, would have been the Lenin of India, and his last (unfinished) book was a biography of Bhagat Singh.

A completely unfounded attack on the book by a section of the media is that it valorises Jawaharlal Nehru to the exclusion of other leaders. In fact, a special feature of India's Struggle for Independence is the balanced treatment of all political trends, from Liberals to Socialists and Communists, and of all movements, from 1857 to Ghadar to INA, Swadeshi to Quit India, peasant and trade union movements, anti-caste movements and states' peoples' movements, and of all leaders, from Dadabhai Naoroji to Birsa Munda, and Lokmanya Tilak, and from Gandhiji and Sardar Patel to Jayaprakash Narayan and Aruna Asaf Ali.

Another completely baseless allegation made in the Lok Sabha is that while denigrating Bhagat Singh, the authors have praised Rahul Gandhi as a charismatic leader, an allegation that we strongly deny since none of the authors have written anything on Rahul Gandhi.

Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee,Sucheta Mahajan

A Tribute to Gerassimos Arsenis (May 1931 - April 2016)

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Prof Gerassimos Arsenis expired in Athens on April 19, 2016. He was an economist of international repute, an eminent international civil servant, a pioneer in the realm of ideas of international cooperation for development and a highly respected political figure for close to 20 years. In the last-mentioned capacity, he held the portfolios of the Minister of National Economy, Finance, Shipping, National Defence and National Education and Religious Affairs. He was a prominent-member of PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party, which he served for many years.

I did not have the privilege of working with Gerry Arsenis, but I felt a sense of great intellectual and personal affinity with him. Our interests converged in many areas and we shared a common view on the state of the world economy and international economic relation-ship and a common vision of where it should be heading. In my capacity as the spokesman of my country and the Group of 77 on international economic issues, I drew heavily on his pioneering work, particularly on financial and trade needs of developing countries.

I was India's representative in the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly when Gerry, as friends used to call him, was working with Sydney Dell in the New York Office of UNCTAD, along with Dr Manmohan Singh. During a part of his tenure in UNCTAD as the Head of its Money and Finance Division, I was India's representative to the UN organisations, including UNCTAD, in Geneva. We both had the privilege of working with Sydney Dell at two different points of time, he in UNCTAD and myself in UNDP.

Gerry was principally responsible for high-lighting, through his studies in UNCTAD, the inter-relationship between Money, Finance and Trade. This was articulated in UNCTAD's flagship Trade and Development Report. I recall the excitement of my participation in the debate on this Report, which was principally Gerry's handiwork, in the Trade and Development Board of UNCTAD in the early 1980s. The last serious and substantive debate on the subject took place at UNCTAD-VI in Belgrade in 1983. Gerry participated in this debate as the head of the Greek delegation and I as a spokesman of the Group of 77.

Gerry Arsenis was a real well-wisher and friend of India. I visited Athens in 1993 as the then Indian Prime Minister's Special Envoy to seek Greece's support for India's candidature for the membership of the Security Council. Because of the very short notice given by me, Gerry could not meet me as he was engaged in a series of meetings that afternoon in his capacity as the Defence Minister of his country. But we had more than half an hour's telephonic conversation in which he not only affirmed the support of the Government of Greece but also promised to do his best to obtain the support of the European Community as a whole. Greece delivered Gerry's commitment by voting for India.

In his death, Greece has lost a politician of great courage and sagacity and an ideologue who stood firm by his conviction; the developing countries have lost a sincere protagonist and a pioneer of ideas conducive to promoting their cause world-wide; and the world has lost a visionary statesman firmly rooted in the values of justice, equality and fair play. Greece will no doubt miss his wise counsel and reassuring presence; but it has at the same time reasons to rejoice in his great achievements as an intellectual and a political leader.

A former Foreign Secretary, Prof Muchkund Dubey is currently the President, Council for Social Development, New Delhi.

Vivekananda and the Sangh Parivar

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by Ashok Celly

In his celebrated Chicago address, Swami Vivekananda declared that he was “proud to belong to a religion which had taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. He also took pride in the fact that “he belonged to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth”.

The Sangh Parivar in general, and the Prime Minister in particular, are supposed to be great admirers of Swami Vivekananda. Do they share his pride in the cultural legacy of “tolerance and universal acceptance”? Can we in all honesty claim that India is a still a nation which shelters the persecuted? In fact, recent events like hounding people on the barest suspicion that they eat beef or intimidating, even eliminating, intellectuals for expressing an opinion different from the overzealous members of the Parivar have generated the uncomfortable feeling that we are fast becoming a nation which persecutes others.

Also, Vivekananda had the highest respect for Islam. He respected Islam for its love of and commitment to equality. In fact, he believed that India's salvation would be possible only if the Vedanta soul and the Islamic body came together. “For our own motherland the junction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam—Vedanta brain and Islam body—is the only hope.” Now, does the Prime Minister share Vivekananda's amiration for Islam? Maybe he does. After all, at the recent International Sufi Conference he waxed eloquent about Islam's love of peace and aversion to violence. In politics, however, you are judged more by what you do rather than what you say. So let the Prime Minister demonstrate his respect for Islam by ensuring for its followers a life of peace and dignity. The harsh truth is whenever such incidents as the intimidation of Muslims on the pretext of beef-eating or the attacks on Christian places of worship take place, the most loquacious of our Prime Ministers responds with an enigmatic silence. So that one is left wondering whether he is afraid of the fanatics within the Parivar or is in league with them.

Above all, Vivekananda was a passionate believer in the philosophy of Vedanta. To raise the self-esteem of his demoralised countrymen, he made use of the Vedanta philosophy. “We are children of the Almighty. We are sparks of the infinite divine fire,” he would say. Also, the most significant thing about Hinduism is its reverence for all life and belief in the essential divinity of all human beings best expressed in ‘tat twam asi' (thou art that). Now if you are a Hindu and an admirer of Vivekananda, can you divide the nation into “ramzades and haramzades”as a certain leader of the BJP, who happens to be a Minister and whose name carries the prefix ‘Sadhvi', did sometime back? Imagine a sadhvi, a Hindu and presumably an admirer of Vivekananda, demonising an entire community. Herein lies the big difference between Viveka-nanda's vision and that of the Sadhvi and others of her ilk. While Vivekananda is an advaitvadi and hence totally free from the I-thou dichotomy, the members of the Parivar are prisoners of dvaitvad (dualism) and their vision is dualistic and divisive. For, the Sadhvi's observation cannot be dismissed as an eccentric view of a political rookie. Vilification of the Muslims with a view to marginalising them has been an important part of the RSS agenda. After all, it was no less a person than M.S. Golwalkar, the chief ideologue of the RSS, who made the following observations about the Muslims in his book Bunch of Thoughts:

“But the question before us now is, what is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam or Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to its salt? Are they grateful towards the land which has brought them up? Do they feel that they are the children of this land and its tradition and that to serve it is their great good fortune? Do they feel it a duty to serve her? No! Together with the change in their faith, gone are the spirit of love and devotion for the nation.”

If the present leadership of the BJP does not endorse Golwalkar's position on the issue, it should publicly dissociate itself from it. After all, it does not require very great intelligence to see that a humiliated minority can be dangerous—a veritable threat to the integrity of the nation. How can a political party which flaunts its patriotism day in and day out and keeps on lecturing to others on patriotism not see that?

Finally, it may not be altogether out of place to recall the French philosopher Romain Rolland's great tribute to India when he made the following observation: “If there is one place where all the dreams of living man have found a home from the earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.” Can we say this of Modi's India?

The author retired as a Reader in English from Rajdhani College, University of Delhi. He is now a freelancer.

Alternative National Plan and State-level Plans Badly Needed

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COMMUNICATION

At a time when the processes and infra-structure of planning have been badly derailed in the country with the unceremonious dismantling of the Planning Commission, a challenge that should be taken up by indepen-dent scholars working with the cooperation of various people's movements is to prepare alternative plans both at the national and State levels. This will help to give the people a more specific idea of what well-planned development effort based on justice, equality and environ-mental comprehension can achieve. For the sake of plurality of views to emerge it will be even more useful if several such efforts are made but the non-negotiable principles for all these efforts should be justice at all social and economic levels, equality including the more specific objective of meeting the basic needs of all people and protection of environment with special emphasis on tackling the emerging survival issues such as climate change.

In this context a concrete exercise can be to prepare a plan linking the essential reduction of greenhouse gases with the fulfilment of the basic needs of all people. Such exercises can be made at all levels, including the panchayat level and the village level to begin with. Such efforts have an international significance and can be of great relevance both within and outside the country.

In fact these efforts of alternative planning can be an improvement on the earlier official planning as these need not be constrained by a narrow paradigm of development. Efforts should be made to integrate social and ecological issues with economic issues to a much greater extent than was achieved under the official plans.

Bharat Dogra

C-27, Raksha Kunj, Paschim Vihar, New Delhi-110063 Ph. 011-25255303

Tables Turned on BJP in Chopper Deal Debate

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EDITORIAL

They had come prepared to put the Opposition Congress on the mat. ‘They' meaning the new nominated member in the Upper House, Subramanian Swamy, and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar in particular. But what happened at the end of the four-and-a-half-hour-long debate on the AgustaWestland helicopter deal in the Rajya Sabha was entirely different. As Hindustan Times noted,

Ruling party speakers were at their wit's end in the face of a concerted counter-offensive by Congress veterans such as A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel, Anand Sharma and Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

The BJP members in general, and especially Subramanian Swamy, charged the erstwhile UPA Government with having changed the specifications of flying altitude and cabin height of the helicopters under scrutiny. With biting sarcasm Swamy quipped that it was probably done for the benefit of the Congress' Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, the six-footer Ghulam Nabi Azad. But in the same breath he decreed that such changes made the UPA leaders liable for prosecution.

But Swamy cut a sorry figure when he remained silent as Singhvi revealed that those changes were carried out under the directive of the Principal Secretary of former PM A.B. Vajpayee, Brajesh Mishra, and thereafter Antony asserted that those changes had met with Mishra's approval.

Antony, who was in charge of the Defence portfolio in the UPA Government, took the Treasury Benches by surprise when he came out uncharacteristically blunt and eloquent:

Complete the cases, blacklist the company, take strongest action against whoever has taken the money... if you have evidence, take action, prosecute, but don't threaten us.

And his words did carry conviction as he is known to be a person of impeccable honesty and probity (which even his political opponents in the BJP cannot refute).

Only last week he was quoted in these columns as having affirmed:

We had initiated the process to blacklist AgustaWestland, its parent company Finmeccanica and all its subsidiaries. We also initiated proceedings for encashing bank guarantees and recovered an amount of Rs 2068 crores. Three helicopters of AgustaWestland have remained confiscated with us.

This he had highlighted to draw the contrast with what the Modi Government did: “it invited the company to participate in Make in India events and even allowed it to bid for contracts”.

Even Ahmed Patel delivered a good speech in the Rajya Sabha seeking to expose Swamy's real game.

That the BJP MPs felt uncomfortable after the debate was quite visible in their faces. The Indian Express quoted an unnamed ruling party member as having given the following explanation for the poor performance of the BJP in the Upper House discussion on the subject:

(Bhupendra) Yadav (who initiated the debate) gave a soft speech and Swamy could not mention names of Congressmen. It seems my party has fallen between the Jaitley line and the Swamy line on AgustaWestland.

While that may well be true, what Hindustan Times observed in a bid to proffer a political analysis is doubtless more significant.

The debate on the chopper scam was taking place at a time when the ruling party faced many uncomfortable questions in Parliament, be it the imposition of President's Rule in Uttarakhand, considerable dip in employment generation, and last but not the least, the alleged foreign policy flip-flops. That might be one of the reasons for the isolation of the BJP on this issue as regional parties chose to back the Congress or maintain an equidistance during the debate.

Politically the isolation of the BJP can no longer be brushed under the carpet.

May 5 S.C.

Would Aung San Suu Kyi succeed in freeing Burma from Army's Dominance?

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by Monaem Sarker

Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Laureate, spent more than 15 years in detention, most of it under house arrest. She was released from her current third period of detention on Saturday, November 13, 2010. Aung San Suu Kyi was born on June 19, 1945 in Rangoon, Myanmar, a country traditionally known as Burma. Her father, formerly the de facto Prime Minister of British Burma, was assassinated in 1947.

Suu kyi's father Aung San, born on February 13, 1915, was a Myanmar revolutionary, nationalist, founder of the Tatmadaw, and is considered as the Father of the Nation of modern-day Myanmar who served as fifth Premier of the British Crown Colony of Burma from 1946 to 1947. He was the founder of the Communist Party of Burma. On July 19, 1947, a gang of armed paramilitaries of former Prime Minister U Saw broke into the Secretariat Building in downtown Rangoon during a meeting of the Executive Council (the shadow government established by the British in preparation for the transfer of power) and assassinated Aung San and six of his Cabinet Ministers, including his elder brother Ba Win, father of Sein Win, leader of the government-in-exile, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB). A Cabinet Secretary and a bodyguard were also killed. U Saw was subsequently tried and hanged.

Aung San was responsible for bringing Burma's independence from British rule in Burma, but he was assassinated six months before independence. He is recognised as the leading architect of independence, and the founder of the Union of Burma. Affectionately known as “Bogyoke” (Major General), Aung San is still widely admired by the Burmese people, and his name is still invoked in Burmese politics to this day.

Her mother, Khin Kyi, was appointed the Ambassador to India in 1960. Suu Kyi obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Oxford in 1969, and in 1972, she married Michael Aris, a scholar in Bhutanese studies. She had two children—in 1973 and 1977—and the family spent the 1970s and 1980s in England, the United States and India.

Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Burma in 1988, after years of living and studying abroad, only to find widespread slaughter of protesters rallying against the brutal rule of dictator U Ne Win. She spoke out against him and initiated a non-violent movement towards achieving democracy and human rights. In 1989, the government placed Suu Kyi under house arrest, and she spent 15 of the next 21 years in custody. In 1991, her ongoing efforts won her the Nobel Prize for Peace, and she was finally released from house arrest in November 2010. She has since gained a parliamentary seat with the National League for Democracy party.

On July 3, 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon went to Burma to pressure the junta into releasing Suu Kyi and to institute democratic reform. However, on departing from Burma, Ban Ki-moon said he was “disappointed” with the visit after junta leader Than Shwe refused permission for him to visit Suu Kyi, citing her ongoing trial. Ban said he was “deeply disappointed that they have missed a very important opportunity”.

On the evening of November 13, 2010, Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. This was the date her detention had been set to expire according to a court ruling in August 2009 and came six days after a widely criticised general election. She appeared in front of a crowd of her supporters, who rushed to her house in Rangoon when nearby barricades were removed by the security forces. Suu Kyi had been detained for 15 of the past 21 years. The government newspaper New Light of Myanmar reported the release positively, saying she had been granted a pardon after serving her sentence “in good conduct”. The New York Times suggested that the military government may have released Suu Kyi because it felt it was in a confident position to control her supporters after the election. The role that Suu Kyi will play in the future of democracy in Burma remains a subject of much debate.

On January 5, 2012, British Foreign Minister William Hague met Aung San Suu Kyi and his Burmese counterpart. This represented a significant visit for Suu Kyi and Burma. Suu Kyi studied in the UK and maintains many ties there, whilst Britain is Burma's largest bilateral donor. During Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to Europe, she visited the Swiss parliament, collected her 1991 Nobel Prize in Oslo and her honorary degree from Oxford University.

In December 2011, there was speculation that Suu Kyi would run in the 2012 national by-elections to fill vacant seats. On January 18, 2012, Suu Kyi formally registered to contest a Pyithu Hluttaw (lower house) seat in the Kawhmu Township constituency in special parliamentary elections to be held on April 1, 2012. The seat was previously held by Soe Tint, who vacated it after being appointed Construction Deputy Minister, in the 2010 election. She ran against Union Solidarity and Development Party candidate Soe Min, a retired Army physician and native of Twante Township.

Although she and other MP-elects were expected to take office on April 23 when the Hluttaws resume session, National League for Democracy MP-elects, including Suu Kyi, said they might not take their oaths because of its wording; in its present form, parliamentarians must vow to “safe-guard” the Constitution. In an address on Radio Free Asia, she said: “We don't mean we will not attend the parliament, we mean we will attend only after taking the oath... Changing that wording in the oath is also in conformity with the Constitution. I don't expect there will be any difficulty in doing it.” On May 2, 2012, National League for Democracy MP-elects, including Aung San Suu Kyi, took their oaths and took office, though the wording of the oath was not changed. According to the Los Angeles Times,“Suu Kyi and her colleagues decided they could do more by joining as lawmakers than maintaining their boycott on principle.” On July 9, 2012, she attended the Parliament for the first time as a lawmaker.

The NLD won a sweeping victory in those elections, winning at least 255 seats in the House of Representatives and 135 seats in the House of Nationalities. In addition, Suu Kyi won re-election to the House of Representatives. Under the 2008 Constitution, the NLD needed to win at least a two-thirds majority in both houses to ensure that its candidate would become President. Before the elections, Suu Kyi announced that even though she is constitutionally barred from the presidency, she would hold real power in any NLD-led government.

Some activists criticised Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence on the 2012 Rakhine State riots (later repeated during the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis). After receiving a Peace Prize, she told reporters she did not know if the Rohingyas could be regarded as Burmese citizens. Under the 1982 Citizenship Law, most Rohingyas are unable to qualify for Burmese citizenship. As such, they are treated as illegal immigrants, with restrictions on their movement and withholding of land rights, education and public service. Some describe her stance as politically motivated; however, she said that she wanted to work towards reconciliation and that she cannot take sides as “violence has been committed by both sides”. According to The Economist, her “halo has even slipped among foreign human-rights lobbyists, disappointed at her failure to make a clear stand on behalf of the Rohingya minority”. However, she has spoken out “against a ban on Rohingya families near the Bangladeshi border having more than two children”.

In a 2015 BBC News article, reporter Jonah Fisher suggested that Aung San Suu Kyi's silence over the Rohingya issue is due to a need to obtain support from the majority Bamar ethnicity as she is in “the middle of a general election campaign”; however, her NLD party has no Muslim candidates for the election and actively discouraged them. Adding to the international criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi's silence, in May 2015, the 14th Dalai Lama called on her to do more to help the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi is negotiating the terms of transition with the military, according to a Reuters report, quoting a local newspaper. The move means Hlaing has consolidated his position in the country's military, and that there will not be any senior-level reshuffle in the Army.

The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which is backed by the military, was defeated by Suu Kyi's party in November, beginning a transition that was to end on April 1 with the new government in saddle. The win allowed the NLD to push forward its nominee for the presidency, but the party will still have to negotiate with the Army as they continue to have 25 per cent reserved seats in parliament. Aung San Suu Kyi had met the former President thrice. Only the future can say whether Suu Kyi would succeed in freeing Burma from the Army's dominance.

Spectre of Influx

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by Samit Kar

India is now witnessing Assembly elections in five States covering the vast expanse of the country. Of the five States where new governments are to be formed subsequent to the poll, West Bengal is now under a very long election process having seven parts. This shows how the State is now reeling under a depressing law and order condition. Never in the history of electioneering in a State of our country had this experience of the conduct of election segregated in so many parts for security reason. The major cause of the worrying law and order situation in West Bengal seems to be a fallout of the incessant influx from neighbouring countries, especially Bangladesh, leading to tremendous overcrowding of urban and rural locale, especially in the bordering districts.

The problem of influx from the other part of Bengal is ageold—having a legacy of over 100 years. The partition of Bengal happened in 1905 and the Congress Party, led by rich landlords, money-lenders and beneficiaries of colonial rule, was formed in 1886. The Permanent Settlement Act was enacted by then Governor General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, in 1793 covering Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and parts of north Madras. Though the colonial historians, both of European and native origin, had relentlessly subscribed to the thesis of the partiton of Bengal as the handiwork of the infamous British policy of ‘divide and rule‘, the introduction of the Zamindari System as the byproduct of the Act of 1793 had butchered the communal amity of Bengal to a very significant extent.

The severe casualty of the relationship between the Hindus and Muslims was largely due to the burgeoning huge divide, which, became ostensible between these two communities in terms of the emerging pattern of agricultural land ownership. Many of the big landowners and rich countrymen were seen to be belonging to the Hindu community whereas the Muslims occupied the lower strata of society indulging in derogotary occupations to earn their living. This emerging economic divide between the Hindus and Muslims since the beginning of the 19th century had led to the gradual growth of mistrust between them, which eventually took the ugly form of severe animosity and hatred.

There can be hardly any denial that the unscrupulous alien rulers did extract this growing dissension between the Hindus and Muslims to the fullest extent in order to reap the highest possible dividend. Thus, there is hardly any scope to say that the British rule was anything but pious and certainly not ‘a beacon of modern civilisation' as it was claimed by some colonial history-writers. However, it may appear unfair if one fails to remember the glorious contribution of some foreigners of British and European origin like Henry Derozio, David Hare, William Jones, William Cearey, J.D. Bethune, Rev. James Long, Sister Nivedita in the annals of Bengal. The demand to partition Bengal was originally raised by the rich Muslim landlords, mostly settled in Dhaka and adjoining areas, and this was known to be wholeheartedly supported by the Muslim community as they began to smell a rat in the wake of the formation of the rich Hindu-led Congress Party in 1886. The beginning of the British era had significantly impacted to make a section of the Bengali Hindus own large landed estates at their expense. The Muslims began to earn their living by selling their labour by working as landless agricultural labourers or at best small peasants. After the formation of the Congress Party, the Muslims began to apprehend that henceforth the unquestionable economic dominance of the Bengali Hindus may be well extended to the political realm in league with the dishonest British administrators.

The relationship of estrangement between the Hindus and Muslims began to slowly yet steadily increase since 1886, which took a near complete turn by way of the declaration of the partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon. Since then, the Bengali Hindus in East Bengal (later East Pakistan and Bangladesh) continued to remain second-grade citizens. But the most notable beginning of the abysmal form of influx to West Bengal happened in the aftermath of the Noakhali riots in 1946. The influx gained a huge momentum during the partition of India in 1947 and the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. Not only due to the sustained fear in the minds of the Bengali Hindus that the influx is continuously happening in the last 130 years, the economic problem of the other part of Bengal had proved to be the major cause of influx containing both the Hindu and Muslim populations. The misery of West Bengal got escalated as all the countries surrounding the State are found to be terribly impoverished. According to Archimidis' principle, water seeks its own level. In economy also, the movement of human capital is largely directed by the question of the survival of the individual beings or to access higher aspirations in life.

The misery of Bengal is a byproduct of the socio-historical realities, which one may describe as the legacy of misfortune of Bengal. We are carrying forward this legacy turning the State into India's most critically populated State. The issues regarding employment and employability, law and order, poverty reduction etc. are now in shambles. Bengal was well known as the icon in the entire country. Now it has become a backbencher. The culprit is the yawning population density. Every citizen of Bengal should have a consensus to raise a moral opposition of the majority against this worrisome, unabated influx across the border in right earnest. The vital statistics of Bengal with regard to crude birthrate (CBR), crude deathrate (CDR), infant mortality rate (IMR) etc. are no way abnormal. But the population size is rising alarmingly. The answer seems to be the worrying trans-border influx, especially from Bangladesh. Social experts believe that a nation or a region is bound to be in utter jeopardy if the locale is beseiged with abnormal population size coupled with a critical form of population density. The breakdown of law and order and the abysmal rise of unemployment in West Bengal is inherently rooted in the socio-historical legacy of Bengal surrounded by impoverished nations having very low quality of human capital. Thus, the large army of men and women who are crowding in Bengal while infiltrating our porous borders are not only causing a havoc by increasing population density, the overall quality and productivity of human capital in Bengal in general is proving to be very disappointing, along with a remarkably poor work culture. The spectre of influx looms large so abjectly that this needs to be done away with as the top priority.

The author is a former Sociology Faculty in the Presidency University, Kolkata.


Modi's Nepal Conundrum

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The India-Nepal relationship is staring at the abyss. It has been on a roller-coaster through the past two-year period of the BJP Government, and of late, hurtling down the hill uncontrollably. A tipping-point is nearing and the famous lines from the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, come to mind: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for, when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes unto you.'

Who are the monsters our country is fighting in Nepal? Prima facie, it appears to be the nationality question devolving upon the Madhesi problem. But then, it ceases to be a monster the moment we refuse to regard it that way. For sure, the monster didn't spoil Prime Minister Narendra Modi's dinner for the visiting Sri Lankan President, Maithripala Sirisena — although Colombo has not kept its word to him to resolve the Tamil problem. Simply put, the Modi Government left it to Colombo to tackle the monster as best it can and stopped being prescriptive.

The searing Sri Lanka experience is relevant because the Madhesi problem, too, is a mythical creature. It exists and becomes an issue in India-Nepal relations if we want it, not otherwise. The Indian elites traditionally co-opted the Nepali upper-class elites. The Madhesi problem came up only when the nexus broke down following Nepal's democratic transition. In principle, India should have had no difficulty to harmonise with the new emergent elites. However, although India's Communist Parties played a constructive role to build bridges with their Nepali comrades, and help the UPA Government to bridge the transition (which proved timely, useful and even productive), Delhi changed course with the advent of the Modi Government.

Modi is averse to taking help from ‘others' who form part of our bourgeois democratic discourse, especially Left parties. In Nepal's case, there was the added factor of Hindu nationalism. It is well-known that the RSS has been active on Nepal— the lone Hindu kingdom on the planet. With Modi in power, the RSS got a free hand to command our compliant bureaucracy. Rational thinking ceased when the RSS decided that Nepal should be a ‘Hindu Rashtra'.

The RSS had got into the business of reorienting India's neighbourhood policies even before Modi became the Prime Minister. It focused on Nepal, because that country is integral to the doctrine of ‘Akhand Bharat'. The BJP General Secretary, Ram Madhav, led RSS missions to Nepal, and even today, the RSS think-tank that he heads in Delhi is widely regarded as the ‘brains trust' of the Modi Government's foreign and security policies. This disastrous superimposition of the RSS agenda on India's Nepal policies completely ignored the great historicity of Nepal's political transition or the revolutionary undercurrents that threw up the present-day political forces.

To be sure, Nepal impacts India's vital interests, and there is a security dimension to it. But then, under the Modi Government, there has been a convergence between the RSS thinking on the one hand and sections of the Indian security establishment, and even the foreign policy bureaucracy weaned on the doctrine of ‘sphere of influence', on the other. The Indian bureaucracy has no dearth of time-servers, who are only too willing to be the doormats for the RSS. Thus, an exclusive syndicate happens to be driving or masterminding India's Nepal policies. Modi is disinterested in seeking independent advice from outside this syndicate, leave alone build a national consensus.

It is not difficult to see why Modi's syndicate tends to see Nepal through the prism of the troubled India-China relationship. If China's shadow in Kathmandu has been a spectre haunting Modi's syndicate, today the reality indeed tends to be that Chinese influence over the Nepali elites has been dramatically expanding. This is for three reasons. One, China took care to diversify its links with the emergent political forces without showing over-riding preferences or being domineering or prescriptive. Two, the Modi Government's flawed policies alienated Nepali opinion, which in turn began viewing China as a ‘balancer'. Three, the Tibet problem is at the epicentre of China's policies toward Nepal. This needs some explaining.

The Indian discourses generally overlook that there is a gory chapter in the chronicle of Sino-Indian ties when our country became— unwittingly, perhaps—the staging post for the US intelligence's operations to undermine ‘communist China', which ultimately resulted in the mayhem in Tibet, leading to the Dalai Lama's exile. Since then, Nepal has served as a revolving door for Tibetan activists to stir up violence in China. China worked hard to close the porous border with Nepal, but cooperation from the leadership in Kathmandu becomes extremely vital. Clearly, China has found the emergent political forces during the period of democratic transition in Nepal to be cooperative partners.

China's President Xi Jinping personally raised this issue while receiving the then Nepalese President, Ram Baran Yadav (leader of the ‘pro-India' Nepali Congress), in March last year— interestingly, six months after the Chinese leader's own controversial visit to India which had ended on a sour note. Xi promised Yadav all Chinese help and ‘voiced the hope that Nepal would not allow any forces to use Nepal's territory to engage in anti-China separatist activities'.

Suffice it to say, we needn't look far to comprehend why we are not on top of the game in Nepal today. A combination of circumstances has thwarted our attempts to create a comprador leadership in Kathmandu. China cannot be expected to have a ‘hands-off' policy toward Nepal since its core national security interests are involved. But India does not have to be paranoid, either. Its influence by far outstrips China's. Things narrow down to certain imperatives. First, it will be in the national interest if the RSS vacates the foreign policy arena, especially as regards Nepal and China. India has established institutions with institutional memory to conduct diplomacy and safeguard national interests. Use them optimally. Modi ought to draw a red line.

Second, a national consensus is needed on our Nepal policies. The Nepali elites without exception are known to our political leaders. Engage the broad spectrum of political opinion in our country. New thinking is needed. Most importantly, Modi should test the sincerity of the standing offer from Beijing to partner with India in the interests of Nepal's long-term stability, eschewing the zero-sum mindset.

Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Towards a Democratic Union of South Asia An Idea Whose Time Has Come

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One out of five persons in the world lives in South Asia. This is also a region where a very large number of farm animals live and where there is a rich diversity of other life forms and their diverse habitats. However, with very serious accentuation of the ecological crisis and science-based prediction of the likelihood of worse to come, human life as well as most other forms of life in the region face unprecedented threats due to man-made factors. While these threats are many-sided, perhaps the most catastrophic may be the enormous loss of life and the even bigger displacement caused by the rise in the sea level along the vast and densely populated coastline of the region, a very real possibility linked to climate change. This is just one of the many-sided worsening of disasters which is likely for this region as can be judged from the available scientific evidence.

This is also the region of very huge accumulation of highly destructive weapons including nuclear weapons. This is also the region where many terrorist organisations are active and have a very strong base. This is a region where several destructive wars have already been fought while civil war-type conditions have also existed in some areas for prolonged periods. This is an area where the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons in a future war has been frequently discussed at the international level and the prospects of nuclear weapons or dirty bombs being acquired and used by terrorists have often been mentioned.

South Asia is also an area where very large scale poverty and deprivation, hunger and malnutrition exist. Concern has frequently been expressed that this can aggravate in the future due to an increasing shortage of water, linked also to climate change and some other important factors.

There are several ways in which these problems can be resolved. However this much is becoming clear that without some very significant action to ensure peace and eliminate the possibility of destructive war, the badly-needed prioritisation for checking ecological ruin, preparing for climate change and related disasters as well as reducing poverty, hunger and deprivation significantly may not be possible.

One of the most effective means of achieving these highly desirable and in fact essential objectives is to establish, by voluntary accep-tance of all nations of this region, a Democratic Union of South Asia including all the nations of this region. This Union should be based on equal rights of all the citizens of South Asia. Equality at all levels, including nationality, religion, gender, caste, ethnicity, should be a basic precept to be mentioned in the Preamble of the Union's Constitution. This Union should be based on the principles of equality, justice, secularism, peace and high priority to environ-ment protection at all levels.

At the international level also this Union should promote the same principles, with special emphasis on peaceful relationships with all neighbours of this Union particularly China. This Union should be committed strongly to the worldwide elimination of all weapons of mass destruction. This Union should be committed to according very high priority to mitigation and adaptation efforts relating to climate change.

This Union will be in a much better position to face catastrophic events relating to climate change compared to individual nations.

This Union will enable South Asia to enter a new phase of peace, prosperity and stability while also providing adequate opportunities to prepare better for meeting the most important but neglected challenges of ecological threats including climate change.

Bharat Dogra is a free-lance journalist who has been involved with several social initiatives and movements.

Lest We Forget

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Several noted personalities passed away in the last few days,

On April 27 veteran CPI-M leader and former Education Minister in the West Bengal Left Front Ministry, Kanti Biswas, 84, breathed his last in Kolkata. He was suffering from diseases related to old age.

Kanti Biswas' original ancestral home was in Faridpur district of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). He migrated to India in 1965 and began residing in the Bongaon region of 24-Parganas, West Bengal. He came in contact with CPI leaders of the area, Ajit Ganguly and Krishnadulal Biswas, and joined the mass organisations of the CPI—Paschim Banga Yuba Sangha and Krishak Sabha. He took up teaching as a profession and became the Headmaster of Nahata High School of Bongaon.

Subsequently he joined the CPI-M and started working among Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and refugees. In 1977 he was elected to the State Assembly from the Gaighata consti-tuency. Initially he was given charge of the Youth Welfare Ministry in the State Government. Thereafter he became the Minister for Rehabi-litation as well as Information and Broadcasting for a brief period. In 1982 he was appointed the Minister for Education, a post he held till 2006. He was quite adamant on not abiding by the Central regulation on the issue of affiliation of the primary teachers' education centres or PTTIs in the State with the National Council for Teachers' Education. He had written several books on education. Various Left parties and mass organisations have mourned his demise.

In the Annual Number of Mainstream 2015 Dr A.K. Biswas wrote a review of Kanti Biswas' memoirs Amar Jeevan: Kichu Katha (in Bengali). The review was entitled “A Communist Speaks: Memoirs of a Namasudra”. Kanti Biswas himself phoned up the Mainstream office and even sent an e-mail expressing sincere gratitude for the publication of the review.

On April 28 veteran Communist social scientist and journalist Prof Sunil Munshi, 94, died in Kolkata after prolonged illness. Hailing from Rajshahi in undivided Bengal, he joined the mounting students' movement in the 1940s close to the end of British rule while studying in Calcutta's Presidency College and soon became the Secretary of the Students' Federation. A meritorious student, he attained a First Class First in MA in Geography from the Calcutta University. He worked at the central head-quarters of the All India Students Federation in Bombay and edited the AISF organ, The Student, for sometime.

In 1942 he became of a member of the CPI and remained so till the end. After having worked in the students' movement he devoted himself to the teachers' movement as well, as he took to teaching after leaving the university. He taught in Calcutta's Vidyasagar College and Burdwan University where he functioned as a Reader. He was a Visiting Professor at the Calcutta University and also taught at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.

He was intimately connected with the youth movement and cultural movement alongside his work as a Professor. He played a prominent role in establishing the Students' Health Home in Calcutta and organising youth festivals in West Bengal. At one time he used to write regularly on science and geography as well as politics in Patriot, Link,The Statesman,Anand Bazar Patrika and New Age.

He was associated with the Kalantar news-paper since its brith in the 1960s. Subsequently he became its editor and thereafter the Chairman of its Editorial Board. He wrote a series of articles on various old buildings in Kolkata under the title Thikana Kolkata in Bengali (meaning Addresses in Kolkata) alongwith pictures and sketches all drawn by himself.

Prof Munsi's elder brother, Dr Nihar Munsi, was a celebrated ophthalmologist, while his wife Vidya Munshi, who happened to be a pioneer among women journalists in the 1950s (having worked in such periodicals as Blitz), was a leading figure in the women's movement. His daughter, Urmimala, is currently teaching in the Department of Arts and Aesthetics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Veteran freedom fighter and former West Bengal State Secretary of the Revolutionary Socialist Party Debabrata Bandyopadhyay, 90, died in Kolkata on April 30.

A brilliant student of Calcutta University, his place of work was the Murshidabad district of West Bengal. He joined the freedom movement and RSP under the guidance and inspiration of the legendary RSP leader, Tridib Chaudhury. He was elected to the West Bengal State Assembly several times from Baharampur. He was a member of the Left Front Government for 24 years from 1977 to 2001 and served as the Minister of such departments as Panchayats, Jails, Social Welfare and Irrigation.

He was the State Secretary of the RSP from 1998 to 2012.

On his death leaders of several political parties and noted personalities have offered their warm tributes.

Lucid Account of Pakistan's Existence and Future

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BOOK REVIEW

CALL FOR ISLAMABAD'S TRANSFORMATION TO MAKE IT GOVERNABLE AND FOCUSSED ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Aejaz Ahmad and Zaboor Ahmad

Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military by Hussain Haqqani; Penguin Viking Books; 2016; pages 464.

Hussain Haqqani's book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military is a straightforward insider's account of Pakistan that traces how the military and religious groups are acting in tandem to rub each other's shoulders and explores the nation's quest for identity and security. From the outset Pakistan has used religion as an instrument for strengthening the Pakistani identity. In what follows are some of the crucial excerpted events discussed in the book.

During its demand for Pakistan as well after its formation, religion has been anticipated to act as a unifying force between diverse people which it failed to pacify. No doubt the bigwigs of the Pakistan movement acted with missionary zeal but the leaders never gave an iota of thought to the blueprint of the future state. Given the dilly-dallying of the leadership up to the last moment of its creation, the state of Pakistan was going to land in trouble. As Nazimuddin, who became the second Governor General of Pakistan, remarked few months before partition, neither he nor anyone in the Muslim League knew what Pakistan means. The fallout has been that armed and unarmed religious groups have gradually become assertive and are able to challenge the writ of the state and have created their own catchment areas. Muslim masses followed as they thought they would be better-off in Pakistan. Interprovincial rivalry, ethnic and language differences, diverse political interests of the elite class, who were silenced during the movement for the sake of its creation, acted as stumbling blocks in the Constitution-making process. Partition accompanied by religious frenzy, economic dislocation, capital flight, refusal of India to hand over the cash balance due to it engendered economic strangulation for the newly-born state that required immediate attention. Before the buck for the dominance of Pakistan is passed to the military, the blame must be put on the shoulders of the civilian leadership which worked at cross-purposes, finally making the way for a smooth military supremacy.

Haqqani doubts that had the civilian leadership crafted a Constitution at the outset, the dominance of the military would still have followed. Pakistan was conditioned to believe that its nationhood has been under siege; thus protecting it by military means took priority. When the political cauldron of issues reached the tipping-point, Islam was used to subsume all identities. India was painted as the enemy of Islam to bolster Pakistan's self-image as a bastion of Islam. Maulana Maudoodi spoke in the same language of hatred, as Golwalkar; while speaking on Pakistan radio, he characterised socialists, ethnic nationalists, Leftists as anti-Islam and unbelievers. Intelligence agencies fabricated evidence of the communist threat to get into the orbit of the USA ensuring economic and military wherewithal. Refusal of the USA to support Pakistan in any of the wars which it fought with India generated anti-Americanism which is as old in Pakistan as the state itself. It increased exponentially only with the drone attacks.

Continued confrontation with India was hurting East Pakistan, but being secular, demanding autonomy within Pakistan and better relationship with India they were characterised as anti-Pakistani elements. Fazlul Haq, the mover of the Lahore Resolution, was charged of collusion with India. India did provide succour to the Bengalis but sliding into civil war was the result of Pakistan's internal folly. The publication of the book, The Turkish Art of Love, by an Indian Jewish author alleged to desecrate Islam brought Islamic parties to the centre-stage when political haggling was going on between and among Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Yahya Khan, Awami League and the military regime. The White Paper, published on the crisis in East Pakistan, acknowledged that Bengali atrocities followed rather than instigated the violence by the Pakistani military. Yahya Khan received Mujibur Rahman in Pakistan with a whisky in hand and remarked that you should work for the glory of Islam. People in West Pakistan were made to believe through propaganda that they were fighting the enemies of Islam. Jamaat-e-Islami cadres functioned as intelligence networks.

While Bhutto maintained hand-in-glove relationship with the military so that his chances of returning to power remained intact, the USA declared the East Pakistan crisis as its internal affair, and unrealistic hopes in the USA and China led the Pakistan rulers into rejecting political options and persist with the military adventure. The matter of the fact is that Islam as a religious doctrine has been made a political device to keep the state glued which it has utterly failed; otherwise all the Islamic states should have been together. Bhutto, after assuming power in a consolidated Pakistan, reciprocated to the Army by pursuing a hard-ball game with India which enabled the continuation of defence spending while simultaneously failing to publish the Hamooodur Rehman Commission Report in 1972 to make public what went wrong, how and where, in which he himself would surely have been implicated. The Jamaat-e-Islami started the ‘Bangladesh Namanzoor' (Bangladesh not acceptable) campaign which squarely put the blame on Bhutto but absolved the military.

Later, the dismissal of the National Awami Party in Baluchistan on the false pretext of finding weapons in the Iraqi embassy meant for the Baloch rebels and resignation of the NWFP Government in protest, engendered the protracted uprising which provided a pretext for use of the military against them, as if they were its ‘saviours'. Haqqani remarks that Bhutto had always been a poor learner and he wasted the considerable capital of the Ahmadi sect, who fought for Pak independence, by declaring them as non-Muslims at the instigation of Islamic forces which boosted his confidence. Religious construction was connected with the boom of oil prices; he could gain from it only by playing up the Islamic identity. Bhutto began to doubt all and sundry and created the Federal Security Service as a force to intervene in the domain of state in case of emergency situations and placed Zia-ul-Haq as the Chief of Army Staff (CoAS) as he was from a non-martial race but both turned their guns towards him. FSS chief provided evidence in court against Bhutto, while Zia gave the order to execute him. The White Paper on Bhutto was prepared by Zia even before his conviction by the court.

Haqqani notes that Zia liberalised the visa regime which made Pakistan the den of religious leaders, as it falsely played the card of pan-Islamism. This dented the already sectarian environment of Pakistan. The Islamisation project ended up accentuating sectarian differences, plunged Pakistani society into theological debates over various issues. Shias and Sunnis looked up for economic and ideological support to Iran and Saudi Arabia respectively which made Pakistan a battleground of ideas and rival armed groups. Islam has never been in danger but this politically motivated half-backed truth has been used to pursue such ends. Zia packed the educational institutions, courts with his own henchmen.

Haqqani subsequently takes up the Pakistan-Afghanistan equation. He writes that Pakistan underscored its Islamic ideology in the hope of blunting the challenge of ethnic nationalism supported by Afghanistan. Pakistan has pursued strategic depth in Afghanistan since the inception, Ayesha Siddiqa argues that all invasions have been through Afghanistan, therefore, for its own protection, it is essential that Pakistan has a degree of control in Afghanistan. Pakistan acted as a conduit for Islamic parties to counter the influence of communist groups supporting the Pushtuns and Balochs in Pakistan. Pakistan created the Afghan Cell in the ISI to coordinate resistance to communist rule and secure international support for Pakistan. Jimmy Carter authorised help to the Mujahedeen covertly on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. When Jamaat-e-Islami students wing burnt down the American embassy in Islamabad for seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca, Zia told the USA to channelise the religious fervour of Pakistan against the Soviets instead of allowing it to run against the USA. People from different parts of world poured in to fight against the Soviets and were bankrolled by the Saudi-based Rabita Alam-i-Islami. Pakistani Islamic parties were getting their cadre trained along with Afghans leading to their flexing of muscles in political clashes on college campuses, with law and order becoming the causality. The question of who should rule Afghanistan after the USSR's withdrawal continued in the fighting among different groups. It was good that Zia died; otherwise he would have done the same to Pakistan as happened to his plane in which he died.

Hussain Haqqani then attempts to map the changes in Pakistan after the September 2001 attack. The September 11 attacks on the USA changed much in Pakistan but the dominance of the military and mosque in Pakistan is far from over. Pakistan sacrificed the Afghan front to keep alive the Kashmir front to prevent it from being bombed. Pakistani religious parties felt not alienated, and were banned only to resurrect in new avatars. The arms supplied by the USA to Pakistan, instead of fighting the militants, were used against the Baloch nationalists. The USA expended considerable capital to fight the ‘terrorists' in Afghanistan, but the roots were always in Pakistan. George Bush found that most of the weapons supplied by America to Pakistan were used to prepare a war against India. Pakistan cooperated only in arresting the foreign terrorists while the locals were let free. Groups like Haqqani, Afghan Taliban were forced back to Afghanistan while the foreigners were eliminated.

For Haqqani, Pakistan has become a major centre of radical Islamic ideas and groups largely because of its past policies of support to militants fighting Indian rule in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir as well as the Taliban in its quest of putting in place a client regime in Afghanistan. The historic alliance between religious groups and the military has the potential to frustrate anti-terror operations, radicalise the key segments of the population. This dominance has weakened the social and economic parameters of Pakistan. Over forty per cent can't read and write while two-thirds live on less than $ 2 dollars a day and fiftyfive per cent women are simply illiterate. Low investment in education has hampered the Pakistani technology base. A majority of Pakistan's ethnically disparate population has traditionally identified themselves with secular politicians; but such a huge majority has failed to determine the direction of Pakistan's policies. A highly centralised and unrepresentative government has caused unpre-cedented grievances among its ethnic groups. Violent vigilantism of some Islamic groups has undermined the civil society and promoted sectarian terrorism. Pakistan's small economy has grown occasionally and is undermined by terrorism. India spends a small part of its GDP on defence but still outspends Pakistan, which has to cut development spending to pay for its armed forces.

On February 4, 2004, General Musharraf told newspaper editors in Islamabad that Pakistan has two vital interests—nuclear state and Kashmir cause. It was to placate the military and religious conservatives that the alliance with the US was not a U-turn as it appeared to be. The semblance of good relationship with India has become a pre-requisite for Pakistan's security relationship with the USA. In Pakistan, the military is told that India is hostage to centrifugal traditions and has a historic inability to exist as a single state. It is justified on the basis of history of which Pakistan is a part. Hence India can break up like Pakistan in Kashmir; Khalistan within India. The Pakistani plan for liberation has two parts: first make Kashmir ungovernable for India, and raise the cost of continued Indian occupation to unbearable levels, the other being internationaliseation of the Kashmir issue. Participation by different religious groups from around the world would ensure support from Islamic countries. The status of freedom fighters given by the USA to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan could also be given to those fighting in Kashmir without knowing that the USA applies double-standards everywhere. Haqqani concludes that Pakistan has to change its national objectives of being focused on economic development and popular participation in government. Pakistan was created in a hurry. Everyone has a stake to transform Pakistan into functional rather than ideological state so as to ensure the development of its people.

In its new edition, the book has two new chapters but fall short of acute analysis in that the book does not shower light on important internal and external dynamics of Pakistan like the Kargil episode, mobilisation of troops along borders in 2002, and failure of the Agra Summit and so on. It seems as if the new chapters in the book have been written aimlessly. No Westphalian state has failed so far, but it is worth noticing that the constituency of Pakistani writers who are against the system is growing. The book is engaging and is written in simple and lucid language.

Aejaz Ahmad studied Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi. He is the contributing author of the book, Political Process in India. His forthcoming book, Modern South Asian Thinkers, is being published by Sage. He has contributed earlier to Economic and Political Weekly and Mainstream.

Zaboor Ahmad is a Lecturer of Political Science in Kashmir; his papers have been published in South Asian Review, and he regularly contributes opinion pieces to various newspapers in Kashmir.

The Inheritance of the Congress Socialist Party

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by Prem Singh

At the time of the establishment of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) on May 17, 1934 in Patna, under the chairmanship of the patriarch of the Indian Socialist Movement, Acharya Narendra Deva, two goals were clear: to achieve the independence of the country and to enhance the pace of the organised efforts towards establishing a socialist system. To achieve both of these goals, it was necessary to strengthen the true anti-imperialist spirit. At the first All India Congress Socialist Party meet on October 21-22, 1934 in Mumbai, the outline of the detailed programme in the direction of creating a socialist society was accepted, JP had said: “Our work within the Congress is governed by the policy of developing into a true anti-imperialist body.”

As was seen later on, the founders of the CSP were in favour of creating a socialist system through a fruitful dialogue between Marxism and Gandhism. Gandhi had opposed the formation of the Congress Socialist Party. But the founder leaders did not retaliate and attack Gandhi in return. The relationship and dailogue between the two continued till the death of Gandhi. This trend did not cease even afterwards: JP remarked on the establishment of the Congress Socialist Party: “Gandhism has played its part. It cannot carry us further and hence we must march and be guided by the ideology of Socialism.” He joined the Sarvodaya movement, and Lohia presented a revolutionary interpretation of Gandhism. After independence, in the same spirit, a dialogue was establshed with Dr Ambedkar, although he unfortunately passed away while the discussion was still on.

The founder leaders of the CSP were Marxists, but they were not simply Communists working under the international communist movement. They were in the midst of the Freedom Struggle; they spent long terms in jails during the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Quit India Movement. The founder members were clear that freedom (of the country, society and individual) is a pre-requisite for a true anti-imperialist spirit.

A socialism which follows external dictates, and a ‘revolutionary' democracy born out of the dictatorship of one-party rule were not acceptable to the founder leaders of the CSP. The decision to create the Socialist Party separate from the Congress after independence, had far-reaching consequences in the direction of democracy and the strengthening of the parliamentary system. For the socialist leaders, participation in the democratic process was not a strategy. The dream of an independent nation, which was inherent in the premise of progress towards socialism, was one which would never again be enslaved, via an active political-cultural-intellectual participation of the marginalised sections—Dalits, Adivasis, Backward, Women, poor Muslims—in the Indian social and economic milieu. Despite what Gandhi had said, the leaders of the Congress did not dissolve the Congress after it had achieved its goals; but the Socialist leaders, after an initial hesitation, disassociated themselves from it. They succeeded, to some extent, in making a dent in the rule of the Congress after a sustained long struggle of two decades. Even if we do not accept any other achievement of the anti-Emergency struggle led by JP, the reinstatement of democracy is a lasting achievement, which is with us even till this day. The first warning of the attack of neo-imperialism, which has been continuing since the last three decades, was given by the socialist leader and thinker, Kishen Patnaik.

The current Indian politics also has two goals: the defence of our independence from the onslaught of neo-imperialism and the establishment of a socialist society. This work can only be done by associating with the inheritence of the Indian Socialist Movement, the foundation of which was laid along with the establishment of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934. Without this determination and initiative the celebration of the 82nd foundation-day of the CSP will be merely ceremonial. Though there must be some real sentiment behind such ceremonial programme, it has many disadvantages. All those who have been hand-in-glove not only with the Congress and BJP but with Anna Hazare, Kejriwal-Sisodia, Ramdev-Shree Shree, V.K. Singh etc. are socialists—this sends a totally negative message to the new generation. This is the reason why the youth are not coming out in clear support of the Socialist movement. They are apprehensive that most politicians conduct their personal political business in the name of socialism. This business, obviously, runs under the all-pervasive business of neo-liberalism thus strengthening the grip of neo-imperialism.

At this juncture, the first lines of the poem written by Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena at the demise of Lohia, are worth remembering:

“See, how their stock soars!

Those, who promise redemption

for a fee ... ”n

A former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla Dr Prem Singh belongs to the Department of Hindi, University of Delhi. He is the General Secretary and spokesperson, Socialist Party (India). He is presently a Visiting Professor, Centre of Eastern Languages and Cultures, Department of Indology, Sofia University, Sofia (Bulgaria).

Do Educational Institutions need Lectures on Patriotism?

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by RAM PUNIYANI

The issues related to our educational institutions' patriotism started coming up to the fore with this government coming to power (May 2014). One after the other news of govern-ment intervention in different institutions, more so the nationally well-known ones, started disturbing us. There was the case of IIT-Madras where the Periyar Ambedkar Study Circle was banned. Then IIT-Bombay Director Prof Shevgaonkar resigned due to the high-handed attitude of the Ministry of HRD. Close to follow suit was Prof Anil Kakodkar who resigned from the chairmanship of the Board of Governors of IIT-Bombay again.

The case of FTII-Pune dragged for a long time as students opposed the appointment of a RSS-BJP sympathiser, a B grade film-actor, Gajendra Chauhan. Students went for a long strike and after trying to make their point for eight long months, withdrew their strike as the recalcitrant government refused to heed to the demands of students. Many other incidents kept happening, including those of Allahabad University, Ferguson College in Pune among others. Two incidents which stood out and shook the student community were related to the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). In both these cases the issue of nationalism, patriotism was thrown up by the Central Government, along with the ruling BJP and its associates in the RSS combine.

In HCU, the local BJP MP, on insistence from the ABVP branch of the university, wrote to the HRD Minister that anti-national and casteist activities were going on and action should be taken against the students belonging to the Ambedkar Students Association (ASA). Incidentally the ASA had organised meetings which were opposed by ABVP as per their political agenda; so they were hostile to it. The incidents included the screening of the film Muzzafarnagar Baki hai, a film on the Muzzafarnagar violence in UP. Then there was the beef festival. On participation in the beef festival Vemula wrote on his face-book that he participated in the festival in solidarity with those who consume beef. Then there was a meeting to oppose the death penalty to Afzal Guru. The argument of the ASA was that the death penalty is inhuman and it is the opposite of what the norms of a civil society should be.

Following this, the Vice Chancellor, under pressure from Ministry, expelled Vemula from the hostel and stopped his fellowship. This is what forced him to take his life. In the case of JNU, the issue of patriotism was brought up in a deliberate way. In a programme organised in JNU some masked students came in and shouted anti-India slogans. Kanhiaya Kumar and two other friends were not a part of this slogan-shouting gang. Incidentally, the slogan-shouters have not been apprehended and identified so far, for reasons best known to the authorities. On the contrary the authorities arrested Kanhaiya, Anirban and Umar on the charge of sedition. A doctored video was played repeatedly by some channels and it became clear that the arrested student leaders of JNU had nothing to do with anti-India sloganeering. Incidentally, the occasion was that of the anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru. As far Afzal Guru is concerned, the less said the better! The BJP after hectic deliberations has tied up with the PDP in Kashmir and the PDP upholds Afzal Guru as a martyr and someone who did not get justice. So it becomes clear that the BJP is using the JNU problem to build up an emotive issue out of the whole thing.

One knows that such slogans have been there in Kashmir, on similar lines talks of secession have been there in the North-Eastern States. The demand for secession from India was raised also raised C.N. Annadurai of the DMK, a prominent leader from Tamil Nadu, who had opposed the imposition of Hindi as a national language. In a nutshell there are different places in the world where parts of the nations have been demanding autonomy or separation. That has not been presented as an act of anti-nationalism. Many groups and political tendencies have criticised the ruling governments, but that is not what sedition is. This is a right inherent in a democratic society.

Even in India there have been various groups which from time to time have been demanding autonomy, secession etc. In countries there are diverse political tendencies and they do keep changing with time. It is a question of their dissatisfactions being met. Students-youth are groups where all types of ideas and ideologies are discussed. There has been a long tradition of anti-British nationalist struggle by student bodies like the All India Students Federation and the like. They were not lectured by the so-called nationalists to become patriotic. During the freedom movement the most patriotic role was played by the followers of Gandhi who were imbued by the example of the national movement.

Even at that time the youth and students influenced by the communal ideology of Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS kept aloof from the patriotic act of participation in nation-building, the freedom struggle. One recalls that even the earlier Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was arrested in 1942 as he was an onlooker in the movement led by the students-youth inspired by Gandhi. Vajpayee in a letter to the authorities confessed that he had nothing to do with the national movement and he was released from prison in two days time. (http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1503/15031150.htm)

Universities and other educational institutions are places where patriotism is in-built in our syllabus and pattern of society. One has never been thinking of such lecturing as is being indulged in by the RSS combine. The cases of JNU and HCU demonstrate that this patriotism is being manufactured as an emotive issue for dividing the society. This has been linked to the slogan of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai'. The way Bhagwat first called for the need to teach this slogan to the youth, and the way Asaduddin Owaisi responded to that shows that both these groups are interested in bringing up Bharat Mata ki Jai as a divisive issue, and the RSS-Bhagwat is having an aggressive stance on this subject. The position of the Constitution as seen in the Jehovah's Witnesses case is that one should respect the national symbols but it is not mandatory to chant or shout any slogan as such.

In that sense patriotism stands for following the laws in our Constitution and abiding by them. Criticism of the ruling government can't be equated with anti-nationalism. So the present exercise in imposing slogans etc. has nothing to do with patriotism. It is being used as a political tool. We need to overcome the sectarian tendencies like those of Bhagwat, Devendra Fadanvis, Baba Ramdev who are trying to force such non-important issues on the society. Baba Ramdev's statement is very frightening. There is a very apt phrase, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels”. I would like to modify that to: ‘in India patriotism is being made the refuge by pseudo-nationalists for their politicalgoals'.

Our educational institutions must cultivate the culture of debate and dialogue even with dissenting voices; the need is to promote the deeper values of Indian nationalism and humanism.

The author, a retired Professor at the IIT-Bombay, is currently associated with the Centre for the Study of Secularism and Society, Mumbai.

Making Sense of the Struggle at JNU: A Call for Action

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by Vikas Bajpai

The following article was written before the indefinite hunger strike by the JNU students ended following the Court order to keep the authorities' disciplinary action in abeyance by staying it for now. However, in view of the importance of the points raised by it, it is being belatedly published for the benefit of our readers.

Even as I write these lines, the indefinite hunger strike of the students at JNU has entered its fifteenth day. The students there are demanding the withdrawal of the punishments handed down to them by the university authorities for what the university describes as‘breach of university rules', first by deliberately giving misleading information to acquire permission for holding an event on the campus to mark the third anniversary of the hanging of the Parliament attack accused Afzal Guru, and then going ahead with the programme despite the permission for the same being withdrawn. It may be added that the permission was withdrawn by way of an SMS sent barely twenty minutes before the programme was to begin.

By the university's own admission, the punishments are not on the point of allegedly anti-national acts of the students which, as per the Vice-Chancellor, Prof Jagdesh Kumar, is an issue to be determined by the agencies of the Government of India and the courts.

It may be remembered that the punishments handed over to as many as twentyone students for this ‘breach of university rules' range between fines of ten to twenty thousand rupees and rustication from the university along with debarment from entering the campus for as many as five years. Even the teachers have been warned against giving shelter to at least two students—Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhatta-charya, both of whom face serious threat to their life from Right-wing Hindu zealots outside the campus.

The struggle at JNU by the students, as also the teachers has now stretched into its fourth month. During these four months there has been little respite from a relentless, motivated, vicious and unsparing assault by the Hindu Right led by the RSS, and the present Modi government supported by it, to virtually decimate JNU. Despite this, if the struggle so demands, the students seem determined to defy death, even though the ongoing hunger strike is not a strike until death.

I'll come back to the ongoing events at JNU a while later; but let us first reflect on what this entire struggle has been about.

The Support from Far and Near

It has been sometime when a colleague circulated on the JNU teachers google-group a mail from his friend, a Professor at the University of Islamabad, regarding the struggle at JNU. At the peak of the struggle, the Pakistani Professor noted how for the last so many days she had come to be gripped by what was happening at JNU; how the first thing she did in the morning was to reach out for the internet to know of the latest developments at JNU; she followed with bated breath the events regarding the cases of Kanhaiya, Anirban and Umar; how she felt concerned for their safety. The Professor admitted how she had been surprised by her anxieties that had made her feel and react as though these students were her own and that she needed to do everything possible to protect them from the big bad world baying for their blood.

These sentiments filled me with an immensely gratifying sense of fulfilment that is beyond words. I had it conveyed to her through my colleague that she had every right to consider them as her students inasmuch as they were living up to the ideals dear to her; and that we at JNU would like to consider the Pakistani students as our own for similar reasons.

I cannot say if Prime Minister Modi's much appreciated surprise stop-over at Lahore gene-rated a goodwill for India among the people of Pakistan that could come anywhere near the poignant sentiments expressed by the Pakistani Professor, but certainly, the outcomes thereafter have not been desirable in the least for either country.

The solidarity expressed by the Pakistani Professor was only one among a legion of solidarity messages and the action programmes undertaken in scores of universities and cities across the world by students, teachers, scientists, artists and political activists. Many academics and Nobel Laureates wrote directly to the Prime Minister to counsel the government for upholding the right to freedom of expression and desist from criminalising dissent.

Nearer home the support received was even more emphatic. I do not know how many times has it happened that the people in Kashmir have observed a complete strike either in support of any struggle or in reaction to any other event in the rest of India; or for that matter the Government of India has managed to motivate the Kashmiri masses to rise in support of a cause dear to it, the government's immense resources and coercive might notwithstanding.

But JNU students need be commended for having broken the ice between the people of Kashmir and the rest of India. In an expression of solidarity, on February 27, 2016 the entire Kashmir Valley remained completely shut down to protest against the arrest of JNU students and the former Delhi University Professor, S.A. R. Geelani, both on sedition charges.

The sole reason for this gesture of the Kashmiri people is the sensetivity with which the JNU students have always viewed the trials and travails and the pain of the people in the Valley. They have not only condemned the excesses committed by the security forces, but a section of them has firmly supported the right to self-determination by the people of different nationalities, including those of Kashmir. It is in this context that the naked terror unleashed by the government on students of JNU elicited such a strong reaction from the people in Kashmir.

Taking such positions undoubtedly runs into conflict with the national chauvinism preached by the ruling classes and contradicts the notions of nationalism this cultivates among the people. To articulate such positions in the kind of socio-political milieu that obtains in the country today is indeed a matter of great courage.

The JNU students have not just had the courage to raise their voice for the people traumatised by the Indian state, but if the people's participation in the number of rallies taken out in the country's Capital and prog-rammes held by students, youth, academics, political and civil society activists in different parts of the country in support of the struggle at JNU are any indication, the JNU students have been successful in rallying large sections of the Indian people behind their struggle. But for this wide support received from outside, the Modi Government would have vanquished this struggle in no time.

The Other Side of the Picture

Nothing encapsulates the pathos of the RSS and Modi Government vis-à-vis JNU better than a statement made by a Professor who hosted me in Amritsar in the first week of March, when I had been invited there to address a meeting on the struggle at JNU. The Professor commented —“aina ne aapna paddar aninna niva kar liya hai ki hun Prime Minister da mukabla ik student union leader naal ho reha hai (they have lowered their standard so much that the Prime Minister is now having to compete with a student union leader)”.

Refined ideological and intellectual contes-tation has never been the forte of the RSS and its cohorts; however, their overzealousness to settle scores with JNU exposed their ideological bankruptcy in the instant case rather too soon. Unable to restrain the struggle despite a high decibel media campaign using morphed videos, they soon came down to fist-fighting and physical intimidation. Repeated attempts to assault JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, threats to assassinate him along with Umar and Anirban, seizure of arms and other objects meant for this purpose have all been in the news.

The ludicrous level to which they stooped in their ‘hate JNU' campaign is shown by the following averments made by a BJP legislator from Rajasthan, Gyandev Ahuja (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/3000-condoms-2000-liquor-bottles-at-jnu-this-bjp-mla-is-keeping-count/article8272367.ece), who said:

“¯More than 10,000 butts of cigarettes and 4000 pieces of beedis are found daily in the JNU campus. 50,000 big and small pieces of bones are left by those eating non-vegetarian food. They gorge on meat... these anti-nationals. 2000 wrappers of chips and namkeen are found, as also 3000 used condoms—the misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters there. And 500 used contraceptive injections are also found. Besides this, 2000 liquor bottles as also over 3000 beer cans and bottles are daily detected in the campus.”

That this is not a misadventure of a wayward loose cannon is shown by the fact that a handful of teachers at JNU who are affiliated to the Sangh Parivar had actually prepared a two hundred page dossier (http://thewire.in/2016/04/26/dossier-calls-jnu-den-of-organised-sex-racket-students-professors-allege-hate-campaign-31709/) in 2015 itself that profiled some of the JNU teachers and made the most shameful of accusations against JNU teachers, students and even the employees. The whole dossier is full of the following kind of slurs, and of course without the obligation to provide any evidence whatsoever.

“Over one thousand boys and girls (sic) students have been fined from Rs 2000 to Rs 5000 for consuming alcohol, for indulging in immoral activities in their hostels. On a casual glance at the gates of the hostel, one can see hundreds of empty alcohol bottles. Sex workers have been openly employed in hostel messes, where they not only lure JNU girls into their organised racket but also pollute the boys. How come big and high brand cars are moving around the hostels particularly in the night hours? Some security staff is (sic) also involved in this racket. Freshers are particularly inducted in this ring of vice by luring through money, sex, drugs and alcohol, so that they become tied up with the cause of foreign agencies.”

It fails one's imagination as to what kind of a teacher it takes to be able to commit such a conscious profanity against his/her own students. Indeed, whom must we consider a genuine friend of the Indian people—these Sanghi zealots or our Pakistani friend?

Unlike the groundswell of support that the JNU students and teachers have received from across the world and in India, the BJP has had to be content with self-certification. The BJP President, Amit Shah, and leaders like Arun Jaitely have declared more than once that the party has won the ‘Nationalism' debate, while the fact is that their own political affiliates — Raj Thackeray of the Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena and even the ‘Hindu Sant Mahasabha', affiliated to the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha (http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Delhi/kanhaiya-umar-not-antinational-says-hindu-sant-mahasabha/article8521473.ece) believe the JNU students to be innocent. In fact the latter even felt that:

“Quite frankly, most of the people were swayed by the BJP propaganda. It is quite shameless and completely wrong to brand innocent students as anti-national when their views are completely within the purview of the Constitution.”

Preserving our Future

JNU presents us with a situation in which it is impossible to remain neutral for anyone who engages seriously with the democratic aspira-tions of the Indian people. It makes it imperative for us to act while the struggle is alive.

In order that an informed action becomes possible, we need to think what has made such a glorious struggle possible? Why despite an elaborately planned advance strategy to brand JNU as anti-national being in place, with a brute political majority and a sway over large sections of the media to back it up, the govern-ment has utterly failed to decimate JNU? What makes completely unrelated people respond to the agony of these students with full force of poignant anger directed at the rulers? Is it just a question of one incident that piqued the rulers of the day or are there larger issues involved?

There is little gainsaying that it is not a ‘revolution' yet; and yet again it has been becoming difficult for the rulers to perpetuate their rule in the same old manner. A situation so obtains that the only answer to mitigate an existing crisis is to invent a larger crisis. Things would still be doable for the ruling classes if they were to remain at this. But most fortunately for the people of this country, a large section of our youth and students seem to be increasingly refusing to be ruled by the old ways.

The trend started with the struggle by students and teachers of Delhi University against the imposition of the four-year undergraduate course under the UPA rule. The suppression of the Ambedkar-Periyar study circle at IIT, Chennai soon after the NDA Government took power at the Centre followed next, followed by the prolonged strike by students at FTII against the imposition of a thoroughly inept actor as the Chairman of its Governing Council; then came the ‘Occupy UGC' movement against withdrawal of scholarships to research students in Central Universities followed by the move-ment against the ‘institutional murder' of Rohith Vemula at the Hyderabad Central University, and the list continues to grow. Even as these struggles were going on, there broke this crisis at JNU. The JNU students had already been playing an active role in the FTII, Occupy UGC and Rohith Vemula struggles.

The ongoing struggle at JNU represents the tallest and the brightest of the green shoots of a new widening student movement in search of an alternative in the country. What is more, the core of this struggle seems to be constituted of the radical Left students and the radicalised sections of the Ambedkarite student groups—both of whom are least encumbered by the dominant ruling class politics of the day. These students are impatient to make their break from the past to usher in a new future for the marginalised labouring masses of India.

None of the alternatives these students articulate are in the ‘populist mould'; rather their ideas are meant to defy the establishment in every sense of the word, may it be on the question of ‘Nationalism', ‘Democracy', ‘Gender', ‘Development', ‘Politics' and every other manner in which the present social political and economic structure oppresses the Indian people. In a nutshell, these struggles are a declaration of war on the status quo.

For the coming summer vacations at the university the JNU Students, Union has given the call to the students—“Stay Back and Fight Back”. It remains to be seen whether the people of India shall ‘Stay Put' and join the ‘Fight Back' with these brave students.

Dr Vikas Bajpai is an Assistant Professor, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He can be contacted at drvikasbajpai[at]gmail.com


Elections: Trends and Projections

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From N.C.'s Writings

In the midst of a general election, it is obviously unfair to predict who or which party is going to emerge victorious or be in a position to form the next government. This is doubly true in a situation facing us today in which no party can claim to win outright the majority of seats in the Lok Sabha. The absence of a ‘wave' or a definite issue round which the election campaign has centred makes all forecasts mere guesswork. However, there are certain trends which are noticeable that may have important bearings in the formation of a new government.

As is generally accepted, the tussle for power will be confined to three contending formations—the Congress, the BJP and the National Front-Left combine. While all the forecasts have put the BJP and the Congress as the main contenders for the position of the front-runner, with scores below 200 seats out of 543 in the Lok Sabha, the general impression until the eve of the first polling on April 27, was that the Congress might have the advantage of roping in allies, but the BJP is bereft of allies except for the new MPs that the Shiv Sena and the Samata Party may return. In other words, the BJP even if it were the first party on the scoreboard may not be able to form the government, while the Congress even with a low score on its own account may form the government because of the advantage of having more potential allies.

From the latest indications, it appears that the BJP's chances on this score are not as bleak as they looked at first. The polarisation along communal lines has not emerged during the electioneering. The election campaign itself has shown that the allergy to the BJP on the ground of its being communal has worn out in many cases and may become more so once it becomes the party with the highest score and thus comes out with a better prospect of forming a government.

Apart from the Shiv Sena and the Samata Party, which other parties are likely to respond to an invitation to a coalition with the BJP? The TDP faction under Lakshmi Parvati, the Akali party and the AGP are being mentioned in this connection. Bansi Lal's Haryana Vikas Party is already in alliance with the BJP. It is expected that Chandra Shekhar may back such a coalition. And his support may pave the way for some Congress dissidents, including a section of the Tewari Congress, to respond positively. And if the score mounts, then one would not be surprised to find the BSP softening up and some elements of the UDF in Kerala taking a responsive position. Although much of this may still be in the realm of speculation, there is no reason to dismiss Atal Behari Vajpayee's reported claim that some soundings have already been available.

The Congress circles dismiss opinion-poll forecasts about the BJP emerging as the first party with a score of 180 and above. Although no party this time is sure of its own score, the more optimistic in the Congress camp expect their party score to reach 200 plus. Objectively speaking, this itself marks a setback for the ruling party. Five years ago, at the time of the last general election in 1991, the Congress had won on its own as many as 232 seats. Out of these about 20 came as the sympathy dividend after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in the middle of the election campaign itself. Since then, the Congress has had a split though nowhere as wide as it was in 1969-70. If one were to go by the record of the government, the number of Assembly elections last year amply made it clear that the economic reforms have not turned out to be vote-catching : rather the discontent with the rising prices and dismay at the bleak prospects in the job market have had a negative impact on the voter. Lastly, the Congress election campaign has been devoid of any central focus.

Taking all this into account, it would be a heroic achievement if the Congress could get 200 seats as the optimists in that party expect it to score. However, the allies it expects to collect for a coalition government will have to come mainly from the National Front, particularly the Janata Dal. This will enhance the importance of Ramakrishana Hegde and those of his line of thinking. It is extremely doubtful if the Akalis and the AGP would respond to the invitation of a coalition with the Congress at the Centre when these parties have to fight the Congress at the State level. In contrast, it would be easier for the BSP to strike a deal with the Congress at the Centre, since both may need each other for the State-level politics in UP.

A question which is very often raised in the Opposition circles, particularly by the Tewari Congress and the Left, is the possibility of Narasimha Rao joining hands with the BJP. They base their argument mainly on the deal struck over the election of the BJP as the Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha in 1991 and more particularly on the extraordinary inaction of Narasimha Rao during the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. This argument does not hold when both the Congress under Narasimha Rao and the BJP have been fighting for the front-runner's position in the poll race for the Lok Sabha. What policy shifts may take place after the new government takes over is another matter. Just at this point of time the two are engaged in a bitter tussle for the formation of the next government, and it is highly unlikely that Narasimha Rao will or can make a 180 degree somersault to embrace the BJP as his coalition partner. Identity or proximity in policy approach does not necessarily lead to alliances for power-sharing.

Narasimha Rao's real trouble will come if the Congress score is staggeringly low. There is no clear view as to what could possibly be the cut-off point. Would it be 150? That would mean that if the Congress score does not go beyond 150, then its manoeuvring capacity in forming a coalition might be very weak, and within the ranks of the party, the sense of defeat might manifest itself in the shape of anger against the Congress President who is doing most of the all-India campaign for the party. In that case, there may arise the demand for electing a new leader of the party who could bring all the dissidents back into the fold of the party. Although it is not openly admitted, the Narasimha Rao camp appears to be conscious of such a danger. In terms of coalition formation for a new government, such a situation will be definitely disadvantageous for Narasimha Rao personally as also for his party.

Can the Third Force be a reality in terms of winning power at the Centre? By arithmetical calculation, perhaps a case can be established that with the support of the Left and in alliance with the Congress dissidents, the National Front might be in a position to stake a claim to power. However, the state of the Janata Dal, the main constituent of the Front, is so rickety that there could possibly be no common approach among themselves which could attract other friendly parties. Available indications hardly bring the National Front-cum-Left combine to a point where it can attract other allies for a coalition to make a bid for power. Apart from the Chandra Babu-TDP in Andhra Pradesh, the Third Force expects some of the Congress dissidents to respond. Even in Tamil Nadu, it is not likely to get Karunanidhi's DMK since the latter was unceremoniously rebuffed by the National Front which last year had made a wistful bid to win over Jayalalitha.

For all the pollsters and astrologers, however, the time stops for the moment—that is, until the ballot boxes are opened from May 8 onward.n

(Mainstream, May 4, 1996)

India, Eurasia, SCO: What Needs to be Done

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by Michael Todd

On account of its preoccupation with efforts to develop strategic ties with the US and advance its “Look East” policy, India has overlooked the importance of the Eurasian region which is at the centre of the interests of the major world powers. Even though New Delhi declared its “Connect Central Asia Policy” in 2012. this was effectively placed on the backburner by the previous UPA Government at the Centre itself. True, present PM Narendra Modi's tour of Central Asia in July 2015 gave a fillip to reworking India's policy in the region; but that soon ran out of steam in the absence of any specific follow-up action.

As a consequence New Delhi's current political and economic presence in Central Asia is quite modest notwithstanding its immense potential as well as expectations of India's role as a “third alternative” to Russia and China in the region. The reality is tht New Delhi is fast losing out to Beijing which is actively pursuing its New Silk Road initiative and even connecting it with the Russia-sponsored Eurasian Economic Union. At the same time, concerned over the rapid development of the India-US military coope-ration, Moscow is about to alter its stance towards having defence partnership with Islamabad. Needless to underline, Russia had spurned all initiatives from the side of Pakistan to develop such a partnership in the past as Moscow deeply valued its military ties with New Delhi; but now if this position changes that would be highly detrimental to Indian security given the level of India-Russia military relations that have withstood all the vicissitudes of time.

Those fully aware of the pivotal role that Moscow continues to occupy in this area from the standpoint of Indian security, are keen that the prevailing situation be changed for the better at the earliest. It is further understood by close observers of the region that the Central Asian republics are interested in decreasing their dependence on both Moscow and Beijing. Against this backdrop they are prepared to support India in its bid to strengthen its position in the region so as to become an alternative to the traditional players—Russia, China, the EU and the US. Simultaneously Iran's nuclear deal and Russia's face-off with the West provide favourable conditions for a qualitative improvement in India's relations with the Eurasian states.

Economic cooperation with these countries is vital for safeguarding India's interests. The Eurasian states are prospective long-term partners in energy (oil, natural gas) and natural resources (that include uranium and iron ore). New Delhi should make every effort to help materialise the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. Reaching an agreement on transit (through Iran) or the swap of gas from Turkmenistan also looks promising. Active steps must be taken to join the Transit Trade Agreement between Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

To step up multilateral engagment with Eurasia India needs to accelerate talks on the creation of a free trade zone with the Eurasian Economic Union.

Another priority is to forge the Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan rail link by using the international North-South Corridor to its full capacity.

However, the most important objective of India's Central Asian policy should be to fully join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). This will give it an opportunity to strengthen its strategic ties and security cooperation with the region (imparting military training, countering terrorism, reinforcing the Afghan peace process) on the lines of New Delhi's “Connect Central Asia Policy”. The economic dimension of the SCO's cooperation will boost India's position in the region. Full membership of the SCO will greatly improve its posture in the region and the world at large. India's membership in the SCO will help New Delhi to have a leverage with the EU and US conveying to them the unambiguous message that while it (India) wants to develop closer ties with them, its trade, energy and security needs are not dependent on them. New Delhi's enthusiasm for the SCO will help India to allay the fears of its Russian allies as well as China that the Modi Government was not strategically moving towards the West. The Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi's South Block has already received the text of the “Memorandum of Obligations of India with the Aim of Obtaining the Status of SCO Member-State” and it must adopt proactive steps to overcome Beijing's opposition to New Delhi's admission into the Organisation as a full-fledged member. It is reliably learnt that Moscow, Tashkent and Ashgabad are eager to help blunt Beijing's opposition to New Delhi entering the grouping. Incidentally, China's feverish moves to reject the Indian application is the most striking proof, if such proof is at all necessary, of the significance of India's endeavour to join the SCO.

India needs to build upon its traditional friendship with the Central Asian republics in the process. Practically all of them support India's efforts to get a seat in the UN Security Council and are ready to cooperate with the Government of India in the international fora that also includes the SCO regional grouping. Nevertheless, it must be candidly pointed out that to achieve all its objectives in Eurasia New Delhi must not be hesitant to clutch the helping hand of its time-tested trusted friend—Moscow.

War for Water in India

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by P. Sakthivel

“The World Cannot Survive without Water and Morality Cannot Exist without Rains.”—Thirukkural (20)

“Anyone who can solve the problems of Water will be worthy of two Nobel Prizes—one for Peace and one for Science.”—John F. Kennedy

In India we have in the recent past witnessed water-related political, economic and social tension in various States leading to imposition of Section 144 in order to prevent any human conflicts. The water wars range from the sharing of precious water between States, blocking of water resources to other States, especially at the time of the Jat agitation over the demand for Backward Class status for them, tussle over sharing of water between the newly formed State of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The Supreme Court of India has come down heavily on the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Government, headed by Arvind Kejriwal, for moving the Apex Court to restore water supply to Delhi. “You rest in Air Conditioned chambers and want orders from the Court!” This is how the Supreme Court rapped the government.

Water supply to New Delhi was disrupted after the Jat community's protest for BC status and they attacked the Munak canal, one of the main sources of water to New Delhi. Soon after this incident, the Army took over the control of the canal.

Previously when there was a protest, the agitators had blocked the roads, damaged the government buildings and the public properties etc. But in the recent past in order to draw national attention and with a view to achieve their hidden agenda, the agitators mercilessly started to target the water resources and boldly obstructed the drinking water supplies to the common man.

Tussles between the States for Water

The newly established State, Telangana, had a tussle with the Andhra Pradesh Government for sharing of water resources. The Andhra Pradesh Government alleged that the Telangana Government had been secretly generating power from Srisailam and clamoured that the Centre should deploy para-military troops for guarding all the reservoirs in the State.

Alleging violation of Schedule 11 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act 2014, the Government of Andhra Pradesh wrote to the Central Water Resources Ministry for issuance of instructions not to use its reservoirs for any kind of power generation and ordered it to comply with the water release protocols.1

Meanwhile the local people from the Telangana region have blocked the water flow to Andhra Pradesh by placing sand bags in the middle of the river. This caused not only enormous tension between the two governments but also enmity between the peoples of the States.

Mention must be made here that Tamil Nadu had the same kind of problem over the sharing of Cauvery water with Karnataka and it had already approached the Supreme Court for its directions. Even after proper directions from the Supreme Court, the Karnataka Government refused to release the due share of water to Tamil Nadu which led to massive protests and rallies by the people and organisations in both the States. Stones were pelted over buses and vehicles of Tamil Nadu and in a few places the properties were damaged.

UN Facts and Figures

The United Nations Organisation, under its Millennium Development Goals, predicted that sooner or later the world is going to face an acute water crisis and water-related human problems will surface and jeopardise the existing political systems. The following are some of the facts and figures of the UNO about the water scenario now existing in the world:

i. 2.6 billion people have gained access to improved drinking water sources since 1990, but 663 million people are still without water.

ii. At least 1.8 billion people globally use as sources of drinking water that are contaminated.

iii. Between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source has increased from 76 per cent to 91 per cent.

iv. But water scarcity affects more than 40 per cent of the global population and is projected to rise. Over 1.7 billion people are currently living in river basins where the water use exceeds the recharge.

v. 2.4 billion people lack access to basic sanitation services, such as toilets or latrines.

vi. More than 80 per cent of wastewater resulting from human activities is discharged into rivers or sea without any pollution removal.

vii. Each day, nearly 1000 children die due to preventable water and sanitation-related diarrhoeal diseases.

viii. Hydropower is the most important and widely-used renewable source of energy and as of 2011, represented 16 per cent of the total electricity production worldwide.

ix. Approximately 70 per cent of all water abstracted from rivers, lakes and aquifers is used for irrigation.

x. Floods and other water-related disasters account for 70 per cent of all deaths from natural disasters.2

Alarming Trend

Latur in Maharashtra has been hitting the headlines in almost all the dailies for its acute water crisis and human conflicts appeared mainly because of water related issues. It is estimated that unable to face water scarcity around 50,000 villagers already migrated from Latur to other places, towns and villages and several industries were closed down due to lack of water. It is significant to note here that, since all sources of water have dread up, Section 144 of the Act has been invoked in Latur to avoid riots over the use of water. It is said that the authorities are supplying water once in 20 days.

In order to tackle the situation the govern-ment supplied water through a train, called Water Express, to the drought-affected districts of Latur. Two trains carrying 25 lakh litres of water have already reached Latur from Miraj.3 In some places the village community people padlocked the household tanks in order to prevent theft of water. “Now water, like other precious materials, is being guarded by the people.” Supply of water in tankers has become a big business. The water market in Latur city has a turnover of at least 10 lakhs a day. The tanker lorry operators, who supply water, are trying to exploit the situation by demanding more money for domestic use and other purposes.4

Drought and Court Reactions

The Bombay High Court has come down heavily on water being used for cricket pitches for conducting the Indian Premier League (IPL) matches when the entire State was reeling under acute water shortage. The Bombay High Court opined: “Ideally the IPL matches should be shifted elsewhere where there is no water crisis. Only if water supply to BCCI is stopped you will understand the situation.”

Further, the Bombay High Court observed: “How can you (Cricket Associations and BCCI) waste water like this? Is it whether the people are more important or your IPL matches? How can you be so careless? Who can waste water like this? This is criminal waste.”5

Because of the Bombay High Court's severe admonition and warning, the IPL matches, scheduled to be held in Maharashtra, were shifted to Rajasthan. But the Rajasthan High Court concurred with the Bombay High Court's opinion when it expressed its opinion in such words: “Why should the Government of Rajasthan allow IPL matches to be held in the State when the State itself is facing acute water shortage?” The Court issued a notice to the Rajasthan Government and BCCI and asked the BCCI: “Why were the IPL matches being shifted from Maharashtra to Jaipur when Rajasthan itself is in the midst of a severe water crisis.”

The Division Bench also sought a proper reply from the State Public Health Engineering Department, Water Resource Department, Water Resources Regulatory Authority etc. It was alleged that for the purpose of conducting IPL matches and maintaining the pitch at least three lakh litres of water will be consumed daily for 27 consecutive days. Therefore, 81 lakh litres of water will be drained only for conducting the IPL matches. The issue came to limelight through a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by an NGO ‘Laksatta Movement'. The NGO said that for pitch formation itself, 60 lakh litres of water was used. It is really disheartening to note here that when the entire State of Maharashtra is reeling under water shortage and drought, IPL matches are being held placing lakhs of people to misery and hardships.

The Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court has directed the State Government to authorise 50 per cent water cut for breweries and distilleries in the area with immediate effect and a further 10 per cent cut from May 10, 2016. Further, the Court also directed water cuts for other industrial units be increased by five per cent from the current 20 per cent from May 20, 2016. The Court significantly observed that “when the people had not seen water for several days, it was inhuman that breweries were guzzling the precious resource”. Industrial units in the Marathwada region get four million litres of water a day from the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC). The Court's decision would cover at least 13 districts, no fewer than 16 distilleries and breweries.6

Migration due to Water Dearth

Due to acute water scarcity, migration of people from rural areas to urban centres is considered a regular phenomenon. In places such as Yadgir, Raichur, Koppal and other parts of Hyderabad large groups of people migrated but this time the number of people who migrated is much higher than in previous years. People from areas hit by irrigation failure and drought and crop failure migrated more. Normally the landless people were the ones who left for other pastures to other districts but this time people with two or three hectares of land left their villages in large numbers to find work in cities like Bengaluru, Pune, Goa or other urban centres. They were usually employed in construction and other industries.7

People's Agitations

In several places in the State of Tamil Nadu people are agitating against the State Government for according sanction to multinational companies who ruthlessly extract several lakh litres of water from river beds for producing soft drinks and mineral water and reap enormous amount of money. For instance, local people, political parties and other organisations have been protesting in Tirunelveli against the government's permission to a multinational company for erecting pipes in the Tamirabarani river bed and tap water for use in their soft drink plants.

It is an unblemished truth that Tamil Nadu is one of the topmost States which has been facing acute water shortage because of the reckless urbanisation process. Every day the demand for drinking water is increasing at an alarming level in which the local bodies are not able to provide a regular supply of drinking water to the people.

Hence allowing mega industries to exploit ground water for commercial purposes is unacceptable and such action cannot be justified on any ground. Discarding the public interest such industries with the sanction of the State Government even in the drought-hit areas would absorb enormous amount of ground water for commercial purposes.

Similarly people in Perundurai, Erode district of Tamil Nadu, have been protesting over the government's decision to allow a soft drink company to establish its bottling plant in the Sipcot area. The agricultural associations along with the local people are fighting against the proposed establishment of the soft drink company because the people dread the company's excessive use of ground water for producing soft drinks. And the people will definitely suffer if the ground water level is gradually reduced.

It is estimated that if the company is allowed to establish its plant, it would absorb 38 lakh litres of ground water every day and this would naturally affect the ground water level in more than 80 villages and towns in and around Perundurai. The district is already known for its depleted ground water level and any attempt to allow the soft drink company to tap ground water would further aggravate the situation and lead to irremediable suffering of the people.

In Vellore district, also known for severe water problem, the village people are protesting over the functioning of several mineral water plants which tap ground water for commercial purposes. The people expressed their apprehension over depletion of ground water and these water purifying companies had dug several deep borewells. Where water from these borewells are purified, only one-fourth of the water available can be used for drinking purposes and the remaining water is packed and bottled and transported to Chennai and Bangalore for sale. The media was informed that in spite of their wide protest and petitions to the government, people have vehemently opposed the functioning of such mineral water plants.8

Water Scarcity or Poor Water Management?

It is incorrect to lay the blame entirely on the poor or insufficient monsoon but the State and other stakeholders must take the blame as they have utterly failed to save or preserve the natural water resources. For instance, Tamil Nadu witnessed torrential rains during the months of November and December, 2015 and the Chennai deluge in 2015 was estimated to be one of the worst deluges in the last 100 years of the history of the city. But the administration and other stakeholders have failed to preserve the rain water and nearly 90 per cent of the water was let off to flow into the sea. Encroachment over water bodies and waterways is also predominant in the State. People unfortunately saw land as a place to build buildings and not a place to preserve the water.

Ordering the IPL matches to shift out of the drought-hit areas and effecting water cut to the breweries and distilleries and other industrial units may be a good beginning to address the water scarcity issue. The crisis that Maharashtra and nine other States in the country are facing is not just scarcity of water but also poor governance of the situation. The water crisis is not just the result of two consecutive failed monsoons, it is a direct outcome of the inability of the governments over decades to manage sensibly, sensitively and sustainably India's water resources.9

Disappearing of Water Resources

Maharashtra has 1845 dams, more than any other State in India, and yet only around 18 per cent of its farmland is irrigated. The recent “dam scam” exposed the extent to which public funds have been utilised to build dams without equally yielding irrigation benefits. Of the 70,000 minor irrigation projects in the State, only 12 per cent are benefiting and working today. An EPW editorial notes that the power of the so-called “sugar lobby”, rather than prudence, has dictated the allocation of surface water for irrigation. Cutting across party lines, no State Government will contemplate placing any limits on water-intensive sugarcane cultivation, even in water-scarce regions like Marathwada, or on sugar factories that need thousands of litres of water everyday for their use.10 Despite the failure of monsoons, sugarcane cultivation in the Marathwada region has increased considerably.

Similarly in the State of Tamil Nadu the districts such as Namakkal, Erode, Salem and Karur are already under severe water scarcity but the number of poultry, textile and other units have increased considerably. Successive governments, irrespective of their party labels, have failed to put reasonable restriction over the extraction of ground water by these industries. Like in the Marathwada region, sugarcane industries are also active in the State of Tamil Nadu even in the water scarcity areas.

In the forthcoming years water-related human conflicts are going to dominate the politics at the State and national levels. Like in other countries, especially African and Latin American states, the water-related human conflicts and tensions would, indeed, undermine our socio-political and economic systems. We need to strengthen the role of the local community people in the preservation of the water resources. People should be sensitised properly about protecting and restore water-related ecosystems, water harvesting, desalination, water efficiency and waste water treatment.

References

1. The Times of India, January 3, 2015, p. 13.

2. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/water-and-sanitation/.

3. The Hindu, April 8, 2016, p. 7.

4. The Times of India, September 1, 2015, p. 11.

5. The Times of India, April 7, 2016, p. 1.

6. Shoumojit Banerjee, The Hindu, April 27, 2016, p. 8.

7. The Hindu, April 24, 2016, p. 9.

8. The Hindu, August 19, 2015, p. 3.

9. EPW, Vol. 51, Issue No. 16. April 16, 2016.

10. Ibid.

Dr P. Sakthivel is an Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Annamalai University, Annamalai Nagar, Tamil Nadu.

Better Water Management will Also Help in Resolution of Inter-State Water Conflicts

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COMMUNICATION

Water disputes involving two or more States have frequently become a source of avoidable tensions in India. One recent instance is the conflict which has emerged once again over the construction of the Satluj-Yamuna Link Canal (SYL) between Punjab and Haryana. Matters appeared to be getting out of hand and could be temporarily brought to some control only after the intervention of the Supreme Court. This tendency of unilateral action and very sudden escalation of tensions seen in this instance should be avoided no matter what is the extent or nature of any grievance.

It is true that a situation of severe water shortage and the resulting stress exists in many parts of the country and in these conditions people genuinely feel very concerned about deprivation of water while politicians find it convenient to whip up emotions on such issues. However, a more dispassionate and fact-based analysis of the issue would reveal that water shortages in most areas are more frequently rooted in non-sustainable and over-extractive water management including cropping patterns not in keeping with basic water resource and spread of urbanisation, industries and mining without even keeping in mind the implications for the most basic resource of water. This has on the one hand led to the depletion and destruction of invaluable water sources and on the other hand resulted in very massive and unsustainable withdrawals of water.

Clearly foremost efforts should be made to promote better water management based on conservation of water, improvement and expansion of rainwater harvesting and water-shed based environment protection works, linking cropping patterns and rotations to local rainfall pattern and water availability and also linking any expansion of industries, mining, urban and tourism projects etc. to water avai-lability as well as their own water harvesting capabilities. The need for all this has increased further in these times of climate change.

This will greatly help to reduce water stress and hence the possibilities of escalation of tensions over water sharing will also be reduced. However, some possibilities of this will still remain and so it is important to re-emphasise that all such conflicts can and should be settled only by peaceful talks in a spirit of give and take. More specifically it needs to be made very clear that there is no room for unilateral action to cancel or breach any agreements that were reached earlier. There is room certainly to take up any issue relating to these which become clearer later, but the path is that of mutual discussions and the legal and constitutional processes only.

There is so much work to be done with mutual co-operation for protection of catchment areas of rivers and for reducing pollution. Should this not receive more attention?

New Delhi Bharat Dogra

Mahatma Gandhi and Bharat Mata ki Jai

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by S.N. SAHU

Nationalism has always been a driving force in uniting people and mobilising them on diverse issues. In many phases of history humanity has witnessed the use of nationalism as a fierce doctrine to arouse hatred and promote violence against nationalities of other nations and stoke war and violence. Europe and the rest of the world faced devastating consequences of aggression and hostility on account of nationalism which emerged in that continent in an intense form and became a major factor behind belligerence and hostility among nations. Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore was extremely critical of Europe and Japan's nationalism and wrote against it. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose described that form of nationalism as “narrow, selfish and arrogant”.1 In India the kind of nationalism, which emerged in the context of our freedom struggle and in response to colonial rule and exploitation, was tolerant, inclusive and all-embracing.

Of late there has been a strident emphasis on nationalism. One specific slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai' is being used to uphold the nationalistic spirit and determine the extent of nationalism and patriotism of Indians. There have been widespread resentments against such attempts. The suspension of Waris Khan,2 a distinguished Member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, by the House unanimously by voice vote on the ground that he refused to recite ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai' even as he was willing to recite ‘Jai Hind' raised many questions regarding nationalism centred on one particular slogan. It is in this context that we need to peep into history and comprehend the stand taken by none other than Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation, on the issue of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai'.

Vande Mataram was Composed in the Context of Imposition of British National Anthem on Indians

From the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi it is evident that he equated Vande Mataram with Bharat Mata ki Jai and preferred the former over latter. While he extensively used Vande Mataram in countless letters and articles, he hardly used or recited Bharat Mata ki Jai. It is well known that Vande Mataram forms part of Bankim Chandra's novel Anandmath which was published in 1882.3 He composed Vande Mataram when the British administration was asking Indians to sing the British national anthem ‘God Save the Queen'.4 The recitation of Vande Mataram captured the imagination of the people and filled them with a high sense of patriotism. Gurudev Rabindra-nath Tagore for the first time recited the whole of Vande Mataram in the session of the Indian National Congress in 1896.5 It was sung across Bengal and in many parts of India during the Swadesi Movement in 1905.6 The first two stanzas of Vande Mataram were adopted by the Indian National Congress as the national song in 1937 and the other stanzas were dropped on the ground that those referred to Goddess Durga. In fact the opposition of Muslims to Vande Mataram arose on the point that it was part of a composition dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Durga and the recitation of it by them would go against their religious faith which proscribed idol worship.

Lala Lajpat Rai established a Urdu news-paper, Vande Mataram, in Lahore. Some Indians started a journal, Bande Mataram, in Switzerland in the first decade of the twentietn century and used it to incite violence and attacked Gopal Krishna Gokhle and Pherozeshah Mehta by describing them as cowardly. Mahatma Gandhi disapproved of such an approach and questioned the method of incitement to violence as a means to achieve independence.7

Gandhi described Vande Mataram as a Passionate Prayer to India

While in South Africa Mahatma Gandhi wrote a small article on Vande Mataram under the title ‘The Heroic Song of Bengal' in Indian Opinion on December 2, 1905.8 He stated in that article that the song proved so popular that it came to be the national anthem of India. Adding that Bankim Chandra composed Vande Mataram after having realised that many Western nations, such as Britain, Germany and France, had their national anthems, Gandhiji asserted that Vande Mataram was ‘nobler in sentiment and sweeter than the songs of other nations'. He continued further and claimed: ‘While other anthems contain sentiments that are derogatory to others, Vande Mataram is quite free from such faults.' Describing it as a song of high order to arouse a sense of patriotism, he wrote that it constituted a passionate prayer to India. Gandhiji's afore-mentioned article on the Vande Mataram song brought out his intense and irresistible love for it in the first half of the first decade of the 20th century.

Vande Mataram and First Satyagraha in South Africa

Vande Mataram had a spell-binding effect as much on Mahatma Gandhi as on many other Indians who participated in the first Satyagraha launched in South Africa by Gandhiji. This was evident from his illuminating article “The Last Satyagraha Campaign: My Experience”,9 written during July 1914. He mentioned in the article that people while participating in a march shouted several slogans such as “Victory to Dwarkanath”, “Victory to Ramchandra” and “Vande Mataram”.10

Vande Mataram as an Ode to

Mother India

On many occasions during the freedom struggle and after independence he generously showered praise on Vande Mataram and gave it an exalted status. On April 22, 1918 he called it “the grand national song” and wrote: “We do not know in full the greatness of the song, its resonance and its tune.”11

In almost 650 letters written by Mahatma Gandhi since 1911, the concluding words were not “Yours sincerely” or “Yours faithfully” but “Vande Mataram, Mohandas”. In several letters addressed to Muslims he used “Aadab”, “Vande Mataram” or “Blessings” as would be proper and fitting. In one letter addressed to Ferozabehn Talyerakhan, Gandhiji conveyed Vande Mataram to her on behalf of Sardar and Mahadev.12

The magical impact of Vande Mataram was so intense and irresistible that even people from abroad who visited India and met Gandhiji used to end their conversations with him and bid farewell by reciting “Vande Mataram” or “Salam”.13

To comprehend the profound influence of Vande Mataram on him we need to go through some of his insightful writings on it and reflect on them. On August 23, 1947 while speaking at a prayer meeting in Calcutta he described it ‘as an ode to Mother India'14 and went on to say that ‘when the rest of India was almost asleep' ‘the national song and the national cry of Bengal sustained her'.15 Even prior to 1947 he wrote an article “National Flag” in Harijan on July 1, 193916 and reflected passionately on Vande Mataram in it and stated: ‘No matter what its source was and how and when it was composed, it had become a most powerful battle-cry among Hindus and Mussalmans of Bengal during the partition days.'17 Emphasising that ‘it was an anti-imperialist cry', he feelingly wrote about its profound impact on him by stating: ‘As a lad, when I knew nothing of Anandmath or even Bankim, its immortal author, Vande Mataram had gripped me, and when I first heard it sung, it had enthralled me.'18 Adding further, he asserted: ‘I associated the purest national spirit with it. It never occurred to me that it was a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus... Unfortunately we have fallen on evil days... It stirs to its death the patriotism of millions in and outside of Bengal. Its chosen stanzas are Bengal's gift, among many others, to the whole nation.'19 However, he categorically stated that he would not risk a single quarrel over singing Vande Mataram at a mixed gathering.20

Gandhi prescribed these slogans—Allah-ho-Akbar, Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Hindu-Musalman ki Jai

His reverence for Vande Mataram never ever closed his mind and made him narrow-minded. With a remarkable open-minded approach he under-stood its deep significance to promote nationa-lism and safeguard the unity of our people. At the same time he underlined its importance in the context of the plurality of slogans suited to our social and religious diversity. It was evident in 1920 when during the Khilafat agitation people welcomed Gandhiji and Ali brothers by shouting “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai” and “Mohamed Ali-Shaukat Ali ki Jai”. In such events recitation of Vande Mataram by the Hindus met with recitation of “Allah-ho-Akbar” by Muslims. Seeing such conflicting recitals he wrote an article entitled ‘Three National Cries' in Young India on September 8, 1920 and urged the people irrespective of faith to recite three slogans—Allah-ho-Akbar, Vande Mataram or Bharat Mata ki Jai and Hindu-Musalman ki Jai.21 He firmly believed that people professing diverse creeds would have no problem in reciting those slogans in the order given. Particularly he felt that nobody would have any objection to recite Allah-ho-Akbar as its meaning is “God is Great”. Very thoughtfully he stated that without Hindu- Musalman ki Jai, Bharat Mata ki Jai would not be complete. It is, therefore, a proven fact that Gandhiji stressed on the plurality of slogans in spite of his exceptional fondness for Vande Mataram and his passionate use of it in several letters he wrote from 1911 to 1948. In fact in response to his exhortations to the people to recite three slogans, several Hindus recited Vande Mataram and Allah-ho-Akbar on many occasions.22

Gandhi inaugurated Bharat Mata Mandir

It is very educative to note that in 1936 Mahatma Gandhi was requested by Shri Shivprasad Gupta to inaugurate the Bharat Mata Mandir in Banaras. The shrine had only one map of India which Shri Gupta had designed in the pattern of a relief map of India which he saw in one Prof Karve's Home for Widows in Pune.23 Inaugurating the temple on October 25, 1936 before a vast gathering of over 25,000 people which included Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists and Harijans from all parts of the country, Gandhiji said: “The temple contains no image of any God or Goddess. It has only a relief map of India made of marble stone in it. I hope this temple, which will serve as a cosmopolitan platform for people of all religions, castes and creeds including Harijans, will go a great way in promoting religious unity, peace and love in the country.”24 In fact the cosmo-politan outlook of Mahatma Gandhi defined his approach to the issue of nationalism and Vande Mataram or Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Gandhi was against imposition

of any slogan

In the early 1940s he authored the Constructive Programme which contained eight points to achieve independence for India and bring about positive social change through non-violence. In the point concerning students he categorically wrote: “They may not impose Vande Mataram or the National Flag on others.”25

When Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose coined the Jai Hind slogan, it electrified the nation and inculcated the values of patriotism and nationalism in the minds of all sections of society. On February 23, 1946 Gandhiji in a statement issued to the press disapproved of attempts of some people to force others to recite Jai Hind. He stated: “Inasmuch as a single person is compelled to shout ‘Jai Hind' or any popular slogan, a nail is driven into the coffin of Swaraj...”26

Gandhi wanted Repertoire

of National Songs

On December 23, 1945 during a discussion with political workers when it was asked if Vande Mataram should be replaced by the new song “Qadam, Qadam”, Gandhiji asserted that Vande Mataram, associated with glorious sacrifice, could never be given up.27 However, he suggested that a new song or songs could certainly be added to the repertoire of national songs after due thought and discrimination.28

Gandhiji's stand was for “repertoire of national songs” and against imposition of any slogan on anybody. In fact he wrote on March 5, 1947: “It would be terrible if people should recite ‘victory to India' and work for her annihilation.29 When some people in Bihar travelled ticketless in train and shouted Jai Hind he disapproved of the use of such slogans as “a cry for loot and murder”.30 As early as February 18, 1939 he wrote that to call the State as a Hindu State or a Muslim State constituted a libel on nationalism.31 Use of force on anybody to recite a slogan constitutes a libel on nationalism.

Raising of Vande Mataram slogan is Not Enough

At a time when some people consider the recitation of Bharat Mata ki Jai as the only indicator of nationalism, it is important to hark back to one of the instructive speeches of Mahatma Gandhi delivered at Baroda on October 9, 1919. He said: “India is in such a plight today that we cannot afford to waste our time in ....parading ....processions, raising slogans of ‘Vande Mataram' and shouting ‘Glory to the Motherland!' Today our India is aflame with a triple fire.”32 He explained the “triple fire” by referring to the prevalence of widespread star-vation, lack of availability of clothes to people and high incidence of disease.33 In the context of starvation he said: “The millionaires and multi-millionaires of Bombay are no true index of the conditions prevailing in India. We cannot adjudge India to be prosperous or otherwise on the basis of their condition. Assuredly, as long as the condition of the weavers and farmers in the seven and a half lakh villages in India is one of utter destitution, we cannot describe the country as prosperous.” He, therefore, prescribed a remedy and stated: “To rescue her from it, what is needed is not processions but physicians, not demonstrations but effective remedies. We need heroic men and heroic mothers.”34

Vande Mataram cannot be recited to Intimidate Others

What is needed in India of the twentyfirst century is “heroic men and heroic mothers” to find remedy to the many challenges facing our nation. It cannot be done by imposition of slogans. While speaking at a prayer meeting on March 3, 1947 in Patna, Mahatma Gandhi had said with pain and anguish that some people professing one faith shouted slogans for the purpose of striking fears in the minds and hearts of people professing different faiths. He said: “I have heard that Hindus here start shouting and threatening when they see Muslims. They raise the slogans of Jai Hind, Vande Mataram. It is all very well to shout slogans; but we must make sure that they do not terrorise, or intimidate or upset other people. We are guilty of a great sin. Do we intend to announce through our slogans that we are proud of these acts? Or that we regard them as right actions? Hindus in Noakhali were also afraid of the slogan Allah-ho-Akbar raised by Muslims. The slogan merely means ‘God is Great' and no one need be afraid of this slogan. But when slogans are used for a wrong purpose, their meanings too are misunderstood and they become curses instead of boons. Jai Hind does not mean victory to Hindus and defeat for Muslims. But nowadays the Muslims take it in that light because we have put it to wrong use and threatened them with it. When we hear the slogans shouted by another person we think that the other fellow is preparing for a fight, and we also start getting ready for it. If we go on fighting like this and wreak vengeance for one place upon another, rivers of blood will flow all over India and still the spirit of vengeance will not subside. Hindus should behave so affectionately that even if a Muslim child comes into their midst, they should wash and clean him, dress him well and shower him with such love that the child should feel entirely at home. Only when this happens will Muslims realise that Hindus have become their friends.”35

Conclusion

Persecution of a person for not saying Bharat Mata ki Jai even as he is more than willing to recite any other slogan is like persecution of Prahlad in the mythology by his father Hiranya Kashyup for worshipping Lord Hari in defiance of his dictation to worship Lord Shiva. Gandhiji compared Prahlad with Jesus Christ, Imam Hussain and Mirabai as fine examples of Satya-grahis. This lesson from mythology combined with his cosmolitan approach to nationalism is relevant for the present debate on Bharat Mata ki Jai.

Footnotes

1. http://www.rediff.com/news/report/the-nationalism-they-represent-is-narrow-selfish-and-arrogant/20160225.htm

2. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/AIMIM-leader-Waris-Pathan-suspended-from-Maharashtra-assembly-for-not-saying-Bharat-Mata-ki-Jai/articleshow/51427607.cms

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vande_Mataram

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 10, pp. 136-137.

8. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 5, p. 35.

9. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 14, pp. 271.

10. Ibid.

11. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 16, pp. 449-450.

12. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 56, p. 114.

13. Speech at D.J.S. College Hall, Karachi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 45, p. 13.

14. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 96, pp. 268-269.

15. Ibid, p. 269.

16. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 76, pp. 68-69.

17. Ibid, p. 69.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibdi, p. 70.

20. Ibid.

21. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 21, pp. 250-51.

22. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 27, p. 468.

23. “Speech at Bharat Mata Mandir”, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 70, pp. 7-9.

24. Ibid, p. 7.

25. http://www.gandhi-manibhavan.org/gandhiphilosophy/philosophy_consprogrammes_bookwritten.htm

26. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 89, p. 441.

27. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 89, p. 89.

28. Ibid.

29. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 94, p. 73.

30. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 92, p. 259.

31. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 75, p. 74.

32. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 19, p. 39.

33. Ibid, pp. 40-41.

34. Ibid, p. 40.

35. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 94, p. 78.

The author was an officer on Special Duty and Press Secretary to late K.R. Narayanan when the latter was the President of India. He then served as a Director in the Prime Minister's Office. He is now serving as a Joint Secretary in the Rajya Sabha Secretariat. The views expressed in the article are personal and having nothing to do with the Rajya Sabha Secretariat.

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