Dr. Binayak Sen (collected voices)

THE EDITORIAL, Times of India May 22, 2008
The detention of Binayak Sen, a respected doctor and civil rightsactivist, by the Chhattisgarh government is a blot on our democracy.The Chhattisgarh police arrested him a year ago under theChhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 on charges of aidingMaoists.The police have charged Sen, winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann awardfor global health and human rights instituted by the Global HealthCouncil, of acting as a courier for Maoists. His appeal for bail hasbeen turned down despite appeals from many public intellectualsacross the world, including 22 Nobel laureates. Clearly, the courtand police are unwilling to consider his exemplary record as a healthand civil rights activist in one of the most underdeveloped regionsof the country.The Chhattisgarh government’s stance on the issue compromises itsresponsibility to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Everycitizen has a right to speech and association and the governmentought to protect these rights. Even if one assumes that Sen issympathetic to Maoist ideology, as alleged by the police, he has aright to uphold his views unless proven to have violated the law inthe process. He also has a right to a speedy and fair trial. Sen isheld guilty by association and the government is unwilling torecognise its mistake despite pleas from all around.The Chhattisgarh government has a hard task at hand, no doubt.Maoists are a powerful threat and have stretched the resources of thegovernment. Unfortunately, the government’s policies to counter themare bad in law and practice. Security measures like Salwa Judum andharassment of political and civil rights activists have only erodedthe credibility of the government. A strong civil society thatvouchsafes political and economic rights is necessary to exposeextremist ideologies like Maoism.As India sets out to expand its influence in global affairs, itsrecord on civil rights will increasingly be under scrutiny. Nogovernment can claim special powers and suspend civil rights likefreedom of speech and association. Extremist political groups likeMaoists don’t thrive because of a liberal legal framework, but theycertainly would benefit from its absence.Sen’s trial has now started after a year spent in prison. Scores ofsimilar undertrials languishing in Indian jails fare worse. It justdoesn’t do any good to India’s brand image as a country that protectscivil rights. Democracy enhances India’s soft power potential on theworld stage. However, disregard for democratic rights will take thesheen off India’s patchy but promising record as a liberal democracy.
THE EDITORIAL in THE ECONOMIC TIMES:
Shift the terror paradigm22 May, 2008, 0000 hrs IST, TNN
The dominant discourse on terrorism in India is bogged down bydetails of instrumentalities. The responses the Jaipur blasts haveevoked indicate that. None of those responses — whether it is thePM’s stress on the need for a new federal agency, or the ChiefJustice of India calling for a new legal framework to tackleterrorism, or the BJP’s clamour for ‘tough’ anti-terror laws — haveaddressed the fundamental question of political processes thatunderpin state apparatuses.In such circumstances, one instrumentality would be as good or bad asany other. India, clearly, needs to shift its state-centric counter-terrorism paradigm to one that focuses primarily on politics on theground. The point is not that the state has no role in tacklingterrorism. But that the effectiveness of its institutions, agenciesand instrumentalities would be a direct function of their legitimacy,which can be expanded and reinforced only through politicalengagement with various social constituents.Community policing, which would ensure accurate intelligencegathering and credible investigation, cannot be effective unless thesterile politics of either terrorising religious minorities and othermarginal groups in the name of majoritarian and elitist prejudices,or patronising and ghettoising them in the name of secularism andsocial justice is replaced with a new politics. One that engages andempowers those groups and transforms them into constituents of modernsociety.It is precisely the absence of such politics that has deprivedmarginal groups of agency. That, needless to say, has beenresponsible for the failure of the system to deliver effectivejustice in cases like the massacre of Muslims by UP PAC in Hashimpurain 1987, the 1992-93 Mumbai riots and post-Godhra riots of 2002.Worse, institutional partisanship has found the requisite politicalwill to express itself through legislation such as theunconstitutional Chhattisgarh State Public Security Act, which hasled to the year-long detention of reputed civil and medical rightsactivist Dr Binayak Sen on flimsy grounds. It would be hard toimagine how social groups would want to willingly cooperate with asystem that has alienated and coerced them thus.
ENEMIES OF THE STATE – Women and men who choose the margins
Cutting Corners Ashok Mitra (The Telegraph) 23/5/08
She was born Krishna Chandavarkar. Love for music ran in the family. She had, even as a tiny tot, a deep, rich, sonorous voice. Rigorous training undergone in the early teens strengthened its texture; it also helped her to negotiate effortlessly the hills and valleys the scales encompassed. The cadence of sensitivity was, however, her very own. Demand for her renditions was intense in the neighbourhood. Another Kishori Amonkar, many thought, was about to emerge. She disappointed them. The prowess of her will nudged her away from music to pursuits of the intellect. There was, in addition, an innate concern for social issues.
Ideology is not an inherited property, it is a gift of the environment one breathes in. In Krishna’s case it was perhaps the influence of an uncle or a cousin coming home full of radical ideas after a term in prison. The stirrings were yet vague, but Krishna had already sorted out in her mind the dilemma of choices and decisions. She opted for economics; the intent was to use the knowledge acquired from this branch of study to advance the cause of the nation’s under-privileged. Krishna turned out to be a star student in the Bombay School of Economics and Sociology and began her teaching career there. She married a fellow economist, Ranganath Bharadwaj, and the two of them decided to travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for further research. The wife was indisputably more brilliant than the husband. This could have been a factor, or it could have been something else; they separated soon after their daughter, Sudha, arrived. Krishna got her PhD, returned to Bombay and kept winning laurels for her forays into hitherto unexplored frontiers of economic theory. Simultaneously she continued work on issues of income inequalities and the production function in Indian agriculture.
While all this was happening, a curious incident took place. The economist, Piero Sraffa, friend and confidant of both Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, was a recluse in Cambridge, England, silently toiling away on editing the works of David Ricardo. He was widely known for both the profundity of the wisdom he tucked into himself and his reluctance to transcribe this wisdom into writing. It was general knowledge though that he was trying to build a halfway house between Marx and Ricardo. His little volume, crammed with insight, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, got published in the early Sixties and took the world of economics by storm. Few could grasp its implications and long critiques were written here and there, with the object of interpreting Sraffa’s point of view. Sachin Chaudhuri, editor of Bombay’s Economic Weekly, had an unerring instinct for discerning who could do what most effectively. He gave the review copy of Sraffa’s book to Krishna Bharadwaj. The review article Krishna wrote created a flutter in the academic dovecots: the world now knew what Sraffa meant. Krishna’s piece became a classic, perhaps the only instance of a review article being set down as compulsory text in university curricula.
Krishna moved from Bombay to the Delhi School of Economics and, after a few years, to the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She lectured, researched, produced papers and, during sabbaticals, dug roots in Cambridge to edit the collection of Sraffa’s writings. Sraffa, who had become Krishna’s close personal friend, had meanwhile passed away, but she took upon herself the Sraffa quest of establishing a bridge between Ricardo and Marx. Her life was, however, cut short in the early Nineties, by the virulence of a malignant brain tumour.
It is not so much of Krishna, but of her daughter, Sudha, that one wants to talk about though. Sudha was a prodigy in every sense of the term. For instance, while still barely seven or eight, she would engage in debates on logical positivism, mercilessly laying bare the entrails of the doctrine. The only child of a busy, divorcée mother, she had to create her own world and build her own hypotheses. She sat through all her examinations with an easy nonchalance, topping in each of them. Her five years at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, were a repetition of the story. A piping first class resting in her pocket, the world was at her feet, more so since, by virtue of the place of her birth, she was the possessor of an American passport.
She could have gone away to the US, earned academic plaudits and plenty of money in a university position. She could have joined a transnational corporation as some sort of a technical apparat. She could have become a management guru in India itself, or travelled high along the totem pole of the Indian administrative service. She did none of these. Once she reached the age of 18, she walked to the US embassy in New Delhi, disowned her American nationality, and returned her passport. Sudha then slipped away into the wilderness of the Chhattisgarh forests.
She was, for a time, associated with Shankar Guha Neogi’s devoted group at Bhilai, fighting against the rampant corruption indulged in by middle- and low-level bureaucrats and local contractors. To wrest proper wages for the toiling workers in the mines and plants located in the region was a major item on her agenda. She soon branched out to the wider issues of Dalit and tribal rights. Sudha began living with the adivasis, and learnt fast to think in the manner they do. She and her husband adopted an adivasi child as their daughter. It has been a life of relentless struggle: to establish and protect the rights of the Dalit and tribal population, the right for land, the right for education, for health and for security against marauding landlords and rentiers.
Which is to say, Sudha is engaged in the same kind of activities Binayak Sen was more or less engaged in, again in Chhattisgarh. The authorities have a particular way of sizing up individuals like Binayak Sen and Sudha Bharadwaj: these people mix too much with the tribals, therefore they are dangerous. Any person or group of persons working for the cause of tribals is officially ordained enemy of the State, any agitation to establish tribal rights is reckoned as insurrectionary activity. Sen was taken in precisely on this ground. His sphere of work was providing health facilities, and the dissemination of information about such facilities, among the tribal population. He was therefore a marked man and was arrested. Conceivably, Sudha’s fate will be no different.
For every 9,999 young Indians from affluent families who either fly away to the US or join a trans-national corporation or choose to be a programming boss in an IT outfit or aspire to be top brass in the government system, there will still be a Binayak Sen or Sudha Bharadwaj. This is bound to be so since, every now and then, rationality, which is an integral element of the human mind, tends to assert itself against the rampant asymmetry of the human condition. True, not all rational minds always think rationally. One or two nonetheless do. The 9,999 young Indians who choose the primrose path will, it goes without saying, roll in money. A Binayak Sen or a Sudha Bharadwaj will live a hard, marginal existence. A question will still keep nagging. If economists and mathematicians succeed in arriving at a common measure for accretions to national welfare on the basis of today and what would accrue in the future and are, at the same time, able to assign comparable weights to contribution by individual citizens, will not the contributions of Binayak and Sudha far outflank those by the rest of the crowd?

Some hope for Darjeeling’s water woes

Press Trust of India
Sunday, May 25, 2008 (Siliguri)
Besides political turmoil, the Queen of the Hills, Darjeeling, has been crippled for decades by a water crisis, but this may end with the completion of a number of projects.A problem was that the West Bengal government could not take any initiative as water was a subject of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, an autonomous body that runs the administrations in the three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalmpong and Kurseong.Just a year ago, former hills strongman, Subhas Ghising, allowed the Public Health Engineering Department to take up a Rs 55 crore project aimed at lifting water from the river Balasan in Siliguri in three phases for supply to Darjeeling and Kurseong after treatment.If everything went according to plan, the hills were sure to get the water by the end of 2009, said Minister for Public Health Engineering, Goutam Deb.He also urged the Centre to increase its share of the project cost of Rupees 10 crore to twenty crore which would accelerate the project.

Pranab happy with Congress poll performance

KOLKATA: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday said that he was happy with the Congress performance in the West Bengal panchayat elections, but he would not offer any instant reactions. “ Unlike instant coffee, there are no instant reactions that can be given,” he said avoiding any comment on the Left’s performance.
Looking visibly pleased he said: “I am happy with the results of the Congress as well as the Trinamool Congress which has done very well. This sort of Opposition is good for democracy”, he said while talking to reporters.
Mr.Mukherjee said that there was need to analyse the election results and the West Bengal Pradesh Congress chief was right now collecting report from various places which will be analysed. “Elections reflect people’s verdict and there is a need for the political parties to analyse the results and then try to take lessons.” He refused to be drawn into any discussion as to whether the results were a verdict on the Left’s land acquisition process.
To a question on the nuclear deal, he said that while he had no idea of what had transpired at the meeting called by the Left parties to discuss the issue among themselves, a UPA-Left meeting has been called on May 28 to discuss the nuclear deal, he said.Food crisis
Earlier inaugurating the annual conference of the National Institute of Personnel Management, he said that in view of the world food crisis, India would need to produce not only for herself but for her neighbours too.
He mentioned that India’s wheat production was 20 million tonnes against a target of 14 million tonnes.
This was revealed at a recent meeting of the group of ministers.
On the conference theme on human capital, he said that while the economy’s rate of growth had to be ensured to absorb more people gainfully, there was also a need to increase investment in education through public-private partnership models.
“Beginnings have already been made through a 11th plan programme to upgrade 309 industrial training institutes in 29 States. This project is likely to be completed by the terminal year of the plan,” he said. (The Hindu)

Double Jeopardy: (Perspectives on West bengal)

M.J. Akbar, letters@covert.co.in

There is a television game called “Double Jeopardy” built around the rather depressing thought that the answer to a problem might be a problem in itself. India’s Marxists have just discovered that this game could spill over into reality.
Moralists have long condemned those politicians who enjoy power without responsibility. The CPI(M) is now discovering the pain of having responsibility without power. That is probably closer to a triple jeopardy.
If ever there was a double jeopardy in politics, then the hammering they have just received across West Bengal in the “panchayat” elections is a gloomy, or glowering, example. From control of 2,303 village “panchayats” in 2003, the CPI(M)-led Left Front has stumbled to 1,633; the Mamata Banerjee-led disunited opposition ascended from 917 to 1,463. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress won more than three-fourths of the village councils.
Two facts stand out in the Bengal results: Mamata won villages that she had not even bothered to campaign in; and the most decisive shift away from the Left was the Muslim vote which it has wooed so consistently with its absolutist opposition to the BJP. The upsurge against the Left in Bengal is therefore greater than these results indicate. If this pattern holds then the Left could lose more than 15 seats in the next general elections.
And it is no longer sufficient to go red each time you see saffron in order to pocket Muslim votes. Muslims want more, including bread and education. As the Sachar Committee’s report proved, during more than three decades in power the Left has given neither to Bengal’s Muslims. It has certainly provided security to the community, but that is not enough.
You cannot take land with impunity from the Bengali Muslim peasant and yet frighten him into voting for you. That era is over. The tectonic shift in the Muslim vote has cut the ground from under the CPI(M)’s Fortress Bengal.
There are many reasons why the Muslims did not revolt against the Left Front before. The leadership of Jyoti Basu was both charismatic and reassuring. Basu knew the language that would communicate with the people, even if in practical terms (that is, bread and education) he did not do very much. He shepherded the community through its most vulnerable phase, 1970s and 1980s, with the kind of concern that the sentimental might even confuse with affection. It was psychologically impossible for Muslims to leave the CPI(M) as long as Jyoti Basu was at the helm. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was another matter. Buddhadev had been insensitive to Muslim sentiment even when a minister in Basu’s Cabinet. Muslims might have accepted his lectures on the “azaan” and “madrasas” if he had begun to address their bread-and-education concerns. Instead, the lectures came with the most appalling usurpation of land in Singur and Nandigram. Muslims were among the worst affected.
There is a phenomenon that is being shrouded by the shift of the Muslim vote toward Mamata Banerjee. In the 1960s, as Bengal’s Muslims abandoned the Congress, many of them first went to marginal parties, including outfits led by the clergy. In the elections of the late 1960s, parties that were variations of the Muslim League set up candidates and got a reasonable chunk of the vote. The CPI(M), under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, weaned the Muslims toward the Left and eliminated such parties. They have returned to Bengal politics.
A little before the “panchayat” elections, Jyoti Basu made a casual remark that was not so casual: It was time for another Front, he suggested. The CPI(M)’s partners are displaying signs of fatigue. But an alliance with CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc may be a smaller problem than the Left’s dalliance with the Congress in Delhi. The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendor to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day.
Blaming the rest of world doesn’t really help: Oil prices shot up to unprecedented levels in 1973 as well, but it did not help Indira Gandhi when she blamed the international situation for domestic inflation. The government can take comfort from clever opinion polls. A recent one showed that the UPA government had 34 percent support, as against 26 percent for BJP and its partners. Then buried somewhere deep in the copy lay an interesting fact: The survey was done among 1,600 respondents in the big cities, and restricted to the very rich, the topmost socio-economic categories. The rich find inflation less demanding than the poor. And if Dr. Manmohan Singh cannot get the vote of this segment, which constitutes less than 10 percent of the population, then he has no vote at all. I am sure if you take a poll within my family, you will find my support at 34 percent. If you check with the whole “mohalla,” it could be a different outcome.
The difference between the Left and the UPA might seem distinct over dialectical debates in Delhi; it seems a blur from the villages of Bengal. Jyoti Basu always had a wonderful alibi when faced with difficult questions. He would blame lack of cooperation from Delhi and send subliminal signals that this was also discrimination against Bengalis. Buddhadev Bhattacharya tried to blame the prime minister during the “panchayat” elections. No one bought his story. The voter had seen him cozying up to Delhi too often.
The Marxists will lose very little if they lose Delhi. The Left can afford to lose Delhi; it cannot afford to slip in Bengal, or it will disappear for a decade.
– M.J. Akbar is chairman and director of publications, Covert. (Arab News)

WEST BENGAL PANCHAYAT ELECTION: GATHERED VIEWS

Reading signs
One swallow does not make a summer and the loss of a few seats does not mark the beginning of the end of a political regime. This is not to suggest that the losses suffered by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the zilla parishad elections are without significance. One thing must be made clear: the results in no way indicate that the overall dominance of the CPI(M) at the village level has in any way been broken, even in east Midnapur. Yet the defeats have drawn the public attention that they have because of the areas in which they have occurred, and the events that preceded the elections in both Singur and Nandigram. Both places have been at the forefront of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s policy of acquiring agricultural land for industrialization in West Bengal, and of opposition to such policy. It is thus easy to draw the conclusion that the election results are a verdict against industrialization. Such a conclusion would be simplistic.
There are other factors that need to be considered to understand the significance of the losses suffered in Nandigram and Singur. The CPI(M) will have to accept that the politics of terror no longer fetches electoral dividends. Perhaps it did at one time, but it no longer does. The perception and the nature of politics even in the rural world have obviously undergone a change that the comrades are not willing to either recognize or accept. The CPI(M) and the government it heads would do well to recall the adverse comments made on West Bengal by the Sachar committee. Muslims in the state featured badly in every sphere — from education to government employment — that the Sachar committee had considered. It would be unrealistic to believe that the poor conditions of the Muslims had nothing to do with the way the rural folk voted in a place like Nandigram or a in a district like Malda. (It goes without saying that the conditions of the Muslims should be improved irrespective of election results at whatever level.) Under the circumstances, the CPI(M) should count its blessings that the results have not been worse.
It could, in fact, have been worse for the Left Front government since it chose, when faced with opposition, to occupy a dubious middle ground. Having begun a process of industrialization it pressed the pause button when its policy of land acquisition encountered resistance. Given the fragmentation of land holdings and the layers of usufructuary rights vested in land, it will be idealistic to expect that land will move from agriculture to industry through the operation of market forces without state intervention. The challenge before Mr Bhattacharjee is to continue with the process of industrialization and to manage the fallout without allowing the cadre of his party to run berserk. His failure to do all this will make the loss of a few rural seats into a setback for the entire economy and society of West Bengal. (The Telegraph) 23.5.08

CPM banks on Dooars mandate- Morcha meets failed, says Asok

The results of the panchayat polls in the Dooars have made it clear that people there do not want their area to be included in the separate state of Gorkhaland demanded by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, Darjeeling district CPM leaders said here today.
“Morcha president Bimal Gurung, at a number of meetings in the Dooars, had urged residents to vote against the CPM and the Left allies. But as the results show, we have done exceptionally well in the Dooars, especially in Malbazar, Birpara, Metelli and Nagrakata blocks where the Morcha meetings were held,” Bengal urban development minister Asok Bhattacharya said.
“We take this mandate as an outright refusal by the residents to express solidarity with the Morcha and its demands,” the CPM leader added. “People even voted us back in power at the Kalchini panchayat samiti, ousting the Congress.”
The district CPM leadership also thanked chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for clarifying his government’s stance on the Morcha’s statehood demand. A four-member delegation of the hill party met the chief minister in Calcutta yesterday. At the meeting, Bhattacharjee reportedly asked the Morcha to focus on greater autonomy for the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council.
“We now expect the Morcha to play a responsible role in ending the stalemate in the hills through discussions with the state and maybe, the Centre,” Jibitesh Sarkar, a state secretariat member of the CPM, said.
Morcha leaders, however, denied the urban development minister’s claims. “We had never passed any directive to the voters in the Dooars and always said they were free to vote for any candidate. The inference drawn by the CPM is wrong, as voting in the panchayat polls and expressing support for Gorkhaland are different issues. We still say that the residents of the Dooars support our demand,” Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri said.