Rama, Modi vs India, Bharat

"Lord Ram’s credos emphasised the sixteen noble qualities of life—unconditional, righteous, assertive, grateful, truthful, steadfast, charismatic, emancipative, thoughtful, capable, presentable, spiritual, dreaded, radiant, admirable and calm, All of this together made him the ideal Maryada Purushottam. These Shodasha Kalyana Gunas, as they are known in Sanskrit, define the human way of living that transcends boundaries making it globally relevant. The Ram temple movement had its own sixteen dimensions due to its religious, social, cultural, spiritual, anthropological, philosophical, judicial, liberal, historical, local, regional, national, global, geographical, mercurial and political contours". More here.

It wasn’t until Sonia took over the Congress that such cooperation became impossible. The current political polarisation started with her. But paradoxically that has worked in favour of the BJP! More here.

An Ode to the doctor’s scribble

"Hindu Resurgence in India That Is Changing"

Trichy’s Initiatives to Enhance Ease of Living

My new article discusses the challenges before the Trichy City Corporation in achieving the vision of ‘ease living for all’. It also sheds light on how a slew of innovative initiatives undertaken by it, involving citizens in most of the programmes, have yielded good results.

The path to Dharma AND path of Adharma

The most critical aspects of humanity facing ever since the human common senses are used purposefully for bettering are two things which also often get infuriated or fanatical in the public debates all over the world: these are religion and the ideology of politics.

I write this post after reading a small article by a senior advocate R Venkataraman who has such an amazing skills to put down the complex things into a clear and lucid manner.

Sometime back, he wrote a article on senior advocate's legal skills and the impact of certain principles of religion in his arguments of cases in court for decades. 

I find some of the his lines of thoughts most interesting and compelling to read and read again to ponder and understand the meaning of the words (m)used by R Venkataraman.

The following are some of the excerpts from the article:

"Religious philosophy is neither caste specific nor gender biased. It only imparts the transformative process to every human being, from the path of Adharma to the path of Dharma. Like Adharma which has universal belonging, the opposite of it namely Dharma has universal application and is relevant in law. The core of Dharma is free from both gender and caste discrimination.Self realisation or emancipation is again free from the clutches of either caste or gender sensitivity.

It is critical to look at religious philosophy as one that is broad-based in its practice and classifies human attitudes on the basis of Dharma and Adharma.....

It is important to remember that religious philosophy is concerned only about Dharma and Adharma and prescribes the method without any favor or bias towards any class or gender."

  

India "move towards a centrist politics"

Some useful reading:

"India is definitely ahead of Europe in how so many diverse cultural, linguistic and even religious communities have all kept together in a federal political system. Look at Europe — it has become more and more divided into countries. Within several countries that are much smaller than India, deep and violent divisions persist. Ireland is one example...

But I must add that one dangerous phenomenon has emerged — post-election alliances. What should happen is that parties get together before an election, declare some kind of common programme and then face the electorate. Instead, I see parties openly declaring that they will enter into alliances after the results are out. This is not fair to the voters and leads to problems in the political system. " More here.

The quality of governance matters, not 10-year averages.

 the Praetorian guards of the “idea of India”

No political party can hope to win even a municipal election in India by relying on the votes of rich Indians. 

Socialist parties have had the enduring slogan of Bharat verses India. Leaders and intellectuals have argued that cities are colonising the countryside and creating a conflict between villages and cities. 

Good read

Would 2 MPs per constituency result in better political outcomes for India?

The myth of Indian civilisaiton

"Nehru lied to Rajendra Prasad when he claimed that he (Nehru) and Sardar Patel had decided that C Rajagopalachari should be the country’s first President. Prasad and Patel called his bluff the next morning."

Indian right is agenda lite

Happy Deepawali & some reading!

Wish you all very happy deepawali. I just don't celebrate all the time but just say it when there is some new lights in new life!

Here are some good reading for good for thought:

Misuse of Sardar Patel is result of disuse of Patel

2014 - Who holds the key?

The military is integral to the US’s understanding of itself

Gujarat’s Muslims: in a politically correct trap?

Good read

Ashok Desai says "Raghuram Rajan made me think more with a 15-minute speech than his three distinguished predecessors did with their 15,000-minute perorations. He should keep his mind ticking."

Gurumurthy says "Reverence for elders and teachers coupled with their power to punish the deviant had helped to prevent deviance. But the modern state doesn’t trust parents or teachers to punish the deviant. Fostering reverence helps to prevent deviance. Deviance cannot be corrected by law. It can only be prevented and corrected by family and society. They need to be strengthened. But modernity weakens both." Read full article Modernity has failed to stop deviance

"Povertarianism"

"He was always warmed by how magnificent India was in so many aspects and felt that his role in life was to amplify this. He was attracted towards the idea of India as a Hindu nation, and it is in the company of like-minded people that he became certain of what was wrong and what it was that needed fixing. In their company he flowered."

"Nobel laureate Michael Spence, while presenting the report of the World Bank’s growth commission that he chaired, admitted that though the commission had found the ingredients for high growth, they had not discovered how to accelerate inclusion with growth, which was becoming an increasing demand everywhere."

" The Congress party's rented intellectuals, led by the NAC, took over the entire discourse and nobody dared to question them, although some fretted behind the scenes."

• "NEVER in India's history has the economic discourse been so one-sided. In the past, there was at least the unabashedly contrarian Forum of Free Enterprise of Nani Palkhivala, A.D. Shroff and M.R. Pai. Now, we have all the venerable chambers, the CII, FICCI and ASSOCHAM, hold grovelling conferences on "inclusive growth". Even in the red-hot Sixties, there was the Swatantra Party, which may not have counted for too much in numbers, and was easily reviled as a chamber of decrepit princes, but was represented by formidable parliamentarians like Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, K.M. Munshi, V.P. Menon, Minoo Masani, Piloo Mody, N.G. Ranga and Gayatri Devi."

"In India, too much credibility is given to ideology and not enough to facts, and especially on issues pertaining to the poverty industry. Yes, I have chosen my words carefully — the poverty industry complex is huge, well nurtured, and encourages corruption. Most economists, politicians and intellectuals, of all ideological persuasions, believe that the PDS system of distributing foodgrains to the "poor" is the most corrupt system in the world. Yet, this is what the FSO will enlarge, encourage and endorse."

"They say we are immoral. But they have no shame in coming and raiding the bars in order to extort money from us. What does that make them?"

Prof F A Hayek & Narendra Modi

"Friedrich August Hayek, the Austrian-born philosopher and economist best known for his defence of classical liberalism, seemed to think it did, claiming that market economy inevitably required cultural underpinnings in the form of a set of “modern” values based on individualism. It’s a view echoed by American political scientistYoshihiro Francis Fukuyama for whom modernization, westernization, and democratization are all part of a single, unilinear process that will conclude when other cultures essentially ape the West. As opposed to this are the theories of cultural variation, which assert that there are different roads to modernization and different conclusions to the process of modernization." More here.

Some links

"BJP itself is seen as a party not seen as subscribing to an idea of India based truly on cultural pluralism."

It is ironic that after 50 years of failure we are still optimistic for in-kind transfers but won't give cash transfers even five years to build the necessary infrastructure.

The blame for the mismanagement of the economy in recent years should squarely lie at the gate of 10 Janpath, where political power resides.

Inheritance of frightening

"..millions of young Indians who have risen in recent years and are now part of the confused, upwardly mobile, post-reform internet generation, the question has a new urgency..."

“If Indian education and scholarship continue along their current trajectory,” writes Sheldon Pollock, the brilliant professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, “the number of citizens capable of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and indeed history, are in the hands of scholars outside the country.” Das's full article is here.

Culture and economics

Niranjan has this wonderful piece on decoding the red-beacon culture and economics.


Here is another piece by Prof Boudreauk of GMU, USA arguing about "The mass production that is a hallmark of modern market economies is made possible not chiefly by money but by culture and institutions."

Arundhati Roy, a Ghost, has got it all wrong!!

I never expected this wonderful surprising commentary article by Aakar Patel who refutes on well grounded basis, the false propositions of cunning socialist and communist leaned Arundhati Roy. 


I must say that when I read Roy's article which was based on a lecture she gave in Mumbai some time ago, I was deeply worried about the false propositions against folly ideas of her.


Patel concludes that:

• When all’s said and done, the solution to such problems in dysfunctional societies like India is simple, though boring. Communities must start taking responsibility for themselves. They cannot wait for a revolution to come to their doorsteps and clean their neighbourhoods, or to care for their infants, or to teach hygiene to their women or to educate themselves. Nor can they entirely depend on the state either, though they must vote against those who fail to help them do this.

• Experience has also shown that in tribal areas where external influence has been allowed, it can be a force for good. The tribals of Mizoram have 90 per cent literacy because of work done by the Presbyterian church. Shielding tribals from the outside world keeps them just as they are. This might have aesthetic appeal for some, but most tribals don’t think so. That is why the Salwa Judam militia attacks those who are their brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, this isn’t the sort of thing we can blame the whole world for, and so it isn’t good material for belles lettres.

Hindu's Spontaneous Cow: B R Ambedkar, M K Gandhi and Modern States

I post this very interesting article fully here for the record. I had met the author once during a book launch which hot to publish as well as release.

The right to eat by S Anand

Apr 21, 2012, 00:26 IST

The state shall, in particular, take steps for … prohibiting the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.” 

— Article 48, The Directive Principles of State Policy

“For the [Vedic] Brahmin every day was a beef-steak day.” — B R Ambedkar

In an otherwise Ambedkarite Constitution, the Gandhian mafia managed to sneak in the cow. However, it was not made the mandate of the Indian state to protect “the porcupine, the hedgehog, the iguana, the rhinoceros, the tortoise or the hare” — all listed by the Manusmriti (circa 200 AD) as “eatable”.

Brahminical Hinduism tends to yoke together practices totally at odds. The meaning of one resides in the meaninglessness of the other. The touch-me-not Brahmin renders everyone else untouchable; sometimes he cannot even touch himself. Time was when the Vedic Brahmin happily ate beef; merrily sacrificed cattle in thousands; treated a special guest with veal pulao. Post-Buddhism, the cow was declared sacred and holy. It became Kamadhenu, the abode of 330 million gods and goddesses. Gandhi called the cow “a poem of pity”; his love for the bovine was rooted in seeing it as divine. “The central fact of Hinduism is cow protection. Cow protection to me is one of the most wonderful phenomena in human evolution.”

Many Dalit communities have myths – the Madigas of Andhra Pradesh haveJambava Purana – that trace their origin back to the consumption of cow meat and the stigma of untouchability enforced on them. After the Brahmins declared the cow holy, society still needed someone to clear the cow carcass. The ingenuity of the caste system was there to manage this problem. Ambedkar argued that untouchability entailed from eating the meat of the dead cow. So, conventionally, “untouchables” got to eat not a cow in prime, after slaughtering it, but after it died of old age or disease — stringy, not juicy, meat.

Yet, beef and buffalo meat comprise the largest meat product to be both produced and consumed in India. “This animal [buffalo] has not been given its due place in the livestock sector. Paradoxically, it is discriminated against merely on account of its dark colour. This is clear apartheid against buffalo.” This is not from Kancha Ilaiah’s Buffalo Nationalism, but from the India report of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Meanwhile, the dark buffalo is ritually sacrificed. In several parts of South India, Dalits are forced to do the slaughtering. Gandhi did not love the buffalo.

The caste system’s inferiorising of those who deal with cattle (dead or alive) and leatherwork has resulted not just in intolerance but also in the lack of evolution of diversity of red-meat products. According to the FAO’s India report, hardly one per cent of the total meat produced in India is used for processing. Take Germany’s wide range of sausages (Bratwurst, Blutwurst, Bregenwurst, Liverwurst, and whatnot) and salamis (dry-cured, aged). Look at the range of knives and precision instruments used for cutting meat in Europe. Think of thin carpaccio. Think of the range of cheeses in France. This comes from not just love for food but from respect for communities that deal with animals. In India, many of the inferiorised castes have wonderful ways of salting and preserving meat (and fish). When these communities are despised and rendered resourceless, how will their secrets and techniques be valourised and commodified? Dal-roti-sabzi, a Brahmin-Bania-Jain diet, is projected as the staple. Indians contributed an ugly word to the English vocabulary — non-vegetarian.

Much hue and cry is being raised over the recent cow-slaughter bans in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh — conveniently ruled by the demonic Bharatiya Janata Party. But few realise that there has been a ban in place in Delhi since 1994 (the Delhi Agricultural Cattle Preservation Act), for few in the secular brigade – who have a Pavlovian response to any agenda set by the BJP/RSS/VHP/Bajrang Dal/Narendra Modi – get worked up over the silent ban on beef in Delhi. Most beef sellers in Delhi are forced to claim they are selling “buff”. Consumption of beef does not seem to excite the secular-liberal elite, for whom Hindutva is an easy enemy — not Hinduism, which by some reckless and perverse misunderstanding is seen as tolerant/non-violent. The vociferous defenders of A K Ramanujan’s essay or Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses won’t sign a we-love-beef petition.

Last week in Hyderabad when students, activists and professors asserted their right to consume beef, they were attacked because they ate beef in a celebratory fashion. They were taking joy in what was expected to be done secretly. A food that has been made an object of stigma and shame was being reclaimed as a symbol of pride, as a right; after all, a kilo of beef costs Rs 130 while okra is Rs 100. It’s time we started a movement to declare beef the national food of India. Some truly Vedic Brahmins may well sign up.

Multipolarity of modern India

Aakar Patel on Anatomy of an ‘Indian’: answers to the FAQs 

“Indians are nationalists” but “not patriots”

“Indians are opportunists” but they are “religious and pious”

“Indians are secular” but they are also “racist”

“Indians are communal” but they are also “hypocrites”

“Indians are not conservative” but they are “liberals” and also “not tolerant”

The literary traditions in India

This particular ‘view from India' may indicate how the study of literature is essential to our varied inquiries into the tangled relationship between colonialism and modernity, as well as into a genuinely democratic postcolonial future.

Demystifying the liberalism and multiculturalism

What we as an individual in a society composed by our actions need to do is the following; first understand the core principles of liberalism at individual level, and do not bother and confuse about multiculturalism, because the word multiculturalism is as complicated as the word ‘secularism’; both has inherited problems; do not link with multiculturalism when you try to understand the entity called liberalism; make sure that the foundation of liberal values are established in your thinking by your own way and methods, then move for understanding the multiculturalism but ensure that you are not moving away from liberal values over the period a journey to understand the multiculturalism.     

What prompted me to utter the above words is Mr.Mehta article in today’s IE. Some excerpts: 

• Munich Conference has evoked sharply contrasting responses. Some see in the speech an attempt to rescue liberalism from its counterfeit cousin, multiculturalism. Others see an enactment of the same narrow politics that produced a crisis in many liberal societies in the first place. 

• The contest between liberalism and multiculturalism was about the relationship between freedom and diversity. Multiculturalism often fell into three traps in the context of this relationship. First, it ignored the fact that equal freedom for all individuals is the core value.  

• ……instead of saying that your identity should be irrelevant to citizenship and to the goods that the state distributes, multiculturalism made identities the axis of distribution. The more identities become an axis of distribution, the greater the chance of destructive group politics. 

• But liberal politics globally has been curiously susceptible to being taken over by right-wing nationalists.

• This is often because defenders of liberal values end up aligning them with a particular way of life or national identity. In India, for example, the debate over reforming personal laws was often framed as being about “national integration” rather than about values of individuality and freedom.

• Liberals should be worried about any attempt to benchmark national identity; such benchmarking diminishes the force of liberalism. 

• The aspect of the speech that was potentially vague was the use of state power to clamp down on extremist groups. When state power should be used for clamping down is always a challenging question for liberals; a liberal society has to put up with a lot of offensive speech. But the challenge that liberal states face is over their credibility in being impartial. Do prejudgments and prejudice make these states more assiduously pursue groups belonging to some communities than others? 

• In short, the future of liberalism will depend not upon a philosophical statement that all groups engaging in extremist speech be condemned; it will depend upon the impartiality of state practice towards all citizens.

• The truth is that we still don’t fully understand the circumstances under which there is a turn to extremism. In that sense, Cameron’s implicit diagnosis that the turn to extremism was fuelled by state multiculturalism seems quite premature. Multiculturalism has its flaws. But it would be foolish for liberals to suppose that simply because state multiculturalism failed, the answer must lie in a more “muscular” liberalism.

• Liberal values are eminently defensible. But their realisation in practice involves sensibly dealing with complex layers of history, psychology and a sense of self.

Struggle to make worth of life in youngage

• As is evident in NYRS 2009, about 48% of all literate youth indicated that they supported it, while 35% were against caste-based reservations. While 54% of SC, 50% of ST and 47% of OBC are in favour of the current system, 43% of the general castes back it.

• The youth are also often prone to violence. Frustration is a key driver of this increasingly marked attribute and it arises from unfulfilled aspirations. The major reasons for frustration in today’s youth are unemployment, injustice and corruption. What rubs salt on this wound is a sense of victimhood to the forces of unemployment, injustice and corruption. Their impressionable minds are hemmed in from all sides by glamorous objects and options that most cannot possess.

From Rajesh Shukla's Young, employed and Unhappy".

How strange is no strange

That is how it sounds in the latest column in To The Manner Born:

• The truth is that India is perhaps the rudest country when it comes to making its rules. We don’t like outsiders. Unless they come with money, fame or status. Even then we tolerate them till we have a use for them. For example, we are almost subserviently polite to diplomats. Why? We think in the long run they will help us jump the line when we apply for a visa. Ditto bureaucrats. Or politicians. Or industrialists. But will we let our Gujarati heiress marry a Punjabi investment banker? Only if they threaten to run away and cause embarrassment. Otherwise we would prefer to keep things within the baraadari.

• What is even more reprehensible is that the more educated the class of Indian the more logical their disdain. They can argue a sane person into believing that it is a sin to accept difference. And that they are merely carrying out their dharma/karma by keeping their community free of impurities. Most young people are so convinced that they buy the logic that an arranged marriage is the only way to find happiness. Love has been thrown out of the window.

• A few years ago Mumbai was labelled as India’s rudest city but the truth is we are perhaps the most liberal of all Indian metros. In Mumbai we are kind to strangers. We talk to them in bars, we invite them to our homes. We even let our most beautiful girls marry them. Many of Mumbai’s top models are married to or living with their foreign partners. Each one of these men is an Indophile and has contributed to the city’s cosmopolitan culture. I guess we are polite enough to live up to our reputation of being a “melting pot”. Too bad the rest of India ignores its perpetual slogan of unity in diversity.

The Margazhi Festival

India is currently going though one of its most turbulent phases of transformation. Political corruption is at its worst, crony-capitalism threatens to destroy the very fabric of democracy and religio-political vested interests are coercing the common citizen to polarise. Created by the web of these daunting trends is a deep and growing cultural trauma of an India that is arguably alienating itself from a syncretic, modern and dynamic 5,000-year-old civilisation to becoming an unrecognisable, imitative, regressive society, nay, market.