Science on the decline

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

In the colonial period undivided India had made a mark at the global level through the pioneering work of scientists like Jagdish Chandra Bose, who was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920, CV Raman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 and Satyendra Nath Bose whose name is clubbed with that of the century’s greatest scientist in Bose-Einstein statistics.

Jawaharlal Nehru attached great importance to science. A decade before Independence, addressing the Indian Science Congress, he had said, “The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.”

Promotion of the scientific temper is one of the directive principles of the Constitution framed under his leadership. As the first Prime Minister, he initiated the nuclear programme with the proclaimed intention of using atomic energy for peaceful purposes. He set up the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and national-level research bodies in physics, chemistry, medicine, agriculture etc.

He also established Indian Institutes of Technology with the help of advanced nations. Several of their graduates migrated to the West, giving rise to concerns about brain drain. But many stayed behind and contributed to India’s development.

All through his 17 years at the helm, the Indian Science Congress invited Nehru to inaugurate its annual session. It is still the Prime Minister’s prerogative to open its session although few of Nehru’s successors have shown his understanding of the importance of science.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi created a sensation in 2014 by mouthing the pseudo-scientific claims of his Hindutva school. Addressing a gathering of doctors, he referred to the elephant-headed god Ganesh and said, “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who put an elephant’s head on the body of a human being.”

He turned to the epic Mahabharata, which says Karna was not conceived in his mother’s womb, and added, “This means that genetic science was present at that time.”

His first address to the Science Congress also contained such wayward ideas, but in later speeches he avoided them. This year he gave the Science Congress a new slogan: Jai Vignan, Jai Anusandhan ((Victory to Knowledge, Victory to Research). It has probably come too late. 

At least two papers presented at this year’s session were straight out of Hindutva’s book in which scientific terminology and mythology are hopelessly mixed up. One of them proclaimed Newton and Einstein were wrong without adducing any evidence and proposed that gravitational force be named after Modi.

India’s recent achievements in science are a repetition of what others have done already. There has been little original contribution since the days of the two Boses and Raman.

In the list of more than 4,000 world-class researchers of 2018, drawn up by the firm Clarivate Analytics on the basis of production of multiple highly cited papers, there are only 10 names from India. The United States with 2,639 names, the UK with 546 and China with 482 top the list.

CNR Rao, Director of the Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore, one of the Indians on the list, told a newspaper that 15 years ago India and China were at the same level, but now China’s contribution to global science is 15 to 16 per cent and India’s only three to four per cent.

Although India is lagging behind in research, Indians are not. They are doing well in other countries. The Clarivate list contains far more Indian names under the US than under India. Names of Indians figure also under other countries like Canada, China, Singapore, Denmark, Finland and Saudi Arabia.

In the 1960s, British scientist JBS Haldane, who had moved to India protesting US military presence in his country, said science was growing slowly in this country not because people were stupid or lazy but because professionalism was weak and there was an obsession with degrees.

More recently, Yamuna Krishnan, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, who had spent 15 years at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore before migrating to the US, identified a herd mentality and paucity of early mentorship as factors that inhibit growth of science in India.

Writing in Nature, the international journal of science, she said, “To catapult India into the top five scientific nations, the country needs enabling policies that money can’t buy.”

Those who believe that all worthwhile knowledge had been gleaned by their ancestors in the misty past cannot be expected to give scientific research the push it needs to blossom. - - Gulf Today, January 8, 2019.

Parliamentary system on trial

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The failure of the budget session of Parliament to transact any business for nearly three weeks has heightened concerns about the future of the democratic system which India prides itself on. 

Of the three limbs of the state which free India inherited from the colonial administration, the Legislature was the one that underwent the most visible transition as an instrument of democracy. Yet today it is the weakest of the three.

In place of the Central and provincial legislatures elected on limited franchise in the British period, the Constitution provided for a Lok Sabha, as the lower house of Parliament, and State Assemblies, all elected on the basis of universal adult suffrage. Elections have led to smooth and peaceful changes of government both at the Centre and in the States.

The forms of democracy are intact. But there is a woeful lack of substance as their chief instruments of the Executive, the bureaucracy and the security forces, have not been transformed into fit tools of democracy. Their colonial traditions often get reflected in their day-to-day work.

There was no serious effort to democratise the Judiciary. Over the years, ambitious judges, exercising the Judiciary’s exclusive right to interpret the provisions of the Constitution, have virtually turned it into a self-perpetuating entity. The total absence of members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and the scant representation of women in the higher courts show how far removed the Judiciary remains from the constitutional ideals of social justice and equality nearly seven decades after they were proclaimed. 

The weakening of the Executive and the Legislature as a result of fragmentation of the polity in the post-Nehru period have rendered them incapable of performing their legitimate roles in the system of mutual checks and balances.

In a democratic set-up, a strong Executive and a strong Legislature go well together. A strong Executive and a weak Legislature make a combination that can breed autocracy. Viewed in this light, the decline of Parliament is a matter of concern. 

Both the government and the opposition share the responsibility for this situation. 

In the early days of Independence the Congress enjoyed overwhelming majority in both houses of Parliament. Conscious of the Opposition’s role in the fledgling democratic set-up, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was attentive to its needs. The standards of democratic practice started deteriorating under his successors. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power four years ago with the slogan of “Congress-free India”. Interestingly, his ideological mentor, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagat recently distanced himself from that slogan, saying it was political. 

There has been a fall in the duration of the sessions of Parliament since Nehru’s days. Both the Central and state governments now tend to limit the length of sessions of legislative bodies to the minimum required to stay on the right side of the Constitution.

Elected representatives of the people have been making their own contribution to the continuing decline. Instead of using the parliamentary forum to present their views on issues of interest to the people, they often disrupt the proceedings to air their feelings or those of groups whose causes they champion. 

During the budget session of Parliament, which ended last Friday, the Lok Sabha lost 127 working hours and the Rajya Sabha 120 hours as members of small regional parties adopted disruptive tactics. Statistical data shows that loss of working time due to disruptions is increasing. 

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan refused to take up the no-confidence motions against the government, for which notices had been given by several parties, including the Congress, saying she could consider them only when there was order in the house. 

A section of the Opposition believes that a regional party disrupted the proceedings of the House at the instance of the government to prevent consideration of the censure motions. One opposition leader insinuated that the disruption was sponsored by the government.

Since the government continues to enjoy majority support in the house there was no possibility of a no-confidence motion succeeding. However, the debate on a censure motion could have provided an opportunity for increased opposition unity. 

The decline of the Legislature puts the parliamentary system on trial. The development has to be viewed also against the fall in the standards of elected representatives. According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, an NGO which regularly analyses the affidavits filed by candidates at the time of fling of nomination papers, one-third of the members of the current Lok Sabha were facing criminal charges when they stood for election. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 10, 2018.

Rise of the nationalists in India

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

It was on this day, the 15th of August, 70 years ago that the British, unable to get the main political forces of their largest colony to come to an agreement, brought forth upon the subcontinent two states – Pakistan, conceived on the basis that the Muslims constitute a separate nation, and India, committed to the idea of common nationality of people of all faiths.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had forcefully articulated the Pakistan demand, rejected arguments in favour of national unity based on the subcontinent’s common history. History may be the same but our heroes are different, he said.

What proved decisive in the end was not the soundness of the arguments of either side but the sick hurry of all concerned.

Britain, weakened by the war, was in a hurry to quit as it was in no position to hold on to the colony after the loyalty of the military became suspect. Soldiers who fell into the hands of the Japanese had joined Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army and naval personnel in Mumbai had mutinied after the war.

Jinnah, who was fighting a disease, was in a hurry as he feared the British might pull out without an agreement, leaving the Muslims at the mercy of the Hindu majority.

“Over my dead body,” Gandhi said when Britain announced the Partition plan but his lieutenants accepted it even as they continued to reject the two-nation theory. Some theorists have postulated that Jawaharlal Nehru and other senior Congressmen agreed to Partition as they were in a hurry to come to power.

But there were possibly other considerations too. If the British pulled out without waiting for an agreement, as Jinnah feared they would, given the prevailing highly charged communal atmosphere, a civil war was certain. The Congress, wedded to non-violence, was not equipped to face it.

The winners of the civil war would have been the extreme Right or the extreme Left. On the Right was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose chief had been advising the flock not to fight the British but conserve their energies to take on the “real enemies”, the Muslims and the Christians. On the Left were Communists who thought time was ripe for revolution.

While India and Pakistan inherited armies and bureaucracies with the same colonial traditions they moved in different directions. Jinnah’s death and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination within five years of Pakistan’s birth paved the way for the emergence of the army and religious forces as political players.

Although Hindu fanatics eliminated Gandhi within six months of Independence, India did not slip into the hands of the army or religious forces, thanks to Nehru’s 17-year stewardship during which the country was set on the path of secular democracy.

In the early general elections, three parties subscribing to the Hindutva ideology challenged the Congress – the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jana Sangh and the Ram Rajya Parishad, the last two founded at the instance of the RSS. They hoped to benefit from the communal feelings generated by the riots of the Partition period but Nehru faced them frontally and beat them off.

It was only after the declining Congress, under his successors, went soft on communalism that the Hindutva forces were able to make headway. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was accused of appeasing Muslims in the Shah Bano matter, sought to overcome it by appeasing Hindu communalists. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao let RSS cadres pull down the centuries-old Babri Mosque to build a Rama temple.

The Jana Sangh was a part of the Janata Party cobbled together by freedom-fighter Jayaprakash Narayan to take on Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime. When Socialists raised the issue of RSS membership, the Sangh pulled out and started functioning under the name of Bharatiya Janata Party.

Since Narendra Modi led the BJP to victory in the 2014 elections, the RSS has been pursuing its concept of Hindu Rashtra (nation), which liberal opinion views as a kind of Hindu Pakistan, through a two-pronged strategy. While RSS affiliates indulge in violence targeted at Muslims and Dalits, hard-core leaders in the Central and state administrations have been pushing the Hindutva ideal in the guise of promoting nationalism.

Modi lacks a two-thirds majority in the two houses of Parliament, which is needed to amend the Constitution and declare India a Hindu Rashtra. But, then, much can be done without going through that formality. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, August 15, 2017.

Doublespeak on cow protection

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke up against cow vigilantism last week for the third time in a month. On all three occasions he said too little and failed to carry conviction.

Modi spoke on the subject for the first time in his home state of Gujarat towards the end of June, ten months after pro-government gangs killed at least a score of people, mostly Muslims and Dalits, in different parts of the country alleging cow slaughter or beef eating.

He said, “Killing people in the name of gau bhakti (cow worship) is not acceptable. No person has the right to take the law in his or her own hands in this country.”

That statement came after the violent phase of cow vigilantism had invited strong criticism from within the country and outside.

He returned to the theme twice subsequently.

In the last speech on the subject, he said, “Some anti-social elements have incited violence in the name of cow protection. Those engaged in disturbing the harmony in the country are trying to take advantage of the situation.”

He went on to point out that lynchings were tarnishing India’s image. He also claimed some people were settling personal scores in the name of cow protection.

This response came immediately after a spate of “Not in My Name” protests across the country against the lynchings.

Interestingly, there was no word of condemnation of violence in the Prime Minister’s statements. He merely distanced himself from the violent incidents by declaring they were “unacceptable”. He sought to distance his party and its affiliates also from them by insinuating that the violence was the work of some people who had scores to settle. To him, the issue was not the killings but the bad name they brought to the country and to his government.

Simultaneously, Modi sought to reinforce the Hindutva position on the cow. In a series of tweets in Hindi, he said, “People see cow as a mother. Their sentiments are attached to it. We have to see that there are laws to protect cows and breaching them is not an option.”

In Parliament, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, standing in for Home Minister Rajnath Singh, replied to Opposition criticism of the violence by cow vigilantes along the same lines as the Prime Minister.

In a bid to turn the tables on the Opposition, Jaitley, who is a reputed lawyer, pointed out that cow slaughter ban was not Modi’s idea. It was written into the Constitution by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar when the BJP was not in the picture.

He was alluding to the mention of ban on cow slaughter in the Constitution as one of the Directive Principles of State Policy. He glossed over the fact that Nehru and Ambedkar had reluctantly agreed to the inclusion of the relevant article in the legally non-enforceable chapter as a compromise in democratic compliance with the wishes of several Congress members of the Constituent Assembly who wanted cow slaughter to be banned respecting Hindu religious sentiments.

The Constitution gives the states the power to ban slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle, not on religious grounds but in the interests of organisation of agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines. Invoking this provision, a majority of the states have already banned cow slaughter without disrupting social harmony.

Thus there is no situation warranting cow vigilantism in the country. The Hindutva elements have deliberately activated the issue with a view to targeting the Muslims and the Dalits. The beef vigilantes claimed to have caught generally turned out to be goat or buffalo meat.

The issue before the nation now is really not cow protection but the life and security of people engaged in occupations like cattle trade and skinning of dead animals. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee put it succinctly when she said gau rakshaks (cow protectors) have turned gau rakshasas (cow demons).

Even as Modi and Jaitley were trying to deflect attention from the core issue with specious arguments, Pravin Togadia, President of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, one of the largest affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, said in speeches in Uttar Pradesh that his organisation would raise, train and equip an army of gau rakshaks. This shows the VHP is preparing for more violent interventions.

The contrary messages emerging from the government and the VHP appear to be part of a well-thought-out strategy. The Indian Express quoted Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, as saying in an interview it was all based on doublespeak. “There is an occasional, pious public message to say the authorities disapprove of certain actions, but then there is the dog-whistle by which people are also being relayed the opposite of what the official message is,” he said. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, July 25, 2017. 

Patriotism made to order

BRP Bhaskar

Gulf Today

Are Indians so lacking in patriotism that the Judiciary has to step in and instruct them on how to honour national symbols like the Flag and the Anthem? Two Supreme Court judges think they are, and invoked their judicial power recently to set things right.

Justices Dipak Misra and Amitava Roy ordered that all cinema halls shut their doors and play the national anthem before the feature film starts. At that time the image of the national flag should be on the screen and all present should stand up to show respect. This would instil in them a sense of committed patriotism and nationalism, they said.

India’s Constituent Assembly adopted a modified version of the Tricolour, the standard of the freedom struggle, as the national flag on attainment of freedom in 1947. In 1950 it chose Jana GanaMana, the opening lines of a 1911 poem by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, as the national anthem.

Some leaders wanted Vande Mataram, which had served as a battle cry during the freedom struggle, to be the anthem. Orthodox Muslims opposed it on the ground it was in the nature of worship of Mother India, and Islam forbade worship of anyone but Allah.

With Jawaharlal Nehru’s stout support Jana GanaMana won the day but it too was not acceptable to all. Some pointed out that when Tagore sang it at a durbar during George V’s visit to the subcontinent British newspapers had said he was the one whom it hailed as the “dispenser of India’s destiny”. However, the poet’s choice of words suggests the reference is to the Almighty.

Some others pointed out that the poem mentions Sind, which is now part of Pakistan. Supporters of the anthem justified its retention, saying India is home to many people of Sindhi origin.

With myriad forces fuelled by regional and even religious sentiments competing for loyalty, fostering a sense of nationalism during the colonial period was no easy task. But the leaders of the freedom movement achieved remarkable success, guided by the ideals of democracy and secularism. They had faced the fiercest opposition from the proponents of Hindu nationalism, as distinct from Indian nationalism. Chief among them was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, ideological mentor of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which now heads the central government.

The RSS wanted the saffron banner of Hinduism to be the national flag and Vande Mataram to be the anthem. Explicit acceptance of the Tricolour as the national flag was one of the conditions imposed by the government to lift the ban imposed on the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination.

Early this year RSS General Secretary Bhayyaji Joshi declared that Vande Mataram was India’s real national anthem, though Jana GanaMana was the constitutionally mandated one. He also claimed the saffron flag could be honoured as the national flag as the Tricolour was no different from it. It was a palpable attempt to blur the distinction between Hindu nationalism and the Indian nationalism fostered by the freedom movement, of which the RSS was not a part.

As Joshi’s statement attracted criticism, the RSS clarified that he had not demanded any change in the national flag or national anthem.

Ironically, RSS cadres, who are half-hearted converts to Indian nationalism, are the loudest champions of the judicial order, which has restored a practice the government had tried and given up on practical considerations.

From time to time the government has issued guidelines outlining when the anthem can be played or sung. Schools generally begin the day with collective singing of the anthem.

In the 1960s, after the disastrous China war, the government ordered that the anthem be played in theatres after the film show to strengthen national sentiments. The order was scrapped later to avoid disrespect to the anthem by movie-goers who were in a hurry to leave. The judges have ordered closure of doors to prevent people from leaving. This direction runs against the government’s stipulation that the anthem should not be played in a closed room.

Justice Misra first held forth on the national flag in a judgment he delivered as a judge of the Madhya Pradesh high court, which the Supreme Court overruled. Thirteen years later, as a judge of the apex court, he has in effect revalidated the views his predecessors had rejected.

Egged on by Hindu nationalists, the police have arrested about 20 persons in two states for not standing up when the anthem was played in theatres. Their conduct appears to be more a protest against what they consider an arbitrary court order than wilful display of disrespect to national symbols. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, December 19, 2016

Free country, unfree people

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

As India stepped into the 70th year of Independence on Monday, large sections of the population whom the promised freedom has eluded so far served notice that they are not ready to wait any longer.

The Congress, an offshoot of the organisation which spearheaded the freedom movement and dominated the political scene for most of the post-Independence period, is now on the decline. So are other parties of pre-Independence vintage like the Communist Party of India and its offshoots.

Parties whose roots lie in movements which were not part of the freedom struggle now wield power at the Centre and in many states. Topping the list is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. It is now the largest political party.

Since Jawaharlal Nehru unfurled the national flag and spoke from the ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort on August 15, 1947, the Prime Minister’s address to the nation from there has been the highlight of Independence Day celebrations. States hold similar events at their capitals.

This year the Centre drew up plans for the fortnight-long celebrations with the stated purpose of rekindling the spirit of patriotism. It sought to link the traditions of the independence movement with those of the army, which the nation inherited from the colonial power.

The celebrations began with events marking the 74th anniversary of the Quit India movement, the last major agitation of the freedom struggle which Gandhi had launched in 1942 with a call to “do or die”. Seventy-five ministers of the Modi government led the events at over 150 places across the country. It was a palpable attempt to appropriate the legacy of the freedom movement in which few Hindutva leaders had participated.

Speaking at a Quit India anniversary function, Modi broke his silence on the situation in Kashmir, many parts of which have been continuously under curfew following protests over the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani more than a month ago. Responding to the slogan of “Azaadi” (freedom), which resounds in the valley from time to time, he said people in Kashmir could feel the same azaadi as people in the rest of the country.

While Modi thus tacitly acknowledged that Kashmiri protesters do not have a sense of freedom, he did not go into the reasons behind it. Nor did he indicate how he proposed to create conditions in which they can feel a sense of freedom.

The presumption, implicit in the Prime Minister’s words, that outside Kashmir the people experience a sense of freedom is not entirely true.

As Modi walked up the steps at Red Fort to address the nation, several thousand Dalits converged in the small town of Una in his home state of Gujarat where on July 11 foot soldiers of Hindutva, posing as protectors of Cow the Mother, had stripped and flogged four members of the community engaged in their traditional occupation of skinning dead animals.

Worried that the Una attack and similar incidents reported from other places would harm its prospects in the forthcoming elections in the states, the BJP replaced Anandiben Patel whom Modi had installed as chief minister when he moved to Delhi.

Modi said most of the cow protectors were anti-socials. His remark angered a section of the Hindutva leadership but it did not impress the protesting Dalits. Jignesh Mevani, a Dalit activist, organised the march to Una from Ahmedabad, styled as “Azaadi kooch” (Towards Freedom).

In the troubled tribal region of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, Soni Sori, an Adivasi activist who had suffered physical and sexual torture at the hands of the security forces, was leading a week-long march which began on August 9, the UN-designated International Day of the Indigenous People. She carried the national flag, ignoring warnings by Maoist insurgents who are active in the area.

Dalits and Adivasis together constitute one-fourth of India’s population of 1.2 billion. Outside these backward communities, too, there are large sections of marginalised people who are yet to reap the fruits of freedom. In fact, even among the rest of the population many remain unempowered. The only gift of freedom they enjoy is the right to vote in the elections.

That explains why the slogan “Azaadi” was raised by students of the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University early this year. The Hindutva establishment dubbed the students traitors. JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar explained that they wanted azaadi, not from India but in India. “We want freedom from hunger, freedom from poverty, freedom from the caste system, all of that,” he said.

A free country with unfree citizens is not entirely unusual. The lack of social mobility adds a new dimension to the problem in India.

On the completion of the framing of free India’s Constitution, its chief architect and Dalit icon BR Ambedkar had pointed out that it only granted political democracy. It should be backed by social democracy, which meant recognising liberty, equality and fraternity as principles of life, he said.  -- Gulf Today, August 16, 2016

Racism raises its ugly head

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A few incidents of attacks on African nationals in and around New Delhi, one of which resulted in the death of a young man from Congo, has turned the spotlight on the ugly face of racism. Though officials are in a state of denial, conscientious Indians accept that racialism is a reality.

Masunda Kitada Oliver, 23, a graduate student who supported himself working as a French tutor, was beaten to death by three men on May 20. Police said the attack followed a late-night quarrel over hiring of an auto-rickshaw. Two men were immediately taken into custody but 10 days later the third remains untraced.

The African embassies decided to stay away from the Africa Day celebrations by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) on May 25 in protest and to advise their governments not to send new students to India. There were retaliatory attacks on a few Indian grocery shops in Congo. All this forced External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to act.

She sent out tweets to assuage African feelings and depa Dayuted her junior colleague, VK Singh, to talk to the envoys. Singh offered to meet the envoys once in three months to discuss the problems African nationals experienced.

The envoys were assuaged enough to drop the planned Africa Day boycott. Officials said the minister of state would do an outreach event with African students, along with the embassies concerned, each quarter to reassure them of their safety. But African outrage did not subside. The Association of African Students (ASA) in India scheduled a demonstration in the capital today (May 31) to “get justice and help prevent more tears”.

The official response was too little and too late. Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to deplore the violence. Sushma Swaraj erred in leaving it to VK Singh, who, as a former Army chief, is no credible guarantor of human rights, to interact with the African envoys. Singh used the opportunity to settle scores with his pet aversion, the non-complaisant media.

Last Thursday, six Africans were attacked with sticks and cricket bats in a Delhi suburb. The victims included a Nigerian priest attached to a local church, a Ugandan woman who runs a salon and a Cameroonian businessman who was in the city for a surgery.

The priest said this was the third time he was attacked. This suggests he may have been targeted on religious grounds.

However, some local residents said there was resentment over the Africans playing loud music.

The police met residents’ association members and asked them not to misbehave with foreigners living in the area. They also met representatives of the Africans and advised them not to play loud music at night.

The Delhi incidents are a manifestation of the deep-rooted prejudice in the society, which the authorities refuse to acknowledge. African nationals are stereotyped as fraudsters and drug addicts. Racist epithets are hurled at them.

Typical of the authorities’ insensitivity to racism is Tourism and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma’s comment that the Delhi lynching was unfortunate but “even Africa is not safe”. To prove the point, he said when he went to South Africa he was not allowed to go for walks for reasons of security.

In February, a Tanzanian woman was attacked in the city of Bangalore following a road accident. One of the men held in connection with the incident was a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Two years ago Somnath Bharti, Minister in the Aam Admi Party government of Delhi state, personally led a raid on a house occupied by Ugandans accusing them of drug addiction and prostitution.

The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had instituted a scholarship scheme to enable young Africans to study in India. Graduates of Indian universities occupied important positions when their countries became free. Many of them had experienced discrimination on the campuses but did not encounter violence.

The ICCR still offers several hundred scholarships to African students. With private universities attracting paying students in large numbers, many cities now have hundreds of African students. Complaints of discrimination are common.

Racism in India is an extension of the centuries-old exclusionary caste system. The demand for fair brides in matrimonial advertisements bear out the ingrained colour prejudice. White foreigners rarely encounter hostility.

The current spurt in racist attacks coincides with the increasing incidence of violence against Dalits, Adivasis and minorities in the wake of the rise of the Hindutva ideology, predicated on the concept of Us and Them. People from the northeastern states, who constitute a racial minority, have come under attack in Delhi and Bangalore in the recent past.

Modi, who played host to 41 African heads of state and governments in New Delhi last year, is due to visit South Africa and Mozambique this year. He must think of some clean-up job at home before that. -- Gulf Today, May 31, 2016.

Befriending Africa again

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

In what has been described as India’s biggest diplomatic outreach to Africa, Prime Minister Narendra Modi played host to governmental leaders from more than 50 countries, 41 of them heads of state or governments, in the last week of October.

The occasion was the third Africa-India Forum Summit. The two previous summits were small affairs as the African Union had limited the number of participants to a maximum of 15. With the ceiling off, India went all out to ensure the widest participation in the five-day meet.

Libya was the only African country which was unrepresented. It was not invited as it was in turmoil when the preparations began and there was no effective government to deal with.

In the one and a half years he has been in office, Modi has visited many countries, big and small. One of the objectives of his foreign travels has been to enlist the support of UN members for reform of the world body, giving India a place in an expanded Security Council. In his address to the summit, he pointed out that India and Africa, which together account for a third of the world’s population, do not have adequate say in the powerful Security Council.

Animated by a clear vision of world history, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had placed great emphasis on development of close relations with all Asian and African countries. Most of them were still under colonial rule at the time, and he vigorously championed the cause of their freedom.

Even before Independence, as head of the interim government set up by the departing colonial regime, Nehru convened an Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi. He was also the prime mover behind the Afro-Asian Conference held at Bandung, Indonesia, in 1956. As they became free, almost all the countries of the two continents joined India, Egypt and Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement.

Nehru instituted a scholarship scheme for African students. By the 1960s, the beneficiaries of the scheme were in influential positions in several newly independent countries of the continent. The scheme is still in place, and it brings about 22,000 African students to India each year.

The ties with Africa weakened in the 1990s as the Indian government embarked upon economic liberalisation and rearranged its priorities. By 2000, China, which had prospered after it switched to market economy, stepped in to fill the breach.

Modi, who has a pathological aversion to the memory of Nehru, who had held Hindutva forces at bay during the communally charged days of Partition, avoided mention of his name in his prepared address, which listed six African winners of the Nobel Prize. Much to his discomfiture, several African leaders, in their speeches, made warm references to Nehru and Indira Gandhi and their contributions to Africa’s cause. “The Prime Minister listened, then swivelled back and forth on his chair and finally left for bilateral meetings,” wrote one correspondent.

To express their displeasure at Modi’s insult to Nehru’s memory, Congressmen stayed away from the dinner he hosted for the African leaders. South African President Jacob Zuma set aside protocol and drove to Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s residence to meet her.

Such irritants notwithstanding, the summit carried forward the effort to put India’s relations with Africa on a firm footing once again, initiated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the 2008 summit. On that occasion he offered a line of credit of $5.4 billion. At the next summit in 2011, he added $5 billion more to it. Also, India wrote off the debts of Mozambique, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Modi followed it up with an offer of $10 billion in concessional credit over the next five years and $600 million by way of fresh grants. While this is a step forward, much more needs to be done to improve economic relations and to regain the high standing India once had in Africa.

China had replaced the United States as Africa’s largest partner in 2009 and its trade with the continent now stands at $222 billion. India’s trade with Africa, which was only $1 billion in 1995, has grown to $71.5 billion. There is clearly vast scope for further improvement.

The summit showed that the enormous goodwill generated by India’s support to the liberation struggles is still intact. This offers a firm basis for expanding cooperation in varied fields as envisaged in the India Africa Framework for Strategic Cooperation which was drawn up during the summit and the Delhi Declaration which was adopted at the end of it. --Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 3, 2015.

A fraud on the Constitution

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

In a democracy, normally, the Legislature alone legislates. In India the Judiciary and the Executive also legislate.

The Judiciary’s power to legislate flows from a clause in the Constitution which says the Supreme Court’s decisions have the force of law. The court has, through judgments, written new laws and even made changes in the Constitution.

The Executive’s power to legislate is derived from the articles that authorise the President and the Governors of States to promulgate ordinances to deal with urgent matters when the legislative bodies are not in session. The President and the Governors are required to act on the advice of the council of ministers.

The Executive cannot make laws in the United Kingdom which has a parliamentary system, or the United States which follows a presidential system. Law-making by the Executive in India is a colonial legacy. The British-enacted Government of India Act of 1935 had a provision to that effect.

An ordinance issued during a recess of the legislature lapses automatically six weeks from the start of its next session unless replaced by a regular law. DC Wadhwa, former Director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune, while working on the issue of sugarcane production, discovered that since 1967 Bihar and some other states were reissuing ordinances repeatedly. An ordinance relating to sugarcane was kept alive in this manner for about 14 years without being placed before the legislature.

Over the years Bihar started relying primarily on the ordinance route. Between 1967 and 1981, the state legislature passed only 180 laws. The ordinance tally for the period stood at 2,014. As many as 50 ordinances were issued on a single day.

Wadhwa brought out his findings in a book titled: “Re-promulgation of Ordinance: A fraud on the Constitution of India”. He also took the issue to the Supreme Court.

Frowning upon Ordinance Raj, the court declared that re-promulgated ordinances could be struck down. However, it took an indulgent view of the government’s conduct. If there was too much legislative business in a session and a law could not be enacted to replace an ordinance, it could be re-promulgated, it said.

Governments continued to use the ordinance route with abandon. According to Shubhankar Dam of the Singapore Management University School of Law, the Centre promulgated 651 ordinances between 1950 and 2009, an average of close to 11 in a year. Of these, 177 were issued within 15 days before or after a Parliament session. Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 major banks through an ordinance a day before a session.

Ironically, abuse of the ordinance provision is as old as the Constitution itself. On January 26, 1950, the very day on which the Constitution came into force, Jawaharlal Nehru’s government issued three ordinances. Eighteen more followed during the year. GV Mavlankar, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, told him the house felt that it was being ignored, and resort to ordinances was not conducive to the development of the best parliamentary traditions. But the situation did not improve.

Nehru, who commanded the support of the majority in the two houses of Parliament, had no need to avoid them. His successors took advantage of the precedent he had set. Some of them headed coalition governments and were wary of facing the houses.

Charan Singh, who was Prime Minister for 170 days without having enjoyed majority support in the Lok Sabha even for a day, issued seven ordinances.

The issue of rule by ordinance came to the surface early this year when Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party commands a majority in the Lok Sabha but is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha, issued eight ordinances in his first 225 days in office.

These included one for acquisition of land for industries, one for auction of coal blocks and one for allowing foreign direct investment in insurance. Failing to push through the land acquisition measure during the winter session due to the stiff opposition of the Congress and other parties in the Rajya Sabha, the government re-promulgated it after the house went into recess.

Government spokesmen justify re-promulgation of the ordinance on the ground that this was necessary to ensure continuity and move forward with the reform agenda. With farmers up in arms against the new law and several parties vowing to block it, the government is not in a position to put the measure on the statute book through the normal process and it is well aware of this. In these circumstances, re-promulgation of the ordinance is an act that falls within the purview of Wadhwa’s expression “a fraud on the Constitution”.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 9, 2015.

Control over levers of economy

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Months of uncertainty over the future of planning ended last week with the government deciding to set up a National Institution for Transforning India (NITI) Aayog.

Like the Planning Commission which it replaces, NITIAayog will have the Prime Minister as its chairman. Unlike it, the new body will have a governing council comprising the chief ministers of the states and the lieutenant governors of the union territories.

A brainchild of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was an admirer of both Soviet planning and post-war Japanese reconstruction, the Planning Commission was established in 1950.

Finance Minister John Mathai, who was inducted into the Cabinet from the business house of Tatas, announced the decision to set up the Commission in his budget speech. As it happened, he quit shortly afterwards saying the Commission was ill-timed and its working and set-up ill-conceived. He feared that it would take away the finance ministry’s powers.

High inflation, steep capital costs and low savings rates were factors that demanded governmental intervention to determine the course of the economy. Nehru expected the Planning Commission’s labours to result in improvement of living standards of the people through efficient exploitation of resources, stepping up of production and expansion of employment opportunities.

The Commission’s main task was to formulate five-year plans for economic development and apportion funds for implementation of plan projects. Unusual circumstances interrupted formulation of five-year plans. On both occasions planning was continued on an annual basis. The fate of the 12th five-year plan, which is due to run till 2017, now hangs in the balance.

It is wrong to suggest, as some critics have done, that planning was a failure. The public sector undertakings, the ownership of which is now being divested to find money for new projects, were the products of the first eight five-year plans. Just as Deng Ziaoping’s reforms could not have succeeded without the modest achievements of the Mao period, the accelerated development of the Indian economy in the period of globalisation would not have been possible without the limited growth of the period of five-year plans.

Centralised planning was a failure inasmuch as the fruits of development did not reach the poor. Not long after the process began it became clear that intermediaries were siphoning off benefits that should flow to those at the bottom. The administration could not fashion measures to redress the situation.

As early as the 1970s Sukhmoy Chakravarty, a leading economist who was associated with the Commission for long, said it was not functioning the way it should. He suggested that it was suffering from “plan weariness”. But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ignored the criticism. Her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, referred to the Commission members as “a bunch of jokers.” He too made no effort to reform the body.

The globalisation project, which led to further growth of inequality, brought the Commission’s failure into sharp focus. Large-scale suicide by impoverished farmers cried for immediate action. Initially the Commission and the government remained impassive. Later they sought to mitigate the situation by laying emphasis on inclusive growth.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself an economist, started talking about the inadequacies of the Commission as he began his second term in 2009. But he too failed to act. Just before laying down office, he was still voicing doubts about the Commission’s role. “Are we using tools and approaches which were designed for a different era?” he asked at the Commission’s last meeting he addressed as its chairman.

Within days of assuming office Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a report from the Independent Evaluation Office, which the Planning Commission itself had set up to study its working and recommend measures for reform. It said, “It is clear that the Planning Commission, in its current form and function, is a hindrance and not a help to India’s development.” It proposed that a think tank be constituted in its place.

While the Planning Commission was dominated by economists, the composition of the NITIAayog indicates that control of the levers of the economy will now be fully in the hands of politicians. It remains to be seen if this will improve the quality of developmental activity. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, January 6, 2015

Denigration of Nehru

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, officially designated as Children’s Day a half-century ago in recognition of his love for kids and theirs for him, passed without the customary celebrations last week. It indicated the Narendra Modi government’s determination to downgrade the first prime minister, who now ranks next only to Mahatma Gandhi in the national political pantheon.

A year ago the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government set up a committee with prime minister Manmohan Singh as the chairman to organise year-long celebrations to mark Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary from November 14, 2014 to November 14, 2015. Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who is a grand-daughter-in-law of Nehru, resigned from the committee after the change of government.

Modi reconstituted the committee with himself as the chairman. He dropped most of the members considered close to the Nehru-Gandhi family and inducted in their place persons belonging to or acceptable to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

On November 14 the government launched a National Bal Swachchata (Children’s Cleanliness) Mission, an extension of the cleanliness programme Modi had launched on October 2, Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

Modi, who was on a 10-day three-nation tour, limited his tribute to Nehru to a tweet, just as he had done on May 27, his death anniversary.

The national pantheon consists of heroes of the freedom movement. Across the country there are many institutions which bear their names. The Congress, while in power, enlarged it to include Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, and grandson Rajiv Gandhi, who too are former prime ministers.

The BJP, while listing the leaders of the freedom struggle in its 2014 election manifesto, omitted Nehru’s name and impliedly accused him of abandoning the spirit and vision of the movement. Modi, in public speeches, repudiates Nehru’s contributions with demagogic declarations that in 60 years of freedom the Congress had given nothing but misrule.

Denigration of Nehru is only one part of Modi’s scheme. Another part involves boosting the image of Vallabhbhai Patel, the first deputy prime minister, to make him look greater than the first prime minister. Last year, as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi sanctioned the construction of a 182-metre Statue of Unity near Vadodara at a cost of Rs29.89 billion as a memorial to Patel, who, as Home Minister, oversaw the merger of about 600 princely states in the Indian Union after the British withdrawal.

The Modi scheme is rooted in the thinking of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which has reasons to love Patel and hate Nehru. In 1947 Patel praised the RSS for its patriotism, while Nehru criticised it for its communal outlook. It was Nehru’s strong pitch for secularism that prevented the RSS from reaping the benefits of the communally charged post-partition atmosphere.

Patel lifted the ban imposed on the RSS following Gandhi’s assassination after securing an assurance that it would stay out of politics. He was reportedly planning to draw RSS cadres into the Congress but died before this could be done.

Modi’s approach is in sharp contrast with that of the first BJP prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who, in a lyrical tribute to Nehru on his death, said, “Mother India is mourning for her beloved prince”. On becoming External Affairs Minister in the Janata government, he ordered reinstallation of Nehru’s portrait which bureaucrats had removed following the fall of the Congress government. As prime minister, he drove to Shanti Van, Nehru’s last resting place, on his birth anniversary and offered flowers.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who inaugurated the scaled-down official commemoration of the 125th birth anniversary, said Nehru’s integrity, his love for the country and his contributions as a maker of modern India were unquestionable. RSS loyalists, fed on Modi’s anti-Nehru rhetoric, swarmed Twitter, pouring scorn on him.

Realising that Modi is seeking to either destroy or appropriate Nehru’s legacy, the Congress party quickly drew up an alternative commemoration programme under its own auspices. Its highlight is a two-day international seminar on Nehru’s worldview, which opened on Monday.

Caught between the declining Congress, to which Nehru is an electoral mascot, and the rising BJP, which views him as a continuing obstacle in the way of a Hindu India, his place in history is under challenge. But his record cannot be wished away. When the clouds of partisan warfare dissipate, the nation is sure to recognise his contributions as one who laid a firm foundation for the country’s orderly development within the framework of democracy. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 25, 2014.

Modi's American conquest

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

More than 2,000 years ago, Julius Caesar wrote to the Roman Senate from the city of Zela: veni, vidi, vici, meaning I came, I saw, I conquered. Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to evoke the same triumphal note when he said at the end of five hectic days in the US that his visit had been a great success.

Modi, who led his Bharatiya Janata Party to a sensational victory in the national elections last May, had met leaders of several countries, including China’s Xi Jinping and Japan’s Shinzo Abe, before going to the US to address the UN General Assembly in New York and hold talks with President Barack Obama. 

He had been to the US previously to spread the Hindutva gospel among the rich and powerful Indian Americans but this visit was special not only because he was now the Prime Minister but also because he had been denied entry into the US since 2005 on account of the communal riots which occurred in Gujarat while he was the Chief Minister.

The highlight of the visit was a spectacular rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden which demonstrated yet again the event management skills he and his team had displayed during the parliamentary elections. The Indian community, a sizable section of which has found in the Hindutva ideology a psychological ballast, turned out in large numbers to greet Modi. Outside the rally venue, another section of the community staged a protest against the 2002 riots.

Officials of the two countries worked hard to project the Modi visit as a landmark in Indo-US relations. Ahead of his arrival, they produced a newspaper article which the Washington Post published on its Op-Ed page under a joint Modi-Obama byline. This was followed by a vision statement in which the two countries committed to expand and deepen their strategic partnership and march forward shoulder to shoulder. After the leaders’ meeting came a long joint statement. No one can wade through these documents without being impressed by the uncanny ability of officials of the world’s largest democracies to say so little in so many words.

The 3,490-word joint statement opened with the leaders’ extolling of the broad strategic and global partnership between the US and India which, it said, would continue to generate greater prosperity and security for their citizens and the world. For the most part, it reiterated past commitments. It also mentioned reinvigoration or extension of some existing programmes.

The term ‘strategic partnership,’ which recurs in all the documents, is comparatively new to the Indian public since the country had avoided such relationships in the heyday of Non-Alignment. India started entering into such relationships only after the turn of the century. It now has about 30 strategic partners, including the US, Russia, China and Japan. China has about 50 of them, including the US and Russia. The US has still more.

Beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru most Indian prime ministers undertook pilgrimages to the US but the platitudes over shared democratic values did not translate into technology transfers which India was looking for. As the US failed to respond India turned to the former Soviet Union and to Europe for assistance to set up steel mills and the Indian Institutes of Technology.

Obama’s endorsement of India’s claim for membership of the missile control and nuclear regimes and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s offer to work with the Indian Space Research Organisation are a result not of love for Modi’s India but of grudging appreciation of the progress the country has achieved without US help. What concrete steps will follow remains to be seen.

Modi made no commitment on the Indian nuclear liability law which US equipment suppliers dread but Obama got him to accept a reference to the South China Sea while mentioning threats to freedom of navigation. Obama agreed with Modi on the need for joint and concerted efforts to dismantle the safe havens of terrorist groups.

The Wall Street Journal said the Modi show was “long on pageantry and short on substance”. But the national media went the whole hog on the veni, vedi, vici theme, enabling Modi to claim on Sunday in a campaign speech in Maharashtra, where Assembly elections are due, that the world was now listening to India. His conquest, however, was limited to the pro-Hindutva NRIs. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, October 7, 2014.

Education cries for attention

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Development has been on India’s agenda for decades. In this year’s parliamentary elections, Narendra Modi could lead his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to victory mainly because a significant section of the electorate believed he is more capable of ensuring speedy development than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Development is still Modi’s favourite theme. However, there is nothing to indicate that his government is aware of the need to tone up the educational system, especially its higher levels, to achieve the development goals. Neither he nor his Human Resources Development Minister, Smriti Irani, has given any indication that education is a high priority area.

Last week, on Teacher’s Day, celebrated nationally since the 1950s, Modi addressed school children across the country through radio, television and the web. He spoke of the need for good teachers and for adequate toilet facilities, especially in girls’ school. He did not touch upon the academic challenges before the nation, presumably because it was not the right occasion to bring up the subject.

Soon after she took charge of the HRD ministry, Smriti Irani asked officials to take steps to introduce in school textbooks lessons on ancient India’s contributions in fields such as science, mathematics and philosophy. Most academics viewed it as a move to smuggle the BJP’s Hindutva ideology into the curriculum.

The BJP is of the view that the previous governments neglected study of Indian culture and that the textbooks now in use are the work of Left-oriented academics. On their part, Hindutva academics, relying upon the epic, Mahabharata, are propagating the ridiculous theory that ancient Indians were familiar with stem cell reproduction.

While there are daunting problems at all levels, the higher education scene cries for immediate attention in view of its high relevance to developmental activity. The country now has about 700 degree-awarding institutions with more than 35,000 affiliated colleges under them. They have a total enrolment of 20 million.

There were only 157 engineering colleges in 1980, most of them in the government or aided sector. Today there are about 3,400, most of them private self-financing colleges. The vast expansion has resulted in dilution of quality.

There is no Indian institution among the top 100 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities 2014, released recently. Even in the list of top 100 Asian universities there are only eight from India. Seven of them are Indian Institutes of Technology, autonomous institutions established under a law enacted in the 1950s on the initiative of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Addressing the first convocation of the first IIT, Nehru said these institutions were symbolic of the changes taking place in the country. Five IITs were established in his time. Now there are 16 and a few more are on the way.

Most engineering colleges get between Rs100 million and Rs200 million from the Central government by way of grants annually. Each IIT receives between Rs900 million and Rs1,300 million. 

A significant proportion of the early graduates of IITs went to the United States for higher studies and did not return. This led to criticism that they were causing brain drain. In recent years, the trend has changed. Some of those who prospered in the US have made munificent donations to their alma mater.

Another criticism against the IITs is that while students passing out of them land well-paid jobs, many end up in the services sector where the technical knowledge they acquired at great cost to the taxpayer is wasted.

The IITs account for only one per cent of the country’s 1.3 million engineering students. Two per cent of the students go into National Institutes of Technology, which too are autonomous institutions in the government sector and 21% into other government colleges. The remaining 76% enter private colleges. 

Only a few private colleges have a good academic record. Many private college graduates are unemployed.

In Tamil Nadu state, more than 171,000 graduates and about 160,000 post-graduates in engineering are jobless. A newspaper recently quoted former Anna University Vice-Chancellor E Balagurusamy as saying only 20% of the state’s engineering graduates have jobs suited to their qualification. About 70% are unemployed and 10% are employed as police constables, hotel supervisors etc.

PK Sivanandan of the Institute for Societal Advancement, who analysed the performance of students in three engineering colleges of Kerala, found that they have a failure rate of 42%. Noting that the failure rate among Dalits was as high as 62%, he asks, “Can the weaker sections ever join the league as equal partners?” -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, September 9, 2014.

Modi reform on the way

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom critics have accused of continuing with the policies and programmes of the previous administration, announced last week a step towards changing the way the government functions. The Planning Commission, set up by the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, 64 years ago, will be wound up, he said.

Nehru was an admirer of socialist planning since his visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He established the Commission to draw up perspective plans for economic development.

He envisaged a socialistic pattern of society in which the public sector will occupy the commanding heights of the economy. The Commission’s task was to formulate five-year plans with this end in view. Under successive prime ministers it produced 12 such plans, and the last of them is now in the process of implementation.

Since the Commission was a brainchild of Nehru, some have interpreted Modi’s decision to do away with it as part of the process of burying his legacy, the main political asset of the Congress Party which was in power for most of the years of Independence.

During this year’s parliamentary elections Modi had campaigned for a Congress-free India. His lieutenant, Amit Shah, who was recently elected president of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has adopted the same slogan for the upcoming Assembly elections in some states.

The fact is that planning in India predates Nehru’s days as prime minister. As Congress President, Subhas Chandra Bose set up a national planning committee in 1938 to formulate a plan for establishment of industries after the country gained freedom. A group of economists and industrialists made another non-official effort in the same direction in 1944. In the last years of colonial rule, the British established a planning board to rebuild the war-ravaged economy.

From the second plan onwards, the Planning Commission followed an economic model developed by internationally reputed statistician PC Mahalanobis, who laid emphasis on industrialisation with key areas under state control. Market reforms of the era of globalisation rendered that model irrelevant. 

The United Progressive Alliance government, which pushed globalisation during the past 10 years, recognised the need to reform the Commission in the light of new realities. It set up an Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) attached to the Commission to initiate the process. However, there was not much change.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who ran the Commission under Manmohan Singh, made it a laughing stock by fixing the poverty line at the abysmally low level of a monthly consumption of Rs859.60 in urban areas and Rs672.80 in rural areas. He also came under criticism for spending Rs3.5 million on renovation of toilets in the Commission’s headquarters.

Justifying the decision to scrap the Commission and go in for a new institution, Modi said, “Sometimes it costs a lot to repair an old house. It gives us no satisfaction and we have a feeling that it is better to construct a new house.”

The IEO, in a report submitted to Modi in June, immediately after he took office, had recommended abolition of the Commission. It suggested that a think tank be created in its place to advise the states on developmental plans. Modi has not indicated what the shape of the new body will be. Some media reports have suggested that he has in mind something like China’s National Development and Reforms Council.

But China, which started revamping its Planning Commission in 1998, still does not have an institution which its rulers consider satisfactory. The NDRC is a leviathan with 30,000 bureaucrats spread across the country. The new leadership of the Communist Party of China is reportedly planning to clip its wings.

According to some other reports, the think tank will consist of eight members, of whom five will be central ministers or serving or former state chief ministers and the remaining three will be drawn from industry.

The crucial issue is not the size and composition of the body but the procedures it will follow. In all likelihood, the Finance Ministry will take over the task of fixing annual outlays of state plans and providing the requisite funds. This may not be conducive to strengthening of federalism, which Modi has mentioned as a key element of his developmental policy, along with optimum use of the country’s young population and promotion of the public-private partnership.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, August19, 2014.

Encounter with diversity

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

The Bharatiya Janata Party claims that its Hindutva ideology is based on cultural nationalism and not connected with the Hindu religion. However, its concept of culture is closely related to Hindu values, more particularly values promoted by sections of the community that dominated the society for long.

Consequently, in the Hindutva discourse, religious minorities constitute the “other”. The BJP and other Hindutva entities have criticised measures by previous governments to safeguard their interests as appeasement.

However, religious pluralism is only one aspect of the wide variety in Indian society which has given rise to the concept of unity in diversity.

The Narendra Modi government, which was swept into office by a pro-Hindutva upsurge, encountered another aspect of India’s diversity when it instructed officials of the central government who have official social network accounts to post messages in the Hindi language.

According to the census report, Hindi, which belongs to the Indo-European group of languages, is the mother tongue of about 45 per cent of the people. The figure has been arrived at on the basis of information provided by householders to the enumerators.

Both the BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, are known to have campaigned among people speaking various allied dialects like Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Haryanvi, Magadhi and Maithili at census time to declare Hindi as their mother tongue to boost its claim for recognition as the national language.

According to the findings of a recent survey, Indians use more than 780 languages and 66 different scripts. During the freedom struggle the Congress party, under Gandhi’s leadership, sought to promote Hindi as the national language. However, when the Congress government in the Madras presidency, provided for study of Hindi in schools, the anti-Brahmin Justice Party’s protests forced it to drop the move.

Vigorous opposition by non-Hindi speaking people, especially the Tamil-speaking people, foiled the efforts of Hindi enthusiasts to get the Congress-dominated body which framed India’s Constitution to grant Hindi the status of national language. It, however, provided for replacement of English with Hindi as the official language of the central government by 1965.

Tamil belongs to the Dravidian group of languages spoken mainly in the south. Tamil speakers are intensely proud of their language and many of them are against exclusive use of Hindi by the Centre.

Protests broke out in Tamil Nadu in the early 1960s when the Centre announced certain steps to promote the use of Hindi on the basis of the recommendations of the Official Languages Commission. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru assured the protesters that Hindi would not be made the sole official language without the concurrence of the non-Hindi states.

In 1963, parliament enacted a law to give effect to Nehru’s assurance. It provided for continued use of English by the Central government, in addition to Hindi, after 1965.

Even so, the Centre took certain steps to promote the use of Hindi in 1965. Protests in Tamil Nadu, spearheaded by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, took a toll of more than 60 lives. The agitation subsided only after prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri went on air and declared that the government would honour Nehru’s pledge to retain English as alternative official language.

The anti-Hindi agitation played a big part in the DMK’s phenomenal growth and its replacement of the Congress as Tamil Nadu’s ruling party in 1967. Since then the state has been continuously under the rule of the DMK or its offshoot, the All India Anna DMK.

The intense feelings of Tamil speakers on the language issue stem from their pride in its antiquity. While Hindi is only five or six centuries old, Tamil boasts of a history of more than two millennia

The BJP-led government’s directive to officials to use Hindi in social networks was ill-timed and imprudent inasmuch as a campaign on these platforms, conducted primarily in English, had made a significant contribution to the party’s electoral triumph.

Both DMK supremo M Karunanidhi and AIADMK leader and Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa opposed the government’s action. So did the BJP’s allies in the state.

The BJP’s first prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, had addressed the UN General Assembly in Hindi. Media reports have indicated that Modi plans to talk to world leaders in Hindi, with the help of interpreters. Such steps can be justified in terms of patriotism.

Promotion of Hindi at home in a manner unacceptable to speakers of other languages cannot be viewed in the same light since it betrays unwillingness to respect India’s diversity.

Modi has not cared to speak on the language controversy. One hopes the lesson that the government has to be sensitive to the sentiments of all sections of the people has not been lost on him.-- Gulf Today, Sharjah, June 24, 2014.

Maturing of Asian relations

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A few months before India attained freedom, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was vice-president in the then interim government, called an Asian relations conference in New Delhi. “Asia is finding herself,” he told the conference.

It was a premature attempt at forging meaningful Asian relations. China was still in the throes of the civil war which was to result in a Communist victory. Japan, battered by two atom bombs and shattered by defeat, was slowly picking up the threads. Korea stood divided. Barring the Philippines, which the United States had granted Independence, all the countries which had been under colonial bondage, were still fighting for freedom.

Asian relations took a back seat as Cold War engulfed the continent. Nehru later devoted his energies primarily to promoting the concept of Non-alignment along with like-minded leaders from other continents.

More than six decades later, Asian relations are showing signs of maturing. The countries of the continent, which include several newly emerging economies, are engaged in bilateral and multilateral efforts to rebuild relations on fresh terms. Indian and Japanese efforts to find new political, economic and strategic equations illustrate this point.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was the chief guest at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi last month, and the two countries signed eight agreements during his three-day visit. Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko were in India on a ceremonial visit a month earlier.

Japan, which is looking for new investment and marketing opportunities, offered $2 billion to expand Delhi’s metro system, which it had funded. Last year it had given $2.32 billion for various infrastructure projects and $753 million for a metro system in Mumbai.

Japan will also provide loans to increase power generation and improve energy efficiency of telecom towers. The New Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor project and the proposed high-speed rail system too will receive assistance.

India invited Japanese companies to help develop a new port in Chennai and to improve facilities in the tribal border state of Arunachal Pradesh, to which China has staked a claim.

Politically, the most significant outcome of the Abe visit is the decision to have regular official consultations on national security. Japan, which has enjoyed US defence cover since the end of World War II, feels the need to work out new strategic arrangements, but it will be unwise to read too much into this.

The inability to clinch agreements on civilian nuclear cooperation and sale of Japanese amphibious aircraft to India, which have been under discussion for quite some time, underscores the difficulties involved in the building of political and military ties.

Both Japan and India are claimants for permanent seats in an expanded UN Security Council. However, they have not been able to make any concerted move in pursuit of the common goal.

Indian experts are divided on the impact of the Abe visit. Their assessments vary widely from that of “a game changer” or “a new balance of power” to “probing of each other’s strategic intent”. One analyst claimed the ties with Japan is taking the flavor of relations with Russia and the US, with the two sides cooperating on virtually everything under the sun.

The varying assessments are reflective of the differing perspectives of the commentators.

The clearest indication that Asian relations are maturing came from Beijing. Asked about bolstering of Indo-Japanese ties, a Chinese government spokesman merely expressed the hope that it would be conducive to peace, stability and security in the region.

China raised no objection to Japanese participation in Arunachal projects. When India sought a loan from the Asian Development Bank in 2007 for Arunachal projects, China had objected, pointing to its claim to the territory.

China also made no reference to the Indian decision to allow Japanese firms to participate in port development, an area from which its own companies are kept out on security considerations.

Writing in the Global Times, a tabloid run by the ruling Communist Party, Fu Xiaoquiang, an international relation specialist, said Abe’s aim was to pin down China but it didn’t look like he was succeeding.

This is not the first attempt by India and Japan to come closer. In the 1950s, Prime Ministers Nehru and Nobusuke Kishi had explored the possibilities of wider cooperation between the two countries. Indira Gandhi too made an effort in that direction when she visited that country in 1969.

The Cold War, which prevented close relations between the two countries for decades, may be over but they still have to find their way through the debris it has left behind. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, February 4, 2014.