SACW | 19-21 May 2004 [India: Elections 2004 - Reax ]

[sacw at sacw.net]

South Asia Citizens Wire | 19-21 May, 2004
via: www.sacw.net

[1]Arundhati Roy On the Indian Elections, on the Iraqi Resistance & the
Privatization of War
[2]India: BJP’s allergy to democracy(Praful Bidwai)
[3]Bye, Bye, Mr. American Pie Vajpayee (Niranjan Ramakrishnan)
[4]India:Good economics, good politics (Mihir Shah)


--------------


[1]

Democracy Now
Wednesday, May 19th, 2004

Arundhati Roy On the Indian Elections, Her Support for the Iraqi Resistance &
the Privatization of War

As India's Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi stuns the country by deciding to
turn down the post of prime minister we go to India to speak with acclaimed
Indian author and activist about elections in the world's largest democracy and
occupation in the Middle East. [includes rush transcript]
India's Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi stunned her supporters yesterday by
deciding to turn down the post of prime minister.
Speaking before Congress party members in India's parliament yesterday she said,
"The post of prime minister has not been my aim. I was always certain that if
ever I found myself in the position I am in today, I would follow my inner
voice. I humbly decline the post."
Her announcement sparked uproar among Congress MPs who shouted and pleaded with
her to reconsider. One man stood on the roof of a car outside Gandhi's home,
held a home-made gun to his head and said he would kill himself if Ghandi
didn't accept the post. Gandhi had widely been expected to become prime
minister after her Congress party and its allies recorded a surprise victory
over the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in national elections
that ended last week.
Following the win, Gandhi became the target of a campaign led by the BJP to
criticize her foreign origins and it has been reported that her son and
daughter were against their mother taking up the position for safety reasons.
Gandhi was born in Italy and became an Indian citizen 21 years ago when she
married former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. He was assassinated by a suicide
bomber in 1991.
Gandhi has not publicly proposed an alternative candidate but reports indicate
former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh is tipped to be next leader of the
world's largest democracy. After initial reports emerged that Gandhi was
reconsidering the post, the Indian stock market bounced back from the worst
losses in its history.
Arundhati Roy, acclaimed Indian author and activist. Her most recent book is The
Checkbook and the Cruise Missile a collection of interviews by David Barsamian.
This summer South End Press wil publish a new collection of essays titled The
Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide
closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank
you for your generous contribution.
AMY GOODMAN: Welcome to Democracy Now!, Arundhati.
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: It's very good to have you with us. Can you explain what is
happening right now in India? Were you surprised by the victory of the Congress
party, and then the rejection by Sonia Gandhi of the prime ministership?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I think many people were surprised by the victory of the
Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred
that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading. One wasn't sure whether the
people would be blinded by that -- and they had been just a few months ago in a
local assembly elections in Gujarat -- or whether the real issues of absolute
poverty and absolute [separation] from the land and water resources would be
the big issues. A lot of us, when the results came out were -- leaving aside
one's cynicism about mainstream politics -- thought it couldn't have been a
better result. The Congress party sort of shackled to the left parties in a
coalition which would make them a pretty formidable opposition to the BJP. But
subsequently, what has happened has been actually fascinating because you can
just see the forces at play, both internationally and nationally, so blatantly,
just so blatantly that, you know, just in order to understand what's going on,
it's been a fascinating few days.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the differences between the BJP, which has been
defeated, and the Congress party? I understand that you have just returned from
the house of the man who we believe will replace Sonia Gandhi since she has
turned down the prime ministership.
ARUNDHATI ROY: No, no, no not returned, but I was in the market and to come back
home I had to drive past all of the politicians' houses, and I could see all
the crowds outside and the television cameras and so on. I have no access to
them in that sense, but, well the fundamental difference between the Congress
and the BJP is that one is an overtly fascist party, proudly fascist. It
doesn't feel bad if you call it that. The culture to which the BJP's big
leaders subscribe to, which is the RSS, openly admires Hitler.
The Congress -- I mean, obviously, the way it has happened is that the Congress
has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in
India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on
in order to secure votes. So, somehow the BJP is the horrible specter that has
emerged from the legacy of the Congress party. You know, you begin to realize
that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is
compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has
never been shy of indulging in.
Economically, again, it's the same thing. You know, the Congress really was the
party that opened India up to the whole neo-liberal regime. But the BJP has
come in and taken it much further, to absurd levels. Today, we have a situation
in which 40% of rural India has food absorption levels lower than sub-Saharan
Africa. You have the biggest rural income divide ever seen in history. You have
millions of tons of food grain rotting in government pogroms while starvation
deaths are announced all over. You have the W.T.O. regime making it possible
for the government to import food grain and milk and sugar and all of these
things while Indian farmers are committing suicide not in the hundreds now, but
the figures have moved into the thousands. And you have a middle class which is
glittering, which is happy... I just wrote a piece about how corporate
globalization and this kind of Hindu nationalism, communal fascism are so
linked. If you see what has happened after the elections, after the people of
India made it clear that their mandate was against communalism, their mandate
was against economic reforms. Even in state governments where the Congress
party had instituted these reforms, the Congress was also overthrown. It wasn't
a vote for Sonia Gandhi or a vote for the congress, it was a vote against very
serious issues.
What has happened is that as soon as the election results were announced, the
BJP., the hard-right wing members of the B.J.P. and its goon squads started
saying we'll shave our heads. We'll eat green gram and make a revolution in
this country against this foreign woman on the one hand, and on the other hand,
equally hard core corporate groups were acting -- they were out on the streets.
They were yelling like fundamentalists would, and all of these corporate
television channels had split screens where on the one hand, you saw what is
happening in Sonia Gandhi's house and on the other half, you just had what the
stockbrokers are saying. And the whole of the one billion people who had voted
had just been forgotten. They had been given their photo opportunity, their
journeys on elephant back and camel and whatever it was to the election booth.
Now they were just forgotten. The only comments you get are what the
industrialists think... and what the centrists think about Sonia Gandhi. It is
an absolutely absurd kind of blackmail by fascists on the one hand and
corporate fascists on the other.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Arundhati Roy, speaking to us from Delhi. She
recently wrote a piece in The Guardian of Britain, “Let Us Hope that the
Darkness has Passed and the Veil of the Virtual Worlds has Collided in a
Humiliation of Power.” On the issue of Sonia Gandhi and why she is stepping
down, what this means, do you think it is significant at all?
ARUNDHATI ROY: I think there was a real dilemma there. All of us are so used to
being cynical and reading meaning into meanings. But she was faced with a party
and with a climate and people at the helm of the BJP, who we know now are
capable of going to any extreme -- as we saw what happened in Gujarat two years
ago when they openly supported a pogrom in which 2,000 Muslims were massacred
on the streets, and not a single person has been brought to book or punished. I
think she was aware of the fact that this kind of vilification and this kind of
chauvinism is in the air. It could have resulted in a situation where a new
government comes in and all it's doing is firefighting on a non-issue, on
whether Sonia Gandhi is a foreigner or whether she should be there or not
there. Whereas, in fact, there are so many really pressing issues that need to
be looked at. So, I think that there was a real dilemma there, and perhaps
strategically it has taken the wind out of the BJP's sails and has exposed them
for being absolutely uncaring for a massive mandate. If you look at all of the
secular and left parties together, it's 320 seats, which is a huge majority.
AMY GOODMAN: As we return to Arundhati Roy in India, as she reports on what's
happening there with the elections that have routed out the B.J.P. party.
Arundhati, as you listen to this report of the Israeli helicopter gun ships
firing into the crowd of thousands [in Rafah in Gaza], a number of people are
dead, and it's certainly an issue you have followed as well as what you're
hearing about what's happening in Iraq, could you share your response?
ARUNDHATI ROY: It's just that you have to sometimes you have come to a stage
where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some
tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the
biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
Next time around, only if it is ratcheted up, will it get our attention? I have
always maintained that it's very, very important to understand that war is the
result of a flawed peace, and we must understand the systems that are at work
here. You know, we must understand that the resistance movement in Iraq is a
resistance movement that all of us have to support, because it's our war, too.
And it will not do for them to call people terrorists and thugs and all of
that. That time is over now. The fact is that America’s weapons systems have
made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is
your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are
fighting. You see that system. You see Iraq as the culmination of a system, and
you see how hard that system is pushing even here. You can see the clear links
between what's happening in the Indian elections and this whole global economy
and how it's suffocating the breath out of the body of poor people.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking with Arundhati Roy in India. We have also gotten
these reports of some Indian workers who were working for a western contractor
in Iraq, who alleged that they were kept there against their will, hardly being
paid. It was a report that was first reported in the Hindu and then followed up
in this country, a group of 20 Indians who ran away from a U.S. Military camp
in Iraq where they worked in the kitchen claiming they had been abused for nine
months. Is this a story that you have been following? They have returned, I
believe, now, to India.
ARUNDHATI ROY: They are all people from Kerala which is where I come from, you
know, and apparently, these kind of job contractors took them to Kuwait,
pretending that they had got them work there. A lot of people from Kerala work
in the Middle East. And then they were put on a bus basically and they realized
they were in Baghdad before they knew it. So, I think, you know, this is the
bottom end of the privatization of war. Torture has been privatized now, so you
have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and
the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the
privatized torturers accountable too? Eventually, you have a situation also in
which -- as it becomes more and more obvious to the American government that
when American soldiers die on the battlefield, pressure goes up at home. so
they're going to try to hire other soldiers to do their work for them. You
know, they're going to try to hire poor people from poor countries who would be
willing to do it. I'm sure they're going to try that. They're trying that
already, trying to get, of course, the Indian army and so on in -- we know
Hamid Karzai's securities are all privatized. I think it's a nightmare and
ultimately, terrorism, in way, is a privatization of war. It's the belief that
it's not only states that can wage war, why not private people? Why not have
your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America
upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to
mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for joining us from New Delhi, India. Arundhati
Roy, the author and activist. Her book is coming out this summer "The Ordinary
Person's Guy to Empire." This is Democracy Now!.

____


[2]


The News International [Pakistan]
May 20, 2004

BJP’s allergy to democracy
by Praful Bidwai

The BJP has proved unwilling to play by the rules of democracy. That’s why India
stands convulsed by Sonia Gandhi’s decision not to become Prime Minister -
despite a landmark electoral verdict in her favour. This great act of
renunciation enhances her moral-political stature. But it equally exposes the
BJP as an egregiously intolerant party, which is deeply uncomfortable with
democracy, and has contempt for political decency and Constitutional law. The
contrast between the two could not be starker. The Indian Constitution bars
discrimination between citizens "on grounds of religion, race or place of
birth".
Besides her "inner voice", a major reason behind Gandhi’s decision is the
hysterical campaign the sangh parivar threatened to unleash on the "foreign
origins" issue for utterly petty reasons - with a nod from the BJP’s top
leaders, including Vajpayee. Evidently, Sonia Gandhi reckoned that a situation
of prolonged strife and contention would not be in India’s interest. It would
distract the government from addressing urgent tasks, and weaken its mandate.
The mandate itself is a stunning rejection of the NDA and its economic, social
and political agenda. Contrary to BJP propaganda, the verdict isn’t
"fractured", attributable to tactical or "local" factors, good alliance
building, "anti-incumbency", and the success/failure of "political brands".
In fact, this election marks a clear watershed. The NDA called for an early
election in the supreme confidence that it would win hands down. It was
trounced in 24 out of 28 states. Its defeat was strategic and derived from
people’s anger against its policies.
The pattern of the vote is complex, regionally differentiated and reflective of
India’s diversity. But the overarching trend is unmistakable. Just as the
Congress in 1977 swept the Southern states, the NDA too retained Orissa, Madhya
Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. But nobody in 1977 denied that the Janata
Party had an unambiguous mandate. The UPA’s right to rule is far stronger than,
say, the Janata Dal’s under V.P. Singh in 1989. It has 320-plus MPs on its own
in the 543-member Lok Sabha.
The Indian people voted against the NDA’s pro-rich, pro-corporate neo-liberal
policies that impoverish the majority; they rejected hate-driven
Hindu-fundamentalist politics of exclusivism and Islamophobia; and they
reaffirmed their commitment to pluralism and secularism. The Left gathered its
highest parliamentary tally in history.
The electorate strongly supported the Congress wherever it took a clear,
combative stand on secularism, and on poverty and unemployment. Rahul and
Priyanka Gandhi added to the impact. But an anti-BJP sentiment already existed
- rooted in public anger at the NDA’s zealously neo-liberal policies, which
have produced agrarian distress, unemployment and hunger.
Three dissimilar states capture the verdict’s essence - Andhra Pradesh, noted
for the computer-savvy Chandrababu Naidu and Microsoft’s investments; Gujarat,
"Hindutva’s laboratory" notorious for the 2002 butchery of Muslims; and Uttar
Pradesh, where Hindu fanatics razed the Babri mosque, and where the BJP was
hoping to score huge gains.
Naidu was ignominiously defeated both in Parliament and state elections -
because of his unabashedly pro-investor policies. For him, it was always more
important to be at Davos than to bother about the suicides of 3,000 highly
indebted farmers, crushed by high power and water charges (thanks to
privatisation), and cheap imports. His Information Technology balloon burst.
Andhra’s software rank slumped from number 3 to number 5. Naidu refused to
demand that the BJP bring the Gujarat pogrom’s perpetrators to book.
Gujarat is the one state where the BJP has ruled on its own, for long years. It
was forecast it would sweep Gujarat - as it did in the post-pogrom state
elections. Instead, it lost in half the constituencies. It performed worst in
those very areas where the anti-Muslim violence was most virulent. Clearly, it
was penalised by an
electorate finally disenchanted with Hindu-chauvinism and with Modi’s
neo-liberal policies.
In UP, the BJP’s social base has shrunk. Even the Brahmins are deserting it. Its
defeat in Faizabad-Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura only means the temple/mosque
issue is dead. The BJP has been reduced to just 15 seats in UP, Bihar and
Jharkhand put together. In the North as a whole, it has shrunk into a minor
party. The defeat of Hindutva hardliners like Vinay Katiyar and Murli Manohar
Joshi shows the BJP’s "identity politics" has no popular appeal.
The elections demolished another myth - Vajpayee’s "magic" and charm as
Hindutva’s "soft" face. The NDA built a personality cult around this. Many
BJP’s supporters put Vajpayee in the same league as Nehru, or Indira and Rajiv
Gandhi at their respective peaks.
Vajpayee turned out a dud. Neither intellectually nor politically was he ever in
Nehru’s league. In Lucknow, he undignifiedly started begging for Muslim votes.
The saree stampede showed he was trying to bribe the poor to get votes. When
the BJP switched from trying to win Muslim votes to splitting them - what UP’s
politicians call "dividation" - Vajpayee got surreal. He courted Mulayam Singh
Yadav and asked Muslims to vote for him, not the Congress! On polling day, only
35.4 percent of Lucknow’s electorate bothered to vote - a rate unprecedented in
a senior politician’s constituency.
In the last six weeks, Vajpayee’s stature has eroded more than in the preceding
six years! The BJP is now left with no issues. Having nothing to offer, it has
focused on "foreign origins". This indicates a deep xenophobic pathology and
contempt for the popular mandate. The NDA used gutter-level language to agitate
that issue during the campaign. But this simply didn’t wash. The people did not
fall into the xenophobic trap. For them, a person born abroad, who has
voluntarily accepted Indian citizenship, is as authentic a national as any
other. What matters is citizenship, not "native" ethnicity.
The BJP has also strained to present the share-market crisis as business’s
rejection of the UPA. There are two components to this. First, there is a
massive decline in stock prices all over Asia. The FIIs had pumped in almost
$600 billion into the "emerging markets" of China-Hong Kong, South Korea,
Taiwan and India. They are now pulling out some money because of high oil
prices, fear of inflation, and a US industrial upturn. A big bear cartel has
been hammering down the Mumbai market to bully the Congress into adopting
conservative policies.
So, it’s especially tragic that the Left parties aren’t joining the UPA
government. Their entry would have given it gravitas, prestige, and longevity.
They can still play a vital role in negotiating a common agenda, which reflects
popular aspirations and rational priorities, covering economics, social policy,
institutional structures, and foreign and security policy. The economic
priorities include major employment programmes, macro-economic correction
through progressive taxation, and reform of the public sector, not
privatisation.
It’s necessary to reaffirm secularism actively by exemplarily bringing the
Gujarat pogrom’s villains to justice, by resolving the Ayodhya dispute through
a temple-plus-mosque formula, by banning Togadia-style hate-speech, and
revising communal textbooks. It’s imperative to "detoxify" institutions
corrupted by the BJP.
India must return to Non-Alignment and emphasise a non-hegemonic, multi-polar,
peaceful and rule-based world order. Similarly, its security policy must be
freed of BJP-style jingoism. This is a wonderful opportunity to turn the
people’s aspirations into radical policies.


____


[3]

http://www.indogram.com/

Bus, Stop - by Niranjan Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Bye, Bye, Mr. American Pie Vajpayee
[May 14, 2004]

For political aficionados, the Indian parliamentary election is the
superbowl of superbowls. The largest electorate in the world moves, and in
that movement, scoffs at elites and cynics all around the world who say
democracy is not for the poor, the illiterate or the backward. As its hand
hovers over the ballot box (or in this election, the touchscreen), it makes
and breaks the rich and the powerful in distant Delhi.

Twice in the last thirty years, a profoundly anti-democratic dispensation in
India has been overthrown by the ballot. On both occasions, the coup de
grace came not from the urban literates mouthing the shibboleth of the day
('law and order' in 1977, 'economic reforms' in 2004), but by the masses who
saw things for what they were. As the results gushed in on May 13, 2004
(electronic voting making the counting of 400,000,000 votes a mere matter of
hours, plus the advantage of India not having a state called Florida), it
became clear that the people had defied TV-anchor and editorial page wisdom
and showed the ruling coalition the door.

This election was also the first to be conducted entirely in electronic
format. That it went flawlessly is a tribute to the world's largest
democracy, and testimony to the country's increasing facility with the
computer.

The new government
I wish one could say that the inheritors were clean knights in shining
armor. The Congress Party,which will form the next government, imposed a
fascist rule on the country between 1975-77. It was responsible for the mass
murder of sikhs following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
in 1984. It was also the originator of economic liberalization (though it
was never so axiomatic about it as the current government) when it reassumed
power in 1991. And as soon as it seemed to have acquired enough support to
form a government, its first statement was the obligatory one -- "economic
reforms will continue". Through the five years of the ruling National
Democratic Alliance (NDA)'s cultural assault, the Congress often did little
to resist. But there will be time enough to deride the Congress during the
rest of its term. Today is a day for cheering.

Reasons for the upset
The opinion and exit polls -- almost uniformly -- predicted either a
majority for the ruling alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or
at the very least an assured position as the largest bloc in Parliament. The
Congress Party, led by Italian-born but India-settled Sonia Gandhi (whose
foreignness is strangely troubling to expatriate Indians settled in far
corners of the world), was at first billed to do worse than the last time,
and though slowly upgraded, never expected to emerge as the largest single
party (its position for the first 30 years of independent India).

How did this upset take place? Who knows? As the Urdu couplet goes, "Ya
subah ka ehsaan ho, ya meri kashish ho, Dooba hua khursheed sarebaam to
aaya..." (Whether it was the kindness of the morning, or my irresistible
attraction, the sunken sun did come up after all).

But we can recount some possible reasons.

Mom, can I be the 51st State?
The NDA, and its leading constituent, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's
BJP, became the standard bearers of globalization, zealous in their pursuit
of 'economic reforms', ardent water carriers for America. To its shame,
official India remained mute when Iraq was attacked. Mr. Vajpayee's
administration threw its weight behind the Strategic Defense Initiative, and
was mightily proud of a projected US-Israel-India alignment in a new world
order.

The globalization policy, while delighting a rudderless urban middle class
drooling over the prospect of luxury at any price, devastated much of the
urban poor and village India. The aftermath of joining the WTO has wreaked
havoc among the farmers, of whom it is reported that more than 25000 have
committed suicide in recent years -- a development not deemed worthy of
serious front page coverage in Indian newspapers, many of whom have far more
important stories to carry, such as Oscar Night and Emmy Nominations.

The identification with America came at a time when America's stock was on
the downswing the world over. Even the BJP's Hindu vote base, though
possessed of no great love for Muslims, could see that Indian silence in the
face of the invasion of Iraq, and the frenetic energy with which Mr.
Vajpayee's government tried to preempt Pakistan and get in bed with the Bush
Administration in the latter's post-9-11 muscle-flexing, were hardly in
keeping with India's tradition of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. And
if America could launch a pre-emptive attack on a country merely suspected
to be developing nuclear weapons, it did not take much imagination to see
that a country with actual nuclear weapons could be considered just as much
of a target.

India on Sale, POTA
On the domestic front, the government proceeded to systematically carry out
a controversial privatization initiative involving the selling off of
billions of dollars of public assets. India's Supreme Court ruled in favor
of the government, declaring that workers had no inherent right to strike.
State high-handedness was rampant, and to seal the deal, Mr. Vajpayee's
government pushed through a law called POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act),
which basically did away with large sections of India's constitutional
protections regarding arbitrary arrest, detention and due process.

Gujarat Burns
To compound this general attitude of callousness, the BJP, as its allies
looked on mutely, oversaw the worst communal pogrom in post-partition India.
Thousands of muslims were killed throughout Gujarat state, in response to
the killing of Hindus in Godhra, a town in the same state. The response of
the central government was the rough equivalent of 'Stuff happens'. The
Gujarat state government, also led by a BJP chief minister, saw in all this
nothing more than the manifestation of the universal law of action and
reaction. Even now, many BJP supporters view this as just a tit for tat.
They would also tell you (quite factually) that thousands of Hindus have had
to leave the state of Jammu and Kashmir owing to fear of militants. They
miss a vital difference: in Gujarat, the killings, rapes and lootings took
place with the deliberate inaction (and in some places, the active
connivance) of the state government (see, Riding the Tiger in India).

The Cultural Taliban
Another aspect of BJP rule (again as its allies, including the anti-fascist
stalwart of 1975, George Fernandes, stood shamelessly by) was the attempted
cultural transformation of the country in the name of 'Hindutva'. This term,
originally coined by VD Savarkar, the spiritual father of the BJP -- and
incidentally an accused in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi -- means
'Hinduness'. In the dispensation of the last five years, the BJP and its
cohorts got to decide who was Hindu enough. Led by a bumbling Hindutva
enthusiast called Murli Manohar Joshi (who lost his seat in the elections),
the BJP pushed through the rewriting of Indian history according to the
Hindutava interpretation, and created revised textbooks now used by millions
of schoolchildren throughout India. A friend of mine, who worked at the
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -- one of the most prestigious
technical institutions in the world -- told me how Joshi was forcing IIT
meetings to begin with a Hindu prayer (the Muttawain would be proud),
something spineless officials, swayed by the atmosphere, readily acceded to.
My friend died of cancer earlier this year -- how I wish he had been alive
to see this clown trounced!

Aside from such backdoor efforts to leave its imprint on Indian history and
culture, the NDA also countenanced with little demur the burning of
libraries, art exhibits, the threatening of artists and others because they
were deemed not to conform to the Hindutva view of things. For all its crave
nness towards things American, the BJP had no time for the spirit of the
First Amendment. When the world-famous Bhandarkar Library in Pune, India, (a
repository of ancient Hindu manuscripts, among other things), was ransacked
and trashed in January because an American author of a book critical of an
Indian folk hero had thanked it for its help, no political leader said a
word, and both the state and central governments stood by watching. No
wonder the looting of the Baghdad Museum did not strike the NDA Government
as calling for an outcry.

India Shining
All this may yet not have been enough to ensure the NDA's ouster. But in the
last few months, it spent public money like water to blanket the airwaves
and roadsides with ads and billboards of "India Shining", showing off the
great progress India had made (neither the message nor its context was lost
on anyone during the election season). I was in Chennai (Madras) early this
year, and the city (run by a recent NDA ally) was without drinking water,
with the worst dry season still to come. People were buying and storing
water by the truckfull, and even scheduling that was getting difficult. In
the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh, the chief minister, another NDA
ally, who prided himself as the chief globalist of India and habitually went
about with a laptop computer, forgot that his state was in the throes of a
drought and that rural indebtedness had driven many to despair. Three days
before the parliamentary election results, his party was thrashed in the
state assembly polls, presaging the rout of his partners on the national
scene. "India Shining", was a slap in the face of the average Indian,
something only a tone-deaf administration with its ear cocked solely toward
praise from the west would have missed. Instead of pulling the plug, they
continued the campaign for months before being ordered to stop by the
Election Commission for being violative of election campaign laws. Deputy
Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani made much of what he called, "the Feel
Good Factor" under the BJP. It turned out to be Feel Good Riddance Factor.

Bye, bye, Mr. Vajpayee
All in all, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, veteran of Indian politics and
regarded (wrongly, in my view, for what politicians do matters more than
what they say) as a moderate, came across as out of touch, and some of his
colleagues as epitomes of downright chest-thumping zealots. Like the myth of
George W. Bush being strong on terrorism, there is one about Vajpayee being
the master of foreign policy. If India is regarded with greater respect in
the world today, it has little to do with Vajpayee, and a lot to do with the
purchasing power of its economy, a product of liberal education and
technological strength for which one must thank Jawaharlal Nehru.

One is tempted to make an analogy of Mr. Vajpayee's defeat with that of
Winston Churchill in 1945. Would that it were true... Churchill left behind
the legacy of a nation united in wartime and prepared to sacrifice. Mr.
Vajpayee leaves behind a culture of callous divisiveness and selfish
consumerism. If Churchill challenged the British people asking for blood,
sweat and tears, Mr. Vajpayee scarcely said anything inspiring, projecting
only a smug, don't worry, be happy attitude. Churchill's words can ring with
power even today. The only place where Vajpayee's clever wordplay evokes
appreciation any more is amidst inebriated Indian audiences in foreign
countries. I speak as one who has attended many of his public meetings and
enjoyed his oratory (See Wanted, An Orator).

Conventional wisdom in India is that Mr Vajpayee brought about, after
several attempts, a kind of a rapprochement between India and Pakistan. One
may say his heart was in the right place, of his surefootedness one is less
certain (see Neither Pragmatism nor Principle -- The Vajpayee record on
Pakistan). His visit to China was considered a success in building bridges
between the two Asian giants. This too is an imperative of the times, and
Vajpayee's abandonment of India's traditional sympathy for the Tibetans has
came in for criticism. The one achievement for which he deserves credit is
the holding of free elections in Jammu and Kashmir.

In the end, Atal Behari Vajpayee's tenure as prime minister of India will be
remembered, like that of friend Bill Clinton's, as a squandered opportunity,
mistaking galloping consumption for real upliftment, spiritual or material,
leaving little lasting positive imprint on the country's ethos.

____


[4]

The Hindu [India]
May 20, 2004

Good economics, good politics
By Mihir Shah

Public investment with employment potential can set in motion a cycle of growth
that will also provide the bedrock for industrial development.
CYNICAL INTERPRETERS of Verdict 2004 believe that good economics makes for bad
politics. Economic reforms, it is said, do not make a party popular. The
reformer politicians have all lost. But perhaps we need to question the
priorities of these privatisation-obsessed reforms. What the electorate has
decisively rejected is a reform agenda undertaken as if the vast majority of
Indians do not matter. The hungry and marginalised have spoken in decisive
terms — India, they say, is not shining.
More than 80 per cent of Indians earn less than two dollars a day. Nearly 200
million people still do not have access to safe drinking water and more than
700 million people lack proper sanitation facilities. India has the highest
percentage of anaemic pregnant women in the world. According to the FAO, the
number of hungry people in India increased by 19 million between 1997 and 2001.
Nearly half our children remain chronically malnourished.
What is the daily-lived experience of people in this Other India? The long and
painful walk to collect drinking water, absence of even the most basic medical
facilities, the endless wait for the ration shop to open, inaccessibility of
government programmes to the deserving but powerless, awesome fear of a
repressive state machinery and absolute lack of hope of getting justice from a
corrupt legal system. The list is endless. How else do you expect these people
to vote but for change?
The direction and scope of reforms must be decisively redefined to centrally
address these issues. Indeed, such reforms would be both good economics and
good politics. This agenda should begin with reform of rural governance. A
concerted effort has to be made to end corruption that becomes more pervasive
by the day. Corruption hurts the poor and powerless the most. For it destroys
their last chance to redress the inequities they already suffer. Corrupt
bureaucrats have not updated land titles in thousands of Adivasi villages for
generations. This deprives farmers of access to electricity, bank loans and
government welfare schemes.
The delivery systems of government, be they primary health centres or schools
are all virtually non-functional, especially in the backward States of north
India. The Public Distribution System has been decimated through hamhanded
attempts at targeting and remains a hotbed of corruption. The great desire of
policy makers, most welcome in itself, to liberalise procedures and make them
transparent and accountable for corporate India, must be extended urgently to
the rural poor.
How can our reformers forget that the Asian Tiger countries they so admire took
care of their rural areas first? That their subsequent high rates of growth
owed in no small measure to prior massive state investments in human resource
development? Why then is India's government expenditure on education and health
still among the lowest in the world? Should economic reforms mean more or less
public investment in these vital sectors?
A new agenda for economic reforms in India must also correct the long-standing
neglect of agriculture. Probably the single most important, yet
underemphasised, macroeconomic statistic of the Indian economy is that although
the contribution of agriculture to national income has fallen from 54 per cent
in 1951 to 25 per cent today, nearly two-thirds of the workforce still remains
dependent on it, a figure that has hardly changed over the last 30 years. Every
attempt needs to be made to address this anomaly. Agricultural productivity has
to be raised, especially in the drylands, if the economy is to achieve
impressive rates of growth. Minimum support price operations also need to be
greatly diversified to include regions and to favour crops that have suffered
historical neglect — regions inhabited by and crops grown and eaten by the
poorest people in India.
The fall in the rate of growth of Indian agriculture in the 1990s to its lowest
level since Independence was fuelled by a fall in public investment. Policy
makers continue to overlook the close complementarity between public and
private investment. In our own work spread over half a million acres across 50
districts of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Rajasthan, we
have shown that even the smallest increment in public investment in local water
conservation, leads to a dramatic rise in agricultural productivity and
employment. What is more, it catalyses successive rounds of private investment
by farmers, once they are freed from the endless cycle of debt.
Policy-makers have failed to recognise that a vast majority of agricultural
labourers in India are poor and marginal farmers, the productivity of whose
land has been so degraded that it is no longer able to support their families.
Our work has made it possible for these farmers to return to their land, whose
fertility has been restored through a carefully worked out strategy of dryland
bio-farming. Such public investment, with massive employment potential, can set
into motion a virtuous cycle of growth that would also provide the necessary
bedrock for industrial development and ensure a sustained upward curve for the
Indian economy.
(The writer leads Samaj Pragati Sahayog, a non-government initiative for water
and food security in India' tribal drylands.)


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