:: Thursday, May 23, 2002 ::

The Unwinnable War:

Our leaders, both political and military, assure us that "we are fully ready" for a nuclear war. Really. And pray what defence might that be? A plan to evacuate the top leadership to safe underground bunkers does not constitute a defence against nuclear attack.

Admiral (retd.) J Nadkarni, cited from rediff.com

:: Conrad Barwa 3:12 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: War on Terror:

AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi

Apropos of your comments on the incongruity of the phrase "a War on Terrorism" I would agree with your policy-mix for combating what you term as cell organisations. Moreover, terrorism is a tactic not a formal ideology or movement and therefore being open to muse by any variety of agents from states to groups, communities and individuals it is meaningless to talk of a "War on Terrorism" (on a deeper level to combat terrorism as a tactic would be a truly radical approach and one that would need a significant re-engineering of much the current organisation of the states involved, the drastic agenda this would entail puts it beyond the pale for most of those who have indulged in this rhetoric over the last few months). On a more relevant note, I would obviously put more emphasis on social and economic change and using ideological persuasion combined with measure to bestow legitimacy to non-violent means to contestation than the more overtly coercive methods in the list of methods you proscribe. But one should keep in mind that the real danger comes not from cell-based organisations but mass-based ones- few cell based terrorist organisations have managed to stage successful revolutions or insurrections unless they have either transformed themselves into or linked up to mass based organisations with a formal party structure. By themselves while difficult to root out and destroy, ceil-based organisations pose less of a threat to states combating them. Even with a disaffected and alienated population amongst which to hide I would argue that cell-based organisations would need to develop a stronger and firm mass-base. This may point out to some of the causes of the relative failure and success of different revolutions e.g. the success of the Cuban revolution and Guevara's failure in Bolivia and the Communist parties success in Vietnam as opposed to their failure in Malaya in the 1950's. The other key point is that cell-based organisations need both arms and money - both of which typically come from abroad and some sort of external support. Isolated internationally, with little flow of either arms or money from overseas sources a cell-based organisation can be a permanent thorn in the side of a state but not a credible threat. In the era of the cold war, such organisations could always approach rival superpowers for support - The Viet Cong relied on Chinese and Russian aid in South Vietnam in the 1960's, the Muhajedin did the same in Afghanistan in the 1980's relying on US aid to defeat the Soviet troops. Other sources of funding and arms come from overseas diasporas, thus these can provided such a base for terrorist organisations even when the concerned states are determined to stamp out resistance - Despite the efforts of the British and Irish governments the ability of the IRA to raise money via the Irish diaspora in the US allowed them to fight their way to the negotiating table. While the IRA could not threaten the direct stability of the British in N. Ireland they could force the British government to realise that a stand-off was the outcome unless a political solution was sought: of course funding can come from diverse sources as the Chechen rebels in Chechnya must obtain a considerable amount of their funds from their control of various illicit activities.

Nonetheless, no cell-based organisation can hope to successfully fight a vastly superior state military machine unless it has some inherent advantage - I can think, just for example, of the several militant outfits in the Northeast who benefit from the inhospitable terrain in fighting the Indian security forces. However, a Kashmiri conflict has all the requisites for s successful pro-longed struggle - flow of funds and arms from abroad and the formal/logistical support of a key external power - Pakistan. The removal of these would greatly reduce the strength of the separatist movement. The key question is - are to regard the separatist movement as a collection of cell-based terrorist organisations or a genuine mass-based movement. Once the latter are mobilised it is difficult to defeat - the East Timorese managed to lose 25% of their population and without much support from abroad except for diplomatic help from Portugal still managed to force an Indonesian withdrawal, similarly Eritrea won out despite a bloody 30-year long war with its much larger neighbor Ethiopia and the lack of international assistance. Obviously, the key thing for the Indian planners to do is to prevent the separatist movement from turning into such a mass-based movement; given the fact that social-demographic nature of the region vis-à-vis India allows the separatists to mobilise sentiment based on ethnic and religious differences to the rest of the Union it is imperative that there is a government in New Delhi that that can effectively counter such a challenge as it would profound implications for the social and political stability of the rest of the country as well. It should also be noted that historically, many successful cell-based terror organisations emerged as the armed wings of legitimate or mass-based political parties/movements - I am in particular thinking of the formation of the IRA as an offshoot of the Nationalist movement in Ireland fighting against the British rule in the run up to the secession. By itself a cell-based terrorist organisation can be a failure in military terms but still lead to a political victory for the ideology or politics it represents - the FLN cells in Algeria were crushed but aroused such nationalist fervour as to make it impossible for French rule to continue the Umkhonto me Sizwe as the armed wing of the ANC was not as big a threat to the Apartheid regime as the ANC movement itself, Mandela in prison I would argue was far more powerful as Mandela the terrorist ( I refer here to the act of sabotage in planting explosives at a power station for which Mandela and his co-conspirators were tried and sentenced). The insistence by Margaret Thatcher during her period in office as British Prime Minister that the ANC was a terrorist organisation and should be treated as such did not enjoy much credibility within the public or opposition in Parliament despite the fact that in a strict sense it was accurate. Given the current ideological and political colour of the regime in New Delhi it is particularly unsuited to handling the sensitive situation in Kashmir. It is also ironic that cell-based organisations played a role in the Indian freedom movement, particularly in Bengal and northern India, where such societies such as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar were prominent in urban-based terror campaigns. The members of most such organisations are entitled to the annual pension given to all those designated as "Freedom Fighters" by the Indian government. One other irony is the similar nature of many of the Hindutva organisations as the RSS is predominantly a cadre based organisation that draws upon paramilitary structures for its own internal organisation and the Shiv Sena in Maharastra has a even closer resemblance to the cell-based structure in the neighbourhood Shaka system it uses to control and mobilise the slum districts of Mumbai.

A really ruthless attack on cell-based organisations therefore would also need the following elements: (1) Blockading of the affected region with respect to communications and aid from the outside world. (2) Strict control over and elimination of the sources of funding and arms for the organisation targeted. (3) The isolation of the relevant organisation from any diplomatic, military, or strategic allies in the international arena. (4) Prevention of the emergence of a mass-based movement supported or linked to the cell-based organisation. My contention is that only when a terrorist organisation can link up or transform itself into a mass movement in some can it pose a critical threat to the established state power; therefore the ultimate test of being able to defeat such an organisation is being able to implement the last method, the other three merely destroy the ability of the cell-based and terrorist organisations to incubate themselves until they are in a position to implement the fourth stage. One has to be extremely careful in advocating, however, state sponsored terrorism as a tactic - notably because this can backfire with spectacular results - Indira Gandhi's cultivation of Bhindrinwale as a counterweight to the mild demands for autonomy from the Akalis in Punjab, led to the radicalisation of autonomy demands and the growth of Sikh ethno-nationalism and another bloody insurgency that took nearly twenty years and 50,000 lives to abate. The problem with such measures is that they have a tendency to yield a result directly opposite to that intended not to mention the fact that unrestrained campaigning by the state can create the conditions for the growth of a real mass-based well-entrenched movement. The difficulty is that to combat the possibility of such an occurrence there will need to be a re-arranging of the social and political relations within the Indian polity itself and this does not accord well at all with the Hindutva agenda, as it will tackle too many vested interests and does accord well with the Hindutva project of nation-building.

:: Conrad Barwa 5:38 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Silencing of a Moderate:

AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool

The death of Abdul Gani Lone is a real blow to the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict. Lone was a "moderate" separatist in the main alliance of separatist parties in Kashmir - the Hurriyat Conference. Moderate in the sense that while firmly in the separatist camp, Lone recognised that a dialogue with the Indian government was an important part of reaching a solution to the insurgency in the Valley; moreover he did not pursue violent struggle as an end in itself. His career makes such an approach unsurprising: he started his political career like so many others in post-Independence India as a member of the Congress party and reached the rank of cabinet secretary within the Kashmir state government, with growing inference in Kashmiri affairs during the 1970's he grew more disillusioned with Congress and joined the Janata Party and was elected again in 1977 despite a popular wave in favour of the National Conference. Again with the Congress resurgence in the 1980's he moved away from Janata to launch his own party the People's Conference, joining the separatist movement when it picked up momentum in 1989. Lone's political trajectory shows the movement of a centrist leader who increasingly incensed and fed up of the manipulations of the federal government in domestic state affairs moved more and more to an extremist and violent position: one could read his journey as that of many moderately-inclined Kashmiris as a whole during this period.

Another interesting facet of Lone's political stance, shared by many Kashmiris, was his dislike of the involvements of certain external elements in the Kashmir insurgency. At a meeting organised by the Pakistani General Musharraf in Sharjar between himself and the leader of the Kashmir Committee Sardar Abdul Qayoom Khan, Lone refused to join in Khan's condemnation of the Indian government’s human right's abuses in Kashmir and in an interview given after the meeting asked Jihadi elements to "leave us alone". In part, this reflects the more popular segment of the Kashmiri separatist movement, which desires autonomy from both India and Pakistan rather than an accession to Pakistan. The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) is the most important vehicle for these views. Incidentally, Lone's son is married to the daughter of the JKLF leader Amaunallah Khan. The pro-independence strain in the Kashmiri separatist movement is deeply suspicious of Pakistani motives in supporting the insurgency in Kashmir and is wary of the extremist elements and groups being smuggled in across the LoC to support the struggle. In part this is due to the different basis for such groups desire for autonomy from India - which stems from a history of federal interference in state governments and the wish to preserve what is seen as a distinct Kashmiryat identity rather than any appeal to religious fundamentalism as such. Of course, as the situation in Kashmir degenerated the insurgency has taken on an increasingly strong ethno-religious character. Many of the more extreme attacks were carried out by Pakistan-based groups, comprised of professional fighters who had made a career of fighting in guerilla wars involving the resistance of Muslim populations to hostile powers such as the Soviet regime in Afghanistan. The winding down of conflicts elsewhere meant that many of these fighters were drawn to Kashmir as a new theatre of operations. A fact which elicited mixed response from many indigenous Kashmiri separatist groups; while realising that to combat the superior military machine of the Indian state external support is a must many Kashmiri leaders and separatists were deeply uneasy about the "jihadisation" of the conflict. Some like Lone even accused these jehadi elements of "contaminating the Kashmiri freedom struggle".

These tensions within the separatist movement has obviously led to internecine conflict and before his assassination there had already been three attempts on Lone’s life within the last year, the most recent of which was a car bomb attack in December 2001. As one of the most prominent and established Kashmiri leaders within the Hurriyat Conference Lone was a major target for his softer-line towards the nature of the separatist movement and willingness to negotiate with the Indian state. This was something well known by the Indian government which had reinstated his passport, previously revoked to allow him to travel to the UK for health reasons earlier this year. Moreover, rumours were circulating that Lone’s party was considering contesting the upcoming elections due in autumn this year, such a move would have broken with the more hardline elements within the Hurriyat Conference which refuse to deal with India and resist the idea of participating in elections. Given Lone’s popularity and past record in office, the possibility of his participation in the lections was serious threat to the extremist position. His death and an independent mind willing and able to seek unconventional and brave approaches to resolving the current confrontation between the separatist and government forces in the Valley

:: Conrad Barwa 12:55 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The War on Terror:

Today the BJP party president Mr Jana Krishnamurthy said the nation must strive to achieve total eradication of terror “once and for all”.

From whence does this desire for "final solutions" come? Obviously the war on terror (what happened to the war on terrorism?), whether in the US or India will fail miserably. In fact, it is likely to produce more rather than fewer terrorists. The juxtaposition of the words war and terrorism is inherently problemmatic. Terrorism cannot be combated by war as the object of conflict will remain vague and indeterminate. Organizations based on cell structures cannot be combatted in the same manner as rival hierarchical military organizations. Cell organizations can only be neutralized, marginalized, or transformed through a combination of (1) law enforcement; (2) state counterintelligence and state sponsored terrorism; (3) ideological persuasion of the general population; (4) social and economic change in disturbed areas; (5) political legitimation of the terrorist organization or a faction of that organization. There is no know cure for permanently rooting out cell organizations.

Guerilla tactics (including terrorizing "civilian" populations) are designed to defeat conventional military forces through assaults on the morale of the rival group. To the extent that guerilla organizations maintain popular support amongst the population of a given territory, states will not succeed in defeating such organizations through conventional struggles. If states want to defeat the employment of terrorism as a tactic, they will need to reorganize their own structure. Even if a particular terrorist organization fades away, the framework for reorganizing a guerilla network along a cell structure remains. Cell structures were designed to exploit weaknesses in conventional military organizations, defeating a terrorist cell will require redesigning state military organizations.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:15 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Fighting Words:

AP Photo/Ajit Kumar (May 30, 1998)

"Be prepared for sacrifices. But our aim should be victory, because it's now time for a decisive fight," Mr Vajpayee said in Kupwara in northern Kashmir.

BBC News

:: Vikash Yadav 9:40 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: The Western Gaze

The power of the gaze is limited not only to the West alone but applies to the indigenous prosperous classes as well. The media after all are well versed in such stories and Indian newspapers are periodically filled with wrenching stories of poverty classed as human interest, for the benefit of the primarily middle-class readership. P. Sainath, himself a journalist, won a Times of India fellowship to spend a year traveling across rural India and looking for the stories behind the stories. He published a weekly article in the Times of India which proved to be immensely popular and the collected articles were brought together in a book called "Everybody loves a Good Drought" - an excellent read. Sainath perceptively remarks on how the media is more interested in reporting events rather than process and describing poverty as a calamitous act of God or misfortunate rather than the very real outcome of the inegalitarian nature of society.

I will take just one story from his book to illustrate this point. One of the most famous newspaper stories of the 1980''s occurred in the Kalahandi district of Orissa, a poor district in a poor state. In July 1985, Phanas Punji burst into the limelight, as it was reported she had "sold" her 14 year-old sister-in-law, Banita, to the nearly blind Bidya Podh. Podh paid 40 rupees to "buy" Banita and use her as a "domestic servant". Phanas's husband had abandoned her two years earlier. She was widely quoted in the press as saying that "my own children are starving. What could I do?" She did not deny selling the girl. It appalled the current Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, worse his office received confirmation of the sale. He decided to visit the district himself; hordes of official descended on Kalahandi not to set things right but to prepare for his visit. Scores of reporters too visit the drought-wracked district. There was some good reporting; brilliant journalism demolished a cover-up story by the then Orissa state government under the leadership of chief minister JB Patnaik. Many reports of poverty followed as journalists reported from the district. Moving stories about drought and scarcity conditions appeared in profusion: there was a not so hidden missionary zeal in much of the outrage expressed. Television too got in on the act, in an interview with the noted journalist MJ Akbar, JB Patnaik was rattled and later denounced the interview as concocted, he further damaged himself by implying in the state assembly that sale of children was a "tradition" in parts of Orissa.

The press crusade had an effect. Two Prime Minister, two chief ministers, and numerous other officials were forced to visit Kalahandi over the years. This meant better roads, improved communications and repaired bridges - these generally receive attention only when a VIP visits. The crusade also brought large development funds and many NGOs awash with foreign funds descended on the region. Sainath reports that a decade later little had changed and none of the principle protagonists were better off. Phanas has lost what little land her family had to moneylenders, though her husband has returned he is unemployed. Banita, by then 21, lives with Podh, and has had three children with him - to whom both parents are very attached.

- both Phanas and Banita look after out of work husbands and their children. They earn less than Rs. 210 per month - 1/3 of what the minimum wage legislation in Orissa is. Children in both families suffer from malnutrition.

- Bidya Podh far from being a landlord himself, is landless. Neither was he particularly old - he was only 25 when the story broke. Nonetheless he made an easy target for the media and humanising the story meant that someone had to be demonised, some stories even had him abandoning the girls after satiating his lust.

The story of the "sale of a girl" had touched the nation's conscience and brought attention to Kalahandi that would not have otherwise been widely heard of. However, focus on the event obscured the processes leading up to it. Although the sale was linked up to issues of drought and poverty, reporting on these issues was marginal and full of errors and stereotypes. The focus was the "sale", everything else was of secondary importance. The real story is of course somewhat more complicated. Neither Phanas nor Banita saw the situation in terms of a simple "sale". In debt to moneylenders Phanas desperately needed money to feed her children, Podh's family were as desperate to find a bride for their relative - it is difficult to find a partner for a physically disabled person in rural India. Sainath noted that Banita displayed no resentment to Phanas or her husband; her primary interest was to secure her husband and eldest son a job. Sainath then goes on to bit by bit fill out the many gaps in the story churned out by the national media, and I won't go into more detail about it here, as his book is full of such exposes...

The broader point is that the nature of media coverage obscured the links between the event and the conditions causing it. Kalahandi produces more food per person than Orissa and the National average, but only 25% of that is consumed domestically within the district the rest is exported outside the region through networks of merchant-moneylenders. In 1989 per capita foodgrain production in India was 203 kg, for Orissa it was 253 kg, for Kalahandi it was 331 kg. Despite this, people suffer from acute hunger. This does not accord well with press reports of Kalahandi as a place of 'perpetual drought' some newspapers even spoke of "twenty years of continuous drought", this reflects the deeper view of the media which sees stories such as Banita's as horrendous events and not the outcome of a series of processes. The belief that only events and not processes make news distorts understanding. As Sainath notes "some of the best reports on poverty suffers from trying to dramatise it as an event. the real drama is in the process". In the causes. The reality is that deforestation is a major cause of drought, since Independence many of Orissa's forests have been exploited for their commercial value by industry and urban consumers hungry for fuel, timber and furniture. Of course the media preferred to see the droguht as a natural calamity and spoke of how "nature had been cruel" and how there "was no longer any hope in the area". Statements like these only help take readers minds off the causes of why people stay poor. The same old story, crisis merits attention only when it results in catastrophe not before; it takes years for a food surplus district like Kalahandi to reach the position it did in 1985 but this does not make the news. Poverty only gets covered when an event occurs that allows the media to recoil in horror and suggest something new has happened even when in fact it hasn't. One of the picture captions of Kalahandi actually describes the scene as " Here is a picture of Hell" and went on to describe the poor who remain in the picture as " moving in groups, licking the water like dogs" - this is the real upper middle-class view of the poor - as animals. Animals to be pitied but animals all the same; and therefore not like us. Real questions such as: skewed land distribution, exploititative usury, corrupt officals, deforestation, lack of irrigation, poor infrastructure and the inability of the food distribution system and employment generation schemes to prevent the growing immerisation of Kalahandi's poor is ignored since this tackles powerful vested interests, requires long-tem persistent action, exposes the hypocrisy of the "developmental" State and the propertied groups and questions many of the values that the, middle-classes in India have.

So the wider point I think is the nature of a predominantly capitalist media that reports news within liberal democracies - the same discrepancies crop up in India as in many Western countries. I guess the US is just more extreme than it's counterparts in this regard. Until India seriously tackles these isues for itself it will not go very far in solving both the reality and the representation of poverty. One note of dissent I will strike with your post is vis-a-vis your assertion that India recieved large amounts of aid during the 50's and 60's by playing on these images; while there is some truth to this I think it is overplayed - the 1950's were a prosperous period for the Indian economy, good monsoons and harvests hid the real shortfall in foodgrain production and a good chunk of aid was industrial in nature directed twoards prestige projects such as steel plants and dams etc. By the time of the droughts of the mid-60's when India really needed food imports her relationship, with the US had worsened and she could no longer rely on these. Moreover, given the tied nature of much of foreign aid and its questionable quality one can be sceptical as to its usefulness. Even the American grain imports under PL 480 were partially a response to bolster prices for US farmers in a period of overproduction and prevent a collapse in prices due to wartime expansion as happened after WWI - please check this for me as you will know more on this than I do.

But I do agree that this is a question that needs to be addressed both from within and from without; in a funny way the advent of print capitalism has meant that we are able to gaze at peoples and places far removed from us socially, nationally, culturally, and economically but the way we percieve these collectives is in some sense sinister - ironic that the medium which Benedict Anderson says should allows us to "imagine our own national communties" can also be used to imagine the communties of the Other in a disconcerting way. Ah well, there is always an element of distortion involved in such representation and the gaze is always blind to its own position - the eye of the beholder can percieve everything but itself.

:: Conrad Barwa 8:37 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Western Gaze:

I want to think more about your comment on the Western view of Calcutta as a "Hell on Earth." I think this is accurate, but I wonder to what extent the media does not perceive the whole of the "Third World" in this same vision. The US media in particular seems to view the entire developing world in this light. US media coverage of the rest of the world, to the exent that the US media covers anything outside of the US, seems pretty much fixated on presenting scenes of sporadic violence and grinding poverty. It is not that poverty and violence are not a part of many countries, I simply wonder why there is so little substantive reporting on major trends in the developing world (e.g., the growing bifurcation between the "emerging markets" and the "heavily indebted" countries).

Given the tendency of the media to "script" stories into familiar narratives, I believe your analysis of the Western gaze is quite interesting. If the West views the developing world as a hell on earth, this begs us to ask how this vision helps and hurts the developing world. For example, although India now seeks to portray itself as an "emerging market" it once benefitted greatly by portraying itself as the perpetual victim of natural disasters (i.e., droughts) and population spirals. I think it is fair to say that India received massive amounts of food and development aid in the fifties and sixties by playing on these images to some extent.

I wonder if contemporary India will be able to formulate and project an image of itself that is not seriously distorted by the Western media. I think the image of India in the world is important, especially if India wants to assume its rightful place in the governance of international institutions.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:26 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Kashmir:

Well, since the drums of war are not too distant, let us talk about J&K:

How would a left-secular position differ from the ruling government's position on the issue of Jammu & Kashmir? I think it might be helpful to spell out our read on the BJP's understanding of the Indian national interest. I also think we need to specify if our concerns would lead to different foreign policy approaches.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:00 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Muslim fears the flame
and the Hindu the tomb
Both die in this fear
So great is the hatred between them.

Bulhe Shah (1680-1758), Punjabi Sufi mystic and Poet, text adapted from the original.

:: Conrad Barwa 6:09 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: The Caste Issue in Modern India

Vikash, I will respond to your invitation to comment on the social construction of caste in Idnai today. This is a big issue and I will just sketch out some of my positions and highlight some of the more salient points. You are absolutely right in pointing out the suspicious haste with which the upper castes are trying to deny caste just when the Backward caste movement has won major concessions in the battle for reservations in the public sector. But this logic is nothing new; let me take a few examples to point out some of the hypocrisy going on here. I his review of R K Narayan's autobiography, MSS Pandian notes how the caste of the writer is only mentioned twice in the entire book. Once in the missionary school where Brahmins were lampooned and the other when Narayan was working for a newspaper with strong links to the anti-Brahmin movement in the South. What is interesting is how on both occasions the caste of the author is called into question by the "other" - first by the rabid fundamentalist Christian and the exclusivist non-Brahmins in the second. Nowhere else does Narayan directly allude to caste, especially his own. All the more considerable that he lived during a period of caste ferment and change, when the Anti-Brahmin movement was fighting for power in the southern states and the Dalit question was confronting the Nationalist leadership in the North.. But as Pandian notes a more careful reading of the autobiography shows the ways in which caste is alluded to. In his meticulous descriptions of the need for a house with the proper cooking facilities and the demands of a separate kitchen for guests to maintain a proper" vegetarian atmosphere" (South Indian will note the irony as the advertisement of predominantly Brahmin neighborhoods as 'vegetarians only' was a favourite tactic to keep out non-Brahmin tenants in the urban centres of South India) the many references to this strict vegetarian atmosphere is really caste by other means. This subtle act of transcoding caste into something else is a regular feature of upper caste biographies. Caste is always a matter of lifestyles, living habits and the minutiae of everyday life - it is nothing so crude as an overt ideology.

Looking at the historical constructions of such a notion I will use Partha Chatterjee's concept of two realms of the colonial and the nationalist. Chatterjee postulated in his influential works a dichotomy between a material sphere dominated by the colonial power and a spiritual cultural sphere that the nationalist movement claimed as its own. This sphere was the vehicle by which nationalism could become an autonomous agent for the indigenous elite free from the need to pay heed to the discourse of the West via Imperialism. But there are two stories at work here, the victory of the nationalist over the colonial can also be read as the victory of the powerful over subaltern groups within society as a whole. All too often many of the upper caste nationalist elite defined their culture as compromising elements such as: shraddha, purity, pollution, the feeding of Brahmins etc... In other words, what gets encoded, as culture here is what is culture to the upper castes and by default, the traditions of the lower castes are left out. The supposedly sovereign domain of the spiritual and the cultural uncolonised by the West remains a vehicle to reinforce upper caste elite culture as the culture of the nation as a whole. This mobilisation of the nation inferiorises whole sections of the lower castes as inadequate citizens - more importantly it delegitmises the language of caste in the domain of politics by subsuming it as part of the cultural sphere. It is only by smashing this prison-house dichotomy between the material and the spiritual that the lower castes can contest the logic of exclusion.

This endures well into the post-colonial era. We can look at the writing of MN Srinivas, the most well known and one of the most highly respected sociologists within India. Srinivas' theories expounded in his influential book "Social Change in Modern India" provided a framework to analyse caste dynamic in Indian Society. Put simply he argued that lower castes pursue Sanskritisation while upper castes pursue Westernisation. Srinivas' model assumes that socially inferior groups all want to advance the ladder of the hierarchy by emulating those above them. For the lower castes, this means that they mimic the Sanskritic culture of the upper castes in an effort to improve their social status and that upper castes mimic the British colonial elite in an effort to meet the challenge posed by modernity. However, Srinivas' theory is riddled with prejudiced assumptions and weak causality. For him the modern cannot come from the lower castes and his accounts of modernised lower castes are limited to making fun of their "pidgin English" and an absurd administration for their employers in the professional hierarchy who were either British or upper caste elites. (In his stress of the importance of language, he is typically Brahminnical which always sets great store on language as a signifier of knowledge and access to power/status) In his list of the "westernised intelligentsia" he gives : Tagore, Vivekananda, Ranade, Gokhale, Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru and Radhakrishan. Interestingly Ambedkar and Phule or Periyar dynamic and ardent advocates of modernisation for the lower castes are excluded. The list is typical not only for its absence of any significant lower caste leaders but also shows a conflation of the national and modern with the upper caste elite.. Srinivas as Edmund Leach pointed out acerbically in a review of his work, never directly spoke about his own caste but was always ready to generalise about caste in society and the castes of others. Leach correctly described Srinivas’s model of social change as "Brahaminocentric" and taunted him with the fact that his interpretation would have been different if he were a shudra. Stung by this Srinivas did concede that his own caste identity and experience of his relations who suffered under the quotas imposed restricting Brahmin access to jobs, in Srinivas's words he "could not help but be sensitive to their distress". Of course distress of the Brahmin is the familiar swan song of post-Mandal India. Nevertheless as soon as he mentions his own caste status Srinivas rushes on to mention his reasons for opposing quotas, he notices "a steady deterioration of efficiency and the fouling of interpersonal relations in academic circles and the administration - both results of a policy of caste quotas" and talked of the manner in which " conflicts between castes prevented the concentration on the all important task of developing the resources of the state for the benefit of all sections of the population". Here Srinivas reveals himself in his desire to protect caste from the pollution of politics. The decrying of the loss of efficiency and the espousal of putting aside caste conflicts in the larger view of nation building are all attempts to keep caste out of the public sphere of discourse. . This espousal of a false unity and appeal to a national goal over the interests of the marginalised is nothing less than a way to destroy the politics of difference and mask the interests of the powerful under the guise of acting on behalf of society as a whole. Chantal Mouffe accurately said that "all forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion" This language of the common good and the national interest is also used to browbeat the lower castes into silence and fosters a form of self-hatred - what Verrier Elwin in talking about tribal societies stigmatised as backward and in need of "civilising" as the "loss of Nerve". The rest of Srinivas's work including his much lauded "The Remembered Village" arouse the same disquiet in me, he goes on at great length to describe the incidents and scandals of village life in a small south Indian town: the Lingayat slapping the priest of the local temple, the dhobi having an affair with his niece, the politicking of the two Vokkaliga village faction leaders, the numerous amorous liaisons between the Kamma peasants in the moonlight, after a while one realises that what Srinivas is effectively protraying is the life of those lower down the social hierarchy - but we never hear of what the Brahmin families get up to behind their locked doors, or what they Kayasth officials indulge in nor the shady dealing of the Reddy landlords, the vices are not restricted to the lower castes alone but we receive only a steady stream of images which wash the laundry of the poorer inhabitants of the village in detail. One could ask why Srinivas will not wash the dirty laundry of the urban Brahmin community in public as well. Such are the silences through which old caste prejudices are enforced and persist. To avoid this everyone who seeks to write on caste or tribe must be able and willing to rigorously deconstruct his own caste/class position; few are ready to do so even amongst the Backwards, ironically it has been radicalised upper caste dissidents and sections of the Dalit movement who have gone furthest in this line.

. The great Dalit activist and writer D R Nagaraj noted on the Dalit movement in Karnataka:The birth of the modern individual in the humiliated communities is not only accompanied by a painful severing of ties with the community, but also a conscious effort to alter one's past is an integral part of it. In his excellent autobiography Growing up Untouchable in Modern India Vasant Moon recounts how in his early days as a government officer he met a leading Mahar bueareacrat who lived part from the community and did not mix with his caste fellows. He also told Moon that he could not display any books by Ambedkar or on Buddhism on shelf as that would land him in trouble. However, when he heard of Ambedkar's death he burst into tears. This is the only solace the public sphere offers the lower castes - no dialogue or engagement in the open sphere of citizen-based politics but the moment of despair in private. The code demands that caste can live only a secret life outside the public sphere. This was the modernist false illusion which was shattered by VP Singh's decision to implement the Mandal report's recommendations on reservations in the public sector: the response of much of the Left was disappointing many genuine campaigners and pro-reform radicals saw it as a victory of the forces of casteism over the forces of secularism. There were moans that education, land reform and poverty programmers merited more attention than castes-based reservations and that much of the benefit would be siphoned off by the elite amongst the recipient groups. To this response one can quote Rajni Kothari's comment on the role of castes in politics made 30 years earlier but still relevant - " Those who in India complain of 'casteism in politics' are really looking for a sort of politics which has no basis in society. They also probably lack any clear conception of either the nature of politics or the nature of the caste system"

One of the more radical responses and one which I have a lot of sympathy with is that espoused by those working with and on marginal communities such as tribals or hill cultivators and pastoralists: such as Nandini Sundar and Raj Gowthaman. This approach rejects the civilising claims of modernity. These writers recuperate the past of the marginalised groups: characterisng their social life as communal with people sharing food with a sense of equality, without much internal differentiation. Gowthaman argues that Dalits should keep themselves outside the "civilising" project of the Indian modernists and that those cultural practise deemed as degrading by the upper castes such as: beef-eating, drinking and speaking in the Dalit dialect should be resignified as positive. The need to reclaim what has been stigmatised as unclean or lowly, is essential because that would play an important role in ending the self-hate that the Indian modernity project has foisted on the lower castes. This is no easy panacea but what is admirable and vital in this approach is the refusal to concede the demands of Indian upper castes modernity to hide and at once practise caste has been explosive. For surely one of the greatest crimes of the Indian National project has been to implicitly and explicitly designate certain communities as unclean, uncivilised or backward. This is endemic in all parts of the national project; even the five-Year plans have sub-section on particular programmes for the upliftment of the so-called "criminal tribes" ignoring the fact that the idea of criminal tribes was a complete colonial construction. In Arundhati Roy’s excerpt from the writings of Maheswati Devi's she recounts a scene where the idealistic and upper caste Indian Administrative Officer encounters a mob of the malnourished tribals that he has been endeavoring to "uplift" surround him and rub their shrunken bellies against him: their silent rebuke about the developmental failure of the Indian state, their naked and tattered bodies surrounding him with his tall stature and immaculate western clothes: the two ends of the Indian spectrum: the civilised and civilisng middle-class and the marginal, poor, rural downtrodden. In their faces - or rather their bodies The IAS officer sees writ large his own inadequacy to treat and understand the objects of his valiant attempts to reform the district administration as adult citizens and even more importantly as human beings. This is not a message that our Indian middle-class modernists want to hear - I mean we have the Bomb surely we can leave caste behind us they ask. I still recall Maheswati Devi's speech on accepting one of the many honours bestowed upon her by the Indian government which opened with the sentence - hamare desh me hum ko kya mila, khali lath mila ( in my country what have I received, only blows). Yet the great Indian juggernaut of modernity rolls on: our Diplomats proclaim the greatness of our ancient architecture built by the artisan castes who only now benefit from reservations, a good portion of the rural labour which brings in the harvest every year to feed urban India is made up of Dalits, yet you still hear sniggering comments about the lazy low castes, almost all the major deities are of non-Vedic and non-Aryan origin yet people still deride the lack of contribution the lower castes have made to Indian culture and spirituality and lower caste men die in large numbers on the fields of Kargil and many other small unremembered battles yet at home they are asked to swallow insults and eschew their sectional community interests in favour of the "Nation." As Ambedkar acutely said " In politics we will be recognisng the principle of one man one vote and one value. In our economic and social life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one-man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions" How long indeed.

So there is a hidden conservatism in the reluctance of the upper castes to talk about caste openly in the public sphere, repeated assaults under the rise of the Dalit movement and Mandal have destroyed this false consensus. However, the fault lines in Indian society remain the same: as far as jobs go the implementation of the Mandal recommendations will only go so far in having an impact. In part this is a matter of timing- to have implemented the report recommendations in the late 1970's or early 1980's would have had a beneficial impact, if reservation had been enacted in the 1950's as recommended by the majority group on the Karlekar commission the impact would have been truly significant. The declining importance and recruitment into the bureaucracy and the increased privatisation of the labour market will greatly lessen the impact of the reservations - when the decision to implement the reservations was first announced by VP Singh in 1989 there was widespread opposition and rioting, by the time the Supreme court approved the implementation in 1992 there was little open protest - what had occurred in between of course was the start of the great liberalisation programme which opened up the Indian economy and reversed many of the socialist polices of the Nehruvian era: this also meant that spending and growth of the state bureaucracy would decline and increasing opportunities for high paying jobs would now be found in the private sector for those with the requisite skills. I remember the phrase feminists used in the West which one can paraphrase: Backwards get a ticket to ride the gravy train after it has left the station.
My analysis of caste dynamics also sees not a two-part division between the upper castes and the lower castes but a three fold division between the upper castes. the Backward castes and the Dalit movement. The tension between the OBC's (Other Backward Castes) and the Dalits is a crucial area of concern. Kancha Illiah in his bitter polemic why I am not a Hindu castigates many of the OBCs for assuming the roles of neo-Kshatriyas and neo-Brahmins in their replication of old forms of oppression. Caste discrimination occurs within varna categories as well and the pollution line that divides the Dalits from the rest of society sets them apart from other disadvantaged groups with whom they would otherwise make common cause. This division amongst the lower castes is one of the most important reasons as to why upper caste hegemony still endures. In many ways I agree that many of the erstwhile Backward castes are not necessarily a force for change the record of the south Indian non-Brahmin dominated by landed elites has not led to a liberation for the Dalits and many now consider that they were betrayed by the anti-Brahmin movement which replaced Brahmin oppression with the oppression by the elite non-Brahmins. Similar tales can be told by the Yadav dominated parties in North India. In Bihar the refusal of the RJD to concede a tribal state to the Jharkandis has led to the BJP domination of the tribal belt and in Uttar Pradesh conflict between the Rajput-Yadav combine in the Samajwadi party and the Dalit-based BSP has led to unstable coalition governments with the BJP which is overtly an upper caste party. Many of the marginal groups have been disillusioned by the co-option of their leaders by other parties and the compromises made to achieve power. One should also add that 50 years of reservations have not removed disabilities from the Dalits - what it has enabled them to do is to form a middle-class which has acted as the bedrock for Dalit activism. In some senses a tripartite strategy to the caste issue is needed addressed to the specific needs of each group: what the Dalit campaigns have shown is that without direct access to political power the aims of Dalit aspirations cannot be achieved, this speaks of the wrong turn taken by the Poona Pact forced on Ambedkar by Gandhi - since separate electorates would have allowed a generation of Dalit politicians to emerge who were not dependent on upper caste parties or electorates to gain office: it is time this decision was rethought and reversed. Secondly the desire for decentralised government reflected by tribals who are concentrated in select regions of the country usually the more inaccessible and remote ones; real and effective statehood should be granted to them: the recent creation of Jharkhand and Chattisgarh came very late and these states still require large amounts of developmental aid and more autonomy. Finally, the reservation policy for the Backward castes should be rigorously enforced and informal extensions should apply to the parastatal organisations and the private sector. These measures should also be reinforced with a concerted effort to increase spending on primary education and an educational infrastructure which improves access for disadvantaged groups. Had these measures been implemented in the early days of independence the social map of India would be very different today. Yet these measures still only half-implemented today had to be wrung from the upper caste elites and having lost ground on these issues the spectre of Fundamentalism is now raised to again subsume these conflicts under the guise of protecting the Hindu Nation and the cultural realm. Now violence is deployed openly to suppress this threat to "Hindu Solidarity" against the false myth social harmony democracy bring only the promise of disharmony. In this coming conflict there can be no sphere which can exclude caste and the issue of inequality since the very positing of such a sphere is in itself a conservative act in favour of the status quo. In the rapidly approaching storm we all will have to take one side or another, and the hidden allegiances of all will be revealed through their actions; but in my view there are amongst the plethora of competing caste groups and interests only two real divisions or two opposed castes if you will: there are those who for one reason or another support and endorse the existing state of affairs, who will stand for preserving what already exists and resist any change under one guise or another and there are those who despise the existing order passionately and who will enter into the belly of the beast to destroy it. In this struggle, there is no fence to sit on and we are all combatants.

:: Conrad Barwa 5:18 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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