Sid's Blog

Green Versus Green

2010-07-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Note: I wrote this essay for the Breakthrough Institute Blog, where it was first published in two parts (Part-I is here and Part-II is here). The Breakthrough Institute, founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is a progressive think tank focusing on environmental issues.

Here's a pop quiz. A, B, C, and D are four rich industrialized countries in Western Europe with similar living standards. Country A's carbon dioxide emissions stand at 9.24 tonnes per capita per year. The corresponding figures for countries B, C, and D are 5.81, 5.62, and 5.05 tonnes a year, respectively.

Can you guess which of these four countries has become the darling of the environmental movement, hailed as a model for a low carbon economy?

It is country A, Denmark -- even though its per capita CO2 emissions are almost twice as much as countries B (France), C (Switzerland), and D (Sweden).

In a piece entitled "The Copenhagen that Matters", New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman speaks for many environmentalists when he says,

Denmark is the most energy efficient country in the E.U.; due to carbon pricing, through energy taxes, carbon taxes, the 'cap and trade' system, strict building codes and energy labeling programs. Renewable resources currently supply almost 30 percent of Denmark's electricity. Wind power is the largest source of renewable electricity, followed by biomass...
My fellow Americans, the fact that the recent Copenhagen climate summit was a bust in terms of solving our energy/climate problems doesn't mean that we can ignore those problems -- or that we can ignore how individual countries, like Denmark, have effectively addressed them.

There is no doubt that Danes emit far less CO2 than Americans. But compared to some other Western European countries, Denmark's performance is distinctly modest.

Why then, do many greens hold up Denmark as the ideal low-carbon economy? Why not France, or Switzerland, or Sweden, which emit significantly less CO2 per capita?

The answer is that their preference for the Danish model has little to do with greenhouse gas emissions or with climate change, and more to do with the ideology and metaphysics of the Green movement.

In France, nuclear power accounts for about three quarters of all the electricity generated, while about 15 percent comes from hydro power. Switzerland gets about 55 percent of its electricity from hydro power and about 40 percent from nuclear. And in Sweden, about 45 percent comes from hydro power, while another 45 percent comes from nuclear power. Denmark, meanwhile, generates no nuclear power and very little hydro. A significant portion - some 30 percent - of Denmark's electricity is generated by wind power but still, much of the rest is generated by traditional coal power plants.

Among many environmentalists, nuclear energy and hydroelectricity are anathema even though they do not emit CO2. There tends to be particular hostility towards nuclear energy, even though the scientific and engineering evidence shows that modern nuclear power plants are safe, clean, and economical.

The green movement's antipathy towards nuclear power is part of a broader ideological distrust of scientific-technological fixes for solving our environmental problems. It is founded on a deep pessimism about human development, and scientific and technological progress.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

There can perhaps be no better example of ideological distrust of scientific-technological fixes than in the case of genetically engineered (GE) crops. Commonly known (somewhat misleadingly) as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), many greens abhor GE in agriculture with an intensity that matches or even exceeds their antipathy towards nuclear power.

GE food crops have been largely banned in Europe due to the opposition of environmentalists, but have been widely grown and consumed in the United States since 1996. More than 60 percent of field corn, 85 percent of soybean, 75 percent of canola, and 80 percent of cotton grown in the U.S. comes from GE crops. In all these years, GE crops have not been found to be any more harmful to humans or the environment than non-GE crops. On the contrary, the environmental benefits of GE crops have been substantial.

Crops that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (e.g., roundup-ready corn, roundup-ready soybean) have enabled farmers to adopt no-till and reduced-till farming practices, allowing for the conservation of topsoil, preservation of more natural vegetation, and sequestration of much of the soil organic carbon.

Crops that have been genetically engineered to be pest resistant (e.g., Bt Cotton, Bt Corn) have brought about dramatic reductions in chemical pesticide usage. For example, the introduction of Bt Cotton in India has caused chemical pesticide usage in the cotton crop to fall by half even as output has doubled.

Such achievements, significant though they are, merely scratch the surface of agricultural biotech's immense potential for doing environmental good. A promising new technology is a rice plant genetically engineered to be more efficient in utilizing nitrogen than conventional rice, thereby reducing the amount of nitrogen fertilizer needed by half. According to Greenpeace estimates, greenhouse gas emissions from the worldwide production and use of nitrogen fertilizer is equivalent to the total CO2 emissions from all the power plants in the United States. Nitrogen efficient GE crops could thus be crucial to mitigating climate change.

Agriculture - of any kind - is, by definition, a human intervention in nature with ambiguous environmental consequences. Agricultural biotechnology, with its potential to greatly increase marketable yields of existing farmlands, can play a major role in resisting the pressure to cultivate virgin land to feed a global population estimated to grow from six billion people now to nine billion people by 2050.

A Paradox

To anybody following the debate over nuclear power and GE crops, it soon becomes clear that the Green position on science and technology is rather paradoxical. On one hand, many Greens eagerly invoke science to emphasize the severity of our environmental problems, especially global warming. On the other hand, they are quick to reject scientific-technological fixes for these same environmental problems.

In the Green climate change narrative, great importance is given to scientific data and reasoning. When climate change skeptics question the seriousness of human induced climate change, arguing that the scientific evidence is insufficient, environmentalists respond (rightly, in my opinion) that the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence indicates that global warming is indeed a real and serious problem. When it come to GE crops, however, their position is reversed. Here, Greens reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that GE crops are no more dangerous than non-GE crops and claim that the scientific evidence is not sufficient to make a reasonable determination.

Interestingly, Green rejection of scientific-technological fixes for environmental problems is structurally very similar to the rejection of climate science by global warming skeptics.

The fact of the matter is that science is not in the business of absolute certainties -- that is the domain of religious revelations. Science can never establish with absolute certainty that climate change is human induced and will be devastating if left unchecked. Science is no more than a certain outlook and a certain technique ('the scientific method') that uses reason, observation, and experimentation to investigate phenomena and acquire or modify knowledge of the material world. It is a reasonable scientific inference, based on the available evidence, that human-induced climate change is real and serious. It is also a reasonable evidence-based scientific inference that GE crops are not inherently more harmful to humans or the environment than non-GE crops. Indeed, the level of scientific certainly regarding the safety of GE crops is far greater than any long-term prognosis regarding climate change, if only because it is so much easier to conduct controlled scientific experiments with GE crops than with the global climate.

This science/anti-science paradox is evident in Al Gore's celebrated documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The entire movie takes the form of Gore delivering a science lecture, arguing that human induced climate change represents a clear and compelling danger. In criticizing climate change skeptics, Gore denounces ideological influences on science, comparing it with Soviet practices.

Gore recommends a solution proposed by scientists Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala -- the only policy framework for global warming mitigation discussed in the movie. This approach calls for reducing CO2 emissions by using a using a combination of seven "stabilization wedges," or techniques, e.g. more efficient vehicles and carbon capture and storage. In the movie, Gore graphs how the wedges can reduce CO2 emissions but he makes one glaring omission: Socolow and Pacala's approach calls for seven wedges while Gore shows only six. The missing wedge? Nuclear power.

Paradoxically, even while emphasizing the scientific evidence for climate change, Gore deliberately ignores a scientific-technological fix that could help solve it.

The Scientific Basis of Environmentalism

Modern American environmentalism was born in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson was a scientist and much of the book is a scientific argument about the harmful effects of chemical pesticides.

The book is replete with scientific data, quotes from scientists, and scientific reasoning. In fact, the entire concluding chapter is an impassioned plea to adopt new biology based breakthrough technologies to replace chemical pesticides.

According to Carson,

A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing - entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists - all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.

Carson characterized chemical pesticides of the time as "Neanderthal" technologies, belonging to the "stone age of science". Clearly, the implication was not that we should replace chemical pesticides with even more ancient Jurassic-era technologies, but rather that we supplant them with advanced biology-based breakthrough technologies that are more environmentally friendly.

In a lecture a few months after the publication of Silent Spring, Carson remarked,

I criticize the present methods because they are based on a rather low level of scientific thinking. We really are capable of much greater sophistication in our solution of this problem.

Silent Spring's influence on the nascent environmental movement is well documented but its call for biology based alternatives to chemical pesticides had a deep influence on another group as well: pioneering scientists working in the fledgling field of agricultural biotechnology. In Lords of the Harvest, a book in which Dan Charles traces the origins of genetically engineered crops, he writes,

Pam Marrone, a researcher at Monsanto during the late 1980s [says] ... "I remember having lunch with [then-CEO] Dick Mahoney and him saying, 'Because of parathion [a particularly hazardous insecticide], I don't ever want to be in chemicals again. And that's why we're in biotechnology.'" ...
"During these years, all of us who went into biology were influenced by the wave of environmentalism," says Willy de Greef, who worked for Plant Genetic Systems in Belgium ... "The idea was reduce chemicals with biologicals or with genetics." Fred Perlak of Monsanto says ... "We were all the children of the sixties and the seventies. We'd all read Silent Spring; we knew the connection between 2-4-D [a common herbicide] and 2-4-5-T, Agent Orange."

Ever since Carson other prominent scientist-environmentalists have tended to support scientific-technological fixes for our environmental problems. James Lovelock, best known for his Gaia hypothesis, is an enthusiastic and active proponent of nuclear energy as a means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

James Hansen, well known for his pioneering work in climate science, is another prominent scientist-environmentalist who favors nuclear power. His Congressional testimony on climate change played a key role in bringing global warming to the forefront of public awareness. According to Hansen,

The scientific method requires that we keep an open mind and change our conclusions when new evidence indicates that we should. The new evidence affecting the nuclear debate is climate change, specifically the urgency of moving beyond fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. We need an urgent, substantial research and development program on fourth-generation nuclear power.

Yet another prominent scientist-environmentalist in favor of technological fixes for our environmental problems is naturalist and biodiversity guru E.O. Wilson -- a strong proponent of genetically engineered crops. According to him,

The problem before us is how to feed billions of new mouths over the next several decades and save the rest of life at the same time ... Most scientists and economists who have studied both sides of it agree that the benefits [of GE crops] outweigh the risks. The benefits must come from an evergreen revolution... Genetic engineering will almost certainly play an important role in the evergreen revolution.

The Anti-Scientific Basis of Environmentalism

Environmentalism, as Western industrialized world knows it, arose in the 1960s and 70s, ushered in by the unprecedented material prosperity of the post-war decades. In accordance with Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, people in the prosperous industrialized world, having satisfied their basic material needs for food, water, shelter, and security sought to satisfy higher order postmaterial needs such as achieving a sense of fulfillment and purpose. In stark contrast to the progressive era, which took a positive view of progress and the spread of material prosperity driven by scientific-technological advances and industrial growth, the Green movement began to view such progress as an encroachment upon nature's inherent purity. Scientific-technological interventions in nature - even scientific knowledge itself - came to be seen negatively, a mark of human hubris. In the view of many Greens, mankind's vain attempts to to play God with nature, or even to understand nature's mysteries, inevitably cause more harm than good.

As celebrated eco-feminist Vandana Shiva puts it,

"It is thus not just 'development' which is a source of violence to women and nature ... at a deeper level, scientific knowledge, on which the development process is based, is itself a source of violence."

This new era with its new outlook may be called the post-progressive era.

Even Silent Spring is not devoid of the post-progressive "human progress destroying the balance of nature" viewpoint. The first chapter, "A Fable for Tomorrow," has a distinct fall-from-Eden quality, which can be (and has been) interpreted as a plea to revert to a pre-technological pre-modern past.

Since modern environmentalism arose in response to postmaterial, rather then material needs, it is not surprising that its emphasis is on metaphysics, morality, and character, instead of material, pragmatic solutions to real world problems. The green movement is thus more about feeling good, being virtuous, and doing the "right" thing, rather than about achieving measurable material outcomes in a practical, pragmatic manner. It is more about utopian aspirations than tangible material achievements.

Environmentalism, for many, has become something akin to a religious faith. In their book Breakthrough, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus compare evangelical Christianity with green enviro-religiosity,

Both tell stories of humankind's fall, one from Eden and the other from Nature. Both tell revenge fantasies about a future apocalypse that serves as punishment for humankind's sins against either God or Nature. And both reward true believers with the warm glow of feeling morally superior to non-believers.

Enviro-religionists believe, at some level, that the climate change is an outward manifestation of a deeper problem: humankind's turn away from nature and towards "immorality", as exemplified by excessive consumption and rampant materialism. They see scientific-technological fixes, such as nuclear power or genetically engineered crops, as either irrelevant or even harmful since they focus too much on the material aspects of the problem and divert attention from the real problem of reforming our ethics.

Green Materialism Versus Green Morality

The environmental movement tends to emphasize Green morality over green pragmatism. A pragmatic and materialistic green outlook would emphasize concrete emissions reductions and welcome scientific-technological solutions. Today's Green morality, however, has a different orientation; its primarily emphasis is on transforming our morality and character irrespective of direct material impact on the environment.

A good illustration of this phenomenon of green morality is Earth Hour. Billed as the "largest climate event in history," it is an annual event in which people are supposed to turn off their lights for one designated hour to "show support for our planet and our future." It is obvious to all that Earth Hour has no significant material impact on greenhouse gas emissions. After all, the coal-fired power plants that generate much of our electricity and are the worst emitters of greenhouse gas emissions cannot simply be turned off and on within an hour.

Earth Hour is all about symbolism, but for what? A symbol for replacing modern electric lights with far less energy efficient technologies like candles? A symbol for abandoning scientific-technological progress and returning to the dark ages?

In the end, it is no more than a spectacle to make some feel morally superior while completely ignoring the real issue of vastly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The dichotomy between the materialistic and the moralistic approaches to solving our environmental problems is analogous to our societal response to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). On one hand, there are those who see AIDS in largely materialistic terms and advocate scientific-technological solutions, such as promoting the use of condoms, funding medical research, and making advanced anti-AIDS drugs more widely available. On the other hand, there are those who see AIDS primarily as a problem that should be addressed at the level of morality and character rather than through scientific-technological fixes. They believe that the disease is just an outward manifestation of a deeper problem: humankind's turn away from God and towards "immorality" as exemplified by sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, etc.

This is not to suggest that morality is not important. Morality gives us a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and, if properly managed, it can create the conditions necessary to nurture the ideas and innovation necessary to develop effective scientific-technological fixes for our environmental problems. But when the morality becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, it can be more harmful than helpful in achieving tangible results, as when Denmark is hailed as the ideal "low carbon economy" though its carbon emissions are relatively high by regional standards. Even worse, the overemphasis on a contrived Green morality alienates those who are seriously concerned about climate change but are nevertheless skeptical of this post-progressive Green morality, thereby undermining the public consensus necessary for serious action on climate change.

What is Wrong With the Right to Education

2010-04-01T22:33:00.000-07:00

Note:The Right to Education (RTE) comes into effect today in India today. I have written an essay for Manushi analyzing the new law. This first appeared here on the Manushi Website.

Education, especially universal primary education, is an important part of any civilized society. For us Indians, it is a matter of serious concern that even today, more than sixty years after independence, universal primary education remains a distant dream.

With the stated intention of addressing this sorry situation, and with some prodding from the Supreme Court (especially the judgment in the case Unnikrishnan vs. State of Andhra Pradesh), the parliament of India passed the 86th Constitutional Amendment in 2002, which inserted Article 21A into the Constitution of India, making education a fundamental right (it is numbered "21A" because this right is thought to flow from Article 21, the fundamental right to life and personal liberty). It is worded as follows.

Article 21A. The State shall provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of six to fourteen years in such manner as the State may, by law, determine.

It is important to note that unlike other fundamental rights, the right to education granted by Article 21A is qualified by the phrase "in such manner as the State may, by law, determine".

So what is this law that is supposed to determine the manner in which the fundamental right to education will be provided? Enacted recently by the Indian parliament, this law is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.

Known more commonly, if informally, as the Right to Education Act or the RTE Act, this new law unfortunately leaves much to be desired.

Continue reading at the Manushi website ...

Frequently Asked Questions about GMOs and Bt-Brinjal

2010-02-24T00:15:00.000-08:00

What is GMO?

GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organisms. But exactly does that mean? Well, all domesticated plants and animals have been genetically modified by human beings. For thousands of years we have been doing this by cross breeding and hybridization. Over the years more and more effective ways have been found for doing this. Since about the 1920s, we've been genetically modifying organisms using chemical and radiation mutagenesis, in which genetic mutations are induced by subjecting organisms to radiation and by exposing them to harsh chemicals.

Around the 1970s a new technology called genetic engineering made its appearance. Using this technology scientists were able to directly insert certain desirable genes into organisms. Think of it this way: cross breeding is like getting an i-Phone along with an AT&T contract, while genetic engineering is like getting an i-Phone without the baggage of an AT&T contract.

The first genetically engineered product approved in the United States was insulin for diabetes patients in 1982. Ever since then genetic engineering has become a very important tool in modern medicine.

In the U.S. genetically engineered crops were first approved for commercial cultivation in 1996. Today these crops cover millions of acres. Most of the corn and and soya in the United States comes from genetically engineered crops.

In general usage, the terms GMO and GM generally refers only to the agricultural application of genetic engineering, and it is only this that has become controversial. Even those who claim to be anti-GMO do not object to genetically modified organisms achieved through cross breeding or even through chemical or radiation induced mutations. Even genetic engineering itself is not controversial. Nobody objects to cancer drugs that are genetically engineered.

Are GM foods safe for humans?

Many people are concerned about the safety of GM foods. However, many studies have been carried out, and most have found that GM foods to be perfectly safe. In the United States GM foods including staples like corn and soya have been widely consumed for the last 15 years. In all these years, not even so much as a single headache has been attributed to GM foods. Not a single lawsuit has found GM foods to be liable for any kind of injury.

There are some scientists who hold the view that GM foods could be unsafe for humans. So there is not 100% scientific certainty regarding this. But then, that is the the way science is. Science is a perpetual argument. There is rarely 100% certainly about anything in science. Even global warming, and even Darwin's theory of evolution are not 100% settled. On a scientific certainty scale of 1 - 10, where 1 is wild speculation and 10 is absolute certainty, I would say Global Warming would be a 6 or a 7. The theory of evolution would be 9 or 9.5. The safety of GM foods would be somewhere in between, at around 8.

What about Frankenfoods?

Many people feel that genetic engineering is fundamentally anti-natural. They call GM foods "Frankenfoods". There is a feeling that it is something grotesque and goes against the will of God and Nature. This is a instinctive reaction and is quite understandable. But really, in nature itself, there is nothing unnatural about gene transfer between different species. There is a class of viruses called retroviruses that carry genetic material with them into human cells and insert them into the host cell's genome. In fact, scientists have found that more than 50% of our human DNA comes from viruses. So, in a way, we are actually more virus than human.

Who is to say what is natural and what is unnatural? These are mere cultural constructs. In U.S., there is a raging debate on homosexuality. Some say that it is unnatural, while others insist that is is perfectly natural. So it is with GM foods. Some are convinced that it is inherently unnatural, but others feel that it is perfectly natural.

Interestingly, nobody raises any concerns about genetically engineered medicines being unnatural. Nobody complains about tinkering with genes when it comes to cancer drugs. Nobody complains about genetically engineered Hepatitis-B vaccine being given to newborn babies. So why complain only when it comes to GM food?

Isn't GMO technology monopolized by Monsanto through its patents?

To a large extent, concerns raised about the patent regime and power of the U.S. based Monsanto Corporation are justified. In my opinion patenting of DNA sequences, as happens in the U.S. is very problematic. Monsanto has locked up far too many patents. And at times Monsanto has acted like a bully. But surely the answer is not to ban agricultural biotechnology outright. In the computer industry there are many who resent Microsoft's dominance, but they don't call for computers to be banned. Instead they try to develop alternatives to Microsoft.

Aren't GM seeds Terminator Seeds, engineered to be sterile?

A technology that would engineer sterility into seeds was developed by a company partially owned by Monsanto. However, the company decided not to commercialize this technology. As of now, there is not a single sterile GM crop anywhere in the world.

What effects do GM crops have on the environment and on biodiversity?

Some are concerned that cross-pollination from GM crops will threaten biodiversity. However, cross-pollination from GM crops is not likely to be any worse than cross-pollination from non-GM crops. On the contrary, practices like reduced pesticide usage and no-till farming, which are made possible by GM technology, have many environmental benefits. Moreover, by increasing marketable yields of existing agricultural lands, GM crops reduce the pressure to bring more land under cultivation in order to feed a growing world population.

One of the gurus of biodiversity, the person who is said to have first used the term 'biodiversity', Prof. E.O. Wilson of Harvard, is a supporter of GM crops because he thinks that GM crops will actually increase biodiversity.

Don't GM crops benefit only large corporate farms and hurt small family farms?

GM crops benefit farmers of all kinds, whether small or large, corporate or family-run. Most farmers who grow GM crops in the developing world are small farmers. In the U.S. the Amish, who are the very embodiment of the notion of small farming communities, have accepted GM crops.

What about choice? Aren't GM foods being forced onto people?

Many people in the U.S. complain that they are left with no choice but to consume GM foods because there is no system of mandatory labeling. They complain that their basic civil liberties are being violated. But then, there is no restriction on voluntary labeling. Many food products have voluntary labels such as "organic", "kosher", "halal", etc. In the U.S. one can avoid GMOs by choosing foods that are labeled "organic". There is no mandatory labeling in the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not see any compelling safety reason to do so. Still, there cerainly is scope for improvement in food labeling, whether voluntary or mandatory.

On the other side of the coin, there are the farmers, and seed companies and biotech companies, who are eager to use genetic engineering in agriculture. Their civil liberties are important too. Using the force of law and the coercive power of the state to ban anything, whether it is a an idea, or a technology, or a book, is an extremely draconian measure in a democratic society. It should be done only if there are clear and compelling reasons for doing so.

What is the need for GM foods? Isn't there too much food in the world already?

While it is true that there is a surplus of foodgrain production in some countries like the U.S., some one billion people in the world go hungry every day. Some say that it is simply a matter of redistributing food. But it is much more than that. Even if practical issues like transportation costs and lack of infrastructure, are overcome, being able to grow their own food is a matter of pride and self respect for developing countries, just as it is a matter of pride and self respect for individuals to take care of their families. Who would want to be completely dependent on the whims and mercies of donor agencies? What is more, the world's population is projected to increase by more than two billion people by 2050. So food production will have to increase correspondingly.

Isn't GMO technology too expensive and too complex for poor farmers in developing countries?

Far from being too complex, GMO is the ultimate user-friendly technology. The beauty of this technology is that it is entirely packaged into the seed. The farmer can grow the seed as he has always done. Compared to green revolution era farming technologies, there is much less need to train farmers on how to use new types of fertilizers, or pesticides, or farming machinery.

Yes, GMO seeds tend to me more expensive than non-GMO seeds, but farmers save on other input costs like pesticides.

What is the long term future of GM foods?

I think the long term future of this technology is somewhat murky. It faces intense objections from some quarters. But I think most of these objections are not insurmountable. Objections about being too unnatural, about patenting life forms, etc., are equally applicable to genetically engineered medicines. But then why doesn't Greenpeace demand that the latest breast cancer drugs be banned? I think that it has to do with the benefits of the technology. For those of us who are relatively well off, living in cities, and working in industries far removed from agriculture, genetic engineering in medicine provides direct and visible benefits to ourselves, our friends and our families. On the other hand genetic engineering in agriculture has no direct benefits for consumers like us. It benefits mainly farmers, and to a lesser extent, the environment.

I think that unless consumers like us can see some direct benefits from agricultural biotechnology, such as say some GM food that will reduce our chances of getting cancer, this technology is unlikely to be embraced wholeheartedly. Many will keep asking: what is the need for this technology?

How did GMOs enter India?

The first - and till date only - GM crop approved for commercial cultivation in Indian is cotton. In 1997, the Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company (Mahyco), which is 26% owned by Monsanto, applied for approval for its genetically engineered Bt-Cotton seeds. As has been the case with Bt-Brinjal , Bt-Cotton, too, was controversial. Activist groups in India as well as international activist groups like Greenpeace were protesting against Bt-Cotton.

While all this was going on, an enterprising gentleman by the name of Dinkar Desai did something that changed everything. Mr. Desai was the boss of a small seed company in Ahmedabad called Navbharat Seeds. He had managed to get hold of some Bt-Cotton seeds, and had back-crossed them with his own hybrid seeds. The result was a Bt-Cotton variety that he named Navbharat 151. In 1998 Mr. Desai began selling these seeds to farmers in Gujarat. For three years nobody complained. Then, in 2001, a severe bollworm infestation swept through Gujarat. As many cotton fields in Gujarat were devastated, a few thousand acres remained gloriously unaffected. These were the fields planted with Mr. Desai's Navbharat 151 seeds. Soon everybody realized that these were unauthorized Bt-Cotton seeds. The government ordered that all fields growing Navbharat 151 be burned down. In response, farmers rose up in protest. A Farmers' mobilization began. In response, the govt. backed down and cleared Bt-Cotton for commercial cultivation in March 2002.

How has India's experience with Bt-Cotton been?

There are many claims and counter-claims about the success or failure of Bt-Cotton in India. Some have claimed that Bt-Cotton has been responsible for a spate of farmers' suicides in India in certain pockets like Vidarbha in Maharashtra. But others have have found this not to be the case. [For my own analysis of farmers' suicides in India, see this]

Whatever the truth of all the claims and counterclaims, what is undeniable is that cotton farmers all over India have fully embraced Bt-Cotton technology. Within only eight years of its approval, more than 80% of India's total cotton area is under Bt-Cotton cultivation. India's annual output of cotton has doubled from about 15 million bales to about 30 million bales, and India has gone from being a net cotton importer to a net cotton exporter. And all this, while the amount of chemical pesticides used by cotton farmers has fallen by 50%.

So overall, India has had a very good experience with the one GM crop that has been allowed so far.

Isn't Monsanto exploiting Indian farmers with its Bt-Cotton seeds?

When Bt-Cotton was first approved in India in 2002 there were fears that Mahyco and Monsanto would monopolize the supply of seeds. But such a situation has not materialized. There is vigorous competition among seed companies for the Bt-Cotton market, and many choices are available to Indian farmers. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) has cleared more than 500 varieties of Bt-Cotton seeds from dozens of seed companies. Not all are based on Monsanto's DNA recombination events. Many Bt-Cotton seeds are based on events developed by other organizations, such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, University of Agricultural Sciences Dharwad, and even the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

What is Bt-Brinjal?

The brinjal plant is highly susceptible to insect infestations. Now, here is a bacterium called Bacillus Thuringiensis or Bt, which naturally produces a toxin that is effective against these insects. Because of this quality Bt has been used for pest control in agriculture since the 1920s. it is considered environmentally friendly and is used widely by organic farmers since it is harmful only to a small class of insects and does not have any affect on other insects or animals or human beings. What scientists have done is that they have isolated the gene responsible for producing the Bt-toxin in the bacterium and have incorporated this gene into the brinjal genome. With this modification the plant itself produces it own Bt-toxin. As a result brinjal growers can use much less pesticides, thus potentially saving them time and money while also and reducing their crop losses. Since chemical pesticides are reduced it has environmental benefits as well.

One thing that must be pointed out is that Bt is a trait and not a variety of Brinjal. And it is important to point this out because people tend to confuse trait and variety. This Bt trait is added to existing varieties of Brinjal by back-crossing. Think of this as an automatic transmission in a car. An automatic car is not a car model itself, but a feature added to an existing model. Similar is the case with genetically engineered crops. For example, there are hundreds of varieties of Bt-Cotton in India, just as there are many non-Bt varieties as well.

What is the Current Status of Bt-Brinjal in India

The govt. of India has announced that more safety tests will be conducted. But it is not clear what safety tests will satisfy the anti-GMO activists. It is true that the regulatory mechanism in India is not perfect. But it is also true that Bt-Brinjal has cleared many more safety tests than any other food product in India. There have already been some 20 to 30 different trials and studies conducted on Bt-Brinjal over the last 8 - 9 years. Some of the trials have been conducted by Mahyco, which developed Bt-Brinjal, but others have been conducted at various government and private labs and agricultural universities. No safety problems have yet been discovered. It has been declared safe by the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), which consists of some 20 to 25 top scientists (though about 4 of them have been accused by anti-GMO activists of having potential conflicts of interest).

In my opinion the opposition to Bt-Brinjal has much more to do with ideology, and has very little to do with public safety. In general food safety in India is very poor. Every year in India some 400,000 children below the age of five die from diarrhea caused by contaminated food and water. It is surreal to see activists raise worries about the remote possibility of someone in the distant future getting allergies and rashes from eating Bt-Brinjal, while being totally unconcerned about thousands of people dying every day from ordinary food and water contamination.

Anyway, let us give them the benefit of the doubt. If the real concern is about safety, then it should be no more than a simple matter of conducting some more safety studies over the next 3 - 5 years at the most. Either the studies should uncover some real tangible safety problems, or else the Bt-brinjal should be cleared for commercial cultivation without any objections. Let us see.

Is the GMO controversy really a question of science, or is it a political issue?

It is definitely not about the science. It is much closer to being a political issue. But I would not really characterize it as a strictly political issue. Politics, after all, is said to be the art of compromise. The opposition to GM foods is the exact opposite of compromise. The further scientists go in demonstrating the safety of GM foods, the more implacable and uncompromising the GMO opponents tend to become. This has more to do with ideological fundamentalism, dogma, and prejudice, than about either science or politics.

Links of Interest

1. AgBioWorld
2. PBS NOVA/Frontline Harvest of Fear (video in 12 parts, highly recommended)
3. Stewart Brand, author of The Whole Earth Catalog (video)
4. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (video)
5. Pamela Ronald's Blog
6. ISAAA Briefs: The Development and Regulation of Bt Brinjal in India (detailed technical paper)

Racism and Discrimination in Australia and India

2009-06-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks there has been a massive hue and cry in India over supposedly racist attacks on a handful of Indian students in Australia. The outcry has been so great that this issue has even been taken up at the diplomatic level between the two countries. Recently Bollywood mega-star Amitabh Bachchan turned down an Australian honor in protest against anti-Indian racism in Australia.

A couple of years ago, a similar uproar broke out in India when film star Shilpa Shetty, while participating in a voyeuristic reality TV show in the U.K., was subjected to some comments that were perceived as racist.

In general, Indians have been very quick to point fingers at others for real and imagined incidents of racism.

But perhaps we Indians should first take a good hard look at ourselves in the mirror. If we do so we will find that appalling discrimination is rampant in Indian society.

Consider, for example, the following.

In India there is quite a large number students from Africa studying in various colleges. Most of these students have to face racial epithets like "kallu", "kalia", etc., on a regular basis. According to a professor, "many African students just don't show up in class; they just come for the exams". "It's especially difficult for them to integrate themselves in second-tier colleges", says the professor, since "the students there believe that all Africans are backward, lazy and belong to the international drug cartel". Outside the classroom, Indian students hardly ever have any close social interactions with the visiting African students, such as becoming roommates, etc. I have never been to Australia, so I cannot comment on the situation there, but at least on American campuses international students from India, Africa, etc., are treated very differently. Close social interactions and even romantic relationships between international and American students are fairly common (in fact the current U.S. President Barack Obama is the product of one such relationship).

Many students from the North East part of India who come to study in Delhi, Mumbai, etc., are called "chinkies" or worse racial epithets, and face a great deal of ridicule and discrimination. According to a Manipuri student in Delhi, "even rickshaw-pullers, auto-drivers, vegetable vendors and bus conductors cheat us because they know we are not aware of the price trend here, and are not in a position to drive hard bargains". What is worse, female students from the North East are considered "easy" or "loose" and often become subject to sexual harassment.

Sometime ago while waiting in a line at an international airport, I overheard a young Australian woman narrating her rather unpleasant flight experience to a friend. Apparently there was a middle aged Indian man sitting next to her on the flight who, while pretending to be asleep, would keep "accidentally" dropping his arm off the armrest and onto his female co-passenger's lap. This kind of obnoxious (or worse) behavior of some Indian men towards women, stemming from repressed sexual urges, is known in India as "eve-teasing" and is very common across the country. It represents a pervasive kind of discrimination that almost every woman in India has to face at some point of time.

I have been told by activists working in predominantly adivasi (tribal) areas in Maharashtra (such as say Nandurbar district) that in state transport buses some non-adivasi conductors do not go up to adivasi passengers and issue tickets to them as is the standard practice all over Maharashtra. Instead, these non-adivasi bus conductors sit in one place and require the adivasi passenger to walk up to them to get their tickets issued, since they consider it beneath their dignity to walk up to adivasi passengers and request them to buy tickets. Adivasis in India face this - and other much more serious forms of discrimination - on a regular basis.

A couple of years ago, when Bollywood superstars Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan got married, news reports suggested that Aishwarya being a Manglik - an astrological condition considered devastating for matrimony - was made to go through all kinds of ritualistic gymnastics in order to overcome her astrological disability. This included her getting married to a tree, and performing various other elaborate rituals. While not all news reports coming out of Bollywood are entirely accurate, the story of Aishwarya's Manglik predicament is at least believable. This is because of the prevalence in India of widespread discrimination on astrological grounds. When it comes to matrimony, many people (especially women) in India face discrimination for being Manglik, or for being astrologically deficient in other ways.

In Mumbai, many of the most elegant housing complexes are marked off as "for vegetarians only". With vegetarianism in India being primarily a caste and community marker, "vegetarians only" really means "reserved for certain upper caste groups only". As a non-vegetarian, I will not be allowed to rent an apartment in such "vegetarian only" complexes in spite of being willing to pay as much as people belonging to vegetarian castes. If you happen to be a Muslim or a Dalit, and you don't have any high-level connections, you will be hard pressed to find any kind of proper rental accommodation in a decent neighborhood in Mumbai. And this is in Mumbai, reputed to be India's most cosmopolitan city. What happens in other cities and in rural areas, where caste discrimination tends to be worse, can only be imagined.

These - and there are many more such accounts - are indicative of the frequent and widespread discrimination that occurs in India.

But what about India's celebrated hospitality? What about India's legendary tolerance?

True, Indians are often very hospitable at the individual level. In fact, many Indians who face societal discrimination are assisted by big hearted individuals who go out of their way to be helpful and hospitable. However, this kind of individual action, though very important, cannot really be expected to overcome the systemic discrimination that pervades Indian society.

Indians are also well known for being tolerant. India's tolerance is said to be the basis of the incredible diversity we see in India today. This is true. Indians are indeed extremely tolerant. However, this much vaunted tolerance is often devoid of mutual respect. Sure, we Indians will tolerate vegetarians and non-vegetarians, Dalits and Muslims, the upper classes and the lower classes, and assorted other groups and communities, all with their own customs and practices - but only if they live their lives separately from each other, in their own separate enclaves and ghettos - for all practical purposes, out of sight and out of mind from each other.

India's tolerance, while very real and very welcome, is unfortunately accompanied by a great deal of social exclusion and social segregation. As result, discrimination thrives.

This is not to say that everything is gloom and doom. There is good news. Segregation and discrimination in India - though still pervasive - are much reduced from what they were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. Much progress has been made. But much more remains to be done.

While we vociferously condemn isolated incidents of racism in far-away Australia, surely we Indians should also condemn, with equal if not more vigor, the various forms of discrimination that are still so widespread in our own midst.

Is Bill Gates a Menace to Poor Farmers?

2009-02-19T02:32:00.000-08:00

Question: What is the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"? Is it (a) grinding poverty, or (b) global warming, or (c) low farm productivity, or (d) drought?

Well, according to noted environmentalist icon, Vandana Shiva, it is none of the above. Addressing a recent conference of the Slow Food Movement in San Francisco, Shiva claimed that the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world" was none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Yes, Microsoft founder Bill Gates' Gates Foundation. The reason for such ire? Apparently, it is because the Gates Foundation has committed the sin of attempting to fight poverty in Africa through technological transformation. Through the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Gates Foundation has sought to increase agricultural productivity in Africa through technology. This, some environmentalists believe in their infinite wisdom, represents the "greatest threat to farmers in the developing world"

The Green Revolution

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, there took place a transformation in agriculture in many developing countries in Asia and Latin America (but largely bypassed Africa). New High Yielding Varieties (HYV) of seeds suited for local conditions were developed, and these, accompanied by other technological and infrastructural inputs like chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems, yielded huge increases in food production, thereby staving off the Malthusian specter of widespread famine caused by a growing population outstripping food supply.

Good or Bad?

For many years the Green Revolution was seen as a spectacular success by much of the world. One of its pioneers, the American scientist Norman Borlaug, became a household name in many developing countries and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (though he remains largely unknown in his own country).

In recent decades, the Green Revolution has come under increasing criticism from environmentalists for its heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Some environmentalists go so far as to describe the Green Revolution as an unmitigated disaster.

I feel that the environmentalist critique of the Green Revolution is unduly harsh. For all its faults, the Green Revolution was largely successful in staving off widespread hunger and famine in many parts of the world. Perhaps the Green Revolution was a victim of its own success. It has been so successful that an entire generation has grown up for whom large-scale famine is unthinkable, almost unimaginable, and who are hence not able to fully appreciate what the Green Revolution has achieved.

Environmentalists who call for reversing the Green Revolution and reverting to the the "purity" of traditional agricultural technologies and traditional economic systems are guilty of severely downplaying the human cost of putting brakes on development and progress.

Consider the following.

In the last sixty years, India's population has grown three-fold. Fortunately, thanks to the Green Revolution, food production has more than kept pace, growing four-fold.

It has been estimated that had the Green Revolution not occurred and high-yield farming not been introduced, India would have had to farm an additional 100 million acres of virgin land (an area the size of California) just to keep pace with its growing population. Thus the Green Revolution was responsible for preventing an environmental disaster of massive proportions.

To give some idea of the sheer desperation and humiliation associated with large scale food shortages in pre Green Revolution India, here is a quote from Indian agriculture minister C. Subramaniam, during a food crisis in the 1960s:
As a last resort, I told my officials and experts to identify the nearest food carrying ships on the ocean throughout the world. I said we would identify the nearest ships carrying wheat to other countries and appeal to the US President to divert it to India if other countries could wait for another six to eight weeks.

The Answer Lies in Leapfrog Technologies

I consider the Green Revolution a positive development, one of mankind's greatest achievements. However, I do realize that it has indeed been accompanied by certain harmful side effects, such as increased use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and greater need for irrigation systems.

In Africa (which has remained largely untouched by the Green Revolution until now), the solution does not lie in blindly adopting of 1960s era chemical and energy intensive agriculture. Nor does redemption lie in completely repudiating the Green Revolution. What is needed in Africa is Green Revolution 2.0: a new Green Revolution driven by new and innovative leapfrog technologies that avoid some of the worst negative side-effects of Green Revolution 1.0, but still increases farm yields very substantially, using seeds and other inputs that are economically competitive.

One leapfrog technology that could play a prominent role in Africa's Green Revolution 2.0 is Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO). It may be possible to use GMO technology to leapfrog over the chemical and energy intensive agriculture of Green Revolution 1.0 and usher in a much more environmentally friendly Green Revolution 2.0 in Africa.

Developing countries are particularly receptive to leapfrog technologies. Here new technologies don't have to compete against established technologies with their preexisting infrastructure. Perhaps the most prominent example of a leapfrog technology being adopted in developing countries is cell-phone technology. Millions of people in developing countries have gone from no-phone technology directly to cell-phone technology, leapfrogging over land-line-phone technology. Similarly, millions have gone from pen-and-paper technology to computer technology, completely leapfrogging over typewriter technology, not only in developing countries, but also in some developed countries like Japan.

Opportunity for America

It is American investment and innovation over many years in the emerging technologies of yesterday (which are the mainstream technologies of today) be it in agriculture, or computers, or aviation, that has given the United States an economic and technological lead in today's world.

Similarly, American in investment and innovation in emerging technologies today - technologies that are likely to become tomorrow's leapfrog technologies in many parts of the developing world - will ensure that American technological leadership in the world remains intact, and these new technologies will serve as engines of economic growth for the coming decades, in America and across the world.

India, Pakistan and Terrorism

2008-12-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

The recent terror attacks in Mumbai captured the world's attention as few other events have done in recent years. Here was a ghastly action-filled terrorism drama unfolding live on our TV screens, holding us transfixed, and filling us with horror and revulsion.

The India-Pakistan Angle

In the West, there has been a tendency to portray the Mumbai terror attack as directed against the West and Jews. However, it must be kept in mind that the attacks took place in India and that the vast majority of victims were Indian. It is also evident that the attack originated from Pakistan. This being the case, I believe that one cannot ignore the India-Pakistan angle.

In this essay I explore some historical strands that I believe are key to understanding the India-Pakistan dispute.

Independence and Partition

As two hundred years of British Rule in India came to an end in 1947, it signaled not only independence for India, but also Partition - the splintering away of Pakistan as a separate sovereign state.

The basic thinking behind the demand for Pakistan can be traced back to a reaction among Muslim notables in Muslim-minority areas of North India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who were alarmed that the distinct Perso-Arabic culture of North Indian Muslim nobility, after being dominant in the area for centuries, was losing ground to local vernacular and popular culture, as well modern Western ideas. (Author William Dalrymple gives a masterful description of this cultural loss in The Last Mughal; see my review of the book here).

In reaction to this cultural loss, a theory was born that Muslims in the Indian Subcontinent were "a nation not a minority". Widely labeled the "Two-Nation Theory", this formed the basis for the demand for Pakistan that culminated in Partition in 1947.

A remarkable feature of the Two-Nation Theory and the Pakistan demand was just how vague and ambiguous it was. What exactly did "two-nations" mean for Muslims who were geographically dispersed across the length and breadth of the Indian Subcontinent? Did it mean two sovereign territorial states? If so, what would be the territorial boundaries? Would the "Muslim State" be exclusively for Muslims, and the "Non-Muslim State" exclusively for non-Muslims? What would happen to those Muslims and non-Muslims who ended up in the "wrong" state?

Some historians conjecture that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the much-venerated leader of the Pakistan Movement, deliberately kept the Pakistan demand vague and undefined because he saw it primarily as a useful political bargaining chip that he and his Muslim League Party could use as they jockeyed for power in a post-independence India. Thus, for Jinnah, the motivation for the Pakistan demand was primarily oppositional - a useful tool for opposing the politically more powerful Congress Party led by Mahatma Gandhi.

For Jinnah, the Pakistan Demand was just that - a demand. He always thought of "Pakistan" as a demand, never as a sovereign state. Consequently, neither Jinnah, nor any of the other leaders of the the Pakistan movement ever seriously thought through the idea of Pakistan, and had nothing resembling any kind of long-term vision for Pakistan as sovereign state.

Salman Rushdie puts it best in his novel Shame: "Pakistan may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind... Perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined."

(For more about Jinnah and the Pakistan Demand, see my essay here)

A Homeland for South Asian Muslims?

In the sixty years of its existence, the nearest that Pakistan has come to developing a national vision is the idea that Pakistan is a homeland for the Muslims of South Asia, an idea rooted in the Two-Nation Theory. This idea was weak to begin with, since Pakistan "left behind" many Muslims in India. In 1971 this vision suffered a further blow when Pakistan split in half, with East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh. Today, with the vast majority (about two-thirds) of all Muslims in South Asia living outside Pakistan, this vision has become impossible to reconcile with reality.

Some "secular" Pakistanis, intellectual descendants of Jinnah, have put forth the vision that Pakistan, though not the actual homeland for South Asian Muslims, is the protector and guardian of all Muslims in South Asia. Here is Pakistani scholar Akbar S. Ahmed using this argument to justify Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India.

What stopped the widespread orgy of rioting in India after Ayodhya were the bomb-blasts in Bombay in 1993. The shock effect froze the rioting. ... The Hindus blamed the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence, the ISI. In the end, if the ISI were responsible, then they and they alone were the guardians of Muslims in India.

Apart from being openly hostile towards India, the idea of Pakistan as "the protector of Muslims in the Indian Subcontiment" is wildly delusional.

Pakistan's Identity Crisis and Opposition to India

As with individuals, a strong sense of identity is very important for nation-states as well. India has a strong identity of being an ancient civilization and culture, as well as a modern multi-religious, multi-lingual, multi-cultural democratic society. The United States has a strong identity as a land of liberty and opportunity and the "American Dream". Many states, like, say France, have strong cultural, linguistic or geographical identities.

Unfortunately, in the sixty years of its existence, the state of Pakistan has failed to come up with any kind of distinct identity for itself.

Pakistan suffers from a severe identity crisis.

Without any real vision of what it stands for, the Pakistani state has always tended to fall back upon the one idea that Jinnah, the leader of the Pakistan movement, articulated very clearly. Jinnah never explained clearly what Pakistan stood for. But he was very clear about what Pakistan stood against: Pakistan was diametrically opposed to the notion of India as a united but diverse democratic society, as articulated by the Indian nationalist movement.

Pakistan's national identity today, such as it exists, is built around this negative idea: the idea of anti-Indianism.

Kashmir

Everybody has heard about the Kashmir dispute. It is generally viewed as a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. But really, it is much more than that.

Pakistan sees Kashmir as the "unfinished business of Partition". Pakistan's claim to Kashmir is based on theory that there is no place for Muslims in India - a theory that is the antithetical to the idea of India as a multi-religious, multi-cultural democratic society.

India has never accepted the basic validity of religious partition. The Partition of 1947 is seen as a "collosal blunder", a result of the "divide and rule" policy of the crafty British. Most Indians believe that any further religious partition of India, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere, must be prevented at any cost.

It is often said that the Kashmir problem is the core issue in the India-Pakistan dispute. Solve the territorial dispute in Kashmir, and terrorism in India - even international terrorism - will cease.

I see it very differently. I see the Kashmir dispute as symptomatic of the larger ideological divide between India and Pakistan. Rather than Kashmir being the core issue in the India-Pakistan dispute, I see the Pakistan problem as the core issue in the Kashmir imbroglio. Fix the Pakistan problem, and there will be peace in Kashmir.

Was the Mumbai Terror Attack Sponsored by Pakistan?

With anti-Indianism being a key component of its national identity, the Pakistani state is on an eternal quest to seek parity with India in matters like military power, diplomatic clout, etc. One strategy has been the systematic use of terrorism an an instrument of state policy against India - the strategy of "bleeding India through a thousand cuts".

Following the Mumbai terror attacks, the question on everybody's minds is: to what extent is the Pakistani state implicated in this terrorist attack? The civilian president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, has insisted that the terrorists were "non-state actors", not directly sponsored by the State of Pakistan.

However, there is a larger issue here than just whether or not the State of Pakistan has directly paid and armed the terrorists who attacked Mumbai. The larger issue is that hatred towards India is very much a state sponsored ideology in Pakistan. Indeed, it goes well beyond a state-sponsored ideology. Anti-Indianism is the very definition of the Pakistani state as it exists today. As long as this remains the case, all terrorism originating from Pakistan and directed against India must be seen as having at least the implicit support of the Pakistani State.

What Should Be Done?

By Pakistan

Pakistan has to realize that compulsive hostility towards India cannot be the basis of a viable national identity. An alternative national identity must be developed. One possible candidate: a distinct cultural-geographical identity of Pakistan as the home of the "Indus People".

By India

India sometimes takes the threat from Pakistan far too seriously - sometimes even viewing Pakistan as an existential threat. India needs to realize that Pakistan's hostility towards India constitutes a far greater existential threat to Pakistan itself, than to India. India should also accept that "historical blunder" though it may have been, Partition is irreversible and Pakistan is here to stay. It is in India's interest that Pakistan is transformed into a stable, prosperous state that has shed its compulsive hostility towards India.

By the International Community

The International Community must realize that there are fundamental ideological differences between India and Pakistan, ideological differences that are unlikely to be resolved in the short term. So rather than being fixated on the remote possibility of friendship between the two states, the focus should be on managing a hostile state-to-state relationship in a civilized manner. Basic "rules of the game" should be drawn up, red lines should be clearly established, and so on.

A Shared Cultural and Civilizational Heritage

In the India-Pakistan relationship, one finds a remarkable paradox: while the state-to-state relationship is ideologically hostile, warm personal friendships between Indians and Pakistanis at the individual level are common. This is not surprising, since Indians and Pakistanis have a shared cultural and civilizational heritage, and have much in common. There are limits to how far this can go, since nationality is an important part of individual identity, but still, people-to-people friendships between Indians and Pakistanis offer a ray of hope.

In the end, it may just be the shared cultural and civilizational heritage and people-to-people friendships that will overcome the ideological differences between the two states.

P. Sainath and Farmers' Suicides in India

2008-11-21T23:17:00.000-08:00

P. Sainath is one of India's most exalted journalists today. Last year he was awarded a Ramon Magsaysay Award for "his passionate commitment as a journalist to restore the rural poor to India's consciousness, moving the nation to action".

I read Sainath's writing occasionally, and last week I attended a talk by him at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here are some of my thoughts on Sainath and on farmers' suicides in India - an issue with which Sainath in intimately connected.

Why Sainath is Important

Today's English educated urban upper middle class India remains almost totally ignorant of rural India. An English language journalist seriously interested in rural India is the rarest of rare creatures. It is therefore remarkable that Sainath has decided to devote his career to reporting about rural India. What is even more remarkable is that Sainath, with his passion and eloquence, has been able to successfully carve out a space for himself in the India's English language media.

For this reason alone, Sainath deserves much acclaim.

Farmers' Suicides: Why Sainath's Analysis is Deeply Flawed

Sainath is a remarkable journalist. However, he does not limit himself to reporting. Though he does not claim any special expertise as a researcher or an economist, he offers a very stark analysis of the problems of rural India. While I agree with some parts of his analysis (the existence of an agrarian crisis, the negative impact of industrialized countries' farm subsidies, etc.), I feel that much of Sainath's analysis is, sadly, deeply flawed.

Sainath's Analysis

The issue most closely associated with Sainath is farmers' suicides. According to him, the story goes as follows.
1. In recent years there has been a huge surge in farmers' suicides in rural India.
2. Farmers' suicides are driven by indebtedness.
3. Rising agricultural input costs are responsible for much of the indebtedness.
4. Corporations, freer markets, and globalization are responsible for the rise in input costs, and hence form the root cause of farmers' suicides.

Thanks largely to Sainath, the issue of farmers' suicides in India has become something of a cause celebre in the global anti-globalization movement today.

The Reality of Farmers' Suicides in India

Sainath's uses data from India's National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) to support his narrative. According to the NCRB data, the total number of suicides in India has risen from 95,829 in 1997 to 118,112 in 2006, an annual growth rate of 2.4%. Farmers' suicides have increased from 13,622 in 1997 to 17,060 in 2006, an annual growth rate of 2.5%. India's population, meanwhile, has been growning at 1.93% annually (between 1991 and 2001).

Total suicides and farmers' suicides in India (reference)

Farmers' suicides as a percentage of total suicides (reference)

It is evident from the data that the number of suicides in India - whether farmer or non-farmer - has grown only slightly over the last decade, especially when adjusted for a growing population. Farmers' suicides as a percentage of total suicides in India has remained fairly constant at around 15%.

Clearly, it is a false notion that farmers' suicide rates in India have shot up dramatically in the last few years.

Farmers' Suicides in Yavatmal District, Maharashtra

While the notion of a huge surge in farmers' suicides in India is largely false, maybe there are pockets where farmers' suicides represent a serious problem.

Let us take a closer look at Yavatmal District in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, considered by Sainath as the epicenter of the farmers' suicide crisis. An investigation into farmers' suicides in Yavatmal District was carried out by Meeta and Ravilochan in conjunction with the Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA). The findings were published in 2006 in a book called Farmers Suicide: Facts and Possible Policy Interventions. The following are some of the points in this book.

Yavatmal District has the highest suicide rate in Maharashtra.

For the years studied, the total number of suicides in Yavatmal District was 640, 819, 832, 787 and 786, in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004, respectively. In each of these years, suicides of farmers and agricultural workers represented 23, 24, 23, 22, and 30 percent, respectively, of all suicides.

The researchers conducted case studies of individual farmers' suicides in Yavatmal District. A total of 148 case studies are presented in the book. To give a flavor of these case studies, two are very briefly described below.

Case 46. A 45 year old farmer who committed suicide by consuming poison in 2004. He had 3 acres of land. There was a crop loan of Rs. 3,954 taken in 2001 from the Primary Agricultural Credit Society, which remained unpaid. In 2003-04 he spent Rs. 10,000 in treating his wife who was a psychiatric patient at a private clinic.
Case 120. A 50 year old farmer who committed suicide by consuming poison in 2004. He had 19 acres of land. There was an outstanding loan of Rs. 33,000 with the Bank of Maharashtra, and another outstanding loan of Rs. 8,000 from the Primary Agricultural Credit Society. In 2004 he spent Rs. 60,000 on the marriage of his second daughter. He used to drink alcohol and also gamble. He was having an affair with his bhabhi (sister-in-law). His affair had been discovered shortly before his suicide.

According to the authors of this study,

We found that while indebtedness was rampant, there was little clarity: was it disabling, to what extent, and who was responsible. On one side, indebtedness as high as 75% has been reported since the early 20th century but it was not considered disabling. On the other side, in the early 21st century, only 14% of the victims had indebtedness that resulted in alienation of land and/or animals. Moreover, we discovered that a loan from a rapacious relative rather than a bank or moneylender was often the cause of economic distress of the victim.

What comes out clearly from this study is that each suicide is a unique and complex phenomenon - the reasons and motivations are varied and multifaceted. To find a single cause, one can certainly try to look for common threads running through the suicides, but one must keep in mind that this is bound to be a substantial oversimplification of a highly complex and multidimensional phenomenon.

Implausible and Plausible Causes of Farmers' Suicides

Sainath attributes farmers' suicides to rising indebtedness. How plausible is his reasoning?

It is true that most farmers who have committed suicides have outstanding loans against them. But can that be isolated as the single most important cause for suicide? The fact is that most farmers who do not commit suicide also have outstanding loans against them. To me, factors like poor farm productivity, medical problems, social pressure to spend lavishly on a daughter's wedding, etc., seem to be at least as important as debt - if not more so - in driving people to suicide.

Sainath's further attribution of blame to economic liberalization, globalization, "the neoliberal agenda", etc., are even more implausible. As can be seen clearly from the NCRB data, the crisis of farmers' suicides is not a nationwide phenomenon, but is visible only in certain pockets. Surely it make sense to look for local factors, not just national or global ones. Nation-wide issues like growing cash crops (instead of food crops) are equally applicable to farmers in, say, Gujarat. So how come there are so few suicides among cotton farmers in Gujarat?

A much more plausible cause for cotton farmers' distress in Maharashtra is provided by Sharad Joshi, leader of the Shetkari Sanghatana, an important farmers' organization in Maharashtra. According to Joshi, the primary villain is the Maharashtra State Cotton Monopoly Procurement Scheme - a mechanism that makes the state government the sole buyer of cotton in Maharashtra, and despite generous promises, usually pays farmers less than prevailing market prices. Cotton farmers in Gujarat, who, by contrast, enjoy better access to markets, a state government that invests in infrastructure, and access to new technologies, are witnessing unprecedented prosperity.

Suicides as a Development Indicator

Every suicide is an incredibly sad event. However, a basic question that must be asked is: how valid is suicide rate as an indicator of human development?

Comparison of suicide rates

According to Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, both eminent developmental economists,

The relevance of the suicide rate as a basic development indicator is far from clear. Indeed, many countries with high suicide rates (e.g., the Scandinavian countries) are doing extremely well in terms of overall social opportunities, and it would be quite odd to take their high suicide rates as a severe indictment of their development record. Suicide rates do correlate with specific social problems such as high rates of unemployment or divorce ... and it is quite possible that problems of this kind contribute to the high rate of suicide in Kerala. But these problems, such as they are, do not detract from Kerala's achievements in other, more fundamental fields such as health and education, just as - say - Finland's high suicide rate does not detract from its success in guaranteeing extensive social opportunities to its citizens.

Farmers' Suicide Crisis in Perspective

Sainath depicts farmers' suicides as one of the worst humanitarian crises facing India. So here are some statistics to keep things in proper perspective.

1. In 2006, 17,060 farmers committed suicide in India.

2. Every year in India some 400,000 to 500,000 children under the age of five die from diarrhea. Diarrhea and other waterborne infectious diseases can be easily prevented simply by improving the infrastructure for drinking water and sanitation.

3. In India some 35,000 people die every year from rabies, i.e., every year twice as many Indians die from rabies alone as from farmers' suicides. Rabies can be very easily prevented, simply by removing stray dogs from public areas.

4. Some 4,000 people die every year in accidents in the Mumbai Suburban Railway system alone (Mumbai city's mass transit system). This is just one example of the enormous numbers of accidents and fatalities that plague India's transportation system - a result of woefully inadequate infrastructure and a virtual absence of even basic safety features.

Such statistics (and there are many more) point to the need for more, not less, economic growth and development in India.

India's Agrarian Crisis

While I disagree with Sainath on many things, I do agree with him that India is facing an agrarian crisis.

One need not look for clues to India's agrarian crisis in suicide statistics - there are many other more obvious pointers, such as anemic growth in agricultural output. The plot below of yield-per-hectare of foodgrains in India illustrates this problem.

Foodgrains yield in India (reference)

This figure points to the issue that is at the heart of India's agrarian crisis: after a period of rapid growth during the Green Revolution, agricultural productivity in India has tapered off. As a result, farm incomes are under pressure. This is in sharp contrast to the industrial and service sectors of the economy, which are booming.

Economic Liberalization and Agriculture

In India the government started a process of economic liberalization in 1991, which aimed to move India away from a Soviet-style statist economic model to a much more free market oriented economic model. Anti-globalizers like Sainath blame economic liberalization for the agrarian crisis in India. I disagree completely. I think it is exactly the opposite - that it is not economic liberalization but rather the lack of it in the agricultural sector that is to blame. If increased economic freedom has made Indian industry boom, why should Indian agriculture be denied the same opportunity?

Below are two examples of how economic liberalization can help Indian farmers.

Consider farmland. Farming in India is not a particularly lucrative profession. It is thus no surprise that, according to a major survey, as many as 40% of Indian farmers would like to give up farming if they had a choice. I think it is important to give these farmers the liberty to monetize the most important asset that they possess - their land - and use the capital to embark on alternative ventures if they so desire. Unfortunately, India's stringent and stifling land regulations do not allow this to happen. According to Barun Mitra,

Indian industry can raise capital from the global market on the basis of a prospectus, which promises performance in the future. But Indian farmers can't raise adequate capital on the basis of the land asset which they already possess.... It is critical that the value of the land of farmers, often their only asset, is maximized, and it is made simple to capitalize. The problem facing the poor is not their poverty, but inability to capitalize their assets... Restrictions such as zoning, land ceiling and land use laws, along with unclear titles and poor land records, grossly undervalue land prices. ... The result is a greatly distorted land market. At one end, there are landowners, millions of small and marginal farmers, who can't even know the market value of their land. At the other end, there are the land mafia and speculators.

Consider farm technology. Like any other sector, to increase productivity, agriculture too needs new and innovative technologies. The good news is that recent advances in fields like biotechnology, genetic engineering, etc., offer immense promise. The bad news is that, partly in response to demands from anti-globalization groups, strict restrictions and prohibitions have been imposed on many of these new technologies.

Gail Omvedt, an American-born Indian scholar who married into a farming family in India has this to say,

Behind the appeal of the campaign is a distorted image of farmers ... which depicts them romantically but demeaningly as backward, tradition-loving, innocent and helpless creatures carrying on with their occupation for love of the land and the soil, and as practitioners of a "way of life" rather than a toilsome income-earning occupation. These imagined farmers have to be protected from market forces and the attacks of multinationals, from the seductions of commercialization and the enslavement of technologies...

Farmers may love the land they work on ... But they are people who are trying to scratch out a living, who want a better life for their children and for whom farming is a source of income and not a very good income. They are familiar with hybrid seeds ... They buy them, try them out, and refuse to use them if they do not perform... Farmers are economic actors and capable of making choices.

The way to overcome widespread poverty is to increase opportunities for people to fully utilize their own talents and abilities. I believe that if given the opportunity, most human beings will be able to overcome poverty through their own enterprise and hard work. For this, economic liberalization and better market access are vitally necessary.

This is not to suggest that the market, by itself, is the answer to all problems. Markets need to be well regulated, with regulations designed to increase choice rather than stifle initiative. And social safety nets must accompany free markets, so that people can survive occasional downturns and bad luck, and live through the vicissitudes of "creative destruction".

Story Versus Analysis

Even though I disagree with much of Sainath's analysis, I can see where he is coming from. He is a journalist - a very good journalist - who is on the lookout for a story that a section of his audience can connect with. His urban English newspaper reading audience, immersed in a post-industrial economy, probably has very little knowledge or interest in the nuances of Maharashtra's cotton procurement system, or in serious but mundane problems like stray dogs and rabies. Maybe Sainath's anti-globalization angle is necessary to attract a certain ideologically inclined section of the metropolitan audience.

Sadly this means that reasoned analysis is sacrificed, and good reporting is lost, in the blind rhetoric of anti-globalization.

A Rising Post-American India

2008-09-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria's new book, "The Post American World" is thoroughly engaging and insightful. It is, he says, "not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else." About half the book is devoted to describing how China and India had lost their creativity and their dynamism over the last few centuries, and how today the spread of modernity is bringing a new vitality to these societies. Zakaria is a perceptive observer and provides an engrossing account of how these two societies are negotiating modernity and globalization in their own different ways. It is all very compelling and thought provoking. Being an Indian, I read these sections on India with particular interest.

Zakaria is all praise for modernity and economic growth. He discusses India's post-1991 economic reforms. "The new economic vigor is stirring things up everywhere," he says, and "you can feel it even the slums." The central point that Zakaria makes in his book is that new-found economic vitality in countries like China and India is fundamentally changing our world, resulting in the "rise of the rest."

But how does this new transformation play out in the "post-American" countries? Who welcomes it? Who opposes it? What can be done to improve it? Here, I explore some of these issues with respect to India.

Mixed Views on Economic Reforms

Zakaria provides a fascinating description of the exuberance generated by India's growth story at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2006. Paradoxically, nothing resembling that has ever been on display in the Indian heartland. Most ordinary Indians appear to be merrily unaware of the fact their country is now being viewed differently by the world -- as rising new "post-American" power.

Zakaria touches upon this Indian ambiguity, at one point calling the recent economic reforms "stealth reforms," hinting at the necessity felt by the reformers to fly below the public radar. He attributes this to the normal chaotic workings of Indian democracy. While that is partly true, I do think that there is more to it than just that.

Widespread Indifference

The vast majority of Indians are either indifferent to the economic reforms, or only mildly supportive. The reason for this is simply that most Indians lie outside the scope of the new economic miracle. I believe that the biggest failure of India's economic reforms has been its narrow scope. While these reforms have energized the corporate sector, they have never been extended to the "informal sector" that employs 90% of India's workforce. True, there are trickle-down benefits for everybody. But the direct and most substantial benefits accrue to only a tiny percentage of the Indian population.

There is great potential for broadening the scope of economic reforms in India. But for now, the Soviet-inspired "License Raj" still rules over the informal sector. Consider, for example, the cycle-rickshaw (pedicab) business in Delhi. Most rickshaw-pullers in Delhi are newly arrived migrants from villages, with neither the money, nor the desire to buy a rickshaw outright. They rent rickshaws from rickshaw-fleet owners, most of whom are themselves enterprising rickshaw-pullers who started small but after years of hard work have come to own fleets of rickshaws. Without paying any heed to this reality, Delhi's rickshaw regulations stipulate that one can ply a rickshaw only if he is the owner of the vehicle. In addition, the officially sanctioned quota of 99,000 rickshaw licenses in Delhi is ridiculously out of proportion with the actual demand, with cycle-rickshaws on Delhi's streets currently numbering around 600,000. Because of stifling restrictions and quotas, almost all of Delhi's rickshaw pullers are forced into a web of illegality where they have to pay frequent and arbitrary bribes just in order to carry on with their livelihoods.

If only the dysfunctional and restrictive "License Raj" in India's informal sector could be reformed to make way for more economic freedom and initiative, it would enable many millions to overcome poverty through their own enterprise and hard work. Unfortunately, the architects of India's economic reforms seem totally disinterested in broadening the scope of the reforms beyond the corporate sector.

Vocal Opposition from Eco-Romantics

In India there exists a small but vocal school of thought that takes a very negative view of modernity, development, economic growth, etc. They view modern India as a society in rapid decline -- quite the opposite of Zakaria's exuberant view of India rising. Their ideal is some vaguely defined pre-modern pre-Enlightenment Golden Age, where society lived in "harmony" with itself and with nature. In this view, India should give up its vain attempts to achieve progress and growth, and instead revert to a society where people are engaged in traditional occupations, where needs are limited, ambition is absent, and subsistence production is sufficient to keep everybody happy.

Typical of this world-view is this statement from Vandana Shiva, a prominent eco-romantic,

Modern concepts of economic development, which [economist Jeffrey] Sachs sees as the "cure" for poverty, have been in place for only a tiny portion of human history. For centuries, the principles of sustenance allowed societies all over the planet to survive and even thrive.

While these eco-romantics are very vocal, they enjoy only very limited support within India. In fact, the eco-romantic world-view is grounded in the West, and seems to be more celebrated in the West, especially among environmental and anti-globalization circles, than in India.

Dalit Support for Rapid Economic Growth

In India's traditional hierarchical caste system, untouchables, who now call themselves Dalits (meaning "oppressed"), lie at the bottom of the pyramid. Dalits are still the most disadvantaged section of Indian society. How they view modernity and development is especially relevant since eco-romantics like Vandana Shiva claim to be upholding the interests of India's poor and the downtrodden in opposing modernity and development.

Typical of the Dalit outlook is the view expressed by Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit columnist. While conceding that there is still a long way to go, he insists that Dalits are indeed benefiting from economic growth. He says that Dalits are now able to afford some consumer goods, like cell phones, shampoos, and occasionally, even cars. He notes with satisfaction that while less than 0.85 percent of Dalit families used shampoo in 1990, 81 percent use it regularly in 2007. According to Prasad,

The untouchable has been touched by India's growth. Dalits are coming out from hunger and humiliation ... Capitalism is beginning to break the caste system.

One of the main reasons that eco-romantics oppose modernity and development is that it threatens traditional lifestyles and livelihoods. Dalits, on the other hand, welcome modernity and development precisely because it threatens traditional lifestyles and heredity-based livelihoods, which they consider to restrictive, bigoted, and exploitative.

Future Direction of India's Economic Growth

India's growth story is just beginning. The future holds immense promise. Zakaria puts it very aptly when he says, "it is as if hundreds of millions of people had suddenly discovered the keys to unlock their potential." He proclaims that it is nothing less than "the birth of India as an independent society -- boisterous, colorful, vibrant, and, above all, ready for change."

Along with immense promise, the future also holds immense challenges. How to broaden India's economic growth and make it more inclusive remains the greatest of all challenges.

Against Anti-Consumption

2008-07-08T02:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks at the Breakthrough Blog, there has been some discussion and debate over consumption and anti-consumption (see my post "Is Consumption Evil" here and Michael Shellenberger's post "The UnGandhi Generation" here). This post is intended to be a continuation of this discussion.

The History of Consumption

Consumption was probably invented thousands of years ago by one of our hunter-gatherer ancestors who figured out that he was better at making stone tools than at hunting deer and decided to set up a business supplying stone tools to hunters. Over the centuries, as division of labor has become more and more complex, so too has consumption become ever more intricate and elaborate.

Here is a 1776 quote from the "father of economics" Adam Smith describing this phenomenon.

The greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor....To take an example, therefore, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business, nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it, could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches ... One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head.

This miracle that Adam Smith calls the "greatest improvement in the productive powers of labor" has enabled mankind to achieve the high standard of living that we see around us today in the developed world. It is based on the idea of division of labor supported by consumption of labor. Non-pin-makers consume the pin-makers' labors, and when pin-makers consume food, they consume the labor of farmers.

Agrarianism Versus Wilderness Environmentalism

Consumption does involve use of natural resources (humans being part of nature, human resources are also natural resources, but I have used "natural resources" here to specifically mean non-human natural resources). There are also by-products of consumption - emissions from machinery, for example. It is this use of natural resources, and undesirable byproducts of consumption that form the basis of environmentalists' objections to consumption. This is certainly a valid point. Up to this point I agree with environmentalists. However, I do not agree with them that the solution lies in abandoning the idea of technological and economic development and instead adopting the "grow your own food", "make your own stuff", "live off the land" model - a localized self-reliant low-tech small-scale subsistence agrarian system.

The Earth has a total land area of approximately 36 billion acres and a human population of some 6 billion, which works out to about 6 acres per person. Now, considering that there are large parts of the Earth that are impossible to farm (Antarctica, Siberia, the Sahara, etc.), if everybody on Earth was to adopt a "grow your own food" approach, I think pretty much every farm-able square inch of land on Earth would have to be converted to farmland just to sustain the human population.

In light of today's environmentalists' championing the localized small-scale low-tech agrarian system as the answer to the world's environmental problems, it is interesting to compare this approach with that of John Muir, one of the architects of modern environmentalism, and the founder of the Sierra Club. Though he lived in a much more agrarian age than today, Muir never advocated the small-scale low-tech agrarian system as environmentally friendly. Instead, he was a strong proponent of preserving pristine wilderness areas. He was as much against converting wilderness areas into small farms as he was against industrial-scale projects in Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy. Muir had such great antipathy towards the small-scale low-tech agrarian system that he characterized farm animals as "hoofed locusts". In Muir's vision, large parts of the world are to be kept aside and protected as pristine wilderness areas. Unsaid, but implied in Muir's approach is the assumption that most human beings will not live directly off the land, but rather will fulfill much of their needs and desires with the help of other resources - human resources.

Human Resources and Natural Resources

In a modern economy like in the U.S., most people live largely off human resources rather than natural resources. Most of us earn our living off our education, our talent, our labor, rather than from crude oil, lumber, etc. The bulk of consumption in a modern economy consists of human resource consumption rather than natural resource consumption. Consider, for example, this blog. When you read this blog, you are in effect consuming my ideas. But you and I are also consuming computers produced by Dell and HP, network connectivity provided by AT&T and Comcast, and software and servers provided Google and Microsoft; web advertisers are consuming your "clicks"; and so on. This consumption does indeed involve natural resources. Computers need to be manufactured from raw materials. Energy is needed to power the computers and run the giant power-hungry server clusters over at Google and Microsoft. But this natural resource consumption pales in comparison to the human resource consumption that is involved - the ideas, the innovation, the software and hardware design, the logistics, and so on. I would say that when you read this blog, more than 90% of the consumption is human resource consumption and only 10% or less is natural resource consumption.

I do realize that we have serious problems with the 10% of consumption that involves natural resources. Even though the percentage is small, it is still large in absolute terms. And greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming is a huge issue. In fact, not only does natural resource consumption threaten the environment and all the world's inhabitants, in my view, it can distort human society as well. Consider Saudi Arabia. While the economies of most countries are powered primarily by human resource consumption, the Saudi economy is driven mostly by natural resource (crude oil) consumption. Dependent on human resources, most countries realize that it is in their interest to fully develop their human resources - by improving education, for example. Not so Saudi Arabia. Valuing human resources, most countries try to provide opportunities to all citizens including women, who represent fully half the available national talent. In Saudi Arabia on the other hand, with human resources counting for very little, women are kept locked up and denied even basic rights and opportunities.

Consumption as a Tool to Advance Environmentalism

Considering that indiscriminate consumption of natural resources is environmentally unsustainable, causes greenhouse gas emissions, and potentially perverts human society, I am fully in favor of changing our natural resource consumption patterns so as to make it more environmentally friendly and sustainable. However, I do not believe that the solution lies in drastically reducing our overall consumption. Since the bulk of our consumption consists of human resource consumption (which is good), the absolutist anti-consumption approach risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Moreover, given that there are six billion people on Earth, all desiring a decent quality of life, I believe that promoting the low-tech small-scale agrarian model is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve problems like global warming.

Instead of promoting an anti-consumption ideology, I think we should use consumption as a tool to encourage new and innovative technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address other environmental problems - technologies like solar energy, wind energy, electric vehicles, biotechnology, etc.

Is Consumption Evil?

2008-06-12T09:14:00.000-07:00

One major tendency among many environmentalists today is to valorize asceticism and to criticize consumerism. On this topic a lively debate has ensued over the last few days in response to Michael Shellenberger's blog post criticizing Gandhi for his advocacy of poverty and rejection of modernity.

Representing one side in this debate is "No Impact Man" Colin Beavan, who is on quest to to "reduce his impact" on the planet by giving up consumerism and eschewing many of the modern products and services that we take for granted in our daily lives.

I certainly admire the efforts of No Impact Man and others in the "personal sustainability" bandwagon. I am impressed by their earnestness and zeal to make the world a better place. However, I disagree substantially with their underlying ideology. The arguments they make are fallacious. Below are some of their arguments and my responses.

Argument no. 1. Consumption is evil because it uses up the earth's limited natural resources and causes global warming and other environmental problems.

No Impact Man and other anti-consumerist environmentalists look at products and services only from the point of view of the raw materials they consume. However, a product is much more than that. Consider the Apple iPhone, which was brought up in the debate cited above. Say someone buys a new iPhone for $199. How much of the $199 goes into the actual raw materials? I don't have the actual numbers, but I am willing to bet that if you try to sell the few ounces of sand (for the silicon chips), copper ore (for the internal wiring), crude oil (for the plastic, and for the transportation from factory to consumer), and other raw materials that go into making an iPhone, no one will be willing to pay you even $20 for it. So are people just plain stupid that they are willing to fork out $199 for an iPhone? Surely not. Then what is the extra $179 for? The answer has to be that people are paying not just for the raw materials, but for the human genius. Each iPhone consists of not just of a few ounces of sand and copper, but a huge dose of human ingenuity, human creativity and human toil. An iPhone is 90% human genius and 10% raw materials. Or, to put it another way, it is 90% human resources and 10% non-human natural resources.

If you throw away consumption because of the utilization of non-human natural resources, you also throw away the utilization of human resources that comes with it and actually forms the bulk of consumption. And without the utilization of human resources and human talent, these talents will go untapped, unrecognized and unrewarded. What does this do to the idea of development and civilization, whose ultimate aim is to provide as many people as possible opportunities to nurture and utilize their talents and abilities? If we were to stop consumption just because of problems with 10% of it, it would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Buying and selling being two sides of the same coin, if you refuse to buy other people's talents, the day cannot be far off when you will not be able to sell your own talents - your ideas, your abilities, your labor.

This is not to say that we need not worry about the 10% of consumption that involves natural material resources. I admit that there are problems - global warming being the biggest one. However, the answer cannot be to stop or drastically reduce consumption altogether. The answer must lie in using human ingenuity to develop new technologies to ensure that the 10% of consumption that involves non-human resources is environmentally sustainable. New technologies have to be found. New forms of energy have to be developed. New hi-tech recyclable materials have to be invented. New efficiencies have to be found.

Argument no. 2. Consumption is evil because it snatches natural resources away from those in the developing world who are less fortunate than we are.

According to this argument, the problem of poverty in the developing world is caused by people in the developed world using up more than "their share" of natural resources. There is a grain of truth in this argument, at least for a handful of globally traded commodities, like oil. If tomorrow Americans were to cut gasoline consumption drastically, worldwide demand would fall and more people in the developing world would be able to afford it. But this is hardly likely to make a serious dent in poverty in India and Africa. The reason for poverty in the developing world is not the lack of natural resources, but rather the lack of demand for those these peoples' talents and labor. In other words, the primary cause of poverty is non-utilization or under-utilization of human resources. The key to fighting poverty therefore lies in making more opportunities available to more people in the developing world so as to enable them nurture and "sell" their talents and labor. This means that what the poor in India, Africa, etc., need most are education, health care, functioning infrastructure, and access to markets.

Consider the poor living in inner-city neighborhoods in the U.S. Can their poverty be eliminated simply by reducing consumption elsewhere in the country? I don't think so. Rather the answer to poverty surely lies in providing better schools, better health care, and better job opportunities.

American consumption, by increasing the overall demand for human labor, can actually help reduce worldwide poverty, as it has already done in China.

Argument no. 3. The problem is not with consumption per-se, but that consumption in the U.S. has crossed all limits. It is excessive consumption that is evil.

I am not a believer in unrestrained or rampant consumerism. I believe in moderation in everything. I believe in the golden mean. However, I believe it is up to individuals and families to decide the extent and form of consumption they are comfortable with. It is up to each individual to decide what to consume and to define what is "excess" and what is "moderate". Some may like to buy books, some may like gadgets like the iPhone, some may like shoes, some may like to travel, and some may scrimp on everything else but splurge on their children's education. Who is to say what is excessive and what is moderate? One individual can choose to reduce all consumption to a bare minimum and shout from the rooftop how happy that makes her, just as another person can splurge on gadgets, or shoes, or whatever, and proclaim how happy that makes him. That is perfectly fine. All that I object to is the implication some people convey (perhaps unintentionally) that their particular consumption pattern is somehow morally superior to others, and the corresponding tendency to look down scornfully on the consumption patterns of others.

Gandhi the Modernist?

2008-06-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Note: I wrote this essay for the Breakthrough Institute Blog. This first appeared here. The Breakthrough Institute, founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is a progressive think tank focusing on environmental issues.

A few days ago, Michael Shellenberger blogged about how some of India's most prominent thinkers, like the leader of the downtrodden, Babasaheb Ambedkar, and poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore, have critiqued Mahatma Gandhi's anti-technology, anti-modern and anti-Western-Civilization views. Not only are Ambedkar and Tagore's views important, if one takes a closer look at Gandhi's life, one does not really find a clear-cut rejection of modernity even there.

Though it is true that Gandhi severely criticized modernity, it is not often understood just how much Gandhi was an integral part of a rapidly-modernizing India and the role he himself played in this process. Gandhi was born in 1869, a mere seven years after the death, in 1862, of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last ruler of the Mughal dynasty. It was only in 1857, just twelve years before Gandhi's birth, that the Mughal Empire, already much diminished from its earlier glory, had come to an end, symbolizing the final end of the old feudal order. Bahadur Shah Zafar held pre-modern feudal values -- values that are almost impossible for us to even comprehend today. His social and political horizons were limited and he spent most of his energy squabbling over who should become the heir apparent to the Mughal throne (For more, read William Dalrymple's brialliant new book, "The Last Mughal." Read my review of the book here.).

The Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar and Gandhi were both prominent Indian political figures in their respective eras. However, they had very little in common. Though their lives almost overlapped, in their thinking and in their world-views, they may well have been separated by centuries. For all his criticism of modernity, Gandhi, unlike Zafar, was firmly rooted in the modern world. His critique of modernity was located within modernity itself.

Gandhi was part of the first generation of Indians to grow up in a post-feudal India. At the age of around eleven Gandhi enrolled in Rajkot's Alfred High School, part of first sizable generation of Indians to get a modern education. In 1888 Gandhi set sail for England to study law. Here again, part of the first sizable generation of Indians to seriously engage with the outside world. In 1893 (an incident shown the movie Gandhi) he stood up for his rights when he was thrown out of a 'Whites-only' railway coach in Pietermatizburg, South Africa. The idea that Gandhi stood up for that day, the idea that all individuals have equal rights -- though not always honored in practice -- is very much a modern ideal, an ideal that lies at the very core of modernity.

In 1915 Gandhi returned to India, and was soon leading the struggle for Indian independence, inspired by the modern concepts of liberty and nationalism. By the time Gandhi died in 1948, India was an independent nation. In 1950, India became the world's largest democracy, embracing the very modern ideas of development and progress. Gandhi's life, book-ended on one side by the demise of the last Mughal Emperor and on the the other side by the birth of an independent, democratic, and forward looking Indian Republic, neatly encapsulates India's remarkable journey into modernity -- a journey in which Gandhi himself played a huge role.

To see how just Gandhi much engaged with modernity, consider the following points:

From an early age, Gandhi seems to have had a thirst for modern ideas. What drove 19-year old Gandhi to go to study in London? It was not an easy venture. Traveling overseas was considered taboo for high-caste Hindus, and Gandhi's caste elders declared him an outcast. However, his burning desire to go to England prevailed. He would recall later that he had imagined London as "the home of philosophers and poets, the very center of civilization." Clearly, young Gandhi was very eager to engage with the wider modern world.

Consider Satyagraha, Gandhi's technique of protest through non-violent non-cooperation. The success of this technique was entirely dependent on influencing public opinion, which would have been impossible without modern communication technology -- the railways, the telegraph, newspapers, etc. Consider the Dandi March (shown in the movie Gandhi), in which Gandhi led a group of marchers to the sea and made salt from sea-water, in contravention of the Salt Act. This event by itself was nothing spectacular. It is likely that coastal communities in India had always made small quantities of salt from sea-water, whatever the stipulations of the Salt Act. What was unique in Gandhi's actions was the well-publicized, open, and intentional, breaking of the Salt law. The ability to publicize this event was key to its success. If, instead of telegraphs and newspapers, Gandhi had to rely on messengers on horseback for publicizing the event, it would likely have been a failure. Rather than seeing Satyagraha as a rejection of modernity and technology, I see it as making smart use of available technology and prevailing circumstances to achieve certain political goals without resorting to unnecessary and destructive violence. It is worth noting that while Gandhi criticized modern printing technology, saying "now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people's minds," he himself edited one newspaper or another throughout most of his political life.

Gandhi lived his life on three continents. Between 1888 and 1931 he made as many as 15 international voyages between India, England and South Africa. Though Gandhi eulogized small self-contained and relatively isolated "village republics," he himself was a global traveler long before words like "globalization" came into vogue. And though he denounced the railways on the grounds that they "spread the bubonic plague," "increased the frequency of famines" and "accentuated the evil nature of man," he himself traveled extensively by rail across the length and breadth of India, getting to know India and her people.

As he himself acknowledged, Gandhi's critique of modernity and the West largely originated from the works of Westerners. In criticizing modernity, Gandhi claimed to have "endeavored humbly to follow Tolstoy, Ruskin, Thoreau, Emerson and other writers, besides the masters of Indian philosophy."

Though he had the moral and political authority to oppose it if he wanted to, once independence was achieved, Gandhi actively supported the installation of unabashed modernizers and progressives like Jawaharlal Nehru and Babasaheb Ambedkar in important positions in the new government of independent India.

In my view, Gandhi's critique of modernity, technology and Western Civilization does not indicate a complete repudiation of these, as eco-romantics would have us believe. In my view, the context is very important. As leader of the Indian independence movement, Gandhi realized that independence could only be achieved if Indians embraced a sense of nationalism -- a sense of shared identity, self-confidence and civilizational pride. At a time when attitudes of racial superiority/inferiority were common, and many influential Westerners like Winston Churchill insisted that Indians were not even capable of self-rule, spreading a self-confident Indian nationalism was not an easy matter for an Indian political leader. Gandhi's ideas and his actions must be seen in this light, through the prism of nationalism, through the prism of the Indian independence movement.

Consider Gandhi's simple clothes and his simple lifestyle -- by all appearances a life of poverty. Did he really believe in the virtues of poverty? Or was it an attempt to identify with the masses of poor Indians, so as to create a sense of shared identity? In my mind there is no doubt that it was the latter. In fact, people often had to go to great lengths to accommodate Gandhi's "simple" lifestyle. As Sarojini Naidu is said to have remarked, "It took a lot of money to keep Gandhi is poverty."

In the case of modernity, too, Gandhi's stance was very similar. Rather than a true repudiation of modernity, Gandhi's criticism of modernity stemmed mainly from his desire to encourage a sense of self-confidence and civilizational pride among Indians, and his refusal to cede the higher moral ground to the British for being more modern.

Gandhi's anti-modernity and his glorification of poverty must be seen in the particular context of the Indian independence movement and in light of its particular needs. In today's very different context, invoking Gandhi to criticize modernity or to justify poverty does not make any sense whatsoever. In my view, had Gandhi lived today, he himself probably would not have been a "Gandhian" in the sense being anti-modern or pro-poverty.

A Weekend With Madhu Kishwar

2008-04-27T14:50:00.000-07:00

Madhu Kishwar, founder of Manushi, an eminent Indian social activist, and a truly extraordinary person was in the San Francisco Bay Area a few days ago. I had the opportunity to attend a talk that she gave at Stanford, and also have more informal discussions with her over a lunch and a dinner. It was a wonderful experience.

I have long been an admirer of Ms. Kishwar’s work and I’ve been reading her essays for many years. Now that I have met her in person, I can say that she is also a very warm and friendly human being.

I first came to know of Ms. Kishwar when, some ten years or so ago, I read some of her writing on Indian women’s issues. I found her observations deeply insightful, nuanced and profound. As far as I am concerned, Ms. Kishwar’s series of essays (here is one) on dowry and related issues is some of the best writing I have ever come across on Indian women’s issues. Here is a quote from her.

It has become politically fashionable to attribute all forms of violence and discrimination against women, including female infanticide and female foeticide to the economic burden of dowry that a daughter is said to represent.

Dowry requirements are used as another excuse for considering daughters a burden. The anti-dowry movement, by limiting itself to the constant repetition of ‘dowry abolition’ as a panacea for women’s empowerment and as the primary strategy for ending their oppression, has only helped give further legitimacy to the conventional belief that daughters are an economic liability.

We need to combat the culture of disinheritance if we wish to effectively combat the growing hold of dowry culture.

Though, in my opinion, some of Ms. Kishwar’s best work has been on women’s issues, she has also worked on and written about a myriad other social issues - on communal violence, on Kashmir, on governance, on globalization, on farm policy, on stifling laws and regulations, and so on. On most of these issues I have found her views to be sensible, and in many cases, very close to my own point of view (rather, I found that my own views were close to hers). I fondly recall an incident from a couple of years ago. I had written an article severely critical of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the NBA, the movement opposed to building a dam across the Narmada River). My article was drawing quite a lot of flak from various NBA supporters. As luck would have it, just around that time, Ms. Kishwar came out with her own article criticizing the NBA, which largely validated my own stance.

This is not to say that I agree with Ms. Kishwar on everything. Ms. Kishwar is an unabashed admirer of Mahatma Gandhi. I don’t quite agree with her on this. I greatly admire Gandhi’s non-violence, his humanity, his leadership of the Indian independence movement, and the dignity and self-respect he engendered among so many Indians. However, I have serious reservations about Gandhi’s rejection of modernity and his denunciation of the scientific-technological world-view (for my views on Gandhi, see this). Ms. Kishwar also appears to hold the view that pre-modern pre-British India was a land of milk-and-honey, a land of all-round prosperity and contentment, conceptually very similar to Gandhi’s views expressed in Hind Swaraj. I disagree. I see pre-modern pre-British India as a civilization in precipitous decline, one that had lost its vitality and capacity for internal renewal. I agree with author V.S. Naipaul, who says, “the Indian system [in 1857] ... has come to the end of its possibilities, ... that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before”.

On the whole, it appears that while I have some disagreements with Ms. Kishwar on how we interpret the past, I agree with her on almost everything she has to say about the present.

In recent years Ms. Kishwar has been working with people who make a living in the informal sector in Delhi, people such as cycle-rickshaw pullers, hawkers, vendors, etc. The talk she gave in Stanford was on this topic.

Consider the case of cycle-rickshaws in Delhi. The law holds that no person shall be allowed to ply a cyle-rickshaw unless he himself is the licensed owner of the rickshaw, and also stipulates that no person shall be granted more than one such license. However, most rickshaw-pullers in Delhi are newly arrived migrants from villages, who have neither the money, nor the desire to buy a rickshaw outright. Most rickshaw owners are themselves enterprising ex-rickshaw-pullers who, through dint of hard work over the years, have come to own a fleet of rickshaws. As a result, almost all the rickshaws on Delhi’s streets are “illegal”. So rickshaw pullers and owners, who are after all providing a legitimate service for which there is a legitimate demand, are forced to pay all kinds of bribes to various officials, just in order to carry on with their livelihoods.

Ms. Kishwar asks a question: suppose similarly restrictive laws were applicable to say cars or aircraft? Suppose, the law stipulated that a person can drive a car or pilot an aircraft only if he owns the vehicle, would it make sense? Why should cycle-rickshaws be treated so differently? We all applaud the business success of, say, Jet Airways when they grow their fleet and expand their network. A migrant from a village who comes pennyless to Delhi, becomes a rickshaw puller, and then grows his business to a fleet of rickshaws, is no less entrepreneurial than the executives at Jet Airways. But far from receiving accolades for building a successful business and creating job opportunities, this entrepreneur is hounded by the police and city administrators and is forced to shoulder the huge cost of predatory bribes.

Similarly irrational and restrictive laws apply to most other businesses in the informal economy. In recent years, Ms. Kishwar and Manushi have been involved in a pilot project in a hawker market in Delhi (read Ms. Kishwar’s article about it here). This project aims to demonstrate what can be achieved by legalizing the status of street vendors. On one hand this effort has been has been an enormous success. The hawkers have been very cooperative and, together with Manushi, they have indeed converted the area into a clean, attractive, and well-functioning marketplace. On the other hand, this very success has caused problems. Legalization has meant that corrupt officials and the local mafia have not been able to extort money; and the transformation of a slum-like area into a well-developed market has meant that the market value of each stall has gone up tremendously, making the stalls targets of the mafia. The hawkers and Manushi activists have been subjected to continuous harassment and threats of violence. Eventually, after a series of life-threatening attacks on Manushi activists and Ms. Kishwar herself, she is now forced to live with round-the-clock police security.

Ms Kishwar’s work with rickshaw-pullers, hawkers, etc., is driven by the foundational belief that poverty is an unnatural condition for human beings, and given half a chance, the poor will be able to overcome poverty themselves through their own enterprise and hard work. In other words, Ms. Kishwar believes that the key to fighting poverty lies in unleashing the talents and energies of the poor that have been kept suppressed by a web of stifling laws and regulations. It was rather inspiring to hear Ms. Kishwar declare that there is an entrepreneur in every human being - all that is needed is a chance to succeed. Asked what she thoughts would happen to hawkers and street vendors in India if multinationals like Wal-Mart enter the scene, Ms. Kishwar replied that she was not worried. She is of the opinion that as long as there is a level playing field (i.e., if hawkers/vendors don’t have pay a huge overhead in the form of bribes, etc.) they will be able to compete effectively with Wal-Mart, or at least will find niches where they will be able to thrive.

Ms. Kishwar is a strong proponent of economic liberalization for the poor. As we are all aware, liberalization of the Indian economy has given a massive boost to the corporate sector and many Indian companies have now become globally competitive. Ms. Kishwar points out, however, that liberalization has never reached the poor. In the informal sector, which employs the vast majority of the Indian population, the License Raj still rules, accompanied by rampant corruption. This stifles initiative and enterprise, and perpetuates poverty.

One particularly fascinating aspect that I have noticed in Ms. Kishwar’s positions on various issues is her propensity to take a nuanced and independent stand, while taking practical matters into consideration, rather than a stark black-or-white ideologically extreme stand. This is a quality that is unfortunately increasingly uncommon in today’s world. Consider, for example, the issue of multinationals coming to India. There is a strong pro-multinational business lobby that says that multinationals are the best thing that ever happened. At the other extreme there are strongly anti-multinational groups, such as the World Social Forum, who say that multinationals and corporates are the source of all the world’s evil. Ms. Kishwar takes the nuanced view that multinationals are not the solution to all our problems, nor the source of all evil; but economic liberalization, which allows multinationals to operate, is good for all, and should be extended to the poor. So independent is Ms. Kishwar in her thinking that she states that she refuses to subscribe to any ‘isms’; so much so that she is well known for her essay “why I do not call myself a feminist”.

Unfortunately, in today’s world of 20-second TV soundbites, thoughtful and nuanced voices such as Ms. Kishwar’s tend to be crowded out by ideologically extreme black-or-white views on most issues.

An Appeal

After being in publication for many years, and after having carved out a special niche for itself, Manushi has now ceased publication because of lack of funds. Plans are afoot to restart publication of Manushi. I, as well as some others, who met Ms. Kishwar during her stay in the U.S. have offered to help out. If you can help Manushi - either financially or otherwise - please do so.

[Addeed Later] Please sign this petition in support of Ms. Kishwar and Manushi's fight to secure rights for street vendors in India.

Can a Coal Power Plant Ever be Good?

2008-04-26T11:36:00.000-07:00

Note: I wrote this essay for the Breakthrough Institute Blog. This first appeared here. The Breakthrough Institute, founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is a progressive think tank focusing on environmental issues.

Recently, plans for a new "Ultra Mega" 4,000MW coal fired power plant in India has come in for much criticism from environmentalists. Writing on Grist.org, environmentalist Nathan Wyeth has called this a "monument to a failed approach". According to him,

Investing in coal generation and plugging it into an unreliable grid (rather than building renewables close to consumers or fixing the grid) has the effect of - get ready for this - spurring the construction of small-scale fossil fuel generation on the other end, which is ... incredibly dirty.

In my opinion, Wyeth's analysis is flawed. It does not take into consideration how, and for what purpose, small-scale fossil fuel generation is widely used in India. Let me give you a real-life example.

The company I work for has a software development center in Pune, India, which I occasionally visit. It is a large modern office building, in many ways better than our office here in Silicon Valley, California. However, there is one problem: power cuts. In order to deal with these, our company has installed back-up diesel generators - generators powerful enough to operate the air-conditioning system, the elevators, the lights, the computers, etc. While I was there, power cuts would occur approximately every other day for a couple of hours. The diesel generators would immediately swing into action, providing uninterrupted electric supply, but also spewing out huge quantities of thick black smoke into the city air.

This is surely the worst possible way to generate electricity. It is much worse than a large modern coal power plant, not only in terms of CO2 but even in terms of sheer "pollution" - the odor, the particulate emission, etc. As in my company, the most common reason for installing small-scale diesel generators in India is the need to have a back-up power supply. These diesel generators are expensive to operate, and are used only when absolutely necessary. How long they operate (and how much dirty emissions they produce) therefore corresponds directly to the deficit between the electricity demand and the (grid) supply. If a new power plant - even a coal fired one - can reduce the usage of these small-scale power generators, it will likely reduce carbon emissions overall for a given electricity demand.

Of course, the problems with the electricity grid in India are part of a larger problem of underdeveloped infrastructure - something we take for granted here in the U.S. Governance and administration at local levels have failed to provide adequate utilities and public services, such as electricity distribution, water, maintenance of roads and public transport, etc. There is certainly a very real need for investments in improving the electricity grid in India. However, it would be foolish to take the position that India should not build any new electricity generation capacity until all the flaws in the electricity grid are completely ironed out.

Whatever problems there are in the electricity grid, these problems are equally applicable to some forms renewable energy as well. Wind power is making headway in India, and one of the world's largest wind power companies, Suzlon Energy, is an Indian one. But wind power also needs the grid to deliver electricity to consumers since wind farms tend to be located far from population centers.

The grid losses that Wyeth cites are not as bad as they appear at first glance. True, the statistics on grid losses in India are staggering. However, it is not that all this electricity is somehow vanishing into thin air. The bulk of these losses come from people actually utilizing the electricity and not paying for it. Sometimes, this is done by unscrupulous individuals. However, in many cases, this "lost" electricity is put to perfectly good use. For example, many people living in shanty-towns in India do not have formal electricity connections. Local politicians eager to keep voters happy sometimes arrange for informal electricity connections. This electricity is counted as a "loss" in all the statistics, but is actually put to good use. No doubt, this is far from an ideal arrangement, and cannot substitute for proper commercial arrangements - but it goes to show that not all grid losses should be seen as equally wasteful.

Moving forward, it is clear that the Indian electricity grid needs to be dramatically improved. What is also clear that with a growing population and a growing economy, the legitimate demand for electricity is going to grow by leaps and bounds, and all that new electricity generation capacity has to come from somewhere. The question is: what technologies should be used? I would rank energy generation technologies in order of preference as follows:

1. Renewables (wind, solar, etc.)
2. Clean non-renewables (nuclear)
3. Moderately dirty but efficient fossil fuel power plants (e.g., coal-fired plants like the Tata Ultra Mega plant)
4. Small scale inefficient and extremely dirty generators powered by diesel or other fossil fuels.

Ideally I would like all electricity to be generated by renewables (who wouldn't?). But as we all know, this is not commercially viable today. Insofar as a coal-fired power plant replaces forms of power generation that are far dirtier, like diesel generators, and make electricity available to people without electricity, a relatively efficient coal-fired power plant, such as the Tata Ultra Mega plant, should be seen as a good thing.

Maybe Horses Will Fly - Developing Countries and Global Warming

2008-04-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Note: I wrote this essay for the Breakthrough Institute Blog. This first appeared here. The Breakthrough Institute, founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, is a progressive think tank focusing on environmental issues.

Last week, the New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin blogged about the World Bank's decision to finance a major new coal fired power plant in India. Revkin ended his blog with a question: "Is all of this bad? If you're one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you're a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no."

In response, the famed environmental writer Bill McKibben asked his own question:

"The really interesting question, to follow on the last sentence of the story, is: what if you're an Indian kid looking for a light to read by-and also living near the rising ocean, or vulnerable to the the range expansion of dengue-bearing mosquitoes, or dependent on suddenly-in-question monsoonal rains."

McKibben may think he knows better but I think the answer for that village kid would probably be the same. Take the electricity and the light to read by and worry about malaria and monsoonal rains later. To get some idea of the problems facing people in rural India, just consider the following:

1. In India, the literacy rate is only 64%. The female literacy rate is even lower. In half the households in rural India, there is not a single female member above the age of 15 who can read or write.

2. Out of a population of one billion, more than 300 million Indians live on less than a dollar a day.

3. In India, some 400,000 children under the age of five die each year from diarrhoea caused by easily preventable factors such as poor hygiene and unsafe drinking water.

4. Indian society continues to be plagued by extreme forms of discrimination and exploitation based on the traditional caste system. There are many millions (estimates range from 40 million to 100 million) of bonded laborers (slaves) in India today, mainly belonging to the lowest castes, the Dalits.

5. There still exists widespread discrimination against women in India. Economist Amartya Sen estimates that in the developing world, due to the preference for sons over daughters, and due to the sheer neglect of women and girls, some 100 million women are simply missing.

In this scenario, how can one seriously suggest that the village kid in India should give up her hopes of prosperity, education, and health care today, in order to prevent rising ocean levels many years down the road? What would Americans do in the same situation? Or Europeans? Or human beings anywhere?

There are some very good reasons why people in rural India should first worry about their basic human necessities today, rather than about the long term effects of global warming.

First, if you and your family don't have access to such things as clean water and basic health care, neither you, nor your children, nor your grandchildren may even be around long enough to witness tomorrow, making the future rise or fall of the world's oceans a moot point.

Second, the life of an educated, healthy and modestly prosperous person living in tomorrow's globally-warmed world of higher ocean levels may well be better than the poverty stricken life of an Indian villager in the pre-global-warming world. In other words, even if the most dire predictions about global warming come true, some of the poorest people in the world may still be better off tomorrow if they are able to enjoy some of the fruits of development, such as education, health care, electricity, etc.

Third, and most important, maybe horses will fly. Let me tell you an Indian story about the Mughal Emperor Akbar and his witty minister, Birbal. One day, for some reason, Akbar became very angry with Birbal, and ordered that he be beheaded. Birbal pleaded for his life, but to no avail. Then Birbal hit upon an idea. He promised Akbar, that if he was spared for a year, he would make Akbar's favorite horse fly. Akbar relented, and let Birbal live. When a friend asked Birbal how he planned to make the horse fly, Birbal replied, "anything can happen in a year; Akbar can die; the horse can die; and who knows, maybe the horse will fly." In a slightly different context, what this means is that, first and foremost, human beings need to achieve a certain minimum level of material well-being and sense of security. And once this is achieved, who knows what wonders can happen. If the billions of impoverished people in the developing world can get widespread access to education, health care, and job opportunities, who knows what the unleashing of their talent and energy can achieve. Having met their basic needs, maybe they will start thinking about the environment. Maybe new ideas will burst forth. Maybe new and better energy technologies will be adopted, which will not only address global warming, but also ensure a minimum standard of living for all people everywhere. Maybe horses will fly.

As Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger put it in the book Breakthrough, "the satisfaction of the material needs of food and water and shelter is not an obstacle to but rather the precondition for the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world".

Ambedkar Against Gandhi

2008-03-02T20:11:00.000-08:00

A guilty liberal finally snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle nut, turns off his power, composts his poop, ... generally turns into a tree hugging lunatic who tries to save polar bears and the rest of the planet from environmental catastrophe. - "No Impact Man" Colin Beavan

The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need but not every man's greed. - Mahatma Gandhi

The two quotes above are far separated in time and place, and may differ ever so slightly in phraseology, but they articulate a remarkably similar world-view: mankind has sinned against Nature by promoting industrial development, mass production, and mass consumption; the only way out is to abandon our vain attempts to achieve progress and growth, and instead, embrace a society based on limited ambition, limited needs and subsistence production.

Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, venerated today as the "father of the nation," can be viewed from many different angles - there is Gandhi the nationalist; there is Gandhi the politician; there is Gandhi the prophet of non-violence; and then, there is the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, the repudiator of modernity and technology and "Western-style" industrial development. It is this last anti-modern Gandhi that is ideologically very close to the eco-austerity paradigm advocated many environmentalists today.

Gandhi's rejection of modern civilization and development comes out most forcefully in Hind Swaraj, a short book he published in 1909. Here are some quotes.

Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word "civilization". ... Formerly, in Europe, people ploughed their lands mainly by manual labor. Now, one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam engines and can thus amass great wealth. This is called a sign of civilization. Formerly, only a few men wrote valuable books. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people's minds. ... This civilization takes note neither of morality nor of religion. ... This civilization is irreligion ... This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Mahommed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age.

To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves... We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors therefore set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich or unhappy because he is poor. .... Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade and charged a regulation wage.

Postmodernist scholar, Ashis Nandy, approvingly describes how this anti-modern Gandhi serves to inspire various fringe anti-development, anti-progressive movements today.

This Gandhi is more hostile to Coca-Cola than to Scotch whiskey and considers the local versions of Coca-Cola more dangerous than imported ones. This is because ... he considers it more dangerous if ... long-lasting, deep-rooted Indian structures are created to produce superfluous items of mass consumption. ... This Gandhi - vintage Hind Swaraj - is also bit of a nag and a spoil-sport... It is this Gandhi who has guided the notorious agitation of Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam, Claude Alvares against Operation Flood, and Vandana Shiva against the Green Revolution.

In spite of Gandhi's iconic status in India, his Hind Swaraj world view was never widely accepted by the mainstream. In 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru (who was to become independent India's first Prime Minister in 1947) wrote to Gandhi, "it is many years since I read Hind Swaraj ... but even when I read it twenty years ago it seemed to me completely unreal." He further reminded Gandhi, "the Congress has never considered that picture (portrayed in Hind Swaraj) much less adopted it." It was the nationalist, non-violent, humanist Gandhi who Indians admired and respected - not the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj.

In my view, the most important critique of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj world view came from Babasaheb Ambedkar, one of modern India's most important thinkers and leaders.

Bhimrao Ramji 'Babasaheb' Ambedkar was born in 1891 to a family of "untouchables," who were (and are) at the very bottom of India's strictly hierarchical and hereditary caste system. With his father serving in the Army, young Bhim got a rare opportunity to acquire a modern education. He eventually earned doctorate degrees from Columbia University in the U.S. and from the London Schools of Economics in England, and qualified as a barrister in London. Ambedkar went on to become an important political figure in India and an inspiring leader of the untouchables, the poorest and most underprivileged section of Indian society. Ambedkar is known as the "chief architect of the Indian Constitution" and can be considered as one of the founding fathers of modern India. Today, Ambedkar and his ideas are held in great esteem by the Dalit movement (former untouchables now call themselves "Dalits," which means "oppressed"). Gandhi and Ambedkar are probably the two most revered and idolized figures in India today.

Ambedkar spent three years at Columbia University in New York City - three years that played a crucial role in his intellectual development. Especially influential was his professor John Dewey, of whom Ambedkar reportedly remarked, "I owe my whole intellectual life to Prof. John Dewey." Ambedkar eventually developed a political philosophy that was almost diametrically opposed to Gandhi's Hind Swaraj world view. In Ambedkar's view, the traditional Indian village economy and society - so favored by Gandhi - was fundamentally exploitative of the lower castes. Rather, Ambedkar saw modernity and economic and industrial development as fundamentally emancipatory for the oppressed. Here is a quote from Ambedkar.

In Gandhism, the common man has no hope. It treats man as an animal and no more. It is true that man shares the constitution and functions of animals, nutritive, reproductive, etc. But these are not distinctively human functions. The distinctively human function is reason, the purpose of which is to enable man to observe, meditate, cogitate, study and discover the beauties of the Universe and enrich his life. ... The conclusion that follows is that ... the ultimate goal of man's existence is not reached unless and until he has fully cultivated his mind. ... How then can a life of culture be made possible? It is not possible unless there is sufficient leisure. ... The problem of all problems which human society has to face is how to provide leisure to every individual. ... Leisure means the lessening of the toil and effort necessary for satisfying the physical wants of life. ... Leisure is quite impossible unless some means are found whereby the toil required for producing goods necessary to satisfy human needs is lessened. What can lessen such toil? Only when machines take the place of man. ... Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute. ... The slogan of a democratic society must be machinery, and more machinery, civilization and more civilization. Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people.

Gail Omvedt, an American-born Indian scholar and activist, and a leading authority on Ambedkar, has this to say.

The great values of the Enlightenment and the French revolution are today under attack ... not only in India from advocates of pseudo-swadeshi who would see them as merely "Western" but also world-wide, from postmodernists and eco-romanticists who think "progress" is impossible... Eco-romanticism, taking its justification from Mahatma Gandhi, tends to see history as heading into a downspin. ... [They argue] that the French Revolution is finished; its ideals cannot be extended to Dalits, women or other sections of the marginalized in the world, and we must turn away from this vain effort to achieve "growth" to acceptance of a society based on limited needs, subsistence production, and stasis.

Many environmentalists today take the view that we must abandon the entire concept of development and progress, and should instead embrace the Gandhian ideal of a traditional village-based society with limited needs, limited ambitions, and small-scale subsistence production. They argue that there is no other way out since the earth is threatened by global warming and world is fast running out of its natural resources. I agree that global warming is a serious problem, and indeed, there are certain non-renewable natural resources, like oil, that are in short supply. However, I do not think that things like oil are our most important natural resources. Rather, our most valuable natural resources are human resources - human ingenuity, human creativity and human intelligence. And guess what? Human resources - with some nurturing - are infinitely renewable and have infinite potential. To me, the fundamental idea of development and progress means unlocking human potential - it means making more opportunities available to more people. This process may indeed involve some use of natural resources like oil, and possibly some greenhouse gas emissions, but over-use of natural resources and excessive greenhouse gas emissions are neither necessary nor sufficient for development and progress.

Traditionalism, as advocated by Gandhi, is not all bad. Our traditions and culture give us our sense of community and family. They give us pride and confidence, and a sense of security and belonging, and values that we hold dear. We live in a rapidly changing, globalized world and are faced with a bewildering array of choices. As we negotiate this perplexing but fascinating world, our traditions serve as our foundations, and make us conscious of who we are and where we come from. At the same time, it is extremely important that we embrace development and progress, which empowers us to discover new horizons and open up new vistas. As a well known saying goes, "there are but two lasting bequests we can give our children; one is roots, the other, wings." Tradition serves as our roots, while progress gives us wings.

Note: a slightly longer discussion of Gandhi's and Ambedkar's thoughts is available at my blog here.

The Little Car that Environmentalists Love to Hate

2008-02-02T00:33:00.000-08:00

Car A gets a fuel efficiency of 46 miles per gallon. Car B gets about 50 miles per gallon. Car A is called the Toyota Prius and is hailed by environmentalists as a step towards solving global warming. Car B, a new car called the Tata Nano unveiled by an Indian company, is reviled by environmentalists as disastrous for global warming. The New York Times devotes an entire editorial condemning the Tata Nano. Columnist and author Tom Friedman calls for the Tata Nano to be “taxed like crazy.” The reason for this extreme criticism? The Tata Nano is cheap - very cheap. It is a revolutionary new car design that will cost only about $2,500 and will bring car ownership within reach of millions of new people in the developing world.

The environmentalists’ hypocrisy is breathtaking. How can anything be criticized simply for being affordable? Tomorrow, if college education is made more accessible and affordable in India, will the New York Times denounce it on the grounds that college graduates tend to earn more and buy more consumer goods and hence enlarge their environmental “footprint”? The attitude of many environmentalists today is not unlike that of the Duke of Wellington at the dawn of the railroad era, who criticized the railways on the grounds that they would “only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.”

Many environmentalists take the view that human civilization and development have been unmitigated disasters for the planet. In this view, human activities such as economic development, industrialization, consumerism, car-ownership, etc., have been guilty of destroying the environment and causing global warming. Supposedly the only way out is to curb these human activities and abandon our vain attempts to achieve progress and “growth.” In this view, an ideal society is one that is based on limited ambition, limited needs and subsistence production.

Based on this core idea that human activities are inherently bad for the planet, the solutions that environmentalists propose generally involve imposition of limits, quotas, punitive taxes, restrictions, etc., with the aim of curbing human activities and human initiative.

True, limits and quotas can certainly lead to some modest reductions in energy consumption. However, to address global warming, it is necessary to achieve not just modest reductions, but fundamental paradigm-changing shifts in energy usage. This calls for key breakthroughs in energy technology, which can hardly be achieved through a limits-and-quotas approach. Consider the following:

- As authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger point out, it is highly unlikely that simply introducing restrictive quotas for typewriters would have instigated critical breakthroughs in computer technology. Rather, public investment in science and technology was the key.

- One of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century was the Green Revolution in countries like India. It dramatically increased food production, thereby avoiding the Malthusian catastrophe of a global “gigantic inevitable famine” caused by population growth outstripping food supply. The Green Revolution was built upon new agricultural technologies and infrastructure. Just like the Computer Revolution, it was not primarily the introduction of food quotas, but rather, large public investments and human ingenuity that made the Green Revolution possible.

What many environmentalists do not seem to understand is that if global warming is ever to be solved, it will be solved by human ingenuity, by technological innovation, by further human progress. The idea that the environment should be saved by severely curbing human ingenuity and human initiative is fundamentally flawed. While we should certainly seek to mitigate the negative side-effects of development, the emphasis must be on moving forward, on further human progress. Human civilization and development have been wonderful. People today live longer, fuller, lives, with more prosperity, freedom, opportunity, and choice, than ever before. How can this be a bad thing? The world needs more progress and development, not less.

The solution to global warming lies not in restricting, but rather, in encouraging human ingenuity and human initiative to develop new innovative clean energy technologies. The Tata Nano is part of a trend: the tendency of companies in countries like India and China to take a product, squeeze costs out of it, and make it much more affordable. The most prominent example is the proliferation of ultra-cheap “made in China” products on the shelves of Wal-Mart. Another example is Indian drug companies selling antiretroviral AIDS drugs in Africa for a fraction of the price charged by Western drug companies. Rather than railing against this trend for bringing “Western-style” consumerism within the reach of millions of the world’s less-wealthy, will it not be better if environmentalists seek to utilize this Indian and Chinese ingenuity to drive down the price of clean energy technologies?

At its core, our approach to dealing with global warming must articulate a positive vision that people - including millions in the developing world - can embrace, not just a nightmare that people need to be scared of. As Nordhaus and Shellenberger point out, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is remembered not for his “I have a Nightmare” speech, but for his “I have a Dream” speech.

Imagine if, instead of painting the Tata Nano as a nightmarish “carbon-emitter,” the New York Times editorial had said something like this: “We have a dream that one day every Indian family will be able to afford a car that runs on clean energy. This dream can become a reality if technological innovations make clean energy affordable to all. We call upon the U.S. government to fund a massive new initiative to develop new affordable clean energy technologies.”

Now, that would have been a vision I’d have loved to embrace. Dreams, after all, are far more powerful than nightmares!

On a personal note, my father worked in Tata Motors for many years, and I spent my childhood in India in a township dominated by a Tata Motors factory. Years ago, I myself worked in the company for a few months. For me, the Tata Nano, with its innovative technology, is certainly something to celebrate.

Also see this.

On Environmentalism, Global Warming, and the Tata Nano

2008-01-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, we were witness to a a spectacular event - the unveiling by Tata Motors of the world’s cheapest car ever, the Nano, which has a base price of just Rs. one lakh (Rs.100,000 or US$2,500). When, amidst unprecedented hype and anticipation, the “people’s car” was unveiled, it exceeded all expectations. What we saw was the cutest little car ever, with room for four adults, and with adequate power for Indian city roads.

What the Nano Means for India

The Indian middle class has already fallen in love with the Nano. Some two hundred thousand people thronged the Auto Expo in New Delhi to get their first glimpse of the car (link). And no wonder! According to the rating agency CRISIL, “the new price point translates into a 65% increase in the number of Indian families that can afford a car” (link).

Millions of Indians look to the Nano to fulfil their dreams of car ownership, and most importantly, to provide safe transportation. In Delhi alone about 1,800 people die on on the roads each year - about one-third of them on two-wheelers, while only 5% die in cars (link). In Mumbai more than 3,000 die every year in the city’s dangerously overcrowded commuter rail system alone (link). While unveiling the Nano, the chairman of Tata Motors, Ratan Tata, explained the motivation for developing this car, “I observed families riding on two-wheelers – the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby. It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family.”

The World Takes Note

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Tata Nano has been the very high level of prominence it has received in the world media. This is possibly the first time ever that an Indian product developed by an Indian company has been seen as a worldwide leader in innovation and technology. (see for examples, the New York Times, Businessweek, the Economist, ABC News).

Typical was an article entitled “Can Detroit be Relevant?” in the New York Times, which said,

This week, Rick Wagoner, chief executive of General Motors, was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas talking about driverless cars and the Cadillac Provoq, a concept vehicle powered by a fuel cell. But bigger news came half a world away, at the New Delhi Auto Expo in India. Tata Motors was unveiling the Nano. Nicknamed the People’s Car, the Nano is a small $2,500 car that is expected to revolutionize the auto industry, in India, at least (link).

An Article in a British newspaper actually speculated on the possibility of the Tata Nano ushering in world peace,

Perhaps the idea of the car industry succeeding in bringing peace and prosperity to parts of the developing world where countless governments and other institutions have failed is just too fanciful, but if it ever happens, just remember that it all started with the little Indian (link).

The Detractors

While the Tata Nano has already become India’s pride and joy, and is seen as a world leader in technology and innovation, it does have its share of detractors.

Land Acquisition for the Manufacturing Plant

When Tata Motors was looking for a site to locate a new manufacturing plant for its small car, the state government of West Bengal government successfully persuaded Tata to choose Singur, near Kolkata, as their site. In order to make space for the plant, the West Bengal government had to acquire land from farmers in Singur - a small part of it forcibly. This land acquisition has now snowballed into a major controversy.

While I realize that the West Bengal government could perhaps have done a better job in dealing with the land acquisition at the local level, I fully support their basic idea of turning Singur into an industrial area. It is clear that compared to agriculture, the auto industry in Singur will generate a much higher volume of economic activity, and will also create many more man-days of gainful employment - employment that is likely to be much better in terms of pay, benefits, etc. I do believe that generous compensation should be provided to those who have lost their land, and help and training should be provided as well, to enable them to adjust to their new lives and take advantage of the new economic opportunities that open up.

The Tata Nano and Oil Prices

Some commentators have criticized the Tata Nano on the grounds that widespread car ownership in India will push up the worldwide price of oil (link). This is really an absurd argument. After all, don’t people in India have the right to buy petroleum products (or in economic terms, “create demand” for oil), just as people in the United States or Europe do? It is like criticizing ordinary middle-class families for buying homes and driving up land prices, thereby making it more difficult for the rich to buy their mansions.

It is true that demand for oil has been rising because of economic growth in China, India, etc. However, it is important to note that this is not the only factor driving up the price of oil. The increase in the price of oil has been disproportionately larger than the growth in demand. Today, the price of oil is far far higher than the economic cost of its extraction. The main reason for this is the monopolization of the crude oil market by a cartel of sellers – the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It is well known that when monopolies exist, markets cease to function effectively. That is why most countries have anti-monopoly laws. Unfortunately, no such laws exist for sovereign states. As a consequence, OPEC has been able to indulge in the worst kind of price gouging. In order to counter OPEC’s monopoly, I feel that oil importing countries should organize themselves into a buyers’ cartel. The combined buying power of an anti-OPEC buyers’ cartel should be used to bargain effectively with OPEC and drive down the price of oil, much like what Wal-Mart does with its suppliers.

Opposition by Environmentalists

Some environmentalists have severely criticized the Tata Nano, for its perceived negative impact on the environment. One of the most prominent of these is Sunita Narain of the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), who has called for the Tata Nano to be “taxed like crazy”. Another prominent environmentalist, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore) remarked that he is “having nightmares” about the Tata Nano.

I think these environmentalists have got it completely wrong.

The Tata Nano and Mass Transit

Some have put forward the argument that instead of small cars, Indians should concentrate on mass transit. I agree that India should indeed invest heavily in mass transit. However, I do not think that this calls for severe curbs (“tax it like crazy”) on the auto industry. This is not a zero-sum game. This is not an “either-or” situation.

Among Indian cities, Delhi has a much more extensive mass transit system than, say, Kolkata. But Delhi also has a higher rate of car ownership than Kolkata. In reality, car ownership is much more closely tied to peoples’ incomes than to the presence or absence of mass transit.

A few months ago I was in France on vacation. I was most impressed with the excellent public transport system there. However, in spite of an impressive mass transit system, car ownership in France is high - almost 500 cars for every 1000 people (India has 7 cars for every 1000 people) (link, link). Car ownership in France is high, not because the mass transit system there is bad, but simply because peoples’ incomes are high.

Had widespread car ownership spelt doom for public transportation (i.e., buses), the introduction of the Tata Nano would surely have been bad news for Indian bus manufacturers. But guess who is India’s largest bus and truck manufacturer? Tata Motors itself! It does not appear that Tata Motors is the slightest bit concerned that sales of the Nano will cannibalize its bus sales, even though Tata’s profit margin on buses is probably larger than it’s going to be on the Nano. Clearly this is not a zero-sum game. The automobile industry in India is not fundamentally opposed to the idea of mass transit. On the contrary, a healthy and growing economy, of which the auto industry forms an important component, is necessary to pay for large mass transit projects.

The Tata Nano and Global Warming

Some environmentalists have denounced the Tata Nano on the grounds that widespread car ownership in India will worsen global warming. While I do recognize the necessity of dealing with global warming, I feel that the environmentalists’ whole approach to dealing with this issue is fundamentally flawed.

Many environmentalists take the view that human civilization and development have been unmitigated disasters for the planet. In this view, human activities such as economic development, industrialization, consumerism, car-ownership, etc., have been guilty of destroying the environment and causing global warming. Supposedly the only way out is to curb these human activities and abandon our vain attempts to achieve progress and “growth”. In this view, an ideal society is one that is based on limited ambition, limited needs and subsistence production.

Based on the core idea that human activities are inherently bad for the planet, the solutions that environmentalists propose generally involve imposition of limits, quotas, punitive taxes, restrictions, etc., with the aim of curbing human activities and human initiative.

The Problem With the Limits and Quotas Approach

Limits and quotas can certainly lead to some modest incremental reductions in energy consumption. However, to address major environmental problems such as global warming, it is necessary to achieve not just modest reductions, but fundamental paradigm-changing shifts in energy usage. In other words, key breakthroughs in energy technology are needed. It is extremely unlikely that such key breakthroughs can ever be achieved through the limits-and-quotas approach. Consider the following.

None of the key breakthroughs in computer technology can be attributed to the effect of quotas or limits. As authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger point out, it is highly unlikely that simply introducing restrictive quotas for typewriters would have instigated critical breakthroughs in computer technology. Rather, public investment in science and technology research played a huge role in ushering in the computer age – by nurturing once fledgling technologies such as the silicon chip, the internet, etc.

One of the greatest achievements of the twentieth century was the Green Revolution, a paradigm-changing transformation of agriculture in countries like India. It dramatically increased food production, thereby avoiding the Malthusian catastrophe of a global “gigantic inevitable famine” caused by population growth outstripping food supply. During the Green Revolution new high yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds were developed, and technologies and infrastructure such as pesticides, fertilizers, and irrigation systems were made available to farmers. Just like the Computer Revolution, it was not primarily the introduction of quotas and limits (say food quotas), but rather, large public investments and human ingenuity that made the Green Revolution possible.

What many environmentalists do not seem to understand is that fundamental environmental problems like global warming cannot be solved simply by imposing limits and restrictions. If problems like global warming are ever to be solved, they will be solved by human ingenuity, by technological innovation, by further human progress. The idea that the environment can be saved by severely curbing human ingenuity and human initiative is, I believe, fundamentally flawed.

At its core, the world-view held by many environmentalists is deeply conservative. They wish to conserve - to preserve - the world as it was before large scale human intervention in nature. Human society too, they argue, should revert back to the way it was before modern development and industrialization. People are urged to preserve traditional hereditary occupations and traditional means of organizing society. In their view, farmers (and farmers’ children too) should forever remain farmers and never seek better paying industrial jobs. Moreover, farmers are urged to shun modern technologies such as genetically modified seeds, irrigation canals, chemical fertilizers, mechanization, etc., in favor of traditional technologies and subsistence agriculture. In this view, the millions of poor in India should always maintain their traditional way of life, and should always be satisfied with whatever standard of living is achievable through their traditional occupations and traditional technologies. They should never even aspire to possess consumer goods like cell phones, cars, etc. As writer and activist Arundhati Roy puts it, “the idea of turning one billion people into consumers is terrifying... are you going to starve to death dreaming of a mobile phone or are you going to have control of the resources that are available to you and have been for generations....?” (link)

I completely reject this conservative environmentalist world-view. My world-view is a progressive one. I believe that while we should seek to mitigate the negative side-effects of development such as environmental over-exploitation and global warming, the emphasis must be on moving forward, on further human progress. Human civilization and development have been wonderful. People today live longer, fuller, lives, with more prosperity, freedom, opportunity, and choice, than ever before. How can this be a bad thing? The world needs more progress and development, not less.

How to Solve Global Warming

The way I see it, the solution to global warming lies not in restricting, but rather, in encouraging human ingenuity and human initiative to develop new innovative clean energy technologies. For example, Tata Motors, the maker of the Tata Nano, is also investing in clean energy technologies such as cars running on compressed air (link) and cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells (link). Unfortunately, while environmentalists are very vocal in criticizing of the Nano, they fall completely silent when it comes to praising Tata Motors for its clean energy efforts.

While it is important that private companies invest in clean energy technologies, these may not be enough. In order to solve the problem of global warming, it is necessary to develop fundamental paradigm-changing new energy technologies. It is not enough to just depend on free market mechanisms and private companies for this. While free markets and private enterprises work well to incrementally refine technology, giving birth to revolutionary new technologies may not be possible without large public investments. In my view, any program to deal with global warming must have, as its central component, large-scale public investment for research into new innovative clean energy technologies.

At its core, our approach to dealing with global warming must articulate a positive vision that people can embrace, not just a nightmare that people need to be scared of. As authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger point out, the great American Civil Rights leader, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is remembered not for his “I have a Nightmare” speech, but for his “I have a Dream” speech.

Imagine if, instead of criticizing the Tata Nano as a “nightmare”, Dr. Pachauri, the eminent environmentalist, had said something like this: “I have a dream that one day every Indian family will be able to afford a car that runs on clean energy. This can never happen by making cars prohibitively expensive through high taxes, but this dream can become a reality if technological innovations make clean energy affordable to all. I call upon the United Nations to fund a massive international effort to develop new affordable clean energy technologies”.

Now, that would have been a vision I’d have loved to embrace. Dreams, Dr. Pachauri, are more powerful than nightmares!

[Added Later] I have written another article on the Tata Nano that can be found here. This article, for a slightly different audience, is for the Breakthrough Institute Blog. Founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the Breakthrough Institute is a progressive think tank focusing on environmental issues.

References

Some of the ideas on environmentalism expressed here have been inspired by reading the book “Breakthrough” by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, and attending their talk at Berkeley, California. For more about the book, click here. A recording of the talk is available here.

A Comment On Islam and Muslims

2008-01-05T13:21:00.000-08:00

Note: A couple of days ago, I received a comment on this blog from a young Muslim. That comment is available here. Below is my response to the comment.

Hi Dana,

Thank you very much for leaving a comment on my blog. You have enriched my blog by leaving a comment here. I very much welcome your views and I’m glad that you have expressed your opinion here.

I am not questioning your opinion that the Quran advocates peace and tolerance. I am glad that this is your opinion.

To tell the truth, it is really not important to me what the Quran says or does not say. What matters to me is what Muslims think the Quran says. From what I can see, not all Muslims think, like you do, that the Quran advocates peace and tolerance towards people of all religions. Some Muslims claim that the Quran says exactly the opposite, and, like you, they also quote certain lines from the Quran to back up their claims. For example, some Muslims say that according to the Quran, idol-worshiping is bad, and idol-worshipers (i.e., Hindus, Buddhists, etc.) are evil. Some of the people who make such statements even claim to have studied the Quran for many years, and claim to be experts on the Quran. Unfortunately, these Muslims, who believe that the Quran directs them to be intolerant towards non-Muslims are not just a negligible fringe minority. Substantial numbers of Muslims do share this intolerant interpretation of the Quran. For example, even the government of Saudi Arabia, which claims to be rigorously following the Quran, practices savage intolerance towards non-Muslims (see, for instance, this).

Again, it really does not matter to me what is actually written in the Quran. What matters to me is what those who believe that the Quran is the word of God (i.e., Muslims) think is written in the Quran. For me, it is Muslims’ interpretation of the Quran than is important, not its actual contents. I am very glad that you believe that Quran preaches peace and tolerance towards people of all religions. I am sure that many, many Muslims agree with you. However, it is unfortunately also true that there is a large and influential number of Muslims who do not.

I certainly do not see Islam as evil. To me, no religion can be either good or evil. Only people can be good or evil. So a Muslim can be good or a Muslim can be evil, but Islam itself can be neither good nor evil. I do think that those Muslims who preach hatred towards non-Muslims are evil (as are non-Muslims who preach hatred).

Statements like “real Islam promotes peace” don’t mean anything to me. For me there is no such thing as “true Islam” or “real Islam”, there are only “real” Muslims. To me, anybody who claims to be following Islam is a “real” Muslim. Sadly, it is an undeniable fact there are many such real Muslims in the world today (and even entire countries like Saudi Arabia) who practice extreme intolerance towards non-Muslims.

I am a secular person by nature. I believe that all human beings should be treated equally, with honor and respect, simply because it is the logical and civilized thing to do. It really doesn’t matter what the Quran, or the Bible, or the Gita, or any other holy book has to say in this regard. I base my ethics and morality on the secular values of the Enlightenment, rather than on any religious text. As the American Declaration of Independence puts it, it is a “self-evident truth” that all men (and women) are “created equal”. This truth, being “self-evident”, does not require validation by any religious text.

With warm regards,

Sid

Needed: Women Drivers In India

2007-11-06T01:55:00.000-08:00

In recent days the gruesome rape and murder of Jyoti Chaudhari in Pune has been in the news. Jyoti, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) worker, was traveling – alone with a driver – in a company-provided cab, going to her office for her late night shift, when the incident took place. It appears that the driver of the cab and an accomplice were the perpetrators of this heinous crime. For more about this incident see this, this, or this.

This horrific incident – apparently not the first such case – has sent shock waves through the BPO industry in India. A large proportion of the BPO workforce is female, and many employees are required to work in late night shifts. Transportation of workers to and from late night shifts is usually contracted out by the BPO company to a fleet of cabs. There appears to be a general perception among women BPO workers, as well as in the media and the police that this kind of travel arrangement raises serious safety issues. Consider this chilling advice given to female BPO workers: “if you are in one such cab, never drop your guard, Avoid distractions like music, keep emergency numbers on speed dial and keep pepper spray or at least a bunch of keys handy” (link). For more see this, this, or this.

It appears that BPO companies have long been aware of these safety issues and have introduced some rules to prevent untoward incidents – the main rule being that female workers are not to travel in a cab unless accompanied by a male colleague. Some companies also put security guards in these cabs. However, in the wake of the Jyoti Chaudhari incident, it is obvious that the current rules are not enough. A number of new ideas to improve security have been floated. These range from bolstering the presence of security guards in the cabs, to increased night patrolling by the police, to improved databases for conducting effective background checks for driver, to installing Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in cabs to track their movements (see this, this, and this). While some of these suggestions are certainly reasonable, most of them will entail large financial outlays and are still not likely to be foolproof.

I propose a radical and elegant solution for this problem – a solution that is likely to be cost-effective as well: hire women drivers to drive the cabs that transport BPO workers. Think about it: the main security concern in a late-night BPO cab is the driver. If the driver is a woman then the fear of sexual assault is automatically eliminated. A security guard will not be needed in a woman-driven cab. Nor will there be any need to juggle pick-up and drop-off routes so as to avoid having unaccompanied female BPO workers in a cab. The possibility of drivers being drunk during their nighttime duty hours is also likely to be greatly reduced if BPO companies hire women drivers. Not only will this approach insulate women BPO workers from the possibility of sexual assault, it is also likely to have the very substantial side-benefit of providing new income opportunities for women from relatively poor socio-economic backgrounds. Of course, BPO companies may have to make some initial investments to train women drivers, but it should pay off financially in the long run.

BPO companies could be just a starting point for professional women drivers in India. I think there is great potential for women working as drivers/chauffeurs. As is well known, many car-owners in India employ drivers/chauffers. Why should women not be considered for this occupation? Many Indian women from poor socio-economic backgrounds work as housemaids, house-cleaners, cooks, child-care providers, etc. Their salary is generally rather low. If these women can learn the additional skill of driving a car, and if – a big if – the upper-middle-class families that employ them accept the notion of women drivers, then the income potential for these women is likely go up substantially. Driving the family car could also fit in very nicely with such women’s work schedules. For example, a housemaid could, in addition to her house cleaning duties, easily take on the additional duty of driving her employer’s kids to school, thereby substantially increasing her income potential, and providing a valuable service to her employer.

Some will say that women from poor socio-economic backgrounds will never be able to learn how to drive. However, the men who work as drivers usually come from very similar socio-economic backgrounds. In terms of education, etc., there is generally not a huge difference between male drivers and female housemaids (in terms of salary, however, a male driver generally earns substantially more than a female housemaid). I am sure female drivers in India will be just as capable as male drivers – if only prejudices and mindsets can be overcome.

New Social Movements, Postmodernism, Gandhism and Ambedkarism

2007-09-12T15:09:00.000-07:00

In recent years in India, there has arisen a phenomenon described variously as the “new social movements”, “anti-globalization movement” or (self described as) “people’s movements”. There are many groups in this category, many of them raucous, with disagreements among themselves. However, they do have a substantial shared ideology. The following are some shared characteristics.

They claim to represent the “people” – the downtrodden Indian masses, without, however, subjecting this claim to the test of democratic elections.
They are against globalization, which, it is claimed, is bad for the “people”, though apparently not for the anti-globalizers themselves, who nurture elaborate multinational networks of activists and supporters.
They claim to be fighting for oppressed groups such as Dalits and Adivasis. However, the movement does not actually include any Dalits or Adivasis among its leaders or ideologues.
They oppose the state as well as large corporations and large funding agencies such as the World Bank. They also oppose large-scale projects. These are seen as fundamentally exploitative of the “people”.
They claim to be fighting for the protection of the environment, which, in their view means minimizing any kind of substantial new technological intervention in nature. Thus, they denounce nuclear power plants even though these produce far less greenhouse gases than thermal power plants. Similarly, they denounce genetically modified crops even though these have the potential to reduce the need for irrigation and the need for chemical pesticides.
They criticize the mainstream industrialized, corporate West, though many of the movements’ leaders themselves maintain strong ties with the West.
They reject Enlightenment ideas of the universalism of science and reason as Western hegemonic impositions. Rather, they claim to be in favor of diverse local or indigenous traditional knowledge and belief systems and ways of organizing society.
They reject universal indices of measuring development and progress such as GDP, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy rate, etc. Rather, they argue in favor of subjective and local yardsticks, such as “happiness”, “preserving the link between people and the Earth/river/forest/God”, “preserving the wholeness of the community”, etc.

Ideological Basis of the New Social Movements

Sometime in the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment ushered in new ways of thinking in Europe and America. Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Voltaire sought to discard irrationality, superstition, and inherited dogmas with reason, science and rationality, and believed that systematic thinking should be applied to all spheres of human activity. Since then, many important intellectuals – Karl Marx for instance – have accepted the basic values of the Enlightenment. These values represent “modernity” and form the basis of the rationalist scientific-technological outlook and the each-citizen-is-equal principles that lie at the foundation of the Western democracies. Enlightenment ideas entered the Indian consciousness around the latter half of the 19th century. The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, lies very much in the Enlightenment tradition.

In the last few decades, a new movement known as postmodernism has become fashionable in intellectual circles, which denounces Enlightenment’s claim to universality. Postmodernists – like Ashis Nandy, one of its leading ideologues – hold that acceptance of Enlightenment ideas by Indians and other non-Westerners represents a “colonization of the mind”. They reject the idea that the spread of rationality and scientific temper are emancipatory, and instead argue for the preservation of “local knowledge systems” embedded in “traditional cosmologies”, religions, and traditional practices of agriculture, medicine, etc.

As far as India is concerned, these postmodern ideas are not new – they were espoused a century ago by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, the father of the nation, can be viewed from many different angles – there is Gandhi the nationalist; there is Gandhi the politician; there is Gandhi the prophet of non-violence; and then, there is the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj, the repudiator of modernity and Enlightenment values. It is this last anti-modern Gandhi that postmodernists embrace.

Gandhi’s rejection of modernity and Enlightenment values comes out most forcefully in Hind Swaraj, a short book he wrote in 1909. In his essay Postmodern Gandhi, Lloyd Rudolph characterizes Hind Swaraj as the “opening salvo of the postmodern era”. Here are a few quotes from Hind Swaraj that demonstrate Gandhi’s complete antipathy towards a modern rationalistic scientific-technological world view.

[on Western civilization] Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word “civilization”. ... Formerly, in Europe, people ploughed their lands mainly by manual labor. Now, one man can plough a vast tract by means of steam engines and can thus amass great wealth. This is called a sign of civilization. Formerly, only a few men wrote valuable books. Now, anybody writes and prints anything he likes and poisons people’s minds. ... This civilization takes note neither of morality nor of religion. ... This civilization is irreligion, and it has taken such a hold on the people in Europe who are in it appear to be half mad. ... Women, who should be the queens of households, wander in the streets or they slave away in factories. ... This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed. According to the teaching of Mahommed this would be considered a Satanic Civilization. Hinduism calls it the Black Age.

[on the railways] The railways, too, have spread the bubonic plague. ... They are the carriers of plague germs. Formerly we had natural segregation. ... Railways accentuate the evil nature of man. Bad men fulfill their evil designs with greater rapidity. The holy places of India have become unholy. Formerly, people went to these places with very great difficulty. Generally, therefore, only the real devotees visited such places. Nowadays rogues visit them in order to practice their roguery.

[on doctors] Doctors have almost unhinged us. Sometimes I think that quacks are better than highly qualified doctors…. The business of a doctor is to … rid the body of diseases that may afflict it. How do these diseases arise? Surely by our negligence or indulgence. I overeat, I have indigestion. I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured. I overeat again, I take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishments deserved by me and I would not have overeaten again. The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body thereby certainly felt more at ease; but my mind became weakened. A continuance of a course of medicine must, therefore, result in loss of control over the mind. ... and the result is that we have become deprived of self-control.

[on education] If we consider our civilization to be the highest, I have regretfully to say that much of the effort [for compulsory education] ... is of no use. …. To teach boys reading, writing and arithmetic is called primary education. A peasant earns his bread honestly. He has ordinary knowledge of the world. He knows fairly well how he should behave towards his parents, his wife, his children and his fellow villagers. He understands and observes the rules of morality. But he cannot write his own name. What do you propose to do by giving him knowledge of letters? Will you add an inch to his happiness? Do you wish to make him discontented with his cottage or his lot?

As Lloyd Rudolph has shown in Postmodern Gandhi, Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj world view was never widely accepted either by Congress or by the Constituent Assembly of India. In 1945 Nehru wrote to Gandhi, “it is many years since I read Hind Swaraj ... but even when I read it twenty years ago it seemed to me completely unreal”. He further reminded Gandhi, “... the Congress has never considered that picture (portrayed in Hind Swaraj) much less adopted it”. In those days it was the nationalist, non-violent, humanist Gandhi who was admired and respected by Nehru and others – not the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj. However, things have changed in recent decades. According to Rudolph, “Gandhi’s image and reputation in India began to recuperate in the 1980s when a postmodern Gandhi began to take shape. Books by Ashis Nandy and other postmodernist scholars contributed to the turn-around. The critical and box office success of Richard Attenborough’s 1983 film Gandhi ... fed back to India. .... A newly-remembered Gandhi began to inspire and legitimize a burgeoning civil society of social and political movements and not-for-profit, non-governmental and voluntary organizations”.

According to postmodernist guru, Ashis Nandy, the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj had “decolonized his mind”, had freed himself from the “intimate enemy”, and spoke from “outside the imperium”. Here is a quote from Nandy approvingly describing the connection between the Gandhi of Hind Swaraj and the new social movements:

The third Gandhi is the Gandhi of the ragamuffins, eccentrics and the unpredictable. This Gandhi is more hostile to Coca-Cola than to Scotch whisky and considers the local versions of Coca-Cola more dangerous than imported ones. This is because his objection to highly mechanized fast foods is structural and, therefore, he considers it more dangerous if, on nationalist grounds, long-lasting, deep-rooted Indian structures are created to produce superfluous items of mass consumption within the Indian economy. ... This Gandhi – vintage Hind Swaraj – is also bit of a nag and a spoil-sport. He loves to be a maverick and an oddity in our public life. ... It is this Gandhi who has guided the notorious agitation of Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam, Claude Alvares against Operation Flood, and Vandana Shiva against the Green Revolution. ... this Gandhi and his young friends are a real nuisance to the Indian State. … They are a menace to the common sense that passes as sanity but can be actually called …the psychopathology of everyday public life. (link)

Gail Omvedt, one of the most astute participants in this debate, has this to say:

The great values of the Enlightenment and the French revolution are today under attack … not only in India from advocates of pseudo-swadeshi who would see them as merely “Western” but also world-wide, from postmodernists and eco-romanticists who think “progress” is impossible and from Leftists who have taken “liberalism” and “liberty” as bad words. … Eco-romanticism, taking its justification from Mahatma Gandhi, tends to see history as heading into a downspin. … [They argue] that the French Revolution is finished; its ideals cannot be extended to Dalits, women or other sections of the marginalized in the world, and we must turn away from this vain effort to achieve “growth” to acceptance of a society based on limited needs, subsistence production, and stasis. (link)

An Alternative World-View

Other social movements that have come up in India claiming to represent the downtrodden have a very different ideology.

Mahatma Phule

Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, who belonged to the low Mali caste, was the leader of the anti-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra from around the 1840s to 1880s. Phule was greatly influenced by the works of Thomas Paine – one of stalwarts of the Enlightenment. Phule was so taken in by the Enlightenment philosophy of the American Founding Fathers, and with the American slavery abolition movement, that he dedicated one of his books to “the good people of the United States” (link). Today, Mahatma Phule is revered figure in low caste movements all over India.

Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker

E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, reverently called Periyar, was the founder and leader of the anti-Brahmin movement in Tamil Nadu from the 1920s to the 1960s. His movement was known as the Self Respect Movement and he founded the social organization Dravidar Kazhagam. He fought against upper caste domination. Periyar’s ideology was quite the opposite of Hind Swaraj. Periyar was a rationalist and an atheist, and he ridiculed Hindu rituals and superstitions. In contrast to Gandhi’s conspicuous vegetarianism, Periyar made it a point to eat large quantities of meat, including beef. Today, Periyar’s ideas still form an important part of Tamil social consciousness, and offshoots of his Dravidar Kazhagam dominate the political scene in the state.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar

Bhimrao Ramji ‘Babasaheb’Ambedkar was one of the greatest leaders that India has ever produced. Ambedkar and his ideas provide inspiration, dignity, and a practical way forward for millions of the most oppressed people in India.

Ambedkar was born in 1891 in an untouchable Mahar family in the Army cantonment of Mhow. British Rule had given his family the chance to break out of their traditional caste occupation. His father served in the Indian Army. Coming from an Army background, young Bhim got a rare opportunity to acquire a modern education. He was one of the first untouchables to go through college. Then, he earned a scholarship for higher studies in the United States. He eventually earned Doctorate degrees from Columbia University in the U.S. and from the London Schools of Economics in England, and was admitted to the London Bar as a barrister.

Ambedkar spent three years (1913 – 1916) at Columbia University in New York City – three years that played a crucial role in his intellectual development. He later recounted that it was at Columbia that he experienced social equality for the first time in his life, and that “the best friends I have had in my life were some of my classmates at Columbia and my great professors, John Dewey, James Shotwell, Edwin Seligman, and James Harvey Robinson” (link). Especially influential was John Dewey, of whom Ambedkar reportedly remarked, “I owe my whole intellectual life to Prof. John Dewey” (link). Dewey’s ideas were very much in the Enlightenment tradition. Ambedkar, like Dewey, held that reason and scientific temper had the potential – for all people everywhere – to challenge unexamined tradition and prejudices by cultivating a collective, democratic “will to inquire, to examine, to discriminate, to draw conclusions only on the basis of evidence after taking pains to gather all available evidence” [Nanda].

In Dr. Ambedkar’s view, an Enlightenment world view, emphasizing reason and a scientific-technological outlook was fundamentally emancipatory in nature, since it provided a means to challenge oppressive traditions and religious dogma. This was diametrically opposed to Gandhi’s Hind Samaj world view. A comparison below of how the two understood the meaning of ‘civilization’ highlights the stark contrast between them.

[Gandhi in Hind Swaraj] Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves. The Gujarati equivalent for civilization means “good conduct”. If this definition be correct, then India … has nothing to learn from anybody else… We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors therefore set a limit to our indulgences. They saw that happiness was largely a mental condition. A man is not necessarily happy because he is rich or unhappy because he is poor. .... Millions will always remain poor. Observing all this, our ancestors dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures. We have managed with the same kind of plough as existed thousands of years ago. We have retained the same kind of cottages that we had in former times and our indigenous education remains the same as before. We have had no system of life-corroding competition. Each followed his own occupation or trade and charged a regulation wage. (link)

[Ambedkar] In Gandhism, the common man has no hope. It treats man as an animal and no more. It is true that man shares the constitution and functions of animals, nutritive, reproductive, etc. But these are not distinctively human functions. The distinctively human function is reason, the purpose of which is to enable man to observe, meditate, cogitate, study and discover the beauties of the Universe and enrich his life. … The conclusion that follows is that … the ultimate goal of man’s existence is not reached unless and until he has fully cultivated his mind. … How then can a life of culture be made possible? It is not possible unless there is sufficient leisure. ... The problem of all problems which human society has to face is how to provide leisure to every individual. … Leisure means the lessening of the toil and effort necessary for satisfying the physical wants of life. … Leisure is quite impossible unless some means are found whereby the toil required for producing goods necessary to satisfy human needs is lessened. What can lessen such toil? Only when machines take the place of man. ... Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute, and for providing him with leisure and making a life of culture possible. … A democratic society must assure a life of leisure and culture to each one of its citizens. … The slogan of a democratic society must be machinery, and more machinery, civilization and more civilization. Under Gandhism the common man must keep on toiling ceaselessly for a pittance and remain a brute. In short, Gandhism with its call of back to nature, means back to nakedness, back to squalor, back to poverty and back to ignorance for the vast mass of the people. (link)

While Gandhi did fight against untouchability, he defended the varnashrama dharma (the system of four varnas or castes and four ashramas or stages of life), insisting that untouchability was only an unfortunate corruption of an otherwise sound system (towards the end of his life, Gandhi did make a few statements against the caste system itself). Gandhi’s approach towards untouchables was patronizing. As V.S. Naipaul put it, they were “Harijans, children of God, people for whom good things might be done, objects of sentiment and a passing piety”. Ambedkar, on the other hand, called for outright annihilation of the entire caste system, and called upon Dalits to stand up for their rights as human beings. Ambedkar also rejected the Gandhian vision of an idyllic Ram Rajya made up of peaceful and contended village communities. He declared, “The love of the intellectual Indians for the village community is of course infinite if not pathetic. ... What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, and communalism?” [Jaffrelot]

In 1936, Ambedkar had declared, “Unfortunately for me I was born a Hindu untouchable. It was beyond my power to prevent that, but I declare that it is within my power to refuse to live under ignoble and humiliating conditions. I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu” [Jaffrelot]. In 1956, he led a mass conversion of Dalits into Buddhism. Ambedkar, however, did not just ask Dalits to convert to one of the existing schools of Buddhism (Mahayana, Hinayana, etc.), rather he launched a new school of Buddhism, which some have labeled ‘Navayana’ – literally the ‘new vehicle’. Ambedkar set forth his Navayana Buddhism in the book The Buddha and His Dhamma (link), in which he laid great stress on encouraging a rational scientific-technological world view, as these following quotes demonstrate.

Belief in the supernatural is not Dhamma. [The Buddha’s] first object was to lead man to the path of rationalism. … Buddhism is nothing if not rationalism. That is why worship of the supernatural is not Dhamma. [The Buddha and His Dhamma, Book 3 Part 4]

Belief in Ishwara (God) is not essentially part of Dhamma. [Book 3 Part 4]

Belief in the infallibility of books of is not Dhamma. [Book 3 Part 4]

Dhamma to be Saddhamma must promote equality between man and man. [Book 3 Part 5]

Now what is Dhamma? and why is Dhamma necessary? According to the Buddha, Dhamma consists of Prajna and Karuna. What is Prajna? And why Prajna? Prajna is understanding. The Buddha made Prajna one of the two corner-stones of His Dhamma because he did not wish to leave any room for superstition. What is Karuna? And why Karuna? Karuna is love. Because without it, Society can neither live nor grow; that is why the Buddha made it the second corner-stone of His Dhamma. [Book 4 Part 1]

If there is anything which could be said with confidence it is: He was nothing if not rational, if not logical. Anything therefore which is rational and logical, other things being equal, may be taken to be the word of the Buddha. [Book 4 Part 2]

It is important to note that Dr. Ambedkar did not disdain all tradition. Rather, he chose to selectively promote those traditions that provide support for rationalism and scientific temper. He said, “my social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words: liberty, equality and fraternity. Let no one however say that I have borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not. My philosophy has its roots in religion and not in political science. I have derived them from the teachings of my master, the Buddha.” The day before his conversion, Ambedkar underlined his connection to Indian tradition, “Buddhism is part and parcel of Bharatiya culture. I have taken care that my conversion will not harm the tradition of the culture and history of this land.” [Jaffrelot]

Some More Observations on the New Social Movements

Today, Dalits display a great deal of enthusiasm for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and his ideas. Ambedkar statues and portraits – usually depicting him in a Western suit and tie – are proudly displayed wherever Dalits live. Following in Ambedkar’s footsteps, Dalits generally do not seem to share the postmodernists’ aversion towards modernity and the West. Consider, for example, the Dalit Goddess called ‘English’, inpired by the Statue of Liberty, unveiled recently by Ambedkarite Dalit columnist Chandrabhan Prasad (see a portrait of Goddess English here and Prasad’s interview here). In view of this, it seems to me that civil society groups, NGOs, etc., who claim to be championing the cause of the downtrodden, should at least take a serious look at Ambedkar’s ideas emphasizing rationality and modernity, rather than blindly follow Gandhian traditionalism and postmodernism. Civil society groups have the potential to play a very positive role in India. Unfortunately, I fear that this potential might largely remain unrealized due to the current tendency of many of these groups to reject modernity and a scientific-technological world view.

Another very serious problem with the postmodernist ideology is that it provides ideological support not only to the new social movements but also to the corrosive and intolerant extremist Hindutva and pseudo-Swadeshi movements. As Meera Nanda has shown, the extreme Hindutva ideology (equating astrology with science, for instance) is a close ideological cousin of postmodernism and Gandhian traditionalism (link). I have not elaborated on this here, but this is a topic worthy of a whole new discussion.

Having said all this, I do have some points of agreement with the new social movements.

On the Environment

One concern raised by the new social movements that I agree with is the need to protect the environment. However I do not agree with them that the solution lies in abandoning the entire concept of development, and moving towards a Gandhian-inspired traditional society with limited needs and subsistence production, populated by contented and unambitious people. My concept of development is completely different. To me, the fundamental idea of development means unlocking human potential. This process of unlocking human potential does involve some use of natural resources, but over-exploitation of natural recourses is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for development. It should be possible, through human ingenuity and technological advancement, to have development without over-exploitation of natural resources.

On Inequality

Another concern raised by the new social movements is the very high degree of inequality in Indian society. I do agree with them that this is a very serious problem. However, I do not agree that the solution lies in being anti-modern, anti-industrialization, anti-economic-growth, anti-Westernization, etc. If there there’s anything worse than the inequality that exists in the modern industrialized part of India, it is the inequality that exists in traditional caste-ridden feudal India. For instance, it is estimated that there are more than 10 million bonded labourers (slaves) in India today (link). In other words, at least one out of every 100 Indians is a slave. However, one finds that slavery, perhaps the worst imaginable form of inequality, is most rampant in India in those occupations and communities that are almost totally untouched by modernity or industrialization or Westernization. True, India’s fast growing information technology sector benefits only a small section of the highly educated, upper-caste, upper-class population of India. Clearly, economic growth must be made much more inclusive. One thing that I think should be done is to introduce some sort of meaningful affirmative action program (maybe reservations, maybe some alternative) in the private corporate sector – the most dynamic part of the Indian economy. I also feel it is important is to encourage the manufacturing sector, which has the potential to provide decent-paying jobs to large numbers of less highly educated people. For this, the government must invest in physical infrastructure – power plants, roads, ports, etc. Every effort must also be made to increase agricultural productivity through technology such as genetically modified seeds, etc. For the long term, the government must invest heavily in universal quality primary education and in basic health care.

Here’s Some Further Reading Available on the Internet

Articles, Essays, Books

1. Hind Swaraj by M.K. Gandhi
2. The Buddha and His Dhamma by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
3. Dams and Bombs by Gail Omvedt
4. Liberty, Equality, Community by Gail Omvedt
5. Marx and Globalization by Gail Omvedt
6. Postmodernism, Hindu Nationalism and ‘Vedic Science’ by Meera Nanda
7. The Darling of the Dispossessed by Ramachandra Guha

Websites

1. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and His People (link)
2. Another very useful Ambedkar web site (link)
3. Prof. Frances Pritchett’s Ambedkar web site at Columbia University (link)

Book References

Jaffrelot, Christophe 2005. Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability. Columbia University Press, New York.

Nanda, Meera 2003. Prophets Facing Backward. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey.

1857: First War of Indian Independence?

2007-06-03T15:05:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks India has been witness to quite a hoopla surrounding celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the ‘First War of Indian Independence’ of 1857. At a celebration in Delhi the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh claimed “there is no doubt that 1857 was a shining example of our national unity”.

I do not quite share these sentiments. In fact, my reading of history leads to very ambiguous sentiments regarding the very same events.

The Background

By 1857 the British East India Company had established its Raj (rule) across India. Lately, they had also started tinkering with religious and social issues. They introduced a radical critique of certain customs and practices that were deeply entrenched in India and had religious and social sanction. Sati was banned, and widow remarriage was made legal. Many Indians resented this and saw it as a threat to their religion. In 1857 such resentment was rife among soldiers in the Bengal Army, most of whom were upper caste Hindus or Muslims from Awadh (present day Central U.P.). So when there was talk that new rifles issued to them had cartridges lubricated with fat from cows and pigs, the soldiers’ resentment boiled over (beef being taboo for high caste Hindus and pork being taboo for Muslims). In cantonments across North India, Bengal Army soldiers rose up against the British, as did some princes. For a few months British rule ceased to exist across large swathes of North India. The British eventually defeated the rebels, and followed it up with brutal reprisals.

The Nature of the Revolt

To understand the nature of the revolt let us take a closer look at events at two locations, Delhi and Jhansi.

Delhi

The events in Delhi during the revolt have been masterfully narrated by William Dalrymple in his book The Last Mughal. The broad outlines are well known, so I give here only a very brief description.

In the years prior to 1857, while the Mughals still retained a powerful hold on the imagination of the people of North India, the British were the real power behind the throne. The Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, had very little interest or influence on the matters of state and spent most of his time on artistic pursuits.

The revolt started in Meerut on May 10th 1857 when soldiers of the Bengal Army, incensed by reports of cartridges greased with the fat of cows and pigs, rose against the British. They then took control of Delhi, where they proclaimed the restoration of Mughal Rule, and compelled a reluctant 81 year old Bahadur Shah Zafar to declare his support for the rebellion. After regrouping, British forces attacked rebel-controlled Delhi in early June and entrenched themselves just outside the city – but mindful of their small numbers, made no attempts to assault the city or even to blockade it. By September, sufficient reinforcements had arrived for the British to go on the offensive. By this time, the ‘British’ forces outside Delhi comprised mostly Indian troops - about 80%. The assault on the city was carried out and after a few days of fierce fighting, Delhi fell to the British on September 21^st 1857.

It is clear from Dalrymple’s book that as far as the Indian participants were concerned, the uprising was overwhelmingly seen as a war of religion. British men and women who had converted to Islam – apparently there were quite a few in Delhi – were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down by the soldiers. Urdu sources refer to the British “not as angrez (the English) or as goras (whites) or even firangis, but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians)”. The proportion of jihadi fighters was significant and eventually grew to almost half the total force defending the city.

Dalrymple also informs us that while many ordinary residents of Delhi initially welcomed the soldiers, people soon “tired of hosting a large and undisciplined army of boorish and violent peasants. ... Delhi sources describe them as ‘Tilangas’ or ‘Purbias’ - effectively outsiders”. The ordinary people of Delhi in their petitions to the Mughal court “did not describe the event there as Ghadr (mutiny) and still less Jang-e-Azadi (war of freedom) so much as fasad (riots) and danga (disturbance)”.

Jhansi

The events in Jhansi are not very widely known. So I give a slightly more detailed description of these events, based primarily on Tapti Roy’s delightful new book, Raj of the Rani.

Jhansi was a principality in Bundelkhand (in present day U.P. and M.P.) where the Marathi Brahmin Newalkar family ruled, initially as governors of the Peshwas, and then under British protection. The Newalkars were devoted to the British, as the quote below exemplifies.

In 1832, William Bentnick, the Governor General of India ... visited Jhansi. Amidst all the glitter [the Jhansi ruler] Ramchandra Rao was awarded the title of Maharajadhiraj and described as a ‘devoted servant of the glorious King of England’ ... Ramchandra, overwhelmed by this honor, begged to be allowed to adopt the Union Jack as the flag of Jhansi. The request was granted and the flag hoisted over ... Jhansi fort.

In 1842, the ruler of Jhansi, Gangadhar Rao, got married to Manikarnika, affectionately known as Manu. Henceforth Manu would be known to the world as Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. In 1853, just a day before Gangadhar Rao’s death, the childless couple adopted a boy as their son and heir to the throne. However, the British authorities refused to recognize him as the legitimate heir, and, under a policy known as the Doctrine of Lapse, decided to annex Jhansi. The Rani spent the next four years trying to reverse that decision through a series of petitions and appeals to the British authorities. She impressed (link) many Britishers with the force of her personality, as well as her beauty and grace. Her exertions were to no avail, however. The British Governor General remained unmoved. According to Roy, Rani Lakshmibai’s actions in these years demonstrate her “faith and trust in British justice”.

The storm broke over Jhansi on 5^th June 1857, when soldiers in the British cantonment rose in rebellion. A massacre of the British followed. The Rani herself seems to have been caught completely by surprise. Roy, in her book, shows that Rani Lakshmibai had nothing to do with either the revolt of the soldiers or the massacre of the British, nor was she consulted prior to the uprising. In fact, in those chaotic days, the Rani herself seems to have been in some considerable danger from the rebel soldiers. Having ousted the British, they demanded money from the Rani in return for installing her on the throne of Jhansi, and threatened to install a rival claimant, Sadashiv Rao, instead. It is likely that they threatened her with more dire consequences as well. After extorting a satisfactorily large sum from the Rani, the soldiers handed Jhansi over to her and left for Delhi. Rani Lakshmibai was now ruler of Jhansi.

In a letter to a British official written on 12th June 1857 Rani Lakshmibai gave her own version of the events.

…the [soldiers] thro’ their faithlessness, cruelty and violence, killed all the European civil and military officers, the clerks and all their families and the Ranee not being able to assist them for want of guns, and soldiers as she had only 100 or 50 people engaged in guarding her house she could render them no aid, which she very much regrets. That they the mutineers afterwards behaved with much violence against herself and servants, and extorted a great deal of money from her. ... if she, at all hesitated to comply with their requests, they would blow up her palace with guns. Taking into consideration her position she was obliged to consent to all the requests made and put up with a great deal of annoyance, and had to pay large sums in property, as well as in cash to save her life and honor (link).

Ruling Jhansi was no cakewalk for the Rani. A rival claimant to the throne, Sadashiv Rao, captured a fort and proclaimed himself ruler of Jhansi. Then, on 10th August 1857, the Rani of Orchha (a neighboring state) sent her army into Jhansi to reclaim land her predecessors had lost to the Newalkars. Not to be left out, another neighboring state, Datia, invaded Jhansi as well. Rani Lakshmibai had to take frantic measures to prevent a complete collapse. It is a testament to her extraordinary ability and leadership qualities that not only was she able to quell Sadashiv Rao’s rebellion and repel the invading armies of Orchha and Datia, but she also managed to restore some semblance of order and normality to Jhansi. What is rather astonishing (in light of popular belief today) is that during this period (June to December 1857), a critical phase in the ‘First War of Indian Independence’, Rani Lakshmibai viewed the British not as her enemy but as her ally. Rather, she viewed Orchha and Datia as her enemies. Here is a quote from a letter she wrote to a British official on 1st January 1858.

To narrate all the strange and unexpected occurrences that took place during your absence from India is a painful task. I cannot describe the troubles and hardships I have suffered during this period. Your return to India has given me new life. ... At the time when the British forces mutinied at this place, and when the chiefs of Dutya and Oorchha commenced their career of coercion and rapine, I lost no time in writing to the British officers ... I tried my best by selling my property, taking money on interest--collected a party of men and took steps to protect the city. … The enemy ... did much mischief. … I wrote [to the British] … for reinforcements ... Under these circumstances I can never expect to get rid of these enemies and to clear myself of the heavy debts without the assistance of the British Government. ...I beg you will give me your support in the best way you can, and thus save myself and the people who are reduced to the last extremity and are not able to cope with the enemy (link).

British officials stationed near Jhansi also viewed Rani Lakshmibai as their ally. A British proclamation was issued declaring that “the Ranee will rule in the name of the British Government” and called on “all great and small, to obey the Ranee, and to pay the government revenue to her”. However, in Kolkata, high ranking British officials were bent upon indiscriminate reprisals. Without bothering about evidence, and discounting reports from their own officials in the area, they decided that Rani Lakshmibai must pay for the massacre of the British in Jhansi. The die was cast. Rani Lakshmibai’s fate was sealed. A Bombay Army force commanded by Major General Hugh Rose was sent to Jhansi. British actions (and inaction) had, by around January/February 1858, created serious doubts in the Rani’s mind about their intentions. However she still harbored hopes of reconciliation. A report reached the British, which said, “it is given out that should this vakeel [the Rani’s representative] be treated kindly the Ranee will in no way oppose the British force. She will pay obedience to our government and return all the districts now in her possession. While on the contrary should the British officers show displeasure she will fight to the last”. By end-February 1858, Rani Lakshmibai had come to the realization that she had no choice but to “fight to the last” against the British.

It is only at this late stage, with the rebel forces already defeated in Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow, and the most critical phase of the revolt already over, that she declares herself against the British and the Rani of Jhansi of popular legend emerges: the heroic warrior queen fighting the British with audacity and courage. On 21^st March 1858, Hugh Rose’s forces besieged Jhansi. By 5^th April they had taken the fort by assault. The battle was fierce, and Rani Lakshmibai led from the front – she was always in the midst of the fighting, inspiring and encouraging her troops. As Jhansi fell, the Rani affected a daring escape. Later, she, along with rebel leaders Rao Saheb and Tantia Tope carried out a bold attack on British ally Jayajirao Scindia, and captured Gwalior. In British eyes, the seizure of Gwalior “created a sensation throughout India only equaled by that which was caused by the first mutinies”. Hugh Rose marched on Gwalior. And there, fighting the British, Rani Lakshmibai died a true warrior’s death on 17^th June 1858, and passed into legend.

First War of Indian Independence?

Can this uprising really be called the ‘First War of Indian Independence’? Were the rebels really fighting for national independence? Was it really a “shining example of our national unity” as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently described it?

As Dalrymple has shown in his book, the rebel soldiers saw this as a war of religion. Muslim soldiers saw the war as a jihad. High caste Hindu soldiers were primarily motivated by a desire prevent any violation of their ritualistic caste purity. Consider the event that triggered the war: reports of cartridges greased with cow and pig fat. Now, touchability/untouchability of beef lies at the core of upper caste Hindu concepts of ritual purity/impurity. Interestingly, and contrary to popular belief, large sections of Hindus – the lowest castes (the Dalits of today), who comprise some one-fifth of all Hindus – have never had any qualms about touching or eating beef or pork (link, link, link). This revolt was certainly a war about religion. But it was about a narrowly defined idea of religion as a set of rituals and taboos wrapped up in notions of caste purity and pollution, rather than any broad inclusive vision. Very different indeed from the progressive and inclusive religiosity of Gandhi or Vivekananda.

We have also seen that for most of the war the Rani of Jhansi was quite willing to ally with the British to take on the neighboring states of Orchha and Datia. Though the Rani of Jhansi was indeed a heroic warrior, the spirit of national unity simply did not exist for her or for any of the other feudal rulers. The rebels certainly did not present a “shining example of our national unity”. If anything, Indian unity was better represented by the ‘British’ forces, which were made up largely of Indians, including Sikhs, Gurkhas, Muslims from the North West Frontier, low-caste soldiers of the Bombay and Madras armies, and contingents from various princely states.

Most of the leaders of the Indian independence movement and social reform movements in the post-1857 period did not take inspiration from the revolt, nor did they say much about it. However, what little they had to say is revealing.

In 1903, in Indian Opinion, Mahatma Gandhi opines:

The year 1857 was a year of great anxiety. … An appeal was made to the worst superstitions of the people of India, religion was greatly brought into play, and all that could possibly be done by the evil-minded was done to unsettle people’s minds, and to make them hostile to British rule. It was at that time of stress and trouble that great mass of the Indian people remained absolutely firm and unshaken in their loyalty [to the British] (link).

Later, however, Gandhi may have taken a somewhat different view of the revolt. In 1925 he says:

You do not know of our condition at the time of the 1857 revolt. The persecution of the people at that time has no parallel. You cannot imagine how happy the country was before the days of the modern innovations – the railways, post and telegraph, etc. (link).

Jawaharlal Nehru in Glimpses of World History writes:

The revolt developed into a war of independence … but it was independence of the old feudal type, with an autocratic emperor at the head. There was no freedom for the common people in it. … It was fighting for a lost cause, the feudal order … The revolt of 1857-58 was the last flicker of feudal India.

And in Discovery of India, he says:

Essentially it was a feudal outburst, headed by feudal chiefs and their followers... There was hardly any national and unifying sentiment among the leaders.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in his foreword to the book 1857, says:

As I read about the events of 1857, I am forced to the sad conclusion that Indian national character had sunk very low. The leaders of the revolt could never agree. They were mutually jealous and continually intrigued against one another. ... [Bahadur Shah Zafar] was not fit to serve even as a symbol.

Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, the great social reformer in Maharashtra, who had started schools for low caste girls in the 1840s, took an active interest in the events of 1857. In his book Slavery he writes:

It was through Providential dispensation that the revolt engineered by Bhat Nana [Saheb] was put down by the brave English rulers. Otherwise the so-called emancipated Brahmins who perform religious rites ... would surely have sentenced many Mahars for wearing the dhoti tucked away on one side, or for (the offence of) having uttered Sanskrit verses during religious discourses, to transportation for life.

Dalits in general take a dim view of the revolt of 1857. Among the loyal soldiers of the Bombay Army around the time of the revolt was one Maloji Sakpal, an untouchable Mahar by caste. The army had instituted a policy of compulsory education for Indian soldiers of all castes as well as their children, both male and female. As a result, Maloji’s son Ramji received a formal education. Ramji also joined the army, and he and his wife – she too from a military family and therefore educated – emphasized education for their own children. One of these children, Bhim, better known today as Dr. Babaseheb Ambedkar, would go on to become one of the greatest thinkers and leaders of modern India. Naturally, Dr. Ambedkar did not think very highly of the revolt, and was actually quite proud of the Dalits’ role in suppressing it. Here is a quote from him:

The mutiny of 1857 was an attempt … to drive out the English and reconquer India. …the mutiny was headed by the Bengal Army. The Bombay Army and the Madras Army remained loyal and it was with their help that the Mutiny was suppressed. What was the composition of the Bombay Army and the Madras Army? They were mostly drawn from the untouchables, the Mahars in Bombay and the Pariahs in Madras. It is therefore true to say that the untouchables not only helped the British to conquer India they helped them to retain India (link).

The only nationalist leader of note who viewed the revolt as a heroic struggle was Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. He was the first one to describe the revolt as “the first war of Indian independence”, which was also the title of a book that he published. Savarkar seems to have taken a romanticized view of the revolt, one not entirely based on facts. Even then, he still struggled with one blatant and undeniable fact – that the rebel soldiers everywhere had proclaimed the restoration of the old and autocratic Mughal Rule, they had not even claimed to establish a new progressive government. Savarkar was never able to entirely square the circle, as this quote from his book demonstrates:

However this establishment of the power of this old representative of the Mughals, was not for bringing back the old Mughal dynasty or the old barbaric tradition…It would have been suicidal to do so…because that would have meant that the blood shed by Hindu martyrs, fighters for their religion, for their independence ... had been in vain.

My own view is that the revolt of 1857 fell well short of a war of national independence. I agree with Jawaharlal Nehru’s characterization that it was the “last flicker of feudal India”. However, it is also true that the revolt was more than just a series of local mutinies and uprisings. Some form of rudimentary nationalism did exist among the rebel soldiers, which gave them some sort of unity of purpose, and which drove them to proclaim the restoration of the Mughal Empire (rather than, say, establish new kingdoms in Meerut, Mathura, etc.).

Various other reasons have also been given by various groups regarding why the revolt should not be viewed as a glorious war of national independence. For a Dalit view, see this. Here is a Sikh view, and here is Hindu Nationalist perspective.

End of Feudal India and the Birth of a New India

Rather than the ‘First War of Indian Independence’, what we should really celebrate in 2007 is the 150th anniversary of end of feudal India. And this is something that is indeed worth celebrating, because the end of feudal India also marks the birth of a new and much more vibrant India.

The very same year as the revolt – 1857 – the great universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were founded. These were representative of the new learning and the new ways of thinking that would sweep India over the next few decades. The very first batch of students to graduate from Calcutta University included Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, whose song Vande Mataram would inspire nationalism in millions of Indians. Among the first few graduates of Bombay University was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the great nationalist thinker and leader. Eventually, it would be people like these, educated and inculcated with modern ideas, rather than the feudal chiefs and princes, who would go on to shape a new India.

As author V.S. Naipaul puts it in India: A Million Mutinies Now, there was a recognition that the feudal system was a “system ... that has come to the end of its possibilities, ... that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before; that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self analysis, things that seem impossibly remote [in 1857].”

References

Unless otherwise mentioned, almost everything here comes from the following:

Majumdar, R.C. 1963. The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857. Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta.

Dalrymple, William. 2006. The Last Mughal The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857. Penguin Viking, New Delhi.

Roy, Tapti. 2006. Raj of the Rani. Penguin Books, New Delhi.

Lakshmibai, Rani of Jhansi (web-site) This excellent web-site has a wealth of information on the Rani of Jhansi.

Sports in India and America

2007-04-21T01:53:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks Indians all over the world have been mourning the national cricket team's abysmal performance in the World Cup. Sadly, failure in the arena of international sports is nothing new for India - the occasional success in cricket being the exception rather than the rule. India’s disappointing performance in the Olympic Games is well known and is much lamented.

Whenever we Indians contemplate our sporting failure, we tend to blame the usual suspects:
(1) The national sports federations are accused of incompetence and/or nepotism.
(2) In cricket, the top players are accused of being excessively greedy, and are said to be spending too much time and energy on product endorsements.
(3) For other (non-cricket) sports, the govt is accused of not providing sufficient financial support for top athletes.
(4) The govt. is accused of not providing “world-class” training facilities for our top athletes.

However, as I see it, these are not really the fundamental problems with Indian sports. Rather, I believe that the fundamental problem lies in the complete lack of interest in sports at the local level – school and college sports, state level sports, etc.

Indian Top-Down Approach Versus American Bottom-Up Approach

I think much can be learned by comparing India's approach to sports to that of other countries. Having lived in the United States for over a decade, I try here to make a broad comparison between the Indian and American approaches.

The Indian approach to sports can be characterized as “top-down”. Great importance is given to how India performs at the international level, but there is very little interest in sport at the school, college, and state level. What little interest there is in, say, neighborhood cricket, derives from the excitement generated by the national team. In stark contrast, in the U.S., public interest in sport is primarily at the local level, not at the international or even national level. Huge amounts of time, effort and money are spent on local sports - especially in high schools and colleges. Of course there is interest and money in national level sports - the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), etc. But this interest in national (and international) sports is built upon a culture of sports at the school/college level. Thus in the U.S. one sees a building-block approach – interest in national and international sport has tended to build upon already existing interest and involvement in local sports. On the other hand in India one sees a trickle-down approach – interest in neighborhood sports has tended to trickle down from interest in international sports. Some of this trickle-down effect can be seen in the establishment of “national academies” or “centers of excellence” to feed the national teams. It is hoped that these academies will select a very small number of highly talented youngsters and coach them into world-class athletes. In the Indian “top-down” model, improving the average standard of sports - by, for instance, building or improving sports fields in a large number of schools - is not considered important. Rather, the priority is on discovering talented individuals who can be coached into winning at the international level.

Consider the Following Observations

The nine largest sports stadiums (excluding auto/horse racing venues) in the U.S. cater exclusively to college sports - Michigan Stadium (University of Michigan), Beaver Stadium (Penn State University) and Neyland Stadium (University of Tennessee) being the top three. In college sports, billions of dollars are spent on facilities, coaches, and equipment, as well as on advertising, TV rights, etc. Athletics is a big part of the identity of many colleges. In contrast, there is hardly any public interest in college sports India – far from attracting gigantic crowds of spectators and TV audiences, sometimes even the players and coaches fail to turn up for college-level sports competitions in India.

High school sports is also taken very seriously in the U.S. Though high school sports stadiums are not as large as college stadiums, they are usually also of high quality, with floodlights and rubber running tracks. For the student body, as well as the local community, high school athletics is part of their identity, and often an immense source of pride. This is especially true in small towns in Middle America. If you drive into a small town in say Iowa or Alabama, be prepared to be greeted by a sign saying something like this: “Welcome to Riverside, Home of the 2003 Division 3A State Champion Riverside Eagles” (see this). In contrast, most schools in India do not take any serious interest in sports. Hardly anybody in India is aware of athletic events involving their neighborhood schools/colleges. Only if somebody makes it to the international level, do Indians take pride in their “local boy” – “Sehweg is from Najafgarh”, “Dhoni is (was?) the pride of Ranchi”, etc. Many high schools in India do organize a rather elaborate annual “Sports Day”, but the emphasis is usually more on pageantry, chief guests, and march-pasts, rather than on the sporting performances themselves (for example, see this).

In the U.S. sports instruction – or coaching – is taken very seriously at all age groups and at all levels. Even very young children, say six years old, often get some form of organized sports instruction. In many parts of Middle America the word “coach” connotes a certain respect and trust that goes beyond athletics, and is often used as an honorific, in the same vein as “prof” or “doc”. Some of the most legendary coaches in America have been college coaches, who have never coached at the national or international level (such as Coach “Bear” Bryant). In India on the other hand, sports instruction at the school and college level is almost nonexistent. Many schools do not even have a single full-time sports instructor.

High school and college sports occupy pride of place in American popular culture and are often celebrated in movies (such as this), TV shows (such as this), and in the local media (for example see this). The best athletes occupy prestigious positions in the school/college social hierarchy and usually command high values in the “dating market”. On the other hand students who favor academics over athletics are often labeled as “nerds” and are looked down upon. The situation in India is quite the opposite. People are barely aware of the existence of school and college sports. Even the super-hit cricket-based Hindi movie Lagaan played on the theme of sport as competition between nations, with a ragtag bunch of Indian villagers – representing the Indian nation – pitted against the mighty British. If Indian newspapers ever report on school/college sports they are usually buried deep in the inside pages. What the Indian media does report very prominently are high school academic examination results (see this or this).

When a youngster in the U.S. takes up sport, he or she does not do it with the dream of “bringing glory to the country”. Of course he (and his parents) may indeed have dreams – perhaps of becoming a high school star, or winning a college sports scholarship and playing for a college. However, it is generally believed that doing well in sports is worthwhile in and of itself, even if one never gets to represent the country. Americans believe that sport not only promotes fitness, it also builds character, leadership qualities, social skills, discipline, etc. In India, by contrast, neighborhood sports are generally considered worthless pursuits, with maybe some redeeming recreational value, but nothing more. Other than recreation, sport is perceived primarily as a way to attain national glory.

In India it is often said that if only the govt were to pump in more money into top-level (non-cricket) sports facilities and top-level sportspersons, India would be a world power in sports. However after seeing the sports scene in the U.S., I have come to the realization that this argument isn’t true at all. In the U.S., though top sports professionals make fortunes, the vast majority of sportspeople have virtually no prospect of ever enjoying any financial return from their sporting endeavors, and they are themselves well aware of this. The most that a talented youngster can generally hope for is to receive a college scholarship and an opportunity to be a college athlete. In fact there are plenty of American Olympic medal winners, in events like say shooting or wrestling, who do not receive any significant financial reward. The lack of any financial incentive does not deter thousands of young athletes from spending huge amounts of time, effort and sometimes money, in their quest to excel in their in sports (unfortunately, sometimes to the detriment of their studies). In comparison, top sportspeople in India – and not just in cricket – are quite lavishly rewarded for any success in international competitions (see this). Even in terms of equipment and facilities top Indian athletes do not appear to be too badly off. The fact that India has been winning a good proportion of its international medals in the sport of shooting says something. This is a highly technical sport that requires a good deal of investment in facilities and equipment to be successful at the international level (even a single bullet for top-level shooters costs significant money). If India really lacked top-level facilities, one would have expected India to do poorly in equipment-intensive sports like shooting and relatively better in sports that do not require expensive facilities, such as long distance running. Instead, quite the opposite is true.

What I think Should Happen in Indian Sports

The American “bottom-up” model is certainly not perfect - I have come across many a college professor ruing the fact that undergraduates prefer to spend much more time and energy on college athletics rather than on college academics. But some aspects of the American model – with its emphasis on school and college sports – are worth emulating in India.

I believe the Indian public should take an active interest in local sport and the govt. should encourage this by building more sports facilities at the grasroots level. Rather than spending colossal sums of money building facilities for a handful of top athletes, why not spend the same money to build sports fields in muncipal and panchayat schools?

There are indeed some encouraging signs. Cricket really does have a mass base now. Recreational cricket is quite widespread in India, and its reach is expanding all the time. Interest in top-level cricket is, of course, huge. What is needed is to fill in the intermediate levels between recreational cricket and international cricket. These intermediate levels – inter-school championships, inter-college championships, state championships, etc. – need to be heavily promoted and energized. Surely this is not impossible, given the interest and money that is there in Indian cricket today.

Outside of cricket the outlook is a lot murkier. Many new schools are starting up in Indian cities without any playground at all. However there is reason for optimism as well. I was in Pune last year during the running of the Pune International Marathon. It was heartening to see many thousands of Puneites, including many school and college students, run the 5k and the 10k. In the publicity leading up to the event, it was good to see the organizers emphasizing and encouraging large-scale public participation. In fact I would encourage the organizers to go one step further, and completely do away with substantial prize money for the top international runners. Instead, why not use that money to buy good running shoes for the top 100 10k finishers from amongst local schoolboys and schoolgirls, or use the money to fund a distance running program in Pune schools run by professional coaches?

If India does indeed build a solid sporting foundation by encouraging school, college and other local sports, the lives of many millions of youngsters will be enriched through sports. There is also little doubt that, with a population of more than one billion, this will eventually lead to better international sports performances.

A Visit to Israel

2007-02-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

I spent two weeks in Israel recently, on a work assignment. I spent most of the time in Haifa, where my company offices are located. I also spent one weekend in the historic city of Jerusalem. It was a wonderful experience.

Here are some observations and thoughts, as well as some photographs I took.

Haifa

Haifa is the largest city in Northern Israel, and the third largest in the country, after Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is a beautiful city nestled between the Mediterranean Sea and Mount Carmel. I stayed in a hotel located at the top of Mount Carmel, with great views of Haifa Bay.

Haifa is a key technology center in Israel, and is home to the Technion, Israel's premier technology institute. My company's office in Haifa is located in the Matam hi-tech park, which is also home IBM and Intel and many other tech companies. Apparently Intel's Centrino chip was designed at this very location.

During the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict in July/August 2006, Haifa was very much in the news. Hundreds of Katyusha rockets, fired by Hezbollah from Southern Lebanon, fell in and around Haifa. While most of these fell harmlessly in the sea or in unpopulated areas, some did cause damage. Around 15 people were killed in Haifa. More importantly, normal life was seriously disrupted. My office colleagues showed me some of the places where Hezbollah rockets had landed. One landed sufficiently close to the Intel building to break some of its windows. However, in spite of the war, our office (and, I understand, almost all other offices) kept functioning throughout that period, with occasional bomb-shelter breaks being the only deviation from normal routine.

The most prominent tourist attraction in Haifa is the spectacular Bahai Gardens on the terraced slopes of Mount Carmel, one of the most important sites of the Bahai faith. Prior to this I had only a very vague awareness of the Bahai faith - I had seen the exquisitely beautiful Bahai Temple in New Delhi from the outside. In Haifa I learned of the Bahais' strong connection to India. Apparently the Bahai faith has had a presence in India since its inception, and India is home to the largest Bahai community in the world.

Here are some pictures I took in Haifa.

Above: A view of Haifa Bay from near my hotel atop Mount Carmel. At the other end of the Bay is the historic city of Akko (Acre). Not too far away beyond that lies Lebanon.

Above: A view of the Bahai Gardens - with the shrine of the Bab at its focus. This is one of the holiest sites of Bahai faith.

Above: The shrine of the Bab at the center of the Bahai Gardens, Haifa.

Above: Looking up Ben Gurion Blvd. towards the Bahai Gardens. This picture is taken from the "German Colony" area of downtown Haifa, which is now a lively area with restaurants and shopping. One restaurant I would recommend to anybody is "Fattoush". Especially recommended there is a dessert called "Knafi"

Above: A busy street in downtown Haifa. This is primarily an Arab area.

Above: A sweet shop on Allenby Road in downtown Haifa selling various kinds of Baklavas and Halvas. The Baklavas here are really very good.

Jerusalem

Nestled in the Judean hills, Jerusalem is a place like no other. The emotions and passions that this city generates among so much of the world's population are just incredible.

Jerusalem is a historic city.

Throughout much of recorded history, Jerusalem has really meant the area that is today the walled Old City, covering an area of only about one square km (less than half a square mile), and is physically only a tiny part of modern Jerusalem (see this map of the Jerusalem metropolitan area today, and this map of the Old City). Outside of the Old City walls, almost all buildings - especially those in sprawling Jewish dominated Western Jerusalem - are less than 50 years old.

There is evidence of continuous human settlement in this area since 10,000 BC. The earliest surviving written record of 'Israel' is in an Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription from around 1200 BC. Jerusalem first came into prominence when David, king of the ancient Israelites, made this his capital city around 1000 BC. After being dominant in Jerusalem for about a thousand years, the Jews were driven out by the Romans. Emperor Constantine of Rome transformed Jerusalem into a center of Christianity in the 4th century AD, and it it remained under Roman and Byzantine rule until the Muslim takeover in 638AD. For most of the time between the 4th century and the Muslim takeover, Jews were not allowed into Jerusalem, and were only allowed back after the Muslim takeover. Between about 1100 and 1300 Jerusalem was fought over during the Crusades, repeatedly changing hands. From around 1300 to 1517 the Muslim Mamelukes ruled, and from 1517 to 1917 it was the Ottoman Turks. From 1917 to 1948 Jerusalem was in British control. In the 1948 Arab-Israeli war there was heavy fighting in Jerusalem. Jewish militias were able to hold on to the western parts of the city, while Arabs held on to the eastern parts. The Old City itself was fiercely contested, with the Transjordanian Arab Legion eventually prevailing. Western Jerusalem became part of the newly established Jewish state of Israel, while the eastern part, including the entire Old City, became part of Transjordan (Transjordan's name was changed to Jordan in 1949). For the next 19 years Jews were banned from entering the Jordanian controlled Old City. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel gained a stunning and decisive victory over its much more numerous and better armed - but poorly led - combined Arab adversaries, and all of Jerusalem - including the Old City - was reunified under Israeli administration.

Jerusalem is a Religious city.

According to the Bible (the Old Testament), Abraham fulfilled God's test to see if he would be willing to sacrifice his son Isaac at a hill-top in Jerusalem (link). Jews, Christians and Muslims - all broadly agree on this biblical story. Around 1000 BC King David's son Solomon built the first great Jewish temple on this hill-top. It was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Second Temple was built by Jews at the same site. The Second Temple - with some expansions, most notably by King Herod - lasted hundreds of years. It was razed by the Romans in 70AD. Only the western retaining wall of the Temple Mount (the compound wall of the Second Temple) survived, and came to be called the Western Wall. However, Jerusalem never lost its significance for Jews. Over many centuries Jews have prayed at the Western Wall, and it remains the holiest site of their faith. Jews everywhere pray in the direction of Jerusalem, and end their Passover rituals every year with the phrase "next year in Jerusalem".

Muslims believe that the prophet Mohammad, on his winged horse al-Buraq, made a night journey to the same hill-top in Jerusalem. From here, he made the Meraj - the ascent to God's presence (link). This is commemorated by a magnificent Islamic shrine known as the Dome of the Rock completed by Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab in 691. The nearby al-Aqsa mosque was built soon after. These - with some modifications - have maintained essentially the same character over the last 1300 years. Together, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque comprise the al-Haram al-Sharif complex (the Noble Sanctuary). For Muslims this is the third holiest site of their faith (after Mecca and Medina). The very earliest Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, though Mohammad and his followers eventually changed the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. Unfortunately, the two days I was in Jerusalem (a Friday and a Saturday) non-Muslims were not allowed to enter the al-Haram al-Sharif complex, and so I couldn't take a closer look (I was told to come on Sunday).

For Christians, Jerusalem represents the land of Jesus. It was here that Jesus preached, and here that he was crucified. Commemorating this is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within the church are shrines at the site of Golgotha (Calvary Hill) where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, and at the site of the sepulchre (tomb) of Jesus. The church was first built by Constantine in the 4th century, destroyed, and eventually rebuilt during the Crusader period. There are many - often squabbling - Christian denominations represented in this church. Weary of the constant squabbling, the Ottoman rulers imposed a "status quo" arrangement in the 18th century, dividing the church among the various denominations. This arrangement remains in force to this day. Old Jerusalem is also home to the Via Dolorosa (Latin for "Way of Sorrow"), where Jesus is believed to have walked on his way to his crucifixion.

Jerusalem is a city of conflict.

There are many historical sites throughout the world, such as say the the pyramids of Egypt, or the sites of the great Mayan cities in Central America, or even Rome or Athens. These cities have also had strong religious associations. However, unlike any of these other very important historic sites, the history that one encounters in Jerusalem is still a living history. This is not cut-and-dried history. This is history that people are passionate about, often still angry about. This is history for which people are willing to fight and kill and die. Given these ingredients, conflict is never far from the surface in Jerusalem, and often breaks out into the open. While I was in Israel, conflict did break out - over something as trivial as excavations related to repairs/reconstruction to a ramp in the Western Wall Plaza area, close to the al-Haram al-Sharif complex. Thousands of Muslim, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, percieved this to be a threat to al-Haram al-Sharif complex, and took to the streets in often violent protests (link).

Here are some pictures I took in Jerusalem.

Above: Old Jerusalem at night from the Mount of Olives. At the center is the majestic Dome of the Rock. The smaller dome on the left is the Al-Aqsa mosque. Adjoining the Dome of the Rock on the far side, and at a lower level (not seen in the picture), is the Western Wall. Also in this picture (but not brightly lit and therefore not clearly visible) is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Above: The Jaffa Gate, on the western wall of the Old City. In 1917, British General Edmund Allenby, having defeating the Turks in battle, ceremonially entered the Old City through the this gate, marking the end of 400 years of Turkish rule over Jerusalem. Between 1948 and 1967, the western wall of the Old City formed the international boundary between Israel and Jordan. West of the walls lay Israel. East of the walls - including entire Old City - lay Jordan.

Above: The Zion Gate, on the southern wall of the Old City. As indicated by the the bullet marks, this has been the scene of fierce fighting. Here, in 1948, a unit of the Jewish Palmach fought desperately in an effort to relieve the besieged Jewish Quarter of the Old City. However, the powerful and highly capable Jordanian Arab Legion led by Major Abdullah Tell prevailed, and wrested control of the entire Old City. The surviving Jews of the Old City surrendered to Abdullah Tell, and were evacuated through this gate. With this, Jewish presence in the Old City ceased for a period of 19 years, during which they were not even allowed to visit the Western Wall.

Above: The al-Haram al-Sharif complex and its northern boundary wall, as seen from near the Lion Gate (St. Stephen's Gate). Here, during the Six Day Way, on June 7th 1967, an Israeli paratroop brigade led by Colonel Mordechai ("Motta") Gur blasted its way through the the Lion Gate and entered the until-then-Jordanian-controlled Old City. After a brief skirmish, Gur took control of the al-Haram al-Sharif complex, and sent a famous radio message, "the Temple Mount is in our hands". However, with Jews being banned from the Old City for the previous 19 years, none of his soldiers knew how to get to the Western Wall, and Gur had to ask an old Arab man for directions.

Above: Me, on a rooftop in the Old City. Behind me can be seen the Dome of the Rock. Further away can be seen the bell tower of the Church of Ascension on the Mount of Olives.

Above: The Western Wall Plaza and the Dome of the Rock. After the 1967 war, a small part of the Western Wall was cleared of surrounding shops and other structures and opened to the public as the Western Wall Plaza.

Above: Signs for visitors at the Western Wall Plaza.

Above: Jews pray at the Western Wall.

Above: Prayers at the Western Wall. A ramp to the al-Haram al-Sharif Complex can be seen in the background. Four days after this picture was taken a huge controversy broke out over excavations related to repairs/reconstruction of this ramp. (For more about this controversy see this).

Above: Main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There are many Christian denominations represented in this church. The Ottoman rulers imposed a "status quo" arrangement in the 18th century, dividing the church amongst the various denominations. This arrangement continues to this day, sometimes leading to bizzare results, such as the permanent presence of a ladder below the upper-floor window (For more about the ladder see this).

Above: Golgotha (Calvary Hill), inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Christian tradition holds that Jesus was crucified here. This site is now within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Two chapels stand here. On the left of this picture is the Greek Orthodox chapel, and on the right is the Catholic one. Nearby, under the great dome of this church, is the sepulchre (tomb) of Jesus.

Above: This is a view from near the Damascus Gate, looking towards the Muslim Quarter and the Dome of the Rock.

Above: This is a view from near the Damascus Gate, looking towards the Christian Quarter and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (notice the two domes of the church).

Above: Market scene in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.

Above: In the Christian Quarter of the Old City. The dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre can be seen in the background. What struck me about this scene was the sheer normality of this back-yard: there are regular people living in regular houses with regular back-yards inside the Old City. With all its history, and religion, and conflict, here normality can sometimes feel abnormal.

Above: Another scene of normality: The amusingly named "Holy Rock Cafe" beckons pilgrims and tourists on the Via Dolorosa.

Above: Near Herod's Gate is the Indian Hospice - an Indian presence in Old City Jerusalem. Apparently the Sufi saint Baba Farid of Shakarganj stayed here some 700 years ago, and his rooms then became a Sufi shrine. Some of the surrounding land was bought and buildings constructed with donations from Indian pilgrims visiting the shrine. Eventually it became a place to stay for Indian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem, and came to be known as the Indian Hospice. Since 1924 the Ansari family, originally from Saharanpur, has functioned as caretaker. (For more, see this and this).

Above: The Mount of Olives. This is a view from the ramparts of the old city walls looking outside towards the Mount of Olives. At the center is the Russian church with its golden colored onion domes. Below that is Church of All Nations. At the top of the Mount of Olives is the bell tower of the Church of Ascension.

Above: Jerusalem has its Old City walls ... and then Jerusalem has its new security barrier ... its 'Berlin Wall'. Here is the security wall passing through East Jerusalem. For a sense of scale, compare with the vehicle on the right. Many human-rights organizations have severely criticized this barrier, but Israelis claim that it has been very effective in reducing the number of terrorist acts in Israel.

Yad Vashem - the Holocaust Memorial

While in Jerusalem I also paid a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, which is located on Mount Herzl in West Jerusalem. Here are some pictures.

Above: Museum entrance, Yad Vashem. The museum at Yad Vashem is a long, straight structure with triangular cross-section. It starts out as an overhang on a hill top, which is seen in this picture. The structure goes right through the hill, and ends as another overhang at the other side of the hill. The overhang at the other end has a beautiful panoramic view of Jerusalem.

Above: The end of the museum with a panoramic view of Jerusalem. One display that I remember particularly vividly showed an actual freight rail-car used to transport victims to Auschwitz, and nearby were canisters partly filled with pellets of Zyklon-B, the chemical used by the Nazis to kill millions in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere. Observing these very ordinary looking objects - the Zyklon-B pellets looking no different from say vitamin capsules - and knowing what these were meant for, I thought of political thinker Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" - the idea that acts of great evil do not necessarily need to be driven by great malevolence, ordinary banal people doing ordinary jobs with ordinary objects can result in great evil.

Some More Observation

On the Lack of Religious Architecture

One thing that struck me was that I hardly noticed any synagogues in Israel. In Jewish controlled Jerusalem, you will notice grand domes and bell towers and minarets of churches and mosques, and in Haifa you will notice the Bahai Gardens. But there are simply no religious Jewish architectural features that stand out. In Jerusalem's Old City, the magnificent Dome of Rock completely dominates the skyline visually. The main Jewish religious site - the Western Wall - is a ruin, though of course a very important, and ancient, and holy ruin. And the Western Wall is something that cannot be seen from far away. Even within the Old City, you can't see it unless you are right in front of it. Throughout Israel there are many secular Jewish buildings that stand out, skyscrapers, hotels, office buildings, and so on; but no Jewish religious ones. Walking around in Haifa one day, I did come across a synagogue. But I didn't realize it was one until I saw an unusual number of men in black suits walking into it. It was a pretty big building too, but there was nothing distinctive about it on the exterior - from far it looked no different from a regular commercial building.

On the Nature of a Religious State

Israel is unambiguously a religious state. It claims - proudly and openly - to be a Jewish state. There is no question of separation of church and state, or of confining religion merely to the domain of spirituality. Being a secular and rationalistic person, I am uncomfortable with the very notion of a religious state. In my view, religion, though important, is best left confined to the spiritual world, and the business of the material world should largely be conducted using non-religious forces such as democracy, rationality, etc. The irrationality of religious regulations can be easily seen in the rules of Shabbat (Sabbath) - the religiously designated weekly day of rest from sundown Friday to 'nightfall' Saturday. On Shabbat almost everything shuts down in Israel. As a tourist, it is difficult to find an open restaurant. Even public transport - buses, trains, and the Israeli airline El Al - shuts down completely. The strangest part of Shabbat is that observant Jews are not allowed to turn electrical devices on or off during that day. Apparently this stems from some ancient religious edict telling people to refrain from "creative work" and from "starting a fire" during Shabbat. Ways have been devised to get around this. Hotels have "shabbat elevators" which stop at every floor so you don't have to press a button, and "shabbat settings" on light switches, which make them turn on/off automatically. As things stand, modern life is not too seriously impaired by these religious rules. I found the "shabbat elevators" rather comical, but not problematic otherwise. But I am uncomfortable with whole concept. Today the religious leaders allow you to use "shabbat settings" to turn electrical lights on and off. What if tomorrow the same religious leaders reinterpret the same ancient texts to say that you cannot use electrical lights at all? Fortunately, I think most people in Israel are secular and rationalistic, so workarounds are found that satisfy the religious leaders, and allow normal people to get along with their lives. But there is bound to be some degree of tension between the religious and the secular. Since the state's claim to legitimacy is based on religion, secularists will never be able to completely dismiss the directives of religious leaders, however irrational they may be.

Above: Door sign to be hung on the door knob by Shabbat (Sabbath) observant gusts at my hotel in Haifa.

Above: Visitors to the Western Wall plaza are informed that passing through the metal detector at the entrance does not violate Shabbat rules.

Some more pictures from my trip can be found here.

Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal

2007-01-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

A few days back I finished reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal, which I bought on a recent trip to India. In vivid detail, this book tells the story of Delhi at the time of the revolt of 1857 – the story of Bahadur Shah Zafar and the last days of the Mughal Empire. I agree completely with Khushwant Singh’s view that Dalrymple’s book “shows the way history should be written: not as a catalogue of dry-as-dust kings, battles and treaties but to bring the past to the present, put life back in characters long dead and gone and make the reader feel he is living among them, sharing their joys, sorrows and apprehensions”. I found the book truly engrossing. Not only is it exceedingly well written, Dalrymple’s attention to detail and the meticulousness of his research is impressive. My one minor quibble here: a few military-style maps showing the disposition of the opposing forces and the axes of attack, and a listing of the orders of battle (ORBATs) would have helped to better understand the military situation.

Dalrymple set off a controversy of sorts with his claim that “as the scale and detail of the material” that he found - mostly in the National Archives of India – became apparent, it “became obvious that most of the material had not been accessed since it was gathered” and it became “increasingly hard to answer why no one has properly used this wonderful mass of material before”. He also accused Indian historians of being overly preoccupied with academic theories about “orientalism, colonialism and imagining of the other” and in producing obscure works such as “Gendering the Colonial Paradigm, Constructing the Imagined Other, Othering the Imagined Construction, and so on” (Here is a response from an eminent Indian historian, Prof. Irfan Habib).

What’s in the Book

Below are, in my view, some of the major points in this book.

As far as the Indian participants were concerned, the uprising was overwhelmingly seen as a war of religion. British men and women who had converted to Islam – apparently there were quite a few in Delhi – were not hurt; but Indians who had converted to Christianity were cut down by the sepoys. Urdu sources refer to the British “not as angrez (the English) or as goras (whites) or even firangis, but instead almost always as kafirs (infidels) and nasrani (Christians)”. The proportion of jihadi fighters was significant and towards the end – after many of the rebel sepoys had abandoned Delhi and returned to their home villages – grew to almost half the total force defending the city.

While many in Delhi initially welcomed the sepoys in their endeavor to restore Mughal power, people soon “tired of hosting a large and undisciplined army of boorish and violent peasants. ... Delhi sources describe them as ‘Tilangas’ or ‘Purbias’ - effectively outsiders”. The ordinary people of Delhi in their petitions to the Mughal court “did not describe the event there as Ghadr (mutiny) and still less Jang-e-Azadi (war of freedom) so much as fasad (riots) and danga (disturbance)”.

As a ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar was weak and ineffectual. He became the figurehead leader of the sepoys only under duress, and at no point did he fully embrace their cause. His writ did not extend even as far as the royal household, which was engaged in a costly squabble over who was to be the heir apparent. Zafar had never been much involved in any political, administrative or military activity. He spent his time on poetry - he “was known for setting his court difficult poetic tasks”, or such activities as ‘watching his elephants being bathed’ and ‘enjoying the moonlight’.

In Dalrymple’s view, one of the major factors that led to the revolt was the decline of what he calls the ‘White Mughals’ - Britishers who had adopted much of the style and mannerisms of the Mughal nobility. Men like Sir David Ochterlony, the first British Resident at Delhi, who “every evening was said to take all thirteen of his Indian wives on a promenade around the walls of the Red Fort”. However, says Dalrymple, “by the late 1830s, White Mughals ... and their way of life were beginning to die out”. They were being replaced by more Anglicized and more militantly Christian officers, which in Dalrymple’s view was responsible for a decline in the spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding.

The rebel sepoys in Delhi vastly outnumbered the British forces, which by the end of the siege were actually around four-fifths Indian. However, the British forces were able to prevail due to superior leadership and organization, and a better reading of the military situation.

The fall of Delhi to the British in September 1857 was accompanied by wholesale destruction of the city, and terrible atrocities were committed by the victors. Muslims residents of Delhi were affected especially badly.

Dalrymple’s love for Mughal Delhi and for Bahadur Shah Zafar – the last Mughal – is obvious and is touching. Delhi in 1857, according to him, was “in the middle of a remarkable cultural flowering”, and Zafar, was “personally one of the most talented, tolerant and likable of his dynasty: a skilled calligrapher, a profound writer on Sufism, a discriminating patron of paintings and miniatures, an inspired creator of gardens, ... and most importantly ... a very serious mystical poet”. Throughout Dalrymple’s book one detects a rather moving elegiac quality. There is a very deep sense of loss. According to him, “when Delhi fell in September 1857 it was not just the city and Zafar’s court which were uprooted and destroyed but the self-confidence and authority of the wider Mughal political and cultural worlds throughout India”. And “the scale of the devastation and defeat, and the depths of the humiliation heaped on the vanquished Mughals, profoundly diminished not just the prestige of the old aristocratic order, but also - at least to some extent - the composite Hindu-Muslim, Indo-Islamic civilization of which Zafar’s court had been the flagship”, and which, according to him, overflowed with “sophisticated, tolerant and open-minded attitudes”. For Indian Muslims, says Dalrymple, the loss was so great that they “now believed that their own ancient and much-cherished civilization had been irretrievably discredited” and many agreed with Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s initial assessment that Indian Muslims could never again prosper or ‘receive esteem’.

Some Disagreements With the Book

While I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, I do have a few disagreement with it. The most important one does not directly have to do with the book itself, but rather with some ideas that Dalrymple has expressed in his earlier writings, especially his critique of V.S. Naipaul.

The other disagreement – more of a comment really – is that while mourning the loss of Mughal Delhi, it is also worth noting the great changes that followed, much of it – as I see it – ultimately positive.

Earlier Destructions

Noted author and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has written and spoken often about the the destruction of temples, and the ravaging of the Hindu and Buddhist civilization by Muslim rulers. In India: A Wounded Civilization Naipaul writes of a visit to the ruins of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar: “It was in Vijayanagar at this time… that I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years. What happened in Vijayanagar happened, in varying degrees, in other parts of the country. ... In the history books, in the accounts of wars and conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed.” And, says Naipaul, “when it was conquered [in 1565] and its capital systematically smashed, more than buildings and temples would have been destroyed. Many men would have been killed; all the talent, energy and intellectual capacity of the kingdom would have been extinguished for generations.”

Isn’t Naipaul’s description of the destruction of Vijayanagar, and the deep sense of loss, very similar to what Dalrymple writes with regard to Mughal Delhi?

Dalrymple, however, disagrees strongly with Naipaul’s view in this essay. He says, “for Naipaul, the fall of Vijayanagar is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country’s self-confidence.” Dalrymple continues: “[Naipaul] talked about how the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: ‘When Vijayanagar was laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current has been broken.’ Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that the city’s craftsmen merely transferred to the patronage of the Sultans of Bijapur where the result was a major artistic renaissance.”

In light of Dalrymple’s obvious sadness and sense of loss at destruction of Mughal Delhi in 1857 at the hands of the British, I find it very difficult to understand his complete lack of any similar sentiment at the destruction of the earlier Hindu and Buddhist civilization at the hands of Muslim rulers. In Dalrymple’s view the destruction and the sacking of Vijayanagar was of little consequence because “the city’s craftsmen merely transferred to the patronage of the Sultans of Bijapur”. In similar fashion, after 1857, many of the noblemen and craftsmen and poets of Mughal Delhi found new employment under the British, or perhaps under princely rulers such as the Nizam of Hyderabad. Some mingling of architectural styles also took place, giving rise to the Indo-Saracenic style of architecture – a fusion of Mughal and British styles. But, as Dalrymple says – correctly in my opinion – these were nowhere near enough to compensate for the huge loss of “self-confidence and authority of the wider Mughal political and cultural worlds”. Why does Dalrymple view the destruction of Mughal Delhi so differently from the destruction of Vijayanagar? It is almost as if there is an unwritten rule that any destruction caused by Muslim rulers must not be seen in a negative light. I suppose, using the same logic, Dalrymple would also not feel any sense of loss or regret at the destruction of the great university at Nalanda by Bakhtiar Khilji in around 1200 - the library so vast that it supposedly burned for months.

A very interesting blog post by Vijay on Vijayanagar and on Naipaul’s and Dalrymple’s views can be found here. Also of interest in this debate is this blog post by Prof. Amardeep Singh.

The Great Revival

While contemplating a great loss such as that of Mughal Delhi in 1857, what is also relevant is what came after the loss. While the destruction of the “Mughal political and cultural worlds” in 1857 was no doubt very sad, it is also true that the period that followed was a period of great renewal for India. As Naipaul says in India: A Million Mutinies Now there was a recognition that the feudal system represented by the Mughals was a “system ... that has come to the end of its possibilities, ... that the India that will come into being at the end of the period of British rule will be better educated, more creative and full of possibility than the India of a century before; that it will have a larger idea of human association, and that out of this larger idea, and out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there will come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self analysis, things that seem impossibly remote [in 1857].”

The very same year as the destruction of Mughal Delhi – 1857 – the great universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were founded – India’s first centers of higher learning on such a scale since the destruction of Nalanda. These were representative of the new learning and the new way of thinking that would sweep India over the next few decades. Around the same period, the Asiatic Society in Kolkata had begun the process of (re)discovering the glory of India’s ancient pre-Islamic past – a process that would be carried forward by the founding of the Archeological Survey of India in 1861. The Great Trignometric Survey of India, begun in 1802 and completed around 1845 – one of the world’s greatest technological achievements in the 19th century – would give Indians the first accurate knowledge of the nation’s geography.

Most importantly, perhaps for the first time ever in India’s history, it would be generally accepted – at least in theory if not always in practice – that the new learning should not be restricted to a few castes or groups, and should be open to all. Among the loyal sepoys of the East India Company’s army around the time of the revolt was one Maloji Sakpal, an untouchable Mahar by caste. The army had instituted a policy of compulsory education for Indian soldiers of all castes as well as their children, both male and female. As a result, Maloji’s son Ramji received a formal education. Ramji also joined the army, and he and his wife – she too from a military family and therefore educated – emphasized education for their own children. One of these children, Bhim, better known today as Dr. Babaseheb Ambedkar, would go on to become one of the greatest thinkers and leaders of modern India. Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, the great social reformer in Maharashtra, who, with his wife Savitribai, had started schools for low caste girls in the 1840s, and who took an active interest in the events of 1857, took a very dim view of the feudal system represented by the “Mughal political and cultural worlds”. In his 1873 book Slavery, Mahatma Phule writes: “It was through Providential dispensation that the revolt … was put down by the brave English rulers. Otherwise the so-called emancipated Brahmins who perform religious rites ... would surely have sentenced many Mahars for wearing the dhoti tucked away on one side, or for (the offence of) having uttered Sanskrit verses during religious discourses, to transportation for life.”

Just twelve years after the fall of Mughal Delhi, Mahatma Gandhi would be born, symbolically signalling the birth of a new India.

Dalrymple, in The Last Mughal, does concede in a paragraph towards the end of the book that what followed the fall of Delhi in September 1857 was not all bad: “Not all changes, of course, were necessarily for the worse. The autocratic political structures of Mughal rule received a devastating death blow. Only ninety years separated the British victory at the gates of Delhi in 1857 from the British eviction from South Asia through the Gateway of India in 1947. ... it was not the few surviving descendants of the Mughals, nor any of the old princely and feudal rulers, who were in any way responsible for India’s march to independence. Instead the Indian freedom struggle was led by the new Anglicized and educated Colonial Service class who emerged from English-language schools after 1857, and who by and large used modern Western democratic structures and methods ... to gain their freedom.”

Despite the above paragraph, Dalrymple’s overriding theme in the book is a deep sense of loss for the Mughal order. This is quite understandable given the subject of the book and his love of that subject. And the eloquence of Dalrymple’s writing is such that the reader cannot help but share that sense of loss. But I feel that at the same time it is important to keep in mind what followed. Delhi today – despite its numerous problems – is the proud capital of a vibrant, democratic, forward-looking and increasingly self confident India – far more meaningful, both symbolically and practically, to the people of India and the world than Bahadur Shah Zafar’s Mughal Delhi ever was.

Jinnah, the Pakistan Demand, and the Meaning of Pakistan

2006-11-02T04:02:00.000-08:00

In order to understand Pakistan I believe that much can be learnt by taking a peek at history - especially the history of the Pakistan movement in the 1940s, led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The basic thinking behind the demand for Pakistan can be traced back to Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan, a descendent of Mughal nobility, and founder of the Aligarh Muslim University. In the aftermath of the revolt of 1857, Sir Sayyed was obsessed with preserving the distinct Perso-Arabic ‘Sharif’ culture of the North Indian Muslim nobility that, after being dominant in the area for centuries, was losing ground to local vernacular and popular culture. Seeking a way around this problem, he was the first to come up with concept that Muslims in the Indian Subcontinent were ‘a nation, not a minority’.

Whatever influence Sir Sayyed and others (like Iqbal, the poet and philosopher) had on the Pakistan movement, from around 1935 onwards, Muhammad Ali Jinnah became the undisputed leader - the sole spokesman – of this movement. Jinnah's own boast that he created Pakistan “with the help of his secretary and typewriter” was not too far from the truth. This being so, it is especially important to understand what Jinnah thought of Pakistan, and what he considered the goals of the Pakistan movement to be.

Early in Jinnah's political career he had been known as the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. However, his views appeared to have changed considerably by 1940, when in his presidential address to the Muslim League at the crucial Lahore Session - where the famous Pakistan Resolution was passed – he said:

It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality ... The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.

This seems to indicate that Jinnah held the view that Hindus and Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent were fundamentally incompatible with each other, and had to be separated whatever the cost. In other words, Jinnah viewed partition and the creation of a sovereign Muslim state as absolutely necessary.

However, on August 11th 1947, in his inaugural address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly - one of his most important and carefully prepared speeches - this is what Jinnah had to say.

Everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs ... is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations. ... In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, will vanish. ... You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. ... We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. ... in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.

It is difficult to believe that these two diametrically opposed visions of Pakistan could have been articulated by the same person. It appears from the second quote that Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be just like India, with religion as a private issue, no business of the state. But if Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be just like India, then what was the purpose of the Pakistan movement, what was the need to create a new state at such great cost?

In recent years revisionist historians - the most prominent being Ayesha Jalal - have come up with a thesis that goes a long way in explaining Jinnah's actions. According to this thesis, Jinnah never really wanted Pakistan, i.e., a separate sovereign state for Muslims. His demand for Pakistan was just that – a demand. For Jinnah this demand was no more than simply a tool to oppose the dominant Congress Party and a ‘bargaining counter’ to be deployed for the sake of achieving his real goal – a larger share of power for himself and for the Muslim League in a united India. Jinnah always thought of ‘Pakistan’ as a demand, never as an independent sovereign state. No wonder then that when the state of Pakistan was actually established in 1947, Jinnah had no idea what this new state was to be all about, and had nothing resembling a long-term vision for it. As Salman Rushdie put it in his novel Shame “Pakistan may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind... Perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined.”

Ayesha Jalal’s book about Jinnah and the Pakistan movement The Sole Spokesman is fascinating. Here is a what historian Francis Robinson says of the book.

By enabling us to peep at Jinnah's cards and by pointing out to us the tricks he was really trying in order to win, Jalal reveals the inner coherence of a career spanning half a century in politics. ... Jinnah never deserted his early attachment to Hindu-Muslim unity. ... There was no disjunction between a secular ideal. ... Jalal reveals the logic of Jinnah’s twists and turns in the complex negotiations surrounding the transfer of power. We understand more fully the wording of the Lahore Resolution. We see how his plans were far more fundamentally threatened by the Cripps offer than those of Congress. We feel for him when the Cabinet Mission proposals tease out the contradictions between his rhetoric and his purpose.

The Pakistan Resolution

The resolution passed at the Muslim League's Lahore session in 1940 has come to be known as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’ and is widely celebrated in Pakistan as a pivotal event in its creation. The site where the resolution was passed is now commemorated by the ‘Minar-e-Pakistan’, and the date (March 23rd) is celebrated every year as ‘Pakistan Day’. Clearly, this resolution is of great importance. It is therefore relevant to ask: how did Jinnah view this resolution; what was his purpose behind it?

Let us first see what the resolution says

.... Resolved that it is the considered view of this session of the All India Muslim League that no constitutional plan would be workable in this country [i.e., British India] or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, viz. that geographically continuous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the north-western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute Independent States, in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign. ... Adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards should be specifically provided in the Constitution for minorities ... for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights. Arrangements thus should be made for the security of Muslims where they were in a minority.

The ambiguous, vague and self-contradictory nature of the resolution is remarkable. Bowing to the desire for autonomy expressed by powerful provincial leaders in Muslim majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal, the resolution demanded ‘Independent States’ (plural) rather than a single ‘Independent State’, and did not say a word about any central government, either Muslim or Indian. Later, when Jinnah became politically more powerful and could afford to disregard the opinions of the regional leaders, he would claim that ‘States’ was simply a misprint, and the Lahore Resolution really meant a single ‘State’ for Muslims (link). While demanding safeguards for minorities, it is significant that the resolution talks of this being a constitutional arrangement rather than treaty arrangements between sovereign states, indicating that what was envisaged was an all-India arrangement under a constitution, rather than two (or more) independent states with treaty arrangements amongst themselves. The borders of the ‘Independent States’ were also intentionally left vague and undefined by the resolution.

According to Jalal, the Lahore Resolution is to be seen as a “bargaining counter, which had the merit of being acceptable (on the face of it) to the majority province Muslims, and of being totally unacceptable to the Congress and to the British also”. Also, notes Jalal, “at no point between 1940 and the Cabinet Mission's arrival in 1946 did the League expand, revise, or make more specific this incomplete and contradictory statement, even when its position was ostensibly stronger, and the need for clarification most urgent.”

The Cabinet Mission Plan

What did Jinnah really want? According to revisionist historians like Ayesha Jalal, Jinnah really had three primary goals in mind.
(a) To create a strong Muslim central government in an unpartitioned India, with the Muslim center being represented by Jinnah and the Muslim League, and powerful enough to discipline regional Muslim leaders.
(b) To create parity at the center (in undivided India) between Muslims and non-Muslims. This meant that at the all-India central government level the Muslim community, which comprised about one-fourth of the population, would have as much power as all other communities put together. The fundamental principle of democracy – parity for individuals, i.e., one person one vote – was not acceptable to Jinnah, because, as he put it, in such a democracy “Brother Gandhi has three votes [in the Constituent Assembly], and Brother Jinnah has only one.”
(c) To get himself and the Muslim League recognized as the sole representative of Muslims in undivided India. Jinnah wanted the Congress (and others) to be barred from nominating Muslims for seats in legislatures. He treated Muslim Congress leaders with utter contempt. For example, while meeting with a Congress delegation at the Simla Conference in 1945, Jinnah refused to shake hands with Maulana Azad even though shook hands with the non-Muslim Congress delegates.

The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 came close to fulfilling these three main goals that Jinnah had in mind. It envisaged a complicated tri-level arrangement for governing India. At one level would be the provincial governments, with the provinces being grouped into Muslim and non-Muslim provinces. At the second level would be two strong central governments - a Muslim center for the Muslim provinces and a non-Muslim one for the non-Muslim provinces. At the third level would be a ‘super-center’ with representation from the Muslim center and the non-Muslim center. The ‘super-center’ would be responsible only for foreign affairs, defense, and communication. After much discussion both the Congress and the Muslim League accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan. Eventually however the plan would fall apart (for more about the plan see this excellent web-site; the author's reasoning, with which I largely agree, of why the Congress had to do what it did is available here).

What is important to note here is that the Cabinet Mission Plan categorically rejected the concept of partition and the creation of a sovereign Muslim state of Pakistan. Yet Jinnah accepted this plan, indicating that even as late as 1946 he did not see a separate sovereign state of Pakistan as an absolute necessity, at least in the near future (the plan called for a re-evaluation after 10 years).

Partition

Unfortunately for Jinnah and for India - especially its Muslims -Jinnah's game of high stakes poker went horribly wrong after the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan. Congress - enjoying the support of the vast majority of the Indian population - would never agree to complete parity with the Muslim League at an all-India level. The British wanted to leave India as soon as possible. Jinnah's own supporters had been whipped into a religious frenzy and had come to see the creation of a sovereign Pakistan as some sort of religious deliverance - they were not willing to accept any compromise. Eventually Jinnah had no option but to settle for a “mutilated, moth-eaten” Pakistan that, on two earlier occations, he had rejected out of hand.

Ayesha Jalal in her book The Sole Spokesman has this insightful passage in the introduction.

The most striking fact about Pakistan [as it actually came into being] is how it failed to satisfy the interests of the very Muslims who are supposed to have demanded its creation. The main centers of Muslim population, the Punjab and Bengal, ended up being sliced in two. In both these provinces ...Muslims had come to dominate the ministries. Partition ... deprived Muslims of the benefits of undivided provinces. Muslim Punjab lost its fertile eastern districts. Muslim Bengal lost Calcutta, its capital city and economic ‘heart’ . ... As for Muslim minorities in other provinces, they were left high and dry inside a country where their more numerous co-religionists to the east and west had no influence. At a stroke, partition stripped them of ... the shield that Muslim-majority provinces might have raised in their defence inside undivided India. ... Muslims of Sind, NWFP and Baluchistan had one thing in common: fierce attachment to their particularist traditions and deep antipathy to any central control. The creation of Pakistan bundled them willy-nilly into a state dominated by ... western Punjab and placed them under the tight central control that Pakistan had to impose if it had to survive.

Jinnah himself appears to have been unsure of how to deal with partition and the creation of Pakistan. He came up with the bizarre notion that the Pakistan Constituent Assembly should meet in Delhi! He objected to India using the name ‘India’ - he preferred ‘Hindustan’. Perhaps he did not want to view Pakistan as splintering away from India, but rather India dividing into Pakistan and Hindustan. One gets the impression that Jinnah did not want to uproot himself from his beloved Bombay and move to Pakistan. He chose not to sell his house in Bombay, which was worth a fortune. Nor did he donate it to the new state of Pakistan (as Liaquat Ali Khan did with his). When, after independence, his house was in danger of being declared ‘evacuee property’, Jinnah pleaded with the Indian High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Pakistan. “Sri Prakasa, don’t break my heart. Tell Jawaharlal not to break my heart. I have built it brick by brick. Who can live in a house like that? What fine verandahs? It is a small house fit only for a small European family or a refined Indian prince. You do not know how I love Bombay. I still look forward to going back there.” (link). This, after independence. It appears that the Quaid-e-Azam had very little desire of spending the rest of his life in Pakistan.

What is the Relevance Today

I feel that a better understanding of Jinnah and the Pakistan demand can go a long way in understanding the Pakistani state today. Not only was Jinnah the sole spokesman of the Pakistan movement in the 1940s, but since then no leader has emerged in Pakistan with sufficient legitimacy to ask basic questions about the nature and purpose of the state that Jinnah created – perhaps Pakistani society does not feel sufficiently self-confident to allow such questions to be asked. As a result, ideas in Pakistan have not evolved much since Jinnah's time.

Consider the following.

For Jinnah, Pakistan was simply a demand that was a useful political tool in opposing the Congress Party and was a ‘bargaining chip’ to extract concessions. His motivations for Pakistan were thus entirely negative, entirely oppositional. Jinnah's Pakistan was never inspired by any positive or constructive ideas. A similar kind of thinking is prevalent in Pakistan today. The Pakistani state views itself primarily as an instrument to oppose India, and defines Pakistani nationality primarily in terms of hostility towards India.

For Jinnah and the Muslim League, achieving parity with the Congress Party was a key goal of the Pakistan movement. Continuing this line of thinking after independence, Pakistan has strived hard to achieve at least some level of parity with India, sometimes going to absurd lengths. For example, India's land area is obviously much larger than Pakistan’s; but Pakistan must seek parity with India; so was born the dubious doctrine of ‘strategic depth’, whereby Pakistan sought to control Afghanistan’s territory, in order to achieve parity of sorts with Indian territorial ‘depth’. Consider another instance. After India tested a nuclear bomb in 1974, Pakistani Leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously said “even if we have to eat grass we will make the bomb” in the eternal Pakistani quest to achieve parity with India.

For Jinnah it was important to be recognized as the sole spokesman for all Muslims in undivided India. After independence, Pakistan, at some level, has sought to do this as well. The intellectual descendents of Jinnah who still are part of the power structure in Pakistan have tried to maintain this rhetoric, seeking to be the ‘Muslim voice’ or the ‘defender of Muslims’ in the subcontinent. There is a school of thought in Pakistan that believes that Muslim Pakistan’s militaristic threats scare Hindus and thereby afford protection to Muslims in India. For example in the book Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity Akbar S. Ahmed – a former Pakistani diplomat, a self-proclaimed admirer of Jinnah, and supposedly a scholar – offers this ‘Pakistan as a guardian of Indian Muslims’ argument in support of the Pakistani state’s policy of sponsoring terrorist activity inside India. “What stopped the widespread orgy of rioting in India after Ayodhya were the bomb-blasts in Bombay in 1993. The shock effect froze the rioting. ... The Hindus blamed the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence, the ISI. In the end, if the ISI were responsible, then they and they alone were the guardians of Muslims in India.” The reality, of course, is very different from this rhetoric. Pakistani sponsored terrorism in India, far from protecting Indian Muslims, may have actually made them more vulnerable to communal violence. And who can deny that in the sixty years since independence, the Pakistani state has been responsible for hundreds of thousands (millions?) more Muslim deaths – such as in the genocide in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) – than all the communal rioting in India put together.

I am a Marathoner Now

2006-11-02T03:53:00.000-08:00

On Sunday I ran the Silicon Valley Marathon. It was awesome experience!!

I started training for the marathon with TeamAsha about six months ago, and it has been a wonderful experience. Before May 2006 I had never ever run more than about 4 miles. On Oct. 29th 2006 I ran 26.2 miles. Wow!! I myself find it difficult to believe.

Unfortunately about 6 weeks before the marathon I developed a persistent knee injury (ITB syndrome), as a result of which I had to miss some of the longest training runs. In the last two weeks prior to the marathon I had been free of ITB pain, but my longest run in that period was only 10miles. I had also done a 20-miler three weeks prior to the marhathon, but I did fast walking there, no running.

On the day of the marathon I was a little apprehensive, especially with regards to the injury. I had packed some Tylenol pills. The weather was great. I started off with another TeamAsha runner, Vinay, and we consistently maintained a 12min per mile race and did the 1-mile-run-1-min-walk routine. At about the half-way point the ITB started acting up a little, and I popped in a couple of Tylenol. The Tylenol did the trick, but in any case, my pace also dropped down a little, and I lost Vinay at about the 16-mile mark. It was a huge relief to reach the Asha waterstop at the 25-mile mark, where my wife, Bonnie, ran out to hug me, and a huge cheer went up as I approached. The remaining 1 mile was smooth sailing, and I eventually eneded up fininshing in 5hrs 47mins. Not a great timing, but as far as I was concerned, I might as well have broken the world record!!

Also see this.

King Devanampiya Piyadasi – and the Discovery of Indian History

2006-09-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

The Ashoka Chakra and the Lion Capital – these symbols of modern India connect us to our glorious past. They arouse in us a sense of pride and grandeur, reminding us of our long and magnificent heritage. Mahatma Gandhi, commenting on the national flag, said, “looking at the wheel some may recall that Prince of Peace, King Ashoka, ruler of an empire, who renounced power. He represents all faiths; he was an embodiment of compassion. … Ashoka’s Chakra represents the eternally revolving Divine Law of Ahimsa.” And according to Jawaharlal Nehru “we have associated with our flag not only this emblem but in a sense the name of Ashoka, one of the most magnificent names in India’s history and the world.” Today every school child in India learns about Emperor Ashoka's righteous rule over a vast empire, and about the Maurya and the Gupta dynasty, now referred to as the Golden Age of India.

What is not so widely known is that for hundreds of years Indians were completely ignorant of this glorious heritage of ours. While myths and legends were common, a historical awareness of India’s pre-Islamic past simply did not exist. Today it may be difficult for us to imagine, but till as recently as 1830 – not quite forty years before Gandhi’s birth – Emperor Ashoka was an unknown name.

King Devanampiya Piyadasi

Credit for initiating the long process of discovery of ancient Indian history must go largely to a group of remarkable scholars who were members of an equally remarkable institution The Asiatic Society of Kolkata, founded by Sir William Jones in 1784, with the goal of advancing the understanding of Indian history and culture.

One especially remarkable member of the Asiatic Society was James Prinsep, who arrived in India from England in 1819 at age twenty, to work at the Kolkata mint. From around 1830, Prinsep, while still working in the mint, would increasingly devote his spare time and energy to the activities of the Asiatic Society. He would eventually make a number of important breakthroughs, but one achievement stands out among all others: his decipherment of inscriptions known then as “Delhi no. 1”.

Members of the Asiatic Society had been aware of a stone column in Delhi known locally as the lat (staff) of Firuz. A number of inscriptions were found on it, which were copied and sent to the Asiatic Society in 1788, where Pundit Radhakanta Sarman was able to decipher some of the later ones (in Kutila script), but not others in an unknown script. These undeciphered inscriptions became known as “Delhi no. 1”. In course of time, similar pillars with similar undecipherable inscriptions were found in Allahabad and in Lauriya Nandagarh near Bettiah in Bihar. Many more such pillars – usually described by local legend as the gada (mace) of Bhima would eventually be discovered across the length and breadth of India. Prinsep and others plunged into an intense effort to decipher these inscriptions. This was not an easy task. Many letters were worn away and some were obliterated by later inscriptions. Moreover, in those pre-photography days, the copies of the inscriptions they had to work with were far from perfect.

The first breakthrough came in 1834. According to Prinsep, “upon carefully comparing them [the Delhi, Allahabad and Lauriya Nandangarh inscriptions] with a view to finding any other words that might be common to them … I was led to a most important discovery; namely that all three inscriptions were identically the same … except for a few lines at the bottom which appear to bear a local import”. The next clue would come from the great Stupa at Sanchi near Bhopal. Prinsep had received drawings and copies of inscriptions found at Sanchi. These included some short inscriptions found on stone railings around the main shrine – it were these “apparently trivial fragments of rude writing [wrote Prinsep] that have led to even more important results than the other inscriptions.” What followed was described by Prinsep in June 1837. “While arranging and lithographing the numerous scraps of facsimiles [from the Sanchi stone railings], I was struck by their all ending in the same two letters. Coupling their circumstance with their extreme brevity, which proved that they could not be fragments of a continuous text, it immediately occurred that they must record either obituary notices, or more probably the offerings and presents of votaries, as is known to be the present custom … ‘Of so and so the gift’ must then be the form of each brief sentence; … [this] led to the speedy recognition of the word danam (gift), teaching me the very two letters d and n, most different from known forms. … My acquaintance with ancient alphabets had become so familiar that most of the remaining letters in the present examples could be named at once on re-inspection. In the course of a few minutes I became possessed of the whole alphabet, which I tested by applying it to the inscription on the Delhi column.” Thus was deciphered the earliest Brahmi script, now known to be the most ancient post-Indus-Valley Indian script and the precursor of all Indian scripts in use today. So what did the inscription on the Delhi Pillar reveal? Prinsep read the first line as:

Devanampiya Piyadasi laja evam aha

Now that these inscriptions could be read, they still had to be understood. Prinsep – a Sanskrit scholar himself – along with a distinguished pundit set about the task. The language turned out to be one of the Prakrit languages, vernacular derivations of classical Sanskrit, which made translation a little difficult. But in a few weeks the translation of the “Delhi no 1” was ready:

Thus spake King Devanampiya Piyadasi. In the twenty-seventh year of my annointment I have caused this religious edict to be published in writing, I
acknowledge and confess the faults that have been cherished in my heart … Let stone pillars be prepared and let this edict of religion be engraven thereon, that it may endure into the remotest ages.

The question now was, who was this person Devanampiya Piyadasi? Prinsep initially thought it could be the Buddha himself, for, so far as scholars then knew, no single Indian monarch had ruled over such a vast territory as was covered by the pillars and rock inscriptions. This explanation, however, had soon to be given up because the inscriptions referred to ‘such and such year of my reign’, and the Buddha had never been a monarch. Unfortunately, wrote Prinsep, “in all the Hindu genealogical tables with which I am acquainted, no prince can be discovered possessing this very remarkable name”. The mystery was solved within a few short months, with information gleaned, not from archeological sites in India, but from distant Sri Lanka. George Turnour, a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, had taken upon himself the task of translating Sri Lankan Buddhist texts in Pali into English – a rather daunting task, since “no dictionaries then existed … and no teacher could be found capable of rendering them into English”. Turnour persisted, however, and his work threw light not only on the history of Sri Lanka but also on the history of Buddhism in India. Around August 1837 while going through a major work of Pali Buddhist literature, the Dipowanso, he came across one passage, which read:

Two hundred and eighteen years after the beatitude of Buddha, was the inauguration of Piyadassi … who, the grandson of Chandragupta, and own son of Bindusara, was at that time viceroy at Ujjayani.

So finally, the mystery was solved. King Devanampiya Piyadasi was none other than Ashoka, already known from the Sanskrit king lists as a descendent of Chandragupta Maurya and, from Himalayan Buddhist sources, as a patron of early Buddhism. Now, his historicity was dramatically established. With the discovery of Ashoka as the righteous ruler of a vast empire, a glorious chapter in the history of India was thrown open. Of course, much work still remained to be done. More and more evidence would be found over the years confirming Ashoka as King Devanampiya Piyadasi – but it would not be until 1915 that the matter was settled beyond all doubt when a rock edict referring to Ashoka explicitly as “Ashoka” was found in Maski in Raichur district in Karnataka.

William Jones – the Pioneer

Thirty-six years before Prinsep’s arrival in India, in September 1783, Sir William Jones had landed in Kolkata to take up his appointment as a judge in the Bengal Supreme Court. He was man of learning, eager to know more about India. During his five month long voyage from England on board the frigate Crocodile, Jones had made a long list of topics he wanted to explore in India. These topics give an indication of the vast scope of his inquiry. Among them were (i) the laws of Hindus and Mahomedans, (ii) the history of the ancient world, (iii) modern politics and geography of Hindustan, (iv) Arithmetic and geometry and mixed sciences of Asiatics, (v) poetry, rhetoric and morality of Asia, (vi) the best accounts of Tibet and Kashmir, and (vii) Mughal administration.

Upon arrival in India Jones realized that in order to embark on his journey of inquiry he would have to learn Sanskrit. With the help of his teacher – Pundit Ramlochan – Jones became an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit. His first great insight – about a common origin of what is today known as the Indo-European family of languages – came in 1786. Here it is in his own words.

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”

In 1789 Jones published an English translation of the Sanskrit play Shakuntala, written by Kalidasa, whom Jones called the ‘Shakespeare of India’. Shakuntala had quite a reception in Europe. It was translated into all major European languages, was adapted for the English stage, the Parisian Opera and the German theater, and influenced many a litterateur, including Goethe – that giant of German literature. As S.N. Mukherjee commented, “after Jones’ publication of the Shakuntala and the Gita Govinda no one could deny the merits of Indian literature.”

Another key discovery made by Jones was that the Indian king known to Greek history as Sandracottus was in fact Chandragupta Maurya, which enabled him to establish the dates (accurate to within 10-15 years) of Chandragupta Maurya’s reign. These dates have come to be known as the ‘sheet anchor of Indian history’, and this has become the primary chronological reference point for the study of ancient Indian history. Many important dates, such as the birth of the Buddha and the reign of Emperor Ashoka, were calculated based on this reference point.

However important Jones’ individual discoveries may have been, his most important contribution was the establishment of the Asiatic Society, which he founded on 15th January 1784, within months of his arrival in Kolkata. This society represented the first successful attempt to study ancient Indian history in a systematic – ‘scientific’ – manner. Not only did the Asiatic Society itself play a leading role in the discovery of Indian history, it also spawned the Archeological Survey of India, founded in 1861 by Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham, whose interest in Indian archeology and antiquity had been sparked by James Prinsep.

Ambiguity About British Legacy

During the Raj, Britain’s economic exploitation of India was appalling. Moreover, the sheer contempt that many (perhaps most) of the British held for Indian civilization is obvious. This is exemplified by Lord Thomas Macaulay’s famous 1835 Minute on Indian Education: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India … that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.”

However there were also among the British many who gave back to India as much as they took – men like William Jones and James Prinsep. The British are widely credited with certain achievements in India, like creating a workable administrative structure, establishing modern universities and colleges, building the railway network, and the magnificent Indian Army. But it went beyond that. Men like Jones and Prinsep – and the institutions they built – gave us a sense of our glorious pre-Islamic history and culture. And men like William Lambton and George Everest – and the institutions they built – gave us the first accurate knowledge of our geography (link). These ideas of Indian culture, ancient history and geography inspired Indians and created a sense of nationhood. These ideas also played a major role in the nationalist movement that swept the country in the first half of the twentieth century. Gandhi, for instance, read the Bhagavad Gita for the first time in Sir Edwin Arnold’s English translation while a law student in London – and was deeply influenced by it.

As author V.S. Naipaul puts it, “out of the encompassing humiliation of British rule, there would come to India the ideas of country and pride and historical self-analysis. …For every Indian the British period in India is full of ambiguities.”

References

Almost everything here comes from the two very illuminating books that I read recently. They are:

Kejariwal, O.P. 1988. The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past. Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi.

Keay, John. 1981. India Discovered The Recovery of a Lost Civilization. HarperCollins, London.

An Appeal - Please Donate Generously

2006-09-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

India – the second most populous country in the world – has the highest absolute number of out-of-school children. According to the MICS 2000 survey (link), almost 27 million school-age children in India do not attend school, or one out of four. India alone accounts for 23% of the world's total.

Founded in 1991 at the University of California at Berkeley, Asha (meaning “hope” in several Indian languages) for Education emerged out of the desire to bring hope to the lives of underprivileged children of India. It also represents the collective hope of volunteers working together to bring about change in the lives of underprivileged children. Deprived of access to education, millions of Indian children grow up unprepared to face the economic and political challenges of the twenty-first century. We believe that addressing the problem of education is critical in breaking the "vicious cycle" of poverty.

Asha, with its 66 chapters across the world, is an organization that is run entirely by volunteers - volunteers like me, and my wife. My own chapter - the Silicon Valley Chapter - disbursed $250,000 in support of 27 projects across India in 2005. Through these projects, we are making a difference - contributing our mite to the socio-economic transformation of India. Click here to see a site-visit report I wrote for one such Asha-supported project.

As someone lucky enough to have received a good education, and as an Asha volunteer,

I have committed to:

Raise at least $2120 for Asha to fund ongoing projects in India to provide basic education to the underprivileged children.

Complete the marathon training and complete the Silicon valley Marathon on Oct. 29th 2006.

Imagine - I had never run more than a couple of miles at a stretch before joining TeamAsha. On July 30th 2006 I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon (13.1 miles) - an awesome experience! The picture at the top of this page is me nearing the finish of the half marathon in Golden Gate Park.

Here's your opportunity to help!

"Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others... he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert F. Kennedy

You too can send out a ripple of hope by donating to Asha and contributing to my fundraising effort. Every Dollar (or Rupee, Pound, whatever) you contribute will go towards the cause of educating underprivileged children in India.

You can choose to contribute:

Approx. $1 for every mile I run: $25
Approx. $2 for every mile I run: $50
Approx. $4 for every mile I run: $100
Choose your own contribution!

According to Charity Navigator, the largest charity evaluator in America, Asha ranks number one in a list of "Top Ten Slam Dunk Charities" and is also number one in the list of "Top Ten Charities Worth Watching".

How to donate?

Credit Card: Please click here to donate using credit card over a secure connection.
Check / Cash: Please contact me if you want to donate via check or cash.
Employer Matching: If your employer has a donation matching program, please contact me after making a donation. You need to send me your company's matching form filled out with the amount you donated.

Though a credit card is preferred, cash and check are also welcome! Please make sure to write my runner id 2006TA294 on your check. An official receipt will provided, no matter which method you choose for donation. All donations are 100% tax deductible in the U.S. under Section 501(c)(3) (Tax Id 770 45 9884).

Thank you for your donation!

Post marathon update: Please see this.

The Middle East

2006-08-10T03:58:00.000-07:00

The Israel-Hezbollah war is raging in Lebanon, and the Middle East once again dominates our news. Here are some thoughts on this subject.

Displacement of Arabs and Formation Israel in 1948

Arabs simply call it the Nakba – the disaster or the cataclysm. In fact it is often made out – sometimes even by non-Arab non-Muslims – that the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 and their continuing suffering is one of the world’s worst cases of human-inflicted suffering in modern history, the Arabs were/are innocent victims, the blame falls entirely on the Jews and on Western powers, and that it is reasonable for Arabs to seek some sort of revenge/redressal. But this is simply not justified. It is generally not known (or at least not well publicized) that while some 800,000 Arabs were driven out of the new State of Israel in 1948, there was a similar-sized exodus of of Jews from Arab lands (link). So it was truly an exchange of population – not just a one way forced migration of Arabs. Though Jewish refugees had something to look forward to – new opportunities and freedom from persecution in the new state of Israel, and many emigrated by choice, they suffered immensely in the early years (link), just as the Palestinian refugees did. The fact that Israel succeeded through ingenuity and hard work in creating a prosperous society that absorbed all Jewish refugees, while the Arabs failed to do so, surely cannot be held against Israel. Today the Jewish population in Arab lands has been reduced by more than 99% since 1948, while the Arab population of Israel has grown larger than its 1948 base, and currently makes up approximately 15% of Israel's population.

Any large scale exchange of population is a horrific event, and does involve much suffering, but the Arab-Jewish population exchange was not a unique event in history. A number of such population exchanges have happened in the last hundred years, such as the Turkish-Greek population exchange when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, etc. The largest population exchange in recent history occurred when, as demanded by the majority of its Muslim inhabitants, India was partitioned in 1947 to create Pakistan. More than 5 million people moved in either direction (link), and more than a million died in the accompanying violence – a much greater humanitarian catastrophe than the Arab-Jewish population exchange. My own family is from an area that became (East) Pakistan and Partition forced many of my relatives to abandon their ancestral homes and possessions and seek refuge in India. Much like the Arabs who were forced to leave their ancestral lands to make way for the Jewish State of Israel, Hindus and Sikhs were forced at the time of Partition to leave their ancestral lands to make way for the Islamic State of Pakistan. However, unlike Arabs in the Middle East, Hindus and Sikhs in India have, on the whole, reconciled themselves to Partition. They have moved on beyond 1947, and have been able to get on with their lives, without the history of Partition continually intruding into the present. While a certain amount of nostalgia still remains, Hindus and Sikhs do not harbor any hatred for Muslims even remotely resembling the visceral hatred that Arabs have for Jews. There are no calls among Hindus and Sikhs for suicide bombings, nor any for “wiping out Pakistan” – very different indeed from the Arab/Islamic reaction to Israel.

Continuing Israeli Human Rights Violations

It cannot be denied that Israel often deals harshly with Arab civilians. But this harshness is often in response to acts of terrorism. Had there not been the threat of terrorism, Israel would likely have treated the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip much better. In fact, it seems to me that Arab citizens of Israel – though unfortunately not treated on par with Jewish citizens – actually enjoy more individual rights and liberties than citizens of most Arab countries. It should also be noted that while Israel is heavily criticized for what it is doing in Lebanon, in Gaza, and in the West Bank, much more serious human rights violations by others are often completely neglected. While the suffering of Palestinians certainly deserves attention, other more serious human rights violations – such as the ongoing genocide in Darfur in which marauding Arab militias have already killed hundreds of thousands of black Africans – deserve more – or at least equal – attention at the United Nations, in the world’s media, etc. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says, “I sympathize with their [Muslims’] horror at what is happening in Lebanon, but I wish they were just as outraged when Muslims slaughter Muslims in Darfur”.

Hatred for Israel among Muslims Worldwide

One aspect of the Middle East conflict that has always puzzled me somewhat is the widespread hatred towards Israel, and sometimes even non-Israeli Jews, that is demonstrated by Muslims throughout the world. Not only in the immediate neighborhood of the conflict, but a significant number of Muslims (though by no means all, or even a majority) in far-away India, Europe, U.S., Indonesia, etc. seem to harbor a visceral hatred for Israel. After all, Indian/Indonesian/Malaysian Muslims have no direct links to the Middle East. Why should an Indian or Malaysian Muslim, whose great great grandfather converted to Islam, and who is unlikely to ever encounter a Jew in his entire lifetime, passionately hate Jews and Israel? Is it simply a general concern for Muslim victims? Partially, perhaps. But that does not explain the widespread indifference towards other, much worse, atrocities involving Muslim victims, for example the current Darfur genocide where the victims are black African Muslims, or the Hama massacre where upto 25,000 Muslim Syrians were killed by their own govt. in Feb 1982, or the East Pakistan (Bangladesh) genocide in 1971 in which the Pakistan army slaughtered well over a million mostly Muslim (but also many Hindu) civilians in a period of 8 - 9 months. Even conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims outside the Middle East, such as say the one in the Philippines, do not appear to generate any intense passion among fundamentalist Muslims. The extreme hatred towards Israel must have some other explanation. I suspect it has got something to do with a core belief of modern Islamic fundamentalism, the belief in Arabism – the glorification of everything Arabic – Arabic culture, Arabic dress, Arabic Architecture, Arab conquests, etc. As Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul says, the Islamic fundamentalism of today is the cruelest and “most uncompromising kind of imperialism,” because it strips converted peoples of their past, their sacred places, and their attachments to their native land. In the minds of fundamentalist Muslims – even those who are not Arab by ethnicity or nationality – Arabia is at the center of the universe, far more important than their own native lands. This kind of thinking is so widespread that Arabs and non-Arabs alike, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, often implicitly equate “Islamic” with “Arabic” even though something like two-thirds (or maybe even more) of the world’s Muslims are non-Arabic. Fundamentalist Muslims are unable to accept that a tiny Jewish state in the middle of the Arab world can easily defeat the combined might of its much larger neighbors with their supposedly superior Arab Islamic martial qualities. There is a widespread feeling of shame/impotence and consequent rage at the fact that Israel is far ahead of its Arab neighbors in almost all fields of modern human endeavor such as science and technology, agriculture, economic development, and most importanty, in the military arena. To a certain extent such feelings in Arab society may be explainable (by those who understand Arabs) in terms of ethnic/tribal pride and/or honor. But why should non-Arab Muslims – the vast majority – feel the same way? No similar sentiment was ever expressed by Buddhists in Thailand or Sri Lanka when Japan was defeated in WWII. After all, had religious affinity been the only criterion, then instead of dwelling on Arab failure in the modern world, non-Arab Muslims could just have easily have identified with – and tried to emulate – the economic success of Muslim-majority Malaysia, or the personal success of individual Muslims in India such as Dr. Abdul Kalam or Azim Premji, emphasizing modernity, education and rational thinking. But no, hatred for Israel seems take up a disproportionately large portion of the Muslim mindshare. Why? it seems to me that this is not because of any genuine concern over human rights violations, but because of the fact that the ascendancy of Israel smack in the middle of the Arab world against the wishes of its much larger Arab Islamic neighbors challenges a core belief of modern Muslim fundamentalism, a belief held not only by Arabs but many non-Arab Muslims as well – the belief in the superiority of Arabism.

The Current Israel-Lebanon Conflict

I couldn’t agree more with Tom Friedman’s latest column in the New York Times, so here’s a long quote. “Nobody [in Israel] wanted this war, and nobody was prepared for it. Look closely at pictures of Israeli soldiers from Lebanon. There is no enthusiasm in their faces, and certainly no triumphalism. Their expressions tell the whole story: I just don’t want to be doing this – another war with the Arabs. …They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World.”

Bomb Blasts in Mumbai Trains – It Happens Every Month

2006-07-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

In the last week we have all been following the news of the Mumbai Bomb Blasts with great interest. Our hearts have gone out to the victims of this heinous terrorist action that killed almost 200 and wounded around 700. We can all feel the anguish of the victims’ families. July 2006 will always be remembered for this horrific incident. But suppose another 200 commuters were to meet their violent deaths in the Mumbai Suburban Rail network in August 2006 ? And yet another 200 in September ? And what if this keeps happening month after month ? Impossible, you say. But in reality this is already happening – in an average year about 3,500 commuters in the Mumbai Suburban Rail System meet a violent death. (link, link and link). That’s about 300 deaths a month. True, these are not caused by bombs – these are caused by accidents – easily preventable accidents. But a person crushed by a train while crossing the tracks is surely just as dead as one who is killed by a terrorist bomb. For his/her loved ones, the loss is surely no less. Why is it that we as a society are so callous regarding death and injury in accidents ? While we rightly demand that the government, police, intelligence agencies, etc., take steps to stop future terrorist attacks, why do we not demand that the government enhance safety measures to prevent accidents ? Why do we not demand that more cross bridges (maybe some with escalators) be built at busy railway stations in Mumbai so that people are less likely to walk across tracks to reach their trains ? Or that some sort of fencing be built between tracks at busy stations ? Or that an ambulance and a first aid station be made available – and most important, be actively manned – at all stations ? Or that compensation be provided to accident victims on par with terrorist victims ? And most importantly, why do we not demand more strongly that the transport infrastructure in cities like Mumbai be drastically improved so that people don’t have to commute to work hanging out of open doors in precariously overcrowded trains ?

Fortunately it does appear that there is some realization of how important it is to improve the transport infrastructure in Mumbai. The Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP), which is currently underway, will hopefully improve the situation somewhat. And the decision to build a metro system in Mumbai (link and link) is also a step in the right direction.

An improved transport infrastructure is likely to greatly improve safety for commuters. However I feel that more needs to be done. I find the general apathy towards safety issues in India appalling, and it goes far beyond the Mumbai rail system. I find it shocking that Indians are so resistant to wearing helmets while riding two-wheelers. After all, it is estimated that 25,000 two-wheeler riders lose their lives every year in India – at least half of them preventable by the effective use of helmets (link). Some 400,000 children under the age of five die in India each year from easily preventable diseases, simply due to our woeful water infrastructure and the lack of basic sanitation facilities (link). Why is it that we are not too bothered by such appalling statistics ? Why is it that 300 deaths every month in the Mumbai Suburban Rail System are accepted by Mumbaikars as the normal and routine course of events ? Even among the NGO community there does not seem to be much interest in public safety issues. The only NGO that seems to have done anything significant to help accident victims in the Mumbai rail network is an organization called Manavta (link) - and I’m not even sure whether it is still active nowadays.

Next time you see people crossing tracks at a busy station, do try to dissuade them. Do wear a helmet if you are riding on a two-wheeler. And when you remember the victims of the Mumbai train blasts, do also spare a thought for the thousands of other commuters who are killed and injured every year in accidents on the same train system – unlamented, unnoticed and unremembered by the people of Mumbai.

Please note that my point here is not to somehow excuse or downplay the recent terrorist act in Mumbai, but to use this incident to highlight the need for overall improvement in public safety. I believe that the strongest possible action must be taken in the fight against terrorism, especially against who promote the ideology and infrastructure of terrorism – the Pakistan Army, Saudi Islamic “charities”, etc. I believe that India-Pakistan peace is impossible as long as the Pakistan Army remains in control of the Pakistani state, and so the “peace process” currently underway is futile anyway. But then, that is a topic for another blog.

Anti-Reservation Protests in India

2006-06-02T23:51:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks there have been many protests against the system of caste-based system reservations in India – especially reservations in institutes of higher education. I broadly support the principle of caste-based reservations. However I do have certain misgivings about the way this principle is put into practice.

Reservations and Merit

Most people who hold an anti-reservation viewpoint claim that caste-based reservations are inherently opposed to merit. Slogans like “murder of merit” are common in the anti-reservation movement. I disagree with this point of view. After all, what is the definition of “merit” ? In India admission to educational institutions is primarily based on obtaining high scores in designated examinations. Can we seriously claim that these exams are truly accurate mechanisms for measuring merit ? To a certain extent, examinations in India do measure a candidate’s level of education, but to an even larger extent doing well in these exams depends on joining the right coaching classes and learning the appropriate exam-writing techniques. If, by “merit” we mean innate talent or ability, then our exam system fails miserably to measure it accurately.

To those who claim that merit is seriously undermined by reservations I ask: do you believe (as I do) that merit (i.e., innate ability or talent) is randomly distributed in society, and is not the exclusive preserve of certain upper-caste groups. If merit/ability/talent is truly distributed randomly in society and the selection process was fair, surely one would expect all castes to be represented in various professions broadly in the same proportion as their share of the population. Clearly this is not the case by a very wide margin. Although caste data is scarce, studies, as well as anecdotal evidence indicate that the vast majority of elite professionals in India belong to the upper castes. For example, Santosh Goyal studied the caste composition of 3,129 top executives of 1,100 large companies in the Indian corporate sector. He could ascertain the castes of approximately two-thirds of these officers from their names. He found that Brahmins accounted for 41% of the total, even though according to the 1931 census Brahmins comprised only 4.32% of the total population of (undivided ?) India (link). If one rejects the idea that upper castes are in some way genetically superior, one has to accept that the social mechanisms through which innate ability is translated into certifiable skill are inherently biased in favor of the upper castes. In reality these unfair social mechanisms work as a form of reservation in favor of upper castes. I believe that any program of affirmative action that seeks to correct this historic unfairness should actually be seen as a form of de-reservation.

Reservations and Efficiency

One argument of the anti-reservation activists is that reservations reduce the efficient functioning of organizations. To a limited extent, I do agree with this argument, at least for those positions that require a very high level of prior specialized technical training (as opposed to innate ability). For example positions that require super-specialization in say neurosurgery may not be ideal for reservations. However this argument is less and less valid as one goes down the level of training. For entrance into a bachelor’s degree program, one does not need any kind of highly specialized technical training; high school level education is sufficient. Moreover evidence on the ground indicates that reservations may not necessarily harm efficiency. For example, in Southern states such as Tamil Nadu reservations are much more extensive than in Northern states. However, the state administrations as well as the industrial sectors in the Southern states have performed no worse (and in most cases much better) than in the Northern states. Moreover, in the U.S., one can see that some of the most competitive and efficient companies such as GE, IBM, etc. follow affirmative action policies to increase diversity (link and link) without any apparent loss of efficiency or competitiveness.

I do agree that reservations may cause some small reductions in efficiency in certain situations and may impose some costs, but I believe that on the whole the benefits to society are likely to be even larger. For a discussion on the costs and benefits of reservation see this.

Reservations and the Creamy Layer

Another major argument of the anti-reservation activists is that reservations help only the already well-to-do among the Schedules Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and the “truly deserving” do not benefit in any way. There is an element of truth in this argument. It is true that those who benefit from reservations are likely to be from among the more prosperous and better educated in their caste. However, I believe that in spite of this, reservations and other forms of affirmative action do serve a useful purpose. First of all, regulations already exist to prevent the highly privileged among the OBCs from taking undue advantage of reservations (link). Secondly, it is clear that even in the open (i.e, non-reserved) category, people from the creamy layer among the upper castes, those with access to the best private schools, coaching classes, etc., have a disproportionately high representation. So this phenomenon exists for general category seats as well, not just for reserved seats. But most importantly, it must be remembered that the primary purpose of caste-based reservations is to reduce inter-caste disparities. Nobody claims that reservations will directly reduce disparities among individuals within the same caste. Here is what the Mandal Commission Report says. “When a backward class candidate becomes a Collector or a Superintendent of Police, the material benefits accruing from his position are limited to the members of his family only. But the psychological spin off of this phenomenon is tremendous; the entire community of that backward class candidate feels socially elevated. Even when no tangible benefits flow to the community at large, the feeling that now it has its ‘own man’ in the ‘corridors of power’ acts as morale booster”. In other words, it is hoped that reservations will help in awakening a new sense of aspiration and a new sense of possibility among those to whom opportunities have long been denied. To a certain extent, this new sense of possibility has indeed become a reality in modern India, and reservations (along with democracy and economic growth) have played a part in this. Author V.S. Naipaul in his book India: A Million Mutinies Now has this to say. “And out of this political frenzy there had come a kind of balance: for the first time in the history of India, perhaps, most people felt that they or their representatives, someone of their group, had a chance of getting to the warm center of power and money.”

Reservations in Higher Education or Better Primary Education

One more argument put forth by anti-reservation activists is that rather than having reservation of seats in institutions of higher education, it would be much better if the govt. were to concentrate on improving the quality of primary and secondary education. On this issue I broadly agree with the anti-reservation activists. I do believe that improving the quality and accessibility of basic education is critically important. The whole idea behind affirmative action and reservations is to provide improved opportunities to those groups that have historically been suppressed. The idea should never be to guarantee specific outcomes for certain chosen individuals. In other words we should try to give lower caste individuals a fair opportunity to become engineers or doctors, not somehow arbitrarily designate them as engineers/doctors. Guaranteeing outcomes is a sure way to discourage individual initiative, and suck the dynamism and vigor out of any society. The best way to guarantee equality of opportunity is to provide good quality primary and secondary education for all. The higher up the education ladder we go with reservations, the more and more we tend to guarantee outcomes rather than opportunity. Affirmative action at the primary and secondary school level is entirely about guaranteeing opportunity, not outcome. At the college level, affirmative action is a mix of guaranteeing opportunity and guaranteeing outcome, and at the post-doctoral or super-specialization level, it is almost entirely about guaranteeing outcome rather than opportunity. Unfortunately the current state of primary and secondary education in India is such that we are far far away from guaranteeing equality of opportunity for all. In this scenario reservations at a higher education level – at least at the college entry level – are absolutely necessary.

While I do agree with anti-reservation activists that basic education is of utmost importance, I have a feeling that their concern they express regarding this issue is not entirely genuine. I feel that they are using the matter of primary and secondary education mainly as an excuse to justify their anti-reservation stance without appearing to be openly unsympathetic towards the weaker sections of society. In recent years the govt. has indeed become somewhat active (at least compared to earlier) regarding basic education. In 2002 Parliament passed the 86th Constitutional Amendment making education a fundamental right (link). The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan program (link) has greatly increased funding available for basic education. The Right to Education Bill is currently in the process of being drafted (link). These are important basic education related issues and, if implemented right, can seriously improve the state of basic education in India. Unfortunately I find that many among the educated upper castes who are anti-reservation and claim to be in favor of basic education do not appear to show any great interest in these issues. For example, in the initial drafts of the Right to Education Bill there was a provision for reserving 25% of seats in all private primary/secondary schools for underprivileged children. In my view this would have been a step in the right direction. Unfortunately under pressure from the private school lobby this provision was discarded (link). Would anti-reservation activists – supposedly pro-basic-education-for-all – be willing to fight to preserve this 25% reservation for underprivileged children in private elementary schools ?

Reservations Based on Economic Criteria

Anti-reservation activists sometimes claim that they are not opposed to reservations per-se, only caste-based reservations. Had reservations been made based on economic criteria they would have fully supportive of the policy. I agree with them that low caste status is not the only disadvantage in India. Economic deprivation, rural upbringing, lack good schools in the vicinity, etc. are all important disadvantages for those desirous of getting the most coveted jobs in our modern economic and administrative system. I do believe that that low-caste status is possibly the most important disadvantage, and in any case, caste disadvantage usually coincides with other disadvantages. In other words, people belonging to low castes tend to be otherwise disadvantaged as well; they tend to be poor, lack access to good schools, etc. Various commissions and committees in India have found that most criteria of social backwardness come down to one common denominator: belonging to a low caste (see here). Even the Supreme Court of India has declared “A caste can be and quite often is a social class in India” (link).

On the whole I agree that economic criteria should be considered in affirmative action programs, but I do not believe that caste criteria should be discarded. Ideally a combination of caste, economic and other criteria should be used. In this regard I think that the new mechanism of affirmative action proposed by sociologists Satish Deshpande and Yogendra Yadav makes a lot of sense. The basic idea is that instead of reservations, candidates would be given points based on their social and individual disadvantages. For college admissions these “disadvantage points” would be considered, in addition to marks scored in the exams. A weightage of 80% for exam points and 20% for “disadvantage points” is proposed. This system of selection has already been used in a limited manner, and a similar system has been used at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. More details of this scheme are available here.

Crying Need for Better Policy and Better Data

If one is interested in learning more about the caste-based reservation system – or more generally about current state of the caste system – one is faced with an extremely frustrating situation. There is an almost complete lack of macro-level statistics and data (small scale village-level studies are available, which provide some micro-level data). Just consider: the most recent detailed macro-level data one can get about caste in India is from the 1931 census. After independence the govt. of India reasoned that collecting caste information in the census would only reinforce divisive caste identities and lead to unnecessary controversies, and stopped collecting caste data (except for SC/STs). While the govt’s intentions seem to have been good, surely some reasonable way can be found to collect caste data in the census in a judicious manner. Census questions should be designed in a sensitive manner, and maybe questions about caste should have options such as ‘inter-caste’, ‘unknown’, etc. As things stand today, it is impossible to find even basic information such as ‘what is the literacy-level of caste xyz’, or ‘what is the life-expectancy of caste xyz’, etc. The National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) has made a commendable start by collecting some limited macro-level caste-based data in the 55th round survey in 1999-2000. For discussion on the NSSO data see this and this. Hopefully something will be done soon to generate more comprehensive and better quality macro-level data on caste.

It is obvious that the govt. policy on caste-based reservations leaves much to be desired. Caste-based quotas have often been carved out by politicians seeking to curry favor with politically powerful castes – based purely on electoral calculations. In general, one often gets the impression that reservation policies are implemented without adequate preparation or study. For example, the OBC category is so huge – covering half the Indian population. Does it not make sense to separate this huge category into smaller segments, such as Lower Backward Classes (LBCs), Most Backward Classes (MBCs), etc., so that the benefits are spread among many castes, and the most dominant among the OBC castes do not corner all the benefits ? Moreover, politicians don’t seem to be making any attempt whatsoever to provide explanations to the anti-reservation activists and to win their confidence. After all, the medical students who are protesting against the reservation policy are not inherently evil. They may not be overly concerned about ensuring equal opportunity for lower-caste students, but they are simply worried about their careers. In their position, who wouldn't be ? I fail to understand why more – many more – seats cannot be made available in engineering, medical and management institutes. If lack of money is the issue, surely fees can be increased, and along with it some form of improved student loan system can be made available. Graduates of such institutions usually move on to lucrative careers, and paying back student loans should not be a big problem.

All in all, though I support affirmative action and reservations as a matter of principle, I feel that there is much much more that the govt. can and should do in the way it determines reservation policy, and in the way it collects caste-related data, which measures the impact of these policies.

A Final Word

The most precious commodity that any society possesses is its human resources. For any society to flourish it must strive to utilize its human resources to the fullest extent possible, which means it must strive to provide as many citizens as possible opportunities to develop and utilize their talents and abilities. I believe that a society like Saudi Arabia that systematically denies opportunities to its women, thereby forfeiting fully 50% of its available national talent, can never progress very far. Something similar happened in India over the course of history. As Dalit economist Narendra Jadhav has pointed out, one of the main reasons that Indian civilization – once one of the World’s most advanced – fell behind was that the talents and energies of the vast majority of our population was kept suppressed by the caste-system. Over the last 150 years much has improved and the unleashing of talent and energy long kept suppressed has allowed India to move forward. However, there is still much more talent and energy in India waiting to be released. In order to do this, effective and well thought out affirmative action policies such as reservations are essential.

Here is a link to Yogendra Yadav's illuminating FAQ on this issue.

Do also read this excellent piece by Siddharth Varadarajan, where he describes caste bias in the Indian media. Here's another one on the same topic by Dilip D'Souza. And another one by Albert at theotherindia.org.

A civilized exchange of letters between Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Yogendra Yadav (anti- and pro-reservationists, respectively) makes for interesting reading. Here is Dilip D'Souza discussing this.

What is Development

2006-04-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

Modern concepts of economic development, which [economist Jeffrey] Sachs sees as the “cure” for poverty, have been in place for only a tiny portion of human history. For centuries, the principles of sustenance allowed societies all over the planet to survive and even thrive.
- Vandana Shiva in Two Myths that Keep the World Poor

Big Dams are to a Nation's ‘Development' what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link - the understanding - between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.
– Arundhati Roy in The Greater Common Good

Why does anybody need “big dams” or “big irrigation projects” ? Arundhati, there is a very simple issue here that urban people - I hope this doesn’t sound too sarcastic - find hard to understand. Water is needed, not only for drinking, but for agriculture. “Rainwater harvesting” is not enough in such areas of low rainfall. The millions of people living in such areas are the drought-afflicted, suffering from years of parched earth and damaged crops; they are driven off their lands to the cities to live, or migrate to work as labourers, for instance sugar-cane cutters, in areas of irrigation. But they would prefer to be able to prosper in their homes just as much as those threatened by dam and project eviction want the alternative of not moving. You say that the thousands of dams built in India since independence have simply led to eviction on one hand and waterlogging on the other, but this is not true. So many farmers have benefited from irrigation water, and millions who have not can see this, and want such benefits also. …Development to so many people in India means getting out of traditional traps of caste hierarchy and of being held in a birth-determined play. It is not simply economic progress, but the capacity to participate in a society in which knowledge, grain and songs will be available in full measure to everyone. When you so romantically imply that such development is not possible, when you give all publicity and support to anti-development organisations, are you not yourself helping to close such doors ?
- Gail Omvedt in An Open Letter to Arundhati Roy

When India attained independence in 1947 there was a widespread consensus on development. Modern technology and modern economic ideas (such as “planning”) were welcomed with open arms. Industries, large power plants and dams, were built, and modern farming techniques introduced. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s enthusiasm for technology and that particular model of development, as well as his “temples of modern India” quote are well known. But Nehru was not the only one. Less widely known, but perhaps an even stronger votary of modernity and technology was Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar played a central role in introducing large dam technologies in India (see this or this). Both Ambedkar and Nehru were enthusiastic supporters of the idea that a technological and scientific worldview (“scientific temper”), along with modern economic development, was essential to fight the obscurantist and traditionalist mindset prevalent in India. Ambedkar’s views were, if anything, even stronger than Nehru’s in this regard. Ambedkar was especially vehement in rejecting any romantic notions of traditional Indian society. He certainly did not see India’s dalits as “thriving”, or having any special “connection to the planet they live on”. In fact Ambedkar saw the traditional social and economic system existing in India’s villages as fundamentally exploitative of the lower castes – a system to be discarded lock-stock-and-barrel – the sooner the better. In this view, technological and economic change was to be welcomed with open arms since it provided the means with which to discard the traditional social/economic system and move to a new, more egalitarian one.

To a very substantial extent I agree with the view of development outlined above, though I disagree with Nehru’s emphasis on heavy rather than light (textiles, shoes, etc.) manufacturing industries, and his emphasis on the public sector. I find that in India today the most serious problems are those that exist in traditional society and in the unorganized sector. For example, there are more than 10 million bonded laborers (slaves) and an equal number of child laborers, more than 1 million manual scavengers (who clean no-plumbing-toilets with their bare hands and carry the waste on their heads), millions of landless laborers who earn barely enough to survive, and hundreds of thousands of workers in stone quarries breathing in so many stone particles that life expectancy is only about 35 years. For the benefit of these often voiceless citizens, I believe that it is imperative to (a) improve agricultural productivity, so that farm labor income increases, and (b) increase industrialization especially in the manufacturing sector in order to increase the number of decent-paying jobs, and (c) increase access to modern (i.e., rationalistic) education. Large infrastructure projects such as dams, canals, power plants, etc. are necessary for these to happen.

Some argue that large projects – especially dams – do not help the weaker sections of society. But the evidence indicates otherwise. Farmers – including marginal farmers – all over India use irrigation wherever it is available. A World Bank study shows that that irrigation and the green revolution have helped landless farm laborers even more than landowning farmers. Moreover, the increase in India’s food production – with the help of green revolution technologies such as hybrid seeds and irrigation – is there for all to see. We seem to have forgotten just how precarious the situation was before the advent of the green revolution. Here is a quote from Agriculture Minister C. Subramaniam in 1966-67, showing just how desperate and humiliating the food shortage was. “As a last resort, I told my officials and experts to identify the nearest food carrying ships on the oceans throughout the world. I said we would identify the nearest ships carrying wheat to other countries and appeal to the US President to divert it to India if other countries could wait for another six to eight weeks.” (link). And it is well known that in any food shortage, prices tend to rise, and the poor suffer the most.

This is not to say that the existing infrastructure technologies are perfect – far from it. Alternatives where they exist must be evaluated and studied, and detailed plans must be made. Then comparisons can be made and the best option chosen. However the alternatives that are generally suggested by the anti-large-projects movement today – use of traditional technologies – simply cannot deliver comparable benefits. After all, traditional technologies have existed for centuries but were not able to prevent famines, even thought the population was a fraction of what it is today. For a good discussion on this issue, see this.

Some take the view that dalits, adivasis and others (landless laborers ?) are happy where they are and mostly do not want change. If they do want change, it is entirely achievable through the use of small-scale local technologies and local arrangements based on their own traditions. I reject this view completely. In my view all human beings are essentially the same. Adivasis or dalit landless laborers are fundamentally no different from you or me. Adivisis and dalits – just like you or me – would like to get educated, make a decent amount of money, appreciate movies, literature, music, write a blog, etc. The fact that they are not organizing morchas, hartals and hunger strikes demanding education, health care, electricity, etc., does not mean they are happy without these. I subscribe to the idea of “capability approach” to social development advanced by economist Amartya Sen in which he holds that there exist a set of basic human capabilities that are intrinsically worthwhile for a flourishing human life – irrespective of cultural or geographical differences. In this view, simply a lack of protest does not mean that people are happy and flourishing. It follows that we must strive to spread modern education, modern health care, access to markets, etc. to all citizens, whether they are actively demanding these or not. This is simply not possible to do through the use of small-scale local technologies and local arrangements. After all, these small-scale local technologies and local arrangements have been around for centuries, but not been able to deliver the desired results.

Of course large dams and other large infrastructure projects must include proper resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R). In my view the govt. should announce a national R&R policy which formally recognizes that R&R should be such as to enable oustees to, at the very least, regain their original standard of living. And this should be applicable to all govt. initiated forced displacement – not just large infrastructure projects. For example millions of adivasis have been displaced by the creation of national parks and wildlife sanctuaries – 100,000 in just one instance as recently as 2002. These oustees should have the same rights as large-project oustees. Civil-society groups should take the lead in ensuring that the govt. R&R policy is actually implemented in all cases.

Some say that western countries have stopped building large dams, and so we should follow suit. But the situations are entirely different. In most western countries, industrialization and modern farming techniques are already widespread. Dams and canals have already been built, which are sufficient to support a high standard of living for almost all their citizens. So there is no pressing need to build new dams. However, the benefits that dams and canals have brought to these countries are there for all to see. I currently live in California, and in this area, the benefits of dams and canals are obvious. The vast agriculture industry in the Central Valley of California is totally dependent on dam-and-canal irrigation. A large part of the of the Southwestern United States, including mega-cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas are heavily dependent on dam-and canal networks, especially the giant Hoover Dam.

In many western countries, it has become fashionable to hold a post-modernist post-industrial view of the world. When applied in the Indian context, this view rejects the Nehru/Ambedkar concept of development outlined above, and in my view, leads to absurd conclusions. For example, this view holds that local mythology and astrology based explanations of natural phenomena are as valid in the vilage context as modern scientific explanations, that traditional medicine as practiced by the village medicine-man is as valid as modern medicine, that traditional heredity-based division of labor is as valid as modern education-and-salary based division of labor, and so on. There is much to commend in these post-modernist post-industrialist ideas, but I believe these ideas are primarily suited to those societies that have already experienced the benefits of modernity and industrialization. In my view, it will be a cruel joke for millions of people in India if we were to adopt these post-modernist post-industrialist ideas at this juncture, when most Indians are yet to fully experience the basic benefits of modernity and industrialization.

Do read this excellent article by Gail Omvedt.