I will shoot the next person who says Jokepal

The day Lalu Prasad Yadav is the voice of reason is the day democracy needs to take a long shower.

On Thursday, in his inimitable style, Lalu asked Parliament not to rush ahead with passing the Lokpal Bill, saying that the country cannot be ruled by a bureaucrat, a former police officer, two lawyers and a social activist. He called for reasoned debate and for the views of every member of India's Parliament to be taken into account. This radical position caused the nation's media to bestow upon him the honour of newsmaker of the day, with interviews and shouting matches (‘moderated’, of course, by news media's resident backpfeifengesicht, Arnab Goswami) on his and other speeches in the Lok Sabha. I am willing to wager my moustache that at least one major newspaper on Friday will contain a list of zingers that “left Parliament in splits.”

The problem, however, was that each of these mentions did not care so much for the fact that a veteran MP asked for greater debate on a marquee legislation that is currently scheduled to be passed by both houses in 48 hours, but that he was in favour of reservations for minorities – minorities, mind you, not Muslims – or that he was scared of a Lokpal or that he had said bad things about Annaji and Annaji would campaign against him in future elections. People called him irrelevant and non-serious and a buffoon, drinking the Kool-Aid (or the RSS equivalent, Gau-Mutra) of meritocracy and sab-neta-chor-hain that Team Anna and whoever is riding that bandwagon this week are feeding them.

At the centre of the media’s – and by extension, the people’s – ire was the fact that Lalu is pissed at the fact that the Lokpal will not have a quota within a quota for backward minorities, despite the fact that other bodies like the Supreme Court and the Election Commission have no reservations (with, of course, the condescending mentions of SY Quraishi and JM Lyngdoh, who overcame their racial handicaps and St Stephen’s educations to become perfectly good chief election commissioners).

Amazingly, the anger – and there was considerable – at the R-Word coming anywhere close to the hallowed office of Lokpal was matched if not exceeded by the fact that it was coming in the way of smooth passage of the bill. Charges were made that the whole thing was just a stunt before the UP elections, which is probably true, but that is another matter. The very fact that such a thing could be even mentioned, let alone debated, was alternately called sacrilege or Machiavellian or plain ol’ dumb.

The fact remains, however, that the issue is worth at least some debate. All parties have agreed to reservations for backward classes in the Lokpal, and Muslims in particular have some legitimate concerns about Dalit converts not getting the same affirmative action they would have enjoyed had they stayed Hindus. It's a murky, complicated issue that is being debated at various fora. The Lokpal Bill, though not central to this debate, is by no means beyond the bounds of that debate. It is a quota within an existing quota, after all. In fact, I would be intrigued to watch Parliament debate the very existence of a quota in the Lokpal. My point is that there are a gazillion issues to be considered before passing the Lokpal, and two days of debate is not nearly enough time to do so. And railroading this bill through Parliament is not going to do anybody any favours. Pranab Mukherjee says that this bill has been discussed over most of the year, and thus MPs are in a good enough position to vote on it. But the special sitting of Parliament next week – Kerala and north-eastern MPs be damned – is going to be the first time this version of the bill is going to be debated in Parliament.

Then again, why this hurry? Because otherwise Annaji will protest. But Annaji is going to protest anyway, as long as he doesn’t get his bill. It makes sense to actually talk this out in Parliament, work out a bill that is at least what all of Parliament wants. You know, so that you can actually back up all that rhetoric about the supremacy of Parliament. More than just a photo-op of Parliament working while Anna protests, robust debate on the current draft should yield a number of amendments that would address many concerns and – hopefully – significantly improve the bill. History has shown that Parliament can be surprisingly coherent when it wants to. Next week, it has its entire raison d’être on the line: if Parliament succumbs to the stereotype perpetuated by Team Anna and discards nuanced debate for grandstanding and cynical ploys, not only will the reputation of the legislature be irreparably tarnished, but its very existence will be that much harder to justify. No pressure.

Maybe one of Lalu’s suggestions should be taken just this once: let all the parties release their members from their whips and let them vote according to their conscience.

Nothingness as policy in a hungry nation

(One of my favourite things in the internship at Tehelka was being asked to review books on a regular basis. Thanks to the quality of books published in the summer of 2011, this allowed me, a lowly college student, to rip into famous authors and their latest offerings. One book that escaped my wrath was Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a remarkable book on poverty that promises to change the way we look at development. On the penultimate day of my internship, I attended a session with the two authors and two of my personal favourite articulators of public policy: Nandan Nilekani and Pratap Bhanu Mehta. The following is a piece I wrote in the aftermath of such awesomeness.)

On being asked for three policies that could help India tackle poverty, MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, co-author with Esther Duflo of the seminal book on development Poor Economics, had a perplexing answer. “I have only one suggestion: don’t do anything,” he said. We do not know enough about the methods, he said, adding that they could do more harm than good. “We have a moral responsibility to deliver, but not to deliver a lie.”

Banerjee and Duflo have long advocated the use of empirical evidence before adopting anti-poverty measures, most of which are prescribed by the West for the entire developing world and might not be applicable in India. These ‘silver bullets’, as Nandan Nilekani calls them, are often gross simplifications of complex economic theory, distilled to fit a 22-minute news programme. As Duflo puts it, it is important to find shoes that fit the poor, and not the poor that fit the shoes.

But for a development economist like Banerjee to ask a nation that is talking about ending hunger, corruption and illiteracy to do nothing is a bit jarring. Largely due to the efforts of a proactive National Advisory Council (NAC), we are talking about expanding entitlement programmes to cover a number of aspects of development. Bills on these, however, receive nowhere close to the public scrutiny they should. Ask a random sample of Indian citizens how many of them support the Right to Education Act, and you are likely to get a large majority in favour of the legislation. Ask the same sample what the law contains, and barring a few stock answers, very few know, or care.

The National Food Security Bill, touted to be the biggest legislation in the UPA2 government’s tenure, has recently had many of its substantive clauses removed by the agriculture ministry, without much hue and cry. The constitutional guarantee to food, child nutrition, maternity benefits and emergency food relief have all been removed from the NAC draft, which now resembles a standard food subsidy.

All over the world, the public holds its government accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

Government is accountable for the laws it makes. In the US, the healthcare debate – albeit not nearly the best when it comes to quality – involved public participation unheard of in India. Everybody had an opinion on the issue. In fact, for better or for worse, public policy is debated minutely, with every major amendment being analysed on the hundreds of news channels. We last discussed a law in such detail when the India-US nuclear deal almost brought the government down. Why do we not dissect the current batch of laws with similar interest?

In his landmark study of electoral strategy, Clientelism and voting behaviour, Leonard Wantchekon performed a unique field experiment to quantify the impact of campaigning on a platform of national policy on election results. He got four parties in the first round of the 2001 presidential election in Benin to canvass on the strength of their policies in one village, and on strictly localised propaganda in another village where their initial support is roughly the same. A team of one party worker and a research assistant would go to the first village and talk about ending corruption and how it would eradicate poverty, and rant to the second village how their region had fallen behind and promise to provide pork barrel spending and hiring sons of the soil. The results confirmed what political parties in India have long known: parochial positions improved the party’s performance, while policy positions actually hurt it.

We have a polity which does not extend beyond our caste, class and region. Politicians have exploited that for decades. The conversation for poverty alleviation is restricted to a general sense of affirmation at the need to do so, but with few original ideas beyond throwing money at the problem. Thankfully, there are fora, such as the NAC, where these ideas are discussed in depth, but like the hatchet job on the food security act shows us, its suggestions can easily be ignored without fear of backlash.

In a country where 42 per cent of the population falls behind the international poverty line, we cannot afford for our government to fall prey to the temptation of symbolic legislation that has not been subjected to field tests first. In the meantime, it would make more sense, as Banerjee says, to fix our development mechanism.

Trolling Terror

(This is a piece I wrote after the Mumbai terror attacks on 13 July. My first opinion piece, it was put up - to my amazement and glee - on the Tehelka website)

I dread terror attacks. Not only because a number of innocent people die, but also because they bring out the worst in the Indian psyche. It makes the common man resemble the grandfather who makes the entire family uncomfortable at reunions with his racist diatribes and unconscionable solutions for all the world's ills. It leaves the Indian soul, which at the best of times is open and accommodating, a thoroughly parochial and violent beast.
On Wednesday, attributed by some news channels as 26/11 perpetrator Ajmal Kasab's birthday, 21 were killed and more than 100 injured in a series of blasts in Mumbai. Within minutes, social media - used by 8 million Indians and counting - erupted with what has now become par for the course on the middle class's response to terrorism: hang Kasab/Afzal Guru in public, bomb Pakistan back to the stone age, get rid of all our inept politicians. Internet trolls poured hate on whoever they considered responsible. One user even asked for Kasab’s castration at the Gateway of India. When calmer heads suggested a more rational approach to the attack, they were silenced by long, emotional diatribes full of moral righteousness calling them unpatriotic, pseudo-secularists and cowards.
Sadly, this is about average for any discussion on Indian politics in cyberspace. There is a disproportionate number of loud fundamentalists on the internet at the best of times, who regularly attack moderate voices with long, hateful posts (with a nationalistic disregard for the grammar of the language of our erstwhile colonial masters), which are interested more in painting the author as anti-national more than debating the issues at hand. In the worst of times, average, decent people take the comfort of the crowd and join in the mud-slinging, elbowing for more room on the moral high ground.
Now, one could argue that 8 million is a tiny majority, but you do not need to be a weatherman to know that these opinions qualify as mainstream in this country. Even if these are the opinions of the minority, it is a very vocal minority.
These knee-jerk reactions conveniently ignore ground realities, possible consequences and even simple morality. There is no evidence that links Pakistan to this particular attack. In fact, the lack of any intelligence seems to suggest a local group was responsible. Even if it was responsible, we cannot bomb a nuclear Pakistan without dire consequences. Similarly, we cannot deny Kasab due process without compromising the principles this country was founded on.
Terrorism is born through instigation of the minority community by playing on its insecurities. It is no accident that the bulk of the members of Indian Mujahideen were radicalised during either the Babri Masjid demolition or the Gujarat pogroms. It needs to be fought by actively engaging with Pakistan on dismantling its terror apparatus, and by building a truly secular state to remove the insecurities of Indian Muslims. These are solutions, however, that are too gradual for a country with as short an attention span as ours.
To a rational human being, these facts should be apparent. Unfortunately, rationality is the first sacrifice we make in trying to come to grips with terrorism. Perhaps it is wrong to expect rationality in a situation such as this. These reactions are, after all, a primal urge for revenge at the people who kill our fellow citizens with impunity. It is very difficult to look at the US going into Abbottabad and assassinating Osama bin Laden, and then be told that there is nothing other than diplomacy that our country can do to stop terrorism. When people look at Kandahar and Entebbe, they naturally assume India is a soft state.
People need to vent, after all. Sure, one would like the public to hold some civil liberties and human rights as inalienable, but on an emotive issue like terrorism, that seems too much to ask for.
It is when this xenophobic rage passes for public consensus on terrorism that it gets dangerous. There are political forces which play on this paranoia for narrow political gains. Thankfully, the BJP desisted from the more extreme measures during their stint in power, but it did pass the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota).
So far, Indian governments from all sides of the political spectrum have shown great maturity in dealing with Pakistan on terrorism. Yes, there have been mistakes and they have sometimes erred on the side of caution, but India is generally perceived as handling the situation as an adult. There is still a lot more to be done on terrorism, but there is no place for simple solutions for such a complex problem. What we as a society need to do is not stick to moral absolutes when talking about terrorism, but acknowledge that there are serious limitations our country faces in the war against terror.

:Sheepish grin:

One of the most revered traditions of college life is procrastination. Doth not now, what thou canst doth tomorrowth, and all that. Though I haven't posted anything on this 'ere blog of mine since April, I have done a fair amount of writing, most of it during my time at The Financial World, a nascent newspaper run by Tehelka. I meant to put some of the better specimens on the blog, but a combination of laziness and protozoic Internet thwarted my plans. Finally, it took the release of another rant for me to get around to putting them up. I'm publishing only the two opinion pieces that can be called political. Most of the people who are ever going to visit this blog have already read them. If you haven't, well Bob's your uncle.

The Importance of being Pissed Off

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
- Howard Beale, Network (1976)

The nation is talking about one man today, and his name is not Tendulkar or Dhoni or Rajanikanth or Chetan Bhagat. No, it's a frail 71-year-old from Ahmadnagar in Maharashtra who has captured everyone's imagination by deciding not to eat until a law drafted by five people - eminent citizens, but none of them a legislator (some would say that follows) - is adopted by Parliament. The law isn't perfect: it has a number of loopholes - some real, some invented by its opponents - and therefore requires further discussion and debate before it can be ratified. Neither is it revolutionary: an authority independent of governmental intervention to investigate governmental corruption is the first logical step for any democracy to take. India's usually not particularly kind to people who go on indefinite hunger strikes, as frailer men and women fasting for much longer have been met with contempt (Medha Patkar) or indifference (Irom Sharmila Chanu) from a jaded public. What is it about Anna Hazare, then, that causes a billion people to support him with such vehemence?

The answer, I'm certain, does not lie in the law that he is championing. With all due respect to the protestors, if a poll were to be taken of all the people taking part in the agitation at Jantar Mantar or the various spinoffs in Mumbai, Chennai and other places, I dare not speculate what proportion will know the ins and outs of the proposed Jan Lokpal Bill, or what an ombudsman really does. No, the law is merely a symbol. As Beale said in Sidney Lumet's masterpiece, Network, first, you've got to get mad. India is not taking to the streets because it cares about empowering five Magsaysay Award winners to choose an independent ombudsman; India is on the streets because India is mad. It's mad at the way corruption has been dealt with in this country. It is mad at the politicos, it's mad at the police, it's mad at the judiciary, it's mad at the whole goddamn system. India is mad as hell, and it's not going to take this anymore.

It is a heady sight, indeed, to watch India mad. Like all other communal emotions we feel in this country, the deluge of our collective rage washes away innocent bystanders, just like our collective triumph last Saturday engulfed everyone who bore witness to it. This agitation is the perfect storm: free (or at least, freed) of nuance, iconoclastic and impossible to oppose. Who, after all, is going to dissent against protests against corruption? It is a rage that does not require original thought, only catchphrases and slogans. It is revolution that can be condensed into 140 characters or less. It carries a credo of change from outside the Establishment; a pseudo-anarchy that has always been in vogue with the youth. It's come after a year of scams beset by scams, in which Parliament couldn't function because the two major political parties couldn't decide which ineffectual body to use to investigate a trillion rupee scam that a Cabinet Minister insisted was purely notional. No political party or celebrity or unpopular social activist has been allowed to hijack the protest, much to the delight of the common man. This is our war against corruption, and by God di kasam, we're not going to let them make it about them.

Popular protests have been on my mind a lot recently. This is the third consecutive post about them, what with all that's happened in the Middle East this year. Students in IIIT-Allahabad are demonstrating - albeit with atrocious grammar - against a corrupt director and his acolytes after the tragic death of a student. Yesterday was the second anniversary of our own culinary revolution here at BITS-Goa. There is one unifying regret I have from all these protests (except for the IIIT one, which, obviously, is still on): that the people gave up after the first sniff of victory. They took the smallest of concessions and went home. Egypt rid itself of a dictator, but the military remained in power; BITS-Goa rid itself of a Chief Warden, but students still have very little say in the arbitrary running of this campus.

The powers-that-be rely on this tendency to keep the status quo. The government can just wait for a bit, then pass a watered-down Lokpal Bill that they can get around in the future. The people and the media will be fatigued of all this protesting: there will be an IPL to watch. They'll take what they get and celebrate it as the triumph of the people against the State. The politicians will distract us by debating minutiae. By uniting against corruption, we have finally got the government on the mat. We have an opportunity to change this system that we've loathed for decades. One law isn't going to change that, we need serious structural change. We need to decide what we're for, not just what we're against. For that we need mature public debate - one that does not dismiss alternate views as anti-agitation, and therefore blasphemous - along with all the bargaining chips we hold only if we care about the issue enough to come out on the streets together for it. To give up now, to continue with the status quo would be the most unkindest cut to not only Anna Hazare, but to everybody who's ever hoped for an India we can be proud of.

It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

So Bammy's got his war, or military intervention, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. Cue CNN, and its Breaking News and shiny round tables and touchscreen maps, and the mandatory news report about how happy being bombed is making the Libyan people. Cue also the legions of America-bashers who bring out terms like 'white man's burden' and 'imperialist dogs'. For my part, I put the Bob Dylan discography on and try to decide which way I stand.

What makes this war different from, say, Iraq, is that there would most certainly have been violence had the Allies - I love how they're still using that term - had not intervened, and civilians would still have died. Mass atrocities would have been reported once Gaddafi's forces retook Benghazi and the West would have been criticised for inaction. #Rwanda would have Trended on Twitter. It's not easy being the West. People expect you to do things.

To his credit, Obama's said all the right things and made sure he has the world - or at least the part that matters - behind him. The US has beautifully played the reluctant leader, making sure other countries commit to the action and that they're invited by all the right people to bomb Libya. He's made it hard to criticise the action. A unanimous SC Resolution carries a lot of weight in this world.

The problem, however, lies not in the execution but in the premise behind military action. What is being stated very often as the unstated goal for the war is regime change in Libya. OK, they've not exactly been subtle about it, with Obama going on record saying that Gaddafi must go. The SC mandate is for protection of civilians only, and the Allies have no business removing sovereign leaders, no matter how vague their titles might be.

For all the ideals of democracy and Egypt and free love that this revolt is based on, it is essentially a civil war between two sons of Gaddafi sorting out who takes over when the old geezer kicks the bucket: a more violent Azhagiri v Stalin. Of course, the people got involved, as they would in heady times like these, and bullets were fired and innocent people died, which prompted more violence. And now the global powers have sensed weakness and chosen sides and upgraded it into a war a la CNN, ignoring similar situations throughout the rest of the Middle East and Cote d'Ivoire, which the global narrative has conveniently forgotten.

So, where do I finally stand? I'm still unsure. It would be naive of me to not expect the West to look after their own interests as they decide what to do. For all the rants it inspires, this is a reality of international diplomacy. And it is in their interest that an unreliable dictator like Gaddafi is replaced by a more reliably ingratiating one. It is also a reality of international diplomacy that as long as they do it outside primetime television, a dictator can kill as many innocent civilians he wants without fear of repercussions. Case in point: Laurent Gbagbo in the aforementioned Cote d'Ivoire, who has in the last few months rigged an election and killed hundreds of people - offences that cost Hosni Mubarak his job, and looks increasingly certain to lose Muammar Gaddafi his - and has received little more than a slap on the wrist and threats from military heavyweights like Burkina Faso. It's a depressing situation, but it is reality. And no amount of ranting is going to do anything about it.

Hosni has left the building!

The tweets are in. Egypt is free. Free from what? An oppressive dictatorship that lasted 30 years and took away people's rights and shit. Oh nice. Good for them. Yeah, man, like, it's a wind of change, man. You know, Tunisia, now Egypt. The people have spoken, man. They got rid of the dictators. The people did, yeah.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Let's stop one second and see what happened today. Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt since the assassination of Anwar Sadat, resigned and handed over power to the military, before leaving Cairo for the seaside resort of Sharm-al-Sheikh. Remember Sharm-al-Sheikh? Never mind. A certain King did something similar in 1952, handing over power to Gamal Nasser, and it was called a coup.

Coup d'etat: (n) the sudden unconstitutional deposition of a government, usually by a small government’s surrender; or the acquiescence of the populace and the non-participant military forces.

Every one in charge of Egypt since that time has been a military leader. Mubarak is a former Air Marshall. The military showed no signs of siding with the people, as happened in Tunisia. Yes, the President still had to have Parliament ratify his bills, and any amendments to the Constitution. Sure, the Establishment rigged the legislative elections well enough to stop that being an issue. The Military now has control over both the legislature and the executive. The head's gone, but the body's thriving.

Mubarak's heir apparent is, of course, is a long trusted CIA man, the man who a Wikileaks cable referred to as "Mubarak's Consigliere." Omar Suleiman is not Gamal Mubarak, Hosni's dear son and heir presumptive thus far. But he's a man the US trusts, as does the military. He was the chief of Egyptian intelligence who helped the US not torture hundreds of terror suspects. He's been cast in the role of peacemaker, and a quasi-democratic leader who will usher in a new era in Egyptian politics. He is their kind of guy.

In 1911, Louis Kuehnle, the Commodore, was in charge of the Republican Party machine in Atlantic City. Then Woodrow Wilson came along, this Virginian who had become Governor of New Jersey and was looking to make a name for himself. He promised to dismantle the party machine and bring proper democracy and law and order to the vice city. He exposed the numerous abuses of the Commodore and his allies. The people were infuriated. That didn't bring down the machine. Deals were made. Kuehnle went to jail for election fraud, but kept getting what Indians would call a hafta until his death. Enoch L. Johnson - played by the excellent Steve Buscemi in the equally excellent Boardwalk Empire - took over and made sure the machine survived, well oiled as it was by Prohibition. Wilson used his popularity to become President. The head was cut off, but the body flourished. Maybe, just maybe, the men in charge decided that Mubarak had become toxic and had to be replaced by a more efficient dictator, so that the Establishment could thrive.

So, I'm sorry I'm not really excited about today's events. I'm sorry I'm not tweeting or buzzing my exuberance. A lot of people believe they changed the world today. Bully for them. I'm not a cynic, really, but I feel it hard to believe that real change took place today.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong. That the military - out of the goodness of its heart - gives the people fair elections and a popular leader emerges, who will safeguard the rights of the Egyptian people and dismantle corruption and part the Red Sea on weekends. Or that the people don't stand for this travesty and manage to pull off a true revolution. It's possible, but I won't be holding my breath.

P.S. It may seem from the tone that I am disparaging of the role the people played, in their continuous protests. On the contrary, I believe that without them, even this change wouldn't have been possible, and Hosniji would have been in charge till kingdom come. What I'm trying to say is that they shouldn't take this as a victory, but as an essential step towards true representative government. The protests shouldn't stop until that is achieved. I'm just skeptical that it will.