South Asia in a Flux

            Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam on the changing scene in key areas of SAARC

Over the last few weeks South Asia has been in a flux. We have been witness to public anger in India over the assault on Sarbjeet Singh, an Indian prisoner in a Pakistani jail, with death sentence for having caused blasts in Pakistan.

Public anger soared in India as Indian media publicized a grievous assault on him by fellow inmates. The media built up a lot of moral outrage unmindful of the fact that only a few months ago an Indian citizen, Qateel Siddiqui, was killed by fellow inmates in Pune jail a day before he was to be released.

Just as another proof that in Indian jails the situation was no better, a Pakistani prisoner was attacked in Jammu jail. He died a few days later from the wounds. So, this is the status of human rights in two leading countries of the SAARC.

To the credit of Indian diplomacy, this series of bad events was handled deftly and much of the damage caused by the media was quickly undone. The SAARC framework has never been relevant in defusing such crises, sadly.

Side by side, with this, a great hype was created in the media over the “ingress” of Chinese troops in India. Much of it was a put on, in any case. We must understand that the “border” between India and China, the Line of Actual Control (LOAC), is far more amorphous than the border between, say, India and Pakistan, the Line of Control (LOC).

Such “incursions” occur several times a year from the eastern Himalayas (Arunachal Pradesh) to the western Himalayas (Laddakh, J & K). If the media do not jump into fray with their jingoistic blah-blah, and if some opposition politicians do not start working themselves into a frenzy, things would be quickly resolved by the DGMOs, diplomats and politicians of the two sides. Those building up war hysteria are not the friends of the country. They push for war because they do not really know the cost of war.

Thank God, the two sides were finally able to resolve the issue amicably. However, one must remember that such episodes will continue to recur till the border issue with China is settled. Is it, then, too much to expect some restraint from the loudmouths of the media on such delicate issues?

Amid all this there is good news from Pakistan: Democracy has asserted itself quite spectacularly in the face of terrorist threat to voters. Nawaz Sharif, wrongly kicked out of power by General Musharraf, is back in power supported by the people, while Musharraf is where he belongs – under house arrest for his illegal power capture. Military coups may be a past phenomenon now in Pakistan. This is a real achievement.

Another noteworthy achievement was heavy turnout of voters despite real possibility of terrorists attacking them. They had shown their seriousness by killing quite a few people in the recent days.

The region has been an unhappy place for quite a while. Bangladesh has witnessed considerable violence over the last few months in course of action against Jamaat-e-Islami leaders allegedly for their role in the overthrow of Mujibur Rahman government and the murder of his family. Some of the Jamaat leaders are also being prosecuted for their alleged support to Pakistan army in the murder of civilians in the 1971 civil war.

However, this is not as simple as it looks, because the Jamaat also happens to be a staunch ally of former Prime Minister Begum Khalida Zia, the adversary of the present premier, Sheikh Hasina Wazed. The Jamaat thinks it is persecuted because of its alliance with Mrs. Zia.

Although Mrs. Wazed is pro-India, this country has not been able to mediate to end the crisis. On the other hand, Western governments have advised Mrs. Wazed to exercise caution and refrain from high-handed behaviour.

It is often said in Delhi diplomatic circles that India does not have a foreign policy. It has only a Pakistan policy. Being the largest player in the SAARC it could have played a more effective role, but has not, for whatever reason.

Another important SAARC country, Sri Lanka, is caught up in a controversy over war crimes against ethnic Tamils, which has seriously disturbed Tamils in India as well. On this front, too, we do not see any effective initiative from India.

Over the last few decades, we have grown to expect better results from the SAARC. But the two most important members – India and Pakistan – are busy untangling their own affairs. Now is the time to concentrate more closely on SAARC for regional peace and prosperity. India must play its leadership role, which comes quite naturally to it.

With democracy maturing in Pakistan and Nawaz Shairf’s declaration that he would visit India whether he is invited or not, we have hope for better ties in future. Already Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has invited him to visit India. It is said that democracies do not fight democracies. We hope and pray for peace with a democratic Pakistan. g

Vande Mataram

If one read this letter of Rabindranath Tagore it would be understood why Vande Mataram song is unsecular to impose on all Indians....

In his letter to Subhas Chandra Bose (1937), Tagore wrote:

"The core of Vande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it. Of course Bankimchandra does show Durga to be inseparably united with Bengal in the end, but no Mussulman [Muslim] can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as 'Swadesh' [the nation]. This year many of the special [Durga] Puja numbers of our magazines have quoted verses from Vande Mataram—proof that the editors take the song to be a hymn to Durga. The novel Anandamath is a work of literature, and so the song is appropriate in it. But Parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song cannot be appropriate. When Bengali Mussulmans show signs of stubborn fanaticism, we regard these as intolerable. When we too copy them and make unreasonable demands, it will be self-defeating."

Media grow up.... dont creat hype... report all versions of a news instead of targeting true Indians.

I am the son of the Indian who died for the nations independence and sone of the father who choosed secualr India against Islamic country Pakistan during Partitions... So dont use a song used a particlar community on all Indians... As you were aware during Independence struggle Muslims raised slogans Narey takbir Allah Hu AKbar can we make it national slogan.....

I will not at any cost sing Vande Mantra which is against the constitutions becuase it stop me to practice my religion freefly. The right which the Indian constitution gives to me to practice religion with freedom.

Our National athem is Jana Gana Mana which is sung by all Indian across the nation..

If at all a song deserves to be national song 

its is --- Sare Janhan Sey Accha Hindustan Humara.......

Jai Hind.....

Corruption and Political Correctness: A Severe Case of Intellectual Laziness: Meera Ashar

JANUARY 30, 2013

tags: Ashis Nandy, caste, Harry Frankfurt, intellectuals, Jaipur Literature Festival

by Lawrence Liang

Guest post by MEERA ASHAR

Ashis Nandy has been called, rather, accused of being, many things—sociologist, historian, political theorist, public intellectual, philosopher, psychoanalyst, leftist, centrist, right wing, Dalit, Christian, Brahmanical, casteist (he describes himself, more poetically, as an intellectual street fighter and reason buster)—but ‘politically correct’ has never been one of them.

This time, Nandy’s political incorrectness has cost him more than before. As in the past, he has been attacked by politicians and the popular media for presenting his analysis of social phenomena—for doing his job well. The response of the Indian intelligentsia to Nandy’s threatened arrest by the right wing government of Gujarat in 2008 was markedly different from the response now. The difference this time, of course, is that Nandy has not offended the right people. He is seen to have betrayed the marginalized. This time, he has been unfashionably politically incorrect. The similarity between the two episodes is the ‘freedom of speech’ brigade, which has dutifully stood by Nandy. But I shall turn to them later.

Nandy’s abandoning of political correctness, perhaps the second-most malignant epidemic of the modern age after ‘bullshit’, is not just an act of impudence or foolhardiness. Sympathetic students and avid readers of Nandy’s writing have often been heard asking, “but why does he have to say these things in this manner; why does he make jokes like this?” It is as though we have assumed that Nandy’s ideas can be repackaged into a politically appropriate, academically gratifying, sanitized format, preferably footnotable. (Many have actually succeeded in achieving that—and rendering him redundant in the process.)

At a time when academics presume that their role is to perpetuate more and more politically correct research (“score one more for the underdogest of the underdog”), Nandy’s work, while challenging old dogmas and hierarchies, cannot be recast into a bite-size snack. There is no ‘Understand Nandy in 3 Simple Steps’…or even 5. Perhaps this is why he has been critiqued almost equally by ideologues of all hues. For example, his brilliant essay on humiliation baffled many. What could he possibly mean when he argues that for humiliation to occur, both the perpetrator and the humiliated need to share the same symbolic world. Humiliation cannot be completed unless this cognitive circuit is complete and another’s categories are violently imposed upon one. A potent identity marker, humiliation can have “creative possibilities”; it can “crystalize new forms of political awareness”. “He makes these statements, and then we have to unpack them for days,” one of my bright students once said of him. But this is a far cry from inane questions such as: Is he justifying humiliation? Is he blaming the humiliated? Is he forgiving the perpetrator? Nandy does not give us new and improved answers; he compels us to question our own questions.

The reactions to Nandy’s exposition on corruption (which has strangely been relegated to the status of ‘remarks’) betray once again the intellectual laziness that pervades society. At the crudest level, Nandy’s words were taken out of context. No surprises here. Blame the media: 24×7 news bites, running the same half-sentence over and over again, uproar, more reruns of the sentence fragment. You get the picture. And indeed, there were people who are either just waiting to pick a fight, be offended, outraged, protest… a familiar routine. Some shook their head in dismay and said this was a reflection of the attitudes of a casteist society.  Brinda Karat called him elitist and Mayawati and the rest wanted him arrested. No one paused even to hear the end of the sentence that began, “It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes, and increasingly the Scheduled Tribes….” This was met with a collective chant of ‘FOUL’. “And as long as this is the case,” Nandy had continued, with his characteristic aphorismic charm, “the Indian Republic will survive.” Of course, Nandy’s point was that the discourse of corruption victimizes the marginalized, while the elite get away with it. He was making the argument that the elite have subtle age-old mechanisms of manipulating power, which the marginalized lack. His use of West Bengal as an example of the least corrupt state but also the state that has kept the SCs/ST and OBCs from getting close to power makes that amply clear.

Of course, this was not all he intended to say. When Nandy said that his co-panelist, the eminent philosopher Richard Sorabji, and he can be corrupt in more subtle ways, by offering scholarships and jobs to kith and kin, he was not simply saying that corruption is everywhere. Nor was he merely stating that the elite get away with it. He was asking us to rethink the category of corruption. Why do certain things not look like corruption? “We congratulate ourselves for promoting talent,” Nandy said of the ‘corruption’ that the elite may engage in. Before we jump in and claim to have solved the paradox by categorizing this as hypocrisy, let us pause to think what Nandy could have been saying. Do we even have a theory of corruption? Or are we blindly waving around a baton against it. It will not do to only say, “corruption is everywhere, let’s strike it, or strike against it,” depending on our chosen mode of ‘participation’ in politics. We have recently seen how that did not turn out too well for the Anna Hazare movement.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is the defense that Nandy’s compatriots, students and fellow social scientists have offered: freedom of speech. Indeed, as our society becomes more and more intolerant, there is a need to hold on tight to our right and ability to express dissent. But that is hardly the end of our task. Far from it. Neither is it enough merely to assert that Nandy’s heart is in the right place. (Indeed it is.) Can our intellectual response to a sophisticated argument, and the furor it created, be: “But he has always spoken for the marginalized”? Is this the only validation an intellectual work needs: that it should speak for the marginalized? If this is the only stipulation for scholarly work, we may as well be lobotomized.

It is no surprise that, where multiple academic and scholarly careers have been built primarily on polished bleeding-heart stories, a ‘gadfly’s’ annoying and persistent demand that we be intellectually honest and willing to challenge the very categories of our analysis has not always been welcomed. His work, even if presented as “paradoxes, aphorisms, ironies, jokes and riddles” strikes at the very foundation of the business of knowledge production.  Nandy’s analysis reveals not just the vacuity of the concept of corruption, but also the intellectual indolence that we all revel in. Nandy has often been called a gadfly. Ironically, this reminds me of another friendly neighbourhood gadfly, Socrates, who was asked to drink hemlock for ‘corrupting’ the youth.

Meera Ashar teaches at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and can be contacted at meera.ashar@anu.edu.au

Karnataka: Some dos and don'ts Congress would do well to remember

The Congress party may fritter away the political edge gained after itswin in the Karnataka state election . Here are some tips for thestate's new ruling party to maintain its advantage in the runup to the Lok Sabha elections due next year.

1. The Congress should appoint someone with a clean image and record for good work as chief minister of Karnataka, and not go by his fund-raising abilities for the party. A political party going to the polls is obviously under pressure for funds, and the Congress should not see Karnataka as an avenue to raise funds for the Lok Sabha and coming assembly elections in five states. 

2. One source of corruption and mis-governance is transfer of bureaucrats. If the party does not succumb to the temptation of irrational transfers and is able to appoint men of integrity to key positions, its image will receive a big boost. The first litmus test: Chief Secretary S.V. Ranganath is retiring in June and the Congress regime will do well to appoint somebody based on his record.

3. The Congress should give its chief minister full freedom to run the state, and intervene only necessary. Past chief ministers have suffered because they were not being able to resist pressure from New Delhi.

4. The new Congress regime should remember the BJP lost power in Karnataka in spite of announcing a plethora of populist schemes and creating a separate budget for agriculture. The writing on the wall is clear: the party must strengthen existing schemes and not succumb to the temptation of launching unnecessary new schemes. It must not abandon the good work done in sectors like food and public distribution, health and urban infrastructure, but strengthen them instead.

5. People voted the Congress in because they wanted to vote the BJP out. The Congress party must benefit from the lessons handed out to the BJP, and not repeat the same mistakes.

6. The outgoing BJP administration has done some good work in the power sector, especially in planning new thermal power projects. These are all likely to be commissioned by 2017. If the Congress sticks to some of its populist poll promises like free power supply to farmers, it will wreck Karnataka's sound finances. 

7. The new ruling party has enough scope for taxation reforms. There is room to reduce VAT and stamp duty rates in Karnataka which has some of the country's highest tax rates.

source :

K R Balasubramanyam