Seinjuti

Problems, solution and the procrastination

2016-03-08T12:09:00.000+05:30

Perhaps I might be forgiven, being in the age group I am, for making a mountain of a molehill and then considering the same as insurmountable. Imagine, therefore, my surprise, a sense of magical exhilaration when the other day I decided and was actually able to solve a simple household problem with a reasonable effort, an action I held up for months.

While in the above case the problem posed could be resolved to one’s satisfaction, I am not sure that all kinds of small problems we face both in our day to day lives and the ‘larger’ problems of life in the realms of technology, environment, health as well as in the broader social, political, economic and cultural contexts (subsuming some of our daily problems as particular instantiations of the bigger issues) can always, in a general way, be shown to possess happy or fair solutions. These may often be justifiably considered intractable.

Health problems of an individual

It is a common experience that some of the problems we face as individuals apparently resolve themselves given sufficient time. There is a certain degree of reversibility associated with some changes with respect to a particular position or the condition of a given system (which our life has to deal with), for instance, our body at any given instant. Changes do occur in our body or in its behaviour. Sometimes one is barely conscious of these changes or almost disregards these. On other occasions, however, these changes may be more significant and it is possible that one perceives the changes as persistent and feels uncertain about the consequences. That is when a problem with our body might come to acquire a definition. But as experienced by many of us, quite a few such apparent changes disappear on their own after a period, or if they remain, are not quite noticeable and seemingly do not interfere with our daily life. This does not mean that the problem has been resolved, but rather the body has come to terms with the apparent changes in it and taken them in its stride. It can be said to have graduated into a new steady state, may be termed better or worse than the previous state. That is a matter of perception, a subjective decision, but usually not calling for any action, a problem-solving intervention.

There are occasions, however, when the changes in one’s body may not be diagnosed as benign. There may be a threat perception about an immediate breakdown of our life or damage to its quality. The problem definition in such a case becomes more urgent with greater specialised and professional inputs. Specific solutions, mandating medically consistent actions and treatments might follow. But it is not guaranteed in all cases that the solutions would be fully satisfactory or would entirely or even partially resolve the problem(s) originally posed.

The main difference between the two cases above (pertaining to health problems of an individual) is the apparent decisiveness and wherewithal to act with the available medical means (scientific knowledge and technology) upon resolving a problem in the latter case whereas in the former hope or faith in the self-healing capacity of the body is in evidence leading to apparent inaction. The outcome in either case may not conform to a uniquely definable ‘solution’, but would be measured in terms of our expectation of what a solution in a given case should look like.

Problems – scaling from individual to community levels

In the household context, people continuously need to solve problems arising with regard to selection, procurement of various gadgets and attending to a myriad maintenance issues related to a number of appliances and procedures of routine use for convenient, smooth and trouble-free conduct of daily chores. By the same token, a cooperative housing society, a larger colony of residents with a more or less homogeneous background, and finally a much larger and a more diverse community living within the precincts of a municipality (municipal corporation) might be required to solve qualitatively similar problems, though not just with wider variability due to heterogeneity of the populace and their requirements, but with a significantly higher scale that may sometimes call for altogether different strategies and skills.

Guaranteed equitable distribution of drinking water to all residents in a large housing complex or a larger community and uninterrupted collection and environmentally safe disposal of accumulated municipal solid waste are examples of two common and pressing problems most cities in India face today, with no immediate and reliable solution on the horizon. There are many more similar problems, such as, public health, sanitation, air/water pollution, roads and efficient drainage (especially for storm water), etc.

Water supply

While the water distribution problem is generally a large-scale citywide one, management of water supply in a smooth and equitable manner even within a much smaller residential complex may present problems to those responsible and entrusted with the job that may not be just technical (removing blockages, repair or replacement of machine parts or some related civil works) or technological (choosing a more modern and advanced technology than used in the existing installation, deciding about water conservation and rain water harvesting). On the other hand, managing city’s growing water need, with growing population, will entail not just planning and construction of new storage facilities ahead of the growing demand, but taking principled position about sanctioning new planned residential/commercial building constructions that source their water from the city’s available water storage facilities, strictly monitoring and controlling unlawful extraction of the groundwater for the same purpose.

Solid waste disposal

A different set of issues become pertinent in the context of solid waste disposal problem. In this case the magnitude of the problem may grow too big and its resolution may become quite intractable with the scale due to the indecisiveness and procrastination (lack of urgency) on the part of the people responsible for its management. Simple issues like segregation of waste into dry and compostable wet garbage or separation of recyclable (such as plastic, metallics) and electronic wastes, which are relatively easy to enforce and implement at the level of individual household units within a residential society, become many times more difficult, hazardous and expensive (if not nearly impossible) to carry out if such a combined (unsegregated) mass of solid waste from a large number of housing complexes are allowed to accumulate at a municipal ward level. Choices among common treatment processes such as composting, incineration, landfill and capping etc, can become orders of magnitude difficult and ineffective, what with poor match between the feed specification of some of these machines and the actual load, poor designs or the inefficiency of the commercially available machines to be selected within municipal funds restrictions. Thus the problem here is not just techno-economic but also about planning and management.

No matter whether it is a problem faced by an individual or by a collective, difficulties in problem solving (making it an open-ended process) are often associated with an inadequate or incomplete problem definition that may happen sometime, in a typical real life scenario, due to lack of input information required and the uncertainty in the data. The indecisiveness to act in a way so as to move towards a solution may also occur when one has to make choices among multiple solution strategies resulting in outcomes which, even though include a good technically consistent solution to the original problem but makes the solution less worthy either because of incurring too much expense or for generating a new problem (like disposal of a byproduct).

Social and political over-determinants of problem-solving choices

An important difference that pertains to this class of problems vis-à-vis the problems faced by an individual household is the collaborative nature of the problem solving in the sense that the decision making in this regard can not be done individually. This might (usually, though not necessarily always) bring into play the social and or even political determinants quite apart from purely technical or technological considerations that would have decided the course of action in an individual based problem-solving scenario.

However, it can be stated with some certainty that delaying decisive actions, even at the risk of failures or sub-optimal solutions, do not help in the long run and may actually compound the problem. This has been amply demonstrated in the case of community wide problem-solving by way of huge cost overruns and/or coming up with an outdated solution designed for a certain assumed scale that may have seen an increase by an order of magnitude during the pendency of the problem solving process.

The tree

2016-01-14T20:54:00.000+05:30

When I happened to step into the balcony of my flat in the morning after a night of torrential rain accompanied as it was with a vicious gale, the first thing I noticed was a bit of a void in the direction of my line of sight which normally did not intersect with a part of the balcony and a good part of the terrace of the two-story house in the neighbouring bungalow society right outside the boundary wall enclosing ours. By then I realised that a stout and big branch at the upper flights on the right side of the Krishnachura (‘Royal Poinciana’) tree I am used to seeing from my balcony was no more, being substantially broken down from the main stem and was precariously dangling above and across the boundary wall with a medley of sub-branches, leaves and flowers further threatening to go where gravity would pull them to. And that meant on top of a lot of spanking cars parked on either side of that wall.

Three things bothered me, in no particular order. Both my neighbours in the opposite two-story house and I would forego a part of the privacy (without having to pay any premium for this privilege) naturally provided by the leafy branches of the tree. The latter, which had a symmetrical expanse as it diverged upwards, well nigh lost it, much like a human shorn of an arm from the shoulder. A cuckoo that used to station itself on some branches and from the leafy incognito issued its unrelenting calls since early morning fell silent, probably confused by the mayhem had gone to a safer abode.

By mid morning there was a flurry of activities on both sides of the wall involving responsible men and a few concerned women, watchmen, safaiwallahs and later one or two babus in grey safari suits from the corporation in-charge of the garden department. They paced up and down the sidewalk, looked up the tree and estimated its broken segments, furiously argued among themselves. An hour later, a thin agile young man armed with a chopper climbed up the tree and bracing himself at a convenient junction on the stem, methodically chipped at the sides of the broken branch before chopping it off close to the corresponding Y-joint, the huge panoply of branches and leaves and flowers being caught hold of and drawn safely down by two more workers from the department standing below. Some further pruning later those workers pulled the remains of the tree, much like an animal carcass, across and out of the colony on to the main road en route to its designated transit area of the municipal ward awaiting further denudation and decapitation towards an appropriate utilitarian end.

Presently, the reasonable and the practical men and women from our colonies, having successfully resolved the fall out of an act of god went their ways. Safaiwallahs got busy with their daily chores. Babus sped away on their two wheelers. Then the tree was left alone to reflect on its bruises and cuts. The places where the chopper had amputated the branches were looking white in the rising sun, bright and raw.

In time the injured stem will be washed by rain of any memory of a presence and tanned by sun, collect grime and look like the others. If its fecundity serves it well the tree might shoot out new arms thereabouts or elsewhere and grow leaves on them and again aspire for the sky, no less, and fill the void in the direction of my line of vision. When the air will rise, the tree will slowly allow its bruised hope to flow up and down the sinews of the branches for them to be swayed, with leaves aflutter and flowers aflame. In time the pint-sized birds will think nothing of their busy flitting across the branches and resume their preferential perch on the lightest among these dangerously tempting gravity. And the cuckoo will be back to pull me out of my slumber with amazing persistence.

Perhaps there was no need to be despondent about this act of god and its human follow up. The tree will survive. And so will all those that animate the nature.

Meek shall inherit the earth

2015-04-22T22:48:00.003+05:30

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Gospel of Matthew 5:5, New Testament). God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.

In a simplistic though fairly prevalent view, the world is often seen to be naturally dominated by those species, groups that are more intelligent and resourceful, powerful, especially ones who are conscious about their dominant status and are ruthless in perpetuating the same. The directions and the dynamics of the world affairs are assumed to be decided by the duel between the extraordinary and the powerful adversaries who, though, share their vaunted ambitions to dominate these proceedings. The meek, by definition, do not figure in these power equations. They are too ordinary, small in stature and low in the scale of their ambitions. Like the grass falling in the path traversed by the horses carrying the marauding armies or under the jackboots of their equally intrepid enemies, many among the meek will be trampled, charred and decimated. But like the grass they will survive being multitudinous, even grow from the ashes, from the unlikely shelter under the boulder and cover the slopes and the ridges, plateaus and the valleys, soak the sun and the rain and continue to thrive long after the gory and destructive competition has stopped. In that sense, the meek may have a greater chance of escaping complete and systematic erasure which their more powerful and assertive brethren are likely to suffer, and therefore have, as a class (individuals may be mauled), a better prospect of survival and might inherit the earth after all, however scorched it is rendered by the big players, and grow life out of the waste land.

Karl Marx used the concept of a so-called “Asiatic mode of production” to characterise the slow and meandering dynamics of the socio-economic and political development in the Indian subcontinent till the advent of the British rule in the middle of the 18^th century. His descriptions in his writings during 1850s call to mind almost an instantiation of the above. The history of India from ancient times has been replete with instances of major kingdoms and empires being overrun and visible symbols of their rule having been razed to ground by invading armies of rival kings in a bid to expand their own fiefdoms. However, almost as a rule, Marx had observed, these big overthrows and takeovers have largely left the plebian populace to live their poor marginalised lives in isolated village communities. The latter were loosely administered by local authorities who in turn were responsible for remitting retainership fees (in turn extracting a tax from the villagers for the communally held and worked land by way of a part of the produce) for the region of their dominance to, say, the potentates of the provincial Hindu kingdoms in earlier times or the emperors under India wide Mughal rule later. For the people at the ground level, the king or the sultan was distant, deity like, dominant and dangerous but also in some way benevolent to his subjects in the matters about construction of large public works like irrigation assets. But his writ at the local level used to be less oppressive and systematic as it became with the introduction of what is known as the “Permanent Settlement” introduced in 1792 by Lord Cornwallis, the governor of the Bengal Presidency under the burgeoning British Raj in the late eighteenth century.

And the village communities sometimes managed to maintain for even centuries a remarkable identity and a continuity of local practices – economic activities, cultural mores. They were too insignificant to have attracted notice or merit the brutal treatment meted out to the active and real adversaries to the kings and the sultans. However, this is not meant to make a case in favour of the state of affairs in pre-British India, nor a philosophical rationalisation of a state of mind that apparently helped the survival of the masses.

Time and again, it has been demonstrated empirically (in the stories upon stories of underdevelopment in the Indian subcontinent) that it is more than likely that what the meek and the docile (and they also mostly happen to be from the subaltern classes) eventually manage to inherit are the losses, the shards of shattered grandiose dreams spun and propagated by powerful rulers (including the ‘potential’ rulers), their ministers, advisers and other representatives. Not just due to their being weak and not having the ambition and the initiative to latch on to the bandwagon of progress to move out of the morass of backwardness but precisely because of their implicit trust and touching faith in those who take upon themselves the ‘onerous’ task of driving the chariot. And when the consequences of the historically wrong choices made by the latter become apparent the meek more often than not lack the wherewithal and the reserves to withstand any negative fall out over long periods or get away from them.

Apart from the facile imagery conjured up by the biblical quote that seems to have an empirical authenticity for many, a lot of people, especially those that are religiously inclined, implicitly believe in the core idea by mixing it up with the familiar good and evil conundrum, that the good eventually prevails (does it always really?). In more modern context of pacifist activism (or what could be better described as politics of pacifism) this might have been a good slogan to be used as a strategic tool for political mobilisation through faith (ultimate triumph of the faith?). One would suspect that behind this there has been an astute appreciation of the cultural predisposition of a milieu, making a virtue of one’s weakness and make a political programme out of it. This is not necessarily a bad idea, after all the history of evolution is that of the survivors.

It is important, however, to take the proposition that ‘meek shall inherit the earth’ with more than a pinch of doubt, to ask why slogans and catch phrases such as these became necessary, who propagated them and what was the underlying purpose?

Work and life style

2014-10-20T19:55:00.000+05:30

Many young people now a days, engaged in busy professions like finance, business management, information technology etc., in the burgeoning knowledge industry, have very little time to spare, in the course of a normal working day, either for themselves or their families. Some of them even display tendencies befitting workaholics. Their time frame is usually packed mostly with business, but sometimes also accommodates structured leisure elements or packages considered ‘cool’ or ‘in vogue’. All of these do not leave many windows allowing them to just look out watching the fading colour of the sky in the evening and wish they could become like a kite gliding into the distant horizon or do something, anything, that does not necessarily have any use value and call for approbation or sanctions of their peers.

It is as if not only are their professional life governed by parameters set by the businesses they work for, and hence ultimately, by the market, their individual life, their choices about consumption to keep their body satiated and the mind tamed, are increasingly dictated and manipulated by the omnipresent and omniscient market. Everything that they do or choose not to do must make sense in terms of a generally accepted paradigm about how to conduct life along a materially secure and prosperous path. They exist in a social ambience - in the family, within the community and wider cultural mileu, valuing and aspiring such a trajectory of life. My life, that is. Irrespective of whatever happens to the environment that supports it or the other concurrent lives in competition.

One wonders, however, if they sometimes miss the work-life balance in an untutored common sense. Which begs the question if some of them would choose to subvert against the denominational patterns of social and cultural preferences, the choices of the items of consumption and leisure (things of desire), the subtle subservience to a ‘factory’-produced uniformity of products and customs, a fetish for efficiency and a distaste for redundancy, apprehension about asymmetry and cultural diversity that run counter to the fundamentalism of the power elite in modern democracies, especially its neo-liberal globalising variant. If they could breach this hegemony, there would have been a need to review their singular focus on profit and self-aggrandisement in both spheres of work and leisure. This also could have nucleated a question or two about the contents and organisation of their work (modularity, object-orientedness, extreme reductionism coupled with an assembly line unity), its impact on the environment and other fellow human beings and even its intellectual quality and worth.

This interrogation of the work and its implication on the life of the workers, especially the knowledge workers, is especially important because there is an aura of superiority, novelty, modernity and of course an array of privileges associated with their exclusive domains of specialised technical competencies. There is a positive impetus, a danger if you like, for such workers to buy into an identity based on such specialised knowledge-oriented work and the consequential hubris. By allowing them to play a key role in the innovation and management of the industry and businesses and, increasingly in sprucing and speeding up governance, the work defines their relevance to those at the helm of the business and the government, in the process providing them not only their financial security but prosperity and social standing and giving them a chance and a reason to celebrate their life in style.

‘Celebration of life’ is often suggested visually on the pages of glossy coffee table books showing walls coming alive in exquisite colour and lustre, huge antique furniture pieces, plush upholstery, ethnic décor, soft lighting, sumptuous food and expensive wine laid out on a scale befitting royalty. And of course an assemblage of chic crowd with similar or higher pedigree and clout enveloped in the hubbub of good-natured banter and a sweetly nagging flavour of good and gated living.

Except that this picturesque life must unspool endlessly. For if it ever stops for want of fuel that runs the motor the response would be to quickly recover the foothold on the bandwagon. Nobody in the right mind would countenance a possibility of even a jolt to the familiar identity, let alone a loss of it.

For them the work they do is probably their only identity and their lifestyle the only acceptable one. If you take out the work, and consequently the attendant assured wherewithal and the status along with it, the emptiness of a life of ordinariness starts staring at them. A sort of life they have not been accustomed to looking at except occasionally through the windows of their cocoon and ignoring it. Work thus becomes an escape from a life which otherwise does not make much sense to them.

Articulation and understanding

2014-10-07T15:28:00.002+05:30

Haven’t we often come across men and women, among our friends, acquaintances, relatives who do not find it comfortable talking about most matters of public interest and importance? Or if they are forced to do so under some circumstances (over which they have little control) like suddenly becoming a part of a media campaign, involving queries or a questionaire, opinion polls on the street or at the work place, they do it in an awkward, uninspired manner.

This becomes even more glaring as in most groups one finds quite a few voluble people who like to dominate any discussion – be it soccer or cricket, gossip about stars or starlets, apparently miraculous occurrences, latest cultural trends, politics or deeper social problems. These latter set seem to have an opinion – sometimes very clear cut and at other times nebulous – on practically every issue that may or may not concern them personally or professionally but may have some bearing on the community, society or the nation in a general way and the world in the case of the international issues.

The common tendency of self-projection discernible in the behaviour such as above in many among this latter category, is rather natural and in conformity with the general social nature of engagement of most people. There may be inaccuracy in the facts and inconsistency in the logical arguments they marshal. Sometimes there could be discordant notes or even violent disagreements among those entertaining quite different perceptions formed from the same set of real life observations. But by and large they reflect the dominant paradigm (including prejudices) of the community or the cultural milieu they belong to. In this environment of preponderant urge for self-expression, it is not easy, given the brevity of expression or relative inarticulateness in many people (actually they are, probably, in the majority), to interpret the implication of what they choose to say as much as what is left unsaid.

It is possible that some among this category of people may choose to be economic with their words as their understanding is genuinely not good enough, they lack clarity in thinking and are confused, or do not have the right words to describe what they have in mind. However, can lack of articulation or ambiguity in that, by itself and in general, be taken to be an indicator of lack of understanding ?

As it happens, the opinion of such people, if any, often go unrepresented if not ignored, simply because they do not or can not express their point of view with sufficient force, flair and urgency which some of their fellow participants in a discussion muster with relative ease. A quiet leader, who speaks occasionally and only briefly at that and not forcefully enough might find it hard to carry friends, associates and followers along unless people get to see his mind in action, in terms of planning and execution of concrete deeds leading to positive results. In the realm of the current Indian politics, names of two politicians exemplifying the two contrasting categories - a super-articulate politician, almost a hustler and a bully to boot on the one hand and an erudite but reticent, almost a reluctant counterpart - obviously come to one’s mind.

The acrimonious debate on the economic development of our country vis-à-vis the care and the protection of the endangered environment is well known. Ideologically inspired people angrily and decisively arguing on either side of this divide may win the debate on the television or at a ‘social impact’ awards function. But the complexity of the ground reality that eludes them may be understood much better by many illiterate villagers, grassroots activists and even some local administration officials with hands-on knowledge. However, the opinion of most of them are routinely ignored or overruled by their superior officers in the capital and metro cities while presenting status reports and offering false diagnoses in national and international conferences.

There are a number of known examples from the field of literature of an apparent disconnect between the deep understanding by an author, expressed through a body of creative work, say, plays, novels and stories, and his publicly articulated social and political opinions, moral and philosophical views. The well-known Marxist literary critic, Georg Lukacs, had extensively discussed and illustrated this dichotomy in several of his books, notably, in ‘Studies in European Realism’. For instance, Honore de Balzac in his cycle of novels ‘La Comedie Humaine’, writing on the French society during the first half of the nineteenth century, meticulously documented the real ups and downs of the various social classes – the royalists and the feudal landowners, the bourgeois or the new business and entrepreneurial classes, the cultural elites – and unfailingly indicated the decline of the erstwhile upper classes despite Balzac’s known royalist sympathies. He never flinched from a realistic depiction of growing dominance of money in the contemporary society, unscrupulousness and moral turpitude irrespective of his yearning for and espousing virtues of Christianity, especially, the catholic religion in his other writings.

Almost a similar detached noveist’s and a social historian’s judgment was delivered by Tolstoy in his novels and stories with regard to the failure of the Tsarist Russian aristocracy and the landowning noble classes (of whom he himself was very much a part) to be the vanguard of the emancipation of the Russian peasantry from their age-old misery and bondage and therefore these classes being eventually overtaken by the new and revolutionary social forces (at the time the anarchists) brewing in the mid-late nineteenth century Russia. Even his early fictional writings show that he was acutely aware of the growing chasm between the landowners and the serfs as a reality as much as the brutal role of the Tsarist state in maintaining the status quo. However, the expressed political views of the author were often critical of some of these new social movements (especially their proclaimed violent methods). On the contrary, during the later part of his life, Tolstoy propounded his Christian-anarchist and anarcho-pacifist version of a religio-social conception of morality and love (Tolstoyanism) that neither quite explained the diagnosis of the social and political changes in Russia nor its potential directions one finds glimpses of in his creative writing.

In many areas of life and human endeavour, particularly those involving decisions regarding environment, social transformation and accretion of culture through creative work, all thinking is not necessarily and immediately actionable or possible to validate in terms of results visible in the short term. It is in such situations that the test of understanding and the long-term correctness of a judgment do not always lie in just a clear enunciation of certain inflexible premises and decisive actions based on the same. Sometimes certain ambiguities in the stated positions should not disqualify them for further serious consideration.

Rebuilding the emotional fabric in northern Sri Lanka

2014-08-24T20:21:00.000+05:30

Had recently re-read a wonderful article ‘Beyond the scars’ published originally in The Hindu Magazine dated 23^rd October 2011 (I retained a clipping). This is about certain impressions retained by a leading Tamil musician T. M. Krishna from his then recent concert visit to a few towns in northern Sri Lanka, Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Vavuniya. Names that automatically evoke tragic images of a people caught in the apparently interminable crossfire between two implacably hostile political opponents fighting a brutal war in the name of the same ‘people’.

The savage scars the war left on the geography almost everywhere in these parts could not be glossed over even in an officially sponsored visit. Perhaps more important is the psychological mauling suffered by the Sri Lankan Tamils in terms of their linguistic, cultural and even religious identity. As if being a Tamil, speaking the language, loving and yearning for the rich cultural heritage seemed almost a crime to borrow an expression from a poem by Brecht.

It is in this backdrop that the enthusiasm, serious intent of the appreciative audience of a Carnatic music recital in Jaffna was so moving, somewhat like an awakening from a long nightmare. The accompanying picture of a large relaxed young audience at the Ramanathan Academy of Fine Arts, Jaffna (“the faces, the laughter, the curiosity, questioning, smart answers”) enhances this feeling.

One cannot agree more with the author for tasking the Indians (particularly the Tamilians) to rebuild the tattered emotional fabric using many coloured threads of culture and history in that shell-shocked island. And one hopes strident competitive politics in the mainland would not snuff out the candle the intrepid cultural ambassadors might manage to rekindle.

The situation calls to mind the timeless visualization by Tolstoy in his masterpiece ‘War and peace’, of Natasha’s subtle awakening to life and new love from the devastation suffered by death of her betrothed Andrei in the 1812 Franco-Russian war. In a remarkably perceptive dialogue between Pierre and Natasha almost towards the end of the novel, both the characters realized through a catharsis of emotional maelstrom of grief and the new enchantment that there is more to life than death, that one can’t help feeling glad, being happy and hoping for new life while feeling sad, occasionally even somewhat guilty of leaving the past in favour of the future.

About faith, surrender, peace and reason

2014-07-11T20:45:00.002+05:30

Let me begin by quoting, rather extensively, from an article by columnist David Brooks ‘Faith, not just creed’, Reprinted from New York Times News Service by The Hindu, January 29, 2014.

There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book God in Search of Man : “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement ... get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ... To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

…

…Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendour of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

…

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervour and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

…..

If you are a secular person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the world: “It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”

David Brooks probably was on the one hand trying to describe, using the mystic language of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel or Saint Augustine what the essence of faith in and love of God may appear to the devout and the savant, with more than a suggestion that despite persistent doubts and a conflict riven mind common men and women, at least have fleeting glimpses of these moments of ecstasy. He has also argued, I think convincingly, that this spirit of living faith, in the practice of organised religion, more often than not, have come to be hemmed in rather badly by ossified creed.

The article prompted me to flag a few irreverent questions:

- What does a common man’s faith in and ‘love’ for God amount to? Is there more often than not a sense of indirect quid pro quo in his expectations from a supposed communion with God? How often are the wishes really altruistic like what Swami Vivekananda had experienced in his famously rumoured first encounter with the Goddess Kali in Dakshineswar temple near Calcutta? It was said that he planned to ask the goddess to alleviate his personal financial distress, but apparently he was so enthralled (by experiencing a sort of divine presence?) all he could manage to ask the goddess to bestow on him were knowledge, wisdom and devotion.

- Is the ‘sublime feeling or satiation/satisfaction’ what Augustine had described in the above quotation an experience reserved for the lucky few tuned to mysticism? Is it also the most optimistic or the ideal scenario?

- Is there a sense of peace in giving up fighting irreconcilable mental conflicts, making difficult, uncomfortable and suboptimal choices and surrendering to some superior power or consciousness that has to be only ‘believed’ (not questioned) to be capable of finding a way around (not necessarily resolving) the conflict and bringing closure to problems (by not making any choices at all)? Choosing peace over reason?

- Does faith provide a new paradigm not accessible to reasoning a human mind is capable of – does one have to give up reasoning (ego?) to attain faith, a different way of life?

- Does faith encourage one to become a pacifist, a status quoist (even fatalist), a non-believer in active intervention at any level beyond the individual? What is the moral position (distinguishing right from wrong) of an individual professing faith vis-à-vis too many inhuman acts of omission and commission of other individuals and communities and nations (as collectives of individuals) all over the world? Should that provoke a breach in faith sometimes? Can faith remain immune?

(This post has appeared in another blog elsewhere)

Media’s freedom of expression, need for introspection

2014-03-06T22:51:00.000+05:30

Not too long ago Delhi High Court had passed an order barring the newspapers and the TV channels (all media organizations) from reporting on a law intern’s complaint of sexual harassment against a former Supreme Court judge, (Justice Swatanter Kumar). A day after this order was passed, the Editors Guild of India in a statement said that the order made a mockery of the rule of law and the open and fair justice system by setting different and a very restrictive standards for the coverage of such allegations against judges (than what is applicable to any other citizen) and that this would mean an unwarranted intrusion on the media freedom.

Among the arguments marshaled by the Guild one finds the contention that such restrictions on the publication in a case such as this was uncalled for as this did not pose a serious threat to national security or would not lead to grave prejudice and miscarriage of justice. Also the presumed damage to reputation of a judge or any other person does not warrant prior restraint and would not pass the test of reasonableness under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution. There was also no justification for an assumption implied in this order that publication of mere allegations against an individual judge would inordinately and unjustifiably damage the image of the judiciary as a whole. The order for gag on the print and the electronic media also may not achieve a complete blackout since through social media and internet so much material continue to be disseminated in any case both within the country and outside.

It is the job of the media in a democracy to report court proceedings including court filings. Of course the only reasonable restriction should be that the reporting is accurate and fair. To lay down how and what exactly they should or should not report, including the type of headlines, whether or not the photographs of a public person should appear, when his images have been widely available in the media, is an avoidable intrusion into media freedom, the Guild said.

The Guild also emphasized the context of the current national debate on protecting women against sexual harassment where cases of this type raise important public issues of how to facilitate and deal with complaints by harassed women who may feel otherwise intimidated even to lodge a formal complaint with the police, who are apt to ignore them because the alleged perpetrators are well known and powerful people.

According to the Guild, responsible media houses can and should be trusted with conducting informed debate through complete and fair professional coverage of the case without critical information being held back from the public. On many similar instances, in the past, of alleged sexual assault and harassment it is only through sustained media pressure by holding open discussions with no prejudice to either the accused or to the judicial process that police have been forced to act and register cases.

Readers and viewers are generally mature enough not to mistake allegations for proof and would not assume that a person is guilty the moment a charge is published, the Guild averred and added that a judge who is trained to evaluate the evidence would be unlikely to be swayed by whatever is published.

On the face of it many of the arguments marshalled by the Guild is unexceptionable. The cumulative effect of deficit in governance and in the administration of justice in India has indeed made general public weary of the so-called ‘due process of law’ where due to sloth and corruption months elapse before police investigations are completed and charge sheets are produced. Charges are often diluted due to witness tampering through threats or inducements if the ‘accused’ happens to be an influential person. And then years pass before trials are completed in lower courts where often due to shoddy police investigation, witnesses turning hostile due to delay and/or manipulation and weak prosecution case, the ‘victim’ may not get justice to his/her satisfaction (if the case is not altogether dismissed). In case the justice goes in favour of the victim, the final closure of the case is indefinitely delayed due to challenges to such judicial orders in various higher courts where verdicts are many times overturned. Everybody spouts the statistics of the pending cases in the Indian courts. Only those fighting for justice appreciate the enormity of the odds against their goal.

It is in this hopeless environment that the dictum ‘one is presumed innocent till pronounced guilty by the courts’ (watch the plural which is indicative of the due process) appears like a cruel joke to the victim, his/her supporters and the public at large, who are becoming more and aware about such cases through media. And it is in this context that the new activist role that both the print and the electronic media in this country have started playing over the last several years can be understood and analysed. For the good it has done, and equally for its pretensions, motivations and the irreparable damage it can cause in some cases. It is as if the media in this country has found a way (which is also a commercially viable business model) for the general public to vicariously satiate its thirst for justice by providing a short cut through media trials conducted under its aegis. Editors Guild and the media in general are loath to give up this freedom and hence are protesting hard.

There can be no denying the fact that but for the wide dissemination in the media, debates, open and critical discussions (often critical of the judicial pronouncements) over the last several years the series of high profile criminal and corruption cases, especially those involving people occupying official and exalted positions, would not have the intense focus of public attention that they secured. Partly as a result of such a media pressure the government administration indirectly had to admit several lapses on their part, took some steps, though admittedly far short of what would have been desirable and in a fairly half-hearted manner. At least the need for ensuring accountability and transparency of many public institutions, government administration including police in particular, has gained currency.

By the same token, the process of justice and, in particular, judiciary itself, could not remain immune from this strong current of public scrutiny. Especially when individual members of this exalted institution have, time and again, shown themselves as susceptible to moral turpitude in corruption or sexual misdemeanour cases. The widely publicised case of Justice Soumitra Sen some years ago which went as far as potential impeachment by the parliament may be recalled.

Late last year, the allegation of sexually inappropriate behaviour against the retired judge Justice A. K. Ganguly by another intern was widely reported and discussed in the media, with pro- and contra-positions ranged in no-holds barred debates. Justice Ganguly, at the time the Chairman of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission, by and large maintained dignified silence through out the ugly, practically one-sided publicly conducted hate campaign (tendentious ‘leaks’ in the media about privileged documents to show him in poor light, insinuation and character assassination) and finally resigned from his position, which he said in his resignation letter that he was unable to do justice to in then prevailing environment. With his resignation, everybody including the media, having satiated the righteous indignation of a section of the public, lost interest and has put the matter in the backburner. Media has not informed us what progress, if any, has been made on the original case (like filing a charge sheet in a court of law) of the sexual misdemeanour of the judge.

Justice Ganguly did not resort to a defamation suit to remedy the loss of reputation he had obviously suffered, though he could have. Many participants in the media debates at the time even questioned his silence. Probably they did not know or care to respect his fundamental right to silence even as an accused of an alleged conduct.

In the light of the defamation case filed by Justice Swatanter Kumar at the Delhi high court and the court’s order about the restriction of the ‘freedom of press’ which the Editors Guild vociferously protested as above, certain issues about the freedom of expression in and by the media again come into sharp focus. Despite Guild’s protestations about the sense of responsibility or the sense of proportion of the media institutions about maintaining fairness and balance in presentation, any independent observer of the kind of media debates conducted these days on most issues of public importance including ongoing criminal and or corruption investigations and court cases will find it difficult to vouch for the media’s ability to fulfill those responsibilities.

Media’s freedom of expression has to be valued. An independent media in India have demonstrably strengthened our democracy by informing the lay public, raising pertinent issues of governance or the lack of it, have been bold enough (and in the process have emboldened ordinary people) to question some of the privileges that those in high places in our society and political-government establishment have been habituated to exercise in an axiomatic manner. But this democratization process has, unfortunately, generated an irreverence (a particularly cheap, sweeping and strident form of the tendency) about all or most of our institutions for governance and the constitutional procedures. For its claim to freedom of expression to be respected the media has to eschew its current tendency to play to the gallery, settle for the lowest common denominator. It should reform and refine its own news generation and dissemination functions so as to maintain the fine balance between public’s democratic right to know and an individual’s (even an accused) equally right to silence if only as a part of his/her democratic right of defence, including that of his/her reputation. There is a danger in media’s playing a moral crusader, a vigilante role.

A new-age Satyagraha

2014-01-31T18:18:00.000+05:30

Grace has become much less common than even common sense! Indeed, rude behaviour, if that is symptomatic of a graceless society, abounds in our daily social interactions, at home, in public places, offices and finally on the streets where this can easily turn into road rage incidents which sometimes lead to violent crimes.

Most people following politics in India today will testify to the fact that the quality of grace is becoming conspicuous by its absence in any political discourse either inside the parliament (or any other legislative bodies) or out of it (say, in TV studios of big national news channels). Political opponents are routinely seen to interrupt each other and blatantly usurp the debating space to voice one’s partisan positions. These could be something like a speculative promise of an intangible beneficial fall out of this or that government policy as a foregone conclusion or an exactly opposite view expressing apprehension of an unmitigated disaster and a dark future guaranteed to unfold from the same policy, depending on their relative coordinates vis-à-vis the political divide.

Just look at the comments people proffer in the ubiquitous electronic space, in respect of the e-paper or ezine articles, blogs and the social media postings. The proclivity to post comments is often not commensurate with minimum required knowledge about the subject, basic civility to engage in a conversation, attitude to learn and contribute to take a discussion thread forward. On the contrary, utter arrogance and extreme and foolhardy self-righteousness often characterize such responses. The more sensitive the topic is the chances are that the author has to walk a sharper razor edge so as not to offend one side or the other and invite virulent comments. To be fair, sometimes the original blogs/postings themselves are tendentious, judgmental, make sweeping statements, and include tasteless insensitive pictures, almost as if spoiling for a fight. And the extreme sensitivity and touchiness about our opinions or beliefs on virtually any subject is legendary.

Intolerance of any view, worldview or even perception other than one’s own is often found in individual or group interactions, and this probably is pointing towards a fact that Indian society is becoming increasingly intolerant. Our prescription of economic development and the way its fall out has been managed has unleashed not only irreconcilable aspirations among various sections of the people but often an ugly conflict between simultaneously prevailing centuries as a part of this modernisation project. We are a divided, indeed, very fragmented society and have too many identities - ethnic, caste-based, religious, regional (even sub-regional), and of course political identities to defend from each other’s perceived pillory.

Just imagine, on the other hand, how different our world would have looked if we, at least the majority among us, could pause in our fast-faster-fastest track of furious one-upmanship before complete derailment and choose, individually, to be the slower coach and address each other with that famously under-used quaint Indian phrase ‘pehle aap’ ! Or perhaps could have reconsidered the strategy of withering contempt for our opponent, whatever his or her identity, in real life (or virtual) and be prepared to acknowledge the inherent ‘otherness’ as a matter of diversity of ways of life, much like the bio-diversity, to be protected and celebrated rather than being demonised, hated and demolished.

I wish we could, in a new form of Satyagraha, disown the inept puppeteers of our economic and political choices, manipulators of our taste, and all those who goad us in our every waking moment into frenetic competition, as if our life is but a dissipative T20 match between India and Pakistan winner taking all, for space, for the right of way, for the wherewithal for conspicuous consumption now and the security to keep doing the same in a distant future. And make these choices and respond not in anger and antipathy but in awareness of colours that the colour-blind would never see.

And persuade the stalker to take the ‘no’ for an answer, admire the candle in the wind and move on.

(A modified and updated version of an older post of mine appearing in another blog)

Media activism – pros and contra

2013-12-31T15:29:00.000+05:30

In contemporary India the media, both print and especially the television media with so many 24x7 news channels, are often found playing a rather active, sometimes bordering on aggressive role. Gone are the days when news casting was this staid objective reporting of news stories, description about an event that has taken place or one about to unfold such as a sports tournament, about government policies, laws being legislated, or information about the success or failure in implementing those that have already been enacted. The news reporting has become interpretive, pretending to be an analysis of what has happened or is likely to happen, who the main dramatis personae are in this news-as-unfolding-drama on the national stage, what their motivations are and what social and political forces their actions represent. The news watchers have often been told on many such channels about their programmes being ones that are supposed to take the viewers behind and beyond the bare bone news stories. They are enlightened by background information, helped along with analytical sounding presumptions, hypotheses, to understand, or as they say, make sense of the stories. A question often being raised and debated within the media itself is what to make of such an activist trend and whether it is good or bad.

It is probably undeniable that during the last few decades (especially since India’s open espousal of the liberalized economic policies during early 1990s) there has been an impetus to the ongoing modernization and the media has been both an active agent for democratization of Indian society, bridging the distances and breaching many social barriers and in the process is itself transformed in radical ways. Increasing media activism is a reflection of the social activism growing over the last several years among sections of Indian Middle classes who are growing in importance within the Indian polity.

News media by way of informing empower people. Increasingly media is taking on the role of an interlocutor (if not an interrogator) on behalf of the people in ‘asking questions’ to and ‘getting straight answers’ from those in charge of governance, others involved in political actions and maneuvering, holding and acting on ideological positions, reformers and renegades, evangelists of progress and modernity on one side and bulwarks of tradition and conservatism on the other). One is reminded of the rhetorical flourish in the way the popular anchors of the TV channels would often like to preface their news analysis: Tonight the Nation wants to know.

Technology today has enabled people, especially in urban and semi-urban areas of the country most exposed to the television and the print media, not just to consume news as readers, listeners and viewers but also to participate in its analysis and dissemination by way of interactions between the news broadcasters and the TV audience, phone-ins with and setting up questions for the anchors and expert panelists at the TV studios, apart from the readers’ response surveys and feed back columns (not to forget the traditional letters to editors) in their print versions.

An important part of this media initiated democratization is an apparent bridging the gap between the patricians and the plebeians, the high and mighty on one side and the lowly proverbial ‘common man’ on the other in the discussion arenas (e.g. TV studios) characterized by an ambience of irreverence. Any body can ask any critical or damaging questions of any body else, cross swords with and lampoon the rich and the powerful and tear down the carefully cultivated façade of lies and hypocrisy built by them over the years to hold down the masses of voiceless people. Class conscious niceties, need for decorum, maintaining a pecking order and orderliness are often dispensed with in no-these holds-barred shrill debates.

A clear danger associated with the inquisition format of much of the television debates is that media (and the consuming public whetted by it) is increasingly displaying a Madame Defarge like tendency, reveling in the downfall of and stridently baying for blood of the high and mighty in the society, the celebrities. Notice the hectoring style being adopted by many television anchors where they ask tendentious leading questions to trap selected participants and extract ‘confessions’. So much so that some people have called these debates/discussions trial by media.

Some people have also discerned a newfound urge for vigilantism in the zeal of the media in indulging in investigative journalism to buttress the generally held opinion on corruption cases involving big politicians and bureaucrat, conducting unorthodox ‘STING’ operations, making disclosures based on unidentified ‘sources’ and ‘leaks’ from those (whistle blowers) who are sometimes part of the government administration. There is insufficient attention on the part of the media to balance people’s right to know vis-à-vis possible defamation of presumed wrongdoers in government, politics and business.

There is also a set of inescapable follow up questions. Is media becoming a parallel center of power not just by occupying a moral high ground seeking ‘truth’, but also because of the financial muscles of some media houses sustained independently of the government largesse, acting/operating outside the pale of government? This supra-government positioning of the media may appear to be beneficial for keeping a watch on the government, which is increasingly appearing to become non-transparent and unaccountable to very people who elect them. This kind of outsider vigilante view of the old style, ‘corrupt’, inept democratic polity is popular with the vocal urban middle class elites

But who is the media accountable to? Is their truth seeking completely value free? Are the big media companies not mixing commerce with conscientiousness? Can the media be a threat and cause destabilization of the other organs or pillars of democracy? These are questions that can not be unequivocally answered.

Comments on the recent article “India’s middle class awakes” by Pavan Varma

2013-11-29T22:43:00.002+05:30

Pavan Varma, an author and former diplomat, and currently an adviser to the Chief minister of Bihar, has recently written an OP-ED article in Times of India (23^rd November, 2013). Interestingly the article has made several points about the growth in importance of the middle classes in the Indian society and polity, which are almost the same or similar to those I made in my post “Rise of the middle India” (February 2013) appearing in this blog.

For instance, he notes, like us, the growing participation of the middle class in the massive public protests in the national capital on a number of issues, such as, miscarriage of justice (e.g. Jessica Lal murder case), corruption in public sphere (most notably during the Anna Hazare agitation), and more recently in a remarkable display of the public anger about the government’s insensitivity and callousness in respect of the Nirbhaya case which was symptomatic of a larger malaise. Clearly there has been a noticeable coalescence of public disaffectation with the way our democracy is being conducted. Varma, however, has not mentioned the three or four other factors (which we felt were equally important for the emergence of the middle class) like the stellar role of the news and the television media in communicating the true facts and vital details of the criminal and the corruption cases; government’s various acts of commission and omission and the people’s fights against this malfeasance through an effective use by the activists of the newly enacted RTI law; a proactive CAG (Comptroller and Auditor General of India) which is Government’s own audit watchdog and the law courts, and last but not the least, the emergence of the social media.

Varma has noted quite correctly that the middle class has gradually come to acquire even a numerical significance, a sort of ‘critical mass’, that it had earlier lacked and in some broad sense has also a India-wide homogeneity in tastes and aspirations. And as we suggested in our own post, the political parties today might find it no longer expedient to ignore this class. We also believe that it would be better to describe the confluence of various social groups and economic categories, as underlined in Varma’s article in terms of a range of earnings, as the middle ‘classes’ rather than an abstract conceptual category such as ‘middle class’.

The point of departure in Varma’s article is the weaknesses he finds within this emerging ‘political class’ and the lacuna it has displayed in its disparate protests and agitation movements and its apparent lack of political vision to provide an alternative to the objectives of and the ways and means adopted by the two main political formations, Congress- and BJP-centered coalition of political parties. He talks about their organizational weakness, lack of pan India presence as an organized force and leadership, apparent inability to go beyond pointing fingers at the multitude of scams and follies indulged by main political parties and not coming out with strong alternative policy options on a national scale. Presumably, Varma does not think much of the newly launched Aam Admi Party and its imminent political initiation by fire in the upcoming elections for the New Delhi assembly early December, 2013.

Varma fears that in absence of a well-articulated set of policy blue prints of national scope and significance, wider coverage of issues other than just a principled stand on corruption, the middle classes and their newer political representatives might not appear as effective to the electorate and fair badly in the elections. On the other hand unscrupulous political parties might use the anger of the middle classes about mis-governance or the governance deficit (lack of goods and services and the economic development the governments are expected to deliver) and manipulate their emotion to their advantage by subsuming and co-opting sections of the middle classes and winning them over to their partisan and disastrous self-centered and sometimes autocratic or fascistic policies.

I think one can broadly agree with Varma’s reservations about the further and more important political role of the middle classes. It is true that while they (if you take the Aam Admi Party as representing them) now have waded into overt political action (like fighting elections) these representatives should probably avoid the simplistic reductionism entailing all economic, political, social issues facing the people of this country to the fountainhead of corruption. They must also make their position clear about the form of capitalist economic development model that the present ruling political parties are committed to and have a good support base among the elite and even sections of the middle classes. Many would argue that some of the major cases of corruption in high places arise out of the crony capitalism and because the kind of unregulated greed of a section of the impatient entrepreneurs is taken to be synonymous with the new aspirational ethos believed to be sweeping India during these past two decades. Since also much of India’s recent economic progress has come about after aligning the country gradually, probably inexorably, with the international trade policies (and quite a few dogmas), and relying on a sizable infusion of foreign capital and much of the domestic economic policies today have to be in consonance with the pulls and pushes generated at the behest of the big global power blocks (like US, European Union, etc) a clear-sighted foreign policy enunciation, that is neither subservient to these blocks nor totally isolationist like in the past, would be a prerequisite for a matured political formation that aspires to rule India. Coming months (or even years) will show if the middle classes have acquired that maturity.

Narendra Modi’s grip on the electoral arithmetic in Gujarat

2013-10-28T20:30:00.001+05:30

Despite strong public opinion prevailing in other parts of the country, successive elections to the Gujarat assembly in 2007 and 2012 were handsomely won by Narendra Modi. Not just critical opinion, there seems to be quite a lot of documentary evidence of the not-so-great performance of Gujarat over the years in terms of the human development, government policies openly favouring the rich and the very rich businessmen and industry groups flouting normal fiscal prudence and administrative norms (running up sizable fiscal debt), the widening of the urban-rural divide, government doing everything to delay and deny justice to the 2002 riot affected and displaced Muslims apart from the official insensitivity towards them and neglect of their rehabilitation needs. Despite all these facts, many of which the congress party brandished as the part of their propaganda at various times before the 2012 elections, 48% of the valid vote polled went in favour of BJP (and in Gujarat the party does not mean anything without Modi), with Congress polling about 39%.

The Muslims constitute only about 9% of the population of the state. For the sake of a simplified analysis, even if Muslims vote enblock against him that hardly affects Modi electorally, as long as he could garner the majority of the remaining votes on the supposed strength of economic development of the state, apparent priority accorded by the government to business and industry (which goes well with the traditional Gujarati ethos), well developed urban infrastructure, good availability of electricity and electronic connectivity, etc. From the reports critical to NaMo and his policies and programs, it may appear that Gujarati society is after all not monolithic and his actions did affect sections of the population in negative ways, especially the poor and the marginalized and those inhabiting the rural Gujarat. Do the voting percentages and patterns in different parts of the State, the regions and the districts demonstrate the disenchantment of these sections? Only a detailed statistical analysis of the poll data can establish that or refute the hypothesis.

Since the voting patterns in 2012 election show a fairly complete polarization between those for and against NaMo (all other parties in the opposition neither significant in gathering votes nor seats) obviously there is a fairly clear divide in the state – it remains, however, to be demonstrated as to whether this divide is indeed between those apparently benefiting from the stress Modi placed on the economic development (coinciding with the benefits visible in the urban and semi-urban areas of the state) and others being denied of the same. That BJP won comprehensively in the urban areas, cities in particular, is beyond dispute as shown by statistics. But the party also appeared to have got majority of seats – if not greater vote percentage- in most of the 5 major regions of the state.

The 8-9% difference between the BJP and the Congress votes during the last election is too large to have happened without a benefit that accrued to Modi on the back of the perception of a development dividend delivered. There are some indications of the role played by the so-called neo-middle classes of the Gujarati society in this election. There is a sizable section of the population from the poorer classes of the rural areas forced to migrate to urban and semi-urban areas as a result of economic difficulties and backwardness. It is quite possible that they have been attracted by the promise of an economic revival of their fate in the wake of the development ‘magic’ they are consuming as new entrants of the burgeoning middle classes in the cities and urban clusters of Gujarat. And for them the perception is that entrepreneurial ethic is getting the desired attention and support from the government. And naturally they became the latest vote bank for Modi.

Lastly, the recent delimitation of the assembly constituencies may also have played a role in tilting the electoral balance by way of redistributing the purely rural areas and combining them with relatively more urban areas and generating a new constituency with both urban and rural category of voters. This again needs more detailed examination provided relevant statistics are available.

Hope to revisit Modi’s magic formula for wining elections and how it could impact countrywide if at all some other time.

Tsunami of public opinion and the response of the marooned political class

2013-10-19T20:52:00.002+05:30

The political class in this country has always moulded the public opinion and is used to commandeering it by (dividing them into religion or caste-based communities,) appealing to raw and the basest and the most archaic instincts of people and historical schisms between communities in terms of their caste, cultural and religious identities. Lack of information, education and enlightenment among the people in broad swaths of the country which foster superstition, outdated outlook and conservatism came in handy in perpetuating this hegemony. And in this they have always had implicit support of the ruling classes, the economically rich and powerful, both in the cities and villages.

But the development breakthrough brought in by the emerging capitalism in India since the 1990s through the policies of liberalization has changed this force field. India is changing with growing aspirational urban middle classes, whose ranks are slowly but surely being swelled with new entrants from poorer and historically and socially backward classes. Ironically, this is helped by the affirmative policies embraced by successive governments and that of positive discrimination that is the staple of the serial political drama played out by the political class for the last three decades. With the growth in the urbanization, education, enterprise, exposure to international standards through television and mobile telephony (probably two major drivers of demands for consumer products that indirectly helped economic growth) came the need for information. At least urban Indians (especially those in semi-urban, tier-2 or tier-3 cities and towns) - and their numbers are no longer miniscule or could be safely ignored in political calculations - are getting to know about the products, standard of life, standard of services available in the most developed and metropolitan cities of the country. They are also getting informed how the best of capitalism is brought out in the first rate cities in the first world countries by harnessing it through intelligent and efficient regulation and steadfastly following the rule of law.

This underlies the importance and increasing role of the media (especially the electronic version) in highlighting the deficiencies, inequities, unreasonableness in our political system and amplifying the popular impatience about the status quo sought to be maintained by the establishment – the government bureaucracy and the political class – and delays in redressal of the public grievances.

There is also the new technological developments in internet based communication and dissemination (social media platforms, blogosphere) that has made this tide of anti-political class sentiment due to its speed and extent of spread – through spontaneous articulation, repetition, recycling, resonance, lack of a command structure, runaway unpredictability – resemble a tsunami, that of public opinion (something the political class has not yet learnt to commandeer to its selfish goals).

It is in the light of the above that we could analyse what might appear as a beginning of a rethinking by the political class on the bill and later the ordinance to retain the lifeline available in the existing Representation of the People Act (RPA), proposed to be snatched by the Supreme Court in its July judgment, to the convicted members of the parliament and the assemblies. Is this a belated recognition of the strength of public opinion against the criminalisation of politics? It is difficult to be sure, though. Indications are there about the political parties individually readjusting their public posturing, especially keeping in view the imminent need to face the electorates for the assembly elections in four states during the end of this year and for the big parliament election early next year.

It was the Congress party that actually took the lead through an all-party meeting to reach a consensus about bringing about a bill in the Parliament making the requisite changes in the Representation of the People Act (RPA) so that the elected representatives can continue to hold their position despite conviction, with some marginal restrictions. Practically every party, including the BJP, supported the move. But somehow between that meeting and the actual debate in the Parliament when the bill was introduced, the principal opposition party and also smaller parties like BJD, CPI etc, were smart enough to sense the public mood (to be more accurate the mood of the articulate and educated middle classes) and opposed the bill brought by the ruling party. When at the end of an acrimonious day of debate the bill was referred to the standing committee, it was clear that the political class bought some time for themselves.

Pressures from the parties supporting the UPA, like the SP and RJD, whose leader Lalu Yadav was looking at the spectre of disqualification as MP after his possible conviction in the fodder scam case, partly forced the hand for Congress. There was also this arrogance of power, feeling of hurt among some cabinet ministers who pride themselves as the legal eagles being forced to bite dust on their own legislative turf. One found a determined government pushing the so-called Congress Core group into resolving to bring the law by the backdoor of an ordinance to be regularized later in the parliament’s winter session.

The response of the BJP was crafted on the basis of their cynical estimate that their current losses, if any, due to the application of the new legal provision, would be more than made up by cornering the Congress in the forthcoming assembly elections later this year if they can get on to the right side of the enormously negative public opinion about the ordinance. They went to town crying hoarse (including protesting to the President) about the Congress party’s mala fide intentions in pushing the bill as an ordinance and parading their own consistent stand opposing the bill since the parliament debate.

Congress party’s own prevarication was finally ended when they realized firstly that persuading the President, if not about the legality but the morality of the ‘criminal’ ordinance, would not be a cakewalk. Secondly in some quarters of the party, especially its youth enclaves, the realization had set in that pushing through this ordinance would alienate the party from the young India of the social media, the new voters, aspiring among other things a better definition and practice of the rule of law. Certainly they were loath to loose the game to the opposition even before it began.

Thus the two main political parties, though not voluntarily, showed for once a remarkable alacrity in deferring to the undercurrent of a progressive public opinion in favour of a more lawful political space where the electoral exercise might aspire to become cleaner and fairer. If this trend can be sustained it will certainly be good for our democracy.

Rationalizing negative and evil deeds of fellow-men

2013-09-30T21:39:00.001+05:30

It is perhaps not too difficult to notice a common enough tendency today in many of us in India to rationalize (if not exactly justify) certain obviously negative traits in people around us, our friends, enemies and those in between. This is done sometimes apparently with a detachment befitting a disinterested observer, although the emotional underpinning of the analysis is not always easy to hide. It is as if people do not anymore expect other people to behave in an ethically correct and consistent manner and most of them are more likely to be in breach of a moral code our elders so painstakingly tried to instill in us during childhood (and in turn us reprising the same futile effort vis-à-vis our children) in schools, at home, in the community and so forth than to adhere to these. With every passing generation the hold of the norm having become less constraining, aberrations stop raising eyebrows.

Thus we are not surprised to find airplane passengers, apparently educated, civilized and smartly turned out people like you and me trying to move ahead towards the exit through the aisle within the aircraft jostling and pushing fellow passengers, elbowing them or trampling their feet with oversized bags brought down from the hastily opened overhead luggage hold against express appeal from the cabin crew for greater patience and sensitivity for ‘others’. We hardly expect motorists on partially waterlogged and pot-holed city roads during the rainy season to drive with moderate speed so as not to endanger lives of drivers of other vehicles (and even their own) let alone try and avoid splashing people who could not avoid walking down the footpath with dirty muddy water. We have rather learned to expect a biker or an auto-rikshaw driver to come to grief if by a slight error of judgment his vehicle so much as touches the glistening posh (possibly imported at a great cost) ‘CAAR’ (just not a car you know, remember the ad on the TV!). An actual scratch can easily lead to a case of ‘involuntary manslaughter’ (or ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’), with bear bottles, baseball bats, pistols and such handy weaponry stocked in the CAAR giving fullest expression to the great Indian ‘Road Rage’.

When women are molested while negotiating our crowded public mass transport system, or are abducted and gang raped with impunity day in and day out, we as onlookers or readers or viewers of such news stories feel dismayed or even outraged. But at heart of hearts many of us are convinced that it is perhaps difficult to control this primeval male proclivity and hence it is hard to wish it away, particularly in view of the unavoidable proximity and visibility of so many women, in modern urban and semi-urban settings, everywhere in public all day long and even during late evenings and sometimes even later. We do not believe it is feasible to teach our sons to behave and not stalk, bully, molest, disfigure women, to learn to take no for an answer. But asking our daughters to follow stricter dress code, restrictions on time and place to move about, as indeed even careers to choose appears as a practical way out.

Some of us, being believers of the adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ would rather advise women about the danger of turning out in ‘modern outfit’ (inviting lecherous male attention), finding themselves at the ‘wrong time and at wrong place’. Some, if they had their way, would even wish they would not turn out at all without male family members, though how much protection that might offer against a pack of desperate louts and rowdies is anybody’s guess.

Some of the more thoughtful among us would rationalize crime against women in terms of a clash between the tradition and the modernity, the inevitable cultural backlash, the male angst in the backdrop of all round female assertiveness and progress that has surfaced as a part of this era of ‘India Growing’ narrative. And of course it might not be too difficult to explain how all manner of religious preachers, godmen, heads of ‘cultural’ organizations, politicians and the policemen have invariably converged as the upholders of the so-called ‘Indian tradition’ against the onslaught of modern tendencies like freedom of speech and freedom of choice, especially by women.

Narendra Dabholkar was felled by the bullets of an assassin on a quiet morning street in Pune. Decades earlier, Safdar Hashmi was clubbed to death on stage during a street play in a village near Delhi. They dared to enlighten people, asked them to wake up and keep the light of reason from being extinguished. Scores of other social activists, RTI campaigners, green crusaders are routinely assaulted and sometimes put away permanently by hoodlums and hitmen let loose by politicians, builders, promoters and contractors who feel threatened by potential disclosures of their misdeeds through RTI or affected by interventions by Courts. In this long running morality play on the real life stage the real villains manage to have their way most of the time over the dead bodies of the good guys and the rest of us demoralized and fearful for our own lives pass by wearing the cloak of neutrality as if what happened to Hashmi or Dabholkar do not really concern us. And to neutral observers like us what had happened was perhaps as logical or inevitable as the Newton’s laws.

Getting past the shadows of the past

2013-08-29T21:18:00.000+05:30

Lamenting about the loss of a time in the past is generally considered futile and a part of the natural wistfulness of a fogey about to be permanently archived. The values and the culture people were then comfortable with could at best be a historian’s curiosity and is certainly ineligible to provide a relevant perspective to our present-day attitude or demeanour.

In terms of the rapid changes occurring in the recent times in India and even in the neighbouring countries, fifty or hundred years are a long time in the past indeed. A writer in The Hindu Sunday Magazine section (dt 3^rdAug 2013) first wonders aloud as to why there is hardly any celebration (official government sponsored or otherwise) on the occasion of the birth anniversary of an once famous Hindi short story writer and novelist Munshi Premchand, and then finds the answer in the innate disconnect between the values of the writer and his contemporary readers. On the one hand Premchand appears too rooted in his times and the society (largely that of villages and small towns of India of late nineteenth and early twentieth century) that appeared almost static and immutable. An India that almost seems to be too primitive and remote, hence not of much relevance to today’s ‘shining’ India. The young readers today are certainly far removed from the mileu Premchand described and was concerned with and hence are probably unenthused about his work (many may not have even heard about him). What might have additionally contributed to the quiescence is that he is not uniquely identified with or appropriated by any currently dominant political constituencies like dalits, scheduled castes and tribes or the Muslims or the women, although much of his writings held up a mirror to the caste oppression and the plight and the position of women in the Indian society with unmistakable empathy for the downtrodden.

Ironically, while The Hindu magazine writer entitled his article ‘Cast into the shadows’ referring to the fate of Premchand, one has the uneasy awareness about the dark shadows of worst forms of cast discrimination being insidiously continued and ingenuously revived in much of the dark hinterland behind the neon shine of the progressive and contemporary India. Undermining of women’s rights and position in society is continuing unabated despite big charades of government-initiated tokenisms perpetuated by power-hungry politicians of all hues. If anything, the humiliation of women have become much more open, brutal and ubiquitous. Are we sure we are getting out of the shadows of our past ?

By a curious coincidence, in another page of the same Sunday Magazine, there was a discussion with Tash Aw the acclaimed Malaysian writer discussing the context of his recent novel “Five star Billionaire” (that made to the Booker Prize long list), that of Malaysians migrating to Shanghai seeking to change their life, make a fortune, pretty much with the same motivation that drives much of the voluntary migrations within and from the post-colonial Asia. But, Tash makes the point, coming out of the shadows of a stagnant underdevelopment in the native country and embracing the new, the glittering, the desirable, has not always been easy despite valiant and somewhat tragic effort. To quote from his analysis of the problem, “I think that there’s a tendency in many Asian cultures to be very ruthless with the past, both in a national and a personal sense. Partly this is because our recent histories have been difficult narratives to deal with; often involving upheaval, violence and, above all, the lingering and badly-articulated humiliation of having been colonized, or defeated in some sense. So we tend to focus on the shiny new ‘Now’, in which our countries are on an upward curve, certainly in a material sense; the past is at best irrelevant, at worst a bit shameful. Which means that we cut off parts of our narratives and, in so doing, cut off our emotional roots.” According to him Asians in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, China have generally found it difficult to deal with their past in an honest and rational manner with the desired detachment despite pretending to do so. That in some sense is also true about Indians in India and those described to be the diaspora Indians.

Morally ambiguous choices in governing a democracy

2013-08-18T14:38:00.002+05:30

Life in India today often presents one with a difficult and morally ambiguous choice. Proscription of illegal and environmentally dangerous sand mining, quarrying etc which is rampant today in many parts of India may be the ‘right’ action on the part of the government, if and when it chooses to do so. But outlawing and putting effective curbs on this pernicious practice might result in two economic consequences. It is known that thousands of trucks are being used in transporting these illegally mined sand to the end users – mainly building contractors – and sizable number of workers are being used for mining as well as for loading, unloading, transporting this commodity. Curbing illegal mining would also mean loss of job for many directly connected these activities.

Secondly, there is a spurt over the last couple of decades in the infrastructure development and other building (residential, commercial) activities, which are directly related to urban prosperity and economic growth in the country. The latter is also responsible for employment generation to some extent, the argument about ‘jobless growth’ notwithstanding. The spectacular rise in the demand of sand is at least partly occasioned by the contractors’ profit motivation which gets its legitimacy within the prevailing dominant capitalist worldview sweeping the country’s corridor of power. Irrespective of whether one agrees with that worldview or not and even if one chooses to say yes to the moral imperative of saving river beds, lands, forests from the predatory and patently illegal mining, it is difficult to ignore the immediate negative impact of curbing the sand mining on the employment, apart from the loss of revenue (in the form of royalty) to the government

This question is symptomatic of much of the current and larger debate in the country : how can the economic development and growth be achieved without letting capital a free hand (or through enabling governmental actions including legislations) in acquiring land (and also forest lands if required), mineral deposits, spectrum for telecommunication and many such resources on its own terms. And how can that be balanced with possible or potential damage to the environment and natural resources, curtailing of rights of the tribal communities, workers and farmers in general.

Can we endanger our natural resources by allowing wanton exploitation in the name of economic development and growth ? The aggressive sand mining in the riverbeds or banks are being held responsible by many experts for changes in direction of the natural course of a river. But the ‘animal spirit’ of the builders of the new India, the ‘growth constituency’, would be dimmed if their voracious appetite for sand is not met at a rate of their choosing. As a result, we are told, there would be no modern roads and expressways connecting our burgeoning cities and towns teeming with little entrepreneurs, the promoters and the contractors of construction projects throughout the length and breadth of urban India. How will, then, the new and massively architectured slick glass-and-concrete office buildings, call centers, back offices and other commercial complexes, shopping malls come up at the rate at which Indian and foreign investors would like it so as to be competitive in the global market ?

A couple of months back, many parts of the state of Uttarakhand were visited by unprecedented rains, cloudburst followed by tear-away flash flood that caused landslides and brought about an avalanche of mud water, boulders, uprooted trees that practically erased many of the ‘Chardham Yatra’ routes and caused death and disappearance of thousands of pilgrims. In the process the flooded rivers also destroyed much of the mushrooming external economy – the hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, shops that have grown not only along the routes, often precariously constructed and perched on slopes or unsound foundations, but sometimes also right inside dried up river beds around the shrines. As watched on television by millions through out the country, these constructions came down like a pack of cards during the deluge in Uttarakhand. In course of the media-led postmortem in the aftermath many well known facts came to be highlighted about utter illegalities, flouting of norms, collusion with local municipal authorities or government administration looking in the other direction apart from sheer ignorance and lack of awareness about the impact of widespread and unregulated building activities in this eco-sensitive region (like causing blockage of the normal flood plains of the rivers like Mandakini).

All these were allowed in the name of growing business activities, prosperity of the locals feeding on the religious tourism. It is undeniable that the tourism in Uttarakhand, especially that related to religious pilgrimage, provide livelihood to a sizable population of the state. In view of the widespread damage to the trekking routes and the infrastructure in and around temple towns this substantial loss of jobs would be definitely an important motivation for reconstruction and reopening of the pilgrimage routes. But like in the case of sand mining, should the livelihood question be posed in a way so that those questioning the laissez fair attitude of the proponents of unregulated construction activities can be disarmed easily ? In some sense this reminds one of the use of Shikhandi, a character in Mahabharata by Pandavas in Kurukshetra war to disarm a major warrior on the side of Kauravas.

You can win a growth vs environment debate in a TV discussion, or be able to cynically maneuver majority in Parliament to ensure the passage of economic legislations like Forest Rights Act or Land Acquisition Bill and others related to Power and Infrastructure Development. But it is the poor, tribals, farmers, migrant labourers and itinerant small service providers and finally common citizens seeking salvation of their souls in gods’ abodes in the Himalaya region who would eventually be at the receiving end as in the above instance, as indeed nearly always, growth or no growth.

Checklist of critical issues about selection of a medical insurance policy

2013-08-01T14:26:00.000+05:30

This is in continuation with an earlier blog on the medical insurance currently being offered by many companies for the elderly in India. Here is a summary of the more critical elements of the policy on offer that one (especially a senior citizen) should be watching out for and be careful about.

Sum insured (range and the maximum amount)
The annual premium for individual/family floater scheme as the case may be
Maximum entry age
Maximum renewal age (For some policies the renewal is said to be guaranteed life long. However, the relevant policy wording usually allows for the insurer to put the insured under “the then prevailing health insurance product or its nearest substitute” as approved by the insurance regulatory authority, IRDA. This may effectively mean enhancement of the premium or other conditionalities not present in the original policy)
Is there a loading of the renewal premium depending on the claims
Percentage co-pay for the age-band concerned and that for treatments in a non-network hospital (make sure the hospitals of interest in a given location are included in the list of network hospitals)
Sub-limits on various components of medical expenditure incurred as an in-patient (accommodation, especially the type of accommodation, nursing, medicines/drugs, diagnostic tests of all kinds, OT charges including equipment, consumables, medicines, anaesthesia gases, blood, oxygen, prosthetics (if implanted inside or fitted externally on the body, fees for surgeons, anaesthesists, additional specialists (if required for the procedure), technicians and attendants)
Sub-limits/package rates applicable to specific surgical or other procedures and special diagnostic tests
Check the definition of ‘one illness” and the number of days (usually about 45 days or so) before which a repeat hospitalisation for the same disease or a relapse may mean that this will have to be part of the ‘one illness’ and therefore one claim (this may adversely affect in case of sub-limits such as above)
Pre- and post-hospitalisation benefits (check the sub-limits and other conditionalities)
Check the list of day care procedures (Usually these are allowed only as in-patients and not taken in the hospital OPD. Advisable to check with the insurer if they will make an exception if either the hospital concerned does not agree to such an admission due to non availability or other reasons and offer to carry out the procedure at the OPD instead)
Mandatory waiting period (30 days/90 days) for the first proposal
Special waiting periods (usually two years) – check the list of diseases for which these waiting periods are applied (in this way treatment of many common diseases and surgeries that may be of interest to everybody, especially senior citizens, are expressly disallowed for as long as 24 months, while one keeps paying the premium)
Waiting periods related to the pre-existing diseases (usually four years) – check carefully what the insurer defines as a pre-existing disease
Policy about the waiting periods in the event of the portability from an existing policy with another company
Claim settlement process – whether in-house or through a TPA
Response time in the case of cashless hospitalization procedure – both for pre-authorisation and during discharge

Anti-corruption – whose movement is it anyway ?

2013-06-26T21:11:00.002+05:30

At the height of the anti-corruption movement during 2011, there were at least some commentators in the media who, apart from expressing serious doubts about the form of the movement and the remedy it suggested to curb corruption (in the form of an all-powerful, extra-governmental institution like Lokpal) also questioned the relevance of the movement to the toiling masses who form the majority of the electorate. The essence of the latter part of the argument was that while it was undeniable that the people at the lower economic rungs of the society pay a disproportionately large price for getting any service from the government machinery that was rightfully theirs, in their cruel daily grind to somehow survive (if necessary by paying a little bribe or speed money) they could not possibly accord a large priority to a high-minded protest agitation to eliminate corruption in the entire government machinery or the establishment, an impractical and utopian goal. A suggestion that the movement was elitist was probably implied.

The jury is still out as to the positive and definitive effect of the current mood of intolerance about corruption in the national capital, big cities and urban centers, among the educated, the intelligentsia, media and specifically that of the Anna Hazare led movement on the electoral outcomes in the assembly elections held since 2011. The results as always in the recent years had been dramatic in terms of biting the dust by the incumbent governments, but it might be disappointing to look for a clear indication of a countrywide uniform anti-corruption mood tilting the electoral choices. Although DMK’s decimation in Tamil Nadu may be ascribed to an extent to the culpability of A Raza (and others in the party) in the 2G scam having occupied both the national center stage and in the state adding to the general perception of DMK as a party full of corrupt politicians, it may not be fair to single out this cause for their fall, especially as governance wise DMK did reasonably well during their tenure. In Tamil Nadu emotive issues like the atrocities against the Sri Lankan Tamils and the perfection of the alliance arithmetic by Jayalalitha might have played equally or more important role. In Goa, a much smaller state, with a more focused political issue around a huge mining scam under the Digambar Kamat government, one might be more justified to flag the corruption as a major issue.

In UP and earlier in West Bengal the issue of regime change was probably the central one. Though the recognized left leadership in West Bengal may have been largely untouched by personal corruption it can not be anybody’s case that the left rule, especially during its last one or two stints had not spawned corrupt local satraps at the district and the block levels. The public anger at Lalgarh in demolishing the CPM’s party office and the opulent residence of the local party leader bore testimony to the popular disgust at their disproportionate wealth while the people they were supposed to serve were utterly impoverished. Still what was at stake in West Bengal in May 2011 was the possibility of ending a long-standing left rule in the state, ushering in what was euphemistically called ‘Poribartan’ (the change). Similarly, notwithstanding the latest indictment of several ministers in her government under corruption charges including Babu Singh Khuswaha earlier in the health mission scam, corruption in Mayawati led BSP government during its five year rule from 2007 was not the dominant issue in the 2012 UP assembly election nor the reason for her downfall.

Congress may be claiming that the spectacular downturn for the BJP in the recent Karnataka election is a vote against a corrupt government run in major part by Yeddyurappa whom the state Lokayukta indicted and the scams and loot, at the state’s connivance, by the mining lobby led by the Reddy brothers. But if corruption happened to be at the top of their mind the Karnataka electorate certainly could not have ignored the humongous record of financial scams and corruption notched by the Congress led UPA-2 government at the Center for the past four years. The election results do not seem to demonstrate such evenhandedness. Similarly, a little earlier, Virbhadra Singh who had to resign (or persuaded to do so by the Congress party) as a minister from the union cabinet under mounting corruption charges against him in his native Himachal Pradesh led, contrary to expectations in some quarters, the Congress party to victory in the state assembly election late last year and triumphantly became the chief minister yet again.

Thus the recent election results do not appear to provide any evidence of the heightened intolerance of the mass of Indian electorate (at least those who actively participate in the elections) about corruption as a priority issue. The commonplace and the cynical view is that for the broad electorate the caste or the religious identity (associated with the magnified assertion of a group’s self-worth, ‘asmita’ or pride), prospects of self-preservation (including physical safety in the face of hostile groups and communities, economic interests but not leaving out preservation of specific socio-cultural practices), and election-time monetary and other largess matter more. Chetan Bhagat in a recent OP-ED article in Times of India (18 May 2013) mentioned these issues as ones possibly overriding the concern of the Indian electorate regarding corruption.

Bhagat in his article suggested (without exploring it beyond it) an interesting angle to view this apparent disconnect between the progressive aspirations of the educated, enlightened, upwardly mobile middle classes and the stodgy and sheepish acquiescence of those occupying the lower depths to the corruption in high places. Ironically, according to him, this may be characterized as a sort of indirect revenge of the masses of the downtrodden on those miniscule sections of the Indian society who have always moved way ahead of them in terms of material prosperity. If anything the liberalization process underway over the last two decades has accentuated this inequity. Wages for the progress and the privileges cornered by these classes due to advantages of birth, education, rich inheritance, networking of classes or groups of higher economic and social standing, are being paid today to the less fortunate Indians for whom a morally spic and span society is possibly less of a priority than an equitable one. That is why they would elect a candidate promising them caste reservation in education and employment (hence making possible an improvement in their economic upliftment) or protection of minority religious rights (often an existential concern for many) despite allegations of financial corruption or criminal charges against him or her.

Ashis Nandy’s somewhat outlandish comments during a seminar within Jaipur literature festival earlier this year highlighted this same dichotomy. This school of thought shared by sections of the avant-garde Indian elite seems to believe that the increase in corruption indulged by the so-called ‘backward’ classes (SC/ST/dalit etc) is to be justified as a historical readjustment wherein the normatively ‘oppressed’ classes are finding ways to turn the tables on their erstwhile oppressors by learning and becoming more adept at the same game of corruption. It follows therefore, derived from this view point, that a principled opposition against corruption by the rich and powerful, especially those involved in the political governance of this country, is not only a distraction, but may eventually prove to be a stumbling block for the natural readjustment that the vigorous capitalism freshly unleashed by recent policies of liberalization. Dalit capitalism, according to these thinkers, is the way forward for ending the caste apartheid in India. And who does not know a little primitive accumulation of capital would serve this cause very well. One need not be squeamish about corruption if it helps this process.

Medical insurance in India for the elderly – II

2013-05-21T20:02:00.000+05:30

(This is a follow up to my earlier post dated 31-3-2013 dealing with a government sponsored insurance scheme for the central government employees and pensioners)

In India medical insurance policies are currently being offered to public by several Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) insurance companies like National, New India, United India or Oriental, etc or by a host of private companies like Bajaj Allianz, Max Bupa, Religare, etc). Collectively these can be grouped as MEDICLAIM type insurance wherein an insured customer is covered mainly for claims arising out of the expenditure incurred by him/her as an in-patient in a ‘network’ of private and government hospitals recognized by the insurance company. Most of these companies either have policies specifically configured for the senior citizens or are extended to age-bands that include the elderly. This is a welcome development.

The customer may choose either a post-hospitalization reimbursement of the expenditure claimed or, more assiduously marketed by the insurance companies, a system of ‘cashless’ direct payment of the incurred expenses by the insurer to the hospital. Many companies, especially those in the public sector, actually outsource the claims management (initiation/intimation, authorization and final settlement) to an interface organization, euphemistically called ‘Third Party Administrator (TPA)’ that is supposed to have the requisite technical and medical expertise to settle the claims. Others declare that they have efficient in-house teams to take care of the claims.

In terms of the sum insured amounts, range of coverage and the corresponding premium, clearly, the policies offered by the public sector companies are much cheaper than the ‘products’ (yes, the policies are offered or being sold as insurance products !) brought to the market by the private players. But premium should probably not be the only criterion to select a health insurance policy. In any case these types of policies target and cover middle and preferably higher income group people usually not eligible or not opting for insurance cover offered by the central and some state governments. Together the total coverage may not be more than about a few percent of the population of the country.

Be that as it may, here is a checklist for anybody looking for a useful medical insurance in India today to carefully consider (looking beyond the advertisement blurbs, glossy brochures and persuasive agents) before making a proposal to an insurance company. One may not have much of a choice as regards many of the terms and conditions governing a policy. But at least one should be fully aware of them and make a more informed choice among the various policies available in the market.

The issues are important for everybody. For the elderly, the general importance stems from the usually limited funds available to them. But there are many issues specially relevant to them, like the limit of indemnity, maximum age of entry, premium loading and the co-pay requirement with progressing age, the waiting period for the pre-existing illness that are more typical of the old age and the permanent exclusion for what the companies (i.e. their panel of doctors) judge as the congenital disorders.

Moreover, it should be emphasized that these policies do not, usually, cover expenditure for visits either to hospital OPD or to dispensaries of neighborhood general practitioners or consulting offices of specialist doctors for regular treatment of chronic diseases like diabetes or hypertension or osteoporosis, etc, some or all of which could be of major concern to the senior citizens.

Sub-limit/ceiling of expenditure (as a % of the sum insured, SI, or the limit of indemnity per illness, defined as a specified period of continuous treatment as an in-patient in a hospital) under any head – accommodation, ICU stay, medicine/drugs, nursing, pathological/laboratory tests, radiological tests (X-ray, etc), scans, CAT lab diagnostic procedures, surgical procedure, operation theatre, anaesthesia, surgical materials/gases used for anaesthesia/drugs used in OT, any procedure to put a prosthetic on or inside the body as a part of the treatment, etc.
Limit of expenditure on or exclusion of any drug (generic or branded), vitamins, supplements, etc.
Limit of expenditure on or exclusion of any prosthetic (type, material) put on or inside the body as a part of the treatment.
List or schedule of day care (less than 24 hrs) procedures (such as dialysis, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, etc) covered. Can these be taken in the OPD of a recognized hospital or only as an in-patient ?
Co-pay (% of the actual expenditure OR % of the admissible claim) due to any reason – treatment in a non-network hospital, claims arising in cases of pre-existing illness.
Of especial importance for the senior citizens, (a) is there an entry age limit (70 or 75 or 80 years ?) for joining a plan beyond which insurance coverage will be refused; (b) will the premium be progressively enhanced with aging of the insured (sometimes there are pre-defined premium loading on renewal after a specified age limit is crossed, say, 65 years) or will the % co-payment increase ?
One should find out the overall/ultimate limit of indemnity (usually a small multiple of the SI) even for a policy that is continuously renewed and no further coverage beyond that limit would be provided for the particular insured [It should be noted that this milepost of denial of cover by one insurance company may eventually be (like a credit rating a credit card user develops with one card company) freely shared by others in deciding to provide or deny the cover in future. This also means that the promised automatic lifetime renewal may be just that – a promise.]
Senior citizens joining a policy should be especially aware that most companies disallow coverage for some very common disorders (like kidney or gall stones, hernia, piles, benign prostatic hypertrophy, any condition requiring hysterectomy, etc) for at least 12 months after joining, some 24 months (called specific waiting periods)
What is a pre-existing illness ? Complete list of pre-existing illnesses and the mandatory waiting period before each of these are covered (say, a continuous claim-free period of 24 to 48 months) should be scrutinized before joining the plan. It may mean, for instance, that a diabetic entering the plan at the age 61, with an waiting period of 48 months, will have to keep paying the premium for up to 4 years but can not make any claim against any hospitalization related to any and every disease or health issues (say, peripheral vascular disease) that can be shown to arise due to diabetes. By the time one becomes eligible for cover, higher co-pay might kick in due to one’s reaching an age band of 65 years and above ! Some plans may cover pre-existing illness after a lower waiting period (say, 12 months) but with a co-pay requirement of say, 20% or coverage limited to 50% of the sum insured.
Can an independently happening diseased condition be deduced or connected to a pre-existing condition (e.g. a cardiac problem happening to a diabetic patient – if such an eventuality occurs within the waiting period will the claim be denied ?). It may be advisable to clarify such issues with the panel of doctors of the insurer before buying the policy.
If a pre-existing illness is covered after a waiting period, it should be clarified whether the coverage is for any and every disease or illness that may be associated with the defined pre-existing disease ?
Congenital disorder/illness and any related treatment are usually permanently excluded. It should be clarified if a correctional treatment or one arising out of such a disorder be considered as a pre-existing illness after a specified waiting period or excluded ?
What happens when the insured gets hospitalized for some emergency medical condition and on final diagnosis this turns out (based on the medical diagnosis) as a result of a pre-existing or congenital disorder genuinely unknown to the insured? Will his claim be denied outright ?
While most companies allow a small percentage of SI as expenditure for both pre- and post-hospitalization treatment, further tests etc, if these treatments and tests are not taken at the OPD of the same hospital (in which case the TPA or insurance department of the hospital may help) the claim form sections/documentation required to be filled by the attending doctor or his private clinic may pose practical difficulties (without satisfactory filling of the forms the claim may be denied or settlement delayed).
In many emergency room (ER)/casualty ward scenarios (before formal admission to the hospital) the patient’s relatives are often not provided with the complete and official prescriptions for medicines to be urgently procured for administering to the patient or the detailed heads (like a blood test/ECG/MRI or ER bed charges, consumables, etc.) not specified under which bills are raised and expected by the hospital to be paid immediately (cash/CC). In absence of a proper prescription consistent with the bills and the amounts paid, claims for reimbursement may be denied or settlement delayed. The relatives either may not be knowledgeable enough or in a stable metal state to insist on such details. Check with the company and the hospital, whether the expenditure incurred in the ER is covered as pre-hospitalization expense or as an integral part of the hospitalization claim.
Is the ambulance charges part of the hospitalization or the pre-hospitalization claims (is there any medical authorization required ?)
Is there a provision of annual health check up within the scheme and how is it paid for ? Is it subjected to continuous renewal of the policy for a specified number of claim-free years ?
Is there a renewal bonus and if so how does the benefit accrue to the insured ?
Finally, one should be aware of the reality of the cashless claim settlement in a hospital scenario vis-à-vis reimbursement of claim made post-discharge (documentation required in the latter case should be clearly understood and diligently procured to avoid harassment).

Despite assurances by the insurance company officials, their agents and the customer care staff of the third party administrator (TPA) agencies actually administering the medical claims, the so-called cash-less procedure is anything but painless. Prior to (or on the day of hospitalization) the insured patient has to get an authorization from the TPA for the hospital treatment, which requires filling up a prescribed pre-authorization form. Help of the hospital (one would be lucky if the hospital has a dedicated TPA department) is required to fill this form and send it to the TPA for their approval.

Usually it is expected that the insured waits (may be for 3-4 hours or more), may be at the hospital reception or some other convenient place till this approval comes and is admitted only after the financial commitment by the insurer is available to the hospital formally. In case the insured gets admitted pending the approval (which may be needed in emergency cases or where the insured requires to undergo urgent diagnostic tests, procedures as per medical advice) he/she may have to either opt for the reimbursement of the claims post hospitalization or give an undertaking to pay the difference in the hospitalization charges between the actual and the amount to be approved by the TPA in due course.

Post-discharge all the medical and billing information will have to be sent to the TPA (usually this is done by the hospital) for their perusal, evaluation against the insurer profile with them (most notably about the exclusions due to pre-existing and congenital diseases, if any) and according to their norms regarding what charges mentioned within the hospital bills (especially some overheads like documentation and office work or some consumables and excluded items included in the bills) are or are not be payable. This processing may take, together with the hospital bill and document preparation, upwards of six hours, as per common experience). Only after the final approved settlement from the TPA, as the authorized representative of the insurance company, is received by the hospital, the insured patient may get his/her discharge, if necessary, by paying any shortfall in payment as required by the hospital.

Atrophy of ethical common sense - Your wrong doing versus mine

2013-05-10T20:36:00.001+05:30

Everybody knows that two wrongs do not make it right. In other words the wrong things, say, of similar nature done by somebody else in the past cannot justify wrongs inflicted by you or me at the present time. This is an ethical common sense hard to escape for anybody. Yet in most conversations between the political adversaries in India this value is conveniently given the go by. At times it does look like a fight between children or silly ego clashes between temperamental adults. But we are talking about serious matters often involving death, destruction and destitution of a large number of poor and helpless people who are anyway living at the edge and mark their time at the mercy of the nature and some powerful men.

Whenever one side criticizes the other of some wrongdoing as of today, rest assured that swift riposte from the other side mentioning similar or related misdeeds of the critic would be invited. If my party is accused of post-Godhra state-sponsored Gujarat pogrom killing two thousand Muslims in 2002, be sure that I will put you on the mat about your party’s active role in organizing and conducting butchering and burning of three thousand Sikhs in 1984 and the government machinery, most notably the police, being complicit in allowing the carnage to happen and sabotaging the dispensation of justice over the next 30 years. If you are going to discuss Gulberg or Naroda Patiya massacre and be silent on the burning of the Sabarmati Express near Godhra that will be an one-sided talk and an indication of your lack of fairness and balanced outlook. If there are a flurry of corruption scandals, during our regime, and losses of public money due to the acts of omission and commission of some of our ministers and bureaucrats working under them, how can we let anybody (including our interlocutors) forget similar misappropriation of funds and cases of financial misdemeanor and sweetheart deals, tailor made policies to suit your crony industrialists and businessmen under your watch in different parts of the country. And so does unspool the blame game.

The amazing thing is that each party feels vindicated by the wrong doing of the other. And once the other party could be maligned with sufficiently strong coat of accusations one could feel relieved and live with one’s own share of the charge sheet. One also has to admire the elephantine memory on both sides of the political divide, helped as they are by technology and perhaps some professional support. Except that such skills are not used to accumulate statistics of hunger, malnutrition and stunted growth with equal perspicacity when the affected population live and die under our political dispensation. All our analytical acuity and statistical prowess would rather be used to prune the number of people taking their lives in our villages from the category of ‘real farmers’ having proper land deeds in their names (and not in the name of their old and infirm fathers), and not just anybody and everybody connected to agricultural activities because they have no other employment, the target being ‘zero farmer suicide’ as reported by some states.

Certain amount of self-righteousness is perhaps at the heart of any political action. But aren’t we overdoing it on all sides ? Moreover, being right should also entail not being wrong on all or most counts that we accuse our opponents about. Sadly, that happens rarely, if at all. As a result no one can occupy the moral high ground any more. If the energy expended and ingenuity marshalled in fault finding exercise directed to others, for a change, would have been redirected towards ourselves and our own decisions and actions, that in turn would have motivated us to take the corrective actions, hopefully, the initiation of the chain of blame would have been much more muted or even stalled from growing by inviting and adding to a similar chain of reverse polarity.

Pursuing authoritarian rule through democracy : Narendra Modi

2013-04-29T15:35:00.000+05:30

Despite the elitist skepticism about the electoral politics in India and many infirmities in the practice of democracy in our country, few will dispute the fact that both Narendra Modi and Mamata Banerjee had roared to win their respective state assembly elections with massive democratic mandate. Modi for the third successive reign, Mamata for the first time after demolishing the red citadel of 34 years standing. The pathways to power were very different. As persons they have many differences in characteristics, so also may be in their officially projected worldviews including political ideologies and affiliations. But there appears to be a singular unanimity in certain basic features of temperament and style of functioning when one observes these two currently prominent politicians in India. In this first part we deal with the peregrinations of Modi. We hope to devote a future post to Mamata.

- Modi’s initial gambit was to project a hardline Hindutva face to encash the majoritarian anxiety and anger sweeping Gujarat like many other parts in the country following the communal riots post Babri Masjid demolition in Mumbai and elsewhere and then the Mumbai blast 1993 and thereby create a strong base in Gujarat. The Hindutva dividend accrued to him through a clear-cut democratic process, namely, the assembly election in 2002 that took place with the backdrop of the Gujarat carnage.

- In the next stage, the challenge of wide spread national and international condemnation and criticism that the state government and administration faced with regard to its acquiescent role during the pogrom and willfully partisan rehabilitation policy it followed in the aftermath, was cleverly turned into an opportunity for consolidating his vote bank among the majority community in Gujarat in the name of defending the ‘asmita (pride)’ of the five crore Gujaratis and promoting the cause of Hindutva under attack from the ‘pseudo-secularists. In course of time by a subtle spin Hinduvta was made synonymous with nationalism. Fighting Islamic terrorists, axiomatically assumed to be Pakistan-supported, by any means, extra-judicial or otherwise, was a duty a truly nationalist chief minister and his administration was justifiably proud of executing. The 2007 assembly election results handing him an absolute majority mandate gave him confidence in continuing more vigorously his ongoing experiment with a model for an economic development of Gujarat he had already embarked on and that he would later claim as a panacea for the whole country.

- The third stage was the economic transformation of Gujarat along the clear-cut capitalist prescriptions. The liberal economic policy pursued by the government coupled with the traditional entrepreneurial zeal and the business skill of the Gujaratis helped the state notch up a very good macroeconomic growth rate (among the highest achieved by various states in India). The stick-at-nothing approach to achieve this goal made Gujarat the most business friendly state in the country, acquiring land for infrastructure (roads and connectivity) and other ‘public purpose’ that included private industry and other entrepreneurial activities, encouraging cash crops, allowing preferential share in scarce water resources to agri-business and industry. There was no ambivalence as to who and what the government stands for and no pretension for equity or inclusiveness. Income disparity, children malnutrition, water scarcity and agricultural distress in many drought affected districts, increasing segregation of the urban population along the religious lines, poor and dwindling rehabilitation of the 2002 riot victims and to top it all increasing debt that the government incurred in order to live up to its promise of business friendliness – all of these and more were brushed aside in the name of achieving the enviable growth statistics. An impression has been created among the upper and middle classes, not only within Gujarat but in many urban centers of India that an economic miracle has been engineered in Gujarat.

- Through these ten odd years of rule Modi had managed to decimate opposition Congress party electorally through huge democratic mandates which was rationalized as a popular response and support of the state electorate to first his Hindutva ideology and later his image as a leader of an efficient business-enabling state administration taking the state to great and demonstrable prosperity. That he had always had his detractors within his party, BJP, and wider organizations of the Sangh Parivar was always known. There were both muted and open criticism within the party and the Sangh about some of his policies, biases and most importantly his autocrat like brook-no-opposition style of functioning. But the spectacular way he had managed to sideline senior state party leaders like Waghela, Keshubhai Patel and others and alienated an important Sangh apparatchik like Sanjay Joshi and eventually pushed them out of the party and even hounded some of them out of the state politics confirm his Machiavellian prowess and the determination to remove any obstacle to the path of his preeminence in the party. Interestingly, he has even reconfigured his relationship with the Sangh Parivar, maintaining a studied distance from some of its important organizations like VHP, the ones that gave him his initial break.

- Modi’s brand of democratic functioning is most illuminatingly demonstrated recently in the new Lokayukta bill he is said to be piloting in the state assembly which he hopes to turn into law by dint of his ‘democratic’ majority. He is clearly trying to sabotage the currently nominated Lokayukta (his dogged opposition to the decisions of the Governor, legal challenges at the High Court having failed to yield desired result, i.e. a Lokayukta of his choice) by bringing in a new law where a new selection procedure is being suggested that will clearly be subservient to and controlled by the chief minister.

- Post his third time anointment as the chief minister after winning absolute majority in the 2012 assembly elections his script is showing up a trajectory of him coming up with increasing frequency to Delhi and many other places (recently Haridwar). These involve occasions of not merely attending important BJP party meetings and functions of national significance but special seminars, meets, discussions for projecting himself, quite successfully, towards the party rank and file, to media and the public at large as the one and the only alternative for BJP’s the prime ministership candidate. If the topmost leaders of BJP are already feeling the heavy breathing of an ambitious and ruthless leader like Modi on their shoulder they are not showing it and making brave noises about democratic functioning of the party. But the first capitulation has already happened in that Modi has bulldozed his way into the top decision making body of the party, namely, the parliamentary board which, at the appropriate time, is expected to ‘democratically’ nominate one among the many equals as the potential prime minister of the shadow cabinet.

Thus in many ways Modi’s is a saga of using his apparent democratic advantage to allow him to pursue a type of authoritarian rule that has many historical parallels with classic developments of fascism in Europe during the last century. One waits with bated breath if the country's democratic system could be subverted yet again to construct the second attempt at installing a quasi-authoritarian dispensation at the center.

Medical insurance in India for the elderly - I

2013-03-31T23:21:00.005+05:30

Health Scheme for the Central Government pensioners

(This is the first part of a multi-part post on this subject. This is not meant to be a comprehensive source of information on various insurance schemes for the aged in India as of now, but rather tries to offer somewhat of a critical appraisal from a user perspective cutting through the received wisdom and advertisement blurbs. The present one talks about one of the most important government funded schemes, a subsequent post will take a look at some of the other health insurance policies available in the market.)

A major escalation in the drug prices and the cost of an increasingly privatized health care in India that has occurred over the last two decades and the liberalized economic policies pursued by the government are significantly correlated, notwithstanding the expected murmurs of protests from the liberalization fetishists against this inference. There seems to be enough wisdom within the government (PMO/panning commission) and advice from outside propelling the government propelling it to get out of the welfare commitment to supply public health care as much as possible and allow private health care providers to take its place and let the market enjoy a free run. This is more than clear both by the various policy pronouncements and through experiences on the ground. Ample statistics exist in the public domain to demonstrate the ballooning of what has been rather graphically described as the OUT-OF-POCKET (OOP) expenditure for health (generally accepted to be about 70% of the total) for the majority of Indians. This is a significant and potentially disastrous burden especially for the poor and of course the elderly and may lead to penury and destitution. I have had occasions to discuss these issues in some of the earlier posts in seinjuti (see, “Drug prices escalation potential in India”, November 5, 2011, “OOP health expenses of India”, November 6, 2011) and more recently elsewhere (“Price of health”, silvertalkies, October 6, 2012).

In this connection, one has only to look at the dwindling utility and effectiveness of the Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS). This is one among the few relatively well-organized government sponsored schemes through which a modicum of medical insurance benefit is provided to the employees (and their dependents, total beneficiaries estimated to be about 4 million or so) working in various central government departments and offices all over the country and autonomous institutions like CSIR under the government of India. CGHS scheme and the rules governing it [under the broader Central Services (Medical Attendance) or the CS (MA) Act of 1954] cover both serving government employees and the pensioners. For the latter, since we are concerned here about the elderly, this service is usually available after retirement either by paying a sort of annual premium or (what is becoming the norm more recently) by making a one-time lump sum payment. In this sense this is like a usual medical insurance offered by private companies for the elderly.

Over the last several years, because of the deliberate reduction (as a government policy) in the CGHS approved rates for a large number of diagnostic tests and procedures (both taken as in-patients or in the OPD) and generally not accepting the market rates charged by good private hospitals, many of these are opting out of the CGHS scheme or are being de-recognized by the government. Even where the treatment in some of these hospitals are not completely disallowed, the CGHS insured has to agree to pay the difference between the rates charged by the hospital and those allowed under the CGHS schedule, even before the admission or undergoing a procedure. Hospital bills may also create such differentials due to the price differences between branded drugs sometimes prescribed by the hospitals and the equivalent generics allowed within the CGHS schedule. The same is true about some critical prosthetics (certain high end drug eluting coronary stents used in angioplasty are ruled out under the revised CGHS schedule). More often than not this may mean 40-80% in OOP. Alternatively the insured has to go and get treated at the restricted number of CGHS recognized hospitals where the test and the treatment facilities may not be up to the mark or one does not get to choose his/her preferred or recommended doctors (who are not necessarily associated with or may not choose to operate in these latter hospitals).

The service is operated either as a cash-less (or the direct payment) facility or as a reimbursable one. In the former the pensioner produces document authorizing the hospitalization and the treatment (office memo, letter from an authorized medical attendant, etc) acceptable to the hospital whereupon the treatment is provided without charging the CGHS beneficiary (except for the differential payments explained above that can be substantial in some cases and some hospitals). At the end of the treatment, the hospital sends bills, details of treatment and other documents to the concerned government office/authority for verifying and accepting the expenditure and finally sanctioning the payment as per its accounts office calculations. In case the office disagrees with some parts of the bill in the sense that these are not admissible under the current CGHS schedule these amounts are recovered from the pensioner.

Many elderly pensioners, especially those not having much human support system (relatives and friends) often find obtaining the correct authorization document from the CGHS dispensaries or the city headquarter time consuming and not devoid of harassment, especially as these offices are not always close to their residence or near the hospitals of interest.

In the case of the reimbursable route, the pensioner makes the payment upfront to the hospital and submits the bills (including complete break up of all expenditure) and the supporting documents like test reports, prescriptions for medicines and tests appending the same to the application to his/her accounts office. The latter after scrutiny and verification with the hospital, reimburse the expenditure, which could be much lower than the actual depending on the admissible rates of treatment, recognition level of the hospital where the treatments are taken. It may strain one’s credulity, but it is true that if a pensioner, because of his/her salary level at the time of retirement has the medical card branded, for instance, as “semi-private”, he or she would not just be entitled to a hospital accommodation in the semi-private ward or some other below that grade, entitlements for many of the critical treatment costs (including surgical or other procedure charges) are also graded in terms of admissible charges under the CGHS schedule. If one uses a higher than entitled accommodation for some unavoidable reasons or that the hospital does not allow for such gradations of charges and insist on levying standard charges the differences are not reimbursed and the pensioner has to make this payment. Thus it is not difficult to appreciate that despite availing of a government sponsored medical insurance the pensioner may end up incurring substantial OOP expenses.

Anecdotal evidence (based on the actual experiences of many pensioners) indicates that the claim settlement in the case of reimbursement often gets delayed by the cavalier attitude of the hospitals in providing incomplete documentation along with the final bills and completely rigid and often indifferent and non-cooperative handling of such deficiencies in the reimbursement applications by the government accounts offices. Though the pensioner is not really to blame, he/she must personally at his/her own cost get the required documents from the hospital billing department in order to expedite the reimbursement process.

The bright side of the CGHS scheme for the pensioners is that the OPD treatments and tests taken at and medicines prescribed by the designated CGHS dispensaries are practically free of cost (covered within the terms of the scheme). Similar tests and/or treatments can be availed at the recognized hospitals or by doctors from a CGHS empanelled list of the so-called “authorized medical attendant”s or the AMAs generally at subsidized prices. Unfortunately, however, such dispensaries and AMAs are comparatively few in number and concentrated more in the main cities (about 25 or so) considering the countrywide validity of the scheme.

The number of recognized (empanelled) hospitals is coming down by the year. Many of these being government hospitals, which have to cater to the disproportionately large number of patients especially the poor and those from the lower strata of the population, are ill equipped, lack sufficient facilities, cleanliness and hygiene, important medicines, blood products and sometimes even good doctors. Many pensioners wishing to avail the scheme perforce have to choose to go to these hospitals.

Why secularism and freedom of expression have India specific connotation

2013-03-22T19:01:00.000+05:30

The democratic experience in India is, comparatively speaking, shallow. We have been introduced to democracy rather late, around the middle of the last century, our political structure based on a borrowed template and formally modeled more or less on the British practice. India was not a democratic country before the colonial take over by the British or even during the major part of their rule, if one leaves out the last twenty odd years. During this latter period some rudimentary democratic institutions came into being as ad hoc response from the rulers to meet the increasing self-rule demand from the articulate educated Indians belonging to some strands of the nationalist movement. These were by no means expressions of mass democracy.

Anti-British movement led by Gandhi and others in Indian National Congress was primarily a political agitation by the Indian masses geared principally to remove the colonial yoke and aimed at major changes in the political superstructure characterizing the country (or the major parts of the country). To the participants of the freedom movement and the people at large the facile assumption was proffered by the leaders that the ‘freedom’ from the colonial rule will necessarily mean democracy, especially as it was being sought to be safeguarded by a meticulously worked document like the ‘Constitution’ (some very erudite, brilliant and humane Indians of the time having authored it). And with the first countrywide general election based on universal suffrage a significant measure of democratic practice was also demonstrated on the ground.

Despite many apparent failures and limitations of and attempts at subversion on our democracy it has to be ungrudgingly accepted, however, that this aspect of our democratic freedom – the ability of the Indians across the length and the breadth of the country to more or less freely exercise their electoral choices at periodic intervals – has remained sacrosanct for all these sixty five years. Being able to throw out of office through a largely non-violent election process the particularly hated dispensation of Emergency introduced by the Congress party during mid-1970s, or the unusually long (for about 34 years) self-perpetuating mis-governance by the left front in West Bengal that almost appeared as a fait accompli bear testimony to the strength of the functioning though flawed democracy in India. In view of what had happened in terms of the shrinkage of the democratic space in many countries in India’s neighborhood and elsewhere, countries that won freedom from the colonial rule around the same time as India this is rightly considered by many as a significant achievement.

Within this basic and broad democratic framework our polity through its varied and evolving strands (roughly represented by various political parties and groups) has managed to develop its programmes projected to benefit the majority of the people and organize corresponding actions so as to best serve the cause laid down by these programmes. The latter could be addressing planning and executing economic development projects, scientific management of the natural resources, managing country’s finances, creating and organizing infrastructure for health and education for the burgeoning population, engineering social upliftment and promoting social mobility, maintaining peace and harmony among a large and widely heterogeneous population characterized by diverse ethnicity, religion, caste, language, economic conditions, etc.

It is in this context that quite early in our experiment with democracy in the post-independence India (in about twenty years or so), the Congress party which by virtue of the momentum it carried from leading the freedom movement had taken over the governance of almost whole of India, lost the absolute monopoly in deciding the form, the content and the priorities of these programmes and who the beneficiaries of these would be. Partly because of conceptual inadequacy in understanding and mediating democratic reforms in a poor, underdeveloped, predominantly agricultural country with effectively feudal land relations and partly out of plain incompetence, arrogance of power, greed and corruption, the ruling party quickly lost the moral hegemony to lord over such a vast and diverse land. Soon there were other claimants to the mantle. First they came flaunting contrasting ideological worldviews. But gradually the challengers put up the flagstaff of diverse identities – of castes, religions, regional and tribal aspirations for ‘self-determination’ - appearing to shoot their arms and articulate newfound voices through the imposed veil of suzerainty of a central government with an overarching national ethos and perspective.

Since then it has become an open season for competition for occupying the preeminent place within the political space among all manner of opportunistic coalitions of groups openly and avowedly promoting their sectional interests and agendas that could sometimes appear almost irreconcilable to each other, quite apart from working against the demands of a modern nation in the 21^st century world. An important aspect of freedom interpreted within democratic India is thus an almost infinite tolerance of the articulation of a restricted, sectional identity even if that works at cross purposes with the interest of ‘others’ (beyond the given group or section) and the ‘nation’ as a whole, if that matters any more to the promoters of identity politics in India.

This incidentally seems to be consistent with the common interpretation of secularism as defined in our constitution. Within the scope of this interpretation, the Indian state (governments both at the center and in the states) can not just be neutral about all religions, they will have to actually bend over backwards to publicly support disparate agendas of followers of each religion, which effectively translates to supporting the religious organizations, parties and those ambitious elites leading them. Religion in India is not something of a cultural value system or worldview practiced by individual followers in private, without demonstrably occupying public space or grabbing public attention or demanding expenditure of public money (or the state’s indulgence or munificence in any way).

That is why shifting or demolishing (even under court order) temples or mosques whether these are of older or recent origins on busy public roads causing clear inconvenience to the flow of traffic in a modern Indian city can be an emotive and law and order issue. In the same vein the financial support by the government for the Haj pilgrimage is expected to be a time honored and therefore compulsory gesture that no decent government hoping not to antagonize a religious group can withdraw. Nor can the government afford to show itself to be fatally insensitive by proposing to control the noise levels in the residential areas and townships in modern cities and towns contributed by the quotidian calls to the faithful and blaring of religious sermons and functions over loudspeakers. And to speak of being wary of regimentation and proliferation of very archaic, ultraconservative ideas and mores among the co-believers in such congregations will be construed as sacrilegious.

That is why a literary work like fiction, essay or a poem or a work of art like painting, a cartoon or a film or play in contemporary India can and does routinely run afoul with the sensitivities of the one or the other among the myriad affiliates of religious allegiances. And the secular government respecting the fundamental rights (to preach and practice a religion) of the aggrieved, enshrined under constitution, is expected to assuage the hurt feelings (due to a perceived affront) by promptly stopping a painting exhibition, live performance or a theatre show, denying censorship certificate to a movie and banning the publication and sale of a book. In addition, most often by an unwritten convention, the state has to remain a passive spectator of the active vandalism and destruction of properties by the mortified activists exercising their freedom in dispensing vigilante justice on the perceived infringement of ‘their’ fundamental rights. Curiously, though, the minor matter about protecting the freedom of expression of the artists and writers and filmmakers under the same article of the constitution never arrests the attention of the government.

It is true that religion happens to be a common enough trigger for backlash on the freedom of expression. However, freedom to preach and practice rabid regionalism, ethno-linguistic chauvinism, to promote caste-based reservation in jobs and promotion, to demand self-determination for a dwindling tribal identity are all very sacrosanct in India. And every Indian worth his salt should clearly know that his freedom to express any rational view on any of these matters is naturally secondary to the primary freedom of a host of other Indians of sensing a hurt in their identity and ideology.

Interestingly, recent experiences also show that the way governments – both at the center and in the states – respond to an alleged infringement of freedom of belief (in a religion, a cultural practice, a certain ideology etc.) is highly variable. A leader of a political outfit can employ a language in his speech what, for all practical purposes, appears extremely abusive to an average Indian audience in describing or interpreting an action of a political opponent or a group, generally without inviting a rap from the law enforcing authorities. In the cases of clear hate speech by some politicians against the believers of a rival religion the police have to be literally coaxed and pressured by the superior courts and mounting public opinion to even initiate some tardy actions. But when an anonymous netizen draws a cartoon of a politician and another shares the same over the cyberspace or a non-political challenger like Anna Hazare or Arvind Kejriwal (in the days before the Aam Aadmi Party was born) or Kiran Bedi lampoons a politician these would galvanize privilege motions in the parliament or immediate police actions by cyber-sleuths and arrests (preferably without bail) under tough provisions of the Information Technology Act. When a movie situates a budding terrorist in an in-your-face realistic cultural, religious and social setting, the filmmaker is hauled over coals for religious stereotyping of terrorism and movie theatres vandalized in whipped up public freenzy.

Thus it is not always important as to what is being said, but rather who is saying that. Freedom is enshrined for a privileged section of the Indians to take offence on the slightest pretext and hurt others by word or action with impunity, but it will be jail for other lesser mortals in the country who dare emulate similar behavior or aspire for the same privileges.

Rise of the middle India (...contd.)

2013-02-09T14:23:00.000+05:30

The importance of the growing middle class both as a beneficiary and therefore as the intellectual champion of the robust growth of the pro-market economy under the post 1991 liberalized regime has always been recognized and was welcomed by ruling parties and their backers both in India and abroad. But this was a conveniently wishful view of the role of an emergent constituent of the Indian polity, the youthful face of our democracy. The latter was testified not only by the progressively dipping average age of the people but by the rapidly increasing number of young electorates exercising their franchise during 2009 parliament election and many of the assembly elections thereafter. The influence of these young (many first time) voters in helping other disenchanted sections to seal the fate of the incumbent left front government in West Bengal during May 2011 election has been noted in published statistical analysis.

It has been an euphemism resorted to by most established political parties that these youthful voters everywhere voted for ‘change’ and ‘development’. It is conveniently forgotten that under the glow of the same youthful idealism (innocence if you like) they also expected the operation of the rule of law, an in-your-face honesty both in political and non-political spheres of our social life. They did not expect to see scandals and financial scams tumbling out every other day from within the immaculate corridors of power. They also expected an end to the endemic small micro-level corruption at almost every interface of the public with the government. Anti-corruption movement in 2011 thus found a ready constituency in the educated middle class, students, young professionals, entrepreneurs, etc. It gradually dawned on the ruling classes, going by the turn out in Anna’s meetings at Delhi and in rallies taken out on his call on the streets of metro and other smaller cities, the Indian middle classes mattered no longer just as consumers of pricey, sleek goodies in the malls. That enlightened public opinion against corruption started to matter in the election was writ large on the defeats of the congress party in Goa and the congress supported DMK in Tamil Nadu assembly elections earlier last year.

Apart from the electronic media in this anti-corruption crusade, the emerging technology of the social media and electronic networking was lapped up by the young middle class India and used, probably as never before in a totally public cause, to inform, interact, agitate and mobilize the minds of such a large number of people with relative ease, eloquence and speed that the cacophony in the cyberspace almost resembled and paralleled the slogan-shouting and roaring crowd in the Ram Lila Maidan in Delhi. New means to go with a new movement for achieving a cleaner, more transparent and accountable democratic functioning of the government. Indian middle class thus has acquired a public-spirited voice and a means to make itself heard and be counted. Even numerically it is no longer a push over.

The unspeakably brutal assault on a young girl (leading to her eventual death) on a cold December night in Delhi was probably like the straw on the camel’s back. Delhi residents, women, young and old, needed no more persuation to say ‘enough’ and hit the streets. Hundreds of young women and yes, young men as well, students from universities, colleges, even school children, women activists, older citizens, congregated from daybreak till night every day at India Gate and an impromptu tableau of collective grief, anguish and anger swelled and brimmed over the majestic path more used to a staged annual display of state power and a cavalcade of phony inclusiveness. Except on that appointed date and time the government found it difficult to be seen to go to the India Gate, and meet the citizens to assuage their grief, to find words of assurance that it understood the real meaning of their ‘we want justice’ outcry which would have carried conviction to the protesters. It was not easy bridging the gulf of trust deficit built up over years of misgovernance and inaction against the gangrenous organs of the state machinery, which has cumulatively over a long period of time created this atmosphere of impunity in which the criminals and their apprentices seem to feel at home and be emboldened.

In time all roads to the India Gate were sanitized with canisters of gas and cannons full of water, some young skulls broken in ‘unfortunate’ collateral damages. But the sound of their footfalls on the empty streets may yet start to sound menacing like Banquo’s visitations in the strategy and plan meetings within stony august buildings reminiscent of raj.

Movement for ensuring dignity and justice for women last year as much as the anti-corruption movement a year ago might be signs of the rising middle India. All power to them.

(concluded)

Rise of the middle India

2013-02-09T14:21:00.000+05:30

Though middle classes usually have been perceived by the political establishment to have only marginal importance based on its numerical sparseness vis-à-vis the electoral politics, the centerpiece of a mass democracy like India, they have always played a significant role in shaping the public opinion on a number of issues that affect Indian society, politics and economy.

Till recently, political parties, leaders and their apparatchicks, sympathasiers, apologists in the media generally believed that no matter how much vocal the educated, city-bred critics from among the middle classes appear to be, neither the party ruling the government nor the major opposition parties (harboring an intention to topple it and come to power after the next election) have anything to fear from these agitators because of their own strong ‘mass base’ which in the Indian political lexicon is sometimes pejoratively termed as the ‘vote bank’.

The twin advantages that the political parties had derived (and continue to do so) by sticking to their comfort zone are (a) the numerical preponderance of their support base and (b) the awareness about the lowest common denominator that binds and cements this base, namely, narrow sectional, sectarian, regional, religious interests in the context of winning the electoral battle (which, sadly, has become the be all and end all of the Indian democracy). Indian parties have by and large, over these last sixty five years since independence, found in the issues related to reservation of caste-based job and education quota (with further religion-based sub-quota being attempted recently) much more emotive appeal for the mass electorate they identify as their major constituency, and therefore put their weights behind such slogans and political actions, rather than enlightened measures for bringing corruption under control or to usher gender equality or dignity and justice for women. Also over the years the mainstream parties, often solely governed by populist tailism (not to forget the calculation of the eventual accrual of the electoral benefits) have unwittingly pandered to pressure groups fighting for the recognition of the various regional (even sub-regional or tribal) aspirations and ethnic identities. So much so that today there is a genuine fear of marginalisation of the so-called ‘national’ parties and their increasing irrelevance in major states and regions of this sub-continental nation.

However, over the last decade or so a wind of change has become slowly but surely emerging in various parts of the country, especially in major cities and towns which, somewhat awkwardly, may be described as an awakening of a liberal conscience of an under-performing democracy and it is the middle classes that are taking the lead. Broadly there were four notable developments that could be said to provide a backdrop to the new assertions to reclaim democracy in this country from being hostage to petty party politics.

The landmark public protests by large sections of concerned citizens in respect of the travesty of justice in the Jessica Lal murder case (and the Priyadarshini Mattoo rape and murder case in almost contemporaneous time frame) brought about a new non-political space where students, youth, women, senior citizens, activists, NGOs could publicly articulate their anguish and dismay at the apparent miscarriage of justice. Though limited in scope the successful outcome of these protests in creating enough public pressure to cause revisiting these cases at the higher courts and eventual sentencing of the accused suggested a template for the citizenry to articulate their justified grievances against the non-performance of the machinery of the state. More pertinently, the activists on the streets and their silent supporters in homes and offices saw that money, political connections, muscle power need not invariably tilt the scale of justice in favor of those who flaunt them and ordinary people could get justice from the judicial system which otherwise looked inefficient and ineffective.

Apart from the judiciary another pillar of the democratic system, newspapers and the media in general – especially the television – played a singular role in communicating about these instances of struggle for justice to almost every urban home with persistence, amplifying the impact and undercutting the usual bland bureaucratic understatement and misinformation that police and the government sources use as a strategy for pacification and diverting attention. Active and alert media, notwithstanding their commercial imperatives and considerations, sometimes resembling like a sort of ‘media trial’, which could be potentially dangerous if unregulated, was the second weapon agitating people discovered in their democratic armoury to challenge the current interpreters of Indian democracy.

No praise is perhaps too much for those intrepid grassroots social workers, NGOs and some leading individuals who, since about 1996, demanded the right to information as a constitutional right, fought government apathy through various levels to move from the very weak ‘Freedom of information’ act through drafts of a model Right-to-information (RTI) act, persevered with the parliamentary committees and the UPA government (with lobbying through the National Advisory Council) so that the act finally entered the statute book in 2005. Much of the democratic citizen activism that we saw these last two-three years would not have assumed the potency but for the way this act was utilized by alert citizens to pile up incontrovertible evidence of many acts of commission and omission on the part of the government both in formulating and implementing many public policies of importance.

It so happened that the government’s own auditor, the CAG, came up during these last two-three years with deeply critical reports on government’s expenditure on a number of projects, starting with the commonwealth games, following up with those on the revenue give away (as in the cases of 2G airwaves and coal block allocation), which largely shaped the public debate and questioning of certain policy decisions of the government and their implementation. In other words executive judgments, instead of being approved in a routine manner as was the staid norm in the past, came up for critical appraisal by an constitutional institution, very much a part of the government. This was followed by detailed investigations by government agencies, court cases and landmark Supreme Court judgment canceling the 2G allocations.

(... to be concluded)