Secular Common Sense

I read Mukul Kesavan's essay on secularism in India. He makes a lot of interesting points which I would like to recount here.

An important point but one which we might already be aware of is that Congress's secularism was founded as an opposition to imperialism. Only when it represented all of the Indian society could congress be successful in its freedom struggle. India as a state as we know it today was ironically formed as a result of imperialistic economic oppression of all sections of our society. If congress were any less secular, then it is possible to imagine that the Indian subcontinent might have been divided into more parts than is the case and the divide and rule policy might, once again have been triumphant.

He quashes the idea which finds many entertainers that Congress (and hence the Indian state) has appeased minorities at the cost of majority to establish the State's secular credentials. Exactly opposite has been the case and too little has been done in this respect. Muslims, and I am speaking of only a section of the minorities here, albeit the largest one, were by all standards of development, backward compared to the rest of the country, even before independence. At the time of partition, many well-to-do Muslims moved to Pakistan and so the discrepancy widened.

Kesavan then talks about reservation. Caste-based reservation was built into our constitution to right the centuries of wrong done to Dalits by the upper caste Hindus. This reservation is exclusively for those Dalits who are Hindu. Thus in a curious way all the minorities, who do not have any kind of reservation have been subsidizing a large section of the Hindus. This, on top of when the ones responsible for the condition of Dalits were Hindus.

I believe that reservation is still necessary to have because the centuries worth of injustice cannot be undone in a short time. But then, we have to make sure that our current policies are not creating future conditions for more reservation. An option could be to make financial condition of a family the criteria for reservation instead of caste.

In 1996, Supreme Court of India in relation to the case of annulling an election on the grounds that the candidates had used religion as a tool to garner votes, ruled that "...the word Hindutva is used and understood as a synonym of "indianization". i.e. development of a uniform culture by obliterating the difference between all the cultures coexisting in the country." At best, Hindutva might be understood as a way of life, just like Islam is. But I do not think the minorities think of Hindutva in the same breath as indianization.

But as an unnatural nation as chronicled beautifully by Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi I believe we would go on and become better along the way.

How Industrialism in England Affected India

I am reading Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India these days. I knew before starting the book that Jawaharlal Nehru was an excellent English writer, what I did not know was that he wrote the entire Discovery of India in five months when he was in Ahmadnagar prison during 1944!

The book is a detailed account of the India, its people, its culture, its philosophy and its values from the time of Indus valley civilization. He has written very passionately about how ancient India and Indians have been one of the leading civilizations in the world. A large portion of the book is devoted in examining how the British occupation of India weakened and drained India socially, economically and even culturally upto an extent.

In chapter seven of the book, Pandit Nehru explains how the rise of Industrialism in England sapped out the Indian economy. The very purpose for which the East Indian company was established was to buy goods and textiles made in India and sell them in England. Indian goods were much in demand in England and Europe during the early period of East India Company.

With the rise of Industrialization and with the availability of cheaper production techniques in England, the pressure at home on the British government grew to promote the cheaper goods made in England. Heavy import duties were levied on the goods coming from India. However, the goods made in England had free entry in India. This double whammy crushed the Indian manufacturers affecting a large number of small scale artisans.

The British made no effort to introduce the modern methods of production in India. In the process, an increasingly large number of artisans, weavers and craftsmen who had been employed in the manufacturing industry started returning to agriculture. However, the land was not sufficient to support all of them. As a result, poverty grew and standard of living fell to very low levels. Agriculture became the sole occupation of a very large proportion of the people in the absence of other profitable vocations.

Pandit Nehru then goes on to say that due to the British policy, the development process in India was reversed as the country became increasingly more ruralized and poor. He gives us a statistic too. In the middle of nineteenth century, about 55 % of the population was dependent on agriculture; this number jumped up to 74 % a century later.

-Huzefa

good and BAD

The good news:

1. BSE Sensex crossed 19,000 points recently.
2. Our economy continues to grow at a 9% rate.
3. We are going to make the nuclear energy deal with America.
4. We are the T20 champions.

The bad news:
1. We are below Ethiopia on the global hunger index. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1127636

2. We have the highest maternal mortality rate.
http://www.hindu.com/2007/10/26/stories/2007102653981200.htm

3. The perpetrators of Gujarat and Bombay riots still go scot free. They even have the gall to brag about taking the foetus out of a pregnant woman.
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main35.asp?filename=Ne031107spycam_videos1.asp

Hope,
Huzefa

Adverse Effects of Bumps

I am writing this post on my Dad's insistence. He is more moved by the inefficiency of the system here. Much more than me.

The distance from Banswara to Pratapgarh is around 85 Kms. But the journey by the bus took more than 3 hours. This time, a passenger is able to do nothing, except sit and wait for his destination. The number of human hours wasted in traveling is so huge in India that it sucks the efficiency out of you. The journey, even a small one leaves you so exhausted that you need to rest another two hours. One day's work takes two days to complete.

I will give another example. When I was studying in Indore, I always dreaded coming home. It was the trip that I dreaded and not the actual being at home. Indore to Mandsaur is about 200 kms, but if you want to leave at any human hour, the journey inevitably takes more than 6 hours. The trains do not run here. They crawl. So what happens is more and more people flock to Indore because of better opportunities and they all avoid coming home.

But, if these trains were fast and if they ran at say, 100 kms per hour, Indore-Mandsaur route could be covered in about two hours. This facility would enable more and more people to remain in Indore during the day and return to their near-by homes at the day-end. The strain on Indore's Infrastructure to support more people than it can would no longer be there. This is a problem with all big cities and not just Indore. Even students could consider making trips everyday for studying if the transportation was fast enough.

All of this would increase the efficiency of us all. People wouldn't have to worry about getting leg room on the last train at day's end. There could be more trains operated on a single track if each train completed its run in shorter time. All along, railways' profits would soar too.

There is so much to do. If only I could raise my head and look around. There was this dialogue in Rang de Basanti- "system ke andar rehkar system ko badalna padta hai".

I don't think I am justified in writing this. India Bashing is not what I am doing. I am just echoing my father's opinion. They are mine too. But at some point we have to start looking for solutions and not just bear.

Huzefa

Bumps

This last week I've been touring to some places of religious significance. I've been to Rampura, Ahmedabad and Galiakot. Most of you might not even know where these are. But anyways, I went there with my Dad. I am writing about the journey which was in most parts in a Bus.

The bus which carried us from Rampura to Neemuch was a minibus which could seat around thirty passengers. I could not believe my eyes when I saw more than seventy people crammed in there. On each stop which was less than every five minutes more people would get in. They all were so desperate like me to get into the bus that it seemed there was no other bus during the day.

We talk about increased leg-rooms on flights and crave for exit seats. There I understood what leg-room is all about. It is the actual space on which your feet are resting and nothing more. Consider all of this with the fact that, all along the road was nearly non-existent. Heavy rains during the past fortnight had washed all that was remaining. The good part was you could not feel the bumps because the bus was so crowded.

In Madhya Pradesh, the govt has dissolved the road transport corporation. There are no State transport buses, only those licensed by it and operated by private operators. There method of operation can be well understood. I also noticed that these buses won't take school children who are returning to their villages from their schools. The reason is a government policy which establishes a reduced fare for students. If only the administration could see.

The same scene was repeated on the route from Banswara to Pratapgarh. Only this time the bus was bigger and therefore the number of passengers were more than hundred.

After seeing what actually India is and how grim the situation is, even in not-so-rural areas, I am sad that these stories are never in the news. Our news channels and newspapers are filled only with the travails of Mumbai local train passengers and the development or lack of it of the Delhi metro. Moreover nobody, not even us act on it. It would do us some good if we are aware of both sides of the India Shining picture.

Realization of a Basic Truth

It happened over 10 days ago, but this one day will stay in my memory for a long time to come.

During the week prior to the last, it was raining cats and dogs here in Mandsaur without any respite. Power supplies were playing truant too. The power in our area went off at around eight in the evening. It turned out that the distribution transformer of our area had burned down. This spiked me to no end and when I called the office of electricity board, they nonchalantly informed me that there would be no power for the night and the transformer would get replaced if necessary only on the next day. Imagine being without electricity for one whole night.

I endured it rather bravely in my own opinion. But as soon as I was awake in the morning, I started calling the office again demanding an explanation. The image state electricity board in my mind was that of a corrupt institution stuck in 1960's both in terms of attitude and technology.

Mr. B who is the supeintendent incharge of repair works kept assuring me that they are doing their best, given the heavy rains and the submerging of the nearby low-lying areas. This bit of information gave me a whiff of what the actual situation was like. Farmers in villages were about to lose their crops and their houses were in the danger zone of floods. Some people were suffering much more than me who was only without electricity.

In the evening, still without power, I visited the site where the transformer had got burnt. About six technicians were working on restoring the power. Mr. B and his boss were also present. I started talking and he descirbed the havoc rains had caused. From the last four days, he was going to his home at about two in the morning, only to leave seven hours later. There were short circuits, equipent was getting burnt and the danger of a major breakdown loomed large with the rains giving no signs of stopping.

I also found the acute manpower shortage in the electricity board. It is not that these workers are corrupt and not working for want of a bribe which I had imagined. They were working their hearts out within the given resources. They were not wearing any kind of protection, not even raincoat and rubber gloves. There were no high rise ladders, save one and all these men were working fifteen the last four days.

I was too Howard Roarkish to believe such ground realities. I wonder how low my levels of toleration have fallen to. Who am I and what gives me the moral right to consider my problems above the life and death question of many others??

Hope,
Huzefa