From Guernica, May 21, 2014

 New Government, New India?

By Dionne Bunsha

It was a sunny day but no one dared to venture out of their homes. The streets were bare, curfew still in force. Godhra felt like a ghost town, but it was actually crowded with refugees. The doors of its schools and hospitals hid the exodus of people who had fled here after being hacked, raped, and tortured during an anti-Muslim pogrom that took place in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002.

As soon as I entered the hospital, I faced the crush of people in the ward, all with terrible wounds and horrific stories to tell. While I was talking to a man slashed by sword wounds, I felt something tugging at my kurta. It was his seven-year-old daughter, Sheela.1 When she finally caught my attention she said: “You know, they threw children into the village well. I don’t know how many children have drowned.”

Amid the sea of stories of rape and murder, I still remember Sheela’s eyes staring up at me, hoping that I could tell the world about the crimes she had witnessed. For the next four years, I reported on the aftermath of the carnage in Gujarat for Frontline magazine, telling the stories of refugees whose homes and businesses were captured, of murder witnesses who were arrested while killers roamed free. I wanted to tell the story of how the extremist Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), then in power in Gujarat under the leadership of Narendra Modi, had turned the state—Gandhi’s birthplace and the home base for many of his civil rights campaigns—into a land of intolerance where mobs ruled long after the violence ended.

Now, 12 years after the mass murders in Gujarat, Modi is set to become India’s Prime Minister. The world’s largest democracy may have voted for one of the most undemocratic leaders in its contemporary history. In a significant victory, the BJP, led by Modi, won 282 of 543 seats in India’s Parliament, the first time since 1989 that a party has won a clear majority. Disgusted by the corruption and lethargy of the ruling Congress (I) government, which was reduced from 206 seats in parliament to 44, voters were restless for change and the BJP reaped the rewards, managing an overwhelming victory despite receiving just 31% of the vote share.

The Indian media has been euphoric about the pro-Modi “tsunami” that has swept across the country. Stories of Muslims and mosques being attacked in Modi’s victory celebrations have been buried in the back pages or ignored while Modi declares that “India has won! Good days are ahead.” The horrors of the 2002 pogrom and the undertone of intimidation that still lingers in Gujarat have also been ignored in favor of Modi’s promises of economic growth. Many Indians, it seems, are eager to buy into Modi’s claims of being the “Vikas Purush” (Man of Progress) who will bring prosperity and good governance to India just as he did in Gujarat. His urban middle class supporters hope that he will transform India using his “Gujarat model of development,” that he is not corrupt, and that he will abandon his divisive prejudice against minorities. However, Modi’s governance record casts doubt on such naive optimism.

The Gujarat carnage may be dismissed today as a footnote, an aberration, but violence has been the BJP’s strategy in innumerable instances—from the destruction of a 400-year-old mosque called Babri Masjid in 1992, which was incited by the party and led to further violence against Muslims across the country, to the Muzaffarnagar riots last year, where BJP leaders allegedly incited violence again. For the thousands like Sheela, India needs to remember the past, because it could well be its future.

 ***

 The Gujarat pogrom occurred after a conflict between Hindu pilgrims and a Muslim tea vendor at the Godhra railway station escalated into violence and arson. 58 Hindus died and Modi immediately called the tragic incident a “terrorist act.” His allies in the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an extremist Hindu group, announced there would be “Blood for Blood.” That evening, Modi allegedly told police officers “to let the mobs vent their anger.” The next day, armed mobs targeted Muslim homes while the police refused to save them. More than 1,000 people were killed, around 2,500 were injured, and over 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, became refugees. Police stood by watching during the attacks, refused to file cases, and hid evidence. According to Human Rights Watch, the death count is likely closer to 2,000.

The BJP’s rule in Gujarat was the party’s “Hindutva experiment,” the rehearsal for its larger vision of a Hindu nationalist state. A few months after the pogrom, VHP leader Ashok Singhal said: “We were successful in our experiment of raising Hindu consciousness, which will be repeated all over the country now.” He said that villages had been “emptied of Islam”, and Muslims had been sent to refugee camps, and that this was a victory for Hindu society. Is this the model of governance that India really wants?

Zakia Jafri, the aged widow of the late Gujarat Congress(I) leader Ehsan Jafri, who was killed in the massacre, appealed to the courts asking for charges to be filed against Modi for criminal conspiracy. A Magistrate court in Gujarat dismissed her case, leading Modi to claim that the courts have given him a “clean chit.” However, Jafri is now challenging this verdict in the Gujarat High Court, stating that investigators have ignored evidence of Modi’s involvement in the criminal conspiracy. It is too early, then, to presume that Modi has a “clean chit.” Now that Modi is in power with a large majority, though, it seems even more unlikely that the courts will dare to cross his path.

The BJP is the political arm of a network of right wing organizations called the Sangh Parivar, which shares a Hindutva nationalist ideology that defines Indian culture solely in terms of “Hindu values.” Inspired by Hitler, Mussolini and European fascism, the Sangh’s ideologues—M.S. Golwalkar and V.D. Savarkar, among others—envisioned India as a Hindu nation, where others would live as ‘second class citizens’. The Sangh Parivar is headed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the organization for which Modi started working at the age of 10, and which was briefly banned after a former member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Though the Sangh Parivar raises hysteria over Muslim “terrorists,” its members have been allegedly involved in several terror attacks within India, including the Malegaon bomb blasts in 2008.

The Sangh’s cadre are trained and armed while young. I visited their training camps in Gujarat where young boys are taught rifle shooting and judo, and indoctrinated with the Hindutva philosophy. One of the young activists told me: “We should have weapons to protect our religion and our country. Muslims should be removed.” Babu Bajrangi, a leader of the militant Bajrang Dal, boasted to me that he had kidnapped more than 400 Hindu women who married non-Hindu men. The girls were kidnapped at the request of their families who did not want them to marry outside their religion and caste. Bajrangi kept them locked in his farmhouse outside Ahmedabad for several weeks, arranged forced abortions if they were pregnant, and sent them back to their parents after “teaching them the right values.” A few girls managed to escape. Similar strategies are adopted across India to ensure women adhere to “Indian values.”

Dissenters who have challenged the Modi government in Gujarat, including former BJP minister Haren Pandya and Right to Information activist Amit Jethwa, have been mysteriously killed. Over the course of Modi’s election campaign, several journalists were threatened and silenced by Sangh Parivar activists as well as by media owners. Police officers who provided proof of Modi’s complicity in the pogrom were arrested or made to resign. When Arvind Kejriwal, the opposition leader from the Aam Aadmi Party, visited Gujarat to probe into Modi’s claims that it is a model state for development, his car was attacked by BJP workers and he was arrested for allegedly violating the election commission’s model code of conduct. Celebrity actor Aamir Khan’s films Rang De Basanti and Fanaa were not allowed to be screened in Gujarat because he spoke out against the government’s pet project, the Sardar Sarovar dam.

Meanwhile, Modi—the strongman with the “56 inch chest,” as he likes to describe himself—cannot even face an interview until questions have been vetted by his PR team. When asked about his role in the Gujarat pogrom during a TV interview, Modi walked off the set. The Editorial Director of India TV, Qamar Waheed Naqvi, resigned after the channel aired a “scripted” interview with Modi hosted by its editor-in-chief, Rajat Sharma.

Of course, the Congress Party has a violent past too; its leaders were involved in a massacre against Sikhs in 1984. But targeting minorities and stirring violence isn’t a deliberate part of the Congress’ agenda, whereas Hindutva was part of Modi’s campaign, which used religion and caste to polarize voters. At election rallies in the eastern state of Assam, Modi threatened to deport Bangladeshi migrants who were Muslim and provide refuge to Hindus from Bangladesh. Giriraj Singh, a senior BJP leader, warned that there will be no place in India for those who want to stop Modi. Those opposed, he said, will have to go to Pakistan.

 ***

 Modi managed to ride to victory on the upsurge of anger against the Congress (I), capturing the public imagination with theatrical public meetings—during which Modi’s speeches were broadcast via 3-D hologram—and exaggerated claims about Gujarat’s economic progress, which Modi takes credit for and has promised to replicate across India.

The truth is, however, that Gujarat was one of India’s more prosperous states even before Modi became its chief minister. “Gujarat’s performance in the 2000s does not seem to justify the exuberant optimism about Modi’s economic leadership,” say economists Maitreesh Ghatak from the London School of Economics and Sanchari Roy from the University of Warwick. Gujarat’s Human Development Index (HDI) was above the national average in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the 2000s under Modi, it fell to the national average. Gujarat’s HDI ranks 9th among the country’s 20 major states, according to the latest HDI computations for Indian states.

Modi is corporate India’s favorite, though, because many companies have benefitted from his largesse in Gujarat. An official Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) report of 2012 stated that government-owned firms in Gujarat granted “undue benefit” to big industrial houses, which resulted in revenue losses worth millions. Modi has been travelling across the country for his election campaign in jets owned by the Adani Group, which purchased government land in Gujarat at heavily discounted rates while Modi was in power. Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, one of BJP’s opponents in the election, alleged that as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi lobbied with the national government to increase gas prices three-fold to favor the Ambani Group, his close allies and India’s largest corporation. These facts tear apart the myth of Modi as Mr. Clean.

The Gujarat model is one characterized by unrestrained power and large subsidies to industry, which comes at a price for the poor. Despite protests, the Gujarat government has usurped land from farmers and wages in the state are 15-20% lower than India’s average. Every year, more than 500 farmers in Gujarat commit suicide, unable to deal with debt. When I visited Malak Nes village where a suicide had occurred in 2007, a group of farmers told me, “Look the holes in our chappals (slippers)—they are broken. Can you please send them to Modi? He gives speeches saying that farmers in Gujarat drive Maruti cars. Can you ask him which farmer in Gujarat has a Maruti car? We can’t even afford a new pair of chappals.” Farmers pay around 14% interest to banks, and over 60% to moneylenders. Compare this to the $1.2 billion loan that the Gujarat government gave to India’s biggest industrial house, the Tatas, at 0.1% interest, to be paid back after 20 years.

Cloaked under the guise of development, Modi’s real agenda is likely to be guided by the RSS, whose priorities are very different from Modi’s campaign promises of electricity and toilets in every home, bullet trains, and 100 new cities. Even before election day, the RSS made it clear that they expect Modi to move forward with the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, on the site where the historic Babri Masjid (mosque) was demolished by Sangh activists in 1992, an act which led to communal violence across India. It also expects Modi to abolish Article 370, which grants special autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir. This is likely to be met with great resentment in Kashmir, a state fighting for its independence from India. To retain “Indian moral values,” the RSS also wants Modi to take a hard stance on issues like the legality of “live-in relationships” and “homosexuality.”

It is clear why India’s billionaires are backing Modi. It’s also evident why Hindu nationalists would be excited by his rise to power. But a wider range of voters, yearning for a change and hope, have bought into Modi’s hype as well. They have voiced their choice for development, effective governance, and the “good days” that Modi has promised. In doing so, they may have inadvertently opted for Hindutva’s brand of fascist rule, where violence is engineered for political ends, where women and minorities live in fear, where children are trained to hate, where corporations can muscle over the poor, and where we may never hear of these abuses because dissent is silenced.

I can still feel Sheela tugging at my kurta.

Notes
1Sheela’s name has been changed to protect her identity.

Dionne Bunsha is a journalist, and author of the book Scarred: Experiments With Violence In Gujrat, a narrative of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 and its aftermath.

From The Hindu, May 21, 2014

The failure of reconstruction

AHILAN KADIRGAMAR

As five years after the war is marked by militarised victory celebrations, who speaks for the continuing suffering of the survivors in the North and East?

What happens to a society and an economy after three decades of war? Over a hundred thousand people dead or disappeared, a displaced population, deteriorating social institutions and disrupted production was the starting point of reconstruction when the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in May 2009. Reconstructing such a society is a task of tremendous political, social and economic proportions. Five years after the war, there is visible rebuilding of infrastructure, a ubiquitous consumer goods market and the bold presence of banks and finance companies across the countryside. Reconstruction, however, has undoubtedly failed.

Social and economic crisis

The post-war impasse is meanwhile being debated inside the country and at international forums. These debates are rightly raising the problems of continuing militarisation, lacking accountability for the deaths and disappeared during the war, increasing centralisation of authoritarian state power and a stalled search for a political solution with little progress on devolving power to the minorities in the North and East. But they have little to say about the social and economic crisis in the war-torn regions.

The response in Sri Lanka to the landslide election victory of Narendra Modi is characterised by euphoric claims by the Rajapaksa government and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) that the new regime in India will be politically favourable to the interests of the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil minority respectively. The impact of the economic shift in India with deepening neoliberal policies on investment and trade in Sri Lanka or support for reconstruction of its war-torn regions are hardly discussed. Indeed, the post-war political debate which has increasingly descended into hyper nationalist rhetoric — both in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu — rarely touches on the challenges of reconstruction.

As with any other society devastated by war, decades of disruption of production in the North and East curtailed capital accumulation. Consequently, there has been little investment in the region to upgrade existing production facilities and new productive ventures. The integration of these war-torn regions into the national and international market in recent years has led to further disruption of local production by market competition. The outcome is a depletion of production and employment.

At the end of the war, the North and East urgently needed capital for reconstruction. The state, with the support of donors, claims it poured billions of dollars in investment and facilitated the flow of considerable private finance. But this form of capital has neither stimulated local production nor mobilised local labour. Rather, it facilitated outside contractors who often arrived with external labour and extractive financial and commercial interests.

Over the last five years, policies aimed at reconstruction focussed primarily on re-building road infrastructure, enhancing connectivity to the market for consumer goods and vehicles, and expanding credit with financialisation. Indeed, financialisation has also determined the path and failure of reconstruction. Banks and finance companies expanded credit through loans and lease hire purchasing, and pawning flourished with the rise in global gold prices. Jaffna society, historically known for its frugality, fast became an indebted society. Even fishers and landless wage labour are indebted on the order of two to four lakhs rupees (INR one to two lakhs) per household in most villages in Jaffna. Herein lies the failure of reconstruction, there is the shell of infrastructure and the circulation of consumer goods, but the economic structures of production necessary to engage labour are hollow even as widespread indebtedness is tearing apart society.It is not that there have been no positive gains: electrification of the countryside, tarring of village roads and rebuilding of small tanks have revitalised rural infrastructure. But these gains are overshadowed by the faltering incomes in agriculture, in part affected by bad rains and drought. In fisheries, encroaching Indian trawlers have crippled fishing. There is much that could have been done to support the local economy such as investing in appropriate rural infrastructure, controlling market price fluctuations, and supporting measures to strengthen co-operatives. Having survived the war, farmers’ organisations are now facing severe pressure from the liberalised market economy.

The response of the state to this has been denial. The Central Bank claims that in 2012 the Northern and Eastern Provinces had the highest provincial GDP growth rates of 26 per cent and 25 per cent respectively. In reality, this was due to the onetime boost of the construction sector and the growth of banking and finance. Donor engagement is also complicated by ground realities. The northern railroad, first built over a century ago by the British, is being rebuilt by India. After disruption of services for over three decades, trains are about to reach Jaffna. Railway connectivity is opening up the North and may contribute to strengthening local exports. However, the faltering incomes, stagnant production and rising indebtedness undermine these positive initiatives.

Dispossession and politics

The social and economic consequences of the failure of reconstruction are devastating. There are rising reports of suicides and attempted suicides linked to indebtedness. In Jaffna district, medical sources claim 31 reported cases of suicide attempts related to debt in April 2014. Women, increasingly burdened with providing for the entire family, find themselves vulnerable to abuse and violence. The Muslim community, evicted from the Northern Province during the war, remains isolated. And the caste structure is fast reconsolidating in the post-war era, with the oppressed castesbeing socially excluded from education and avenues of employment.

This period of reconstruction is not a “transition” towards normalcy (as it is termed in policy circles), much less a better future, but rather a failure of planning that has led to dispossession. This dispossession is characterised by a loss of assets, declining livelihoods, exclusion from avenues for social mobility and widespread insecurity.

The political economy of this flawed reconstruction process is an accelerated version of neoliberal development in the rest of the country, where accumulation by dispossession by finance capital siphons off local assets and creates massive indebtedness. The reaction in the North and East is out migration, with monthly remittances on the order of Rs 20,000 (INR 10,000) sent by workers exploited in the Middle East. However, those remittances are in part transferred as debt payments contributing to the accumulation of global finance capital and national financiers.

As the trauma of war is augmented by the trauma of post-war reconstruction, there is a need for critical rethinking within Tamil society. However, middle class Jaffna is counting on their children joining the Tamil diaspora, and are therefore, less committed to rebuilding a devastated society. The Tamil elite in the country and the diaspora are complicit in the continuing deterioration of Tamil society by their disregard for the social and economic predicament.

The TNA-led Northern Provincial Council elected last year, albeit with limited powers and undermined by the Rajapaksa government, has done little by way of even analysis and advocacy to address the social and economic predicament in the North. If a progressive Tamil political leadership is serious about charting a different path, it should first advocate solutions. The priority now is to reverse the process of financialisation, address indebtedness and generate incomes. Strengthening the co-operatives, and introducing a new small industries scheme that can utilise local resources and create employment is one avenue of economic revitalisation. Here, India is well placed to complement its large housing scheme and railroad construction with both capital and technical assistance for employment generating small industries.

As five years after the war is marked by militarised victory celebrations by the authoritarian neoliberal regime in Colombo and reduced to victimhood by the Tamil nationalists, who speaks for the suffering of the survivors in the North and East? The political ground has shifted. If we are to address 2009, the three decades of war, and the majoritarian politics that have reigned over the last century, we need to begin by working with the people to address the consequences of the failure of post-war reconstruction.

(Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and researcher based in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.)

INSAF Bulletin 145: May 2014 (Election Supplement)

Containing news release by CERAS, Montreal and Pankaj Mishra’s article on the elections in India published in The Guardian.

INSAF Bulletin …on supt #4).pdf

From The Hindu

April 23, 2014

 By the ruling class, for the ruling class

ANAND TELTUMBDE

In the next few weeks the gigantic exercise of conducting elections in India will be over. The nation will pat itself on the back for being crowned yet again the world’s greatest functional democracy while most people will get back to their struggle for survival. The long dance of democracy would come to an end, leaving the elected representatives to do the business of recovering their huge investments. A fortune is spent to conduct elections in India, rivalled only by the United States (it is said that in this election, Indian politicians would spend upwards of $5 billion as against $7 billion spent in the 2012 U.S. presidential election). All kinds of intrigues and foul play come into motion for acquiring money to fight elections. By any logic, these amounts can only be raised through plutocracy and crime. That being closer to the truth, one wonders whether this process of election needs to be probed for being at the centre of what ails India.

Trajectory of corruption

In a liberal framework, direct democracy is not possible. Elections are meant to get peoples’ representatives to operationalise democracy. Peoples’ choices however are restricted to the candidates put up by political parties, and to some independents, most of whom contest to help the electoral arithmetic of the main political parties as dummy candidates. This results in the same set of people getting elected election after election without any evidence of performance. The entire process has a kind of barrier of entry. For instance, the official expenditure allowed for a candidate for the Lok Sabha election is Rs.70 lakh that only mainstream political parties can afford. The actual investment is several times more. If this is the quantum of risk capital one invests in elections, there should be a theoretical return on this investment. Since there is none, it inevitably manifests itself as growing corruption. This has turned politics into a big ticket business with unrivalled returns. The elected leader becomes a feudal lord and the constituency his fiefdom, fortified by musclemen and money power.

The data on politicians who participate in elections are in the public domain, thanks to the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), that picks it up from their affidavits filed with the Election Commission and presents them in a manner that is comprehensible. These self-sworn data, likely to be a gross understatement, nonetheless reveal the rapidly growing number of crorepatis among these representatives. In the 15th Lok Sabha election, there were 1,249 crorepati candidates, of whom over 300 reached Parliament. The crime record closely correlates with their riches, and both exist across parties. The parliamentarians with criminal cases belonging to the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the two main political parties, were 24 and 29 in 2004 respectively, which went up to 44 each in 2009. These are the so-called representatives of the people, a vast majority of whom live off Rs.20 a day!

More interesting is the incredible growth of their wealth before every election. The analysis by ADR and National Election Watch (NEW) has found that the wealth of 304 re-contesting MPs had grown by 289 per cent. These rates are almost unheard of even in the corporate world. A person of average calibre, ostensibly in service of poor people, outbeats the best of fund managers. In an ordinary case, such evidence would alarm the income tax and anti-corruption authorities; but the political connections of these worthies provide them immunity from such mundane risks. There are no prizes for guessing the sources of wealth here when it is known that the entire machinery works for corporate houses and other moneybags in the name of the people.

Method of election

When India became independent, the biggest challenge the new rulers faced was in fulfilling the aspirations of the people — the aspirations they helped build during the freedom struggle. These were further amplified by developments such as the dazzling progress made by the post-revolution USSR, the welfarist ethos of the post-War world, and the ongoing revolution in neighbouring China. The communal flare-up in the wake of the transfer of power, the integration of nearly 600 political fragments in the form of princely states within India, the communist-led armed struggles in certain pockets in the country, and the awakening of the lower castes collectively posed a formidable challenge to the new rulers. The republican constitution they created reflected these aspirations. However in real terms, the Congress Party that assumed the reins of power, represented the interests of the bourgeoisie and had to skilfully promote them. This tension between the need to appear addressing peoples’ aspirations — but in reality furthering the interests of capital — necessarily showed up in a series of its deceitful acts. Launching Five-Year Plans to display socialist orientation but clandestinely adopting the Bombay Plan created by the then eight top capitalists of the country, or to initiate land reforms but ensuring that they remained throttled so as to create a class of rich farmers as an ally in the vast countryside, or to push the Green Revolution to spread capitalist relations in countryside in the name of removing hunger, are just a few examples. It was politically imperative to adopt such a method for operating democracy to ensure that they remained in full control of power.

The First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) type of election system (in which the winner is the person with most votes) was chosen as a means to fortify the political power of the ruling classes. This system as such was inherited from the colonial regime like all other former colonies of the British Empire. But there was nothing that could have prevented India to discard it for the one better suited to its specific situation. The rulers ignored these considerations and rather focussed on their own interests which would be best served by this system. Most of the evils that we find ourselves engulfed in today stem from the FPTP system. A single winner in elections with such extraordinarily diverse polity could not come without the support of the majority party. It followed that most interest groups would be forced to come to terms with the majority party, paving ways for co-option and other manipulations. The diversity of interests in the country may still throw up many parties, which could only aggravate the inherently competitive FPTP elections. That in turn would only mean increasingly huge expenditure, to be met by big businesses, and the use of existing fault lines like caste, community and religion. It necessarily evolved into an oligopolistic power structure of all ruling classes, irrespective of parties, fortified by multilayered defences such as the police and the military.

Another model

Was there no alternative to FPTP? The diverse polity would point to a different model of election, say, the Proportional Representation (PR) system, which is followed in most European democracies and many others that have had far superior democratic records. While there are many practical variants of the PR system, essentially it entails voting for parties or social groups (rather than for individuals), that get representation in proportion to their share of votes. For example, Dalits in India are 17 per cent but being in the minority in every constituency, one of them would never get elected independently in the FPTP system; not even from the so-called reserved constituencies. The PR system would assure them their share in Parliament and legislatures and may even create a centripetal force to expand their constituency. What is euphemistically called bahujan today was possible to be created through this process. The social identities would make way for class consciousness and impart class orientation to the entire politics. There would be no cut-throat competition as every interest group would be reasonably assured of its share of representation. The competition would then shift to the ring of Parliament to shape the policies in the interests of the majority of the people. In the FPTP system, once the elections are over, there is no motivation for debate in Parliament on policy content. The most material policies of the government that impacted people (such as the imposition of Emergency and the neoliberal economic reforms) were never discussed in Parliament.

The theoretical fallacy in the FPTP elections that the elected representatives hardly enjoy consent of even half the voters is overcome in the PR system that ensures most interest groups their due share of representation. The intense competition of the FPTP elections leading to huge resource expenditure and consequent rise of corruption would also be eliminated in the PR system. Most importantly, in the context of India, it would curb the vile motives in the ruling classes to divide people on the lines of caste and community.

For instance, there would not be any need for the reserved constituencies for Dalits and hence even the Dalit tag, thereby eliminating the salience of castes from politics. Although, no system may prevent the black sheep being black, the PR system would surely eliminate the structural spaces by promising them their dues. Dalits lamented for years the Gandhian blackmail in the Poona Pact but did not understand that it was pivoted on the FPTP system. It would lose its relevance in the PR system. The same could even be extended to any need of preserving caste identities and vexatious problems they have created.

Indeed, India would hugely gain. But then, what will happen to the ruling class?

(Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist with Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.)