From The Hindu

April 11, 2014

The Gujarat muddle

JEAN DRÈZE

 In the 1980s, Gujarat already had the Public Distribution System, the mid-day meal scheme in primary schools and the best system of drought relief works in the country. The ‘Gujarat model’ story fails to recognise that these achievements have little to do with Narendra Modi.

Why does Gujarat have indifferent social indicators, in spite of having enjoyed runaway economic growth and relatively high standards of governance?

Gujarat’s development achievements are moderate, largely predate Narendra Modi, and have as much to do with public action as with economic growth.

As the nation heads for the polling booths in the numbing hot winds of April, objective facts and rational enquiry are taking a holiday and the public relations industry is taking over.

Narendra Modi’s personality, for one, has been repackaged for mass approval. From an authoritarian character, steeped in the reactionary creed of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and probably complicit in the Gujarat massacre of 2002, he has become an almost avuncular figure — a good shepherd who is expected to lead the country out of the morass of corruption, inflation and unemployment. How he is supposed to accomplish this is left to our imagination — substance is not part of the promos. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), too, is being reinvented as the party of clean governance, overlooking the fact that there is little to distinguish it from the Congress as far as corruption is concerned.

Spruced up image

Similarly, Gujarat’s image has been spruced up for the occasion. Many voters are likely to go the polling booths under the impression that Gujarat resembles Japan, and that letting Mr. Modi take charge is a chance for the whole of India to follow suit.

Some of Mr. Modi’s admirers in the economics profession have readily supplied an explanation for Gujarat’s dazzling development performance: private enterprise and economic growth. This interpretation is popular in the business media. Indeed, it fits very well with the corporate sector’s own view that the primary role of the state is to promote business interests.

However, as more sober scholars (Raghuram Rajan, Ashok Kotwal, Maitreesh Ghatak, among other eminent economists) have shown, Gujarat’s development achievements are actually far from dazzling. Yes, the State has grown fast in the last twenty years. And anyone who travels around Gujarat is bound to notice the good roads, mushrooming factories, and regular power supply. But what about people’s living conditions? Whether we look at poverty, nutrition, education, health or related indicators, the dominant pattern is one of indifferent outcomes. Gujarat is doing a little better than the all-India average in many respects, but there is nothing there that justifies it being called a “model.” Anyone who doubts this can download the latest National Family Health Survey report, or the Raghuram Rajan Committee report, and verify the facts.

To this, the votaries of the Gujarat model respond that the right thing to look at is not the level of Gujarat’s social indicators, but how they have improved over time. Gujarat’s progress, they claim, has been faster than that of other States, especially under Mr. Modi. Alas, this claim too has been debunked. Indeed, Gujarat was doing quite well in comparison with other States in the 1980s. Since then, its relative position has remained much the same, and even deteriorated in some respects.

An illustration may help. The infant mortality rate in Gujarat is not very different from the all-India average: 38 and 42 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. Nor is it the case that Gujarat is progressing faster than India in this respect; the gap (in favour of Gujarat) was a little larger twenty years ago — in both absolute and proportionate terms. For other indicators, the picture looks a little more or a little less favourable to Gujarat depending on the focus. Overall, no clear pattern of outstanding progress emerges from available data.

In short, Gujarat’s development record is not bad in comparative terms, but it is nothing like that of say Tamil Nadu or Himachal Pradesh, let alone Kerala. But there is another issue. Are Gujarat’s achievements really based on private enterprise and economic growth? This is only one part of the story.

When I visited Gujarat in the 1980s, I was quite impressed with many of the State’s social services and public facilities, certainly in comparison with the large north Indian states. For instance, Gujarat already had mid-day meals in primary schools at that time — decades later than Tamil Nadu, but decades earlier than the rest of India. It had a functional Public Distribution System — again not as effective as in Tamil Nadu, but much better than in north India. Gujarat also had the best system of drought relief works in the country, and, with Maharashtra, pioneered many of the provisions that were later included in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Gujarat’s achievements today build as much on its ability to put in place functional public services as on private enterprise and growth.

Misleading model

To sum up, the “Gujarat model” story, recently embellished for the elections, is misleading in at least three ways. First, it exaggerates Gujarat’s development achievements. Second, it fails to recognise that many of these achievements have little to do with Narendra Modi. Third, it casually attributes these achievements to private enterprise and economic growth. All this is without going into murkier aspects of Gujarat’s experience, such as environmental destruction or state repression.

At the end of the day, Gujarat poses an interesting puzzle: why does it have indifferent social indicators, in spite of having enjoyed runaway economic growth for so long, as well as relatively high standards of governance? Perhaps this has something to do with economic and social inequality (including highly unequal gender relations), or with the outdated nature of some of India’s social statistics, or with a slackening of Gujarat’s earlier commitment to effective public services. Resolving this puzzle would be a far more useful application of mind than cheap propaganda for NaMo.

(Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor, at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University.)

 

From The Hindu

April 9, 2014

 What lies beneath, what lies ahead

ANANYA VAJPEYI

Campaign rhetoric that is patently incendiary is being read as the discourse of moderation. Actions that are menacingly communal are being interpreted as harmlessly secular. Silence is being taken as proof of innocence

As India enters its 2014 general election to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha, the spectacle of prominent commentators adjusting their views towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi unfolds before our eyes with escalating frequency and vivid clarity. These adjustments — to use a term that is more descriptive than judgmental, at least for starters — take a variety of forms, and come from a range of observers, analysts and experts.

Abdications of political judgment

We are told that Mr. Modi has changed his ways: to reassure likely allies and be able to lead a coalition government, he has transformed himself from an extreme Hindutva majoritarian to a right-of-centre moderate. We are told that Mr. Modi will not act in the future as he did in the past: he has left behind his persona of a parochial leader whose popularity was confined to Gujarat, and is in the process of becoming a statesman of national and indeed international stature. We are told that Mr. Modi is not what he was made out to be by his critics: he was never divisive, sectarian, authoritarian and violent; he has always been more interested in economic growth and infrastructure development than in religious politics and communal violence.

Further, we are told that all along, the liberal commentariat has been biased against Mr. Modi and intent on demonising him, mainly because it is habituated to flattering the Congress and the Left parties; sensible Muslims both inside and outside Gujarat who seek concrete economic opportunities over abstract secular values actually back Mr. Modi — as they must, being driven by pragmatism rather than sentimentality; and moreover there is no legally actionable proof that Mr. Modi or his administration planned, incited, encouraged, tolerated, enacted or helped mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, which left at least 1,000 dead and tens of thousands displaced. These being the new facts (“new” because they differ quite noticeably from what we were used to thinking of as the facts), many former sceptics have now become supporters of Mr. Modi and are not embarrassed to declare themselves in public.

These apparent adjustments of political opinion, I would suggest, are in fact stunning abdications of political judgment. Campaign rhetoric that is patently incendiary is being read as the discourse of moderation. Actions that are menacingly communal are being interpreted as harmlessly secular. Silence is being taken as proof of innocence. Denial is being projected as maturity. Claims about administrative efficiency, good governance and high growth rates — themselves empirically dubious — are being presented as satisfactory alibis and valid substitutes for a lack of concern for, not to say an outright threat to, the rights of minorities. The ecological costs of Mr. Modi’s preferred model of aggressive corporate investment are being papered over with unseemly haste. What is really at stake, as Dr. David Bromwich wrote in his brilliant essay of 2008, “Euphemism and American Violence,” is the truth of words and the reality of violence.

The language of Narendra Modi

In a recent exhibition of art at the Lalit Kala Akademi in Delhi, held to mark 25 years of the SAHMAT collective — named after the radical theatre activist, Safdar Hashmi, who was killed in 1989 at the age of 34 — there were many images that showed very clearly what this increasingly voluble language of equivocation, compromise, euphemism, complicity and propaganda tries so hard to hide. The sickening, brutal arson, rape, murder and displacement in Gujarat during the riots of 2002. Gutted homes, traumatised survivors. Ahmedabad charred and disfigured, as documented not only by countless photographs, but also recorded and mourned in paintings, sculptures and poems. Gulbarg Society and Naroda Patiya, scars on our collective conscience that would be slow to heal — and that cannot even begin to heal without some gesture of acknowledgement, howsoever oblique, a tacit ownership of responsibility, an apology, be it belated and muted, from Mr. Modi and his lieutenants who were ruling Gujarat at that time. If such a heinous pogrom could happen once under Mr. Modi’s watch, what guarantee is there that it will not happen again? How can we trust that justice will be done, when no one is willing to own up to what happened?

Images can reveal what words try to conceal. But the most reliable guide to what Mr. Modi really stands for and promises, is his own language. This language is saturated with Hindu piety, religious chauvinism, contempt for Muslims, and the fears and fantasies of Hindutva nationalism. This is a man who equated Muslims killed in 2002 with a puppy run over by a car. Whose popular campaign slogans are “Har Har Modi” and “Namo NaMo.” Who said that rhinoceroses are being hunted in Assam to clear space for illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. Who referred to Rahul Gandhi as “Shehzada” and Sonia Gandhi as “Sultana” — using Persianate terms in Urdu for royalty to designate, at one go, the dynastic nature of the Nehru-Gandhi family as well as the “foreign” origins of its most prominent members. Who dismissed genocidal violence against Muslims as the “reaction” of the “action” that consisted of the Godhra train fire in which 59 Hindu kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya were killed in February 2002 — the infamous kriya-pratikriya remark.

This is the man who parsed being a Hindu Nationalist as “I am a Hindu and I am a nationalist.” Who glossed “true government” as dharma, the Constitution as a “Holy Book” and public service as puja (i.e., worship, in the religious sense). Who characterised relief camps for displaced 2002 survivors — most of them Muslim — as “baby-making factories.” These are examples of phrases not including his innumerable personal insults and digs at rival politicians, notably Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (whom Mr. Modi called “Maun Mohan Singh,” thereby deriding his silence in various corruption scandals that surfaced during his tenure as Prime Minister), and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal (whom he called “AK49” — alluding to the 49 days of his Chief Ministership of Delhi from December 2013 to February 2014, and simultaneously to the AK47 rifle used most often in Kashmir’s separatist militancy for the past 25 years, thereby implying that Mr. Kejriwal is an anti-India insurgent of sorts).

The alarming love of euphemism

Many times it is not Mr. Modi himself but his henchmen, admirers and self-appointed spokespersons, who speak in terms of revenge rather than reconciliation, of invasion versus indigenousness, when talking about Muslims and Hindus. They say we have to choose secularism or growth, as though there were something at all obvious or logical in presenting the nation with this sort of absurd choice, between a cornerstone of our political beliefs and a desideratum of our economic agenda. They say we have to count how many prominent Muslims are joining the BJP, as though the opportunism of a handful of elites is any indication of the options that are or are not available to millions of disenfranchised members of a beleaguered minority. They say Mr. Modi has learned respect and moderation, as though pretence, affectation and mendacity during election-time are simply unheard of tricks that we would never expect from our politicians when they go out seeking votes. They say Mr. Modi is clean, as though his apparent lack of fiscal corruption offsets other, very serious shortfalls in the values of toleration, inclusion and pluralism that are foundational to our democratic culture.

Do we really want to forget, ignore, misrepresent or deliberately misunderstand these and many other highly inflammatory words of Mr. Modi and his coterie? Should we be a party to what Dr. Bromwich called the “euphemistic contract” between the Modi camp and some sections of the media as well as influential opinion-makers? Do we want to fall prey to the Lady Macbeth syndrome, washing and washing those bloodstained hands so as to give over the reins of power to them in coming weeks? In the American context, discussing President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” after 9/11, Dr. Bromwich wrote: “Democracy exists in continuous complicity with euphemism.” Indian democracy too, and especially its most vocal proponents, the liberal intelligentsia, seem to have developed an alarming love of euphemism that is taking our polity further and further away from both moral responsibility and political judgment. It’s time to call a spade a spade, before it’s too late.

(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, Harvard 2012. E-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From EPW, Economic and Political Weekly, April 12, 2014

Maitreesh Ghatak, Sanchari Roy

Gujarat’s lead over the national average in terms of economic growth has remained fairly constant over the last two decades. In this regard Gujarat’s performance was also very similar to that of Maharashtra, another rich state of India . . . Thus Gujarat did not show any signs of accelerating any faster in the 2000s than before, and nor was tithe only one at the top of the league. For GDP growth and NSDP [net state domestic product] growth, Gujarat has to share this honor with Maharashtra, Hariyana, and Tamil Nadu. The state that achieved the most impressive turnaround for all measures of state income was Bihar.

Our conclusion is that Gujarat growth rate was similar to or above the national average in the 1980s . . . there is definitely evidence of growth acceleration in Gujarat in the 1990s, but there is no evidence of any differential   acceleration in the 2000s, when Modi was in power, relative to the 199s, both with respect to the country as whole, as well as other major states.

For the full article see: http://www.epw.in/system/files/pdf/2014_49/15/Did_Gujarats_Growth_Rate_Accelerate_under_Modi.pdf

 

From straight.com

Arundhati Roy explains how corporations run India and why they want Narendra Modi as prime minister

by CHARLIE SMITH on MAR 30, 2014 at 1:51 PM

INDIAN AUTHOR AND social critic Arundhati Roy wants the world to know that her country is under the control of its largest corporations.

“Wealth has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Roy tells the Georgia Straight by phone from New York. “And these few corporations now run the country and, in some ways, run the political parties. They run the media.”

The Delhi-based novelist and nonfiction writer argues that this is having devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of the poorest people in India, not to mention the middle class.

Roy spoke to the Straight in advance of a public lecture on Tuesday (April 1) at 8 p.m. at St. Andrew’s–Wesley United Church at the corner of Burrard and Nelson streets. She says it will be her first visit to Vancouver.

In recent years, she has researched how the richest Indian corporations—such as Reliance, Tata, Essar, and Infosys—are employing similar tactics as the U.S.-based Rockefeller and Ford foundations.

She points out that the Rockefeller and Ford foundations have worked closely in the past with the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency to further U.S. government and corporate objectives.

Now, she maintains that Indian companies are distributing money through charitable foundations as a means of controlling the public agenda through what she calls “peception management”.

This includes channelling funds to nongovernmental organizations, film and literary festivals, and universities.

She acknowledges that the Tata Group has been doing this for decades, but says that more recently, other large corporations have begun copying this approach.

Private money replaces public funding

According to her, the overall objective is to blunt criticism of neoliberal policies that promote inequality.

“Slowly, they decide the curriculum,” Roy maintains. “They control the public imagination. As public money gets pulled out of health care and education and all of this, NGOs funded by these major financial corporations and other kinds of financial instruments move in, doing the work that missionaries used to do during colonialism—giving the impression of being charitable organizations, but actually preparing the world for the free markets of corporate capital.”

She was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things. Since then, she has gone on to become one of India’s leading activists, railing against mining and power projects that displace the poor.

She’s also written about poor, rural villagers in the Naxalite movement are taking up arms across several Indian states to defend their traditional way of life.

“I’m a great admirer of the wisdom and the courage that people in the resistance movement show,” she says. “And they are where my own understanding comes from.”

One of her greatest concerns is how foundation-funded NGOs “defuse people’s movements and…vacuum political anger and send them down a blind alley”.

“It’s very important to keep the oppressed divided,” she says. “That’s the whole colonial game, and it’s very easy in India because of the diversity.”

Roy writes a book on capitalism

In 2010, there was an attempt to lay a charge of sedition against her after she suggested that Kashmir is not integral to India’s existence. This northern state has been at the centre of a long-running territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.

“There’s supposed to be some police inquiry, which hasn’t really happened,” Roy tells the Straight. “That’s how it is in India. They…hope that the idea of it hanging over your head is going to work its magic, and you’re going to be more cautious.”

Clearly, it’s had little effect in silencing her. In her upcoming new book Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Roy explores how the 100 richest people in India ended up controlling a quarter of the country’s gross-domestic product.

The book is inspired by a lengthy 2012 article with the same title, which appeared in India’s Outlook magazine.

In the essay, she wrote that the “ghosts” are the 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who’ve committed suicide, as well as “800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us”. Many live on less than 40 Canadian cents per day.

“In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the post-IMF ‘reforms’ middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests,” Roy wrote.

The essay examined how foundations rein in Indian feminist organizations, nourish right-wing think tanks, and co-opt scholars from the community of Dalits, often referred to in the West as the “untouchables”.

For example, she pointed out that the Reliance Group’s Observer Research Foundation has a stated goal of achieving consensus in favour of economic reforms.

Roy noted that the ORF promotes “strategies to counter nuclear, biological and chemical threats”. She also revealed that the ORF’s partners include weapons makers Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

Anna Hazare called a corporate mascot

In her interview with the Straight, Roy claims that the high-profile India Against Corruption campaign is another example of corporate meddling.

According to Roy, the movement’s leader, Anna Hazare, serves as a front for international capital to gain greater access to India’s resources by clearing away any local obstacles.

With his white cap and traditional white Indian attire, Hazare has received global acclaim by acting as a modern-day Mahatma Gandhi, but Roy characterizes both of them as “deeply disturbing”. She also describes Hazare as a “sort of mascot” to his corporate backers.

In her view, “transparency” and “rule of law” are code words for allowing corporations to supplant “local crony capital”. This can be accomplished by passing laws that advance corporate interests.

She says it’s not surprising that the most influential Indian capitalists would want to shift public attention to political corruption just as average Indians were beginning to panic over the slowing Indian economy. In fact, Roy adds, this panic turned into rage as the middle class began to realize that “galloping economic growth has frozen”.

“For the first time, the middle classes were looking at corporations and realizing that they were a source of incredible corruption, whereas earlier, there was this adoration of them,” she says. “Just then, the India Against Corruption movement started. And the spotlight turned right back onto the favourite punching bag—the politicians—and the corporations and the corporate media and everyone else jumped onto this, and gave them 24-hour coverage.”

Her essay in Outlook pointed out that Hazare’s high-profile allies, Arvind Kerjiwal and Kiran Bedi, both operate NGOs funded by U.S. foundations.

“Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the Hazare movement did not breathe a word against privatisation, corporate power or economic ‘reforms’,” she wrote in Outlook.

Narendra Modi seen as right-wing saviour

Meanwhile, Roy tells the Straight that corporate India is backing Narendra Modi as the country’s next prime minister because the ruling Congress party hasn’t been sufficiently ruthless against the growing resistance movement.

“I think the coming elections are all about who is going to crank up the military assault on troublesome people,” she predicts.

In several states, armed rebels have prevented massive mining and infrastructure projects that would have displaced massive numbers of people.

Many of these industrial developments were the subject of memoranda of understanding signed in 2004.

Modi, head of the Hindu nationalist BJP coalition, became infamous in 2002 when Muslims were massacred in the Indian state of Gujarat, where he was the chief minister. The official death toll exceeded 1,000, though some say the figures are higher.

Police reportedly stood by as Hindu mobs went on a killing spree. Many years later, a senior police officer alleged that Modi deliberately allowed the slaughter, though Modi has repeatedly denied this.

The atrocities were so appalling that the American government refused to grant Modi a visitor’s visa to travel to the United States.

But now, he’s a political darling to many in the Indian elite, according to Roy. A Wall Street Journal report recently noted that the United States is prepared to give Modi a visa if he becomes prime minister.

“The corporations are all backing Modi because they think that [Prime Minister] Manmohan [Singh] and the Congress government hasn’t shown the nerve it requires to actually send in the army into places like Chhattisgarh and Orissa,” she says.

She also labels Modi as a politician who’s capable of “mutating”, depending on the circumstances.

“From being this openly sort of communal hatred-spewing saccharine person, he then put on the suit of a corporate man, and, you know, is now trying to play the role of the statesmen, which he’s not managing to do really,” Roy says.

Roy sees parallels between Congress and BJP

India’s national politics are dominated by two parties, the Congress and the BJP.

The Congress maintains a more secular stance and is often favoured by those who want more accommodation for minorities, be they Muslim, Sikh, or Christian. In American terms, the Congress is the equivalent of the Democratic Party.

The BJP is actually a coalition of right-wing parties and more forcefully advances the notion that India is a Hindu nation. It often calls for a harder line against Pakistan. In this regard, the BJP could be seen as the Republicans of India.

But just as left-wing U.S. critics such as Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky see little difference between the Democrats and Republicans in office, Roy says there is not a great deal distinguishing the Congress from the BJP.

“I’ve said quite often, the Congress has done by night what the BJP does by day,” she declares. “There isn’t any real difference in their economic policy.”

Whereas senior BJP leaders encouraged wholesale mob violence against Muslims in Gujarat, she notes that Congress leaders played a similar role in attacks on Sikhs in Delhi following the 1984 assassination of then–prime minister Indira Gandhi.

“It was genocidal violence and even today, nobody has been punished,” Roy says.

As a result, each party can accuse the other of fomenting communal violence.

In the meantime, there are no serious efforts at reconciliation for the victims.

“The guilty should be punished,” she adds. “Everyone knows who they are, but that will not happen. That is the thing about India. You may go to prison for assaulting a woman in a lift or killing one person, but if you are part of a massacre, then the chances of your not being punished are very high.”

However, she acknowledges that there is “some difference” in the two major parties’ stated idea of India.

The BJP, for example, is “quite open about its belief in the Hindu India…where everybody else lives as, you know, second-class citizens”.

“Hindu is also a very big and baggy word,” she says to clarify her remark. “We’re really talking about an upper-caste Hindu nation. And the Congress states that it has a secular vision, but in the actual playing out of how democracy works, all of them are involved with creating vote banks, setting community against community. Obviously, the BJP is more vicious at that game.”

Inequality linked to caste system

The Straight asks why internationally renowned authors such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth or major Indian film stars like Shahrukh Khan or the Bachchan family don’t speak forcefully against the level of inequality in India.

“Well, I think we’re a country whose elite is capable of an immense amount of self-deception and an immense amount of self-regard,” she replies.

Roy maintains that Hinduism’s caste system has ingrained the Indian elite to accept the idea of inequality “as some kind of divinely sanctioned thing”.

According to her, the rich believe “that people who are from the lower classes don’t deserve what those from the upper classes deserve”.

Her comments on corporate power echo some of the ideas of Canadian activist and author Naomi Klein.

“Of course, I know Naomi very well,” Roy reveals. “I think she’s such a fine thinker and of course, she’s influenced me.”

Roy also expresses admiration for the work of Indian journalist Palagummi Sainath, author of the 1992 classic Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts.

However, she suggests that the concentration of media ownership in India makes it very difficult for most reporters to reveal the extent of corporate control over society.

“In India, if you’re a really good journalist, your life is in jeopardy because there is no place for you in a media that’s structured like that,” Roy says.

On occasions, mobs have shown up outside her home after she’s made controversial statements in the media.

She says that in those instances, they seemed more interested in performing for the television cameras than in attacking her.

However, she emphasizes that other human-rights activists in India have had their offices trashed by demonstrators, and some have been beaten up or killed for speaking out against injustice.

Roy adds that thousands of political prisoners are locked up in Indian jails for sedition or for violating the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

This is one reason why she argues that it’s a fallacy to believe that because India holds regular elections, it’s a democratic country.

“There isn’t a single institution anymore which an ordinary person can approach for justice: not the judiciary, not the local political representative,” Roy maintains. “All the institutions have been hollowed out and just the shell has been put back. So democracy and these festivals of elections is when everyone can let off steam and feel that they have some say over their lives.”

In the end, she says it’s the corporations that fund major parties, which end up doing their bidding.

“We are really owned and run by a few corporations, who can shut India down when they want,” Roy says.

Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter @csmithstraight.