Protests, progress and polemic

Protest is the means by which we progress. No liberty has been gained, no right secured, nor freedom won, without protest of some sort. All protest starts with an awakening, a sense of injustice, grows into a demand that is more often than not denied because those in power would much rather conserve and consolidate their own position. All protest therefore sooner or later grows into a struggle that seeks to calibrate the degree of vigour in the protest movement with the resistance put up by the status quo. Some protests fizzle out, some succeed. If we enjoy any freedoms and rights at all it is because of past protests that have won through. 

The sight of an elected leader of Delhi demostrating on the streets of his own city against a police force run and controlled by the federal government in the Centre must indeed seem odd. The protestors, usually,  are the dispossessed; their target, usually, is the established state or institutional power. 

So by sitting down on the street and holding a cabinet meeting in his car was Arvind Kejriwal behaving like an elected Chief Minister of Delhi or, as the press and many commentators called him, like an anarchist?

Is it anarchy for an elected leader to take to the streets? 

That depends on who you are and how much power and privilege and comfort you derive from the status quo ante.

 
Chetan Bhagat (an author with some mediocre literary talent, but enough to gain him a right to pop up on television with his views) decries the tactics of street protest used by the Aam Aadmi Party. But that is because he and the people who move in his circles would rather the prevailing situation continued. They would, wouldn't they?

But if you're a slum dweller in the city or a street worker at the mercy of the police, you would see this as a legitimate aandolan for your rights. What we are witnessing in India is the result of years of lopsided economic and social development in which the majority has been left behind, carried along only by false promises made every 5 years by a conniving kleptocratic class of politician; denied their due, instead offered tidbits: a quota here and a handout there.

These politicians have built and run a system of civil administration that functions only to keep the masses in their place. As a result, education, public health, infrastructure for transport, travel, electricity, water and sanitation serve, to the extent they function at all, only the minority; police and and the criminal justice system work only in the service of their political masters. 

Suddenly this arrangement - cosy for the elite, burdensome for many, and desperate for the mass at the bottom of the heap - is coming under challenge. For those on the lower rungs this is not anarchy. It is a revolt against the oppressive regime that prevailed. It is an on-going protest. It may yet fizzle out but that would be the bigger tragedy.  

Suchitra Sen

Suchitra Sen, 82, died 17 Jan 2013. 

Remember Aandhi? The 1975 Gulzar movie? 

I had just finished my internship, perhaps a house job or two. I remember the film made an impression on me. It was not the usual boy-meets-girl run-around. It had a grown up theme, love unsanctioned by social mores; separation under societal pressure; a strong woman determined to make her way in a man's dirty world of ruthless politics; no room for personal life, much less for the consummation of love and romance. I thought Sen was a complete and mature actor. Sanjeev Kumar was good but without question she was the star; she stormed Aandhi.

Now, when reading about her illness, her stay in a Kolkata hospital's intensive care unit, with the news reporting each development - 'stable but critical' what the hell does that phrase mean? - and amplifying the false hope of a new team of medical experts, I think not like a movie-goer but like a health policy commentator. Was it all necessary? 

For ultimately she endured the futility of the sort of critical intensive care that old and infirm people with fatal illnesses are subjected to in India especially if they are well off and get into the clutches of private hospitals; doctors scurrying round pretending she would recover and go home; experts called in to advise even more invasive interventions than those that failed. 

In Aandhi the film, Aarti, once she had become a successful politician could not embrace the man she had separated from - the man who was the father of her daughter - for fear of public and electoral rejection. In life, Sen could not reject a medical care system that took away her dignity. In death, we can all embrace her memory. 

RIP.

Aam Aadmi Arvind Kejriwal

In a decade or two from now, if he does not make a serious mistake, and given a fair wind of good luck, Arvind Kejriwal may well come to be seen as the man who put India on the path to greatness.

A year after formally launching his Aam Aadmi Party he has won an unprecedented victory in the Delhi State Elections. With 28 out of 70 seats he may not have a majority but the upset caused to India’s usual vote-bank based electoral calculations is justification enough to kindle genuine expectations ( rather than mere hope) of sustainable change in the decrepit state of governance in India’s body politic.

Is it a flash in the pan? Is it just a protest vote? Time will tell but for now a lot will depend on delivery of electoral promises. No doubt the mainstream parties will do their best and their worst to discredit an AAP led Government in Delhi.If hope is not to be snuffed out even before it has begun then AAP will have to learn a few simple lessons in the art of survival while delivering policies based on the simple but intractable idea of good clean honest and open governance.

1. Running a government is very different from mounting a campaign. In a campaign you speak to people who want you to win and as long as you can attract supporters your job is done. In government you have to deliver, and if that involves changing the existing system then you’be better take heed of what Machiaveli said:

there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.

Delivering policy objectives when in power means making choices, and there will always be someone who feels hard done by. Doing the right thing and then explaining to the disgruntled why they can’t see the benefits is the best you can do.

2.  It is better to under-promise and over deliver. Two or 3  years from now it may well  be the case that you’ve delivered 7 out of 10 campaign promises. But if your detractors can argue that the 3 you’ve failed to deliver are the ones that matter most, then your term in office can come to be seen as a failure. In the new system of transparency of information that AAP is promoting there will be no hiding place. So its as well to manage expectations, even as you prepare to deliver promises.

3.There is nothing Aam or common about being in power. It’s a privilege and the office is both high and important.  So I don’t understand Arvind’s Kejriwal’s apparent refusal of an official residence, car and security. Think ahead, what will happen when the Mayor of Shanghai, say, comes calling on an official visit. Besides, an emphasis on being a humble commoner can come to be seen as mere posturing. The office is more than the individual occupying it and so long as you can keep the two separate its not only okay but even essential that the symbols of power are wielded to good effect. 

4.  Use the power of the market to deliver your policy promises.  This is always better than trying to employ and directly control the staff you need to deliver services. And spend the time to develop intelligent solutions that achieve more than one policy objective. A case in point is electricity tariffs. AAP’s promise to cut the electricity tariff by 50% is flawed because it tries to do what markets do best. It would have been much better to have promised a policy goal of ‘affordability’ by the bottom 25% of the population. To achieve this AAP would not have needed to either blame the distribution companies or do an expensive audit of their accounts. Simply  make it a condition that the first few  essential units of power must be charged at a price that the bottom 5 or 10% can afford. After that let the market decide the price. By having a graded tariff that allows companies to charge more from more prolific consumers, AAP could have at once placated the environment lobby, met its real objective of making power affordable, and achieved the progressive goal of the rich subsidising the poor.

5. Resist the superficial attractions of political vendetta. It may be appropriate to try and right past wrongs by the erstwhile regime, but investigating leaders of the last regime sets the wrong precedent.  Commissions of enquiries and probes by judges or the CBI have never delivered  justice. If anything they lead to litigation, acrimony and counter accusation and counter probes. The previous regime has been judged by the electorate and kicked out. That is verdict enough.

Start as you mean to go on and make a clean break with the past and announce a set of measures to ensure all future spending decisions are free of the taint of corruption. Publish details of expenditures incurred and of contracts awarded. Better still insist on all cabinet members and senior officials declaring their assets to an independent body in advance of the new government taking charge. It is better to prepare for the next election battle than to refight the last one.

6. Finally, coalition is not a dirty word. Politics is the art of the possible, and sometimes nothing is possible without allies. The key is openness and transparency even when deals are struck that you would rather have done without. It is important for Arvind Kejriwal to keep in mind that the real change he has wrought thus far lies in the hope he has kindled that a better cleaner, more responsive form of politics is possible. To set that hope firmly on the path to realisation he doesn't have to do everything at once. How he governs and the value systems he embeds is every bit as important as the results he achieves on the ground.

The criminalisation of homosexuality

The decision by the Indian Supreme Court on 11 Dec 2013 to uphold the constitutional validity of Sec 377 of the Indian Penal Code – and thus once again criminalise consensual homosexual acts -  has reopened the debate in India and elsewhere.

The judgement overturned a 2009 decision of the Delhi High Court that Sec. 377 of the Indian Penal Code was discriminatory against the gay community. It was for Parliament to decide, the country's highest court said, not for judges to make the law. Surprisingly for a Court that has taken an activist position on many other issues, on this question it decided to go conservative. 

Sec 377 of the IPC violates an important liberal principle of law making and for that reason alone it needs urgently to be repealed.

Law making

We need laws in order to regulate society and the economy. These laws are broadly of two sorts, they are either restrictive in some way, i.e they proscribe certain acts and activities that we might want to do; or they place a duty on us to act in a certain way under a given set of circumstances. All restrictive laws – don’t drink and drive, don’t assault someone and so on – inherently interfere with our personal liberties - our freedom to go about our lives as we see fit. Two essential criteria for a restrictive law therefore are: 1) We must be satisfied that any personal liberty that it constrains is justified by the protection it affords to someone else’s rights. As a corollary, no individual liberty should be infringed by a law unless the exercise of that liberty hurts or harms someone else or infringes another's legitimate right.  2) that by making the law and by the process of implementing it there is not likely to be more harm than good. Personal prejudice has no place in deciding which laws to enact.  

Does Sec 377 measure up?

Sec 377 fails on both counts. It infringes the rights of homosexuals in a dramatic manner by  making  it a criminal act to have consensual sex. But does it meet the first criterion? Does it protect someone else’s rights? Clearly so long as same sex relationships are both consensual and confined to the privacy of the bedroom, it is hard to see how anyone’s rights are infringed. Right wing religious groups that appealed to the Supreme Court would argue that they are offended by what they regard as unnatural sex.

This is a fundamentally flawed argument: there is no such thing as the right not to be offended.  So long as the act that offends takes place in the privacy of someone’s bedroom then any offence taken is entirely in the mind of those outside it. There is good reason why it would be dangerous to accept a right not to be offended by someone else’s private behaviour as a basis of state enforced legislative or executive action. Each of us has his or her own set of prejudices and while we are free to hold those views we have no right to impose them on others.  If this principle was held firmly then we wouldn’t have to give in to illiberal demands to ban books or films just because some group or other decided to take offence when they had both the choice and the right to ignore whatever it was that so offended them.

The second criterion is more nuanced. If there were public benefit or some societal good to emerge from a law that restricts individual rights and freedoms then there is an argument to be made for such a law. Legislation aimed at curbing smoking for example, or a tax that discourages alcohol or fatty food consumption fall into this category.

But in the case of Sec 377, the overwhelming evidence is that a law that criminalises consensual homosexual acts actually causes a great deal of harm to society as a whole. Across India some 50 million people will be denied the opportunity to live their lives as they wish. Their sexual lives will be driven underground. They will have to pretend to be something they are not, subject to arbitrary persecution and exploitation by the police, marry against their will an innocent person of the opposite gender simply to keep up the pretense, and lead a life a fear, denial and despair. 

And there is a further twist that is peculiar to the Indian context. The fact that our police and criminal justice system are both inept and corrupt, the law is often used to threaten, harass, persecute and exploit the people. Such malafide action is helped by the fact that an allegation of engaging in 'unnatural sexual acts'  is difficult to disprove.    

Simply put Sec. 377 infringes personal liberties and causes harm to wider society. The activity that Sec 377 proscribes - consensual homosexual acts in no way harms or hurts any third party, not does it impinge upon any right of any other person. Any offense taken by unconnected people is based on a personal prejudice that they should deal with without recourse to the law.  Denying freedom to some people because of a baseless prejudice held by a vocal segment of society is a step nearer to the state pandering to bigotry.

India’s Parliament should act to free its people from a law that has been overturned in the country that introduced it 152 years ago when it ruled India as its colony. 

Growing skills

No close friend or casual acquaintance of mine would describe me as a gardener, never mind a keen one. I like to have a nice tidy garden and am perfectly capable of admiring a beautiful well-stocked garden. But I would rather work extra at what I know I can do reasonably well to earn the money to pay the gardener to do the work.   But this year I decided to do something in the line of growing things.  Beans, tomatoes, and a few flowers should be within any thinking man's reach, I reckoned.

Its taught me a few things. Not that I had any illusions, but you feel it more when you've had the personal experience. Its hard work even when the scale of the operation is limited. I can understand the worry farmers must feel when the weather turns. Too cold, too dry, too hot, its all a worry. Nature seldom provides circumstances Goldilocks favoured for her porridge - neither too hot nor too cold. And when it does appear balmy there's usually a catch somewhere.  

I worried about the slugs eating the bean plants (WD40 - a lubricant - works well I was told; I sprayed it liberally; not on the plants, even I know better than that - but on the outside of the containers. I am concerned at the small white spots that have appeared on the young leaves of  my two tomato plants. I know nothing about fungal or viral diseases of plants and how to fight them. I'm letting nature take its course. I can afford to since there isn't a lot riding on my success at growing things. I am thankful that I don't have to depend on my farming skills to feed myself. I have renewed respect for farmers and growers everywhere especially in poorer countries with scarce resources, neck deep in debt, everything invested in the crop, no insurance to cover unforeseen events, and all too exposed to the vagaries of nature. They may not know it but they must be naturally gifted risk managers.

But these plants have come up nicely. 

I'd like to think I can take some credit for them.. at the very least I didn't do them any harm when they were merely bedding plants that I bought in the local market. 

Its like having children - hard work, worry, concern, disappointment when things go wrong but joy when they turn out okay.

Quotas and reservations - again

One of my earliest blogs was on the subject of reservations and quotas for groups defined in some arbitrary way - colour race or in India's case by caste or the lack of it. 

I argued then that any such policy of preferential treatment of people from special interest groups lead to a corrupt regime where establishing entitlement takes precedence over striving for excellence. 

In this week's Economist the harm done by 'affirmative action' as it is called in America is reviewed once again. Much better put than my own blog post but essentially the same argument. I feel vindicated. 

But I also know that the political imperative to continue with a system that provides so much opportunity for patronage is not likely to diminish. That India's corrupt and debased system of caste-based reservations does nothing to help those whom it is intended to benefit is not a strong enough argument, so long as there are enough voices to convince the majority of the downtrodden that their turn will come if only they fight for an even bigger quota. The desperate will buy any promise however debased, and the charlatan politician will make any promise howsoever false.

But that should be no reason for India's reformers and thinkers not to lead a quiet revolution in thinking that accepts the manifest  impossibility of guaranteeing jobs and prosperity not by better education, infrastructure, respect for law, and protection of property, but by offering access to a percentage quota  of the same grossly inadequate opportunity. 

To paraphrase the Economist editorial's concluding paragraph:

Selection on the basis of caste is neither a fair nor an efficient way of identifying and helping people who suffer social and economic disadvantage. Caste-based reservations replace old injustices with new ones: it divides society rather than unites it; it creates an incentive to establish entitlement rather than to work hard and excel; it blunts enterprise and dulls effort while encouraging complacency. Governments should tackle disadvantage directly, without reference to caste. If a school is bad, fix it. If there are barriers to opportunity, knock them down. And if the sons and daughters of people like the late ex-President KR Narayanan and  Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar apply to a university or for a job, judge them on their academic prowess, not their caste.

Be careful what you wish for

In the days following the Delhi gangrape in December last year, a justifiably outraged public rightly demanded swift action by the police. When 5 men were arrested and charged with the crime there were calls for a swift trial followed by the death penalty. Some commentators even called for summary execution.

Yesterday the news broke that Ram Singh, one of the 5 accused, was found hanging in his Tihar cell. Job done and justice delivered? Or was it another example of the failings of India's crumbling, corrupt and decrepit system for administering criminal justice?

No one, least of all those who had called for the death penalty, should rejoice at this turn of events. Ram Singh's death in custody is as much a tragedy for India's justice system as the original crime was a brutally grim reminder of how we as a society treat our women. Before we condemn him with loose comments to the effect that he got what was deservedly coming to him anyway, lets not forget that he was accused of a major and horrific crime, not yet convicted by a proper court of law after due process.

This matters to each and every citizen of India. When the police investigate a crime they often arrest a suspect. Just as any of us could become the victim of crime so too can any one of us be picked up as a suspect. A suspect - potentially one of us, remember – has a right to his day in court, to answer to the charge and to test the prosecution's case that he is guilty. During the time that the suspect is in custody his - or her - safety and welfare is the responsibility of the police, the courts and the rest of the state apparatus that make up the criminal justice system.

And when the suspect dies under suspicious circumstances in jail before his trial has concluded it is not summary justice. It is a tragedy for everyone involved: for the original victim’s family because they have been denied knowing for certain that the right man has been convicted and punished; for the justice system because it has failed to deliver justice in an open and transparent  way; and it is a tragedy for all of us because our trust and faith in the ability of the police to do their job properly is eroded.  

How Ram Singh came to meet his end is now the subject of another investigation. But the fact of his death under suspicious circumstances when in custody, in theory at least the safest place possible, is unacceptable and shocking. Any number of possibilities come to mind but it is difficult to believe that the system that allowed this to happen will be capable of getting to the truth of what happened in that jail cell.