The Indian elections of 2009
Indian elections are more difficult to predict than those of, say the U.S. or Britain, for the reason that the factors going into the making of voters’ choices are more numerous and more complex but less articulated. For the same reason, it is also difficult to manipulate voters’ choices.
Except when there is a clear wave of sympathy or anger or whatever, which is what the demagogues and the rabble rousers of all the parties try to whip up all the time, and the media agitate and amplify, predicting election results is a gamble. This is exactly the reason why leaders of all parties consult astrologers or seek divine dispensations. Sephology is also no better. It is just sophisticated astrology. Instead of basing predictions on astronomical conjunctions, it uses sample surveys among a minuscule section of the population. Both are humbug, as they themselves have proved this time also.
Analysing election results to diagnose voters’ behaviour is just an idle exercise or a palliative indulgence. So, drawing any conclusions about why the BJP lost or the Congress gained is hazardous. And projecting them as a trend will be delusional.
For the loss in the 2004 elections, Mr.L.K.Advani has repeatedly blamed two mistakes his party had committed: the slogan of ‘India shining’ and the party’s ‘overconfidence’. Blaming a slogan for the loss of an election in which close to half a billion voters participated is like blaming a horseshoe nail for losing a battle. It is sheer baloney, floated desperately to sell his claim that the loss was a mistake the voters committed inadvertently. He blamed, unintentionally perhaps, the voters of flippantly exercising their franchise in a fit of reaction to a silly slogan. This need not surprise anyone, as Mr.Advani is known to relish insulting his detractors and adversaries.
If the slogan excuse is only silly, the ‘overconfidence’ excuse is plain stupid. Mr.Advani was blaming overconfidence as the reason for his party’s underperformance. The performers were the voters, and the overconfidence, if real, was of the party leaders. How could the overconfidence of the BJP leaders impact the voters’ choice? Is he, perhaps, suggesting that the voters chose to punish the BJP for the indiscretion of displaying arrogance or neglecting proper campaigning? How one wishes the near half a billion voters of India are diligently tracking even the private thoughts of their leaders to punish or reward them instantly!
By chance, was Mr.Advani blaming only his own workers? It cannot be even by a whisker, for the workers are only the cheerleaders, not the players. The players are the voters.
Personally I am happy that the BJP lost, because, they are enemies of an inclusive, pluralistic political system. They disrupt the life of many, mostly for no fault of theirs, by fanning whatever tensions are already there among different communities. Its leaders indulge in mouthing personal insults against their political adversaries, in which, invariably, Mr. Advani himself leads the rest from the front.
And I wish they would never come to power again at the centre.
Regarding the Left, especially the CPI(M), it is a pity that Mr.Karat has blundered on more than one occasion, may be under the pressure of ideological compulsions and the real-politik in West Bengal and Kerala. That India could absorb much of the effects of the global economic downturn was largely due to the Left’s spirited resistance to the Manmohan-Chidambaram plan to throw open the Indian financial market to foreign direct investments, to invest employees pension fund in share markets, etc. But, it overreached itelf and landed itself in an undeserved political crisis. It may recover lost ground and even improve their tally in course of time, and I wish it well, for it was the Left that had functioned as a constructive Opposition in the Parliament when the legitimate Opposition led by Mr.Advani had recklessly forfeited its constitutional obligations.
SUZARIN
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Response to Jerrold Atlas of Psychohistory-Historical Motivations
Response to Atlas about Pakistan
Your reading of the situation in Pakistan is absolutely correct. Pakistan is in deep trouble, which is perhaps the worst in its history. It may break up again, as it did in 1971 when its East Pakistan province broke off to become Bangladesh; but this time it may be into three or more parts.
The breaking off of East Pakistan from the West was an event waiting to happen ever since Pakistan was formed. The former was treated more or less like a colony by West Pakistan. The two were not geographically contiguous, being at the extreme ends of the Indian sub-continent with the vast Gangetic plane in between. There were all kinds of conflicts – ethnic, cultural, linguistic, economic, and even religious as the Islam they practised was of different flavours. India helped the break up in a big way.
The present situation, however, is largely its own making that has cumulatively gathered into a crisis.
In any plan to save Pakistan by its ‘friends’ like the U.S. or China, India may not be of much help, because, India is actually a part of the problem. The distrust between the two is almost visceral, in which religion has played and is playing a major role. With fundamentalism on the rise among Muslims as well as Hindus, it may only worsen.
India would definitely prefer a weak or dismembered Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir issue the way it wants, and to please the radical anti-Muslim elements.
As to your pointed question, ‘what can the US gain from being involved in this region?’, I think, the involvement is a carry over from the past engagements with Pakistan as well as a worry about the danger from radical Islamic groups.
I am not sure whether the U.S. ever had a genuine concern for Pakistan’s well being or for democracy in Pakistan. It had all along helped Pakistan with money and arms, in fact more when Pakistan was under military dictatorships than when it had elected governments. The U.S. had earlier used Pakistan as an observation post and a military base for action against the Soviet Union, as a poke to taunt India in the name of maintaining ‘balance of power’ in South Asia, and as a broker of friendship between itself and China. This situation changed after the end of the cold war and especially under the presidentship of George W. Bush. Pakistan’s use for the U.S. now may be solely as a base for its operations against Al Qaida and Taliban.
If you would like to to have another view, please check http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22557.htm
Suzarin
Your reading of the situation in Pakistan is absolutely correct. Pakistan is in deep trouble, which is perhaps the worst in its history. It may break up again, as it did in 1971 when its East Pakistan province broke off to become Bangladesh; but this time it may be into three or more parts.
The breaking off of East Pakistan from the West was an event waiting to happen ever since Pakistan was formed. The former was treated more or less like a colony by West Pakistan. The two were not geographically contiguous, being at the extreme ends of the Indian sub-continent with the vast Gangetic plane in between. There were all kinds of conflicts – ethnic, cultural, linguistic, economic, and even religious as the Islam they practised was of different flavours. India helped the break up in a big way.
The present situation, however, is largely its own making that has cumulatively gathered into a crisis.
In any plan to save Pakistan by its ‘friends’ like the U.S. or China, India may not be of much help, because, India is actually a part of the problem. The distrust between the two is almost visceral, in which religion has played and is playing a major role. With fundamentalism on the rise among Muslims as well as Hindus, it may only worsen.
India would definitely prefer a weak or dismembered Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir issue the way it wants, and to please the radical anti-Muslim elements.
As to your pointed question, ‘what can the US gain from being involved in this region?’, I think, the involvement is a carry over from the past engagements with Pakistan as well as a worry about the danger from radical Islamic groups.
I am not sure whether the U.S. ever had a genuine concern for Pakistan’s well being or for democracy in Pakistan. It had all along helped Pakistan with money and arms, in fact more when Pakistan was under military dictatorships than when it had elected governments. The U.S. had earlier used Pakistan as an observation post and a military base for action against the Soviet Union, as a poke to taunt India in the name of maintaining ‘balance of power’ in South Asia, and as a broker of friendship between itself and China. This situation changed after the end of the cold war and especially under the presidentship of George W. Bush. Pakistan’s use for the U.S. now may be solely as a base for its operations against Al Qaida and Taliban.
If you would like to to have another view, please check http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22557.htm
Suzarin
Sunday, May 03, 2009
The Hindu did not disappoint. It did not publish my letter.
Indidentally, Dr.Steve Farmer mentioned in one of his postings in the Indo-Eurasian forum one Indian historian saying that The Hindu was getting 'hinduized'. I cannot agree more if the tense is 'was'. There was a clear 'hindu' slant in the choice and exposition of topics for some of the editorials, and in the choice of people for interviews and reporting during the last two years that peaked during the cofidence motion debate in the Parliament around July last year - N.Ram's two-part interview of L.K. Advani, coverage given to Narendra Modi and Dr.Subramanian Swami are some of the relevant instances. As a diligent reader, I feel that the slant is being corrected to regain its rating as a liberal, left-leaning paper.
Indidentally, Dr.Steve Farmer mentioned in one of his postings in the Indo-Eurasian forum one Indian historian saying that The Hindu was getting 'hinduized'. I cannot agree more if the tense is 'was'. There was a clear 'hindu' slant in the choice and exposition of topics for some of the editorials, and in the choice of people for interviews and reporting during the last two years that peaked during the cofidence motion debate in the Parliament around July last year - N.Ram's two-part interview of L.K. Advani, coverage given to Narendra Modi and Dr.Subramanian Swami are some of the relevant instances. As a diligent reader, I feel that the slant is being corrected to regain its rating as a liberal, left-leaning paper.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Investigation of Godhra and post-Godhra riots
An extremely hard hitting article by Siddarth Varadarajan, one of the best writers on current affairs with The Hindu, was published today. This is the article:
Where silence prevails, justice will not
Siddharth Varadarajan
Narendra Modi is unwilling to even apologise for the Gujarat massacres because neither religious India nor political India considers his involvement a liability.
When young Aman Kachroo was murdered by fellow students in a distant medical college in Himachal Pradesh last month, some politicians tried to appropriate his death to the narrative of forcible displacement that Kashmiri Pandits were subjected to by terrorist violence in the 1990s. Had the valley’s Hindus not felt compelled to flee, they argued, young Aman might well have studied in Srinagar, where the academic and social culture would not have allowed such wanton vi olence to be visited on a student in the name of “ragging.” Despite his death reflecting this invisible dimension of the larger tragedy of exile, however, the Kachroo family asked the politicians to back off. Aman died not because he was a Kashmiri Pandit or because the community was in exile but because of the insensitivity of the educational and law enforcement systems of the country. And his family is determined to make sure the lessons are learned and such tragedies never repeated.
The Kachroo family’s dignity and steadfastness reminded me of a meeting I had in September 2003 with a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits from the Hindu Welfare Society of Kashmir. They wanted something to be done to enable the community to return to their homeland without fear. Apart from official indifference, what angered the Pandits was the manner in which “Hindu” politicians had tried to exploit their plight. “Since 1990, groups like the VHP and RSS have played politics with the fate of the Hindus of Kashmir,” Sanjay Tickoo, a young Pandit from Srinagar, told me. “Riots were organised in Gujarat in our name. But tell me, what do the poor Muslims of Gujarat have to do with our plight?”, he asked.
That conversation — and the heartfelt manner in which one set of victims was attempting to reach out to another — moved me so much, I wrote about it at the time. And I bring it up again now because of a recent statement by Sri Sri Ravishankar on the condition of relief camps run by the Sri Lankan government for Tamil refugees displaced by the war against the LTTE in the Vanni. These camps, he said, had better facilities than “those the Indian Government has provided for the Kashmiri pandits and those provided for Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu.”
For Ravishankar to draw a parallel with Indian camps for Lankan refugees was entirely appropriate. I also applaud him for reminding us of the terrible conditions in which thousands of Pandits, who are now entering the 20th year of their displacement, are forced to live in camps in Jammu. But I must also confess to feeling bad that Sri Sri, who is one of India’s most influential godmen, missed an opportunity to prick our conscience by also remembering the callousness of the Indian authorities towards other internally displaced persons like the Muslims of Gujarat or the Christians in the Kandhamal district of Orissa. During the 2002 riots, the Gujarat government played no role whatsoever in setting up relief camps for the victims. Even today, an unconscionable number of Muslim IDPs there eke out a living under the most parlous of circumstances. And in Orissa, impoverished Christians who want to return to their villages are unable to do so because of the demand by Hindu missionaries that they first give up their faith. Like the Pandits, the Muslims and Christians have also been forgotten by all of us. Ravishankar missed an opportunity to build collective awareness and empathy towards the three groups who are all victims of the Indian state’s indifference.
This omission of Muslims and Christians from the story of displacement is, I believe, not accidental or innocent. It is of a piece with the new age guru’s elliptical moral orbit which appears to be drawing him closer and closer to the sangh parivar. One manifestation of this is his pronouncement on various topics like the Babri Masjid. Another is the warning issued to his Art of Living foundation by the Election Commission that its Mantranaad programme in Gujarat not be misused to lend political support to any political party during the ongoing election. The warning was sent following a complaint by the Congress which alleged the foundation was backing the Bharatiya Janata Party. But the omission is also symptomatic of a wider silence maintained by most Hindu religious figures over the blatant distortion and misuse of their great religion by organizations like the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Ram Sene, Shiv Sena and BJP. Whenever terrorist incidents suspected to be the handiwork of jihadi groups take place, dozens of Muslim clerics issue immediate statements of condemnation. It is a different matter that our media usually doesn’t bother to report these statements. But when the large-scale killing of Muslims was orchestrated in Gujarat in 2002 by organisations claiming allegiance to Hinduism with the backing of the State administration, hardly any Hindu religious preacher stood up to denounce the profaning of their faith by these politically motivated groups. And this in a region where the concept of ahimsa was born and took deep roots, and where the followers of influential preachers like Morari Bapu or Asaram Bapu or sects like the Swaminarayans run into millions.
Is there a connection between this silence and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s refusal to speak when he was asked by a persistent television reporter whether he intended to apologise to the country for the Gujarat killings in the same manner that the Congress party now had for the 1984 massacres? Mr. Modi first replied that he had already given many interviews. When the reporter asked what he meant, he kept silent. When the question of an apology was again raised, he remained silent and gestured for a glass of water. And he refused to utter a word on the subject.
When those who are tasked by the almighty to introspect prefer the comforting shores of silence, why should a mere politician be any different? Now we are told that the BJP will create a regular “consultative mechanism” with religious leaders if it comes to power. In a letter to “1,000 religious heads of all denominations,” the party’s prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, said that a government he heads would “seek on a regular basis” their guidance “on major challenges and issues facing the nation.” Among the two names the BJP confirmed sending this letter to was Sri Sri Ravishankar. The other was Baba Ram Dev. Were such a “consultative mechanism” to ever get established, it is unlikely that the spiritual heads who stuck to their vow of silence during Gujarat or Orissa would remain tongue-tied. Apart from making a mockery of the constitutional separation of religion and state, as the Left parties and the Congress have pointed out, this mechanism could easily metamorphose into something truly malignant. As in Pakistan, where Sufi Mohammed has tasted the sweet blood of appeasement, the opinions of our seers on everything except the misuse of religion in politics will flow thick and fast.
When Mr. Advani was presented with a “lifetime achievement award” by NDTV in February, he was asked by Prannoy Roy what he considered his greatest accomplishment to be. The BJP leader said it was the rathyatra he led as part of the Ayodhya agitation. That agitation led to the demolition of the Babri masjid, an event that Mr. Advani had once described as the “saddest day” of his life. But when Prannoy asked what was the one thing he regretted about his life, he said it was the fact that he belonged to an occupation where so many of his peers were corrupt! What explains Mr. Advani’s unwillingness to introspect over how his greatest accomplishment could have ended in that “saddest day”? Could his unwillingness be the product of our unwillingness to ask such questions? Everyone agrees that the presence of Jagdish Tytler at the scene of an attack on a gurudwara in 1984 is enough to render him ineligible for public office. And yet we do not regard the presence of senior BJP leaders at the scene of the mosque’s demolition or the burning of Gujarat as being enough to morally disqualify them for the job of Prime Minister. Is this because the Congress party has more of a conscience than that of the BJP? No. It is because influential sections of our society —corporate leaders, religious personalities, media commentators, strategic analysts and everyone else who is in the business of forming and influencing the groupthink that goes by the name of ‘public opinion’ in India — do not consider 1992 and 2002 as crimes on par with the 1984 genocide of the Sikhs. Unless that changes, we can forget about apologies and remorse. As for justice, I’m not holding my breath.
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
I felt it could have ended expressing faith in the judicial process initiated and being supervised by the Supreme Court. So I wrote a letter to The Hindu. This is it:
Sir,
Congratulations to Siddharth Varadarajan for the hard hitting article, ‘Where silence prevails, justice will not’, and to The Hindu (2 May) for publishing it. But, unlike the author, I am holding my breath, anxiously waiting for the noose to tighten around the necks of the perpetrators of Godhra and post-Godhra violence. The directives of the Supreme Court are so thoroughgoing and the Chairman of the SIT is so professional that justice will certainly catch up with the criminals this time. Rhetoric about development, endorsements by industrialists, or the red herring of other communal riots will not and should not save any one of them.
P.P.Sudhakaran
Bangalore
Prof. P.P.Sudhakaran,
301, East Mansion,
No.2, Hutchins Road, Cooke Town,
Bangalore. 560005
Ph. 080 25467483
Hope it will be published
Where silence prevails, justice will not
Siddharth Varadarajan
Narendra Modi is unwilling to even apologise for the Gujarat massacres because neither religious India nor political India considers his involvement a liability.
When young Aman Kachroo was murdered by fellow students in a distant medical college in Himachal Pradesh last month, some politicians tried to appropriate his death to the narrative of forcible displacement that Kashmiri Pandits were subjected to by terrorist violence in the 1990s. Had the valley’s Hindus not felt compelled to flee, they argued, young Aman might well have studied in Srinagar, where the academic and social culture would not have allowed such wanton vi olence to be visited on a student in the name of “ragging.” Despite his death reflecting this invisible dimension of the larger tragedy of exile, however, the Kachroo family asked the politicians to back off. Aman died not because he was a Kashmiri Pandit or because the community was in exile but because of the insensitivity of the educational and law enforcement systems of the country. And his family is determined to make sure the lessons are learned and such tragedies never repeated.
The Kachroo family’s dignity and steadfastness reminded me of a meeting I had in September 2003 with a delegation of Kashmiri Pandits from the Hindu Welfare Society of Kashmir. They wanted something to be done to enable the community to return to their homeland without fear. Apart from official indifference, what angered the Pandits was the manner in which “Hindu” politicians had tried to exploit their plight. “Since 1990, groups like the VHP and RSS have played politics with the fate of the Hindus of Kashmir,” Sanjay Tickoo, a young Pandit from Srinagar, told me. “Riots were organised in Gujarat in our name. But tell me, what do the poor Muslims of Gujarat have to do with our plight?”, he asked.
That conversation — and the heartfelt manner in which one set of victims was attempting to reach out to another — moved me so much, I wrote about it at the time. And I bring it up again now because of a recent statement by Sri Sri Ravishankar on the condition of relief camps run by the Sri Lankan government for Tamil refugees displaced by the war against the LTTE in the Vanni. These camps, he said, had better facilities than “those the Indian Government has provided for the Kashmiri pandits and those provided for Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu.”
For Ravishankar to draw a parallel with Indian camps for Lankan refugees was entirely appropriate. I also applaud him for reminding us of the terrible conditions in which thousands of Pandits, who are now entering the 20th year of their displacement, are forced to live in camps in Jammu. But I must also confess to feeling bad that Sri Sri, who is one of India’s most influential godmen, missed an opportunity to prick our conscience by also remembering the callousness of the Indian authorities towards other internally displaced persons like the Muslims of Gujarat or the Christians in the Kandhamal district of Orissa. During the 2002 riots, the Gujarat government played no role whatsoever in setting up relief camps for the victims. Even today, an unconscionable number of Muslim IDPs there eke out a living under the most parlous of circumstances. And in Orissa, impoverished Christians who want to return to their villages are unable to do so because of the demand by Hindu missionaries that they first give up their faith. Like the Pandits, the Muslims and Christians have also been forgotten by all of us. Ravishankar missed an opportunity to build collective awareness and empathy towards the three groups who are all victims of the Indian state’s indifference.
This omission of Muslims and Christians from the story of displacement is, I believe, not accidental or innocent. It is of a piece with the new age guru’s elliptical moral orbit which appears to be drawing him closer and closer to the sangh parivar. One manifestation of this is his pronouncement on various topics like the Babri Masjid. Another is the warning issued to his Art of Living foundation by the Election Commission that its Mantranaad programme in Gujarat not be misused to lend political support to any political party during the ongoing election. The warning was sent following a complaint by the Congress which alleged the foundation was backing the Bharatiya Janata Party. But the omission is also symptomatic of a wider silence maintained by most Hindu religious figures over the blatant distortion and misuse of their great religion by organizations like the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Ram Sene, Shiv Sena and BJP. Whenever terrorist incidents suspected to be the handiwork of jihadi groups take place, dozens of Muslim clerics issue immediate statements of condemnation. It is a different matter that our media usually doesn’t bother to report these statements. But when the large-scale killing of Muslims was orchestrated in Gujarat in 2002 by organisations claiming allegiance to Hinduism with the backing of the State administration, hardly any Hindu religious preacher stood up to denounce the profaning of their faith by these politically motivated groups. And this in a region where the concept of ahimsa was born and took deep roots, and where the followers of influential preachers like Morari Bapu or Asaram Bapu or sects like the Swaminarayans run into millions.
Is there a connection between this silence and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s refusal to speak when he was asked by a persistent television reporter whether he intended to apologise to the country for the Gujarat killings in the same manner that the Congress party now had for the 1984 massacres? Mr. Modi first replied that he had already given many interviews. When the reporter asked what he meant, he kept silent. When the question of an apology was again raised, he remained silent and gestured for a glass of water. And he refused to utter a word on the subject.
When those who are tasked by the almighty to introspect prefer the comforting shores of silence, why should a mere politician be any different? Now we are told that the BJP will create a regular “consultative mechanism” with religious leaders if it comes to power. In a letter to “1,000 religious heads of all denominations,” the party’s prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, said that a government he heads would “seek on a regular basis” their guidance “on major challenges and issues facing the nation.” Among the two names the BJP confirmed sending this letter to was Sri Sri Ravishankar. The other was Baba Ram Dev. Were such a “consultative mechanism” to ever get established, it is unlikely that the spiritual heads who stuck to their vow of silence during Gujarat or Orissa would remain tongue-tied. Apart from making a mockery of the constitutional separation of religion and state, as the Left parties and the Congress have pointed out, this mechanism could easily metamorphose into something truly malignant. As in Pakistan, where Sufi Mohammed has tasted the sweet blood of appeasement, the opinions of our seers on everything except the misuse of religion in politics will flow thick and fast.
When Mr. Advani was presented with a “lifetime achievement award” by NDTV in February, he was asked by Prannoy Roy what he considered his greatest accomplishment to be. The BJP leader said it was the rathyatra he led as part of the Ayodhya agitation. That agitation led to the demolition of the Babri masjid, an event that Mr. Advani had once described as the “saddest day” of his life. But when Prannoy asked what was the one thing he regretted about his life, he said it was the fact that he belonged to an occupation where so many of his peers were corrupt! What explains Mr. Advani’s unwillingness to introspect over how his greatest accomplishment could have ended in that “saddest day”? Could his unwillingness be the product of our unwillingness to ask such questions? Everyone agrees that the presence of Jagdish Tytler at the scene of an attack on a gurudwara in 1984 is enough to render him ineligible for public office. And yet we do not regard the presence of senior BJP leaders at the scene of the mosque’s demolition or the burning of Gujarat as being enough to morally disqualify them for the job of Prime Minister. Is this because the Congress party has more of a conscience than that of the BJP? No. It is because influential sections of our society —corporate leaders, religious personalities, media commentators, strategic analysts and everyone else who is in the business of forming and influencing the groupthink that goes by the name of ‘public opinion’ in India — do not consider 1992 and 2002 as crimes on par with the 1984 genocide of the Sikhs. Unless that changes, we can forget about apologies and remorse. As for justice, I’m not holding my breath.
© Copyright 2000 - 2008 The Hindu
I felt it could have ended expressing faith in the judicial process initiated and being supervised by the Supreme Court. So I wrote a letter to The Hindu. This is it:
Sir,
Congratulations to Siddharth Varadarajan for the hard hitting article, ‘Where silence prevails, justice will not’, and to The Hindu (2 May) for publishing it. But, unlike the author, I am holding my breath, anxiously waiting for the noose to tighten around the necks of the perpetrators of Godhra and post-Godhra violence. The directives of the Supreme Court are so thoroughgoing and the Chairman of the SIT is so professional that justice will certainly catch up with the criminals this time. Rhetoric about development, endorsements by industrialists, or the red herring of other communal riots will not and should not save any one of them.
P.P.Sudhakaran
Bangalore
Prof. P.P.Sudhakaran,
301, East Mansion,
No.2, Hutchins Road, Cooke Town,
Bangalore. 560005
Ph. 080 25467483
Hope it will be published
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