FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2011

The return of the carpetbaggers

CARPETBAGGERS :

“After the civil war in the US, carpetbaggers was a derogatory term Southerners gave to Northerners (also referred to as Yankees) who moved to the South during the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877

 Together with Republicans they are said to have politically manipulated and controlled former Confederate states for varying periods for their own financial and power gains. In sum, carpetbaggers were seen as insidious Northern outsiders with questionable objectives meddling in local politics, buying up plantations at fire-sale prices and taking advantage of Southerners.” 

Cut to present day: the Yankee is seen no differently to what he was in the previous century. The arena has changed. From the confines of N America, the world has become the theatre. Moving for country to country, the carpetbaggers seek to intervene in matters of state with the presumption that the formula they bring with them is the most suitable for that country, with business interests of a chosen few following the state intervention.

Not that such a methodology is new- the Spanish, the Dutch and later the British and the French, and later, et all of Europe  jumped the bandwagon and followed this well laid out strategy - enter as traders, follow it with missionaries, proselytise, and when the locals get enraged at an alien faith being superimposed to their existing faith and culture, call in the army, fight wars, and finally take over their territories. Familiar script, but wait, doesn't is sound terribly colonial? Could it be adapted to the present day? We all we are, after all, in the 21st century, and nations are sovereign, so the script has to be re written to give it a modicum of respectability for the present day.

The present day strategy has been geo political spheres of influence, starting with, initially containing the aggrandisement of Prussia, Russia, Karl Marx, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Fidel Castro, Kennedy, Brezhnev, Kim Il Jong and so on- the list is endless. From Banana Republics to dictatorships, to Communists, to struggles for independence, the world has offered innumerable opportunities for intervention of the guardians of peace, whoever they may be. Powers of relative size and strength as in the case of the US and USSR in the first instance, and followed by Britain France and Germany have all played decisive roles in their relative spheres of influence, which has in turn always made space for the carpetbagger to come in and rake the spoils of war.  

In keeping with this tradition, the United States has over the last 100 years, has assumed the role of the peacemaker along with the rich industralised nations, first in the creation of the League of Nations, after the first world war, and then with the revised and moderinsed version, the United Nations. Often enough, the supreme peace keeping bodies have been misused to get sanction for invading sovereign nations as was done in the case of Iraq by President George Bush.

After the Second World war, two factors came to play in the world theatre; the Cold war, ie the standoff between the two predominant blocs, the Western world compromising of the capitalist nations, and the Eastern Bloc, comprising  of the socialist nations. Much of the earlier years after the 2nd WW a paranoia gripping the West about containing the spread of communism, and a fight in such areas, such as the Korean war of North/ south, the Vietnam war of North /south, the Cuban missile standoff at the bay of pigs, the Kuwait invasion, the Iraq invasion, the Afghan invasion..

Whilst the earlier part of the second half of the 20^th century was spent waging wars against communist protagonists, the later part was spent in coming to terms with religious militancy. The US were the initial authors of proxy wars, mercenary Muslim armies were mobilised to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Later after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan these armies were cut adrift, and without a job in hand, became Islamist militia, mercenary to begin with, and then later as the Afghanistan state government called Taliban, a medieval sub human form of religious fanatic statecraft with the singular principle of radical Islam. It was these radical islamists that gave sanctuary to Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda founder that came to regard the US as enemy no 1

Whilst the war aginst terror is a well documented, what assumed importance in later years is the presence of coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Quotes on the Anti corruption movement.

Civil Society "they are not fighting in support of your specific Jan Lokpal Bill, they are supporting your fight against corruption" Jaya Jaitley


'Democracy is as much about the right to vote as it is about the freedom to disobey and disagree.' Harsh Mander

I'd rather not be Anna

ARUNDHATI ROY

While his means maybe Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.

If what we're watching on TV is indeed a revolution, then it has to be one of the more embarrassing and unintelligible ones of recent times. For now, whatever questions you may have about the Jan Lokpal Bill, here are the answers you're likely to get: tick the box — (a) Vande Mataram (b) Bharat Mata ki Jai (c) India is Anna, Anna is India (d) Jai Hind.

For completely different reasons, and in completely different ways, you could say that the Maoists and the Jan Lokpal Bill have one thing in common — they both seek the overthrow of the Indian State. One working from the bottom up, by means of an armed struggle, waged by a largely adivasi army, made up of the poorest of the poor. The other, from the top down, by means of a bloodless Gandhian coup, led by a freshly minted saint, and an army of largely urban, and certainly better off people. (In this one, the Government collaborates by doing everything it possibly can to overthrow itself.)

In April 2011, a few days into Anna Hazare's first “fast unto death,” searching for some way of distracting attention from the massive corruption scams which had battered its credibility, the Government invited Team Anna, the brand name chosen by this “civil society” group, to be part of a joint drafting committee for a new anti-corruption law. A few months down the line it abandoned that effort and tabled its own bill in Parliament, a bill so flawed that it was impossible to take seriously.

Then, on August 16th, the morning of his second “fast unto death,” before he had begun his fast or committed any legal offence, Anna Hazare was arrested and jailed. The struggle for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill now coalesced into a struggle for the right to protest, the struggle for democracy itself. Within hours of this ‘Second Freedom Struggle,' Anna was released. Cannily, he refused to leave prison, but remained in Tihar jail as an honoured guest, where he began a fast, demanding the right to fast in a public place. For three days, while crowds and television vans gathered outside, members of Team Anna whizzed in and out of the high security prison, carrying out his video messages, to be broadcast on national TV on all channels. (Which other person would be granted this luxury?) Meanwhile 250 employees of the Municipal Commission of Delhi, 15 trucks, and six earth movers worked around the clock to ready the slushy Ramlila grounds for the grand weekend spectacle. Now, waited upon hand and foot, watched over by chanting crowds and crane-mounted cameras, attended to by India's most expensive doctors, the third phase of Anna's fast to the death has begun. “From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, India is One,” the TV anchors tell us.

While his means may be Gandhian, Anna Hazare's demands are certainly not. Contrary to Gandhiji's ideas about the decentralisation of power, the Jan Lokpal Bill is a draconian, anti-corruption law, in which a panel of carefully chosen people will administer a giant bureaucracy, with thousands of employees, with the power to police everybody from the Prime Minister, the judiciary, members of Parliament, and all of the bureaucracy, down to the lowest government official. The Lokpal will have the powers of investigation, surveillance, and prosecution. Except for the fact that it won't have its own prisons, it will function as an independent administration, meant to counter the bloated, unaccountable, corrupt one that we already have. Two oligarchies, instead of just one.

Whether it works or not depends on how we view corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality, or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

Meanwhile the props and the choreography, the aggressive nationalism and flag waving of Anna's Revolution are all borrowed, from the anti-reservation protests, the world-cup victory parade, and the celebration of the nuclear tests. They signal to us that if we do not support The Fast, we are not ‘true Indians.' The 24-hour channels have decided that there is no other news in the country worth reporting.

‘The Fast' of course doesn't mean Irom Sharmila's fast that has lasted for more than ten years (she's being force fed now) against the AFSPA, which allows soldiers in Manipur to kill merely on suspicion. It does not mean the relay hunger fast that is going on right now by ten thousand villagers in Koodankulam protesting against the nuclear power plant. ‘The People' does not mean the Manipuris who support Irom Sharmila's fast. Nor does it mean the thousands who are facing down armed policemen and mining mafias in Jagatsinghpur, or Kalinganagar, or Niyamgiri, or Bastar, or Jaitapur. Nor do we mean the victims of the Bhopal gas leak, or the people displaced by dams in the Narmada Valley. Nor do we mean the farmers in NOIDA, or Pune or Haryana or elsewhere in the country, resisting the takeover of the land.

‘The People' only means the audience that has gathered to watch the spectacle of a 74-year-old man threatening to starve himself to death if his Jan Lokpal Bill is not tabled and passed by Parliament. ‘The People' are the tens of thousands who have been miraculously multiplied into millions by our TV channels, like Christ multiplied the fishes and loaves to feed the hungry. “A billion voices have spoken,” we're told. “India is Anna.”

Who is he really, this new saint, this Voice of the People? Oddly enough we've heard him say nothing about things of urgent concern. Nothing about the farmer's suicides in his neighbourhood, or about Operation Green Hunt further away. Nothing about Singur, Nandigram, Lalgarh, nothing about Posco, about farmer's agitations or the blight of SEZs. He doesn't seem to have a view about the Government's plans to deploy the Indian Army in the forests of Central India.

He does however support Raj Thackeray's Marathi Manoos xenophobia and has praised the ‘development model' of Gujarat's Chief Minister who oversaw the 2002 pogrom against Muslims. (Anna withdrew that statement after a public outcry, but presumably not his admiration.)

Despite the din, sober journalists have gone about doing what journalists do. We now have the back-story about Anna's old relationship with the RSS. We have heard from Mukul Sharma who has studied Anna's village community in Ralegan Siddhi, where there have been no Gram Panchayat or Co-operative society elections in the last 25 years. We know about Anna's attitude to ‘harijans': “It was Mahatma Gandhi's vision that every village should have one chamar, one sunar, one kumhar and so on. They should all do their work according to their role and occupation, and in this way, a village will be self-dependant. This is what we are practicing in Ralegan Siddhi.” Is it surprising that members of Team Anna have also been associated with Youth for Equality, the anti-reservation (pro-“merit”) movement? The campaign is being handled by people who run a clutch of generously funded NGOs whose donors include Coca-Cola and the Lehman Brothers. Kabir, run by Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, key figures in Team Anna, has received $400,000 from the Ford Foundation in the last three years. Among contributors to the India Against Corruption campaign there are Indian companies and foundations that own aluminum plants, build ports and SEZs, and run Real Estate businesses and are closely connected to politicians who run financial empires that run into thousands of crores of rupees. Some of them are currently being investigated for corruption and other crimes. Why are they all so enthusiastic?

Remember the campaign for the Jan Lokpal Bill gathered steam around the same time as embarrassing revelations by Wikileaks and a series of scams, including the 2G spectrum scam, broke, in which major corporations, senior journalists, and government ministers and politicians from the Congress as well as the BJP seem to have colluded in various ways as hundreds of thousands of crores of rupees were being siphoned off from the public exchequer. For the first time in years, journalist-lobbyists were disgraced and it seemed as if some major Captains of Corporate India could actually end up in prison. Perfect timing for a people's anti-corruption agitation. Or was it?

At a time when the State is withdrawing from its traditional duties and Corporations and NGOs are taking over government functions (water supply, electricity, transport, telecommunication, mining, health, education); at a time when the terrifying power and reach of the corporate owned media is trying to control the public imagination, one would think that these institutions — the corporations, the media, and NGOs — would be included in the jurisdiction of a Lokpal bill. Instead, the proposed bill leaves them out completely.

Now, by shouting louder than everyone else, by pushing a campaign that is hammering away at the theme of evil politicians and government corruption, they have very cleverly let themselves off the hook. Worse, by demonising only the Government they have built themselves a pulpit from which to call for the further withdrawal of the State from the public sphere and for a second round of reforms — more privatisation, more access to public infrastructure and India's natural resources. It may not be long before Corporate Corruption is made legal and renamed a Lobbying Fee.

Will the 830 million people living on Rs.20 a day really benefit from the strengthening of a set of policies that is impoverishing them and driving this country to civil war?

This awful crisis has been forged out of the utter failure of India's representative democracy, in which the legislatures are made up of criminals and millionaire politicians who have ceased to represent its people. In which not a single democratic institution is accessible to ordinary people. Do not be fooled by the flag waving. We're watching India being carved up in war for suzerainty that is as deadly as any battle being waged by the warlords of Afghanistan, only with much, much more at stake.

This article appeared in the Indian Express, written by veteran journalist  Kanchan Gupta.


India needs reforms, not a super babu
August 20, 2011   10:22:52 PM

Kanchan Gupta
We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was, in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky, rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their passage from ‘freedom’ into ‘servitude’, a large board had been put up for their benefit: “You are leaving the American sector.” These six words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned. It was a bright summer day when the bus in which I was travelling crossed into East Berlin after a brief halt at Checkpoint Charlie. A rather well-built East German woman with a stern, unsmiling face, muscles straining at the fabric of her severely cut dark brown Army jacket, had boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, and sold each one of us a ticket, a rectangular piece of cardboard printed with undecipherable details. Her job done, the bus began to inch its way through the narrow opening; within seconds we had made our passage from West into East. A short distance later, the bus stopped again. An official boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, made elaborate notes in a leather-bound logbook, and disembarked, without so much as saying guten morgen or danke — he was clearly not paid for that. A kilometre or so away, the bus was flagged down at a barricade. A third official, jowly and scowling, boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, and made further elaborate notes in his logbook, also leather-bound. That, however, was not the end of the passport-ticket story. When we disembarked from the bus, we were made to pass through a turnstile which would turn only after we handed over our passports and tickets to a woman who bore remarkable similarity to Herta Bothe of Bergen-Belsen fame and she pressed a switch behind the counter where she stood, her face passive and her gaze steely. The passport was returned, the ticket was retained as it was ‘state property’. I later learned that the multiple checks were to ensure that the previous official had done his or her job and meticulously followed all rules. Each one of them would file a report to his or her boss, who would then file a report to higher officials, who would then compare and match the reports and file yet another report recording their satisfaction or pointing out lapses. Those reports would then be put in a file and the file would be filed in a high-security Stasi building somewhere for future reference. As for the tickets, they would be recycled till the cardboard crumbled; the remains would then be sent to a recycling plant to produce fresh tickets. A very elaborate system, and foolproof too, just that it did not prevent the edifice from collapsing after the first brick in the Berlin Wall was dislodged in the winter of 1989, leading to the fall of the sprawling Soviet Empire. Memories of that summer day’s experience at Checkpoint Charlie and beyond came flooding back last Friday as I heard Ms Kiran Bedi addressing the crowd at Ramlila Maidan, or Midan-e-Ramlila if we must borrow metaphors since Anna Hazare’s do-or-die crusade against corruption which has captured the popular imagination is being compared with Egypt’s Midan-e-Tahrir, or Tahrir Square, ‘revolution’ by easily excitable though appallingly ill-informed ‘revolutionaries’ waving the National Tricolour and chanting “Azadi”, demanding that the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which they of course haven’t even read, be adopted and implemented without a comma or full stop being changed. There was Ms Bedi on the dais, waving at the crowds and swaying to their sloganeering. “You don’t need to know what is there in the Jan Lok Pal Bill we have drafted,” she assured the cheering masses, “All you need to know is that we (and she emphasised the ‘we’ with a great degree of emphasis) will get you 101. Do you know what is 101? Let me tell you what is 101. If someone asks you for a bribe, no matter where you are, whether in a city or in a village, you will have to just dial 101 and immediately Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to the place with cameras and recorders.” Here she took a pause as the masses went into a frenzy of cheering, assured that a solution to the gargantuan problem of corruption was just three digits away. “And… listen to me… and, if 101 doesn’t do its job, you can dial 102. Other Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to your help and take the first lot of inspectors to task,” Ms Bedi was in full flow now, “You will ask me, what if 102 doesn’t work? Don’t worry, you can then dial 103…” I didn’t bother to listen any further, but possibly she went on to explain how 104 would monitor 103, and 105 would keep a watch on 104, and so on. In other words, what we are being promised is a Soviet-style parallel bureaucracy with Soviet-style inspectors to enforce a Soviet-style law in a Gestapo state which will rule not on the strength of respect for the law but fear of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Big Brother. What is being demanded are not measures to remove the primary reason for corruption, a bloated Government with a humongous bureaucracy, but a law that will make Government even bigger — a return to the days of Inspector Raj which we had to cope with for the privilege of living in a joyless socialist India wrapped with endless red tape. Everybody knows that the route to a corruption-free India lies through radical reforms that will ensure minimum government, maximum governance. But that’s a tedious process which will also mark the end of entitlements. So, what we are being asked to adopt instead is a second version of the hugely wasteful NREGA which has bred further corruption and thievery at all levels of our administration. The new job-generating scheme shall be called JLPEGA — it will create sufficient employment to keep retiredbabus, busybodies and self-appointed monitors of rectitude in clover at the taxpayers’ expense. Sadly, our political class, denuded of credibility, has so compromised itself that it lacks the guts to take on those who claim to represent all of India but have nothing to show, apart from a well-choreographed made-for-television protest, to substantiate that claim. Strait is the gate and narrow the path to redemption. If legislation and the creation of bureaucratic institutions could alone redeem us as a nation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a sorry mess. Populism has brought us to where we are today; populism of the kind being witnessed at Midan-e-Ramlila (and before that at Tihar Square) will only leave us stuck deeper in the mire of hopelessness. Anna Hazare is right up to a point. India does need a second freedom movement, but not to recreate the Inspector Raj of our socialist past. We need a second freedom movement to secure economic freedom and freedom from a system that intrudes into every aspect of our lives. That’s how democracies have dealt with the menace of corruption elsewhere in the world.

The Lok Pal bill

Happy in the Hills!

India need a Hero !

HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO - 
Sung by Bonnie Tyler

Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and I turn and dream of what I need


I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta soon
And he's gotta be larger than life


Somewhere after midnight
In my wildest fantasy
Somewhere just beyond my reach
There's someone reaching back for me
Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat
It's gonna take a superman to sweep me off feet


I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta soon
And he's gotta be larger than life


Up where the mountains meet the heavens above
Out where the lightning splits the sea
I would swear that there's someone somewhere
Watching me


Through the wind and the chill and the rain
And the storm and the flood
I can feel his approach
Like the fire in my blood


INDIA  need a hero
INDIA's  holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
INDIA need a hero
INDIA holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta soon
And he's gotta be larger than life

A New Beginning at 65,

Happy Independence Day !

Monsoon magic in the hills !!