Peter Ronald deSouza, "Fly away Peter, fly away Paul," The Economic Times, 7 June 2oo8.

Remember the old nursery rhyme which made little sense to us as kids but which we loved to sing because it had so much punch and we could act it out.

Two little dicky birds sitting on a wall,
One named Peter, one named Paul,
Fly Away Peter, Fly away Paul,
Come Back Peter, Come Back Paul.

The innocuous news item that the Union cabinet had given its clearance to the aviation ministry’s proposal to allow private parties to have their own airports and helipads, for their own exclusive use, and thus, as a consequence, not have to use public airports, completes the story that India’s Super Elite have finally seceded from the country. As practical as the proposal may appear, as convincing as its back-of-envelope calculations may suggest, the policy is deeply flawed, both morally and politically.

It is yet another illustration that our policy community, at the highest levels, has succumbed to a flawed positivist mindset that only valorises the comfort of the wealthy. What is good for them is good for the country.
This is in error.

One needs only to look at Amartya Sen’s book Ethics and Economics, and the global debates in the area on normative concerns of economics, to know how flawed such thinking is. And yet it drives our policy-making as if the larger concerns of justice, and community solidarity and fraternity are of little relevance. This is a mindset that needs to be challenged and the innocuous news item, and the nursery rhyme, will help me do so. Let me elaborate.

Three basic arguments have been forwarded for private airports. The first concerns simple pragmatics. It will reduce congestion at a time when our airports are getting overcrowded and since private planes take longer to land, by moving them out we will save landing time of the other aircraft. The second relates to safety. The aviation authorities will ensure that these airports will maintain the highest safety standards and so, for the flying public, there is no cause for anxiety. The third is a version of ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune’. As long as they pay for it they can have it.

When seen from the perspective of the super elite these are sound reasons. Since they will have saved time and discomfort, they can get back to the business of generating wealth. This, as the argument goes, is good for the country. But is it? Are things so straightforward?

When seen from a host of other perspectives the policy seems perverse. Take the secessionist argument which holds that the policy encourages the super-elite to live life in a bubble. From the helipad at the top of the corporate headquarters, to another helipad in the factory complex, to perhaps a private airport for a journey to Delhi, the captains of industry can journey across the country without having to meet, or rub shoulders with, or even see the ordinary Indian, let alone experience the minimal existential reflections on the lives of those who live in the slums they have to drive through on their way to the airport.

Those people, in many cases, might be their own workers. They will thus never know the possible causes that have reduced to a life of indignity those who beg at red-light crossings, or the conditions of the villagers who have to walk for miles for water, or the anxieties of our rural youth as they search for a space between the rural and urban. The helipad has airbrushed the poor Indian from the lives of our super-elite. They can now sit in oak-panelled boardrooms as they plan India’s growth story without the smells and sounds and colours of India. The Mahatma’s train journey has no lesson for them nor does the more recent yatras of Rahul Gandhi. Why subject them to a little existential angst? How can they script India’s rise if they have to face a little discomfort at a public airport?

So not only are India’s poor being airbrushed from the lives of our super rich, but also the aspiring middle class in ill-fitting jeans and cheap French perfumes as they wait for their flights in pursuit of the next sales target or the next LTC. The middle classes, the foot soldiers of Indian industry, are also a nuisance. So, who do the super-elite meet? People like themselves only. The faceless lackeys, who make it possible, fade into the wall paper. This is bad not just for Indian democracy, because we will have a class of very powerful people who have lived very insulated lives, but also for them since they will have lost access to the diversity of India and life itself.

And once this is permitted it will produce a cascading ‘me too’ trend. From the ‘biggies’ of industry the policy will produce similar aspirations among the ‘wannabes’ of the corporate world. Just look at the 176% growth of in the luxury car segment in January and February 2008, as compared to the same period last year, and the number of Indians queuing up to purchase a residence in Palazzo Versace in Dubai, to get a sense of the magnitude of this ‘me too’ phenomenon.

And if corporate India can have private airports then why not the political class? And the senior bureaucracy? Surely their comfort and time is also important? So what began with private housing enclaves, then moving on to private schools, then private hospitals, has now extended to private airports. A life in a bubble. And for leisure, it’s the yachts in Goa! If this is not secession, what is?

There is another important concern. Private airports will require a lot of land. The country has just witnessed political movements on the SEZ policy requiring the government to take corrective measures and in some cases reverse its decisions. Again the poor farmer will have to give up prime land with the Land Acquisition Act being used to get (let me get it right) private land for a public purpose for a private airport.

This is perverse. Taking land from the poor and giving it to the rich for the benefit of the poor! Why not just improve our public airports so that all air travellers can benefit? A little discomfort will not hurt the super-elite too much. And it will also make flying, for us poor sods, a bit more exciting to see our icons in the same security queue as us. Oh the nursery rhyme, I forgot. The new policy wants to stop at the third line of the rhyme: ‘fly away Peter, fly away Paul’. I want to stop at the fourth ‘come back Peter, come back Paul’.

(The author is director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.)

Chandu Tum Zinda Ho...

Pamplet brought out by AISA, "Chandu Tum Zinda HO..." on the XIth Anniversary of Com.Chandrashekar's martyrdom,31 March 2008.

"...Future generations will ask us-where where you when new social forces of struggle where being unleashed, when the marginal voices of our society were asserting?...It's our duty to be a part of the struggle to make a truly secular, democratic, self-reliant, egalitarian India." -Comrade Chandrashekhar in JNUSU Presidential Debate 1994.

With his life, his struggles and his martyrdom, Chandrashekar reminded us that our campus can't simply be an academic enclave; it is bound by a thousand links to the heartbeat of India's struggling people. As JNUSU VP in 1993, as JNUSU President in 1994 and 1995, he led the successful struggle for restoration of Deprivation Points for students from deprived sections in JNU admissions, the historic movement against fee hike and privatization proposals and initiated the move for creation of an autonomous body in JNU to look into cases of sexual harassment. He resolutely resisted communal fascism and linked JNU with the people's movements all over India.

Many make the journey from the village to the city-Chandu chose to make the journey back: deciding to return to his hometown Siwan for a life of activism. This campus heared Chandu's voice resound often, raising bold slogans challenging the powers that be. On March 31 1997, exactly ten years back, while he was addressing a street-corner meeting at JP Chowk, Siwan, for Bihar Bandh against massacre of dalits, bullets sponsored by the local mafia-MP Shahabuddin sought to silence him. Following his martyrdom an unprecedented student movement led by the students of JNU rocked the national capital for over a month.

Throught the last decade, both the communal-casteist gang up as well as the corporate-dictated neo-liberal policies have intensified their offensive against people of this country. The Apex court of the land while endrosing the Brahminical meritocracy of corporate-backed anti-reservationists is turning a blind eye to the massive reservation of land and subsidies for the mega-corporates in the name of SEZs. But it is also the phase when people's resistance movements are scaling new heights: from the powerful assertion of North-East people against the draconian AFSPA following Manorama Devi's brutal rape and murder to the heroic resistance by the people of Kalinganagar and now Nandigram braving bullets against SEZs and corporate land grab.

Chandu's spirit was one of bold interventation in all the key political questions of his time: the communal campaign against Babri Masjid; the casteist frenzy against Mandal Commission reservation; the policies of privatization; a range of people's movements on the issues of caste, gender, class.

In our times, whenever students of JNU have boldly kicked out Nestle and defended the campus from corporatisation; joined the cry to scrap AFSPA, both on the streets od Delhi and Manipur; held hunger strike for over a month to defend OBC quotas from the elitist anti-reservationsist; waged and won battles to democratise JNU through increased MCM fellowships and recognition for Madarsa certificates; looked the Prime Minister in the eye to show him black flags;rallied with the protesting peasants of Singur and Nandigram, Kalinganagar and Khammam, and corporate land grab; risked rustication to protest when workers are denied minimum wages on campus; spoken out in solidarity with those being witch-hunted in the name of being Muslim or Naxalite; and resolutely resisted the communal lumpens on campus and beyond...their political impulses and struggles have kept alive Chandrashekhar's spirit and his politics!

Today on the XIth anniversary of Com.Chandrashekhar's martyrdom, AISA salutes the martyr of peoples' struggle and rededicates itself to carry forward their unfinished agenda both in the campus and beyond.

The Centre-State Relations in India

By Shiv Visvanathan,"Delhi cannot hold", The Indian Express, 28 March 28, 2008, OP-ED

I think the message of the information technology revolution and the rise of the regional parties has been lost on us. We read IT as the dominance of private over public. We read the new success stories in cricket and Bollywood as the rise of small town, as a diffusion of the myth of mobility. But our politicians and bureaucrats still behave like satraps from the capital visiting remote domains when they drop in on Gujarat or Kerala. The message coming from all over India is that Delhi is irrelevant. It might still legislate but its laws make little sense outside.
The danger of Delhi is that it feels an idea is good only if it exists in Delhi. So every tribal academy, research institution, major university has to be in Delhi. Ask yourself a simple question: why is national equal to Delhi when it is in reality an isolated city without even the vision of a cosmopolitan city state? Delhi legislates but it rarely invents, it controls but can hardly create. Every inmate sits with a committee gene in his soul. What Delhi does not realise is that India is seceding and the state does not even know it.
A nation state like India cannot remain intact without a collection of secessions. Secession is a hypothesis we must encourage. It need not be an act of treason, it could be a ritual of renewal. It should be as seasonal as migration.
Any imaginative democracy allows for secession, especially as temporary segmentation. Our notion of the Centre should not demand the fixity of Fevicol. The Centre should be a hypothesis reinvented constantly by the regions. Why should the idea of national be certified by Delhi? I am not denying the need for order, quality and standards. But why should order, control, hierarchy stem from a single source called the capital? Consider a set of simple anecdotes.
Imagine I want to start an institute for ecology. I begin the idea as institute for understanding pastoral and nomadic change or an attempt to look at the future of tribes. The standard notions of development, homogeneity, hierarchy would feel (a) that tribals should not have an idea of a tribal institute, and (b) to call it a national tribal or nomadic institute is an oxymoron.
If I am tribal, I am marginal; if I am nomadic, I am already decentred. Why do I need the capital’s certification to be national? The vision of national, regional, state level institutes is a hierarchised one. It makes no sense to a tribal in Jharkhand to create a national centre in Delhi. It is a form of detribalisation. Anyway, most of the new national institutes are mere fiefdoms for IAS officers out on a limb or planning a leisurely retirement.
Push the issue deeper. Our notions of security are Delhi-centric. We respond to any model of tribal rights as secession. If marginal tribals and peasants protest they are all dubbed as Naxal. What if I as a tribal were to say that forests belong to me? What if tribal areas were handed to local tribal councils? What if we were to say no forest land can be appropriated without a local referendum? Why can’t national interests be decided locally? Why should the idea of locality be so parochial? In fact, nationalism today requires the cosmopolitanism of localities thinking in terms of size and scale.
A nation state is a poor notion of the complexities of a nation. Just ask yourself a simple question. Why should the diaspora which has virtually seceded be given dual citizenship while a nomad or a pastoral group be arrested for crossing a boundary line? What is so sacrosanct about a boundary that we have to censor any picture that distorts it? A lot of what we call border violation is merely an expression of old ways of life, old memories questioning the illiteracy of boundary, a memory-less empty line that destroys ways of life that are struggling to survive. What is it about identity that needs fixity?
Modify the problem a bit. Why should we have an ICSSR in Delhi? In fact, why an Indian Council? Why not let different regions invent their own social science? Why bureaucratise it? ICSSRs don’t create social science any more than Knowledge Commission creates knowledge. Knowledge commissions only talk about science as certified statist knowledge.
What if we had a series of ‘local’ reports on tribal, craft knowledge, women’s knowledge, marginal ideas of coping, reports on how slums and neighbourhood create science and use it? We might arrive at more enlightened notions of waste or sensitive models of medical knowledge. A nation is a collection of absences. Secession is a reminder of the presences the nation treats as noise or silence. An aggregation of such reports would have at least given us a better idea of innovation that we currently have.
It is paradoxical that we talk of decentralising the organisation and not the nation. A few minor flexibilities, a few acts of delegation become canonised as decentralisation. We need to invent alternative possibilities, temporary acts of secession which tell the Centre it actually does not hold.
Secession does not have to be seen as threatening. Secession is first a playful attempt to rethink the frame of Centre/state. The Congress was once a collection of secessions, that is why it held India together. Today the Congress is a centrist frame, a little club in Delhi pretending it understands the country. English viceroys had a better sense of India than our prince in waiting in the party.
The diversity of India to which democracy is tied demands we break away from the current idea of Delhi. We have to invent alternative worlds before Delhi destroys us. The challenge is simple. Find ways to secede such that Delhi does not know it. The old slogan ‘Delhi door nahi’ should now be ‘Delhi door rahe’. Think of six ways to secede without the state knowing it.

India must relate growth rate with social development, says U.N expert

Report by Aarti Dhar

The Hindu, 3 February 2008

NEW DELHI: For years now, India has proved there need not be a trade-off between democracy and high economic growth rate. But what it has to do now is to relate economic growth rate with social development, according to Thandika Mkandawire, Director of the Geneva-based U.N. Research Institute for Social Development.
Talking to The Hindu during his brief visit to the Capital, Mr. Mkandawire said the world was looking at India as a fast growing economy in the developing world but this growth needed to have a trickle-down effect on the poor people. “You can have this effect but for it to have a major impact, you would need a rapid growth,” he said.
However, the process of deliberate re-distributive growth had not happened so far and the government needed to devise some kind of a mechanism to combine economic and social policies because this would not happen automatically. “It has to be made to happen. And that where social policy matters,” he said, adding that historically India had produced some very interesting ideas on development.
Pointing out that for years India had remained a low-growth, low-equality country, Mr. Mkandawire said now it had entered the high growth bracket but inequality was also increasing, though the government claims that the number of poor has been reduced. “But then, Indian data is always controversial.”

Simultaneous process
Arguing that not many countries in the developing world had found a way of reconciling social policy to development process, Mr. Mkandawire said they thought social policy was costly and focused on growth rate with a hope that some day they would have enough money for social policy. “But our institute has done research that suggests that social policy is not something you do after development. It has to be a simultaneous process.”
Suggesting social policy was an important instrument for development, Mr. Mkandawire said there were some interesting initiatives taken by India for social development such as the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) scheme that was being keenly followed at the United Nations. “This seems to be a serious attempt to share the growth rate but how effective it would be one cannot say though it is an interesting idea.”
The U.N. has commissioned studies to look at what is happening and review this interesting experiment if it worked, he said.

Great achievement
Democracy is another ‘sector’ in India that interests Mr. Mkandawire. Sustained democracy is a great achievement of India in the context of high poverty figures that also proves that democracy did not automatically reduce poverty, he explained. “For years there was this debate on how democracy had not provided poor the space to use their numbers to change this for them. I suggest there has to be social and political mobilisation to use this democratic space for pursuing policies that benefit them. The poor have to organise themselves to change things in their favour.”

Low enrolment
While India is being perceived as an important actor on the world scene, Mr. Mkandawire is at a loss to explain the low school enrolment ratio. “The gap seems so obvious and I am curious to know how some low-income growth and less democratic countries have more number of kids going to school than in India.”