Comments (6)

By Ritwik Agrawal | July 21, 2009 5:41 am

Some interesting recent comments on this blog:

Naval Das comments on Why statues won’t help Mayawati:

Ritwik and Shivam, you don’t truly understand this matter: you shouldnt be talking about this.

Mayawatiji is truly the heroine of the hindus of this country.

Like dayanand, the struggle of ambedkar and mayawati is an internal struggle of hinduism.

Mayawati has never said that she will convert to another faith. she now accpets hindu iconography openly (haathi nahi ganesh hai, brahma vishnu mahesh hai)

The act of erecting statues is a truly pagan, hindu act.
Its christians who find it odd that someone is erecting their own statues. The kings of vijaynagar did this often. so did other hindu kings. and the romans and other pagan people. Ritwik, when people like you feel odd that statues of a living person are being put up, I shake my head at the christianisation of this country!

the dalit struggle is an internal reform movement of hinduism, and that is the reason why mayawati has never had a problem in joining hands with the BJP.

inspite of political tensions, mayawati chose to stand with narendrabhai in his hour of distress, when she campaigned for bjp after the 2002 “riots”. This when so-called allies like the unpatriotic paswan had withdrawn support to the nda.

wishy washy liberals like Ritwik and pseudo-friends of dalits like shivam can debate all they want, but unless they realize the true nature of the dalit movement, they will always miss the truth.

Long live the dalit cause.

jai bheem!
jai bharat!

(Naval Das on July 19, 2009)

In reply, Neelakshi had the following to say:

I really don’t see how the question of ‘Christianisation’ (or whatever that is) is relevant here. It may be a very ‘Hindu’ act and Ritwik is probably very very wrong in writing against it. Only thing is, Mayawati’s statues and lavish birthday are not helping the Dalits in any way. erecting massive statues to instill ‘pride’ in the Dalits is also not working. As Ritwik pointed out, the Lok Sabha elections have shown that Mayawati does not hold resonance with the Dalits any longer. And has lost pretty badly in the elections.
There is nothing wrong with statues per se but if that money was only used for the upliftment of the Dalits, it would be better. Mayawati champions the Dalit cause, but I would really like to know; how will erecting statue after statue help the Dalits in any way whatsoever? (Neelakshi on July 20, 2009)

Dilip Simeon writes on Great Danes:

The Danes were not colonised, but despite their helplessness before the Third Reich they dealt with the Nazis with much greater dignity than did Vichy France. There are different ways of dealing with the same predicament. Your blank verse implies that the gross inequalities, injustice, corruption & lack of accountability after 62 years of independence are attributable to the fact of being colonised. I find that unacceptable. We are responsible for how we manage our resources and conduct ourselves in the public realm. No light is shed on the matter by continuing to blame the British for everything. (posted by Dilip Simeon on July 19, 2009)

I reply with:

Then why is that almost all former colonies in Asia and Africa find themselves in a pretty bad shape as far as human development indicators are concerned?

Nobody is blaming the British for “everything”, but equally they cannot be absolved entirely of the blame for India’s crushing poverty merely because “62 years have passed”. If the British can’t be blamed for everything, neither can the post independence leadership be solely held responsible for all our ills.

This blank verse was only meant to highlight the fact that for many, colonialism either never took place or with time, it has become a minor blip on the radar; the gross exploitation inherent to it is being forgotten. (posted by Ritwik Agrawal on July 20, 2009)

Comments (20)

By Ritwik Agrawal | July 17, 2009 4:59 am

Recently there has been a fair bit of comment on the Mayawati government’s decision to build statues and memorials to “Dalit icons” [including herself] at a cost of thousands of crores of taxpayer money.

While the commentary on this matter has been relatively recent, large scale edification has been on Mayawati’s radar ever since she first assumed chief ministership of India’s largest state, back in the mid nineties. Over the last two decades and more, erecting statues of Ambedkar and other Dalit icons has been seen as a potent symbol of the shift in the dynamics of power. Like all manifestations of identity politics, Dalit leaders sought to give their followers “pride”, as a substitute for real improvement in the ground situation.

Much of the reporting and “analysis” regarding the latest statue building exercise, in newspapers and on TV [between such vital topics as "dhoni ke dhurandar" and "rakhi ka swayamwar"] hasn’t touched upon the topic of electoral gain: will this statue building spree benefit Mayawati electorally? A happy exception is Gautam Bhatia’s article in Open magazine, in which Bhatia lambasts Mayawati for wasting not only vast amounts of money, but also a real opportunity of providing change.

Bhatia’s piece aside, the lack of electoral speculation is hardly surprising – the Indian media [particularly of the English language variety] has a terrible record of predicting electoral outcomes.

We must not forget that this is the same media which was projecting no more than 150 seats for BSP in the 2007 UP assembly elections [BSP finally got 200+ for a simple majority]. After that stellar performance, the media pendulum swung the other way, with commentators falling over themselves projecting 40+ parliamentary seats for the BSP. Some went so far as to project Mayawati as a viable candidate for Prime Ministership.

The people, sadly for the commentators and happily for the country, gave Mayawati a total of 19 seats, way less than any opinion poll prediction.

The media, still licking its wounds, has apparently decided not to stick out its neck once again, and is thus refusing to speculate about the electoral dividend [if any] generated by what one reporter has charmingly called the ‘BSP School of Architecture’. The reporter, an avid propagandist of the BSP movement, seems to have temporarily stopped writing on Dalit issues ever since the Lok Sabha results. Now, he wisely devotes his attention to matters such as LGBT rights and persecution of Uighurs in China.

Since I am not a journalist, nor connected to the media in any way, I will go ahead and do what most Indians are very happy doing in their drawing rooms/paan shops/offices/playgrounds etc etc – predict the fate of politicians and political parties.

I contend that this grand architectural exercise is not going to help Mayawati in any way. The fact remains that BSP candidates lost 15 out of 17 reserved constituencies in UP in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. This clearly implies that BSP’s trustworthy core votebank of Dalits deserted it in large numbers. It is my hunch that non-jatav dalits didn’t vote for Mayawati this time as enthusiastically as 2007.

Mayawati seeks to win back these sections through the tired old formula of “pride”. I firmly believe that his formula is now past its sell-by date.

How will I prove my assertion?

Well, certainly not through a “caste based voting pattern survey”, or whatever the hell it is called, brought out by comedian-in-chief Yogendra Yadav and his team at CSDS, election after election. In a secret ballot, how the hell does the CSDS team know that 33.67% leuva patels voted for BJP? Were Mr. Yadav and his cohorts hovering as invisible angels near the voting machines?

I have a much more reliable formula on which I base my political predictions. My weather vane is our ever unreliable Indian English media. Much as when the Met department predicts rain, I apply sunscreen, when I see a topic garnering massive attention in the English language press, it is clear that the issue has no great resonance with the masses.

For example, almost nobody wrote about Mayawati’s “social engineering” [going on since at least 2003] before the 2007 UP elections. After her stunning victory,social engineering was the buzz in town. This time, the English press focused only on social engineering, forgetting about such petty matters as crime and ganglordism, and the BSP was swept aside. In much the same way, statues had resonance in the 80s and the 90s, when the press was busy elsewhere [high number of beauty queens from India, for example]. Now that the press focuses on statues, I am sure the real issues lie elsewhere, such as water scarcity in Bundelkhand.

Comments (3)

By Ritwik Agrawal | July 2, 2009 3:42 pm

The following is a critique of Jean Drèze’s article Interpretation of Dreams published in the Times of India [April 28,2009]. Read it here

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In an article published in the Times of India, noted economist Jean Drèze has launched a stinging attack on the BJP [‘Interpretation of Dreams’, Apr 28], calling the preamble to the party manifesto an “exercise in obfuscation”.  Undoubtedly, the BJP’s politics is based upon deception. BJP ideologues, if given a free reign, would love to rewrite Indian history to suit their own world view. But in pointing out the excesses of the BJP’s rhetoric, Jean Drèze has swung to the other extreme. His article has ended up sounding, perhaps unwittingly, like an apologia for colonialism.

To take just one example, Drèze cites the Ramayana, Mahabharata et al to prove that famine existed in India and thus India was not a “land of abundance”. Famine has existed in all societies. What is pertinent is not just the occurrence of famine but the rate at which successive famines occur. W. Digby, noted in “Prosperous British India” in 1901 that :

stated roughly, famines and scarcities (in India) have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago.

In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were thirty one serious famines in one hundred and twenty years of British rule compared to seventeen in the two thousand years preceding British rule.

It is generally accepted that this was because of the mercantilist economic policies thrust upon India by her colonial masters. Wikipedia tells us:  “British policies led to the seizure and conversion of local farmland to foreign-owned plantations, restrictions on internal trade, heavy taxation of Indians to support unsuccessful British expeditions in Afghanistan, inflationary measures that increased the price of food, and substantial exports of staple crops from India to Britain.” (Dutt, 1900 and 1902; Srivastava, 1968; Sen, 1982; Bhatia, 1985).

In view of this, it would be difficult even for an eminent economist like Jean Drèze to prove that economically, India was better off under the British than without them. It seems that Indians knew how to manage their agriculture better than their “advanced” colonial masters.

Does Indian nationalism exist? Do Indians have a sense of national pride, some sense of the history of their civilization?  Reading Drèze’s article, one would think that such sentiments would by and large be restricted to the so called upper castes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even though the BJP’s manifesto talks of the “hurt pride” of India, Drèze considers it appropriate to substitute India for “upper castes”. In doing so, he denies the freedom movement, which derived its strength from the support of various sections of society. In contemporary times, the BJP, according to Dreze’s argument, should be the natural party of so-called upper castes. But it derives its strength from so-called other backward classes [OBCs]. Examples of OBC stalwarts like Narendra Modi, Kalyan Singh and Vinay Katiyar can be cited and multiplied, but will it open Dreze’s eyes to the fact that the hurt pride of India does not constitute the hurt pride of upper castes only but also that of the under classes?

Colonial rule contributed not only to misery but also to cultural stagnation of Indian society. Most non-European societies had to undergo the painful experience of colonialism which didn’t allow indigenous modernity to grow organically. European ideas were thrust upon non-European people with minimum regard to their histories and experiences. Apart from pauperizing the colonies, colonialism broke the continuity of civilizations. In matters of caste too, colonialism wasn’t a silent spectator; it played an active role in altering caste dynamics. Thus, Indian society is unequal today both because of its own ills and because of the ills perpetuated by colonialism. Any comment on Indian society which fails to note this point, as Drèze’s intervention appears to, can hardly be deemed fair.

Medieval European society was characterized by widespread inequality and cruelty. Europe was witnessing “witch” burning on a massive scale; hundreds of thousands of women were most mercilessly put to death, often with the authorization of the Holy See. Europe’s dark past does not prompt scholars to dismiss achievements of European Civilization out of hand. Similarly, Drèze should not flippantly disregard Indian thought and tradition because society was (and is) unequal and discriminatory.

The problem with Drèze’s approach is that it concedes the patriotic space to the BJP – which in turn does not hesitate in making pernicious use of it. Undoubtedly, India has many failings, but at the same time there are real achievements to the credit of the Indian civilization. More than occasionally, Indians have been known to take pride in the achievements of their countrymen even if they are not related by caste. People may be attracted to support aggressive votaries of India “pride” when they see famed scholars casually dismissing the glories of India’s past.

The BJP is definitely given to constructing a romanticized ideal of ancient India as a society free from all defects. But equally, Drèze must examine his position and determine whether by denying the achievements of Indian civilization, does he manage to successfully ridicule the BJP or does he end up making himself ridiculous in the eyes of the average Indian?