Who is to stop pilgrims running amok in the forests

FirstPost, 30 September, 2012

Millions of pilgrims enter India’s protected forests, including many high security national parks and tiger reserves, to visit temples. On Tuesdays and Saturdays, the crowd swells to thousands. Mega annual events attract lakhs of devotees.

It is impossible to monitor such crowds when they fan out inside forests, camp, lop firewood, cook, bathe and litter. Human waste causes contamination and plastic waste chokes herbivores. Too many speeding vehicles threaten wild animals and blaring loudspeakers scare them away. It’s anybody’s guess what poachers make of the open season.

No administration stops pilgrims from entering protected forests. But this month, lakhs of pilgrims taking over Ranthambhore tiger reserve for the annual Ganesh mela has made news. Frustrated with the now-two-month-long interim ban slapped by the SC on tourism in core tiger forests, many are accusing the authorities of double standards for allowing rowdy pilgrims while shutting the door on law-abiding tourists.

A religious congregation cannot be challenged in India without grave consequences.  Understandably, the Sawai Madhopur district administration and the Ranthambhore management pleaded helplessness. To be fair, the administration worked admirably to remove tonnes of garbage as soon as the fair got over. But the educated, liberal, tiger-loving tourist cannot quite stomach the rural pilgrim’s wanton disregard for wildlife and forest laws and the state’s helplessness compounded by vote bank politics.

But is any of it surprising? For the politician, allowing people access to their forest temples is far easier than ensuring food, shelter and jobs. The state, we know, is secular and the state knows the convenience of absence. The average Indian pilgrim is not known for public hygiene. Those familiar with the hinterland will know how every household keeps the indoors clean by dumping every bit of garbage outside the door and how an open sewage is nobody’s problem. The forests, remember, are the outdoors.

Not all pilgrims entering forests are poor or rural or uneducated. But none of India’s billion salt-of-the-earth villagers believes that a little lopping can harm a forest or taking an oily dip in a stream contaminates it. Forests naturally have a liberating effect on millions used to squatting by village bushes. Also, they are either blissfully fatalistic about animal encounters or aware of their strength in numbers and the resulting dispensability of a few for earning a little compensation from the government.

The welfare state, of course, is never totally absent. During the Ganesh festival in 2010, the Ranthambhore management regularly baited a wayward tiger that had earlier killed a man, to keep it from the pilgrims. The priorities are readily switched during such unusual times because no reserve manager wants to face a local politician leading the funeral procession of a wildlife attack victim, with a devout mob in tow.

 

However harmful to the wilderness and unacceptable to many of us, these are Indian realities. To feel outraged by these is to proclaim a complete lack of understanding of or an arrogant disregard for how our societies function far away from feel-good urban activism and debates. Sadly, nestled in this mock outrage, the tiger-loving tourist’s real argument – why deny us our little indulgences when they get away with doing so much – does not hold water.

Laws require social resonance to be effective. Murder, for example, is both legally punishable and socially unacceptable. But certain laws – barring child marriage, for example – took many decades to gain social acceptability. Conservation laws that make certain areas out of bounds for people are barely three to four decades old.

Unlike collecting firewood or poaching which are issues of material rights and have always been determined by the ruler, religious rights have almost always been a given. So when they enter the forests in thousands, the rural pilgrims do not reckon they are breaking any law. They are simply following a tradition as most of these temples were in place much before the green legislations or even the state of India came to be.

Increasing use of loudspeakers, plastic and cooking gas is evident. Gangs of young mischief makers can at times get innovative. Otherwise, the pilgrims still follow the same routine they did, say, 50 years ago. Much of it is callous but if they camp outdoors, they must also cook, bathe, eat and defecate. It is simply beyond their comprehension how any of it can possibly harm the forest or wildlife.

Nature and the elements are worshiped in all oriental religions. Trees and animals are revered as powerful symbols. Religion has been the reason why most Indian societies are remarkably tolerant towards the wild. The result is no less than a miracle and all carnivore species, except one, survive in the world’s most densely populated country. Yet, no forest temple trust or pilgrims I met ever claimed to be conservationists.

The rural devout does not know the science of conservation. For long, it has been a way of Indian life. Growing population and shrinking wilderness have changed that equilibrium in recent times when even traditional lopping and grazing leads to deforestation because of the sheer scale involved. But killing wild animals is still a taboo in most parts. In fact, the biggest threat from pilgrims is their feeding of wild animals. They have no idea why it is not good for the wild; just like they cannot fathom how bathing, cooking or defecating inside forests can possibly damage the environment.

On the other hand, most tourists and hoteliers assert that the tiger would not be secure but for tourism. The majority of these tiger-lovers knowingly flout the rules when it suits them. Some of these violations, such as blocking animal corridors or baiting big cats, are criminal offences. But even seemingly inconsequential acts, such as crowding or getting too close to wild animals for better viewing, are far more condemnable than the pilgrim’s excesses because these are carried out with full knowledge of potential consequences.

If the conservationist indeed feels outraged by the rowdy pilgrim, that outrage better be directed inward. The biggest failure of modern conservation practised by the urban elite is its inability to go beyond convenient symbolism. Instead of taking the message to the masses living around and affecting the forests, it is happy to create urban constituencies of glorified tourists (experts, activists, media et al), affluent tiger lovers and tourism service providers who seek to monopolise the country’s best forests for their intellectual and business pursuits.

It is already beyond the financial, even social, means of the average Indian villager to enter the tiger reserve next door as a tourist. When they run amok inside the same forests on certain auspicious days of the year, it is a blatant reminder from the grassroots of our exclusionist conservation. It does not demand outrage but introspection.

  

The Bones of Contention

Overenthusiastic and lax in turn, media and NGOs often end up fueling the wildlife trade

Tehelka, 28 September, 2012

“What would be the price, sir?”

Sargam Singh Rasaily, an IFS officer in Uttarakhand, briefly scowled as he checked a fresh pelt that his enforcement team had just seized from a trader when villagers crowded in. After minutes of excited speculation, one of them had gathered courage to address a forest staff.

Before the forester could hazard a guess, the officer turned around. “Seven years,” he said. Confused, the villagers hesitantly repeated their question: “No, sir. We were asking what price such a skin…”

“I told you. It fetches seven years. Rigorous,” answered Rasaily, going on to explain the punishment stipulated for poaching under the Wildlife Protection Act.

The officer recounted the story a couple of years ago in Dehradun at a mid-career training session where I was showing a short film on poaching. Rasaily was unhappy that my film revealed the market price of tiger skin and bone which might lure people to poaching. We had a brief debate. I recalled that exchange when the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau imposed a ban this month on assigning monetary value to seized wildlife articles.

Only traditional hunting tribes have the skill required to kill animals in all terrains under hostile conditions. A villager cannot acquire such talent overnight even if he gets excited on learning how much a dead tiger is worth. But he can still target wildlife in and around his village. Shooting a wandering rhino, for example, does not take any jungle skill but safe and timely disposal of the huge carcass becomes a challenge. Leopards are more convenient targets and fetch a high price as tiger substitute. Then there are smaller catches ranging from owls to butterflies.

At least thrice in the past two years, it turned out that people with no history of involvement in wildlife crime had decided to give it a try after reading or watching in the media how lucrative the trade was. A couple of them were graduates. One taught boxing; another was a driver. None of them had to enter any forest to poison or trap the leopards they killed.

Understandably, the anti-poaching NGOs have their hands full. But few have the intelligence network or skills of investigation required to bust poaching rackets. Instead, they send staff to forested areas as decoy customers, ready to pay a good price. This is harmless strategy as long as they look for an existing stock of wildlife goods. But it crosses the line when they offer money to anyone willing to make a kill.

It is indeed a matter of fine judgement for an NGO when the potential trader seeks time to supply a consignment. It is usual for poachers to take a few days for moving stock from remote locations of safekeeping. But that time may as well be utilised in making fresh kills. While it is a debatable moral question if another big cat is too big a price for nabbing a prolific poacher, it is certainly inexcusable when random fishing with monetary baits tempts poor villagers with no history of poaching to the crime.

Wary that their lax protection regimes would get exposed, forest officials in the past have accused even the most experienced NGO hands of “inciting villagers to poach”. At the same time, the shoddy handling of seizures poses serious questions.

The bones of a big cat are worth up to ten times its pelt. Seizure data claims that at least 466 leopards and 66 tigers have been poached since 2010. That would amount to 532 pelts and, at the very least, 4000 kg of bones. Yet, seizures almost always throw up only skins. More inexplicably, very few skin seizures, if any, subsequently lead to recovery of bones.

Since poachers almost always get bails, they go back or get their associates to recover the buried bones for the international market. While the strike rate of NGOs improves, the trade continues to flourishes.

Must Downsize Before Upgrading

Zoos in India have long become hellholes where poaching is just another threat. But is it necessary, or viable, to have so many zoos with surplus animals?

  

Tehelka, 27 September, 2012

The killing of a six-year-old tiger in Itanagar zoo by suspected poachers should not have shocked us. In 2006, three tigers and a leopard were poisoned in the same zoo. In 2000, a young tigress was killed in Hyderabad zoo and its jugular vein slashed to collect blood for a Durgashtami ritual. In neighbouring Bangladesh, four tigers were poisoned over three days by their keepers at the Dhaka zoo in 1996.

Tigers have not been the only target. Eight rare Brazilian marmosets were stolen from the Calcutta zoo in 2009. The mastermind later confessed to stealing military macaws from Ahmedabad’s Kankaria zoo and sundry other wildlife from different zoos in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. Only this January, a poacher was nabbed next to the rhino enclosure inside the Guwahati zoo in possession of a .303 rifle, cartridges and an axe.

The zoo debate has been one of the pet issues of conservationists and let me revisit a few arguments. The 2010 vision statement of the Central Zoo Authority (CZA) said that zoos “will have healthy animals in eco-system based naturalistic enclosures, supportive to in-situ conservation with competent and contented staff, good educational and interpretive facilities, support of the people and be self-sufficient”. Two years on, most of the zoos in the country rather fit the standards set by the American Heritage Dictionary that defines the word zoo as “a place or situation marked by rampant confusion or disorder”.

During 1992-2009, the CZA evaluated 347 zoos, out of which 164 were recognized and 183 refused sanction. Out of these 183, 92 were closed down and their animals relocated to other facilities. The future of the remaining 91 derecognized zoos was under review. As of March 2011, the number of recognised zoos has gone up to 198. Of these, till this January, only 49 zoos have their master plans approved by the CZA. The obvious result is gross mismanagement, corruption in purchase, abysmal safety or healthcare standards and, of course, non-existent security.

Before demanding better facilities in these hellholes, we need to ask ourselves if we really need so many overcrowded zoos. Distressed animals deserve dignity and shelter. Captive breeding can offer certain threatened species a second chance. But how many of those 36,000 animals and birds held captive, and many of them breeding, in India’s zoos are rescued specimens or part of any scientific re-wilding programme?

In Reading Zoos, Professor Randy Malamud was candid: “What people see inside the zoo cage is a symbol of our power to capture and control other aspects of the world. They see what was once a marvellous, vibrant, sentient creature, full of instincts and emotions and passions and life force, reduced to a spectacle, a prisoner, a trophy of our conquest of the natural world. They see a celebration of the human power to displace and reconfigure an animal’s life for our own amusement and supposed edification.”

But this not only an ethical question. Craig Redmond of Captive Animals’ Protection Society offered some amazing data. A study by Bristol University in 2008 looked at all 77 elephants in UK zoos, concluding ‘there was a welfare problem for every elephant’. They spent 83% of their time indoors, 54% of them showed repeated obsessive performance and only 16% could even walk normally due to degenerative foot and leg problems.

Elephants in the wild live up to three times longer than those in zoos. Even lion cubs in zoos record a higher mortality than those in the wild though at least a third of deaths in the wild are due to factors, such as predation, which are absent in captivity.

Redmond went on to argue how many conservation scientists criticised captive breeding as a diversion from the reasons for a species’ decline. As one paper in Conservation Biology put it, captive breeding programmes give “a false impression that a species is safe so that destruction of habitat and wild populations can proceed”.

But zoos educate the children, right? David Hancocks, a zoo veteran who worked across continents, dismissed the idea: “If zoos were as effective as they claim to be, surely after so many millions of visits by so many millions of children over so many decades we would have a society that was very knowledgeable of, concerned about and enthusiastically supportive of wildlife conservation. I strongly suspect that much of what is learned at the zoo, especially subconsciously, is in fact detrimental to the development of supportive and considerate attitudes towards wild habitat conservation.”

But do not we at least get to see species that we would never have otherwise? Malamud has a curious take on this: “What’s most amazing about, say, a giraffe or a panda, is that a person like me who lives in Georgia, is not supposed to see these animals. They just don’t belong here. Making these fascinating creatures so easily available greatly diminishes their real beauty, their authentic existence.”

“Secondly, zoos teach us that habitat, environment or ecosystem is not very important. Why bother trying to protect the environment when we can just scoop up all the interesting animals who live in it and put them on display? Naturalistic education should, on the contrary, teach us in the strongest possible terms that our awareness of living beings must be inextricably connected with their contexts, their life-spaces.”

While even the best of zoos do infringe on the basic welfare needs of animals in order to benefit the secondary desires (amusement or enlightenment) of humans, India cannot just dismantle its hundreds of zoos and abandon thousands of captive wildlife. What we need is urgent zoo reform and a time bound strategy to reduce the number of zoos, bring down the numbers of animals to ensure more space for each, and ensure scientific, accountable management of the facilities. 

Security is only one aspect of that professionalism.

Why bother at all with environment laws, Mr Ahluwalia?

FirstPost, 24 September, 2012

Discussing reforms at a newspaper office in Delhi, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, made a few candid points (read here).

The most important reform, he said, was to free the large number of infrastructure projects which were held up because “our processes are such, that (a) it takes very long, and (b) I think the sensitivity to these clearances have hugely increased because in the public mind, it is somehow felt that these projects are leading to the damage of the environment”.

Ahluwalia was only echoing his boss Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who, in his statement on coal block allocation earlier this month, blamed “cumbersome processes involved in getting statutory clearances” for the private parties’ failure to achieve their production targets. This was, of course, not the first time Dr Singh singled out environmental norms as an impediment to growth.

At the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit organised by TERI in February 2011, Singh underlined how it was “necessary to ensure that these (green) regulatory standards do not bring back the License Permit Raj”. Even the Reserve Bank, in its quarterly review released in January 2011, blamed “environmentalism” for a one-third dip in FDI.

What triggered such strong sentiments in UPA-II is, however, unclear. During Jairam Ramesh’s tenure, the MoEF cleared 99 per cent of the projects referred to it. His face-off with coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal over ‘go’ and ‘no-go’ forest areas ended in Ramesh conceding 85 per cent of the disputed areas to mining.

The 11th Five-Year Plan projected a target of 50,000 MW of additional thermal power capacity while the 12th Plan aims at another 1,00,000 MW. During the 2007-11 period, the green ministry granted environmental clearance to 2,10,000 MW of power, which is 60,000 MW in excess of the combined Plan target of 1,50,000 MW by 2017.

Since 1982, the MoEF has approved 94 per cent of coal mining projects. Between 1982 and 1999, the average delay in project clearance was five years. During the BJP rule, it came down to three years. The UPA-I government further slashed it to 17 months. The UPA-II takes 11 months to decide on a project and its rejection rate has been just 1 per cent. Yet, Ahluwalia thinks “half the time the problem is we could not achieve the (growth) target because we could not get clearances”.

The plan panel boss goes on to explain how the method of clearances for environment and forest has been arbitrary, non-scientific and non-transparent: “There is a very elaborate procedure for giving environment clearance for whatever is declared a forest area. Now we know half of the declared forest area is actually degraded forest where hardly a blade of grass grows. The procedures for degraded forest area should be simpler because what you are doing is imposing the same compensatory forestry requirement but the sensitivity you have to show is much lower when you see the forest is degraded than if it is a dense forest.”

So who decides what is degraded (considering it a euphemism for ecologically dispensable)? Scientists (biologists and ecologists), one presumes. But Ahluwalia dismisses their expertise as activism in one broad stroke: “Because we have not taken it (forest clearances) seriously, the only expertise and only acknowledged ones are those of activists who are actually protecting the forests… Until you make the system subject to scientific criteria, why would neutral experts emerge?”

What Ahluwalia conveniently overlooks is that, in the absence of so-called neutral experts and scientific criteria, the official expertise of the cabinet and GoMs decided what is degraded or dispensable, by conveniently slashing the proposed no-go forest zones by 85 per cent. So what exactly is he complaining about?

Ahluwalia, in fact, is unhappy with what he calls “silo mentality” and wants to protect the bureaucracy against the file system that he finds “extremely damaging” because “you write something and you don’t know what the next fellow is going to write or what consideration he is going to bring to say that you are wrong” and “all of that becomes open to questioning”.

Green clearances are considered within the explicit provisions of three central laws – Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act and Wildlife Protection Act – which are available to every bureaucrat. Why should one feel vulnerable to scrutiny if one has not violated the legal framework while granting clearances? Or is it in Ahluwalia’s case that sidestepping the laws becomes difficult, even risky, when it involves file noting?

Otherwise why should he advocate junking the file system in favour of “speaking orders”? Of course, he wants groups of ministers to have “a free-flowing discussion and record minutes which then says that all of these views were taken into account and this is the right thing to do” to end “administrative paralysis”.

A couple of months before he left the green ministry, Jairam Ramesh considered 59 project proposals in a little over two hours during a 2011 meeting of the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), rejecting only four. That works out to be less than three minutes of “free-flowing discussion” per project. On most occasions, considering “all views” simply means brushing aside inputs by NBWL members, citing lack of time. Often minutes of the meetings are tweaked to claim a consensus even after members submit written objections.

The government’s latest solution to fast track clearances is to set up the National Investment Approval Board (NIAB). Argues Ahluwalia: “The Finance Minister said the NIAB should be chaired by the prime minister. Now, such a board will not take arbitrary decisions.” It must be incidental that the NBWL that has been clearing 99 per cent of the projects referred to it is also chaired by the prime minister.

The Centre is already tracking the progress of every investment above Rs 1,000 crore to ensure that these projects go through. Earlier this year, the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council asked all ministries to provide details of public sector projects above Rs 1,000 crore, prompting them “to indicate whether there are any sector specific issues such as environment and forest clearances which may be causing delays”.

The idea, clearly, is to subvert the green laws. Ahluwalia himself gave it away: “The finance minister made an excellent suggestion. He said that for projects above a critical size, presumably in the infrastructure space, the rules of business should be amended so that the permission that has to be given is given (emphasis mine).”

Really? Why not get the green laws abolished in Parliament instead?

There's Method in her Mamata-ness

Mamata Banerjee's seemingly illogical walk out of UPA is actually a high-stakes bet. She's betting on the average Bengali's phobia of capital & enterprise, on stealing the Left's 'pro-poor' thunder & on next elections producing a hopelessly hung Parliament   

The Economic Times, 23 September, 2012

The last ten days could have shaken India. They did not. The suspense is over for now and we are handed a scorecard too happy to be real. End of the day, every player emerges a winner without anybody having to lose.

The government is safe. The Congress hopes that the decision to push reforms and, more importantly, resist rollbacks will improve its negative ratings. More importantly, the UPA gets rid of an ally that has been stretching it possibly more than the Opposition could.

On her part, Mamata Banerjee finally demonstrates that she can also bite and promptly anoints herself a tigress. In doing so, she steals the pro-people thunder from the Left while clearing the way for the Trinamool Congress to fight the state Panchayat polls without having to suffer a scam-tainted Congress. She also escapes political guilt because the government survives.

The BJP gets to make all the right noises and is relieved to have avoided an immediate mid-term poll that would have tested its preparedness. The Samajwadi Party gains key leverage and the power to decide -- with an eye on the Bahujan Samaj Party -- when to opt for the polls. Mayawati, likewise, gets to wait and watch how incumbency plays out in Uttar Pradesh. The same is true for J Jayalalithaa and her AIADMK. Even Nitish Kumar comes clean on his openness to fair bidding for Bihar’s sake.

But is this for real?

+++

Mamata’s national politics is part of her Bengal strategy. She knows that an average Bengal voter is a Left stereotype. It is customary to attach an element of intellectualism traditionally associated with Left ideologies to the people in states that have a history of Communist movements. On ground, however, much of Left dialectics has long been reduced to Left morality.

In Bengal, this Left morality has been fed by decades of popular culture that idolise struggle (not of classes but merely getting by in life) and penury (not as a challenge but a badge of integrity). This restricts the bhadrolok’s default expression of anti-establishmentarianism to a phobia, not scrutiny, of capital and enterprise. Over time, it has degenerated into a misplaced disregard for authority and subsequent loss of work culture. Worse, this self-defeating order is perpetuated by an aversion to change of any kind.

The first Indian state where computer became a household term was Bengal. Not that most Bengalis ever saw one in glass and plastic in the early 1980s, but an aggressive campaign by trade unions backed by the Jyoti Basu government educated them about “the job-eating monster bred by western imperialism”. Last year, an ISO 9001:2008 certified computer literacy programme was named Jyoti Basu Computer Saksharta Mission.

Whether Bengal will think tomorrow what much of India thinks today has not come in the way of Mamata’s assessment of her voters and paying the Left back in its devalued coins. She has been mastering this craft for nearly three decades, cultivating symbolism of that very Left morality. Her ordinary sarees, rubber slippers, country accessories and shrill rhetoric only reinforce her street fighter image of a perennial struggler. Her party, after all, is packed with former Left cadre or their equivalents.

In 1977, when the Left came to power in Bengal, the feudal, anachronistic Congress leadership was replaced by a new order that was subaltern and contemporary. An inevitable but violent land reform drive cemented the Left base in rural Bengal. But to capture the urban space, the party employed thousands of cadres in mills, schools and offices across the state.

Once the benefits of land reform wore off, successive generations demanded fresh incentives for backing the party. So one-third of government spending was routed through panchayats. Such complete disregard to merit in appointments and tenders soon reduced governance to a joke. This culture of political reward is so embedded in Bengal that the non-beneficiaries of the Left Front’s power network quickly cast their lot with Mamata.

Therefore, unlike 1977, the Trinamool victory in 2011 was no triumph of an alternative politics. It was merely a realignment of forces within a political equilibrium that both draws from and feeds a larger social decadence. Mamata has always played by Bengal’s established rules. On FDI, a pet issue with the Left since the early years of liberalisation, she has again trumped her arch rival in its own game.

It worked and how. Even former CPI-M minister Abdur Rezzak Mollah has offered her “blue salute” (instead of the customary red salute of the Left) for withdrawing support to the “anti-people UPA” government.

+++

Yet, Mamata’s Bengal mandate also includes the aspiration of a large section of restive young voters hungry for jobs and opportunities. The state economy is in tatters and immediately needs massive investment in infrastructure. Mamata inherited empty coffers and the early euphoria over the ouster of the Left would have allowed her government to take a few tough decisions to raise funds. Instead, she even scrapped the water tax her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had levied under the Centre’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

Ever since, Mamata has been dealing in symbolism that costs nothing: the law to return Singur land to farmers; the visits to Darjeeling and Sikkim; the tough posturing on Teesta waters; generating headlines on Jangalmahal and Gorkhaland; and opposing “anti-poor policies” of the UPA. If she was buying time till a bailout package arrived from the centre, that wait is over.

In fact, former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s elevation to the Rashtrapati Bhawan drastically reduced her chances of securing an economic package for the state. Mamata was finding it hard to explain her failure to extract the concessions from a government she belonged to. Now that she has quit the alliance on grounds that have many takers in Bengal, she hopes to garner some sympathy for her financial handicap.

It is unlikely though that she will be able to cite the so-called betrayal by the centre to stave off popular disenchantment for too long. She was not elected chief minister on a central undertaking and remains accountable for her failure to fix the fiscal mess in Bengal. Mamata has already whiled away the first one and a half years, considered a new government’s honeymoon period with voters, in banal populism. She will not risk harsh measures in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. That leaves her with a really tight window to enforce some fiscal discipline.

Her last week’s show will only make attracting capital more difficult for her government. Amit Mitra, Bengal’s finance minister, did his years at FICCI and should know a thing or two about investor sentiment. If lack of infrastructure, loss of work ethics, a history of popular hostility towards capital and political whimsicality were not enough, now he will have his chief minister’s public posturing to contend with.

+++

Only 23 hours ahead of the Trinamool ministers formally leaving the UPA, the party website removed its 2009 election manifesto that, in paragraph 42, endorsed large domestic and foreign capital in retail trade. Mamata explained the contradiction by claiming that the online document was only a draft. But the inconsistency, if not the hypocrisy, is exposed.

In the last two decades, a range of political parties have attacked many facets of liberalisation that has triggered unprecedented growth, created jobs and also increased poverty in the country. In these 20 years, all political parties, including the Left, have been in power at the Centre or part of a ruling coalition. None of the governments deviated from the path of liberalisation. P Chidambaram himself was the finance minister (from Tamil Maanila Congress) in the United Front government during 1996-1998. The NDA even sought to decontrol fuel price in 2002.

Since India was not doing particularly well in the four decades before liberalisation and was on the verge of bankruptcy when reforms became the only choice, reverting to the old economy cannot be anybody’s case. But while criticizing policies of liberalisation for its many legitimate and imaginary deficiencies, not a single political party has offered a concrete economic alternative. The CPI-M is an exception but Bengal bears testimony to why few take such prescriptions seriously.

Policies can and should be debated. For example, even the Prime Minister’s argument that a state is free to decide for itself but not for others glosses over the fact that any potential impact of FDI in retail – displacement of surplus and unemployed agricultural labour, for example – may spill over to affect other states and eventually the entire country. Then again, certain experts have pointed out how the share of organised retail is unlikely to exceed 25-30% even after FDI and pose any real danger to small businesses.

But rarely, if ever, our politicians have debated the pros and cons of reform beyond clichéd rhetoric which is based more on perception than facts. In fact, there is an alarming dearth of data because successive governments have not bothered to commission enough independent studies or field assessments to evaluate the outcome of their policies. It only reflects the insincerity and convenience of the debate.

The criticism of reforms has long become the obligation of the Opposition and the compulsion of the communists and the socialists. Mamata is only a newly added spoke of this noisy wheel.

+++

So why was the Trinamool chief the only one to act on her threat?

On paper, she banks heavily on Muslim votes and is unlikely to join hands with the BJP. She cannot be part of a third front because that would require aligning with the Left. It is unlikely that Mulayam will ditch the Left to join a potential alliance of Jaya-Nitish-Naveen-Mamata which on its own will not be able to muster the numbers (and will be anyway jeopardized by too many prime ministerial aspirants). So hasn’t Mamata forfeited her say in Delhi by severing ties with the Congress?

The Congress, in fact, should worry as much. In spite of the success in pushing through the current set of reforms, the party may not benefit at all. The FDI in retail will take years to benefit the economy. The fuel price hike has only taken off a fraction of the subsidy burden. The harsh measures will irk the voters who may not see any tangible benefit by 2014. If the Congress goes it alone in Bengal, it is unlikely that any of its five MPs from the state will return to the House.

Mulayam should also be worried. The fast deteriorating law and order situation in Uttar Pradesh has already dented his dream of leading a 40-strong group of MPs in Parliament in 2014. Given the anti-Congress sentiment and the disorder within the BJP, Mayawati may be the likely beneficiary of an SP slide if Akhilesh fails to firm up governance.

To Mamata, her decision makes perfect political sense. This was her best opportunity to dump the dwindling stock of the Congress and deny the Left the pro-poor plank. In the 2014 polls, unless the Congress delivers a performance miracle in the next few months or Mamata accelerates on the path of fiscal disaster, she believes she will benefit by going it alone and concede fewer seats than she would have to in an alliance with the Congress.

Of course, it will depend on her ability to buy time with her voters with innovative show of symbolism, to milk her tigress image and reinforce it through opportunistic posturing from time to time, and restrain herself from slipping into those bouts of self-destructive madness when she gets just anyone arrested. Given her record, the first two are not big asks really.

If she can indeed walk the tightrope till the 2014 polls, she should harvest enough MPs to try what Nitish attempted last week. Only, she will have too many potential takers during government formation in what will presumably be a hung House. Mamata will go with anyone, the Congress included, who gives her a very special Bengal package. Special enough for her to lavish sops on her voters till she gets to retain Bengal for another five years in 2016.

The nation can wait.

The Flip Side of Freedom

We have always been intolerant. Then the new media empowered us to flaunt our prejudices

Tehelka, 21 September, 2012

I WAS in Class VIII, or was it IX, when late Rajiv Gandhi was expected to campaign in Kolkata with his family. The convoy was to pass through a road close to my school. Most students in my class were keen to catch a glimpse of Priyanka Gandhi, who they all fell in love with that torrid October of 1984 when Doordarshan beamed the image of a sad, young girl, standing quietly next to her deceased grandmother, for days together.

But a few senior students coming from political families had a strong anti-Congress (therefore anti-Rajiv) bias and would have none of it. We were told not to join the cheering crowd waiting at the roadside barricades unless we carried black flags along. Warned that we might report them, the bullies turned the tables and accused us of having “obscene discussions about a sister”. As voices rose, a bemused teacher reminded us that nobody was going anywhere during school hours.

The bullies were worked up but there was no way they could contact their comrades outside to “teach the dirty, infatuated lot a good lesson”. As we cautiously picked our way back from school, we realised that Rajiv was suitably late. We waited and soon enough those very seniors sheepishly joined the crowd. With the convoy due any minute, they conceded, it would be stupid to miss the young lady wave by, flags or no flags.

A decade later, a few months into my first job at a Calcutta newspaper in 1995, I was borrowed by the edit page for a week. The new boss was scowling. Having typed out highlighted portions from all five letters he had given me for the Letters to the Editor column, I had ventured to pick a postcard on my own to fill it up.

“You don’t put just anyone there. Unless it is a rare special letter, always stick to the regulars,” the assistant editor grunted. I learnt that there were about 20 regulars responsible for nearly half the letters the newspaper received. Most of them were erudite, retired men given to sober pontificating. I also realised why, despite posting numerous enthusiastic letters to three newspapers through high school, not a single one was published.

Three years on, I was handling slightly more meaningful editorial responsibilities in New Delhi. My indulgent editor put me in a team of three assigned to bring out a bulky I-Day special edition full of government ads. A number of stalwarts contributed to what was basically a PR exercise for the Vajpayee government. There was not much editing involved but our cartoonist Asit Bagchi had his hands full.

I remember one particular cartoon that accompanied Julio Ribeiro’s piece on corruption. The three lions in the national emblem were replaced by a politician, a cop and a criminal. We did not think twice before putting it on page. The edition was distributed widely in Parliament and within the government. Nobody — except the group’s super editor BN Uniyal who briefly admonished us for not consulting him “before touching the emblem” — said a word about sedition.

Times have changed. Today, mobile phones are common in schools. Millions blog and many more copiously comment every day on every interactive website. Nobody in this connected world is voiceless; and nothing goes unnoticed. Cartoonist Aseem Trivedi is as much a creation as a victim of this new order.

WE HAVE always been intolerant. Our history and literature are replete with instances of ostracism and exile for breaking away from religious traditions and socio-political decorum. In modern times, Henry Derozio’s Young Bengal movement got the bhadrolok all riled up in Calcutta during the early years of the 19th century. Reverend James Long was sentenced for libel after publishing Nil Darpan, an account of the 1859 Indigo Revolt. Sajjad Zaheer’s radical collection of short stories (Angaray) was banned in 1932.

Post-Independence, the secular, democratic State fared no better. Soon after the disastrous 1962 war, India clamped down on Bertrand Russell’s Unarmed Victory. Ram Swarup’s Understanding Islam Through Hadis, a critique of political Islam, was banned in 1982. Two years later, Sunanda Datta-Ray’s Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkimfaced the axe. In 1989, Soft Target: How the Indian Intelligence Service Penetrated Canada by Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew proved too hard to swallow.

Sixteen years before and after Gulzar’s Aandhi was not allowed a full release in 1975, Mrinal Sen’s Neel Akasher Neechey, on the plight of migrant Chinese labourers, and RK Selvamani’s Kutrapathirikkai, on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, faced political embargo. In between, Mark Robson’s cinematic interpretation of Stanley Wolpert’s already banned novel on Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination (Nine Hours to Rama) and Amrit Nahata’s political satire (Kissa Kursi Ka) suffered the same fate.

Between Salman Rushdie and MF Husain, India’s secularism was defined not by rejection of all religious considerations but by appeasement of bigotry of all shades. Even the Church successfully lobbied a ban on Christ Illusion, an album by heavy metal band Slayer, in 2006. Things actually took a turn for worse in the mid-1990s. As in the past, potentially controversial films such as Mira Nair’s Kamasutra, Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Water and Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen or books like James Laine’s Shivaji,Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah and Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja faced harsh scrutiny. But it did not necessarily require sensitive issues or big names anymore to attract intolerant attention.

Actress Khushboo advocated safe pre-marital sex in an interview and it took her five years to get a battery of criminal cases against her quashed. The Shiv Sena blocked My Name Is Khan because the lead actor, while promoting the film, spoke about cultural integration between Indians and Pakistanis. Songs in Aaja Nachle and Kaminey were edited and the film title Billu Barber was trimmed to Billu because the mochis (shoemakers), sunars (goldsmiths) and telis (oil seed crushers) and nais (hairdressers) decided to take offence.

Are these instances of intolerance or people acting recklessly just because they can and know that they will get away with it?

WHEN WE published that cartoon in 1998, the newspaper did not have a website, the number of Internet connections in India was less than 1,50,000, mobile connections did not even touch the 1-million mark and Zee and Star were the only private news channels. Information, and opinion, was not so much of a right but a privilege.

Till the mid-1990s, a relatively small tribe of journalists and experts generated news and views for a sizeable but limited audience and feedback was restricted to snail mail. Information remained locked in files and paper cuttings. Barring few truly national houses, media was restricted regionally and nobody in Pune knew what was being published in Guwahati. Television news was just that, news.

Today, India has 140 million Internet users, more than 200 million computer literates and 950 million mobile owners. Facebook alone has 46 million members here. More than 120 regional channels and a dozenplus English channels beam dramatised news and breathless views into 150 million TV homes. Then, there are news websites and blogs.

The result is mind-blowing. TV viewers are flooded with an option of over 2,300 hours of news and views daily. Every media output is available on the web to be accessed from anywhere. Almost all websites allow instant feedback. Any trivia published or aired anywhere can be potentially magnified by billions of texts, tweets and social media chains in a matter of hours. Most significantly, anyone with an Internet connection and a computer can add her voice to this infinite matrix. The information flood may reduce an expression’s chances of getting noticed but the perpetuity of its presence in the public space more than compensates for that.

This technology boom has ensured that nobody or nothing can be really suppressed anymore. But like all miracles in life, this is a double-edged sword. At its best, this opportunity hastened the Arab spring. At its worst, the rumour mill triggered a mini exodus of Northeast people from the rest of the country.

This new order is doubly unpredictable due to its vulnerability to the impulses of the youth who dominate it. When public opinion was the realm of a handful of qualified and politically correct grown-ups, it was usually staid, banal and even, at times, dishonest. But it was responsible more often than not. Today, with experience and expertise no bar, many online forums and blogs are refreshingly candid while others utterly provocative for provocation sake.

Since talent is relatively sparse, this flood of expression has not unearthed too many. But scores of not-so-gifted have declared themselves part of the larger media which, in turn, is scouted by self-styled custodians of honour and ethics for perceived breaches.

Like most Indians, Aseem Trivedi feels strongly about corruption. At 25, his craft does not compare to any I have come across in the professional media. But for his blog and involvement with Anna’s movement, he probably would not be considered much of a cartoonist.

Amit Katarnayea, 27, is a follower of Babasaheb Ambedkar and a member of the Republican Party of India. A student of law, he could have moved court on a hundred issues more relevant to social justice. But Katarnayea was probably in a hurry to pass the test as a nationalist.

End of the day, it was a 27-year-old aspiring lawyer taking on a 25-year-old aspiring cartoonist. The cops messed up and the nation has been debating it over hundreds of TV hours, tonnes of newsprint and millions of mobile and social media messages.

INTOLERANCE IS not restricted to freedom of opinion either. Our choice of lifestyle is also under attack. Young couples are routinely heckled in pubs simply because they are there and women are targeted for daring to dress or behave “differently”.

Till the 1980s, social classes in India lived in mostly watertight compartments. No Delhi bureaucrat’s (or Bombay businessman’s) daughter was ever taunted for wearing skirts by his driver’s son or a village bumpkin outside the movies. If they had opinions (which they usually did), it remained within their circle.

Liberalisation and technology suddenly broke the barriers for some. Cities expanded with a burgeoning urban middle class and land deals put unforeseen cash in the hands of a section of peasantry. A larger number of subaltern youth was absorbed as security guards or salespersons in housing apartments and malls. That story is still unfolding.

As the two worlds first overlapped in the suburbs, the subaltern got his land deals and jobs but no education or cultural preparation was possible overnight. The first decade of liberalisation was also the period when right-wing sentiments were gaining strength across the country. Moral policing soon became a pseudo-legitimate means for sexual, monetary or political extortion.

Meanwhile, money and exposure to a fast-flourishing media made a sizeable plebeian population aspire to what they saw as modern lifestyles. On Valentine’s Day, the moral brigade found it was easier to target their own. While opportunistic attacks on the elite continue, case studies from across India show that perpetrators of sexual offences usually seek out low-risk targets.

This quasi-ideological front of religion, politics and morality emboldened the growing ranks of the intolerant to target film sets, book releases, and celebrities. While they got away with simple detention, the financial and psychological damage their attacks caused has converted India into a no-go location for many. Mehta shot Midnight’s Children in Sri Lanka and will not release the film here. Those who must do business at home now go weak in the knees at the first sign of protest and concede to even the most absurd of demands.

Genuine intolerance was bad enough and we were never short of it. But thanks to a hungry, indulgent media, now any show of intolerance — more inconvenienced the people are the better — even by pretenders, has become the easiest route to securing attention. It is a dangerous leverage with so many willing to test the fine lines of public discourse and conduct. We applaud every time the boundaries are stretched. But more often, it will cause overstepping.

To be or what to be

Sachin’s end-career slump is the worst among Indian batting icons but is he handcuffed to cricket?

The Economic Times, 19 September, 2012

Even the hype around the T20 world cup cannot quite drown the buzz over Sachin Tendulkar’s tenacious longevity. Tendulkar-baiting may have suddenly become fashionable but it is time for a few home truths. By contemporary and historical standards, Tendulkar’s current form does not merit prolonging his career.

Since he scored his last Test hundred at Cape Town in January 2011, Tendulkar has played 13 Tests and scored five 50s, averaging 35.04. Even Saurav Ganguly, the least accomplished Test batsman among the fab four, maintained a higher average of 35.59, including five 50s and one 100, in his last 13 Tests before he got real. VVS Laxman did still better, scoring seven 50s and one 100 at an average of 39.36 when he was made to feel unwanted. Rahul Dravid was on a song during his home run with four 50s and 100s each and an average of 48.77.

Sunil Gavaskar had called it a day after posting an average (48.94) higher than even Dravid’s in his last 13 Tests. Unlike today, the reserve talent pool in the 1980s was hardly promising and yet the original little master bowed out after scoring six 50s and two 100s in his last 19 innings. The other little master, Gundappa Vishwanath, was axed after scoring five 50s and one 200 in his last 13 Tests to make room for, of all batsmen, Ashok Malhotra.

So those who are asking if Tendulkar should carry on do have a case. Tendulkar’s recent performances in the 50-over game beg the same question. Since his Word Cup ton against at Nagpur last March, he played 14 ODIs to score three 50s and his 100th 100 at an average of 33.78. Ganguly, who outscored Tendulkar during a good part of his ODI career, maintained an average of 33.07, including four 50s, in the last 14 ODI innings. No serious follower of the game argued that the southpaw should have continued playing.

Few icons get to leave the game on a high. Imran Khan quit after lifting the world cup for Pakistan. Gavaskar announced his retirement while dwarfing the other batting greats with an epic ton at the Lords centenary test. Others, like Kapil Dev, hung on till they reach a milestone. Some are dropped after a single bad tour like Vishwanath was on his return from Pakistan. Some, like Laxman, retire hurt. Then there is Dravid who hung up his shoes while leading the batting pack.

Tendulkar earned his big occasions: the World Cup victory at home and his 100th hundred. He has no milestone to chase. It is unlikely that selectors will ever master the courage to call time on him or even make him feel unwanted. And he is certainly no Dravid.

In fact, Tendulkar is perhaps unlike any other cricketer – both on and off the field. He started playing cricket, virtually all day, since he was nine. He left his parents and shifted from Bandra to his uncle’s house adjacent to Shivaji Park where he practised. Even his choice of school, Shardashram Vidyamandir, was only to be under the watch of Ramakant Achrekar.

Lives of most top cricketers revolve around the game. But they also keep open other windows to life, even if as mere curiosities. Dravid is a commerce graduate and a keen reader. His occasional speeches reflect the range of his versatile mind. Anil Kumble is an engineering graduate and a wildlife enthusiast. His otherwise unremarkable photography is distinguished by a learner’s keenness. There is a lot more to Ganguly, a man of enterprise and opinions, than cricket. Laxman, a medical student, became a philosopher wondering what more he could do to cement his place in the team.

But imagine Tendulkar beyond cricket. All we know is that he idolised John McEnroe, is a fan of Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, collects watches, loves perfume and occasionally takes his sports cars out on empty Mumbai roads. But how many times, if ever, have we heard Tendulkar speak on anything outside cricket? Unlike more rounded men such as MAK Pataudi, Gavaskar or Ganguly, he did not even make a good captain despite being one of the best cricketing brains ever.

Since he was 16, Tendulkar batted for his country like nobody else could in their dreams. This long journey has seen too many rare milestones. But hunger for records is too naïve an explanation for his 275-month long international career. His middle-class upbringing must have valued the never-ending monetary rewards. But the assumption that he is sticking around to keep his brand value intact rings unimaginative.

Could it be that Tendulkar continues to play cricket because that is all he has done his entire life? Genius alone does not fuel a three-decade-long pursuit. It has taken him a lot of blood, sweat and determination. This single-mindedness has been Tendulkar’s greatest marvel. It has also been his biggest sacrifice, and limitation.

What do they know of cricket, wondered CLR James in Beyond the Boundary, who only cricket know. Tendulkar’s focussed understanding of the game has certainly belied the Trinidadian’s rhetoric. Only, a few months short of 40, even the most disciplined of bodies is bound to falter, and the most alert of minds blink, every now and then. Tendulkar is too sharp a cricketer to miss those signs. But James would be smiling. What does one do after cricket who only cricket knows?