Shunya's Notes

Alan Wolfe on Political Evil

Michael Ignatieff reviews Alan Wolfe's Political Evil: What it is and how to combat it.

Evil is a moral problem for everyone, difficult to acknowledge in ourselves, hard to understand in others, and difficult to defeat without committing lesser evils. Liberals—I count myself as one—have a special problem with evil, connected to our particular form of self-regard. Liberals like to believe we are tolerant, but evil, by definition, cannot be tolerated. We believe that politics ought to be deliberative, but we can't deliberate with evil. We think compromise can be honorable, but there are no honorable compromises with evil. We think politics ought to be governed by reason, but evildoers, while they may reason, are not reasonable.

Alan Wolfe, a distinguished and prolific professor of political science at Boston College, and author of more than 20 books, including The Future of Liberalism, has written a dispassionate guide to these quandaries in Political Evil. He distinguishes between evil in general and political evil in particular, and argues that we should think politically about evil because the evil that we can actually do something about is a form of politics and can be defeated only if understood as such.

More here.

Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Homer’s Iliad is the story of an epic war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The apparent cause of the war was the ‘abduction’ of Helen by Paris—Helen was the wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta; Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy. Menelaus, his pride wounded, called on other Greek kings bound to him by an oath. Joining forces, they set sail and laid siege to the coastal city of Troy in Asia Minor. Mostly an account of the last days of the war, the Iliad teems with intrigue, character, and incident.

Herodotus, the 5th century BCE historian regarded as the father of history, lived more than three hundred years after the Iliad was written. He is justly famous for preferring rational—rather than mythical and supernatural—explanations for human events; to understand his past he looked to the actions, character, and motivations of men. Among the more charming passages of Histories is his take on the Trojan War. In his day and age, the Iliad was considered a true account of Greek ancestry and it was obligatory for every Greek schoolboy to read it. Cultivated Greek gents were expected to recite colorful stretches from it.

From the start, Herodotus had trouble with the Iliad. He found it odd that the Trojans, ‘when the Greeks ran off with their women, never troubled themselves about the matter; but the Greeks, for the sake of a single [Spartan] girl, collected a vast armament, invaded Asia, and destroyed the kingdom of Priam’. He doubted that Helen could have been taken from Sparta against her wishes, and even if she was, wasn’t that deed the work of a rogue, unworthy of such a large mobilization by the Greeks? What also didn’t sit well with his sense of human nature was the response of the otherwise reasonable Trojans to the Greek invasion, for ‘surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children and their city, merely that Paris might possess Helen.’

Should You Kill the Fat Man?

Are you familiar with the famous "trolley problem" in ethics? If you're not (and even if you are), start with this introductory exercise. This thought experiment is a great way of spending a few minutes to probe some of your fundamental moral intuitions. Don't worry, there aren't any right or wrong answers here.

Assuming you are now familiar with the "trolley problem", read this discussion on it by Terrance Tomkow and his take on why most people consider it OK to pull the lever that kills one (rather than letting five people die) but do not consider it OK to push the fat man onto the tracks to achieve the same goal. Read Tomkow's progressively complex scenarios and see if you find his explanation plausible.

Finally, in Philosophy Now, read Phil Badger's engaging piece on the topic, and his own attempt at finding "a plausible account of morality which takes into consideration both the sense that we have to weigh the consequences of our actions and also the sense that, nonetheless, there are moments when consequences are secondary to higher principles".

On Equality vs. Growth

What should a country emphasize more: a more equitable income distribution or macroeconomic growth? Most people tend to assume that the two are opposed to each other. Research however reveals a very different picture. Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry explain why.

In his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). The late Yale University and Brookings Institution economist said that not only can more equal distribution of incomes reduce incentives to work and invest, but the efforts to redistribute—through such mechanisms as the tax code and minimum wages—can themselves be costly. Okun likened these mechanisms to a “leaky bucket.” Some of the resources transferred from rich to poor “will simply disappear in transit, so the poor will not receive all the money that is taken from the rich”—the result of administrative costs and disincentives to work for both those who pay taxes and those who receive transfers.

Do societies inevitably face an invidious choice between efficient production and equitable wealth and income distribution? Are social justice and social product at war with one another?

In a word, no.

In recent work, we discovered that when growth is looked at over the long term, the trade-off between efficiency and equality may not exist. In fact equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth. The difference between countries that can sustain rapid growth for many years or even decades and the many others that see growth spurts fade quickly may be the level of inequality. Countries may find that improving equality may also improve efficiency, understood as more sustainable long-run growth.

More here. (via the browser.)

How Terrorists Are Made

Anthropologist Scott Atran, compelling as usual, talks to Robert Wright about what creates terrorists, the subject matter of his book a year ago, Talking to the Enemy (via 3QD). Additionally, here is an audio interview (click on Listen near the top), and another video interview.

9/11 and the Cycle of Revenge

Last week a flood of articles commemorated the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Not surprisingly, I was nauseated by all the self-love and self-absorption on display—including among American liberals, most of whom seem to me Americans first before they are liberals. I have just found a viewpoint that's close to my own take on 9/11 and its aftermath. It is by Simon Critchley. I only wish he had developed it further!

I’ve never understood the proverbial wisdom that revenge is a dish best served cold. Some seem to like it hot. Better is the Chinese proverb, attributed to Confucius, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Osama bin Laden’s grave was watery, but the other still appears empty. Is it intended for us?

Revenge is the desire to repay an injury or a wrong by inflicting harm, often the violent sort. If you hit me, I will hit you back. Furthermore, by the logic of revenge, I am right to hit you back. The initial wrong justifies the act of revenge. But does that wrong really make it right for me to hit back? Once we act out of revenge, don’t we become mired in a cycle of violence and counterviolence with no apparent end? Such is arguably our current predicament.

Of course, moving from ends to beginnings, the other peculiarity of revenge is that it is often unclear who committed the first wrong or threw the first stone. If someone, George W. Bush say, asserts that the United States is justified in revenging itself on Al Qaeda, by invading Afghanistan, then Iraq and the rest of the brutal saga of the last 10 years, what would Bin Laden have said? Well, the opposite of course.

More here.

On Public Corruption in India

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Public corruption is often defined as the misuse of public office for private gain. It tends to thrive when discretionary power is vested in officials amid a weak architecture of deterrence. A persistent feature of all societies, public corruption is today considered a problem of the developing world. Examples include politicians, bureaucrats, and other officials taking bribes to influence outcomes in business licensing, awarding contracts, registering property, citing traffic violations, disbursing education funds, and so on.

The stakes rise dramatically with neoliberal reforms, when the state begins to transfer public assets to private firms—such as land, mines, and airwaves—usually under weak regulatory, supervisory, and legal frameworks. For instance, the big Bofors scandal of pre-reforms India of the 1980s involved $25 M, whereas the 2G telecom scam last year may have cost the exchequer $39 B. It is said that as developing countries turn into developed nations, bribery turns into another means of influence: lobbying.

It is widely believed that public corruption hurts macroeconomic growth. However, research on the impact of corruption on growth is not conclusive. China, among the most corrupt countries, has one of the highest growth rates. Perhaps China's GDP would have grown even faster without corruption, but that's a conjecture; theoretical explanations for China cut both ways. Some researchers now favor the view that the impact of corruption on macroeconomic growth depends on the nature of the regime and the kind of corruption there is. Some kinds can align in favor of growth, others against. Corruption of course has wider implications beyond growth. Various studies have shown its adverse impact in the microeconomic realm. Higher corruption reduces entrepreneurial activity, allocates talent less efficiently, and worsens services integral to human development. Finally, public corruption also eats away at social institutions, undermines the rule of law, erodes social trust, and can jeopardize public safety and hurt the environment.

It seems to me that most fights against public corruption, including in India, strive to make the system function "as advertised". They strive for transparency and accountability in the system. They tend not to challenge the rigged rules of the system itself, including the investment priorities of the country, or its response to socioeconomic disparities. But this is not necessarily a shortcoming. Tactical prudence may require such focus, and these latter concerns, related and complementary in nature, may sometimes be best left to other concerned citizens.

Reducing corruption, to be clear, may do nothing for equitable distribution —unless significant redistributive programs and safety nets already exist in a country. Indeed, in such cases, the clearest adverse impact of corruption occurs in the delivery of social services to the marginalized—food, schooling, medicine, employment assistance, etc. The more programs for socioeconomic justice that exist in a country, the bigger the obstacle that corruption poses for their delivery. This then is the context in which a fight against public corruption is also a promoter of socioeconomic justice, even if as a byproduct. The big question then becomes: how does one go about reducing corruption, especially in India?

What is the Jan Lokpal Bill?

(The Jan Lokpal Bill is at the heart of the anti-corruption movement now raging in India. Here is a brief overview of the bill based on my reading of the JLP bill ver 2.3 and its key features. This is an extract from my longer opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)
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The JLP bill is associated with the self-styled Gandhian, Anna Hazare, and his team—Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Kiran Bedi, and others—under the banner of "India Against Corruption". It proposes to create a single independent agency to investigate allegations of public corruption all across India in accordance with the Prevention of Corruption Act 1988. It'll incorporate the currently defanged anti-corruption units of existing agencies, like the CBI and CVC.

The Lokpal will have eleven appointed members, all "eminent individuals", chosen by a search and a selection committee. It will have lots of investigators and support staff. Investigators will have the powers vested in police officers, and will also be able to wiretap any suspect's phone and internet lines (utilizing a 2008 amendment to the Information Technology Act 2000, which, incidentally, has been criticized for lacking adequate "legal and procedural safeguards to prevent violation of civil liberties").

Complaints against any government employee can be filed by any citizen in the form of an FIR. Following investigations, the Lokpal can fine, demote, or fire government employees from their jobs. It will prosecute them in special courts established within the existing judicial system (more courts can be created based on demand) and all trials have to be completed within 12 months. It will even go after their personal assets to recover the embezzled monies. Whistle-blowers are protected but frivolous or vindictive complaints are punishable by a fine.

Alongside the independence and prosecutory power vested in the Lokpal, the bill has some provisions to thwart abuses of power. Whether on not they are adequate is I think debatable. The Lokpal's and the special court's decisions can be legally challenged, though, for no good reason, this has been made far more onerous than for other civil and criminal cases. For transparency, the Lokpal will post each month the full records of completed investigations on the web, cases opened and closed, and minutes of board meetings. An Independent Complaints Authority with multiple offices, each comprised of five appointed "eminent individuals", would hear complaints against corrupt Lokpal officials and remove them if necessary, but the Lokpal's eleven members can be removed only by the Supreme Court.

Employment quotas, much as in other government bodies, will exist at the investigator and staff level, but not among its top echelon or in the search and selection committees. And while much of the focus is on policing, the bill also requires additional reforms to increase the odds of its success against corruption. For instance, it requires all public offices to publish a citizen's charter defining roles, responsibilities, and procedures, as well as a grievance redressal system. However, the entire focus of the bill is on the conduct of the public servant, and none at all on the "demand side" of the market, that is, on the role of ordinary citizens and businesses in creating incentives for public corruption. To tackle public corruption in state governments, each state will have a similar ombudsman agency too, called the Lokayukta.

Guinier on Redefining Merit

A brilliant short lecture by Lani Guinier, professor of law at Harvard and civil rights activist, on what merit means, why we need to redefine it, the benefits of diversity in approaching complex problems, what standardized tests like the SAT reveal about you ("what kind of car your parents drive"), and why we have moved into an era of "modern scientific racism" (via Anu Ramdas).

The General in Anna's Labyrinth

(Also consider reading my related opinion piece, On Public Corruption in India.)

Mehboob Geelani has an interesting profile of Arvind Kejriwal, a well-known Indian social activist and anti-corruption crusader most often associated with the Right to Information (RTI) Act. By many accounts, Arvind is the main strategist and mastermind behind the Jan Lokpal bill that is at the heart of the currently raging anti-corruption movement whose populist (and problematic) figurehead is Anna Hazare.

Full disclosure: Arvind and I were batchmates at IIT Kharagpur. We lived in the same hostel, Nehru Hall, for four years and have met many times since, especially during my two years in India, 2004-6. Even in college he was articulate and self-confident, and had a quiet intensity about him. He was Nehru Hall's mess secretary in his second year and was very active in Hindi debate and theater, serving as governor of the Hindi drama society in his final year. I liked him well enough. For me, he was also a fellow Hindi belter, relatively few in Kharagpur.

I can't however recall any specifics that foreshadowed his later firebrand activism, moral outrage, impassioned oratory, media savvy, and organizational acumen. Perhaps I simply failed to recognize the cues in college, or perhaps he did blossom later on, leading him to quit his corporate job and switch to a civil services career, an uncommon vocation for an IITian. Based on a 2005 conversation and hanging out with him during a movement against water privatization in Delhi, I can say that the man has derived much inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi. He told me that he would never run for office. In recent years, I have come to admire his personal integrity, courage, and dedication to fighting injustice, especially the kind that can be addressed by bringing transparency and accountability to governance.

Though Hazare is the recognised face of an anti-corruption campaign that began with his fast on 5 April, Kejriwal is the architect of the movement—the man journalists swarm to, seeking an interview. At press briefings, he often sits next to Hazare and helps the self-styled Gandhian handle tough questions: Kejriwal whispers into Hazare’s ear or scribbles key points on a piece of paper lying between them. When questions are posed to Kejriwal, he responds like an impassioned professor explaining a complicated problem—piling detail upon detail with the supreme confidence that his answer is the correct one. His essential message never changes: only a powerful independent anti-corruption agency, with wide-ranging authority and minimal government interference, can cure the plague of graft—and anything less will fail.

The ideas that would eventually lead to the Jan Lokpal Bill—and plans for a mass mobilisation to support it—had been on Kejriwal’s mind at least since September 2010, when public frustration with the inept preparations for the Commonwealth Games erupted into fury over evidence of widespread corruption. India’s middle classes, who already saw the event as a tremendous waste of money, were further enraged when the Games delivered nothing but international embarrassment and a multi-million rupee scam. Kejriwal, however, saw an opportunity to mobilise public opinion against corruption, and began to plot the course that would lead “Team Anna” into a high-profile showdown with the ruling United Progressive Alliance coalition. He spent his days consulting with experts and prospective allies, from lawyers to bankers to former bureaucrats and religious leaders, as well as his colleagues in the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI). He devoted his nights to drafting and revising a bill to create a new Lokpal: an independent body vested with the extraordinary powers—to investigate, prosecute and sometimes even judge—that Kejriwal thought necessary to prevent any politician or bureaucrat from obstructing the agency’s work.

More here.   Also check out an interview with and four speeches by Arvind: What is the Jan Lokpal Bill? (2011), Team Anna answers your Qs (2011), War Against Corruption Rally (2011), India Against Corruption rally in Guwahati (2011), Against Water Privatization (2007).

Mexico and the War on Drugs

Al-Jazeera has this sad and chilling report from Ciudad Juaraz, a border town in Mexico now embroiled in the absurd American war on drugs:

Once known as a booming industrial city and a model of economic progress in Mexico, the border city of Juarez has become infamous as the murder capital of the world. More than 8,000 people have been killed there since 2008, when Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to carry out his offensive against the drug cartels.

The official story is that the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels are fighting for the city and the access it provides to the multi-billion dollar US drug market only a few hundred metres away.  On this episode of Fault Lines, Josh Rushing travels to Ciudad Juarez, and asks how human life there came to be worth so much less than the drugs being trafficked through.

Indians Abroad: A Story from Trinidad

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. A shorter version appeared in Himal Southasian, Oct-Nov 2011.)

I somehow managed to write a 3,500-word essay on Trinidad without mentioning cricket, rum, or the steelpan. Can I be forgiven for that?
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In April this year, I visited the Indian Caribbean museum near the town of Chaguanas in Trinidad. Set in a large hall, the museum had no other visitors. Its curator, Saisbhan Jokhan, 69, came out to greet me. Jokhan, I soon realized, not only loved to talk but was also a trove of information. As I began taking notes, he asked if I was a journalist. Yes, I said; I wrote for a venerable publication called 3 Quarks Daily, and I intended to write about the Indo-Trinidadian experience. His eyes lit up and for the next ninety minutes, he accompanied me in the museum, explaining and answering my questions.

The museum commemorates the history of a million Indo-Caribbeans whose ancestors came as indentured laborers from India between 1838-1917. Its panels include details on immigrant ships, copies of girmits, or indenture agreements, and rare archival photos of life on sugarcane plantations. Evocative objects abound: an improvised sarangi, a pair of wood slippers, a rotary sugarcane press like the ones still used in mofussil India, even a lifesize model of an indentured worker’s hut. Other displays show milestones in the life of the community, such as a 1970 photo of the first Indo-Trini policewoman; a panel on Alice Jan, the first lady of Indo-Trini culture; Indo-Trinis winning the right to build their own schools in 1952, allowing them to replace Christian teaching with Hindu teaching.

The museum is run by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, a conservative Hindu organization that also runs many temples. Talking to Jokhan it struck me that he lived with a clear sense of ‘his people’, what they have suffered, what challenges awaited them. His tone, and the museum’s singular focus, brought to mind a pastiche of Jewish museums I have seen over the years. This too felt like a museum designed to preserve the collective memory of a people’s suffering and struggles, and Jokhan seemed to me the right man for the job: proud of his identity, devoted to his community, slightly paranoid.

Jokhan’s historical memory is alien to people like me who have joined the Indian diaspora in recent decades. We have fostered the stereotype of Indians as a model minority, led by professionals and marked by diligence and enterprise in the pursuit of opportunities around the globe. But most of the Indian journeys in the colonial era were very different. They involved harsh unskilled labor on sugarcane estates, horrible living conditions, and severe discrimination. Trinidad, which I will look at here, is one chapter of that past; others include Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, South Africa, Fiji, Mauritius, and Réunion. 

BBC Documentary on Gandhi

A three-hour BBC documentary on Gandhi (2009) is now on YouTube. It does a reasonable job of covering Gandhi's life: basic biographical details, historical events, key influences, lucky breaks, setbacks, etc. Based on mainstream scholarship, it avoids edgy controversy while conveying a sense of this immensely bold, complex, and charismatic man who, despite his many flaws and idiosyncrasies, still captivates people worldwide and has become an icon for non-violent resistance. It includes some rare historical footage as well.

Click here to watch all video clips consecutively on YouTube. The three episodes are: The Making of the Mahatma, The Rise to Fame, and The Road to Freedom. (Whoever posted the video has curiously inserted "British Propaganda" in the name! Is that merited you think?)

The Absence of Ambedkar

Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of Open Magazine, has a good essay in 3QD. Here is an excerpt:

One of the arguments I have heard over and over again explaining the success of Indian democracy is the invocation of a civilizational ethos, our tolerance, the claim goes, is rooted in the traditions of Hinduism. While it is not entirely untrue, this idea is given too much credit. The dailts are a huge counterargument, tolerance for oppression is as much a part of Hinduism as a tolerance of other faiths.

If today revolutionary groups such as the Maoists seek recruits and fail to find them in large numbers among the untouchables it is largely because of Ambedkar.  At the same time Ambedkar as much as Nehru is responsible for the calm rationalism of the Indian Constitution. Gandhi lends himself to every new age anti-science fad, Ambedkar is one of our key antidotes. Far more than the Ganga or Gandhi, if writers and academics  needs to make sense of India they need to spend time on Ambedkar.

More here.

Social Mobility in America

I came across a fairly detailed study on social mobility that shows that despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, social mobility remains unusually poor in the United States. Some non-contiguous excerpts:

The United States has long been known as the land of opportunity, where hard work is rewarded and economic prosperity is within reach for all ... our national faith in this proposition is on the rise ... While few would deny that it is possible to start poor and end rich, the evidence suggests that this feat is more difficult to accomplish in the United States than in other high-income nations.... In sum, the intergenerational findings paint a portrait of a society in which family background matters a great deal, and matters for reasons that many people find unjust. Our national commitment to equality of opportunity requires that we take these statistics seriously, gain a better understanding of the mechanisms at work and work towards policies that will allow all Americans to reach their full economic potential.

The key findings relating to intergenerational mobility include the following:

• Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

• By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

What Do We Deserve?

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments. This essay also appeared in the Humanist, May/Jun 2011, and was included in three anthologies for college students in the U.S. from Sage Publications, McGraw-Hill, and Bedford/St. Martin's.)

I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?

The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being at the right place at the right time.

A pivotal question in market-based societies is ‘What do we deserve?’ In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. In this short essay, inspired by American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice, I’ve tried to synthesize a few thoughts on the matter by reviewing three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.

The Triumph of Taxophobia

In Democracy, Jonathan Chait "looks at the principle that most defines conservative economics today: taxophobia." This essay is part of a series of five essays, First Principles: Arguing the Economy. Some non-contiguous excerpts:

The conservative movement’s embrace of taxophobia is probably the most important development in American political life over the last three decades. It is the one quality that most distinguishes American conservative elites from conservative elites in other countries. They’re more likely to question climate science, more sanguine about people dying for lack of health insurance, and less xenophobic (which is rather nice). But above all—far above all—they hate taxes ...

In the mid-1970s, the new doctrine of supply-side economics suddenly emerged on the right. The doctrine took what had been a marginal notion within the economics profession—the idea that higher tax rates can dampen the incentive to work and innovate—and elevated it to something close to a religion. The supply-side creed held that tax rates, especially on the rich, had enormous effects on economic growth. It was even possible, the supply-siders famously promised, that tax cuts could unleash so much economic growth that the net effect would increase tax revenue ...

And yet, as three decades of economic and budgetary data have repudiated supply-side belief time and again, its hold on the Republican Party has only strengthened ... There is one idea that explains Republican behavior: moral disgust at income redistribution. Since it doesn’t poll well, this is not an idea that you often find expressed in talking points or in other means of public persuasion. But occasionally this sentiment pops up in the form of a kind of raw royalism, usually from conservatives who don’t have to run for office. Former Bush economist Greg Mankiw endorses the belief that free markets are a flawless arbiter of income distribution. Republicans, he writes, believe that “in a free society, people make money when they produce goods and services that others value, and that, as a result, what they earn is rightfully theirs.” Adds American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, “[I]t is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can.”

More here. In an essay next Monday, "What do we deserve?", I'll look at redistributive economic justice and the erosion of egalitarianism in America.

S. Anand on Dalit Literature

In The Caravan, S. Anand provides an overview of modern Dalit literature, as well as insights into the portrayal of Dalits by many famous non-Dalit writers like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Rohinton Mistry. While often sympathetic, he notes, these portrayals also tend to be unidimensional, where "Dalit characters lack distinct subjecthood prior to their involvement with high-caste characters." Anand is co-founder of Navayana, "India’s first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective."

The journey of modern Dalit literature has been a difficult one. But even though it has not necessarily enjoyed the support of numbers (in what has come to be the trade publishing market) we must engage with what Dalits are writing—not simply for reasons of authenticity, or as a concession to identity politics, but simply because of the aesthetic value of this body of writing, and for the insights it offers into the human condition. In a society that is still largely unwilling to recognise Dalits as equal, rights-bearing human beings, in a society that is inherently indifferent to the everyday violence against Dalits and their near-total ghettoisation in various spheres of social and cultural activity, in a society unwilling to share social and cultural resources equitably with Dalits unless mandated by law (as seen in the anti-reservation discourse), Dalit literature has the potential to humanise non-Dalits and sensitise them to a world into which they have no insight. But before we can understand what Dalit literature is seeking to accomplish, we need first to come to terms with the stranglehold of non-Dalit representations of Dalits.

More here. The other founder of Navayana is Ravikumar, author of Venomous Touch, a collection of his writings translated from Tamil.

Arab Poetry of Resistance

In the video below (via Vijay Prashad on facebook), Sudhanva Deshpande recites a few poems of resistance from the great poets of the Arab world, including Palestine and "the Middle-East at a time when the region is going through one of the most historic revolutions." The poems, recited in Hindustani with scrolling English translations, include Ticket (Samih al-Qasim), Ek Diwaliye ki Report (Samih al-Qasim), Filistini Ladka (an extract by Safi Abdi), Poochtach (Mahmoud Darwish), and Dil-e-Mann, Musafir-e-Mann (Faiz Ahmed Faiz). FYI, this is also the centenary year of Faiz's birth and Himal Southasian has a special issue on the man.

Anu Ramdas on 'dharmic expressions'

Anu Ramdas, who writes from a Dalit perspective, offers some food for thought on her blog, Time and Us.

i recently read an academic paper which was laboring to make a point about UN recognizing caste as a race issue and trying to decipher the relation and difference between race and caste. this is what this picture made me write “caste is not a sibling of race, it is not even the parent, it is the God of all forms of discriminations.”  just look at those women’s faces, there is no hate, there is only a supreme conviction of righteousness, such pure dharmic expressions. who needs conical masks and nooses, who needs to disguise hate that is so pure that it does not even require the face to contort into a negative expression.

More here.

Plutocracy Now

Mother Jones has a report with eleven revealing charts on inequality in America and its trajectory in recent decades. It made be think of George Carlin's remark on the American dream: "It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Ramadan and Zizek on Egypt

Must see. "The revolutionary chants on the streets of Egypt have resonated around the world, but with a popular uprising without a clear direction and an unpopular leader refusing to concede, Egypt's future hangs in the balance. Riz Khan talks to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the power of popular dissent, the limits of peaceful protest and the future of Egyptian politics."

How to Change the World

Ben Wilson's review of Eric Hobsbawm's latest work, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism.

Near the end of this fascinating study of Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm charts the recession of Marxist thought. A theory that had offered certainty and hope was beset by doubt. The abysmal record of communist states and their eventual fall, the collapse of organised labour movements, the decline of radicalism, the success of capitalism in fulfilling human needs and many other factors placed Marxism in eclipse.

For Hobsbawm the financial crisis changed everything. “A systematic alternative system may not be on the horizon,” he argues, “but the possibility of disintegration, even collapse, of the existing system is no longer to be ruled out. Neither side knows what would happen in that case.”

We are living, then, at the end or at least the beginning of the end. The market, as Hobsbawm writes, creates many problems in its pursuit of limitless growth. “Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.” Hobsbawm has little time for those on the Left who treat Marx as a prophet whose word is law. “What could be learnt from Marx was his method of facing the tasks of analysis and action rather than ready-made lessons to be derived from classic texts.”

More here. Also check out this wonderful conversation with the great historian.

Three on Mofussil India

Two journalistic reports from Eastern UP and Maharashtra and an extensive survey of caste practices in rural Gujarat.

A Village in a Million by Anonymous / The Economist

Shahabpur, a village on the Gangetic plain, is caste-addled and somehow cohesive. But modernity, fast encroaching, is changing its ancient ways ... 

There is no typical Indian village. India is too vast and its cultures and ecology too diverse. Much that is true of Shahabpur will be irrelevant elsewhere. Yet the socio-economic pressures evident here are being felt across much of the country. Agriculture is in the doldrums, so millions of peasants are leaving the land, to find alternative work at home or in distant cities. Many are struggling: India’s services-led economic growth is creating too few semi-skilled jobs. Yet, if Shahabpur is any guide at all, the boom may be more far-reaching than is often supposed. And with the country expected to sustain high growth rates for many years, it will in the end bring about massive changes.

The Caste Buster by Anand Giridharadas / NYT

And I had a sense, from this and earlier visits to Indian finishing schools, of a generation being trained rather than educated. They knew nothing about industry, art, history, literature, science. There were now hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Indians who were making this bargain and adopting this focus. And they were liberating India. But I wondered what kind of country they would make when there were enough of them to change its essential character. Their heads were filled with SWOT analysis and ways to win friends and influence people, not with the tolerance of Asoka, the poetry of Kabir, the universalism of Tagore.

Understanding Untouchability by Navsarjan and RFK Center

Caste-based discrimination is the most complex human rights issue facing India today. To date, the tools used to assess its status have been divided by discipline—human rights, legal and social science. Although significant contributions toward understanding untouchability have been made in each of these areas, it is difficult to comprehend the scope and pervasiveness of the problem without combining the tools of all three. We have spent the last four years compiling quantitative, comprehensive and reliable data exposing the current state of untouchability (caste-based discrimination) against Dalitsi (“untouchables”) in Gujarat, India. This report presents data on untouchability practices in 1,589 villages from 5,462 respondents in Gujarat on the issue of untouchability.

Race vs. Class: The Future of Affirmative Action

I came across this excellent debate and Q&A from last year on the following motion: "Affirmative action policies should focus on class and wealth rather than race and ethnicity." It is worth watching for Lee Bollinger alone. The four participants represent distinct political constituencies, and the debate has obvious parallels with the caste vs. class reservations debate in India (1 hr, 32 mins).