Shunya's Notes

Combating Air Pollution in Delhi

(Full disclosure: I'm currently leading a task force on air pollution at the Delhi Dialogue Commission, a think tank of the Delhi government.)

The government of Delhi recently announced several measures to combat the hazardous levels of air pollution in the city. This includes emergency measures to reduce some of the eighty daily deaths from the current spike in cardiopulmonary cases in Delhi’s hospitals. It also declared some medium- and long-term actions, such as shutting down one coal power plant and possibly another; raising of vehicle and fuel emissions standards from Bharat IV to VI in just one year (a very bold move that leapfrogs Bharat V entirely, pulling in Bharat VI earlier than anyone had thought possible); limiting operating hours and enforcing emission standards for diesel trucks entering Delhi; adding more bus and metro services; taking steps to reduce road dust, and the open burning of trash, leaves, and other biomass in Delhi.

What intrigues me is how many of the chatterati have focused on the alternate-day driving restrictions for a fortnight (based on the license plate’s even/odd last digit) to the exclusion of other measures. Is this because it’s the only measure that calls for a bit of sacrifice from them? They’re posting articles on why such rationing of road space won’t work, or how car owners will rush to buy cheap used cars that’ll be even more polluting. They’re conveniently ignoring the fact that this is a 15-day emergency measure, that no rich man is likely to buy another car for the 8 out of 15 days that he won’t be able to drive his primary car. The complainers seem to include: (1) entitled upper-class folks who forget that driving is not a right but a privilege, that the right to non-toxic air precedes the right to drive; and (2) those who have no idea how bad Delhi’s air is right now and what it’s doing to our bodies.

Second, even if this measure became permanent at a future date (after due analysis and debate), it’ll likely happen after scaling up public transportation, in certain zones before others, and during certain hours. Designed right, it’ll accompany disincentives for diesel (which emits 7.5 times more PM 2.5 than petrol), reclaiming sidewalks for pedestrians, bike lanes, and a much higher cost of car ownership. For instance, we could charge an annual registration fee that rises steeply for two or more cars in a household (to prevent out-of-state registrations, it’d require the driver’s main residence to be the registered address), raise parking fees, limit and enforce parking in designated spaces, etc. To deter people from buying a second car to beat driving restrictions, its license plate could be given the same last digit as their first car, or the permitted days for a car could be shuffled every three months. More options might become possible in due course (when we have an up-to-date vehicle registration database), such as congestion pricing in certain zones and issuing citations via traffic cameras. That some devious little minds may find ways to beat the system is hardly a good argument against trying to redesign our transport systems and urban spaces.

On the Politics of Identity

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily and Raiot.)

The highs and lows of identity politics, and why despising it is no smarter than despising politics itself.

Our identity is a story we tell ourselves everyday. It is a selective story about who we are, what we share with others, why we are different. Each of us, as social beings in a time and place, evolves a personal and social identity that shapes our sense of self, loyalties, and obligations. Our identity includes aspects that are freely chosen, accidental, or thrust upon us by others.

Take an example. A woman may simultaneously identify as Indian, middle-class, feminist, doctor, Dalit, Telugu, lesbian, liberal, badminton player, music lover, traveler, humanist, and Muslim. Her self-identifications may also include being short-tempered, celibate, dark-skinned, ethical vegetarian, and diabetic. No doubt some of these will be more significant to her but all of them (and more) make her who she is. Like all of our identities, hers too is fluid, relational, and contextual. So while she never saw herself as a ‘Brown’ or ‘person of color’ in India, she had to reckon with that identity in America.

Identity politics, on the other hand, is politics that an individual—an identitarian—wages on behalf of a group that usually shares an aspect of one’s identity, say, gender, sexual orientation, race, caste, class, disability, ethnicity, religion, type of work, or national origin. Any group—majority or minority, strong or weak, light or dark-skinned—can pursue identity politics. It can be a dominant group led by cultural insecurities and chauvinism, or a marginalized group led by a shared experience of bigotry and injustice (the focus of this essay). Both German Nazism and the American Civil Rights movement exemplify identity politics based on the racial identity of their constituent groups, as do the white nationalism of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the activism of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. Both Hindutvadis and Dalits are identitarians of religion and caste, respectively. As Eric Hobsbawm noted in his essay Identity Politics and the Left, labor unions, too, have long pursued identity politics based on social class and the identity of being an industrial worker.

Life, and identity politics, can amplify certain aspects of our identity while suppressing others. During the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Tamil Tigers elevated Tamil national identity over that of caste. Gender identity turns secondary in some contexts: Indian women often close ranks with Indian men when White Westerners lecture them on sexual violence in India. Likewise, Dalit women often close ranks with Dalit men when upper-caste women expound on gender violence among them. Especially after September 11, 2001, many European citizens and residents with complex ethno-linguistic roots faced a world hell-bent on seeing them as, above all, ‘Muslims’.

'What do we deserve?' A Talk Hosted by Nirmukta, Chennai

Below is a talk I gave at Thinkfest 2015 to a classroom-sized audience on 26 Jan, 2015 (90 minutes). It was hosted by Nirmukta, dedicated to promoting science, freethought and secular humanism in South Asia. (NB: the audio in the first few minutes is choppy but fine thereafter.)

The topic I chose is "What do we deserve?" For our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements can we fairly claim? This question is particularly relevant in market-based societies in which people tend to think they deserve both their success and their failure. I explore the fraught concepts of "merit" and "success", and what outcomes we can take credit for or not. I present three leading models of economic justice by which a society might allocate its rewards—libertarian, meritocratic, egalitarian—and consider the pros and cons of each using examples from both India and the U.S. (Also read a companion essay to this video, and read a report on Thinkfest 2015.)

The Perils of Majoritarianism

(On the ethnic history and politics of Sri Lanka and a review of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War. A shorter version appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 3 April 2015. Below is the original long version—the director’s cut. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
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Few places in the world, of similar size, offer a more bracing human spectacle than the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. It abounds in deep history and cultural diversity, ancient cities and sublime art, ingenuity and human folly, wars and lately, even genocide. It has produced a medley of identities based on language (Sinhala, Tamil, English, many creoles), religion (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, animism), and geographic origin (Indian, Malaysian, European, Arab, indigenous), alongside divisions of caste and class. Rare for a country its size are the many divergent accounts of itself, fused at the hip with the politics of ethnic identities—a taste of which I got during my month-long travel on the island in early 2014.

The Sri Lankan experience has been more traumatic lately, owing to its 26-year civil war that ended with genocide in 2009. The country’s three main ethnic groups—Sinhalese (75 percent), Tamil (18 percent), and Muslim (7 percent)—now live with deep distrust of each other. One way to understand Sri Lankan society and its colossal tragedy is to study the causes and events that led to the civil war. What historical currents preceded it? Did they perhaps make the war inevitable? What was at stake for those who waged it? What has been its human toll and impact on civic life? In his brave and insightful work of journalism, This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, Samanth Subramanian attempts to answer such questions while bearing witness to many of its tragedies.

A Brief Social History of Sri Lanka

Around two-and-a-half millennia ago, waves of migrants from the Indian subcontinent overwhelmed the island’s indigenous hunter-gatherers, the Veddah (a few descendants still survive). Migrants arriving from modern day Bengal, speakers of Prakrit—an Indo-European language that evolved into Sinhala—intermixed with indigenous islanders to later become the Sinhalese.  Other migrants from southern India, speakers of Tamil and other Dravidian languages and belonging mostly to the Saivite sect, also intermixed with the islanders to later become the Tamils of Sri Lanka. Which group of migrants arrived first, a question hotly pursued by the nationalists, lacks scholarly resolution. Both groups established themselves in different parts of the island: the Sinhalese in the center, south, and west, the Tamils in the north and east.

Ronald Dworkin on the Right to Ridicule

I really like the clarity and point of view in this short 2006 essay by Ronald Dworkin, American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. The essay is relevant in light of both Perumal Murugan and Charlie Hebdo incidents.

So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law—if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance—then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means—whatever it means to call for increased “respect” for all citizens and groups—these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

More here.

Thinkfest 2015

It is my honor to have been invited to speak at Thinkfest 2015 in Chennai on January 26. "Thinkfest is the annual programme organized by Chennai Freethinkers, a regional group of Nirmukta, during which science popularizers, humanists, and freethought activists are invited to share their ideas with the general public." Read more about the event and the schedule. The event is open to all but requires registration.

The topic I've chosen is "What do we deserve?" For our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements can we fairly claim? This is a question of particular relevance in market-based societies in which people tend to think they deserve both their success and their failure. I’ll explore the fraught concepts of "merit" and "success", and what outcomes we can take credit for or not. I'll present three leading models of economic justice by which a society might allocate its rewards—libertarian, meritocratic, egalitarian—and consider the pros and cons of each using examples from both India and abroad.

Delhi: the City of Rape?

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

On how caste patriarchy in urban India hijacks and distorts the reality of gender violence.

Delhi now lives in infamy as India’s ‘rape capital’. In December 2012, the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a young woman, named Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media, unleashed intense media and public outrage across India. Angry middle-class men and women, breaking some of their taboos and silences around sexual crimes, marched in Delhi shouting ‘Death to Rapists!’ The parliament scrambled to enact tough new anti-rape laws.

Many Delhiites have since grown fearful of their city’s public spaces. Spotting an emotionally charged issue, opposition politicians promised to make Delhi safe for women. Campaigning for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2013, Narendra Modi told Delhiites, ‘When you go out to vote, keep in mind "Nirbhaya" who became a victim of rape.’ The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, even promised private security guards with ‘commando training’ in every neighborhood. All this might suggest that a rape epidemic has broken out in Delhi’s streets, alleys, and buses. Mainstream media outlets in India and abroad seem to agree.

Anyone trying to analyze the issue must at least ask three questions: who are the rapists, where do they rape, and how common is rape in Delhi? The 2014 Delhi Police data on rape is a great place to start, not the least because it challenges the conventional wisdom of Delhiites and their media and politicians. It shows that, as in other countries and consistent with previous years in Delhi, men known to the victims commit the vast majority of rapes—96 percent in Delhi. These men include friends, neighbours, ‘relatives such as brother-in-law, uncle, husband or ex-husband and even father.’ More than 80 percent of them rape inside the victim’s home or their own. Strangers commit only 4 percent of rapes, which are also likelier to be reported. Yet so many people fixate on this latter scenario and take it as proof that Delhi is unsafe for women to go out by themselves.

The hard truth is that sexual predators are not so much ‘out there’ in the faceless crowd as among the familiar ones. ‘Statistically speaking’, journalist Cordelia Jenkins wrote in August 2013, ‘the problem [of rape in Delhi] is not on the streets at all, but in the home; the greatest threat to most women is not from strangers but from their own families, neighbours and friends.’ According to Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research, a women’s rights organisation in Delhi, ‘This data compels us to look at what is happening in and around our homes and workplaces.’ In other words, we ought to worry about rape less when women enter public spaces on their own, and more when they return home or hang out with friends. Why do so few Indians—men and women, including policy makers and public figures—seem to realize this? Some feminists have argued that this blend of pious concern with plain denial is the modus operandi of patriarchy itself.

Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy

Check out "Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy", an engaging documentary film by Rakesh Sharma. Set in Kutch, Gujarat, it tells the story of people in two remote villages whose lives are plunged into upheaval by an earthquake, an apathetic state, corporate greed, religious myth, baseless optimism, and other human tragedies (64 mins, 2002). Sharma is better known for "The Final Solution", a really good film on the 2002 Gujarat riots. You'll find both films at his Vimeo channel.

In a hospital. At the beach. Hamas, Israel tells us, is hiding among civilians

(See the first comment for an archive of articles and videos on the Israel-Palestine conflict — Namit)

They hid at the El-Wafa hospital.
They hid at the Al-Aqsa hospital.
They hid at the beach, where children played football.
They hid at the yard of 75-year-old Muhammad Hamad.
They hid among the residential quarters of Shujaya.
They hid in the neighbourhoods of Zaytoun and Toffah.
They hid in Rafah and Khan Younis.
They hid in the home of the Qassan family.
They hid in the home of the poet, Othman Hussein.
They hid in the village of Khuzaa.
They hid in the thousands of houses damaged or destroyed.
They hid in 84 schools and 23 medical facilities.
They hid in a cafe, where Gazans were watching the World Cup.
They hid in the ambulances trying to retrieve the injured.
They hid themselves in 24 corpses, buried under rubble.
They hid themselves in a young woman in pink household slippers, sprawled on the pavement, taken down while fleeing.
They hid themselves in two brothers, eight and four, lying in the intensive burn care unit in Al-Shifa.
They hid themselves in the little boy whose parts were carried away by his father in a plastic shopping bag.
They hid themselves in the “incomparable chaos of bodies” arriving at Gaza hospitals.
They hid themselves in an elderly woman, lying in a pool of blood on a stone floor.
Hamas, they tell us, is cowardly and cynical.

—By Richard Seymour, The Guardian, 21 July, 2014.

An Uncommon History of the United States

For the most part, mainstream history in the United States has little in common with this trenchant narrative from a leftist perspective — and not because this has any less truth or clarity (23 mins). (They could have chosen a better title for this film though. :-)

Fixing Capitalism in the 21st Century

By now you've probably heard of this summer's blockbuster book by French economist Thomas Piketty. As I see it, Piketty's primary, carefully argued, data-backed conclusion is: To salvage capitalism (and to improve the odds of social stability and world peace), governments need to raise taxes on the rich—more steeply on capital (i.e., tax on wealth and inheritance) than on labor (i.e., tax on wages)—and redistribute it to reduce today's absurd level of inequality that's on track to become even worse. The book jacket description says:

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy, but satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx, but we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality — the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth — today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values, but economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Many excellent reviews of the book are compiled here (thanks to Patrick S O'Donnell). Four reviews I liked in particular, the last two of them mixed ones, are by Cory Doctorow, Paul Krugman, David Harvey, and Fred Guerin. Those who like graphs will find this summary interesting.

Representative Democracy?

Some observations on the recently concluded parliamentary elections in India (for a closer look at the electoral data, see here and here): 

1. The BJP polled only 31% votes nationwide but won 52% seats in the parliament (282/543). Even more strikingly, the BJP polled only 42% votes in U.P. but won 89% seats (71/80).
2. BSP polled 4.2% votes nationwide (3rd highest after BJP and Congress) but won 0 seats. In U.P., the BSP polled 20% votes but won 0 seats.
3. Both AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and Trinamool Congress in W. Bengal polled fewer votes than BSP (and only a bit more than BSP in U.P.), but won 37 and 34 seats, respectively (vs. 0 for BSP).
4. SP polled 18 M votes in U.P. but won only 5 seats, whereas the Shiv Sena polled only 10 M votes in Maharashtra and won 18 seats.
5. About half of all Indians voted for regional parties, not national parties. 69% of the people voted for a party other than the BJP. 

These examples show how India’s parliamentary democracy, owing to its first-past-the-post voting system, fails to represent the political preferences of its citizens. This is in addition to the fact that elected politicians in India also do not represent its citizens sociologically (they’re far more likely to be upper caste, wealthier, Hindu, male, urban, etc.). According to the economist Jeffrey Sachs, "The first-past-the-post election tends to produce a small number of major parties, perhaps just two, a principle known in political science as Duverger’s Law. Smaller parties are trampled in first-past-the-post elections." Alternatives that reduce the drawbacks of FPTP exist. Isn’t it time to rekindle the debate on making Indian democracy more representative, both at the political and sociological levels?

The Rationalist and the Romantic

On Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. (Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A few weeks ago, the Indian publishing house Navayana released an annotated, "critical edition" of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s classic, Annihilation of Caste (AoC). Written in 1936, AoC was meant to be the keynote address at a conference but was never delivered. Unsettled by the scathing text of the speech and faced by Ambedkar’s refusal to water it down, the caste Hindu organizers of the conference had withdrawn their invitation to speak. Ambedkar, an "untouchable", later self-published AoC and two expanded editions, which included MK Gandhi’s response to it and his own rejoinder.

AoC, as S. Anand points out in his editor’s note, happens to be "one of the most obscure as well as one of the most widely read books in India." The Navayana edition of AoC carries a 164-page introduction by Arundhati Roy, The Doctor and the Saint (read an excerpt). The publisher’s apparent strategy was to harness Roy to raise AoC’s readership among savarna (or caste Hindu) elites to whom it was in fact addressed, but who have largely ignored it for over seven decades, even as countless editions of it in many languages have deeply inspired and empowered generations of Dalits.

However, this new edition has drawn a mixed response. Expressions of praise coexist alongside howls of disapproval and allegations of an ugly politics of power and privilege, co-option and misrepresentation. To many Dalit and a few savarna writers and activists, this Roy-Navayana project—Navayana is a small independent publishing house run by Anand, a Brahmin by birth—is a bitter reminder that no Dalit-led edition of AoC can get such attention in the national media, that gimmicks are still needed in this benighted land to "introduce" AoC and Ambedkar to the savarnas, that once again, caste elites like Roy, with little history of scholarly or other serious engagement with caste (as Anand himself suggested about Roy three years ago), are appropriating AoC and admitting the beloved leader of Dalits into their pantheon on their own terms—all while promoting themselves en route: socially, professionally, and financially (see this open letter to Roy and her reply).

Such responses may seem provincial, hypersensitive, or even paranoid to some, but they should not be brushed aside as such. They point to a universally toxic dynamic of power and knowledge to which savarna elites are so alert and sensitive in colonial, orientalist contexts, yet so blind to its parallels within India, propagated by their own class. Is this because it is easier to see prejudice directed from above at one’s own class, versus the prejudice it doles out below? Especially on a fraught topic like caste, one’s social location shapes how one frames and conducts a debate on annihilating caste, its current state, and the heroes and villains in this fight. The folks at Navayana—a leading English language publisher of anti-caste books, including many by Dalit authors—would surely nod in agreement.

Caste Iron

I have an essay in The Caravan on Ambedkar's place in the Indian imagination, and why he hasn't received his due from upper-caste Indians.

"Turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path,” wrote Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, India’s foremost crusader for dignity and civil rights. That monster has always haunted Ambedkar’s legacy, polarising it along caste lines. On the one hand is his godlike presence in Dalit communities, who, out of affection and admiration, have built countless statues of him, usually dressed in a Western suit and tie, with a fat book under his arm, and in whose folk songs, poems, and calendar art he has long held pride of place. For generations, his bold, secular, and emancipatory ideas inspired many Dalit activists and writers, many of whom recall their lives in “before-and-after Ambedkar” phases. When Omprakash Valmiki, the author of the memoir Joothan: A Dalit’s Life, first read about Ambedkar’s life and work, he “spent many days and nights in great turmoil.” He grew more restless; his “stone-like silence” began to melt, and “an anti-establishment consciousness became strong” in him. Ambedkar gave voice to his muteness, Valmiki wrote, and raised his moral outrage and self-confidence.

On the other hand, there remains a longstanding apathy for Ambedkar among caste Hindus. What respect he gets from India’s elites is usually limited to his role as the architect of the constitution—important, but arguably among the least revolutionary aspects of his legacy. The social scientist and educationist Narendra Jadhav, interviewed in the Times of India earlier this year, described Ambedkar as the “social conscience of modern India”, and lamented that he has been reduced to being “just a leader of Dalits and a legal luminary.” Indeed, even thoughtful, liberal elite Indians are commonly ignorant about Ambedkar’s life and social impact, both in his lifetime and in the decades since—as the scholar Sharmila Rege noted in Against the Madness of Manu: BR Ambedkar’s writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, not only lay readers, but Indian post-graduates and academics in the social sciences, humanities, and women’s studies are also unlikely to have read him. What explains this severe disjunction in how Ambedkar is received in India?

More here.

The Terrain of Indignities

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

A review of Unclaimed Terrain, a book of short stories translated from Hindi, and a conversation with its author, Ajay Navaria.

"Indian writing" is often equated in the West with its small subset: the work of a tiny class of Indians that thinks and writes in English. Salman Rushdie fueled this folly in his introduction to Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-97, declaring the work of such Indians a ‘more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the "16 official languages" of India’. He co-edited this anthology and of the 32 works of fiction and non-fiction that appear in it, 31 were written in English and one in Urdu, i.e., only one translation made the cut. Some of this lopsidedness can be explained by the paucity of translations into English, but is Rushdie’s judgment defensible in a country where, even today, less than one percent of Indians consider English their first language, less than ten percent their second, and 80 percent of all books are put out by hundreds of vernacular language publishers, including from authors with far greater Indian readership than most who write in English? Rushdie doesn’t even speak most of these languages. Isn’t his claim, then, an instance of linguistic prejudice? Aren’t the dynamics of class in India, and the power of English language publishing in the West, speaking through him?

Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain—a collection of seven short stories translated from Hindi to English by Laura Brueck—shows from its first page how different its world is from those imagined by the Indians in Rushdie’s anthology. Navaria, a faculty member in the Hindi department in Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, may well be the first Dalit to teach Hindu religious scriptures at a major university. He is also the author of a novel and two books of short stories. In Unclaimed Terrain the protagonists of most stories are Dalit men who have clawed their way into the urban middle-class through their wits and education, sometimes with the help of reservations. Many harbor episodic memories of social life in ancestral villages, memories in which bigotry and abuse overwhelm kindness and beauty. They love the anonymity of the big city, even as they live in fear of being "found out" and reminded—in the artful ways of the metropolis—of their "proper place".

In the story Subcontinent, for instance, the protagonist, as a boy, has seen village men abuse and assault his groveling father and grandma—returning after a stint in the city—for breaking caste taboos. As a boy, he has seen a Dalit wedding party attacked by thugs because the groom has dared to ride a horse in the village, and later that day, a woman of the party being raped: ‘I saw, beneath the white dhoti-clad bottom of a pale pandit-god, the darkened soles of someone’s feet flailing and kicking’. Rather than file a complaint, the village policeman mocks them, ‘They say she was really tasty. Lucky bitch, now she’s become pure!’ In his middle-age, the protagonist, Siddhartha Nirmal, Marketing Manager in a government enterprise in the big city, exults at the distance he has traveled in the world: 3BR flat; car; eating out at Pizza Hut and Haldiram’s, where the counter-boys call him Sir. He can hire the services of a Brahmin doctor, keep a Garhwali Brahmin driver who bows at him, and employ a Bengali music teacher he found on the Internet for his daughter, who goes to an expensive convent school. But such welcome anonymity that the city affords him disappears in familiar spaces, such as his office, which has ‘the same snakes. The same whispers, the same poison-laden smiles. Our "quota is fixed". I got promoted only because of the quota ... that’s it. Otherwise ... otherwise, maybe I’m still dirty. Still lowborn. Like Kishan, the office janitor. Like Kardam, the clerk. Because I am their caste.’

PechaKucha #20, New Delhi

I spoke on the topic of "value" at a recent PechaKucha event in New Delhi, hosted by the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, New Delhi on Aug 29, 2013. "PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images."

Pecha Kucha Night #20: Value

We use the term value in two surprisingly contradictory ways in our everyday life: on the one hand, we speak of our valuables, market valuation, and other forms of economic worth, and on the other hand we speak of social, cultural and moral values. In generations past it was more or less accepted that these two forms of value could not be reconciled. The things one had to do to create economic value might simply remain in tension or opposition with one’s personal or familial values. Increasingly, however, we see that young people in India and around the world are trying to bring these two kinds of value into alignment with one another.

Since the establishment of numerous other social venture funds, we have seen the world of social entrepreneurship explode. National governments are beginning to make further investments into new private organizations that are committed to doing well while also doing good. Many new start ups and social enterprises are making waves in India, Africa, Europe and the United States.

Have we truly reached the point where economic value = social value? Or is further innovation in policy making, regulation and market maturity going to be required to ensure that we get there? Do different people, from different walks of life see value in increasingly similar terms? Or do can we now see new grades and shades of meaning in this term, as it splinters between financial, macroeconomic, environmental, political and cultural dimensions.

This is the theme for our upcoming Pecha-Kucha Night at the Adianta School Campus at Chhattarpur in New Delhi. We will host eight pathbreaking speakers who will speak for seven minutes each, using 20 slides for 20 seconds per slide, exactly. RSVP now for what will be a memorable night of beer, momos, sound, light, thought and conversation.

John Stoltenberg on Manhood

Here is a thought-provoking interview with John Stoltenberg, an American radical feminist activist, scholar, magazine editor, and author of The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience and Refusing to be a Man. He was the life partner of radical feminist Andrea Dworkin.

Q: How do you see the place of pro-feminist men in the feminist movement? A number of feminists have reservations about it because, in their view, some of these allies tend to speak in their place and pretend to decide what feminism should be about. According to these feminists, men’s contribution to feminism can be of help only if it meets certain conditions: acknowledging their privilege, never forgetting that they belong to the dominant class. And do for feminism what they can do best as men: deconstruct male supremacy from the inside. Do you agree with these views or do you think they are too limiting?

A: First of all I don’t think any man of conscience—whether self-identified as pro-feminist or not—can or should presume to speak in women’s place or “decide what feminism should be about.” That’s just a baseline principle. Many women have justifiable grievances about individual men who have disregarded it. Those “me too” men ought to know better, and they should not require scolding and hand-holding from women to figure it out, because exemplary life lessons abound: Individuals from the dominant class in other struggles have found countless meaningful ways to be of use while analogously abiding by that principle—for example, whites in the black civil-rights movement in the US, sons and daughters born to wealth in the movement for economic justice, non-Jews in the movements against antisemitism. Such sincerely committed allies always recognize and acknowledge the privilege that stems from their membership in the dominant class. And often such allies have found that their usefulness lies in deconstructing, disrupting, interrupting, exposing, protesting, and defying such systems of oppression from the inside. Same holds for any man of conscience who wishes to be of use on behalf of feminist revolution. It’s not complicated.

More here.  Also check out two related pieces on the same website: The trouble with male allies and How to be a male feminist ally.

Jackson Katz on Gender Issues

To commemorate Teacher's Day today, here is a great talk on how men ought to approach "gender issues", and the complicit silence and self-deception that pervades the lives of men. Obvious parallels here for upper-caste Indians on how to approach "caste issues".

Of Meenas, Migrants, and Medicine

By Usha Alexander (Also cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

Two days in south Rajasthan with AMRIT Health Services, a not-for-profit initiative

             A hamlet in Bedawal village

“The demand to sacrifice a goat was not something we had expected as a precondition for setting up the clinic,” Dr. Pavitra Mohan explained. A pediatrician and public health professional, he was telling me about the initial days of setting up the first AMRIT Clinic in Bedawal, a Meena village in south Rajasthan that otherwise had no healthcare facility. The problem was that the building he had identified as adequate for his purpose was directly across from the village temple to their god, Hemliya Bavji, but it required major renovations, including the construction of a toilet, apparently the first in the village. Though the panchayat welcomed the clinic, several villagers refused to allow a toilet so near the temple, on religious grounds. To make matters worse, they also refused to allow trimming the sacred tree overhanging the building in order to build rooms on the roof for the healthcare workers to sleep at night. But after further talks and negotiations, they finally granted permission to build the clinic and trim the tree as well.

And so, in early 2013, AMRIT Clinic opened in Bedawal with a small team of qualified nurses and healthcare workers, who constitute the core of AMRIT Health Services (AHS) in the villages. They are supported by a doctor who visits once a week and is also available for telephone consultations on other days. Hoping for a view into the work of this organization—its context, its challenges, its benefits to the local population—my partner and I went for a visit in early August; our plan was to produce an introductory video about their work.

AMRIT clinic in Bedawal
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At the Bedawal clinic: Himi, Manju Meghwal, Baiji, Moti, Dr. Mohan

              Newborn with septicemia
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With Dr. Mohan, Niti Sharma, Manager of Operations, Himi, Fellow, public health, and Dr. Gargi Goel, a young pediatrician who had come out on a job interview, we drove ninety minutes from Udaipur city to Salumbar, the last little town where basic services—petrol, meals for purchase, rooms for the night—were to be found before we headed out into the fairly isolated villages of the remote countryside. From Salumbar, we continued for another forty-five minutes on narrow, broken or dirt roads to Bedawal, the first of two clinic sites we visited.

With little vehicular traffic, buffaloes and goats took up the slack. An occasional bus or jeep rattled back toward Salumbar, overloaded with people sitting on top or swinging off the sides, as this was their only available transportation. Maize stood tall in small plots receding into the hills and valleys on both sides of the roadway, and squatting among these fields were mud and stone dwellings with broad verandahs and rough tiled roofs supported by carved wooden beams and lintels. Droves of children in shabby school uniforms—mostly boys—milled along the roadside near the village center, laughing, playing. Electrical wires were stitched across the landscape, but we learned that much of the time they are dormant, sometimes for days. For me, arriving from the sticky heat of Delhi, the cooling breezes of this region’s modest elevations and its fresher monsoon air were invigorating.

Despite the goat sacrifice, Himi told us, one of AHS’s early challenges has been to gain the trust of the local people. There had never been qualified medical practitioners in these villages, but a particular brand of charlatan, known locally as Bengali Doctors, preys upon the people, charging hundreds of rupees to put patients on a saline drip and inject a drug cocktail that gives them a jolt, no matter their ailment. When villagers first came to the clinic, they expected the same treatment and were suspicious or dismissive if they did not receive it. And when the nurses asked only fifty rupees for a week’s treatments, the villagers scoffed. What kind of medicine can be so cheap? “Then they were afraid we might do some magic on them,” Himi said. Fortunately, as more and more people have been helped or cured by the efforts of AHS, the perceptions are changing.

On Domestic Workers in India

An incisive article by Harsh Mander on how the Indian middle-class relates to its domestic workers (aka servant, bai, aayah, bahadur, etc.):

Behind the walls of Indian middle-class houses, unequal India is produced and reproduced. This is where children of privilege learn early to accept and normalise inequality, lessons they carry for life. Domestic workers are the only elders they can command, call by their first names, and speak rudely to without being deterred. When a small boy of four is asked to touch the feet of all his elders, how does he know so early that he is expected to touch the feet of all older people — except the domestic help?

In the novel [The Help by Kathryn Stockett], one coloured help raises 17 white children in her lifetime of employment. She has to sacrifice the care-time she wanted for her own son so that she could earn the money to tend him. As babies, many white children love her more than their own mothers. Her heartbreak is that, when they grow up, most acquire the same prejudices as their mothers and treat her with the same casual disrespect and condescension. How many of us urban Indian middle-class adults have been similarly raised by women who neglected their own children, whom we have forgotten as we grow and they age?

More here.

On Eating Animals

The latest issue of the Humanist magazine (July-Aug '13) has a slightly modified version of my essay from last year.

Clearly, most people don’t even know about the horror and pain we inflict on billions of birds and mammals in our meat factories. But there’s no good excuse for this, is there? It’s more likely that we don’t want to know—can’t afford to know for our own sake—so we turn a blind eye and trust the artifice of bucolic imagery on meat packaging. Some see parallels here with the German people’s willful denial of the concentration camps that once operated around them, or call those who consume factory-farmed meat little Eichmanns. “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer (who also used to say he turned vegetarian “for health reasons—the health of the chicken”).

Predictably enough, many others are offended by such comparisons. They say that comparing the industrialized abuse of animals with the industrialized abuse of humans trivializes the latter. There are indeed limits to such comparisons, though our current enterprise may be worse in at least one respect: it has no foreseeable end. We seem committed to raising billions of sentient beings year after year only to kill them after a short life of intense suffering. Furthermore, rather than take offense at polemical comparisons—as if others are obliged to be more judicious in their speech than we are in our silent deeds—why not reflect on our apathy instead? Criticizing vegetarians and vegans for being self-righteous—or being moral opportunists in having found a new way of affirming their decency to themselves—certainly doesn’t absolve us from the need to face up to our role in perpetuating this cycle of violence and degradation.

More here. Also listen to a Philosophy Bites interview with Jeff McMahan on why most humans today can and should be vegetarians.

On Ambedkar and 'The Annihilation of Caste'

(Also see my longer essay, Ambedkar in the Indian Imagination, a version of which also appeared in The Caravan)

In the story of modern India, as any schoolkid will confirm, the anti-colonial struggle looms large. Almost all national heroes are men associated with it. To what extent is this because the Congress, which led the anti-colonial movement, ruled in the decades that followed? Why do mainstream histories — by Indians and, for their own reasons, even by the British — give political emancipation most of the air time and lionize Gandhi and Nehru at the expense of others? From what perspective does it seem that no other movements of significance were afoot besides anti-colonialism, no other heroes?

Notably, Ambedkar, who didn't quite participate in the anti-colonial struggle — focusing instead on the emancipation of the "depressed classes" — was sidelined for decades. At best, he received grudging respect as the architect of the Constitution, arguably one of the smaller and least subversive parts of his legacy. Was this dimunition because Ambedkar was openly combative and critical of both Gandhi and Nehru, attacked Hinduism's most sacred scriptures and age-old practices, converted to Buddhism, and became a trenchant spokesman of the oppressed castes? Did that made it easy for the defensive Hindu elites to pigeonhole him as a partisan man of his people, rather than a revolutionary social thinker? Was this because the dominant castes and their intellectuals had not done even the minimal soul-searching necessary to embrace Ambedkar's most profound and radical ideas? Indeed, why is it that far more upper caste Indians have read works by Gandhi, Nehru, and Tagore, but almost nothing by Ambedkar? Do non-Dalits have little to gain from reading Ambedkar? Meanwhile, his bold and subversive analyses continue to inspire countless lower-caste activists and writers, who continue to goad Brahminical India towards a long overdue reckoning with its past and its heroes.

According to historian Perry Anderson, Ambedkar was "intellectually head and shoulders above most of the Congress leaders". The fact is that Ambedkar, uniquely among the major national figures, not only overcame enormous personal odds, he also developed a pioneering critique of Indian society based on the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Indeed, he was far more modern than even Nehru. This aspect of Ambedkar — rooted in a scrupulously reasoned, secular and radical egalitarianism, coupled with bracing civil rights talk of social justice and human dignity — is unprecedented among Indian leaders and it still hasn't received its due in mainstream scholarship.

For a good introduction to Ambedkar's mind, few documents will surpass The Annihilation of Caste. Originally written in 1936, it was meant to be a speech that was never delivered — the reasons for which appear in the prologue. This reprint in 1944 is accompanied by a critique by Gandhi, followed by Ambedkar's brilliant rejoinder. Read it and realize why perhaps more than any other leader of modern India, Ambedkar remains relevant to every dream of a just, modern, liberal, secular, humane, and democratic society in India. 

Rowena on Indian Nationalism

For citizens of modern nations, there is no life outside nationalism. The only question is: what kind of nation and nationalism? In all nations, the dominant groups shape the idea of the nation to their advantage, an idea that is contested by other groups. Here is a piece of the latter lineage, The Protests in Delhi and the Nationalist Paradigm, by Jenny Rowena, a faculty member at Miranda House, Delhi. Food for thought.

Most mainstream understanding of Indian nationalism think of it as a postcolonial phenomenon, where in a suppressed colony asserted itself against an oppressive empire. In spite of this, they argue, nationalism was often accessible only to the upper castes. So it excluded the lower castes and minorities, who fell outside its ambit and thereby of Indian modernity itself.

However, one sees a different way of thinking about nationalism in the writings and speeches of many dalit and bahujan leaders like Phule, Periyar and Ambedkar; later theorists like G Aloysius, Braj Ranjan Mani;and writers like K KKochu and J Raghu in Kerala. All of them seem to think of nationalism as a strategic organizing principle of the upper castes, which allowed them to successfully consolidate themselves against the onslaught of the anti-caste identities of various lower caste and dalit groups in India. With it, the brahminical upper castes, who had made use of colonialism to consolidate their cultural power, came forward to demand a transfer of power towards their own benefit.

In other words, it was not that the brahminical class had better access to nationalism and modern categories, which resulted in the exclusion of all “others.” Instead the argument that can be built from the available pool of dalitbahujan thinking is this: the brahminical upper caste re-imagined themselves through national categories, put forward a nationalistic politics and countered the lower caste mobilizations that invoked particular caste categories and locations, with a more universal and all pervading nationalist identity. With this they took over the nation and its various dominant categories like secularism, merit, progress and modernity, and gained almost absolute control over its numerous institutions – from academics to administration to art and popular culture.

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance

In late 2011, Danielle L. McGuire published a book that revisits the history of a certain "rape culture" in the United States, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. The book recounts experiences of black women that have obvious parallels with the struggles of Dalit and Adivasi women in India today:

"The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement."

As this review relates, "African-American women had been victimized for centuries by white sexual violence in the South, but fear of reprisal kept most crimes from being reported, let alone prosecuted." In her review of McGuire's book, Jennifer Jensen writes:

McGuire argues that rapes of black women by white men were largely ignored by mainstream society due to an underlying racial and economic hierarchy. As a result, rape systematically subjugated the black race and also challenged black respectability. Black people—women especially—were under continuous public scrutiny. Consequently, when black women were raped, the unwarranted violent sex acts allowed society to blame the victim for the assault, which was attributed to deficiencies of their race. ... McGuire’s method contrasts media coverage against extant state or court documents. The result reveals how newspapers reported the rape cases, in what context the victim was portrayed, and any public outrage incited because of the inertia of law enforcement. The state and court documents illustrate the lack of legal recourse black communities had when women were raped and, more importantly, the legal barriers built into the system to subjugate black people through sexual racialization.

Read two more reviews of the book here and here. The second of these two reviews mentions the story of Taylor, "one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation." Decades later at age 90, in words that are nothing short of haunting, Taylor grapples with why she was gang-raped. “I was an honest person and living right,” Taylor said. “They shouldn’t have did that. I never give them no reason to do it.”

Of Sacred and Paraded Bodies

On the recent Delhi gang-rape, here are two probing and insightful essays I've read. The first is by Madhuri Xalxo. An excerpt:

I am a bit shaken by what outrages the mainstream media on rape. The incident is horrifying and yet so very familiar to us dalit, bahujan and adivasi women.

In the same Delhi, hundreds of adivasi girls are taken as domestic slaves and get raped, and go missing.  Why doesn't the mainstream media even consider that newsworthy?  Why is there no uproar for the death penalty for these upper caste men from elite backgrounds raping us? Is it because we are born to get justly raped by the others?

The present protests and silences only endorse the caste hindu paradigm that the upper caste woman's body is sacred and its violation requires the highest retribution while the bodies of dalit, bahujan and adivasi women and women under military regimes such as Manipur and Kashmir are 'rape-worthy' and the men's sexual depravity on these women need no correctives.

The second essay is by Urvashi Butalia. An excerpt:

Protest is important, it shakes the conscience of society, it brings people close to change, it makes them feel part of the change. And there is a good chance that the current wave of protests will lead to at least some results — perhaps even just fast track courts. But perspective is also important: we need to ask ourselves: if it had been the army in Manipur or Kashmir who had been the rapists, would we have protested in quite the same way? Very likely not, for there nationalism enters the picture. Remember Kunan Posphpora in the late nineties when the Rajasthan Rifles raped over 30 women? Even our liberal journalists found it difficult to credit that this could have happened, that the army could have been capable of this, and yet, the people of Kunan Poshpora know. Even today, women from this area find it difficult to marry — stigma has a long life. Would we have been as angry if the rape had taken place in a small town near Delhi and the victim had been Dalit? Remember Khairlanji? Why did that rape, of a mother and her daughter, gruesome, violent, heinous, and their subsequent murder not touch our consciences in quite the same way.

Both excerpts raise the question of selective media coverage and public outrage. One response might start by saying that all humans participate in overlapping moral communities, such as whites, males, Brahmins, Americans, Muslims, heterosexuals, urban professionals, Arabs, and so on. Membership rules and benefits vary but those within our moral community evoke more of our empathy and are more real to us. (We also tend to identify with the pain of those "above us", who we envy and emulate.) The recent killing of 20 children in Connecticut provoked massive outrage among folks who aren't much perturbed by American drones killing children in Pakistan. Is there any doubt that the intensity of the outrage owes much to the ability of every soccer mom and dad in America to relate to the tragedy? Never mind the larger violence beyond their daily lives, to both human and non-human animals, that their privileges both require and blind them to (which may well be a wider human problem).

The moral community of urban upper-caste Indians (and, by extension, of the media institutions they control) is likewise circumscribed. It discounts the travails and the humanity of other Indians "beneath them". Moral communities can of course expand and become more porous or inclusive — usually not without a fight — where greater moral consideration is accorded to outsiders, including even to animals. Affecting this change then, through various means (socialization, law enforcement, public debate, etc.), is the struggle ahead in India and elsewhere.